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19406	----	Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net [Illustration] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL INFORMATION, ART, SCIENCE, MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY, AND MANUFACTURES. NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 24, 1877. Vol. XXXVI.--No. 8. [NEW SERIES.] $3.20 per Annum [POSTAGE PREPAID.] * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ESTABLISHED 1845 MUNN & CO., Editors and Proprietors. PUBLISHED WEEKLY AT NO. 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. O.D. MUNN. A.E. BEACH. * * * * * TERMS FOR THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. One copy, one year, postage included. $3.20 One copy, six months, postage included. 1.60 Clubs.--One extra copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be supplied gratis for every club of five subscribers at $3.20 each; additional copies at same proportionate rate. Postage prepaid. THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT is a distinct paper from the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. THE SUPPLEMENT is issued weekly; every number contains 16 octavo pages, with handsome cover, uniform in size with SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Terms of subscription for SUPPLEMENT, $5.00 a year, postage paid, to subscribers. Single copies 10 cents. Sold by all news dealers throughout the country. COMBINED RATES.--The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and SUPPLEMENT will be sent for one year, postage free, on receipt of seven dollars. Both papers to one address or different addresses, as desired. The safest way to remit is by draft, postal order, or registered letter. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, N.Y. Subscriptions received and single copies of either paper sold by all the news agents. * * * * * VOL. XXXVI., No. 8. [NEW SERIES.] _Thirty-second Year_. NEW YORK, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1877. * * * * * CONTENTS. (Illustrated articles are marked with an asterisk.) Academy of Sciences, New York. 117 Answers to correspondents. 123 Arts, lost, in New York. 113 Augers and drills (16). 123 Bain, Alexander. 121 Blue glass deception, the. 113 Blue glass science. 121 Boilers for small engines (2,14). 123 Business and personal. 123 Caffeone. 114 Chromate of lime, acid (18). 123 Circle problem, the three (8). 123 Clock collector, a. 119 Coal, burning small (19). 123 Cremation temple, proposed*. 119 Dark days (11). 123 Dates and the date palm*. 111 Diseases, infections. 121 Dyeing process, a cold (9). 123 Engines for boats (12). 123 Floors, filling for hardwood (6). 123 Friction at rest (15). 123 Frost plant of Russia, the*. 116 Glass making, toughened. 121 Greenhouses, tar paint in (3). 123 Harness cockeye, improved*. 118 Heating ranges (17). 123 Heating rooms (7). 123 Hemi-plunger, the.* 115 Hens, Leghorn. 114 Ink, purple marking. 117 Iron trade in England. 117 Laboratory manipulations. 117 Lathe chuck.* 118 Lathe, screw-cutting.* 118 Lead, sea water and. 119 Moneyed men. 122 Mortar, black (10). 123 New books and publications. 122 Ornaments in winter, natural. 118 Papin's steam engine.* 120 Patent decision, a. 115 Patent matters in Washington. 116 Patent office annual report. 117 Patents, American and foreign. 122 Patents, official list of. 124 Planing mill machinery. 115 Posterity, for--a suggestion. 112 Railroad, the Wetli mountain.* 114 Rock sections for microscopy. 117 Roofs, leaky slate (1). 123 Rose bushes, soot for. 119 Salicylic acid for the feet. 115 Sawdust in rough casting. 114 Seed-distributing panthers. 111 Self-reliance and success. 121 Snow a fertilizer. 119 Something to do. 121 Spectroscope prisms (11). 123 Steam engine, Papin's. 120 Steam engine, the Brown. 120 Suicide statistics. 116 Telegraph, the speaking. 120 Trolling hook, improved*. 114 Watch, position of a (13). 123 Waterproofing, suint for. 114 White color in animals. 114 Wire, crossing a river on a. 121 Wool, purifying. 114 Zinc roofs (4). 123 * * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, No. 60, For the Week ending February 24, 1877. I. ENGINEERING AND MECHANICS.--Artificial Production of Ice by Steam Power--The American Roller Skate Rink, Paris, 1 engraving.--The Little Basses Light House, 4 figures.--The Souter Point Electric Light.--On the Minute Measurements of Modern Science, by ALFRED MAYER.--Method of Measuring by Means of the Micrometer Screw furnished with the Contact Level; Method of Electric Contact Applied to Measurements with the Micrometer Screw, 2 engravings.--Abstracts from Report of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers on the Metric System.--New Turret Musical and Chiming Clock for the Bombay University, with 1 page of engravings.--Water Gas and its advantages, by GEO. S. DWIGHT.--Brattice Cloths in Mines.--Eight Horse Power Portable Steam Engine, with dimensions, particulars, and 1 page of engravings.--Clyde Ship Building and Marine Engineering in 1876.--Four Masted Ships.--New Bridges at and near New York city.--The Sutro Tunnel.--Independent Car Wheels.--Passenger Travel, New York city. II.--TECHNOLOGY.--Design for Iron Stairway, and Iron Grilles, with 3 engravings.--The Process of Micro-photography used in the Army Medical Department.--Direct Positives for Enlarging.--A Monster Barometer.--Architectural Science, Carpentry Queries and Replies.--The Carpet Manufactures of Philadelphia. How the Centre Selvage is Formed, 3 figures.--Glass of the Ancients.--On the Preservation of Meat; a resume of the various methods now practiced.--California Pisciculture.--Savelle's System of Distillation, 2 engravings.--New Bromine Still, by W. ARVINE, 1 engraving.--The Phoenix Steam Brewery, New York.--French Cognac Distillation, 1 engraving.--Schwartz's Sugar Refinery, London. General description of the establishment.--Vienna Bread and Coffee.--How Pictorial Crystals are Produced and Exhibited. III. LESSONS IN MECHANICAL DRAWING. New Series. By Professor C.W. MACCORD; with several engravings. IV. ELECTRICITY, LIGHT, HEAT, SOUND, ETC.--Magnetic Action of Rotatory Conductors.--The Sensation of Sound.--Sympathetic Vibration of Pendulums.--Protection from Lightning.--Musical Tones, photograph of. V. MEDICINE, HYGIENE, ETC.--On the Treatment of Typhoid Fevers. By ALFRED L. LOOMIS, M.D.--Hydrophobia Cured by Oxygen.--The efficacy of Lymph, by M. HILLER.--Success of Chloral Hydrate for Scalds and Burns.--Uses of Cyanide of Zinc.--Dr. Brown-Sequard on Nerve Disease. VI. MISCELLANEOUS.--Geological Notes.--A Geological Congress.--The last Polar Expedition.--Old Men of Science.--Pre-glacial Men.--Post-glacial period, Esthonia.--Northern Pacific Formations. TERMS:--SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, one year, postpaid, _five dollars_. One copy of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and one copy of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, one year, postpaid, _seven dollars_. CLUBS.--One extra copy of the SUPPLEMENT will be supplied gratis for every club of five SUPPLEMENT subscribers at $5.00 each. All the back numbers of the SUPPLEMENT, from the commencement, January 1, 1876, can be had. Price 10 cents each. NOW READY.--The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT for 1876. Complete in two large volumes. Over 800 quarto pages; over 2,000 engravings. Embracing History of the Centennial Exhibition. New Illustrated Instructions in Mechanical Drawing. Many valuable papers, etc. Price five dollars for the two volumes, stitched in paper; or six dollars and fifty cents, handsomely bound in stiff covers. Remit by postal order. Address MUNN & CO., PUBLISHERS, 37 Park Row, New York. [Hand->] Single copies of any desired number of the SUPPLEMENT sent to any address on receipt of 10 cents. * * * * * PUBLISHERS' NOTICE. New subscriptions to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT will, for the present, be entered upon our books to commence with the year, and the back numbers will be sent to each new subscriber unless a request to the contrary accompanies the order. Instead of a notice being printed on the wrapper, announcing that a subscription is about to end, the time of expiration is now denoted in the printed address each week, so that the subscriber may see when the period for which he has prepaid is about to expire. * * * * * DATES AND THE DATE PALM. Even those whose knowledge of the customs of the Orient extends no further than a recollection of the contents of that time-honored story book, the "Arabian Nights," are doubtless aware that, since time immemorial, the date has been the chief food staple of the desert-dwellers of the East. The "handful of dates and gourd of water" form the typical meal and daily sustenance of millions of human beings both in Arabia and in North Africa, and to this meager diet ethnologists have ascribed many of the peculiar characteristics of the people who live upon it. Buckle, who finds in the constant consumption of rice among the Hindoos a reason for the inclination to the prodigious and grotesque, the depression of spirits, and the weariness of life manifest in that nation, likewise considers that the morbid temperament of the Arab is a sequence of vegetarianism. He points out that rice contains an unusual amount of starch, namely, between 83 and 85 per cent; and that dates possess precisely the same nutritious substances as rice does, with the single difference that the starch is already converted into sugar. To live, therefore, on such food is not to satisfy hunger; and hunger, like all other cravings, even if partially satisfied, exercises control over the imagination. "This biological fact," says Peschel, "was and still is the origin of the rigid fastings prescribed by religions so widely different, which are made use of by Shamans in every quarter of the world when they wish to enter into communication with invisible powers." Peschel and Buckle, however, are at variance as to the influence of the date diet as affecting a race; and the former remarks that, "while no one will deny that the nature of the food reacts upon the mental powers of man, the temperament evoked by different sorts is different;" yet "we are still far from having ascertained anything in regard to the permanent effects of daily food, especially as the human stomach has, to a great degree, the power of accommodating itself to various food substances, so that with use even narcotics lose much of their effect." The same author also adds that the date "trains up independent and warlike desert tribes, which have not the most remote mental relationship to the rice-eating Hindoos." It remains for the reader to reconcile this disagreement of learned doctors according to his own judgment. The evidence of those who subsist on the date is certainly overwhelming in its favor. The Assyrians, tradition says, asserted that it was such a great gift to them that its worth could not be too extravagantly told; for they had found, for the leaves, the fruit, the juices, and the wood of the tree, three hundred and sixty different uses. The Mohammedans adopt the date palm into their religion as an emblem of uprightness, and say that it miraculously sprang into existence, fully grown, at the command of the Prophet. Palm branches still enter as symbols of rejoicing into Christian religious ceremonies; and throughout Palestine constant reference is found to the date and the palm in the naming of towns. Bethany means "a house of dates." Ancient Palmyra was a "city of palms," and the Hebrew female name Tamar is derived from the word in that language signifying palm. In Africa there is an immense tract of land between Barbary and the great desert named Bilidulgerid, "the land of dates," from the profusion of the trees there growing. [Illustration: GATHERING DATES IN CEYLON.] In this country, the date as an article of food is classed with the prune, the fig, and the tamarind, to be used merely as a luxury. We find it coming to the markets at just about this time of year in the greatest quantities, packed in baskets roughly made from dried palm leaves. The dates, gathered while ripe and soft, are forced into these receptacles until almost a pasty mass, often not over clean, is formed. Their natural sugar tends to preserve them; but after long keeping they become dry and hard. This renders them unfit for use; but they still find a sale to the itinerant vendors who, after steaming them to render them soft (of course at the expense of the flavor), hawk them about the streets. Dates in the pasty condition are not relished by those who live on them; nor, on the other hand, would we probably fancy the dried, almost tasteless fruit which, strung on long straws, is carried in bunches by the Arabs in their pouches. The date palm (_phoenix dactylifera_) is the most important species of the dozen which make up its genus. Though slow in growth, it shoots up a magnificent stem, to the height sometimes of eighty feet, the summit of which is covered with a graceful crown of pinnated leaves. The trunk is exceedingly rough and spiny; the flower spathes, which appear in the axils of the leaves, are woody, and contain branched spadices with many flowers; more than 11,000 have been counted on a single male spadix. As the flowers are dioecious, it is necessary to impregnate the female blossoms artificially in order to insure a good crop; and to this end the male spadices are cut off when the pollen is ripe and carefully shaken over the female ones. At from six to ten years of age, the tree bears, and then remains fruitful for upward of 200 years. An excellent idea of the palm in full bearing may be obtained from our illustration, which represents the mode of gathering the dates, of which a single tree will often yield from one to four hundredweight in a season. The fruit varies much in size and quality; and in the oases of the Sahara forty-six varieties have been named. The utilizations of the date palm and its products are very numerous. The stem yields starch, and timber for houses, boats, fences, fuel, etc., as well as an inferior kind of sago. The leaves serve as parasols and umbrellas, and for material for roof covering, baskets, brushes, mats, and innumerable utensils. At their base is a fiber, which is spun into excellent rope. When the heart of the leaf is cut, a thick honey-like juice exudes, which, by fermentation, becomes wine (the "toddy" of India), or vinegar, and is also boiled down into sugar. The young shoots, when cooked, resemble asparagus; and the dates themselves are dried and ground into meal, from which bread is prepared. * * * * * PANTHERS AS SEED DISTRIBUTORS. It is well known that bees carry pollen from flower to flower, and that eggs of marine animals are often carried long distances in the stomachs of aquatic birds. A very curious instance of this kind, showing how vegetable species may be diffused by means which no botanist, however acute, would be likely to think of, is mentioned by Mr. Alfred Smee, who states that, attached to the skin of a panther recently shot in India, were found numerous seeds, each of which had two perfect hooks, manifestly designed to attach themselves to foreign bodies. As the panther moved about it collected the seeds on the skin and carried them about wherever it went; but when it rubbed against the shrubs, it of necessity brushed some off, and thus distributed them. One of the seeds produced a handsome plant, and beautiful clusters of tubular flowers. It was immediately recognized to be the _Martynia diandra_--a plant which, although introduced into England as far back as 1731, has scarcely ever been cultivated, although it has been commented on by botanists and other writers. * * * * * FOR POSTERITY--A SUGGESTION. The Irish gentleman who declined to aid an enterprise for the benefit of posterity, remarking that posterity had never done anything for him, was, after all the sport made of him, no unfair representative of the bulk of mankind. There is talk enough about doing great things for the advantage of future ages, but the real motive is apt to be something very different. To perpetuate their own name or fame, men or nations often set up lasting monuments, and sometimes unintentionally convey thereby to after times a few more or less instructive indications of the artistic or industrial skill of their day and generation. To further their own immediate ends, or to secure some benefit to their immediate descendants, men frequently undertake great material enterprises, and sometimes the work so done remains for ages the source of perennial good. But very rarely, if ever, can it be said that any work of man was undertaken solely, or even chiefly, for the benefit of posterity--more rarely still, for remote posterity. Hence it happens that we owe far more to accident, to fire, rapine, volcanic outbursts, and the protecting care of desolation, for the knowledge we have of times long past, than to any intentional legacies of art or learning left us by the men of those times. The lost and abandoned tools, weapons, and ornaments of the stone age are all that we have to tell us of the childhood of humanity. Had no fiery disasters ever overtaken the pile-dwellers of the Swiss lakes, we should probably have never heard of such a people. To the mud and ashes of Vesuvius, rather than to the historians of the Roman Empire, we owe the best of our knowledge of how Roman cities looked and Roman citizens lived eighteen hundred years ago. In the fragments of a _terra cotta_ library, buried in the ruins of a royal palace, we find almost our only records of the arts and sciences of ancient Assyria. Under the ash heaps of a forgotten age, in Cyprus, Cesnola finds the only known vestiges of a primitive civilization, reaching far back into the domain of mythology. Thanks to the destroyers of Troy and Mycenæ, and the protective care of temporary oblivion, Schliemann is now able to verify tradition and lay before an astonished and delighted world numerous precious relics of heroic ages hitherto remembered only in song. Who can estimate the value of these and similar findings to us--the value of the revelations they bring of man's condition in those remote ages? Who can say how many or how few the ages will be ere the time comes when the antiquaries of the future will be rejoicing over equally fragmentary vestiges of the doings and possessions of our day? On the other hand, who can estimate the value of the knowledge lost beyond hope of recovery, or the checks to human progress experienced, in the repeated wiping out, so to speak, of the higher races and the civilizations they embodied? And who can say that similar disasters may not come again and again to humanity? Suppose a pestilence peculiarly fatal to the white race should fall upon the world to-day, crippling, perhaps exterminating, the now dominant civilized nations; how long would the material elements of our science and art or general culture remain with power to enlighten the barbarous tribes that would inherit the earth? Human progress has more than once been set back for centuries by such natural or unnatural causes, leaving the sites of once splendid civilizations to be overrun with barbaric hordes knowing nothing of the better times that went before. Suppose, again, that, by one of those geologic changes so numerous in the history of our unstable globe, the existing continents should sink a thousand feet. Every center of modern civilization would be submerged. The great social and political organizations of humanity would be broken up, and in the wreck of nations that would ensue very little of the glory and culture of the race could survive. The earth is dotted with vestiges of lost and forgotten empires. Can we reasonably assume, in the face of such facts, that the nations of to-day are immortal? The question is: Shall we continue to trust to chance, as all other civilizations have, for the preservation of the conquests we have made among the forces and secrets of nature; or shall we do something positive for posterity, and leave the ages to come some certain and abiding legacy of our treasures of art and learning? It may be that human progress will go on and on to the end of time without a break; that in the course of centuries mankind will surpass us in civilization, knowledge and power, as much as we surpass the earliest and rudest men we have yet found traces of: maybe infinitely more. In such a case, what would not the scholars of, say the year 5000 A.D., or any other future age, be willing to give for a comprehensive picture of humanity as it exists to-day--for a reasonably complete library of our literature, science, and art? We may safely assume that nothing of the sort will be possible if matters are left to take their natural course. By that time every structure, every machine, every book, every work of art, now in use or stored away in our libraries and galleries of art, will have disappeared, a prey to time, the elements, or the more destructive violence of man. On the other hand, it may be that, through repeated disasters of one sort or another, mankind, three thousand years hence, will have lost all the knowledge men ever possessed, and be slowly struggling upward for the hundredth time from inherited barbarism. In such a case, what enormous benefits might not accrue to man from a fortunate opening up of the wealth of knowledge we possess! In any supposable case between these extremes of progress or degradation, a legacy of art and learning, such as we might easily set apart for remote posterity, would certainly be acceptable, perhaps extremely useful. Besides, it might be possible for us to set such a worthy example to those who shall come after us that, come what might, humanity would never be left absolutely void of the means of instruction, nor any worthy human achievement be absolutely lost or forgotten. The experience of these later years has demonstrated the value of such legacies even when unintentional, unselected, and wretchedly fragmentary. It has made clear also how a legacy deliberately made may be indefinitely preserved. Roughly outlined, the carrying out of such a truly philanthropic enterprise would involve nothing more difficult than-- _First_. The construction of a practically indestructible treasure chamber in some secure place; and _Second_. The preparation of a library well calculated to withstand the corroding tooth of time. Two kinds of structures would meet the first demand--massive pyramids of covered earth or of solid masonry, or chambers hewn from the heart of some granitic hill. In low latitudes, where glacial action is not to be feared, the pyramidal form might be preferable: in more northern regions the rock-cut chamber would probably be at once cheaper and more durable. In either case, an elevated site should be chosen as a safeguard against submergence. To secure the permanence of the records would be more difficult. Ordinary books and papers would clearly be unsuitable for long keeping; though for comparatively limited periods they might answer if securely packed in airtight waterproof cases. Nothing liable to spontaneous decay should be admitted. Stereotype plates of metal would be even more open to objection than printed sheets. The noble metals would be too costly, the baser would corrode; and with either the value of the plates as metal would be a standing danger to the deposit. The material basis of the library must be, as nearly as possible, worthless for other uses (to insure them against the natural greed of man), yet such as will hold the records sharply and faithfully under all circumstances. The _terra cotta_ tablets of ancient Assyria are instructive in this connection. Possibly plates of artificial stone, or sheets of a _papier-maché_-like preparation of asbestos, might be less bulky and equally durable. Having determined this point, and dug from the solid rock a chamber for the reception of our legacy, the next step would be the selection of its contents. Obviously the books to be preserved should embrace first of all lexicons and grammars of every known form of speech, since it is impossible to tell which of the dialects of to-day will be the parents of the dominant tongue of any distant future time; while we may be practically certain that some one or more of the languages of to-day will furnish a key to any language that men will ever use. Next in order would come encyclopædias, the most comprehensive and complete that there might be room for. The sacred books of all nations might come next; then the works of the great poets, historians and novelists; after them, the best obtainable records of art, science, the various industries, and so on, with specimens of the best and most typical of our works of art, manufacture, and the like. The spaces between the various articles should be filled in with some insoluble and neutral substance, to prevent corrosion, or the infiltration of water and consequent damage to the plates. Then, the entrance to the chamber being securely sealed, permanent records should be made in many places and in various ways, setting forth the purpose of the deposit, its exact location, and the nature of its contents. Among such records not the least valuable would be deeply cut polyglot inscriptions on natural cliffs in different parts of the world, observation having shown that such records may remain to challenge human curiosity for ages after all other records of their time have disappeared. Even a single deposit of this sort might prove of enormous value to the race at some critical period of its history. But the probability is that the good work would not end with one deposit. From age to age this and other nations might repeat the experiment, commemorating in this way important epochs in their history. The fashion once set might easily become a permanent feature of all great national celebrations. The cost would be comparatively small: a penny contribution from each of the visitors to the Philadelphia Exhibition, for example, would have been quite sufficient to provide for a memorial of our first Centennial year that would have carried an imperishable picture of the civilization of the day to the end of--our first millennium, at least; and we may safely infer that, whatever may be the condition of the world at that not very remote epoch, a memorial of that sort would be something worth having. As we have intimated, the custom might easily become general, so that in the course of ages the earth would become dotted with such repositories of art and learning. Then, come what might to humanity--whatever might be the ups and downs of nations--whatever moral, social, or intellectual advances mankind might make--whatever lapses or disasters might befall them--it could hardly happen that a knowledge of any considerable period of human history, or the advantage of any worthy human achievement, could ever be permanently blotted out and lost. It is true that "posterity" has never done anything of the sort for us. It is true that "posterity" may have no valid claim on us for such a legacy. But we might venture to make "posterity" a present! It would not cost us much, and it might turn out to be immensely valuable and useful to some far future age. * * * * * THE LOST ARTS IN NEW YORK. While the objects of ancient art contained in the Castellani collection, recently placed on exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in this city, are individually of great rarity and archæological value, they derive additional importance from the fact that, viewed conjunctively as a collection, they represent connected histories of two great industrial arts extending over many centuries. Both in the work of the goldsmith and of the potter, we are enabled to trace progress from the earliest stages up to a period when the greatest skill was attained, and even subsequently into the era of decadence. In both industries, we find that ancient and mediæval workmen possessed knowledge which we do not possess; and among Signor Castellani's treasures may be seen handiwork which is the embodiment of two lost arts, the secrets of which the modern world, with all its infinitely superior wisdom, has not yet rediscovered. The productions, in the Castellani collection, of precious metal workers dating from prehistoric epochs, the exact dates of which are wholly unknown, and covering the long period ending in the thirteenth century, are represented by the contents of some twenty cases. The first three of these receptacles bear no dates. The ornaments which they contain are of bronze, amber, silver, and glass (the latter having become converted into opalescent silicic acid), and were found in Præneste (modern Palestrina, Italy), and in the territory which was ancient Etruria. Case No. 4 bears date 700 B.C., and here is a rich treasure of primitive Etruscan and Phoenician ornaments of gold, adorned with granulated work. Signor Castellani considers that the workmanship of these objects is so perfect that it is impossible at the present time to explain the process of execution, and very difficult to imitate it. The ornaments are of two kinds--those for ordinary use and those for funereal purposes. The first are massive, and might be worn for years without injury; the others are extremely delicate. All are made of the purest gold, and their decoration evinces the most consummate skill and taste on the part of the artist. There is, for example, a small flask, shaped something like an antique wine jar, and about five inches in height. It is of beaten gold, and is covered with a pattern intended to imitate the similarly shaped designs of variegated glass of the Græco-Phoenician period. This pattern is entirely produced by minute globules of metal soldered to the surface in tiers of zigzag or Vandyke patterns. Another specimen is a strip of gold covered with granulated lines and bearing a row of birds in relief. On other ornaments are exquisitely carved heads and flowers, produced apparently by hammering on the reverse of the object, but with a delicacy and precision of touch which is simply marvelous. The closest students of this ancient handiwork are entirely at a loss to understand how the processes of melting, soldering, and wire drawing, which were employed in the art, were performed. Modern workmen have failed in their attempts exactly to imitate the old ornaments; and it is certain that the secret of the mechanical agents, whereby it was possible to separate and join pieces of gold hardly perceptible to the naked eye, is lost. Signor Castellani has taken great pains to solve the problem, reading all the treatises of mediæval goldsmiths, inquiring of all classes of Italian jewelers, and experimenting with all kinds of chemicals, in the hope of finding the solder wherewith the minute grains were attached to the surface of the metal. At last he found some of the old processes still employed in a remote district, hidden in the recesses of the Apennines, far from the great towns. Bringing away a few workmen, he gave them much more instruction, and at last succeeded, not perhaps in equalling, but certainly in rivalling the ancient productions. We question whether the Etruscans used fire at all in their soldering, as it would be almost an impossibility to keep the excessively fine tools necessary for the work at a proper heat. Mr. Joshua Rose offers the plausible suggestion that a cold flux was employed, with which the workman followed the lines or dots of his pattern. Then the gold granules were possibly sprinkled over the surface, and adhered only to the solder, the superfluous grains being brushed off after the solder had set. There is also a fragment of a finely woven fabric, made of threads of pure gold, found on the body of a woman in a tomb at Metapontum. This is without doubt the material to which the Psalmist refers in speaking of "the King's daughter" having "clothing of wrought gold;" and in the Pentateuch there is reference to gold threads being used upon looms. As we follow the various objects in the twenty cases above mentioned, the decline of the goldworker's art when the use of enamels came into vogue is evidenced. Continuing on to later periods, the decadence is more marked under the successors of Alexander. In Rome, under the emperors, we find gold used as a mere setting for precious stones, and finally the collection terminates with examples of workmanship of the time of Charlemagne, when the workmen had lost their cunning, and the noble metal had been altogether debased to secondary uses. The second instance where a lost art is exemplified in Signor Castellani's collection is in the glazing of the Gubbio majolica. We have not space here to review the magnificent series of ancient specimens of pottery in detail; and thus it will suffice to say that, beginning with some of the earliest pieces made by the Arabs when they occupied Sicily, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, the collection presents examples of all the finest types of later mediæval art. Gubbio, where the peculiar kind of majolica above noted was made, is a small town once in the territory of the dukes of Urbino; and in the sixteenth century it became famous for its pottery. This was attributable to the talent of one man, Giorgio Andreoli, who is reputed to have invented the wonderful luster characteristic of the Gubbio ware. The body of majolica is mere common clay; and after the piece is finished on the wheel, it is dried and burnt in a furnace. After the biscuit thus prepared has been dipped in the glaze, the colors are applied on the soft surface of the latter, and the vitrifying process fuses all into a glossy enamel of the color of the pigment. This is still the common practice; and we mention it merely to show that to his pigment and glaze Andreoli must have added some third substance, which rendered the enamel capable of reflecting white light as blue, red, green, or yellow light--in other words, of giving the object a luster of a color wholly different from the tints of the pigment. He evidently could produce any desired color at will, and the effects gained are indescribably beautiful. The Castellani collection contains 130 superb specimens, which glow like jewels. In one, the scene of the nativity of Christ is provided with the figures in low relief, and the exquisite cerulean lustre is imparted to give the effect of moonlight. The rarest pieces are those of which the luster is a delicate green. Some blaze with yellow, as if of gold; others exhibit the brilliancy of the ruby; while others resemble the interior of the pearl oyster shell. Whether this sheen is produced by polarization of the light in some manner, or whether it is at all analogous to fluorescence, is yet to be decided. The impression of the surface with fine microscopic lines might produce an iridescence, but not separate and clearly defined hues. The ware was intended for ornamental purposes, not for household use; and it was suspended against the rich, dark tapestries of the period with which walls were covered, thus aiding, as it were, in illuminating the apartment with its exquisite radiance. * * * * * THE BLUE GLASS DECEPTION. On September 26, 1871, General A.J. Pleasonton, of Philadelphia, Pa., obtained a patent for "utilizing the natural light of the sun transmitted through clear glass, and the blue or electric(!) solar rays transmitted through blue, purple, or violet colored glass, or its equivalent, in the propagation and growth of plants and animals." In his specification, of which the above constitutes one claim, he states that he has discovered "special and specific efficacy in the use of this combination of the caloric rays of the sun and the electric blue light in stimulating the glands of the body, the nervous system generally, and the secretive organs of man and animals." He also states that he finds that vegetation is vastly improved by the transmitted blue light. These alleged re-discoveries--for the General only claims to have devised the method of utilizing them--were extensively promulgated through the press early in 1871. Subsequently, in 1876, General Pleasonton published a book on the subject, the volume being appropriately bound in blue and printed in blue ink. Recently public attention has again been called to the subject by a New York daily journal. The peculiar kind of glass in question is known as "pot metal blue," that is, it is stained a bluish violet throughout, and is not clear glass covered with flashings of blue glass. It is used in greenhouses, etc., in connection with clear glass; and in General Pleasonton's grapery it appears that only every eighth row of panes was blue. Some of the results alleged to have been obtained by exposing animals and plants are as follows: Twenty grape vines, in their second year, after being set out under the blue glass, bore 1,200 lbs. of splendid fruit. A very weak Alderney bull calf was in four months developed into a strong and vigorous bull. Heifers when kept under blue glass may safely bear young when 18 months old. A weak child, weighing but 3½ lbs. at birth, weighed at the end of four months 22 lbs.--the light in this instance having come through blue curtains. Two major-generals with rheumatism were cured in three days. A young lady whose hair had come out regained her tresses; and to these must be added various other cures of severe ailments which we have not space here to recapitulate. The above are the alleged facts; and we propose to consider the supposed discovery in the light of previous investigations. With reference to the theories of electricity, etc., advanced by General Pleasonton to account for his phenomena, their absurdity is so complete that we shall waste no time over them. The important question in the matter, and the only one in which the public is interested, is whether or not blue glass is capable of producing all or any of the results imputed to its use. In order to clear the way for the examination of the investigations, the records of which we have carefully collected, let us consider first those which General Pleasonton quotes in support of his views. These are (1) Seunebier's researches, which go to show that the blue and violet rays are the most active in determining the decomposition of carbonic acid in plants, and (2) experiments of Dr. Morichini, repeated by Carpa and Ridolfi, proving that violet rays magnetized a small needle. The first statement has been totally disproved. Dr. Von Bezold, in his recent work on color, states that "the chemical processes in plants, as far as they are dependent upon light, are principally caused by the rays of medium and of lower refrangibility. The development of the green color of the chlorophyll, the decomposition of carbonic acid, as well as the formation of starch, etc., in the grains of the chlorophyll, are induced by the red, green, and orange rays." The blue, violet, and ultra violet rays, the same authority goes onto explain, influence "the rapidity of growth, compel the so-called zoöspores to move in certain directions, and alter the positions of leaves, etc." In confirmation of this, we have Sach's experiments in 1872, which show that light, transmitted through the yellow solution of potassium chromate, enables green leaves to decompose over 88 per cent. of carbonic acid; while that passed through blue ammonia copper oxide decomposes less than 8 per cent. This proves the superiority of the yellow ray to decompose carbonic acid; and this fact Professor J.W. Draper discovered a long time ago by the direct use of the spectrum. In still further confirmation, we may cite the investigations of Vogel, Pfeiffer, Selim, and Placentim. The last three have conducted researches in full knowledge of those of General Pleasonton, and their experiments show that yellow rays are more promotive of the evolution of carbon in animals and its absorption in plants than any others in the spectrum, the violet rays having least power in these respects, with the exception of the red rays in the case of animals. The absorption of carbonic acid by plants, and its evolution by animals, we hardly need add, are prime essentials to the growth and health of each. The notion that light possesses a magnetizing power on steel was upset by Niepce de St. Victor in 1861. After removing every source of error, he "found it impossible to make one sewing needle, solarized for a very long time under the rays of light concentrated by a strong lens, attract another suspended by a hair, whether the light was white or colored by being made to pass through a violet-colored glass." We can proceed further and even show that violet light is in some respects hurtful to plants. Cailletet, for example, says in 1868 that "light which was passed through a solution of iodine in carbonic disulphide prevents decomposition altogether." Baudrimont says that "no colored light permits vegetables to go through all the phases of their evolutions. Violet-colored light is positively injurious to plants; they absolutely require white light." This scientist instituted the most elaborate experiments on the subject, ranging over 11 years, from 1850 to 1861; and the result of all his labor may be summed up in the simple statement that no illumination which human ingenuity can devise is so well adapted for promoting natural processes as the pure white light provided by the Creator. So much by way of general denial of the claims of superior efficacy residing in blue light of any kind. Now we have yet to examine the peculiar variety of blue light here used. Sunlight can, by means of the prism, be split into colored rays, any one of which we may isolate, and so obtain a certain colored light. Similarly we may obtain light of a desired color by the use of a colored glass which will stop out the rays not of the hue required. So that we may obtain violet light from the spectrum or by filtering sunlight through violet glass. When, however, Dr. Von Bezold, as above, asserts that the violet rays have such and such an effect, he means the violet of the spectrum, which has its specific duty to perform in the compound light of which it is a necessary portion. But the violet light of the spectrum and filtered violet sunlight are altogether different things. The first, as our valued contributor Dr. Van der Weyde has very clearly pointed out, is "a homogeneous color containing, besides the luminous, the invisible chemical rays without any caloric rays; while the light colored by passing through violet glass is a mixture of blue rays with the red rays at the other end of the spectrum; and it contains a quantity of the chemical rays belonging to the blue and the caloric rays belonging to the red. In fact, violet glass passes a light identical with sunlight, only much reduced in power, containing but a portion of its caloric, chemical, and luminous agency: being simply deprived of its strongest rays." And this the spectroscope has clearly demonstrated. Reduced to its simplest terms, then, the necessary conclusion is that the violet glass acts purely as a shade for decreasing the intensity of the solar light. And in the simple fact that it does so serve as a shade lies the sole virtue (if any there be) of the glass. In 1856, Dr. Daubeny made experiments on the germination of seeds, and in his report is this suggestive sentence: "In a south aspect, indeed, light which had passed through the ammonia sulphate of copper (blue solution), and even darkness itself, seemed more favorable than the whole of the spectrum; but this law did not seem to extend to the case of seeds placed in a northern aspect where the total amount of light was less considerable." In our next issue, we shall review the effects of light and darkness upon the animal organization, and endeavor to account for the curing of diseases and the production of other phenomena which have been erroneously ascribed to the influence of the blue filtered sunlight. * * * * * THE WETLI MOUNTAIN RAILROAD AND ITS DISASTROUS TRIAL TRIP. Among the various means proposed of late years for building lines of railroad on the steep slopes of mountains, that of M. Wetli, of Zurich, Switzerland, has attracted considerable attention from European engineers. We have already laid before our readers the system of central toothed rails used on the Righi and other mountain roads in Europe. In the Wetli system, instead of this rail and the pinion on the vehicle engaging it, there is a drum having a helicoidal thread which engages with triangular rails. This drum is attached to the locomotive. The construction will be readily understood from the illustrations given herewith, which we take from _La Nature_. The thread on the drum is precisely that which would be formed could a rail similar to one of the central angular rails be wrapped around it; so that it always is in contact with the mid rails, and necessarily prevents any bodily sliding or rolling of the vehicles over the regular track when the drum is held motionless. The V-shaped mid rails are securely fastened to horizontal iron ties, which rest on wooden traverses. The angle of the V is 50°; the distance between any two traverses is 2.8 feet. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--THE WETLI MOUNTAIN RAILROAD.] The locomotive has three coupled axles, on the mid one of which the drum is attached so as to be raised or lowered to engage the rails at the will of the engineer: it being possible to cause it to act on the rails with a pressure of 3.7 tons. The diameter of the drum is 2.14 feet. Its spiral thread is of steel, very solidly attached, and so made as to grip the rails to a distance of 0.6 inch below the level of the track. In order to insure this contact, on the drum axle are two pulleys which run on the exterior road, and of which the diameter determines the depth of the hold of the threads. These pulleys are 34.7 inches in diameter, while the driving wheels are very slightly in excess, to provide for the use of tyres. M. Wetli's invention, as we have described it, was placed between Woedensweil and Einsiedlen, Switzerland. The difference in altitude between these points is 1,513 feet, the distance 9.6 miles. The grade is from 4 to 5 per cent over the first six miles of the way, and subsequently decreases to 1 per cent. The Wetli railroad was established last October only on the heavy grade, that is, the first six miles. [Illustration: Fig. 2.] Early in November, trial trips were made which did not prove satisfactory. Sometimes the drum thread gripped the triangular rails properly and acted well; again it would wedge itself upon them, and often would simply roll over their tops without engaging at all. After the first trials, during which very many of the rails were broken, M. Welti re-adjusted the drum thread. Finally, he concluded that he had overcome all difficulties in his apparatus; and accordingly a formal trial was arranged on November 30. For about four and a half miles of the ascent the drum worked well; and the hoarfrost, with which the rails were thickly covered, showed good contact. Afterward it worked irregularly; but the station of Schindelleghi, a distance of five miles, was reached without accident, the locomotive dragging a car loaded with 20 tons of rails. It was then attempted to make the descent by the aid of the helicoidal drum; but this jumped the rails, and broke them almost immediately. By the aid of back pressure of steam and brakes, the locomotive was stopped. Then, unfortunately, the engine was started again; but hardly had the descent been resumed when it was evident that the drum was not holding, and that the speed was accelerating rapidly. Brakes and steam were both found useless, and the engine went tearing over the rails at the rate of a mile a minute. Of the fourteen persons in the vehicles, three were thrown out and killed, and the rest were more or less seriously injured. The heavily loaded car left the track, and tore up both central and side rails until its coupling broke. The engineer, with great intrepidity, clung to his engine, coolly giving signals to open switches so that the locomotive might run upon the level track and so expend its momentum; but the engine left the rails at a sharp curve, destroyed the track for about a hundred feet, and finally stopped a mass of ruins, with its brave engineer mortally wounded. Whether the Wetli system can be made to work as intended by the inventor is regarded as doubtful by the engineers who have examined into the causes of the disaster. * * * * * LEGHORN HENS. If a man keeps Leghorns he must have no garden, or he must cover the top of his hen yards. That Leghorns are great layers and active hens, there can be no denying, but they are great flyers. We have built our yard a lath and a half high, says the _Poultry Review_, but what do these saucy things care for that? Although they have the whole outside world to range in, yet the garden seems to have a greater attraction than all the rest. The other day we found it necessary to feed a weak chicken in the garden by itself, so that it might be sure of its share. A few minutes afterwards, on looking out of the window, we discovered the weak chicken in the henyard and two Leghorn hens finishing up its food. We went out, but the two robbers had fled. Going around the corner, we found them rolling in a flower bed. A Leghorn will do as much mischief in a garden in five minutes as anything we know of. * * * * * SAWDUST IN ROUGH CASTING. Siehr recommends very highly the use of sawdust in mortar as superior even to hair for the prevention of cracking and subsequent peeling off of rough casting under the action of storms and frost. His own house, exposed to prolonged storms on the seacoast, had patches of mortar to be renewed each spring, and after trying without effect a number of substances to prevent it, he found sawdust perfectly satisfactory. It was first thoroughly dried and sifted through an ordinary grain sieve to remove the larger particles. The mortar was made by mixing 1 part cement, 2 lime, 2 sawdust, and 5 sharp sand, the sawdust being first well mixed dry with the cement and sand. * * * * * SUINT FOR WATERPROOFING FABRICS.--A German chemist has patented the waterproofing of finely woven fabrics, linen, cotton, etc., by means of suint composition. He adapts his method to securing the suint to wool-washing establishments at a small cost. * * * * * ABSENCE OF WHITE COLOR IN ANIMALS. Some very curious physiological facts bearing upon the presence or absence of white colors in the higher animals have lately been adduced by Dr. Ogle. It has been found that a colored or dark pigment in the olfactory region of the nostrils is essential to perfect smell, and this pigment is rarely deficient except when the whole animal is pure white. In these cases the creature is almost without smell or taste. This, Dr. Ogle believes, explains the curious case of the pigs in Virginia adduced by Mr. Darwin, white pigs being poisoned by a poisonous root which does not affect black pigs. Mr. Darwin imputed this to a constitutional difference accompanying the dark color, which rendered what was poisonous to the white colored animals quite innocuous to the black. Dr. Ogle, however, observes that there is no proof that the black pigs eat the root, and he believes the more probable explanation to be that it is distasteful to them, while the white pigs, being deficient in smell and taste, eat it, and are killed. Analogous facts occur in several distinct families. White sheep are killed in the Tarentino by eating _hypericum criscum_, while black sheep escape; white rhinoceros are said to perish from eating _euphorbia candelabrum_; and white horses are said to suffer from poisonous food where colored ones escape. Now it is very improbable that a constitutional immunity from poisoning by so many distinct plants should, in the case of such widely different animals, be always correlated with the same difference of color; but the facts are readily understood if the senses of smell and taste are dependent on the presence of a pigment which is deficient in wholly white animals. The explanation has, however, been carried a step further by experiments showing that the absorption of odors by dead matter, such as clothing, is greatly affected by color, black being the most powerful absorbent, then blue, red, yellow, and lastly white. We have here a physical cause for the sense-inferiority of totally white animals which may account for their rarity in nature. For few, if any, wild animals are wholly white. The head, the face, or at least the muzzle or the nose, are generally black. The ears and eyes are also often black; and there is reason to believe that dark pigment is essential to good hearing, as it certainly is to perfect vision. We can therefore understand why white cats with blue eyes are so often deaf--a peculiarity we notice more readily than their deficiency of smell or taste.--_Dr. Wallace, British Association_, 1876. * * * * * IMPROVED TROLLING HOOK. Mr. Henry C. Brush, of Brush's Mills, N.Y., has patented through the Scientific American Patent Agency an improved troller, the novel feature in which consists in attaching a float to the shank of the implement under the revolving blade, the object being to keep the troller near the surface of the water, where the fish may see it more readily, and whereby the liability of catching in weeds and logs is obviated. [Illustration] A is a float, attached to the shank, _a_, of the troller. B is the spoon, which is swiveled in the usual manner. The device is very simple, and is claimed to prevent all the annoyance arising from the hook catching in sunken obstructions. * * * * * PURIFICATION OF WOOL AND WOOLEN STUFF. The process, patented some time ago, for the removal of straw, burrs, etc., from wool, by treatment with sulphuric acid, has been modified by Lisc as follows: The stuff is worked for one to two hours in a bath consisting of about 26 gallons sulphuric acid, of 3° to 6°, 1 lb. alum, ½ lb. salt, and 750 grains borax. It is then treated in a centrifugal machine, and afterward subjected to a temperature of 212° to 248°. For removal of the acid it is first washed with pure water for 1½ hours, then treated for two hours with fuller's earth, soda, and lime, and finally washed for two hours with fresh water. As sulphuric acid can only be employed with uncolored cloths, or such as have been dyed with indigo, chloride of zinc and chloride of manganese diluted to 6° are substituted with fabrics otherwise dyed. * * * * * CAFFEONE. Caffeone, the aromatic principle of coffee, may be isolated by distilling 5 or 6 lbs. roasted coffee with water, agitating the aqueous distillate with ether, and afterwards evaporating the ether. It is a brown oil, heavier than water, in which it is only very slightly soluble. An almost imponderable quantity of this essential oil will suffice to aromatize a gallon of water. * * * * * THE HEMI-PLUNGER. The novel form of vessel, to which the above odd name has been given by its inventor, M. Donato Tommasi, of Paris, France, is a combination of a boat wholly submerged with a raft: a connecting link, to borrow the naturalist's expression, between the submerged torpedo boat and the monitor. The advantages which are expected to be realized from this hybrid craft, the inventor describes as follows: "It is evident that a vessel, plunged several yards below the surface of the sea, is no longer influenced by wind or wave. Let the sea be agitated, let there be the most violent tempest, yet the boat which navigates under water will never be wrecked, for the same reason that a fish cannot be drowned. * * * What a beautiful vision, that of traversing the ocean, as a balloon floats through the air, with the same tranquillity, without shocks, without the insupportable rolling and pitching!" etc. The construction of the invention introduced in this glowing manner will be understood from Figs. 1 and 2. A is the plunger cylinder, shown with its side broken away in Fig. 2. In Fig. 1, G is the rudder, H the propeller, and I the tube through which sea water passes to the pump. In Fig. 2, C is the smokestack, M M are compartments in which water may be admitted to increase the weight, and hence the depth of flotation of the plunger, the same being filled or emptied by the pump, P. N is the hold for merchandise, partitioned off from the boiler room as shown. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--TOMMASI'S HEMI-PLUNGER] [Illustration: Fig. 2.--THE HEMI-PLUNGER, THE SUBMERGED PORTION] From the plunger, A, rise two hollow columns, E, to which metallic plates, F, are attached to diminish friction through the water. These support the upper division or platform, B. The second shaft (not lettered), which rises above the platform in Fig. 1, serves to ventilate the plunger. The columns, E, serve as shoots down which merchandise is lowered to the compartments, N; and their upper ends are received in two immense inverted cups attached to the bottom of the part, B. Through these cups pass large screws, which confine the columns so that, by removing the connection, the whole submarine apparatus may in case of necessity be freed from the upper works. On each side of the platform, B, which is of elliptical figure, is a large float, seen in Fig. 3, which, by means of racks and gearing, may be raised or lowered at will. Usually these floats are carried at a height of a yard above the water. In calm weather, this distance is increased, and in storms it is diminished, the object of the floats being to keep the whole vessel on an even plane, and to prevent too violent oscillations. In order to facilitate navigation in shallow water, the columns, E, may be made telescopic, and operated by hydraulic apparatus, so that they may be shortened at will. Any form of engine or propeller may be used. [Illustration: Fig. 3.--THE HEMI-PLUNGER ON A VOYAGE] Besides the advantage of the vessel being unaffected by waves, since its submerged portion travels far below them, the inventor claims that it will meet less resistance from the water than would a vessel of corresponding volume sailing on the surface. It will make faster progress, because it has no waves to mount and descend; and hence it always travels in a nearly right line. The screw being submerged at a great depth will not tend to turn the vessel from her straight path. The platform being easily detachable may serve as a raft in case of injury to the submarine boat. For fast travel, on lakes, rivers, and shallow water generally, M. Tommasi proposes to support his platform on two floats which rest on the surface of the water. No weight, therefore, is thrown on the submarine vessel, which need be constructed with only just enough buoyancy to sustain itself and its engine. In this way, the upper craft has no engine or other load than its cargo; and as it merely rests upon the surface, the inventor thinks that it will skim over the same like an ice boat on ice. For war purposes, the hemi-plunger is especially adapted, because the vulnerable portions, engines, boiler, rudder, etc., are wholly out of the reach of shot. Guns are mounted on the platform, which thus becomes a circular or elliptical turret, just above the water when the vessel is in fighting trim. Instead of steel armor, M. Tommasi has a new invention which he calls hydro-metallic plating. He reserves the details of this for future publication; but generally the armor consists of tubes in which liquid is forced under a pressure equivalent to the resistance, say, of forged steel. He thinks this will oppose shot as effectually as the solid metal, and will have the additional advantage of superior lightness. * * * * * IN-SOLES saturated with salicylic acid have been introduced as a remedy for perspiration of the feet. * * * * * SUPREME COURT PATENT DECISION. A United States patent was granted May 23, 1854, to John Myers and Robert G. Eunson for a wood-sawing machine for cutting boards into thin stuff for making picture frame and mirror backs. One of the principal claims was for the employment of two deflecting plates, one on each side of the circular saw, by which both sides of the sawed stuff, as fast as it was cut, was slightly deflected so as not to bind upon the saw. Suit was brought by the patentee against Dunbar and Hopper for infringement, and judgment was given in favor of the patentees, in the United States Circuit Court, this city, the damages awarded being $9,121. The defendants thereupon took an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, which tribunal has reversed the finding of the Circuit Court and dismissed the complaint. It was held by the Supreme Court that, inasmuch as the use of a single deflecting plate was old, well known, and in common use, it was simply an exercise of ordinary mechanical skill, and not a patentable invention, to employ a second deflecting plate, although the superiority of the double deflectors, for certain kinds of work, appears to be conceded. * * * * * PLANING MILL MACHINERY. The planing machine, next to the saw, is perhaps the most important agent for the conversion and manipulation of wood in use; and before proceeding to consider it, in its present form, says the author of this article, Mr. F.H. Morse, in the _Northwestern Lumberman_, it may not be out of place to notice briefly its origin and history. The first man to employ power in the operation of smoothing the surface of wood was Sir Samuel Bentham, of London, England, and to him belongs the honor of having discovered the principle upon which all planing machines operate. A brief personal notice of this remarkable inventor will serve to show under what circumstances the planing machine originated. His education was secured at the Westminster school of London, and, as far as can be ascertained from the meager records of his life that have come down to us, was of the most thorough kind, both classical and scientific, that could be obtained at that time (1770). When his education was finished, he was bound to the master shipwright of the Woolwich dockyard, to whom he served an apprenticeship of seven years, acquiring in that time a practical knowledge of the methods of working in both wood and iron then in vogue, and receiving the best scientific instruction that the development of that period afforded. After his term of apprenticeship had expired, he spent about two years in looking up the local peculiarities of other shipyards whose methods of working differed in some respects from those of the Woolwich mechanics. In 1779 he was ordered by the government to examine into the progress of shipbuilding in Northern Europe, and in carrying out this commission he repaired to Russia, where he invented the first machine for planing wood. Its mode of operation, whether reciprocating or rotating, it is impossible to ascertain positively, but the conclusion arrived at, after referring to the specifications of his first patent, which was issued in 1791, is that it worked upon the former principle by means closely analogous to the operation of planing by hand. He seems to have made no use of his venture in Russia, though he resided there several years and filled several important positions under the Russian Government. He returned to his native country in 1791 and joined his brother, Jeremy Bentham, who had at that time just received an appointment from the government to introduce industrial prisons in England. To utilize the unskilled labor of the convicts, the talents of Sir Samuel were called into use, and he devised a number of new machines, the greater part of which were for working wood. For want of a more suitable place, these machines were constructed at the residence of Jeremy Bentham, which was thus converted into the first manufactory for woodworking machines. This factory was established in 1794, but was soon found to be too small for the purpose, and another building was occupied. In a lecture before the Society of Arts, in 1853, Professor Willis, referring to the shops of the Benthams, stated that "there were constructed machines for all general operations in woodwork, including planing, molding, rebating, grooving, mortising, and sawing, both in coarse and fine work, in curved, winding, and transverse directions, and shaping wood in complicated forms; and further, as an example, that all parts of a highly finished window sash are prepared, also all parts of an ornamented carriage wheel were made so that nothing remained to be done by hand but to put the component parts together." In 1797 the Admiralty consented to the introduction of such of these machines as could be used to advantage in the different dockyards, and they were manufactured under the direction of Jeremy Bentham, and forwarded from time to time to Portsmouth and Plymouth, where they were used with good results, performing all that was claimed for them. Bentham was joined in 1810 by another genius (formerly in the employ of the brothers) by the name of Brunel, who had invented several valuable machines, among which was one for shaping block shells, which seems to have had Bentham's indorsement. As Inspector General, in 1803, Sir Samuel advised the Admiralty to introduce many of his new machines, and also to permit the use of steam engines; accordingly, the dockyards were fitted with engines for sawing, planing, boring, tenoning, mortising, etc. The labor saved by their use can be inferred from the fact that Brunel, who had assisted in their construction, received as a premium for his inventions the amount saved in the yards by their use in one year, which reached the respectable sum of $80,000. In the same year the government settled with Jeremy Bentham, after arbitration, and allowed him for machines furnished the yards and prisons, $100,000. We learn from testimony given before the arbitrators that "Sir Samuel Bentham prepared a system of machinery for the employment of men without skill, and particularly with a view to utilizing convict labor. In 1793 patents were taken out on these inventions to secure their exclusive use for the prisons." The testimony states that no skill was required in the use of these machines; they were introduced into the dockyards and worked by common laborers. It was claimed that nine tenths of the labor was saved by the use of Bentham's machines, which proves that they were at least effective, which cannot be said in all cases of those of modern manufacture. The patent of Bentham, issued in 1793, is doubtless one of the most remarkable ones ever issued, both for the importance of the inventions it protected and the clearness with which they and the principles on which they operated are described. Richards, in referring to that section of this patent which relates to rotary tools for woodcutting, quotes the inventor as saying: "The idea of adapting the rotative motion of a tool with more or less advantage, to give all sorts of substances any shape that may be required, is my own, and, as I believe, entirely new." For those not skilled in nor acquainted with the nature and extent of the various operations in wood conversion which come under the head of shaping with rotary cutters, it will be difficult to convey an idea of the invention here set forth; it includes, indeed, nearly all operations in woodworking, and as an original invention may be said to consist in the discovery of the fact that flat surfaces, or surfaces of any contour, can be properly prepared by the action of rotating tools. It is not to be wondered at that such an operation should not have been sooner discovered, for even at the present time there are few processes in treating material which seem so anomalous as that of planing a flat surface with cutters revolving in a circle of a few inches in diameter. In reference to planing mouldings, it is said: "If the circumference of a circular cutter be formed in the shape of any moulding, and projecting above the bench no more than necessary, the piece being shoved over the cutter will thus be cut to a moulding corresponding to the cutter--that is, the reverse of it, just as a plane iron cuts the reverse. If a plane cutter, such as that above spoken of for cutting a groove in the breadth of a piece, be made so thick, or, as we might be apt to say now, so broad, or so long, as to cover the whole breadth of the piece, it will present the idea of a roller. This I call a cutting roller; it maybe employed in many cases with great advantage to perform the office of a plane." The cutting roller of Bentham is the present cutter block of England, or the cutting cylinder of America, and after what has been quoted it may be seen that the idea of rotary planing and moulding machines had been fully grasped by Bentham. He goes on as usual to the various conditions which attach to the process of planing, and says further: "if a cutting roller of this sort be placed with its axis horizontal and the bench beneath, it may be made to rise and lower. The bench (machine) may be very readily adjusted, so as to determine the thickness to which a piece will be reduced by being passed under the roller." "To gain time, cutters may be applied to different sides of a piece at once, and such of them as make parallel cuts may be mounted on the same spindle." These extracts would not be out of place in an explanatory lecture or essay on woodcutting at the present day, and cannot help awakening surprise that they should have been written eighty-three years ago, when there had, so far as we know, been no precedents, nor even suggestions from previous practice. The foregoing shows that nearly all the fundamental principles, upon which woodcutting by machinery in its present development depends, were familiar to Sir Samuel Bentham, and though his name has been almost forgotten, it may be safely asserted that he gave to the world more useful inventions than any other man of his age. His work shows throughout a constant method and system of reasoning, which point rather to a life of persistent labor than to one of what would ordinarily be called genius. That latter quality he must certainly have possessed in the highest degree, for without it even his knowledge and experience could not have been equal to the work he accomplished. Directed to different ends, his talent and genius would doubtless have secured for him a fame that would live for years, though it does not seem possible that he could have conferred upon the world a greater benefit. * * * * * SUICIDE STATISTICS. A curious and suggestive table of statistics has recently appeared in France, which will doubtless prove of much value in the hands of students of psychology and nervous mental ailments. It relates to suicides; and the conditions, etc., of the people who made away with themselves in 1874 in France are taken as the basis of the figures. In that year, 5,617 suicides occurred, the largest number ever known in any one year in the country. Of these, 4,435, or 79 per cent., were committed by men, 1,182, or 21 per cent., by women. In spite of the careful investigations of the police, the ages of 105 people could be determined. The 5,512 others are divided as follows: 16 years, 29; between 16 and 21 years, 193; between 21 and 40 years, 1,477; between 40 and 60 years, 2,214; exceeding the last mentioned age, 1,599. About 36 per cent. of these unfortunates were unmarried, 48 per cent. married, and 16 per cent. widowers. Of those which constituted the last two classes, nearly two thirds had children. More than seven tenths of the suicides were effected by strangulation or drowning. The crime was most frequently committed during spring, when 31 per cent. of the whole number destroyed themselves; during other seasons the percentages were: in summer, 27; in winter, 23; in autumn, 19. Included in the tables are the results of the judicial inquests, showing the professions and callings of the deceased. About 33 per cent. were farmers, 30 per cent. mechanics, 4 per cent. merchants or business men, 16 per cent. members of the liberal professions, 4 per cent. servants, and 13 percent. were destitute of any calling. The table even analyzes, in all but 481 people, the motives which caused the fatal act. Thus we are told that 652 killed themselves because of reverses in fortune, 701 through family troubles, 572 through drunkenness, 243 through love, debauchery, etc.; 798 died to avoid physical suffering, 59 to avoid the penalties of capital crimes, 489 for unclassified troubles, and 1,622 were clearly shown to have been afflicted with some mental disease. * * * * * COMMUNICATIONS. * * * * * THE FROST PLANT OF RUSSIA. _To the Editor of the Scientific American:_ Mr. Charles Williams, of Winoa, Ohio, has written a letter to that veteran botanist, Humphrey Marshall, of Chester county, Pa., on the subject of the abovenamed plant, and my opinion concerning it has been asked for. Seeds of this plant were obtained by citizens of Boston, who had snow brought from the White Mountains and from the coast of Labrador, and who stated that they have "now the most unbounded satisfaction and pleasure of announcing that all signs are favorable to the realization of their fondest hopes." This wonderful plant, it seems, was found amid the perpetual snows of the northern boundaries of Siberia, in 1863, by Count Swinoskoff, the eminent Russian botanist, and it was by him cultivated at St. Petersburgh. The account sent me is very vague, and is evidently not from the pen of a botanist. It is stated that it comes forth on the first day of the year, grows to the height of three feet, and flowers on the third day. It continues in bloom for twenty-four hours, then dissolves itself, being of the finest snow; it has a stalk one inch in diameter, and leaves, three in number, 1½ inches wide, covered with infinitesimal frost or snow cones. The flower is of the shape of a star, with petals 3 inches long and ½ inch wide at the broadest part, forming a basketwork of frost. The seeds are like a pin's head. This is about all that can be gleaned from the description, and is by no means satisfactory. Allow me to present my humble views of an analogous discovery of frostwork on December 6, 1856, in a sandy loam in Chester county, Pa., near the Paoli monument. In the _Horticultural Journal_ of Philadelphia, then edited by J. Jay Smith (New Series, volume vii., page 73, 1857), an account was published of my observations then. These I have since more fully confirmed. The common dittany (cunila Mariana) is frequently met with in December, with the base of the stem surrounded with shellwork of ice, of a pearly whiteness. Dr. Darlington, in his "Flora Cestrica" published in 1853, page 199, under the article cunila, observes: "In the beginning of winter, after a rain, very curious ribbons of ice may be observed, attached to the base of the stems, produced, I presume, by the moisture of the earth rising in the dead stems by capillary attraction, and then being gradually forced out horizontally, through a slit, by the process of freezing. The same phenomenon has been observed in other plants. See observations on _helianthemum_, page 27." Had the doctor given a more extended investigation, I fancy he would have agreed with me as to the cause. I found hundreds of diversified specimens. I am not aware that it was after a rain, but I took up a number of the plants, and always found a vigorous scaly root bud, undergoing development at this early season under ground, to produce a new stem the following spring. I came to the conclusion that, as the temperature was below freezing and snow was on the ground, the expanding bud, in close proximity to the surface, gave out sufficient caloric or warmth to generate vapor from the moist soil. This vapor rising around the stem of the plant, and attracted by it, becomes congealed into what we term hoar-frost, in numerous forms; some like shellwork, others like tulips, with radiated petals, variously contorted, and often as symmetrical as snowflake crystals. [Illustration: Root-bud and frost-flower of the Cunila Mariana (Maryland Dittany). A, the developing or budding root. B, the old stem of the previous year. C, the congealed vapor or hoarfrost, forming the first flower of various shapes.] That plants in germinating have the power of generating heat was proved by Mr. Hunter and by Lamarck. Experiments of Hales and Du Hamel show that vegetation is not wholly suspended, however cold it may be; and that there is a regular and gradual progress till the returning warmth of spring gives a greater degree of velocity to the juices, rendering their development more vigorous and apparent. If the crystallization takes place when the air is calm, the crystals will be regularly formed; otherwise, when windy, I have seen them like a shell within a shell, very thin, of a pearly whiteness. Professor Tyndall has shown in a very beautiful manner that ice is but an agglomeration of snow crystals: the transparency of the former being due to the expulsion of the air, entrapped in and causing the whiteness and opacity of the latter. There is a formation called the snow plant of California, which arises to some height, and has been compared to various things, a fountain convoluted and enlarged above, a crystallized small bushy shrub, etc.; but on closer inquiry, I have failed as yet to get any definite ideas to its true character. Some bulbs in the soil might cause such formations by the congelation of vapor deposited successively upon itself, or the stems of the previous year's growth yet remaining, and thus give them a sheathing of frosting. The shape of a star is common in snow crystals, which we all know assume the most beautiful forms, and which are illustrated in various publications. The eminent botanist Count Swinoskoff should give us some clue as to the genus or character of the plant, the flower of which, we are told, melted away on being touched, and as to the stamens, the diamond seeds like a pin's head, etc. The whole needs further explanation. I trust those Bostonians who are in such hope will edify the public as to the final result of their experiment. What has that veteran in botany, Dr. Asa Gray, to say about it? Let some one well qualified tell us more about this frost flower of Russia. J. Stauffer. Lancaster, Pa. * * * * * PATENT MATTERS IN WASHINGTON, D.C. _To the Editor of the Scientific American:_ From the report of the Commissioner of Patents, just issued, it appears that its surplus revenue for the past year amounts to over one hundred and five thousand dollars, and that there is nearly a million dollars in the United States Treasury to the credit of the Patent Office; and yet, notwithstanding that this enormous amount is lying idle, our pseudo-economists at the Capitol refuse to grant the Office sufficient of its own funds to carry on its business promptly. So much is the work behindhand in some of the departments that, as the Commissioner states in his report, some of the attorneys who require certified copies of papers have been obliged to employ their own clerks to do office copying, and then had to pay the full legal rate of ten cents per hundred words, the same as though the Office had done the work. This style of _economizing_, by making inventors pay two prices for their work, may be "reform" in the eyes of the average Democratic Congressman; but speaking for myself, as one of those who have had to pay twice, I would prefer to dispense with this style of "retrenchment and reform," and therefore ask you, Messrs. Editors, in behalf of the inventors of the United States, to so stir up our legislators that they will allow the Office sufficient of its own funds to do its work properly, and not delay the work of the inventor--work that he has to pay for in advance--and so prevent the discouragement and trouble which these delays always cause. As the Patent Office has been doing a good business lately, there appears to be some attempt at rivalry at the Capitol, as the following list of applications for extension will show: LIST OF APPLICANTS FOR EXTENSIONS OF PATENTS NOW BEFORE CONGRESS. ---- Reynolds, power loom brake. Strong & Ross, scales. Wm. & W.H. Lewis, photographic plates. T.A. Weston, differential pulley. S.S. Hartshorn, buckles. H.A. Stone, making cheese. N. Whitehall, cultivator. J.R. Harrington, carpet lining. H.L. Emery, cotton gins. J. Stainthorp, moulding candles. Walter Hunt's heirs, paper collars. A.B. Wilson, sewing machines. S.A. Knox, plows. Rollin White, firearms. Aikin A. Felthousen, sewing machines. H. Woodman, stripping cotton cards. L. Hall, heel trimmer. J.A. Conover, wood splitter. J. Dyson, carding engine. G. Wellmann, card strippers. E. Brady, safety valves. Jearum Atkins, harvester rakes. John Thomas, re-rolling railroad rails. Thomas Mitchell, hair brushes. Stephen Hull, harvesters. T.R. Crosby, wiring blind slats. G.W. Laban, mitre cutting machine. T.A. Whitenack, harvesters. J.J. Vinton, furnaces. A. Fuller, faucets. D. Baker, pitcher spouts and lids. G.F. Chandler, refining sugar. G.H. Nott, boiler furnace. William Hall, lightning rods. B.F. Rice, paper bag machines. S.D. Nelson, shovels. E.T. Russell, car springs. Hubbell & Conant, steam pumps. C.A. Chamberlain, shovels. C.A. Adams, locks. E.A. Leland, paint can. In addition to the above, I find the following names as applicants for extensions, but the inventions covered by the patents sought to be extended is not mentioned: S.S. Turner, Arculous Wyckoff, De Witt C. Cummings, Moses Marshall, J.W. Fowler, and Holloway & Graham. Many of the applicants have apparently given up their cases for this session, but they may be only lying back to its close in hopes that in the final rush their "little bills" may slip through easily. Several bills tinkering at the patent laws are before Congress, and one of these (House Bill, No. 3,370) passed the House on the 30th ult. It has one section that may be made to work great harm to inventors, as it prevents infringers being sued for more than one year's damages previous to notice of infringement being given. By this bill, if it is allowed to become a law, a person will be able to build and use patented machines or processes for years in some out of the way place where the inventor cannot easily find him; and should he be discovered, he can only be sued for one year's damages. There are other sections in this bill which will bear ventilating. Another bill, introduced into the Senate by Mr. Paddock, provides that all appeals from the Board of Appeals shall be direct to the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, instead of to the Commissioner as heretofore; and that the fees shall be the same as now paid to the latter official. Mr. Sampson has introduced into the House a bill changing section 4886 so that it shall read as follows: "SEC. 4886. Any person who has discovered any new or useful art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter, or any new or useful improvement thereof, not known or used by others in this country, and not patented or described in any printed publication in this or any foreign country, before his invention or discovery thereof, and not in public use or on sale for more than two years prior to his application, unless the same is proved to have been abandoned, may, upon payment of the fees required by law, and other due proceedings had, obtain a patent therefor: _Provided, That the manufacture or composition of drugs as a medicine shall not be patentable_." The change is the addition of the words in italics. The Smithsonian Institute has sent to Congress a memorial setting forth that the present Institute building is already too small for the vast amount of articles already placed there on exhibition; that at the late Centennial Exposition the Commissioners of various countries presented their entire collection of exhibits to the United States, which had delegated their care to the Smithsonian Institute, and they had no place for them; that the armory building was being fitted up for the reception of the United States Centennial collection, and they therefore asked that a building be erected for the foreign collection, which could be used as a national museum, or otherwise we should have to offend the donors by keeping their valuable gifts stowed away in cellars and other rubbish receptacles. Mr. Eads, who is now here on the lookout for his pay for his work on the South Pass of the Mississippi's mouth, has received intelligence from the resident engineer at the jetties that the channel through the shoal at the head of the South Pass is now twenty-two feet deep, and that the least width at which twenty feet depth is found is one hundred and ten feet. The principal works to improve this shoal were constructed during the last six months. The low stage and feeble current of the river has delayed their effect until the recent flood from the Ohio reached them, and the problem of deepening the shoal has been fully solved by the rapid scouring away of the obstruction. It is stated that the channel is quite straight and is deepening rapidly. The channel through the jetties at the mouth of the Pass is twenty-one feet deep. The entrance from the sea through the jetties is one thousand feet wide, and through the works at the head of the Pass eight hundred feet. A recent telegram from Nevada states that the Sutro Tunnel (of which I gave you some particulars in one of my letters) has now progressed a total distance of 15,565 feet and has fairly entered the mineral belt, and will soon help to increase the already vast products of the Comstock lode. While on the subject of mining, I will state that the amount of quicksilver produced in California has increased so immensely during the last two years that it has attracted the attention of all interested in the article throughout the world. The receipts for the year have been 63,928 and the exports 48,010 flasks. In addition to the receipts there, probably about six thousand flasks were shipped direct from the mines to Nevada, thus bringing up the total production to over 70,000 flasks, a gain in round numbers of from twelve thousand to fifteen thousand flasks over 1875. The exports in that year were 34,844 flasks, or 13,666 less than in 1876. Occasional. * * * * * TYRIAN PURPLE INK FOR MARKING LINEN.--Von Bele gives the following method for preparing an ink for marking linen and cotton: Neutralize 75 grains of carbonate of ammonia with pure nitric acid, and triturate 45 to 60 grains of carmine with the solution. Mordant the fabric with a mixed solution of acetate of alumina and tin salt, and write upon it, when it is perfectly dry, with the ink. * * * * * NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. On Monday evening, January 29, 1877, a meeting of this Academy was held at the School of Mines, Columbia College, Dr. J.S. Newberry, President, in the chair. Mr. A.A. Julian, A.M., read a paper on the PREPARATION OF ROCK AND MINERAL SECTIONS FOR MICROSCOPIC STUDY. The speaker described in detail the various operations, exhibited the different kinds of apparatus employed, showed the operations, and exhibited the finished sections. In some rocks a thin chip can be broken off, others require to be sawn, and for the latter purpose the diamond saw is best. Having obtained the chip, it is first polished on one side, then cemented to a little square of glass, and the other side polished in the same way. The sections must not be too thick, nor too thin; they are usually made from a hundredth to a thousandth of an inch thick. Lathes employed in polishing minerals require to be provided with conical spindles, so that the wear, due to grit and emery dust getting on them, may be readily taken up. The grinding wheel may be either horizontal or vertical; the former has the advantage that the mineral can be held in either hand; with the latter only the right hand can be employed, and that in an awkward and tiresome position. Mr. Julian then referred briefly to the kinds of emery, its preparation by elutriation, etc., and cautioned operators against using rouge or tin putty powder in polishing rock sections, although they may be employed in polishing certain minerals and gems. The object of making the rock sections being to study their constituents and determine what minerals enter into their composition, it is important that no foreign substance, liable to adhere to the specimen and to be mistaken for one of its ingredients, be placed on the section while grinding. Lastly, the minerals are mounted on glass, with or without covers, by means of Canada balsam. Square glasses are to be preferred to the long and narrow strips, usually employed, as less liable to break in the center, and more easily revolved on the stage of a microscope. Mr. L.H. Landy then exhibited, by means of the gas microscope, several beautiful rock sections, both American and German. The same gentleman also showed the effect of passing polarized light through certain crystal sections, the black cross and rainbow-hued rings revolving like so many wheels as the polarizer was turned. At the conclusion of this brilliant exhibition, Dr. P.T. Austen made some remarks on LABORATORY MANIPULATIONS. The points referred to were the apparently unimportant details which often contribute so much to the ease and pleasure of working. First, the use of square pieces of felt, such as are used under beer glasses in saloons, for setting hot beakers and flasks on to prevent chilling and consequent cracking. Second, in crystallizing substances for examination under the microscope; one watch glass is placed upon another with the substance between them, and the upper glass filled with ether, the cold produced by its evaporation hastening the crystallization. Third, removing precipitates and solid matter from flasks, by heating to boiling, and inverting in a vessel of water. Fourth, crystallization by gradual dilution. Fifth, filter paper without ash. In German laboratories it is customary to dissolve out the mineral matter from white filtering paper by washing in dilute hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids. Sixth, the use of infusorial silica for drying purposes. Being very porous, it will absorb five times its own volume of water. If a filter paper, holding a wet precipitate, be placed upon a layer of this earth, it will become quite dry in a very short space of time. Mr. Austen also remarked that substances retain their heat for several days when placed in cork boxes. To keep a substance air-tight, it may be placed in a flask, the neck painted with a solution of india rubber in chloroform, and a plate of glass laid upon it. The solvent quickly evaporates, leaving a delicate film of rubber, which holds the glass tightly in place. The next meeting of the Chemical Section will be held February 12; of the Mineralogical Section, February 19. * * * * * ANNUAL REPORT OF THE PATENT OFFICE. The annual report to Congress of the Commissioner of Patents, for the year 1876, has made its appearance. The amount received on applications for patents, reissues, designs, extensions, caveats, disclaimers, appeals, trade marks, labels, copies, etc., was $757,987.65. The amount paid for salaries was $425,930; other expenses, $226,612. Total payments, $652,542. Number of applications for patents during the year 1876 21,425 Number of patents issued, including reissues and designs 15,595 Number of applications for extension of patents 2 Number of patents extended 3 Number of caveats filed during the year 2,697 Number of patents expired during the year 814 Number of patents allowed but not issued for want of final fee 3,353 Number of applications for registering of trade marks 1,081 Number of trade marks registered 959 Number of applications for registering of labels 650 Number of labels registered 402 Of the patents granted there were to-- Citizens of the United States 16,239 Subjects of Great Britain 511 Subjects of France 104 Subjects of other foreign governments 172 ----- Total 17,026 The number of applications for patents was a little less than during the previous year. The Commissioner suggests that Congress should appropriate $50,000 to promote the printing of the old patents; that additional examiners be employed, and more clerks, for the purpose of expediting the business of the office; that the price of the Official Gazette be reduced, also the fee for trade mark registration; that the library fund be increased; that more space be provided for models, and for the transaction of business. In respect to the Centennial, the value of new improvements, and the service of the Patent Office in stimulating discovery, the Acting Commissioner speaks as follows: "The display made at the Exposition by the Patent Office was creditable in every respect, and excited general attention. About 5,000 models of inventions, representing the leading branches of the arts and manufactures, were exhibited in suitable cases, and properly labeled, the various publications of the Office were displayed, its practice fully explained to all inquirers, and copies of the Patent Laws and the Office regulations and forms freely distributed. The knowledge of our patent system thus imparted to foreigners and all others unable to visit Washington has more than repaid the small cost attendant upon the representation. The exhibits were sent from and returned to the Office with scarcely any damage being suffered. "But the array of models, etc., made by the Patent Office at the Exposition was not needed to illustrate the value of our patent practice. The wisdom of that system was demonstrated in the most practical and triumphant manner in nearly every branch of that munificent enterprise. Not only in the grand display of labor-saving machinery, but in the vast collection of manufactured articles, and even in the department of fine arts, were seen the fruits of that provision in our Constitution giving to Congress the power 'to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.' "Whatever persons may do in a 'perfect condition of society' in sharing, without price, the fruits of their labors with others, it must be apparent to the dullest observer that the wonderful growth of the useful arts in this country is due, thus far, to the protection given by our Government to property in inventions--a property as sacred as any other class of property, and whose value is determined by the same general law of supply and demand. "It may be safely said that two thirds of the manufacturing interests of the country are based upon patents, and the welfare of all such interests are intimately connected with the welfare of the patent system. During the past seven years a larger number of applications for patents were filed and patents granted than during the entire seventy-eight preceding years, reaching back to the enactment of the first patent law. The needs of the Office have advanced in proportion to this sudden and vast increase of work, but have been but partly supplied. Nay, in fact, its already scanty force and accommodations have been actually reduced at a time when most required. If these vast interests, and the future promotion of science and the useful arts are to be encouraged, a liberal recognition must be made of the wants of this Office. "The Examining Corps, the duties in which are most arduous and exacting, comprises gentlemen of legal, as well as scientific, attainments. It should be re-inforced by more of the same character. They should be relieved, by legislation, of continual embarrassment by reason of meager salaries and fears of removal incident to merely political changes. The Office would then be spared the continual loss of its most experienced and efficient men." * * * * * THE IRON TRADE IN ENGLAND. The British _Mercantile Gazette_ of January 15 states that the situation and prospects of the iron trade have not materially improved in the month of December, but some week or two must elapse yet before trade returns to its regular channels. In the north of England the tone of the market is tolerably cheerful, and prospects, though still vague, are considered encouraging. Makers of pig iron go into the next quarter with a good supply of orders on their books, and merchants and consumers are desirous of buying over the first half of the year. Notwithstanding the great depression which has ruled throughout 1876, there is likely to be a greater production of pig iron by several thousand tons than ever there was before, and the total make must considerably exceed two million tons, which is twice the quantity turned out in Scotland, though in the latter district a greater number of furnaces have been kept in blast. Prices are nominally the same as were quoted last week, but show an upward tendency. The bulk of the mills and forges, foundries, etc., have resumed work, and the finished iron trade is again in full swing. The plate department is well provided with orders, but the rail manufacturers, though rather better off than they were, are still in a poor position. The miscellaneous branches of the iron trade, such as the foundries and tube, wire, and cut-nail manufactories are generally well off for orders, and engineers find plenty to do. The wages agreement in the finished iron trade ends this week, but it is thought that no alteration will be made. In the South Staffordshire iron trade, work has been only partially resumed as yet, and many of the mills and forges will not be started until the quarterly meetings, next week. Orders have rarely been so scarce as they are at this moment, arrears having been pretty generally cleared off before the holidays, and no new ones coming in. Nevertheless, the feeling of the trade is more hopeful than it was a month ago. The number of furnaces in blast in this district is now only 58 out of 153; but should the expected improvement in trade arrive with the quarterly meeting, this number will soon be increased. In the finished iron branch, in which quotations for marked iron contain the basis of $45 for bars, makers of leading brands of sheets and bars are better off than the manufacturers of cheap iron, who suffer much from competition in the north. Some considerable contracts for girders, bridges, gasometers, etc., are under execution at the works devoted to constructive ironwork; but the merchant iron trade, as a whole, is very dull. Unmarked iron is weak and variable, and to this circumstance may be attributed the reduction, announced this week, in various descriptions of common iron hardware. * * * * * IMPROVED LATHE CHUCK. The annexed engravings represent a new lathe chuck, which may be constructed of any size, which holds tools with great firmness, and which is provided with an improved device for taking up wear and for the separate adjustment of the jaws. The implement is made of the best steel, by special machinery, so that its parts are interchangeable. [Illustration: VINTON'S LATHE CHUCK.] Figs. 1 and 2 represent the chuck taken apart so as to exhibit the interior. Figs. 3 and 4 are sectional views. A is a collar which encircles the spindle, and has formed on its outer face a bevel gear wheel, B. C, Fig. 3, is the rear portion of the shell of the chuck inclosing the forward part of the collar, A. Also on said collar, A, is a washer, D, which rests against the shell, C, and a nut, E, which travels on a thread formed on the collar. As it is necessary, as will be explained further on, to turn the entire shell in order to move the jaws, the use of the nut just described is to jam the part, C, and the enlarged portion of the collar, A, tightly together, and so rigidly hold the jaws in any position in which they may be adjusted. Fig. 1 represents the outer face of the chuck with the jaws and their working mechanism. Within the chuck, each jaw has attached to it a screw, E. This enters a bevel wheel, F. As the jaws are incapable of any but radial motion, it follows that, when the chuck is rotated bodily and the bevel wheels engage on the motionless gear wheel, B, the effect of the rotation of said bevel wheels is to cause the jaws to travel toward or from the center of the chuck face. And it will be further clear that this motion must be simultaneous in all the jaws. As the outer portion of the chuck is rigidly secured to the shell, C, by screws, of course when that shell is jammed, as already stated, by the nut, E, it becomes impossible to turn the chuck bodily; and hence the bevel wheels cannot be rotated around the main gear wheel, and consequently the position of the jaws cannot be altered. The above comprises the mechanism proper of the device, that is to say, all that is necessary for moving or clamping the jaws. There is, however, another feature of considerable importance yet to be described, and that is the device for taking up any play of the jaws due to wear, and which enables each to be adjusted so that the motion of all may be uniform. By referring to Fig. 4, it will be seen that, above the bevel wheel, there is a projection, into the threaded interior of which, as already explained, the jaw screw enters. Surrounding this projection is a sleeve, G, the outer surface of which is threaded to fit a similarly threaded aperture, cut partly in the shell and partly in the face plate. The upper portion of the sleeve is notched to receive a wrench or driver; and beneath the sleeve an armed washer, H, is slipped over the projection. The arms of this washer enter recesses in the face plate. It will be evident that, by turning the sleeve, F, so that the screw works inward, the jaw and all its appendages will be moved bodily in corresponding direction. But its movement is limited by the arms of the washer, G, which, through the narrowness of the recesses, are allowed only just enough play to compensate for slight changes in the jaw. As the above device is applied to every jaw, it follows that any one of them may be nicely adjusted from the outside, so that all are caused to grasp the tool accurately. The spindle, instead of being solid as represented, may be made hollow. Patented to J.H. Vinton, August 18, 1874. For further information, address the manufacturer, Mr. F. Armstrong, Bridgeport, Conn. * * * * * SCREW-CUTTING LATHES. [Illustration: Screw-Cutting Lathes] An English lathe, now in use at the Rogers Locomotive Works, Paterson, N.J., contains several novel features. The ways are flat on the faces, instead of having raised Vs; and this is a feature of all English lathes, and of those known in this country as the Freeland lathes. A great deal of discussion has at various times taken place as to the relative qualification or merits of these two forms of lathe bed. The advocates of the flat way, with Vs at the edges of the way, claim superiority on the score of steadiness, increased wearing surface, and strength; while, on behalf of the raised Vs, it is urged that, the Vs being true, the saddle is bound to travel true, because there can be no lost motion on the slides; whereas any lost motion, from want of adjustment of the slides in flat ways, is liable to be reproduced twofold in the work, for the reason that 1/100 of an inch lateral movement of the slide carriage becomes 1/50 of an inch in the diameter of the work. Then, again, the most of the wear upon a lathe bed takes place at the part at and near the running center of the lathe, because the saddle is, on account of short jobs, more used in that part than on any other. As a result, when wear has taken place, the saddle, if adjusted to suit the worn part, becomes too tight to travel over the unworn part of the bed; and hence, after the wear has taken place, a proper adjustment of the lathe saddle becomes impossible if the job is a long one. In the case of raised Vs, however, the wear simply causes the saddle to fall vertically, so that an amount of wear equal to 1/100 of an inch would have the same effect as lowering the tool 1/100 inch, its effect upon the work being almost imperceptible by ordinary measurement. On the other hand, however, V lathes are usually made with either a weight or a spring to keep the saddle down; and as a result, when the cutting tool stands far out from the tool post, the saddle is apt to tip, especially in the case of boring with a lathe tool. In some cases, the raised Vs are accompanied with gibs to secure the saddle; but in many instances the gibs are given too little wearing surface. In the lathe above referred to, there are three ways in one casting, with the slide angles on the outer edges. There are also three separate and independent tail stocks fitting into the two openings between the ways. The running head has one cone pulley connected by suitable gearing to three face plates. The three centers at the running head are stationary. The slide rest saddle spans the three ways, having a V slide which contains three separate slide rests, all connected by a nut to the feed screw, so that all three are operated by the one screw. In addition to this, the two back slide rests have the nuts so attached that they can be moved by means of a separate screw, the object being to facilitate setting the cuts, since it would be a tedious matter to set all three tools to an equal cut, or to their desired respective cuts, without means of operating two of them independently. To set the cut during screw-cutting operations, the ingenious device shown in our engraving is provided. A represents the cross-feed or slide rest screw, which operates the three slide rests. It is fast to the notched wheel, B, and is operated by it in the usual way. C is a short screw which provides journal bearing for the screw, A, by a plain hole. It is screwed on the outside, and the plate in which it fits acts as its nut. It is fast to the handle, D, and is in fact operated by it. The handle or lever is provided with a catch, E, pivoted in the enclosed box, F, which also contains a means of detaining the catch in the notches of the wheel, or of holding it free from the same when it is placed clear. If, then, the lever, D, be moved back and forth the feed screw, A, and hence the three slide rests, will be operated; while, if the catch be placed in one of the notches on the wheel, B, both the screws, A and C, will act to operate the rests. When, therefore, the operator is cutting screws, he sets the catch, E, into one of the notches so soon as the tools are properly adjusted to the work; and then lifting the catch, E, he turns the wheel, B, so that the catch falls into the next notch, and this puts the cut on. When the tool has taken that cut, and while the latter saddle is traveling back, the catch is placed in the next notch, and so on, the cut for the forward travel always being put on as above while the saddle is traveling back. Thus is insured an exactly equable amount of cut on the whole three rests. When the lever, D, is not in use, the catch is removed from the wheel, B, and is allowed to rest against the pins, G or A, provided for that purpose. For piston rods, or for work such as cutting jack screws, this lathe is very useful. It is obviously, however, a special tool. * * * * * NATURAL ORNAMENTS IN WINTER. Now that the hedges are no longer green, and the trees stand black and bare on the landscape, is the time to seek for endless variety and beauty waiting to be admired in its turn. What miniature fairy glens and grottoes are distributed over the hedge banks of our country lanes! Mosses, delicate and beautiful, may be found in the interstices of any old wall, or at the foot of almost any tree or shrub. In the winter time mosses and lichens are found in fruit, and are beautiful objects. A pocket microscope lens is essential for their proper observation; and though the delicate carmine cups of the species known as the cup moss, and the familiar gray and yellow mosaic appearance we see on twigs and branches on our way, are easily recognized, the study of this form of winter vegetation is an inexhaustible one, and is an occupation for a lifetime, if earnestly pursued. We do not however, suggest that every one who endeavors to recognize the different species of moss, lichens, or fungi should necessarily do so through the medium of the microscope; but it will greatly add to the pleasure of making a collection out of doors if there be a good microscope at home, so that when the contents of the basket be turned out, after the winter's walk, there should be interest even in the fragments left, after a little pile of varied bits has been constructed, rivalling the choicest summer bouquet in beauty of form and color. We have seen such a collection formed into a beautiful object by raising a little mound of rough bits of bark in a plate or saucer, and placing on it varieties of fungus of every shade of red, brown, yellow, and gray. They seem to spring forth from a bed of sphagnum or bog moss of brightest emerald green; while a clump of the screw wall moss in fruit, with its curious little box-like capsules, supports a gray or yellow lichen, which has been gently removed from some old wall or tree. A bit of stick or a twig, incrusted with a bright orange-colored lichen, supports a trailing branch of delicate green ivy, the most beautiful and adaptable of all winter foliage. Over this little arrangement is placed a bell glass, to preserve it from dust and the effect of a dry atmosphere; and we know how pleasing to the eye is its varied beauty of form and color, lasting thus, a constant source of pleasure, for many a day without renewal.--_Chambers' Journal_. * * * * * IMPROVED HARNESS COCKEYE. We illustrate herewith a very simple little device for attaching traces to the single tree. It forms a secure fastening which may be instantly attached, and which, by its construction, is prevented from wearing out rapidly. [Illustration: Figs. 1 and 2] Fig. 1 shows the cockeye attached to the single tree, and Fig. 2 exhibits parts in section, displaying the construction very clearly. The yoke is of the usual pattern. Swiveled to it is a long loop, which is chambered out to receive a spiral spring which acts upon a plunger. The latter is provided with a follower having a semicircular notch, which corresponds in form to the inside of the end of the loop. The follower also has guiding lips which extend over the sides of the loop. Through the yielding of the spring, the space between the follower and loop adjusts itself to studs or hooks of any size. Patented December 12, 1876, through the Scientific American Patent Agency. For further particulars, address the inventors, Messrs. F.W. Knapp and C. Schallhorn, Fiddletown, Amador county, Cal. * * * * * PROPOSED CREMATION TEMPLE. Cremation, in this country at least, is not popular. For a time, it occupied here some public attention, but only in a sensational way; and the sober discussion of the subject, which followed after its novelty had worn off, led to the general opinion that, while every one might be quite willing to see his dead neighbors cremated, no one would acquiesce in the disposal of his friends and relatives in so abnormal a manner. Hence, with the single exception of the late revolting exhibition in Pennsylvania, which we alluded to at the time, the dead in this country have continued to be deposited in their hallowed resting places, and have not been packed away, in an incinerated state, in labeled urns. In Europe, however, cremation still finds many warm adherents; and during last summer a congress of the "Friends of Cremation" (a society which, we are informed by _Engineering_, whence we take the annexed engravings, has branches in various parts of the world), was held in Dresden. Before this meeting, a large number of designs for cremation and mortuary buildings were brought in competition, and finally the prize was awarded to Mr. G. Lilienthal, a Berlin architect, for the imposing structure illustrated herewith. This will be the grand temple of cremation when it is erected--a proceeding to take place in the dim future: when or where not stated. On each side of a central chapel there is a circular memorial hall; and extending so as to inclose the garden of the establishment, on the sides of the halls are wings containing a large number of niches for the reception of funeral urns. The cremation ceremony is proposed to be as follows: The body, having been brought into the hall, is subjected to the usual medical examination; or when an inquest is necessary, it is removed to offices in another part of the building, where the required investigation can be held. When all is ready, the body, placed on the platform, B, Fig. 2, is raised by a lift into the hall, A, where visitors are gathered, and here the result of the medical examination is declared, and whatever preliminary religious ceremonies that are desired are performed. The body is then transported to the chapel, E, in front of the pulpit, F, where the burial service is performed. The bier is afterward lowered mechanically, and brought to the furnaces, which are arranged in a semicircle and partitioned for the reception of several biers. The ashes are subsequently placed in an urn, on which the name, etc., of the deceased are recorded, and which is set up in a suitable niche. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--DESIGN FOR A CREMATION TEMPLE] The building, which we illustrate both in elevation, Fig. 1, and in plan, Fig. 2, is designed to contain 100,000 urns, and is adapted for a town of 200,000 inhabitants. The architect has certainly exhibited much taste in his design for the building, and has provided every convenience in the internal arrangement for carrying on a large business in the cremation line. [Illustration: Fig. 2.--SECTION OF A CREMATION TEMPLE.] * * * * * HOW TO REJUVENATE AN OLD ROSE BUSH. Never give up a decaying rose bush till you have tried watering it two or three times a week with soot tea. Make the concoction with boiling water, from soot taken from the chimney or stove in which wood is burned. When cold, water the bush with it. When it is used up, pour boiling hot water on the soot a second time. Rose bushes treated in this way will often send out thrifty shoots, the leaves will become large and thick, the blossoms will greatly improve in size and be more richly tinted than before.--D.H. Jacques. * * * * * A CLOCK COLLECTOR. One of those odd geniuses, who spend their lives and means in collecting curious and rare articles, lately died. His name was Sylvester Bonaffon, a retired merchant of Philadelphia. His elaborate collections were sold at auction, and their oddity has attracted general attention. His chief mania was for clocks, which literally covered every portion of available space in his apartments, whether they were placed on chairs, tables, shelves, or hung against the wall. Some of these timepieces were of unique construction. One clock was made to run for 400 days after one winding; another was set in the dashboard of his carriage, and he used Mr. Bonaffon also had an especial fondness for electrical apparatus. His windows were provided with ingenious burglar alarms, his rooms with fire alarms, and he ignited his gas always by electricity. His place of business, his stable, the Continental Hotel where he dined, were all connected with instruments in his room; and he even had perfected arrangements so that he could set at home and send his own messages to California. Besides the clocks and electric apparatus, there was an immense collection of _bric-a-brac_ of every conceivable variety, which was sold at the auction--as is usually the case--at prices much below those paid by its late owner. * * * * * FERTILIZING INFLUENCE OF SNOW. Snow is often called the "poor man's manure;" and if it is true that it has any manurial value, the farmer's prospects for the next season are certainly flattering. The body of snow upon the ground in all the Northern and Middle States is very great, and millions of acres of land are covered by it as with a blanket of the whitest wool. It is probable that seldom, perhaps never, has so wide an area of our country been covered as during this month of January, 1877. The question whether snow is capable of affording to lands any of the elements of fertility is one often asked; and in reply, the Boston _Journal of Chemistry_ says that it probably is. The atmosphere holds ammonia and some other nitrogenous products, which are without doubt brought to the soil by snowflakes as well as by rain drops. Experiments both here and abroad would seem to prove the truth of this conclusion. Rains are not only valuable for the moisture which they supply, but for what they bring to us from the atmosphere. During a thunderstorm nitric acid is produced in considerable quantities; and dissolved in the rain drops to a high degree of attenuation, its effects upon soils are highly salutary, as the nitrogen permeates the entire soil. * * * * * ACTION OF SEA WATER ON LEAD. The _Journal of the Chemical Society_ says that freshly cut strips of lead were kept in a bottle of sea water for four days, the bottle being frequently shaken. No trace of lead could be detected in the water, but the bright surface of the strips was coated with an insoluble lead compound. Hence lead pipes may be used in marine aquaria without any fear of injury to their inhabitants. * * * * * PAPIN'S STEAM ENGINE. BY PROFESSOR CHARLES A. JOY. It is a matter of history that, as early as 1688, Denis Papin, Professor of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Marburg, proposed to substitute steam for powder in the engine invented by Huyghens, and that in 1695 he published a description of several new inventions, in which steam played an important part. The Elector Carl, of Hesse-Cassel, was anxious to be free from the annoyances and impositions practised upon his boatmen by the authorities at Münden, and he proposed to avoid that city by constructing a canal connecting the Weser with the river that flowed through Cassel. Much of the work was accomplished, and the half finished line of the canal can be traced even at the present day. Papin was authorized to build a powerful steam pump by which the supply of water was to be regulated. A working model of this pump was completed; and the Elector was on the point of visiting the laboratory to witness its operation, when a fearful explosion frightened the workmen, and afforded an opportunity for enemies to intrigue for the expulsion of Papin from the country. The model was preserved for a long time in Cassel; but at the time of the French invasion, it disappeared, and no trace of it has since been found. In writing about his inventions, Papin says, in 1695: "It would occupy too much space for me to describe in what manner this principle could be applied to removing water from mines, throwing bombs, sailing against the wind, and for many other similar purposes; everyone according to his wants can imagine the constructions that could be made. I cannot, however, refrain from remarking how much preferable this power would be to oars for those whose business calls them to the sea." And further on he says: "The steam cylinders could be employed for a great variety of purposes." One of the cylinders, which was to form a part of the pump, was cast at the foundry in Cassel, and after various vicissitudes has finally become the property of the Historical Museum in that city, where it will be preserved, with jealous care, from any further injury. During the recent exhibition of philosophical instruments in London, this remnant of Papin's invention played an important part, it having been generously loaned by the authorities for that occasion. After the flight of Papin from Germany, the cylinder was used as a receptacle for iron turnings and borings in the royal works; and after the destruction of those works by fire, it came into the possession of Henschel, the founder of one of the most extensive locomotive works in Germany. This man fully appreciated the value of the historical relic; and when I visited him at the works, twenty-five years ago, he pointed out with pride to me the inscription on its side, "Papin's Cylinder," and said that he intended to have it placed upon a solid pedestal near the gate. His grandson has since presented it to the city, and its preservation from destruction or sale is now secured. A copy of the drawing made by Papin of the pump of which this cylinder was to form a part, and which was published in 1695, has recently appeared in Dingler's _Journal_, and I send it to you, hoping that you will have it engraved and perpetuated in your valuable paper. It is a peculiar combination of Savery's invention and Papin's piston engine, suggested for another purpose, and is a decided improvement on Huyghens' powder engine. [Illustration: PAPIN'S STEAM ENGINE.] A is the boiler for the generation of the steam, provided with a safety valve (an invention of Papin). On opening the stopcock, C, the steam passes through B into the cylinder, D, and by its expansion drives the plunger, E, against the water contained in the cylinder, D, which is thus forced into the chamber, F, compressing strongly the air, which in turn expels the water through the pipe, G, to the height desired. K is a funnel for the fresh supply of water, and at I and H are valves opening upwards and downwards. After the condensation of the steam in D, a renewed supply of water, through K, forces the plunger, E, to the top of the cylinder, ready for the next action of steam. The strokes of such a pump could not be frequent, and it would not compare very favorably with the wonderful machinery exhibited in Philadelphia last summer; but it contains the germ of the idea, and is worthy of all honor. Having often seen it stated that Papin had invented a steamboat, I resolved during a recent visit to Germany to investigate the matter, and especially to search for the correspondence between Papin and Leibnitz in the library at Hanover. It will be borne in mind that two hundred years ago, on December 4, 1676, Leibnitz was appointed to take charge of the library in Hanover, and that he remained in this position until his death in 1716. He bequeathed his manuscripts to the library; and as he had the habit of writing upon all manner of loose scraps of paper, it has cost much labor to assort and classify them. On making my application to the librarian to be permitted to see the correspondence between Papin and Leibnitz, my request was at once granted; and a table having been assigned me, I was able to examine these precious relics at my leisure. I was also shown a copy of an original treatise on the steam engine by Papin, which contained numerous marginal notes by Leibnitz. In one place, Leibnitz criticized Papin's method for condensing steam, and makes a drawing on the margin, showing a piston and valve which he thought would be more practical. It is somewhat remarkable that the Germans have not caused a fac-simile of this little volume to be published. After considerable search, I found a copy of the original letter addressed by Papin to Leibnitz in 1707, asking Leibnitz to assist him in obtaining the consent of the Hanoverian Government to navigate the river Weser with a sidewheel steamboat. The letter was dated July 7, 1707, and contained among other interesting passages the following sentence: "The new invention will enable one or two men to accomplish more effect than several hundred oarsmen." It is evident that Leibnitz was deeply impressed by Papin's letter, and he supported the simple and reasonable request contained in it by the following petition addressed to the Councillors of State. This communication from Leibnitz bears two indorsements, one by the clerk of the council, "_pro memoria_ respectfully, in reference to the passage of a ship from the river Fulda into the Weser;" the other is in the handwriting of Leibnitz: "Papin's sidewheel ship." This last indorsement is of great value, as indicating the fact that Papin proposed to apply side wheels for the propulsion of his new invention. The following is a translation of Leibnitz' letter, the original of which I saw in the library: "Dionysius Papin, Councillor and Physician to his royal highness the Elector of Cassel, also Professor of Mathematics at Marburg, is about to dispatch a vessel of singular construction down the river Weser to Bremen. As he learns that all ships coming from Cassel, or any point on the Fulda, are not permitted to enter the Weser, but are required to unload at Münden, and as he anticipates some difficulty, although those vessels have a different object, his own not being intended for freight, he begs most humbly that a gracious order be granted that his ship may be allowed to pass unmolested through the electoral domain, which petition I most humbly support. G.W. LEIBNITZ. "Hanover, July 13, 1707." This letter was returned to Leibnitz with the following indorsement: "The Electoral Councillors have found serious obstacles in the way of granting the above petition, and, without giving their reasons, have directed me to inform you of their decision, and that in consequence the request is not granted by his Electoral Highness. H. REICHE. "Hanover, July 25, 1707." This failure of Papin's petition was the deathblow to his effort to establish steam navigation. A mob of boatmen, who thought they saw in the embryo ship the ruin of their business, attacked the vessel at night and utterly destroyed it. Papin narrowly escaped with his life, and fled to England, where he endured great hardships and poverty, and all traces of him were soon lost, so that it is uncertain in what country he finally died or where he was buried. This remarkable man was driven out of France on account of his Protestant faith, and found a refuge in Germany; here he was again persecuted on account of the injury that ignorant and jealous people believed his inventions would inflict upon the industries of the country; and when the climax of steam engines for pumping water and propelling ships was reached, the enlightened government of the period "found serious obstacles" in the way of granting him protection, and, without condescending to state what those "objections" were, secretly instigated the mob to make an end of the trouble. It is another instance, unfortunately too often repeated in history, of the mischief men dressed up in a little brief authority can work upon their generation. If Papin had been permitted to navigate the Weser with his ship, and to carry it to London, as was his intention, it is possible that we should have had steamboats one hundred years earlier than they were given to us by Fulton. The plan proposed by Papin was highly impracticable; but a knowledge of what Savery had done in the way of steam machinery, aided by the shrewd suggestions of Leibnitz, combined with the practical assistance of Englishmen, would, no doubt, have enabled him to improve upon his invention until it had obtained sufficient credit to be secure against the misfortune of being totally forgotten. After the lapse of 100 years from the date of Papin's invention, when the first steamboat was put upon the river Rhine, the vessel was fired into by concealed marksmen on shore, and navigation was more dangerous than it is now on the upper waters of the Missouri in times of Indian hostility. It was only after stationing troops along the banks of the river to protect the boatmen that the government, fortunately more enlightened than in the days of Leibnitz, was able to establish steam navigation on a secure footing. I have thought it worth while to make this contribution to the history of steam navigation, particularly as I have been able to authenticate a portion of it by reference to original documents. Columbia College, New York city, January, 1877. * * * * * THE SPEAKING TELEGRAPH. We have heretofore given accounts of the wonderful success of Professor Bell in transmitting the vibrations of the human voice by electrical means over a telegraph wire. He has lately made improvements in his method of transmission, by which he dispenses with the use of the battery, and substitutes the magneto-electric plan of producing the current. The Boston _Transcript_ describes a recent experiment with the new apparatus, by which conversation and singing was successfully carried on between Boston and Malden, a distance of six miles. The telephone, in its present form, consists of a powerful compound permanent magnet, to the poles of which are attached ordinary telegraph coils of insulated wire. In front of the poles, surrounded by these coils of wire, is placed a diaphragm of iron. A mouthpiece to converge the sound upon this diaphragm substantially completes the arrangement. As is well known, the motion of steel or iron in front of the poles of a magnet creates a current of electricity in coils surrounding the poles of the magnet, and the duration of this current of electricity coincides with the duration of the motion of the steel or iron moved or vibrated in the proximity of the magnet. When the human voice causes the diaphragm to vibrate, electrical undulations are induced in the coils environing the magnets, precisely analogous to the undulations of the air produced by that voice. These coils are connected with the line wire, which may be of any length, provided the insulation be good. The undulations which are induced in these coils travel through the line wire, and, passing through the coils of an instrument of precisely similar construction at the distant station, are again resolved into air undulations by the diaphragm of this instrument. The experiments were as follows: Telephones having been connected with the private telegraphic line of the Boston Rubber Shoe Company, conversation was at once commenced. Stationed at the Boston end of the wire, Professor Bell requested Mr. Watson, who was at the Malden end, to speak in loud tones, with a view of enabling the entire company at once to distinguish the sounds. This was so successful that a smile of mingled pleasure and surprise played on the features of those present. That it, however, might not be supposed that loud speaking was essential to intelligibility, Mr. Bell explained that soft tones could be heard across the wires even more distinctly than loud utterances, even a whisper being audible. In confirmation of this statement, Mr. Watson commenced speaking in turn with each member of the company; and after the efficiency of this method had been proved to the satisfaction of all, he took up a newspaper and informed the assemblage that gold had closed the previous evening at New York at 105-5/8. As there were quite a number of business men present, the effect that this practical demonstration of the value of the telephone produced can scarcely be exaggerated. Other passages from the daily journals were then given, and by this time the desire for conversation having become general, Mr. Watson was plied with questions such as: "Is it thawing or freezing at Malden? Who will be the next President?" etc. It was remarkable that Mr. Watson was able to distinguish between the voices at the Boston end, he calling at least one gentleman by name as soon as the latter commenced speaking. This went on for some time, until a lady at the Malden end sent the company an invitation to lunch per telephone, and an appropriate response was made by the same medium. At length the Boston company were requested to remain quiet while a lady at the other end conveyed to them the sweet strains of music. The assemblage thereupon listened with rapt attention while a young lady commenced singing "The Last Rose of Summer." The effect was simply charming. The sound of the voice penetrated into the Boston end of the telephone with a distinctness equal to that attainable in the more distant parts of a large concert room, and a unanimous vote of thanks was sent by the handy little instrument which had procured for the assemblage so agreeable an hour. * * * * * The superb steam engine built by C.H. Brown & Co., of Fitchburg, Mass., which was illustrated and described on page 1 of our current volume, has been purchased by Messrs. Phineas Jones & Co., and is being erected in their extensive carriage wheel works at Newark, N.J. * * * * * CROSSING A RIVER ON A WIRE. A reporter of the New York Sun wanted to realize the sensation of being suspended on a wire 275 feet from the surface of the earth. He applied to the engineer of the Brooklyn bridge for permission to cross the East river on a wire, three quarters of an inch in diameter, which hangs between the two towers. He was refused permission; but he finally saw the president of the company, who granted his request. Arriving at the appointed time, the engineer, Mr. Farrington, said: "Well, sir; whenever you're ready, I am." "All ready, said I, as bold as brass outside, and as nervous as the Endorian witch on the inside. He walked on and I followed, when, Horror of Horrors--capital H's--to both Horrors--instead of leading me to the 'cradle,' which I called a raft, he took me to a little square board held up by two crossed iron arms, called a 'buggy.' It was about three feet square, and depended from the 'traveler,' a three quarter inch wire which crosses the river, and is run from tower to tower over apparatus, by means of a stationary engine. It was too late to back out, but I didn't feel exactly prepared to plunge in. He did. "He jumped in, and the little buggy swung from side to side, precisely as a swing does when you jump on the board and try to steady it by the ropes. I looked at him, at the scale--that's it; it's exactly like a pair of scales, with one scale--at the deep depths below us, and at myself. I imagined the ticklish thrill which would permeate my body when we started. I fancied the glories of the prospective perspective before me. "'Come, hurry up, please,' interrupted Farrington, and with resignation I hurried down. He stood up. I crouched down. Perhaps you think you'd have stood up as he did. You're mistaken. I crouched down and held on tight. Make no mistake. I held on tight and waited for my thrill. It didn't come. Then I stood up, and Farrington gave the word 'Go.' 'Wouldn't you better take a rope along?' said one of the men. 'Yes, I think I would.' What did he want of a rope? He feared I would be nervous. He meant to grapple me in the middle of the river, and tie me in. I knew it. I felt it. But I didn't say a word. "With a gentle jerk we started--slow, slow, very slow. Farrington stood in front and watched the wire. I stood behind and watched myself. I felt nothing. I was'n't exhilarated. I was'n't scared. I was'n't even timid. I can't look from the top of a house without desiring to jump off, but I looked down from the buggy and hadn't the least desire to jump. Farrington says: 'It's because it's so high up.' Well, we went on without any special sensation till the buggy struck against a stay rope which reaches from one of the cables to the tower. In the effort to free the buggy, Mr. Farrington gave a push which swung us out some little distance and back again, at which a little piece of indigestion seemed to be monarch of my interior, and for a moment I was on the verge of a sensation. Having passed the middle, the ascent was more labored. I waved my handkerchief to the people on the ferryboats. I looked out toward the sea. I looked up at the heavens. I even looked toward Harlem, but, like the buyer in the Bible, I said: 'It is naught, it is naught.' "In about eight minutes we touched the New York side--all but ten feet. The red flag waved for the engine to stop. There we hung in mid-air 275 feet above the level, swinging to and fro like a drunken buggy, at an angle of forty degrees, and quite uneasy. The rope which was to haul us on was fastened to the iron--blest be the tie that binds--and with a few hearty pulls we were brought so near the New York tower that without difficulty we clambered up. I had made the trip, but I had not felt a feel. From the top of the New York tower I saw much, but the chief point of interest was the innumerable jets of steam which flourish in the air, and fantastically curl off into space. "Again the steeples, the tower, and the long, narrow, dirty river filled the prospect, and the bright sun of a charming day lightened up the western sky That was all, except to say 'thanks and good-bye,' and descend the stairs. There were 417 of them stairs, and before I reached the bottom I was dizzy, faint, seasick, and filled with a decoction of tickle, so that I had to shut my eyes and rest from my labors. "Thus ends the trip which filled my anticipatory imagination as the waters fill the sea, but which resolved itself in realization to a simple, childlike faith in the fixtures on the wire, and in the skill and competence of the man who guided them. MONSIEUR X." * * * * * BLUE GLASS SCIENCE. There is nothing more reassuring in these days, when new "isms" of the scientists are slowly sapping the foundations of cherished beliefs, than to remember that, after all, the much vaunted dicta of Nature are yet opposable by the sound operations of honest common sense. See for example how one of our evening dailies, tossing the dogmas of so-called science contemptuously aside, evolves such profoundly original thoughts as these, to explain the lucid blue glass theory of General Pleasonton: "The blue glass presents an obstruction to the sun's rays which can only be penetrated by one of the seven primary rays--the blue ray; the remaining six rays, travelling with the velocity of 186,000 miles a second, falling upon the blue glass, are suddenly arrested; the impact evolves upon the surface of the glass friction, heat, electricity and magnetism; the heat expands the molecules of the glass, and a current of electricity and magnetism passes through it into the room; this current, falling upon animal or vegetable life within, stimulates it to unusual vigor. Certainly the results achieved, and abundantly certified to, are marvellous, and sufficient to provoke further experiments and inquiry." Prior to these splendid original discoveries of our contemporary, we ignorantly believed that blue glass only partially sifted out the orange and yellow rays from the spectrum, and that with this exception, it acted merely as a screen to diminish the intensity of all the rays. We also supposed that there was a sharp distinction to be drawn between sunlight after passing through blue glass and the blue spectral ray: that in one case all the colored rays were more or less present, and that in the other but one was. But think of the utter dismay of such pretenders as Helmholtz, Tyndall, and Henry when they learn that the undulatory theory of light with which they have so long taxed our credulity is overthrown--that of the seven primary rays, six bounce off from blue glass and distribute themselves over the adjoining neighborhood. That the glass is heated by the impact; and as the sun persistently emits more rays, there are more impacts and more heat. The glass gets hotter and hotter; but--mark the scientific acumen here--just as we are wondering whether it will reach the melting point, the pores open. It is the Turkish bath of Nature. Electricity and magnetism, no longer shut out, rush in between the separate molecules. Hand in hand, these great curative powers seek a proper subject. They meet (we learn from a report, also in our contemporary, of Pleasonton's latest triumph) a pig or a young lady whose hair has come out--a heifer, a rooster, or a rheumatic child. Forthwith the pig fattens, hair equal to that produced by the finest _tricopherus_ pervades the female scalp, and "unusual vigor" and general happiness prevail. Such is the boon which Pleasonton bestows on humanity, as elucidated by the original genius of our contemporary. * * * * * INFECTIOUS DISEASE PROPAGATION. In view of the alarming prevalence of scarlet fever in many parts of the country, the following hints by the _British Medical Journal_ are wholesome warnings: "There are three common ways by means of which infectious diseases may be very widely spread. It is a very usual practice for parents to take children suffering from scarlet fever, measles, etc., to a public dispensary, in order to obtain advice and medicines. It is little less than crime to expose, in the streets of a town and in the crowded waiting room of a dispensary, children afflicted with such complaints. Again, persons who are recovering from infectious disorders borrow books out of the lending departments of public libraries; these books, on their reissue to fresh borrowers, are sources of very great danger. In all libraries, notices should be posted up informing borrowers that no books will be lent out to persons who are suffering from diseases of an infectious character; and that any person so suffering will be prosecuted if he borrow during the time of his illness. Lastly, disease is spread by tract distributors. It is the habit for such well meaning people to call at a house where a person is ill and to leave him a tract. In a week or so the tract is called for again, another left in its place, and the old one is left with another person. It needs not much imagination to know with what result to health such a practice will lead if the first person be in scarlet fever or smallpox." Dr. Hutton offers "a warning on the reckless manner in which parents allow their healthy children to run into the houses of acquaintances who have members of their families suffering from scarlatina, etc., and states that he has seen the infection thus carried from the patient, and several families attacked." * * * * * TOUGHENED GLASS MAKING IN BROOKLYN. A _World_ reporter has lately visited the works in Brooklyn where the manufacture of the La Bastie toughened glass is now in active progress. The manufacturer states that, in June last, his factory was destroyed by fire, and the introduction of the glass into our markets has for that reason been delayed. Only one kind of goods, lamp chimneys, are now made, and the process is as follows: A workman, having in his hand a pole about eight feet long, with a knob on the end of the size of a lamp burner, fits a chimney on the knob and plunges it into the flame of a furnace. He with-draws it twice or thrice that it may not heat too quickly, turning the pole rapidly the while, and when the glass reaches a red heat quickly shoots it into one of a dozen small baths fixed on a revolving table, and seizes another chimney. A boy keeps the revolving table always in position, and as the chimneys come around to him, having been the proper time in the bath, he takes them out to be dried, sorted, cleaned, and packed. The bath has to be of just the right temperature, as, if it be too hot or too cold, the chimneys are liable to explode. In either case the process of annealing is imperfect. By working the tables at a certain rate, the baths are kept at the right temperature by the immersion of the red hot glass. Oil or tallow is used in the bath. Any greasy substance will do, though tallow has proved most satisfactory. M. De la Chapelle, the manufacturer, states that he has already sold $150,000 worth of the chimneys. The toughened chimneys are about 60 per cent dearer than those of ordinary glass. The factory is in Delavan street, Brooklyn, N.Y. * * * * * ALEXANDER BAIN, ELECTRICIAN. This ingenious man, whose inventions in connection with the electric telegraph entitle his name to be held in grateful remembrance, died in January last at the new Home for Incurables at Broomhill, Kirkintilloch, near Glasgow, Scotland, and on Saturday his remains were interred in the burying ground in the neighborhood of that town known as the Old Aisle Cemetery. Mr. Bain, who was about sixty-six years of age, was a native of Thurso. He was the inventor of the electro-chemical printing telegraph, the electro-magnetic clock, and of perforated paper for automatic transmission of messages, and was author of a number of books and pamphlets relating to these subjects. Sir William Thomson, in his address to the Mathematical Section of the British Association at its meeting in Glasgow last year, said: "In the United States Telegraphic Department of the Great Exhibition at Philadelphia, I saw Edison's automatic telegraph delivering 1,015 words in 57 seconds. This was done by the long neglected electro-chemical method of Bain, long ago condemned in England to the helot work of recording from a relay, and turned adrift as needlessly delicate for that." Mr. Bain was stricken by paralysis, and suffered from complete loss of power in the lower limbs. For some time he had received a pension from the government, obtained for him, we believe, through the instrumentality of Sir William Thomson. Mr. Bain was a widower, and has left a son and daughter, the former of whom is in America, and the latter at present on the Continent. Photographs of him by Mayall were recently presented to the Society of Telegraph Engineers and the American Society of Telegraphers at Philadelphia. --_The Engineer._ * * * * * SELF-RELIANCE NECESSARY TO SUCCESS. Self-reliance, conjoined with promptitude in the execution of our undertakings, is indispensable to success. And yet multitudes live a life of vacillation and consequent failure, because they remain undetermined what to do, or, having decided that, have no confidence in themselves. Such persons need to be assured; but this assurance can be obtained in no other way than by their own successes in whatever they may attempt for themselves. If they lean upon others, they not only become dissatisfied with what they achieve, but the success of one achievement, in which they are entitled to but partial credit, is no guaranty to them that, unaided, they will not fail in their very next experiment. For want of self-reliance and decision of character, thousands are submerged in their first essays to make the voyage of life. Disappointed and chagrined at this, they underestimate their own capacities, and thenceforward, relying on others, they take and keep a subordinate position, from which they rise, when they rise at all, with the utmost difficulty. When a young man attains his majority, it is better for him, as a general rule, to take some independent position of his own, even though the present remuneration be less than he would obtain in the service of others. When at work for himself, in a business which requires and demands foresight, economy, and industry, he will naturally develop the strong points of his character, and become self-reliant. A glance at the business men of any community will show who have and who have not improved the opportunities of their earlier years. The former transact their business with ease, promptitude, and profit. They rely upon themselves, and execute what they have to do with energy and dispatch. But those who shirked everything in their youth are compelled to rely on their clerks and salesmen for advice, and are never ready to act when occasions of profit arise. Many parents commit a lamentable error in this respect. They lead their children to believe that they can do nothing without the constant assistance of their superiors, and after awhile the child becomes impressed with that idea. Fortunate will it be for him when he emerges from the parental roof, if he can at once acquire the self-reliance which has been kept down at home--otherwise he must necessarily fail in whatever independent enterprise he undertakes; and in such a case, while the misfortune is his own, the fault lies at the door of misjudging parents rather than at his own. * * * * * SOMETHING TO DO. It is an old trick of despots, and a good one, to employ their subjects. Why? To keep them out of mischief, Employed men are most contented. There is no conspiracy. Men do not sit down and coolly proceed to concoct iniquity so long as there is plenty of pleasant and profitable employment for body and mind. Work drives off discontent, provided there is compensation in proportion to the amount of labor performed. There must be a stimulant. God never intended a man should sweat without eating of the fruits of his labor--reaping a reward--more than he intended the idle man should revel in plenty and grow gouty on luxuries. Industry is a great peacemaker--a mind-your-own-business citizen. Something to do renders the despairing good-natured and hopeful--stops the cry of the hungry, and promotes all virtue. The best men are the most industrious; the most wealthy work the hardest. They always find something to do. Do you ever wonder that men of wealth do not "retire" and enjoy their substance? We know some young men look forward with anticipation to the time of "retiring." It is doubtful if a man should ever retire from business as long as he lives. We think we know men who, were they to abandon business, would be ruined, not pecuniarily, but mentally--their lives would be shortened. God never intended man's mind should become dormant. It is governed by fixed laws. Those laws are imperative in their exactions. Something to do! "Oh, if I had something to do!" There are young men who sigh for it, yet one thing they can do--that is, seek for a job. Once found, provided it is an honest one, do not hesitate to perform it, even if it does not pay as well as you expected. * * * * * MONEYED MEN. The Cleveland _Herald_ said, twenty years ago, during a stringency of the times, that moneyed men are the veriest cravens on earth: so timid, that on the least alarm they pull their heads, turtle-like, within their shells, and, snugly housed, hug their glittering treasure until all fear is removed. The consequence is that a few days' disturbance of the monetary atmosphere brings on a perfect dearth of not only the precious metals, but even of paper money, their representative. Moneyed men never adopt the tactics of mutual support; hence, as soon as a shot is fired into the flock, they scatter, each looking out for himself, each distrustful of the other, and each recognizing only the great law of selfishness, which is to take care of number one. Courage has saved many an army, even when ammunition was low; and many a foe has been scattered by one yell of defiance when there was not a cartridge left. * * * * * NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS. ARCHOLOGY, OR THE SCIENCE OF GOVERNMENT. By S.V. Blakeslee. Price $1.25. New York and San Francisco: A. Roman & Co. This book is a very metaphysical treatise on theories of government and the duties of citizens to the law, each other, and themselves. Theoretical politics are little in favor with thinking men of this day; and the social difficulties of our age will have to be solved by practical wisdom founded on experience. The people that knows that a certain course of legislation has destroyed an empire, and that a contrary policy has developed one, will care little as to whether or not "the will controls the feelings by mediate and indirect force." We are unable to find in this book any attempt to apply the finely worded theories stated to practical use and popular instruction in political science. GRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF ROOF TRUSSES, FOR THE USE OF ENGINEERS, ARCHITECTS, AND BUILDERS. By Charles E. Greene, A.M., Professor of Civil Engineering in the University of Michigan. Chicago, Ill: George H. Frost. The author of this work truly says that any designer who fairly tries the graphical method will be pleased with the simplicity and directness of the analysis, even for apparently complex forms. The hindrance to the general use of the method is the want of knowledge of the higher mathematics, which are largely used in most treatises on the subject. Professor Greene has avoided this stumbling block, and given us a treatise which may be understood and appreciated by any one of common school education. We therefore give his work a hearty commendation, and we hope that every carpenter and builder may be induced to analyze the stresses which affect the different parts of structures, which he can readily do by carefully reading this volume. THE HUB: a Journal devoted to the Carriage Building Trades. Published monthly. Subscription price, $3.00 a year. New York city: The Hub Publishing Company, 323 Pearl street. This journal is widely known for its accurate and extended information as to carriage building, trimming, lining, painting, etc.; and since its first issue it has maintained its reputation, and given the public an immense amount of instruction in a spirited and practical manner. The illustrations and typography are excellent, and every number shows how extended an area it serves as an authority on the important industry to which it is devoted. ASSIGNATS AND MANDATS: the Money and the Finances of the French Revolution of 1789. By Stephen D. Dillaye. Price, free by mail, 30 cents. Philadelphia, Pa.: Henry Carey Baird & Co., 810 Walnut street. Mr. Dillaye differs with the Hon. A.D. White, President of Cornell University, as to the relative merits of money and promises to pay money; and he begins with the assertion that the President's "object is to depreciate American credit, stability, and honor." Further perusal, to ascertain the meaning of this attack on a patriotic and useful member of society, shows us what Mr. Dillaye thinks he means. He talks of credit being the vital element of national power; and from this he argues that the more "credit" a nation has--that is, the deeper it is in debt--the more powerful it becomes. In short, he confuses credit as opposed to discredit with credit as opposed to cash--a grievous blunder, surely. A nation's credit is like a merchant's; it becomes greater only as his debts become smaller; and people trust a government for the same reason as they trust an individual, mainly because every previous obligation has been honorably observed. It is gratifying to know that persons of Mr. Dillaye's way of thinking are few and unimportant, and their number is diminishing daily. CROTON WATER SUPPLY FOR THE CITY OF NEW YORK: an Address by George B. Butler to the New York Municipal Society. New York city: Published by Order of the Society, 87 Madison avenue. A review of the whole subject of our water supply, its sources and the area they drain, the geographical features of the district, and the works erected by the city. Mr. Butler maintains that the Croton valley, with proper storage reservoirs, can abundantly supply the whole city; and that no new aqueduct need be constructed in the present condition of the public debt. EINE KURZE ALLGEMEINE EINLEITUNG ZU DEN AROMATISCHEN NITROVERBINDUNGEN. Von Peter Townsend Austen. Leipzig, Germany: Winter, Publisher. We are glad to see that an American is able to publish a very useful chemical treatise in Germany, the great head center of chemistry. Dr. Austen, one of our most distinguished young chemists in the field of original research, has produced a work which bears the marks of much patient thought and study. The book is dedicated to the renowned German chemist, Professor A.W. Hofmann. OUR YOUNG FOLKS' MAGAZINE: a Monthly Journal of Instruction and Amusement. Subscription price, $1.60 a year. Boston, Mass.: Post Office Box 3090. A readable little periodical, well calculated to amuse the little ones for whom it is intended. GLASS FOR THE STUDIO AND DARK ROOM. By Thomas Gaffield. Philadelphia, Pa.: Benerman & Wilson. There is much useful information in this little pamphlet, and photographers especially should read it. The matter first appeared in the Philadelphia _Photographer_. * * * * * RECENT AMERICAN AND FOREIGN PATENTS * * * * * NEW AGRICULTURAL INVENTIONS. IMPROVED GANG PLOW. Ezra Peak, Montana, Kan.--This invention is so constructed that it may be easily raised from and lowered to the ground, and adjusted to work at any desired depth in the ground. It is claimed to be of lighter draft than plows constructed in the usual way, also to be simple in construction and inexpensive in manufacture. The wheels, the faces of which are notched to give them a slight up-and-down movement as they are drawn forward, slightly jar the plows, and thus cause them to be easier drawn than when smooth wheels are used. The shaft can be provided with a ratchet wheel and pawl to hold it in any position into which it may be turned; and to it is attached a rope or chain, the other end of which, is attached to the forward end of the frame, so that by turning the shaft the plows may be raised from, lowered to, and adjusted to work at any desired depth in the ground. IMPROVED PLOW. James Willis Hendley, Cedar Hill, N.C., assignor to David N. Bennett and Samuel T. Wright, of same place.--The objects here are simplicity and cheapness of construction, and such arrangement of parts as will prevent the plow becoming clogged with weeds, etc. The mold-board is welded to the land side, or cast in one piece with it, so that no brace or other connection is required between the mold-board and standard; secondly, the curved beam is attached to the heel of the land-side and supported by a brace, which is bolted to the middle portion of the latter, and arranged in such relation to the mold-board that a space is left between them, into which the trash will fall, and thus be drawn into the furrow and covered. IMPROVED GRAIN DRILL. George W. Osborn, Parkville, Mich.--This is an improved attachment for seed drills, for gaging the depth at which the grain shall be deposited in the earth. It consists in an adjustable spring gage bar attached to the shank of each drill tooth, whereby the teeth may be made to enter the ground a greater or less depth. It is claimed to ensure the planting of seeds at equal depth in hard or soft ground, and to diminish the draft. IMPROVED HORSE HAY RAKE. Joseph B. Wakeman and John L. Wager, Deposit, N.Y.--The construction of this implement is such that a large space is afforded beneath the rake head for the collection of hay. The pivots of said rake head back are also brought back, so that the teeth may be readily raised to discharge the collected hay. By an ingenious lever arrangement the driver is enabled to hold the rake to its work by the pressure of his foot, and also readily to discharge the hay gathered. IMPROVED BEE HIVE. George W. Akins, Bridgeton, Pa.--In this hive, holes are bored in the sides of the compartment for ventilation, and windows are flared for the purpose of inspecting the inside of the hive. A frame is used whenever it is desired to have the honeycomb of any particular shape. It consists of a form of tin or other suitable maternal, placed on a frame or slide, and having the shape required in the comb. Bees will build inside of the form, leaving about one fourth inch space between the form and the comb. The tin sheet receives a portion of the refuse matter, and can be readily taken out and cleaned. On the 1st of May the bees are driven out into another hive and the frames examined. Three frames are taken out and set in a new box, and three empty frames are put in their place. The old queen must be put with the new colony, and half of the bees must be put in each box and shut up, and put on a stand. The hives are to be opened the next morning. At the next natural swarming time the swarms can be again divided. The hive cannot freeze, and it is proof against mice. IMPROVED PLOW STOCK. Robert Weber, New Ulm, Texas.--In this invention, by loosening a nut, the point of draft attachment may be raised and lowered to cause the plow to work deeper or shallower in the ground, or turned to one or the other side, to cause the plow to take or leave land, and may be secured in place when adjusted by again tightening the nut. IMPROVED COMBINED HAY TEDDER AND SIDE RAKE. John Huber and Henry Snell, Girard, Ill.--This machine may be used simply for stirring up and turning the hay, or for turning the hay and gathering it into windrows. The shaft of a reel revolves in bearings attached to the side bars of the frame near their rear ends. To the bars of the reel are attached spring teeth, which, as the machine is drawn forward, take hold of the hay, carry it up and over the reel, and drop it to the ground in the rear of the machine. A carrier takes the hay from the teeth, when it has been brought to the top of the reel, carries it over the shaft, and discharges it into a trough, down which it slides, and is deposited in a windrow along one side of the path of the machine. IMPROVED GRUBBING MACHINE. Ira Burley, Redwing, Minn.--This invention consists in the combination of wheels and axle, tongue, adjusting bar, adjustable brace, uprights, cross bar, two ropes, and four pulley blocks with each other. To the forward end of the tongue is attached a loop or clevis, to receive an iron pin, to be driven into the ground to keep the machine from moving about while being used. To the pulley block is swiveled a hook, to be hooked into a loop, attached to the forward end of a lever. The rear end of the lever passes through a slot in the upper end of a fulcrum post, and has a notch formed in its lower side to receive a bolt or pin, attached to said post to serve as a fulcrum to said lever. Several notches are formed in the lever to receive the fulcrum bolt, to enable the position of the fulcrum post to be adjusted to regulate the leverage, and as circumstances may require. To the lever is attached a strong clevis, to receive the hook of the chain, that is secured to the stump to be pulled. IMPROVED SEED PLANTER. Daniel J. Davis, Red Boiling Springs, Tenn.--In this invention two wheels revolve upon the journals of the axle. Upon the end parts of the axle are attached the rear ends of side bars, the forward ends of which are bolted to the outer sides of the forward ends of the plow beams. The forward ends of the beams are bolted to the ends of the front bar, to the center of which is secured the forward end of the central bar. To the beams are attached the plows for opening furrows to receive the seed as it passes from the conductor spouts. The lower ends of the spouts or tubes pass in through the sides of the plows, so as to conduct the seed into the bottom of the furrows before they have been partially filled by the falling in of the soil. The dropping plate is concaved around its dropping holes, and is provided with a plate that may be adjusted to cover one set of dropping holes to drop the hills twice as far apart as when both sets of holes operate. IMPROVED ANIMAL TRAP. Thomas N. Hughes, Muddy Creek, Tenn.--This trap is for animals of all kinds, as rats, mice, and larger animals, as foxes, minks, coons, etc., that are allured by bait, and is automatically set again by the animal caught, to be ready for the next animal attracted by the bait. It is divided by a longitudinal partition into two main sections, in which the working parts are disposed. The entrance at the end of one section has a drop door, which is arranged back of the same, resting, when closed, on side strips in inclined position, and being supported on an upright arm, of a centrally pivoted treadle door, at the bottom of the trap, when the trap is set. The treadle door is only required to swing sufficiently on its pivots to release the drop door from the arm, suitable seats at the under side of the trap, at both sides of the treadle door, preventing the door from swinging farther than necessary. The bait is placed, in a grated receptacle, near the treadle door, and entices the animal to pass in, so as to close the drop door when it arrives at the part of the treadle door near the bait. The back end of this section is perforated or grated to admit light, which attracts the frightened animal and induces him to pass toward the light. The top part of the trap may be grated to admit air, and the glass door at the end made to slide, to admit the taking out of the animals for killing them. * * * * * NEW MISCELLANEOUS INVENTIONS. APPARATUS FOR THE HYDRATION OF CHLORINE GAS. William Maynard, New York city.--This invention relates to an improved construction of apparatus for the hydration of gases, and more particularly chlorine gas for the manufacture of chlorine water for use in the industrial arts of bleaching, etc. It consists mainly in a case having an inlet for the water above, an inlet for the gas below, and provided with an intermediate water percolating medium; combined with a reservoir located below the level of the case and having a water-sealed communication therewith, which reservoir receives the hydrated gases, and which water seal prevents the heavy gas in the case from passing out through the bottom inlet. The case for the percolation of water and the absorption of the gas is made of conical shape, with the largest diameter at the bottom, to produce the greatest absorption of the heavy gas when first admitted; while horizontal partitions, or shelves, in said case are provided with upwardly projecting tubes which hold a permanent surface of water on the said partition or shelves. The tubes permit, by their peculiar shape, the water to pass down on one side and the gas up on the opposite side of said tube, while their alternating arrangement in the alternating shelves gives a zigzag and long continued passage to the gas and water in moving in opposite directions through the case. IMPROVED PROCESS OF PREPARING GAS FUEL. Martin N. Diall, Terre Haute, Ind.--This inventor saturates wood by immersing it in any hydrocarbon oil for from six to twelve hours, as required by the nature of the wood, so that it may take up the necessary quantity of oil for the required strength of gas. The wood is then immersed in a bath of water, for taking up a quantity of water outside the oil, and is then charged in the retorts, the same as coal, and distilled in the same way. By this process the inventor claims that he produces fixed gas equal to coal gas, much faster, and with less expense, the wood and water furnishing the hydrogen, and the oil furnishing the carbon. IMPROVED FISHING LINE LEADER. Welmer T. Jahne and Anthony Moors, Jersey City, N.J.--This consists of a leader made of spring wire, bent into V form, provided with a swivel and eye at its middle part, and with eyes or loops at its ends to receive the line and snells. By this construction the snells and hooks will be kept apart however the line maybe thrown, and however they and the leader may be turned about by the tide or current. The device is one well calculated to meet with a favorable reception from fishermen. IMPROVED ABDOMINAL CORSET. Christina Lascell, Newark, N.J.--The object of this invention is to furnish an improved abdominal corset, which supports the weight of the abdomen in a perfectly comfortable and easy manner, and throws the strain on the shoulders and hips of the wearer. The corset is adjustable to the varying conditions of the abdomen, does not interfere with the motion and different positions of the body, and is readily put on and taken off. It has adjustable elastic shoulder straps, and opening at the sides by lacings and elastic bands and buttons. The front part of the corset is stiffened by a stay that slides in a pocket to provide for stooping. A central front and lacing admit the front part of the corset to expand. The lower extension part of the corset has short stiffening stays, and it is connected independently of the upper stays by short side lacing and elastic straps to the side or hip parts of the corset. A hernial band extends from the lowermost part of the corset-extension between the legs to the rear, and is attached by adjustable hip straps to the sides of the corset. IMPROVED FIRE ESCAPE. John F. Werner, New York city.--The terrible disaster in the Brooklyn theater is serving as a stimulus to induce the invention of devices looking to the prevention of a like occurrence. The present inventor has devised a new fire escape for theaters, concert halls, and other public places of amusement, by which the space at the upper parts of the entrances, halls, or vestibules of the buildings is utilized for the purpose of forming additional passage ways for the persons in the buildings, to be used in case of fire for the more convenient and less dangerous exit of the same. The invention consists, mainly, of a movable floor, suspended by chains, pulleys, and weights, near the ceiling of the entrances, and lowered in case of fire. It is supported on projecting rests of the side walls, at suitable height above the floor. Sliding extensions and swinging stairs and rear sections connect with the ground outside of the door, and with the staircases of the gallery, so as to form separate exits above the regular entrances. IMPROVED ELECTRO-MAGNETIC DENTAL PLUGGER. James E. Dexter, New York city.--This invention consists, first, in a magnet having a centrally bored iron core, surrounded by a magnetic coil, which is enveloped by an iron shell that is concentric with the central core, and is attached to a flange formed on the lower end of the said central core. One side of both shell and core are split for the purpose of obviating residual magnetism. The invention also consists in combining a spring yoke, a vibrator, and a spring contact piece, as hereinafter particularly described. The third part of this invention consists in the arrangement of the key for completing the circuit, which is made with an insulating exterior, and is provided with one of the termini of the magnet coil, and bears against the side of the key to insure a constant contact of the surfaces. The various parts of the plugger are combined, so that pressing the key with the finger makes the circuit, and a succession of regular strokes is produced, the force of which may be varied by an adjusting screw. * * * * * NEW MECHANICAL AND ENGINEERING INVENTIONS. IMPROVED COTTON GIN. Joseph W. Thorn, Iuka, Miss., assignor to himself and M.W. Beardsley, of same place.--In this machine there is a new construction of the brush drum for simplifying the same, and facilitating the application of the brush wings, so that they can be readily taken off and put on; also, an arrangement of the ribs between the saws for facilitating the separating of the seed from the cotton without breaking and injuring the fiber. There are also ingenious devices for preventing the seed from gathering and clogging at the ends of the saw drum. IMPROVED SAFETY CHECK FOR ELEVATORS. Nathan H. Fogg, Boston, Mass.--When the car is suspended normally from the rope, the rubber balls, arranged in sockets near the lower part of the car, are supported on their seats in a state of rest; but the instant that the rope breaks or gets detached from the bolt the action of a spiral spring throws an actuating plate downward, and levers and ball-carrying rods upward. The balls are thus thrown off their seats and wedged between the inclined sides of the pockets and the guide posts of the elevator so as to stop thereby the car. IMPROVED COMBINATION LOCK. Achille Parise, Naples, Italy.--This is a new combination lock for doors, trunks, safes, etc., that admits of a large number of combinations, and may be opened and closed quickly. It consists of sliding tumbler plates, having longitudinal slots and a number of perforations placed at different relative positions to the slots of each tumbler. The trunks are connected by screw set pins attached to face slides, and passing through any one of the perforations, admitting the setting of the tumblers and opening of the lock by outer projections or buttons of the slides to fixed exterior guides. IMPROVED MACHINE FOR WIRING AND BINDING HATS. Mari A. Cuming and Judson Knight, New York city.--This is a machine for binding hats, felt skirts, and similar articles, by a uniform and parallel pressure on the rims, and by facilitating the applying and taking off of the articles from the machine, and accomplishing the cutting of the binding or braid and wire in a reliable and improved manner. Pressure rollers attach the binding and the wire, if one is required, in connection with a grooved gage that is supported on a seat of the shaft of the lower pressure roller. The wire is guided by annular recesses or chamferings at the rear circumference of the pressure rollers and the groove of the gage. The gage is so connected to its seat that it may be turned and another guide groove of the same be exposed to face the pressure rollers, so as to adapt the same for a variety of work. * * * * * BUSINESS AND PERSONAL _The Charge for Insertion under this head is One Dollar a line for each insertion. If the Notice exceeds four lines, One Dollar and a Half per line will be charged._ * * * * * Manufs. of Scissors address J.W.D.E., Harmony Grove, Ga. For Sale--36 in. Lathe, $4.00; 72 in. Lathe, $4.50; 10 in. Pratt Whiting Shaper, $2.75; 35 H.P. Loco. Boiler, $300; 12 in. Lathe, $65; at Shearman's, 132 N. 3d St., Phila. Iron Tubing--Wanted, a yearly supply of 1-4 in. light Iron Tubing. Address P.O. box 1250, New York city. Baxter's Adjustable Wrenches--The best for Farmers, Householders and Mechanics. Greene, Tweed & Co., 18 Park Place, N.Y. For Sale--Baldwin No. 4 Foot Lathe and fittings; in perfect order. Address P.O. Box 196, Clinton, Mich. National Steam Pump--Simple, durable, economical. Reduced price. National Iron Works, N. Brunswick, N.J. Manufs. and dealers in Cotton Gins, Grist Mills, and Rice Hullers and Polishers, address with terms, Y.L. Ridley, Liberty, Texas. For Sale--Patent Combination Fruit Press, Filter and Funnel. An indispensable article in every household. For circulars, address G.A. Newsam, 118 3d Pl. Brooklyn. Mill Stone Dressing Diamonds. Simple, effective, and durable. J. Dickinson, 64 Nassau St., N.Y. Will purchase or introduce, on a reasonable royalty, some good, useful article. Address, with description and full particulars, A.E. Lowison, Boston, Mass. Mechanical inventors familiar with Envelope Manufacturing. L.J. Henry, 615 Kearny st., San Francisco, Cal. Set of Mechanical Curves, as illustrated in Sci. Am. Supplement, No. 50, mailed on receipt of $5.25, by Keuffel & Esser, New York. Hyatt & Co.'s Varnishes and Japans, as to price, color, purity, and durability, are cheap by comparison than any others extant. 246 Grand st., N.Y. Factory, Newark, N.J. Send for circular and descriptive price list. Lightning Screw Plates. A perfect thread at one cut adjustable for wear. Frasse & Co., 62 Chatham St., N.Y. Wire Needle Pointer, W. Crabb, Newark, N.J. Power & Foot Presses, Ferracute Co., Bridgeton, N.J. Superior Lace Leather, all sizes, cheap. Hooks and Couplings for flat and round Belts. Send for catalogue. C.W. Arny, 148 North 3d St., Philadelphia, Pa. F.C. Beach & Co., makers of the Tom Thumb Telegraph and other electrical machines, have removed to 530 Water St., N.Y. For Best Presses, Dies, and Fruit Can Tools, Bliss & Williams, cor. of Plymouth and Jay Sts., Brooklyn, N.Y. Water, Gas, and Steam Pipe, Wrought Iron. Send for prices. Bailey, Farrell & Co., Pittsburgh, Pa. Walrus Leather and supplies for polishing Iron, Steel, and Brass. Greene, Tweed & Co., 18 Park Place, N.Y. Hydraulic Presses and Jacks, new and second hand. Lathes and Machinery for Polishing and Buffing metals. E. Lyon, 470 Grand St., N.Y. Solid Emery Vulcanite Wheels--The Solid Original Emery Wheel--other kinds imitations and inferior. Caution.--Our name is stamped in full on all our best Standard Belting, Packing, and Hose. Buy that only. The best is the cheapest. New York Belting and Packing Company, 37 and 38 Park Row, New York. Steel Castings from one lb. to five thousand lbs. Invaluable for strength and durability. Circulars free. Pittsburgh Steel Casting Co., Pittsburgh, Pa. M. Shaw, Manufacturer of Insulated Wire for galvanic and telegraph purposes, &c., 259 W. 27th St., N.Y. Shingle, Heading, and Stave Machine. See advertisement of Trevor & Co., Lockport, N.Y. For Solid Wrought iron Beams, etc., see advertisement. Address Union Iron Mills, Pittsburgh, Pa., for lithograph, etc. Articles in Light Metal Work, Fine Castings in Brass, Malleable Iron, &c., Japanning, Tinning, Galvanizing. Welles Specialty Works, Chicago, Ill. See Boult's Paneling, Moulding, and Dovetailing Machine at Centennial, B. 8-55. Send for pamphlet and sample of work. B.C. Mach'y Co., Battle Creek, Mich. Wanted--Novel and practical invention, by a reliable house, for manufacturing. Address Post Office, Box 25, Chillicothe, Ohio. Chester Steel Castings Co. make castings twice as strong as malleable iron castings, at about the same price. See their advertisement on page 125. Hand Fire Engines, Lift and Force Pumps for fire and all other purposes. Address Rumsey & Co., Seneca Falls, N.Y., U.S.A. * * * * * NOTES & QUERIES * * * * * S.J.S. will find good recipes for laundry soaps on pp. 331, 379, vol. 31. For toilet soaps, see p. 289, vol. 28.--B.F.T. will find directions for putting a black finish on brass on p. 362, vol. 25.--J.C.S. will find directions for coloring a meerschaum pipe on p. 90, vol. 36.--A.B. will find a good recipe for Babbitt metal on p. 122, vol. 28.--G.A.D. will find directions for coloring butter with annatto on p. 187, vol. 31.--L.O.J. will find something on iceboats sailing faster than the wind on p. 107, vol. 36.--J.M.L. will find directions for clarifying cotton seed oil on p. 91, vol. 36.--D.V. will find a good recipe for shoe polish on p. 107, vol. 36.--A.B. will find directions for japanning on metal on p. 408, vol. 30.--T.S.D. will find recipes for all kinds of colored fires on p. 203, vol. 34.--G.S.C. can fasten his paper labels to wood with flour paste.--W.R.B. will find directions for dyeing billiard balls on p. 88, vol. 34.--G.W.M. will find directions for making raisins on p. 59, vol. 34.--T.F.T. will find something on burning petroleum in steam boilers on p. 165, vol. 30.--S.B.U. will find some illustrations of lathes for turning spokes, tool handles, etc., on p. 88, vol. 36.--W.E.P. will find a formula for safety valves on p. 330. vol. 32.--A.O. will find directions for removing mildew on p. 138, vol. 27. For mending rubber boots, etc., see p. 203, vol. 30.--W.C.L. will find directions for preserving eggs on p. 306, vol. 34.--R.M.G. will find a recipe for root beer on p. 138, vol. 31.--W.F.H.'s plan for a refrigerator might answer. See p. 251, vol. 31.--J.C. can remove the wool from pelts by steeping the skins in water, and hanging them up till the wool putrifies. Then scrape with a blunt knife. For cleansing wool, see p. 6, vol. 32.--W.H.J. will find a recipe for a cement for marble on p. 344, vol. 32.--T.B. can gild his steel scabbard by following the directions given on p. 106, vol. 34.--A.H.B., J.A.C., W.H.H., J.F.P., D.S., J.N.H., J.P., F.F., M.N., M.C., R.C., K.S.W., T.J., and others, who ask us to recommend books on industrial and scientific subjects, should address the booksellers who advertise in our columns, all of whom are trustworthy firms, for catalogues (1) R.H.C. says: We have a slate roof which leaks very much. I have not discovered any defect in the way in which it was put on; it appears to be perfect. The pitch may be too low, and the rain may be driven through by the wind on this account. Is there any wash, paint, or cement that might be used for the purpose of remedying this defect? A. There is an india rubber paint which is used to make leaky roofs tight, but we have not learned of its being applied to slate roofs. (2) C.C.B. says: I am making a small steam engine. The cylinder has, inside diameter, about 1 inch with 2½ inches stroke. What would be the most suitable material and dimensions for the boiler? A. Make one 10 or 12 inches in diameter and 18 inches high, of 1/8 inch iron. You can carry 60 lbs. steam pressure. (3) M.C. says: I have had charge of some greenhouses that were erected about four years ago; they are thoroughly heated, and all the pipes have a thick coat of black paint. The houses never gave any satisfaction, no matter how healthy the plants were in the fall. Soon after the fires were lighted both leaves and flowers began to drop, and some plants died. My predecessors attributed it to gas getting into the houses. Upon inquiry I found no gas was there except when the pipes were hot, and that the hotter they were the worse it was. In my opinion, the cause of the trouble was a strong smell of paint from the pipes. Since then I only keep heat enough to save the plants from freezing. A. From your statement there is no doubt that the paint used on the pipes was an imperfectly purified coal tar. Such tar contains a great number of hydrocarbons--naphtha, naphthalen, anthracen, phenol, several organic alkaloids, hydrosulphuric and hydrocyanic acids, etc., all of which are more or less volatile at the temperature to which they must have been subjected. These exhalations have proved fatal to plant life when in sufficient quantity. We do not know of a better remedy than that of removing the cause. Painting the pipes with a strong solution of washing soda and lime would, in a measure, prevent the escape of the most objectionable constituents into the air, by forming with them compounds non-volatile at any temperature to which they are likely to be subjected in contact with the pipes; but the former would be the surest plan. (4) C.D.W. asks: The roof of the new Illinois State House, as well as the stylobate cornices and upper portion of the dome, are covered with zinc. It has been on about three years, and I am told is materially affected by oxidation. The theory is that zinc, though subject to oxidization, has the peculiarity that the oxide does not scale off as from iron, but forms a permanent coating impervious to the action of the atmosphere. Some mechanics, however, assert that neither zinc, copper, nor lead will withstand the action of our atmosphere, as bituminous coal strongly impregnated with sulphur is almost the only fuel used. It is claimed by some that the sulphurous acid in the atmosphere tends to corrode zinc so as to make it worthless for roofs or gutter linings. A. Are you sure that the roof and gutters in question are not of galvanized iron, iron coated with zinc? This is the material most commonly used for that purpose at the present time. Zinc has been found to be too brittle for the strain to which it is subjected, in such cases, by the expansion and contraction induced by changes of temperature. A slight oxidation will adhere to the surface, but an acid deposit from the atmosphere will penetrate the coating in points and deteriorate the metal. (5) N.J.S. says: I have a floor of ash and black walnut which has been oiled with raw linseed oil once. How can I finish it so as to get a hard, smooth finish that will not be scratched by boot heels nor be sticky or retain the dirt as a waxed floor does? A. Oil raises the fiber of black walnut and gives it a rougher surface than when free from it. To polish any wood, it is only necessary to fill the pores well, and then rub it down to a smooth surface. Thus painters prefer to put on a coat of shellac varnish first, before oiling walnut and other hard woods. For fine floors, a thin coat of liquid wax is applied as a finish. (6) A.J.S. asks: What is the best plan for putting up a cheap dry house of lumber, for drying (by steam) white oak, hickory, and other lumber used in wagon and buggy making? A. Make as tight a house as possible with tongued and grooved siding-boards, floors, roof, etc., and provide a stack of steam pipe containing 1 foot of heating surface to every 50 cubic feet of air contained in the building. Set the steam pipe in compact shape and enclose it with a casing of galvanized sheet iron open at the top; supply cold air from outside of the building by a boxed conduit to the bottom of this stack. The air when heated will rise and diffuse itself into the room, and as it cools will fall to the floor; provide registers in the floor, through which it may escape into other boxed tubes under the floor leading to an upright chimney discharging above the roof. Let a smoke pipe from the boiler enter the chimney and extend up inside the flue far enough to heat the same. The change of air is necessary to dry the lumber. The size of the house of course will depend upon the quantity of material required to be stacked up into it at any one time. (7) G. asks: 1. How do you calculate the amount of pipe of a given size to warm a room of a given size? A. One square foot of plate or pipe surface is generally taken as sufficient to heat about 70 cubic feet of air in dwellings. 2. What allowance should be made for doors and windows? A. The said foot of surface will heat, in accordance with varying conditions, from 40 to 100 cubic feet of air, and allowance should be made for extra exposures, to correspond with that scale. A steam pressure of 5 lbs. is sufficient for heating purposes. 3. What is meant by the terms direct and indirect radiation, in giving capacity of steam generators for heating houses? A. Direct radiation is used when the pipes are located in the room, and indirect when they are located in a chamber in the cellar, to warm air which is conducted to the room by air pipes. (8) D.M. says: After reading L.S.W.'s reply to J.B.C., p. 75 (6), vol. 36, I think the following demonstration will be more acceptable to J.B.C.: Imagine three spheres of which the given circles are great circles, and a plane tangent to the three spheres. Any two of the spheres may be conceived to have been generated by the revolution of two of the circles about the line joining their centers. During such revolution, the lines tangent to the two circles describe a conical surface. We have, therefore, three spheres and three conical surfaces. Now the plane, which is tangent to the three spheres, is also evidently tangent to the three conical surfaces; and therefore the vertices of those conical surfaces are all in the tangent plane. Now those vertices are the points (1), (2), (3). But the same points are also in the plane passing through the centers of the three spheres, which is the same with the plane of the paper on which the figure is drawn. Those points, being in two planes at the same time, must therefore be in the intersection of those planes, that is to say, in a straight line. (9) C.W.H. asks: Can dyeing or coloring be done in cold water? A. Many of the coal tar colors may be used in this way: For animal fibers--wool, silk, | etc.--the affinity of these colors is so great that, in most instances, no mordants are necessary. The baths are usually made slightly acid. With vegetable fibers, however, a fast dye is not assured without mordanting. Some of the finer goods are prepared by treating with steam coagulated albumen (animalizing), gelatin, various tannates, tin salt, alum, and other metallic salts. The following is, the usual method of treatment, except with goods intended for very light shades: Pass the goods through a strong decoction of sumac or other tannin solution for an hour, and afterwards for an hour or two through a weak solution of stannate of soda; wring out, dip into a dilute solution of sulphuric acid, and rinse well in water. The goods are then ready to be passed through the color bath, slightly acidulated. For different tints, these baths are worked at different temperatures. (10) F.W. says: I wish to lay the face tier of a brick wall in black mortar. How can I make the coloring material and mix it? A. Some prefer to use red mortar and afterwards pencil the joints with black. Color the ordinary white mortar with Spanish brown for red mortar, and with ivory black for black, by mixing in enough of the color in a powdered state to give a good deep tone. (11) H.A.S. asks: 1. How many prisms are required in a spectroscope to detect mineral elements in presence of all the ash ingredients of organic bodies? A. If we understand you, one 60° prism will answer. 2. What is the best and cheapest form of apparatus to heat such compounds for examination? A. Mix the substance with a little pure hydrochloric acid and glycerin, and introduce into the flame on a coil of platinum wire. 1. Has soup prepared by dissolving meat bones in a Papin's digester ever been known to produce ossification of any of the soft tissues? A. We have never heard of such a result. 2. Has it ever been known to produce a new crop of teeth in toothless persons? A. We have no data as to such a fact. I have seen a statement that May 19, 1780, was so dark a day that candles were necessary everywhere; and I have heard that another occurred about the year 1820. Has any scientific explanation ever been given of this phenomenon? A. The darkness on the days you mention were the result of solar eclipses. They occurred on days of unusual cloudiness. Perhaps the darkest day in modern history was that caused by the total solar eclipse in the year 1806. (12) A.B. says: 1. I have built a boat 15 feet long and 4 feet 6 inches wide. How large a boiler and engine do I require to work her to best advantage? She is 22 inches deep from top of rail to top of keel. A. Cylinder, 2½ x 3 inches; boiler, 20 inches in diameter and 3 feet high. Propeller, 18 to 20 inches in diameter, and of 3 feet pitch. 2. How fast ought she to run? A. Probable speed, 5 miles an hour in smooth water. (13) L.L. asks: 1. Does it make any difference in what position a watch is in when running? A. For watches adjusted to temperature and position, it does not make much difference. 2. When not being carried, what position should it be left in? A. In the case of ordinary watches, we imagine that the wear will be rather more uniform when they are in a vertical position. 3. If a person sleeps in a cola room, would a watch be better under his pillow than on a table or hung up in the same room? A. It is best not to subject them to great changes of temperature. (14) W.G. says, in reply to C.W.W., who has an engine, of 2-5/8 inches bore and 4 inches stroke, which runs slower with increase of pressure: Having had much experience with small engines and boilers, I will state that I have had the same difficulty when using an upright tubular boiler, and discovered the following to be the cause: The upper portions of the tube superheat the steam to such a degree as to prevent lubrication on the valve and piston surface by condensation, and thereby reduce the speed of engine. Even with increased pressure, this effect will be more appreciable when the area and travel of slide valve are in excess. (15) J.M.T. asks: Is there friction between two bodies while at rest, or only when one or both are in motion? A. Both when at rest and in motion. Why does a balloon rise in the air? A. See p. 64, vol. 32. (16) S.J.S. asks: 1. How are augers twisted? A. By special machinery. 2. How are twist drills made, and are they single or double grooved? A. They are double grooved or double twisted, and are cut out in a milling machine. Can weights, springs, or water from a tank be used to any advantage to run a lathe? A. No. How much do iron and brass, in rods or bands, expand in length when heated to red heat? A. Iron about 1/8 inch per foot, brass 1/10 inch. Is the pressure of the air to be added to the weight of water in the bottom of a vessel in estimating the pressure on the bottom? A. No. Does a watch or clock run faster when just wound up? A. No. Is it not moisture in the air that makes it heavier, and so affects the barometer? A. Yes. Is the pressure in a siphon equal throughout, or is it greater in the upper end? A. Equal throughout. Will it take more power to run two millstones in opposite directions than it will to run one at the same speed, the other being stationary? A. Yes, it will take double the power. 1. How are common screws made? A. In lathes, with tools and dies. 2. How can I make wooden screws perfectly smooth? A. By using keen tools. What is the simplest way of cutting a square hole in a bar of iron? A. Drill a round hole and square it out. (17) G.E.C. asks: Could I have a brick range 2�3 feet, built on a platform about 1 foot from floor, with two compartments, to be heated with petroleum, the lower one to be used as an oven, the upper one to have a stove top to set cooking utensils on, and have a ventilating pipe run from each compartment of the oil receptacles into the place in the chimney where the stove pipe usually goes, to carry away any gas or smoke? I want the oil receptacles to be arranged to be drawn out, to be filled and trimmed, and I would like four burners to heat an oven 22 inches square, as hot as the same oven could be heated with wood. A. We doubt the propriety or the economy of substituting oil for wood, but something may be done to make the atmosphere of kitchens more endurable in summer, and permanently so in warm climates. A double faced range could be made and set in the center of the thickness of the chimney, with the space above the top of it open to the exterior of the house; a very slight structure, simply having a good floor and roof and open around the sides, and built against the chimney as an extension to the house, would answer for a summer kitchen, while the ordinary kitchen inside the house could be used in winter. The transposition could be made by a pair of iron sliding doors shutting off the kitchen not in use; and these doors could be transferred from one side of the chimney to the other when the change of season required it. (18) A.X.A. says: In your issue of December 2 is a recipe in which "insoluble acid chromate of lime," and gelatin are to be used; and in a succeeding number of your paper the modes of preparing the insoluble acid are given. I have made the acid according to your directions, but the result of my manipulation of the recipe is a failure. You say: "Take of insoluble acid chromate of lime one part, and of gelatin five parts;" but you do not say what further is to be done. Will the acid dissolve the gelatin, or must warm water be added? In my experiment the acid would not dissolve the gelatin, and I had to add considerable warm water before it would do so. A. Dissolve the bichromate of lime in the smallest possible quantity of warm water, and filter; then add the gelatin, previously softened by immersion in cold water. Heat the mixture over a water bath until the gelatin is completely dissolved, stir well, and use while hot. The recipe should have stated that this cement was best suited for glassware. The bichromate of potash or of ammonia will answer nearly as well as the lime salt. (19) E.C.N. asks: How must a stove be constructed to burn pea coal, for heating outbuildings? Is there any way of constructing a draught below the grate of any common heating stove, sufficiently strong to do without an extra long chimney? A. Use a broad grate to spread the coal out well, so as to avoid the necessity of heaping it up much; make the opening for the draft some distance below the grate, and regulate by the usual slide dampers in the lower and upper doors. MINERALS, ETC.--Specimens have been received from the following correspondents, and examined, with the result stated: F.R.R.S.--The substance you send is carbonate of iron. It is held in solution in the water by the large excess of carbonic acid which the water contains. On boiling the water the carbonic acid gas is expelled and the iron salt is precipitated from solution. The removal of this and some other objectionable salts which the water very probably contains, may be removed by the addition of the proper quantity of clear lime water to it--the lime in this instance will combine with the excess of carbonic acid and fall to the bottom together with the carbonate of iron. To determine the precise quantity of lime water requisite, add the reagent (saturated solution) to a small portion (of known volume) of the freshly drawn water, in small quantities at a time, and with constant stirring until no further precipitate forms. Then by a simple operation in proportion the quantity of the reagent necessary for the purification of a given quantity of the well water may be easily determined. An excess of the reagent must be avoided. This impurity would probably prevent the successful working of an injector. W.S.W. asks: How is the best rosin, used on violin bows, prepared?--W.F. asks: What is a simple method for washing clay for brick and tile making?--E.S.D. asks: What is the best kind of wood to construct a guitar? * * * * * COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED. The Editor of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN acknowledges, with much pleasure, the receipt of original papers and contributions upon the following subjects: On Rheumatism. By A.R.E. On Postage Stamps. By E.B. On Boiler Explosions. By G.B.B. On Reaching the North Pole. By J.H.S. On Heating Street Cars. By P.T. On a Hybrid Fruit, By R.S.B. On an Air Vessel. By J.T.R. Also inquiries and answers from the following: E.B.M.--F.F.F.--N.B.H.--B.B.--O.F.--R.V.J.--F.M.--N.B.C.--C.F.E.--W.T. --C.W.C.--T.F.--C.A.S.--S.N.M.--J.R.D.--P.J.D.S. * * * * * HINTS TO CORRESPONDENTS. Correspondents whose inquiries fail to appear should repeat them. If not then published, they may conclude that, for good reasons, the Editor declines them. The address of the writer should always be given. Inquiries relating to patents, or to the patentability of inventions, assignments, etc., will not be published here. All such questions, when initials only are given, are thrown into the waste basket, as it would fill half of our paper to print them all; but we generally take pleasure in answering briefly by mail, if the writer's address is given. Hundreds of inquiries analogous to the following are sent: "Who sells a tool for truing up a crosshead wrist? Who sells tools for refitting steam valves without unscrewing them from the pipes? Who sells spoke-turning lathes? Who makes machinery for freeing wool of burrs and dirt? Where can tungsten, or tungsten steel, be procured, and at what price? Who sells silicate of alumina and silicate of potash?" All such personal inquiries are printed, as will be observed, in the column of "Business and Personal," which is specially set apart for that purpose, subject to the charge mentioned at the head of that column. Almost any desired information can in this way be expeditiously obtained. * * * * * OFFICIAL. INDEX OF INVENTIONS FOR WHICH LETTERS PATENT OF THE UNITED STATES WERE GRANTED IN THE WEEK ENDING January 18, 1877, AND EACH BEARING THAT DATE. [Those marked (r) are reissued patents.] * * * * * A complete copy of any patent in the annexed list, including both the specifications and drawings, will be furnished from this office for one dollar. In ordering, please state the number and date of the patent desired, and remit to Munn & Co., 37 Park Row, New York city. * * * * * Abdominal corset, C. Lascell 186,258 Acoustic telegraph, T.A. Edison 186,330 Advertising card, H. Mahler 186,209 Air compressor, J. Clayton 186,306 Air compressor, W.F. Garrison 186,336 Animal trap, T.N. Hughes 186,252 Annealing furnace, H.B. Chess 186,404 Atomizer, W. Kennish 186,208 Axle tree, trussed, J.B. Brewster 186,227 Barbed fence, C.F. Washburn 186,389 Bee hive, G.W. Akins 186,223 Belt shipping attachment, R. Denmark 186,318 Blotter and paper clip, C.B. Farrington 186,288 Bone black, cooling, C. Doscher 186,327 Book back, metallic, I. Reynolds 186,216 Bottle and basket, E. Cusenier, Sr 186,311 Bottle for hair dye, T. Divine 186,321 Bottle stopper, E.B. Requa 186,270 Bread cutter, G.B. Heath 186,248 Brick and tile lifter, Braislin & Wood 186,303 Broom, W.M. Jackson 186,254 Brush handle, I.L. Landis 186,399 Buckle, G.F. Eberhard 186,329 Buffing roll, L.S. Graves 186,205 Butter press, W.S. Alexander 186,224 Button, D. Wilcox 186,392 Call bell, A.C. Gould 186,338 Car axle lubricator, R. Macdonald 186,354 Car coupling, O. & M. Crum 186,313 Car coupling, J.W. Skeele 186,373 Car roof, H. Aldridge 186,188 Car roof, H. Aldridge 186,189 Cards for fibers, making, Yates & Kellett 186,396 Cartridge, J.P. White 186,220 Chamber vessel, J.C. Moore 186,264 Clamp for ratchet drills, L. Beland 186,225 Cloth, folding and scouring, R.D. Nesmith 186,363 Clothespin, W.S. Davis 186,314 Clutch, A.B. Bean 186,296 Coffee pot, W.W. Stevens 186,378 Combination lock, A. Parise 186,268 Combination lock, G. Winter 186,393 Combination tool, I.U. Malphurs 186,259 Combustible, J.B.D. Cassinelli 186,294 Corn planter, W. Gilman 186,203 Corn planter, J.L.G. Schmidt 186,275 Corn planter and cultivator, E.C. Gage 186,244 Corn popper, G.P. Sisson 186,279 Corset, J. Mayer, 186,210 Cotton gin, J.W. Thorn 186,383 Cotton holder, dental, T. Cogswell 186,307 Curtain fixture, Collins & Saltsgaver 186,198 Curtain fixture, J.B. Marshall 186,357 Dial telegraph, J.H.C. Watts 186,283 Door and gate fastener, J. Gibbs 186,337 Door hanger, W.E. Warner 186,388 Door retainer, R.E. Dietz 186,319 Drop light, J.A. Evarts 186,332 Egg beater, G.P. Sisson 186,278 Egg carrier, L. Inglee 186,253 Electric gas lighting, C.H. Hinds 186,343 Electro harmonic telegraph, E. Gray 186,340 Electric dental plugger, J.E. Dexter 186,234 Elevator, safety check, N.H. Fogg 186,241 Fabrics, winding up, G.E. Jones 186,256 Feed apparatus, punching, J. Morgan 186,212 Feed bag for horses, G.C. Booth 186,301 Fence post, P.J. Rickard 186,271 Fire place, H.F. Watson 186,390 Fire place heater, J.K. Dimmick 186,320 Fire place, portable, T.C. Nativel 186,361 Fish scrap, treating, S.L. Goodale 186,204 Fly fan, H.B. Baker 186,292 Fly fan, W.R. Fowler 186,243 Folding chair, B F. Little 186,353 Friction wheel, E. Brauer 186,304 Fruit or paint can, W.H. Fowler 186,333 Furnace, evaporating, J. Kitchen 186,349 Furnace, smelting, G.W. Swett (r) 7,468 Gang plow, W. Fruhling 186,335 Gang plow, E. Peak 186,269 Gas and air carbureter, Boomer & Randall 186,302 Gas governor, J.R. Blossom 186,299 Gas, manufacturing, J G. Hunt 186,207 Gas retort cover, A. Schwarz 186,276 Gate, D. Scherer 186,274 Gill net, D.W. & S.H. Davis 186,232 Grafting machine, E. Walters 186,219 Grain binder, J.M. Rosebrooks 186,272 Grain separator, O.J. Chubbuck 186,230 Grain separator, T.J. Doyle 186,235 Grubbing machine, I. Burley 186,228 Hand truck, H.R. Ferris 186,237 Hat bodies, washing, T.C. Beatty 186,295 Hats, wiring and binding. Cuming & Knight 186,312 Hay tedder and side rake, Huber & Snell 186,346 High pressure hot air engine, O. Stenberg 186,377 Hook for drawrods, M.B. Eskine 186,236 Hoops, racking, S. Parker 186,365 Horse power, traverse pinion, J.A. Field 186,238 Horseshoe, weighted, E.E. Seixas 186,277 Hose nozzle, M.S. Curtis 186,310 Hot air furnace, J.C. Sanborn 186,217 Hydraulic motor, J.M. Bois 186,195 Indexer, J. Suter 186,382 Indicator for liquids, I. Levi 186,400 Insects, destroying, J.B. Margarit 186,260 Iron fence, Nellis & Guttridge 186,362 Key board, musical, B. Bishop 186,298 Knob roses to doors, W.A. Barlow 186,194 Lamp burner, H.H. Doty 186,201 Lamp chimney, S.W. Fowler (r) 7,463 Lathe chuck, metal, J.H. Harris 186,245 Leather-covered nut, L.T. Smith 186,375 Letter scales, J.V.H. Nott 186,267 Lifting jack, C.F. Davis 186,315 Lifting jack, F.M. Lottridge 186,402 Lifting jack, D.M. Ross 186,368 Lighting alarm clocks, H.J. & W.D. Davies 186,317 Limekiln, J.W. Devling 186,233 Lock for drawers, etc., G.W. Baker 186,192 Locomotive engine, W. Wells 186,285 Loom, L.J. Knowles 186,350 Loom, Smith & Skinner 186,374 Looms, preparing warps for, W. Heaton 186,249 Molasses gate, S. Barker 186,193 Multifold pipe coupling, E.A. Leland 186,351 Muzzle bit for horses, A.J. Short 186,371 Newspaper file, P.E. Sloan 186,280 Odorless air closet, G.R. Moore 186,266 Odorless receptacle, G.R. Moore 186,265 Oiler, S.S. Newton 186,364 Ordnance, S. Crispin 186,308 Ore and coal jigger, G. Schmauch 186,370 Ores, process of treating, G.D. Wyckoff 186,222 Paper box, R.H. Foster 186,242 Paper, cloth, etc., machine for cutting, E. Allen 186,190 Paper cutting machine, P. McAleer 186,262 Paper dish, S.E. Harlow 186,247 Paper folding machine, L.C. Crowell 186,309 Paper, folding, S.D. Tucker 186,384, 186,385 Pasting machine, T. Goodall 186,339 Piano forte attachment, E. Zachariae 186,397 Pins, dowels, etc., cutting, F.H. Kane 186,348 Pipes bursting, preventing, A. Bujac 186,305 Plaiting machine, E.S. Harding 186,246 Plane irons, adjusting, J.A. Traut 186,281 Plate for stoves, N.M. Simonds 186,372 Plow attachment, D.W. Hughes 186,344 Plow stock, R. Weber 186,284 Powder, compensating, Miltimore & Totten 186,211 Printing telegraph transmit, G.M. Phelps 186,215 Pulleys from shafting, drawing, H.F. Casterline 186,229 Pulverizing machine, A.B. Lipsey 186,401 Pump, G.R. McCrum 186,358 Quilting frame, H.T. Davis 186,316 Railway brake apparatus, H.F. Knapp 186,257 Railway car, S.R. & O.V. Wallace 186,387 Rake, self-cleaning, V.W. Blanchard 186,300 Refrigerating car, J.M. Ayer (r) 7,467 Refrigerator, G.H. Crisfield 186,200 Refrigerator, J.W. Stewart 186,376 Registering fare box, J.C. Strong 186,380 Reversing valve, engine, Bevins, Weis & Phillips 186,297 Riding saddle, J.C. Miller 186,359 Rotary engine, D.R. Harder 186,342 Sad iron, Baker & Asbury 186,291 Sample garment, L.E. Warner 186,282 Saw set, C. Heinen 186,250 Saw table, G.E. Burt 186,196 Screw for piano stools, G.W. Archer 186,191 Seat, reversible, J.E. Rugg 186,273 Seed planter, D.J. Davis 186,231 Seed sower, J. Pearce 186,214 Seeder and cultivator, W.A. Van Brunt (r) 7,466 Separating germs from grain, C.A. Duprez 186,328 Sheep shears, Porterfield & Malin 186,366 Sheet metal can, J.S. Field 186,239 Shirt stud, C.H. Field 186,202 Shot cartridge, J.P. White 186,391 Sock and stocking, J.L. Krauser 186,398 Socket for scythe shanks, M. Smith 186,218 Sofa bedstead, H. Compes 186,199 Spark arrester, W.S. Hudson 186,345 Spark arrester and consumer, T.E. Roberts 186,367 Spinning frame, G. Draper 186,325 Spinning frame, ring, G. Draper 186,324 Spinning frame, ring, W.F. Draper 186,322 Spinning machine, G. Draper 186,323 Spring back wagon seat, J.W. Wood 186,394 Spring bolt for sliding doors, etc., A. Hance 186,341 Spring for wagons, auxiliary, A.W. McKown 186,263 Stalls, cutting, J.M. Goff (r) 7,469 Stencil plate, Wright & Bryant 186,395 Stove, M.L. Wood 186,286 Stove pipe, A.B. Allen 186,290 Straw cutter, D. Maxwell 186,261 Tempering steel, etc., G.F. Simonds (r) 7,464, 7,465 Tension regulator, G. Draper 186,326 Ticket case, S. Strandgaard 186,381 Time attachment for locks, J. Sargent 186,369 Time lock, E.J. Woolley 186,221 Toothbrush, S. Woolverton 188,287 Toy card shooter, C.W. Frost 186,334 Tubular gang saw, J.A. Balch 186,293 Underground telegraphs, W. Mackintosh 186,355, 186,356 Valve gear of engines, link for, J.H. Luther 186,403 Vapor burner, W.C. North 186,213 Variable cut-off, J. Fish 186,240 Vehicle wheel, H. Mounts 186,360 Vehicle wheel, G.F. Almy 186,289 Velocipede, Stineman & Halloway 186,379 Vent clearer for wash bowls etc., J.S. Hawley 186,206 Ventilator, J.B. Hill 186,251 Vessels, lessening draught of, E. Ellison 186,331 Wagon end gate, T.L. Black 186,226 Water closet trunk, E.A. Leland 186,352 Weaning bit for animals, J.P. Israel 186,347 Weather strip, E.C. Underwood 186,386 Whirling toy, J.H.Jenkins 186,255 Wrench, P. Chapin, Sr 186,197 * * * * * DESIGNS PATENTED. 9,700, 9,701.--CHAINS.--D.A. Beam, Newark, N.J. 9,702.--BRACKETS.--O.F. Fogelstrand, Kensington, Conn. 9,703.--BOTTLE.--A.T. Francis, Paterson, N.J., et al. 9,704, 9,705.--CARPETS.--A. Heald, Philadelphia, Pa. 9,706.--CARPETS.--D. McNair, Boston, Mass. 9,707, 9,708.--CARPETS.--T.J. Stearns, Boston, Mass. 9,709.--BRONZE.--J.W. Tiemann et al., Darlington, N.J. 9,710.--SHIRT FRONT.--S. Weill, New York city. 9,711.--DESK.--J.H. Frink, Detroit, Mich. [A copy of any of the above patents may be had by remitting one dollar to MUNN & Co., 37 Park Row, New York city.] * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS. * * * * * Inside Page, each insertion 75 cents a line. Back Page, each insertion $1.00 a line. _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Friday morning to appear in next issue._ * * * * * WATER WHEELS. More than four times as many of Jas. Lefell's improved Double Turbine Water Wheels in operation than any other kind. 24 sizes made, ranging from 5 3-4 to 96 in. diam. under heads from 1 to 240 ft. Successful for every purpose. Large new pamphlet, the finest ever published, containing over 30 fine illustrations, sent free to parties interested in water power. [Illustration] JAS. LEFFEL & CO., Springfield, O., and 109 Liberty St., New York City. * * * * * STEEL CASTINGS, From 1-4 to 10,000 lbs. weight. An invaluable substitute for expensive forgings or for malleable iron castings requiring great strength. Send for circular and price list to CHESTER STEEL CASTING COMPANY, EVELINA STREET, PHILADELPHIA, PA. * * * * * GEORGE C. HICKS & CO., Baltimore, Md. CLAY RETORTS, TILES, FIRE BRICKS, &c. Terra Cotta Pipes of all sizes. * * * * * CHEAPEST ROTARY HAND CORNSHELLER IN THE U.S. Guaranteed to be the simplest, cheapest, most durable, effective and the best. Buy it. Try it and be convinced. Samples $1.00. Large profits to agents. Address Harrisburgh Pa., Family Cornsheller Co. Lock Box 9. * * * * * Y.A. FAY & CO. CINCINNATI, OHIO U.S.S. WOOD WORKING MACHINERY. Woodsworth Planers and matchers, Daniels & Dimension Planers, Universal Wood Workers, Band & Circular Re-Saws, Ripping, Edging & Cross-Cutting Saws, Molding, Mortising and Tenoning Machines, Band & Scroll Saws, Carving, Boring, Shaping, Friezing & Sand Papering Machines, Wood Lathes & Machinery for Furniture, Car, Wheel & Agricultural Shops. Superior to any in use. Prices reduced to suit the times. * * * * * DAYTON CAM PUMP. THE ONLY PUMP IN THE MARKET DESIGNED AND CONSTRUCTED ESPECIALLY FOR BOILER FEEDING. Are Pumping water at 268° F. No Dead Centers. The Steam Valve is a plain Slide Valve identical to the slide valve of a Steam Engine, but derives its motion from a cam. Speed can be regulated to suit evaporation. Pumping Returns from Steam Heating Apparatus a specialty. Send for Circular. Smith, Vaile & Co., DAYTON, OHIO. [Illustration] * * * * * WANTED THE SOLE MANUFACTURE for England, of one or two Patent Articles in demand by steam users. Advertisers have good manufacturing premises, and a first-class connection among steam users in England and the Continent. Apply in first instance by letter to P.S.B., care of Mr. G. STREET, Advertising Offices, 30 Cornhill, London, E.C., England. * * * * * A NEW YEAR'S GIFT A $5 NEW YEAR'S GIFT GIVEN AWAY! To Every Reader of This Paper! Consisting of the beautiful and valuable Steel Engraving, entitled "CHRIST IN THE TEMPLE!" In an American edition, issued by W.W. Bostwick & Co., Publishers, 177 and 179 West Fourth Street, Cincinnati, O., and furnished to every READER OF THIS PAPER FREE. The retail price of the English edition of this Engraving is $12.00 PER COPY. It illustrates one of the most remarkable incidents in the life time of our Savior. The subject is taken from Luke, Second Chapter, 46, 47, 48, 49, and 50th Verses. Its size is three feet long and two feet wide, and has over 30 FIGURES REPRESENTED. It is the best Premium ever given away. W.W. Bostwick & Co. will supply every Reader of this paper with the valuable and appropriate Engraving of "Christ in the Temple" as a New Year's Gift. A NEW YEARS GIFT Readers will therefore please cut out the following Certificate and send it to W.W. Bostwick & Co., Publishers, 177 and 179 West Fourth Street, Cincinnati, O., for redemption, together with 25 cents to pay for postage, wrapping, roller, and mounting the Engraving. Cut Out this Readers' Certificate. It is worth $5.00. CERTIFICATE. On receipt of this Certificate, together with 25 cents to pay for postage, roller, wrapping, and mounting, we will send the beautiful Engraving, three feet long and two feet wide, entitled "CHRIST IN THE TEMPLE," To every Reader of this paper, by mail, postpaid. Send for Engraving at once, stating name in full, P.O. address, county, and State, Address all orders to W.W. BOSTWICK CO., PUBLISHERS, 17. & 17 W. Fourth St., Cincinnati, O. Readers of this paper will be allowed this New Year's Premium Gift, and all orders must be accompanied with above Certificate, which be sure to cut out and send with directions for mailing to W.W. BOSTWICK & CO., PUBLISHERS, 177 AND 179 WEST FOURTH STREET, CINCINNATI, O. A NEW YEAR'S GIFT COPYRIGHT SECURED * * * * * A MAN OF A THOUSAND. Having discovered, in a manner which might be considered almost providential, a positive cure for consumption and all Lung Complaints, I feel it my duty to make it known in a practical manner by furnishing a sample bottle, free of charge, to all sufferers, my only hope of remuneration being that the medicine will perform all I claim for it. The ingredients are of the choicest herbal products and perfectly safe; will be sent FREE TO ALL. Address at once. DR. O. PHELPS BROWN, 21 Grand St., Jersey City, N.J. * * * * * I HAVE 500 ACRES OF LAND IN SAN Jacinto County, Texas. Rolling and heavily timbered, with two spring branches running through the land. The entire tract suitable for farming purposes. Title perfect. At the present valuation of land in the neighborhood, its worth five dollars per acre. The Bast and West Narrow Gauge R.R. when completed will run within easy distance of the land, which will increase its value materially. I will give a warranty deed to the above tract of land in exchange for one 15-horse power portable engine, and 20-horse boiler return flues, new and complete-geared to run sugar mill without Band and Gin with Band. The machinery to be delivered at depot in Liberty. Any reference given desired. Address Y.L. RIDLEY, Liberty, Liberty County, Texas. * * * * * $290 FOR BEST PIANOS IN THE WORLD --in use all over the U.S. in over 900 towns by persons you will find in our Illustrated Circular, probably residents of your own place, or very near, where you can try our pianos. Genuine Rosewood--overstrung --full iron plate--7 1-3 octaves--Agraffe--and possessing every improvement known, and warranted 5 years by a responsible incorporated Manufacturing Co., referring by permission to the Chemical National Bank, New York City, by far the strongest bank in America. Pianos sent everywhere on trial. We have no agents. Send for Illustrated Circular giving full particulars. Address UNITED STATES PIANO COMPANY. 810 Broadway, New York. (Please name this paper.) * * * * * PRACTICAL TREATISE ON THE PROPERTIES OF CONTINUOUS BRIDGES. By Charles E. Bender, C.E. Illustrated. Being No. 26, Van Nostrand's Science Series. 18mo. boards, 50 cents. _Recently Published._ THE FATIGUE OF METALS UNDER REPEATED STRAINS, with various tables of results of experiments, from the German of Prof. Ludwig Spangenberg, with a preface by S.H. Shreve, A.M. 18 mo. bound, 50 cents. D. VAN NOSTRAND, Publisher, 23 Murran Street, and 27 Warren Street. [3 stars] Copies sent free by mail on receipt of price. * * * * * WANTED--A Second-Hand Shaping Machine; 12 inch stroke; in good condition. Pratt & Whitney's make preferred. Address, with full particulars as to size, make, and price, R.G.E., 589 Lorimer Street, Greenpoint, L.I. * * * * * WOOD-WORKING MACHINERY, Such as Woodworth Planing, Tongueing, and Grooving Machines, Daniel's Planers, Richardson's Patent Improved Tenon Machines, Mortising, Moulding, and Re-Saw Machines, and Wood-Working Machinery generally. Manufactured by WITHERBY, RUGG & RICHARDSON, 26 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Mass. (Shop formerly occupied by R. BALL & CO.) * * * * * BRAINARD MILLING MACHINES all styles and sizes. Universal Milling Machines from $200 upwards; Brown's Patent Screw Machines. &c., &c. Address BRAINARD M.M. CO., 131 Milk St., Boston, Mass. * * * * * AGENTS TO CONTROL TERRITORY, West and South (New England States, Connecticut excepted, taken), for the sale of the "Eureka Button Fasteners," Patented 1876. No tool required to put them on. Samples, &c., free. W.L. URANN, M'f'r, 21 Fulton St., New York. * * * * * ENGINES AND BOILERS. New and complete. One 2-horse power, $140: 3 H.P., $175; 5H. P., $250; 10 H.P., $500; 25 H.P., $1,000; all sizes in proportion. Patterns, drawings and models best and cheapest of any. Address POND 187 Grand St. N.Y. * * * * * _Founded by Mathew Carey, 1785._ BAIRD'S SCIENTIFIC BOOK CATALOGUES NOW READY, NEW REVISED EDITIONS. Of our valuable SCIENTIFIC BOOK CATALOGUES, which will be sent by mail gratis, and free of postage, on application. We are now receiving and keeping in stock the most important ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC BOOKS as they are published, and are prepared to furnish them or to give information in regard to all American and Foreign publications in this department of literature. HENRY CAREY BAIRD & CO., Industrial Publishers, Booksellers & Importers, _810 Walnut Street, Philadelphia._ * * * * * AIR COMPRESSORS FOR ALL PURPOSES. _A SPECIALTY of HEAVY PRESSURES._ THE NORWALK IRON WORKS CO., SOUTH NORWALK, CONN. * * * * * OTIS' SAFETY HOISTING MACHINERY. OTIS BROS. & CO., No. 348 Broadway, New York. * * * * * WROUGHT IRON _Beams and Girders_ THE UNION IRON MILLS, Pittsburgh, Pa., Manufacturers of improved wrought iron Beams and Girders (patented). The great fall which has taken place in the prices of Iron and especially in Beams used in the construction of FIRE PROOF BUILDINGS, induces us to call the special attention of Engineers, Architects, and Builders to the undoubted advantages of now erecting Fire Proof structures; and by reference to pages 52 & 54 of our Book of Sections--which will be sent on application to those contemplating the erection of fire proof buildings--THE COST CAN BE ACCURATELY CALCULATED, the cost of Insurance avoided, and the serious losses and interruption to business caused by fire; these and like considerations fully justify any additional first cost. It is believed, that were owners fully aware of the small difference which now exists between the use of Wood and Iron, that in many cases the latter would be adopted. We shall be pleased to furnish estimates for all the Beams complete, for any specific structure, so that the difference in cost may at once be ascertained. Address CARNEGIE, BROS. & CO., Pittsburgh, Pa. * * * * * ARSENIC IN THE ARTS.--A Lecture before the Medical Association of Central New York. By S.A. Lattimore, LL.D., Professor of Chemistry in the Rochester University. A popular and important paper. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 29. Price, 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. * * * * * A NEW DEPARTURE. Traveling and local salesmen wanted. STAPLE GOODS. NO PEDDLING. Salary $75 a month. Hotel and traveling expenses paid, S.A. GRANT & CO., manufacturers of ENVELOPES and PAPER. 2,4, 6, and 8 Home St., CINCINNATI, OHIO. * * * * * $66 a Week in your own town. Terms and $5 outfit free. H. HALLETT & CO., Portland, Maine. * * * * * MESSRS. B. DAMBACHER & CO., Hamburg, Germany dealers in American Wood-Working Machinery and Tools of all kinds. Messrt. D. & Co., solicit consignments from American manufacturers. Catalogues and descriptive circulars desired, by mail. * * * * * MACHINERY OF EVERY DESCRIPTION, COLD ROLLED SHAFTING, HANGERS, PULLEYS, COUPLINGS, BELTING, TANITE EMERY WHEELS AND GRINDERS, IN STOCK. GEORGE PLACE, 121 Chambers & 103 Reade Sts., New York City. * * * * * $10 to $500 INVESTED IN WALL ST. Often leads to wealth. A 72 page book explaining everything, and a copy of the Wall Street Review, sent free. JOHN HICKLING & CO., Bankers and Brokers 72 Broadway, New York * * * * * WE ENAMEL in FINE JET BLACK every variety of turned woodwork parts of machinery, casting's, tinware and other metalwork, ENAMELED JET GOODS, in wood or metal, made to order. AMERICAN ENAMEL CO. 17 WARREN ST., PROVIDENCE, R.I. * * * * * A GIFT By an arrangement with the Publisher we will send every reader of this Paper a sample package of Transfer Pictures free. Send 3¢. stamp for postage. They are highly colored, beautiful, and easily transferred to any object. Agents wanted. J.L. PATTEN & CO., 162 William St., New York. * * * * * FLOWERS _Strong Plants_ delivered, _free of cost_ safely per mail at your door. Satisfaction guaranteed. Splendid assortment of ROSES 6 for $1; 13 for $2. Send for _New Catalogue of Plants._ HOOPES, BRO. & THOMAS, Cherry Hill Nurseries. West Chester. Pa. * * * * * SHAFTS. PULLEYS. HANGERS COUPLINGS ETC. In Stock, and for Sale by WILLIAM SELLERS & CO., Philadelphia, and 79 Liberty St., New York. Price lists and pamphlets on application. * * * * * WANTED Salesmen to sell light hardware to _Dealers,_ NO PEDDLING. Salary, $1,200 a year. Hotel and traveling expenses paid. Address DEFIANCE M'F'G CO., Chicago, Ill. * * * * * [Illustration] BARNES FOOT POWER MACHINERY. 10 INVALUABLE MACHINES for Mechanics and Amateurs. Also Fancy Woods and Designs. Send for 48 page Illustrated Catalogue, Free. W.F. & JOHN BARNES, ROCKFORD, Winnebago Co., Ills. * * * * * CELEBRATED FOOT LATHES. [Illustration] Foot Power, Back-geared Screw Lathes, Small Hand and Power Planers for Metal, Small Gear Cutters, Slide-rests, Ball Machine for Lathes, Foot Scroll Saws, light and heavy, Foot Circular Saws. Just the articles for Amateurs or Artisans. Highly recommended. Send for illustrated Catalogues. N.H. BALDWIN, Laconia, N.H. * * * * * POND'S TOOLS. Engine Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c. Send for Catalogue. DAVID W. POND, Successor to Lucius W. Pond, Worcester, Mass. * * * * * L. SMITH HOBART, PRESIDENT. JOHN C. MOSS, SUPERINTENDENT. D.J. CARSON, GENERAL AGENT. PHOTO ENGRAVING CO. MOSS' PROCESS NO. 67 PARK PLACE NEW YORK [Illustration] RELIEF PLATES IN HARD TYPE METAL, FOR PRINTING ALL KINDS OF PICTORIAL ILLUSTRATIONS IN BOOKS, NEWSPAPERS, AND CATALOGUES. These plates are an excellent substitute for woodcuts, being used in precisely the same way, giving equally good results for much less money. ELECTROTYPES AND STEREOTYPES are made from them in the usual manner. We offer special advantages to MANUFACTURERS AND INVENTORS, as our mechanical work is of the best quality and rapidly executed. Our plates are used satisfactorily in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, and by Manufacturers and Publishers in all parts of the country. "COPY" We work direct only from Prints or properly prepared Pen and Ink Drawings. Any other copy may be furnished, such as Photographs, Pencil Sketches, or the articles themselves, in which cases we have drawings made in the best manner by our own trained draughtsmen. Photographs, taken in the ordinary way, are suitable, and they may be of any size. We make the plates larger or smaller, as desired. We are glad to have customers prepare their own Pen Drawings, and append one or two, DIRECTIONS TO ARTISTS: The most important requisite in Drawings for our use is that every line shall be _perfectly black._ The paper or drawing board must be _white_ and _smooth_. For fine work drawings should be made double the scale of the plate desired. Carefully observing these main points, the artist has the utmost freedom in his choice of styles of drawing. For further information and fine samples of our work, send stamp for current number of our illustrated _Quarterly Circular_. * * * * * WE ALSO PUBLISH, | LIST OF ENGRAVINGS. PRICE ONE DOLLAR | 1. THE LETTER WRITER. ART ALBUM | 2. THE CROSSING SWEEPER. CONTAINING | 3. THE ROYAL PRINCESSES. Twelve Beautiful Photo Engravings | 4. THE SKEIN WINDER. Suitable for Framing | 5. THE SPANISH SISTERS. Reproduced by Moss Process from | 6. A REST ON THE HILL. Art Journal Steel Engravings | 7. THE FAIR CORRESPONDENT. Published By | 8. BARTHRAM'S DIRGE. PHOTO ENGRAVING CO. | 9. GOING TO SCHOOL. 67 PARK PLACE | 10. PEEP O'DAY BOY'S CABIN. | 11. THE SCANTY MEAL. | 12. THE AMAZON. Printed on heavy toned plate paper, 12�15 inches. Liberal discount to the trade. Sent postpaid on receipt of price. _Please say where you saw this._ PHOTO-ENGRAVING CO., 67 PARK PLACE, NEW YORK. * * * * * [Illustration] THE TRADE ENGINE. Noiseless in operation--Perfect in workmanship--all light parts of Cast Steel. Every Engine indicated, and valve corrected to give the highest attainable results. Warranted superior to any semi-portable Engine in the market! Send for Price List and Circular. HERRMANN & HERCHELRODE M'F'G CO., Dayton, Ohio. * * * * * Wood-Working Machinery. Patent Scroll Saws and Band Saws a Specialty. OVER 100 MACHINES IN USE. Medal at Cincinnati Industrial Exposition. Agents in all large cities. CORDESMAN, EGAN & CO., M'f'rs, Cincinnati, O * * * * * [Hand->]Send for _Descriptive Catalogue_ of RELIABLE Vegetable and Flower SEEDS containing 192 pages on SEEDS and Plants mailed free. H.A. DREER, SEEDSMAN AND FLORIST, PHILADA. * * * * * [Illustration] $100. REWARD. $100. This MOUSTACHE produced on a smooth face by the use of DYKE'S BEARD ELIXIR without injury, or will forfeit $100. Price by mail in sealed package 25 cents, for three 50 cents. A.L. SMITH & CO., Ag'ts, Palatine, Ill. * * * * * [Illustration] J.H. Blaisdell's MOULDER, North 4th St., PHILADELPHIA, PA. * * * * * [Illustration] Shaping Machines Have novel device for changing length of stroke while in motion, also, automatic down feed, and quick return. Four sizes. Patented 1868, 1871, 1874, Wood & Light Machine Co. Worcester, Mass. Manufacturers of all kinds of Iron Working Machinery Shafting, Pulleys, &c. * * * * * $12 a day at home. Agents wanted. Outfit and terms free. TRUE & CO., Augusta, Maine. * * * * * Lathes, Planers, Shapers, Drills, Gear & Bolt Cutters, &c. E. GOULD, Newark, N.J. * * * * * SNYDER'S LITTLE GIANT STEAM ENGINE The Best SMALL POWER ENGINES IN THE COUNTRY. WARD B. SNYDER 84 Fulton Str. New York [Illustration] One-Horse Power, with tubular boiler complete, only $150 Two-Horse Power 200 Three-Horse Power 250 Call and Examine OR SEND FOR ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUE * * * * * SEE PHOTOGRAPHIC APPARATUS & CHEMICALS complete, with directions, $10. No toy; takes pictures 4x5½ inches. Send for illustrated circular. B. MORGAN, 14 Ann St. New York, P.O. Box 4349. * * * * * WANTED! SALESMEN at a salary of $1200 a year to travel and sell goods to Dealers. NO PEDDLING. Hotel and traveling expenses paid. Address. MONITOR MANUFACTURING Co., Cincinnati, Ohio. * * * * * $39 Each week to Agents. Goods Staple. 10,000 testimonials received. Terms liberal. Particulars free. J. Worth & Co. St. Louis, Mo. * * * * * $55 to $77 a Week to Agents. $10 _Outfit Free_. P.O. VICKERY, Augusta, Maine. * * * * * THE COMPOUND STEAM PUMP USES steam expansively, hence economically. Simpler than any other. Only two moving parts in cylinder. No levers, springs, tappets, or reversing valves. 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BRANCH OFFICE--Corner of F and 7th Streets, Washington, D.C. * * * * * EMERSON'S PATENT DAMASCUS TEMPERED SAWS Patent Planer, Clipper, Lumberman's Clipper, from clipper cross-cut, Universal Adjustable Saw Swage, Band Saws for Saw Mills and re-sawing, and solid saws of all kinds. Are superior to all others, Extra Thin Saws a specialty. Send your full address, plainly written, for Price List and Circular to Emerson, Smith & Co., Beaver Falls, Pa., Successors to Emerson, Ford & Co. * * * * * ROOTS' PATENT PORTABLE FORGE. [Illustration: ADAPTED TO EVERY VARIETY OF WORK. ] THE ONLY FORGE WITH FORCE BLAST BLOWER. THE ONLY EFFECTIVE FORGE MADE. P.H. & F.M. ROOTS, Manuf's, CONNERSVILLE, IND. S.S. TOWNSEND, Gen'l Ag't, 31 Liberty St., NEW YORK * * * * * First Premium ahead of All at Centennial, Hand and Self-Inking. [Illustration: Do Your Own PRINTING The Excelsior Presses ] Save money! Do more advertising. $3 Press for cards, labels, envelopes, etc. Large sizes for large work. _Anybody_ can work them, have good pastime for spare hours, and can make money by taking in small Jobs. BOYS have much fun and make money very fast at printing cards, etc., Send two stamps for catalogue, to Mfrs, KELSEY & CO. MERIDEN, CONN. * * * * * MACHINISTS' TOOLS. NEW AND IMPROVED PATTERNS. Send for new illustrated catalogue. Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c. NEW HAVEN MANUFACTURING CO., New Haven, Conn. * * * * * To appear end of February, The United States BUSINESS DIRECTORY FOR 1877. This Directory contains over 400,000 names of persons in all kinds of business. Arranged alphabetically according to States, and classified according to business. It is a valuable aid to the Merchant, Manufacturer, and Mechanic, for correspondence or the distribution of circulars. The edition of 1877 is the third year of issue, and has already received a largely increased patronage from the business public. Price to parties who send their order before the book is issued, $7.00. GEO. DE COLANGE & CO., Publishers, 8 Bond St., New York. * * * * * HARTFORD STEAM BOILER Inspection & Insurance COMPANY. W.B. Franklin, V. Pres't J.M. Allen, Pres't J.B. Pierce Sec'y. * * * * * ELOCUTIONIST'S JOURNAL gives choicest standard and new pieces for professional and amateur Readers and Speakers, and interesting articles on appropriate subjects. Just the thing wanted. 10 cts. of any newsdealer or by mail. JESSE HANEY & CO., 119 Nassau Street, New York. * * * * * NOYE'S MILL FURNISHING WORKS are the largest in the United States. They make Burr Millstones, Portable Mills, Smut Machines, Packers, Mill Picks, Water Wheels, Pulleys and Gearing, specially adapted to flour mills. Send for Catalogue. J.T. NOYE & SON, Buffalo, N.Y. * * * * * [Illustration: ROCK DRILLING MACHINES AND AIR COMPRESSORS MANUFACTURED BY BURLEIGH Rock Drill Co. SEND FOR PAMPHLET. FITCHBURG MASS. ] * * * * * [Illustration] NIAGARA STEAM PUMP WORKS. ESTABLISHED 1826. CHARLES B. HARDICK, No. 23 Adams Street, BROOKLYN, N.Y. * * * * * NON-COMBUSTIBLE STEAM BOILER AND PIPE COVERING WITH "AIR SPACE" IMPROVEMENT. Saves 10 to 20 per cent. CHALMERS SPENCE CO., Foot E. 9th St. N.Y.; 1202 N. 2d St., St. Louis, Mo. * * * * * The HOADLEY PORTABLE STEAM ENGINE. WITH AUTOMATICAL CUT-OFF REGULATOR AND BALANCED VALVE THE BEST AND MOST ECONOMICAL ENGINE MADE _SEND FOR CIRCULAR_ The J.C. HOADLEY CO. LAWRENCE, MASS. STATE WHERE YOU SAW THIS * * * * * IMPORTANT FOR ALL CORPORATIONS AND MANF'G CONCERNS.--BUERK'S WATCHMAN'S TIME DETECTOR, capable of accurately controlling the motion of a watchman or patrolman at the different stations of his beat. Send for circular. J.E. BUERK, P.O. BOX 979. BOSTON, MASS. N.B.--The suit against Imhaeuser& Co., of New York, was decided in my favor, June 10, 1874. Proceedings have been commenced against Imhaeuser & Co. for selling, contrary to the order of the Court. Persons using clocks infringing on my patent, will be dealt with according to law. * * * * * ESTABLISHED 1844. JOSEPH C. TODD, (Formerly of Todd & Rafferty), ENGINEER and MACHINIST. Flax, Hemp, Jute, Rope, Oakum, and Bagging Machinery, Steam Engines, Boilers, etc. Also Agent for the celebrated and improved Rawson & Rittinger Hoisting Engine, I will furnish specifications and estimates for all kinds of machinery. Send for descriptive circular and price. Address J.C. TODD, 10 Barclay St., New York, or Paterson, N.J. * * * * * [Illustration: PATENT COLD ROLLED SHAFTING. ] The fact that this shafting has 75 per cent. greater strength, a finer finish, and is truer to gauge, than any other in use, renders it undoubtedly the most economical We are also the sole manufacturers of the CELEBRATED COLLINS' PAT. COUPLING, and furnish Pulleys, Hangers, etc., of the most approved styles. Price list mailed on application to JONES & LAUGHLINS, Try Street, 2d and 3rd Avenues, Pittsburgh, Pa. 190 S. Canal Street, Chicago, Ill., and Milwaukie, Wis. Stocks of this shafting in store and for sale by FULLER. DANA, & FITZ, Boston, Mass. GEO. PLACE & CO. 121 Chambers St., N.Y. * * * * * A Cyclopedia of Mechanics and Engineering, FOR SALE. The few copies of the Author's Extra Edition of Prof. R.H. Thurston's Report on Machinery and Manufactures at the Great International Exhibition, 1873, with an account of European manufacturing districts. The volume contains over 450 pages, and contains 223 wood-cuts and plates. Please send orders for copies at once. Price, $4.00. F.T. THURSTON, Civil and Mechanical Engineer. HOBOKEN, N.J. * * * * * TUBE CLEANERS for cleaning Boiler Tubes. THE NATIONAL STEEL TUBE CLEANER Co. 814 E. 9th St., N.Y. * * * * * KNOWLES STEAM PUMP WORKS, 92 & 94 Liberty St., New York. Great reduction in prices. Send for catalogue. The "Knowles" has always been the best steam pump made. * * * * * [Illustration: TO INVENTORS AND MANUFACTURERS ] FOLLOWS & BATE, Manchester, England, Hardware and Machinery Merchants, are prepared to buy American Goods for Cash, and to act as Sole Wholesale Agents. * * * * * PUNCHING PRESSES Drop Hammers and Dies, for working Metals, &c. THE STILES & PARKER PRESS CO., Middletown, Conn. * * * * * ALCOTT LATHES, for Broom, Rake and Hoe Handles. S.C. HILLS, 78 Chambers St., N.Y. * * * * * MACHINERY OF IMPROVED STYLES FOR making SHINGLES, HEADING and STAVES; also GUAGE LATHES for TURNING HANDLES. Sole makers of Law's Pat. Shingle and Heading Sawing Machine. Address TREVOR & CO., Lockport, N.Y. * * * * * CHLORIDE OF CALCIUM. FOR SALE VERY CHEAP. RANSOME, 10 Bush Street, San Francisco, Cal. * * * * * PERFECT NEWSPAPER FILE The Koch Patent File, for preserving newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, has been recently improved and price reduced. Subscribers to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT can be supplied for the low price of $1.50 by mail, or $1.25 at the office of this paper. Heavy board sides; inscription "SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN," in gilt. Necessary for every one who wishes to preserve the paper. Address MUNN & CO., Publishers SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. * * * * * LECOUNT'S PATENT MACHINISTS' TOOLS. REDUCED PRICES. Set Iron Dogs, 3-8 to 2 in., $5.60 " " " 3-8 to 4 in., 12.00 " Steel " 3-8 to 2 in., 6.30 " " " 3-8 to 4 in., 13.00 Iron & Steel Clamps, Die Dogs, Clamp Dogs, Vice Clamps Expanding Mandrels, &c. Send for latest Price list to C.W. LE COUNT, South Norwalk, Conn. * * * * * BEST DAMPER REGULATORS AND LEVER GAUGE COCKS. MURRILL & KEIZER, 41 HOLLIDAY ST., BALTIMORE. * * * * * BRAYTON READY MOTOR It has no boiler, is safe, economical, started by any one in one minute, occupies small space, and gives an unsurpassed steady, reliable power. Address Penna Ready Motor Co., 20 N. 4TH ST PHILADELPHIA, PA. * * * * * THE TANITE CO., STROUDSBURG, PA. EMERY WHEELS AND GRINDERS. GEO. PLACE, 121 CHAMBERS ST., NEW YORK AGENT. * * * * * BOLT CUTTERS SCHLENKER'S NEW MACHINE REVOLVING-DIE. Send for Catalogue, giving prices and full description. HOWARD IRON WORKS, BUFFALO, N.Y. * * * * * STATE, COUNTY AND SHOP RIGHTS for sale of C. Koons' Patent Rat Trap; best out; caught 16 one night. Enclose stamp to owners and manufacturers, J.T. WILHIDE & BRO., York Road, Carroll Co., Md. * * * * * $5 TO $20 day at home. Samples worth $5 free. STINSON & Co., Portland, Me. * * * * * DUC'S IMPROVED PATENT ELEVATOR BUCKET, FOR BREWERS, FLOUR MILLS, GRAIN ELEVATORS, SUGAR REFINERS, &C. These buckets are made of the best charcoal stamping iron, and are warranted to outwear six of the "OLDSTYLE BUCKETS." The cost is about the same. Address T.F. ROWLAND, Brooklyn, E.D., N.Y. * * * * * $3 WATCHES. Cheapest in the known world. _Sample watch and outfit free to Agents._ For terms address COULTER & CO. Chicago. * * * * * BOGARDUS' PATENT UNIVERSAL ECCENTRIC MILLS--For grinding Bones, Ores, Sand, Old Crucibles, Fire Clay, Guanos, Oil Cake, Feed, Corn, Corn and Cob, Tobacco, Snuff, Sugar, Salts, Roots, Spices, Coffee, Cocoanut, Flaxseed, Asbestos, Mica, etc., and whatever cannot be ground by other mills. Also for Paints, Printers' Inks, Paste Blacking, etc. JOHN W. THOMSON, successor to JAMES BOGARDUS, corner of White and Elm Sts. New York. * * * * * _WORKING MODELS_ And Experimental Machinery, Metal or Wood, made to order by J.F. WERNER, 62 Center St., N.Y. * * * * * EAGLE FOOT LATHES, [Illustration: Eagle Foot Lathe] With Scroll and Circular Saw Attachments, Slide Rest, Tools, &c.; also Small Engine Lathes, Metal Hand Planers, &c. Neatest designs, superior finish. LOW PRICES. Our new Catalogue describes these and every tool necessary for the Amateur or Artisan. Send for it. WM. L. 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19180	----	[Illustration] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL INFORMATION, ART, SCIENCE, MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY, AND MANUFACTURES. NEW YORK, MARCH 18, 1871. Vol. XXIV.--No. 12. [NEW SERIES.] $3 per Annum [IN ADVANCE.] * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. MUNN & CO., Editors and Proprietors. PUBLISHED WEEKLY AT NO. 37 PARK ROW (PARK BUILDING), NEW YORK. O. D. MUNN. S. H. WALES. A. E. BEACH. VOL. XXIV., NO. 12 ... [NEW SERIES.] _Twenty-sixth Year_ NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 1871. * * * * * CONTENTS: (Illustrated articles are marked with an asterisk.) *Knots and Splices 175 Influence of Cold on Iron and Steel. 176 Oak Graining in Oil Colors 176 Knots and Splices (Explanation) 177 Hartford Steam Boiler and Insurance Co.'s Report 177 *Improved Spiral Spring for Railway Carriages 178 *Portable Writing and Copying Case 178 How Walking-sticks are Made 178 Flowering of the Victoria Regia 178 Jute 178 Ventilation of the Liverpool Tunnel 178 *Impregnating Wood with Tar, etc. 178 *Boardman's Combined Tool 179 *Belt Tightener 179 Some Things I don't want in the Building Trades 179 *Action of the Reciprocating Parts of Steam Engines 179 *Answer to Practical Problem 179 Reciprocating Parts of Steam Engines 179 Test for White Lead 180 How to Build a Chimney 180 Crystallized Honey 180 Rambles for Relics.--No. 2 180 Silk Culture 181 *Universal Boring Machine 182 *Combined Trunk and Rocking-chair 182 Cosmetics 182 *Smith's Infant Dining-chair 182 The Medicines of the Ancients 182 *Barnes Ventilator for Mattresses 182 Exhibition of the National Photographic Association 182 A Scientific and Technical Awakening 183 The Sherman Process 183 Rubber Tires for Traction Engines 183 Central Shaft of the Hoosac Tunnel 184 A Museum of Art and Natural History 184 Report of Judges, American Institute Fair. --The Allen Engine 184 Lyceum of Natural History 184 Warming and Ventilating Railroad Cars 184 The Mineral Resources of Missouri 185 Scientific Intelligence 185 American Institute of Mining Engineers 185 Consumption of Sugar, Coffee, and Tea 185 Unpleasant Discovery in the Patent Office 185 Substitute for Albumen in Photography (omitted) 185 Louisiana State Fair 185 Test for Purity of Water 185 New Books and Publications 185 Business and Personal 186 Answers to Correspondents 186 Applications for the Extension of Patents 186 Recent American and Foreign Patents 187 Queries 187 Inventions Patented in England by Americans 187 List of Patents 187 * * * * * THE INFLUENCE OF INTENSE COLD ON STEEL AND IRON. [Condensed from Nature.] There has recently been a most interesting discussion at the Literary and Philosophical Society, Manchester, on the above subject. The paper which gave rise to the discussion was by Mr. Brockbank, who detailed many experiments, and ended by stating his opinion that iron does become much weaker, both in its cast and wrought states, under the influence of low temperature; but Mr. Brockbank's paper was immediately followed by others by Sir W. Fairbairn, Dr. Joule, and Mr. Spence, which at once put an entirely new complexion on the matter. Dr. Joule says: "As is usual in a severe frost, we have recently heard of many severe accidents consequent upon the fracture of the tires of the wheels of railway carriages. The common-sense explanation of these accidents is, that the ground being harder than usual, the metal with which it is brought into contact is more severely tried than in ordinary circumstances. In order apparently to excuse certain railway companies, a pretence has been set up that iron and steel become brittle at a low temperature. This pretence, although put forth in defiance, not only of all we know, of the properties of materials, but also of the experience of everyday life, has yet obtained the credence of so many people that I thought it would be useful to make the following simple experiments: "1st. A freezing mixture of salt and snow was placed on a table. Wires of steel and of iron were stretched, so that a part of them was in contact with the freezing mixture and another part out of it. In every case I tried the wire broke outside of the mixture, showing that it was weaker at 50° F., than at about 12° F. "2d. I took twelve darning needles of good quality, 3 in. long, 1/24 in. thick. The ends of these were placed against steel props, 2-1/8 in. asunder. In making an experiment, a wire was fastened to the middle of a needle, the other end being attached to a spring weighing-machine. This was then pulled until the needle gave way. Six of the needles, taken at random, were tried at a temperature of 55° F., and the remaining six in a freezing mixture which brought down their temperature to 12° F. The results were as follow:-- Warm Needles. Cold Needles. 64 ounces broke 55 ounces broke 65 " " 64 " " 55 " " 72 " " 62 " " 60 " bent 44 " " 68 " broke 60 " bent 40 " " --- --- Average, 58-1/3 Average, 59-5/6 "I did not notice any perceptible difference in the perfection of elasticity in the two sets of needles. The result, as far as it goes, is in favor of the cold metal. "3d. The above are doubtless decisive of the question at issue. But as it might be alleged that the violence to which a railway wheel is subjected is more akin to a blow than a steady pull; and as, moreover, the pretended brittleness is attributed more to cast iron than any other description of the metal, I have made yet another kind of experiment. I got a quantity of cast iron garden nails, an inch and a quarter long and 1/8 in. thick in the middle. These I weighed, and selected such as were nearly of the same weight. I then arranged matters so that by removing a prop I could cause the blunt edge of a steel chisel weighted to 4lb. 2oz., to fall from a given height upon the middle of the nail as it was supported from each end, 1-1/16 in. asunder. In order to secure the absolute fairness of the trials, the nails were taken at random, and an experiment with a cold nail was always alternated with one at the ordinary temperature. The nails to be cooled were placed in a mixture of salt and snow, from which they were removed and struck with the hammer in less than 5"." The collective result of the experiments, the details of which need not be given, was that 21 cold nails broke and 20 warm ones. Dr. Joule adds, "The experiments of Lavoisier and Laplace, of Smeaton, of Dulong and Petit, and of Troughton, conspire in giving a less expansion by heat to steel than iron, especially if the former be in an untempered state; but this, would in certain limits have the effect of strengthening rather than of weakening an iron wheel with a tire of steel. "The general conclusion is this: Frost does _not_ make either iron (cast or wrought), or steel, brittle. Mr. Spence, in his experiments, decided on having some lengths of cast iron made of a uniform thickness of ½ in. square, from the same metal and the same mould. He writes:--"Two of the four castings I got seemed to be good ones, and I got the surface taken off, and made them as regular a thickness as was practicable. "I then fixed two knife-edged wedges upon the surface of a plank, at exactly nine inches distance from each other, with an opening in the plank in the intervening space, the bar being laid across the wedges, a knife-edged hook was hung in the middle of the suspended piece of the bar, and to the hook was hung a large scale on which to place weights. "The bar was tried first at a temperature of 60° F.; to find the breaking weight I placed 56lb. weights one after another on the scale, and when the ninth was put on the bar snapped. This was the only unsatisfactory experiment, as 14 or 28lb. might have done it, but I include it among others. I now adopted another precaution, by placing the one end of the plank on a fixed point and the other end on to a screw-jack, by raising which I could, without any vibration, bring the weight to bear upon the bar. By this means, small weights up to 7lb. could be put on while hanging, but when these had to be taken off and a large weight put on, the scale was lowered to the rest, and again raised after the change was made. I may here state that a curious circumstance occurred twice, which seems to indicate that mere raising of the weight, without the slightest apparent vibration, was equal in effect to an additional weight. 3¾ cwts. were on the scale, a 14lb. weight was added, then 7lb., then 4lb., 2lb., 1lb., and 1lb., making 4cwts. and 1lb. This was allowed to act for from one to two minutes, and then lowered to take off the small weights, which were replaced by a 56lb. with the intention of adding small weights when suspended; the whole was then raised so imperceptibly by the screw, that the only way of ascertaining that it was suspended, was by looking under the scale to see that it was clear of the rest. As soon as it was half-an-inch clear it snapped, thus breaking at once with one pound less than it resisted for nearly two minutes. "Six experiments were carefully conducted at 60° F., the parts of the bars being selected so as to give to each set of experiments similar portions of both bars; the results are marked on the pieces. My assistant now prepared a refrigerating mixture which stood at zero, the bars were immersed for some time in this, and we prepared for the breaking trials to be made as quickly as could be, consistently with accuracy; and to secure the low temperature, each bar, on being placed in the machine, had its surface at top covered with the freezing mixture. The bars at zero broke with more regularity than at 60°, but instead of the results confirming the general impression as to cold rendering iron more brittle, they are calculated to substantiate an exactly opposite idea, namely, that reduction of temperature, _cæteris paribus_, increases the strength of cast iron. The only doubtful experiment of the whole twelve is the first, and as it stands much the highest, the probability is that it should be lower; yet, even taking it as it stands, the average of the six experiments at 60° F., gives 4cwt. 4lb. as the breaking weight of the bar at that temperature, while the average of the six experiments at zero gives 4cwt 20lb. as the breaking weight of the bar at zero, being an increase of strength, from the reduction of temperature, equal to 3.5 per cent." Sir W. Fairbairn states: "It has been asserted, in evidence given at the coroner's inquest, in a recent railway accident, that the breaking of the steel tire was occasioned by the intensity of the frost, which is supposed to have rendered the metal, of which this particular tire was composed, brittle. This is the opinion of most persons, but judging from my own experience such is not the fact. Some years since I endeavored to settle this question by a long and careful series of experiments on wrought iron, from which it was proved that the resistance to a tensile chain was as great at the temperature of zero as it was at 60° or upwards, until it attained a scarcely visible red heat." The immense number of purposes to which both iron and steel are applied, and the changes of temperature to which they are exposed, renders the inquiry not only interesting in a scientific point of view, but absolutely necessary to a knowledge of their security under the various influences of those changes. It was for these reasons that the experiments in question were undertaken, and the summary of results is sufficiently conclusive to show that changes of temperature are not always the cause of failure. Sir W. Fairbairn adds: "The danger arising from broken tires does not, according to my opinion, arise so much from changes of temperature as from the practice of heating them to a dull red heat, and shrinking them on to the rim of the wheels. This, I believe, is the general practice, and the unequal, and in some cases, the severe strains to which they are subject, has a direct tendency to break the tires." * * * * * OAK GRAINING IN OIL COLORS. CONDENSED FROM THE BUILDING NEWS. There is a charm and feeling about work executed by the hand, which gives it a value no mere machine work can possess. Machine work, from its very nature, necessitates a repetition of pattern, which cannot be avoided. Hand-work, on the contrary, can imitate every variety, and follow nature so closely that no two pieces need be alike. There is also in hand-work a wide scope for the inventive faculty and the exercise of good taste (both in form and color) and skillful workmanship. As a rule, strong contrasts between the ground and the graining color should be avoided. The figure and grain should of course be seen clearly, but only so clearly as to be distinct, without interfering with the general and uniform quietness of tone necessary to fulfil the conditions required by the laws of harmony and good taste. Violent contrasts and gaudy coloring are always vulgar, brilliancy and richness of color are not necessarily vulgar; it is the absence of the guiding power of knowledge and pure taste in their arrangement which degrades them to the rank of vulgarity. We have before spoken of the importance of good combing, and of the various kinds of combs used; we now proceed to describe how the work is done. The graining color is brushed over the work, in the ordinary manner, with a pound-brush, care being taken not to put too much color on, or else it is very liable to be dirty. A dry duster is now used to stipple with, which, if properly done, will distribute the color evenly; it is now ready for combing. In the real oak it will be found, as a rule, that the grain is invariably coarser on one side of the panel than on the other; this arises from the very nature of the growth of the tree; it is, therefore, well to imitate this pattern, and in order to do so we take first a medium or coarse cut gutta-percha comb, and draw it down one side of the panel; then use a finer one to complete it. This comb will leave the marks of the grain in clear unbroken lines from top to bottom of the panel. We now take a fine steel comb and go over the whole of the previous combing, moving it in a slanting or diagonal direction across the previous grain, or with a quick and short wavy motion or curl; both the former and the latter motion will break up the long lines, left by the gutta-percha comb, into short bits, which of course represent the pores or grains of the real wood. There are several other motions of the comb having the same end in view; and by using the gutta-percha or cork combs, in conjunction with the fine steel, an infinite variety of grain may be produced. Steel combs, with one or more folds of thin rag placed over the ends of the teeth are a style of comb which has nothing to recommend it. A natural variation in the grain may be produced by one comb alone, according to the manner in which it is held. For instance, if we take a coarse or broad-toothed gutta-percha comb, and commence at the top of a panel, with the comb, placed at its full width: if drawn down in this position it will leave a grain of the same width as the width of the teeth: but if we start with the full width, and gradually turn the comb or slightly incline it to one side--that is to say, on its edge, we thereby graduate the grain from coarse to fine at pleasure, and by holding the comb at a certain inclination we may actually make very fine the coarse comb. A very important point is the formation of the joints in the wood, as much of the effect of otherwise good work is lost in consequence of neglect in this respect. In looking at a real oak door, the joints of the stiles and rails are clearly and sharply defined, not by any defect of workmanship, but by the difference in the run of the grain, the stiles being perpendicular, and the rails horizontal. The rails being cut sharp off by the stiles, show a perfectly straight line. The light also acts differently upon the two, simply because the grain or fibre of the wood is exposed to its influence under different aspects. This also tends to produce a difference in the depth of the color of rails and stiles, and panels also. It will be evident that no imitations can be considered really good except they include these seemingly unimportant points. It is a common practice for grainers to imitate a broad piece of heart or sap of oak, upon the back rail of almost every door they do, and many of them are not even content with that, but daub the stiles over from top to bottom with it also. There is nothing so vulgar or in such bad taste. It should only be done upon those parts of the work on which it would appear on a real oak door, namely, on the edges of the doors and on mouldings. There is a vulgar pretentiousness about what we may call the sappy style of work which is very undesirable. The figures cross the grain more or less abruptly and of course are of different shapes, sizes, and forms, a knowledge of which can only be acquired by study of the real wood. The figure may be wiped out with a piece of soft rag, held tight over the thumb nail. This should have two or three folds over the nail, the superfluous rag being held by the other hand to prevent it hanging down and smearing the grain; and every time a figure is wiped, the rag should be moved slightly, so that the same part of the rag will not be used twice, thus insuring clean work. It will often happen that the thumb-nail will get broken, or is too weak to stand the work; in these cases, or, in fact, in any case, a good substitute or artificial thumb-nail may be made of gutta-percha, thus: A piece of thin sheet gutta-percha is put into warm water, and, while soft, is wrapped around the end of the thumb up to the first joint. It is then pressed with the hand, so as to fit and take the shape of the thumb and nail. This cannot be done at one heating, but will have to be put into the hot water again, and the end pinched and squeezed into form to the shape of the nail, and to fit easily upon the thumb. When this gets hard, it may be trimmed into perfect form with a penknife. This artificial nail will answer the purpose admirably if properly made; and even when the natural nail is good, the gutta-percha will serve to save it from injury. Good figuring may also be done by using the blank end of the steel comb with a rag folded over its edge. We have also used a piece of gutta-percha to take out the lights. This should be square-ended, about one inch wide, and three or four inches long, and will do successful work of a certain class, but not of the best. Many grainers use a piece of thin horn, in shape something like a spatula, about three or four inches long and three quarters of an inch wide, with rounded ends, and quite flexible. With this tool the figure is cut or scooped out--a sort of quick, side-long motion, very difficult to describe, and requiring a very considerable amount of practice before it can be worked with any success. There is, however, the same objection to this tool as may be urged against the gutta-percha for figuring, namely, that neither of them take the color clean away, but leave an accumulation of color on the edge of the figure, which is fatal to good work; and therefore we cannot honestly recommend the use of any method but the wiping out with the thumb-nail or its substitute. When the figure is wiped out it will require to be softened. By softening, we mean the imitation of those half shades seen upon and about the figures in the real wood. Between and around the lights or figure in oak, there is always a lighter tint of color; this is imitated by doubling a piece of rag into a small roll, and with the side of this the grain is partially wiped away, but not to the extent of taking off the whole of the grain. A recent but most admirable system of graining oak, by means of over-combing, is worked exactly the reverse of any of the foregoing methods; that is to say, the figure is first wiped out, and the combing or grain is done afterwards, when the graining color is dry, in this wise: The graining color is mixed somewhat thinner than for ordinary graining, and is brushed over the work sparingly, leaving it just sufficiently strong to show a clear distinction between the ground and the color. The light or figure is then softened by drawing the end of a flat hog-hair fitch, or a small thin mottler, across each figure, and slightly softening with the badger-hair softener. The figure is broken up a little with fine lines across it in parts, such as may be seen in the real wood; but previous to wiping out the figure, streaks of light should be wiped out and softened on one side of the panel or across the stiles, in imitation of the reflective lights seen in oak. The color should also be partially wiped off the rails or stiles at their junction; this tends to define the joint. The color is now let to dry hard, when it will be ready for over-combing--that is, combing or graining over the figure (hence its name), and this will have to be done somewhat differently to the ordinary combing. As thus: The color is rubbed in as before, and combed solely with the gutta-percha combs, but these are specially cut for the purpose; they are best about 2 in. wide. The first must be cut with teeth about three-sixteenths of an inch in width, the next one-eighth, and the third about one-sixteenth. The broad-toothed comb is first used, and must be drawn down the panel, with a wavy motion, in short or long curls; either will answer our purpose now. The next size of comb is then drawn straight down--the straighter the better. This has the effect of breaking the wavy combing into short and long straight bits, similar to the pores or grain of the real wood. Both the first and second combing may be varied by holding the comb in a slanting direction, and may be fine or coarse, according to the width of the combs used; now take a soft rag folded, and with this partially clear off the grain which runs over the figure, leaving only a sufficient quantity crossing the light or figure, to be just distinguished, exactly as it appears upon the figure in real oak. The grain is also wiped off in parts on the plain spaces between the figure, in order to break it up and take away any formality. If this method be well and probably done, a thoroughly deceptive imitation may be produced; and except this end be kept in view, no really good work will result. * * * * * KNOTS AND SPLICES. [_SEE ENGRAVING ON FIRST PAGE._] 1. Turn used in making up ropes. 2. End tapered for the purpose of passing it readily through a loop. To make this, we unlay the rope for the necessary length, reducing a rope diminishing in diameter towards the end, which is finished by interlacing the ends without cutting them, as it would weaken the work; it is lastly "whipped" with small twine. 3. Tapered end, covered with interlaced cordage for the purpose of making it stronger. This is done with very small twine attached at one end to the small eye, and at the other to the strands of the rope, thus making a strong "webbing" around the end. 4. Double turn used for making rope. 5. Eye splice. The strands of the cable are brought back over themselves, and interlaced with their original turns, as in a splice. 6. Tie for the end of a four-strand rope. 7. The same completed; the strands are tied together, forming loops, laying one over the other. 8. Commencement for making the end by interlacing the strands. 9. Interlacing complete, but not fastened. 10 and 11. Shell in two views used in No. 65, showing the disposition of it at the throat. This joining is advantageous, as it does not strain the cords, and it prevents them from cutting each other; so that the rings pass one into the other and are joined outside the intermediate shell. 12. Interlacing in two directions. 13. Mode of finishing the end by several turns of the twine continued over the cable. 14. Interlacing commenced, in one direction. 15. Interlacing finished, the ends being worked under the strands, as in a splice. 16. Pigtail commenced. 17. Interlacing fastened. 18. Pigtail with the strands taut. 19. Dead eye, shown in two views. 20. Pigtail finished. We pass the ends of the strands, one under the other, in the same way as if we were making a pudding splice: thus bringing it in a line with the rope, to which it is seized fast, and the ends cut off. 21. Scull pigtail; instead of holding the ends by a tie, we interlace them again, as in No. 16, the one under the other. 22. Pigtail, or "lark's nest." We make this to the "pennant" of a cable, which has several strands, by taking the requisite number of turns over the pudding, in such a manner that the strands shall lay under each other. This "pigtail" forms a knot at the end of the rope. It thus draws together two ropes, as shown in No. 32, forming a "shroud" knot. In these two pigtails, the strands are crossed before finishing the ends, so that the button, a, is made with the strands, a, and b, with those of the rope, b. 23. Slip clinch to sailors' knot. 24. Slip clinch, secured. 25. Ordinary knot upon a double rope. 26. Bowline knot for a man to sit in at his work. 27. Called a "short splice," as it is not of great length, and besides, can be made quickly. 30. Long splice. This extends from a to b. We unlay the strands of each of the ropes we intend to join, for about half the length that the splice will be, putting each strand of the one between two strands of the other. 31. Simple fastening on a rope. 32. A "shroud" knot. 33. The ends of the rope are prepared for making the splice (No. 29) in the same manner as for the "shroud" knot in No. 32. When the strands are untwisted, we put the ends of two cords together as close as possible, and place the ends of the one between the strands of the other, above and below alternately, so as to interlace them as in No. 29. This splice is not, however, very strong, and is only used when there is not time to make a long splice, which is much the best. 34 and 35. Marline spikes. Tools made of wood or iron, used to open out a rope to pass the strands of another through it. 36. Shows strands arranged as described in No. 30. 37. Fastening when a lever is used, and is employed when hauling upon large ropes, where the strength of several men are necessary. 38. A "pudding splice." This is commenced, like the others, by placing the rope end to end, the turns of the one being passed between those of the other; having first swelled out the yarns by a "rat's-tail," we put them, two by two, one over the other, twisting them tightly, and opening a way for them with the marlinspike. The inconvenience of this splice is, that it is larger in diameter than the rope itself; but when made sufficiently long, by gradually reducing the size of the strands, it has great strength. 39. This shows two strands, a and b, of the ropes, A B, knotted together, being drawn as tight as possible; we unlay the strand, a', of the rope, A, for half the length of the splice, and twist the strand, b', of the rope, B, strongly in its place, tying a' and b' together tightly. The same process is again gone through on the rope, B, the strand, a", of the rope, A, being knotted to the strand, b", of the rope, B. When all the strands are thus knotted together, we interlace them with the strands of the cable. Thus the strands, a a' a", are interlocked by being passed alternately above and below the turns of the cord, B, the ends being also sometimes "whipped." In the same manner the strands, b b' b", pass alternately over and under the strands of the rope, A, and are in like manner "whipped." It is important that the several interlacings and knots should not meet at one point; we reduce the size of the strands towards the end, so that they loose themselves in the body of the splice, cutting off such parts as may project. This splice is employed for joining the ends of a rope when a chafed part has been cut out, and is quite as strong as the rope itself. 40. Belaying-pin opened to serve as a button; these are used where it is necessary to stop or check velocity. 41. Chain knot, or fastening. 42. Variable or regulating lashing. By laying the piece, a f, horizontally, it can be slipped along the rope, b; by raising or lowering this, we shall raise or depress the weight, c, the cord, b, running over the two pulleys, d, from the piece, a f, in the direction shown in the figure. The friction of the cord, b, passing through the hole, e, sufficiently fixes the piece, a f, and holds the weight, c, securely. 43. Cleet, with three ties. 44. Cleet, showing the mode of belaying the cord. 45. The piece, a f, of No. 42. 46. Fair leader. 47. Cleet to be fixed to a stay. 48. Loop for slipping other lines. 49. A "bend" which is only used for fear of the stoppers snapping. 50. Bastard loop, made on the end of the rope, and whipped with yarns. 51. Tie to pins: a, the pin; b, small cords fixed by a cross tie. 52. Cleet, fixed to the "rail," either with screws or nails, to which the lines are belayed. 53. Waterman's knot. 54. Fair leader. 55. Tie, or bend to pier. 56. Simple fastening to tie. 57. Fastening by a loop. This can be tied or untied without loosening the loop itself. It is made by following, towards the longer loop, the direction as numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and is terminated by the loop, 6, 7, 6, finally passing it over the head of the post, A. This knot holds itself, the turns being in opposite directions. To untie it, we slack the turns of the cable sufficiently to again pass the loop, 6, 7, 6, over the post, A, and turn the ends in the contrary direction to that in which they were made (as 5, 4, 3, 2, 1). 58. Iron "shell," in two views. 59 and 60. "Wedding" knots; a b, eyelets; c d, the join; e, the fastening. 61. Lark's-head fastening to running knot. 62. A round turn; the cord, a, is passed through the bight of the cord, b, over the button, c, where it is secured by an ordinary knot. 63. Belaying-pin splice. The cord, b, "stops" the pin, e, its end being spliced upon itself, and "served" with yarn; this rope, with its pin, is passed through the spliced eye, f of the line, g. 64. Round button. 65. Joint by a spherical shell, each loop, a and b, being made by ties and splices, and surrounding the shell, c. 66. Belaying-pin, shown separately, before being stoppered. 67. Fastening to shears. 68. Square mooring. When the cable is round the post, A, and the piece, c, without being crossed, it lays in the section 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and the end is fastened by tying. 69. Wooden shell in section. 70. Crossed fastening. The turns of the cable, passing in front of the post, B, are crossed at the back of C, in the direction 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, the end, 8, being secured to the cable. 71. Wooden shell. 72. Double-chain fastening. 73. Lashing for "ram" block, or "dead-eye." The ram blocks, a and b, are strapped by the cords, e, which hold them; the small lanyards, d, pass through the holes to make the connection, and as they are tightened give the requisite tension to the cordage; the ends are fastened to the main rope. Usually one of these dead-eyes is held by an iron strap to the point where it is required to fix and strain the cordage, which is ordinarily a shroud. 74. Chain fastening. 1'. Simple band, showing the upper side. 2'. The same, showing the under side and the knot. 3'. Tie, with crossed ends, commenced; a turn is taken under the strands, to hold the ends of the cord. 4'. The same, completed. 5'. Bend with crossed strands, commenced, the one end being looped over the other. 6'. The same, completed. 7'. Necklace tie, seen on the upper side. 8'. The same, seen underneath. The greater the strain on the cords, the tighter the knot becomes. 9' and 10' are similar splices to 7' and 8' with slight modifications. 11' shows the commencement of 13', the legs in elevation; 12' being a front view. An ordinary band, made by several turns of a small rope, is lapped round them and hauled taut, and then interlaced at the ends. This done, the legs are shifted into the shape of a St. Andrew's cross. Thus the lashing is tightened, and, for further security, we pass the line several times over the tie and between the spars, knotting the ends. 13'. Portuguese knot. This is a lashing for shear legs, and must be tight enough to prevent the spars slipping on each other; the crossing of the two legs gives a means of securing the knot. 14'. For binding timbers; a, knot commenced. Take several turns round the timbers, and fasten the ends by passing them under the turns; b, knot completed. The end of a round stick, m n, termed a packing stick, should be passed under the knob, the cord being slack enough to allow of this. By turning the stick, the turns can be tightened to any extent; when tight, we fasten the longer arm of the lever to some fixed point, by a rope, p q, so that it cannot fly back. Care must be taken not to turn the stick too far, or the rope may be broken. As the timber dries and shrinks, the lever may be used to make all taut again. * * * * * THE HARTFORD STEAM BOILER INSPECTION AND INSURANCE COMPANY. The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company makes the following report of its inspections in January, 1871: During the month, there were 522 visits of inspection made, and 1,030 boilers examined--853 externally and 363 internally, while 106 have been tested by hydraulic pressure. Number of defects in all discovered, 431, of which 163 were regarded as dangerous. These defects were as follows: Furnaces out of shape, 24--3 dangerous; fractures, 47--25 dangerous; burned plates, 29--14 dangerous; blistered plates, 54--10 dangerous; cases of sediment and deposit, 97--18 dangerous; cases of incrustation and scale, 70--24 dangerous. To show how little attention is paid to the internal condition of boilers by incompetent engineers, we copy the following from a letter of one of our inspectors: "In one tubular boiler I found sediment in the back end, eight inches deep, and extending forward more than four feet. It seemed to be an accumulation of fine scale cemented together, so that it was necessary to break it up with a hammer and chisel before it could be removed. The engineer said _he had cleaned the boilers only three days before_, and objected to my making another examination. This is one of the many cases we find, where the proprietor trusts everything about his boilers to his engineer, supposing him to be reliable." With such accumulation of sediment and deposit, is it any wonder that sheets are burned? A careful engineer will understand, if the feed water be impure, that he must blow down two or three inches every day, or oftener, that the sediment may be removed as it accumulates, and then an internal examination once in two weeks, or once a month, will insure a clean boiler. Cases of external corrosion, 26--10 dangerous; cases of internal corrosion, 17--5 dangerous; cases of internal grooving, 28--11 dangerous; water gages out of order, 50; blow-out apparatus out of order, 15--7 dangerous; safety valves overloaded, 40--12 dangerous; pressure gages out of order, 54--6 dangerous, varying from -15 to +8 pounds. (We have found several gages entirely ruined from being frozen). Boilers without gages, 4; cases of deficiency of water, 5--1 dangerous; broken braces and stays, 31--7 dangerous; boilers condemned, 2--both dangerous. Two engineers were found drunk on duty, and promptly discharged. There were 9 serious explosions during the month, by which 99 persons were killed, and 6 wounded. Eighty-seven of the killed were passengers on the ill-fated steamer _H.R. Arthur_, on the Mississippi River. Many were drowned, and some burned, but the origin of the calamity was the bad quality of the boilers, which a careless management was unable to detect. The upper and fore part of the boat was blown away by the exploded boilers, and, to add to the horror, what remained took fire. None of these exploded boilers were under the care of this company. * * * * * Five ore-roasting furnaces are in full blast in Nevada. * * * * * IMPROVED COMPOUND SPIRAL CAR SPRING FOR RAILWAY CARRIAGES. Our engravings illustrate an improved compound car-spring, which appears to possess all the requisites of a first-class spring, combining in its construction extreme simplicity with great strength, and a feature whereby the power of the spring increases with increase of the load, and _vice versâ_, so that its flexibility remains nearly constant for all loads. Fig. 1 is a perspective view of this spring, with a portion of the side of the case broken out to show the interior arrangement of the spiral springs. Fig. 2 is a section of the compressing plate. Fig. 3 is a plan view, showing the arrangement of the tubes which enclose the springs. [Illustration: POTT'S' SPIRAL CAR SPRING FOR RAILWAY CARRIAGES. _Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3_] The case is cast in two pieces. Its vertical wall is cast in a single piece, and has at the top a flange or bead extending inwardly, against which the compressing plate abuts when the spring is not compressed, as shown in Fig. 2. A bottom plate completes the case. The spiral components of the spring are inclosed in tubes, as shown in Figs. 1 and 3. It is not deemed essential that these tubes should be seamless, or that their edges, brought together in bending, should be soldered, brazed, or welded. They act merely as guides to compel the component springs to expand or contract in vertical lines, and need only be strong enough for that purpose. The compressing plate is formed with concentric steps or ledges, as shown in Fig. 2, so that with light loads, only a portion of the component spirals act. With a heavier load a new series of spirals is brought into action, and so on, till the spring is loaded to its full capacity. This feature is novel, and as important as novel, as it gives the spring a far more easy and flexible carriage, with light loads, than would be the case if all the spirals were permitted to act. In putting the spring together, the vertical part of the case is inverted. The compressing plate is then placed within the case, resting upon the inner flange of the case above described. The tubes with their inclosed springs are then arranged in position, as shown in the plan view, Fig. 3. The bottom plate of the case is then placed in position, and held to its place by lugs and rivets, as shown in Fig. 1; the spring is then ready for use. The employment of tubes in the manner described, enables springs of the greatest practical length to be used, without the sectional or division plates met with in other spiral car springs. A greater and easier movement is therefore obtained. These springs can, it is claimed, compete in price with any spring in market, and are guaranteed by the manufacturers. Patented through the Scientific American Patent Agency, December 27, 1870, by Albert Potts, whom address for further information, No. 490 North Third street, Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * PORTABLE WRITING AND COPYING CASE. This device is the invention of A. G. Buzby, of Philadelphia, Pa. It is a combined writing and copying case. Besides the usual recesses or chambers for pen, ink, paper, etc., it is provided with a book of copying paper, in which copies of important letters may be made, by damping the letters in the usual way, and pressing them between the leaves of the copying book; or the transfer paper may be used, so that the letter will be copied as it is written, if preferred. [Illustration] * * * * * HOW WALKING STICKS ARE MADE. Sticks are manufactured both from large timber of from two to six feet girth, and from small underwood of about the thickness of a man's thumb. The timber, which is chiefly beech, is first sawed into battens of about three feet in length and as many inches in width; and from each of these battens two square sticks, with square heads are afterwards cut in opposite directions, so that the middle portion is waste wood. The corners of each are afterwards rounded off by a planing process called "trapping," and the square head is reduced, by a small saw, to a curve or rectangular bend, so as to form a handle. When the sticks are brought in this way to the exact size and pattern, they are polished with great care, are finely varnished, and packed in boxes or bundles for the market. Many sawn sticks, however, are supplied with bone and horn handles, which are fastened on with glue; and then of course there is less wood waste, as a larger number of them may be cut from one batten. A very different process takes place in the manufacture of sticks from small underwood, in which there is no sawing required. The rough unfashioned sticks, which are generally of hazel, ash, oak and thorn, are cut with a bill in the same way as kidney bean sticks, and are brought to the factory in large bavins or bundles, piled on a timber tug. There must of course, be some little care in their selection, yet it is evident that the woodmen are not very particular on this score, for they have in general an ungainly appearance; and many are so crooked and rough, that no drover or country boy would think it worth while to polish the like of them with his knife. Having arrived at this place, however, their numerous excrescences are soon pruned away, and their ugliness converted into elegance. When sufficiently seasoned and fit for working, they are first laid to soak in wet sand, and rendered more tough and pliable; a workman then takes them one by one, and securing them with an iron stock, bends them skillfully this way and that, so as to bring out their natural crooks, and render them at last all straight even rods. If they are not required to be knotted, they next go to the "trapper," who puts them through a kind of circular plane, which takes off knots, and renders them uniformly smooth and round. The most important process of all is that of giving them their elegantly curved handles, for which purpose they are passed over to the "crooker." Every child knows that if we bend a tough stick moderately when the pressure is discontinued, it will soon fly back, more or less, to its former position; and if we bend it very much, it will break. Now the crooker professes to accomplish the miracle of bending a stick as it might be an iron wire, so that it shall neither break nor "backen." To prevent the breaking, the wood is rendered pliant by further soaking in wet sand; and a flexible band of metal is clamped down firmly to that portion of the stick that will form the outside of the curve; the top end is then fitted into a grooved iron shoulder which determines the size of the crook, the other end being brought round so as to point in the opposite direction; the metal band during this process binding with increasing tightness against the stretching fibers of the wood, so that they cannot snap or give way under the strain. The crook having been made, the next thing is to fix it, or remove from the fibers the reaction of elasticity, which would otherwise, on the cessation of the bending force, cause it to backen more or less, and undo the work. In the old process of crooking by steam, as timber bending is effected, the stick was merely left till it was cold to acquire a permanent set; but in the new process, a more permanent set is given by turning the handle about briskly over a jet of gas. The sticks being now fashioned, it only remains to polish and stain or varnish them; and they are sometimes scorched or burned brown, and carved with foliage, animal heads and other devices.--_Chambers' Journal_. * * * * * FLOWERING OF THE VICTORIA REGIA IN THE OPEN AIR.--Joseph Mager, Esq., has succeeded in flowering the Victoria lily, in his pond in England. The pond is perfectly open, but the water is heated by hot water pipes coming from a boiler near the pond, carefully concealed. The seeds of the Victoria were planted in May last, and the first flower was produced Sept. 10th. Afterwards seven other flowers opened. The plant has eight leaves, of which the largest is five feet two inches in diameter. Mr. Mager has also succeeded in flowering a large number of other tropical lilies in his pond. * * * * * JUTE, a material largely used in combination with hemp, for making cordage, sacking, mats, and carpets, is produced in India to the extent of 300,000 tuns per annum. The scarcity of fuel prevents its manufacture on the spot, except by the rudest and most primitive means, so that the bulk of the growth is sent to Great Britain. * * * * * VENTILATION OF THE LIVERPOOL TUNNEL. This tunnel, which forms an ascending incline of a mile and a quarter length from the terminal station in Lime-street London and N. W. Railroad, was worked until recently by a rope and stationary engine, to avoid fouling the air of the tunnel by the passage of locomotives; but the increase of the traffic having necessitated the abandonment of the rope and the substitution of locomotives for bringing the trains up through the tunnel, it became requisite to provide some efficient means of ventilation for clearing the tunnel speedily of the smoke and steam after the passage of each train. A large exhausting fan has been designed by Mr. John Ramsbottom for this purpose, which works in a chamber situated near the middle of the length of the tunnel, and draws the air in from the tunnel, through a cross drift; discharging it up a tapering chimney that extends to a considerable hight above the surface of the ground over the tunnel. The fan is about thirty feet diameter, and is made with straight radial vanes; it revolves on a horizontal shaft at a speed of about forty-five revolutions per minute, within a brick casing, built concentric with the fan for the first half of the circumference, and afterwards expanding gradually for discharging into the base of the chimney, the air from the tunnel being drawn in at the center of the fan at each side, and discharged from the circumference of the fan by the revolution of the vanes. The engine driving the fan is started by telegraph signal at each departure of a train from the terminal station, and the fan is kept running until the discharge from it becomes quite clear, showing that no steam or smoke remains in the tunnel; this is usually the case in about eight minutes after the time of the train entering the lower end of the tunnel, the passage of the train through the tunnel occupying about three minutes. The fan draws air in at both ends of the tunnel simultaneously, and begins to clear the lower end immediately upon the train entering; the clearing of the upper end commences as soon as the train has passed out of the tunnel, and as the fan is situated nearer the upper end of the tunnel than the lower, the clearing of both lengths is completed almost simultaneously. The fan is so constructed as to allow an uninterrupted passage through it, for the air, whilst the fan is standing still; and the natural ventilation thus obtained by means of the large chimney is found sufficient for clearing the tunnel during the night and some portion of the day, without the fan being worked at those times. This natural ventilation is aided by the engine exhaust and the boiler discharging into the chimney. The fan has now been in regular operation for three-quarters of a year, and has been found completely successful. * * * * * IMPREGNATING WOOD WITH TAR OR OTHER PRESERVING MATERIAL. The preservation of wood is a problem which is attracting increased attention, as year by year diminishes the material supply of timber, and consequently gradually increases its price. Among other methods employed, the impregnation of wood by the vapors of tar, creosote, petroleum, etc., has been tried, and one of the practical difficulties met with has been the obtaining of suitable apparatus for the purpose. [Illustration] The engraving annexed is an invention intended to supply this want. The wood is inclosed, in a tank kept hot by a steam jacket which surrounds it, as shown. A boiler at one end is used to heat the substance with which it is desired to impregnate the wood. An air pump is also employed to remove the steam, generated in the heated timber, and the air from the tank. The pores of the wood being thus rendered vacuous, the hot liquid or vapors from the heating tank readily penetrate the entire substance, and thoroughly impregnate it. This apparatus is the invention of George Pustkuchen, of Hoboken, N. J. * * * * * BOARDMAN'S COMBINED TOOL. This tool, of which our engraving is a good representation, comprises a screw wrench, a pipe wrench, a hammer, a nail claw, a screw-driver, and a bit handle, or socket wrench. The bit handle is the entire tool, the square socket or opening being made in the end of the handle, in which the shanks of bits may be inserted. The screw driver is formed on the end of the screw bar, attached to the outer jaw of the wrench, and is taken out from the hollow of the handle when required for use. The use of the other parts of the tool will be apparent from the engraving. The tool is very compact, and has this advantage over the ordinary screw wrench, that its leverage increases as it is opened to receive nuts of larger size. [Illustration] This invention is protected by two patents, dated respectively, May 30, 1865, and July 10, 1866. For further information address B. Boardman & Co., Norwich, Conn. * * * * * BELT TIGHTENER. [Illustration] This instrument will be found of great service in bringing together the ends of belts, the weight of which is so great that they cannot be held together by the hand while lacing. A strap engages with holes made in the belt, at the back of the holes punched for lacing, the tightening strap being provided with claws or hooks, as shown. A winch axle and ratchet, adjusted in a frame as shown, are then employed to pull the ends of the belt together and hold them firmly till the lacing is completed. This is the invention of T. G. Stansberry, of Medora, Ill. Patented in September, 1867. * * * * * SOME THINGS I DON'T WANT IN THE BUILDING TRADES. I don't want my house put in repair, or rather out of repair, by a master who employs "Jacks of all Trades." I don't want my foreman to tell me too much at one time about the faults of the workmen under him, as I may forget asking him about himself. I don't want a builder or carpenter to give a coat of paint to any joinery work he may be doing for me, until I have examined first the material and workmanship. I don't want any jobbing carpenter or joiner, whom I may employ, to bring a lump of putty in his tool basket. I prefer leave the use of putty to the painters. I don't want jobbing plumbers to spend three days upon the roof, soldering up a crack in the gutter, and, when done, leaving fresher cracks behind them. The practice is something akin to "cut and come again." I don't want a contractor to undertake a job at a price that he knows will not pay, and then throw the fault of his bankruptcy on "that blackguard building." I don't want any more hodmen to be carrying up the weight of themselves in their hod, as well as their bricks; I would much prefer seeing the poor human machines tempering the mortar or wheeling the barrow, while the donkey engine, the hydraulic lift, or the old gray horse, worked the pulley. I don't want house doors to be made badly, hung badly, or composed of green and unseasoned timber. I don't want houses built first and designed afterwards, or, rather, wedged into shape, and braced into form. I don't want to be compelled to pay any workman a fair day's wages for a half day's work. I don't want an employer to act towards his workmen as if he thought their sinews and thews were of iron, instead of flesh and blood. I don't want any kind of old rubbish of brick and stone to be bundled into walls and partitions, and then plastered over "hurry-skurry." Trade infamy, like murder, will out, sooner or later. I don't want men to wear flesh and bone, and waste sweat and blood, in forms of labor to which machinery can be applied, and by which valuable human life and labor can be better and more profitably utilized. * * * * * CORRESPONDENCE. _The Editors are not responsible for the opinions expressed by their Correspondents._ * * * * * ACTION OF THE RECIPROCATING PARTS OF STEAM ENGINES. MESSRS. EDITORS:--I have hesitated about the propriety of replying to the criticisms of your correspondent, J. E. Hendricks, upon my paper, on the action of the reciprocating parts of steam engines. It is not to be expected that a truth so opposed to commonly received notions--the reception of which requires so much to be unlearned--should at once receive the assent of every one. Some odd fancies on the subject are likely to be ventilated first. But your correspondent touches the root of the matter, and perhaps the fact questioned by him should be more clearly placed beyond dispute. I will dismiss the introductory part of his letter, merely observing that his "logical inference" is quite gratuitous and unwarranted. He says himself that its absurdity is obvious, in which I quite agree with him. The real question is this: What is the figure representing the acceleration of the motion of a piston, controlled by a crank which revolves with a uniform velocity? I stated it to be a right-angled triangle, and indicated, as I supposed, clearly enough, a simple method by which this could be shown. Your correspondent claims that the calculation, according to my own rule, gives a figure of a totally different form, and one that shows the acceleration, as well as the motion, to be reduced to zero at the commencement of the stroke. Let us see. Let the straight line, AJ, in the following figure, represent half the stroke of the piston, and let the distances, AB, AC, etc., on this line, represent the versed sines of 10°, 20°, etc., up to 90°, or the motion of the piston while the crank is moving through these arcs. At the points A, B, C, etc., erect the perpendiculars, Aa, Bb, Cc, etc., and let the length of each of these ordinates represent the acceleration imparted in a given time at that point of the stroke. Then will AJ be to Aa as IJ is to Ii, as HJ is to Hh, etc., showing that the straight line, aJ, connects the extremities of all the ordinates, and that the triangle, AJa, represents the acceleration of the motion of the piston, from the commencement to the middle of the stroke. [Illustration] The following table will enable any one to make the calculations proving the truth of the above proposition: Degrees. Versed sine. Motion for 10° Acceleration during 1°. 0° .0000000 _Aa_ .0003046 10° _AB_ .0151922 _AB_ .0151922 _Bb_ .0003001 20° _AC_ .0603074 _BC_ .0451152 _Cc_ .0002862 30° _AD_ .1339746 _CD_ .0736672 _Dd_ .0002638 40° _AE_ .2339556 _DE_ .0999810 _Ee_ .0002332 50° _AF_ .3572124 _EF_ .1232568 _Ff_ .0001958 60° _AG_ .5000000 _FG_ .1427876 _Gg_ .0001523 70° _AH_ .6579799 _GH_ .1579799 _Hh_ .0001041 80° _AI_ .8263518 _HI_ .1683719 _Ii_ .0000529 90° _AJ_ 1.0000000 _IJ_ .1736482 _Jj_ .0000000 The method of obtaining the decimals representing the acceleration for 1°, at any point, was fully explained in the paper, and compared with the similar method of showing the uniform acceleration of a body acted on by a constant force. The ordinary tables in the hand-books, going only to five places of decimals, are of no use for these computations. I would suggest a practical experiment. Let any one having an engine running at a good speed, loosen the crank pin brasses a little, so that, at starting, it will thump heavily. Let the engine be lightly loaded, so that only a small portion of the boiler pressure will need to be admitted to the cylinder. As its speed increases, the thump will die away; and, if at its full speed, the pressure of the steam admitted is not so great as to overcome the centrifugal strain of the reciprocating parts on the crank, as it passes the centers, the engine will revolve in silence. Any one can ascertain, by the rule given in the note to the paper, just what pressure can be admitted without causing a thump, or this can be found by a little experimenting. I am running an engine which does not thump with loose crank pin brasses, under eighty pounds pressure, admitted sharply on the centers. Charles T. Porter. * * * * * ANSWER TO PRACTICAL PROBLEM. MESSRS. EDITORS;--I submit the following solution of "Practical Problem" on page 147: Given AB, arm, C, arm, D, chord of half angle of oscillation of arm, D, and angles of arms, with line AB. To find angles, BAc', ABb, and length of link, E. 1. As the length of arm, D, is to the chord of arc, ab, divided by 2, so is the radius to the sine angle oscillation of arm, D, divided by 4. 2. 360° is to the whole circumference as the angle bBa is to the length of arc ab. 3. Now arc ab is equal to arc a'c'. 4. The whole circumference is to 360° as the length of arc a'e' is to the angle oscillation of C divided by 2. 5. Half angle oscillation, C, taken from angle BAa' is equal to angle BAc'. 6. Half angle oscillation, D, taken from angle ABa is equal to angle ABb. 7. The diagonal of the rectangle formed by the (sum of the sines of the angles of the arms with AB) into (AB--sum of cosines of same) will be the length of link, E. [Illustration] G. R. NASH, Civil Engineer. North Adams, Mass. [We have received other solutions of this problem, but as this covers the ground in a very simple manner, we think it will be sufficient. Those forwarding the solutions not published will accept our thanks and assurances that it is not because they lack merit that they are declined.--EDS. * * * * * RECIPROCATING PARTS OF STEAM ENGINES. MESSRS. EDITORS:--In one of the late numbers of your journal, you publish a paper, read by Mr. Porter before some learned society in New York, on something about the possibility or practicability of running a steam engine at a high rate of speed, and claiming to give a scientific explanation of the why and wherefore. Now, scientifically, I know nothing about a steam engine; practically, I know how to stop and start one. Therefore, you will understand that what I say is not as coming from one who claims to be wise above what is written, but as simply being a statement of the case, as it appears to one who wants to learn, and takes this way to draw out the truth. A scientific theory, invested with all its sines, coefficients, and other paraphernalia, is a very pretty thing to look at, no doubt, for those who understand it, and, when properly applied, is invaluable; but when, as in this case, a practical question is to be decided, by the aid of a scientific demonstration, it will not do to throw aside the main elements of the problem, or any, in fact, of the minor points, no matter how trivial they may appear. Mr. Porter's labors were strictly of a scientific nature. He starts out with the proposition that what he is about to explain is very simple, and very likely it is; but, for one, I can't see it, and I want more light. He says that it takes a certain number of pounds to overcome the inertia of the reciprocating parts of a certain weight, to give it a certain speed. What is inertia? He says, "we will not take into account the friction of parts." Now, my understanding of this point is, that friction is practically one of the main elements in the problem. How can we hope to obtain a correct solution when he rubs out one of the terms of the equation? What is friction doing all the time, while he is theoretically having his reciprocating parts storing up power and then giving it out again, just at the right time, and in the right quantity? What an immense amount of iron has been wasted by being cast into fly wheels, when a fraction of the amount, if only put into cross heads, would render fly wheels unnecessary! Mr. Porter stops short in his discussion. He should have added a table giving the proportionate length of stroke, weight of parts, and number of revolutions required to produce the effect of an engine running at a high speed, without the least fraction of inequality in the strain on the crank, and then the sun would have fairly risen in the "dawn of a new era for the steam engine." But, as it is so very simple, we can all figure it out for ourselves. In the diagram Mr. Porter gives, to illustrate the travel of the piston, he wets his finger and draws it over another term in the equation (a method of elimination not taught by Hutton, Davies, and other mathematicians). It is a quick way, but is it correct? He says, "the distance traveled by the piston is the versed sine of an angle formed by a line from the center of the crank pin, in any part of its stroke to the center of the circle described by the crank pin, leaving out of the calculation the angular vibration of the connecting rod." What he means by the "angular vibration," I do not know. He is wrong in the statement. If he will think of it he will see it. If he meant to say that the piston's travel was measured by the versed sine of the angle formed by the connecting rod and the line of horizontal centers, he is wrong again, yet nearer the truth than before, just as the proportion between the length of the connecting rod and the half diameter of the circle described by the crank pin. This can quickly be seen by supposing the connecting rod to be detached, and allowed to fall down on the center line, at any part of the stroke. If he understood this (as no doubt he did), he should not ignore the facts. What I am aiming at is this. When a man attempts to demonstrate a thing mathematically, he must take into his calculation everything essentially connected with the problem, just exactly as it is, and not as he would have it; otherwise, he cannot, by any possibility, attain a correct result. When he claims, as now, the practicability of running engines at a high speed, I think he is claiming too much. Build an engine of proper materials, make it strong, and fit everything as it should be, balance crank and fly wheel to a nicety, keep everything snugly in its place, and the terrors of a quick stroke vanish. S. W. H. * * * * * TEST FOR WHITE LEAD. MESSRS. EDITORS:--I have read, with much interest, Dr. Chandler's colorimetric test of the purity of white lead, as published in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN sometime ago. I enclose another test, which, though not new, is of value to all using white lead on account of its simplicity and effectiveness. It has been in use here for nearly two years, and has been found reliable. Having never seen it in print, I have tried to put it in as simple words as possible. FELIX MCARDLE, Analytical Chemist. St. Louis, Mo. Take a piece of firm, close grained charcoal, and, near one end of it, scoop out a cavity about half an inch in diameter and a quarter of an inch in depth. Place in the cavity a sample, of the lead to be tested, about the size of a small pea, and apply to it continuously the blue or hottest part of the flame of the blow pipe; if the sample be strictly pure, it will in a very short time, say in two minutes, be reduced to metallic lead, leaving no residue; but if it be adulterated to the extent of ten per cent. only, with oxide of zinc, sulphate of baryta, whiting or any other carbonate of lime, (which substances are now the only adulterations used), or if it be composed entirely of these materials, as is sometimes the case with cheap lead, it cannot be reduced, but will remain on the charcoal an infusible mass. Dry white lead, (carbonate of lead) is composed of metallic lead, oxygen and carbonic acid, and, when ground with linseed oil, forms the white lead of commerce. When it is subjected to the above treatment, the oil is first burned off, and then at a certain degree of heat, the oxygen and carbonic acid are set free, leaving only the metallic lead from which it was manufactured. If, however, there be present in the sample any of the above mentioned adulterations, they cannot of course be reduced to metallic lead, and cannot be reduced, by any heat of the blow pipe flame, to their own metallic bases; and being intimately incorporated and ground with the carbonate of lead, they prevent it from being reduced. It is well, after blowing upon the sample, say for half a minute, by which time the oil will be burned off, to loosen the sample from the charcoal, with a knife blade or spatula, in order that the flame may pass under as well as over and against it. With proper care the lead will run into one button, instead of scattering over the charcoal, and this is the reason why the cavity above mentioned is necessary. A common star candle or a lard oil lamp furnishes the best flame for use of the blow pipe; a coal oil lamp should not be used. By the above test, after a little practice, so small an adulteration as one or two per cent. can be detected; it is, however, only a test of the purity or impurity of a lead, and if found adulterated, the degree or percentage of adulteration cannot be well ascertained by it. Jewellers usually have all the necessary apparatus for making the test, and any one of them can readily make it by observing the above directions, and from them can be obtained a blow pipe at small cost. If you have no open package of the lead to be tested, a sample can most easily be obtained by boring into the side or top of a keg with a gimlet, and with it taking out the required quantity; care should be used to free it entirely from the borings or particles of wood, and it should not be larger than the size mentioned; a larger quantity can be reduced, but of course more time will be required, and the experiment cannot be so neatly performed. * * * * * HOW TO BUILD A CHIMNEY. MESSRS. EDITORS:--I am satisfied that a great many fires originate through poorly constructed chimneys; and, although not a bricklayer by trade, I would offer a few hints how to construct a fire-proof chimney. Let the bed be laid of brick and mortar, iron, or stone; then the workman should take a brick in his left hand, and with the trowel, draw the mortar upon the end of the brick, from the under side, and not from the outside edge, as is usual. Then, by pressing the brick against the next one, the whole space between the two bricks will be filled with mortar; and so he should point up the inside as perfectly as the outside, as he proceeds. By drawing the mortar on the edge of the brick, the space between the ends will not always be entirely filled, and will make (where the inside pointing is not attended to) a leaky and unsafe chimney, which, if not kept clear of soot, will, in burning out, stand a good chance of setting the building on fire. The best thing that I know of, to put the fire out in a burning chimney is salt; but the matter of first importance, after having a chimney properly constructed, is to keep it clean. AUSTIN B. CULVER. Westfield, N. Y. * * * * * CRYSTALLIZED HONEY. MESSRS. EDITORS:--Please allow me to say to the querist who, through your columns, asks what to do with crystalline honey, that if he will "doctor" it with almost any artificial honey of the day, it will not become like lard in cold weather, which change is a natural proof that it is pure. For almost any purpose, pure honey is preferable to that which has been adulterated, but purity is a minor consideration with many. Next we shall hear of some fastidious customer who objects to pure lard, because it looks white when cold. To such we would recommend lard oil as a great improvement, especially for cooking purposes. A. M. B. Louisville, Ky. * * * * * [For the Scientific American.] RAMBLES FOR RELICS. NUMBER II. At a depth of fifteen feet, we were about to suspend our labors, supposing from the nature and uniformly dark color of the earth, that we had reached the surface of the alluvium, when a sign of the inevitable wood and bark layer was seen in a crevice. An excavation, five or six feet, into the wall, revealed the skeleton of a man laid at length, having an extra coverlid of wooden material. Eighteen large oblong beads, an ax of polished green stone, eleven arrow points, and five implements of bone (to be described) were deposited on the left side; and a few small beads, an ornamental shell pin, two small hatchets, and a sharp-pointed flint knife or lance, eight inches long, having a neck or projection at the base, suitable for a handle, or for insertion in a shaft, on the right side. The earth behind the skull being removed, three enormous conch shells presented their open mouths. One of my assistants started back as if the ghost of the departed had come to claim the treasure preserved, in accordance with superstitious notions, for its journey to the "happy lands." The alarm seemed to be a warning, for at the moment the embankment, overloaded on one side, caved in, nearly burying three workmen, myself, and a spectator. Our tools being at the bottom of the heap, and the wall on the other side, shaken by the falling earth, giving tokens of a change of base, our prospects of a ready deliverance were not very hopeful. The bystanders, however, went to work with their hands, and we were soon relieved, not without casualty, the spectator having the worst of it. Struggling to extricate himself, instead of abiding his time, he dragged one leg out of the pile shorter than the other. The occurrence of marine shells in a burial depository, especially of the varieties pyrula and oliva, four or five hundred miles from the Gulf and that portion of the Southern coast where the mollusks exist, bears upon the question of migration and tribal intercourse, and the commercial value of these articles. Obtained from a distance and regarded as precious commodities, they were used in exchange, for the material of ornaments, and for choice utensils. Only two or three of these shells have been found in a perfect condition, but defective ones are frequent, with fragments, "cuttings," and various trinkets made out of them--such as ornamental pins, needles, crosses, buttons, amulets, engraved plates, and beads. From one of the specimens recovered from the mound sepulchre, the spire and columella had been removed, leaving a hollow utensil. It would have been suitable for a water vessel, but for a hole in the bottom, which had furnished a button-shaped ornament, or piece of money, which was found with the relic, and exactly corresponded to the orifice. The twirled end of the shell, however, had been improved for a handle by shallow cavities, one on the inside slanting from the middle longitudinal line, and one crossing that line at right angles on the convex side, so as to be fitted to the thumb and fore finger of the left hand, suggesting a use of the implement as a shield, or a mask held before the face. Adair speaks of large shells in use by the Indians of his time (1735), suspended about the neck for shields, and regarded as badges of priestly dignity. A trench was dug on the east side of the mound, nearly corresponding in dimensions to the one on the west side, making the length of the whole excavation, including the central cavity, thirty-two feet. In the last opening, eight skeletons were exhumed; the mode of burial was the same throughout. The only article of value recovered was a curiously wrought pipe of stone, having a "figure head" representing the human face, which I have put down in a list of "articles stolen," and which the thief can describe better than the writer. After filling up all the gaps, and levelling the surface to suit the taste of the proprietor, we closed our labors on the mound in the Bent. Of the skulls collected, it is sufficient to say that they belong to the "short heads," the length and breadth having a comparative medium proportion, a common form of cranium in the mounds of Tennessee. Of stone implements I specify an ax of serpentine, ten inches long, two thick, and four broad, having plain sides and a straight edge ground down on both of the flat faces; hatchets ("tomahawks") of green stone, flint, and diorite, from five to eight inches long, with rounded faces and sides, contracted to an edge at one end, and to a flat heel at the other; a wedge of black slate, seven inches long and half an inch thick, of a square finish on the faces and sides and at the heel, which was diminished two inches, as compared with the length of the edge; hatchets with a serrated edge at each end, plane on both sides, convex on one face and flat on the other. With one skeleton was deposited a "set of tools," eight in number, of the species of rock before mentioned, varying in length from two to eight inches. Their peculiarity consists in a variety of shapes--no two being precisely alike--and in their fitness to various uses, such as carving, hacking, paring, and grooving. The smallest of them, having a square finish, was held by the thumb and two fingers, and is suitable for cutting lines and figures in wood and shells. Specimens of this art were furnished from the mound. The largest number might serve for hatchets, chisels, and gouges. One had been ground in the form of a cylinder five inches long and an inch thick, and then cut an inch on two sides to an edge, and worked into a handle with a round bead, from the center of the elliptical faces. It might be used for chipping wood and stone. One answered the purpose of a cold chisel; another was somewhat similar, but had a hollow face reduced to a curved edge for grooving. These polished instruments, wrought with much care, seemed intended for use by the hand rather than for insertion in a handle or socket, or attachment to a shaft by means of a strap or withe. Only one was perforated. The drilling through granite, quartz, and diorite, without the use of metal, was a severe labor, even for savage patience. A long knife of silex, with a wrought handle, lance heads, leaf shaped, of the same material, of beautiful workmanship, arrow points of fine finish, furnished, with others before mentioned, an assortment of arms. Several flint points, though only an inch long, were curved like a cimeter, and used probably as flaying instruments. True disks, of various mineral substances, from an inch to five inches in diameter, having convex faces, complete the list of stone implements. Those of bone comprise several like hollow chisels, sharpened at one end, and pierced through one face, near the other extremity, so as to be fastened to a handle; these were used for dressing skins. One was formed like a poniard, with a worked hilt. With these may be connected arrow heads and sharp pointed weapons of the worked antlers of the stag, and tusks of the wild boar. Of ornaments, I noticed pins used for dressing the hair, made of the columns of large sea shells. The head is generally round, sometimes oval, from an eighth to a half of an inch in diameter, retaining the diagonal groove of the pillar from which it is made. The stems vary in length from one to six inches. It would be tedious even to classify ornamental beads and buttons of shell work, such as are usually found in the mounds. These trinkets are perforated, and, in addition to their being articles of dress, were used probably as "wampum," the currency of the recent Indians. A miscellaneous collection includes a hematite stone, wrought in the shape of a cup weighing half a pound; when rubbed or ground it furnished the war paint of the savages; also the extremity of a copper tube, two inches long; needles in bone and shell, from an inch to six inches long, with grooves round the head, to serve the purpose of eyes; and plates of mica. The use of mica plates, which are found of large size in some of the Western mounds, has excited some inquiry. Of a certain thickness, they make good mirrors. Beside their use for ornamental purposes, they were probably looking-glasses of the beauties of the stone age. There was also found a pipe of soap stone, having a stem five inches long, and a bowl with a broad brim, like a Quaker's hat. Of earthenware, there was an endless variety of fragments of the usual black, grey, or red compressed clay, mixed with pulverized shells or stones. One kind I have never seen described. The sherds had a red coating on both sides, an eighth of an inch in thickness, evidently not a paint or a glaze. The red coloring might have come from the pottery being burnt in the open air, instead of baked in a furnace, were not the layer of uniform thickness and of homogeneous paste, unlike the material of the vessel, which was a gray mixture of clay and particles of shells. I give the above memoranda to the general fund of information, touching a subject that invites inquiry on account of its novelty and ethnological importance. Every examination of the monumental remains of the ancient Americans brings to light some new feature in structure or type of rudimental art. And since archæology has become a science, investigators, for half a century, may be looking about for facts to complete the system auspiciously introduced by the antiquarians of Northern Europe, and advanced in our own country by the researches of Caleb Atwater (_Archæologia Americana_) and by those of the Smithsonian contributors to knowledge, especially Squier and Davis. RAMBLER. * * * * * A SMALL WATER WHEEL.--There is in the town of Meriden, Conn., a Leffel double turbine wheel, running under 240 feet fall and driving a manufactory. It uses only about one-half of a square inch of water, and runs at the marvelous speed of 3,000 revolutions per minute, or 50 revolutions per second, which is by far the most rapid rate of motion ever imparted to a water wheel. This is, also, beyond comparison the greatest fall applied to the propulsion of a wheel in America. The wheel at Meriden is of the most diminutive size, scarcely exceeding in dimensions the old-fashioned "turnip" watches which our grandfathers used to carry in their capacious vest pockets. The complete success of this wheel has attracted much attention and affords further evidence of the wide range of adaptability of the Leffel turbine. * * * * * [For the Scientific American.] SILK CULTURE. BY W. V. ANDREWS. A vague notion that silk culture ought to form one of the industrial pursuits of the American people seems to be prevalent enough; but it does not take practical hold upon anybody. The nearest approach to anything practical which we have seen, in late years--excepting, of course, what has been done in California--occurred in New York in July last, when a number of gentlemen pledged themselves, according to a report given in the _Tribune_ of July 30, "to promote the native silk trade." The gentlemen present at the meeting represented the most prominent silk manufacturing and importing houses in this country. What these gentlemen have since done towards promoting the native silk trade, I do not know, but, having pledged themselves, it is presumed they have done something. At the meeting, of which the _Tribune_ article is a report, dags, and other things, manufactured from California silk, were exhibited; and the report goes on to say that "Mr. Warren also exhibited samples of native and foreign cocoons, and of raw and thrown silk, together with the common _Cecropia_ and _Bombyx Cynthia_, species of silkworms which feed upon oak leaves. * * Also the _Bombyx Yamamai_ which feeds upon mulberry leaves; also the _Bombyx Pernyi_, of which the cocoons are early as good as the cocoons of worms fed upon mulberry leaves." I have given this extract, word for word, as it stands in the columns of the _Tribune_, because it contains more blunders of one kind or another than I remember ever to have seen in so many words. _Cecropia_ is certainly not very particular as to its food, but it is not an oak feeder. _Cynthia_ will thrive on nothing except ailanthus, though it will eat one or two other things, but not oak. The _Yamamai_, on the other hand, will eat oak, indeed it is its natural food; but Mr. Warren errs greatly when he says that it will feed on mulberry. The last clause of the sentence, which says that cocoons of _Pernyi_ are nearly as good as those of worms fed on mulberry leaves, must be a sort of entomological joke, of which the point is not discoverable by me, so I pass it over. I do not, however, notice this report on account of its grammatical and entomological mistakes. It is because of the evil effects it may, and probably will, have on amateur silk culturists, that I notice it; for most assuredly, failure will be the result of all attempts to produce silk cocoons by feeding the caterpillars of the different moths on the food prescribed by Mr. Warren. Any patriotic, money making farmer, who believes in the _Tribune_, purchasing _Yamamai_ eggs and setting his worms to feed upon mulberry, which they refuse to eat, and consequently, all die, will probably give up silk culture as being nothing more or less than a humbug. And thus the cause is injured. For several years past, I have made some experiments in the rearing of the silkworms, giving the result of my experience in the first year in Vol. II., page 311, of the _American Naturalist_; and of a subsequent year in the _Entomologist_, for November, 1869. The paper in the _Naturalist_ is devoted to my experiments with the ailanthus silkworm, _Samia Cynthia_ (G. & R.), a naturalized species from the East. In that paper, I have said all that is necessary to say at present, on that species, except perhaps that I am further convinced, from the inspection of samples of sewing and other silks, made from the cocoons of _Cynthia_, that one day it will be reared very extensively in the United States. It is perfectly hardy, is double brooded, and may be reared by any one possessed of a few acres of land, which may be good enough for growing ailanthus trees, but not good enough to grow any thing else. The labor of a few old men, or women, or even children, is sufficient for the purpose. The cost is therefore trifling. The objection to the cultivation of _Cynthia_ is that the cocoon cannot be reeled. But it can be carded, and if the Chinese can make excellent silk goods from it, why cannot we? I suspect, too, that _Cynthia_ silk can be worked in with cotton, or, perhaps, woolen goods, adding to their beauty and durability (for it is indestructible in wear), and thus open up branches of manufacture hitherto unknown. For manufacturers of coarse goods, I have no doubt that the silk from our native silk moths, _Cecropia_ and _Polyphemus_, may be used. Indeed, I believe that M. Trouvelot is of opinion that _Polyphemus_ may fairly enter into competition with _Bombyx mori_, the ordinary mulberry silkworm. The worm, however, is rather difficult to rear. In reference, however, to _Bombyx mori_, it is well known that the silk crop in France and Italy has been reduced greatly, and the price of silk goods consequently enhanced, by prevalence of disease among the worms. So much is this the case, that silk breeders have been obliged to look around for some silk-producing moths whose products may, at any rate, supplement the deficient crop. _Cynthia_, as already mentioned as one of these, and two others mentioned by Warren in the _Tribune_ reports above adverted to, are at present the subjects of experiment. My article mentioned before as appearing in the _American Entomologist_ is mainly devoted to my experiments, and those of my correspondents, with _Yamamai_, which, as I said before, is an oak feeder. In Japan, which is its native country, it feeds, in its wild state, on _Quercus serrata_. Whether that oak be found in America, I do not know, but it is of little importance, as the worm will feed on almost any species of oak, although I think that it prefers white oak. The importance of acclimatizing new species of silk moths is of so much prospective importance, that I shall devote the remainder of this article to the consideration of whether _Yamamai_ and _Pernyi_ may not be naturalized here. Any one, who happens to have the number of the _Entomologist_ containing the article above alluded to, may find it worth while to read it, but as many persons may not be able to obtain that number, I will here repeat the substance of my remarks, adding as much new matter as subsequent experience has afforded. The silk from the _Yamamai_ being considered superior to that produced by any other of the substitute silk moths, great efforts have been made in Europe to acclimatize it; but, it must be confessed, hitherto with but slight success. There are exceptions, however, particularly among amateurs in Germany, sufficient to show that success is possible. The Baron de Bretton raises about 27,000 cocoons annually. In this country but little has been done, or attempted, and that little has not been very successful. The fact is, that _Yamamai_ is a difficult moth to rear in a country like this, where in early spring the temperature varies so much; but that success is possible, I am convinced. The moth emerges from the cocoon in the latter part of the summer, copulates, lays its eggs, and of course dies. And now the trouble commences; that is, with eggs laid, say in Japan, from whence we mainly get our supplies. As soon as the egg is laid, the young larva commences its formation, which in a short time (about one month) is perfected. It lies in the egg in a quiescent state till early spring. If the egg remain in the country where it is laid, and is kept at a pretty even temperature, and free from damp, the caterpillar emerges in a healthy condition. But if it be removed some thousands of miles, passing in the transit from heat to cold, and back to heat again: and if, in addition, it be closely confined in a damp place, with little or no circulation of air, the egg is attacked by a fungus which sometimes prevents the worm from emerging at all; or, if it emerge, it is in a sickly condition. That these conditions obtain in the transit of eggs, from Japan to Europe, and thence to America, is evident enough; and it may, therefore, require the efforts of many persons, continued for a long time, to enable us to acclimatize the _Yamamai_. But this is all that is required, and I feel confident that ultimate success is certain. On hatching out, the worm is of a brimstone yellow, and thinly covered with strong hairs; after the second month it is greenish, with black, longitudinal streaks, and the thread a dull coral red color. After the third month it becomes of a fine apple green, with yellow tubercles on each segment, from which issue a few black hairs. The head and legs are chocolate brown, the prolegs reddish, and the first segment edged with pinkish color. The greatest care is necessary, as the spring advances, to prevent the eggs from hatching before the oak buds are ready for them, and the temperature must be regulated with the greatest nicety. If the eggs can be kept somewhere about 50 deg. Fah., it would be quite safe; higher than that the mercury should not be allowed to rise, till you are quite ready for the worms, and, on the other hand, the eggs should not be allowed to freeze. On emerging from the eggs, the worms should be allowed either to crawl to the oak branches, or rather to sprigs obtained for that purpose, the end of which should be placed in a jar, or bottle, of water, or the worms may be placed on gently with a camel-hair brush. The leaves should be well sprinkled with clean water that the caterpillars may drink. From some cause, not well understood, the young caterpillars have a tendency to wander; and if care be not taken many may be lost. To prevent this, it is well to cover the branches with a gauze bag, tied tightly around the stems, and close to the bottle. Care must also be taken that the caterpillars do not find their way into the water, which they assuredly will if they have the opportunity, committing suicide in the most reckless manner. If the number of caterpillars be few, it is a good plan to place them at the outset with their food, in a wide-mouthed bottle, covering the mouth with gauze. The branches, particularly if the weather be warm, must still be occasionally sprinkled, so that the caterpillars may have the opportunity of drinking. It must be remembered that experiment is necessary in rearing _Yamamai_, but one thing is ascertained, and that is, that the worms must not be exposed to direct sunshine, at least not after seven or eight in the morning. If the spring be warm, I am inclined to think that a northeastern exposure is the best, and we may sum up by saying, that comparatively cool and moist seasons are more favorable to success that hot, dry weather. In America the worms suffer in the early spring, from the rapid changes of temperature, 40° at 9 A.M. increasing to 70° in the afternoon and falling off to freezing point during the night. The worms cannot stand this. They become torpid, refuse to eat, and consequently die. To prevent this, if the nights be cold, they must be placed where no such change of temperature can occur. It is scarcely necessary to say that an ample supply of fresh food must be always supplied, but it may not be amiss to say that it is well, when supplying fresh branches, to remove the worms from the old to the new. The best way of doing this is to clip off the branch, or leaf, on which the worm is resting, and tie, pin, or in some way affix the same to the new branches. If this be not done, they will continue to eat the old leaf, even if it be withered, and this induces disease. If the worm has fastened itself for the purpose of moulting, the best way is to remove the entire branch, clipping off all the dried leaves before so removing it. These remarks apply, in general, to the treatment of all silkworms, except _Bombyx mori_. The results of numerous experiments with _Yamamai_ go to show that it is, as I said before, a difficult worm to rear; but it has been reared near New York to the extent of eight hundred cocoons out of sixteen hundred eggs, and this, although not a remunerative result, is encouraging. The Chinese silk moth, _Aulterea Pernyi_, also an oak feeder, has been successfully raised by me and by others, for several years. Eggs have been sold to persons in States widely separated, and the results show that this worm is perfectly hardy. The moth winters in the cocoon, emerges early in May, if the weather be warm, pairs readily, and lays from 150 to 200 eggs. These hatch out in about fourteen days, and like _Yamamai_, always about 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning. It is necessary to be on the alert to catch them on hatching only, and to remember that they are vagabonds, even to a greater extent than _Yamamai_. Consequently similar precautions must be taken. The worm on emerging from the egg is large, and of a chocolate-brown color. After the first month it becomes of a yellowish green; head, pale brown; feet and prolegs of nearly the same color. The body has numerous reddish tubercles, from which issue a few reddish hairs. At the base of some of the tubercles on the anterior segments are silvery patches. The _Pernyi_ worm is much more easily reared than that of _Yamamai_, but still great care is needed; fresh food of course is essential, and a slight sprinkling of the branches and worms in very warm weather is advisable; although it is not so necessary as with _Yamamai_. It is remarkable that _Pernyi_ worms, fed in the open air, on oak trees, do not, at present, thrive so well as those fed in-doors, but this, doubtless, is a question of acclimation. I advise white oak (_Quercus alba_) as food, if it can be readily obtained, but failing that, pin oak (_Quercus palustris_) will do; and I have no doubt that they will feed on any kind of oak. They will, indeed, feed on birch, and on sweet gum (_Liquidambar_), but oak is the proper food. It is worthy of remark that _Pernyi_ bears a strong resemblance to our _Polyphemus_, but it is more easily reared in confinement, and double brooded; an important fact for the silk culturist. From American reared eggs, I obtained cocoons as early as July 4th, the perfect insect emerging on July 31. Copulation immediately ensued, and the resulting eggs hatched only on August 12, ten days only from the time of laying; and as the worm feeds up in about four or five weeks, this affords plenty of time for rearing the second brood. It must be remembered that on the quantity and quality of food, much depends, not only with _Pernyi_ but with all caterpillars. By furnishing food sparingly the time of feeding would be much prolonged. I have already said that both _Yamamai_ and _Pernyi_ should be fed under shelter for the reasons given, but there is another reason of less importance. The young worms are liable to be attacked by spiders and wasps, and even after the second month, they are not safe from these enemies. I have seen a wasp bite a large caterpillar in two, carry off the anterior section and return for the posterior, which had held on by its prolegs. Did the wasp anticipate this fact, and therefore carry off the anterior part first? As to the spiders, they form a series of pulleys and hoist the caterpillar off its legs, sucking its juices at leisure. And now I must devote a few words to the advisability of silk culture from a pecuniary point of view. _Bombyx mori_, or the ordinary mulberry silkworm, is, of course, the best to rear, if you can obtain healthy eggs. But this is the difficulty, and thence arises the necessity of cultivating other silk-producing species. I imagine that silk can be produced in most of the States of the Union, and manufactured from the cocoon at a large profit; but for the present, we will leave the manufacture out of the question, and consider only, whether it will not pay to rear eggs and cocoons for sale? It must be remembered that European manufacturers are at this moment largely dependent on foreign countries for the supply of both eggs and cocoons; and this, because of the general prevalence of disease among all the races of _Bombyx mori_. And now, to what extent does the reader suppose this dependence exists? Of cocoons I have no returns at hand, but, of raw silk, European manufacturers purchase, annually, not less than $160,000,000 worth; and of eggs (_Bombyx mori_) to the value of $10,000,000. This, then, is a business of no trifling amount. California seems to be alive to the fact, and, I am informed, raised, this last season, $3,000,000 cocoons; and, for sale, about 4,000 ounces of eggs, worth at least $4 per ounce, wholesale. Now, there is no earthly reason why California should monopolize this business. Why are not companies formed in other States for this purpose? or if private individuals lack the enterprise or the means, why do not the legislatures, of those States most favorably located, do something by way of starting the business? A few thousand dollars loaned, or even donated, may prove to be a valuable investment for the people at large, and, even supposing a failure, would not be a very great loss to any body. So far as farmers are concerned, it may interest them to know that one man in England, Capt. Mason, clears $50 per acre by rearing silkworms (_Bombyx mori_ in this case), and I much doubt whether any crop raised here pays as well. By way of commencement, then, let everybody that has sufficient leisure set to work, and rear as many silkworms, of the above-named species, as he possibly can; and if the process be not remunerative in a pecuniary sense, it most assuredly will be in the amount of pleasure and knowledge obtained. One caution I must give to those who cultivate _Bombyx mori_. Although _Yamamai_ requires sprinkled branches, _Bombyx mori_ does not; nor must the leaves be furnished to them while wet with rain or dew. * * * * * EFFECT OF COLD UPON IRON.--The article upon this subject, giving experiments of Fairbairn and others, referred to in our editorial upon the same subject, in our last issue, was crowded out by press of matter. The reader will find it in the present number. * * * * * UNIVERSAL BORING MACHINE. Our readers will recollect an illustrated description of an universal wood-working machine, published on page 79, Vol. XIII. of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. The machine herewith illustrated is manufactured by the same firm, and is a valuable addition to the many excellent wood-working machines now in use. A boring machine, though one of the simplest, is by no means an unimportant adjunct to a full outfit of wood-working machines. The one shown in our engraving is one of the most complete ever brought to our notice, and the great variety of work it is capable of performing, renders the name chosen for it peculiarly applicable. It is called the "Universal Boring Machine" because the most prominent feature of its construction is its power to bore a hole in any desired angle with the axis of the bit. Any sized bit required is inserted into the chuck, which is adjustable to fit large and small shanks. The mandrel which carries the chuck is made to traverse by a foot lever, so as to bore any depth up to twelve inches. The mandrel is driven by belt from a cone pulley of three faces, which gives the proper speeds for different sized bits. Slots and stops upon the table enable the work to be set at any desired angle on the horizontal plane, while the table can be set on an incline to any angle not exceeding forty-five degrees. The table is twenty-one inches wide, with fifteen inches slide, and it can be raised or lowered fifteen inches. The countershaft rests in self-adjusting boxes, and has a tight and a loose pulley eight inches in diameter. The traversing mandrel is of the best quality of steel, and the machine is otherwise made of iron in a substantial manner. [Illustration: McBETH, BENTEL, & MARGEDANT'S UNIVERSAL BORING MACHINE.] The several adjustments enable the operator to do all kinds of light and heavy boring, with ease and with great rapidity. This machine was awarded the first premium at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition, in October, 1870, and was patented through the Scientific American Patent Agency, Aug. 16, 1870. It is manufactured by McBeth, Bentel and Margedant, of Hamilton, Ohio, whom address for machines rights to manufacture, or other information. * * * * * COMBINED TRUNK AND ROCKING CHAIR. A unique invention, calculated to increase the comforts of travellers on steamboats, ships, and in crowded rooms of hotels, is illustrated in the engraving published herewith. It is the invention of T. Nye, of Westbrook, Me., and was patented by him, June 18, 1867. It is a combined trunk and rocking chair. The rockers are made to fold into recesses, where they are retained by suitable appliances till wanted. The trunk being opened, as shown, forms a back to the seat, which is held by metallic braces. When closed, the whole presents the appearance of an ordinary trunk. [Illustration] * * * * * COSMETICS. The extensive use of preparations for hiding nature's bloom on the human countenance, and presenting to our view a sort of metallic plaster, suggests the inquiry, "how are these pigments made?" Without going into an unnecessary analysis of the "Bloom of Youth," the "Rejuvenator," the "Corpse Decorator," or the other inventions for destroying the skin, with which the druggists' stores abound, we may state again the fact, always unheeded, that all the detestable compounds are injurious. They are nearly all metallic poisons, and, if there be any that are innocent of this charge, they are in every instance harmful to the health. The color and surface of the skin cannot be changed by any application which does not close the pores; the pores, which are so exquisitely fine that there are millions of them to the square inch, and which must be kept open if a healthy and cleanly body is to be preserved. There is more breathing done through the pores of a healthy person than through the lungs; and we need not remind our readers of a ghastly piece of cruelty once enacted in Paris (that of gilding the body of a child, for a triumphal procession, which killed the subject in two hours), to show that the stoppage, in any degree, of the natural functions of so important an organ as the skin, is injurious. The immediate effect of the use of such compounds is to destroy the vitality of the skin, and to render it, in appearance, a piece of shriveled parchment. We must warn our readers that a temporary and meretricious "bloom" can only be attained at the cost of future freshness and lively appearance, so that a year or two of "looking like paint" is followed by a long period of "looking like dilapidation." * * * * * SMITH'S INFANT DINING CHAIR. The accompanying engraving illustrates a convenient and cheap infant dining chair, which can be attached to any of the ordinary chairs in common use. [Illustration] It consists of a chair without legs, suspended by the posts of the back, as shown, on pins engaging with hooked bars, which are placed upon the back of an ordinary chair. The details of the device will be seen by a glance at the engraving. The chair is adjusted in hight by placing the pins in the proper holes in the posts made for this purpose. For further information, address Smith, Hollenbeck & Co., Toledo, Ohio. * * * * * THE MEDICINES OF THE ANCIENTS. At the recent commencement of the Homeopathic College in this city, Mr. S. H. Wales, of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN addressed the graduating class, and from his remarks, we quote the following: "Many writers of our time persist in regarding this, above all others, as the best period in the history of our race; and, doubtless, it is true in many important respects. But I cannot forbear the suggestion at this moment that there was a time in the history of the world when the science of medicine was unknown, when people lived to the incredible age of many centuries; and, even after the span of life had been reduced to threescore and ten, sickness was comparatively unknown. In ancient times, it was looked upon as a calamity, that had overtaken a tribe or people, when one of its members prematurely sickened and died. "Other arts and sciences flourished in Rome long before medicine was thought of; and the historian tells us that the first doctor who settled in Rome, some two hundred years before Christ, was banished on account of his poor success and the very severe treatment applied to his patients; and it was a hundred years before the next one came. He rose to great popularity, simply because he allowed his patients to drink all the wine they wanted, and to eat their favorite dishes. Some writer on hygiene has made the statement that the whole code of medical ethics presented by Moses consisted simply in bathing, purification, and diet. This simplicity of life was not confined to the wandering tribes who settled in the land of Canaan, but was the universal custom of all nations of which history gives us any account. This simple arrangement for health was considered enough in those primitive times, when the human system had not been worn out and exhausted by depletive medicines. The luxuries of public baths, athletic sports and games were deemed ample, both to educate the physical perceptions and to prevent disease. "All this wisdom, which had its origin in ancient games and sports of the field, led to the erection of extensive bath-houses, and the adoption of other healthful luxuries to which all the people could resort to recreate their wasted powers." * * * * * BARNES' VENTILATOR FOR MATTRESSES, ETC. Many diseases are caused by the use of beds not properly aired; and it is difficult, if not impossible, to properly air, or ventilate, a mattress, made in the usual manner. If this could be done more thoroughly than it generally is, much sickness would be avoided. [Illustration] To secure this object cheaply and efficiently is the design of the invention herewith illustrated. By it a complete circulation of air through the mattress is secured, which carries off all dampness arising from constant use. Thus the mattress becomes more healthy for sleeping purposes, more durable and better fitted for the sick room. The ventilators consist of coiled wire, covered with coarse cloth (to prevent the stuffing closing up the tube), running through the mattress in all directions. The ends of the coils are secured to the ticking by means of metal thimbles, inside of which are pieces of wire gauze, to prevent insects getting in, but which admit air freely. The cost of the ventilators is small, and they will last as long as any mattress. They can be applied to any bed at small expense. This invention was patented through the Scientific American Patent Agency, January 10, 1871. The right to manufacture will be disposed of in any part of the country. Further information can be obtained by addressing the proprietors, Barnes & Allen, Hoosick Falls, N. Y. * * * * * The third annual exhibition of the National Photographic Association takes place at Horticultural Hall, Philadelphia, June 6, 1871. Prof. Morton is to deliver two lectures on Light. * * * * * A SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL AWAKENING. Our English cotemporary, _Engineering_, appears to have seriously exercised itself in the perusal of our good-natured article on "English and American Scientific and Mechanical Engineering Journalism," which appeared in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, February 4th; at least, we so judge from the tenor of an article in response thereto, covering a full page of that journal. The article in question is a curiosity in literature. It deserves a much wider circulation than _Engineering_ can give it, and we would gladly transfer it to our columns, but for its exceeding length--a serious fault generally, not only with _Engineering's_ articles, but most other technical journals published in England. It would scarcely do for them to be brief in their discussions, and above all other things, spice and piquancy must always be excluded. _Engineering_ evidently labors under the conviction that the heavier it can make its discussions, the more profoundly will it be able to impress its readers. Hence, we are equally astonished and gratified to find a gleam of humor flashing out from the ordinary sober-sided composition of our learned contemporary. The article came to us just as we were laboring under an attack of dyspepsia, and its reading fairly shook our atrabilious _corpus_. We said to ourselves, "can it be possible that _Engineering_ is about to experience the new birth, to undergo regeneration, and a baptism of fire?" The article is really worth reading, and we begin to indulge the hope that at least one English technical is going to try to make itself not only useful, but readable and interesting. And what is most perplexingly novel in this new manifestation, is the display of a considerable amount of egotism, which we had always supposed to be a sinful and naughty thing in technical journalism. And, as if to magnify this self-complaisance, it actually alludes to its "_own extensive and ever-increasing circulation in America_." Now to show how small a thing can impart comfort to the soul of our cotemporary, we venture to say that the circulation of _Engineering_ in this country cannot much exceed three hundred copies per week. It evidently amazes our English cotemporary that a journal like the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, which, according to its own notions, is chiefly the work of "scissors and paste," should circulate so widely; and it even belittles our weekly circulation by several thousand copies, in order to give point to its very amusing, and, we will also add, generally just criticism. The writer in _Engineering_, whoever he may be, appears to be a sort of literary Rip Van Winkle, just waking out of a long sleep; and he cannot get the idea through his head that it is possible that a technical journal can become a vehicle of popular information to the mass of mankind, instead of being the organ of a small clique of professional engineers or wealthy manufacturers, such as seems to hold control of the columns of _Engineering_, and who use it either to ventilate their own pet schemes and theories, or to advertise, by illustration and otherwise, in the reading columns, a repetition of lathes, axle-boxes brakes, cars, and other trade specialities, which can lay little or no claim to novelty. It is, furthermore, a crying sin in the estimation of our English critic that American technical journals do not separate their advertisements from the subject matter; and he thinks that when Yankee editors learn that trade announcements are out of place in the body of a journal, they will see how to make their journals pay by making them higher priced. Now we venture to say, without intending to give offence, that Yankee editors understand their business quite as well as do English editors; and it is presumable, at least, that they know what suits their readers on this side, much better than do English editors. We venture to suggest--modestly, of course--that journalism in the two countries is not the same, and should the editor of _Engineering_ undertake to transfer his system of intellectual labor to this side of the Atlantic, he would not be long in making the discovery that those wandering Bohemian engineers, who, he tells us, are in sorrow and heaviness over the short-comings of American technical journals, would turn out after all to be slender props for him to lean upon. We think it probable, however, that with a little more snap, a journal like _Engineering_ might possibly attain a circulation, in this country, of 500 or 1000 copies weekly. Why, American engineers have scarcely yet been able to organize themselves into an association for mutual advancement in their profession, much less to give the reading public the benefit of their experience and labors! This fact alone ought, of itself, to satisfy _Engineering_ that no such journal could profitably exist in this country. Whenever our American engineers are ready to support such a journal, there will be no difficulty in finding a publisher. _Engineering_, in its casual reference to the various technical journals of America, omits to name our leading scientific monthly, but introduces with just commendation a venerable cotemporary, now upwards of three score years of age. Now, it is no disparagement of this really modest monthly to say, that perhaps there are not sixty hundred people in the States who know it, even by name; and so far as the use of "scissors and paste" are made available in our technical journals, we venture the assertion that the editorial staff expenses of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN are as great, if not greater, than those of _Engineering_. The question, however, is not so much one of original outlay, but which of the two journals gives most for the money. In this very essential particular, and with no intention to depreciate the value of _Engineering_, we assert, with becoming modesty, that the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN occupies a position which _Engineering_ will never be able to attain. * * * * * THE SHERMAN PROCESS. When people boast of extraordinary successes in processes the details of which are kept profoundly hidden from public scrutiny, and when the evidences of success are presented in the doubtful form of specimens which the public has no means of tracing directly to the process, the public is apt to be skeptical, and to express skepticism often in not very complimentary terms. For a considerable time, the public has been treated to highly-colored accounts of a wonderful metallurgic process whereby the best iron and steel were said to be made, from the very worst materials, almost in the twinkling of an eye. This process has been called after its assumed inventor, or discoverer, the "Sherman Process." The details of the process are still withheld, but we last week gave an extract from an English contemporary, which throws a little light upon the subject. The agent relied upon to effect the remarkable transformation claimed, is iodine, used preferably in the form of iodide of potassium, and very little of it is said to produce a most marvellous change in the character of the metal. A very feeble attempt at explaining the rationale of this effect has been made, in one or two English journals, which we opine will not prove very satisfactory to chemists and scientific metallurgists. The _Engineer_ has published two three-column articles upon the subject, the first containing very little information, and the second a great number of unnecessary paragraphs, but which gives the proportion of the iodide used, in the extremely scientific and accurate formula expressed in the terms "a small quantity." Assertions of remarkable success have also been given. Nothing, however, was said of remarkable failures, of which there have doubtless been some. A series of continued successes would, we should think, by this time, have sufficed for the parturition of this metallurgic process, and the discovery would ere this have been introduced to the world, had there not been some drawbacks. We are not prepared to deny _in toto_ that the process is all that is claimed for it; but the way in which it has been managed is certainly one not likely to encourage faith in it. The very name of "process" implies a system perfected, and if it be still so far back in the experimental stage that nothing definite in the way of results can be relied upon, it is not yet a process. If, in the use of iodine, in some instances, fine grades of iron or steel are produced, and in as many other experiments, with the same material, failures result, it is just as fair to attribute the failures to the iodine, as the successes. A process worthy the name is one that acts with approximate uniformity, and when, in its use, results vary widely from what is usual, the variation may be traced to important differences in the conditions of its application. On the whole, we are inclined to believe Mr. Sherman's experiments have not yet developed a definite process, and we shall receive with much allowance the glowing statements published in regard to it, until such time as it can face the world and defy unbelief. The patents obtained by Mr. Sherman seem to cover the use of iodine, rather than the manner of using it, and throw no light upon the rationale of the process. A patent was granted by the United States Patent Office, Sept. 13, 1870, to J. C. Atwood, in which the inventor claims the use of iodide of potassium in connection with the carbons and fluxes used in making and refining iron. In his specification he states that he uses about _fifteen grains_ of this salt to eighty pounds of the metal. This is about 1/373 of one per cent. He uses in connection with this exceedingly small proportion of iodide of potassium, about two ounces of lampblack, or charcoal, and four ounces of manganese, and asserts that steel made with these materials will be superior in quality to that made by the old method. These claims we are inclined to discredit. Certainly, we see no chemical reason why this small amount of iodide should produce such an effect, and the specification itself throws no light upon our darkness. If the experiments in these so-called processes have no better basis than is apparent from such information as at present can be gathered respecting them, it is probable we shall wait some time before the promised revolution in iron and steel manufacture is accomplished through their use. * * * * * RUBBER TIRES FOR TRACTION ENGINES. When it was first discovered that a smooth-faced driving wheel, running on a smooth-faced rail, would "bite," the era of iron railways and locomotive engines may be said to have fairly commenced. The correction of a single radical error was, in this case, the dawn of a new system of travel, so extensive in its growth and marvelous in its results, that even the wildest dreamer could not, at that time, have imagined the consequences of so simple a discovery. A popular and somewhat similar error regarding the bite of wheels on rough and uneven surfaces, has also prevailed. We say popular error, because engineers have not shared it, and it has obtained, to any notable extent, only among those unfamiliar with mechanical science. The error in question is, that hard-surfaced wheels will not bite on a moderately rough surface, sufficiently to give an efficient tractile power. It seems strange that this error should have diffused itself very extensively, when it is remembered that a certain degree of roughness is essential to frictional resistance. The smoothness of the ordinary railway track is roughness compared to that of an oiled or unctuous metallic surface; and it has been amply demonstrated that the resistance of friction, of two bearing surfaces depends, not upon their extent, but upon the pressure with which they are forced together. A traction wheel, of given weight, resting upon two square inches of hard earth or rock, would develop the same tractile power as though it had a bearing surface of two square feet of similar material. On very rough and stony ways, however, another element practically of no importance on moderately rough ways, like a macadam surface or a concrete road, where the prominences are nearly of uniform hight, and so near together as to admit between their summits only very small arcs of the circumference of the wheel; comes into action. This element is the constantly recurring lifting of the superincumbent weight of the machine. Even this would not result in loss of power, could the power developed in falling be wholly applied to useful work in the direction of the advance of the engine. The fact is, however, that it is not so applied, and in any method of propulsion at present known to engineering science, cannot be so applied. Above a certain point where friction enough is developed to prevent slip, the more uneven the road surface is, the greater the power demanded for the propulsion of the locomotive. And this will hold good for both hard and soft-tired wheels. What then is the advantage, if any, of rubber-tired wheels? The advantages claimed may be enumerated as follows: increased tractile power, with a given weight, secured without damage to roadways; ease of carriage to the supported machinery, whereby it--the machinery--is saved from stress and wear; and economy of the power, expended in moving the extra weight required by rigid-tired wheels, to secure the required frictional resistance. The last-mentioned claim depends upon the first, and must stand or fall with it. The saving of roadway, ease of carriage, and its favorable result upon the machinery, are generally conceded. A denial of the first claim has been made, by those interested in the manufacture of rigid-tired traction engines and others, in so far as the rubber tires are employed on comparatively smooth surfaces; although the increased tractile power on quite _rough_ pavements and roads is acknowledged. This denial is based upon results of experiments performed on the streets of Rochester, England, between the 9th October and the 2nd November, 1870, by a committee of the Royal Engineers (British Army), with a view to determine accurately the point in question. Care was taken to make the circumstances, under which the trials took place, exactly alike for both the rubber and the iron tires. The experiments were performed with an Aveling and Porter six-horse power road engine, built in the Royal Engineers' establishment. The weight of the engine, without rubber tires, was 11,225 pounds; with rubber tires, it weighed 12,025 pounds. Without rubber tires it drew 2.813 times its own weight up a gradient of 1 in 11; with rubber tires, it drew up the same incline 2.763 times the weight of engine, with the weight of rubber tires added; showing that, although it drew a little over 2,200 pounds more than it could do without the rubber tires, the increase of traction was only that which might be expected from the additional weight. It is claimed, moreover, that the additional traction power and superior ease of carriage on rough roads, secured with rubber tires, is dearly bought at the very great increase in cost, of an engine fitted with them, over one not so fitted. This is a point we regard as not fully settled, though it will not long remain in doubt. There are enough of both types of wheels now in use to soon answer practically any question there may be of durability (upon which the point of economy hinges), so far as the interest on the increased cost due to rubber tires, is offset against the greater wear and tear of iron rimmed wheels. It is stated, on good authority that a rubber tired engine, started at work in Aberdeen, Scotland, wore out its tires between April and September, inclusive, and when it is taken into consideration, that the cost of these tires is about half that of other engines, made with solid iron rimmed driving wheels, it will be seen that, unless very much greater durability than this can be shown for the rubber, the advantages of such tires are very nearly, if not more than, balanced by their disadvantages. The fact that one set of tires wore out so soon does not prove a rule. There may have been causes at work which do not affect such tires generally, and it would be, we think, quite premature to form favorable or unfavorable judgment, of relative economy from such data as have been yet furnished. The difference in the current expenses of running the two most prominent types of engines, with hard and soft tires, now in use, does not affect the question of rubber tires, unless it can be shown that these tires necessitate, _per se_, such a form of engine as requires a greater consumption of fuel, and greater cost of attendance, to perform a given amount of work. * * * * * CENTRAL SHAFT OF THE HOOSAC TUNNEL. As many of our readers have evinced much interest and ingenuity on the question of the propriety of placing reliance upon the accuracy of dropping a perpendicular from the top to the bottom of a shaft 1,030 feet in depth, by means of an ordinary plummet, we take the earliest opportunity of settling the matter beyond dispute, by reporting the results lately obtained, through a series of experiments by the engineers in charge, for the ultimate purpose of laying down the correct line for the tunnel. The perpendicular line has, of course, been dropped many times, and the main result taken. The plummet used is made of steel, properly balanced and polished, in shape something like a pineapple, and of about the same size, weighing fifteen pounds. It was suspended, with the large end downwards, by a thin copper wire, one fortieth of an inch in diameter, immersed in water; and, after careful steadying with the hand, occupied about an hour in assuming its final position or motion, which, contrary to the expectation and theories of many, resulted in a circular motion around a fixed point, the diameter of the circle being a mean of one quarter of an inch. The suspending wire in these operations was not quite the entire length of the shaft, being only 900 feet; and before the plummet had settled, the wire had stretched nearly twenty feet. The suspension of the plummet in water was not considered necessary for any other reason than that water was continually trickling down the wire, and dropping on the plummet. The experiments so far have not been of the perfect character it is determined to attain, when the final alignment is made, as, until the headings east and west of the shaft have advanced to a considerable distance, any slight error would be of no account. A neat and ingenious instrument has been constructed for determining the variation of the plummet, and will be used when great accuracy is desired; the plummet will also be suspended in oil. The bearing of the tunnel is about S. 81° E.; but, independently of its near approach to the line of revolution described by the earth, it is not considered necessary to take into account any motion it may derive from this cause. In fact, the opinion is, that the motion of the earth will not practically have any effect. On the whole, after the still imperfect experiments which have been made, enough is established to show there is no difficulty to be encountered, other than the accurate and delicate manipulation of the plummet and its attachments. The shaft headings are progressing favorably. The rock is not so hard or varied as that met with at the west end markings. Already nearly 300 feet have been taken out, and with the proved energy of the contractors, this great task will doubtless be prosecuted steadily and surely to completion, within the contract time expiring March 1, 1874. * * * * * A MUSEUM OF ART AND NATURAL HISTORY. Our recent articles on "Scientific Destitution in New York" and "The Scientific Value of the Central Park," have called forth numerous letters from correspondents, and have been extensively noticed by the press. We now learn that the legislature of the State has taken the matter in hand, and there is some prospect, with an honest administration of the appropriations, of something being done to relieve our city of the opprobrium that rests upon it. A bill is pending, before the Senate, authorizing the Park Commissioners to build, equip, and furnish, on Manhattan Square, or any other public square or park, suitable fire-proof buildings, at a cost not exceeding $500,000 for each corporation, for the purpose of establishing a museum of art, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and of a museum of natural history, by the American Museum of Natural History, two societies recently incorporated by the Legislature. This is a million dollars to begin with, and an ample site, without cost, to the aforementioned corporations. Manhattan Square extends from Seventy-seventh to Eighty-first streets, and from Eighth to Ninth avenues, and spans about eighteen acres. Until it was set apart by the state Board of Commissioners, for the purposes of a Zoological Garden, it was proposed, by a number of enlightened citizens of New York, to devote it to the uses of four of our existing corporations, giving to each one a corner, and an equal share in the allotment of space. The societies were, "the Academy of Design," for art, "the Historical Society," for public records and libraries, "the Lyceum of Natural History," for science, and "the American Institute," for technology. These have been incorporated for many years, and are known to include the leading artists, men of letters, science, and the arts, of the city, on their lists of members. The committee went so far as to have plans of the building drawn by competent architects; but, like many other well-meant schemes, want of money compelled the originators of the plan to abandon any further attempts. In the meantime, the Legislature chartered the American Botanical and Zoological Society, and gave the Commissioners of the Park authority to set apart a portion of it, not exceeding sixty acres, for the use of the Society, for the establishment of a zoological and botanical garden. This society was duly organized under the act, and Mr. Hamilton Fish was made its president, and considerable sums of money were subscribed. But, according to the sixth annual report of the Board of Commissioners, "the society never manifested its desire for an allotment of ground." It appears to have died, and made no sign. Some of our citizens, fearing that the Central Park would go the way of every other public work in the city, made strenuous effort to revive the Zoological Society, for the purpose of obtaining a perpetual lease of a suitable site, on which to establish a zoological garden, similar to those in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Cologne. Their object was to remove this part of the Park beyond the reach of political intrigue. Subsequent events have shown that the fears of these gentlemen were well founded. The Legislature of the State, on the 25th of March, 1862, gave ample powers to the New York Historical Society to establish a Museum of Antiquity and Science, and a Gallery of Art, in the Central Park. They have submitted designs for a building, but, for some reason, no decisive steps have been taken towards its construction. The Lyceum of Natural History was also negotiating with the Commissioners, for the use of the upper rooms of the arsenal for its collections, and there is no doubt that an arrangement to this effect would have been made, if a fire had not destroyed the entire collections of the Lyceum. The Lyceum made great effort to raise money to purchase a new collection, but without avail; and, although this is the oldest scientific society in New York, and has inrolled in its list of members, nearly every professional scientist of the city, it is probably the poorest, in income and resources, of any academy of sciences in the world. We do not know that the Academy of Design has ever applied for a home in the Central Park; and we cannot speak for the American Institute, nor for the Geographical Society, in this particular. As we stated in our former article, the old Board of Commissioners appears to have become weary of the unsuccessful attempts on the part of numerous societies to divide up and apportion the Central Park, and they applied to the Legislature for authority to conduct matters in their own way. An act was duly passed, authorizing the Board "to erect, establish, conduct, and maintain, on the Central Park, a Meteorological and Astronomical Observatory, a Museum of Natural History, and a Gallery of Art, and the buildings therefor, and to provide the necessary instruments, furniture, and equipments for the same." Here would seem to be ample power for the establishment of museums of science and art, but nothing is said about the manner of raising the money. One would suppose, however, that, by means of the "Central Park Improvement Fund," abundant means could have been raised. The bill now before the Legislature puts matters in a new light. If it does not conflict with previous enactments, nor destroy vested rights, it has the appearance of being a thoroughly practical way of solving the question of art and science for the city. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History are in the hands of the most respectable citizens of New York. It would not be possible to find a body of men of more unimpeachable integrity and greater worth, than the gentlemen who have founded these two societies. It is impossible that they should lend their names to anything that will not bear the closest scrutiny; hence the proposition, now before the Legislature, to put up buildings for them, at a cost of a million dollars, must attract unusual attention. If the State would appropriate the money to these corporations, giving them the control of its expenditure, we should have considerably more confidence in its honest administration than, we are grieved to say, we can feel under the present circumstances; and if we knew what other institutions are to have the remaining portions of Manhattan Square, it would be a great relief to our minds. "We fear the Greeks bringing gifts," but are willing to accept the gifts, if the officers of the two organizations are certain that it is all right. The need of a Museum of Natural History, and of a Gallery of Art, in New York, is so pressing that there is some danger of our accepting the appropriations without a proper regard to consequences. The Court House is not yet finished, and the foundations of the Post-office are scarcely laid. * * * * * REPORT OF THE JUDGES OF GROUP 1, DEPARTMENT V. OF THE EXHIBITION OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR 1870. THE ALLEN ENGINE. The labors of the judges in this department were much lighter in the last exhibition than in the preceding one, and we are happy to say, were, in our opinion, so far as the award of premiums is concerned, much more fairly performed. The award of two first premiums to two competing engines could scarcely be repeated this time, as there was in reality no competition. The Allen engine was the only important one entered, and of course received the first premium. The engine is, however, one that evidently could have competed favorably with those previously exhibited. We are in receipt of advanced sheets of the judges' report pertaining to the critical examination of this engine, being a record and account of experiments performed under the supervision of Washington Lee, C. E. The experiments were very comprehensive, and comprised approved tests, of each important detail, usually made by expert engineers. The report is too voluminous for reprint or even for condensation in our columns. In looking it through, we are satisfied that the experiments were accurately made, and that the engine exhibited great working efficiency and economy. As the engine has been recently illustrated and described in our columns, we deem it unnecessary to dwell upon the details of its construction. The water test of the previous exhibition was employed, the water being this time measured, with indisputable accuracy, in a tank, instead of by a meter as before. The voluminous comparison of this engine with those previously exhibited, seems unnecessary, and we think not in good taste in such a report, however much it may possess of scientific interest. Moreover, the circumstances under which the trials were respectively performed, render the comparison difficult, if not unfair. Mr. Lee concludes his report with a thorough endorsement of the theory of Mr. Porter upon the action of the reciprocating parts of engines, as set forth by the last named gentleman in recent articles in this journal. He says: "Under the resistance of 128.375 horse powers at the brake, the motion of the engine was remarkably uniform; not the least diminution of speed in passing the centers could be detected, illustrating very satisfactorily the value, in this respect, of the speed employed, and of the action of the reciprocating parts of the engine in equalizing the rotative pressure on the crank through the stroke. The governor was, during the trials and through the exhibition, nearly motionless, while the load remained constant, and instantaneous in its action on changes of resistance, maintaining a steadiness of running which left nothing to be desired." The judges--Prof. F. A. P. Barnard, Thos. J. Sloan, and Robert Weir--speak in their report as follows: "The performance of this engine has exceeded that of the two fine engines which were on trial here last year. The results seem to be without precedent in such engines. The engine ran from 11 to 12 hours repeatedly without showing a sign of a warm bearing, displaying thorough perfection in all its parts. In all respects the engine is first-class, and from the fact of its presenting weight with speed, as a requisite for perfection in steam engines, it has opened a new era in this necessary branch--its economy having been clearly demonstrated in the careful trials, which ought to be published in full." * * * * * LYCEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. There was an unusually large attendance of members at the meeting of the Lyceum of Natural History, on Monday evening, the 6th inst., to listen to an address by Professor B. Waterhouse Hawkins, on the progress of the work of the restoration of the forms of extinct animals in the Central Park. Mr. Hawkins gave an account of the difficulties he encountered at the outset, in finding any skeletons of animals in New York, with which to make comparisons, and he was finally compelled to go to Boston and Philadelphia for this purpose. After much study and many delays, the casts of the _Hadrosaurus_ were completed, and numerous smaller skeletons prepared. At this stage of the proceedings an entire change in the administration of the Park took place, and the newly appointed Commissioners decided to suspend the work upon the Palæozoic Museum, and they dismissed Mr. Hawkins from their service. The announcement that an end had thus been summarily put to one of the most important educational projects ever started in this country, was received by the Lyceum with profound surprise. For a few minutes after the close of Mr. Hawkins' report, no one felt disposed to make any comment, but as the truth of the great damage became apparent, there was considerable disposition manifested to have the Society give expression to its sense of the value of Mr. Hawkins' services in the cause of education, and their regret that so important a work should be suspended at this critical period. Remarks were made by Dr. Newbery, Professor Joy, Mr. Andrew H. Green, Professor Seely, Dr. Walz, Mr. E. G. Squier, and others, and the following resolutions were unanimously adopted: _Resolved_, That the Lyceum of Natural History, in the city of New York, has learned with deep regret of the temporary suspension of the work of restoration of the forms of extinct animals, as hitherto prosecuted in the Central Park, under the able superintendence of Professor Waterhouse Hawkins. _Resolved_, That the Society considers the proposed palæozoic museum not only a valuable acquisition to the scientific treasures and resources of the city, but also as a most important adjunct and complement to our great system of public education. * * * * * WARMING AND VENTILATION OF RAILROAD CARS. There has been enough of denunciation against the present general method of warming and ventilating railway cars. It produces no effect on the corporations who could, if they would, adopt appliances that would not burn people to death in cases of accident, nor regularly and persistently poison them with bad air. There is no lack of ways and means; the problem is simple and easily solved; nay--a not very extensive search through the Patent Office records will show that it has been solved already; perhaps not in the most practical and perfect manner, but still solved so well, as, were it not for corporation cupidity, would greatly add to the comfort and safety of passengers. The real problem is how to compel corporations to recognize the fact that the public has rights they are bound to respect. It is the disregard of these rights that fills our cars with smoke, dust, and exhalations, and puts box stoves full of hot coals in the corners, ready to cook the human stew whenever a frisky car shall take a notion to turn a somersault. The invention needed is a conscience for corporations--an invention, by the way, scarcely less difficult than the one advertised for in our last issue, namely, a plan for preventing the sale of intoxicating liquors and tobacco in New Jersey. The _Railroad Gazette_, imitating the English ideal of prolixity in discussion, for which _Engineering_ has recently patted it on the back approvingly, treats us, in its issue of February 11th, to a page article, to be continued, under the title of "Warming and Ventilation of Railroad Cars." In this article the writer takes the ground that people in general are ignorant of the effects of pure air, and not being able to "see the foulness," they "therefore do not believe it exists." It is quite possible they may not be able to see the foulness, but if in the majority of railroad cars run in this country, they are not able to feel it in gritty, grimy accumulations on skin and linen, and smell it in suffocating stenches which serve, with sneeze-provoking dust, to stifle anything like comfort, their skin must be thicker, their linen more neglected, and their noses less sensitive than those of the majority of fellow travellers it has been our fortune to be cooped up with for a day's railroad journey. The _Railroad Gazette_ makes this wholesale charge of ignorance and insensibility the excuse for an essay on the physiology of respiration, mostly extracted from Huxley's "Elementary Lessons in Physiology," and therefore excellent in its way, though having a somewhat remote bearing upon the subject as announced in the title of the article. We trust that before this journal concludes its series of articles thus commenced, it will tell how to breathe into the breasts of the corporations which choke us in their human packing boxes, something resembling the soul which they are universally acknowledged to be destitute of. When this is done, carbonic acid, ammoniacal smells, organic exhalations, smoke, and dust, will be invited to shun the interiors of railway cars, and comparative comfort will descend upon the peregrinating public. * * * * * THE MINERAL RESOURCES OF MISSOURI. The incalculable wealth, which lies hid in the bosom of Mother Earth, in our vast possessions of the West, is undoubtedly centered in the State of Missouri; and the development of this fund of riches must add to the national prosperity, not only by its immeasurable intrinsic value, but by its affording occupation to armies of laborers, the latter being the highest and most important consideration. In 1852-3, a geological survey of the State was wisely decided upon, and a liberal provision for its execution made. Two valuable reports, by Professor Swallow, have been printed, in the year 1855, but the notes of his subsequent investigations have not been made public. In the session of 1869-70, further action, in this important public work, was taken by the State legislature, and arrangements made for a still more accurate and detailed examination, under the direction of Professor A. D. Hager, of Vermont. The distribution of metals all over the State will be seen in the following figures, taken from the St. Louis _Journal of Commerce_, which show the number of counties in which the various ores are found: Iron in 46 counties, lead in 43, coal in 36, copper in 24, marble in 11, zinc in 27, fire clay in 16, barytes in 10, nickel in 6, granite in 4, tin in 4, plumbago in 2, gypsum in 2, alum in 1, antimony in 4. There is probably no country in the world so endowed as this. Of iron alone, according to the State geologist's report for 1855, there is ore of the best quality, sufficient to furnish 200,000,000 tuns of iron; and this quantity lies in a small space, in the vicinity of Pilot Knob and Iron Mountain, and within 100 miles of St. Louis. The quality of the iron is highly spoken of by the manufacturers, and the capacity of the smelting appliances has reached to over 150,000 tuns per annum. The coal is well suited for reduction of ores, either by hot or cold blast treatment. The Scotia Iron Co. commenced operations in January, 1870; and, although the materials for building blast furnaces had to be carried 80 miles into a desert, the first furnace was blown into blast in August, 1870. This furnace will run about 24 tuns per day. The company procures ore from a hill, near the furnace, in which there is an apparently inexhaustible supply of red oxide and brown specular. This ore yields 60 per cent of pure metal. The erection of mills for making wrought iron is contemplated, and the high quality and prodigious quantity of the raw material will justify and reward any outlay of capital in this direction. The shipment of ore to other States goes on constantly, the last year's account showing that 246,555 tuns were dispersed over Indiana, Ohio, and others. The furnaces at Kingsland, South St. Louis, Lewis Iron Co.'s Works, Carondelet, and Maramec are all well situated as to coal and limestone, the Maramec Works having a most valuable water-power. These latter works also ship about 40,000 tuns red hematite ore yearly. * * * * * SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE. According to _Petermann's Mittheilungen_, the new German empire, including Alsatia and Lorraine, will embrace 9,901 square miles, with 40,148,209 inhabitants. Russia alone will exceed it in extent and population, for Russia in Europe has 100,285 square miles with a population of 69,379,500. France, after the loss of Alsatia and Lorraine, will have 9,588 square miles of territory, with 36,428,548 inhabitants. Austria will number 35,943,592 inhabitants spread over a larger extent of country, namely, 10,980 square miles. Great Britain and Ireland has 5,732 square miles, with 30,838,210 inhabitants; and Italy, including Rome, has 5,376 square miles, with 26,470,000 inhabitants. In the order of population, the Governments will stand: Russia, Germany, France, Austria, and England; but in military power, the first position must henceforth be accorded to Germany. AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF MINING ENGINEERS. A circular has been issued by several mining engineers, proposing a meeting at Wilkes-Barre, some time in April or May next, of all persons interested in the general subjects of mining and metallurgy, for the purpose of establishing an association, to be called "The American Institute of Mining Engineers." The Institute will hold meetings periodically "in the great mining and metallurgical centers, when works of interest, such as mines, machine shops, furnaces, and other metallurgical works, can be inspected, and the members exchange their views, and consult, for mutual advantage, upon the difficulties encountered by each." There will be the usual publication of "Transactions" and "Proceedings." The idea of forming an association of persons thus mutually interested in each other's occupations, is an excellent one; but it has been suggested by a number of scientific gentlemen that the American Association for the Advancement of Science offers every facility for the accomplishment of the objects set forth in the circular, while it affords the very great advantage of an assemblage of men learned in all departments of knowledge, whose acquaintance mining engineers would do well to make, and from whom they could learn much, while at the same time imparting of their own knowledge. As a section of the American Association, the mining engineers would have more influence before the country, and it would perhaps be well for them to stop and consider before establishing a separate institute. CONSUMPTION OF SUGAR, COFFEE, AND TEA. E. Behm gives in his geographical year book, for 1870, the following estimate of the consumption of sugar, coffee, and tea, _per capita_, in various countries: COUNTRIES. Sugar, lbs. Coffee, lbs. Tea, lbs. Great Britain 35.96 0.90 3.190 United States 24.63 5.68 ..... Holland 14.86 7.03 0.800 France 14.30 2.32 0.018 Norway 11.04 6.92 0.060 Sweden 9.80 0.80 0.060 Switzerland 9.60 5.28 ..... Germany 9.42 4.03 0.035 Denmark 9.00 3.40 0.400 Belgium 7.18 8.59 0.018 Portugal 6.33 0.69 0.040 Italy 5.20 0.90 0.020 Austria 4.93 1.30 0.012 Spain 4.23 0.01 0.040 Russia 2.40 0.007 0.160 The entire consumption of sugar in Europe has averaged, during the last few years, three thousand four hundred and ten million pounds (3,410,000 pounds), and for the whole world it is set down at nearly twice that amount. It is estimated that three fourths of the sugar is made from cane, and one fourth from the beet. The consumption of coffee has doubled in most countries during the last twenty years. * * * * * UNPLEASANT DISCOVERY IN THE PATENT OFFICE--LEVYING BLACK MAIL. "The Patent Office has been, during the past week, in a high state of excitement, occasioned by the discovery of the operations of E. W. W. Griffin, clerk in charge of the draftsmen's division, who, it appears, has been levying black mail on the lady employés of the office, for nearly two years. During the administration of Colonel Fisher, late Commissioner of Patents, a large number of ladies were employed, for the purpose of recopying drawings, when ordered by the inventors, of patents already on file. "These ladies were placed under charge of Griffin, with power to retain them in office so long as their services were satisfactory. It has been proved that Griffin hired the ladies at regular salaries of $1,000 per annum, the most of whom he blackmailed to the amount of $400 per year each. It is estimated that he has made $1,000 per month for the past two years. "The matter was brought to the notice of Commissioner Duncan, and an investigation ordered, which resulted in the dismissal of Griffin. "It is thought that there are other cases of this kind, and the Commissioner expresses his determination to ferret them all out, and make a clean sweep of all parties in his department engaged in swindling operations, against the government or against individuals. "The Patent Office has for a long time been considered a rich field for operations of this kind, and investigations have often been suggested, but passed unheeded by the proper authorities. "It is openly stated that an investigation into the relations existing between certain examiners of patents and certain patent agents, would disclose a more fearful state of blackmailing than exists in all the other government departments combined." [We find the above sensational paragraph among the recent Washington items of the _Evening Mail_. We are in a position to say that "the high state of excitement" alluded to has existed only in the brain of the newspaper correspondent. The facts, in brief, are these: In July, 1869, a lady, and wife of one of the clerks in the draftsmen's room, made application to Commissioner Fisher for a position in the copying division of the same department; and, upon the urgent solicitation and recommendation of Mr. E. W. W. Griffin, chief of the division, she was appointed, and has held the position from that time until now, receiving as salary $1,000 per annum, which, with the full knowledge of her husband, she has divided with Griffin, in consideration of his services in procuring for her the appointment. About a month ago, one of the lady's friends got hold of the matter, and reported it to the Court, which resulted in an investigation and the subsequent dismissal of Griffin. This is the only case of the kind that we have heard of, and we have no reason to believe that there is any other, or that corruption exists in the Examining Corps, as alleged.--EDS. * * * * * A method of testing the purity of samples of water, by watching the rapidity of its action on soap and similar compounds, has been introduced by the French _savants_, MM. Boutron and Boudet. The experiment tests, at the same time, the purity of the soap. Dissolved in water in which lime is held in solution, the soap is precipitated in hard white flakes. If the quantity of soap put in the lime water be noted, it will be found that the smaller the quantity producing precipitation, the purer the soap. The _Journal de Pharmacie et de Chemie_ (of Paris) reports some experiments, on this subject, by M. F. Schulze. * * * * * LOUISIANA STATE FAIR.--The fifth State fair of the Mechanics, and Agricultural Fair Association of Louisiana will commence in the city of New Orleans, on Saturday, April 8, 1871, and continue nine days. Over $20,000 in premiums are offered. Rules, regulations, and schedule of premiums may be obtained of the Secretary and Treasurer, Luther Homes, Esq., New Orleans, La. * * * * * KNITTED GOODS.--John Kent advertises, in this paper, valuable machinery for the manufacture of knitted goods, to which we invite the attention of all who are interested in this branch of industry. Mr. Kent has devoted many years to the perfection of these machines. * * * * * KAOLIN, a white clay, used largely in the adulteration of flour, starch, and candles, is found near Augusta, Ga., and is sent to the Northern States in large quantities. * * * * * We are indebted to James Vick, practical florist, Rochester, N. Y., for a choice variety of flower seeds. * * * * * NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS. A COMPLETE GUIDE FOR COACH PAINTERS. Translated from the French of M. Arlot, Coach Painter, for Eleven Years Foreman of Painting to M. Eherler, Coach Maker, Paris. By A. A. Fesquet, Chemist and Engineer. To which is added an Appendix, containing Information respecting the Materials and the Practice of Coach and Car Painting and Varnishing, in the United States and Great Britain. Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, Industrial Publisher, 406 Walnut street. London: Sampson Low, Son & Marston, Crown Buildings, 188 Fleet street. 1871. Price, by mail, to any part of the United States, $1.25. This is another of the large number of practical works and industrial treatises issued from the press of Mr. Baird. It is intended as a practical manual for the use of coach painters, and we must say, upon examination of its contents, that we think it admirably adapted to meet the wants of that class of artisans for which it has been prepared. There is perhaps no department of decorative art in which there is greater room for the display of skill and taste than in coach painting. This work, however, does not deal with the subject of art, to any great extent. Its aim is to give information in regard to colors, varnishes, etc., and their management in carriage painting in the plainest manner, and in this way it thoroughly fulfils the intention of the author. ON THE GENERATION OF SPECIES. By St. George Mivart, F. R. S. London: MACMILLAN & CO. 1871. The Darwinian theory of the Origin of Species, has, perhaps, aroused more attention, excited more dispute, and won more converts in a shorter time among scientific and unscientific men, than any other of equal importance promulgated in the 19th century. It seems to be the rule either to swallow the theory whole, or reject it as unworthy of belief, and as conflicting with orthodoxy. The author of the work before us has, however, taken a middle ground, from which we opine it will be difficult to dislodge him, though it is within full range of the batteries of both the contending parties. While he admits the truth of Darwin's views regarding the operation of natural selection as a cause of the origin of species, he denies that it is the sole cause, yet maintains that if it could be demonstrated to be the sole cause, it would in no manner conflict with orthodox belief in the Scriptures as the revelation of God to mankind. The perfect candor of the author is one of the marked features of the discussion, and his style is a model of pure terse English writing, seldom, if ever, excelled by any scientific writer. The work is an octavo, most beautifully printed on tinted paper, and illustrated by many fine wood engravings. THE ARCHITECT'S AND BUILDER'S POCKET COMPANION AND PRICE BOOK, Consisting of a Short but Comprehensive Epitome of Decimals, Duodecimals, Geometry and Mensuration; with Tables of U. S. Measures, Sizes, Weights, Strengths, etc., of Iron, Wood, Stone, and Various Other Materials; Quantities of Materials in Given Sizes and Dimensions of Wood, Brick, and Stone; and a Full and Complete Bill of Prices for Carpenter's Work; also Rules for Computing and Valuing Brick and Brick Work, Stone Work, Painting, Plastering, etc. By Frank W. Vogdes Architect. Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, Publisher, 406 Walnut street. Price by mail, postpaid, $2. This is a small work, but printed in small type, and containing a large amount of useful matter, thoroughly indexed for reference; bound in morocco; and provided with a clasp, so as to be conveniently carried in the pocket. GAS SUPERINTENDENT'S POCKET COMPANION for the year 1871. By Harris & Brother, Gas Meter Manufacturers, Nos. 1115 and 1117 Cherry street, Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, Industrial Publisher, 406 Walnut street. We find in this pocket-book much of interest to gas consumers, as well as to gas makers. The subject of meters is fully discussed. The work is bound in pocket-book style, in flexible morocco binding. Price, by mail, postpaid, $2. * * * * * BUSINESS AND PERSONAL. _The Charge for Insertion under this head is One Dollar a Line. If the Notices exceed Four Lines, One Dollar and a Half per Line will be charged._ * * * * * The paper that meets the eye of manufacturers throughout the United States--Boston Bulletin, $4.00 a year. Advertisements 17c. a line. Half Interest for sale in established Machinery Depot, new and second-hand. Steam fitting connected. Small capital, with energy, required. Address T. V. Carpenter, Advertising Agent, Box 773, New York. See advertisement of a Woolen Mill for sale. A bargain. I am active, have a clear record, and some capital. How can I make some money? F. Carmill, Box 1268, Boston, Mass. Pattern Letters for Machinists, Molders, and Inventors, to letter patterns of castings, all sizes. Address H. W. Knight, Seneca Falls, N. Y. Improved mode of Graining Wood, pat. July 5, '70, by J. J. Callow, Cleveland, O. See illustrated S. A., Dec. 17, '70. Send stamp for circular. Can a round, spring-steel rod be drawn to any desired length, with a true taper to a point, with equal elasticity the whole length, and rolled temper? What is the price per hundred pounds, and where can they be procured? Answer "Sportsman," Malone, N. Y. Manufacturers of Foot Lathes and other light machinery please address Geo. B. Kirkham, 167 E. 33d st., N. Y. city. Business of importance! Safety Kerosene Lamps (Perkins & House's Patent). Explosion or breaking impossible; light equal to gas, and no odor. Families supplied and canvassers appointed, by Montgomery & Co., 42 Barclay st., New York, or Cleveland, O. All parties wanting a water wheel will learn something of interest by addressing P. H. Wait, Sandy Hill, N. Y., for a free circular of his Hudson River Champion Turbine. Ashcroft's Low Water Detector, $15; thousands in use; 17 year's experience. Can be applied for $1. Send for circular. E. H. Ashcroft, Boston, Mass. Wanted.--Machines for manufacturing Pails, Tubs, and Matches. Also, competent man to superintend construction of buildings, and manage all parts of business when complete. Address, with descriptive circulars, price, etc., No. 266 Lexington avenue, New York. Turbine Water Wheels, Portable and Stationary Engines, Gang and Circular Saw Mills, Rolling Mill Machinery, and Machinery for Axe Manufacturers, manufactured by Wm. P. Duncan, Bellefonte, Pa. For best Power Picket Header in use, apply to Wm. P. Duncan, Bellefonte, Pa. New Blind Wirer and Rod Cutter. B. C. Davis & Co., Binghamton, N. Y. Self-testing Steam Gage. There's a difference between a chronometer watch and a "bull's eye." Same difference between a self-tester and common steam gage. Send for Circular. E. H. Ashcroft, Boston, Mass. See advertisement of L. & J. W. Feuchtwanger, Chemists, N. Y. $3.50. Stephens' Patent Combination Rule, Level, Square, Plumb, Bevel, etc. See advertisement in another column. Agents wanted. American Boiler Powder Co., Box 315, Pittsburgh, Pa., make the only safe, sure, and cheap remedy for "Scaly Boilers." Orders solicited. Belting that is Belting.--Always send for the Best Philadelphia Oak-Tanned, to C. W. Arny, Manufacturer, 301 Cherry st., Phil'a. E. Howard & Co., Boston, make the best Stem-winding Watch in the country. Ask for it at all the dealers. Office 15 Maiden Lane, N. Y. For mining, wrecking, pumping, drainage, and irrigating machinery, see advertisement of Andrews' Patents in another column. The best place to get Working Models and parts is at T. B. Jeffery's, 160 South Water st., Chicago. Brown's Coalyard Quarry & Contractors' Apparatus for hoisting and conveying material by iron cable. W. D. Andrews & Bro, 414 Water st., N. Y. Improved Foot Lathes. Many a reader of this paper has one of them. Selling in all parts of the country, Canada, Europe, etc. Catalogue free. N. H. Baldwin, Laconia, N. H. Peteler Portable R. R. Co. contractors, graders. See adv'ment. E. P. Peacock, Manufacturer of Cutting Dies, Press Work. Patent Articles in Metals, etc. 55 Franklin st., Chicago. Peck's Patent Drop Press. Milo Peck & Co., New Haven, Ct. Millstone Dressing Diamond Machine--Simple, effective, durable. For description of the above see Scientific American, Nov. 27th, 1869. Also, Glazier's Diamonds. John Dickinson, 64 Nassau st., N. Y. Steel name stamps, figures, etc. E. H. Payn, M'f'r, Burlington, Vt. Cold Rolled-Shafting, piston rods, pump rods, Collins pat. double compression couplings, manufactured by Jones & Laughlins, Pittsburgh, Pa. Keuffel & Esser 116 Fulton st., N. Y., the best place to get 1st-class Drawing Materials, Swiss instruments, and Rubber Triangles and Curves. For Solid Wrought-iron Beams, etc., see advertisement. Address Union Iron Mills, Pittsburgh, Pa., for lithograph, etc. For the best Self-regulating Windmill in the world, to pump water for residences, farms, city buildings, drainage, and irrigation, address Con. Windmill Co., 5 College Place, New York. The Merriman Bolt Cutter--the best made. Send for circulars. H. B. Brown & Co., Fair Haven, Conn. Taft's Portable Hot Air, Vapor and Shower Bathing Apparatus. Address Portable Bath Co., Sag Harbor, N. Y. (Send for Circular.) Glynn's Anti-Incrustator for Steam Boilers--The only reliable preventive. No foaming, and does not attack metals of boilers. Price 25 cents per lb. C. D. Fredricks, 587 Broadway, New York. For Fruit-Can Tools, Presses, Dies for all Metals, apply to Bliss & Williams, successor to May & Bliss, 118, 120, and 122 Plymouth st., Brooklyn, N. Y. Send for catalogue. 2d-hand Worthington, Woodward and Novelty Pumps, Engines 25 to 100 H. P., 60 Horse Loc. Boiler. W. D. Andrews & Bro., 414 Water st., N. Y. Agents wanted, to sell the Star Bevel. It supersedes the old style. Send for Circular. Hallett & White, West Meriden, Conn. English and American Cotton Machinery and Yarns, Beam Warps and Machine Tools. Thos. Pray, Jr., 57 Weybosset st., Providence, R. I. For small, soft, Gray Iron Castings, Japanned, Tinned, or Bronzed, address Enterprise Manufacturing Company, Philadelphia. Conklin's Detachable Rubber Lip, for bowls, etc., works like a charm. For Rights, address O. P. Conklin, Worcester, Mass., or A. Daul, Philadelphia, Pa. To Ascertain where there will be a demand for new machinery or manufacturers' supplies read Boston Commercial Bulletin's Manufacturing News of the United States. Terms $4.00 a year. * * * * * FACTS FOR THE LADIES. In 1870, Mrs. W. made, with her Wheeler & Wilson machine, 2,255 vests, besides doing her family sewing for six persons. * * * * * THE PITTSBURGH, PA., "LEADER" SAYS: "The firm of Geo. P. Rowell & Co. is the largest and best Advertising Agency in the United States, and we can cheerfully recommend it to the attention of those who desire to advertise their business scientifically and systematically in such a way; that is, to secure the largest amount of publicity for the least expenditure of money." * * * * * AFTER AN EXHAUSTIVE TRIAL, at American Institute Fair for 1870, Pratt's Astral Oil was pronounced the safest and best. * * * * * DYSPEPSIA: Its Varieties, Causes, Symptoms, and Cure. By E. P. MILLER, M. D. Paper, 50cts.; Muslin, $1. Address MILLER, HAYNES & CO., 41 West Twenty-sixth st., New York city. * * * * * VITAL FORCE: How Wasted and How Preserved; or, Abuses of the Sexual Function, their Causes Effects and Means of Cure. By E. P. MILLER M. D. Paper, 50cts. Address MILLER, HAYNES & CO., 41 West Twenty-sixth st., New York city. * * * * * ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS. * * * * * _CORRESPONDENTS who expect to receive answers to their letters must, in all cases, sign their names. We have a right to know those who seek information from us; besides, as sometimes happens, we may prefer to address correspondents by mail._ _SPECIAL NOTE.--This column is designed for the general interest and instruction of our readers, not for gratuitous replies to questions of a purely business or personal nature. We will publish such inquiries, however, when paid for as advertisements at 1.00 a line, under the head of "Business and Personal."_ _All reference to back numbers must be by volume and page._ * * * * * MIXING METALS.--All the hard gray American charcoal iron, of which car wheels and all such work are made, requires more heat and a longer time to melt than soft iron, especially Scotch pig, which is the most fluid and the easiest to melt of any iron. Consequently, unless the melter exercises good judgment in charging, the Scotch pig will melt and run off before the car-wheel iron is melted. If G. H. P. be particular in the quality and strength of his iron, he will make better results by using soft American charcoal pig, with old car-wheel iron. It will make stronger castings, mix better, and melt more uniformly; but he should always recollect in charging his furnace that soft iron will melt before hard in the same position, in the cupola. I also think he had better use a larger proportion of soft pig, as every time cast iron is melted it becomes harder, so much so that iron which can be filed and turned with ease, when re-cast will often be found too hard to work.--J. T., of N. Y. HARDENING TALLOW.--If E. H. H. will use one pound of alum for every five pounds of tallow, his candles will be as hard and white as wax. The alum must be dissolved in water, then put in the tallow, and stirred until they are both melted together, and run in molds.--F. O. H. L. L., of N. Y.--According to Ure, strass is made as follows: 8 ounces of pure rock crystal or flint, in powder, mixed with 4 ounces of salt of tartar, are to be baked and left to cool. The mixture is then poured into hot water, and treated with dilute nitric acid till it ceases to effervesce, and the "frit" is then washed in water till the water comes off tasteless. The frit is then dried, and mixed with 12 ounces of white lead, and this last mixture reduced to fine powder, and washed with distilled water; 1 ounce of calcined borax is now added to every 12 ounces of the mixture, the whole rubbed together in a porcelain mortar, melted in a clean crucible, and poured out into pure cold water. This melting and pouring into water must be done three times, using a clean, new crucible each time. The third frit is pulverized, five drachms of niter added, and then melted for the last time, when a clean, beautiful white crystal mass results. C. M. S., of Wis.--There are no precise proportions observed in making the coal-tar and gravel walks of which you speak. The aim is to saturate the gravel with the hot tar without surplus. The interstices of the gravel are simply to be filled, and the amount required to do this depends wholly upon the coarseness or fineness of the gravel employed. W. P. T., of Ohio.--Two teams of horses, of equal strength, pulling against each other, by means of a rope, would create the same tension in the rope, as one of the teams drawing against an immovable object. W. H. B., of Va.--Ice can be made by compressing air, and, after it has radiated its heat, allowing it to extract the heat of water with which it is brought into contact. The temperature of air at 59° Fah., would be raised, by compressing the air to one fourth its original volume, to 317° Fah; and the air would radiate and absorb again, in expanding, about 190 units of heat. E. T. H., of Ga.--The friable sandstone, a specimen of which you send us, may, we think, be rendered firmer by soaking it in a solution of silicate of soda, and allowing it to stand till dry. J. A. V., of Ohio.--The use of steam expansively, by means of cut-off appliances, enables the expansive force of the steam to be utilized, which cannot be done when the pressure is maintained at one standard, and steam admitted through the fall stroke. It takes no more power to do a given amount of work in one case than in the other, but more boiler capacity, and more fuel, as the working power of the steam is more economically applied when the cut-off is used. Geo. F. R., of Ohio.--Type metal is composed of 3 parts lead and 1 part antimony for smallest, hardest, and most brittle types; 4 of lead and 1 of antimony for next grade; 5 of lead and 1 of antimony for medium sizes; 6 of lead and 1 of antimony for larger types; and 7 of lead and 1 of antimony for the largest. E. J. M., of Texas.--The term "power of a boiler" means its evaporating power, and in that sense is proper. If its evaporative power be sufficient to perform a given amount of work, it is proper to estimate that work in horse power. Water can not be pumped out of a pipe from which atmospheric air is excluded. A pipe driven into a soil impervious to air, can never yield water unless the water is forced up by hydraulic power, as in the artesian system. A. P. Y., of N. Y.--You will find descriptions of iron enamelling processes, on pages 297 and 408, Vol. XII. of this journal. It can be done in colors. See Ure's "Dictionary of Arts and Manufactures." H. C., of Pa.--We do not think increasing the size of the journals of your car axles from 2½ inches to 6 inches diameter, would make them run lighter. H. H. A., of N. Y.--The lining up of a beam engine, in a vessel, is a process for which no definite mode of procedure is exclusively applicable. It is an operation to which common sense and judgment must be brought, and for which each engineer must be a law unto himself. J. S., of Va.--The use of horizontal propellers to force balloons up or down is not a new suggestion. It has been tried, but, we believe, without much practical success. J. T .S., of N. Y.--You will find further information on the subject of transmitting power by compressed air, in our editorial columns of last week. * * * * * APPLICATIONS FOR EXTENSION OF PATENTS. HARVESTERS.--William T. B. Read, Chicago, Ill., has petitioned for an extension of the above patent. Day of hearing, May 17, 1871. MODE OF FASTENING SHEET METAL ON ROOFS, ETC.--Asa Johnson, Brooklyn, N. Y., has petitioned for an extension of the above patent. Day of hearing, May 3, 1871. METHOD OF PRINTING IN COLORS.--Rosalie Croome, Brooklyn, N. Y., has petitioned for an extension of the above patent. Day of hearing, May 3, 1871. MACHINERY FOR COMPRESSING GASEOUS BODIES.--William A. Royce, Newburgh, N. Y., has petitioned for an extension of the above patent. Day of hearing, May 10, 1871. PLOWS.--John S. Hall, Pittsburgh, Pa., has petitioned for an extension of the above patent. Day of hearing, May 17, 1871. CARRIAGE WHEELS.--James D. Sarven, New Haven, Conn., has petitioned for an extension of the above patent. Day of hearing May 24, 1871. * * * * * NEW PATENT LAW OF 1870. INSTRUCTIONS HOW TO OBTAIN LETTERS-PATENT FOR NEW INVENTIONS. * * * * * INFORMATION ABOUT CAVEATS, EXTENSIONS, INTERFERENCES, DESIGNS, TRADE-MARKS, AND FOREIGN PATENTS. * * * * * For Twenty-five years, MUNN & CO. have occupied the leading position of SOLICITORS OF AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN PATENTS. During this long experience they have examined not less than _Fifty Thousand Inventions_, and have prosecuted upwards of THIRTY THOUSAND APPLICATIONS FOR PATENTS. In addition to this they have made, at the Patent Office, _Twenty-Five Thousand_ Special Examinations into the novelty of various Inventions. The important advantage of MUNN & CO.'s American and European Patent Agency is that the practice has been tenfold greater than that of any other agency in existence, with the additional advantages of having the aid of the highest professional skill in every department and a Branch Office at Washington, that watches and supervises cases when necessary, as they pass through Official Examination. MUNN & CO., ASK SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THEIR SYSTEM OF DOING BUSINESS. _CONSULTATION AND OPINIONS FREE._ Inventors who desire to consult with MUNN & CO. are invited to call at their office 37 PARK ROW, or to send a sketch and description of the invention, which will be examined and an opinion given or sent by mail without charge. A SPECIAL EXAMINATION is made into the novelty of an invention by personal examination at the Patent Office of all patented inventions bearing on the particular class. This search is made by examiners of long experience, for which a fee of $5 is charged. A report is given in writing. To avoid all possible misapprehension, MUNN & CO. advise generally, that inventors send models. But the Commissioner may at his discretion dispense with a model--this can be arranged beforehand. MUNN & CO. take special care in preparation of drawings and specifications. If a case should for any cause be rejected it is investigated immediately, and the rejection if an improper one set aside. NO EXTRA CHARGE is made to clients for this extra service. MUNN & CO. have skillful experts in attendance to supervise cases and to press them forward when necessary. REJECTED CASES. MUNN & CO. give very special attention to the examination and prosecution of rejected cases filed by inventors and other attorneys. In such cases a fee of $5 is required for special examination and report; and in case of probable success by further prosecution and the papers are found tolerably well prepared, MUNN & CO. will take up the case and endeavor to get it through for a reasonable fee to be agreed upon in advance of prosecution. CAVEATS Are desirable if an inventor is not fully prepared to apply for a Patent. A Caveat affords protection for one year against the issue of a patent to another for the same invention. Caveat papers should be carefully prepared. The Government fee on filing a Caveat is $10, and MUNN & CO.'s charge for preparing the necessary papers is usually from $10 to $12. REISSUES. A patent when discovered to be defective may be reissued by the surrender of the original patent, and the filing of amended papers. This proceeding should be taken with great care. DESIGNS, TRADE-MARKS, & COMPOSITIONS Can be patented for a term of years, also new medicines or medical compounds, and useful mixtures of all kinds. When the invention consists of a medicine or compound, or a new article of manufacture, or a new composition, samples of the article must be furnished, neatly put up. There should also be forwarded a full statement of its ingredients, proportions, mode of preparation, uses, and merits. CANADIANS and all other foreigners can now obtain patents upon the same terms as citizens. EUROPEAN PATENTS. MUNN & CO. have solicited a larger number of European Patents than any other agency. They have agents located at London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and other chief cities. A pamphlet containing a synopsis of the Foreign Patent Laws sent free. MUNN & CO. could refer, if necessary, to thousands of patentees who have had the benefit of their advice and assistance, to many of the principal business men in this and other cities, and to members of Congress and prominent citizens throughout the country. All communications are treated as confidential. _Address_ MUNN & CO., No. 37 Park Row, _NEW YORK._ * * * * * RECENT AMERICAN AND FOREIGN PATENTS. _Under this heading we shall publish weekly notes of some of the more prominent home and foreign patents._ * * * * * SELF-ACTING SHACKLE AND CAR BRAKE.--Lyman Alphonzo Russell, Shrewsbury, Vt.--This invention relates to improvements in self-acting shackles and car brakes, and consists in an improved connection of the brakes with the shackle, for automatic operation, whereby the connection may be readily so adjusted that the brakes will not be set in action as when required to back up the train. FEED BAGS FOR HORSES.--W. A. Hough, South Butler, N. Y.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in feed bags for horses, and consists in making the bag self-supplying, by means of one or more reservoirs, the discharge orifices of which reservoirs are closed by a valve or valves. TRUSS.--Adam Hinoult, Montgomery, N. Y.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved truss, which shall be so constructed as to yield freely to the various movements of the body of the wearer, while holding the rupture securely in place. GOVERNOR FOR STEAM ENGINES.--Charles A. Conde, Indianapolis, Ind.--This invention relates to a new method of regulating the movement of the balls of a steam governor, with a view of adjusting the same in proportion to the increased or diminished centrifugal force. CIRCULAR SAW GUARD.--G. W. Shipman, Ischua, N. Y.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in means for protecting the operator and others, near running circular saws, from injury, and it consists in a movable guard, operated by means of the saw carriage, in such a manner that, during the period of danger (when the saw is not cutting), the guard covers the saw, and is thrown back from the saw when the latter is in actual use. CARPET-CLEANING MACHINE.--J. C. Craft, Baltimore, Md.--This invention relates to a machine, through which a carpet may be passed, and so beaten and brushed, during its passage, as to come out of the machine thoroughly cleansed. The invention consists in the peculiar construction and arrangement of beaters and brushes for effecting this result. COMBINED COTTON AND CORN PLANTER.--L. A. Perrault, Natchez, Miss.--This invention relates to improvements in machinery for planting seed, and consists in a combination, in one machine, of a seed-dropping apparatus, adapted for corn, and another adapted for cotton, in a manner to utilize one running gear for the two kinds of seed, and thereby save the expense of separate gear for each. LIME KILN.--T. A. Kirk, Kansas City, Mo.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved lime kiln, which shall be so constructed as to enable the kiln to be worked from the front, in firing and in drawing the lime and ashes, which will not allow cold or unburnt rock to pass through, and which will consume its own smoke. CAR BRAKE.--S. D. Tripp, Lynn, and Luther Hill, Stoneham, Mass.--This invention relates to improvements in railroad car brakes, and consists in an arrangement, on the locomotive or tender, of a steam cylinder and piston, and the arrangement, on the cars, in connection with the brakes, of sliding rods, so that the rod of the car next to the engine or tender, being moved backwards by the piston rod of the above cylinder, will bring the brakes of the rear wheels down upon them, as well as the brakes of the tender, and slacken the speed thereby, so that the rear projecting end of the brake rod will come in contact with the rod of the next car, and set its brakes in action in like manner, and so on, throughout the train. The arrangement of the said brake actuating rods is such that no matter which end of the car is foremost, the wheels of one track will be acted on by the brakes. COMBINED RULER, BLOTTER, AND PAPER CUTTER.--Hugh S. Ball, Spartanburgh, S. C.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in a combined ruler, blotter, and paper cutter, three articles indispensable for the desk, combined in one. REED FOR ORGANS AND MELODEONS.--Augustus Newell, Chicago, Ill.--The object of this invention is to so construct the tongue-butts, or shanks, of musical reeds, that the same cannot, during the vibratory motion of the tongues, be raised from their seats. ANTI-FRICTION COMPOUND.--Victory Purdy, Poughkeepsie, N. Y.--This invention relates to a new and useful compound for lubricating railroad car axle journals, and other journal bearings. * * * * * QUERIES. [_We present herewith a series of inquiries embracing a variety of topics of greater or less general interest. The questions are simple, it is true, but we prefer to elicit practical answers from our readers, and hope to be able to make this column of inquiries and answers a popular and useful feature of the paper._] * * * * * 1.--EMERY WHEELS.--Can I make emery wheels similar to those used in a foot lathe, that will answer for sharpening fine tools, such as gouges, rounds, and hollows, and if so, how shall I proceed?--F. W. 2.--BOILER FURNACE.--I have two boilers, twenty-four feet long and four feet in diameter each, with five ten-inch flues. The fire passes under the boiler, and enters the flues at the back end, passes through the flues, and enters the smoke stack at the front end. I use hard pine wood for fuel. Will some of your many readers give me the best way of constructing the flue under the boiler, from the end of the grate bars to where it enters the flues at the back end, and also state the proper distance from the back wall to the end of the boiler?--N. H. 3.--MEDAL CASTS.--I have some medals which I should like to copy. Having tried several times, and failed, I thought that I would ask advice through your query columns. I do not know of what the medals are manufactured. They are, I suppose, made to imitate bronze. I have tried casting them in plaster of Paris molds, but have had very poor success, as the surface of the medals was covered with small holes. The metal used was lead and antimony, seven to one. I should like to know, if there be any metal that I can cast them of, and bring out the bronze color afterwards, or if there be any metal that I can cast them of, and afterwards color by some solution. Also, of what should I make my molds?--J. E. M. 4.--REMOVING THE TASTE OF TAR FROM RAIN WATER.--Will some of your correspondents tell me if rain water, which runs off a gravel roof, and tastes very strongly of tar, is unhealthy, and if there be anything that will prevent its tasting, as it is very disagreeable for cooking purposes?--C. E. H. 5.--SORGHUM MOLASSES.--How can I separate the molasses from the sugar, in sorghum sugar mush, to make a dry merchantable sugar? 6.--FLUX FOR ALUMINUM.--Will some of your readers tell me, through your columns, the best flux to use in melting and mixing aluminum and copper? * * * * * INVENTIONS PATENTED IN ENGLAND BY AMERICANS. [Compiled from the Commissioners of Patents' Journal.] APPLICATIONS FOR LETTERS PATENT. 350.--BREECH-LOADING FIRE-ARMS.--Eli Whitney, New Haven, Conn. February 10, 1871. 352.--GOVERNOR.--Stilliman B. Allen, ----, Mass. February 10, 1871. 357.--WINDMILL.--A. P. Brown, New York city. February 11, 1871. 332.--FURNITURE CASTERS.--F. A. Gardner and H. S. Turrell, Danbury Conn. February 8, 1871. 339.--WIRE FABRICS FOR MATTRESSES.--Samuel Rogers, New York city. February 9, 1871. 340.--SCREW PROPELLER CANAL BOATS.--Thomas Main, Pierpoint, N. Y. February 9, 1871. 362.--FLYER FOR SPINNING MACHINERY.--Thomas Mayor and Geo. Chatterton, Providence, R. I. February 14, 1871. 373.--TELEGRAPHIC APPARATUS AND DETECTORS.--W. B. Watkins, Jersey City, N. J. February 14, 1871. 381.--STEAM AND OTHER SAFETY VALVES.--Walter Dawson Scranton, Pa. February 15, 1871. 388.--IRON RAILS AND BARS, AND MODES OF MANUFACTURING THE SAME.--Eldridge Wheeler, Philadelphia, Pa. February 15, 1871. * * * * * OFFICIAL LIST OF PATENTS. ISSUED BY THE U. S. PATENT OFFICE. FOR THE WEEK ENDING MARCH 7, 1871. _Reported Officially for the Scientific American._ SCHEDULE OF PATENT FEES On each Caveat $10 On each Trade-Mark $25 On filing each application for a Patent, (seventeen years) $15 On issuing each original Patent $20 On appeal to Examiners-in-Chief $10 On appeal to Commissioner of Patents $20 On application for Reissue $30 On application for Extension of Patent $50 On granting the Extension $50 On filing a Disclaimer $10 On an application for Design (three and a half years) $10 On an application for Design (seven years) $15 On an application for Design (fourteen years) $30 _For Copy of Claim of any Patent issued within 30 years_ $1 _A sketch from the model or drawing, relating to such portion of a machine as the Claim covers, from_ $1 _upward, but usually at the price above-named._ _The full Specification of any patent issued since Nov. 20, 1866 at which time the Patent Office commenced printing them_ $1.25 _Official Copies of Drawings of any patent issued since 1836, we can supply at a reasonable cost, the price depending upon the amount of labor involved and the number of views._ _Full information, as to price of drawings, in each case, may be had by addressing_ MUNN & CO., PATENT SOLICITORS, 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. * * * * * 112,309.--HOSE SPRINKLER.--William Anderson, San Francisco, Cal. 112,310.--LOCOMOTIVE SPARK ARRESTER.--J. G. Armstrong, New Brunswick, N. J. 112,311.--TOOL FOR CARRIAGE MAKERS' USE.--George Atkinson, San Francisco, Cal. 112,312.--POTATO PROBE.--John A. Beal, Waterford, N. Y. 112,313.--HINGE FOR CARRIAGE DOORS.--George W. Beers, Bridgeport, Conn. 112,314.--STOVE LEG.--James Birckhead, Jr., Baltimore, Md. 112,315.--CLOTHES PIN.--Orris A. Bishop, Chicago, Ill. 112,316.--MANUFACTURE OF ROCHELLE SALTS AND BORAX.--V. G. Bloede, Brooklyn, N. Y. 112,317.--BEEHIVE.--Felix Brewer, Waynesville, Mo. 112,318.--THILL COUPLING.--Theodore Burr (assignor to Allen Muir and Henry Muir), Battle Creek, Mich. 112,319.--EVAPORATING PAN FOR SACCHARINE LIQUIDS.--F. C. Butler, Bellows Falls, Vt., assignor to himself and James B. Williams, Glastonbury, Conn. 112,320.--DOOR SECURER.--William H. Caldwell, Wheeling, W. Va. 112,321.--TOE-CALK BAR.--R. B. Caswell, Springfield, Mass. Antedated March 2, 1871. 112,322.--GLASS FLATTENING FURNACE AND LEER.--James Clabby, Lenox, Mass. 112,323.--SPRING BED BOTTOM.--Alex. Cole, Manamuskin, N. J. 112,324.--WATER WHEEL.--E. E. Coleman, West Cummington, Mass. 112,325.--TOY HORSE AND CARRIAGE.--John B. Cuzner, Bridgeport, Conn. 112,326.--MACKEREL-LINE HOLDER.--E. L. Decker, Southport, Me. 112,327.--SEWING MACHINE.--J. William Dufour, Stratford, Conn. 112,328.--STEAM BOILER.--Edwards Evans, North Tonawanda, N. Y. 112,329.--MEDICAL COMPOUND FOR CURE OF CATARRH AND ASTHMA.--Erastus Field, Ostrander, Ohio. 112,330.--MACHINE FOR GRINDING THE CUTTERS OF MOWERS, ETC.--H. C. Fisk, Wellsville, N. Y. 112,331.--MACHINE FOR MAKING HOOKS AND EYES.--Jeremy T. Ford, San Francisco, Cal. 112,332.--CHURN.--Thompson Freeman, Westfield, Ill. 112,333.--ATTACHMENT FOR REVOLVING MOLD BOARDS FOR PLOWS.--J. S. Godfrey, Leslie, Mich., assignor to himself and S. M. Loveridge, Pittsburgh, Pa. 112,334.--GRAIN CLEANER AND FERTILIZER SIFTER.--J. A. Green, Mill Dale, Va. 112,335.--SCREW PROPULSION.--E. C. Gregg (assignor to A. H. Gregg and C. P. Gregg), Trumansburg, N. Y. 112,336.--SEEDING MACHINE.--P. M. Gundlach, Belleville, Ill. 112,337.--COMPOUND FOR KINDLING FIRES.--J. L. Hannum and S. H. Stebbins, Berea, Ohio. 112,338.--LAWN MOWER.--Benjamin Harnish, Lancaster, and D. H. Harnish, Pequea, Pa. 112,339.--COMPOSITION FOR PAVEMENTS.--C. B. Harris, New York city. Antedated February 25, 1870. 112,340.--SPRING FOR VEHICLES.--John R. Hiller, Woodland, Cal. 112,341.--HARVESTER RAKE.--S. T. Holly, (assignor to John P. Manny), Rockford, Ill. 112,342.--DOOR CLAMP.--Henry O. Hooper, Diamond Springs, Cal. 112,343.--TAPER HOLDER.--Thomas W. Houchin, Morrisania, N. Y. 112,344.--METALLIC GARTER.--Henry A. House, Bridgeport, Conn. 112,345.--BOBBIN WINDER.--Henry A. House, Bridgeport, Conn. 112,346.--METHOD OF KNITTING STOCKINGS, ETC.--Henry A. House, Bridgeport, Conn. 112,347.--APPARATUS FOR EVAPORATING AND CONCENTRATING LIQUIDS.--John Howarth, Salem, Mass. Antedated March 1, 1871. 112,348.--APPARATUS FOR EVAPORATING AND CONCENTRATING LIQUIDS.--John Howarth, Salem, Mass. Antedated March 1, 1871. 112,349.--APPARATUS FOR REMOVING OIL FROM VEGETABLE AND OTHER MATTERS.--Elias S. Hutchinson, Baltimore, Md. 112,350.--APPARATUS AND PROCESS FOR REMOVING OIL FROM GRAIN, SEEDS, ETC.--Elias S. Hutchinson, Baltimore, Md. 112,351.--CHANDELIER.--Charles F. Jacobsen, New York city. 112,352.--CULINARY VESSEL.--Carrie Jessup, New Haven, Conn. 112,353.--MACHINE FOR CUTTING LEATHER.--Aberdeen Keith, North Bridgewater, Mass. 112,354.--ATTACHING KNOBS TO THEIR SPINDLES.--John F. Keller and Nathaniel Sehner, Hagerstown, Md. 112,355.--MITER MACHINE.--T. E. King, Boston, Mass. 112,356.--TAKE-UP FOR CORSET LOOMS.--Julius Kuttner, New York city. 112,357.--ELEVATOR AND CARRIER.--T. W. Lackore, Worth, Ill. 112,358.--APPARATUS FOR BURNING HYDROCARBON OILS.--James R. Lee, Grass Valley, Cal. 112,359.--BURGLAR ALARM.--Robert Lee, Cincinnati, Ohio. 112,360.--TELEGRAPH APPARATUS.--L. T. Lindsey, Jackson, Tenn. 112,361.--HARVESTER.--J. P. Manny, Rockford, Ill. 112,362.--HARVESTER.--J. P. Manny, Rockford, Ill. 112,363.--HARVESTER RAKE.--J. P. Manny, Rockford, Ill. 112,364.--CHEESE CURD SINK.--H. C. Markham, Collinsville, N. Y. 112,365.--MOWING MACHINE.--H. C. Markham and Dewitt C. Markham, Collinsville, N. Y. 112,366.--PROPELLER.--Alex. J. Marshall, Warrenton, Va. Antedated March 3, 1871. 112,367.--OILER.--Edward McDuff and E. D. Forrow, Warwick, R. I. 112,368.--WASH BOILER.--John McInnes, Oxford, Pa. 112,369.--PROPELLING CANAL BOATS.--H. B. Meech, Fort Edward, N. Y. Antedated February 25, 1871. 112,370.--WATER-PROOF COMPOUND FOR COATING CLOTH WOOD, METALS, ETC.--Peter E. Minor, Schenectady, N. Y. 112,371.--COOKING STOVE.--W. N. Moore, Neenah, Wis. 112,372.--BORING MACHINE.--J. H. Pardieck (assignor to himself and S. M. Brown), Acton, Ind. 112,373.--VAPOR BURNER.--R. W. Park, Philadelphia, Pa. 112,374.--MACHINE FOR POINTING BLANKS FOR CULTIVATOR TEETH.--John Pedder and George Abel, West Pittsburgh, Pa. 112,375.--BALE TIE.--J. E. Perkins, San Francisco, Cal. 112,376.--LINING WALLS WITH FELT, ETC.--James Phillips, Chicago, Ill. 112,377.--COOKING STOVE.--Samuel Pierce, Boston, Mass. 112,378.--TACK.--A. A. Porter, New Haven, Conn. Antedated Feb. 25, 1871. 112,379.--MACHINE FOR SHAPING AND CUTTING GEAR CUTTERS.--F. A. Pratt (assignor to the Pratt & Whitney Company), Hartford, Conn. 112,380.--COMBINATION CAMERA AND DEVELOPING BOX.--E. C. Ratzell, Philadelphia, Pa. 112,381.--PUNCHING MACHINE.--J. C. Rhodes, South Abington, Mass. 112,382.--WASHING MACHINE.--J. W. Ricker, Chelsea, Mass. 112,383.--CURTAIN FIXTURE.--Charles Robin. Chester, Conn. 112,384.--MACHINE FOR MAKING PRINTERS' LEADS.--Isaac Schoenberg, New York city. 112,385.--SLIDE VALVE FOR STEAM RIVETING MACHINES.--Coleman Sellers (assignor to William Sellers & Co.), Philadelphia, Pa. 112,386.--MACHINE FOR POLISHING THREAD.--Samuel Semple, Sr., John Semple, Samuel Semple, Jr., and R. A. Semple, Mount Holly, N. J. 112,387.--PAINT BRUSH.--F. S. Shearer, Washington, Ill. 112,388.--BEE HIVE.--S. A. Short, F. J. Short, J. B. Short, and Jasper Kile, Decatur, Ala. 112,389.--APPARATUS FOR REMOVING OIL FROM VEGETABLE AND OTHER MATTER.--Thomas Sim, Baltimore, Md. 112,390.--RETORT FOR PRODUCING BISULPHIDE OF CARBON.--Thomas Sim, Baltimore, Md. 112,391.--UTILIZING THE SILKY DOWN OF THE WILD COTTON.--M. H. Simpson, Boston, Mass. 112,392.--PRUNING SHEARS.--Frank Smiley, Batavia, N. Y. 112,393.--WATER-CLOSET VALVE.--A. J. Smith, San Francisco, Cal. 112,394.--GANG PLOW.--J. W. Sursa, San Leandro, Cal. 112,395.--GRINDING PAN AND AMALGAMATOR.--W. H. Thoss, West Point, Cal. 112,396.--STREET LANTERN.--Augustus Tufts, Malden, Mass. 112,397.--COOKING STOVE.--Alvin Warren, Swanton, Ohio. 112,398.--SAFETY BRIDLE.--James Weatherhead, San José, Cal. 112,399.--FIRE GRATE.--George Wellhouse, Akron, Ohio. 112,400.--HAY KNIFE.--G. F. Weymouth, Dresden, Me. 112,401.--CLAW BAR.--Charles Winter, Chillicothe, Ohio. 112,402.--STEAM GENERATOR.--J. C. Woodhead, Pittsburgh, Pa. 112,403.--ANIMAL TRAP.--W. D. Wrightson, Queenstown England. 112,404.--BRUSH.--John Ames, Lansingburg, N. Y. 112,405.--CLOD FENDER.--F. L. Bailey, Freeport, Ind. 112,406.--RULER.--H. S. Ball, Spartanburg, S. C. 112,407.--FANNING MILL.--Benjamin Barney, Time, Ill. 112,408.--ICE-CUTTING MACHINE.--Lafayett Barnum (assignor to himself and A. R. Hale), Bridgeport, Conn. 112,409.--MANUFACTURE OF ICE.--T. J. Bigger, Kansas City, Mo. 112,410.--MACHINE FOR HEADING BOLTS AND SPIKES.--Reinhold Boeklen, Brooklyn, N. Y., assignor to himself and Henry Torstrick New York city. Antedated Feb. 28, 1871. 112,411.--WASHING MACHINE.--Joseph Boswell, L. M. Boswell, Jonathan Palmer, and J. H. James (assignors to themselves and Thomas Starbuck), Wilmington, Ohio. 112,412.--WATER WHEEL.--E. C. Boyles, New York city. 112,413.--COTTON PRESS.--R. M. Brooks, Pike county, Ga. 112,414.--PAPER-CUTTING MACHINE.--Samuel Brown (assignor to himself and C. R. Carver), Philadelphia, Pa. 112,415.--GOVERNOR FOR DIRECT-ACTING ENGINES.--A. S. Cameron, New York city. 112,416.--GOVERNOR FOR DIRECT-ACTING ENGINES.--A. S. Cameron, New York city. 112,417.--BUTT HINGE.--J. W. Carleton (assignor to the Union Manufacturing Co.), New Britain, Conn. 112,418.--MACHINE FOR CUTTING SHEET METAL.--C. R. Choate, East Saginaw, Mich. 112,419.--BIT BRACE.--William Cleveland, Lawrence, Mass., assignor to himself and James Swan, Seymour, Conn. 112,420.--STEAM ENGINE GOVERNOR.--C. A. Condé, Indianapolis, Ind. 112,421.--CARPET-CLEANING MACHINE.--J. C. Craft (assignor to himself and Antonio Rosello), Baltimore, Md. 112,422.--STEAM REGULATOR FOR PAPER DRYERS.--Daniel Crosby, Hampden, Me. 112 423.--METALLIC PISTON AND VALVE ROD PACKING.--G. M. Cruickshank, Providence, R. I. 112,424.--GRAIN-THRASHING AND SEPARATING MACHINE.--John Culham, Grand Rapids, Mich. Antedated Feb. 25, 1871. 112,425.--COOKING STOVE.--David Curtis, Mishawaka, assignor to himself and C. B. Graham, South Bend, Ind. 112,426.--LIGHTNING ROD.--S. D. Cushman, New Lisbon, Ohio. 112,427.--HOSE BRIDGE.--Patrick Daily (assignor to himself and J. J. Kehoe), New York city. 112,428.--COVER FOR OPENINGS IN SIDEWALKS.--William Dale, New York city. 112,429.--ROTARY PUMP.--F. O. Deschamps, Philadelphia, Pa. 112,430.--MACHINE FOR CUTTING FILES.--James Dodge, Manchester, England, assignor to David Blake, Spencertown, N. Y. 112,431.--COUPLING FOR RAILWAY CARS.--Henry Dubs and S. G. Goodall-Copestake, Glasgow, Great Britain. 112,432.--TOBACCO PIPE.--P. J. Dwyer, Elizabethport, N. J. 112,433.--BASKET FOR HOUSE PLANTS.--Albert P. Eastman, Washington, D. C. 112,434.--SULKY PLOW.--Milo A. Elliott, Stratford Hollow, N. H. 112,435.--STRETCHER FOR PAINTINGS.--James Fairman, New York city. 112,436.--BODY LANTERN HOLDER.--Samuel C. Fessenden, Stamford, Conn. 112,437.--STOVE LEG.--Amon L. Finch, Sing Sing, N. Y. 112,438.--PUMP PISTON.--John S. Follansbee and George Doolittle (assignors to the Forrester Manufacturing Company), Bridgeport, Conn. 112,439.--SHOE.--Samuel W. Francis (assignor to himself and W. H. Newton), Newport, R. I. 112,440.--GUARD-FINGER FOR HARVESTERS.--George Fyfe and Chester Hard, Ottawa, Ill. 112,441.--DINING TABLE.--S. R. Gardner (assignor to himself and S. M. Marquette), Independence, Iowa. 112,442.--STEP LADDER.--M. Boland Geary, New York City. 112,443.--OILCLOTH PRINTING MACHINERY.--Ebenezer A. Goodes (assignor to Philadelphia Patent and Novelty Company), Philadelphia, Pa. 112,444.--TENONING MACHINE.--Lyman Gould, Norwich, Conn. 112,445.--PRINTER'S CASE.--Wm. H. A. Gresham, Atlanta, Ga. 112,446.--LAMP CHIMNEY.--Geo. W. Griswold, Factoryville, Pa. 112,447.--GRAIN SEPARATOR.--Philander Griswold, Hudson, Mich. 112,448.--CLAMP FOR THILL COUPLINGS.--John W. Guider (assignor to himself and John Kiefer), St. Joseph, Mo. 112,449.--BIRD CAGE.--Gottlob Gunther, New York city. 112,450.--STOP COCK AND VALVE.--William Haas, New York city. 112,451.--VALVE FOR STEAM ENGINES.--Joseph L. Harley, Baltimore, Md., and Xaver Fendrich, Georgetown, D. C. 112,452.--METALLIC HUB.--John H. Harper, Pittsburgh, Pa. 112,453.--COMPOSITION FOR LUBRICATING MACHINERY.--E. Q. Henderson (assignor to John C. Burroughs and Richard A. Springs) Charlotte, N. C. 112,454.--POST-HOLE DIGGER.--Bryant B. Herrick, Decatur, Mich. 112,455.--DOOR CHECK.--Levi S. Hicks (assignor to himself, J. Perrin Johnson, and John Buell), Peoria, Ill. 112,456.--RAILWAY-CAR BRAKE.--Luther Hill, Stoneham, and Seth D. Tripp, Lynn, Mass. 112,457.--TRUSS.--Adam Hinoult, Montgomery, N. Y. 112,458.--FEED BAG FOR HORSES.--Walter A. Hough, South Butler, N. Y. 112,459.--SHADE HOLDER FOR LAMPS--Mark W. House, Cleveland, Ohio. 112,460.--LAMP CHIMNEY.--Mark Wiggins House (assignor to the Cleveland Non-Explosive Lamp Company), Cleveland, Ohio. Antedated March 1, 1871. 112,461.--HORSE HAY RAKE.--James Howard and E. T. Bousfield, Bedford, England. 112,462.--TONGS FOR ROLLING BARRELS.--Mark W. Ingle, Indianapolis, Ind. 112,463.--PITMAN.--George W. Jayson, Lodi, Ohio. 112,464.--PASTE FOR PAPER HANGINGS.--John Jones (assignor to himself and Henry A. Smith), New York city. 112,465.--TWINE HOLDER.--Edward M. Judd, New Haven, Ct. 112,466.--CLOTHES PIN OR CLASP.--Amos L. Keeports and William Yount, Littletown, Pa. 112,467.--PUTTING UP HAMS.--Samuel Edward Kelly, Philadelphia, Pa. 112,468.--LIMN KILN.--Thomas A. Kirk, Kansas City, Mo. 112,469.--FASTENING FOR SEATS FOR WAGONS OR SLEIGHS.--John G. Knapp and John F. Robertson (assignors of one third their right to James H. Holly), Warwick, N. Y. 112,470.--POTATO PLANTER.--George Knowlton (assignor for one-half his right to N. Haynes), Johnstown, Pa. 112,471.--REVOLVING FIREARM.--Edwin S. Leaycroft, Brooklyn, N. Y., assignor by mesne assignment, to "Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company," Hartford, Conn. 112,472.--REVOLVING FIREARM.--Edwin S. Leaycroft, Brooklyn, N. Y., assignor, by mesne assignment, to "Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company," Hartford, Conn. 112,473.--RAILROAD CATTLE-GUARD GATE.--J. H. Mallory, La Porte, Ind. 112,474.--BACK-REFLECTING MIRROR.--Richard Mason (assignor to himself and Matthew Ely), Newark, N. J. 112,475.--VENTILATOR AND CHIMNEY TOP.--James McGowan (assignor to himself and Daniel H. Waring), New York city. 112,476.--APPARATUS FOR RECTIFYING AND REFINING SPIRITS.--Frederick Measey (assignor to himself and Henry D. Fling), Philadelphia, Pa. 112,477.--TIN CAN.--John F. Merrill (assignor to himself and Alexander Stewart), Cincinnati, Ohio. 112,478.--TAKE-UP MECHANISM FOR LOOMS.--John Michna and Joseph Fischer, New York city. 112,479.--COMBINED BAKER AND BROILER.--Wm. H. Miller, Brandenburg, Ky. 112,480.--SHUTTLE FOR SEWING MACHINES.--James D. Moore, Grinnell, Iowa. 112,481.--COTTON CHOPPER AND GRAIN CULTIVATOR.--Daniel Mosely, Osark, Arkansas. 112,482.--SAD AND FLUTING IRON.--Frederick Myers, New York city. 112,483.--REED FOR ORGANS AND MELODEONS.--Augustus Newell, Chicago, Ill. 112,484.--STRAW CUTTER.--Amon Park, Germanville, Iowa. 112,485.--APPARATUS FOR AGING WHISKY AND OTHER SPIRITS.--Josiah Peiffer and Samuel Richards, Valonia, Pa. 112,486.--COMBINED COTTON AND CORN PLANTER.--Louis A. Perrault (assignor to himself and Joseph Huber), Natchez, Miss. 112,487.--FAUCET.--Solomon Pfleger, Reading, assignor to himself and J. S. Pfleger, Tamaqua, Pa. 112,488.--TREADLE.--George K. Proctor, Salem, Mass. 112,489.--LUBRICATING COMPOUND.--Victory Purdy, Poughkeepsie, N. Y. 112,490.--FERTILIZER AND SEEDING MACHINE.--Archibald Putnam (assignor to Elizabeth Putnam), Owego, N. Y. 112,491.--ROTARY PUMP.--George W. Putnam, South Glens Falls, N. Y. 112,492.--HAT BRUSH.--Robert Dunbar Radcliffe, Palmyra, N. Y. 112,493.--REFRIGERATING SHOW CASE.--Thomas L. Rankin, Lyndon, Kansas, assignor to himself and D. W. Rockwell, Elyria, Ohio. 112,494.--DEVICE FOR STARTING AND STOPPING CARS.--Philip Rhoads, Carlisle, Pa. 112,495.--PIPE-MOLDING MACHINE.--George Richardson, Milwaukee, Wis. 112,496.--SULKY CULTIVATOR.--Richard B. Robbins, Adrian, Mich. 112,497.--HAND PLOW.--Nelson Rue, Harrodsburg, Ky. 112,498.--MECHANICAL MOVEMENT.--Edward G. Russell, Ravenna, Ohio. 112,499.--RAILWAY CAR BRAKE.--Lyman Alphonzo Russell, Shrewsbury, Vt. 112,500.--STOVEPIPE CLEANER.--David Sanford, Ashton, Ill. 112,501.--TWINE HOLDER.--Joseph B. Sargent and Purmont Bradford (assignors to Sargent & Co.), New Haven, Conn. 112,502.--DOVETAILING MACHINE.--James M. Seymour, Newark, N. J. 112,503.--WOODEN PAVEMENT.--Eaton Shaw, Portland, Me. 112,504.--GUARD FOR CIRCULAR SAWS.--George W. Shipman, Ischua, N. Y. 112,505.--BREECH-LOADING FIREARM.--Dexter Smith and Martin J. Chamberlin, Springfield, Mass. 112,506.--SPARK ARRESTER.--James Smith, Altoona, Pa. 112,507.--HORSE HAY RAKE.--Solomon P. Smith, Waterford, N. Y. 112,508.--PLOW.--S. M. Stewart, New Harrisburg, Ohio. 112,509.--MEDICAL COMPOUND FOR TREATING FEVER AND AGUE.--George E. Swan, Mount Vernon, Ohio. 112,510.--DEVICE FOR COOLING JOURNALS OF CAR AXLES.--Henry G. Thompson, Milford, Conn. 112,511.--COOLING JOURNAL OF CAR AXLES.--Henry G. Thompson, Milford, Conn. 112,512.--COOLING JOURNAL OF CAR-WHEEL AXLES.--Henry G. Thompson, Milford, Conn. 112,513.--DEVICE FOR COOLING JOURNALS OF RAILWAY CARS.--Henry G. Thompson, Milford, Conn. 112,514.--NON-HEATING HANDLE FOR SAD IRONS, ETC.--William H. Towers, Boston, Mass. 112,515.--LUBRICATOR.--John Erst Uhl, Renovo, Pa. 112,516.--COMBINED CORN PLANTER AND CULTIVATOR.--Franklin Underwood, South Rutland, N. Y. 112,517.--KING BOLT.--Wendel Vondersaar, Indianapolis, Ind. 112,518.--WHEAT ROASTER.--George W. Waitt (assignor to himself and Robert B. Fitts), Philadelphia, Pa. 112,519.--PLASTER SOWER.--Thomas J. West, Alfred Center, N. Y. 112,520.--TICKET HOLDER.--Henry Wexel, Providence, R. I. 112,521.--TOBACCO PRESS.--Abraham N. Zell, Lancaster, Pa. 112,522.--COMBINED BAG HOLDER AND SCALES.--William Zimmerman, Lebanon, Pa. Antedated February 25, 1871. 112,523.--BREECH-LOADING FIREARM.--James M. Mason, Washington, D. C. * * * * * REISSUES. 4,287.--TREATING FRUITS TO DRY, SACCHARIFY, AND PRESERVE THEM.--Charles Alden, Newburg, assignor of part interest to Alden Fruit Preserving Company, New York city. Patent No. 100,835, dated March 5, 1870; reissue No. 4,011, dated June 7, 1870. 4,288.--DEVICE FOR SECURING PULLEYS TO SHAFT.--John H. Buckman (assignor to himself and Peter W. Reinshagen), Cincinnati, Ohio. Patent No. 98,144, dated December 21, 1839. 4,289.--SHAWL STRAP.--George Crouch, Westport, Conn. Patent No. 82,606, dated September 29, 1868. 4,290.--ATMOSPHERIC DENTAL PLATE.--Nehemiah T. Folsom, Laconia, N. H. Patent No. 60,871, dated January 1, 1867. 4,291.--PESSARY.--William R. Gardner, Leonardsville, N. Y. Patent No. 105,191, dated July 12, 1870. 4,292.--DIVISION A.--SKATE.--James L. Plimpton, New York city. Patent No. 37,305, dated January 6, 1863; reissue No. 3,906, dated April 5, 1870. 4,293.--DIVISION B.--SKATE.--James L. Plimpton, New York city. Patent No. 37,305, dated January 6, 1863; reissue No. 3,906, dated April 5, 1870. 4,294.--APPARATUS FOR PITCHING BARRELS.--Louis Schulze, Baltimore, Md. Patent No. 106,964, dated August 30, 1870. * * * * * DESIGNS. 4,694.--PICTURE FRAME.--John H. Bellamy, Charlestown, Mass. 4,695.--BELL CRANK AND ESCUTCHEON.--Pietro Cinquini, West Meriden, Conn., assignor to Parker & Whipple Company. 4,696.--PEDESTAL FOR A CAKE DISH.--George Gill (assignor to Reed & Barton), Taunton, Mass. 4,697.--TABLE CASTER.--William Parkin (assignor to Reed & Barton), Taunton, Mass. 4,698.--BUCKLE FRAME.--John E. Smith, Waterbury, Conn. 4,699.--BACK OF A CHAIR OR SOFA.--George Unverzagt, Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * TRADE-MARKS. 182.--HAT.--Nathan A. Baldwin, Milford, Conn., James H. Prentice, Brooklyn, and John R. Waller, New York city. 183.--SPOOL COTTON.--Lewis Coleman & Co., Boston, Mass. 184.--SALVE.--Robert Dobbins, Binghamton, N. Y. 185.--SOAP.--Leberman & Co., Philadelphia, Pa. 186.--MEDICINE.--Ridenour, Coblentz & Co., Springfield, Ohio. 187.--PAPER.--Union Manufacturing Company, Springfield, Mass. * * * * * EXTENSIONS. WAGONS.--Edgar Huson, Ithaca, N. Y. Letters Patent No. 16,648, dated February 17, 1857; reissue No. 2,500, dated March 5, 1867. OPERATING VALVE OF STEAM ENGINE.--Samuel R. Wilmot, Bridgeport, Conn. Letters Patent No. 16,668, dated February 17, 1857. HINGES.--John David Browne, Cincinnati, Ohio. Letters Patent No. 16,678, dated February 24, 1857. KEEPER FOR RIGHT AND LEFT HAND DOOR LOCKS.--Calvin Adams, Pittsburgh, Pa. Letters Patent No. 16,676, dated February 24, 1857. SOLAR CAMERA.--David A. Woodward, Baltimore, Md. Letters Patent No. 16,700, dated February 24, 1857; reissue No. 2,311, dated July 10, 1866. CAST SEAMLESS THIMBLE SKEINS FOR WAGONS.--John Benedict, Kenosha, Wis., administrator of Andrew Leonard, deceased. Letters Patent No. 16,688, dated February 24, 1857; reissue No. 575, dated July 27, 1858; reissue No. 1,229, dated October 8, 1861. MODE OF CASTING SEAMLESS SKEINS FOR WAGONS.--John Benedict, Kenosha, Wis., administrator of Andrew Leonard, deceased. Letters Patent No. 16,688, dated February 24, 1857; reissue No. 575, dated July 27, 1858; reissue No. 1,228, dated October 8, 1861. BREECH-LOADING FIREARMS.--William Cleveland Hicks, Summit, N. J. Letters Patent No. 16,797, dated March 10, 1857; reissue No. 1,952, dated May 9, 1865; reissue No. 3,798, dated January 18, 1870; reissue No. 3,860, dated March 1, 1870. SEEDING MACHINE.--Lewis B. Myers and Henry A. Myers, Elmore, Ohio. Letters Patent No. 16,772, dated March 3, 1857. * * * * * DISCLAIMER. SOLAR CAMERA.--David A. Woodward, Baltimore, Md. Letters Patent No. 16,700, dated February 24, 1857; reissue No. 2,311, dated July 10, 1866. Filed February 23, 1871. * * * * * CITY SUBSCRIBERS.--THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be delivered in every part of the city at $3.50 a year. Single copies for sale at the News-stands in this city, Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Williamsburgh, and by most of the News Dealers in the United States. * * * * * RECEIPTS--When money is paid at the office for subscriptions, a receipt for it will be given; but when subscribers remit their money by mail, they may consider the arrival of the first paper a bona-fide acknowledgment of their funds. * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS. * * * * * _The value of the_ SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN _as an advertising medium cannot be over-estimated. Its circulation is ten times greater than that of any similar journal now published. It goes into all the States and Territories, and is read in all the principal libraries and reading-rooms of the world. We invite the attention of those who wish to make their business known to the annexed rates. A business man wants something more than to see his advertisement in a printed newspaper. He wants circulation. If it is worth 25 cents per line to advertise in a paper of three thousand circulation, it is worth $2.50 per line to advertise in one of thirty thousand._ RATES OF ADVERTISING. BACK PAGE - - - - 1.00 A LINE, INSIDE PAGE - - - 75 CENTS A LINE, _for each insertion_. _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter-press_. * * * * * TO MANUFACTURERS OF KNITTED GOODS. JOHN KENT is now in England, completing arrangements so as to be able to supply his American friends with his improved Knitting Machines with greater dispatch, and with all the latest improvements. He would beg to call especial attention to The Improved Rib Top Frame, now so well known, and acknowledged to be the best rib top frame ever built, for speed and quality of goods produced. Price, delivered free in New York, $520, currency. The Improved Circular Web Frame, for drawers and shirts, built of any size and gage. Price for a 4-head set, 17 inch to 20 inch diameter, $810, currency, delivered free in New York. The Circular Stocking Frame, from 2 in. to 5½ in. diameter. These circular frames, with my last improvements, are as near perfection as possible. The Patent Full-fashioned Shirt, Drawers and Stocking Frames produce the most perfect goods ever made by steam-power machinery, and cost fifty per cent less to keep in repair than any other Knitting Machine. Built 10 to 24 gage, and from 30 to 140 inch wide, to order. The Improved Circular Looping Frame, for putting on shirt cuffs, drawers bands, clearing the top of circular shirts, &c., built to order, of any size, from 2 in. to 22 in. diameter, and of any gage. Steel Needles and Sinkers to pattern. Persons wishing to order while Mr. Kent is in England, will please address JOHN KENT, Nottingham, up to April 12th, or, if they prefer, may send through depot. Address JOHN KENT, 348 Pearl st., New York. * * * * * PUMPS.--For Description, Price Lists etc., of the Best Centrifugal Pump ever invented, with Overwhelming Testimony in its favor, send for new illustrated pamphlet (40 pp.) to Messrs. HEALD, SISCO & CO., Baldwinsville, N. Y. * * * * * BRICK PRESSES. FOR RED AND FIRE BRICK. Factory 309 S. Fifth street, Philadelphia, Pa. S. P. MILLER. * * * * * ST. JOSEPH, Mo., Nov. 10, 1870. T. R. BAILEY & VAIL, LOCKPORT, N. Y.: GENTLEMEN:--The Lathe you shipped me has arrived, and I have it in full operation. It works perfectly, and I think it the best lathe made in the world for Bedstead and Chair work. I would recommend it to any one desirous of obtaining such a lathe. Yours truly, H. R. BRISTOL. * * * * * WOOLEN MILL FOR SALE. With House and 3 acres of land, Seymour, Ct., (Naugatuck Valley,) 2 miles from R. R. depot. Never-failing stream. 3 ft. fall, dam and wheel in good condition. Inquire of JAS. ORMSBEE, on the premises. * * * * * PORTABLE & STATIONARY STEAM ENGINES AND HOISTING ENGINES. A good article at low prices. Every machine warranted. Send for descriptive Price List. H. B. BIGELOW & CO., NEW HAVEN, CONN. * * * * * PATENT BANDSAW MACHINES [Illustration] Of the most approved kinds, of various sizes, to saw bevel as well as square, without inclining the table, by FIRST & PRYIBIL, 452 to 456 Tenth ave., New York. Price $250, $275, $350, and $400. At present (Oct. 16), there are in operation, in this city alone, 88 of our machines. Send for circular. Manufacture, also, an improved saw-filing apparatus; price, $30. Have also on hand a large stock of best FRENCH BANDSAW BLADES. * * * * * L. & J. W. FEUCHTWANGER, 55 CEDAR ST., NEW YORK, CHEMISTS, MANUFACTURERS, AND IMPORTERS OF SPECIALITIES, SILICATES, SODA AND POTASH, CHLORIDE OF CALCIUM, PEROXIDE OF MANGANESE, HYDROFLUORIC ACID, METALLIC OXIDES, STEEL AND GLASS MAKERS' AND POTTERS' ARTICLES, PUBLISHERS OF TREATISES ON "SOLUBLE GLASS," "GEMS," AND "FERMENTED LIQUORS." * * * * * PIMLICO BRACES, SOMETHING NEW. THIS invention is based on a strictly scientific principle, and is a valuable improvement on old style suspenders. It is simple in construction, and combines the qualities of Brace and Suspender. They are unequaled for elegance, durability and comfort. Manufactured at the Monumental Silk Works, Baltimore. JOHN M. DAVIES & CO., Sole Agents, 384 & 386 B'd'y, N. Y. * * * * * DR. J. ARMSTRONG'S (Patent) IMPROVED HEATER, FILTER, LIME EXTRACTOR, AND CONDENSER COMBINED, FOR STEAM BOILERS. [Illustration] MANUFACTURED BY ARMSTRONG & STARR, Toledo, Ohio. _Send for Circulars._ Formerly Armstrong & Welsh. * * * * * FOR SALE.--An Engine, 12×36 in. cylinder, and two Boilers, 4×15 feet, in good order, will be sold cheap. J. J. TAYLOR & CO., 68 Courtlandt st., New York. * * * * * HUNTING, Trapping and Fishing. All about it. SENT FREE. Address "HUNTER," Hinsdale, N. H. * * * * * FIRST PREMIUM awarded by Am. Inst., 1870 MICROSCOPES, } Illustrated price list and catalogues MAGIC LANTERNS, } free to any address. T. H. McALLISTER, Optician, 49 Nassau st., N. Y. * * * * * Rare and Beautiful Flowers --AND-- CHOICE VEGETABLES Can always be obtained by Sowing [Illustration: BLISS'S SELECT GARDEN SEEDS.] BLISS'S SELECT GARDEN SEEDS. The Seventeenth Annual Edition of their celebrated "SEED CATALOGUE AND GUIDE TO THE FLOWER AND KITCHEN GARDEN," is now ready for distribution. It contains FOUR BEAUTIFULLY COLORED LITHOGRAPHS, and about 300 choice Engravings of favorite Flowers and Vegetables, 136 pages of closely-printed matter, and a list of Twenty-five Hundred species and varieties of Flower and Vegetable Seeds, with explicit directions for their culture, and much other useful information upon the subject of Gardening. A copy will be mailed to all applicants inclosing 25 cts. Regular customers supplied gratis. Address B. K. BLISS & SONS, Nos. 23 Park Place, and 20 Murray st., P. O. Box No. 5712. New York. * * * * * SCIENCE FOR THE MILLION. THE BOSTON JOURNAL OF CHEMISTRY, DEVOTED TO THE SCIENCE OF HOME LIFE, THE ARTS, AGRICULTURE, AND MEDICINE. JAMES R. NICHOLS, M. D.,} WILLIAM A. ROLFE, A. M.,} Editors. ONE DOLLAR PER YEAR. A paper which commends itself at once to Physicians, Druggists, Chemists, Teachers, Farmers, Mechanics--in short, to Professional and Practical Men of every class. The Domestic Recipes and Formulæ for Art Processes are of themselves worth many times the cost of subscription. ---> SPECIMEN COPIES SENT FREE. Address BOSTON JOURNAL OF CHEMISTRY, 150 Congress st., Boston. * * * * * FOOT LATHES, And all kinds of small tools. Illustrated catalogue free. GOODNOW & WIGHTMAN, 23 Cornhill, Boston, Mass. * * * * * AGENTS WANTED.--To sell Stephens' PATENT COMBINATION RULE, which embraces a Rule, Level, Square, Plumb, Bevel, Slope Level, T Square, etc., in one compact tool. These instruments retail at $3.50 each, and energetic salesmen can make money by selling them among mechanics. We warrant them in every particular, as the construction and graduation is faultless. Send for descriptive circular, cuts, and terms. STEPHENS & CO., Riverton, Conn. * * * * * FELT. THE BEST, CHEAPEST and MOST DURABLE non-conductor known, for sale by the Original Manufacturer, at the BOILER FELTING WORKS, 46 Courtland st., New York. * * * * * UNIVERSAL WOOD WORKER. For Agricultural, Railroad, Car, Carriage, and Wagon Works, Planing Mill, Sash, Door and Blind, Bedstead, Cabinet and Furniture Factories. McBETH, BENTEL & MARGEDANT, Hamilton, O. * * * * * INVENTOR'S EXCHANGE, 245 BROADWAY, N. Y., "AM. AGRICULTURIST" BUILDING. TANGIBLE INVENTIONS NEGOTIATED. No goods received unless ordered. B. F. KEMP, Proprietor. * * * * * MACHINISTS' TOOLS, at greatly reduced prices. Also, some Woodworth Planers and Second-hand Tools. 97 to 113 R. R. ave., Newark, N. J. E. & R. J. GOULD, successors to Gould Machine Co. * * * * * N. B. PATENTED Articles introduced. Also, State and County Rights sold for Inventors. STONE, PUGH & CO., 55 N. 6th st., Philadelphia. * * * * * GOLDEN HILL Seminary for young ladies, Bridgeport, Conn. Miss EMILY NELSON, Principal. * * * * * 1826 USE THE VEGETABLE 1870 PULMONARY BALSAM. The old standard remedy for Coughs, Colds, Consumption. "Nothing Better." CUTLER BROS. & Co., Boston. * * * * * THE CALVERT IRON ROLLING MILLS are offered at private sale. These mills are situated in the city of Baltimore, and cover 1½ acres of ground. The Machinery is of the most approved description, for making all sizes of round and square bar iron, from ¼ in. to 3 in. diameter, and flat bars of all widths, up to 7 inches. The buildings are ample and commodious. In addition to the Rolling Mills are two brick buildings (50×125 feet and 40×90 feet), now containing an 80 H. P. Engine, and Spike Machinery, but which could be used for the manufacture of Nails, Horseshoes, or any other branch of heavy hardware. This property offers an unusual opportunity to capitalists, and will be sold at a reasonable price. For further description address MARSHALL P. SMITH, P. O. Box 1158, Baltimore, Md. * * * * * BURDON IRON WORKS.--Manufacturers of Pumping Engines for Water Works, High & Low Pressure Engines, Portable Engines and Boilers, of all kinds, Sugar Mills, Screw, Lever, Drop, & Hydraulic Presses, Machinery in general. HUBBARD & WHITTAKER, 102 Front st., Brooklyn. * * * * * ENGINES AND MACHINERY FOR SALE, at a great sacrifice. Two new Steam Engines, 12 and 20 horse power; 1 Faribain's Riveting Machine; 1 large Power Shears; 1 ditto Table Punch; 2 ditto Flange Punches; 1 set Power Bending Rolls; together with a large lot of Turning Lathes, Drilling Machines, Machinists' and Smiths' Hand Tools, Pulleys, Hangers, and 6 Fairbanks' Platform Scales. Send for catalogue, or apply at the South Brooklyn Steam Engine Works, cor. Imlay and Summit sts., Brooklyn. * * * * * SHINGLE AND HEADING MACHINE-- Law's Patent with Trevor & Co.'s Improvements. The Simplest and Best in use. Also, Shingle, Heading and Stave Jointers, Equalizers, Heading Turners, Planers etc. Address TREVOR & CO., Lockport, N. Y. * * * * * AGENTS WANTED--($225 A MONTH) by the AMERICAN KNITTING MACHINE CO. Boston, Mass., or St. Louis, Mo. * * * * * THE _UNITED STATES_ BRICK MACHINE IS THE BEST IN THE WORLD, BECAUSE IT MAKES THE GREATEST NUMBER, THE BEST, and THE CHEAPEST BRICKS. IT IS THE PERFECTION OF SIMPLICITY. IT IS DURABLE, AND NOT LIKELY TO GET OUT OF REPAIR. See SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Sept. 17, 1870. For Descriptive Circular apply to F. C. WELLS, PRESIDENT, ROOM 13, 98 MADISON ST., CHICAGO. MACHINES can be seen in operation at the Company's Works, Chicago; at rear 59 Ann st., New York city; and at Novelty Iron Works, corner of Delord and Peter sts., New Orleans. * * * * * PREPARED ASPHALTE ROOFING FELT. [Illustration] This new prepared production is ready coated, and can be applied on the roof without further trouble. It is easy of application, and does not require any repairs for a long time. It is more durable than some slates, and has been found a suitable substitute for iron or tin roofs. It has a sanded or stony surface, which renders it UNINFLAMMABLE and FIRE-PROOF. Exposed to the most intense fire, and sparks falling upon it, it will not propagate the fire. Under the influence of the sun it will not run, which makes it specially adapted to hot climates. Its easy application and pleasing appearance have made it a favorite roofing material throughout all the Indies and other colonies. Being not cumbrous for transport, it is of invaluable service to settlers and farmers in far remote districts. When used for temporary purposes it may be taken off and applied again to another construction. It replaces common Asphalting on Terraces, Lobbies, Counting-houses, Office Floors, etc.; is a great preservative against dampness and vermin, and equalizes the temperature. It is 32 inches wide, and made in rolls of 25 yards each. Send for circular to E. H. MARTIN, 70 MAIDEN LANE AND 9 LIBERTY ST., N. Y. * * * * * J. J. H. GREGORY'S SEED CATALOGUE. My Annual Illustrated Catalogue, containing a list of many new and rare Vegetables, some of which are not found in any other catalogue, and all the standard vegetables of the farm and garden (over one hundred of which I grow on my three seed farms), with a carefully selected list of flower seed, will be sent free to all. All my seed is sold under three warrants: 1st. That all money sent shall reach me. 2d. That all seed ordered shall reach the purchaser. 3d. That my seeds shall be fresh and true to name. JAMES J. H. GREGORY, Marblehead, Mass. * * * * * THE NEW WILSON UNDER-FEED SHUTTLE SEWING MACHINES! $25 CHEAPER THAN ANY OTHER! [Illustration] For Simplicity, Durability and Beauty they stand _UNRIVALLED!_ For STITCHING, HEMMING, TUCKING, FELLING, Quilting, CORDING, BINDING, BRAIDING, GATHERING, Gathering & sewing on gathers, _they are unexcelled!_ For particulars address Wilson Sewing Machine Co., Cleveland, O., or St. Louis, Mo. AGENTS WANTED. * * * * * MACHINERY, NEW AND 2d-HAND.--Send for Circular. CHAS. PLACE & CO., 60 Vesey st., New York. * * * * * MACHINISTS. Illustrated Catalogue and Price List of all kinds of small Tools and Materials sent free to any address. GOODNOW & WIGHTMAN, 23 Cornhill, Boston, Mass. * * * * * P. BLAISDELL & CO. MANUFACTURERS of the "BLAISDELL" PATENT DRILL PRESSES, with quick return motion, Agricultural Drills, Improved Engine Lathes, from 12 in. to 28 in. swing, Planers, Gear Cutters, Boring Mills, Hand Lathes, and other first-class Machinists' Tools. Jackson st., Worcester, Mass. * * * * * PATENT BEDSTEAD FASTENING. The BEST, CHEAPEST, and STRONGEST FASTENING ever invented. Rights for States and Territories for sale. Address JOHN DOMINGOS and BENJAMIN ESSIG, Sacramento, Cal. * * * * * BENT, GOODNOW & CO., Boston, Mass., Publishers of "PATENT STAR", sell Patent Rights and goods of all kinds. Orders solicited. AGENTS WANTED. ---> Send stamp for copy. * * * * * TO THE WORKING CLASS.--We are now prepared to furnish all classes with constant employment at home, the whole of the time or for the spare moments. Business new, light and profitable. Persons of either sex easily earn from 50c. to $5 per evening, and a proportional sum by devoting their whole time to the business. Boys and girls earn nearly as much as men. That all who see this notice may send their address, and test the business, we make this unparalleled offer: To such as are not well satisfied, we will send $1 to pay for the trouble of writing. Full particulars, a valuable sample which will do to commence work on, and a copy of _The People's Literary Companion_--one of the largest and best family newspapers published--all sent free by mail. Reader, if you want permanent, profitable work, address D. C. ALLEN & CO., Augusta, Maine. * * * * * _IMPORTANT_ TO MACHINISTS.--The Best Metal for all Machine Uses is the MARTIN STEEL, made by THE NEW JERSEY STEEL AND IRON CO., Trenton, N. J. This steel is made by an entirely different process from any other and is tougher than wrought iron. It can be turned without annealing, being entirely free from hard spots. Every one who uses it pronounces it just what they have long wanted, for a multitude of uses, such as Crank Pins, Lathe Spindles and Screws, Cotton Machinery Rollers, Saw and Fan Spindles, etc., etc. Also, particularly adapted for Firebox Plates. Prices low. Send for further information, or a sample, stating use to which it is to be applied. * * * * * OTIS' SAFETY HOISTING MACHINERY. OTIS, BROS. & CO. No. 309 BROADWAY, NEW YORK. * * * * * [Illustration: TRADE MARK.] Union Emery Wheels. Solid and with Stone Center. UNION STONE CO., Boston, Mass. Branch Office, 93 Liberty st., N. Y. General Agents for the Am. Twist Drill Co.'s Superior Grinder and other Emery Wheel Machinery and Tools. Send for Circular. * * * * * WOODBURY'S PATENT _PLANING AND MATCHING_ and Molding Machines, Gray & Wood's Planers, Self-oiling Saw Arbors, and other wood working machinery. S. A. WOODS, {91 Liberty street, N. Y.; Send for Circulars. {67 Sudbury street, Boston. * * * * * RICHARDSON, MERIAM & CO., Manufacturers of the latest improved Patent Daniels' and Woodworth Planing Machines, Matching, Sash, and molding, Tenoning, Mortising, Boring, Shaping, Vertical, and Circular Re-sawing Machines, Saw Mills Saw Arbors, Scroll Saws, Railway, Cut-off, and Rip-saw Machines, Spoke and Wood Turning Lathes, and various other kinds of Wood-working Machinery. Catalogues and price lists sent on application. Manufactory, Worcester, Mass. Warehouse, 107 Liberty st., New York. 17 1 * * * * * [Illustration] REYNOLDS' TURBINE WATER WHEELS. The Oldest and Newest. All others only imitations of each other in their strife after complications to confuse the public. We do not boast but quietly excel them all in staunch reliable, economical power. Beautiful pamphlet free. GEO. TALLCOT, 96 Liberty st., New York. GEARING, SHAFTING. * * * * * _NIAGARA STEAM PUMP._ CHAS. B. HARDICK, Adams st., Brooklyn, N. Y. * * * * * MODELS, PATTERNS, EXPERIMENTAL, and other machinery, Models for the Patent Office, built to order by HOLSKE MACHINE CO., Nos. 528, 530, and 532 Water st., near Jefferson. Refer to SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN office. 14 tf * * * * * 1832. SCHENCK'S PATENT. 1870. WOODWORTH PLANERS. And Re-Sawing Machines, Wood and Iron Working Machinery, Engines, Boilers, etc. JOHN B. SCHENCK & SON, Matteawan, N. Y., and 118 Liberty st., New York. * * * * * WANTED--AGENTS, $20 PER DAY, TO sell the celebrated HOME SHUTTLE SEWING MACHINE. Has the under-feed, makes the "lock stitch" alike on both sides, and is fully licensed. The best and cheapest Family Sewing Machine in the market. Address JOHNSON, CLARK & CO., Boston, Mass.; Pittsburgh, Pa.; Chicago, Ill., or St. Louis, Mo. * * * * * MILLING MACHINE, INDEX, STANDARD, UNIVERSAL, AND HORIZONTAL.--The largest variety to be found in the country, on hand and finishing. Workmanship, Material, and Design unsurpassed. Machines on exhibition at Fair of American Institute. UNION VISE CO. OF BOSTON. Office 80 Milk st. Works at Hyde Park, Mass. * * * * * _ANDREW'S PATENTS._ NOISELESS, FRICTION GROOVED, PORTABLE, AND WAREHOUSE HOISTERS. FRICTION OR GEARED MINING & QUARRY HOISTERS. SMOKE-BURNING SAFETY BOILERS. OSCILLATING ENGINES, DOUBLE AND SINGLE, 1-2 TO 100-HORSE POWER. CENTRIFUGAL PUMPS, 100 TO 100,000 GALLONS PER MINUTE, BEST PUMPS IN THE WORLD, PASS MUD, SAND, GRAVEL, COAL, GRAIN, ETC., WITHOUT INJURY. ALL LIGHT, SIMPLE, DURABLE, AND ECONOMICAL. SEND FOR CIRCULARS. WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO., 414 Water street, New York. * * * * * $150 A MONTH! EMPLOYMENT! EXTRA INDUCEMENTS! A premium HORSE and WAGON for Agents. We desire to employ agents for a term of seven years, to sell the Buckeye $20.00 Shuttle Sewing Machine. It makes a stitch alike on both sides, and is the best low-priced licensed machine in the world. W. A. HENDERSON & CO., Cleveland, Ohio, or St. Louis, Mo. * * * * * ALLCOTT'S LATHES, for Broom, Hoe, and Rake Handles, for sale by L. W. POND, 98 Liberty st., New York. * * * * * UNRIVALLED Hand Saw Mill, Self-feeding, with ease. Rip 3-in. lumber; guaranteed do work of 3 men. The only hand saw machine known, does as represented. Thousands in use. Send for circular. WM. H. HOAG, Sole Manufacturer, 214 Pearl st. N. Y. * * * * * U. S. PIANO CO. N. Y. Best in the World--$290. Sent on trial--See large cut and terms in Scientific American. Oct. 1st 1870. * * * * * _DOVETAILING MACHINE._ WILL MAKE 400 DRAWERS PER DAY. See SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Jan. 11, '71. H. H. EVARTS, 93 Liberty st.; TREVOR & CO., Lockport N. Y. * * * * * CIRCULAR SAW MILLS. HAYS & NEWMAN'S PATENT DOUBLE PARALLEL EDGERS, FOSTER'S PATENT LOG-CANTING MACHINES, and Sawmill Machinery generally, manufactured by the WASHINGTON MOWING MACHINE COMPANY. LEROY MOWRY, Agent, Sandy Hill, Wash. Co., N. Y. Send for Illustrated Circulars and Price Lists. * * * * * _TO ELECTRO-PLATERS._ BATTERIES, CHEMICALS, AND MATERIALS, in sets or single, with books of instruction, manufactured and sold by THOMAS HALL, Manufacturing Electrician, 19 Bromfield street, Boston, Mass. Illustrated catalogue sent free on application. * * * * * PRIZE MEDAL SCROLL SAW.-- THOS. L. CORNELL, DERBY, CONN. * * * * * PATENT RIGHTS SOLD ON COMMISSION. By E. E. ROBERTS & CO., Consulting Engineers, 15 Wall St., N. Y. Send Stamp for Circular. * * * * * NEWSPAPER ADVERTISING. A Book of 125 closely printed pages, lately issued, contains a list of the best American Advertising Mediums giving the names, circulations, and full particulars concerning the leading Daily and Weekly Political and Family Newspapers, together with all those having large circulations, published in the interest of Religion, Agriculture, Literature, etc., etc. Every Advertiser, and every person who contemplates becoming such, will find this book of great value. Mailed free to any address on receipt of 25c. GEO. P. ROWELL & CO., Publishers, No. 40 Park Row, New York. The Pittsburgh (Pa.) Leader, in its issue of May 29, 1870 says: "The firm of G. P. Rowell & Co., which issues this interesting and valuable book, is the largest and best Advertising Agency in the United States, and we can cheerfully recommend it to the attention of those who desire to advertise their business SCIENTIFICALLY and SYSTEMATICALLY in such a way: that is, so as to secure the largest amount of publicity for the least expenditure of money." * * * * * THE CELEBRATED _COLD-ROLLED SHAFTING._ This Shafting is in every particular superior to any turned Shafting ever made. It is the most ECONOMICAL SHAFTING to buy, being so very much stronger than turned Shafting. Less diameter answers every purpose, causing a great saving in coupling, pulleys and hangers. It is perfectly round, and made to Whitworth Gage. All who give it a trial continue to use it exclusively. We have it in large quantities. Call and examine it, or send for price list. Address GEORGE PLACE & CO., 126 and 128 Chambers st., New York. * * * * * _N. Y. MACHINERY DEPOT._ GEORGE PLACE & CO., Manufacturers and Dealers in Wood and Iron Working Machinery, of every description, Stationary and Portable Engines and Boilers, Leather and Rubber Belting, and all articles needful in Machine or Railroad Repair Shops. 126 and 128 Chamber st., New York. * * * * * _STURTEVANT BLOWERS._ These are in every particular the best and most perfect Blower ever made. A full assortment of every size on hand, ready to deliver. Address GEORGE PLACE & CO., 126 and 128 Chamber St., New York. * * * * * [Illustration: WROUGHT IRON Beams & Girders] The Union Iron Mills, Pittsburgh, Pa. The attention of Engineers and Architects is called to our improved Wrought-iron Beams and Girders (patented), in which the compound welds between the stem and flanges, which have proved so objectionable in the old mode of manufacturing, are entirely avoided, we are prepared to furnish all sizes at terms as favorable as can be obtained elsewhere. For descriptive lithograph address Carnegie, Kloman & Co., Union Iron Mills, Pittsburgh, Pa. * * * * * MILL OWNERS, ATTENTION.--Our Turbine Water Wheels still ahead. No complications. Simple, compact, and durable. Prices moderate. VALENTINE & CO., Ft. Edward, N. Y. * * * * * THE WOODWARD STEAM-PUMP MANUFACTURING COMPANY, Manufacturers of the Woodward Pat. Improved Safety Steam Pump and Fire Engine, Steam, Water, and Gas Fittings of all kinds. Also Dealers in Wrought-iron Pipe, Boiler Tubes, etc. Hotels, Churches, Factories, & Public Buildings heated by Steam. Low Pressure. Woodward Building, 76 and 78 Center st., cor. of Worth st. (formerly of 77 Beekman st., N. Y.) All parties are hereby cautioned against infringing the Pat. Right of the above Pump. G. M. WOODWARD, Pres't. * * * * * BUERK'S WATCHMAN'S TIME DETECTOR.--Important for all large Corporations and Manufacturing concerns--capable of controlling with the utmost accuracy the motion of a watchman or patrolman, as the same reaches different stations of his beat. Send for a Circular. J. E. BUERK, P. O. Box 1,057 Boston, Mass. N. B.--This detector is covered by two U. S. Patents. Parties using or selling these instruments without authority from me will be dealt with according to law. * * * * * PORTABLE STEAM ENGINES, COMBINING the maximum of efficiency, durability and economy, with the minimum of weight and price. They are widely and favorably known, more than 750 being in use. All warranted satisfactory or no sale. Descriptive circulars sent on application. Address J. C. HOADLEY & CO., Lawrence, Mass. 46. Cortlandt st., New York. * * * * * $5 TO $10 PER DAY. MEN, WOMEN, BOYS and GIRLS who engage in our new business make from $5 TO $10 PER DAY in their own localities. Full particulars and instructions sent free by mail. Those in need of permanent, profitable work, should address at once. GEORGE STINSON & CO., Portland, Maine. * * * * * _AGENTS! READ THIS!_ WE WILL PAY AGENTS A SALARY OF $30 PER WEEK and expenses, or allow a large commission, to sell our new and wonderful inventions. Address M. WAGNER & CO., Marshall, Mich. * * * * * EPILEPSY OR FITS. A sure cure for this distressing complaint is now made known in a Treatise of 48 octavo pages, on Foreign and Native Herbal Preparations, published by Dr. O. Phelps Brown. The prescription was discovered by him in such a providential manner that he cannot conscientiously refuse to make it known, as it has cured everybody who has used it for Fits, never having failed in a single case. The ingredients may be obtained from any druggist. Persons desiring a copy may address Dr. O. Phelps Brown, No. 21 Grand Street, Jersey City, N. J., and it will be sent by return mail. * * * * * WOOD-WORKING MACHINERY GENERALLY. Specialties, Woodworth Planers and Richardson's Patent Improved Tenon Machines. Nos. 24 and 26 Central, corner Union st., Worcester, Mass. Warerooms 42 Cortlandt st., New York. WITHERBY RUGG, & RICHARDSON. * * * * * CINCINNATI BRASS WORKS.--Engineers and Steam Fitters' Brass Work, Best Quality at very Low Prices. F. LUNKENHEIMER, Prop'r. * * * * * HINKLEY KNITTING MACHINE. The simplest, cheapest, and best in use. Has but one needle! A child can run it! AGENTS WANTED IN EVERY TOWN. Send for Circular and Sample Stocking to HINKLEY KNITTING MACHINE CO., Bath, Me. * * * * * LATHE CHUCKS--HORTON'S PATENT from 4 to 36 inches. Also for car wheels. Address E. HORTON & SON, Windsor Locks, Conn. * * * * * SILICATE OF SODA, IN ITS VARIOUS forms, manufactured as a specialty, by Philadelphia Quartz Co., 783 South 2d st. Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS. _Advertisements will be admitted on this page at the rate of $1.00 per line for each insertion. Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter-press._ * * * * * _AN IMPORTANT FACT._ MARVIN & CO.'S SPHERICAL SAFES HAVE NEVER BEEN ROBBED. Hundreds are in use by Banks, Bankers, and Merchants. {265 Broadway, New York. {721 Chestnut st., Philadelphia. Warehouses, {108 Bank st., Cleveland. { 93 Main st., Buffalo. * * * * * L: L: SMITH & CO., NICKEL PLATERS, 6 HOWARD ST., NEW YORK, Between Elm and Centre. * * * * * _SAVE YOUR FUEL._ [Illustration] THE ORIGINAL L. B. TUPPER'S FURNACE GRATE BAR. Guaranteed to make from 5 to 10 lbs. more steam, with less fuel, than any other bar. Adapted to all kinds of fuel; no alteration of furnace required. Received Silver Medal at Cincinnati Industrial Exposition, 1870; Silver Medal at Worcester Co. Mechanics' Association, 1866; Medal and Diploma at American Institute Fair, 1870; Honorable Mention at Paris Exposition. Send for descriptive pamphlet. Now in use in 10,000 places. L. B. TUPPER, 120 West st., New York. * * * * * [Illustration] PYROMETERS. For Blast Furnaces, Bakers' Ovens, Boiler Flues, Superheated Steam Oil Stills, Zinc and Lead Baths. E. BROWN, 311 Walnut st., Philadelphia. * * * * * _AGENTS WANTED._ To sell the UNIVERSAL SASH LOCK. IT IS SELF-ACTING AND BURGLAR-PROOF. Send stamp for circulars. Carpenters and Builders can make from $10 to $20 selling them. Address G. S. LACEY, care of Patterson Brothers, No. 27 Park Row, New York city. * * * * * SPERM OIL, _strictly pure_, for SEWING MACHINES and fine Machinery, in bottles and bbls. Sample by mail, 25 cts. W. F. NYE, New Bedford, Mass. * * * * * _THE REASONS WHY_ DOOLEY'S YEAST POWDER is preferred to any other Baking Powder in market, are owing to its perfect purity, quality, quantity, and economy. The ingredients are strictly free from deleterious substances, and hence the full strength of each is obtained, and the results are uniform every time it is used. This cannot be the case in those of ordinary manufacture, and for proof of our assertion, we ask those who have never used DOOLEY'S YEAST POWDER to give it a trial. Your grocer keeps it. DOOLEY & BROTHER, Manufacturers, 69 New st., New York. * * * * * PATENT CUTTERS for the Teeth of Gear Wheels, which can be sharpened by grinding, without changing their form. Cutters made on this plan will last many times as long as those of the common form, with the advantage of being always ready for use. Descriptive circular, with price list, sent per mail on application. BROWN & SHARPE M'F'G CO., Providence, R. I. * * * * * A SPRING OF WATER AT THE TOP OF THE HOUSE. HOUGHTON'S AUTOMATIC WATER ELEVATOR, patented Feb. 7, 1871, No. 111,542, delivers water from the well or cistern in the tank at the top of the house. Is operated by the fire in the kitchen range without additional fuel; is simple in construction, reliable and cheap. Reliable parties wanted to introduce them into use in all the States except New England. For drawings and full description address CHARLES HOUGHTON, 41 State St., Boston, Mass. * * * * * SHORT HAND.--150 words per minute in four weeks. Send stamp for Circular. PROF. GRAY, P. O. Box 4847, New York. * * * * * WATCHES THAT ARE WATCHES. WE SHALL BE PLEASED TO SEND OUR DESCRIPTIVE PRICE LIST OF GENUINE WALTHAM WATCHES, TOGETHER WITH AN ILLUSTRATED PAMPHLET ENTITLED A HISTORY OF WATCHMAKING, TO ALL WHO SEND US THEIR ADDRESS. NO MATTER HOW REMOTE YOU ARE FROM NEW YORK, WE CAN SELL YOU A WATCH AT THE SAME PRICE AS IF YOU WERE HERE. WHEN YOU WRITE MENTION THAT YOU SAW THIS NOTICE IN THE SCIENTIFIC AMER. HOWARD & CO., 865 BROADWAY, N. Y. * * * * * ENGINES, TOOLS, MACHINERY, ETC., FOR SALE AT THE NOVELTY IRON WORKS, FOOT OF EAST 12TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY, EMBRACING Engines, Planers, Lathes, Smith and Boiler Makers' Tools, and Machinery and Patterns of the most approved kinds, etc. Also, 1 High Pressure Engine, 12-inch diameter by 30-inch stroke: 2 Stevenson's Patent Turbine Water Wheels, 66-inch diameter, and 1 Marine Beam Engine, 60-inches by 10-feet stroke. Send for catalogue. JNO. S. SCHULTZE, RECEIVER OF THE NOVELTY IRON WORKS. New York, March 1, 1871. * * * * * FOR CIRCULAR ILLUSTRATING A NEW and greatly improved TURBINE WHEEL, believed to be the best and cheapest in the market, apply to PUSEY JONES & CO., Wilmington, Delaware * * * * * HOTCHKISS BRICK AND TILE MACHINE.--Send for Circular to Room 7, No. 19 Cliff street, New York. * * * * * PRATT'S ASTRAL OIL: Not the cheapest, but the best Illuminating Oil ever made. Does not take fire or explode if the lamp be upset or broken. Over 100,000 families continue to use it, and no accidents of any description, directly or indirectly, have occurred from it. Oil House of CHARLES PRATT, Established 1770, New York. * * * * * UNION SPOKE WORKS. SPOKES, RIMS, AND PLOW HANDLES. All goods warranted seasoned, and of the best quality. JOHN G. DAVIS & SON, Southwest cor. of Leopard and Otter sts., Philadelphia. * * * * * [Illustration] Vertical & Horizontal CORN MILLS. 30-inch grinds 30 bus. per hour, and 20-in. 15. Price $280 and $140. EDWARD HARRISON, New Haven, Conn. * * * * * IRON STEAMSHIP BUILDERS. NEAFIE & LEVY, PENN WORKS, MARINE ENGINES, BOILERS, ETC., PHILADELPHIA, PA. * * * * * SWAIN TURBINE. "OUR LOW-WATER WHEEL FROM THIS ON" WILL DO TEN PER CENT MORE WORK on small streams, in a dry season, than any wheel ever invented. Gave the best results, in every respect, at the Lowell Tests. For Report of tests at Lowell, with Diagrams and Tables of Power, address THE SWAIN TURBINE CO., NORTH CHELMSFORD, MASS. * * * * * BUILDING PAPER OF THREE GRADES. TARRED SHEATHING, For outside of Studding, under Clapboards. A non-conductor of cold, heat, and dampness. PREPARED PLASTERING BOARD, a cheap and perfect substitute for lath and plaster; makes a smooth, warm, and substantial wall, at less than half the usual cost. DOUBLE THICK ROOFING and Quartz Cement, make a good water and fire-proof roof, for less than $3.50 per square. Sample and Circulars sent free, by ROCK RIVER PAPER CO., Chicago; or, B. E. HALE, 22 & 24 Frankfort street, N. Y. * * * * * IRON PLANERS, ENGINE LATHES, Drills, and other Machinists' Tools, of superior quality, on hand, and finishing. For sale low. For Description and Price address NEW HAVEN MANUFACTURING CO. New Haven Conn. * * * * * _RUMPFF & LUTZ,_ IMPORTERS and Manufacturers of Aniline Colors and Dyestuffs, Colors for Paperhangers and Stainers. Reliable recipes for Dyeing and Printing on Silk, Wool, and Cotton. All new improvements in the art of Dyeing, and new Colors are transmitted to us by our friends in Europe, as soon as they appear. 42 Beaver street, New York. * * * * * PAGE'S _PATENT TANNED BELTING_ Runs 25 per cent more machinery, is nearly twice as strong, and wears 50 per c. longer than any other. Send for circular containing price lists and discounts. PAGE BROTHERS, SOLE MANUF'RS, FRANKLIN, N. H. * * * * * [Illustration] STEAM ENGINES & BOILERS From 4 to 500 horse power including Corliss Engines, Slide Valve Stationary Engines, Portable Engines, etc. Also, Circular Saw Mills, Shafting, Pulleys etc. Wheat and Corn Mills, Circular Saws, etc. Send for Price List. WOOD & MANN STEAM ENGINE COMPANY, WORKS--UTICA, N. Y. PRINCIPAL OFFICE--42 CORTLANDT ST., NEW YORK. * * * * * DRILLS DIAMOND POINTED _STEAM DRILLS._ FOR ALL KINDS OF ROCK DRILLING, Mining, Quarrying, Tunneling, Railroad Grading, Well Boring, Prospecting, etc. Fifty to Seventy-five per cent of cost and time of hand labor saved. "Test Cores," in form of solid cylinders of rock or mineral taken out of mines from any depth not exceeding one thousand feet, showing true value, stratification, etc. No percussion. Never require sharpening. FIRST PREMIUMS awarded in both American and Europe. Illustrated Circulars sent on application. Beware of infringements. SEVERANCE & HOLT, Proprietors and Manufacturers, Office 16 Wall st., New York. * * * * * _NICKEL PLATING._ BEARDSLEE NICKEL AND MANUFACTURING CO., 82 AND 84 FULTON ST., BROOKLYN, N. Y. RIGHTS sold for the use of, and instruction given in the best method of Nickel Plating. An experience of twelve years enables us to offer a solution and apparatus that remain practically unchanged for years, in constant use. FIRST PREMIUM AWARDED us by the AMERICAN INSTITUTE in 1870. Critical examination of our work solicited. All goods sent to our Factory will meet with prompt attention. New York Office--4 DEV ST., ROOM 2. * * * * * [Illustration] BEST DAMPER REGULATOR for Steam Boiler. Send for Circulars. Agents wanted. MURRILL & KEIZER, Baltimore, Md. * * * * * PAT. SOLID EMERY WHEELS AND OIL STONES, for Brass and Iron Work, Saw Mills, and Edge Tools. Northampton Emery Wheel Co., Leeds, Mass. * * * * * NO LIVE MECHANIC Can afford to be without some of BAIRD'S BOOKS FOR PRACTICAL MEN. My new and enlarged Catalogue of PRACTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC BOOKS, 82 pages, 8vo., will be sent, free of postage, to any one who will favor me with his address. HENRY CAREY BAIRD, Industrial Publisher, 406 Walnut St., PHILADELPHIA. * * * * * THE FIFTH GRAND STATE FAIR OF THE MECHANICS AND AGRICULTURAL STATE ASSOCIATION OF LOUISIANA Will be held on the Fair Grounds of the Association, in the city of New Orleans, commencing SATURDAY, APRIL 8, 1871, and continuing nine days. Exhibitors are invited from every section of America. Railroads, steamships, and other transportation lines, as named in the Premium Catalogues, will carry exhibitors and their wares to and from the Fair at one half the usual rates. For further information see Premium Catalogue, which will be sent to any address free of charge. LUTHER HOMES, Secretary and Treasurer, New Orleans, La. * * * * * [Illustration] ROOT'S SAFETY BOILER. For Pamphlets with Price List and Testimonials, address ROOT STEAM ENGINE CO,, 2d Ave., cor. 28th st., N. Y. THE BEST IN THE MARKET. * * * * * _WIRE ROPE._ JOHN A. ROEBLING'S SONS, MANUFACTURERS, TRENTON, N. J. For Inclined Planes, Standing Ship Rigging, Bridges, Ferries, Stays, or Guys on Derricks & Cranes, Tiller Ropes, Sash Cords of Copper and Iron, Lightning Conductors of Copper. Special attention given to hoisting rope of all kinds for Mines and Elevators. Apply for circular, giving price and other information. Send for pamphlet on Transmission of Power by Wire Ropes. A large stock constantly on hand at New York Warehouse, No. 117 Liberty street. * * * * * $732 IN 31 DAYS, Made by one Agent, selling Silver's Broom. 100,000 in use. Recommended by Horace Greeley and _Am. Agriculturist_. One county for each Agent. _Prices Reduced_. C. A. CLEGG & CO., New York, or Chicago, Ill. * * * * * AMERICAN SAW CO., MANUFACTURERS OF [Illustration: EMERSON'S PATENT MOVEABLE TOOTHED CIRCULAR SAWS] And Perforated Circular and Long Saws. Also Solid Saws of all kinds. No. 1 Ferry St., cor. Gold street, New York. Branch Office for Pacific Coast, No. 606 Front street, San Francisco, Cal. * * * * * _MACHINE SCREWS,_ For all purposes, with square, round, and hexagon heads. A. W. GIFFORD & CO., Worcester, Mass. * * * * * PATENT COLD ROLLED SHAFTING. The fact that this Shafting has 75 per cent greater strength, a finer finish, and is truer to gage, than any other in use, renders it undoubtedly the most economical. We are also the sole manufacturers of the CELEBRATED COLLINS PAT. COUPLING, and furnish Pulleys, Hangers, etc., of the most approved styles. Price Lists mailed on application to JONES & LAUGHLINS, 120 Water street, Pittsburgh, Pa. ---> Stocks of this Shafting in store and for sale by FULLER, DANA & FITZ, Boston, Mass. GEO. PLACE & CO., 126 Chambers street, N. Y. * * * * * [Illustration: SCHLENKER'S PATENT BOLT CUTTER NEW INVENTION. ADDRESS, HOWARD IRON WORKS, BUFFALO, N. Y. ] * * * * * _STEAM SUPER-HEATER,_ For Saving Fuel, and supplying Dry Steam of any desired temperature. Safe, durable, easily attached. H. W. BULKLEY Engineer, 98 Liberty st., N. Y. * * * * * FOR CIRCULAR OF TREMPER'S PATENT VARIABLE CUT-OFF, for high and low pressure Steam Engines, address PUSEY JONES & CO. Wilmington Delaware. * * * * * HARRISON SAFETY BOILER. First-class Medal, World's Fair, London, 1862. And American Institute Fair, New York, 1869. Over 1,000 Boilers in Use. WESTON'S PATENT DIFFERENTIAL PULLEY BLOCKS. 75,000 IN USE. Address HARRISON BOILER WORKS, PHILADELPHIA, PA. or, JOHN A. COLEMAN, Agent, 110 Broadway, New York, and 139 Federal st., Boston. * * * * * _DOYLE'S_ PATENT DIFFERENTIAL PULLEY BLOCKS, The celebrated DOYLE BLOCKS have taken premiums over the differential Blocks of all other makers at every Fair where they have been exhibited at the same time. WHEN YOU BUY, SEE THAT THE BLOCKS ARE MARKED J. J. DOYLE. Pat. Jan. 8, 1861. All others are infringements. SAMUEL HALL'S SON & CO., SOLE MANUFACTURERS. 229 WEST 10TH STREET, NEW YORK. * * * * * HEAVY CASTINGS FOR FORGE AND MILL WORK. The M. & T. SAULT CO. Steam Engine Builders & Founders, New Haven, Conn. * * * * * EMPLOYMENT. $250 A MONTH with Stencil Dies. Samples free. Address S. M. SPENCER Brattleboro Vt. * * * * * THE TANITE EMERY WHEEL. Does not Glaze, Gum, Heat, or Smell. Address THE TANITE CO., Stroudsburg, Monroe Co., Pa. * * * * * A. S. & J. GEAR & CO., Boston, furnish every description of Wood and Iron Working Machinery and Supplies. The best in use, regardless of maker, at lowest possible rates. * * * * * _WORKING MODELS_ And Experimental Machinery, Metal, or Wood, made to order, by J. F. WERNER 62 Center st. N. Y. * * * * * McNAB & HARLAN, Manufacturers of Wrought Iron Pipe and Fittings, Brass Cocks, Valves, Gage Cocks, Whistles, Water Gages, and Oil Cups, Harlin's Patent Lubricator, Plumber's Brass Work, Getty's Patent Pipe Cutter, Getty's Patent Proving Pump and Gage. No. 86 John st., New York. * * * * * THE ALLEN ENGINE WORKS, THE ALLEN ENGINE. Fourth avenue and 130th and 131st sts., New York city Manufacturers of PORTER'S GOVERNOR, THE ALLEN BOILER, AND STANDARD STRAIGHT EDGES, SURFACE PLATES, AND ANGLE PLATES. Four first premiums were awarded to us at the Fair of the American Institute, 1870. Send for our illustrated circular. * * * * * _L. W. POND--NEW TOOLS._ EXTRA HEAVY AND IMPROVED PATTERNS. LATHES, PLANERS, DRILLS, of all sizes; Vertical Boring Mills, ten feet swing, and under; Milling Machines, Gear and Bolt Cutters; Hand Punches and Shears for Iron. Office and Warerooms, 98 Liberty st., New York; Works at Worcester, Mass. A. C. STEBBINS, New York, Agent. * * * * * WATER-PROOF _BUILDING PAPER_ (No Tar), for Roofing, Sheathing, Ceilings, Oil-cloths, Shoe Stiffenings, Tags, Trunks, Cartridges, Blasting, Pass-book Covers, Grain and Flour Bins, etc., for sale by J. HUNTER, JR., Paper Warehouse, 59 Duane st., New York. * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN FOR 1871. TWENTY-SIXTH YEAR. EVERY NUMBER is printed on fine paper, and elegantly illustrated with original engravings representing NEW INVENTIONS, NOVELTIES IN MECHANICS, MANUFACTURES, CHEMISTRY, PHOTOGRAPHY, ARCHITECTURE. AGRICULTURE. ENGINEERING, SCIENCE, AND ART. Farmers, Mechanics, Inventors, Engineers, Chemists Manufacturers and People of all Professions or Trades will find the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN of great value and interest. The Editors are assisted by many of the ablest American and European Writers, and having access to all the leading Scientific and Mechanical Journals of the world, the columns of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN are constantly enriched with the choicest Information. An Official List of all the Patents Issued is published Weekly. The Yearly Numbers of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN make two splendid Volumes of nearly ONE THOUSAND PAGES equivalent in size to FOUR THOUSAND ordinary book pages. SPECIMEN COPIES SENT FREE. TERMS--$3.00 a year, $1.50 half year; Clubs of Ten Copies for one year, at $2.50 each, $25.00, With a SPLENDID PREMIUM to the person who forms the Club, consisting of a copy of the celebrated Steel Plate Engraving, "Men of Progress." Address MUNN & CO., PUBLISHERS OF THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. * * * * * THE "Scientific American" is printed with CHAS. ENEU JOHNSON & CO.'S INK. Tenth and Lombard sts. Philadelphia, and 59 Gold st. New York. 
21081	----	[Illustration] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (Entered at the Post Office of New York, N. Y., as Second Class Matter) A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL INFORMATION, ART, SCIENCE, MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY, AND MANUFACTURES. NEW YORK, DECEMBER 18, 1880. Vol. XLIII., No. 25. [New Series.] $3.20 per Annum. [POSTAGE PREPAID.] * * * * * CONTENTS. (Illustrated articles are marked with an asterisk.) Air engine, new 385 Amateur mechanics* 390 American Institute of Architects 389 Architects, American Institute 389 Arctic winter, characteristics of 393 Aquarium (29) 395 Balance attach. for valves* 386 Band saw, hand power* 387 Barometer, chemical (15) 394 Battery, Leclanche, to renew (13) 394 Beetle, Hercules, the* 391 Belts, capacity of (12) 394 Business colleges* 383, 388 Carbons, to solder (20) 395 Chinese women's feet* 393 Chisels, tempering 389 Colleges, business* 383, 388 Engine, air, new 385 Engine, steam, single-acting* 390 Eruption of Mauna Loa 385 Exhibition of bathing appliances 393 Feet, Chinese women's* 393 Fires--causes and prevention 384 Glass spinning and weaving 385 Gun, submarine, new 387 Harbor at Montreal, the 387 Hercules beetle, the* 391 Horse-power of turbines (12) 394 Ice at high temperatures 393 Ice, removing from railroads* 387 Induction coil for transmitter (14) 394 Induction coil, small (26) 395 Invention, schools of 393 Inventions, miscellaneous 390 Inventions, recent 387 Knots, learning to tie 392 Leaves, variegation of 392 Light, what is? 384 London underground railway 389 Mantis, the embrace of the 391 Mechanics, amateur* 390 Montreal, the harbor at 387 Noise, to deaden (9) 394 Nut, safety, improved* 386 Packard's Business College* 383, 388 Patents, decisions relating to 393 Petroleum prospects 386 Photos, to color (10) 394 Poultry raising, mechanical 391 Railway, underground, London 389 Safety nut, improved* 386 Safety valve, improved* 386 Schools of invention 393 Screw-cutting foot lathe (11) 394 Steamers, Collins line of 393 Steam heating, return pipe (17) 394 Steel, to tin (38) 395 Submarine gun, new 387 Sun dial, to adjust (27) 395 Telegraph insulator, new* 387 Telegraph wires underground 385 Valve, safety, improved* 386 Valves, balance attachment for* 386 Vanilla, cinnamon, cocoanut 392 Vennor's winter predictions 389 Vessels, sunken, raising 386 Winter predictions, Vennor's 389 Zinc, to amalgamate (23) 395 * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. ESTABLISHED 1845. MUNN & CO., Editors and Proprietors. PUBLISHED WEEKLY AT NO. 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. O. D. MUNN. A. E. BEACH. * * * * * TERMS FOR THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. One copy, one year postage included $3 20 One copy, six months, postage included 1 60 Clubs.--One extra copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be supplied gratis for every club of five subscribers at $3.20 each: additional copies at same proportionate rate. Postage prepaid. Remit by postal order. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. To Advertisers--The regular circulation of the Scientific American is now Fifty Thousand Copies weekly. For 1880 the publishers anticipate a still larger circulation. The Scientific American Supplement Is a distinct paper from the Scientific American. THE SUPPLEMENT is issued weekly. Every number contains 16 octavo pages, uniform in size with Scientific American. Terms of subscription for Supplement, $5.00 a year, postage paid, to subscribers. Single copies, 10 cents. Sold by all news dealers throughout the country. Combined Rates--The Scientific American and Supplement, will be sent for one year, postage free, on receipt of _seven dollars_. Both papers to one address or different addresses as desired. The safest way to remit is by draft, postal order, or registered letter. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, N. Y. Scientific American Export Edition. The Scientific American Export Edition is a large and splendid periodical, issued once a month. Each number contains about one hundred large quarto pages, profusely illustrated, embracing (1.) Most of the plates and pages of the four preceding weekly issues of the Scientific American, with its splendid engravings and valuable information; (2.) Commercial, trade, and manufacturing announcements of leading houses. Terms for Export Edition, $5.00 a year, sent prepaid to any part of the world. Single copies 50 cents. Manufacturers and others who desire to secure foreign trade may have large, and handsomely displayed announcements published in this edition at a very moderate cost. The Scientific American Export Edition has a large guaranteed circulation in all commercial places throughout the world. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. * * * * * NEW YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1880. * * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. 259. For the Week ending December 18, 1880. Price 10 cents. For sale by all newsdealers. PAGE I. ENGINEERING AND MECHANICS.--Frager's Water Meter. 3 figures.-- Vertical section, horizontal section, and plan 4119 Transmission of Power to a Distance.--Wire ropes--Compressed air--Water pressure.--Electricity 4120 The Livadia at Sea 4120 The Herreshoff Launch 4121 New Steering Gear. 2 figures.--Steam steering gear for Herreshoff launch 4121 II. TECHNOLOGY AND CHEMISTRY.--Glucose 4126 American Manufacture of Corn Glucose 4126 The Conversions--Starch--Dextrine.--Complete glucose 4126 Depreciation of a Glucose Factory 4126 The Fire Risks of Glucose Factories and Manufactures 4126 Glucose Factory Fires and Ignitions 4127 The Hirsh Process. By Adolf H. Hirsh--Improvement in the manufacture of sugar from Corn 4127 Time in the Formation of salts. By M. Berthelot 4127 An Old Can of Preserved Meat By G. W. Wigner 4127 Chemistry for Amateurs. 6 figures.--Reaction between nitric acid and iron.--Experiment with Pharaoh's serpents.--Formation of crystals of iodide of cyanogen--Experiment with ammoniacal amalgam.--Pyrophorus burning in contact with the air.--Gold leaf suspended over mercury 4128 Carbonic Acid in the Atmosphere. 2 figures 4129 On Potash Fulling Soaps By W. J. Menzies 4129 Photography of the Invisible 4134 III. ELECTRICITY. LIGHT, HEAT, ETC.--Exhibition of Gas and Electric Light Apparatus, Glasgow 4125 Electric Light in the German Navy. 1 illustration. Armored Frigates Friedrich Karl and Sachsen.--Dispatch Boat Grille, and Torpedo Boat illuminated by Electric Light 4130 Interesting Facts about Gas and Electricity.--Gas as Fuel.--Gas for Fire Grates 4130 A New Electric Motor and its Applications. 6 figures. Trouve's New Electric Motor 4131 On Heat and Light. By Robert Ward 4131 Photophonic Experiments of Prof. Bell and Mr. Tainter. By A. Bregult 4132 Distribution of Light in the Solar Spectrum. By J. Mace and W. Nicati 4132 Mounting Microscopic Objects 4132 New Sun Dial. By M. Grootten. 1 figure 4132 Antoine Cesar Becquerel, with portrait 4132 IV. HYGIENE AND MEDICINE.--On the Etiology of the Carbuncular Disease. By L. Pasteur, assisted by Chamberland and Roux. An extremely valuable investigation of the nature, causes, and conditions of animal plagues 4133 Report on Yellow Fever in the U. S. Steamer Plymouth. By the Surgeon-General in U. S. Navy 4134 Fuchsin in Bright's Disease 4134 V. ART, ARCHITECTURE, ETC.--Artists' Homes. No. 7. Sir Frederick Leighton's House and Studio. 10 figures. Perspective, plan, elevation details, etc. 4121 Initials by Eisenlohr and Weigle, in Stuttgart. Full page 4123 Suggestions in Decorative Art. 1 figure. Reserved part of a Great Saloon. By H. Penox, Paris 4124 Great Saloon (Text) 4124 Cologne Cathedral The Historical Procession 4124 Suggestions in Decorative Art. 1 figure. Mantlepiece in Walnut. By E. Carpenter 4125 * * * * * ONE MORE NUMBER. The next issue will close another volume of this paper, and with it several thousand subscriptions will expire. It being an inflexible rule of the publishers to stop sending the paper when the time is up for which subscriptions are prepaid, present subscribers will oblige us by remitting for a renewal without delay, and if they can induce one or more persons to join them in subscribing for the paper, they will largely increase our obligation. By heeding the above request to renew immediately, it will save the removal of thousands of names from our subscription books, and insure a continuance of the paper without interruption. The publishers beg to suggest to manufacturers and employers in other branches of industry that in renewing their own subscriptions they add the names of their foremen and other faithful employes. The cost is small, and they are not the only ones that will derive benefit. The benefit to the employe will surely reflect back to the advantage of the employer. The hints, receipts, and advice imparted through our correspondence column will be found of especial value to every artisan and mechanic, as well as to students and scientists. For terms, see prospectus. * * * * * FIRES--CAUSES AND PREVENTION. It is estimated that the total annual losses of insured property by fire, throughout the world, average nearly two hundred million dollars. Add to this the annual destruction of uninsured property, and we should probably have a total amounting to quite double these figures. How great the loss, how severe the tax upon the productive industry of mankind, this enormous yearly destruction amounts to, will come home to the minds of most readers more directly if we call attention to the fact that it just about equals the value of our total wheat crop during a year of good yield. And it is a direct tax upon productive industry everywhere, because, although here and there a nominal loser, fully insured, has only made what is sometimes called "a good sale" to the companies holding his risk, this is only a way of apportioning the loss whereby the community at large become the sufferers. Thus it is that we find all ably-managed insurance companies earnestly endeavoring to make it plain to the public how fires should be guarded against, or most effectually localized and controlled when once started. During the fall, or from "lighting up" time till about New Year's day, more fires occur ordinarily than in any other portion of the year. This fact points to some of the most general causes of conflagrations--as in the lighting and heating of houses, factories, etc., where this had not been necessary during the summer months. It is also found that after the first of the year the number of fires is greatly diminished, the lighting and heating arrangements having been subjected to a period of trial during which their most obvious defects would be remedied. While it may readily be conceded that the utmost care of the owner of property could not totally prevent great average losses from fire--for the greater the holdings the more must the proprietor trust to the oversight of others--it is evident that the above facts indicate the necessity of more strenuous precautions at this season. Gas pipes and fittings should then be tested; furnace flues and settings looked to; stove, heater, and grate fixtures and connections examined--and in all these particulars the scrutiny should be most closely directed to parts ordinarily covered up or out of sight, so that any defect or weakness from long disuse may be exposed. When to the above causes of fires we have added the extremely fruitful one found in the extensive use of coal oil within a few years past, we have indicated the most common sources of conflagrations of known origin. An English authority gives the percentages of different causes of 30,000 fires in London, from 1833 to 1865, as follows: Candles, 11.07; curtains, 9.71; flues, 7.80; gas, 7.65; sparks, 4.47; stoves, 1.67; children playing, 1.59; matches, 1.41; smoking tobacco, 1.40, other known causes, 19.40; unknown causes, 32.88. The foregoing figures do not give the percentage of incendiary fires, and later statistics would, no doubt, show vastly more fires from the use of kerosene than are here attributed to candles. The prevention of fires, and the best means of minimizing the loss when they do occur, are topics which cover a wide field, and a collection of the literature on the subject would make a very respectable library. As the question presents itself to-day, it may well be doubted whether the general practice of large property holders of insuring all their possessions does not tend to lessen the constant vigilance which is the most essential requisite in preventing fires. Thousands of merchants never mean to keep a dollar's worth of goods in store or warehouse that is not fully covered by insurance, and they make this cost a regular charge upon their business as peremptorily as they do the wages paid the hands in their employ. But few manufacturers can so completely cover their risks by insurance, yet a large portion of them do so as far as they are able. It does not follow but that the larger portion of both merchants and manufacturers exercise what the law will fully decide is "due vigilance" in the care of the property so insured, but it is evident that in most cases the thoughtfulness is much less complete--the care wonderfully lacking in personal supervision--as compared with what would be the case were each one his own insurer. Of course, this in no way casts a doubt upon the general policy of business men being amply insured, but in fact shows the greater necessity why they should be so, that they may not suffer from the carelessness of a neighbor; it also points to the necessity of continually increasing care and thoroughness of inspection on the part of the insurance companies. These agencies, in fact, must compel the insured to keep up to the mark in the introduction of every improvement to ward off fires or diminish their destructiveness. The progress made in this department during recent years has been great. The almost universal use of steam has been attended by the fitting up of factories with force pumps, hose, and all the appliances of a modern fire brigade; dangerous rooms are metal sheathed, and machinery likely to cause fire is surrounded by stationary pipes from which jets of water may be turned on instantaneously from the outside; stores and warehouses have standing pipes from which every floor may be flooded with water under pressure, and the elevators, those most dangerous flues for rapidly spreading a fire, are either bricked in entirely or supposed to be closed at every floor. The latter point, however, is sometimes forgotten, as sea captains forget to keep the divisions of their vessels having watertight compartments separate from one another; the open elevator enlarges a small fire as rapidly as the open compartment allows the vessel to sink. With the best of appliances, however, discipline and drill on the part of the hands, in all factories, is of prime importance. It is always in the first stages of a fire that thoroughly efficient action is necessary, and here it is worth a thousand-fold more than can be any efforts after a fire is once thoroughly started. Long immunity is apt to beget a feeling of security, and the carelessness resulting from overconfidence has been the means of destroying many valuable factories which were amply provided with every facility for their own preservation. The teachers in some of the public schools of New York and Brooklyn, during the past year, set an example which some of our millowners might profitably follow. There have been cases when, from a sudden alarm of fire, children have been crushed in their crowding to get out of the building. The teachers, in the instances referred to, marched their children out, under discipline, as if there had been a fire. Let owners of factories try some such plan as this, by which workmen may be called upon to cope with an imaginary fire, and many of them will, we venture to say, find means of improving their present system or appliances for protection, elaborate as they may at present think them to be. * * * * * WHAT IS LIGHT? If on opening a text book on geology one should find stated the view concerning the creation and age of the earth that was held a hundred years ago, and this view gravely put forward as a possible or alternative hypothesis with the current one deducible from the nebula theory, one would be excused for smiling while he turned to the title page to see who in the name of geology should write such stuff. Nevertheless this is precisely similar to what one will find in most treatises on physics for schools and colleges if he turns to the subject of light. For instance, I quote from a book edited by an eminent man of science in England, the book bearing the date 1873. "There are two theories of light; one the _emissive_ theory; ... the other, the _vibratory_ theory;" just as if the emissive or corpuscular theory was not mathematically untenable sixty years ago, and experimentally demonstrated to be false more than forty years ago. Unless one were treating of the history of the science of optics there is no reason why the latter theory should be mentioned any more than the old theory of the formation of the earth. It is not to be presumed that any one whose opinion is worth the asking still thinks it possible that the old view may be the true one because the evidence is demonstrable against it, yet while the undulatory theory prevails there are not a few persons well instructed otherwise who still write and speak as though light has some sort of independent existence as distinguished from so-called radiant heat; in other words, that the heat and light we receive from the sun are specifically different. A brief survey of our present knowledge of this form of energy will help to show how far wrong the common conception of light is. For fifteen years it has been common to hear heat spoken of as a mode of molecular motion, and sometimes it has been characterized as _vibratory_, and most persons have received the impression that the vibratory motion was an actual change of position of the molecular in space instead of a _change of form_. Make a ring of wire five or six inches in diameter, and, holding it between the thumb and finger at the twisted ends, pluck it with a finger of the other hand; the ring will vibrate, have three nodes, and will give a good idea of the character of the vibration that constitutes what we call heat. This vibratory motion may have a greater or less amplitude, and the energy of the vibration will be as the square of that amplitude. But the vibrating molecule gives up its energy of vibration to the surrounding ether; that is to say, it loses amplitude precisely as a vibrating tuning fork will lose it. The ether transmits the energy it has received in every direction with the velocity of 186,000 miles per second, whether the amplitude be great or small, and whether the number of vibrations be many or few. It is quite immaterial. The _form_ of this energy which the ether transmits is _undulatory_; that is to say, not unlike that of the wave upon a loose rope when one end of it is shaken by the hand. As every shake of the hand starts a wave in the rope, so will every vibration of a part of the molecule start a wave in the ether. Now we have several methods for measuring the wave lengths in ether, and we also know the velocity of movement. Let v = velocity, l = wave length, and n = number of vibrations per second, then n = v/l, and by calculation the value of n varies within wide limits, say from 1 � 10^{14} to 20 � 10^{14}. But all vibrating bodies are capable of vibrating in several periods, the longest period being called the fundamental, and the remainder, which stand in some simple ratios to the fundamental, are called _harmonics_. Each of these will give to the ether its own particular vibratory movement, so that a single molecule may be constantly giving out rays of many wave lengths precisely as a sounding bell gives out sounds of various pitches at one and the same time. Again, when these undulations in the ether fall upon other molecules the latter may reflect them away or they may absorb them, in which case the absorbing molecules are themselves made to vibrate with increased amplitude, and we say they have been heated. Some molecules, such as carbon, appear to be capable of stopping undulations of all wave lengths and to be heated by them; others are only affected by undulations of particular wave lengths, or of wave lengths between special limits. In this case it is a species of sympathetic vibration. The distinction between the molecular vibrations, and the undulations in ether that result from them, must be kept in mind, as must also the effect of the undulations that fall upon other molecules. To one the name _heat_ is applied, to the other the name of _radiant energy_ is given; and it matters not whether the undulations be long or short, the same molecule may give out both. Now let a prism be placed in the path of such rays of different wave length from a single molecule, and what is called the dispersive action of the prism will separate the rays in the order of their wave lengths, the longer waves being less refracted than the shorter ones; but the energy of any one of these will depend upon the _amplitude of undulation_, which in turn will depend upon the amplitude of vibration of the part of the molecule that originated it, but in general the longer waves have greater amplitude, though not necessarily so. Consequently, if a thermopile be so placed as to receive these various rays, and their energy be measured by its absorption on the face of the pile, each one would be found to heat it, the longer waves more than the shorter ones, simply because the amplitude is greater, but for no other reason, for it is possible, and in certain cases is the fact, that a short wave has as much or more energy than a longer one. If the eye should take the place of the thermopile it would be found that some of these rays did not affect it at all, while some would produce the sensation of light. This would be the case with any waves having a wave length between the limits of, say, 1-37,000 of an inch and 1-60,000 of an inch; any shorter waves will not produce the sensation of light. If instead of the eye a piece of paper washed in a solution of the chloride of silver should be placed where the dispersed rays should fall upon it, it would be found that only the shorter waves would affect it at all, and among these shorter ones would be some of those rays which the eye could not perceive at all. It was formerly inferred from these facts that the heat rays, the light rays, and the chemical rays were different in quality; and some of the late books treating upon this very subject represent a solar spectrum as being made up of a heat spectrum, a light spectrum, and an actinic or chemical spectrum, and the idea has often been made to do duty as an analogy in trinitarian theology; nevertheless it is utterly wrong and misleading. There is no such thing as an actinic spectrum; that is, there are no such rays as special chemical rays; any given ray will do chemical work if it falls upon the proper kind of matter. For instance, while it is true that for such salts of silver as the chloride, the bromide, etc., the shorter waves are most efficient; by employing salts of iron one may get photographic effects with wave lengths much too long for any eye to perceive. Capt. Abney has photographed the whole solar spectrum from one end to the other, which is sufficient evidence that there are no special chemical rays. As to the eye itself, certain of the wave lengths are competent to produce the sensation we call light, but the same ray will heat the face of a thermopile or produce photographic effects if permitted to act upon the proper material, so there is no more propriety in calling it a light ray than in calling it a heat ray or an actinic ray. What the ray will do depends solely upon what kind of matter it falls upon, and all three of these names, _light_, _heat_, and _actinism_, are names of _effects of radiant energy_. The retina of the eye is itself demonstrably a photographic plate having a substance called purpurine secreted by appropriate glands spread over it in place of the silver salts of common photography. This substance purpurine is rapidly decomposed by radiant energy of certain wave lengths, becoming bleached, but the decomposition is attended by certain molecular movements; the ends of the optic nerves, which are also spread over the retina, are shaken by the disrupting molecules, and the disturbance is the origin of what we call the sensation of light. But the sensation is generally a compound one, and when all wave lengths which are competent to affect the retina are present, the compound effect we call white or whiteness. When some of the rays are absent, as, for instance, the longer ones, the optical effect is one we call green or greenness; and the special physiological mechanism for producing the sensation may be either three special sets of nerves, capable of sympathetic vibration to waves of about 1-39,000, 1-45,000, and 1-55,000 of an inch in length, as Helmholtz has suggested, or, as seems to the writer more probable, the substance purpurine is a highly complex organic substance made up of molecules of different sizes and requiring wave lengths of different orders to decompose them, so that a part of the substance may be quite disintegrated, while other molecules may be quite entire throughout the visual space. This will account for most of the chromatic effects of vision, for complementary colors, and for color blindness, by supposing that the purpurine is not normally constituted. This is in accordance with experimental photography, for it has been found that the long waves will act only upon heavier molecules. It is true vision may be good when there is no purpurine, but there is no doubt but that this substance is secreted in the eye, and that it is photographic in its properties, and so far must be taken as an element in any theory of vision; but the chief point here considered is that objectively light does not exist independent of the eye, that light is a physiological phenomenon, and to speak of it otherwise is to confound a cause with an effect. It is, hence, incorrect to speak of the velocity of light; it has no velocity. It is _radiant energy_ that has the velocity of 186,000 miles a second. It is incorrect to say we receive heat from the sun. What we do receive is radiant energy, which is here transformed into heat. This is not hypercritical, but is in accordance with the knowledge we have to-day. The old nomenclature we use, but without definite meaning; the latter is left to be inferred from the connection or context. If a man should attach to the water main in a city a properly constructed waterwheel, the latter will rotate; but it would not be proper to say that he received rotation from the reservoir. What he received was water with a certain pressure; in other words, a certain form of energy, which he transforms into rotation by the appropriate means; but by substituting other means he can make the same water pressure maintain a vibratory motion, as with the hydraulic ram valve, or let it waste itself by open flow, in which case it becomes ultimately molecular vibration that is heat. The analogy holds strictly. The trouble all comes from neglecting to distinguish between different forms of energy--energy in matter and energy in the ether. * * * * * GLASS SPINNING AND WEAVING. Quite recently a Pittsburg glass firm has succeeded, to a notable degree, in producing glass threads of sufficient fineness and elasticity to permit of their being woven into fabrics of novel character and quality. Their success is such as to warrant the assumption that garments of pure glass, glistening and imperishable, are among the possibilities of the near future. The spinning of glass threads of extreme fineness is not a new process, but, as carried on at present by the firm in question--Messrs. Atterbury & Co.--possesses considerable interest. From a quality of glass similar to that from which table ware is made, rods of glass averaging half an inch in diameter are drawn to any desired length and of various colors. These rods are then so placed that the flame of two gas burners is blown against that end of the rod pointed toward the large "spinning" wheel. The latter is 81/2 feet in diameter, and turns at the rate of 300 revolutions per minute. The flames, having played upon the end of the glass cylinder until a melting heat is attained, a thread of glass is drawn from the rod and affixed to the periphery of the wheel, whose face is about 12 inches wide. Motion is then communicated, and the crystal thread is drawn from between the gas jets and wrapped upon the wheel at the rate of about 7,500 feet per minute. A higher speed results in a finer filament of glass, and vice versa. During its passage from the flame to the wheel, a distance of five or six feet, the thread has become cooled, and yet its elasticity is preserved to a notable degree. The next step in the process consists in the removal of the layers of threads from the wheel. This is easily accomplished, and after being cut to the desired lengths, the filaments are woven in a loom somewhat similar to that used in weaving silken goods. Until within the past few weeks only the woof of the fabric was of glass, but at present both warp and woof are in crystal. Samples of this cloth have been forwarded to New York and to Chicago, and the manufacturers claim to be able to duplicate in colors, texture, etc., any garments sent them. A tablecloth of glass recently completed shines with a satiny, opalescent luster by day, and under gaslight shows remarkable beauty. Imitation plumes, in opal, ruby, pale green, and other hues, are also constructed of these threads, and are wonderfully pretty. The chief obstacle yet to surmount seems to lie in the manipulation of these threads, which are so fine that a bunch containing 250 is not so thick as an average sized knitting needle, and which do not possess the tractability of threads of silk or cotton. [The foregoing information is furnished by a correspondent in Pittsburg. A sample of the goods mentioned, a tablecloth of glass, is now on exhibition in this city. The weaving of such heavy fabrics of glass for ornamental purposes and for curiosities is no new thing; nor, in our estimation, does comparative success in such experiments warrant the enthusiastic claims of the Pittsburg manufacturers touching the adaptability of glass for wearing apparel. Unless it is in their power to change the nature of glass absolutely and radically, it does not seem possible for them so to overcome the ultimate brittleness of the separate fibers as to make the fabric fit to be brought in contact with the skin. The woven stuff may be relatively tough and flexible; but unless the entire fabric can be made of one unbreakable fiber the touch of the free ends, be they never so fine, must be anything but pleasant or beneficial, if one can judge by the finest filaments of glass spun hitherto. Besides, in weaving and wearing the goods, a certain amount of fiber dust must be produced as in the case of all other textile material. When the softest of vegetable fibers are employed the air charged with their fragments is hurtful to the lungs; still more injurious must be the spiculæ of spun glass. However, although the manufacturers are likely to be disappointed in their expectation of finding in glass a cheap and available substitute for linen, cotton, and silk in dress goods, it is quite possible that a wide range of useful application may be found for their new fabric.] * * * * * REMARKABLE ERUPTION OF MAUNA LOA. Late advices from the Sandwich Islands describe the eruption of Mauna Loa, which began Nov. 5, as one of the grandest ever witnessed. The opening was about six miles from the summit of the mountain, and already two great streams of lava had been poured out; one of them, from one to two yards wide and twenty feet deep, had reached a distance of thirty miles. Terrible explosions accompany the flow of the lava stream, which for a time threatened the town of Hilo; at last reports the flow seemed to be turning in another direction. Mauna Loa, "long or high mountain" occupies a large portion of the central and southern part of the island of Hawaii, and reaches an elevation of 13,760 feet. It has been built up by lavas thrown out in a highly fluid state, and flowing long distances before cooling; as a consequence the slopes of the mountain are very gentle, averaging, according to Prof. Dana, not more than six and a half degrees. Its craters are numerous, and usually occur near the summit and on the sides, new ones opening frequently, and furnishing, as in the latest instance, magnificent lava streams. The terminal crater is circular, 8,000 feet in diameter, and in 1864 was about 1,000 feet deep. In 1859 an enormous lava fountain spouted from this crater for four or five days, throwing a column of white hot fluid lava about 200 feet in diameter to the height of two or three hundred feet. The lava stream ran 50 miles to the sea in eight days. Other great eruptions have occurred in 1832, 1840, 1843, 1852, 1855, 1868 and 1873. The lava streams poured out in 1840, 1859, and 1868, flowed to the sea, adding considerably to the area of the island. Those of 1843 and 1855 are estimated to have poured out respectively 17,000,000,000 and 38,000,000,000 cubic feet of lava. In 1868 the lava stream forced its way under ground a distance of twenty miles, and burst forth from a fissure two miles long, throwing up enormous columns of crimson lava and red hot rock to the height of five or six hundred feet. On the eastern part of Mauna Loa, 16 miles from the summit crater, is Kilauea, the largest continuously active crater in the world. It is eight miles in circumference, and 1,000 feet deep. Its eruptions are generally independent of those of Mauna Loa. * * * * * NEW AIR ENGINE. A valuable improvement in compressed air engines has recently been patented in this country and in Europe by Col. F. E. B. Beaumont, of the Royal Engineers, and we learn from accounts given in the London and provincial papers that it has proved highly efficient and satisfactory. The engine possesses some peculiar features which render it very economical in the use of compressed air. It has two cylinders, one being much larger than the other. Into the smaller of these cylinders the compressed air is taken directly from the reservoir, and after doing its work there it is discharged into the larger cylinder, where it is further expanded, being finally discharged into the open air. The admission of air to the smaller cylinder is regulated by an adjustable cut-off apparatus, which admits of maintaining a uniform power under a variable pressure. When the reservoir at first starting contains air at a very high pressure, the cut-off is adjusted so that the small cylinder receives a very small charge of air at each stroke; when the pressure in the reservoir diminishes the cut-off is delayed so that a larger quantity of air is admitted to the small cylinder; and when the pressure in the reservoir is so far reduced that the pressure on the smaller piston gives very little power, the supply passages are kept open so that the air acts directly on the piston of the larger cylinder. This arrangement is also available when the air pressure is high and great power is required for a short time, as, for example, in starting a locomotive. It is, perhaps, needless to mention the advantages a motor of this kind possesses over the steam locomotive. The absence of smoke and noise renders it particularly desirable for tunnels, elevated roads, and, in fact, for any city railroad. Further information in regard to this important invention may be obtained by addressing Mr. R. Ten Broeck, at the Windsor Hotel, New York. * * * * * TELEGRAPH WIRES UNDERGROUND. Philadelphia newspapers report that the American Union Telegraph Company are about to try in that city the experiment of putting their wires underground. The plan works well enough in European cities, and there would seem to be no reason why it should not succeed here, save the indisposition of the companies to bear the first cost of making the change. For some months the Western Union Telegraph Company has had the matter under consideration, but will probably wait until pressed by a rival company before it undertakes the more serious task of taking down its forest of poles and sinking the wires which contribute so much to the prevailing ugliness of our streets. Sooner or later the poles and wires must come down; and it is altogether probable that the change will be beneficial to the companies in the long run, owing to the smaller cost of maintaining a subterranean system. It will certainly be an advantage to the community. * * * * * IMPROVED SAFETY NUT. That a safety nut so simple and so obviously efficient as the one shown in the annexed engraving should be among the recent inventions in this line instead of being among the first, is a curious example of the manner in which inventors often overlook the simplest means of accomplishing an end. The principle on which this nut operates will be understood by reference to the engraving. Two nuts are represented on each bolt, simply for the purpose of showing the difference between the nut when loose and when screwed down. In practice only one nut is required to each bolt. The square nut shown in Fig. 1 is concaved on its under side, so that it touches its bearings only at the corners and in the outer face of the nut there are two slots at right angles to each other. When this nut is screwed home the outer portion is contracted so as to clamp the bolt tightly. The hexagonal nut shown in Fig. 2 has but a single transverse slot, and the nut is made concave on the under surface, so that when the nut is screwed home it will contract the outer portion and so clamp the bolt. This nut may be removed and replaced by means of the wrench, but it will not become accidentally loosened, and the bolt to which it is applied will always remain tight, as the nut possesses a certain amount of elasticity. The action of this nut is such as to prevent stripping the threads of either bolt or nut. As only one nut is used with each bolt, and as no washer or other extra appliance is required, it is obvious that a great saving is effected by this invention. We are informed that several of the leading railroads have adopted this nut, and use it on the tracks, engines, cars, and machinery. The Atwood Safety Nut Company manufacture this article in a variety of forms. [Illustration: THE ATWOOD SAFETY NUT.] Further information may be obtained by addressing J. W. Labaree, Secretary and Treasurer, Room 2, Agawam Bank Building, Springfield, Mass. * * * * * PETROLEUM PROSPECTS. The total oil production of the Pennsylvania oil regions for the month of October was 2,094,608 barrels. The conditions in the producing field are gradually giving warrant for permanently higher prices of crude. The confidence of the trade is daily becoming more fixed in the definiteness and limit of the Bradford field, as the last of the several "rich streaks" in the region are being worked. We entertain an increased belief that the coming year will exhibit a continued falling off in the volume of production, notwithstanding all the modern improvements in drilling and the great energy with which they are employed. For the past few weeks the markets of both crude and refined seem to have been rigorously and artificially held by the refining interest. The refined has been quoted at 12 cts. for four weeks without change--and as a consequence the exporter has taken oil very sparingly. The exports of last year to November 1, as compared with the exports of this year to November 1, show a decrease of 1,269,646 barrels in crude equivalent. The falling off of production, taken together with the increased demand which must result from the present reluctance of exporters, unite in warranting us in the belief above expressed, in enhanced prices for the coming year. Our figures show a decrease in production for last month, compared with the preceding month, of 933 barrels per day, notwithstanding the number of wells drilled was slightly greater than in the preceding month. It will be noticed, too, that the average per well of the new wells for last month is a little less than that of the new wells for the month before, besides, it is generally recognized that the force of the gas in the region is gradually becoming less, and pumping is more commonly resorted to. As nearly as we can ascertain, about one-eighth of all the wheels of the Bradford region are now pumping. We believe, however, on the whole, judging the character of the Bradford producing field, that the falling off of production will be quite gradual. Our reason for this is that the Bradford field is essentially different from its predecessor--the Butler field. The wells in the Butler field were often close together, many of them were very large and fell off rapidly; while the wells of the Bradford region are smaller, farther apart, much greater in number, have a greater area from which to draw oil, and consequently decline very much more slowly.--_Stowell's Reporter_. * * * * * TOOL FOR DRIVING AND CLINCHING NAILS. A novel method of making a nail hole and driving and clinching the nail is shown in the annexed engraving. The instrument for making the hole has a notched end which leaves a ridge in the center of the hole at the bottom. The nail driving tool consists of a socket provided with a suitable handle, and containing a follower which rests upon the head of the nail to be driven, and receives the blows of the hammer in the operation of driving the nail. The nail is split for one half its length, and the two arms thus formed are slightly separated at the point, so that when they meet the ridge at the bottom of the hole they will be still further separated and will clinch in the body of the wood. [Illustration: TOOL FOR DRIVING AND CLINCHING NAILS.] This invention was recently patented by Mr. Charles P. Ball, of Danville, Ky. * * * * * AUTOMATIC BALANCE ATTACHMENT FOR VALVES. It is well known that in all air compressors and water pumps the pressure in cylinder of air compressors or in working barrel or cylinder of pumps is much greater at the point of opening the delivery valves than the actual pressure in the air receivers of compressors or in water column of pumps because of the difference in area between the top and bottom of delivery valves. In some air compressors a hundred and twenty-five pounds pressure to the square inch is required in the cylinder to eighty pounds in the receiver, and in some instances a hundred pounds pressure is required in the cylinder to eighty pounds pressure in the receiver or column. The engraving shows an invention designed to remedy this defect in air compressors and pumps, to provide a device which will enable the compressors and pumps to operate with equal pressure on both sides of the delivery valve. The invention consists of an auxiliary valve arranged outside of the cylinder, where it is not subjected to back pressure, and connected with the delivery valve by a hollow valve stem. In the engraving, which is a sectional view, the cylinder of an air compressor is represented, on the end of which there is a ring containing delivery ports, through which the air from the cylinder is forced into a receiver or conducting pipe. This ring is provided with an inner flange or valve seat on which rests the delivery valve. These parts are similar to those seen in some of the air compressors in common use, and with this construction and arrangement one hundred pounds pressure to the square inch in the cylinder is required to open the valve against eighty pounds pressure in the receiver or in the conducting pipes. [Illustration: AUTOMATIC BALANCE ATTACHMENT FOR DELIVERY VALVES OF AIR COMPRESSORS AND WATER PUMPS.] A drum having an open end is connected with the cylinder head by inclined standards, and contains a piston connected with the valve by means of a rod that extends centrally through the cylinder head. On the outer end of this rod is screwed an adjusting nut, by means of which the piston may be adjusted. This rod is bored longitudinally, establishing communication between the compressor cylinder and the drum containing the piston. It will be seen that the upper face of the piston is exposed so as to be subjected to atmospheric pressure only, and when the compressor is in operation a portion of the air in the compressor cylinder passes through the hollow rod into the space beneath the piston, and there exerts sufficient pressure, in combination with the pressure on the inner face of the valve, to open the valve against an equal pressure in the receiver or conducting pipes, so that when the pressure in the cylinder equals the pressure in the receivers the valve is opened and held in place until the piston in the cylinder starts on the return stroke, when the pressure under the piston is immediately relieved through the hollow rod and the main valve closes. The space between the valve and its seat is made as shallow as possible, so that the space may be quickly filled and exhausted. The piston may be adjusted to regulate this space. This invention was recently patented by Messrs. Samuel B. Connor and Henry Dods, of Virginia City, Nevada. * * * * * IMPROVED SAFETY VALVE. In the annexed cut we have represented a steam safety valve, which is the invention of M. Schmidt, M. E., of Zurich, Switzerland. It consists of a lever terminating in two prongs, one of which extends downward and rests upon the cap, closing the top of the tube through which the steam escapes. The other prong extends upward and catches under a projection of the steam tube, and forms the fulcrum for the lever. The opposite end of this lever is provided with an adjustable screw pressing upon a plate that rests on the top of a spiral spring, which keeps the valve closed by pressing the outer end of the lever upward. As soon as the pressure of the steam overcomes the pressure of the spiral spring the valve will be raised, permitting the steam to escape. The apparatus is contained in a case having a central aperture for the escape of steam. [Illustration: IMPROVED SAFETY VALVE.] * * * * * RAISING SUNKEN VESSELS. An experiment recently took place in the East India Dock Basin, Blackwall, London, by permission of Mr. J. L. du Plat Taylor, the secretary of the Dock Company, for the purpose of testing and illustrating the mode of raising sunken ships by means of the apparatus patented by Mr. William Atkinson, naval engineer, of Sheffield. The machinery employed consists of the necessary number and size, according to the power required, of oval or egg-shaped buoys constructed of sheet iron, having an internal valve of a simple and effective character. Captain Hales Dutton, the dock master, who assisted during the operations, had placed his small yacht at the inventor's service for the occasion. The vessel was moored in the basin, and a set of four buoys were attached to it, one on each side near the bow and the stern. Air was supplied from a pump on the quay by a pipe communicating with a small copper globe resting on the deck of the vessel, and from which place proceeded four other flexible tubes, one to each buoy, thus distributing the air to each one equally. The vessel being flooded and in a sinking condition, the buoys were attached and the valves opened; they rapidly filled with water, and the vessel immediately sank in about 30 feet. Upon the first attempt an air chamber in the stern had been lost sight of, causing the vessel to come up to the surface stern uppermost; this being rectified, the vessel was again sent to the bottom, and allowed to remain a short time to allow her to settle down. When the order was given to work the pump, the vessel was brought to the surface, perfectly level, in about three minutes. The apparatus used, although only models, and on a comparatively diminutive scale (the buoys measuring 3 feet 4 inches in height and 2 feet 6 inches in diameter), was estimated to be capable of lifting a weight of nearly 20 tons, and that it needed, as represented by the patentee, only a corresponding increase in the lifting power to deal successfully with vessels of any tonnage. * * * * * NEW HAND POWER BAND SAW. The engraving shows a new hand power band saw made by Frank & Co., of Buffalo, N. Y., and designed to be used in shops where there is no power and where a larger machine would be useless. It is calculated to meet the wants of a large class of mechanics, including carpenters and builders, cabinet makers, and wagon makers. It is capable of sawing stuff six inches thick, and has a clear space of thirty inches between the saw and the frame. The upper wheel is adjusted by a screw pressing against a rubber spring which compensates for the expansion and contraction of the saw. The machine has a very complete device for raising, lowering, and adjusting the wheel, and all of the parts are made with a view to obtaining the best results in the simplest and most desirable way. The machine is six feet wide and five feet high, and weighs 380 lb. The wheels are covered with pure rubber bands well cemented. [Illustration: HAND POWER BAND SAW.] Further particulars may be obtained by addressing Messrs. Frank & Co., 176 Terrace street, Buffalo, N. Y. * * * * * THE HARBOR OF MONTREAL. A plan for the improvement of the harbor of Montreal, Canada, has been submitted to the City Board of Trade by James Shearer, a well known citizen. Mr. Shearer's plan is to divert the current of the St. Lawrence opposite the city into the channels between St. Helen's Island and the southern shore, and by having various obstructions removed from the channel, and running a dam, or "peninsula," as he calls it, built from Point St. Charles, in the west end of the city, to St. Helen's Island, midway in the river, thus stopping the current from running through the present main channel between the city and St. Helen's Island. Among the practical advantages that will accrue to the city and harbor from the carrying out of this project, Mr. Shearer sets forth the following: The dam will prevent the shoring of ice opposite the city, and the consequent flooding of the Griffintown district, which is annually very destructive to property, and will make a still harbor, where vessels may lie during the winter. It is estimated that the construction of the dam, which would be 2,700 feet long and 900 feet broad, would raise the water two feet in the river and lower it ten feet in the harbor. This would give a head of twenty-five feet for mills, elevators, and factories, and the transportation of freight. The dam would afford a roadway across the river, upon the construction of a bridge from St. Helen's Island to St. Lambert, thus removing the necessity of a tunnel. The roadway could be utilized for a railway, a road for carriages and foot passengers. The estimated cost of the improvement is $7,000,000. * * * * * APPARATUS FOR REMOVING ICE FROM RAILROADS. The engraving shows an improved apparatus for removing snow and ice from railroads and streets by means of heat. The invention consists of a double furnace mounted on wheels, which are incased in the fire boxes of the furnace, so that in use the entire apparatus, including the wheels, will become highly heated, so that the snow and ice will not only be melted by radiant heat, but by the actual contact of the hot surfaces of the furnace and wheels. This apparatus was recently patented by the late E. H. Angamar, of New Orleans, La. [Illustration: APPARATUS FOR REMOVING ICE FROM RAILROADS.] * * * * * ERICSSON'S NEW SUBMARINE GUN. The protracted trials conducted on board the Destroyer to test its submarine gun terminated last week. Having, says the _Army and Navy Journal_, in a previous issue described this novel type of naval artillery, it will suffice to remind our readers that its caliber is 16 inches, length of bore 30 feet, and that it is placed at the bottom of the vessel, the muzzle passing through an opening formed in the wrought iron stem. We have hitherto, in discussing the properties of the Destroyer, referred to its offensive weapon as a "torpedo," a term not altogether inappropriate while it was actuated by compressed air. But Capt. Ericsson having in the meantime wholly abolished compressed air in his new system of naval attack, substituting guns and gunpowder as the means of producing motive energy, it will be proper to adopt the constructor's term, _projectile_. It will not surprise those who are acquainted with the laws of hydrostatics and the enormous resistance offered to bodies moving swiftly through water, that the determination of the proper form of projectile for the submarine gun has demanded protracted experiments, commencing at the beginning of June and continued up to last week, as before stated. The greater portion of these experiments, it should be observed, has been carried out with a gun 30 feet long, 15 inches caliber--not a breech-loader, however, as in the Destroyer, but a muzzle-loader, suspended under the bottom of two wrecking scows, the gun being lifted above the water, after each shot, by shears and suitable tackle. The present projectile of the Destroyer is the result of the extended trials referred to; its length is 25 feet 6 inches, diameter 16 inches, and its weight 1,500 pounds, including 250 pounds of explosive materials. We are not at liberty at present to describe its form, but we may mention that the great length of the body and the absence of all internal machinery enable the constructor to carry the stated enormous quantity of explosive matter. With minimum charge of powder in the chamber of the gun, the speed attained by the projectile reaches 310 feet in the first three seconds. The question may be asked, in view of these facts, whether the boasted costly steam ram is not superseded by the cheap aggressive system represented by the Destroyer. Evidently the most powerful of the English steam rams could not destroy an armored ship as effectually as the projectile from the submarine gun, the explosion of which is capable of shattering any naval structure. It should be borne in mind, also, that being protected by heavy inclined transverse armor, the Destroyer, attacking bows on, can defy ordnance of all calibers. Again, the carrier of the submarine gun, in addition to the swiftness of its projectile, can outrun ironclad ships. * * * * * RECENT INVENTIONS. Mr. Francis M. Osborn, of Port Chester, N. Y., has patented a covering for a horse that protects him from the weather and from chafing. The blanket has a band, also stays and straps, the use of which does away with the surcingle and affords a most efficient protection for the horse, and may be easily worn under harness in wet weather or at other times, when desirable. A novel device, designed especially for containing boxes of cigars and protecting and displaying their contents, has been patented by Mr. Robert B. Dando, of Alta, Iowa. The invention consists of a case containing shelves, on which are fixed the covered cigar or other boxes, cords connecting the box lids and case doors, so that the opening of the case doors causes the box lids to open. An improved bottle stopper has been patented by Mr. Andrew Walker, of Cincinnati, O. The invention consists in combining with the stopper caps connected by an intermediate spring. Mr. James B. Law, of Darlington Court House, S. C., has patented an improved construction of buckle for fastening the ends of cotton and other bale bands; it consists in a buckle having a permanent seat for one end of the bale band, a central opening, into which the other end of the band is entered through an oblique channel, and a bar offsetting from the plane of the buckle, notched or recessed to prevent lateral movement of the band, and connecting the free ends of the buckle on each side of the oblique channel to strengthen the buckle. An improved buckboard wagon has been patented by Mr. William Sanford, of Cohoes, N. Y. The invention consists in combining with the buckboards curved longitudinal springs placed beneath the buckboards, and curved cross springs connected at their ends with the buckboards by cap plates so as to increase the strength and elasticity of the wagon. An improved vehicle wheel has been patented by Messrs. George W. Dudley and William J. Jones, of Waynesborough, Va. The main object of this invention is to form a wheel hub for vehicles in such manner that the wheel will yield sufficiently when undue and sudden strains or jars may come upon it to receive the force of the blow and shield the other portions of the vehicle from the destructive effects of such action, as well as to afford ease and comfort of motion to the occupant; and the improvement consists in securing the inner ends of the spokes to rim plates, to form a fixed and solid connection therewith, the rim plates being loosely secured to the butt flanges and box of the hub, so that it is free to move in a vertical plane, but prevented from moving laterally and limited in its vertical movement by an elastic packing interposed between the inner ends of the spokes and the hub box. Mr. Francis G. Powers, of Moweaqua, Ill., has patented an improvement in the class of atmospheric clothes pounders, that is to say, pounders which are constructed with one or more chambers or cavities in which the air is alternately compressed and allowed to expand at each reciprocation. An improved means for connecting the body of a baby carriage to the running gear has been patented by Mr. Charles M. Hubbard, of Columbus, Ohio. It consists in supporting the rear end by one or more coil springs, and hinging the front portion of the body to a pair of upturned supports rising from the front axle. An improved ferrule for awl handles has been patented by Mr. Jules Steinmeyer, of St. Louis, Mo. The object of this invention is to prevent splitting of the handle, to secure both the ferrule and leather pad firmly in place, and to furnish a durable and serviceable awl handle. * * * * * NEW TELEGRAPH INSULATOR. The insulator represented in the annexed engraving was originally designed to meet the requirements of South American telegraph service, but it is equally well adapted to lines in other places. The main idea is to avoid breakage from expansion and contraction in a climate subject to sudden changes of temperature, and to avoid the mischief occasioned by a well known South American bird, the "hornero," by building nests of mud on the brackets and insulators. With this insulator these nests cannot cause a weather contact or earth; on the contrary, the nest rather improves the insulation. The sectional view, Fig 2, shows the construction of the insulator and the manner of fastening it to the cross arm or bracket. A rubber ring is placed between the upper end of the porcelain insulator and the cross arm, and another similar ring is placed between the head of the suspending screw and the bottom of the insulator. It will be noticed that with this construction the insulator cannot be broken by the contraction of the screw or by the swelling of the cross-piece. This insulator can be used on an iron bracket and in connection with either iron or wooden posts, and is in every way more secure than the insulators in common use. The first cost of these insulators compares favorably with the cheapest in market, while it is less liable to breakage, lasts longer, and gives better results. It has been patented in this country and in Europe. [Illustration: IMPROVED TELEGRAPH INSULATOR.] Further information maybe obtained by addressing Mr. J. H. Bloomfield, Concordia, Entre Reos, Argentine Republic, South America. * * * * * BUSINESS COLLEGES. PACKARD'S BUSINESS COLLEGE. [Illustration: THE FIRST DEPARTMENT] [Illustration: SECOND DEPARTMENT] [Illustration: THIRD DEPARTMENT] [Illustration: FOURTH OR FINISHING DEPARTMENT] [Illustration: THE BUDGET ROOM] [Illustration: THE ASSEMBLY ROOM] There are two very general prejudices against the class of schools known as business colleges. One is that their chief aim--next to lining the pockets of their proprietors--is to turn out candidates for petty clerkships, when the country is already overrun with young men whose main ambition is to stand at a desk and "keep books." The other is that the practical outcome of these institutions is a swarm of conceited flourishers with the pen, who, because they have copied a set or two of model account books and learned to imitate more or less cleverly certain illegibly artistic writing copies, imagine themselves competent for any business post, and worthy of a much higher salary than any merely practical accountant who has never been to a business college or attempted the art of fancy penmanship as exhibited in spread eagles and impossible swans. As a rule popular prejudices are not wholly unfounded in reason; and we should not feel disposed to make an exception in this case. When the demand arose for a more practical schooling than the old fashioned schools afforded, no end of writing masters, utterly ignorant of actual business life and methods, hastened to set up ill managed writing schools which they dubbed "business colleges," and by dint of advertising succeeded in calling in a multitude of aspirants for clerkships. In view of the speedy discomfiture of the deluded graduates of such schools when brought face to face with actual business affairs, and the disgust of their employers who had engaged them on the strength of their alleged business training, one is not so much surprised that prejudice against business colleges still prevails in many quarters, as that the relatively few genuine institutions should have been able to gain any creditable footing at all. The single fact that they have overcome the opprobrium cast upon their name by quacks, so far as to maintain themselves in useful prosperity, winning a permanent and honorable place among the progressive educational institutions of the day, is proof enough that they have a mission to fulfill and are fulfilling it. This, however, is not simply, as many suppose, in training young men and young women to be skilled accountants--a calling of no mean scope and importance in itself--but more particularly in furnishing young people, destined for all sorts of callings, with that practical knowledge of business affairs which every man or woman of means has constant need of in every-day life. Thus the true business college performs a twofold function. As a technical school it trains its students for a specific occupation, that of the accountant; at the same time it supplements the education not only of the intending merchant, but equally of the mechanic, the man of leisure, the manufacturer, the farmer, the professional man--in short, of any one who expects to mix with or play any considerable part in the affairs of men. The mechanic who aspires to be the master of a successful shop of his own, or foreman or manager in the factory of another, will have constant need of the business habits and the knowledge of business methods and operations which a properly conducted business school will give him. The same is true of the manufacturer, whose complicated, and it may be extensive, business relations with the producers and dealers who supply him with raw material, with the workmen who convert such material into finished wares, with the merchants or agents who market the products of his factory, all require his oversight and direction. Indeed, whoever aspires to something better than a hand-to-mouth struggle with poverty, whether as mechanic, farmer, professional man, or what not, must of necessity be to some degree a business man; and in every position in life business training and a practical knowledge of financial affairs are potent factors in securing success. How different, for example, would have been the history of our great inventors had they all possessed that knowledge of business affairs which would have enabled them to put their inventions in a business like way before the world, or before the capitalists whose assistance they wished to invoke. The history of invention is full of illustrations of men who have starved with valuable patents standing in their names--patents which have proved the basis of large fortunes to those who were competent to develop the wealth that was in them. How often, too, do we see capable and ingenious and skillful mechanics confined through life to a small shop, or to a subordinate position in a large shop, solely through their inability to manage the affairs of a larger business. On the other hand, it is no uncommon thing to see what might be a profitable business--which has been fairly thrust upon a lucky inventor or manufacturer by the urgency of popular needs--fail disastrously through ignorance of business methods and inability to conduct properly the larger affairs which fell to the owner's hand. Of course a business training is not the only condition of success in life. Many have it and fail; others begin without it and succeed, gaining a working knowledge of business affairs through the exigencies of their own increasing business needs. Nevertheless, in whatever line in life a man's course may fall, a practical business training will be no hinderance to him, while the lack of it may be a serious hinderance. The school of experience is by no means to be despised. To many it is the only school available. But unhappily its teachings are apt to come too late, and often they are fatally expensive. Whoever can attain the needed knowledge in a quicker and cheaper way will obviously do well so to obtain it; and the supplying of such practical knowledge, and the training which may largely take the place of experience in actual business, is the proper function of the true business college. Our purpose in this writing, however, was not so much to enlarge upon the utility of business colleges, properly so called, as to describe the practical working of a representative institution, choosing for the purpose Packard's Business College in this city. This school was established in 1858, under the name of Bryant, Stratton & Packard's Mercantile College, by Mr. S. S. Packard, the present proprietor. It formed the New York link in the chain of institutions known as the Bryant & Stratton chain of business colleges, which ultimately embraced fifty co working schools in the principal cities of the United States and Canada. In 1867 Mr. Packard purchased the Bryant & Stratton interest in the New York College, and changed its name to Packard's Business College, retaining the good will and all the co operative advantages of the Bryant & Stratton association. The original purpose of the college, as its name implies, was the education of young men for business pursuits. The experience of over twenty years has led to many improvements in the working of the school, and to a considerable enlargement of its scope and constituency, which now includes adults as well as boys, especial opportunities being offered to mature men who want particular instruction in arithmetic, bookkeeping, penmanship, correspondence, and the like. [Illustration: LECTURE AND RECITATION ROOM.] The teachers employed in the college are chosen for their practical as well as their theoretical knowledge of business affairs, and every effort is made to secure timeliness and accuracy in their teachings. Constant intercourse is kept up with the departments at Washington as to facts and changes in financial matters, and also with prominent business houses in this and other cities. Among the recent letters received in correspondence of this sort are letters from the Secretary of State of every State in the Union with regard to rates of interest and usury laws, and letters from each of our city banks as to methods of reckoning time on paper, the basis of interest calculations, the practices concerning deposit balances, and other business matters subject to change. The aim of the proprietor is to keep the school abreast of the demands of the business world, and to omit nothing, either in his methods or their enforcement, necessary to carry out his purpose honestly and completely. An idea of the superior housing of the college will be obtained from the views of half a dozen of the rooms at No 805 Broadway, as shown in this issue of the Scientific American--the finest, largest, most compact, and convenient suite of rooms anywhere used for this purpose. The college is open for students ten months of the year, five days each week, from half past nine in the morning until half past two in the afternoon. Students can enter at any time with equal advantage, the instruction being for the most part individual. The course of study can be completed in about a year. The proprietor holds that with this amount of study a boy of seventeen should be able-- 1. To take a position as assistant bookkeeper in almost any kind of business; 2. To do the ordinary correspondence of a business house, so far as good writing, correct spelling, grammatical construction, and mechanical requisites are concerned; 3. To do the work of an entry clerk or cashier; 4. To place himself in the direct line of promotion to any desirable place in business or life, with the certainty of holding his own at every step. In this the student will have the advantage over the uneducated clerk of the same age and equal worth and capacity, in that he will understand more or less practically as well as theoretically the duties of those above him, and will thus be able to advance to more responsible positions as rapidly as his years and maturity may justify. It is obvious that the knowledge which makes an expert accountant will in all probability suffice for the general business requirements of professional men, the inheritors of property and business, manufacturers, mechanics, and others to whom bookkeeping and other business arts are useful aids, but not the basis of a trade. For the last-named classes, and for women, shorter periods of study are provided, and may be made productive of good results. A sufficient idea of the general working of the college may be obtained by following a student through the several departments. After the preliminary examination a student who is to take the regular course of study enters the initiatory room. Here he begins with the rudiments of bookkeeping, the study which marks his gradation. The time not given to the practice of writing, and to recitations in other subjects, is devoted to the study of accounts. He is required, first, to write up in "skeleton" form--that is, to place the dates and amounts of the several transactions under the proper ledger titles--six separate sets of books, or the record of six different business ventures, wherein are exhibited as great a variety of operations as possible, with varying results of gains and losses, and the adjustment thereof in the partners' accounts, or in the account of the sole proprietor. After getting the results in this informal way--which is done in order as quickly as possible to get the theory of bookkeeping impressed upon his mind--he is required to go over the work again carefully, writing up with neatness and precision all the principal and auxiliary books, with the documents which should accompany the transactions, such as notes, drafts, checks, receipts, invoices, letters, etc. The work in this department will occupy an industrious and intelligent student from four to six weeks, depending upon his quickness of perception and his working qualities. While progressing in his bookkeeping, he is pursuing the collateral studies, a certain attainment in which is essential to promotion, especially correcting any marked deficiency in spelling, arithmetic, and the use of language. Upon a satisfactory examination the student now passes to the second department, where a wider scope of knowledge in accounts is opened to him, with a large amount of practical detail familiarizing him with the actual operations of business. The greatest care is taken to prevent mere copying and to throw the student upon his own resources, by obliging him to correct his own blunders, and to work out his own results; accepting nothing as final that has not the characteristics of real business. Much care is bestowed in this department upon the form and essential matter of business paper, and especially of correspondence. A great variety of letters is required to be written on assigned topics and in connection with the business which is recorded, and thorough instruction is given in the law of negotiable paper, contracts, etc. During all this time the student devotes from half an hour to an hour daily to penmanship, a plain, practical, legible hand being aimed at, to the exclusion of superfluous lines and flourishes. It is expected that the work in the first and second departments will establish the student in the main principles of bookkeeping, in its general theories, and their application to ordinary transactions. In the third department the student takes an advanced position, and is expected, during the two or three months he will remain in this department, to perfect himself in the more subtle questions involved in accounts, as well as to shake off the crude belongings of schoolboy work. He will be required to use his mind in everything he does--to depend as much as possible upon himself. The work which he presents for approval here must have the characteristics of business. His letters, statements, and papers of all kinds are critically examined, and approved only when giving evidence of conscientious work, as well as coming up to strict business requirements. Before he leaves this department he should be versed in all the theories of accounts, should write an acceptable business hand; should be able to execute a faultless letter so far as relates to form, spelling, and grammatical construction, should have a fair knowledge of commercial law, and have completed his arithmetical course. The next step is to reduce the student's theoretical knowledge to practice, in a department devoted to actual business operations. This business or finishing department is shown at the upper left corner of our front page illustration. The work in this department is as exacting and as real as the work in the best business houses and banks. At the extreme end of the room is a bank in complete operation, as perfect in its functions as any bank in this city or elsewhere. The records made in its books come from the real transactions of dealers who are engaged in different lines of business at their desks and in the offices. The small office adjoining the bank, on the right, is a post office, the only one in the country, perhaps, where true civil service rules are strictly observed. In connection with it is a transportation office. From fifty to a hundred letters daily are received and delivered by the post office, written by or to the students of this department. The correspondence thus indicated goes on not only between the students of this college, but between members of this and other similar institutions in different parts of the country. A perfected system of intercommunication has for years been in practice between co-ordinate schools in New York, Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, and other cities, by which is carried on an elaborate scheme of interchangeable business, little less real in its operations and results than the more tangible and obtrusive activity which the world recognizes as business. The work of the transportation office corresponds with that of the post office in its simulation of reality. The alleged articles handled are represented by packages bearing all the characteristic marks of freight and express packages. They are sent by mail to the transportation company, and by this agency delivered to the proper parties, from whom the charges are collected in due form, and the requisite vouchers passed. Whatever is necessary in the way of manipulation to secure the record on either hand is done, and, so far as the clerical duties are concerned, there is no difference between handling pieces of paper which represent merchandise and handling the real article. In the bank is employed a regular working force, such as may be found in any bank, consisting of a collector or runner, a discount clerk, a deposit bookkeeper, a general bookkeeper, and a cashier. The books are of the regular form, and the work is divided as in most banks of medium size, and the business that is presented differs in no important particular from that which comes to ordinary banks. After getting a fair knowledge of theory, the student is placed in this bank. He begins in the lowest place, and works up gradually to the highest, remaining long enough in each position to acquaint himself with its duties. He is made familiar with the form and purpose of all kinds of business paper, and the rules which govern a bank's dealings with its customers. He gets a practical knowledge of the law of indorsement and of negotiability generally, and is called upon to decide important questions which arise between the bank and its dealers. Wherever he finds himself at fault he has access to a teacher whose duty it is to give the information for which he asks, and who is competent to do it. Throughout the whole of this course of study and practice the students are treated like men and are expected to behave like men. The college thus becomes a self-regulating community, in which the students learn not only to govern themselves, but to direct and control others. As one is advanced in position his responsibilities are increased. He is first a merchant or agent, directing his own work; next, a sub-manager, and finally manager in a general office or the bank, with clerks subject to his direction and criticism, until he arrives at the exalted position of "superintendent of offices," which gives him virtual control of the department. This is, in fact, an important part of his training, and the reasonable effect of the system is that the student, being subject to orders from those above him, and remembering that he will shortly require a like consideration from those below him, concludes that he cannot do a better thing for his own future comfort than to set a wholesome example of subordination. This, however, is not the only element of personal discipline that the college affords. At every step the student's conduct, character, and progress are noted, recorded, and securely kept for the teacher's inspection, as well as that of his parents and himself. Such records are kept in the budget room, shown in the lower left corner of the front page. This budget system was suggested by the difficulties encountered in explaining to parents the progress and standing of their sons. The inconvenience of summoning teachers, and of taking students from their work, made necessary some simpler and more effective plan. The first thing required of a new student is that he should give some account of himself, and to submit to such examinations and tests as will acquaint his teachers with his status. This account and these tests constitute the subject-matter of his first budget, which is placed at the bottom of his box, and every four weeks thereafter, while he remains in the school, he is required to present the results of his work, such as his written examinations in the various studies, his test examples in arithmetic, his French, German, and Spanish translations and exercises, various letters and forms, with four weekly specimens of improvement in writing, the whole to be formally submitted to the principal in an accompanying letter; the letter itself to exhibit what can be thus shown of improvement in writing, expression, and general knowledge. These budgets, accumulating month by month, are made to cover as much as possible of the student's school work, and to constitute the visible steps of his progress. Besides this is a character record, kept in a small book assigned to each student, every student having free access to his own record, but not to that of any fellow student. Each book contains the record of a student's deportment from the first to the last day of his attendance, with such comments and recommendations as his several teachers may think likely to be of encouragement or caution to him. In addition to the strictly technical training furnished by the college, there is given also not a little collateral instruction calculated to be of practical use to business men. For example, after roll call every morning some little time is spent in exercises designed to cultivate the art of intelligent expression of ideas. Each day a number of students are appointed to report orally, in the assembly room, upon such matters or events mentioned in the previous day's newspapers as may strike the speaker as interesting or important. Or the student may describe his personal observation of any event, invention, manufacture, or what not; or report upon the condition, history, or prospects of any art, trade, or business undertaking. This not to teach elocution, but to train the student to think while standing, and to express himself in a straightforward, manly way. Instruction is also given in the languages likely to be required in business intercourse or correspondence; in phonography, so far as it may be required for business purposes; commercial law relative to contracts, negotiable paper, agencies, partnerships, insurance, and other business proceedings and relations; political economy, and incidentally any and every topic a knowledge of which may be of practical use to business men. In all this the ultimate end and aim of the instruction offered are practical workable results. Mr. Packard regards education as a tool. If the tool has no edge, is not adapted to its purpose, is not practically usable, it is worthless as a tool. This idea is kept prominent in all the work of the college, and its general results justify the position thus taken. The graduates are not turned out as finished business men, but as young men well started on the road toward that end. As Mr. Packard puts it: "Their diplomas do not recommend them as bank cashiers or presidents, or as managers of large or small enterprises, but simply as having a knowledge of the duties of accountantship. They rarely fail to fulfill reasonable expectations; and they are not responsible for unreasonable ones." * * * * * AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS. The fourteenth annual convention of the American Institute of Architects began in Philadelphia, November 17. Mr. Thomas U. Walter, of Philadelphia, presided, and fifty or more prominent architects were present. In his annual address the president spoke of the tendency of the architectural world as decidedly in the direction of originality. But little attention is paid to the types of building drawn from the works of by-gone ages or to the mannerisms of the more recent past. Progress in the development of the elements of taste and beauty, and the concretion of æsthetic principles with common sense in architectural design, are now everywhere apparent. The responsibilities of architects are greater than they have ever before been; the growing demand of the times calls for intelligent studies in all that relates to architecture, whether it be in the realm of æsthetics, in sciences that relate to construction, in the nature and properties of the materials used, in the atmosphere that surrounds us, or in the availability of the thousand-and-one useful and ingenious inventions that tend to promote the convenience and completeness of structures. Papers were read by Mr. A. J. Blood, of New York, on "The Best Method of Solving the Tenement House Problem;" Mr. George T. Mason, Jr., of Newport, on "The Practice of American Architects during the Colonial Period;" Mr. Robert Briggs, of Philadelphia, on "The Ventilation of Audience Rooms;" Mr. T. M. Clark, of Boston, on "French Building Laws, etc." The following named officers were elected: President, T. U. Walter, Philadelphia; Treasurer, O. P. Hatfield, New York; Secretary, A. J. Blood. Trustees, R. M. Hunt, H. M. Congdon, J. Cady, Napoleon Le Brun, New York. Committee on Publication, R. M. Upjohn, New York; T. M. Clark, Boston; John McArthur, Jr., Philadelphia; A. J. Blood, H. M. Congdon, New York. Committee on Education, W. R. Narr, Boston; Russell Sturgis, New York; N. Clifford Ricker, Champagne, Ill.; Henry Van Brunt, Boston; Alfred Stone, Providence. Corresponding Secretary, T. M. Clark, Boston. The time and place of the next annual convention were left to the Board of Trustees, with a request that Washington be selected. * * * * * VENNOR'S WINTER PREDICTIONS. He communicates as follows to the Albany _Argus_: "December will, in all probability, open with little snow, but the weather will be cloudy, threatening snow falls. During the opening days of the month, dust, with the very light mixture of snow which may have fallen, will be swept in flurries by the gusty wind. There will probably be some snow from about the 4th of the month. With the second quarter of the month colder weather will probably set in with falls of snow. The farmers will be able to enjoy sleigh rides in the cold, exhilarating air, but good sleighing need not be expected until after the middle of the month. There will be a spell of mild weather about the 13th and 14th. After a brief interval of mild weather, during which more snow will fall, the third quarter of the month will probably see blustering and cold weather--a cold snap with heavy snow storms and consequent good sleighing. Very cold weather may be expected during this quarter. The last quarter of the month will bring milder weather, but will terminate, probably, with heavy snow-falls and stormy weather; in fact, the heaviest snow falls will be toward the end of the month, and snow blockades may be looked for, the snow falls extending far to the southward, possibly as far as Washington, with very stormy weather around New York and Boston." Mr. Vennor's latest predictions are that the coming month will be "decidedly cold, with tremendous snow-falls during the latter half and early part of January, causing destructive blockades to railroads." * * * * * THE LONDON UNDERGROUND RAILWAY. The opening recently of the extension of the Metropolitan Railway to Harrow, and the early commencement of another of the lines of the company, give especial prominence to it. The Metropolitan Underground Railway is emphatically the great passenger railway of the country, for its few miles of line carry more than the hundreds of miles of line of companies such as the London and North Western or Great Western. Seventeen years ago--in 1868--the Metropolitan carried less than 10,000,000 passengers, and in the full year's work of the following twelve months it carried less than 12,000,000. But year by year, almost without exception, the number of passengers has grown. In 1865, over 15,000,000 passengers were carried; in 1867, over 23,000,000; and in 1870, over 39,000,000 passengers traveled on the line. The years that have since passed have swollen that number. In 1872, over 44,300,000 were carried, but in the following year there was one of the few checks, and not till 1875 was the number of 1872 exceeded. In 1875 it rose to 48,302,000; in 1877 it had advanced to 56,175,000; in 1878 to 58,807,000; and in 1879 to 60,747,000. In the present year there has been a further advance, the number carried for the first six months of the present year being 31,592,429. When it is borne in mind that this is equal to 7,272 passengers every hour, and that the length of line worked by the company's engines, including that of the "foreign" line worked, is slightly less than 25 miles, the fecundity in traffic of the metropolitan district must be said to be marvelous. It is to be regretted that the official account from which these figures are given does not give any idea of the number of passengers in the different classes, for such a return would be of value. It is a marvelous fact in the history of locomotion that this great passenger traffic is worked with not more than 53 engines, while the total number of carriages, 195, is in comparison with the number of travelers in them a marvel in railway history. But it is tolerably clear that there is yet a vast amount of undeveloped metropolitan traffic, and it is also certain that as that traffic is developed the future of the Metropolitan as it attains more completeness will be brighter even than it has been in the past. The great city is more and more the mart of the world, and the traffic and travel to and in it must increase. That increase will be shared in considerable degree by the "underground" companies, and as they have shown that their capabilities of traffic are almost boundless, it may be expected that the oldest and the chief of these will in the early future know a growth as continuous if less rapid than in the past. We take the above from the _Engineer_, London. In this city there are now existing 27 miles of elevated steam railways for local passenger traffic. These roads have carried during the past year 61,000,000 of passengers. In this service they employ 175 locomotives and 500 passenger cars. It is a terrible nuisance to have these locomotives and cars constantly whizzing through the public streets; still the roads are a great accommodation. The only underground railway in this city is that of the New York Central and Hudson River, 4 miles in length, extending under Fourth avenue from Forty-second street to Harlem River. Over this road the enormous traffic of the Central, Harlem, and the New Haven roads, with their connections, passes. But so removed from public sight are the cars and locomotives that the existence of this underground railway is almost forgotten. * * * * * TEMPERING CHISELS. A practical mechanic communicates to the Scientific American the following: In hardening and tempering a cold chisel care should be taken to have a gradual shading of temper. If there is a distinct boundary line of temper color between the hard cutting edge and softer shank portion, it will be very apt to break at or near that line. The cutting edge portion of the chisel should be supported by a backing of steel gradually diminishing in hardness; and so with all metal cutting tools that are subjected to heavy strain. Not every workman becomes uniformly successful in this direction, for, in addition to dexterity, it requires a nice perception of degree of heat and of color in order to obtain the best result. * * * * * MR. A. A. KNUDSON, of Brooklyn, N. Y., has lately perfected and patented a system of protecting oil tanks from lightning, which is approved by several prominent electricians. The invention includes a device for distributing a spray of water over the top of the tank for condensing the rising vapor and cooling the tank; a system of lightning conductors connected with a gutter surrounding the tank, and a hollow earth terminal connected with the gutter by a pipe, and designed to moisten the earth, and at the same time prevent the earth around the terminal from becoming saturated with oil. * * * * * A correspondant of the _Christian Union_, writing from Constantinople, says that Abd ul-Hamid, the Sultan of Turkey, reads the Scientific American, the engravings in which seem to specially interest him. The writer adds that whatever in literature the Sultan may chance to hear of which he thinks may interest him, he has translated into Turkish. * * * * * AMATEUR MECHANICS. A SIMPLE SINGLE-ACTING STEAM ENGINE. The great bugbear staring the amateur mechanic in the face when he contemplates making a small steam engine is the matter of boring the cylinder. To bore an iron cylinder on a foot lathe is difficult even when the lathe is provided with automatic feed gear, and it is almost impossible with the ordinary light lathe possessed by most amateurs. To bore a brass cylinder is easier, but even this is difficult, and the cylinder, when done, is unsatisfactory on account of the difficulty of adapting a durable piston to it. The engravings show a simple steam engine, which requires no difficult lathe work; in fact the whole of the work may be done on a very ordinary foot lathe. The engine is necessarily single-acting, but it is effective nevertheless, being about 1-20 H. P., with suitable steam supply. It is of sufficient size to run a foot lathe, scroll saw, or two or three sewing machines. The cylinder and piston are made from mandrel drawn brass tubing, which may be purchased in any desired quantity in New York city. The fittings are mostly of brass, that being an easy metal to work. The principal dimensions of the engine are as follows: Cylinder.--Internal diameter, 1½ in.; thickness, 1/8 in.; length, 3-3/8 in. Piston.--External diameter, 1½ in.; thickness, 3-32 in.; length, 3¾ in. Length of stroke. 2 in. Crank pin.--Diameter, 1/4 in.; length of bearing surface, 1/2 in. Connecting rod.--Diameter, 5/16 in.; length between centers, 5½ in. Shaft.--Diameter, 5/8 in.; diameter of bearings, 1/2 in.; length. 6 in.; distance from bed to center of shaft, 1½ in. Flywheel.--Diameter, 8 in.; weight, 10 lb. Valve.--Diameter of chamber, 9-16 in.; length, 1¼ in.; width of valve face working over supply port, 3/32 in.; width of space under valve, 3/8 in.; length of the same, 1 in.; distance from center of valve spindle to center of eccentric rod pin, 3/4 in. Ports, supply--Width, 1/16 inch.; length, 1 in. Exhaust.--Width, 1/8 in.; length, 1 in.; space between ports, 5-16 in. Pipes.--Steam supply, 1/4 in.; exhaust, 3/8 in. Eccentric.--Stroke, 3/4 in.; diameter, 1-5/16 in. length of eccentric rod between centers, 8-3/8 in. Cut off, 5/8 Thickness of base plate, 1/4 in. Wooden base, 6¼ in x 8 in.: 2-3/8 in. thick. Thickness of plate supporting cylinder, 3/8 in. Total height of engine, 13¼ in. Distance from base plate to under side of cylinder head. 9¼ in. Diameter of vertical posts, 9-16 in.; distance apart, 3½ in.; length between shoulders 6¼ in. Base plate fastened to base with 1/4 in. bolts. The connecting rod, eccentric rod, crank pin, and shaft, are of steel. The eccentric-strap and flywheel are cast iron, and the other portions of the engine are of brass. The screw threads are all chased, and the flange, a, and head of the piston, F, in addition to being screwed, are further secured by soft solder. Fig. 1 shows the engine in perspective. Fig 2 is a side elevation, with parts broken away. Fig. 3 is a vertical transverse section. Fig. 4 is a partial plan view. Fig. 5 is a detail view of the upper end of the connecting rod and its connections; and Fig. 6 is a horizontal section taken through the middle of the valve chamber. The cylinder, A, is threaded externally for 1 inch from its lower end, and the collar, a, 1/4 inch thick, is screwed on and soldered. The face of the collar is afterward turned true. The same thread answers for the nut which clamps the cylinder in the plate, B, and for the gland, b, of the stuffing box, which screws over the beveled end of the cylinder, and contains fibrous packing filled with asbestos or graphite. The posts, C, are shouldered at the ends and secured in their places by nuts. Their bearing surface on the plate, D, is increased by the addition of a collar screwed on. The posts are made from drawn rods of brass, and need no turning except at the ends. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--SIMPLE SINGLE-ACTING STEAM ENGINE] The cylinder head, E, which is a casting containing the valve chamber, is screwed in. The piston, F, fits the cylinder closely, but not necessarily steam tight. The head is screwed in and soldered, and the yoke, G, which receives the connecting rod pin, is screwed into the head. The connecting rod, H, is of steel with brass ends. The lower end, which receives the crank pin, is split, and provided with a tangent screw for taking up wear. The crank pin is secured in the crank disk, I, by a nut on the back. The eccentric rod, J, is of steel, screwed at its lower end into an eccentric strap of cast or wrought iron, which surrounds the eccentric, K. The valve, L, is slotted in the back to receive the valve spindle, by which it is oscillated. The ports are formed by drilling from the outside, and afterward forming the slot, with a graver or small sharp chisel. The supply port, for convenience, may be somewhat enlarged below. The holes for the exhaust port will be drilled through the hole into which the exhaust pipe is screwed. The chamber communicating with the exhaust is cored out in the casting. The easiest way to make the valve is to cut it out of a solid cylinder turned to fit the valve chamber. An engine of this kind will work well under a steam pressure of 50 lb., and it may be run at the rate of 200 to 250 revolutions per minute. [Illustration: SIDE ELEVATION. SECTIONAL, AND DETAIL VIEWS OF SIMPLE STEAM ENGINE] It is desirable to construct a flat pasteboard model to verify measurements and to get the proper adjustment of the valve before beginning the engine. M. * * * * * MISCELLANEOUS INVENTIONS. An improved finger ring has been patented by Mr. David Untermeyer, of New York city. The object of this invention is to furnish finger rings so constructed that they can be opened out to represent serpents, and which, when being worn, will give no indication of being anything more than rings. An improved heel skate-fastener has been patented by Mr. Elijah S. Coon, of Watertown, N.Y. This invention consists, essentially, of a screw threaded hollow plug or thimble, a dirt plate for covering the opening in the plug, and a spring for holding the dirt plate in place. This fastener possesses several advantages over one that is permanently attached to the heel. Being cylindrical, it is more easily connected, because the hole for its reception can be made with a common auger or bit without the necessity for lasting the boot or shoe or using a knife or chisel. Being screw threaded it can be readily screwed into place with a common screwdriver; this also enables it to be screwed either in or out, in order to make it fit the heel key. The screw thread permits of screwing it in beyond the surface of the heel, so as to prevent it from wearing out by the ordinary wearing of the shoe. An improved velocipede has been patented by Messrs. Charles E. Tripler and William H. Roff, of New York city. The object of this invention is to obtain a more advantageous application of the propelling power than the ordinary cranks, to avoid the noise of pawls and ratchets, and to guard the velocipedes against being overturned should one of the rear wheels pass over an obstruction. Mr. Philip H. Pax on, of Camden, N. J., has patented a machine that will cut lozenges in a perfect manner, and will not be clogged by the gum and sugar of the lozenge dough. Mr. John H. Robertson, of New York city, has patented an improved mat, which consists of longitudinal metal bars provided with alternate mortised and tenoned ends, and composed of series of sockets united by webs and of wooden transverse rods entered through said sockets and held therein by vertical pins. Mr. Charles F. Clapp, of Ripon, Wis, has patented a novel arrangement of a desk attachment for trunks. The desk and tray may be lifted from the trunk when the desk is either raised or lowered. A combined scraper, chopper, and dirter has been patented by Messrs. Francis A. Hall and Nathaniel B. Milton, of Monroe, La. The object of this invention is to furnish an implement so constructed as to bar off a row of plants, chop the plants to a stand, and dirt the plants at one passage along the row, and which shall be simple, convenient, and reliable. Mr. Hermann H. Cammann, of New York city, has patented a basket so constructed that it can be compactly folded for transportation or storage. Messrs. David H. Seymour and Henry R. A. Boys, of Barrie, Ontario, Canada, have patented an improvement in that class of devices that are designed to be applied to steam cylinders for introducing oil or tallow into the cylinder and upon the cylinder valves. It consists of an oil cup provided with a gas escape, a scum breaker, an interior gauge, and an adjustable feed pipe extension. Mr. John H. Conrad, of Charlotte, Mich., has patented a portable sliding gate which will dispense with hinges and which can be used in any width of opening. It may be readily connected with a temporary opening or gap made in the fence. An improved reversible pole and shaft for vehicles has been patented by Mr. Francis M. Heuett, of Jug Tavern, Ga. The object of this invention is to so combine the parts of shafts for vehicles that they may be readily transposed and re-employed to form the tongue without removing the thill arms or hounds from the Mr. William Jones, of Kalamazoo, Mich., has patented an improved box which is useful for various purposes, but is particularly intended for shipping fourth class mail matter. The feature of special novelty is the means of fastening the hinged cover. Mr. Louis J. Halbert, of Brooklyn, N. Y., has patented an improved slate cleaner, which is simple, convenient, and effective. An improved boot, which is simple in its make, fits well, and is convenient to put on and take off, has been patented by Ellene A. Bailey, of St. Charles, Mo. The boot is provided with side seams, one of which is open at its lower end, and is provided with lacing, buttons, or a like device, so that it can be closed when the boot is on the wearer's foot. * * * * * THE HERCULES BEETLE. In the handsome engraving herewith are shown the male and female of the Hercules beetle (_Dynastes hercules_) of Brazil. The family of the _Dynastidæ_ comprises some of the largest and most beautiful of the beetle race, and all of them are remarkable for enormous developments of the thorax and head. They are all large bodied and stout limbed, and by their great strength abundantly justify their generic name, _Dynastes_, which is from the Greek and signifies powerful. The larvæ of these beetles inhabit and feed upon decaying trees and other rotting vegetable matter, and correspond in size with the mature insects. Most of them inhabit tropical regions, where they perform a valuable service in hastening the destruction of dead or fallen timber. An admirable example of this family of beetles is the one here represented. In the male of the Hercules beetle the upper part of the thorax is prolonged into a single, downward curving horn fully three inches long, the entire length of the insect being about six inches. The head is prolonged into a similar horn, which curves upward, giving the head and thorax the appearance of two enormous jaws, resembling the claw of a lobster. The real jaws of the insect are underneath the lower horn, which projects from the forepart of the head. The under surface of the thorax-horn carries a ridge of stiff, short, golden-yellow hairs, and the under surface and edges of the abdomen are similarly ornamented. The head, thorax, and legs are shining black; the elytra, or wing-covers, are olive-green, dotted with black spots, and are much wrinkled. The wings are large and powerful. [Illustration: THE HERCULES BEETLE] The female Hercules is quite unlike the male. It is much smaller, being not more than three and a half inches long, is without horns, and is covered with a brown hairy felt. These beetles are nocturnal in habit, and are rarely seen in the daytime, except in dark hiding places in the recesses of Brazilian forests. * * * * * A POULTERER'S VIEW OF MECHANICAL POULTRY RAISING. A prominent dealer in poultry, Mr. H. W. Knapp, of Washington Market, gives a discouraging opinion of the probable success of chicken raising by artificial means in this country. He said recently when questioned on this subject by a representative of the _Evening Post_: "I went to France to study the matter, for if it can be made to succeed it will make an immense fortune, as it has already done in Paris. I was delighted with what I saw there, and the matter at first sight seems to be so fascinating that I do not wonder that new men here are always ready to take hold of it as soon as those who have bought dear experience are only too glad to get out of it. Even clergymen and actors are bitten with the desire to transform so many pounds of corn into so many pounds of spring chicken. The now successful manager, Mackaye, spent about a thousand dollars, in constructing hatching machines and artificial mothers in Connecticut, but he found that the stage paid better, and his expensive devices may now be bought for the value of old tin. "Enthusiasts will tell you that by the new discovery chickens may be made out of corn with absolute certainty. In Paris this has been done; but the conditions are entirely different here. There the land is valuable, and they cannot devote large fields to a few hundred chickens; the French climate is so uniform that the markets of Paris cannot be supplied from the south with produce which ripens or matures before that of the neighborhood of Paris; the price of chickens is so high and labor so cheap that more care can be given with profit to one spring chicken than one of our poultry raisers could give to a dozen. Here we have plenty of land, the climate south of us is so far advanced in warmth that even with steam we cannot raise poultry ahead of the south, and the margin of profit is so small that one failure with a large batch of chickens sweeps away the profits from several successful experiments. "When persons wanted me to go into the project I declined and was called an old fogy. One man spent a fortune on the enterprise in New Jersey, and at first was hailed as a public benefactor. What was the result of all his outlay and work? He managed to hatch quantities of young chickens every February, but although he could fatten them by placing them in boxes and forcing a fattening mixture down their throats, he could not make them grow; they had no exercise; they remained puny little things, and another defect soon appeared: though fat they were tough and stringy. The breeder sent lots of them to me, and they looked fat and tender; but my customers complained that they could not be young, for they were tough and tasteless, and that I must have sold them aged dwarfs under the name of spring chickens. It was found absolutely necessary to let them run out of doors as soon as the weather allowed it, and by the time that they were ready for market the southern chickens were here and could be sold for less than these. The upshot of the business is that this breeder has sold out, and another man has now taken hold of a small part of his old establishment to try other methods of making it a success. "As to raising turkeys in that manner it will tail more disastrously than the chicken business. Size and weight are wanted in turkeys; and that reminds me," continued Mr. Knapp, "that the newspapers ought to impress the country people with the necessity of improving their poultry stock; breeding in and in is ruining poultry; every year the stock we receive is deteriorating, and this is the cause. I could give you some striking examples from my experience of forty years in the business. Some years ago we poulterers thought that ducks were going to disappear from bills of fare altogether; they were tasteless, worthless birds which people avoided. On Long Island a farmer made experiments in breeding with an old Muscovy drake, tough as an alligator, and the common duck. The result was superb and has changed the whole duck industry. If the farmers of Southern New Jersey, the sandy country best suited to turkeys, would bring from the West a few hundred wild turkeys we should have an immediate improvement. I see no such turkey now as we had twenty years ago. The breast is narrow and the body runs to length; it is all neck and legs, and can be bought by the yard. Rhode Island sends us the best turkeys, but they are not what they used to be. If, instead of attempting to beat nature at her own game, the rich men who have money to spend would devote it to better breeding, there would be an improvement. I do not yet despair of seeing immense farms wholly devoted to raising better poultry than we yet have." * * * * * THE EMBRACE OF THE MANTIS. Mr. Addison Ellsworth favors us with a transcript of a letter from Mr. Albert D. Rust, of Ennis, Ellis County, Texas, describing a remarkable exhibition of copulative cannibalism on the part of the mantis. The ferocious nature of these strange insects is well known, and is in striking contrast with the popular name, "praying mantis," which they have gained by the pious attitude they take while watching for the flies and other insects which they feed upon. About sunrise, August 28, 1880, Mr. Rust's attention was attracted by a pair of mantis, whether _Mantis religiosa_ or not, he was not sure, but from the length of the body and the shortness of the wings he was inclined to think them of some other species. The female had her arms tightly clasped around the head of the male, while his left arm was around her neck. Mr. Rust watched intently to see whether the embrace was one of war or for copulation. It proved to be both. As the two abdomens began to approach each other the female made a ferocious attack upon the male, greedily devouring his head, a part of the body, and all the arm that had encircled her neck. A moment after the eating began, Mr. Rust observed a complete union of the sexual organs, and the eating and copulation went on together. On being forcibly separated the female exhibited signs of fear at her headless mate, and it was with difficulty that they were brought together again. On being suddenly tossed upon the back of the female the male seized her with a grasp from which she could not extricate herself, and immediately the sexual union was renewed, to all appearances as perfectly as before. The pair were accidentally killed, otherwise, Mr. Rush thinks, the female would have continued her cannibalistic repast until she had devoured the entire body of her companion. This peculiarity of the mantis seems not to have been observed before, though their mutually destructive disposition has been noted by several. Desiring to study the development of these insects, M. Roesel raised a brood of them from a bag of eggs. Though plentifully supplied with flies, the young mantis fought each other constantly, the stronger devouring the weaker, until but one was left. M. Poiret was not more successful. When a pair of mantis were put together in a glass they fought viciously, the fight ending with the decapitation of the male and his being eaten by the female. * * * * * VARIEGATION OF LEAVES. BY JAMES HOGG. At the meeting of the Association of Nurserymen in Chicago, last July, one of our prominent horticulturists described leaf variegation as a disease. Incidentally this brought up the question: Does the graft affect the stock upon which it is inserted? Much confusion of ideas exists upon this subject, largely due to a loose application of the term disease. Strictly speaking, this term is only applicable to that which shows the health of the plant to be impaired. It should be distinguished from aberrant or abnormal forms, for these are not necessarily indicative of disease. Nobody thinks of saying that red or striped roses are diseased because they are departures in color from the white flower of the type species; or that white, yellow, or striped roses are diseased when the color of the type species is red. Nobody thinks of saying that double flowers are evidences of disease in the plant, or that diminution in the size of leaves or variation in their form is a disease. Why then should it be said that because leaves may become of some other color than green, or become party-colored, therefore they are diseased? If it be said that flowers are not leaves, and that therefore the analogy is not a good one, the reply is, that flowers in all their parts, and fruits also, are only leaves differently developed from the type. This fact is a proven one, and so admitted to be by all botanists and vegetable physiologists of the present day. If it be objected that by becoming double, flowers lose the power of reproducing the variety or species, the answer is, that this loss of power is not necessarily the result of disease, but may arise from various other causes. Because an animal is castrated, it surely will not be claimed that therefore it is diseased. In man and in the higher animals the power of reproduction ceases at certain ages, but it cannot therefore be said that such men or animals are diseased. Neither is a redundancy of parts an unequivocal evidence of disease. Topknot fowls and ducks are as healthy as those which do not have such appendages, and a Shetland pony is as healthy as a Percheron horse, notwithstanding the difference in their size and weight. Again, color in block or in variegation is not positive evidence of disease in animal life. The white Caucasian is as healthy as the negro, the copper-colored Malay as the red Indian. The horse, ox, and hog run through white and red to black both in solid and party-color, and all are equally healthy; so with the rabbit, dog, cat, and others of our domestic animals. In wild animals, birds, reptiles, fishes, and insects, it is the same, so that mere difference in color or combinations of color are not _prima facie_ evidence of disease. But some will say this may be true of animal life, but not of plant life. That there is a strong and evident analogy, the one with the other, is now universally admitted by physiologists. Formerly many physiologists considered leaf variegation a disease, because it generally ran in stripes lengthwise of the leaf or in spots. In the former case it was supposed to originate from disease in the leaf cells of the leaf stalk, which, as the cells grow longitudinally, naturally prolonged it to the end of the leaf. But the originating of varieties in which the variegation did not assume this form, with other considerations, has done much to upset this theory. In the variegated leaved snowberry we have the center and border of the leaf green, separated the one from the other by an isolated white or yellow zone. In the zebra-leaved eulalia and the zebra-leaved juncus, from Japan, we have the variegation of the leaf transversely instead of longitudinally, so that according to the old theory we have the anomaly of a healthy portion of the leaf producing an unhealthy portion, and that again a healthy one, and thus alternately along the whole length of the leaf. When we dissect a leaf in its primal development, we find that its cells contain colorless globules, by botanists called chlorophyl or phyto-color; these undergo changes according as they are acted upon by light, oxygen, or other agents, producing green, yellow, red, and other tints. This chlorophyl only exists in the outer or superficial cells of the parenchyma or cellular tissue of the leaf, and thus differs from starch and other substances produced in the internal cells, from which the light is more or less excluded. It is a fatty or wax-like substance, readily dissolved in alcohol or ether. The primal color of all leaves and flowers is white or a pale yellowish hue, as can readily be seen by cutting open a leaf or flower bud. The seed leaves of the French bean are white when they come out of the earth, but they become green an hour afterward under the influence of bright sunshine. A case is on record where in a certain section, some miles in extent, in this country, about the time of the trees coming into leaf, the sun did not shine for twenty days; the leaves developed to nearly their full size, but were of a pale or whitish color; finally, one forenoon the sun shone out fully, and by the middle of the afternoon the trees were in full summer dress. These facts show that the green color of leaves is due to the action of light. Variegation is sometimes produced independently of the chlorophyl, as in _Begonia argyrostigma_ and _Carduus marianus_, in which it is produced by a layer of air interposed between the epidermis or outer skin of the leaf and the cells beneath; this gives the leaf a bright, silvery appearance. To what, then, are we to ascribe leaf variegation? I think that it is entirely due to diminished root power; by this I do not mean that the roots are diseased, but that they are either in an aberrant or abnormal state; but disease cannot be predicated upon either of these states. To explain: everybody knows _Spirea callosa_ to be a strong growing shrub, having umbels of rosy-colored flowers and strong, stout roots; the white flowered variety is quite dwarf, is more leafy and bushy than the species, and has more fibrous and delicate roots than the type; the crisp-leaved variety is still more dwarf, very bushy, and very leafy, and has very fine threadlike roots. This would indicate that the aberrance is in the roots; the two varieties are much more leafy in proportion to their size than the species, so that if the leaves controlled the roots, the latter should have been larger in proportion than those of the species. Again, once when, in the autumn, I was preparing my greenhouse plants for their winter quarters, I cut back a "Lady Plymouth" geranium, which chanced to be set away in a cool and somewhat damp cellar. When discovered the following February and started into growth in the greenhouse it produced nothing but solid green leaves, and never afterward produced a variegated leaf. This I attributed to its having gained greater root power during its long season of rest. By this I mean that the roots had grown and greatly increased in size, although there had not been any leaf growth. That roots under certain circumstances do so is well known. The roots of fir trees have been found alive and growing forty five years after the trunks were felled. The same has occurred in an ash tree after its trunk had been sawn off level with the ground. A root of _Ipomea sellowii_ has been known to keep on growing for twelve years after its top had been destroyed by frost; and in all that time it never made buds or leaves, yet it increased to seven times its original weight. The tuberous roots of some of the _Tropoeolums_ will continue to grow and increase in size after the tops have been accidentally broken off; and potatoes buried so deep in the earth that they cannot produce tops will produce a crop of new potatoes. On the other hand, I have had an oak-leaved geranium overlooked in a corner of the greenhouse until it was almost dried up for lack of water. When its branches were pruned back and it was started into growth only one branch showed the almost black center of the leaf, all the rest were clear green. This was an evident case of diminished root power, but the plant grew as thriftily as ever. The lack of the dark marking in the leaves was equivalent to the variegation in other varieties, only in a reverse direction. In practice, when gardeners wish to produce an abnormal condition in a tree or plant, they will, if they wish to dwarf it, graft it on a species or variety of diminished root power, and contrariwise, if they wish to increase its growth, will graft it upon a stock of strong root power. But in neither case can the graft be said to be diseased by the action of the roots of the stock. When this root power is so far diminished as to produce complete albinism, the shoots from such roots appear to partake of this diminished power, and to lose the power of making roots, and thus become very difficult to propagate. It is sometimes said that albino cuttings cannot be rooted at all, but this is a mistake, for I have succeeded in striking such cuttings from the variegated leaved _Hydrangea_. It required much care to do it; they did not, however, retain their albino character after they rooted and started into growth. Albinism and white variegation in leaves appear to be due to the chlorophyl in such leaves being able to resist the action of the three (red, yellow, and blue) rays of light. What we call color in any substance or thing is due to its reflecting these different rays in various proportions of combination and absorbing the rest of them, the various proportions giving the various shades of color. White is due to the reflection of all of them, and black to the absorption of them. In some plants with variegated foliage we have the curious fact that the cells containing chlorophyl reflecting one color produce cells which reflect an entirely different color. In the coleus "Lady Burrill," for instance, the lower half of the leaf is of a deep violet-crimson color, and the upper half is golden yellow. In other varieties of coleus, in _Perilla nankiensis_, and other plants, we have foliage without a particle of green in it, and yet they are perfectly healthy. This shows that green leaves are not absolutely necessary to the health of a plant. As a proof of leaf variegation being a disease, the speaker alluded to cited a case in which a green leaved abutilon, upon which a variegated leaved variety had been grafted, threw out a variegated leaved shoot below the graft. This can easily be explained. The growth of the trunk or stem of all exogenous plants, or those which increase in size on the outside of the stem, is brought about by the descent of certain formative tissue called cambium, elaborated by the leaves and descending between the old wood and the bark, where it is formed into alburnum or woody matter. Some think that it is also formed by the roots and ascends from them as well as descending from the leaves. Be this as it may, there is no doubt about its descent. In such comparatively soft-wooded, free growing plants as the abutilon the descent of the cambium is very free and in considerable quantity, so that the stock would soon be inclosed in a layer of it descending from the graft. When being converted into woody matter it also forms adventitious buds which under certain favorable circumstances will emit shoots of the same character as the graft from which it was derived. The graft is such cases may be said to inclose the stock in a tube of its own substance, leaving the stock unaffected otherwise. The variegated shoot in this case was in reality derived from the downward growth of the graft and not from the original stock, which was not therefore contaminated by the graft. In cases where the stock is of much slower growth than the graft, or the graft is inserted upon a stock of some other species, the descending cambium does not inclose the stock, but makes layers of wood on the stem of the graft, which thus, as is frequently seen, overgrows the stock, sometimes to such an extent as to make it unsightly. Nobody ever saw an apple shoot from a crab stock, a pear from a quince stock, or a peach shoot from a plum stock. This is one of the arguments in favor of the view that cambium also rises from the roots. Again, to show that the stock is not affected by the graft, or the graft by the stock, except as to root power, let any person graft a white beet upon a red beet, or contrariwise, when about the size of a goosequill, and when they have attained their full growth, by dividing the beet lengthwise he will find the line of demarkation between the colors perfectly distinct, neither of them running into the other. The theory that leaf variegation is a disease has been held by many distinguished botanists and is in nowise new. But this theory has been controverted, and we think successfully, by other botanists, and it is not now accepted by the more advanced vegetable physiologists. There are now so many acute and industrious students and observers in every department of science, and the accumulation of facts is so rapid and so great, that very many of the older theories are being set aside as not in accord with the newly discovered facts. A student brought up in institutions where the old theories are inculcated has afterward to spend half his time in unlearning what he had been previously taught, and the other half in studying the new facts brought to his notice and testing the theories promulgated by men of science. Botanical science does not wholly consist in the classification and nomenclature of plants, but largely consists in a knowledge of vegetable anatomy and physiology, and these require much study and some knowledge of other sciences, such as chemistry, meteorology, geology, etc. Without such general knowledge it is difficult to form a harmonious theory in regard to any of the phenomena of plant life. * * * * * VANILLA, CINNAMON, COCOANUT. The following interesting facts concerning the cultivation of the above products in the island of Ceylon, were given in Mr. H. B. Brady's recent address before the British Pharmaceutical Conference at Swansea: The vanilla plant is trained on poles placed about twelve or eighteen inches apart--one planter has a line of plants about three miles in length. Like the cardamom, it yields fruit after three years, and then continues producing its pods for an indefinite period. The cinnamon (_Cinnamomum zeylanicum_) is, as its name indicates, a native of Ceylon. It is cultivated on a light sandy soil about three miles from the sea, on the southwest coast of the island, from Negumbo to Matura. In its cultivated state it becomes really productive after the sixth year, and continues from forty to sixty years. The superintendent of the largest estate in this neighborhood stated that there were not less than fifteen varieties of cinnamon, sufficiently distinct in flavor to be easily recognized. The production of the best so injures the plants that it does not pay to cut this at any price under 4s. 6d. to 5s. per lb. The estate alluded to above yields from 30,000 to 40,000 lb. per annum; a uniform rate of 4½ d. per lb. of finished bark is paid for the labor. Cinnamon oil is produced from this bark by distillation; the mode is very primitive and wasteful. About 40 lb. of bark, previously macerated in water, form one charge for the still, which is heated over a fire made of the spent bark of a previous distillation. Each charge of bark yields about three ounces of oil, and two charges are worked daily in each still. The cultivation of the cocoanut tree and the production of the valuable cocoanut oil are two important Cingalese occupations. These trees, it appears, do not grow with any luxuriance at a distance from human dwellings, a fact which may perhaps be accounted for by the benefit they derive from the smoke inseparable from the fires in human habitations. The cultivation of cocoanuts would seem to be decidedly profitable, as some 4,000 nuts per year are yielded by each acre, the selling price being £3 per thousand, while the cost of cultivation is about £2 per acre. In extracting the oil, the white pulp is removed and dried, roughly powdered, and pressed in similar machinery to the linseed oil crushing mills of this country. The dried pulp yields about 63 per cent by weight of limpid, colorless oil, which in our climate forms the white mass so well known in pharmacy. * * * * * LEARNING TO TIE KNOTS. A correspondent suggests that it would be a handy accomplishment for schoolboys to be proficient in the handling, splicing, hitching, and knotting of ropes. He suggests the propriety of having the art taught in our public schools. A common jackknife and a few pieces of clothes line are the main appliances needed to impart the instruction with. He concludes it would not only be of use in ordinary daily life, but especially to those who handle merchandise and machinery. Any one, he adds, who has noticed the clumsy haphazard manner in which boxes and goods are tied for hoisting or for loading upon trucks, will appreciate the advantage of practical instruction in this direction. Probably a good plan, he further suggests, would be to have one schoolboy taught first by the master, and then let the pupil teach the other boys. Our correspondent thinks most boys would consider it a nice pastime to practice during recess and at the dinner hour, so that no time would be taken from study or recitation time. * * * * * DECISIONS RELATING TO PATENTS. Supreme Court of the United States PEARCE _vs._ MULFORD _et al._ Appeal from the Circuit Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. 1. Reissued patent No. 5,774 to Shubael Cottle, February 24, 1874, for improvement in chains for necklaces, declared void, the first claim, if not for want of novelty, for want of patentability, and the second for want of novelty. 2. Neither the tubing, nor the open spiral link formed of tubing, nor the process of making either the open or the closed link, nor the junction of closed and open spiral links in a chain, was invented by the patentee. 3. All improvement is not invention and entitled to protection as such. Thus to entitle it it must be the product of some exercise of the inventive faculties, and it must involve something more than what is obvious to persons skilled in the art to which it relates. The decree of the circuit court is therefore reversed, and it is ordered that the bill be dismissed. BY THE COMMISSIONER OF PATENTS. DICKSON vs. KINSMAN.--INTERFERENCE.--TELEPHONE. The subject matter of the interference is defined in the preliminary declaration thereof as follows: The combination in one instrument of a transmitting telephone and a receiving telephone, so arranged that when the mouthpiece of the speaking or transmitting telephone is applied to the mouth of a person, the orifice of the receiving telephone will be applied to his ear. 1. While it is true that the unsupported allegations of an inventor, that he conceived an invention at a certain date, are not sufficient to establish such fact, the testimony of a party that he constructed and used a device at a certain time is admissible. 2. Abandonment is an ill-favored finding, which cannot be presumed, but must be conclusively proven. The decision of the Board of Examiners-in-Chief is reversed, and priority awarded to Dickson. * * * * * CHARACTERISTICS OF ARCTIC WINTER. Lieutenant Schwatka, whose recent return from a successful expedition in search of the remains of Sir John Fanklin's ill-fated company, combats the prevalent opinion that the Arctic winter, especially in the higher latitudes, is a period of dreary darkness. In latitude 83° 20' 20" N., the highest point ever reached by man, there are four hours and forty-two minutes of twilight on December 22, the shortest day in the year, in the northern hemisphere. In latitude 82° 27' N., the highest point where white men have wintered, there are six hours and two minutes in the shortest day; and latitude 84° 32' N., 172 geographical miles nearer the North Pole than Markham reached, and 328 geographical miles from that point, must yet be attained before the true Plutonic zone, or that one in which there is no twilight whatsoever, even upon the shortest day of the year, can be said to have been entered by man. Of course, about the beginning and ending of this twilight, it is very feeble and easily extinguished by even the slightest mists, but nevertheless it exists, and is quite appreciable on clear cold days, or nights, properly speaking. The North Pole itself is only shrouded in perfect blackness from November 13 to January 29, a period of seventy-seven days. Supposing that the sun has set (supposing a circumpolar sea or body of water unlimited to vision) on September 24, not to rise until March 18, for that particular point, giving a period of about fifty days of uniformly varying twilight, the pole has about 188 days of continuous daylight, 100 days of varying twilight, and 77 of perfect inky darkness (save when the moon has a northern declination) in the period of a typical year. During the period of a little over four days, the sun shines continuously on both the North and South Poles at the same time, owing to refraction parallax, semi-diameter, and dip of the horizon. * * * * * THE COLLINS LINE OF STEAMERS. The breaking up of the Baltic, the last of the famous Collins line of steamships, calls out a number of interesting facts with regard to the history of the several vessels of that fleet. There were five in all, the Adriatic, Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Baltic. They were built and equipped in New York. Their dimensions were: Length, 290 feet; beam, 45 feet; depth of hold, 31½ feet; capacity, 2,860 tons; machinery, 1,000 horse power. In size, speed, and appointments they surpassed any steamers then afloat, and they obtained a fair share of the passenger traffic. A fortune was expended in decorating the saloons. The entire cost of each steamer was not less than $600,000, and notwithstanding their quick passages, the subsidy received, and the high rates of freight paid, the steamers ran for six years at great loss, and finally the company became bankrupt. The Atlantic was the pioneer steamship of the line. She sailed from New York April 27, 1849, and arrived in the Mersey May 10, thus making the passage in about thirteen days, two of which were lost in repairing the machinery; the speed was reduced in order to prevent the floats from being torn from the paddle-wheels. The average time of the forty-two westward trips in the early days of the line was 11 days 10 hours and 26 minutes, against the average of the then so called fastest line of steamers, 12 days 19 hours and 26 minutes. In February, 1852, the Arctic made the passage from New York to Liverpool in 9 days and 17 hours. The Arctic was afterward run into by a French vessel at sea and only a few of her passengers were saved. The Pacific was never heard from after sailing from Liverpool, and all the persons on board were lost. The Atlantic, after rotting and rusting at her wharf, was deprived of her machinery and converted into a sailing vessel, and was broken up in New York last year. The Adriatic, the "queen of the fleet," made less than a half dozen voyages, was sold to the Galway Company, and is now used in the Western Islands as a coal hulk by an English company. The Baltic was in the government service during the war as a supply vessel, and was afterward sold at auction; her machinery was removed and sold as old iron. She was then converted into a sailing ship, and of late years has been used as a grain carrying vessel between San Francisco and Great Britain. On a recent voyage to Boston she was strained to such an extent as to be made unseaworthy, and for that reason is to be broken up. One cannot but remark in this connection how small has been the advance in steamship building during the quarter century since the Collins line was in its glory. * * * * * CHINESE WOMEN'S FEET. [Illustration: CHINESE WOMEN'S FEET.] An American missionary, Miss Norwood, of Swatow, recently described in a _Times_ paragraph how the size of the foot is reduced in Chinese women. The binding of the feet is not begun till the child has learnt to walk. The bandages are specially manufactured, and are about two inches wide and two yards long for the first year, five yards long for subsequent years. The end of the strip is laid on the inside of the foot at the instep, then carried over the toes, under the foot, and round the heel, the toes being thus drawn toward and over the sole, while a bulge is produced on the instep, and a deep indentation in the sole. Successive layers of bandages are used till the strip is all used, and the end is then sewn tightly down. The foot is so squeezed upward that, in walking, only the ball of the great toe touches the ground. After a month the foot is put in hot water to soak some time; then the bandage is carefully unwound, much dead cuticle coming off with it. Frequently, too, one or two toes may even drop off, in which case the woman feels afterward repaid by having smaller and more delicate feet. Each time the bandage is taken off, the foot is kneaded to make the joints more flexible, and is then bound up again as quickly as possible with a fresh bandage, which is drawn up more tightly. During the first year the pain is so intense that the sufferer can do nothing, and for about two years the foot aches continually, and is the seat of a pain which is like the pricking of sharp needles. With continued rigorous binding the foot in two years becomes dead and ceases to ache, and the whole leg, from the knee downward, becomes shrunk, so as to be little more than skin and bone. When once formed, the "golden lily," as the Chinese lady calls her delicate little foot, can never recover its original shape. Our illustrations show the foot both bandaged and unbandaged, and are from photographs kindly forwarded by Mr. J. W. Bennington, R.N., who writes: "It is an error to suppose, as many do, that it is only the Upper Ten among the daughters of China that indulge in the luxury of 'golden lilies,' as it is extremely common among every class, even to the very poorest--notably the poor sewing women one sees in every Chinese city and town, who can barely manage to hobble from house to house seeking work. The pain endured while under the operation is so severe and continuous that the poor girls never sleep for long periods without the aid of strong narcotics, and then only but fitfully; and it is from this constant suffering that the peculiar sullen or stolid look so often seen on the woman's face is derived. The origin of this custom is involved in mystery to the Westerns. Some say that the strong-minded among the ladies wanted to interfere in politics, and that there is a general liking for visiting, chattering, and gossip (and China women _can_ chatter and gossip), both and all of which inclinations their lords desired, and desire, to stop by crippling them." * * * * * To the alteration and metamorphism of rocks by the infiltration of rain and other meteoric waters, M. De Koninck, of the Belgian Academy of Sciences, assigns the cause of many hitherto unexplained phenomena in geology. * * * * * CORRESPONDENCE ICE AT HIGH TEMPERATURES. _To the Editor of the Scientific American:_ Your issues of October 23 and 30 contain some remarkable articles under the heading of "Ice at High Temperatures." Prof. Carnelley says; "In order to convert a solid into a liquid, the _pressure_ must be above a certain point, otherwise no amount of heat will melt the substance," as it passes at once from the sold state into the state of gas, subliming away without previous melting. And, "having come to this conclusion, it was easily foreseen that it would be possible to have solid ice at temperatures far above the ordinary melting point." The first conclusion of the professor is correct, but not new. The second conclusion is new, but very doubtful as to its correctness, and certainly does not follow as a sequence from his premise. If we try to heat ice in a vacuum, we cannot apply any heat to the ice direct, but only to the vessel containing the ice. The vessel may be much heated; but whether it will convey heat to the ice quick enough to heat it over 32°, and whether at all it can be heated over 32°, this is a question of a different nature. Before crediting such a conclusion we must know more of the details of the experiments which the professor made in order to verify its correctness. When saying that "on one occasion a small quantity of water was frozen in a glass vessel which was so hot that it could not be touched by the hand without burning it," he evidently assumes that if the vessel is hot, the ice inside must be equally so; but this assumption is erroneous. Faraday has made water to freeze in a red hot platina pot; the ice thus formed was not red hot like the platina, but was below the freezing point. Just so with Professor Carnelley's glass vessel: the vessel was hot, but the ice inside no doubt was "ice cold." If the professor would surround a thermometer bulb with ice and then make the mercury rise above the freezing point, we would believe in "hot ice;" not before. Until he does, we prefer to believe that the heat conveyed through the vessel to the ice is all absorbed in vaporizing the ice, and not in raising its temperature above 32°. Professor Carnelley's further statement, apparently proving his theory, that the ice at once liquefies as soon as pressure is admitted (say by admitting air), is readily accounted for by the phenomena connected with the "Leydenfrost Drop." Water in a red hot vessel will vaporize off much slower than in a vessel heated a little above the boiling point, from the reason that in the red hot vessel no _real contact_ takes place between the vessel and the water. At the place where the two ought to touch, steam is formed quicker than it can escape, which steam prevents the contact between vessel and water; therefore, as no real contact takes place, the heat from the vessel can pass into the water but slowly, viz., in the proportion as it works itself through the layer of steam, which in itself is a bad conductor. Just so in Prof. Carnelley's experiment: The heated glass vessel will convey heat to the ice only at those points where it touches the ice; at those points at once a formation of vapor takes place, which prevents an intimate contact between the glass and the ice, so that they do not really touch each other, consequently the heat can pass into the ice but slowly, having to work its way through the thin layer of rarefied vapor between the two. As soon as pressure is admitted by admitting atmospheric air, vapors can no longer form; an intimate contact will take place between the glass and the ice, and consequently the heat be conveyed over quick enough to make the ice melt away rapidly. The professor's experiments, therefore, so far as published, do not prove anything to justify his strange conclusion. It is perfectly true that in a vacuum of less than 4.6 mm. mercury pressure, no amount of heat will melt ice, all heat that can be conveyed to the ice being absorbed by vaporization. But before crediting the professor's further conclusion, that ice can be heated much above the freezing point, he must actually produce "hot ice," not only a hot vessel containing ice. N. J. Brooklyn, N. Y., October 25, 1880. * * * * * SCHOOLS OF INVENTION. The school of invention has not yet been established, but its germ is growing in the mechanical schools. This school, according to Hon. W. H. Ruffner, in _Va. Ed. Journal_, will educate men, and women too, for the special career of inventing new things. Why not? We already have something closely analogous in schools of design, where the pupil is trained to invent new forms or patterns, chiefly of an artistic or decorative character. The same idea will be applied to the invention of machinery, or improvements in machinery, or the adaptation of machinery to the accomplishment of special ends. Inventions usually spring from individuals striving to lighten their own labor, or from some idea entering the brain of a genius. But we shall have professional inventors who will be called on to contrive original devices, and his success will depend on the sound and practical character of his prescriptions. * * * * * PROPOSED EXHIBITION OF BATHING APPLIANCES. The Board of Health of this city has recently been notified that a Balneological Exhibition, to illustrate the various systems of bathing, bath appliances, and kindred matters, is to be held in Frankfort-On-Main, Germany, next summer. The exhibition will last from May to September, 1881. H. H. Heinrich, No. 41 Maiden Lane, New York, Inventor Patentee, and Sole Manufacturer of the Self-Adjusting Chronometer Balance, which is not affected by "extremes of high and low temperatures, as fully demonstrated by a six months' test at the Naval Observatory at Washington, D. C., showing results in temperatures from 134° down to 18°, of 5-10 of a second only, unparalleled in the history of horology and certified to by Theo F. Kone. Esq., Commander U. S. N. in charge of the Observatory. Mr. Heinrich is a practical working mechanic and adjuster of marine and pocket chronometers to positions and temperatures, and is now prepared to apply his new balance wheel to any fine timekeeping instrument, either for public or private use, he also repairs marine and pocket chronometers, as well as all kinds of complicated watches, broken or lost parts made new and adjusted. Mr. Heinrich was connected for many years with the principal manufacturers of England, Geneva and Locle, Switzerland, and for the last fifteen years in the United States, and very recently with Messrs. Tiffany & Co., of Union Square, New York. Shipowners, captains naval and army officers, railroad and telegraph officials, physicians and horsemen, and all others wanting true time, should send to him. Fine watches of the principal manufacturers, for whom he is their agent, constantly on hand. His office is connected by electric wires with the Naval Observatory's astronomical clock, through the Western Union Telegraph, thus giving him daily New York's mean time. Many years ago the British Government made an offer of £6,000 for a chronometer for her navy, keeping better time than the ones in use, but no European horologist ever discovered the sequel which Mr. Heinrich has now worked out to perfection, overcoming the extremes, as stated above. With him is connected Mr. John P. Krugler for thirty years connected with the trade as salesman.--Adv. * * * * * Toope's Felt and Asbestos Covering for Steam Pipes and other surfaces, illustrated on page 357, present volume, received a Medal of Excellence at the late American Institute Fair. See advertisement on another page. * * * * * BUSINESS AND PERSONAL. _The Charge for Insertion under this head is One Dollar a line for each insertion; about eight words to a line. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ [Symbol: Hand] _The publishers of this paper guarantee to advertisers a circulation of not less than 50,000 copies every weekly issue._ Chard's Extra Heavy Machinery Oil. Chard's Anti-Corrosive Cylinder Oil. Chard's Patent Lubricene and Gear Grease. R. J. Chard, Sole Proprietor, 6 Burling Slip, New York. Wanted--Superintendent for six thousand spindle cotton yarn mill. State salary and references, Rosalie Yarn Mills, Natchez, Miss. Use Vacuum Oil Co.'s Lubricating Oil. Rochester, N. Y. 50,000 Sawyers wanted. Your full address for Emerson's Hand Book of Saws (free). Over 100 illustrations and pages of valuable information. How to straighten saws, etc. Emerson, Smith & Co., Beaver Falls, Fa. Interesting to Manufacturers and Others.--The worldwide reputation of Asbestos Liquid Paints, Roofing, Roof Paints, Steam Pipe, Boiler Coverings, etc., has induced unscrupulous persons to sell and apply worthless articles, representing them as being made of Asbestos. The use of Asbestos in these and other materials for structural and mechanical purposes is patented, and the genuine are manufactured only by the H.W. Johns M'f'g Co., 87 Maiden Lane, New York. Three requisites--pens, pins, and needles. The two latter you can get of any make, but when you want a good pen get one of Esterbrook's. For Heavy Punches, etc., see illustrated advertisement of Hilles & Jones, on page 380. Frank's Wood Working Mach'y. See illus. adv., p. 382. Painters' list of 65 good recipes. J. J. Callow, Clevel'd, O. Improved Speed Indicator. Accurate, reliable, and of a convenient size. Sent by mail on receipt of $1.50. E. H. Gilman, 21 Doane St., Boston, Mass. Astronomical Telescopes, first quality & low prices, Eye Pieces, Micrometers, etc. W. T. Gregg, 75 Fulton St., N. Y. Engines. Geo. F. Shedd, Waltham, Mass. The Mackinnon Pen or Fluid Pencil. The commercial pen of the age. The only successful reservoir pen in the market. The only pen in the world with a diamond circle around the point. The only reservoir pen supplied with a gravitating valve: others substitute a spring, which soon gets out of order. The only pen accompanied by a written guarantee from the manufacturers. The only pen that will stand the test of time. A history of the Mackinnon Pen, its uses, prices, etc., free. Mackinnon Pen Co. 200 Broadway, New York. Among the numerous Mowing Machines now in use, none ranks so high as the Eureka. It does perfect work and gives universal satisfaction. Farmers in want of a mowing machine will consult their best interests by sending for illustrated circular, to Eureka Mower Company, Towanda, Pa. Peck's Patent Drop Press. See adv., page 333. The Inventors Institute, Cooper Union Building, New York. Sales of patent rights negotiated and inventions exhibited for subscribers. Send for circular. Fragrant Vanity Fair Tobacco and Cigarettes. 7 First Prize Medals--Vienna, 1873: Philadelphia. 1876; Paris, 1878: Sydney, 1879--awarded Wm. S. Kimball & Co., Rochester, N. Y. Superior Malleable Castings at moderate rates of Richard P. Pim, Wilmington, Del. Wood Working Machinery of Improved Design and Workmanship. Cordesman, Egan & Co., Cincinnati, O. The E. Stebbins Manuf'g Co. (Brightwood, P. O.), Springfield, Mass., are prepared to furnish all kinds of Brass and Composition Castings at short notice; also Babbitt Metal. The quality of the work is what has given this foundry its high reputation. All work guaranteed. The "1880" Lace Cutter by mail for 50 cts.; discount to the trade. Sterling Elliott, 262 Dover St., Boston, Mass. The Tools, Fixtures, and Patterns of the Taunton Foundry and Machine Company for sale, by the George Place Machinery Agency, 121 Chambers St., New York. Improved Rock Drills and Air Compressors, Illustrated catalogues and information gladly furnished. Address Ingersoll Rock Drill Co., 1½ Park Place. N. Y. Mineral Lands Prospected, Artesian Wells Bored, by Pa Diamond Drill Co. Box 423. Pottsville, Pa. See p. 349. Experts in Patent Causes and Mechanical Counsel. Park Benjamin & Bro., 50 Astor House, New York. Corrugated Wrought Iron for Tires on Traction Engines, etc. Sole mfrs. H. Lloyd, Son & Co., Pittsb'g, Pa. Malleable and Gray Iron Castings, all descriptions, by Erie Malleable Iron Company, limited, Erie, Pa. Power, Foot, and Hand Presses for Metal Workers. Lowest prices. Peerless Punch & Shear Co. 52 Dey St., N. Y. Recipes and Information on all Industrial Processes. Park Benjamin's Expert Office, 50 Astor House, N. Y. For the best Stave, Barrel, Keg, and Hogshead Machinery, address H. A. Crossley, Cleveland, Ohio. National Steel Tube Cleaner for boiler tubes. Adjustable, durable. Chalmers-Spence Co., 40 John St., N. Y. For Mill Mach'y & Mill Furnishing, see illus. adv. p. 349. The Brown Automatic Cut-off Engine; unexcelled for workmanship, economy, and durability. Write for information. C. H. Brown & Co., Fitchburg, Mass. Gun Powder Pile Drivers, Thos. Shaw, 915 Ridge Avenue, Philadelphia, Pa. For Separators, Farm & Vertical Engines, see adv. p. 349. For Patent Shapers and Planers, see ills. adv. p. 349. Best Oak Tanned Leather Belting. Wm. F. Forepaugh, Jr., & Bros., 531 Jefferson St., Philadelphia, Pa. Stave, Barrel, Keg, and Hogshead Machinery a specialty, by E. & B. Holmes, Buffalo, N.Y. Split Pulleys at low prices, and of same strength and appearance as Whole Pulleys. Yocom & Son's Shafting Works, Drinker St., Philadelphia. Pa. C. B. Rogers & Co., Norwich, Conn., Wood Working Machinery of every kind. See adv., page 348. National Institute of Steam and Mechanical Engineering, Bridgeport, Conn. Blast Furnace Construction and Management. The metallurgy of iron and steel. Practical Instruction in Steam Engineering, and a good situation when competent. Send for pamphlet. Reed's Sectional Covering for steam surfaces; any one can apply it; can be removed and replaced without injury. J. A. Locke, Agt., 32 Cortlandt St., N.Y. Downer's Cleaning and Polishing Oil for bright metals, is the oldest and best in the market. Highly recommended by the New York, Boston, and other Fire Departments throughout the country. For quickness of cleaning and luster produced it has no equal. Sample five gallon can be sent C. O. D. for $8. A. H. Downer, 17 Peck Slip, New York. Presses. Dies, and Tools for working Sheet Metal, etc. Fruit & other can tools. Bliss & Williams, B'klyn, N.Y. For Pat. Safety Elevators, Hoisting Engines. Friction Clutch Pulleys, Cut-off Coupling, see Frisbie's ad. p. 349. Nickel Plating.--Sole manufacturers cast nickel anodes, pure nickel salts, importers Vienna lime, crocus, etc. Condit. Hanson & Van Winkle, Newark, N. J., and 92 and 94 Liberty St., New York. Sheet Metal Presses. Ferracute Co., Bridgeton, N. J. Wright's Patent Steam Engine, with automatic cut off. The best engine made. For prices, address William Wright, Manufacturer, Newburgh, N. Y. Machine Knives for Wood-working Machinery, Book Binders, and Paper Mills. Also manufacturers of Soloman's Parallel Vise, Taylor, Stiles & Co., Riegelsville, N. J. Rollstone Mac. Co.'s Wood Working Mach'y ad. p. 366. Silent Injector, Blower, and Exhauster. See adv. p. 380. Fire Brick, Tile, and Clay Retorts, all shapes. Borgner & O'Brien, M'f'rs, 23d St., above Race, Phila., Pa. Clark Rubber Wheels adv. See page 381. Diamond Saws. J. Dickinson, 64 Nassau St., N.Y. Steam Hammers, Improved Hydraulic Jacks, and Tube Expanders. R. Dudgeon, 24 Columbia St., New York. Eclipse Portable Engine. See illustrated adv., p. 382. Peerless Colors--For coloring mortar. French, Richards & Co., 410 Callowhill St., Philadelphia, Pa. Tight and Slack Barrel machinery a specialty. John Greenwood & Co., Rochester, N. Y. See illus. adv. p. 380. Elevators, Freight and Passenger, Shafting, Pulleys and Hangers. L. S. Graves & Son, Rochester, N.Y. Steam Engines; Eclipse Safety Sectional Boiler. Lambertville Iron Works, Lambertville, N. J. See ad. p. 349. Magic Lanterns, Stereopticons, and Views of all kinds and prices for public exhibitions. A profitable business for a person with small capital. Also lanterns for home amusement, etc. Send stamp for 116 page catalogue to McAllister, M'f'g Optician, 49 Nassau St., New York. Lenses for Constructing Telescopes, as in Sci. Am. Supplement, No. 252, $6.50 per set; postage, 9 cts. The same, with eye piece handsomely mounted in brass, 8.00. McAllister, M'f'g Optician, 49 Nassau St., N. Y. For best low price Planer and Matcher, and latest improved Sash, Door, and Blind Machinery, Send for catalogue to Rowley & Hermance, Williamsport, Pa. The only economical and practical Gas Engine in the market is the new "Otto" Silent, built by Schleicher, Schumm & Co., Philadelphia, Pa. Send for circular. Penfield (Pulley) Blocks, Lockport N. Y. See ad. p. 381. 4 to 40 H. P. Steam Engines. See adv. p. 281. Tyson Vase Engine, small motor. 1-33 H. P., efficient and non-explosive: price $50 See illus. adv., page 380. For Yale Mills and Engines, see page 381. Lightning Screw Plates and Labor-saving Tools. p. 333. * * * * * PATENTS ISSUED TO AMERICANS. FROM NOVEMBER 9 TO NOVEMBER 12, 1880, INCLUSIVE. Book binding, L. Finger, Boston, Mass. Draining and sewerage. G. E. Waring Newport, R. I. Electric gas lighter, G. D. Bancroft. Boston, Mass. Electric signal. EH Johnson _et al._, Menlo Park, N. J. Horse nail manufacture, S. S. Putnam. Boston, Mass. Hygienic confection, T. S. Lambert _et al._, New York city. Looms, F. O. Tucker, Hartford, Conn Reflectors for lamps. J. S. Goldsmith, New York city. Railroad vehicles, E. R. Esmond _et al._. New York city. Sewing machine. G. F. Newell, Greenfield. Mass. Steam boilers, D. Sutton. Cincinnati. Ohio. Steam boilers, W. D. Dickey, New York city. Toy money box, J. E. Walter. New York city. Trucks, hand., E. J. Lyburn, Fredericksburg, U. S. A. * * * * * NOTES AND QUERIES HINTS TO CORRESPONDENTS. No attention will be paid to communications unless accompanied with the full name and address of the writer. Names and addresses of correspondents will not be given to inquirers. We renew our request that correspondents, in referring to former answers or articles, will be kind enough to name the date of the paper and the page, or the number of the question. Correspondents whose inquiries do not appear after a reasonable time should repeat them. If not then published, they may conclude that, for good reasons, the Editor declines them. Persons desiring special information which is purely of a personal character, and not of general interest, should remit from $1 to $5, according to the subject, as we cannot be expected to spend time and labor to obtain such information without remuneration. Any numbers of the Scientific American Supplement referred to in these columns may be had at this office. Price 10 cents each. * * * * * (1) L. L. asks: 1. How can I grind and polish quartz and agate rock, and what kind of grinding and polishing material should I use? A. Quartz and agate are slit with a thin iron disk supplied with diamond dust moistened with brick oil. The rough grinding is done on a lead wheel supplied with coarse emery and water. The smoothing is done with a lead lap and fine emery, and the polishing may be accomplished by means of a lead lap, whose surface is hacked and supplied with rottenstone and water. 2. What is the best method of polishing steel? A. The usual method is to grind first on a coarse wet stone, then on a fine wet stone, then on a lead lap supplied with fine emery and oil, and finally polish on a buff wheel supplied with dry crocus and revolving rather slowly. (2) R. L. J. asks how to make copying black and red inks. A. 1. Bruised Aleppo nutgalls, 2 lb.; water, 1 gallon; boil in a copper vessel for an hour, adding water to make up for that lost by evaporation; strain and again boil the galls with a gallon of water and strain; mix the liquors, and add immediately 10 oz. of copperas in coarse powder and 8 oz. of gum arabic; agitate until solution of these latter is effected, add a few drops of solution of potassium permanganate, strain through a piece of hair cloth, and after permitting to settle, bottle. The addition of a little extract of logwood will render the ink blacker when first written with. Half an ounce of sugar to the gallon will render it a good copying ink. 2. Shellac, 4 oz.; borax, 2 oz.; water, 1 quart; boil till dissolved, and add 2 oz. of gum arabic dissolved in a little hot water; boil and add enough of a well triturated mixture of equal parts indigo and lampblack to produce the proper color; after standing several hours draw off and bottle. 3. Half a drachm of powdered drop lake and 18 grains of powdered gum arabic dissolved in 3 oz. of ammonia water constitute one of the finest red or carmine inks. (3) X. inquires: What is the rule for making a counterbalanced face wheel for engines? A. It is a common practice to place the counter weight directly opposite the crank, with its center of gravity at the same distance from the center of the shaft as the center of the crank pin, making its weight equal to weight of piston, piston rod, crosshead, and crank pin, plus half the weight of the connecting rod. (4) A. R. asks: What is the best way to remove cinders from the eye? A. A small camel's hair brush dipped in water and passed over the ball of the eye on raising the lid. The operation requires no skill, takes but a moment, and instantly removes any cinder or particle of dust or dirt without inflaming the eye. (5) D. F. H. asks: Can I move a piston in a half inch glass tube by the expansion of mercury? A. Yes, but you will require a long tube to get any appreciable motion of the piston. (6) J. W. asks: What size of a bore and what length of a stroke I would want for a rocking valve engine of half a horse power? A. About 2 inches cylinder and 3 inch stroke, depending upon pressure and velocity. (7) R. W. H. writes: In a recent discussion on hot air and steam portable engines it was decided to ask your opinion, which should be final. Water is scarce, though enough to use steam is easily procured. The country is hilly, so that lightness is desirable. The power wanted is 6 horse, and movable, that is, on wheels. Which will be best, hot air engine or steam engine? Which consumes most coal for a given power? Which will be cheapest in above case? A. For small powers the hot air engine is most economical, but we do not think it adapted to your purpose. We would recommend the steam engine for a portable power. (8) J. C. T. writes: 1. I have a water tank for supplying my boiler, which is made of No. 22 galvanized iron; size 30 inches by 9 feet 4 inches. How many gallons will it hold? A. 342 gallons. 2. Will it be better to have it painted inside? A. Yes. 3. How many years will the tank wear under favorable circumstances, using well water? A. Depends upon the care taken of it. (9) W. H. C. asks: Is there any way of deadening the noise of machinery overhead from the engine room below? The noise comes from machinery in the weave room of an alpaca mill. A. This is generally accomplished by setting the legs of the machines on thick pieces of India-rubber or other non-conductor of sound. (10) G. H. asks: How can I mount photos on glass and color them? A. Take a strongly printed photograph on paper, and saturate it from the back with a rag dipped in castor oil. Carefully rub off all excess from the surface after obtaining thorough transparency. Take a piece of glass an inch larger all round than the print, pour upon it dilute gelatin, and then "squeegee" the print and glass together. Allow it to dry, and then work in artists' oil colors from the back until you get the proper effect from the front. Both landscapes and portraits can be effectively colored by the above method without any great skill being required. (11) C. W. S. asks: 1. Is there any practical and effective method known for cutting screws by connecting the slide rest with the mandrel of the lathe by gears or otherwise? A. This can be done in this way: attach a spur wheel to the back of the face plate. Mount a similar wheel on a short hollow shaft, and support the shaft by an arm bolted to the lathe bed so that the two spur wheels will mesh together. Fit right and left hand leading screws to the hollow shaft of the second spur wheel, and drill a hole through them as well as through the hollow shaft to receive the fastening pin. Now remove the longitudinal feed screw of the slide rest and attach to one side of the carriage an adjustable socket for receiving nuts filled to the leading screws. The number of leading screws required will depend of course on the variety of threads it is desired to cut unless a change of gear is provided. 2. A writer in a foreign journal claims to make slides, or V-shaped pieces for slide rests, eccentric chucks, etc., on his lathe. Is any such process known here, or any process within the capabilities of an amateur mechanic by which the planing machine can be dispensed with? A. For small work held between the lathe centers a milling device fitted to the slide rest in place of the tool post will answer an excellent purpose. This device consists of a mandrel carrying at one end the cutter and at the other end a large pulley. This mandrel is journaled in a hinged frame supported by a block replacing the tool post, and is adjusted as to height by a screw passing through an arm projecting from the supporting block. The direction of the belt is adapted to this device by means of pulleys. (12) J. E. B. asks: 1. What is the best turbine water wheel now in use? A. There are several wheels in market that seem equally good. You should examine all of them and decide from your own observation which is best. 2. What is the rule for finding the horse power of water acting through a turbine wheel which utilizes 80 per cent of the water? A. Finding the weight of water falling over the dam and its velocity in feet per minute, multiply the weight in pounds by the velocity, and the result is foot pounds, divided by 33,000, the quotient is theoretical horse power; if your wheel gives out 80 per cent. then 80 per cent of that result is the horse power of the wheel. 3. How can I calculate the capacity of a belt? A. You will find an exhaustive article on the subject of belts on pp. 101, 102, Vol. 42, Scientific American, which contains the information you desire. 4. What machine now in use is the best, all things considered, for the manufacture of ground wood pulp? Where are they manufactured? A. This information can probably be obtained by inserting an advertisement in the Business and Personal column of this paper. (13) C. A. R writes: Wishing to renew my Leclanche batteries, which were giving out, I bought some new empty porous cells. Please give the following information: 1. Can I use the carbon plates of the old elements over again? If so, do they need to undergo any washing or soaking; or are they as good as ever? A. Yes. Soak them for a few hours in warm water. 2. Is there anything I must add to the granular manganese with which I fill the cells, in order to obtain maximum power and endurance? Some makers add pulverized or even coarsely broken carbon. Is it an advantage? A. It is an advantage to add granulated carbon to the manganese. Use equal parts of each. 3. What is the exact composition of the curdy mass which forms around and especially underneath the zincs of newly mounted and old gravity batteries. Is this substance formed naturally, or is it the result of using poor zinc or sulphate of copper? A. It is copper, and should be removed, for it weakens the battery. It is the result of placing the zinc in the sulphate of copper solution. 4. Is there any real advantage in amalgamating the zincs of the above batteries? A. No. 5. Is there a speedy way of cleaning them when coated with this substance? A. They can be cleaned by scraping. 6. At certain occasions my electric bells began ringing without anybody apparently closing the circuit. I often notice that if I unjoin the batteries and let them remain thus for a few hours, on reconnecting them the bells would work all right for a week, sometimes a fortnight, when the same trouble would again occur. Can you in any way explain this phenomenon? The batteries are not placed in a very dry part of the house, but the wires, which run pretty closely together, are nearly all exposed, so that I can control the slightest corrosion or uncovering of the conductors. A. There must be some accidental closing of the circuit. We could not explain the action of your line without seeing it. (14) J. E. E. asks: What is the number of layers of wire, and the size used for the primary of the induction coil in the Blake transmitter, and as near as you can the amount used for secondary? A. For primary, use three layers of No. 20 magnet wire, and for the secondary use twelve or fourteen layers of No. 36 silk covered copper wire. The resistance of the secondary wire should be from 100 to 150 ohms. (15) J. M. I. asks how to make a barometer by coloring ribbon, so that they will change color, indicating weather changes. A. Use a moderately strong solution of chloride of cobalt in water. (16) O. C. H. writes: In reply to R. A. R., question 22, in Scientific American, December 4, I will say that some months ago I was engaged in running a saw mill, lathe, and shingle factory; was troubled with two hot boxes, and frequently had to stop and apply ice. Seeing in the Scientific American a reference to the use of plumbago, I sent for some, and after three or four applications was troubled no more with hot boxes. (17) F. W. asks: What is the best way for return pipe to go into the boiler from radiators--steam at 60 lb. per square inch, fall 15 feet? A. If your job is properly piped you can bring your return pipe in at any convenient place in your boiler below the water line. If you go into the feed pipe, have your connection inside all other valves. (18) L. T. G. writes: 1. I have four cells of carbon battery; the solutions are bichromate of potash and sulphuric acid. Also three cells of the Smee; sulphuric acid one part, to ten of water; and the four cells of the carbon battery are not sufficient to run my small electro-magnetic engine, for more than two or three minutes. I wish to know if it would be injurious to either one of the batteries if I should unite them both in one circuit, to run the engine, for about one or two hours at a time. A. The batteries will not be injured, but they will not work well together. Better increase the number of carbon elements. 2. Will either of the above batteries freeze in winter, or will cold weather affect their working? A. They will not freeze, but it is better to keep them at a temperature above freezing 3. Is it always best to use the largest wire in connecting batteries with any instrument, say, above No. 11 or No. 12 wire, as the larger the wire the less the resistance, thereby getting nearly the full power of the battery? A. Yes. 4. What purposes are quantity and intensity electricity best suited for respectively? A. Batteries are arranged for quantity or intensity according to the work to be done. The maximum effect is obtained when the battery elements are combined, so that the total resistance in the elements is equal to the resistance of the rest of the circuit. (19) J. H. asks: Which would be the strongest, two 2-inch by 4-inch joists nailed together, or one 4-inch by 4-inch joist? A. One 4-inch by 4-inch. (20) J. K. B. writes: I suppose every experimenter who uses a carbon battery has been troubled by the uncertainty of the carbon connection. The makers of the Grenet battery seem to have solved the problem. Can you tell us through your correspondence column what solder they use, and how they make it stick? A. The carbon is coated with copper by electro-deposition; this coating is readily soldered to the carbon support with common soft solder. (21) M. D. M. asks: 1. Is there a difference in a steam engine between the boiler pressure and the pressure on the piston when the piston is moving 460 feet per minute? A. Yes. 2. About what difference? A. From 2 to 8 lb., depending upon size and length of steam pipe. 3. Does the difference between them vary with a difference in the motion of the piston in the same engine? A. Not appreciably within usual limits of speed. (22) F. writes: We have just closed up our steam stone works for this season, and we wish to know what is best to coat the inside of our steam boilers to keep them from rusting. Some say black oil, and others common tallow: which do you recommend as the best? A. We think the black oil quite as good and cheaper than tallow. Have the surfaces thoroughly cleaned before applying the oil. (23) O. H. asks for a cheap and easy way of amalgamating battery zincs. A. It depends on the kind of battery. In the Fuller the mercury is placed in the porous cell with the zinc. In bichromate batteries all that is necessary is to dip the zinc in the bichromate solution and then pour on a drop or two of mercury. It soon spreads over the entire surface of the zinc. Another method is to dip the zincs in dilute sulphuric acid and then pour on a little mercury, but these methods, except in the case of the Fuller battery, are wasteful of mercury. It is better to apply an amalgamating solution with a brush. This solution is made by dissolving one part (by weight) of mercury in five parts of nitro-muriatic acid (nitric acid one part, muriatic acid three parts), heating the solution moderately to quicken the action; and, after complete solution, add five parts more of nitro-muriatic acid. (24) G. W. asks: 1. Would a perfectly round ball of the same specific gravity throughout lie still on a level surface? A. Yes. 2. Can a mechanic's square be made so true that a four-inch block may be made exactly square by such an instrument? A. Yes. (25) W. H. asks: 1. What is the weight of a boiler 24 feet long, 44 inches diameter, ¼ inch thick? A. With two flues, 16 inches diameter, 6,900 lb. 2. What is the contents (in gallons) of a tank 15 feet deep, 10 feet in diameter, top and bottom diameters being equal? Please give me a formula. A. Area of 10 feet diameter = 78.54 x 15 feet deep = 1,178 cubic feet, and, allowing 7½ gallons per cubic foot = 1,178 x 7.5 = 8,835 gallons. (26) C. L. W. writes: I have constructed a small induction coil to be used for giving shocks. It is 3 inches long. The primary coil is wound with 3 layers of No. 18 cotton covered wire, and the secondary consists of about 12 layers of No. 38 silk covered. 1. How many cells and what kind of battery shall I use to get the best results? A. For temporary use one cell of Grenet battery would answer, but for continued use some form of sulphate of copper battery is to be preferred. 2. Is it necessary that the spring and screw in the interrupter should be coated with platinum? A. Yes; otherwise they would soon burn out. (27) H. C. P. writes: In the Scientific American of September 18, Mr. B. Y. D., query 26, asks whether a sun dial, made for latitude 48° 15', can be utilized in latitude 38° 50' for showing correct time. To make his dial available in the lower latitudes, he has only to lift the south side, so as to give the face a slope to the north, equal to the difference of the latitude, in this case 9° 25'. For then the plane of the gnomon being in the plane of the meridian, the edge of the gnomon casting the shadow will be parallel with the earth's axis; and the face of the dial will be parallel with the horizon of the latitude for which the dial was made, and the graduation will show the time required; that is, on the supposition that it was correctly made, and for a horizontal dial. (28) O. M. M. asks for a cheap process of plating steel case knives with tin. A. Clean the metal thoroughly by boiling in strong potash water, rinsing, pickling in dilute sulphuric acid, and scouring with a stiff brush and fine sand. Pass through strong aqueous salammoniac solution, then plunge in hot oil (palm or tallow). When thoroughly heated remove and dip in a pot of fused tin (grain tin) covered with tallow. When tinned, drain in oil pot and rub with a bunch of hemp. Clean and polish in hot sawdust. (29) V. R. P. writes: I have an aquarium which contains 4-2/3 gallons of water. How many fish must I have in it--average length of fish 1½ to 2 inches to insure the health of the fish? At present, I refill the aquarium semi-weekly. Please tell me a process by which I can lengthen the time. A. Put in three fish, 1½ inches in length, to one gallon of water, one small bunch of fresh water plants to one gallon of water. Tadpoles (after they have cast their branchia or gills), newts, and rock fish can be used to the extent of six to the gallon. The aquatic plants will supply the fish with sufficient oxygen, so that the water will seldom require changing. (30) A. S. writes: I am about to construct an aqueduct 1,200 feet in length, the water level differing 40 feet. By placing a forcing pump in the valley I could then raise the water to a height of 40 feet, and having erected a tank at that height and connected it by means of pipes with another tank 1,200 feet distant, but on the same level, the water according to a law of nature would travel over the distance of 1,200 feet. But finding it very difficult to erect tank 40 feet high, I would prefer to construct the whole on the incline. Will the forcing pump having just power enough to raise the water 40 feet perpendicularly into the tank have sufficient power to force it into a tank of the same elevation through 1,200 feet of pipe running on the incline, or must I have more power, and how much more? A. The forcing pump must have enough more power to overcome its own additional friction and the friction of water in the long inclined pipe. Allow 20 per cent more power at least. * * * * * MINERALS, ETC.--Specimens have been received from the following correspondents, and examined, with the results stated: Box marked C. H. (no letter.)--1. and 2. Garnetiferous quartz rock. 3 and 4. Micaceous quartz rock. 5. Granite. 6. Basalt with traces of chalcopyrite.--L. C. G.--They are fossil sharks' teeth, common in marl beds.--J. E. C.--1. Iron sulphide and lead sulphide. 2. Quartzite, with traces of galena and molybdic sulphide. 3 and 4. Dolomite. 5. Fossiliferous argillaceous limestone, containing traces of lead sulphide. 6. Lead sulphide in argillite.--C. T. M.--1. A silicious kaolin. 2. Similar to No. 1. Useful if mixed with finer clay for white ware. 3. Silicions carbonate of lime--some of this would probably make fair cement. 4. Brick--the clay from which this was made would probably be useful to potters. 5 and 6 are very silicious clays. * * * * * COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED. Liniment. By J. L. T. Seen and Tangible and the Unseen and Intangible. By J.L.T. On Cheap Railroads. By R. P. N. On a Meteor. By W. E. C. * * * * * [OFFICIAL.] INDEX OF INVENTIONS FOR WHICH Letters Patent of the United States were Granted in the Week Ending: November 16, 1880, AND EACH BEARING THAT DATE. [Those marked (r) are reissued patents.] * * * * * A printed copy of the specification and drawing of any patent in the annexed list, also of any patent issued since 1866, will be furnished from this office for one dollar. In ordering please state the number and date of the patent desired and remit to Munn & Co., 37 Park Row, New York city. We also furnish copies of patents granted prior to 1866; but at increased cost, as the specifications not being printed, must be copied by hand. Alloy for coating metals, J. B. Jones 234,482 Axle box, car, H. Hazel 234,568 Bag holder and truck therefor, L. H. Aldrich 234,381 Baling press, W. Duke 234,549 Band cutting and removing apparatus. W. Gray 234,561 Basket splints, machine for shaving, A. B. Fisher 234,398 Belt shifting mechanism for washing machines, L. Sternberger 234,439 Belt shipper, B. H. Hadley 234,563 Bias cutter, W. F. Hood 234,476 Bit brace, N. Spofford 234,624 Bit stock, Q. S. Backus 234,517 Book case, M. C. Dodge 234,461 Book holder, W. B. Daugherty 234,460 Boot and shoe heel, J. G. Ross 234,430 Boot and shoe soles, machine for forming imitation fair stitches to the edges of, Tayman & Bennor 234,503 Boot treeing machine, E. F. Grandy 234,401 Borer and excavotor, earth, J. W. Carley 234,532 Bottle wrapper, M. V. Kacer 234,582 Bridle front, B. A. Wilson 234,445 Buckle, D. C. Bassett 234,453 Buckle, harness, B. H. Cross 234,394 Butter worker, Cornish & Curtis 234,459 Button and stud, N. Nelson 234,604 Buttonhole for cuffs, etc., C. H. Shaw 234,620 Can, E. P. Fox 234,465 Can opener, W. E. Brock 234,527 Car brake, G. Bressler 234,525 Car brake, C. V. Rote 234,493 Car brake, G. A. Small 234,622 Car coupling, W. I. Ely 234,550 Car door fastener, Briggs & Dougherty 234,526 Car, railway, G. L. Waitt 234,507 Car starter, J. Ladner 234,590 Car, stock, W. Neracher 234,420 Car wheel, E. L. Taylor 234,502 Cars, shield for railway Mason & Hanson 234,416 Caster, trunk, J. Simmons 234,496 Chain, J. M. Dodge 234,548 Chains, device for making, H. Wexel 234,444 Chair, W. R. Clough 234,537 Chandelier, extension, T. D. Hotchkiss 234,477 Cheese curd sifter and picker, F. M. Cummings 234,543 Churn, M. F. Mitchel 234,418 Clock, traveling, H. Reinecke 234,612 Clock winding and gas cock mechanism, combined, G. P. Ganster 234,557 Clothes wringer, S. Huffman 234,577 Coal fork, T. R. Way 234,633 Coin, device for holding, counting, and delivering, Van Slyke & Nesom 234,441 Collar and cuff folding machine, M. Hermann 234,571 Confectioners' forms and their application, W. E. H. Sommer 234,623 Corn husks, apparatus for cutting, W. A. Wright 234,640 Corn husks, disintegrating, W. A. Wright 234,641 Corset, C. F. Allen 234,380 Cotton picker, G. Risler 234,613 Cotton press, S. Stucky 234,626 Cradle and carriage, combined, G. F. Doyle 234,547 Crank movements, apparatus for overcoming the dead point in, P. E. Jay 234,496 Crimping pin, C. D. Thompson 234,629 Cuff fastener and supporter, A. B. Case 234,533 Cultivator and seeder, combined, J. D. Chichester 234,390 Current and tide water wheel, H. Fake 234,396 Currycomb, M. Sweet 234,501 Curtain fixture, H. Seehausen 234,495 Draught equalizer, F. H. Sandefer 234 625 Drawer lock, G. E. Bendix 234,454 Drilling machine, T. Naish 234,603 Drip pan for oil barrels, C. E. Laverty 234,411 Electric light burner, J. Sarcia 234,618 Electric lights or motors, automatic cut-out apparatus for, C. F. Brush 234,456 Electric machines, rotating armature for dynamo, E. Weston 234,443 Electrical switch board, J. W. See 234,432 Embroidering machines, jacquard attachment for, M. Umstadter (r) 9,470, 9,471 End board, wagon, H. A. Riggs 234,614 Excelsior machine, C. Howes 234,475 Explosive compound, C. A. Morse 234,489 Eyeglasses, R. Kabus 234.581 Faucet attachment, C. A. Raggio 234,429 Feed bag, T. R. Lowerre 234,593 Fence post, wire, Ticknor & Bebee 234,440 Ferric oxide and cupric chloride, manufacture of, J. F. N. Macay 234,595 Filter, coffee and tea, T. Fitzgerald, Jr. 234,556 Filter, reversible, R. S. Jennings 234,408 Firearm, breech-loading, J. L. Volkel 234,632 Fire escape, Quintavalle & Lindberg 234,611 Fires, process of and apparatus for extinguishing, J. H. Campbell 234,531 Foot, artificial, A. A. Marks 234,596 Fruit drier, G. P. & L. J. Lee 234,412 Fuel burning apparatus, J. Wolstenholme 234,448 Galvanic battery, G. L. Leclanché 234,413 Gas making apparatus, C. F. Dieterich 234,546 Gas pressure regulator, P. Noyes 234,421 Gas, process of and apparatus for manufacturing illuminating, Granger & Collins, Jr. 234,400 Gate, L. P. Allen 234,515 Gate, D. B. Hamilton 234,471 Gate, K. A. Scott 234,619 Gears, machine for cutting the teeth of metal, W. Gleason (r) 9,468 Gears, machine for cutting the teeth of wooden, W. Gleason (r) 9,469 Glassware, mould for pressed, W. Haley 234,564 Glove, R. D. Burr 234,528 Grain binder, C. B. Withington 234,638 Harness, C. E. Berry 234,519 Harness, suspending swinging, C. E. Berry 234,520 Harrow, W. H. Hulings 234,576 Harrow and cultivator tooth, G. C. Winslow 234,639 Hat body, W. W. Thoman 234,505 Hat ironing machine, Hedden & McCormick 234,569 Hatchway door mechanism, J. W. Evans 234,464 Hay press, B. M. Watts 234,509 Head light, locomotive, W. Kelley 234,410 Hides, machine for shaving wool or hair from, J. Curson 234,542 Hinge, gate, J. L. Anderson 234,382 Hopple, C. J. Gustaveson 234,562 Hydrocarbon burner, D. M. Graham 234,468 Hydrocarbon furnace, W. D. Dickey 234,395 Ice cutting machine, E. S. Field 234,397 Inhaler, gas, H. R. Hurd 234,479 Instep holder, McKay & Fairfield 234,488 Insulator, telegraph, C. Bigeon 234,523 Iron with oxide, coating, G. & A. S. Bower 234,524 Iron with zinc and alloys of zinc, coating, J. B. Jones 234,481 Ironing machine, J. Vandercar 234,631 Jewelers' use, tool for, L. G. Grady 234,560 Keg, lager beer, J. B. Hayden 234,473 Knitting machines, feed mechanism for circular, H. Clarke 234,535 Knob attachment, W. H. Gonne 234,466 Ladder, C. D. Cannon 234,389 Lantern holder, P. G. Stephenson 234,500 Lathe, gauge, F. W. Clough 234,536 Life preserver, C. D. Oatman 234,606 Lightning guard for oil tanks, A. A. Knudson 234,484 Limb, artificial, A. A. Marks 234,597 Lock, A. Lemke 234,592 Lock cylinder, H. R. Towne 234,630 Loom. A. L. & C. L. Bigsby 234,521 Lubricating apparatus, automatic, G. W. Baker 234,383 Machine brake, automatic, E. Pitman 234,426 Magnet, relay or sounder, G. Little 234,415 Malt, compressed, Prendergast & Free 234,428 Marble, etc., composition for cleaning, G. P. Cole 234,539 Meat cutter, R. Hübner. 234,470 Meat cutting machine, L. Steigert 234,499 Mercurial fumes, apparatus for condensing, T. W. Dresser 234,462 Metals from their ores, machine for separating precious, G. Hall 234,565 Mirror hanger, C. W. Prescott 234,609 Moulding machines, apparatus for turning cutters for, L. Wenchel 234,635 Mower, lawn, H. G. Fiske 234,553 Musical string instruments, key for, J. Singer 234,643 Needle wrapper, J. M. Woodward 234,514 Optometer, A. Mayer 234,598 Overalls, A. Clement 234,391 Overalls, L. H. Wise 234,512 Packing case, folding, W. H. Yaxley 234,450 Paint cans, machine for filling, W. M. Shoemaker 234,434 Pantaloons elevator, C. B. Plympton 234,427 Paper bag machine, O. E. Davidson 234,544 Paper cutting machine, J. M. Jones 234,409 Paper feeding machine, Griffith & Byrne 234,469 Paper, machine for fringing, S. Garrett 234,399 Paper machine pulp screen, S. L. Gould 234,559 Paper pulp digesters, etc., slide valve gate for, J. Saunders 234,431 Paper pulp pail, E. Hubbard 234,405 Paner tool, H. Dewey 234,545 Planter, check row seed, G. W. Fink 234,555 Planter, corn, Wickey & Brown 234,447 Planter, cotton seed, J. H. Walker 234,508 Plow and seed planter, combined, Sapp & Mantz 234,616 Plow, sulky, W. H. Ryer 234,615 Plumbers' traps, machine for making, F. N. Du Bois 234,463 Pocket, S. Marcus 234,487 Pocketbook, H. J. Lehman 234,414 Portable engine boiler, D. M. Swain. 234,627 Preparations melting under 32° Fahrenheit, apparatus therefor, and their application, S. H. Rouart 234,494 Preserving animal and vegetable substances, compound for, J. Hauff 234,567 Pressure regulator, fluid, N. C. Locke (r) 9,466 Printing machines, stretching and drying apparatus for calico, F. J. Crowley 234,541 Printing presses, traversing inking roller for, A. Shedlock 234,433 Propelling vessels, mechanism for, B. Palmer 234,607 Pulley attachment, F. A. Kittell 234,585 Pump, P. E. Jay 231,407 Pump, L. M. Canavel 234,583 Pump, air, W. Auteurietti 234,516 Pump bucket, chain, Laraway & Rockwell 234,588 Pump, diaphragm ship's, J. Edson 234,551 Pump, steam, E. E. Miller 234,601 Radiator, steam, H. Mooers 234,419 Railway chair, J. H. Collingwood 234,458 Railway fish plate, W. Butcher 234,529 Railway signal, pneumatic, J. A. Emery 234,552 Railway signaling apparatus, F. J. Wenker 234,636 Railway switch, T. Solt 234,436 Railway time signal, H. A. Wayne 234,634 Refrigerator, S. B. Clemmens 234,457 Riddle and sieve, E. Oliver 234,605 Roofing and paving material, C. M. Warren 234,412 Roofing composition, C. F. Pearson 234,425 Rudders, raising and lowering ships', R. F. Loper, Jr. 234,594 Saccharine substances, treatment and preparation of, M. Weinrich 234,510, 234,511 Sash fastening, Burgess & Sanford 234,387 Seed huller, cotton, S. Kitchens, Sr. 234,584 Sewing machine, Koch & Wiese 234,587 Sewing machine, E. T. Thomas 234,628 Sewing machine, boot and shoe, E. Woodward 234,513 Sewing machine, button hole, J. H. Applegate 234,451 Sewing machine quilting gauge, J. H. Lavance 234,485 Sewing machine treadle, R. Steel 234,498 Seeding machines, spring hoe attachment for, S. B. Hart 234,566 Shirt, C. A. Gilbert 234,558 Sink outlet cover, J. W. Grows 234,102 Skate, roller, M. C. Henley 234,404 Smoke and gas consuming furnace, W. C. P. Bissell 234,885 Snow scraping machine, G. B. Gruman 234,470 Soda water and other liquids, apparatus for cooling, A. D. Puffer (r) 9,465 Soldering irons, rotary benzine furnace for heating, G. H. Perkins 234,424 Sole edge burnishing machine, Tayman & Bennor 234,504 Spinning frames, mechanism for supporting the spindles of ring, J. Birkenhead 234,522 Spout, sap, I. H. Spelman 234,437 Steam pipes, etc., covering for, J. Merriam 234,417 Steam trap, J. H. Blessing 234,886 Stencil, D. W. Ream 234,492 Stereotype matrices, drying, W. J. Johnson 234,480 Stove, gasoline, W. C. North 234,491 Stove grate, G. Froh (r) 9,463 Stove pipe shelf, S. Ayres 234,452 Stoves, portable extension top for, J. H. Hutchinson 234,575 String instruments, key for tuning, J. Singer 234,642 Telegraph, duplex. A. Muirhead 234,490 Telephone, J. H. Irwin 234,579 Telephone, speaking, S. D. Field 234,554 Telephone system, G. D'Infreville 234,578 Thill coupling, P. Klipple 234,483 Thill coupling. L. B. Lathrop 234,591 Thrashing or hulling cylinder, J. I. McClung 234,599 Thread cutter, M. D. Barringer 234,384 Tinned metal plates by heat and pressure, automatic apparatus for uniting, G. H. Perkins 234,423 Tobacco curing apparatus, A. Gordon 234,467 Tobacco leaves, apparatus for coloring, J. M. Henningsen 234,474 Tobacco, marking plug, W. Painter 234,608 Toilet case, C. Carroll 234,388 Tongue hound for wagons, R. W. McClelland 234,600 Tongue support, wagon. G. F. Wingate 234,446 Tool shank, A. H. Suplee (r) 9,472 Toothpick, E. Osgood 234,422 Toy horse and wagon, F. W. Carpenter 234,534 Toy money bank, C. A. Bailey 234,518 Truck. E. J. Leyburn 234,486 Trucks, rub iron for car, D. E. Small 234,621 Valve, J. P. Hillard 234,573 Valve, balanced, Moore & Pertz 234,602 Vehicle bow trimming, H. Higgin 234,574 Vehicle sand band, J. Hitchcock 234,572 Vehicle seat, F. Oppenheim (r) 9,464 Vehicle spring, G. E. Harris 234,403 Vehicle wheel, J. Ladner 234,589 Vehicle wheel, C. H. Triphagen 234,506 Wagon brake, Whitman & Igon 234,637 Wagon brake shoe, C. A. Skene 234,435 Washing machine, J. G. Crawford 234,393 Washing machine, L. Sternberger 234,438 Watch, acoustic, G. A. Bowen 234,455 Watch case, W. Calame 234,530 Watches, roller abstractor for, B. Frese (r) 9,467 Water closet, S. S. Hellyer 234,570 Water elevator, J. R. Cluxton 234,538 Wells, drilling machine for Artesian and oil, F. Knowlan 234,586 Whiffletree hook, C. Wright 234,449 Wind wheel, J. Sander 234,617 Windmill, Coriell & Adams 234,392 Windmill, W. C. Jacob 234,580 Wood, ornamenting, Pruyn & Hyatt 234,610 Wood turning machine, F. Hanson 234,472 Wrench and screw driver, comb'd, J. K. Collins 234,540 * * * * * DESIGNS. Coffin screw, E. A. Cuppers 12,033 Gem setting, Vennin & Peltier 12,037 Lamp bracket, F. R. Seidensticker 12,036 Stove, cooking, H. L. Fennell 12,034 Type, font of printing, J. K. Rogers 12,035 * * * * * TRADE MARKS. Fish, manufactured, Ferguson, Walker & Co 8,091 Hats, gentlemen's and boys' and ladies' and misses' soft felt, Topping Maynard & Hobron 8,096 Tobacco, plug, G. Wittler 8,097 Jewelry, comprising lace pins, scarf pins, earrings, ear drops, brooches studs, sleeve buttons, and scarf rings. Howard & Scherrieble 8,095 Soap, J. Oakley & Co. 8,094 Tobacco, smoking and chewing, Wilson & McCallay 8,092, 8,093 Yarn, cotton and woolen darning, H. C. Conkle 8,090 * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS. Inside page, each insertion--75 cents a line. Back page, each insertion--$1.00 a line. _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ The publishers of this paper guarantee to advertisers a circulation of not less than 50,000 copies every weekly issue. * * * * * A SPLENDID HOLIDAY GIFT. DR. SCOTT'S ELECTRIC HAIR BRUSH. A REMARKABLE INVENTION, Which has won its way to Royal favor in England, been cordially indorsed by the Prince and Princess of Wales, and written upon by the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, is now brought to the notice of the American public. It cures by natural means, will always do good, never harm, and is a remedy lasting for many years. It should be used daily in place of the ordinary Hair Brush. The Brush Handle is made of a new odorless composition resembling ebony; a combination of substances PRODUCING A PERMANENT ELECTRIC VOLTAIC CURRENT WHICH ACTS IMMEDIATELY UPON THE HAIR GLANDS AND FOLLICLES. This power can always be tested by a silver compass which accompanies each Brush. IT IS WARRANTED TO CURE NERVOUS HEADACHE IN 5 MINUTES!!! CURE NEURALGIA IN 6 MINUTES!! PREVENT FALLING HAIR AND BALDNESS!! CURE DANDRUFF & DISEASES OF THE SCALP!! PROMPTLY ARRESTS PREMATURE GRAYNESS!! MAKES THE HAIR GROW LONG & GLOSSY!! IMMEDIATELY SOOTHES THE WEARY BRAIN MONEY RETURNED IF NOT AS REPRESENTED. IT RARELY FAILS TO PRODUCE A RAPID GROWTH OF HAIR ON BALD HEADS, WHERE THE GLANDS and FOLLICLES ARE NOT TOTALLY DESTROYED. Proprietors: The Pall Mall Electric Association of London. 5th New York Branch: 842 Broadway. [From the Mayor of Saratoga.] August 12, 1880. "I cheerfully testify to the merits of Dr. Scott's Electric Hair Brush. It cures my headaches within a few minutes. I am so pleased with it I purchased another for my wife. It is an excellent Hair Brush, well worth the price, aside from its curative powers." JAS. B. CHAPMAN. [From Rev. Dr. Bridgeman.] Brooklyn, June 1st, 1880. "Gents: I have never before given a testimonial, but am willing to encourage the use of an honest remedy. I am so Pleased with your Hair Brush that I deem it my duty to write you recommending it most cordially. My hair, about a year since, commenced falling out, and I was rapidly becoming bald; but since using the Brush a thick growth of hair has made its appearance, quite equal to that which I had previous to its falling out. I have tried other remedies, but with no success. After this remarkable result I purchased one for my wife, who has been a great sufferer from headache, and she finds it a prompt and infallible remedy." A. C. Bridgeman, D. D. [Illustration] 218 Pulton Street, New York, August 31, 1880. "I would Not take $1,000 for my Brush If I could not replace it." PLINY F. SMITH. Mr. Smith is a gentleman well known in this City as a Law Publisher, and also as a Director in several Public Institutions of New York. "Domestic" Sewing Machine Co., New York, August 16, 1880. DR. GEO. A. SCOTT--Dear Sir: Permit me to add the testimony of my wife to that of the many others who have been benefited by the use of your Electric Brush. She has for years been a sufferer from Neuralgia in an acute form, but since I obtained for her one of your Brushes, she has experienced entire relief. Please accept her sincere thanks.--HENRY BARTLETT. Round Lake Camp-Meeting Grounds, Saratoga Co., N. Y., June 8, 1880. Your Brush is certainly a remarkable cure. I am highly pleased with it. Its effect is most wonderful, and you may be sure I shall recommend it heartily among my friends. It is also a splendid Hair Brush, well worth the money, and will last me for years.--Rev. J. D. ROGERS, Superintendent. Mention this Paper. Over 7,000 similar Testimonials can be seen at our office. Remember that this is NOT a "metallic" wire brush, but made of PURE BRISTLES. A BEAUTIFUL BRUSH, LASTING FOR YEARS. We will send it, postpaid, on receipt of $3.00; or by Express C. O. D. at your expense, with privilege of opening and examining. Or request your nearest Druggist or Fancy Store to obtain one for you, FROM US. MONEY RETURNED IF NOT AS REPRESENTED. As soon as you receive the Brush, if not well satisfied with your bargain, write us, and we will return the money. What can be fairer? This paper will not knowingly publish any humbug, and I have placed a Brush in the hands of Mayor Cooper and Postmaster James of New York, as a guarantee of my good faith. UP Remittances should be made payable to GEO. A. SCOTT, 842A Broadway, New York. Agents wanted in every town. They can be made in checks, drafts, post office orders, or currency. Inclose 10 cents for registration, and we guarantee safe delivery of Brush. * * * * * THE SWISS WARBLER OR MOCKING-BIRD WHISTLE IT IMITATES EVERY SOUND IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM FROM THE THRILL OF THE NIGHTINGALE TO THE HOWL OF THE WOLF AFTER A LITTLE PRACTICE YOUR MOUTH WILL SEEM TO BE A COMPLETE MENAGERIE YOU can raise a laugh or pierceing cry of horror at pleasure. Sample by mail, only 10 cts., 6 for 25 cts., 15 for 50cts. Valuable catalogue of agent's goods free. WORLD MANUFACTURING CO., 122 Nassau Street, New York. * * * * * STEAM BOILERS; THEIR DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION, AND MANAGEMENT. BY WILLIAM M. SHOCK, Chief of Bureau of Steam Engineering, United States Navy. In one large quarto volume of 480 pages, and illustrated with 150 wood-cuts and 36 full-page plates (20 of which are double). Bound in half crimson Morocco, gilt tops. Price $15 D. VAN NOSTRAND. Publisher, 23 Murray and 27 Warren Sts., New York. *** Copies sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of price. * * * * * THE HOLLY SYSTEM OF STEAM HEATING FOR CITIES AND VILLAGES, HOLLY STEAM COMBINATION CO. LIMITED LOCKPORT, N. Y. SEE ILLUSTRATED AD IN LAST NUMBER * * * * * TOOPE'S PAT. FELT AND ASBESTOS Non-Conducting, Removable Covering, as manufactured by Toope's Asbestos Covering Co., Limited, London, England. Awarded a Medal of Excellence at the late American Institute Fair. For steam Boilers and Pipes, Steam Pans and Coppers, Hot and Cold Water Pipes, Refrigerators, Meat Cars, etc. Samples free. A few first-class agents wanted. Address CHS. TOOPE, Sole Manufacturing Agent in U. S. Office and Works, 353 East 78th Street, New York City. * * * * * Agents Wanted Sells rapidly. Particulars _free_. S. M. Spencer, 112 Wash'n St., Boston, Mass. * * * * * FOR SALE-LARGE MACHINE SHOP, WITH Machinery, Tools, Engine, etc., _ready for running_. Inquire of A. MONNETT & CO., Bucyrus, Ohio. * * * * * 50 A Elegant, All New, Chromo & Scroll Cards, no 2 alike, Name Nicely printed, 10c. Card Mills, Morthford, Ct. * * * * * [Illustration] PATENT BENDING ROLLS, For Heavy Punches, Shears, Boiler Shop Rolls, Radial Drills, etc., send to HILLES & JONES, Wilmington, Del. * * * * * NO MORE USE FOR OIL ON MACHINERY Oline Lubricating Compound, manuf'd by HOLLAND & THOMPSON, Troy, N. Y. Avoids hot journals, dripping, and waste. Send for catalogue of Grease and Cups for all kinds of machinery. * * * * * PLAYS! PLAYS! PLAYS! PLAYS! For Reading Clubs, for Amateur Theatricals, Temperance Plays, Drawing Room Plays, Fairy Plays, Ethiopian Plays, Guide Books, Speakers, Pantomimes, Tableaux Lights, Magnesium Lights, Colored Fire, Burnt Cork, Theatrical Face Preparations, Jarley's Wax Works, Wigs, Beards, and Moustaches at reduced prices. Costumes, Scenery, Charades. New catalogues sent free containing full description and prices. Samuel French & Son, 38 E. 14th Street, New York. * * * * * ICE AND ICE HOUSES--HOW TO MAKE ice ponds; amount of ice required, etc., and full directions for building ice-house, with illustrated plan. Contained in Scientific American Supplement, No. 55. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. * * * * * [Illustration] THE NEW TOY! Old Folks Tickled and Children Delighted Mechanical grasshopper, jumps 6 feet high. Samples free for 10 cents, 4 for 25 cents, 1 doz. for 50cts. By mail. Big Profit to Dealers. Agents Wanted. Valuable Catalogue of Agents Goods free. Address, WORLD M'F'G, CO. 122 Nassau St., New York. * * * * * 50 CHROMOS, name in new type, 10c. by mail. _40 Agts. Samples_, 10c. U. S. Card Co., Northford, Ct. * * * * * WANTED, BY THE SOUTHWARK FOUNDRY AND MACHINE CO., Philadelphia, a number of first-class fitters on engine work. * * * * * ICE-HOUSE AND COLD ROOM.--BY R. G. Hatfield. With directions for construction. Four engravings. Contained in Scientific American Supplement, 59. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. * * * * * For Sale.--Engine for Steam Launch, at a bargain. Cylinder, 4½ in. diameter, 5 in. stroke. For particulars, address JAMES T. MILLER, 119 Monroe St., Chicago, Ill. * * * * * [Illustration] Langdon Mitre Box Co, MILLERS FALLS MASS. Langdon and New Langdon Mitre Box. Send for Circular. * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT. Any desired back number of the Scientific American Supplement can be had at this office for 10 cents. Also to be had of newsdealers in all parts of the country. * * * * * THE OPEN FIREPLACE IN ALL AGES. By J. P. Putnam, Architect. One vol. 12mo. Price $2. With 269 illustrations of famous fireplaces of historical and artistic interest, together with original designs and suggestions for modern use. *** For sale by all Booksellers, or will be sent, postpaid, on receipt of price, by the Publishers, JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., BOSTON. * * * * * STEAM PUMPS, THE NORWALK IRON WORKS CO., SOUTH NORWALK, CONN. * * * * * GREAT IMPROVEMENTS Recently made in CRUSHING AND GRINDING GOLD and SILVER ORES, BONES, PHOSPHATE ROCK, and CHEMICALS. We compel QUARTZ to grind QUARTZ. Address, for new circular, BAUGH & SONS, Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * [Illustration] BEST FOOT LATHES, Back geared and screw cutting. Small Lathes, Hand Planers for Metal, Small Gear cutters, Slide Rests, Scroll and Circular Saw Machines. Lowest Prices. Send for illustrated catalogue. N. H. BALDWIN, Laconia, N. H. * * * * * MECHANIC WANTED. A skilled mechanic, capable of constructing and operating a works for the manufacture of wrought iron pipe and tubing. Address DUNMOYLE, Lock Box 1459, Pittsburg, Pa. * * * * * CENTENNIAL, AND PARIS MEDALS. Mason's Friction Clutches and Elevators. "New and Improved Patterns." VOLNEY W. MASON & CO., Providence, R. I., U. S. A. * * * * * WANTED A thoroughly competent and experienced man to take charge of a foundry employing 200 men, doing engine and general work. Address A. & Co., Box 773, New York. * * * * * BLAKE'S PATENT POSITIVE STEAM TRAP. [Illustration] This Trap is adapted to all places where steam is used for _heating_ or _drying_ purposes. It is simple in construction, _positive in its working_ and much lower in price than any other Trap. Descriptive Circular sent on application. Address SALAMANDER GRATE BAR CO, 110 Liberty Street, New York. * * * * * THE PERFECTED STYLOGRAFIC LITTLE [Illustration] GIANT The most convenient and economical outfit for writing. Pen, Pencil, and Inkstand in one. Writes 50 large pages without refilling. Lasts a lifetime. Attaches to watch chain or neck cord, or fits vest pocket. Price $2.50. Can be ordered by mail, and exchanged or returned if not suited. For full description of various styles, send for circular. READERS' AND WRITERS' ECONOMY CO., 25-33 Franklin Street, Boston; 4 Bond Street, New York; 38 Madison Street, Chicago. * * * * * Phosphor-Bronze Wire, Sheets, Rods, Bolts. [Illustration] Pamphlets and particulars on application to The Phosphor-Bronze Smelting Co. Limited, 2038 Washington Ave., Phila., Pa. OWNERS OF THE U S. PHOSPHOR-BRONZE PATENTS. Sole Manufacturers of Phosphor-Bronze in the U. S. * * * * * Magic Lantern Catalogue, 50 pp, and Lecture, 10cts. MAGIC LANTERNS AND VIEWS THE MAGICAL ORGANETTE, ONLY $8.00. Double size Reeds, extra strength and finish. Circulars and beautiful Set Fancy Cards, 8 Cents. THEO. J. HARBACH, 809 FILBERT ST., PHILA., PA. * * * * * PERKINS' High Pressure Engine and Boiler, Etc. On returning to England, I have arranged with Mr. James L. Howard, of Hartford, Conn., to represent the interests of The Perkins' Engine Company, Limited, of London, in this country. All communications addressed to him on this subject will receive attention. GEO. DEANE. Secretary, The Perkins' Engine Co., Limited. * * * * * 50 _Lithographed_ Chromo Cards, no 2 alike, 10c. Name in fancy type. Conn. Card Co., Northford, Ct. * * * * * DO YOUR OWN PRINTING [Illustration] Presses and outfits from $3 to $500 Over 2,000 styles of type. Catalogue and reduced price list free. H. HOOVER, Phila., Pa. * * * * * STRAUSS'S LAST. THE HEKTOGRAPH SCHNELL POLKA pronounced by critics as unrivalled, the rage at balls and parties, sent on receipt of 15 cts. Hektograph Co. Pub's, 22 Church St., N. Y. * * * * * TOOPE'S PATENT FURNACE GRATE BAR. Best and cheapest in the world. CHS. TOOPE, Manufacturing Agent, 353 East 78th Street, New York. * * * * * Wanted Manufactured on royalty, a valuable patented two-horse Corn Planter. Box 1525, Terre Haute, Ind. * * * * * Pond's Tools, Engine Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c. DAVID W. POND, Worcester, Mass. * * * * * [Illustration] THE GREAT WORK, splendidly illustrated with colored plates, now ready. It sells at sight. Agents wanted. Send for particulars. Rich Masonic goods, Kt. Templar outfits, and books at hard-pan prices. Send for illustrated catalogue. REDDING & CO., Masonic Publishers, 731 Broadway, New York. Beware of spurious works. * * * * * SPARE THE CROTON AND SAVE THE COST. Driven or Tube Wells furnished to large consumers of Croton and Ridgewood Water. WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO., 235 Broadway. N. Y., who control the patent for Green's American Driven Well. * * * * * WOOD WORKING Machinery. Celebrated "Schenck" Planers and Matchers. 20,000 ft. flooring, 45,000 ft. surfacing per day. Re-sawers, Moulders, Tenoners, Scroll Saws, etc. H. B. Schenck, Successor to Jno. B. Schenck's Sons, Matteawan, N. Y. * * * * * CARY & MOEN STEEL WIRE OF EVERY DESCRIPTION AND STEEL SPRINGS. 234 W. 29 ST. NEW YORK CITY * * * * * "The 1876 Injector." Simple, Durable, and Reliable. Requires no special valves. Send for illustrated circular. WM. SELLERS & CO., Phila. * * * * * Shafts, Pulleys, Hangers, Etc. Full assortment in store for immediate delivery. WM. SELLERS & CO., 79 Liberty Street, New York. * * * * * _Two New and Important Books._ SOAP AND CANDLES, STARCH, DEXTRINE, and GLUCOSE. IN PRESS. A Technical Treatise on Soap and Candles, with a Glance at the Industry of Fats and Oils. By R. S. Cristiani. Fully illustrated. 500 pages 8vo, handsomely printed on fine paper. _Subscriptions will now be received at $6.00 per copy, payable on delivery._ A Practical Treatise on the Manufacture of Starch, Dextrine, and Glucose. Illustrated by about 75 engravings. 300 pages 8vo, handsomely printed on fine paper. _Subscriptions will now be received at $3.50 per copy, payable on delivery._ HENRY CAREY BAIRD & CO., Industrial Publishers, Booksellers, and Importers, 810 Walnut Street, Philadelphia. * * * * * [Illustration] WITHERBY, RUGG & RICHARDSON, Manufacturers of Patent Wood Working Machinery of every description. Facilities unsurpassed. Shop formerly occupied by R. Ball & Co., Worcester, Mass. Send for Catalogue. * * * * * $72 A WEEK. $12 a day at home easily made. Costly outfit free. Address True & Co., Augusta, Me. * * * * * Superior Wood Working Machinery, principally for Cabinet, Piano, and Piano Action Makers. Shafting, Pulleys, and Hangers. P. Pryibil, 461 to 467 W. 40th St., New York. * * * * * SURFACE FILE HOLDERS. By their use a crooked file may be utilized as well as a straight one, and _both_ are made to do better execution in filing broad surfaces than has hitherto been possible. No. 4 holds files 12 to 14 in. long. Price 75c. each. No. 5 " " 14 to 16 in. " Price $1.00 each. For sale by the trade generally. Manufactured only by the NICHOLSON FILE CO., Providence, R. I. * * * * * THE BIGGEST THING OUT. Illustrated book sent free. Address E. NASON & CO., 111 Nassau St., New York. * * * * * ORGANS $30 to $1,000; 2 to 32 Stops. Pianos $125 up. Paper free. Address Daniel F. Beatty, Washington, N. J. * * * * * [Illustration] Leffel Water Wheels, With recent improvements. Prices Greatly Reduced. 8000 in successful operation. FINE NEW PAMPHLET FOR 1879, Sent free to those interested. James Leffel & Co, Springfield, O. 110 Liberty St., N. Y. City. * * * * * THREE BEAUTIFUL GIFT BOOKS FOR THE HOLIDAYS. "THE DORE BIBLE GALLERY." Containing One Hundred of the choicest of Gustave Doré's illustrations of the Bible, and a page of explanatory letter-press facing each engraving, together with a superb portrait of the artist. Large quarto, cloth, full gilt, $6; morocco, full gilt, $10. "ATALA" By M. De Chateaubriand. An American story, and one of the best efforts of the celebrated author. Superbly illustrated with numerous full pages of some of our grandest scenery, by Gustave Doré. Printed on heavy tinted paper, and richly bound. Large quarto, cloth, full gilt, $5; morocco, full gilt, $10. "THE WANDERING JEW." A series of twelve illustrations by Gustave Doré, picturing the weird and unearthly scenes of the legend, with explanatory letter-press. Large quarto, cloth, gilt, $2.50. "A most beautiful production."--_Brooklyn Advance_. "Published in very rich style."--_Publishers' Weekly_. "Is meeting with deserved success."--_Bookseller and Stationer_. "Such books are educators in the highest sense of the term."--_Chicago Inter-Ocean_. "One of the most successful productions that have done honor to the pencil of Gustave Doré."--_Providence Journal_. "Contains some of the most striking productions of Doré at a moderate cost."--_N. Y. Tribune_. "We are very glad they have been put within the reach of the many."--_Hartford Courant_. THE FINE ART PUBLISHING CO., 535 Pearl Street, New York. For sale by all Booksellers, or sent, postpaid, on receipt of price, by the Publishers. * * * * * SASH DOVETAILING MACHINE. [Illustration] Planers, Moulding Machines, Mortisers and Borers, Tenoning Machines, Blind Rabbeting Machines; also, a large variety of other wood working machines, manufactured by LEVI HOUSTON, Montgomery, Pa. * * * * * TELEPHONE Works 1 mile. Price $4. Pat'd. Circulars free. Holcomb & Co., Mallet Creek, Ohio. * * * * * AGENTS WANTED TO INTRODUCE a new and novel Account Book to business men. A rich harvest to competent parties during the next three months. All particulars by return mail. H. W. PAMPHILON, 30 Bond St., New York City. * * * * * $5 to $20 per day at home. Samples worth $5 free. Address Stinson & Co., Portland, Me. * * * * * CATALOGUE OF NOVELTIES FOR AGENTS Free. J. F. GAGE, Boston, Mass. * * * * * ERICSSON'S NEW MOTOR. ERICSSON'S NEW CALORIC PUMPING ENGINE, FOR DWELLINGS AND COUNTRY SEATS. Simplest cheapest, and most economical pumping engine for domestic purposes. Any servant girl can operate. Absolutely safe. Send for circulars and price lists. DELAMATER IRON WORKS C. H. DELAMATER & CO., Proprietors, No. 10 Cortlandt Street, New York, N. Y. * * * * * SUPERIOR SUBSTITUTE FOR WOOD ENGRAVING. _J. C. MOSS, Pres. and Sup't._ _R. B. MOSS, Assist. Sup't._ _M. A. MOSS, Treasurer._ _J. E. RAMSEY, Secretary._ _H. A. JACKSON, Assist. Sec._ MOSS ENGRAVING CO INCORPORATED (MOSS'S NEW PROCESS.) APRIL 2, 1880 535 PEARL STREET, COR. ELM, NEW YORK. LARGEST ESTABLISHMENT OF THE KIND IN THE WORLD. ENGRAVINGS OF PORTRAITS, BUILDINGS, LANDSCAPES, MACHINERY, MAPS, ORNAMENTAL LETTERING and GENERAL ILLUSTRATIONS FOR NEWSPAPERS, BOOKS, CATALOGUES, etc. Much cheaper than Wood Cuts. _Mr. J. C. Moss, the inventor of the Moss Process of Photo-Engraving, in withdrawing from the Photo-Engraving Co., 67 Park Place, has retained for himself all improvements made and used by him in Photo-Engraving since May, 1872._ Send green stamp for Illustrated Circular. Send copy for estimate. Please mention this paper. * * * * * [Illustration] THE BLAKE "LION AND EAGLE" CRUSHER, A patented improvement of the former "New Pattern" Blake machine. Has much greater efficiency than the old. It requires only about half the power to drive, and is transported at much less expense (the size most used weighing several thousand pounds less than the unimproved machine). It requires less than half the time in oiling and other manipulation, and less than half the expense for repairs. Address E. S. BLAKE & CO., Pittsburgh, Pa., Sole Proprietors and Manufacturers. [Illustration] * * * * * [Illustration] W. C. WREN'S Pat. Grate Bar, Manufactured by D. & S. CRESWELL, Eagle Iron Foundry, 816 RACE ST., PHILADELPHIA, PA. * * * * * [Illustration] ROCK BREAKERS & ORE CRUSHERS. (THE "BLAKE" STYLE.) This machine has for twenty years stood the Test, and found to be the _best one_ made for breaking all kinds of hard and brittle substances, such as Ores, Quartz, Emery, etc., etc. Mr. S. L. Marsden, for the past twenty years connected with the manufacture of this machine, superintends its manufacture. FARREL FOUNDRY AND MACHINE CO., Manufrs., Ausonia, Conn. * * * * * The Melodette, or Automatic Piano, [Illustration] The most marvellous mechanical invention of the age. It will play any tune that ever was written, in a melodious and pleasing manner. Difficult and simple music produced in a masterly style, and it can be played by a child as well as by a grown person, and will furnish music for social gatherings of any description, playing hour after hour, without any knowledge of music being required in the operation. The most wonderful of all musical inventions; a machine which in a purely mechanical manner produces any kind of music, Waltzes, Polkas, Marches, &c., &c., without any practice or knowledge of music whatever; in this respect far superior to any music-box, even though it costs many times as much, for there is no limit whatever to the number of tunes it will play. This instrument is on a somewhat similar principle to the wonderful Phonograph, the perforations in a flexible strip producing the effect. It has just been perfected (the accompanying cut showing it in its improved form), and is having the largest sale ever obtained by a musical instrument in the country. It has solid metal cases in imitation of green bronze; the notes or bars (the music producers) are metal, on same principle as a tuning-fork, which produce clear and most melodious notes, and never get out of tune; the bars are struck by strikers, the same as the wires are in a piano, only they work automatically instead of by the fingers. The strip of prepared paper in which the tune is stamped or perforated, is about 10 inches wide, and as it passes through the rollers and over the keys the strikers spring through the perforations in the paper and strike the right note; this is all done automatically, without any assistance from the operator (except turning the rollers), and the tune is played perfectly. It would be one of the most appropriate presents to make anyone, especially where there is no other musical instrument. Its execution is admirable, and its capacity or capability almost unlimited. It is selling faster than any musical instrument ever invented. The music is fine, and everybody delighted. The regular retail price of the Melodette is only $5, including a selection of popular tunes. Address, The Massachusetts Organ Co., 57 Washington Street Boston, Mass., U. S. A., Sole Manufacturers. SPECIAL OFFER--Agents Wanted--We wish a good Agent in every town, and big money can be made selling these instruments. We will send a sample instrument to any one wishing to act as our agent, for $3.25, Boxed Free, including music price lists, etc., etc., and will give territory. Order at once. $50 a week easily made. _We have 1000 testimonials_. * * * * * RUBBER BACK SQUARE PACKING. BEST IN THE WORLD. [Illustration] For Packing the Piston Rods and Valve Stems of Steam Engines and Pumps. B represents that part of the packing which, when in use, is in contact with the Piston Rod. A the elastic back, which keeps the part B against the rod with sufficient pressure to be steam-tight, and yet creates but little friction. This Packing is made in lengths of about 20 feet, and of all sizes from ¼ to 2 inches square. JOHN H. CHEEVER, Treas. NEW YORK BELTING & PACKING CO., 37 & 38 Park Row, New York. * * * * * [Illustration] THE STEARNS MANUFACTURING CO., ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA, make a specialty of improved SAW MILL MACHINERY. Designed in its construction for producing lumber economically and rapidly. Plans and estimates for Mills of any capacity furnished on request. Also build ENGINES, BOILERS, AND MACHINERY IN GENERAL. * * * * * [Illustration] Forster's Rock & Ore Breaker and Combined Crusher and Pulverizer. _The simplest machine ever devised for the purpose._ Parties who have used it constantly for six years testify that it will do _double_ the work of _any other Crusher_, with one-third the Power, and one-half the expense for keeping in repair. The smaller sizes can be run with Horse Power. Address TOTTEN & CO., Pittsburgh, Pa. * * * * * The BELMONTYLE OIL Prevents Rust, Tarnish, etc., on Firearms, Machinery, Tools, Cutlery, Safes, Saws, Skates, Stoves, Hardware, etc., without injury to the polish. In use over 10 years. Highest Testimonials. Samples 50 cents, three for $1.00, sent free of expressage. Send for circular. BELMONTYLE OIL CO., SOLE MANUFACTURERS, 150 Front Street, New York. * * * * * CARNEGIE BROS & CO UNION IRON MILLS PITTSBURGH PA WROUGHT IRON BEAMS CHANNELS TEES & ANGLES The attention of Architects, Engineers, and Builders is called to the great decline in prices of wrought STRUCTURAL IRON. It is believed that, were owners fully aware of the small difference in cost which now exists between iron and wood, the former, in many cases, would be adopted, thereby saving _insurance_ and avoiding all risk of _interruption_ to _business_ in consequence of fire. Book of detailed information furnished to Architects, Engineers, and Builders, on application. * * * * * [Illustration] MICROSCOPES, TELESCOPES, FIELD GLASSES, MAGIC LANTERNS, ANEROID BAROMETERS, SPECTROSCOPES, DRAWING INSTRUMENTS, PHILOSOPHICAL & CHEMICAL APPARATUS. Catalogues as follows sent on application: Part 1, Mathematical Instruments, 162 pp.; Part 2, Optical Instruments, 186 pp.; Part 3, Magic Lanterns, 112 pp.; Part 4, Philosophical and Chemical Apparatus, 160 pp. JAMES W. QUEEN & CO. 924 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * "RELIABLE" Engines a complete success. Prices still 40 per cent. below those of other makers. Unequaled for efficiency, simplicity, and durability. Prices from $250 for 10 H. P., to $400 for 30 H. P. All complete, with Governor, Pump, and Heater. Address, for circular, HEALD, SISCO & CO., Baldwinsville, N. Y. * * * * * UNIVERSAL GRINDER. These Grinders consist of a series of disks with beveled edges locked together on a shaft. They revolve towards each other at different rates of speed. They combine strength and durability. No friction; hence no heat. They will grind all kinds of Grain, also Quartz Rocks, Ores, Gypsum, Brimstone Shavings, Shells, Brick Clay, Cork, Rubber, Bone, Oil Cake, Flax Seed, Cotton Seed, and any number of articles in use by manufacturers and farmers. These Grinders are disposed of on reasonable terms. Send for Illustrated Catalogue with terms. NEWELL & CHAPIN, foot of West 19th Street, New York. * * * * * [Illustration] 23 Sizes of Direct, 24 Sizes of Boilers, and the best Indirect Radiation. Send for circulars. EUREKA STEAM HEATING CO. ROCHESTER, N. Y. * * * * * OTIS' SAFETY HOISTING Machinery. OTIS BROS. & CO., No. 348 Broadway, New York. * * * * * JOHN R. WHITLEY & CO. European Representatives of American Houses, with First-class Agents in the principal industrial and agricultural centers and cities in Europe. London, 7 Poultry, E. C. Paris. 8 Place Vendême. Terms on application. J. R. W. & Co. purchase Paris goods on commission at shippers' discounts. * * * * * ROOTS' NEW IRON BLOWER. [Illustration] POSITIVE BLAST. IRON REVOLVERS, PERFECTLY BALANCED IS SIMPLER, AND HAS FEWER PARTS THAN ANY OTHER BLOWER. P. H. & F. M. ROOTS, Manuf'rs, CONNERSVILLE, IND. S. S. TOWNSEND, Gen. Agt., 6 Cortlandt St., 8 Dey Street, NEW YORK. WM. COOKE, Selling Agt., 6 Cortlandt Street, NEW YORK. JAS. BEGGS & CO., Selling Agts., 8 Dey Street, NEW YORK. SEND FOR PRICED CATALOGUE. * * * * * PROPOSALS FOR MAIL LOCKS. POST OFFICE DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON. D. C., October 23, 1880. SEALED PROPOSALS will be received at this Department, until 12 o'clock, noon, on the 26th day of January, 1881, for furnishing a new kind of mail locks and keys for the sole and exclusive use of the United States through registered mails. As the public exposure and searching examination necessary to intelligent bidding on any prescribed model of a lock and key would tend to impair, if not entirely destroy, the further utility of such locks and keys for the purposes of the mails, the Postmaster General prescribes no model or sample for bidders, but relies for a selection on the mechanical skill and ingenuity which a fair competition among inventors, hereby invited, may develop in samples submitted by them. Specifications of the conditions and requirements relating to proposals, samples, contract, etc., as well as forms of proposal, will be furnished on application by letter to the Second Assistant Postmaster General. No proposal will be considered unless it shall have been submitted in accordance with such specification and forms. The contracts which may be made will be in conformity to the specifications and the accepted proposal. But the right is, however, reserved to reject any and all of the proposals. JAS. N. TYNER, Acting Postmaster General. * * * * * SHEPARD'S CELEBRATED $50 Screw Cutting Foot Lathe. [Illustration] Foot and Power Lathes, Drill Presses, Scrolls, Circular and Band Saws, Saw Attachments, Chucks, Mandrels, Twist Drills, Dogs, Calipers, etc. Send for catalogue of outfits for amateurs or artisans. H. L. SHEPARD & CO., 331, 333, 335, & 337 West Front Street, Cincinnati, Ohio. * * * * * HUB MACHINERY.--HUB TURNING, HUB MORTISING, and Hub Boring Machines. Send for price list and circulars. DAVID JENKINS, Sheboygan, Wis. * * * * * ROOFING. For steep or flat roofs. Applied by ordinary workmen at one-third the cost of tin. Circulars and samples free. Agents Wanted. T. NEW, 32 John Street, New York. * * * * * PATENT COLD ROLLED SHAFTING. The fact that this shafting has 75 per cent. greater strength, a finer finish, and is truer to gauge, than any other in use renders it undoubtedly the most economical. We are also the sole manufacturers of the Celebrated Collins' Pat. Coupling, and furnish Pulleys, Hangers, etc., of the most approved styles. Price list mailed on application to JONES & LAUGHLINS, Try Street, 2d and 3d Avenues, Pittsburg, Pa. 190 S. Canal Street, Chicago, Ill. Stocks of this shafting in store and for sale by FULLER, DANA & FITZ, Boston, Mass. Geo. Place Machinery Agency, 121 Chambers St., N. Y. * * * * * Model Engines. [Illustration] Complete sets of CASTINGS for making small Model steam Engines 1½ in. bore, 3 in. stroke, price,$4; ditto 2 in. bore, 4 in. stroke, price, $10, same style as cut. Gear Wheels and Parts of Models. All kinds of Small Tools and Materials. Catalogue Free. GOODNOW & WIGHTMAN, 176 Washington Street, Boston, Mass. * * * * * SEND FOR THE BEST BAND SAW BLADE in the market to London, Berry & Orton, Phila., Pa. * * * * * COE BRASS MFG. CO. WOLCOTTVILLE CONN. BRASS AND COPPER IN SHEETS. WIRE AND BLANKS MATERIALS FOR METALLIC. AMMUNITION A SPECIALTY. * * * * * MACHINISTS' TOOLS. New and Improved Patterns. Send for new illustrated catalogue. Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c. NEW HAVEN MANUFACTURING CO., New Haven, Conn. * * * * * SKATES AND NOVELTIES. Send for Catalogue. R. SIMPSON, 132 Nassau St., N. Y. * * * * * PORTER MANUF'G CO. [Illustration] The New Economizer, the only Agricultural Engine with Return Flue Boiler in use. Send for circular to Porter MFG. Co., Limited, Syracuse. N. Y. [Illustration] G. G. YOUNG, Gen. Agt., 42 Cortland St., New York. * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS. Inside Page, each insertion--75 cents a line. Back Page, each insertion--$1.00 a line. (About eight words to a line.) _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ The publishers of this paper guarantee to advertisers a circulation of not less than 50,000 copies every weekly issue. * * * * * THE WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS "ST. NICHOLAS." A special Holiday number, designed for boys and girls everywhere, whether regular readers of the magazine or not;--the best, and, by reason of its immense edition, 105,000, the cheapest Christmas book published, Price 30 cents. A brilliant Holiday cover; superb pictures by the best American artists; a capital acting operetta for children "The Land of Nod," with words and music; a splendid story by Washington Gladden, "A Christmas Dinner with the Man in the Moon," the illustrations of which rival Dore's; "King Arthur and his Knights," by Sidney Lanier; one of Frank R. Stockton's inimitable FAIRY STORIES; the "Treasure Box of Literature," etc., etc.;--in all, thirty-three departments and contributions. A Grand Holiday Gift-Book of 100 Pages, printed on tinted paper, illustrated with scores of charming pictures, for only 30 cents. Ask for the Christmas (December) St. Nicholas. Four editions of last year's Holiday number were demanded. For sale everywhere. Subscription price, $3.00 per year. Scribner & Co., 743 Broadway, N. Y. * * * * * $100 PRESENT! For a Machine that will Saw as Fast and Easy as this one. [Illustration] This is the King of Saw Machines. It saws off a 2 foot log in 2 minutes. 20,000 in use. The cheapest machine made, and fully warranted. Circular free. United States Manufacturing Co., Chicago, Ill. * * * * * THE NEW YORK BELTING AND PACKING COMPANY LOOK FOR OUR STAMP on the goods whenever you buy BELTING, HOSE, OR PACKING. 37 & 38 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. * * * * * [Illustration] Watchman's Improved Time Detector, with Safety Lock Attachment, Patented 1875-6-7. Beware of Infringements. This Instrument is supplied with 12 keys for 12 different stations. Invaluable for all concerns employing night watchmen. Send for circulars to E. IMHAUSER, P. O. Box 2875. 212 Broadway, New York. * * * * * Mill Stones and Corn Mills. We make Burr Millstones, Portable Mills, Smut Machines, Packers, Mill Picks, Water Wheels, Pulleys, and Gearing specially adapted to Flour Mills. Send for catalogue. J. T. NOYE & SONS, Buffalo, N. Y. * * * * * THE NEW PULSOMETER Is more economical in points of original cost, expense for repairs and running expenses, than any other Steam Pump in the World. [Illustration] Simple and compact, with no machinery whatever to oil, or get out of order, it stands at the head of all means of elevating water or other liquids by steam. _It needs no skilled labor to look after it._ Send for book giving full description, reduced prices and many letters of commendation from leading manufacturers and others throughout the country who are using them. Pulsometer Steam Pump Co., Sole Owners of Hall's Patents in the U. S., 131,515 to 131,543, both inclusive, and the NEW PULSOMETER, Office, No. 83 John St., P.O. Box No. 1533. New York City. * * * * * Pictet Artificial Ice Co., Limited, P.O. Box 3083 142 Greenwich St., New York. Guaranteed to be the most _efficient_ and _economical_ of all existing Ice and Cold Air Machines. * * * * * H.W. JOHNS' ASBESTOS LIQUID PAINTS, ROOFING, Steam Pipe & Boiler Coverings, Steam Packing, Mill Board, Sheathing, Fire Proof Coatings, &c. Send for Descriptive Price List. H. W. JOHNS M'F'G CO. 87 MAIDEN LANE, N. Y. * * * * * $66 a week in your own town. Terms and $5 outfit free. Address H. Hallett & Co., Portland, Me. * * * * * The George Place Machinery Agency Machinery of Every Description. 121 Chambers and 103 Beade Streets, New York. * * * * * EMERY WHEELS and GRINDING MACHINES. [Illustration: EX INUTILI TRADE TANITE MARK UTILITAS] THE TANITE CO., Stroudsburg, Monroe Comity, Pa. Orders may be directed to us at any of the following addresses, at each of which we carry a stock: New York, 14 Dey Street. Chicago, 152 and 154 Lake St. St. Louis, 209 North Third St. St. Louis, 811 to 819 North Second St. Cincinnati. 212 West Second St. Louisville, 427 West Main St. Indianapolis, Corner Maryland and Delaware Sts. New Orleans, 26 Union St. San Francisco, 2 and 4 California St. Philadelphia, 11 North Sixth Street. Boston, 21 Doane st. Portland, Oregon, 43 Front St. London. Eng., 9 St. Andrews St., Holborn Viaduct, E. C. Liverpool, Eng., 42 The Temple, Dale St. Sydney, N. S. W., 11 Pitt St. * * * * * _Before ordering engraving of any kind, send to us for estimates and samples. We have the largest engraving establishment in the world, and the best facilities for doing work of the best quality, quickly and cheaply._ _PHOTO-ENGRAVING CO. 67 & 69 Park Place, New York._ * * * * * HARTFORD STEAM BOILER Inspection & Insurance COMPANY W. B. FRANKLIN, V. Pres't, J. M. ALLEN, Pres't. J. B. PIERCE, Sec'y. * * * * * COLUMBIA BICYCLE. [Illustration] The Bicycle has proved itself to be a permanent, practical road vehicle, and the number in daily use is rapidly increasing. Professional and business men, seekers after health or pleasure, all join in bearing witness to its merits. Send 3 cent stamp for catalogue with price list and full information. THE POPE M'F'G CO., 89 Summer Street, Boston, Mass. * * * * * AGENTS CAN MAKE $5,000.00 BY SECURING THE MANUFACTURERS' CABINET. By employing Agents for 500 Manufacturers. By manufacturing rapid selling articles. By getting, through means of the Cabinet, the best agencies in the world. Address J. B. CHAPMAN, 12 West St., Madison, Ind. * * * * * TELEPHONE and Electrical Supplies Send for Catalogue. C. E. JONES & BRO., CINCINNATI, O. * * * * * Steam Fitters' & Plumbers' Supplies. STURTEVANTS' FAN BLOWERS. ALBERT BRIDGES, 46 Cortlandt Street, New York. * * * * * PUMPING, PISTON ROD, PLUNGER & WELL THE WATSON PUMP, FOR ARTESIAN, OR DEEP WELL ROD IN DIRECT LINE MACHINE SIMPLE, EFFICIENT. JAMES WATSON 1608 S. FRONT ST. PHILA. * * * * * BOILER COVERINGS. Plastic Cement and Hair Felt, with or without the Patent "AIR SPACE" Method. ASBESTOS MATERIALS. Made from pure Italian Asbestos in fiber mill board and round packing. THE CHALMERS-SPENCE CO., 40 John Street, and Foot of E. 9th Street, New York. * * * * * Perfectly Smooth Thoroughly Seasoned CUT THIN LUMBER!! Manufactured by our Patent Board Cutting Machines and Seasoning Presses. Pronounced the only Perfect Cut Lumber!! MAHOGANY, Rosewood, Satinwood, Walnut, Ash, Red Cedar, Cherry, Oak, Poplar, Maple, Holly, French Walnut, etc., etc.. in Logs, Planks, Boards, and Veneers. Send for catalogue and price lists. GEO. W. READ & CO., 186 to 200 Lewis St. foot 5th and 6th Sts., New York. * * * * * [Illustration] SNOW'S BEST Water Wheel Governor, MANUFACTURED BY COHOES IRON FOUNDRY AND MACHINE, CO., COHOES, N.Y. * * * * * $55.66 Agents' profit per week. Will prove it or forfeit $500.00. Outfit and Samples worth $5.00 free. Address E. G. RIDEOUT & CO., 10 Barclay Street, New York. * * * * * Steel Castings From ¼ to 15,000 lb. weight, true to pattern, of unequaled strength, toughness, and durability. 15,000 Crank Shafts and 10,000 Gear Wheels of this steel now running prove its superiority over other Steel Castings. Send for circular and price list. Chester Steel Castings Co., 407 Library St., Phila, Pa. * * * * * Pyrometers. For showing heat of Ovens, Hot Blast Pipes, Boiler Flues Superheated Steam, Oil Stills, etc. HENRY W. BULKLEY, Sole Manufacturer, 149 Broadway, N.Y. * * * * * WM. A. HARRIS PROVIDENCE, R. J. (PARK STREET), Six minutes walk West from station. Original and Only builder of the HARRIS-CORLISS ENGINE With Harris' Patented Improvements, from 10 to 1,000 H. P. * * * * * SHAFTS PULLEYS HANGERS At Low Prices. Large Assorted Stock. A. & F. BROWN, 57-61 Lewis St., New York. * * * * * [Illustration] THE BAKER BLOWER, Centennial Judges Report. "Good Design and Material. Very efficient in action. With the special advantages that they can be connected for motion directly with engine without the use of gearing or belting." SEND FOR CATALOGUE. WILBRAHAM BROS. No. 2518 Frankford Avenue, PHILADELPHIA, PA. * * * * * MICROSCOPES, OPERA GLASSES, SPY Glasses, Spectacles, Thermometers, Barometers, Compasses. R. & J. BECK, Manufacturing Opticians. Philadelphia, Pa. Send for Illustrated Priced Catalogue. * * * * * The Oldest YANKEE NOTION HOUSE In the World. HOWARD BROTHERS & READ, Successors to Howard, Sanger & Co., OWNERS OF THE HOWARD MANUFACTURING CO., MANUFACTURE AND INTRODUCE PATENTED NOVELTIES. [Illustration] THE ONLY Real Pocket Scale IN THE MARKET. MADE OF METAL, Heavily Nickel Plated, COMPACT, STRONG, DURABLE. Can be carried in the Vest Pocket. Each one warranted absolutely accurate. Weighs up to 8 lbs. PRICE 25 CENTS. Sample by mail on receipt of price. A liberal discount to the trade. No. 1--"Post Office," weighs to 8 ozs. " 2--"Pocket," weighs to 8 lbs. Howard Manufacturing Co., Box 2295, New York. * * * * * BOGARDUS' PATENT UNIVERSAL ECCENTRIC MILLS--For grinding Bones, Ores, Sand, Old Crucibles, Fire Clay, Guanos, Oil Cake, Feed, Corn, Corn and Cob, Tobacco, Snuff, Sugar, Salts, Roots, Spices, Coffee, Cocoanut, Flaxseed, Asbestos, Mica etc., and whatever cannot be ground by other mills, Also for Paints, Printers' Inks, Paste Blacking, etc. JOHN W. THOMSON, successor to JAMES BOGARDUS, corner of White and Elm Sts., New York. * * * * * THE New York Ice Machine Company, 21 Courtland St., New York, Booms 54, 55. LOW PRESSURE BINARY ABSORPTION SYSTEM Machines Making ICE AND COLD AIR. Low Pressure when running. No pressure at rest. Machines guaranteed by C. H. Delamater & Co. * * * * * [Illustration] Our new Stylographic Pen (just patented), having the duplex interchangeable point section, is the very latest improvement. THE STYLOGRAPHIC PEN CO., Room 13, 169 Broadway, New York. Send for circular. * * * * * KNABE PIANOFORTES. Unequaled in TONE, TOUCH, WORKMANSHIP, & DURABILITY. Warerooms 112 Fifth Avenue. New York. 204 & 206 W. Baltimore St., Baltimore. * * * * * NON-CONDUCTOR COVERINGS, _FOR STEAM BOILERS AND PIPES._ THE RAYMOND M'F'G CO., 642 West 52d St., 108 Liberty St., New York. * * * * * POWER SHEARS. STILES & PARKER PRESS CO., Middletown, Conn. * * * * * [Illustration] DO YOUR OWN PRINTING $3 PRESS prints &c. (Self-inker $4) Larger sizes for larger work. For old or young. Great money saver. A paying business anywhere for all or spare time. Send two stamps for a catalogue of all sizes. Presses, Type, Cards, Paper &c., to the Manufacturers KELSEY & CO., Meriden, Conn. * * * * * The Asbestos Packing Co., Miners and Manufacturers of Asbestos, BOSTON, MASS., OFFER FOR SALE: PATENTED ASBESTOS ROPE PACKING, " " LOOSE " " " JOURNAL " " " WICK " " " MILL BOARD, " " SHEATHING PAPER, " " FLOORING FELT, " " CLOTH. * * * * * PROSPECTUS OF THE Scientific American FOR 1881. The Most Popular Scientific Paper in the World. VOLUME XLIV. NEW SERIES. Only $3.20 a Year, including postage. Weekly, 52 Numbers a Year. This widely circulated and splendidly illustrated paper is published weekly. Every number contains sixteen pages of useful information, and a large number of original engravings of new inventions and discoveries, representing Engineering Works, Steam Machinery, New Inventions, Novelties in Mechanics, Manufactures, Chemistry, Electricity, Telegraphy, Photography, Architecture, Agriculture, Horticulture, Natural History, etc. All Classes of Readers find in The Scientific American a popular _resume_ of the best scientific information of the day; and it is the aim of the publishers to present it in an attractive form, avoiding as much as possible abstruse terms. To every intelligent mind, this journal affords a constant supply of instructive reading. It is promotive of knowledge and progress in every community where it circulates. Terms of Subscription.--One copy of The Scientific American will be sent for _one year_--52 numbers--postage prepaid, to any subscriber in the United States or Canada, on receipt of three dollars and twenty cents by the publishers; six months, $1.60; three months, $1.00. Clubs.--One extra copy of The Scientific American will be supplied gratis _for every club of five subscribers_ at $3.20 each; additional copies at same proportionate rate. One copy of The Scientific American and one copy of The Scientific American Supplement will be sent for one year, postage prepaid, to any subscriber in the United States or Canada, on receipt of seven dollars by the publishers. The safest way to remit is by Postal Order, Draft, or Express. Money carefully placed inside of envelopes, securely sealed, and correctly addressed, seldom goes astray, but is at the sender's risk. Address all letters and make all orders, drafts, etc., payable to MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. To Foreign Subscribers.--Under the facilities of the Postal Union, the Scientific American is now sent by post direct from New York, with regularity, to subscribers in Great Britain, India, Australia, and all other British colonies; to France, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Russia, and all other European States; Japan, Brazil, Mexico, and all States of Central and South America. Terms, when sent to foreign countries, Canada excepted, $4, gold, for Scientific American, 1 year; $9, gold, for both Scientific American and Supplement for 1 year. This includes postage, which we pay. Remit by postal order or draft to order of Munn & Co., 37 Park Row, New York. * * * * * THE "Scientific American" is printed with CHAS. ENEU JOHNSON & CO.'S INK. Tenth and Lombard Sts., Philadelphia, and 50 Gold St. New York. 
25822	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 25822-h.htm or 25822-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/5/8/2/25822/25822-h/25822-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/5/8/2/25822/25822-h.zip) ILLUSTRATED SCIENCE FOR BOYS AND GIRLS. [Illustration: FROM DR. FRANKLIN'S BROOM-CORN SEED. See Page 223.] Boston: D. Lothrop & Company, Franklin Street. Copyright, 1881, By D. Lothrop & Company. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Page How Newspapers are made. 11 Umbrellas. 38 Paul and the Comb-makers. 54 In the Gas-works. 69 Racing a Thunder-storm. 86 August's "'Speriment." 103 The Birds Of Winter. 125 Something About Light-houses. 141 "Buy a Broom! Buy a Broom!" 158 Talking by Signals. 171 Jennie finds out how Dishes are made. 183 Archery For Boys. 192 Dolly's Shoes. 202 A Glimpse of some Montana Beavers. 208 How Logs go to Mill. 211 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Page Frontispiece The N. Y. Tribune Building at Night. 13 A Contributor to the Waste-Paper Basket. 16 Office of the Editor-In-Chief. 17 Regular Contributors 19 How Some of the News is Gathered 22 Type-Setter's Case In Pi. 22 Type-Setters' Room. 23 Taking "Proofs." 24 In the Stereotypers' Room. 25 Finishing the Plate. 27 Printing Presses of the Past and Present 29 A News-Dealer. 32 A Bad Morning for the News-Boys. 35 "Any Answers come for Me?" 36 The First Umbrella. 37 What Jonas saw adown the Future. 38 Lord of the Twenty-Four Umbrellas. 41 A "Duck's Back" Umbrella. 43 An Umbrella Handle Au Naturel. 44 Cutting the Covers. 45 Finishing the Handle. 48 Sewing "Pudding-Bag" Seams. 49 Completing the Umbrella 50 Master Paul did not feel Happy. 51 My Lady's Toilet. 53 The New Circle Comb 55 Ancient or Modern--Which? 56 "In Some Remote Corner Of Spain." 58 A Retort. 64 Kitty in the Gas-Works. 69 The Metre. 69 The Gasometre. 75 Inflating the "Buffalo." 79 A Plucky Dog. 83 Our Balloon Camp. 85 The Professor's Dilemma. 89 The Wreck of the "Buffalo." 91 The Incubator. 94 How the Chicken is Packed. 106 How the Shell is Cracked. 107 The Artificial Mother. 109 The Chickadee. 115 The Black Snow-Bird. 118 The Snow Bunting. 121 The Brown Creeper. 122 Nuthatches. 124 The Downy Woodpecker. 126 Fourth Order Light-House. 129 A Modern Light-House 132 Light-House on Mt. Desert. 134 Light-House at "The Thimble Shoal" 138 First Class Light-Ship. 141 The Blind Broom-Maker of Barnstable. 146 A Gay Cavalcade. 147 The Comedy of Brooms. 150 Up in the Attic. 151 Plant the Broom! 153 The Tragedy of Brooms. 156 In Obedience to the Signals. 163 The Potter's Wheel. 169 The Kiln and Saggers. 170 Mould for a cup. 171 Handle Mould. 171 Making a Sugar-Bowl. 171 Rest for flat Dishes. 173 The Target. 183 Dolly's Shoes 186 A Maine Wood-Chopper. 193 A River-Driver. 196 "The Liberated Logs came sailing along." 197 Through the Sluice. 198 ILLUSTRATED SCIENCE FOR BOYS AND GIRLS. HOW NEWSPAPERS ARE MADE. We will suppose that it is a great newspaper, in a great city, printing daily 25,000, or more, copies. Here it is, with wide columns, with small, compact type, with very little space wasted in head lines, eight large pages of it, something like 100,000 words printed upon it, and sold for four cents--25,000 words for a cent. It is a great institution--a power greater than a hundred banking-houses, than a hundred politicians, than a hundred clergymen. It collects and scatters news; it instructs and entertains with valuable and sprightly articles; it forms and concentrates public opinion; it in one way or another, brings its influence to bear upon millions of people, in its own, and other lands. Who would not like to know something about it? And there is Tom, first of all, who declares that he is going to be a business man, and who already has a bank-book with a good many dollars entered on its credit side--there is Tom, I say, asking first of all: "How much does it cost? and where does the money come from? and is it a paying concern?" Tom shall not have his questions expressly answered; for it isn't exactly his business; but here are some points from which he may figure: "_How much does it cost?_" Well, there is the publishing department, with an eminent business man at its head, with two or three good business men for his assistants, and with several excellent clerks and other employès. Then there is the Editor-in-Chief, and the Managing Editor, and the City Editor, and a corps of editors of different departments, besides reporters--thirty or forty men in all, each with some special literary gift. Then there are thirty or forty men setting type; a half-dozen proof-readers; a half-dozen stereotypers; the engineer and foreman and assistants below stairs, who do the printing; and several men employed in the mailing department. Then there are tons and tons of paper to be bought each week; ink, new type, heavy bills for postage; many hundreds of dollars a week for telegraphic dispatches; and the interest on the money invested in an expensive building; expensive machinery, and an expensive stock of printers' materials--nothing being said of the pay of correspondents of the paper at the State Capitol, at Washington, at London, at Paris, etc. Tom is enough of a business man, already, I know, to figure up the weekly expenses of such an establishment at several thousands of dollars--a good many hundreds at each issue of the paper. [Illustration: THE N. Y. TRIBUNE BUILDING AT NIGHT.] "_And where does the money come from?_" Partly from the sale of papers. Only four cents apiece, and only a part of that goes to the paper; but, then, 25,000 times, say two-and-a-half cents, is $625, which it must be confessed, is quite a respectable sum for quarter-dimes to pile up in a single day. But the greater part of the money comes from advertisements. Nearly half of the paper is taken up with them. If you take a half-dozen lines to the advertising clerk, he will charge you two or three dollars; and there are several hundred times as much as your small advertisement in each paper. So you may guess what an income the advertising yields. And the larger, the more popular, and the more widely read the paper, the better will be the prices which advertisers will pay, and the more will be the advertisements. And so the publisher tries to sell as many papers as he can, partly because of the money which he gets for them, but more, because the more he sells the more advertising will he get, and the better rates will he charge for it. So, Tom, if you ever become the publisher of a newspaper, you must set your heart on getting an editor who will make a paper that will sell--whatever else he does or does _not_ do. "_And is it a paying concern?_" Well, I don't think the editors think they get very large pay, nor the correspondents, nor the reporters, nor the printers, nor the pressmen. They work incessantly; it is an intense sort of work; the hours are long and late; the chances of premature death are multiplied. I think they will all say: "We aren't in this business for the money that is in it; we are in it for the influence of it, for the art of it, for the love of it; but then, we are very glad to get our checks all the same." As to whether the paper pays the men who own it--which was Tom's question: I think that that "depends" a great deal on the state of trade, on the state of politics, and on the degree to which the paper will, or will not, scruple to do mean things. A great many papers would pay better, if they were meaner. It would be a great deal easier to make a good paper, if you did not have to sell it. When, then, Jonathan shall have become a minister, he doesn't want to bear down too hard on a "venal press" in his Fast Day and Thanksgiving sermons. Perhaps, by that time, Tom will be able to explain why. "_How, now, is this paper made?_" "But," interrupts Jonathan, "before they make it, I should like to know where they get the 100,000 words to put into it; I have been cudgeling my brains for now two weeks to get words enough to fill a four page composition--say 200 words, _coarse_." The words which are put into it are, besides the advertisements, chiefly: 1. News; 2. Letters and articles on various subjects; 3. Editorial articles, reviews, and notes; 4. Odds and ends. The "_letters and articles on various subjects_" come from all sorts of people: some from great writers who get large pay for even a brief communication; some from paid correspondents in various parts of the world; some from all sorts of people who wish to proclaim to the world some grievance of theirs, or to enlighten the world with some brilliant idea of theirs--which generally loses its luster the day the article is printed. A large proportion of letters and articles from this last class of people get sold for waste-paper before the printer sees them. This is one considerable source of income to the paper, of which I neglected to tell Tom. [Illustration: A CONTRIBUTOR TO THE WASTE-PAPER BASKET.] As for the "_odds and ends_"--extracts from other papers, jokes, and various other scraps tucked in here and there--a man with shears and paste-pot has a good deal to do with the making of them. If you should see him at work, you would want to laugh at him--as if he were, for all the world, only little Nell cutting and pasting from old papers, a "frieze" for her doll's house. But when his "odds and ends," tastefully scattered here and there through the paper, come under the reader's eye, they make, I am bound to say, a great deal of very hearty laughter which is not that laughter of ridicule which the sight of him at his work might excite. [Illustration: OFFICE OF THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF.] About the "_news_," I must speak more fully. The "_editorial articles, reviews, and notes_," we shall happen upon when we visit the office. A part of the news comes by telegraph from all parts of the world. Some of it is telegraphed to the paper by its correspondents, and the editors call it "special," because it is especially to them. Perhaps there is something in it which none of the other papers have yet heard of. But the general telegraphic news, from the old-world and the new, is gathered up by the "Associated Press." That is to say, the leading papers form an Association and appoint men to send them news from the chief points in America and in Europe. These representatives of the Associated Press are very enterprising, and they do not allow much news of importance to escape them. The salaries of these men, and the cost of the telegraphic dispatches, are divided up among the papers of the Association, so that the expense to each paper is comparatively small. Owing to this association of papers, hundreds of papers throughout the country publish a great deal of matter on the same day which is word-for-word alike. Two devices in this matter of Associated Press dispatches save so much labor, that I think you will like me to describe them. One is this: Suppose there are a dozen papers in the same city which are entitled to the Associated Press dispatches. Instead of making a dozen separate copies, which might vary through mistakes, one writing answers for all the dozen. First, a sheet of prepared tissue paper is laid down, then a sheet of a black, smutty sort of paper, then two sheets of tissue paper, then a sheet of black paper, and so on, until as many sheets of tissue paper have been piled up, as there are copies wanted. Upon the top sheet of paper, the message is written, not with pen, or pencil, but with a hard bone point, which presses so hard that the massive layers of tissue paper take off from the black paper a black line wherever the bone point has pressed. Thus a dozen pages are written with one writing, and off they go, just alike, to the several newspaper offices. The printers call this queer, tissue-paper copy--"manifold." [Illustration: REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS] The other device is a telegraphic one. Suppose the Associated Press agent in New York is sending a dispatch to the Boston papers. There are papers belonging to the Association at, say, New Haven, Hartford, Springfield and Worcester. Instead of sending a message to each of these points, also, the message goes to Boston, and operators at New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, and Worcester, _listen to it as it goes through_, and copy it off. Thus one operator at New York is able to talk to perhaps a score of papers, in various parts of New England, or elsewhere, at once. But in a large city there is a great deal of city and suburban news. Take for example, New York; and there is that great city, and Brooklyn, and Jersey City, and Hoboken, and Newark, and Elizabeth, to be looked after, as well as many large villages near at hand. And there is great competition between the papers, which shall get the most, the exactest, and the freshest, news. Consequently, each day, a leading New York paper will publish a page or more of local news. The City Editor has charge of collecting this news. He has, perhaps, twenty or twenty-five men to help him--some in town, and others in the suburbs. His plan for news collecting will be something like this: He will have his secretary keep two great journals, with a page in each devoted to each day. One of these, the "blotter," will be to write things in which are going to happen. Everything that is going to happen to-morrow, the next day, the next, and so on, the secretary will make a memorandum of or paste a paragraph in about upon the page for the day on which the event will happen. Whatever he, or the City Editor, hears or reads of, that is going to happen, they thus put down in advance, until by and by, the book gets fairly fat and stout with slips which have been pasted in. But, this morning, the City Editor wants to lay out to-day's work. So his secretary turns to the "blotter," at to-day's page, and copies from it into to-day's page in the second book all the things to happen to-day--a dozen, or twenty, or thirty--a ship to be launched, a race to come off, a law-case to be opened, a criminal to be executed, such and such important meetings to be held, and so on. By this plan, nothing escapes the eye of the City Editor who, at the side of each thing to happen, writes the name of the reporter whom he wishes to have write the event up. This second book is called the "assignment book;" and, when it is made out, the reporters come in, find their orders upon it, and go out for their day's work, returning again at evening for any new assignments. Besides this, they, and the City Editor, keep sharp ears and eyes for anything new; and so, amongst them, the city and suburbs are ransacked for every item of news of any importance. The City Editor is a sort of general. He keeps a close eye on his men. He finds out what they can best do, and sets them at that. He gives the good workers better and better work; the poor ones he gradually works out of the office. Those who make bad mistakes, or fail to get the news, which some other paper gets, are frequently "suspended," or else discharged out-and-out. Failing to get news which other papers get, is called being "beaten," and no reporter can expect to get badly "beaten" many times without losing his position. [Illustration: HOW SOME OF THE NEWS IS GATHERED] And now, Tom, and Jonathan, and even little Nell, we'll all be magicians to-night, like the father of Miranda, in "The Tempest," and transport ourselves in an instant right to one of those great newspaper offices. [Illustration: TYPE-SETTER'S CASE IN PI.] It is six o'clock. The streets are dark. The gaslights are glaring from hundreds of lamp-posts. Do you see the highest stories of all those buildings brilliant with lights? Those are the type-setters' rooms of as many great newspapers. In a twinkling we are several stories up toward the top of one of these buildings. These are the Editorial Rooms. We'll make ourselves invisible, so that they'll not suspect our presence, and will do to-night just as they always do. [Illustration: TYPE-SETTERS' ROOM.] Up over our heads, in the room of the type-setters, are a hundred columns, or more, of articles already set--enough to make two or three newspapers. The Foreman of the type-setters makes copies of these on narrow strips of paper with a hand-press, and sends them down to the Editor-in-Chief. These copies on narrow strips of paper, are called "proofs," because, when they are read over, the person reading them can see if the type has been set correctly--can prove the correctness or incorrectness of the type-setting. [Illustration: TAKING "PROOFS."] The Editor-in-Chief runs rapidly through these proofs, and marks, against here and there one, "_Must_," which means that it "must" be published in to-morrow's paper. Against other articles he marks, "_Desirable_," which means that the articles are "desirable" to be used, if there is room for them. Many of the articles he makes no mark against, because they can wait, perhaps a week, or a month. By having a great many articles in type all the time, they never lack--Jonathan will be glad to know--for something to put into the paper. Jonathan might well take the hint, and write his compositions well in advance. Against some of the articles, the word "_Reference_" is written, which indicates that when the article is published an editorial article or note with "reference" to it must also be published. Before the Editor-in-Chief is through, perhaps he marks against one or two articles the word "_Kill_," which means that the article is, after all, not wanted in the paper, and that the type of it may be taken apart--the type-setters say "distributed"--without being printed. [Illustration: IN THE STEREOTYPERS' ROOM.] When the Editor-in-Chief is through with the proofs, perhaps he has a consultation with the Managing Editor--the first editor in authority after him--about some plans for to-night's paper, or for to-morrow, or for next week. Perhaps, then, he summons in the Night Editor. The Night Editor is the man who stays until almost morning, who overlooks everything that goes into the paper, and who puts everything in according to the orders of the Editor-in-Chief, or of the Managing Editor. Well, he tells the Night Editor how he wants to-morrow's paper made, what articles to make the longest, and what ones to put in the most important places in the paper. Then, perhaps, the City Editor comes knocking at the door, and enters, and he and the Editor-in-Chief talk over some stirring piece of city news, and decide what to say in the editorial columns about it. After the Editor-in-Chief has had these consultations, perhaps he begins to dictate to his secretary letters to various persons, the secretary taking them down in short-hand, as fast as he can talk, and afterwards copying them out and sending them off. That is the sort of letter-writing which would suit little Nell--just to say off the letter, and not to have to write it--which, in her case, means "printing" it in great, toilsome capitals. After dictating perhaps a dozen letters, it may be that the Editor-in-Chief dictates in the same manner, an editorial article, or some other matter which he wishes to have appear in the paper. Thus he spends several hours--perhaps the whole night--in seeing people, giving directions, dictating letters and articles, laying out new plans, and exercising a general headship over all things. Turning, now, from his room, we observe in the great room of the editors, a half dozen men or more seated at their several desks--the Managing Editor and the Night Editor about their duties; two or three men looking over telegraph messages and getting them ready for the type-setters; two or three men writing editorial, and other articles. From this room we turn to the great room of the City Department. There is the City Editor, in his little, partitioned-off room, writing an editorial, we will suppose, on the annual report of the City Treasurer, which has to-day been given to the public. At desks, about the great room, a half-dozen reporters are writing up the news which they have been appointed to collect; and another, and another, comes in every little while. [Illustration: FINISHING THE PLATE.] Over there, is the little, partitioned-off room for the Assistant City Editor. It is this man's duty, with his assistant, to prepare for the type-setters all the articles which come from the City Department. There are stacks and stacks of them. Each reporter thinks his subject is the most important, and writes it up fully; and, when it is all together, perhaps there is a third or a half more than there is room in the paper to print. So the Assistant City Editor, and his Assistant, who come to the office at about five o'clock in the afternoon, read it all over carefully, correct it, cut out that which it is not best to use, group all the news of the same sort so that it may come under one general head, put on suitable titles, decide what sort of type to put it in, etc.,--a good night's work for both of them. They also write little introductions to the general subjects, and so harmonize and modify the work of twenty or twenty-five reporters, as to make it read almost as if it were written by one man, with one end in view. The editors of the general news have to do much the same thing by the letters of correspondents, and by the telegraphic dispatches. While this sort of work goes on, hour after hour, with many merry laughs and many good jokes interspersed to make the time fly the swifter, we will wander about the establishment. Here, in the top story of the building, is the room of the type-setters. Every few minutes, from down-stairs in the Counting Room, comes a package of advertisements to be put into type; and from the Editorial Rooms a package of news and general articles for the same purpose. They do not trouble to send them up by a messenger. A tube, with wind blown through it very fast, brings up every little while a little leathern bag, in which are the advertisements or the articles--the "copy" as the type-setters call it. In this room are thirty or forty type-setters. Each one of them has his number. When the copy comes up, a man takes it and cuts it up into little bits, as much as will make, say, a dozen lines in the paper, and numbers the bits--"one," "two," etc., to the end of the article. Type-setter after type-setter comes and takes one of these little bits, and in a few moments sets the type for it, and lays it down in a long trough, with the number of the bit of copy laid by the side of it. We will suppose that an article has been cut up into twenty bits. Twenty men will each in a few moments be setting one of these bits, and, in a few minutes more they will come and lay down the type and the number of the bit in the long trough, in just the right order of the number of the bits--"one," "two," etc. Then all the type will be slid together, and a long article will thus be set in a few minutes, which it would take one or two men several hours to set. It is by this means that long articles can in so short a time be put into type. Each man who takes a bit, has to make his last line fill out to the end of the line; and, because there are sometimes not words enough, so that he has to fill out with some extra spaces between the words, you may often see in any large daily paper every two inches, or so, a widely spaced line or two showing how the type-setter had to fill out his bit with spaces--only he would call the bit, a "take." [Illustration: PRINTING PRESSES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT] I said that each type-setter has his number. We will suppose that this man, next to us, is number "twenty-five." Then he is provided with a great many pieces of metal, just the width of a column, with his number made on them--thus: "TWENTY-FIVE." Every time he sets a new bit of copy, he puts one of these "twenty-fives" at the top; and when all the bits of type in the long trough are slid together the type is broken up every two inches or so, with "twenty-five," "thirty-seven," "two," "eleven," and so on, at the top of the bits which the men, whose numbers these are, have set. When a proof of the article is taken, these several numbers appear; and, if there are mistakes, it appears from these numbers, what type-setters made them, and they have to correct them. Also, of each article, a single "proof" is taken on colored paper. These colored paper "proofs" are cut up the next day, and all the pieces marked "twenty-five," "thirty-seven," and so on, go to the men who have these numbers, and when pasted together show how much type, number "twenty-five," "thirty-seven," and so on, are to be paid for setting--for the type-setters are paid according to the amount of type which they set. [Illustration: Add Yellow Fever Eight new cases of yellow fever--four whites and four colored--were reported to the Board of Health to-day. But one death has occurred since last night, Archie P. Kehoe, son of the late Captain P. M. Kehoe, who died beyond the city limits. THIRTY-FOUR In addition to the new cases reported to the Board of Health, the following persons were stricken with the fever to-day: Lyttleton Penn; P. S. Simonds, an ex-policeman; Jessie Anderson, Mrs. John Bierman, and R. T. Dabney, the Signal Service officer, who it was thought had a mild attack of the fever about three weeks ago. FIVE Miss Louise Bedford died last night of yellow fever at Barclay Station, Tenn. Fifteen nurses were assigned to duty to-day by the Howards. The weather is clear and pleasant. TWENTY THREE FAC-SIMILE OF "PROOF" SHOWING "TAKES."] As fast as the proofs are taken they go into the room of the proof-readers to be corrected. The bits of copy are pasted together again, and one man holds the copy while another reads the proof aloud. The man holding the copy notices any points in which the proof does not read like the copy, and tells the man who is reading it. The man reading it corrects the variations from copy, and corrects all the other mistakes which he can discover, and then the type-setters have to change the type so as to make it right. There the proof readers sit hard at work, reading incredibly fast, and making rapid and accurate corrections; then the "copy" is locked up, and no one can get at it, except the Managing Editor or Editor-in-Chief gives an order to see it. This precaution is taken, in order to make certain who is responsible for any mistakes which appear in the paper--the editors, or the type-setters. By this time it is nearly midnight, and the editors, type-setters, etc., take their lunches. They either go out to restaurants for them, or have them sent in--hot coffee, sandwiches, fruit, etc.--a good meal for which they are all glad to stop. And now the Foreman of the type-setters sends to the Night Editor that matter enough is in type to begin the "make-up"--that is, to put together the first pages of the paper. There the beautiful type stands, in long troughs, all corrected now, the great numbers of the type-setters removed from between the bits of type--the whole ready to be arranged into page after page of the paper. So the Night Editor makes a list of the articles which he wants on the page which is to be made up; the Foreman puts them in in the order which the Night Editor indicates; the completed page is wedged securely into an iron frame, and then is ready to be stereotyped. [Illustration: A NEWS-DEALER.] The room of the stereotypers is off by itself. There is a furnace in it, and a great caldron of melted type metal. They take the page of the paper which has just been made up; put it on a hot steam chest; spat down upon the type some thick pulpy paper soaked so as to make it fit around the type; spread plaster of Paris on the back, so as to keep the pulpy paper in shape; and put the whole under the press which more perfectly squeezes the pulpy paper down upon the type, and causes it to take a more perfect impression of the type. The heat of the steam chest warms the type, and quickly dries the pulpy paper and the plaster of Paris. Then the pulpy paper is taken off, and curved with just such a curve as the cylinders of the printing-press have, and melted type metal is poured over it, which cools in a moment; when, lo, there is a curving plate of type-metal just like the type! The whole process of making this plate takes only a few minutes. They use such plates as these, rather than type, in printing the great papers chiefly for reasons like these: 1. Because plates save the wear of type; 2. Because they are easier handled; 3. Because they can be made curving, to fit the cylinders of the printing presses as it would be difficult to arrange the type; 4. Because several plates can be made from the same type, and hence several presses can be put at work at the same time printing the same paper; 5. Because, if anything needs to be added to the paper, after the presses have begun running, the type being left up-stairs can be changed and new plates made, so that the presses need stop only a minute for the new plates to be put in--which is a great saving of time. But, coming down into the Editorial Rooms again--business Tom, and thoughtful Jonathan, and sleepy little Nell--all is excitement. Telegrams have just come in telling of the wreck of an ocean steamer, and men are just being dispatched to the steamer's office to learn all the particulars possible, and to get, if it may be, a list of the passengers and crew. And now, just in the midst of this, a fire-alarm strikes, and in a few moments the streets are as light as day with the flames of a burning warehouse in the heart of the business part of the city. More men are sent off to that; and, what with the fire and the wreck, every reporter, every copy-editor, every type-setter and proof-reader are put to their hardest work until the last minute before the last page of the paper must be sent down to the press-rooms. Then, just at the last, perhaps the best writer in the office dashes off a "leader" on the wreck sending a few lines at a time to the type-setters--a leader which, though thought out, written, set, corrected, and stereotyped in forty minutes, by reason of its clearness, its wisdom, and its brilliancy, is copied far and wide, and leads the public generally to decide where to fix the blame, and how to avoid a like accident again. There is the work of the "_editorial articles, reviews, and notes_"--to comment on events which happen, and to influence the minds of the public as the editorial management of the paper regards to be wise. There is all sorts of this editorial writing--fun, politics, science, literature, religion--and he who says, with his pen, the say of such a newspaper, wields an influence which no mind can measure. [Illustration: A BAD MORNING FOR THE NEWS-BOYS.] Well, the fire, and the wreck, have thoroughly awakened even little Nell. And so down, down we go, far under ground, to the Press-rooms. There the noise is deafening. Two or three presses are at work. At one end of the press is a great roll of paper as big as a hogshead and a mile or more long. This immense roll of paper is unwinding very fast, and going in at one end of the machine; while at the other end, faster than you can count, are coming out finished papers--the papers printed on both sides, cut up, folded, and counted, without the touch of a hand--a perfect marvel and miracle of human ingenuity. The sight is a sight to remember for a lifetime. Upon what one here sees, hinges very much of the thinking of a metropolis and of a land. And now, here come the mailing clerks, to get their papers to send off--with great accuracy and speed of directing and packing--by the first mails which leave the city within an hour and a half, at five and six o'clock in the morning. And after them come the newsboys, each for his bundle; and soon the frosty morning air in the gray dawn is alive with the shouting of the latest news in this and a dozen other papers. [Illustration: "ANY ANSWERS COME FOR ME?"] This, I am sure, is too fast a world even for business Tom: so let us "spirit" ourselves back to our beds in the quiet, slow-moving, earnest country--Tom and Jonathan and little Nell and I--home, and to sleep--and don't wake us till dinner-time! UMBRELLAS. [Illustration: THE FIRST UMBRELLA.] About one hundred and thirty years ago, an Englishman named Jonas Hanway, who had been a great traveller, went out for a walk in the city of London, carrying an umbrella over his head. [Illustration: WHAT JONAS SAW ADOWN THE FUTURE.] Every time he went out for a walk, if it rained or if the sun shone hotly, he carried this umbrella, and all along the streets, wherever he appeared, men and boys hooted and laughed; while women and girls, in doorways and windows, giggled and stared at the strange sight, for this Jonas Hanway was the first man to commonly carry an umbrella in the city of London, and everybody, but himself, thought it was a most ridiculous thing to do. But he seems to have been a man of strength and courage, and determined not to give up his umbrella even if all London made fun of him. Perhaps, in imagination, he saw adown the future, millions of umbrellas--umbrellas enough to shelter the whole island of England from rain. Whether he did foresee the innumerable posterity of his umbrella or not, the "millions" of umbrellas have actually come to pass. But Jonas Hanway was by no means the first man in the world to carry an umbrella. As I have already mentioned, he had travelled a great deal, and had seen umbrellas in China, Japan, in India and Africa, where they had been in use for so many hundreds of years that nobody knows when the first one was made. So long ago as Nineveh existed in its splendor, umbrellas were used, as they are yet to be found sculptured on the ruins of that magnificent capital of Assyria, as well as on the monuments of Egypt which are very, very old; and your ancient history will tell you that the city of Nineveh was founded not long after the flood. Perhaps it was that great rain, of forty days and forty nights, that put in the minds of Noah, or some of his sons, the idea to build an umbrella! Although here in America the umbrella means nothing but an umbrella, it is quite different in some of the far Eastern countries. In some parts of Asia and Africa no one but a royal personage is allowed to carry an umbrella. In Siam it is a mark of rank. The King's umbrella is composed of one umbrella above another, a series of circles, while that of a nobleman consists of but one circle. In Burmah it is much the same as in Siam while the Burmese King has an umbrella-title that is very comical: "Lord of the twenty-four umbrellas." The reason why the people of London ridiculed Jonas Hanway was because at that time it was considered only proper that an umbrella should be carried by a woman, and for a man to make use of one was very much as if he had worn a petticoat. There is in one of the Harleian MSS. a curious picture showing an Anglo-Saxon gentleman walking out, with his servant behind him carrying an umbrella; the drawing was probably made not far from five hundred years ago, when the umbrella was first introduced into England. Whether this gentleman and his servant created as much merriment as Mr. Hanway did, I do not know; neither can I tell you why men from that time on did not continue to use the umbrella. If I were to make a "guess" about it, I should say that they thought it would not be "proper," for it was considered an unmanly thing to carry one until a hundred years ago when the people of this country first began to use them. And it was not until twenty years later, say in the year 1800, that the "Yankees" began to make their own umbrellas. But since that time there have been umbrellas and umbrellas! [Illustration: LORD OF THE TWENTY-FOUR UMBRELLAS.] The word umbrella comes from the Latin word _umbra_, which means a "little shade;" but the name, most probably, was introduced into the English language from the Italian word _ombrella_. Parasol means "to ward off the sun," and another very pretty name, not much used by Americans, for a small parasol, is "parasolette." It would be impossible for me to tell you how many umbrellas are made every year in this country. A gentleman connected with a large umbrella manufactory in the city of Philadelphia gave me, as his estimate, 7,000,000. This would allow an umbrella to about one person in six, according to the census computation which places the population of the United States at 40,000,000 of people. And one umbrella for every six persons is certainly not a very generous distribution. Added to the number made in this country, are about one-half million which are imported, chiefly from France and England. You who have read "Robinson Crusoe," remember how he made his umbrella and covered it with skins, and that is probably the most curious umbrella you can anywhere read about. Then there have been umbrellas covered with large feathers that would shed rain like a "duck's back," and umbrellas with coverings of oil-cloth, of straw, of paper, of woollen stuffs, until now, nearly all umbrellas are covered either with silk, gingham, or alpaca. And this brings us to the manufacture of umbrellas in Philadelphia, where there are more made than in any other city in America. If you will take an umbrella in your hand and examine it, you will see that there are many more different things used in making it than you at first supposed. First, there are the "stick," made of wood, "ribs," "stretchers" and "springs" of steel; the "runner," "runner notch," the "ferule," "cap," "bands" and "tips" of brass or nickel; then there are the covering, the runner "guard" which is of silk or leather, the "inside cap," the oftentimes fancy handle, which may be of ivory, bone, horn, walrus tusk, or even mother-of-pearl, or some kind of metal, and, if you will look sharply, you will find a rivet put in deftly here and there. For the "sticks" a great variety of wood is used; although all the wood must be hard, firm, tough, and capable of receiving both polish and staining. The cheaper sticks are sawed out of plank, chiefly, of maple and iron wood. They are then "turned" (that is made round), polished and stained. The "natural sticks," not very long ago, were all imported from England. But that has been changed, and we now send England a part of our own supply, which consists principally of hawthorne and huckleberry, which come from New York and New Jersey, and of oak, ash, hickory, and wild cherry. [Illustration: A "DUCK'S BACK" UMBRELLA.] If you were to see these sticks, often crooked and gnarled, with a piece of the root left on, you would think they would make very shabby sticks for umbrellas. But they are sent to a factory where they are steamed and straitened, and then to a carver, who cuts the gnarled root-end into the image of a dog or horse's head, or any one of the thousand and one designs that you may see, many of which are exceedingly ugly. The artist has kindly made a picture for you of a "natural" stick just as it is brought from the ground where it grows, and, then again, the same stick after it has been prepared for the umbrella. Of the imported "natural" sticks, the principal are olive, ebony, furze, snakewood, pimento, cinnamon, partridge, and bamboo. Perhaps you do not understand that a "natural" stick is one that has been a young tree, having grown to be just large enough for an umbrella stick, when it was pulled up, root and all, or with at least a part of the root. If, when you buy an umbrella that has the stick bent into a deep curve at the bottom for the handle, you may feel quite sure that it is of partridge wood, which does not grow large enough to furnish a knob for a handle, but, when steamed, admits of being bent. The "runner," "ferule," "cap," "band," etc., form what is called umbrella furniture and for these articles there is a special manufactory. Another manufactory cuts and grooves wire of steel into the "ribs" and "stretchers." Formerly ribs were made out of cane or whalebone; but these materials are now seldom used. When the steel is grooved, it is called a "paragon" frame, which is the lightest and best made. It was invented by an Englishman named Fox, seventeen or eighteen years ago. The latest improvement in the manufacture of "ribs" is to give them an inward curve at the bottom, so that they will fit snugly around the stick, and which dispenses with the "tip cup,"--a cup-shaped piece of metal that closed over the tips. [Illustration: AN UMBRELLA HANDLE _au naturel_] Of course we should all like to feel that we Americans have wit enough to make everything used in making an umbrella. And so we have in a way; but it must be confessed that most of the silk used for umbrella covers, is brought from France. Perhaps if the Cheney Brothers who live at South Manchester in Connecticut, and manufacture such elegant silk for ladies' dresses, and such lovely scarfs and cravats for children, were to try and make umbrella silk, we would soon be able to say to the looms of France, "No more umbrella silk for America, thank you; we are able to supply our own!" [Illustration: CUTTING THE COVERS.] But the "Yankees" do make all their umbrella gingham, which is very nice. And one gingham factory that I have heard about has learned how to dye gingham such a _fast_ black, that no amount of rain or sun changes the color. The gingham is woven into various widths to suit umbrella frames of different size, and along each edge of the fabric a border is formed of large cords. As to alpaca, a dye-house is being built, not _more_ than a "thousand miles" from Philadelphia on the plan of English dye-houses, so that our home-made alpacas may be dyed as good and durable a black as the gingham receives; for although nobody minds carrying an _old_ umbrella, nobody likes to carry a faded one. Although there are umbrellas of blue, green and buff, the favorite hue seems to be black. And now that we have all the materials together to make an umbrella, let us go into a manufactory and see exactly how all the pieces are put together. First, here is the stick, which must be "mounted." By that you must understand that there are two springs to be put in, the ferule put on the top end, and if the handle is of other material than the stick, that must be put on. The ugliest of all the work is the cutting of the slots in which the springs are put. These are first cut by a machine; but if the man who operates it is not careful, he will get some of his fingers cut off. But after the slot-cutting machine does its work, there is yet something to be done by another man with a knife before the spring can be put in. After the springs are set, the ferule is put on, and when natural sticks are used, as all are of different sizes, it requires considerable time and care to find a ferule to fit the stick, as well as in whittling off the end of the stick to suit the ferule. And before going any farther you will notice that all the counters in the various work-rooms are carpeted. The carpet prevents the polished sticks from being scratched, and the dust from sticking to the umbrella goods. [Illustration: FINISHING THE HANDLE.] After the handle is put on the stick and a band put on for finish or ornament, the stick goes to the frame-maker, who fastens the stretchers to the ribs, strings the top end of the ribs on a wire which is fitted into the "runner notch;" then he strings the lower ends of the "stretchers" on a wire and fastens it in the "runner," and then when both "runners" are securely fixed the umbrella is ready for the cover. As this is a very important part of the umbrella, several men and women are employed in making it. In the room where the covers are cut, you will at first notice a great number of V shaped things hanging against the wall on either side of the long room. These letter Vs are usually made of wood, tipped all around with brass or some other fine metal, and are of a great variety of sizes. They are the umbrella cover patterns, as you soon make out. To begin with, the cutter lays his silk or gingham very smoothly out on a long counter, folding it back and forth until the fabric lies eight or sixteen times in thickness, the layers being several yards in length. (But I must go back a little and tell you that both edges of the silk, or whatever the cover is to be, has been hemmed by a woman, on a sewing machine before it is spread out on the counter). Well, when the cutter finds that he has the silk smoothly arranged, with the edges even, he lays on his pattern, and with a sharp knife quickly draws it along two sides of it, and in a twinkling you see the pieces for perhaps two umbrellas cut out; this is so when the silk, or material, is sixteen layers thick and the umbrella cover is to have but eight pieces. After the cover is cut, each piece is carefully examined by a woman to see that there are no holes nor defects in it, for one bad piece would spoil a whole umbrella. Then a man takes the pieces and stretches the cut edges. This stretching must be so skilfully done that the whole length of the edge be evenly stretched. This stretching is necessary in order to secure a good fit on the frame. After this the pieces go to the sewing-room, where they are sewed together by a woman, on a sewing-machine, in what is called a "pudding-bag" seam. The sewing-machine woman must have the machine-tension just right or the thread of the seam will break when the cover is stretched over the frame. [Illustration: SEWING "PUDDING-BAG" SEAMS.] The next step in the work is to fasten the cover to the frame, which is done by a woman. After the cover is fastened at the top and bottom, she half hoists the umbrella, and has a small tool which she uses to keep the umbrella in that position, then she fastens the seams to the ribs; and a quick workwoman will do all this in five minutes, as well as sew on the tie, which has been made by another pair of hands. Then the cap is put on and the umbrella is completed. But before it is sent to the salesroom, a woman smooths the edge of the umbrella all around with a warm flat-iron. Then another woman holds it up to a window where there is a strong light, and hunts for holes in it. If it is found to be perfect the cover is neatly arranged about the stick, the tie wrapped about it and fastened, and the finished umbrella goes to market for a buyer. After the stick is mounted, how long, think you does it take to make an umbrella? Well, my dears--it takes only fifteen minutes! So you see that in the making of so simple an every-day article as an umbrella, that you carry on a rainy day to school, a great many people are employed; and to keep the world supplied with umbrellas thousands and thousands of men and women are kept busy, and in this way they earn money to buy bread and shoes and fire and frocks for the dear little folks at home, who in turn may some day become umbrella makers themselves. [Illustration: COMPLETING THE UMBRELLA] PAUL AND THE COMB-MAKERS. Little Paul Perkins--Master Paul his uncle called him--did not feel happy. But for the fact that he was a guest at his uncle's home he might have made an unpleasant exhibition of his unhappiness; but he was a well-bred city boy, of which fact he was somewhat proud, and so his impatience was vented in snapping off the teeth of his pocket-combs, as he sat by the window and looked out into the rain. It was the rain which caused his discontent. Only the day before his father, going from New York to Boston on business, had left Paul at his uncle's, some distance from the "Hub," to await his return. It being the lad's first visit, Mr. Sanford had arranged a very full programme for the next day, including a trip in the woods, fishing, a picnic, and in fact quite enough to cover an ordinary week of leisure. Over and over it had been discussed, the hours for each feature apportioned, and through the night Paul had lived the programme over in his half-waking dreams. [Illustration: MASTER PAUL DID NOT FEEL HAPPY.] And now that the eventful morning had come, it brought a drizzling, disagreeable storm, so that Mr. Sanford, as he met his nephew, was constrained to admit that he did not know what they should find to supply the place of the spoiled programme. "And my little nephew is so disappointed that he has ruined his pretty comb, into the bargain," said the uncle. "I was--was trying to see what it was made of," Paul stammered, thrusting the handful of teeth into his coat pocket. "I don't see how combs are made. Could you make one, uncle?" "I never made one," Mr. Sanford replied, "but I have seen very many made. There is a comb-shop not more than a half-mile away, and it is quite a curiosity to see how they make the great horns, rough and ugly as they are, into all sorts of dainty combs and knicknacks." "What kind of horns, uncle?" "Horns from all parts of the country, Paul. This shop alone uses nearly a million horns a year, and they come in car-loads from Canada, from the great West, from Texas, from South America, and from the cattle-yards about Boston and other Eastern cities." "You don't mean the horns of common cattle?" "Yes, Paul; all kinds of horns are used, though some are much tougher and better than others. The cattle raised in the Eastern, Middle and Western States furnish the best horns, and there is the curious difference that the horns of six cows are worth no more than those of a single ox. Many millions of horn combs are made every year in Massachusetts; perhaps more than in all the rest of the country. If you like we will go down after breakfast and have a look at the comb-makers." Paul was pleased with the idea, though he would much rather have passed the day as at first proposed. He was not at all sorry that he had broken up his comb, and even went so far as to cut up the back with his knife, wondering all the while how the smooth, flat, semi-transparent comb had been produced from a rough, round, opaque horn. By and by a mail stage came rattling along, without any passengers, and Mr. Sanford took his nephew aboard. They stopped before a low, straggling pile of buildings, located upon both sides of a sluggish looking race-way which supplied the water power, covered passage-ways connecting different portions of the works. "Presently, just over this knoll," said his uncle, "you will see a big pile of horns, as they are unloaded from the cars." [Illustration: MY LADY'S TOILET.] They moved around the knoll, and there lay a monstrous pile of horns thrown indiscriminately together. "Really there are not so many as we should think," said Mr. Sanford, as Paul expressed his astonishment. "That is only a small portion of the stock of this shop. I will show you a good many more." He led the way to a group of semi-detached buildings in rear of the principal works, and there Paul saw great bins of horns, the different sizes and varieties carefully assorted, the total number so vast that the immense pile in the open yard began to look small in contrast. At one of the bins a boy was loading a wheelbarrow, and when he pushed his load along a plank track through one of the passage-ways Mr. Sanford and his nephew followed. As the passage opened into another building, the barrow was reversed and its load deposited in a receptacle a few feet lower. In this room only a single man was employed, and the peculiar character of his work at once attracted the attention of Paul. In a small frame before him was suspended a very savage-looking circular saw, running at a high rate of speed. The operator caught one of the great horns by its tip, gave it a turn through the air before his eyes, seized it in both hands and applied it to the saw. With a sharp hiss the keen teeth severed the solid tip from the body of the horn, and another movement trimmed away the thin, imperfect parts about the base. The latter fell into a pile of refuse at the foot of the frame, the tip was cast into a box with others; the horn, if large, was divided into two or more sections, a longitudinal slit sawn in one side, and the sections thrown into a box. [Illustration: THE NEW CIRCLE COMB] "This man," said Mr. Sanford, "receives large pay and many privileges, on account of the danger and unpleasant nature of his task. He has worked at this saw for about forty years, and in that time has handled, according to his record, some twenty-five millions of horns, or over two thousand for every working day. He has scarcely a whole finger or thumb upon either hand--many of them are entirely gone; but most of these were lost during his apprenticeship. The least carelessness was rewarded by the loss of a finger, for the saw cannot be protected with guards, as in lumber-cutting." Paul watched the skilful man with the closest interest, shuddering to see how near his hands passed and repassed to the merciless saw-teeth as he sent a ceaseless shower of parts of horns rattling into their respective boxes. Before he left the spot Paul took a pencil and made an estimate. "Why, uncle," he said, "to cut so many as that, he must saw over three horns every minute for ten hours a day. I wouldn't think he could handle them so fast." Then, as he saw how rapidly one horn after another was finished, he drew forth his little watch and found that the rugged old sawyer finished a horn every ten seconds with perfect ease. "Would you like to learn this trade?" the old fellow asked. He held up his hands with the stumps of fingers and thumbs outspread; but Paul only laughed and followed his uncle. They watched a boy wheeling a barrow-load of the horns as they came from the saw, and beheld them placed in enormous revolving cylinders, through which a stream of water was running, where they remained until pretty thoroughly washed. Being removed from these, they were plunged into boilers ranged along one side of the building, filled with hot water. "Here they are heated," said Mr. Sanford, "to clear them from any adhering matter that the cold water does not remove, and partially softened, ready for the next operation." [Illustration: ANCIENT OR MODERN--WHICH?] From the hot water the horns were changed to a series of similar caldrons at the other side of the room, filled with boiling oil. Paul noticed that when the workmen lifted the horns from these vats their appearance was greatly changed, being much less opaque, and considerably plastic, opening readily at the longitudinal cut made by the saw. As the horns were taken from the oil they were flattened by unrolling, and placed between strong iron clamps which were firmly screwed together, and put upon long tables in regular order. "Now I begin to see how it is done," Paul said, though he was thinking all the time of questions that he would ask his uncle when there were no workmen by to overhear. "The oil softens the horn," said Mr. Sanford, "and by placing it in this firm pressure and allowing it to remain till it becomes fixed, the whole structure is so much changed that it never rolls again. Some combs, you will notice, are of a whitish, opaque color, like the natural horn, while others have a smooth appearance, are of amber color, and almost transparent. The former are pressed between cold irons and placed in cold water, while the others are hot-pressed, it being 'cooked' in a few minutes. These plates of horn may be colored; and there are a great many 'tortoise-shell' combs and other goods sold which are only horn with a bit of color sprinkled upon it. "The solid tips of the horns, and all the pieces that are worth anything cut off in making the combs, are made up into horn jewelry, chains, cigar-holders, knife-handles, buttons, and toys of various kinds. These trinkets are generally colored more or less, and many a fashionable belle, I suppose, would be surprised to know the amount of money paid for odd bits of horn under higher sounding names. But the horn is tough and serviceable, at any rate, and that is more than can be said of many of the cheats we meet with in life." The next room, in contrast with all they had passed through previously, was neat and had no repulsive odors. Here the sheets of horn as they came from the presses were first cut by delicate circular saws into blanks of the exact size for the kind of combs to be made, after which they were run through a planer, which gave them the proper thickness. "What do you mean by 'blanks'?" Paul asked, as his uncle used the term. "You can look in the dictionary to find its exact meaning," was the answer. "But you will see what it is in practice at this machine." [Illustration: "IN SOME REMOTE CORNER OF SPAIN."] They stepped to another part of the room; and here Paul saw the "blanks" placed in the cutting-machine standing over a hot furnace, where, after being softened by the heat, they were slowly moved along, while a pair of thin chisels danced up and down, cutting through the centre of the blank at each stroke. When it had passed completely through, an assistant took the perforated blank and pulled it carefully apart, showing two combs, with the teeth interlaced. After separation they were again placed together to harden under pressure, when the final operations consisted of bevelling the teeth on wheels covered with sand-paper, rounding the backs, rounding and pointing the teeth; after which came the polishing, papering and putting in boxes. "I suppose they go all over the country," said Paul as he glanced into the shipping-room. "Much further than that," was the reply. "We never know how far they go; for the wholesale dealers, to whom the combs are shipped from the manufactory, send them into all the odd corners of the earth. Every little dealer must sell combs, and in the very nature of the business they frequently pass through a great many hands before reaching the user, so at the last price is many times what the makers received for them. I suppose it often happens that horns which have been sent thousands of miles to work up are returned to the very regions from which they came, in some other form, increased very many fold in value by their long journey. Or a horn may come from the remoter parts of South America to be wrought here in Massachusetts, and then be shipped from point to point till it reaches some remote corner of Africa, Spain, or Siberia, as an article of barter. And even different parts of the same horn may be at the same moment decking the person of a New York dandy and unsnarling the tangled locks of a Russian Tchuktch." While Paul was watching the deft fingers of the girls who filled the boxes and affixed the labels, his uncle stepped through a door communicating with the office, and soon returned with three elegant pocket-combs. "One of these," he said, "represents a horn which came from _pampas_ of Buenos Ayres; this one, in the original, dashed over the boundless plains of Texas; and here is another, toughened by the hot, short summers and long, bitter winters of Canada. Take them with you in memory of this cheerless rainy day." Paul could not help a little sigh as he thought again of the pleasures he had enjoyed in anticipation; but still he answered bravely, "Thank you; never mind the rain, dear uncle. All the New York boys go off in the woods when they get away from home; but not many of them ever heard how combs are made, and I don't suppose a quarter of them even know what they are made of. I can tell them a thing or two when I get home." IN THE GAS-WORKS. Philip and Kitty were curled up together on the lounge in the library, reading Aldrich's "Story of a Bad Boy." It was fast growing dark in the corner where they were, for the sun had gone down some time before, but they were all absorbed in Tom Bailey's theatricals, and did not notice how heavy the shadows were getting around them. Papa came in by-and-by. "Why, little folks, you'll spoil your eyes reading here; I'd better light the gas for you," and he took out a match from the box on the mantle. "O, let me, please," cried Philip, jumping up and running to the burner. So he took the match, and climbed up in a chair with it. Scr-a-tch! and the new-lit jet gave a glorified glare that illuminated everything in the room, from the Japanese vase on the corner bracket to the pattern of the rug before the open fire. But as Philip turned it off a little it grew quieter, and finally settled down into a steady, respectable flame. Philip always begged to light the gas. It had not been long introduced in the little town where he lived, and the children thought it a very fine thing to have it brought into the house, and secretly pitied the boys and girls whose fathers had only kerosene lamps. "Why can't you blow out gas, just as you do a kerosene light?" asked Kitty, presently, leaving the Bad Boy on the lounge, and watching the bright little crescent under the glass shade. "Because," explained papa, "unless you shut it off by turning the little screw in the pipe, the gas will keep pouring out into the room all the time, and if it isn't disposed of by being burned up, it will mix with the air and make it poisonous to breathe. A man at the hotel here, a few nights ago, blew out the gas because he did not know any better, and was almost suffocated before he realized the trouble and opened his window." "And where does the gas come from in the first place?" pursued Kitty. "Why, from the gas-works, of course," said Philip in a very superior way, for he was a year the elder of the two. "That brick building over by Miller's Hill--don't you know--that we pass in going to Aunt Hester's." "I know that as well as you do, Philip Lawrence," said Kitty with some dignity. "What I wanted to know was what it's made out of. What is it, papa?" "Out of coal," said papa. "They put the coal in ovens and heat it till the gas it contains is separated from the other parts of the coal, and driven off by itself. Then it is purified and made ready for use." "Out of coal? How funny! I wish I could see all about it," said Philip, looking more interested. "And so do I wish I could," added Kitty. "I don't see why it cannot be done," said papa. "If you really care to see it, and won't mind a few bad smells, I will ask Mr. Carter to-morrow morning, when he can take you around and explain things." The next day when Mr. Carter was asked about it, he said, "O, come in any day you like. About three in the afternoon would be a good time, because we are always newly-filling the retorts then." This sounded very nice and imposing to the children, and at three the next afternoon they started out with papa. The gas-house certainly did smell very badly as they drew near it, and dainty Kitty sniffed in considerable disgust. Philip suggested that perhaps she had better not go in after all; he didn't believe girls ever did go into such places. And upon that Kitty valiantly declared she did not mind it a bit, and sternly set her face straight. [Illustration: A RETORT.] Mr. Carter met them at the door. "You are just in time to see the retorts opened," said he, and led the way directly into a large and very dingy room, along one side of which was built out a sort of huge iron cupboard with several little iron doors. The upper ones were closed tight, but some of the lower ones were open a crack, and a very bright fire could be seen inside. Everything around was dirty and gloomy, and these gleams of fire from the little iron doors made the place look weird and ghostly. Long iron pipes reached from each of the upper doors up to one very large horizontal pipe or cylinder near the ceiling overhead. This cylinder ran the whole length of the room, and, at its farther end, joined another iron pipe which passed through the wall. "Those are the furnace-doors down below," said Mr. Carter to the children. "What you see burning inside of them is coke. Coke is what is left of the coal after we have taken the gas and tar out of it. The upper doors open into the retorts, or ovens, that we fill every five hours with the coal from which we want to get gas. Each retort holds about two hundred pounds, and from that amount we get a thousand cubic feet of gas." "Is it just common coal;" asked Kitty, "like what people burn in stoves?" "Not exactly. It is a softer kind, containing more of a substance called hydrogen than the sorts that are generally used for fuel. Several different varieties are used: 'cherry,' 'cannel,' 'splint,' and so on, and they come from mines in different parts of England and Scotland, chiefly. Glasgow, Coventry and Newcastle send us a great deal." Philip started as if a bright idea had struck him. "Is that what people mean when you're doing something there's no need of, and they say 'you're carrying coals to Newcastle?'" "Yes. You see such an enterprise would be absurd. Just notice the man yonder with the long iron rod! He is going to open one of the retorts, take out the old coal--only it is now coke--and put in a fresh supply." A workman in a grimy, leather apron loosened one of the retort doors, and held up a little torch. Immediately a great sheet of flame burst out, and then disappeared. He took the door quite off, and there was a long, narrow oven with an arched top, containing a huge bed of red-hot coals. "What a splendid place to pop corn!" exclaimed Kitty. Papa laughed. "You would find it warm work," said he, "unless you'd a very long handle to your corn-popper." And Kitty thought so too, as she went nearer the fiery furnace. "You see," said Mr. Carter, "these red-hot coals have been changed a great deal by the heat. They have given up all their gas and tar, and are themselves no longer coal, but _coke_. We shovel out this coke and use it as fuel in the furnaces down below to help heat up the next lot. Then new coal is put into the retorts, and they are closed up with iron plates, like that one lying ready on the ground." "It's all muddy 'round the edge," observed Kitty. "Yes, that paste of clay is to make it air-tight. The heat hardens the clay very quickly, so all the little cracks around the edge are plastered up. When the coal is shut up in the ovens, or retorts, the heat, as I just told you, divides it up into the different substances of which it is made; that is, into the coke which you have seen, a black, sticky liquid called tar, the illuminating gas, and more or less ammonia, sulphur, and other things that must be got rid of. Almost all these things are saved and used for one purpose or another, though they may be of no use to us here. If we have more coke than we ourselves need it is sold for fuel. The coal-tar goes for roofing and making sidewalks, or sometimes (though you wouldn't think it possible, as you look at the sticky, bad-smelling, black stuff) in the manufacture of the most lovely dyes, like that which colored Miss Kitty's pink ribbon. The ammonia is used for medicine and all sorts of scientific preparations, in bleaching cloth, and in the printing of calicoes and cambrics." "When the materials of the coal are separated as I told you in the retorts, most of the tar remains behind, and is drawn off; but some gets up the pipes. That large, horizontal cylinder is always nearly half full of it. The gas, which is very light, you know, rises through the upper pipes leading from the retorts, and bubbles up through the tar in the bottom of the cylinder. Then it passes along the farther end of the cylinder, and into the condensing pipes." He opened a door, and they went through into the next room. Here the large pipe which came through the wall of the room they had just left, led to a number of clusters of smaller pipes that were jointed and doubled back and forth upon each other, cob-house fashion. "When the gas goes through these pipes," said Mr. Carter, "it gets pretty well cooled down, for the pipes are kept cold by having so great an amount of surface exposed to draughts of air around them. And when the gas is cooled the impurities are cooled too, so that many of them take a liquid form and can be drawn off." The next room they entered had a row of great, square chests on each side, as they walked through. "These are the purifiers," explained Mr. Carter again. "They are boxes with a great many fan-like shelves inside, projecting out in all directions, and covered thickly with a paste made of lime." "Lime like what the masons used when they plastered the new kitchen?" asked Philip. "About the same thing. The boxes are made air-tight, and the gas enters the first box at one of the lower corners. Then before it can get through the connecting-pipe into the next box, it has to wind its way around among these plates coated with lime. This lime takes up the sulphur and other things that we do not want in the gas, and so by the time it gets through all the boxes it is quite pure and fit to use." Then the party all went into the room where the gas was measured. It was a little office with a queer piece of furniture in it; something that looked like a very large drum-shaped clock, with several different dials or faces. This, Mr. Carter said, was the metre or measurer, and by looking at the dials it could be told exactly how much gas was being made every day. [Illustration: KITTY IN THE GAS-WORKS.] "As soon as the gas gets through the purifiers," said he, "it comes, by an iron pipe, in here, and is made to pass through and give an account of itself before any of it is used. And now I suppose you would like to know how it does report its own amount, wouldn't you?" [Illustration: THE METRE.] Philip and Kitty both were sure they did want to know, so he sketched a little plan of the metre on a piece of paper, and then went on to explain it: "This shows how the metre would look if you could cut it through in the middle. The large drum-shaped box A. A. is hollow, and filled a little more than half way up with water. Inside it is a smaller hollow drum, B. B. so arranged as to turn easily from right to left, on the horizontal axis C. This axis is a hollow pipe by which the gas comes from the purifiers to enter the several chambers of the metre in turn, through small openings called valves. The partitions P. P. P. P. divide the drum B. B. into--let us say--four chambers, 1, 2, 3, 4, all of the same size, and capable of holding a certain known amount of air or gas. The chamber 1 is now filled with gas, 3 with water, and 2 and 4 partly with gas and partly with water. The valves in the pipe C are so arranged that the gas will next pour into the chamber 2. This it does with such force as to completely fill it, lifting it quite out of the water and into the place that 1 had occupied before. Then as 1 is driven over to the place which 4 had occupied, the gas with which it was filled passes out by another pipe and off to the large reservoir you will see by and by, its place being filled with water. At the same time 4 is driven around to the place of 3, and 3 to that of 2. The water always keeps the same level, and simply waits for the chambers to come round and down to be filled. "Next, 3, being in the place of 2, receives its charge of gas from the entrance pipe, is in turn lifted up into the central position, and sends all the other chambers around one step further. And when the drum gets completely around once, so that the chambers stand in the same places as at first, you know each chamber must have been once filled with gas and then emptied of it. If then we know that each chamber will hold, say two and a half cubic feet of gas, we are sure that every time the drum has turned fully around it has received and sent off four times two and a half feet, or ten feet in all. Now we connect the axis C with a train of wheel-work, something like that in a clock, and this wheel-work moves the pointers on the dials in front, so that as the gas in passing in and out of the chambers turns the drum on the axis, it turns the dial pointers also. "The right hand dial marks up to one hundred. While its pointer is passing completely around once, the pointer on the next dial (which marks up to one thousand) is moving a short space and preserving the record of that one hundred; and then the first pointer begins over again. The two pointers act together just like the minute and hour hands on a clock. Then the next dial marks up to ten thousand, and acts in turn like an hour-hand to the thousands' dial as a minute-hand, and so on. You see each dial has its denominations, 'thousands,' 'hundred thousands,' or whatever it may be, printed plainly below it. And now, when we want to read off the dials, we begin at the left, taking in each case the last number a pointer _has passed_, and read towards the right, just as you have learned to do with any numbers in your 'Eaton's Arithmetic.' There is one thing more to remember, however; the number you read means not simply so many cubic feet of gas but so many hundred cubic feet." Philip and Kitty immediately set to work to read the dials on the office metre, and found that they were not now so very mysterious. "But how do you know how much people use?" asked Philip. "There is something like this metre, only smaller, down cellar at home, and a man came and looked at it the other day, to see how much gas had been burned in the house he said, when I asked him what he was going to do." "The metre you have at home works in the same way as this," said Mr. Carter, "and the dial-plates are read in the same way. But the gas that your little metre registers is only that which you take from the main supply-pipe, to light your parlors and bed-rooms. "When a stream of gas from the main enters the house, it has to pass through the metre the very first thing, before any of it is used; and each little metre keeps as strict an account of what passes through from the main to the burners, as the large one here in the office does of that which passes from the purifiers to the reservoir. But there is this difference between the two: the gas keeps pouring through the office metre as long as we keep making it in the retorts, but it passes through your metre at home only just as long as you keep drawing it off at the burners. So if we find by looking at the metre that 5450 feet have passed through during a given time, we send in our bill to your papa for that amount, knowing it must have been burned in the house. "But most likely the metre doesn't say anything directly about 5450. It says, perhaps, 11025. 'How can that be?' you would think. 'We haven't burned so much as that,' and you haven't--during this one quarter. But after the metre had been inspected at the end of the last quarter, the pointers did not go back to the beginning of the dials and start anew; they kept right on from the place where they were, so that 11025 is the amount you paid for last time and the amount you want to pay for this time, lumped together. Now this is what we do. We turn to our books and see how much you were charged with last time, and subtracting that record from the present record leaves the amount you have used since the last time of payment. "Then suppose another case. Your metre registers only as far as 100,000. At the end of the last quarter it marked 97850; now it records but 3175. How would you explain that, master Philip?" Philip looked puzzled a moment, and then said, "I should think it must have finished out the hundred thousand and begun over again." "Exactly. And to find the amount for this quarter you would add together the remainder of the hundred thousand (2150) and the 3175, and get 5325, the real record. But I guess you've had arithmetic enough for the present, so we'll go out now and see the gasometer, or gas reservoir." They all went out of doors then, papa, Mr. Carter, Philip and Kitty, across a narrow court-yard. There was a huge, round box, or drum, with sides as high as those of the carriage-house at home, but with no opening anywhere, "like a great giant's bandbox," thought Kitty. Four stout posts, much taller still than the "bandbox" itself, were set at equal distances around it, and their extremities were joined by stout beams which passed across over the top of the gasometer. As the children went up nearer to it, they saw it was made of great plates of iron firmly riveted together, and that it did not rest on the ground, as they had supposed, but in the middle of a circular tank of water. "After the gas has been made and purified and measured," said Mr. Carter, "it is brought by underground pipes into this gasometer, and from here drawn off by other pipes into the houses. The weight of this iron shell bearing down upon the gas, gives pressure or force enough to drive the gas anywhere we wish." [Illustration: THE GASOMETRE.] "But why do you put the--the iron thing in water, instead of on the ground?" asked Kitty. "So as to make it air-tight, and give it a chance to move freely up and down. Of course if the iron shell were empty its own weight would make it sink directly to the bottom of the water-tank and stay there. But gas, you know, is so much lighter than common air that it always makes a very strong effort to rise higher and higher, carrying along whatever encloses it. You saw that illustrated in the balloon that went up last Fourth of July. Now, as the gas from the works pours into the reservoir from beneath, it is strong enough to lift the iron box up a little in the water. Of course that gives a little more room. Then as more gas comes in to take up this room, the gasometer keeps on rising slowly. We make sure of its not rising above the water and letting the gas leak out, by means of the beams you see stretched across above it. They are all ready to hold it down in a safe position if the need should come. "On the other hand, as the people in town draw off the gas to burn, the gasometer would, of course, tend to sink down gradually. So we have the water-tanks made deep enough to allow for every possible necessity in that direction. In very cold weather we keep the water from freezing by passing a current of hot steam into it. If it should ever freeze, the gasometer might as well be on the ground, for it could not move up and down, or be trusted to keep the gas from leaking out around the edges. With these precautions, however, we know it is perfectly trustworthy." "I saw it one morning early, when I was out coasting on the hill," said Philip, "and it wasn't more than half as high as it is now." "A great deal had been drawn off during the night and we had not been making any more during the time to take its place." "Does it ever get burned out too much?" "No, there's no danger of it. We make enough to allow a good large margin above what we expect will be used." The children looked about a little longer, and then, with good-byes and many thanks to Mr. Carter, walked home again with papa, over the crisp, hard snow. Next week Philip had a composition to write at school. He took "Gas" for his subject, and wrote: "Gas that you burn is made out of soft coal. They put it in Ovens and cook it until it is not coal any longer. The Ovens are so hot you cant go anywhare near them but the men do With poles and big lether aprons. I would not like to shovle in the coal. I would rather have a Balloon. They use two or three tons every day. it makes coke and Tar and the gas that goes up the pipes. They make the gas clean and mesure it in a big box of water, and tell how much there is by looking at the clock faces in front. Then it goes into a big round box made of iron and then we burn it. but I do not like to smell of it. you must not blow it out for if you do you will get choked. This is all I Remember about gas. "PHILIP RAYMOND LAWRENCE." RACING A THUNDER-STORM. If it had been a yacht in which we were speeding along at the rate of a trifle over a mile per minute, we should have "taken our reckoning," "hove the log," or done something nautical, and the captain would doubtless have reported in regular sea-faring terms that we were off Oil City with Lake Chautauqua so and so many knots on our port quarter. But it wasn't a yacht, nor a schooner, nor a Conestoga wagon, lightning express or catamaran, in which we were travelling neck and neck with one of the wildest looking storm clouds of hot mid-summer. No. It was--can you guess it? Yes, a _balloon_. And this is how it all came about: Fourth of July came upon the _fifth_ that year, (because of some strange oversight on the part of the folks who first hit upon the plan of dividing time into weeks, somehow the Fourth will, every once in a while, strike Sunday.) [Illustration: INFLATING THE "BUFFALO."] At least it did in Cleveland; and although they were a day late, the Clevelanders determined to have a big time. So they had sent for Prof. Samuel A. King, an aeronaut of distinction. Balloonists, you know, are nearly always called "Professors"--why this is so I don't _profess_ to know. And Prof. King had arrived in Cleveland a few days before, bringing his great balloon, the "Buffalo." Early upon the morning of the 5th he was on hand with the helpless monster all in a heap tied about with ropes, mixed up with netting and sand-bags, and supplemented with a big basket which looked a good deal like an inverted straw hat made for some huge giant. The netting was carefully spread out on the Nicholson pavement in the centre of the pretty square that you will remember if you have ever been in Cleveland. The bags were filled from a wagon-load of sand and hitched with snap-catches about the edges. So they stood about in a circle. Then the aerostat, as the great bag is called, was unrolled and spread evenly over this. An oiled-muslin tube was tied to the neck, and its other extreme to a gas main in a hole which some of the workmen had dug for the purpose. Next the gas was turned on. The bag began to rise, looking at first like ever so many young whales all huddled together. The men now began, under the Professor's direction, to pull the netting over to hold the bag down. The sand-bags were brought closer and set along on either side of the tube. The bag now began to grow round and plump. Groups of lookers-on kept growing, too, until all the square was alive with them. The helpers kept walking around the swelling globe, changing the bags to lower strands of the netting; and so it continued until by two o'clock the balloon was full--that is, allowance was made only for expansion when the balloon should have reached the clouds. Every few moments the breeze would sway the monster to and fro, and it seemed chafing to break away. Soon after, the basket was tied upon the ring, and into this a great heap of sand-bags was piled, and a lot of ropes, an anchor, an aneroid, thermometer, compass and other accessories tied into the rigging or outside of the basket. How grandly she stood there, the vast dome towering above the trees, her amber sides bright with decorations and her shapely globe held in leash by the white network--but bless me! here's more than four pages used up, and we haven't started yet. At precisely four o'clock the Professor's cheery voice was heard all through the square as he sang out, "All aboard!" And his eight companions responded as soon as they could get through the dense crowd that surged on every side. Now the sole remaining rope which held us to the earth was gripped by a score of eager men. The order came, "Let go!" The basket was raised a few feet and then settled slowly back. This made the crowd laugh. "Throw out two bags!" cried the Professor. Then--then how grandly we lifted! How the cannon roared and bands added their noise to the shouts of the hundred thousand people whose faces were all turned toward our little wicker car! The writer was sand-man, and following orders, he let out the contents of another bag which fell in a swift gray stream plump down into the midst of a little group of young ladies who were seated on a house-top. If it happens that _this book_ reaches that family, opportunity is now taken to apologize to those young ladies for thus pouring sand down the backs of their necks. Well, we sailed along grandly, soon leaving the city far behind--I forgot to say that just as we were leaving, a darkey in a white apron came through the crowd bringing us a hamper of good things. What an appetite this keen upper air gave us, to be sure! We ate and drank and toasted everything and everybody. Pretty soon one of the boys said, (we were all newspaper men, and spoke of each other as "boys"): "Listen a moment!" And we all held our breaths. What supreme silence! the gentle sighing of the wind among the trees a mile below, the barking of dogs, or subdued shouts of excited villagers, was all we could hear--but hark! We were approaching a small town. In the square, through the gathering twilight, we could discern a crowd, and now there came to us, refined by distance, the familiar notes, played by the village band, of "Up in a balloon, boys!" We passed over the village, and the Professor pulled the valve cord gently, so we dropped towards the place and cheered in reply. "Now let's give them a song," said the Professor. [Illustration: A PLUCKY DOG.] So he began, and we came in on the chorus: "Oh! 'twas old Sam Simons, And young Sam Simons, Old Sam Simons' son: Now young Sam Simons Is old Sam Simons, For old Sam Simons is gone." I wish the editor would only give me room to tell you about the scores of funny things that happened that afternoon; but after all, the real adventures happened the next day. So I can only speak briefly of the pretty carrier-pigeons we loosed, which flew swiftly back to Cleveland, bearing our messages to the newspapers--short notes only, to be sure, wrapped about their slender legs, and which appeared in the papers the following morning. One of these I find in the scrap-book before me, for it was returned to me some weeks afterwards. It reads: "_We've just eaten supper out of our hamper, unhampered by any fears as to breakfast. Supper above the clouds is what I call high living. We can see you yet, but you are only a smoky stain upon the shore of Lake Erie. The Professor says we are to go into camp and then continue trip to-morrow. Good-night._" It would never do, either, to forget the plucky dog which ran after our drag-rope as it trailed along the ground when we were quite near the earth, and held on with his teeth though we pulled him along over the stubble on his back, and never let go until we had jerked him plumb over a fence. I've been in all sorts of camps--military camps, hunting camps and camp meetings, but never dreamed of such a thing as a _balloon camp_ before! By the help of some farmers we filled the great basket with stones and then pitched a tent and made a fire at a safe distance. Lines were run to trees in three directions, loosely to give the balloon "play" in case of much wind, and then we all lay down in our blankets and tried to sleep. At the very first signs of dawn we were up, and there she stood in the still air just like a vision. At sunrise a hospitable farmer invited us to breakfast, and wasn't it good? I'll never forget that coffee. By eight o'clock quite a large number of country folks had reached the field. Teams were hitched all along the fences. Now the Professor announced that as he wished to make a long trip that day, he should carry plenty of ballast and so could allow only two persons with him. It had been agreed that we should draw cuts, and this was done good-naturedly. The [Illustration: OUR BALLOON CAMP.] choice fell upon a photographer, and the writer. We were sorry indeed to leave our companions behind us, but there was no help for it. So we took our seats in the basket, said good-by, and were off. Now we went up! _up!_ UP! passing through a thin cloud that made everything below look dim and distant. We were in the region where _November spends the summer_. Whew! how chilly it was. We wrapped our overcoats and blankets close about us and our teeth chattered. Then we rubbed our hands and faces. Why! how queerly they looked and felt. "Ha! ha! look at the Professor's face. Why! there _ain't a wrinkle left_!" said the photographer. And so it proved. The aneroid told us that we were over three miles from the ground, and the atmosphere was so diminished in pressure that the internal forces of the body pressed outward and made the skin full and smooth. One of yesterday's party had provided some large envelopes with long red tails of tissue paper to drop into towns, and we wrote messages and enclosed them in some of these, putting sand in one end, and launched them. We watched them as they shot hither and yon in their swift flight toward the earth. The chance finder was requested to send the contents to the nearest telegraph office, but we never heard from any of them, save one. About noon we found by comparing our maps with the streams below that we had passed into Pennsylvania; and not long afterwards we descried Oil City set upon the creek, with all its hills covered with derricks and oil tanks. Speaking of Oil City, reminds me of a rather funny incident: For a couple of years I had been in correspondence with a young man who resided there, and who was also a journalist. His name and mine were just the same. I had promised faithfully to stop and see him at any time chance might bring me near his home. I took one of the envelopes and wrote a _regret_, dropping it over the city. It was picked up in the road and handed to him, but he always insisted that I had broken my promise unreasonably. At the rate in which Oil City was left behind we knew our pace was very rapid, though to us it all seemed like a dead calm, for we kept just even with the wind. The Professor said we could reach New England by midnight if the wind held and it didn't grow cloudy; but alas! for the past hour we had been watching a little fleecy nebulous bit of mist that seemed, like a spirit, to spring from the nothingness of the blue ether, growing constantly, and attracting other cloudlets which came toward it from all quarters of the heavens and were swallowed up. A growing, whirling wall of pearly gray mounted and spread its shadow over half the earth. We threw out sand and mounted above it. Then it arose toward us again. It seemed as though we could reach our hands into its surging depths. Over went seats, baskets, the tent--everything we could spare, and I'm not sure the Professor didn't glare at one of his companions with malicious and deadly intent. The truth rushed upon us that we were racing with a storm. It was of vital importance to keep in the sun, for the moment the shadows below could place their chilly spell upon our steed, the gas would chill and condense, and we would drop! drop! swiftly to the earth. At last it came, and we knew it was inevitable. Below us we could hear the crashing of thunder reverberating away into the depths of the black storm masses, and the lightnings every moment lit the weird scene with a grandeur but few mortals have ever witnessed. For a brief moment we hung suspended like Mahomet's coffin in the centre of a great cave of pearl. Shall I ever forget that glimpse of heavenly splendor? A single shaft of sunlight broke through its walls and then died like the last ray of hope. Then downward we rushed! A mile nearer earth within the first minute! As the air grew denser we fell more gradually. Our long drag-rope was out, weighing perhaps three hundred pounds. Now we were closely enshrouded by leaden clouds. The rain ran down the bag in rivulets and trickled upon our heads. "Look, oh look!" cried the Professor. We were now below the storm, and along its dense ceiling could see its broad extent. We were above the mountains. No towns nor even houses could be discovered, only dense forests, through which the gale howled as among the rigging of a ship upon a winter sea. Very quickly our drag-rope touched the tree-tops and began to glide among the swaying pines. "Hold on at life-ropes!" shouted the Professor, knife in hand. In another instant the basket gave a dreadful surge; a mass of pine boughs swept about our heads, followed by a strong jerk. The Professor had cut the cord which bound the anchor coil. The anchor had dropped and caught among the limbs. We were safe! No! not yet. [Illustration: THE PROFESSOR'S DILEMMA.] The line must be shortened so we could clear the tree-tops. All three tugged at the rope. Then other lashings were made while the great aerostat plunged about like a wounded leviathan. We were eighty feet from the ground. Two of us found it convenient to go down the drag-rope, but the poor Professor, tall and heavy, preferred to try the tree. This was wet and slippery, as well as full of projecting points of broken branches. About twenty feet from the ground the Professor's clothes caught. He was in a great dilemma. Amid a good deal of laughter we managed to liberate him, and as he reached the ground he exclaimed: "Well, of all the scrapes I was ever in, this is about the meanest!" But help came even here. Far down the slope we heard a shout, which you may be sure was quickly answered. Then, after a while, the bushes parted and a half-score of woodsmen carrying gleaming axes ran to our aid. They were all thoroughly wet, like ourselves. "What can we do for you?" they asked. "Cut down half a dozen of these pines. I want to save the balloon," answered the aeronaut. Then you should have seen the chips fly! Down came the trees, one after the other, and finally the one to which our steed was lashed. The gas soon escaped through great holes torn by the limbs, and our gallant craft was robbed of its power. Standing upon one of the fallen trees I made the sketch you see before you. We found upon inquiring that we had landed in Potter county, Pennsylvania; and consulting our watches, found we had travelled one hundred and twenty-five miles in about two hours. We were made comfortable at a lumberman's cabin, [Illustration: THE WRECK OF THE "BUFFALO."] and managed to get out of the woods in a couple of days where we could telegraph to our friends. It cannot be denied that after the excitement had passed we felt very much like an old farmer who listened to our adventures. He said: "Mebbe some folks prefer to travel in a flying Beelzebub, but I'm willin' to git along in a buck-board with a good road to put my feet agin when I git off." _You'll_ say, now, "I guess that race was enough for you!" But you're wrong; for I've had several trips since; and now you've a perfect right to retort, "Well! you are a bigger _balloonatic_ than I took you for." Perhaps you're right. AUGUST'S "'SPERIMENT." August _was_ rather a troublesome boy. Generous and jolly,--his playmates called him a firstrate good fellow, but older people complained that he was curious, meddlesome, and always "cluttering round." But here is mamma's opinion: "August was born to be busy. He is inventive too. He asks questions to gain information, and he handles things to see how they are made." "What is he tinkering at now, mamma?" asked Tom. "He has got hold of an old, old book, full of _f ss_, and all yellow; he's rigged two pans in a barrel, and bought a naptha lamp, and locked us all out of the attic." "And he just came in with a covered basket, mamma," said Katie, "carrying it ever so carefully. I was jumping rope in the hall, and he asked me not to joggle. What do you suppose he was doing, mamma?" "Suppose we wait till he tells us," said mamma, smiling. "He's only trying some of his 'speriments," said wise little Robbie, aged five. After the children went out, mamma took up her work and sat down by the window, watching the three outside, and waiting for her oldest boy, August, who presently came to take her into his confidence. "Mamma, I am trying an experiment." "And is that something new, August?" with an encouraging smile. "But the _kind_ is new, mamma. Did you ever hear of Réaumur?" "Who wrote that curious old book on the art of hatching fowls by artificial incubation? Yes, August." "Then will you come and see, mamma, what _I_ have begun to do?" He led the way, two steps at a time, to the attic. When they reached the door, August drew from his pocket a key, and unlocked it and led his mother in. A flour-barrel stood in the centre of the floor, closely covered. August removed the cover, and lifted up a piece of carpet. His mother looked in. Within the barrel was suspended a large, deep pan, resting on three iron cleats. This pan was partly filled with hot water, and floating on the water was another pan--a shallow one--which contained a layer of sand an inch deep. Over this was spread a piece of linen cloth, and in the cloth thirty-six large Brahma eggs lay closely packed. In the center stood a neat thermometer. [Illustration: THE INCUBATOR.] "You have made your arrangements very neatly, August," said mamma. "Of course I do not understand them exactly." "Well, you see, mamma, this shallow pan gets its heat from the water beneath it. I put that in hot, and keep it just right with this lamp." Saying which, he knelt in front of the barrel, and opened a neat little door, fitted with a brass knob and hinges. Stooping down and looking in, his mother saw on a tall flower-pot, which stood upside down, a naptha safety-lamp sending forth a small, steady flame. "That keeps the temperature about equable;" said August, "but I have another lamp, larger than this, to use in case my incubator grows too cool." "When did you set them?" asked mamma. "This morning." "To-day is the first of March: then if no accident happens, and the eggs are good, you expect them to hatch on the twenty-first?" "Yes, mamma, and the eggs are all right because I told Grandma I wanted some _very_ fresh, and she saved them for me." "Did Grandma know of your experiment?" "Oh! no, mamma. Not a soul but you knows about it; and I want you to keep the secret until we know how it will turn out." "Very well!" said mamma; "but if you lock the door you had better leave the key with me in case anything should happen. I will look at your incubator occasionally while you are at school." August gave his mother a grateful look--he felt so encouraged by her sympathy. "How warm do you keep the eggs?" she asked as he carefully replaced the carpet and cover. "Réaumur says at 32°, that is about 103 1-2 Fahrenheit.[A]" "Must the eggs be kept at that temperature all the time?" "No, only through the first week. The second it is a little less and the third still less." "There is the luncheon-bell, dear; we must go down or the children will be trooping up here. I hope, my boy, that you will succeed." "If I don't I shall try again," said August. Then, taking a final look to see that the thermometer and lamp were all right, he locked the room and they went down. He paid several visits to the attic during the day and evening, finding on each occasion that all worked well and steadily. Before going to bed he refilled the lamp, so the supply of naptha shouldn't be exhausted; then he went to sleep and dreamed all night of eggs and chickens. In the morning he was up and at his incubator before any one else was stirring. The thermometer indicated that the eggs were a trifle cool, so he turned up the wick of the lamp. Before going to church he turned the eggs. This he did twice daily, being careful not to jar them. The incubator worked well all day and all night. The next day was Monday and he had his school duties to attend to. He left everything in good order, took the attic key to his mother, and went off to school full of confidence. Alas! When mamma went up at ten o'clock, she could scarcely see across the room. Everything was black with soot. The naptha lamp was smoking fiercely. The first thing was to get the window open, and put out the lamp. Then mamma looked at the eggs. Alas, again! There they lay covered with fine black soot. She took up one and tried to wipe it, but succeeded only in making a smirch which she could not wipe off. She knew then that the eggs were spoiled. In the midst of it all August came in from school having been dismissed early. Poor August! He could scarcely keep the tears back. "Well, August," said his mamma very practically, "I don't think a naptha lamp just the thing. They are very apt to smoke, and they are very inflammable." "Yes," said August, trying to be cheerful. "Failure the first! I shall try it again. Grandma will give me some more eggs. I've only lost three days." "And _I_ will go to town this afternoon," said his mother, "and see if I cannot find a lamp which will be more reliable." There was no school that afternoon, so August cleaned the room, and supplied the incubator with fresh eggs, greatly encouraged by his mother's sympathy and interest. The other children were curious enough to know what was going on in the attic; but they could get no information. Toward evening Mrs. Grant returned from town, bringing for her little boy a large tin lamp which would burn kerosene. He lighted it and adjusted the wick to just the right height. Then it was placed within the barrel to warm the second setting of eggs. Day after day August and his mother watched and tended them. Everything progressed finely. On the next Monday the eggs, having been in the incubator a week, were far enough advanced to be tested. At a south window there hung a heavy green Holland curtain. In this mamma allowed August to cut a hole, a little smaller than an egg, and she herself staid to assist him. When all was ready, she handed August the eggs one by one. One by one he held them to the aperture. The first seemed quite transparent. In vain August turned and turned it--there was nothing to be seen but the yolk floating at the top. With a sigh he laid that aside and took up another. "O, mamma, look!" he cried excitedly. Mrs. Grant examined it with great interest. Not only could she distinctly see the dark form of a little chick, particularly the head with its immense eye, but bright blood-veins were also plainly defined, branching out in all directions from the body. Another and still another of the eggs looked like this one. August was greatly excited. "They are lively enough!" he said. "See, mamma, this one moves, and this!" Then came one that was dark and shaky. "Addled," pronounced August. After this a number more appeared as promising as the former ones. Finally all were tested. They were pleased enough with the result. Three were clear--that meant there were no chickens within the shells; one was addled; and thirty-two contained live chicks. August was so wild over this discovery that his hands grew unsteady, and he unfortunately dropped two of the eggs and broke them. This left him but thirty likely to hatch; but these were all very promising. "I am sure we will succeed now, mamma," cried August gaily. "It looks like it, certainly," said mamma. But alas for poor August's bright hopes! and alas for the expected chickens! Whether August was too confident and grew careless, or whether it was one of those unforeseen accidents that _will_ happen, will never be known; but this is certain, that the next morning when August went, later than usual, to look at his incubator, he found the thermometer had gone up to 110 and must have been at that temperature some time, for in egg after egg, which he opened in despair, was a poor little dead chick. Even if a boy is fourteen years old, he cannot help crying sometimes over a great disappointment. Poor August put out his lamp with sorrowful breath and some of his tears fell upon the hot chimney which hissed as if in mockery. Then he locked himself in his own room, threw himself on the bed, refused his breakfast and gave way to his grief. Tom, Katie and Robbie all tried to get at him, but without avail. Katie coaxed with loving words. Robbie murmured, "Poor Gussie!" Tom said "Never mind, old fellow, if your 'speriment has failed. Come and play ball." August's reply was not very polite. "My experiment hasn't failed, and that is all you know about it, Tom!" But the word "fail" seemed to rouse him, to restore his courage; for presently unlocking the door and coming out, he said quietly to himself, "I shall just go down to Grandma's for some more eggs--that's what I shall do!" Grandma was curious to know what he did with so many eggs; but she asked no questions. She had great respect for August and his 'speriments. She only said, "This makes one hundred and eight eggs, child. Now, if I had set all these, and if they had all hatched, what a lot of little chickens I would have had!" "Ah!" thought August. "If!--" And he drew a long sigh. Mamma, meanwhile, had been up to the attic to look at the incubator, knowing nothing of what had happened. Great was her amazement to find the lamp out, a basin full of broken eggs and little dead chicks, and the incubator itself deserted and empty. "Why, August!" she cried, as she met him in the door with a basket of fresh eggs. "What has happened, dear child?" "Only failure number two;" he answered, trying to speak cheerfully, though even yet the tears lay high. "They got too hot in the night, mamma." "Yet you are not quite discouraged?" said mamma. August held out his basket with a smile. So once more the incubator was set. "We must take more pains this time," said mamma. "Yes'm," answered August, "I'll try not to let any thing happen to these." Things did work more smoothly this time. The temperature was kept about right, the eggs were tested successfully and without accident. One week, two weeks, two weeks and a half, and then things happened again, things which came near being serious enough. It was Saturday afternoon. August was going with the other children to a circus. He had turned the eggs carefully and sprinkled them lightly with warm water. He had admitted the children into his secret, and they were all in the room waiting for him. "These eggs are a little cool," said August, putting one up to his cheek. "I must leave them just right, I think I will fill the lamp and turn it up a little. Tommy, will you take the lamp out?" Down on his knees Tommy went, and drew out the lamp which he set on the floor. Then, kneeling still above it, he blew hard, directly down the chimney. "PUFF! BANG! _Crack!_" went something, causing August, Katie and Robbie to start violently, while poor Tommy, with his hands to his eyes, rolled over on the floor with a groan. "Mamma, oh! mamma!" screamed Katie, "the lamp is 'sploded!" "And Tommy's killed!" shrieked Robbie. Mamma flew up the stairs and to Tommy. "Oh! his eyes!" she cried. "Quick, August, water!" "Oh! my poor Tommy!" sobbed little Robbie. "See him all b'eedin', b'eedin'!" August came running with the water, and knelt down and held the basin while Katie flew for a sponge and soft linen. When the blood was washed off, and his smarting eyes had been bathed with fresh, cool water, Tommy discovered that he had been more frightened than hurt; and mamma and the rest were greatly relieved to find his worst wound, a slight cut between the eyes, could be cured by court-plaster. It was a great wonder, however, that more harm had not been done; for when the child blew so forcibly down the chimney, the wick shot up out of the lamp and the chimney shivered in pieces; one of the pieces had struck his face, making the cut, while the hot air and smoke flashing into his eyes caused them to smart fiercely. August had neglected to fill the lamp at the proper time, and the oil had burned nearly out. It was the sudden forcing of air down the tube which caused the explosion. "I thought you said 'twas a safety lamp!" said Katie indignantly. "'Tisn't half so good as our un-safety ones;" declared Robbie. "It's never safe to blow directly down upon a full flame in any lamp," said mamma. "The wick should always be turned down first and the flame gently blown." "Accident the third;" said August ruefully. "Mamma, do you feel like trusting me any farther?" His mother smiled. "The usual experience of inventors, my son." Sunday passed quietly. Monday with its school duties was well over. Tuesday morning--"Three weeks to-day!" said August, and half fearfully opened his incubator. "_Peep! Peep! Peep!_" The lad trembled with excitement, and a flush of joy spread over his face. He could hardly believe his ears. "One, two, three," he hurriedly counted, "four, five, six." On he counted, up to twenty eggs chipped or cracked. One chicken was half out of its shell, and one, quite independent, was scrambling over the rest of the eggs. August held his breath and looked at them as long as he dared to keep the incubator open. Then softly closing the lid, he rushed down stairs. "Hurrah! Hurrah!" he shouted at the door of his mother's room. "They're hatching, mamma! They're hatching!" "Are they, really?" asked mamma, pleased enough, and she hurried up the stairs, closely followed by the children, whom August's joyful cry had aroused from their sleep. In great excitement they clustered around the barrel. "Oh! what a cunning, fluffy one!" cried little Katie, as she spied the oldest chick. "But what is the matter with that other one?" asked Tommy. "He has just left the shell and is not dry yet," August explained. "As soon as he is dry he will be downy like the other." "Hear em say '_peep! peep!_'" cried little Robbie, grasping the edge of the barrel with both hands, and stretching his short legs to their utmost extent in order to get his eyes high enough to look over the edge. "What lots are cracked!" said Tommy. "Oh! August, here is one cracked all round." "Yes," said August, "that chick will soon be out." Even as he spoke the shell parted, and a third little bright-eyed chicken struggled out and looked about in amazement. The children could have watched them much longer with great interest, but mamma was afraid the incubator would get too cool, and she advised August to cover it. "How _do_ they do it, mamma?" asked Katie. [Illustration: HOW THE CHICKEN IS PACKED.] "The little chick is packed very wonderfully in his shell," said mamma. "His head under his wing, legs folded up with the feet toward the head, his bill coming out from under one wing. This bill is furnished with a little hard point on the top. When he is ready to crack the shell and come out, he begins to move. He turns his whole body slowly round, cracking the shell as he goes, by pressing with his whole force against it, the hard, sharp point on the top of his bill coming next the shell. When he is a few days old this hard point drops off. Just before he hatches, after the egg is cracked all around, he frees his head from his wing and struggles to stretch himself. Then the shell parts and he gets his head out, and presently his legs, one after the other. I forgot to say that just before hatching he gradually absorbs the yolk of the egg into his body, and that nourishes him for twenty-four hours after hatching." [Illustration: HOW THE SHELL IS CRACKED.] "It's very curious, isn't it?" said Tommy. "I didn't know anything but hens or ducks could hatch eggs," said Katie. "Why, Katie!" exclaimed August, "there is a place at Canton, in China, where _thousands_ of ducks' eggs are hatched artificially every day. There are twenty-eight rooms to the establishment, and all along the sides of these rooms are rows of sliding trays filled with eggs. These eggs are put in the first room the first day; on the second day they are moved to the second room; and so on, until they hatch in the last room. The heat is graduated, the last rooms being cooler than the first. All these eggs are hatched by the heat of the rooms." "If they hatch thousands every day," asked Tommy, "what do they do with the little ducks?" "They hatch them for the people in the neighboring towns," replied August. "The Chinese are very fond of ducks and ducks' eggs. A gentleman who has been to Canton, and seen the hatching-rooms, told me he had seen people take eggs there to be hatched. They would pay for the hatching and then one of the men in charge of the rooms would count their eggs, and give them just as many little ducklings." "I guess they don't have accidents there, then," said Katie. "_I_ won't have accidents _always_," August replied. "But what _do_ they do with so many ducks?" asked Tommy. "Why, half the poor Chinese people near the coast live on the water all the time in boats that are half houses. Of course they could not keep hens, but they can keep ducks and they do." "Oh, yes!" cried Tommy. "I 'member how papa told about seeing them fed and called into the boats. He said every flock knew its own call, and would go scuttling through the water to the right boat. He thought they were in this d'edful hurry, cause the last one got whipped." "What shall I do about school, mamma?" August asked. "Oh! go, and recite your most important lessons," she answered wisely. "I will take care of the eggs and chickens till you return." It was just as well for August to be occupied, since the hatching, although it went on surely, was slow work. With great faith in his incubator, August had previously built a little yard for the expected chickens. It was in box form, about eight feet long and two feet wide. In the center was a feeding-tray and water tank, and at one end a hover. This hover (H) was [Illustration: THE ARTIFICIAL MOTHER.] lined with soft fur loosely tacked to the top and sides and hanging down the front in narrow strips to form a curtain. It sloped from the front to the back. The water tank was a stout earthen bottle in a saucer; a small hole near the bottom of the bottle let the water, drop by drop, into the saucer, so that as the chickens drank, the supply in the saucer was continually freshening. The bottom of the yard was covered with gravel three inches deep. This neat yard was now waiting down stairs in a sunny shed room to receive the chickens. August went to school, and on his way home called for his grandmother to go up to the house to dinner. Grandma knew that it was just three weeks since August had taken the last eggs, and that twenty-one days was the time allotted by nature for the bringing forth of chickens, so she shrewdly suspected what she would find; but it had not occurred to her that she would find chickens alive without the aid of a hen. "Grandma," asked August, as they walked along "when you set a hen on thirteen eggs, how many do you expect will hatch?" "I hope for all," she replied, "but I seldom get all. I think ten out of thirteen is a very good proportion." "My incubator beats your hens!" thought August. When they reached the house he took her straight to the attic. "Well, I never!" she exclaimed. "So that is your secret, August! Well, I declare! And it really hatches the eggs, doesn't it? I always knew, child, that you would invent something wonderful." "I didn't _invent_ much," he said modestly. "In 1750, Réaumur, the French naturalist, gave an account of his experiments in hatching eggs in barrels set in hot-beds of horse-manure; and the Chinese and the Egyptians have hatched them for ages in ovens." "But this is by hot water and lamps," said Grandma. "Yes," said August, "I never saw an incubator before I made this; but, Grandma, I had read of them made on the same principle." "At any rate," said Grandma, "I think that you deserve great credit for patience and ingenuity." By evening thirty chickens were hatched from the thirty-six eggs. The other six gave no signs of life. By Grandma's advice they were left in the incubator "to give them a chance," but they never hatched. The next morning all the members of the family took the chickens down-stairs, even Robbie, who took two in a basket, and deposited them in their new home. Then their food was prepared, the yolks of hard-boiled eggs crumbled up fine, bread crumbs, milk, and a little fine cracked corn. After a few days they could be fed almost entirely upon the cracked corn. The whole family then stood around the yard admiring the brood, thirty little, bright-eyed, yellow, fluffy balls. They soon learned to eat and to drink, and were busy, happy little creatures. They would run under the hover when they wanted warmth or quiet, just as naturally as they would have run under a mother hen. The box was built on castors, and could be rolled from window to window, and thus kept in the sunlight, in which the little creatures reveled; and at night it could be pushed near the stove. Of course August had to renew the gravel very often, and he was very particular to keep the food dishes sweet and clean. When the weather grew warm enough the yard was rolled into an open shed, and they could run out of doors. These chickens were considered very wonderful, and many visitors came to see them. They grew fast and were as tame as kittens. Day after day the children came to feed the pretty pets, bringing them young clover tops and tender grass. Katie treated them with her birds' canary and hemp seed. Robbie gave them bits of his cookies and cakes. Anything that the children liked to eat, these little chickens liked also; and when they heard the little boots coming towards them they would perch on the edge of their yard and chirp and peep and coax for their dainties. By and by their wings began to grow and the fluffy down was changed to feathers. Grandma said that now they must have meat occasionally, chopped up fine, and they had it Wednesdays and Saturdays. The little creatures were frantic for the meat. They would fly upon August, and, if they could get there, into the dish, which they more than once overturned. When their plumage was well out they were handsome fowls. August built a large coop and out-door yard for them, but they were not often confined in it, for the children loved to have them about with them, and watched them as carefully as a hen mother could have done; and great was the joy of Katie and Robbie as they ran to their mother to report the first crowing of the little cockerels. When last I saw them they were well grown. The pullets, August proudly informed me, were laying. It was the glorious Fourth. Torpedoes were the order of the day, and Katie and Robbie were amusing themselves by throwing the snappers in all directions, and seeing their feathered pets run to eat what they could never find. The other fowls, disturbed by the noise of the day, preferred to keep hidden away in their houses, but these liked to keep about with the children and see the fun. August began his experiments when some of my young readers were quite little children. He has continued them through several seasons, until now, after much study and patient industry, he has enlarged and greatly improved his incubator. He has changed its form entirely, and has attached an electric apparatus which regulates the heat, and avoids all danger from smoke. He has applied for a patent, and has made arrangements for taking care of a large number of chickens as early as February, being still greatly interested in this successful "'speriment." ----- [A] Fahrenheit and Réaumur were both inventors of thermometers. Those commonly in use are Fahrenheit's. THE BIRDS OF WINTER. It seems strange that any birds should stay with us during the cold and frost when there is so much food which they like in the southern part of our country. Men of science wonder why they do remain here, and are unable to account for it. Perhaps it is because it is the true home of these birds which remain, and they prefer to search long and diligently for their scanty food, and bear the cold and the winds and the frost, rather than leave it. This is as _we_ should do, and doubtless the birds that stay through the winter love _their_ homes just as much--as a bird possibly can. Of course everybody,--that is, everybody except the tiniest, wee baby, has seen the winter birds, some of them; at least the Chickadees, the Snow-birds, and Downy Woodpeckers, and Bluejays and Shore larks. _But are you acquainted with the little fellows?_ Do you know where and how they live, and what they eat, and of their habits and songs? [Illustration: THE CHICKADEE.] A great favorite of mine is the Chickadee, with his black cap and white shirt bosom. This active little gentleman is the most social and friendly of them all. If out in the country, this little fellow in company with his mates will twitter gaily at sight of you, every now and then looking curiously at you as if asking, "And who are _you_, sir?" or "Who are _you_, ma'am?" and pecking his way gradually nearer and nearer will inspect you in the quaintest and merriest way. Afraid! O no, not they. Mr. Samuels, a writer about birds, says that he once had an inquisitive little Chickadee perch on the end of his boot and sit there watching him inquiringly. They have even been known to feed from the open hand. If you will daily scatter some crumbs for them before the door, or upon the window-sill, you will learn for yourselves how neighborly they are. Still the Chickadees are strangely tender, needing a warm, cosy nest to shield their little bodies. They cannot make their nests on the limbs of trees. Oh, no, that wouldn't do, for the first thing they knew the wind would blow, blow, and down would come their home. So they hunt around in the woods or along the rails and posts, for the nests in the wood that have been deserted by the woodpecker, who has flown away to a milder clime. If the Chickadees can not find these, they set to work themselves and with great labor dig a hole in a tree, or post, for their winter quarters. They prefer decayed trunks or posts so they can work more easily. To the bottom of their holes they bring pieces of wool, moss, and feathers or hair, and weave warm carpets and curtains to make cosy their little homes. The Chickadees are very active, lively little things. They are always in motion; now hopping along in search of food, sending forth the peculiar cry that gives them their name, and then alighting on the tree limbs and moving from one tree to another "traversing," as Wilson, a great authority on birds, says, "the woods in regular procession from tree to tree, and in this manner traveling several miles a day." They are very strong for their size, and will hang below a limb supported by their claws, with their head downwards, which we should think would make them dizzy, but it does not seem to. These little roamers of our roads and woods are so genial, companionable and social, that not only do _we_ enjoy their society, but other birds are enchanted with them and seek their company. The Chickadees do not object. And so Brown Creepers, Nuthatches, Downy Woodpeckers, and other birds, often join them in their merry rambles and scrambles. They feed mostly on very small insects and eggs, such as infest the bark of trees, but will eat almost anything offered them; even meat they will peck from a bone. Pleasant, indeed, in the midst of winter is this little bird's cry: "_Chick-a-dee-dee-dee! Chick-a-dee-dee-dee!_" Pleasant his sharp whistle: "_Pe-wee! Pe-wee! Pe-wee!_" How much we should miss these amiable favorites should they ever take a notion to desert us! They stay with us throughout the year, but in summer they are shyer than in winter for they rear their young then. It is not until their family cares are over in the autumn, that they gather in small flocks and resume their merry life and social ways. [Illustration: THE BLACK SNOW-BIRD.] Another very interesting and neighborly winter bird is our familiar Snow-bird, often called the "Black Snow-bird" to distinguish it from the Snow Bunting or "White Snow-bird." These tiny birds visit us from the north. Their journeys extend over the whole breadth of the United States. They appear here in the latter part of October, and are first seen among the decaying leaves near the borders of the woods, in flocks of about thirty. If molested, they at once fly to the trees. As the weather becomes colder they approach nearer the farm-houses and towns. They are real weather prophets. When a storm is near at hand they gather together in large flocks, and work very, very diligently in search of food,--doubtless making provision for the time of wind and storm when they can get none. But it is after the snow-storms, when the ground is white with the downy flakes, that the Snow-birds become the most friendly. How pleasant it is then to see them gather about the house, and around the barn and out-houses, to search for edibles. Not only then do they appear in the country-places, but even in the crowded city their little forms may be seen in multitudes, on the snowy streets and in the windows. They build their nests near the ground, often on a stump or log, or in a deep thicket, in such a manner as to be shielded from the wind and storms. They construct their homes from bits of fine grasses and leaves, and it is interesting to observe what wonderful architects they are. The Snow-birds, I am sorry to say, though friendly with us are not, like the little Chickadees, peaceful among themselves. They are often very quarrelsome, and will peck at each other in a way that little birds should not. Perhaps they "make up" with one another and are good friends again. I hope so. The Snow-birds are very nimble on the ground, and, I guess, can eat faster and more for their size than any other winter bird. It is a very funny sight to see them scratch away the snow with their tiny feet to get their food, which, when insects and eggs are not to be had, is the seeds of many kinds of weeds that still rise above the snow, and along the border of the roads. Sometimes, perhaps, you have come upon a dead Snow-bird in the morning following a cold night, and perhaps have wondered if the poor little creature froze to death, and why he did not die at home. But the Snow-birds are sometimes affected with a dizziness or faintness which makes them fall from the limbs, or during their flight. _What_ makes them dizzy or faint, we do not know; not from hanging head downwards like the little Chickadees, surely. But they often, alas! come to their death through this affection. The snow-birds have a peculiar cry of "_Chuck! chuck!_"--and another of "_Chit, chit-a-sit!_" which however, they seldom utter except when taking flight. They stay with us until about the 29th of April, when they wing away to the north or to the higher ranges of our mountains. Somewhat similar to the Snow-birds are the Snow Buntings or "White Snow-birds." They appear every winter in large flocks, often of many thousands. They are sometimes called "bad weather birds," from the fact of their moving to the northward during fine weather and to the southward on the advent of deep snow-storms. They are much shyer than either the Chickadees or Snow-birds; but they are often seen on the roadsides and in the lanes searching for the seeds of weeds that grow there. On the sea-shore, which they greatly frequent, they live on small shellfish. It is curious that the greater the snow and the colder the weather of winter, the whiter do the Snow-Buntings appear. They are very swift flyers, and often in flocks of great numbers seem to be a cloud of snow-flakes driven before a storm. They make their nests in the fissures of the rocks, forming from grass, and feathers, and the down of the Arctic fox, a very cosey home. They frequent the roads and lanes in the vicinity of Boston, and their white forms and busy beaks can be seen throughout the winter season. [Illustration: THE SNOW BUNTING.] They have peculiar notes like a clear whistle, and a "_chirr, chirr!_" which they utter when flying. A very fine little bird quite common in this State in the winter season, is the Brown Creeper, with its showy brown and white coat. These active little creatures are great lovers of the woods and pass their lives among the trees. Unlike the Chickadees and Nuthatches, who also are partial to the woods, they very rarely descend to the ground to either hop about or hunt for food. Nor do they, like the two former birds, ever hang to a limb with their heads downward. Still the Brown Creeper seems to be constantly in activity, and hunts most diligently for the insects it feeds upon. This it does somewhat in the manner of the Woodpecker, by clinging to the trunks or branches of trees, supporting itself by its stiff tail-feathers and thus moving about quite securely. [Illustration: THE BROWN CREEPER.] They are very methodical. They strive to get every insect from a tree that there is on it, before leaving for another. So they generally alight near the foot of a tree and gradually climb to the top; an insect must be very, very small to escape their piercing gaze. They often work around a tree in spirals, and so are at times lost to the sight of an observer of their ways; and if the watcher runs around to the other side of the tree, very likely by the time he gets there, lo! they are back to the former side. But they are not at all shy, and though not as neighborly and social as the Chickadee, or Snow-bird, still they will not fly away from the presence of unmolesting persons. The Brown Creeper has not the bill suitable to excavate a hole for himself, so he is obliged to find a hollow trunk, a squirrel's nest, or a deserted Woodpecker's home. Here the little bird builds a nest of dry twigs and lays its pretty eggs. As the mid-winter cold deepens they retire to the depths of the woods, or into the brown and sheltered thickets, where their little cry of "_Chip, chip_," and "_Cree, cree, cree_," may be frequently heard; and very pleasant it is, too. Very useful they are, these little Brown Creepers, as well as the Chickadees and Nuthatches, for they help preserve our beautiful trees and shrubbery from the destroying worms and insects. I have mentioned the Nuthatches. These birds, a little larger than the others before noticed, are not so numerous as the Chickadees and Snow-birds, but they are very interesting. The name of Nuthatches was given to them long ago, because it was supposed they broke the wood nuts by repeated _hatchings_ or hammerings with their bills. But now men of science, who study birds, do not think that is true, and believe the Nuthatches to be wrongly named. [Illustration: NUTHATCHES.] It was also thought that the Nuthatches, like the squirrels, lay up in the summer a store of nuts for their winter use. But this also is doubted, since the Nuthatch will climb along the trees and limbs in search of insects and larvæ when the tree hangs full of nuts. So it is thought their principal food is composed of ants, seeds of various shrubbery, bugs and insects. While the female bird is sitting on her eggs, the male Nuthatch displays a great deal of care and affection, supplying her regularly with the choicest food he can collect. With this he flies away to the mouth of the hole where they have established their home, and calls to her so tenderly, offering her the delicacy he has brought. He seems to call to her sometimes, simply to inquire how she is, and to soothe her labors with his incessant chatter. Seldom does he venture far from the nest, and if any danger threatens he instantly flies back to alarm her. The white-breasted Nuthatch is known by his cry of "_quank, quank_," repeated frequently as he keeps moving along the branches of a tree, piercing the bark with his bill and breaking off pieces in search of insects and their larvæ. This affectionate bird, like the little Chickadees, rests and roosts with his head downwards; and also like them, is very curious and inquiring. If you are in sight, he will gradually make his way to you and reconnoitre your appearance, as if he would learn who you are. There is also another bird of this species called the red-breasted Nuthatch, who is seen in New England, in winter, and who leads a similar life to his white-breasted relative. [Illustration: THE DOWNY WOODPECKER.] Though most of the many species of Woodpeckers leave us on the advent of cold weather, still there are some that remain. My little readers, I am certain, have nearly all seen the round homes of the Woodpecker. You may observe them in almost any wood. They are about alike except in size and situation. A round hole in a tree or post is all you will see from a distance; but if you can climb,--for their holes are usually more than six feet from the ground,--you may look down into the deep home itself. How much patience and perseverance they must have to dig, bit by bit, such straight deep nests. These holes are seldom lined with any thing, but are generally enlarged at the bottom so as to give the family more "elbow room." The one we know best in winter is the Downy Woodpecker, the prettiest and smallest of the tribe. It builds its nest in various trees, preferring the apple-tree, poplar and birches. Its hole is smaller than those of other woodpeckers because, I suppose, the bird itself is so much smaller that he can do with less room. The Downy Woodpeckers are very sociable; and although they themselves are not gregarious, you may often see them followed by Chickadees, Creepers, Nuthatches and Wrens, whose company they appear to be pleased with. They are not shy of man, but, unlike most of their tribe, haunt roadsides, orchards, and grounds about houses and out-buildings, which they prefer to the deep forests. They are generally seen in pairs, and are very active little birdies. In searching for food, insects and eggs, they move from tree to tree and thus pass the day. They rarely alight on the ground. Their ordinary cry is a "_Chick_, _chick_," repeated rapidly. A somewhat larger Woodpecker, called the Hairy Woodpecker, is also an inhabitant of our woods in winter and much like the Downy Woodpecker in habits. These are the principal and most common of our winter birds. There are some others sometimes seen, such as the Tree-Sparrow, Blue-Jay and Golden Crowned Wren, but space forbids an account of their ways and songs. I hope what I have told you of the winter birds will induce you to study and observe more closely their almost human ways. SOMETHING ABOUT LIGHT-HOUSES. You have all heard of the Seven Wonders of the World; did you know that two of these wonders were veritable Light-houses? About 300 B. C., Cheres, the disciple of Lysippus, cast the famous brazen Colossus of Rhodes, a statue of the Sun God Apollo, and erected it at the entrance of the harbor where it was used as a Light-house, the flames which crowned the head of the Sun God by night serving to guide wandering barks into his Rhodian waters. [Illustration: FOURTH ORDER LIGHT-HOUSE, AT PENFIELD REEF, L. I. SOUND.] For eighty years its hundred brazen feet towered superbly above port and town, and then it was partly destroyed by an earthquake. For nearly a thousand years the sacred image remained unmolested where it had fallen, by Greek and Roman, Pagan and Christian; but at last the Saracen owners of Rhodes, caring as little for its religious association as for its classic antiquity, sold the brass of it for the great sum of £36.000, to the Jewish merchants of Edessa. Just about the time that the Colossus was set astride the Rhodian harbor, King Ptolemy Philadelphus caused a noble tower of superb white stone, four hundred feet high, to be erected by an architect named Sostrasius, son of Dixiphanes, at the entrance to the port of Alexandria, which was a bran-new busy city in those days, a mere mushroom growth in that old, old Egypt, where the upstart Ptolomies were reigning on the throne of the Pharaohs. It is said that this Sostrasius didn't want his own name to be forgotten, so he carved it deep in the stone of the tower and covered it over with plaster whereon he inscribed by royal command: "King Ptolemy to the Gods, the Saviours, for the benefit of sailors." Josephus tells us that the light, kept burning on the top of this Pharos, as it was called, probably from a word that signifies _fire_, was visible for forty miles at sea. For a thousand years it shone constantly until the Alexandrian Wonder likewise fell a prey to time and the Saracens. The words Pharos-Phâre, Faro, etc., have been adopted into more than one European language to express Light-house or sea-light. Some persons suppose that great mirrors must have been used to direct the light on the Pharos and keep it from being lost, but it is most probable that no more effective means of illumination than a common fire was employed. The only other Light-houses of antiquity of which any record has been preserved are the Tower of Conira in Spain, which Humboldt mentions as the _Iron Tower_, and a magnificent stone Light-house at Capio, near the mouth of the Guadalquiver, that Strabo tells us about, on a rock nearly surrounded by sea. Then tradition points out Cesar's Altar at Dover, the _Tour d' Ordre_ at Boulogne, a Roman Pharos at Norfolk, and, in early British history, St. Edmund's Chapel at the same place, as having been originally intended for sea-lights. Though we are far ahead of our forefathers in our scientific apparatus for illuminating Light-houses, we have never equalled them in magnificence of architecture; for, in point of grandeur, the _Tour de Corduan_ at the mouth of the River Garonne, in France, is probably the noblest edifice of the kind in the world, and it is nearly three hundred years since it was completed under Henry IV., having been twenty-six years in building. [Illustration: A MODERN LIGHT-HOUSE] All these centuries it has stood strong on its great reef, and has served to guide the shipping of Bordeau and the Languedoc Canal, and all that part of the Bay of Biscay; and it promises, in all human probability, to show its steadfast light for centuries to come. Corduan is stoutly built in four stories, each of a different order of architecture, highly ornamented and adorned with the busts of the Kings of France, and of the heathen divinities. The first story contains the store-rooms, the second, the so-called King's apartments, the third a chapel, and the fourth the dome or lower lantern. The tower completed is 197 feet high. When this splendid structure was completed no better method for illuminating was known than by burning billets of oak wood in a chauffer in the upper lantern; and it was considered a great matter when a rude reflector in the form of an inverted cone was suspended above the flame to prevent the light from escaping upward. It is not known, in fact, that any more effective mode of lighting was employed until 1760, not much more than one hundred years ago; and then the radiance was not especially brilliant as it would seem to us. At that time Smeaton the engineer began to use wax candles at the Eddystone Light-house, which soon degenerated to tallow dips, probably on account of the expense, and they must have given the keeper abundance of occupation in the way of snuffing and replenishing. In 1789 a French scientist, M. Lenoir, made an epoch in the history of Light-houses, and in the progress of civilization as well, when he introduced an improvement in the way of lighting up the _Tour de Corduan_; for, of course, the comparative safety in coast navigation attained to by means of our modern Light-house system is of the first consequence in commerce and international communication, which means the spread of science, enlightenment and religion throughout the world. M. Lenoir placed Argand lamps with parabolic mirrors or reflectors in the lantern, which is, as it appears, a glass room on the summit of the tower entered by a trap-door at the head of a spiral staircase. Such a great change having been brought about, men of science have not rested content, but have gone on making one advance after another. In 1820 the famous diaptric instruments of Mr. Fresnel were placed in Corduan on trial, and proved such a grand success that, gradually, they have been universally adopted. The wonderful lens which you saw at the Centennial belongs to a diaptric refracting light of the first order, and oil lamps constructed on the Fresnel principle, and, placed with lenses of different orders, according to the Light-house they are used for, serve an admirable purpose. Lard is found to be the best illuminator, as a general thing, for the light it casts through lenses of the first order reaches as far out to sea as it is possible for any light to be seen on account of the convexity of the earth. Experiment has proved it safer than mineral oil, and it is cheaper than gas, which however is occasionally used near a city whence it can easily be obtained. Only in some few special instances electric light, the most intense procurable, is employed. [Illustration: LIGHT-HOUSE ON MT. DESERT, COAST OF MAINE.] The Centennial birth-day gift of the citizens of France to the American Republic is a colossal brazen statue of Liberty, which is to be a Pharos to light the shipping of the world into New York harbor. It will stand on Bedloe's Island, and from the torch in its uplifted hand will flash a calcium light. Only the hand and arm were finished in time to be sent to the Exposition; but these were on so gigantic a scale that a man standing in the little gallery which ringed the thumb holding the torch seemed like an ant or a fly creeping along at that height. Sir Walter Scott--dear Sir Walter, whose "Tales of a Grandfather" and Scottish stories and poems were so delightfully familiar to the boys and girls of the last generation, left a charming little diary of a voyage he made in the summer of 1814, on board a Light-house yacht, in company with the Commissioners of Northern Lights,--who have charge of the Light-houses in Scotland, as the Elder Brethren of Trinity House have of those in England,--their Surveyor-Viceroy, the engineer Stevenson, and a few other gentlemen. The first Light-house they visited was an old tower, like a "border keep," still illuminated by a grate fire on top. The commissioners think of substituting an oil revolving-light; but Sir Walter wonders if the _grate_ couldn't be made to revolve! Next they came to Bell Rock, which, in olden times, was the terror of sailors feeling their way in and out of the islands and rocks and shoals of the beautiful, perilous coast of Scotland. Inch-cape Rock, as it was then called, had shipwrecked many a helpless crew before the Abbot of Aberbrathock, fifteen miles off, out of pity caused a float to be fixed on the rock, with a bell attached which, swinging by the motion of the waves, warned seamen of the danger. Many years later, when Abbot and Monastery bells had all become things of the past, a humane naval officer set up two beacons on Bell Rock by subscription; but they were soon destroyed by the fury of the elements. At last in 1802, people began to realize the danger of this terrible reef in the highway of navigation, and the Commissioners appointed Mr. Robert Stevenson to erect a Light-house on this point. It was a perilous undertaking, and once the engineer and his workmen made a very narrow escape from drowning; but it was successfully accomplished by the brave and skilful Stevenson. Sir Walter thus describes this famous beacon. "Its dimensions are well known; but no description can give the idea of this slight, solitary, round tower, trembling amid the billows, and fifteen miles from Arbraeth (Aberbrathock), the nearest shore. The fitting up within is not only handsome, but elegant. All work of wood (almost) is wainscot; all hammer-work brass; in short, exquisitely fitted up. You enter by a ladder of rope, with wooden steps, about thirty feet from the bottom where the mason-work ceases to be solid, and admits of round apartments. The lowest is a storehouse for the people's provisions, water, etc.; above that, a storehouse for the lights, oil, etc.; then the kitchen of the people, three in number; then their sleeping chamber; then the saloon or parlor, a neat little room; above all the Light-house; all communicating by oaken ladders with brass rails, most handsomely and conveniently executed." In the course of the voyage Mr. Stevenson determined that his "constituents" should visit a reef of rocks called _Skerry Vhor_ (Skerrymore), where he thought it would be essential to have a Light-house. Sir Walter's description of this visit is quite amusing and perhaps you would like to read it. The wind had blown squally all night, and in consequence everything and everybody were pitched and tossed about at a great rate, on board the little vessel. Nobody relished the attempt to land under these circumstances on this wild ridge. "Quiet perseverance on the part of Mr. Stevenson, and great kicking, bouncing, and squabbling upon that of the Yacht, which seems to like the idea of Skerry Vhor as little as the Commissioners. At length, by dint of exertion, comes in sight this long ridge of rocks (chiefly under water) on which the tide breaks in a most tremendous style. There appear a few low, broad rocks at one end of the reef, which is about a mile in length. These are never entirely under water though the surf dashes over them. Pull through a very heavy swell with great difficulty, and approach a tremendous surf dashing over black pointed rocks--contrive to land well wetted. We took possession of the rock in the name of the Commissioners, and generously bestowed our own great names on its crags and creeks. The rock was carefully measured by Mr. S. It will be a most desolate position for a Light-house--the Bell Rock and Eddystone a joke to it, for the nearest land is the wild island of Tyree, at fourteen miles distance. So much for the Skerry Vhor." [Illustration: LIGHT-HOUSE AT "THE THIMBLE SHOAL," HAMPTON ROADS, VA.] As might have been expected, the Commissioners were discouraged at the aspect of affairs and delayed the work from year to year, but at last, in 1834, the Board placed this serious undertaking in the hands of Mr. Alan Stevenson. Mr. Stevenson has left us a thrilling account of his noble work on Skerrymore Rocks, than which no worthier monument was ever left behind to the memory of a gifted and conscientious man. In the first place he had to build barracks for his workmen on the Isles of Tyree and Mull, and then to begin the foundation of the tower on the only one of the gneiss rocks of the reef which was broad enough for the purpose, and this is but barely so, for at high water little remains around the tower's base but a narrow band of a few feet of rugged rocks, washed into gullies by the sea, which plays through them almost incessantly. Everything had to be thought of and provided for beforehand; even so small a matter as the want of a little clay for tamping holes might have stopped the work for a time. Piers were built at Mull where the granite was quarried, and all sorts of conveniences and contrivances for the vessels and tug in use. The poor workmen suffered dreadfully from seasickness when compelled to live on their vessel, so they erected a temporary wooden barrack on the rock, but it was completely swept away in a November gale, destroying the work of a season in a single night. The dauntless men went to work again, however, and built another shelter which stood so successfully that it was finally taken down several years after the Light-house was completed. Alan Stevenson tells us of their life in this wave-washed eyrie, where he was perched forty feet above the sea-beaten rock with a goodly company of thirty men, where often for many a weary night and day they were kept prisoners by the weather, anxiously looking for supplies from the shore. At such times they were generally obliged to stay in bed, where alone they found an effectual shelter from the wind and spray which searched every cranny in their walls. More than once the fearfulness of the storm drove the more timid from their frail abode, which the sea threatened to overwhelm, out on the bare rock where the roofless wall of the Light-house offered a safer defence against the perils of the wind and waves. Innumerable were the delays and disappointments which tried the courage and faith of Stevenson and his brave band. It was a good lesson in the school of patience, and they learned to trust in something stronger than an arm of flesh. More than once their cranes and materials were swept away by the waves, and the workmen left, desponding and idle. They incurred daily risks in landing and in blasting the splintery gneiss, and in the falling of heavy bodies in the narrow space to which they were confined. For all, they met with no loss of life or limb, and maintained good health in spite of being obliged to live on salt provisions for six summers. But the hardships and responsibilities by no means end with the building of the Light-house; the keeper who has it in charge holds a most important position, for upon the skill of his hands in the management of the delicate costly lenses and machinery, the clearness of his head, and the courage of his heart, as well as his honesty and fidelity, depends, even more than upon the captain of a vessel, the safety of many precious lives and millions of property; so it is of the first importance that he be intelligent, efficient and trustworthy. A Light which has been visible for years cannot be suffered to be extinct for one hour without endangering a vessel's safety. The failure to illuminate at the proper time might prove fatal to the confiding mariner. In England it is a situation for life unless the holder prove unworthy, with a pension if superannuated; but in our own country the appointments are in a measure political, and consequently liable to be temporary. This circumstance is deplored by the Board which sometimes in this way loses valuable servants after they have gained a skill and experience which only comes with time; and raw, untried hands have to be placed in positions of trust. It is hoped that some change will soon be brought about in this matter. [Illustration: FIRST CLASS LIGHT-SHIP, WITH STEAM FOG WHISTLE.] A year or more ago a gentleman, who holds an important position in the office of the Light-house Board and is specially interested in the comfort and welfare of the keepers, came in the course of a tour he was making on one of the Supply Ships, which carry half-yearly stores to the different posts, to a very isolated Light-house off the Florida coast, twenty miles from any human habitation and sixteen from _terra firma_. Just before the arrival of the vessel a little child of the keeper had died, and was about to be buried in the sea without so much as a word of prayer being said over it. Mr. ---- was shocked to find that these poor people in their isolation seemed to have no idea of religion, and that there was not a book of any kind at the station. The parents made no objection to his reading the burial service over the poor baby, out of a little prayer-book which he happened to have in his pocket, and he went away determined to do his part towards making good the deficiency he had discovered; for on investigation it was found that very many Light-houses were quite as much cut off from books as the one he had visited, and one instance had occurred of a poor fellow who had actually gone crazy, from sheer mental starvation, in his loneliness. Many persons have interested themselves in Mr. ----'s scheme. An appropriation has been asked from Congress for supplying reading matter to the six hundred and more Light-houses along our coast; and in the mean time private individuals have sent in contributions in the way of old books and magazines. The lady and gentlemen clerks at the Light-house Board have been most kind and helpful in the matter; for they always feel an interest in the condition of the keepers and their families, and when cases of suffering come to their knowledge, as lately, when a keeper at the South was burnt out and lost all his possessions, are prompt with their assistance. In this instance they helped to sort and arrange the motley piles of donated literature, which was then bound up nicely, in uniform volumes, at the Government Printing Office, and a neat little library-case of strong oak wood was made, fitted up with shelves and having heavy metal clasps and handles; and just so many volumes, always including a Bible, were placed in each case. The Store-ships will now go out with a goodly lading of these supplies; one will be left at each station, and the next time the ship comes round the old case will be taken away and a fresh one substituted. In this way a circulating library system is established, and every Keeper well supplied with abundance of wholesome and entertaining reading matter. You children, with your wealth of books and delightful magazines coming every month, can perhaps hardly appreciate the boon this kind thought, so well carried out, will prove; for you have never known what it is to be shut up in a lonely tower, day after day, month after month, with no outside interest or amusement. You can do your part towards brightening the lives of these men with their wives and children, and I am sure you will be glad of the opportunity. Many of you, no doubt, have piles of old magazines or story papers, or even of books, for which you have no further use. Would you not like to put up a nice package of these, and send them by Express to the "Care of the Chief Clerk of the Light-house Board, Washington, D. C."? New supplies are constantly needed, and in this way you could not fail to give pleasure to those who have little enough in a life of monotonous duty. "BUY A BROOM! BUY A BROOM!" Last summer while on our vacation trip along the sea-coast we made our plans so as to stop over a train at Barnstable that we might have time to take a look at that ancient burgh, but found to our dismay when it was too late, that of _time_ we had altogether too much, for when we stepped out of the car it was seven o'clock in the morning, and our train would not leave till four in the afternoon! And to make matters worse it began to rain. We managed, however, at intervals when the rain held up, to get a pretty good idea of the place, but were driven back to the station by the persistent drizzle long before noon; and there we seemed destined to spend five tedious hours, with not much of anything to do, except to get the way-bills of the Old Colony Railroad by heart, and commit to memory whatever might be available in the other advertisements posted on the walls. [Illustration: THE BLIND BROOM-MAKER OF BARNSTABLE.] We were beginning to be desperate, when my companion, strolling about, discovered a small placard saying that fruit was for sale in the freight depot. I set out to explore, having visions of apples and pears, but especially peaches and grapes before me. Passing the wide freightage doors, I came to a narrow one which was wide open; so I first looked, and then walked in. It was an unfinished place where a slim young woman was busy about her housework, while a sick-looking man was "standing round." There was a cooking-stove, and she was taking pies out of the oven, which she set in a row on a cumbrous wooden bench that filled all the opposite end of the room, and under it were stored bunches of something unknown to me which I found afterwards was broom-corn. She was pretty and girlish, and had blue eyes, and fair hair. She asked me to sit down, and told me they had been living there off and on for three years. "We used to live in 'Commons,' but we did not like, and so came up here. My husband is not well, and I go out washing, and take in washing." It was a very queer place to live in, but neat and comfortable, yet it seemed just as if they might have been moving, and had merely stopped here over night and set up their stove in order to cook something to eat. Upon inquiring for the fruit, about which it began to seem as if there must be either a mistake or a mystery for nothing of the kind was to be seen except the dish of apples left over from the pies, she directed me up-stairs; and up the steep narrow stairs I went, nearly stumbling over a great black dog (which she assured me would not bite) that lay stretched at the threshold of a dreary kind of room which had one occupant--a man with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows at work near one of the windows at the farther end. And now I remembered that we had seen him at his bench there as we sat in the depot, and wondered what he was doing. [Illustration: A GAY CAVALCADE.] No indications of fruit; but there were four machines and a stack of brooms, and the litter of shreds and waste, and I was about to retreat with an apology after making known my errand. He said I had made no mistake, but he was out of everything except confectionery; peanuts, dates and figs. So as there were no apples, no pears, no peaches, no grapes, after all my perseverance, _dates_ I would have, and he went to a closet where he said he kept them, holding his hands out before him in such a way that I knew he could not see even before he said, "I am blind." After he had weighed them and received his pay, there were a few words about his business, which he seemed delighted to talk about, and because I put a question or two, he asked if I was a reporter, and said "that used to be my business. I was on the reportorial staff of the Pennsylvania legislature, when from overtasking my eyes, and other causes, I became blind. I went to the Institution at South Boston, and learned to make brooms so that I could earn my living." He was full of interest in the work he had been compelled to fall back upon, and invited me to come in with my companion and see how it was done. "Now I wish," said he, "that I had some stuff ready. I have to soak it before I use it. But your train does not go till four o'clock. I will put some to soak immediately, and if you will come in about three I will begin at the beginning and make a broom, so that you can then see the whole process." To be sure we were glad to go, and he did as he said he would, and explained every particular, even to the cost. "The broom-corn comes from the West," he said, "though a good deal grows in the Mohawk valley, and the largest broom establishment in the United States is at Schenectady. "It often grows, if thriving stalks, ten or twelve feet tall; it can be cultivated here, but not so profitably. It comes in large bales, weighing anywhere from one hundred and fifty to five hundred pounds. Where I buy mine in Boston it costs me six cents a pound, though the price varies. "I sort it out on a 'sorting bench,' first, for if I took it as it is, the brooms would be of queer qualities. Sorting is a regular trade to learn. "The next thing, I tie it in bundles, and then it is ready for use. I put as many of these to soak the night before, as I want to make up in the day. I leave it in the water half an hour, then let it drain, and it keeps damp enough for working; if it was dry it would break when I sew it. Here you see this lot, from which I shall make the broom. I call now we have wire, and it is galvanized to prevent it from rusting. It costs me twelve cents a pound; it used to cost seventeen." [Illustration: THE COMEDY OF BROOMS--MAMMA'S LITTLE HOUSEMAID.] Having made the handle fast, he took a bunch of the corn, smoothed it carefully through his hands to even it, laid it against the handle, put his foot on the treadle or whatever the hour-glass shaped piece of mechanism might be named, and with one or two revolutions wired it tight. This lot had the butts left on, but from the next layer he sliced them down wedge-fashion with a very sharp knife, having secured them to those already on by a strap which could be fastened at such length as he chose by means of a leather button; another and another tier, each time of choicer quality, succeeded, and so on till the stock for that broom was used up. "This," he explained, "is a number eight broom. If there had been time I would have made a _hurl_ broom, which is the best. (The 'hurl' is the finest part of the corn, the heart.) I make five sizes: number six is the smallest, and it is the smallest manufactured in this country. I can make twenty of those in a day. Of the number ten, the hurl, I have made twelve, and they sell for forty cents apiece. Sometimes when I have got a lot of brooms on hand I hire a horse and cart, take a boy with me, and go round the country to sell them; and people will object to paying my prices, and I can't always make them believe that it pays to buy a good article, even if it is a broom. They sometimes say that they can get enough of them at fourteen cents, but I tell them when they pay fourteen cents for a broom, they only get a fourteen-cent broom." [Illustration: UP IN THE ATTIC.] He had now a rough broom, which he released from the vise and took over to the press which had three pairs of cruel-looking irons that he said were "the jaws," of sizes to shut round brooms of three different thicknesses and hold firmly, while he did the next thing, which he made known in this wise: "Now I shall sew it. The number six have only two sewings--all they need, they are so thin. The others have three. They are all sewed with waxed linen twine: the higher sizes have pink, because it looks better; the others have tow-colored. You see my needle? It is some like a sail-maker's, but not exactly. I have two, though one will last a lifetime. I keep them in this oiled rag to prevent them from rusting. They cost fifty cents apiece, and were made of the very best of steel. See what nice metal it is!" He held out one, shaped more like a paddle than anything else, polished to the last degree, and as lustrous as silver; then he threw it on the floor to show us how it would ring. "Broom tools of all kinds are made at Schenectady, but my needles, knives and combs come from Hadley. I will show you the combs pretty soon; the knives you have already seen. Let me see--where did I lay that other needle? No, you need not look for it; I must find it myself. I have to be careful where I leave my things, so that I can put my hand on them the moment I want them. Oh, here it is," picking it up with his long supple fingers, and rolling it securely up in the oiled cloth. "Now you notice I put on this _palm_," and he held up what looked like a mitt just large enough to cover the palm of the hand and the wrist, having a hole to slip the thumb through and leaving that and the fingers free. It was made of cowhide, and sewed together on the back, while in the inside was set a thimble against which the needle was to be pressed in doing the hard sewing, while the leather protected the skin from being fretted by the broom. "It is not just like a sail-maker's palm," he added. "I have one of those which a man gave me, and I will show it to you." So going again to his dark closet, he groped for it among his multifarious things, and came back with one similar, except that it was of raw-hide, and the thimble was a little projection looking like a pig's toe. [Illustration: "PLANT THE BROOM!"] He sewed the broom through and through, producing the three pink rows. Then he said he would comb it to clear away the loose and broken stems; and so he passed through it a sort of hetchel made of thirty small knife-blades set in a frame, "which cost me," said he, "more than you would think--that comb was five dollars; and now I comb it out with this one to remove the small stuff and the seeds." And releasing it from the clamp, he took down a fine comb from a nail, and repeated the process. "And now it is ready to be trimmed. I lay it on this hay-cutter, which some friends bought cheap for me at a fair, and answered my purpose after a few alterations, and I trim it off, nice and even at one end--and now it is done. You have seen a broom made." That was true. Our only regret was that we could not have that same broom to take away; but on our zig-zag journey, when we were likely enough to stop over or turn off anywhere, that was an absurdity not to be thought of. We did, however, "buy a broom" that we _could_ take--and an excellent one it proved--and we accepted a small package of broom-corn seed which the blind workman was anxious we should have, "to plant in some spare spot just to see how it looks when growing." When we went down-stairs, the woman was out on the platform, her yellow hair tossing about in the wind, and she seemed as happy with her meagre accommodations in the freight house as if she were owner of a mansion. She begged us to go in and get some of her apples, we were welcome, and "they did not cost me anything," she added. She told us more about her fellow-tenant, and said he paid half the rent, "and he used to board with us, but now he boards up in town, and he goes back and forth alone, his self." * * * * * This curious and pleasant little episode made us so ready to be interested in everything pertaining to brooms that it seemed a kind of sarcasm of circumstances when, at a junction not very far along our route, we saw, perched upon his cart, a pedler doing his best to sell his brooms to the crowd on their way home from one of the Cape camp-meetings. His words were just audible as the train went on: "Buy a broom! Buy a broom! Here's the place to buy a cheap broom, for _fourteen_ cents! _only_ fourteen cents! A broom for fourteen cents! So CHEAP!" And it happened not many days later that somebody read in our hearing that the broom-corn is a native of India, and that Dr. Franklin was the means of introducing it into this country; from seeing a whisk of it in the hands of a lady he began to examine it--being of an inquiring mind, as everybody knows--and found a seed, which he planted. The street-sweeper's broom is the genuine _besom_, made of birch stems, cut out in the country, and brought into town tied up in bundles like fagots; suitable enough for those stalwart men who drag them along so leisurely, but burdensome for the hands of the wretched little waifs, who, tattered and unkempt, make a pretence of keeping the crossings clean; who first sweep, and then hold out a small palm for the penny, dodging the horses' hoofs, and just escaping by a hair's breadth the wheels of truck or omnibus in their attempts to secure the coin, if some pitiful passer-by stops at the piping call: "Please ma'am, a penny!" That is the almost tragic prose of brooms. [Illustration: THE TRAGEDY OF BROOMS--THE CROSSING SWEEPER.] But there is a bit of poetic history that ought not to be forgotten, for it was a sprig of the lovely broom bush--call it by the daintier name of heath if you will--such as in some of its varieties grows wild in nearly every country in Europe, a tough little flowering evergreen, symbol of humility, which was once embroidered on the robes, worn in the helmet, and sculptured on the effigies of a royal house of England. Which of the stories of its origin is true, perhaps no one at this distant day can determine; but whether a penitent pilgrim of the family was scourged by twigs of it--the _plantagenesta_--or a gallant hunter plucked a spray of it and put in his helmet, it is certain that the humble plant gave the stately name of "Plantagenet" to twelve sovereigns of that kingdom; and their battle-cry--which meant to them conquest and dominion, but has a very practical sound to us, and a specially prosaic meaning to one like the blind broom-maker of this simple story--was this: "_Plant the broom! Plant the broom!_" TALKING BY SIGNALS. When boys live some distance apart, it is pleasant to be able to communicate with each other by means of signals. Many and ingenious have been the methods devised by enthusiastic boys for this purpose. But it can be brought much nearer perfection than has yet been done, by means of a very simple system. At the age of fourteen I had an intimate friend who lived more than a mile away, but whose home was in plain sight from mine. As we could not always be together when we wished, we invented a system of signalling requiring a number of different colored flags; but we were not quite satisfied with it, for we could send but few communications by its use. Then, when we came to test it, we found the distance was too great to allow of the different colors being distinguished. The white one was plainly visible. It seemed necessary, therefore, that only white flags should be used. We studied over the problem long and hard, with the following result. We each made five flags by tacking a small stick, eighteen inches long, to both ends of a strip of white cloth,[B] two feet long by ten inches wide. Then we nailed loops of leather to the side of our fathers' barns, so that, when the sticks were inserted in them, the flags would be in the following positions: The upper left hand position was numbered 1, upper right 2, lower right 3, lower left 4, centre 5. Notice, there was no difference in the _flags_; the _positions_ they occupied determined the communication. Thirty combinations of these positions can be made: 1--1 2--2 4--1 2 3--1 4 5--1 2 3 5 2--1 3--2 5--1 2 4--2 3 5--1 2 4 5 3--1 4--3 4--1 2 5--2 4 5--1 3 4 5 4--1 5--3 5--1 3 4--3 4 5--2 3 4 5 5--2 3--4 5--1 3 5--1 2 3 4--1 2 3 4 5. These combinations were written down; and opposite each was written the question or answer for which it stood. The answers likely to be used most we placed opposite the shortest combinations, to save time in signalling. My old "Code" lies before me, from which I copy the following examples: 1. _Yes._ 2. _No._ 3. _Morning._ 4. _Afternoon._ 5. _Evening._ 1 2. _Can you come over?_ 1 3. _When?_ 2 5. _Wait till I find out._ 1 3 4. _Can you go a-fishing?_ 2 4 5. _Are you well to-day?_ Suppose, now, that I place flags in positions 2 4 and 5. (See the above examples.) Harry glances down his "code" until he reaches 2 4 5 and its signification, and perhaps answers with a flag at 1. Then the following dialogue ensues: I. 1 2. He. 1 5. I. 4. He. 2 5. And, in a few moments, He. 1. We usually spent our noon hour conversing with each other in this manner; and, when it became necessary for either to leave his station, all the flags, 1 2 3 4 5, were put out, signifying "gone." One combination, 1 2 3 4, was, by mutual consent, reserved for a communication of vital importance, "COME OVER!" It was never to be used except in time of trouble, when the case would warrant leaving everything to obey the call. We had little expectation of its ever being used. It was simply a whim; although, like many other things, it served a serious purpose in the end. Not far from my father's house stood a valuable timber lot, in which he took an especial pride. Adjoining this was an old apple-orchard, where the limbs of several trees that had been cut down, and the prunings of the remainder, had been heaped together in two large piles to be burned at a favorable opportunity. One afternoon, when there was not the slightest breath of wind, we armed ourselves, father and I, with green pine boughs and set the brush-heaps a-fire. We had made the heap in as moist a spot as possible, that there might be less danger of the fire spreading through the grass. While the flame was getting under way, I busied myself in gathering stray bits of limbs and twigs--some of them from the edge of the woods--and throwing them on the fire. "Be careful not to put on any hemlock branches!" shouted my father from his heap. "The sparks may snap out into the grass!" Almost as he spoke a live coal popped out with a loud snap and fell at my feet, and little tongues of flame began to spread through the dead grass. A few blows from my pine bough had smothered them, when snap! snap! snap! went three more in different directions. As I rushed to the nearest I remembered throwing on several dead hemlock branches, entirely forgetting their snapping propensity. Bestowing a few hasty strokes upon the first spot of spreading flame, I hastened to the next and was vigorously beating that, when, glancing behind me, I saw to my dismay that the first was blazing again. Ahead of me was another, rapidly increasing; while the roaring, towering flame at the heap was sputtering ominously, as if preparing to send out a shower of sparks. And, to make matters worse, I felt a puff of wind on my face. Terror-stricken I shouted: "Father! The fire is running! Come quick!" In a moment he was beside me, and for a short time we fought the flame desperately. "It'll reach the woods in spite of us!" he gasped, as we came together after a short struggle. "There isn't a neighbor within half a mile, and before you could get help it would be too late! Besides, one alone couldn't do anything against it!" A sudden inspiration seized me. "I'm going to signal to Harry!" I cried. "If he sees it he'll come and, perhaps, bring help with him!" "Hurry!" he shouted back, and I started for the barn. The distance was short. As I reached it I glanced over to Harry's. There were some white spots on his barn. He was signalling and, of course, could see my signal. Excitedly I placed the flags in 1 2 3 4, and, without waiting for an answer, tore back across the fields to the fire. It was gaining rapidly. In a large circle, a dozen rods across, it advanced toward the buildings on one hand and swept toward the woods on the other. We could not conquer it. We could only hope to hinder its progress until help should arrive. [Illustration: IN OBEDIENCE TO THE SIGNALS.] Fifteen minutes of desperate struggle and then, with a ringing cheer, Harry and his father dashed upon the scene. Their arrival infused me with new courage; and four pairs of hands and four willing hearts at length conquered the flame, two rods from the woods! My father sank down upon a rock, and, as he wiped the perspiration from his smutty face, he said: "There, boys, your signalling has saved the prettiest timber lot in the town of Hardwick! I shall not forget it!" Were we not justly proud? Two days after I found upon my plate at breakfast a small package, which contained two pretty little spy-glasses. "Perhaps they will enable you to enlarge your 'signal code,'" was all my father said when I thanked him. We soon found that with the aid of the glasses we could distinguish any color. So we made a set of blue flags, which gave us thirty more communications by using them in place of the white ones. And, by mixing the blue flags with the white combinations and the white with the blue combinations, over _two hundred_ communications could be signalled. Thus we could converse with each other by the hour. The way we wrote down the mixed combinations was, by using a heavy figure to represent a blue flag; as 1[2]4[5], which meant that positions 1 and 4 were occupied by white flags, 2 and 5 by blue ones. Blue flags can be inserted in the original thirty combinations in the following manner: 1[2], 12[3], 1[23], 123[4], 12[34], 1[2]3[4], 1[23]4, 1[234], 23[5], 2[35], 234[5], 23[4]5, 2[3]45, 2[3]4[5], 2[34]5, 23[45], 2[345], and so on. Among the many recollections that throng my memory in connection with this subject, is that of an incident which has caused me many a hearty laugh since its occurrence, although at the time I did not feel particularly amused. Harry had gone away visiting, giving me no definite idea of when he would return. So, one drizzling, uncomfortable day, as I was sitting rather disconsolate at my barn window, I was delighted to see several flags appear on his barn. Eagerly I read: 1 3 4. "_Can you go a-fishing?_" The fine drizzling rain was changing into larger drops, and there was every reasonable prospect of a very wet day, and I thought he must be joking; but I answered: "_When?_" "_Now_," was the reply. "_Where?_" I asked. "_Bixbee's pond._" "_Are you in earnest?_" "_I will meet you there._" I answered "_Yes_," and, shouldering my fish-pole, started off across-lots. The distance was fully a mile and a half, and before I had passed over a quarter of the distance the bushes, dripping with rain, had completely drenched me. When nearly there the increasing rain became a heavy shower; but I kept on. I reached the pond, but nothing was to be seen of Harry. Not a frog could I find for bait, owing to the incessantly pouring rain, and I knew it would be difficult to find a worm. So, after half an hour of tedious waiting and monotonous soaking, I started for Harry's, my patience entirely worn out. The rain came down in torrents as, at length, I turned in at the gate; and I suppose I looked as forlorn as a drenched rooster, for I heard a girlish giggle as I stepped upon the piazza, but I did not then suspect the truth. "Where's Harry?" I asked of his mother whom I found alone. "Why, you didn't expect to find him at home, did you? He won't be back for a number of days yet." (Another subdued giggle from the next room.) "You're as wet as a drowned rat!" went on the motherly woman. "What on earth started you out in this rain?" "It's that Hattie's work!" I burst out angrily, and told her the whole story. "Dear me!" she exclaimed, holding up her hands, despairingly, "I never did see such a torment as that girl is! I noticed she has seemed very much tickled over something! I'll give her a real scolding!" I darted out the door; and, as I splashed my way disconsolately down to the road, I heard a voice, struggling between repentance and a desire to laugh, call after me: "Forgive me, Charlie, but it was _such_ a joke!" Hattie never meddled with her brother's signals again. For her mother's displeasure and the severe cold that followed my drenching more than balanced the enjoyment she derived from that very practical joke. * * * * * Two years ago I visited my native town. Resuming my old place by the barn window, I gazed across the intervening forest to where Harry used to stand and signal to me. Tacked up against the window-sill was my old "signal code," covered with dust and cobwebs. Harry was hundreds of miles away, carving himself a name among his fellow-men. Of all the friends of former days, scarcely one remained in the old town. And I could only wish, with all my heart, that I were once again enjoying my boyhood's happy hours. ----- [B] If the buildings should be painted, the flags should be of a color that would contrast with that of the paint. JENNIE FINDS OUT HOW DISHES ARE MADE. Ah! I know something! I know something you girls don't know! I know how they make dishes what you eat off of; and it's just the same way they make dolly's dishes, I guess. Yes, I _do_ know. And I've got some pictures papa _drawed_ for me, too, and I'll tell you all about them. They're in my pocket right under my handkerchief. I put them under my handkerchief because I don't want them to get dirty. I've got some 'lasses candy on top. I haven't got enough, or I'd give you all some. Papa took me to a _pottery_. I don't know why they call it a pottery, for they make cups and saucers, and sugar-bowls, and everything. First the man took us through the _dressing-room_. I did not see any dresses, nor anybody dressing themselves. I only saw piles of dishes and men and women hammering at them. I asked papa why they called it that, and he said, wait till we come back, for that was the very last of all. So we went on into the yard. I looked into one part of the building where it was all dark, with three great chimneys, broad on the ground and narrow high up. But the man and papa went right on, round to the other side of the building. There wasn't anything to see, though, but horses and carts hauling clay, and great heaps of it on the ground. I wouldn't have called it anything but dirt, but papa said it was _kaolin_, not exactly dirt, but clay. He spelt it for me. There was another of those big chimneys in the yard, only bigger. The man said that was where they dried the clay. Then he led us to a little door in the side of the house, and we went in. That brought us into a little room where they were getting the clay ready. First there was a sand-screen--like Mike uses, where they sieved it. Next they weighed it and put it into bins. It looked like fine, dark flour. [Illustration: THE POTTER'S WHEEL.] A little piece off from the bins there was a big deep box. They were mixing clay and water in it, and making a paste. It looked like lime when they're making mortar. The box leaked awfully, and white paste was running down on the floor. At the end of the box they had a pump working, and it was pumping the paste into what they called a _press_. It was too funny for anything. I couldn't more than half understand it. But it looks something like a baby-crib, only it has slats across the top, and they're close together. They have a lot of bags inbetween the slats, and the clay gets into the bags and gets pressed flat, so that most of the water is squeezed out. When they take it out of the bags it looks something like a sheet of shortcake before it's cut or baked. Then they roll a lot of them together, and that's what they make dishes out of. They call it _biscuit_. The man took us down into the cellar under the little room to show us the engine that made the paste and pumped and pressed the clay. I was afraid, and didn't want to go down, but papa said it was only a little one. It was nice and clean down there, with a neat brick floor, but awful hot. I was glad to come up. [Illustration: THE KILN AND SAGGERS.] After the little room there's one big room where they don't do much of anything. It is like a large shed, for it is dark and has no floor. The dressing-room where we were first is on one side, and the dark room where the big chimneys are, is back of it. We went through it, and over to one side and up the stairs to the second story. It's nice up there. It's one great big room, five times as big as our Sunday School room, with ever so many windows. All around the sides and down the middle, and cross-ways, and out in the wings are shelves, piled full of brand-new dishes. And there are tables all along the walls, and that's where they make them. I could stand and look all day. I saw two boys throwing up a great big lump of clay and catching it; then cutting it with a string and putting the pieces together again, then throwing it up again, until it made me dizzy to look at them. I asked the man what they were doing, and he said, _wedging the clay_. That means taking the air out. They keep on doing that until there are no air-bubbles in it. We stopped and talked to a man who was making a sugar-bowl, and he told us how he did it. All the men have on the table in front of them a lump of clay, a wheel, some moulds, a sharp knife, a bucket of water with a sponge in it, and something like the slab of a round, marble-topped table, only it's made of plaster Paris, to work on. [Illustration: MOULD FOR A CUP.] And do you know what the potter's-wheel is? It's as old as the hills and it's in the Bible, but I guess everybody don't know what it is. It looks as if it was made of hard, smooth, baked white clay, and is something like a grindstone, only not half as thick. The grindstone stands up, but this lays flat, with its round side turned up, like the head of a barrel. And it's set on a pivot, like the needle of the compass in our geographies. The moulds are like Miss Fanny's wax-fruit moulds. They're made of plaster Paris, and they're round outside, and they have the shape of what the man wants to make on the inside, and they're in two pieces. Little things like cups are made in one mould; but big things like pitchers are made in two or three pieces, in two or three moulds, and then put together. Handles and spouts and such things are made separately in little moulds and put on afterwards. [Illustration: HANDLE MOULD.] Here's the way. First the man cuts off a piece of the biscuit, and kneads it on the plaster Paris slab. Then he takes one piece of the mould, fixes the clay in nicely, shaves off what he don't want, then puts on the other piece of the mould, and sets it on the wheel. He gives it a shove and sets it spinning. It stops itself after a while, then he opens the mould, and there is the dish. The clay keeps the same thickness all through, and fills both pieces of the mould. [Illustration: MAKING A SUGAR-BOWL.] Then the man takes it out and sponges it. If it isn't just the right shape all he has to do is wet it, and it will come right. Then he puts on the handle or puts the pieces together, fixing them just so with his fingers and knife. It isn't very hard, but he has to be careful. The soft dishes look real cute. Then they're ready to be burnt the first time. We walked all around and saw here one man making cups, another, tureens, another, bird-baths, and every imaginable thing that is ever made in porcelain. Then we went down-stairs, through the dark rooms, into where the tall chimneys are. Then I found out they called them _kilns_. They have at the bottom a prodigious furnace, over that a tremendous oven, where they put the dishes in to bake. But they don't put them right in just as they are. Oh, no. There were on the high shelves all around, a lot of things called _saggers_. They look something like bandboxes made of firebrick. The soft dishes are put in them, the lids are put on, and then they are piled up in the oven. Then the men build a big fire in the furnace, and let it burn for several days. When it goes out they let several more days go by for the kiln to cool, and then take out the saggers. When the dishes are taken out they are hard and rough and of a yellowish white. They build the fire after they get them in, and let it out and the kiln cool off before they take them out, because the men have to go in and out the big ovens. Wouldn't you think a pile of soft plates and saucers would burn all together and stick fast to each other? Well, they don't. There are little things made of hard clay with three bars and three feet, and they put them in between dishes so that one plate has one in it, and the next plate sets on top of that, so that they can't stick together. Did you ever see three little dark spots on the bottom of a saucer? This is what makes them. There are lots and lots of these little stands lying all around everywhere, and broken pieces of them and the clay, scattered like flour all over the ground and floors thick. We next went into the room back of the kilns. It had shelves all around, too, and there were piles of dishes after the first burning. A lot of women sat on stools on the floor and they were brushing the fire cracks with some stuff out of little bottles. This was to fill them up so that the glazing wouldn't run in. [Illustration: REST FOR FLAT DISHES.] We went into another room at one side of the first and there's where they did the glazing. They called it _dipping_. There was a large tank in the middle of the room with a deep red liquid in it. Papa asked the man what it was, and he said it was a secret preparation. The men dipped the dishes in, and they came out a beautiful pink, so pretty that it seemed a pity they couldn't stay so. There were shelves all around this room, too, and there the dishes look like they do when we see them--the pink glazing has turned white. There is nothing more done to them except the _dressing_. We had now gone all around, and were almost at the _dressing-room_ where we started. And when we went in again we found that the dressing was nothing but knocking off any rough lumps with a chisel. I remember every bit of it. And every time I look at dishes I think there are ever so many things we use every day and don't know anything about. ARCHERY FOR BOYS. Mr. Maurice Thompson has excited all the grown-up boys who loved in their younger days to draw the bow, by his graceful articles on archery for young men and women. [Illustration: Fig. A.] I want to tell the boys who are wide awake how they may, without too much labor and with but little expense, make their own bows and arrows and targets, having _their_ fun, like their elders, in this health-giving and graceful recreation. In the first place, after you have made your implements for the sport, you must never shoot at or towards anyone; nor must you ever shoot directly upwards. In the one case you may maim some one for life, and in the other you may put out your own eye as an acquaintance of the writer's once did in Virginia. To make a bow take a piece of any tough, elastic wood, as cedar, ash, sassafras or hickory, well-seasoned, about your own length. Trim it so as to taper gradually from the centre to the ends, keeping it flat, at first, until you have it as in this sketch--for a boy, say, five feet in height: (Fig. A) This represents a bow five feet long, one and a quarter inches broad in the middle, three-fourths of an inch thick at the centre, and a half-inch scant at the ends in breadth and thickness. Bend the bow across your knee, pulling back both ends, one in each hand, the centre against your knee, and see whether it is easily bent, and whether it springs readily back to its original position. If so your bow is about the right size. Cut near each end the notch for the string as in this figure: (Fig. B.) [Illustration: Fig. B.] Bevel the side of the bow which is to be held towards you, so that a section of your bow will look like this figure: (Fig. C.) [Illustration: Fig. C.] The back or flat part is held from you in shooting, and the bevelled or rounded part towards you. Scrape the bow with glass and smooth it with sand-paper. To shape your bow lay it on a stout, flat piece of timber, and drive five ten-penny nails in the timber, one at the centre of your bow, and the others as in figure below, so as to bend the ends for about six inches in a direction contrary to the direction in which you draw the bow: (Fig. D.) [Illustration: Fig. D. (A and B are six inches from the ends. The bow is bent slightly at C.)] Your bow is now finished as far as the wood-work is concerned, and you may proceed to wrap it from end to end with silk or colored twine, increasing its elasticity and improving the appearance. The ends of the wrap must be concealed as in wrapping a fish-hook. Glue with Spaulding's glue a piece of velvet or even red flannel around the middle to mark your handhold. The ends may in like manner be ornamented by glueing colored pieces upon them. A hempen string, whipped in the middle with colored silk, to mark the place for your arrow nock to be put, in shooting, will make a very good string. For arrows any light, tough wood, which splits straight, will do. I use white pine, which may be gotten from an ordinary store-box, and for hunting-arrows seasoned hickory. These must be trimmed straight and true, until they are in thickness about the size of ordinary cedar pencils, from twenty-five to twenty-eight inches in length. They must be feathered and weighted either with lead or copper, or by fastening on sharp awl-points or steel arrow-points with wire. I used to make six different kinds; a simple copper-wrap, a blunt leaden head, a sharp leaden head like a minie bullet, an awl-point wrapped with copper wire and soldered, and a broad-head hunting-arrow. To make a copper wrap, wrap with copper wire the last half-inch of the arrow until you get near the end, then lay a needle as large as your wire obliquely along the arrow as in this figure: (Fig. E.) Continue the wrapping until you have weighted the arrow sufficiently; draw out the needle and thrust the end [Illustration: Fig. E.] of your wire through the little passage kept by the needle, and draw it tight thus: (Fig. F.) [Illustration: Fig. F (Before wrap was drawn through.)] [Illustration: Fig. G. (After wire was drawn through.)] A blunt leaden head is made by pouring three or four melted buck-shot into a cylinder of paper, wrapped around the end of the arrow, slightly larger at the open end, and tied on by a piece of thread. The wood of the arrow must be cut thus: (Fig. H.) [Illustration: Fig. H.] The paper is put on thus: (Fig. X.) [Illustration: Fig. X.] It should look like this after the metal has been poured in and the paper all stripped off. (Fig. I.) [Illustration: Fig. I.] It should look like this after being sharpened like a minie bullet: (Fig. J.) [Illustration: Fig. J.] An awl-point arrow is made by inserting the point in the end of the arrow, wrapping with copper wire, and getting a tinner to drop some solder at the end to fasten the wire and awl-point firmly together. The awl-point looks like this: (Fig. K.) [Illustration: Fig. K.] The awls (like Fig. L.) are filed like this into teeth-like notches on the part going into the wood, and roundly sharp on the other part thus: (Fig. M.) [Illustration: Fig. L.] [Illustration: Fig. M.] These may be shot into an oak-tree and extracted by a twist of the hand close to the arrow-point. [Illustration: Fig. N.] The broad-head hunting-point (Fig. N.) is put on by slitting the arrow and inserting the flat handle of the arrow point, and wrapping it with silk, sinews, or copper wire. These points can be sharpened along the line A B on a whetstone, and will cut like knives. The hunting arrow looks like this: (Fig. O.) [Illustration: Fig. O.] To feather an arrow you strip a goose feather from the quill and, after clipping off the part near the quill-end, you mark a line down the arrow from a point one inch from the nock and, spreading some Spaulding's glue along that line apply the feather, lightly pressing it home with forefinger and thumb. After you have glued on one piece lay aside the arrow and fix another, and so on until the first is set, so that you may put on another piece. When you have fastened these feathers on each arrow lay them aside for ten or twelve hours. The three feathers will look like this: (Fig. P.) [Illustration: Fig. P.] A boy can hardly make a good quiver unless he were to kill some furred animal and make a cylindrical case such as the Indians have, out of its skin. I am afraid that he usually would have to get a harness-maker to make him a quiver out of leather, somewhat larger at the top than at the bottom. It should hold from eight to twelve arrows. A good target may be made of soft pine, circular or elliptical in shape. In the latter case a line-shot might count, even though it were farther from the centre. Pieces should be tacked to the back of this target at right angles to the grain of the wood. Differently-colored circles or rings, a little more than the width of an arrow, must be painted on this, with a centre twice the width of an arrow. The outer ring counts one, the next two, three, four and so on to the centre, which of course counts highest. By this plan one's score could be told with perfect accuracy. [Illustration: THE TARGET.] If an arrow struck on a line between number three and four it counts three and a half. Anything like this rarely happens. The target is fixed upon an easel formed of three pieces of wood fastened together by a string at the top, and it ought to lean back at the top slightly, away from the archer. The three arrows count seven, nine, ten--twenty-six in all. In target-shooting you should use awl-pointed, wire-wrapped arrows, as they can be easily drawn out of even a wooden target. DOLLY'S SHOES. I can't help wondering if any of the little maidens who are having so much comfort with their beloved dolls in these Christmas holidays, ever think that _somebody_ must have taken a great deal of pains to dress them up so nicely, and above all, to make the tiny garments and hats and shoes. The doll's _shoes_!--so pretty, so daintily shaped, so beautifully stitched and trimmed, so perfectly, faultlessly finished from heel to toe, the "cunningest things" in all dolly's wardrobe--did it ever occur to the girlie "playing mother," to ask where they came from, and by whose dexterous fingers they were fashioned? She knows well enough that when Angelina Christina, or Luella Rosa Matilda Jennette, has worn these out, there are enough to be bought in the toy shops for twenty-five or thirty cents a pair; _but who makes them?_ That was the question which came into _my_ head one day, and I set to work to find out--doing just what must suggest itself to anybody who wants information, whatever the subject: that is to say, I went to head-quarters, and asked questions. There are two places in Boston--one a "shoe and leather exchange," and the other the establishment of an importer and dealer in shoe store supplies, where they furnish doll's shoes "to the trade," as the phrase is: one is on Congress street, and the other on Hanover; and the proprietors, Mr. Daniels and Mr. Swanberg, instead of being amused at my errand, very kindly told me what I wanted to know. Some of the shoes are imported, but they are inferior in style to those made in this country--notwithstanding they come from Paris, and everything from that place is supposed superlatively choice and to be desired, as you are very well aware. In the United States there is one factory--and but one, so far as I could ascertain--which supplies a large quantity, about fifteen hundred dozens, for the American market, sending them to all parts, and furnishing the toy-stores in Chicago and other western cities, as well as New York, Philadelphia and Boston. This manufactory is at Bordentown, New Jersey, and has been in existence about twelve years, and the value of stock now sent out is about seven thousand dollars a year; so much money for the wee feet that run on no errands, and save no steps for anybody! The wholesale jobbers of course advance the price, and in the retail stores they are higher yet; so that each tradesman through whose hands they pass has his trifle of profit in helping to shoe the feet of the doll-people. They retail from a dollar and a dollar and a quarter a dozen, to three dollars and seventy-five cents, according to the style. [Illustration: DOLLY'S SHOES] They "run," as the dealers express it, in twelve sizes; the "common doll's shoes" (which means shoes for common dolls) vary, however, from the class made for wax dolls, which have grades peculiar to themselves, being not only extra full and wider in the soles, but numbering fewer sizes, from one to six only. Of the common kind, the slippers and ties run from one to twelve, the others from three, four or five to that number. They come packed in regular sizes, a "full line," as those for children do, or in assorted sizes and styles; in small, square boxes, such as shoe dealers know by the name of "cartoon," which is another word for the French _carton_, meaning simply that they are made of paste-board. The tiniest is not much more than an inch long, but is a perfectly formed and finished shoe on that miniature scale; and the largest is almost big enough for Mrs. Tom Thumb, measuring about four inches, and it could certainly be worn by many a baby you have seen. As for the names, they come in this order:--slippers, ties, ankle ties, Balmorals, buttoned boots, Polish buttoned, Polish eyeletted, and Antoinette, which is a heeled, croquet slipper, in which her doll-ship, when engaged in that out-of-door game, can show off her delicate, clocked stockings to advantage. But what shall I say of the variety in color and trimmings? They are in white and crimson, in buff and blue, in scarlet and purple, in rose color and violet, in bronze and silver and gold, everything but black, for dolls don't like black except in the tips of their gay Balmoral or Polish boots. And the stuff they are made of is such soft material as can only be found in goat and sheep and kid and glove kid, and _skivers_, which is the name for split leather. I strongly suspected that they were all made of scraps left from large slippers and shoes, but, though this is generally the case, some whole skins have to be used because nothing is ever manufactured for real people boots and shoes and slippers for all kinds of dolls, high and low, rich and poor; to walk in, to dance in, to play croquet in, or to stay at home in; to match their costumes, to match their hair, to match their eyes, to suit them if anything on earth _could_ suit. And every doll could be sure about her "size," for the number is stamped on the bottom of the soles; and I must not forget to say that they have also the "trademark," which is the imprint under the number; this "trade mark" is a pair of boots smaller than anything you can think of. Now I am coming to the original question--"_who makes them?_" They are made in large quantities during about six months of the year, accumulating in the summer, ready for the trade, which begins in August, and drops off after the first of January, and is over with for that season by March. In those six working months the factory employs about forty women, and they are mostly invalids or old persons who are not able to do anything but light work, and who receive only small wages, because they are not capable of earning much. So they are generally thin, pale hands and slender fingers which patiently and skillfully fit the patterns, and sew the seams, and do the even nice stitching, and dainty ornamentation, which help to make glad the hearts of the many little girls all over the country, who have found a precious doll, all so daintily shod, among the gifts of their Merry Christmas. [Illustration: MY DOLLY! MY OWN LITTLE DAUGHTER!] A GLIMPSE OF SOME MONTANA BEAVERS. Our road passed down along Hell-Gate river, leaving Deer Lodge City some eight miles to the left. As one goes down, the country changes, and occasional pines appear along the banks of the stream, and the landscape becomes much more interesting. At one place, where a tiny tributary flows in, a large community of beavers were building a dam. They were not at all afraid of us, and so we leisurely observed the process, wishing to settle the vexed question as to whether beavers do actually do intelligent mason-work. They had already sunk a great deal of brush, together with limbs of trees, and were now filling this wicker-work in with earth and rocks which they procured a little distance above on the opposite bank. A beaver would run up, flatten his tail on the mud near the bank, then another beaver would scrape the earth up and upon the tail of the first, and pack it down. After he had his load complete, the carrier-beaver would swim away rapidly; his tail, with the load of earth, floating on the surface, the swift movement of the animal alone keeping it afloat. The sagacious creature would invariably swim to the right place and dump the load, and then return for another, the stream presenting a scene of great activity, as several of these curious animal-masons were constantly and swiftly passing and repassing each other with their heavy loads. Others, the carpenters among them, were at work in the thicket opposite, cutting brush. We saw many large trees which had been cut down by them. The stumps looked as though some boy had chopped them down with a dull axe. It is surprising to reflect upon the pertinacity of these creatures which enables them to gnaw down such immense trees, and the wisdom with which they calculate the direction in which the trees will fall. It is said here that the beavers cut the limbs off from these trees and then sever them into lengths of about three feet each, and after that float them to the center of their pond, sink them to the bottom and fasten them there, where they remain and are used as food during the winter when the pond is frozen over. This is thought to be one of the principal uses of the pond--to provide a pantry which will not freeze. The pond furnishes a depth of water that is always still, and never freezes to the bottom. Although, after witnessing this almost human sagacity, we had many compunctions, we concluded to shoot one fine animal for his skin. We shot one through the head. His companions immediately disappeared; and before we could secure our wounded beaver he also had dived beneath the waters of their pond, and although we waited sometime in the vicinity, we failed to discover him again. The inhabitants say it is nearly impossible to kill a beaver with a rifle, and never, on any occasion does the trapper shoot one. HOW LOGS GO TO MILL. [Illustration: A MAINE WOOD-CHOPPER.] All boys and girls know that boards are made of sawed logs, and that logs are trunks of trees. Few, however, know with what hardship and difficulty the trees are felled, trimmed and carried from the woods where they grow to the mills where they are made into boards. In the far West, and in the wilds of Maine, are acres upon acres, and miles upon miles, of evergreen forests. One wooded tract in Maine is so vast that it takes an army of choppers twenty years to cut it over. By the time it is done a new growth has sprung up, and an intermediate one is large enough to cut; so the chopping goes on year after year. The first or primeval growth is pine. That is most valuable. After the pines are cut, spruce and hemlock spring up and grow. Most of the men who live in the vicinity of the lake region work in the woods in the winter. They camp in tents and log huts near the tracts where they are felling trees. All day long, day after day, week after week, they chop down such trees as are large enough to cut, lop off the branches and haul the logs to the nearest water. This work is done in winter because the logs are more easily managed over snow and ice. All brooks large enough to carry them, all rivers, ponds and lakes, are pressed into service and made to convey the ponderous freight towards civilization. All along the shores and in the woods are busy scenes--men, oxen and horses hard at work, the smoke from the logging camps curling among the trees. Every log has the initial or mark of the owner chopped deep into the wood to identify it. Then, when the ice breaks up, the logs are sent down the brooks to the rivers and through the rivers to the lakes. The logging camps are disbanded, the loggers return to their homes, and the river-drivers alone are left to begin their duties. The river-drivers are the men who travel with the logs from the beginning of their journey till they are surrendered to the saw-mills. Each wears shoes the soles of which are thickly studded with iron brads an inch long; and each carries a long pole called a "pick-pole," which has a strong sharp-pointed iron spike in the end. This they drive into the wood, and it supports and steadies them as they spring from log to log. Their first duty is to collect "the drive." The logs which form "the drive" are packed together and held in place by a chain of guard-logs which stretches entirely around the drive, forming what is called "the boom." The guard-logs are chained together at the ends about two feet apart. The guard is always much larger than the boom of logs, so that the shape of the boom may be changed for wide or narrow waters. At the head of each boom is a raft which supports two large windlasses, each of which works an anchor. On this head-work about thirty river-drivers take up their position to direct the course of the boom. To change its position or shape, ten of the drivers spring into a boat or bateau; one takes a paddle at the bow; eight take oars; and one, at the stern, holds the anchor. They row with quick strokes toward the spot where the anchor is to be dropped, the cable all the time unwinding from the windlass. "Let go!" shouts the foreman. Splash! goes the anchor overboard. The boat then darts back to the head-works. Out spring the men to help turn the windlass to wind the cable in. They sing as they work, and the windlass creaks a monotonous accompaniment as "Meet me by moonlight," or the popular "Away over yonder," comes floating over the rippling water. [Illustration: A RIVER-DRIVER.] Meanwhile another bateau has been out with another anchor; and as both windlasses turn, the boom swings toward the anchorage, and thus is so much further on its way. Though the men sing as they work, and make the best of their mishaps with jests and laughter, they often carry homesick hearts. In cold and stormy weather their hardships are great, an involuntary bath in the icy water being an event of frequent occurrence. Also their work demands a constant supply of strength which is very trying; frequently a head wind will drive them back from a position which it has taken several days to gain, and all the toil of fresh anchorages must be repeated. The most dangerous part of the work is "sluicing" the logs. When the boom reaches the run which connects the lake or river with the dam through the sluice of which the logs must pass, the chain of guard-logs is detached, and fastened in lines along both sides of the run, and the rafts are drawn off to one side and anchored to trees. The river-drivers, armed with their pick-poles, are then stationed along the run, on the dam, wherever they may be needed. The liberated logs now come sailing along, their speed quickening as they near the sluice. When they reach it they dart through, their dull, rapid, continuous thud mingling with the roar of the water. How they shoot the sluice! log after log--two, six, a dozen together--pitching, tossing, struggling, leaping end over end; finally submitting to destiny and sailing serenely down the river toward another lake. Meanwhile the river-drivers with their long poles and quick movements, looking not unlike a band of savages, have enough to do, with steady feet, and eyes on the alert. For of all the vast array of logs--and I once saw twenty-four thousand in one drive--not one goes through the sluice but is guided on to it by one or more of the drivers. They often ride standing on the floating logs, conducting this, pushing that, hurrying another, straightening, turning and guiding; and just before the log on which a driver stands reaches the sluice, he springs to another. Woe to him if his foot should slip, or his leap fail! He would be crushed among the logs in the sluice, or dashed among the rocks in the seething water. [Illustration: "THE LIBERATED LOGS CAME SAILING ALONG."] After all the logs are safely sluiced, the chains of the guards are slipped, the rafts are broken up, and these, windlasses and all, follow the logs. Then the boats are put through the sluice. Sometimes, when the dam is high, some of the river-drivers go through in the boats--a dangerous practice, this; for often the bateaux have gone under water, entirely out of sight, to come up below the falls, and more than once have lives been lost in this foolhardy feat. [Illustration: THROUGH THE SLUICE.--A DANGEROUS PRACTICE THIS.] A boom generally passes from three to six dams, and sometimes takes four months to reach the mills. Occasionally the logs become jammed in the rivers, and must wait for more water; if this can be supplied from a lake above, the difficulty is easily remedied. In the spring of 1880, a jam occurred at Mexico in Maine. The logs were piled forty feet above the water and covered an extent of area as large as an ordinary village. This great jam attracted visitors from all parts of the country until the spring freshets of the next year could supply the river with water sufficient to loose them and bear them on their way. ----- At the present time, July, 1880, the jam is still there. I saw the driving and sluicing as I have described it, in May, 1880. It was very interesting.--S. B. C. S. 
27867	----	[Illustration: Issue Title] THE NEW YORK SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL INFORMATION, ART, SCIENCE, MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY, AND MANUFACTURES. NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 26, 1846. * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN _Published Weekly at_ 128 _Fulton Street_, (_Sun Building_,) _New York_. BY MUNN & COMPANY. RUFUS PORTER, EDITOR. TERMS.--$2 a year--$1 in advance, and the remainder in 6 months. [Symbol: right Index] _See Advertisement on last page_. * * * * * CONTENTS. Nature's Image of Washington 1 The Viol Seraphine* 1 An Eclipse in Arabia 1 Giving Credit 1 The Bowie Knife and its Inventor 1 Forests and Streams 1 Prussian Music 1 Philosophy 1 Polite Preaching 1 Pure Air 2 The Deerfield (N. H.) Phenomena 2 Extraordinary Instance of Gambling 2 Gen. Taylor's Patriotism 2 The Columbian Magazine 2 A Mountain In Labor 2 The Pope's Will 2 Improved Railroad 2 Sageisms 2 As Good as Cash 2 How Very Hot It Is 2 California Farming 2 Diversification of Language 2 "Keep that Testament In your vest pocket, over your heart." 2 Temperance in the Army 2 Modes of Raising Ponderous Articles 3 Information to persons having business to transact at the Patent Office 3 The Regulator(?)* 3 A Remarkable Mineral Spring 3 Cool Forethought 3 It May Be So 3 Howe's Sewing Machine 4 Steering Apparatus 4 Electro-Magnetic Boat 4 Improvement in Boats 4 Casting Iron Cannon by a galvanic Process 4 New Shingle Machine 4 Improvement in Blacksmiths Forges 4 Improved Fire Engine 4 A simple Cheese-Press* 4 Cast Iron Roofing 4 The New and Wonderful Pavement 4 To render Shingles Durable 4 Best Plan of a Barn 4 Robert Fulton 4 Introduction to Volume II 5 Advantage of Low Fares 5 Avalon Railroad Iron 5 The Magnetic Telegraph 5 Advertising In London 5 Deerfield Bridge 5 Information Wanted 5 Railroad Intelligence 5 Arrival of the Cambria 5 The Mexican War 5 Trade to Santa Fe 5 THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN--subscriptions 5 The Harbor of Havana* 6 A Very Long Nose 6 Sol. Smith 6 A Profitable Hoax 6 Reforming 6 Wrong Side Up* 6 Importance of Humility 6 The Eureka: or Journal of the National Association of Inventors 7 ADVERTISEMENTS 7 The Ball of the Bears 7 All is not Gold that Glitters 7 Painting In Imitation of Rose-Wood 8 India Rubber 8 Communication on Atmospheric Resistance 8 The Conical Windlass* 8 Requisite Strength of Steam Boilers 8 Bagley's Gold Pens 8 The Humming Bird 8 (Illustrated articles are marked with an asterisk.) * * * * * [Illustration: POETRY] NATURE'S IMAGE OF WASHINGTON. BY MARSHALL S. PIKE, OF THE HARMONEONS DESCRIPTIVE: Opposite Harper's Ferry,--which is situated on a pleasant elevation at the junction of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers--a few rods north of "Pinnacle Bluff," a flighty eminence on the Blue Ridge Mountains, stands a most singular formation of rock, known as 'Washington's Face'; and which, to a casualist void of imaginative powers, is easily recognized if pointed out by a guide; but to a close observer, however, with common discernable perception, it presents _at first sight_ a most striking and correct resemblance of _the great original_. From midway the bridge which crosses the Potomac, the countenance and contour of the face _to me_, appeared discriminatingly perfect, and constrained me to look upon it as _one_ of the most wonderful, and the noblest work of revealed nature. In the high barren cliffs of the Blue Mountain Ridge, That frightfully hang o'er the trestle-built bridge, Juts out into space a huge rocky bluff, Which the elements rudely left broken and rough. Near this, stands a bust so exquisitely fair, That the chisel of art would be uselessness there! For nature wrought well till the model was done-- An impress on stone of our GREAT WASHINGTON. The Earth born from chaos at some mighty shock, Left the image to rest on the high mountain rock, On a turret-like peak, in the heavens above, _As a sentinel over the country we love:_ Where the sunbeam could linger till daylight had fled, Where the bright stars of night, form a crown o'er its head; And where, through the greenwood, the faintest breeze creeps, To sigh for the Hero, who deathlessly sleeps. There it stands like a giant in storm and in calm, Like the Hero in battle, no foeman could harm! And commandingly looks with a Patriot's pride, On the wild mountain stream of Potomac's fast tide, Whose waters swell on in the valley between, Through the vast hilly regions and forests of green; O'er a rock-bottomed track, to the blue-bosomed sea, From its struggles to rest, like our sire of the free. Stand up there in might, till the bright sun shall die, Till the stars glimmer out their light in the sky, And the moon shall no longer lend beauty or light, But _all_ shall again be dark chaos and night,-- Till then, let its base be the tall craggy steep, Where rocks are o'er moss-grown, and ivy-vines creep; With the Heaven's wide canopy over its head, _An immortal image of greatness that's dead._ * * * * * [Illustration: THE VIOL SERAPHINE] INTRODUCTION.--The clear tones of a viol or bass viol are generally admitted to be more melodious than those produced by other kinds of instruments, and many have expressed a desire to see an instrument so constructed as to be played with keys, like the organ or piano forte, and give the tones of the violin. This is the character of the instrument here introduced. It is elegant in appearance; occupies less than half the space of a piano forte, and is so light and portable that a lady-performer may readily place it before her, and thus avoid the necessity,--unpleasant to all parties,--of turning her back on the company. We do not say that an instrument of this kind has been as yet constructed complete: but the principle has been proved, and it may, and probably will be soon, offered to the public, at a cost not exceeding sixty dollars. EXPLANATION.--In the engraving, a side view elevation only is represented, showing only one string and one key of a series of twenty or more of each. The body of the machine A B, is a light hollow chest about three feet square and six inches deep, supported by four posts or legs with castors. Two bridges, C and D, extend across the breadth of the chest. The bridge D is supported by a cleat, E, in which is inserted the pin F, to which is attached one end of the string C D F. The other end of the string is simply attached to the bridge C. A key-lever, G H, passes through the bridge, and is mounted on a pivot therein. The front end of the key (G) is held in its ordinary position by a small spring thereunder, and may be easily depressed by the finger of the performer: the other end of the key serves as the bearing of the pivot of a delicate arbor, the opposite pivot of which has its bearing in the bridge D. On the front end of this arbor is a wheel three-fourths of an inch in diameter, with its periphery smooth, and polished with rosin, or rosin varnish; and so adjusted, that by the depression of the key, this wheel is brought up in contact with the string, whereby, if in motion rotarily, a full sound is produced, as if a violin bow was drawn across the string. On the other end of the arbor is a grooved pulley, over which passes a silken cord, which also passes round a delicate band-wheel, I, below, and by which, motion is communicated to the arbor and sounding wheel. The band-wheel is mounted on a shaft, I J, which has its bearings in two small head blocks which project from two crossbars: and from the block J is suspended a vertical rod, to the bottom of which is attached a treadle, K L, and from which a curved ratch, L M, extends upward and takes to a small ratchet on the shaft I J; so that, by the horizontal motion of the treadle, the motion is communicated to the wheel, &c. The teeth of the ratch and ratchet have so gentle an inclination on one side of each, that although the ratch applies force to the ratchet in the upward direction, they slide freely over in their return. It may be understood that the machine is to have two treadles and two ratches, which move forward alternately: and that twenty or more arbors, pulleys, strings and keys are arranged in series, although only one of each is represented in the engraving. The cord applies to each pulley in the series, by passing over the first, under the second, and over the third, and so on, descending from the last of the series to the band-wheel. Each arbor is placed directly under its respective string, and it is also proposed to place moveable stops under the strings, at equal distances from the key bridge, and to regulate the tones by adjusting the stops, without depending on the pins at the ends for that purpose. We shall employ a competent mechanic to construct one or more of these instruments as soon as convenient, and give due notice accordingly. * * * * * AN ECLIPSE IN ARABIA. Casting my eyes over the bright, full moon, I perceived that an eclipse was just coming upon it. What astronomer had calculated this eclipse for Arabia? It was indeed a privilege to witness one in the bright sky that over-spread the lonely mountains of Seir. Soon we were seated in a circle, with our Arabs round their watch-fire, enquiring of them their views of an eclipse, and explaining to them ours. They appeared to have no idea of its real cause, regarding it as a judgment from God, a sign of a bad season, and little camel feed. When we undertook to explain to them the theory of the earth being round, turning over every day, sometimes getting between the sun and moon, they seemed to look upon us as telling very strange tales. The eclipse was nearly total. I gazed upon it with interest, and then eyed the strange scene around me. The wild, lonely landscape of rock and sand--the camels kneeling round the bivouac--the wild faces of the Arabs, reflecting the red light of the fire round which they were seated--their wild voices and strange guttural language, all combined to produce an effect so startling, that I felt till then I had never been thoroughly sensible of our complete separation from the civilized world. * * * * * GIVING CREDIT. "One of our exchange" says one of our exchanges, "came to us this week with four of our editorials _not credited_." A frivolous complaint. Not a week passes but we find in some of our exchanges from ten to twenty of our editorials; and instead of complaining, we are thankful for being thus complimented. * * * * * THE BOWIE KNIFE AND ITS INVENTOR. This instrument was devised by Col. James Bowie, an American, and a man of desperate valor. He considered, and apparently with justice, too, that, in close fighting, a much shorter weapon than the sword ordinarily in use, but still _heavy_ enough to give it sufficient force, and, at the same time, contrive to cut and thrust, would be far preferable, and more advantageous to the wearer. He accordingly invented the short sword, or knife, which has since gone under his name. It is made of various sizes; but the best, I may say, is about the length of a carving knife--case perfectly straight in the first instance, but greatly rounded at the end on the edge side; the upper edge at the end, for the length of about two inches, is ground into the small segment of a circle and rendered sharp; thus leaving an apparent curve of the knife, although in reality the upturned point is not higher than the line of the back. The back itself gradually increases in weight of metal as it approaches the hilt, on which a small guard is placed. The Bowie knife, therefore, has a curved, keen point; is double edged for the space of about a couple of inches of its length; and when in use, falls with the weight of a bill hook.--Bowie went to Texas during the troubles which preceded the independence of that country,--and was lying sick in bed at the fortress of the Alamo, when, on the 6th of March, 1836, it was stormed by Santa Anna and taken. Bowie was murdered there upon his pillow. The hand that formed the dreadful knife could no longer wield it. * * * * * FORESTS AND STREAMS. That remarkable man, Humbolt, has reduced it almost to a demonstration, that the streams of our country, fail in proportion to the destruction of its timber. And of course, if the streams fail, our seasons will be worse; it must get drier and drier in proportion. Humbolt, speaking of the Valley of Araguay in Venezuela, says that the lake receded as agriculture advanced, until the beautiful plantations of sugar-cane, banana and cotton-trees, were established on its banks, which (banks) year after year were farther from them. After the separation of that Province from Spain, and the decline of agriculture amid the desolating wars which swept over this beautiful region, the process of clearing was arrested, and old lands grew up in trees with that rapidity common to the tropics, and in a few years the inhabitants were alarmed by a rise of the waters, and an inundation of their choice plantations. * * * * * PRUSSIAN MUSIC. The Boston Brigade Band has been presented with a copy of the collection of the celebrated martial music of the Prussian army. Prussia has long been famous for the excellence of its military bands, and the music which they have produced is of the highest order. We hope this attempt to introduce it into our city will improve the style of martial music here. * * * * * PHILOSOPHY. "Uncle Jo," said an observing little boy, "our folks always put up the window when the room is filled with smoke, and the wind always blows in so as to prevent the smoke from going out that way: now where does the smoke go?" "It goes into the people's eyes," was uncle Jo's philosophic answer. * * * * * POLITE PREACHING. A certain preacher, when treating on the subject of repentance, said, "My dear hearers, you must repent; if you do not, you will go to a place which it would be improper to mention in this polite assembly." * * * * * Mr. H. Longfellow of Cincinnati, has about one hundred acres under culture of grapes, strawberries, peaches and raspberries. [Illustration: VARIETY.] PURE AIR. Throw open the window and fasten it there! Fling the curtain aside and the blind, And give a free entrance to heaven's pure air, 'Tis the life and health of mankind. Behold that dull concourse in yonder closed space, With visages sluggish and red; How calmly they sit, each one in his place, While their lungs with poison are fed. What makes the grave deacon so drowsy at church? The scholar so dull in his class? Dry sermons!--dry studies!--the brain's in the lurch, For want of pure oxygen gas. Come, 'rouse, from your stupor, before it's too late, And do not yourself so abuse-- To sit all day with your feet on the grate; No wonder you're getting the "blues!" Are you fond of coughs, colds, dyspepsia and rheums? Of headaches, and fevers and chills? Of bitters, hot-drops, and medicine fumes, And bleeding, and blisters and pills? Then shut yourself up like a monk in his cave, Till nature grows weary and sad, And imagine yourself on the brink of the grave. Where nothing is cheerful and glad. Be sure when you sleep, that all is shut out: Place, too, a warm brick to your feet-- Wrap a bandage of flannel your neck quite about And cover your head with the sheet. But would you avoid the dark gloom of disease? Then haste to the fresh open air, Where your cheek may kindly be tanned by its breeze; 'Twill make you well, happy and fair. O, prize not this lightly, so precious a thing; 'Tis laden with gladness and wealth-- The richest of blessings that heaven can bring, The bright panacea of health. Then open the window, and fasten it there! Fling the curtain aside and the blind. And give a free entrance to heaven's pure air, 'Tis light, life, and joy to mankind. * * * * * THE DEERFIELD (N. H.) PHENOMENA. We have frequently heard of singular and unaccountable reports, as of explosion, in Deerfield, but nothing so definite as the following statement by a correspondent of the Portsmouth Journal. "Mr Editor,--During the last twelve years, certain curious, not to say alarming phenomena in the town of Deerfield, N. H., have excited the fears of the inhabitants, and we think should, ere this, have attracted the attention of the scientific. These are reports of explosions in the ground, apparently of a volcanic or gaseous nature. When first heard they were attributed to the blasting of rocks in Manchester, a new town some ten miles distant; but from the frequency of the reports at all hours in the night as well as the day, from the consideration that they were so loud, and were heard in all seasons, winter as well as summer, it was soon concluded that they had some other origin. The explosions, if they may be so called, commenced on a ridge of land running S. E. and N, W, some five miles in length, and principally on that portion called the South Road. They have, however, extended, and arc now heard in a northerly direction. The sounds have become louder, and during the last fall and the present spring or summer, as many as twenty have been heard in one night. Many of them jar the houses and ground perceptibly, so much so, that a child whose balance is not steady, will roll from one side to the other. They are as loud as a heavy cannon fired near the house, with no reverberation, and little roll. Last fall some of the inhabitants were riding in a wagon when an explosion was heard, and they saw the stone wall, which was apparently quite compact, fall over on one side of the way, and a second after upon the other. The stone wall of an unfinished cellar also fell in. This can be attested by many witnesses. There is no regularity in these reports, as they are heard at intervals of a day, a week, and sometimes of months: but for the last year they have become very common, and are heard almost every week more or less." * * * * * EXTRAORDINARY INSTANCE OF GAMBLING. It is well known upon the western waters, that the firemen and other hands employed upon the boats spend much of their idle time in playing cards. Of the passion for gaming, thus excited, an instance has been narrated to us upon the most credible authority, which surpasses the highest wrought fictions of the gambler's fate. A colored fireman, on board a steamboat running between Saint Louis and New-Orleans, had lost all his money at poker with his companions. He then staked his clothing, and being still unfortunate, pledged his own freedom for a small amount. Losing this, the bets were doubled, and he finally at one desperate hazard, ventured his full value as a slave, and laid down his free papers to represent the stake. He lost, suffered his certificates to be destroyed, and was actually sold by the winner to a slave dealer, who hesitated not to take him at a small discount upon his assessed value. When last heard of by one who knows him, and informed us of the fact, he was still paying in servitude the penalty of his criminal folly. * * * * * GEN. TAYLOR'S PATRIOTISM. In answer to the complimentary resolutions passed at a meeting in this city some weeks since, Gen. Taylor says, "It is a source of gratulation to me that the meeting refrained from the meditated nomination for the presidency. For the high office in question I have no aspirations. The government has assigned to me an arduous and responsible duty in the prosecution of the existing war: in conducting it with honor to the country lie all my real aspirations." * * * * * THE COLUMBIAN MAGAZINE. The October number of this splendid work will be found to be equal, if not superior, to anything and everything of the kind in the literary region. It presents three superb embellishments--"A Cure for Love," mezzotint, by Sadd; "View on the St. Lawrence," fine steel engraving, by C. F, Giles, and a plate of fashions; in a new style, besides a piece of first rate music. This work is published monthly by Isreal Post, 140 Nassau st. Terms, only $3 per annum. * * * * * A MOUNTAIN IN LABOR. The workmen, says a Paris paper, are still busily engaged in excavating Montmartre in quest of holy vases and other riches said to have been deposited there in early days of the French revolution by the orders of Lady Superior of the Abbey of Montmartre. Two workmen, who were at the time charged with transporting the wealth to the place designated were never seen, and it is supposed that they were sacrificed to the necessity of the secret. The Superior, at her death, bequeathed the secret to a lady friend, who in turn, on her death bed, divulged it to her daughter, then 13 years of age. The child, now a sexagenary, disclosed it to the municipiality. Her statements have thus far been found scrupulously correct. The _cesarian_ operation is actively going on, an excavation of fifty feet having been made, and the mountain's speedy deliverance of a mine of wealth is anticipated. May it not prove a mouse! * * * * * THE POPE'S WILL. The late Pope has left a fortune of eleven millions of francs, which, after some religious bequests; is to be divided among his relations! upon the singular condition that they never contest the will, and that they never take up their residence in Rome. * * * * * IMPROVED RAILROAD. The Harlem Railroad Company have laid down a section of their road with cast iron rails of a new construction, invented by Mr. Imley. These rails are highly approved, and are expected to supersede the common wrought rails to a considerable extent. * * * * * It is reported that Mr. Isaac Fisk of Massachusetts, spells his name "Eyzurk Physque." Well, what if he does? * * * * * SAGEISMS. He who is passionate and hasty is generally honest. It's your cool, dissembling, smiling hypocrite, of whom you should beware. There is no deceit about a bull dog. It's only the cur that sneaks up and bites you when your back's turned. Again, we say, beware of a man who has psalmody in his looks. If a person is bent on quarrelling with you, leave the whole of it to himself, and he will soon become weary of his unencouraged occupation. Even the most malicious ram will soon cease to butt against a disregarding object, and will usually find his own head more injured than the object of his blind animosity. So let them kick. An easy flow of words is no sign of an abundance of ideas. Swift made a wise comparison when he likened a well stored mind to a crowded church, where the people elbow each other, and cannot get out. "If a civil word or two will render a man happy," said a French king, "he must be a wretch indeed who will not give them to him. Such a disposition is like lighting another man's candle by one's own, which loses none of its brilliancy by what the other gains." * * * * * IN PREPARATION. We have in course of preparation for future numbers, some large and elegant engravings, illustrative of some of the most interest and deeply scientific _new inventions_, together with illustrations of architecture, geometry and magnetism. Also a variety of intelligence in _arts and trades_. * * * * * A STRONG POSITION. "Gentlemen of the jury," said an eminent lawyer, "there are four points in this case. In the first place, we contend that we never had the plaintiff's horse; second, that we paid him for the use of the horse; third, he agreed to let us use the horse for his keeping, without any charge; and fourth, that his horse is a jackass." * * * * * AS GOOD AS CASH. An editor out west having asked the consent of a father to his daughter's hand in marriage, the provident old gentleman inquired how much money he could bring the bride. The editor said he hadn't got any money, but he would give her a puff in his paper. The father was satisfied. * * * * * HOW VERY HOT IT IS. The following lines would have been inserted earlier, but the weather was so hot we could not attend to it. Did you ever know such weather? Seven bright burning days together! Swelt'ring nights and broiling days, Sultry moonbeams, sun's hot rays: No one knows which way to turn him, All things either melt or burn him; Half the weight of all the nation, Is flying off in perspiration, And every man, and woman too, As languidly they look at you, Exclaims, with moist and mournful phiz, "Dear me! how very hot it is!" Ladies all languid in muslin array, Loll upon couches the live long day, Looking more lovely than we can say-- Though, alas! they are rapidly melting away "Bring me _an ice!_" they languidly cry, But alas and alack! it is "all in my eye"-- For before it reaches the top of the stairs, It's turned into water quite "unawares," While John with his salver, looks red and stares, And the moist confectioner inwardly swears, As he wipes with his apron his long, pale phiz, "Oh--pooh! how infernally hot it is!" Oh, what a treat 'twould be to wade Chin deep in fresh ice and lemonade! Or to sit a deep marble bowl within, And camphor gurgling around your chin-- Hissing and sparkling round your nose, Till you open your mouth and down it goes, Gulp by gulp, and sup by sup, As you "catawumpishly chew it up." Refreshing your heart and cooling your faces-- Burnt down as they've been with all sorts of sauces Oh, the fellow who thus could lave his phiz Needn't care how hot the weather is! * * * * * A son of the Emperor Nicholas, of Russia, is now travelling in the United States. He is said to be an intelligent looking man. * * * * * CALIFORNIA FARMING. A gentleman, writing from California to the editors of the Saint Louis Reveille, says his stock consists of about four thousand head of oxen, one thousand seven hundred horses and mules, three thousand sheep, and as many hogs. They all pasture! themselves without difficulty in the rich prairies and bottoms of the Sacremento, and only require to be attended. This is dune by the Indians, of whom he employs four hundred. His annual crop of wheat is about twelve thousand bushels, with barley, peas, beans, etc, in proportion. * * * * * DIVERSIFICATION OF LANGUAGE. _A poetic line from Gray admits of the following twenty-eight variations without changing the accent:_ The weary ploughman plods his homeward way, The ploughman, weary, plods his homeward way, His homeward way the weary ploughman plods, His homeward way the ploughman weary plods, The weary ploughman homeward plods his way, The ploughman, weary, homeward plods his way, His way, the weary ploughman homeward plods, His way, the ploughman, weary, homeward plods, The ploughman, homeward, plods his weary way, His way the ploughman, homeward, weary plods, His homeward weary way the ploughman plods, Weary, the ploughman homeward plods his way, Weary, the ploughman plods his homeward way, Homeward, his way the weary ploughman plods, Homeward, his way the ploughman, weary, plods, Homeward, his weary way, the ploughman plods, The ploughman, homeward, weary plods his way, The ploughman, weary, homeward plods his way, His weary way, the ploughman homeward plods, His weary way, the homeward ploughman plods, Homeward the plowman plods his weary way, Homeward the weary ploughman plods his way, The weary ploughman, his way, homeward plods, The ploughman, weary, his way homeward plods, The ploughman plods his weary, homeward way, Weary, the ploughman, his way homeward plods, Weary, his homeward way the ploughman plods. From the Gem of the Prairie. * * * * * "KEEP THAT TESTAMENT IN YOUR VEST POCKET, OVER YOUR HEART." We have been forcibly reminded of an interesting anecdote of the Revolution, while witnessing so many young men in the ranks of the volunteer companies, in connection with the highly praiseworthy resolution of the Nashville Young Men's Bible Society, to present a copy of the New Testament to each officer and private constituting the regiment quartered here. The fond-hearted mother had assisted in adjusting upon her son the "tow frock and trowsers," had tightly secured the knapsack, canteen and cartridge box in the strings twisted with her own fingers from the same material as his clothes; as he turned, on opening the door, to speak the "manly good-bye," she suppressed the parting tear, lest it might damp the flame of freedom which fired his noble soul, and echoed the "good-bye" with a forced smile. As she went to the window to take another look, she discovered the Testament had been forgotten; she caught it in her hand, ran to the door--called him loudly, holding the book in her uplifted hand, in order to show him why she stopped, and soon stood by his side. Without uttering a word she put the book in its place, grasped his hand, looked him full in the face, and with quivering lips, heart big with emotion, checks bedewed with tears of maternal affection, she spoke: "My son, I would not have you stay; your country has the FIRST claim upon you; be true to that as you have been dutiful to me, and Heaven will protect you--KEEP THAT TESTAMENT IN YOUR VEST POCKET, OVER YOUR HEART!" After faithfully serving the term of his enlistment, he returned to his home. Before he uttered a word, he took from his "vest pocket" the old Testament, and there lay British bullet, snugly imbedded where the force of the powder had driven it, and this was the only shot he had received while fighting for his country.--_Nashville Union_. * * * * * TEMPERANCE IN THE ARMY. We are gratified to learn that Gen. Taylor has totally prohibited the traffic in intoxicating liquors in the vicinity of the army. One fellow, persisting in the trade, was put in the guard house by Capt. Miles: and when liberated, on going to Gen. Taylor's tent with a complaint, was kicked out. He finally took marching orders _t'other way_. * * * * * MODES OF RAISING PONDEROUS ARTICLES. A wedge is considered to be the most simple of "mechanical powers," and is often used in cases where no other apparatus can be made to apply; as in splitting logs and other adhesive articles. If a massive rock is to be elevated from the ground, a wedge must first be driven between that and its foundation, preparatory to the application of levers. Yet the wedge is in most cases objectionable on account of the friction with which its use is attended. The next, and most common power applied for elevating buildings on large rocks, is the simple lever, commonly called a pry. This usually consists of a long straight beam or pole, one end of which is placed under the object to be raised, while a fulcrum consisting of a stone or block of wood, is placed under the lever, at a short distance from the object to be raised. The opposite extremity then being forced down by the weight of one or more of the workmen, a force is applied to the object to be raised, bearing the same proportion to that applied to the lever, that the distance between the fulcrum and the extreme end of the lever does to that between the fulcrum and the object. Levers made of iron, and simply denominated "iron bars," are commonly used in raising and removing rocks. A machine called a "bed-screw" is frequently used for elevating buildings. It originally consisted principally of a large vertical screw, which was placed on a foundation called the "bed," and was turned by levers; but many improvements and variations have been added, till, in some instances, the screw has been dispensed with, and a rack and pinion have been substituted. Some of the best in use consist of a vertical iron rack, which is occasionally forced upward by the teeth of a pinion: a geer wheel on the same axle with the pinion being driven by the thread of a horizontal screw, to the head of which is attached a crank. By a machine of this construction, properly proportioned, one man may raise about twenty tons weight. Vertical screws, turned by levers, have been frequently used for the purpose of raising vessels to repair. But in these cases a large portion of the power applied is lost in the friction of the screw, and the process is laborious and tedious. This is probably the most awkward and injudicious method that has been applied to that purpose. Another method which has been applied to the purpose of elevating vessels, is decidedly ridiculous, although less laborious than the former. It is called the "hydraulic power," and consists in forcing water into large cylinders, by forcing pumps which are operated by steam power; while the water thus forced into the cylinder moves a piston and piston-rod, to which is connected several stout chains, which passing over corresponding pulleys, descend to a platform, on which rests the vessel to be raised. An expensive apparatus, called the "Marine Railway," constructed on the principle of the _inclined plane_, with a huge and complicated carriage to travel thereon, has been extensively used for taking vessels out of the water to repair. This plan is objectionable, however, on several accounts. It requires the application of a great quantity of power to overcome the friction of its many axles and machinery, in addition to what is requisite to overcome the gravity of the vessel. It is, moreover, injurious to the vessels which are taken up thereby, on account of its elevating the forward part, before the centre and stern become seated on the carriage. The most judicious mode in present use, for raising vessels to repair, and which must be preferred to all others, where there is a supply of water from an elevated reservoir, is on the principle of locks; the vessel being floated into one apartment, is elevated by the induction of water from above, till it can be floated over an elevated platform, where it is left at rest, while the water is allowed to pass off below. The sides of this upper box or apartment, are moveable, being attached to the bottom or platform by hinge joints, so that they may be let down to a horizontal position, thus giving the workmen the advantage of light and convenience. The "dry dock" in the Navy Yard at Charlestown, Mass., is constructed awkwardly enough; but as the vessels at that place are not _raised_, it does not come under this head. The massive stones which were used in the construction of some of the ancient edifices, were evidently raised by inclined planes. A huge mound of earth was built up round the building, completely enclosing it; and the elevation of the mound kept pace with that of the edifice: thus giving the laborers a chance to roll up the stones to their places. They used no other mechanical power than the simple windlass and lever; and no other carriage than a drag, under which was placed rollers. When the building was completed, the earth was taken away, and levelled about the vicinity. The modern method of raising stones for building, and which is now used in the building of heavy stone edifices, is by the use of a set of stout tackle blocks, the _fall rope_ of which is taken up by a geered windlass, operated by a steam engine; the upper block being of course attached to an elevated _shears_ or derick. Vessels, and other bodies, which have been sunk in the ocean, have been sometimes raised by means of airtight sacks, attached to different parts of the object by means of diving bells, been inflated with air, forced down through hollow tubes by pumps, till they thus acquired a buoyancy sufficient for the purpose. The power of buoyancy has also been applied for elevating vessels above water, by placing hollow trunks, filled with water, under the keel of the vessel, and then pumping them out. One of the best methods that has ever yet been proposed for raising vessels to repair, is to place under the keel a horizontal platform, to which is attached four large hollow trunks under its four corners: the trunks to be filled with water, and to have open apertures in the bottom of each. Then by allowing a stream of atmospheric air, to rush by its own expansive force from the reservoirs in which it had been previously compressed, through suitable pipes or hose, into each trunk, the water is expelled through the apertures in the bottom, and the vessel is elevated immediately, and without loss of time. In this case, the reservoirs (iron cylinders) of compressed air, may be recharged by steam or other power, during the process of repairing one vessel, and be thus in readiness for another. A patent has been granted for this invention, but it has not yet been put in operation on a scale of practical use, though the patentee would willingly give the right of the patent to any person or company who should be disposed to construct the apparatus on a large scale. We have recently given a description of Mr. Spencer's plan for elevating vessels, and some other modes have been recently projected, which we may describe in a future number. * * * * * INFORMATION TO PERSONS HAVING BUSINESS TO TRANSACT AT THE PATENT OFFICE. SEC. 1. The existing laws relating to patents are those approved July 4, 1836, March 3, 1837, and March 3, 1839; all former acts having been repealed by the act of 1836. SEC. 2. "Patents are granted for any new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement on any art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, not known or used by others before his or their discovery or invention thereof, and not, at the time of his application for a patent, in public use, or on sale, with his or their consent, or allowance, as the inventor or discoverer." Act of 1836, section 6. "No patent shall be held to be invalid by reason of the purchase, sale, or use [of the invention,] prior to the application for a patent as aforesaid, except on proof of abandonment of such invention to the public, or that such purchase, sale or public use, has been for more than two years prior to such application for a patent."--Act of March 3, 1839. SEC. 3. The term for which a patent is granted, is fourteen years; but it may, under certain circumstances, be renewed for seven years, as hereinafter mentioned. SEC. 4. Patents are granted to citizens of the United States, to aliens who shall have been resident in the United States one year preceding, and shall have made oath of their intention to become citizens thereof, and also to foreigners who are inventors or discoverers. SEC. 5. A patent may be taken out by the inventor in a foreign country, without affecting his right to a patent in the United States, provided the invention has not been introduced into public and common use in the United States prior to the application for such patent. In every such case the patent is limited to fourteen years from the date of the foreign letter patent. A patent is not granted upon introduction of a new invention from a foreign country, unless the person who introduced it be the inventor or discoverer. If an alien neglects to put and continue on sale the invention in the United States, to the public, on reasonable terms, for eighteen months, the patentee Uses all benefit of the patent. SEC. 6. Joint inventors are entitled to a joint patent, but neither can claim one separately. SEC. 7. An invention can assign his right before a patent is obtained, so as to enable the assignee to take out a patent in his own name; but the assignment must be first entered on record; and the application therefor must be duly made, and the specification signed, and sworn to by the inventor. And in the case of an assignment by a foreigner, the same fee will be required as if the patent issued to the inventor. SEC. 8. The assignment of a patent may be to the whole or to an undivided part, "by any instrument in writing." All assignments, and also the grant or conveyance of the use of the patent in any town, comity, State, or specified district, must be recorded in the Patent Office, within three months from date of the same.--But assignments, if recorded after three months have expired, will be on record as notice to protect against subsequent purchases. No fee is now charged for recording assignments. Patents, grants, and assignments, recorded prior to the 15th of December, 1836, must be recorded anew before they can be valid as evidence of any title. This is also free of expense. SEC. 9. In case of the decease of an inventor, before he had obtained a patent for his invention, "the right of applying for and obtaining such patent shall devolve on the administrator or executor of such person, in trust for the heirs of law of the deceased, if he shall have died intestate; but if otherwise, then in trust for his devisees, in as full and ample manner, and under the same conditions, limitations, and restrictions, as the same was held, or might have been claimed or enjoyed, by such person in his or her lifetime; and when application for a patent shall be made by such legal representatives, the oath or affirmation shall be so varied as to be applicable to them."--Act of 1836, sec. 10. SEC. 10, The Patent Office will be open for examination during office hours, and applicants can personally, or by attorney, satisfy themselves on inspection of models and specifications, of the expediency of filing an application for a patent. SEC. 11. All fees received are paid into the Treasury, and the law has required the payment of the patent fee before the application is considered; two-thirds of which fee is refunded on withdrawing the application. But no money is refunded on the withdrawal of an application, after an appeal has been taken from the decision of the Commissioner of Patents. And no part of the fee paid for caveats, and on applications for the addition of improvements re-issues, and appeals, can be withdrawn. SEC. 12. It is a frequent practice for inventors to send a description of their inventions to the office, and inquire whether there exists any thing like it, and whether a patent can be had therefor. _As the law does not provide for the examination of descriptions of new inventions, except upon application for a Patent, no answer can be given to such inquiries_. * * * * * A sentimental writer says it is astonishing how much light a man may radiate upon the world around him, especially when the body he admires is beside him. * * * * * Among the persons who recently laid in the Boston jail over Sunday, and were fined Monday morning for intemperance or rowdyism, were a member of the bar and a clergy man. * * * * * Said a bishop to a rough wagoner, "you seem better fed than taught." "Of course," replied the fellow, "for we _feed_ ourselves, but for teaching we depend on _you._" * * * * * [Illustration: The Reg(ulator?)] The use of a pair of conical drums in reversed position, and connected by a band, as shown in the cut, has been known for several years to a few, but yet are not extensively known, and but a few of them have been seen in operation in this country. It will be seen that if the band be removed laterally, either to the right or left, the relative motion of drums will be materially varied. These drums being arranged to constitute a connection of motion between the driving power and driven machine, may be made to render the motion of the latter either regular or irregular at the option of the operator. If the band connecting the drums, is governed by a shifting lever connected with a _governor_, it may be so adjusted as to keep the motion of the machine regular, although the driving power should be irregular in its motion, as is the case with a wind-wheel. But if the operator is engaged, requires a move rapid motion at one time than at another, he can accommodate himself by shifting the position of the cone-band, to the right or left, as occasion may require. This is very convenient for turners, whose business requires at some times a rapid speed of the mandrill, and at other times a slow or gentle motion. These drums, as represented, must be swelled in the centre, that the band may be kept uniformly straight. * * * * * A REMARKABLE MINERAL SPRING. It may not perhaps be generally known even to our own citizens that there is in the town of Riga, N.Y., one mile east of Churchville, on the farm of Linus Pierson, a Mineral Spring, the gases from which are sufficiently combustible to burn as clear and brightly as a lamp, at all times of the day and night, and which is never exhausted. The spring is located near the bathing-house on the farm, and a tube has been constructed, leading from the spring to the rooms, by means of which the house is made sufficiently light without the use of lamps. Some time ago the State Geological Surveyors paid this spring a visit, and analyzed the gas, which was found to be composed of sulphurated and carbonated hydrogen. The water is strongly impregnated with iron. * * * * * COOL FORETHOUGHT. One of the most admirable instances of prudential forethought we have ever heard of, occurred in Boston a few days since. Three Irishmen were engaged in taking down a wall in Mount Vernon street. The wall fell upon and buried them. A lady from the opposite side of the street rushed out, and calling to those who were rescuing the poor fellows, said, "Bring them in here. Bring them in here. I have been expecting this all day." The men were carried into her house, and, true enough, she had "every thing ready," bandages, lint, laudanum, and all. If this be not an instance of _cool forethought_, we know not what is. * * * * * IT MAY BE SO. It is stated in a Cincinnati paper, that the body of a drowned child has been discovered by means of a loaf of bread in which was deposited a quantity of quicksilver. The loaf was sent afloat in the canal, and after floating some distance, remained stationary, and beneath the spot thus indicated, the child was found. That mercury may have a natural attraction towards a human body, is possible; but the use of the loaf of bread in combination, indicate a superstitious faith rather than real science. * * * * * Several rich lead mines have recently been discovered on the Mississippi River, a few miles above Bellevue. The unusual low state of the river lead to the discovery. * * * * * NEW INVENTIONS. HOWE'S SEWING MACHINE. We have heretofore noticed the extraordinary invention by Mr. Elias Howe, Jr., of Cambridge, Mass.--a machine that sews beautiful and strong seams in cloth as rapid as nine tailors. We are not yet prepared to furnish a full description of this machine, but the following claims, in the words of the patentee, may give some idea of the various parts in combination. This machine was patented September 10th. "I claim the lifting of the thread that passes through the needle eye by the lifting rod, for the purpose of forming a loop of loose thread that is to be subsequently drawn in by the passage of the shuttle; said lifting rod being furnished with a lifting pin, and governed in its motions by the guide pieces and other devices. "I claim the holding of the thread that is given out by the shuttle, so as to prevent its unwinding from the shuttle bobbin, after the shuttle has passed through the loop, said thread being held by means of the lever, or clipping piece. "I claim the manner of arranging and combining the small lever, with the sliding box in combination with the spring piece, for the purpose of tightening the stitch as the needle is retracted. "I claim the holding of the cloth to be sewn, by the use of a baster plate, furnished with points for that purpose, and with holes enabling it to operate as a rack, thereby carrying the cloth forward, and dispensing altogether with the necessity of basting the parts together." * * * * * STEERING APPARATUS. Mr. R. C. Holmes, says the United States Gazette, has invented a new application of the tiller rope to the wheel for steering vessels, and has prepared a model of the whole application, tiller-frame, wheel, and rope, so that the properties of the invention can be easily discovered. The advantages are that there is no slack made; and, consequently, there is no chafing, and a single hand at the wheel will do the ordinary work of two men. * * * * * ELECTRO-MAGNETIC BOAT. It is stated in some of our exchanges, that Dr. Page, of Washington, has perfected a boat to be propelled by the electro-magnetic power. We know of no man better qualified to produce and introduce successfully such an invention, and we feel assured that whatever enterprise Dr. Page undertakes in that line, will be very apt to go ahead. We hope soon to obtain further intelligence on the subject. * * * * * It is reported that the British government has granted $100,000 per annum to the royal company of Atlantic steamers, for the establishment of a post route to the Pacific, across the Isthmus of Panama. * * * * * IMPROVEMENT IN BOATS. There is a model of a steamboat to be seen on the Chesapeake, invented and constructed by Cyrus Williams, Esq., which is exciting considerable interest among steamboat men. It is in the usual form of a boat, but more flat-bottomed, and much longer in proportion to its width, than the boats now in use, giving it a greater surface to the water, and of course a lighter draught. The improvement is in applying the bridge principle of bearers in supporting length of boats. It looks perfectly feasible. Mr. Williams thinks it will be a great saving of expense, as it takes much less timber, and all of it can be sawed in a mill, being straight stuff. He offers to build a boat on this model, furnishing one third of the stock, and if it does not make 25 miles to the hour, he will forfeit his share. * * * * * CASTING IRON CANNON BY A GALVANIC PROCESS. A hoaxical looking article, under the above caption, is going the rounds, and represents that successful experiments on this subject have been recently made at Berlin. As no description or illustration of the process or principle is given, we leave the subject for those who are ever ready to swallow whatever appears in a newspaper, without regard to probability. * * * * * NEW SHINGLE MACHINE. Among the patents particularly noticed in the Commissioner's report, is one for a shingle machine, which cuts the shingles in a peculiar form. The shingles cut by this machine does not taper from one extremity to the other, but the taper is confined to about half the length of it at one end, the faces of the remaining half being parallel to each other. This shape of the shingle avoids the bending which is incidental to those of the ordinary form, when nailed upon the roof--an object well worthy of attainment. * * * * * IMPROVEMENT IN BLACKSMITHS FORGES. This invention was entered at the Patent Office on the 15th instant, by James K. Hobbs. The improvement consists in the placing of grate-bars at the bottom of the fire chamber, below which is an open air chamber into which the cinders and ashes fall through the grate, instead of accumulating and clogging the fire chamber. The cinders may be drawn out of the air chamber by an opening at the side of the forge. The blast is admitted above the grate, and the mouth of the air chamber being ordinarily closed, the blast is not affected by the grate. We think it must prove a useful invention. * * * * * IMPROVED FIRE ENGINE. This improvement consists in part, in the arrangement of two sets of levers and hand poles on each side, in such a manner that "when force is applied to the hand-poles of the outside levers, in a reverse direction to that which is applied to the hand poles of the inside levers, both powers will agree in forcing the pistons of the pumps in one and the same direction, while the reverse motion of the levers will prevent the engine from rocking". Entered at the Patent Office, on the 10th instant, by Barton & Button. * * * * * A SIMPLE CHEESE-PRESS. [Illustration] An ingenious mechanic, not long since, hearing some persons conversing on the ordinary cost of cheese-presses, which is generally from three to six dollars, boldly averred that he could build a cheese-press in one hour, which would answer a good purpose as such, and which might be afforded for fifty cents. Being bantered on the subject, he went to work, and by means of a good lathe and boring machine, he actually produced his cheese-press within the hour; though not very smoothly finished. We give a sketch of it at the head of this article,--too plain to require explanation. Subsequently, several others were made on the same plan. * * * * * CAST IRON ROOFING. A specimen of cast-iron plates for roofing of buildings, says the Philadelphia Ledger, has been exhibited at the Exchange, in Philadelphia, by the inventor and patentee, Mr. Wm. Beach. The plates are about a foot square, and are made to fit one into another so as to render the roof perfectly water-tight, with the application of white lead to the joints. In every respect this material for roofing is preferable to any other description now in use. As to its durability, there can be no doubt that it would remain perfectly whole for ages, if covered occasionally with a coat of paint, and even without that preservative, rust would not affect it materially for a period of fifty years at least. As compared with copper, the cost would be nearly one half, as it is expected the iron can be furnished at 16 cents per square foot, while copper would at the most moderate estimate cost 28 cents. As regards the weight of an iron roof, which at first sight would appear an objection, it is far less than one formed of slate, and does not much exceed one of copper. The iron plates weigh three and a half pounds per square foot. A slate roof would cost about eight cents per square foot, but for durability, and the ease with which it can be put on and made water tight, the iron roofing would appear to be far preferable. The plates exhibited were cast at Troy, New York, and are of the very best quality. The patent for the eastern States is now owned by Mr. Hiram Hemmistone, of Troy, in which neighborhood the adaptation of such a durable material for roofing is rapidly attracting public attention there. Starbuck's machine shop and foundry at Troy has been covered on this plan, and it has also been adopted for the roofing of an arsenal at West Point. * * * * * THE NEW AND WONDERFUL PAVEMENT. We presented in a late number, a brief extract from an article on this subject from the "Eureka," and should have thought no more of it, had we not observed the following notice editorial in the N, Y. Farmer and Mechanic. We copy the article entire, that our readers may judge for themselves whether the style and statements savor most of reality or humbug. "NEW PAVEMENTS.--A new system of making streets has been made known to us;--but as it will be the subject of Patents, here and in Europe, we can only give some of its most prominent features. A material or composition, of a very cheap character, has been invented, as hard, strong and compact as flint. It is formed into any desirable shape in the course of manufacture. From this, streets of any grade may be formed, and in such a way as to entirely secure a permanent and level surface to its proper arch; it can be taken up in five minutes, so as to get at the water pipes, and on being replaced will, from necessity, resume its first position. In durability, it will last ten times as long as granite, and twenty times as long as the common paving, without liability to require repair. It is so laid that frost and storms cannot affect it. But we shall have occasion to refer to it again".--Persons wishing information may inquire of Kingsley & Pirsson, No. 5 Wall street. * * * * * TO RENDER SHINGLES DURABLE. One of our exchanges mentions an experiment which was made twenty-seven years ago, of dipping shingles into hot linseed oil prior to nailing them on the roof: and although they have not been painted, they are said to continue perfectly sound as when first put on. They were of the common pine, and as much exposed as roofs in general. This instance may be sufficient to establish the fact that shingles thus prepared, will last longer without painting than they could possibly be preserved by painting in the usual way. As a security against fire, however, we should recommend that they be first dipped in a hot solution of common salt; and afterward, when dry, be dipped in the hot oil. The expense will be trifling, and there can be no doubt of their durability, and there will be no danger of their taking fire from sparks or cinders. * * * * * BEST PLAN OF A BARN. Perhaps no building on the farm in the Northern States is of more importance than the barn. Those who have had the charge of cattle during our long winters, can at once see that much time and hard labor could be saved by a judicious arrangement of stalls, and bay or bay lots, granaries, &c, so that every creature could be fed by taking as few steps as possible. One very important thing to be considered, is the best mode of preserving as well as collecting manure, so that it shall retain all its valuable properties in the spring, and be easily got out. We like the plan of having a barn on the side of a hill, and so arranged that you may drive your cart load in pretty near the ridge pole, and thus pitch most of your hay down instead of up. Having your stalls under the hay, you can continue to pitch the hay down, and if you have a cellar beneath, you can throw the manure down also, and thus make the attraction of gravitation perform much of the labor of transportation from the mow to the manure cart. * * * * * The Westfield, Mass., News-Letter states that there are between 25 and 30 manufacturers of whips in that town, who employ not less than 1000 braiders, beside their shop hands. * * * * * ROBERT FULTON. Robert Fulton, a celebrated engineer, whose name is connected with steamboat navigation, was born in the town of Little Britain, in the state of Pennsylvania, in 1765. His genius disclosed itself at an early period. He was attracted to the shops of mechanics; and at the age of seven he painted landscapes and portraits in Philadelphia. Thus he was enabled in part to purchase a small farm for his widowed mother. At the age of twenty-one, he by the advice of his friends repaired to London, to place himself under guidance of Mr. West, the painter, and by him was kindly received, and admitted as an inmate of his house for several years. Prosecuting his business as painter, he spent two years in Devonshire, where he became acquainted with the duke of Bridgewater and with lord Stanhope, well known for his attachment to the mechanic arts. In 1793, he engaged in the project of improving inland navigation, and in 1796, obtained patents for a double inclined plane, and for machines for spinning flax and making ropes. The subject of canals now chiefly occupied his attention, and at this period, in 1796, his work on canals was published. In his profession of civil engineer he was greatly benefitted by his skill in drawing and painting. He went to Paris in 1797, and being received into the family of Joel Barlow, he there spent seven years, studying chemistry, physics and mathematics, and acquiring a knowledge of the French, Italian, and German languages. In Dec. 1797, he made his first experiment on sub-marine explosion in the Seine, but without success. His plan for a sub-marine boat was afterwards perfected.--In 1801, while he was residing with his friend, Mr. Barlow, he met in Paris Chancellor Livingston, the American minister, who explained to him the importance in America of navigating boats by steam. Mr. Fulton had already conceived the project as early as 1793, as appears by his letter to lord Stanhope. He now engaged anew in the affair, and at the common expense of himself and Mr. Livingston built a boat on the Seine, in 1803, and successfully navigated the river. The principles of the steam engine he did not invent; he claimed only the application of that machine to water wheel, for propelling vessels. In 1806 he returned to America; he and Mr. Livingston built, in 1807, the first boat, the Clermont, 130 feet in length, which navigated the Hudson at the rate of five miles an hour. Nothing could exceed the surprise and admiration of all who witnessed the experiment. The minds of the most incredulous were, changed in a few minutes. Before the boat had made the progress of a quarter of a mile, the greatest unbeliever must have been converted. The man who, while he looked on the expensive machine, thanked his stars that he had more wisdom than to waste his money on such idle schemes, changed the expression of his features as the boat moved from the wharf and gained her speed, and his complacent expression gradually softened into one of wonder. The jeers of the ignorant, who had neither sense nor feeling to suppress their contemptuous ridicule and rude jokes, were silenced for a moment by a vulgar astonishment, which deprived them of the power of utterance, till the triumph of genius extorted from the incredulous multitude which crowded the shores, shouts and acclamations of congratulation and applause. In February, 1809, he took out his first patent. In 1811 and 1812, he built two steam ferry boats for crossing the Hudson; he contrived also a very ingenious floating dock for the reception of those boats. In 1813, he obtained a patent for a sub-marine battery. Conceiving the plan of a steam man-of-war, the government, in March 1814, appropriated $320,000 for constructing it, and appointed him the engineer. In about four months, she was launched with the name of Fulton the First; but before this frigate was finished, Fulton had paid the debt of nature. * * * * * The population of Great Britain for the last ten years shows an average annual increase of 230,000. The population of London has increased 27 per cent. within fifteen years. * * * * * Within the last 16 years, 612 steamboats have been built in Pittsburg--besides 31 the present year. * * * * * INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME II. With our best bow, we present ourselves before our friends and the public, in a new dress, from head to foot, and though conscious of appearing rather plain and quaker-like, we can assure our friends that in this, we conform to the newest fashion, and have no doubt of being treated civilly by as large a portion of the public, as if we had appeared with more gay feathers in our cap, with starched ruffles and gilt buttons and trimmings. In this, however, we would not be understood to boast, of any peculiar evidence of taste of our own, as we have been induced in this instance, to submit wholly to that of our tailors, who it must be conceded, understand these things much better; while we have only to regard alertness and independence of movement, with a little vivacity, and intelligence of conversation.--Our general principles, and rules of self-government will continue according to our original pledge, and the policy pursued in our first volume: we shall endeavor to encourage and excite a spirit of enterprise and emulation in artists, manufactures and mechanics, while we present such instruction and useful intelligence in arts and trades, practical science and new discoveries, inventions and improvements, as will add to the facilities of enterprise, and conduce to the prosperity and independence of the working class in particular. And that we may furnish an acceptable family newspaper, we shall continue to give in a brief and condensed form, the most useful and interesting intelligence of passing events,--not omitting a small portion of serious matter, suitable for Sunday reading, but avoiding the disgusting and pernicious details of crime, with which too many of our public journals abound, and which evidently produces a deleterious effect on the morals of the community. With regard to political and sectarian subjects, however, we feel much inclined to change our style of neutrality so far as to advocate all parties, sects and denominations, each in its turn, which course may be more in accordance with our own maxim of "enlightening and pleasing," than either growling policy, or the affected indifference and cold inattention which tends to produce a reciprocity of coldness, and pleases none. On the subject of policy and rules, we might say more; but having already said twice as much as we at first intended, and finding ourselves near the bottom of the scrap on which we scribble, we have only to find some suitable form of sentence wherewith to round off this subject; and for this purpose, without wishing to be suspected of any motives of interest, we would gently and respectfully suggest to our readers the propriety of advancing the intelligence, enterprise and consequent prosperity of the community, by introducing and recommending to the patronage of all, this same SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. * * * * * ADVANTAGE OF LOW FARES. During the month of July, 1845, when the fare between New York and Boston was reduced to the "ruinous rates" of only two dollars, the receipts on the different routes were $45,208; but during the corresponding month of the present year, with the fare up to four dollars, the receipts have been only $35,963: being _nine thousand two hundred and forty-five dollars_ less for a single month, than when the fares were at half-price. * * * * * AVALON RAILROAD IRON. The Covington Manufacturing Co. at their Avalon works, near Baltimore, are now delivering, under their contract, the iron for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. This iron is made exclusively of the best quality of Baltimore charcoal pig iron. The fixtures by which it is manufactured are of the most approved description, and embrace several original improvements, by means of which nearly every bar is made perfect. * * * * * THE MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH. LINE TO BURLINGTON, VT.--A movement appears to be in progress in Vermont for establishing a line of telegraphic communication from Springfield or Albany to Burlington. Much confidence is expressed by some of the Vermont papers that the enterprise will be carried through. It is stated that the Magnetic Telegraph will extended from Washington city to Richmond, and completed before the middle of December next. TELEGRAPH TO CANADA.--It affords us great satisfaction, says the Montreal Herald, to learn that there is a great probability of the "lightning lines"--the Electric Telegraph--being extended from the great cities of the United States to Montreal and Quebec. A gentleman is now in town, and has submitted proposals to the Board of Trade for making an immediate commencement with this most, important public work. This line is expected to be extended to Montreal from Saratoga, to which place a line is already in operation. The line between New York and Buffalo having been recently completed, the following is reported to have been the first telegraphic conversation on the occasion. GENERAL CHAT BY LIGHTNING.--At one o'clock, P. M., precisely, the Telegraph Line connected through the whole distance from New York to Buffalo, 507 miles. Upon turning the adjusting screw of the magnet by Prof. Morse, all things were found right, and Prof. Morse sent his compliments to all the operators on the line. The first to answer was Albany. "The compliments of the _Albany_ Office to Prof. Morse and Mr. Wood." "_Utica_ Office wishes to be remembered to Prof. Morse and Mr. Wood." "_Auburn_ Office sends compliments to Prof. Morse and Mr. Wood." "_Buffalo_ sends compliments to Prof. Morse and Mr. Wood, and presents _Lake Erie_ to _Old Ocean_." "_Rochester_ Office sends compliments to Prof. Morse and Mr. Wood, and presents _Erie Canal_ to _Croton Aqueduct_." "_Auburn_ presents _State Prison_ to the _Tombs_." "_Syracuse_ sends compliments to Prof. Morse, and asks how are the Yorkers." "_Troy_ says, Now give me a chance. Compliments to Prof. Morse and Mr. Wood; and now for business, if there is any." "_Utica_ asks, Need we keep dark any longer?" "_Troy_ answers, No. Announce it to the four winds that Buffalo and New York _are no longer separated--they talk to each other by lightning._" This entire dialogue occupied somewhat less than _five minutes_! * * * * * Setts of thirty-six numbers of the last volume of this paper, may be had for one dollar--very cheap. Any one desiring them may enclose the amount to the publishers. * * * * * ADVERTISING IN LONDON. A new and "improved" mode of advertising has been introduced in London; which is to furnish laborers, carmen, &e. with while frocks or jackets, on the backs of which are printed in large characters, the advertisements of hotels, tradesmen, &c. The wearers of the bills are generally allowed a small compensation. * * * * * DEERFIELD BRIDGE. The railroad bridge at Deerfield, Mass., is said to be a splendid affair. It is fifty feet above the traveled stage road bridge, and nearly eighty feet above the waters of the river. The piers are already erected, and nearly ready for the superstructure. * * * * * The Artesian well at South Boston has been sunk to the depth of nearly 400 feet. The boring machine is worked by steam power, and progresses about 12 feet per day. * * * * * Some impudent doctor says that tight lacing is a public benefit; for it kills off the foolish girls, and leaves the wise ones for good wives and mothers. * * * * * An exchange remarks--"When we see a man kick a horse, we say at once, that he never need come to court our daughter, for he should not have her if he was worth a million." * * * * * INFORMATION WANTED. Mr. Editor,--I have a saw-mill which draws thirty-six square inches of water, under thirty feet head. I wish to build another below with only twenty feet head of water. How many square inches aperture will be required to discharge the same quantity in the same time? If some of your correspondents will give me an answer, they will much oblige me. R. C. Navarino, Sept. 7, 1846. We shall have no occasion to depend on correspondents for the intelligence above required. Thirty-six inches of aperture under thirty feet head, will admit the discharge of 660 cubic feet of water per minute; the velocity of the water being forty-four feet per second. Under twenty feet head the velocity is only thirty-six feet per second, and consequently forty-four inches aperture is required to discharge an equal quantity. _Rule in Hydraulics_: (never before published.) To ascertain the velocity of water issuing through an aperture under a given head: Multiply the head in feet by 62, and the square root of the product will show the velocity in feet per second. * * * * * RAILROAD INTELLIGENCE. Old Colony Railroad, from Boston to Plymouth, Mass., has for some time past been in full operation, and is doing a fair business. The whole amount of the stock of the Michigan Central Railroad--$2,000,000--has been taken up, and of course the enterprise will go forward. On the first day of the opening of the subscription books for the stock of the New York and Boston Railroad, the people of Middletown took shares to the amount of $350,000; and they expect to go up to half a million. The Cheshire N. H. Railroad is going ahead rapidly, the grading and bridging on every part of the line being in progress. This road is to be carried over the Connecticut River at or near Bellows' Falls. The stock of the Wilton N. H. Branch Railroad is said to be all taken up. A General Meeting of the proprietors of the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railway was recently held at Montreal. It appears by the report of the board of directors, that 5,364 shares had been taken up, amounting to about £1,200,000. All parties appear to be confident that this road will be constructed and in operation at an early day. The Little Miami Railroad having been opened to Springfield, is doing a fair business, and adds important facilities to trade in that section. The directors of the New York and Erie Railroad are said to be "going on with it in the right way to accomplish the great object of the undertaking." Contracts are already made for the construction of the road as far as the valley of the Delaware. Proposals for grading 133 miles more are advertised for, which will carry the road to Binghampton, 270 miles from New York. * * * * * It is asserted that of all single marriageable ladies who reached Oregon last season, two-thirds were married before the first of March. * * * * * Alexandria has decided on re-annexation to Virginia, by a vote of 633 to 197. Probably some of her citizens want to be Governors and Representatives. * * * * * The arrival of the new steamship Southerner in Charleston, 57 hours from New York, excited much admiration. She brought 125 passengers; and was pronounced decidedly the handsomest vessel seen in those waters. * * * * * The price of flour at Buffalo, on the 18th inst., was $3.70 per barrel. Corn, 49 cents per bushel. * * * * * Mr. J. B. Gough, who has been for some time seriously indisposed, has nearly recovered his health, and returned north. * * * * * Gold is imported from St. Petersburgh to London, at the rate of $500,000 per month.--The mining business in Russia is increasing. * * * * * The Boston Common Council charge $600 per annum for the licenses of the Howard and National Theatres, with the condition that spirituous liquors shall not be sold, and no female admitted unless in company with a male. * * * * * LATEST NEWS: [Illustration: Latest News] ARRIVAL OF THE CAMBRIA. The steamship Cambria arrived at Boston on Friday, the 18th inst., thirteen days from Liverpool. From the news by this arrival, we select the following brief items:--not very interesting, but better than none. * * * * * The man Henry, who lately attempted to shoot the King of France, has been tried and condemned to work in the galleys for life.--During his trial, he expressed a wish to be condemned to death, but the request was not granted. * * * * * The Bank of England has reduced its rate of interest to 3 per cent., whereby greater facilities are given to trade to counteract the depression likely to proceed from other causes. * * * * * The British ship America recently arrived from the coast of Mexico and Peru, liberally laden with specie, the amount whereof is stated at _six millions of dollars_, which, in silver, would make nearly two hundred and fifty tons. * * * * * The Queen of Spain, Isabella, has decided to marry her cousin, the Duke de Cadiz; thus putting to rest a subject which has long agitated the circles of royalty in Europe. * * * * * Late news from the east furnishes the report that robberies and piracies are of hourly occurrence in the immediate vicinity of Hong Kong. An ordinance had been promulgated in China for the relief of debtors. * * * * * The Cambria brought 133 passengers, among whom were Hon. Washington Irving, our late minister to Spain, and the celebrated "Cruikshanks," the caricaturist. * * * * * THE MEXICAN WAR. The latest news from Mexico, and from our army, represent affairs in a most quaint and ludicrous light, with regard to the policy and movements of all parties. The average progress of the army of invasion appears to be about three miles a day, with no opposition, nor prospect of any; while the Mexicans are tame as bullfrogs, showing no disposition to either fight or run. Gen. Parades having got sick of his job, has suffered himself to be imprisoned at the approach of Santa Anna, who has returned and resumed the government without opposition. Mr. Polk having sent an embassy, virtually asking permission to "give it up," has been refused a hearing, unless he will first withdraw our troops from the Mexican territory; while the Mexican army appointed to combat and conquer Gen. Taylor, remains at ease and content at Mexico, calculating, probably, that the longer they wait, the less distance they will have to travel to encounter the Yankees. Whether our President will call off Gen. Taylor with the American troops, before they reach anywhere in particular, remains to be decided. * * * * * TRADE TO SANTA FE. The trade to Santa Fe is said to be much greater this year than ever before. Thirty-nine companies of traders have gone out this season, taking with them four hundred and thirteen wagons, which are in the charge of about eighteen hundred men. The value of the goods carried out by these traders, is estimated at nearly a million of dollars. * * * * * A large mastiff dog picked up a favorite lap dog in the upper part of the city last week, and ran off with it. He was pursued by a mob, and after a severe chase, the terrified pet was recovered and brought back rejoicing. * * * * * THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Persons wishing to subscribe for this paper, have only to enclose the amount in a letter directed (post paid) to MUNN & COMPANY, Publishers of the Scientific American, New York City. TERMS.--$2 a year; ONE DOLLAR IN ADVANCE--the remainder in 6 months. _Postmasters_ are respectfully requested to receive subscriptions for this paper, to whom a discount of 25 per cent will be allowed. Any person sending us 4 subscribers for 6 months, shall receive a copy of the paper for the same length of time, gratis. * * * * * THE HARBOR OF HAVANA [Illustration: Havana Harbor] Our engraving represents a view of the harbor of Havana, which is one of the most commodious in the world, communicating with the sea by a channel little more than half a mile in length, and from 300 to 350 yards wide; its depth varying from eight to ten fathoms. The harbor itself is an oblong basin, surrounded by heights which usually shelter it from the wind. Havana is a place of considerable strength, and, besides the walls and ditches which surround it, the city is defended by six strongholds, called the Moro, the Cobanas, No. 4, the Atares, the Principie and the Putna. The first and last serve to protect the entrance of the harbor, the second is a sort of citadel and the others are so placed as to cover the approaches by land. The line of fortification, embraces a sort of irregular polygon of an eliptical form, the greatest diameter of which is 2,100 yards, and the smallest 1,200 yards in extent. The entrance between the Moro and Putna, castles is about 1,500 yards long, and in its narrowest part 350 yards wide. In the arsenal of the Havana, there have been built 49 ships of the line, 22 frigates, 7 packet ships, 9 brigs of war, and 15 schooners of war. The town is built on the western side of the basin, near the channel, on a kind of promontory. The suburbs, or _barrios esta muros_, cover more ground and contain a larger population than the city itself, and yet they are so intimately connected with it, that the first of the houses in the suburban street, stands on the very edge of the _glacis_. The streets are narrow, crooked, and generally unpaved, but they contain some well-built houses. There are, too, several good buildings among the churches, one of which contains the remains of Christopher Columbus. The other large edifices, as the Palace of the Government (shown to the right of the engraving,) that of the commandant of the marine, the arsenal, the post-office, and the building used for the manufacture of tobacco, are less remarkable for their architecture than for their solidity. Besides these, the city contains nine parish churches; six other churches, connected with hospitals and military orders; five chapels or hermitages; the Caza Cuna, a foundling hospital; and eleven convents, four for women, and seven for men. The other public establishments are the University, the colleges of San Carlos and San Francisco de Soles, the Botanic Garden, the Anatomical Museum and lecture rooms, the Academy of Painting and Design, a school of Navigation, and seventy-eight common schools for both sexes. These places of education are all under the protection of the Patriotic Society and the municipal authorities. The charitable institutions consist of the _Caza de Beneficiencia_, for both sexes, a penitentiary, a Magdalen Asylum, and seven hospitals--one of them contains a lunatic asylum. There are, besides, three theatres, an amphitheatre for bull fights, _plaza de toros_, and several public promenades, such as the Alameda and the Paseo Nuevo; In Turnbull's "Travels in Cuba," published by Longman & Co., London, 1840, the city is said to contain 3,671 houses within the walls, all built of stone; and in the suburbs, 7,968, of various materials. The number of private carriages for hire amounted, in 1827, to 2,651, and they are certainly now more numerous. In the same year, the population was 122,023--the whites were 46,621; the free negroes, 15,347; the free mulattoes, 8,215; the negro slaves, 22,830, and the mulatto slaves 1,010. Turnbull, speaking of the _Real Caza de Beneficencia_, says: "Girls are not admitted to the institution after 10 years of age; and, being entirely supported there, they are completely separated from their parents and their families, until the time of their final removal from the establishment has arrived. They are taught the various branches of needle-work and dress-making, and receive such other instruction as may sufficiently qualify them for becoming domestic servants, housemaids, cooks or washerwomen. They are not suffered, by the regulations, to remain in the house after the age of twenty-one: but, before that time, it is the duty of the _junta_, or committee of management, to endeavor to procure employment for them earlier in a private family or in some house of business. Should the circumstances of the parents have improved during the stay of their daughter at the institution, they are not suffered to take her away until they have paid her previous board and education at the rate of fifteen dollars a month; but if the girl herself has acquired property by inheritance, or is able to improve her condition by marriage or otherwise, independent of her parents, she is suffered to leave the house without any payment; and, in the event of her marriage to the satisfaction of the junta, a little dowry is provided for her, amounting to $500, from a fund created from prizes in the lottery, the produce of tickets presented to the institution. Six such marriages had taken place, and dowries bestowed from this fond in the course of a single year." This lottery business shows the spirit of gambling so largely developed in nations of Spanish descent. The Mexicans are noted for it, and Santa Ana, who spent his exile in Cuba, and recently sailed from Havana for Vera Cruz, indulged in the propensity to a great extent. But he had two strings to his bow, and whilst playing his fighting cocks was also playing for an empire, and has won the game. How long he will hold it remains to be seen. * * * * * [Illustration: HUMOUROUS] HUMOROUS. A VERY LONG NOSE. A gentleman having put out a candle by accident one night, ordered his waiting man (who was a simple being) to light it again in the kitchen, adding--"But take care, James, that you do not hit yourself against anything in the dark." Mindful of the caution, James stretched out both arms at length before him, but unluckily, a door that stood half open, passed between his hands and struck him a woful blow upon the nose. "Golly gracious!" muttered he, when he recovered his senses a little, "I always heard that I had a very long nose, but I never thought it was longer than my arm!" * * * * * SOL. SMITH. The American Sentinel, speaking of "Sol. Smith, the Lawyer, Actor, Preacher," &c,. remarks--"We want a few more of such men," To which a Dayton (Ala.) paper replies--"You'll not get them. There are none others like him. He is the first and last of his genus, a _sol_itary specimen of a strange combination of character. Even in the physical way Sol. will be hard to match, for he is tall as a May-pole, and crooked as a pump-handle". * * * * * The True American says that when John C. Calhoun takes snuff, every man in South Carolina sneezes. * * * * * A PROFITABLE HOAX. Recently at the Copper Mines on Lake Superior, a "greenhorn" asked some miners to show him where to dig; they offered to do it, provided he would treat to a quart of "_prairie dew_," which he did, and they set him to work under a shady tree, in mere sport. Before night he struck a "_Lead_," and the next sold out for $4000. * * * * * REFORMING. "Well, how are you this morning?" said one old rowdy to another. "Well, sir, quite well--never was better; I'm another man, sir." "Ah! Then who pays those old accounts of yourself that was?" "Don't remind me of my sins, I'm reformed man. I was sinful in contracting such debts, and I must now atone for my error by not paying for them." * * * * * Yankee Hill is most outrageously puffed by some of the Albany papers. It is even insinuated that he is employed in part by a combination of tailors to cause the citizens to split their coats and other garments with laughing,--for the benefit of the trade. * * * * * Isaac Hill of the N. H. Patriot, concludes that the new tariff law is not seriously affecting the manufacturing interests, because he lately saw two loads of machinery going into the country. He must be a sage. * * * * * Some scoundrel has run away with the wife, children and furniture of a Mr. Reynold, residing in Allegany county, leaving nothing but an empty house with the rent unpaid. Really too bad. * * * * * [Illustration: Wrong Side Up] The appearance of many things and circumstances, like the above cut, depends on the view we take of them: and be it remembered that when a man's head is inverted, to him all appear _wrong side up_. Hence arises most of the complaints, grumbling and murmurings, about the times, the weather, the government, the people, &c. To one who possesses, or is possessed of a malignant, peevish disposition himself, most of the conduct of others, and the times and circumstances in general, will to him appear _wrong side up_, and he will not infrequently find his own calculations _up side down_. Could we at once, view each circumstance in all its different bearings, we should generally see some things that would paliate others, and thus render the whole at least tolerable: and most of the jarring and clashing in the world would thus be avoided. But by far the better way is to take of each and every thing a view the most favorable. This course is evidently peaceable, else politicians and sectarians could not so uniformly applaud every act of their favorite sect or party, and as uniformly oppose and deprecate those of their opponents. Every man who habituates himself to viewing things in the most favourable light, will find this course the most conducive to his own happiness, while it contributes much to that of his neighbors and associates. Look at the bright side of every thing, and hold every picture _right side up_. * * * * * IMPORTANCE OF HUMILITY. Dr. Franklin once received a very useful lesson from the excellent Dr. Cotton Mather, which he thus relates in a letter to his son:--"The last time I saw your father was in 1724. On taking my leave, he showed me a shorter way out of the house, by a narrow passage, which was crossed by a beam over head. We were still talking, and as I withdrew, he accompanying me behind, and I turning towards him, he said hastily, "Stoop, stoop!" I did not understand him till I felt my head hit against the beam. He was a man who never missed an opportunity of giving instruction; and upon this he said to me: 'You are young and have the world before you. _Learn to stoop_ as you go through it, and you will miss many hard thumps.' This advice, thus beat into my head, has frequently been of use to me. And I often think of it when I see pride mortified, and misfortune brought upon people by their carrying their heads too high." * * * * * "An ambassador" is defined as a man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country. To compensate them for the wear and tear of conscience, the country allows him a larger salary than any other subordinate they employ. * * * * * _Communicated_ THE EUREKA: OR JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF INVENTORS. (We had not intended to say any thing on the subject of the "Eureka" in this number, nor until the second number of the work should have been issued: but finding that a great degree of dissatisfaction exists in the minds even of those who are represented in that paper to be the supporters and conductors thereof; and having received an implied request for the insertion of the following communication, we would not refuse it, although we doubt whether the Eureka will ever reach its third number, whether its contents are subjected to public criticism or not.) _Mr. Editor:_ I had a little curiosity to hear what the press said of this periodical; but as yet I have not seen any notice, except the brief one in your columns. As a general rule, it is inexpedient for an association to publish a periodical. Instead of being an expression of the society, it almost unavoidably becomes the organ of a clique, and renders the patronage of an otherwise liberal organization subservient to private interest. In the columns of the "N. York Farmer" was first advocated the formation of the N. Y. State Agricultural Society. Among the first acts of this society was the issuing of an agricultural paper at _twenty-five cents_ per annum. This was scattered over the whole country to the injury of those who had been pioneers in publishing agricultural papers. The Society could not sustain it without loss. It was sold to an individual on condition that he would publish the proceedings of the Society. The price was quadrupled. It was soon found that a periodical having a general circulation, could not devote much space to a local society, however noble and prosperous. Necessity led to the columns of the daily press, and to the issuing of a yearly volume of Transactions. This will be the result of every prosperous association. If the proceedings are worth publishing, the press will spread them over the whole face of the civilized world. A collection of the most important and well-digested papers in a yearly volume, is more in accordance with the dignity and usefulness of a national association. Besides the injustice done to other periodicals previously in existence, the association adds nothing to its reputation by the undertaking. There are three or four individuals at the American Institute who have a hankering for the control of a paper. It is very easy to see that the publishing of a weekly paper by the Institute would be a suicidal act. All the Institute has to do is to make its proceedings interesting, and the widest publicity will be given as a matter of course. It was natural to suppose that with such an array of editors, editorial committee, and of associate professors, the "Eureka" would have done credit to the age, and claimed a rank, in point of literature, with other monthlies. But candor leads me to say, I do not recollect of having read a select journal with so many violations of correct writing. With the exception of two or three articles, the whole number abounds with school-boy violations of the English language. Redundancy and the want of appropriateness in the use of words are the most common errors. Circumlocution and want of precision are common; and in many sentences all these and other violations occur, rendering it almost impossible to guess at the meaning. Independent of "_inflexibly_ in advance" on the cover, the first sentence in the announcement on the first page is an instance of ambiguity and careless construction. In the first article, on the same page, are several sentences indicating the same carelessness. The article describing Hoe's cylinder press is a collection of badly-constructed sentences. If your limits permitted I would give a whole column of illustrations. The following sentences have so many faults I cannot Italicise. They may serve to exercise your juvenile readers. "We intend to pursue the publication of the list hereafter, future and past; that is in our next number will appear those of August 20, and follow for one month; also the list for one month prior to the 21st of June." "A material or composition, of a very cheap character, has been invented, and hard, strong and compact as flint." "From this, streets of any grade may be formed, and in such a way as to entirely to secure a permanent and level surface to its proper grade and arch". Three fourths of the sentences forming the article on Dr. Lewis' Railroad are very faulty. "Hutching's Propeller. It consists of forming a set of oars, and by cams upon themselves, and a foundation-plate with cams to match, cause the oars to revolve of themselves, when the main wheel, composed of these oars, revolves." "A patent is pending for the invention of a wheel, in which Mr. Wm. Hulme, of Paterson, N. J, has made an invention." "Russ's Pavement, There is no doubt it will make a good road in comparison with our present streets, as far as surface goes; but we must confess our incredulity of the entire success of this plan. We do not like the ideal method of getting at the water-pipes, &c. of the city." The Report on Rider's Iron Bridge is by another and different pen. I will pass by "_protracted_ from beneath upwards," &c., and give a few more quotations. "Inventors scarcely ever receive the compensation due their however distinguished merit, either pecuniary or laudatory. The originators or first conceivers of the most momentous plans of utility and comfort are oftenest the most grossly neglected and overlooked." "Shortly after these details reached the U. States, by Professor S. F. B. Morse, of New York, who was at the time of the discovery residing in Paris." "This committee give their services for the promotion of good to the cause of Invention and Science, without any consideration other than this." "Almost all other branches of knowledge have their magazines and journals, and other means of diffusing information, so that in their departments hardly a desideratum is left to be supplied; while the Inventor, as such, has almost no channel through which he may legitimately appear before the public." "An editorial committee was accordingly appointed for the supervision of this department, and to whose inspection all matter of the journal, previous to publication, will be submitted." All the previous articles have been descriptive. We now come to our argumentative, on Novelty in Inventions. The reasoning powers of the writer may be learned from the following: "Thus we conclude that the _novelty_ of _an invention_ consists in making something 'useful to society,' and that in an original and novel way, so as to embody the great principle of invention." Or, as far as the writer has informed us, the novelty is the useful, the useful is the original and novel, and the original and novel are the great principle, and the great principle is the novelty or something else. "We offer an explanation, not an apology for the want of a more full variety of scientific matter." "Fisher's Magazine publishes a complete list, comprising the Railroads of the U. States, as far as they are completed, and as far as particulars are known." "The French government has patronized an exploration of the island of Cyprus, for the purpose of exploring its architectural remains." Under the head of "Editors' Table," I subjoin the principal and most important sentence: "In this department we have but little room, and in this case it is, perhaps, well we have little, as it is seldom much in the way of articles for notice, are placed before an editorial corps before the appearance of the first number." With the exception of three or four articles, the whole number is discreditable to The National Association of Inventors. A second number should not appear until the editors have had the benefit of at least one term in the preparatory school of Columbia College. Sept. 15, 1846. S. F. * * * * * A heron measuring over six feet from tip to tip of his wings, and nearly four feet from beak to toe, was lately captured in Whately, Mass. His beak was six inches in length. * * * * * The print works of East Greenwich, R. I. engaged in printing mousseline-de-laines, are preparing to close business and shut up. * * * * * WORTHY OF ATTENTION.--"We wonder at the foolish practice of the Chinese, in the uncomfortable form and pressure of their shoes, while at the time, the construction of our own is often but little better. If shoes were made in the shape of our feet so as to exert an equal pressure on every part, corns and bunions would never exist."--[N. Y. Organ, Sept. 19, 1846. [Symbol: right Index] The above truthful and judicious remarks emanating from the able editors of the above valuable Journal, should strongly present itself to the minds of every person having an eye to the comforts of life. To those who have given a trial of the Superior Boots and Shoes manufactured with DICK'S Patent Elastic Metallic Shanks, information would be needless; for they could not be induced to purchase elsewhere. But we would respectfully ask attention of the entire Boot and Shoe wearing community, to call at 109 Nassau street, being assured that it gives the proprietors great pleasure to impart every information for the ease and comfort of the UNDERSTANDING, and also with regard to their entirely new mode of taking the measurement of the foot, to give an equal pressure on every part. * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS. [Symbol: right Index] THIS paper circulates in every State in the Union, and is seen principally by mechanics and manufacturers. Hence, it may be considered the best medium of advertising, for those who import or manufacture machinery, mechanics tools, or such wares and materials as are generally used by those classes. The few advertisements in this paper are regarded with much more attention than those in closely printed dailies. Advertisements are inserted in this paper at the following rates: One square, of eight lines one insertion, $ 0.50 " " " " " two do., .75 " " " " " three do., 1.00 " " " " " one month, 1.25 " " " " " three do., 3.75 " " " " " six do., 7.50 " " " " " twelve do., 15.00 TERMS:--CASH IN ADVANCE. GENERAL AGENTS FOR THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. New York City, GEO. DEXTER. " " " WM. TAYLOR & CO. Boston, Messrs. HOTCHKISS & CO. Philadelphia, Messrs. COLON & ADRIANCE. LOCAL AGENTS Albany, PETER COOK. Baltimore, Md., S. SANDS. Cabotville, Mass., E. F. BROWN. Hartford, Ct., WM. WOODWARD. Lynn, Mass., J. E. F. MARSH. Middletown, Ct., WM. WOODWARD. Norwich, Ct., SAFFORD & PARKS. New Haven, Ct., E. DOWNES. New Bedford, Mass., WM. ROBINSON & CO. Newark, N.J., J. L. AGENS. Patterson, N.J., L. GARSIDE. Providence, R. I., H. & J.S. ROWE. Springfield, Mass., WM. B. BROCKET. Salem, Mass., S. CHANDLER. Troy, N.Y., W. SMITH. Taunton, Mass., W. P. SEAVER. Worcester, Mass., S. THOMPSON. TRAVELLING AGENTS V. D. DAVID, JOHN STOUGHTON, JOHN MURRAY, SYLVESTER DIERFENORF. CITY CARRIERS CLARK SELLECK, SQUIRE SELLECK, NATHAN SELLECK. Persons residing in the city or Brooklyn, can have the paper left at their residences regularly, by sending their address to the office, 128 Fulton st., 2nd floor. * * * * * GOLD PENS!!--In consequence of the increased facility afforded by machinery for the manufacture of my GOLD PENS, I am enabled to furnish them to the Trade, at a much less price than they have heretofore obtained them through my Agent. Those purchasing direct of the manufacturer will have the double advantage of the lowest market price, and the privilege of returning those that are imperfect. In connection with the above, I am manufacturing the usual style of PENHOLDER, together with PENCIL. All orders thankfully received, and punctually attended to. A. G. BAGLEY. sept 25. 1* 189 Broadway. N. Y. * * * * * SHERWOOD'S MAGNETIC MACHINE,--Is warranted to be greatly superior to every other manufactured, by whatever imitations or pretensions foisted upon the public. No premium has ever been obtained over this machine at the American or any other Institute, as has been falsely represented. It imparts the magnetic forces more continuously, with less violence to the sensations of the patient, and with more permanent efficacy, than any other invented, while the cures it has actually effected are incomparably more numerous. It is compactly fitted, together withs it batteries, wires and other appliances in neat cases, of several sizes, and powers, at $10, $12, $14, and $16 each. Each case is accompanied with a Manual, (eighth edition, pp. 234, 8vo.) in the English or French language, according to order, containing specific direction for the new method of using the instrument, and which alone can render it effectual. H. H. SHERWOOD, M.D. 102 Chambers st. sept. 8 to2* * * * * * GENERAL PATENT AGENCY.--The subscriber has established an agency at his warehouse, 12 Platt street, New York, for the protection and general advancement of the rights and interests of Inventors and Patentees. The objects of this agency are more particularly to aid and assist Inventors and Patentees in effecting sales of their inventions and of goods and wares made therewith--and also for the sale and transfer of Patent Rights. Arrangements have been made with a lawyer familiar with the Patent Laws, who will attend to the legal branch of the business upon reasonable terms. Satisfactory references will be given. Applications may be made to the undersigned personally, or by letter, post paid. SAMUEL C. HILLS 45-2dv6* General Patent Agent. * * * * * ENGRAVING ON WOOD. NEATLY AND PROMPTLY EXECUTED AT the OFFICE OF THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 128 Fulton st, three doors from the Sun Office. Designs, DRAWINGS of all kinds for PATENTS, &c., also made, as above, at very low charges. * * * * * COPPER SMITH!--The subscriber takes this method of informing the public that he is manufacturing Copper Work of every description. Particular attention is given to making and repairing LOCOMOTIVE tubes. Those at a distance, can have any kind of work made to drawings, and may ascertain costs, &c., by addressing L. R. Bailey cor. of West and Franklin sts., N. Y. N. B.--Work shipped to any part of the country. 45to2dv18* * * * * * BLACK LEAD POTS!--The subscriber offers for sale, in lots to suit purchasers, a superior article of BLACK LEAD POTS, that can be used without annealing. The price is low, and founders are requested to make a trial. SAMUEL C. HILLS, 45to2ndv6 Patent Agent, 12 Platt street. * * * * * ELECTRICITY. SMITH'S CELEBRATED TORPEDO, OR VIBRATING ELECTRO MAGNETIC MACHINE--This instrument differs from those in ordinary use, by having a third connection with the battery, rendering them much more powerful and beneficial. As a CURIOUS ELECTRICAL MACHINE, they should be in the possession of every one, while their wonderful efficacy as a medical agent, renders them invaluable. They are used with extraordinary success, for the following maladies. RHEUMATISM--Palsy, curvature of the Spine, Chronic Diseases, Tic-doloureaux, Paralysis, Tubercula of the brain, heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, sick-headache. TOOTHACHE--St Vitus dance, Epilepsy, Fevers, diseases of the eye, nose, antrum, throat, muscles, cholera, all diseases of the skin, face, &c. DEAFNESS--Loss of voice, Bronchitis, Hooping cough. These machines are perfectly simple and conveniently managed. The whole apparatus is contained in a little box 8 inches long, by 4 wide and deep. They may easily be sent to any part of the United States. To be had at the office of the Scientific Americcan, 128 Fulton st, 2nd floor, (Sun building) where they may be seen IN OPERATION, at all times of the day and evening. * * * * * THE BALL OF THE BEARS. As Stanilaus Augustus, the last king of Poland, was a tool of Russia, and did not enjoy any consideration, the Polish grandees played him many tricks. Prince Radziwill came to court in a carriage drawn by six wild bears;--the horses of course, were extremely frightened; in consequence of which, some accidents happened. The king pointed out to the prince the impropriety of his conduct. Radziwill added, that the bears were not cross, as whip, gold, and patience can put in order every thing; He added also, that, sometimes the ace beats the king at cards, and paid liberally the damages. After some time, he gave a splendid party, to which he invited all the ambassadors, and all the leading personages in Poland, and displayed extraordinary luxury. The dancing was kept up in several drawing rooms. After the supper, he conducted a select parly to a separate apartment--where, to their astonishment, they found four girls of uncommon beauty, richly dressed, in company not with four gentlemen, but with four enormous bears!--which, after the first outbreak of music, began to dance with the girls all the figures of French quadrilles, with the utmost accuracy, and with as much ease as if they were highly educated gentlemen. At first the guests were alarmed; but, seeing the extra ordinary tameness of the beasts, struck with amazement, they seemed to have been pleased with this extraordinary sight. After the dance was over, their bear-ships conducted themselves with the utmost propriety, and, at a sign from the keeper, each of them made a bow to his lady, and withdrew to another room. For some time, nothing was talked of at Warsaw but that singular ball. * * * * * ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS. A lady, at a ball lately given in Calcutta, attracted the attention of all, and excited the jealousy of many, in consequence of the splendor and brilliancy which her diamonds shed upon her person and all around her. At length that curiosity which is the moving spring of woman's actions, could be no longer resisted by her female admirers, who at the close of the ball, instituted a rigid examination of the nature of those incomparable brilliants, when, to their astonishment, they found that they were no more or less than so many fire flies, which the envy of the ball-room had secured in gauze bags, and which as she moved about, fluttered, and thus threw out their varied brilliant hues. * * * * * The Odd Fellows procession to the dedication of their new Hall at Philadelphia, says our exchanges "_came off_ on Thursday". We suppose the procession "came off" this way, as we saw a part of it passing through this city. * * * * * A young lady by the name of Emma D. Tower, sixteen years of age, has been missing from her parents and home in Providence, R. I., since the 11th. Her parents are distressed with anxiety to find or hear of her. * * * * * [Illustration: Curious Arts] PAINTING IN IMITATION OF ROSE-WOOD. (By the particular request of a "Mechanic" in Cherryfield, Me.)--In this art the process is various according to the circumstances, and the ground on subjects to which it is applied. In painting common chairs, the ground is prepared by a coat of paint composed of ivory black and rose-pink,--equal quantities, ground in a mixture of equal parts of linseed oil, drying japan and spirits of turpentine.--When this is dry, the graining color, consisting of three parts of rose-pink with one of vermillion, ground in a mixture of oil, japan and spirits of turpentine, is applied with a common flat graining brush. Fancy boxes and cabinet furniture are painted by a different process, by which a better imitation is produced. The ground is prepared by one or more coats of white lead changed two or three shades with yellow ochre. When dry, a thin staining of burnt terra-de-sienna ground in water, containing a very little sugar or gumarabic is laid on the work, and while this continues moist and flowing, the graining is applied. The graining should consist of a mixture of black and rose pink, ground in the staining compound. This must be varnished when dry, with copal varnish. Some prefer, however, to grind the staining and graining in oil, diluted with spirits of turpentine. The learner must have some sample pieces of varnished rosewood before him when graining. * * * * * INDIA RUBBER. The substance called India Rubber, or Caoutchouc, was not known in Europe until the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was originally brought as a great curiosity from South America. Europeans continued ignorant of its origin until a deputation of the French Academicians undertook a voyage to South America in 1735, for the purpose of obtaining the correct admeasurement of a degree of the meridian. These philosophers did not confine their attention to the one great object of their pursuit, but among other interesting discoveries made themselves acquainted with that peculiar substance--caoutchouc. These Academicians discovered at Emeralds, in Brazil, trees called by the natives _heve_, whence flowed a juice, which, when dried, proved to be what is called India Rubber. The _heve_ was also found growing in Cayenne, and on the banks of the Amazon river. It has since been discovered that caoutchouc may be obtained from another species of tree growing in South America, called _jatropha elastica_. If these trees are punctured, a milky juice flows out, which, on exposure to the air, thickens into a substance of a pure white color, having neither taste nor smell. The hue of the caoutchouc of commerce is black in consequence of the method employed in drying it. The usual manner of performing this operation is to spread a thin coating of the milky juice upon the moulds made of clay, and fashioned into a variety of figures. These are then dried by exposure to the heat of a smoke-fire: another layer is then spread over the first, and dried by the same means; and thus layer after layer is put on, until the whole is of the required thickness. While yet soft it will receive and retain any impression that may be given to if on the outside. When perfectly dry the clay within is broken into small fragments by percussion, and the pieces are drawn out through the aperture which is always left fur the purpose. The common bottle of India Rubber, therefore, consists of numerous layers of pure caoutchouc, alternating with as many layers of soot. The natives of those parts of South America to which these trees are indigenous, convert the juice to a variety of purposes. They collect it chiefly in the rainy season, because, though it will exude at all times, it flows then most abundantly. Boots are made of it by the Indians, through which water cannot penetrate; and the inhabitants of Quito prepare a kind of cloth with it, which they apply to the same purposes as those for which oil-cloth or tarpaulin, it used here. This, no doubt, is similar to the cloth now prepared with this substance in America, the use of which yields so many important advantages.--_Youths' Gazette_. * * * * * COMMUNICATION ON ATMOSPHERIC RESISTANCE. The following letter has been on hand several weeks, but deferred on account of a constant press of matter by which the limited space in our former small sheet was crowded. Our respected correspondent has consented to excuse the delay. Providence, ---- 1846. _Friend Porter_: In January last, I addressed a few lines to you, asking information in regard to an article entitled Atmospheric Resistance, in the New York Mechanic, of December 11, 1841. In your answer, you say if the full surface is 30,000 square feet to each wing, (which makes 60,000 square feet,) only about half of one horse power would be required to sustain this weight, and I understand you, virtually to say, that they must be ten times as large, in order that the strength of one man be sufficient to work this and elevate himself together with the apparatus, if it were not too heavy. Now, this makes 600,000 square feet. This is rather more than 774 feet square: rather large sized wings. One would suppose that they might lift rather heavy, if they were very light, being 387 by 774 feet each. Now, to me this is entirely incomprehensible, and I should like an explanation, if this calculation is correct, how it is that an eagle which sometimes weighs nearly thirty pounds, can elevate himself, with so much ease, and even carry with him nearly his own weight, using a pair of wings, which if they were five feet long and two feet wide each, would make but twenty feet of surface. Thus, you will see, is no where in proportion to the weight even of the eagle alone, (which we will suppose to weigh twenty pounds,) that the wings bears to the 150 pounds, while on the other hand, it is near in proportion to the surface of the wings of a pidgeon and its weight. Nor can I comprehend why it would require so much power, the eagle though he exerts himself considerable in rising, no doubt, does not seem to use power any where in the proportion that you have thought would be required supposing the wings to be made in the same proportion to the 150 pounds that his wings are to his weight, his beats are not so quick but what they can be very easily counted. By answering, you will much oblige, your friend, YANKEE. In answer to the foregoing, we would remind our correspondent, that in his former communication, he proposed a limited weight of apparatus, and in our answer, it was far from our intention to allow an additional weight on account of the requisite extent of surface. With regard to the philosophy of the flight of the eagle, it must be borne in mind that atmospheric resistance is as the square of the velocity _downward_ and the only way in which the phenomenon of the flight of the eagle can be reconciled with the laws of mechanical science as established by experiment, is by supposing the velocity of the wing downward to be equal to 70 feet per second, whereby a resistance would be encountered equal to 12 pounds per square foot of surface to the wings. It is a fact, however, that kites, and hawks are often seen to continue suspended in the air several minutes without any apparent motion of the wings; but by what law or theory the feat is accomplished, natural philosophy has ventured no other conjecture than that the bird is endowed with the faculty of suspending occasionally its ordinary subjection to the laws of gravity. If any observing theorist will give any more rational conjecture on the subject, we should be glad to have him examine it. * * * * * It is proposed and urged by the papers in several States, to have a thanksgiving day throughout the Union, on the 26th of November. * * * * * "As dull as a hoe," is a very common phrase, and implies that hoes are necessarily or ordinarily dull. But it is advisible for farmers to keep their hoes sharp, as they regard a saving of labor. * * * * * [Illustration: the conical windlass] THE CONICAL WINDLASS. Various methods have been heretofore described, for raising heavy bodies, or producing for other purposes, a great force,--usually miscalled power--by the application of a comparatively small force: but no method is known, more unlimited in its effect, or more simple in construction; than the conical windlass. It consists of a simple horizontal windlass, with a crank at one end, as shown in the engraving. The windlass is made in a conical form, being a little larger at one end, than at the other; and if the friction of its bearings be relieved by the ordinary friction rollers, it will so far multiply the force applied, as to break a double inch-rope, by the power of one man at the crank. An endless rope, or one of which the two ends are spliced together, is passed five or six times round the small end of the windlass, and down under a single pulley below: then, as the windlass is turned by the crank, the rope is constantly given off from one part, while the circumference is greater. Now it is plain, that if the windlass is one-fifth of an inch larger in circumference, at the point at which the rope is taken up, than at the place where it is given off to the pulley, that whatever may be appended thereto, will be raised one tenth of an inch by each revolution Then, if we suppose the crank lever to be fifteen inches, the handle will travel about 100 inches, in each revolution, which gives a power, or increase of force, of 1000 to one. Therefore, if 100 pounds of power be applied to the crank handle, it will be sufficient--minus friction--to raise a weight of 100,000 lbs. The only inconvenience in this apparatus, and which prevents its coming into more general use, is, that it is too limited in the extent of its motion, in consequence of the travelling of the rope from one end of the windlass to the other. Thus, if the windlass be but twenty-five inches long, and the rope one inch in diameter, it will admit only twenty revolutions, without renewing. Yet, in many cases, in which an article in required to be raised, or moved but a few inches, the conical windlass will be found preferable to any other method. * * * * * REQUISITE STRENGTH OF STEAM BOILERS. Our correspondent S. B. cannot comprehend that the strength of iron for a cylindrical boiler should Be in direct proportion to the diameter thereof, in order to sustain an equal pressure per square inch; wherefore, we must reason with him on the long scale. The cohesive strength of good iron is 64,000 lbs. per square inch; and of course, a strip of boiler-iron plate 1/8th inch thick will sustain 8000 lbs. If a boiler made of thin iron is 14 inches in diameter, or 44 inches in circumference, each inch of its length will contain 44 square inches, and either half thereof will contain 22 inches, and as the pressure on this portion is sustained by at least two inches of width of plate,--one inch on each side,--it follows that it will sustain a pressure of at least 700 lbs. per square inch, in the direction of circumference. If the diameter is double, the number of square inches will be double, and will require double the thickness to sustain equal pressure. With regard to the pressure endwise, the area of a cylinder head 14 inches in diameter is 154 inches, and the strength of the 44 inches of circumference would be sufficient to sustain 352,000 lbs., which, divided by the area, is 2,275 lbs. per square inch. If the diameter is 56 inches, the circumference being 172, would sustain a pressure endwise of 555 lbs. per inch. Thus it will be seen that if the cylinder were even 20 feet in diameter, the iron would better sustain the pressure on the head that on the periphery. With regard to the requisite strength of the cylinder's head, if they are made in a semi-spherical convex form, they will require no more thickness of plate than the cylinder: but if they consist of plane disks, the thickness thereof should bear the same proportion to that of the periphery that the area in square inches does to three times the circumference. But in general, no other rule is observed for the thickness of the heads, than to make them extravagantly heavy, without much regard to theoretic calculation. * * * * * BAGLEY'S GOLD PENS. Do our readers wish to hear any thing more about them? If so, they have only to inquire of any one of the many thousands of writers who have used these pens six months or more, and can hear the fact attested, that these are decidedly the cheapest pens (at $4) that can be any where found. Mr. Bagley has recently patented a neat, elegant, and excellent improvement in the pen-holder, which "takes the shine off" all precedents. Should our readers find a real good article in this paper, they may know it was written with one of Bagley's pens. Nuf ced. * * * * * THE HUMMING BIRD. A gentleman who resided some time on one of the West India Islands informs us that while he was once travelling along the bed of a deep ravine overhung with thick vines, he was actually startled by the immense numbers of humming birds which hovered over and about him. They hovered about him as if actuated by curiosity alone. They were of various kinds and colors, some of them being nearly as large as sparrows, while others were but little larger than a bee. Some were of a dingy green, or a light brown, while others seemed gaudily arrayed in plumage as brilliant and variegated as the rainbow. They would approach within arms length of his face, and pausing in their flight, with their little wings, in rapid motion, would stare at him as if they wondered what possible business he could have in those remote wilds; but they exhibited no symptoms of terror, not having been taught by experience to fear the cruelty of man. * * * * * THE NEW YORK SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: _Published Weekly at_ 128 _Fulton Street_., (_Sun Building_,) _New York_. BY MUNN & COMPANY. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is the Advocate of Industry and Journal of Mechanical and other Improvements: as such its contents are probably more varied and interesting, than those of any other weekly newspaper in the United States, and certainly more useful. It contains as much interesting Intelligence as six ordinary daily papers, while for _real benefit_, it is unequalled by any thing yet published. Each number regularly contains from THREE to SIX ORIGINAL ENGRAVINGS, illustrated by NEW INVENTIONS, American and Foreign,--SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES and CURIOSITIES,--Notices of the progress of Mechanical and other Scientific Improvements, Scientific Essays on the principles of the Sciences of MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY and ARCHITECTURE,--Catalogues of American Patents,--INSTRUCTION in various ARTS and TRADES, _with engravings_,--Curious Philosophical Experiments,--the latest RAIL ROAD INTELLIGENCE in EUROPE and AMERICA,--Valuable information on the Art of GARDENING, &c. &c. This paper is especially entitled to the patronage of MECHANICS and MANUFACTURERS, being devoted to the interests of those classes. It is particularly useful to FARMERS, as it will not only apprise them of IMPROVEMENTS in AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS, but INSTRUCT them in various MECHANICAL TRADES, and guard against impositions. As a FAMILY NEWSPAPER, it will convey more USEFUL Intelligence to children and young people, than five times its cost in school instruction. Being published in QUARTO FORM, it is conveniently adapted to PRESERVATION and BINDING. TERMS.--The Scientific American is sent to subscribers in the country at the rate of $2 a year, ONE DOLLAR IN ADVANCE, the remainder in 6 months. Persons desiring to subscribe, have only to enclose the amount in a letter, directed to MUNN & COMPANY, Publishers of the Scientific American, New York. [Symbol: right Index] Specimen copies sent when desired. All letters must be POST PAID. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: [Symbol: right Index] is used where the text had a picture of a hand with the index finger pointing right. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without comment, except in those articles where they were intentionally presented. 
38480	----	[Illustration] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL INFORMATION, ART, SCIENCE, MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY, AND MANUFACTURES. NEW YORK, DECEMBER 14, 1878. Vol. XXXIX.--No. 24. [NEW SERIES.] [$3.20 per Annum [POSTAGE PREPAID.]] * * * * * CONTENTS. (Illustrated articles are marked with an asterisk.) Alum in baking powders Alum in bread 376 Argonaut, or Paper Nautilus* 375 Astronomical notes 377 Babbitt metal, to make [5] 378 Belts, rubber, slipping [6] 378 Bench, saw, Casson's* 374 Boot polish liquid [8] 378 Butter, to color [16] 378 Canal, ship, Belgian* 367 Economy, machine shop 371 Eggs, preservation of 375 Electric light, Werdermann* 373 Engineers, warning to 367 Engine, steam, valve yoke [48] 379 Exterminator, roach [57] 379 Filter for rain water [19] 378 Foot power, new* 370 Glass, iridescent 368 Glass, to make a hole in 375 Hair, to prevent falling out [42]379 Inks, sympathetic 377 Invention, reward of 371 Inventions, new, 370 Inventions, new agricultural 377 Inventions, new mechanical 374 Inventors, bait for 374 Iron and steel, preservation of 367 Iron, malleable, to make [43] 379 Leaves, culinary uses for 370 Line, straight, to draw* [36] 379 Mechanics, amateur* 371 Mexico, progress of science in 376 Microphone as a thief catcher 375 Naphtha and benzine 377 Nitrate of silver, reduction of 377 Notes and queries 378 Oil notes 372 Petroleum and gold 377 Petroleum, progress of 368 Poultices 374 Quinine, effects of on hearing 374 Railroad, first in U. S. [2] 378 Rails and railway accidents 368 Railway notes 373 Sanitary Science in the U. S. 369 Screw heads, blue color for [4] 378 Sheep husbandry, American 375 Shutter fastener, new* 370 Silver mill in the clouds 374 Spider, trap-door* 375 Sprinkler, garden, improved* 370 Telescope, sunshade for [3] 378 Tools, steel, to temper [55] 379 Tree, tallest in the world 375 Tree trunks elongation of 376 Trees, felling by electricity 370 Tubing, to satin finish [51] 379 Vise, an improved* 370 White lead, to test [14] 378 Wire clothing for cylinders* 377 Work, the limit of 368 * * * * * THE BELGIAN SHIP CANAL. The ship canal from Ghent to Terneuzen was originally laid out with many bends, rendering navigation difficult; it had a depth of 14 feet 4 inches and a width of 98 feet 6 inches at the water level. The works which are at present in course of execution have especially for their object the deepening of the canal to 21 feet 3 inches, with a width of 55 feet 9 inches at the bottom and 103 feet 9 inches on the water line. The slopes have a uniform inclination of 1 to 3, and the towing paths on each side are placed 6 feet 6 inches above the water level, and are 32 feet 8 inches wide. In many instances also the course of the canal has been altered and straightened for the improvement of navigation; several important diversions have been made for this purpose. The excavation has been effected by hand, by dredging, and by the Couvreux excavator, figured as below in _Engineering_. The earth excavated was carried to spoil, and in many cases was employed to form dikes inclosing large areas, which served as receptacles for the semi-liquid material excavated by the dredging machines with the long conductors; the Couvreux excavator used will be readily understood from the engraving. It had already done service on the Danube regulation works. The material with which it had to deal, however, was of a more difficult nature, being a fine sand charged with water and very adherent. The length of track laid for the excavator was about 3 miles along the side of the old canal, which had been previously lowered to the level of the water. * * * * * PRESERVATION OF IRON AND STEEL FROM OXIDATION. We are indebted to J. Pechar, Railway Director in Teplitz, Bohemia, for the first official report in English from the Paris International Exhibition which has come to hand. This volume contains the report on the coal and iron products in all countries of the world, and is valuable for its statistical and other information, giving, as it does, the places where the coal and minerals are found, and the quantities of each kind produced, for what it is used, and to what other countries it is exported. The able compiler of these statistics in the introduction of his report gives the following account of the means recommended by Professor Barff, of London, for preventing oxidation, which is being considerably used abroad. The writer says: It is well known that the efficient preservation of iron against rusting is at present only provided for in cases where human life would be endangered by failure, as in the case of railway bridges and steamers. Thus, for example, at Mr. Cramer-Klett's ironworks at Nuremberg every piece of iron used for his bowstring bridges is dipped in oil heated to eight hundred degrees. The very great care which is at present taken in this matter may be judged from the current practice of most bridge and roofing manufacturers. Every piece of iron before being riveted in its place is cleaned from rust by being immersed in a solution of hydrochloric acid. The last traces of free acid having been cleared away, at first by quicklime and afterward by a copious ablution with hot water, the piece is immediately immersed in hot linseed oil, which protects every part of the surface from the action of the atmosphere. Afterward it is riveted and painted. Notwithstanding all this, the painting requires continual and careful renewal. On the Britannia Bridge, near Bangor, the painter is permanently at work; yet, in spite of all this care and expense, rust cannot be entirely avoided. The age of iron railway bridges is still too short to enable us to draw conclusions as to the probabilities of accidents. Now, Professor Barff has discovered a process by which iron may be kept from rusting by being entirely coated with its own sesquioxide. A piece of iron exposed to the action of superheated steam, in a close chamber and under a certain pressure, becomes gradually covered by a skin of this black oxide, of a thickness depending upon the temperature of the steam and the duration of the experiment. For instance, exposure during five hours to steam superheated to five hundred degrees will produce a hermetical coating capable of resisting for a considerable time the application of emery paper and of preserving the iron from rust even in a humid atmosphere, if under shelter from the weather. If the temperature is raised to 1,200 degrees, and the time of exposure to six or seven hours, the skin of sesquioxide will resist every mechanical action, and the influence of any kind of weather. The sesquioxide being harder than the iron itself, and adhering to its surface even more firmly than the atoms of iron do to each other, there is an increased resistance not only to chemical but also to mechanical action. The surface is not altered by the process in any other respect, a plain forging retaining its roughness, a polished piece its smooth surface. If the skin is broken away oxidation takes place, but only just on the spot from which the oxide has been removed. If Professor Barff's experiments are borne out by practice, this invention may become of very great importance. It is within the bounds of probability that it may enable iron, by increasing its facility in competing with wood, to recover, at least for a considerable time, even more than the ground it has lost by the extraordinary extension of the use of steel. Iron is already being used for building purposes to a large extent; but oxidation once thoroughly prevented it will be able to take the place of wood and stone to a still greater degree. Iron roofing may be made quite as light as that of wood, and of greater strength, by a judicious arrangement and use of T iron. * * * * * WARNING TO LOCOMOTIVE ENGINEERS. Drs. Charles M. Cresson and Robert E. Rogers, of this city, says the Philadelphia _Ledger_, well known as experts in chemistry and dynamics, were appointed by the Reading Railroad Company to inquire into and report upon the causes of the recent explosion of the boiler of the express locomotive "Gem," at Mahanoy City, by which five lives were lost. Their report, which is designed to cover the whole scope of a most careful investigation, is not yet made public, but they have arrived at the following specific conclusion, which we give in their own language: "We are, therefore, of the opinion that the explosion of the boiler of the locomotive 'Gem,' was produced by the projection of foam upon the heated crown bars of the furnace, caused by suddenly and widely opening the safety valve, at a time when the water had been permitted to get so low as to overheat the crown of the furnace." This is an important matter that should be carefully noted by locomotive and other engineers. * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ESTABLISHED 1845 MUNN & CO., Editors and Proprietors. PUBLISHED WEEKLY AT NO. 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. * * * * * O. D. MUNN. A. E. BEACH. * * * * * TERMS FOR THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. One copy, one year, postage included $3 20 One copy, six months, postage included 1 60 CLUBS.--One extra copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be supplied gratis for every club of five subscribers at $3.20 each; additional copies at same proportionate rate. Postage prepaid. -->Single copies of any desired number of the SUPPLEMENT sent to one address on receipt of 10 cents. Remit by postal order. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Bow, New York. THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT is a distinct paper from the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. THE SUPPLEMENT is issued weekly; every number contains 16 octavo pages, with handsome cover, uniform in size with SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Terms of subscription for SUPPLEMENT, $5.00 a year, postage paid, to subscribers. Single copies 10 cents. Sold by all news dealers throughout the country. Combined Rates.--The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and SUPPLEMENT will be sent for one year, postage free, on receipt of _seven dollars._ Both papers to one address or different addresses, as desired. The safest way to remit is by draft, postal order, or registered letter. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, N. Y. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXPORT EDITION. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition is a large and splendid periodical, issued once a month. Each number contains about one hundred large quarto pages, profusely illustrated, embracing: (1.) Most of the plates and pages of the four preceding weekly issues of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, with its splendid engravings and valuable information; (2.) Commercial, trade, and manufacturing announcements of leading houses. Terms for Export Edition, $5.00 a year, sent prepaid to any part of the world. Single copies 50 cents. -->Manufacturers and others who desire to secure foreign trade may have large, and handsomely displayed announcements published in this edition at a very moderate cost. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition has a large guaranteed circulation in all commercial places throughout the world. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. * * * * * VOL. XXXIX., No. 24. [NEW SERIES.] Thirty-third Year. NEW YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1878. * * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 154, For the Week ending December 14, 1878. Price 10 cents. For sale by all newsdealers. I. ENGINEERING AND MECHANICS.--Portable Steam Pumping Engine, 1 engraving.--New Bone Crushing Mill, 2 engravings.--Picard's Boiler. Extraction of Salt from Salt Water.--Compressed Air Machines. Hydraulic vs. air pressure. Causes of the losses of power. Estimates of useful effects obtainable.--The St. Gothard Tunnel. By GEO. J. SPECHT, C.E.--Apparatus for Lifting Sunken Vessels, with 8 figures.--Russia Sheet Iron.--Manufacture of Artificial Stone.--Compressed Fuel.--The New Magnesi Process for Boiler Feed Water. II. FRENCH INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF 1878.--Wine Presses. Description of sixteen new and peculiar wine presses at the Exhibition, with 31 figures and 9 engravings. The Press Primat; Press Mabille; Press David; Samain Press; Marchand, Maupre, Boyries, Chapellier, Marmonier, Nogues, Mailhe, Moreau, Piquet, Delperoux, Terrel des Chenes, and Cassan fils Presses. The Algerian Exhibit. The street of Algiers, with 1 illustration.--Woolen Fabrics. III. ELECTRICITY, LIGHT, HEAT, ETC.--Electric Lighting. Estimate of the comparative heating effect in gas and electric lighting, and the consequent loss of power.--The Electric Light. Remarks on its economy.--The Present Bugbear of French Savants. New Planets. The Dutch Arctic Expedition. The Peak of Beerenburg, Spitzbergen, with 1 illustration. IV. CHEMISTRY AND METALLURGY.--New Process for Separating Iodine and Bromine from Kelp.--Inoffensive Colors for Toys.--New Coloring Matters.--Tungsten. Ozone and the Atmosphere. By ALBERT R. LEEDS, Ph.D. Table of percentage of ozone contained in the atmosphere at various localities in the United States. Register of ozone observations for one month at Upper Saranac Lake, N. Y., giving thermometric and barometric observations, and full record of weather. Examination of methods in ozonometry. Preparation of ozone by electrolysis of water containing sulphuric acid, with 1 engraving. Preparation by electricity, with 1 engraving. Does the electric spark decompose potassium iodide? Collection and preservation of ozone. Preparation by chemical methods. Critical examination of ozonoscopes. Potassium iodide; starch; paper classification of ozonoscopes. Examination of ozonoscopes under certain conditions. Limits of the Combustibility of Gases.--The Diffusion of Salicylate of Soda.--Singular use of Fluorescein.--New Metal. Philippium By M. MARC DELAFONTAINE.--Better Pharmaceutical Education. By RICHARD V. MATTISON, Ph. G.--An El Dorado for Apothecaries. V. MEDICINE AND HYGIENE.--The Science of Easy Chairs. The muscular conditions of fatigue, and how to obtain the greatest rest. How easy chairs should be made. Prof. Huxley on the Hand. Abstract of his inaugural lecture before the South London Workingmen's College. Paint from a Sanitary Point of View. The required abolition of absorbent surfaces in dwellings. Lead poisoning from paint not thoroughly dry. Cases described in which white lead paint in dwellings never dries, but gives off poisonous particles, which are inhaled by the inmates, causing depression, weakness headache, and loss of appetite. Zinc recommended in paint to avoid lead poisoning, and the new oxy-sulphide of Zinc described, with covering qualities equal to white lead. The Purification of Sewage. By HENRY ROBINSON, F.R.S. Paper read before the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain. Progress in purifying sewage by precipitation. The use of chemicals for precipitating, deodorizing, and disinfecting. Practical data on a large scale, with cost. Average number of gallons per head of population, etc., of the successful system now in operation at Coventry and Hertford. How the water is removed from the sludge by filter presses. Drying and removal of the sludge. Theoretical and actual values of the sludge for fertilizing. VI. AGRICULTURE, HORTICULTURE, ETC.--The Broadside Steam Digger, with 1 engraving.--Shall I Plow the Lawn?--Bee Culture. * * * * * PROGRESS OF PETROLEUM. The efforts of the great majority of the Western Pennsylvania petroleum producers to obtain relief from what they deem the oppressive acts of the Standard Oil Company and the unjust discriminations of the United Pipe Lines, and the various railroads traversing the oil regions, have attracted more than usual attention to the present condition of this industry and its possible future. We would here explain that the Standard Oil Company originated in Cleveland, Ohio, about twelve years ago, and was incorporated under the laws of Ohio, with a nominal capital now, we are informed, of $3,000,000, which, however, very inadequately represents the financial strength of its members. It is now a combination of the most prominent refiners in the country, and has before been credited with manipulating the transportation lines to its own special advantage. We can recall no instance of such serious hostility between parties whose interests are at the same time of such magnitude and so nearly identical; nor can we see what substantial, enduring benefit would accrue to the producers in the event of their victory in the struggle. They charge that the Standard Oil Company has become the controlling power to fix prices and to determine the avenues by which the oil shall be transported eastward for home consumption and for foreign exportation; that the railway companies have given this company lower rates than other parties for transporting the oil; and that through the rates given to it by the railways the value of their property is destroyed. The reply, in effect, is, Granting all this to be true, what does it amount to? Neither more nor less than that the managers of the Standard Oil Company, by combination of capital, by intelligence and shrewdness in the management of their operations, have built up a successful business, and that they have so extended it by the use of all practicable appliances, and by the purchase of the property of competitors, that they do practically control the prices of oil, both crude and refined, and that the uncombined capital of the other oil producers, lacking the power, the intelligence, and the business skill which combined capital can secure, cannot compete with the Standard Oil Company. Now, is there any great wrong or injustice in this? When brains can command capital it is always more successful in business matters than any amount of brains without capital or capital without brains. This result is the natural working out of the same principle that is everywhere to be seen--some men are successful and others are not. It is the essence of communism to drag down those who succeed to the level of the unsuccessful. If men cannot compete with others in any business they must accept the fact, and try some other employment. If, through superior intelligence and capital, the Standard Oil Company can control the oil business of Pennsylvania, then, according to the principles of common sense, it must be permitted to do so. What right, then, has the oil producer to complain? Why, if all that is alleged is true, will they persist in sinking more wells, when, as they say, they are controlled by the Standard Oil Company? No one forces them to lose money by continuing in the business. Let them find other employment. They do not show that the Standard Oil Company does anything that combined capital on their part and equal business ability could not effect. The cry of monopoly in this case is altogether unfounded, those opposed to the Standard Oil Company having just as much right to do all that that company does, and, therefore, there can be no monopoly, because they have no exclusive powers. As to the railway companies, they can afford and have a right to transport the tonnage offered them by the Standard Oil Company at less cost, because it costs them less to do a regular and large business than an irregular and smaller one. They would simply be acting in accordance with business principles the world over. These are the arguments, the statement of the position of a successful combination confident in its resources and of victory in the coming struggle. The justness, the correctness of the doctrines enunciated, and the wisdom of so doing at this crisis, we do not propose to criticise; but it is very safe to say that if the prosperity of the complainants depends upon relief in this direction they may as well cease producing. There are too many of them for harmonious and concerted action against the powerful corporations they complain of; and if they should succeed in securing equal transportation facilities the prices would still be regulated by the monopolists, who carry more than four-fifths of the accumulated stock of the oil regions. The proposed appeal to Congress to pass some law whereby each producer can compel railroad companies to carry his produce at regular rates, amounts to a confession of the desperate straits of the producers and of their weakness as well; and even if successful, which is most improbable, would not remedy the deplorable existing state of things. Still lower rates would fail to give relief, with all the present avenues of trade filled to repletion and with an increasing output at the wells. Relief and permanent relief can be found only in the direction we have before indicated: in the general application of petroleum and its products to the manufacture of gas for illuminating and heating purposes, and its substitution for coal in the metallurgic and other prominent industries of the world. * * * * * THE LIMIT OF WORK. In distributing the prizes to workmen at the Paris Exhibition, Louis Blanc, the leader of the French Republican Socialist party, quoted approvingly these words of Simonde de Sismondi: "If the workman were his own master, when he had done in two hours with the aid of machinery what would have taken him twelve hours to do without it, he would stop at the end of the two." M. Blanc had been discussing very eloquently, but also very fallaciously, the relations of machinery to labor. If men were properly united in the bonds of association, he said, if the solidarity of interests were realized, "the happy result of the application of mechanical power to industry would be equal production, with less of effort, for all. The discovery of an economic method would never have the lamentable consequence of robbing men of the work by which they live. Unfortunately, we are far from this ideal. Under the empire of that universal antagonism which is the very essence of the economic constitution of modern societies, and which too often only profits one man by ruining another, machinery has been employed to make the rule of the strong weigh more heavily on the weak. There is not a single mechanical invention which has not been a subject of anguish and a cause of distress to thousands of fathers of families from the moment it began to work." If all this, and much else that M. Blanc alleges, were true, then the condition of all workingmen to-day should be in every way worse than that of their fathers, in anti-machinery days. But such is not the case. There never was a time when the laborer toiled less or enjoyed more than in these days of machinery; and the laborer's condition is best where the machinery is best and most used. A hundred years ago the laborer toiled long, produced little, and enjoyed less. To-day, thanks to the victories of invention, machinery does the heaviest of the work; the workman's hours of labor are fewer than formerly; his wages are greater; and his earnings will buy vastly more, dollar for dollar, than in any previous age in the world's history. What laborer of to-day would be satisfied with the remuneration, the food, the shelter, the clothing of the laboring classes of one hundred years ago? The wants of men, as well as their thoughts, are widened by the process of the suns. And in no section of society have the daily wants been more markedly increased, or the facilities for gratifying them either, than among those that live by labor. "If the workman were his own master, when he had done in two hours with the aid of machinery what it would have taken him twelve hours to do without it, he would stop at the end of the two." So says the theoretical socialist. The practical workman never has, nor, we believe, ever will, act so foolishly; certainly not until the limit of man's capacity to enjoy has been reached. When the united products of manual and mechanical effort fully satisfy the desires of all men, and leave no margin of want unfilled, then and then only will men be satisfied with the reduction of effort demanded by the socialists. Until then the larger part of every increase in production by mechanical improvements will go to swell the volume of good things for human use and enjoyment. Our machinery enables our thousands of busy workers to accomplish what millions could not have done years ago, and a very large part of the aggregate increase of product comes back to them in conveniences and luxuries surpassing those the wealthiest could enjoy were machinery not employed, or were it employed, as the socialist advocates, without increasing the aggregate of production. The laziness of the savage and the advantages of civilization are incompatible. The chief merit of machinery lies in its enabling us to multiply constantly the scope and variety of our enjoyments without a corresponding increase of toil. * * * * * IRIDESCENT GLASS. Ornamental glassware in many styles, tinted with the glowing colors of the rainbow, is now making its appearance in the shop windows of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. This is one of those brilliant little achievements of science that delights the eye and pleases the imagination. To produce the colors, the glass, while in a heated state, is subjected to the vapor of chloride of tin. Shades of more or less depth or intensity are imparted by adding to the tin chloride a little nitrate of strontium or barium. * * * * * RAILS AND RAILWAY ACCIDENTS--NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. A meeting of the Section of Physics, New York Academy of Sciences, was held November 25, 1878. President J. S. Newberry in the chair. Numerous publications of learned societies were received and acknowledged. Professor Newberry read a letter from Professor Agassiz stating that sea lilies, which had hitherto been very rare--a single specimen bringing as much as fifty dollars--have been found in some numbers by dredging in the Gulf of Mexico. Their colors are white, pink, and yellow. Professor Newberry also exhibited specimens of garnet from California, lamellar quartz from North Carolina, sharks' teeth belonging to the eocene and miocene tertiary ages from the phosphate beds of South Carolina, and a number of shells. Professor Thomas Egleston then addressed the Academy on the subject of "The Structure of Rails as Affecting Railway Accidents." The destruction of rails is due to three causes. 1. Defects in the manufacture; 2. Improper mechanical or chemical composition; and 3. Physical changes. A very large number of rails are annually made which should never be put in any track. Their defects are often imperceptible to the naked eye, but they very soon begin to break. Statistics show that the breakage from defects in making increase until they have been used 18 months; then it decreases to zero, and after that rails break from different causes. In France, breakage usually begins in December, reaches its maximum in January, and becomes normal in April. As a more intense cold would be necessary to explain such breakage than that which is felt in that climate, the cause must be sought in the stiffness and inelasticity of the frozen road bed. The impact of the locomotive is then apt to break the rail, very much on the same principle that is taken advantage of in breaking them up for the manufacture of smaller objects. A nick is made somewhere, and the workman then strikes a blow with a hammer at a point between the nick and the place where the rail is supported. This will sever the rail at the nicked place. Sometimes more than a second intervenes between the blow and the fracture. Now, whenever holes are punched in rails for the fish plates, flaws are apt to radiate from them; and if these flaws are not planed or filed out, they may cause the rail to break, just as the nicks above mentioned. Such rails have been known to last no longer than 18 months, and some have actually broken on the way from the manufacturer to their destination. There are establishments in this country and in Europe where they "doctor" such rails by filling up the flaws with a mixture of iron filings, sal ammoniac, and some adhesive substance. Beware of them; a poor cheap rail is dear at any price. The French government stipulates in its contracts for rails, that flaws shall be planed, drilled, or filed out; that the rails shall not be allowed to drop on the ground, but shall be carried by men and slid down. The Lyons railroad does not pay for its rails until 15,000 trains have passed over them. By imperfect mechanical composition is meant imperfect union of the parts of rails. Steel heads are welded to the rest of the rail in a variety of ways, and this welding is necessarily imperfect. A number of sections of rails etched with acid plainly showed this want of homogeneity, as did likewise prints taken from the etched surfaces. Before such rails have lost weight appreciably, they are used up by the constant rolling they undergo. The advantage of a steel rail is its homogeneity, but a good iron rail, such as those made under the direction of the speaker, for the Reading Railroad Company, is likely to prove better than one of poor steel. The life of a steel rail is chiefly affected by the temperature at which it is rolled and annealed. It ought not to wear off more than 1 mm. for 20,000,000 tons of traffic, and is usually calculated to wear 10 mm. before it is taken up. In other words, it would last about 20 years on roads doing as much business as the New York Central. It is, however, unlikely that our steel rails will stand more than half this amount of traffic. The effects of chemical composition are but little understood. Some of the purest irons have turned out utterly worthless. Apparently the absolute quantities of carbon, silicon, aluminum, phosphorus, etc., present are not of so much importance as their relative proportion. One specimen containing carbon 0.16, silicon 0.08, and phosphorus 0.012, could be bent double when cold, while another, containing carbon 0.58, silicon 0.56, and phosphorus 0.011 broke at once. The physical tests for tensile and torsional strength, usually made on a portion cut out of the head of the rail, are not sufficient, because the flaws before spoken of exist mostly in the flange of the rail, and fracture usually begins there. The effect of cold rolling and shocks that a rail is exposed to was shown by a piece of rail made by the Campbells, Sheffield, Eng., which had been worn 3 mm. by a traffic of 60,000,000 tons at Spuyten Duyvel. The head had been somewhat flattened, and the flange driven down into the foot to a certain extent. Under such usage an iron rail would have gone to pieces long ago. Sometimes steel rails crumble all at once and pieces fall out of the head. This is probably due to some physical defects or to crystallization from shocks. The cause has not yet been definitely ascertained. Mr. Collingwood stated that of a rail only a section of 3/8 square inch was pressed by the wheel of a locomotive, the effect being to cause this portion to act like a wedge, and thus to contribute to the disintegration of the rail. He also exhibited a hook which had been used to hoist stones of 10 to 12 tons, and then suddenly broke with a weight of only 6½ tons. It had been worn from a thickness of 2 inches to 1-7/8. The pressure at the upper surface crowded the particles and caused them to act as wedges. Their fracture was crystalline, while that of the lower surface, which parted more slowly, was fibrous. Professor Egleston asserted that there was no such thing as fibrous iron; what appeared so being simply crystalline with the ends drawn out. A sharp blow would cause this to fall off and show the crystalline structure beneath. The discussion was continued by Professors Trowbridge, Egleston, and Newberry. C. F. K. * * * * * FORMATION OF IODIFORM.--All mixtures in which alcohol and iodine enter in combination with any alkali forming colorless solutions go in part to the formation of iodiform. Even chloroform and iodine, forming a colorless solution, give rise to the same product.--_L. Myers Connor._ * * * * * SANITARY SCIENCE IN THE UNITED STATES. The following is an abstract of a paper on the Present and Future of Sanitary Science in the United States, read by Professor Albert R. Leeds, of the Stevens Institute of Technology, before the New York Academy of Sciences at their meeting, November 11th, 1878: Sciences, such as the one under consideration, that have in them a side largely practical, are sure of a welcome in our midst. The study of the laws of public health grew into prominence in this country during the war, when the Sanitary Commission undertook to supervise the camps and hospitals. Sanitary associations were then formed in many States and smaller communities, and these have led to the establishment of State and city boards of health, clothed to a greater or less degree with executive functions. Every epidemic has been the cause of wider dissemination of sanitary knowledge by the daily press. The yellow fever plague, by which more than twelve thousand people have perished, has thoroughly aroused public interest. During its continuance the papers were full of homilies on private and public hygiene, the people everywhere sent aid and sympathy to the afflicted, and a lady offered to defray the expenses of a scientific commission of sanitary experts to inquire into the cause and prevention of the scourge. The proper execution of sanitary laws depends on the free and intelligent co-operation of individuals much more than on the influence of a strong central authority. A general health department at Washington could not legislate pure air, pure water, and pure food into use throughout the nation. The people themselves, in each community, must be educated to demand these requisites of health and to secure them in their own way. I. _Vital Statistics._--The first "Bill of Mortality" in New York city extended from November 1st, 1801, to January 1st, 1803. In it people are said to have died of "flux," "hives," "putrid fever," "breaking out," "stoppage," "fits," of "rash," and, by way of contrast, of "lingering illness." This rude beginning gradually led to the organization of the Metropolitan Board of Health, whose first report was made in 1866. Their second report showed a decrease of 3,152 deaths, mainly in districts where the greatest amount of sanitary work had been done. Valuable illustrations of the relation between damp houses and consumption were obtained by constructing maps of certain wards, on which every death from phthisis for several years was noted opposite each house. It was found that the disease was most fatal in the lowest levels, in rainy seasons, and in crowded localities. The registration of marriages continued so defective that a writer on the subject declares it would be impossible for a large portion of the adult native population of the United States to prove by any legal document that they have a right to the name they bear, or that their parents were ever married. The mortality returns of 1871 were probably nearly perfect, and their very accuracy told against New York city, whose death rate was 28.6 per thousand, while St. Louis reported 17, Rochester 16, Buffalo 14, and Jersey City 7 per thousand. To secure accuracy in the returns of marriages and births, etc., more stringent legislation will be necessary. In New Jersey the State Sanitary Association has conclusively shown the utter worthlessness of the State vital statistics. They memorialized the legislature, and caused the passage of a law which gives to New Jersey one of the best systems of registration yet devised. It owes its excellence to the following features, which should be universally copied: 1. _Burial Permits_ are issued only after registry has been made by a properly qualified person; and 2. The returns are made to an _expert_, who collates them and deduces practical lessons from them. II. _Registration of Disease_.--A large class of diseases may be prevented from becoming epidemic if their existence is known in time. For this purpose the boards of health should be invested with power and provided with means to investigate, reform, and, if necessary, to punish delinquency. Yet in the face of so practical a requirement little more is annually appropriated for the Board of Health of New Jersey than for the pay of two policemen. III. _State Sanitary Legislation_.--The agitation for sanitary reform caused by the yellow fever should not be allowed to die out with the pressure of the calamity that aroused it. It should continue until every State that has been the seat of yellow fever, year after year, has as efficient a health code as Massachusetts and Michigan. The necessity of educating the people before it is possible to secure the requisite legislation will cause a considerable period of time to elapse before all the States have laws in accordance with modern knowledge. Probably no community takes the trouble to protect itself until it has actually suffered. To the distress of London the world owes the report of the Royal Commissions on water supply and the pollution of rivers, still the best repertory of the best knowledge on the subject. The manufactories of England have made it necessary for the government to take cognizance of aerial impurities. Similarly in this country the pollution of the Passaic has caused inquiries to be set on foot in the same direction. [1] [Footnote 1: See Report to Board of Public Works of Jersey City, by Professors Wurtz and Leeds; also, Analyt. Beiträge aus dem Laboratorium des Stevens Institute of Technology, by Professor Leeds, in _Zeitschr. fur Anal. Chem. _1878.] An attempt was made to deprive the inhabitants of New York of their public parks, and to occupy them with buildings devoted to military and other purposes; but the people had already been sufficiently educated up to an appreciation of their sanitary value not to permit it. Dr. Seguin eloquently advocated the improvement of the parks, to make them not only pleasure grounds, but places of æsthetical and practical out-door education of the public school children. IV. _Ventilation_.--It would be a great step in the interests of sanitary science if builders, vestrymen, and school or hospital trustees could be persuaded that their offices did not make them temporary authorities on ventilation, and that they had best intrust this matter to specialists who have fought their way into successful practice. It appears that both the system of ventilation by aspiration and that by propulsion have had great successes and great failures. Many authorities have declared in favor of mechanical ventilation, yet in most institutions where fans had been introduced they are now standing still. In Roosevelt Hospital, New York, they ran their fan backwards for months and then stopped it. V. _Physical Education_.--Instruction in hygiene and physical exercise as a part of the college curriculum was first successfully accomplished at Amherst College, and has now had a trial of nearly twenty years. The importance attached to it is shown by the fact that only distinguished members of the medical profession are appointed as professors, and that they have the same rank as the rest of the faculty. Their first duty is to know the physical condition of every student and to see that the laws of health are not violated. In case of sickness, the students are given certificates to excuse them from attendance and are put in the way of obtaining suitable treatment. The records kept are of great interest. All the classes are required to attend the gymnastic exercises four times a week. For a full account see Professor Hitchcock's report on Hygiene at Amherst College to the American Public Health Association. The excellent results of this feature--it can no longer be regarded as an experiment--recommend its introduction in all our colleges and public schools. VI. _Health Resorts_.--The number of people who leave the cities in the summer to visit the seashore, the mountains, and the country is annually increasing. A healthful village is often changed to a center of pestilence merely by such an influx of strangers, the ordinary means of removing offal, etc., being no longer adequate. The town of Bethlehem, N. H., became so popular by reason of its pure air that several thousand hay fever patients sought relief there in 1877. The consequence was insufficient drainage; but as the inhabitants understood their interests, this defect was at once remedied. The sea shore of New Jersey from Sandy Hook to Cape May is becoming an almost continuous city, and harbors a multitude of visitors every summer. Those whose interest it is to retain this patronage cannot have it too strongly impressed upon them to preserve their healthfulness by introducing cemented cisterns, by causing garbage to be removed daily, and by encouraging local boards of health. VII. _Illuminating Gas_ not only withdraws from the air of our rooms a considerable amount of oxygen, but fills them with noxious products of combustion. All this may be avoided in the future by the introduction of the electric light. VIII. _Sanitary Surveys_.--Dr. Bowditch has shown that a thousand deaths from consumption in Massachusetts are due to a wet and retentive soil, and this fact alone will show the importance of sanitary surveys of the country, such as that made of Staten Island by Professors Newberry and Trowbridge, who determined the influence of the surface soil, of the underlying rock, its porosity, its bedding and its joints, upon the drainage and upon the local climate and health. A similar survey of Hudson county, New Jersey, has been recently made by L. B. Heard, C.E. IX. _Composition of the Atmosphere_.--The English government has been obliged to appoint the celebrated Dr. Angus Smith to examine the effects of atmospheric contamination. In Philadelphia there is scarcely a house front that is not disfigured by the stain of magnesia and lime salts, caused by acid vapors in the atmosphere. A discussion followed, which was introduced by Mr. Collingwood, who remarked that the problem of the sewage of cities was still far from being solved. Though the recent experiments in England on utilizing sewage for agricultural purposes by filtration and otherwise were reported to be successful, we had only dodged the question in this country. Our sewage is still emptied into rivers to poison the water of cities further down their course. When the country becomes more thickly settled, this will answer no longer. It was also stated that while gas in large chandeliers could be made an effective means of ventilation, there was another objection to its use in the fact that the soil of the city was everywhere impregnated with it from leaky mains, thus causing poisonous exhalations and an insufferable odor whenever the ground was opened. Attention was also called to the evil effects of the system of tenement houses, which led to an unfavorable comparison of the health and morality of New York with those of cities like Philadelphia and Cleveland, that abound in small homes. Dr. Minor attributed disease to what Richardson calls "ultra-microscopic molecular aggregates," which always exist in the air, but take hold of us only when our vitality is reduced to a certain point. It has been shown that decay is absolutely impossible in vessels from which they are excluded. But for them the earth would now be heaped with the undecomposed remains of animals and vegetables. According to this view, the future efforts of sanitary science must be simply in the direction of learning how to protect ourselves against the "ultra-microscopic molecular aggregates." C. F. K. * * * * * FELLING TREES BY ELECTRICITY. Some years ago a Doctor Robinson of this city obtained a patent through the agency of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN for Felling Trees by Electricity. Subsequently a description of the invention was published in this paper, soon after which the newspapers in this country and Europe teemed with the account of a gentleman in India having contrived an apparatus for felling trees in the same manner. Since these several years have elapsed we have heard nothing of the gentleman from India till a few days ago our papers have taken up the subject anew, and annexed is the account they give of the inventor's progress in developing his discovery. The electric fluid in the form of lightning oftentimes proves itself a very efficient wood cutter, and it has occurred to some ingenious gentleman in India that artificial electricity may be so applied and controlled as to cut down trees a good deal faster than the clumsy ax or that American notion the chain saw. The two ends of the copper wires of a galvanic battery are connected with platinum wire, which of course instantly becomes red hot, and while in that state it is gently seesawed across the trunk of the trees to be felled. When arrangements were made for the experiment, it turned out that the thickness of the thickest platinum wire that could be got was only that of crochet cotton. It was at once seen that such a wire would be consumed before the tree was half severed from its trunk. However, the attempt was made. The burning wire performed its task very well as long as it lasted, but, as anticipated, the wire continually broke, and at length there was no wire left. There can be little doubt that, with a stronger battery and a thicker wire, the experiment would have been entirely successful. As it was, the tree was sawn one fifth through. * * * * * AN IMPROVED VISE. The novel vise shown in the engraving was recently patented by Mr. William Starkey, of Pittsburg, Pa. [Illustration: STARKEY'S VISE.] The fixed jaw is supported by two standards from the base piece, and has a square boxing or tube for receiving the slide of the movable jaw. This slide is hollow, and contains a rack which is engaged by a pinion on the short vertical shaft, which is supported by the fixed jaw. At the lower end of the vertical shaft there is a worm wheel, that is engaged by a worm on the horizontal shaft on which is placed the hand wheel. By turning the hand wheel the vertical shaft is rotated and the movable jaw is drawn against the object to be clamped by the vise. * * * * * CULINARY USES FOR LEAVES. A writer in the London _Iron Trade Exchange_, calling attention to a neglected source of culinary flavors, says: "With the exception of sweet and bitter herbs, grown chiefly for the purpose, and parsley, which is neither bitter nor sweet, but the most popular of all flavoring plants, comparatively few other leaves are used. Perhaps I ought also to except the sweet bay, which is popular in rice and other puddings, and certainly imparts one of the most pleasant and exquisite flavors; but, on the other hand, what a waste there is of the flavoring properties of peach, almond, and laurel leaves, so richly charged with the essence of bitter almonds, so much used in most kitchens! Of course such leaves must be used with caution, but so must the spirit as well. An infusion of these could readily be made, either green or dry, and a tea or table spoonful of the flavoring liquid used. One of the most useful and harmless of all leaves for flavoring is that of the common syringa. When cucumbers are scarce, these are a perfect substitute in salads or anything in which that flavor is desired. The taste is not only like that of cucumbers, but identical--a curious instance of the correlation of flavors in widely different families. Again, the young leaves of cucumbers have a striking likeness in the way of flavor to that of the fruit. The same may be affirmed of carrot tops, while in most gardens there is a prodigious waste of celery flavor in the sacrifice of the external leaves and their partially blanched footstalks. Scores of celery are cut up into soup, when the outsides would flavor it equally well or better. The young leaves of gooseberries added to bottled fruit give a fresher flavor and a greener color to pies and tarts. The leaves of the flowering currant give a sort of intermediate flavor between black currants and red. Orange, citron, and lemon leaves impart a flavoring equal to that of the fruit and rind combined, and somewhat different from both. A few leaves added to pies, or boiled in the milk used to bake with rice, or formed into crusts or paste impart an admirable and almost inimitable bouquet. In short, leaves are not half so much used for seasoning purposes as they might be." * * * * * NEW SHUTTER FASTENER. We give herewith an engraving of a new shutter fastener, recently patented by Mr. P. F. Fernandez, of San Juan, Porto Rico, West Indies. This fastener is designed for holding doors or window shutters in position when open, to prevent them from closing or swinging in the wind. [Illustration: IMPROVED SHUTTER FASTENER.] To the wall is secured a plate to which is pivoted the spring-acted hook, A, and upon the shutter in the proper position for engaging the hook, A, there is a rigid hook, B. A coil spring is attached to the plate that supports the hook, A, and when the shutter is open is engaged by a boss formed on the end of the hook, B. By this means the hook, B, is pressed forward into close contact with hook, A, thereby preventing all jarring and rattling. The hook, A, is provided with an eye for receiving the cord, C, which extends to the window casing and is within easy reach, so that when it is desired to close the shutter the hook, A, may be readily disengaged from the hook, B, by simply pulling the cord. Further information may be obtained by addressing the inventor as above. * * * * * AN IMPROVED GARDEN SPRINKLER. A novel garden sprinkler, which may be carried on the back, is shown in the accompanying engraving. The cylindrical vessel has a removable cover, and contains a perforated plunger which is operated by a hand lever from without. The cylindrical vessel is provided with shoulder straps, and it has two sprinkling nozzles connected with it by flexible tubes. [Illustration: HODEL & STAUBER'S GARDEN SPRINKLER.] This sprinkler is especially designed for applying insect-destroying poison to plants. The operator, as he goes through the field or garden, takes one nozzle in each hand and distributes the liquid upon the plants. From time to time the liquid will be agitated by moving the perforated plunger. This invention was recently patented by Adolf Hodel, of Jefferson, and F. A. Stauber, of Chicago, Ill. * * * * * A NEW FOOT POWER. In our issue of November 9 we illustrated and described a sewing machine having W. F. Lane's improved foot power applied. We give herewith views of the foot power in detail, Fig. 1 being a side elevation, and Figs. 2 and 3 sectional views. The device is designed for application to any light machinery that can be propelled by foot power. A is the shaft to which motion is to be imparted by the treadles, B, the latter being pivoted to oscillate on the shaft, H. Two ratchet wheels, C, are secured to the shaft, A, and are each worked by pawls, D, which are pivoted to a carrier, E, which turns loosely on the shaft. The pawls are in the form of an elbow lever, and the movement of their tooth ends is limited by lugs or shoulders on the carrier, E. The outer ends of the pawls are received between lugs that project from the plate, F, which turns loosely on the shaft, A, and has attached to it the rope pulley, G. When the plate, F, is turned in one direction the pawls are raised and ride loosely over the teeth, but when the plate turns in the other direction the pawls engage the ratchet teeth and carry them and also the shaft, A. A guide pulley, I, is pivoted below the shaft, A, with its axis at right angles to the shaft. The motion from the alternately-oscillated treadles, B, is transmitted to the pulleys, G, by means of a rope (shown in dotted lines), both ends of which are fastened by hooks to some fixed point. This rope runs from one of the hooks down under a pulley pivoted in the toe of one of the treadles, thence around one of the pulleys, G, thence around the pulley, I, over the other pulley, G, and downward around the pulley in the other treadle, and upward to the second fixed hook. The depression of one of the treadles causes the shaft to rotate, and also lifts the other treadle into position to be operated. [Illustration: LANE'S FOOT POWER.] For further information address Wm. F. Lane, Elgin, Ill. * * * * * NEW INVENTIONS. Mr. Samuel Heaton, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has patented an improved Iron Fence Post, which is particularly adapted for wire fences. It is formed of a slotted iron bar, constituting the post proper, and a triangular brace, which is so connected with said bar that it may be easily adjusted at different angles, corresponding to the undulation or unevenness of the ground surface where the post is used. Mr. Thomas S. Alexander, of Meriden, Conn., has patented an improved Drawer Pull, which is neat, strong, and durable, and is less expensive than when made in the usual way. An improved Earth Scraper has been patented by Mr. Benjamin Slusser, of Sidney, Ohio. This is an improvement in that class of earth scrapers which are arranged to revolve for the purpose of dumping the load, and during the intervals, or while being filled, are locked in rigid position. An improvement in Wagon Bodies has been patented by Mr. James H. Paschal, of Camden, Ark. This invention consists, essentially, in a frame provided with spurs projecting therefrom for engagement with the bales to prevent them from slipping, and the combination therewith of removable extension side and end pieces, for enabling the wagon to be used for other purposes when not employed for hauling cotton bales; there is an extension of the frame forming a feed trough for the horses employed to draw the vehicle. An improved Scraper has been patented by Mr. George Eiteman, of Round Grove, Ill. This is a double-ended scraper hung at its center on a rod connected to the handle arms, whereby either end of the scraper may be used. It has catches to prevent the scraper from revolving backward, and spring actuated dogs on the handle frame to retain the scraper in position and prevent it from turning over until released. * * * * * AMATEUR MECHANICS. For amusement, exercise, and profit we commend, to those who are mechanically inclined, the practice of working with tools of the smaller sort, either in wood or other of the softer materials, or in metals, glass, or stone. This practice renders the hands dexterous, the muscles strong, and the head clear, with the further advantage of producing something for either ornament or use. Of course a bench with a vise and a few wood working and iron working tools will be required; but the most expensive as well as the most essential tool is a lathe. With this tool, not only turning in wood, metal, ivory, rubber, etc., can be accomplished, but it may also be used for screw-thread cutting, gear cutting, drilling metals, boring wood, spinning metals, milling, sawing metal and wood, grinding, polishing, moulding, shaping, and other purposes. A first class plain lathe of small size cannot be purchased for less than $50 or $60, and one of inferior quality will cost $20 to $30. While the purchase of a lathe is recommended there may be many who would prefer to make one. A lathe that will do admirably and which may be easily made is shown in the accompanying engravings, Fig. 1 representing in perspective the lathe complete; Fig. 2 is a perspective view of the lathe without the table; Fig. 3 is a vertical longitudinal section of the lathe, showing the manner of securing the head and tail stocks to the bars which form the bed or shears. In making this lathe one pattern only will be required for the two standards of the head stock, and the support of the ends of the bars. The lower part of the tail stock is made in two parts, so that they may be clamped tightly together on the shears by means of the bolt that passes through both parts, and is provided with a nut having a lever handle. The rest support is also made in two parts, clamped together on the ways in a similar way. The patterns may be easily sawed from 1¼ inch pine. The holes that receive the round bars should be chambered to receive Babbitt metal, used in making the fit around the bars forming the shears, around the head and tail spindles, and around the shank of the tool rest. The smallest diameter of the holes that receive the round bars should be a little less than that of the bars, so that the several pieces that are placed on the bars may be fitted to hold them in place while the Babbitt metal is poured in. The dimensions of the lathe are as follows: Length of round bars forming shears, 24 inches; diameter of bars, 1 inch; distance from the upper side of upper bar to center of spindle, 3 inches; between bars, ¾ inch; between standards that support the live spindle, 3½ inches; size of standard above shears, ¾ x 1¼ inch; diameter of head and tail spindles, ¾ inch; diameter of pulleys, 5 inches, 3½ inches, and 2 inches; width of base of standards, 5 inches; height of standards, 7 inches. The live spindle should be enlarged at the face plate end, and tapered at both ends, as indicated in the engraving. The pulleys, which are of hard wood, are made of three pieces glued together, bored, and driven on the spindle, secured by a pin passing through both it and the spindle, and turned off. The bars forming the shears may be either cold rolled iron or round machinery steel; they will require no labor except perhaps squaring up at the ends. The castings having been fitted to the bars, and provided with set screws for clamping them, the two standards that support the live spindle and the support for the opposite end of the bars are put in position, when the bars are made truly parallel, and a little clay or putty is placed around each bar and over the annular cavity that surrounds it, and is formed into a spout or lip at the upper side to facilitate the pouring of Babbitt metal. The metal must be quite hot when poured, so that it will run sharp and fill the cavity. To guard against a possible difficulty in removing the castings from the bars it might be well to cover the side of the bar next the screw with a thin piece of paper. The pieces of the tail stock and tool rest support are fitted to the bars by means of Babbitt metal, the metal being poured first in one half and then in the other. The bolts which clamp the two parts of the rest support and tail stock together are provided with lever handles. After fitting the parts to the two bars by means of Babbitt metal, the tail spindle, which is threaded for half its length, is placed in the tail stock parallel with the bars and Babbitted. A binding screw is provided for clamping the tail spindle, and the spindle is drilled at one end to receive the center, and has at the other end a crank for operating it. A steel or bronze button is placed in the hole in the standard that supports the smaller end of the live spindle, and the spindle is supported in its working position and Babbitted. The thread on the spindle should be rather coarse, so that wooden or type metal face plates and chucks may be used. The table shown in Fig. 1 is simple and inexpensive. It consists of two pairs of crossed legs halved together and secured to a plank top. A small rod passes through the rear legs near their lower ends, and also through a piece of gas pipe placed between the legs. A diagonal brace is secured to the top near one end, and is fastened to the lower end of the rear leg at the other end of the table. A block is secured to each pair of legs for supporting a pair of ordinary grindstone rollers, which form a bearing for the balance wheel shaft. This shaft has formed in it two cranks, and it carries an ordinary balance wheel, to the side of which is secured by means of hook bolts a grooved wooden rim for receiving the driving belt. The cranks are connected, by means of hooks of ordinary round iron, with a treadle that is pivoted on the gas pipe at the rear of the table. The shaft will work tolerably well, even if it is not turned. The cranks must have half round grooves filed in them to receive the treadle hooks. The size of the different diameters of the drive wheel may be found by turning the larger one first and the smaller ones afterward, using the belt to determine when the proper size is reached. The wooden rim may be turned off in position by using a pointed tool. [Illustration: Fig. 1] [Illustration: Fig. 2] [Illustration: Fig. 3] [LATHES FOR AMATEUR MECHANICS.] The lathe above described, although very easily made and inexpensive, will be found to serve an excellent purpose for hand work, and if the holes, instead of being Babbitted, are bored, and if the bars forming the shears are turned, the lathe may be converted into a kind of engine lathe by placing a feeding screw between the bars, and putting a small tool post in the rest support. M. * * * * * MACHINE SHOP ECONOMY. In times like the present, when even with good management our best machine shops are enabled to exhibit but small margins of profit, and shops with indifferent management exhibit margins on the wrong side, it is a question of paramount importance what kind of economy should be pursued in order to maintain a successful business. The directors of long established machinery enterprises differ widely upon some methods of conducting business, and while one gains success by pursuing a certain plan, another, with perhaps as much ability, cannot pursue the same with satisfactory results. While in the main there are many different plans upon which successful machinery establishments are conducted, there are some underlying principles that must be observed to avoid meeting with difficulties. The rate of wages paid is certainly a large element of shop economy, but there are so many other elements that should be considered before wages are reached, that we often find proprietors, who pay their workmen at a comparatively high rate, doing a more prosperous business than their competitors who have reduced wages to the lowest possible scale. Many machine shop owners, not having mastered the various economies of management, as soon as profits begin to shorten, pounce directly upon the wages paid to their workmen, and pare them down so as to make up for the deficiency elsewhere. They don't seem to realize that there are important elements of economical management other than closely watching the wages of labor and the cost of material. It is sometimes necessary to reduce the rate of wages, but what a different effect it has upon the men in different shops! In one shop you scarcely hear a murmur--no angry meetings--no threats of a strike--no growling at the head of the establishment. The intelligent workmen understand the reasons for the reduction without a wordy explanation, and accept it, feeling confident that it has not been unjustly made. In another shop it causes ill feeling, angry protests, and perhaps a disastrous strike. The owner often charges his trouble to the character of his workmen. Let him review his course, and see if the great cause is not in his own management. Mechanics are keen and observing. If the business is poorly managed they are not slow to mark it, and when a cut is made in wages can generally cipher out the cause. It is good economy to keep a systematic record of the cost of everything. This record will be found very valuable in making estimates, much more so than guess work. It is not good economy to keep using worn-out tools when any work of consequence is to be performed. The extra cost of labor and spoiled pieces would soon pay for new tools. It is not good economy to keep discharging capable workmen for petty causes, and employing new hands to take their places. It is poor economy to use slow-cutting grindstones to accomplish work that fast cutting emery wheels are suited for. It is questionable economy to employ lathes, planers, and drills to perform work of any extent that a milling machine will do better in less time and at much less expense. It is decidedly bad economy to employ engines and boilers that waste fuel and are troublesome to keep in good running condition. It is mistaken economy to buy inferior tools, machines, and shop supplies, because they are low priced. It is very defective economy to fit the parts of machines together by trial instead of making them by aid of correct drawings and standard tools for accurate measurement. It is faulty economy to practice borrowing and lending working tools. The idea that economy consists in withholding every expense not absolutely demanded is erroneous. An extra outlay in one or another direction often assures the saving as well as the making of money. Wise economy looks to the future as well as the present, and requires that all work sent out from a shop should be of the best and most reliable character.--_American Machinist._ * * * * * THE REWARD OF INVENTION. _Capital and Labor_ publishes the substance of a letter from Mr. Henry Bessemer with reference to the refusal of the English Government, or of its ambassador in Paris, to allow the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor to be accepted by its countrymen, and in his letter Mr. Bessemer furnishes some autobiographic particulars which cannot fail to be of interest. He tells us that at the age of eighteen he came to London from a small country village, knowing no one, and himself unknown; but his studious habits and his love of invention soon gained for him a footing, and in two years he was pursuing a method of his own invention for taking copies from antique and modern bassi-rilievi in a manner that enabled him to stamp them on a cardboard, thus producing thousands of embossed copies of the highest works of art, at a small cost. The facility for making a permanent die, even from a thin paper original, capable of producing a thousand copies, would have opened a wide door to successful fraud if the process had been known to unscrupulous persons; for by its means, Mr. Bessemer states, there is not a government stamp, or the paper seal of a corporate body, that every common office clerk could not forge in a few minutes at the office of his employer or at his own home. The production of a die from a common paper stamp is the work of only ten minutes; the materials cost less than one penny. No sort of technical skill is necessary, and a common copying press or letter stamp yields most successful copies. There is no need for the would-be forger to associate himself with a skillful die sinker, capable of making a good imitation in steel of the original, for the merest tyro could make an absolute copy on the first attempt. The public knowledge of such a means of forging would, at that time, have shattered the whole system of the British Stamp Office, had a knowledge of the method been allowed to escape. The secret has, however, been carefully guarded to this day. During the time that Mr. Bessemer was engaged in studying this question he was informed that the government were themselves cognizant of the fact that they were losers to a great amount annually by the transfer of stamps from old and useless deeds to new skins of parchment, thus making the stamps do duty a second or third time, to the serious loss of the revenue. One official in high position said that he believed they were defrauded in this way to the extent of probably £100,000 per annum. To fully appreciate the importance of this fact, and realize the facility afforded for this species of fraud by the system then in use, it must be understood that the ordinary impressed or embossed stamp, such as is employed on all bills of exchange, if impressed directly on a skin of parchment, would be entirely obliterated by exposing the deed for a few months to a damp atmosphere. The deed would thus appear as if unstamped, and therefore invalid. To prevent this it has been the practice as far back as the reign of Queen Anne to gum a small piece of blue paper on to the parchment; and for still greater security a strip of metal foil is passed through it, and another small piece of paper with the printed initials of the Sovereign is gummed over the loose ends of the foil at the back. The stamp is then impressed on the blue paper, which, unlike parchment, is incapable of losing the impression by exposure to a damp atmosphere. But, practically, it has been found that a little piece of moistened blotting paper applied for a whole night so softens the gum that the two pieces of paper and the slip of foil can be removed from the old deed most easily, and be applied to a new skin of parchment, and thus be made to do duty a second or third time. Thus the expensive stamps on thousands of old deeds of partnership, leases, and other old documents, when no longer of value, offer a rich harvest to those who are dishonest enough to use them. A knowledge of these facts led Mr. Bessemer to fully appreciate the importance of any system of stamps that would effectually prevent so great a loss; nor did he for one moment doubt but that government would amply reward success. After some months of study and experiment, which he cheerfully undertook (although it interfered considerably with the pursuit of regular business, inasmuch as it was necessary to carry on the experiments with the strictest secrecy, and to do all the work himself during the night after his people had left work), he succeeded in making a stamp that satisfied all the necessary conditions. It was impossible to remove it from one deed and transfer it to another. No amount of damp, or even saturation with water, could obliterate it, and it was impossible to take any impression from it capable of producing a duplicate. Mr. Bessemer says that he knew nothing of patents or patent law in those days; and adds that if he had for a moment thought it necessary to make any preliminary conditions with government he would have at once scouted the idea as utterly unworthy, thinking his interests absolutely secure. In this full confidence he sought an interview with the then chief of the Stamp Office, Sir Charles Presley, and showed him by numerous proofs how easily all his stamps could be forged, and also the mode of prevention. He was greatly astonished, and at a later interview he suggested that the principle of the invention should be worked out fully. This Mr. Bessemer was only too anxious to do; and some five or six weeks later called again with a newly designed stamp, which greatly pleased him. The design was circular, about 2½ inches in diameter, and consisted of the Garter with the motto in capital letters surmounted by a crown. Within the Garter was a shield with the words "five pounds." The space between the shield and the Garter was filled with network in imitation of lace. The die had been executed in steel, which pierced the parchment with more than 400 holes, each one of the necessary form to produce its special portion of the design. Since that period perforated paper of this kind has been largely employed for valentines and other ornamental purposes, but was previously unknown. It was at once obvious that the transfer of such a stamp was impossible. It was equally clear that dampness could not obliterate it; nor was it possible to take any impression from it capable of perforating another skin of parchment. This design gave great satisfaction, and everything went on smoothly; Sir Charles consulted Lord Althorp, and the Stamp Office authorities determined to adopt it. Mr. Bessemer was then asked if, instead of receiving a sum of money from the Treasury, he would be satisfied with the position of Superintendent of Stamps, at some £600 or £800 per annum. This was all that he then desired, rejoicing over the prospect, for he was at that time engaged to be married, and his future position in life seemed assured. An incident now occurred that reads almost like romance. A few days after affairs had assumed this satisfactory position, he called on the young lady to whom he was then engaged (now Mrs. Bessemer), and showed her the pretty piece of network which constituted the new parchment stamp, explaining how it could never be removed from the parchment and used again, and mentioning the fact that old deeds with stamps on them dated as far back as the reign of Queen Anne could be fraudulently used. She at once said, "Yes, I understand this; but surely, if all stamps had a date put upon them, they could not at a future time be used again without detection?" This was indeed a new light, and greatly startled the inventor, who at once said that steel dies used for this purpose could have but one date engraved upon them. But after a little consideration he saw that movable dates were by no means impossible, and that this could easily be effected by drilling three holes of about a quarter of an inch in diameter in the steel die, and fitting into each of these openings a steel plug or type with sunk figures engraved on their ends, giving on one the date of the month, on the next the month of the year, and on the third circular steel type the last two figures of the year. This plan would be most simple and efficient, would take less time and money to inaugurate than the more elaborate plan that had been devised; but while pleased and proud at the clever and simple suggestion of the young lady, her future husband saw also that all his more elaborate system of piercing dies, the result of months of study, and the toil of many a weary and lonely night, was shattered to pieces by it. He feared to disturb the decision that Sir Charles Presley had come to, as to the adoption of the perforated stamp, but, with a strong conviction of the advantages of the new plan, felt in honor bound not to suppress it, whatever might be the result. Thus it was that he soon found himself again closeted with Sir Charles at Somerset House, discussing the new scheme, which he much preferred, because, as he said, all the old dies, old presses, and old workmen could be employed, and there would be but little change in the office--so little, in fact, that no new superintendent of stamps was required, which the then unknown art of making and using piercing dies would have rendered absolutely necessary. After due consideration the first plan was definitely abandoned by the office in favor of the dated stamps, with which every one is now familiar. In six or eight weeks from this time an Act of Parliament was passed calling in the private stock of stamps dispersed throughout the country, and authorizing the issue of the new dated ones. Thus was inaugurated a system that has been in operation some forty-five years, successfully preventing that source of fraud from which the revenue had so severely suffered. If anything like Sir Charles Presley's estimate of £100,000 per annum was correct, this saving must now amount to some millions sterling; but whatever the varying amount might have been, it is certain that so important and long established a system as that in use at the Stamp Office would never have been voluntarily broken up by its own officials, except under the strongest conviction that the losses were very great, and that the new order of things would prove an effectual barrier to future fraud. During all the bustle of this great change no steps had been taken to install the inventor in the office. Lord Althorp had resigned, and no one seemed to have authority to do anything. All sorts of half promises and excuses followed each other, with long delays between, and Mr. Bessemer gradually saw the whole thing sliding out of his grasp. Instead of holding fast to the first plan, which they could not have executed without his aid and special knowledge, he had, in all the trustfulness of youthful inexperience, shown them another plan, so simple that they could put it in operation without any assistance. He had no patent to fall back upon, and could not go to law, even if he wished to do so, for he was reminded, when pressing for mere money out of pocket, that he had done all the work voluntarily. Wearied and disgusted, he at last ceased to waste time in calling at the Stamp Office, and he felt that nothing but increased exertions could make up for the loss of some nine months of toil and expenditure. Thus, sad and dispirited, and with a burning sense of injustice overpowering all other feelings, he went from the Stamp Office, too proud to ask as a favor that which was indubitably his just right, and he adds, "Up to this hour I have never received one shilling or any kind of acknowledgment whatever from the British Government." It is notorious, adds the editor, that some of the most renowned and invaluable inventions of recent years, especially those connected with the navy, have narrowly escaped rejection by permanent but ignorant officials; and that the authors of the inventions have had to submit to delay, loss, annoyance, and contumely before their processes could be tried, even after their success had been officially demonstrated. Perhaps it is not now so much a question of money, for it is to be hoped that Mr. Bessemer is reaping the due reward of ingenuity and skill in other fields of invention. But even his discoveries in steel making, if they have very properly enriched himself, have, in an infinitely larger degree, added to the wealth of the country, and have given employment to many thousands. Such a man is a public benefactor, and eminently deserves recognition by the state, especially by way of atonement for former neglect and injustice. Military men receive titular honors and a pecuniary reward for slaying a crowd of savages and burning their huts, while the men who have helped to make England what she is, commercially and industrially, are in most cases left to their fate, which may chance to be pecuniary ruin. * * * * * OIL NOTES. PENNSYLVANIA. The total production of crude petroleum for the first three quarters of 1878 was 11,126,037 barrels, against 8,436,867 barrels for the same time in 1877; increase in 1878, 1,689,170 barrels. The total number of drilling wells completed for the first three quarters of 1878 were 2,333, against 2,699 for the same time in 1877; decrease in 1878, 366. The daily average production of the new wells completed for the first three quarters of 1878 was 13 2-10 barrels, against 14 2-10 for the same time in 1877; decrease in 1878, 1 barrel. The total number of dry holes developed in the first three quarters of 1878 were 280, against 476 for the same time in 1877; decrease in 1878, 196. The total amount of crude petroleum held in the producing regions of Pennsvlvania, at the close of the third quarter of 1878, was 4,599,362 barrels, against 2,503,657 at the same time in 1877; increase in 1878, 2,095,705 barrels. The amount of crude petroleum represented by outstanding certificates on the last day of September was 1,705,853 barrels, against 1,317,484 barrels on the last day of October, a reduction during October of 158,127 barrels. Mr. J. M. Guffey has purchased of Marcus Hulings an undivided half interest in the celebrated Kinzua Creek property (Bradford district). The purchased portion contains 6,400 acres, on which there is a well that was struck in June last, and since that time has been doing from 16 to 18 barrels, and has never been torpedoed. Mr. Guffey looks upon this as one of the best prospective oil territories in the country. D. W. C. Carroll & Co., of Pittsburg, have kept from 45 to 75 men employed, since June, in the oil regions, building iron tanks, nearly all of which are located in the Bradford district. WEST VIRGINIA. The Wheeling _Intelligencer_ says: As noticed in our Moundsville letter this morning, extensive preparations have been made to bore for oil on the opposite side of the river at the Union Coal Works shaft. The machinery was brought down from Pittsburg on Tuesday, and is now being put in position by contractors, who have engaged to go down 1,200 feet. It will be recollected that for a long time past oil has been found in the coal shaft, and the company who are putting down the well feel confident that plenty of it exists deeper down. Some parties look forward to the development of the fact that Moundsville is situated in an important oil break, and that oil in abundance will be found on both sides of the river. The progress of the well will be looked forward to with much interest by the people of that vicinity. MASSACHUSETTS. The Maverick Oil Works at East Boston have recently made some very extensive additions and improvements, lengthening their wharf and making a variety of alterations in their buildings. They will shortly complete a new cooper shop, wherein, it is probable, they will construct all the tin cans required by the demands of their business. OHIO. The oil excitement has broken out afresh in West Mecca, Warren county, Ohio. Oil men, heavily backed with capital, have recently come in from Pennsylvania, and are making things lively in that locality. Eight new wells have been put in operation during the past week. This district is the same where the principal excitement prevailed 18 years ago. JAPAN. The Tokio _Times_ states that the principal feature of American trade with Japan is the petroleum exports from New York. The enterprise was inaugurated only eight years ago; but the business has so increased that while only 200 cases of kerosene, valued at $600, were exported in 1870, in 1877 366,639 cases were sent to Yokohama, and 128,158 cases to Hiogo, whither none had before been carried direct. The value of these consignments was over $1,000,000. Several refineries are in operation in Japan, making kerosene from native petroleum. RUSSIA. The recent reports concerning the discovery of oil near the shores of the Caspian Sea seem to be fully confirmed. From one of the wells a stream, free from gas and froth, is forced to a height of 75 feet, yielding at the rate of 10,000 barrels a day. It is reported that companies are forming at Odessa, Kovo-Tcherkask, Astrakhan, and other cities, for the purpose of obtaining oil. Two large manufacturing concerns, who have their headquarters in New York city, recently received orders for considerable quantities of oil-line pipes, steam pumps, engines, boilers, and other apparatus, to be shipped immediately for St. Petersburg, Russia. ITALY. The oil wells of Italy comprise about 5, with a capacity of about 30 barrels per day, of a thick substance of 14 gravity. They are pumped by hand, which, though primitive, is cheaper than steam, for both men and women are employed, the former receiving as compensation for a day's work 1 lira, equal to 20 cents; and the women 60 centessimi, equal to 12 cents of our money. The wells are located in a deep valley, and the oil carried up on the backs of donkeys to a refinery, where it is treated, and yields from 2 to 5 per cent. of burning oil. PERU. It is proposed to build a pipe line from the refinery on the estates of Henry Meiggs to the shipping port, a distance of about 7 miles. It is stated that oil can be produced at this point for less than 1 cent a gallon, and as the fields have produced from time immemorial, there is no prospect of their early exhaustion. ONTARIO. The oil refinery at St. Thomas, Ont., is running day and night; 494 barrels of crude petroleum were brought from Petrolia for it in one week recently.--_Stowell's Petroleum Reporter_. * * * * * RAILWAY NOTES. The new track laid in this country during the year ending September 10, 1878, was 1,160 miles. During the six preceding years the number of miles of track laid was: In 1872, 4,498; 1873, 2,455; 1874, 1,066; 1875, 702; 1876, 1,467; 1877, 1,176. The statement made in the recent Narrow Gauge Convention, that standard gauge freight cars weigh ten tons and carry ten tons, is indignantly disputed by users of the latter. One gentleman, having much to do with freight cars, says that the modern freight cars weigh from 17,000 to 18,000 lbs., commonly carry (and that on long hauls) 28,000 lbs., are guaranteed to carry 30,000 lbs., while he has seen them show on the scales 30,000 and 32,000 lbs. of load, and in one case 35,000 lbs. The general tendency for some years has been to increase loads without increasing, but in many cases decreasing, weights of cars; and it seems quite likely that 30,000 lbs. will soon be the standard load. The tank cars used for carrying petroleum have an average capacity--and they are almost always run full--of 30,000 lbs. The Standard Oil Company, which has some 3,000 of such cars, carried on four-wheeled trucks with the Master Car Builders' standard axle, has run them with such loads for years, and only recently had its first case of a broken axle, manifestly due to a defect in the iron. INTERESTING observations have been made recently on the Cologne-Minden Road, Prussia, on the rusting of iron rails. A pile of rails of odd lengths were laid on sleepers over a bed of gravel early in 1870, and remained undisturbed until the fall of 1877, there being no use for them. It was then found that they were covered with a layer of rust 0.12 inch thick, which had to be removed by striking the rail with a hammer. The cleaned rail weighed only 398.2 lbs., while its original weight was 419.1 lbs., showing that 5 per cent. of the rail had been destroyed by rust, which covered the rail quite uniformly. This confirms the observation often made, that rails stacked away are much more liable to rust than those laid down in a track. According to _Le Fer_, at a meeting of directors of the German railroads held at Constance, the following information was furnished in regard to the relative value of the different methods of injecting ties: 1. Railroad from Hanover and Cologne to Minden. Pine ties injected with chloride of zinc; after 21 years the proportion of ties renewed was 21 per cent. Beech ties injected with creasote; after 22 years, 46 per cent. Oak ties injected with chloride of zinc; after 17 years, 20.7 per cent. Oak ties not injected; after 17 years, 49 per cent. The conditions were very favorable for experiment; the road bed was good, and permitted of easy desiccation. The unrenewed ties showed, on cutting, that they were in a condition of perfect health. 2. Railroad "Kaiser-Ferdinands-Nord." Oak ties not injected; after 12 years the proportion renewed was 74.48 per cent. Oak ties injected with chloride of zinc; after 7 years, 3.29 per cent. Oak ties injected with creasote; after 6 years, 0.09 per cent. Pine ties injected with chloride of zinc; after 17 years, 4.46 per cent. The annual official reports of the railroads of India place the length of railways there at 7,551½ miles, of which 492½ miles were completed during the year 1877, and 223 miles since the close of the year. There are 806½ miles of double track; 5,912¾ miles are constructed on the 5 foot 6 inch gauge, and 1,638¾ on narrower gauges. The capital outlay on the State lines amounted to £3,122,051, and on the guaranteed lines to £1,374,882, bringing the total capital expenditure, up to the end of October, as regards the State, and to the end of March last, as regards the guaranteed lines, to £113,144,541. The expenditure up to the end of the year may be taken in round numbers at £13,344,500. The revenue from all the open lines was £6,232,888, of which £6,091,532 were earned by the guaranteed lines, with a capital of £95,482,941, and £141,356 were earned by the State lines, on a capital expenditure of £17,661,600. The net receipts from the guaranteed lines exceeded the amount advanced for guaranteed interest by £1,454,591; the year previous there was a deficit of £216,517. A French engineer named Duponchel has made a report on the project of a railroad across the Desert of Sahara. The projected railway would run from Algiers to Timbuctoo, a distance of 2,500 kilometers. M. Duponchel stated that the principal portion of the line would rest during nearly its whole extent on layers of sand, and toward the end on primitive volcanic rocks, granite, gneiss, etc. No mountainous obstructions would have to be encountered. The average heat does not appear to exceed 23° or 24° C. (73 2-5° or 75 1-5° Fah.), but account must be taken of the great variations which occur in the 24 hours. For instance, occasionally, a very cold night succeeds a temperature of 40° C. (104° Fah.) in the day time. The great difficulty to be overcome would be the want of water, which is not to be procured in that region. M. Duponchel calculates that for three trains daily the amount of water required would be 4,000 cubic meters, and that the engineering science of the day is quite sufficient to supply even a much greater quantity at the requisite points. The government of Costa Rica has advertised for tenders for building bridges on the second Atlantic Division of its railroad. There will be needed 194 bridges. The bridges will vary in length from 3 feet to 1,044 feet, and will be built for a track of 3 foot 3½ inch gauge. They will be of sufficient strength to stand a strain of 2,240 lbs. to the lineal foot, in addition to the weight of the usual freight carried. * * * * * THE WERDERMANN ELECTRIC LIGHT. [Illustration: FIG. 1 THE WERDERMANN LAMP.] It has been looked upon as essential that a certain distance should separate the ends of the carbon electrodes used in electric lamps. Every one has accepted this as an axiom. Mr. Werdermann's skepticism has, however, caused him to doubt the axiom, and the result is that he has discarded the electric arc space, and by placing his electrodes in actual contact, has produced a lamp which provides the means of dividing the electric current, and promises to give almost any number of lights from a single machine. Mr. Werdermann's inventions, says the _Engineering_, are secured by patents considerably in advance of those of Mr. Edison, and may in their chief points be explained as follows: In place of two electrodes of similar form and dimensions, one electrode consists of a large bun-shaped disk of carbon placed with the rounded face downward. The other carbon is a fine rod of carbon of about 1/8 or 5-32 inch in diameter. The upper end of this is pointed and maintained in contact with the center of the lower surface of the disk. This rod is supported by means of a spring collar, which also forms the circuit connection. This is within about ¾ in. of the top of the carbon, so that the ¾ in. becomes incandescent, and the contact between the two carbons being only a point, a small electric arc is produced between the two carbons, while the electricity is at the same time passed on through the carbon disk, and the connections there attached to the next lamp. [Illustration: DIAGRAM OF CURRENT.] Referring to our diagrams, in Fig. 1 the upper carbon is shown at C, and the rod carbon at c. The former is supported by means of an adjustable jointed bracket, B, attached to the wood stand. The rod carbon is guided by the spring collar on the top of the stand, and to which the connection is made, and is supported by the fine cord running over the pulley, P. This cord is attached to the clasp, D, at the bottom of the rod, and to the balance weight, W, by which the rod is maintained in constant, practical, though not absolute contact with the disk. Round the upper part of the disk is a metal band, A, to which the circuit wire is attached, and the current thus passed on to the next lamps. At a recent trial of this lamp, the current was derived from a small Gramme electro-plating machine, requiring only 2 horse power to put it in full work. It may therefore be assumed that this was about the limit of the power at work to produce the light. At the commencement of the proceedings two lights were maintained, each stated to be equal to 320 sperm candles. At this rate the two lights would be equal to 640 candles, or 40 full power gas lights, each consuming 5 cubic feet of 16 candle gas per hour. Such gas lights, it may be observed, are not often seen, except in the argand form. The two lights burned with extreme steadiness, there being no undulation, or flickering whatever, although there was no glass globe to tone down any variations of luster. The lights were perfectly bare and unprotected, and the place where the trial was made was a workshop of moderate size. Later in the evening one light was exhibited outside the building, in an open thoroughfare, and the same perfect steadiness was observable. After the two lights had been burning for a time they were extinguished, and the current was sent through a row of ten lamps. The light per lamp was of course reduced, but there was the remarkable fact that ten lights were maintained by a comparatively weak machine, driven by an engine exerting the power of only two horses. The light of each of these ten lamps was stated to be that of 40 candles, making, therefore, a total of 400. A reduction of light, consequent on the further division of the current, is thus apparent; but for this loss there may be ample compensation in the superior economy of a distributed light as compared with one that is concentrated. In the case of the ten lamps, the light is equal to that of 25 full power gas lights, consuming altogether 125 cubic feet of gas per hour. The extremely small arc due to the peculiar arrangement of the carbons in the Werdermann light has the advantage of offering the least possible resistance to the passage of the current. This resistance increases much more rapidly than is represented by increase of distance between the carbon points. Hence the electric power with Werdermann's lamp is economized to the utmost in this respect, and it becomes possible--as in the recent experiment--to make use of an electric current large in quantity but of low intensity. The tension being small, there is the less difficulty with regard to insulation. If one lamp or more should be accidentally extinguished, the rest will continue to burn. The whole of the lamps can also be extinguished and relit by merely stopping the current and then sending it on again. No nice and troublesome adjustment with reference to the length of the electric arc is requisite, and simple contact between the point of the rod and the surface of the disk is sufficient for the manifestation of the light. In respect to duration, a carbon rod 5-32 in. in diameter, and a yard long, obtained from Paris, costs a franc. This, placed in a large lamp, having an estimated lighting power of 320 candles, will last from 12 to 15 hours. The smaller lamps take a carbon of 1/8 in. diameter. Mr. Werdermann endeavors to make the resistance of the external portion of the circuit equal to the internal resistance, in order to obtain the greatest effect. It is well known that the best results are obtained when the internal and external resistances are equal. The method adopted is that known to electricians as the divided arc, and will easily be understood from Fig. 2. Let B represent the source of the electric current, and A a copper wire connected to the positive and negative poles of the source as in the diagram. The wire, A, has a certain resistance. Suppose, now, we arrange for the current to pass as in the diagram, Fig. 3. By the insertion of the new wire, C, we have lessened the total external resistance and increased the current, as will be seen by reference to Ohm's law. C = E/(R+r) where C = current; E = electromotive force; R = resistance external; r = resistance internal. The fraction E/(R+r) increases as its denominator is lessened. The current passes along the two branches in equal quantities if the resistances of the wires are equal, but inversely as the resistances if they are unequal. Thus, if the branch, A, has a resistance, 9, and C has a resistance, 1, 9-10 of the current will pass through C, and 1-10 through A. Similarly, for any number of branches the current will divide itself according to the resistances. If, then, we have a number of branches, as indicated in Fig. 4, the current will divide itself equally among the branches when the resistances of the branches are equal. This is the arrangement adopted by Mr. Werdermann, as will be seen from the annexed diagram, Fig. 5, in which N and P represent the negative and positive poles of the machine, and L L the electric lamps. When any one lamp is put out the inventor arranges that an equivalent resistance shall be put into the circuit, so that as a whole the circuit is unaltered, and the other lamps unaffected. * * * * * CASSON'S SAW BENCH. We give herewith a perspective view of a circular saw bench made by Messrs. Oliver & Co. (Limited), of Chesterfield, England, which we take from _Engineering_. The chief features in this machine are that it is fitted with Mr. John Casson's patent feed gear and apparatus for steadying the saws. This feeding arrangement has now been in use some years, and has been fitted to a very large number of circular saw benches. This being the case, and the arrangement being very clearly shown by our engraving, it will be unnecessary for us to describe it in detail here. The saw-steadying apparatus, with which the saw bench we illustrate is fitted, is a novel arrangement, recently patented by Mr. Casson; in the present case it is applied to two saws. The steadying arrangement consists of accurately fitted sliding jaws mounted on the arms of a forked support, so that they can be moved and adjusted only by fine threaded screws, the jaws having their surfaces next the saws, accurately parallel with the plane of the collar of the saw spindle; these jaws, A, are fixed when the adjusting screws are at rest, and they are faced with strips of greenheart or other suitable timber, secured by countersunk screw bolts, these faces forming a perfectly true guide for the saw blades. For a single saw the guides just described would suffice; but for two or more saws the outside guides must be supplemented by others between the saw blades. It will be noticed that the support, F, carrying the guiding jaws, has a square stem sliding through the head of a suitable standard, and it can be readily fixed at any desired height by means of the set screw. [Illustration: BENCH WITH SAW-STEADYING APPARATUS.] The arrangement we have been describing is well carried out, and there can be no doubt that it will do good service, and enable thin saws to be efficiently used with a heavy feed. We have received very satisfactory reports of its performance. * * * * * A BAIT FOR INVENTORS. I will give $200 for a machine that will bale hay in the field. Rake and press combined would be preferable, but would not object to its taking the hay in the windrow. The machine must be expeditious, executing as fast as a mower is able to cut. Must have sufficient power to make a bale suitable for commercial uses; shape of the bale immaterial; a round one preferred. Must be of light draught; one team is generally all that is available for any machine on the farm. These, with the other qualifications demanded of every machine, simplicity, durability, easy to manage, etc. If such an invention could be produced it would make a revolution in the hay field almost equal to that which the mower has made. What an awkward, ungainly spectacle a man presents, struggling at one end of a six foot pole, with a ten pound lock of hay at the other end, endeavoring with all his might and main to elevate it 12 or 15 feet on top of a load! It is an insult to human intelligence. A load of loose hay is an uncertain quantity. You are never sure of getting it into the barn. Top heavy, one sided, too wide or too high for the doors; and even with the best of luck, a good percentage has drizzled in the wake of the wagon over the lot to the barn. A 100 or 200 lb. bale, with an inclined plane, or a pulley on side or aft of a good strong rack, and all this barbarism has succumbed to civilization. At the barn comes a worse servitude. (I don't mean the horse fork; that is a grand lift to civilization. I hope to modify it shortly to throw bales.) There a man struggles with sheer desperation to press by his own avoirdupois 20 tons of hay into a place that won't hold 10. Tramp, tramp, tramp, leg-weary, panting like an overheated dog, every fiber of his clothing saturated with perspiration, a subject worthy of a better immortality than the Greek slave. O Edison! don't fritter away your genius on sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. Elevate the laborer. Liberate our overworked people. Make us a chariot to press our hay.--_Edmund Adams, North Manlius, N. Y., to the New York Tribune._ * * * * * A SILVER MILL IN THE CLOUDS. The largest and most complete silver mill ever constructed, says the San Francisco Stock Report, has recently been built by Messrs. Rankin, Brayton & Co., of the Pacific Iron Works of that city, for the Cerro de Pasco Mining Company, of Peru, and shipped for Callao, the port of destination. This enormous mill consists of 80 stamps, 900 lbs, each, 44 live foot amalgamating pans, 22 nine foot settlers, and all the accessories of a first-class modern mill. It is to be erected upon the above named mines, which are situated in the heart of the Andes, some 150 miles east of the city of Lima, at an elevation of more than 14,000 feet. To admit of mule transportation a portion of the way up this tremendous ascent, the mill had to be made in sections, no piece weighing more than 500 lbs. Some idea of the magnitude of this work may be inferred from the fact that the mill, as thus constructed, consisted of more than 17,000 pieces, and weighed upward of 600 tons. This enormous amount of machinery was constructed by the above firm and put on board a ship 50 days from date of contract. The Cerro de Pasco mines have been the richest and most famous in the world's history. They have been worked by the old arastra process for the past 200 years, and have produced, according to the most authentic records, more than $500,000,000. With such improved machinery the product of these mines will undoubtedly attract the attention of the world, and so reflect great credit upon the capacity, ingenuity, and skill of our mechanical establishments. * * * * * POULTICES. The common practice in making poultices of mixing the linseed meal with hot water, and applying them directly to the skin, is quite wrong, because, if we do not wish to burn the patient, we must wait until a great portion of the heat has been lost. The proper method is to take a flannel bag (the size of the poultice required), to fill this with the linseed poultice as hot as it can possibly be made, and to put between this and the skin a second piece of flannel, so that there shall be at least two thicknesses of flannel between the skin and the poultice itself. Above the poultice should be placed more flannel, or a piece of cotton wool, to prevent it from getting cold. By this method we are able to apply the linseed meal boiling hot, without burning the patient, and the heat, gradually diffusing through the flannel, affords a grateful sense of relief which cannot be obtained by other means. There are few ways in which such marked relief is given to abdominal pain as by the application of a poultice in this manner.--_Dr. T. Lauder Brunton, in Brain._ * * * * * NEW MECHANICAL INVENTIONS. Mr. Joseph Adams, of Washington, D. C., has patented an improved Gas Regulator, designed either to cut off the gas entirely or to let on a larger amount of gas than its automatic action would ordinarily permit, or to allow the regulator to operate with an automatic action, as usual. Mr. Jean A. Hitter, Jr., of St. Martinsville, La., has patented an improved Type Writer, of simple and compact construction, that may be readily used for printing on paper and for other purposes, being small enough to be carried conveniently in the pocket, if desired, and readily operated with little practice. Messrs. Edwin N. Boynton, Geo. M. Coburn, and Thos. F. Carver, of Worcester, Mass., have patented an improved Hand Drilling Machine, by which a fast or slow motion can be readily obtained, at the will of the operator, the slower motion being especially advantageous in drilling large holes, as more power is obtained, and the holes are drilled with greater ease. Mr. Reuben R. James, of Rising Sun, Ind., has devised an improved Adding Machine of simple and comparatively inexpensive construction. The chief feature of the machine is a series of toothed revolving counting wheels, which are inscribed on their peripheries with the nine digits and cipher, and mounted loosely on a common axis, and each having four lateral inclines or cams, which cause, at the proper time, a weighted pawl lever to engage the next counting wheel on the left, so as to carry ten when the numbers added on the wheel on the right exceed ten. The adding is effected by successively drawing down to a stop on the finger board the teeth of the counting wheels which are opposite the numbers to be added, and the numerical result will be seen on the wheels in a series of slots or apertures in the case of the machine. Mr. Jacob Croft, of Scipio, Utah Ter., has devised an improved Turbine Water Wheel, which is constructed to prevent back pressure by the water against the casing as it escapes from the buckets. Sand and other substances in the water are prevented from entering around the shaft and cutting or wearing it. An improvement in Sweeping Machines has been patented by Mr. Isaac A. Chomel, of Brooklyn, N. Y. This invention relates to apparatus for sweeping up and collecting dirt, dust, and other refuse from floors, carpets, streets, and other places. The dust box is to be rolled over the floor and the brush revolved by a winch. The speed of the brush is independent of the motion of the machine along the floor. Mr. D. A. Ferris, of Tioga Center, N. Y., has patented an improved Implement for Forcing Flooring Planks together when laying floors. It is simple, convenient, and powerful. * * * * * EFFECT OF QUININE ON THE HEARING. It is a well known fact to medical men that there exists a great prejudice among a large number of people against taking quinine, the idea being very prevalent that a prolonged use of it not only affects the hearing, but (to use the common expression) that it "gets into the bones." As regards the former belief, Dr. Roosa, of New York, has recently been collecting and examining the evidence as far as possible, and has come to the conclusion that in some cases there really is a permanent nervous affection of the ear produced which justifies the opinion held by the laity. Hitherto physicians have generally disbelieved this, and ascribed the notion to prejudice. * * * * * THE MICROPHONE AS A THIEF CATCHER. The microphone as a thief catcher has proved very useful to an English resident in India, who found his store of oil rapidly and mysteriously diminishing. He fixed a microphone to the oil cans, carried the wire up to his bedroom, and, after the house had been closed for the night, sat up to await the result. Very shortly he heard the clinking of bottles, followed by the gurgling sound of liquid being poured out, and running downstairs he caught his bearer in the act of filling small bottles with oil for easy conveyance from the premises. * * * * * THE TALLEST TREE IN THE WORLD. The tallest accurately measured _Sequoia_ standing in the Calaveras Grove, near Stockton, California, measures 325 feet, and there is no positive evidence that any trees of this genus ever exceeded that height. Of late years, explorations in Gippsland, Victoria, have brought to light some marvelous specimens of _Eucalyptus_, and the State Surveyor of Forests measured a fallen tree on the banks of the Watts River, and found it to be 435 feet from the roots to the top of the trunk. The crest of this tree was broken off, but the trunk at the fracture was 9 feet in circumference, and the height of the tree when growing was estimated to have been more than 500 feet. This tree, however, was dead, though there is no doubt that it was far loftier than the tallest Sequoia. Near Fernshaw, in the Dandenong district, Victoria, there has recently been discovered a specimen of the "Almond Leaf Gum" (_Eucalyptus amygdalesia_), measuring 380 feet from the ground to the first branch, and 450 feet to the topmost wing. This tree would overtop the tallest living _Sequoia_ by 125 feet. Its girth is 80 feet, which is less than that of many Sequoias, but as far as height is concerned it must be considered the tallest living tree in the world. * * * * * THE ARGONAUT, OR PAPER NAUTILUS. [Illustration: ARGONAUT, OR PAPER NAUTILUS.] This mollusk received the first title in allusion to the pretty fable which was formerly narrated of its sailing powers, and the latter title is given on account of the extreme thinness and fragility of the shell. It is remarkable that the shell of the argonaut is, during the life of its owner, elastic and yielding, almost as if it were made of thin horn. The two arms of the argonaut are greatly dilated at their extremities; and it was formerly asserted, and generally believed, that the creature was accustomed to employ these arms as sails, raising them high above the shell, and allowing itself to be driven over the surface by the breeze, while it directed its course by the remaining arms, which were suffered to hang over the edge of the shell into the water and acted like so many oars. In consequence of this belief the creature was named the argonaut, in allusion to the old classical fable of the ship Argo and her golden freight. The animal, or "poulp," as it is technically called, is a lovely creature despite its unattractive form. It is a mass of silver with a cloud of spots of the most beautiful rose color, and a fine dotting of the same, which heighten its beauty. A large membrane, which is the expanded velation of the arms, covers all. It has been definitely proved that the use of the expanded arms which cover the exterior of the shell is to build up its delicate texture, and to repair damages, the substance being secreted by these arms, and by their broad expansions moulded into shape. The larger figure in the engraving represents the argonaut while thus within its shell. While crawling the creature turns itself so as to rest on its head, withdraws its body as far as possible into its shell, and, using its arms like legs, creeps slowly but securely along the ground, sometimes affixing its disks to stones or projecting points of rocks for the purpose of hauling itself along. When, however, it wishes to attain greater speed, and to pass through the waters, it makes use of a totally different principle. Respiration is achieved by the passage of water over double gills or branchiæ; the water, after it has completed its purpose, being ejected through a moderately long tube, technically called a siphon. The orifice of the siphon is directed toward the head of the animal, and it is by means of this simple apparatus that progression is effected. When the creature desires to dart rapidly through the water, it gathers its six arms into a straight line, so as to afford little resistance to the water, keeps its velated arms stretched tightly over the shell, and then, by violently ejecting the water from the siphon, drives itself by reaction in the opposite direction. The uppermost figure shows the argonaut in the act of swimming. * * * * * THE TRAP DOOR SPIDER OF JAMAICA. This spider digs a burrow in the earth and lines it with a silken web. The burrow is closed by a trap door, having a hinge that permits it to be opened and closed with admirable accuracy. The door is circular, and is made of alternate layers of earth and web, and is hinged to the lining of the tube that leads to the burrow by a band of the same silken secretion. The door exactly fits the entrance to the burrow, and when closed, so precisely corresponds with the surrounding earth that it can hardly be distinguished, even when its position is known. It is a strange sight to see the earth open, a little lid raised, some hairy legs protrude, and gradually the whole form of the spider show itself. [Illustration: TRAP DOOR SPIDER.] The mode in which these spiders procure food seems to be by hunting at night, and in some cases by catching insects that are entangled in the threads that the creature spins by the side of its house. In the day time they are very chary of opening the door of their domicile, and if the trap be raised from the outside, they run to the spot, hitch the claws of their fore feet in the silken webbing of the door, and those of the hind feet in the lining of the burrow, and so resist with all their might. The strength of the spider is wonderfully great in proportion to its size. * * * * * TO MAKE A HOLE IN GLASS. _New Remedies_ describes the following easy method of making a hole in plate glass: Make a circle of clay or cement rather larger than the intended hole; pour some kerosene into the cell thus made, ignite it, place the plate upon a moderately hard support, and with a stick rather smaller than the hole required, and a hammer, strike a rather smart blow. This will leave a rough-edged hole, which may be smoothed with a file. Cold water is said to answer even better than a blow. * * * * * THE PRESERVATION OF EGGS. As science advances, the processes proposed for the preservation of organic substances are being brought to greater and greater perfection. No subject perhaps in this connection has received greater attention, and been the subject of more processes, patent and otherwise, than that of the preservation of eggs. In fact this is a question of considerable importance, not only from a culinary, but also from an industrial standpoint--that of the manufacture of albumen for photographic purposes. In the _Moniteur de la Photographie_ Dr. Phipson calls attention to a new process, which may be briefly stated as follows: On taking the eggs from the nest they are covered over, by means of a bit of wool, with butter in which has been dissolved 2 or 3 per cent of salicylic acid. Each egg, after receiving this coat, is placed in a box filled with very fine and absolutely dry saw dust. If care be taken that the eggs do not touch each other, and that they be perfectly covered with the saw dust, they will keep fresh for several months--perhaps for more than a year. Dr. Phipson states that he has experimented with this process for two years, with most excellent results. So much for the preservation of the entire egg; but there is also a process for the preservation of the albumen of the egg for photographic uses, due to M. Berg. In this process, the white, separated from the yolk, is evaporated in zinc pans or porcelain cups, at a temperature of 45° C. The solidified albumen thus obtained is pulverized by means of a mill. The yolk, by means of machinery, is whipped up into a light mass, and then spread out on zinc plates and evaporated to dryness at a temperature of 80°, and finally powdered. The powders thus obtained keep for a long time. The white of eggs, so prepared, is used for the purposes to which albumen is applied in the industrial arts, while the powdered yolks are used for domestic purposes. * * * * * CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICAN SHEEP HUSBANDRY. Dr. Hayes, in his recent address before the National Agricultural Congress, remarking that a very inadequate idea is given of a nation's resources by the number of sheep raised--the character of the animals being of the first consideration--proceeds to show some of the characteristics of American sheep husbandry. He states that the sheep of the United States consist, first, of what are called native sheep; second, descendants from improved English races; third, the Mexican sheep found in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and California; fourth, the merino sheep, and crosses of that breed with the three preceding races. The merinos constitute the principal and characteristic race of the United States; and this is the most important fact in the enumeration of our resources for sheep husbandry and the wool manufacture. England has no merinos, except in her colonies; Russia has but 12,000,000 merinos; France, but 9,000,000. The merinos and grades in the United States exceed 25,000,000. Merino wool is for clothing what wheat is for food; it is the chief material for cloth at the present day, the coarsest as well as the finest. While the softest, it is the strongest of all fibers. From its fulling and spinning qualities, it is the best adhesive for the cheap fabrics--coarser wool, cotton, or shoddy; the mixture of merino wool increasing indefinitely the material for cheap clothing. An abundance of merino wool is the greatest boon the world has received from the animal kingdom in the last century. It is, in fact, in its extended culture the product of the last century. A century ago all the merinos in the world, confined exclusively to Spain, did not number 1,000,000. 1765 marks the epoch of the first exportation of the merinos to Saxony; 1786, to France; 1833, to Australia; 1802, the introduction of the first merino sheep to this country; and to Gen. Humphreys, of Connecticut, and to the introduction to his farm of twenty-one rams and seventy ewes, may be directly traced the most celebrated breeds of the American merino; producing individuals actually sold for $5,000 each, others for $2,000 to $3,000, and one for which $10,000 was refused. The fiber of the merino sheep is not the only excellence of the animal; when properly bred, this race has a hardiness surpassing all other high-bred races. The "yolk," provided by nature to assist in the growth of the wool, abounding in this race more than in any other, causes the tips of the fleece to be cemented, and to become impenetrable to rains and snows. A lighter pasture suffices for their maintenance than would support the mutton races. This race is fitted, above all others, for the remote pastoral lands and for culture on a large scale. Our breeders, in aiming to increase the weight of their fleece, have developed the length of the staple, and have unconsciously created a merino combing wool--a wool in special demand through modern improvements in machinery and changes in the fashion of goods. Mr. Ferneau, an eminent Belgian wool manufacturer, who has thoroughly studied our wool resources and manufactures, says that three quarters of the American wool is "combing wool," and will be ultimately employed for this purpose. The bulk of American merino wools is of strong, sound, and healthy staple, having few weak spots in them. Those from the other States of the West are free from burrs. Those from California have this defect in a high degree. They are admirably fitted for blankets, flannels, and fancy cassimeres, and the great bulk of our card wool manufactures. They are so excellent, as a whole, that M. Ferneau says they are too valuable to be used for clothing purposes. They supply nine tenths of all the card or clothing wool consumed in American mills. * * * * * THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE IN MEXICO. Mexico, the land of so many and such frequent revolutions, and the scene of such intestinal commotions and bitter strife through the whole period of her existence, from the Spanish conquest up to within a few years, is at present happily in a state of comparative peace and quiet; the laws are less disregarded, brigandage is gradually disappearing, more attention is being paid to the protection of life and property, and public education is in a prosperous condition. No greater evidence of this felicitous state of affairs could be afforded than that shown in the display of energy and zeal with which the present administration, aided by the foremost Mexican scientists, is carrying out an extended system of scientific explorations, investigations, and internal improvements; and the progress of which is being recorded in a valuable series of government publications; one of these--the _Annals of the Minister of Public Works_--being now before us. This volume, the third of the series, begins with an article by the able director of the National Meteorological Observatory, Sr. Mariano Barcena, calling attention, in the first place, to the great national importance, as well as necessity, of a well organized system of meteorological observations; (2) giving a description of the Mexican Observatory, its equipment, the questions it proposes to investigate, and the hours of observation; (3) an explanation, accompanied by charts, of the daily system of registration pursued at the observatory; and, finally, observations on the periodic phenomena of vegetation, and notes on the orography and geology of the valley of Mexico. Sr. A. Anquiano follows with a communication on the "Geographical Position of Chalco," prefacing the results of his labors by an able essay on the "Mexican Method" of determining the latitude of places, a "method" founded on an observation of the stars. It would be interesting to quote from this, but our limited space will not permit. The "Citlaltepetl Commission," consisting of the engineers, Srs. Plowes, Rodriguez, and Vigil, whose patriotic ardor induced the minister to commission them to explore "and be the first to plant the flag of Mexican science on the snow clad peak of Citlaltepetl," render their report of operations during the year 1877 in the form of an exceedingly interesting memoir. They ascertained the peak of the volcano Citlaltepetl (or Orizaba) to be 17,651 feet above the level of the sea, which is 292 feet more than Humboldt made it. After a somewhat exhaustive treatise on the "Telescope and its Amplifying Power," by Sr. Jimenez, we have a long and extremely interesting account of the Ancient Aqueduct of Zempoala, one of the most notable of existing monuments of the old Spanish rule. These aqueducts (for there were three) were projected and carried to a successful termination by an humble and ignorant Franciscan monk--the Friar Tembleque. The construction of these remarkable works, begun in 1554 and occupying a period of 17 years, was undertaken for the purpose of carrying water from Zempoala to Otumba (a distance of 27 miles), and was the occasion of a curious contract between the inhabitants of these two cities. It seems that Otumba, situated at a high elevation, needed water; Zempoala was blessed with water, but was sadly in need of spiritual advisers; the people of the former city, therefore, agreed to furnish a certain proportion of friars to minister to the religious wants of the parties of the second part, and the latter in return bound themselves to furnish water, and the labor and materials for the building of an aqueduct to lead it, to the parties of the first part. No tradition remains to state when these structures ceased to be used. The longest of the three extends across the valley of the Papelote, a distance of 2,960 feet, and consists of 68 arches, the highest of which has an altitude of 106 feet. Señor Salazar urges on the Minister of Public Works the importance of having these monuments of a past age repaired and restored, not alone for archaeological reasons, but because Otumba to-day is as greatly in need of running water as it was in that remote period when these viaducts were constructed. Señor Barcena follows with a description and colored plate of a plant (_Gaudichaudia Enrico-Martinezii_) new to the Mexican flora, and Sr. Federico Weidner with some "General Reflections on the Iron Industry of the Country." Succeeding the latter paper, an exhaustive article by the same writer gives us, from a geological point of view, the structure, as far as can be ascertained, of the "Cerro de Mercado" of Durango, which is said to be one vast mass of iron. The author after a thorough examination of this hill, last year, concludes that it is of eruptive or volcanic origin. This is contrary to the statements made in most published works, the authors of which probably derived their notions from the views expressed by Humboldt, who was of the opinion that this mass of iron was an immense aerolite. Sr. Weidner, however, concludes that the great traveler never visited the locality in person, but obtained his information from heresay. He shows that the hill is deficient in the chemical constituents of aerolites, namely, iron, nickel, and cobalt, in a native or malleable state; but, on the contrary, is made up in a great measure of crystalline magnetic iron, and various useful oxides of the same metal. By a careful estimate of the quantity of iron contained in that portion only of the Cerro which appears above the surface of the soil, the author obtains as a result the enormous sum of 507,000,000 pounds, and this reduced to a metallic state would yield 250,000,000 pounds of pure iron. The structure of this remarkable hill is made apparent to the reader by means of an excellent geological section, in colors, accompanying the text. The volume closes with some notes by Sr. Barcena on the "Hydrographic System of the Hacienda of Cienega de Mata, and its application to one of the theories that explain Natural Fountains." In taking leave of this subject we have to congratulate the Mexican Government not only for the valuable matter contained in its scientific publications, but also for the very excellent style in which the latter are being issued. The general make up of the volume before us leaves little to be desired; the arrangement of the types is extremely tasty, the imprint is clean, sharp, and clear, the paper good, the margins of the pages broad, and the illustrations exceedingly well executed. It is to be sincerely hoped that the present state of peace, which our sister republic is enjoying, will endure for numerous years to come; and that the scientific work begun under such happy auspices may go on uninterruptedly until the whole country shall have been thoroughly explored. For as yet, we know but comparatively little about the geology of Mexico, and a great deal is yet to be learned, too, about her natural productions. * * * * * CORRESPONDENCE. * * * * * ALUM IN BREAD.--A REPLY TO DR. MOTT'S ARTICLE IN SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN OF NOVEMBER 16, ENTITLED "DELETERIOUS USE OF ALUM IN BAKING POWDER." By W. P. CLOTWORTHY, BALTIMORE, MD. On August 13, 1878, I obtained letters patent for the exclusive right to use exsiccated ammonia alum in baking powders. This fact I state that the public may know the reason that elicits this reply to the remarkable article on adulterations in baking powders, in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN of Nov. 16th, emanating from the pen of Henry A. Mott, Jr. I wish the Professor had been equally candid in stating his reasons for contributing the article. It is rare for a chemist to turn philanthropist without some consideration. The analysis of forty-two baking powders requires no little labor; twenty-one were examined at the expense of the government for the benefit of the Indian Department, the others, no doubt, at the expense and for the benefit of the Royal Baking Powder Company. I hope his services have been liberally requited. The public certainly owe him nothing for his labor or opinions. An excuse can be made for the prejudice existing against the use of alum in any form for baking purposes; it is an inheritance from a preceding age; but no apology can be offered for a practical chemist in this day, who labors to keep alive and foster a prejudice by the suppression of truths and facts. Professor Mott, in attempting to prove a fraud in food, has perpetrated a fraud in facts. That this opinion may not be unwarranted, I will state the facts about alum, which may be new to the public, but familiar to every chemist. Alum was formerly a compound of sulph. alumina and sulph. potash. In the past ten years nearly all manufacturers of alum have substituted sulph. ammonia for the sulph. potash; this change removes from alum a dangerous and objectionable ingredient, and adds a healthful one. Professor Mott recommends the use of ammonia in the form of a carbonate--carbonate of ammonia is one of the results in baking powder of the decomposition which takes place between alum and bicarbonate of soda; in the complete decomposition which takes place pure alumina is eliminated, highly recommended as an antacid. During the process of baking, alum is completely decomposed through the liberation of carbonic acid. Professor Mott must have known this, yet with this knowledge warns the public on the deleterious effect of alum in bread. About the first of last October I determined to vindicate the use of exsiccated ammonia alum as a substitute for cream of tartar, and accordingly issued a circular to the trade; from this circular I now give the following extract, which enters minutely into the subject: "To claim that an experience of 35 years in compounding medicines should entitle my opinion on chemicals and chemical compounds to a respectful consideration, is neither presumptuous nor unreasonable. With this simple introduction I now avow myself the originator and patentee of exsiccated ammonia alum baking powder. The use of exsiccated ammonia alum has been declared unhealthful by the advocates of other baking powders, and every manufacturer using it has been held up for public reprobation. This has been done by rival manufacturers, either through ignorance or malice; if from the former they are to be pitied, if from the latter they are contemptible. These opinions have been promulgated by kitchen chemists, whose circle of knowledge begins and ends with cream tartar and soda; and even of these articles they only know that cream tartar is in some way derived from grapes. In this circular I propose to state a few facts in relation to cream tartar and exsiccated alum, and the combinations they form with bicarbonate of soda, and allow you to form your own opinion of their respective merits. Crude tartar is the incrustation found in wine casks. It contains coloring matter and about 15 per cent of lime. This article is purified and called the cream of tartar, but it is impossible to extract all the lime. Commercially pure cream tartar contains at least 5 per cent of lime. When cream tartar is used in proportion of two parts to one of bicarbonate of soda, you will have an average of 3 to 4 per cent of lime. In using cream tartar and soda in baking, a chemical change commences as soon as water is added; the cream tartar unites with the soda, setting free the carbonic acid gas, which lightens the bread, and the residue is Rochelle salts. This is what you eat in your bread, the cream tartar and soda entirely disappearing in the process of baking, by forming this salt. Any doctor or chemist will confirm the above statement. When I undertook to manufacture baking powder, I labored to improve the quality and cheapen the cost. The first I accomplished by retaining the carbonic acid until heat was applied, the latter, by manufacturing a more economical acid than foreign cream tartar. After more than a thousand experiments covering a period of six months, I discovered by exsiccating ammonia alum I provided an article that would possess the necessary qualities. This article no more resembles the ordinary alum than charcoal resembles wood--it is light, porous, friable, and without taste. This article, under the influence of heat, combines with the soda and forms Glauber salts. In baking, the alum unites with the soda, just as cream tartar unites. In using the baking powder prepared according to my formula, you have in your bread Glauber instead of Rochelle salts. To your physician apply for his opinion of these salts; I will bow to his decision. Another false impression these zealous guardians of the public health have made is, that I used the exsiccated alum because it was cheap. The fact is that when I commenced its use it cost by the thousand pounds 12 per cent. more than the best cream tartar is worth to-day, and 33 per cent. more than average price of that article for the past year. I have since reduced the cost of manufacturing, and as I did so, correspondingly reduced the price of powder to the public. I regard the quantity of soda in cream tartar baking powders as very objectionable; they generally contain about 33 per cent. In my powder only 20 per cent. The prejudice in the public mind against alum, originated in the habit of the English bakers buying damaged flour, and by the addition of crude alum, made their bread in appearance equal to that made from best flour. Against this practice laws were enacted, not so much against the qualities of alum, as against its use in covering up a fraud in flour. This was the common potash alum and uncombined with any carbonated alkali, and it passed into the stomach unchanged. It is a trick--for it deserves no better name--of our rivals to show by chemical analysis that my powder contains alum, but are careful neither to state the kind nor the change it undergoes in baking. The manufacturer who knowingly misrepresents the goods of a rival, may well be doubted when he speaks of the quality of his own. "Great stress is laid on the fact that cream tartar is a vegetable acid, the product of the grape, hence it must be healthy. They forget that cream tartar is not entirely vegetable, but principally second handed minerals. It is a compound of tartaric acid, potash, and lime; the last two are minerals, which the grape takes up from the earth, but redeposits them as crude tartar when fermentation converts the grape into wine. In 1807 Sir Humphry Davy from this crude tartar first made the metal potassium. Of lime it is unnecessary to speak. The potash and lime form the bulk of cream tartar. In ammonia alum there is no more mineral substance than in cream tartar. The chemistry of nature is wonderful. Vegetation lives on minerals--wheat, corn, potatoes, are all mineral compounds. Lime, soda, potash, magnesia, sulphur, iron, etc., are all found abundantly in water and grain, and all these minerals are essential in food." Professor Mott has given the Royal Baking Powder the benefit of his indorsement; it may be all that he claims for it. But baking powders are now judged by constituent ingredients and chemical analysis; to this test I propose to bring the Royal. It is now in the hands of a competent chemist, and when the analysis is complete I will give the public the benefit of a comparison between that powder and the Patapsco. I will take Professor Mott's analysis of Patapsco, which, though not correct, I accept as such. The comparison will be made on the healthfulness of constituents in combination, and the chemical changes they undergo in baking. This is a progressive age. The people want facts, and they will form their own theories. Will the reader believe that in the reign of Henry VIII. of England, a citizen of London was executed for burning coal, which was then a capital offense? A pope about the same time issued a Bull excommunicating all Catholics who used tobacco, calling it the devil's weed. To-day coals still burn, and tobacco solaces millions of the civilized world. If the Royal Baking Powder Company (what a misnomer) possessed royal prerogatives, the advocates of exsiccated alum would fare no better than they did under the sumptuary laws of England. Professor Mott has fulminated _ex cathedra_ his blast, but we survive. "Truth is a torch, the more 'tis shook it shines." Our strength is in the intelligence of the age. SMITH, HANWAY & Co., Baltimore. * * * * * THE ELONGATION OF TREE TRUNKS. The _College Quarterly_ says that experiments made at the Iowa Agricultural College show that the popular notion that the trunks of trees elongate is entirely erroneous. Tacks were driven into the trunks of various trees, and the distance between them accurately measured. At the end of the season they were found to have neither increased nor decreased their distances. In the experiment, tree trunks were selected of all ages, from one year up to five or six, and in no case was there any change whatever noticeable. * * * * * ASTRONOMICAL NOTES. BY BERLIN H. WRIGHT. PENN YAN, N. Y., Saturday, December 14, 1878. The following calculations are adapted to the latitude of New York city, and are expressed in true or clock time, being for the date given in the caption when not otherwise stated: PLANETS. H.M. Mars rises 4 57 mo. Jupiter sets 7 54 eve. Saturn in meridian 6 16 eve. Uranus rises 10 11 eve. Neptune in meridian 8 48 eve. FIRST MAGNITUDE STARS, ETC. H.M. Alpheratz in meridian 6 28 mo. Mira (var.) in meridian 8 39 eve. Algol (var.) in meridian 9 26 eve. 7 stars (Pleiades) in merid. 10 06 eve. Aldebaran in meridian 10 54 eve. Capella in meridian 11 33 eve. Rigel in meridian 11 34 eve. Betelgeuse in meridian 0 18 mo. Sirius rises 8 05 eve. Procyon rises 7 40 eve. Regulus rises 9 43 eve. Spica rises 2 24 mo. Arcturus rises 1 27 mo. Antares rises 6 30 mo. Vega sets 9 52 eve. Altair sets 8 40 eve. Deneb sets 1 02 mo. Fomalhaut sets 9 16 eve. MOON'S PLACE IN THE CONSTELLATIONS AT 7 P.M. Saturday, Cancer 26° Sunday, Leo 9° Monday, Leo 23° Tuesday, Virgo 7° Wednesday, Virgo 22° Thursday, Libra 6° Friday, Libra 21° REMARKS. The sun will attain his greatest southern declination and enter the constellation _Sagittarius_ December 21, 5h. 45m. evening, at which time winter begins. Mars will be 5° north of the moon December 21, in the morning. Saturn will be 90° east of the sun December 18, passing the meridian at 6 o'clock in the evening. He is now advancing among the stars, and will soon be again upon the equinoctial colure. Uranus will be nearly 4° north of the moon December 15. * * * * * SYMPATHETIC INKS. Under the name of sympathetic inks are designated certain liquids which, being used for writing, leave no visible traces on the paper, but which, through the agency of heat, or by the action of chemicals, are made to appear in various colors. The use of such means for secret correspondence is very ancient. Ovid, Pliny, and other Roman writers speak of an ink of this kind, which, however, was nothing more than fresh milk. It merely sufficed to dust powdered charcoal over the surface of the paper upon which characters had been traced with the colorless fluid, when the black powder adhered only to those places where the fatty matter of the milk had spread. Such a process, however, was merely mechanical, and the results very crude. A great number of sympathetic inks may be obtained by means of reactions known to chemistry. For instance, write on paper with a colorless solution of sugar of lead; if the water that is used for the solution be pure, no trace of the writing will remain when it becomes dry. Now hold the paper over a jet of sulphureted hydrogen, and the characters will immediately appear on the paper, of an intense black color. The following recipes for inks of this kind are more simple: If writing be executed with a dilute solution of sulphate of iron, the invisible characters will appear of a beautiful blue, if the dry paper be brushed over with a pencil full of a solution of yellow prussiate of potash; or they will be black, if a solution of tannin be substituted for the prussiate. If the characters be written with a solution of sulphate of copper, they will at once turn blue on exposing to the vapors of ammonia. Another sympathetic ink is afforded by chloride of gold, which becomes of a reddish purple when acted upon by a salt of tin. A red sympathetic ink may be made in the following manner: Write with a very dilute solution of perchloride of iron--so dilute, indeed, that the writing will be invisible when dry. By holding the paper in the vapor arising from a long-necked glass flask containing sulphuric acid and a few drops of a solution of sulpho-cyanide of potassium, the characters will appear of a blood-red color, which will again disappear on submitting them to the vapors of caustic ammonia. This experiment can be repeated _ad infinitum_. During the war in India, some years ago, important correspondence was carried on by the English by means of the use of rice water as a writing fluid. On the application of iodine the dispatches immediately appeared in blue characters. Sympathetic inks which are developed under the influence of heat only are much easier to use than the foregoing. The liquids which possess such a property are very numerous. Almost every one perhaps knows that if writing be executed on paper with a clean quill pen dipped in onion or turnip juice, it becomes absolutely invisible when dry; and that when the paper is heated the writing at once makes its appearance in characters of a brown color. All albuminoid, mucilaginous, and saccharine vegetable juices make excellent sympathetic inks; we may cite, as among the best, the juices of lemon, orange, apple, and pear. A dilute solution of chloride of copper used for writing is invisible until the paper is heated, when the letters are seen of a beautiful yellow, disappearing again when the heat that developed them is removed. The salts of cobalt, as the acetate, nitrate, sulphate, and chloride, possess a like property. When a dilute solution of these salts is used as an ink, the writing, although invisible when dry, becomes blue when exposed to heat. The addition of chloride of iron, or of a salt of nickel, renders them green, and this opens the way for a very pretty experiment: If a winter landscape be drawn in India ink, and the sky be painted with a wash of cobalt alone, and the branches of the trees be clothed with leaves executed with a mixture of cobalt and nickel, and the snow-clad earth be washed over with the same mixture, a magic transformation at once takes place on the application of heat, the winter landscape changing to a summer scene. There is a well known proprietary article sold in Paris under the name of _"Encre pour les Dames"_ (ink for ladies). Hager, in a recent scientific journal, states that this consists of an aqueous solution of iodide of starch, and is "specially intended for love letters." In four weeks characters written with it disappear, preventing all abuse of letters, and doing away with all documentary evidence of any kind in the hands of the recipient. The signers of bills of exchange who use this ink are of course freed from all obligations in the same length of time. * * * * * NEW WIRE CLOTHING FOR BURRING CYLINDERS. Heretofore two kinds of clothing for cylinders for treating fibrous material have been employed, one consisting of a set of serrated rings cut from sheet steel and secured to the periphery of the cylinder, and the other consisting of flat serrated iron wire. The serrated rings, of necessity, entail a great loss of material in their manufacture, and the iron wire clothing is so soft that it soon wears out or becomes dull, necessitating the reclothing or sharpening of the cylinder. [Illustration: NEW WIRE CLOTHING FOR BURRING CYLINDERS.] Our engraving represents a new form of steel wire clothing for such cylinders, which was recently patented by Mr. Frank P. Pendleton, of Philadelphia, Pa. The improvement consists in notching or nicking the base of the teeth or back of the wire, so as to admit of bending the wire around the cylinders without breaking. * * * * * PETROLEUM AND GOLD. As one of the leading staples of American export, our petroleum wells have been more valuable than gold mines. A recent discovery by Mr. John Turnbridge, of Newark, N. J., indicates that in some cases petroleum wells may be in fact, as well as in effect, real gold mines. He says that while investigating the peculiar behavior of the hydrocarbons and their singular quality of separating the precious metals from aqueous solutions, assisted by constant application that furnished evidence of the force of chemical action which could be satisfactorily measured, there occurred to him the probability that analogous effects might be traced in the operations of nature; more particularly in certain geological formations peculiar to auriferous soils. These ideas, he asserts, have been singularly verified in subsequent research by the discovery of gold in many samples of crude petroleum, also in the sediment or refuse of the distillation of that substance. The attraction existing between the hydrocarbons and many elementary bodies ought to create no surprise, especially if reference is had to the reducing action of the hydrocarbons in contact with metallic solutions. The procedure in the examples above referred to consist in pouring crude petroleum on vegetable fiber or wood shavings and firing it, collecting the ashes and making the usual fire assay. The cupel disclosed a small pellet. After due examination with the appropriate test it was found to be pure gold. The distillery refuse when assayed gave $34.85 value per ton. It may be mentioned in the last case considerable molybdenum was present, a substance resembling plumbago. Mr. Turnbridge has no knowledge of the locality whence these samples of crude petroleum were originally obtained. He infers, however, that oil wells in the vicinity of auriferous deposits may yield a larger quantity of gold than from oil wells situated in carboniferous strata. There has been, he states, a practical application of this discovery for the recovery of gold, applied in cases where quicksilver has failed to be of service. * * * * * REDUCTION OF NITRATE OF SILVER BY MEANS OF CHARCOAL. A very simple method of reducing nitrate of silver, analagous to that some years ago mentioned by the late Mr. Hadow, is given in the _Archiv der Pharmacie_, by Mr. C. F. Chandler. If crystallized or fused nitrate of silver be placed upon glowing charcoal, combustion forthwith takes place, the silver remaining behind in a metallic form, while nitrous oxide and carbonic acid are freely given off. The nitrate of silver is fused by the heat developed by the reaction, and is imbibed through the pores of the charcoal; as every atom of consumed carbon is replaced by an atom of metallic silver, the original form and structure of the charcoal are preserved intact in pure silver. By proceeding in this manner it is possible to produce silver structures of any desired size, possessing in every way the original form of the wood. A crystal of nitrate of silver is in the first place put upon a piece of charcoal, and a blowpipe flame is then applied in the vicinity, in order to start the reaction in the first instance, and as soon as combustion commences crystal after crystal may be added as these, one after another, become consumed. The silver salt is liquefied, and penetrates into the charcoal, where it becomes reduced. Pieces of silver may in this way be prepared, of one or two ounces in weight, which exhibit all the markings and rings of the original wood to a most perfect and beautiful degree. * * * * * NEW AGRICULTURAL INVENTIONS. Mr. Charles E. Macarthy, of Forsyth, Ga., has patented an improved Horse Power, designed more particularly to be located beneath a gin house for ginning cotton, but applicable for all purposes for which a horse power is ordinarily employed. An improved Corn Planter has been patented by Mr. Thomas A. Sammons, of Lewisburg, West Va. This corn planter is designed to plant the corn in straight rows both ways and at varying distances apart. It is constructed upon the general principle of a reciprocating slide, passing alternately beneath a hopper, and carrying a number of grains from beneath the same to a discharge outlet. An improved machine for Cutting the Bands of Gavels or bundles of grain, and feeding the same to the cylinder of a thrasher, has been patented by Mr. James M. O'Neall, of Fort Worth, Texas. An improved Sulky Breaking Plow has been patented by Mr. Edward T. Hunter, of Hallsville, Ill. This is an improved sulky attachment for breaking plows, which is so constructed as to receive any ordinary plow; it may be adjusted to cause the plow to work deeper or shallower in the ground, and will allow the plow to be turned to either side. Mr. Osman C. Du Souchet, of Alexandria, Mo., has invented an improved Check Row Corn Planter and Drill, which is so constructed that its operating mechanism may be at all times under the control of the driver. It will plant the corn in accurate check row, and is easily controlled. An improved Thrashing Machine has been patented by Mr. Peter Parrott, of Red Bud, Ill. This is an improvement in the class of thrashing machines having an attachment for removing dust from the space in front of the cylinder, and having pickers for loosening or shaking the grain from straw delivered from the cylinder. An improved Corn Planter has been patented by Mr. John H. Zarley, of Oakland, Ill. The object of this invention is to provide an efficient and cheaply constructed corn planter, which may be drawn forward by horses, but is arranged so that the seed valves may be operated by hand. Messrs. Clayton M. Van Orman and James M. Hagenbaugh, of Athens, Mich., have patented an improved Grain Separator, in which the arrangement of the screens, feedboard, and blast of a fanning mill effect the thorough removal from the grain of all impurities. Only two screens are employed. An improved Churning Apparatus has been patented by Messrs. William H. Foster and Isaac C. Roberts, of Louisburg, Kan. It is simple, inexpensive, convenient, and effective in operation. It will bring the butter very quickly, and at the same time gather it. An improved Plow has been patented by Mr. Robert B. Mitchell, of Minneapolis, Kan. The object of this invention is to improve the construction of sod, stirring, and other plows, so that the cutter may be moved forward as it is worn or ground off. It prevents roots, grass, and other trash from gathering upon the share. Messrs. John B. Martin and William T. Carothers, of Clarence, Mo., have patented an improved Hay Loader capable of placing hay upon stacks or ricks, or upon wagons. It is simple in its construction and effective in its operation. * * * * * NAPHTHA AND BENZINE. We have often been asked the difference between benzine and naphtha, many people wanting to know whether naphtha didn't include benzine, or whether it wasn't the same thing under a marketable name. A prominent refiner says that benzine is the first product that arises from the process of refining crude oil, and bears the same relation to naphtha that that distillate does to refined oil. In other words, benzine is crude naphtha. The reason it is not quotable under the name of benzine, therefore, is because it has to be reduced to naphtha before it is marketable in any extensive quantity. The process that benzine is subject to, to produce naphtha, is not a separate business, but is carried on by the regular oil refiners in the same stills and retorts that the refined oil is produced. The benzine is treated with sulphuric acid, and the result is naphtha, which is in wide demand in Europe, especially in France, for the purpose of producing aniline dyes, while it is also put to many other purposes. This demand is partially instrumental in keeping up its price, but its rapid evaporation also has a tendency in that direction, as any large seller of it has to take into consideration the depreciation that might take place by the time he sells it on that account, and for the same reason buyers give no more orders than immediate necessity requires. All refiners, however, do not produce naphtha, but some of them sell the benzine, which is largely used for fuel purposes, for which it is much better than coal, as it is not only absolutely cheaper, but gives a steadier heat.--_Parker Daily_. * * * * * For joining the porcelain heads to the metal spikes used for ornamental nails, the _Prakt. Maschinen Construct._, recommends the use of a thick paste made of a mixture of Portland cement and glue. * * * * * TO INVENTORS. An experience of more than thirty years, and the preparation of not less than one hundred thousand applications for patents at home and abroad, enable us to understand the laws and practice on both continents, and to possess unequaled facilities for procuring patents everywhere. In addition to our facilities for preparing drawings and specifications quickly, the applicant can rest assured that his case will be filed in the Patent Office without delay. Every application, in which the fees have been paid, is sent complete--including the model--to the Patent Office the same day the papers are signed at our office, or received by mail, so there is no delay in filing the case, a complaint we often hear from other sources. Another advantage to the inventor in securing his patent through the Scientific American Patent Agency, it insures a special notice of the invention in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, which publication often opens negotiations for the sale of the patent or manufacture of the article. A synopsis of the patent laws in foreign countries may be found on another page, and persons contemplating the securing of patents abroad are invited to write to this office for prices, which have been reduced in accordance with the times, and our perfected facilities for conducting the business. Address MUNN & CO., office SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. * * * * * BUSINESS AND PERSONAL. * * * * * _The Charge for Insertion under this head is One Dollar a line for each insertion; about eight words to a line. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ * * * * * Magic Lanterns and Stereopticons of all prices. Views illustrating every subject for public exhibitions. Profitable business for a man with a small capital. Also lanterns for college and home amusement. 74 page catalogue free. McAllister, Mf. Optician, 49 Nassau St., N. Y. Chapman Valves and Hydrants received the highest award at Mass. Mechanics Fair. Chapman Valve Manuf. Co., Boston, Mass. Wanted, cheap.--2d hand Lathe Chuck to swing 17 in. Iron sheave. Penfield Block Works, Lockport, N. Y. To Manufacturers.--Messrs. Bignall & Ostrander, 806-808 N. 2d St., St. Louis, Mo., have added to their present establishment a Machinery Department, from whence the wants of the Western machine-using public will be supplied. Manufacturers will do well to correspond with them. On actual test the Eaton Sulky Plow is ahead. Manufacturers wanted to build them. Territory for sale. Address E. C. Eaton, Pinckneyville, Ill. Sir Henry Halford says Vanity Fair Smoking Tobacco has no equal. Received highest award at Paris, 1878. Wanted.--Tools for the manufacture of Wagon Axles and Springs. Address Box 66, Lambertville, N. J. For Sale.--Norwalk Engine, 16 x 42; little used; excellent order; very cheap. Address Box 106, Meriden, Ct. H. W. Johns' Asbestos Liquid Paints contain no water. They are the best and most economical paints in the world for general purposes, and for wood and iron structures exposed to severe tests of climatic changes, saltwater atmosphere, etc. They are 50 per cent more durable than the best white lead and linseed oil. 1,000 2d hand machines for sale. Send stamp for descriptive price list. Forsaith & Co., Manchester, N. H. Florey & Smith, San Francisco, make a specialty of introducing useful inventions in the Pacific States. J. C. Hoadley, Consulting Engineer and Mechanical and Scientific Expert, Lawrence, Mass. Nickel Plating.--Wenzel's Patent Perforated Carbon Box Anode for holding Grain Nickel. A. C. Wenzel, 114 Center St., New York City. Bolt Forging Machine & Power Hammers a specialty. Send for circulars. Forsaith & Co., Manchester, N. H. For Sale.--A 6 x 6 Upright Yacht Engine, 6 H.P. Wm. F. Codd, Nantucket, Mass. For Solid Wrought Iron Beams, etc., see advertisement. Address Union Iron Mills, Pittsburgh, Pa., for lithograph, etc. The Lawrence Engine is the best. See ad. page 381. Sheet Metal Presses, Ferracute Co., Bridgeton, N. J. The only Engine in the market attached to boiler having cold bearings. F. F. & A. B. Landis, Lancaster, Pa. Brush Electric Light.--20 lights from one machine. Latest & best light. Telegraph Supply Co., Cleveland, O. The Lathes, Planers, Drills, and other Tools, new and second-hand, of the Wood & Light Machine Company, Worcester, are to be sold out very low by the George Place Machinery Agency, 121 Chambers St., New York. For the best advertising at lowest prices in Scientific, Mechanical, and other Newspapers, write to E. N. Freshman & Bros., Advertising Agents, 186 W. 4th St., Cin., O. For Town and Village use, comb'd Hand Fire Engine & Hose Carriage, $350. Forsaith & Co., Manchester, N. H. Manufacturers of Improved Goods who desire to build up a lucrative foreign trade, will do well to insert a well displayed advertisement in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition. This paper has a very large foreign circulation. Brick Presses for Fire and Red Brick. Factory, 309 S. 5th St., Philadelphia, Pa. S. P. Miller & Son. Punching Presses, Drop Hammers, and Dies for working Metals, etc. The Stiles & Parker Press Co., Middletown, Conn. Hydraulic Presses and Jacks, new and second hand. Lathes and Machinery for Polishing and Buffing Metals. E. Lyon & Co., 470 Grand St., N. Y. Nickel Plating.--A white deposit guaranteed by using our material. Condit, Hanson & Van Winkle, Newark, N. J. English Agency, 18 Caroline St., Birmingham. H. Prentiss & Co., 14 Dey St., N. Y., Manufs. Taps, Dies, Screw Plates, Reamers, etc. Send for list. Diamond Engineer, J. Dickinson, 64 Nassau St., N. Y. Solid Emery Vulcanite Wheels--The Solid Original Emery Wheel--other kinds imitations and inferior. Caution.--Our name is stamped in full on all our best Standard Belting, Packing, and Hose. Buy that only. The best is the cheapest. New York Belting and Packing Company, 37 and 38 Park Row, N. Y. Presses, Dies, and Tools for working Sheet Metals, etc. Fruit and other Can Tools. Bliss & Williams, Brooklyn, N. Y., and Paris Exposition, 1878. The Cameron Steam Pump mounted in Phosphor Bronze is an indestructible machine. See advertisement. Wheel Press, Cotton Press, Pipe Line, and Test Mercury Gauges. T. Shaw, 915 Ridge Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition is published monthly, about the 15th of each month. Every number comprises most of the plates of the four preceding weekly numbers of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, with other appropriate contents, business announcements etc. It forms a large and splendid periodical of nearly one hundred quarto pages, each number illustrated with about one hundred engravings. It is a complete record of American progress in the arts. Special Planers for Jointing and Surfacing, Band and Scroll Saws, Universal Wood-workers, etc., manufactured by Bentel, Margedant & Co., Hamilton, Ohio. Boston Blower Co., Boston, Mass. Blowers, Exhaust Fans, Hot Blast Apparatus. All parts interchangeable material and workmanship warranted the best. Write for particulars. We make steel castings from ¼ to 10,000 lbs. weight 3 times as strong as cast iron. 12,000 Crank Shafts of this steel now running and proved superior to wrought iron. Circulars and price, list free. Address Chester Steel Castings Co., Evelina St., Philadelphia, Pa. Machine Cut Brass Gear Wheels for Models, etc. (new list). Models, experimental work, and machine work generally. D. Gilbert & Son, 212 Chester St., Phila., Pa. Elevators, Freight and Passenger, Shafting, Pulley and Hangers. L. S. Graves & Son, Rochester, N. Y. Holly System of Water Supply and Fire Protection for Cities and Villages, is fully described in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, No. 140. Howard Patent Safety Elevators. Howard Iron Works Buffalo, N. Y. Mellen, Williams & Co., 57 Kilby St., Boston, Mass. Wiegand Sectional Steam Boiler. �tna Rocking Grate Bar. North's Lathe Dog. 347 N. 4th St., Philadelphia, Pa. Self-feeding upright Drilling Machine of superior construction. Drills holes from 1/8 to ¾ in. diameter Pratt & Whitney Co., Manufs., Hartford, Conn. Wm. Sellers & Co., Phila., have introduced a new Injector, worked by a single motion of a lever. For Shafts, Pulleys, or Hangers, call and see stock kept at 79 Liberty St. Wm. Sellers & Co. The Turbine Wheel made by Risdon & Co., Mt. Holly N. J., gave the best results at Centennial test. Wheels and Pinions, heavy and light, remarkably strong and durable. Especially suited for sugar mills and similar work. Pittsburgh Steel Casting Company, Pittsburgh, Pa. * * * * * NOTES AND QUERIES [illus.] * * * * * (1) Detroit asks whether a boat propelled with a force of 3 miles an hour on still water will with the same propelling force run 6 miles an hour in a current running 3 miles an hour? A. We think so. (2) J. C. R asks: Which was the first railroad built in the United States? That is, a regular, incorporated road, connecting two points, and conveying passengers, freight, etc. A. We believe that the road now known as the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was the first in the United States chartered for carrying on a general transportation business. (3) J. R. E. asks how to make an ordinary sunshade for a telescope when placed, and what kind of glass it is composed of. A. Any very dark glass will answer, providing it is perfectly plane. It should be placed between the eye and eyepiece. (4) W. H. G. S. writes: I wish to give a blue color to screw heads, wire and steel. What shall I use? A. Heat them in a sand bath, or apply shellac or copal varnish, to which a little Prussian blue has been added. (5) T. McW. asks (1) for a good recipe for making Babbitt metal. A. By weight, 4 parts copper, 8 parts antimony, 96 parts tin. 2. What is meant by heating surface in boilers, and how is it computed? A. The term heating surface, as ordinarily used, refers to the surface which has water on one side, and flame or the products of combustion on the other. 3. I have a peculiar kind of steel which I cannot harden by fire and water, neither will it caseharden by prussiate of potash. What can I do with it to harden it? A. Assuming your account to be correct, we judge that you cannot harden it. (6) A. Van B. writes: A correspondent in your last issue asks how to keep rubber belts from slipping. Mine slipped considerably, but I checked it by throwing powdered rosin in between the belt and pulley while running. The pulley soon becomes covered with a tough black coating, very much like leather, and there is no more slip. [This expedient can be used to advantage in certain cases, but it is better to have a belt large enough to drive without using any preparation.--ED.] (7) E. B. C. asks: 1. Does a more powerful battery produce better results in telephone or microphone? A. A powerful battery is not required for either. 2. Can you give me a short description of the principle and construction of the aerophone? A. We think it has not been perfected. (8) A. T. L. asks for a recipe for a liquid boot or shoe polish. A. Clausen's ink is made as follows: Nutgalls, 8 parts; logwood extract, 10 parts; boil together in water, q. s., and add Castile soap, 4 parts; glycerin, trace. Crocker's--Logwood extract, 6 ozs.; water, 1 gallon; ivory black, 1.5 oz.; glycerin, 1 oz.; bichromate of potassa, 0.125 oz.; copperas, 0.125 oz.; boil together. Sefton's--Orange shellac, 64 ozs.; alcohol, 4 gallons; pure asphaltum, 60 ozs.; neat's foot oil, 1 pint; lampblack, q. s. Ovington's--Water, 1 gallon; logwood extract, 6 ozs.; water, 1 gallon; borax, 6 ozs.; shellac, 1.5 oz.; water, 0.5 pint; bichromate of potassa, 0.375 oz. Mix the solutions, and add 3 ozs. ammonia. Shaw's--Borax, 3 ozs.; orange shellac, 5 ozs.; water, q. s.; boil and add soluble aniline black or nigrosine, q. s. Rub the spots with strong aqueous solution of ferric chloride, and dry before applying the dressing. (9) J. S. & R. M. write: 1. We propose putting in a steam engine of 20 horse power, and we are informed there is an engine that weighs 2,700 lbs., that has a balance wheel weighing 500 lbs., cylinder 10 x 10 inches; cutting off at ¾ stroke, running at 180 to 200 revolutions a minute, and they say that it is 20 horse at 70 lbs. steam. Will such an engine develop 20 horse power? A. The engine would develop 20 horse power under the above conditions, if well constructed. 2. How can we calculate the power of an engine? A. To determine the power of an engine, multiply the mean pressure on the piston in lbs., by the piston speed in feet per minute, and divide the product by 33,000. (10) A. L. G. asks: 1. With a boiler 15 inches in diameter by 30 inches in height, with five 1½ inch tubes 18 inches long, firebox 12 x 12, and all made of iron plates ¼ inch thick. What is the greatest number of pounds of steam to the square inch it will hold, and what fraction of a horse power will it give to an engine having a cylinder 2 x 4 inches, situated 2 feet from the boiler, and connected by 40 inches of steam pipe? A. You can carry 150 lbs. of steam, and might develop 1 horse power. 2. What is meant by the pitch of a wheel in a propeller, and what is the inclination of a cylinder? A. The pitch of a propeller is the distance it would advance in the direction of its axis at each revolution, if it worked without slip. The inclination of a cylinder refers to the angle made by its axis with a horizontal or vertical line. (11) J. H. asks: 1. Has steel been used for portable boilers? A. Yes. 2. What size boiler is required for an engine having a 3 x 4 inch cylinder? A. Diameter, 24 inches; height, 45 inches; heating surface, 65 to 70 square feet. (12) J. A. M. asks: How large must an air pump be for an engine steam cylinder 8 x 8, making 100 revolutions per minute with 90 lbs. of steam, allowing the pump to be 4 inches stroke, double acting, to be attached to surface condenser? A. Diameter, 3½ inches. (13) J. A. F. asks: 1. What shall I paint my boiler and smoke stack with, and where can I get the paint? My engine is a thrashing engine, and of course is out of doors during the fall of the year. A. Get some black varnish made from petroleum, from a dealer in machinists' supplies. 2. How shall I care for the boiler inside? A. Leave the boiler perfectly dry, unless you can coat the interior with oil. 3. What shall I do for the engine. Is it necessary to take the piston out of cylinder and oil it? A. If the engine is to stand for some time, remove the piston, coat it and the cylinder with tallow; the same for the journals. Cover all finished parts of the engine with a mixture of white lead and tallow. 4. I find my steam gauge does not indicate less than 10 lbs. when boiler is cold. What is the trouble and how can it be repaired? A. In such a case it is best to send the gauge to a maker for repairs. (14) "Zebra" wishes to know the best test of the genuineness of white lead; also the simplest way to try the comparative value of two samples of ground white lead. Also the name of the best work to consult upon the manufacture of Portland cement. A. See answer No. 29, p. 283, current volume, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Also pp. 102-105 Normandy and Noad's "Commercial Analysis." The relative value of different samples of white lead in oil is roughly judged from the weight of a given measured quantity, the covering properties when compared on glass with a sample of finest white lead, and the color and general appearance of the sample. You may consult Reid's "Manufacture of Portland Cement." (15) J. B. B. asks: Can I arrange an electric battery so as to heat a platinum wire for the purpose of cutting wood? Is it practicable? A. Two or three Bunsen cells will do it. It is impracticable save as an experiment. (16) D. S. M. asks how to color butter to make it yellow, without injuring it in any way. A. A little annotto is often used. If pure, it is not injurious. (17) H. C. M. asks: What substances are there that will absorb light during the day when exposed to light, and give it out again at night? A. 1. Heat strontium theosulphate for fifteen minutes over a good Bunsen gas lamp and then for 5 minutes over a blast lamp. 2. Heat equal parts of strontium carbonate and lac Supt gently for 5 minutes, then strongly for 25 minutes over a Bunsen lamp, and finally 5 minutes over a blast lamp. 3. Precipitate strong aqueous solution of strontium chloride by means of sulphuric acid, dry the precipitate, and heat it to redness for some time in a current of hydrogen, then over a Bunsen lamp for 10 minutes, and for 20 minutes over a blast lamp. Mix any of these with pure melted paraffin for use as a paint, and expose for a time to sunlight. The two former yield a greenish phosphorescence in the dark, the latter a bluish light. (18) Z. asks: Is the Great African Desert below the level of the sea, and if so, could it be made into an inland sea by flooding from the ocean? A. A considerable, though relatively small, portion of the Sahara is below the sea level, and the flooding of the lowest portion has been proposed. The greater part of North Africa lies at a higher level, the exception being a chain of old lake beds or chotts on the border of Algeria. (19) J. P. L. asks: How can I make a filter to cleanse rain water from smoke as it passes from the roof to the cistern? The coal which is burned here (bituminous) gives us a great deal of trouble in this regard. A. The carbonaceous matters may be removed by passing the water through a large barrel half filled with fine gravel and pounded, freshly-burnt charcoal (free from dust), distributed in alternate layers, each several inches deep. Over this spread a clean piece of bagging, and fill in with fine gravel or coarse clean quartz sand for 12 inches or more. The inlet pipe should discharge at the bottom of the barrel--the filtered water flowing from the top. (20) F. E. H. asks: Can percussion caps be so composed as to explode when pierced by a sharp pointed needle? If so, of what should they be composed? A. Such an arrangement is employed in the needle gun. The composition may be of mercuric fulminate. (21) C. A. N. asks: What is the horse power of an engine 30 inches stroke, 14 inches cylinder, 51 revolutions per minute, 60 lbs. mean pressure in cylinder? A. Piston area = 153.94 square inches. Piston speed = 255 feet per minute. Indicated horse power = 153.94 x 60 x 255 ----------------- = 71.4 33,000 (22) P. O. asks: If I admit steam 100 lbs. pressure in a cylinder 15 x 24 inches, and cut the steam off when piston has traveled 6 inches, what will be the pressure at 6 inches, 12 inches, 18 inches, and 24 inches, or just before it exhausts? A. The pressure will vary about in the inverse ratio of the volume, so that, approximately, vol. of cylinder up to point of cut-off + clearance vol. --------------------------------------------------------- vol. of cylinder at any point of expansion + clearance vol. pressure above zero, at the given point. = ---------------------------------------- pressure above zero, at point of cut-off. (23) H. T. S. asks: What size should I make the holes in the side of a fan wheel, 20 inches in diameter? Also what size should the nozzle be? A. Allow an opening of from 17 to 20 square inches at inlet and discharge. (24) E. M. D. writes: I am constructing a telephone according to directions in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 142, using a bar magnet in place of horseshoe magnet and soft iron core. 1. Would it reduce the strength of bar magnet to cut a thread on one end of it? A. No. 2. Will a bar magnet, used in Bell telephone, lose its power to such a degree as not to work? A. Not readily. 3. Is No. 22 copper wire of sufficient size for a telephone line of 1,000 feet? A. Yes; but larger would be better. (25) S. & Y. write: We have a pair of burrs on which we grind plaster. The burrs are about 4 feet in diameter and 1½ foot thick. We are running them as an over runner at this time, but wish to change them and make the lower burr run instead of the upper. Can a pair of burrs of the above size be run in that way, and if so, what is the maximum speed at which they can be run? A. If properly arranged, you can run them, after the change, as fast as is allowable for overrunning stones. (26) J. J. asks: Which tire makes a wheel the strongest, 1.25 x 0.50 inch iron, or 1.25 x 5/16 steel tire? A. The steel tire will be the strongest, comparing good qualities of steel and iron. (27) E. L. W. asks: Is a ton (2,000 lbs.) of first class coke equal in heat giving power to a ton (2,000 lbs.) of coal? If not, please give me the relative value of coke and coal in heat giving power? A. Calling the evaporative power of good anthracite coal 1, good bituminous coal rates at about 0.92, and coke from 0.89 to 0.95. (28) J. W. S. asks what to impregnate paper with to give it an agreeable smell while burning. A. You may try a strong ethereal or alcoholic solution of benzoin, tolu, storax, olibanum or labdanum. To burn well the paper should first be impregnated with an aqueous solution of niter and dried. (29) M. G. asks whether hydrogen and oxygen can be produced as rapidly and copiously in the decomposition of water by the galvanic battery as by the action of sulphuric acid on zinc or lead in the one case, and by heating chlorate of potassa in the other. A. Yes, with a very powerful current. (30) T. G. H. asks for names of useful treatises on mechanical movements. A. "Scientific American Reference Book," and "507 Mechanical Movements." (31) R. B. T. writes: We have just set up a new engine; the cylinder is 8 x 12, has a common slide valve. We think the valve is too short; it is set 0.125 inch open when on center, takes steam 10 inches before cutting off; the exhaust is very free. The engine runs about 110 revolutions per minute. We think we could save steam by using a longer valve, and cut-off about 5/8 stroke, and make the exhaust space in the valve shorter, so that it will shut in a portion of the exhaust and form a cushion for the piston. About how much of the exhaust can we shut in without overdoing it? A. You can obtain a good action by making the ratio of compression equal to the ratio of expansion, with the proviso that the final cushion pressure must not exceed the initial pressure. (32) D. B. L. writes: Our boiler after being repaired was tested at 110 lbs. cold water pressure. Three days after it gave out where it was repaired at 58 lbs. steam pressure. To find the leak we put on 80 lbs. cold water pressure, and could not find it. We then put steam pressure at 40 lbs., which made the leak very great, whereas with cold water pressure we could find none. Can you explain it? A. The phenomenon is probably due to the change of shape in the boiler when heated. (33) F. C. writes: Our engine is a plain slide valve engine, 24 x 9, steam following almost to end of stroke. How shall I make a valve to cut off at ¾? Our exhaust now is 1 inch, steam ports 0.75, bridges 0.75. Length of valve 4½ inches, cavity 2-3/8, travel of valve 2 inches. Will I have to enlarge the steam chest; the valve uses the whole length of it now? A. As the length and travel of valve must be increased, it will be necessary to lengthen the steam chest, unless you can apply an independent cut-off valve. (34) T. P. writes: A small basement room 9 feet high is to be heated by a furnace in an adjoining room. By carrying the hot air pipe through the partition midway between the floor and the ceiling it will stand at an angle of about 45°. If carried through at the top of the room it will of course be nearer vertical. In which position of the hot air pipe will the room be most easily heated? A. Place the hot air pipe in the position first described. Take the cold air from a point near the floor through a flue opening above the roof. (35) G. M. P. asks: What is a good and cheap substitute for salt for raising the temperature of water to 230° Fah.? A. An oil bath is often used instead. Chloride of calcium will answer as well as salt, though not so cheap. [Illustration: Right Triangle--sides 15, 20, 25ft.] (36) J. D. reminds us of an old and good method of drawing a perpendicular to a straight line for the purpose of squaring foundations, etc. From the corner of the foundation take two lines respectively 15 and 20 feet, and connect them by a line of 25 feet; the angle included between the two shorter lines will be a right angle. The numbers 3, 4, 5, or, as in the present case, their multiples 15, 20, 25, are taken to measure respectively the perpendicular, base, and slant side of the triangle. It is obvious that any scale may be used so long as the ratio of 3, 4, 5, is observed. (37) J. H. asks what kind of iron to use in making cast iron armatures. A. Soft gray iron. (38) F. H. C. asks: How can I etch cheaply on glass to imitate ground figures or transparent figures on a ground background? A. For this purpose the sand blast is now generally used; the glass is covered with a film of wax or varnish, through which, with suitable needles or gravers, is etched the design; a fine sharp silicious sand impelled by a current of air is then directed from a suitable jet over the prepared surface, and the etching is accomplished in a few minutes. Glass is etched also by hydrofluoric acid; the plate may be prepared as for the sand blast, and placed face downwards over a shallow leaden tray, containing powdered fluorspar moistened with strong oil of vitriol and gently warmed; the gaseous hydrofluoric acid given off rapidly etches the portions of the glass not protected by the wax or varnish. Hydrofluoric acid should be used with great care. (39) L. H. writes: I have seen it asserted that the parasites that infest the Asiatic tiger's paw are an exact miniature image of itself. Is this so? A. No. (40) J. G. B. asks if there is any way of melting brass in a common sand crucible for castings of a pound or so in weight for a small engine. A. You may melt small quantities of brass in any common stove having a good draught, using a coal fire. You may use borax as a flux. (41) F. & Co. ask: 1. In making a telephone as described in Figs. 4 and 5, SUPPLEMENT 142, must the diaphragm be entirely free, or can it be punched and the screws which secure the flange pass through it? A. The diaphragm should not be punched. 2. In new form of telephone in No 20, current volume, must there be a battery in the circuit, or is the telephone sufficient to work it? A. A battery is required. (42) J. M. B. asks: What will prevent the hair from falling out? A. Keep the pores of the skin open by frequent bathing and change of underclothing. Bathe the head with clean soft water, and stimulate the scalp with a moderately stiff brush morning and evening. The head should be occasionally cleansed with a weak solution of glycerin soap in dilute spirit of wine, with care to remove all traces of soap from the hair. Use no pomades or oils of any kind. (43) B. H. P. asks (1) how to make malleable iron, such as used in wrenches. A. Malleable iron castings are made from mottled iron. They are cleaned by tumbling and then packed in iron boxes with alternating layers of rolling mill scale. The boxes are carefully luted and packed in an annealing furnace, where they are kept at a white heat for a week or more, and then allowed to cool gradually. 2. How is steel or iron made to adhere to the face of the jaws of the wrench? A. By welding. (44) J. G. E. asks: What is the highest column of water that can be raised from a well by means of a siphon pump with 60 lbs. steam, likewise a 1 inch column of water with 60 lbs. steam? A. Lift, from 26 to 27 feet. (45) W. H. W. asks: 1. Is there any solution excepting rubber that will make cloth thoroughly waterproof, or at least withstand the attack of water for an hour or so? It should be applied by dipping the cloth in the solution. A. Linseed oil boiled with a little wax and litharge is useful for some purposes. Cloth prepared with paraffin, balata gum, the gum of the asclet pias or milkweed, naphtha solution of the dried pulp of the bamboo berry, anhydrous aluminum soaps (see pp. 149 and 159, "Science Record," 1874), are also employed. 2. Is there any chemical that could be combined with the solution, imparting some property to the same for which rats or mice would have an antipathy so as to prevent their attacks? A. A trace of phenol will generally suffice. (46) J. L. asks: Is the balata gum softened by animal oils or fat? A. Yes. (47) P. L. W. asks. What distance would a 100 lb. weight have to fall to run a sewing machine for 5 hours? A. For an ordinary family sewing machine, requiring about one thirtieth of a horse power, the weight would have to fall about 3,300 feet in the 5 hours. (48) W. G. R. asks: 1. What is the valve yoke of a steam engine? A. We presume you refer to the rectangular yoke that receives the back of the valve in the class of engines having balanced valves. 2. What should be the diameter of the bore of an engine of 1 horse power with 100 lbs. pressure, also the length of stroke? A. Diameter, 2¾ inches; stroke, 4½ inches. 3. How are the back gears of a lathe made so as to be thrown out of gear when it is wished to use the lathe at a high speed? A. Ordinarily by a cam and lever, or tight and loose joint. 4. Would 1/64 of an inch thickness of sheet steel be strong enough for the boiler of a small model locomotive? How much pressure would it stand to the inch? A. If the diameter does not exceed 3 inches, you can carry a pressure of from 50 to 60 lbs. per square inch. (49) J. W. W. asks: Which will stand the most pressure, a piece of round iron 1 inch long and 1 inch in diameter, or a piece of gas pipe the same dimensions, both being set upon end? A. The round iron. (50) W. M. B. writes: 1. I have one eighth inch basswood, cherry, butternut and walnut. Which do you advise for the sounding board of a microphone and Hughes telephone? A. Either will do, but pine or spruce is better. 2. Would a glazed earthen jar do for the outside of battery described in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, No. 149? A. Yes. 3. Could I make insulated wire myself? If so, how? A. Wire may be insulated by giving it a coat of shellac varnish and allowing it to become dry and nearly hard before winding. (51) W. H. S. asks how to satin finish tubing like sample sent. A. The specimen has been electro-plated with silver in the usual manner, and the electric current then reversed for a few moments, thus redissolving a portion of the plate, the remainder presenting the peculiar satin like luster. (52) S. W. C. asks: Has carbon for telephone purposes ever been made by subjecting the black deposited by a flame to a heavy pressure? A. Yes. Edison's carbons are made in this manner. (53) "Hardware" asks: 1. Where is best to take hot air in a room, at register near ceiling or in floor? A. At or near the floor. 2. Where is best place to have ventilation, near floor or near ceiling? A. If connected with a flue having a good draught it should be near the floor. (54) R. W. J. asks: What causes the cracking noise in the pipes of a steam heating apparatus, when a fire has been started to warm up the building? Is it the water in the pipes made by condensed steam, or is it the expansion of the pipes from being heated? A. The noise is due to both causes in some degree, but principally to the water, which produces violent blows. (55) C. N. A. asks how to temper steel tools for working on stone or similar work. There is some preparation which is put in water which accomplishes the purpose when the steel is heated and plunged in. A. Heat the tools to a cherry red, and plunge in clean, moderately cool water. A little common salt is sometimes added to the water. (56) G. B. asks: 1. Is the height to which water is raised by a hydraulic ram measured from the ram itself or from the spring from which the supply comes? A. From the ram. 2. Can a hydraulic ram be constructed to discharge 1,000 gallons of water per minute? A. Yes. (57) L. D. writes that benzine will answer much better to exterminate roaches, moths, etc., than anything else. It will not hurt furniture in the least, will evaporate, and can be easily applied. MINERALS, ETC.--Specimens have been received from the following correspondents, and examined, with the results stated: M. B. W.--No. 1 is a silicious clay--it might be useful in the manufacture of some grades of pottery, etc. No. 2 is a ferruginous shale--contains about 80 per cent. of silica and 10 per cent. of alumina, besides lime, magnesia, iron oxide, and water.--W. S.--It is fibrous talc--talc of good quality is in considerable demand for paper making and other purposes.--W. G. H.--The sand contains no precious metal--the glittering particles are mica.--S. F.--The specimen you send consists of a mass of the long hairs which have been attached to the seeds of the "milkweed" (_asclepias_), or, as it is sometimes called, from the silky nature of these appendages, "silkweed." We believe that this material is put to no other economic use at present than that of a filling for cushions and pillows. The beauty of this silk like down long ago attracted attention, and many unsuccessful attempts have been made to put it to some practical use in the arts; but, as you have probably noticed, the hairs are both brittle and weak, and an examination with a lens will show that it wants the roughness and angularity necessary to fit it for being spun like other fibers. It has, however, been mixed with cotton and woven into fabrics having a silky luster and capable of taking brilliant dyes, but the manufacture has never been prosecuted. The plants, though widely distributed over the United States, and quite common, are nevertheless not abundant enough in a wild state to afford much of a supply, and we believe no experiments have been made in cultivating them. * * * * * Any numbers of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT referred to in these columns may be had at this office. Price 10 cents each. * * * * * COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED. The Editor of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN acknowledges with much pleasure the receipt of original papers and contributions on the following subjects: Manufacture of Porous Cups for Tyndall Grove Battery. By W. H. S. Cylinder Condensation. By F. F. H. Sawdust. By W. H. M. Keely Motor. By G. R. S. Firing. By A. P. A. Steam Launches. By G. F. S. * * * * * HINTS TO CORRESPONDENTS. We renew our request that correspondents, in referring to former answers or articles, will be kind enough to name the date of the paper and the page, or the number of the question. Many of our correspondents make inquiries which cannot properly be answered in these columns. Such inquiries, if signed by initials only, are liable to be cast into the waste basket. Persons desiring special information which is purely of a personal character, and not of general interest, should remit from $1 to $5, according to the subject, as we cannot be expected to spend time and labor to obtain such information without remuneration. * * * * * English Patents Issued to Americans. From November 8 to November 12, inclusive. Electric light.--T. A. Edison, Menlo Park, N. J. Feed water apparatus.--S. J. Hayes et al.,-------. Pipe, manufacture of.--W. Radde, N. Y. city. Potato digger.--L. A. Aspinwall, Albany, N. Y. Refrigerator.--J. A. Whitney, N. Y. city. Screw cutting machinery.--C. D. Rogers, Providence, R. I. Sewing machine.--Wilson Sewing Machine Company, Chicago, Ill. Wire machinery.--C. D. Rogers, Providence, R. I. * * * * * [OFFICIAL.] INDEX OF INVENTIONS FOR WHICH Letters Patent of the United States were Granted in the Week Ending October 15, 1878, AND EACH BEARING THAT DATE. [Those marked (r) are reissued patents.] * * * * * A complete copy of any patent in the annexed list, including both the specifications and drawings, will be furnished from this office for one dollar. In ordering, please state the number and date of the patent desired, and remit to Munn & Co., 37 Park Row, New York city. * * * * * Animal trap, B. H. Noelting 209,068 Axle box, car, J. N. Smith 208,993 Axle skein, vehicle, L. A. Winchester 209,096 Ballot box, W. L. Barnes 208,951 Bed bottom, F. W. Mitchell 208,917 Bed bottom, spring, H. Pitcher 208,987 Bed lounge, H. S. Carter 209,019 Bed, spring, A. J. Lattin 208,979 Bedstead fastening, L. P. Clark 209,022 Boilers, low water alarm for steam, G. H. Crosby 208,962 Boot and shoe counter support, etc., J. Wissen 208,943 Bootjack, C. Tyson 209,091 Brake, vacuum, F. W. Eames 208,895 Bran scourer, R. Tyson 209,092 Broom, M. T. Boult 209,017 Brush, A. C. Estabrook 208,898 Camera, J. W. T. Cadett 208,956 Can, E. Norton 209,070 Can, metallic, J. Broughton 209,009 Can, oil, A. E. Gardner 209,037 Can, sheet metal, A. N. Lapierre 209,060 Car bumper, S. M. Cummings (r) 8,448 Car coupling, J. Simmons 208,934 Car draw bar attachment, railway, J. H. Smitt 208,994 Car journal box, F. M. Alexander 208,947 Car running gear, railway, J. C. Weaver 209,093 Cars, dust deflector for, Morgan & Gilleland 209,066 Carbureter, air, G. Reznor 209,076 Carriage, C. H. Palmer, Jr. 208,923 Carriage seats, corner iron for, L. Emerson 208,971 Carriage top standard, F. W. Whitney 209,097 Cartridge loading machine, G. S. Slocum 208,935 Cartridges, machine for gauging, J. H. Gill 208,903 Casting andirons, mould for, S. E. Jones 209,054 Casting temple rollers, mould for, J. B. Stamour 208,997 Chair for children, high, J. Nichols (r) 8,454 Chair, reclining, N. N. Horton 208,907 Chalk, sharpener for tailor's, J. Butcher 208,955 Churn, J. H. Folliott 209,033 Churn, reciprocating, L. B. Wilson 208,941 Clasp, T. P. Taylor 208,998 Clock striking attachment, D. C. Wolf 209,098 Cock, steam, G. H. Crosby 208,961 Coin holder, C. H. Carpenter 208,958 Coin holder, B. McGovern 208,984 Coin measure, C. H. Fuller 208,902 Coke oven, W. H. Rosewarne 208,930 Combing machine, Rushton & Macqueen 208,991 Cooler and filter, water, J. C. Jewett 208,909 Cooler, water, G. W. Malpass 208,913 Cotton gin, J. B. Hull 209,049 Crucible machine, J. C. Clime 208,960 Cultivator, J. C. Bean 209,005 Cultivator, B. H. Cross 208,964 Cultivator, C. Nash 208,921 Dental foil package, R. S. Williams 209,002 Dental plugger, W. G. A. Bonwill 209,006 Desk, H. E. Moon 208,919 Doffer combs, operator for, E. Wright 208,946 Draught equalizer, L. O. Brekke 209,007 Dredging machine, J. B. Eads 208,894 Drill cleaner, grain, J. W. Lucas 208,982 Dummy, H. H. Baker 208,881 Ear ring, W. P. Dolloff 208,968 Electric machine, dynamo, E. Weston 209,094 Elevator, windlass water, J. Knipscheer 209,057 End gate fastening, F. Rock 208,928 Evaporator, fruit and vegetable, J. W. Powers 208,925 Excavating machine, J. T. Dougine 208,893 Exercising machine, W. J. O. Bryon, Jr. 208,954 Exhaust nozzle, N. J. White 208,939 Fabric cutter, Muehling & Davis 208,920 Feathers for dusters, G. M. Richmond 209,080 Fence, J. Williams 209,095 Fence, picket, Terry & W. W. Green, Jr. 209,089 Firearm, breech-loading, H. C. Bull 209,010 Firearm, breech-loading, J. D. Coon 208,889 Fire escape, V. Wohlmann 208,944 Firekindler, T. M. Benner 208,882 Firekindler, E. J. Norris 209,069 Fluting machine, C. G. Cabell (r) 8,453 Fork, W. H. Kretsinger 209,058 Fuel compressor, W. H. Rosewarne 208,929 Gas burner, pressure governing, J. N. Chamberlain 209,021 Gas burners, apparatus for, A. L. Bogart 209,016 Gate, C. D. & I. Haldeman 209,040 Gate, J. S. Henshaw 208,976 Gate, Nason & Wilson (r) 8,456 Grain binder, M. A. Keller 209,059 Grain separator, G. W. Earhart 208,896 Gun, air, B. T. Babbitt 209,014 Harness, neck yoke attachment for, J. S. Nelson 208,922 Harrow, sulky, S. C. Dix 209,028 Harvester rake, J. Barnes 208,950 Harvester reel, Hodges & Mohler 209,047 Head light, locomotive, E. L. Hall 209,041 Heels, turner for wooden, Prenot & Marchal 208,989 Hide and skin dresser, C. Molinier 208,918 Hitching post, Thomas & Knox 209,090 Hoe. T. Weiss 209,000 Hog cholera compound, M. Hemmingway 208,975 Horse collar, J. J. Crowley 209,025 Horse power, C. H. Baker 208,948 Horsepower, A. B. Farquhar 209,032 Horse toe weight, J. W. Bopp 208,927 Ice, manufacturing, A. Albertson (r) 8,455 Indicator, water level, E. Jerome 209,052 Journal, R. Macdonald 208,983 Journal bearing, W. W. Smalley 209,084 Knife, chopping, W. Millspaugh 209,065 Knob attachment, door, J. F. Peacock 208,924 Lamp holder, A. A. Noyes 209,071 Lamp bowl, F. Rhind 209,077 Lamp chimney, nursery, E. Mecier 208,916 Lamp, miner's, W. Roberts 209,082 Lamp, self-extinguishing, F. Rhind 209,078 Lantern, J. H. Irwin 209,051 Lantern, signal. H. E. Pond (r) 8,457 Latch, B. W. Foster 209,034 Lathe for turning regular forms, E. A. Marsh 209,064 Lead, refining, impure, N. S. Keith 209,056 Leather skiving machine, M. M. Clough 208,959 Leather splitting machine, A. E. Whitney 209,001 Loom temple, J. B. Stamour 209,101 Lubricator, N. Seibert 208,932 Lubricator, steam cylinder, N. Seibert 208,931 Marble, slate, etc., ornamenting, W. K. Lorenz 209,062 Match dipping machine, A. R. Sprout 208,996 Meter, steam diaphragm, C. Holly 209,048 Middlings bolt, M. Inskeep 209,050 Middlings separator, G. T. Smith. 208,936 Musical instrument, E. P. Needham (r) 8,451 Musical string instruments, key for, F. Z. Nicolier 208,985 Needle, J. Burrows 209,018 Oat meal machine, Eberhard & Turner 208,970 Ordnance, operating heavy, H. C. Bull 209,011 Ore separator, P. Plant 209,074 Oven, hot blast, Miles & Burghardt 208,915 Package wrapper, G. V. Hecker 209,044 Packing for piston rods, metallic, M. H. Gerry 208,973 Pan cover, milk, C. C. Fairlamb 208,900 Paper feeding apparatus, F. H. Lauten 208,980 Paper making machines, box for, C. Young 209,003 Paper pulp, reducing wood to, Cornell & Tollner 208,890 Peach parer, W. S. Plummer 208,988 Pen, puncturing, J. M. Griest 208,905 Pessary, medicated, T. N. Berlin 208,883 Pipe, smoking, W. H. Caddy 208,886 Planter, corn, Brigham & Flenniken 208,885 Planter, grain, C. E. McBonn 208,914 Planter, seed, G. A. Woods 208,945 Plaster bandages, making, C. G. Hill 209,045 Plow, C. Myers 209,067 Plow and harrow attachment, shovel, A. Heartsill 209,043 Plow and harrow, W. G. Himrod 209,046 Plow clevis, H. Estes 208,899 Plow, hillside, shovel, and subsoil, E. Tate 209,088 Plow, sulky, F. H. Isaacs 208,978 Press, cotton and hay, Tappey & Steel 209,087 Printing and painting machine, O. Currier 208,892 Printing, photo-mechanical, M. R. Freeman 209,036 Propelling vessels, P. Boisset 208,952 Pulleys to wheels, engaging, Blake & Davis 208,884 Pump, S. Stucky 209,086 Pump, double acting lift, Dean & Pike 209,027 Rafter, F. M. Covert 209,024 Railway rails, muffling, A. Atwood 208,880 Railway signal, C. E. Hanscom 209,042 Railway signal, electro-magnetic, H. W. Spang 208,995 Railway track, B. F. Card 208,957 Rake, horse hay, W. Adriance 209,004 Rolling mills, bearing for, S. W. Baldwin 208,949 Roofs, attaching slates to, S. Farquhar 209,031 Rope holding reel, C. N. Cass 209,020 Rosettes from wood, making, J. H. Burnshow 239,012 Seal, baggage, E. J. Brooks 208,953 Seal, metallic, E. J. Brooks 209,008 Seeding machine, S. O. Campbell 208,887 Sewing machine, C. S. Cushman 209,026 Sewing machine, J. A. Davis 208,967 Sewing machine, L. Evans 209,030 Sewing machine, book, J. S. Lever 209,061 Sewing machine, hem stitching, J. A. Lakin 208,911 Sewing machine tuck marker, G. Rehfuss 209,075 Shaft and pulley coupling, H. C. Crowell 208,965 Shears, metal, W. G. Collins 208,888 Ships unloading grain from W. Stanton (r) 8,452 Shoe, J. F. Emerson 208,897 Shutter bower, T. Thorn 208,937 Shutter worker, W. Jones 209,055 Sign, W. Gulden 208,974 Sinks, measuring and weighing, D. T. Winter 208,942 Sled, stone and log, W. Gregg 209,039 Sleigh, propeller, R. Schluter 209,083 Spittoon, T. Loughran 208,981 Spring, car, G. F. Godley 208,904 Spring, vehicle, E. Chamberlin (r) 8,449, 8,450 Spring, vehicle, C. W. Fillmore 208,901 Spring, vehicle, H. R. Huie 208,977 Steamer, feed, Machamer & McCulloch 209,063 Stirrup, saddle, J. M. Freeman 208,972 Stove board, A. C. Stoessiger 209,085 Stove cover and check damper, H. Ritter 209,081 Stove pipe shelf, L. W. Turner 208,938 Stoves, foot bar and rail for, J. Jewett 209,053 Stoves, hood for cooking, S. Cromer 208,891 Stump puller. W. A. Webb 208,999 Sugar, manufacture of hard, J. O. Donner 209,029 Switch cords, tip for, T. B. Doolittle 208,969 Table folding, R. M. Lambie 208,912 Tablet, writing, W. O. Davis 208,966 Target, W. Kuhn 208,910 Ticket, passenger, A. C. Sheldon 208,933 Ticket-reel. T. D. Haehnlen 208,906 Toy money box J. Gerard 209,038 Treadle power, I. M. Rhodes 209,079 Turbines, steam and other, P. C. Humblot 208,908 Valve, J. Patterson 208,986 Valve, feed water regulating, E. C. Da Silva 208,992 Valve gear, steam engine, J. Butcher 209,013 Ventilator, T. Owens 209,072 Wagon jack, W. B. Bartram 209,015 Wagon jack, Williams & Dodge 208,940 Washing machine, D. Coman 209,023 Washing machine, A. R. Fowler 209,035 Washing machine, F. F. Reynolds 208,990 Water gauge, G. H. Crosby 208,963 Weighing apparatus, J. H. Wright 209,099 Window, A. K. Phillips 209,073 Window frame, C. Rebhun 208,926 Wreaths, machine for twining, G. B. Shepard 209,100 TRADE MARKS. Cigars, cigarettes, etc., E. Hilson 6,726 Cigars, etc., Engelbrecht Fox & Co. 6,724, 6,725 Disinfecting compound, Hance Bros. & White 6,718 Gin, Hoffheimer Brothers 6,729 Lamp chimneys, Norcross, Mellen & Co. 6,730 Liquid cements. W. H. Sanger 6,731 Malt extract, Tarrant & Co. 6,722 Matches, J. Eaton & Son 6,727 Mustard and spices, H. B. Sherman 6,720, 6,721 Perfumery, J. T. Lanman 6,719 Playing cards, The N. Y. Consolidated Card Co. 6,723 Smoking tobacco, H. W. Meyer 6,728 Wash blue, F. Damcke 6,711 DESIGNS. Carpet, C. Magee 10,870 Cigar boxes, Weller & Repetti 10,871 Font of printing types, J. M. Conner 10,868 Group of statuary, J. Rogers 10,869 Handkerchiefs, J. Grimshaw 10,866, 10,867 * * * * * THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXPORT EDITION. * * * * * PUBLISHED MONTHLY. * * * * * THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition is a large and SPLENDID PERIODICAL, issued once a month, forming a complete and interesting Monthly Record of all Progress in Science and the Useful Arts throughout the World. Each number contains about ONE HUNDRED LARGE QUARTO PAGES, profusely illustrated, embracing: (1.) Most of the plates and pages of the four preceding weekly issues of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, with its SPLENDID ENGRAVINGS AND VALUABLE INFORMATION. (2.) Prices Current, Commercial, Trade, and Manufacturing Announcements of Leading Houses. In connection with these Announcements many of the Principal Articles of American Manufacture are exhibited to the eye of the reader by means of SPLENDID ENGRAVINGS. This is by far the most satisfactory and superior Export Journal ever brought before the public. Terms for Export Edition, FIVE DOLLARS A YEAR, sent prepaid to any part of the world. Single copies, 50 cents. For sale at this office. To be had at all News and Book Stores throughout the country. * * * * * NOW READY. THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXPORT EDITION FOR NOVEMBER, 1878, WITH ONE HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS. GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS Of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition for November, 1878. I.--INVENTIONS, DISCOVERIES AND PATENTS. The Incoming Commissioner of Patents. A South Australian Offer for an Improvement. The Forster-Firmin Amalgamator. Three engravings. Lyman's Trigonometer. One figure. Patent Law. The Benefits of Patent Rights. Hop Picking by Machinery. Description of Recent Most Important Agricultural Inventions. Displays of Ingenuity at the Boston Mechanics Fair. Description of Recent Most Important Mechanical Inventions. New Wilson Oscillating Sewing Machine. Seven figs. A Nail Gun. Who will Invent a Satisfactory Milking Machine? The Hermetical Sanitary Closet. One engraving. New Refrigerator Basket. Two engravings. New Fireproof Shutter. One engraving. Inventors Needed in England. New Foot Power. One engraving. New Wool Scouring and Rinsing Machine. One eng. New Measuring Jacket. Three engravings. New Rheostat. Two engravings. The Paris International Patent Congress. Patent Rights, and Who Oppose Them. New Gas Regulator. Three engravings. Combined Traction Engine and Steam Fire Engine. One engraving. Van Renne's Caloric Engine and Pump. Three engs. The Watson Pump. One engraving. The Swedish Buckeye Machine. Pipe Wrench and Cutter. Two engravings. Drilling Square Holes. Four figures. Description of Recent Most Important Engineering Inventions. New Mortising Machine. One engraving. New Steam Fire Engine. One engraving. New Bank Note Paper Wanted. The Proposed Addition to the Patent Office. Two engravings. A Year's Work in the Patent Office. New Rule in Trade Mark Cases. Electric Light in Chancery. Novel Egg Opener. Two engravings. Patents for Protecting the Dead. Electric Light Patents. A New Platen Gauge. Four engravings. New Draughting Pencil. Two engravings. Gas and Water-tight Cloth. New Regulator for Clock Pendulums. Two engs. Steam Engine Governor. One engraving. Description of Recent Most Important Miscellaneous Inventions. Notices of New Inventions. Patent Office Library. II.--MECHANICS AND ENGINEERING. Chard's Lubricene and Cups. The Electric Light and the Gas Companies. Fuel Gas. New Ways to Use Iron Wanted. Progress and Prospects of the East River Bridge. Two engravings. A Steam Tricycle. New Artesian Well, Victoria, Spain. A Long Train. How a Good House Should be Built. Jetties Under Water. How the Capitol at Albany, N. Y., is to be Warmed and Ventilated. What a Perfect Railway Brake Should do. The Secret of It. Florida Ship Canal. The Torpedo Vessel Destroyer. One illustration. Steam from Petroleum. The Motion of a Wagon Wheel. Building in Steel. Locomotive for the Metropolitan Elevated Railway. One illustration. The French Dam Below Pittsburg, Ohio. The Adelphi Explosion. "Forney" Locomotive for the New York Elevated Railway. One large engraving. The Steam Value of Oil Fuels. The Mechanical and other Properties of Iron and Mild Steel. French Wheelbarrows. Twenty-five engravings. Small Steamboats. Life Preservers. A Gas Clock. Another Mountain Railway. Preservation of Iron. The Salisbury Furnace for Petroleum. Danger from Lubricating Oils. The Testing of Boiler Iron. Tramway Rail Experiments. Two engravings. Aluminum and Platinum in the Manufacture of Watches. Great Machine Tool Makers. Gas as a Substitute for Solid Fuel. III.--MINING AND METALLURGY. The Formation of Quartz. Depth of Nevada Gold and Silver Mines. California Mining vs. Farming. New Form of Iron Manufacture. Comstock Silver Lodes. IV.--CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. Dangers from Impure Potassium Iodide. The Poplar as a Lightning Conductor. The Mariner's Compass. Crude Sulphur from Iron Pyrites. Antimony for Batteries. Delicate Test for Water. The Polarization of Electrodes. Fragarine. Balata Gum. Astronomical Notes. Giving the Positions, Rising, and Setting of the Planets for November. Professor Morton on the Electric Light. The Electrical Department in the Mechanic's Fair, Boston. The Satellites of Mars. Gold Amalgams. Another New Electric Light. Albumen of the Serum and that of Egg, and their Combinations. A Mirror Telegraph. Some Modifications of the Microphone and Telephone. Four engravings. A Chance for Electric Competition. Advantages of Experimental Study. The Black Spot of Jupiter. The Electric Light. With five engravings. Spontaneous Combustion. Recent Military Balloon Experiments. Burner for Electric Light. One engraving. Artificial Ball Lightning. One engraving. To Make Corks Air-tight and Water-tight. Electric Time Service for New York. Four engravings. The Hosmer Motor. Polarized Light. Phosphorescent Timepieces. The De Meritens Magneto-electric Machine. Two figures. Cellulose as a Material for Washers. V.--NATURAL HISTORY, NATURE, MAN, ETC. The Golden Cup Oak. Serpulas, or Sea Worms. One engraving. The King Tody Bird. One engraving. Life Without Air. Cadaver-poison of the Australian Natives. The Contortion of Rocks from Heat Mechanically Generated. The Stiffening of Plant Stalks. Immense Labor Performed by Bees. The Torrey Botanical Club. The Big Trees of California. Explorations in Greenland. The Umbrella Bird. One engraving. The Argan Tree. A Spruce-destroying Beetle. A Geological Discovery in Deep Water. The Mound Builder's Unit of Measure. Progress of Horticulture. Bishop Ferrette on the Cedars of Lebanon. Special Senses in Insects. Natural History Notes. New Cave Discovery in Kentucky. Longevity of the Horse. Left-handedness. Bee Culture in Egypt. The Poison Ivy and Virginia Creeper. Two engravings. The Crafty Hermit Crab. One illustration. VI.--MEDICINE AND HYGIENE. Nitrate of Amyl in Sea Sickness. Milk cure for Lead Colic. Milkweed Juice for Raw Surfaces. The Use of Snails in Medicine. The Art of Prolonging Life. The Deleterious Use of Alum in Bread and Baking Powders.--Alum being Substituted for Cream of Tartar. The Treatment of Hydrophobia. New Use for Warts. Removal of the Entire Scalp by Machinery. The Probable Starting Point of the Yellow Fever. Piedra. Heredity. Scientific Reliance on Soap. The Medical Ice Hat. Ventilation of Bed Rooms. The Filtration of Drinking Water. The Texas "Screw Worm." VII.--THE PARIS EXHIBITION, SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS, ETC. Success of American Exhibitors at Paris. The Main Building at the Exhibition. With one full page illustration. The French Industrial Exhibition of 1878. Awards and Honors at Paris. Ingram Rotary Press. One illustration. A Grand World's Fair in New York. A Mexican Exhibition. Australia to have a World's Fair. Closing of the French Exhibition. Hydraulic Motors at the Exhibition. With two engravings. The National Academy of Sciences. The Official Reports of the Paris Exhibition. American Society of Civil Engineers. VIII.--INDUSTRY AND COMMERCE. Should the Nation Engage in Manufactures? American Export of Agricultural Machinery. Corundum. American Made Goods Exhibited as European Manufactures. The California Tea Fields. An Odd Craft. Progress of our Foreign Trade. The Condition of Manufacturing Interests in Germany. Labor in Chicago. Apples for Europe. Adulterated Graham Flour. Addition to our List of Food Fishes. Preservation of Milk. Electrical Test for Oils. Parsnips. Russian Pottery. Two engravings. Notes from the South.--Facts about the Cotton Worm. The Mediterranean Trade. American Competition in Great Britain. Rapid Increase in French Woolen Industries. The Rockport Granite Quarries. Trade Mark Treaty with Brazil. Early Manufacture of Steel Pens. New and Stale Bread. Leather from Sheep Stomachs. New Source of Rubber. A National Law Governing Adulteration Needed. How to get Pure Teas. Skilled Labor in New York City. French Subsoil and Clearing Plow. One figure. Opening for Trade in Madagascar. Handling Grain in Buffalo. The Blue Process of Copying Tracings. We Buy of them that Advertise. Unprofitable Agents. Various Uses of Paper. Improved Grinding Mill and Crusher. Two engravings. The Cultivation of the Common Nettle. The Economic Products of Seaweed. The Japanese Wax Tree in California. Preservation of Food by Gelatin. Pearl Millet. To Turn Oak Black. Dairy and Poultry Produce in America. Australian Gum Trees. Frauds in Wine Making. Removal of Iron Coloring from Liquors. The Utilization of Iron Slag. Relative Cost of Coal Transportation by Water and by Rail. How to get Rid of Ants. The Science of Milling. IX.--PRACTICAL RECIPES AND MISCELLANEOUS. Progress in England and America. An Improvement on Tea Chromos. A Correction. The Stability of Modern Civilization. Future Rifle Shooting. "Bruce," the Manchester Fire Horse. The Trial of the "Pyx." Early Gold Payments. Workingmen in England and France. Washington Memorials in Northamptonshire. Three engravings. Culinary Uses of Leaves. A Remarkable Bank Robbery.--Scientific Safeguards Neglected. Cleopatra's Needle. A Steam Juryman. Roads in Baden. Indications of Progress. Practical Education in Russia. Table Forks. The Cost of Insecurity. Improved Copying Pencils. Answers to Correspondents, embodying a large quantity of valuable information, practical recipes, and instructions in various arts. Single numbers of the _Scientific American Export Edition_, 50 cents. To be had at this office, and at all news stores. Subscriptions, _Five Dollars a year_; sent postpaid to all parts of the world. MUNN & CO., PUBLISHERS, 37 PARK Row, NEW YORK. To Advertisers:-->Manufacturers and others who desire to secure foreign trade may have large and handsomely displayed announcements published in this edition at a very moderate cost. The Scientific American Export Edition has a large guaranteed circulation in all commercial places throughout the world. Regular Files of the Export Edition are also carried on ALL STEAMSHIPS, foreign and coastwise, leaving the port of New York. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. * * * * * STRONG AND CHEAP SPAR BRIDGES. General description, dimensions, and particulars, with 2 pages of drawings, covering illustrations of all the details, for a bridge of 100 feet span or less; specially useful for crossing of creeks, small rivers, gullies, or wherever a costly structure is not desirable. The drawings are from the Spar Bridge exhibited at the Centennial, in the U. S. Department of Military Engineering. These bridges are wholly composed of undressed stuff. SUPPLEMENT 71. Price 10 cents. * * * * * FIREPROOF DWELLINGS OF CHEAP CONSTRUCTION. A valuable and important paper, containing Plans and Descriptions of Model Fireproof Dwellings of cheap construction lately erected in Chicago. By A. J. Smith, Architect. With 9 illustrations. Plan No. 1 exhibits the construction of comfortable one-story, 16 ft. front dwellings, of brick and concrete, finished complete at a cost of $1,200. Plan No. 2 exhibits the construction of a comfortable 23 ft. front, two-story dwelling, of brick and concrete, finished complete, with cellar, for $1,700. Several of these dwellings, on both plans, have been built at the prices stated. This valuable paper also contains the Report of the City Authorities of Chicago, certifying to the fireproof nature of these buildings, with other useful particulars. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 91. Price 10 cts. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. * * * * * OUTWARD MARKS OF A GOOD COW. By Capt. JOHN C. MORRIS, Pa. Carelessness in Breeding. How to Select for Breeding. Marks of the Handsome Cow. Care and Training of the Heifer. Infallible Marks of Good Milkers. Distinguishing Marks and Characteristics of the "Bastard" and the "Bogus" Cow, etc. Contained, with useful Remarks on Bee Culture, in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 135. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. * * * * * ON CHRONIC MALARIAL POISONING. By ALFRED L. LOOMIS, M.D. A Highly Instructive Clinical Lecture, delivered at the University Medical College, N. Y Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 102. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. * * * * * ICE-HOUSE AND COLD ROOM.--BY R. G. Hatfleld. With directions for construction. Four engravings. SUPPLEMENT No. 59. Price, 10 cents. * * * * * THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN The Most Popular Scientific Paper in the World. THIRTY-THIRD YEAR. Only $3.20 a Year including Postage. Weekly. 52 Numbers a Year. This widely circulated and splendidly illustrated paper is published weekly. Every number contains sixteen pages of useful information, and a large number of original engravings of new inventions and discoveries, representing Engineering Works, Steam Machinery, New Inventions, Novelties in Mechanics, Manufactures, Chemistry, Electricity, Telegraphy, Photography, Architecture, Agriculture, Horticulture, Natural History, etc. ALL CLASSES OF READERS find in THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN a popular _resume_ of the best scientific information of the day; and it is the aim of the publishers to present it in an attractive form, avoiding as much as possible abstruse terms. To every intelligent mind, this journal affords a constant supply of instructive reading. It is promotive of knowledge and progress in every community where it circulates. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.--One copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be sent for _one year_--52 numbers--postage prepaid, to any subscriber in the United States or Canada, on receipt of THREE DOLLARS AND TWENTY CENTS by the publishers; six months, $1.60; three months, $1.00. CLUBS.--ONE EXTRA COPY of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be supplied gratis _for every club of five subscribers_ at $3.20 each; additional copies at same proportionate rate. Postage prepaid. One copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and one copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT will be sent for one year, postage prepaid, to any subscriber in the United States or Canada, on receipt of _seven dollars_ by the publishers. The safest way to remit is by Postal Order, Draft, or Express. Money carefully placed inside of envelopes, securely sealed, and correctly addressed, seldom goes astray, but is at the sender's risk. Address all letters and make all orders, drafts, etc., payable to MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. TO FOREIGN SUBSCRIBERS.--Under the facilities of the Postal Union, the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is now sent by post direct from New York, with regularity, to subscribers in Great Britain, India, Australia, and all other British colonies; to France, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Russia, and all other European States; Japan, Brazil, Mexico, and all States of Central and South America. Terms, when sent to foreign countries, Canada excepted, $4, gold, for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 1 year; $9, gold, for both SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN AND SUPPLEMENT for 1 year. This includes postage, which we pay. Remit by postal order or draft to order of Munn & Co., 37 Park Row, New York. * * * * * NEW PATENT LAW FOR SPAIN, CUBA, PORTO RICO, ETC. By the terms of the New Patent Law of _Spain_, which has lately gone into operation, the citizens of the United States may obtain Spanish Patents on very favorable conditions. The Spanish Patent covers SPAIN, and all the Spanish Colonies, including CUBA, Porto Rico, the Philippine Islands, etc. Total cost of obtaining the Patent, $100. Duration of the Patent, 20 years, 10 years, and 5 years, as follows: The Spanish Patent, if applied for by the original inventor before his American patent is actually issued, will run for 20 years. Total cost of the patent, $100. It covers Spain, Cuba, etc. The Spanish Patent, if applied for by the original inventor not more than two years after the American patent has been issued, will run for 10 years. Total cost of patent, $100. Covers Spain, Cuba, etc. _A Spanish Patent of Introduction_, good for 5 years, can be taken by any person, whether inventor or merely introducer. Cost of such patent, $100. Covers Spain, Cuba, and all the Spanish dominions. In order to facilitate the transaction of our business in obtaining Spanish Patents, we have established a special agency at No. 4 Soldado, Madrid. Further particulars, with Synopsis of Foreign Patents, Costs, etc., furnished gratis. MUNN & CO., Solicitors of American and Foreign Patents, Proprietors of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. * * * * * WATER SUPPLY FOR TOWNS AND Villages.--By Clarence Delafield, C.E. A concise and valuable report, showing the costs and merits of the various systems--Discussion of the Holly system, its merits and defects--The reservoir system, with pumps, cost, and advantages--Results obtained and economy of use of various systems in different towns, with names and duty realized--Facts and figures to enable town committees to judge for themselves as to the system best suited for their wants--The best sources of water supply-- Water-bearing rocks--Artesian wells, their feasibility, excellence, and cost of boring--Importance of pure water--How surface water is rendered impure--Cost of water pipes, from 2 to 12 inches diameter, for towns, including laying, all labor, materials, gates, joints, etc. Estimates of income, water-rates for supply of 1,000 buildings. Contained in SUPPLEMENT 27. Price 10 cents. * * * * * ICE BOATS--THEIR CONSTRUCTION and management. With working drawings, details, and directions in full. Four engravings, showing mode of construction. Views of the two fastest ice-sailing boats used on the Hudson river in winter. By H. A. Horsfall, M.E. SUPPLEMENT 1. The same number also contains the rules and regulations for the formation of ice-boat clubs, the sailing and management of ice-boats, etc. Price 10 cents. * * * * * ICE AND ICE-HOUSES--HOW TO MAKE ice ponds; amount of ice required, etc., and full directions for building ice-house, with illustrated plan. SUPPLEMENT 55. Price 10 cents. * * * * * [Illustration: Patents] CAVEATS, COPYRIGHTS, TRADE MARKS, ETC. Messrs. Munn & Co., in connection with the publication of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, continue to examine Improvements, and to act as Solicitors of Patents for Inventors. In this line of business they have had OVER THIRTY YEARS' EXPERIENCE, and now have _unequaled facilities_ for the preparation of Patent Drawings, Specifications, and the Prosecution of Applications for Patents in the United States. Canada, and Foreign Countries. Messrs. Munn & Co. also attend to the preparation of Caveats, Trade Mark Regulations, Copyrights for Books, Labels, Reissues, Assignments, and Reports on Infringements of Patents. All business intrusted to them is done with special care and promptness, on very moderate terms. We send free of charge, on application, a pamphlet containing further information about Patents and how to procure them; directions concerning Trade Marks, Copyrights, Designs, Patents, Appeals, Reissues, Infringements, Assignments, Rejected Cases, Hints on the Sale of Patents, etc. _FOREIGN PATENTS._--We also send, _free of charge_, a Synopsis of Foreign Patent Laws, showing the cost and method of securing patents in all the principal countries of the world. American inventors should bear in mind that, as a general rule, any invention that is valuable to the patentee in this country is worth equally as much in England and some other foreign countries. Five patents--embracing Canadian, English, German, French, and Belgian--will secure to an inventor the exclusive monopoly to his discovery among about ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLIONS of the most intelligent people in the world. The facilities of business and steam communication are such that patents can be obtained abroad by our citizens almost as easily as at home. The expense to apply for an English patent is $75; German, $100; French, $100; Belgian, $100; Canadian, $50. _COPIES OF PATENTS._--Persons desiring any patent issued from 1836 to November 26, 1867, can be supplied with official copies at reasonable cost, the price depending upon the extent of drawings and length of specifications. Any patent issued since November 27, 1867, at which time the Patent Office commenced printing the drawings and specifications, may be had by remitting to this office $1. A copy of the claims of any patent issued since 1836 will be furnished for $1. When ordering copies, please to remit for the same as above, and state name of patentee, title of invention, and date of patent. A pamphlet, containing full directions for obtaining United States patents sent free. A handsomely bound Reference Book, gilt edges, contains 140 pages and many engravings and tables important to every patentee and mechanic, and is a useful hand book of reference for everybody. Price 25 cents, mailed free. Address MUNN & CO., Publishers SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 37 Park Row, N. Y. _BRANCH OFFICE--Corner of F and 7th Streets, Washington, D. C._ * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS * * * * * Inside Page, each insertion - - - 75 cents a line. Back Page, each insertion - - - - $1.00 a line. (About eight words to a line.) _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ * * * * * BAIRD'S CATALOGUES OF BOOKS Our new and enlarged CATALOGUE OF PRACTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC BOOKS, 96 pages, 8vo; a Catalogue of Books on DYEING, CALICO PRINTING, WEAVING, COTTON and WOOLEN MANUFACTURE, 4to; Catalogue of a choice collection of PRACTICAL, SCIENTIFIC, and ECONOMIC BOOKS, 4to; List of Books on STEAM AND THE STEAM ENGINE, MECHANICS, MACHINERY, and ENGINEERING, 4to; List of Important Books on METALLURGY, METALS, STRENGTH OF MATERIALS, CHEMICAL ANALYSIS, ASSAYING, etc., 4to; two Catalogues of Books and Pamphlets on SOCIAL SCIENCE, POLITICAL ECONOMY, BANKS, POPULATION, PAUPERISM, and kindred subjects sent free to any one who will forward his address. HENRY CAREY BAIRD & CO., Industrial Publishers, Booksellers, and Importers, 810 WALNUT ST., PHILADELPHIA, PA. [Illustration] An engine that works without Boiler. Always ready to be started and to give at once full power. SAFETY, ECONOMY, CONVENIENCE. Burns common Gas and Air. No steam, no coal, no ashes, no fires, no danger, no extra insurance. Almost no attendance. THE NEW OTTO SILENT GAS ENGINE. Useful for all work of small stationary steam engine. Offered in sizes of 2, 4, and 7 H.P. Send for illustrated circular. SCHLEICHER, SCHUMM & CO., Phila., Pa. * * * * * A GOOD PLAN _The most profitable plan_ for operating in stocks is by uniting capital of various sums in combining or pooling orders of thousands of customers and using them as _one mighty whole_, which is done so successfully by Messrs. Lawrence & Co., Bankers, 57 Exchange Place, N. Y. City. By this cooperative system each investor is placed on an equal footing with the largest operator and profits divided _pro rata_ among shareholders every 30 days. $10 invested makes $50 or 5 per cent. on the stock during the month--$50 returns $350 or 7 per cent., $100 pays $1,000, or 10 per cent., and so on according to the market. The firm's new circular (copyrighted and free) contains "Two unerring rules for success in stock operations," and explains everything. All kinds of Stocks and Bonds wanted. New Government Loan supplied. LAWRENCE & CO., _Bankers and Brokers_, 57 Exchange Place, N. Y. City. * * * * * PORTABLE GRAIN MILLS. [Illustration] For Mill and Farm. Built on the durable and scientific principles. Warranted fully equal to any in the market. Mills for grinding all substances. We have made mill building a specialty for 13 years. WALKER BROS. & CO., Engineers, Founders & Machinists, 23d and Wood St., Phila., Pa. ON THE CARE OF HORSES. BY PROF. PRITCHARD, R.V.S. Showing the Proper Construction of Stables. Best Floor. Lighting and Ventilation. Hay-racks. Watering and Feeding. Grooming and Exercise. Cracked Heels; Lice; Colic; Mud Fever; Wind Galls. Also, in same number, facts about improved Cow Stables. How to keep Cows clean and maintain Pure Air in Stables. Increased Cleanliness and Convenience with Less Labor. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT. No. 123. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. MINING MACHINERY. ENGINES, BOILERS, PUMPS, Coal and Ore Jigs, Dust Burning Appliances. Drawings and advice free to customers. Jeanesville Iron Works (J. C. Haydon & Co.). Address HOWELL GREEN, Supt., Jeanesville, Luzerne Co., Pa. [Illustration] Straub's Scientific GRAIN MILL, 12, 20, and 30 inch MILL STONES, For Farm and Merchant work. Warranted the full equal of any mill built in America. Before purchasing elsewhere send for our circular and price list. A. W. STRAUB & CO., Philadelphia, Pa. USE WILHIDE'S NOISELESS, SELF-Setting Rat and Mouse Traps. Caught 19 rats one hour; 46 one night. Ask your storekeeper for them. State right for sale. Circulars, etc., free. J. T. WILHIDE & BRO., York Road, Carroll Co., Md. AGENTS and SALESMEN wanted in every city and town to introduce a new Work, the "COMPLETE BUSINESS REGISTER" to dealers. Great inducements. Don't fail to write for particulars. W. H. Pamphilon, Pub., 30 Bond St., N. Y. LADIES CAN MAKE $5 A DAY IN THEIR OWN CITY OR TOWN. ADDRESS ELLIS M'F'G CO., WALTHAM, MASS. [ILLUSTRATION] THE "BIJOU" MICROSCOPE, WITH MOUNTED OBJECTS, 50C. A COMPLETE LITTLE INSTRUMENT FOR EXAMINING MINUTE OBJECTS. HAS ADJUSTABLE LENS-CAP, OBJECT SLIDES AND DIAPHRAGM, AND MAGNIFIES 10,000 TIMES. A MARVEL OF PERFECTION, CHEAPNESS, SIMPLICITY AND COMPACTNESS. OF PRETTY DESIGN AND NICELY FINISHED IN BRASS. PRICE, WITH AN ASSORTMENT OF INTERESTING MOUNTED MICROSCOPIC OBJECTS, 50C. SENT POST PAID ON RECEIPT OF PRICE TO GEM MICROSCOPE CO., 156 FULTON ST., N. Y. XMAS "WONDER BOX." CONTAINS 12 SHEETS PAPER, 12 ENVELOPES, 3 SHEETS COLORED PAPER, 1 LEAD PENCIL, 3 PENS, 1 TEXT, 12 COMIC CARDS, 40 SILHOUETTES, 36 MOTTOES, 85 PATTERNS FOR FANCY WORK, 112 DECALCOMANIE, 131 EMBOSSED PICTURES, 50 FANCY ORNAMENTS, 1 PENHOLDER, 2 BOOK MARKS, 5 BLACK TABLETS, 5 PICTURE CARDS, 30 SCRAP-BOOK PICTURES, 1 XMAS BANNER, 1 GAME AGE CARDS, 2 XMAS CARDS, 1 TOY PARASOL. PRICE, 42 CTS.; BY MAIL. 53 CTS. RETAIL VALUE, $1.45. _POSTAGE STAMPS TAKEN_. J. JAY GOULD, 10 BROOMFIELD ST., BOSTON, MASS. GOLD, SILVER, AND NICKEL PLATING. A TRADE EASILY LEARNED. COSTS LITTLE TO START. THE ELECTRO PLATER'S GUIDE, A 72 PAGE BOOK, SENT FOR 3 STAMPS. SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS AND BOOKS LOANED TO ANY ONE. PRICE LIST FREE. F. LOWEY, 90 11TH ST., BROOKLYN, N. Y. DIAMONDS AND CARBON SHAPED OR CRUDE, FURNISHED AND SET FOR BORING ROCKS, DRESSING MILL BURRS, EMERY WHEELS, GRINDSTONES, HARDENED STEEL, CALENDER ROLLERS, AND FOR SAWING, TURNING, OR WORKING STONE AND OTHER HARD SUBSTANCES; ALSO GLAZIERS' DIAMONDS. J. DICKINSON, 64 NASSAU ST., N. Y. IMPORTANT FOR ALL CORPORATIONS AND MANF'G CONCERNS.--BUERK'S WATCHMAN'S TIME DETECTOR, capable of accurately controlling the motion of a watchman or patrolman at the different stations of his beat. Send for circular. J. E. BUERK, P.O. BOX 979, BOSTON, MASS N. B.--The suit against Imhaeuser & Co., of New York, was decided in my favor, June 10, 1874. A fine was assessed against them Nov. 11, 1876, for selling contrary to the order of the court. Persons buying or using clocks infringing on my patent will be dealt with according to law. THE GEORGE PLACE MACHINERY AGENCY Machinery of Every Description. 121 Chambers and 103 Reade Streets, New York. [Illustration] THE FORSTER-FIRMIN GOLD AND SILVER AMALGAMATING COMP'Y of Norristown, Pa., will grant state rights or licenses on easy terms. This system works up to assay, and recovers the mercury rapidly. Apply as above. THE DRIVEN WELL. Town and County privileges for making DRIVEN WELLS and selling Licenses under the established AMERICAN DRIVEN WELL PATENT, leased by the year to responsible parties, by WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO., NEW YORK. SPARE THE CROTON AND SAVE THE COST. DRIVEN OR TUBE WELLS furnished to large consumers of Croton and Ridgewood Water. WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO., 414 Water St., N. Y., who control the patent for Green's American Driven Well. STEAM AND HYDRAULIC PASSENGER AND FREIGHT ELEVATORS, STEAM ENGINES AND BOILERS, WHITTIER MACHINE CO., Boston, Mass. [Illustration] PORTABLE STEAM ENGINES WITH AUTOMATIC CUT-OFF. No Commissions to Agents. Bottom Prices to Purchasers. SEND FOR CATALOGUE. ARMINGTON & SIMS A. & S. were lately with THE J. C. HOADLEY COMP. STEAM PUMPS. HENRY R. WORTHINGTON, 239 Broadway, N. Y. 83 Water St., Boston. THE WORTHINGTON DUPLEX PUMPING ENGINES FOR WATER WORKS--Compound, Condensing or Non-Condensing. Used in over 100 Water-Works Stations. STEAM PUMPS--Duplex and Single Cylinder. WATER METERS. OIL METERS. PRICES LARGELY REDUCED. RIVAL STEAM PUMPS $35 & UPWARDS JOHN. H. MCGOWAN & CO. CINCINNATI OHIO. PATENTS AT AUCTION. Regular Monthly Sales by George W. Keeler, Auctioneer. For terms, address NEW YORK PATENT EXCHANGE, 67 Liberty Street, New York. 50 PERFUMED CHROMO AND MOTTO CARDS, 10C. _Name in Gold and Jet._ Seavy Bros., Northford, Ct. WARRANTED WATCHES ONLY $3 EACH $12 WATCHES FOR ONLY $3 EACH. A BANKRUPT STOCK OF WATCHES, _Warranted for One Year._ [Illustration] This bankrupt stock of Watches must be closed out in 90 days. THE FORMER PRICE OF THESE WATCHES WAS $12.00 EACH. They are silvered case and open face, all one style, and of French manufacture, the movements of which being well known the world over for their fine finish. They are used on RAILROADS and STEAMBOATS, where ACCURATE TIME is required, and give good satisfaction. Think of it, a $12.00 Watch for ONLY $3.00, and WARRANTED ONE YEAR FOR TIME. CINCINNATI. O., October 1st, 1878. The Walters Importing Co. is an old established and very reliable house, and we cheerfully recommend them. CINCINNATI POST. After the closure of sale of this bankrupt stock of Watches, which will continue 90 days from date of this paper, no order will be filled at less than $12.00 each; so please send your order at once. With each Watch we furnish our SPECIAL WARRANTEE FOR ONE YEAR FOR ACCURATE TIME. We will forward the Watch promptly on receipt of $3.00, or will send C.O.D. if customers desire and remit $1.00 on account. Address all orders to WALTERS IMPORTING CO., 180 ELM STREET, CINCINNATI, O. -->TO WATCH SPECULATORS: We call particular I attention to these Watches, as they sell readily at from $12.00 to $20.00 each. -->_Cut this Advertisement Out._ WARRANTED WATCHES ONLY $3 EACH $10 to $1000 Invested in Wall St. Stocks makes fortunes every month. Books sent free explaining everything. Address BAXTER & CO., Bankers, 17 Wall St., N. Y. [Illustration] PATENT PORTABLE CHUCK JAWS. Improved Solid Emery Wheels, for grinding Iron and Brass Castings. Tools, etc. Manufactured by AM. TWIST DRILL CO., Woonsocket, R. I. LATHES, PLANERS, SHAPERS Drills, Bolt and Gear Cutters, Milling Machines. Special Machinery. E. GOULD & EBERHARDT, Newark, N. J. U. S. PIANO CO., 163 BLEECKER ST., N. Y., Manufacturers of strictly first-class Pianos. We sell DIRECT to Families from OUR OWN Factory at LOWEST WHOLESALE price. Beautiful NEW 7 1-3 Octave, Rosewood Pianos. Sent on trial. Thousands in use. HEAVY DISCOUNT to CASH buyers. DON'T buy until you read our Catalogue. It will INTEREST you--Mailed FREE. [Illustration] MEDAL & PREMIUM AWARDED TO [Illustration] ALCOTT'S TURBINE WATER WHEELS MANUFACT'D AT MOUNT HOLLY N. J. MOWRY CAR & WHEEL WORKS, MANUFACTURERS OF CARS AND CAR WHEELS of all descriptions, Wheels and Axles, Chilled Tires, Engine, Car and Bridge Castings, of any pattern, furnished to order at short notice. Also Street Car Turn Tables. WHEELS OF ALL SIZES CONSTANTLY ON HAND. OFFICE, 27 1-2 W. THIRD ST., CINCINNATI, O. Works, Eastern Avenue and Lewis Street. C. W. LE COUNT, SOUTH NORWALK, CONN., Mfr. of Lathe Dogs, Iron and Steel Expanding Mandrels of all sizes. A specialty made of Amateurs' Mandrels and Dogs. [Illustration] BARNES' FOOT POWER MACHINERY. 13 Different machines with which Builders, Cabinet Makers, Wagon Makers, and Jobbers in miscellaneous work can compete as to QUALITY AND PRICE with steam power manufacturing; also Amateurs' supplies. MACHINES SENT ON TRIAL. Say where you read this, and send for catalogue and prices. W. F. & JOHN BARNES, Rockford, Winnebago Co., Ill. AMERICAN NOVELTIES wanted for English trade. 1,000 Sewing Machines to be sold cheap. Apply BRITANNIA COMPANY, Colchester, England. [Illustration: Anvil FISHER & NORRIS TRENTON N. J.] Retail 9 CENTS PER POUND. Warranted of the hardest temper, and _never_ to settle. ESTABLISHED 1843 Steel Horn, warranted not to break and Face of _Best Cast Steel_. BETTER THAN ANY ENGLISH MAKE, AND ONLY ONE THAT IS FULLY !! WARRANTED !! 50 SIZES, FROM 1-2 LB. TO 800 LBS. Catalogues furnished on application. A VALUABLE WORK. THE STEAM ENGINE. The Relative Proportions of the Steam Engine. A course of Lectures on the Steam Engine delivered to the students of Dynamical Engineering in the University of Pennsylvania. By WM. D. MARKS, Whitney Professor of Dynamical Engineering. With numerous Illustrations. 12mo. Flexible cloth. $1.50. "A valuable addition to the literature of the Steam Engine, and one which will be appreciated by engineers in practice as well as by students."--_Pittsburgh American Manufacturer_. "A valuable work, and one which will meet with a favorable reception. * * * There is much need and much room for a rational and practical method for proportioning the various parts of the steam engine, and in this respect your work is very welcome."--_Augustus Jay Du Bois, Ph.D., Yale College_. *** For sale by all Booksellers, or will be sent by mail, postpaid, upon receipt of price, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., PUBLISHERS, 715 AND 717 MARKET ST., PHILADELPHIA. [Illustration] SHEPARD'S CELEBRATED $50 Screw Cutting Foot Lathe. Foot and Power Lathes, Drill Presses, Scrolls, Circular and Band Saws, Saw Attachments, Chucks, Mandrils, Twist Drills, Dogs, Calipers, etc. Send for catalogue of outfits for amateurs or artisans. H. L. SHEPARD & CO., 331, 333, 335, & 337 West Front Street, CINCINNATI, OHIO. [Illustration] TELEPHONES. _25 per cent. Discount._ SPECIAL OFFER OUR NEW IMPROVED DOUBLE COILED METALIC TELEPHONE IS THE FINEST IN THE WORLD, and the only completely satisfactory low priced instrument, with SPRING CALL ATTACHMENT, made by PRACTICAL MACHINISTS on scientific principles; warranted to work ONE MILE, unaffected by changes in the weather. We will send to one address ONE SAMPLE SET, comprising two Telephones, two walnut holders, six copper bound insulators and 200 feet heavy wire, AT 25 PER CENT. DISCOUNT from REGULAR RATES, which is $3.00 for the $4.00 instruments. This offer WILL NOT hold good after JAN. 15, 1879, as our goods will then be sufficiently well known to sell through the trade, and we shall be obliged to strictly maintain the retail price. Any person of ordinary intelligence can put them up by following directions sent with each pair. We have sold during the last three months nearly 1000 of these instruments, and have HUNDREDS OF TESTIMONIALS from all parts of the country. We GUARANTEE all instruments sold. For any Telephone that fails to work, we will REFUND THE MONEY and pay all charges. Ask any Commercial Agency, and you will find we are good for all we agree to do. Name this paper when you write. KENT, WOODMAN & CO., 25 CONGRESS ST., BOSTON, MASS. THE DEFIANCE METALLIC PLANES TRADE MARK [Illustration] "THE BATTLE AXE." ARE THE BEST IN THE WORLD. Send for a full descriptive circular and price list to the manufacturers, the BAILEY WRINGING MACHINE CO., 99 CHAMBERS ST., NEW YORK. [Illustration] BEST AND CHEAPEST FOOT POWER SCREW CUTTING ENGINE LATHES SEE FULL DESCRIPTION IN SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN JULY 27 SEND FOR ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUE GOODNOW & WIGHTMAN 176 WASHINGTON ST BOSTON MASS. _THE ONLY GRAND PRIZE_ FOR SEWING MACHINES, AT THE EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE, PARIS, 1878, WAS AWARDED, OVER 80 COMPETITORS, TO WHEELER & WILSON MFG. CO. NEW YORK CITY, AND BRIDGEPORT, CONN. Round Writing Useful for Everybody Book of Instructions & Pens Sent on receipt of $1.50 KEUFFEL & ESSER, 127 FULTON ST., N. Y., Importers and Manuf'rers of Drawing Materials. AMERICAN STANDARD GAUGE AND TOOL WORKS. 22d and WOOD STS., PHILADELPHIA. Standard Gauges and Measuring Implements, Hardened Steel Turning Mandrels, Adjustable Blade Reamers, Patent Tool Holders, Lathe Drivers, etc. JOHN RICHARDS & CO., [Illustration] WARRANTED THE BEST. 1 H.P. BOILER & ENGINE, $150. 2 H.P., $175. 3 H.P., $200. Tested to 200 lbs. Steam. LOVEGROVE & CO., 152 N. 3d ST., PHILADELPHIA, PA., Builders of Engines and Boilers, 1 to 100 horse power. Send for circulars and prices, and state size and style you want. WOOD-WORKING MACHINERY, Such as Woodworth Planing, Tonguing, and Grooving Machines, Daniel's Planers. Richardson's Patent Improved Tenon Machines, Mortising, Moulding, and Re-Saw Machines, and Wood-Working Machinery generally. Manufactured by WITHERBY, RUGG & RICHARDSON, 26 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Mass. (Shop formerly occupied by R. BALL & CO.) LAP WELDED CHARCOAL IRON Boiler Tubes, Steam Pipe, Light and Heavy Forgings, Engines, Boilers, Cotton Presses, Rolling Mill and Blast Furnace Work. READING IRON WORKS, 261 SOUTH FOURTH ST., PHILA. PERRY & CO.'S STEEL PENS. [Illustration] A sample box, for trial, containing our leading styles, including the famous "U" and "Falcon" Pens, mailed on receipt of 25 cts. IVISON, BLAKEMAN, TAYLOR & CO., SOLE AGENTS FOR U. S., NEW YORK. EAGLE TUBE CO., 614 TO 626 W. 24TH ST., NEW YORK. BOILER FLUES of all the Regular Sizes, OF BEST MATERIAL AND WARRANTED. -->ORDERS PROMPTLY EXECUTED. No Payment Required till Tubes are Fully Tested and Satisfactory. [Illustration] LANSDELL'S PATENT STEAM SYPHON LANDELL'S AND ENG'S LEVER AND CAM GATE VALVES WELDLESS STEEL TUBING. JOHN S. LENG. 4 FLETCHER ST. NEW YORK. [Illustration] CIGAR BOX LUMBER, MANUFACTURED by our NEW PATENT PROCESS. The Best in the World. SPANISH CEDAR, MAHOGANY, POPLAR. Also thin lumber of all other kinds, 1/8 to ½ in., at corresponding prices. All qualities. Equal in all respects to any made, and at prices much under any to be obtained outside of our establishment. Send for price list. GEO W. READ & CO., 186 TO 200 LEWIS STREET, N. Y. Advertisements. INSIDE PAGE, EACH INSERTION 75 CENTS A LINE. BACK PAGE, EACH INSERTION $1.00 A LINE. (About eight words to a line.) _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ [Illustration: MARVIN'S Fire & Burglar SAFES Counter Platform Wagon & Track SCALES MARVIN SAFE & SCALE CO. 265 BROADWAY N. Y.] [Illustration: The INGERSOLL ROCK DRILL CO 1½ PARK PLACE N. Y.] PARTNER WANTED To introduce my IMPROVED PROTRACTOR. Splendid chance for a person with small capital. Address or call on O. M. DAYTON, Utica, N. Y. CALVIN WELLS, Prest. JAS. K. VERNER, Secy. PITTSBURGH FORGE & IRON CO., IRON AND HAMMERED CAR AXLES. Also manufacture as a specialty WROUGHT IRON BRIDGE BOLTS & BOLT ENDS, WITH PLAIN AND UPSET ENDS, To any required tensile strength, from one to three and one-half inches, with thread and nuts. Orders for which are respectfully solicited. Office, 10th Street, near Penn Ave., Pittsburgh, Pa. J. LLOYD HAIGH, Manufacturer of [Illustration: WIRE ROPE] Of every description, for Railroad and Mining Use. Elevators, Derricks, Rope Tramways, Transmission of Power, etc. No. 81 John St., N. Y. Send for price list. Plans and Estimates furnished for Suspension Bridges. MILL STONES AND CORN MILLS. We make Burr Millstones, Portable Mills, Smut Machines, Packers, Mill Picks, Water Wheels, Pulleys, and Gearing, specially adapted to Flour Mills. Send for Catalogue. J. T. NOYE & SON, BUFFALO, N. Y. MACHINISTS' TOOLS. NEW AND IMPROVED PATTERNS. Send for new illustrated catalogue. Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c. NEW HAVEN MANUFACTURING CO., New Haven, Conn. HYDRAULIC CEMENT Of the very highest order and quality made any and everywhere from Refuse or Decomposed Limestone, Marble, Shells, Chalk and Clay, and River Deposit as per Letters Patent. Address JOHN DIMELOW, Laboratorian, Austin, Texas. PARIS EXHIBITION PRIZES. FULL Official List of the Awards in the American Department, enumerating Exhibits and Names and Addresses of Exhibitors, with kind of Prize awarded in each case. SUPPLEMENTS 149, 150. Price 10 cents each. [Illustration: WROUGHT IRON BEAMS & GIRDERS] THE UNION IRON MILLS, Pittsburgh, Pa., Manufacturers of improved wrought iron Beams and Girders (patented). The great fall which has taken place in the prices of Iron, and especially in Beams used in the construction of FIRE PROOF BUILDINGS, induces us to call the special attention of Engineers, Architects, and Builders to the undoubted advantages of now erecting Fire Proof structures; and by reference to pages 52 & 54 of our Book of Sections--which will be sent on application to those contemplating the erection of fire proof buildings--THE COST CAN BE ACCURATELY CALCULATED, the cost of Insurance avoided, and the serious losses and interruption to business caused by fire; these and like considerations fully justify any additional first cost. It is believed, that, were owners fully aware of the small difference which now exists between the use of Wood and Iron, in many cases the latter would be adopted. We shall be pleased to furnish estimates for all the Beams complete, for any specific structure, so that the difference in cost may at once be ascertained. Address CARNEGIE, BROS. & CO., Pittsburgh, Pa. $7 A DAY to Agents canvassing for the FIRESIDE VISITOR. Terms and Outfit Free. Address P. O. VICKERY, Augusta, Maine. B. W. Payne & Sons, Corning, N. Y. Established in 1840. [Illustration] EUREKA SAFETY POWER. +----+--------+--------+-----+------+-------+ |h.p.| cyl. | ht. |space| wt. |price. | +----+--------+--------+-----+------+-------+ | 2 |3-1/8x4 | 48 in. |40x25| 900 | $150 | +----+--------+--------+-----+------+-------+ | 4 | 4x6 | 56 |46x30| 1600 | 250 | +----+--------+--------+-----+------+-------+ | 6 | 5x7 | 72 |72x42| 2700 | 400 | +----+--------+--------+-----+------+-------+ Also, SPARK ARRESTING PORTABLES, and STATIONARY ENGINES _for Plantations_. Send for Circulars. _PERFECT_ NEWSPAPER FILE * * * The Koch Patent File, for preserving newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, has been recently improved and price reduced. Subscribers to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT can be supplied for the low price of $1.50 by mail, or $1.25 at the office of this paper. Heavy board sides; inscription "SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN," in gilt. Necessary for every one who wishes to preserve the paper. Address MUNN & CO., Publishers SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. [Illustration: HOWE SCALE CO., Rutland, Vt. Paris 1878 Were awarded the GOLD MEDAL] The highest award for Scales; also several Special Medals of Gold, Silver, and Bronze. In addition to the above the HOWE SCALE CO. have been awarded the _"First Premium"_ at Twelve different State Fairs held during the Fall of the present year. PRINCIPAL AGENCIES: PRIEST, PAGE & CO., 325 Broadway, New York. PRIEST, PAGE & CO., 145 Franklin St., Boston. A. M. GILBERT & CO., 97 to 101 Lake St., Chicago. J. FRED DENNIS, European Manager, Bremen, Germany. [Illustration] THE COLUMBIA BICYCLE, Made by THE POPE M'F'G CO., 89 Summer Street, Boston. A practical road machine, easy to learn to ride, and when mastered one can beat the best horse in a day's run over an ordinary road. Send 3c. stamp for catalogue. BIG PAY.--With Stencil Outfits. What costs 4 cts. sells rapidly for 50 cts. Catalogue _free_. S. M. SPENCER, 112 Wash'n St., Boston, Mass. 65 MIXED CARDS with name, 10c. and stamp. Agent's Outfit, 10c. L. C. COE & Co., Bristol, Ct. [Illustration] YALE VERTICAL MILL Iron Frame; French Burr; Self-oiling; Self-feeding; Long Bearings; Adjustable-balanced; best arranged, made and finished, _cheapest_, and for quality and quantity ground no superior in the world. Also the Yale Vertical and Horizontal Steam Engines and Boilers, Send for Circular. YALE IRON WORKS, New Haven, Conn. _WORKING MODELS_ And Experimental Machinery, Metal or Wood, made to order by J. F. WERNER, 62 Centre St., N. Y. [Illustration: H. W. JOHN'S BOILER COVERINGS ASBESTOS (Trade Mark)] Are the most Effective and Economical Non-conducting Coverings in the World. Ready for use and can be easily applied by any one. Be sure and get the Genuine, which are Manufactured only by H. W. JOHNS MANUFACTURING CO., 87 Maiden Lane. New York, Sole Manufacturers of Genuine Asbestos Roofing, Liquid Paints, Cements, etc. Send for Price Lists, etc. PYROMETERS, For showing heat of Ovens, Hot Blast Pipes, Boiler Flues, Superheated Steam, Oil Stills, etc. HENRY W. BULKLEY, Sole Manufacturer, 149 Broadway, N. Y. CAMERON STEAM PUMPS For Mines, Blast Furnaces, Rolling Mills, Oil Refineries, Boiler Feeders, &c. For Illustrated Catalogue and Reduced Price List send to WORKS, FOOT EAST 23d ST., NEW YORK. [Illustration: WIRE ROPE] Address JOHN A. ROEBLING'S SONS, Manufacturers, Trenton, N. J., or 117 Liberty Street, New York. Wheels and Rope for conveying power long distances. Send for circular. ICE AT $1.00 PER TON. The PICTET ARTIFICIAL ICE CO., LIMITED, Room 51, Coal and Iron Exchange, P.O. Box 3083, N. Y. ROOTS' ROTARY HYDRAULIC ENGINE. [Illustration] FOR BLOWING ORGANS AND RUNNING LIGHT MACHINERY OPERATED BY HYDRANT PRESSURE, GIVES GREATEST USEFUL EFFECT OF WATER. IS A POSITIVE PRESSURE ENGINE. P. H. & F. M. ROOTS, Manuf'rs, CONNERSVILLE, IND. S. S. TOWNSEND, Gen'l Ag't, 6 Cortlandt St., NEW YORK. WOODWARD STEAM PUMPS AND FIRE ENGINES, G. M. WOODWARD, 76 and 78 Centre Street, New York. Send for catalogue and price list. 60 Chromo and Perfumed Cards [no 3 alike], Name in Gold and Jet, 10c. CLINTON BROS., Clintonville, Ct. DIAMOND ROCK DRILLS The only Machines giving a solid core showing exact nature of rocks passed through. THE AMERICAN DIAMOND ROCK BORING CO. NEW YORK. SEND FOR PAMPHLET. Every Man His Own Printer! [Illustration: THE EXCELSIOR] $3 PRESS Prints labels, cards etc. (Self-inker $5) 9 Larger sizes For business, pleasure, young or old. Catalogue of Presses, Type, Etc., for 2 stamps. KELSEY & Co. Meriden, Conn. MICROSCOPES, Opera Glasses, Spectacles, at greatly reduced prices. Send three stamps for Illustrated Catalogue. R. & J. BECK, Philadelphia, Pa. FOR ALL KINDS OF MACHINERY --Apply to S. C. HILLS, 78 Chambers St., New York. BEST DAMPER REGULATORS AND WEIGHTED GAUGE COCKS. MURRILL & KEIZER, 44 HOLLIDAY ST., BALTIMORE. GET THE BEST PIPE AND BOILER COVERING ASBESTOS-LINED HAIR FELT. Lightest covering and best non-conductor. Asbestos lining prevents any charring of the hair felt. Easily applied and removed. For prices, etc., address THE ASBESTOS PACKING CO., 25 STATE ST., BOSTON, MASS. THE TANITE CO., STROUDSBURG, PA. EMERY WHEELS AND GRINDERS. GEO. PLACE, 131 Chambers St., New York Agent. ROCK DRILLING MACHINES AND AIR COMPRESSORS, MANUFACTURED BY BURLEIGH ROCK DRILL Co. SEND FOR PAMPHLET. FITCHBURG MASS. ESTABLISHED 1844. JOSEPH C. TODD, ENGINEER and MACHINIST. Flax, Hemp, Jute, Rope, Oakum and Bagging Machinery, Steam Engines, Boilers, etc. I also manufacture Baxter's New Portable Engine of 1877. Can be seen in operation at my store. A one horse-power portable engine, complete, $125; two horse-power, $225; two and a half horse-power, $250; three horse-power, $275. Manufactured exclusively by J. C. TODD, 10 Barclay St., New York, or Paterson, N. J. BAXTER $100 1 HORSE ENGINE OF 1877. For State Rights to manufacture above, apply to A. VAN WINKLE, Newark, N. J. TO ADVERTISERS We fill orders for the insertion of advertisements in the newspapers of the United States and Dominion of Canada. To furnish advertisers with reliable information concerning newspapers and their rates, and thus enable the most inexperienced to select intelligently the mediums best adapted to any particular purpose, WE ISSUE SEMI-ANNUAL EDITIONS OF AYER & SON'S MANUAL FOR ADVERTISERS. 164 8vo. pp. Gives the names, circulation, and advertising rates of several thousand newspapers in the United States and Canada, and contains more information of value to an advertiser than can be found in any other publication. All lists carefully revised in each edition, and where practicable prices reduced. The special offers are numerous and unusually advantageous. It will pay you to examine it before spending any money in newspaper advertising. The last edition will be sent postpaid to any address on receipt of 25 cents by N. W. AYER & SON, ADVERTISING AGENTS, Times Building, Philadelphia. [Illustration: WATSONS NON CHANGEABLE GAP LATHE HAS GREAT FACILITIES FOR LARGE OR MEDIUM SIZE WORK JAMES WATSON MANR 1608 S. FRONT ST. PHILA. PA.] POND'S TOOLS, Engine Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c. DAVID W. POND, Worcester, Mass. * * * * * CAN I OBTAIN A PATENT? This is the first inquiry that naturally occurs to every author or discoverer of a new idea or improvement. The quickest and best way to obtain a satisfactory answer, without expense, is to write to us (Munn & Co.), describing the invention, with a small sketch. All we need is to get the _idea_. Do not use pale ink. Be brief. Send stamps for postage. We will immediately answer and inform you whether or not your improvement is probably patentable; and if so, give you the necessary instructions for further procedure. Our long experience enables us to decide quickly. For this advice we make _no charge_. All persons who desire to consult us in regard to obtaining patents are cordially invited to do so. We shall be happy to see them in person at our office, or to advise them by letter. In all cases, they may expect from us a careful consideration of their plans, an honest opinion, and a prompt reply. _WHAT SECURITY HAVE I_ that my communication to Munn & Co. will be faithfully guarded and remain confidential? _Answer_.--You have none except our well-known integrity in this respect, based upon a most extensive practice of thirty years' standing. Our clients are numbered by hundreds of thousands. They are to be found in every town and city in the Union. Please to make inquiry about us. Such a thing as the betrayal of a client's interests, when committed to our professional care, never has occurred, and is not likely to occur. All business and communications intrusted to us are kept _secret and confidential_. Address MUNN & CO., Publishers of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 37 Park Row New York. * * * * * THE "Scientific American" is printed with CHAS. ENEU JOHNSON & CO.'S INK. Tenth and Lombard Sts., Philadelphia, and 59 Gold St., New York. * * * * * Transcriber's Note: _x_ indicates italic script; =x= indicates bold script. ^ indicates superscript. Some archaic (Early American) spellings have been retained. Erata: 'irridescent' corrected to 'iridescent'. "Glass, iridescent" (Contents) 'monoply' corrected to 'monopoly'. "The cry of monopoly in this case is altogether unfounded,..." (Article 4: Progress of Petroleum) 'possesing' corrected to 'possessing'. "... possessing in every way the original form of the wood." (Article 42: Reduction of Nitrate of Silver by Means of Charcoal.) 
18866	----	[Illustration: Issue Title.] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL INFORMATION, ART, SCIENCE, MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY, AND MANUFACTURES. NEW YORK, MARCH 29, 1879. Vol. XL., No. 13. [NEW SERIES.] $3.20 PER ANNUM. [POSTAGE PREPAID.] * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. ESTABLISHED 1845. MUNN & CO., Editors and Proprietors. PUBLISHED WEEKLY AT NO. 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. O. D. MUNN. A. E. BEACH. TERMS FOR THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. One copy, one year, postage included $3 20 One copy, six months, postage included 1 60 CLUBS.--One extra copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be supplied gratis for every club of five subscribers at $3.20 each; additional copies at same proportionate rate. Postage prepaid. Single copies of any desired number of the SUPPLEMENT sent to one address on receipt of 10 cents. Remit by postal order. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT is a distinct paper from the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. THE SUPPLEMENT is issued weekly. Every number contains 16 octavo pages, with handsome cover, uniform in size with SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Terms of subscription for SUPPLEMENT, $5.00 a year, postage paid, to subscribers. Single copies 10 cents. Sold by all news dealers throughout the country. COMBINED RATES.--The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and SUPPLEMENT will be sent for one year, postage free, on receipt of _seven dollars_. Both papers to one address or different addresses, as desired. The safest way to remit is by draft, postal order, or registered letter. ADDRESS MUNN & CO., 37 PARK ROW, N. Y. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXPORT EDITION. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition is a large and splendid periodical, issued once a month. Each number contains about one hundred large quarto pages, profusely illustrated, embracing: (1.) Most of the plates and pages of the four preceding weekly issues of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, with its splendid engravings and valuable information; (2.) Commercial, trade, and manufacturing announcements of leading houses. Terms for Export Edition, $5.00 a year, sent prepaid to any part of the world. Single copies 50 cents. Manufacturers and others who desire to secure foreign trade may have large, and handsomely displayed announcements published in this edition at a very moderate cost. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition has a large guaranteed circulation in all commercial places throughout the world. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. VOL. XL., NO. 13. [NEW SERIES.] _THIRTY-FOURTH YEAR_. NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 1879. * * * * * CONTENTS. (Illustrated articles are marked with an asterisk.) Africa crossed again 193 Aluminum 197 Barometer, aneroid 201 Bolt, door, improved* 198 Bread, snow-raised 199 Buffalo, domestication of the 197 Carpet beetle, remedy for the 195 Chimney flues 198 Clocks, pneumatic 196 Cooper, Peter, as an inventor 193 Crusher, ore, novel* 194 Electricity, statical, phenom. in 194 Flour, banana 195 Furnace, imp., for burn'g garbage* 198 Hardware, English & American 201 Ice cave of Decorah, Iowa 196 Inventions, new agricultural 199 Iron, advance in 201 Light, albo-carbon 201 Magnetism, curious facts in 194 Motor, Gary, the* 196 Natural science, charms of 200 Neutral line, Gary's 196 Notes and queries 203 Patent laws 192 Patents, American, recent 194 Pen, stencil, new* 195 People, a strange 195 Phosphorescence 199 Plants protected by insects 201 Pleuro-pneumonia 192 Railway, Vesuvius 200 Reading and eyesight 199 Reading, taste for 193 Regulator, engine, novel* 195 Spain a field for machinery 193 Sponges, glass* 200 Table, ironing, new* 194 Telegraph, writing 196 Telegraph, writing, Cowper's 197 Telegraphy, ocean, progress of 195 Tiller, steam, new* 191 Tree, pottery 200 Vase, Greek, ancient* 199 * * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. 169, FOR THE WEEK ENDING MARCH 29, 1879. Price 10 cents. For sale by all newsdealers. I. ENGINEERING AND MECHANICS.--The Herreshoff Torpedo Boat, recently built at Bristol, R. I., for the British Government. The novelties in the placing of the screw, etc. The Peculiar Boiler. 4 figures.--Improved Hopper Steam Dredger. 2 figures.--The St. Gothard Tunnel.--The Beacon Tower of Lavezzi. 3 figures. II. ARCHITECTURE.--Bath Abbey Church. Full page illustration. III. TECHNOLOGY.--The Achison Stone Cutting Machine. 1 engraving.--The Deep Mines of the World.--Shoemakers' Wax.--Gruber's New Method of Germination. 1 engraving.--Improved Process for Treating Wood, etc., for Paper Manufacture.--Bronzing Plaster of Paris Casts.--Sal Soda for Unhairing Hides and Skins.--Sieburger's Paste.--To Tan Lace Leather with Softsoap. Practical Dyeing Recipes: Blue white zephyr, Scotch blue on worsted, Scotch green on worsted, jacquineaux on worsted, drab on worsted, gold on venetian carpet yarn, red brown slubbing, scarlet braid, slate braid, light drab on cotton, blue on cotton, brown on cotton, chrome orange on cotton carpet yarn, black on common mixed carpet yarn for filling, black on cotton and wool mixed yarn. Damar Varnish for Negatives.--To Make Vignetters by Means of Gelatino-Chromate.--Resorcine Colors.--Phosphate Soaps.--Substitution of Different Metals in Ultramarine Colors.--A Harmless Green for Paper Hangings.--Siegwart's Bath for Etching Glass.--Composition of French Bronzes.--A New Enemy to the Tea Plant.--The Bradford Oil Sand. IV. CHEMISTRY AND METALLURGY.--Apparatus for Titration, 1 figure.--Palladium.--Hæmocyanin.--Test for Alcohol in Ethereal Oils and Chloroform.--Reaction of Tartaric and Citric Acid.--A Peculiar Observation.--Insolubility of Iodate of Lead.--Mode of Preventing the Contamination of Water with Lead.--Separating Phosphorus from Iron and Steel.--Production of Alcohol without Fermentation. V. ELECTRICITY, LIGHT, HEAT, ETC.--Some Facts in regard to Telescopic and Stereoscopic Vision.--The Centenary of the Birth of Sir Humphry Davy. His boyish days. His first chemical experiments. His first lecture at the Royal Institution. A very entertaining biographical sketch.--Light and Heat in Gas Flames.--Nickel Needles for Compasses.--The Nature of the Elements.--A New Compound Prism for Direct Vision Spectroscopes. VI. MEDICINE AND HYGIENE.--Filaria in the Eye. By CHAS. S. TURNBULL, M. D.--The Species of Tapeworm now Prevalent.--Nitrous Oxide under Pressure. VII. NATURAL HISTORY, GEOLOGY, ETC.--A Gigantic American Deep-sea Crustacean, 1 engraving.--Glaciers in the United States.--The Toulomne Cave.--Archæological Explorations in Tennessee. By F. W. PUTNAM. 6 figures.--Memorably Cold Winters.--Life at Timber Line. By Professor C. E. ROBINS, Summit, Colorado.--The Walled Lake in Iowa. VIII. ASTRONOMY.--Is the Moon Inhabited? By CAMILLE FLAMMARION. The various opinions that have been held in regard to the moon. The best we can do with our present telescopes. The means we possess for judging of the condition of the moon. Recent changes on the moon. Photographs of the moon and their defects. Facts that have been observed by the persevering eyes of astronomers. * * * * * A NEW STEAM TILLER. Steam is now made to perform almost everything in the way of heavy labor, to the saving of muscle and energy that may be more profitably employed; and since inventive genius has devised means of governing steam with absolute accuracy, there seems to be no limit to its economical application. A recent invention in steam engineering, which exhibits in a marked degree the controllability and adaptability of steam, is Mr. Herbert Wadsworth's steam tiller, an engraving of which we present herewith. [Illustration: Fig. 1, 2, 3.] This machine (Fig. 1) is provided with a steam cylinder, similar to the cylinder of a steam engine, containing a piston, the rod of which is attached to a crosshead, A, that slides on ways, B, secured to the bed supporting the cylinder. The tiller, D, as it is carried to starboard or port, slides through a socket, E, pivoted to the crosshead. The motion of the rudder is communicated to the steam cut-off by means of the shaft, C, crank, J, rod, K, crank, I, and the hollow valve spindle. When the tiller is amidships the valve handle, H, is at right angles to the cylinder, and parallel to the tiller. By moving the lever, H, to right or left, steam is admitted to one end or the other of the cylinder, which, acting on the tiller through the piston, piston rod, and crosshead, moves the rudder; and when the rudder reaches the desired position the cut-off will have been moved the amount necessary to prevent further entrance of steam. When the rudder is influenced by the waves or by the expansion or contraction of steam, the cut-off alters its position in relation to the valve and automatically arranges the steam passages so that the piston is returned to its proper position. The details of the cut-off are shown in Fig. 2; the valve, G, which covers the cut-off, F, acts like a four way cock. The spindle of the cut-off, F, is connected with the lever, I, and is moved by the rudder, as already described. By enlarging or gradually narrowing the ends of the steam ports great rigidity or elasticity may be given to the hold of this engine, according to the requirements of the particular vessel. Few and simple as are the parts of this machine it is possible, by balancing the valves and suiting the diameter of the cylinder to the work to be performed, to overcome great resistances with a slight effort. The inventor says that this system of valves is considered by experts to be novel and very valuable. In Fig. 3 is shown a pattern of a slide valve suited to special purposes. Its working is essentially the same as that of the valve already described. The ports are set side by side, parallel with the sides of the valve. The supply port is in the middle, the other ports lead to opposite ends of the cylinder. [Illustration: Fig. 4.] In Fig. 4 is shown another application of the controlling valve and cut-off described above. Two oscillating steam cylinders are employed in working the rudder. They are placed on opposite sides of the chest, A, and are supplied with steam through the controlling valve, B. The piston rods of the two cylinders are connected with cranks placed on opposite ends of the shaft, C, at right angles to each other. Upon this shaft, half-way between the pillow blocks which support it, there is a worm which engages a toothed sector, D, on the rudder-post, E. To an extension of the rudder-post is secured an arm, F, which is connected with the arm, G, of the controlling valve. By shifting the lever, H, the supply of steam to the two cylinders may be increased or diminished, or its direction may be changed, so that the engines will be reversed or stopped. This engine is remarkable for its simplicity. The cylinders may be detached and changed if required, one size of bed answering for three different sizes of cylinder, which may vary only in diameter, the stroke being the same, so that the castings for engines of different power are the same except in the matter of the cylinders and pistons, and all the parts are interchangeable--a feature of modern engine building that cannot be too highly valued. Further information may be obtained from Herbert Wadsworth, 26 Merchants' Bank Building, 28 State street, Boston, Mass. * * * * * HOW OUR PATENT LAWS PROMOTE AND IMPROVE AMERICAN INDUSTRIES. On another page we print in full a most suggestive paper recently read before the Manchester (Eng.) Scientific and Mechanical Society, by Mr. Frederick Smith, a prominent builder of that city, contrasting the qualities, styles, and prices of American and English builders' hardware--a paper which the _Ironmonger_ pronounces one of the most serious indictments yet preferred against British workmanship in that department. The field covered by the paper--the supplying of house builders' hardware--embraces a multitude of conveniences, but no real necessities. Why is it that America has been prolific in novel devices and clever improvements in this department of manufacture as in so many others, while England has gone on stolidly copying ancient forms, changing only to cheapen by the introduction of poor material and sham construction? Mr. Smith mentions several reasons that English manufacturers have given him for the state of things he, as an Englishman, so greatly deplores; but evidently he is not satisfied with any of them, and very justly; for none of them touches the real cause--the radically different attitude of the public mind toward inventions, characteristic of the two countries. In England the user of household inconveniences accepts them as matters of fact; or if he grumbles at them he never thinks of trying to change them. It is not his business; and if he should devise an improvement, ten to one he could not get it made. To patent it is practically out of the question, for if it were not condemned off-hand as trivial, the patent fees would make it cost more than it was likely to be worth. The mechanic who makes such things is trained to work to pattern, and not waste his time on experiments. Besides, if he should make a clever invention he would not be able to raise the necessary fees for a patent, or to get any one to help him thereto. The manufacturer "makes what his customers call for." Why should he spend his money and spoil his plant to introduce improvements? So things go, until some pestilent Yankees flood the markets with better articles at a lower price; and British consumers suddenly discover that they want something that the native manufacturer cannot make. The need was there; but invention did not follow. How happened it that the American manufacturer did not pursue the same uninventive course? What produced the radically different attitude of the American mind toward newfangled notions out of which inventions proceeded and flourished? No doubt several causes have been at work: freedom of thought and action; popular education; a blending of races; and the tide of adventurous spirits naturally resorting to a new and free land. These have had their influence undoubtedly; but all these have existed, more or less completely, in other new lands, without that outburst of creative energy which has made America the nursery of inventions, great and small. The determining cause, the one condition that prevailed here and not elsewhere, was the circumstance that almost from the start new ideas were given a market value in this country. Unlike all others, the American patent law directly encouraged independent thinking in all classes. The fees were low and the protection offered fairly good. Men soon found that it paid to invent; that one of the surest roads to competency was a patented improvement on something of general use. If a household utensil or appliance went wrong or worked badly, every user was directly interested in devising something better; and, more than that, he was interested in making his invention known and in securing its adoption. The workman at his bench had an ever-present inducement to contrive something at once cheaper and better than the article he was hired to make. He could patent his improvement, or the wholly original device he might hit upon, for a few dollars; and his patent would count as capital. It would make him his own master, possibly bring him a fortune. The manufacturer could not rest contented with the thing he set out to make, for the meanest hired man in his employ might suddenly become a competitor. He must be constantly alert for possible improvements, or his rivals would get ahead of him. The result is a nation of inventors, at whose hands the newest of lands has leaped to the leadership in the arts, almost at a bound. There is talk of changing all this; of emulating the conservative spirit of the Old World; of putting inventors under bonds; of stopping the rush of industrial improvement--to enable a few short-sighted yet grasping corporations to get along without paying license fees for such inventions as they happen to approve of. They profess to want inventors to go on making improvements. They are willing to ascribe all honor to the successful inventor; but they are determined not to pay him for his work. Still more they are determined to change the attitude of the public mind toward inventors and inventions, if such a change can be wrought by plausible misrepresentations. The fact that they were able to inveigle one branch of the American Congress into assenting to their unjust and mischievous scheme is one of the anomalies of our recent history. It should be taken as a timely warning of impending danger to all the industrial interests of the country. It is outrageous that the inventors of the land, after having raised their country to the first rank among industrial nations, should have to defend their constitutional rights against Congressional invasion; but the fact exists; and the defense should be made a matter of personal interest and effort not only by every inventor and manufacturer, but by every honest citizen. * * * * * PLEURO-PNEUMONIA. The cattle plague, which is creating so much anxiety throughout the Eastern States, is a contagious fever, affecting cows chiefly, characterized by extensive exudations into the respiratory organs, and attended by a low typhus inflammation of the lungs, pluræ, and bronchia. It has prevailed in Europe for ages, at times developing into wide-spread scourges, causing incalculable loss. It was imported into England in 1839, and again three years later; and it was estimated that within twenty-five years thereafter the losses by deaths alone in England had amounted to $450,000,000. In 1858 the disease was carried to Australia by an English cow, and, spreading to the cattle ranges, almost depopulated them. In 1843 an infected Dutch cow brought the disease to Brooklyn, where it has since lingered, slowly spreading among the cattle in Kings and Queens counties. In 1847 several head of infected English cattle were imported into New Jersey, and, spreading among a herd of valuable cattle, made it necessary for them all to be slaughtered, the only certain method of stamping out the disease. In 1859 four infected cows were imported into Massachusetts from Holland; the plague spread rapidly, and was stamped out only by persistent effort, the State paying for over 1,000 slaughtered cattle. Since 1867 the disease has not been known there. Meantime the pest had invaded Eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, where it has since prevailed in isolated localities. The absence of large herds of moving cattle in these districts, except for speedy slaughter, has prevented the disease from developing into a general plague. The recent action of the British Council in forbidding the importation of American live cattle is likely to prove of inestimable benefit to this country, in forcibly calling attention to the grave risk that the presence of the disease on Long Island and elsewhere constantly entails. Fortunately the drift of the cattle traffic is eastward, and as yet there has been no propagation of the poison in the great cattle ranges of the West. Unless summarily arrested, however, the disease will surely reach those sources of our cattle supply, and occasion losses that can be estimated only in hundreds of millions of dollars. The experience of all countries into which this disease has gained access appears to prove that there is only one way of getting rid of it--namely, the immediate killing of all infected cattle, and the thorough disinfection of the premises in which they are found. The disease is purely infectious, and is never found in regions where it has not gained a foothold by importation. Palliative measures have in every instance failed to eradicate the disease, and are only justifiable, as in Australia, after the plague has reached dimensions utterly beyond the reach of any process of extermination. Professor Law, of Cornell University, one of our best informed veterinary surgeons, most emphatically opposes every attempt to control the disease by quarantining the sick or by the inoculation of the healthy. "We may quarantine the sick," he says, "but we cannot quarantine the air." To establish quarantine yards is simply to maintain prolific manufacturers of the poison, which is given off by the breath of the sick, and by their excretions, to such an extent that no watchfulness can insure against its dissemination. Besides, the expense of thorough quarantining operations would amount to more than the value of the infected animals whose lives might be saved thereby. Inoculation is still less to be tolerated at this stage of the pest. The Professor says: "Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, and England, have been treating the victims of this plague for nearly half a century, but the result has only been the increase of disease and death. Our own infected States have been treating it for a third of a century, and to-day it exists over a wider area than ever before. Contrast this with the results in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where the disease has been repeatedly crushed out at small expense, and there can be no doubt as to which is the wisest course. As all the plagues are alike in the propagation of the poison in the bodies of the sick, I may be allowed to adduce the experience of two adjacent counties in Scotland when invaded by the rinderpest. Aberdeen raised a fund of £2,000, and though she suffered several successive invasions, she speedily crushed out the poison wherever it appeared by slaughtering the sick beasts and disinfecting the premises. The result was that little more than half the fund was wanted to reimburse the owners for their losses, and the splendid herds of the county were preserved. Forfar, on the other hand, set herself to cure the plague, with the result of a universal infection, the loss of many thousands of cattle, and the ruin of hundreds of farmers. Finally the malady was crushed out in the entire island by the method adopted by Aberdeen and other well advised counties at the outset." And again, "Cattle have been inoculated by the tens of thousands in Belgium and Holland, and of all Europe these are the countries now most extensively infected. France, Prussia, Italy, Austria, and England have each practiced it on a large scale, and each remains a home of the plague. Australia has followed the practice, and is now and must continue an infected country. Our own infected States have inoculated, and the disease has survived and spread in spite of it, and even by its aid. Whatever country has definitively exterminated the plague (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holstein, Mecklenburg, Switzerland, Massachusetts, and Connecticut), that country has prohibited inoculation and all other methods that prevail on the principle of preserving the sick, and has relied on the slaughter of the infected and the thorough disinfection of their surroundings. So will it be with us. If any State adopts or allows any of these temporizing measures, that State will only repeat the experience of the past alike in the Old World and the New, will perpetuate the disease in the country, will entail great losses on its citizens, will keep up the need for constant watchfulness and great expense by the adjoining States for their own protection, and will indefinitely postpone the resumption of the foreign live stock trade, which, a few months ago, promised to be one of the most valuable branches of our international commerce." We are persuaded that the position taken by Professor Law, and other similar-minded veterinary surgeons, is the only safe one. The disease can be stamped out now with comparatively small loss. If trifled with, and tolerated, it cannot but result in a great national calamity. * * * * * SPAIN A FIELD FOR MACHINERY AND PATENTS. From a too lengthy communication to admit in full to our columns, a resident of Madrid communicates to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN some facts relative to the fertility of the soil of Spain, her necessity for improved agricultural and other implements, and closes with the assertion that it is a good field withal for patents. We cull from the letter as follows: I have lived, says the writer, for a number of years in this beautiful country, so little understood by foreigners, so little appreciated by its own inhabitants. The Spain of romance, poetry, and song, is the garden as well as the California of Europe. But it stands in great need of the health-giving touch of the North American enterprise. We have here the same mineral treasures, the same unrivaled advantages of climate, that made Spain once the industrial and commercial emporium of the world. But Spain is awakening. She is endeavoring to shake off her lethargy. The late Exhibition of Paris has proved this; and those who are familiar with the past history and present condition of Spain have been astonished at the result of this effort. A new era has commenced for the country, and it is everywhere evident that a strong current of enterprise and industry has set in. But it is with nations, as with individuals, when they have remained long in complete inaction, brain and muscles are torpid and cannot at first obey the will. Spain needs the assistance of other nations hardened and inured to toil. The plows now used to till the land are precisely such as were those left by the Moors in the unfinished furrow, when with tears and sighs they bade farewell to their broad fields, their mosques and palaces, whose ideal architecture is still the wonder of the world, to go forth as outcasts and exiles in obedience to the cruel edict that drove them away to the deserts of Africa. I doubt whether there is an American plow in Spain, much less a steam plow. Sowing and reaping machines are here unknown, and grain is tread out by oxen and mules just as it was in Scripture times, and cleaned by women, who toss it in the air to scatter the chaff. Everything is primitive and Oriental here as yet. Spain could supply all Europe with butter and cheese, and, on the contrary, these articles are imported in large quantities from England, Holland, and Switzerland. The traveler crosses leagues and leagues of meadow land where not a tree is to be seen, nor one sheep pasture, and which are nevertheless watered by broad rivers that carry away to the ocean the water that would, by irrigation, convert these fields into productive farms. There are many places in Spain where the wine is thrown away for want of purchasers and vats in which to keep it. In the Upper Aragon, the mortar with which the houses are built is made with wine instead of water, the former being the most plentiful. Aragon needs an enterprising American company to convert into wholesome table wine the infinite varieties there produced, and which our neighbors the French buy and carry away to convert into Bordeaux. We want American enterprise in Galicia and Asturias, where milk is almost given away, to convert it into the best of butter and cheese; and also in those same provinces, where delicious fruit is grown in such abundance that it is left on the ground for the swine. Spain needs many more railroads and canals, all of which, when constructed, are subsidized by the government; the railroads at the rate of $12,000 a kilometer, and many more additional advantages are offered for canals. With regard to commerce with Spain, we have to lament the same indifference on the part of the Americans. I have, for instance, an American double-burner petroleum lamp. All who see it admire and covet it, but they are not to be had here. If we except one American in Madrid, who brings mostly pumps and similar articles on a very small scale, we have no dealers in American goods here. Wooden clothes pins, lemon squeezers, clothes horses, potato peelers, and the hundreds of domestic appliances of American invention, elsewhere considered indispensable, are in Spain unknown. We had confidently expected that the new Spanish law on patents would draw the attention of American inventors toward this country, that to-day offers a wide field for every new practical invention, but I am sorry to see that, with the exception of Edison and a few others, the Americans have not yet availed themselves of the easy facility for taking patents for Spain, where new inventions and new industries are now eagerly accepted and adopted. And while the Americans are thus careless as to their own interests, the French take out and negotiate, in Spain, American patents with insignificant variations. Let American inventors be assured that any new invention, useful and practical, and above all, requiring but little capital to establish it as an industry, will find a ready sale in Spain. I could enlarge to a much greater extent upon the indifference of American inventors, merchants, manufacturers, and business men, as to the market they have in Spain in their respective lines, and upon the importance of building up a trade with this country, but to do so would require more space than I think you would feel justified in occupying in your columns. * * * * * PETER COOPER AS AN INVENTOR. The successes of Peter Cooper's long and useful life are well known. Not so many are aware of his varied experience in the direction of failure, particularly in the field of invention. More than once he has found his best devices profitless because ahead of his time, or because of conditions, political or otherwise, which no one could foresee. He possessed the rare qualities, however, of pluck and perseverance, and when one thing failed he lost no time in trying something else. Before he was of age he had learned three trades--and he did not make his fortune at either. In a familiar conversation with a _Herald_ writer recently, Mr. Cooper related some of his early experiences, particularly with reference to enterprises which did not succeed. His father was a hatter, and as a boy young Cooper learned how to make a hat in all its parts. The father was not successful in business, and the hatter's trade seems to have offered little encouragement to the son. Accordingly he learned the art of making ale. Why he did not stick to that calling and become a millionaire brewer, Mr. Cooper does not say. Most probably the national taste for stronger tipple could not at that time be overcome, and ale could not compete with New England rum and apple-jack. The young mechanic next essayed the art of coachmaking, at which he served a full apprenticeship. At the end of his time his employer offered to set him up in business, but the offer was not accepted, through fear of losing another's money. He felt that if he took the money and lost it he would have to be a slave for life. So he quit coachmaking and went to work for a man at Hempstead, L. I., making machines for shearing cloth. In three years, on $1.50 a day, Cooper had saved enough money to buy his employer's patent. Immediately he introduced improvements in the manufacture and in the machine, which the war with England made a great demand for by excluding foreign cloths. At this time Cooper married. In due time the family numbered three, and the young father's inventive faculty was again called upon. "In those days," said Mr. Cooper to the reporter, smiling as the remembrance came to his mind, "we kept no servants as they do nowadays, and my wife and myself had to do all that was to be done. After our first child was born I used to come into the house and find my wife rocking the cradle, and I relieved her from that while I was there. After doing that for a few days I thought to myself that I could make that thing go of itself. So I went into my shop, and made a pendulous cradle that would rock the child. Then I attached a musical instrument which would sing for it, and at the same time the machine would keep the flies off. The latter was very simple; by hanging something to the cross bar, as the cradle swung under it, backward and forward, it would create wind enough to drive away the flies. The machine was wound up by a weight, and would run for nearly half an hour without stopping. I took out a patent for it, and one day a peddler came along with a horse and wagon, as they do in the country, and saw the cradle. He struck a bargain with me and bought the patent right for the State of Connecticut, giving for it his horse and wagon and all the goods he had with him. They afterward made some there, but nothing like as good as mine. It was a beautiful piece of furniture," said Mr. Cooper regretfully, as he thought of it as a thing of the past. "They afterward substituted springs for the weight movement, but that kind was not so good." About this time the war with England ended and the market was spoiled for the shearing machines. Then, we believe, Mr. Cooper tried his hand at cabinetmaking, but that failed, and he set up a grocery store where the Bible House now stands. While selling groceries Mr. Cooper made an invention which ought to have made his fortune, but it did not. The story is best told in Mr. Cooper's own words: "It was just before the Erie Canal was completed, and I conceived a plan by which to tow boats by the use of all the elevated waters on the line of the canal. To demonstrate that that was practicable I made with my own hands a chain two miles long, and placed posts 200 feet apart in the East River from Bellevue dock down town about a mile. These posts supported grooved wheels to lay the chain in, forming an endless chain. The whole was moved by an overshot waterwheel placed at the Bellevue dock. A reservoir twelve feet square and three deep held the water to turn the wheel." At the suggestion of Governor Clinton Mr. Cooper tightened his chain and pulled up the end post just before the grand trial of his device was to come off. He succeeded in getting stone enough to anchor the post, however, and the experiment went off swimmingly. The boat was hooked on to the chain, and the passage back and forward--two miles--was made in eleven minutes. "I ran that boat some ten days," says Mr. Cooper, "to let people see what could be done, and carried nearly a thousand people. Part of the time I ran two boats. Once I counted 52 people in one boat. I made the whole chain myself and planted the posts. As I could find no wheels to suit me I made the moulds and cast the wheels myself out of block tin and zinc. It was no small job, I can tell you." This was unquestionably a grand invention. In itself it was a perfect success; but it was not used. Mr. Cooper tells why: "It demonstrated completely that the elevated water power along the line of the canal and every lock in the canal could be made use of to drive the boats. Governor Clinton gave me $800 for the privilege of buying the right to the plan in case he should want to use it on the Erie Canal. In making the canal he had promised the people along the route that as soon as it was finished they could sell their horses to tow the boats, their grain and fodder to feed the horses, and their provisions for the passengers. On reflection he thought that if he took all that away from them he would have to run the gantlet again, and he could not afford to do that. There never was anything done with the plan until a few years ago, when Mr. Welch, president of the Camden and Amboy Railroad and Canal, invented exactly the same thing and put it in practice on his locks on the canal. He found it saved half the time and great expense. He went to Washington to take out a patent for it, and when he got there he found that I had patented the same thing fifty-three years before. My patent had run out, so he could use the plan on his canal. It has also been used on one lock on the Erie Canal. If they could have used that chain on the whole length of the Erie Canal it would have saved many millions of dollars." This would not be a bad place, were there room for it, to speak of "undeveloped" and therefore worthless inventions; and the assumption that if an inventor does not make his invention immediately profitable it must be good for nothing, and should be dispatented. But the moral goes without telling. Mr. Cooper's next attempt at invention was made about the same time, but in quite a different direction. It was during the struggle of the Greeks for independence, and wishing to do something for their assistance, Mr. Cooper undertook to make a torpedo boat for them. Mr. Cooper says: "It was a small one that could be taken on board ship and used to destroy any vessel that came to destroy them. It was fixed with a rotary steam engine and a screw wheel to propel it. It was intended to be guided from the ship or the shore. There were two steel wires fixed to the tiller of the rudder, and the operator could pull on one side or the other and guide the vessel just as a horse is guided with reins. It was so arranged that at night it would carry a light with its dark side toward the object to be destroyed, and by simply keeping the light in range with the vessel it would be sure to hit it. The torpedo was carried on a little iron rod, projecting in front of the torpedo vessel a few inches under water. Contact would discharge the torpedo and bend this iron rod. This would reverse the action of the engine and cause the torpedo vessel to return right back from whence it came, ready to carry another torpedo." Unfortunately the torpedo boat was not ready in time to go with the ship carrying the contributions for Greece. It was stored in Mr. Cooper's factory (he had then turned his attention to glue) and was destroyed by the burning of the factory. It seems to have been quite a promising affair for the time. Mr. Cooper says: "I experimented with it at once to see how far it could be guided. I made a steel wire ten miles long and went down to the Narrows to test the matter. I had steel yards fastened to one end of the wire, and to the other end the torpedo vessel as attached. It got about six miles away when a vessel coming into the harbor crossed the wire and broke it. Although the experiment was not complete it showed that for at least six miles I could guide the vessel as easily as I could guide a horse." Mr. Cooper's work as the pioneer locomotive builder in this country; his later inventions and improvements in the manufacture of railway iron and wrought iron beams for fireproof buildings; his application of anthracite coal to iron puddling, and his other successes are almost as widely known as his philanthropic efforts for the education and advancement of the industrial classes of this city. After all, we are not sure but the story of his long and varied and always honorable career, told by himself, would not be worth, to young people who have to make their way in life through many difficulties, more even than the advantages of the noble institution which bears his name. * * * * * TASTE FOR READING.--Sir John Herschel has declared that "if he were to pray for a taste which should stand under every variety of circumstance and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to him through life, it would be a taste for reading." Give a man, he affirms, that taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you cannot fail of making him good and happy; for you bring him in contact with the best society in all ages, with the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest men who have adorned humanity, making him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all times, and giving him a practical proof that the world has been created for him, for his solace, and for his enjoyment. * * * * * AFRICA CROSSED AGAIN. Information has been received by way of Lisbon, March 12, that the Portuguese explorer, Pinto, has succeeded in traversing Africa from west to east, and has reached Transvaal. The latitude of his course across is not mentioned. * * * * * CURIOUS FACTS IN MAGNETISM. At the meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences February 17th, the article in the March number of _Harper's Magazine_, entitled "Gary's Magnetic Motor," was incidentally alluded to, and Prof. C. A. Seeley made the following remarks: The article claims that Mr. Gary has made a discovery of a neutral line or surface, at which the polarity of an induced magnet, while moving in the field of the inducing pole, is changed. The alleged discovery appears to be an exaggerated statement of some curious facts, which, although not new, are not commonly recognized. If a bar of iron be brought up, end on, near a magnetic pole, the bar becomes an induced magnet, but an induced magnet quite different from what our elementary treatises seem to predict. On the first scrutiny it is a magnet without a neutral point, and only one kind of magnetism--namely, that of the inducing pole. Moreover, the single pole is pretty evenly distributed over the whole surface, so that if iron filings be sprinkled on the bar they will be attracted at all points and completely cover it. Now, if while the bar is covered by filings it be moved away from the inducing pole, the filings will gradually and progressively fall, beginning at the end nearest the inducing pole and continuing to some point near the middle of the bar; the filings at the remote end will generally be held permanently. When the bar is carried beyond the field of the inducing pole it is simply a weak magnet of ordinary properties--_i. e._, of two poles and a neutral point between them. A plausible and simple explanation of this case is that the inducing pole holds or binds the induced magnetism of opposite name, so that it has no external influence; the two magnetisms are related to each other as are the positive and negative electricities of the Leyden jar. Let the inducing pole be N.; the S. of the bar will be attracted by it and bound, while the N. of the bar becomes abnormally free and active. On moving the bar from the pole the bound magnetism is released and a part becomes residual magnetism. Now when the residual balances the free magnetism which is of opposite name, we are on Gary's neutral line. In a restricted sense there is a change of polarity over the half of the bar contiguous to the inducing pole; on the other half there is no change of pole in any sense. Experiment with a shingle nail in the place of the filings, _à la_ Gary, bring the nail to the induced bound pole, and it may be held, except at the neutral line. Now if one will read the magazine article with such ideas as these he will feel pretty sure that the writer of it has used words recklessly, that Gary has not made an original discovery, and that the "neutral" line, whatever it be, has only an imagined relation to the "principle" of the motor. The Gary Motor as a perpetual motion scheme, of course, is not worthy of serious notice from a society devoted to science. It has no noteworthy novelty of construction or conception. Mr. Gary is afflicted with the very old delusion of the cut-off or shield of magnetism, which is to cost less than what comes from it. His cut-off is a sheet of iron, which we know acts simply as an armature. * * * * * A NEW PHENOMENON IN STATICAL ELECTRICITY. M. E. Duter, in a paper read before the French Academy in December, showed that when a Leyden jar is charged with either positive or negative electricity its internal volume increases, and that this effect is a new phenomenon, unexplainable by either a theory of an increase of temperature or of an electrical pressure. The experiment was performed by means of a flask-shaped Leyden jar with a long tube attached to its neck, and containing a liquid which served as the inner armature. The author's attention had been called to the fact that this phenomenon had been observed ten years ago by M. Gori. His researches, just made public, leave no doubt of the accuracy of M. Duter's view, that the glass of the jar really expands. According to the theory of elasticity, the effect of an internal pressure in a hollow sphere is in the inverse ratio of its thickness. M. Duter, therefore, had three flasks made of the same volume, but of thicknesses of 4 mm., 0.8 mm., and 0.5 mm. respectively. They were filled with water and enveloped by tin foil. Each carried a capillary thermometer tube, in which the variations of the height of liquid served to measure the changes in volume due to electrification. He found that these changes were imperceptible in the thick glass, very marked in the flask of mean thickness, and rose to 30 mm. in the thinnest. The variations in volume were very nearly in inverse ratio of the square roots of the thicknesses. * * * * * A NEW ORE CRUSHER. The accompanying engravings represent an improved ore crusher, which is said to be very effective and economical in the use of power. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--BROWN'S ORE CRUSHER.] [Illustration: Fig. 2.--HORIZONTAL SECTION.] A short vertical cast iron cylinder, A, having in one side a discharge opening, H, contains all of the movable parts. The upper portion of the cylinder is lined with chilled iron plates, L, and an inclined chute, X, leads to the discharge opening, H. A rigid shaft, B, carries the circular crusher, C, and moves in a ball and socket joint at the upper end, and extends eccentrically through the boss of a bevel wheel, G, at its lower end, and rests on a step supported by a lever that may be adjusted by the screw, R. The wheel, G, is driven by the pinion, P, on whose shaft there are a pulley and a fly-wheel. The double gyratory motion of the crusher, C, causes it to approach all portions of the lining, L, crushing whatever lies between. It is said that this machine is capable of crushing 10 tons of the hardest ore per hour. Its weight is 6,500 lbs.--_Musée de l'Industrie._ * * * * * RECENT AMERICAN PATENTS. Enos Richmond, of Troy, N. Y., has invented a steak tenderer, having a plunger studded with chisel-pointed rods, and arranged in a case in connection with an elevating spring. A blow upon the knob at the top of the plunger forces the chisel-pointed rods through holes in the casing into the meat, the casing resting on the surface of the steak. Messrs. A. W. Southard and Volney R. Sears, of Falls City, Neb., have patented an improved invalid bedstead, which is provided with ingenious mechanism for placing the invalid in different positions. An improved spring attachment for carriage tops, which is designed to prevent the rear bow from being bent by the weight of the top when turned back, has been patented by Mr. Robert E. McCormick, of Doylestown, O. Mr. Espy Gallipher, of Schellsburg, Pa., has devised an axle journal having a groove lengthwise upon its upper side which extends back upon the surface of the axle and communicates with an oil cup. A sliding rod occupies a portion of the groove; when this rod is drawn out it permits the oil to fill the groove; when it is pushed into the groove in the axle, the oil is ejected and a further supply is cut off. An improved pill machine, invented by Messrs. W. N. Fort and R. R. Moore, of Lewisville, Ark., is adapted to the manufacture of pills in large quantities. The machine has mechanism for grinding and mixing ingredients, a grooved wheel and trough for forming the pills, and a device for applying powder. An improvement in millstone adjustments has been patented by Mr. Stephen P. Walling, of South Edmeston, N. Y. This invention consists in a screw applied to the end of the mill spindle on which the stone is rigidly held, so that the running stone may be forced by the screw away from the stationary stone and held against the action of a spring at the opposite end of the spindle, the object being to prevent the stones from becoming dulled by contact with each other. An improved attachment for sewing machines for soaking or waxing the thread as it passes the needle, has been patented by Mr. Pedro F. Fernandez, of San Juan, Porto Rico. The invention consists in a frame secured to the arm of a sewing machine by a thumb-screw, and provided with a clamping device for holding wax or soap. A novel combination of a toggle and springs and levers for operating a drag saw has been patented by Mr. Harvey Hughes, of Wheat Ridge, Ohio. The saw, while properly guided, is free to move up or down without affecting the leverage. An improvement in filters, which consists in re-enforcing the felt disk with a backing of wire cloth to enable it to resist heavy water pressure, has been patented by Mr. B. P. Chatfield, of Aiken, S. C. A basket having light sheet metal sides attached to a wooden bottom by crimping the edges over a rib on the periphery of the bottom, has been patented by Mr. Samuel Friend, of Decatur, Ill. The handle and lid may be easily removed to permit of packing and storage. An improved cross bar for fastening doors, patented by Mr. Richard Condon, of La Salle, Ill., has a spring acted portion which engages a socket on the door casing, and is retained in that position by a spring catch. * * * * * A NEW IRONING TABLE. The accompanying engraving represents a convenient and inexpensive table recently patented by Mr. Albert H. Hogins, of Morrisania, N. Y. It is more especially designed for ironing, but it may be used for other purposes when closed up. The top is made in two tapering sections, A B. The section, B, is narrower than the other, and is pivoted at its wider end to a bar, E, which slides into a socket formed in the table. The table has five legs, one of which, D, is attached to a sliding rail that supports the narrower end of the movable part of the top. The table is provided with a drawer in one end and with a tray, C, for containing blankets, etc. [Illustration: HOGINS IMPROVED TABLE.] The convenience and practicability of this table for general laundry use, will be apparent without further explanation. The board, B, when drawn out will be used for ironing skirts, shirts, and other garments requiring a board of this character, and when the table is closed together and fastened by the hooks, it may be used in ironing larger articles. When closed it presents the appearance of an ordinary table and may be used as such. Further information may be obtained by addressing the inventor as above. * * * * * A NOVEL ENGINE REGULATOR. The accompanying engraving represents two different styles of regulator, invented by Mr. Stenberg, in which the effect of centrifugal force is utilized. In a vessel, A, of parabolic shape is placed a disk, C, which floats on glycerine contained by the vessel, and is attached to the walls of the vessel by an annular membrane, so that it may rise and fall in a vertical direction as the glycerine is carried with more or less force toward the edge of the vessel by centrifugal action. The inner surface of the vessel, A, is provided with radial grooves, by which the rotary motion of the vessel is communicated to the glycerine. To the center of the disk, C, is attached a vertical rod, which extends downward through the hollow shaft and is connected with governor valve. An increase of speed throws the glycerine toward the periphery of the valve, and, raising the disk, C, closes the steam valve; a diminution of speed permits the glycerine to fall back, when the disk descends and the valve opens. [Illustration: STENBERG REGULATOR.] The disk, C, has a small aperture for the admission and escape of air, and the apparatus is adjusted by pouring lead into the groove in the disk. The regulator shown in Fig. 2 operates upon the same principle, but it is adjusted by means of a spring. This apparatus is manufactured by Blancke Bros., Magdeburg.--_Musée de l'Industrie._ * * * * * A STRANGE PEOPLE. Botel Tobago is an island in the South Seas which has lately been visited by a party of United States naval officers. They were surveying a rock east of the South Cape of Formosa, and called at this island. They found a curious race of Malay stock. These aborigines did not know what money was good for. Nor had they ever used tobacco or rum. They gave the officers goats and pigs for tin pots and brass buttons, and hung around the vessel all day in their canoes waiting for a chance to dive for something which might be thrown overboard. They wore clouts only, ate taro and yams, and had axes, spears, and knives made of common iron. Their canoes were made without nails, and were ornamented with geometrical lines. They wore the beards of goats and small shells as ornaments. Such is the account of these strange people given by Dr. Siegfried, in a letter read at the last meeting of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. * * * * * REMEDY FOR THE NEW CARPET BEETLE. Noticing a statement made by Mr. J. A. Lintner, to the effect that the Persian insect powder would probably prove unavailing as a remedy against the ravages of the new carpet beetle (_Anthrenus_), W. L. Carpenter, of the U.S.A., was led to institute some experiments with this well known insecticide, the results of which he communicates to the current number of the _Naturalist_. A small quantity of the powder was introduced, on the point of a penknife, under a tumbler beneath which various insects were consecutively confined. The movements of the insects brought them in contact with the poison, which readily adhered to their body; in endeavoring to remove it from their appendages a few particles would be carried to the mouth and thence to the stomach, with fatal effect. The results were briefly thus: A honey bee became helpless in 15 minutes; a mad wasp in 8 minutes; a small ant in 5 minutes; a large butterfly resisted the effects for over an hour, and apparently recovered, but died the next day; a house-fly became helpless in 10 minutes; a mosquito in 15; and a flea in 3 minutes. In experimenting on beetles, an insect was secured as nearly the size of the carpet beetle as could be found. It was easily affected, and became helpless in 12 minutes. In these, and experiments with various other insects, the scent from the powder did not produce any bad effect on those subjected to its odor where actual contact was not possible; but when carried to the mandibles the effect was to produce complete paralysis of the motor nerves. The experiments prove that all insects having open mouth parts are peculiarly susceptible to this popular insecticide. As a result, the writer does not hesitate to recommend the powder to housekeepers as an infallible agent in destroying the carpet beetle and preventing its ravages. The Persian insect powder liberally sprinkled upon the floor before putting down a carpet, and afterward freely placed around the edges, and never swept away, will suffice to preserve a large sized carpet. No ill effects from its use need be feared by the householder, since the drug is poisonous to no kinds of animals except insects. * * * * * BANANA FLOUR. The banana has recently found a new use in Venezuela. It has the property of keeping the soil moist round it, in a country where sometimes no rain falls for months; so it has been employed to give freshness, as well as shade, to the coffee plant, whose cultivation has been greatly extended (Venezuela produced 38,000,000 kilogrammes of coffee in 1876). The Venezuelans can consume but little of the banana fruit thus furnished, so that attention is being given to increasing its value as an export. At the Paris Exhibition were samples of banana flour (got by drying and pulverizing the fruit before maturity) and brandy (from the ripe fruit) The flour has been analyzed by MM. Marcano and Muntz. It contains 66.1 per cent of starch, and only 2.9 of azotized matter. * * * * * NEW STENCIL PEN. The accompanying engraving shows new form of stencil pen invented by Mr. J. W. Brickenridge, of La Fayette, Ind. In Fig. 1 the entire apparatus is shown in perspective; Fig. 2 is a longitudinal section of the pen; and Fig. 3 is a vertical section of a portion of the driving apparatus. In this instrument compressed air is used as a motive force for driving the perforating needle. The inverted cup, shown in detail in Fig. 3, has its mouth closed with a flexible diaphragm, which is vibrated rapidly by a pitman having a convex end attached by its center to the middle of the diaphragm. The pitman is reciprocated by a simple treadle motion, which will be readily understood by reference to Fig. 1. [Illustration: BRICKENRIDGE'S PNEUMATIC STENCIL PEN.] The cup has a small aperture covered by a valve to admit of the entrance of air when the diaphragm is drawn down. The pen, shown in detail in Fig. 2, has a cup and flexible diaphragm similar to the one already described. The diaphragm rests upon the enlarged end of a bar which carries at its lower end a perforating needle. The pen is connected with the driving mechanism by a flexible tube. The needle bar is pressed lightly against the diaphragm by a spiral spring. When the treadle motion is operated the impelling diaphragm is rapidly vibrated, and through the medium of the air contained in the flexible tube it communicates motion to the pen diaphragm and consequently to the needle bar and needle. If, while the needle is reciprocated in this way, the pen is moved over the surface of the paper, a line of fine perforations will be made. With this instrument stencils may be made for making multiplied copies of maps, drawings, and manuscripts. * * * * * ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF OCEAN TELEGRAPHY. At the celebration in this city of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the formation of the company for laying the first Atlantic cable, Monday, March 10, the projector of the enterprise, Mr. Cyrus W. Field, spoke as follows: NEIGHBORS AND FRIENDS: Twenty-five years ago this evening, in this house, in this room, and on this table, and at this very hour, was signed the agreement to form the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company--the first company ever formed to lay an ocean cable. It was signed by five persons, four of whom--Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor, Marshall O. Roberts, and myself--are here to-night. The fifth, Mr. Chandler White, died two years after, and his place was taken by Mr. Wilson G. Hunt, who is also present. Of my associates, it is to be said to their honor--as might have been expected from men of their high position and character--that they stood by the undertaking manfully for twelve long years, through discouragements such as nobody knows but themselves. Those who applaud our success know little through what struggles it was obtained. One disappointment followed another, till "hope deferred made the heart sick." We had little help from outside, for few had any faith in our enterprise. But not a man deserted the ship: all stood by it to the end. My brother Dudley is also here, who, as the counsel of the company, was present at the signing of the agreement, and went with Mr. White and myself the week after to Newfoundland, to obtain the charter, and was our legal adviser through those anxious and troubled years, when success seemed very doubtful. At St. John's the first man to give us a hearty welcome, and who aided us in obtaining our charter, was Mr. Edward M. Archibald, then Prime Minister of Newfoundland, and now for more than twenty years the honored representative of Her Majesty's Government at this port, who is also here to-night. It is a matter for grateful acknowledgment that we were spared to see accomplished the work that we began; and that we meet now, at the end of a quarter of a century, to look with wonder at what has been wrought since in other parts of the world. Our little company came into existence only a few weeks before the Western Union Telegraph Company, which is entitled to share in our congratulations, and has kindly brought a connecting wire into this room, by which we can this evening communicate with every town and village from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and by our sea cables, with Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, and South America. While our small circle has been broken by death but once, very different has it been with the Atlantic Telegraph Company, which was formed in London in 1856, to extend our line across the ocean. At its beginning there were eighteen English and twelve American directors, thirty in all, of whom twenty-nine have either died or retired from the board. I alone still remain one of the directors. Many of the great men of science on both sides of the Atlantic, who inspired us by their knowledge and their enthusiasm, have passed away. We have lost Bache, whose Coast Survey mapped out the whole line of the American shores; and Maury, who first taught us to find a path through the depths of the seas; and Berryman, who sounded across the Atlantic; and Morse; and last, but not least, Henry. Across the water we miss some who did as much as any men in their generation to make the name of England great--Faraday and Wheatstone, Stephenson and Brunel--all of whom gave us freely of their invaluable counsel, refusing all compensation, because of the interest which they felt in the solution of a great problem of science and engineering skill. It is a proud satisfaction to remember that while the two Governments aided us so generously with their ships, making surveys of the ocean, and even carrying our cables in the first expeditions, such men as these gave their support to an enterprise which was to unite the two countries, and in the end to bring the whole world together. Others there are, among the living and the dead, to whom we are under great obligations. But I cannot repeat the long roll of illustrious names. Yet I must pay a passing tribute to one who was my friend, as he was the steadfast friend of my country--Richard Cobden. He was one of the first to look forward with the eye of faith to what has since come to pass. As long ago as 1851 he had a sort of prophet's dream that the ocean might yet be crossed, and advised Prince Albert to devote the profits of the great London Exhibition of that year to an attempt thus to unite England with America. He did not live to see his dream fulfilled. But though men die, their works, their discoveries, and their inventions live. From that small beginning under this roof, arose an art till then scarcely known, that of telegraphing through the depths of the sea. Twenty-five years ago there was not an ocean cable in the world. A few short lines had been laid across the channel from England to the Continent, but all were in shallow water. Even science hardly dared to conceive of the possibility of sending human intelligence through the abysses of the ocean. But when we struck out to cross the Atlantic, we had to lay a cable over 2,000 miles long, in water over 2 miles deep. That great success gave an immense impulse to submarine telegraphy then in its infancy, but which has since grown till it has stretched out its fingers tipped with fire into all the waters of the globe. "Its lines have gone into all the earth, and its words to the ends of the world." To-day there are over 70,000 miles of cable, crossing the seas and the oceans. And, as if it were not enough to have messages sent with the speed of lightning, they must be sent in opposite directions at the same moment. I have just received a telegram from Valentia, Ireland, which reads, "This anniversary witnesses duplex working across the Atlantic as an accomplished fact"--by which the capacity of all our ocean cables is doubled. Who can measure the effect of this swift intelligence passing to and fro? Already it regulates the markets of the world. But better still is the new relation into which it brings the different kindreds of mankind. Nations are made enemies by their ignorance of each other. A better acquaintance leads to a better understanding; the sense of nearness, the relation of neighborhood, awakens the feeling of brotherhood. Is it not a sign that a better age is coming, when along the ocean beds strewn with the wrecks of war, now glide the messages of peace? One thing only remains which I still hope to be spared to see, and in which to take a part, the laying of a cable from San Francisco to the Sandwich Islands--for which I have received this very day a concession from King Kalakaua, by his Minister, who is here to night--and from thence to Japan, by which the island groups of the Pacific may be brought into communication with the continents on either side--Asia and America--thus completing the circuit of the globe. But life is passing, and perhaps that is to be left to other hands. Many of our old companions have fallen, and we must soon give place to our successors. But though we shall pass away, it is a satisfaction to have been able to do something that shall remain when we are gone. If in what I have done to advance this enterprise, I have done something for the honor of my country and the good of the world, I am devoutly grateful to my Creator. This has been the great ambition of my life, and is the chief inheritance which I leave to my children. * * * * * CORRESPONDENCE. * * * * * THE GARY MOTOR. _To the Editor of the Scientific American:_ In your article on the "Gary Motor," issue of March 8, page 144, you say: "There is no neutral line in the sense that polarity changes when Mr. Gary moves his piece of sheet iron with its attached shingle nail across the pole or near the pole of a magnet." "The most delicate instruments fail to detect such a change of polarity," etc. Mr. Gary's claim of a neutral line is of course absurd, but you are wrong in saying that the polarity does not change under the conditions described in the _Harper's Monthly_ article. Mr. Gary is perfectly correct in claiming a change of polarity in that experiment, although his other claim of deriving from this change of polarity a continuous motion without consuming energy are manifestly absurd. [Illustration: Gary Motor A.] [Illustration: Gary Motor B.] The change of polarity is easily explained. If a bar of soft iron, whose length is two or three times the distance between the poles of the horseshoe magnet, be placed in front of the latter as in the sketch, and at some distance, poles will be induced, as shown by the letters N S. Now let the bar approach the magnet. When within a short distance consequent points will be formed and the polarity at the ends will be reversed, the bar having four poles, as in the second sketch. The bar of soft iron must have certain dimensions depending on the size and power of the horseshoe magnet. By using a powerful electro-magnet in place of a permanent one, a soft iron bar of considerable size may be used, and the change of polarity exhibited by showing the repulsion in one case for the south pole and in the other for the north pole of a heavy permanent magnet. When in the proper position a very small movement of the soft iron bar is sufficient to produce the change. WM. A. ANTHONY. Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y., March 2, 1879. * * * * * GARY'S NEUTRAL LINE. _To the Editor of the Scientific American:_ I have just read the article in the issue of March 8, on the Gary Motor, and cannot refrain from offering a suggestion on the subject. When I read the article referred to in _Harper's_, I formed the same opinion of the so-called invention that the writer in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN has expressed, and, in the main, such is my opinion still. I, however, tried the experiment by which Gary claims to prove the existence of his neutral line, and soon found the same explanation that the writer in the AMERICAN has given. I then, curiously enough, modified the experiment in precisely the manner he suggests, placing the magnet in a vertical position, and using first a piece of sheet iron and then an iron wire under it. This was before seeing the article in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. My experiment is well illustrated by the writer's diagram, except that the nail should be at the end of the iron wire, where its polarity is of course most strongly marked. But the result is not as he states it. For, as the wire is brought up toward the magnet, the nail drops off before the wire touches the magnet. When the sheet iron is used, the point at which the nail drops off is farther from the magnet than in the case of the wire, and when it is brought nearer it will again pick up the nail, which then continues to cling until the iron touches the magnet and afterwards. Thus the existence of a line in which the soft iron, or induced magnet, does not attract the nail, and above and below which it does attract it, is demonstrated. That the polarity of the induced magnet is reversed when it crosses this line may be demonstrated as follows: When it is held beyond (or below) this line (Fig. 1), the negative pole of the permanent magnet, the positive being kept at a distance, may be made to approach the iron and touch it, without causing the nail to drop. (Fig. 3.) But when contact occurs, the whole of the iron must possess the polarity of that part of the magnet which it touches, namely, negative. Hence in the position indicated in Fig. 1, the polarity of the induced magnet does not correspond with that of the permanent magnet, but is as indicated by the letters. On the other hand, if the positive pole alone be made to approach, the nail will drop; but when it is very near, or in contact, it again holds the nail, and the iron is now positive; and if the negative pole also be now brought into contact, the polarity of the soft iron will correspond with that of the magnet, as shown in Fig. 2. [Illustration: Gary's Neutral Line A.] [Illustration: Gary's Neutral Line B.] [Illustration: Gary's Neutral Line C.] These experiments should be performed with the soft iron under both poles of the magnet, and the ends of the former should extend somewhat beyond the poles of the latter, or the nail is liable to jump to the magnet as the "neutral" line is crossed. The position of the letters in Fig. 1, of the previous article, represents the polarity of the induced magnet to be the same as that of the permanent, which is true only within (or above) the line described; and this, together with his statement that no such line can be discovered, appears to indicate that the writer relied upon his knowledge of the laws of magnetism to state what would be the result, without testing it experimentally. It is probable that this reversal of polarity is susceptible of explanation by the known laws of magnetic currents, but if it has hitherto escaped observation, its discovery is certainly deserving of notice, and may lead to valuable results. Of the fact, any one may easily convince himself by the simple experiments above described. G. H. FELTON, M.D. Haverhill, Mass., February 28, 1879. * * * * * PNEUMATIC CLOCKS. _To the Editor of the Scientific American:_ In the description of the pneumatic clock, copied from _La Nature_, and published in your journal of date 1st of March, the invention is credited to me. Such is not the case. By an arrangement between Mr. Wenzel, Mr. Brandon of Paris, and myself, patents have been obtained in France, England, etc., for the clock, and issued in my name; but the honor of the invention belongs exclusively to Hermann J. Wenzel, of San Francisco. Yours faithfully, E. J. MUYBRIDGE. San Francisco, Cal., February 27, 1879. * * * * * THE ICE CAVE OF DECORAH, IOWA. _To the Editor of the Scientific American:_ Some years ago I visited the "Ice Cave" of Decorah, Winneshiek county, Iowa, and having since been unable to receive any explanation of the wonderful phenomenon exhibited by it, I write, hoping that you or some correspondent may explain the paradox. The thriving town of Decorah lies in a romantic valley of the Upper Iowa River, and the cave is almost within its corporate limits. Following the left bank of the stream, one soon reaches the vicinity, and with a hard scramble through a loose shale, up the side of a precipitous hill, forming the immediate bank of the river, the entrance is gained--an opening 5 feet wide and 8 feet high. These dimensions generally describe the cave's section. From the entrance the course is a steep decline--seldom less than 40°. At times the ceiling is so low that progress on hands and knees is necessary. About 125 feet from the entrance the "Ice Chamber" is reached. At this spot the cave widens into a well proportioned room, 8 by 12 feet. The floor is solid ice of unknown thickness, and on the right hand wall of the room a curtain of ice drops to the floor, from a crevice extending horizontally in the rock at the height of one's eyes. Close examination discovers the water oozing from this crevice, and as it finds its way down the side it freezes in the low temperature of the chamber. Singularly this one crevice, and that no wider than a knife edge, furnishes this, nature's ice house, with the necessary water. It was a hot day in August, the thermometer marking 80° in the shade when the visit was made, and comparatively the cold was intense. In common with all visitors, we detached some large pieces of ice and with them hurriedly departed, glad to regain the warmth of the outside world. The most remarkable fact in connection with this wonder is that the water only freezes in the summer. As the cold of actual winter comes on the ice of the cave gradually melts, and when the river below is frozen by the fierce cold of Northern Iowa, the ice has disappeared and a muddy slush has taken the place of the frigid floor. I would add that the ice chamber forms the terminus of the cave. Beyond a shallow crevice in the crumbling rock forbids further advance. The rock formation of this region is the Portland sandstone. Why should the temperature of the ice chamber be such as to freeze the water trickling into it? And above all, why should the ice disappear with the cold of winter? Mansfield, O. H. M. W. * * * * * THE WRITING TELEGRAPH. On the evening of February 26, 1879, the writing telegraph of Mr. E. A. Cowper, of London, was exhibited in operation before the Society of Telegraph Engineers, in that city. It is a curious and remarkable invention. By its use the handwriting of the operator may be transmitted, but a double circuit, that is, two telegraph wires, are used. The operator moves with his hand an upright pointer or stylus, with which he writes the message on paper. The stylus has two arms connected with it, one of which arms, when the stylus makes an upward movement, causes a current to be sent over one wire, while the other arm causes a current to pass over the other wire when the stylus is moved laterally. These two motions are, at the receiving end of the line, made to operate on the needles of galvanometers, and the latter are by silk threads combined or connected with a delicately suspended ink tube, from which a minute stream of ink falls upon the strip of paper below it; the arrangement being such that the combined motions of the galvanometers so move the ink pen as to make it correspond to the motion of the stylus at the sending end. The apparatus is said to work very well, and it is expected that it will form a useful adjunct to the art of telegraphy. We present herewith a facsimile of writing done by this new instrument, which has been worked with success over a line of forty miles length. It is hardly probable that it can compete in rapidity with some of the telegraph instruments now in use; but for many purposes it is likely to become important, while in point of ingenuity it is certainly a great achievement, and the author is deserving of the highest credit. [Illustration: Writing Telegraph.] * * * * * A RARE GEOLOGICAL SPECIMEN. Rev. R. M. Luther, while absent in attendance upon the Missionary Convention, held in Addison, Vt., obtained through the kindness of the Rev. Mr. Nott a rare and curious geological specimen from the shores of Lake Champlain. It is a slab of limestone, about eleven inches long by six inches wide, which seems to be composed almost entirely of fossils. There is not half an inch square of the surface which does not show a fossil. There are many varieties, some of which have not been identified, but among those which have been are many remains of the Trinucleus conceniricus, some specimens of Petraia, fragments of the Orthis, a number of Discinæ, several well preserved specimens of Leptenæ, and impressions of Lingula. The latter is the only shell which has existed from the first dawn of life until the present time without change. The specimens of existing Lingula are precisely similar to those found in the earliest geological formations. There are also in the slab several rare specimens of seaweed, remains of which are seldom found at so early an age in the geological history of the world. The slab belongs to the lower Silurian formation, the first in which organic remains are found. It is probably from the Trenton epoch of that age. If geologists can be trusted, at the time the little animals, whose remains are thus preserved, were living, the only part of this continent which had appeared above the primeval ocean was a strip of land along the present St. Lawrence River and the northern shores of the great lakes, with a promontory reaching out toward the Adirondacks, and a few islands along what is now the Atlantic coast line.--_Bennington (Vt.) Banner._ * * * * * COWPER'S WRITING TELEGRAPH. The most recent of the brilliant series of telegraphic marvels which has from time to time, and especially of late, engaged the attention of the world, is the "telegraphic pen" of Mr. E. A. Cowper, the well known engineer of Great George street, Westminster. This ingenious apparatus, which constitutes the first real telegraph, was publicly shown by its inventor at the meeting of the Society of Telegraph Engineers on Wednesday, February 26. There had been no lack of copying telegraphs hitherto. We have Bakewell's, Casselli's, Meyer's, and D'Arlincourt's, so recently tried at our General Post Office by Mr. Preece. All of these instruments telegraph an almost perfect copy of the writing or sketch submitted to them by means of synchronous mechanism. But the process is necessarily complex and slow; whereas by the new device a person may take the writing pencil in his hand, and himself transmit his message in the act of writing it. The principle which guided Mr. Cowper to a solution of the problem which he has successfully overcome, is the well known mathematical fact that the position of any point in a curve can be determined by its distance from two rectangular co-ordinates. It follows, then, that every position of the point of a pencil, stylus, or pen, as it forms a letter, can be determined by its distance from two fixed lines, say the adjacent edges of the paper. Moreover it is obvious that if these distances could be transmitted by telegraph and recombined so as to give a resultant motion to a duplicate pen, a duplicate copy of the original writing would be produced. But inasmuch as the writing stylus moves continuously over the paper, the process of transmission would require to be a continuous one; that is to say, the current traversing the telegraph line, and conveying the distances in question (or what comes to the same thing, the up and down, and direct sidelong ranges of the stylus) would require to vary continuously in accordance with the range to be transmitted. Mr. Cowper effects this by employing two separate telegraphic circuits, each with its own wire, battery, sending, and receiving apparatus. One of these circuits is made to transmit the up and down component writing of the pencil's motion, while the other simultaneously transmits its sidelong component. At the receiving station these two components are then recomposed by a pantograph arrangement of taut cords, or levers, and the resultant motion is communicated to the duplicate pen at that place. The plan adopted by Mr. Cowper to transmit each continuously varying component is to cause the resistance of the circuit to vary very closely with the component in question. Fig. 5 shows how the apparatus is theoretically arranged for this purpose. P is the writing style, which is held in the writer's hand in the ordinary way, while he shapes the letters one by one on paper pulled uniformly underneath by means of clockwork. To P are attached, at right angles, two arms, a a, one for each circuit; but as it is only necessary to consider one of the circuits, say that sending up and down motions, we will confine our attention for the present to the arm, a. One pole of the sending battery, B, is connected to the arm, a, the other pole being connected to earth. Now the arm, a, is fitted with a sliding contact at its free extremity, and as the pencil, P, is moved in writing, a slides lengthwise across the edges of a series of thin metal contact plates, C, insulated from each other by paraffined paper. Between each pair of these plates there is a resistance coil, C, and the last of these is connected through the last plate to the line, L. It will be seen that as a slides outward across the plates the current from the battery has to pass through fewer coils, since a short-circuits a number of coils proportional to its motion. But the fewer of these coils in circuit the stronger will be the current in the line; so that the extent of the motion of the arm, a, in the direction of its length, that is to say, the direct component of the motion of the pencil along the line of the arm, a, is attended by a corresponding change in the current traversing the line. If the pencil makes a long up and down stroke there will be a strong current in the line, if a short one there will be a weak current, and so on. A precisely similar arrangement is used to transmit the sidelong motion of the pencil along the line, L. [Illustration: Fig. 5.] The current from the line, L, flows at the receiving station through a powerful galvanometer, G, to earth. The galvanometer has a stout needle, one tip of which is connected to a duplicate pen, P, by a thread, t, which is kept taut by a second thread stretched by a spring, s'. The current from the line, L', flows through a similar galvanometer, G', to earth. The needle of G' is also connected to the pen, P, by a taut thread, t', stretched by means of the spring, s. Now, since the needle of each of these galvanometers deflects in proportion to the strength of the current flowing through its coil, the points of these two needles keep moving with the varying currents. But since these currents vary the motions of the sending pen, the receiving pen controlled by the united movements of the needles will trace out a close copy of the original writing. We give on another page a facsimile of a sentence written by Mr. Cowper's telegraph. [Illustration: THE COWPER WRITING TELEGRAPH.] The receiving pen is a fine glass siphon, drawing off aniline ink from a small glass holder. There are thirty-two coils, C, in each circuit, with a corresponding number of contact plates, c, so as to get accuracy of working. A few Daniell's cells are sufficient to operate the apparatus, and writing has been already sent successfully over a line 40 miles in length. The writing may be received either of the same size or larger or smaller than the original, as the case may be. At present the writing must not be too hurried, that is, unless the characters are bold and well formed; but further improvement will, of course, quicken the working of the apparatus. The engravings, Figs. 1 to 4, illustrate the actual apparatus. Fig. 4 is a plan of the sending instrument, with the writing pencil, a, the traveling paper, b, the light connecting rods or arms, d (which correspond to a in the theoretical diagram above), the series of metal contact plates over which these arms slide, the resistance coils connected to these plates, and the battery and line wires. It will be seen that each arm, d, is connected to its particular battery, and each set of contact plates to its particular line. Fig. 3 is an elevation of the sending instrument, in which a is the pencil as before, c c the contact plates over which the arms, d d, slide, f f the coils, and b the traveling slip of paper. Fig. 2 is a plan of the receiving instrument, in which h h are the light pivoted needles surrounded by coils of fine insulated copper wires, i i, and controlled in their zero position by the electro-magnets, j j j j, placed underneath, the whole forming a pair of galvanoscopes or current detecters, one for each line. It will be understood that the varying currents from the lines are allowed to flow through the coils, i i, so as to deflect the needles, and that the deflections of the needles follow, so to speak, the variations of the currents. The electro-magnets are magnetized by a local battery; permanent magnets might, however, take their place with a gain in simplicity. Now the writing pen, k, is connected to the nearest tip of the needle, h, of each galvanoscope by threads, n n, which are kept taut by the fibers, o_{1} o_{2} o_{3}, the springs, o, and the pins, o_{4}. In this way the motions of the needles are recombined in the motion of the duplicate pen upon the paper, p. Fig. 1 is an elevation of the receiving instrument, in which i i are the coils as before, j j j j the controlling electro-magnets, k is the writing siphon dipping with its short leg into the ink well, m, and l is the bridge from which the writing siphon is suspended by means of a thread and spring. The long leg of the siphon reaches down to the surface of the paper, p, which is pulled along beneath it in contact with the film of ink filling the point of the tube. When the siphon is at rest its point marks a zero line along the middle of the paper, but when the receiver is working, the siphon point forms each letter of the message upon the paper as it passes.--_Engineering._ * * * * * ALUMINUM. The splendid exhibit of the French aluminum manufacturers at the late Exhibition has again called attention to that metal, which is so admirably adapted to many purposes on account of its great lightness and its stability under the influence of the atmosphere. While aluminum industry has heretofore been thought to be confined to France solely, we are now told by Mr. C. Bambery, in the Annual Report of the Society of Berlin Instrument Makers, that for some years past aluminum has been extensively manufactured in Berlin. Three firms especially (Stückradt, Häcke, and Schultze) are engaged in this branch of industry. The articles manufactured principally are nautical instruments, as sextants, compasses, etc. The German navy is supplied throughout with aluminum instruments. As a proof of the superiority of German aluminum, it may here be mentioned that the normal sets of weights and balances used by the International Commission for the regulation of weights and measures, which lately was in session at Paris, were obtained from Stückradt, in Berlin, and not from any of the firms at Paris, the reputed seat of aluminum industry. Aluminum is, in Berlin, generally used pure, and cast pieces only are composed of aluminum containing about 5 per cent of silver. Nevertheless the use of aluminum will remain limited, even in case the cost of manufacturing it could be materially reduced, until some method shall have been discovered by which aluminum may be soldered. This difficulty has, in spite of all efforts, not yet been overcome, and for some purposes, to which the metal would otherwise be well adapted, it remains so far unavailable. Here then is a chance for some ingenious mind. * * * * * AN IMPROVED DOOR BOLT. The accompanying engraving represents, in perspective and in section, an improved door bolt, recently patented by Mr. Thomas Hoesly, of New Glaras, Wis. The principal features of this bolt will be understood by reference to the engraving. On the plate or body are cast two loops or guides for the bolt, and the plate is slotted under the bolt, and a lug projects into the slot and bears against a spring contained by a small casing riveted to the back of the plate. The end of the bolt is beveled, and its operation is similar to that of the ordinary door latch. Two handles are provided, one of which is of sufficient length to reach through the door, and a pawl or dog accompanies the bolt, which may be attached to the door with a single screw, and is to be used in locking the door. The bolt is very simple and strong, suitable for shops, out-buildings such as barns, stables, etc., and some of the doors of dwellings. [Illustration: HOESLY'S DOOR BOLT.] Further information may be obtained by addressing the inventor, as above. * * * * * CHIMNEY FLUES. Messrs. W. H. Jackson & Co., of this city, whose long experience in treating refractory flues gives weight to their opinion, communicate to the _American Architect_ the following useful information: To secure a good draught the chimney should be of sufficient size, should be carried up above surrounding objects, should be as straight as possible throughout its length, and should be as smooth as possible inside, to avoid friction. As a draught is caused by unequal temperatures, the chimney should be so arranged as to avoid a rapid radiation of heat. If in an exterior wall there should be at least 8 inches of brickwork between the flue and the exterior surface. For country houses it is much better to have the chimneys run up through the interior, as the flue is more easily kept warm, and the heat that is radiated helps to warm the house. The most frequent cause of a "smoky chimney" is the insufficient size of the flue for the grate or fireplace connected therewith. The flue should not be less than one eighth the capacity of the square of the width and height of the grate or fireplace. That is, if the grate has a front opening 20 inches wide and 26 inches high, the flue should be 8 in. × 8 in.; or, with an opening 36 inches wide and 32 inches high, the flue should be 12 in. × 12 in.; and, to get the best result, the opening into the flue from the grate or fireplace should be of a less number of square inches than the square of the flue, and never larger, as no more air should be admitted at the inlet than can be carried through the flue. Where there is more than one inlet to the same flue, the sum of all the inlets should not more than equal the size of the flue. A number of stoves may be connected with the same flue, one above another, if this rule is observed. A square flue is better than a narrow one, as in two flues containing the same number of square inches the square flue would have the smallest amount of wall surface, and consequently less friction for the ascending currents, and less absorption of heat by the walls. Chimneys should be closely built, having no cracks nor openings through which external air may be drawn to weaken the draught. If they could be made throughout their length as impervious to air as a tube of glass, with interior surface as smooth, one cause of smoky chimneys would be removed. A downward current of air is frequently caused by some contiguous object higher than the chimney, against which the wind strikes. This higher object may sometimes be quite a distance from the chimney, and still affect it badly. A good chimney top constructed to prevent a down draught will remedy this difficulty. Each grate or fireplace should have a flue to itself. Under very favorable conditions, two grates or fireplaces might be connected with the same flue, but it is not a good plan. We have known grates and fireplaces connected with two flues, where they have been built under a window for instance, and, owing to there being insufficient room for a flue of suitable size, a flue has been run up on each side of the window. This is a very bad plan, and never can work well; it requires too much heat to warm both flues, and if the room in which the grate or fireplace is situated should be pretty close, so that there was no other entrance for air, there is danger that it would circulate down one flue and up the other, forcing smoke out of the fireplace into the room. * * * * * IMPROVED FURNACE FOR BURNING GARBAGE. The refuse matter and garbage of large cities is in the main composed of animal and vegetable offal of the kitchens; of the sweepings of warehouses, manufactories, saloons, groceries, public and private houses; of straw, sawdust, old bedding, tobacco stems, ashes, old boots, shoes, tin cans, bottles, rags, and feathers; dead cats, dogs, and other small animals; of the dust and sweepings of the streets, the condemned fruit, vegetables, meat, and fish of the markets, all of which compose a mass of the most obnoxious and unhealthy matter that can be deposited near human habitations. The inventor of the furnace shown in the accompanying engravings aims to produce a change of form and of chemical nature and a great reduction in bulk of all such refuse and garbage within the limits of the city where it accumulates, without screening, separating, preparing, or mixing, without the expense of using other fuel, without any offensive odors being generated in the operation, and to produce an entirely unobjectionable residuum or product that may be made useful. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--FOOTE'S FURNACE FOR BURNING GARBAGE.] As a rule organic matter largely preponderates in the refuse, being as high in some instances as 94 per cent. There is always more than enough to generate sufficient heat to fuse the earthy or inorganic portion, which is mainly composed of sand, clay, and the alkalies from the coal and vegetable ashes, etc. By producing a high degree of heat in the combustion of the organic portion of the refuse with a forced blast or forced draught, the non-combustible elements are fused, and form a vitreous slag, which is entirely inodorous and unobjectionable, and which may be utilized for many purposes. The upper section or cone of the consuming furnace is built of boiler iron, and lined with fire brick resting upon an iron plate, which is supported by iron columns. The hearth is made of fire brick, and is in the form of an inverted cone, being smaller at the bottom and larger at the top, as shown in Fig. 2. The sides of the hearth are perforated near the bottom with arches for the tuyeres or blast pipes, and also in front for the special blast pipe and the tapping hole. The top of the furnace is closed with an iron plate, provided with a circular opening, through which the hopper enters the top of the furnace. At the left in the larger engraving is seen an elevator, operated by a steam engine, for conveying the garbage and refuse to a platform, whence it is projected into the furnace by an inclined plane or chute. Gas or smoke conductors convey the gas from the top of the furnace to the furnace of the boiler and to the heating oven, where it is used in heating air, which is conveyed through the iron pipes passing through the heating oven into a wind box, from which it enters the furnace at several points near the bottom by means of the tuyere pipes. [Illustration: SECTION OF FURNACE.] The consumption of the garbage is effected near the bottom of the furnace, where the air is forced in, and is continued as long as the blast is applied, and while burning at the base it is continually sinking down at the top, so that it is necessary to keep filling all the time. The odoriferous gases and the hot products of such combustion are forced upward through the superimposed mass, and escape to the fires of the boiler and heating oven, and, being largely composed of carbonic oxide and the hydrocarbon gases distilled from the animal and vegetable offal of the garbage, are thoroughly consumed; and it is said that by this means not only are all the offensive odors destroyed, but the heat generated is utilized for making steam and heating the air used for blast. The refuse in its descent through the high furnace is exposed to the drying action of the hot gases of distillation and the hot products of combustion, its temperature increasing in its descent the nearer it approaches the tuyeres, and becomes completely desiccated and combustible when it reaches the blast. The high heat in this way obtained by the combustion of the organic portion melts all of the inorganic portion, forming a vitreous slag or glass, which may be allowed to run continuously, or by closing the tap may be allowed to accumulate, and can be drawn off at intervals. If there is an adequate supply of clay and sand in the refuse to combine with the ashes, the slag will run hot and free. The combination of silex or alumina and an alkali in proper portions always yields a fusible, easy-running compound. The molten slag, as it runs from the furnace, may be discharged into tanks of cold water, which will pulverize or granulate it, making it like fine sand, or as it pours over a runner, through which it flows, if struck with a forcible air or steam blast it will be spun into fine thread-like wool. The furnace once lighted and started may be kept running day and night continuously for days, months, or years, if desired; but if it becomes necessary to stop at any time, the tuyere pipes may be removed and the holes all stopped with clay, so as to entirely shut off the supply of air, and it will then hold in fire for many days, and will be in readiness to start again at any time the pipes are replaced and the blast turned on. This furnace is the invention of Mr. Henry R. Foote, of Stamford, Conn. * * * * * AN ANCIENT GREEK VASE. The vase shown in the accompanying engravings must not be classed with ordinary ceramic ware, as it is a veritable work of art. It is the celebrated cup of Arcesilaus, which is preserved in the collection of the library of Richelieu street after having figured in the Durand Museum. It was found at Vulsei, in Etruria. It was made by a potter of Cyrene, the capital of Cyrenaica, founded by Greeks from the island of Thera. It is remarkable that Cyrene, removed from the center of Grecian manufacture, should possess a manufactory of painted vases from which have come so many works of art. The traveler, Paul Lucas, discovered in the necropolis of Cyrene, in 1714, many antique vases, both in the tombs and in the soil. One of them is still preserved in the Museum at Leyden. The Arcesilaus, who is represented on this vase, is not the celebrated skeptical philosopher of that name; it is Arcesilaus, King of Cyrenaica, who was sung by Pindar, and who was vanquished in the Pythian games under the 80th Olympiad (458 years B.C.). The height of this vase is 25 centimeters, its diameter 28 centimeters. The paste is very fine, of a pale red. It is entirely coated with a black groundwork, which has been generally re-covered with a yellowish white clay, baked on. According to M. Brongniart, this piece has been subjected to the baking process at least two or three times, thus indicating that the ceramic art had made considerable progress in Cyrene even at that remote epoch. The following description of this vase is given in the catalogue of the Durand Museum: The King Arcesilaus is seated under a pavilion upon the deck of a ship. His head is covered with a kind of hat with a large brim, and his hair hangs down upon his shoulders. He is clothed in a white tunic and embroidered cloak or mantle, and he carries a scepter in his left hand; under his seat is a leopard, and his right hand he holds toward a young man, who makes the same gesture, and he is weighing in a large scale assafoetida, which is being let down into the hold of the ship. We know that he deals with assafoetida because one of the personages (the one who lifts up his arm toward the beam of the scale) holds in his right hand something resembling that which is in the scale, and the Greek word traced near it signifies "that which prepares _silphium_." Assafoetida, the resinous matter of the silphium, is used largely by the Greeks in the preparation of their food. The Orientals to-day make frequent use of it and call it the delight of the gods; while in Europe, because of its repulsive odor, it has long been designated as _stircus diaboli_. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--ANCIENT GREEK VASE.] [Illustration: Fig. 2.--TOP OF GREEK VASE.] * * * * * SNOW-RAISED BREAD. Somebody thinks he has discovered that snow, when incorporated with dough, performs the same office as baking powder or yeast. "I have this morning for breakfast," says a writer in the _English Mechanic_, "partaken of a snow-raised bread cake, made last evening as follows: The cake when baked weighed about three quarters of a pound. A large tablespoonful of fine, dry, clean snow was intimately stirred with a spoon into the dry flour, and to this was added a tablespoonful of caraways and a little butter and salt. Then sufficient cold water was added to make the dough of the proper usual consistence (simply stirred with the spoon, not kneaded by the warm hands), and it was immediately put into a quick oven and baked three quarters of an hour. It turned out both light and palatable. The reason," adds the writer, "appears to be this: the light mass of interlaced snow crystals hold imprisoned a large quantity of condensed atmospheric air, which, when the snow is warmed by thawing very rapidly in the dough, expands enormously and acts the part of the carbonic acid gas in either baking powder or yeast. I take the precise action to be, then, not due in any way to the snow itself, but simply to the expansion of the fixed air lodged between the interstices of the snow crystals by application of heat. This theory, if carefully followed out, may perchance give a clew to a simple and perfectly innocuous method of raising bread and pastry." And stop the discussion as to whether alum in baking powders is deleterious to health or otherwise. * * * * * NEW AGRICULTURAL INVENTIONS. An improved gate, invented by Messrs. P. W. McKinley and George L. Ellis, of Ripley, O., is designed for general use. It is operated by cords and pulleys, and can be opened without dismounting from the horse. It is constructed so that it cannot sag, and is not liable to get out of order. An improved apparatus for pressing tobacco has been patented by Mr. F. B. Deane, of Lynchburg, Va. It consists mainly in the construction of a suspended jack, arranged to travel over a row of hogsheads, so that a single jack gives successively to each hogshead the desired pressure. An improved combined harrow and corn planter has been patented by Mr. M. McNitt, of Hanover, Kan. In this machine the opening, pulverizing, planting, and covering teeth are combined with a single frame. A machine, which is adapted to the thrashing and cleaning of peas and seeds, and for cleaning all kinds of grain, has been patented by Mr. J. J. Sweatt, of Conyersville, Tenn. Mr. Amos M. Gooch, of Farmington, W. Va., has patented an improved corn planter, which drops the fertilizer simultaneously with the seed, and is provided with a device for pressing the soil around the seed, leaving over the seed a portion of loose earth. An improved machine for harvesting cotton has been patented by R. H. Pirtle, of Lowe's, Ky. This machine carries two vertical cylinders armed with teeth or spurs, and two inclined endless belts provided with teeth. The teeth of the cylinders and the belts remove the cotton from the plants, and deliver it to a receptacle carried by the machine. Messrs. Julius Fern and Samuel Bligh, of Oneonta, N. Y., have patented an improved power for churning and other purposes where little power is required. It consists in the combination of a drum and weight, a train of gearing, and a pallet wheel arranged to oscillate a balanced beam. An improvement in the class of feed cutters in which two or more knives work between parallel bars attached to the cutter box, has been patented by Messrs. J. N. Tatum and R. C. Harvey, of Danville, Va. The improvement consists in arranging the knives so that one begins and finishes its cut in advance of the other. Mr. William Bradberry, of Darrtown, O., has invented an improvement in reciprocating churns. The aim of this inventor is to utilize the resistance of the milk as a source of power. To accomplish this a peculiar combination of mechanism is required, which cannot be clearly described without an engraving. * * * * * READING AND EYESIGHT. M. Javel, in a recent lecture, tries to answer the question, "Why is reading a specially fatiguing exercise?" and also suggests some remedies for this fatigue. First, M. Javel says reading requires an absolutely permanent application of eyesight, resulting in a permanent tension of the organ, which may be measured by the amount of fatigue or by the production of permanent myopy. Secondly, books are printed in black on a white ground; the eye is thus in presence of the most absolute contrast which can be imagined. The third peculiarity lies in the arrangement of the characters in horizontal lines, over which we run our eyes. If we maintain during reading a perfect immobility of the book and the head, the printed lines are applied successively to the same parts of the retina, while the interspaces, more bright, also affect certain regions of the retina, always the same. There must result from this a fatigue analogous to that which we experience when we make experiments in "accidental images," and physicists will admit that there is nothing more disastrous for the sight than the prolonged contemplation of these images. Lastly, and most important of all in M. Javel's estimation, is the continual variation of the distance of the eye from the point of fixation on the book. A simple calculation demonstrates that the accommodation of the eye to the page undergoes a distinct variation in proportion as the eye passes from the beginning to the end of each line, and that this variation is all the greater in proportion to the nearness of the book to the eye and the length of the line. As to the rules which M. Javel inculcates in order that the injurious effects of reading may be avoided, with reference to the permanent application of the eyes, he counsels to avoid excess, to take notes in reading, to stop in order to reflect or even to roll a cigarette; but not to go on reading for hours on end without stopping. As to the contrast between the white of the paper and the black of the characters, various experiments have been made in the introduction of colored papers. M. Javel advises the adoption of a slightly yellow tint. But the nature of the yellow to be used is not a matter of indifference; he would desire a yellow resulting from the absence of the blue rays, analogous to that of paper made from a wood paste, and which is often mistakenly corrected by the addition of an ultramarine blue, which produces gray and not white. M. Javel has been led to this conclusion both from practical observation and also theoretically from the relation which must exist between the two eyes and the colors of the spectrum. His third advice is to give preference to small volumes which can be held in the hand, which obviates the necessity of the book being kept fixed in one place, and the fatigue resulting from accidental images. Lastly, M. Javel advises the avoidance of too long lines, and therefore he prefers small volumes, and for the same reason those journals which are printed in narrow columns. Of course every one knows that it is exceedingly injurious to read with insufficient light, or to use too small print, and other common rules. M. Javel concludes by protesting against an invidious assertion which has recently been made "in a neighboring country," according to which the degree of civilization of a people is proportional to the number of the short sighted shown to exist by statistics; the extreme economy of light, the abuse of reading to the detriment of reflection and the observation of real facts, the employment of Gothic characters and of a too broad column for books and journals, are the conditions which, M. Javel believes, lead to myopy, especially if successive generations have been subjected to these injurious influences. * * * * * PHOSPHORESCENCE. M. Nuesch records, in a recent number of the _Journal de Pharmacie_, some curious observations regarding luminous bacteria in fresh meat. Some pork cutlets, he found, illuminated his kitchen so that he could read the time on his watch. The butcher who sent the meat told him the phosphorescence was first observed in a cellar, where he kept scraps for making sausages. By degrees all his meat became phosphorescent, and fresh meat from distant towns got into the same state. On scratching the surface or wiping it vigorously, the phosphorescence disappears for a time; and the butcher wiped carefully the meat he sent out. All parts of the animal, except the blood, acquired the phenomenon over their whole surface. The meat must be fresh; when it ceases to be so, the phosphorescence ceases, and _Bacterium termo_ appear. None of the customers had been incommoded. It was remarked that if a small trace of the phosphorescent matter were put at any point on the flesh of cats, rabbits, etc., the phosphorescence gradually spread out from the center, and in three or four days covered the piece; it disappeared generally on the sixth or seventh day. Cooked meat did not present the phenomenon but it could be had in a weak manner, from cooked albumen or potatoes. No other butcher's shop in the place was affected. The author is uncertain whether to attribute the complete disappearance of the phenomenon to the higher temperature of the season, or to phenic acid, or to fumigation with chlorine. * * * * * THE CHARMS OF NATURAL SCIENCE. The Earl of Derby, in an address at the Edinburgh University, said: "Of the gains derivable from natural science I do not trust myself to speak; my personal knowledge is too limited, and the subject is too vast. But so much as this I can say--that those who have in them a real and deep love of scientific research, whatever their position in other respects, are so far at least among the happiest of mankind.... No passion is so absorbing, no labor is so assuredly its own reward (well that it is so, for other rewards are few); and they have the satisfaction of knowing that, while satisfying one of the deepest wants of their own natures, they are at the same time promoting in the most effectual manner the interests of mankind. Scientific discovery has this advantage over almost every other form of successful human efforts, that its results are certain, that they are permanent, that whatever benefits grow out of them are world-wide. Not many of us can hope to extend the range of knowledge in however minute a degree; but to know and to apply the knowledge that has been gained by others, to have an intelligent appreciation of what is going on around us, is in itself one of the highest and most enduring of pleasures." THE VESUVIUS RAIL WAY.--The Italian Ministry of Public Works, in union with the Ministry of Finance and the Prefecture of Naples, has issued the concession for the construction of the Vesuvius Railway. The line will run along that part of the mountain which has been proved, after the experience of many years, to be the least exposed to the eruptions. The work is to be commenced immediately, and it is believed that it will come into use during the present year. A sufficient number of carriages are being built to convey 600 persons during the day. The line is to be constructed upon an iron bridge, built after a patented system. * * * * * THE POTTERY TREE. Among the various economic products of the vegetable kingdom, scarcely any hold a more important place than barks, whether for medicinal, manufacturing, or other purposes. The structure and formation of all barks are essentially very similar, being composed of cellular and fibrous tissue. The cell contents of these tissues, however, vary much in different plants; and, for this reason, we have fibrous or soft, woody, hard, and even stony barks. To explain everything which relates to the structure of bark would lead us into long details which our space will not permit. Briefly stated, the bark of trees (considering, now, those of our own climate) consists of three layers. The outermost, called the "cortical," is formed of cellular tissue, and differs widely in consistency in different species; thus, in the cork oak, which furnishes man with one of his most useful commercial products, the cortical layer acquires extraordinary thickness. The middle layer, called the "cellular" or "green bark," is a cellular mass of a very different nature. The cells of which it is composed are polyhedral, thicker, and more loosely joined, and filled with sap and chlorophyl. The inner layer (next the wood), called the "liber," consists of fibers more or less long and tenacious. It is from the liber that our most valuable commercial fibers are obtained. In some plants the fibrous system prevails throughout the inner bark; but what we wish to refer to more particularly at present is a remarkable example of the harder and more silicious barks, and which is to be found in the "Pottery Tree" of Para. This tree, known to the Spaniards as _El Caouta_, to the French as _Bois de Fer_, to the Brazilians as _Caraipe_, is the _Moquilea utilis_ of botanists, and belongs to the natural order _Ternstroeiaceæ_. It is very large, straight, and slender, reaching a height of 100 feet before branching; its diameter is from 12 to 15 inches; and its wood is exceedingly hard from containing much flinty matter. Although the wood of the tree is exceedingly sound and durable, the great value of the tree to the natives exists in the bark for a purpose which, to say the least, is a novel one in the application of barks--that of the manufacture of pottery. The Indians employed in the manufacture of pottery from this material always keep a stock of it on hand in their huts for the purpose of drying and seasoning it, as it then burns more freely, and the ashes can be gathered with more ease than when fresh. In the process of manufacturing the pottery the ashes of the bark are powdered and mixed with the purest clay that can be obtained from the beds of the rivers; this kind being preferred, as it takes up a larger quantity of the ash, and thus produces a stronger kind of ware. Though the proportions of ash and clay are varied at the will of the maker, and according to the quality of the bark, a superior kind of pottery is produced by a mixture of equal parts of fine clay and ashes. All sorts of vessels of small or large size for household or other purposes are made of this kind of ware, as are also vases or ornamental articles, many of which are painted and glazed. These articles are all very durable, and are able to stand almost any amount of heat; they are consequently much used by the natives for boiling eggs, heating milk, and indeed for culinary purposes generally. A brief glance at the structure of the bark will show how it comes to be so well adapted for this purpose. The bark seldom grows more than half an inch thick, and is covered with a skin or epidermis; when fresh, it cuts somewhat similar to a soft sandstone, but when dry, it is very brittle and flint like, and often difficult to break. On examination of a section under the microscope, all the cells of the different layers are seen to be more or less silicated, the silex forming in the cells when the bark is still very young. In the inner bark the flint is deposited in a very regular manner, the particles being straight and giving off branches at right angles; that of the porous cells of the bark, however, is very much contorted, and ramifies in all directions. In the best varieties of the tree, those growing in rich and dry soil, the silex can be readily detected by the naked eye; but to test the quality of the various kinds of bark, the natives burn it and then try its strength between their fingers; if it breaks easily it is considered of little value, but if it requires a mortar and pestle to break, its quality is pronounced good. From an analysis of this singular bark, that of old trees has been found to give 30.8 per cent of ash, and that of young 23.30 per cent. Of the different layers of old bark, the outer gave 17.15 per cent, the middle 37.7, and the inner 31. The wood of the tree, in comparison with the bark, is relatively poor in silex, the duramen of an old tree giving only 2.5 per cent of silex. * * * * * GLASS SPONGES. The natural history of sponges had, up to the middle of this century, been comparatively neglected. Until 1856, when Lieberkuhn published his treatise on sponges, very little or nothing had been written on the subject. Later, Haeckel did much to determine their exact nature, and it is now universally admitted that sponges form one of the connecting links between the animal and the vegetable kingdom. Sponges, generally considered, consist of fine porous tissue, covered, during life, with viscid, semi-liquid protoplasm, and are held in shape and strengthened by a more or less rigid skeleton, consisting chiefly of lime or silica. The tissue consists of a very fine network of threads, formed probably by gradual solidification of the threads of protoplasm. The inorganic skeleton is formed by larger and smaller crystals and crystalline threads. In the various families of sponges the quantity of inorganic matter varies greatly; some sponges are nearly devoid of an inorganic skeleton, while other families consist chiefly of lime or silica, the organic tissue being only rudimentarily developed. As observed in their natural state, sponges are apparently lifeless. When, however, a live sponge is placed in water containing some finely powdered pigment in suspension, it will be noticed that in regular, short intervals water is absorbed through the pores of the tissue and ejected again through larger openings, which are called "osculæ." Following up these into the interior, we find them divided into numerous branches, the walls of which are, under the microscope, found to be covered with minute cells, fastened at one end only and oscillating continually. By means of these cells the sponge receives its nourishment. Sponges with very rigid inorganic skeletons may be divided into two classes--calcareous and silicious--according to whether the skeleton is chiefly composed of lime or silica. Our engravings represent two species of the latter kind, which are, on account of the peculiar appearance of their skeleton, called glass sponges. Fig. 1 represents the "sprinkling pot sponge," _Eucleptella aspergillum_. It is generally found in very deep water throughout the Pacific. Specimens were found over fifty years ago, but, as they had to be brought up from depths between 500 and 800 fathoms, they remained very scarce and sold at fabulous prices. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--SPRINKLING POT SPONGE.--(_Eucleptella aspergillum_.)] The skeleton is formed by small crystals and long threads of vitreous silica, cemented together, during life, by protoplasm. They are arranged in longitudinal and annular bands so as to form a long curved cylinder, about nine to twelve inches long, the walls of which are about one inch in thickness. The threads and bands are interwoven with the greatest regularity, and when the skeleton is freed from the adhering organic matter, it looks extremely beautiful. The mode in which the intersecting bunches of crystals are connected is shown in Fig. 2. The upper end of the cylinder is closed by a perforated cover, which probably has given rise to the name of the sponge. The upper portion of the cylinder is surrounded by a few irregular, annular masses of organic tissue, which adheres loosely only to the skeleton. The lower end is formed by a bunch of long threads, rooting firmly in the ground. [Illustration: Fig. 2.--SPONGE CRYSTALS MAGNIFIED.] Up to about ten years ago the price of specimens of this sponge was very high. At that time, however, a colony of Eucleptellas was found near the cities of Cebu and Manila, in the East Indies, in a depth not exceeding 100 fathoms, and since they have appeared in larger quantities in the market. It is remarkable that, contrary to their habits, these organisms have immigrated into regions to which they were totally unaccustomed. Yet it must be regarded as a greater curiosity that they have been accompanied to their new abode by a few animals living in equally deep water and never met with before at depths less than three or four hundred fathoms. Among these animals is a _Phormosoma_ (water hedgehog), noted for its long spines. Glass sponges are not confined to tropical regions. They are met with in latitudes as high as the Färöe Islands, where the beautiful _Holtenia Carpentaria_ abounds. It is represented in Fig. 3. Its cup-shaped skeleton is similar in structure to that of the _Eucleptella_; numerous crystalline needles protrude from the surface of the upper part. Lately some specimens of _Holtenia_ have been found on the coast of Florida. [Illustration: Fig. 3.--HOLTENIA CARPENTERIA.] Glass sponges serve as dwellings for numerous animals, especially crustaceæ. A small shrimp inhabits the tubes of the _Eucleptella_, a male and a female generally living together. They are shut up as in a prison in their crystalline home, as they are generally too large to pass through the meshes formed by the bundles of crystals. It was formerly believed that these skeletons had actually been built by the shrimps, and we can find no explanation for this curious circumstance, other than that the shrimps entered these habitations while very small and became too large to leave them. * * * * * PLANTS PROTECTED BY INSECTS. Mr. Francis Darwin, in a lecture on "Means of Self-Defense among Plants," delivered lately at the London Institution, said that one of the most curious forms of defense known is afforded by a recently discovered class of plants, which, being stingless themselves, are protected by stinging ants, which make their home in the plant and defend it against its enemies. Of these the most remarkable is the bull's-horn acacia (described by the late Mr. Belt in his book "The Naturalist in Nicaragua"), a shrubby tree with gigantic curved thorns, from which its name is derived. These horns are hollow and tenanted by ants, which bore a hole in them, and the workers may be seen running about over the green leaves. If a branch is shaken the ants swarm out of the thorns and attack the aggressor with their stings. Their chief service to the plant consists in defending it against leaf-cutting ants, which are the great enemy of all vegetation in that part of America. The latter form large underground nests, and their work of destruction consists in gathering leaves, which they strip to form heaps of material, which become covered over with a delicate white fungus, on which the larvæ of the ants are fed, so that literally they are a colony of mushroom growers. The special province of the little stinging ants, which live in the thorns of the acacia, is, therefore, to protect the leaves of the shrub from being used by the leaf-cutters to make mushroom beds. Certain varieties of the orange tree have leaves which are distasteful to the leaf-cutters, this property of the leaves thus forming a means of defense. Other plants are unaccountably spared by them--grass, for example, which, if brought to the nest, is at once thrown out by some ant in authority. The bull's-horn acacia, in return for the service rendered by the stinging ants, not only affords them shelter in its thorns, but provides them with nectar secreted by glands at the base of its leaves, and also grows for them small yellow pear-shaped bodies, about one twelfth of an inch in length, at the tip of some of its leaflets, which they use as food. These little yellow bodies are made up of cells containing protoplasm rich in oil, and afford the insects an excellent food. When the leaf unfolds, the ants may be seen running from one leaflet to another, to see if these little yellow bodies are ripe; and if they are ready to be gathered they are broken up by the ants and carried away to the nest in the thorn. Several small birds, also, build their nests in the bull's horn acacia, thus escaping from a predatory ant which is capable of killing young birds. The trumpet tree, another plant of South and Central America, is also protected by a standing army of ants; and, like the above mentioned acacia, grows for its protectors small food bodies containing oil, but instead of secreting nectar in its leaves it harbors a small insect (coccus), whose sweet secretion is much relished by the ants. Dr. Beccari mentions an epiphytal plant growing on trees in Borneo, the seeds of which germinate, like those of the mistletoe, on the branches of the tree; and the seedling stem, crowned by the cotyledons, grows to about an inch in length, remaining in that condition until a certain species of ant bites a hole in the stem, which then produces a gall-like growth that ultimately constitutes the home of the ants. If the plant is not fortunate enough to be bitten by an ant it dies. These ants, then, protect their plant home by rushing out fiercely on intruders, and thus are preserved the sessile white flowers which, in this plant, are developed on the tuber like body. * * * * * ADVANCE IN IRON.--At a meeting of the Philadelphia Iron Merchants' Association, March 11, prices of all descriptions of merchant iron were advanced fully 5 per cent. * * * * * THE ANEROID BAROMETER. The aneroid barometer was invented by M. Vidi, of Paris. It consists essentially of a circular box, the face of which is made of thin elastic metal, rendered more elastic by being stamped and pressed into concentric circular wave-like corrugations. This box is nearly exhausted of air, and its elastic face supports the pressure of the atmosphere, and yields to it with elastic resistance in proportion to the amount of pressure. Thus, if the atmospheric pressure increases, the face is pressed inward; if atmospheric pressure diminishes, the elastic reaction of the metal moves the face outward. These movements are communicated to an index by suitable and very delicate mechanism, and registered in largely magnified dimensions, by the movements of this index upon the face of the dial. Aneroid barometers are now made of pocket size, compensated for temperature, and with double scales, one reading the height of the barometer column, the other the elevation obtained. I have, says Prof. W. M. Williams, used one of these during many years, and find it a very interesting traveling companion. It is sufficiently sensitive to indicate the ascent from the ground floor to the upper rooms of a three-storied house, or to enable the traveler sitting in a railway train to tell, by watching its face, whether he is ascending or descending an incline. Such slight variations are more easily observed on the aneroid than on the mercurial barometer, and therefore it is commonly stated that the aneroid is the more sensitive instrument. This, however, is a fallacious conclusion. It is not the superior sensitiveness of the movements of the instrument, but the greater facility of reading them, that gives this advantage to the aneroid, the index of which has a needle point traveling nearly in contact with the foot of the divisions; the readings are further aided by a needle point register attached to a movable rim, which may be brought point to point against the index, thus showing the slightest movement that human vision may detect. A magnifying lens may be easily used in such a case. It should be understood that the aneroid barometer is not an independent instrument; it is merely a device for representing the movements of the mercurial barometer. It is regulated by comparison with the primary instrument, and this comparison should be renewed from time to time, as the elastic properties of the metal may and do vary. An adjusting or regulating screw is attached to the back of the instrument, and is usually movable by a watch key. Besides this, the magnified reading of course magnifies any primary error, and is largely dependent on the accuracy of the mechanism. * * * * * THE ALBO-CARBON LIGHT. We need hardly remind our readers that numerous unsuccessful attempts have been made at various times to enrich ordinary coal gas by the aid of volatile oils. Upon the present occasion we have to place before them particulars of a process having the same object in view, but which is so far dissimilar in that it deals with a solid substance instead of a liquid oil. The invention has been brought into its present practical shape by Mr. James Livesey, C. E., of No. 9 Victoria Chambers, Westminster, in conjunction with Mr. Kidd, with whom it originated. The process consists in the employment of a substance called albo-carbon, which is the solid residuum of creosote. This material is moulded into the form of candles, which in large lamps are placed in a metallic vessel or receiver near the gas burner. The albo-carbon is warmed by the heat of the burning gas, the heat being transmitted to the receiver by a metallic conductor. Upon the albo-carbon being raised to the necessary temperature it volatilizes, and as the coal gas passes over it to the burner its vapor becomes mingled with the gas, and greatly raises its illuminating power. Of course when first lighted the coal gas only is burned, but in a few minutes the albo-carbon communicates its enriching vapor to it. The only alteration necessary to the present gas fittings is the vaporizing chamber, which is of simple construction, although at present the details of the various arrangements necessary for the different kinds of lights have not yet been fully worked out. This invention is now being tried experimentally in the eastern section of the Westminster Aquarium, where we recently examined it, and found it to afford a marked improvement upon the ordinary system of gas illumination, although a smaller number of burners is being used. Tried alternately with ordinary coal gas, the higher illuminating power of the albo-carbon light was very remarkable. It appears that there are 200 burners fitted at the Aquarium with the new light, and these successfully take the place of 500 ordinary gas burners previously in use. The illuminating effect is stated to be doubled, with an additional advantage as regards economy. The reduction of cost arises from the smaller quantity of gas consumed with the albo-carbon process than without it, and the very small cost of the enriching material. According to our information, 1,000 cubic feet of ordinary gas as generally used will, by the albo-carbon appliance, give as much illumination as 3,000 cubic feet without it, and the cost of the material to produce this result is only 1s. 6d. Experiments have been made with this light by Mr. T. W. Keates, the consulting chemist to the Metropolitan Board of Works, who reports very favorably upon it, as does also Dr. Wallace, of Glasgow, who has obtained some very satisfactory results with it. It is claimed for the albo-carbon material that it is perfectly inexplosive, safe and portable, that it causes no obstruction and leaves no residuum, and that the receivers can be replenished almost indefinitely without any accumulation taking place, so perfect is the evaporation of the albo-carbon. On the whole the display at the Aquarium speaks greatly in favor of the new process of gas enrichment, which, other things being equal, bids fair to find its way into practice.--_Engineering._ * * * * * ENGLISH AND AMERICAN HARDWARE. Mr. Frederick Smith, Manager of the Union Land and Building Company (limited), recently read a paper on the above subject before the Manchester Scientific and Mechanical Society. Mr. H. Whiley, Superintendent of the Manchester Health Department, presided. The following is the text of the paper, as given in the London _Ironmonger_. The lecturer said: A spectator in any of our courts of justice will generally be struck with the amount of hard swearing which is given to the court, under the name of evidence. He will find one set of witnesses testifying, under oath, to one thing, and another set, also under oath, to the very opposite. Some prove too much, some too little, some are of a totally negative character, proving nothing, and some are of no character at all, and therefore are willing to prove anything. To some extent the same phenomena are to be observed in reference to the question of foreign competition. On the one hand the manufacturers hold up to our affrighted vision the picture of our mills stopped, our machine shops standing empty and idle, our hardware trade slipping through our fingers, our ships rotting in our own and in foreign ports, and our greatness as a producing nation for ever passed away. On the other hand, the journalists who take the labor side of the question, the trades-union leaders, and a large number of the workmen themselves, hold that we have little or nothing to fear from our foreign rivals; that the depression, like those atmospheric ones of which our American cousins are constantly warning us, will pass away, and leave us with better times to follow. I will, therefore, as far as possible, keep out of the region of speculation, give you a few facts, show you some examples, and leave you to draw your own inferences. Some two or three years ago ordinary axle pulleys of English make were difficult to get; the price was scandalously high, and the quality as scandalously low. Out of a dozen probably four would not turn round without sticking, and the casting was--well, simply vile. I show you a sample rather above the average, and the retail price for this inferior article was 22s. per gross. All at once the Americans deluged the English market with the pulley which I now show to you, and it needs no explanation of mine to satisfy the mechanical minds present of the superiority of the transatlantic article; but when we also bear in mind that the price of the American was from 25 to 33 per cent less than the English pulley, you can understand how the builders exulted, and how the Volscians of the Birmingham district were fluttered. Then, and not till then, would the English maker condescend to believe that it was possible to improve upon the wretched things which he had foisted upon his customers, and he at once commenced to copy the American pulley. He has not yet succeeded in producing such a beautiful casting, but I venture to say that he has improved the quality more in the last eighteen months than in the previous eighteen years. Now take the ordinary door furniture. For generations the English builder and householder has had to be content with the stereotyped, with all its aggravating propensities. First, the little screw (so small as to be scarcely perceptible to touch or to sight) shakes loose from its countersunk depression in the spindle, gets lost, and lets the knob go adrift; or next, the knob itself, formed of a bit of sheet brass, turns round on its shank and the door cannot be opened, or the shank, not having a sufficient bearing on the spindle, works loose, and the whole thing is out of repair. It is the same thing to-day as it was when it tormented my grandfather; for, of course, no improvement could be made until Uncle Sam sent us his cheap, strong, serviceable, and sensible "Mineral Knob." The English maker says: "But look at the many devices which we have invented for door furniture." Granted, and some of them very good, but none of them so good as this--for the money. Plenty of them well adapted for extraordinary use, but none of them cheap enough and strong enough to be placed in competition with this in fitting up the dwelling of the ordinary Englishman. The spindle and furniture of a lock is the portion which is liable to and receives the most rough usage. I have here an ordinary cheap set of china furniture of English make, which I dare not drop lest I should break it, but as you see, I dare throw its Yankee competitor the whole length of this room. The retail price of this English set is ninepence--the price of the American is less than sixpence. The English spindle is fitted with the usual little screw, the knob is loose, the roses are china, and liable to break with the least strain or blow. The American set, as you see, has a long shank; the form of the knob is a very oblate spheroid, giving a good grip and free play for the fingers between the knob and the door. The rose is japanned iron, and has small studs or teeth projecting on its inner side effectually preventing it from turning round with the spindle; the screw is strong, and is tapped through the spindle itself, insuring both security and perfect steadiness. Several small washers are supplied with each spindle, enabling the slack to be taken up perfectly, and at the same time preventing the spindle from sticking with any ordinary amount of friction. I will now show you a cheap American rim lock. First, you will notice that both sides are alike. Next, that by pulling the latch forward it can be turned half round, and is thereby converted from a right hand to a left hand, or _vice versa_, in an instant. This is an important point to a builder, but our lockmakers do not seem to know it. Several attempts have been made to introduce locks of this kind, but the fancy prices put upon every article which departs, in ever so slight a measure, from the antediluvian patterns mostly used, practically prohibits their adoption. The carcass of the lock is of cast iron; the casting, like all the small American castings, is simply perfect; bosses are cast round the follower and keyholes; the box staple is one piece of metal, neat and strong. But there is another point, and, to my mind, the most important one. Whatever opinions may be held as to the relative quality of this lock, whether it is better or worse than an English one, it is at least an honest article. It makes no pretensions to be any better than it is. It does not entrap the unwary purchaser by pretending to be a first-class article, when at the same time it may be a swindle. I will now show you an ordinary 6 inch rim-lock of English manufacture. At a short distance it looks like a superior article; the follower and keyhole appear as if they were bushed with brass. But let us take it to pieces, and see what we can find. The follower is a rough casting, not turned at the bearings, and is in no sense a fit. The screw holes are not countersunk, but merely punched in; the key is of the roughest and worst fitting description; the inside is as rough and cheap as possible; the key is cut so as to deceive the purchaser into the belief that there are twice as many wards in the lock as is really the case, and the bushes prove to be thin plates of brass riveted on, and not bushes at all. In short, the whole article is a vile fraud, and the maker was a swindler. This is strong language, but I think you will agree with me when I maintain that it is not stronger than the circumstances warrant. But there are still its defects of bad design and useless workmanship. The lock is of the usual form given to the English rim-lock, that is, it has a flange which requires to be let into the edge of the door. I have fixed hundreds of them, and have never yet been able to see a use for this flange. It is one great obstacle to the general introduction of a reversible lock; it adds to the labor of fixing without adding to the security of the door, for if the door is to be forced from the outside, the box staples give way first; if from the inside, the unscrewing of the box staple is all that is necessary to give egress; if the door requires easing, it effectually prevents it being done--in fact, it is a nuisance, and nothing but a nuisance. But our lockmakers do not appear to give these things a thought; their doctrine seems to be, "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be." Again, notice that the edges of the iron which lie against the door and the sham bushes are ground bright. Here is labor wasted, for as soon as the lock is fixed these polished portions are hidden for ever. Next, take the box staple. As is usual, it is fearfully and wonderfully made up of sheet iron, square iron, and brass; the outcome of which is that the showy brass striking piece comes unriveted, the door comes unfastened, and the tenant's temper comes unhinged. Why, in the name of common sense, could they not substitute a neat malleable casting? In our own houses I have long since discarded the ordinary box staple for draw-back locks, and find it cheaper to buy a cast iron staple, and throw away the one supplied by the English lockmaker. Bear in mind that I have shown neither of these locks as samples of high-class goods, but as samples of the furniture fixed in the houses of the working and middle classes of this country; and when I tell you that the American lock, fitted with the mineral furniture, is at least 25 per cent cheaper than the English abortion I have shown to you, you will begin to realize what our English markets have to fear from the Americans. Here is a common, cheap English mortise lock, and you will naturally ask why the outside of this lock is ground bright, when it is buried in the door and never seen except it has to be taken out for repairs. I have asked the same question, and for 20 years have paused for a reply. This lock is not reversible, the follower is not bushed, and the inside is rough and cheap. Contrast it with this neat American lock, and notice again the bosses to receive the wear; notice also that the bolts are brass; the latch-bolt is, of course, reversible--I never saw an American lock which was not. The body of the lock is cast iron; and, seeing that there are no strains upon a mortise lock, it is quite as good as if it was of wrought iron. There is no unnecessary grinding, but the iron is japanned, and the japan is as much superior to the English compound as is the lacquer ware of the Japanese to that which is executed in Birmingham and palmed upon the ignorant buyer as Japanese work. In fact, as you can see for yourselves, the English japan looks almost like gas tar beside the American. This American lock is a two-lever, and there is no sham about the key, which is made of some kind of white metal and is small and neat. This lock is only 2½ per cent higher in price than the English. Before leaving these locks, let me say a word or two upon the relative wear upon their different portions, and their relative safety. The English maker appears to ignore the fact that nineteen-twentieths of the wear of a lock is upon the latch, spindle, and follower; the amount of actual wear upon the rest of the lock is comparatively slight. Let any of you consider the number of times you open and close a door, compared with the times you lock it. Our drawbacks and large rim locks are used about once a day; the great bulk of our mortise locks are not used, except as latches, once a week. One argument used by our manufacturers against the American lock is that, being made by machinery, there is necessarily a great duplication of parts, and a consequent lowering of the standard of security; while their own locks, being made by hand, are not alike, and therefore cannot be so easily opened. Let any of you put this argument to proof, by trying how many front doors you can open with one key in a row of workmen's dwellings such as are found in Manchester, ranging up to £25 rentals, and the result will astonish you. If our own manufacturers made their locks sufficiently well to give this security, there would be some force in what they say; but so far as security is concerned, they might as well make their locks by machinery as make them in the way they do. I now show you two thumb latches, one of American and one of English make. Notice the general finish of the American latch; the shape, the mode of construction, and everything about it proves that brains were used when it was designed and made. The English "Norfolk latch," on the other hand, is ill designed, uncomfortable in hand, clumsily finished, the japan hangs about it in lumps, the latch is clumsy, the catch is clumsier, and the keeper, a rough piece of hoop iron, seems as if designed to "keep" the latch from doing its duty. In this case the American latch is 25 per cent cheaper than the English one; and the English latch is of the same pattern as the one that was in use when I was a boy, only that it is a greatly inferior article. I will now introduce you to the well known nuisance which we have been accustomed to use for fastening our cupboard doors--the cupboard turn--and without further comment, ask you to compare it with this neat and simple latch of American make, costing about 5 per cent more, twice as efficacious, and five times as durable. In this case no improvement has been made in the English fastener. It is just as it was when I went to the trade, about 28 years ago, and although many attempts have been made to improve it they have added so much to its cost as to prevent the improved articles from coming into general use. The difference between the English and American inventor and designer seems to consist in this--that while an Englishman devotes all his energies to the improvement of an existing shape, the American throws the old article under his bench and commences _de novo_. I think I have made out a case against the English hardware manufacturer, but when I have pointed these matters out to merchants and ironmongers, I have been met with various reasons for this manifest inferiority. I do not know how far these excuses may be valid, but one man says that the reason, as regards locks, is somewhat as follows: The locksmiths of the district wherein they are made in many cases work at their own homes; one man making one part of a lock, while other men make other parts. This goes on generation after generation, and the men become mere machines, not knowing how the entire lock is constructed, and not caring to know. Another attributes it to the influence of the trades-unions, and says that if a manufacturer wants a different kind of lock, the price for the work is immediately put higher, even though the actual labor may not be increased. A third says it is due to the drunkenness of the hands, and their consequent poverty and physical and social demoralization, which prevents them from rising to such an intellectual level as will enable them to see the evils of their system, and adopt the right means to remove them. A fourth boldly says, "We make these goods because our customers want them." How far the reasons assigned by the first three are correct I am unable to say, but for the fourth, the extent to which the builders of England have patronized the Americans is a complete answer. This defense, "Our customers want them," is as old as the hills, and has been used to cover every kind of deception and inferior article ever manufactured. Our Lancashire manufacturers use it when they are charged with sending china clay and mildew (and call it calico) for the mild Hindoo and the Heathen Chinee to dress themselves in. Our butter merchants use it when they make up grease and call it butter; and our hardware merchants use it when they send us sham locks, and call them brass bushed, etc. It is the duty of the manufacturer to invent for his customers, and it is preposterous to say that the builder would prefer that embodiment of fraud--the English rim-lock, which I showed to you--to the American lock, which, at any rate, was an honest article, especially when the latter had the great advantage of being considerably cheaper. I am afraid that the swindling and greed of our merchants is having the effect of thrusting us out of the markets of the world, including our home markets; and when it is too late, these men who are making the name of English goods a byword and a reproach, even among the Hindoos, the Chinese, and the untutored savages of the South Sea Islands, will find that "honesty is the best policy." We have been accustomed to hear a deal of buncombe talked about the honesty of the Englishman, and the want of honesty of the Yankee; about the enterprise of our manufacturers and the skill of our workmen; but if what I have shown to you is to be taken as a specimen, it is time we set our house in order. Since commencing the paper I have read the discussion between Messrs. Chubb and Hill, and am at a loss to know why Messrs. Chubb entered into the arena. If all the English makers tried to reach Chubb's standard we should keep our markets, at least so far as high quality is concerned; and to see Messrs. Chubb acting as champions of the English lockmakers is something like seeing Messrs. Horrocks taking up the cudgels for those people who manufacture china clay and call it calico, the proportion of fiber in the material being just a little greater than that found in hair mortar. In conclusion, I wish it to be understood that I bring these facts before you in no exultant spirit. I am an Englishman, and the future welfare of myself and my children depends very much upon the future of English manufactures; but we cannot be blind to the fact that the apathy and conservatism of our manufacturers, the greed of our Merchants, and the ignorance and drunkenness of our workmen, are weighing us so heavily in the race for trade that a member of our own family, whose leading business should be to produce food for us, is outstripping us with the greatest ease. Our boasted supremacy as a manufacturing people is leaving us, and leaving us under such humiliating circumstances--and if the men of Birmingham and the district are content to dwell in their present "fools' paradise," it is the duty of every lover of his country to speak as plainly as possible to them. Of course I am prepared to be told that as I am not a lockmaker my opinion is worthless; but I have been about 28 years as man and boy, employer and workman, in the building trade, and if I have not got to know something about builders' hardware during that period, I have made but a poor use of my time. I do not know if I have added to your stock of knowledge, but deeming the subject an important one, I have done the best I could in the time at my disposal. In the discussion which followed the opinion of the members present was unanimously in favor of the American articles shown to them. * * * * * A high Indian official reports that the people of Cashmere are dying of famine like flies, and at the present rate of mortality the province will be nearly depopulated by the end of the year. * * * * * TO INVENTORS. An experience of more than thirty years, and the preparation of not less than one hundred thousand applications for patents at home and abroad, enable us to understand the laws and practice on both continents, and to possess unequaled facilities for procuring patents everywhere. In addition to our facilities for preparing drawings and specifications quickly, the applicant can rest assured that his case will be filed in the Patent Office without delay. Every application, in which the fees have been paid, is sent complete--including the model--to the Patent Office the same day the papers are signed at our office, or received by mail, so there is no delay in filing the case, a complaint we often hear from other sources. Another advantage to the inventor in securing his patent through the Scientific American Patent Agency, it insures a special notice of the invention in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, which publication often opens negotiations for the sale of the patent or manufacture of the article. A synopsis of the patent laws in foreign countries may be found on another page, and persons contemplating the securing of patents abroad are invited to write to this office for prices, which have been reduced in accordance with the times, and our perfected facilities for conducting the business. Address MUNN & CO., office SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. * * * * * BUSINESS AND PERSONAL. _The Charge for Insertion under this head is One Dollar a line for each insertion; about eight words to a line. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ Valves and Hydrants, warranted to give perfect satisfaction. Chapman Valve Manuf. Co., Boston, Mass. Brown & Sharpe, Prov., R. I. Best Gear Teeth Cutters and Index Plates at low prices. Send for catalogue. Wanted--Galvanic Battery, Induction Coil, Electro-Magnet. Address, with description and price, Box 1700, Boston, Mass. New Steam Governor.--Entire right for $3,000. For circulars address E. Towns, Cisne, Ill. Gutta Percha, pure and sheeted, for sale in quantities to suit. Anderson & Reynolds, Salem, Mass. The new fragrant Vanity Fair Cigarettes. New combinations of rare Old Perique and Virginia. Wanted--Second-hand Corliss Engine, 100 to 125 H. P. Address P. O. Box 1208, New Haven, Conn. 17 and 20 in. Gibed Rest Screw Lathes. Geo. S. Lincoln, Hartford, Conn. "Downer's Anti-Incrustation Liquid" for Removal and Prevention of Scales in Steam Boilers, is spoken of in highest terms by those who have given it a thorough trial. Circulars and price lists furnished on application. A. H. Downer, 17 Peck Slip, New York. Mr. W. B. Adams, one of the most extensive contractors and decorators in this city, says he has used nearly fifty thousand gallons of H. W. Johns' Asbestos Liquid Paints, and after an experience of twenty years with white lead and other paints, he considers them not only superior in richness of color and durability, but owing to their wonderful covering properties, they are fully 20 per cent more economical than any others. New Pamphlet of "Burnham's Standard Turbine Wheel" sent free by N. F. Burnham, York, Pa. Gaume's Electric Engine. 171 Pearl St., B'klyn, N. Y. Engines, ½ to 5 H. P. G. F. Shedd, Waltham, Mass. Clipper Injector. J. D. Lynde, Philadelphia, Pa. Diamond Drills, J. Dickinson, 64 Nassau St., N. Y. Eagle Anvils, 9 cents per pound. Fully warranted. Case Hardening Preparation. Box 73, Willimantic, Ct. Vertical Burr Mill. C. K. Bullock, Phila., Pa. Sheet Metal Presses, Ferracute Co., Bridgeton, N. J. Mundy's Pat. Friction Hoist. Eng., of any power, double and single. Said by all to be the best. J. S. Mundy, Newark, N. J. Auction Sale.--The Machinery and Property of the well known Hardie's Machine Works, 62 and 64 Church St., Albany, N. Y., will be sold March 26, at noon. No postponement. To Manufacturers or Capitalists.--A rare chance to control a valuable agricultural patented implement. Address S. A. Fisher, Maplewood, Mass. Reflecting Telescope, 6½ inches aperture, well mounted, price only $70. J. Ramsden, Philadelphia, Pa. See Hogins' Laundry Table, illustrated on page 194. State, Canada, and entire right for sale. Emery.--Best Turkey Emery in bbls., kegs, and cases in quantities to suit. Greene, Tweed & Co., 18 Park Place, N. Y. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition is published monthly, about the 15th of each month. Every number comprises most of the plates of the four preceding weekly numbers of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, with other appropriate contents, business announcements, etc. It forms a large and splendid periodical of nearly one hundred quarto pages, each number illustrated with about one hundred engravings. It is a complete record of American progress in the arts. Gold, Silver, and Nickel Plater wants situation. Address Plater, Oakville, Conn. Amateur Photo. Apparatus, including instructions; outfits complete. E. Sackmann & Co., 278 Pearl St., N. Y. Outfits for Nickel and Silver Plating, $5 to $200. Union Silver Plating Company, Princeton, Ill. Send for Circulars of Indestructible Boot and Shoe Soles to H. C. Goodrich, 40 Hoyne Ave., Chicago, Ill. For Sale.--Brown & Sharp Universal Milling Machine; Bement Profiling Machine; first-class 2d hand Machine Tools. E. P. Bullard, 14 Dey St., New York. For Sale.--7 foot bed Putnam Planer, $350. A. A. Pool & Co., Newark, N. J. Bevins & Co.'s Hydraulic Elevator. Great power, simplicity, safety, economy, durability. 94 Liberty St. N. Y. A Cupola works best with forced blast from a Baker Blower. Wilbraham Bros., 2,318 Frankford Ave., Phila. Shaw's Noise Quieting Nozzles and Mercury Pressure Gauges. T. Shaw, 915 Ridge Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. For Solid Wrought Iron Beams, etc., see advertisement. Address Union Iron Mills, Pittsburgh, Pa., for lithograph, etc. H. Prentiss & Company, 14 Dey St., N. Y., Manufs. Taps, Dies, Screw Plates, Reamers, etc. Send for list. Presses, Dies, and Tools for working Sheet Metal, etc. Fruit & other can tools. Bliss & Williams, B'klyn, N. Y. Nickel Plating.--A white deposit guaranteed by using our material. Condit, Hanson & Van Winkle, Newark, N. J. Hydraulic Elevators for private houses, hotels, and public buildings. Burdon Iron Works, Brooklyn, N. Y. The Lathes, Planers, Drills, and other Tools, new and second-hand, of the Wood & Light Machine Company, Worcester, are to be sold out very low by the George Place Machinery Agency, 121 Chambers St., New York. Hydraulic Presses and Jacks, new and second hand. Lathes and Machinery for Polishing and Buffing Metals E. Lyon & Co., 470 Grand St., N. Y. Solid Emery Vulcanite Wheels--The Solid Original Emery Wheel--other kinds imitations and inferior. Caution.--Our name is stamped in full on all our best Standard Belting, Packing, and Hose. Buy that only. The best is the cheapest. New York Belting and Packing Company, 37 and 38 Park Row, N. Y. Pulverizing Mills for all hard substances and grinding purposes. Walker Bros. & Co., 23d & Wood St., Phila., Pa. Portland Cement--Roman & Keene's, for walks, cisterns, foundations, stables, cellars, bridges, reservoirs, breweries, etc. Remit 25 cents postage stamps for Practical Treatise on Cements. S. L. Merchant & Co., 53 Broadway, New York. Needle Pointed Iron, Brass, and Steel Wire for all purposes. W. Crabb, Newark, N. J. Manufacturers of Improved Goods who desire to build up a lucrative foreign trade, will do well to insert a well displayed advertisement in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition. This paper has a very large foreign circulation. Band Saws, $100; Scroll Saws, $75; Planers, $150; Universal Wood Workers and Hand Planers, $150, and upwards. Bentel, Margedant & Co., Hamilton, Ohio. The best Friction Clutch Pulley and Friction Hoisting Machinery in the world, to be seen with power applied, 95 and 97 Liberty St., New York. D. Frisbie & Co., New Haven, Conn. C. M. Flint, Fitchburg, Mass., Mfr. of Saw Mills and Dogs, Shingle and Clapboard Machines. Circulars. Blake's Belt Studs; strongest, cheapest, and best fastening for Leather or Rubber Belts. Greene, Tweed & Co., New York. No gum! No grit! No acid! Anti-Corrosive Cylinder Oil is the best in the world, and the first and only oil that perfectly lubricates a railroad locomotive cylinder, doing it with half the quantity required of best lard or tallow, giving increased power and less wear to machinery, with entire freedom from gum, stain, or corrosion of any sort, and it is equally superior for all steam cylinders or heavy work where body or cooling qualities are indispensable. A fair trial insures its continued use. Address E. H. Kellogg, sole manufacturer, 17 Cedar St., New York. The unprecedented demand for Kinney Bros.' New Cigarette, Sweet Caporal, is a good recommendation as to their merit. Wheels and Pinions, heavy and light, remarkably strong and durable. Especially suited for sugar mills and similar work. Pittsburgh Steel Casting Company, Pittsburgh, Pa. Deoxidized Bronze. Patent for machine and engine journals. Philadelphia Smelting Co., Phila., Pa. For Sale.--4 H. P. Vertical Engine and Boiler (New York Safety Steam Power Co.'s make), as good, and in some respects better, than new. Address H. M. Quackenbush, Herkimer, N. Y. Wood-working Machinery, Waymouth Lathes. Specialty, Wardwell Patent Saw Bench; it has no equal. Improved Patent Planers; Elevators; Dowel Machines. Rollstone Machine Company, Fitchburg, Mass. Galland & Co.'s improved Hydraulic Elevators. Office 206 Broadway, N. Y., (Evening Post Building, room 22.) The only economical and practical Gas Engine in the market is the new "Otto" Silent, built by Schleicher. Schumm & Co., Philadelphia, Pa. Send for circular. Dead Pulleys that stop the running of loose pulleys and their belts, controlled from any point. Send for catalogue. Taper Sleeve Pulley Works, Erie, Pa. _Vick's Illustrated Monthly Magazine_ is one of the most beautiful magazines in the world. Each number contains a chromo of some group of flowers, and many fine engravings. Published monthly at $1.25 per year. Address James Vick, Rochester, N. Y. * * * * * [Illustration: Notes and Queries] NOTES & QUERIES HINTS TO CORRESPONDENTS. No attention will be paid to communications unless accompanied with the full name and address of the writer. Names and addresses of correspondents will not be given to inquirers. We renew our request that correspondents, in referring to former answers or articles, will be kind enough to name the date of the paper and the page, or the number of the question. Correspondents whose inquiries do not appear after a reasonable time should repeat them. Persons desiring special information which is purely of a personal character, and not of general interest, should remit from $1 to $5, according to the subject, as we cannot be expected to spend time and labor to obtain such information without remuneration. * * * * * (1) S. Q.--The speed of a circular saw at the periphery should be from 6,000 to 7,000 feet per minute. The number of revolutions per minute will of course vary with the diameter of the saw. (2) T. J. F. asks (1) for the best way to fasten emery on a wooden wheel, to be used in place of a solid emery wheel. A. Cover the wheel with leather devoid of grease, and coat the leather surface, a portion at a time, with good glue; immediately roll the glued surface in emery spread out on a board. 2. How can I fasten small pieces of looking glass on iron? A. Use equal parts of pitch and gutta percha together. (3) W. C. asks: 1. What is the power of the simple electric light described in SUPPLEMENT NO. 149? A. When supplied with a strong current it is equal to 5 or 6 5-foot gas burners. It is designed for temporary use only. 2. What is the cost of manufacturing the dynamo-electric machine in SUPPLEMENT NO. 161? A. The one shown in the article referred to cost about $35. (4) L. D. asks: 1. Which is the better conductor, silver or copper? A. Silver. 2. And the comparative resistance offered to the electric current by water and the above? A. Taking pure silver as 100,000,000, the conductivity of distilled water would be 0.01. (5) H. J. F. writes: In SUPPLEMENT 162 a simple electric light is described. I wish to light a room 20×20×10 feet. 1. How large is the bell glass? A. 2½ inches. 2. Can I use battery carbon? A. Use a carbon pencil made for electric lamps. 3. How can I make tray water tight after putting wire through? A. With gutta percha. 4. I have one large cell Bunsen and one Smee. How many more and of what kind shall I get? A. One of the batteries described in SUPPLEMENTS 157, 158, 159, will do, probably 8 or 10 Bunsen elements would be the best. (6) W. B. F. writes: I tried to make an electric pen, like the one described in your SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, of February 22d, 1879, using a Smee's battery, a circuit breaker, and an induction coil, but it did not work. Is there anything wrong, or is a condenser different from an induction coil? A. A condenser consists of a number of sheets of tin foil separated from each other by larger sheets of paper. One half of the tin foil sheets are connected with one terminal of the primary coil, the other half with the other terminal; the tin foil sheets connected with one terminal alternate with those of the other terminal. The condenser is essential to the working of the coil. For complete directions for making induction coils, see SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. 160. (7) J. De F. asks: 1. Knowing the resistance of a wire of given conductivity, length, and diameter, will the resistance of any other wire be in proportion inversely? A. Yes. 2. Is there heat enough developed in the secondary coil of an induction coil to prevent the use of paraffine as an insulating material? A. With proper battery power, no. 3. How high in the list of non-conductors does paraffine stand? A. It is one of the best. 4. Will a cotton insulator soaked in paraffine answer as well as silk? A. No, because it renders the covering of the wire too thick. 5. Can you recommend any insulating material for making induction coils which will dry rapidly? A. Alcoholic shellac varnish. Rosin to which a little beeswax has been added is an excellent insulator; it must be applied in a melted state. 6. What is the composition of the black material covering the Leclanche porous cell? A. Gutta percha. 7. Is the magneto-electric machine described in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT patented? A. To which do you refer? Most, if not all of them are patented. (8) B. V. F. writes: With reference to item 8, on page 139, of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, March 1, 1879, I think there is some mistake about the coal you think required to heat 1,000 cubic feet space. I burn some 8 tons coal to heat, in the whole year, such part of my house as must exceed 25×20×18=9,000 cubic feet. We keep up a moderate heat at night. Ventilate more than most families do; take part only of the cool air, and only in part of the coldest weather, from the cellar, which at such times is opened into the main entries. House wood, back plastered, and stands alone. If 100 lbs. coal would heat 1,000 feet one day, I ought to burn 900 lbs. a day, or nearly 14 tons in December and 14 more in January. A. We are glad to receive these data, which correspond quite closely with some obtained by recent accurate experiments. The estimate given in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN also agrees well with experiments on the use of hot air heaters for very small buildings or rooms. Of course, the larger the space to be heated, the more economically it can generally be done. (9) W. M. S. asks: Will the coil described in SUPPLEMENT NO. 160 do for the electric pen described in a recent number of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN? If not how must it be changed? A. It is too large; make it one half the size given. [Illustration] (10) B. G.--In reply to your inquiry as to Mr. Stroh's telephone experiment, we give the following, which we clip from the _English Mechanic_: A singular experimental effect, of special interest just now from its possible bearing on the theory of the source of sound in the Bell telephone, has just been observed by Mr. Stroh, the well known mechanician. If a telephone, T, with the circuit of its coil left open, be held to the ear, and a powerful magnet, M, be moved gently up and down along the length of the magnet, as shown by the arrow, and at a distance of an inch or two from it, a faint breathing sound will be heard, the recurring pulses of sound keeping time with the up and down motion of the magnet. The sound may be aptly compared to the steady breathing of a child, and there is a striking resemblance between it and the microphonic sounds of gases diffusing through a porous septum as heard by Mr. Chandler Roberts. We understand that Professor Hughes is investigating the cause of this curious sound by help of the microphone. (11) "Enterprise" asks: What part of its volume will iron expand in passing from a temperature of 60° to melting temperature? A. The cubical expansion of iron for each degree (C.) between 0° and 100° is 0.00003546 of its volume, its volume being 1. This ratio however, increases somewhat at higher temperatures, since the mean coefficient of expansion for each degree between 0° C. and 300° C. is 0.00004405. The question you ask has probably never been settled. You may form an approximation by the use of the above ratios, knowing the melting point of the iron. (12) P. L. O. asks for a good chemistry for a beginner to study without a teacher. A. Fownes' "Chemistry;" Gorup-Besanez, "Inorganic, Organic and Physiological Chemistry." (13) L. E. M. asks: What is the best method of keeping fine guns from rusting, and what oil should be used? A. For the outside, clear gum copal 1 part, oil of rosemary 1 part, absolute alcohol 3 parts. Clean and heat the metal and apply a flowing coat of the liquid by means of a camel's hair brush. Do not handle until the coat becomes dry and hard. For the inside of the barrel a trace of refined sperm oil is as good as anything, but an excess should be avoided. (14) A. H. B. asks how much weight, falling 10 feet, will be required to produce one horse power for five hours? A. One horse power for 5 hours = 33,000 × 300 = 9,900,000 foot pounds--so that the weight required is 9,900,000 ÷ 10 = 990,000 lbs. (15) A. D. R. asks: 1. In renewing a Leclanche battery, do the zincs have to be amalgamated? A. They are usually amalgamated. 2. Will two cells large size Leclanche battery give any light, using the simple lamp described in SUPPLEMENT NO. 162? A. No. (16) H. L. J. writes: In a recent issue of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN you state that the floating of solid iron on melted iron is on the same principle as the floating of ice in water. I do not quite understand how it can be. Please explain. A. Solid iron, at an elevated temperature, floats upon molten iron for the same reason that ice floats upon molten ice-water--because it is specifically lighter. You will find the subject discussed at length in Tyndall's "Heat as a Mode of Motion." (17) J. W. will find full directions for canning corn, etc., on p. 394 (4), vol. 39, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. (18) "Amateur" writes: I wish to make some small bells that have a clear ring. What metal or metals can I use that I can melt easily? A. Use an alloy of tin and antimony. See SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. 17. (19) H.--A nutritious mixed diet is unquestionably the best, care being taken to avoid an excess of meat. (20) W. F. writes: I have made an engine, and would like to find out what size of boiler it will require. The cylinder has 2¼ inch bore and 3 inches stroke. A. It depends upon pressure and speed to be maintained; probably a vertical tubular boiler, 15 inches diameter, and 32 to 36 inches high, would suit you. (21) R. G. (Salt Lake).--Please send full name. (22) J. M. G. asks: If two persons each pull one hundred pounds on opposite ends of a rope, what will be the strain on the rope? A. The strain on the rope will be 100 lbs. (23) W. M. M. asks: In laying off a mill stone in furrows, what draught is given? What amount of the space of a stone is given to furrows and what to grinding surface? A. There is considerable difference in the practice of various millers, and we would be glad to receive communications from those experienced in the art of dressing millstones. MINERALS, ETC.--Specimens have been received from the following correspondents, and examined, with the results stated: S. (New Orleans.)--The powder consists of a mixture of zinc oxide and finely powdered resin. A quantitative analysis would be necessary to determine the proportions. Any numbers of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT referred to in these columns may be had at this office. Price 10 cents each. * * * * * COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED. Life Preserving Stone. By J. D. W. On Ventilation. By D. W. What is Mental Action? By N. K. Panama Railroad or Canal. By G. R. P. A Problem. By K. On the Gary Motor. By G. F. M. Magnetic Motor. By G. W. W., W. A. A., G. H. F. House Warming. By H. B. F. The Injector. By M. A. B. Columbus' Problem; Cure for Diphtheria; The Mullein Cure for Consumption. By R. W. L. A Visit to Tula. By L. R. On Vacuum in Pumps and the Atwood Machine. By P. J. D. On the Patent Bill. By R. * * * * * [OFFICIAL.] INDEX OF INVENTIONS FOR WHICH LETTERS PATENT OF THE UNITED STATES WERE GRANTED IN THE WEEK ENDING February 18, 1879, AND EACH BEARING THAT DATE. [Those marked (r) are reissued patents.] A complete copy of any patent in the annexed list, including both the specifications and drawings, will be furnished from this office for one dollar. In ordering, please state the number and date of the patent desired, and remit to Munn & Co., 37 Park Row, New York city. Air heater, W. Pickhardt 212,499 Anchor, A. F. White 212,340 Animal trap, S. J. Bennett 212,430 Axle box, vehicle, P. K. Hughes 212,382 Axle, carriage, C. H. Kendall 212,387 Axle for wagons, trussed, J. Herby 212,378 Axle, vehicle, C. H. Kendall 212,386 Barrel cover, C. Brinton 212,350 Bed bottom, J. Flinn 212,451 Bed bottom, spring, W. B. Crich 212,443 Bedstead, sofa, A. N. Hornung 212,312 Bedstead, wardrobe, H. P. Blackman 212,348 Belt hook templet, E. Card 212,353 Boot and shoe laster, L. Graf 212,460 Boot and shoe sole polisher, etc., O. Gilmore 212,372 Boot and shoe sole edge trimmer, C. H. Helms 212,311 Boot fronts, cutting in, C. H. Colburn 212,357 Boot, India-rubber, G. Watkinson (r) 8,587 Bottle filler, W. S. Paddock 212,494 Bread board, H. Van Doren 212,334 Brick, shed for drying, C. H. Roselius 212,511 Bridge gate, A. Stempel 212,329 Broom corn tabler, G. W. Foulger 212,454 Button F. E. Williams 212,418 Calculator, tax, P. F. Pettibone 212,498 Car coupling, G. R. Hamilton 212,462 Car coupling, S. A. Haydock 212,464 Car coupling, J. Worrall 212,529 Car heaters, coupling for pipes of railway, J. W. Graydon 212,376 Car heater, railway, J. W. Graydon 212,375 Car heating pipe coupling, railway, J. W. Graydon 212,374 Car ventilation, J. Knipscheer 212,475 Cars, heating, J. & J. W. Russell 212,403 Cars, supplying water to wash stands on, D. H. Jones 212,385 Carbureter feed regulator, W. H. Reed 212,502 Card machine burr conveyer, W. C. Bramwell 212,435 Carpet beater, J. L. Leach 212,476 Carriage, C. H. Palmer, Jr. 212,397 Carriage bow, F. H. Niemann 212,491 Carriage, child's, F. H. Way (r) 8,583 Carriage top prop, J. P. Simpson 212,519 Carriage canopy top, D. Gleason 212,458 Cartridge, W. W. Hubbell 212,313 Chair foot or leg rest, M. E. Keiran 212,474 Chimney, locomotive engine, H. R. Walker 212,414 Chuck, lathe, J. H. Vinton 212,413 Churn power motion, W. F. Witherington 212,527 Cigarette, C. C. Millaudon 212,392 Coat, reversible, N. H. Lund 212,479 Cock and faucet, etc., self-closing, J. Broughton 212,436 Coffee pot, teapot, etc., stand, D. H. Murphy 212,395 Coffee roaster, R. Davis 212,445 Corset, W. Thomas 212,411 Corset steel, E. M. Smith 211,520 Dental plugger, W. G. A. Bonwill 212,434 Door securer and combined tool, P. E. Rudel 212,512 Door sill and carpet strip, S. M. Stewart 212,521 Drip pan and self-oiler for bearings, R. B. Eason 212,449 Egg cup and opener, D. H. Murphy 212,394 End gate, wagon, W. H. Parkin 212,398 File, bill, E. H. Owen 212,493 Files, recutting, M. J. Murphy 212,490 Filter, J. W. Lefferts 212,477 Firearm, breech-loading, H. Goodman 212,459 Firearm lock, Kaufmann & Warnant 212,473 Fire extinguisher, D. T. Perkins 212,322 Fires in buildings, extinguishing, C. Barnes 212,346 Fluid motor, Chase & Bowker 212,356 Fountain tip, H. G. Fiske 212,368 Furnace, G. B. Field 212,366 Game apparatus, W. T. Ebert 212,304 Garter, etc., clasp, L. Lobenstein 212,390 Gate, McKinley & Ellis 212,482 Gate, G. W. Pyle 212,501 Glassware, decorating, H. Feurhake 212,365 Glassware shaper and finisher, Atterbury & Beck 212,421 Glazier's tool, W. H. G. Savage 212,515 Governor and friction brake for machinery, speed, T. A. Weston 212,337 Grain drill, C. F. Davis (r) 8,589 Harness breeching strap, H. Holt 212,467 Harrow, toothless, J. W. Mulvey 212,393 Harvester, W. A. Wood 212,528 Harvester cutter, B. Pratt 212,323 Harvester, grain binding, J. F. Appleby 212,420 Harvester reel, B. Moreland 212,318 Harvesting machine, Dutton & Tornquist 212,303 Hat formers, web tender for, R. Eickemeyer 212,450 Hay binder and elevator, P. H. Nichols 212,319 Hay elevator, H. Barlow 212,427 Hay tedder, E. J. Knowlton 212,388 Headlights, signal for locomotive, W. Kelley (r) 8,591 Heat regulator for furnaces, A. C. Norcross (r) 8,582 Hoisting bucket, F. H. C. Mey 212,317 Hoisting drums, etc., friction brake and clutch for, T. A. 212,338 Weston Hoisting machine, T. A. Weston 212,339 Horse toe weight, G. C. Clausen 212,440 Hydrant, J. Snell 212,408 Hydrant, street, G. C. Morgan 212,486 Hydraulic motor, W. S. Puckett 212,500 Injector, steam boiler, G. R. Buckman 212,438 Keg trussing machine, E. & B. Holmes 212,381 Kettle, H. C. McLean 212,483 Kitchen cabinet, C. A. Adams 212,343 Lamp, J. H. Irwin 212,470 Lamp burner, E. B. Requa 212,401 Lamp, fountain, C. Stockmann 212,522 Lamp shade holder, Brown & Taplin 212,437 Lamp, street, J. Stewart 212,410 Lamp wick, H. Halvorson 212,309 Life preserver, T. Richards 212,402 Life preserver, R. E. Rose 212,404 Lock, W. E. Forster 212,452 Lock gate, D. Risher, Jr. 212,506 Mechanical movement, C. B. Hitchcock 212,380 Metal tube maker, A. Ball 212,425 Middlings separator, J. Schoonover 212,406 Milker, cow, A. C. Baldwin 212,423 Millstone adjustment, S. P. Walling 212,525 Millstone curb or hoop, J. S. Detwiler 212,361 Miter machine, J. J. Spilker 212,409 Mop head, H. Murch 212,489 Needle eye polisher, George & Payne 212,455 Oil cup, F. Lunkenheimer 212,480 Ore concentrator, E. W. Stephens 212,330 Ore roaster, C. E. Robinson 212,508 Oven bottom and slide, J. Jewett 212,471 Oysters, board bank for fattening, F. Lang 212,389 Package or box filler, Bolton & Strieby 212,349 Paper cutter, J. M. Jones 212,384 Paper folder, R. M. Hoe 212,466 Paper machines, method and apparatus for producing a vacuum in 212,362 the suction box of, Dunn & Hollister Paper machines, wire guide for J. W. Moore 212,485 Paper making, treating pulp stock, S. & J. Deacon 212,447 Paper scorer and cutter, G. L. Ingram 212,314 Paper scorer and cutter, W. F. Lodge 212,315 Permutation lock dial screen, Corbett & Miller 212,359 Picture exhibitor, A. L. High 212,465 Pill machine, Fort & Moore 212,453 Pipe wrench, S. W. Hudson 212,468 Pipe wrench with cutter, Franklin & Gilberds 212,369 Plant protector, E. R. Frederick 212,306 Plants, etc., poison distributer for, G. Townsend 212,412 Planter and drill, check row, G. J. Hyer 212,469 Planter, corn, J. A. Roderick 212,509 Plow, E. Walker 212,524 Plow attachment, A. O. Bement 212,429 Plow cutter, A. Aldrich 212,419 Plow, sulky, J. R. Whitney 212,341 Printer's roller, T. M. Fisher 212,367 Printing machine, L. C. Crowell 212,444 Pumping engine, duplex, G. F. Blake (r) 8,585 Radiator for steam heaters, Covert & Snyder 212,360 Railway crossing, Bernard & Perkins 212,432 Railway switch, C. F. Gessert 212,456 Ratchet mechanism and clutch for machinery, T. A. Weston 212,336 Rocking chair, J. W. Hamburger 212,461 Rotary engine, A. B. Haughey 212,463 Rubber mat, E. L. Perry 212,497 Sad iron holder, A. Failor 212,363 Safety pin, I. W. Stewart (r) 8,592 Salt cellar, W. Sellers 212,518 Sandpaper roll, O. Gilmore 212,371 Sash cord guide, Clarkson & Kesler (r) 8,586 Sash fastener, J. Benson 212,431 Sash fastener, G. W. Cary 212,354 Sash fastener, J. B. Morris 212,487 Saw, circular, G. Schleicher 212,516 Saw handle, E. R. Osgood 212,396 Saw, jig, G. W. Gary 212,355 Saw mill, gang, H. D. & E. N. Wickes 212,526 Saw mill head block, J. T. James 212,383 Sawing machine, scroll, N. P. Selden 212,326 Scales, platform, F. Fairbanks 212,364 Scales, weighing, G. L. C. Coulon 212,300 Scarf pins, etc., making ball heads of, J. N. Allen 212,297 Scythe snath fastening, P. E. Rudel 212,513 Sewer trap, J. P. Cahill 212,352 Sewing implement, A. J. Lytle 212,481 Sewing machine, C. O. Parmenter 212,495 Sewing machine attachment, J. B. Sulgrove 212,523 Sewing machine plaiter, White & Bowhannan 212,417 Sheet metal vessel bottom, F. W. Moseley 212,484 Shoe, Searl & Bly 212,517 Skate, C. T. Day (r) 8,590 Skylight, J. Friend 212,307 Slate frame, E. Butler (r) 8,588 Sled propeller, G. F. Shaver (r) 8,593 Smelting furnace, iron, P. L. Weimer 212,415 Sole edge burnisher, T. P. Young 212,342 Spoke tenoning machine, A. J. Roberts 212,507 Sprinkling can, G. F. Payne 212,321 Stamp, postage and revenue, K. Wheeler 212,416 Staple machine, W. M. Collins 212,441 Staples in paper, etc., device for inserting metallic, G. W. 212,316 McGill Stave crozer and chamferer, H. H. Dunlevy 212,448 Steak tenderer, E. Richmond 212,505 Steam boiler, fire tube, J. Cowhig 212,301 Steam brake for locomotives, etc., W. L. Card 212,439 Steam piping for heating, etc., B. F. Osborne 212,420 Steam trap, I. W. Merrill 212,391 Stove and furnace grate, S. Smyth 212,407 Stove, cooking, G. H. Hess 212,379 Stove, cooking, J. Jewett 212,472 Stove, oil, Fleming & Hamilton 212,305 Stove oven door and shelf, C. W. Brieder 212,351 Strainer, gravy, J. Scheider (r) 8,584 Strap for garments, adjusting, T. O. Potter 212,400 Street motor, J. T. Cord 212,442 Surveying instrument leveler, G. N. Saegmuller 212,405 Swing, J. Ryan 212,514 Telephone apparatus, speaking, E. Gray 212,373 Telephony, electric, Black & Rosebrugh 212,433 Telephony, electric, A. M. Rosebrugh 212,510 Thill coupling, D. C. Bacon 212,422 Thill coupling, C. E. Gillespie et al. 212,308 Thill coupling, M. F. Ten Eyck 212,333 Thill supporter, vehicle, H. O. Rector 212,325 Ticket, passenger, J. H. Purdy 212,324 Tiles for use as stands, frame for holding ornamental or fancy 212,335 pottery, C. A. Wellington Tiles, decorative, J. G. Low 212,478 Tiles, paving blocks, etc., composition for drain, W. H. Haight 212,377 Tire upsetter, B. K. Taylor 212,332 Tobacco, curing, A. P. Poladura 212,399 Tobacco cutter, Bauer & Seitz 212,347 Tobacco flavoring compound, D. Sternberg 212,331 Tobacco manufacture, J. T. Harris 212,310 Tobacco presser, F. B. Deane 212,446 Traction engine, J. Cooper 212,358 Truss, J. R. Alexander 212,344 Type distributer, A. C. Richards 212,503 Type setter, A. C. Richards 212,504 Umbrella, M. Girbardt 212,457 Umbrella runner, W. H. Belknap 212,428 Undershoe or slipper, G. Gardner 212,370 Vehicle seat lock, W. G. Allen 212,345 Vehicle spring, M. H. Crane 212,302 Vehicle spring bolster, J. G. Snyder 212,328 Velocipede, E. C. F. Otto 212,492 Wash boiler, F. J. Boyer 212,299 Washing and bath tub, J. B O. Shevill 212,327 Washing machine, J. W. Patterson 212,496 Water meter diaphragm, W. B. Mounteney 212,488 Whip holder, Curtis & Worden (r) 8,581 Wire measurer and cutter, G. A. Baron 212,426 Wire, winding tubes and rods with, A. Ball 212,424 Wrench, C. B. Billings 212,298 * * * * * TRADE MARKS. Boots, shoes, and brogans, W. F. Thorne & Co. 7,037 Cigars, Sullivan & Burk 7,035 Cigars, cigarettes, and smoking and chewing tobacco, B. Hilson 7,038 Cotton gins, Printup, Brother & Pollard 7,042 Fertilizers for flowers, W. H. Bowker & Co. 7,041 Grain fans, J. Montgomery 7,032 Hair goods for ladies' wear, M. E. Thompson 7,040 Hoes, Semple & Birge Manufacturing Company 7,039 Medicine for the cure of neuralgia, and the like diseases, J. S. Nicolds 7,033 Roofing paper, carpet paper, or paper felt, and building paper, Watson & Janes 7,043 Soap, Gallup & Hewitt 7,036 Spool cotton, J. & J. Clark & Co 7,031 Table cutlery, John Russell Cutlery Company 7,034 * * * * * DESIGNS. Carpet, T. J. Stearns 11,029 Combined sleigh bell and terret ring, H. M. Richmond 11,027 Crocheted body for shawls, L. Howard 11,028 Oil cloth, C. T. & V. E. Meyer 11,024 to 11,026 Statue, A. Bartholdi 11,023 * * * * * ENGLISH PATENTS ISSUED TO AMERICANS. From February 18 to February 21, inclusive. Bed bottoms, etc.--C. D. Flynt, Brooklyn, N. Y. Berth.--D. Huston, Boston, Mass. Lead smelting furnace.--G. T. Lewis, Philadelphia, Pa. Locks.--A. P. Thomas _et al._, Baltimore, Md. Railway joint.--P. T. Madison, Indianapolis, Ind. Spikes for railroads.--R. Bocklen, New York city. Ventilating buildings.--F. S. Norton, New York city. * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS. INSIDE PAGE, EACH INSERTION 75 CENTS A LINE. BACK PAGE, EACH INSERTION $1.00 A LINE. (About eight words to a line.) _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ * * * * * A RARE OPPORTUNITY, ON EASY TERMS. To be sold at Auction, at Charleston, South Carolina, on Tuesday, the first day of April, 1879, the Taylor Iron Works, complete and in operation, together with all stores, stock, and work on hand on day of sale. The above is a large, first-class engineering establishment, complete within itself for all kinds of work, comprising iron and brass foundries, boiler shop, machine shops, pattern and millwright shops, with a large stock of patterns for local machinery, and Taylor presses. Connected with the works is a large, well-stocked engineer and mill supply store. All departments have the best of modern tools in thorough repair. Buildings comparatively new, and conveniently arranged on large grounds. The business was established 1844; has always done a large business and maintained a high reputation. The present works, built since 1866, have ample facilities to work 200 men. At present about 100 men are employed. For further particulars apply to the works or to JOHN F. TAYLOR, Sharon Springs, N. Y., who will meet parties at Albany, N. Y., by appointment, or New York, if preferred. * * * * * LARGEST ASSORTMENT IN THE WORLD of Plays, Dramas, Comedies, Farces, Ethiopian Dramas, Plays for Ladies only, Plays for Gentlemen only. Wigs, Beards, Moustaches, Face Preparations, Burnt Cork, Jarley's Wax Works, Tableaux, Charades, Pantomimes, Guides to the Stage, and for Amateurs Make up Book, Make up Boxes, New Plays. SAM'L FRENCH & SON, 38 East 14th St., Union Square, New York. CATALOGUES SENT FREE!!! * * * * * 50 _Latest Style_ CARDS. _Bouquet, Lawn, Floral,_ etc., in case, _name in gold_, 10c. SEAVY BROS., Northford, Ct. [Symbol: Right index] RARE OPPORTUNITY. [Symbol: Left index] The proprietor, advanced in years and desirous of retiring from active control of business, would _sell at a bargain_, or convert into a joint stock company and retain an interest himself, a Foundry and Machine Shops, with all their machinery and fixtures complete, and now crowded with custom work, having cost upwards of sixty thousand dollars, and the only ones of magnitude for 120 miles on the Mississippi River, on various points of which may be seen specimens of work of these shops at Stillwater, Winona, McGregor. Dubuque, Fulton, Lyons, Clinton, Muscatine, and on many of the boats. For particulars, address the proprietor at Clinton, Iowa. A. P. HOSFORD. * * * * * FOR SALE--GEAR CUTTER. Been in use only eighteen months; will cut gears, both Spur-Bevel-Miter and Spiral, from four feet to one inch in diameter. Is complete with counter-shaft and several cutters. Machine made by Pond, of Worcester. Index made by Browne & Sharpe. Cost $900. Will sell for $250. Address J. G. STOWE, 126 Main Street, Cincinnati, O. * * * * * THE TRIUMPH NON-CONDUCTOR weighs but 1½ lbs. to the square foot, and saves daily four pounds of coal. (Asbestos saves but 2 lbs.) Price 15 cts.--5 cts. cash and 10 cts. after satisfactory trial. Agents wanted. For circulars showing WHY fuel is wasted and HOW 25 to 50 per cent., can be saved; also, HOW to construct reduction works for mineral ores of half the present weight and cost, to do three times the work with the fuel now used, and save 98 per cent. of assay; also, the opinions of distinguished engineers, address B. F. SMITH, New Orleans, La. * * * * * PHOTO VISITING CARDS--Now all the rage in Paris. One dozen beautiful gilt edged (round cornered) Cards with your name and photograph, only 60 cents; 2 dozen, $1. Full particulars and a 50-page book free. E. NASON & CO., 111 Nassau St., New York. * * * * * "BELL" TELEPHONES. _Any_ one can make in fifteen minutes. Send three 3c. stamps for "Where to get the Parts, Prices (Total $3.60 per pair), and how put together." A. H. DAVIS, 30 Hanover St., Boston, Mass. * * * * * CATARRH. A SURE CURE. Samples by mail, 10c. GEO. N. STODDARD, Buffalo, N. Y. It cures others. _It will cure you_. Sample will prove. * * * * * ANY NUMBER OF OPPORTUNITIES to buy what you want or sell or exchange what you don't want, in the _Property Journal_. Send 5c. for copy. ANDERSON & CO., 252 Broadway, New York. * * * * * NOVELTIES, NOTIONS, WATCHES, CHEAP JEWELRY, STATIONERY PACKAGES. Agents and country stores supplied. Illustrated circular _free_. J. BRIDE & CO., Manufacturers, Salesroom, 297 B'way, New York. Address letters to P. O. Box 2773. * * * * * FOR UNIVERSAL LATHE DOGS, DIE DOGS, ETC., send for circular to C. W. LE COUNT, S. Norwalk, Ct. * * * * * ICE-HOUSE AND COLD ROOM.--BY R. G. Hatfield. With directions for construction. Four engravings. SUPPLEMENT NO. 59. Price, 10 cents. * * * * * SEND FOR OUR PRICED AND ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUES. Part 1st--MATHEMATICAL INSTRUMENTS, 160 pages; contains list and prices of Drawing Instruments, Drawing Materials, Pocket Compasses, Surveying Compasses, Engineers' Transits and Levels, Surveying Chains, Tape Measures, Pocket Rules, and Books relating to Drawing, Engineering, and Mechanics. Part 2d--OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS, 144 pages; contains list and prices of Spectacles, Eye Glasses, Lenses, Spy Glasses, Telescopes, Opera and Field Glasses, Graphoscopes, Stereoscopes, Camera Obscuras, Camera Lucidas, Microscopes, Microscopic Preparations, and Books on Optics and Microscopy. Part 3d--MAGIC LANTERNS AND SLIDES, 112 pages; contains list and prices or Magic Lanterns for Toys, for Public and Private Exhibitions, Sciopticons, Stereopticons, Scientific Lanterns, and accessory apparatus to be used with them; Magic Lantern Slides, both colored and uncolored. Part 4th--PHYSICAL INSTRUMENTS, 188 pages; contains list and prices of Instruments to illustrate Lectures in every department of Physics and Chemical Science, Air Pumps, Electric Machines, Galvanic Batteries, Barometers, Thermometers, Rain Gauges, Globes, Spectroscopes, Auzoux's Anatomical Models, and Books relating to Scientific Subjects. JAMES W. QUEEN & CO., Optical and Philosophical Instrument Makers, 924 CHESTNUT ST., PHILADELPHIA. * * * * * WOOD-WORKING MACHINERY, Such as Woodworth Planing, Tonguing, and Grooving Machines, Daniel's Planers, Richardson's Patent Improved Tenon Machines, Mortising, Moulding, and Re-Saw Machines, and Wood-Working Machinery generally. Manufactured by WITHERBY, RUGG & RICHARDSON, 26 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Mass. (Shop formerly occupied by R. BALL & CO.) * * * * * THE DRIVEN WELL. Town and County privileges for making DRIVEN WELLS and selling Licenses under the established AMERICAN DRIVEN WELL PATENT, leased by the year to responsible parties, by WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO., NEW YORK. * * * * * MINING MACHINERY. ENGINES. BOILERS, PUMPS, Coal and Ore Jigs, Dust Burning Appliances. Drawings and advice free to customers. Jeanesville Iron Works (J. C. Haydon & Co.). Address HOWELL GREEN, Supt., Jeanesville, Luzerne Co., Pa. * * * * * IT PAYS to sell our Rubber Hand Printing Stamps. Goods delivered in any country. Circulars free. G. A. HARPER & BRO., Cleveland, O. * * * * * FOR TEN DOLLARS CASH, we will insert a seven-line advertisement one week in a list of 269 weekly newspapers, or four lines in a different list of 337 papers, or ten lines two weeks in a choice of either of four separate and distinct lists containing from 70 to 100 papers each, or four lines one week in all four of the same lists, or one line one week in all six lists combined, being more than 1,000 papers. We also have lists of papers by States, throughout the United States and Canada. Send 10 cents for our 100 page pamphlet. Address GEO. P. ROWELL & CO., Newspaper Advertising Bureau, 10 Spruce Street, New York. * * * * * MACHINERY AT VERY LOW PRICES. 2d hand Lathes, Drills, Planers, Hand Tools for Iron Work, new Woodworth Planing Machines, Resawing, Tenoning, Moulding Machines, Scroll Saws, Portable Steam Engine. Jos. R. Blossom, Ass'e, Matteawan, N. Y. * * * * * THE GEORGE PLACE MACHINERY AGENCY Machinery of Every Description. 121 Chambers and 103 Reade Streets, New York. * * * * * 60 Chromo and Perfumed Cards [no 3 alike], Name in Gold and Jet, 10c. CLINTON BROS., Clintonville, Ct. * * * * * ROOF PAINTING. For $5, by Post Office Order or express, I will send the recipe for making Langhorne's English Gum Coating Paint and other mineral paints, with full instructions for roof and sidewall painting. This paint is used by the U. S. Government. Address M. LANGHORNE, 708 E Street, Washington, D. C. * * * * * FOR SALE.--LETTERS PATENT OF Wilhide's Celebrated Noiseless Self-setting Rat and Mouse Traps. Thoroughly introduced. Traps sold by all dealers. Address Owners and Manufacturers, J. T. WILHIDE & BRO., York Road, Carroll Co., Md. * * * * * IMPORTANT FOR ALL CORPORATIONS AND MANF'G CONCERNS.--BUERK'S WATCHMAN'S TIME DETECTOR, capable of accurately controlling the motion of a watchman or patrolman at the different stations of his beat. Send for circular. J. E. BUERK, P. O. BOX 979. BOSTON, MASS N. B.--The suit against Imhaeuser & Co., of New York, was decided in my favor, June 10, 1874. A fine was assessed against them Nov. 11, 1876, for selling contrary to the order of the court. Persons buying or using clocks infringing on my patent will be dealt with according to law. * * * * * SPARE THE CROTON AND SAVE THE COST. DRIVEN OR TUBE WELLS furnished to large consumers of Croton and Ridgewood Water. WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO., 414 Water St., N. Y., who control the patent for Green's American Driven Well. * * * * * A New and Valuable Work for the Practical Mechanic and Engineer. APPLETONS' CYCLOPÆDIA OF APPLIED MECHANICS. A DICTIONARY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING AND THE MECHANICAL ARTS. Illustrated by 5,000 Engravings. _Edited by PARK BENJAMIN, Ph.D._ This valuable work is now being published in semi-monthly parts, at fifty cents each. Active agents wanted. For terms and territory address GEO. W. DAVIS, care of D. APPLETON & CO., New York. * * * * * CAVEATS, COPYRIGHTS, TRADE MARKS, ETC. Messrs. Munn & Co., in connection with the publication of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, continue to examine Improvements, and to act as Solicitors of Patents for Inventors. In this line of business they have had OVER THIRTY YEARS' EXPERIENCE, and now have _unequaled facilities_ for the preparation of Patent Drawings, Specifications, and the Prosecution of Applications for Patents in the United States, Canada, and Foreign Countries. Messrs. Munn & Co. also attend to the preparation of Caveats, Trade Mark Regulations, Copyrights for Books, Labels, Reissues, Assignments, and Reports on Infringements of Patents. All business intrusted to them is done with special care and promptness, on very moderate terms. We send free of charge, on application, a pamphlet containing further information about Patents and how to procure them; directions concerning Trade Marks, Copyrights, Designs, Patents, Appeals, Reissues, Infringements, Assignments, Rejected Cases, Hints on the Sale of Patents, etc. _Foreign Patents_.--We also send, _free of charge_, a Synopsis of Foreign Patent Laws, showing the cost and method of securing patents in all the principal countries of the world. American inventors should bear in mind that, as a general rule, any invention that is valuable to the patentee in this country is worth equally as much in England and some other foreign countries. Five patents--embracing Canadian, English, German, French, and Belgian--will secure to an inventor the exclusive monopoly to his discovery among about ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLIONS of the most intelligent people in the world. The facilities of business and steam communication are such that patents can be obtained abroad by our citizens almost as easily as at home. The expense to apply for an English patent is $75; German, $100; French, $100; Belgian, $100; Canadian, $50. _Copies of Patents_.--Persons desiring any patent issued from 1836 to November 26, 1867, can be supplied with official copies at reasonable cost, the price depending upon the extent of drawings and length of specifications. Any patent issued since November 27, 1867, at which time the Patent Office commenced printing the drawings and specifications, may be had by remitting to this office $1. A copy of the claims of any patent issued since 1836 will be furnished for $1. When ordering copies, please to remit for the same as above, and state name of patentee, title of invention, and date of patent. A pamphlet, containing full directions for obtaining United States patents sent free. A handsomely bound Reference Book, gilt edges, contains 140 pages and many engravings and tables important to every patentee and mechanic, and is a useful hand book of reference for everybody. Price 25 cents, mailed free. Address MUNN & CO., Publishers SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. _BRANCH OFFICE--Corner of F and 7th Streets, Washington, D. C._ * * * * * PRACTICAL DRAUGHTSMAN'S BOOK OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AND MACHINISTS' & ENGINEERS' DRAWING COMPANION. Forming a Complete Course of Mechanical, Engineering, and Architectural Drawing. From the French of M. Armengaud the elder, Professor of Design in Conservatoire of Arts and Industry, Paris, and MM. Armengaud the younger, and Amoroux, Civil Engineers. Rewritten and arranged with additional matter and plates, selections from and examples of the most useful and generally employed mechanism of the day. By William Johnson, Assoc. Inst. C. E. Illustrated by fifty folio steel plates, and fifty wood cuts. A new edition, 4to....$10 Among the contents are: Linear Drawing, Definitions, and Problems. Sweeps, Sections, and Mouldings, Elementary Gothic Forms, and Rosettes. Ovals, Ellipses, Parabolas, and Volutes. Rules and Principal Data. Study of Projections. Elementary Principles. Of Prisms and other Solids. Rules and Practical Data. On coloring Sections, with applications. Conventional Colors, Composition or Mixture of Colors. Continuation of the Study of Projection--Use of Sections--details of machinery. Simple applications--spindles, shafts, couplings, wooden patterns. Method of constructing a wooden model or pattern of a coupling. Elementary applications. Rules and Practical Data. THE INTERSECTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF SURFACES, WITH APPLICATIONS.--The Intersection of Cylinders and Cones. The Delineation and Development of Helices, Screws, and Serpentines. Application of the helix--the construction of a staircase. The Intersection of Surfaces--applications to stop cocks. Rules and Practical Data. THE STUDY AND CONSTRUCTION OF TOOTHED GEAR.--Involute, cycloid, and epicycloid. Involute, Cycloid. External epicycloid, described by a circle rolling about a fixed circle inside of it. Internal epicycloid. Delineation of a rack and pinion in gear. Gearing of a worm with a worm wheel. Cylindrical or Spur Gearing. Practical delineation of a couple of Spur wheels. The Delineation and Construction of Wooden Patterns for Toothed Wheels. Rules and Practical Data. CONTINUATION OF THE STUDY OF TOOTHED GEAR.--Design for a pair of bevel wheels in gear. Construction of wooden patterns for a pair of bevel wheels. Involute and Helical Teeth. Contrivances for obtaining differential Movements. Rules and Practical Data. ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OF SHADOWS.--Shadows of Prisms, Pyramids, and Cylinders. Principles of Shading. Continuation of the Study of Shadows. Tuscan Order. Rules and practical data. APPLICATION OF SHADOWS TO TOOTHED GEAR.--Application of Shadows to Screws. Application of Shadow to a Boiler and its Furnace. Shading in Black--Shading in Colors. THE CUTTING AND SHAPING OF MASONRY.--Rules and Practical Data. Remarks on Machine Tools. THE STUDY OF MACHINERY AND SKETCHING.--Various applications and combinations: The Sketching of Machinery. Drilling Machines; Motive Machines; Water wheels. Construction and Setting up of water wheels. Delineation of water wheels. Design of a water wheel. Sketch of a water wheel. Overshot water wheels. Water Pumps; Steam Motors; High-pressure expansive steam engine. Details of Construction; Movements of the Distribution and Expansion Valves; Rules and Practical Data. OBLIQUE PROJECTIONS. PARALLEL PERSPECTIVE. TRUE PERSPECTIVE.--Elementary principles. Applications--flour mill driven by belts. Description of the mill. Representation of the mill in perspective. EXAMPLES OF FINISHED DRAWINGS OF MACHINERY. [Symbol: Right index] The above, or any of our Books, sent by mail, free of postage, at the publication price. Our new and enlarged CATALOGUE OF PRACTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC BOOKS--96 pages, 8vo.--sent free to any one who will furnish his address. HENRY CAREY BAIRD & CO., INDUSTRIAL PUBLISHERS and BOOKSELLERS, 810 Walnut Street, Philadelphia. * * * * * STEAM PUMPS. HENRY R. WORTHINGTON, 239 Broadway, N. Y. 83 Water St., Boston. THE WORTHINGTON DUPLEX PUMPING ENGINES FOR WATER WORKS--Compound, Condensing or Non-Condensing. Used in over 100 Water-Works Stations. STEAM PUMPS--Duplex and Single Cylinder. PRICE LIST ISSUED JAN. 1, 1879, WITH A REDUCTION EXCEEDING 30 PER CENT. WATER METERS. OIL METERS. * * * * * [Illustration: Truss] THIS NEW ELASTIC TRUSS Has a Pad differing from all others, is cup-shape, with Self-Adjusting Ball in center, adapts itself to all positions of the body, while the BALL in the cup PRESSES BACK the INTESTINES JUST AS A PERSON WOULD WITH THE FINGER. With light pressure the Hernia is held securely day and night, and a radical cure certain. It is easy, durable and cheap. Sent by mail. Circulars free. EGGLESTON TRUSS CO., CHICAGO, ILL. * * * * * THE HANCOCK INSPIRATOR TESTIMONIALS. OFFICE OF THE HANCOCK INSP. CO., LONDON, ENG., Feb. 11, 1879. I have just received an order from the English Government for 22 Number 15 Inspirators--making 24 machines in all for the Government this month. B. H. WARREN, Agent. * * * * * OFFICE OF H. S. MANNING & CO., 111 Liberty St., NEW YORK, Feb. 26, 1879. GENTLEMEN: We have authority from Mr. Martin, Chief Engineer Union Ferry Co., Brooklyn, to state that they have 17 Inspirators at work on 17 of their boats, feeding their main boilers, and all giving satisfaction, and to refer any one to him. Yours truly, H. S. MANNING & CO., Agents. [Symbol: Right index] ILLUSTRATED AND DESCRIPTIVE CIRCULARS SENT ON APPLICATION TO HANCOCK INSPIRATOR CO., 52 CENTRAL WHARF, BOSTON. * * * * * [Illustration: Corrugated Iron] THIS NEW MOSELEY IRON BRIDGE AND ROOF CO. CORRUGATED IRON Buildings, Roofs, Shutters, Doors, Iron Sashes, Skylights, etc. 5 Dey Street, New York. * * * * * [Illustration: Crusher] THIS NEW BLAKE'S STONE AND ORE BREAKER AND CRUSHER. For breaking hard and brittle substances to any size. Endorsed by the leading MINING, MANUFACTURING, and RAILROAD corporations in the UNITED STATES and FOREIGN COUNTRIES. FIRST PREMIUM wherever exhibited, and hundreds of testimonials of the _highest character_. A NEW SIZE FOR PROSPECTING AND LABORATORY USE. [Symbol: Right index] ALL STONE CRUSHERS not made or licensed by us, containing vibratory convergent jaws actuated by a revolving shaft and fly-wheel, are infringements on our patent, and makers and users of such will be held accountable. Address BLAKE CRUSHER CO., NEW HAVEN, CONN. * * * * * [Illustration: RIVAL STEAM PUMPS. $35. and UPWARDS JOHN McGOWAN & Co. CINCINNATI, OHIO. ] * * * * * PULMOCURA AN ABSOLUTE AND UNFAILING REMEDY FOR CONSUMPTION and all other diseases of the LUNGS AND THROAT. Mailed free on receipt of $1. A. A. MARTIN, Pulmocura Man'f'g Co., sole depot for the U. S., 60 East 12th St., cor. Broadway, New York. * * * * * Soft, Strong, and Smooth Iron or Brass CASTINGS Plain, Galvanized, Bronzed or Nickled to order promptly. Also patterns and models. Light work a specialty. LIVINGSTON & CO., Iron Founders, Pittsburg, Pa. * * * * * [Illustration: Horse Shoe] NEW STEEL HORSE SHOE With Level Spring Platform--Continuous Calk. The best in the world. Cures Tender and Contracted Feet, Corns, Interfering, Quarter-crack Lameness, and all evils resulting from the use of the common shoe. Responsible men can make money selling this Shoe. Send for pamphlet. Trial set with nails, $1.00. To measure, place foot on paper, and draw pencil around. The JOHN D. BILLINGS PATENT HORSE SHOE COMPANY 265 Broadway, New York. * * * * * [Illustration: Steel Stamps. N.Y. STENCIL WORKS, 87 Nassau St., N.Y.] * * * * * LAP WELDED CHARCOAL IRON Boiler Tubes, Steam Pipe, Light and Heavy Forgings, Engines, Boilers, Cotton Presses, Rolling Mill and Blast Furnace Work. READING IRON WORKS, 261 SOUTH FOURTH ST., PHILA. * * * * * PHOSPHOR-BRONZE BEARINGS, PUMP-RODS, AND SPRING WIRE. [Illustration: Phosphor-bronze] Apply to THE PHOSPHOR-BRONZE SMELTING CO., Limited, 2038 Washington Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * LATHES, PLANERS, SHAPERS Drills, Bolt and Gear Cutters, Milling Machines. Special Machinery. E. GOULD & EBERHARDT, Newark, N. J. * * * * * THE BEST STEAM PUMP in AMERICA THE DEANE Made by HOLYOKE MACHINE CO. More than 4500 in use. Send for reduced Price List. Deane Steam Pump Works 85 LIBERTY ST., NEW YORK. * * * * * [Illustration: Gear Wheels] Small Tools of all kinds; GEAR WHEELS, parts of MODELS, and materials of all kinds. Catalogues free. GOODNOW & WIGHTMAN, 176 Wash'n St., Boston, Mass. * * * * * FINE PAMPHLETS printed for 75c. A PAGE per 1,000. 1,000 Fine 9×12 Circulars, $2.50. Price list or estimate and samples for stamp. 250 Bill Heads, $1. "LOCAL" PRINTING HOUSE, Silver Creek, N. Y. * * * * * $77 a Month and expenses guaranteed to Agents. Outfit free. SHAW & CO., AUGUSTA, MAINE. * * * * * LEFFEL WATER WHEELS. [Illustration: Water Wheel] With recent improvements. PRICES GREATLY REDUCED. 7000 in successful operation. FINE NEW PAMPHLET FOR 1877 Sent free to those interested JAMES LEFFEL & CO., Springfield, O. 109 Liberty St., N. Y. City. * * * * * [Illustration: Medal] Paris, 1878 Australia, 1877 Phila., 1876 Santiago, 1875 Vienna, 1873 J. A. FAY & CO'S WOOD WORKING MACHINERY was awarded at the Paris Exposition over all competitors THE GOLD MEDAL OF HONOR. Also highest award at Phila., Santiago, Australia, and Vienna. It is ORIGINAL IN DESIGN, SIMPLE IN CONSTRUCTION, PERFECT IN WORKMANSHIP, SAVES LABOR, ECONOMIZES LUMBER, AND INCREASES PRODUCTS OF THE HIGHEST STANDARD OF EXCELLENCE. Railroad, Furniture, and Agricultural Implement Shops, Planing Mills, etc., equipped at short notice, and the lowest cash prices. Send for Circulars. J. A. FAY & CO., Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A. * * * * * L. F. STANDISH & CO., SCREW MANUFACTURERS, Builders of Small Machinery and Fine Tools. 26 Artisan St., New Haven, Ct. * * * * * [Illustration: Emery Wheel.] Emery Wheel. NEW YORK BELTING AND PACKING COMP'Y. The Oldest and Largest Manufacturers of the Original SOLID VULCANITE EMERY WHEELS. All other kinds Imitations and Inferior. Our name is stamped in full upon all our standard BELTING, PACKING, and HOSE. Address NEW YORK BELTING AND PACKING CO., NEW YORK. JOHN H. CHEEVER, Treas. * * * * * THE SEVENTH CINCINNATI INDUSTRIAL EXPOSITION Opens for the reception of goods AUGUST 20TH. Opens to the public SEPTEMBER 10TH, and continues open until OCTOBER 11TH, in the NEW PERMANENT BUILDINGS ERECTED FOR THE PURPOSE. Machinery Tested and Fully Reported upon. Send for Rules and Premium Lists after April 1. H. McCOLLUM, Sec'y. * * * * * [Illustration: Amalgamating.] THE FORSTER-FIRMIN GOLD AND SILVER AMALGAMATING COMP'Y of Norristown, Pa., will grant state rights or licenses or easy terms. This system works up to assay, and recovers the mercury rapidly. Apply as above. * * * * * THOMAS'S CONCENTRATED DYE Stuffs. (138 Recipes SENT GRATIS.) (See SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, March 15, '79.) Address N. SPENCER THOMAS, Elmira, N. Y. * * * * * [Illustration: Rotary Pressure Blower.] BAKER ROTARY PRESSURE BLOWER. (FORCED BLAST) Warranted superior to any other. WILBRAHAM BROS. 2318 Frankford Ave. PHILADELPHIA * * * * * "THE 1876 INJECTOR." Simple, Durable, and Reliable. Requires no special valves. Send for illustrated circular. WM. SELLERS & CO., Phila. * * * * * [Illustration: Cold Rolled Shafting.] The fact that this shafting has 75 per cent. greater strength, a finer finish, and is truer to gauge, than any other in use renders it undoubtedly the most economical. We are also the sole manufacturers of the CELEBRATED COLLINS' PAT. COUPLING, and furnish Pulleys, Hangers, etc., of the most approved styles. Price list mailed on application to JONES & LAUGHLINS, Try Street, 2d and 3d Avenues, Pittsburgh, Pa. 190 S. Canal Street, Chicago, Ill., and Milwaukee. Wis. [Right index] Stocks of this shafting in store and for sale by FULLER, DANA & FITZ, Boston, Mass. Geo. Place Machinery Agency, 121 Chambers St., N. Y. * * * * * VEGETABLE AND FLOWER SEEDS WE SELL EVERYTHING FOR THE GARDEN Descriptive Catalogues of 175 pages sent Free PETER HENDERSON & CO. _35 Cortlandt St., New York._ FLOWER AND FRUIT PLANTS * * * * * [Illustration: Engraving.] L. SMITH HOBART, President. JOHN C. MOSS, Superintendent. TYPE-METAL RELIEF PLATES. A SUPERIOR SUBSTITUTE FOR WOOD-CUTS AT MUCH LOWER PRICES. Persons desiring illustrations for Books, Newspapers, Catalogues, Advertisements, or for any other purposes, can have their work done by us promptly and in the best style. OUR RELIEF PLATES are engraved by photo-chemical means; are mounted on blocks type-high ready for use on any ordinary press, and will wear longer than the common stereotype plates. They have a perfectly smooth printing surface, and the lines are _as deep, as even,_ and _as sharp_ as they could possibly be cut by hand. ELECTROTYPES may be made from them in the same manner as from wood-cuts. COPY. The engraving is done either from prints or pen-drawings. Almost all kinds of prints can be re-engraved directly from the copy, provided they be in _clear, black lines_ or stipple, and on _white_ or only slightly tinted paper. Pen drawings, suitable for engraving by us, must be made with _thoroughly_ BLACK ink, on _smooth, white_ paper. They should usually be made twice the length and twice the width of the plates desired. When such drawings cannot be furnished us, we can produce them from photographs, pencil sketches, or designs of any kind accompanied with proper instructions. Photographs taken in the usual way, and of any convenient size, we can use. CHANGE OF SIZE.--Wood-cut prints of the coarser kind may often be reduced to half their lineal dimensions, while others will admit of very little reduction, and some of none at all. Most lithographic and steel-plate prints will admit of no reduction. Very fine prints of any kind may be _enlarged_ moderately without detriment. Any prints which cannot be satisfactorily reduced or enlarged may be _redrawn_ and thus brought to any desired size. In all cases of reduction and enlargement, the relative proportions remain unchanged. PROOFS.--Whenever desired, we will furnish tintype proofs of the drawings made by us, for approval or correction, before engraving. A printed proof is furnished with each plate. TIME.--We cannot usually engage to fill an order for a single plate in less than from three to six days; larger orders will require longer time. ESTIMATES will be promptly furnished when desired. That these may be definite and correct, the copy to be used--whether print, photograph, sketch, or drawing--should always be submitted for our examination, together with a distinct statement of the size of plate wanted, and of any other details to be observed. TERMS.--To insure attention, all orders must be accompanied by an advance of half the price charged, the balance to be paid on delivery. ELECTROTYPING AND PRINTING.--We have recently added to our establishment excellent facilities for making electrotypes, and also three power presses specially fitted for printing plates of all sizes in the finest manner. ARTIFICIAL LIGHT.--We have just introduced this most important facility, which enables us to prosecute our work _in cloudy weather_, and to push forward hurried orders _in the night_. REFERENCES.--Our plates are now used by the principal publishers in this city, and by most of the leading houses in every State in the Union. OUR GENERAL CIRCULAR contains a few specimens of the various kinds of our work, and will be sent on receipt of stamp. We have just prepared five special circulars, as follows: No. 1. Portraits and Figures. No. 2. Buildings and Landscapes. No. 3. Machinery and Apparatus. No. 4. Maps, Autographs, and Ornamental Lettering. No. 5. Reproductions from Wood-Cuts, Steel-Plate Prints, and Lithographs. These will be furnished at _ten cents_ each. * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS. INSIDE PAGE, EACH INSERTION--75 CENTS A LINE BACK PAGE, EACH INSERTION--$1.00 A LINE. (About eight words to a line.) _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ ADJUSTABLE INCLINE PRESSES. STILES & PARKER PRESS CO., Middletown, Conn. * * * * * [Illustration: Illustrated Guide.] 136 pages beautifully illustrated, mailed to all applicants inclosing 10 cents. Regular customers free. BLISS' ILLUSTRATED AMATEUR'S GUIDE to the FLOWER and KITCHEN GARDEN, with colored chromo; 216 pages, price 35 CENTS. Address B. K. BLISS & SONS, P. O. Box 4129, New York City. * * * * * TO LARGE CONSUMERS OF FINE LIGHT MALLEABLE IRON CASTINGS, we can offer special inducements in the way of VERY SUPERIOR QUALITY GUARANTEED, and at fair prices. Being ourselves large consumers and requiring the most perfect castings, other work is insured the same attention. MALLORY, WHEELER & CO., NEW HAVEN, CONN. * * * * * [Illustration: Lawn Mower.] THE PHILADELPHIA LAWN MOWER _Stands_ "_Head of the Class._" Descriptive Circulars and Price Lists sent on application. GRAHAM, EMLEM & PASSMORE, Patentees and Manufacturers, 631 Market Street, Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * SHAFTING PULLEYS, HANGERS, ETC. a specialty. Send for Price List to A. & F. BROWN, 57-61 Lewis Street, New York. * * * * * AIR COMPRESSORS, HOISTING ENGINES and OTHER MINING MACHINERY; MANUFACTURED BY GRIFFITH & WEDGE. ZANESVILLE, OHIO. * * * * * MILL STONES AND CORN MILLS. We make Burr Millstones, Portable Mills, Smut Machines, Packers, Mill Picks, Water Wheels, Pulleys, and Gearing, specially adapted to Flour Mills. Send for catalogue. J. T. NOYE & SON, BUFFALO, N. Y. * * * * * HOW TO SELL PATENTS.--This little book fully explains how all patents can be sold for good prices. Price 25 cents. L. D. SNOOK, Barrington, Yates Co., N. Y. * * * * * POND'S TOOLS, Engine Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c., DAVID W. POND, Worcester, Mass. * * * * * EDMUND DRAPER, Manufacturer of First-class Engineers' Instruments. Established in 1830. 226 Pear St., Phila., Pa. * * * * * J. LLOYD HAIGH, Manufacturer of [Illustration: Wire Rope.] every description, for Railroad and Mining Use, Elevators, Derricks, Rope Tramways, Transmission of Power, etc. No. 81 John St., N. Y. Send for price list. Plans and Estimates furnished for Suspension Bridges. * * * * * THE DINGEE & CONARD CO'S BEAUTIFUL EVER-BLOOMING ROSES THE BEST IN THE WORLD. OUR GREAT SPECIALTY is _growing_ and _distributing_ these BEAUTIFUL ROSES. _We deliver_ STRONG POT PLANTS, suitable for _immediate_ bloom, _safely by mail_ at all post-offices. 5 SPLENDID VARIETIES, _your choice_, all labeled, for $1; 12 for $2; 19 for $3; 26 for $4; 35 for $5; 75 for $10; 100 for $13. [Symbol: Right index] Send for our NEW GUIDE TO ROSE CULTURE--60 pages, elegantly illustrated--and _choose_ from over FIVE HUNDRED FINEST SORTS. Address THE DINGEE & CONARD CO., ROSE GROWERS, WEST GROVE, CHESTER CO., PA. * * * * * HOW TO SELL PATENTS. We send our 100 page book of instruction, containing valuable information, free. Send us your address. GEO. C. TRACY & CO., Cleveland, O. * * * * * [Illustration: NO MORE RHEUMATISM OR GOUT ACUTE OR CHRONIC SALICYLICA SURE CURE.] Manufactured only under the above Trade-Mark, by the EUROPEAN SALICYLIC MEDICINE CO., OF PARIS AND LEIPZIG. IMMEDIATE RELIEF WARRANTED. PERMANENT CURE GUARANTEED. Now exclusively used by all celebrated Physicians of Europe and America, becoming a Staple, Harmless, and Reliable Remedy on both continents. The Highest Medical Academy of Paris report 95 cures out of 100 cases within three days. Secret--The only dissolver of the poisonous Uric Acid which exists in the Blood of Rheumatic and Gouty Patients. $1.00 a Box; 6 Boxes for $5.00. Sent to any address on receipt of price. ENDORSED BY PHYSICIANS. SOLD BY ALL DRUGGISTS. Address WASHBURNE & CO., ONLY IMPORTERS' DEPOT. 212 BROADWAY, COR. FULTON ST., NEW YORK. * * * * * 19TH ANNUAL STATEMENT OF THE EQUITABLE LIFE ASSURANCE SOCIETY OF THE U. S. HENRY B. HYDE, PRESIDENT. FOR THE YEAR ENDING DECEMBER 31, 1878. AMOUNT OF LEDGER ASSETS, JAN. 1, 1878 $32,477,991.87 Less Depreciation in Government Bonds, and Appropriation to meet any depreciation in other assets 369,553.27 -------- 32,108,438.60 INCOME 8,217,943.24 -------- $40,326,381.84 DISBURSEMENTS. Paid Policy Holders for Claims by Death, Dividends, Surrender Values, Discounted and Matured Endowments and Annuities 4,935,171.43 Other Disbursements as per extended statement 1,195,841.88 -------- NET CASH ASSETS, December 31, 1878 $34,195,368.53 ASSETS. Bonds and Mortgages $12,437,584.93 Real Estate 6,834,904.96 United States Stocks 5,638,768.54 State, City, and other Stocks authorized by the Laws of the State 6,201,978.16 Loans secured by United States and other Stocks 928,000.00 Cash and other Ledger Assets as per extended statement 2,154,131.94 ------------- $34,195,368.53 Market Value of Stocks over Cost 129,796.41 Accrued Interest, Rents, and Premiums, as per extended statement 1,128,927.42 ------------- TOTAL ASSETS, DEC. 31, 1878 $35,454,092.36 TOTAL LIABILITIES, including legal reserve for reinsurance of all existing policies 28,560,268.00 ------------- TOTAL UNDIVIDED SURPLUS $6,893,824.36 ------------- RISKS ASSUMED IN 1878, 6,115 POLICIES, ASSURING $21,440,213.00 N. B.--For the details of the above statement, see the Society's "Circular to Policy Holders," and other publications for 1879. JAMES W. ALEXANDER, VICE-PRESIDENT. E. W. SCOTT, Superintendent of Agencies. SAMUEL BORROWE, SECRETARY. * * * * * [Illustration: Bolt Cutters.] BOLT CUTTERS. Send for Catalogue of Schlenker's Automatic Bolt Cutters and Screw Cutting Machines. HOWARD IRON WORKS, BUFFALO, N. Y. * * * * * BIG PAY to sell our Rubber Printing Stamps. Samples free. Taylor Bros. & Co., Cleveland, O. * * * * * [Illustration: LA CAISSE GENERALE OF PARIS, FRANCE.] FIRE INSURANCE EXCLUSIVELY. PAID UP CAPITAL $1,458,007.78 NET SURPLUS, DEC. 31, 1876 530,056.86 CASH ASSETS IN U. S. JAN. 1, 1878 427,881.28 NET ASSETS IN U. S. JAN. 1, 1878 220,000.00 TRUSTEES IN NEW YORK: LOUIS DE COMEAU, ESQ., of De Rham & Co. CHAS. COUDERT, JR., ESQ., of Coudert Bros. CHAS. RENAULD, ESQ., of Renauld, Francois & Co. JULIEN LE CESNE, RESIDENT SECRETARY. T. J. TEMPLE, MANAGER FOR THE MIDDLE STATES. _WESTERN UNION BUILDING, N. Y._ * * * * * THE ECLIPSE ENGINE [Illustration: Eclipse Engine.] Furnishes steam power for all _Agricultural_ purposes, _Driving Saw Mills_, and for every use where a first-class and economical Engine is required. Eleven first-class premiums awarded, including Centennial, '76. Refer to No. 7, issue of '77, No. 14, issue of '78, of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, for Editorial illustrations. FRICK & CO., Waynesboro, Franklin Co., Pa. When you write please name this paper. * * * * * THE CAMERON STEAM PUMP, Also known as the "SPECIAL" PUMP, is the standard of excellence at home and abroad. For Price Lists, address CAMERON PUMP WORKS, Foot East 23d Street, New York. * * * * * [Illustration: Foot Lathe.] SHEPARD'S CELEBRATED $50 Screw Cutting Foot Lathe. Foot and Power Lathes, Drill Presses, Scrolls, Circular and Band Saws, Saw Attachments, Chucks, Mandrels, Twist Drills, Dogs, Calipers, etc. Send for catalogue of outfits for amateurs or artisans. H. L. SHEPARD & CO., 333, 335, & 337 West Front Street, CINCINNATI, OHIO. * * * * * Established 1844. JOSEPH C. TODD, ENGINEER and MACHINIST. Flax, Hemp, Jute, Rope, Oakum and Bagging Machinery, Steam Engines, Boilers, etc. I also manufacture Baxter's New Portable Engine of 1877. Can be seen in operation at my store. A one horse-power portable engine, complete, $125; two horse-power, $225; two and a half horse-power, $250; three horse-power, $275. Manufactured exclusively by J. C. TODD, 10 BARCLAY ST., NEW YORK, OR PATERSON, N. J. Send for Catalogue * * * * * STEEL CASTINGS, From ¼; to 10,000 lbs. weight, true to pattern, sound and solid, of unequaled strength, toughness and durability. An invaluable substitute for forgings or cast-iron requiring three-fold strength. Send for circular & price list. CHESTER STEEL CASTINGS CO., Evelina St., Phila, Pa. * * * * * [Illustration: STEEL WIRE OF EVERY DESCRIPTION & STEEL SPRINGS. CARY & MOEN 234 W. 29. ST. NEW YORK CITY] * * * * * SHAFTS, PULLEYS, HANGERS, ETC. Full assortment in store for immediate delivery. WM. SELLERS & CO., 79 LIBERTY STREET, NEW YORK. * * * * * THE LEHIGH VALLEY EMERY WHEEL CO., WEISSPORT, Carbon Co., Pa. Manufacturers of Wheels and Machines. * * * * * CENTENNIAL AND PARIS MEDALS. MASON'S FRICTION CLUTCHES AND ELEVATORS. "New and Improved Patterns." 20 per cent. off list. VOLNEY W. MASON & CO., Providence, R. I., U.S.A. * * * * * RUFFNER & DUNN, PATENTEES and Sole Manufacturers of the Excelsior Steel Tube Cleaners. Price $1.00 per inch. Send for circular. SCHUYLKILL FALLS, PHILA., PA. * * * * * WOODWORTH SURFACE PLANERS, $125. Planers and Matchers, $350. S. C. HILLS, 78 Chambers Street, New York. * * * * * [Illustration: Columbia Bicycle.] THE COLUMBIA BICYCLE, Made by THE POPE M'F'G CO., 89 Summer Street, Boston. A practical road machine, easy to learn to ride, and when mastered one can beat the best horse in a day's run over an ordinary road. Send 3c. stamp for price list and 24-page catalogue with full informat'n. * * * * * [Illustration: Bradford Mill Company Cin. O.] BRADFORD MILL CO. Successors to Jas. Bradford & Co., MANUFACTURERS OF FRENCH BUHR MILLSTONES, PORTABLE CORN & FLOUR MILLS, SMU MACHINES, ETC. Also, dealers in Bolting Cloths and General Mill Furnishings. Office & Factory, 158 W. 2d St. CINCINNATI, O. J. R. Stewart, _Pres._ W. R. Dunlap, _Sec._ [Symbol: Right index] PRICE LISTS SENT ON APPLICATION. * * * * * SECOND-HAND BOILERS AND MACHINERY FOR SALE.--Boilers from 30 to 70 horse power, 15-horse power portable Engine, one 60-inch Lathe, two Upright Drills, Blowers, etc., etc. For prices, etc., address JAMES F. MANN, Utica, N. Y. * * * * * WETHERILL & BROTHER, PHILADELPHIA. PURE WHITE LEAD * * * * * ROCK DRILLS. NATIONAL DRILL AND COMPRESSOR CO., 95 LIBERTY ST., NEW YORK. AIR COMPRESSORS to be run by Steam, Water Power, or Belt. * * * * * [Illustration: Foot Power.] BARNES' FOOT POWER MACHINERY. 13 Different machines with which Builders, Cabinet Makers, Wagon Makers, and Jobbers in miscellaneous work can compete as to QUALITY AND PRICE with steam power manufacturing; also Amateurs' supplies. MACHINES SENT ON TRIAL. Say where you read this, and send for catalogue and prices. W. F. & JOHN BARNES, Rockford, Winnebago Co., Ill. * * * * * NAT'L BOLT & PIPE MACHINERY CO., Mfrs. of Hand and Power Bolt and Pipe Cutters, Bolt Pointers, Bolt Headers, Hot and Cold Pressed Nut Machinery, Taps and Dies, etc. Send for Cir. Cleveland, O. * * * * * [Illustration: ELEVATORS HAND POWER AND HYDRAULIC FREIGHT AND PASSENGER SHAFTING PULLEYS & HANGERS S. GRAVES & SON ROCHESTER N.Y.] * * * * * BOILER COVERINGS. WITH THE "AIR SPACE" IMPROVEMENTS. THE CHALMERS-SPENCE CO., FOOT E. 9TH ST., NEW YORK. Sole owners of the Air Space Patents. * * * * * THE TANITE CO., STROUDSBURG, PA. EMERY WHEELS AND GRINDERS. LONDON--9 St. Andrews St., Holborn Viaduct, E. C. LIVERPOOL--42 The Temple, Dale St. GEO. PLACE, 121 Chambers St., New York Agent. * * * * * [Illustration: ROCK DRILLING MACHINES AND AIR COMPRESSORS MANUFACTURED BY BURLEIGH ROCK DRILL CO FITCHBURG MASS. SEND FOR PAMPHLET.] * * * * * PATENTS AT AUCTION. Regular Monthly Sales. For terms, address N. Y. PATENT EXCHANGE, 67 Liberty Street, New York. * * * * * HOLLY'S IMPROVED WATER WORKS. Direct Pumping Plan. Combines, with other advantages, over older systems, the following: 1. Secures by variable pressure a more reliable water supply for all purposes. 2. Less cost for construction. 3. Less cost for maintenance. 4. Less cost for daily supply by the use of Holly's Improved Pumping Machinery. 5. Affords the best fire protection in the world. 6. Largely reduces insurance risks and premiums. 7. Dispenses with fire engines, in whole or in part. 8. Reduces fire department expenses. For information by descriptive pamphlet, or otherwise, address the HOLLY MANUFACTURING CO., Lockport, N. Y. * * * * * EVERY MAN HIS OWN PRINTER. [Illustration: The Excelsior.] THE EXCELSIOR $3 PRESS Prints labels, cards etc. (Self-inker $5) 9 Larger sizes For business, pleasure, young or old Catalogue of Presses, Type, Etc., for 2 stamps. KELSEY & Co. MERIDEN, CONN. * * * * * PYROMETERS. For showing heat of ovens. Hot Blast Pipes, Boiler Flues, Superheated Steam, Oil Stills, etc. HENRY W. BULKLEY, Sole Manufacturer, 149 Broadway, N. Y. * * * * * MACHINISTS' TOOLS. NEW AND IMPROVED PATTERNS. Send for new illustrated catalogue. Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c. NEW HAVEN MANUFACTURING CO., NEW HAVEN, CONN. * * * * * [Illustration: Sanitary Closet.] HERMETICAL SANITARY CLOSET GUARANTEED ABSOLUTELY WATER & GAS TIGHT SEND FOR CIRCULAR JOHN S. LENG, 4 FLETCHER ST. N. Y. * * * * * CIGAR BOX LUMBER, MANUFACTURED by our NEW PATENT PROCESS. THE BEST IN THE WORLD. SPANISH CEDAR, MAHOGANY, POPLAR. Also thin lumber of all other kinds, 1/8 to 1/2 in., at corresponding prices. All qualities. Equal in all respects to any made, and at prices much under any to be obtained outside of our establishment. Send for price list. GEO. W. READ & CO., 186 TO 200 LEWIS STREET, N. Y. * * * * * BOGARDUS' PATENT UNIVERSAL ECCENTRIC MILLS--For grinding Bones, Ores, Sand, Old Crucibles, Fire Clay, Guanos, Oil Cake, Feed, Corn, Corn and Cob, Tobacco, Snuff, Sugar, Salts, Roots, Spices, Coffee, Cocoanut, Flaxseed, Asbestos, Mica, etc., and whatever cannot be ground by other mills. Also for Paints, Printers' Inks, Paste Blacking, etc. JOHN W. THOMSON, successor to JAMES BOGARDUS, corner of White and Elm Sts., New York. * * * * * [Illustration: Watson Pump.] THE WATSON PUMP, FOR ARTESIAN, OR DEEPWELL PUMPING, PISTON ROD, PLUNGER & WELL ROD IN DIRECT LINE MACHINE SIMPLE, EFFICIENT. JAMES WATSON. 1608. S. FRONT ST. PHILA. * * * * * FARM LAW. ADDRESS OF HON. EDMUND H. BENNETT, delivered before the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture. This is an essay embracing complete and practical information, valuable not only to the farmer but to every one. Showing how to Buy a Farm: Bargains that are not Binding; Boundaries, and where they are in Streams, Ponds, Lakes, or on the Seashore; what a Deed of a Farm includes; Rights in the Road. Farm Fences: their Legal Height, etc. Railway Fences. Stray cattle; Cattle on Railways; Impounding Cattle. The Farmer's Liability for his Animals. The Law on the Dog. The Farmer not Liable for his Dogs. Water Rights and Drainage; Damming; Diverting the Course of a Stream. Surface Water; Underground Water. Trespassing, in Summer and in Winter. Hunting and Fishing. Fruit Trees on Boundary Lines, etc., etc. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT 166. Price 10 cents. * * * * * [Illustration: WROUGHT IRON. BEAMS & GIRDERS] THE UNION IRON MILLS. Pittsburgh, Pa., Manufacturers of improved wrought iron Beams and Girders (patented). The great fall which has taken place in the prices of Iron, and especially in Beams used in the construction of FIRE PROOF BUILDINGS, induces us to call the special attention of Engineers, Architects, and Builders to the undoubted advantages of now erecting Fire Proof structures; and by reference to pages 52 & 54 of our Book of Sections--which will be sent on application to those contemplating the erection of fire proof buildings--THE COST CAN BE ACCURATELY CALCULATED, the cost of Insurance avoided, and the serious losses and interruption to business caused by fire; these and like considerations fully justify any additional first cost. It is believed, that, were owners fully aware of the small difference which now exists between the use of Wood and Iron, in many cases the latter would be adopted. We shall be pleased to furnish estimates for all the Beams complete, for any specific structure, so that the difference in cost may at once be ascertained. Address CARNEGIE, BROS. & CO., Pittsburgh, Pa. * * * * * ICE AT $1.00 PER TON. The PICTET ARTIFICIAL ICE CO., LIMITED, Room 51, Coal and Iron Exchange, P. O. Box 3083, N. Y. * * * * * [Illustration: H. W. JOHNS' ASBESTOS] LIQUID PAINTS, ROOFING, BOILER COVERINGS, Steam Packing, Sheathings, Fire Proof Coatings, Cements, &c. SEND FOR DESCRIPTIVE PRICE LIST. H. W. JOHNS M'F'G CO. 87 MAIDEN LANE, N. Y. * * * * * $10 TO $1000 Invested in Wall St. Stocks makes fortunes every month. Books sent free explaining everything. Address BAXTER & CO., Bankers, 17 Wall St., N. Y. * * * * * The "Scientific American" is printed with CHAS. ENEU JOHNSON & CO.'S INK. Tenth and Lombard Sts., Philadelphia, and 59 Gold St., New York. * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: [Symbol: right Index] and [Symbol: Left index] are used where the text had a picture of a hand with the index finger pointing right or left, respectively. Table of Contents: Article named "Buffalo, the domestication of" page 197 was not included in the original. Table of Contents: Article named "Steamship, ocean, large" page 196 was not included in the original. Table of Contents: Article named "Specimen, a rare geological" page 196 was not included in the Table of Contents. 
43282	----	TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=. The picture of a pointing finger, known in typography as an index, a manicule, or a fist, has been rendered in this text version as "=>". Subscripts have been rendered using braces, so that the formula for sulphuric acid is shown as "H{2}SO{4}", and the formula for water, if it had appeared, would have been shown as "H{2}O". * * * * * [Illustration: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN] A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL INFORMATION, ART, SCIENCE, MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY, AND MANUFACTURES. Vol. XXXIX.--No. 6 NEW YORK, AUGUST 10, 1878 $3.20 per Annum. [NEW SERIES.] [POSTAGE PREPAID.] THE PARIS EXHIBITION.--A SKETCH IN THE PARK. Our engraving, which represents a portion of the park at the Paris Exhibition grounds, needs little mention beyond that it is one of those delightful retreats so refreshing to the weary visitor, who, tired out with tramping about the buildings and grounds, is only too pleased to refresh his eyes with some of that exquisite miniature water scenery which is scattered about the grounds. We take our illustration from the London _Graphic_. * * * * * =Improvements in Silk Worm Breeding.= _Galignani_ states that a very curious discovery has just been made, which, if found as practicable in application as it seems to promise, may create a very considerable change in the production of silk. It is nothing more nor less than the possibility of obtaining two yields in the year of the raw material instead of one, as at present. The moth lays its eggs in May or June, and these do not hatch before the spring of the following year. But sometimes they are observed to hatch spontaneously ten or twelve days after they are laid. It was such a circumstance as this coming to the attention of M. Ducloux, Professor of the Faculty of Sciences at Lyons, that led him to undertake a series of experiments on the subject, by means of which he has found that this premature hatching can be produced at will. The means for effecting the object are very simple--rubbing the eggs with a hair brush, subjecting them to the action of electricity, or more surely still by dipping them for half a minute in concentrated sulphuric acid. M. Bollé, who has also turned his attention to the same subject, states that the same effect is produced by hydrochloric, nitric, or even acetic and tartaric acid. Finally, a submersion of a few seconds in water heated to 50° Cent. (122° Fah.) is equally efficacious. However, M. Ducloux states that the operation must be performed while the eggs are quite young, the second or third day at the outside. When this new hatching is accomplished the mulberry tree is in its full vigor, and the weather so favorable that the rearing of the worm is liable to much less risk than during the early days of spring, when the sudden atmospheric changes are very detrimental, and frequently fatal to the growing caterpillars. * * * * * =The Natural History of the Eel.= According to the reports of shad fishermen, the chief enemy of the shad is the eel, which not only follows that fish up the streams and devours the spawn, but often attacks the shad after they are caught in the nets. Entering the shad at the gill openings the eels suck out the spawn and entrails, and leave the fish perfectly clean. The finest and fattest shad are the ones selected. It is a curious circumstance that of a fish so well known as the eel so many of its life habits should be in dispute. An animated discussion has been going on in Germany quite recently with regard to the natural history of this fish, and in a late number of a scientific journal the following points are set down as pretty well substantiated. Though a fresh water fish which passes the greater part of its life in rivers, the eel spawns in the sea. That it is viviparous is extremely improbable. The eel found in the upper waters of rivers is almost always female. At the age of four years it goes down to the sea to spawn and never returns to fresh water. The spawning process is somehow dangerous to the eel, thousands being found dead near the mouths of rivers, with their ovaries empty. The descent of the fish to the sea does not appear to take place at any definite period, but is probably dependent on the season for spawning. The male is always much smaller than the female, and never exceeds half a yard in length. The males never ascend to the head waters of rivers, but keep continually in the sea or in the lower reaches of the river. Nothing is definitely known about the spawning season, though it is probable that the eggs are deposited in the sea not far from the mouths of rivers. * * * * * [Illustration: THE PARIS EXHIBITION.--A SKETCH IN THE PARK.] * * * * * [Illustration: "Scientific American." In Gothic script] Established 1845. MUNN & CO., Editors and Proprietors. PUBLISHED WEEKLY AT NO. 37 ARK ROW, NEW YORK. ====================================================================== O. D. MUNN. A. E. BEACH. ====================================================================== =TERMS FOR THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN.= One copy, one year, postage included..........................$3.20 One copy, six months, postage included........................$1.60 =Clubs.=--One extra copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be supplied gratis for every club of five subscribers at $3.20 each; additional copies at same proportionate rate. Postage prepaid. =>Single copies of any desired number of the SUPPLEMENT sent to one address on receipt of 10 cents. Remit by postal order. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row New York. =The Scientific American Supplement= is a distinct paper from the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. THE SUPPLEMENT is issued weekly; every number contains 16 octavo pages, with handsome cover, uniform in size with SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Terms of subscription for SUPPLEMENT, $5.00 a year, postage paid, to subscribers. Single copies 10 cents. Sold by all news dealers throughout the country. =Combined Rates.=--THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and SUPPLEMENT will be sent for one year, postage free, on receipt of _seven dollars_. Both papers to one address or different addresses, as desired. The safest way to remit is by draft, postal order, or registered letter. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, N. Y. =Scientific American Export Edition.= The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition is a large and splendid periodical, issued once a month. Each number contains about one hundred large quarto pages, profusely illustrated, embracing: (1.) Most of the plates and pages of the four preceding weekly issues of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, with its splendid engravings and valuable information; (2.) Commercial, trade, and manufacturing announcements of leading houses. Terms for Export Edition, $5.00 a year, sent prepaid to any part of the world. Single copies 50 cents. =>Manufacturers and others who desire to secure foreign trade may have large, and handsomely displayed announcements published in this edition at a very moderate cost. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition has a large guaranteed circulation in all commercial places throughout the world. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. ====================================================================== VOL. XXXIX., No. 6. [NEW SERIES.] _Thirty-third Year._ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 1878. ====================================================================== =Contents.= (Illustrated articles are marked with an asterisk.) American goods, excellence of 89 Astronomical notes* 90 Astronomical observation* 91 Brass, recipe for cleaning [4] 91 Cancer, treatment of 85 Chloride of lime, to neutralize [6] 91 Coal, distillation of* 85 Discoveries, Prof. Marsh's recent 90 Drawings, how to mount [19] 91 Drawings, printing copies of [9] 91 Edison telephone and Hughes' microphone 80 Education, industrial 90 Eel, natural history of the 79 Electro-magnet, to construct [12] 91 England, wages in 85 Engraving, photographic 82 Exhibition, American Institute 84 Export edition, Scientific Amer. 80 Fire, chemicals to extinguish [22] 91 Flour, explosiveness of 87 Gas, saw tempering by natural 87 Germany, labor in 89 Gold, how to melt [18] 91 Hair, removing superfluous [1] 91 Hughes, letter from Prof. 80 Industrial enterprises, new 84 Ink to rule faint lines [7] 91 Inventions, new 86 Inventions, new agricultural 86 Inventions, new engineering 87 Inventions, new mechanical 89 Iron making, progress of 80 Journalism, crooked 88 Lathes, attachment for* 86 Lemon verbena, new use for 89 Life, minute forms of 85 Lime light, how to make [14] 91 Main joints, street 88 Mormons, hint from the 86 N. Y. Capitol, machinery for 87 Paris Ex., Japanese Building* 87 Paris Exhibition, the park* 79 Patent law, our 84 Pens, fountain 80 Petroleum June review 90 Petroleum oils as lubricators 89 Petroleum, short history of 85 Plants, etc., influence of light on 89 Poisoning of a lake, remarkable 90 Production, ill-balanced 89 Production, more perfect 88 Puddling, mechanical* 82 Quick work 86 Rainfall, decrease of N. Y. 86 Rhinoceros Hornbill, the* 87 Shad hatching, successful 88 Shellac, to dissolve bleached [2] 91 Shoes, dressing for ladies' [21] 91 Silk worm breeding 79 Substances, how to rate [3] 91 Sun, the* 80, 81 Teeth, replanting, etc. 84 Telephone, science promoter 80 Thermometer, new deep sea* 83 Timber, ribs on surface of [17] 91 Valve, new steam* 86 Velocipede feat, extraordinary* 89 Wires, copper finish to [24] 91 Wood, to make sound boards [11] 91 Wool product of the world 88 $150,000,000 a year, trying to save 90 TABLE OF CONTENTS OF =THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT= =No. 136,= =For the Week ending August 10, 1878.= I. ENGINEERING AND MECHANICS.--The Manufacture of Wrought Iron Pipe. Bending the Sheets. Welding the Tube. Manufacture of Gas Pipe. Polishing and Smoothing. 4 figures. Improved Marine Engine Governor. 1 figure.--Improved Screw Steering Apparatus. 3 figures.--West's Reversing Gear. 1 figure.--Engineering in Peru. The Oroya Railroad over the summit of the Andes. A remarkable engineering feat. The famous Cerro de Pasco Silver Mines. Extensive Coal Fields. II. TECHNOLOGY.--Coal Ashes as a Civilizer. Grading. Coal Ashes as a Fertilizer.--Utilization of the Waste Waters of Fulling Mills and Woolen Works.--Suggestions in Decorative Art. Marquetry Ornaments from Florence. 3 illustrations. Useful Recipes. By J. W. PARKINSON. Cream cake. Kisses. Apples a la Tongue. Mead. Bread without yeast. Biscuit. Doughnuts. Glaire of Eggs. Crumpets. Ratafia de Framboises. Ratafia de Cerises. To color sugar sand. Raspberry and currant paste. Cheese cake. Cocoanut macaroons. Orange slices. Ice cream. Fruit juices. Lady fingers. White bride cake. Scalloped clams. Iced souffle. Sugar for crystal work. To restore the fragrance of oil of lemon. Family bread. III. FRENCH INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF 1878.--Tobacco at the Exhibition. Manufacture of snuff. The two processes of fermentation. The grinding. The packing of the snuff. Manufacture of chewing tobacco, etc. New Cutting Apparatus for Reapers. 1 figure.--The Algerian Court. 1 illustration.--The French Forest Pavilion. 1 illustration. IV. CHEMISTRY AND METALLURGY.--A Reducing Agent.--Climbing Salts.--Chloride of Lime.--Action of Watery Vapor.--The Active Principles of Ergot.--Cadaveric Alkaloids. Outlines of Chemistry. By HENRY M. MCINTIRE. V. ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING.--A Cottage Costing $150. By S. B. REED, Architect. Plans for cheap summer residence for family of four persons. Dimensions, construction, and estimate for all materials and labor, with 6 figures.--Buildings in Glass. Improved method of constructing conservatories, 2 figures.--Buildings and Earthquakes. On structures in an earthquake country. By JOHN PERRY and W. E. AYRTON, Japan. Also a new Seismometer for the measurement of earthquakes. VI. NATURAL HISTORY, GEOLOGY, ETC.--Colors of Birds and Insects.--Microscopy. Minute and low forms of life. Poisonous Caterpillar. Sphærosia Volvox. An Australian Polyzoon. A Chinese Tornado. VII. MEDICINE AND HYGIENE.--Nervous Exhaustion. By GEORGE M. BEARD, M.D. Symptoms continued. Mental depression with timidity; morbid fear of special kinds; headaches; disturbances of the nerves and organs of special sense; localized peripheral numbness and hyperæsthesia; general and local chills and flashes of heat; local spasms of the muscles. Suggestions and treatment. Electricity. Application of cold; kind of food; exercise; medicines. The Art of Preserving the Eyesight. V. From the French of Arthur Chevalier. Presbyopy, or long sight. Symptoms. Causes. Artificial light. Franklin's spectacles. Spectacles for artists. Hygiene for long sight, and rules. Myopy, or short sight. Dilation of pupil, and other symptoms of myopy. Glass not to be constantly used in myopy. How to cure slight myopy. Choice of glasses. Colored glasses for short sight. False or distant myopy, and glasses to be used, 5 figures. VIII. MISCELLANEOUS.--The Repair of the Burned Models after the Patent Office Fire of 1877. By GEORGE DUDLEY LAWSON. An interesting description of the importance and difficulty of the work, and the enterprise and care shown. Reconstructing complicated models from miscellaneous fragments. Verneuil, Winner of the Ascot Cup, 1 illustration. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. * * * * * =PROGRESS OF IRON MAKING.= The success of the Dank's puddling furnace fired with pulverized coal seems to be no longer a matter of doubt in England. It is stated that Messrs. Hopkins, Gilkes & Co., the well known iron makers of the North of England, have succeeded in turning out from it from Cleveland pig alone iron capable of bearing tests which Staffordshire iron has not yet surpassed. The English iron manufacturers in their struggle with us are wisely taking advantage of every improvement in their line to keep ahead of us, and are likely to be successful unless our manufacturers arouse from their fancied security. We are now underselling the English at home and abroad in many articles of manufacture, because so much of our work is done by machinery, and is consequently better and cheaper than can be produced by hand labor at the lowest living rate of wages; but so soon as the English masters and workmen shall fully appreciate this fact, the same machines run there with cheaper labor will deprive us of our present advantages. Already we notice several instances in which the workmen, renouncing their prejudices, have willingly consented to the substitution of machine for hand work, and we doubt not that the success of these innovations, conjoined with the pressure of the times, will ere long create a complete revolution in the ideas of the British workmen, so that instead of longer opposing they will demand the improved appliances and facilities for work, converting them from rivals or opponents to allies. Such a radical change is not necessarily far in the future, for the logic of it has long been working in the brains of both masters and men and may reasonably bear fruit at any time. We fear that when this time arrives our makers of iron, especially, will wake up to the consciousness that they have not kept up with the advance. * * * * * =THE TELEPHONE AS A PROMOTER OF SCIENCE.= Every new thing, whether it be in the realm of mind or matter, has an influence on whatever existed before, of a similar kind, to modify, develop, and improve it, or to doom it to oblivion. Whatever is new necessitates a better knowledge of the old, so that the world gains not only by the acquirement of the new thing, but also by a better understanding of things already known. A discovery, published, sets a thousand minds at work, and immediately there is a host of experimentalists who, in their desire to make and try the new thing for themselves, begin without a knowledge of the science or art to which the discovery pertains, and inevitably fail. After failure comes research, which to be of value must be extended. Every investigator can recall the novelty that induced his first experiments, and can recount his trials in his search for information. Among the inventions or discoveries that have induced extended experiment, the telephone may, without doubt, be mentioned as the chief, for no sooner was the first speaking telephone brought out than here and there all over the country it was imitated. Persons who never had the slightest knowledge of electrical science had a desire to see and test the telephone. To do this first of all requires a degree of mechanical skill. Acoustics must be understood, and a knowledge of the four branches of electrical science is requisite, as the telephone involves galvanism, magnetism, electrical resistance, induction, and many of the nicer points which can be understood by investigation only, and this not only in the direction indicated, but in the allied branches of physics and also in chemistry. Familiarity with these things develops a scientific taste that will not be easily satisfied. The characteristic avidity with which the American people seize upon a novelty has been wonderfully exemplified by the manner in which the telephone mania has spread. In consequence of this science has received an impetus, and now we have everywhere embryo electricians and experimentalists, where before were only the unscientific. * * * * * =LETTER FROM PROFESSOR HUGHES.= We print in another column a letter received from Mr. D. E. Hughes concerning the distinction he finds between his microphone and Mr. Edison's carbon telephone. Mr. Hughes is very confident that the two inventions have nothing in common, and that they bear no resemblance to each other in form, material, or principles. We would not question Mr. Hughes' sincerity in all this. No doubt he honestly believes that the invention of Mr. Edison "represents no field of discovery, and is restricted in its uses to telephony," whilst the "microphone demonstrates and represents the whole field of nature." But the fact of his believing this is only another proof that he utterly fails to understand or appreciate the real scope and character of Mr. Edison's work. To those familiar not only with Mr. Edison's telephone but with the long line of experimental investigation that had to be gone through with before he was able to control the excessive sensitiveness of the elements of his original discovery, it is very clear that Mr. Hughes has been working upon and over-estimating the importance of one phase, and that a limited phase, of Mr. Edison's investigations. We propose shortly to review at length the evidence of Mr. Edison's priority in the invention or discovery of all that the microphone covers; this purely as a question of scientific interest. For the personal elements of the controversy between Mr. Edison on the one side and Messrs. Preece and Hughes on the other we care nothing. * * * * * =THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXPORT EDITION.= The inquiry for American manufactured products and machinery abroad seems to grow in volume and variety daily. And though, in comparison with our capacity to produce, the foreign demand is yet small, its possibilities are unlimited. To increase the demand the immediate problem is to make known throughout the world in the most attractive fashion possible the wide range of articles which America is prepared to furnish, and which other nations have use for. As a medium for conveying such intelligence the monthly export edition of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is unequaled. The table of contents of the second issue, to be found in another column, will give an idea of the wide range and permanent as well as timely interest of the matter it circulates. It is a magazine of valuable information that will be preserved and repeatedly read. The handsomely illustrated advertising pages supplement the text, and make it at once the freshest, fullest, and most attractive periodical of the sort in the world. An examination of the index of advertisers will show how widely its advantages for reaching foreign buyers have been appreciated by leading American houses. In the advertising page XXV. appears a list of some eight hundred foreign commercial places in which the circulation of the paper is guaranteed, as evidence that it reaches those for whom such publications are intended. * * * * * =FOUNTAIN PENS.= For several days we have had in use in our office examples of the Mackinnon Fountain Pen, and find it to be a very serviceable and effective instrument. This is a handsome looking pen, with a hollow handle, in which a supply of ink is carried, and the fluid flows from the point in the act of writing. The necessity of an inkstand is thus avoided. One of the difficulties heretofore with pens of this character has been to insure a free and certain delivery of the ink, and also to bring the instrument within the compass and weight of an ordinary pen. The inventor seems to have admirably succeeded in the example before us. The ink flows with certainty, and there is no scratching as with the ordinary pen; it writes with facility on either smooth or rough paper; writes even more smoothly than a lead pencil; may be carried in the pocket; is always ready for use; there is no spilling or blotting of ink. The construction is simple, durable, and the action effective. One filling lasts a week or more, according to the extent of use. These are some of the qualities that our use of the pen so far has seemed to demonstrate; and which made us think that whoever supplies himself with a Mackinnon Pen will possess a good thing. The sole agency is at No. 21 Park Row, New York city. * * * * * =THE SUN.= BY S. P. LANGLEY, ALLEGHENY OBSERVATORY, PA.* When, with a powerful telescope, we return to the study of the sun's surface, we meet a formidable difficulty which our first simple means did not present. This arises from the nearly constant tremors of our own atmosphere, through which we have to look. It is not that the tremor does not exist with the smaller instrument, but now our higher magnifying power exaggerates it, causes everything to appear unsteady and blurry, however good the glass, and makes the same kind of trouble for the eye which we should experience if we tried to read very fine print across the top of a hot stove, whence columns of tremulous air were rising. There is no remedy for this, unless it is assiduous watching and infinite patience, for in almost every day there will come one or more brief intervals, lasting sometimes minutes, sometimes only seconds, during which the air seems momentarily tranquil. We must be on the watch for hours, to seize these favorable moments, and, piecing together what we have seen in them, in the course of time we obtain such knowledge of the more curious features of the solar surface as we now possess. The eye aches after gazing for a minute steadily at the full moon, and the sun's light is from 300,000 to 600,000 times brighter than full moon light, while its heat is in still greater proportion. The object lens of such a telescope as the equatorial at Allegheny is 13 inches in diameter, and it is such light, and such heat, concentrated by it, that we have to gaze on. The best contrivance so far found for diminishing both, and without which our present acquaintance with the real appearance and character of sunspots would not have been gained, depends upon a curious property of light, discovered by a French physicist, Malus, in the beginning of this century. Let A (Fig. 10) be a piece of plane unsilvered glass, receiving the solar rays and reflecting them to a second similar one, B, which itself reflects them again in the direction C. Of course, since the glass is transparent, most of the rays will pass through A, and not be reflected. Of those which reach B again most will pass through, so that not a hundredth part of the original beam reaches C. This then, is so far a gain; but of itself of little use, since, such is the solar brilliancy, that even this small fraction would, to an eye at C, appear blindingly bright. Now, if we rotate B about the line joining it with A, keeping always the same reflecting angle with it, it might naturally be supposed that the light would merely be reflected in a new direction unchanged in quantity. But according to the curious discovery of Malus this is not what happens. What does happen is that the second glass, after being given a quarter turn (though always kept at the same angle), seems to lose its power of reflection almost altogether. The light which comes from it now is diminished enormously, and yet nothing is distorted or displaced; everything is seen correctly if enough light remains to see it by at all, and the ray is said to have been "polarized by reflection." It would be out of place to enter here on the cause of the phenomenon; the fact is certain, and is a very precious one, for the astronomer can now diminish the sun's light till it is bearable by the weakest eye, without any distortion of what he is looking at, and without disturbing the natural tints by colored glasses. In practice, a third and sometimes a fourth reflector, each of a wedge shaped, optically plane piece of unsilvered glass, are thus introduced, and by a simple rotation of the last one the light is graded at pleasure, so that with such an instrument, called "the polarizing eyepiece" (Fig. A), I have often watched the sun's magnified image for four or five hours together with no more distress to the eye than in reading a newspaper. With this, in favorable moments, we see that the sun's surface away from the spots, everywhere, is made up of hundreds of thousands of small, intensely brilliant bodies, that seem to be floating in a gray medium, which, though itself no doubt very bright, appears dark by comparison. What these little things are is still uncertain; whatever they are, they are the immediate principal source of the sun's light and heat. To get an idea of their size we must resort to some more delicate means of measurement than we used in the case of the watch. The filar micrometer consists essentially of two excessively fine strands of cobwebs (or, rather, of spider's cocoon), called technically "wires," stretched parallel to each other and placed just at the focus of the telescope. Suppose one of them to be fixed and the second to be movable (keeping always parallel to the first) by means of a screw, having perhaps one hundred threads to the inch, and a large drum shaped head divided into one hundred equal parts, so that moving this head by one division carries the second "wire" 1/10000 part of an inch nearer to the first. Motions smaller than this can clearly be registered, but it will be evident that everything here really depends upon the accuracy of the screw. The guide screw of the best lathe is a coarse piece of work by comparison with "micrometer" screws as now constructed (especially those for making the "gratings" to be described later), for recent uses of them demand perhaps the most accurate workmanship of anything in mechanics--the maker of one which will pass some lately invented tests is entitled at any rate to call himself "a workman." [Illustration: Fig. 11] Since the "wires" are stretched precisely in the focus, where the principal image of the sun is formed, and move in it, they, and the features of the surface, form one picture, as magnified by the eye lens, so that they appear as if moving about on the sun itself. We can first set them far enough apart, for instance, to take in the whole of a spot, and then by bringing them together measure its apparent diameter, in ten thousandths of an inch. Then, measuring the diameter of the whole sun, we have evidently the proportion that one bears to the other, and hence the means of easily calculating the real size. A powerful piece of clockwork, attached to the equatorial, keeps it slowly rotating on its axis, at the same angular rate as that with which the sun moves in the sky, so that any spot or other object there will seem to stay fixed with relation to the "wires," if we choose, all day long. The picture of "wires," spots, and all, may be projected on a screen if desired; and Fig. 11 shows the field of view, with the micrometer wires lying across a "spot," so seen on the 6th of March, 1873. Part of a cambric needle with the end of a fine thread is represented also as being projected on the screen along with the "wires" to give a better idea of the delicacy of the latter. Now we may measure, if we please, the size of one of those bright objects, which have just been spoken of as being countable by hundreds of thousands. These "little things" are then seen to be really of considerable size, measuring from one to three seconds of arc, so that (a second of arc here being over 400 miles) the average surface of each individual of these myriads is found to be considerably larger than Great Britain. Near the edge of the disk, under favorable circumstances, they appear to rise up through the obscuring atmosphere, which darkens the limb, and gathered here and there in groups of hundreds, to form the white cloudlike patches (_faculæ_), which may sometimes be seen even with a spy-glass--"something in the sun brighter than the sun itself," to employ the expression by which Huyghens described them nearly two hundred years ago. They are too minute and delicate objects to be rendered at all in our engraving; but this is true also of much of the detail to be seen at times in the spots themselves. The wood cuts make no pretense to do more than give an outline of the more prominent features, of which we are now about to speak. The wonderful beauty of some of their details must be taken on trust, from the writer's imperfect description of what no pencil has ever yet rendered and what the photograph has not yet seized. [Illustration: Fig. A.] [Illustration: Fig. 10.] Bearing this in mind, let us now suppose that while using the polarizing eyepiece on the part of the spot distinguished by the little circle, we have one of those rare opportunities when we can, by the temporary steadiness of our tremulous atmosphere, use the higher powers of the telescope and magnify the little circle till it appears as in Fig. 12. We have now nearly the same view as if we were brought close to the surface of the sun, and suspended over this part of the spot. All the faint outer shade, seen in the smaller views (the _penumbra_) is seen to be made up of long white filaments, twisted into curious ropelike forms, while the central part is like a great flame, ending in fiery spires. Over these hang what look like clouds, such as we sometimes see in our highest sky, but more transparent than the finest lace vail would be, and having not the "fleecy" look of our clouds, but the appearance of being filled with almost infinitely delicate threads of light. Perhaps the best idea of what is so hard to describe, because so unlike anything on earth, is got by supposing ourselves to look _through_ successive vails of white lace, filled with flower-like patterns, at some great body of white flame beyond, while between the spires of the flame and separating it from the border are depths of shade passing into blackness. With all this, there is something crystalline about the appearance, which it is hard to render an idea of--frost-figures on a window pane may help us as an image, though imperfect. In fact the intense whiteness of everything is oddly suggestive of something very cold, rather than very hot, as we know it really. I have had much the same impression when looking into the open mouth of a puddling furnace at the lumps of pure white iron, swimming half-melted in the grayer fluid about them. Here, however, the temperature leaves nothing solid, nothing liquid even; the iron and other metals of which we know these spot-forms do in part at least consist are turned into vapor by the inconceivable heat, and everything we are looking at consists probably of clouds of such vapor; for it is fluctuating and changing from one form into another while we look on. Forms as evanescent almost as those of sunset clouds, and far more beautiful in everything but color, are shifting before us, and here and there we see, or think we see, in the sweep of their curves beyond, evidences of mighty whirlwinds (greater by far than the largest terrestrial cyclone) at work. While we are looking, and trying to make the most of every moment, our atmosphere grows tremulous again, the shapes get confused, there is nothing left distinct but such coarser features as our engraving shows, and the wonderful sight is over. When we consider that this little portion of the spot we have been looking at is larger than the North and South American continents together, and that we could yet see its parts change from minute to minute, it must be evident that the actual motion must have been rapid almost beyond conception--a speed of from 20 to 50 miles a _second_ being commonly observed and sometimes exceeded. (A cannon ball moves less than ¼ of a mile per second.) I have seen a portion of the photosphere, or bright general surface of the sun, drawn into a spot, much as any floating thing would be drawn into a whirlpool, and then, though it occupied by measurement over 3,000,000 miles in area, completely break up and change so as to be unrecognizable in less than twenty minutes. When we come to discuss the subject of the sun's heat, we shall find that the temperature of a blast furnace or of the oxyhydrogen blowpipe is low compared with that which obtains all over such a vast region, and remembering this, it is evident that its disappearance is a cataclysm of which the most tremendous volcanic outburst here gives no conception. We cannot, by any terrestrial comparison, describe it, for we have no comparison for it in human experience. If we try to picture such an effect on the earth, we may say in another's words that these solar whirlwinds are such as, "coming down upon us from the north, would in thirty seconds after they had crossed the St. Lawrence be in the Gulf of Mexico, carrying with them the whole surface of the continent in a mass, not simply of ruin, but of glowing vapor, in which the vapors arising from the dissolution of the materials composing the cities of Boston, New York, and Chicago would be mixed in a single indistinguishable cloud." These vast cavities then in the sun we call spots are not solid things, and not properly to be compared even to masses of slag or scoria swimming on a molten surface. They are rather rents in that bright cloud surface of the sun which we call the photosphere, and through which we look down to lower regions. Their shape may be very rudely likened to a funnel with sides at first slowly sloping (the _penumbra_), and then suddenly going down into the central darkness (the _umbra_). This central darkness has itself gradations of shade, and cloud forms may be seen there obscurely glowing with a reddish tinge far down its depths, but we never see to any solid bottom, and the hypothesis of a habitable sun far within the hot surface, suggested by Sir William Herschel, is now utterly abandoned. We are able now to explain in part that mysterious feature in the sun's rotation before insisted on, for if the sun be not a solid or a liquid, but a mass of glowing vapor, it is evidently possible that one part of it may turn faster than another. _Why_ it so turns, we repeat, no one knows, but the fact that it does is now seen to bear the strongest testimony to the probable gaseous form of the sun throughout its mass--at any rate, to the gaseous or vaporous nature of everything we see. We must not forget, however, that under such enormous temperature and pressure as prevail there the conditions may be--in fact, must be--very different from any familiar to us here, so that when we speak of "clouds," and use like expressions, we are to be understood as implying rather an analogy than an exact resemblance. [Illustration: Fig. 12] We must expect, with the great advances photography has lately made, to know more of this part of our subject (which we may call solar meteorology) at the next spot maximum than ever before, and by that time it may be hoped that some of the wonderful forms described above so imperfectly will have been caught for us by the camera. * For parts 1 and 2 see SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN for July 20 and July 27. * * * * * IN the notice in our issue for July 27 of a new screw cutting lathe made by Messrs. Goodnow & Wightman, the address should have been 176 Washington street instead of 128, and the diameter of the tail spindle, which was given as 5/16, should have been 15/16 inch. * * * * * THE Olympia (Wyoming Territory) _Standard_ announces that a company has been formed there to bring ice from a glacier. The deposit covers a number of acres, is seventy or eighty feet deep, and is supposed to contain a hundred thousand or more tons, some of which may have been there as many years. The ice can be cut and sold at one and one half cents a pound, and by the ship load at five dollars a ton. * * * * * =MECHANICAL PUDDLING IN SWEDEN.= The accompanying engravings, which we take from _Iron_, give plan and section of the puddling apparatus invented by Mr. Oestlund, as used at the Finspong Ironworks. The gas generator, A, is of the common Swedish type, as used for charcoal. The tube, _k_, conducts the gases into the refining pot, _a_. This pot has a lining of refinery slag, which is melted, as the apparatus revolves, to get it to adhere to the sides. The revolution of the pot, _a_, on its axis, _d_, is effected by the action of the beveled wheels, _b_ and _b'_, and the pulley, _c_, which takes from an iron chain the power given off by a turbine. The spindle, _d_, is supported in the bearings, _e_ and _e', c_ carrying a pair of trunnions which form the axis of oscillation, and allow the apparatus to rise or fall, the whole of this mechanism being supported on the plummer blocks, _f f_. One of the trunnions, _e''_, is prolonged so as to form the axis of the beveled wheel, _b_, and the pulley, _c_, the latter sliding along the trunnion so as to put _b_ in or out of gear. The bush, _e_ is tied by means of the stay, _g'_ to the upper end of the toothed segment, _g_, the lower extremity of which is connected with the second bush at the end of the spindle. By means of the pinion, _h_, revolving on standards, _i i_, and the segmental rack, _g_, the pot can be raised or lowered without interfering with the action of the beveled wheels. [Illustration: APPARATUS FOR MECHANICAL PUDDLING.] The gas from the generator is brought to the mouth of the pot by the tubes, _k_ and _m_. The air necessary for the combustion of the gas is brought in by a tube, _l_, branching from the air main, _l''_. The air tube, _l_, passes into the gas tube and is continued concentrically within the latter. The gas and air tubes both have joints at _m'_ and _m''_. By means of the bar, _n_, which has a counterpoise to keep the moving parts in position, the tubes can be brought from or toward the mouth of the pot, so as to make it free of access to the workman. With a key fitting on the stem, _n'_, the tubes can be turned in _m'_, so as to give the currents of gas and air a more or less oblique direction. To screen the workmen from the heat of the pot a disk of iron, _o_, lined with fire clay on the side next the pot, is fitted to the end of the tubes. [Illustration: APPARATUS FOR MECHANICAL PUDDLING.] Before running the metal into the pot, the latter must be heated, to such a degree that the slag lining is pasty or semi-fluid at its surface. Generally an hour and a half will be spent in heating with gas to this point. There should be sufficient live coal in the pot when the gas is first let in to keep up its combustion; should it be extinguished by excess of air or gas, it must be relit. As soon as the pot begins to get red hot the full heat can be put on. The gas generator is tended in the usual way with the ordinary precautions. To keep ashes and dust out of the gas tube, lumps of charcoal are heaped up to the height of the top of the flue. The wind pressure for the generator was 33 to 41 millimeters of mercury, that of the wind for the combustion of the gas (at Finspong the blast is not heated) being only 16½ millimeters. The pressure of the gas in the tube near the pot was 6.2 millimeters of mercury. The method of working, viewed chemically, does not sensibly differ from puddling; although giving as good, perhaps better, results at a much less cost. There are three principal periods in the operation: 1. The period before boiling. 2. The boiling itself. 3. The end of the boiling, and the formation of balls. When cast metal is poured into the pot a shovelful or two of refinery slag is added. The temperature of the bath is thus brought down; it thickens and boils, the pot revolving at the rate of 30 or 40 revolutions a minute. The metal is worked with a rabble, either to cool it or to get the slag to incorporate with it, as is done in puddling. Note must be taken of the temperature of the melted metal and that of the pot, at the moment of charging, the heat during working being regulated accordingly by increasing or diminishing the inflow of air and gas. When circumstances are favorable, boiling begins five minutes after the metal is run into the pot, and it lasts about ten minutes. Boiling having begun, the batch swells, the iron forms, granulates, and seems to cling to the rabble and the sides of the pot. The rotation of the pot is continued, as well as the working, to separate out parts which are not yet refined; but no more cold cinder is put in. While boiling goes on the temperature is regulated so that the pig does not cling to the side of the pot during a complete revolution, but so that the particles next the side fall back into the bath when the side comes uppermost in the revolution. The heat is raised a little when the iron can be felt by the rabble to be completely refined, when shining lumps make their appearance in the bath, and the iron begins to cling to the walls. At the moment, therefore, that the temperature is brought to its highest point, and the iron begins to agglutinate, the rotation of the pot should be stopped, and either immediately, or after the delay of a couple of minutes, it is removed. If the iron does not ball well, it is not completely refined, and the pot may be started again. If the iron is firm enough already, the isolated particles are exposed to the hottest flame possible, the blast being carried to its maximum. The refining is thus completely finished, and all the particles are agglomerated. The mobility of the gas tube at _m''_ is of advantage in this operation. It is sometimes useful to start the pot again to round up the puddled ball, but it is best if this has been formed with the rabble. The iron from a charge of 75 kilos. of pig may be divided with advantage into a couple of balls; a third may be made of the iron separated from the walls of the pot. To get out the balls the pot is lowered, and the workmen use tongs, pointed rabble, and hooked bar. If things have gone well the balls ought to come out soft at a welding heat, filled with cinder like puddled balls, but a little more resisting and solid under the hammer. They are forged into bars, and these are at once passed to the rolls. If nothing hinders the balling and shingling, these operations will not consume more than fifteen minutes. * * * * * =Photographic Engraving.= Scamoni's process is as follows: The original drawings are carefully touched up, so that the whites are as pure and the blacks as intense as possible, and then the negative is taken in the ordinary way, the plate being backed in the camera with damp red blotting paper, to prevent reflection from the camera or back of the plate. The negative is developed in the ordinary manner, intensified by mercuric chloride, and varnished. A positive picture is taken in the camera, the negative being carefully screened from any light coming between it and the lens. This is intensified by pyrogallic acid, and afterward washed with a pure water to which a little ammonia has been added. It is then immersed in mercuric chloride for half an hour, and again intensified with pyrogallic acid. This is repeated several times. When the intensity of the lines is considerable, the plate is well washed, treated with potassium iodide, and finally with ammonia, the image successively appearing yellow, green, brown, and then violet brown. The plate is then thoroughly drained, and the image is treated successively with a solution of platinic chloride, auric chloride, ferrous sulphate, and finally by pyrogallic acid, which has the property of solidifying the metallic deposits. The metallic relief thus obtained is dried over a spirit lamp, and covered with an excessively thin varnish. This varnish, which is evidently a special preparation, retains sufficient tackiness to hold powdered graphite on its surface (the bronze powder now used may be employed instead), which is dusted on in the usual manner. After giving the plate a border of wax, it is placed in an electrotyping bath, and a perfect facsimile in intaglio is obtained, from which prints may be taken in a printing press. * * * * * =A NEW DEEP SEA THERMOMETER.= Perhaps some of our readers may have seen a description of a form of thermometer devised by MM. Negretti and Zambra for the purpose of ascertaining the temperature of the ocean at great depths. This consisted of a tube bent into the shape of a siphon, which when it had reached the desired depth was made, by means of an ingenious arrangement, to pour all the mercury found above a certain point near the reservoir into the second arm of the siphon. This second arm, which, like the other, was a capillary tube, carried a scale of divisions on which might be read the temperature of the depths to which the instrument had been lowered. This thermometer gave all the results that might have been expected. The ship Challenger during its polar expedition had on board a certain number of these instruments. The report of Capt. G. S. Nares made to the English Admiralty describes all the benefits that we may hope to reap from a serious study of the temperature of the ocean at different depths, and not the least of these are those that pertain to the fishery interest. Notwithstanding the good results given by this instrument, its inventors have endeavored to render it still more practical and more within the reach of all by diminishing the cost of construction, and increasing its compactness. [Illustration: Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 NEW THERMOMETER FOR OBTAINING THE TEMPERATURE OF THE OCEAN AT GREAT DEPTHS.] Fig. 1 represents the thermometer isolated from its case. It is an ordinary thermometer furnished at A with a little device that M. Negretti has already made use of in the construction of his larger instrument, and which allows the liquid to run from the reservoir into the capillary tube when the temperature rises, without letting it flow back when it lowers, if moreover the precaution has been taken to incline the tube slightly, reservoir upward. At B there is a bulge in the tube in which a certain quantity of mercury may lodge; this bulge is placed in such a way that the mercury resulting from the dilatation of the reservoir may come to it and continue its ascension in the capillary tube when the reservoir is down (the thermometer being vertical), but cannot get out when the reservoir is upward. We should add that these thermometers are constructed so as to give the variations of temperature within determined limits. The small reservoir, B, is indispensable to the well working of the apparatus; for in seeking the temperature at a certain depth the instrument may, on being drawn up, pass through warmer strata, and it is necessary, therefore, to provide the reservoir with a means of diffusing the small quantity of mercury resulting from this excess of temperature. The tube has also a small bulge at its upper extremity at C. The thermometer is placed in a small wooden case having a double bottom throughout its length. In this double bottom are placed a certain number of lead balls that can run from one end of the case to the other, and of sufficient weight to render the instrument buoyant in sea water. To use the apparatus, one end of a cord is passed through a hole in the case under the reservoir of the thermometer, and the other end is tied to the sounding line at a certain distance from the lead (Fig. 2). While the line is descending the thermometer will remain reservoir downward (Fig. 2); but when it is again drawn up the thermometer case will take the position indicated in Fig. 3, and the column of mercury breaking at A will fall into the capillary tube, the divisions of which, as will be seen at Fig. 1, are reversed. As to the thermometer itself, it is important to protect it against the pressure which becomes so considerable at great depths; to do this the reservoir is surrounded by an envelope of thick glass about three quarters full of mercury. The mercury serves to transmit the temperature to the reservoir, and should the exterior envelope yield to the effects of pressure, the reservoir proper would not be affected, the mercury not exactly filling the annular part which surrounds it. * * * * * =New Inventions.= George E. Palmer, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has patented an improved Ironing Board, on which the garments may be held in stretched state while being smoothed with the irons, and readily adjusted thereon to any required degree of tension by a simple attachment. William B. Rutherford and Joel T. Hawkins, of Rockdale, Texas, have patented an improved Bale Tie, which is formed of the plate provided with a longitudinal groove and cross ribs or loops, and having projections or keys to adapt it to receive and hold the notched ends of the bale band. An improvement in Composition Pavements has been patented by John C. Russell, of Kensington, Eng. This invention relates to the treatment of peat and spent tan for the manufacture of an improved product or material suitable for paving roads and other places and for roofing, etc. The most important steps in making the composition consist in drying bruised or finely ground peat or spent tan, heating the same _in vacuo_ to degree of 150° Fah., and adding sulphur and gas tar, gas pitch, and stearine pitch in the proportions specified, then kneading the mixture while heated and adding carbonate of lime and furnace slag. Louis Blanck, of New York city, has patented an improved Safety Brake or attachment for locomotives and railroad cars, by which the entire train, either by a collision with another train or by contact with any obstruction, is first raised from the rails, and then moved in backward direction for the distance of a few feet, so that all danger of accident is avoided, and no other sensation than that of a slight rocking motion exerted. The attachment is constructed so as to admit of being worked by the engineer from the cab or the locomotive, or, if desired, from any car of the train. An improved Evaporating Pan had been patented by Andrew D. Martin, of Abbeville, La. This invention consists in a tapering sheet metal tank having transverse partitions and longitudinal tapering flues that extend through all of the partitions and terminate at the ends of the tank. Lloyd Arnold, of Galveston, Texas, has patented an improved Bale Tie, which is formed of a block of iron, with a space or opening running longitudinally through its breadth from one end nearly to the other, and having the alternate edges of the two plates thus formed notched, the notch of the lower plate being square and of a width equal to or a little greater than the bale band, and the notch of the upper plate being narrower at its bottom than the bale band, and with its sides inclined and beveled to an edge, to adapt it to receive and hold the bale band. An improved Tie for Letter Packages has been patented by John Mersellis, of Knowersville, N. Y. The object of this invention is to provide a tie by means of which letter packages may be quickly and securely fastened or tied. It consists in a plate apertured to receive one end of the string and also to receive the hook upon which the tie is hung when not in use, and having a button and clasp spring for engaging the string in the process of tying. Fred P. Hammond, of Aurora, Ill., has patented an improved Inking Pad, which consists in a novel arrangement of layers of cloth or felt, chamois skin, oiled silk, and printing roller composition, which enables a clean impression of the stamp to be made. The pad retains the desired rounded surface and proper degree of softness, and is easily manipulated when necessary to replenish the supply of ink. William J. Clark and Thomas W. Roberts, of Coffeeville, Miss., have patented an improved Trap for Catching Fish in streams, which will allow the fish to be conveniently taken out without taking up the trap. John W. Cooper, of Salem, Ind., is the inventor of an improved Alcohol Lamp for soldering and similar purposes; and it consists in a reservoir pivoted in a supporting frame, and provided with two wick tubes, and an extinguisher secured to a spring support, and capable of closing the larger wick tube when it is in a vertical position. It has an independent extinguisher for the smaller wick tube, and is provided with a novel device for projecting the wick from the larger tube as it is moved out of a vertical position. Benjamin Slater, of Attica, N. Y., has invented a simple and effective device for Renovating Feathers by the combined action of steam and hot air. It consists of a cylindrical receptacle, partly surrounded by a steam jacket, and having a hot air box, a perforated bottom, a cover or damper for the same, and an aperture in the top, to which is fitted a perforated cover and a close cover. An improved Blind Fastening has been patented by George Runton and John Runton, of Hoboken, N. J. This fastening is so constructed as to fasten the blind or shutter automatically when swung open, and in such a way as to prevent all rattling or shaking of the blind or shutter from the action of the wind. David R. Nichols, of Alexandria Bay, N. Y., has patented an improved Animal Trap, which is so constructed as to set itself after each animal has been caught, and leave no trace of the trapped animal to frighten away those that may come afterward. William A. Doherty, of Fall River, Mass., has patented an improved Loom Shuttle Attachment, by which the weaving of bad cloth is prevented, and in case any false shed is made by any irregularities in the warp, and that part of the shed carried lower than usual, the attachment is released and thrown over the spindle point, so as to render it impossible to draw out the filling from the shuttle, and thus break it and stop the loom. Jonas Bowman, of Somerset, O., has patented an improved Vehicle Spring, which permits of dispensing with side bars, thus taking less space to turn on, and by which the tilting and pitching motion usual with springs as heretofore constructed is avoided. Hiram Unger, of Germantown, O., is the inventor of an improved Gate Latch, which is so constructed that the gate cannot be opened accidentally by being lifted or by rebounding of the catch or latch. Madison Calhoun, of Ocate, Ter. of New Mex., has patented an improved Hame Fastening, which is not liable to become accidentally unfastened, and is easily and quickly fastened and unfastened, even with cold or gloved hands. * * * * * The Downer well at Corry, Pa., is now down over 1,300 feet, and an oil bearing sand has been struck of about five feet thickness. * * * * * [Illustration: "Communications.", in Gothic script.] =Our Patent Law.= _To the Editor of the Scientific American_: While I cannot handle this subject with any master talent, nor afford to devote the time which should be given to so important a subject before expressing an opinion, yet I can less afford to keep quiet and allow shrewd avarice to manipulate or titled ignorance to legislate my property out of existence. "Property! There is no property in patents," I often hear said. And how about the invention covered by a patent? Is that property? A large majority of people may say no, and deny the justice of a patent law. On the contrary, I, as an inventor, think an invention is genuine property, and as such should be under the same protection in common law as all other property, instead of requiring a special law by which the people magnanimously grant me the privilege for a short time of using what was never theirs, what they never knew of until I brought it into existence. But what is real property, and by what title is it held? Mother earth, from which we sprung, by which we exist, and to which we return, is, without question, real estate. How is it obtained; how held? History answers, By conquest, by subjugation. But these words, conquest and subjugation, have a more significant meaning than the spoiling of one people by another; they are the actual price of possession. He who, toiling, subjugates the soil, is undoubted owner of its production, by virtue of the highest blessing on record--"By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou obtain bread." And this principle is so far acknowledged that the laborer holds a lien on the product of his labor, even though the property belongs to another. Mr. A has an unpromising piece of land on which he would like to raise corn. He analyzes the soil, experiments upon it chemically, reads up on the properties and components of corn, the effects of fertilizers and acids upon the soil, and makes himself a fool and laughing-stock generally among his neighbors because he steps out of the beaten track by which they have succeeded in making the ground barren. He does not have much success the first year, and is sympathizingly consoled with "I told you so." But he perseveres and wins the reputation of being "visionary" and "as stubborn as a mule." In the meantime he becomes more familiar with his subject, sees more clearly the requirements of the case, finds he must post himself more thoroughly in certain branches of science in order to conduct his experiments, wrestles with this obstacle and that, and finally discovers a fertilizer based on some natural law of rotation, and produces a crop of corn never before equaled. Now his neighbors come out with this very intelligent question, "How did you happen to think of it?" And they further very condescendingly remark, "That is a rousing crop; I guess I'll try the same thing myself. How did you say you mixed the stuff?" This man is the true conqueror. He has endured privation and scorn, fought obstacles, and in subduing them has eliminated a new principle in agriculture that is an engine of power to all generations. Shall his crops be his only reward? Shall they who laughed him to scorn step into his reward without sharing the labor that produced it? This is a simile for thousands of inventions, only that the inventor is seldom situated to plant the corn on his own land and reap the harvest. Then which of you will say that he has not a just lien on every man's crop raised by his process for a per cent of the gains thereby? There is a bill before Congress favoring a periodical taxation of patents under the pretext of removing useless patents from the path of later inventors. Let me show you how one inventor looks at that. My neighbor has a vacant lot on which he is unable to build; but joined to mine it would increase the value of my property vastly. Now can't you legislate that old heap of rubbish into my possession somehow? Of course he is waiting for the rise of property around him to sell his lot well; but can't you make that appear unnatural, and that he is a dog in the manger? It is also said that sharpers get control of old patents and lay an embargo on legitimate business. I reply, first, no one could be damaged by the owner of a patent unless he infringed that owner's right; second, if he does infringe, it shows that said patent is valuable, otherwise he need not infringe; and if valuable why should not he pay for it? Mr. B, in the employ of Mr. C, watches the machine he uses, and spends his leisure hours in working out an improvement, which he patents and offers to C for sale; but as the invention is useless except as attached to C's machine, he thinks B can't help himself, and adopts the improvement without paying for it. When a few years have built up a great industry, and C is rich from his spoils, B steps in with a few friends at his back, incorporated especially to make C shell out. Of course this is bad and ought to be legislated against. If it were not valuable C need not use it. It is not becoming to the Congress of a great nation to spend its time in legislating worthless patents out of existence. All such will die a natural death. And if there is sufficient worth in any patent to claim your consideration, the inventor is entitled to its price, whether he waits four years or fifteen for his pay. I speak of myself, not as an individual, but as representing in this letter a class, without whose achievements America, in her proud length and breadth, could not to-day have been. For the last half of my past life, over twenty years, I have been an inventor. Schooled in adversity, accustomed to disappointment, sometimes successful, enjoying no luxuries but the conquest of obstacles, and often forced to simple pursuits to keep the pot boiling, yet I expect to spend the rest of my life inventing, feeling strong in the school of experience, and hoping for such prosperity as will enable me to work out some of the larger problems in view. If those in power would really aid the inventor, let them increase his facilities for information. Circulate the Patent Office _Gazette_ at one dollar a year, a nominal subscription to insure _bona fide_ readers, and pay the balance out of the Patent Office surplus now accumulated. This both to educate and to save inventors from going over old ground, bringing more talent up to the standard of to-day. Lessen rather than increase Patent Office fees. Enable the Commissioner to give the strictest possible examination on every application for a patent, that when issued it shall bear a _bona fide_ value, by retaining the most competent examiners at a salary adequate to keep them. Reduce the cumbrous machinery of patent litigation to about this text, in two headings: First, Is plaintiff the first inventor? Allow one month to find that out. If not disproved in that time, allow it. Second, Does defendant infringe? Allow one month to decide that. If not proven, discharge the case, with cost to plaintiff. If proved, cost and damage to be settled by defendant in thirty days. The ability of wealthy corporations to absorb with impunity the product of all talent within their reach, and put off the day of reckoning until plaintiff is swallowed in cost, is the greatest present discouragement to inventors. Our patent law is now better than any amendment yet proposed will leave it. If you must tinker over it, remember all laws are for protection of the weak. The bulldog does not need law to take the bone from the spaniel. Just in proportion as you damage the patent law, you destroy the accomplishments and purpose of my life. Therefore I have spoken; so could a thousand more. W. X. STEVENS. East Brookfield, Mass. * * * * * =The Edison Carbon Telephone and Hughes' Microphone.= _To the Editor of the Scientific American_: Mr. Edison finds a resemblance between his carbon telephone and my microphone. I can find none whatever; the microphone in its numerous forms that I have already made, and varied by many others since, is simply the embodiment of a discovery I have made, in which I consider the microphone as the first step to new and perhaps more wonderful applications. I have proved that all bodies, solid, liquid, and gaseous, are in a state of molecular agitation when under the influence of sonorous vibrations; no matter if it is a piece of board, walls of a house, street, fields or woods, sea or air, all are in this constant state of vibration, which simply becomes more evident as the sonorous vibrations are more powerful. This I have proved by the discovery that when two or more electrical conducting bodies are placed in contact under very slight constant pressure, resting on any body whatever, they will of themselves transform a constant electrical current into an undulatory current, representing in its exact form the vibrations of the matter on which it reposes; it requires no complicated arrangement and no special material, and to most experimenters the three simple iron nails that I have described form the best and most sensitive microphone. But these contact points would soon oxidize, so naturally I prefer some conducting material which will not oxidize. Mr. Edison's carbon telephone represents the principle of the varying pressure of a diaphragm or its equivalent on a button of carbon varying the amount of electricity in accordance with this change of pressure; it represents no field of discovery, and its uses are restricted to telephony. The three nails I have spoken of will not only do all, and that far better than Edison's carbon telephone in telephony, but has the power of taking up sounds inaudible to human ears, and rendering them audible, in fact a true microphone; besides it has the merit of demonstrating the molecular action which is constantly occurring in all matter under the influence of sonorous vibrations. Here we have certainly no resemblance in form, materials, or principles to Mr. Edison's telephone. The carbon telephone represents a special material in a special way to a special purpose. The microphone demonstrates and represents the whole field of nature; the whole world of matter is suitable to act upon, and the whole of the electrical conducting materials are suitable to its demonstrations. The one represents a patentable improvement; the other a discovery too great and of too wide bearing for any one to be justified in holding it by patent, and claiming as his own that which belongs to the world's domain. London, July 2, 1878. D. E. HUGHES. * * * * * =New Industrial Enterprises.= The increasing wealth of a nation, as well as the profitable and steady employment of its capital and people, depends upon a continual increase of the producing power. Whenever there are latent resources undeveloped or opportunities for establishing the first foundation of an industry, leading as it will to the originating of hundreds of auxiliary ones, an unusual effort should be made to bring it into existence. If in the power of individuals to accomplish, so much the better; if needing an association with State or national influence, then this association should be formed. It is incumbent upon individuals that they possess a sufficient pride in the prosperity of the country to give every possible attention and assistance to a careful practical demonstration of the feasibility of all the new industrial enterprises which may be presented with reasonable assurance of final success. Not in a great expenditure of money: influence is better than money, and a potential interest in a new enterprise is often better than capital. The industrial resources of the United States are by no means worked to their full capacity. The people by no means make all they consume. The finer articles of use, and requiring much labor and often the highest skill, are imported from foreign nations. A premium of $10,000 offered for an improved method in any known present process of production or manufacture would be almost sure to be called for. While America exports $175,000,000 worth of raw cotton annually to be worked up by other people, is it not possible to so increase the manufacture in America as to keep the greater part of that raw material and to export the cloth instead? Is it not practicable to establish great numbers more of sugar estates in the same tropical climate? Is it not practicable to lay the foundation of half a dozen beet sugar mills in the country? To begin the weaving of linen goods, and to teach our farmers that they may produce all the flax fiber as fast as required? To start a ramie industry in a small way and teach the process to those who will engage in it? Will not our silk men put a velvet industry into operation as a germ from which a future industry may grow? And we might name a hundred other lesser enterprises which have hardly name in this country, but every one of which is needed and will add to the wealth of the people. * * * * * =Replanting and Transplanting Teeth.= Dr. G. R. Thomas, of Detroit, in the current number of the _Dental Cosmos_, states that this operation of "replanting" has become so common with him, and the results so uniformly satisfactory, that he does not hesitate to perform it on any tooth in the mouth, if the case demands it; and he finds the cases that demand it, and the number that he operates upon, continually multiplying. He makes it a point to examine the end of the roots of nearly all his cases of abscessed teeth; and a record of more than 150 cases, with but one loss (and that in the mouth of a man so timid that he utterly refused to bear the pain which nearly always follows for a few minutes, therefore necessitating re-extraction), convinces him that the operation is not only practical, but decidedly beneficial to both patient and operator. For one sitting is all that he has ever really found necessary to the full and complete restoration of the case. In the present article, however, Dr. Thomas states that it is his object not so much to speak of replanting as of transplanting, which he has reason to believe is just as practical, so far as the mere re-attachment is concerned, as is replanting. He details, in illustration, a case in which he successfully performed the operation; inserting in the mouth of a gentleman, who had lost a right superior cuspidate, a solid and healthy tooth that he had removed from a lady's mouth four weeks previously. He opened into canal and pulp chamber of the tooth, from the apex of the root only; cut the end off one eighth of an inch (it being that much too long), reduced the size somewhat in the center of the root (it being a trifle larger than the root extracted), filled and placed it in position. He states that the occlusion, shape, and color were perfect, so much so that several dentists who saw the case were not able to distinguish the transplanted tooth from the others. The two features in the case that he calls particular attention to are: first, that although the tooth had been in his office four weeks, there is to-day no perceptible change in color; and second, that the re-attachment is as perfect as though it had been transplanted or replanted the same day of extraction. The operation was performed about three months ago. Dr. Thomas knows of but two obstacles in the way of the perfect practicability of "transplanting:" first, the difficulty of obtaining the proper teeth at the proper time; and second, the possibility of inoculation. The latter is the more formidable of the two, and, to escape the ills that might follow, the greatest caution is necessary. The first difficulty is more easily gotten over, for it is not necessary that the tooth transplanted should correspond exactly in shape and size to the one extracted; if it is too large, it may be carefully reduced; or if too small, new osseous deposit will supply the deficiency. Neither is it necessary, as we have seen, that the transplanted tooth should be a freshly extracted one. As a demonstration of what modern dental surgery is capable of performing Dr. Thomas' statements are very interesting; it is doubtful, however, whether popular prejudice will allow this practice of "transplanting" to become of much use. * * * * * =American Institute Exhibition.= For forty-seven years the American Institute of New York has opened its doors and invited American inventors and manufacturers to exhibit their productions; and again this year it renews its invitation to all. To such as wish to reach the capitalist and consumer, they must admit that New York is the place. For details apply to the General Superintendent by mail or otherwise. * * * * * On the 22d of June, cloud bursts occurred in the mountains northeast of San Buenaventura, Cal., causing the Ventura river to pour down such a volume of muddy water that the ocean was discolored for a distance of six miles. * * * * * =THE DISTILLATION OF COAL.= Bituminous coal, of which there are several varieties, is the best suited for the production of coal gas. The Newcastle coal is principally used in the manufacture of London gas. Scotch parrot coal produces a superior gas, but the coke produced is of inferior quality. Boghead coal is also used for gas making--in fact, every kind of coal, except anthracite, may be used for this purpose. The bituminous shale produces a very good gas, and it is used partly to supply the place of cannel or parrot coal. As carbon and hydrogen, principally with oxygen, are the elements from which gas is formed, most substances containing these elements can be partially converted into gas. And gas has been made from grease or kitchen waste, oil peat, rosin, and wood, besides coal. A ton of Newcastle or caking coal yields about 9,000 cubic feet of gas, Scotch coal about 11,000, English cannel about 10,000, and shale about 7,000, with illuminating powers in the ratio of about 13, 25, 22, and 36 respectively. The coal is put in retorts, _r_, commonly made of fire clay and often of cast iron. These retorts are from 6 feet to 9 feet long, and from 1 foot to 1 foot 8 inches in breadth. They are made like the letter D, elliptical, cylindrical, or bean shaped. They are built into an arched oven, and heated by furnaces, _f_, beneath. One, three, five, seven, or more are built in the same oven. The mouthpieces are of cast iron, and project outward from the oven, so as to allow ascension pipes, _a p_, to be fixed, to convey the gas generated from the coal to the hydraulic main, _h m_. After the coal has been introduced into the retorts, their mouths are closed with lids luted round the edges with clay, and kept tight by a screw. The retorts are kept at a bright red heat. If the temperature be too low, less gas and more tar are produced, less residue being left; while, should the temperature be too high, the product is more volatile, more residue remaining. And should the gas remain for any length of time in contact with the highly heated retort, it is partially decomposed, carbon being deposited, thereby lessening the illuminating power, and choking up the retort, and more carbon disulphide is produced at a high temperature. The object is to maintain a medium temperature, in order to obtain a better gas having the greatest illuminating power. In about four or five hours the coal in the retort will have given off all its gas. The mouth of the retort is opened, and the coke is raked out into large iron vessels, and extinguished by water. A fresh charge is immediately introduced by means of a long scoop in the cherry-red retort, and the door luted to. The ascension pipes, which convey the gas from the retorts, pass straight up for a few feet, then turn round, forming an arch, then pass downward into the hydraulic main, beneath the level of the liquid contained in it, and bubble up through the liquid into the upper portion of the main. On commencing the main is half filled with water, but after working some time, this water is displaced by the fluid products of distillation. In this way, the opening into each retort is closed, so that a charge can be withdrawn and replaced without interfering with the action of the other retorts and pipes. The liquid tar, ammoniacal water, and gas pass from the end, _e_, of the hydraulic main, down through the pipe, P, and the liquid falls down into the tar well, T W, while the crude gas goes on into the chest, C, partially filled with the liquid, so that the plates, _p p_, from the top dip into it to within a few inches of the bottom. These dip plates are placed in the chest, so as to separate the openings into each pair of condensing pipes, _c c_, so that the gas passing into the chest finds no exit except up _c_{1}, and down _c_{2}; and there being no dip plate between _c_{2} and _c_{3} it passes up _c_{3}, and down _c_{4}, and as there is no dip plate to prevent its progress, it passes up _c_{5}, and down _c_{6}, into the lime or iron purifiers, L I. The condensers are kept cool by exposure to the atmosphere, and are often cooled by a stream of water from a tank above. The gas cools quickly, and liquids passing along with the gas in a state of vapor are condensed and fall into the chest, and pass by an overflow pipe into the tar well. The purifier is a cast iron vessel, L I, containing a number of perforated shelves, _s_{1} _s_{1} _s_{1}, on which slaked lime, to the depth of about 4 inches, or much greater thickness of iron oxide and sawdust, is placed. The gas passes up through the shelves, _s s s_, and down through the shelves, _s_{1} _s_{1} _s_{1}, through the pipe, G, into the gas holder, and from thence through the pipe, M, to the main pipe. The lime abstracts carbonic anhydride, sulphureted hydrogen, cyanogen, naphthalin, and a portion of the ammonia, but not carbon disulphide, which latter may be absorbed by passing the gas through a solution of sodic hydrate and plumbic oxide, mixed with sawdust. Gas containing CS{2}, on burning, produces H{2}SO{4}, which injures books and furniture in rooms. However, the quantity of CS{2} in gas is generally so minute as to be practically uninjurious. By a proper regulation of the temperature during distillation, the quantity produced is infinitesimal. When the lime is saturated it is removed, and fresh supplied; but the iron, after use, can be reconverted into oxide by exposure to the atmosphere, and used repeatedly. When iron is used a separate lime purifier is necessary to remove carbonic anhydride. The last traces of ammonia are removed before passing to the gas holder, by passing the gas through dilute sulphuric acid, or up through the interior of a tower having perforated shelves covered with coke in small pieces, through which a constant supply of fresh water percolates. This washing removes some of the more condensable hydrocarbons, and lessens the illuminating power of the gas. Before the gas passes from the condensers into the purifiers, it passes through a kind of pump, termed an exhauster, driven by steam power. This action relieves the retorts from the pressure of the gas passing through the hydraulic main, etc. It diminishes the deposit of graphite in the retorts, and lessens leakage in them, should there be any flaws. It also has the beneficial effect of producing a gas of a higher illuminating power, since the relief of pressure in the retorts produces a more favorable condition of combustion. [Illustration: THE DISTILLATION OF COAL.] The following are some of the bodies produced in the manufacture of gas, namely, acetylene, _g_, the carbonate, _s_, chloride, _s_, cyanide, _s_, sulphide, _s_, and sulphate, _s_, of ammonium; aniline, _t_, anthracene, _s_, benzine, _l_, carbonic oxide, _g_, carbonic anhydride, _g_, carbonic disulphide, _l_, chrysene, _s_, cumene, _l_, cymene, _l_, ethylene, _g_, hydrogen, _g_, leucoline, _l_, methyl-hydride, _g_, naphthaline, _s_, nitrogen, _g_, paraffine, _s_, phenylic alcohol, _l_, picoline, _l_, propene, _g_, quartene, _g_, sulphureted hydrogen, _g_, toluene, _l_, water, _l_, xylene, _l_, etc. The most of the above solid and liquid substances, with the letters _s_ and _l_ written after, are removed by cooling the gas in the condensers, and the gaseous substances marked _g_, that are injurious in the consumption of the gas, are removed by purification. The impurities in the gas may consist of ammonic carbonate and sulphide, carbonic anhydride and disulphide, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphureted hydrogen, and water in the form of vapor; and acetylene, ethylene, and the vapors of the acetylene, ethylene, and phenylene series of hydrocarbons are the illuminating ingredients diluted with carbonic oxide, hydrogen, and methyl-hydride. The approximate percentage composition of coal gas is: H, 45.6; Me, 34.8; CO, 6.5; C{2}H{4}, 4; CO{2}, 3.6; N, 2.4; C{4}H{8}, 2.3; SH{2}, 0.3, etc.--_Hugh Clements in English Mechanic._ * * * * * =A Short History of Petroleum.= The _Lumberman's Gazette_ gives the following short history of petroleum: The production of petroleum as an article of trade dates from the 28th of August, 1859, when Colonel Drake, in a well 69½ feet deep, "struck oil," and coined a phrase that will last as long as the English language. From that beginning it has increased to an annual production of 14,500,000 barrels of crude oil. The first export was in 1861, of 27,000 barrels, valued at $1,000,000, and the export of petroleum in the year 1877 was, in round numbers, $62,000,000. The annual product of petroleum to-day--crude and refined--is greater in value than the entire production of iron, and is more than double that of the anthracite coal of the State of Pennsylvania, and exceeds the gold and silver product of the whole country. As an article of export it is fourth, and contests closely for the third rank. Our leading exports are relatively as follows: Cotton annually from $175,000,000 to $227,000,000; flour from $69,000,000 to $130,000,000; pork and its products (bacon, ham and lard) from $57,000,000 to $82,000,000; and petroleum from $48,000,000 to $62,000,000. The total export of petroleum from 1861 to and including 1877 (16 years) has been $442,698,968, custom house valuation. From the best sources of information there are at this time 10,000 oil wells, producing and drilling, which, at a cost of $5,000 per well, would make an investment of $50,000,000 in this branch of the business. Tankage now existing of a capacity of 6,000,000 barrels cost $2,000,000, and $7,000,000 has been invested in about 2,000 miles of pipe lines connected with the wells. The entire investment for the existing oil production, including purchase money of territory, is something over $100,000,000, which amount cannot be lessened much, if any, for as wells cease to produce new ones have been constantly drilled to take their place. * * * * * =Minute Forms of Life.= The Rev. W. H. Dallinger lately delivered a lecture at the Royal Institution, descriptive of the recent researches of Dr. Drysdale and himself. The object of the lecture was mainly to explain the method of research which had been employed. The first essays of the opticians to produce "high powers" were, as might be expected, feeble. These powers amplified, but did not analyze; hence it began to be questioned whether "one could see more really with a high power than with a moderate one." And this was true at the time. But it is not so now. The optician has risen to the emergency, and provided us with powers of great magnifying capacity which carry an equivalent capacity for analysis. They open up structure in a wonderful way when rightly used. The lecturer began by projecting upon the screen the magnified image of a wasp's sting--an object about the 1-20th of an inch in natural size--and beside it was placed a piece of the point of a cambric sewing needle of the same length, magnified to the same extent. The details of the sting were very delicate and refined, but the minute needle point became riven and torn and blunt under the powerful analysis of the lens, showing what the lecturer meant by "magnifying power;" not mere enlargement, but the bringing out of details infinitely beyond us save through the well made lens. This was further illustrated by means of the delicate structure of the _Radiolaria_, and still further by means of a rarely delicate valve of the diatom known as _N. rhomboides_. With a magnification of 600 diameters no structure of any kind was visible; but by gradually using 1,200, 1,800, and 2,400 diameters, it was made manifest how the ultimate structure of this organic atom displayed itself. But this power of analysis was carried still further by means of the minutest known organic form, _Bacterium termo_. The lecturer had, in connection with Dr. Drysdale, discovered that the movements of this marvelously minute living thing were effected by means of a pair of fine fibers or "flagella." These were so delicate as to be invisible to everything but the most powerful and specially constructed lenses and the most delicate retinas. But since this discovery, Dr. Koch, of Germany, had actually photographed the flagella of much larger bacteria, such as _Bacillus subtilis_, and expressed his conviction that the whole group was flagellate. Mr. Dallinger determined then to try to measure the diameter of this minute _flagellum_ of _B. termo_ that the real power of magnification in our present lenses might be tested. This was a most difficult task, but 200 measurements were made with four different lenses, and the results were for the mean of the first 50 measurements 0·00000489208; for the second, 0·00000488673; for the third, 0·00000488024; for the fourth, 0·00000488200, giving a mean value for the whole, expressed in vulgar fractions, of the 1/204700 of an inch as the diameter of the flagellum of _B. termo_. With such power of analysis it was manifest that immense results might be expected from a good use of the "highest powers." The proper method of using them was next dwelt on, and then the apparatus was described, by means of which a drop of fluid containing any organism that was being studied might be prevented from evaporating while under the scrutiny of the most powerful lenses, and for an indefinite length of time. The importance of studying such organisms in this way--by continuous observation--was then plainly shown, some of the peculiar inferences of Dr. Bastian, as to the transmutation of bacteria into monads, and monads into amoebæ, etc., being explained by discontinuity of observation. * * * * * =Wages in England.= Consul General Badeau reports that during the past five years wages have increased gradually about 10 per cent, while the cost of living has increased about 25 per cent. Clothing is about 30 per cent higher, while fuel has not risen in price. Agricultural laborers get from $2 to $3 per week, including beer; building laborers and gardeners from $4.40 to $5.10 per week; bricklayers, carpenters, masons, and engineers from $6.80 to $11 per week; cabinetmakers, printers, and jewelers from $8 to $12.30 per week, although the best marble masons and jewelers receive $14.75. Bootmakers and tailors get from $4.86 to $7.65 per week, and bakers from $4.65 to $7.25, with partial board. Women servants are paid from $70 to $240 per annum. Railway porters and laborers on public works get from $4.45 to $12 per week. Rents have risen some 30 per cent, and are, for artisans in London, from $1.20 to $2.40 per week for one or two rooms. * * * * * =The Treatment of Cancer by Pressure.= M. Bouchut has recently introduced to the notice of the members of the Académie des Sciences a cuirasse of vulcanized caoutchouc, which he has used with success for the treatment of cancerous and other tumors of the breast. In this country there has been much division of opinion upon the utility of pressure in the treatment of cancer, some surgeons regarding it as harmful, or but rarely useful, others attributing to it great retardation of the rapidity of growth of the tumor, or even cure. The surgeons of Middlesex Hospital studied it systematically some years ago, and gave an unfavorable report. The theory of the plan is certainly good: a neoplasia, like a healthy tissue, is dependent upon its blood supply for vitality and growth, and complete anæmia causes the death of a tumor, as it does of a patch of brain substance. It will be remembered that Mr. Haward last year related at the Clinical Society a case in point. He ligatured the left lingual artery for a recurrent epithelioma of the tongue; the tumor sloughed away, and a fortnight before the patient's death from blood poisoning the tongue was quite healed. In just the same way ischæmia will impair the vitality and so lessen the growth of a tumor. The difficulty is rather in the practical application of this theory. The knowledge that we now possess of the mode of growth of cancers gives us at least one important indication. If we have to deal with a neoplasia that grows at the periphery by gradual infiltration of the surrounding tissues, it is plain that, for pressure to be useful, it must be applied around the tumor rather than over it, where, by compressing and obstructing the capillaries, it would cause overfullness of those at the circumference. It is the periphery of a cancer that is its active part, and we must, therefore, produce ischæmia around and not in the tumor. In the application of the treatment this must be obtained by the careful adjustment of elastic pads or cotton wool, and as the whole success of the plan depends upon the skill with which this is done, too much attention cannot be given to it. We cannot regard pressure as a substitute for removal of a cancer; but in the frequent cases where this is impracticable it appears to be the best substitute at present open to the surgeon. M. Bouchut's cuirasse would seem to be an improvement upon the spring pads and other appliances in use in this country.--_Lancet._ * * * * * =NEW CUTTING AND BORING ATTACHMENT FOR LATHES.= Our engraving represents a useful little machine which is intended for attachment to lathes. Although it is exceedingly simple it is capable of performing a great variety of work. The machine is used in two ways, either by attachment to a rigid support, as shown in Fig. 1, or by suspending it by a belt, so that it is capable of universal motion, as shown in Fig. 2. The supporting frame, A, has three boxes for the spindle, B, and on the shaft at one side of the middle box there are planing knives, C, on the opposite side there is a balance wheel, and a pulley for receiving the driving belt. The spindle, B, extends beyond the ends of the frame, A, and has at each end a socket for receiving interchangeable cutting and boring tools. One end of the spindle is externally threaded to receive a face plate, to which may be attached a disk of wood for receiving sandpaper for smoothing and polishing wood or metal. The frame, A, is held to its work by means of handles, A', and the spindle is driven by a round belt that passes over a suspended pulley, E, and also over the pulley on the lathe mandrel. The entire attachment is balanced by a weight, F, attached to a cord that passes over a fixed pulley, F', to the pulley, E, to which it is secured by a swivel hook that permits of turning the belt in any direction. The belt is guided by small pulleys, H, so that the device may be turned without running the belt from the pulley on the spindle. Guides, G, are attached to the frame, A, for guiding the material being operated upon by the planing knives. The frame, A, may be supported by attachment to an arm, I, at the lower end of the screw-acted follower, J, which slides in a rigid support, K. The arm, I, has a notched disk which is engaged by a spring detent which holds the frame at any desired inclination. Among the kinds of work that may be done on this machine may be mentioned shaping and edging, fluting and beading table legs, balusters, etc.; dovetailing, boring, carving, paneling, shaping or friezing mouldings, scroll or fret work, inlaying and engraving, blind stile mortising and blind slat planing. By changing the inclination of the spindle different varieties of mouldings may be produced by the same cutter. The machine may be used as an emery grinder, and it may also be used for drilling and shaping metals. For further information address Mathew Rice, Augusta, Ga. * * * * * =Decrease of the New York Rainfall.= In his report for 1876, Director Draper, of the New York Meteorological Observatory in Central Park, showed that a careful examination of the records in his office proved that there had been, in late years, a change in the rainfall of New York and its vicinity, affecting seriously its water supply. The decrease had been steady since 1869, previous to which there had been an increase. In his report for 1877, Mr. Draper discusses the question whether the change continues, or is likely to continue, in the same direction, and comes to the conclusion that the rainfall of New York will, most probably, continue to decrease by fluctuations for several years to come; also, that the variations are very nearly the same in the two portions of the year, the division date being July 1. * * * * * =NEW STEAM VALVE.= The improved valve shown partly in section in the engraving is designed for removing the water of condensation from steam pipes, so that dry steam may be furnished. [Illustration: SAUNDERS' STEAM VALVE.] In the engraving, the globe valve, A, is of the usual form, except that the casing below the valve seat is enlarged, forming a pocket, B, which communicates through an aperture at the bottom with a small valve, C. The steam, in passing through the valve, fills the pocket and there deposits any water that may have condensed from the steam in its passage through the steam pipe. The increased depth of the lower portion of the valve prevents siphoning, which takes place in valves of the ordinary form. The valve, C, is kept slightly open to discharge the water at the moment it collects in the pocket; the water is thus prevented from passing onward to the engine or other point of use. [Illustration: =CUTTING AND BORING ATTACHMENT FOR LATHES.=] This valve affords a ready means of supplying dry steam to sulphuric acid chambers. We are informed that by its use a chamber in ordinary working order will produce acid 3° to 5° Baumé stronger than can be obtained with ordinary globe valves. Thirty steam pipes, arranged at different points, are found to deliver into a chamber in the space of five minutes from 4 to 16 ounces of condense water (according to the circumstances of distance, temperature of the air, size of pipe, etc.). These valves, being placed close to the chamber separating all the condense water, deliver with certainty uniformly dry steam, without the inconvenience of ordinary steam traps or other expensive appliances. This valve was patented through the Scientific American Patent Agency, May 21, 1878. For further particulars address Mr. Joseph Saunders, 975 Third avenue, Brooklyn, N. Y. * * * * * =A Hint from the Mormons.= Ex-Governor Hendricks, in a recent industrial address, alluded to the highly prosperous condition of the Mormons as existing previous to the influx of the Gentiles into Utah, saying that "to the fact that they produced all they consumed I attribute their wonderful prosperity." This remark, associated with the prosperity of other communities in different parts of the country, would suggest the query of "Why the principle cannot be more largely applied to the whole nation?" Certainly the resources of the whole country would indicate a much greater diversity of production, and if there was the same regard for a uniform building up of our industrial system there would seem to be need of but little importation, certainly of goods which can be readily made, and which our people need the labor to produce. * * * * * =New Agricultural Inventions.= Joseph George, of Springfield, Greene Co., Mo., has patented an improved form of Cultivator or Shovel Plow, designed to be convertible into either a single, double, or triple shovel plow as occasion may require. It consists in two detachable clamping plates, which hold the plow beams, and their arrangement with respect to the said beams and the handles of the plow, whereby a single bolt is made to secure the forward ends of the handles and clamp the plates to hold the plow beams in place. Russel O. Bean, of Macedonia, Miss., is the inventor of an improved Seed Planter for planting cotton and other seeds, and for distributing fertilizers. The details of the construction of this planter cannot be explained without engravings. Rutus Sarlls and Alexander Kelman, of Navasota, Texas, have invented an improved combined Planter, Cultivator, and Cotton Chopper, which may be readily adjusted for use in planting seed, cultivating plants, and chopping cotton to a stand, and is effective and reliable in operation in either capacity. William H. Akens, of Penn Line, Pa., is the inventor of an improved Dropper, for attachment to the finger bar of a reaper, to receive the grain and deliver it in gavels at the side of the machine, so as to be out of the way when making the next round. It is so constructed that when attached to the finger bar of a mower it will convert it into a harvester. James Goodheart, of Matawan, N. J., has devised an improved machine for Distributing Poison upon potato plants to destroy the potato bug. It may also be used for sowing seeds. William V. McConnell and Charles M. Dickerson, of Crockett, Texas, have invented an improved Fruit Picker, having cup-shaped self-opening spring jaws attached to its handle, and operated by a cord to close upon and clamp the fruit. It also has a hollow extensible adjustable handle and a fruit receiver. * * * * * =Quick Work.= Two years ago a farmer-miller and his wife, at Carrolton, Mo., furnished some invited guests with bread baked in eight and a quarter minutes from the time the wheat was standing in the field. This year it was determined to make still better time. Accordingly elaborate preparations were made to reap, thrash, grind, and bake the grain with the least possible loss of time. In 1 minute 15 seconds the wheat, about a peck, was cut and thrashed, and put on the back of a swift horse to be carried to the mill, 16 rods away. In 2 minutes 17 seconds the flour was delivered to Mrs. Lawton, and in 3m. 55s. from the starting of the reaper the first griddle cake was done. In 4 minutes 37 seconds from the starting of the reaper, a pan of biscuits was delivered to the assembled guests. After that, according to the Carrolton _Democrat_, other pans of delicious "one minute" biscuits were baked more at leisure, and eagerly devoured, with the usual accompaniment of boiled ham and speech making. * * * * * =THE RHINOCEROS HORNBILL.= [Illustration: =THE RHINOCEROS HORNBILL.=] There are many strange and wonderful forms among the feathered tribes; but there are, perhaps, none which more astonish the beholder who sees them for the first time than the group of birds known by the name of hornbills. They are all distinguished by a very large beak, to which is added a singular helmet-like appendage, equaling in size the beak itself in some species, while in others it is so small as to attract but little notice. On account of the enormous size of the beak and helmet, the bird appears to be overweighted by the mass of horny substance which it has to carry, but on closer investigation the whole structure is found to be singularly light and yet very strong, the whole interior being composed of numerous honeycombed cells with very thin walls and wide spaces, the walls being so arranged as to give very great strength when the bill is used for biting, and with a very slight expenditure of material. The greatest development of beak and helmet is found in the rhinoceros hornbill, although there are many others which have these appendages of great size. The beak varies greatly in proportion to the age of the individual, the helmet being almost imperceptible when it is first hatched, and the bill not very striking in dimensions. The beak gains in size as the bird gains in strength. In the adult the helmet and beak attain their full proportions. It is said that a wrinkle is added every year to the number of the furrows found on the bill. The object of the helmet is obscure, but the probability is that it may aid the bird in producing the loud roaring cry for which it is so celebrated. The hornbill is lively and active, leaping from bough to bough with great lightness, and appearing not to be in the least incommoded by its huge beak. Its flight is laborious, and when in the air the bird has a habit of clattering its great mandibles together, which together with the noise of the wings produces a weird sound. The food of the hornbill seems to consist of both animal and vegetable matters. We take our illustration from Wood's "Natural History." * * * * * =Saw Tempering by Natural Gas.= Beaver Falls, Pa., contains several gas wells at an average depth of eleven hundred feet, yielding about 100,000 cubic feet of gas every twenty-four hours. This gas has been introduced into a large saw tempering furnace at that place in the works of Emerson, Smith & Co. The furnace is 8 feet wide by 14 feet long. It is said to be a perfect success, giving a uniform heat, and there being no sulphur or impurity in the gas the steel is not deteriorated in the operation of heating. * * * * * =THE JAPANESE BUILDING AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION.= [Illustration: =THE JAPANESE BUILDING AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION.=] Japan, on the terrestrial globe, lies furthest away in that direction beyond the Far West of America, and beyond the wide Pacific. The Japanese structure has a simple and solid aspect, resembling the portal of a half-fortified mansion, with massive timber frames at the sides; but it is adorned with two handsome porcelain fountains, and each of these is designed to represent the stump of a tree supporting a shell into which the water is poured from a large flower. Before entering the porch a large map of Japan and a plan of the city of Tokio are seen displayed on the walls to right and left.--_Illustrated London News._ * * * * * =Machinery for New York State Capitol Building.= The Buckeye Engine Company of this city have been awarded the contract for a pair of condensing engines, cylinders 14 inches diameter, stroke 28 inches, for the State Capitol Building at Albany, New York. The engines will be of the company's usual horizontal type with automatic cut off, and will be elaborately finished. * * * * * =The Explosiveness of Flour.= Professors Peck and Peckham, of the University of Minnesota, have been making an extensive series of experiments to determine the cause of the recent flour mill explosion at Minneapolis. The substances tested were coarse and fine bran, material from stone grinding wheat; wheat dust, from wheat dust house; middlings, general mill dust, dust from middlings machines, dust from flour dust house (from stones), and flour. When thrown in a body on a light, all these substances put the light out. Blown by a bellows into the air surrounding a gas flame, the following results were obtained: Coarse bran would not burn. Fine bran and flour dust burn quickly, with considerable blaze. Middlings burn quicker, but with less flame. All the other substances burn very quickly, very much like gunpowder. In all these cases there was a space around the flash where the dust was not thick enough to ignite from particle to particle; hence it remained in the air after the explosion. Flour dust, flour middlings, etc., when mixed with air, thick enough to ignite from particle to particle, and separated so that each particle is surrounded by air, will unite with the oxygen in the air, producing a gas at high temperature, which requires an additional space, hence the bursting. There is no gas which comes from flour or middlings that is an explosive; it is the direct combination with the air that produces gas, requiring additional space. Powerful electric sparks from the electric machine and from the Leyden jar were passed through the air filled with dust of the different kinds, but without an explosion in any case. A platinum wire kept at a white heat by a galvanic battery would not produce an explosion. The dust would collect upon it and char to black coals, but would not blaze nor explode. A piece of glowing charcoal, kept hot by the bellows, would not produce an explosion when surrounded by dust, but when fanned into a blaze the explosion followed. A common kerosene lantern, when surrounded by dust of all degrees of density, would not produce an explosion, but when the dust was blown into the bottom, through the globe and out of the top, it would ignite. To explode quickly the dust must be dry. Evidently when an explosion has been started in a volume of dusty air, loose flour maybe blown into the air and made a source of danger. * * * * * =New Engineering Inventions.= Erskine H. Bronson, of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, has patented an improvement in Automatic Switches for Railways, which consists in an arrangement of sliding cams for moving the switch rails, and in treadles to be operated by the pilot wheels of the locomotive, and in intermediate mechanism for connecting the treadles with the switch operating cams, the object being to provide a switch will be operated by the pilot wheels of the locomotive as it approaches the movable switch rails. An improved Refrigerator Car has been patented by Michael Haughey, of St Louis, Missouri. The object of this invention is to ventilate and cool railway cars used in the transportation of perishable articles. This car has a novel ventilator and ice box and is provided with a new form of non-conducting walls. * * * * * =CROOKED JOURNALISM.= In the English scientific journal _Engineering_, of June 21, 1878, appears a six column article on "Edison's Carbon Telephone," illustrated with ten engravings from Mr. Prescott's recent work on "The Speaking Telephone, Talking Phonograph, and other novelties." The descriptions of the cuts, and the rest of the information given, so far as correct, obviously come from the same source. So far as correct: unhappily for the honor of scientific journalism, the writer's desire is plainly not so much to do justice to truth as to exalt Mr. Hughes at the expense of Mr. Edison. To this end he has studiously suppressed from Mr. Prescott's description of the carbon telephone the points which establish Mr. Edison's claim to the prior invention or discovery of everything involved in Mr. Hughes' microphone, while he has as studiously dwelt upon those same points as constituting the peculiar merits of Mr. Hughes' work. For example, while he uses Fig. 21 of Mr. Prescott's book, he leaves out the very important little diagram numbered 20. It represents one form of the apparatus to which Sir William Thomson refers in the letter in which he says: "It is certain that at the meeting of the British Association at Plymouth last September, a method of magnifying sound in an electric telephone was described as having been invented by Mr. Edison, which was identical in principle and in some details with that brought forward by Mr. Hughes." The figure looks altogether too much like one form of Mr. Hughes' microphone to allow of its use in an article intended to establish the novelty of Mr. Hughes' discovery. The omissions from the text are quite as significant. Under the first cut used in _Engineering_, Mr. Prescott says: "In the latest form of transmitter which Mr. Edison has introduced the vibrating diaphragm is done away with altogether, it having been found that much better results are obtained when a rigid plate of metal is substituted in its place.... The inflexible plate, of course, merely serves, in consequence of its comparatively large area, to concentrate a considerable portion of the sonorous waves upon the small carbon disk or button; a much greater degree of pressure for any given effort of the speaker is thus brought to bear on the disk than could be obtained if only its small surface alone were used." The _Engineering_ writer coolly suppresses this important statement. He does worse: he puts in its place the false statement that "the essential principle of Mr. Edison's transmitter consists in causing a diaphragm, vibrating under the influence of sonorous vibrations, to vary the pressure upon, and therefore the resistance of, a piece of carbon," and so on. A little further on, while repeating Mr. Edison's account of the experiments which led to the abandonment of the vibrating diaphragm (page 226 of Mr. Prescott's book), the _Engineering_ writer drops out the following remark by Mr. Edison: "I discovered that my principle, unlike all other acoustical devices for the transmission of speech, did not require any vibration of the diaphragm--that, in fact, the sound waves could be transformed into electrical pulsations without the movement of any intervening mechanism." Worse yet, in the very face of Mr. Edison's assertion to the contrary--an assertion which he could not by any possibility have overlooked--this most unscientific journalist says: "Mr. Edison finds it necessary to insert a diaphragm in all forms of his apparatus, that being the mechanical contrivance employed by which sonorous vibrations are converted into variations of mechanical pressure, and by which variations in the conductivity of the carbon or other material is insured.... On the other hand, Mr. Hughes employs no diaphragm at all, the sonorous vibrations in his apparatus acting directly upon the conducting material or through whatever solid substance to which they may be attached." In this way throughout the offending article, the writer persistently robs Edison to magnify Hughes, giving credit to Mr. Hughes for exactly what he has suppressed from Mr. Prescott's book. To insist as he does, that, because Mr. Edison covers his carbon button with a rigid iron plate, in his very practical telephone, therefore a vibrating diaphragm is an essential feature of Mr. Edison's invention, is a very shallow quibble in the face of Mr. Edison's and Mr. Prescott's statements that the carbon button acts precisely the same in the absence of such covering, though not so strongly. Mr. Edison's laboratory records show a great variety of experiments in which the carbon was talked against without "any intervening mechanism." In a telephone for popular use, however, to be held in the hand, turned upside down, talked into, exposed to dust and the weather, it was obviously necessary to use some means for holding the carbon in place, and to prevent its sensitiveness from being destroyed by dirt and the moisture of the breath when in use. For this purpose a rigid iron partition seemed at once convenient and durable. It is not in any sense a "vibrating diaphragm." With a persistence worthy of a better cause, the _Engineering_ writer returns to the point he seems especially anxious to enforce. Toward the end of the article he says: "In every instrument described by Mr. Edison the diaphragm is the ruling genie of the instrument. Professor Hughes, however, has through his great discovery been enabled to show that variations of resistance can be imparted to an electrical current not only without a diaphragm, but with very much better results when no such accessory is employed." The animus of all this is only too apparent. Altogether the article is the most dishonest piece of writing we have ever seen in a scientific periodical; and although the article appears in the editorial columns of _Engineering_, we prefer, for the honor of scientific journalism, to think that the management of that paper was not party to the rascally act. It is more credible that a gross imposition has been practiced by some trusted member of the _Engineering_ staff, or by some contributor whose position seemed to justify the acceptance of his utterances without any attempt at their verification. It is well known here to whom, in London, at Mr. Edison's request, Mr. Prescott sent proofs of the matter abused, together with electros of the cuts used, in _Engineering_. Accordingly the burden of dishonor lies upon or between a prominent British official on the one hand, and on the other a journal which cannot afford to leave the matter unexplained. Whoever is hurt, we sincerely hope that the fair fame of scientific journalism for candor and honesty may come off unstained. * * * * * =A More Perfect Production.= The highest skill in manufacture or in production of any kind is not yet the prevailing characteristic of American industry. Uniformity of production, of whatever kind, is of much greater importance than to attempt the manufacture of any grade for which the material or the tools, the machinery or the knowledge of the workmen is not fitted. The highest condition of product in any nation is to produce the finest or highest cost articles in the most perfect manner, and to have material and machinery adopted, and the skilled workmen, so as to be able to so produce economically. But until the master hand is satisfied of all the requisites for producing fine goods, he should confine production to the best his facilities will make in the most perfect, uniform manner. Samples of fine goods are shown all over the country every day, and were consumers or merchants sure that the product would be the same, there would be much less difficulty in introducing and more homemade goods used where now importations are depended upon. The Stevens crash mills import raw flax because it is to be had according to sample, perfectly classified, and saves the employment of skilled labor to assort and classify, and of purchasing a great deal not wanted. The manufacturers of edge tools and knives use imported steel because it is warranted and the warrant proves good, while the uncertainty of American steel is such that a knife will often crack in tempering and cause the loss of labor worth ten times the difference in the price of the steel. Samples of alpacas and other dress goods are shown in our jobbing houses fully equal to any imported goods, but the goods when received are quite often of various grades and imperfections of character. The imperfect or second quality productions find sale, but at a much lower price, and are to be found at second rate places, the imperfections slight and the goods perhaps generally quite as serviceable, but not absolutely so, and first class houses, catering to those who pay highest prices, cannot afford to have any other house carry better articles than they do. The use of perfect appliances and the best material and the employment of the highest skill are not yet the first step and an absolute necessity, as it should be, in America. The supply of such machinery, material, and labor can be had if those who propose to enter the production of first class articles will insist upon it, and if such supplies are appreciated by the payment of their higher value. The American standard of production is not the highest, and it can be materially elevated, and while, as at present, too many common articles are supplied, the leading manufacturers should turn to producing finer, the finest, and in smaller quantities, to take the place of many articles now imported, and to supply the new market which such productions will always create in any country. * * * * * =The Wool Product of the World.= From an interesting article on the wool trade of the Pacific coast, published in a recent number of the San Francisco _Journal of Commerce_, we learn that the number of sheep in the world is now estimated at from four hundred and eighty-four to six hundred millions, of which the United States has about 36,000,000, and Great Britain the same number. From 1801 to 1875 the wool clip of Great Britain and Ireland increased from 94,000,000 to 325,000,000 pounds. That of France has increased almost as rapidly, though the wool is finer, as a rule, and hence the superiority of French cloths. Australia produces nearly as much wool as the parent country--Great Britain. The United States product increased from very little at the beginning of the century to about 200,000,000 pounds at the present time. Of this California has produced about one fourth, and the Pacific coast as a whole almost one third. If the ratio of growth shown in the past prevails in the future, the day is not far distant when the Pacific coast will produce at least one half the wool produced in the United States, as not only California and Oregon, but also Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and New Mexico are well adapted to its production. The wool clip of Australia is about 284,000,000 pounds; that of Buenos Ayres and the river Plata, 222,500,000 pounds; other countries not previously given, 463,000,000 pounds. The total clip of the world last year was about 1,497,500,000 pounds, worth $150,000,000. This when scoured would yield about 852,000,000 pounds of clean wool. * * * * * =Street Main Joints.= At the annual meeting of the New England Association of Gas Engineers, Mr. Thomas, of Williamsburg, made the following remarks on this subject: "In my early experience with the Williamsburg Gaslight Company, with which I became connected in the year 1854, I found pretty nearly all the street mains that were laid were connected with cement joints. While there is no doubt in my own mind that a joint can be made perfectly tight with cement, I much prefer the lead joint. Another thing to be taken into consideration to keep tight joints is that the mains should be laid a sufficient depth under the surface to protect them from the action of severe frosts. A great many of the mains were not more than 18 inches or 2 feet below the surface of the streets, and at this depth in our climate it is a matter of impossibility to keep joints tight, as the action of the frost in winter will displace the mains and cause the joints to leak. From the bad manner in which our mains were laid, and the cement joints leaking so much, we could not afford to turn gas on during the day. Had we done so we should not have had any to supply the city at night, and we were thus compelled to shut off the gas just as soon as there was any apology for daylight, and keep it shut off as late as possible in the evening. "With the most careful working in this manner, for a period of nine or twelve months, our losses from leakage amounted to about 52 to 55 per cent of the gas manufactured. A great part of this loss was caused by the cement joints leaking, and also a part due to the fact that the mains were not at sufficient depth under the surface to protect them from the action of the frost. As soon as we possibly could I went over the whole of our mains (there was about 17 miles in all), stripping them, cutting out the cement, and rejointing them with lead. In one season we got the loss from leakage down to 20 per cent, and this with the gas turned on during the 24 hours of the day. "One great objection to cement joints is the rigidity of them; in cases where pipes have been disturbed by other excavations and settled, I found in all cases that the mains were broken. In a leading main from our old works, with cement joints, the main, a 10-inch one, was broken entirely off and fractured lengthwise besides, by the upheaval of the ground from frost. In some of the same mains that we had rejointed with lead the mains were drawn apart, drawing the lead out, but with very little loss of gas, as the gasket being driven in tight prevented any great leakage. In cases of this kind the lead was easily driven back, and the joint made perfectly tight again. I have never in our city put in any street mains that I have not used lead in the joints, and in laying mains we always make them gas tight with the gasket used. "At the present time we have over 90 miles of street mains laid, and outside of our loss from street lamps (we get paid for three foot burners and they average about 3¼ foot) our loss from leakage will not exceed 6 per cent. We have suffered severe loss of gas from sewering in our city. In some cases where there are railroad tracks in the streets, the sewers have been run on both sides of the street, alongside and parallel with our pipes; these excavations are much deeper than our mains lie, and the earth is always filled in loosely and left to settle. "In cases of this kind, whole blocks of mains were dragged down, the pipe broken, and the joints partially pulled apart; at the same time the leakage from the joints was not so great, the gasket preventing the leakage. In laying street mains, what you want particularly to attend to, and especially in the East here, where you have colder weather than we have (we have not seen much winter until we came on here), is to get them down under the surface a sufficient depth to protect them from the frost. With us the least depth is 2 feet 9 inches under the surface of the street, and I am confident, could our mains remain in the ground as we put them down, our loss from leakage by them would be very small indeed. While, as I stated in the beginning, I have no doubt that a cement joint can be made tight, I can see no benefit in using cement for the purpose, as I consider lead far superior in accommodating itself to any upheaval or settling of the earth where the mains are laid down." * * * * * =Successful Shad Hatching.= Professor J. W. Milner, who has charge of the shad hatching operations under the direction of the United States Fish Commissioner, Professor Baird, is now engaged in the preparation of the report of the work for the season just completed. Speaking of the work on the Atlantic seaboard, and the distribution of young fish, the report says that at the Salmon Creek Station, on Albemarle Sound, they obtained 12,730,000 eggs, and turned out 3,000,000 young fish. At the Havre de Grace Station 12,230,000 eggs were obtained, and 9,575,000 young fish were turned out. About 6,000,000 young shad have been distributed in the rivers emptying into the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico during the season. The distribution of shad during the past season has been carried on on a much larger scale than in any previous year, and with great success. The restocking of the rivers of the Atlantic is only the work of a few years. * * * * * =New Use for Lemon Verbena.= The well known fragrant garden favorite, the sweet-scented or lemon verbena (_Lippia citriodora_), seems to have other qualities to recommend it than those of the fragrance for which it is usually cultivated. The author of a recent work, entitled "Among the Spanish People," describes it as being systematically gathered in Spain, where it is regarded as a fine stomachic and cordial. It is used either in the form of a cold decoction, sweetened, or five or six leaves are put into a teacup, and hot tea poured upon them. The author says that the flavor of the tea thus prepared "is simply delicious, and no one who has drunk his Pekoe with it will ever again drink it without a sprig of lemon verbena." And he further states that if this be used one need "never suffer from flatulence, never be made nervous or old-maidish, never have cholera, diarrhea, or loss of appetite." * * * * * =A VELOCIPEDE FEAT EXTRAORDINARY.= Two intrepid velocipedists, M. le Baron Emanuel de Graffenried de Burgenstein, aged twenty years and six months, and a member of the Society of Velocipede Sport, of Paris, has accomplished, with M. A. Laumaillé d'Angers, the greatest distance that has been made with a velocipede in France. Leaving Paris on March 16, they returned on the 24th of April, after having traveled a distance of more than three thousand miles. [Illustration: =A VELOCIPEDE FEAT EXTRAORDINARY.=] Their route extended through a part of the west, the middle, and the south of France, Italy, and southern Switzerland. They traveled through Orléans, Tours, Poitiers, Angoulême, Bordeaux, Montauban, Toulouse, Montpellier, Marseilles, Toulon, Nice, Menton, San-Remo, Genoa, Turin, Milan, the Simplon--where they barely escaped destruction by an avalanche--Vevay, Berne, Lausanne, Geneva, Dijon, Troy, and Provins. The longest distance that they accomplished in a single day, was between Turin and Milan, a distance of 90 miles, which they made in 9½ hours. * * * * * =Superior Excellence of American Goods.= The _Post_, of Birmingham, England, remarks with regard to American competition, that "perhaps the most humiliating feature of the business for British manufacturers is the fact that their competitors are prevailing, not through the cheapness, but through the excellence of their goods. Time was when English workmanship ranked second to none, and the names of our great manufacturing firms were a guarantee for the sterling quality of the goods they turned out; but competitions, trades unions, piece work, short hours, and other incidents of the 'march of progress' have altered all that. Complaints, received by hardware merchants from their customers abroad, are not confined to the goods of second class firms. Manufacturers who have obtained a world-wide reputation for their products are frequently convicted of sending out scamped and unfinished work, and they do not venture to deny the impeachment, pleading only that the most vigilant must be sometimes at fault, and that their men, unfortunately, are not to be depended upon. In other cases it is the merchants or their customers who are to blame for the inferior quality of the articles by cutting prices so low as to preclude the possibility of honest work, thinking, probably, that anything is good enough for a foreign or colonial market. But whatever the cause, the fact is now undeniable, that a great deal of the manufactured produce shipped from this country of late years has been of a very low standard, and that the American manufacturers have consequently had an easy task in beating it." * * * * * =Petroleum Oils as Lubricators.= Oils from petroleum are now produced suitable for nearly every mechanical process for which animal oils have heretofore been used, not excepting those intended for cylinder purposes. A serious objection attaching to the animal oils is present in petroleum. If, through the exhaust steam, some of the oil be carried into the boiler, foaming or priming is the consequence, but the same thing happening in the case of petroleum is rather a benefit than otherwise, for it not only does not cause foaming, but it prevents incrustation or adhesion of the scale or deposit, and this aids in the preservation of the boiler, and is perhaps the best preventive of the many everywhere suggested. Often, in removing the cylinder head and the plate covering the valves of an engine, we see evidences of corrosion or action on the surfaces, differing entirely from ordinary wear, and the engineer is generally at a loss how to account for it. According to the general impression grease or animal oil is the preservative of the metal, and is the last thing suspected of being the cause of its general disintegration. The reason of this is that vegetable and animal oils consist of fatty acids, such as stearic, magaric, oleic, etc. They are combined with glycerin as a base, and, under ordinary conditions, are neutrals to metals generally, and on being applied they keep them from rusting by shielding them from the action of air and moisture. But in the course of time the influence of the air causes decomposition and oxidation, the oils become rancid, as it is called, which is acid, and they act on the metals. What happens at the ordinary temperature slowly goes on rapidly in the steam cylinder, where a new condition is reached. The oils are subjected to the heat of high pressure steam, which dissociates or frees these acids from their base, and in this condition they attack the metal and hence destroy it. This applies as well to vegetable as to oils of animal origin, fish or sperm oil included. Petroleum and oils derived therefrom (generally called mineral oils) are entirely free from this objection. Petroleum contains no oxygen, and hence it cannot form an acid, and therefore cannot attack metal. It is entirely neutral, and so bland that it may be and is used medicinally as a dressing to wounds and badly abraded surfaces where cerates of ordinary dressing would give pain.--_Coal Trade Journal._ * * * * * =Influence of Light on Plants and Animals.= Professor Paul Bert, who has recently devoted a great deal of attention to the study of the influence of light on animals and plants, denies that the leaves of the sensitive plant close on the approach of evening, the same as if they had been touched by the hand. On the contrary, he finds that from 9 in the evening, after drooping, they expand again and attain the maximum of rigidity at 2 in the morning. What is commonly called the "sensitiveness" of plants is but the external manifestations of the influences of light. Professor Bert placed plants in lanterns of different colored glass; those under the influence of green glass drooped in the course of a few days as completely as if placed in utter darkness, proving that green rays are useless, and equal to none at all. In a few weeks all plants without exception thus treated died. It has been proved by the experiments of Zimiriareff that the reducing power of the green matter of plants is proportionate to the quantity of red rays absorbed, and Bert shows that green glass precisely intercepts these colored rays, and that plants exist more or less healthily in blue and violet rays. In the animal world phenomena of a directly opposite nature are found, and of a more complex character. Here the light acts on the skin and the movements of the body, either directly or through the visual organs. M. Pouchet has shown the changes in color that certain animals undergo, according to the medium in which they live. For instance, young turbots resting on white sand assume an ashy tint, but when resting on a black bottom become brown; when deprived of its eyes the fish exhibits no change of color in its skin; the phenomenon, therefore, seems to be nervous or optical. Professor Bert placed a piece of paper with a cut design on the back of a sleeping chameleon; on bringing a lamp near the animal the skin gradually became brown, and on removing the paper a well defined image of the pattern appeared. In this case the light acted directly, and without nervous intervention. If, however, the eye of the chameleon be extracted, the corresponding side of the animal becomes insensible to the influence of the light. Professor Bert's conclusion, therefore, is that the circulation in the transparent layers of the skin must be affected by light. According to Dr. Bouchard a sunstroke is the effect of the direct action of light upon the skin, produced by the blue and violet rays. The heat producing rays have no part in such accidents, as proved by the fact that workmen exposed to intense heats do not feel their fatal effect. Professor Bert, in a series of experiments on a variety of animals, found that none avoided light, but all rather sought it; and the lowest forms, like the highest, absorbed the same rays. As regards intensity of color, however, there was a difference, some being more partial to one ray than another. Thus the microscopic daphne of the pond preferred yellow; violet was less in request; spiders seemed to enjoy blue rather than red rays--so resembling people suffering from color blindness. No two persons are sensible to the same shades or tones, while absorbing the same light; and this would seem to indicate that the retina possesses a selective power. * * * * * =New Mechanical Inventions.= An improved Weighing Scale has been patented by Hosea Willard, of Vergennes, Vt. The object of this invention is to economize time in ascertaining the weight of an article by avoiding the necessity for shifting the poise on the scale beam. It consists in providing a scale beam with a number of dishes suspended from different points on said beam, and representing or corresponding with different weights, so that the weight of an article may be ascertained by placing it in one or more of said dishes and observing which dish is depressed. William John, of Rigdon, Ind., has patented an improved Tire Setting and Cooling Apparatus, by which the tire may be set by one person, easily and quickly, without burning the fellies, and without straining the wheel by the unequal cooling of the tire. Joseph A. Mumford, of Avondale, Nova Scotia, Canada, has patented an improved machine for Sawing and Jointing Shingles. This machine cannot be properly described without engravings. It has an ingenious feeding device, and its flywheel carries the jointing knives. * * * * * =Ill-balanced Production.= The Philadelphia _Record_ sensibly remarks that the popular complaint of over-production is a mistake. Though of a few things we make or mine too much, our main trouble arises from not producing enough, in variety if not in quantity. "The wants of mankind never can be satisfied. Every new means of supplying a want creates new wants. They grow by what they feed on. As long as humanity is so constituted, over-production, in a general and enlarged sense, is impossible. It is this impossible thing with which the reformers would deal who propose to work fewer hours each day, or fewer hours in the week. The trouble they deplore does not exist; the remedy they propose defeats itself. A man cannot get rid of his load by shifting it from his right hand to his left hand. Production will not be stopped by making men their own employers certain hours in the day or certain days in the week, instead of allowing them to pursue their usual avocations. "The real trouble, which the labor reformers seem incompetent to fathom, is that there is not enough diversity in employments. What is desired is more work in productive enterprises, a more diffused industry, and a closer commercial connection with those countries wherein we can make desirable exchanges both of our raw material and our manufactured products. Every miner that drops his pick and takes up a hoe, every idle man that turns himself into an earner of wages, every person that picks up some loose thread of employment, every capitalist that takes advantage of stagnating industry and cheap material to build a house or beautify or improve a country seat, or set on foot some new process of manufacture, does something toward working out the problem which is puzzling the economists. In good time the surplus iron and coal will be sold; new populations will want new railroads; recuperated capital will gather confidence and take hold of new enterprises, and the whole nation will move forward again to more assured prosperity and to vaster undertakings." * * * * * =Labor in Germany.= The consul at Barmen reports that for agricultural labor the pay varies greatly, according to the proximity to or remoteness from manufacturing centers; and ranges from fifty-six cents a day in the neighborhood of Barmen to thirty-one cents a day in the lower Rhine valley, and as low as eighteen cents in parts of Silesia. At Barmen, Crefeld and Düsseldorf, carpenters, coppersmiths, plumbers, machinists and wagonsmiths earn fifty-one to seventy-five cents daily; saddlers and shoemakers forty-seven to fifty-two cents daily; bakers and brewers, with board and lodging, from $1.42 to $2.14 weekly, and without board from sixty cents a day to $4.28 a week; farm hands are paid from $107 to $215 yearly, with maintenance; railroad laborers from fifty-six to eighty-three cents per day, and as high as ninety-five cents daily for piece work on tunnels; silk weavers can earn $2.15 to $2.85 a week per loom; factory women $2.15, and children $1 a week. Business and wages are very low. In good times wages are eighty per cent higher. The cost of the necessaries of life has increased some fifty per cent in thirteen years, although it is now but little higher than five years ago. A man and wife with two or three children can live in two or three rooms in a poor and comfortless manner for $275 a year, and to support such an establishment all the members have to work ten or twelve hours daily. For a family of six persons the cost is about $7 per week--an amount but few families can earn, as the depression of trade and the reduction of time allow few to do a full week's work, although wages are nominally a trifle higher than five years ago. * * * * * =Petroleum June Review.= DRILLING WELL ACCOUNT. The low price of oil and large accumulation of stock in the producing regions have had the effect to lessen operations in this department during the month of June. The total number of drilling wells in all the districts, at the close of the month, was 266, which was 110 less than in the preceding month. Rigs erected and being erected 243, against 309 last month. The number of drilling wells completed during the month was 269, being 151 less than in May. Aggregate production of the new wells was 3,788 barrels, against 6,851 barrels in May. The total number of dry holes developed in the month was 22, against 42 in May. The operators in the great northern field (Bradford district) have curtailed operations to an extent which will compare favorably with the operators in the other portions of the producing regions, as will be seen by the following statement, namely: Number of wells drilling at the close of the month, 187, against 284 at the close of the previous month. Number of drilling wells completed in June, 193, against 346 in May. Number of rigs erected and being erected, 196, against 234 in May. PRODUCTION. The daily average production for the month was 40,575 barrels, being a decrease of 227 barrels. The new wells completed in June failed to make good the falling off of the old ones, by decreasing the daily average 227 barrels. Bradford district shows a daily average production of 16,000 barrels, being an increase of 1,280 barrels over last month. The aggregate production in June of all the other districts combined, with the aid of 76 new wells, decreased the daily average 1,507 barrels. SHIPMENTS. The shipments in June, out of the producing regions, were 174,225 barrels larger than in the preceding month. The total shipments of crude, and refined reduced to crude equivalent, by railroad, river and pipes to the following points, were 1,135,119 barrels: New York took 555,794 bbls. Pittsburg " 153,182 " Cleveland " 239,389 " Philadelphia " 73,426 " Boston " 29,266 " Baltimore " 26,623 " Richmond " 7,000 " Ohio River refiners took 5,200 " Other local points took 45,239 " --------- Total shipments 1,135,119 " Included in the above shipments there were 140,299 barrels of refined from Titusville and Oil City, which is equal to 187,065 barrels of crude.--_Stowell's Petroleum Reporter._ * * * * * =Remarkable Poisoning of a Lake.= A contributor to _Nature_ describes the remarkable poisoning of Lake Alexandrina--one of the bodies of water which form the estuary of the Murray river, Australia. This year the water of the river has been unusually warm and low, and the inflow to the lakes very slight. The consequence has been an excessive growth of a conferva which is indigenous to these lakes and confined to them. This alga, _Nodularia spumigera_, is very light and floats on the water, except during breezes, when it becomes diffused, and being driven to the lee shores, forms a thick scum like green oil paint. This scum, which is from two to six inches thick, and of a pasty consistency, being swallowed by cattle when drinking, acts poisonously and rapidly causes death. The symptoms of the poisoning are stupor and unconsciousness, falling and remaining quiet (as if asleep), unless touched, when convulsions are induced, the head and neck being drawn back by a rigid spasm, subsiding before death. The poison causes the death of sheep in from one to six or eight hours; of horses, in from eight to twenty-four hours; of dogs, in from four to five hours; and of pigs in three or four hours. A _post mortem_ shows the plant is rapidly absorbed into the circulation, where it must act as a ferment, and causes disorganization. As the cattle will not touch the puddle where the plant scum has collected and become putrid, all they take is quite fresh, and the poisoning is therefore not due to drinking a putrescent fluid full of bacteria, as was suggested. When the scum collects and dries on the banks it forms a green crust. When, however, it is left in wet pools it rapidly decomposes, emitting a most horrible stench, like putrid urine; but previous to reaching this stage it gives out a smell like that of very rancid butter. A blue pigment exudes from this decomposing matter, having some remarkable properties. It is remarkably fluorescent, being red by reflected and blue by transmitted light; it appears to be a product of the decomposition, and allied to the coloring matter found in some lichens. * * * * * =ASTRONOMICAL NOTES.= BY BERLIN H. WRIGHT. PENN YAN, N. Y., Saturday, August 10, 1878. The following calculations are adapted to the latitude of New York city, and are expressed in true or clock time, being for the date given in the caption when not otherwise stated. PLANETS. H.M. H.M. Mercury sets 8 03 eve. | Saturn Rises 8 89 eve. Venus rises 2 42 mo. | Saturn in meridian 2 58 mo. Jupiter in meridian 10 52 eve. | Neptune rises 10 27 eve. FIRST MAGNITUDE STARS H.M. H.M. Alpheratz rises 6 54 eve. | Regulus sets 7 29 eve. Algol (var.) rises 8 34 eve. | Spica sets 9 24 eve. 7 stars (Pleiades) rise 10 53 eve. | Arcturus sets 0 08 mo. Aldebaran rises 0 17 mo. | Antares sets 11 24 eve. Capella rises 9 40 eve. | Vega in meridian 9 15 eve. Rigel Rises 2 23 mo. | Altair in meridian 10 27 eve. Betelgeuse rises 2 08 mo. | Deneb in meridian 11 19 eve. Sirius rises 4 24 mo. | Fomalhaut rises 9 34 eve. Procyon rises 3 59 mo. | REMARKS Mercury is brightest this date, and furthest from the sun August 13. Venus will be at her descending node August 17. Jupiter will be near the moon August 17, 4h. 20m. morning, being the moon's apparent diameter north; this will be an occultation south of the equator. Saturn will be near the moon August 16, being about 7° south. There will be a partial eclipse of the moon August 16, in the evening. The moon will rise more or less eclipsed east of Kansas, west of which no eclipse will be visible. Middle. End. H.M. H.M. Boston 7 24 eve. 8 50 eve. New York 7 12 eve. 8 38 eve. Washington 7 00 eve. 8 26 eve. Charleston 6 48 eve. 8 14 eve. Chicago --------- 7 44 eve. St. Louis --------- 7 33 eve. New Orleans --------- 7 34 eve. The following shows the appearance of the moon when the eclipse is greatest--7·1 digits, or 0·596 of the moon's diameter. [Illustration] The size of the eclipse will be the same for all places. The time of middle and end for any other places may be obtained by applying the difference of longitude from Washington, converted into time, to the Washington time of middle and end, adding if east of Washington, and subtracting if west. * * * * * =An Interesting Astronomical Observation.= _To the Editor of the Scientific American:_ While viewing the planet Jupiter, at about 5 minutes past 10 o'clock P.M., a very strange sight presented itself to the observers, who were looking for a transit of one of the satellites. A very dark spot much larger than a satellite was seen on the eastern edge of the disk, as shown in the above diagram. It moved rapidly westward along the upper margin of the northern belt and passed off at 1 o'clock 24 minutes A.M. (12th). From its first internal contact till its last external contact was just 3h. 19m., Pittsburg time. It appeared to be a solid opaque body, truly spherical, very sharply defined, and most intensely black. The transit of the satellite occurred at 15 minutes after 11 o'clock, and had no unusual appearance. Now what was that dark body? We are constant observers of the heavenly bodies, though not deeply versed in the science of astronomy, and are anxious to know if any one can give us some light on the subject. The telescopes used were a 2½ inch and 5 inch achromatic, magnifying 154 and 216 diameters, but the 154 was chiefly used. JOSEPH WAMPLER. JAMES R. GEMMILL. McKeesport, Pa., July 11, 1878. [Illustration] * * * * * =Some of Professor Marsh's Recent Discoveries.= Mr. S. W. Williston, the assistant of Professor Marsh, has been giving to the Omaha _Bee_ some interesting facts with regard to the great reptilian fossils recently discovered in Wyoming and Colorado. The bones found represent reptiles of many sizes, from that of a cat up to one sixty feet high. The latter, found at Como, Wyoming, belonged to the crocodile order; but the remains give evidence that the animal stood up on its hind legs, like a kangaroo. Another found in Colorado is estimated by Professor Marsh to have been 100 feet long. A great many remains of the same general class, but belonging to different species, have been collected and sent East. Among them from three to four hundred specimens of the dinosaur, and about a thousand pterodactyls, have been shipped from Colorado, Wyoming, and Kansas. The wings of one of the latter were from thirty to forty feet from tip to tip. Seventeen different species of these flying dragons have been found in the chalk of western Kansas. There have also been found six species of toothed birds. Comparatively little has been done toward classifying the late finds, the task is such an enormous one. Great importance is attached to them, however, since nothing of the kind had been found in America until a little over a year ago and great stress had been laid by certain geologists on their absence. Another remarkable feature of the discovery was that the fossils which had been reported as not existing in this country had hardly been brought to light in one locality before thousands of tons of them were simultaneously discovered in half a dozen different places. * * * * * =Trying to Save a Hundred and Fifty Million Dollars a Year.= Professor Riley, recently appointed Government Entomologist and attached to the Agricultural Department, reports that specimens of insects injurious to agriculture are constantly being sent to the department from all parts of the country, with requests for information. In every instance, if a proper examination could be made, an effectual remedy could be found, and not less than $150,000,000 saved to the country annually. Recently a worm entirely new to science was sent to the department by an Iowa farmer, whose orchard of several thousand apple trees had been rendered unproductive for several years by the new depredator. For the interests of Western fruit growers this insect should immediately be investigated. Professor Riley asserts that the $5,000 recently voted by Congress for the investigation of the cotton worm, which has sometimes damaged the cotton crop of the South as much as $20,000,000 in a single fortnight, might have been used to better advantage by the department; the salary of the entomologist will use up all the money, leaving next to nothing for experiments for the eradication of the pest. * * * * * =Industrial Education.= All are agreed that some education is necessary; but what? The great proportion of those having the direction of our educational system and facilities in charge still cling to a system which was established long before the first mechanical operation came into existence. Before the present system of man's relation to man, socially, industrially, politically, or commercially, was heard of, and notwithstanding the revolutions and advancement in all other things, there is a determined resistance to any attempt at revolution in what shall be considered education. There is an effort to establish compulsory education; but what is the child to be taught? As if in league with the false theories of the rights of labor, these efforts take the apprentices from the shops, force them away from where they would learn something, and confine them inside a school house to learn--what? Certainly nothing of the materials, or tools, or pursuits by which they are to obtain their livelihood. The child knows nothing of when or by whom the compass was discovered, the printing press, the use of powder, electricity, of steam, or of any one of the thousand mechanical operations now controlling every department of life. Does any school boy know how many kingdoms there are in the natural world, or whether an animal, a vegetable and a mineral all belong to the same or to different ones? Will he know that from instinct the young of animals seeks its food and expands its lungs, as by the same instinct the root of a seed sucks up its nourishment from the soil and sends its leaves up to breathe the air? Will he know anything of the nature or requirements of the soils or the plants that grow in them? Will this compulsory education teach the boy anything of the iron furnace, the foundry or rolling mill, or the uses or handling of any of their products? Will it teach him anything of woods and their value, or for what and how they are useful to man? Will this knowledge, for which the powers of the State are to be required to force him to know it--will it teach him anything of the nature or uses of metals, of metal working, or the business depending upon them? Will it teach him anything of gold or silver, copper or brass? Anything of pottery, of bone, ivory, celluloid, etc.? Will he learn anything of hides, leather, or the production of these necessary articles? Will he know whether the word textile applies to anything but a spider's web or the wing of a butterfly? Whether the United States make, import, or grow cotton, wool, silk, flax, and hemp? Will he know anything of commerce, railroads, telegraphs, printing, and the great number of clerk labors in the larger towns? Will he have learned a single thing which will assist him in his work of life? Will not every boy thus taken out of the shop and placed at the compulsory schooling find after he has mastered all it has to give him that he yet knows nothing; that he must then commence where he was and serve his apprenticeship; that instead of compulsory education his past years have been wasted in obtaining but a compulsory ignorance? * * * * * =Business and Personal.= _The Charge for Insertion under this head is One Dollar a line for each insertion; about eight words to a line. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ Lubricene.--A Lubricating Material in the form of a Grease. One pound equal to two gallons of sperm oil. R. J. Chard, New York. Assays of Ores, Analyses of Minerals, Waters, Commercial Articles, etc. Technical formulæ and processes. Laboratory, 33 Park Row, N. Y. Fuller & Stillman. Manufacturers of Improved Goods who desire to build up a lucrative foreign trade, will do well to insert a well displayed advertisement in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition. This paper has a very large foreign circulation. Cutters, shaped entirely by machinery, for cutting teeth of Gear Wheels. Pratt & Whitney Co., Manufacturers, Hartford, Conn. 18 ft. Steam Yacht, $250. Geo. F. Shedd, Waltham, Mass. Electrical instruments of all kinds. One Electric Bell, Battery, Push Button, and 50 feet Wire for $4.00. Send for catalogue. H. Thau, 128 Fulton St., N. Y. Wheels and Pinions, heavy and light, remarkably strong and durable. Especially suited for sugar mills and similar work. Pittsburgh Steel Casting Company, Pittsburgh, Pa. Boilers ready for shipment, new and 2d hand. For a good boiler, send to Hilles & Jones, Wilmington, Del. Best Steam Pipe & Boiler Covering. P. Carey, Dayton, O. Foot Lathes, Fret Saws, 6c., 90 pp. E. Brown, Lowell, Ms. Sperm Oil, Pure. Wm. F. Nye, New Bedford, Mass. Power & Foot Presses, Ferracute Co., Bridgeton, N. J. Kreider, Campbell & Co., 1030 Germantown Ave., Phila., Pa., contractors for mills for all kinds of grinding. Punching Presses, Drop Hammers, and Dies for working Metals, etc. The Stiles & Parker Press Co., Middletown, Conn. All kinds of Saws will cut Smooth and True by filing them with our New Machine, price $2.50. Illustrated Circular free. E. Roth & Bro., New Oxford, Pa. "The Best Mill in the World," for White Lead, Dry, Paste, or Mixed Paint, Printing Ink, Chocolate, Paris White, Shoe Blacking, etc., Flour, Meal, Feed, Drugs, Cork, etc. Charles Boss, Jr., Williamsburgh, N.Y. A Practical Engineer and Machinist, 24 years' experience. Best of reference, marine or stationary; forge; fit; repair. W. Barker, 433 2d Ave., N. Y. Hydraulic Presses and Jacks, new and second hand. Lathes and Machinery for Polishing and Buffing metals. E. Lyon & Co., 470 Grand St., N. Y. Nickel Plating.--A white deposit guaranteed by using our material. Condit, Hanson & Van Winkle, Newark, N. J. Cheap but Good. The "Roberts Engine," see cut in this paper, June 1st, 1878. Also horizontal and vertical engines and boilers. E. E. Roberts, 107 Liberty St., N. Y. The Cameron Steam Pump mounted in Phosphor Bronze is an indestructible machine. See ad. back page. Presses, Dies, and Tools for working Sheet Metals, etc. Fruit and other Can Tools. Bliss & Williams, Brooklyn, N. Y., and Paris Exposition, 1878. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition is published monthly, about the 15th of each month. Every number comprises most of the plates of the four preceding weekly numbers of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, with other appropriate contents, business announcements, etc. It forms a large and splendid periodical of nearly one hundred quarto pages, each number illustrated with about one hundred engravings. It is a complete record of American progress in the arts. Bound Volumes of the Scientific American.--I will sell bound volumes 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 28, and 32, New Series, for $1 each, to be sent by express. Address John Edwards, P. O. Box 773, New York. For Solid Wrought Iron Beams, etc., see advertisement. Address Union Iron Mills, Pittsburgh, Pa., for lithograph, etc. Pulverizing Mills for all hard substance and grinding purposes. Walker Bros. & Co., 23d and Wood St., Phila. 2d hand Planers, 7' x 30", $300; 6' x 24", $225; 5' x 24", $200; sc. cutt. b'k g'd Lathe, 9' x 28", $200; A. C. Stebbins, Worcester, Mass. J. C. Hoadley, Consulting Engineer and Mechanical and Scientific Expert, Lawrence, Mass. Best Wood Cutting Machinery, of the latest improved kinds, eminently superior, manufactured by Bentel, Margedant & Co., Hamilton, Ohio, at lowest prices. Water Wheels, increased power. O. J. Bollinger, York, Pa. We make steel castings from ¼ to 10,000 lbs. weight. 3 times as strong as cast iron. 12,000 Crank Shafts of this steel now running and proved superior to wrought iron. Circulars and price list free. Address Chester Steel Castings Co., Evelina St., Philadelphia, Pa. Diamond Saws. J. Dickinson, 64 Nassau St., N. Y. Machine Cut Brass Gear Wheels for Models, etc. (new list). Models, experimental work, and machine work generally. D. Gilbert & Son, 212 Chester St., Phila., Pa. Holly System of Water Supply and Fire Protection for Cities and Villages. See advertisement in Scientific American of last week. The only Engine in the market attached to boiler having cold bearings. F. F. & A. B. Landis, Lancaster, Pa. The Turbine Wheel made by Risdon & Co., Mt. Holly, N. J., gave the best results at Centennial tests. Hand Fire Engines, Lift and Force Pumps for fire and all other purposes. Address Rumsey & Co., Seneca Falls, N. Y., U. S. A. For Shafts, Pulleys, or Hangers, call and see stock kept at 79 Liberty St. Wm. Sellers & Co. Wm. Sellers & Co., Phila., have introduced a new Injector, worked by a single motion of a lever. * * * * * =NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.= METALS AND THEIR CHIEF INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS. By Charles R. Alder Wright. London: Macmillan & Co. 12mo; pp. 191. Price $1.25. In this neat little volume we have the substance of a course of lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1877, with thirty or more engraved illustrations of various metallurgical operations. The author discusses briefly, yet with sufficient fullness for popular purposes, the principal processes for reducing metals from their ores, the natural sources of metals, the metallurgy of the different metals, the physical properties of metals, and their thermic, electric, and chemical relations. The style is simple and the matter well chosen. DOSIA. A Russian Story. Translated from the French of Henry Greville, by Mary Neal Sherwood. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. Price $1.50. This is the seventh of the Cobweb Series of choice fiction, a bright, wholesome but rather thin story, as befits its associations. Novel readers will find it an amusing companion for a rainy day in the country, or for beguiling the tedium of a summer journey. * * * * * [Illustration: Notes & Queries] (1) H. P. says: Please inform me of some recipe for removing superfluous hair. A. Make a strong solution of sulphuret of barium into a paste with powdered starch. Apply immediately after being mixed and allow to remain for ten or fifteen minutes. See also p. 107 (8), vol. 38, and p. 25, current volume. (2) M. A. C. writes: I would like to know how to dissolve bleached shellac, to make it a cement for stone. A. Dissolve it by digestion in 3 or 4 parts of strong alcohol, or by the aid of ¼ its weight of borax in about 4 volumes of boiling water. (3) A. K. asks: 1. In rating substances as to hardness, diamond being No. 10, how do aluminum, osmium, iridium and steel as used in steel pens, number, also common and tempered glass? A. Aluminum about 3, iridosmine 6.5 to 7, steel 5.5 to 6, glass 5 to 5.5. 2. Can glass 1/32 inch in thickness be ground to angles of 15 per cent or less, and points as fine as pins, without difficulty, and how? A. No. (4) D. C. S. asks for a good recipe for cleaning and polishing dirty and tarnished brass. A. Dip for a short time in strong hot aqueous solution of caustic alkali, rinse in water, dip for a few moments in nitric acid diluted with an equal volume of water, rinse again, and finish with whiting. (5) C. J. H. asks for the simplest way of producing a coating of the magnetic or black oxide of iron on iron plates 3 feet x 6 feet. I think it is called the Barff process. A. See pp. 1041 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, and 232, vol. 36, and 4, vol. 37, of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. How can I make tissue paper impervious to air and water, and yet strong enough to confine gas? A. You may pass the fabric through a solution of about 1 part caoutchouc in 35 parts of carbonic disulphide, exposing it then to the air until the solvent has evaporated. (6) J. H. J. asks how to use hyposulphite (?) of soda to neutralize chloride of lime in cotton and linen goods after bleaching the same. A. After washing from it the large excess of the hypochlorite, the fabric is passed slowly through a solution containing about 10 per cent of the hyposulphite, and then again thoroughly washed in clean water. (7) Columbus asks for a recipe for making ink to rule faint lines, such as he is now writing on. He wants it to rule unit columns in books. A. Dissolve in a small quantity of warm water 20 parts of Prussian blue by the aid of 3 parts of potassium ferrocyanide, and dilute the solution with thin gum water until the proper degree of color is obtained. (8) A. I. B. asks: Can I add anything to Arnold's writing fluid which will cause it to give a good free copy in my letter book? A. Try a little sugar. (9) R. & C. ask for information in regard to the process of printing copies of drawings made on transparent materials, by using chemically prepared paper and exposing to the sunlight. A. It is based on the fact that an acid in the presence of potassium dichromate strikes a blackish-green color when brought in contact with aniline. The paper is prepared by floating it on a bath of aqueous solution of potassium dichromate and a trace of phosphoric acid, and then drying it in the dark. Aniline is dissolved in a little alcohol, and the mixed vapors allowed to come into contact with the sensitive paper that has been exposed to strong sunlight beneath the drawing, when the portions not changed by the sunlight assume the dark color mentioned. All that is requisite is that the paper or cloth original should be fairly penetrable by the light. A piece of paper sensitized as indicated, a sheet of glass to place over the drawing, and a box in which to place the exposed print to the aniline vapor are the only necessary plant. (10) P. Y. P. writes: 1. To find the number of acres in a farm of valley and hillside land, is it by measuring the general contour of the land, allowing its actual surface, or by measuring and allowing only the imaginary face of the plane of it? A. The latter is the correct method. 2. Can more grain, say rye, be raised on a farm of valley and hillside land, as described above, than on a farm having a flat surface, the area of which is equal to the plane of the former, all other things supposed to be equal? A. No. (11) Inventor asks: 1. Can you tell me of a book on sound boards? A. We do not know of a book especially devoted to the subject. 2. Also the best kind of wood to make them out of? A. Spruce. (12) F. C. A. writes: I wish to construct a bar electro-magnet to go in a cylinder 1 inch in diameter and 1 inch long. 1. What size ought the core to be? What number of wire shall I use, and what number of Léclanché cells shall I use (not to exceed twelve) to obtain the greatest possible attractive power, distance 1/10 of an inch? A. Make the core 3/8 inch, wind it with No. 24 silk covered wire. Use 6 or 8 cells. 2. In the same space, could a horseshoe magnet be used, with a gain of power over the bar magnet? A. A cylindrical magnet, which is substantially the same as a horseshoe, might be substituted with advantage for the bar magnet. (13) W. C. H. writes: In turning a tapering shaft in an engine lathe, will the tool if raised above the centers of the lathe turn the taper true from end to end, _i. e._, neither concave nor convex, the taper to be made by sliding the tail center the required distance? A. The taper will be concave. (14) H. E. H. asks how to make lime light. A. The lime light is made by directing the jet of an oxyhydrogen blowpipe against a cylinder of lime. The blowpipe is contrived to take the proper proportion of oxygen and hydrogen gas, and the lime is placed in the reducing focus of the jet. (15) L. F. asks: 1. How many Daniell's or Smee's cells would it require to produce the same effect as 50 Bunsen cells? A. About 100. 2. Is the diaphragm equally necessary in Bunsen's, Smee's and Daniell's cells, or can it be omitted in any one of them easier than in the others, and why so? A. The diaphragm or porous cell is required in Daniell's and Bunsen's batteries, but is not used in Smee's. The porous cell is used only in two fluid batteries; its object is to allow the current to pass, but to prevent the mixture of the two liquids. 3. Is the thickness of the zinc of any importance? A. Only that the thicker zinc lasts longer. 4. Which is the cheapest way to produce electric sparks and to charge a Leyden jar, and what will be the expense? A. By means of a frictional electrical machine. The machines cost from $10 upward. (16) R. C. K. writes: I am an engineer by trade; have been at it 9 years. Am out of a position at present and want to learn mechanical draughting. How long would it take me to become a good draughtsman by taking a special course at some university? And with my knowledge of engineering and draughting, would my services be likely to be in fair demand? A. If you are familiar with mechanical operations, you might become a good draughtsman by close application under a competent instructor for one or two years. At present there are many excellent draughtsmen looking for positions. (17) G. B. M. asks for the cause of the ribs or ridges on the surface of a piece of timber which has passed through a planing machine. A. They are frequently due to the intermittent motion of the feed. (18) A. F. writes: Having a small quantity of gold and gold plated things, I would like to know the simplest way to melt it. A. Put it in a small crucible with a little borax and melt in a common kitchen fire. (19) J. H. S. writes: I have three drawings each 21 x 30 inches, which I wish to mount upon cloth like a map, placing them end to end so as to make one whole sheet 90 inches long. The drawings are upon heavy Whatman paper. A. You should stretch wet canvas or factory cloth upon a frame, and while it is still damp apply paste to the backs of the drawings and lay them smoothly on the stretched cloth. When the paste becomes thoroughly dry cut the cloth from the stretching frame and paste a tape binding around the edges. (20) P. M. asks: What is the difference between the inner and outer rails of a 10° curve 100 yards in length, gauge 4 feet 8 inches? A. If this 100 yards is measured on the center of the curve, whose radius in R - 2-1/3 feet is R, the length of the inner rail is --------- X 100, and of the R R + 2-1/3 outer tail --------- X 100. R (21) W. B. K. asks how to make a shoe dressing for ladies' shoes. A. Soft water, 1 gallon; extract of logwood, 6 ozs.; dissolve at a temperature of about 120° Fah. Soft water, 1 gallon; borax, 6 ozs.; shellac, 1½ oz.; boil until dissolved. Potassium dichromate, 3/8 oz.; hot water, ½ pint; dissolve, and add all together. It is preferred to add 3 ozs. of strong aqua ammonia to the liquid before bottling. (22) J. D. asks: What chemicals can be put into water to increase its efficiency in extinguishing fire? A. Carbonic acid; sodium carbonate. (23) H. P. writes: Please give me the advantages and disadvantages of substituting a galvanized iron tube 18 inches in diameter and 20 feet high for a wood tank, 5 feet wide and 6 deep, as a container of water in a dwelling house in the country. Would the narrower body of water keep fresh or sweet longer, etc.? Also the thickness of iron necessary to safety, and the number of gallons of water this tube would hold. A. The advantages are in favor of the wooden tank; zinc lined vessels (galvanized) are unsuitable for reservoirs for potable water. See p. 369, vol. 36, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. 0.3 inch iron would be stout enough. A pipe of the dimensions specified would contain about 327 gallons when full. (24) F. L. M. asks: 1. What is the process by which wire is given a copper finish? A. Clean the wire by pickling it for a short time in very dilute sulphuric acid and scouring with sand if necessary. Then pass the clean wire through a strong bath of copper sulphate dissolved in water. 2. Can wire be thus finished and also annealed? If so, how? A. The wire should be annealed first. 3. What other finish can be put on iron wire (annealed), and by what process? A. Zinc--by passing the clean wire through molten zinc covered with sal ammoniac; tin--by drawing the wire through a bath of molten tin covered with tallow. MINERALS, ETC.--Specimens have been received from the following correspondents, and examined, with the results stated: J. H. McF.--A fine quality of kaolin.--F. C. H.--The floury powder consists chiefly, if not altogether, of calcium carbonate.--C. L. G.--They are all silicious limestones. We cannot judge fairly of their value for building purposes from the powders sent.--D. K.--Ferruginous earth or marl.--A. E.--It is a partially decomposed feldspar. The white powder is for the most part an impure, silicious, kaolin.--E. H.--It consists chiefly of basic carbonate and hydrated oxide of lead--poisonous.--J. B. V.--It is a fair quality of pipe clay--impure silicate of alumina--probably worth about $2 per ton in New York. * * * * * =COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED.= The Editor of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN acknowledges with much pleasure the receipt of original papers and contributions on the following subjects: Religion. By W. M. E. Cause of Explosion in Flouring Mills. By G. M. * * * * * [OFFICIAL.] INDEX OF INVENTIONS FOR WHICH =Letters Patent of the United States were Granted in the Week Ending= =May 28, 1878,= =AND EACH BEARING THAT DATE.= [Those marked (r) are reissued patents.] A complete copy of any patent in the annexed list, including both the specifications and drawings, will be furnished from this office for one dollar. In ordering, please state the number and date of the patent desired and remit to Munn & Co., 37 Park Row, New York city. Acid, recovering waste sulphuric, A. Penissat 204,244 Axle box slide, car, G. Williams 204,178 Axle nut, adjustable, O. B. Thompson 204,399 Axles, sand guard for carriage, M. C. Nay 204,164 Baker and cooker, steam, J. A. McClure 204,353 Bale tie, L. Arnold 204,183 Bale tie, Wynkoop & Bloomingdale 204,409 Barrel and box, moth-proof, M. L. Thompson 204,263 Barrel for shipping bottled liquors, S. Strauss 204,259 Barrel washer, H. Binder 204,288 Bed bottom, T. & O. Howe 204,222 Bed bottom, G. S. Walker 204,401 Bedstead, wardrobe, Hand & Caulier 204,321 Bedstead, wardrobe, E. Kiss 204,340 Bedstead, invalid attachment for, T. T. Kendrick. 204,232 Belting, rubber, C. T. Petchell 204,368 Bending links, machine for, H. E. Grant 204,316 Boiler brooms, operating, A. C. Cock 204,200 Boilers, removing sediment from, T. C. Purves 204,250 Boots and shoes, making, Hurst & Miller 204,330 Bottle stopper, H. Martin 204,350 Bottle stopper fastener, L. Kutscher 204,341 Brake, car, J. Ramsey, Jr. 204,372 Brake for railway carriages, R. D. Sanders 204,378 Brake for railway trains, safety, L. Blanck 204,186 Brake, horse, I. Spitz 204,258 Brake pipes on cars, coupling, F. A. Sheeley 204,383 Brake shoe, W. McConway (r) 8,255 Brick kiln, E. F. Andrews 204,182 Bridge eyes, making, A. Schneiderlochner 204,381 Bridge, self-adjusting, B. Williams 204,407 Buckle, trace, Landon & Decker 204,342 Burial apparatus, Patterson & Wheeler 204,366 Burial casket, W. Hamilton 204,320 Can, fish, bait, and oyster, R. Roney 204,168 Can, refrigerating, transportation, W. A. Moore 204,239 Car coupling, L. Gasser 204,313 Car coupling, C. Gifford 204,212 Car coupling, C. A. Roberts 204,251 Car, sleeping, A. Jaeger 204,230 Cars, dust arrester for railway, A. Clarke 204,134 Carbureter, gas and air, Dusenbury & Winn 204,413 Carriage seats, corner iron for, W. B. C. Hershey 204,326 Carriages, reversible handle for, A. Shoeninger 204,385 Casting apparatus, J. Duff 204,307 Castings, moulding dovetails, Burdick & Easterly 204,129 Celluloid, etc., core and tube former, J. W. Hyatt 204,227 Celluloid tubes and hollow articles, J. W. Hyatt 204,228 Celluloid bar or spring coater, Hyatt & Burroughs 204,229 Chair, convertible, M. V. Lunger 204,346 Chair, invalid, E. C. Jones 204,231 Chair, rocking, L. Rausch 204,373 Chuck, A. Saunders 204,254 Churn, Barrett & Smith 204,124 Churning apparatus, A. N. Myers 204,241 Churning apparatus, J. A. Perry 204,245 Clasp for ribbons on rolls, H. G. & C. G. Hubert 204,224 Clevis, double tree, A. Rosier 204,252 Clew line leader, S. R. Brooks 204,290 Clock case, G. & D. B. Hills 204,328 Clock, repeating, H. Thompson 204,175 Clod crusher, C. R. Polen, Sr. 204,247 Clothes drier, W. F. Wilson 204,179 Clothes pounder, O. Schindler 204,379 Cock, stop, G. N. Munger 204,162 Cooler, beer, H. F. Schmidt 204,380 Corkscrew, A. W. Sperry 204,389 Corn sheller, J. W. Miller 204,161 Corpse preserver, Miller & Schneider 204,237 Cotton roving can, J. Hill 204,220 Cotton worm destroyer, G. Yeager 204,410 Cream, apparatus for raising, J. W. Brady 204,127 Cultivator, J. Young 204,412 Cultivator, harrow, E. Crane (r) 8,260, 8,261 Cutter, rotary, Mellor & Orum (r) 8,265 Cutting board, F. Weed 204,176 Desk, school, J. Edgar 204,207 Draught equalizer, J. Branning 204,289 Drilling apparatus, well, J. B. & G. R. Elliote 204,143 Drilling machine, metal, D. W. Pond 204,248 Drills, spring hoe for grain, C. E. Patric 204,365 Drying kiln, E. T. Gennert 204,211 Engine cylinder, steam, G. E. Banner 204,282 Engine standard and cylinder, steam, G. E. Banner 204,283 Engine, wind, H. N. Hill 204,221 Engine, wind, Longyear & Clark 204,345 Envelope, Shade & Lockwood 204,256 Escapement, W. A. Wales 204,400 Excavator and plow, W. M. Smith 204,387 Eyeglasses, J. F. Traub 204,266 Fence, hedge, I. O. Childs 204,197 Fence, iron, F. R. Martin 204,236 Fence post, O. Allen 204,275 Fence post, H. A. Pierce 204,246 Fence, wire, W. H. H. Frye 204,312 Field roller, T. B. Rice, Jr. 204,376 File, newspaper, D. H. King 204,233 Fire alarm signal box, R. N. Tooker (r) 8,267 Firearm, revolving, B. F. Joslyn 204,334, 204,335 Firearms, extractor for, B. F. Joslyn 204,336, 204,337 Fire escape, I. D. Cross 204,299 Flour, manufacturing, R. L. Downton 204,302 Fruit pitting and cutting machine, C. P. Bowen 204,189 Fruit pitting machine, A. T. Hatch 204,217 Furnace, brass melting, J. Fletcher 204,309 Furnace door, P. S. Kemon 204,339 Furnace, metallurgic, H. Swindell 204,392 Furnace, ore roasting, C. Stetefeldt (r) 8,266 Game apparatus, M. Entenmann 204,208 Game counter, C. B. Wessmann 204,404 Gas, making illuminating, H. W. Adams 204,181 Gas burner, W. Anderson 204,278 Gas burners, attachment for, W. W. Batchelder 204,286 Gas meter, A. C. Blount 204,188 Gas, scintillator for lighting, W. W. Batchelder 204,285 Glass from lava, making, F. S. Shirley 204,384 Globe holder, Bayles & Hunter 204,184 Grain binder, G. H. Howe 204,329 Grain decorticating apparatus, A. Ames 204,277 Grain distributing machine, Fascher & Singer 204,308 Grinding machine, S. Trethewey 204,393 Gun, spring air, A. Pettengill 204,167 Harness, E. R. Cahoone 204,195 Harrow, H. F. Wasmund 204,268 Harrow, rotary, E. & E. H. McNiel 204,354 Harvester gearing, J. Harris 204,148 Hat and cap sweat, J. R. Terry, Jr. 204,262 Head protector, F. P. Cummerford 204,204 Heaters, draught pipe for, M. A. Shepard 204,170 Hogs from rooting, preventing, J. M. Stansifer 204,171 Hoisting device, tobacco, C. F. Johnson 204,332 Horse power, Bettis & Heath 204,185 Ice, forming sheets of, J. Gamgee 204,210 Illuminating fluid, testing, S. S. Mann 204,235 Index tag for books, E. M. Capen 204,196 Indicator for vessels, roll and pitch, R. Chandler 204,133 Inkstand, W. P. Speller 204,388 Iron for case hardening, preparing, S. A. Conrad 204,202 Ironing apparatus, A. K. Brettell 204,128 Jewelry, wire trimming for, L. Heckmann 204,149 Labeling bottles, E. L. Witte 204,272 Ladder, F. A. Copeland 204,295 Ladder, step, J. J. Brady 204,191 Lamp, J. S. Butler 204,193 Lamp, E. S. Drake 204,303, 204,304, 204,305, 204,306 Lamp, F. G. Palmer 204,364 Lamp for cooking, H. S. Fifield 204,144 Lantern, C. J. Swedberg 204,261 Lap link, A. Perry 204,367 Lap ring, H. S. Wood 204,273 Latch, gate, H. Unger 204,267 Leather, compound for currying E. S. Thayer 204,398 Lemon squeezer and shaker, H. L. Heaton 204,325 Lifting jack, T. J. Woods 204,408 Lightning conductor, H. W. Spang 204,257 Lightning rod, D. Munson 204,359 Lock, C. C. Dickerman 204,139 Lock, seal, F. G. Hunter 204,226 Lock, vehicle seat, D. Kirk 204,234 Log turner, C. & F. Strobel 204,391 Loom picker, C. T. Grilley 204,213 Loom picking mechanism, Terrell & Williams 204,396 Magnet, multipolar, A. K. Eaton 204,141 Manure spreader, J. S. Kemp (r) 8,254 Marble, composition for artificial, J. F. Martin 204,348 Meat chopper, E. W. Fawcett 204,209 Meat chopping machine, Meahl & Kwoczalla 204,355 Military accouterments, C. Harkins 204,322 Milking cows, apparatus for, W. F. George 204,314 Mordants and dyestuffs, S. Cabot, Jr. 204,130 Mosquito bar frame, O'Sullivan & Bloom 204,243 Mosquito net frame, E. Bloom 204,187 Mower, lawn, F. G. Johnson 204,153 Mower lawn, A. P. Osborne 204,242 Mower, lawn, J. Shaw (r) 8,268 Music box, W. Meissner 204,356 Musical instrument, mechanical, M. J. Matthews 204,352 Mustache guard, C. H. Barrows 204,125 Nut cracker, F. A. Humphrey 204,225 Oatmeal machine, G. H. Cormack 204,137 Oatmeal machine, D. Oliver 204,165 Organ case, L. C. Carpenter 204,131 Paddle wheel, A. Wingard 204,180 Paddle wheel, aerial, Cowan & Page 204,296 Paper and other fabrics, marbleizing G. Grossheim 204,146 Paper pulp from wood, H. B. Meech (r) 8,256, 8,257, 8,258 Paper pulp pail, E. Hubbard 204,223 Pea nut warmer, F. A. Bowdoin 204,190 Pen, fountain, T. H. & J. E. Quinn 204,371 Pencil sharpener and eraser, W. Sellers 204,169 Pianoforte tuning attachment, H. F. Jacobs 204,152 Pianofortes, hand guide for, M. Sudderick 204,260 Pipe, stand, Lewis & Maloney 204,344 Planing and sawing wood, W. H. Webb 204,403 Planter and plow, corn, D. Hays 204,218 Planter, corn, H. Steckler, Jr. 204,390 Plow, T. M. Moore 204,358 Plow, F. Nitschmann 204,361 Plow clevis, E. A. Sanders 204,253 Pocket for garments, Y. Chow 204,199 Pole, carriage, A. R. Bartram (r) 8,253 Post office apparatus, G. W. Wiles 204,270 Press, cotton, E. L. Morse 204,240 Press, cotton, Tate & Curtis 204,395 Press, power, J. L. Lewis 204,158 Pump, A. S. Baker 204,280 Pumps, machinery for operating, J. W. Hull (r). 8,262 Punching and beveling metal, J. Morgan (r) 8,251 Railway gate, C. P. Austin 204,279 Railway gate, McCaffrey & Larkin 204,160 Railway rail joint, O. Pagen 204,363 Refrigerator, R. T. Hambrook 204,216 Rein guide, check, A. L. Whitney 204,269 Rowlock, I. C. Mayo 204,159 Rubber cutting machine, Ford, Slade, & Baylies 204,145 Rule, lumber, A. J. Colburn 204,293 Sad iron stand, K. E. Keeler 204,338 Sash balance and lock, Rayner & Burr 204,374 Saw, R. E. Poindexter 204,369 Saw mill carriage, M. Taplin 204,394 Saw mill head block, Brett & Perry 204,192 Saw sharpener, W. M. Watson 204,402 Scale beam, J. Weeks 204,177 Scintillator for lighting cord, W. W. Batchelder 204,284 Scraper, earth, J. H. Edmondson 204,142 Screen, G. F. Halley 204,147 Screen, window, G. L. Reynolds 204,375 Scythe snath fastening, M. Hewitt 204,327 Seed and fertilizer distributer, W. Harper 204,323 Seed distributer, J. W. Dooley 204,301 Sewer trap, J. M. Thatcher 204,397 Sewer trap valve, P. J. Convery 204,135 Sewing machine needle bar, Cook & Hill 204,294 Sewing machine mechanism, E. Brosemann _et al._ 204,291 Sewing machine table, S. Hill 204,219 Sewing machine table, T. Lanston 204,157 Sheet metal vessels, handle for, F. Grosjean 204,319 Shipping case, J. H. Byrne 204,194 Shoetip, H. White (r) 8,263 Shoes, rack for holding, etc., J. Priest 204,249 Shot, tin plated, L. Crooke 204,298 Shovels, manufacture of, H. M. Myers 204,163 Sink, kitchen, M. W. Scannell 204,255 Slate, apparatus for grinding, etc., J. W. Hyatt. 204,151 Snuff package, B. F. Weyman (r) 8,264 Soldering square cans, R. Gornall 204,315 Spectacle frame, J. F. Traub 204,265 Spinning mules, building rail for, Ogden & Garrett 204,362 Spinning mules, mechanism for, G. Gurney 204,214 Spring, door, O. Seely 204,382 Spring, vehicle, N. Nilson 204,360 Sprinkler, J. M. Josias 204,333 Sprinklers, inlet pipe for street, G. H. Stallman 204,172 Steam generator, Collinge & Savage 204,201 Steam generator, M. Cullen 204,203 Steam superheater, W. Standing 204,173 Stone sawing machine, Jennings & Robellaz 204,331 Stove damper, T. White 204,406 Stove for burning crude, etc., oils, P. Martin 204,349 Stoves, fire pot lining for, R. J. King 204,155 Sulphur, apparatus for refining, H. H. Eames 204,206 Suspender ends, E. Painter 204,166 Table, S. Bobbins 204,377 Tablet, writing, W. O. Davis 204,138 Tanks, etc., movable hopper, F. C. Prindle 204,370 Target, spherical, S. A. Darrach 204,300 Tea and coffee pots, knob for, W. B. Choate 204,198 Telegraph repeater, F. Catlin 204,132 Thrashers, clover huller attachment for, J. Allonas 204,276 Ticket, railway coupon, C. J. Stromberg 204,174 Tile for fireproof buildings, bridge, M. F. Lyons 204,347 Tin, coating lead articles with, J. J. & L. Crooke 204,297 Tire setter, J. A. Miles 204,238 Tire upsetter M. W. Griffiths 204,317 Toy pistol, A. F. Able 204,123 Toy pistol, H. J. P. Whipple 204,405 Trace, etc., tug coupling, Hazlewood, Jr., & Reagin 204,324 Track clearer, A. Day 204,205 Truck shifting apparatus, car, R. H. Ramsey (r) 8,259 Truss, hernial, Banks & Merck 204,281 Tubing, manufacture of metal, B. C. Converse 204,136 Valve gear for engines, L. C. Mason 204,351 Vehicle running gear, P. Letalle 204,343 Vehicle, side bar, J. Kauffman 204,154 Vehicles, spring seat for, J. T. Yerkes 204,411 Velocipede, H. A. Reynolds (r) 8,252 Ventilator, S. S. Thompson 204,264 Ventilator valve, railway car, E. H. Winchell 204,271 Warming, etc., buildings, apparatus for, L. Bennet 204,126 Wash board, F. Kueny 204,156 Wash boiler, A. Friedley 204,311 Wash stands, water closets, cover for, F. Grosjean 204,318 Washing machine, E. S. M. Ford 204,310 Watch regulator, G. Bichsel 204,287 Watch winding device, B. Wormelle 204,274 Watches, winding click for, C. T. Higginbotham 204,150 Water meter, piston, T. Melling 204,357 Water wheel, W. S. Clay 204,292 Weather strip, D. Austin 204,122 Whip socket and rein holder, B. J. Downing 204,140 Wrench, Sievers & Winkler 204,386 Wringer, mop, W. Haas 204,215 * * * * * TRADE MARKS. Baking powder, Carter Brothers & Co. 6,136 Cigars, Foxen, Newman & Co. 6,132 Cigars, J. Hirsch 6,142 Cigars, Oliver & Robinson 6,150 Cigars, B. F. Weyman 6,154 Cigars, J. & A. Frey 6,156 Cigars, J. Martinez 6,161 Cigars, cigarettes, etc., Straiten & Storm 6,144 Cigars, cigarettes, etc., E. A. Smith 6,145 Cigars, cigarettes, etc., C. Swartz & Co. 6,152 Cigars, cigarettes, etc., I. Underdorfer 6,158 Cigarettes, Seidenberg & Co 6,135 Cheese, G. S. Hart 6,133 Copying paper and books, W. Mann 6,159 Cotton fabrics, Hamilton Manufacturing Company 6,141 Cotton goods, Nashua Manufacturing Company 6,162 Dry goods, The Eddystone Manuf. Company 6,157 Illuminating oils, Wadsworth, Martinez & Longman 6,163 Knitted undershirts, etc., Dunham Hosiery Co. 6,155 Ladies' corsets, C. A. Griswold 6,139 Lemonade compound, Abrams & Carroll 6,147 Liquid paints, G. W. Pitkin & Co. 6,151 Overalls, jumpers, etc., B. Greenebaum 6,138 Perforated plasters, Holman Liver Pad Company 6,140 Pile ointment, G. W. Frazier 6,149 Plug tobacco, B. F. Weyman 6,148 Prepared skins for beer, C. Maegerlein & Son 6,134 Saleratus, soda, etc, H. A. De Land & Co. 6,137 Smoking, etc., tobacco, Marburg Brothers 6,143 Snuff, B. F. Weyman 6,146, 6,153 Soap, Ecker & Co. 6,160 Weighing scales, E. & T. Fairbanks & Co. 6,131 * * * * * DESIGNS. Buckle, F. Crane 10,704 Fancy cassimere, F. S. Bosworth 10,692 to 10,702 Handkerchief, J. Grimshaw 10,703 * * * * * =English Patents Issued to Americans.= From June 28 to July 2, inclusive. Bale tie.--S. H. Gilman, New Orleans, La. Blast furnace.--J. F. Bennett, Pittsburg, Pa. Cigarette machine.--V. L'Eplattinaire, N. Y. city. Furnace for steam boilers.--O. Marland, Boston, Mass. Grain binders.--C. H. McCormick, Chicago, Ill. Grain separators.--Barnard & Leas Manufacturing Co., Moline, Ill. Mortising chisel.--A. J. Buttler, New Brunswick, N.J. Paper making machinery.--J. H. & G. Hatch, South Meriden, Conn. Paper vessels or receptacles.--R. B. Crane, N. Y. city. Skates.--P. C. Franke, St. Paul, Minn. Teeth cleaner.--A. P. Merrill, N. Y. city. Timber joining machine.--W. E. Brock. N. Y. city. Wearing apparel.--Israel Crane, N. Y. city. * * * * * =The Scientific American= =EXPORT EDITION.= PUBLISHED MONTHLY. THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition is a large and SPLENDID PERIODICAL, issued once a month, forming a complete and interesting Monthly Record of all Progress in Science and the Useful Arts throughout the World. Each number contains about ONE HUNDRED LARGE QUARTO PAGES, profusely illustrated, embracing: (1.) Most of the plates and pages of the four preceding weekly issues of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, with its SPLENDID ENGRAVINGS AND VALUABLE INFORMATION. (2.) Commercial, Trade, and Manufacturing announcements of leading houses. Terms for Export Edition, $5.00 a year, sent prepaid to any part of the world. Single copies, 50 cents. For sale at this office. To be had at all News and Book Stores throughout the country. * * * * * =NOW READY.= SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN for July, 1878, with Eighty-one Engravings. =GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS.= Brewster's Carriage Manufactory, New York. One engraving. The Parlor or Cabinet Organs of Mason & Hamlin. The New Wheeler & Wilson Sewing Machine. Howe's Improved Scales. The Chickering Pianos. The Ingersoll Rock Drill. Photo-engraving. The Paper Product of the United States. Electrical Indicator for Exhibiting the Rotation of the Earth. Two engravings. The Elevated Railroad Nuisance. Steam Boilers. Progress of our Western Industries. The Decline of the Whaling Industry. Transmitting Power by Electricity. Native Magnesium Salts. Scientific American Export Edition for June. The Eothen Arctic Expedition. Patent Matters in Congress. The Turkish Bath. Remarkable Locomotive Performances. The United States Building at the Paris Exposition. Recent Ship Designs. Figures which Seem Untruthful. The Hotchkiss Ship's Log. Starting New Industries. The Telephone at Sea. Horizontal Condensing Engine at the Exposition. One engraving. Deep Boring. Whitening Positives. Mr. Thomas A. Edison. One engraving. Patteson's Improved Car Coupling. One engraving. Project for Increasing the Water Power of Pennsylvania. A Japanese Built Ironclad. A Great Public Nuisance.--The Steam Street Railways New York City. What the South Owes New England. New Mechanical Inventions. Iridescent Glass. Fast Paper Making. Effect of Gas on Cotton Goods. Electrotypes of the Brain. Astronomical Notes for July. With Three figures, giving the Positions, Rising and Setting of the Planets. Sun Spots. Removing Spots from Cloths. "American" New Process Milling. New Agricultural Inventions. A Defense of Sludge Acid. Shad Hatching at Havre de Grace, Md. Improved Wrench. Two engravings. A Drygoods Palace Car. Radial Drilling Machine. One engraving. Improved Self-oiling Car Wheel. Three engravings. The Whitehead Torpedo. One engraving. A Californian Wheat Farm. Edison's Telephonic Researches. Eleven figures. New Inventions. New Electric Light. Quick Freight Time. The Adams Gas Process. Three engravings. The Invention of the Microphone. Preparation of Iron Fuels. Millstones. An Hour with Edison. Four engravings. Suspension Bridge Accident. Mill Explosion Science. Learn Something. Unsuitable Steam Vessels. One engraving. Our Naval Tubs. Leaves and their Functions. Lever and Cam Valve. Two engravings. An Ingenious Toy. One engraving. Milk as a Substitute for Blood Transfusion. Dr. Brown-Sequard. Odd Uses of Paraffin. American Institute Exhibition. Solidification of Petroleum. A Simple Fire-escape. Mr. Edison on the Microphone. Driving Piles in Sand. Is our Globe Hollow? The Best Penwiper. The Etiology of Asiatic Cholera.--A New Theory. Diagnosis. Proposed Process for the Fixation of Atmospheric Nitrogen. Two figures. Hallucinations. Perils of Base-ball Playing. Music Boxes. Electric Light Photography. Improved Beehive. Three engravings. A Good Act. Improved Gas Condenser. Two engravings. American Crop Prospects. The Launch of the Nipsic. The Swiss House at the French Exposition. One engraving. The Ingenuity of Bees. The St. Benoit Twins. One engraving. Improved Method of Milling. A Remarkable Meteoric Phenomenon. Drinking Water. Where to Observe the Solar Eclipse of July 29th. Explorations and Surveys. Tests for Good Burning Oil. Curious Hedge Figures. One engraving. Food Supply of Paris. The Leona Goat Sucker. One engraving. Oatmeal. Salt in Beer. Dr. Morfit's Method of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Food. The Ring of Fire, and the Volcanic Peaks of the West Coast of the United States. To Imitate Ground Glass. Railroad Birds. Improved Variable Automatic Cut-off. Four engravings. The Uses of Mechanism. Working Gold Ores. The Sun. With nine engravings. An excellent paper. Professor Edison's New Carbon Rheostat. Two engravings. The Chase Elemental Governor. Two engravings. Chinese Wine Powder. Amber Varnish. The Alkaloids of Opium. Microscopy. Is the Moon Inhabited? Description of the Recent Most Important Mechanical Inventions. Counterfeiting American Goods. The Steam Street Railways of New York City. Improved Piston Rod Stuffing Box. One engraving. Improved Automatic Fan. One engraving. Wandering Needles. Improved Step Box. One engraving. Heat Conductivity. New Volcano in Peru. Wood Carver of Simla. One engraving. Natural History Notes. Belgium, Holland, and England. Jointed Artillery. The Armstrong 100-ton Gun. The Phonograph. Scientific American Boat Drawings. Wire Tramway Worked by Water Wheels. Shell Polishing. Floating Batteries at Kertch. Apparatus for Administering Medicine to Horses. One engraving. Apprentice Shops for the Boys. A Boat Older than the Ark. Three figures. Employment of Ships against Forts. The Otto Bicycle. One engraving. A Simple Gas Generator. One engraving. Labor in Scotland. The Cattle Drives of 1878. Effects of Emancipation. A New Trouble with French Wines. The New Twin Steamer "Calais-Douvres." One engraving. Industrial Drawing and Art Studies. Vulcanizing Rubber. Strawberries and Constipation. Professor Langley's Papers on the Sun. Destruction vs. Construction of Ironclads. How Raisins are Prepared. The Sun.--A Total Eclipse. With six engravings. The Bishop of Manchester on British Trade Depression. A New Insect Pest. Death of a Giant. Edison's Phonomotor. Two engravings. Excavating Scoop. One engraving. Treatment of Acute Rheumatism. How a Horse Trots. Danger of Carbolic Acid Dressings. Welded Union and Rebel Bullets. One engraving. Indicator of a Steamboat Engine. A Remedy for the Effects of the Poison Ivy. Thymol. Copper Oysters. The Use of Antimony in Batteries. Photographs on Silk. How to Use a File. A valuable practical paper. Our Iron Industry. Two Ways of Looking at the Same Facts. New Screw-cutting Lathe. One engraving. New Cloth Measuring Apparatus. One engraving. Moth Remedies. Gampert's Wood-sole Shoe. Three engravings. Science and Sentiment. American Coal in Europe. An Active Volcano in the Moon. Tic-douloureux. Landing of Cleopatra's Needle. One large engraving. Heat Conductivity. The Total Eclipse of the Sun, July 29. Two figures. New Iron Fence. Two engravings. The Adjutant. One engraving. A New Disinfectant. The Curiosities of Tobacco. Preserving Fish by Hydraulic Pressure. Answers to Correspondents, embodying a large quantity of valuable information, practical recipes, and instructions in various arts. Single numbers of the Scientific American Export Edition, 50 cents. To be had at this office, and at all news stores. MUNN & CO., PUBLISHERS, 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. To Advertisers: =>Manufacturers and others who desire to secure foreign trade may have large and handsomely displayed announcements published in this edition at a very moderate cost. The Scientific American Export Edition has a large guaranteed circulation in all commercial places throughout the world. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. * * * * * =Advertisements.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =Inside Page, each insertion 75 cents a line. Back Page, each insertion $1.00 a line.= (About eight words to a line.) _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SEND 30 CENTS BY MAIL AND GET [Illustration: A KEY THAT WILL WIND ANY WATCH] AND NOT WEAR OUT Circulars free. Mention paper. J. S. BIRCH & CO., 33 Dey Street, N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- THE GEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY OF Flowers and Insects. By J. E. TAYLOR, F.G.S. A plain, comprehensive review of the subject, bringing forward many instructive facts; with six illustrations. The invariable correlation between insects and flowers. How they are fossilized. Fossil botany. Geological Evidences of Evolution. Correspondence in the succession of Animal and Vegetable life. Flowers necessary to Insects, and Insects necessary to Flowers. Insects and Plants in the Devonian, the Switzerland Lias, the English Stonesfield Slate, the Tertiary Strata, the Coal Measures, a Greenland, and other formations. A Peculiar Aspect of Evolution. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. =120.= Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- THE PHONOGRAPH AND ITS FUTURE. BY THOMAS A. EDISON. The instrument and its Action. Durability, Duplication, and Postal Transmission of Phonograph Plates. The probable great utility of the Phonograph in Letter-writing, Business Correspondence and Dictation; Literature; Education; Law; Music; Oratory, etc. Application to Musical Boxes, Toys, and Clocks. Telegraphy of the Future; the Phonograph and Telephone combined. Being a most interesting and valuable paper by the author and inventor of the Phonograph himself. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, NO. =124.= Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- THE [Illustration: "Scientific American." In Gothic script] =The Most Popular Scientific Paper in the World. THIRTY-THIRD YEAR.= =Only $3.20 a Year including Postage. Weekly. 52 Numbers a Year.= =This widely circulated= and splendidly illustrated paper is published weekly. Every number contains sixteen pages of useful information, and a large number of original engravings of new inventions and discoveries, representing Engineering Works, Steam Machinery, New Inventions, Novelties in Mechanics, Manufactures, Chemistry, Electricity, Telegraphy, Photography, Architecture, Agriculture, Horticulture, Natural History, etc. =All Classes of Readers= find in THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN a popular _resume_ of the best scientific information of the day; and it is the aim of the publishers to present it in an attractive form, avoiding as much as possible abstruse terms. To every intelligent mind, this journal affords a constant supply of instructive reading. It is promotive of knowledge and progress in every community where it circulates. =Terms of Subscription.=--One copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be sent for _one year_--52 numbers--postage prepaid, to any subscriber in the United States or Canada, on receipt of =three dollars and twenty cents= by the publishers; six months, $1.60; three months, $1.00. =Clubs.=--=One extra copy= of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be supplied gratis _for every club of five subscribers_ at $3.20 each; additional copies at same proportionate rate. Postage prepaid. One copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and one copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT will be sent for one year, postage prepaid, to any subscriber in the United States or Canada, on receipt of _seven dollars_ by the publishers. The safest way to remit is by Postal Order, Draft, or Express. Money carefully placed inside of envelopes, securely sealed, and correctly addressed, seldom goes astray, but is at the sender's risk. Address all letters and make all orders, drafts, etc., payable to =MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York.= =To Foreign Subscribers.=--Under the facilities of the Postal Union, the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is now sent by post direct from New York, with regularity, to subscribers in Great Britain, India, Australia, and all other British colonies; to France, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Russia, and all other European States; Japan, Brazil, Mexico, and all States of Central and South America. Terms, when sent to foreign countries, Canada excepted, $4, gold, for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 1 year; $9, gold, for both SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and SUPPLEMENT for 1 year. This includes postage, which we pay. Remit by postal order or draft to order of Munn & Co., 37 Park Row, New York. * * * * * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- WALTHAM WATCHES. _Improved in Quality, but no higher in price._ After this date, we shall sell none but =New Model Waltham Watches=, particulars of which will be found in our New Price List. Every one concedes that genuine WALTHAM watches are superior to all others, and at present prices they are within the reach of all. We continue to send single watches by mail or express to any part of the country, no matter how remote, without any risk to the purchaser. Price List sent free and postpaid. _Address_ HOWARD & CO., =No. 264 Fifth Ave., New York.= _All silver cases for the_ NEW MODEL WATCHES _are made of sterling silver, and cases as well as movements are guaranteed by special certificate._ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: BEST AND CHEAPEST FOOT POWER SCREW CUTTING $85. ENGINE LATHES SEE FULL DESCRIPTION IN SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN JULY 27 SEND FOR ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUE GOODNOW & WIGHTMAN 176 WASHINGTON ST. BOSTON MASS. ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Midsummer Holiday Scribner. ANOTHER ROYAL NUMBER. Charming Writers--New Artists--Superb Engraving. The August number of this progressive magazine is the third "Midsummer Holiday" issue, and the publisher is confident that in literary and artistic excellence it will be found fully equal to, if not in advance of, its predecessors, which met with such distinguished favor from the press and the public. It opens with a Frontispiece, =A NEW PORTRAIT OF BRYANT,= Drawn in crayon, from life, by WYATT EATON, and engraved by COLE, with a sketch of the haunts and homes of Bryant, by HORATIO N. POWERS, with numerous wood-cuts. Among the other illustrated material is "=A SEA-PORT ON THE PACIFIC,=" By MARY HALLOCK FOOTE. The drawings are also by Mrs. Foote, and are engraved by Marsh, Cole, and others. They have not been excelled in magazine literature for charm, picturesqueness, and fine engraving. A paper of wide interest is "=TO SOUTH AFRICA for DIAMONDS!=" By Dr. W. J. MORTON, a narrative of personal experience in the mines, with striking illustrations of this romantic and curious life. There are also =TWO CHARMING FIELD PAPERS=: "Sharp Eyes" by JOHN BURROUGHS, with illustrations by a new artist; "Glimpses of New England Farm Life," by R. E. ROBINSON, a paper of rare picturesque interest. There are illustrated poems by Dr. HOLLAND and J. T. TROWBRIDGE; also, poems by STEDMAN, BRET HARTE, and others. THE ILLUSTRATIONS are by Wyatt Eaton, Mary Hallock Foote, Vanderhoof, Waud, Frederick Dielman, R. Swain Gifford, Jervis McEntee, Henry Farrer, Winslow Homer, J. E. Kelly, Walter Shirlaw, L. C. Tiffany, Thomas Moran, Will H. Low, Mrs. Fanny Eliot Gifford, and others. The shorter stories are by STOCKTON and HENRY JAMES, Jr. DR. EGGLESTON'S STORY of WESTERN LIFE reaches its climax, and will end in October. A New Novel, "=FALCONBERG," by BOYESEN,= Begins in this issue. It is a story of immigrant life in America, told by one of the most promising of the younger generation of novelists, and will be read with interest abroad as well as at home. The Editorial Departments include "Our Commune," "The Death of Bryant," "Greatness in Art," "A Rural Art Association," "Recent Improvements in Telephony," thoughtful and suggestive Book Reviews, Humorous Sketches and Verses by new hands, &c., &c. The frontispiece is upon a peculiar tint of paper, manufactured by Warren expressly for Eaton's portrait of Bryant. The printing is by De Vinne, from the press of Francis Hart & Co., who take rank among the foremost printers of the world. EDITION =85,000.= Price 35 cents Sold by all News-dealers and Book-sellers. =SCRIBNER & CO., NEW YORK.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Baker Rotary Pressure Blower. [Illustration] (FORCED BLAST.) Warranted superior to any other. WILBRAHAM BROS. 2318 Frankford Ave. PHILADELPHIA. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- OUTWARD MARKS OF A GOOD COW. By Capt. JOHN C. MORRIS, Pa. Carelessness in Breeding. How to Select for Breeding. Marks of the Handsome Cow. Care and Training of the Heifer. Infallible Marks of Good Milkers. Distinguishing Marks and Characteristics of the "Bastard" and the "Bogus" Cow, etc. Contained, with useful Remarks on Bee Culture, in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. =135.= Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PATENTS AT AUCTION. Regular Monthly Sales the first week of each month by George W. Keeler, Auctioneer, at his salesrooms, 53 and 55 Liberty Street, N. Y. For terms, etc., address The New York Patent Exchange, 53 Liberty St., N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SPARE THE CROTON AND SAVE THE COST. Driven or Tube Wells furnished to large consumers of Croton and Ridgewood Water. WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO., 414 Water St., N. Y., who control the patent for Green's American Driven Well ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] BIBB'S Celebrated Original Baltimore Fire Place Heaters Mantels and Registers. B. C. BIBB & SON, Baltimore, Md. Best workmanship. Lowest prices guaranteed. Send for circulars. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- JAPANESE ART MANUFACTURES. By Christopher Dresser, Ph.D., etc. Paper read before Society of Arts. The Japanese Potter at Work. Curious mode of Making Scarfs. How the Japanese Print on Cloth. Japanese Process for Silk Ornamentation. Japanese Weaving. How Fine Japanese Fans are made. Japanese Method of Making Moulds for Ornamental Castings for Vessels, Bronzes, etc. Japanese Lacquer Manufacture. Curious Method of Decorating Lacquer Work. The Love and Pursuit of the Beautiful in Japan. A very entertaining, instructive, and comprehensive paper. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. =115.= Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] BURNHAM'S STANDARD TURBINE WATER WHEEL. WARRANTED BEST AND CHEAPEST. N. F. BURNHAM, YORK, PA. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RUPTURE Relieved and cured, without the injury trusses inflict, by Dr. J. A. Sherman's method of support and curative externally applied. Office, 251 Broadway, N. Y. His book, with photographic likenesses of bad cases before and after cure, mailed for 10 cents. Beware of imitators. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =25= =NEW YEAR CARDS=, with name, 20c. 25 Extra Mixed, 10c. Geo. I. Reed & Co., Nassau, N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =ARTIFICIAL LIGHT.= We have just introduced this important facility, which enables us to prosecute our work in =cloudy weather=, and to push through hurried orders =in the night=. [Illustration: NEW METHOD OF ENGRAVING Moss' Process. Photo Engraving Co. 67 Park Place, New York. L. SMITH HOBART, President. JOHN C. MOSS, Superintendent. ] RELIEF PLATES For Newspaper, Book, and Catalogue Illustrations. Engraved in Type-Metal, by a new Photo-Chemical Method, from all kinds of Prints, Pen Drawings, Original Designs, Photographs, etc., =much cheaper than wood cuts=. These plates have a perfectly smooth printing surface, and the lines are =as deep, as even, and as sharp= as they could possibly be cut by hand. We guarantee that they will print satisfactorily, on wet or dry paper, and on any press where type or wood cuts can be so printed. Electrotypes may be made from them in the usual way. =Our plates are now used by the principal publishers and manufacturers in every State in the Union.= _Send stamp for illustrated Circular._ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =State, County and Shop Rights For Sale.= The Patent Adjustable Die Co. invite the attention of Printers, Lithographers, Paper Box Makers, Leather, Cloth, and Metal Workers, and all who use dies of any description, or who cut by laborious hand work patterns of any size or shape, to their patent device for cutting any desired outline at a cost of a few cents, and doing it with exactness, cutting from one to three hundred at a single pressure. Among those who have purchased shop rights, the following are referred to: Rand, Macnally & Co.; Donnelly, Loyd & Co.; Shoeber & Carqueville Lithograph Co.; Wright & Leonard; Frank Roehr; Gregory & Staiger; Western Label Man. Co.; S. A. Grant & Co., Cincinnati. PATENT ADJUSTABLE DIE CO., No. 96 Dearborn Street, Chicago, Il. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] =BARNES' FOOT POWER MACHINERY.= 13 Different machines with which Builders, Cabinet Makers, Wagon Makers, and Jobbers in miscellaneous work can compete as to QUALITY AND PRICE with steam power manufacturing; also Amateurs' supplies. MACHINES SENT ON TRIAL. Say where you read this, and send for catalogue and prices. W. F. & JOHN BARNES, Rockford, Winnebago Co., Ill. Eastern Agency for =Barnes' Foot Power Machinery.= _Full line in stock_ at factory prices. Can be seen in operation at CHAS. E. LITTLE'S, 59 Fulton St., N. Y. _Cast Steel Pump Log Augers and Reamers a specialty._ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =$250.= HEALD, SISCO & CO.'S "=RELIABLE=" 20 Horse Power, Stationary, Horizontal, Double-crank Steam Engine. Complete with Judson Governor, Boiler-feed Pump, Water Heater, etc. Best and cheapest in the world, and fully guaranteed. TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS. Send for circular to HEALD, SISCO & CO., Baldwinsville, N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =Wood-Working Machinery,= Such as Woodworth Planing, Tonguing, and Grooving Machines, Daniel's Planers, Richardson's Patent Improved Tenon Machines, Mortising, Moulding, and Re-Saw Machines, and Wood-Working Machinery generally. Manufactured by WITHERBY, RUGG & RICHARDSON, 26 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Mass. (Shop formerly occupied by R. BALL & CO.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =PATENT MINERAL WOOL.= Entirely _Fireproof_, undecaying, and the best _non-conductor of heat, cold, or sound_. Cheaper than hair-felt. =A. D. ELBERS=, _P. O. Box 4461._ 26½ Broadway, N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: WROUGHT IRON BEAMS & GIRDERS] THE UNION IRON MILLS, Pittsburgh, Pa., Manufacturers of improved wrought iron Beams and Girders (patented). The great fall which has taken place in the prices of Iron, and especially in Beams used in the construction of FIRE PROOF BUILDINGS, induces us to call the special attention of Engineers, Architects, and Builders to the undoubted advantages of now erecting Fire Proof structures; and by reference to pages 52 & 54 of our Book of Sections--which will be sent on application to those contemplating the erection of fire proof buildings--THE COST CAN BE ACCURATELY CALCULATED, the cost of Insurance avoided, and the serious losses and interruption to business caused by fire; these and like considerations fully justify any additional first cost. It is believed, that, were owners fully aware of the small difference which now exists between the use of Wood and Iron, in many cases the latter would be adopted. We shall be pleased to furnish estimates for all the Beams complete, for any specific structure, so that the difference in cost may at once be ascertained. Address CARNEGIE, BROS. & CO., Pittsburgh, Pa. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =Pond's Tools=, =Engine Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c.= Send for Catalogue. DAVID W. POND, Successor to LUCIUS W. POND. =Worcester, Mass.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =$3 GOLD PLATED WATCHES.= Cheapest in the known world. _Sample Watch Free to Agents._ Address, A. COULTER & Co., Chicago. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =EAGLE FOOT LATHES,= [Illustration] Improvement in style. Reduction in prices April 20th. Small Engine Lathes, Slide Rests, Tools, etc. Also Scroll and Circular Saw Attachments, Hand Planers, etc. Send for Catalogue of outfits for Amateurs or Artisans. WM. L. CHASE & CO., 95 & 97 Liberty St., New York. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =The George Place Machinery Agency= =Machinery of Every Description.= 121 Chambers and 103 Reade Streets, New York. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CIVIL and MECHANICAL ENGINEERING At the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N. Y. Next term begins Sept. 12. The Annual Register for 1878 contains a list of the graduates for the past 52 years, with their positions; also, course of study, requirements for admission, expenses, etc. Address Wm. H. Young, Treas'r. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =THE DRIVEN WELL.= Town and County privileges for making =Driven Wells= and selling Licenses under the established =American Driven Well Patent=, leased by the year to responsible parties, by =WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO.,= NEW YORK. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _NOW READY._ =The Army of the Republic:= ITS SERVICES AND DESTINY. =BY HENRY WARD BEECHER.= An Oration at the Re-union of the Army of the Potomac, at Springfield, Mass., June 5th, comprising Christian Union Extra No. 12. Price 10 Cents. =THE CHRISTIAN UNION,= 27 Park Place, N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: WOOD WORKING MACHINERY. PLANING, MATCHING, MOLDING, MORTISING, TENONING, CARVING, MACHINES. BAND & SCROLL SAWS UNIVERSAL AND VARIETY WOOD WORKERS, &c. &c. =J. A. FAY & CO.= CINCINNATI, O.U.S.A.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =Lathes, Planers, Shapers= Drills, Bolt and Gear Cutters, Milling Machines. Special Machinery. E. GOULD & EBERHARDT, Newark, N. J. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =A BLOCK PLANE,= =WITH ADJUSTMENT FOR SETTING THE CUTTER.= [Illustration] =Length, 7½ inches; 1¾ inch Cutter.= =PRICE $1.00.= Sent by mail, to any address, postage prepaid, on receipt of price. Price of the above Plane _without_ the adjustment, 70c. Write for an Illustrated Descriptive Circular and Price List of our full line of "Defiance" Metallic Planes to BAILEY WRINGING MACHINE CO., 99 Chambers Street, New York. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] READ THIS! READ THIS!! Adjustable Safety Stilts. A NOVELTY FOR THE BOYS. A Great Chance to Make Money. Parties wishing to invest in a paying business can do so with a small capital by addressing CHAS. S. SHUTE, Springfield, Mass. Send Stamp for Illustrated Circular. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =VINEGAR.= I teach by letter the new English Quick-Vinegar-Process, that is, how vinegar is made in one day without drugs. For particulars and terms, address J. H. LAUTERBACH, Zanesville, Ohio. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =Foundry and Machine Shop,= in live Western town, for sale cheap. Address Box 275, Winona, Minn. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- WOOD ENGRAVING At Photo-Engraving Process Rates, by T. P. DONALDSON, 33 Park Row, N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =SHEET METAL WORKS FOR SALE.= The largest and best equipped establishment in the United States for the manufacture of Sheet Metal Architectural and Cornice Works, and Ornamental Stamped and Spun Zinc Work. Located at an important station on the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad. Taxes and rents low. The ornamental sheet metal work upon the Main Building for the Centennial Exposition was made at these shops. The real estate, tools, and equipments cost some sixty thousand dollars. Will be sold at a very great sacrifice. Call on or address LUCIEN L. GILBERT, Salem, Columbiana Co., Ohio. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- THE BEST FRICTION CLUTCH IN THE _World_ for hoisting coal, logs, or freight. It can be fitted direct on line shaft, run at high speed, and start without shock. _No end thrust_ on journals. Patent Safety Elevators at low prices. D. FRISBIE & CO., New Haven, Conn. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: !!New and Improved!! Engraving Process!!!! Perfect Substitute for Wood-Cuts. Photo-Plate Company 63 Duane St. New York. Can be printed on an ordinary Press. RELIEF PLATES in hard Type Metal FOR Newspaper & Book Illustration. Send Stamp for Illustrated Circular. MUCH CHEAPER THAN WOODCUTS. ARTISTIC PRINTING. FINE ELECTROTYPING. State where you saw this. ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] =$4. TELEPHONES= For Business Purposes, ours excel all others in clearness and volume of tone. Illus. circular and testimonials for 3 cts. Address J. R. HOLCOMB, Mallet Creek, Ohio. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EXPLOSIVE DUST. A COMPREHENSIVE description of the Dangers from Dust in various Manufactures and the Cause of many Fires. How combustible substances can explode. Spontaneous Combustion of Iron, Charcoal, and Lampblack in Air. Flour Dust and Brewery Dust Explosions. Explosions of Coal Dust in Mines. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. =125.= Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =Can I Obtain a Patent?= This is the first inquiry that naturally occurs to every author or discoverer of a new idea or improvement. The quickest and best way to obtain a satisfactory answer, without expense, is to write to us (Munn & Co.), describing the invention, with a small sketch. All we need is to get the _idea_. Do not use pale ink. Be brief. Send stamps for postage. We will immediately answer and inform you whether or not your improvement is probably patentable; and if so, give you the necessary instructions for further procedure. Our long experience enables us to decide quickly. For this advice we make _no charge_. All persons who desire to consult us in regard to obtaining patents are cordially invited to do so. We shall be happy to see them in person at our office, or to advise them by letter. In all cases, they may expect from us a careful consideration of their plans, an honest opinion, and a prompt reply. _What Security Have I_ that my communication to Munn & Co. will be faithfully guarded and remain confidential? _Answer._-You have none except our well-known integrity in this respect, based upon a most extensive practice of thirty years' standing. Our clients are numbered by hundreds of thousands. They are to be found in every town and city in the Union. Please to make inquiry about us. Such a thing as the betrayal of a client's interests, when committed to our professional care, never has occurred, and is not likely to occur. All business and communications intrusted to us are kept _secret and confidential_. Address =MUNN & CO.,= Publishers of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, =37 Park Row New York.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =Advertisements.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =Inside Page, each insertion - - - 75 cents a line. Back Page, each insertion - - - $1.00 a line.= (About eight words to a line.) _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =TELEPHONES,= Perfect working, at reduced prices. Send for illustrated circular to =TELEPHONE SUPPLY CO.,= =Box 3224, Boston, Mass.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: =H.W. JOHNS'= ASBESTOS TRADEMARK ] =LIQUID PAINTS, ROOFING, BOILER COVERINGS,= Steam Packing, Sheathings, Fire Proof Coatings, Cements. SEND FOR SAMPLES, ILLUSTRATED PAMPHLET AND PRICE LIST. =H. W. JOHNS M'F'G Co., 87= MAIDEN LANE, N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =Mill Stones and Corn Mills.= We make Burr Millstones, Portable Mills, Smut Machines, Packers, Mill Picks, Water Wheels, Pulleys, and Gearing, specially adapted to Flour Mills. Send for catalogue. =J. T. NOYE & SON, Buffalo, N. Y.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] =WARRANTED THE BEST. 1 H. P. Boiler & Engine, $150. 2 H. P., $175. 3 H. P., $200.= Tested to 200 lbs. Steam. =LOVEGROVE & CO., 152 N. 3d St., Philadelphia, Pa.,= Builders of Engines and Boilers, 1 to 100 horse power. Send for circulars and prices, and state size and style you want. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ESTABLISHED 1844. =JOSEPH C. TODD,= ENGINEER and MACHINIST. Flax, Hemp, Jute, Rope, Oakum and Bagging Machinery, Steam Engines, Boilers, etc. I also manufacture Baxter's New Portable Engine of 1877. Can be seen in operation at my store. A one horse-power, portable engine, complete, $125; two horse-power, $225; two and a half horse-power, $250; three horse-power, $275. Manufactured exclusively by =J. C. TODD,= 10 Barclay St., New York, or Paterson, N. J. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =CAMERON= =Steam Pumps= For Mines, Blast Furnaces, Rolling Mills, Oil Refineries, Boiler Feeders, &c. For Illustrated Catalogue and _Reduced_ Price List send to =Works, Foot East 23d St., New York.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: WIRE ROPE] Address JOHN A. ROEBLING'S SONS, Manufacturers, Trenton, N. J., or 117 Liberty Street, New York. Wheels and Rope for conveying power long distances. Send for circular. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =$1200 Salary.= Salesmen wanted to sell our Staple Goods to dealers. No peddling. =Expenses= paid. Permanent employment. address S. A. GRANT & CO., 2, 4, 6 & 8 Home St., Cincinnati, O. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _Working Models_ And Experimental Machinery, Metal or Wood, made to order by J. F. WERNER, 62 Centre St., N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- B. W. Payne & Sons, Corning, N. Y. Established in 1840. [Illustration] Eureka Safety Power. |h.p. cyl. ht. space. wt. price. ------------------------------------------- | 2 |3-1/8x4| 48 in.| 40x25 | 900 | $150 | -------------------------------------------| | 4 | 4x6 | 56 | 46x30 | 1600 | 250 | -------------------------------------------| | 6 | 5x7 | 72 | 72x42 | 2700 | 400 | ------------------------------------------- |_Also_, =SPARK ARRESTING PORTABLES=, _and_| | =Stationary Engines= _for Plantations_. | | Send for Circulars. | ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Patent Wood-working Machinery, Band Saws Scroll Saws, Friezers, etc. Cordesman, Egan & Co., Cincin'ti, O. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =CORLISS ENGINES.= Beam, horizontal, vertical, condensing, and non-condensing Steam Engines. =Machine Tools, Sugar Machinery.= =Facilities for Constructing Heavy Machinery.= Send for Circular. PASSAIC MACHINE WORKS, WATTS, CAMPBELL & CO., Proprietors, Newark, N. J. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] THE ONLY Genuine GEISER SELF-REGULATING GRAIN SEPARATOR. Celebrated for its light and smooth movements, also SEPARATING and CLEANING all kinds of grain. Manufactured only by THE GEISER M'F'G CO., Waynesboro, Franklin Co., Pa. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =CIGAR BOX LUMBER,= Manufactured by our new =Patented Processes.= Poplar 1¼c. Mahogany 2½c. Spanish Cedar Veneers ½c. Spanish Cedar, 2d quality 2¾c. " 1st and 2d quality 3¼c. " 1st " 3¾c. No charge for cartage. Terms cash. =GEO. W. READ & CO.,= =186 to 200 Lewis Street, New York.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =BELT PULLEY,= Lightest, strongest, and best made. Secured to the Shaft without Keys, Set Screws, Bolts or Pins; also, _Adjustable Dead Pulleys_ and _Taper-Sleeve Couplings_. Send for catalogue. Address Taper-Sleeve Pulley Works, Erie, Pa. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: MARVIN'S FIRE & BURGLAR SAFES COUNTER PLATFORM · WAGON & TRACK SCALES MARVIN SAFE & SCALE CO. ·265 BROADWAY. N. Y.· ---------------------------------------------------------------------- An assortment of =WOOD-WORKING MACHINERY= made by Richards, London & Kelley (dissolved); also, a number of first-class =MACHINE TOOLS= (nearly as good as new) of Philadelphia construction, on hand and for sale. For list or inspection of machines and estimates, apply at the works of JOHN RICHARDS & CO., 22d and Wood Sts., Philadelphia, manufacturers of Standard Gauges and other Implements. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ON THE CARE OF HORSES. BY PROF. PRITCHARD, R. V. S. Showing the Proper Construction of Stables. Best Floor. Lighting and Ventilation. Hay-racks. Watering and Feeding. Grooming and Exercise. Cracked Heels; Lice; Colic; Mud Fever; Wind Galls. Also, in same number, facts about improved Cow Stables. How to keep Cows clean and maintain Pure Air in Stables. Increased Cleanliness and Convenience with Less Labor. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. =123.= Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Every Man His Own Printer! [Illustration: The Excelsior] =$3 Press= Prints labels, cards etc. (Self-inker $5) =9= Larger sizes For business, pleasure, young or old Catalogue of Presses, Type, Etc., for 2 stamps. =KELSEY & Co.= =Meriden, Conn= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =Pyrometers=, For showing heat of Ovens, Hot Blast Pipes Boiler Flues, Superheated Steam, Oil Stills, &c. HENRY W. BULKLEY, Sole Manufacturer, 149 Broadway, N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =ICE AT $1.00 PER TON.= The PICTET ARTIFICIAL ICE CO., LIMITED, Room 51, Coal and Iron Exchange, P. O. Box 3083, N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LAP WELDED CHARCOAL IRON Boiler Tubes, Steam Pipe, Light and Heavy Forgings, Engines, Boilers, Cotton Presses, Rolling Mill and Blast Furnace Work. =READING IRON WORKS,= =261 South Fourth St., Phila.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =OPERA GLASSES= =At Reduced Prices.= Microscopes, Spectacles, Telescopes, Thermometers. Send for Illustrated Catalogue. R. & J. BECK, 921 Chestnut St., Philadelphia. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] WOOD-WORKING MACHINERY, New and improved, for special work. Boring Machines, Turning Lathes, Saw Arbors, Saw Benches, Scroll Saws, Panel Raisers, and other Wood Tools. We build the only patented Panel Raiser, with vertical spindles, all others being infringements on our patents of July 11 and October 31, 1871. =WALKER BROS.,= =_73 and 75 Laurel St., Phila._= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ALCOHOLISM. AN INTERESTING Paper upon the Relations of Intemperance and Life Insurance. The average Risks and Expectancy of Life of the Temperate and of the Intemperate. Physiological action of Alcohol; stimulating the Nervous System, Retarding the Circulation. Alcohol Oxidized in the System. Insomnia, Congestion of the Lungs, Deterioration of Structure, Calculus, and Liver Diseases as results of Liquor. Extended Medical Testimony. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. =125.= Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =Telephones.= How made, adjusted, and operated by any person. Send stamp for full and interesting description, with illustrations and instructions. One pair first-class Telephones complete, except diaphragms, sent to any address upon receipt of $5. J.H. BUNNELL, Electrician, 112 Liberty St., New York. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT FOR ALL CORPORATIONS AND MANF'G CONCERNS.--=Buerk's Watchman's Time Detector=, capable of accurately controlling the motion of a watchman or patrolman at the different stations of his beat. Send for circular. =J. E. BUERK, P. O. Box 979, Boston, Mass= N. B.--The suit against Imhaeuser & Co., of New York, was decided in my favor, June 10, 1874. A fine was assessed against them Nov. 11, 1876, for selling contrary to the order of the court. Persons buying or using clocks infringing on my patent will be dealt with according to law. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- THE HUGHES TELEPHONE. SIX FIGURES. Sound converted into Undulatory Electrical Currents by Unhomogeneous Conducting Substances in Circuit. The Simplest Telephone and the most sensitive Acoustical Instrument yet constructed. Instrument for Testing the Effect of Pressure on Various Substances. Astonishing Experiments which may be performed by any person with a few nails, pieces of sealing wax, a glass tube containing powders, and a few sticks of charcoal. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. =128.= Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: MEDAL & PREMIUM AWARDED TO ALCOTT'S TURBINE WATER WHEELS] MANUFACT'D AT MOUNT HOLLY N. J. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "OLD RELIABLE." TO KNOW ALL about the =Best Pump= for Paper Makers, Tanners, Contractors, and for irrigation, send for illustrated pamphlet, 78 pages. HEALD, SISCO & CO., Baldwinsville, N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =BOOKS=, Papers. Want Agents. Send stamp. L. L. FAIRCHILD, Rolling Prairie, Wis. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =IT PAYS= to sell our Rubber Stamps and Novelties. Terms free. G. A. HARPER & BRO., Cleveland, O. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DYSPEPSIA. BY DR. C. F. KUNZE. Symptoms. Appetite Diminished. Stomach Digestion much slower than Normal. Constipation. Symptoms in Children. Chronic Cases. Dyspepsia as caused by too much Food; by Indigestible Food; by General Derangement; by Altered Conditions of Innervation. Treatment. Nourishment should be Easily Digestible; taken Little at a Time; and Digested before more is taken. Necessity of Few and Plain Dishes. Treatment when Stomach is Overloaded. Aiding Gastric Juice. Treatment in Febrile Diseases. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. =129.= Price 10 cents, To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] =SHEPARD'S CELEBRATED= $50 Screw Cutting Foot Lathe. Foot and Power Lathes, Drill Presses, Scroll, Circular and Band Saws, Saw Attachments, Chucks, Mandrills, Twist Drills, Dogs, Calipers, etc. Send for catalogue of outfits for amateurs or artisans. =H. L. SHEPARD & CO., 88, 90 & 92 Elm St., Cincinnati, Ohio.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =TO ADVERTISERS!= We will send free to all applicants who do any newspaper advertising, the THIRD EDITION of =AYER & SON'S MANUAL= =FOR ADVERTISERS.= 160 8vo. pp. More complete than any which have preceded it. Gives the names, circulation, and advertising rates of several thousand newspapers in the United States and Canada, and contains more information of value to an advertiser than can be found in any other publication. All lists have been carefully revised, and where practicable prices have been reduced. The special offers are numerous and unusually advantageous. Be sure to send for it before spending any money in newspaper advertising. Address =N. W. AYER & SON,= ADVERTISING AGENTS, Times Building, Philadelphia. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =PORTLAND CEMENT,= ROMAN & KEENE'S. For Walks, Cisterns, Foundations, Stables, Cellars, Bridges, Reservoirs, Breweries, etc. Remit 10 cents for Practical Treatise on Cements. S. L. MERCHANT & CO., 53 Broadway, New York. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] =NORTH'S UNIVERSAL LATHE DOG. S. G. NORTH 347 North 4th Street, Philadelphia, Pa.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =MACHINISTS' TOOLS.= NEW AND IMPROVED PATTERNS. Send for new illustrated catalogue. Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c. =NEW HAVEN MANUFACTURING CO., New Haven, Conn.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- POINTS OF A GOOD HORSE. BEING the Report of the Committee appointed by the New England Agricultural Society to decide upon Rules for Guidance of Judges of Horses. The Points of Excellence. Size, Color, Symmetry of Body, Head and Neck, Eye and Ear, Feet and Limbs, fully described. Speed at the Trot, and in Walking, Style and Action, etc., with the percentage allowed for each quality. The Standard Size and Speed for Matched Carriage Horses, Gents' Driving Horses, Family Horses, Park or Phæton Horses, etc. An excellent Guide in selecting animals. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. =103=, price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] ="THE EAGLE CLAW."= The best Trap in the World for catching FISH, ANIMALS & GAME. [Illustration] One bait will catch =Twenty Fish=. No. 1, for ordinary fishing, small game, &c. 35c. No. 2, for large fish, mink, musk-rats, &c. 75c. Sent by mail. =J. BRIDE & CO.,= Mfrs., 297 Broadway, New-York. Send for Catalogue of useful novelties and mention this paper. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EMERY AND CORUNDUM WHEELS, for Grinding and Surfacing Metals and other materials. By ARTHUR H. BATEMAN, F. C. S. A paper read before the Society of Arts, London. Files, Chisels, Grindstones, Composition of Emery, where found, Quality, Specific Gravity, and Hardness, Manufacture of the wheels, Emery Powder, Buffing, Polishing, Cutting Power, Corundum. The Magnesian or Union Wheel, the Tanite, the Northampton, the Vulcanite, the Climax, the Vitrified, a porous wheel with central water supply. Fifty uses enumerated to which the wheels are put, for Metals, Stone, Teeth, Millboard, Wood, Agate, and Brick. How to mount a wheel. How to hold the work, and directions for various classes of work. Discussion and questions proposed and answered. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, NO. =125=. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =THE BIGELOW= =Steam Engine.= BOTH PORTABLE AND STATIONARY. =The CHEAPEST AND BEST in the market. Send for descriptive circular and price list.= =H. B. BIGELOW & CO., New Haven, Conn.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: Diamonds and Carbon] Shaped or Crude, furnished and set for Boring Rocks, Dressing Mill Burrs, Emery Wheels, Grindstones, Hardened Steel, Calender Rollers, and for Sawing Turning, or Working Stone and other hard substances: also Glaziers' Diamonds. J. DICKINSON, 64 Nassau St., N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =SECOND-HAND ENGINES,= Portable and Stationary, at Low Prices. HARRIS IRON WORKS, TITUSVILLE, PA. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HOW TO MAKE A PHONOGRAPH. Full Instructions, with Eight Working Drawings, Half Size. Construction easy and Inexpensive. These drawings are from an actual working Phonograph; they show the sizes, forms, and arrangement of all the parts. The explanations are so plain and practical as to enable any intelligent person to construct and put a Phonograph in successful operation in a very short time. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT NO. =133.= Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: SCHLENKERS AUTOMATIC REVOLVING BOLT CUTTER DIAMOND SELF CLAMP PAPER CUTTER HOWARD'S SAFETY ELEVATORS HOWARD'S PARALLEL VISE HOWARD IRON WORKS BUFFALO N. Y. ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =_PERFECT_= =NEWSPAPER FILE= The Koch Patent File, for preserving newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, has been recently improved and price reduced. Subscribers to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT can be supplied for the low price of $1.50 by mail, or $1.25 at the office of this paper. Heavy board sides; inscription "SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN," in gilt. Necessary for every one who wishes to preserve the paper. Address =MUNN & CO., Publishers SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- THE TANITE CO., STROUDSBURG, PA. =EMERY WHEELS AND GRINDERS.= GEO. PLACE, 121 Chambers St., New York Agent. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: ROCK DRILLING MACHINES AND AIR COMPRESSORS. MANUFACTURED BY BURLEIGH ROCK DRILL CO. SEND FOR PAMPHLET. · FITCHBURG MASS. ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =STEAM PUMPS.= HENRY R. WORTHINGTON, 239 Broadway, N. Y. 83 Water St., Boston. THE WORTHINGTON DUPLEX PUMPING ENGINES FOR WATER WORKS--Compound, Condensing or Non-Condensing. Used in over 100 Water-Works Stations. STEAM PUMPS--Duplex and Single Cylinder. WATER METERS. OIL METERS. =Prices largely Reduced.= ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: WATSONS NON CHANGEABLE GAP LATHE HAS GREAT FACILITIES FOR LARGE OR MEDIUM SIZE WORK JAMES WATSON MANR. 1608 S. FRONT ST. PHILA. PA.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HARTFORD STEAM BOILER Inspection & Insurance COMPANY. W. B. FRANKLIN V. Pres't. J. M. ALLEN, Pres't. J. B. PIERCE, Sec'y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration] =Patent Portable Chuck Jaws.= Improved Solid Emery Wheels, for grinding Iron and Brass Castings, Tools, etc. Manufactured by AM. TWIST DRILL CO., Woonsocket, R. I. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =$7= A DAY to Agents canvassing for the =Fireside Visitor=. Terms and Outfit Free. Address P. O. VICKERY, Augusta, Maine. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =HAND SAW MILL= SAVES THREE MEN'S labor. S. C. HILLS, 78 Chambers St., N. Y. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- =BEST= DAMPER REGULATORS AND WEIGHTED GAUGE COCKS. MURRILL & KEIZER, 44 HOLLIDAY ST., BALTIMORE. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: PATENTS] =CAVEATS, COPYRIGHTS, TRADE MARKS, ETC.= Messrs. Munn & Co., in connection with the publication of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, continue to examine Improvements, and to act as Solicitors of Patents for Inventors. In this line of business they have had OVER THIRTY YEARS' EXPERIENCE, and now have _unequaled facilities_ for the preparation of Patent Drawings, Specifications, and the Prosecution of Applications for Patents in the United States, Canada, and Foreign Countries. Messrs. Munn & Co. also attend to the preparation of Caveats, Trade Mark Regulations, Copyrights for Books, Labels, Reissues, Assignments, and Reports on Infringements of Patents. All business intrusted to them is done with special care and promptness, on very moderate terms. We send free of charge, on application, a pamphlet containing further information about Patents and how to procure them; directions concerning Trade Marks, Copyrights, Designs, Patents, Appeals, Reissues, Infringements, Assignments, Rejected Cases, Hints on the Sale of Patents, etc. =_Foreign Patents._=--We also send, _free of charge_, a Synopsis of Foreign Patent Laws, showing the cost and method of securing patents in all the principal countries of the world. American inventors should bear in mind that, as a general rule, any invention that is valuable to the patentee in this country is worth equally as much in England and some other foreign countries. Five patents--embracing Canadian, English, German, French, and Belgian--will secure to an inventor the exclusive monopoly to his discovery among about ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLIONS of the most intelligent people in the world. The facilities of business and steam communication are such that patents can be obtained abroad by our citizens almost as easily as at home. The expense to apply for an English patent is $75; German, $100; French, $100; Belgian, $100; Canadian, $50. =_Copies of Patents._=--Persons desiring any patent issued from 1836 to November 26, 1867, can be supplied with official copies at reasonable cost, the price depending upon the extent of drawings and length of specifications. Any patent issued since November 27, 1867, at which time the Patent Office commenced printing the drawings and specifications, may be had by remitting to this office $1. A copy of the claims of any patent issued since 1836 will be furnished for $1. When ordering copies, please to remit for the same as above, and state name of patentee, title of invention, and date of patent. A pamphlet, containing full directions for obtaining United States patents sent free. A handsomely bound Reference Book, gilt edges, contains 140 pages and many engravings and tables important to every patentee and mechanic, and is a useful hand book of reference for everybody. Price 25 cents, mailed free. Address =MUNN & CO.=, Publishers SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 37 Park Row, N. Y. _BRANCH OFFICE--Corner of F and 7th Streets, Washington, D. C._ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The "Scientific American" is printed with CHAS. ENEU JOHNSON & CO.'S INK. Tenth and Lombard Sts., Philadelphia, and 59 Gold St., New York. * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES Obvious punctuation errors have been corrected. Spelling inconsistencies have been retained. On page 83, the clause "It has an independent extinguisher for the smaller wick tube" had "ndependent" in the original. On page 91, the ad reading "The Turbine Wheel made by Risdon & Co., Mt. Holly, N. J., gave the best results at Centennial tests." had "tets" in the original. On page 92, the patent named "Gas, scintillator for lighting" was numbered "204,28" in the original. The final "5" has been added because sorting the list reveals that the patent numbers form a consecutive series from 204,122 to 204,413, with the only one missing being 204,285. On page 92, the patent named "Shoetip" was guessed at; the "t" is unclear in the original. On page 94, the phrase "Alcohol Oxidized in the System." had no terminating punctuation in the original. On page 94, the illustration containing the words "Diamonds and Carbor", the "Carbor" may be an abbreviation for "Carborundum"; the image is unclear in the original. On page 94, in the advertisement for "WATSONS [sic] NON [sic] CHANGEABLE GAP LATHE", the abbreviation "MANR." had the "R" as a superscript in the original. 
29411	----	Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net Images generously provided by "Making of America" Cornell University. THE NEW YORK SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: _Published Weekly at 128 Fulton Street, (Sun Building,) New York._ BY MUNN & COMPANY. * * * * * RUFUS PORTER, EDITOR. * * * * * TERMS.--$2 a year--$1 in advance, and the remainder in 6 months. [Illustration: hand pointing right] _See Advertisement on last page._ =The New Roman Road.= [The present Pope has given his consent to build railroads in his dominions, which the former Pope was averse to. The following lines are predicated on his consent.] Ancient Romans, ancient Romans-- Cato, Scipio Africanus, Ye whose fame's eclips'd by no man's, Publius Æmilianus, Sylla, Marius, Pompey, Cæsar, Fabius, dilatory teaser, Coriolanus, and ye Gracchi Who gave so many a foe a black eye, Antony, Lepidus, and Crassus; And you, ye votaries of Parnassus, Virgil, and Horace, and Tibullus, Terence and Juvenal, Catullus, Martial, and all ye wits beside, On Pegasus expert to ride; Numa, good king, surnamed Pampilius, And Tullus, eke 'yclept Hostilius-- Kings, Consuls, Imperators, Lictors, Prætors, the whole world's former victors, Who sleep by yellow Tiber's brink; Ye mighty names--what d'ye think? The Pope has sanctioned Railway Bills! And so the lofty Aventine, And your six other famous hills Will soon look down upon a 'Line.' Oh! if so be that hills could turn Their noses up, with gesture antic, Thus would the seven deride and spurn A Roman work so unromantic: 'Was this the ancient Roman Way. With tickets taken, fares to pay, Stockers and Engineers, perhaps-- Nothing more likely--English chaps Brawling away, 'Go on!' for Ito, And 'Cut along!' instead of Cito; The engine letting off its steam, With puff and whistle, snort and scream; A smell meanwhile, like burning clothes, Flouting the angry Roman nose? Is it not Conscript Fathers shocking? Does it not seem your mem'ry mocking? The Roman and the Railway station-- What an incongruous combination! How odd, with no one to adore him, Terminus--and in the Forum!'--[Punch. =Good Advice.= Somebody lays down the following rules to young men in business. They will apply equally well to young and old. 'Let the business of every one alone, and attend to your own.--Don't buy what you don't want. Use every hour to advantage, and study even to make leisure hours useful. Think twice before you spend a shilling; remember you have another to make for it. Find recreation in looking after your business, and so your business will not be neglected in looking after recreation.--Buy fair, sell fair, take care of the profits; look over the books regularly, and if you find an error, trace it out. Should a stroke of misfortune come upon you in trade, retrench--work harder, but never fly the track; confront difficulties with unflinching perseverance, and they will disappear at last, and you will be honored; but shrink from the task, and you will be despised.' * * * * * In Russia, coffins are generally brown, but children have pink, grown up unmarried girls sky blue, while other females are indulged with a violet color. [Illustration: Barnum's Safety Apparatus] INTRODUCTION.--Much has been said of late in and about New York on the subject of the adoption by steamboat proprietors of some apparatus that will in some measure secure the passengers against such casualties as have occurred on board the Excelsior and several other boats. There have been a great variety of inventions introduced for the purpose of preventing explosions; but from the best information we can obtain on the subject, we are of the opinion that Mr. Barnum's apparatus takes a general preference over all others. It consists of an arrangement of machinery, partly within the boiler, and which is constructed on such a self-regulating principle as to keep up a supply of water within the boiler, without any attention from the engineer; and in case that the apparatus itself should become impaired or cease to operate regular, the engineer becomes instantly notified thereof. EXPLANATION.--It is inexpedient for us to give a full and minute description of the several points and peculiarities of the mechanism of this apparatus; but we may so far explain as to say that a horizontal lever inside of the boiler, being mounted on a pivot near its centre, and connected to a buoy or float at one end, as represented in the engraving, (a part of the surface of the boiler being omitted for that purpose, and not, as some might infer, to represent the apparatus attached to a boiler already burst by an explosion.) One of these floats is placed within a small enclosed box within the boiler, that it may be secure from the effect of foam which sometimes pervades the surface of the water in a steam boiler.--This lever, near its bearing, is connected to a short valve-rod, which governs the valves in a small valve-chamber, whereby the steam is occasionally admitted to operate a small steam engine, placed directly over the boiler; and this engine puts in motion a pump, by which the water in the boiler is replenished. This engine, it will be understood, is never put in operation except when the water in the boiler becomes too low: and when the water rises, the elevation of the encased float closes the valve and stops the engine. The ball on the end of the lever acts as a counterpoise to the float, (which is of stone) that it may be freely influenced by the rising or falling of the surface of the water. The small engine constructed by Mr. Barnum for this purpose, is well adapted to its place, and has several peculiarities whereby the valves, and consequent reciprocal motion of the engine are regulated without the use of a crank or fly-wheel: but of these we cannot at present give a minute description. The whole of this apparatus evinces much scientific ability of the inventor, Daniel Barnum, Esq., resident at present in this city, and who has received many certificates from the first scientific men in the Union, in commendation of his invention. =A Piggish Parvenue.= A proud porker, fancying that it was degrading to his dignity to root in the gutter, came upon the sidewalk, and full of his consequence, promenaded from morning till night, leaving his humbler companions to munch corn, husks and potatoe parings. He fared as people usually do, who from vanity assume a station they are not qualified to fill. In the gutter he would have lived in unnoticed enjoyment. On the walk he got kicked by every passenger and bitten by every cur, till hungry and bruised he was glad to return to his proper station.--[Ex, paper. =Wanting Workmen back Again.= The proprietors of the cotton mill in Schuylerville, N. Y., who reduced the wages of their hands, a week or two since, says the Schuylerville Herald, twenty-five per cent., are now, and have been for several days, endeavoring to induce them to return to their work, at the old wages; but they are too late, as most of them are engaged to work in other mills. =Hard Climbing.= A man in Orange county was found one night climbing an over-shot wheel in a fulling mill. He was asked what he was doing. He said he was 'trying to go up to bed, but some how or other these stairs won't hold still.' There are many unlucky wights who are laboriously endeavoring to climb fortune's ladder on the same principle. =Power of Imagination.= An amusing incident recently occurred at Williams College, which is thus related by a correspondent of the Springfield Gazette: The professor of chemistry, while administering, in the course of his lectures, the protoxide of nitrogen, or, as it is commonly called, laughing gas, in order to ascertain how great an influence the imagination had in producing the effects consequent on respiring it, secretly filled the India rubber gas-bag with common air instead of gas. It was taken without suspicion, and the effects, if anything, were more powerful than upon those who had really breathed the pure gas. One complained that it produced nausea and dizziness, another immediately manifested pugilistic propensities, and before he could be restrained, tore in pieces the coat of one of the bystanders, while the third exclaimed, 'this is life. I never enjoyed it before.' The laughter that followed the exposure of this gaseous trick may be imagined. =True Policy.= Under all circumstances there is but one honest course; and that is, to do right and trust the consequences to Divine Providence. 'Duties are ours: events are God's.' Policy, with all her cunning, can devise no rule so safe, salutary and effective, as this simple maxim. * * * * * Six thousand pounds of Saxony wool have been purchased in Pennsylvania, at sixty-two and a half cents per pound. A LIST OF PATENTS _Issued from the 20th of July to the 28th of July, 1846, inclusive._ To M. W. Obenchain, of Springfield, Ohio, for improvement in Carding Machines. Patented 20th July, 1846. To Russell Wildman, of Hartford, Ct., for improvement in Machinery for forming Hat Bodies. Patented 20th July, 1846. To William Sherwood, of Ridgefield, Ct., for improvement in Carpet Looms. Patented 20th July, 1846. To Richard Garsed, of Frankford, Pa., for improvement in Operating Treadle Cams in Looms for Tweeling. Patented 20th July, 1846. To James Ives, of Hamden, Ct., for improvement in Locks for Carriage Doors. Patented 20th July, 1846. To Jacob Peebles, of Concordia, La., for improvement in Brick Cisterns. Patented 20th July, 1846. To Jacob Shermer, of New Valley, Md., for improvement in Winnowing Machines. Patented, 20th July, 1846. To George Levan, of Gap, Pa., for improvement in Doubling and Twisting and Reeling. Patented 20th July, 1846. To Joseph Stevens, of Northumberland, N. Y., for improvement in Fences. Patented 20th July, 1846. To James Boss, of Philadelphia, Pa., for improvement in Ever Pointed Pencils. Patented 20th July, 1846. To Richard C. Holmes and Jonathan J. Springer, of Cape May C. H., N. J., for improvement in Machinery for Steering Vessels. Patented 20th July, 1846. To Daniel Hoats, of Mifflingburgh, Pa., for improvement in Threshing Machines. Patented 20th July, 1846. To Tappan Townsend, of Albany, N. Y., for improvement in Warming Railroad Cars.--Patented 24th July, 1846. To Elizur L. Booth, of Canandaigua, N. Y., for improvement in Threshing Machines. Patented 24th July, 1846. To Allen Eldred, of Oppenheim, N. Y., for improvement in Potatoe Ploughs. Patented 24th July, 1846. To Amos L. Reed, of Pittsburgh, Pa., for improvement in Feeding Nail Plates. Patented 24th July, 1846. To Joseph Greenleaf, of North Yarmouth, Me., for improvement in Washing Machines. Patented 24th July, 1846. To James Atwater, of New Haven, Ct., for improvement in Door Locks. Patented 24th July, 1846. To Richard Flint, of Meriden, Ct., for improvement in Rat-Tail Files. Patented 24th July, 1846. To Addison Smith, of Perrysburgh, Ohio, for improvement in Magnetic Fire Alarms.--Patented 24th July, 1846. To Charles F. Johnson, of Oswego, N. Y., for improvement in Turret Clocks. Patented 28th July, 1846. To H, D. Reynolds, of Mill-Hall, Pa., for improvement in Smut Machines. Patented 28th July, 1846. To Charles Edward Jacot, of New York City, for improvement in Lever Escapements. Patented 28th July, 1846. To Ross Winans, of Baltimore, Md., for improvement in Locomotive Carriages. Patented 28th July, 1846. To Jonathan Knowles, of Lowell, Mass., for improvement in Children's Chairs and Wagons. Patented 28th July, 1846. To Moses Miller, of Fort Ann, N. Y., for improvement in Sleighs. Patented 28th July, 1846. To William Hatch, of Medford, Mass., for improvement in Spike and Nail Machines.--Patented 28th July, 1846. [Illustration: Variety] =Old Bachelors.= They are wanderers and ramblers--never at home, Making sure of a welcome wherever they roam. And ev'ry one knows that the bachelor's den Is a room set apart for these singular men-- A nook in the clouds, of some five feet by four, Though sometimes, perchance, it may be rather more, With skylight, or no light, ghosts, goblins and gloom, And ev'ry where termed, 'The Bachelor's Room.' These creatures, they say, are not valued at all, Except when the herd give a Bachelor's ball. Then drest in their best, In their gold broidered vest, It is known as a fact, That they act with much tact, And they lisp out 'How do?' And they coo and they woo, And they smile, for a while, Their fair guests to beguile; Condescending and bending, For fear of offending, Though inert, And they spy, They exert, With their eye, To be pert, And they sigh And to flirt, As they fly. And they whisk, and they whiz, And are brisk, when they quiz. For they meet, Advancing, To be sweet, And glancing, And are fleet, And dancing, On their feet, And prancing. Sliding and gliding with minuet pace, Piroueting and setting with infinite grace. And jumping, And racing, And bumping, And chasing, And stumping, And pacing, And thumping, And lacing. They are flittering and glittering, gallant and gay, Yawning all the morning, and lounging all day, But when he grows old, And his sunshine is past, Three score years being told, Brings repentance at last. He then becomes an odd old man: His warmest friend's the frying pan; He's fidgety, fretful and weary; in fine, Loves nothing but self, and his dinner and wine. He rates and he prates, And reads the debates: Despised by the men, and the women he hates. Then prosing, And pouring, And dozing, And snoring, And cozing, And boring, And nosing, And roaring, Whene'er befalls in with a rabble, His delight is to vapor and gabble. He's gruffy, And musty, And puffy, And tusty, And stuffy, And rusty, And huffy, And crusty, He sits in his slippers, with back to the door, Near freezing, And grumbling, And wheezing, And mumbling, And teazing, And stumbling, And sneezing, And tumbling, And curses the carpet, or nails in the floor. Oft falling, Oft waking, And bawling, And aching, And sprawling, And quaking, And crawling, And shaking, His hand is unsteady: his stomach is sore, He's railing, Uncheery, And failing, And dreary, And ailing, And teary, Bewailing, And weary, Groaning and moaning, His selfishness owning. Grieving and heaving, Though nought is he leaving. But pelf and ill health, Himself and his wealth. He sends for a doctor, to cure or to kill, Who gives him advice, and offence, and a pill, And drops him a hint about making his will, As fretful antiquity cannot be mended, The mis'rable life of a bachelor's ended. Nobody misses him, nobody sighs, Nobody grieves when the bachelor dies. =Wellman's Illustrated Botany.= We have received the October number of this incomparable work, and find it equal in all respects to its "illustrious predecessors." Among the flowers presented in full colors, by way of illustration, we notice the Scarlet Pimpernel, China Aster, Blue Hepatia, Cerus Speciosus, Agrimonia Eupatoria, besides several other sketches of buds, sections, &c. We esteem this work worth at least double the publishers' price,--$3 per annum. Published at 116 Nassau street. =Literary Emporium.= We have hitherto neglected to notice the September and October numbers of this serious, rational and elegant periodical. Each number is embellished with beautiful portraits, landscapes and flowers, and contains the most useful and interesting reading matter, as well as choice poetry and occasional music. Terms $1 per annum. By J. K. Wellman, 116 Nassau street. =A Delicate Compliment.= Washington was sometimes given to pleasantry. Journeying east on one occasion, attended by two of his aids, he asked some young ladies at a hotel where he breakfasted, how they liked the appearance of his young men! One of them promptly replied, 'We cannot judge of the STARS in the presence of the SUN!' =Fatal Deer Fight.= The skeleton heads of two deers, their antlers so closely interlocked that they cannot be disengaged without violence, were found about a month ago by a gentleman while hunting in Nassau county, East Florida. The ground for a quarter of an acre was completely cut up by their hoofs. =A Provoking Blunder.= The letter bags for the steamer Cambria, despatched from this city, and containing upwards of ten thousand letters for Europe, was taken from the Boston Post Office by a country stage driver, through mistake, and the Cambria was compelled to sail without them. They were returned to this city. =Curious Needlework.= A complete map of the State of Pennsylvania, wrought in lace--in which the town, counties, rivers, &c., are all distinctly shown, each county being worked in a style of lace different from those adjoining--is being exhibited in Baltimore, and commands much admiration. =The Credit System.= We infer, from certain polite hints and intimation, in the 'Massachusetts Farmers' and Mechanics' Leger,' that that paper is circulated on trust. If so, the publishers are in no danger of wanting business for some years to come. =Charcoal Road.= The citizens of Yazoo, Miss., have determined to make a charcoal road over the valley swamp of that place. Sixty hands cutting timber will burn and spread the coal over two miles in thirty days--the embankments being already thrown up. =Quick Work.= The Baltimore Sun says--'A communication was made from _Buffalo to Baltimore_ last week, and an answer was received at the telegraph office in the former city in about _two hours_!' =Oregon Currency.= By an act of the Oregon Legislature, wheat is made a lawful tender, in payment of debts or taxes, at the market prices, when delivered at such places as it is customary for the merchants to receive it. =Suffering by Success.= It is reported that a gentleman congratulated Mr. Polk on having carried all his measures through Congress. Mr. Polk replied, 'Yes, I have carried all of them through, and am the weaker for the passage of each one of them.' =A Rich Ore.= The Detroit Advertiser, in an article upon the nature of the ores in the Lake Superior region, remarks that Messrs. Robbins and Hubbard, of that city, have recently assayed a specimen of native copper from Lake Superior, and found in 12 ounces of copper, not only 1-3/4 ounces of pure silver, but several grains of gold! =Musical.= The gross receipts of a late musical festival at Birmingham, amounted to $56,000. The excitement was caused by performing Mendleson's Messiah, which we learn is to be brought out in this city. =Singular Accident.= The steamboat Highland having got aground near Turkey Island, on the Mississippi, a large tree, three feet in diameter, fell directly across the boat, smashing the cabin, breaking the connecting pipe, and seriously injuring the pilot. =Combined Accomplishments.= Mr. S. Lover, who recently arrived in this city, is said to be a good poet, a good painter, a good musician, full of wit, anecdotes and pleasantry--it is impossible to pass a dull evening in his company. =Marriage of Rossini.= This celebrated composer was married at Bologna, on the 16th of August, after a courtship of 16 years, to Mademoiselle Olympe Bearrien of Paris. It may change the turn of his muse. =Great Luck.= A poor Englishman, with a wife and family living in St. Louis, has had a fortune of $265,000 in money, and a family estate worth $115,000, recently left him by a deceased relative. =Zinc Mines.= There are several mines of zinc in New Jersey, one of which is said to consist of a deposit 600 feet in length, and is thought to contain ore worth $2,000,000. =A Monstrous Woman.= The Ohio State Journal says that there is a woman in Pickaway county, in that State, who weighs 46 pounds! =Old Boy.= A southern paper advertises a runaway boy, _thirty-six years of age_! * * * * * By a recent telegraphic arrangement, the papers in Albany, Troy, Utica, Syracuse, Auburn, Rochester and Buffalo, are furnished with reports from New York twice a day,--at 2 and 8 P. M. * * * * * The Connecticut river is reported to be lower than it has been known within the remembrance of the oldest inhabitants. It is reduced to a mere brook. * * * * * A company formed in Boston has commenced operation on a copper mine in Cumberland, R. I. About 4000 lbs. of ore were taken out a few days since, and yields about 20 per cent. * * * * * The Hon. Louis McLane gets a salary of $5000 a year--nearly $100 per week--for holding the office of President of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway Company. * * * * * An imperial _quarter_ of Indian corn, in 480 pounds, which is equal to eight bushels of sixty pounds each. We suppose some of our readers would like to know about that. * * * * * A solution of copper is an excellent wash for purifying sinks, and removing all unpleasant effluvia. Two or three applications will be effectual. * * * * * We are informed that the steamer Buffalo is making arrangements for the adoption of Barnum's Safety Apparatus. * * * * * Two iron steamboats, of 70 tons each, are to run between Philadelphia and Reading, Pa., carrying freight and passengers. * * * * * The editor of the Cincinnati Commercial says that he has a project for connecting the old and new worlds by telegraph. * * * * * Twelve hundred and thirty-four miles of magnetic telegraph are reported to be in actual operation in the United States. * * * * * An association of capitalists at Worcester county, Mass., are exploring a vein of copper in Greenfield. =The True Ornament.= 'The ornament of a meek and quiet spirit.' BY MISS E. J. ANDREWS. I ask not for the glittering wreath, Of India's sparkling diamonds rare, To deck my brow, while oft beneath, There throbs a heart with heaviest care. I ask not for the gilded chain, Of perishing and worthless gold, To clasp my neck, while oft in vain The heart's best sympathies unfold. Oh! give me not the worthless dust, For which vain, anxious mortals toil, To treasure up where moth and rust, Doth soon corrupt the hoarded pile. I covet not the gay attire, In which vain beauty oft appears, Oft that which wondering crowds admire, Needeth far more their heartfelt tears. But there's an ornament I crave;-- To grant, vain world, it is not thine, It floateth not o'er yon proud wave, Nor yields it me earth's richest mine. Oh, may it be a guileless heart! In heaven's own sight of priceless worth! Where nought corrupting e'er hath part, Pure, as the source which gave it birth. _A spirit meek and pure within;_ May this, alone, my life adorn, Unsullied by the touch of sin, Though subject to the proud world's scorn. This ornament, O God of Love! 'Tis Thine, and Thine alone, to give; Oh, may I its rich beauties prove, And in its full possession, _live_! _Bethel, Conn._, 1846. =Female Piety.= The gem of all others which enriches the coronet of woman's character, is unaffected piety. Nature may lavish much on her person; the enchantment of her countenance, the grace of her mind, the strength of her intellect; yet her loveliness is uncrowned till piety throws around the whole the sweetness and power of its charms. She then becomes unearthly in her desires and associations. The spell which bound her affections to the things below is broken, and she mounts on the silent wings of her fancy and hope to the habitation of God, where it is her delight to hold communion with the spirits that have been ransomed from the thraldom of Earth and wreathed with a garland of glory. Her beauty may throw a magical charm over many; princes and conquerors may bow with admiration at the shrine of her beauty and love; the sons of science may embalm her memory in the page of history; yet her piety must be her ornament, her pearl. Her name must be written in 'The Book of Life,' that when the mountains fade away, and every memento of earthly greatness is lost in the general wreck of nature, it may remain and swell the list of that mighty throng who have been clothed in the mantle of righteousness, and their voices attuned to the melody of Heaven. With such a treasure, every lofty gratification on earth may be purchased; friendship will be doubly sweet; and sorrow will lose their sting; and the character will possess a price far above rubies: life will be but a pleasant visit to earth, and entrance upon a joyful and perpetual home. And when the notes of the last trump shall be heard, and sleeping millions awake to judgment, its possessor shall be presented faultless before the throne of God with exceeding joy, and a crown of glory that shall never wear away. Such is piety. Like a tender flower, planted in the fertile soil of woman's heart, it grows, expanding in its foliage, and imparting its fragrance to all around, till transplanted, and set to bloom in perpetual vigor and unfading beauty, in the Paradise of God. =Iron Ore.= One of the most valuable beds of iron ore ever discovered has been found in the northeast corner of Dodge county, Wisconsin, and is said to yield ninety per cent. The deposit is 30 feet thick. * * * * * 'Pursue your calling with diligence, and your creditor shall not interrupt you.' NEW INVENTIONS. =Lewis's Reversible Faucet Filters.= Highly favorable as our opinion may be of the several excellent filters which have been introduced, we cannot avoid giving a preference to the one recently invented by Mr. S. H. Lewis. It consists of a very neat faucet, calculated to be attached to a common Croton or other hydrant, and in connection with the faucet key, is a circular chamber, three inches in diameter, within which is a circular filter consisting of a quantity of cotton cloth, flannel sponge or porous porcelain (which is preferred) compressed between two perforated metallic disks: and the faucet key is so constructed that by turning it to the right, the water is permitted to flow through the filter in one direction; but its course is reversed and it is made to flow in the opposite direction through the filter by turning the key to the left. The filter is thus cleansed at pleasure without any trouble, on examination of the filter or chamber. They may be seen at 28 1-2 Broadway. =West's Cheap and Convenient Filter.= For the thousands of families in this city whose houses are not furnished with the Croton water-pipes, a neat portable filter, recently invented by Mr. N. West, of this city, is as near perfection, in convenience and utility, as could be furnished for the low price of _one dollar_, and should find a place in every house or shop where the Croton water is used. It consists of two conical pails, one within the other; the first is furnished with an efficient filter at the bottom thereof; and the other has a faucet, by which the water is drawn off as occasion requires. They may be found at 156 Delancy street. =Improved Yoke for Oxen.= This yoke is constructed with sliding blocks attached to the under side of the beam of the yoke, near each end, and each sliding block is attached to the beam by bolts which pass through mortises so that the blocks may be made to slide occasionally to the right or left. To these blocks are attached the bows, the position of which are adjusted by gauge screws; and by the sliding of the blocks, the distance of the oxen from each other may be regulated. The middle of the yoke is furnished with a draught staple or eye-bolt which is moveable and regulated by a hand screw at the top, whereby the _pitch_ of the draught it regulated. Invented by David Chappel, and entered at the Patent Office, Sept. 3d. =Another Improvement In Stoves.= Messrs. Hartshorn, Payson & Ring entered at the Patent Office, September 3d, an improved stove, in which they claim the combination of the common wood stove and cylinder coal stove, so that the coal may be burned alone, and the draught so arranged as at the same time to heat the wood stove with the same heat, and if wood alone should be burned, then the draught should be so managed and arranged as at the same time to heat the side radiators and coal cylinders. A minute description of this improvement, is not, in this place, essential. =Iron Shingles.= We have never been able to understand the reason why iron has so long been neglected as a covering for roofs, but are gratified to learn that Mr. Wm. Beach, of Troy, N. Y., has invented and patented a mode of using cast iron plates for covering roofs. They are about one foot square, and are made to fit one into another, so as to render the roof water tight, by applying white lead to the joints. It can be afforded at 16 cents the square foot, and probably may be so far improved as to cost no more than slate, and will be much more permanent and safe. We see no difficulty in dispensing with white lead, however, and making the seams tight without it. =Improvement in the Railroad Track.= This improvement was entered Sept. 5th, by John F. Rogers. What he claims is the combination of the balance beam with the centre beam, by means of the recesses in the centre beam, spring plates, having tubes thereon on which the springs rest, and attached to the beam by bolts, by which a compact and secure connection is formed, while all the necessary flexibility is preserved. =THE GREAT FAIR.= The American Institute appears emblematical of the genius of our countrymen--unsubdued even by conflagration, and looking upon obstacles as incentives to redoubled effort. Contrast the smoking ruins of Niblo's with Castle Garden, having its whole amphitheatre enriched with a tastefully arranged collection of the most varied products of American arts and manufactures, and behold an evidence that we even inherit perseverance, enterprize and skill. We here see the embodiment of the excellence of greatness of our country--an unerring index of our future advance--if it be not that the signs of the times indicate that madness in our rulers which precedes and forebodes heaven's wrath. But it cannot, it must not be, that the blood of _labor_ shall cry from the ground of America. It must be sheathed, it must be protected. Protection is nature's first law. Expose the bleating flocks to the hungry beasts of the forest; cut the wings and pluck the feathers of her whom nature teaches to protect her brood from cold and rain; say to the mother to leave her babe unprotected and in free competition with all the elements of destruction, sooner than refuse the protection of our Government to the hitherto flourishing American manufactures. Castle Garden, or more correctly Castle Clinton, is at the southern extremity of our city. It was built for a fort--is of a circular form, of solid mason work, surrounded by the waters of the bay--connected to that ornament of the city, the Battery, by a long bridge. This bridge the managers have covered with a roof, and thus secured a very eligible and spacious apartment for the exhibition of carriages, sleighs, carts, farming implements and machinery in great variety. Thence the ingress suddenly opens into view the whole interior, creating the most lively and pleasing emotions. In the columns of the Scientific American we shall endeavor to give those details that will, we trust, interest our readers and promote the cause of American improvements. =BATHS.= After leaving the bridge, the passage way to the interior of the Castle is ornamented on both sides with a pleasing display of Baths--the immersion bath made of tin and of iron, and these combined with the showering apparatus. The shower baths are variously constructed, and some of them are of finished workmanship and costly material. Stebbin's Patent Furniture shower Bath presents itself first in the form of a very convenient washstand, with all its out fit; it is next easily converted into a work stand; with equal dispatch it assumes the form of a shower bath, furnished with every requisite. We regard this as an ingenious piece of furniture, that will greatly increase the use of the shower-bath, and thus add to the health of the community. =SOFA BEDSTEADS.= Much ingenuity has been expended in combining the Sofa and Bedstead. The first that attracted our attention was that manufactured by Mr. John A. Robson, 30th st. and 8th Avenue. It is on the double cone spring, so constructed that using it as a bed does not affect the cushion, and vice versa. The matrass or bed is 4 by 6 feet, without an intervening bar. It is exceedingly simple, of admirable contrivance, and of moderate price. =CUTLERY.= The display of American Cutlery is rich, affording a most gratifying evidence of the progress of the useful arts among us. Our neighbors, J. C. Nixon & Sons, in the Sun Buildings, feel quite confident that they will, as usual, carry off the premiums, particularly for their much celebrated tailor's shears. In the manufacture of engravers' tools; they challenge not only all America, but the world itself.--They manufacture for customers, from whom their articles have derived their just and solid reputation. (_To be Continued._) =Improved Steam Printing Press.= We have recently seen a model of a new Steam Printing Press, the invention of Mr. Wm. W. Marston, a young and ingenious mechanic of this city. A mass of other matters prevents our giving a description at present; we shall probably procure an engraving, however, and publish a full description in a few days. =Information to persons having business to transact at the Patent Office.= OF MODELS. (_Continued from No. 2._) SEC. 26. The law requires that the inventor shall deliver a model of his invention or improvement when the same admits of a model. The model should he neatly made, and as small as a distinct representation of the machine or improvement, and its characteristic properties, will admit; the name of the inventor should be printed or engraved upon, or fixed to it, in a durable manner. Models forwarded without a name, cannot be entered on record, and therefore liable to be lost or mislaid. SEC. 27. When the invention is of 'a composition of matter,' the law requires that the application be accompanied with specimens of ingredients, and of the composition of matter, sufficient in quantity for the purpose of experiment. ON GRANTING ANEW LOST PATENTS. SEC. 28. The third sec. of the act of March 3, 1837, provides: 'SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, That whenever it shall appear to the Commissioner that any patent was destroyed by the burning of the Patent Office building on the aforesaid fifteenth day of December, or was otherwise lost prior thereto, it shall be his duty, on application therefor by the patentee, or other persons interested therein, to issue a new patent for the same invention or discovery, bearing the date of the original patent, with his certificate thereon, that it was made and issued pursuant to the provisions of the third section of this act; and shall enter the same of record; Provided, however, That before such patent shall be issued, the applicant therefor shall deposit in the Patent Office a duplicate, as near as may be, of the original model, drawings, and description, with specification of the invention or discovery, verified by oath, as it shall be required by the Commissioner; and such patent and copies of such drawings and descriptions, duly certified, shall be admissible as evidence in any judicial court of the United States, and shall protect the rights of the patentee, his administrators, heirs, and assigns, to the extent only in which they would have been protected by the original patent and specification.' PROCEEDINGS ON APPLICATIONS FOR PATENTS, AND ON APPEALS FROM DECISIONS OF THE COMMISSIONER. (Act of 1836, Section, 7.) SEC. 29. 'That on the filing of any such application (consisting of petition, specification, model, and drawings, or specimens,) and the payment of the duty hereinafter provided, the Commissioner shall make, or cause to be made, an examination, of the alleged new invention or discovery; and if, on any such examination, it shall not appear to the Commissioner that the same had been invented or discovered by any other person in this country prior to the alleged invention or discovery thereof by the applicant, or that it had been patented or described in any printed publication in this or any foreign country, or had been in public use or on sale, with the applicant's consent or allowance, prior to the application, if the Commissioner shall deem it to be sufficiently useful and important, it shall be his duty to issue a patent therefor. But whenever on such examination it shall appear to the Commissioner that the applicant was not the original and first inventor or discoverer thereof, or that any part of that which is claimed as new had before been invented or discovered or patented, or described in any printed publication in this or any foreign country as aforesaid, or that the description is defective and insufficient, he shall notify the applicant thereof, giving him briefly such information and references as may be useful in judging of the propriety of renewing his application, or of altering his specification to embrace only that part of the invention or discovery which is new. In every such case, if the applicant shall elect to withdraw his application, relinquishing his claim to the model, he shall be entitled to receive back twenty dollars, part of the duty required by this act, on filing a notice in writing of such election in the Patent Office; a copy of which, certified by the Commissioner, shall be a sufficient warrant to the Treasurer for paying back to the said applicant the said sum of twenty dollars. But if the applicant, in such case, shall persist in his claim for a patent, with or without any alteration his specification, he shall be required to make oath or affirmation anew, in manner as aforesaid; and if specification and claim shall not have been so modified as, in the opinion of the Commissioner, shall entitle the applicant to a patent, he may appeal to the Chief Justice of the United States Court for the District of Columbia, who may affirm or reverse the decision of the Commissioner of Patents, in whole or in part, and may order a patent to issue; or he may have remedy against the decision of the Commissioner of Patents, or the decision of the Chief Justice of the United States Court for the District of Columbia, by filing a bill in equity in any of the United States Courts having jurisdiction, as hereinafter explained. (_To be continued._) =Consolation for the Christian.= 'Eye hath not seen; nor ear heard; neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for those that love Him.'--1 Cor. ii: 9. But it is said in the words following, that God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit. In this, we are not to understand, that the excellent things spoken of, are _communicated_ to men; but that by the aid of the divine Spirit they are enabled to receive such sublime and brilliant ideas of the glorious things which are prepared for them, that they are filled with sublime and unspeakable joy, though they find it utterly impracticable to describe these things to another, so as to be understood. It is like the new name which no man can know, but him to whom it is given: and although, in the solicitude of those who have been favored with a view of these things, to represent them to others, the most full and expressive forms of language have been put in requisition, it has in every instance failed to convey the least correct idea on the subject: because no man can see, or in anywise appreciate the excellence of these things, without the aid of the Spirit of Truth. But to those who obtain such enlightened views--and every man may, or might, obtain them,--the glorious things prepared are as the 'pearl of great price,' which, when a man hath found, he is ready to sacrifice all things else,--riches, honors, friends, pleasures, reputation in the world, or even life itself,--to obtain it. Neither Adam nor Eve, in their sinless, paradisaical state, could have had any correct idea of such delectable and glorious excellence of blessings as are prepared for these who become 'joint heirs of the Son of God,' through the blood of a crucified Saviour: for, had they been capable of seeing or imagining such things, they would never have fallen. There can be no question but that the glorious consolation of the faithful and obedient believers, will incomparably, not to say infinitely, excel that of the primitive state of man, or anything which could have been by man attained, if the blessed SON had not suffered. Let the most brilliant and soaring imagination exert its most strenuous and happy efforts in conceiving, arranging and representing to itself the highest possible state of bliss and glory, and it will fall as far short of the reality of the immortal state of the glorified saints,--the salvation purchased by the suffering of Christ,--as a mere shadow of the most beautiful picture comes short of the rich coloring of the original. And this fact is well known to those who have had the beauties of the 'world to come' revealed to them by the divine Spirit. These statements may appear strange to those who are accustomed to look upon the popular _reverend clergy_, fashionable church members and wealthy deacons, as choice specimens of the saints of the Lord. The true, and most favored saints, are generally found among those who are subject to poverty and tribulation, in this world. But these blessings of the gospel are free for all who will conform to the requisitions plainly expressed by our Savior, and recorded by the evangelist, and practicable by all who are willing to forsake all things else, for the sake of this great and everlasting salvation. * * * * * A cotton manufacturer in New-Haven lost his operatives, last week, by attempting to reduce their wages. =THE COLOR PRINTING MACHINE.= [Illustration:] INTRODUCTION.--There have appeared, in modern times, but few machines, to which more importance apparently attaches, than to the one here presented. It is well known that the best paper hangings, or room-papers command from $1 to $1,50 per piece, of eight yards, while most of those of American manufacture are sold for 25 to 50 cents per piece; and this difference is occasioned by the difficulty and extra labor of applying a great variety of different colors. But by means of this machine, seven, twelve, or even twenty different colors, may be accurately applied by one operation, and with less labor than is required to print with a single color, by the ordinary method; and thus the manufacturer will be enabled to sell, for 50 cents, such patterns as ordinarily cost a dollar or more, to either import or manufacture them. EXPLANATION.--The first row of gear wheels, A B, are attached to the ends of a row of cylinders, each cylinder being 30 inches long, and 3 inches in diameter. These cylinders support a broad, endless apron or belt, which passes over the whole series, and supports the strip of paper as it passes through the machine to receive the colors. The second series of wheels, C D, are attached to cylinders of the same dimensions of those in the first row, and are connected to each other by intervening pinions, whereby a uniform velocity is maintained through the whole series. The peripheries of this row of cylinders are cut in figures, according to the design of the pattern to be worked. The figures are left prominent, so as to come in contact with the paper upon the apron, as the cylinder revolves; the surface between the figures, being cut away to the depth of one eighth of an inch. Each of these printing cylinders contains sections of the figures to be printed, and is calculated to work a different color from the others; and the sections of figures on each cylinder are calculated to match those of the others, so as to complete the entire figure in all its colors on the paper. The entire machine is put in operation by a band, passing over the band-wheel, H. The third row of cylinders, E F, are distributing cylinders, which are put in motion by mere contact with the series below, and receives the several colors from the small cylinders in the upper rows, and distributes the same upon the prominent figures of the printing cylinders. The fourth series, I J, are called the receiving cylinders, because they receive the colors from the hoppers or reservoirs, M N, and impart them to the series below. The cylinders of the third and fourth rows, are covered with cloth, and the bottom of each hopper is so nicely fitted to its respective cylinder, that but a small quantity of each color (which passes through an aperture at the bottom of the hopper) adheres to the cloth periphery of the cylinder. The colors ordinarily used consist of various pigments, ground and mixed in water, with a solution of glue. The principles of this mode of color printing have been satisfactorily tested, though the entire machine has not yet been constructed: and any person who may be disposed to construct and enjoy the exclusive use of this invention, may have the most favorable terms. NEW INVENTIONS. =A New Brick Machine.= Messrs. Culbertson, McMillen & Co. of Cincinnati, have recently put in successful operation, a new machine, a description of which is given in a Cincinnati paper, as follows: 'A frame of fourteen moulds, one brick to each is drawn by the power of steam between two press rollers, the lower one of which enables the frame to support the pressure of the upper roller, and being run through backwards and forwards equalizes the pressure over the entire face of the brick. These, after undergoing in this mode a pressure of nearly one hundred tons to each brick, a pressure which covers clay, apparently perfectly dry, with a coat of glossy moisture, are raised above the surface of the mould by parallel levers, and are then delivered over to a bench or table by self-acting machinery, whence they are taken in barrows to the stacker at the kiln. The dry clay is shoveled into a hopper, and if more of the material is pressed into a mould than serves to make a brick, a knife which ranges with the surface of the mould, shaves off the surplus. Two hands shoveling, two more taking off, and one at the barrow, constitute a gang of five persons who turn out from 30,000 to 35,000 per day of ten hours. As brick makers' days are from sun to sun, say twelve working hours per day, during the season, from 46 to 50,000 bricks, per day, may be made by a single machine. This is, however, by no means the most important feature in the invention. In the ordinary mode of making bricks, the manufacturer cannot begin operations for the season, until the spring has so far advanced that working in wet clay will no longer chill his moulders' hands. On the same account, he loses also morning hours, until the advance of summer enables his hands to put in the whole period of daylight. He loses, also, sometimes days together--from the entire stoppage of his operations in the rainy weather, which forbids the bricks being put out to dry. In making press brick, all these difficulties are obviated. As a theory, operations in this mode can go on throughout the entire winter, frost never extending into solid clay; but as a practical business, it can be conveniently carried on two months earlier and one month later than in the ordinary mode. Pressed brick, made by these machines, are also stronger than their competitive article, the last of equal hardness in burning, always giving way when struck by the pressed bricks, as I have witnessed. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise, the one being porous and the other as compact as the enormous pressure employed can make it. The machine, it must be apparent, offers peculiar advantages in turning out brick without occupying the ordinary brick yard space necessary for spreading wet brick out to dry. It affords great economy in time, owing to its operations being independent of frost or rains. To every new and thriving place commencing the making of bricks, it dispenses with the necessity of bringing skilful workmen from other places--in short, it enables every man to be his own brick-maker. Under these considerations, I anticipate an extensive sale of these machines, especially for places at a distance. =Marble Saw Mills.= We are informed that a large mill for sawing marble is in course of erection at Brandon, Vt. The marble in that vicinity is principally of a beautiful white, and of a fine texture, though not very hard. =Railroad Locks.= It is reported that locks for elevating railroad trains, from one level to another, are coming into successful use in France. It appears to us to be much behind the age, since, by certain American inventions, an ordinary train may be elevated 100 feet in five minutes, by the engine alone. [Illustration: The Vertical Propeller.] We have alluded to this subject in a former number, and now present one of the several plans which have been introduced within the present year, although we are not fully authorised to give the name of the inventor of this particular plan. We have preferred to represent the paddles and crank unconnected with an apparent vessel or section thereof, but must require the reader to suppose that the line A B is the level of the railing of the boat, and that the crank-shaft E projects from the side, while the crank-pivot governs the motion of the walking bar D E, and with it the paddles, which are supposed to be just now dipping in the surface of the water. It will be understood that the motion of the walking bar being circular, and that of the heads of the paddles being vertical and nearly rectilinear, the motion of the blades of the paddles must be elliptical, inclining to the horizontal; and that the position of the paddles is kept so nearly vertical that they will meet with less resistance in entering or leaving the water than those of a common paddle wheel, while the atmospheric resistance to be encountered thereby is much less. There appears no reasonable doubt that this plan might be made to succeed well on a larger scale, though it is very doubtful whether any of the steamboat proprietors can be persuaded to adopt it until it has been more thoroughly tested by experiment. =A Great Astronomical Discovery.= A late number of an astronomical journal published at Altona, near Hamburg, contains a long article by Dr. Maedler, director of the Dorpat Observatory, Russia, well known to the astronomical world, in which he announces the extraordinary discovery of the _grand central star or sun_, about which the universe of stars is revolving, our own sun and system among the rest. This discovery, the result of many years of incessant toil and research, has been deduced by a train of reasoning and an examination of facts scarcely to be surpassed in the annals of science. He announces his discovery in the following language: 'I therefore pronounce the Pleiades to be the central group of that mass of fixed stars limited by the stratum composing the Milky Way and Alcyene as the individual star of this group, which, among all others, combines the greatest probability of being the true Central Sun.' By a train of reasoning, which I shall not attempt to explain, he finds the probable parallax of this great central star to be six thousandths of one second of arc, and its distance to be 34 millions of times the distance of the sun, or so remote that light, with a velocity of 12 millions of miles per minute, requires a period of 537 years to pass from _the great centre_ to our sun. As a first rough approximation, he deduces the period of the revolution of our sun, with all its train of planets, satellites and comets, about the grand centre, to be _eighteen millions two hundred thousand years_. =Ocean Steam Navigation.= The 'Ocean Steam Company,' which has the patronage of the United States Government to the amount of $400,000 per annum, are getting on rapidly with the first steamship of their line. She is to be completed and commence running on the first of March next. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN NEW YORK, OCTOBER 10, 1846. =Employment.= It is dangerous for a man of superior ability to find himself thrown upon the world without some regular employment. The restlessness inherent in genius, being thus undirected by any permanent influence, frames for itself occupations out of accidents. Moral integrity sometimes falls a prey to the want of a fixed pursuit, and the man who receives his direction in active life from the fortuitous impulse of circumstances, will be very apt to receive his principles likewise from chance. Genius, under such guidance, attains no noble ends, but resembles rather a copious spring conveyed in a falling aqueduct, where the waters continually escape through the frequent crevices, and waste themselves ineffectually on their passage. The law of nature is here, as elsewhere, binding, and no powerful results ever ensue from the trivial exercise of high endowments. The finest mind, when thus destitute of a fixed purpose, passes away without leaving permanent traces of its existence; losing its energy by turning aside from its course, it becomes as harmless and inefficient as the lightning, which, of itself irresistible, may yet be rendered powerless by a slight conductor. =The Editor.= Write--keep writing--is the motto of an editor. If he has no ideas, he must dig for them; if he has but little time to arrange them, no matter, the work must be done. Sickness may come upon him; want may stare him in the face, but he must cogitate something for the dear public. Perhaps in his darkest moments, he indites a paragraph that cheers thousands. When almost desponding, his words may put courage into the hearts of millions. Who would be an editor? Yet he has much to encourage him. If he can call no time his own, he is not rusting out, or in unprofitable society. A faithful contributor of the public press, is a man of great influence. No person has more power than himself. He instructs tens of thousands, and leads them to virtue, to honor, to happiness. No man will have more to answer for than the conductor of a corrupt and vacillating press. =A Mountain in Labor.= The workmen, says a Paris paper, are still busily engaged in excavating Montmarte in quest of holy vases and other riches said to have been deposited there in the early days of the French revolution by the orders of the Lady Superior of the Abbey of Montmarte.--Two workmen, who were at the time charged with transporting the wealth to the place designated, were never after seen, and it is supposed that they were sacrificed to the necessity of the secret. The Superior, at her death, bequeathed the secret to a lady friend, who, in turn, on her death bed, divulged it to her daughter, then thirteen years of age. The child, now a sexagenary, disclosed it to the municipality. Her statements have thus far been found scrupulously correct. The _cesarian_ operation is actively going on, an excavation of 50 feet having been made, and the mountain's speedy deliverance of a mine of wealth is anticipated. May it not prove a mouse! =That Editorial Committee.= We are informed that the Editorial Committee of the National Association of Inventors have by _their own request_ been discharged from the supervision of the new periodical which has recently appeared under the title of 'The Eureka.' =News by Telegraph.= The news by the Great Western which arrived on Wednesday week, was published within four hours in Boston, New Haven, Springfield, Albany, Utica, Rochester, Buffalo, Philadelphia and Baltimore. The following beautiful extract we find in a recent number of the New York Sun. It is from the pen of Mr. C. D. Stuart, the able correspondent of that paper, now in London. "On remarking to an Englishman, that I did not see here in London as at home, the artizan, the drayman, the laborer of every kind, with a newspaper in his pocket, which at intervals in his toil he could glance at and be as learned in the condition of his country and the world as the man of fortune, he replied--"No, they have something better to do, they attend to their work." Here lies the rub, and it may be a fear of the sedition of thought that has put these close hampers upon the English press. It would seem by such an argument that the differences of condition are not induced by unholy oppressions, by the trampling for ages of one class upon another until servitude became almost a birth-right--and the law of strength that proved itself in barbarous times the "Supremacy" had at last from concession so long made, become the law of human justice and divine right. The steer may work under his yoke an appointed time, the slave bow mutely through his whole life, but the freeman--has he so fallen, that while the lord revels in his "club-room" and reads not only papers, but gilt edged and velvet bound books, he forsooth being a common "poor devil" not able to enjoy a tithe of his unearned luxury--has something better than reading to do. Let him dig then! There are those in the young republic whose spirit begins to animate the world, who, though they toil, remember, that it was said in the beginning to all men, "thou shalt earn thy bread by the sweat of thy brow," and will read freely as they drink in the common air, and enjoy the common light. There are classes in England intelligent no doubt beyond any other people in the world--classes that enjoy the means of making themselves so, but as a mass they will in no-wise compare with their progeny, the Anglo-Saxons. All that they have here in the main we have got, and our wits have not been blunted by a contact with the wilderness, and the difficulties of founding an empire "in the Woods." I see now more clearly than ever where our faults lie; contrast exposes them; but they are all twigs upon the rising trunk, which the keen knife of national experience, age, and the calm that must succeed the rush and tumult of our giant and boisterous infancy will cut off.--With greater pride than ever, however much I may like the Old World, and especially England, I look over the Ocean to America for an exemplification of what the world has not known, an _Earthly_ paradise for humanity.--It is but three quarters of a century, remember, since we were nationally born: give as the fourteen hundred years that have nursed and cultivated this Island, and where is the limit of our perfection and strength? On either side of that Mississippi back-bone of ours to the Oceans, and as far north and south as freedom and knowledge can pierce, America must be a garden and a goal, filled with every excellence and beauty, beyond which there can be no advance. We shall not live to see it, but it will come, only let us pull careful and steady. We have been Dickens'd and Trollop'd, and it should do us good. Nothing but the grandeur that lies germinating in our heart provokes this idle spleen from our neighbors, and the moment we cool down and think and curb ourselves the rest is secure." =New Glass Factory.= Erastus Corning & Co. are about establishing a factory near the ferry at Troy, for the manufacture of all kinds of glass ware. The work is fast progressing, and in about four weeks they will commence blowing. It will afford employment to a large number of men, and will, no doubt, meet with that success which it certainly merits. =Result of Observation.= The editor of the New Haven Herald sets it down as a fact in natural history, proved by his experience for years, that when a traveller rides up to a toll gate, the keeper--if a man, invariably brings out a box, or a handful of change; but if a woman, she comes out and takes the traveller's coin, and then goes back for the change. * * * * * Snags and other obstructions in the Western rivers, are now denominated _Polk stalks_. =The Science of Astronomy.= DESCRIPTIVE ASTRONOMY. Mercury, the nearest planet to the sun, is a globe of about 3140 miles in diameter, rotating on its axis in 24 hours and 5 1-2 minutes, and revolving round the central luminary, at a distance of 37,000,000 of miles, in 88 days.--From the earth it can only be seen occasionally in the morning or evening, as it never rises before, or sets after the sun, at a greater distance of the time than 1 hour and 50 minutes. It appears to the naked eye as a small and brilliant star, but when observed through a telescope, is horned like the moon, because we only see a part of the surface which the sun is illuminating. Mountains of great height have been observed on the surface of this planet, particularly in its lower or southern hemisphere. One has been calculated at 10 3-4 miles in height, being about eight times higher, in proportion to the bulk of the planet, than the loftiest mountains upon earth. The matter of Mercury is of much greater density than that of the earth, equalling lead in weight; so that a human being placed upon its surface would be so strongly drawn towards the ground as scarcely to be able to crawl. Venus is a globe of about 7800 miles in diameter, or nearly the size of the earth, rotating on its axis in 23 hours, 21 minutes, and 19 seconds, and revolving round the sun, at the distance of 68,000,000 of miles in 225 days.--Like Mercury, it is visible to an observer on the earth only in the morning and evening, but for a greater space of time before sunrise and after sunset. It appears to us the most brilliant and beautiful of all the planetary and stellar bodies, occasionally giving so much light as to produce a sensible shadow. Observed through a telescope, it appears horned, on account of our seeing only a part of its luminous surface. The illuminating part of Venus occasionally presents slight spots. It has been ascertained that its surface is very unequal, the greatest mountains being in the southern hemisphere, as in the case of both Mercury and the Earth. The higher mountains in Venus range between 10 and 22 miles in altitude. The planet is also enveloped in an atmosphere like that by which animal and vegetable life is supported on earth; and it has consequently a twilight. Venus performs its revolution round the sun in 225 days. Mercury and Venus have been termed the Inferior Planets, as being placed within the orbit of the Earth. The Earth, the third planet in order, and one of the smaller size, though not the smallest, is important to us, as the theatre on which our race have been placed to 'live, move, and have their being.' It is 7902 miles in mean diameter, rotating on its axis in 24 hours, at a mean distance of 95,000,000 of miles from the sun, round which it revolves in 365 days, 5 hours, 50 minutes, and 57 seconds. As a planet viewed from another of the planets, suppose the moon, 'It would present a pretty, variegated, and sometimes a mottled appearance. The distinction between its seas, oceans, continents, and islands, would be clearly marked; they would appear like brighter and darker spots upon its disc. The continents would appear bright, and the ocean of a darker hue, because water absorbs the greater part of the solar light that falls upon it. The level plains, (excepting perhaps, such regions as the Arabian deserts of sand) would appear of a somewhat darker color than the more elevated and mountainous regions, as we find to be the case on the surface of the moon. The islands would appear like small bright specks on the darker surface of the ocean; and the lakes and mediterranean seas like darker spots or broad streaks intersecting the bright parts, or the land. By its revolution round its axis, successive portions of the surface would be brought into view, and present a different aspect from the parts which preceded,'--(Dick's Celestial Scenery, 135.) The form of the earth, and probably that of every other planet, is not strictly spheroidal; that is, flattened a little at the poles, or extremities of the axis. The diameter of the earth at the axis is 56 miles less than in the cross direction. This peculiarity of the form is a consequence of the rotatory motion, as will be afterwards explained. [Illustration: LATEST NEWS] =Late Foreign News.= The steamer Hibernia arrived at Boston on Saturday last, thirteen days from Liverpool. The British Government and people have manifested so much violent opposition to the marriage of the youngest son of Louis Phillipe to a sister of the Queen of Spain, that the celebration of the nuptials has been postponed for the present, if not forever; and there is apparent danger of a rupture between England and France on this account. In Spain, Don Carlos having escaped from imprisonment, it is expected that a serious insurrection will immediately take place. Property to the amount of $800,000 has been destroyed by incendiary fires at Leipsic. A line of electric telegraph has been put in operation between Brussels and Antwerp. Twenty thousand bales of cotton were sold at Liverpool on the 14th of September. =Latest from the Army.= According to recent intelligence by private letters, Gen. Kearney has taken quiet possession of Santa Fe, notwithstanding the considerable preparations which the Mexicans had made to defend it. Gen. Armijo had assembled 5000 troops to defend the Canon Pass, but on account of the disaffection and insubordination of his officers and men, he was constrained to retreat on the approach of a few companies of Americans. Gen. Taylor had advanced steadily, though slowly on Monterey, and has probably ere this, taken possession, notwithstanding the strong force, and full supply of well mounted cannon, concentrated to oppose him. Should he prove successful in this, it would seem that Mexico is destined to fall under the protection of the United States, whether our Government desires it or not. What can we do? The Mexicans will neither treat nor fight; and although our armies move as slow as possible, they cannot well avoid progressing through the country in time, and are bound to furnish protection as far as they go. We shall see. =The Sea and Wave Roaring.= The steamer Great Western, which arrived at this port last week, reports having encountered one of the most terrific storms ever known on the Atlantic Ocean. Capt. Mathews is said to have remarked that at three different times the ship was approached by seas of such magnitude and power that he thought destruction inevitable; but unexpectedly each broke just before reaching the vessel. The passengers assembled in the cabin where they joined in religious service, and in the solemn administration of the Lord's supper. Their lives were preserved, but some of them appeared to forget their obligations to their preserver very quick after getting safe on shore. =An American Slave in England.= Douglas, who escaped from slavery and found his way to England, has received marked attention from the nobility and gentry of England. He has attended their soirees, occupied the most honorable positions at their dinner parties, rode in their carriages, flirted with their daughters, walked arm in arm through their gardens with lords, viscounts, counts and mayors of cities. * * * * * Many of the girls employed in the mills of the Nashua Corporation, have refused to work by candlelight. They may be right. THE =SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN=. Persons wishing to subscribe for this paper, have only to enclose the amount in a letter directed (post paid) to MUNN & COMPANY, Publishers of the Scientific American, New York City. TERMS.--$2 a year; ONE DOLLAR IN ADVANCE--the remainder in 6 months. _Postmasters_ are respectfully requested to receive subscriptions for this paper, to whom a discount of 25 per cent will be allowed. Any person sending us 4 subscribers for 6 months, shall receive a copy of the paper for the same length of time. Observations on the more recent Researches concerning the operations of the Blast Furnace in the Manufacture of Iron. BY DR. J. L. SMITH. The great difference existing between metallurgical operations of the present day, and those of a former period, is owing chiefly to the ameliorations produced by the application of the science of chemistry to the _modus operandi_ of the various changes taking place during the operations, from their commencement to their termination. Copper and some other metals are now made to assume forms in the chemist's laboratory, that formerly required great artistical skill for their production--the chemist simply making use of such agents and forces as are at his command, and over which he has, by close analytical study, acquired perfect control. Our object, at present, is only to advert to the chemical investigations more recently made on the manufacture of iron, treating of those changes that occur in the ore, coal and flux, that are thrown in at the mouth of the furnace, and in the air thrown in from below. For most that will be said on this subject, we are principally indebted to the recent interesting researches of M. Ebelman. The importance of a knowledge of the facts to be brought forward, in this article, will be apparent to every one in any way acquainted with the manufacture of iron. It will be seen that the time is not far distant when the economy in the article of fuel will amount in value to the present profit of many of the works. The consequences must be, that many of those works that are abandoned will be resumed, and others erected in localities formerly thought unfit. It is well known that the blast furnace is the first into which the ore is introduced, for the purpose of converting it into malleable iron, and much, therefore, depends upon the state in which the pig metal passes from this furnace, whether subsequent operations will furnish an iron of the first quality or not. In putting the blast furnace into operation, the first step is to heat it for some time with coal only. After the furnace has arrived at a proper temperature, ore, fuel and flux, are thrown in alternately, in small quantities, so as to have the three ingredients properly mixed in their descent. In from 25 to 48 hours from the time when the ore is first thrown in, the entire capacity of the furnace, from the tuyer to the mouth, is occupied with the ore, fuel and flux, in their various stages of transformation. In order to explain clearly, and in as short space as possible, what these transformations are, and how they are brought about, we may consider:--1. The changes that take place in the descending mass, composed of ore, fuel and flux. 2. The changes that take place in the ascending mass, composed of air and its hygrometric moisture, thrown in at the tuyer. 3. The chemical action going on between the ascending and descending masses. 4. The composition of the gases in various parts of the furnace during its operation. 5. The causes that render necessary the great heat of the blast furnace. 1. _Changes that take place in the descending mass, composed of ore, coal and flux._--By coal is here meant charcoal; when any other species of fuel is alluded to, it will be specified. In the upper half of the fire-room the materials are subjected to a comparatively low temperature, and they lose only the moisture, volatile matter, hydrogen, and carbonic acid, that they may contain; this change taking place principally in the lower part of the upper half of the fire-room. In the lower half of the fire-room, the ore is the only material that undergoes a change, it being converted wholly or in part into iron or magnetic oxide of iron--the coal is not altered, no consumption of it taking place from the mouth down to the commencement of the boshes. From the commencement of the boshes down to the tuyer, the reduction of the ore is completed. Very little of the coal is consumed between the boshes and in the upper part of the hearth; the principal consumption of it taking place in the immediate neighborhood of the tuyer. The fusion of the iron and slag occurs at a short distance above the tuyer, and it is in the hearth of the furnace that the iron combines with a portion of coal to form the fusible carburet or pig-iron. It is also on the hearth that the flux combines with the siliceous and other impurities of the ore. This concludes the changes which the ore, coal and flux, undergo, from the mouth of the furnace to the tuyer. If the fuel used be wood, or partly wood, it is during its passage through the upper half of the fire-room that its volatile parts are lost, and it becomes converted into charcoal. M. Ebelman ascertained that wood, at the depth of ten feet, in a fire-room twenty-six feet high, preserved its appearance after an exposure for 1 3-4 of an hour, and that the mineral mixed with it preserved its moisture at this depth; but three and a half feet lower, an exposure of 3 1-4 hours reduced the wood to perfect charcoal, and the ore to magnetic oxide. The temperature of the upper half of the fire-room, when wood is used, is lower than in the case of charcoal, from the great amount of heat made latent by the vapor arising from the wood. In the case of bituminous coal, Bunsen and Playfair find that it has to descend still lower before it is perfectly coked. After the wood is completely charred, or the coal become coked, the subsequent changes are the same that happen in the charcoal furnaces. _To be continued._ =ANIMALCULAE IN WATER.= [Illustration:] The fact is generally known that nearly all liquids contain a variety of minute living animals, though in some they are too small for observation, even with a microscope. In others, especially in water that has been long stagnant, these animals appear not only in hideous forms, but with malignant and voracious propensities. The print at the head of this article purports to be a microscopic representation of a single drop of such water, with the various animals therein, and some of the inventors and venders of the various improved filters for the Croton water, would have no objection to the prevalence of the opinion that this water contains all the variety of monsters represented in this cut. But the fact is far otherwise; and it is doubtful whether these animals could frequently be detected in the Croton water, with the best solar microscope. Nevertheless, the fact is readily and clearly established that the Croton water contains a quantity of deleterious matter, which is arrested by the filters; and, on this account, we cheerfully and heartily recommend the adoption of filters by all who use this water, from either the public or private hydrants. To this end we would call the special attention of our city readers to the improved filters noticed under the head of "New Inventions." =Length of Days.= At Berlin and London the longest day has sixteen and a half hours. At Stockholm and Upsal, the longest has eighteen and a half hours, and the shortest five and a half. At Hamburg, Dantzic, and Stettin, the longest day has seventeen hours, and the shortest seven. At St. Petersburg and Tobolsk, the longest has nineteen, and the shortest five hours. At Toreno, in Finland, the longest day has twenty-one hours and a half, and the shortest two and a half. At Wandorbus, in Norway, the day lasts from the 21st of May to the 22d of July, without interruption; and in Spitzbergen, the longest day lasts three months and a half. =Excitement of Curiosity.= The editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, having been one of a recent excursion party on the opening of a new section of railroad, remarks on the occasion, 'It is really amusing to see the sensation a train of railroad cars produces on all animate beings, human and brute, for the first few times it passes over a section of road. We saw herds of cattle, sheep, and horses, stand for a few seconds and gaze at the passing train, then turn and run for a few rods with all possible speed, stop and look again with eyes distended, and head and ears erect, seemingly so frightened at the tramp of the iron horse as to have lost the power of locomotion. Men women and children also seemed dumbfounded at the strange and unusual spectacle. As the cars came rumbling along early in the morning, they seemed to bring everybody out of bed, all eager to catch a glance as we whirled past. Old men and women, middle-aged and youth, without waiting to put on a rag in addition to their night gear, were seen at the doors, windows and round the corners of log huts and dwellings, gaping with wonder and astonishment at the new, and to them grand and terrific sight.' [COMMUNICATED.] At the last special meeting of the National Association of Inventors, called to hear the report on the rights and duties of the Editors of the Eureka, on a resolution offered by one of the Editorial Committee who had been dissatisfied by the proceedings of the 'Acting Editors,' and refused to attend their sittings, it was reported that the 'Acting Editors,' had exceeded their authority, and a majority of the Editorial Committee resigned and a resolution was passed that the resignation should be published in the Eureka, but it has not appeared. Mr. Kingsley, one of the 'Acting Editors,' spoke at the said meeting of having consulted counsel who had declared that the Association were under a legal obligation to furnish Messrs. Kingley & Pirsson with matter for publication in the Eureka, and on the understanding that they had advanced money they were allowed to have the first use of the reports and advertisements of the Association. But as they in effect refuse to publish a resolution of great importance to the reputation of all the parties interested, it is left for the public to decide whether the 'Acting Editors' are in any respect entitled to the name they have assumed for their paper. ONE OF THE EDITORIAL COMMITTEE. HUMOROUS. =To my Sweetheart.= You're a broth of creature, In form and in feature,-- It's myself that now tells you that same, And sure, by my troth, I'll not be very wroth. If you'll plaze me by changing your name What a swate little wife, As a partner for life, My darlint, 'tis you might be living; And I'm just the boy, To wish you much joy, When your heart it's to me you'll be giving. I'm half dead--botheration! With sad consternation-- Of your flirting it is that I'm speaking; So plaze to be thinking, When you're winking and blinking. It's my own honest heart that you're braking. The divil a haper, Will I stand of a caper,-- 'Twould kill me to find you deceiving; By my sowl and I'd die, And that same is no lie, Before I'd be kilt by me grieving. Then spake but the word. My nate little bird, That you're niver a man's but mine; And straight to the praist, It's myself that'll haste, To make you my _swate waluntine_! [_Teddy Magowan._ =Boys and Men.= A youthful volunteer, the other day, out in Arkansas, was taunting a married gentleman, who had a wife and three small children depending upon him, for not rallying to the standard of his country, soon after the requisition upon that State arrived. 'Tom,' said our friend, 'you _boys_ can whip the Mexicans, but should old England take a hand in the pie, _I'll_ join, for it will require _men_ to whip the English.' =Trusting too Long.= We recollect that a weekly paper was started, some years ago, in one of the Western States, the terms of which were $2,50 in advance, $3 at the end of the year--to which the editor jocosely added in a paragraph, 'and $5 if never paid.' We think that most of his subscribers took the paper upon the latter terms, since it has been non est. He played a joke upon himself. =Business Stand.= A Frenchman, being about to remove his shop, his landlord inquired the reason, stating, at the time, that it was considered a very good stand for business. He replied, with a shrug of the shoulders, "Oh, yes, he's very good stand for de businis; by gar, me stan' all day, for nobody come to make me _move_!" =Plain Directions.= Represent me in my portrait, said a gentleman to his painter, with a book in my hand reading aloud. Paint my servant also in a corner where he cannot be seen, but in such a manner that he may hear me when I call him. =Homogeneous.= Joe Snooks, seeing some farmer's boys employed, some at hoeing and others at mowing, in the same field, remarked that they were a _hoe-mow_-geneous set of fellows. * * * * * The Louisville Journal, philosophizing on the recent commencement of several newspapers, gives the following poetic remark: 'Income and ink'em, Although you may link'em, Are not such first cousins as some folks may think'em.' * * * * * We did not expect to mention large peaches again; but the Louisville Journal speaks of a lot which measured nearly _twelve inches_ each, in circumference. =Proposition of a New Patent Law.= The following remarks and proposition, which we copy from the 'Farmer and Mechanic,' was written by a prominent member of the National Association of Inventors, and expresses the sentiments of a large majority of the members of that Association. No person who carefully examines the subject, can fail of seeing that the cause of justice and equity, as well as the advance of improvement, would be promoted by the substitution of the principles therein expressed, in place of some of those embraced in the existing patent laws of the United States. "We advance the principle, which may be novel to some, that if the inventor apply genius, time, toil, and capital, to produce anything he may consider valuable, he has the same right to the exclusive use and enjoyment of it as the man who may apply time, and toil, and capital, without genius. That the application of genius does not divest him of any right enjoyed by all others in society. It is true, the creations of genius are sometimes intangible, but that is no objection; all rights are abstractions, until embodied in constitutions and laws, and rendered practical by penalties. If an inventor can define the limits of his claim, he is entitled to protection in it just the same as when a deed is put on record, limiting the boundaries of a lot of ground. All rights to real property are traced back to original discovery and occupancy, and now all the inventor desires, or nearly all, in any patent law, is a simple registry, just as we find in our Halls of Record. The Commissioner of Patents should be called the Register of Patents. Indeed, grants of land, as they are termed, have frequently been registered by the name of patents, in our Halls of Records, so strong is the analogy, if not perfect similarity. Then what should be the Patent Law? We answer, by sections, at once. The first should be declaratory of the rights of inventors, as follows: SEC. 1. The application of capital, time, skill and ingenuity, to the production of new and useful discoveries, shall be protected under the 5th article of the Amendments to the Constitution, which forbids private use without the consent of the owner, and for public use without just compensation. SEC. 2. Should any invention or discovery be deemed of great importance to the general prosperity, its value shall he appraised on the requisition of the Secretary of State, which value, which ascertained, as hereinafter provided, shall be paid to the inventor from the Treasury of the United States, and, until this payment shall take place, the discovery of any inventor duly qualified to take out a patent, shall remain his property, and inalienable without his consent or the consent of his legal representatives. SEC. 3. Any inventor or discoverer who may desire a patent for any discovery of his own, shall make oath or solemnly affirm thereto, and any specification, drawing or model, he may see fit to deposit with the Register of Patents, shall be received by him and recorded, as a matter of evidence of original right. SEC. 4. There shall be no salaried Examiners of Patents, but each patentee may contract on any terms he may see fit with any Patent Agent or Examiner, to examine the Records of the Patent office, on the payment of ten dollars fee for the use of the books and privilege of the Patent Office, and no more fees than this first $10 shall be charged on any single patent, excepting five dollars each for every record of transfer of rights or parts of rights. Nor shall the fees be raised until it may be discovered that they will not support the expenses of the Patent Office. And it is provided, no expenses for the improvement of agriculture, or any purpose foreign to the business of the registry of Patents, and the necessary books and buildings, and salaries of the register, librarian and two clerks and door-keeper, shall be charged upon the Patent Fund. SEC. 5. The Commissioner of Patents shall give advice of a scientific and legal character as he may be desired and qualified to do, to inventors. He may guaranty the originality of any invention at his own risk, at any price be may agree upon with any inventor to give certificates thereof, and this shall not interfere with his regular salary. But it is provided that the Commissioner shall not in any manner prevent others from examining and guarantying the originality of any invention for which a patent may be desired. And it is also provided that any Commissioner, Register, Clerk, Attorney, Examiner or Agent, who may give a guaranty or warrant of the novelty of any invention shall be held responsible in costs on any information to be filed by any party who may feel himself aggrieved, to rescind the patent which may not be an original invention of the claimant so guarantied. SEC. 6. To rescind a patent, any party feeling himself aggrieved may file information in the District Court of the United States, of the district in which the patentee resides, notifying the patentee of such information filed, with what the former intends to prove, and where the patentee may discover the evidence relied upon by the informer, on which, the patentee may surrender his patent without costs should he so elect. But should the patentee determine to stand trial, he shall plead to such information within twenty days, denying the allegations of the informer, on which the trial shall proceed in its regular order on the calendar, and the patentee, if found wilfully and knowingly a monopolizer of the public rights, shall suffer costs and the reasonable expenses and counsel fee of the informer. And if such inventor shall make oath he has not been enabled to examine the proofs on which the informer relies to rescind his patent, he shall be allowed such further time as the court having jurisdiction may prescribe. And the court may make an order to the informer to exhibit fully his evidence of priority of invention, and no other evidence than has been exhibited to the inventor excepting rebutting, shall be introduced on the trial to rescind the patent. SEC. 7. The Commissioner of Patents shall collect and keep in the Patent Office all the scientific works published and useful for references, and pay the expenses of the same from the patent fund. But the Commissioner shall not subscribe for more than three copies of any publication for the use of the office as aforesaid out of the Patent Fund. SEC. 8. The application of any known machinery or matter of combination of machinery, or matter to new purposes or old purposes after a new method, or any means by which useful results are to be more advantageously produced than formerly, shall be the subject of a patent. SEC. 9. A method, plan, design, or any new and useful idea, which can be defined, shall be the subject of a patent. SEC. 10. A simple change of form shall not entitle any one to evade the patent of any inventor by a new patent. The above are the principal improvements desired by inventors. Some think it not well to ask for all they want at once, but we think differently, for it will be said hereafter, when new amendments are desired, 'Gentlemen, you petitioned for the very provisions you now seek to have annulled. Your own committee was here at Washington assenting.' What answer will there be to this? None can be made without confusion of face for having over assented to a wrong. We do not desire to censure the committee charged with the mission to Washington.--They have thought to act prudently and for the greatest good. We differ only on the real expediency of the case. We do not believe that such men as Benton, Calhoun, and other kindred spirits, ask or desire anything but what they think is right. They will not sacrifice their reputation against a body of men to whom the Republic owe so much, and who have so long suffered in silence. The law as it now stands, is an improvement on the former law, and considering how low was the state of morals in former times respecting inventors, such sentiments as have been advanced by Judge Woodbury, and which are in spirit the same as the above, are destined ultimately to prevail. And those who choose to record their names in opposition are free to do so, as are also the tribe of persecutors who in all ages have stoned the prophets. The principle endeavored to be followed throughout, is that of the common and statutes laws respecting the rights to real property. It may tend to create litigation, as to claims which are now refused entirely, but if no litigation or less is the grand desideratum, why not establish a dictatorship at once? The _ipse dixit_ of one man will then prevent all argument. But the rights of property and jury trial in all cases are ours by the constitution--and equally are we entitled by the constitution to the pursuit of happiness and wealth in ærial regions as on the common earth--and if we may not be divested of our other property without certain laws and a fair jury trial, why should we be of patent property? And if patent agents presume to beguile honest inventors, why should they not be held responsible? They may refuse to back their operation by a guaranty, but then the inventor has a right to know it, and to know he has a remedy, should they do so improperly. The Clerk of one of our Courts guarantied the searches of one of his Clerks as to a piece of real property, and had to pay some ten thousand dollars, and why should it not be so. When a tailor makes a coat he warrants it to fit, and when a surgeon sets a leg unscientifically he is also responsible in damages to his patient, and as is an attorney for negligent practice. Holding examiners responsible will leave the patent office open to the filing of new claims at the same time that it will prevent a world of litigation, favoritism and corruption. We are not striking at our present worthy Commissioner, Mr. Burke. We are friendly to him. But the more honest a man may be, the sooner will he find himself displaced, if the office he holds may be used to grasp a vast amount of patronage and property.' ADVERTISEMENTS. [**hand pointing right]This paper circulates in every State in the Union, and is seen principally by mechanics and manufacturers. Hence it may be considered the best medium of advertising, for those who import or manufacture machinery, mechanics tools, or such wares and materials as are generally used by those classes. The few advertisements in this paper are regarded with much more attention than those in closely printed dailies. Advertisements are inserted in this paper at the following rates: One square, of eight lines one insertion, $ 0 50 " " " " two do., 75 " " " " three do., 1 00 " " " " one month, 1 25 " " " " three do., 3 75 " " " " six do., 7 50 " " " " twelve do., 15 00 TERMS:--CASH IN ADVANCE. * * * * * GENERAL AGENTS FOR THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. New York City, Geo. Dexter " " Wm. Taylor & Co. Boston, Messrs. Hotchkiss & Co. Philadelphia, Messrs. Colon & Adriance. LOCAL AGENTS. Albany, Peter Cook. Baltimore, Md., S. Sands. Cabotville, Mass., E. F. Brown. Hartford, Ct., E. H. Bowers. Lynn, Mass., J. E. F. Marsh. Middletown, Ct., Wm. Woodward. Norwich, Ct., Safford & Parks. New Haven, Ct., E. Downes. New Bedford, Mass., Wm. Robinson & Co. Newark, N.J. J. L. Agens. Patterson, N.J., L. Garside. Providence, R.I., H. & J. S. Rowe. Springfield, Mass., Wm. B. Brocket. Salem, Mass., L. Chandler. Troy, N.Y., A. Smith. Taunton. Mass., W. P. Seaver. Worcester, Mass., S. Thompson. Boston, Jordon & Wiley. Newark, N. J., Robert Rashaw. Williamsburgh, J. C. Gander. TRAVELLING AGENTS. O. D. Davis, John Stoughton, John Murray, Sylvester Dierfenorf. CITY CARRIERS. Clark Selleck, Squire Selleck, Nathan Selleck. Persons residing in the city of Brooklyn, can have the paper left at their residences regularly, by sending their address to the office, 128 Fulton st., 2d. floor. =AMERICAN AND FOREIGN PATENT AGENCY.= No. 23 Chambers street, New York. JOSEPH H. BAILEY, Engineer and Agent for procuring Patents, will prepare all the necessary Specifications, Drawings, &c. for applicants for Patents, in the United States or Europe. Having the experience of a number of years in the business, and being connected with a gentleman of high character and ability in England, he has facilities for enabling inventors to obtain their Patents at home or abroad, with the least expense and trouble. The subscriber, being practically acquainted with all the various kinds of Drawing used, is able to represent Machinery, Inventions, or Designs of any kind, either by Authographic Drawing, or in Isometrical, Parallel, or True Perspective, at any angle best calculated to show the construction of the Machinery of Design patented. To those desiring Drawings or Specifications, Mr. B. has the pleasure of referring to Gen. Wm. Gibbs McNiel, Civil Engineer, Prof. Renwick, Columbia College, Prof. Morse, Jno. Lee. Residence, No. 10 Carroll Place; office, No. Chambers street. oct10 tf * * * * * BLACK LEAD POTS!--The subscriber offers for sales, in lots to suit purchasers, a superior article of BLACK LEAD POTS, that can be used without annealing. The price is low, and founders are requested to make a trial. SAMUEL C. HILLS, 45to2ndv6 Patent Agent, 12 Platt street. STATE OF NEW YORK. Secretary's Office, Albany, July 24, 1846. To the Sheriff of the City and County of New York: Sir--Notice is hereby given, that at the next General Election, to be held on the Tuesday succeeding the first Monday of November next, the following officers are to be elected, to wit:--A Governor and Lieutenant Governor of this State. 2 Canal Commissioners, to supply the place of Jonas Earll, junior, and Stephen Clark, whose terms of office will expire on the last day of December next. A Senator for the First Senatorial District, to supply the vacancy which will accrue by the expiration of the term of service of John A. Lott on the last day of December next. A Representative in the 30th Congress of the United States for the Third Congressional District, consisting of the 1st, 2d, 3d, 4th and 5th Wards of the City of New York. Also a Representative in the said Congress for the Fourth Congressional District, consisting of the 6th, 7th, 10th and 13th Wards of said City. Also a Representative in the said Congress for the Fifth Congressional District, consisting of the 8th, 9th and 14th Wards of said city. And also a Representative in the said Congress for the Sixth Congressional District, consisting of the 11th, 12th, 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th Wards of said City. Also the following officers for the said County, to wit: 16 Members of Assembly, a Sheriff in the place of William Jones, whose term of service will expire on the last day of December next. A County Clerk in the place of James Connor, whose term of service will expire on the last day of December next, and a Coroner in the place of Edmund G. Rawson, whose term of service will expire on the last day of December next. Yours, respectfully, N. S. BENTON, Secretary of State. * * * * * Sheriff's Office, New York, August 3d, 1846. The above is published pursuant to the notice of the Secretary of State and the requirements of the statute in such case made and provided for. WM. JONES, Sheriff of the City and County of New York. [Illustration: hand pointing right]All the public newspapers in the County will publish the above once in each week until election, and then hand in their bills so that they may be laid before the Board of Supervisors, and passed for payment. See Revised Statutes, vol. 1, chap. vi. title 3d, article 3d--part 1st, page 140. aug18 =BRASS FOUNDRY.= JAMES KENNEARD & CO. respectfully inform their friends and the public that they are prepared to furnish all orders for Brass and Composition Castings, and finishing in general at the shortest possible notice. N.B. All orders for Rail Road, Factory and Steamboat work from any distance, will be thankfully received and attended to with despatch and on reasonable terms. [Illustration: hand pointing right]Patterns made to order. JAMES KENNEARD & CO. oct. 10 3m* 27 1-2 Chrystie st. New York. [Illustration: hand pointing right]NOTICE--R. C. WETMORE & CO. RETURN their thanks to the Fire Department & Police, for the zealous exertions used by them in saving the property in the store No. 85 Water street, at the fire this evening. R. C. Wetmore & Co. desire especially to acknowledge the aid of his honor the Mayor, in preserving their books and papers. Tuesday Night. PROSPER M. WETMORE, Navy Agent, begs to return his grateful acknowledgment to his Honor the Mayor, the members of the Fire Department, and Municipal Police, for the assistance rendered him in saving all the books and papers of the Navy Agency from the fire this evening, Tuesday night. NOTICE. The Office of the Navy Agent is removed for the present to the back office of the store No. 11 Broad street. PROSPER M. WETMORE, Navy Agent. [Illustration: hand pointing right]All city papers please copy, and send bill. o10 3t * * * * * NEW IMPROVEMENT.--M. H. Mansfield, of Mifflintown, Juniata Co., Pennsylvania, has invented a new CLOVER HULLING MACHINE, which is one of the best inventions of the kind now in use. This machine will hull forty bushels of seed per day. Persons wishing to manufacture them can procure the right on moderate terms from the inventor. For further particulars, address. MARTIN H. MANSFIELD, oct.3 3t* Mifflintown, Juniata Co. Pa. * * * * * COPPER SMITH!--The subscriber takes this method of informing the public that he is manufacturing Copper Work of every description. Particular attention is given to making and repairing LOCOMOTIVE tubes. Those at a distance, can have any kind of work made to drawings, and may ascertain costs, &c., by addressing L. R. BAILEY, cor. of West and Franklin Sts., N. Y. N.B.--Work shipped to any part of the country. 45to2dv18* * * * * * =ELECTRICITY.= SMITH'S CELEBRATED TORPEDO, OR VIBRATING ELECTRO MAGNETIC MACHINE --This instrument differs from those in ordinary use, by having a third connection with the battery, rendering them much more powerful and beneficial. As a curious Electrical Machine, they should be in the possession of every one, while their wonderful efficacy as a medical agent, renders them invaluable. They are used with extraordinary success, for the following maladies. =Rheumatism=--Palsy, curvature of the Spine, Chronic Diseases, Tic-doloureaux, Paralysis Tubercula of the brain, heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, sick-headache. =Toothache=--St Vitus dance, Epilepsy, Fevers, diseases of the eye, nose, antrum, throat, muscles, cholera, all diseases of the skin, face, &c. =Deafness=--Loss of voice, Bronchitis, Hooping cough. These machines are perfectly simple and conveniently managed. The whole apparatus is contained in a little box 8 inches long, by 4 wide and deep. They may be easily sent to any part of the United States. To be had at the office of the Scientific American, 128 Fulton st, 2nd floor, (Sun building) where they may be seen IN OPERATION, at all times of the day and evening. 2 * * * * * GOLD PENS!!--In consequence of the increased facility afforded by machinery for the manufacture of my GOLD PENS, I am enabled to furnish them to the Trade, at a much less price than they have heretofore obtained them through my Agent. Those purchasing direct of the manufacturer will have the double advantage of the lowest market price, and the privilege of returning those that are imperfect. In connection with the above, I am manufacturing the usual style of PENHOLDER, together with my PATENT EXTENSION PENHOLDER with PENCIL. All orders thankfully received, and punctually attended to. A. G. BAGLEY, sept. 25 tf 189 Broadway, N. Y. =Engraving on Wood.= NEATLY AND PROMPTLY EXECUTED AT the Office of the Scientific American, 128 Fulton st, three doors from the Sun Office. Designs, DRAWINGS of all kinds for PATENTS, &c., also made, as above, at very low charges. 1 [Illustration: CURIOUS ARTS] =Labor to make a Watch.= Mr. Dent, in a lecture delivered before the London Royal Institute, made an allusion to the formation of a watch, and stated that a watch consists of 992 pieces; and that 40 trades, and probably 215 persons are employed in making one of these little machines. The iron of which the balance wheel is formed, is valued at something less than a farthing; this produces an ounce of steel, worth 4 1-2 pence, which is drawn into 2,250 yards of steel wire, and represents in the market, 13_l._ 3_s._; but still another process of hardening this originally a farthing's worth of iron, renders it workable into 7,050 balance springs, which will realize, at the common price, of 2_s._ 6_d_ each 746_l_. 5_s_, the effect of labor alone. Thus it may be seen that the mere labor bestowed upon one farthing's worth of iron, gives it the value of 950_l._ 5_s_, or $4,552, which is 75,680 times its original value. =Mule Boats.= This kind of conveyance is, we believe, peculiar to the Illinois River, for we never remember to have seen one belonging to any other stream. A year or two since, we were perfectly astonished at beholding the first one that ever arrived in this port; but now they are as common as the species usually termed _broad horns_, and their appearance creates about as much surprise and curiosity among the more aristocratic order of steam and sail. A genuine mule boat is not unlike an ocean steamer, as they are susceptible of being propelled both by steam and wind; with this difference, the mule-boat steam is generated upon the tread-mill plan, and by the united exertions of some half dozen quadrupeds, generally of the long-eared kind. To this treading or pulling apparatus are attached cylinder, pitt-man, boilers, &c., in the shape of some three or more cog-wheels, and immediately connected with them is a couple of shafts, which give a rotary motion to a couple of water-wheels, one on each side, and which usually propel a keel about 100 feet in length, and of about 75 tons burthen; over it is a roof and covering, usually called a cargo box, to protect the inside from the weather, and the whole making an appearance similar to an Ohio river keel boat, with the exception of a space left her to operate in. The difficulty and danger attending the management of a boat propelled by steam, is upon the mule boat entirely dispensed with. There is no firing up, or blowing up; all that is necessary, when wishing to commence a journey, is to start, and when tired of going, all that is to be done is to stop the mules; in giving a lick ahead, they are all made to bounce at once, and in giving a lick back, they are turned around and made to pull the other way: and should the wind prove favorable, by means of a mast, with which they are all provided, sails can be hoisted, and the the double power of mules and wind be put in requisition. This description of boat is getting to be quite fashionable on the Illinois and tributaries, and some two or three extend their trips to this city. They are a great benefit in low water, as they are of exceeding light draught, and the running of them is attended with but trifling expense. We learn that several new ones are in a state of completion, on the line of the Illinois, intended as regular traders up the Sangamon river, and from the head of navigation on the Illinois to this city. There is nothing like enterprise, or a mule boat on the Illinois, in a low stage of water, to get along.--[St. Louis New Era. =Discovery of Glass.= 'As some merchants,' says Pliny, 'were carrying nitre, they stopped near a river which issues from Mount Carmel. As they could not readily find stones to rest their kettles on, they used for this purpose some of these pieces of nitre. The fire, which gradually dissolved the nitre, and mixed it with the sand, occasioned a transparent matter to flow, which in fact was nothing less than glass.' =Pumping the water out of Lake Michigan.= It is well known to our readers that, by an arrangement with the English bond holders, the State of Illinois has given over to them the unfinished canal, from the waters of Lake Michigan, at Chicago, to the Illinois river.--They are about completing it, but the principal difficulty now is, to supply it with water, owing to the level of the lake being _eight_ feet below the bottom of the canal. To overcome this, the present company, after various propositions, finally bethought themselves of raising the water of the lake, so as to supply the canal. They went to Messrs. Knapp & Totten, of this city, and furnished them with a data to calculate whether it could be done, and what force and what machinery would accomplish it. These gentlemen soon furnished an answer to build some powerful machinery for that purpose,--a steam engine and _eight_ pumps of four and a half bore and six feet stroke. We are glad to hear that this eminently scientific firm have been selected to execute this order. Their shop and mechanical force are not excelled by any establishment in the United States.--[Pittsburg Gaz. =The Self-Regulating Ventilator.= [Illustration:] Explanation:--This is a cheap and simple but scientific apparatus for regulating the air-vent of a common, cheap stove, according to the temperature of the atmosphere in the room in which it is located. The draught door is a plain iron door, hung by a common hinge joint at the upper end; and to the front of the hinge is attached a piece of brass wire, which extends vertically nearly to the top of the room, and is connected at B to a horizontal brass wire C D. This is the only apparatus required, but must be so adjusted as to allow the door to be closed, or nearly so, when the temperature is about right. If the temperature rises above that point, the horizontal wire will immediately expand so as to allow the door to close. But as soon as the temperature begins to fail, the wire contracts and opens the vent. On this principle the apparatus will readily find a medium, and there remain, varying only occasionally to accommodate itself to the variations of the quantity of fuel in the stove. The entire expense of this apparatus, exclusive of the stove, will not exceed 50 cents. It is generally conceded that a large portion of cases of colds, coughs, &c. are occasioned by irregularities of the temperature of sitting-rooms but with this plan of regulation this evil may be avoided without any material expense. =New Paper Mill.= Mr. C. C. P. Moses has erected a line brick building, 75 by 38 feet, three stories high, on the site of the old foundry, at Dover, N. H., $12,000 to $15,000. The rooms are constructed and furnished in a complete manner for carrying on the paper making business in all its departments. The works are nearly completed, and will be in operation in five or six weeks. =New Mill at Lowell.= The Merrimack Company have in progress of erection the largest mill in Lowell, and which is calculated to employ from 300 to 400 operatives. The building is nearly finished, and the machinery is to embrace the latest improvements in this or any other country. =Machine Shop.= A new machine shop is about commencing operation in Norwich: about half a mile northeast from the railroad depot. The building is 100 by 40 feet, and is calculated to employ 60 hands in the manufacture of steam engines and manufacturing machinery. The work at this shop will be finished in the best style and at moderate prices. =Ornamental Kites.= [Illustration:] This month being considered as one of the best for flying kites, we may indulge our young friends with an article on that subject. The principle on which kites are made to ascend by the action of the wind, is too well understood, even by children, to require explanation. We shall merely introduce and describe some fancy models of kites, which are not often seen. The pattern, fig. 1, which is the figure called a star, is very easily made. The frame consists simply of the strips, or rods of light wood; spruce timber, willow twig's--and interlocked, as shown in the cut; so that each rod shall pass alternately over and under the other rods at each intersection. These rods being lashed together at the points, the whole frame is covered with white or yellow paper, and the twine is attached to three of the angles of the star. The eagle, fig. 2, is but little more difficult; a rod extends from the beak to the tail, and is crossed by another which extends from tip to tip of the wings. The rods being lashed together, a small thread is drawn from the place of the head of the eagle, to the two extremities of the wings, and thence to the leeward end of the centre rod. This thread should be white or light blue, and will not be visible when aloft; but the form of the eagle should be made of black, dark or brown paper. The paper eagle must be sewed to the several threads, and two or more threads may extend from the wings to the centre rod to support the feathers of the wings. The eagle kite appears curious, but is not so elegant as The Rose, fig. 3. To construct this figure there must be four light rods of wood, made to cross each other in the centre, being there lashed together, and thus constituting eight arms. From the end of each arm, a thin strip of light wood or reed, is bent in a curved form to the next arm on either side: the bow being lashed to the arms. This frame is covered with white paper, which is to be afterward colored with rose color, with the yellow centre. The twine must be fastened to four of the arms, and the tail of the kite should be covered with green paper, which by the contrast, will have a pleasing effect. =Rochester Edge Tools in England.= Some time since, a Mr. Ash, an extensive manufacturer of Mechanics' Tools at Sheffield, England, sent to this country for patterns of the latest improvements, and amongst the rest, ordered a variety from Messrs. Barton & Belden of Rochester, which were promptly forwarded. On their arrival there, it seems that their make gave such universal satisfaction, that they were immediately copied, and the fact that they came from this country made prominent, by stamping upon them 'Rochester Pattern.' =An Animal Curiosity.= Travellers state that there is on the island of St. Luce a cavern, in which is a large basin twelve or fifteen feet deep, at the bottom of which are rocks. From these rocks proceed certain substances that present at first, sight beautiful flowers, but on the approach of a hand or instrument, retire like a snail, out of sight! On examination, there appears in the middle of a disk, filaments resembling spiders' legs, which moved briskly round a kind of petal. The filaments, or legs, have pincers to seize their prey, when the petals close, so that it cannot escape. Under this flower is the body of an animal, and it is probable he lives on the marine insects thrown by the sea into his basin. * * * * * The first clock that ever measured time was made for the Caliph of Bagdad. This art was afterwards lost for several centuries. =Skate Runners.= At Drontheim, in Norway, they have a regiment of soldiers, called Skate Runners. They wear leg gaiters for travelling in deep snow, and green uniform. They carry a short sword, a rifle fastened by a broad strap passing over the shoulder, and a climbing staff seven feet long, with a spike in the end. They move so fast in the snow that no cavalry can overtake them, and it does little good to fire cannon balls at them, as they go two or three hundred feet apart. They are very useful soldiers in following an enemy on a march. They go over marshes, rivers and lakes at a great rate. =A Receipt to make Peach Wine.= Take four or five bushels of ripe juicy peaches, mash or bruise them in a tub, and pour them into a barrel, large enough to contain them, and place it in a cool place. At the bottom of the barrel, before putting in the peaches, some clean straw must be placed to prevent the pumice from filling up the spigot. The head of the barrel must be covered. In about three days the Peach Wine is ready for use. Draw it off, from the spigot, and if care and attention have been adopted, a delicious beverage will be produced. =A Novel Enterprise.= An expedition, which promises the most important results both to science and commerce is at this moment fitting out in England, for the purpose of navigating some of the more important unexplored rivers in South America It is to be under the command of Lord Ranelagh. Several noblemen and gentlemen have already volunteered to accompany his lordship, and the enterprising and scientific band, it is said, will sail as soon as the necessary arrangements shall be completed. THE NEW YORK =SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN:= _Published Weekly at 128 Fulton Street., (Sun Building,) New York._ BY MUNN & COMPANY. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is the Advocate of Industry and Journal of Mechanical and other Improvements: as such its contents are probably more varied and interesting, than those of any other weekly newspaper in the United States, and certainly more useful. It contains as much interesting Intelligence as six ordinary daily papers, while for _real benefit_, it is unequalled by any thing yet published. Each number regularly contains from THREE to SIX ORIGINAL ENGRAVINGS, illustrated by NEW INVENTIONS, American and Foreign,--SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES and CURIOSITIES,--Notices of the progress of Mechanical and other Scientific Improvements, Scientific Essays on the principles of the Sciences of MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY and ARCHITECTURE,--Catalogues of American Patents,--INSTRUCTION in various ARTS and TRADES, _with engravings_,--Curious Philosophical Experiments,--the latest RAIL ROAD INTELLIGENCE in EUROPE and AMERICA,--Valuable information on the Art of GARDENING, &c. &c. This paper is especially entitled to the patronage of MECHANICS and MANUFACTURERS, being devoted to the interests of those classes. It is particularly useful to FARMERS, as it will not only apprise them of IMPROVEMENTS in AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS, but INSTRUCT them in various MECHANICAL TRADES, and guard against impositions. As a FAMILY NEWSPAPER, it will convey more USEFUL Intelligence to children and young people, than five times its cost in school instruction. Being published in QUARTO FORM, it is conveniently adapted to PRESERVATION and BINDING. TERMS.--The Scientific American is sent to subscribers in the country at the rate of $2 a year, ONE DOLLAR IN ADVANCE, the remainder in 6 months. Persons desiring to subscribe, have only to enclose the amount in a letter, directed to MUNN & COMPANY, Publishers of the Scientific American, New York. [Illustration: hand pointing right]Specimen copies sent when desired. All letters must be POST PAID.] 
38481	----	[Illustration] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL INFORMATION, ART, SCIENCE, MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY, AND MANUFACTURES. NEW YORK, JULY 14, 1877. Vol. XXXVII.--No. 2. [NEW SERIES.] [$3.20 per Annum [POSTAGE PREPAID.]] * * * * * CONTENTS. (Illustrated articles are marked with an asterisk.) Africa, carrying peace into 16 Air compressor, Bower's * 15 Alloy, new 18 American inventions. N.S.Wales 25 American Institute Exhibition 24 Answers to correspondents 27 Artesian well, pumping (13) 27 Billiard ball holder * 22 Billiard table * 22 Bisulphide of lime (35) 28 Bleaching silk and wool 24 Boot and shoe machinery * 19 Bookbinding, new method of * 19 Books and publications 25 Business prospects 15 Carrigeen crop 17 Catastrophism, Clarence King on 16 Catastrophe in geology 17 Chalk cup * 22 Coloring matter from herbs (2) 27 Copper plates covered with steel 22 Curtain fixture * 19 Disinfecting rooms 15 Duplex education 17 Dyspepsia, on 20 Education in Germany 24 Electricity, conducting power (21) 27 Electrotyping cylinders (33) 28 Electricity and magnetism (5) 27 Gold, dentists' (24) 27 Horses, dead, standing erect 20 Inventions patented in England 25 Lightning, effects of 20 Lime, precipitating (22) 27 Locomotive valves, setting 21 Man's place in Nature 25 Measures of the U. S. (32) 28 Mints of the U. S. (30) 27 Papier Mache (40) 28 Patents, American and foreign 25 Patent decisions, recent 25 Patents, official list of 28 Phosphorescent sweating 18 Plague, extension of the 24 Plants, curious carnivorous * 23 Popular fallacies 24 Santini, death of Professor 15 Sebastin, a new explosive 18 Solar heat, apparatus for utilizing 18 Special notice 25 Steamer, new 21 Steam pump, pounding (20) 27 Sulphur, test for 22 Sunstroke 20 Tin scrap, utilization of * 18 Tin-can telephone 21 Tin and phosphorus, alloy of 24 Yule, John 15 * * * * * BOWER'S PATENT AIR COMPRESSOR. The new air compressor herewith illustrated may be operated by steam or water power, and is available for work in mines, tunnels, or quarries, for driving rock drills, coal cutters, and hauling and pumping engines, working mining pumps, for use in factories, and in fact for all service where a safe and efficient power is required. The construction of the machine, the capacity of which differs according to the amount of power required, will readily be understood from the illustration. Above the air cylinder are two distinct air chambers, each having two induction or receiving valves, which cushion on rubbers. With the movement of the piston these chambers alternately receive and force the compressed air through check valves placed in the upper part of the air compartment, both compartments being connected with one pipe conveying the air to the ordinary air receiver. These check valves lift alternately, and cushion on water; and as the compressed air is forced into the pipe connecting with the receiver, without a possibility of any of it escaping back into the receiving chambers, it is claimed that there is the smallest possible loss of power, and that the machine will give fully 90 per cent of steam power expended in the shape of compressed air. The compressor is compact in form, strongly made, simple in construction, and not liable to get out of order. One peculiarity in its construction is that no water jacket or hollow piston is used; yet under any of the extreme pressures to which the machine has been tested, no inconvenience, we are informed, from heat has been perceptible. In connection with the compressor, receivers of various sizes are used, into which the air is pumped and thence conveyed by pipe to the location where required, even if it be a mile or more, the loss by friction between receiver and point of utilization of the air being, it is claimed, under 2 lbs. of the pressure. The manufacturers also build water-power compressors, one of which, driven by 75 to 100 horse power, they have recently shipped to Utah. The machine is intended to convey the air through iron tubes 5,000 feet to the mouth of a silver mine, where a 50 horse power hoisting and a 25 horse power pumping engine will be driven by air instead of steam, and a tube will be extended into the mine 1,000 feet deep, where the power drills and small pumps will be operated by air also. The manufacturers submit a number of excellent testimonials from parties using the machine. From one, we learn, that at the Antelope and Prince of Wales mine, near Alta City, Utah, the compressor runs 10 hours per day, and supplies compressed air to two 3 inch drills used in running levels. The distribution terminates at distances of from 1,000 to 2,000 feet from the compressor. The machine also drives one hoisting engine and ventilates the lower part of the mine. The main supply pipe is three inches in diameter, 2,300 feet long, and is tapped by two inch pipe wherever power is required. The expenditure of fuel is one cord of green pine wood and 600 lbs. of bituminous coal per 10 hours. Air pressure in receiver 100 lbs. This pressure is reported to be obtained by 70 lbs. of steam as indicated by the gauges. For further particulars, address the manufacturers, Messrs. Griffith and Wedge, Zanesville, Ohio. [Illustration: BOWER'S AIR COMPRESSOR.] * * * * * DEATH OF PROFESSOR SANTINI. A cable dispatch announces the death of the Italian astronomer, Giovanni Santini. The Professor was born at Tuscany, June 30, 1786, and was in the ninety-first year of his age. He graduated at the University of Pisa. He soon devoted himself to a study of the exact sciences, and in 1814 he had achieved so much distinction that he was appointed to a professorship in the Padowa Observatory in place of Vincenzo Cheminello. In 1825 he was appointed Rector of the University, and up to the time of his death he held the position of Professor of Astronomy and Director of Mathematical Studies. He was generally esteemed by the learned societies of Europe, and held a number of honorary titles and degrees from various leading universities. He was also a correspondent of the French Academy. The principal books published by him are strictly scientific, such as "Decimal Arithmetic" (1808), "Elements of Astronomy" (1820), "Logarithms and Trigonometry," and "Optical Problems" (1821-23). Some of his elementary works on astronomy for beginners are the best ever published in Italy. * * * * * JOHN YULE. The death is announced of Mr. John Yule, of the Hutchestown Engine Works, Rutherglen, N. B., at the age of 66. During early life, Mr. Yule went the round of the best engineers' shops in Scotland and England, and became one of the recognized leaders in engineering progress. His inventiveness took various directions, amongst other fruits being an improved rotary engine, a compensating governor for the steam engine, and a screw tap, drill, and mandrel. For the latter he was awarded the silver medal of the Scottish Society of Arts. For some years Mr. Yule acted as the manager of the boiler department of Messrs. Robert Napier & Son's establishment, but eventually resumed business at the Hutchestown Works, and devoted attention amongst other matters to the improvement of swing bridges and steam cranes and hammers. In the former line two of his most important works are the plate girder bridge over the entrance to one of the docks at Port Glasgow, for the Caledonian Railway, erected from plans by Messrs. Bell and Miller, C.E., Glasgow; and a lattice girder bridge over the entrance to Kingston Dock, Glasgow Harbor. Owing to the angle at which this last bridge crosses the dock, great difficulties were experienced in working out the mechanical details so as to admit of easy motion. These were skillfully overcome, and the bridge was, as finally erected, a monument of his design as well as workmanship. The Blackhill incline on the Monkland Canal, constructed nearly a quarter of a century ago, is a sample of Mr. Yule's mechanical powers. Of late years he was largely engaged as a professional valuator. * * * * * BUSINESS PROSPECTS. We have recently taken the pains to make inquiries from the more eminent bankers and merchants in the chief cities of the interior, and the results of our inquiries have tended to confirm the belief we have more than once expressed in this journal, that although, from various causes, there is overhanging a portion of our American industries a cloud of gloom and depression, still throughout the nation at large there is going on a process of growth and recovery from which the best results are anticipated. How long we shall have to wait before the life which is at work silently and secretly beneath the surface will put forth its full power, in the full harvest of productive activity, is, of course, impossible to foretell. What is chiefly important for us to know, however, is that the progress we are making tends upwards and not downwards, and that it promises to lead our industry and commerce to a brighter and not to a darker future.--_Financial Chronicle._ * * * * * TO DISINFECT ROOMS. The disinfection of a room is not complete unless the walls have been thoroughly cleansed. If they are papered, the paper must be removed and the surface beneath carefully scraped and washed. If the walls are painted, they should be washed with caustic soda. The ceiling should also be subjected to a similar treatment. * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. ESTABLISHED 1845. MUNN & CO., Editors and Proprietors. PUBLISHED WEEKLY AT NO. 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. O. D. MUNN. A. E. BEACH. * * * * * TERMS FOR THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. 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Y. --> Subscriptions received and single copies of either paper sold by all the news agents. PUBLISHERS' NOTICE TO MAIL SUBSCRIBERS. Mail subscribers will observe on the printed address of each paper the time for which they have prepaid. Before the time indicated expires, to insure a continuity of numbers, subscribers should remit for another year. For the convenience of the mail clerks, they will please also state when their subscriptions expire. New subscriptions will be entered from the time the order is received; but the back numbers of either the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN or the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT will be sent from January when desired. In this case, the subscription will date from the commencement of the volume, and the latter will be complete for preservation or binding. * * * * * VOL. XXXVII., NO. 2. [NEW SERIES.] _Thirty-second Year._ NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JULY 14, 1877. * * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, NO. 80, FOR THE WEEK ENDING JULY 14, 1877. I. ENGINEERING AND MECHANICS.--Wrought Iron Bridge Designs: by WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS. A method of construction whereby the safety of the structure is not dependent on any single member. 2 engravings.--Steel Wire Hawsers. Health and Sewage of Towns; by ALFRED CARPENTER, M.D., C.S.S. A practical experience of the Dry system. Carlisle Bridge, Dublin, 1 engraving--Extinction of Fires.--Important Dutch Enterprise. Foot Bridge across the River Ness at Inverness; by C. R. MANNERS, Engineer. 13 illustrations. Radiating Steam Hercules for the St. Heliers' Harbor Works, Jersey. 2 figures.--New Meat Trucks.--New Horseshoe.--Scott's Wheel-Cutting and Moulding Machine. 3 figures. Compound Engine with Rope Driving Gear; by BENJAMIN GOODFELLOW, Engineer. 3 engravings.--Differential Screw Pipe Joint. 6 figures. Pipes for Gas and Other Purposes (continued from SUPPLEMENT No. 77). Main-laying continued, with 4 figures.--Fittings of Gas and Water Pipes; Includes the average "life" of pipes; an account of various soils, and amount of corrosion in each; Professor Barff's new iron-preserving process, and other processes in practical use for preserving iron pipe; proving pipe; the utility of various metals, and directions for pipe-laying: various fittings, illustrated in 16 figures. II. TECHNOLOGY.--The Sizing of Cotton Goods; a paper read before the Society of Arts, by W. THOMPSON, F.R.S. A very full and clear description, embracing: An account of the process of weaving, explaining the object and utility of size. A table of sizing mixtures in which are enumerated all the substances used, (1) for giving adhesive properties to the size, (2) to give weight and body to the yarn, (3) for softening the size or yarn, and (4) for preserving the size from mildew and decomposition. Tests for these substances and directions for mixing, so as to obtain the results required. Proportions of sizing. Use of flour in size. Weighting materials, China clay and its substitutes. "Softenings" and oils for softening. East winds. Glycerin, grape sugar, mildew preventives, and tape sizing. "Slashing," packing, mildew, damaged goods, etc.--Notes on Garment Dyeing. Giving preparation of garments with cotton warps, green on garments with cotton warps, brown on the same, etc. III. LIGHT, HEAT, ELECTRICITY, ETC.--On the Minute Measurements of Modern Science. By ALFRED M. MAYER. Article IX. The dividing engine and methods of making accurate linear scales. 8 illustrations. IV. NATURAL HISTORY, ETC.--Catastrophism, or the Evolution of Environment. An address by Clarence King before the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College, New Haven, Conn. V. AGRICULTURE, HORTICULTURE.--Pencils of Silver Nitrate.--The Black Poplar.--Tree Leaves as a Fertilizer.--Improving Pastures.--Lawns and Hay.--Thoroughbred Pigs.--Shall Country Houses have Cellars? VI. MISCELLANEOUS.--The New German Patent Law: being the Full Text of the New Law for Patents, passed July 1, 1877, covering all the States of the German Empire. Terms.--SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, one year, postpaid, _five dollars_. One copy of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and one copy of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, one year, postpaid, _seven dollars_. CLUBS.--One extra copy of the SUPPLEMENT will be supplied gratis for every club of five SUPPLEMENT subscribers at $5.00 each. All the back numbers of the SUPPLEMENT, from the commencement, January 1, 1876, can be had. Price 10 cents each. NOW READY.--The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT for 1876, Complete in two large volumes. Over 800 quarto pages; over 2,000 engravings. Embracing History of the Centennial Exhibition. New Illustrated. Instructions in Mechanical Drawing. Many valuable papers, etc. Price five dollars for the two volumes, stitched in paper; or six dollars and fifty cents, handsomely bound in stiff covers. Remit by postal order. Address MUNN & CO. PUBLISHERS, 37 Park Row, New York. --> Single copies of any desired number of the SUPPLEMENT sent to any address on receipt of 10 cents. * * * * * CARRYING PEACE INTO AFRICA. To carry war into Africa has been a proverb ever since Rome vowed the destruction of Carthage. But the Carthagenian invasion was a modern episode in Africa's experiences of that nature. On one of the earlier monuments of Egypt there is figured a slave-hunter's raid upon an Ethiopian village, the horrid details of which are said by travelers to be an accurate picture of a slave raid of to-day. The same murderous work has been going on incessantly for at least 4,000 years: how much longer there is no telling. For all these ages the African borders have known war and war only, and of the most destructive and barbarizing nature. Recently, under the influence of Sir Samuel Baker, Colonel Gordon, and the civilized world in general, the Khedive of Egypt has carried war into the interior in the interests of peace: a conquest in a measure justified by the suppression of inter-tribal war for the filling of slave pens, and the abolition of the slave trade down the Nile. A similar reform has been effected on the east coast by the pressure of English power on the Sultan of Zanzibar. And the immediate effect of these two movements has been to prevent the butchery or enslavement of not less than half a million negroes annually. A still more promising invasion of Africa has just been decided upon in the International Geographical Conference in Brussels: an invasion wholly in the interests of peace and civilization. At the meeting, a year ago, it was declared advisable to establish, by international effort, a line of permanent commercial stations from Bagomoyo, on the coast of Zanzibar, to St. Paul de Loanda, on the opposite Atlantic coast; the first stations to be at Ujiji, where Stanley found Livingstone, on the eastern shore of lake Tanganyika; at Nyangwe, Livingstone's furthest point northward on the Lualaba; and at some point further west on the route of Cameron, to be fixed in the dominions of Muata Yamvo, one of the most powerful chiefs of Central Africa. At the second conference, which ended June 24, arrangements were made for sending out the first expedition toward Tanganyika. The object of the proposed stations is the development of civilization by commerce, not by religious propaganda. Primarily they will serve as bases of operation for explorers of the interior, a sort of _entrepôts_, where the explorer may supply himself with provisions, instruments, and goods, and thus save the cost and embarrassment of an army of porters from the coast. They will also serve as places of refuge for explorers in times of sickness and other reverses, which have hitherto so terribly hampered explorers. The heads of these pioneer establishments are to be men of scientific training and proved executive ability; and each will be aided by a physician-naturalist and a few skilled artisans. The points thus far chosen are on a line regularly traveled by the caravans of Arab traders, carrying coffee, tea, sugar, arms, and woven goods to permanent Arab residences and trading stations in the interior. An agent of the London Missionary Society has already begun the survey of a route for ox teams as far as lake Tanganyika; and Cameron has expressed the opinion that a light narrow-gauge railway could be constructed from the coast to the lake at a cost not exceeding four thousand dollars a mile. The traffic along such a road, he thinks, would soon pay interest on the outlay. The unexplored region thus to be opened up to civilization and commerce (other than in human beings) is larger than the United States east of the Mississippi. Around it is a still larger region of partially explored country of unequalled fertility, abounding in great lakes and navigable rivers, and for the most part so high above the sea that the products of the tropics mingle with those of the temperate zone. The cereals, durah, maize, rice, sugar cane, starch-yielding roots and tubers, cotton, coffee, tobacco, spices, gums and caoutchouc, dye-stuffs and medicinal plants, the banana, fig, date, orange, and the vine are among the known products of this region; and all are capable of becoming important staples of foreign commerce. The country is not less rich in coal, iron, copper, gold, and other valuable minerals. The climate, though moist from abundant rain, is less debilitating than India or Brazil; and everywhere, away from the miasmatic coast regions and the marshes of the lower river courses, European explorers have found small cause for complaining of excessive heat or unhealthiness. On the elevated plateaus which cover so large a part of Central Africa, the climate is like that of the sanitariums of India; while among the mountains the finest climates of the world are fairly rivalled. Stanley found in the mountainous region between the great lakes and within a degree of the equator every climatic condition and every element of landscape beauty that could attract and delight a white colony. It was a perfect alpine country, with mountains rising from twelve to fifteen thousand feet, yet free from alpine cold and snow. Countless torrents from the hills watered ever-verdant valleys as beautiful as those of Tyrol, lying under a brilliant equatorial sun, yet with a climate as cool and equable as any European might desire. Further south, among the mountains about Lake Nyassa, the same features are presented on a grander scale: a country aptly described as a second Switzerland of gigantic proportions. There can be no question of the ability of Europeans to sustain themselves in the greater part of the interior-certainly on all the higher plateaus-nor of the possibility of building up in Central Africa a great civilized empire. Nature offers every facility, and the native population seem to be well fitted for productive industry. In every respect they are physically and morally superior to the negroes of the coast, and only need protection and the encouragement of legitimate commerce to weld them into a great nation. Already they stand on the borders of civilization. They are intelligent, industrious, and not unskillful in the manufacture of iron and copper ornaments, utensils, and weapons. The arts of tanning, spinning, weaving, dyeing, mat-making, etc., are widely diffused among them, and many of their products are remarkable for their fineness and strength. They carry on agriculture with considerable success; and, notwithstanding the chronic state of insecurity incident to slave-hunting, their wealth in cattle is very great. As soon as the disturbing and impoverishing influence of the slave traffic is abated, and a market provided for the products of peace, the advancement of the people in civilization is likely to go on with great rapidity. As the source of raw materials which we need, and as a market for the surplus manufactures of Europe and America, the country offers, to say the least, many attractions; and it will not be surprising if, within fifty years, thriving commercial stations will be founded on all its great lakes and rivers, and connected with the outer world by telegraphy, railways, and steamship lines. * * * * * ADDRESS OF CLARENCE KING ON CATASTROPHISM. Mr. Clarence King lately delivered an interesting address before the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College, New Haven, Conn., under the title of "Catastrophism, or the Evolution of Environment," which promises to evoke considerable discussion. We subjoin an abstract of the principal features of the address, which is quite lengthy. The full text will be found in our SUPPLEMENTS, Nos. 80, 81. Mr. King refuted the doctrine of slow evolution as taught by Huxley and Darwin, and declared that the surface of the earth and climate had been subject to sudden and catastrophic mutation, which included in its environment all types of life. He reasoned that marine fossils are found entombed in rocky beds far remote from present seas; and that these beds were once sea bottoms that have been upheaved by convulsions of Nature. The earliest history of mankind is pregnant with catastrophe, and we have historic story and biblical record of its sudden and destructive energy. He called to mind the vast and massive eruptions of the Pliocene basalt as seen upon our own continent. The great obvious changes in the rocky crust were referred to a few processes; the sub-aerial decay of continents, delivery by streams of land-detritus into the sea, the spreading out of these comminuted materials upon a pelagic floor, and lastly upheaval, by which oceanic beds were lifted up into subsequent land masses. All these processes he declared to have been more rapid in the past than now. Suddenness, world-wide destructiveness, were the characteristics of geological changes. Periods of calm, like the present, are suddenly terminated by brief catastrophic epochs. Successive faunas and floras were created only to be extinguished by general cataclysms. He believed in recurrent, abrupt accelerations of crust change, so violent as to destroy all life on the globe. He declared the idea to be the survival of a prehistoric terror, and was backed up by breaks in the great palæontological record. Of the geologic features of our continent, he said that beneath our America lies buried another distinct continent, which he called Archæan America, which was made up of what was originally ocean beds lifted into the air and locally crumpled into vast mountain chains, which were in turn eroded by torrents into mountain peaks. The original coast lines of this continent we may never be able fully to survey, but its great features, the lofty chains of the mountains which made its bones, were very nearly co-extensive with our existing systems, the Appalachians and Cordilleras. The cañon-cutting rivers of the present Western mountains have dug out the peaks and flanks of those underlying, primeval uplifts and developed an astonishing topography; peaks rising in a single sweep 30,000 feet from their bases, precipices lifting bold, solid fronts 10,000 feet into the air, and profound mountain valleys. The work of erosion, which has been carried on by torrents of the quaternary age, brings to light buried primeval chains loftier than any of the present heights of the globe. At the close of the Palæzoic age, two enormous masses of what, probably, were then continents began to sink, and as they disappeared the present Atlantic and Pacific oceans appeared, while the sea-floor of a then ocean, emerged, and became the new continent of America. Dividing this new continent was a sea, but catastrophe removed this sea and resulted in the folding up of mountain ranges 20,000 and 40,000 feet in height, thereby essentially changing the whole climate of the continent. Of the land life of the mesozoic age we have abundant remains. The wonderful reptilian and avian fauna of the mesozoic age is now familiar to all. But after the catastrophe, and the change of climate which must necessarily have ensued, this fauna totally perished. After criticising the opinions of Huxley, Lyell, Hutton, Darwin, and others, he recurred to the effects of sudden terrestrial or cosmical changes, and conceived that the effects of these changes would be, first, extermination; secondly, destruction of the biological equilibrium; and thirdly, rapid morphological change on the part of plastic species. When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity, and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words "Change or die!" plasticity became the sole principle of salvation. And plasticity is the key to survival and prosperity. Mr. King remarked in conclusion of his address: "He who brought to bear that mysterious energy we call life upon primeval matter bestowed at the same time a power of development by change, arranging that the interaction of energy and matter, which make up environment should, from time to time, burst in upon the current of life and sweep it onward and upward to ever higher and better manifestations. Moments of great catastrophe, thus translated into the language of life, become moments of creation, when out of plastic organisms something newer and nobler is called into being." * * * * * DUPLEX EDUCATION. The age in which we live is a fast one, and he who does not move with equal celerity, and keep pace with those around him, is ruthlessly thrust to the wall, and remains there unless he has strength and will to regain the lost position. We call to our aid every force of Nature and invoke the assistance of every appliance with which we are cognizant. We call our fathers slow, and to us they were so; but there was the same need of celerity in their every-day life as to-day there is in ours. While calling to our aid the elements of Nature and adapting thousands of mechanical appliances to our wants, do we not often feel that there is beyond all these a "something" that may be invoked and trained to help us on in the race of life? Occasionally we find dim glimmerings of this "something" that we believe will eventually grow to be one of the prominent sciences. Physiologists tell us that the human brain is double, that the right and left lobes act in a degree independent of each other--the right lobe of the brain controlling the physiology of the left side of the individual from head to heel, while the left lobe exercises a like dominion on the opposite side. Grant this to be true, then can be explained the idiosyncrasy that is occasionally seen in individuals, of which we may instance that of writing at the same time with both hands; and again we have heard of telegraph operators sending and receiving two messages at the same time, operating with both hands, and independent of each other. It is said that Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer, could actually produce two sketches or drawings in this way and at the same time. It is also affirmed that Sir Charles Fox, the architect of the Exhibition building of 1851, could write upon two ideas at the same time and transfer these ideas simultaneously to paper with right and left hand. The mechanic can often be found who can operate upon one piece of mechanism, while at the same time his brain is busy upon the study of some unborn idea, foreign to that work upon which he is laboring. Writers can be found who can write out one train of ideas, while ideas entirely different are being cogitated upon somewhere in their craniums. We have even heard it affirmed that an indistinct glimmering of a third idea would occasionally peep around the corner of the caputs of these favored ones. Why not educate this? Why not form schools and institutions to bring it out and lead the brain to perform this double function? It can certainly be done. The world wants it, surely. The age demands it. Individuals need it. If these individuals can succeed and become experts in this method of double work, will not double compensation and a greater remuneration be their reward? This, certainly, will be an incentive to its acquirement. Go to the apprentice when first he takes position beside the vise, with chipping chisel in one hand and hammer in the other. The injunction he mentally receives as he raises the hammer is, that to miss the chisel is to hit his knuckles. After a few demonstrative blows he knows what it means, and therefore chisel and hammer soon come by some strange process to harmonize in action, so that in whatever position the head of the chisel may be, the blow is sure to be properly received, and that, too, without any sensible effort on his part. In this illustration both right and left hand are taught to act, by brain dictation, in a certain concerted manner. Again, we find that mutes have been learned to articulate words and sentences by proper education, they being taught to imitate the motions of the mouth and labial organs as by their tutors directed. Education can do much, and these are some of its results. Can we not by proper teaching produce all the results as shown in the case of Nasmyth and Fox. The first lessons must necessarily be simple. For instance, two things done at the same time with both hands, giving expression at this time to ideas connected therewith, but distinct from each other. From this simple lesson we progress, and, as the ultimatum, we may arrive at greater achievements than Nasmyth or Fox ever dreamed of. We may find that we can so divide our entity that we can be conscious of a double-brain existence in a dual action. * * * * * THE CARRIGEEN CROP. To the great majority of people, Carrigeen, under the more familiar name of Irish Moss, is known chiefly as the basis of a pleasant and wholesome drink for the sick room, or as an article of use in the preparation of delicacies for the table. Comparatively few are aware of its wide and varied use in the arts, or that the thousands of barrels of it employed annually by our manufacturers of paper, cloth, felt, and straw hats, etc., and by brewers, is not an Irish, but an American product, and, speaking strictly, is not a moss but a seaweed. Carrigeen (_chondrus crispus_) is to be found more or less abundantly all along our northern coast, ranging between the low water line and the depth of forty feet, or so; but as a rule its fronds, which correspond to the leaves of air plants, are so numerously inhabited by small mollusca that they are spoiled for other use. The clean-growing article seems to be limited almost wholly to certain ledges in the neighborhood of Scituate, Mass.--a section of coast guarded by the celebrated Minot Ledge Lighthouse, and famous for its danger to shipping. Here, where the waves of the Atlantic dash with full force upon the rocky coast, the carrigeen grows to perfection; and wherever it escapes the spawn of mussels and other shellfish, is gathered during the summer season in vast quantities. The harvest begins in May and ends about the first of September. The gathering is made in two ways--by hand-picking during exceptionally low tides, and by means of long-handled iron-toothed rakes at ordinary tides. Of course the work cannot be carried on except during fair weather. Hand-pulling is possible only during the bi-monthly periods of spring tides, that is, when the moon is full and again at new moon. At such times high tide occurs about midday and midnight, and the ledges are exposed for moss gathering morning and evening. The mossers' boats are rowed to the rocks where the finest grades abound, and the gatherers select with great care the growths that are freest from minute shells and other foreign matter. This portion of the crop, if properly handled afterwards, generally goes to the apothecary and fetches a price two or three times that of the common grade. As the tide rises the pickers are driven to their boats, and proceed to the outer moss-bearing rocks where the rake is used, as it also is during ordinary low tides. Moss taken in this way is not so clean as the hand-picked, and is always mixed with tape grass, which must be removed during the process of curing and packing. The curing of the moss is the most critical part of this peculiar farming. On being brought to the shore the moss is black and unsightly; it must be bleached as well as dried. The bleaching is effected by repeated wetting and drying in the sun; and as the moss is readily soluble in fresh water the bleaching beds are situated near the banks of the salt creeks that abound along the shore. After drying, the moss is packed in tubs and rolled to the water, where it is thoroughly washed, then rolled back to the bleaching bed, to be dried again in the sun. Five or six such exposures are usually sufficient. On the bleaching ground, the moss is carefully spread and turned, and watchfully guarded against wetting by rain. In this process it turns from black to red, then to the yellowish-white of the perfected article. When properly cured the moss is stored in bulk, in shanties; where, as time permits, it is picked over and packed in barrels. The crop averages about half a million pounds a year; and thanks to the brighter and more abundant sunshine of our coast, the moss has a brighter color and is of finer quality than the Irish product. * * * * * CATASTROPHISM IN GEOLOGY. Mr. Clarence King was probably not a little surprised to learn from the Tribune that in his most suggestive address on "Catastrophism and the Evolution of Environment," he had turned the guns of Geology upon Biology; and that in calling attention to the influence of periods of accelerated change in environment upon exposed types of life he had swept away the "fundamental doctrines upon which has been built the scheme of development by natural selection and the survival of the fittest." Certainly nothing in the address betrays any consciousness of possible effects of that sort. And it is quite probable also that Mr. King will have to suffer some annoyance from seeing his name set up at gaze, like Joshua's moon in Ajalon, by the unscientific press generally, as that of the newest champion of orthodoxy against the leaders of modern scientific thought: a penalty which scientific men always have to pay for emphasizing neglected truths. Mr. King certainly deals some telling blows against the position of the stricter school of Uniformitarians in geology, and brings into prominence a much neglected element in the struggle for existence; but there is no scientific revolution threatened, nor are any crumbs of comfort spread for those endeavoring to arrest the natural drift of scientific progress. The issue between Mr. King and the sticklers for uniformity in rates of geological change is simply this: In the reaction against the sweeping cataclysms, the sudden wipings out of whole creations and the sudden introductions of new worlds of life believed in by earlier geologists, the modern English school has come to look upon time and the slower modifications of the earth's surface, now observable, with the struggle for existence under easy conditions, as the chief factors in geological change and its accompanying variations in the forms of life. Mr. King, on the other hand, insists that in so doing they have taken too little account of catastrophic changes, that is, widespread and sudden movements of sea and land. In other words, he raises rapid change of environment from the subordinate place it has hitherto occupied in the scheme of historical development, and gives special emphasis to the grand geologic movements which have to do with such changes. In this Mr. King has unquestionably rendered good service to the science he has done so much to extend and honor in the field; while the illustrations from American geology which he brings to bear on the subject are as likely as his sturdy opinions to attract attention. Yet we are inclined to think that in some things he has allowed his enthusiasm to run away with him. The stolid self-confidence of extreme Uniformitarians has tempted him to exaggerate the periodic accelerations of geologic and biologic movement, and to overstate their effects quite as much as others have underestimated them; and when he charges the followers of Lyell with intellectual near-sightedness and a lack of "the very mechanism of imagination," they may possibly be able to retort not unjustifiably that he has mistaken the natural foreshortening of the geological vista due to distance for actual brevity; and that his belief in the abruptness and suddenness of the great changes which the earth's strata record, may be due to his own lack of sustained imaginative power for grasping and interpreting all the evidences of the enormous time really involved. But this is a question not of imaginative capacity but of logical deduction from observed facts; and however abrupt the beginning of some of the great geologic movements may have been, their subsequent progress cannot in all cases have been so rapid as to allow of their being called catastrophic in any ordinary acceptation of the term. Take, for example, the alleged catastrophe which marked the close of the mesozoic age in the West. Of this movement Mr. King remarks: "In a quasi-uniformitarian way, 20,000 or 30,000 feet of sediment had accumulated in the Pacific and 14,000 in the [American] mediterranean sea; when these regions, which, during the reception of sediment, had been areas of subsidence, suddenly upheaved, the doming up of the middle of the continent quite obliterating the mediterranean sea and uniting the two land masses into one. The catastrophe which removed this sea resulted in the folding up of mountain ranges 20,000 and 40,000 feet in height, thereby essentially changing the whole climate of the continent." That this great change occurred, and was attended with an obliteration of the wonderful reptilian and avian fauna of the mesozoic age, is most true: that it occurred suddenly does not appear. On the contrary, there is evidence to show that the prodigious folding up of mountain ranges involved could not have proceeded with sufficient rapidity to turn the course of a stream of water. It happened that one of those folds--one which, had no denudation been going on meanwhile, would have lifted its crest higher than the highest peak of the Himalayas--lay directly across the course of the Colorado river. The river held its course uninterruptedly, sawing its way through the uplift until six vertical miles of rocky strata had risen past it. At no time, therefore, could the rapidity of motion in the bulging strata have exceeded the capacity of the river to wear away the obstruction, and the bulge was fifty miles across! We do not know how rapidly a river may sink its channel through such a rising barrier; but we do know that a process of that nature cannot legitimately be described as swift or sudden. And surely it requires not less intellectual far-sightedness and imaginative faculty to carry the mind across the enormous stretch of time involved in such a change slowly wrought--a period during which at least three vertical miles of the rising mountain fold was worn down by rain and atmospheric abrasion--as to mass the continental doming, the mountain folding, and the attendant life changes together as a convulsive "catastrophe." Mr. King, however, is not a Catastrophist of a very violent sort. He shelves among the errors of the past the belief in such cataclysms as Cuvier believed in, involving world-wide destruction of all life--"the mere survival of a prehistoric terror, backed up by breaks in the palæontological record and protected within those safe cities of refuge, the Cosmogonies;" though he rejects as equally unsatisfactory the mild affirmations of the Uniformitarians, that existing rates of change and indefinite time are enough to account for all the geological record. With our present light, he holds, geological history seems to be a dovetailing together of the two ideas. "The ages have had their periods of geological serenity, when change progressed in the still, unnoticeable way, and life through vast lapses of time followed the stately flow of years; drifting on by insensible gradations through higher and higher forms, and then all at once a part of the earth suffered short, sharp, destructive revolution unheralded as an earthquake or volcanic eruptions." Thus stated, his position does not seem to be radically different from that of the broader Uniformitarians, except that he marks the periods of accelerated physical change, and not those of comparative quiescence, as the dominant ones in their influence on life-change. He takes high and strong ground, too, in insisting that it is the business of geology not simply to decipher and map out the changes which have taken place in the configuration of the globe and in its climatic conditions, but also to investigate and fix the rates of change. And when the evolution of environment takes form as a distinct branch of geology, he expects to witness a marked modification in the dominant views of biologists. Its few broad laws will include "neither the absolute uniformitarianism of Lyell and Hutton, Darwin and Haeckel, nor the universal catastrophism of Cuvier and the majority of teleogists." "Huxley alone among prominent evolutionists opens the door for a union of the residue of truth in the two schools, fusing them in his proposed evolutional geology." So, on looking back over a trail of thirty thousand miles of geological travel, Mr. King is impelled to say that Mr. Huxley's far-sighted view perfectly satisfies his interpretation of the broad facts of the American continent. Of Mr. King's observations in regard to plasticity of physical structure in connection with rapidly changing environment and the struggle for existence, we propose to speak at another time. * * * * * The great stone monuments of England, like Stonehenge, are supposed, by Mr. James Fergusson, to be military trophies, erected in the time of King Arthur on the battle fields by the victorious armies. * * * * * A NEW APPARATUS FOR STORING AND UTILIZING SOLAR HEAT. The apparatus herewith illustrated is devised to collect solar heat or other heat, store it up in a heat reservoir--a mass of iron or other suitable material--confine it in the reservoir until needed, keep it in such form that it can be transported from place to place, and utilize it for industrial or other purposes. [Illustration: APPARATUS FOR STORING AND UTILIZING SOLAR HEAT.] A is a concave mirror for concentrating the solar rays upon the heat reservoir, B, which is a mass of iron. C is the heat box for confining the heat until needed, and also for serving as package for transporting the heat reservoir when hot. G is the heat reservoir chamber, in which the heat is communicated from the hot reservoir to the air. Under certain circumstances the heat reservoir may be heated in the heat reservoir chamber. H is a devaporizing chamber, for extracting the moisture from the air by means of a deliquescent substance or other material or treatment. A vertical stack or flue, I, communicates with the heat reservoir chamber, for conveying the heated air away for use. The device for concentrating the solar rays may be either stationary or movable, and, if movable, may be moved by hand, or automatically, to follow the sun. The various chambers mentioned will have valves, J, at the ends to regulate the passage of the air, and there will be a door, K, at the side or bottom. Patented through the Scientific American Patent Agency, March 20, 1877, by Messrs. John S. Hittell and Geo. W. Deitzler, of San Francisco, Cal. * * * * * PHOSPHORESCENT SWEATING. While the subject of phosphorescence in marine animals was under discussion at a society meeting in Florence, Professor Panceri cited the case of a medical man, who, after eating fish, felt indisposed, had nausea, and sweats that were luminous. This idiosyncrasy was laid to the _pesce baudiera_, a Neapolitan fish. Dr. Borgiotti, another member of the Academy, also narrated a case of phosphorescent sweating in a patient with miliaria, a fact which has previously been noticed. * * * * * UTILIZATION OF TIN SCRAP. Messrs. Charles A. Catlin and George F. Wilson, of Providence, R. I., have patented, May 8, 1877, a new process of utilizing tin scrap, whereby they claim the tin is recovered, either as a valuable salt of that metal or in the metallic form, and the iron or other metal is left as a scrap at once available for reworking. [Illustration: CALLIN AND WILSON'S PROCESS OF UTILIZING TIN SCRAP.] In any suitable building, a crane, A, is erected and placed in the sweep of that crane; in any convenient order are a boiler, D, two tanks, B and C, an evaporating pan, F, and an additional tank, E. From the crane is suspended a wire basket to contain the scrap to be treated, so perforated as to admit of the ready entrance of the liquid when submerged in, and its ready escape when withdrawn from, the boiler, D, in which boiler is put a sufficient quantity of the solution of caustic soda or potash to allow of a complete submersion therein of the basket and its contents. The basket, G, is then filled with the material to be treated, sprinkling in during the filling the requisite quantity of common salt or other chloride and nitrate of soda or other nitrate, using these dry, not in solution, either previously mixed or shaken in together in the proportion of from three to five pounds each to every hundred pounds of scrap, the requisite quantity depending upon the thickness of the thin [tin?] plate to be removed. The loaded basket, being elevated by the crane, A, is then swung round, and, by lowering, submerged in the hot or boiling solution of caustic soda or potash in the iron boiler, D, which may hold in solution a further proportion of the chloride and nitrate used, the heat of which solution is maintained by a fire beneath the boiler, or in any other and ordinary way. In the ensuing reaction the oxygen of the nitrate combines with the tin to form stannic acid, and this, in turn, combining with the alkali present, forms a stannate of that base, which, entering into solution, leaves the before-plated metal tin-free, the chloride present assisting in the reaction. A further and more complex reaction takes place, by which copious fumes of ammonia are evolved, which may be utilized by proper appliances. When the reaction is complete, the basket containing the now tin-freed scrap is withdrawn from the boiler, and suspended above it long enough to drain. It is then swung over the tank, C, containing water, in which it is washed by submerging and withdrawing several times, and in like manner the washing completed in the water of the tank, B. The contents of the basket being now discharged, it is again filled with fresh scrap in the manner already described, and the process repeated. The loss by evaporation from the boiler, D, is supplied by the wash water in the tank, C; this, in turn, being supplied by the wash water in the tank, B, to which fresh water is supplied as required. When the caustic solution is sufficiently charged with the tin salt, it is allowed to deposit the impure crystals, which, being removed and drained, are redissolved in water in the iron tank, E. This solution in the iron tank, E, after filtration or decantation, is again concentrated in the evaporating pan, F, the crystals of stannate being removed from time to time, drained and dried; or the impure crystals obtained in the boiler, D, may be mixed with fine charcoal or other reducing agent, and subjected to the requisite heat for the reduction of the tin to the metallic form. * * * * * NEW ALLOY. A very beautiful new alloy, intended to replace brass in various ornamental uses, especially in window and door furniture, has been invented by W. A. Hopkins, of Paris. The alloy is composed of copper, tin, spelter, or zinc and lead, which metals are manipulated. A crucible is placed in the furnace and fired to red heat, and into the crucible thus heated the metals are placed in the proportions of--tin 1-1/8 (say) 1 oz., spelter or zinc ½ oz., lead 5/16 of an ounce. These are the proportions he prefers to use, as he has found them to give excellent and satisfactory results, but he does not intend to confine himself rigidly to the precise proportions named, as they may, perhaps, be slightly varied in some particulars without materially detracting from the beautiful color of the alloy which it is intended to produce. The molten metals are kept well stirred, and any impurities therein should be removed. When thoroughly mixed, this alloy, which is termed the first alloy, is poured off into ingot moulds and left to cool. Copper, in the proportion of eight parts to one of this first alloy, is then placed in the crucible and brought to melting heat, when the tin or first alloy is added and intimately mixed with the copper, for which purpose the molten mass must be well stirred for several minutes; it is then poured into ingot moulds for sale in the form of ingots, or it may be poured into pattern moulds so as to produce the articles required. This is the mode of manipulation which it is preferred to employ, as an opportunity is thus afforded of removing any impurities from the first alloy before mixing it with the copper; but all the metals may, if preferred, be mixed together in the proportions given and melted at one operation. By this means an alloy is obtained of great strength, and of a very beautiful appearance, and which is particularly suitable for small work, such, for instance, as window and door furniture and other house furniture which is usually made in brass or other alloy of copper, though it is not intended to confine its use to such articles. * * * * * SEBASTIN--AN IMPROVED EXPLOSIVE. In the manufacture of the explosive known as dynamite, an infusorial earth is used, which is filled with or made to absorb nitroglycerin. As compared with certain kinds of charcoal, however, the absorptive and retentive power of infusorial earth in small changes of temperature unfavorably affect the common dynamite, and cause a separation of the nitrogylcerin from the infusorial earth. The improvement we now refer to is the invention of G. Fahnehjelm, of Stockholm, Sweden, and consists in the substitution of a highly porous and absorptive species of wood charcoal, in place of the earth heretofore employed. The author designates his production as "sebastin," and gives a number of interesting particulars as follow: In order to produce a charcoal having the required quantities, the carbonization or coking must be done in such a manner as to completely destroy the organic substances, and to produce as porous a charcoal as possible. For this he selects by preference young trees or striplings or branches of poplar, hazelwood, or alder tree, and he burns them in an open fire. When the wood has been consumed he does not put out the fire by means of water, but leaves it to go out of itself. In this way he obtains a very inflammable and very porous charcoal, which can absorb more than five, and approaching six times its weight of nitroglycerin without any risk of the separation of the oil. The charcoal is pulverized in a wooden mortar, but it should not be reduced to too fine a powder, else it will not so completely absorb the nitroglycerin. The charcoal produced in the ordinary way, or by closed fire, is quite different as regards absorbing power. Charcoal of fir trees may, however, be used, and may acquire nearly the same qualities, that is, if charred a second time in a special oven. By mixing the different kinds of charcoal, a material may be obtained possessing the required absorbing qualities, and an explosive compound may then be obtained of the required power without loss of the necessary consistency--that is, without being too dry, which is not desirable. The charcoal not only serves as the best absorbent for the nitroglycerin, but it plays also an important part in the combustion. The nitroglycerin in exploding decomposes into steam, carbonic acid, nitrogen, and oxygen. In the explosion of dynamite with inert base the oxygen goes away without being utilized, but in the explosion of this new compound (the new sebastin as he calls it) a part of the absorbent charcoal is burnt by means of the liberated oxygen. The quantity of gas is thus augmented, and also the development of heat, whereby again the tension of this gas is augmented. As, however, the quantity of charcoal necessary for the complete absorption of the nitroglycerin is in all cases much larger than that which can reduce the excess of oxygen produced at the explosion into carbonic acid, he adds to the compound a salt, which also by the combustion gives an excess amount of oxygen which may contribute to burn the rest of the charcoal. For this purpose he uses by preference nitrate of potassa, which may be added without any risk, and which gives the explosive compound a very much greater rapidity or vehemence, and consequent force of explosion. The composition of the new sebastin depends upon the objects for which it is to be used, and the effects intended to be produced. The strongest compound, and even in this there is stated to be no risk of the separation of the nitroglycerin, is composed of 78 parts by weight of nitroglycerin, 14 of the wood charcoal, and 8 of nitrate of potassa; and when less power is required the proportions are varied, the second quality consisting of 68 per cent. by weight of nitroglycerin, 20 of the charcoal, and 12 of nitrate of potassa. To show the relative strength of the compounds, the inventor says: Let the dynamic force of pure nitroglycerin be represented by the number 2,884,043.6, then the dynamic force of the sebastin No. 1, as above, will be indicated by 2,416,575, and of the sebastin No. 2 by 1,933,079.4, while that of dynamite No. 1 (consisting of 75 per cent. of nitroglycerin and 25 per cent. of infusorial earth) will be represented by 674,694. For the above qualities of sebastin the increased effect produced by the greater rapidity of the explosion must be taken into account also. The increase has not yet been measured, but is estimated at 10 per cent. The sebastin may also be compounded in other proportions of the constituent parts, but the object being to produce explosive compounds of the greatest force which it is possible to employ without danger, he merely mentions that the proportion by weight may vary from 50 to 80 per cent. of nitroglycerin, 15 to 35 per cent. of the prepared charcoal, and 5 to 20 per cent. of the nitrate of potassa; the parts being taken by weight, as above stated. * * * * * A NEW METHOD OF BOOKBINDING. The annexed engravings represent a new system of binding books, for which a number of important advantages are claimed. It obviates stitching, allows of each leaf being firmly secured, and hence is especially well suited for single-leaved books. It admits of plates and maps being bound in their proper places instead of being pasted in, and renders the book much stronger and more durable. The inventor claims a saving of 40 to 75 per cent of the time required for stitching, and of 50 per cent of the time needed in ordinary rebinding work. [Illustration: Bookbinding Fig. 1, 2, 3, 4] The mode of operation is as follows: On receiving the sheets, the binder folds them and places them in consecutive order, according to the printer's signature. The front and bottom edges of the book are then trimmed so as to obtain two straight sides; and the backs of the sheets are cut off, transforming them into single leaves. Horizontal lines are now marked with pencil across the back of the book for the saw cuts; and a diagonal line, A, B, Fig. 2, is drawn to serve as a guide in replacing the leaves in their proper places. A thin coat of glue is next applied to the back; and when this is dry, the book is divided into sections of from four to eight leaves (without counting them) entirely disregarding the printer's signatures, but placing the sheets in their original order. The binder places the first section removed at his right hand, the next at his left, and so on, forming two piles. Each pile is then straightened, and in the back of each, a little below the transverse lines, are made bevel cuts with the saw. Said cuts are 1/8 inch in length, inclined at an angle of 45°, and so placed that one half their length is above and the other half below the marked line. When one pile of sheets is thus sawn, the other pile is similarly treated; but the corresponding cuts are made at relatively opposite angles. This will be understood from Fig. 1, in which C represents the edge of the right hand pile, for example, and D that of the left hand pile. The sections of each pile are now returned in their regular order, according to the printer's signatures. Should a section have been misplaced, the diagonal line, being thus broken, will show the fact. It will be seen, however, that this arrangement involves the alternate use of sheets from each pile, so that, when all are put together, the beveled cuts will cross or form dovetails, as shown in Fig. 3. Half inch strips of white paper muslin, E, Fig. 4, are next pasted around the back edges of the first and last sections. This is done to strengthen the hold of the twines in the back of the book, said sections necessarily bearing the whole strain of the covers. The twine used corresponds in size to the holes made by the coincidence of the beveled saw cuts. This twine is passed through the holes by means of a blunt darning needle. The back of the book is shown in Fig. 2; and in Fig. 4 the twines are represented as passed. Nothing further remains to be done but to paste in the fly-leaves and lining, and finish the book in the usual manner. It is evident that this a very much stronger method of securing the leaves than that in which the twine is simply laid and glued in a straight cut. Each leaf is independently fastened; and the thread is prevented from cutting through, as is commonly the case when the book has been used to any great extent. Books can be bound to open more or less as desired; and in rebinding, instead of taking the book apart and cutting threads, a thin shaving is sliced off the back, and the leaves are treated in the manner already described. Patented March 20, 1877, by Mr. Florenz E. Schmitz. For further information, address Messrs. Schmitz and Slosson, box 1180, Middletown, Orange county, N. Y. * * * * * IMPROVED CURTAIN FIXTURE. We illustrate herewith an improved curtain fixture, which may be adjusted to windows or curtains of different widths, and is adapted for use in connection with different means for raising and lowering the curtain. Fig. 1 represents the device in place, a portion of the cornice being broken away to exhibit it; and Fig. 2 shows the same in detail. [Illustration: Improved Curtain Fixture Figs. 1 and 2] Attached to the cornice are guides, A, in which are sliding loops, B. The latter may be adjusted to suit the position of the hooks placed in the window case to sustain the cornice, so that said hooks need not be set with any particularity. The curtain roller, C, has both its ends screw-threaded, to receive hollow pulleys, as shown. The spindles projecting from these pulleys are inclosed in coiled springs which press against the bearings, D, and so hold the shade in any position in which it may be placed. The bearings, D, are clasped in the ways, A, and are laterally adjustable. Sliding blocks are also arranged in said ways, and through each block passes a set screw, E. It will be perceived that the bearings may be readily adjusted to curtains of different widths, and the parts may afterward be locked in position by the set screws, E. The curtain may be raised or lowered by cords wound on the hollow pulleys. Patented December 5, 1876, by Mr. K. J. Pospisil. For further particulars relative to sale of patent, address the Penn Patent Agency, 133 South Second street, Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * BOOT AND SHOE MACHINERY. [Illustration: Boot and Shoe Machinery Fig. 1] No manufacturers have taken greater advantage of the ingenuity of the mechanical engineer than the American boot and shoe makers. Nearly every operation in the complex process of evolving finished boots from the plain skins of leather is the object of a special class of machinery; and for several years past, we have weekly chronicled the patenting of several improvements in the devices for effecting some of the numerous operations. We present herewith a series of eight labor-saving machines of the most approved construction, which we select from Knight's "American Mechanical Dictionary."[1] [Footnote 1: Published in numbers by Messrs. Hurd & Houghton, New York city.] Fig. 1 is a shoe-edge trimmer, in which the shoe is mounted on a jack, the carriage of which has a motion of translation and rotation communicated to it: so that, while the side of the sole is being trimmed, the shoe is fed longitudinally against the knife, but at the toe and heel is rotated beneath it. The knife is universally jointed, to permit the hands of the operator to determine the different bevels cut. [Illustration: Boot and Shoe Machinery Fig. 2] Fig. 2 is an ingenious little machine for placing the eyelets of the lace holes in position, and fastening them. The eyelets are fed, one by one, from the reservoir at the top, down the inclined ways, and are seized at the foot between the plunger and anvil, and they are riveted in their proper places in the shoe or strip of leather, which is held and fed by the operator. [Illustration: Boot and Shoe Machinery Fig. 3] Fig. 3 is a machine in which a shoe or boot is chucked and revolved against a burnishing tool, to impart a smooth and elegant finish to the heel. Our engraving shows a machine with what is called in the trade a "hot kit," a heated burnishing tool, with a flexible gas pipe of sufficient length, which follows the oscillations of the burnishing stock, _a_, and which conveys gas to the interior of the tool, where it is burnt in a jet. The tool is made to reciprocate over the surface of the heel, passing from breast to breast at each oscillation with an elastic pressure. [Illustration: Boot and Shoe Machinery Fig. 4] Fig. 4 is a machine for pressing together the "lifts" which compose a boot or shoe heel, thus dispensing with the handiwork of the hammer and lapstone. The bed is adjusted vertically by a screw to any thickness to which the blank heel may be built; and the plunger is brought down by the depression of the treadle with such force as to compact the lifts together. Fig. 5 shows a heel-pricking machine. When the lifts of the heel are fairly pressed together by the appliance shown in Fig. 4, the pricking machine pierces the necessary holes through all the lifts at once by a gang of awls. The compressed heels are first secured together by tacking, and then placed on the platen; and the plunger, with its gang of awls, descends with great force. Fig. 6 is a heel trimmer, known in the trade as the Coté trimmer. The shoe is held stationary by the treadle clamp; and the knife stock, which is centrally pivoted to the outer plate or jaw bearing upon the tread lift, is then grasped in the hands of the operator, and moved to give a sweeping cut to trim the heel. Fig. 7 is a machine for pressing boot soles. Beneath the crosshead of the press is a swinging bed, on each end of which is a form, in order that a shoe may remain under pressure upon one while the operator is placing another shoe on the other. The pressure is given by the treadle, which brings down the upper platen on the channeled sole. [Illustration: Boot and Shoe Machinery Fig. 5] [Illustration: Boot and Shoe Machinery Fig. 6] [Illustration: Boot and Shoe Machinery Fig. 7] * * * * * ON DYSPEPSIA. At a late meeting of the Harveian Society, of London, Dr. Farquharson read a paper on this subject. Attention was directed to the state of the tongue in dyspepsia. A deeply fissured tongue often meant little; whereas a thin white fur, composed of minute dots, was generally found along with pain immediately after food. Pain after a longer interval was accompanied by a pale, flabby tongue, with reddish tip and center. The treatment of dyspepsia consisted of two parts, that of food and that of drugs. The latter was the principal part with patients applying for gratuitous relief. The pain occurring immediately after food was usually relieved by alkalies; whereas acids were indicated where suffering was not experienced until an hour or two after the commencement of the digestive act. For the relief of the nausea and sickness remaining after the bowels were thoroughly cleansed, nothing was so effectual as hourly drop doses of ipecacuanha wine. Nux vomica was also a valuable remedy. Pain might be but the protest of the stomach against an overload, or be the result of deficient tone from general nervous exhaustion. In some cases each meal was followed by diarrh[oe]a; and for these cases attention was directed to Ringer's plan of minute doses of the liquor hydrargyri perchloridi In speaking of diet, Dr. Farquharson pointed out that there are three forms of dyspepsia: 1. The dyspepsia of fluids, as it is called, where the stomach seems intolerant of all forms of fluid; 2. The digestive derangement following intemperance in the matter of animal food; and, 3. The dyspepsia connected with indulgence in tea, or other warm and weak infusions of tannin. * * * * * THE DESTRUCTIVE EFFECTS OF LIGHTNING. The amount of destruction of life and property by lightning, or rather electrical discharges, has been very great throughout the world. It is estimated that at least 45 persons are killed annually by lightning in this country. The average number of deaths by lightning has been 22 in England, 9 in Switzerland, 3 in Belgium, and 75 in France. In France alone, during a period of thirty years, over 10,000 persons were smitten, of which 2,252 were instantly killed. Eighty were wounded and 9 killed during one thunderstorm at Châteauneuf les Montiers in 1861, and within one week, when the air was highly charged with electricity, thirty-three fearful flashes of lightning were observed, each bringing death to some victims. During the sixteen years between 1799 and 1816, 156 vessels of the British navy were struck by lightning; 73 men were killed and 138 injured, and the loss of materials amounted to over a million dollars; but since the system of metallic conductors, adapted for vessels, devised by Sir W. Snow Harris, has been applied to the vessels in that navy, the losses and damages by lightning have almost entirely ceased, although the number of vessels has been greatly increased. In Fuller's Church History it is stated that "scarcely a great abbey in England exists which once, at least, was not burned down by lightning from heaven." On the night of April, 1718, twenty-four steeples were struck along the coast of Brittany; and on the 11th of January, 1815, twelve steeples suffered a similar fate in the Rhenish provinces. On the 27th of July, 1759, lightning burnt all the woodwork of the great cathedral at Strasbourg; and on the 14th of August, 1833, it was struck three times within a quarter of an hour, and so much damaged that the repairs cost about $6,000,000. In 1835 lightning conductors were placed upon the building and steeple, and since then it has not been damaged whatever by lightning, although discharges have on several occasions occurred in line with the top of the steeple, which is 437 feet above the ground. On the 18th of August, 1769, the Tower of St. Nazaire, at Brescia, was struck, and the subterranean powder magazine, containing 2,076,000 lbs. of powder, belonging to the Republic of Venice, was exploded. One sixth of the whole town was laid in ruins and the rest very much injured, and about 3,000 persons killed. On the 26th of June, 1807, the powder magazine of Luxembourg, containing 28,000 lbs., was struck, and besides about 30 persons killed and 200 injured, the town was ruined. Explosions and large fires, involving a great loss, have become rather frequent in this country, owing to the iron tanks used for the storage of petroleum being struck by lightning. From March to August, in 1876, over 10,000,000 gallons, and on April 19, 1877, over 2,000,000 gallons of oil, and the village of Troutman, were destroyed in the oil regions of Pennsylvania. Some of the thunderstorms which have prevailed in this country have been very terrific and destructive. During August 14th, 15th, and 16th, 1872, portions of New York State and the New England States were visited by some of the most terrific thunderstorms ever experienced, during which over 200 dwellings were struck and damaged, about 10 persons were instantly killed, and 160 stunned. Quite a number of barns, with their contents, hay and cattle, were also struck, fired, and consumed. Cars, while running on some of the railroads, were surrounded by a vivid electric light, but no passengers were injured, although they were greatly alarmed. Telegraph wires were melted by the half mile, telegraph instruments broken, and poles shattered in all directions. One of these storms occurred at midnight, at Arlington, Mass., August 14th, in which brilliant streams of electricity darted across the sky in every direction, and the thunder which followed was constant for a period of thirteen minutes, without the intermission of an instant of silence. Three hundred and thirty-one discharges were counted in seven minutes by an observer, and each discharge was followed by loud and sometimes rattling reports, whose reverberations rolled through the heavens in an endless procession of majestic and terrific sounds. During this scene, the moon, which was about half an hour above the western horizon, was visible, but so magnified, through the haze and vapor, as to appear like a brilliant flame suspended in the sky. For a period of twenty minutes the scene was one of grandeur and sublimity rarely witnessed. In the States of Illinois and Iowa, and the prairie country west of the Mississippi river, thunderstorms are generally more terrific, and more lives have been lost there from the effects of lightning than in any other section of this country. Owing to the said country being level and devoid of trees, the equilibrium between the electricity of the atmosphere and that of the earth is principally restored by disruptive discharges.--_Spang's "Treatise on Lightning Protection"_ * * * * * A tooth of a mastodon has been dug up near the Ashley river in South Carolina. It is 11½ inches long, 6 inches in diameter, and weighs more than 5 lbs. * * * * * THE SEA SERPENT SIGHTED FROM A ROYAL YACHT. The Osborne, paddle royal yacht, Commander Hugh L. Pearson, which arrived at Portsmouth from the Mediterranean on Monday, June 11, has forwarded an official report to the Admiralty, through the Commander-in-Chief (Admiral Sir George Elliot, K.C.B.), respecting a sea monster which she encountered during her homeward voyage. At about 5 o'clock in the afternoon of June 2, the sea being exceptionally calm, while the yacht was proceeding round the north coast of Sicily toward Cape Vito, the officer on the watch observed a long ridge of fins, each about 6 feet long, moving slowly along. He called for a telescope, and was at once joined by other officers. The Osborne was steaming westward at ten and a half knots an hour, and having a long passage before her, could not stay to make minute observations. The fins were progressing in a eastwardly direction, and as the vessel more nearly approached them, they were replaced by the foremost part of a gigantic monster. Its skin was, so far as it could be seen, altogether devoid of scales, appearing rather to resemble in sleekness that of a seal. The head was bullet-shaped, with an elongated termination, being somewhat similar in form to that of a seal, and was about six feet in diameter. Its features were only seen by one officer, who described them as like those of an alligator. The neck was comparatively narrow, but so much of the body as could be seen, developed in form like that of a gigantic turtle, and from each side extended two fins, about fifteen feet in length, by which the monster paddled itself along after the fashion of a turtle. The appearance of the monster is accounted for by a submarine volcano, which occurred north of Galita, in the Gulf of Tunis, about the middle of May, and was reported at the time by a steamer which was struck by a detached fragment of submarine rock. The disturbance below water, it is thought probable, may have driven up the monster from its "native element," as the site of the eruption is only one hundred miles from where it was reported to have been seen--_Portsmouth (Eng.) Times._ * * * * * SUNSTROKE. The sudden accession of heat has already produced one fatal, and more than one severe, case of sunstroke in the metropolis. Probably the affection so designated is not the malady to which the term _coup de soleil_ can be properly applied. The condition brought about is an exaggerated form of the disturbance occasioned by entering too suddenly the "hot" room of a Turkish bath. The skin does not immediately perform its function as an evaporating and therefore cooling surface, and an acute febrile state of the organism is established, with a disturbed balance of circulation, and more or less cerebral irritation as a prominent feature of the complaint. Death may suddenly occur at the outset of the complaint, as it has happened in a Turkish bath, where the subject labors under some predisposition to apoplexy, or has a weak or diseased heart. It should suffice to point out the danger and to explain, by way of warning, that although the degrees of heat registered by the thermometer, or the power of the sun's rays, do not seem to suggest especial caution, all sudden changes from a low to a high temperature are attended with danger to weak organisms. The avoidance of undue exercise--for example, persistent trotting or cantering up and down the Row--is an obvious precaution on days marked by a relatively, if not absolutely, high temperature. We direct attention to this matter because it is obvious the peculiar peril of overheating the body by exertion on the first burst of fine weather is not generally realized. It is forgotten that the increased temperature must be measured by the elevation which has recently taken place, not the number of degrees of heat at present recorded. The registered temperature may be more or less than that which occurred a year ago; but its immediate effects on the organism will be determined by the conditions which have preceded it and the violence of the change.--_Lancet_. * * * * * DEAD HORSES STANDING ERECT. The Danville _Advertiser_ of the 7th inst. says: Mr. Smith was in town on Saturday with his hired man, and the two tell a singular story about a lightning stroke. Mr. Smith was on a grain drill in a field, and his hired man was about 12 rods from him, dragging. Suddenly Smith heard the noise of thunder, and became unconscious. The man also heard the noise, but neither of them saw any flash of lightning. The man went to Smith, and in about twenty minutes he was restored to consciousness. Then attention was given to the horses. One of them was standing erect, with one foot lifted a little way from the earth, and the other was kneeling with his nose in the earth, and both were stone dead, and retained their positions until they were pushed over. The supposition is that in this case the electricity went from the earth to the sky. * * * * * The Berlin correspondent of the London _Times_ states that General Berdan, of the United States, has invented an instrument which will greatly improve the art of killing. He calls his invention a "range-finder." It consists of a telescope and other instruments, all of which can be carried on a dogcart, and which enable the engineers to measure with perfect accuracy up to 2,000 metres, or 1,500 yards. The time needed to ascertain distances, is only two minutes, and the General believes that his invention will double the accuracy of artillery fire, and quadruple that of infantry. * * * * * SETTING LOCOMOTIVE SLIDE VALVES. BY JOSHUA ROSE. E. G. asks: "How can I set the slide valves of a locomotive when she is on the road?" J. H. S. asks: "What is the method of setting locomotive slide valves from marks on the slide spindle?" And F. O. asks: "How are the valves of inside cylinder locomotives set, since the back ports are out of sight and you cannot measure the lead?" Our correspondent will find these questions answered in full below. It is presumed that the lengths of the eccentric rod, reverse rod, and other parts are correct, and they are properly connected and oiled so as to be in working order. The first thing to do is to place the reverse lever in the forward full-gear notch of the quadrants, or sectors, as they are sometimes called. The next procedure is to place the crank on its forward dead center as near as can be ascertained by the eye, and loosening the set screw of the forward eccentric, that is to say, the eccentric which connects with the upper end of the link, move that eccentric round on the shaft until the valve leaves the port at the front end of the cylinder open to the amount of whatever lead it is desired to give the valve. In moving the eccentric round on the shaft, it is necessary to move it in the direction in which it will turn when in operation. This is done in order to take up any lost motion there may be in the eccentric straps, in the eccentric rod eyebolts, or other working parts or joints between the eccentric and the slide valve rod or spindle. If the eccentric was turned backward instead of forward, all the lost motion would operate to vitiate the set of the valve, because, when the eccentric begins to move, its motion will have no effect in moving the slide valve spindle, until all the lost motion in the various parts is taken up by the eccentric movement. In considering this part of the operation, we must bear in mind that, to set the valve, we must move the wheels of the engine, it being impracticable to move the piston itself. Now, in moving the wheels, we are confronted with the fact that the crank pin is pulling the connecting rod; hence, if there is any lost motion in the brasses at either end of the connecting rod, the piston will not be at the end of its stroke when the crank is on its dead center. Suppose, for instance, that we have moved the driving wheel forward until the crank stands upright at a right angle to the bore of the cylinder, the resistance to motion of the piston and crosshead has caused the crank pin to bed against the half-brass nearest to the cylinder, all the play or lost motion is then between the other half-brass and the crank pin. When, however, the engine is at work and the piston is driving the crank pin, instead of being driven by it, the lost motion will exist between the crank pin and the half-brass nearest to the cylinder, and the contact will exist between the crank pin and the other brass. The difference in the position of the piston, caused by this lost motion, may be ascertained by moving the piston back and forth until the crank pin contacts with first one and then the other half-brass. It is sometimes attempted to remedy the defect due to this lost motion by moving the crank pin past the dead center and then moving it back to the dead center, so that while on that center the play or lost motion in the connecting rod is taken up. This is all very well so far as the connecting rod and piston is concerned, and will cause them both to stand on their respective dead centers with the lost motion taken up; but, in moving the wheel back to the dead center, we have given full liberty to all the lost motion in the various parts of the valve motion or gear, as already explained, in reference to moving the eccentric upon the shaft. As there are so many more parts in the valve gear, in which lost motion may occur, it is manifestly preferable to take up that play by moving the driving wheel in a continuous direction, rather than to move the latter back to accommodate any play there may be in the connecting rod. The crank being placed by the eye upon its forward dead center, and the eccentric connected to the top of the link being moved round on the axle (in the direction in which the wheels will run when the engine is going forward) until the steam port at the front end of the cylinder is open to the amount of the lead, we fasten the eccentric to hold in that position. We then throw the reverse lever over into the last notch at the other end of the sector, lifting the link up so that the eccentric connected to the lower end of the link may be approximately adjusted, which is done by moving the eccentric round upon the axle (in the direction in which the axle will revolve when the engine is running backward) until the crank stands upon the same dead center, and the front port is open to the amount of the lead. This being done, we have the eccentrics approximately adjusted and may proceed to the final adjustment, in which the first thing to do is to find the exact dead centers of the crank. It is obvious that a line drawn through the center of the crank pin and the center of the wheel axle, will stand horizontally true and level when the crank is on either of the dead centers, but the presence of the crank pin makes it impracticable to draw such a line. We can therefore draw one which will be parallel to those centers; and to do this we draw a circle upon the end of the wheel axle (and from its center) of the same diameter as that of the crank pin, and then resting a straight-edge upon the bearing of the crank pin (taking care to avoid the round corner upon the pin, if there is one), we place the other end of the straight-edge even with the top of the circle drawn upon the axle; and then, using the straight-edge as a guide, we draw a line across the end of the axle and the wheel face. When this line is level the crank will be upon its dead center. This plan is sometimes employed, but is not a very accurate one, because the length of the line is very short as compared to the circumference of the driving wheel; hence, an error of the thickness of the line becomes one equal to several thicknesses of the line when carried out to the wheel circumference. Furthermore, if the line of the cylinder does not stand horizontally level, as is sometimes the case, the result of the whole proceeding will be inaccurate. Again, the connecting rod end and the coupling rod is in the way, rendering it awkward to both draw and level the line. A better and more accurate method to find the dead centers is as follows: Place the reverse lever into the end notch of the sector at the forward end, and then move the driving wheel forward until the guide block is within about a quarter of an inch of the end of its travel, then place a straight-edge against the end of the guide block, and draw, on the outside face of the guide bar, a line even with the end of the guide block. Bend a piece of wire (pointed at both ends) to a right angle, make a center punch mark either in the rail, under the driving wheel, or in some stationary, solid part contiguous to the wheel, or at such distance from it that when one end of the bent wire is placed in the center punch mark, the operator with the other end will be able to draw a line across the rim of the driving wheel. Here, however, arises another consideration, that it is better to set the valves with the wheel axle in its proper position in the pedestal shoes, and in order to do this the wheel should rest upon the rail with its proper proportion of the weight of the engine resting upon it. The springs will then be deflected to their proper amount, and the axle box will have passed its proper distance up the pedestals. It is obvious that if the engine is blocked up so that the driving wheels clear the rails (which is done in order to avoid having the weight of the engine to move while setting the valve), the axle boxes will drop in the pedestal and the valve will be set incorrectly, as the wheels are in a wrong position. To avoid this, and at the same time to avoid having to move the whole engine while setting the valve, the engine is blocked up from the rails, and the axle boxes of the driving wheels are wedged up so as to be lifted up into their proper position. In this case there is no very accurate means of ascertaining what is the exact proper height, save it be by first marking upon the outside faces of the shoes or pedestal a line even with the top of the axle box when the load is upon the wheels, and then, after blocking up the engine from the rails, wedging up the axle boxes till the face again comes even with the line. Whatever plan is pursued, one end of the piece of wire is rested in the fixed center punch mark, and with the other a line is drawn across the outside face of the wheel rim. The driving wheel is then revolved forward until the guide block returns, having passed to the end of its travel. When its end again stands exactly even with the mark made upon the guide bar, the piece of wire is again brought into requisition, one end being rested in the fixed center punch mark as before, and with the other end another line is drawn across the outside rim of the wheel. It is obvious that by taking a pair of compasses and finding a point exactly equidistant between the two lines thus marked upon the wheel rim, and then marking that point with a center punch mark, the crank will be upon its exact dead center, when one end of the piece of bent wire rests in the fixed center punch mark, the other end rests in the center punch mark upon the wheel rim. To find the other dead center, the wheel must be moved about halfway round and the process repeated with the motion block at the other end of the guide bars. Thus, whenever the piece of wire will stand with one end resting in the fixed center punch mark and the other end in either of the center punch marks upon the wheel run, the crank is upon a dead center. Having thus placed the crank upon either dead center, we measure the valve lead, and if in temporarily fixing our eccentrics we gave it too much lead, we mark where it stands upon the shaft by means of a line drawn on the axle and carried up on the side face of the eccentric; then move the eccentric back some little distance more than is necessary to make the adjustment, and then move it forward again a little at a time, noting when the valve has the proper amount of lead, and thus fasten the eccentric upon the axle by means of the set screw. The object of moving the eccentric too far back and then moving it forward is to make the adjustment so that the latter may be made with the lost motion of the valve gear all taken up. The next proceeding is to move the driving wheel halfway round and try the lead at that end of the stroke. If the lead at the two ends is not equal, it shows that either the slide valve spindle or the eccentric rods are not of the proper length and must be rectified; this being done, the crank must be again placed upon first one and then the other dead center, the valve lead being measured at each end. When the lead is equal at each end, the rods are of correct length, and the amount of the lead must be regulated by moving the eccentrics as already directed. If the link block does not come opposite the end of the eccentric rod when the reverse lever is in the end notch of the sector, the length of the reverse rod is wrong and should be corrected. If the link block comes right, under the above conditions, for the forward but not for the backward eccentric rod, the notches in the sector are not cut in their proper positions, or the link hanger is not of the proper length. In either case the error may be remedied by altering the length of the latter. But, as doing this would alter the amount of the valve lead, it is well, if there is any prospect of such errors, to correct them before setting the valves. Instead of measuring the lead of the valve with a rule, or by a wedge, the following plan is very often adopted: After the valve and spindle are in position, the valve is placed with the proper amount of lead upon the front port. A center punch mark is then made upon the face of the steam chest. A piece of quarter inch iron wire is then bent at right angles and each end filed to a point. One end of this wire is placed in the fixed center punch mark in the steam chest, and with the other a mark is made upon the slide spindle. Upon this latter mark a center punch mark is also made sufficiently deep to be very plainly visible when the burr raised by center punching is filed off, which is necessary to prevent this burr from cutting the packing. It follows that whenever the bent piece of wire will rest with one end in the center punch mark in the steam chest, and the other end in the center punch mark in the slide spindle, the valve is in its proper position when the crank is on the corresponding dead center. This plan is a very old one and possesses the advantage that the valve may be set without seeing it, that is to say, with the steam chest cover on. If the length of the piece of wire measured direct from point to point is known, the valve may be set when the engine is upon the road without taking off the steam chest cover. The center punch mark upon the steam chest should, however, always be placed in about the same spot, so as to avoid mistakes in case of there being other similar marks upon the chest. It should always be made deep, so as not to get filled up with paint and be difficult to find. In course of time the mark upon the slide valve spindle is apt to disappear from the wear of the spindle, hence the center punch with which it is made should have a long conical point. To mark the position of the eccentric upon the axle, it is an excellent plan, after the eccentrics are finally adjusted, to take a chisel with the cutting end ground to the form of a fiddle drill, one cutting edge being at a right angle to the other. The chisel must be held so that while one edge rests upon the axle, the other edge will bear against the radial face of the eccentric. A sharp blow with a hammer upon the chisel-head will make a clean indented cut upon the axle and the eccentric, the two cuts exactly meeting at their junction and denoting the position of the eccentrics. In setting the valves of inside cylinder locomotives, the back ports being out of sight, the amount of lead is ascertained by making a wooden wedge about three inches long, a thirty-second of an inch thick at one end and three eighths of an inch thick at the other end. The faces of this wedge are chalked, and the lead is measured by inserting it between the edge of the valve and the edge of the port until its thickness just fills the space, and then moving it edgeways so that the valve and port edges will just mark it. By measuring the thickness of the wedge at the mark, the amount of lead is ascertained. After the valves are set, it is still desirable to mark the position by center punch marks upon the outside of the steam chests and upon the valve spindles, as already described. If an eccentric should slip when the engine is upon the road, and there are no marks whereby to readjust them, it may be done approximately as follows: Put the reverse lever in the end notch of the forward gear, then place the crank as nearly on a dead center as the eye will direct, and open both the cylinder cocks, then disconnect the slide valve spindle from the rocker arm, and move the valve spindle until the opening of the port corresponding to the dead center on which the crank stands will be shown by steam blowing through the cylinder cock, the throttle valve being opened a trifle. The position of the valve being thus determined, the eccentric must be moved upon the shaft until the valve spindle will connect with the rocker arm without being moved at all. The throttle valve should be very slightly opened, otherwise so much steam will be admitted into the cylinder that it will pass through any leak in the piston and blow through both cylinder cocks before there is time to ascertain which cock gives first exit to the steam. * * * * * NEW STEAMER. A new steamer for the Mallory line, between New York and Texas, was lately launched from the yard of Roach & Co., Chester, Pa., 2,200 tons burden. Principal dimensions as follows: Length over all, 239 feet 7 inches; beam (moulded), 34 feet; depth from the base to the spar deck beams, 18 feet 2½ inches; depth of hold, 16 feet 5½ inches; diameter of propeller (Hirsch's patent-four blades), 11 feet 6 inches. She is to be provided with compound engines, having cylinders 24 and 44 inches in diameter, with a stroke of 44 inches, and two return tubular boilers 10 feet long, 10 feet 3 inches wide, and 8 feet 6 inches high. Aft are compartments capable of holding 80 tons of water, for the purpose of depressing the stern before and after crossing the bar at Corpus Christi. Her low draught is 7½ feet; speed, 14 knots. * * * * * A TIN-CAN TELEPHONE. In Professor Bell's telephone a plate of sheet iron is made to vibrate by means of the electrical current, something after the manner of the skin of a drumhead. In a recent improvement by Mr. G. B. Havens, Louisville, Ky., the electrical wires are wrapped around a common tin fruit can. By means of tin cans at each end, sounds, it is said, were sent over 92 miles of wire, and included several pieces of music. * * * * * MR. HOTCHKISS, an American inventor, whose improved revolving cannon we illustrated some time since, has received intimation that his system has been approved by the French Government, and that they have decided to adopt his cannon. * * * * * COLLENDER'S IMPROVED BILLIARD TABLE. In the accompanying engravings, we illustrate two important improvements in the construction of billiard tables, which have recently been devised by Mr. H. W. Collender, the well known billiard table manufacturer of this city. The first, which is represented in Fig. 1, relates to the construction of the bed-supporting frame, and aims to render the same stronger while cheapening its manufacture. In putting together the body and framework of the table, the usual practice is to cut away the stock of the cross beam and longitudinal beam, and halve them together. Longitudinal grooves are also formed on the inner surface of the side and "broad rails," to accommodate tenons on the ends of the cross beams; and the latter are secured in place by bolts fastening their ends to the broad rails. Mr. Collender claims that, by this mode of construction, not only are the cross beams weakened by being halved together, but the broad rails are also weakened by the cutting away of this stock near the middle to effect the framing into them of the ends of the cross beams. [Illustration: Fig 1, billiard table support frame] From Fig. 1, it will be seen that the cross beam, A, is combined with the side broad rails in the following manner: Upon the inner face of each broad rail is secured a cast iron socket piece, B, into which fits one end of the cross beam, A. From said beam the bolt, C, passes through the shoe, B, and is secured by a nut, D, let into the stock of the broad rail. The shoe, B, has lugs which enter the broad rail; and the aperture in it, through which the bolt passes, is made oblong to admit of the drawing of the parts together after the insertion of the bolt. Upon the sides of the cross beam near the middle, and directly opposite each other, are two shoes, E; these have no bolt holes. In them are placed the adjacent ends of the longitudinal beams, F, the other extremities of which are seated in shoes on the broad rails. The shoes, E, have their lugs of such a length, compared with the thickness of cross beam, A, that when put in place on said beam said lugs will come together. The advantage of this is that, should the beam, A, shrink in width, the shoes on each side of it will still maintain their proper relation to form immovable abutments for the ends of pieces, F. This construction allows of shorter stuff being used in the manufacture, and renders the framework stronger. [Illustration: Figure 2, billiard table frame corner] In Fig. 2 is illustrated a new method of forming the corners of the table. Hitherto it has been customary to use corner blocks, of various sizes according to the dimensions of the table, located one at each corner. Into these the broad rails were framed and secured. To this arrangement Mr. Collender adduces a long category of objections, based on the possibility of the weight of the bed being thrown on these blocks in case of shrinkage of the frame, on the fact that the corner of the table bed must necessarily be left without any support where it extends over the upper end of the corner block, and also that in a bevel table, in which the area of the top of the corner block is unavoidably much greater than that of the top of the corner block of a vertical-sided table, a large portion of the table bed will be left without any support. The new device consists of a cast iron union plate, G, which is bolted to the leg as shown. The broad rails and casting are securely fastened by the bolt, H. It will be seen that this bolt, passing through the end of one broad rail, and into a nut let into the other rail, will securely draw and hold together the ends of said rails and the interposed metal plate clamped between them, and that as the plain ends of the wooden rails just fit (widthwise) between the projecting heads on the edges of said interposed plate, the latter will form a sort of housing for the ends of the rails. And it will be understood that in this construction not only does the bead on the outer edge of the plate overlap the edges of the rails and form a neat and durable corner finish to the body, but the broad rails being bolted together in the direction of the grain of the wood with only an interposed metal plate, there will be no tendency to a loosening of the union of the parts of the frame. The main importance of this invention rests in the idea of dispensing with the usual corner blocks, and thus permitting the top edges of the broad rails, on which the bed rests, to practically come together and afford a perfect support to the bed clear out to the corners of the latter; at the same time the whole structure is rendered stronger and more durable with less weight of material. These inventions are the subject of separate patents, that of the first being dated April 4, 1876, and of the second, November 16, 1875. For further information, address the manufacturer and patentee, Mr. H. W. Collender, 738 Broadway, New York city. * * * * * COATING ENGRAVED COPPER PLATES WITH STEEL. In order to render copper plates which are used in printing more durable, they can be covered with an electrolytic deposit of iron which possesses an unusual degree of hardness almost superior to steel. The salt usually employed has been the double sulphate of iron and ammonia. Professor Böttger, who first invented this process, has recently devised an improvement in the bath employed. He dissolves 10 parts of ferrocyanide of potassium (yellow prussiate of potash) and 20 parts of the double tartrate of soda and potash (Rochelle salts) in 200 parts of water, and to this he adds 3 parts of persulphate of iron dissolved in 50 parts of water. A large precipitate of Prussian blue is formed. To the whole is added, drop by drop, with constant stirring, a solution of caustic soda until the blue precipitate entirely disappears, leaving a perfectly clear, light yellow liquid, which is now ready for use. Professor Böttger also claims that this solution can be employed with advantage for dyeing cotton yarn and fabrics a beautiful blue, without the use of a mordant. For this purpose the goods are put into the bath, that has previously been slightly warmed, until they are saturated through and through, and then dried in the air, after which they are immersed in extremely dilute sulphuric acid (1 to 50), which neutralizes the alkali, and after washing and drying again they are permanently dyed a fine blue color. * * * * * TEST FOR SULPHUR IN ORGANIC COMPOUNDS. H. Vohl recommends the following as the best method of detecting sulphur in organic compounds: The substance to be tested is heated in a solution of caustic lime and oxide of lead in glycerin. The latter is prepared as follows: One volume of distilled water is mixed with 2 volumes of pure glycerin and heated to boiling; freshly prepared slaked lime is added, little by little, until it is saturated. Freshly precipitated hydrated oxide of lead, or moist litharge, is added in excess, and the liquid allowed to boil gently for a few minutes, then tightly corked and left to cool, after which the clear liquid is decanted from the sediment into a glass vessel that can be tightly corked. If into this solution be introduced and heated any organic which contains sulphur, like hair, feathers, horn, albumen, and the like, it will at once turn black from the formation of sulphide of lead. The great delicacy of this test is evident from the fact that, when pure wheat bread is boiled with this reagent, it turns yellow at first and then dark gray in consequence of the presence of sulphur in the gluten of the bread. * * * * * IMPROVED BILLIARD BALL HOLDER. The usual receptacle for the fourth ball, when only three balls are used in the game of billiards, is placed at the side of the table. As this is both inconvenient and unsightly, a neat device, clearly shown in the annexed illustration, has been invented, which is intended to be attached to a gas fixture over the table. A plate or sign is also added on which the number of a table--in case several tables are employed, as in a billiard saloon--may be inscribed. The form and design of the arrangement may of course be varied in many ways. [Illustration: billiard ball holder] Patented May 2, 1876. For further particulars, address the manufacturer, Mr. H. W. Collender, 738 Broadway, New York city. * * * * * THE MONITOR CHALK CUP. The annexed engraving represents an improved chalk cup or holder for billiard tables, which is so constructed that it will not become loose, sag down, mar the table, or jar when the ball strikes the cushion. It may be adjusted to remain in any desired position. The shank is pivoted in a metallic frame which is secured to the table. The rear end of the shank works against a spring. On the upper portion of the shank is a projection which embraces a horizontal flange to sustain the box against being forced downward. The arrangement is very similar to the ordinary window catch. The player has only to start the box from its position under the table, when the spring carries it out at right angles to the rail. A touch is sufficient to cause the spring to carry the box back to its former position. The device is very simple, and its advantages will be evident to all billiard players cognizant of the defects of the ordinary cup. [Illustration: THE MONITOR CHALK CUP.] Patented May 1, 1877. For further particulars, address the manufacturer and patentee, Mr. H. W. Collender, 738 Broadway, New York city. * * * * * CURIOUS CARNIVOROUS PLANTS. The _arum Dracunculus_ is one of the most curious of that wonderful series of carnivorous plants which at the present time are engaging the closest scrutiny of naturalists. It is a true trap in one sense--inasmuch as it captures the victim which ventures near it; but it relies on little or no mechanical means for securing its prey, but stupefies the living insect by its odor. The flower is horn-shaped, about 11 inches in length, with an opening some 5 inches in diameter. The color within is a dull dark violet, while the interior of the spathe is lined with black, hooked bristles, the whole appearance of the flower being thoroughly repulsive. The illustrations herewith presented, Figs. 1 and 2, represent it at one third its natural size, Fig. 2 showing a section of the flower. It is not certain what attracts the insects, which are usually of the species known as the meat fly and the common house fly. They do not seem to seek for the small quantity of nectar concealed, and yet they cluster about the fatal opening, as if drawn by some overpowering fascination. Overcome by lethargy, they fall inert upon the flower, are lightly held by the bristles, and finally die asphyxiated by the carbonic acid which the plant disengages in large quantities during its inflorescence. Strange as is the action of the _arum_, the method whereby the _mentzelia_ takes its prey is even more wonderful. To illustrate on a magnified scale, let the reader imagine a surface thickly covered with strong iron posts, on the sides of which are numerous keen barbs pointing downward. Then between these posts, suppose that jars overflowing with honey are placed. An elephant, let it be imagined, attracted by the profusion of sweetness, inserts his trunk between the posts and finds easy access to the honey. But while he can force his proboscis downward past the barbs turned in that direction, when he attempts to withdraw it he finds the keen points catch in the flesh, and render it impossible to do so. A terrible struggle follows, the unfortunate animal twisting and writhing in every direction, until finally by an Herculean effort the head is torn from the body, and the latter becomes digested by some potent gastric juice, exuding from the colossal organism of which the trap forms but a portion. Of course this is vastly exaggerated, and it would puzzle an elephant to pull his own head off; but if for the post studded trap, we substitute the surface of a flower, and if we replace the elephant by a fly, we shall have conceived an accurate picture of what takes place in the peculiar receptacle with which Nature has provided the _mentzelia ornata_. This is very beautifully shown in Fig. 3; and at A, in same figure, is represented the barbed bristles grasping the highly magnified proboscis of the fly. Between the barbed bristles are mushroom-shaped projections, from the summits of which a viscous nectar exudes. This is the honey bait which induces the insect to insert his trunk between the fatal barbs. There is still another plant, _physianthus albens_, which captures butterflies by grasping the proboscis. The construction of the flower is quite complicated, so that the insects are compelled to insert their trunks through a narrow and winding passage in order to reach the nectar. The organ then necessarily comes in contact with an adhesive substance, which prevents its removal. The _Gronovia scandens_, Fig. 4, is another plant trap, which catches no flies nor possesses any such wonderfully adapted devices as the plants already described. It simply has its branches covered with double barbed bristles of great strength which attach themselves to anything brought in contact with them. The bristles are strong enough to hold lizards, as represented by our engraving, the points inserting themselves in the interstices of the scaly covering of the reptile. Of course the lizard thus held starves to death, and small birds often follow a like fate. We are indebted to _La Nature_ for the illustrations. [Illustration: Figs. 1 and 2.--ARUM DRACUNCULUS.] [Illustration: Fig. 3.--MENTZELIA.] [Illustration: Fig. 4.--GRONOVIA SCANDENS.] * * * * * POPULAR FALLACIES. Night air and damp weather are held in great horror by multitudes of persons who are sickly or of weak constitutions; consequently, by avoiding the night air, and damp weather, and changeable weather, and weather that is considered too hot or too cold, they are kept within doors the much largest portion of their time, and as a matter of course continue invalids, more and more ripening for the grave every hour; the reason is, they are breathing an impure atmosphere nineteen-twentieths of their whole existence. As nothing can wash us clean but pure water, so nothing can cleanse the blood, nothing can make health-giving blood, but the agency of pure air. So great is the tendency of the blood to become impure in consequence of waste and useless matters mixing with it as it passes through the body, that it requires a hogshead of air every hour of our lives to unload it of these impurities; but in proportion as this air is vitiated, in such proportion does it infallably fail to relieve the blood of these impurities, and impure blood is the foundation of all disease. The great fact that those who are out of doors most, summer and winter, day and night, rain or shine, have the best health the world over, does of itself falsify the general impression that night air or any other out-door air is unhealthy as compared with in-door air at the same time. Air is the great necessity of life; so much so, that if deprived of it for a moment, we perish; and so constant is the necessity of the blood for contact with the atmosphere, that every drop in the body is exposed to the air through the medium of the lungs every two minutes and a half of our existence. Whatever may be the impurity of the out-door air of any locality, the in-door air of that locality is still more impure, because of the dust, and decaying and odoriferous matters which are found in all dwellings. Besides, how can in-door air be more healthy than the out-door air, other things being equal, when the dwelling is supplied with air from without? To this very general law there is one exception, which it is of the highest importance to note. When the days are hot, and the nights cool, there are periods of time within each twenty-four hours, when it is safest to be in-doors, with doors and windows closed; that is to say, for the hour or two including sunrise and sunset, because about sunset the air cools, and the vapors which the heats of the day have caused to ascend far above us, condense and settle near the surface of the earth, so as to be breathed by the inhabitants; as the night grows colder, these vapors sink lower, and are within a foot or two of the earth, so they are not breathed. As the sun rises, these same vapors are warmed, and begin to ascend, to be breathed again, but as the air becomes warmer, they are carried so far above our heads as to be innocuous. Thus it is that the old citizens of Charleston, S. C., remember, that while it was considered important to live in the country during the summer, the common observation of the people originated the custom of riding into town, not in the cool of the evening or of the morning, but in the middle of the day. They did not understand the philosophy, but they observed the fact that those who came to the city at mid-day remained well, while those who did so early or late suffered from it. All strangers at Rome are cautioned not to cross the Pontine marshes after the heat of the day is over. Sixteen of a ship's crew, touching at one of the West India islands, slept on shore several nights, and thirteen of them died of yellow fever in a few days, while of two hundred and eighty, who were freely ashore during the day, not a single case of illness occurred. The marshes above named are crossed in six or eight hours, and many travelers who do it in the night are attacked with mortal fevers. This does, at first sight, seem to indicate that night air _is_ unwholesome, at least in the locality of virulent malarias, but there is no direct proof that the air about sunrise and sunset is not that which is productive of the mischief. For the sake of eliciting the observations of intelligent men, we present our theory on this subject. A person might cross these marshes with impunity, who would set out on his journey an hour or two after sundown, and finish it an hour or two before sun-up, especially if he began that journey on a hearty meal, because, in this way, he would be traveling in the cool of the night, which coolness keeps the malaria so near the surface of the earth as to prevent its being breathed to a hurtful extent. But if it is deadly to sleep out of doors all night in a malarial locality, would it be necessarily fatal to sleep in a house in such a locality? It would not. It would be safer to sleep in the house, especially if the windows and doors were closed. The reason is, that the house has been warmed during the day, and if kept closed, it remains much warmer during the night indoors than it is outdoors; consequently, the malaria is kept by this warmth so high above the head, and so rarefied, as to be comparatively harmless. This may seem to some too nice a distinction altogether, but it will be found throughout the world of Nature that the works of the Almighty are most strikingly beautiful in their _minutæ_, and these _minutæ_ are the foundation of His mightiest manifestations. Thus it is, too, that what we call fever and ague might be banished from the country as a general disease, if two things were done. 1. Have a fire kindled every morning at daylight, from spring to fall, in the family room, to which all the family should repair from their chambers, and there remain until breakfast is taken. 2. Let a fire be kindled in the family room a short time before sundown; let every member of the family repair to it, and there remain until supper is taken. In both cases, the philosophy of the course marked out consists in two things. First. The fire rarefies the malaria and causes it to ascend above the breathing point. Second. The food taken into the stomach creates an activity of circulation which repels disease.--_Hall's Journal of Health_. * * * * * THE EXTENSION OF THE PLAGUE. Our recent English medical exchanges mention, with undisguised apprehension, the fact that already early this spring authentic observers state that the plague has broken out in Bagdad, and is rapidly increasing there; and information from other sources renders it probable that the disease has shown itself in other places in the vicinity of that city, some of which have not suffered before since the new development of the disease in Mesopotamia, three or four years ago. The progress of the epidemic in and about Bagdad last year shows that each year since its reappearance in that district it has covered a wider area, and it will be remembered that last year it crossed the Turco-Persian frontier, and broke out at Shuster, in Khuzistan. From the phenomena of the epidemic to this period it was feared, especially by the physicians on the spot, that, if it should recur in the present year, it must be expected to extend over a still wider area, and show itself in even a more aggravated form than had yet been observed. This opinion is concurred in by Surgeon-Major Colville, the medical officer attached to the British Embassy at Bagdad, and is expressed in his official report, on the subject of the last and previous year's outbreak. The Turco-Russian struggle in Asia Minor, and the massing of Persian troops on the western frontier of that country, add an additional and most grave factor to this ominous intelligence. It has been so long since Christian Europe has suffered from this terrible disease that most medical men have never seen a case, and, indeed, for awhile, epidemiologists flattered themselves it had "died out." They yet say that a thorough system of sanitation will certainly check its advance. Let us hope so; for of all pestilences which have ever scourged humanity, and desolated empires, none approach in magnitude those of the plague. Under the name of "the black death," it fills, as Hirsch remarks, one of the darkest pages in the history of the human race. It devastated every known country of the earth, and penetrated to the remotest mountain hamlets and granges, sometimes sweeping away in a few days every inhabitant, leaving not one to remember the name or to inherit the goods of the family or the village. Long years afterward, travelers would come upon these unknown villages, the houses rotting, the bones of the plague-stricken owners bleaching in the rooms and streets, and no one to say who they had been. As an epidemic disease, it no doubt spreads from India, that mother of pestilence, where, in the province of Kutch and Guzerat, it is found as an endemic of great malignancy. Far more fatal in its historical appearance than the cholera, it is well that the medical mind of Europe is on the alert to meet its approach with the most energetic measures; and should they fail, it will devolve upon us to lose no time in taking up the defensive in the most energetic manner.--_Medical and Surgical Reporter._ * * * * * EDUCATION IN GERMANY. The compulsory school laws of Prussia are frequently pointed to as models for similar laws, perhaps with the hope that by imitating her lower schools we can bring up our high schools to an equal rank with hers, and place our universities on a level with those which are producing the most finished scholars, the deepest thinkers, and the greatest investigators. We are likely to forget that the conditions are different, and especially that _nascitur, non fit_, is as true of a chemist as of a poet. The state of popular education in Germany is, however, a matter of interest, and is best illustrated by the following table, showing the percentage of unschooled men among the recruits from different German provinces: Per cent. Prussia 3.19 Bavaria 1.79 Saxony 0.23 Würtemberg 0.02 Baden 0.22 Hesse 0.35 Mecklenburg 1.09 Thuringia 1.42 Alsace 3.45 These figures seem to indicate a higher grade of intelligence and wider diffusion of knowledge among all classes, for recruits are from every class, than in Austria, although in the latter the figures are arranged so differently as to make any accurate comparison of Austria and Germany rather difficult and unsatisfactory. -----------------+----------+----------------+-----------------+---------- NAME OF DISTRICT.| Number of| Number of | Percentage of | Number of | Common | inhabitants to | school children | Normal | Schools. | each school. | who attend. | Schools. -----------------+----------+----------------+-----------------+---------- Bohemia | 4,190 | 1,254 | 77 | 12 Bukowina | 167 | 3,121 | 9 | 1 Dalmatia | 241 | 1,864 | 12 | 2 Galicia | 2,374 | 2,341 | 15 | 1 Carinthia | 318 | 1,060 | ? | 2 Carniola | 234 | 1,187 | 48 | 2 Custrin | 396 | 1,496 | 38 | 5 Moravia | 1,866 | 1,082 | 78 | 5 Lower Austria | 1,267 | 1,578 | 76 | 5 Upper Austria | 506 | 1,455 | 82 | 2 Salzburg | 155 | 982 | 85 | 1 Steiermark | 690 | 1,657 | 59 | 3 Schlesia | 433 | 1,208 | 77 | 4 Tyrol | 1,926 | 457 | ? | 6 |----------|----------------|-----------------|---------- Total | 14,763 | | | 51 -----------------+----------+----------------+-----------------+---------- Over 3,000 teachers' positions are said to be vacant at the present time. * * * * * BLEACHING SILK AND WOOL. The methods now in use for bleaching silk, wool, and all animal fibers, such as sulphurous acid, alkalies, soap, etc., are so imperfect that Tessié du Motay has patented the following process, involving the use of binoxide of barium, with or without the addition of permanganates. The binoxide of barium is pulverized and subjected to the action of carbonic acid to remove any unconverted caustic baryta present. It is then thrown into boiling water, and after the bath has partially cooled the materials to be bleached are introduced and the bath kept at a temperature of 86° Fah. to 194° Fah. for two hours; silk from wild silkworms requiring a higher temperature than wool, goat's hair, and the like. It is then taken out and washed, put into an acid bath, then washed again. If necessary, the barium bath is repeated, as also the subsequent washings. If this second bath of binoxide of barium does not produce the requisite whiteness, it is introduced into a solution of permanganic acid or permanganate of magnesia before the last washing. Binoxide of Barium, BaO_{2}, is made by subjecting the oxide or caustic baryta, BaO, to a stream of oxygen or common air at a high temperature. Its bleaching action is probably due to the formation of peroxide of hydrogen in solution in the bath. * * * * * AN ALLOY OF TIN AND PHOSPHORUS. At the Graupen Tin Works, in Bohemia, an alloy of tin and phosphorus is made containing the greatest possible quantity of phosphorus which the tin is able to retain without losing any of it upon repeated meltings. This compound, which is neither entitled to the name of alloy nor is it a phosphide of tin, is employed in the manufacture of phosphorus-bronze. In the manufacture of phosphorus-bronze, by alloying copper with phosphorus-tin, no other precautions require to be observed than in the preparation of common bronze. As the different properties of phosphorus-bronze depend upon the proportions of phosphorus and of tin, two kinds of phosphorus-tin are prepared. No. 0 contains 5 per cent., and No. 1, 2½ per cent. of phosphorus. These two kinds suffice to make the greater part of all the desired mixtures. For special purposes, the Graupen Works make to order phosphorus-tin with any desired quantity of phosphorus not exceeding 5 per cent., which is the highest possible limit. It is claimed that phosphorus-bronze may be manufactured by the use of this phosphorus-tin as much as 40 per cent. cheaper than that now in the market, while it will only cost 8 per cent. more than the ordinary tin and copper bronze. No details are given of the method employed to make the phosphorus combine with tin, but the low melting point of tin as compared with that of copper would indicate that this would lead to the great saving promised above. * * * * * AMERICAN INSTITUTE EXHIBITION. The forty-sixth Exhibition of this Institute will open September 12, in this city. Parties having novelties which they intend to bring to public notice should at once address the General Superintendent for blanks and information. The medals, it is said, have been increased and special awards will be made upon a number of articles. * * * * * AMERICAN INVENTIONS FOR NEW SOUTH WALES. Writing from Sydney, under date of April 14, the _Times_ correspondent thus refers to the supply of locomotives and carriages from America: Our appearance at Philadelphia has drawn the attention of American manufacturers to us in a most marked and unexpected degree. A country that, like New South Wales, is rolling in wealth must be a country that is able to buy, and a country that is able to buy is exactly the country that American manufacturers have been anxiously looking out for. Our representatives at Philadelphia have come back strongly impressed with the fact that there are many things that the Americans can supply us with advantage. Our Government has an offer from Messrs. Baldwin & Co. to furnish a locomotive engine for about £1,000 less than the cost of an English engine, and to leave the payment open until the engine has been thoroughly proved and approved. A Pullman's sleeping car and an ordinary passenger car have already been ordered, and American wheels, axles, rails, and brakes are strongly pressed on our acceptance. As our Government engineers are all of the English school, American novelties will have a hard battle to fight to win official acceptance, but the demand for economy in railway construction and working is so great that people and Parliament will press on the Minister for Public Works a fair trial for any American novelties that may seem to be suited to our wants. The English manufacturers, therefore, who have hitherto supplied us must look to their laurels.--_Capital and Labor_. * * * * * MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. Concerning man's true place in Nature, Haeckel says: "Whatever part of the body we consider, we find upon the most exact examination that man is more nearly related to the highest apes than are the latter to the lowest apes. It would therefore be wholly forced and unnatural to regard man in the zoological system as constituting a distinct order, and thus to separate him from the true ape. Rather is the scientific zoologist compelled, whether it is agreeable to him or not, to rank man within the order of the true ape (Simiæ)." To whatever minutiæ of detail the comparison is carried, we reach in every case the same result. Between man and the anthropoid apes there are the closest anatomical and physiological resemblances. In form and function, there is the most exact agreement between all the corresponding bones of the skeleton of each; the same arrangement and structure of the muscles, nerves and entire viscera, and of the spleen, liver and lungs--the latter being a matter of especial significance, for between the manner of breathing and the process of nutrition there is the closest relation. The brain, also, is subject to the same laws of development, and differs only with regard to size. The minute structure of the skin, nails, and even the hair, is identical in character. Although man has lost the greater part of his hairy covering, as Darwin thinks, in consequence of sexual selection, yet the rudimentary hairs upon the body correspond, in many respects, to those of the anthropoids. The formation of the beard is the same in both cases; while the face and ears remain bare. Anthropoids and men become grayhaired in old age. But the most remarkable circumstance is that, upon the upper arm, the hairs are, in both cases, directed downward, and upon the lower arm upward; while in the case of the half-apes it is different, and not as soft as that of man and the anthropoids. The eye, on account of its delicate structure, is peculiarly suitable for comparisons of this kind; and we find here the greatest similarity: even inflammation and green cataract occur under the same circumstances, in both. See, also, Darwin upon this point. There is no more striking proof that man and the anthropoid apes have the same anatomical and physiological nature, and require the same food, than the similarity of their blood. Under the microscope the blood corpuscles are identical in form and appearance; while those of the carnivora are clearly different from them. It may now be interesting, in confirmation of what has been said, to refer to the family life, and, if one may so speak, to the mental and moral life of the anthropoids. Like man, the ape provides with exceeding care for its young, so that its parental affection has become proverbial. Connubial fidelity is a general and well known virtue. The mother ape leads its young to the water, and washes its face and hands in spite of its crying. Wounds are also washed out with water. The ape, when in distress, will weep like a human being, and in a manner that is said to be very affecting. Young apes manifest the same tendencies as human children. When domesticated, they are in youth docile and teachable, and also, at times, like all children, disobedient. In old age they often become morose and capricious. Most apes construct huts, or, at least, roofs, as a protection from the weather, and sleep in a kind of bed. One peculiarity is alone common to them and man, and this is the habit of lying upon the back in sleep. In battle they defend themselves with their fists and long sticks; and, under otherwise like circumstances, they manifest like passions and emotions with man: as joy and sorrow, pain and envy, revenge and sympathy. In death, especially, the ape face assumes a peculiarly human-like and spiritual expression, and the sufferer is the object of as genuine compassion as exists in the case of man. It is also well known that apes bury their dead, laying the body in a secluded spot, and covering it with leaves. Regarding the domestic life of the ape, Darwin says, in his "Descent of Man" (vol. 1, p. 39): "We see maternal affection manifested in the most trifling details. Thus Rengger observed an American monkey (a Cebus) carefully driving away the flies which plagued her infant; and Duvancel saw a Hylobates washing the faces of her young ones in a stream. So intense is the grief of female monkeys for the loss of their young, that it invariably caused the death of certain kinds kept under confinement by Brehm in North Africa. Orphan monkeys are always adopted, and carefully guarded by other monkeys, both males and females. One female baboon had so capacious a heart, that she not only adopted young monkeys of other species but stole young dogs and cats, which she continually carried about with her. Her kindness did not go so far, however, as to share her food with her adopted offspring; at which Brehm was surprised, as his monkeys divided everything quite fairly with their own young ones. An adopted kitten scratched the above-mentioned affectionate baboon, who certainly had a fine intellect, for she was much astonished at being scratched, and immediately examined the kitten's feet, and without more ado bit off the claws." The number of characteristics possessed in common by man and the higher apes is, indeed, very great, and includes not only physical and emotional but even intellectual qualities.--_From Schlickeysen's "Fruit and Bread," translated by Dr. Holbrook._ * * * * * SPECIAL NOTICE. Persons who have sent numbers of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN to this office, for the purpose of having them bound, will please call or send for them immediately. Some of the volumes extend back to 1860, and as we need the room they occupy, we shall dispose of those not claimed within ten days from date of this paper. MUNN & Co., 37 Park Row, New York. * * * * * DECISIONS OF THE COURTS. UNITED STATES CIRCUIT COURT.--DISTRICT OF NEW JERSEY. SHAWL STRAP PATENT.--GEORGE CROUCH _vs._ WILLIAM ROEMER. [In equity.] By Nixon, District Judge. This is an action for an alleged infringement of complainant's letters patent No. 82,606, dated September 29, 1868, and reissued March 7, 1871, No. 4,289. The subject-matter of the patent is in the reissue described to be a strap "to confine a shawl or similar article in a bundle," and termed a shawl-strap. The schedule attached to and forming a part of the said reissued patent states, that before the complainant's invention "straps had been used to confine a shawl or similar article in a bundle, and a leather cross-piece with loops at the ends, had extended from one strap to the other; and above and attached to this leather cross-piece was a handle. This leather cross-piece or connecting strap is liable to bend and allow the straps to be drawn toward each other by the handle in sustaining the weight. Hence the bundle is not kept in a proper shape and the handle is inconvenient to grasp." The invention is then stated to consist "of a rigid cross-bar beneath the handle, combined with suspending straps, that are to be passed around the shawl or bundle, such straps passing through loops at the ends of the handle." No question can be made but that the shawl straps manufactured and sold by the defendant are an infringement of the complainant's reissue. They consist of a metallic cross-bar, with slots at the ends for the reception of the straps, and which also connect the ends of the handle. Several defences are set up in the answer, but the only one necessary to consider is the first, to wit: The want of novelty and prior public use. I had occasion, heretofore, to inquire into the validity of the complainant's patent, in a controversy between the same complainant, and Speer _et al._, reported in VI. Off. Gaz. 1874, in which, as in this case, the principal defence turned upon the novelty of the invention. A prior public use was alleged and attempted to be proved. I there said and now repeat "that the patent is _prima facie_ evidence that the patentee was the original and first inventor, and that any one who controverts this assumes the burden of proof and undertakes to show affirmatively that there was a prior knowledge and use of the alleged invention under such circumstances, as to give to the public the right of its continued use against the patentee." The defence in this case has brought out many facts in regard to the public use of the rigid cross-bar in shawl straps anterior to the date of the complainant's patent, which were not developed in the former suit. There is no evidence which in my judgment affects the honesty of the complainant's claim, or which creates any doubt that he really believed himself to be the original and first inventor, but nevertheless I am constrained to the conclusion, after a most careful examination of the whole testimony, that the proofs show with reasonable certainty that he has been anticipated in the invention and that his patent is void, in consequence of the prior knowledge and public use, and the bill must be therefore dismissed with costs. [_E. B. Barnum_, for complainant. _Arthur v. Briesen_, for defendant.] * * * * * NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS. THE ECONOMIC THEORY OF THE LOCATION OF RAILWAYS. By Arthur M. Wellington, C.E. Price $2.00. New York city: Office of the Railroad Gazette, 73 Broadway. The author of this book is thoroughly conversant with his subject, and his statement that the book has gradually grown from a few notes into a volume may be accepted as an explanation of the somewhat fragmentary character of the work. He asserts that "all our railways are uneconomically located," and "in many cases these errors are shockingly evident." If these statements are true, he is right in stating that "there is something almost pitiful in the waste of human labor enforced by such costly blundering." He considers that other countries have made lamentable blunders in locating their railroads, so that the suffering stockholders of American lines may take comfort from the thought that others are or may be as badly off. FRUIT AND BREAD. A SCIENTIFIC DIET. By Gustav Schlickeysen. Translated from the German by M. L. Holbrook, M.D. With an Appendix. Illustrated. New York city: M. L. Holbrook & Co. The author and translator of this little treatise are firm believers in vegetarianism, and present in a highly attractive form the main arguments which sustain them in their position. The subject is most carefully and systematically treated, and although the conclusions at which the author arrives are greatly at variance with modern belief and practice, the book is nevertheless entitled to proper and respectful consideration. Illustrations are given of the teeth and stomachs of various animals, and these are compared with the similar organs existing in man, so exhibiting in a clear and satisfactory manner the perfect adaptedness of the latter to a purely vegetable regimen, which is certainly something more than merely accidental. Altogether the book is well worthy of perusal by others than those more immediately interested in the question of diet. THEORETICAL NAVAL ARCHITECTURE: a Treatise on the Calculations involved in Naval Design. By Samuel J. P. Thearle, F.R.S.N.A., etc. Two Volumes; Text and Plates. New York city: G. P. Putnam's Sons. This book is designed to meet the requirements of both those who possess but a moderate amount of mathematical knowledge as well as of those who are much further advanced. Numerous formulæ and rules clearly stated will enable the former to perform without much difficulty the ordinary routine of the draughting office, while ample opportunity is afforded the latter to trace back the processes from which these rules have gone forth. The book is divided into six parts. Part I. embraces the calculations relating to the forms and dimensions of ships. II. those relating to the weights and centers of gravity of ships. Part III. refers to the strength of ships. IV. and V. to their propulsion by sails and by steam engines; while Part VI. treats of the calculations relating to steering. An excellent book of plates and tables accompanies the text. KEMLO'S WATCH REPAIRER'S HANDBOOK: being a complete guide to the young beginner in taking apart, putting together, and thoroughly cleaning the English lever and other foreign watches, and all American watches. By F. Kemlo, Practical Watchmaker. With Illustrations. Price $1.25. Philadelphia, Pa.: Henry Carey Baird & Co. This work will prove of great value to all in whom the curious mechanism of clocks and watches has excited more than a passing interest. None but skilled followers of the art have been allowed to contribute to its pages, so that the practical worth of the information given can be fully relied upon. A concise history of timekeepers is followed by a clear and exhaustive description of the English lever watch, which in turn is followed by articles on cleaning, putting together, and the conditions necessary to produce a good English watch. American watches deservedly engage considerable attention. Papers on repairing watches, cleaning and repairing clocks, and a short description of the necessary tools complete the book. RECENT PROGRESS IN SANITARY SCIENCE. By A. R. Leeds. Salem, Mass.: Printed at the Salem Press. This is a reprint of a paper read at the Lyceum of Natural History, October 9, 1876, by the well known Professor of Chemistry at the Stevens Institute. WILLIAMS' TOURIST'S MAP AND GUIDE TO COLORADO AND THE SAN JUAN MINES. Price 50 cents each. New York city: H. T. Williams, 46 Beekman street. Two well edited publications, deserving the attention of travelers and emigrants. * * * * * INVENTIONS PATENTED IN ENGLAND BY AMERICANS. June 7 to June 15, 1877, inclusive. BOOTS AND SHOES.--Mellen Bray, Newton, Mass. ELECTRO-MAGNETIC MOTOR.--W. W. Gary, Washington, D. C. FURNACES.--J. J. Storer, New York city. GAS.--M. H. Strong, Brooklyn, N. Y. GAS APPARATUS.--D. C. Smith, East Northwood, N. H. GAS MACHINES.--T. F. Rowland, Greenpoint, N. Y. MINERAL WOOL APPARATUS.--A. D. Elbers, Hoboken, N. J. MOTIVE POWER.--W. G. Smith et al., New York city. POWER LOOMS.--James Long, Philadelphia, Pa. PULVERIZING MACHINES.--J. J. Storer, New York city. PUMP.--A. F. Eells et al., Boston, Mass. REFRIGERATING APPARATUS.--B. J. B. Mills, Lexington, Ky. SEWING MACHINES.--C. H. Warner, Sturbridge, Mass. SHEET METAL UTENSILS.--F. G. Niedringhaus, St. Louis, Mo. VALVE GEAR.--E. Cope et al., Hamilton, Ohio. * * * * * RECENT AMERICAN AND FOREIGN PATENTS. NOTICE TO PATENTEES. Inventors who are desirous of disposing of their patents would find it greatly to their advantage to have them illustrated in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. We are prepared to get up first-class WOOD ENGRAVINGS of inventions of merit, and publish them in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN on very reasonable terms. We shall be pleased to make estimates as to cost of engravings on receipt of photographs, sketches, or copies of patents. After publication, the cuts become the property of the person ordering them, and will be found of value for circulars and for publication in other papers. * * * * * NEW AGRICULTURAL INVENTIONS. IMPROVED HAY ELEVATOR. Eugene L. Church, Walworth, Wis.--This is a hay elevator and carrier of simple and effective construction; and it consists essentially of a traveling carriage locking, by a tilting catch, on a fixed stop block of the track, from which it is released by the action of the bail of the sheave frame of the hay fork on a pivoted grappling hook, the sheave being held in suspended position by the joint action of a fixed hook, of the pivoted hook, and of the tilting catch. A track beam, which is suspended from the rafters of a barn or other building by means of eyebolts passing through the center of the track beam. A carriage runs along the track beam by a pair of flanged wheels, at each end of which the wheels of one pair are set at such distance from each other that they clear readily the suspension bolts as they pass along the same. A hoisting rope is attached, in the customary manner, to a fixed point at one end of carriage, and passed then through the sheave frame of the hay fork, and over a pulley of the carriage, and through a sheave at the end of track beam, and down to the ground, where a horse is hitched to its free end. IMPROVED CORN HARVESTER. Bennett Osgood, Lenox, Iowa.--This invention is an improved machine for cutting up the corn, removing the ears from the stalks, and cutting the stalks into pieces, and which may be adjusted to cut up the corn and shock it. As the stalks are carried back by chains, pins or hooks on bars tear open the husks of the ears; and the bars, in connection with rollers, break the ears from the stalks. The ears, when broken off, drop through an opening in the platform into an elevator, up which they are carried, and are discharged into a wagon drawn at the side of the machine. The box of the elevator is supported from the frame of the machine, and its carrier is driven from a shaft by an endless band. The stalks are carried back by endless chains, and allowed to drop from the rear end of the platform upon the brackets attached to the rear bar of the frame. As they fall upon the brackets they are cut into three pieces by two knives, which work in slots in the brackets, and to the upper part of which are pivoted the upper ends of two bars. The lower ends of these bars are pivoted to a crank formed upon the shaft, which revolves in bearings attached to the rear bar of the frame. IMPROVED SULKY HARROW. George M. Furman, Laclede, Mo.--This is an improved riding harrow, so constructed that it may be readily raised from the ground, by the driver from his seat, to clear it of rubbish, to pass obstructions, and to pass from place to place, to cut up the ground and cover the seed thoroughly, and be used for cultivating small grain and plants. IMPROVED HARROW. Hans Iver Lund, Charlotte, Iowa.--The object of this invention is to furnish an iron harrow which shall be light, strong, and durable, of less draft than an ordinary harrow, of less size, inexpensive in manufacture, and effective in operation, breaking up the lumps thoroughly, and stirring up the soil evenly. The harrow is designed to be made in three sections, all exactly alike, one, two, or three of which may be used at a time. IMPROVED COMBINED COTTON SCRAPER AND CULTIVATOR. Malachiah Roby, Kosciusko, Miss.--This machine is so constructed as to bar off and dirt or cultivate cotton plants at one operation; and the invention relates to the construction and arrangement of a center or main beam, to the forward end of which the draft is attached. To the beam, a little in the rear of its forward end, is attached the middle part of a crossbar, in which are formed a number of holes to receive the hooks or clevises by which the forward ends of side beams are secured to said crossbar. To the rear end of the main beam is attached the middle part of a crossbar, to which the rear ends of the side beams are secured by a bow and yoke passed around them diagonally, and which are tightened, when adjusted in place, by nuts screwed upon the ends of the bows. Bands are passed around said beams and diagonally around said standards, and tightened in place by wedges or other suitable means, so that the scrapers can be readily adjusted to work deeper or shallower in the ground, and easily detached when not required for use. Cultivating plows or dirters have standards which are attached to the side beams, the plows and standards of the inner side beams being placed in advance of those attached to the outer side beams. When the machine is to be used as a cultivator, the scrapers are detached, and may be replaced by cultivating plows. IMPROVED CULTIVATOR. Austin S. McDermott, Prairie Creek (Melleray P. O.), Iowa.--The object of this invention is to furnish a cultivator which shall be readily adjusted as the character of the work to be done may require, and easily guided and controlled. The tongue of the machine is made in V shape, and its rear end is attached to the axle. The arms of the tongue are connected by a crossbar, to which the doubletree is pivoted by a hammer bolt. To the ends of the axle are attached, or upon them are formed, crank axle arms, upon the journals of which the wheels revolve. To the arms of the tongue, near the forward end of said tongue, are bolted the ends of the forward arms of the three-armed bar, the third arm of which projects to the rearward, and its rear end is bent into U form to receive a curved bar, which is pivoted to the three-armed bar by a bolt that passes through the bend of the three-armed bar and through the center of the curved bar. The ends of the curved bar are secured to the forward ends of the beams by bolts, two to each end. To the rear ends of the beams are attached handles which may be strengthened by braces, and are designed for use in guiding the plows when the machine is used as a walking cultivator. IMPROVED CHICKEN COOP. Daniel M. Sullivan and Thomas A. Retallic, Montgomery City, Mo.--This invention consists of a coop adjustable vertically on a standard, and provided with removable partitions and doors for convenience in cleansing. The frame of the coop is placed on a standard, at the top of which is placed a pulley. A cord is attached to the top of the coop frame, and runs over the pulley, and is attached to a counterweight. The coop is divided by a central transverse partition into two compartments, which are subdivided by transverse partitions composed of slats, and held in place by a dowel pin at the bottom and by a pin at the top. The vertical strips that hold the slats of the partitions together are grooved on each side to receive sliding partitions which are arranged on a central longitudinal line of the coop, and at right angles to the partitions. Grooves are also made in the ends and central partition of the coop to receive these sliding partitions. * * * * * NEW TEXTILE INVENTIONS. IMPROVED FULLING MILL. James Hunter, North Adams, Mass., assignor to himself and James E. Hunter, of same place.--The object of this invention is to improve the construction of fulling mills in such a way that there can be no possibility of injuring the cloth while passing through the rollers, and in such a way as to give the operator full control over the friction caused by the tongue or lever upon the goods, whether said goods be heavy or light. IMPROVED SHUTTLE-DRIVING MECHANISM FOR NARROW-WARE LOOMS. William B. Willard, New York city.--This invention, relating to looms for weaving narrow ware, consists in the arrangement of a spur wheel traveling on a fixed rack, and actuating a movable rack attached to the shuttle carrier. Motion is given to the spur wheel by a cam on the main shaft of the machine, which acts through a slotted lever and a connecting rod. The object is to provide mechanism for throwing the shuttle in such looms. In the loom the shuttlerace is divided at its center, leaving a space of sufficient width to admit of the passage and shedding of the warp. The shuttle slides in the race, and is of such length as to overlap the opening, so that it may pass smoothly from one section of the shuttlerace to the other. The shuttle is pierced to receive the fingers of the shuttle carrier, which slides on the bar. The latter is a piece of sheet metal, which is turned over at its upper edge to receive the bar, and is provided with guides for the fingers. The said fingers are capable of engaging with the holes in the shuttle and project below the piece of sheet metal, and are bent at right angles, and provided with grooved friction rollers, which engage with a cam slot of such form that it will draw the fingers, one at a time, downward out of the shuttle, and retain them below the warp during the passage of the portion of the shuttle with which they engage, through the threads of the warp, and replace them after that part of the shuttle passes the warp. IMPROVED LOOM TEMPLE. Christian H. Schlaf, Rockville, Conn.--This is an improved device for stretching the cloth while being woven. It is so constructed as to adjust itself as the cloth is being woven and carried forward to the cloth beam. * * * * * NEW WOODWORKING AND HOUSE AND CARRIAGE BUILDING INVENTIONS. IMPROVED THILL COUPLING. Josiah Kitzmiller, Keedysville, Md.--This is an improvement upon that form of thill coupling in which a pivoted cap is employed to slide over the end of the bolt or pin which secures the eye of the thill iron to the lugs or ears of the axle clip, the said cap serving to prevent the said pin from becoming accidentally displaced without the use of a screw nut or other securing device. It consists in the construction and arrangements of a spring catch for holding said pivoted cap down to its place against any tendency to rise accidentally, the said spring catch being located in a transverse groove or recess in the cap and between the cap and the adjacent lug and being provided with a beveled head and square shoulder, which engages with the under side of the lug to hold the cap down. The merit of this arrangement is that the catch is concealed from sight by the complete inclosure of the spring and the position of the beveled head beneath the coupling, and hence the exterior of the coupling presents a plain, smooth, and neat appearance, free from catches or projections, which would be liable to hook into the clothing in getting into or out of the carriage. IMPROVED VEHICLE SPRING. Fredrick W. Faber, Columbus, Texas.--This invention consists in combining an auxiliary spring with a spring suspended from goosenecks attached to the axle, the said auxiliary spring being attached to the axle, and provided with yokes for embracing the suspended spring, the object being to provide a device for steadying the main spring and preventing lateral motion. IMPROVED TIRE HEATER. Philip W. Cassil, New Athens, O.--To the top of the furnace or firebox is secured the ring heating chamber, which consists of the ring plate having a ring flange or rim formed around its outer edge. To the ring plate are attached the outer ends of a number of arms, the inner ends of which meet in the center of the ring plate, and have a journal attached to them. The journal may be hollow or solid, and upon it is placed a hub to which are attached a number of radial arms, to the outer ends of which is attached a rim. The rim fits against the inner part of the ring plate, and forms the inner wall of the heating chamber. IMPROVED CHIMNEY COWL. Andrew F. Barry and Ira G. Lane, New York city.--This invention is a chimney cowl or ventilator which will deflect the natural current of air, so that a draft is continually maintained. To the upper end of a sheet metal chimney top is attached a strip of metal, bent into a spiral form, and having spaces between the successive convolutions of the spiral. The spirals overlap each other, and increase in diameter towards the top. The coils are connected at intervals by stays, and the end of the upper and outer coil is tapped on to the one that precedes it, and is trimmed off horizontally, and upon it is placed an ornamental border. The wind, striking this top from any direction, is deflected so as to cause a draft. The device is claimed to be ornamental in appearance, is cheaply and easily made, and does not obstruct the chimney. IMPROVED WAGON AXLE. Wilbur F. Buckelew, Shreveport, La.--The object of this invention is to strengthen the wooden axles of wagons, and to fasten the skeins so that they will not become loose. A wooden axle is grooved longitudinally upon its under side throughout its entire length, to receive a rod, which is reduced in size at its ends, and threaded to receive the nuts. This rod is bent so as to conform to the tapering portion of the axle upon which the skein is placed. The skeins, having countersunk outer ends, are placed on the ends of the axle, and nuts having a beveled face corresponding to the countersunk ends of the skeins, are placed on the ends of the rod, and clamp the skeins securely on the axle. By giving the nut this peculiar form, it contains more threads than it otherwise would, and is in consequence stronger. The rod not only serves to retain the skeins securely in their places, but it also acts as a stay or truss rod for the axle, greatly strengthening it. IMPROVED WAGON BRAKE LEVER. Jacob P. Outson, Racine, Wis.--This invention consists of a curved ratchet bar and two levers working on the same pivot, one carrying a spring pawl, that engages with the curved ratchet bar, and the other carrying a stud for throwing the pawl out of the notches of the ratchet bar. When the brake is to be applied to the wheels of the wagon, one lever is thrown forward, carrying with it the other lever; and the pawl, by engaging the notches of the bar, holds the lever at any desired point. When it is desired to release the brake first named, the lever is drawn back, moving first the length of the slot, the stud striking the pawl and throwing it out of engagement with the ratchet bar, when the lever may be carried back to any required position. * * * * * NEW HOUSEHOLD INVENTIONS. IMPROVED BAKER. Luna Drew, Irving, Wis.--This is an improved baking attachment to heating stoves of all kinds, so that the heat of the same may be utilized for baking, warming, raising bread, and other purposes. It consists of a baker supported on adjustable legs, and secured to a round, oval, or square heating stove by suitable top and bottom slides. A warmer is arranged below the baker. The front of the baker is detachable, to admit its use for baking or warming purposes. IMPROVED FIRE KINDLER. John G. Distler, Brooklyn (Greenpoint P. O.), N. Y.--This invention is an improved fire kindler, simple in construction, convenient in use, and effective in operation, burning freely, and lasting long enough to fully kindle the fire. It is formed of corncobs, steamed, having a number of transverse holes formed through them, dried, dipped in melted white resin, and wrapped in paper. The corncobs are steamed to prevent them from breaking while being bored. The cobs, while still moist with the steam, have a number of transverse holes bored in them with a rapidly revolving bit, and are then thoroughly dried. When dry the cobs are dipped in melted white resin, and before they are fully cold they are wrapped in ordinary paper, which adheres to them, prevents any odor from passing off into the room and prevents them from soiling the hands while being handled. IMPROVED MATCH SAFE. John A. Field, Racine, Wis.--This is a match safe, the back, top, and front of which are made from a single piece of tin, and to which a lighter of wire cloth is attached, which is placed over a picture, to give the match safe an ornamental appearance. It is so arranged that the matches are delivered singly to a pair of hooks, from which they may be readily taken by the fingers. IMPROVED NURSERY CHAIR. Luther I. Adams, East Templeton, Mass.--This chair may be readily converted into a high or low chair, and in which an attached toy box retains the toys when the chair is in either position. The armed low chair has curved legs. Between the rear legs a shaft is journaled, upon which two wheels are placed. The support for the low parts when it is used as a high chair consists of two similar sides, each composed of two curved strips, which are held together partly by crossbars and partly by triangular metallic pieces that are attached to their upper ends and pivoted to the center of the crossbars that connect the legs. A shaft, having upon it wheels, is journaled in the curved strips at the back of the chair near the lower ends. The toy box consists of a tray that is concaved at its upper edge and is made convex at its lower end, and is provided with a cover that extends over a portion of it, and forms a receptacle for toys when the box is in a vertical position. IMPROVED FRUIT JAR. Catherine Hastings, Oswego, N. Y.--This is an improved attachment for fruit jars, to enable them to be conveniently handled when filled with hot fruit, and at other times. It does not interfere with standing the full fruit jars upon their tops, if desired, and enables the jars to be used for holding and carrying various articles. There is a metallic screw band, by which the cover is secured upon the mouth of jar. To the opposite sides of the band are soldered lugs to which are pivoted the ends of a wire bail. IMPROVED VENTILATOR. Charles E. Darling, Lewiston, Me., assignor of two thirds his right to Henry Free and John E. Lydston, of same place.--This ventilator for windows, doors, etc., works in noiseless manner, and is watertight. It consists of radially recessed face disks, clamped to the glass frame, and having an intermediate pivoted disk with corresponding recesses that are set by a crank lever and cords into open or closed piston. IMPROVED BAKING PAN. Charles I. Kagey and Fred W. Stoneburner, Arcola, Ill.--The body of this roaster is made of sheet iron, and is rectangular in form. To one end of the body a cap is secured, and to the other end a rectangular cast iron frame is fitted, to which a cast iron door is hinged. At the top of the roaster, at or near its center, an aperture is made, which is closed by a tapering projection that extends downward from a plate that is hinged to the top of the roaster. Rings are attached to the top of the roaster near each end for convenience in handling. The apparatus, when in use, is placed upon a stove or in an oven. IMPROVED STOVEPIPE SHELF. John W. Jackson, Sharpsville, Pa.--A wire of the requisite strength is bent into the shape required to form the horizontal support. To this the shelf is attached, and also the bracket, which rests against the pipe for supporting the same. * * * * * NEW MECHANICAL AND ENGINEERING INVENTIONS. IMPROVED WATER WHEEL. Isaac Mallery, Dryden, N. Y.--This invention relates to downward discharge turbine water wheels; and it consists in the employment, in combination with a stationary chute case and an independent adjustable frame, of a series of gates, which are pivoted to this frame and adjustable to the periphery of said case. The bucket wheel is formed of curved and inclined buckets arranged around a hub, and applied to a cap ring and a skirting. This wheel is keyed on a driving shaft, stepped on a bridge, and passed up through a tubular sleeve, which is cast on the top of a cylindrical chute or guide case. This case is rigidly secured to the base or bed frame, and constructed with oblique issues, which direct the currents of inflowing water against the buckets of the wheel. IMPROVED VALVE MOTION FOR STEAM ENGINES. Henry Haering, New York city.--This is an improved device for operating the slide valve of a steam engine from the piston rod of said engine, in such a way that the valve will be moved slightly to partially uncover the inlet and exhaust ports as the piston completes its stroke, and its motion will be continued in the same direction as the piston begins to move upon the return stroke, until the ports are fully opened, and will then stand still, with the ports fully open, until the piston has nearly completed its return stroke. It consists in the combination of a three-armed bar, two levers, connecting bar, and connecting lever, with the piston rod and the valve stem of a steam engine; and in the combination of a lockbar, spring, two cylinders, and pin, with the two levers and the three-armed bar. As the piston approaches the end of its stroke, the upper end of an upright arm of a bar strikes the concaved side of the upper part of one of the levers operating it, and moving the slide valve to close the ports and admit steam in front of the piston. As the piston begins its return stroke the inclined upper surface of one of the side arms of the three-armed bar comes in contact with the lower end of the said lever, and continues its motion in the same direction, fully opening the said inlet port, which remains fully open until the piston has again nearly completed its stroke. IMPROVED REVERSIBLE ECCENTRIC. George G. Lafayette and Pitt W. Strong, Brockville, Ontario, Canada.--This is an improved device to act as a substitute for the link motion on a reversible engine, or for adjusting the stroke of a boiler-feed pump, while in motion, so as to regulate the amount of feed water supplied to the boiler, without the use of an overflow pipe and cock, and keeping thereby the pump constantly in motion, which will save the annoyance frequently experienced in pumps by their refusing to prime after having been stopped for a short time. It may be further used to control the speed of all kinds of engines, whether with plain slide valve or with a cut-off valve working on top of the other by connecting directly to the device a suitable governor, so as to automatically shorten and lengthen the stroke of the valve, and give a uniform motion to the engine under different loads. IMPROVED EXPANDING REAMER. Robert Blair, San Francisco, Cal.--In this improved tool there is a clamping bolt by which the cutters are clamped fast after being adjusted. The cutters are arranged to slide directly across the stock in dovetail grooves, and are slotted to slide along the clamping bolt and washers, by which they are clamped fast after they are adjusted to the position required by a toothed pinion and racks. The pinion is arranged in the stock between the cutters, and the shaft extends out of the end of the stock, with a nick in the end for a screwdriver to turn it. * * * * * NEW MISCELLANEOUS INVENTIONS. IMPROVED TORTOISE-SHELL HANDLE. Christian W. Schaefer, New York city.--The object of this invention is to mount the handles of canes, umbrellas, parasols, whips, opera glasses, and similar articles with a tortoise-shell covering, in such a manner that the present inefficient mode of attaching the same by glue may be dispensed with, the covering attached in tightly fitting and durable manner, and the joint or weld of the edges be not noticeable in the least. IMPROVED HAND STAMP. Leonard Tilton, Brooklyn, E.D., N. Y.--This invention consists in novel devices for giving positive rotation to the stamp heads after the impressions are made, in combination with a reciprocating inking pad, and in means for adjusting the throw of the inking pad with respect to the printing faces of the stamp heads. IMPROVED BUCKLE. John Fenton, Indianapolis, Ind.--This invention is an improved buckle, neat in appearance, strong and durable, which may be easily fastened and unfastened, which will not require the strap to be perforated, and will hold it securely in any position into which it may be adjusted. The buckle is formed of a plate having holes in its middle part to receive the rivets by which it is secured to the strap, and having cross slots formed in its ends to receive the free end of the said strap, and the eccentric, having its outer side corrugated radially, and provided with a handle. IMPROVED LIQUID DIFFUSER. George M. Smyth, Brooklyn, N. Y.--This invention consists in the combination of an air compressor, an air reservoir, and a receptacle for the liquid, and an arrangement of pipes and nozzles for atomizing the liquid. An air compressor of any ordinary construction is connected with the reservoir by a pipe, in which two stopcocks are placed. There is a receptacle for containing the liquid to be diffused or atomized. A pipe passes through a stopper placed in the neck of the said receptacle, and extends nearly to the bottom of the same, and its upper end is provided with a stopcock and nozzle. A nozzle is arranged at right angles to the first-mentioned nozzle, and is attached to a brace that is secured to the pipe. IMPROVED OIL CAN. John Graves, New York city, assignor to himself and James L. Miller, Westfield, N. J.--This is an improved case for packing oil cans for transportation, the case furnishing the additional facility that the can may be readily inserted into the same and tilted for use. The invention consists of a wooden projecting case with side slots, in which trunnions of the can are guided and supported for swinging the can on pivot hooks, which serve also for the purpose of locking the lid to the case. IMPROVED HARNESS TUGS. Charles Hauff, Ashland, O.--The body of the carrier is made in the form of a ring with outwardly projecting flanges around its edges. The strap is passed around the ring in the groove formed by its flanges, and its inner end is sewed to its body at the side. Small wedge-shaped blocks of leather are inserted in the angle between the parts of the strap where they meet and the ring, which angular blocks are covered by angular projection of the flanges of the ring. IMPROVED COMPOSITION FOR CASTING ORNAMENTAL FIGURES. August Kiesele, New York city.--This consists in a composition formed by the admixture of dry pulverized sugar, melted paraffin, and stearine. It is poured into moulds and allowed to cool. The article is then removed from the mould, and powdered starch or sugar is dusted over it to destroy the gloss and give it the appearance of alabaster. IMPROVED PEN RACK. Harvey W. Forman, Golden City, Col.--This consists of an upper frame with intercrossing wires, forming wide spaces or meshes, and of a second frame with closer wires below the same, for holding the pen in upright position, in connection with a bottom pad or absorbent below the rack frames. IMPROVED STOPPER FOR MUCILAGE BOTTLE. James Tilghman, New York city.--This is a combined brush and stopper, consisting essentially of a handle having a stem and a flat end corresponding to the top of the cork. The brush has a flat head, corresponding to the bottom of the cork. The cork is interposed between the said head and end of the handle, and held in place by the central stem. * * * * * BUSINESS AND PERSONAL. * * * * * _The Charge for Insertion under this head is One Dollar a line for each insertion. If the Notice exceeds four lines, One Dollar and a Half per line will be charged._ * * * * * Metallic Letters and Figures to put on patterns of castings, all sizes. H. W. Knight, Seneca Falls, N. Y. How to make Violins--Write J. Ranger, Syracuse, N. Y. Blake's Belt Studs.--The best and cheapest fastening for Rubber or Leather Belts. Greene, Tweed & Co., 18 Park place, N. Y. All kinds of new Lift and Force Pumps for all purposes, at half price, or trade for firearms or tools. W. P. Hopkins, Lawrence, Mass. Steam Yacht for sale. 31 feet long, 6½ beam; new. John Howard, No. 1720 Rittinhouse st., Philadelphia. Mothers make selections for themselves uptown, but they always go to Baldwin the Clothier in New York and Brooklyn for boys' outfits. Wanted--The Agency of small article of merit or novelty for the Hardware or House furnishing lines. W. M. Ernst & Co., 26 Cliff street, New York. Thermometers and Hydrometers for scientific and other purposes. Goldbacher, 98 Fulton street, N. Y. For Sale.--One 3 ft. Planer, $195; one 8 ft. do., $350; one 26" Lathe, $295; one 22" do., $175; one 15" do., $120. At Shearman's, 132 North 3d street, Philadelphia, Pa. Inventors.--Send 10 cents for the "Journal of Invention," 4 months. 37 Park Row, N. Y. Room 2. Reliable Oak Leather and Rubber Belting. A specialty of Belting for high speed and hard work. Charles W. Arny, Manufacturer, Phila., Pa. Send for price lists. Shaw's Noise-Quieting Nozzles for Escape Pipes of Locomotives, Steamboats, etc. Quiets all the noise of high pressure escaping steam without any detriment whatever. T. Shaw, 915 Ridge Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. For 13, 15, 16, and 18 in. Swing Screw-Cutting Engine Lathes, address Star Tool Company, Providence, R. I. John T. Noye & Son, Buffalo, N. Y., are Manufacturers of Burr Mill Stones and Flour Mill Machinery of all kinds, and dealers in Dufour & Co.'s Bolting Cloth. Send for large illustrated catalogue. Removal.--Fitch & Meserole, Manufacturers of Electrical Apparatus, and Bradley's Patent Naked Wire Helices, have removed to 40 Cortlandt St., N. Y. Experimental work. Power & Foot Presses, Ferracute Co., Bridgeton, N. J. For Best Presses, Dies, and Fruit Can Tools, Bliss & Williams, cor. of Plymouth and Jay Sts., Brooklyn, N. Y. Lead Pipe, Sheet Lead. Bar Lead, and Gas Pipe. Send for prices. Bailey, Farrell & Co., Pittsburgh, Pa. Hydraulic Presses and Jacks, new and second hand. Lathes and Machinery for Polishing and Buffing metals. E. Lyon & Co., 470 Grand St., N. Y. Solid Emery Vulcanite Wheels--The Solid Original Emery Wheel--other kinds imitations and inferior. Caution.--Our name is stamped in full on all our best Standard Belting, Packing, and Hose. Buy that only. The best is the cheapest. New York Belting and Packing Company, 37 and 38 Park Row, N. Y. Steel Castings from one lb. to five thousand lbs. Invaluable for strength and durability. Circulars free. Pittsburgh Steel Casting Co., Pittsburgh, Pa. Leather and Rubber Belting, Packing, Hose, and Manufacturers' Supplies. Send for list. Greene, Tweed & Co., 18 Park place, N. Y. For Solid Wrought Iron Beams, etc., see advertisement. Address Union Iron Mills, Pittsburgh, Pa., for lithograph, etc. Blank Book Back-Shaping Machine. Illustrated circular free. Frank Thomas & Co., Home St., Cincinnati, O. Hand Fire Engines, Lift and Force Pumps for fire and all other purposes. Address Rumsey & Co., Seneca Falls, N. Y., U. S. A. Help for the weak, nervous, and debilitated. Chronic and painful diseases cured without medicine. Pulvermacher's Electric Belts are the desideratum. Book, with full particulars, mailed free. Address Pulvermacher Galvanic Co., 292 Vine St., Cincinnati, Ohio. Silver Solder and small Tubing. John Holland, Cincinnati, Manufacturer of Gold Pens and Pencil Cases. Patent Scroll and Band Saws. Best and cheapest in use. Cordesman, Egan & Co., Cincinnati, O. Mill Stone Dressing Diamonds. Simple, effective, and durable. J. Dickinson, 64 Nassau St., N. Y. Best Glass Oilers. Cody & Ruthven, Cincinnati, O. For Boult's Paneling, Moulding, and Dovetailing Machine, and other wood-working machinery, address B.C. Machinery Co., Battle Creek, Mich. Chester Steel Castings Co. make castings for heavy gearing, and Hydraulic Cylinders where great strength is required. See their advertisement, page 30. Reliable information given on all subjects relating to Mechanics, Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Steam Engines, and Boilers, by A. F. Nagle, M.E., Providence. R. I. * * * * * NOTES & QUERIES It has been our custom for thirty years past to devote a considerable space to the answering of questions by correspondents; so useful have these labors proved that the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN office has become the factotum, or headquarters, to which everybody sends, who wants special information upon any particular subject. So large is the number of our correspondents, so wide the range of their inquiries, so desirous are we to meet their wants and supply correct information, that we are obliged to employ the constant assistance of a considerable staff of experienced writers, who have the requisite knowledge or access to the latest and best sources of information. For example, questions relating to steam engines, boilers, boats, locomotives, railways, etc., are considered and answered by a professional engineer of distinguished ability and extensive practical experience. Inquiries relating to electricity are answered by one of the most able and prominent practical electricians in this country. Astronomical queries by a practical astronomer. Chemical inquiries by one of our most eminent and experienced professors of chemistry; and so on through all the various departments. In this way we are enabled to answer the thousands of questions and furnish the large mass of information which these correspondence columns present. The large number of questions sent--they pour in upon us from all parts of the world--renders it impossible for us to publish all. The editor selects from the mass those that he thinks most likely to be of general interest to the readers of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. These, with the replies, are printed; the remainder go into the waste basket. Many of the rejected questions are of a primitive or personal nature, which should be answered by mail; in fact, hundreds of correspondents desire a special reply by post, but very few of them are thoughtful enough to inclose so much as a postage stamp. We could in many cases send a brief reply by mail if the writer were to inclose a small fee, a dollar or more, according to the nature or importance of the case. When we cannot furnish the information, the money is promptly returned to the sender. J. P. D. will find directions for colored whitewash on pp. 235, 236, vol. 36.--A. M. will find directions for electroplating on p. 59, vol. 36.--H. P. can recover silver from photographers' waste by the process detailed on p. 250, vol. 27.--A. W. A.'s difficulty as to 64 and 65 squares in the puzzle can be solved by an inspection of the diagrams on p. 323, No. 21, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT.--I. A. will find a description of a magneto-electric machine on p. 195, vol. 34. A clock thus would go for 12 hours, and wind itself at the same time for 12 hours more, if such a machine could exist, would be a perpetual motion. As to tempering small drills, see p. 186, vol. 26.--R. B. can prevent rust on iron or steel by the means described on p. 26, vol. 25. For a recipe for a depilatory, see p. 186, vol. 34.--A. T. R. is informed that the hydrocarbon engine is reversible.--T. W. will find directions for making sand belts on p. 235, vol. 36.--M. G. should address a manufacturer of oxygen cylinders.--J. S. C., who inquires as to a water fountain, sizes of pipes, etc., should send us a sketch with dimensions.--O. L. is informed that the proper way to ascertain the relative strengths of corrugated and plain sheet metal is by experiment.--G. H. B. will find directions for making colored printing inks on p. 90, vol. 36.--P. M. will find on p. 250, vol. 36, directions for making a polishing starch.--C. H. B. can braze the ends of his brass plate to make a cylinder of it. See p. 219, vol. 36.--W. H. C. is informed that his method of fluting reamers is not new.--C. C. G. will find his method of raising coal or other weights impracticable.--E. S. G. had better test so simple an experiment and satisfy himself.--W. H. C. is informed that the most satisfactory plan would be to get his tools nickel-plated. (1) J. H. N., of Christ Church, New Zealand, asks: Is the stearin from which the olein has been extracted by Dr. Mott's process fit to be made at once into good stearin candles, without any further treatment? A. Yes. (2) B. B. says: I wish to express the strongest coloring matter from certain herbs, sage leaves, for instance. How can it best be done cheaply and quickly? Evaporation during several days, after boiling and simmering, has the effect; but it is inconveniently slow. The color produced is a medium brown. A. Dry the leaves, etc., thoroughly, and grind to a fine powder. Digest this for several days in enough warm water to thoroughly moisten it throughout. Then add enough wood naphtha to make a stiff paste, and after standing an hour transfer to a fine linen bag and express the thick liquid in a screw press. 2. Is there anything that will set the color? A. Try a strong hot solution of alum. (3) H. K. F. M. says: I have a box made of Bohemian crystal. The cover, which was held to the box by a brass frame, has come apart from its frame. It seemed to have been cemented by a hard substance resembling plaster of Paris. How can I make it? A. Boil 3 parts powdered rosin for sometime with 1 part of caustic soda and 5 parts of water; then stir into the soap formed one half its weight of plaster of Paris, and use immediately. (4) F. N. Y. asks: Would a canvas bag, coated with a varnish made of india rubber dissolved in naphtha, be suitable to hold oxygen gas? A. Yes; but bags made of double pieces of cloth, cemented together with the varnish, are better. (5) J. A. B. asks: Is there any difference between electricity and magnetism? A. Electricity and magnetism are supposed to be manifestations of the same force whose actions are produced at right angles to each other; the action which occurs in the line of polarization being called electricity, and the one at right angles to this line, magnetism. There is an important difference between them, however, as electricity is essentially a dynamic force, while magnetism is purely static. 1. Is not the idea of the world moving around the sun in an elliptic form absurd? A. No. 2. My idea is that the north star is the center of the universe, or in fact is the magnet that all the suns or fixed stars move around, and that the attraction of the pole of the earth, although it moves around the sun, is the cause of the change of seasons, or, in other words, the angle of light. A. There is nothing whatever to support the idea. But a supposed center of the universe has really been designated by some astronomers. (6) P. S. asks: How much copper wire does it require to construct an electro-magnet that will uphold 100 lbs., and what size of wire should be used? A. Probably 500 or 600 feet of No. 14 copper wire would be sufficient with 3 or 4 very large size Grove cells and cores about 6 inches long and 1 inch in diameter. (7) H. S. B. says: Water falls about 16 feet per second. My overshot water wheel moves about 4 feet per second. Do I in that way lose that percentage of the actual power of the water? A. Not necessarily. (8) C. N. B. asks: Can a steam engine be worked with compressed air the same as with steam? A. Generally speaking, it can; but not in every respect. (9) J. Y. says: If all the measures of length, surface, and capacity in the world, and all the weights were lost, by what means could new ones be made corresponding exactly with those we now have? A. It would be impossible, as all the measures in use refer to certain arbitrary standards. (10) R. B. G. asks: If a horse be pulling at the end of a lever and traveling 3 miles an hour, how many lbs. pressure against his collar must he exert, to raise 33,000 lbs. 1 foot per minute? A. The force exerted by the animal will depend upon the length of the lever, which should be given. (11) C. H. McK. asks: Would a pump so constructed as to create an incessant suction draw water an indefinite distance, or how far would it draw it? A. Such a pump would raise water no higher than any other that was equally tight. (12) J. W. says: I wish to get some boilers made about 12 inches in diameter and 13 inches deep. I want them to stand a pressure corresponding to 400° Fah°. Do you think it would be safe to have them made of cast iron? A. We think it will be better to use wrought iron. Make the shell about 7/16 of an inch thick. (13) J. R. S. says, in reply to E. W. P., who says that he has an artesian well which does not flow; but from which he pumps by inserting a pipe inside the well tubing, and asks: "If we attach the pump to the well tubing directly, allowing no air to enter the tube, would it not be like trying to pump water from an airtight barrel?" If such were the case, the drive well would be a miserable failure; for in all drive wells the pump is attached directly to the tube. I would advise E. W. P. to attach his pump to the well tube direct, and he will gain three times the amount of water that he now gets. By having his pump attached to the well tube directly, the working of the pump creates a vacuum, and the atmospheric pressure on the earth's surface violently forces the liquid to fill the vacuum thus formed, thereby giving a much greater amount of water than can be otherwise obtained. It is a well established fact that more water can be obtained by the drive well than by any other. A. In our answer to E. W. P., it will be evident, we think, to most of our readers, that we only referred to the case in which the well had no connection with the atmosphere, when the pipe was tightly fitted. It appears, however, that it might have been better to have stated this more definitely, and we gladly embrace the opportunity afforded by the interesting letters of our correspondents. We would be glad to receive from J. R. S. some experimental data in proof of his assertion as to the great gain from a tight connection. This also answers J. T. G. and W. H. F. (14) H. H. S. says: 1. Given, a boat with a 35 feet keel, of 6 feet beam, with fine lines; also a two-cylinder engine, each cylinder 4 x 5 inches; and a wheel 28 inches in diameter and of 3½ feet pitch. Will an upright boiler, with 135 square feet heating surface, and 4 square feet grate surface, be sufficient to run the engine at 250 or 300 revolutions per minute with 100 lbs. steam? A. With good coal and a forced draft, the boiler may be large enough. 2. What will be the probable speed of boat? A. In smooth water, 7 to 8 miles an hour. (15) F. A. asks: What would be a safe outside pressure for a cylinder of wrought iron, ½ inch thick and 4 feet in diameter, and 8 feet long? A. According to tables given in Wilson's "Treatise on Steam Boilers," the working pressure for such a tube would be about 65 lbs. per square inch. (16) F. M. M. asks: 1. How large must an engine be to run a boat 12½ feet wide, 75 feet long, drawing 4 feet of water, at the rate of 30 miles per hour, on a river or bay where the surface is smooth? A. We have some doubts as to whether these conditions could be fulfilled. 2. Do steamboats on the ocean use salt water in their boilers for steam, or do they carry fresh water? A. They ordinarily have surface condensers, so that the water of condensation is returned to the boilers. (17) E. S. N. says: Please give your ideas as to how much water an engine 18 inches in diameter by 22 inches stroke, running at 145 revolutions per minute, at 80 lbs. steam, cutting off at about 18 inches, will require. We furnished an injector for one of the above dimensions, capable of throwing 900 gallons per hour. It was found to be insufficient, and I went to the mill to discover the cause, if possible. The manufacturers of the injector thought it ought to be large enough, and so did we. I found everything set up properly, and the piston and valve were evidently in good order. I finally measured the capacity of the tank which supplied the injector, and found that it drew 960 gallons per hour. A. We do not think the data are sufficient for an accurate calculation. It is possible, however, that some of our readers have made experiments on similar engines, and can give some useful information. (18) T. W. asks: What size of breast water wheel, with a fall of 2 feet water, would it require to produce the same power as an overshot wheel of 4 feet diameter, 18 inches face, with a fall of 5 feet water? A. If the breast wheel gave the same efficiency as the other, it would require a face about 2½ times as wide. (19) A. K. says: A. asserts that if a small and a large boiler be set side by side and connected with the top gauge cock of the two boilers, level, when they are first filled with water, and then steam is raised, that the water will not remain the same, that the pressure will be greater in the larger boiler, and consequently will force the water into the smaller one. B. says that the water will always remain the same as long as the boilers are connected; that the pressure on the water will be the same in both boilers, and therefore the water will always assume the same level in each. Which is right? A. The pressures sometimes vary in two boilers connected in this way; and they should be set in such a way that the water cannot be forced from one into the other under any circumstances. (20) J. T. G. says: I notice your reply to W. G. in regard to pounding of a steam pump, in which you recommend the use of a larger air vessel. I think that W. G. can remedy the difficulty by allowing a small quantity of air to enter the pump cylinder at each stroke, which can be done without sensibly diminishing the amount of water delivered, provided the lift is not so high as to nearly equal the capacity of the pump. That would keep the maximum quantity of air in the air vessel, and I think that the air in the discharge pipe would have the effect of converting a comparatively rigid column into an elastic one. W. G. can easily try the experiment by running with the drain cocks at the end of his pump partially open; and if that remedies the difficulty, he might insert a small check valve opening inward to prevent the discharge of water during the out-stroke. If W. G. tries this, I wish that he would let us know the result through the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. (21) G. H. says: Please decide the following: A. claims that a team of horses can draw a greater load when hitched close to it than when hitched at a distance of 10 or 20 feet. B. claims that, everything else being equal, distance makes no difference, and that the team could pull as many lbs. at a distance of 20 feet as it could at ten or less. Which is right? A. We incline to B.'s opinion. Please tell me the relative power of conducting electricity of the principal metals. A. According to Matthiessen, the electrical conductivity of the principal metals, under similar conditions, is as follows: Silver 100.0 Copper 99.9 Gold 80.0 Aluminium 56.0 Sodium 37.4 Zinc 29.0 Cadmium 23.7 Potassium 20.8 Platinum 18.0 Iron 16.8 Tin 13.1 Lead 8.3 German silver 7.7 Antimony 4.6 Mercury 1.6 Bismuth 1.2 (22) S. R. S. asks: How can lime, or rather phosphate of lime, be precipitated from cod liver oil, which is perfectly clear and said to contain 2 per cent. of the phosphate? A. This can only be done by first destroying the organic matter of the oil, and then examining the residue for the phosphates with the usual reagents--magnesia solution, barium chloride, nitrate of silver, ammonium molybdate, etc. With so small a percentage of the phosphates, it will be necessary for you to work with concentrated solutions, and slowly. The oil may be oxidized by treating it on the waterbath with hot hydrochloric acid, with some chlorate of potash, added in small quantities at a time. Then evaporate down nearly to dryness, and treat with a little strong nitric and a few drops of sulphuric acid. This will take some time if properly done. (23) J. H. S. says, in answer to J. H. B.'s query as to a parrot pulling out his feathers: Take a knife and scrape the inside edge of the bill, and the feathers will slip from the bill without coming out. This is done for feather-eating hens; no doubt it will answer for a parrot as well. (24) S. R. S. says: I have some dentists' pellet gold. I alloyed it with brass and silver. I melted it several times, but it was so very brittle that I could not work it. I then added a $2½ gold coin, and fused, all together, but it was as brittle as before. I then fused it and dropped in lumps of pure saltpeter, but it is still as brittle as before. I fused the gold on a lump of charcoal with an alcohol blowpipe. Please tell me how to work it. A. You fail to state the proportions of your alloy. There may be an excess of zinc and copper, or the fusion may not have been complete. Place it, together with several small pieces of rosin and a little borax or carbonate of soda, in a small blacklead crucible, and heat to very bright redness over a good fire. If this does not obviate the difficulty, fuse the alloy with about three times its weight of nitrate of potassa (saltpeter), and treat the mass when cold with dilute sulphuric acid. Pour off the acid solution and fuse the alloy, together with any silver sulphate adhering to it and a little carbonate of soda. Any silver contained in the acid solution may be recovered by adding a little salt or muriatic acid, and fusing the precipitated chloride of silver with carbonate of soda. (25) N. S. asks: 1. Can water be decomposed into its constituents (oxygen and hydrogen) with any considerable rapidity, and in large quantities, by electricity? A. Yes; providing a large magneto-electric machine be used. 2. What is the best and cheapest method of generating hydrogen in large quantities? A. The action of iron or zinc scraps on diluted oil of vitriol is among the best. A considerable volume of pure hydrogen may also be obtained with facility by passing superheated steam through a large iron tube filled with scrap iron heated to bright redness. (26) G. S. D. W. asks: Is there any process by which an engraving can be transferred either to stone or wood, where the printing ink can be made to show up as black as in the original after the transfer has been made? A. We know of no satisfactory method whereby this may be accomplished directly. By means of the chromate of gelatin photographic process, such transfers may be made without great difficulty. (27) F. M. M. asks: 1. If a steamboat 100 feet long, of 5 feet beam and 4 feet draught, be provided with one set of common side paddle wheels, and power enough to run it at the rate of 10 knots per hour, would two sets of side wheels, with the power doubled and the revolutions of the wheels doubled, double the speed of the boat? A. No. 2. If we take the same boat, side wheels, and power, for running 10 knots per hour, and arrange for the side wheels to feather their paddles, what effect would it have on the speed of the boat? A. You might obtain from 10 to 15 per cent. more of the power of the engine in useful effect. (28) W. J. T. asks: 1. What is the best dark color to paint a laboratory, and what kind of paint must I use? A. One of the best for this purpose is shellac in alcohol, colored to suit with Vandyke or Spanish brown, etc. 2. I wish to varnish my benches. What varnish would you recommend? A. Shellac is commonly used, but copal gives good results, also Brunswick black in oil. Of what should a waste water pipe be made, so as to resist acids? A. Make it of lead or block tin. Can you recommend an elementary work on electric batteries? A. Sprague's "Electricity: its Theory, Sources, and Applications," is one of the best. (29) T. P. H. asks: Can I take a wax impression off type and then electrotype it with a battery? A. Yes. This is the common method of making electrotypes for printing from. (30) C. M. asks: What are the locations of the various branch mints of the United States? A. A recent authority gives them as Philadelphia, Pa., San Francisco, Cal., Carson City, Nev., and Denver, Col. Assay offices are situated at New York city, Charlotte, N. C., and Boise City, Idaho. (31) B. L. D. asks: Can you give me a recipe for making paste for sharpening razors, knives, etc.? A. Mix the finest emery obtainable with a little suet. (32) C. B. McM. says: I hear that four gallon measures of different capacities are in use, and that The United States standard gallon contains 230 cubic inches. In the confusion of text-book statements such as--"wine gallon = 231 cubic inches," "beer gallon = 282 cubic inches," "American standard gallon = 58973 grains (Youmans' Chemistry) = nearly 234 cubic inches," and the very extensive ignorance of what is really correct, please repeat the information in a way that may be quoted as authority for the capacity of a United States gallon in cubic inches, and the weight in grains. A. "The gallon of the United States is the standard or Winchester wine gallon of 231 cubic inches, and contains 8.3388822 lbs. avoirdupois, or 58372.1754 troy grains of distilled water at 39.83° Fah., the barometer being at 30 inches. It is equal to 3.785207 liters. The gallon of the State of New York is of the capacity of 8 lbs. pure water at its maximum density, or 221.184 cubic inches. It is equal to 3.62346 liters."--_Appleton's Cyclop[oe]dia._ (33) S. C. D. says: Please give directions for electrotyping cylindrical rollers for impressing upon sheets of wax, accurately, of the proper figure for honeycomb foundations. The figure for the surface of the cylinders to be derived from sheets of wax foundation, having the figure correctly impressed upon them. A. This can be done by coating with plumbago, and then electrotyping with copper, in a way familiar to most printers and to all electrotyping establishments. The plates can afterwards be bent round a roller, and used to impress the sheets of wax. (34) J. H. T. asks: There is a piece of ground, 100 rods long and 10 rods wide at one end, running to a point at the other, which we wish to divide into 4 equal lots. Please give a rule. A. Let the 100 rods be the base of a triangle, divide it into 4 parts of 25 rods each, and join the apex with each of the three dividing points. You will then have 4 triangles on equal bases and between the same parallels, which, according to Euclid, are equal to each other. (35) R. S. asks: What are the chemical qualities of bisulphide of lime, and how can I prepare it? A. The bisulphide of calcium (C_{2}S_{5}) is produced by boiling milk of lime with sulphur and water, but not long enough to allow the lime to become completely saturated. The filtered liquid, on cooling, deposits crystals whose composition agrees with the formula C_{2}S_{2} + 3H_{2}O. Exposed to the air, it soon absorbs oxygen, becoming converted into insoluble sulphate of calcium. Its aqueous solutions are likewise decomposed. Its reactions with the metallic salts are similar to those of the alkaline sulphides. (36) H. M. S. asks: 1. Of what is the bronze preparation made and how is it applied to clock fronts? A. Bronze powders are made of various metallic alloys. The gold bronze is usually made of Dutch gold (an alloy of copper and zinc) and of the bisulphide of tin (_aurum musivum_). They are usually applied to metal work by means of an oil size or japan varnish. 2. In what way can I remove the old bronze? A. Wash first with a solution of washing soda (hot), clean and dry, and then rub with a little benzole, alcohol, or ether. (37) W. E. W. asks: 1. Of what mixture is the bright red paint usually put upon axes made? A. It consists of fine vermilion ground with 1 part boiled oil and 2 parts turpentine. 2. Is more than one coat applied? A. One coat will suffice. It is best applied with a fine brush, when the metal is warm. (38) C. M. B. asks: Is the odor emitted by the ailanthus tree unwholesome? A. It is considered so by many, but we have no proof as to the facts. (39) L. S. & Co. ask: Is there anything known which would clean the hands from paints and lacquers without the use of turpentine? A. A little ammonia and benzine or naphtha, aided by a little sand, is often used in stubborn cases; put plenty of good soap and warm water, with a stiff brush or a small piece of pumicestone, will ordinarily suffice. (40) W. P. S., Jr., says: Can you give me a recipe for making _papier maché_? A. _Papier maché_ is obtained from old paper and the like made into a pulp by grinding with milk of lime or lime water, and a little gum dextrin or starch. This pulp is then pressed into form, coated with linseed oil, baked at a high temperature, and finally varnished. The pulp is sometimes mixed with clay (kaolin), chalk, etc.; and other kinds are made of a paste of pulp and recently slaked lime. This is used for ornamenting wood, etc. (41) M. P. B. says, in reply to a correspondent who asked how to prevent his water filter from getting choked up: Fit in the filter, on the top of the charcoal, a piece of board having in the center a circular hole from two to four inches in diameter, according to the size of the filter; force in this a sponge so tightly that all the water has to pass through it first, but not so as to prevent its free passage. This sponge will absorb readily the gross impurities of the water, and can easily be taken out and cleaned once or twice a week. (42) A. C. S. asks: 1. Is there any reason why lightning rod points should always be bright, if the points are kept sufficiently sharp? A. It makes no difference if the points are not bright. 2. If lightning rods put up in the ordinary way above the roof terminate in the eaves' spouting of the house, and said spouting had good ground connections, would this not be equal to the best lightning rod, and thereby save many feet of rod and many dollars of expense? A. The arrangement you suggest would be good. Make a thoroughly good ground connection with leaders, have all joints well soldered, and you may dispense with the rod as you propose. (43) J. A. W. says: Having occasion to do some copper plating some time ago, I dissolved sulphate of copper in water in a glass jar. I then poured it off into my battery, and there was some left in the jar. I threw a small piece of iron into it and left it for some days. I then took it out; and to my surprise, I found that it had been perfectly plated with copper. Please let me know the cause? A. The reaction you note is taken advantage of to cheaply copper plate small articles of cast iron. See answer to J. O. M., p. 347, vol. 36. In the presence of water, the reaction is as follows: CuSO_{4} + Fe = FeSO_{4} + Cu. Sulphate of copper. Iron. Sulphate of iron. Copper. As the iron is a more positive metal than copper, it displaced the latter in combination with acids, the remaining portions of the iron becoming coated with the precipitated copper. (44) A. G. asks: Is the silver, for a reflecting telescope, put on the back of the glass the same as on looking glasses? A. No. Only one side of the glass is ground and polished to the shape required. The silvering is done on this side; and then, with the softest buckskin and the finest rouge, the surface of the silver is polished for the reflecting surface. In cities where gas is used, it will not retain its brilliancy very long; then it requires to be cleaned with nitric acid and resilvered, which is only the work of a few hours when a person has become accustomed to it. (45) A. L. B. says: 1. I understand that, in modern chemistry, the acids and alkalies are the two extremes of a class of substances called hydrates, the only difference being the radical. In the reaction of nitric acid, HO NO_{2} or HNO_{3} on potassic hydrate, KOH is KO NO_{2} or KNO_{3}, and H_{2}O. Which molecule loses the oxygen atom, and why should one part with it more than the other? A. HNO_{3} + KOH = KNO_{3} + H_{2}O Nitric acid potassic potassic water hydrate nitrate In this reaction the potassium is considered, by virtue of its greater affinity, as replacing the hydrogen atom in the hydric nitrate; the hydrogen in turn satisfying the OH group to form water. These hydrates are similar only in point of constitution. Their chemical deportments are widely different. 2. What are oxides in modern chemistry? A. The bodies formed by the direct combination of oxygen with the elementary bodies are called oxides. With water some of these oxides form hydrates, as K_{2}O + H_{2}O = 2(KHO) potassium water potassic oxide hydrate (46) J. R. M. asks: To have a circular saw run well, should the mandrel have a little end play if it is desired to relieve the saw and guides of strain? A. If the saw is not true or the carriage runs crooked, end play of the mandrel to the extent of the deviations will relieve the strain upon the saw. But if the carriage runs true and the saw true, the mandrel should have no end play. MINERALS, etc.--Specimens have been received from the following correspondents, and examined, with the result stated: M. S. M.--It is a quartz crystal, the opposite sides of which have been ground flat, probably by artificial means.--F. B.--It is graphite. * * * * * COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED. The Editor of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN acknowledges, with much pleasure, the receipt of original papers and contributions upon the following subjects: On a Battery and Electric Clock. By J. E. W. On Anti-Water Drinking. By C. P. W. On Snakes Catching Fish. By C. R. G. On Utilization of Sewage. By Dr. H. D. T. On Aerial Navigation. By C. W. On the Ash-Colored Salamander. By C. F. S. * * * * * HINTS TO CORRESPONDENTS. Correspondents whose inquiries fail to appear should repeat them. If not then published, they may conclude that, for good reasons, the Editor declines them. The address of the writer should always be given. Inquiries relating to patents, or to the patentability of inventions, assignments, etc., will not be published here. All such questions, when initials only are given, are thrown into the waste basket, as it would fill half of our paper to print them all; but we generally take pleasure in answering briefly by mail, if the writer's address is given. Hundreds of inquiries analogous to the following are sent: "Who makes machinery suitable for making flour barrels? Whose is the best theodolite? Who sells steam whistles? Whose is the cheapest silk, suitable for balloons? Who makes the best engraving machine for transferring designs to copper?" All such personal inquiries are printed, as will be observed, in the column of "Business and Personal," which is specially set apart for that purpose, subject to the charge mentioned at the head of that column. Almost any desired information can in this way be expeditiously obtained. * * * * * OFFICIAL. INDEX OF INVENTIONS FOR WHICH LETTERS PATENT OF THE UNITED STATES WERE GRANTED IN THE WEEK ENDING June 5, 1877, AND EACH BEARING THAT DATE. [Those marked (r) are reissued patents.] * * * * * A complete copy of any patent in the annexed list, including both the specifications and drawings, will be furnished from this office for one dollar. In ordering, please state the number and date of the patent desired and remit to Munn & Co., 37 Park Row, New York city. * * * * * Air, cooling, C. Pfanne 191,710 Apple parers, etc., W. M. Griscom 191,669,191,670 Ash sifter, G. W. & L. Demond 191,520 Bag holder. E. Woods 191,741 Baking pan, L. B. Foss 191,578 Baking pan, J. H. Pitts 191,548 Barrel cover, McClellan & McBride 191,699 Barrel head, G. M. Breinig 191,644 Bedstead, wardrobe, S. S. Burr 191,651 Bee hive, T. A. Atkinson 191,635 Bee hive, H. F. Poggenpohl 191,612 Bee hive, Sperry & Chandler 191,620 Bench dog, W. Lyle 191,693 Bit stock, J. T. Matthews 191,540 Blacksmith's tongs, J. Van Matre 191,734 Boiler furnace, etc., J. E. Crowell 191,518 Bottle stopper, C. De Quillfeldt (r) 7,722 Bottles, etc., sealing, C. L. Darby 191,519 Bottling machine, W. H. Kelly 191,596 Bracket, J. B. Sargent 191,718 Breech loading fire arm, V. Bovy 191,563 Breech loading fire arm, J. Schudt 191,721 Bridge, E. S. Sherman 191,552 Bung cutter, R. & G. N. Crichton 191,658 Button, clasp, L. B. Colin 191,657 Button fastening, A. Brookmann 191,649 Calender and washing list, J. C. Coombs 191,517 Car brake, E. S. Jones 191,594 Car coupling, W. Duesler 191,522 Car lavatory, C. E. Lucas 191,691 Carriage perch stay, J. R. McGuire 191,700 Chair convertible, J. P. True 191,733 Chair, folding, B. F. Little 191,689 Chicken coop, Sullivan & Retallic 191,621 Chicken coop, R. L, & N. J. Todd 191,556 Chimney draft regulator, W. H. Sears 191,722 Chisel, mortising, J. T. Bowen 191,643 Churn, T. J. Parrish 191,708 Churn, reciprocating, H. C. Sperry 191,726 Churn, rotary, A. J. Borland 191,562 Churn, rotary, Hatton & Record 191,676 Churn, rotary, J. G. Wallace 191,736 Clasp hook, spring, J. W. Knause 191,686 Clocks, adjusting position of, W. F. Wuterich 191,630 Coal and ore washer, J. M. Bailey 191,511 Corn dropper, J. P. Simmons 191,723 Corset skirt supporter, T. F. Hamilton 191,672 Cotton scraper, etc., M. Roby 191,613 Cultivator, W. E. Dewey 191,660 Cultivator, A. S. McDermott 191,606 Cupboard, W. H. Sallada 191,549 Curry comb, Bennett & Moody 191,559 Curry comb, P. Miller 191,608 Desk, school, C. H. Presbrey 191,713 Drawing instrument, J. R. Peel 191,611 Drill hoe, E. F. Pryor 191,714 Easel, T. L. Fisher 191,577 Easel, F. S. Frost 191,579 Eccentric, reversible, Lafayette & Strong 191,602 Elevator, etc., telescopic, W. R. Comings 191,516 Elliptic spring, N. J. Tilghman 191,731 Engine frame, S. W. Putnam 191,716 Engine exhaust, C. T. Parry 191,545 Engine valve motion, H. Haering 191,583 Feed rack, W. H. Howard 191,590 Feed water heater, N. W. Kirby 191,597 Fence, E. H. Perry 191,547 Fences, R. F. Ward 191,626, 191,627 Fence cap, metallic, J. D. W. Lauckhardt 191,603 Finger guard, K. A. Wynne 191,742 Fire escape, L. Henkle 191,677 Fire front, G. W. Purcel 191,715 Fire kindler, J. G. Distler 191,572 Fireproof column, Drake & Wight 191,662 Flour bin and sifter, F. M. Mahan 191,694 Fluting and polishing, C. Johnson 191,684 Fluting machine, Keller & Olmesdahl 191,595 Fly trap, Carroll & Lamb 191,652 Fountain, portable, W. H. Zinn 191,557 Fruit crate, G. Willard 191,739 Fuel, pressing, stalks, etc., for, Davis & Fisk 191,571 Fulling mill, J. Hunter 191,592 Furnace bottom construction, P. D. Nicols 191,543 Furnaces, oxygen, blast, C. Hornbostel 191,530 Gage cock, boiler, D. T. Ellis 191,663 Gas apparatus, portable, D. H. Irland 191,531 Gate, B. R. Baker 191,637 Gate, J. T. Guy 191,671 Gearing, oscillating, N. P. Otis 191,705 Glassware, making, C. L. Knecht 191,534 Grate, J. H. Mearns 191,702 Griddle, H. C. Milligan 191,703 Gutter holder, M. Schmitt 191,616 Hame attachment, J. Hudson 191,591 Harness saddle tree, W. L. Frizzell 191,525 Harrow, H. I. Lund 191,604 Harvester, Philleo & Cox 191,711 Harvester corn, B. Osgood 191,610 Harvester finger bar, H. L. Hopkins 191,678 Harvester rake, R. Emerson 191,664 Harvester rake, R. D. Warner 191,743 Harvester reels, H. A. Adams 191,631, 191,632 Harvester cutter, Haskin & Reigart 191,675 Hats, pressing, R. Kent 191,533 Hatter's measure, J. A. Harrington 191,674 Hay derrick, etc., R. N. B. Kirkham 191,598 Hay elevator, E. L. Church 191,568 Hinge and door, safe, P. F. King 191,680 Hog catcher, J. H. Eames 191,575 Hoisting machine, H. J. Reedy 191,717 Hoisting machine, G. H. Reynolds (r) 7,727 Hoisting machine, F. G. Hesse 191,529 Holdback, J. W. Hight 191,589 Honey box, Johnson & Keeley 191,593 Hoopskirt spring, etc., A. Benjamin 191,641 Hydrocarbon injector, H. E. Parson 191,546 Hydrocarbons, extracting, W. Adamson 191,623 Ice cream freezer, J. Solter 191,725 Ice cutting machine, C. Chadwick 191,515 Ice house, E. Schandein 191,719 Ice machine, A. T. Ballantine 191,638 Indicator for bellows, J. E. Treat 191,624 Iron and steel cementation, J. W. Hoxie. 191,681 Iron from cold short pig, etc., C. C. McCarty 191,698 Jar cover, E. Meier 191,541 Jewelry, plated, English & Covell 191,665 Keyhole guard, C. H. Covell (r) 7,720 Label holder, J. E. Sweetland 191,555 Lathe tool, E. F. Beugler 191,560 Lathes, truing work in, A. Hatch 191,586 Lifting jack, T. Weathers 191,737 Lime kiln, M. Callan 191,566 Lithographic press, C. C. Maurice 191,696 Locomotive light, A. Dressell 191,574 Loom take-up, J. Lyall 191,692 Loom harness cording, L. J. Knowles 191,600 Lubricator, C. H. Parshall 191,707 Mandrel, expanding, Amann & Harker 191,634 Manure drill, A. C. Hurley 191,682 Marine ram, N. H. Borgfeldt 191,514 Match safe, J. A. Field 191,576 Medicine case, J. C. Millard 191,607 Milk cooler, J. Bissonett 191,513 Millstone dress, R. S. Williams 191,740 Mineral wool, treating, A. D. Elbers 191,524 Mirror, adjustable, S. R. Scottron 191,720 Motion, converting, C. Chadwick 191,654, 191,655 Needle, knitting, etc., S. Peberdy 191,709 Oil can, D. Bennett 191,642 Oil well rope socket, H. Baddock (r) 7,719 Ore, reducing nickel, W. B. Tatro 191,728 Organ swell, reed, Kelly & Hebard 191,532 Paper barrels, making, E. M. Slayton 191,618 Paperbox, P. B. Pickens 191,712 Pianoforte bridge, J. Herald 191,587 Picture exhibitor, J. Hannerty 191,673 Plow, E. Haiman (r) 7,724 Plow, L. F. W. Liles 191,688 Plow clevis, C. O. Wilder 191,629 Plow colter, C. R. Thompson 191,622 Plow, sulky, A. A. Fowler 191,677 Plow, sulky, W. Henry 191,588 Preserving, bleaching fruit, etc., J. R. Dodge, Jr. 191,661 Pulleys, casting, G. G. Lobdell 191,690 Pulp, die for forming, D. Scrymgeour 191,551 Pump, rotary, Swan & Edgecomb 191,727 Pumps, making buckets for, J. N. Kaufholz 191,685 Pumping from casks, etc., W. F. Class 191,656 Quicksilver condenser, R. F. Knox 191,687 Railway signal, electric, J. P. Tirrell 191,732 Reamer, expanding, R. Blair 191,561 Refrigerator, Thompson & Parkhurst 191,729 Refuse burner, W. Glue 191,744 Ribbon block, G. N. Stanton 191,554 Ribbon, etc., storing, A. C. Mason 191,695 Ripping tool, G. D. Clark 191,569 Safe, fireproof, Saxe & Harding 191,550 Sandpapering machine, J. P. Beck 191,640 Sash fastener, S. G. Monce 191,609 Saw guide, J. B. Currier 191,659 Sawing machines, scroll, J. H. Plummer (r) 7,725, 7,726 Seed drill, H. L. Brown 191,565 Seed planter, check row, G. D. Haworth 191,528 Sewing machine, straw, S. C. Brown 191,647 Sewing machine trimmer, H. H. Hallett 191,584 Shingles, etc., bunching, P. Dexter (r) 7,723 Shoes, making, J. Tibbetts 191,730 Skate, J. A. Dodge 191,573 Skate, roller, J. Miner 191,542 Skylight bar, J. W. Atkinson 191,636 Spinning, roll support. F. B. Hart 191,585 Spooling, stop motion, J. Wild 191,738 Spools, preventing unrolling tape, etc., A. C. Gould 191,581 Spoon blank, die, H. W. Bassett 191,639 Stamp, hand, L. Tilton 191,623 Stamp mill, G. Downing 191,521 Steamboat smoke stack, Rouze et al 191,614 Stop motion fork slide, J. McCaffrey, Jr. 191,697 Stove, J. Gladding, 3d 191,580 Stove, coal oil, M. H. Barnes 191,558 Stove, cooking, D. E. Paris 191,706 Stovepipe damper, A. Brightman 191,646 Stovepipe thimble, J. Carhartt 191,567 Stove, oil, cooking, Sherburne et al 191,553 Straw cutter, A. Vahldieck 191,625 Sugar, liquefying hard, O. H. Krause 191,535 Sugar liquor, collecting, A. A. Goubert 191,527 Sugar liquor, collecting, Matthiessen et al 191,537, 191,538 Sugar, washing raw, F. O. Matthiessen 191,539 Swing, J. J. Janezeck 191,683 Thill coupling, J. Kitzmiller 191,599 Tobacco, hoisting, C. H. Slaton 191,619 Tobacco pipe, N. T. Oberg 191,544 Tobacco plant planter, R. A. Knox 191,601 Top, spinning, T. McLaughlin 191,701 Tortoise-shell handle, C. W. Schaeffer 191,615 Towel rack, C. A. Brickley 191,564 Trap for balls, T. Wilkie 191,628 Tube well, T. J. Dean (r) 7,721 Type writer, D. H. Sherman 191,617 Upholstering tuft, R. H. Bryant 191,650 Valve tank, J. P. Duncan 191,523 Vegetable cutter, W. Chapin 191,653 Vehicle spring and axle, S. W. Ludlow 191,536 Ventilation, etc., W. H. Bennett 191,512 Wagon axle skein, H. L. Hinds 191,679 Wagon gearing, W. P. Brown 191,648 Wagons, skid attachment for, C. Crandall 191,570 Wardrobe hook, labeled, T. F. Breese 191,645 Wash boiler, T. Gunsalus 191,582 Water gauge, C. D. Smith 191,724 Water wheel, L. Good 191,668 Water wheel, I. Mallery 191,605 Weaving shuttle, duck, W. L. Gilbert 191,526 Wheelbarrow, E. W. Walker 191,735 Wood pressing machine, S. L. Nagle 191,704 Wrench, pipe, G. Fletcher 191,666 * * * * * DESIGNS PATENTED, 10,030 to 10,032.--EMBROIDERY.--E. Crisand, New Haven, Conn. 10,033.--LOCK-CASE.--R. Flocke, Newark, N. J. 10,034.--BOTTLES.--J. H. Harrison, Davenport, Iowa. 10,035 to 10,037.--CARPET.--H. S. Kerr, Philadelphia, Pa. 10,038, 10,039.--CARPETS.--T. J. Stearns, Boston, Mass. 10,040.--MOULDING.--R. M. Merrill et al., Laconia, N. H. 10,041 to 10,044.--OIL CLOTH.--C. T. Meyer et al., Bergen, N. J. 10,045.--STUDS, ETC.--J. W. Miller et al., Newark, N. J. 10,046.--BOOK CASES.--J. W. Schuckers, New York city. [A copy of any one of the above patents may be had by remitting one dollar to MUNN & Co., 37 Park Row, New York city.] * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS * * * * * Inside Page, each insertion 75 cents a line. Back Page, each insertion $1.00 a line. _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Friday morning to appear in next issue._ * * * * * THE SCIENTIFIC GRAIN & MIDDLINGS MILL. [Illustration] 12, 20, and 30 inch Mill Stones. Sent on trial to responsible parties, and warranted the full equal of any heavy mill built in the world. Send for our price list, as this may not appear again. A. W. STRAUB & CO., 1361 Ridge Avenue, Phila, Pa. NO MORE SLIPPING BELTS. MY NEW Patent Pulley Cover will do double the work before the belt will slip. Put on without disturbing shafting. Agent wanted in every city. Circulars free. JOHN W. SUTTON, 95 Liberty St., New York. THE NEW GERMAN PATENT LAW. Being the Full Text of the New Law for Patents, passed July 1st, 1877, covering all the States of the German Empire. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 80. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. PATENT COLD ROLLED SHAFTING Price list mailed on application to JONES & LAUGHLINS, Try Street, 2d and 3rd Avenues, Pittsburgh, Pa. 190 S. Canal Street, Chicago, Ill., and Milwaukie, Wis. --> Stocks of this shafting in store and for sale by FULLER, DANA, & FITZ, Boston, Mass. GEO. PLACE & CO. 121 Chambers St., N. Y. EUREKA SAFETY POWER! Practically IMPOSSIBLE TO EXPLODE. Tested to 300 lbs. pressure per square inch. 2-Horse Power, $150, 3 to 4 H.P., $250. Also, Stationary Engines and boilers, and SPARK ARRESTING PORTABLE ENGINES for plantation use. Send for our circular. Discount to the trade. B. W. PAYNE & SONS, Corning, N. Y. SIZING OF COTTON GOODS. Read before the Society of Arts by W. Thompson, F.R.S. A most Full and Clear Description of the process, embracing: An account of the process of Weaving, explaining the object and utility of Size. A table of Sizing Mixtures, in which are enumerated the Substances used: 1, for giving Adhesive properties to Size; 2, to give Weight and Body to the Yarn; 3, for Softening the Size or Yarn; and 4, for Preserving the Size from Mildew and Decomposition. Tests for these Substances, and Directions for Preparing, so as to obtain the results required. Proportions of Sizing. Use of Flour in Size. Weighting Materials, China Clay and its substitutes. "Softenings," and Oils for Softening. East Winds and their effect. Glycerine, Grape Sugar, Mildew Preventives, and Tape Sizing. "Slashing," Packing, Damaged Goods, etc. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 80. Price 10 cents. For sale at this office and of all newsdealers. CELEBRATED FOOT LATHES. Foot Power Back-geared Screw Lathes, Small Hand and Power Planers for Metal, Small Gear Cutters, Slide-rests, Ball Machine for Lathes, Foot Scroll Saws, light and heavy Foot Circular Saws. Just the articles for Amateurs or Artisans. Highly recommended. Send for illustrated Catalogues. N. H. BALDWIN, Laconia, N. H. $66 a Week in your own town. Terms and $5 outfit free. H. HALLETT & CO., Portland Maine. SAVE OIL. USE TOMLINSON'S Car Axle Box. Cars run for 3 cents for a thousand miles. See _Car Builder_ for June, 1877. Address J. B. TOMLINSON, 80 White St., N. Y. DAYTON CAM PUMP [Illustration] THE ONLY PUMP IN THE MARKET DESIGNED AND CONSTRUCTED ESPECIALLY FOR BOILER FEEDING. Are Pumping water at 268° F. No Dead Centers. The Steam Valve is a plain Slide Valve, identical to the slide valve of a Steam Engine, but derives its motion from a cam. Speed can be regulated to suit evaporation. Pumping Returns from Steam Heating Apparatus a specialty. --> Send for Circular. Smith, Vaile & Co., DAYTON, OHIO. WHAT 25 CENTS WILL BUY! THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN REFERENCE BOOK. PRICE TWENTY-FIVE CENTS. This is a most useful Little bound book of 150 pages, comprising, probably, the most extensive variety of standard, practical, condensed information ever furnished to the public for so small a price. Contents: 1. THE LAST CENSUS OF THE UNITED STATES (1870), by States, Territories and Counties. IN FULL, showing also the area in square miles of each State and Territory. 2. TABLE OF OCCUPATIONS.--Showing the occupations of the people of the United States, and the number of persons engaged in each occupation. Compiled from the last census. 3. TABLE OF CITIES, having over 10,000 Inhabitants. Compiled from the last census. 4. MAP OF THE UNITED STATES. Miniature outline. 5. THE UNITED STATES PATENT LAWS (full text).--Principal Official Rules for Procedure; Directions How to Obtain Patents, Costs, etc.; Forms for Patents and Caveats: How to Introduce and Sell Inventions; Forms for Assignments; Licenses; State, Town, County, and Shop Rights; General Principles applicable to Infringements; Synopsis of the Patent Laws of Foreign Countries; Rights of Employers and Employes in respect to Inventions. 6. THE ORNAMENTAL DESIGN PATENT LAW (full text).--Costs and Procedure for securing Design Patents for Ornamental Productions such as Designs for Textile Fabrics, Patterns for Wood and Metal Work, New Shapes and Configurations of any article of Manufacture, Prints, Pictures, and Ornaments, to be printed, woven, stamped, cast, or otherwise applied upon machinery, tools, goods, fabrics, manufactures. 7. THE UNITED STATES TRADE-MARK LAW (full text).--With Directions, Proceedings and Expenses for the Registration of Trade-Marks of every description. 8. 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Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York, THE SECOND GREAT SALE OF PATENTS AT AUCTION Will take place at the Auction Rooms of GEO. W. KEELER, 53 Liberty St., N. Y., on July 16, at 12 o'clock. Models now on exhibition. Send for Catalogue. WOOD & LIGHT MACHINE CO. WORCESTER, Mass. Manufacture of all kinds of IRON-WORKING MANCHINERY, including many novelties. Shafting, Pulleys, &c. Send for Circulars. [Illustration] $95 A month and expenses. SALESMAN WANTED to sell to DEALERS. SAMPLES FREE. CANDY & NOVELTIES LETTERS must have enclosed return postage. H. SMITH & CO., CONFECTIONERS, Cincinnati, O. POND'S TOOLS ENGINE LATHES, PLANERS, DRILLS, &c. Send for Catalogue. DAVID W. POND, Successor to LUCIUS W. POND. WORCESTER, MASS. STEAM PUMPS. FIRST PRIZES, CENTENNIAL, PHILA., VIENNA, PARIS, NEW YORK, BALTIMORE, BOSTON. Send for circular of recent patented improvements, THE NORWALK IRON WORKS CO., South Norwalk, Conn. Prices Reduced. N. F. BURNHAM'S 1874 WATER WHEEL Is declared the "STANDARD TURBINE," by OVER 600 persons who bought and use them with PART and FULL GATE open. Pamphlets Free. N. F. BURNHAM, YORK, PA. OTIS' SAFETY HOISTING MACHINERY OTIS BROS. & CO., No. 348 Broadway, New York. $55 TO $77 a week to Agents. $10 _Outfit Free_. P. O. VICKERY, Augusta Maine. WE ENAMEL in FINE JET BLACK every variety Of turned woodwork parts of machinery castings tin-ware and other metal work ENAMELED JET GOODS, in wood or metal, made to order AMERICAN ENAMEL CO. 17 WARREN ST. PROVIDENCE. R. I. 50 MIXED CARDS, with name, l0c. and stamp. Agent's Outfit, l0c. COE & CO., Bristol, Ct. [Illustration: PHOTO ENGRAVING CO. MOSS'S PROCESS 67, Park Place.] NEW YORK L. SMITH HOBART. President. J. C. MOSS, Superintendent. TYPE-METAL RELIEF PLATES. A SUPERIOR SUBSTITUTE FOR WOOD-CUTS AT MUCH LOWER PRICES. These plates are engraved almost entirely by photo-chemical means, thus avoiding the old, slow and tedious method of engraving on wooden blocks, where the workman is compelled to engrave each line separately by cutting away the wood around it, often spending many days upon a plate a few inches square. In appearance our relief plates are the same as regular stereotypes, being mounted type high on blocks ready to be set up and printed from, with type, on any ordinary press. They can be used directly and will wear as long as any type-metal plates, but if a great number of impressions are wanted, duplicate ELECTROTYPES AND STEREOTYPES can be made from them the same as from wood-cuts. They have a printing surface as smooth as glass, and the lines are engraved deeper than they are in hand-cut plates. Notwithstanding the _low prices_ at which they can be furnished, they are very much superior to wood-cuts, and in some classes of work are rapidly taking the place of lithography. REFERENCES. Among those who manifest their satisfaction with our work, by continued orders, we may mention:--D. Appleton & Co., Scribner & Co., Frank Leslie, A. D. F. Randolph & Co., G. W. Carleton & Co., The American Tract Society, Robert Carter & Bros., Munn & Co., Pub. "Iron Age," Pub. "Illustrated Weekly," Pub. "McGee's Illustrated Weekly," and also a large part of the principal publishers and manufacturers throughout the country. COPY. Almost all kinds of Prints or Engravings from Wood, Stone, Copper and Steel may be reproduced directly. _The requisites are, clean, distinct black lines or stipple work, on white or only slightly tinted paper. All Photographs and Pencil Sketches must first be drawn in ink._ We keep a corps of artists constantly employed, trained to do this work in the best manner. We can make drawings from photographs or tin-types taken in the usual way. They may be of any size, but should, of course, show the object distinctly. Drawings for our use, unless intended to be redrawn, should be on a _smooth, white_ surface, in _perfectly black_ lines, and usually twice the dimensions each way of the desired plate. Copy for fac-similes of handwriting should be in _perfectly black ink_, on _smooth white_ paper, written with a full pen, and without use of blotting paper. TIME. While we can engrave a plate in a few hours that would occupy a wood-engraver a month, and often do so, yet with the large amount of work constantly on hand and promised, we cannot usually engage to fill an order for a single plate in less than from three to six days; larger orders will, of course, require longer time. CHANGE OF SIZE. In reproducing wood-cut prints, the size can often be considerably reduced; but if the reduction is great, the lines become so fine and close together that they will not print well. Coarse wood-cuts, such as are generally used in Newspapers, may often be reduced to half their linear dimensions, but _fine_ wood-cuts will admit of but little reduction. _Most_ steel plate prints and lithographs will not admit of any reduction, and even when reproduced, the same size in relief, require considerable care in printing. All kinds of prints generally look bad when much enlarged, as the lines become very coarse and ragged on the edges; though we have sometimes made very effective cuts for posters and hand-bills in this way. In all cases of enlargement and reduction the relative proportions remain the same. It must not be forgotten, however, that by redrawing, prints of any kind can be enlarged or reduced to any desired size. PROOFS. We will, whenever desired, furnish tin-type proofs of drawings made by us, for examination and approval, or correction, before engraving. A printed proof is sent with each plate when delivered, which may always be equaled or surpassed in actual work with proper usage. PRICES. It is impossible to give a scale of prices by the square inch for miscellaneous job-work, as sometimes a small cut two or three inches square may require as much work as another one a foot square. We can, however, give an average inch rate to newspaper publishers whose work runs uniformly about the same from week to week, especially when they furnish us with copy already prepared--such as prints and pen-and-ink drawings. In sending for estimates, be careful to send us the copy we are to work from, with full specifications as to size and quality, and remember that it is the same with engraving that it is with everything else; the price will vary greatly with the quality of work ordered. Never, directly or indirectly, ask us to give _you_ better prices than we give our other customers, as we try to treat all alike. The great advantage of our method of engraving enables us to give better work at lower prices than can be given by any other method for the greater part of such work as would be given to wood-engravers, though in very small pieces of the poorer grades of work the advantage is not so great, and in very coarse work such as is usually engraved on mahogany and pine, our process gives us no advantage over the wood-engraver. To estimate properly upon any piece of work, we must understand just what is wanted. We guarantee all our work to be executed in the style agreed upon. TERMS. OUR TERMS are CASH ON DELIVERY, except by special agreement. Orders from parties not known to us must be accompanied by an advance of at least half the price, or satisfactory City reference. Goods sent by Express will be C. O. D. Where plates are small they may be sent by Mail upon receipt of price and postage. Remittances must be by draft on New-York or P. O. money order, payable to the order of Photo-Engraving Co., or by registered letter--_not by Checks on Local Banks_. We pledge ourselves to meet the reasonable demands of those who employ us. If, in any case, we cannot do so, we will refund the money advanced. _SEND STAMP FOR ILLUSTRATED CIRCULAR_. WROUGHT IRON BEAMS & GIRDERS [Illustration: WROUGHT IRON BEAMS & GIRDERS] THE UNION IRON MILLS, Pittsburgh, Pa., Manufacturers of improved wrought iron Beams and Girders (patented). The great fall which has taken place in the prices of Iron, and especially in Beams used in the construction of FIRE PROOF BUILDINGS, induces us to call the special attention of Engineers, Architects, and Builders to the undoubted advantages of now erecting Fire Proof structures; and by reference to pages 52 & 54 of our Book of Sections-- which will be sent on application to those contemplating the erection of fire proof buildings--THE COST CAN BE ACCURATELY CALCULATED, the cost of Insurance avoided, and the serious losses and interruption to business caused by fire; these and like considerations fully justify any additional first cost. It is believed, that were owners fully aware of the small difference which now exists between the use of Wood and Iron, that in many cases the latter would be adopted. We shall be pleased to furnish estimates for all the Beams complete, for any specific structure, so that the difference in cost may at once be ascertained. Address CARNEGIE, BROS. & CO., Pittsburgh, Pa. $5 TO $20 per day at home. Samples worth $5 free. STINSON & CO., Portland, Me. LIGHT GRAY IRON CASTINGS to order promptly. Plain, Bronzed, or Galvanized. We make a _specialty_ of light work. LIVINGSTON & CO., Iron Founders, Pittsburgh, Pa. THE GEORGE PLACE MACHINERY AGENCY Machinery of Every Description. 121 Chambers and 103 Reade Streets, New York. SPARE THE CROTON AND SAVE THE COST. DRIVEN OR TUBE WELLS furnished to large consumers of Croton and Ridgewood Water. WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO., 414 Water St., N. Y. who control the patent for Green's American Driven Well. PATENT RIGHTS for Useful Inventions Wanted. Address Box 1012, P.O., N. Y., with description and terms. TO ELECTRO-PLATERS. JEWELERS, AND WATCHMAKERS. BATTERIES, CHEMICALS, AND MATERIALS, in sets or single, with Books of instruction for Nickel, Gold, and Silver Plating. THOMAS HALL, Manufacturing Electrician, 19 Bromfield Street, Boston, Mass. Illustrated Catalogue sent free. LATHES, PLANERS, SHAPERS, DRILLS, GEAR & BOLT CUTTERS, &c. E. GOULD, Newark, N. J. SELF-ACTING SASH-LOCK for Meeting Rails [Illustration: Sash-lock] BURGLAR PROOF. Can not be forced or tampered with in any way. BEAUTIFUL DESIGN; PRACTICAL; SIMPLE. United States, State, or County Rights for sale. Address D. C. GOODRICH, Harrisburg, Pa. [Illustration] THE TRADE ENGINE Noiseless in operation-Perfect in workmanship--all light parts of Cast Steel. Every Engine indicated, and valve corrected to give the highest attainable results. Warranted superior to any semi-portable Engine in the market! Send for Price List and Circular. HERRMANN & HERCHEL-- RODE M'F'G Co., Dayton, Ohio, WESSELL METAL, A PERFECT IMITATION of gold in color, surface, etc., for manufacturers of imitation jewelry, and other workers in fine yellow metal. Wessell Manuf'g Co., No. 204 East 23d St., N. Y. [Illustration] YOU ask WHY we can sell First-Class 7 1-3 Octave Rosewood Pianos for $290. Our answer is, that it costs less than $300 to make any $600 Piano sold through Agents, all of whom make 100 per ct. profit. We have no Agents, but sell direct to Families at Factory price, and warrant five years. We send our Pianos everywhere for trial and require no payment unless they are found satisfactory. Send for our Illustrated Circular, which gives full particulars, and contains the names of over 1500 Bankers, Merchants and Families that are using our Pianos in every State of the Union. Please state where you saw this notice. Address, U. S. PIANO CO., 810 BROADWAY, N. Y. $12 A DAY at home. Agents wanted. Outfit and terms free. TRUE & CO., Augusta, Maine. WOOD-WORKING MACHINERY, Such as Woodworth Planing, Tongueing, and Grooving Machines, Daniel's Planers, Richardson's Patent Improved Tenon Machines, Mortising, Moulding, and Re-Saw Machines, and Wood-Working Machinery generally. Manufactured by WITHERBY, RUGG & RICHARDSON, 26 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Mass, (Shop formerly occupied by R. BALL & CO.) STEEL NAME STAMPS. N. Y. STENCIL WORKS, 87 Nassau St., N. Y. WANTED -- FOR MONCLOVA, State of Coahuila, Mexico, a man who knows how to make Star Candles, without the use of Sulphuric Acid, capable to put up and put in running order the necessary apparatus, superintend the manufacturing process, and teach same to the parties interested. Apply and state terms to GOLDFRANK, FRANK & CO., San Antonio, Texas. WE WANT SALESMEN on a regular salary of $85 a month and expenses to sell our CIGARS to DEALERS. Samples FREE. Send 3c. stamp to insure answer. S. FOSTER & CO. Cincinnati, O. EXTRAORDINARY, WONDERFUL, AND VALUABLE MEDICAL WORK. With engravings; price, $1. Contains, also, fifty original prescriptions for prevailing diseases, each worth ten times the price of the book. Gold Medal has been awarded the author. Descriptive circulars sent free. Address Dr. W. H. PARKER, No. 4 Bulfinch Street, Boston. [Illustration] $100.00 REWARD This MOUSTACHE or HEAVY BEARD produced on a smooth face by the use of DYKES BEARD ELIXIR, without injury, or will forfeit $100.00. Price by mail in sealed package 25 cents, 3 packages only 50 cents. A. L. SMITH & Co., Palatine, Ill., Sole Agents. --> We caution the public against imitations. THE DRIVEN WELL. Town and County privileges for making DRIVEN WELLS and selling Licenses under the established AMERICAN DRIVEN WELL PATENT, leased by the year to responsible parties, by WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO., NEW YORK. IMPORTANT FOR ALL CORPORATIONS AND MANF'G CONCERNS.--BUERK'S WATCHMAN'S TIME DETECTOR, capable of accurately controlling the motion of a watchman or patrolman at the different stations of his beat. Send for circular. J. E. BUERK, P.O. BOX 979, BOSTON, MASS N. B.--The suit against Imhaeuser & Co., of New York, was decided in my favor, June 10, 1874. Proceedings have been commenced against Imhaeuser & Co. for selling, contrary to the order of the Court. Persons using clocks infringing on my patent, will be dealt with according to law. [Illustration] 25 per cent. Discount on Price List of SUPERIOR WOOD-WORKING MACHINERY allowed for the present. Also for SMITH'S CHILLED-BEAM VISES; effective, heavy, strong, durable, and economical. For full particulars, address H. B. SMITH, Smithville, Burlington Co., N. J., U. S. A. HINTS TO YOUNG MACHINE-TENDERS. By an old Papermaker. Practical Instructions for the tending and care of Papermaking Machinery. Showing how to clean a Dandy; how to make good edges; to keep paper from crushing and worming; to stop crimping; together with many other valuable directions, hints, and suggestions, contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 79. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. JOHN HOLLAND'S GOLD PENS [Illustration] Received the Centennial Medal from the Judges on Awards, for "superior elasticity and general excellence." If not sold by your Stationer, send for Illustrated Price-List to the MANUFACTORY, 19 W. 4TH ST., CINCINNATI. SECOND-HAND MACHINERY. FOR SALE. The Machinery in the works of the UTICA STEAM ENGINE CO., comprising Large Face Plate Lathe, Engine Lathes, large and small, 20 ft. x 4 ft. Planer, Slotter, Shaper, Lauback Universal Drills, Bolt Cutter, Fans, Upright Drills, Cranes, Dudgeon Steam Hammer, Steam Fire Pump, Hose, Platform Scales, Pulleys, one 40 H. P. Locomotive Boiler, two 50 H. P., and one 25 H. P. Tubular Boilers, one 36 in. by 16 ft. Cylinder Boiler, etc., etc. For Catalogue and Price List, address JAMES F. MANN, UTICA, N. Y. THE PATENT PARAGON LAMP STOVE Can be used with any ordinary Kerosene Lamp. Every family wants one. PRICE 35 CTS.; BY MAIL 45 CTS. _One agent made $21 in 3 days._ Send for terms. ABOTT M'F'G CO., 101 BEEKMAN STREET, NEW YORK. IRON CASTINGS to order, _smooth_ and _exact to pattern_, of _Soft Tough Iron_, at T. Shriver & Co.'s Foundry, 333 East 56th St., N. Y. Prices very low. _Favorable terms_ made on Castings in regular supply. ADVERTISEMENTS Inside Page, each insertion - - - 75 cents a line. Back Page, each insertion - - - $1.00 a line. _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Friday morning to appear in next issue._ COTTON MILLS AND MACHINE SHOPS Can make great savings by using the Allen Governor. Its operation is unequalled and wonderful. Nearly all machinists once using these Governors become agents for their sale. They are simple in construction, not liable to get out of order, permit the speed of the engine to be changed at will, are neat in appearance, noiseless, very durable, save the engineer's time, save fuel, and are at once the most powerful and most sensitive Governors ever made. Russell (Cotton) Mills, Plymouth, Mass., March 20, 1876. S. B. ALLEN: Your Governor has been attached to our Corliss engine over one year, and has given perfect satisfaction. The engine was never governed until yours was attached, although we have tried three of the best kind of Governors known. When steam or work varied, the speed would vary, and we could only run our looms an average of 103 picks per minute. Since using your Governor, and solely on account of the perfect steadiness with which it holds the engine and machinery, we are enabled to run the looms regularly 112 picks per minute, MAKING AN ACTUAL INCREASE OF OUR ENTIRE PRODUCTION OF OVER EIGHT PER CENT. Your Governor saves coal, saves waste, saves care and labor of the engineer, and produces more goods and better goods. I have timed the engine a hundred times, and never found it to vary in the least. It is the honest truth that the Allen Governor holds it exactly on speed. Address L. C. KING, Superintendent. GERARD B. ALLEN & CO., St. Louis. FRASER & CHALMERS, Chicago. NEW ORLEANS MACHINERY DEPOT, New Orleans. PACIFIC IRON WORKS, San Francisco. FILER, STOWELL & CO., Milwaukee, Wis., or THE ALLEN GOVERNOR CO., BOSTON. HORSE STALL FLOOR, Patented through the Scientific American Patent Agency, June 4th, 1872. Rights sent by mail, with full instructions how to make and use, on receipt of $1.00; two for $1.50. It will keep the stall cleaner and the horse much more comfortable than any floor in use. It requires less than one-half of the usual amount of bedding. Any man can make them with very little expense. A liberal discount to carpenters or stable keepers in quantities of twelve or more. This floor is used throughout the New England States, and many parts of the South and West. State, County, and Town rights for sale. Agents wanted. G. W. GORDON, 256 Broadway, Chelsea, Mass. THE BIGELOW STEAM ENGINE. BOTH PORTABLE AND STATIONARY. The CHEAPEST AND BEST in the market. Send for descriptive circular and price list. H. B. BIGELOW & CO., New Haven, Conn. LeCOUNT'S PATENT MACHINISTS' TOOLS. REDUCED PRICES. Set Iron Dogs, 3-8 to 2 in., - - - - - $5.60 " " " 3-8 to 4 in., - - - - - - 12.00 " Steel " 3-8 to 2 in., - - - - - 6.30 " " " 3-8 to 4 in., - - - - - - 13.00 Iron & Steel Clamps, Die Dogs, Clamp Dogs, Vice Clamps, Expanding Mandrels, &c. Send for latest Price List to C. W. LE COUNT, South Norwalk, Conn. WORKING MODELS And Experimental Machinery, Metal or Wood, made to order by J. F. WERNER, 62 Center St., N. Y. [Illustration: Patents] PATENTS CAVEATS, COPYRIGHTS, TRADE MARKS, ETC. Messrs. Munn & Co., in connection with the publication of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, continue to examine Improvements, and to act as Solicitors of Patents for Inventors. In this line of business they have had OVER THIRTY YEARS' EXPERIENCE, and now have _unequaled facilities_ for the preparation of Patent Drawings, Specifications, and the Prosecution of Applications for Patents in the United States, Canada, and Foreign Countries. Messrs. Munn & Co. also attend to the preparation of Caveats, Trade Mark Regulations, Copyrights for Books, Labels, Reissues, Assignments, and Reports on Infringements of Patents. All business intrusted to them is done with special care and promptness, on very moderate terms. We send free of charge, on application, THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN HAND BOOK, an elegantly illustrated pamphlet of 48 pages, containing further information about Patents and how to procure them; directions concerning Trade Marks, Copyrights, Designs, Patents, Appeals, Reissues, Infringements, Assignments, Rejected Cases, Hints on the Sale of Patents. _Foreign Patents._--We also send, _free of charge,_ a Synopsis of Foreign Patent Laws, showing the cost and method of securing patents in all the principal countries of the world. American inventors should bear in mind that, as a general rule, any invention that is valuable to the patentee in this country is worth equally as much in England and some other foreign countries. Five patents--embracing Canadian, English, German, French, and Belgian --will secure to an inventor the exclusive monopoly to his discovery among about ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLIONS of the most intelligent people in the world. The facilities of business and steam communication are such that patents can be obtained abroad by our citizens almost as easily as at home. The expense to apply for an English patent is $75; German, $100; French, $100; Belgian, $100; Canadian, $50. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York city. PYROMETERS, For showing heat of Ovens, Hot Blast Pipes, Boiler Flues, Super-Heated Steam, Oil Stills, &c. HENRY W. BULKLEY. Sole Manufacturer, 149 Broadway, New York. $5 Outfit free. Salary guaranteed. Write at once to EMPIRE NOVELTY CO., 309 Broadway, New York. TAYLOR'S M'F'G CO., WESTMINSTER, MD., Portable and Stationary Engine Builders, etc. Send for Cata. STEAM PUMPS Wright's Pat. Bucket Plungers are the best. VALLEY MACHINE Co. Easthampton, Mass. ROOTS' FORCE BLAST BLOWER, [Illustration: Roots blower] FIRST PREMIUM AWARDED AT PARIS AND VIENNA, SPEED ONLY 100 TO ??0 REV. PER M. SAVES HALF THE POWER REQUIRED FOR FAN. P. H. & F. M. ROOTS, Manuf'rs, CONNERSVILLE, IND. S. S. TOWNSEND, Gen'l' Ag't, 6 Cortlandt St., NEW YORK. ESTABLISHED 1844. JOSEPH C. TODD, (Formerly of Todd & Rafferty), ENGINEER AND MACHINIST. Flax, Hemp, Jute, Rope, Oakum, and Bagging Machinery, Steam Engines, Boilers, etc. Also Agent for the celebrated and improved Rawson & Rittinger Hoisting Engine, I will furnish specifications and estimates for all kinds of machinery. Send for descriptive circular and price. Address J. C. TODD, 10 Barclay St., New York, or Paterson, N. J. GUILD & GARRISON, [Illustration: Pump] 34 to 44 First St., Williamsburgh, N. Y., Manufacturers of STEAM PUMPS for all purposes. Also Vacuum Pumps, Vacuum Fans and Air Compressors. NON-COMBUSTIBLE STEAM BOILER AND PIPE COVERING WITH "AIR SPACE" IMPROVEMENT. Saves 10 to 20 per cent. CHALMERS SPENCE CO., Foot E. 9th St. N. Y.; 1202 N. 2d St., St. Louis, Mo. NEW WOOD LATHE; ALSO SCROLL SAW. BOTH new and first-class. Send for circulars. H. BICKFORD, Cincinnati, O. ROCK-DRILLING MACHINES AND AIR COMPRESSORS MANUFACTURED BY BURLEIGH ROCK DRILL CO. SEND FOR PAMPHLET. FITCHBURG MASS MACHINISTS' TOOLS. NEW AND IMPROVED PATTERNS. Send for new illustrated catalogue. Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c. NEW HAVEN MANUFACTURING CO., New Haven, Conn. STEEL CASTINGS, From ¼ to 10,000 lbs. weight, true to pattern. An invaluable substitute for forgings, or for malleable iron castings requiring great strength. Send for circular and price list to CHESTER STEEL CASTING COMPANY, EVELINA STREET, PHILADELPHIA, PA. [Illustration: Planer Saw teeth] FULL SIZE PLANER SAW TOOTH 3 CENTS EACH "OFFICE OF DICKINSON BROS., RIDGEWAY, ELK Co., PA., May 28th, 1877. "Messrs. EMERSON, SMITH & Co. GENTS: We have been through four winters in frozen hemlock, cutting 20,000 feet of lumber per day with your Patent Planer Saw, averaging 75,000 feet with each set of 40 bits." --> Mill Men and Sawyers, send your full address, plainly written, on a postal card, for Emerson's Hand Book of Saws, free, to EMERSON, SMITH & CO., BEAVER FALLS, PA. Please name size and style of saw used. [Illustration: LEHIGH VALLEY EMERY WHEEL CO.] Machines AND Wheels Guaranteed, Send for Illustrated Circular, _Weissport_, PA. PERFECT NEWSPAPER FILE The Koch Patent File, for preserving newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, has been recently improved and price reduced. Subscribers to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT can be supplied for the low price of $1.50 by mail, or $1.25 at the office of this paper. Heavy board sides; inscription "SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN," in gilt. Necessary for every one who wishes to preserve the paper. Address MUNN & CO., Publishers SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. HARTFORD STEAM BOILER INSPECTION & INSURANCE COMPANY. W. B. FRANKLIN, V. PRES'T. J. M. ALLEN, PRES'T. J. B. PIERCE, SEC'Y. PUNCHING PRESSES. Drop Hammers and Dies, for working Metals, &c. THE STILES & PARKER PRESS CO., Middletown, Conn. A PRACTICAL MACHINIST, WITH TEN years' experience as Foreman in one of the largest and most successful shops in the country, employing over four hundred men, wishes employment. Would be willing to invest a few thousand dollars in a safe and paying business. Address A. Foreman, P. O., Phila., Pa. WANTED: Agents for the Automatic Gas Lighting Torch in every gas-burning town in the United States. Exclusive territory given. Sewing machine agents preferred. This Torch lights without matches. Address THE STOCKWELL SELF-LIGHTING GAS BURNER CO., 89 LIBERTY STREET, NEW YORK. GUARDIOLA'S COFFEE & SUGAR MACHINERY COFFEE, MALT, CORN, COCOA, AND GRAIN-DRYING MACHINE. COFFEE-HULLING AND POLISHING MACHINES. COFFEE-WASHING MACHINE. HELIX SUGAR EVAPORATOR. MESSRS. C. ADOLPHE LOW & CO., 42 Cedar Street, MESSRS. MUNOZ & ESPRIELLA, 52 Pine Street, New York, are Mr. Guardiola's Agents, and they will give prompt attention to all orders for any of the above machines. THE HOADLEY PORTABLE STEAM ENGINE. WITH AUTOMATICAL CUT-OFF REGULATOR, AND BALANCED VALVE. THE BEST AND MOST ECONOMICAL ENGINE MADE SEND FOR CIRCULAR The J. C. HOADLEY CO. LAWRENCE, MASS. STATE WHERE YOU SAW THIS. EAGLE FOOT LATHES, [Illustration] Improvement in style. Reduction in prices April 20th. Small Engine Lathes. Slide Rests, Tools, etc. Also Scroll and Circular Saw Attachments, Hand Planers, etc. Send for Catalogue of outfits for Amateurs or Artisans. WM. L. CHASE & CO., 95 & 97 Liberty St., New York. MILL STONES AND CORN MILLS. We make Burr Millstones, Portable Mills, Smut Machines, Packers, Mill Picks, Water Wheels, Pulleys, and Gearing, specially adapted to Flour Mills. Send for catalogue. J. T. NOYE & SON, BUFFALO, N. Y. F. ADEE & CO.'S PATENT LEAD STENCH TRAPS. Positive protection against Sewer-gas. Best and cheapest. See illustration, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 14th. Send for circular. F. ADEE, 275 Pearl St., N. Y. ASBESTOS BOARD, For Flange Joints, Cylinder Heads, Man-hole Plates, etc. The only genuine, strictly fire-proof, made from pure ITALIAN ASBESTOS. All sizes, from 1-32 to 1-4 inch. H. W. JOHNS M'F'G CO., 87 MAIDEN LANE, NEW YORK. THE TANITE CO., STROUDSBURG, PA. EMERY WHEELS AND GRINDERS. GEO. PLACE, 121 Chambers St., New York Agent. [Illustration: The Excelsior 1st Premium at Centennial] $3 PRINTING PRESS! Prints cards, envelopes, etc., equal to _any_ press. Larger sizes for large work. _Do your own printing and advertising and save money_. Excellent spare hour amusement for old or young. Or it can be made _money making_ business anywhere. Send 3c. stamps for large catalogue to KELSEY & CO., Manufacturers, Meriden, Conn. NOTICE TO FOREIGN SUBSCRIBERS. For the convenience of subscribers residing abroad, we have prepared the annexed table, exhibiting the subscription price of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and SUPPLEMENT in the principal foreign currencies: The prices here given | SCIENTIFIC | SCIENTIFIC | SCIENTIFIC are for one year's | AMERICAN | AMERICAN | AMERICAN and subscription, including | | SUPPLEMENT | SUPPLEMENT the postage. | | | together. ------------------------|-----------------|------------|-------------- Austria | S. Florins 9 | 13 | 20 Belgium | Francs 20 | 30 | 46 Denmark | Kroner 15 | 23 | 35 France | Francs 20 | 30 | 46 German Empire | R. M. 16 | 25 | 37 Great Britain | Shillings 16 | 24 | 36 Holland | H. F. 9 | 14 | 21 Italy | Francs 20 | 30 | 46 Norway | Kroner 15 | 23 | 35 Russia | Roubles 5 | 8 | 11 Sweden | Kroner 15 | 23 | 35 Switzerland | Francs 20 | 30 | 46 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Deposit either of the above amounts in any of the important post offices in Great Britain or Ireland, or in any country on the Continent of Europe, making the order payable to MUNN & Co., New York city, and send us the receipt, with the name of the sender, and the address to which the paper is to be mailed. TUBE CLEANERS for cleaning Boiler Tubes. THE NATIONAL STEEL TUBE CLEANER CO. 814 E. 9th St., N. Y. ALCOTT LATHES, for Broom, Rake and Hoe Handles. S. C. HILLS, 78 Chambers St. N. Y. DROP FORGINGS AND SPECIAL MACHINERY, THE HULL & BELDEN CO., Danbury, Conn. BEST DAMPER REGULATORS AND LEVERS GAUGE COCKS. MURRILL & KEIZER, 44 HOLLIDAY ST., BALTIMORE TORPEDO VESSELS. BY MR. DONALDSON. A valuable paper, lately read before the United Service Institute. Being a full exposition of the Torpedo-boat system, from the earliest efforts to the present time. Giving dimensions and performances of the several sizes built by Thornycroft Bros. for the various governments, highly interesting trials of these boats, and experiences in war, and a description of the torpedoes used. 1 illustration. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 79. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. BOGARDUS' PATENT UNIVERSAL ECCENTRIC MILLS--For grinding Bones, Ores, Sand, Old Crucibles, Fire Clay, Guanos, Oil Cake, Feed, Corn, Corn and Cob, Tobacco, Snuff, Sugar, Salts, Roots, Spices, Coffee, Cocoanut, Flaxseed, Asbestos, Mica, etc., and whatever cannot be ground by other mills. Also for Paints, Printers' Inks, Paste Blacking, etc. JOHN W. THOMSON, successor to JAMES BOGARDUS, corner of White and Elm Sts., New York. LEHIGH UNIVERSITY.--TUITION FREE. Civil, Mechanical, and Mining Engineering; Chemistry and Metallurgy; Full Classical Instruction; French and German; English Literature; International and Constitutional Law; Psychology and Christian Evidences. For Registers, address the Rev. JOHN M. LEAVITT, D.D., President, Bethlehem, Penna. DRILLS, Jigging Machines, etc. Illustrated catalogues sent FREE Address AMES M'F'G CO., Chicopee, Mass. PHOSPHOR-BRONZE AND ITS APPLICATIONS. By ALEXANDER DICK. A series of valuable tests, showing the superiority of Phosphor-bronze over ordinary bronze. Old bronze and new compared. Phosphor-bronze under oft-repeated strains; also its adaptability to frictional purposes. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 79. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. [Illustration: Advertisement H. W. JOHNS' PATENT ASBESTOS MATERIALS.] PAINTS, ROOFING, STEAM PIPE AND BOILER COVERINGS, STEAM PACKING, _Sheathings, Fire, Acid_, and _Waterproof Coatings, Cements_, etc. Send for Samples, Illustrated Catalogues, Price Lists, etc. 87 MAIDEN LANE, NEW YORK. FIFTY SYRUP RECIPES, FOR HOUSEHOLD purposes, Mineral Waters, etc., to wit: Simple Syrup, (2) Lemon Syrup, Mulberry Syrup, Vanilla Syrup, Vanilla Cream Syrup, (2) Cream Syrup, Ginger Syrup, Orange Syrup, (2) Pineapple Syrup, Nectar Syrup, Sherbet Syrup, Grape Syrup, Banana Syrup, (2) Coffee Syrup, Wild Cherry Syrup, Wintergreen Syrup, (2) Sarsaparilla Syrup, Maple Syrup, (2) Chocolate Syrup, Coffee Cream Syrup, Ambrosia Syrup, Hock and Claret Syrup, Solferino Syrup, Capsicum Syrup, Cherry Syrup, Strawberry Syrup, (2) Raspberry Syrup, Peach Syrup, Blackberry Syrup, Orgeat Syrup, Catawba Syrup, Milk Punch Syrup, Champagne Syrup, Sherry Cobbler Syrup, Excelsior Syrup, Fancy Syrup, Currant Syrup, Framboise Syrup, Maidenhair Syrup, Orange Flower Syrup, Cinnamon Syrup. How to make Syrups Frothy. Colognes for the Sick Room, by GEO. LEIS. With recipes for the production of preparations that serve as pleasing perfumes, deodorizers, and cosmetic lotions. All the above are contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 77. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. * * * * * THE "Scientific American" is printed with CHAS. ENEU JOHNSON & CO.'S INK. Tenth and Lombard Sts., Philadelphia, and 59 Gold St., New York. * * * * * Transcriber's Note: _x_ indicates italic script. Some archaic (Early American) spellings have been retained. Errata: Article 13 ("CALLIN AND WILSON'S PROCESS OF UTILIZING TIN SCRAP.'"): 'thin' corrected to 'tin' "... the requisite quantity depending upon the thickness of the tin plate to be removed." Article NQ (39): 'put' corrected to 'but' "... but plenty of good soap and warm water,..." P. 16, Advert for 'ROOTS' FORCE BLAST BLOWER': "SPEED ONLY 100 TO ??0 REV. PER M. SAVES HALF THE POWER REQUIRED FOR FAN." figure obscured by address label: ('Journal of Pharmacy X 145 S 10th st.'). 
38482	----	[Illustration] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL INFORMATION, ART, SCIENCE, MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY, AND MANUFACTURES. NEW YORK, JULY 3, 1880. Vol. XLIII.--No. 1. [NEW SERIES.] [$3.20 per Annum [POSTAGE PREPAID.]] * * * * * CONTENTS. (Illustrated articles are marked with an asterisk.) 1 Agricultural inventions 1 40 Aspirator and compressor* 11 38 Astronomical notes 11 25 Baby elephant takes a bath 7 22 Bath, shower, portable, new* 6 11 Boiler explosions, prevention of* 4 38 Canal boat, improved 10 17 Carpetings, etc., printing gold on 5 30 Chloral hydrate, simple test for 7 13 Chloroforming during sleep 5 35 Corn magnets 10 14 Dipper, watering, improved* 5 29 Drowned, perseverance with the 7 15 Electric lamp, improved* 5 25 Elephant, baby, takes a bath 7 37 Engineering inventions 10 6 Epidemic, strange, a 2 33 Exhibition, internation., Sydney* 8 11 Explosions, boiler, prevention of* 4 39 Fires in New York 11 8 Fogs, navigation in* 3 16 Fruit, preserving app. for* 5 3 Gas machine, Maxim's* 1 3 Gas making, simple process* 1 20 Genessee Falls, utilization of 5 34 Horology, report of judges* 8 33 International exhibition, Sydney* 8 1 Inventions, agricultural 1 37 Inventions, engineering 10 24 Inventions, mechanical 7 12 Inventions, miscellaneous 4 42 Inventions, new 11 9 Iron, effect of age on quality 3 15 Lamp, electric, improved* 5 23 Leadville mines and railroads* 6 35 Magnets, corn 10 36 Materials, resistance of, exp. on 10 3 Maxim's gas machine* 1 24 Mechanical inventions 7 31 Natural history notes 7 8 Navigation in fogs* 3 7 Oil tanks, cannonading of 3 18 Ore separator, Edison 5 41 Photoglyptic process, new 11 26 Phyllirhoe Bucephala* 7 32 Ruggles, S. P 7 22 Shower bath, portable, new* 6 19 Slate washer, novel* 5 2 Specimen, rare, lost 1 5 Steamer, little, remarkable 2 10 Steamers, large, collision between 3 21 Stevens Institute of Technology 5 33 Sydney Industrial Exhibition* 8 28 Tree growth, force of* 7 27 Trees and shrubs, care of 7 19 Washer, slate, novel* 5 4 Watches, Am., superiority of 2 14 Watering dipper, improved* 5 * * * * * AGRICULTURAL INVENTIONS. Mr. Sterling A. Millard, of Clayville, N. Y., has invented a scythe blade that contains much less weight of metal and possesses equal or greater strength than the ordinary scythe blades. It is made in the usual manner from what is termed by scythe makers a "scythe rod," and is wrought and shaped in such form that a proper thickness is left to serve as the back of the blade. A longitudinal auxiliary rib or supplementary back is formed on the blade, which stiffens the scythe without requiring the same weight of metal as those of the usual construction. Mr. George C. Winslow, of Kalamazoo, Mich., has patented an improvement in spring harrow teeth, which consists generally in hinging the harrow tooth in the forward end of a rectangular frame bolted to the harrow bar, and combining therewith a spring, which at its back end is clamped to the harrow bar by the same bolts which secure the rectangular frame, and which spring then curves upward and forward, and then down through the slot or opening of the rectangular frame, and is jointed at its extremity, near the bottom of the harrow tooth, so that its tension serves to throw the harrow tooth forward, but allows it to yield to obstruction. * * * * * A RARE SPECIMEN LOST. Captain Ingalls, of the schooner Chalcedony, has let slip an opportunity to make a small fortune and at the same time settle the long vexed question as to the reality of the elusive and possibly mythical sea serpent. His story, as told in the _Argus_, of Portland, Maine, June 8, runs as follows: "Last Saturday, about one o'clock in the afternoon, we were slowly sailing past Monhegan, there being very little wind, about twenty miles southwest of the island, when we caught sight of what looked like a large schooner floating bottom up. As the object lay almost dead ahead, we made directly for it, but before we got very close a Cape Ann schooner lay to and sent a boat's crew to inspect what now plainly appeared to be a monstrous carcass of some species or other. We finally hove to, about a ship's length off, and took a leisurely survey of the thing. It was dead, and floated on the water, with its belly, of a dirty brown color, up. It head was at least twenty feet long, and about ten feet through at the thickest point. About midway of the body, which was, I should guess, about forty feet long, were two fins, of a clear white, each about twelve feet in length. The body seemed to taper from the back of the head down to the size of a small log, distinct from the whale tribe, as the end had nothing that looked like a fluke. The shape of the creature's head was more like a tierce than anything I can liken it to. I have seen almost all kinds of shapes that can be found in these waters, but never saw the like of this before. Two years ago, off Seguin, I saw shooting through the water a thing which, I think, resembled this creature considerably, but I didn't get close enough to it to say for certain. The men from the Cape Ann schooner got on this dead creature, and one of the boys cut a double shuffle on its belly, which for all the world looked like the bottom of a schooner covered with barnacles and seaweed by the weather. We should have towed the thing to Portland had there been any wind, but as there wasn't, we steered away and left it. What sort of a sea monster this was I can't say for sure, but in my opinion it was the original 'sea serpent,' which has been seen once in a while for years past, and which, when alive, was too swift a swimmer for any sailing vessel to get alongside of." The report of the captain of the "Cape Ann schooner" will be in order now. * * * * * [Illustration: MAXIM'S NEW GAS MACHINE.] SIMPLE AND CHEAP PROCESS OF GAS MAKING. When a current of air is passed over the surface of gasoline it becomes carbureted or charged with its vapors to saturation. Air thus charged is somewhat heavier than pure air, and when passed through an Argand or bat's wing burner, it burns with a brilliant white flame. Nothing would seem easier than to make a machine that would force a current of air through, over, or on some material saturated with gasoline, and this apparently simple process has led many into attempts to make a successful gas machine. Many fortunes have been spent by the unscientific in the chase after this, to them, _ignis fatuus_. The stumbling block which has wrecked so many enterprises in this line has been the cold produced by the evaporation of the gasoline. One pound of gasoline, in passing from a liquid to a vapor, requires about as much heat as would be required to melt two pounds of cast iron. It is therefore obvious that where no heat is supplied, the gasoline, air, and machine must soon become very cold when any considerable quantity of gas is being made. The heat must come from somewhere, and as none is supplied, it is taken from the apparatus, air, and gasoline, making them very cold. A beautiful and simple experiment to illustrate this refrigeration can be made as follows: Place a gill of water in a common washbasin, then pour over it one pint of light gasoline; shake the basin, and blow the liquids vigorously, when very soon the basin will become intensely cold--the water will freeze, and may be taken out in the form of a snowball. If the water and basin are hot, and the experiment performed in a hot room or in the sun, it is much more striking.[1] This refrigeration operates upon the gas as follows: Air will take up and hold in suspension any volatile liquid in proportion to the square of its temperature, so that when the temperature of the gasoline and air have fallen off one half, the quantity of gasoline in the air has fallen off three quarters, and the light is destroyed. The quality of the gas in such machines varies from a rich smoky flame to a pale blue and blowing flame in a short time. Every change of quality in the liquid, temperature of the apparatus, or number of burners used causes a vexatious change in the quality of the gas. If heat is applied at the right time and in the right quantity it is not so bad, but too much heat, or neglecting to regulate it properly, converts the machine into a still, the condenser of which is the pipes of the building lighted, when danger is added to vexation. About ten years ago a machine was illustrated in these columns that obviated all these troubles; it was the invention of the well known mechanical engineer, Hiram S. Maxim, of this city. His machine was on an entirely new principle, and has since gone into general use. It was intricate and somewhat expensive, but it performed its work well. Messrs. A. T. Stewart & Co. use them largely in their mills and hotels. Mr. Maxim made one of six thousand burner capacity for the Grand Union Hotel, Saratoga Springs, it being the largest gas machine ever built. It has supplied gas of an unvarying quality for six years, and is as good as new to-day. To reduce the cost as far as possible, Mr. Maxim has designed a new machine on another principle, which we herewith illustrate. Fig. 1 shows the machine in perspective, and Fig. 2 is a sectional view. The vertical cylinder is a common gas holder of sheet brass. It is 36 inches in diameter for a thousand burner machine. The operative parts of the machine are best shown in the sectional view, which represents the portion of the machine called the injector. A is a steam chamber supplied with four or more pounds of steam through the pipe, K. B is the gasoline supply pipe, and C the air supply. D is an index valve. The operation is as follows: Steam being in the chamber, A, the descent of the holder opens the valve, M, and allows the steam to [_Continued on page 4._] [Footnote 1: This experiment should not be tried in the vicinity of a gaslight or fire.] * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ESTABLISHED 1845 * * * * * MUNN & CO., EDITORS AND PROPRIETORS. PUBLISHED WEEKLY AT NO. 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK. * * * * * O. D. MUNN. A. E. BEACH. TERMS FOR THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. One copy, one year postage included $3 20 One copy, six months, postage included 1 60 Clubs.--One extra copy of THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be supplied gratis for every club of five subscribers at $3.20 each; additional copies at same proportionate rate. Postage prepaid. Remit by postal order. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. -->To Advertisers.--The regular circulation of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is now FIFTY THOUSAND COPIES weekly. For 1880 the publishers anticipate a still larger circulation. THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT Is a distinct paper from the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. THE SUPPLEMENT is issued weekly. Every number contains 16 octavo pages, uniform in size with SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Terms of subscription for SUPPLEMENT, $5.00 a year, postage paid, to subscribers. Single copies, 10 cents. Sold by all news dealers throughout the country. COMBINED RATES.--The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and SUPPLEMENT will be sent for one year, postage free, on receipt of _seven dollars_. Both papers to one address or different addresses, as desired. The safest way to remit is by draft, postal order, or registered letter. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, N. Y. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXPORT EDITION. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition is a large and splendid periodical, issued once a month. Each number contains about one hundred large quarto pages, profusely illustrated, embracing: (1.) Most of the plates and pages of the four preceding weekly issues of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, with its splendid engravings and valuable information; (2.) Commercial, trade, and manufacturing announcements of leading houses. Terms for Export Edition, $5.00 a year, sent prepaid to any part of the world. Single copies 50 cents. -->Manufacturers and others who desire to secure foreign trade may have large, and handsomely displayed announcements published in this edition at a very moderate cost. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Export Edition has a large guaranteed circulation in all commercial places throughout the world. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. * * * * * NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JULY 3, 1880. * * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT No. 235, For the Week ending July 3, 1880. Price 10 cents. For sale by all newsdealers. PAGE I. ENGINEERING AND MECHANICS.--The New Railway up Mount Vesuvius. 6 illustrations. Plan of road.--General view of mountain and railway.--Side view and end view of passenger car.--Mount Vesuvius Railway.--Map showing railway, mountain, crater, and surrounding country.--The carriage road and railway 3735 The St. Gothard Tunnel--Notes on the junction of the two galleries. By Dr. CALLADON 3736 The St. Gothard Tunnel.--Conditions and causes of air currents in the tunnel 3736 Protection of Ships from Loss by Fire and from Loss by Sinking. Recent improvements in the construction of ships and steamers 3738 Regenerative Stoves.--A Sketch of their History and Notes on their Use. By JOHN N. HARTMAN. An important paper read at the Pittsburg meeting of the American Institute of Mining Engineers. 1 figure 3738 Cowper's Hot Blast Stoves. 2 full page illustrations of hot blast stoves for a pair of furnaces.--Plan and cross section of stove.--Plan and cross section of furnace.--Plan and cross section of gas downcomer.--Sectional elevation of stove and downcomer 3739 Wilson's Lock-up Safety Valve. An important improvement. 10 figures. 3742 Working Low Grade Ores 3742 The Largest Concrete Tank in England 3742 II. ELECTRICITY, ETC.--Siemens' Improvements in Electric Railways. 4 figures. Siemens' combined steam and electric railway.--Siemens' electric mail railway 3743 Difference in the Actions of Positive and Negative Electricity 3743 Forces Exciting Electricity 3743 The New Electrical Middlings Purifier. By THOS. B. OSBORNE. 5 figures 3744 Physical Society, London. Photo--electricity.--Electrometer key.--Air in water.--Steam thermometer 3745 Atmospheric polarization. Influence of terrestrial magnetism 3745 III. HYGIENE AND MEDICINE.--Lead Poisoning. Clinical lecture by Dr. WM. PEPPER. Effects of a cosmetic of carbonate of lead.--Symptoms of lead poisoning.--Affinity of lead for nerves and muscles.--Treatment of lead poisoning 3745 Recent Investigations of the Blood 3746 The Pulse. Lecture on the pulse in health and disease, by Dr. T. A. McBRIDE 3746 Some Early Symptoms of Insanity 3747 An Improved Method of Applying Antiseptic Vapors 3747 Treatment of Phthisis by Inhalation of Borax and Salicylic Acid 3747 IV. CHEMISTRY AND TECHNOLOGY.--Detection of Starch in Cane Sugar. By P. CASAMAJOR 3747 Double Lever Cement Testing Apparatus. 1 figure 3748 Prediction of Chemical Elements 3748 Oil of Sage 3748 Bronzing Iron 3748 Rust Preventing Compound 3748 Argentine Sheep and Wool 3748 V. NATURAL HISTORY, ETC.--Brain of Limulus Polyphemus. General anatomy of the brain.--Internal structure and histology of the brain.--Comparison of the Limulus brain with the brain of other arthropods 3749 An Unfortunate White Whale. A live whale with a broken neck 3749 Ethereal Oil of California Bay Tree. By J. M. STILLMAN 3749 Forest Trees of North America. Prof. Sargent's catalogue (continued from SUPPLEMENT No. 234). Cedars, Red Woods, Firs, Spruces, etc. 3750 * * * * * THE SUPERIORITY OF AMERICAN WATCHES. The extract from the report of the judges in horology, at the Sydney International Exhibition, with the diagrams showing the comparative merit of the watches tested, given on other pages of the current issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, cannot fail to interest our readers. There were ten exhibitors, and the inherent and comparative merits of the various exhibits were rated under ten heads on the basis of 100 points "for the highest degree of excellence." There were British, German, French, Swiss, and American competitors; and while the scores of the nine European exhibitors footed up totals ranging from 76 to 686, their average being 389-1/3, the total of the Waltham Watch Company was 981. In detail this remarkable score stood thus: Originality, 98; invention and discovery, 95; utility and quality of material, 95; skill in workmanship, 93; fitness for purpose intended, 100; adaptation to public wants, 100; economy, 100; cost, 100; finish and elegance of cases, 100; timekeeping qualities, 100. Total, 981. The timekeeping tests were made, as the report points out, by Prof. H. C. Russell, Astronomer Royal at the Sydney Observatory; and it is especially noted that while the majority of the watches tested had been made for exhibition purposes, and specially prepared for that end, the exhibit of the American company was the ordinary and regular product of the factory, such as is finished every day. Another evidence of the superiority of the American system, as emphasized in the report, is the fact that a sixth grade Waltham watch, one of the cheapest tested, showed a better performance than many very expensive and otherwise first class watches of other makes. The moral of the victory is happily drawn in the following editorial review of the contest and its lessons, by the Sydney _Morning Herald_ of April 14, last: "The report of the judges in horology, which we published on Saturday last, was a document of more than ordinary interest. The slightest glance at it will show that the judges brought no small amount of ability and industry to their task. In many other classes of exhibits judging must, to no small extent, be a matter of opinion. There is no absolute test by which one photograph, for example, or one oil painting can be decided to be superior to another. In exhibits of this kind much must be left to the taste of the critic. Watches and chronometers, on the other hand, can be submitted to the minutest tests. The care and trouble which these require are not small, but the issue is sufficiently important to warrant all the labor which the judges in horology brought to their work. Time-keepers that can be relied upon in all weathers and in all climates, and that are within reach of all classes, are a luxury of no common order, but to a large number of persons they are a necessity also. In these fast days, when everything must be done to time, it is for a variety of purposes found necessary to make accurate divisions, not merely of the days and hours, but of the minutes and seconds also. The verdict which the judges in our Exhibition have pronounced on the Waltham watches is one of which any company might be proud; but the facts on which the verdict is based are as interesting to the public at large as to the parties immediately concerned. One of the secrets of American progress lies first in the invention of machinery, and then in its application to almost all descriptions of industry. It is the bringing of machinery to every branch of watchmaking that is enabling Americans to beat the world in this as well as in many other things. "There has been a general belief that a machine-made watch is not to be compared to one that is hand-made, and that on this account the English watch must always hold its own against the American. This belief will have to be given up, if it is not given up already. It has now been established that machinery can be used for the purposes of watchmaking with quite as much success as for those of agriculture. The Americans are showing that they can make better watches than the Swiss or the English, but, what is of equal importance, they are showing that they can make them for less money. The boast of the Yankees is that they can turn out work cheaper and better than anybody else, and that for that reason the world must take their products. It would be difficult to prove that in some departments the boast is wholly without foundation. The American mechanic is paid better than the English mechanic, and yet the work which he turns out can, as a rule, be sold for less. The reason is, not only that he works harder, but that the assistance of machinery enables him to produce the largest result by the smallest amount of labor. "Mr. Brassey, who believes that the workmen of his own country are equal if not superior to any in the world, maintains that an English mechanic can do more work than an American mechanic. The American really does more, because the inducements to industry are greater, and because he has better machinery. The success of the Waltham Company has furnished a striking instance of this. This company has now not only well-nigh driven foreign watchmaking companies out of America, but it has shown that it can more than compete with them on their own ground. This arises partly from the fact that it can turn out the best work on a large scale, but also from the fact that the principle on which it operates enables it to do all this economically. The Waltham Company claims to have arrived at simplicity, uniformity, and precision in the manufacture of watches, and the report of our judges shows that its claim is well founded. One of its discoveries was that a simple instrument, where simplicity is possible, will cost less and be worth more than a complicated one. Another was that the making of all instruments of the same grade exactly alike, so that the part which belongs to one belongs to the whole, will not only facilitate manufacture, but will greatly economize it. A third was, that these properties of simplicity and interchangeability are the best guarantees of perfect exactitude. The success which the Americans have reached in this as well as in other branches of industry, ought to excite the gratitude rather than the jealousy of the world. Any company or nation that shows how a maximum of efficiency can be reached by a minimum of labor confers a benefit on mankind. This our American cousins have done in other spheres besides that of watchmaking. There are branches of the prosperity of the Americans that are traceable to the extent of their territory and the fertility of their soil; but the triumph of their machinery has been the result of their inventiveness and of their enterprise, and for that reason it points a moral that Australians might profitably observe." * * * * * A REMARKABLE LITTLE STEAMER. There is soon to set sail from London for New York a new and remarkable little steamer of 70 tons gross burden, named the Anthracite, designed to exhibit the advanced engineering ideas of Mr. Loftus Perkins, of England. The distinctive peculiarities of this steamer are the very high steam pressure that she carries--350 to 500 lb. to the square inch, and the small consumption of fuel--one pound of coal per hour per horsepower. A trial trip of this new little boat was lately made of 46 miles, during which 350 lb. steam pressure was steadily maintained, 132 revolutions per minute of propeller, and a speed of eight knots per hour. Other vessels, some of larger size than the above, have been built on the Perkins system, and are running in England. One of them, the yacht Emily, carries 500 lb. boiler pressure. Most of our readers are familiar with Mr. Perkins' system, which has been fully described in our columns. Those who may wish to refer thereto are directed to an interesting article by Mr. Perkins, with engravings, published in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, No. 81, July 21, 1877; also to the description of the steam ferry boat, run on this principle, given with three pages of engravings in our SUPPLEMENT No. 217. Engineering theory and practice have for a long time plainly pointed to high steam pressures as one of the surest ways to economy of fuel. Twenty five years ago our ocean steamers carried only 16 lb. pressure to the inch, and burned 5 to 6 lb. of coal per hour per horse power. To-day they are carrying 75 lb. pressure, and burning 2½ to 3 lb. of coal per hour per horse power. In 1840 the Britannia, one of the finest steamers of the Cunard line plying between this country and England, burned 5,291 lb. of coal for each ton of paying freight she carried, her speed, then considered fast, being 8½ knots per hour. In 1877 the Britannic, speed 15.6 knots per hour, burned only 551 lb. of coal per ton of freight carried. Although our present steamers are making fast time and are very economical as compared with earlier vessels, still it is a lamentable fact that on the largest and finest of them, furnished with all the latest improvements and best appliances to secure economy, worked by the most careful and intelligent engineers, we succeed in putting into our steam only about one tenth of the heat realized in our boiler fire, the remaining nine-tenths of the heat being lost. Only in proportion as we make our steam hotter, and expanding it more, shall we economize in fuel. In this respect the voyage of the Anthracite is designed by her owners, we presume, to be an eye-opener for steamboat owners, not only in this country but throughout the world. If a little bit of a boat like this, 84 feet long, 16 feet beam, and 10 feet deep, can carry its own coal and water across the Atlantic, with a pressure of 350 to 500 lb. to the inch, and on one pound of coal per horse power, the natural inference is that our great steamers, when fitted with the same system, will realize far better results. The change from three pounds of coal to one pound per horse power means a shaving of two thirds in the coal bill, which is always an enormous item in the expenses of large boats. We ought to add that another peculiarity of the Anthracite is that she uses the same boiler water over and over, only a trifle of fresh water being supplied to make good the slight waste. Our New York steamboat men, who have to pay so dear for Croton water, will be likely to examine the water tank of the Anthracite with interest. * * * * * A STRANGE EPIDEMIC. On the night of Tuesday, June 15, a remarkable epidemic fell upon several towns in western Massachusetts, the town of Adams suffering most severely. Out of a population of 6,000, several hundred--variously estimated from 600 to over 1,000--were prostrated by a disease resembling cholera morbus. The symptoms were first dizziness, then great nausea, followed by vomiting and prolonged purging, and in some cases delirium. A belt of country two or three miles in width and several miles long was thus afflicted, beginning at the west, the whole number of victims being estimated at from 1,200 to 1,500. No deaths are reported. The cause of the epidemic is not known, but seems most likely to have been atmospheric. For some time the weather had been dry and hot. A heavy local rain fell during the evening, and was followed by or attended with a sudden and great lowering of the temperature. A chilly fog hung over the belt of country invaded by the disease, and a heavy "swampy" odor and taste were in the air. The malady reached its climax in about twenty-four hours. It was first suspected that the water supply had been somehow poisoned, but many people who had not used the water were prostrated, while others who used it freely escaped. Adams has hitherto been regarded as an exceptionally healthy town, and the surrounding country is high and wholesome. * * * * * CANNONADING OF OIL TANKS. On the morning of Friday, June 11, lightning struck an oil tank belonging to the Tidioute and Titusville Pipe Line, at Titusville, Pa. The fire thus kindled, raged until Sunday night, consuming 200,000 barrels of oil, crude and refined, and destroying property to the amount of $1,500,000. The most appalling feature in this fire was the successive "boiling over" of oil from burning tanks of the liquid. To empty rapidly a tank containing 20,000 barrels of oil, while the latter is on fire, is no easy matter. The pipes connected with the tanks were utterly inadequate to remove the oil rapidly enough to rob the "boiling over" of its terrors. A happy thought suggested itself on Friday to Mr. D. R. Herron, of the Titusville Battery. Obtaining permission, Mr. Herron brought out one of the Parrott guns of the battery, loaded it with solid shot, and began firing against the three-eighths iron sheets of the distant blazing tank. The first shot glanced, but subsequent volleys pierced the shell of the tank, releasing a large quantity of oil that otherwise would have fed the flames. The battery then moved on to the Emery tank, also burning, and lastly to the Acme tank. Large rents were made in all these, and the liberated oil ran harmlessly down into a stream. This novel target practice greatly shortened the duration of the fire at these tanks, and so drained them that the flames died out for want of fuel, and no "boiling over" resulted. The peculiar attraction for lightning which these iron oil tanks appear to possess has been several times referred to in our columns. Whenever a thunderstorm passes fairly over one of them it seems to be devoted to destruction. Millions of dollars' worth of property have thus been destroyed. No practical safeguard has yet been suggested. Ordinary buildings, when properly provided with rods that are well grounded in the earth, are comparatively safe from lightning. Structures made of iron and simply resting upon the earth, without rods, are also exempt from electrical damage. Such structures always present a continuous body of conducting material for the free passage of electricity to earth. Why is it, then, that iron oil tanks form such conspicuous exceptions to our common experience with lightning? Rods put on other structures save them; but rods have been put on oil tanks, masts with rods have surrounded the tanks, but the tanks were exploded by lightning all the same. We will repeat a possible explanation which we have heretofore given. From every oil tank, according to our theory, there is a constant escape of light hydrocarbon vapor, which forms a permanent cloud or column, rising to a great height above the tanks, far above any rod that could be erected. This vapor rod is a conductor, which the lightning naturally follows, sets on fire the vapor, and explodes the tank. A column of heated air or vapor rising from a chimney is well known to be a conductor for lightning; the rise of hydrocarbon vapors is illustrated by the balloon. If the theory we have outlined is correct, the remedy for the electrical explosion of oil tanks is to be found in such a treatment of the oil, or such a construction of tank, as shall prevent any escape of the light vapors. * * * * * NAVIGATION IN FOGS. The disastrous collision of the Sound steamers Narragansett and Stonington was quickly followed by one at sea, by which two great passenger ships escaped instant destruction almost by a hair's breadth. Shortly after noon, Monday, June 12, the National Line steamship Queen, bound from London to New York, and within 300 miles of her journey's end, ran into the Anchor Line steamship Anchoria, on the way from New York to Glasgow. The bow of the Queen struck the Anchoria on the port side, about twenty feet abaft the foremast, smashing a great hole through the iron hull. Two compartments of the Anchoria filled immediately, but the partitions stood firm, and the other compartments sufficed to keep the vessel afloat. The bow of the Queen was badly crushed, and her forward compartment was flooded. Fortunately the bulkhead proved stanch, and the ship was saved. The fog was very thick, and both ships were going at full speed. It is said that the captain of the Anchoria mistook the whistle of the Queen for that of the Anchoria's companion vessel, the Victoria, which left New York at the same time, and was probably not far away, and before the error was discovered the ships were too close to avoid the catastrophe. Had the sea been rough or the partitions less stanch, both ships must have gone to the bottom almost instantly. The passengers of the Anchoria were transferred to the Queen, which was least hurt, and the two ships sailed together for New York, arriving Tuesday noon. These two collisions, coming in such quick succession and imperiling so many lives, give terrible emphasis to the dangers attending navigation in foggy weather. They make very pertinent also the query whether the means now employed for discovering the position and nearness of unseen vessels are at all commensurate with the necessities of the case, or with the means already known, and known to be well calculated to prevent such dangers. In a dense fog the ordinary ship's light is visible scarcely more than a ship's length; and as it proved in the case of the Narragansett and Stonington, the time between thus sighting an approaching vessel and the instant of collision is fatally brief. The recent test of electric headlights for ships in this harbor clearly demonstrated the possibility of projecting a beam of electric light through the densest fog for a thousand feet or more, and through ordinary fogs a distance several times as great. Except in very rough weather the steam whistle can be heard a long distance, but it is liable to be a treacherous guide. It is not always possible to determine by the ear alone the direction from which a sound comes; and it would seem that a mistake of this nature was made on the Stonington, since the order intended to change her course away from that of the Narragansett only served to precipitate the collision. Had the whistle of the Queen signaled her course it could not have been mistaken for that of a ship sailing in the opposite direction, and the safety of two great floating hotels and their occupants would not have been imperiled thereby. Means for the better penetration of fogs, for determining the direction of unseen sources of sounds, and for enabling steamers to announce to all within hearing the course they are pursuing, seem therefore to be imperative necessities on shipboard. The first is furnished by the electric headlight, with a system of projection similar to but more efficient than that used on locomotives. The last would be provided by an efficient code of whistle signals to indicate the several points of compass. The second need is supplied by the instrument figured in the accompanying illustration. [Illustration: PROFESSOR MAYER'S TOPOPHONE.] The aim of the topophone, which was invented and patented by Professor A. M. Mayer, last winter, is to enable the user to determine quickly and surely the exact direction and position of any source of sound. Our figure shows a portable style of the instrument; for use on ship-board it would probably form one of the fixtures of the pilot-house or the "bridge," or both. In most cases arising in sailing through fogs, it would be enough for the captain or pilot to be sure of the exact direction of a fog horn, whistling buoy, or steam whistle; and for this a single aural observation suffices. Every one has twirled a tuning fork before the ear, and listened to the alternate swelling and sinking of the sound, as the sound waves from one tine re-enforce or counteract those from the other tine. The topophone is based upon the same fact, namely, the power of any sound to augment or destroy another of the same pitch, when ranged so that the sound waves of each act in unison with or in opposition to those of the other. Briefly described, the topophone consists of two resonators (or any other sound receivers) attached to a connecting bar or shoulder rest. The sound receivers are joined by flexible tubes, which unite for part of their length, and from which ear tubes proceed. One tube, it will be observed, carries a telescopic device by which its length can be varied. When the two resonators face the direction whence a sound comes, so as to receive simultaneously the same sonorous impulse, and are joined by tubes of equal length, the sound waves received from them will necessarily re-enforce each other and the sound will be augmented. If, on the contrary, the resonators being in the same position as regards the source of sound, the resonator tubes differ in length by half the wave length of the sound, the impulse from the one neutralizes that from the other, and the sound is obliterated. Accordingly, in determining the direction of the source of any sound with this instrument, the observer, guided by the varying intensity of the sound transmitted by the resonators, turns until their openings touch the same sound waves simultaneously, which position he recognizes either by the great augmentation of the sound (when the tube lengths are equal), or by the cessation of the sound, when the tubes vary so that the interference of the sound waves is perfect. In either case the determination of the direction of the source of the sound is almost instantaneous, and the two methods may be successively employed as checks upon each other's report. It is obvious that with such a help the pilot in a fog need never be long in doubt as to the direction of a warning signal; and if need be he can without much delay, by successive observations and a little calculation, determine, approximately at least, the distance of the sounding body. * * * * * EFFECT OF AGE ON THE QUALITY OF IRON. Professor Bauschinger, in 1878, tested iron taken from a chain bridge built in 1829, and found that fifty years of use had not perceptibly altered its quality--either its strength or its elasticity--as reported at the time of its erection. He also examined metal from another bridge built in 1852, and found that the average quality remained as given by Von Pauli at the time of its erection. Professor Thurston, testing pieces of the wire cable of the Fairmount Suspension Bridge, recently taken down at Philadelphia, after about forty years' use, found the iron to have a tenacity and elasticity and a ductility fully equal to the best wire of same size found in the market to-day. He therefore concludes that iron subjected to strains such as are met with in properly designed bridges does not deteriorate with age. * * * * * A COLLISION BETWEEN LARGE PASSENGER STEAMERS. During a fog near midnight, June 11, two of the large passenger steamers plying on Long Island Sound, Stonington line, between New York and Boston, came in collision, while running at considerable speed. One of the boats, the Narragansett, was struck near the middle, her side cut open, and a smoke-pipe knocked over, which made a down draught through the furnace, driving out a great sheet of burning gas into the cabins and between decks, by which the vessel was set on fire, at the same time the opening in her side caused her to begin to sink. Some three hundred passengers were on board, and a frightful scene of confusion followed. Happily there was a plentiful supply of life-preservers, some life-rafts, and a few life-boats. There was delay in lowering the boats, but the rafts, life-preservers, chairs, and other floatables served to support most of the unfortunate people, who, to escape the flames, were obliged to leap quickly into the water. About fifty lives were lost; the remainder were rescued by boats from another steamer, the New York, also by help sent from the other damaged vessel, the Stonington. It seems remarkable that so many were saved. This calamity illustrates the necessity for further effort on the part of inventors to discover new and improved means for fog signaling, saving life, preventing the spread of fires, and keeping vessels afloat. Most of the large local steamers that communicate with New York are veritable palaces, built regardless of expense, and supplied with every known reliable appliance for safety; but the occurrence of accidents like this and their disastrous results show that much remains to be done before navigation, even upon smooth waters, can be considered secure. The life-rafts of the Narragansett seem to have proved more useful than the life-boats in rescuing the drowning people, the rafts being more quickly and easily launched, requiring less skill, etc. The upperworks of our river and Sound passenger steamers consist at present of a mass of light, dry woodwork, forming cabins that are very comfortable and commodious for travelers, but highly dangerous in case of fire. The collision of river steamers above described was followed a few hours later by a collision between two great ocean steamers, accounts of which we give in another column. * * * * * HONORS TO AN AGED CHEMIST. The chemists of Germany are collecting money for the purpose of presenting a gold medal to Prof. Woehler on his eightieth birthday, which will be July 31, 1880. Prof. Woehler is one of the most distinguished as well as the oldest of living chemists. Himself a pupil of old Berzelius, a contemporary of Liebig, and the loved instructor of many of our best chemists, his name is equally respected on both sides of the Atlantic. Profs. Jay and Chandler, of Columbia College, New York city, two of his former pupils, are receiving contributions from those who wish to join in this well deserved memorial. * * * * * PERSEVERANCE UNDER DIFFICULTIES. A good lesson to young people inclined to exaggerate the hinderances to their success in life, and to think that their chances are too poor to justify honest exertion, is furnished by a young colored man of Columbus, Ohio, F. P. Williams by name, now serving in that city as census enumerator. Several years ago he was run over by a train of cars, his arms being so mutilated that both had to be taken off near the shoulder. Lacking hands he learned to write legibly by holding his pencil between his teeth. He writes quite rapidly, and in his work as enumerator takes an average of 200 names a day. * * * * * MAXIM'S NEW GAS MACHINE [_Continued from first page._] escape through the jet, L. This produces a partial vacuum at L, and draws air in at C. The air and steam pass with great rapidity through the tube, G. The action of the air and steam produces another partial vacuum at N, which draws gasoline in through the pipe, B. The adjustment of the opening is such that one pound of steam draws in air sufficient for two pounds of gasoline. The heat of the steam is taken up by the refrigeration caused by the evaporation of the gasoline, so that at E the compound is carbureted air and cold water. The tube, F, presents the curious phenomenon of being hot at _a_ and cold at _b_. In one short piece of tube we have a hot retort and a cold condenser. The supply of gasoline is regulated by the valve, D. The dash pot, H, prevents a too rapid action of the valve, I. Gas of any desired density may be made, and when once adjusted the gas does not vary. The burner used with this machine is made to produce the very best results attainable, and then the gas is regulated to a density and pressure to suit the burner. The nuisance of an adjustable burner is thus obviated. The holder closes off the supply when full, and lets on a supply when nearly empty. Gasoline has been much improved within a few years. It is now so very cheap that the equivalent of one thousand feet of coal gas of standard quality may be equaled for sixty cents. Where no steam is at hand these machines are run with a small oil burner. They are being made by the Pennsylvania Globe Gas Light Co., 131 Arch St., Philadelphia, Pa., of from 100 to 10,000 burner power. This machine was patented June 8, 1880. [Illustration: Fig 2. MAXIM'S GAS MACHINE--SECTION OF INJECTOR] * * * * * PREVENTION OF BOILER EXPLOSIONS. This vexed problem has occupied the minds of engineers and inventors since the introduction of steam as a motive power, and there are several theories of boiler explosions, each having its adherents. Of course there are conditions under which a boiler explosion is involved in no mystery; as, for example, when the water is dangerously low, when the safety valve is of insufficient capacity, or when it is unduly loaded; but there are other cases where an explosion cannot be rationally explained in the light of the well known theories. Mr. Daniel T. Lawson, of Wellsville, Ohio, has recently patented, in this and several other countries, a device for preventing boiler explosions, which appears practical, and according to the testimony of scientific men the claims of the inventor are well founded. The inventor, in explaining his invention, says that when water is superheated it becomes as explosive as gunpowder, exploding by bursting into steam from a reduction of pressure. When the engineer opens the throttle valve the cylinder is instantly filled with steam, creating a vacuum to that extent in the boiler. The superheated water then immediately rises to fill the vacuum, and is met by the valve, instantly cutting off the escape into the cylinder; this causes a concussion on every square inch in the boiler much greater than the regular pressure of the steam. There is abundant reason to believe that it is this concussive action which causes the numerous and mysterious boiler explosions, and which cause is wholly independent of the amount of water in the boiler; in fact, the greater the amount of water in the boiler the more terrific the explosion. This invention, which is based upon this theory, consists in reducing the concussive strain produced by the impulsive and intermittent escape of steam to the cylinders to an approximately uniform pressure, by rendering the evolution or passage of steam from the water to the steam space approximately constant and independent of the intermittent discharges from the steam space to the cylinder. The means for accomplishing this consist in a boiler constructed with a partition, A, intervening between the water space and the space from which the steam is taken to supply the cylinder, and feeding the steam as it is generated through valves or orifices, B, in the partition, of a smaller size than the port or opening through which the steam passes into the cylinder. By this means the normal steam pressure or steam supply, when thus intermittently or alternately reduced, is restored gradually by reducing the flow from the water space to the steam space, so that the transformation of water into steam is made approximately uniform in spite of the intermittent escape of steam through the cylinders, and the boiler is thus relieved of the constant wear and strain of the concussion. [Illustration: LAWSON'S IMPROVED STEAM BOILER.] In supplying steam from the water compartment to the steam compartment, the inventor intends using a number of small perforations, not amounting in the aggregate to more than about one twentieth the size of the cylinder port, in connection with a number of small valves to be under control of the engineer, so that the amount of steam required can be readily regulated, yet carefully avoiding the possibility of all, when opened to their utmost capacity, forming as large an opening as the valve through which the cylinder is supplied. A number of small valves and perforations in the partition sheet between the water and steam compartments, will remedy that hitherto very general annoyance of water rising to and through the valves, which is occasioned by pressure of steam upon the surface of the water, and when _one large_ valve is opened, the pressure is partly removed from the water immediately under it, consequently the water rises through the valve. A number of small openings for the liberation of steam from the superheated water will remedy this difficulty. * * * * * MISCELLANEOUS INVENTIONS. Mr. Niels C. Larsen, of Sacramento, Cal., has patented a purse or satchel fastening which can be securely locked and present a smooth and unbroken surface without projections. A combined dental speculum and shield has been patented by Mr. Alfred W. Edwards, of New York city. The object of this invention is to facilitate the performance of dental operations, such as the filling of teeth. It consists in a combined dental speculum, gag, and shield formed of a flaring or bonnet-shaped shell of metal, having a longitudinal slot in its lower side to receive the teeth, and an arched wire attached to its lower part, upon the opposite sides of the forward end of the slot, to rest upon the teeth and support the forward part of the shell. An improved coupling for the shafts of a wagon, which can be readily fastened to or unfastened from the axle, has been patented by Mr. William W. French, of Stockbridge, Mass. The invention consists in the combination with the axle clip and knuckle joint of a sliding bearer and spring catch to facilitate the opening and closing of the coupling. Mr. Joseph Kintz, of West Meriden, Conn., has patented an improved process for bronzing iron surfaces, which consists in cleaning and buffing the iron surfaces, then electroplating with copper, then dipping in acid solution, then again buffing, then boiling in a salt of tin solution, and then finishing by subjecting the article to heat until the copper and spelter coatings are fused into bronze. A simple device for extending the steps of passenger cars, for the convenience of passengers getting in and out of the car, and for protecting at the same time the treads of the permanent steps from sparks, cinders, snow, etc., during the passage of the car from one station to another, has been patented by Mr. Benjamin F. Shelabarger, of Hannibal, Mo. Mr. Luther C. Baldwin, of Manchester, N. H., has patented a new and improved automatic heat regulator, simple in construction and so arranged as to operate, under the smallest changes of temperature, upon the valves of the source of heat. An improved cigar lighting stand has been patented by Mr. Joseph Kintz, of West Meriden, Conn. This improvement relates to lamp stands for cigar lighting, and has for its object the production of a stand of ornamental character which may be packed closely for transportation and readily put together for use. A simple, safe, and efficient device in which light oils may be used as fuel for heating sad irons for domestic use, or for the use of tailors, dressmakers, etc., has been patented by Mr. Harvey L. Wells, of Evansville, Ind. It consists essentially of an iron box divided longitudinally into two chambers, the lower being the combustion chamber and the upper the heating chamber. An improvement in electric light has been patented by Mr. Charles J. Van Depoele, of Detroit, Mich. The object of this invention is to automatically regulate the feed of the carbon in electric lights according to the changes of resistance in the current caused by the consumption of the carbon points, so as to prevent flickering and variations in intensity of the light. * * * * * CHLOROFORMING DURING SLEEP. The possibility of chloroforming a person in sleep, without waking him, having been disputed in a recent murder trial, Dr. J. V. Quimby, of Jersey City, was led to test the question experimentally. The results were presented in a paper before the section of medical jurisprudence at the meeting of the American Medical Association a few days ago. Dr. Quimby made arrangements with a gentleman to enter his room when he was asleep and apply chloroform to him. He did this with entire success, transferring the person from natural to artificial sleep without arousing him. He used about three drachms of Squibb's chloroform, and occupied about seven minutes in the operation. The second case was a boy of thirteen who had refused to take ether for a minor operation. Dr. Quimby advised the mother to give the boy a light supper and put him to bed. She did so, and Dr. Quimby, calling when the boy was asleep, administered the chloroform and performed the operation without awakening the boy. The third case was a boy of ten years suffering from an abscess, and the same course was pursued with equal success. Two important inferences may be drawn from these cases, Dr. Quimby said. Minor surgical operations may be done with perfect safety and much more pleasantly than in the ordinary way, and, secondly, a person somewhat skilled in the use of chloroform may enter a sleeping apartment and administer chloroform with evil intentions while a person is asleep. Hence the use of this drug in the hands of a criminal may become an effective instrument in the accomplishment of his nefarious designs. * * * * * IMPROVED WATERING DIPPER. A convenient vessel for watering plants, sprinkling floors, and for other similar purposes is shown in the annexed engraving. It is simply a dipper of the usual form, partly covered at the top by a shield, at the center of which is fixed a sprinkler spout. The utility of this improvement will be recognized without further description. It was recently patented by Mr. R. Harrison, of Columbus, Miss. [Illustration: HARRISON'S WATERING DIPPER] * * * * * IMPROVED ELECTRIC LAMP. The lamp shown in the engraving will be recognized as an Edison lamp, the vacuum globe and the carbon horseshoe being the principal elements. Mr. John H. Guest, a well known electrical inventor of Brooklyn, N. Y., judging from his own experience in fusing platinum with glass in the manufacture of thermostatic fire alarms, concluded that the principal trouble with the Edison lamp would be the entrance of air around the wires passing through the glass of the vacuum globe, devised a simple plan of sealing the joint between the wires and the glass by means of mercury, thus interposing an effectual barrier to the entrance of air at that point. [Illustration: GUEST'S IMPROVED ELECTRIC LAMP, Fig 1 and Fig 2] The invention is so clearly shown in the engraving that scarcely a word of explanation is necessary. In the lamp shown in Fig. 1, the wires that convey the current to the carbon horseshoe are sealed in the ends of curved glass tubes communicating with the globe, and these joints are inclosed in small globes formed on the ends of the glass tubes and filled with mercury. In this lamp Mr. Guest has made provision partially or wholly preventing the circulation of air, should any remain in the globe after exhaustion with the air pump. The device by which this is accomplished is simply a small globe connected with the lower portion of the lamp globe by a contracted passage, the theory being that the cooler and heavier portion of the air will be drawn into the auxiliary globe by its own gravity. Fig. 2 shows a lamp in which the tubes that support the wires extend downward into the lamp globe. These tubes at their junction with the vacuum globe are fused to the platinum conducting wires, and the tubes act simply as lateral supports to the wires inside the globe, allowing the wires to expand freely lengthwise. The tubes are sealed outside the globe in the manner shown in Fig. 1. Another improvement made by Mr. Guest consists in inclosing the ends of the platinum wire conductors in the ends of the material of the carbon before it is carbonized, the wire being formed into a loop to increase the conducting surface and to insure a good connection with the carbon. * * * * * APPARATUS FOR PRESERVING FRUIT. The annexed engraving represents a simple apparatus for preserving fruit in its natural state, by means of a partial vacuum. The vessel is especially designed for the purpose, and is provided with an absorbent which takes up whatever moisture may emanate from the fruit. The vessel is preferably made of glass or earthenware, and is provided with a cover having a packing ring and a device for receiving the stems of the fruit. The cover is secured to the vessel by an adjustable screw clamp. In the bottom of the vessel there is an absorbing ring made of burnt or dried clay, which absorbs the moisture escaping from the fruit. The air in the vessel is rarefied either by heat or by the application of an air pump to the opening in the bottom. This apparatus was recently patented by Mr. Carl J. Renz, of Hudson, N. Y. [Illustration: FRUIT-PRESERVING APPARATUS.] * * * * * NEW PROCESS FOR PRINTING GOLD AND SILVER COLORS ON CARPETINGS AND OTHER TEXTILES. (TRANSLATED FOR THE _COMMERCIAL BULLETIN._) Gold and silver designs for carpeting and oilcloths have been hitherto prepared in the following manner: The gold or silver were put in leaves or bronze powder on the designs, which were printed with a varnish of linseed oil, or similar adhesive. The bronze thus attached did not possess much firmness, and the method was necessarily expensive. The method recently adopted by Wohlforth is as follows: The bronze powder is united at once to printing material. The liquid silicate of potash, or of oxide of sodium, answers this purpose. One part, by weight, of gold, silver, or bronze powder, along with two parts of the silicate, will give a print color, which is easily transferable by rollers to paper, oilcloth, and woods and metals. The bronze thus printed dries very rapidly, and cannot be taken off by oil or water, unless they are boiling. It bears light and heat equally well, and especially sulphureted hydrogen, which has such a destructive effect on bronzes put on in the form of powder. It is recommended to thin the mass by an addition of warm water, 10 to 20 per cent, so as to keep it from becoming too hard during the process of printing. An addition of glycerine or sirup, of 5 to 10 per cent., will be even preferable. The bronze color remaining on the printing forms can be taken off by warm water. * * * * * THE EDISON ORE SEPARATOR NOT NEW _To the Editor of the Scientific American:_ In your issue of June 19, 1880, I notice an illustration of an electro-magnetic ore separator invented by Mr. Edison, and patented June 1, 1880. A device absolutely identical with this has been in use for the past ten or fifteen years at the emery works at Chester, Hampden county, Mass. I there saw it in use myself in November, 1876, and was informed, I think by Mr. Ames, that it was not patented, and that no valid patent could be granted upon it by reason of its long continued public use. My uncle, John S. Williams, of this city, president of the Ore Knob Copper Company, had heard of the machine, and sent me to Chester with a view to purchasing the right to use it at the Ore Knob Copper Works, in Ashe county, North Carolina. On my return to Baltimore I had the magnets constructed by Watts & Co., electricians, on November 24, 1876, for a large machine, similar to the one at Chester, which machine was completed about December 10, 1876, and practically tested at No. 52 Commerce St., Baltimore. It was sent to the Ore Knob Mine about Christmas, 1876, to be used in separating magnetic oxide of iron from the copper ore, and, for aught I know to the contrary, is in use there yet. This is a striking instance of how history repeats itself in inventions. Mr. Edison is doubtless an original inventor of the device, but he most certainly is not the first inventor. R. D. WILLIAMS. Baltimore, Md., June, 1880. * * * * * NOVEL SLATE WASHER. Few articles meet with a readier sale or more promptly remunerate the inventor than the class of inventions adapted to the use of children either in their school life or in their amusements. One of these useful little novelties is shown in our engraving. It is a slate washer, consisting of two pieces of metal stamped up so as to form a holder for the sponge at the top and the cloth drier at the bottom. They also form a tubular receptacle containing a supply sponge, which is moistened by removing the corks at the ends. This invention was recently patented by Mr. Jacob A. Smith, of Salem, Ohio. [Illustration: SMITH'S SLATE WASHER.] * * * * * THE UTILIZATION OF GENESEE FALLS. The plan to furnish Rochester, N. Y., with power for manufacturing and for running street cars through the utilization of the falls of the Genesee in compressing air, was described in this paper some weeks ago. All the power of the lower falls, save what is needed to run two wheels for factories already in operation, has been purchased by the inventor of the system, and a promising beginning has been made. According to the Rochester _Union_, a large gang of men are at work building the crib just below the falls on the east side of the river in a cove which seems to have been made by nature for this purpose. This foundation is 100 feet long by 75 feet wide, and will have an average depth of 13 feet. It is being constructed of solid logs of oak timber bolted together, and the center will be filled with stone. On the top of the crib will be erected the derrick, 125 feet high, and the water will pour into it from the top of the falls through the bulkheads at one end of the dam. The stand pipes will run from the top of the derrick to the cylinders on the crib, which will be in the neighborhood of 500 feet long. The whole machinery will be roofed in. The difficulty in the way of getting the materials to the place, they all having to be lowered over the falls, makes the work of construction somewhat slow. It is expected, however, that the first application of the system to the propulsion of street cars will be possible in September next. * * * * * STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. The commencement exercises took place on June 16 and 17, and were of a very interesting nature. On the 16th President Henry Morton delivered an able address before the graduating class on "Popular Fallacies in Engineering." We intend to publish the address in full in our next week's SUPPLEMENT. * * * * * NEW PORTABLE SHOWER BATH. We give herewith perspective and sectional views of an improved portable shower bath, recently patented by Mr. James E. Vansant, of Covington, Ky. It consists of a spherical vessel, having at the bottom a supporting rim which admits of setting it on the floor when occasion requires. The top is provided with a screw cap, perforated with numerous small holes for discharging water in fine streams. In the center of the cover there is a filling tube, which extends nearly to the bottom of the vessel. A float is provided to indicate when the vessel is filled, and shot contained in the two side tubes serves as ballast to keep the device either in an upright or inverted position. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--VANSANT'S PORTABLE SHOWER BATH.] [Illustration: Fig. 2.--SECTION OF SHOWER BATH.] The vessel is pivoted in a light jointed frame that admits of hanging it up or setting it down. In use it is tipped by means of the cords attached. * * * * * MINES AND RAILROADS OF LEADVILLE. _To the Editor of the Scientific American:_ Nearly every person interested in geology sets up a theory of his own with regard to the carbonate deposits of Leadville, immediately on arriving in this famous district. There is, however, but one theory which has been generally adopted by scientific men, formulated by W. S. Keyes, General Manager of the Chrysolite Iron and Little Chief Mines, and substantiated by the mute testimony of the fossil remains that fix the geologic data. The theory is substantially as follows: A shallow sea overspread this entire region. An even bed of limestone, dolomitic, was formed by the myriads of shell-fish that subsisted in this shallow sea. From some natural convulsion the waters flowed off, leaving the sedimentary deposits. Subsequently the porphyritic rock flowed over the surface in a pasty mass, covering the limestone. There then followed two processes of ore making. The first was through the mineralizing action of heated and ore depositing waters, coming up out of the depths, and impregnating and permeating the hanging and foot walls of the contact. No free oxygen was contained in these waters; neither did they carry any chlorides or chlorobromides, wherein consists the present richness of Leadville's ores; but in the first process the ore was entirely in the form of sulphurets. The second process was initiated by the uplifting of the mountain ranges to their present height, at which time the diorites, those ore indicators of the globe, uprose through the sedimentary strata. Thus was the original surface of deposit bent and folded, and not unfrequently entirely broken. The surface waters carrying free oxygen and free carbonic acid now penetrated along the contact, and oxidized the sulphurets, which formed free sulphuric acid, giving rise to the sulphates and sulpho-carbonates. The irresistible law of gravity distributed these sulphates, these oxides, and these carbonates in vast bonanzas, that have been the wonder of the world. The fossil trilobites of this region identify it with the silver lead districts of Nevada, Utah, and Mexico. It is not anomalous, but simply richer than its sister regions to the West and South. The output of ore from the Leadville mines last year (1879) aggregated 122,483 tons, which represents a value of $11,477,046. That is to say, there was an average yield at $90 per ton, or just $31,443.96 each day. On the first day of May of the present year (1880), the returns from thirty-seven of the leading mines gave a total daily output of 899½ tons of ore, yielding, at the low average of $90 per ton, something like $80,955 per day. The world's history of silver mining in the past shows nothing like this for so young a camp. Scarcely a month passes without opening up some new and vast carbonate deposits. The territory has not even been thoroughly prospected; and the future yield of the royal metal will far eclipse its past production. It might not be uninteresting in this connection to give something regarding the sampling and milling of ores. One of the most complete concerns engaged in this business anywhere in the country is that of Augustus R. Meyer & Co. This establishment has grown with the growth and development of this carbonate district. The business was first established as long ago as the year 1877 (before Little Pittsburg was dreamed of). A little log house, a relic of seventeen years previous, was found sufficiently ample for the needs of the business of that period. However, it was not long before additions had to be made and new buildings erected. In the year 1879 the present company was incorporated with a capital stock of $50,000, and every preparation that money and business sagacity could effect was made to meet the demands of the prosperous era, that has built a mining metropolis 10,240 feet above the sea level, at the base of the great continental divide. As at present constituted the premises of the company comprise seven and one-half acres of ground, upon which six buildings have been erected, including ore houses and crushing and sampling buildings. During the busy season of summer from thirty-five to forty men are employed, who alternate their work in two shifts, day and night. At this season it frequently happens that the ore houses, which hold 1,500 tons, are insufficient for the accommodation of the mineral sent from the mines to be crushed, and large quantities have to be stored outside. In sampling ores from the various mines about Leadville this establishment pursues the most careful methods. The different ores are first deposited in large bins holding from 25 to 100 tons. One-tenth of each load is taken and run through a Dodge crusher, which well adapts it for the furnaces. A fifth of the tenth already indicated is put through heavy rollers, and one half of this finely crushed ore is subjected to the Bucking hammer and powdered to an eighty-sieve grade. One sample of this powder, consisting of a fourth, is given to the miner, two samples are kept for reference, and the other is sent to the assayer, who takes his "assay ton," upon which the company buys and sells. The capacity of the works are all the way from 80 to 150 tons per day. For samples, $7.50 is charged for silver and lead per ton, and $10 per ton for gold; but in large quantities a less charge is made. In job crushing, the market value of silver is allowed, with from five to ten per cent. deducted. The Meyer works enjoy an excellent patronage from the best mines of the camp, including such as the Chrysolite, Carbonate, Vulture, Duncan, Matchless, Climax, Morning Star, Crescent, and J. D. Dana, some of which have all their crushing done at these sampling works. [Illustration: AUGUSTUS R. MEYER AND COMPANY'S ORE MILL.] * * * * * RAILROADS. In order to furnish better transportation facilities for the mineral of this district, and to emancipate it from the freight embargo that has virtually fettered its commerce, citizens of Leadville have determined to construct a broad gauge railway down the Arkansas Valley to Pueblo. This will enable Leadville merchants to ship goods through from the East without breaking bulk, and lay them down in their warehouses as cheaply as the same commodities could be laid down in Denver. This will insure Leadville the control of the business of the Gunnison country, whose mineral developments are spoken of in the highest terms. Propositions from Eastern railroad contractors have already been received, preliminary surveys have been made, and $200,000 guaranteed to the stock subscription. It now seems to be only a question of what method to pursue in constructing the road. Growing out of the broad gauge movement, to some extent, two or three narrow gauge enterprises have been organized. One is projected from Leadville to Salt Lake City, following the carbonate belt, as shown in Hayden's Geological Map, around through the Eagle River, Roaring Fork, and White River Agency districts, into Utah. Such men as H. A. W. Tabor and C. B. Rustin stand at the head of this project. Another narrow gauge road is organized to be built into the "Ten-Mile" and Breckenridge districts, where the famous Robinson Mine is located. Should the broad gauge be built this summer to Pueblo, there is little doubt but that narrow gauges would ramify out from Leadville into every mineral bearing gulch that was found accessible. W. Leadville, May 6, 1880. * * * * * MECHANICAL INVENTIONS. Mr. William B. Hickman, of Sterling, Kan., has patented a swage to be used in welding the triangular bar which is to form the flange of a plow point or share to the body of the same. Mr. Lucius S. Edleblute, of Cincinnati, O., has recently patented what he calls the rubber cushioned spoke and hub. This is an improvement in the class of vehicle wheel hubs having an elastic band or annular portion which surrounds the journal box and on which the butts of the spokes rest, so that the wheel is rendered elastic and more durable, also comparatively noiseless when running on stony pavements, roads, or streets. Mr. George Richards, of Boxbury, Mass., has patented a steam muffler composed of two plates of a diameter very much greater than the diameter of the pipe through which the steam escapes from the boiler, so that the steam has room to expand before escaping to the outer air, its expansion effectually deadening the noise caused by the passage through the contracted escape pipe. * * * * * THE BABY ELEPHANT TAKES A BATH. It is customary with traveling menageries in hot weather when convenient to a river to allow the elephants to take a bath. The London Circus passed through Woonsocket, R. I., the other day, when the keeper let loose all the elephants, including "Hebe" and her baby, for the above purpose. The mother and her offspring were permitted to approach a river for the first time since the baby was born, and they were, therefore, watched with great interest by their keeper. The mother cautiously approached the Blackstone River, which flows past the circus grounds, and waded in a short distance, carefully feeling her way; she then encouraged the baby to follow her, which the obedient little fellow did. When far enough in the mother caught the baby between her fore legs, and then lay down in the water and rolled over, giving the baby the first bath. The mother then felt perfectly satisfied with her job, and rising up approached the bank, bringing the little one with her. On reaching terra firma she drove the younger before her, and would not allow it to approach the water again, though it showed a disposition to do so. * * * * * PHYLLIRHOE BUCEPHALA. This little animal belongs to the family of snails, class Heteropoda, is about an inch long, and is devoid of any shell or covering whatever. It is flat, and so absolutely transparent that a person can read through its body. It is provided with a pair of feelers. The little animal is very luminous if placed in fresh water or disturbed, but this phenomenon is most beautiful when an ammonia solution is poured over the animal. It will shine with a vivid blue light, which extinguishes with life. But even after death the nerve cells, which are directly below the skin and produce the light, can be irritated sufficiently to become luminous. It is a singular fact that electricity has no effect upon these nerve cells. [Illustration: PHYLLIRHOE BUCEPHALA--AS SEEN IN THE LIGHT. _a b_, ganglion; _c_, intestines; _d_, liver; _f_, kidneys; _g_, generative organs.] [Illustration: PHYLLIRHOE BUCEPHALA--SHOWING IN THE DARK THE LUMINOUS SPOTS.] * * * * * CARE OF TREES AND SHRUBS. In view of the drought which prevails in many parts of the country and its unusual severity over extensive districts, the _Rural New Yorker_ suggests to those who have planted trees or shrubs the past spring that there is one method, and so far as we know, says the writer, only one, by which they may be protected against injury or death from that cause. Surface watering has been shown to do more harm than good. The ground is made hard and compact, thus becoming a better conductor of heat while it becomes less pervious to air and moisture. A portion of the surface soil should be removed, and then pailful after pailful of water thrown in until the ground, to a depth of two feet and to a width about the stem of not less than three feet in diameter, has become saturated. Then, as soon as the water has disappeared from the surface, the removed soil should be well pulverized and returned. A covering of boards, straw, or hay, or even of sand or gravel, may then be applied, and the tree or shrub, thus treated, will pass through ten days of additional drought in safety. As soon as rain comes to wet the earth thoroughly, we think it is better to remove the mulch. Nothing is then gained by permitting it to remain. Mellowing the surface soil about the trees, thus keeping it free from grass and weeds, is then the most that is needed. We would repeat that the present is the season when the female borer deposits her eggs on the stems of fruit trees, and the wash of lime, potash, sulphur, etc. (darkened with lampblack), should now be applied and reapplied during June and July, as soon as washed off by rain. * * * * * THE FORCE OF TREE GROWTH. [Illustration: THE FORCE OF TREE GROWTH.] The disruptive power of tree roots, growing in the crevices of rocks, is well known. Masses of stone weighing many tons are often dislodged in this way from the faces of cliffs, and no one gives them more than a passing glance. When, however, the sanctity of the tomb is invaded, despite the graven warning of the occupant, the case is very different, and superstitious people are apt to think there must be something in it more than accident and the unconscious expression of the resistless force of growing vegetation. The engraving herewith is copied from a photograph sent to us by a European correspondent, of a grave in the Garten churchyard, in Hanover, Germany, the invasion of which by a birch tree has been the occasion of much wonderment by country people, who come from great distances to examine it. The monument, so unfeelingly disrupted, was erected in 1782, and bears on its base the following inscription: "This grave, which was bought for all eternity, must never be opened." A chance birch seed, lodging in a crevice of the monument, has displayed the irony of nature in slowly yet surely thwarting the desire of the person who designed it for a perpetual memorial. All the joints are separated, the strong iron clamps are broken, and the birch tree has embraced the upper large block, which weighs about one and a quarter tons, and the tree is driving its roots below, gradually but surely tilting the structure. * * * * * PERSEVERANCE WITH THE DROWNED. In a recent communication to the French Academy, Professor Fort asserts that he was enabled to restore to life a child three years old, by practicing artificial respiration on it four hours, commencing three hours and a half after apparent death. He mentions also a case in which Dr. Fournol, of Billancourt, reanimated, in July, 1878, an apparently drowned person by four hours of artificial respiration begun one hour after the patient was taken from the water. At this season, when cases of drowning are apt to be frequent, the possible benefit that may come from a persevering effort to revive victims of drowning, should encourage friends not to despair of their resuscitation, even after several hours of seemingly fruitless labor. * * * * * SIMPLE TEST FOR CHLORAL HYDRATE. A new test for chloral hydrate has been devised by Frank Ogston, namely, yellow sulphide of ammonium. On adding this reagent to a solution of chloral of moderate strength there is at first no change noticed, but in a short time the colorless solution acquires an orange yellow color, and on longer standing turns brown and evolves a gas of very disagreeable odor. Ogston's experiments show that a solution containing ten milligrammes turns brown in six hours, and gives the peculiar odor. With one milligramme the orange-yellow color appears in twelve hours, but no odor. Croton chloral gives the same reactions, but chloroform, chloric ether, and formic acid do not. * * * * * NATURAL HISTORY NOTES. _The Propagation of Oysters._--At the recent meeting in this city of the American Fish Cultural Association, a paper was read on the propagation of the oyster, by Dr. W. J. Brook, of the Johns Hopkins University. The manner in which this propagation takes place had never before, he said, been thoroughly understood. Through studies made by him last summer, however, great light was thrown on the subject. He found that the American oysters do not breed their young in the shell, as had been supposed, and that consequently the eggs can be impregnated artificially. An average oyster contains from six to nine million eggs, and one of large size may contain fifty millions. The plan pursued by him in fertilizing these eggs was to chop the male and female oyster up together; thus the fluids are mixed and the impregnation is made complete. The process of development immediately begins, and goes on so rapidly that a change may be noted every fifteen seconds. In a very few hours the embryo is sufficiently formed to swim in the water. The shells at first are very small, and are not adjacent to each other. They grow very rapidly, closing down over the sides, and finally unite and form the hinge. In the short space of twenty-four hours the young oyster is able to take food, and from three days to a week it attains perfect form. During its early life it is a swimming animal. The oyster is able to reproduce its species at the end of a year's growth, and it is marketable at the age of three years. * * * * * S. P. RUGGLES. S. P. Ruggles died at Lisbon, N. H., May 28. He was principally known as the inventor of the Ruggles printing press, which was among the first of machine presses. His invention was what printers call an "upside-down press," the type being upside down when in the bed. About twenty-five years ago Mr. Ruggles sold out his interest for nearly $200,000, and since then has not been in active business. He was the inventor of the raised alphabet for the blind, and always showed great interest in the amelioration of the condition of the sightless. He was also a great friend of mechanical education, and has written much on the subject. * * * * * SYDNEY INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION.--1879-1880. EXTRACTS FROM THE REPORT OF THE JUDGES IN HOROLOGY. DEPARTMENT III.--EDUCATION AND SCIENCE. _Group_--_Scientific and Philosophical Instruments and Methods._ Class 310.--Chronometric Apparatus, Chronometers, Astronomical Clocks, Watches, Chronographs, etc., etc. _Judges_.--John McGarvie Smith, New South Wales. P. E. Bound, Switzerland. H. C. Russell, B.A., F.R.A.S., Great Britain. E. Beckmann, Germany. Gregory P. Harte, United States. _To the Honorable Committee on Judging and Awards, Sydney International Exhibition._ GENTLEMEN: I have the honor to hand you herewith the report of the judges of Class 310, as above, And remain, sirs, your obedient servant, GREGORY P. HARTE, Chairman. * * * * * The following exhibits were submitted for examination: U. S. Exhibit, 537, American Watch Company, Waltham, Mass., U. S. A.--Watches and Chronographs. British Exhibit, 1,048, Victor Kullberg, London, England--Watches and Chronographs. British Exhibit, 1,054, Nicole & Nielsen, London, England--Watches, Chronographs, etc. British Exhibit, 1,060, T. Russell & Sons, London, England--Watches, Chronographs, etc. British Exhibit, 1,041, Castleberg & Co., London, England--Watches, etc. British Exhibit, 1,060a, S. Backschmid, Switzerland--Watches. * * * * * German Exhibit, 36, A. Lange & Sons, Dresden, Germany--Watches, etc. Swiss Exhibit, L. Audemars, Brassus, Switzerland--Watches, etc. French Exhibit, 146, A. H. Rodanet, Paris, France--Chronometers. French Exhibit, 177, G. Tribandeau, Besançon, France--Watches. Swiss Exhibit, 14a, International Watch Company--Watches. In presenting the following report, the judges desire to make some explanations, which, we trust, will excuse them in the minds of the impartial for any apparent neglect in the form of their report, and for the limited number of tests made of the horological exhibits. The judges were appointed too late to do the full amount required, inasmuch as the number of exhibits was so much in excess of any reasonable allotment for examination and report before the closing of the Exhibition. Commencing their labors, however, immediately after the first call, the examinations were not complete until March 3d, which only permitted a time test to be made of nine days in a single position. This single position was objected to by some of the exhibitors, but ill-advisedly, for the ratings observed in the watches of the objecting exhibitors were of such character as to establish in the minds of the judges the conclusion that their watches would not have made so good a comparative showing if there had been more time to observe the ratings in other positions. Great care was taken by the individual judges in making up their note books during the examination of the watches, and scrutinizing the inherent and comparative merits of exhibits under the ten different heads unanimously agreed upon, as follows: 1. Originality. 2. Invention and discovery. 3. Utility and quality of material. 4. Skill in workmanship. 5. Fitness for purposes intended. 6. Adaptation to public wants. 7. Economy. 8. Cost. 9. Finish and elegance of cases. 10. Time-keeping qualities. It was agreed the judges should use the number 100 as expressing the highest degree of excellence in each of these ten elements of inherent and comparative merit, and adjudge individually to each of the several exhibits such rating as their respective judgments would warrant after careful examination; each set of opinions being made a portion of this report, and in the _résumé_ the mean average being taken as the unanimous verdict of the judges. It was also decided we should take up each exhibit in the order originally examined, and, beginning with the first element of merit (originality), each judge should in numbers express his judgment of the inherent and comparative merit attaching to each exhibit in this one element; this being done, to proceed with each succeeding element in order and in the same manner. The five judgments being complete and in numbers, the aggregated verdict is arrived at simply by addition and division. This is not only a verdict as to the inherent and comparative merits of each exhibit, but also a full analysis of each order of merit in any exhibit as compared with all the others.... In giving this verdict it was absolutely necessary to ascertain to the fullest extent the time-keeping qualities of the exhibits. The judges were led to this conclusion from the fact that in some of the exhibits we were shown watches of equal finish containing every known application of horological science in practically the same construction, which should, as far as they could determine by merely optical examination, keep quite as good time as watches of double and treble the costs in other exhibits, thus involving their judgment in doubt upon several elements of merit. In justice to themselves and to the exhibitors the judges determined to make the test in only one position, and give the whole of the time at their disposal to testing the watches in what might be considered their normal position, if such term is allowable--that is, "pendent up," or hanging. At the solicitations of the judges Prof. H. C. Russell, Astronomer Royal at the Sydney Observatory, kindly consented to make the tests, and each of the exhibitors was requested to send three watches of his own selection to the Observatory for this trial. As will be seen by the report of Professor Russell, eight of the ten exhibitors availed themselves of this opportunity. It is proper, however, to state here that none of the exhibitors apparently anticipated this test, and that it is possible some of the watches might have made a better record if they had been differently attended to since the opening of the Exhibition; but they were in this respect all upon a par. The majority of the watches had been made for exhibition purposes and specially prepared to that end; and some had been previously rated at observatories before sending. _Notably, however, to the contrary of the above, the exhibit of the American Watch Company was the ordinary and regular product of the factory, such as is finished every day._ Notwithstanding the possibility that these exhibits might have been better prepared for observatory time tests, some of the exhibits, as will be seen by the rating, demonstrate the wonderful advances made in the application of horological sciences to the manufacture of watches, and that their rating is being made equal to that of the best marine chronometers. The following is the report of Professor Russell, and the accompanying diagram (see next page) will readily give an idea of the comparative performance of the different watches. "_Sydney Observatory, 26th February, 1880_. "GREGORY P. HARTE, ESQ., "_Chairman of the Judges in Horology_. "SIR: I have the honor to report that, in response to your circular, inviting exhibitors of watches each to send three watches to the Observatory to be tested, I received on Monday, February 16th: "Three watches, Nos. 611, 669, 237, from Mr. Dolman, agent for Mr. Tribandeau, Besançon. "Three watches, Nos. 987271, 670068, 1221336, from Mr. Manson, agent for Waltham Watch Company. "Three watches, Nos. 3171, 1935, 2526, from Mr. Allerding, agent for Mr. Kullberg. "And on the forenoon of February 17th: "Three watches, Nos. 11527, 19967, 12629, from Mr. Hoffnung, agent for Lange & Sons. "Three watches, Nos. 1004, 8632, 8370, from Mr. Jacob, as agent for Nicole & Nielsen. "Three watches, Nos. 70690, 23496, 113516, from Mr. Jacob, as agent for Thomas Russell & Sons. "One watch, No. 47150, from Mr. Jacob, as agent for Castleberg. "Three watches, Nos. 12731, 12483, 11680, from Mr. Wiesener, as agent for L. Audemars. "And on 18th February: "Two watches, Nos. 2724, 3528, from Mr. Jacob, as agent for Castleberg. "On the 17th I began rating these watches, keeping them all in one position (hanging), and subject to the same conditions of temperature; in fact, they were all hung on one board, and kept in a compartment locked up so as to avoid change of temperature, except such changes as were due to changes in the weather. "They were rated once a day by the standard clock, which affords special convenience for this work, and the error of which was found by daily astronomical observations giving the absolute time; great care was taken in rating so as to get the exact error of each watch every day, care being taken at the same time to avoid errors in the seconds dials, a fault sufficiently obvious in some of these exhibits. "In presenting the result of this test in the form of a diagram (see diagram on the opposite page), it is necessary to explain that the curves show only the change of rate in each case, and nothing is shown here of the actual rate, which was large in several instances. "In the diagram spaces between faint lines represent seconds; and the thicker faint lines represent the mean rate in each case: When the curve rises it shows that the watch was gaining on its previous rate, and when it falls the watch was losing on its previous rate. For example, in No. 4 curve the thicker line shows the position of a gaining rate of 3 sec. per day; on the 18th, watch No. 4 had a gaining rate of 2.7 sec., and is plotted below the thick line; on the 19th and 20th it was less than 3 sec., but on the 21st the rate increased to 4.8 sec., and the curve rises above the line. The same rule is followed with losing rates; and, therefore, each curve shows whether the watch was gaining or losing on its own rate. "For convenient reference the barometer and temperature curves are plotted on the same sheet; although from the short time at command the watches could only be tested in one position, a glance at the diagram will show that in some degree at least the temperature adjustment and the isochronal properties of the balance springs were also tested; and I wish to call your attention to the fact that the whole of these show in a more or less degree a marked response to the change in temperature, some being over and others under corrected. "This fact is important, because it adds another proof that the old form of compensation balance--even when combined with chronometer spring and escapement and all the refinements which the best modern workman can add to it--fails to yield a complete correction for temperature; and I much regret that the American Watch Company, who claim to have overcome this fault by means of a balance involving a new arrangement of the metals, did not send to be tested any of their first-class watches containing this important improvement. "Several of the rate curves, especially Nos. 4, 10, 13, 16, 21, and 24, respond to the change in the barometer in a way that shows the isochronal properties of their balance springs are not quite perfect. _Looking down the curves it becomes at once evident that watch No. 5, which is No. 670068, second grade of the American Watch Company, is remarkably free from these defects, and presents the best rate of all the watches tested._ No. 9, which is No. 2526, Kullberg, is the nearest approach to No. 5; indeed, the difference between its highest and lowest rates is 0.1 sec. less than No. 5, but it has not such a steady rate. The timekeeping of both these watches is remarkably good, and shows that we have entered upon a new era in the manufacture of pocket chronometers; _for these rates are better than the majority of marine chronometers._ "_Among the cheaper watches tested, No. 6, which is No. 1221336, of the American Watch Company, is worthy of notice; it is a watch of the sixth grade, yet its performance has been better than that of many very expensive and otherwise first-class watches among those tested; such a watch speaks volumes in favor of the system under which it was made, and is the best comment upon the accuracy of the machines that produced it._ "There are several watches among those tested which have kept wonderfully steady rates, but their comparative merit is shown in the diagrams much better than it could be by any description. The daily rate of each watch will be found in a table attached. "The changes in Nos. 1, 2, 3, 17, and 19 were too great to plot. "H. C. RUSSELL, "_Government Astronomer._" * * * * * CONCLUSION OF THE REPORT. In consideration of the facts developed in this examination, and the preponderance of elements of inherent and comparative merit adjudged by the judges (each in independent judgment) being equal to nearly 70 per cent. more than the next highest exhibit, they have found it exceedingly difficult to make such a classification in degree as will give even-handed justice to all. We adjudge to the AMERICAN WATCH COMPANY, OF WALTHAM, MASS., U. S. A., a first-class award, and such other special distinction, diploma, medal, or award, as is consistent with the duties and obligations of the honorable Sydney International Commission, for the largest and most complete exhibit of horological instruments examined. They also propose, as the only means by which their appreciation of the merits of the production of this company can be adequately or equitably recognized by the Committee on Judging and Awards, that a separate first-class award be given for the timekeeping qualities of all grades of these watches. Also a separate first-class award for the perfection of this system of watchmaking and the improvements in the mechanical parts of the watch, being notably in the main spring and going barrel, the patent safety pinion, the perfect epicycloidal form of all the teeth of the train, in every grade of watch alike, and the isochronal adjustment of the balance spring. Also to Charles V. Woerd, mechanical superintendent of the American Watch Company, Waltham, Mass., U. S. A., a first-class award for his new mode of compensating balances. Also a separate first-class award for the improvements in cases, the number of artistic forms and designs used, the beauty and elegance of their finish, and for their new and indestructible method of enameling. VICTOR KULLBERG The display of marine chronometers by this maker, with the Observatory ratings, was of the very first order. Every part of those instruments was remarkably well made, and the modifications of some of the balance wheels worthy of special attention. Adjudged a first-class award. The display of watches by the same maker, although small, commanded attention from their very nice finish in all parts. As will be seen from the report and diagram of Professor Russell, they are good timekeepers, especially the one having the chronometer escapement. This style of watch, however, is of too delicate construction and too costly to fully meet the requirements of any considerable public want. The same objection will hold good as to the lever escapements as far as cost or economy is concerned, they being comparatively too high priced. Representing a certain class of manufacture, they are of the first order of merit, and adjudged a first-class award. The "gas governor" exhibited by the same maker, an instrument for regulating the amount of heat in the testing of chronometers, is commended as a useful invention. [Continued on page 10.] RESUME OF THE JURY'S EXAMINATION [page 9] * * * * * +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ | |AMERICAN| | | | | | NAMES | WATCH | | | Thos.| Castle-| | OF |COMPANY,| Victor |Nicole &|Russell| berg & | | EXHIBITORS. |WALTHAM.|Kullberg.|Nielsen.|& Sons.|Company.| +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ |Originality. | 98 | 0 | 28 | 8 | 0 | +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ |Invention & | 95 | 0 | 22 | 0 | 0 | | discovery. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ |Utility and | | | | | | |quality of | 95 | 73 | 47 | 25 | 29 | |material. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ |Skill in | 93 | 80 | 58 | 30 | 30 | |workmanship. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ |Fitness for | | | | | | |purposes | 100 | 89 | 70 | 36 | 36 | |intended. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ |Adaptation to | 100 | 53 | 60 | 34 | 41 | |public wants. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ |Economy. | 100 | 57 | 48 | 22 | 25 | +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ |Cost. | 100 | 65 | 38 | 26 | 32 | +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ |Finish and | | | | | | |elegance | 100 | 73 | 76 | 42 | 42 | |of cases. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ |Timekeeping | 100 | 96 | 80 | 44 | 53 | |qualities. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ | | | | | | | |Totals | 981 | 586 | 527 | 267 | 288 | | | | | | | | +--------------+--------+---------+--------+-------+--------+ [_Cont._] +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ | | | | | | Inter- | | NAMES | | | | |national| | OF |S. Back-|A Lange| Louis |G. Tri- | Watch | | EXHIBITORS. | schmid.|& Sons.|Audemars.|bandeau.|Company.| +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ |Originality. | 0 | 45 | 98 | 0 | 0 | +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ |Invention & | 0 | 33 | 24 | 0 | 0 | | discovery. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ |Utility and | | | | | | |quality of | 11 | 68 | 73 | 10 | 32 | |material. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ |Skill in | 11 | 83 | 85 | 19 | 31 | |workmanship. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ |Fitness for | | | | | | |purposes | 7 | 86 | 80 | 15 | 37 | |intended. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ |Adaptation to | 15 | 73 | 54 | 15 | 49 | |public wants. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ |Economy. | 12 | 59 | 44 | 18 | 41 | +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ |Cost. | 10 | 79 | 58 | 19 | 63 | +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ |Finish and | | | | | | |elegance | 10 | 71 | 76 | 20 | 0 | |of cases. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ |Timekeeping | 0 | 89 | 79 | 0 | 0 | |qualities. | | | | | | +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ | | | | | | | |Totals | 76 | 686 | 671 | 116 | 287 | | | | | | | | +--------------+--------+-------+---------+--------+--------+ [Illustration: FACSIMILE DIAGRAM SHOWING THE CHANGE IN RATE OF WATCHES TESTED AT THE OBSERVATORY, SYDNEY, FEBRUARY 17 TO 26, 1880.] * * * * * SYDNEY INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION. [page 10] [_Continued from page 8._] NICOLE & NIELSEN. This exhibit, made specially for the Exhibition, comprised a full line of plain levers, split seconds, chronographs, calendars, repeaters, etc., and was a representative display of their peculiar style of manufacture in all its details. The cost of these watches, compared with others of similar construction and finish, was excessive; and while they show good timekeeping qualities, they do not equal that of other exhibits. As representing their own methods of construction they are of the first order of merit, and are adjudged a first-class award. THOS. RUSSELL & SONS exhibit a full line of their manufacture, which, upon comparison with other exhibits of the same general character and construction, places them in the third order of merit, and they are adjudged a third-class award. S. BACKSCHMID exhibits a class of cheap watches of very inferior workmanship and finish, of the last order of merit, and adjudged a fourth-class award. N. CASTLEBERG & CO. exhibit a meritorious line of watches in many respects, of good finish, and not excessively high priced for their performances; of the second order of merit, and adjudged a second class award. A. LANGE & SONS exhibit a class of watches possessing many elements of merit, and of superior finish in many respects and at a cost which is quite reasonable. That the watches are constructed upon scientific principles and are intended as reliable timepieces, is shown from Observatory tests. The variations show that care has been taken to approximate a perfect adjustment, and that a partial success has been attained. A peculiarity in the construction of the balance wheel--having a horizontal split from the timing second holes each way--is noticeable, which we fail to understand. This exhibit was made expressly for this Exhibition, and Observatory rates sent with each watch, and, as a representative exhibit, although small, was the second best examined, and is, in its class, of the first order of merit, and adjudged a first-class award. * * * * * LOUIS AUDEMARS exhibits a wonderful class of complicated watches, calendars, repeaters, chronographs, etc., etc., combined in one watch, and elaborately cased and artistically finished. The great element of merit in this exhibit is in the combination of the great number of unusual functions for a watch, and by skill in workmanship and mechanical science securing a correct performance. The enormous cost of these watches is an effectual embargo on their use to any except the very few, and their utility is, therefore, very limited. In their class they are, however, of the first order of merit, and adjudged a first-class award. G. TRIBANDEAU exhibits a considerable collection of watches in a great variety of cases, of a class of workmanship, finish, and performance calling for the fourth order of merit, and are adjudged a fourth-class award. A. H. RODANET exhibits two marine chronometers only, one of which was broken and the other out of order; commended. INTERNATIONAL WATCH COMPANY exhibit a collection of watches of the third order of merit, and adjudged a third-class award. In concluding this report, the judges very much regret the limitation in time which has prevented them securing position tests of this very interesting exhibit in horology, as much on account of the exhibitors as on their own account. Such advances have in the last few years been made in this science that, in the interest of the public as well as of the manufacturers, a sufficiency of time is desirable to make tests in five or six positions, and fourteen days should be allowed to each position. Tests for heat and cold, and an opportunity to carefully note barometric and thermometric influences upon the various systems of adjustment, would be very valuable and interesting. Respectfully, etc., GREGORY P. HARTE, _Chairman_, United States. H. C. RUSSELL, B.A., F.R.A.S., Great Britain. J. McGARVIE SMITH, New South Wales. P. E. BOUND, Switzerland. E. BECKMANN, Germany. * * * * * CORN MAGNETS. Every kind of salve or lotion that is supposed to remove or relieve corns meets with a large sale. Corn files and pencils are getting stale, and an enterprising inhabitant of Dresden has lately brought out what he calls a "corn magnet." It is evident that it is as unlike a magnet as possible, for an examination shows that it is made of sulphur colored with graphite. The directions are to set fire to one end, and let a drop of the melted sulphur fall upon the corn. A convenient and agreeable operation, especially if the corn is on the bottom of the foot. It is needless to say that the corn usually survives the slight burn and lives to torment the owner again. All burns, whether by caustic or otherwise, should be avoided. * * * * * EXPERIMENTS ON THE RESISTANCE OF MATERIALS. Prof. J. Burkitt Webb, C.E., now in Europe, writes as follows: On the invitation of Prof. Spangenberg we visited the "Versuchsstation," at the Gewerbe-Akademie, where the important experiments upon materials for engineering purposes are being made. These tests are of two kinds--trials of strength and trials of endurance. The first are made by means of very heavy and accurate machinery, mostly new within the last two or three years; the latter are the celebrated "Dauer-Versuche," a description of which we will reserve for another letter. The main machine, of which there are three or four duplicates at work at various points in Germany, is housed in a special building in the interior court of the academy. It consists of heavy iron "ways," some fifty feet long, accurately planed and secured to a stone foundation, with a hydraulic pump and scales at one end, and a number of massive attachments for subjecting the piece of iron or other material to various kinds of strains. There are also other instruments which belong to the machine as delicate as it is heavy, and which are used for adjusting the parts of the apparatus, reading the results of a test, or making calculations. This machine differs from others in the way of measuring the force used. It has been the custom to take the pressure on the liquid in the hydraulic cylinder, as shown by a manometer, as the basis of calculation. This introduces an inaccuracy, as part of this is due to the friction on the piston packing, and the true pressure is less than that shown by this irregular quantity. To avoid this difficulty a massive lever is introduced between the hydraulic press and the point where its pressure is applied. One arm of this lever is one-eighth inch long, and the other five hundred times as long, so that to measure a pressure of one hundred tons, four hundred pounds must be placed on the scale pan which hangs from the end of the long end of the lever. The fulcrum rests against the piston, and the short end of the lever is connected by heavy links with the apparatus by means of which the strain is applied. Technically speaking the fulcra of scales are "knife edges," but to convey a pressure of one hundred tons and remain free to move, these edges must be very obtuse, perhaps 160° to 170°; they must be as long as possible, some fifteen inches, of the best hardened steel, accurately ground, and must rest against a hardened plate of steel. Made with the greatest care the sharp edge under such a pressure will sometimes make a dent in the plate and the scales are clogged. As it is very difficult to measure the one-eighth inch with accuracy, another lever is provided with a ratio of one to ten, and with a short arm long enough to be made of a certain length with but a small percentage of error. To test the main lever this occupies essentially the same place as a sample of iron to be stretched; it is loaded with, say, two hundred pounds, which it multiplies to a ton; this pressure is then weighed by placing four pounds upon the main scale pan, and the fulcrum of the main lever is adjusted until the two weights balance. The attachments consist of: I. Jaws for holding round, square, and flat bars to be submitted to tension. II. Arrangements for holding beams and columns in various ways at their ends, and compressing them until they are crushed or "buckle." III. Two massive graduated iron beams, which are placed crosswise on the "ways," and used for twisting shafts, railroad axles, etc. IV. A face plate, about four feet square, for holding plates of boiler iron nearly as large by the perimeter, and crushing in the middle by forcing various shaped pieces against it. V. Apparatus for bending a beam by crushing an angular piece into it; and in the same connection, VI. Shears for cutting off bars of metal and measuring the force required. In connection with this main machine were some, quite old, which had been used in the infancy of the subject by a former professor, and a new special machine for the same purpose as attachment V., and which seemed to "kink" a piece of railroad iron as if it were only lead. In this the pressure was obtained by screws. Among the instruments used for the adjustment of the parts of the main machine we saw the finest cathetometer we had ever seen. This instrument, by Breithaupt, in Cassel, has two telescopes, with micrometer screws with more than one hundred and twenty-five threads per inch, and scales graduated on glass with more than six hundred and twenty five divisions to the inch. Another instrument for measuring the deflection, in two directions at once, of a column under pressure, has micrometer screws with more than two hundred and fifty threads per inch. We saw also a planimeter, which not only calculated mechanically the area of a figure, but gave also its center of gravity, moment of inertia, etc. We saw also a French calculating machine; the other apparatus is, we believe, all German. If one is, however, critical, it will be found in many lines of business that all the fine goods here are imported, though naturally the Germans are slow to acknowledge it. We witnessed the experiments on a sample of round iron over an inch in diameter, and on a piece of iron plate three inches wide by half an inch thick. It is perhaps needless to say that they seemed to stretch like putty and to break like thread. The pressure is put on a few hundred pounds at a time, and the elongation is read by two telescopes and a scale, which multiply the distance five hundred times. At the same time the first "elastic limit" is watched for. Before this is arrived at the piece will return to its original length when the tension is removed; after this the stretching is in part permanent. One of the facts brought out is that there are _several_ elastic limits, in copper seven or eight. The appearance of the surface after the elastic limit is passed and the iron stretches is peculiar. A wavy appearance is seen, and longitudinal ridges begin to form, due to the changes going on in the crystals, by which they adapt themselves to the increased length. After a further general adaptation of structure becomes impossible, these appearances culminate in the weakest part. The apparatus for measuring the increase in length has long since been removed, and the places where it was attached have been filed smooth to avoid introducing the weak point artificially. The diameter of this part now reduces rapidly, and the surface becomes rough and the iron hot--you can see it stretch. When it has reduced twenty-five or more per cent. it gives way suddenly with a sharp crack. The percentage of reduction before breaking is now recorded with the observations on the elasticity and the breaking strain, and the experiment is at an end. It suggested itself to see if the work done in pulling the iron apart was fully accounted for by the heat generated. We could easily calculate the work up to the point of maximum tension, but after this the force required was not measured; however, a rough calculation showed that the iron was as hot as required, or at least that the data would require to be quite complete if any residual was to be found. Berlin, May 13, 1880. * * * * * ENGINEERING INVENTIONS. An improved wheel guard, which will push any obstacles on the track aside, and which can be adjusted to a greater or less height above the rails, has been patented by Mr. Solomon Brisac, of New York city. It consists in a wheel guard formed of a metallic box with a beveled front side, which box is adjustably fastened to the front end of a recessed plate resting on and partially surrounding the grease box. The box is braced by means of a rod attached to its forward end and passing into a socket fastened to the bottom of the car. An improved water motor, constructed on the general principle of a rotary engine, in which two compartments are arranged side by side, with a partition intervening, and in which the sliding pistons in the piston wheels in the two compartments are arranged at right angles to each other, has been patented by Mr. William E. Seelye, of Anoka, Minn. Mr. Stephen Barnes, of New Haven, Conn., has invented a vibrating propeller, adapted to small boats and vessels to be operated by either hand or steam power. The floats are arranged so that they will offer no resistance on the return stroke. An improved device for removing snow from railway tracks, and especially from between the rails, has been patented by Mr. David M. Horton, of Fishkill Village, N. Y. It consists of a revolving brush, a mould board in juxtaposition thereto, and a fan blower, in combination with suitable driving gear for propelling the brush and fan. An improvement in steam traps, patented by Mr. Hugh O. Ames, of New Orleans, La., consists in combining with a vibratory arm carrying a water receiver, a side apertured hollow trunnion, a discharge pipe, a jacketed standard, and an outlet pipe. An improved cotton press has been patented by Mr. Alfred A. Janney, of Montgomery, Ala. This invention relates to an improvement in the class of cotton and hay presses in which the follower is worked by a screw that passes through a nut, to which the required rotary motion is imparted by means of lateral sweeps or levers. It consists in the means for supporting and securing the levers and forming a vertical guide for the screw, so that the levers are prevented from rocking or swaying as power is applied in the operation of packing. * * * * * IMPROVED STEAM CANAL BOAT. The late experiments in canal steamboats bid fair to be a complete success. The Baxter steamers were not sufficiently remunerative to continue the building of that kind of boat. They do not carry a sufficient load, owing to their build, and that is made necessary by the form and arrangement of the machinery and propelling power, the propeller being that form used by the tug in Buffalo. The new style, which bids to pay handsomely, is as full a bow and stern as the ordinary first-class canal boat. The propelling power is radically different from the tug propeller. The wheel is eight feet in diameter and placed close to the stern; the boiler is upright, with a single engine, very compact machinery, taking up no more room than the stable in many boats, and enabling the boat to carry 7,500 bushels of corn and coal for the trip. With this cargo they run from Buffalo to New York in seven days on five and a half gross tons of coal, saving river and harbor towing. One returned from New York to Buffalo in one hour less than seven days, bringing one hundred and thirty tons of freight. The outlook now promises to supersede mule and horse towing. The Belgian system of cable towing will take that large number of boats now relying on the mule, and deliver them promptly as consigned and in much less time and cost than can be done by the mule. Both systems are necessary for rapid movement on the canal, and to cheapen the transfer from the West to the seaboard. Steam is sure to supersede animal power on the canal, as everywhere else. The canal steamboats are at last so far perfected as to insure a handsome profit in running them, and a large number will soon be at work on the canal. Two are to be constructed in Lockport as speedily as possible by one of our most enterprising boat builders, and the machinery is contracted for, thus opening up a new industry for our numerous and worthy mechanics.--_Lockport_ (_N. Y._) _Journal_. * * * * * ASTRONOMICAL NOTES. OBSERVATORY OF VASSAR COLLEGE. The computations in the following notes are by students of Vassar College. Although merely approximate, they are sufficiently accurate to enable the ordinary observer to find the planets. M. M. POSITIONS OF PLANETS FOR JULY, 1880. MERCURY. On July 1 Mercury sets a few minutes after 9 in the evening. Mercury can be readily found, early in July, a few degrees south of the point of sunset; the planet moves rapidly southward, but can be followed, and may be seen as late as the 20th. On July 18 Mercury has nearly the declination of Regulus. VENUS. Venus keeps nearly the path of the sun, setting after the sun late in July, but so nearly with it that the planet is not likely to be seen. MARS. Mars has moved from its position nearly in line with Castor and Pollux toward Leo. It sets on July 1 at 9h. 44m. P.M. On the 31st Mars sets at 8h. 32m. On the 31st, at meridian passage, Mars and Uranus are nearly together. Uranus is east of Mars and half a degree south. JUPITER. Jupiter is coming into the evening hours. On July 1 Jupiter rises a few minutes after midnight. On July 31 Jupiter rises a few minutes after 10 P.M. It will be known at once by its brilliancy. Besides the ordinary belts of Jupiter the planet still shows at this time (June 10) the large ruddy spot spoken of by many persons some weeks since. This spot is elliptical in shape; its longest diameter is about one-fifth that of Jupiter. A small glass will show it, and the ordinary observer can, by watching its appearance and disappearance and reappearance, determine the time of rotation of Jupiter on its axis, or the length of the planet's day. The best evenings for looking at Jupiter are those of July 23, when the satellite nearest to Jupiter goes across its face, preceded by its shadow; July 28, when the first and second satellites will make similar transits; and July 29, when Jupiter will rise without the presence of its third satellite, which will be in eclipse, and will come out of the shadow after midnight. SATURN. Saturn follows close upon Jupiter, but keeps further north in declination by about 2½°. On July 1 Saturn rises 36m. after midnight. On the 31st Saturn rises at 10h. 38m. P.M. The waning moon will pass north of Jupiter and Saturn on the 27th to 28th. Any one who has a glass sufficient to show the ring of Saturn and the largest satellite, Titan, will find this planet intensely interesting, and the movements of the satellite will show the time of its revolution in its orbit around Saturn. URANUS. Uranus rises after the sun, and sets too nearly with the sun to be seen. NEPTUNE. Neptune may be seen, with a good telescope, in the early morning hour. Neptune is 2¼° west of Alpha Ceti, and 11° north. It approaches Alpha Ceti during the month, and if it can be found, may be known to be a planet by that movement. * * * * * FIRES IN NEW YORK. The report of the Board of Fire Commissioners, just printed, shows that during the year 1879 there were in this city 1,551 fires, of which 1,029 were discovered by persons not connected with the Fire or Police Department. In 1,456 cases the fires were confined to the buildings in which they originated. Twenty-five buildings were totally destroyed, and 69 were greatly damaged. Of all the fires, 1,001 were extinguished by buckets of water and fire extinguishers. The total estimated loss by fire during the year was $900,280 on buildings and $4,771,300 on stock, making a total of $5,671,580. The estimated insurances on the buildings were $7,276,446, and on stock, $14,525,264, making a total of $21,801,710. The estimated uninsured loss was $180,060. In three cases the loss was between $100,000 and $115,000; in one case $168,908; in one case $352,185; in one case $333,900; and in one case $1,978,991. In 1,066 cases the loss was less than $100. Nearly a quarter of all the fires were caused by carelessness, and 100 are attributed to children playing with matches and fire. Forty fires were caused by the spontaneous combustion of oily rags and other materials, and 93 by exploding kerosene lamps. Four members of the department and 12 citizens died of injuries received at fires during the year, and 139 firemen and 54 citizens were more or less injured. There are 729 uniformed members of the department The pay roll of the whole department for 1879 was $1,030,822.14, and the appropriation for all expenses was $1,254,970. The appropriation for the present year is $1,307,670. The department now possesses 233 horses, 1 marine steam fire engine, 58 steam fire engines, of which 5 are self propelling, 10 chemical engines, 24 hook and ladder trucks, 108 chemical fire extinguishers, and 4 aerial ladders, together with other fire apparatus. The annual inspection of the department showed that the quickest average time in hitching a team was 3.17 seconds, and in hitching a single horse, 5.66 seconds. The general average in hitching all apparatus was, in 1879, 9.54 seconds; in 1878, 10.26 seconds; and in 1877, 13.03 seconds. During the year, $30,300 was collected for licenses for the sale of kerosene oil, each license costing $10. The Fire Department Relief Fund now amounts to $422,569.07, and the insurance fund to $12,780. * * * * * ASPIRATOR AND COMPRESSOR. Professor Marangoni, of Pavia, has invented an aspirator for measuring gases which is much simpler than many now in use in laboratories, which latter have the defect that the air or gas ascends through the descending liquid and makes thus the measuring of the former uncertain. The improved apparatus is shown in our illustration. It consists of two vessels attached to a fixed horizontal shaft, FE, which is placed upon two upright supports. This shaft has several ways or passages made in it which performs the functions of the taps. The water of the upper receptacle passes into the lower one by the passage, A, and thence through the tube, BC, issuing at its lowest extremity at C. The air contained in the lower vessel is thus emitted by the channel DE, cut into the shaft, while the air or gas is aspirated in the same ratio by the passage and tube, FG. The apparatus acts thus at the same time as aspirator and compressor. It is simple, and will be a useful addition to the laboratory. [Illustration] * * * * * NEW PHOTOGLYPTIC PROCESS.[1] [Footnote 1: A communication to the Photographic Society of France.] WALTER B. WOODBURY. It is now thirteen years since I had the honor of introducing in France my new photoglyptic process, which, up to the present time, has remained in the hands of very few, owing to the great expense hitherto necessary to start the working of it. For some time I have been engaged in making experiments with a view to discover a system which should be at the same time simple and inexpensive; and the process which I have this evening the honor to bring before your notice is the result of my researches. The summary of the new system is as follows: To obtain from negatives reliefs on glass similar to transparencies by the carbon process, but modified in the quantity of materials used. To attach, and keep in absolute contact with the relief so obtained, a sheet of tin foil. To solidify this sheet of tinfoil by coating it with copper; then backing it up with another sheet of plate glass covered with a composition; and then to detach the whole from the first relief--the result being a mould ready to place in the press and print one thousand or more proofs. I commence by showing you the relief made from the negative, and explaining how this is obtained. I take a sheet of plate glass of a convenient size, and place it in hot water, together with a sheet of paper a little smaller; then, having driven out the excess of water by means of a squeegee, I place it on a leveling stand. Having prepared a solution composed of gelatine 200 parts, water 1,000 parts, glycerine 20 parts, white sugar 30 parts, with a little Indian ink, and filtered the same, I pour a sufficient quantity on the paper and spread it up to the corners with the finger. These plates are then dried in a dry place and can be kept until wanted. To sensitize the plates I employ a bath of bichromate of potash of six per cent., and again dry them. Without doubt this method is rather long; but one should consider that each proof made is capable of giving five or ten thousand prints if necessary, as the same relief will make many printing moulds. I tried, with the aid of the Autotype Company, of London, to get a suitable tissue; but as this requires a uniform thickness of half a millimeter the ordinary system did not succeed. When the sensitized plate is dry the edges are cut with a knife, the glasses serving over and over again. I show you a piece of this prepared paper. As in the carbon process, it is necessary to place a border of black paper at the back of the negative, and to cut the sensitized tissue a little larger than the opening. After the exposure the gelatine is fixed on a collodionized glass by placing them both in water and squeegeeing the surface; but in dry weather it is as well to use albumen in place of collodion, as used by M. Ferrier for his transparencies in carbon. The glass holding the gelatine is now placed in a hot water bath heated to 42° Centigrade, and left till the paper comes away from the gelatine, when it is placed in this apparatus by the frame holding the grooves. By means of this small gas regulator the temperature is kept always the same, namely, 50° Centigrade. The water should be now and then agitated by lifting up and down the frame holding the glasses. After a space of three or four hours the reliefs will be sufficiently washed, and can be taken out and placed in alcohol to dry quickly and sharp at the same time. In this stage of the process all spots or scratches that may have been on the negative can be removed (being in relief on the gelatine) by means of a piece of glass. The relief is now ready to be covered with the tin. You will observe that up to the present the operations have been almost the same as those necessary to produce a transparency in carbon. As it is of the first necessity that the tin should be kept in absolute contact with the gelatine relief, I prepare the latter by rubbing it over with a piece of flannel charged with a greasy matter (pomatum answers as well as anything). I then make a border of India-rubber in benzine round the glass. The effect of this is to prevent any air from returning between the tin and the relief when once it has been driven out. Taking care that the back of the glass is perfectly clean, it is now placed on the steel or glass bed of a rolling-press. A sheet of tin foil (without holes) that has been smoothed on a sheet of glass by a soft brush is now laid on it, and then three or four thicknesses of blotting paper. The whole is then passed under the cylinder several times, each time increasing the pressure. The surface of the tin is now ready to place in the electrotyping cell, but must first be cleaned with a solution of caustic potash to remove any grease, and bordered with shellac varnish to prevent the copper from depositing where not required. Electric contact is made by means of the small apparatus, on removing a small proportion of the lac varnish. After two or three hours sufficient copper will have been deposited, and after drying can be then attached to another glass, on which it will remain. This glass is covered while hot with a composition of shellac, resin, and Venice turpentine, and can be prepared in advance, using an iron plate heated direct by the gas flame. The same iron plate is employed to again soften the composition and attach it to the copper; but this time heated only by boiling water, this temperature being sufficient to soften it until it enters into all the hollows of the copper. On placing a weight on the two glasses the excess of the composition is forced out at the edges. When cold the glass plate on which the copper and tin are now attached can be separated from the relief, which can then be used over and over again to produce fresh matrices. The matrix or intaglio is now ready to place in the printing press, and the remaining operations of printing are exactly the same as those used in the old process of photoglyptic printing. In placing the mould in the press it is advisable to place one or two thicknesses of stout blotting paper, previously wetted, under the mould to give to it a slight amount of elasticity and, at the same time, to keep it in place. As in all other mechanical processes a reversed or pellicle negative is required; but it is very simple to print upon a specially prepared transfer paper, and, instead of mounting the print with the face uppermost, to attach it under water to the mount, and when dry to detach the paper on which the print has been made. By this means there remains only one thickness of paper instead of two, thus doing away with an objection which has often been found in mounted photographs for book illustration. * * * * * NEW INVENTIONS. An improved combined cutting and clinching tool has been patented by Mr. Peter D. Graham, of Black Hawk, Col. The object of this invention is to provide a new, useful, and convenient tool for cutting and clinching horseshoe nails. Mr. John J. Berger, of Brooklyn, N. Y., has patented an improved hand perforating or check stamp of the class which are used to cut or perforate the paper with figures and letters as a safeguard against alterations of the check; and the object of this improvement is to perforate the check with needle points, and at the same time ink the perforations, whereby the numbers may be clearly marked without cutting large openings in the paper. An improved apparatus for the manufacture of nitric acid has been patented by Mr. Paul Marcelin, of Black Rock, Conn. The object of this invention is to furnish apparatus for manufacturing nitric acid so constructed that the stronger acid may be separated from the weaker acid as the acid passes from the retort to the receiving bottles, to obtain a strong acid suitable for use in manufacturing nitro-glycerine. Mr. Max Rubin, of New York city, has patented an improved shawl strap, so constructed that either strap may be wound up alone, or both may be wound up together, or one may be wound up tighter than the other, by adjusting the handle. Mr. Ambrose Madden, of Asbury Park, N. J., has patented an attachment for use with halters for preventing horses from cribbing and to cure them of that pernicious habit; and the invention consists in a combination of rigid arms and straps hung upon the halter and carrying a spiked plate, which is retained beneath the animal's under lip in such manner that the motions of the horse in the act of cribbing cause the spikes to prick. * * * * * BUSINESS AND PERSONAL. _The Charge for Insertion under this head is One Dollar a line for each insertion; about eight words to a line. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ -->_The publishers of this paper guarantee to advertisers a circulation of not less than 50,000 copies every weekly issue._ * * * * * Lubricene, Gear Grease, Cylinder and Machinery Oils. R. J. Chard, 6 Burling Slip, New York. Telephones repaired, parts of same for sale. Send stamp for circulars. P.O. Box 205, Jersey City, N. J. The genuine Asbestos Liquid Paints are the purest, finest, richest, and most durable paints ever made for structural purposes. H. W. Johns M'f'g Co., 87 Maiden Lane, sole manufacturers. The Finger Annunciator, and all other electr. apparatus, by Finger Annunciator Co., 73 Cornhill, Boston. The most popular Pens in use are those of the Esterbrook Steel Pen Company. For sale everywhere. Everybody send Circular to R. K. Teller, Unadilla, N. Y. A few pat. Centering and Squaring Attachments for Lathes, made by R. E. State & Co., entirely new, for sale cheap. J. & W. State, Lock Box 291, Springfield, Ohio. Soapstone and Empire Gum Core Packing, the best for Railroads. Greene, Tweed & Co., New York. Our new Stylographic Pen (just patented), having the duplex interchangeable point section, is the very latest improvement. The Stylographic Pen Co., Room 13, 169 Broadway, N. Y. Shaw's U. S. Standard of Pressure. Mercury Gauges, all pressures, Steam, Hydraulic, and Vacuum. Best for pumping stations and pipe lines. 915 Ridge Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. For Sale low--52 x 17 feet Sidewheel Boat, and one 23 x 5½ feet Launch; best condition. S. E. Harthan, Worcester, Mass. Wanted.--Farm Engine, with Steam Plow Attachment. Address P. O. Box 18, Reinbeck, Iowa. Advertising of all kinds in all American Newspapers. Special lists free. Address E. N. Freshman & Bros., Cincinnati, O. Patent for Sale Cheap.--Entire Patent or State Rights. Just the thing for the summer. Money can be made out of it. Other business prevents owner from handling it. A. H. Watkins, 294 Harrison Ave., Boston, Mass. We keep a full assortment of Esterbrook's, Gillott's, Spencerian, Perry's, and Lamar's Pens. Send for price list to J. Leach, 86 Nassau St., New York. For Sale.--A Baltimore City Fire Department Steam Fire Engine, in complete working order. Address P.O. Box 676, Baltimore, Md. Metallic Piston Rod Packing Company, 773 Broad St., Newark, N. J. Agents wanted; terms liberal. Skinner & Wood, Erie, Pa., Portable and Stationary Engines, are full of orders, and withdraw their illustrated advertisement. Send for their new circulars. Asbestos Board on Chimneys prevents their heat from affecting the temperature of rooms through which they pass. Asbestos Pat. Fiber Co., lim., 194 Broadway, N. Y. Sweetland & Co., 126 Union St., New Haven, Conn., manufacture the Sweetland Combination Chuck. Power, Foot, and Hand Presses for Metal Workers. Lowest prices. Peerless Punch & Shear Co., 52 Dey St., N. Y. The Brown Automatic Cut-off Engine; unexcelled for workmanship, economy, and durability. Write for information. C. H. Brown & Co., Fitchburg, Mass. Corrugated Traction Tire for Portable Engines, etc. Sole manufacturers, H. Lloyd, Son & Co., Pittsburg, Pa. For the best Stave, Barrel, Keg, and Hogshead Machinery, address H. A. Crossley, Cleveland, Ohio. Best Oak Tanned Leather Belting. Wm. F. Forepaugh, Jr., & Bros. 531 Jefferson St., Philadelphia, Pa. National Steel Tube Cleaner for boiler tubes. Adjustable, durable. Chalmers-Spence Co., 40 John St., N. Y. Split Pulleys at low prices, and of same strength and appearance as Whole Pulleys. Yocom & Son's Shafting Works, Drinker St., Philadelphia, Pa. Stave, Barrel, Keg, and Hogshead Machinery a specialty by E. & B. Holmes, Buffalo, N. Y. Solid Emery Vulcanite Wheels--The Solid Original Emery Wheel other kinds imitations and inferior. Caution.--Our name is stamped in full on all our best Standard Belting, Packing, and Hose. Buy that only. The best is the cheapest. New York Belting and Packing Company, 37 and 38 Park Bow. N. Y. For Separators, Farm & Vertical Engines, see adv. p. 382. Walrus Leather, Emery, and Polishing Goods. Greene, Tweed & Co., 118 Chambers St., New York. Nickel Plating.--Sole manufacturers cast nickel anodes, pure nickel salts, importers Vienna lime, crocus, etc. Condit, Hanson & Van Winkle, Newark, N. J., and 92, and 94 Liberty St., New York. Presses, Dies, and Tools for working Sheet Metal, etc. Fruit & other can tools. Bliss & Williams, B'klyn, N. Y. Bradley's cushioned helve hammers. See illus. ad. p. 397. Instruction in Steam and Mechanical Engineering. A thorough practical education, and a desirable situation as soon as competent, can be obtained at the National Institute of Steam Engineering, Bridgeport, Conn. For particulars, send for pamphlet. Hydraulic Jacks, Presses and Pumps. Polishing and Buffing Machinery Patent Punches, Shears, etc. E. Lyon & Co., 470 Grand St., New York. Forsaith & Co., Manchester, N. H., & 207 Centre St., N. Y. Bolt Forging Machines, Power Hammers, Comb'd Hand Fire Eng. & Hose Carriages, New & 2d hand Machinery. Send stamp for illus. cat. State just what you want. For Mill Mach'y & Mill Furnishing, see illus. adv. p. 381. Air Compressors, Blowing Engines, Steam Pumping Machinery, Hydraulic Presses. Philadelphia Hydraulic Works, Philadelphia, Pa. For Patent Shapers and Planers, see ills. adv. p. 380. For Pat. Safety Elevators, Hoisting Engines, Friction Clutch Pulleys, Cut-off Coupling, see Frisbie's ad. p. 316. Machine Knives for Wood-working Machinery, Book Binders, and Paper Mills. Large knife work a specialty. Also manufacturers of Soloman's Parallel Vise. Taylor. Stiles & Co., Riegelsville, N. J. For Alcott's Improved Turbine, see adv. p. 297. Mineral Lands Prospected, Artesian Wells Bored, by Pa. Diamond Drill Co. Box 423, Pottsville, Pa. See p. 381. Rollstone Mac. Co's Wood Working Mach'y ad. p. 380 Improved Solid Emery Wheels and Machinery, Automatic Knife Grinders, Portable Chuck Jaws. _Important_, that users should have prices of these first class goods. American Twist Drill Co., Meredithville, N. H. For Standard Turbine, see last or next number. Burgess' Non-conductor for Heated Surfaces; easily applied, efficient, and inexpensive. Applicable to plain or curved surfaces, pipes, elbows and valves. See p. 284. Diamond Saws. J. Dickinson, 64 Nassau St., N. Y. Steam Hammers, Improved Hydraulic Jacks, and Tube Expanders. R. Dudgeon, 24 Columbia St., New York. Wanted--The address of 40,000 Sawyers and Lumbermen for a copy of Emerson's Hand Book of Saws. New edition 1880. Over 100 illustrations and pages of valuable information. Emerson, Smith & Co., Beaver Falls, Pa. Eagle Anvils, 10 cents per pound. Fully warranted. For Wood-Working Machinery, see illus. adv. p. 413. Eclipse Portable Engine. See illustrated adv., p. 413. Tight and Slack Barrel machinery a specialty. John Greenwood & Co., Rochester, N. Y. See illus. adv. p. 413. Elevators, Freight and Passenger, Shafting, Pulleys and Hangers. L. S. Graves & Son, Rochester, N. Y. $400 Vertical Engine, 30 H.P. See page 413. Best American Shot Gun made is the "Colts." Far superior to any English guns for the same price. For description, see SCI. AMERICAN of May 29. Send for circular to Hodgkins & Haigh, Dealers in General Sporting Goods, 300 Broadway, New York. Telephones.--Inventors of Improvements in Telephones and Telephonic Apparatus are requested to communicate with the Scottish Telephonic Exchange, Limited, 34 St. Andrew Square, Edinburgh, Scotland. J. G. Lorrain, General Manager. Pat. Steam Hoisting Mach'y. See illus. adv., p. 413. Hydraulic Cylinders, Wheels, and Pinions, Machinery Castings; all kinds; strong and durable; and easily worked. Tensile strength not less than 65,000 lbs. to square in. Pittsburgh Steel Casting Co., Pittsburgh, Pa. C. J. Pitt & Co., Show Case Manufacturers, 226 Canal St., New York. Orders promptly attended to. Send for illustrated catalogue with prices. For best low price Planer and Matcher, and latest improved Sash, Door, and Blind Machinery, Send for catalogue to Rowley & Hermance, Williamsport, Pa. Elevators.--Stokes & Parrish, Phila., Pa. See p. 412. Penfield (Pulley) Block Works. See illus. adv. p. 413. * * * * * [OFFICIAL.] INDEX OF INVENTIONS FOR WHICH LETTERS PATENT OF THE UNITED STATES WERE GRANTED IN THE WEEK ENDING; JUNE 1, 1880, AND EACH BEARING THAT DATE. [Those marked (r) are reissued patents.] * * * * * A printed copy of the specification and drawing of any patent in the annexed list, also of any patent issued since 1866, will be furnished from this office for one dollar. In ordering please state the number and date of the patent desired, and remit to Munn & Co., 37 Park Row, New York city. We also furnish copies, of patents granted prior to 1866; but at increased cost, as the specifications not being printed, must be copied by hand. Adding machine, C. P. Sullivan 228,416 Advertising checker board, H. P. Eysenbach 228,330 Annunciator, pneumatic, D. & T. Morris 228,267 Axle lubricator, car, C. D. Flynt 228,337 Axle lubricator, vehicle, L. Adams 228,242 Bale tie, W. S. E. Sevey 228,223 Baling press, H. O. King 228,361 Bedstead, invalid, E. Conover 228,318 Bedstead, sofa, C. S. E. Spoerl _et al_ 228,408 Belting and process of manufacture, cotton, M. Gandy 228,186 Belts, lacing, O. C. Pomeroy 228,390 Berth for vessels, self-leveling, D. Huston (r) 9,224 Berth for vessels, self-leveling, C. C. Sanderson 228,278 Berth, self-leveling ship's, C. C. Sanderson 228,279 Binders, knot tyer for self, W. Stephens 228,228 Blacking and polishing boots and shoes, machine for, P. P. Audoye 228,297 Blower, fan, H. Allen 228,293 Bolting tree, J. M. Springer 228,409 Boot and gaiter, rubber, G. H. Sanford 228,398 Bottle, etc., lock, A. T. Boone 228,170 Bottle stopper, E. Hollender 228,355 Bow strings, clutch for, C. M. Beard 228,302 Bracelet, C. E. Hayward 228,348 Bracelet, A. Vester 228,425 Bran cleaner, L. Gathmann 228,340 Brick, pottery, etc., kiln for burning, E. Escherich 228,331 Buckboard, E. Hitt 228,352 Buckle, tug, D. O. Fosgate 228,255 Bumper, W. V. Perry 228,385 Bung, J. H. Stamp 228,227 Button fastener, D. Bainbridge 228,298 Button, sleeve and cuff, H. McDougall 228,370 Buttons, machine for making, W. W. Wade 228,233 Can, D. Bennett 228,167 Can fastening, J. Hall 228,343 Car coupling, Neff & Thalman 228,378 Car coupling, J. F. Stanley 228,411 Car coupling, Morand & Edwards 228,212 Car coupling tool, G. Searl 228,400 Car door bolt, A. W. Zimmerman 228,241 Car wheel, J. A. Woodbury 228,430 Car wheel chill, W. Wilmington 228,428 Cars, bell cord guide for railway, S. L. Finley 228,253 Cars upon railways, running, J. R. Cox 228,176 Carbureting gas and air, W. M. Jackson 228,357 Card teeth, apparatus for tempering wire for, W. F. Bateman 228,301 Carpet fastener, W. Bray 228,306 Carpet lining, G. J. Bicknell 228,168 Carpet sweeper, B. W. Johnson 228,358 Carriage top, E. S. Scripture (r) 9,230 Carriage top rest, G. Miles 228,211 Cartridge shells, machine for drawing, A. C. Hobbs 228,197 Centering machine, J. E. Dimsey 228,249 Chair seats and backs, making, F. D. Newton 228,377 Chandelier, extension, G. Bohner 228,244 Cheese press, M. B. Fraser (r) 9,228 Cheese press, G. F. White 228,291 Cheese vat, J. B. Marquis 228,366 Chuck, J. H. Westcott 228,426 Churn, E. Rhoades (r) 9,225 Clock, alarm, F. Krober 228,202 Clock, calendar, C. S. Lewis 228,261 Clock case, G. Havell 228,193 Cloth pressing machine, P. Miller 228,375 Clutch, W. J. Ray 228,276 Cockle separator, D. Brubaker 228,310 Collar, horse, T. Hepburn 228,351 Commode, A. Climie 228,313 Copying process, dry, Kwaysser & Husak 228,362 Cork tapering machine, F. L. Blair 228,169 Corn husking machine, F. L. Collis 228,174 Corn husking machine roller, E. A. Bourquin 228,305 Corn popper, D. Lumbert 228,205 Cornice, window, H. F. Gray 228,189 Cranks, device for overcoming the dead points of, C. L. Fleischmann 228,185 Crochet needles, manufacture of, J. A. Smith 228,404 Crucible furnaces, hydrocarbon burner for, I. M. Seamans 228,281 Cutlery, pocket, J. W. Ayers 228,163 Danger signal, M. A. Vosburgh 228,232 Diagram for theaters, etc., H. T. Lemon 228,204 Domestic boiler, C. Friedeborn 228,339 Drawing, apparatus for assisting in, W. B. O. Peabody 228,273 Drying apparatus, W. J. Johnson 228,259 Electrotype mould, E. B. Sheldon 228,224 Exercising machine, F. Saunders 228,277 Eyeglasses, J. Schaffer 228,399 Fan, M. Rubin 228,394 Fastening device, E. F. Miller 228,373 Faucet attachment, C. A. Raggio 228,219 Fence nail, wire, E. L. Warren 228,236 Fertilizers, process and apparatus for the manufacture of, W. Plumer 228,387 Firearm, breech-loading, W. H. Baker 228,165 Fluted fabrics, machine for creasing, E. Brosemann 228,309 Fruit basket, H. B. Crandall 228,248 Fuel, process and apparatus for burning pulverized, A. Faber de Faur 228,334 Furnace, B. F. Smith 228,405 Gas, making illuminating, T. J. F. Regan 228,392 Gate, E. J. Clark 228,314 Gate roller, F. W. Holbrook 228,354 Gelatine or ichthyocolla from salted fish skins, extracting, J. S. Rogers (r) 9,226 Glass furnace, T. B. Atterbury 228,296 Glassware, machine for grinding, A. M. Bacon 228,164 Glove fastener, Smith & Hassall 228,403 Governor, elevator, I. H. Small 228,284 Governor for marine engines, W. U. Fairbairn 228,252 Governor for middlings purifiers, etc., feed, W. Donlon 228,180 Grain conveyer, pneumatic, F. A. Luckenbach 228,206 Grain meter, J. B. Stoner 228,229 Grain separator, magnetic, C. E. Fritz (r) 9,229 Grate, fire, E. Moneuse 228,376 Grinding and polishing wheel, G. Hart 228,257 Hammer lifter, drop, C. G. Cross 228,324 Harness, breast, J. W. Cooper 228,175 Harrow, S. A. Bollinger 228,303 Harrow, C. W. Page 228,382 Harvester, Jones & Emerson 228,359 Header, guiding, W. H. Keen 228,260 Heating and ventilating apparatus, J. W. Geddes 228,188 Hinge, spring, L. Bommer 228,304 Hitching strap, J. C. Covert 228,322 Hoes and other tools, eye for, J. R. Thomas 228,419 Hog holder and nose ring carrier, W. A. Stark 228,286 Horse hoof pad, A. J. Lockie 228,262 Horse power equalizer, W. T. G. Cobb 228,173 Horse power sweep, J. Branning 228,307 Horseshoe nail machine, J. Roy 228,220 Hose coupling, S. Adlam, Jr. 228,161 Hose coupling, M. B. Hill 228,196 Hot air furnace, B. W. Felton 228,336 Hydraulic joint, E. D. Meier 228,209 Indigo blue, making artificial, A. Baeyer 228,300 Lamp, car, G. Seagrave 228,402 Lamp globe, G. Chappel 228,247 Lamp, street, J. G. Miner 228,265 Last, W. J. Crowley 228,178 Latch, G. L. Crandal 228,323 Life protector for railway rails, E. J. Hoffman 228,353 Lifting jack, J. State 228,285 Lithographic press, J. A. Parks 228,271 Lock, C. F. Otto 228,379 Locomotive, J. B. Smith 228,406 Locomotive cone, F. A. Perry 228,386 Locomotive engine, J. W. Clardy 228,172 Locomotive lubricator, W. P. Phillips 228,215 Loom for weaving gauze fabrics, A. McLean 228,372 Loom shedding mechanism, H. Halcroft 228,191 Loom temple, E. Hamilton 228,346 Loom temple, J. & L. Hardaker 228,256 Lubricator, W. P. Phillips 228,216, 228,217 Mash machine, W. Craig 228,177 Mash rake, whisky, D. L. Graves 228,190 Mash stirrer, G. Schock 228,222 Measuring machine, cloth, B. K. Parker 228,381 Middlings purifier, J. B. Martin 228,367 Milk cooler, T. Stahler 228,412 Milk pail holder, A. C. Dodge 228,327 Mining and excavating apparatus, E. M. Hugentobler 228,356 Mortising machine, E. H. N. Clarkson (r) 9,221 Nickel, solution for electro-deposition of, J. Powell 228,389 Oil and lard oil, treatment of petroleum lubricating, H. V. P. Draper 228,181 Ore separator, magnetic, T. A. Edison 228,329 Packing for piston rods, etc., metallic, L. Katzenstein 228,200 Packing for steam engines, spring, J. W. Smith 228,225 Packing, piston, W. M. Thompson, Jr. 228,420 Packing, piston rod, R. B. H. Gould 228,341 Padlock, McDonald & McAllister (r) 228,371 Pantaloons, F. H. Carney 228,246 Paper bag machine, C. A. Chandler 228,312 Paper floor covering, compound, H. Hayward 228,194 Paper for bank notes, checks, etc., J Sangster 228,221 Parchment or toughening paper, making artificial, L. H. G. Ehrhardt 228,328 Pens, pointing, E. Wiley 228,427 Permutation lock, J. B. Cook 228,316 Photo-negatives, producing, embellishing, and retouching, W. D. Osborne 228,380 Photographic background, accessory for forming, W. F. Ashe 228,295 Picture support, G. H. Brown 228,308 Pillow sham holder, M. A. Steers 228,414 Pipes, tubing etc., protector for the threaded ends of, H. E. Boyd 228,171 Planter, corn, R. H. C. Enyeart 228,332 Planter, corn, A. Hearst 228,258 Planter, corn, A. Runstetler 228,396 Plow attachment, J. R. Harbaugh 228,192 Plumbers' traps, manufacture of, J. McCloskey 228,369 Preserving evaporated fruits and vegetables, H. G. Hulburd 228,198 Printer's chase, J. Kingsland, Jr. 228,201 Printer's quoin, C. G. Squintani 228,410 Printer's type case, J. T. Edson 228,251 Pulley, J. B. Stockham 228,415 Pump, W. S. Laney 228,203 Pump, lift, P. T. Perkins 228,383 Pump, rotary, J. Hallner 228,344 Pump, steam jet, Randall & Tuttle 228,275 Railway heads, stop motion for, H. T. Spencer 228,407 Railway joints, angle splice for, J. D. Hawks 228,347 Railway signal apparatus, electric, O. Gassett 228,187 Range, D. H. Nation 228,268, 228,269, 228,270 Reclining chair, T. G. Maguire 228,263 Refrigerating and ice making apparatus, C. P. G. Linde 228,364 Rivets, making tubular, G. W. Tucker 228,423 Rock drills and earth augers, machine for operating, G. Taylor 228,418 Rubber bottles, etc., closing the openings in India, T. J. Mayall 228,207 Rubber, ornamenting hard, H., O., & M. Traun 228,290 Sash cord fastener and sash lock, combined, E. V. Heaford 228,349 Sash cord guide, E. H. N. Clarkson (r) 9,222 Sash fastener, S. P. Jackson 228,199 Sash fastening, J. Pusey 228,274 Sawing machine, circular, P. Pryibil 228,218 Sawing machine, drag, S. F. Steele 228,413 Sawing machine, drag, A. Wilkins 228,237 Screw bolt, L. Strauss 228,288 Screw threads, device for cutting, J. C. Williams 228,429 Sealing packages, E. A. McAlpin 228,368 Seaming machine, F. A. Walsh 228,234, 228,235 Sewing machine balance wheel pulley, E. Flather 228,184 Sheet metal joint, C. Wright 228,240 Shirt, G. C. Henning 228,195 Shoe, J. J. Snyder 228,226 Shoe nail, Z. Talbot 228,417 Shoe support, rubber, J. G. Foreman 228,338 Shoulder brace, C. A. Williamson 228,238 Sign, flexible, F. Tuchfarber (r) 9,223 Skiving machine, W. S. Fitzgerald 228,183 Skylight, W. D. Smith 228,282 Smoker's kit, T. V. Curtis 228,325 Soap and other materials, apparatus for mixing, W., Sr., W., Jr., & A. W. Cornwall 228,320 Soap, machine for mixing materials for making, W., Sr., W., Jr., & A. W. Cornwall 228,319 Soap, process and apparatus for remelting, W., Jr., & A. W. Cornwall 228,321 Soda water, apparatus for generating gas for, J. Collins 228,315 Spark arrester, locomotive, D. P. Wright 228,431 Spool box, C. Tollner 228,289 Stamp, hand, T. Berridge 228,243 Stamp, postage, J. Macdonough 228,365 Steam engine, J. C. Miller 228,374 Steam engine recorder, G. H. Crosby 228,179 Steam generator, N. Eaton 228,250 Stove, A. C. Barstow 228,166 Stove grate, J. Moore, Jr 228,266 Stove, hay, Stocum & Merrill 228,287 Stove, magazine, C. Seavor 228,401 Surface gauge, F. J. Rabbeth 228,391 Swarm catcher, J. W. Bailey 228,299 Syringe attachment, S Turner 228,422 Tackle or pulley block, T. R. Ferrall 228,335 Telephone, S. Russell 228,395 Telephone circuit switch, G. L. Anders 228,294 Telephones, dental attachment for, H. G. Fiske 228,254 Testing machine, T. Olsen 228,214 Textile and other materials, machine for cutting, A. Warth (r) 9,232 Textile fabrics, machine for cutting, A. Warth (r) 9,231 Ticket holder, C. Scherich 228,280 Ticket, railway, F. C. Nims 228,213 Tobacco caddy, R. Finzer 228,182 Tobacco hoisting apparatus, W. S. Guy 228,342 Tongs, pipe, S. Fawcett 228,333 Toy, creeping, P. Von Erichsen 228,231 Treadle mechanism, D. S. Van Wyck 228,424 Treadle power machine, G. W. Ziegler 228,432 Tree protector, J. W. Richards 228,393 Trimmings, flitter for milliners', J. Lambert 228,363 Tube machine, D. Appel 228,162 Valve, balanced, E. D. Meier 228,210 Vapor burner, W. H. Smith (r) 9,227 Vehicle spring, H. M. Keith 228,360 Vent for beer barrels, O. Zwietusch 228,292 Vessels, apparatus for unloading coal, etc., from, Cooney & Swanston 228,317 Vise and clamp, J. Brady 228,245 Wagon, road, C. W. Saladee 228,397 Wagon running gear, G. W. Burr 228,311 Wash boiler, O. Tilton 228,230 Washing and wringing machine, combined, C. H. Wood 228,239 Washing machine, J. B. Pettit 228,272 Water closets, flushing cistern for, S. G. McFarland 228,264 Water heater, K. McDonald 228,208 Water heater, fireplace, I. B. Potts 228,388 Whiffletree hook, E. Hanrahan 228,345 Windlass locking gear, Remington & Manton (r) 9,233 Windmill, A. H. Smith 228,283 Window screen, R. Perrin 228,384 Wire stretcher, H. Hemenway 228,350 Wood bit, L. Thuston 228,421 * * * * * DESIGNS. Carpets, T. J. Stearns 11,800 to 11,803 Carriage door fender, M. Wiard 11,805 Coffin lid lifters, J. W. Rogers 11,798 Fringe for knitted fabrics, G. Upton 11,804 Funeral ornaments, J. W. Rogers 11,799 Key bow, G. S. Barkentin 11,794 Medal batteries, Lewis & Brice 11,796 Pencil cases, L. W. Fairchild 11,795 Statuary, group of, J. Rogers 11,797 * * * * * TRADE MARKS. Cigars, E. Aschermann & Co 7,924 Cigars, Giglio & Freschi 7,926 Dry goods, Eddystone Manufacturing Co 7,931, 7,933 Flour, B. R. Pegram, Jr. 7,727, 7,728 Prints, Eddystone Manufacturing Company 7,932 Soap, C. Davis & Co 7,925 Teas, table, Sanders & George 7,912 Velocipedes, N. S. C. Perkins 7,929 * * * * * ENGLISH PATENTS ISSUED TO AMERICANS. FROM MAY 25 TO JUNE 1, 1880, INCLUSIVE. Anthracite, obtaining, C. M. Warren, Norfolk, Mass. Burners and generators for hydrocarbons, E. G. Furber, New York city. Corsets, L. C. Warner, New York city. Engines, locomotive, W. P. Hauszey, Philadelphia, Pa. Filtering apparatus, G. H. Moore, Norwich, Conn. * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS INSIDE PAGE, EACH INSERTION - - - 75 CENTS A LINE. BACK PAGE, EACH INSERTION - - - $1.00 A LINE. (About eight words to a line.) _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ -->The publishers of this paper guarantee to advertisers a circulation of not less than 50,000 copies every weekly issue. _Fifth Edition Just Ready._ THE COMPLETE PRACTICAL MACHINIST Embracing Lathe Work, Vise Work, Drills and Drilling, Taps and Dies, Hardening and Tempering, the Making and Use of Tools, etc., etc. By Joshua Rose. Illustrated by 130 engravings. Fifth edition, revised. In one vol., 12mo., 376 pages. Price $2.50 by mail, free of postage. CONTENTS: Chapter I. Lathe and Machine Tools. II. Cutting Speed and Feed. III. Boring Tools for Lathe Work. IV. Screw-cutting Tools. V. General Observations on Lathe Work. VI. Turning Eccentrics. VII. Hand Turning. VIII. Drilling in the Lathe. IX. Boring Bars. X. Laps. XI. Twist Drills. XII. Tool Steel. XIII. Taps and Dies. XIV. Vise-work Tools. XV. Fitting Connecting Rods. XVI. Milling Machines and Milling Tools. XVII. To Calculate the Speed of Wheels, Pulleys, etc. XVIII. The Slide Valve. XIX. How to Set a Slide Valve. XX. Pumps Index. We also publish: THE MODERN PRACTICE OF AMERICAN MACHINISTS AND ENGINEERS. By Egbert P. Watson. Illustrated by 86 engravings. 12mo, $2 50 -->The above or any of our Books sent by mail, free of postage, at the publication price. Our new and enlarged CATALOGUE OF PRACTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC BOOKS--96 pages, 8vo--sent free to any one who will furnish his address. HENRY CAREY BAIRD & CO., Industrial Publishers, Booksellers, and Importers, 810 WALNUT ST., PHILADELPHIA, PA. FOR SALE, A full set of Patent Office Reports, from 1849 to 1872. Price $60. Apply to C. M. ALEXANDER, Washington, D. C. BAND SAWS AND PLANERS a specialty. C. Hodgkins & Son, Marlboro, N. H. [Illustration] 1880 1880 PITTSBURGH EXPOSITION SOCIETY. THE FOURTH EXPOSITION AND FAIR Will open to the public Thursday, September 2, and remain open day and evening (Sundays excepted) until Saturday, October 9th, 1880. Blank forms of application for space, Prospectus, and Premium list may be had by addressing the secretary. Exhibitors are earnestly requested to make early application for space, thus enabling the managers to better arrange the whole Exhibition. New Machinery Hall; new Engine and Boilers. Manufacturers and Inventors should avail themselves of the unsurpassed facilities offered by this Exposition for the introduction of new machinery to the public. OFFICE, GERMANIA BANK BUILDING, 89 WOOD ST. P.O. BOX 895. E. P. YOUNG, I. C. PATTERSON, General Manager. Secretary. JOHN D. BAILEY, Asst. Manager and Cashier. [Illustration: -->SEND STAMP FOR CATALOGUE. TOOLS: TAPS & DIES VISES CHUCKS TWIST DRILLS MACHINE SCREWS LATHES FILES STUBS TOOLS & STEEL TALLMAN & McFADDEN--PHILADELPHIA.] CIGAR BOX LUMBER, MANUFACTURED BY OUR NEW PATENT PROCESS. THE BEST IN THE WORLD. SPANISH CEDAR, MAHOGANY, POPLAR ALSO THIN LUMBER OF ALL OTHER KINDS, 1/8 TO ½ IN., AT CORRESPONDING PRICES. ALL QUALITIES. EQUAL IN ALL RESPECTS TO ANY MADE, AND AT PRICES MUCH UNDER ANY TO BE OBTAINED OUTSIDE OF OUR ESTABLISHMENT. SEND FOR PRICE LIST. GEO. W. READ & CO., 186 TO 200 LEWIS STREET, N. Y. MOSQUITO CATCHER. WILL CLEAR YOUR ROOM IN A FEW MINUTES WITHOUT SMOKE, SOIL, OR GREASE. PRICE 50 CENTS. SEND FOR CIRCULAR. AGENTS WANTED EVERYWHERE. GOOD TERMS. L. T. JONES, 166 LIGHT STREET, BALTIMORE, MD. ROOTS' NEW IRON BLOWER. [ILLUSTRATION] POSITIVE BLAST. IRON REVOLVERS, PERFECTLY BALANCED IS SIMPLER, AND HAS FEWER PARTS THAN ANY OTHER BLOWER. P. H. & F. M. ROOTS, MANUF'RS, CONNERSVILLE, IND. S. S. TOWNSEND, GEN. AGT., {6 CORTLANDT ST., } {8 DEY STREET, } NEW WM. COOKE, SELLING AGT., 6 CORTLANDT STREET, } YORK. JAS. BEGGS & CO., SELLING AGTS., 8 DEY STREET,} -->SEND FOR PRICED CATALOGUE. FOUR SIDED MOULDER, WITH OUTSIDE BEARING. WE MANUFACTURE 5 SIZES OF THESE MOULDERS. ALSO ENDLESS BED PLANERS, MORTISERS AND BORERS. TENONING MACHINES, SASH DOVETAILERS. BLIND RABBETING MACHINES. ALSO A LARGE VARIETY OF OTHER WOOD WORKING MACHINES. ADDRESS LEVI HOUSTON, MONTGOMERY, PA. [ILLUSTRATION] STEAM PUMPS. THE NORWALK IRON WORKS CO., SOUTH NORWALK, CONN. THE BLAKE "LION AND EAGLE" CRUSHER, A patented improvement of the former "New Pattern" Blake machine. Has much greater efficiency than the old. It requires only about half the power to drive, and is transported at much less expense (the size most used weighing several thousand pounds less than the unimproved machine). It requires less than half the time in oiling and other manipulation, and less than half the expense for repairs. Address E. S. BLAKE & CO., Pittsburgh, Pa., Sole Proprietors and Manufacturers. [2 Illustrations] DELAMATER STEAM PUMPS For every variety of work WATERWORKS PUMPING ENGINES DELAMATER IRON WORKS Boiler Makers, Engine Builders, and Founders, Office, No. 10 CORTLANDT ST., Works, Foot of W. 18th St., North River, New York. ESTABLISHED 1841. MODEL ENGINES Complete sets of CASTINGS for making small Model steam Engines 1½ in. bore, 3 in. stroke, price, $4; ditto 2 in. bore, 4 in. stroke, price, $10, same style as cut. Gear Wheels and Parts of Models. All kinds of Small Tools and Materials. Catalogue Free. GOODNOW & WIGHTMAN, 176 Washington Street, Boston, Mass. STUTTERING CURED by Bates' Appliances. Send for description to SIMPSON & Co., Box 2236, New York. SPARE THE CROTON AND SAVE THE COST. DRIVEN OR TUBE WELLS furnished to large consumers of Croton and Ridgewood Water. WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO., 235 Broadway, N. Y., who control the patent for Green's American Driven Well. THE DRIVEN WELL. Town and County privileges for making DRIVEN WELLS and selling Licenses under the established AMERICAN DRIVEN WELL PATENT, leased by the year to responsible parties, by WM. D. ANDREWS & BRO., 235 BROADWAY, NEW YORK. ROOFING. For steep or flat roofs. Applied by ordinary workmen at one-third the cost of tin. Circulars and samples free. Agents Wanted. T. NEW, 32 John Street, New York. XX COT (NOT PAINTED, WHITE DUCK) $2. [Illustration: Painted Red, Brown Canvas and Fancy Bolster, $2.50. Painted Red, Striped Canvas and Fancy Bloster, $3.00. COT FOLDED XX CANVAS COT 27 IN. WIDE MEAS. ½ CUBIC FT.] Makes a perfect bed. No mattress or pillows required. Better than a hammock, as it fits the body as pleasantly, and lies _straight_. Folded or opened instantly. Self-fastening. It is just the thing for hotels, offices, cottages, camp-meetings, sportsmen, etc. Good for the lawn, piazza, or "coolest place in the house." Splendid for invalids or children. Sent on receipt of price, or C. O. D. For 50 CTS. EXTRA, with order, I will prepay expressage to any railroad station east of Mississippi River and north of Mason and Dixon's line. For 75 CENTS, in Minnesota, Missouri, and Iowa. HERMON W. LADD, 108 FULTON ST., BOSTON; 207 Canal St., New York; 165 North Second St., Phila.; 94 Market St., Chicago. SEND FOR CIRCULARS. [Illustration] RUBBER BACK SQUARE PACKING, BEST IN THE WORLD [Illustration] FOR PACKING THE PISTON RODS AND VALVE STEMS OF STEAM ENGINES AND PUMPS. B represents that part of the packing which, when in use, is in contact with the Piston Rod. A the elastic back, which keeps the part B against the rod with sufficient pressure to be steam-tight, and yet creates but little friction. This Packing is made in lengths of about 20 feet, and of all sizes from ¼ to 2 inches square. JOHN H. CHEEVER, Treas. NEW YORK BELTING & PACKING CO., 37 & 38 Park Row, New York. JOHN R. WHITLEY & CO. European Representatives of American Houses, with First-class Agents in the principal industrial and agricultural centers and cities in Europe. London, 7 Poultry, E. C. Paris, 8 Place Vendôme. Terms on application. J. R. W. & Co. purchase Paris goods on commission at shippers' discounts. STEAM HEATING APPARATUS LIGHTS PATENTS 24 SIZES OF BOILERS RADIATION 28 PER CENT SUPERIOR TO ANY OTHER. ADDRESS: EUREKA STEAM HEATING CO. ROCHESTER, N. Y. GRAIN SPECULATION in large or small amounts. $25 or $25,000. Write W. T. SOULE & CO., Commission Merchants, 130 La Salle St., CHICAGO. ILL., for Circulars. TELEPHONE Works 1 mile. Price $3.50. Pat'd. Circulars free. HOLCOMB & CO., Mallet Creek, Ohio. JOHNSON'S PATENT UNIVERSAL LATHE CHUCK. [Illustration] Lambertville Iron Works, Lambertville, N. J. GREEN HOUSE HEATING AND VENTILATING APPARATUS. BASE BURNING WATER HEATERS. For Small Conservatories. HITCHINGS & CO., No. 233 Mercer Street, New York. POND'S TOOLS, Engine Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c. DAVID W. POND, Worcester, Mass. LATHES, PLANERS SHAPERS Drills, Bolt and Gear Cutters, Milling Machines. Special Machinery. E. GOULD & EBERHARDT, Newark, N. J. [Illustration: COE BRASS MFG. CO. BRASS AND COPPER IN SHEETS. WIRE AND BLANKS. WOLCOTTVILLE, CONN. MATERIALS FOR METALLIC. AMMUNITION A SPECIALTY.] BUCKET PLUNGER STEAM PUMPS, FOR EVERY DUTY. BUCK VALLEY MACHINE CO., EASTHAMPTON, MASS. GRISCOM & CO'S VALVE REFITTING MACHINE. [Illustration] POTTSVILLE, PA. STEEL CASTINGS From ¼ to 15,000 lb. weight, true to pattern, of unequaled strength, toughness, and durability. 15,000 Crank Shafts and 10,000 Gear Wheels of this steel now running prove its superiority over all other Steel Castings. Send for circular and price list. CHESTER STEEL CASTINGS Co., 407 Library St., Phila, Pa. CARNEGIE BROS & CO UNION IRON MILLS PITTSBURGH PA. WROUGHT IRON BEAMS CHANNELS TEES & ANGLES The attention of Architects, Engineers, and Builders is called to the great decline in prices of wrought STRUCTURAL IRON. It is believed that, were owners fully aware of the small difference in cost which now exists between iron and wood, the former, in many cases, would be adopted, thereby saving _insurance_ and avoiding all risk of _interruption_ to _business_ in consequence of fire. Book of detailed information furnished to Architects, Engineers, and Builders, on application. ALAND'S Silent Injector, Blower & Exhauster. Apply to S. ALAND, Rome, Oneida Co., N. Y. [Illustration] WOOD-WORKING MACHINERY, Such as Woodworth Planing, Tonguing, and Grooving Machines, Daniel's Planers, Richardson's Patent Improved Tenon Machines, Mortising, Moulding, and Re-Saw Machines. Eastman's Pat. Miter Machines, and Wood-Working Machinery generally. Manufactured by WITHERBY, RUGG & RICHARDSON, 26 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Mass. (Shop formerly occupied by R. BALL & CO.) SHAFTS, PULLEYS, HANGERS, ETC. Full assortment in store for immediate delivery. WM. SELLERS & CO., 79 Liberty Street, New York. PORTER MANUF'G CO. [Illustration] [Illustration: The New Economizer Boiler] The New Economizer, the only Agricultural Engine with Return Flue Boiler in use. Send for circular to PORTER MFG. Co., Limited, Syracuse, N. Y. G. G. YOUNG, Gen. Agt., 42 Cortland St., New York. FORSTER'S ROCK & ORE BREAKER AND COMBINED CRUSHER AND PULVERIZER. [Illustration] _The simplest machine ever devised for the purpose._ Parties who have used it constantly for six years testify that it will do _double_ the work of _any other Crusher_, with one-third the Power, and one-half the expense for keeping in repair. The smaller sizes can be run with Horse Power. Address TOTTEN & CO., Pittsburgh Pa. STEAM PUMPS. HENRY R. WORTHINGTON. 239 BROADWAY, N. Y. 83 WATER ST., BOSTON. 709 MARKET ST., ST. LOUIS, MO. THE WORTHINGTON PUMPING ENGINES FOR WATER WORKS--Compound, Condensing or Non-Condensing. Used in over 100 Water-Works Stations. WORTHINGTON STEAM PUMPS of all sizes and for all purposes. PRICES BELOW THOSE OF ANY OTHER STEAM PUMP IN THE MARKET. WATER METERS. OIL METERS. KNOW THYSELF. The untold miseries that result from indiscretion in early life may be alleviated and cured. Those who doubt this assertion should purchase the new medical work published by the PEABODY MEDICAL INSTITUTE, Boston, entitled THE SCIENCE OF LIFE; or, SELF-PRESERVATION. Exhausted vitality, nervous and physical debility, or vitality impaired by the errors of youth, or too close application to business, may be restored and manhood regained. [Illustration] Two hundredth edition, revised and enlarged, just published. It is a standard medical work, the best in the English language, written by a physician of great experience, to whom was awarded a gold and jeweled medal by the National Medical Association. It contains beautiful and very expensive engravings. Three hundred pages, more than 50 valuable prescriptions for all forms of prevailing disease, the result of many years of extensive and successful practice, either one of which is worth ten times the price of the book. Bound in French cloth; price only $1, sent by mail, postpaid. The London Lancet says: "No person should be without this valuable book. The author is a noble benefactor." An illustrated sample sent to all on receipt of 6 cents for postage. The author refers, by permission, to Hon. P. A. BISSELL, M.D., prest. of the National Medical Association. Address Dr. W. H. PARKER, No. 4 Bulfinch Street, Boston, Mass. The author may be consulted on all diseases requiring skill and experience. HEAL THYSELF EXTRA BARGAINS. Town rights, $10; county, $25. Best novelty yet manufactured. If you want to make money, address, with stamp, J. H. MARTIN, Hartford, N. Y. [Illustration: CARY & MOEN STEEL WIRE OF EVERY DESCRIPTION & STEEL SPRINGS. 234 W. 29. ST., NEW YORK CITY] "THE 1876 INJECTOR." Simple, Durable, and Reliable. Requires no special valves. Send for illustrated circular. WM. SELLERS & CO., Phila. [Illustration: PATENTS.] CAVEATS, COPYRIGHTS, LABEL REGISTRATION, ETC. Messrs. Munn & Co., in connection with the publication of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, continue to examine Improvements, and to act as Solicitors of Patents for Inventors. In this line of business they have had OVER THIRTY YEARS' EXPERIENCE, and now have _unequaled facilities_ for the Preparation of Patent Drawings, Specifications, and the Prosecution of Applications for Patents in the United States, Canada, and Foreign Countries. Messrs. Munn & Co. also attend to the preparation of Caveats, Registration of Labels, Copyrights for Books, Labels, Reissues, Assignments, and Reports on Infringements of Patents. All business intrusted to them is done with special care and promptness, on very moderate terms. We send free of charge, on application, a pamphlet containing further information about Patents and how to procure them; directions concerning Labels, Copyrights, Designs, Patents, Appeals, Reissues, Infringements, Assignments, Rejected Cases, Hints on the Sale of Patents, etc. _Foreign Patents_.--We also send, _free of charge_, a Synopsis of Foreign Patent Laws, showing the cost and method of securing patents in all the principal countries of the world. American inventors should bear in mind that, as a general rule, any invention that is valuable to the patentee in this country is worth equally as much in England and some other foreign countries. Five patents--embracing Canadian, English, German, French, and Belgian--will secure to an inventor the exclusive monopoly to his discovery among about ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLIONS of the most intelligent people in the world. The facilities of business and steam communication are such that patents can be obtained abroad by our citizens almost as easily as at home. The expense to apply for an English patent is $75; German, $100; French, $100; Belgian, $100; Canadian, $50. _Copies of Patents_.--Persons desiring any patent issued from 1836 to November 20, 1866, can be supplied with official copies at reasonable cost, the price depending upon the extent of drawings and length of specifications. Any patent issued since November 20, 1866, at which time the Patent Office commenced printing the drawings and specifications, may be had by remitting to this office $1. A copy of the claims of any patent issued since 1836 will be furnished for $1. When ordering copies, please to remit for the same as above, and state name of patentee, title of invention, and date of patent. A pamphlet, containing full directions for obtaining United States patents sent free. A handsomely bound Reference Book, gilt edges, contains 140 pages and many engravings and tables important to every patentee and mechanic, and is a useful handbook of reference for everybody. Price 25 cents, mailed free. Address MUNN & CO., Publishers SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 37 Park Row, New York. _BRANCH OFFICE--Corner of F and 7th Streets, Washington, D. C._ THE HOLLY SYSTEM OF STEAM HEATING FOR CITIES AND VILLAGES. HOLLY STEAM COMBINATION CO. LIMITED. LOCKPORT N. Y. SEE ILLUSTRATED AD. IN LAST NUMBER. THE ASBESTOS PACKING CO., Miners and Manufacturers of Asbestos, BOSTON, MASS., OFFER FOR SALE: PATENTED ASBESTOS ROPE PACKING, " " LOOSE " " " JOURNAL " " " WICK " " " MILL BOARD, " " SHEATHING PAPER, " " FLOORING FELT. " " CLOTH. COLUMBIA BICYCLE. A practical road machine. Indorsed by the medical profession as the most healthful of outdoor sports. Send 3 cent stamp for 24 page catalogue, with price list and full information, or 10 cents for catalogue and copy of _The Bicycling World_. THE POPE M'F'G CO., 89 Summer Street, Boston, Mass. MACHINISTS' TOOLS. NEW AND IMPROVED PATTERNS. Send for new illustrated catalogue. Lathes, Planers, Drills, &c, NEW HAVEN MANUFACTURING CO., New Haven, Conn. H. W. JOHNS' ASBESTOS LIQUID PAINTS, ROOFING, BOILER COVERINGS, Steam Packing, Sheathings, Fireproof Coatings, Cements, SEND FOR SAMPLES, ILLUSTRATED PAMPHLET, AND PRICE LIST. H. W. JOHNS M'F'G CO., 87 MAIDEN LANE, N. Y. THE GEORGE PLACE MACHINERY AGENCY Machinery of Every Description 121 Chambers and 103 Reade Streets, New York. THE WATSON PUMP, FOR ARTESIAN, OR DEEPWELL PUMPING, PISTON ROD, PLUNGER & WELL ROD IN DIRECT LINE MACHINE SIMPLE, EFFICIENT. JAMES WATSON, 1508 S. FRONT ST., PHILA. DIES FOR EVERY PURPOSE. STILES & PARKER PRESS CO., Middletown, Ct. BI-SULPHIDE OF CARBON. E. R. TAYLOR, Cleveland, O. ICE-HOUSE AND REFRIGERATOR.-- Directions and Dimensions for construction, with one illustration of cold house for preserving fruit from season to season. The air is kept dry and pure throughout the year at a temperature of 34° to 36°. Contained in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, 116. Price 10 cents. To be had at this office and of all newsdealers. BEECHER & PECK, Successors of MILO PECK, Manufacturers of PECK'S PATENT DROP PRESS, Regular sizes. Hammer from 50 to 2,570 Lb. Special attention given to making of Drop Dies, Drop and Machine Forgings. New Haven, Conn. [ILLUSTRATION] [ILLUSTRATION] 17--STOP ORGANS Sub-bass and Oct. Coupler, box'd and ship'd only $97.75. New Pianos, $195 to $1,600. Before you buy an instrument be sure to see my Mid-summer offer, illustrated, free. Address Daniel F. Beatty, Washington, N. J. ADVERTISEMENTS. INSIDE PAGE, EACH INSERTION - - - 75 CENTS A LINE. BACK PAGE, EACH INSERTION - - - $1.00 A LINE. (About eight words to a line.) _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter press. Advertisements must be received at publication office as early as Thursday morning to appear in next issue._ -->The publishers of this paper guarantee to advertisers a circulation of not less than 50,000 copies every weekly issue. FOR SALE.--PLYMOUTH MACHINE Works, Engine, and Saw Mill. Patterns on hand. Locality good. For particulars, call on or address the works. Plymouth Machine Works, Plymouth, Richland Co., O. FIRE BRICK, TILE AND CLAY RETORTS ALL SHAPES BORGNER & O'BRIEN 23rd ST, ABOVE RACE, PHILADELPHIA. HOLLY'S IMPROVED WATER WORKS. Direct Pumping Plan. Advantages: 1. Secures by variable pressure a more reliable water supply for all purposes. 2. Less cost for construction. 3. Less cost for maintenance. 4. Less cost for daily supply for all use of Holly's Improved Pumping Machinery. 5. Affords the best fire protection in the world. 6. Largely reduces insurance risks and premiums. 7. Dispenses with fire engines, in whole or in part. 8. Reduces fire department expenses. For information, address the HOLLY MANUFACTURING CO., Lockport, N. Y., Or PARK BENJAMIN & BRO., Gen. Agents, 49 and 50 Astor House, N. Y. City. [Illustration] Established 1844. JOSEPH C. TODD, Successor to TODD & RAFFERTY, PATERSON, N. J., Engineer and Machinist. Flax, Hemp, Jute, Rope, Oakum, and Bagging Machinery. Steam Engines, Boilers, etc. Sole Agent for Mayher's New Patent Acme Steam Engine and Force Pumps combined. Also owner and exclusive manufacturer of THE NEW BAXTER PATENT PORTABLE STEAM ENGINE. These engines are admirably adapted to all kinds of light power for driving printing presses, pumping water, sawing wood, grinding coffee, ginning cotton, and all kinds of agricultural and mechanical purposes, and are furnished at the following low prices: 1 Horse Power, $150 | 1½ Horse Power, $190 2 Horse Power, 245 | 2½ Horse Power, 275 3 Horse Power. 290 | 4 Horse Power, 350 Send for descriptive circular. Address J. C. TODD, PATERSON, N. J. Or No. 10 Barclay St., New York. EMERY WHEELS AND GRINDING MACHINES. [Illustration: EX INUTILI UTILITAS TANITE TRADE MARK] THE TANITE CO., Stroudsburg, Monroe County, Pa. Orders may be directed to us at any of the following addresses, at each of which we carry a stock: London, Eng., 9 St. Andrews St., Holborn Viaduct, E. C. Liverpool, Eng., 42, The Temple, Dale St. Sydney, N. S. W., 11 Pitt St. San Francisco, 2 and 4 California St. Chicago, 152 and 154 Lake St. St. Louis, 209 North Third St. " " 811 to 819 North Second St. Cincinnati, 212 West Second St. Indianapolis, Corner Maryland and Delaware Sts. Louisville, 427 West Main St. Nashville, 28 West Side Public Square. New Orleans, 26 Union St. THE NEW YORK ICE MACHINE COMPANY, 21 COURTLANDT STREET, ROOM 54. Low Pressure Binary Absorption System. Advantages over other Machines. Makes 25 per cent. more Ice. Uses only ¼ water of condensation. No Pressure at rest. Pressure in running, 14 pounds. Self-lubricating. No Leaks, non-inflammable. No action on Metals. Easy Attendance. WM. A. HARRIS. PROVIDENCE, R. I. (PARK STREET), Six minutes walk West from station. Original and Only builder of the HARRIS-CORLISS ENGINE With Harris' Patented Improvements, from 10 to 1,000 H.P. [Illustration] THE BAKER BLOWER. Centennial Judges Report. "Good Design and Material. Very efficient in action. With the special advantages that they can be connected for motion directly with engine without the use of gearing or belting." SEND FOR CATALOGUE. WILBRAHAM BROS. No. 2318 Frankford Avenue, PHILADELPHIA, PA. BOILER COVERINGS, Plastic Cement and Hair Felt, with or without the Patent "AIR SPACE" Method. ASBESTOS MATERIALS, Made from pure Italian Asbestos, in fiber, mill board, and round packing. THE CHALMERS-SPENCE CO., 40 John Street, and Foot of E. 9th Street, New York. TELEGRAPH and Electrical Supplies. Send for Catalogue. C. E. JONES & BRO., CINCINNATI, O. WOOD SOLE SHOES. The cheapest, most durable, warm, good looking, and thoroughly waterproof shoe. Particularly adapted to Brewers, Miners, and all classes of laborers. Send stamp for circular and price list. CHAS. W. COPELAND, 122 Summer St., Boston, Mass. BUY NO BOOTS OR SHOES Unless the soles are protected from wear by _Goodrich's Bessemer Steel Rivets. Guaranteed to outwear any other sole._ All dealers sell these boots. Taps by mail for 50 cents in stamps. Send paper pattern of size wanted. H. C. GOODRICH, 19 Church St., Worcester, Mass. SPY Glasses, Field & Opera Glasses, MICROSCOPES, McALLISTER Magnifying Glasses. Circulars free. Mfg Optician, 49 Nassau St., N. Y. [Illustration] PAINTERS attention: send for circulars. etc. of my latest Metallic Plates for graining oak, walnut, chestnut, ash, etc., in the most rapid and excellent manner, no skill required. J. J. CALLOW. Cleveland. O. HARTFORD STEAM BOILER Inspection & Insurance COMPANY. W. B. FRANKLIN, V. Pres't, J. M. ALLEN, Pres't. J. B. PIERCE, Sec'y. THE RODIER PATENT SINGLE IRON PLANE. [Illustration] Made of extra quality iron. A practical labor saving tool. Cuts against the grain equally as well as with it. Can be adjusted instantly to cut a coarse or fine shaving, and excels any double iron plane ever produced. Address LAFLIN MANUFACTURING CO., North Elm Street, Westfield, Mass. PYROMETERS, For showing heat of Ovens, Hot Blast Pipes, Boiler Flues. Superheated Steam, Oil Stills, etc. HENRY W. BULKLEY, Sole Manufacturer, 149 Broadway, N. Y. THE MACKINNON PEN OR FLUID PENCIL. [Illustration] Particulars mailed Free. MACKINNON PEN CO., 200 Broadway, near Fulton St., N. Y. FRIEDMANN'S PATENT INJECTOR, The best BOILER FEEDER In the world. Simple, Reliable, and Effective. 40,000 IN ACTUAL USE. NATHAN & DREYFUS, Sole Manufacturers, NEW YORK. Send for Descriptive Catalogue. [Illustration: THE BACKUS WATER MOTOR] SUPPLIES FROM HYDRANT PRESSURE the cheapest power known. Invaluable for blowing Church Organs, running Printing Presses, _Sewing Machines in Households_, Turning Lathes, Scroll Saws, Grindstones, Coffee Mills, Sausage Machines, Feed Cutters, _Electric Lights_, Elevators, etc. It needs little room, no firing up, fuel, ashes, repairs, engineer, explosion, or delay, no extra insurance, no coal bills. Is noiseless, neat, compact, steady; will work at any pressure of water above 15 lb.; at 40 lb. pressure has 4-horse power, and capacity up to 6 or 8 horse power. Prices from $15 to $250. Send for circular to THE BACKUS WATER MOTOR CO., Newark, N. J. PICTET ARTIFICIAL ICE CO., LIMITED, P.O. Box 3083. 142 Greenwich St., New York. Guaranteed to be the most efficient and economical of all existing Ice and Cold Air Machines. MICROSCOPES, OPERA GLASSES, SPY Glasses, Spectacles, Thermometers, Barometers, Compasses. R. & J. BECK, Manufacturing Opticians, Philadelphia, Pa. Send for ILLUSTRATED PRICED CATALOGUE. J. STEVENS & CO., P.O. Box 28, Chicopee Falls, Mass. [Illustration] Manufacturers of Stevens' Patent Breech-Loading Sporting and Hunters' Pet Rifles, Single and Double Barrel Shot Guns, Pocket Rifles, Pocket Shot Guns, Gallery Rifles, Superior Spring Calipers and Dividers, including the New Patent Coil Spring Calipers: also Double Lip Countersinks and Hathaways' Patent Combination Gauge. MILL STONES AND CORN MILLS. We make Burr Millstones, Portable Mills, Smut Machines, Packers, Mill Picks, Water Wheels, Pulleys, and Gearing specially adapted to Flour Mills. Send for catalogue. J. T. NOYE & SONS, Buffalo, N. Y. [Illustration: PATENT COLD ROLLED SHAFTING.] The fact that this shafting has 75 per cent. greater strength, a finer finish, and is truer to gauge, than any other in use renders it undoubtedly the most economical. We are also the sole manufacturers of the CELEBRATED COLLINS' PAT. COUPLING, and furnish Pulleys, Hangers, etc., of the most approved styles. Price list mailed on application to JONES & LAUGHLINS, Try Street, 2d and 3d Avenues, Pittsburg, Pa. 190 S. Canal Street, Chicago, Ill. -->Stocks of this shafting in store and for sale by FULLER, DANA & FITZ, Boston, Mass. Geo. Place Machinery Agency, 121 Chambers St., N. Y. LEFFEL WATER WHEELS, [Illustration] With recent improvements. Prices Greatly Reduced. 8000 in successful operation. FINE NEW PAMPHLET FOR 1879, Sent free to those interested. James Leffel & Co, Springfield, O. 110 Liberty St., N. Y. City. A PLANING MILL OUTFIT FOR SALE very low for cash. Will sell all together or each machine separate. All first-class machines, good order. J. H. KERRICK & CO., Indianapolis, Ind. BOGARDUS' PATENT UNIVERSAL ECCENTRIC MILLS --For grinding Bones, Ores, Sand, Old Crucibles, Fire Clay, Guanos, Oil Cake, Feed, Corn, Corn and Cob, Tobacco, Snuff, Sugar, Salts, Roots, Spices, Coffee, Cocoanut, Flaxseed, Asbestos, Mica etc., and whatever cannot be ground by other mills. Also for Paints, Printers' Inks, Paste Blacking, etc. JOHN W. THOMSON, successor to JAMES BOGARDUS, corner of White and Elm Sts., New York. $3 PRINTING PRESS [Illustration: The Excelsior] Print cards labels &c. (Self-inker $5) 13 larger sizes For business or pleasure, young or old. Do your own advertising and printing. Catalogue of presses, type, cards, &c., for 2 stamps. Kelsey & Co. Meriden, Conn. HEKTOGRAPH Patents for the process of Dry Copying have been issued to us, dated May 18 and June 1, 1880. The Hektograph is now the only gelatine copying pad which can be used without infringing. All infringements will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. HEKTOGRAPH CO., 23 and 24 Church Street, New York. THE TANITE CO., STROUDSBURG, PA. EMERY WHEELS AND GRINDERS. LONDON--9 St. Andrews St., Holborn Viaduct, E. C. LIVERPOOL--42 The Temple, Dale St. WOOD WORKING MACHINERY. PLANNING, MATCHING, MOLDING, MORTISING, TENONING, CARVING, MACHINES. BAND & SCROLL SAWS UNIVERSAL AND VARIETY WOOD WORKERS, &c &c. J. A. FAY & CO. CINCINNATI, O., U. S. A. Metallic Shingles Make the most DURABLE and ORNAMENTAL ROOF in the world. Send for descriptive circular and new prices to IRON CLAD MANUFACTURING CO., 22 CLIFF STREET, NEW YORK. SHEPARD'S CELEBRATED $50 Screw Cutting Foot Lathe. Foot and Power Lathes, Drill Presses, Scrolls, Circular and Band Saws, Saw Attachments, Chucks, Mandrels, Twist Drills, Dogs, Calipers, etc. Send for catalogue of outfits for amateurs or artisans. H. L. SHEPARD & CO., 331, 333, 335. & 337 West Front Street, Cincinnati, Ohio. WANTED.--FIRST-CLASS PARTIES IN cities to sell Wing's Fan Ventilators. A great success. Rare chance to make money. See SCI. AM., Jan. 31, 1880, or send for pamphlets, etc. L. J. WING, or THE SIMONDS MFG. CO., 50 Cliff Street, New York. CENTENNIAL AND PARIS MEDALS. Mason's Friction Clutches and Elevators. "New and Improved Patterns." VOLNEY W. MASON & CO., Providence, R. I., U. S. A. 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(TRADE MARKS.) Error 'pecularities' corrected to 'peculiarities' "The distinctive peculiarities of this steamer are the very high steam pressure that she carries--..." (Article 5: 'A REMARKABLE LITTLE STEAMER.') 
36768	----	images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) TRIUMPHS OF INVENTION AND DISCOVERY IN ART AND SCIENCE. [Illustration: GEORGE STEPHENSON'S HOME. Page 120.] TRIUMPHS OF INVENTION AND DISCOVERY IN ART AND SCIENCE. BY J. HAMILTON FYFE. "PEACE HATH HER VICTORIES NO LESS THAN WAR." LONDON: T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW; EDINBURGH; AND NEW YORK. 1871. Preface. "_Peace hath her victories, no less renowned than war._"--MILTON. It is not difficult to account for the pre-eminence, generally assigned to the victories of war over the victories of peace in popular history. The noise and ostentation which attend the former, the air of romance which surrounds them,--lay firm hold of the imagination, while the directness and rapidity with which, in such transactions, the effect follows the cause, invest them with a peculiar charm for simple and superficial observers. As Schiller says,-- "Straight forward goes The lightning's path, and straight the fearful path Of the cannon ball. Direct it flies, and rapid, Shattering that it _may_ reach, and shattering what it reaches. My son! the road the human being travels, That on which blessing comes and goes, doth follow The river's course, the valley's playful windings: Curves round the corn-field and the hill of vines, Honouring the holy bounds of property! And thus secure, though late, leads to its end." The path of peace is long and devious, now dwindling into a mere foot-track, now lost to sight in some dense thicket; and the heroes who pursue it are often mocked at by the crowd as poor, half-witted souls, wandering either aimlessly or in foolish chase of some Jack o' lantern that ever recedes before them. The goal they aim at seems to the common eye so visionary, and their progress towards it so imperceptible,--and even when reached, it takes so long before the benefits of their achievement are generally recognised,--that it is perhaps no wonder we should be more attracted by the stirring narratives of war, than by the sad, simple histories of the great pioneers of industry and science. Picturesque and imposing as deeds of arms appear, the victories of peace--the development of great discoveries and inventions, the performance of serene acts of beneficence, the achievements of social reform--possess a deeper interest and a truer romance for the seeing eye and the understanding heart. Wounds and death have to be encountered in the struggles of peace as well as in the contests of war; and peace has her martyrs as well as her heroes. The story of the cotton-spinning invention is at once as tragic and romantic as the story of the Peninsular war. There were "forlorn hopes" of brave men in both; but in the one case they were cheered by sympathy and association, in the other the desperate pioneers had to face a world of foes, "alone, unfriended, solitary, slow." The following pages contain sketches of some of the more momentous victories of peace, and the heroes who took part in them. The reader need hardly be reminded that this brief list does not exhaust the catalogue either of such events or persons, and that only a few of a representative character are here selected. In the present edition the different sections have been carefully revised, and the details brought down to the latest possible date. J. H. F. Contents. THE ART OF PRINTING-- 1. John Gutenberg, 13 2. William Caxton, 28 3. The Printing Machine, 32 THE STEAM ENGINE-- 1. The Marquis of Worcester, and his Successors, 53 2. James Watt, 63 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON-- 1. Kay and Hargreaves, 77 2. Sir Richard Arkwright, 81 3. Samuel Crompton, 90 4. Dr. Cartwright, 98 5. Sir Robert Peel, 104 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE-- 1. "The Flying Coach," 111 2. The Stephensons: Father and Son, 116 3. The Growth of Railways, 133 THE LIGHTHOUSE-- 1. The Eddystone, 141 2. The Bell Rock, 153 3. The Skerryvore, 160 STEAM NAVIGATION-- 1. James Symington, 171 2. Robert Fulton, 176 3. Henry Bell, 183 4. Ocean Steamers, 186 IRON MANUFACTURE-- Henry Cort, 193 THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH-- 1. Mr. Cooke, 201 2. Professor Wheatstone, 204 3. The Submarine Telegraph, 209 THE SILK MANUFACTURE-- 1. John Lombe, 221 2. William Lee, 225 3. Joseph Marie Jacquard, 227 THE POTTER'S ART-- 1. Luca Della Robbia, 237 2. Bernard Palissy, 241 3. Josiah Wedgwood, 250 THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP-- 1. Sir Humphrey Davy, 263 2. George Stephenson's Lamp, 275 PENNY POSTAGE-- 1. Sir Rowland Hill, 279 2. New Departments of the Postal System, 292 THE OVERLAND ROUTE-- 1. Lieutenant Waghorn, 299 2. The Suez Canal, 309 The Art of Printing. I.--JOHN GUTENBERG. II.--WILLIAM CAXTON. III.--THE PRINTING MACHINE. The Art of Printing. "A creature he called to wait on his will, Half iron, half vapour--a dread to behold-- Which evermore panted, and evermore rolled, And uttered his words a millionfold. Forth sprung they in air, down raining in dew, And men fed upon them, and mighty they grew." LEIGH HUNT, _Sword and Pen_. I.--JOHN GUTENBERG. Some Dutch writers, inspired by a not unnatural feeling of patriotism, have endeavoured to claim the honour of inventing the Art of Printing for a countryman of their own, Laurence Coster of Haarlem. Their sole reliance, however, is upon the statements of one Hadrian Junius, who was born at Horn, in North Holland, in 1511. About 1575 he wrote a work, entitled "Batavia," in which the account of Coster first appeared. And, as an unimpeachable authority has remarked, almost every succeeding advocate of Coster's pretensions has taken the liberty of altering, amplifying, or contradicting the account of Junius, according as it might suit his own line of argument; but not one of them has succeeded in producing a solitary fact in confirmation of it. The accounts which are given of Coster's discovery by Junius and his successors present many contradictory features. Thus Junius says: "Walking in a neighbouring wood, as citizens are accustomed to do after dinner and on holidays, he began to cut letters of beech-bark, with which, for amusement--the letters being inverted as on a seal--he impressed short sentences on paper for the children of his son-in-law." A later writer, Scriverius, is more imaginative: "Coster," he says, "walking in the wood, picked up a small bough of a beech, or rather of an oak-tree, blown off by the wind; and after amusing himself with cutting some letters on it, wrapped it up in paper, and afterwards laid himself down to sleep. When he awoke, he perceived that the paper, by a shower of rain or some accident having got moist, had received an impression from these letters; which induced him to pursue the accidental discovery." Not only are these accounts evidently deficient in authenticity, but it should be remarked that the earliest of them was not put before the world until Laurence Coster had been nearly a hundred and fifty years in his grave. The presumed writer of the narrative which first did justice to his memory had been also twelve years dead when his book was published. His information, or rather the information brought forward under cover of his name, was derived from an old man who, when a boy, had heard it from another old man who lived with Coster at the time of the robbery, and who had heard the account of the invention from his master. For, to explain the fact of the early appearance of typography in Germany, the Dutch writers are forced to the hypothesis that an apprentice of Coster's stole all his master's types and utensils, fleeing with them first to Amsterdam, second to Cologne, and lastly to Mentz! The whole story is too improbable to be accepted by any impartial inquirer; and the best authorities are agreed in dismissing the Dutch fiction with the contempt it deserves, and in ascribing to JOHN GUTENBERG, of Mentz, the honour to which he is justly entitled. * * * * * Of the career of Gutenberg we shall speak presently, but let us first point out that the invention of typography, like all great inventions, was no sudden conception of genius--not the birth of some singularly felicitous moment of inspiration--but the result of what may be called a gradual series of causes. Printing with movable types was the natural outcome of printing with blocks. We must go back, therefore, a few years, to examine into the origin of "block books." Mr. Jackson observes that there cannot be a doubt that the principle on which wood engraving is founded--that of taking impressions on paper or parchment, with ink, from prominent lines--was known and practised in attesting documents in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Towards the end of the fourteenth, or about the beginning of the fifteenth century, he says, there seems reason to believe that this principle was adopted by the German card-makers for the purpose of marking the outlines of the figures on their cards, which they afterwards coloured by the practice called _stencilling_. It was the Germans who first practised card-making as a trade, and as early as 1418 the name of a _kartenmacher_, or card-maker, occurs in the burgess-books of Augsburg. In the town-books of Nuremburg, the designation _formschneider_, or figure-cutter, is found in 1449; and we may presume that block books--that is, books each page of which was cut on a single block--were introduced about this time. These books were on religious subjects, and were intended, perhaps, by the monks as a kind of counterbalance against the playing-cards; "thus endeavouring to supply a remedy for the evil, and extracting from the serpent a cure for his bite." The earliest woodcut known--one of St. Christopher--bears the date of 1432, and was found in a convent situated within about fifty miles of the city of Augsburg--the convent of Buxheim, near Memmingen. It was pasted on the inside of the right hand cover of a manuscript entitled _Laus Virginis_, and measures eleven and a quarter inches in height, by eight and one-eighth inches in width. The following description of it by Jackson is interesting:-- "To the left of the engraving the artist has introduced, with a noble disregard of perspective, what Bewick would have called a 'bit of nature.' In the foreground a figure is seen driving an ass loaded with a sack towards a water-mill; while by a steep path a figure, perhaps intended for the miller, is seen carrying a full sack from the back-door of the mill towards a cottage. To the right is seen a hermit--known by the bell over the entrance to his dwelling--holding a large lantern to direct St. Christopher as he crosses the stream. The couplet at the foot of the cut,-- 'Cristofori faciem die quacunque tueris, Illa nempe die morte mala non morieris,' may be translated as follows,-- Each day that thou the image of St. Christopher shall see, That day no frightful form of death shall chance to fall on thee. These lines allude to a superstition, once popular in all Catholic countries, that on the day they saw a figure or image of St. Christopher, they would be safe from a violent death, or from death unabsolved and unconfessed." Passing over some other woodcuts of great antiquity, in all of which the figures are accompanied by engraved letters, we come to the block books proper. Of these, the most famous are called, the _Apocalypsis, seu Historia Sancti Johannis_ (the "Apocalypse, or History of St. John"); the _Historia Virginis ex Cantico Canticorum_ ("Story of the Virgin, from the Song of Songs"); and the _Biblia Pauperum_ ("Bible of the Poor"). The first is a history, pictorial and literal, of the life and revelations of St. John the Evangelist, partly derived from the book of Revelation, and partly from ecclesiastical tradition. The second is a similar biography of the Virgin Mary, as it is supposed to be typified in the Song of Solomon; and the third consists of subjects representing many of the most important passages in the Old and New Testaments, with texts to illustrate the subject, or clinch the lesson of duty it may shadow forth. With respect to the engraving, we are told that the cuts are executed in the simplest manner, as there is not the least attempt at shading, by means of cross lines or hatchings, to be detected in any one of the designs. The most difficult part of the engraver's task, says Jackson, supposing the drawing to have been made by another person, would be the cutting of the letters, which, in several of the subjects, must have occupied a considerable portion of time, and have demanded no small degree of perseverance, care, and skill. These block books were followed by others in which no illustrations appeared, but in which the entire page was occupied with text. The Grammatical Primer, called the "Donatus," from the name of its supposed compiler, was thus printed, or engraved, enabling copies of it to be multiplied at a much cheaper rate than they could be produced in manuscript. And thus we see that the art of printing--or, more correctly speaking, engraving on wood--has advanced from the production of a single figure, with merely a few words beneath it, to the impression of whole pages of text. Next, for the engraved page were to be substituted movable letters of metal, wedged together within an iron frame; and impressions, instead of being obtained by the slow and tedious process of friction, were to be secured by the swift and powerful action of the press. * * * * * About the year 1400, John Gænsfleisch, or Gutenberg, was born at Mentz. He sprung from an honourable family, and it is said that he himself was by birth a knight. He seems to have been a person of some property. About 1434 we find him living in Strasburg, and, in partnership with a certain Andrew Drytzcher, endeavouring to perfect the art of typography. How he was induced to direct his attention towards this object, and under what circumstances he began his experiments, it is impossible to say; but there can be no doubt that he was the first person who conceived the idea of _movable types_--an idea which is the very foundation of the art of printing. An old German chronicler furnishes the following account of the early stages of the great printer's discovery:-- "At this time (about 1438), in the city of Mentz, on the Rhine, in Germany, and not in Italy as some persons have erroneously written, that wonderful and then unheard-of art of printing and characterizing books was invented and devised by John Gutenberger, citizen of Mentz, who, having expended most of his property in the invention of this art, on account of the difficulties which he experienced on all sides, was about to abandon it altogether; when, by the advice and through the means of John Fust, likewise a citizen of Mentz, he succeeded in bringing it to perfection. At first they formed or engraved the characters or letters in written order on blocks of wood, and in this manner they printed the vocabulary called a 'Catholicon.' But with these forms or blocks they could print nothing else, because the characters could not be transposed in these tablets, but were engraved thereon, as we have said. To this invention succeeded a more subtle one, for they found out the means of cutting the forms of all the letters of the alphabet, which they called _matrices_, from which again they cast characters of copper or tin of sufficient hardness to resist the necessary pressure, which they had before engraved by hand." This is a very brief and summary account of a great invention. By comparison of other authorities we are enabled to bring together a far greater number of details, though we must acknowledge that many of these have little foundation but in tradition or romance. Let us, therefore, take a peep at the first printer, working in seclusion and solitude in the old historic city of Strasburg, and endeavouring to elaborate in practice the grand idea which has been conceived and matured by his energetic brain. Doubtlessly he knew not the full importance of this idea, or of how great a social and religious revolution it was to be the seed, and yet we cannot believe that he was altogether unconscious of its value to future generations. Shutting himself up in his own room, seeing no one, rarely crossing the threshold, allowing himself hardly any repose, he set himself to work out the plan he had formed. With a knife and some pieces of wood he constructed a set of movable types, on one face of each of which a letter of the alphabet was carved in relief, and which were strung together, in the order of words and sentences, upon a piece of wire. By means of these he succeeded in producing upon parchment a very satisfactory impression. To be out of the way of prying eyes, he took up his quarters in the ruins of the old monastery of St. Arbogaste, outside the town, which had long been abandoned by the monks to the rats and beggars of the neighbourhood; and the better to mask his designs, as well as to procure the funds necessary for his experiments, he set up as a sort of artificer in jewellery and metal-work, setting and polishing precious stones, and preparing Venetian glass for mirrors, which he afterwards mounted in frames of metal and carved wood. These avowed labours he openly practised, along with a couple of assistants, in a public part of the monastery; but in the depths of the cloisters, in a dark secluded spot, he fitted up a little cell as the _atelier_ of his secret operations; and there, secured by bolts and bars, and a thick oaken door, against the intrusion of any one who might penetrate so far into the interior of the ruins, he applied himself to his great work. He quickly perceived, as a man of his inventiveness was sure to perceive, the superiority of letters of metal over those of wood. He invented various coloured inks, at once oily and dry, for printing with; brushes and rollers for transferring the ink to the face of the types; "forms," or cases, for keeping together the types arranged in pages; and a press for bringing the inked types and the paper in contact. [Illustration: GUTENBERG IN THE OLD MONASTERY. Page 22.] Day and night, whenever he could spare an instant from his professed occupations, he devoted himself to the development of his great design. At night he could hardly sleep for thinking of it, and his hasty snatches of slumber were disturbed by agitating dreams. Tradition has preserved the story of one of these for us as he afterwards told it to his friends. He dreamt that, as he sat feasting his eyes upon the impression of his first page of type, he heard two voices whispering at his ear--the one soft and musical, the other harsh, dull, and bitter in its tones. The one bade him rejoice at the great work he had achieved; unveiled the future, and showed the men of different generations, the peoples of distant lands, holding high converse by means of his invention; and cheered him with the hope of an immortal fame. "Ay," put in the other voice, "immortal he might be, but at what a price! Man, more often perverse and wicked than wise and good, would profane the new faculty this art created, and the ages, instead of blessing, would have cause to curse the man who gave it to the world. Therefore let him regard his invention as a seductive but fatal dream, which, if fulfilled, would place in the hands of man, sinful and erring as he was, only another instrument of evil." Gutenberg, whom the first voice had thrown into an ecstasy of delight, now shuddered at the thought of the fearful power to corrupt and to debase his art would give to wicked men, and awoke in an agony of doubt. He seized his mallet, and had almost broken up his types and press, when he paused to reflect that, after all, God's gifts, although sometimes perilous and capable of abuse, were never evil in themselves, and that to give another means of utterance to the piety and reason of mankind was to promote the spread of virtue and intelligence, which were both divine. So he closed his ears to the suggestions of the tempter, and persisted in his work. Gutenberg had scarcely completed his printing machine, and got it into working order, when the jealousy and distrust of his associates in the nominal business he carried on, brought him into trouble with the authorities of Strasburg. He could have saved himself by the disclosure of all the secrets of his invention; but this he refused to do. His goods were confiscated; and he returned penniless, with a heavy heart, to his native town Mentz. There, in partnership with a wealthy goldsmith named John Fust, and his son-in-law Schoeffer, he started a printing office; from which he sent out many works, mostly of a religious character. The enterprise throve; but misfortune was ever dogging Gutenberg's steps, and he had but a brief taste of prosperity. The priests looked with suspicion upon the new art, which enabled people to read for themselves what before they had to take on trust from them. The transcribers of books,--a large and influential guild,--were also hostile to the invention, which threatened to deprive them of their livelihood. These two bodies formed a league against the printers; and upon the head of poor Gutenberg were emptied all the vials of their wrath. Fust and Schoeffer, with crafty adroitness, managed to conciliate their opponents, and to offer up their partner as a sacrifice for themselves. By the zeal of his enemies, and the treachery of his friends, Gutenberg was driven out of Mentz. After wandering about for some time in poverty and neglect, Adolphus, the Elector of Nassau, became his patron; and at his court Gutenberg set up a press, and printed a number of works with his own hands. Though poor, his last years were spent in peace; and when he died, he had only a few copies of the productions of his press to leave to his sister. Meanwhile, at Strasburg, some of his former associates pieced together the revelations that had fallen from him, while at the old monastery, as to his invention; and not only worked it with success, but claimed all the credit of its origin. In the same way, Fust and Schoeffer, at Mentz, grew rich through the invention of the man they had betrayed, and tried to rob of his fame. There is a curious, but not very well authenticated story about a visit Fust made to Paris to push the sale of his Bibles. "The tradition of the Devil and Dr. Faustus," writes D'Israeli in the "Curiosities of Literature," "was said to have been derived from the odd circumstances in which the Bibles of the first printer, Fust, appeared to the world. When Fust had discovered this new art, and printed off a considerable number of copies of the Bible to imitate those which were commonly sold as MSS., he undertook the sale of them at Paris. It was his interest to conceal this discovery and to pass off his printed copies for MSS. But, enabled to sell his Bibles at sixty crowns, while the other scribes demanded five hundred, this raised universal astonishment; and still more when he produced copies as fast as they were wanted, and even lowered his price. The uniformity of the copies increased the wonder. Informations were given in to the magistrates against him as a magician; and on searching his lodgings, a great number of copies were found. The red ink, and Fust's red ink is peculiarly brilliant, which embellished his copies, was said to be his blood; and it was solemnly adjudged that he was in league with the Infernal. Fust at length was obliged, to save himself from a bonfire, to reveal his art to the Parliament of Paris, who discharged him from all prosecution in consideration of the wonderful invention." The edition of the Bible, which was one of the very first productions of Gutenberg and Fust's press, is called the Mazarin, in consequence of the first known copy having been discovered in the famous library formed by Cardinal Mazarin. It seems to have been printed as early as August 1456, and is a truly admirable specimen of typography; the characters being very clear and distinct, and the uniformity of the printing perfectly remarkable. A copy in the Royal Library at Paris is bound in two volumes, and every complete page consists of two columns, each containing forty-two lines. The reader will recognize the appropriateness of the fact that from the first printing press the first important work produced should be a copy of God's Word. It sanctified the new art which was to be so fruitful of good and evil results--the good superabounding, and clearly visible--the evil little, and destined, perhaps, to be directed eventually to good--for successive generations of mankind. It was a fitting forerunner of the long generation of books which have since issued so ceaselessly from the printing press; books, of the majority of which we may say, with Milton, that "they contain a potency of life in them to be as active as those souls were whose progeny they are; to preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellects that feed them." Gutenberg's career was dashed with many lights and shadows, but it closed in peace. In 1465, the Archbishop-elector of Mentz appointed him one of his courtiers, with the same allowance of clothing as the remainder of the nobles attending his court, and all other privileges and exemptions. It is probable that from this time he abandoned the practice of his new invention. The date of his death is uncertain; but there is documentary evidence extant which proves that it occurred before February 24, 1468. He was interred in the church of the Recollets at Mentz, and the following epitaph was composed by his kinsman Adam Gelthaus:-- "D. O. M. S. "Joanni Gesnyfleisch, artis impressoriae repertori, de omni natione et lingua optime merito, in nominis sui memoriam immortalem Adam Gelthaus posuit. Ossa ejus in ecclesia D. Francisci Moguntina feliciter cubant." II.--WILLIAM CAXTON. During the last thirty or forty years of the fifteenth century, while printing was becoming gradually more and more practised on the Continent, and the presses of Mentz, Bamberg, Cologne, Strasburg, Augsburg, Rome, Venice, and Milan, were sending forth numbers of Bibles, and various learned and theological works, chiefly in Latin, an English merchant, a man of substance and of no little note in Chepe, appeared at the court of the Duke of Burgundy at Bruges, to negotiate a commercial treaty between that sovereign and the king of England; which accomplished, the worthy ambassador seems to have liked the place and the people so well, and to have been so much liked in return, that for some years afterwards he took up his residence there, holding some honourable, easy appointment in the household of the Duchess of Burgundy. This was William Caxton, who here ripened, if he did not acquire, his love of literature and scholarship, and began, from hatred of idleness, to take pen in hand himself. "When I remember," says he, in his preface to his first work, a translation of a fanciful "Recueil des Histoires de Troye," "that every man is bounden by the commandment and counsel of the wise man to eschew sloth and idleness, which is mother and nourisher of vices, and ought to put himself into virtuous occupation and business, then I, having no great charge or occupation, following the said counsel, took a French book, and read therein many strange marvellous histories. And for so much as this book was new and late made, and drawn into French, and never seen in our English tongue, I thought in myself, it should be a good business to translate it into our English, to the end that it might be had as well in the royaume of England as in other lands, and also to pass therewith the time; and thus concluded in myself to begin this said work, and forthwith took pen and ink, and began boldly to run forth, as blind Bayard, in this present work." While at work upon this translation, Caxton found leisure to visit several of the German towns where printing presses were established, and to get an insight into the mysteries of the art, so that by the time he had finished the volume, he was able to print it. At the close of the third book of the "Recuyell," he says: "Thus end I this book which I have translated after mine author, as nigh as God hath given me cunning, to whom be given the laud and praise. And for as much as in the writing of the same my pen is worn, mine hand weary and not steadfast, mine eyen dimmed with overmuch looking on the white paper, and my courage not so prone and ready to labour as it hath been, and that age creepeth on me daily, and feebleth all the body; and also because I have promised to divers gentlemen and to my friends, to address to them as hastily as I might, this said book, therefore I have practised and learned, at my great charge and dispense, to ordain this said book in print, after the manner and form you may here see; and is not written with pen and ink as other books are, to the end that every man may have them at once. For all the books of this story, named the 'Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye,' thus imprinted as ye here see, were begun in one day, and also finished in one day" (that is, in the same space of time). By the year 1477, Caxton had returned to London, and set up a printing establishment within the precincts of Westminster Abbey; had given to the world the three first books ever printed in England,--"The Game and Play of the Chesse" (March 1474); "A boke of the hoole Lyf of Jason" (1475); and "The Dictes and Notable Wyse Sayenges of the Phylosophers" (1477),--and was fairly started in the great work of supplying printed books to his countrymen, which, as a placard in his largest type sets forth, if any one wanted, "emprynted after the forme of this present lettre whiche ben well and truly correct, late hym come to Westmonster, in to the Almonesrye, at the reed pale, and he shal have them good chepe." From the situation of the first printing office, the term chapel is applied to such establishments to this day. [Illustration: WILLIAM CAXTON. Page 30.] Caxton published between sixty and seventy different works during the seventeen years of his career as a printer, all of them in what is called black letter, and the bulk of them in English. He had always a view to the improvement of the people in the works he published, and though many of his productions may seem to us to be of an unprofitable kind, it is clear that in the issue of chivalrous narratives, and of Chaucer's poems (to whom, says the old printer, "ought to be given great laud and praising for his noble making and writing"), he was aiming at the diffusion of a nobler spirit, and a higher taste than then prevailed. In 1490, Caxton, an old, worn man, verging on fourscore years of age, wrote, "Every man ought to intend in such wise to live in this world, by keeping the commandments of God, that he may come to a good end; and then, out of this world full of wretchedness and tribulation, he may go to heaven, unto God and his saints, unto joy perdurable;" and passed away, still labouring at his post. He died while writing, "The most virtuous history of the devout and right renouned Lives of Holy Fathers living in the desert, worthy of remembrance to all well-disposed persons." Wynkyne de Worde filled his master's place in the almonry of Westminster; and the guild of printers gradually waxed strong in numbers and influence. In Germany they were privileged to wear robes trimmed with gold and silver, such as the nobles themselves appeared in; and to display on their escutcheon, an eagle with wings outstretched over the globe,--a symbol of the flight of thought and words throughout the world. In our own country, the printers were men of erudition and literary acquirements; and were honoured as became their mission. III.--THE PRINTING MACHINE. Between the rude screw-press of Gutenberg or Caxton, slow and laboured in its working, to the first-class printing machine of our own day, throwing off its fifteen or eighteen thousand copies of a large four-page journal in an hour, what a stride has been taken in the noble art! Step by step, slowly but surely, has the advance been made,--one improvement suggested after another at long intervals, and by various minds. With the perfection of the printing press, the name of Earl Stanhope is chiefly associated; but, although when he had put the finishing touches to its construction, immensely superior to all former machines, it was unavailable for rapid printing. In relation to the demand for literature and the means of supplying it, the world had, half a century ago, reached much the same deadlock as in the days when the production of books depended solely on the swiftness of the transcriber's pen, and when the printing press existed only in the fervid brain and quick imagination of a young German student. Not only the growth, but the spread of literature, was restricted by the labour, expense, and delay incident to the multiplication of copies; and the popular appetite for reading was in that transition state when an increased supply would develop it beyond all bounds or calculation, while a continuance of the starvation supply would in all likelihood throw it into a decline from want of exercise. Such was the state of things when a revolution in the art of printing was effected which, in importance, can be compared only to the original discovery of printing. In fact, since the days of Gutenberg to the present hour, there has been only one great revolution in the art, and that was the introduction of steam printing in 1814. The neat and elegant, but slow-moving Stanhope press, was after all but little in advance of its rude prototype of the fifteenth century, the chief features of which it preserved almost without alteration. The steam printing machine took a leap ahead that placed it at such a distance from the printing press, that they are hardly to be recognised as the offspring of the same common stock. All family resemblance has died out, although the printing machine is certainly a development of the little screw press. Of the revolution of 1814, which placed the printing machine in the seat of power, _vice_ the press given over to subordinate employment, Mr. John Walter of the _Times_ was the prominent and leading agent. But for his foresight, enterprise, and perseverance, the steam machine might have been even now in earliest infancy, if not unborn. Familiar as the invention of the steam printing machine is now, in the beginning of the present century it shared the ridicule which was thrown upon the project of sailing steam ships upon the sea, and driving steam carriages upon land. It seemed as mad and preposterous an idea to print off 5000 impressions of a paper like the _Times_ in one hour, as, in the same time, to paddle a ship fifteen miles against wind and tide, or to propel a heavily laden train of carriages fifty miles. Mr. Walter, however, was convinced that the thing could be done, and lost no time in attempting it. Some notion of the difficulties he had to overcome, and the disappointments he had to endure, while engaged in this enterprise, may be gathered from the following extracts from the biography of Mr. Walter, which appeared in the _Times_ at the time of his death in July 1847:-- "As early as the year 1804, an ingenious compositor, named Thomas Martyn, had invented a self-acting machine for working the press, and had produced a model which satisfied Mr. Walter of the feasibility of the scheme. Being assisted by Mr. Walter with the necessary funds, he made considerable progress towards the completion of his work, in the course of which he was exposed to much personal danger from the hostility of the pressmen, who vowed vengeance against the man whose inventions threatened destruction to their craft. To such a length was their opposition carried, that it was found necessary to introduce the various pieces of the machine into the premises with the utmost possible secresy, while Martyn himself was obliged to shelter himself under various disguises in order to escape their fury. Mr. Walter, however, was not yet permitted to reap the fruits of his enterprise. On the very eve of success he was doomed to bitter disappointment. He had exhausted his own funds in the attempt, and his father, who had hitherto assisted him, became disheartened, and refused him any further aid. The project was, therefore, for the time abandoned. "Mr. Walter, however, was not the man to be deterred from what he had once resolved to do. He gave his mind incessantly to the subject, and courted aid from all quarters, with his usual munificence. In the year 1814 he was induced by a clerical friend, in whose judgment he confided, to make a fresh experiment; and, accordingly, the machinery of the amiable and ingenious Koenig, assisted by his young friend Bower, was introduced--not, indeed, at first into the _Times_ office, but into the adjoining premises, such caution being thought necessary upon the threatened violence of the pressmen. Here the work advanced, under the frequent inspection and advice of the friend alluded to. At one period these two able mechanics suspended their anxious toil, and left the premises in disgust. After the lapse, however, of about three days, the same gentleman discovered their retreat, induced them to return, showed them, to their surprise, their difficulty conquered, and the work still in progress. The night on which this curious machine was first brought into use in its new abode was one of great anxiety, and even alarm. The suspicious pressmen had threatened destruction to any one whose inventions might suspend their employment. 'Destruction to him and his traps.' They were directed to wait for expected news from the Continent. It was about six o'clock in the morning when Mr. Walter went into the press-room, and astonished its occupants by telling them that 'The _Times_ was already printed by steam! That if they attempted violence, there was a force ready to suppress it; but that if they were peaceable, their wages should be continued to every one of them till similar employment could be procured,'--a promise which was, no doubt, faithfully performed; and having so said, he distributed several copies among them. Thus was this most hazardous enterprise undertaken and successfully carried through, and printing by steam on an almost gigantic scale given to the world." On that memorable day, the 29th of November 1814, appeared the following announcement,--"Our journal of this day presents to the public the practical result of the greatest improvement connected with printing since the discovery of the art itself. The reader now holds in his hands one of the many thousand impressions of the _Times_ newspaper which were taken off last night by a mechanical apparatus. That the magnitude of the invention may be justly appreciated by its effects, we shall inform the public that after the letters are placed by the compositors, and enclosed in what is called a form, little more remains for man to do than to attend and watch this unconscious agent in its operations. The machine is then merely supplied with paper; itself places the form, inks it, adjusts the paper to the form newly inked, stamps the sheet, and gives it forth to the hands of the attendant, at the same time withdrawing the form for a fresh coat of ink, which itself again distributes, to meet the ensuing sheet, now advancing for impression; and the whole of these complicated acts is performed with such a velocity and simultaneousness of movement, that no less than 1100 sheets are impressed in one hour." Koenig's machine was, however, very complicated, and before long, it was supplanted by that of Applegath and Cowper, which was much simpler in construction, and required only two boys to attend it--one to lay on, and the other to take off the sheets. The vertical machine which Mr. Applegath subsequently invented, far excelled his former achievement; but it has in turn been superseded by the machine of Messrs. Hoe of New York. All these machines were first brought into use in the _Times'_ printing office; and to the encouragement the proprietors of that establishment have always afforded to inventive talent, the readiness with which they have given a trial to new machines, and the princely liberality with which they have rewarded improvements, is greatly due the present advanced state of the noble craft and mystery. The printing-house of the _Times_, near Blackfriars Bridge, forms a companion picture to Gutenberg's printing-room in the old abbey at Strasburg, and illustrates not only the development of the art, but the progress of the world during the intervening centuries. Visit Printing-House Square in the day-time, and you find it a quiet, sleepy place, with hardly any signs of life or movement about it, except in the advertisement office in the corner, where people are continually going out and in, and the clerks have a busy time of it, shovelling money into the till all day long. But come back in the evening, and the place will wear a very different aspect. All signs of drowsiness have disappeared, and the office is all lighted up, and instinct with bustle and activity. Messengers are rushing out and in, telegraph boys, railway porters, and "devils" of all sorts and sizes. Cabs are driving up every few minutes, and depositing reporters, hot from the gallery of the House of Commons or the House of Lords, each with his budget of short-hand notes to decipher and transcribe. Up stairs in his sanctum the editor and his deputies are busy preparing or selecting the articles and reports which are to appear in the next day's paper. In another part of the building the compositors are hard at work, picking up types, and arranging them in "stick-fulls," which being emptied out into "galleys," are firmly fixed therein by little wedges of wood, in order that "proofs" may be taken of them. The proofs pass into the hands of the various sets of readers, who compare them with the "copy" from which they were set up, and mark any errors on the margin of the slips, which then find their way back to the compositors, who correct the types according to the marks. The "galleys" are next seized by the persons charged with the "making-up" of the paper, who divide them into columns of equal length. An ordinary _Times_ newspaper, with a single inside sheet of advertisements, contains seventy-two columns, or 17,500 lines, made up of upwards of a million pieces of types, of which matter about two-fifths are often written, composed, and corrected after seven o'clock in the evening. If the advertisement sheet be double, as it frequently is, the paper will contain ninety-six columns. The types set up by the compositors are not sent to the machine. A mould is taken of them in a composition of brown paper, by means of which a "stereotype" is cast in metal, and from this the paper is printed. The advertisement sheet, single or double, as the case may be, is generally ready for the press between seven or eight o'clock at night. The rest of the paper is divided into two "forms,"--that is, columns arranged in pages and bound together by an iron frame, one for each side of the sheet. Into the first of these the person who "makes up" the paper endeavours to place all the early news, and it is ready for press usually about four o'clock. The other "form" is reserved for the leading articles, telegrams, and all the latest intelligence, and does not reach the press till near five o'clock. The first sight of Hoe's machine, by several of which the _Times_ is now printed, fills the beholder with bewilderment and awe. You see before you a huge pile of iron cylinders, wheels, cranks, and levers, whirling away at a rate that makes you giddy to look at, and with a grinding and gnashing of teeth that almost drives you deaf to listen to. With insatiable appetite the furious monster devours ream after ream of snowy sheets of paper, placed in its many gaping jaws by the slaves who wait on it, but seems to find none to its taste or suitable to its digestion, for back come all the sheets again, each with the mark of this strange beast printed on one side. Its hunger never is appeased,--it is always swallowing and always disgorging, and it is as much as the little "devils" who wait on it can do, to put the paper between its lips and take it out again. But a bell rings suddenly, the monster gives a gasp, and is straightway still, and dead to all appearance. Upon a closer inspection, now that it is at rest, and with some explanation from the foreman you begin to have some idea of the process that has been going on before your astonished eyes. The core of the machine consists of a large drum, turning on a horizontal axis, round which revolve ten smaller cylinders, also on horizontal axes, in close proximity to the drum. The stereotyped matter is bound, like a malefactor on the wheel, to the central drum, and round each cylinder a sheet of paper is constantly being passed. It is obvious, therefore, that if the type be inked, and each of the cylinders be kept properly supplied with a sheet of paper, a single revolution of the drum will cause the ten cylinders to revolve likewise, and produce an impression on one side of each of the sheets of paper. For this purpose it is necessary to have the type inked ten times during every revolution of the drum; and this is managed by a very ingenious contrivance, which, however, is too complicated for description here. The feeding of the cylinders is provided for in this way. Over each cylinder is a sloping desk, upon which rests a heap of sheets of white paper. A lad--the "layer-on"--stands by the side of the desk and pushes forward the paper, a sheet at a time, towards the tape fingers of the machine, which, clutching hold of it, drag it into the interior, where it is passed round the cylinders, and printed on the outer side by pressure against the types on the drum. The sheet is then laid hold of by another set of tapes, carried to the other end of the machine from that at which it entered, and there laid down on a desk by a projecting flapper of lath-work. Another lad--the "taker-off"--is in attendance to remove the printed sheets, at certain intervals. The drum revolves in less than two seconds; and in that time therefore ten sheets--for the same operation is performed simultaneously by the ten cylinders--are sucked in at one end and disgorged at the other printed on one side, thus giving about 20,000 impressions in an hour. Such is the latest marvel of the "noble craft and mystery" of printing; but it is not to be supposed that the limits of production have even now been reached. The greater the supply the greater has grown the demand; the more people read, the more they want to read; and past experience assures us that ingenuity and enterprise will not fail to expand and multiply the powers of the press, so that the increasing appetite for literature may be fully met. * * * * * We have briefly alluded to stereotyping; but some fuller notice seems requisite of a process so valuable and important, without which, indeed, the rapid multiplication of copies of a newspaper, even by a Hoe's six-cylinder machine, would be impossible. If stereotyping had not been invented, the printer would require to "set up" as many "forms" of type as there are cylinders in the machine he uses; an expensive and time-consuming operation which is now dispensed with, because he can resort to "casts." There is yet another advantage gained by the process; "casts" of the different sheets of a book can be preserved for any length of time; and when additional copies or new editions are needed, these "casts" can at once be sent to the machine, and the publisher is saved the great expense of "re-setting." The reader is well aware that while many books disappear with the day which called them forth, so there are others for which the demand is constant. This was found to be the case soon after the invention of printing, and the plan then adopted was the expensive and cumbrous one of setting up the whole of the book in request, and to keep the type standing for future editions. The disadvantages of this plan were obvious--a large outlay for type, the amount of space occupied by a constantly increasing number of "forms," and the liability to injury from the falling out of letters, from blows, and other accidents. As early as the eighteenth century attempts seem to have been made to remedy these inconveniences by cementing the types together at the bottom with lead or solder to effect their greater preservation. Canius, a French historian of printing, states that in June 1801 he received a letter from certain booksellers of Leyden, with a copy of their stereotype Bible, the plates for which were formed by soldering together the bottom of common types with some melted substance to the thickness of about three quires of writing-paper; and, it is added, "These plates were made about the beginning of the last century by an artist named Van du Mey." This, however, was not true stereotyping; whose leading principle is to dispense with the movable types--to set them again, as it were, at liberty--by making up perfect fac-similes in type-metal of the various combinations into which they may have entered. These fac-similes being made, the type is set free, and may be distributed, and used for making up fresh pages; which may once more furnish, so to speak, the punches to the mould into which the type-metal is poured for the purpose of effecting the fac-simile. The inventor of this ingenious process of casting plates from pages of type was William Ged, a goldsmith of Edinburgh, in 1735. Not possessing sufficient capital to carry out his invention, he visited London, and sought the assistance of the London stationers; from whom he received the most encouraging words, but no pecuniary assistance. But Ged was a man not readily discomfited, and applying at length to the Universities and the King's printer, he obtained the effective patronage he needed. He "stereotyped" some Bibles and Prayer-books, and the sheets worked off from his plates were admitted equal in point of appearance and accuracy to those printed from the type itself. But every benefactor of his kind is doomed to meet with the opposition of the envious, the ignorant, or the prejudiced. "The argument used by the idol-makers of old, 'Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth,' and, 'This our craft is in danger to be set at nought,' was, as is usual in such cases, urged against this most useful and important invention. The compositors refused to set up works for stereotyping, and even those which were set up, however carefully read and corrected, were found to be full of gross errors. The fact was, that when the pages were sent to be cast, the compositors or pressmen, bribed, it is said, by a typefounder, disturbed the type, and introduced false letters and words. Poor Ged died, and left the dangerous secret of his art (which he did not disclose during his life-time) to his son, who, after many struggles for success, failed as his father had done before him." There is a tradition current, however, that he joined the Jacobite rebellion, was arrested, imprisoned, tried, and sentenced, but was eventually spared in consideration of the value of his father's admirable invention. That invention, after being forgotten for nearly half a century, was revived by a Dr. Tilloch, and taken up, improved, and extended by the ingenious Earl Stanhope. It is now practised in the following manner:-- The type employed differs slightly from that in common use. The letter should have no shoulder, but should rise in a straight line from the foot; the spaces, leads, and quadrats are of the same height as the stem of the letter; the object being to diminish the number and depth of the cavities in the page, and thus lessen the chances of the mould breaking off and remaining in the form. Each page is corrected with the utmost care, and "imposed" in a small "chase" with metal furniture (or frame-work), which rises to a level with the type. Of course the number of pages in the form will vary according to the size of the book; a sheet being folded into sixteen leaves, twelve, eight, four, or two for 16mo, 12mo, 8vo, quarto, or folio. Having our pages of type in complete order, we now proceed to rub the surface with a soft brush which has been lightly dipped into a very thin oil. Plumbago is sometimes preferred. A brass rectangular frame of three sides, with bevelled borders adapted to the size of the pages, is placed upon the chase so as to enclose three sides of the type, the fourth side being formed by a single brass edge, having the same inward sloping level as the other three sides. The use of this frame is to determine the size and thickness of the cast, which is next taken in plaster-of-paris--two kinds of the said plaster being used; the finer is mixed, poured over the surface of the type, and gently worked in with a brush so as to insure its close adhesion to the exclusion of bubbles of air; the coarser, after being mixed with water, is simply poured and spread over the previous and finer stratum. The superfluous plaster is next cleared away; the mould soon sets; the frame is raised; and the mould comes off from the surface of the type, on which it has been prevented from encrusting itself by the thin film of oil or plumbago. The next step is to dress and smoothen the plaster-mould, and set it on its edge in one of the compartments of a sheet-iron rack contained in an oven, and exposed, until perfectly dry, to a temperature of about 400°. This occupies about two hours. A good workman, it is said, will mould ten octavo sheets, or one hundred and sixty pages in a day: each mould generally contains a couple of octavo pages. [Illustration] In the state to which it is now brought, the mould is exceedingly friable, and requires to be handled with becoming care. With the face downwards it is placed upon the flat cast-iron _floating-plate_, which, in its turn, is set at the bottom of a square cast-iron tray, with upright edges sloping outwards, called the "dipping pan." It has a cast-iron lid, secured by a screw and shackles, not unlike a copying machine. This pan having been heated to 400°, it is plunged into an iron pot containing the melted alloy, which hangs over a furnace, the pan being slightly inclined so as to permit the escape of the air. A small space is left between the back or upper surface of the mould, and the lid of the dipping-pan, and the fluid metal on entering into the pan through the corner openings, _floats_ up the plaster together with the iron plate (hence called the _floating-plate_) on which the mould is set, with this effect, that the metal flows through the notches cut in the edge of the mould, and fills up every part of it, forming a layer of metal on its face corresponding to the depth of the border, while on the back is left merely a thin metallic film. The dipping-pan, says Tomlinson, is suspended, plunged in the metal, and removed by means of a crane; and when taken out, is set in a cistern of water upon supports so arranged that only the bottom of the pan comes in contact with the surface of the water. The metal thus _sets_, or solidifies, from below, and containing fluid above, maintains a fluid pressure during the contraction which accompanies the cooling. As it thus shrinks in dimensions, molten metal is poured into the corners of the pan for the purpose of maintaining the fluid pressure on the mould, and thus securing a good and solid cast. For if the pan were allowed to cool more slowly, the thin metallic film at the back of the inverted plaster mould would probably solidify first, and thus prevent the fluid pressure which is necessary for filling up all the lines of the mould. Tomlinson concludes his description of these interesting processes by informing us that an experienced and skilled workman will make five dips, each containing two octavo pages, in the course of an hour, or, as already stated, at the rate of nearly ten octavo sheets a day. When the pan is opened, the cake of metal and plaster is removed, and beaten upon its edges with a mallet, to clear away all superfluous metal. The stereotype plate is then taken by the _picker_, who planes its edges square, "turns" its back flat upon a lathe until the proper thickness is obtained, and removes any minute imperfections arising from specks of dirt and air-bubbles left among the letters in casting the mould. Damaged letters are cut out, and separate types soldered in as substitutes. After all this anxious care to obtain perfection, the plate is pronounced ready for working, and when made up with the other plates into the proper form, it may be worked either at the hand-press or by machine. Other modes of stereotyping have been introduced, but not one has attained to the popularity of the method we have just described. The Steam Engine. I.--THE MARQUIS OF WORCESTER. II.--JAMES WATT. The Steam Engine. "It is said that ideas produce revolutions and truly they do--not spiritual ideas only, but even mechanical."--CARLYLE. I.--THE MARQUIS OF WORCESTER. As the last century was drawing to its close, two great revolutions were in progress, both of which were destined to exercise a mighty influence upon the years to come,--the one calm, silent, peaceful, the other full of sound and fury, bathed in blood, and crowned with thorns,--the one the fruit of long years of patient thought and work, the other the outcome of long years of oppression, suffering, and sin,--the one was Watt's invention of the steam engine, the other the great popular revolt in France. These are the two great events which set their mark upon our century, gave form and colour to its character, and direction to its aims and aspirations. In the pages of conventional history, of course, the French revolution, with its wild phantasmagoria of retribution, its massacres and martyrdoms, will no doubt have assigned to it the foremost rank as the great feature of the era,-- "For ever since historians writ, And ever since a bard could sing, Doth each exalt with all his wit The noble art of murdering." But those who can look below the mere surface of events, and whose fancy is not captivated by the melo-drama of rebellion, and the pageantry of war, will find that Watt's steam machine worked the greatest revolution of modern times, and exercised the deepest, as well as widest and most permanent influence over the whole civilized world. Like all great discoveries, that of the motive power of steam, and the important uses to which it might be applied, was the work, not of any one mind, but of several minds, each borrowing something from its predecessor, until at last the first vague and uncertain Idea was developed into a practical Reality. Known dimly to the ancients, and probably employed by the priests in their juggleries and pretended miracles, it was not till within the last three centuries that any systematic attempt was made to turn it to useful account. But before we turn our attention to the persons who made, and, after many failures and discouragements, _successfully_ made this attempt, it will be advisable we should say something as to the principle on which their invention is founded. The reader knows that gases and vapours, when imprisoned within a narrow space, do struggle as resolutely to escape as did Sterne's starling from his cage. Their force of pressure is enormous, and if confined in a closed vessel, they would speedily rend it into fragments. Let some water boil in a pipkin whose lid fits very tightly; in a few minutes the vapour or steam arising from the boiling water, overcoming the resistance of the lid, raises it, and rushes forth into the atmosphere. Take a small quantity of water, and pour it into the hollow of a ball of metal. Then with the aid of a cork, worked by a metallic screw, close the opening of the ball hermetically, and place the ball in the heart of a glowing fire. The steam formed by the boiling water in the inside of the metallic bomb, finding no channel of escape, will burst through the bonds that sought to confine it, and hurl afar the fragments with a loud and dangerous explosion. These well-known facts we adduce simply as a proof of the immense mechanical power possessed by steam when enclosed within a limited area. Now, the questions must have occurred to many, though they were themselves unable to answer them,--Why should all this force be wasted? Can it not be directed to the service and uses of man? In the course of time, however, human intelligence _did_ discover a sufficient reply, and _did_ contrive to utilize this astonishing power by means of the machine now so famous as the Steam Engine. Let us take a boiler full of water, and bring it up to boiling point by means of a furnace. Attach to this boiler a tube, which guides the steam of the boiler into a hollow metallic cylinder, traversed by a piston rising and sinking in its interior. It is evident that the steam rushing through the tube into the lower part of the cylinder, and underneath the piston, will force the piston, by its pressure, to rise to the top of the cylinder. Now let us check for a moment the influx of the steam _below_ the piston, and turning the stopcock, allow the steam which fills that space to escape outside; and, at the same time, by opening a second tube, let in a supply of steam _above_ the piston: the pressure of the steam, now exercised in a downward direction, will force the piston to the bottom of its course, because there will exist beneath it no resistance capable of opposing the pressure of the steam. If we constantly keep up this alternating motion, the piston now rising and now falling, we are in a position to profit by the force of steam. For if the lever, attached to the rod of the piston at its lower end, is fixed by its upper to a crank of the rotating axle of a workshop or factory, is it not clear that the continuous action of the steam will give this axle a continuous rotatory movement? And this movement may be transmitted, by means of bands and pulleys, to a number of different machines or engines all kept at work by the power of a solitary engine. This, then, is the principle on which the inventions of Papin, the Marquis of Worcester, Newcomen, and James Watt have been based. The great astronomer Huyghens conceived the idea of creating a motive machine by exploding a charge of gunpowder under a cylinder traversed by a piston: the air contained in this cylinder, dilated by the heat resulting from the combustion of the powder, escaped into the outer air through a valve, whereupon a partial void existed beneath the piston, or, rather, the air considerably rarified; and from this moment the pressure of the atmospheric air falling on the upper part of the piston, and being but imperfectly counterpoised by the rarified air beneath the piston, precipitated this piston to the bottom of the cylinder. Consequently, said Huyghens, if to the said piston were attached a chain or cord coiling around a pulley, one might raise up the weights placed at the extremity of the cord, and so produce a genuine mechanical effect. [Illustration: GENERAL PRINCIPLE OF THE STEAM ENGINE.] But Experiment, the touchstone of Physical Truth, soon revealed the deficiencies of an apparatus such as Huyghens had suggested. The air beneath the piston was not sufficiently rarified; the void produced was too imperfect. Evidently gunpowder was not the right agent. What was? Denis Papin answered, Steam. And the first Steam Engine ever invented was invented by this ingenious Frenchman. Papin was born at Blois on the 22nd of August 1645. He died about 1714, but neither the exact date nor the place of his death is known. The lives of most men of genius are heavy with shadows, but Papin's career was more than ordinarily characterized by the incessant pursuit of the evil spirits of adversity and persecution. A Protestant, and devoutly loyal to his creed, he fled from France with thousands of his co-religionists, when Louis XIV. unwisely and unrighteously revoked the Edict of Nantes, which permitted the Huguenots to worship God after their own fashion. And it was abroad, in England, Italy, and Germany, that he realized the majority of his inventions, among which that of the Steam Engine is the most conspicuous. In 1707 Papin constructed a steam engine on the principle we have already described, and placed it on board a boat provided with wheels. Embarking at Cassel on the river Fulda, he made his way to Münden in Hanover, with the design of entering the waters of the Weser, and thence repairing to England, to make known his discovery, and test its capabilities before the public. But the harsh and ignorant boatmen of the Weser would not permit him to enter the river; and when he indignantly complained, they had the barbarity to break his boat in pieces. This was the crowning misfortune of Papin's life. Thenceforward he seems to have lost all heart and hope. He contrived to reach London, where the Royal Society, of which he was a member, allowed him a small pittance. In 1690 this ingenious man had devised an engine in which atmospheric vapour instead of steam was the motive agent. At a later period, Newcomen, a native of Dartmouth in Devonshire, conceived the idea of employing the same source of power. But, previously, the value of steam, if employed in this direction, had occurred to the Marquis of Worcester, a nobleman of great ability and a quick imagination, who, for his loyalty to the cause of Charles I., had been confined in the Tower of London as a prisoner. On one occasion, while sitting in his solitary chamber, the tight cover of a kettle full of boiling water was blown off before his eyes; for mere amusement's sake he set it on again, saw it again blown off, and then began to reflect on the capabilities of power thus accidentally revealed to him, and to speculate on its application to mechanical ends. Being of a quick, ingenious turn of mind, he was not long in discovering how it could be directed and controlled. When he published his project--"An Admirable and Most Forcible Way to Drive up Water by Fire"--he was abused and laughed at as being either a madman or an impostor. He persevered, however, and actually had a little engine of some two horse power at work raising water from the Thames at Vauxhall; by means of which, he writes, "a child's force bringeth up a hundred feet high an incredible quantity of water, and I may boldly call it the most stupendous work in the whole world." There is a fervent "Ejaculatory and Extemporary Thanksgiving Prayer" of his extant, composed "when first with his corporeal eyes he did see finished a perfect trial of his water-commanding engine, delightful and useful to whomsoever hath in recommendation either knowledge, profit, or pleasure." This and the rest of his wonderful "Centenary of Inventions," only emptied instead of replenishing his purse. He was reduced to borrow paltry sums from his creditors, and received neither respect for his genius nor sympathy for his misfortunes. He was before his age, and suffered accordingly. * * * * * In 1698 his work was taken up by Thomas Savery, a miner, who, through assiduous labour and well-directed study, had become a skilful engineer. He succeeded in constructing an engine on the principle of the pressure of aqueous vapour, and this engine he employed successfully in pumping water out of coal mines. We owe to Savery the invention of a vacuum, which was suggested to him, it is said, in a curious manner: he happened to throw a wine-flask, which he had just drained, upon the fire; a few drops of liquor at the bottom of the flask soon filled it with steam, and, taking it off the fire, he plunged it, mouth downwards, into a basin of cold water that was standing on the table, when, a vacuum being produced, the water immediately rushed up into the flask. In tracing this lineage of inventive genius, we next come to Thomas Newcomen, a blacksmith, who carried out the principle of the piston in his Atmospheric Engine, for which he took out a patent in 1705. It is but just to recognize that this engine was the first which proved practically and widely useful, and was, in truth, the actual progenitor of the present steam engine. It was chiefly used for working pumps. To one end of a beam moving on a central axis was attached the rod of the pump to be worked; to the other, the rod of the piston moving in the cylinder below. Underneath this cylinder was a boiler, and the two were connected by a pipe provided with a stop-cock to regulate the supply of steam. When the pump-rod was depressed, and the piston raised to the top of the cylinder, which was effected by weights hanging to the pump-end of the beam, the stop-cock was used to cut off the steam, and a supply of cold water injected into the cylinder through a water-pipe connected with the tank or cistern. The steam in the cylinder was immediately condensed; a vacuum created below the piston; the latter was then forced down by atmospheric pressure, bringing with it the end of the beam to which it was attached, and raising the other along with the pump-rod. A fresh supply of steam was admitted below the piston, which was raised by the counterpoise; and thus the motion was constantly renewed. The opening and shutting of the stop-cocks was at first managed by an attendant; but a boy named Potter, who was employed for this purpose, being fonder of play than work, contrived to save himself all trouble in the matter by fastening the handles with pieces of string to some of the cranks and levers. Subsequently, Beighton, an engineer, improved on this idea by substituting levers, acted on by pins in a rod suspended from the beam. Properly speaking, Newcomen's engine was not a steam, but an atmospheric engine; for though steam was employed, it formed no essential feature of the contrivance, and might have been replaced by an air-pump. All the use that was made of steam was to produce a vacuum underneath the piston, which was pressed down by the weight of the atmosphere, and raised by the counterpoise of the buckets at the other end of the beam. Watt, in bringing the expansive force of steam to bear upon the working of the piston, may be said to have really invented the steam engine. Half a century before the little model came into Watt's hands, Newcomen's engine had been made as complete as its capabilities admitted of; and Watt struck into an entirely new line, and invented an entirely new machine, when he produced his Condensing Engine. II.--JAMES WATT. There are few places in our country where human enterprise has effected such vast and marvellous changes within the century as the country traversed by the river Clyde. Where Glasgow now stretches far and wide, with its miles of swarming streets, its countless mills, and warehouses, and foundries, its busy ship-building yards, its harbour thronged with vessels of every size and clime, and its large and wealthy population, there was to be seen, a hundred years ago, only an insignificant little burgh, as dull and quiet as any rural market-town of our own day. There was a little quay at the Broomielaw, seldom used, and partly overgrown with broom. No boat over six tons' burden could get so high up the river, and the appearance of a masted vessel was almost an event. Tobacco was the chief trade of the town; and the tobacco merchants might be seen strutting about at the Cross in their scarlet cloaks, and looking down on the rest of the inhabitants, who got their livelihood, for the most part, by dealing in grindstones, coals, and fish--"Glasgow magistrates," as herrings are popularly called, being in as great repute then as now. There were but scanty means of intercourse with other places, and what did exist were little used, except for goods, which were conveyed on the backs of pack-horses. The caravan then took two days to go to Edinburgh--you can run through now between the two cities in little more than an hour. There is hardly any trade that Glasgow does not prosecute vigorously and successfully. You may see any day you walk down to the Broomielaw, vessels of a thousand tons' burden at anchor there, and the custom duties which were in 1796 little over £100, have now reached an amount exceeding one million! Glasgow is indebted, in a great part, for the gigantic strides which it has made, to the genius, patience, and perseverance of a man who, in his boyhood, rather more than a hundred years ago, used to be scolded by his aunt for wasting his time, taking off the lid of the kettle, putting it on again, holding now a cup, now a silver spoon over the steam as it rose from the spout, and catching and counting the drops of water it fell into. James Watt was then taking his first elementary lessons in that science, his practical application of which in after life was to revolutionize the whole system of mechanical movement, and place an almost unlimited power at the disposal of the industrial classes. When a boy, James Watt was delicate and sickly, and so shy and sensitive that his school-days were a misery to him, and he profited but little by his attendance. At home, though, he was a great reader, and picked up a great deal of knowledge for himself, rarely possessed by those of his years. One day a friend was urging his father to send James to school, and not allow him to trifle away his time at home. "Look how the boy is occupied," said his father, "before you condemn him." Though only six years old, he was trying to solve a geometrical problem on the floor with a bit of chalk. As he grew older he took to the study of optics and astronomy, his curiosity being excited by the quadrants and other instruments in his father's shop. By the age of fifteen he had twice gone through De Gravesande's Elements of Natural Philosophy, and he was also well versed in physiology, botany, mineralogy, and antiquarian lore. He was further an expert hand in using the tools in his father's workshop, and could do both carpentry and metal work. After a brief stay with an old mechanic in Glasgow, who, though he dignified himself with the name of "optician," never rose beyond mending spectacles, tuning spinets, and making fiddles and fishing tackle, Watt went at the age of eighteen to London, where he worked so hard, and lived so sparingly in order to relieve his father from the burden of maintaining him, that his health suffered, and he had to recruit it by a return to his native air. During the year spent in the metropolis, however, he managed to learn nearly all that the members of the trade there could teach, and soon showed himself a quick and skilful workman. In 1757 we find the sign of "James Watt, Mathematical Instrument Maker to the College," stuck up over the entrance to one of the stairs in the quadrangle of Glasgow College. But though under the patronage of the University, his trade was so poor, that thrifty and frugal as he was, he had a hard struggle to live by it. He was ready, however, for any work that came to hand, and would never let a job go past him. To execute an order for an organ which he accepted, he studied harmonics diligently, and though without any ear for music, turned out a capital instrument, with several improvements of his own in its action; and he also undertook the manufacture of guitars, violins, and flutes. All this while he was laying up vast stores of knowledge on all sorts of subjects, civil and military engineering, natural history, languages, literature, and art; and among the professors and students who dropped into his little shop to have a chat with him, he soon came to be regarded as one of the ablest men about the college, while his modesty, candour, and obliging disposition gained him many good friends. [Illustration: JAMES WATT. Page 67.] Among his multifarious pursuits, Watt had experimented a little in the powers of steam; but it was not till the winter of 1763-4, when a model of Newcomen's engine was put into his hands for repair, that he took up the matter in earnest. Newcomen's engine was then about the most complete invention of its kind; but its only value was its power of producing a ready vacuum, by rapid condensation on the application of cold; and for practical purposes was neither cheaper nor quicker than animal power. Watt, having repaired the model, found, on setting it agoing, that it would not work satisfactorily. Had it been only a little less clumsy and imperfect, Watt might never have regarded it as more than the "fine plaything," for which he at first took it; but now the difficulties of the task roused him to further efforts. He consulted all the books he could get on the subject, to ascertain how the defects could be remedied; and that source of information exhausted, he commenced a series of experiments, and resolved to work out the problem for himself. Among other experiments, he constructed a boiler which showed by inspection the quantity of water evaporated in a given time, and thereby ascertained the quantity of steam used in every stroke of the engine. He found, to his astonishment, that a small quantity of water in the form of steam heated a large quantity of water injected into the cylinder for the purpose of cooling it; and upon further examination, he ascertained the steam heated six times its weight of well water up to the temperature of the steam itself (212°). After various ineffectual schemes, Watt was forced to the conclusion that, to make a perfect steam engine, two apparently incompatible conditions must be fulfilled--the cylinder must always be as hot as the steam that came rushing into it, and yet, at each descent of the piston, the cylinder must become sufficiently cold to condense the steam. He was at his wit's end how to accomplish this task, when, as he was taking a walk one afternoon, the idea flashed across his mind that, as steam was an elastic vapour, it would expand and rush into a previously exhausted place; and that, therefore, all he had to do to meet the conditions he had laid down, was to produce a vacuum in a separate vessel, and open a communication between this vessel and the cylinder of the steam-engine at the moment when the piston was required to descend, and the steam would disseminate itself and become divided between the cylinder and the adjoining vessel. But as this vessel would be kept cold by an injection of water, the steam would be annihilated as fast as it entered, which would cause a fresh outflow of the remaining steam in the cylinder, till nearly the whole of it was condensed, without the cylinder itself being chilled in the operation. Here was the great key to the problem; and when once the idea of separate condensation was started, many other subordinate improvements, as he said himself, "followed as corollaries in rapid succession, so that in the course of one or two days the invention was thus far complete in his mind." It cost him ten long weary years of patient speculation and experiment, to carry out the idea, with little hope to buoy him up, for to the last he used to say "his fear was always equal to his hope,"--and with all the cares and embarrassments of his precarious trade to perplex and burden him. Even when he had his working model fairly completed, his worst difficulties--the difficulties which most distressed and harassed the shy, sensitive, and retiring Watt--seemed only to have commenced. To give the invention a fair practical trial required an outlay of at least £1000; and one capitalist, who had agreed to join him in the undertaking, had to give it up through some business losses. Still Watt toiled on, always keeping the great object in view,--earning bread for his family (for he was married by this time), by adding land-surveying to his mechanical labours, and, in short, turning his willing hand to any honest job that offered. He got a patent in 1769, and began building a large engine; but the workmen were new to the task, and when completed, its action was spasmodic and unsatisfactory. "It is a sad thing," he then wrote, "for a man to have his all hanging by a single string. If I had wherewithal to pay for the loss, I don't think I should so much fear a failure; but I cannot bear the thought of other people becoming losers by my scheme, and I have the happy disposition of always painting the worst." And just then, to make matters still more gloomy, he learned that some rascally linen-draper in London was plagiarizing the great invention he had brought forth in such sore and protracted travail. "Of all things in the world," cried poor Watt, sick with hope deferred, and pressed with little carking cares on every side, "there is nothing so foolish as inventing." When nearly giving way to despair, and on the point of abandoning his invention, Watt was fortunate enough to fall in with Matthew Boulton, one of the great manufacturing potentates of Birmingham, an energetic, far-seeing man, who threw himself into the enterprise with all his spirit; and the fortune of the invention was made. An engine, on the new principle, was set up at Soho; and there Boulton and Watt sold, as the former said to Boswell, "what all the world desires to have, POWER;"--the infinite power that animates those mighty engines, which-- "England's arms of conquest are, The trophies of her bloodless war: Brave weapons these. Victorious over wave and soil, With these she sails, she weaves, she tills, Pierces the everlasting hills, And spans the seas." Watt's engine, once fairly started, was not long in making its way into general use. The first steam-engine used in Manchester was erected in 1790; and now it is estimated that in that district, within a radius of ten miles, there are in constant work more than fifty thousand boilers, giving a total power of upwards of one million horses. And the united steam power of Great Britain is considered equal to the manual labour of upwards of four hundred millions of men, or more than double the number of males on the face of the earth. From the factory at Soho, Watt's improved engines were dispersed all over the country, especially in Cornwall--the firm receiving the value of a third part of the coal saved by the use of the new machine. In one mine, where there were three pumps at work, the proprietors thought it worth while, it is said, to purchase the rights of the inventors, at the price of £2500 yearly for each engine. The saving, therefore, on the three engines, in fuel alone, must have been at least £7500 a year. In the first year of the present century, Watt withdrew himself entirely from business; but though he lived in retirement, he did not let his busy mind get rusty or sluggish for want of exercise. At one time he took it into his head that his faculties were declining, and though upwards of seventy years of age, he resolved to test his mental powers by taking up some new subject of study. It was no easy matter to find one quite new to him, so wide and comprehensive had been his range of study; but at length the Anglo-Saxon tongue occurred to him, and he immediately applied himself to master it, the facility with which he did so, dispelling all doubt as to the failing of his stupendous intellect. He thus busied himself in various useful and entertaining pursuits, till close upon his death, which took place in 1819. Extraordinary as was Watt's inventive genius, his wide range of knowledge, theoretic and practical, was equally so. Great as is the "idea" with which his name is chiefly associated, he was not a man of one idea, but of a thousand. There was hardly a subject which came under his notice which he did not master; and, as was said of him, "it seemed as if every subject casually started by him had been that he had been occupied in studying." He had no doubt a rapid faculty of acquiring knowledge; but he owed the versatility and copiousness of his attainments above all to his unwearied industry. He was always at work on something or other, and he may truly be called one of those who-- "Could Time's hour-glass fall, Would, as for seed of stars, stoop for the sand, And by incessant labour gather all." In a recent volume of memoirs by Mrs. Schimmel Pennick, we find the following graphic sketch of this extraordinary man:--"He was one of the most complete specimens of the melancholic temperament. His head was generally bent forward or leaning on his hand in meditation, his shoulders stooping, and his chest falling in, his limbs lank and unmuscular, and his complexion sallow. His utterance was slow and impassioned, deep and low in tone, with a broad Scotch accent; his manners gentle, modest, and unassuming. In a company where he was not known, unless spoken to, he might have tranquilly passed the whole time in pursuing his own meditations. When he entered the room, men of letters, men of science, many military men, artists, ladies, and even little children, thronged around him. I remember a celebrated Swedish artist being instructed by him that rat's whiskers made the most pliant painting-brushes; ladies would appeal to him on the best modes of devising grates, curing smoking chimneys, warming their houses, and obtaining fast colours." His reading was singularly extensive and diversified. He perused almost every work that came in his way, and used to say that he never opened a book, no matter what its subject or worth, without learning something from it. He had a vivid imagination, was passionately fond of fiction, and was a very gifted story-teller himself. When a boy, staying with his aunt in Glasgow, he used every night to enthral the attention of the little circle with some exciting narrative, which they would not go to bed till they had heard the end of; and kept them in such a state of tremor and excitement, that his aunt used to threaten to send him away. Since Watt's time, innumerable patents have been taken out for improvements in the steam engine; but his great invention forms the basis of nearly all of them, and the alterations refer rather to details than principles of action. The application of steam to locomotive purposes, however, led to the construction of the high pressure engine, in which the cumbrous condensing apparatus is dispensed with, and motion imparted to the piston by the elastic power of the steam being greater than that of the atmosphere. The Manufacture of Cotton. I.--KAY AND HARGREAVES. II.--SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT. III.--SAMUEL CROMPTON. IV.--DR. CARTWRIGHT. V.--SIR ROBERT PEEL. The Manufacture of Cotton. "Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men who walk daily among us, clothing us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men."--CARLYLE. I.--KAY AND HARGREAVES. On the 3d of May 1734, there was a hanging at Cork which made a good deal more noise than such a very ordinary event generally did in those days. There was nothing remarkable about the malefactor, or the crime he had committed. He was a very commonplace ruffian, and had earned his elevation to the gallows by a vulgar felony. What was remarkable about the affair was, that the woollen weavers of Cork, being then in a state of great distress from want of work, dressed up the convict in cotton garments, and that the poor wretch, having once been a weaver himself, "employed" the last occasion he was ever to have of addressing his fellow creatures, by assuring them that all his misdeeds and misfortunes were to be traced to the "pernicious practice of wearing cottons." "Therefore, good Christians," he continued, "consider that if you go on to suppress your own goods, by wearing such cottons as I am now clothed in, you will bring your country into misery, which will consequently swarm with such unhappy malefactors as your present Object is; and the blood of every miserable felon that will hang after this warning from the gallows will lie at your doors." All which sayings were no doubt greatly applauded by the disheartened weavers on the spot, and much taken to heart by the citizens and gentry to whom they were addressed. This is only one out of the many illustrations which might be drawn from the chronicles of those days, of the prejudice and discouragement cotton had to contend against on its first appearance in this country. Prohibited over and over again, laid under penalties and high duties, treated with every sort of contumely and oppression, it had long to struggle desperately for the barest tolerance; yet it ended by overcoming all obstacles, and distancing its favoured rival wool. Returning good for evil, cotton now sustains one-sixth of our fellow-countrymen, and is an important mainstay of our commerce and manufactures. First imported into Great Britain towards the middle of the seventeenth century, cotton was but little used for purposes of manufacture till the middle of the eighteenth. The settlement of some Flemish emigrants in Lancashire led to that district becoming the principal seat of the cotton manufacture; and probably the ungenerous nature of its soil induced the people to resort to spinning and weaving to make up for the unprofitableness of their agricultural labours. A nobler monument of human skill, enterprise, and perseverance, than the invention of cotton-spinning machinery is hardly to be met with; but it must also be owned that its history, encouraging as it is in one aspect, is in another sad and humiliating to the last degree. It is difficult at first to credit the uniform ingratitude and treachery which the various inventors met with from the very men whom their contrivances enriched. "There is nothing," said James Watt in the crisis of his fortunes, worn with care, and sick with hope deferred--"there is nothing so foolish as inventing;" and with far more reason the inventors of cotton-spinning machines could echo the mournful cry. It is sad to think that so proud a chapter of our history should bear so dark a stain. In 1733 the primitive method still prevailed of spinning between the finger and thumb, only one thread at a time; and weaving up the yarn in a loom, the shuttle of which had to be thrown from right to left and left to right by both hands alternately. In that year, however, the first step was made in advance, by the invention of the fly-shuttle, which, by means of a handle and spring, could be jerked from side to side with one hand. This contrivance was due to the ingenuity of John Kay, a loom-maker at Colchester, and proved his ruin. The weavers did their best to prevent the use of the shuttle,--the masters to get it used, and to cheat the inventor out of his reward. Poor Kay was soon brought low in the world by costly law-suits, and being not yet tired of inventing, devised a rude power-loom. In revenge a mob of weavers broke into his house, smashed all his machines, and would have smashed him too, had they laid hands on him. He escaped from their clutches, to find his way to Paris, and to die there in misery not long afterwards. Kay was the first of the martyrs in this branch of invention. James Hargreaves was the next. The use of the fly-shuttle greatly expedited the process of weaving, and the spinning of cotton soon fell behind. The weavers were often brought to a stand-still for want of weft to go on with, and had to spend their mornings going about in search of it, sometimes without getting as much as kept them busy for the rest of the day. The scarcity of yarn was a constant complaint; and many a busy brain was at work trying to devise some improvement on the common hand-wheel. Amongst others, James Hargreaves, an ingenious weaver at Standhill, near Blackburn, who had already improved the mode of cleaning and unravelling the cotton before spinning, took the subject into consideration. One day, when brooding over it in his cottage, idle for want of weft, the accidental overturning of his wife's wheel suggested to him the principle of the spinning-jenny. Lying on its side, the wheel still continued in motion--the spindle being thrown from a horizontal into an upright position; and it occurred to him that all he had got to do was to place a number of spindles side by side. This was in 1764, and three years afterwards Hargreaves had worked out the idea, and constructed a spinning frame, with eight spindles and a horizontal wheel, which he christened after his wife Jenny, whose wheel had first put him in the right track. Directly the spinners of the locality got knowledge of this machine that was to do eight times as much as any one of them, they broke into the inventor's cottage, destroyed the jenny, and compelled him to fly for the safety of his life to Nottingham. He took out a patent, but the manufacturers leagued themselves against them. Sole, friendless, penniless, he could make no head against their numbers and influence, relinquished his invention, and died in obscurity and distress ten years after he had the misfortune to contrive the spinning-jenny. The history of the cotton manufacture now becomes identified with the lives of Arkwright, Crompton, and Cartwright--the inventors of the water-frame, the mule, and the power-loom. II.--SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT. Somewhere about the year 1752, any one passing along a certain obscure alley in Preston, then a mere village compared with the prosperous town into which it has since expanded, might have observed projecting from the entrance to the underground flat of one of the houses, a blue and white pole, with a battered tin plate dangling at the end of it, the object of which was to indicate that if he wanted his hair cut or his chin shaved, he had only to step down stairs, and the owner of the sign would be delighted to accommodate him. But either people in that quarter had little or no superfluous hair to get rid of, or they had it taken off elsewhere; for Dicky Arkwright, the barber in the cellar, for whom the pole and plate stood sponsor in the upper world, had few opportunities of displaying his talents, and spent most of his time whetting his razors on a long piece of leather, one end of which was nailed to the wall, while the other was drawn towards him, and keeping the hot water and the soap ready for the customers who seldom or never came. This sort of thing did not suit Dick's notions at all; for he was of an active temperament, and besides feeling very dull at being so much by himself all day, he pulled rather a long face when he counted out the scanty array of coppers in the till after shutting up shop for the night. As he sat one night, before tumbling into his truckle bed that stood in a recess in one corner of the dingy little room, meditating on the hardness of the times, a bright idea struck him; and the next morning the attractions of the sign-pole were enhanced by a staring placard, bearing the urgent invitation:-- COME TO THE SUBTERRANEOUS BARBER! HE SHAVES FOR A PENNY!! Now twopence, as we believe all those who have investigated the subject are agreed, was the standard charge for a clean shave at that period; and as soon as this innovation got wind, we can fancy how indignant the fraternity were at the unprincipled conduct of one of their number; how they denounced the reprobate, and prophesied his speedy ruin, over their pipes and beer in the parlour of the "Duke of Marlborough," which they patronized out of respect for that hero's enormous periwig,--in their eyes his chief title to immortality, and a bright example for the degenerate age, when people had not only taken to wearing their own hair, but were even beginning to leave off dusting it with flour! And to make matters worse, here was a low fellow offering to shave for a penny. A number of people, tickled with the originality of the placard, and not unmindful of the penny saved, began to patronize the "Subterraneous barber," and he soon drew so many customers away from the higher-priced shops, that they were obliged to come down, after a while, to a penny as well. Not to be outdone, Arkwright lowered his charge to a halfpenny, and still retained his rank as the cheapest barber in the place. Arkwright's parents had been very poor people; and as he was the youngest of a family of thirteen, it may be readily supposed that all the school learning he got was of the most meagre kind,--if, indeed, he ever was at school at all, which is very doubtful. He was of a very ardent, enterprising temperament, however, and when once he took a thing in hand, stubbornly persevered in carrying it through to the end. About the year 1760, being then about thirty years of age, Arkwright got tired of the shaving, which brought him but a very scanty and precarious livelihood, and resolved to try his luck in a business where there was more scope for his enterprise and activity. He therefore began business as an itinerant dealer in hair, travelling up and down the country to collect it, dressing it himself, and then disposing of it in a prepared state to the wig-makers. As he was very quick in detecting any improvements that might be made in the process of dressing, he soon acquired the reputation amongst the wig-makers of supplying a better article than any of his rivals, and drove a very good trade. He had also picked up or discovered for himself the secret of dyeing the hair in a particular way, by which he not only augmented his profits, but enlarged the circle of his customers. He throve so well, that he was able to lay by a little money and to marry. He was very fond of spending what leisure time he had in making experiments in mechanics; and for a while was very much taken up with an attempt to solve the attractive problem of perpetual motion. No doubt he soon saw the hopelessness of the effort; but although he left the question unsolved, the bent thus given to his thoughts was fruitful of most valuable consequences. Living in the midst of a manufacturing population, Arkwright was accustomed to hear daily complaints of the continual difficulty of procuring sufficient weft to keep the looms employed; while the exportation of cotton goods gave rise to a growing demand for the manufactured article. The weavers generally had the weft they used spun for them by their wives or daughters; and those whose families could not supply the necessary quantity, had their spinning done by their neighbours; and even by paying, as they had to do, more for the spinning than the price allowed by their masters, very few could procure weft enough to keep themselves constantly at work. It was no uncommon thing, we learn, for a weaver to walk three or four miles in a morning, and call on five or six spinners, before he could collect weft to serve him for the rest of the day. Arkwright must have been constantly hearing of this difficulty, and of the restrictions it placed on the manufacture of cotton goods; and being a mechanical genius, was led to think how it might be lessened, if not got rid of altogether. The idea of having an automaton spinner, instead of one of flesh and blood, had occurred before then to more than one speculator; but the thing had never answered, and no models or descriptions of the machines proposed were preserved. One inventor had, indeed, destroyed his own machine, after having constructed it and found it to work, for fear that if it came into use it would deprive the poor spinners of their livelihood,--in reality its effect would have been to provide employment and food for thousands more than at that time got a miserable living from their spinning-wheels. While Arkwright was intent on the discovery of perpetual motion, he fell in with a clockmaker of the name of Kay, who assisted him in making wheels and springs for the contrivance he was trying to complete. This led to an intimate connection between them; and when Arkwright had given up the perpetual motion affair, and applied his thoughts to the invention of some machine for producing cotton weft more rapidly than by the simple wheel, Kay continued to help him in making models. Arkwright soon became so engrossed in his new task, and so confident of ultimate success, that he began to neglect his regular business. All his thoughts, and nearly all his time, were given up to the great work he had taken in hand. His trade fell off; he spent all his savings in purchasing materials for models, and getting them put together, and he fell into very distressed circumstances. His wife remonstrated with him, but in vain; and one day, in a rage at what she considered the cause of all their privations, she smashed some of his models on the floor. Such an outrage was more than Arkwright could bear, and they separated. In 1768, Arkwright, having completed the model of a machine for spinning cotton thread, removed to Preston, taking Kay with him. At this time he had hardly a penny in the world, and was almost in rags. His poverty, indeed, was such, that soon after his arrival in Preston, a contested election for a member of Parliament having taken place, he was so tattered and miserable in his appearance, that the party with whom he voted had to give him a decent suit of clothes before he could be seen at the polling-booth. He had got leave to set up his machine in the dwelling-house attached to the Free Grammar School; but, afraid of suffering from the hostility of the spinners, as the unfortunate Hargreaves had done some time before, he and Kay thought it best to leave Lancashire, and try their fortune in Nottingham. Poor and friendless, it may easily be supposed that Arkwright found it a hard matter to get any one to back him in a speculation which people then regarded as hazardous, if not illusory. He got a few pounds from one of the bankers in the town; but that was soon spent, and further advances were refused. Nothing daunted, Arkwright tried elsewhere for help, and at length succeeded in convincing Messrs. Need and Strutt,[A] large stocking-weavers in the place, of the value of his invention, and inducing them to enter into partnership with him. In 1769 he took out a patent for the machine, as its inventor, and a mill, worked by horse-power, was erected for spinning cotton by the new machine. Two years after, he and his partner set up another mill in Derbyshire, worked by a water-wheel; and in 1775 he took out another patent for some improvements on his original scheme. The machinery which he patented consisted of a number of different contrivances; but the chief of these, and the one which he particularly claimed entirely as his own invention (for he frankly admitted that some of the other parts were only developments of other inventors), was what is called the water-frame throstle for drawing out the cotton from a coarse to a finer and harder twisted thread, and so rendering it fit to be used for the warp, or longitudinal threads of the cloth, which were formed of linen, as well as the weft. This apparatus was a combination of the carding and spinning machinery; and the principle of having two pairs of rollers, one revolving faster than the other, was now for the first time applied to machinery. In a year or two the success of Arkwright's inventions was fairly established. The manufacturers were fully alive to its importance; and Arkwright now reaped the reward of all the toil and danger he had undergone in the shape of a diligent and persistent attempt to rob him of his monopoly, which was carried on for a number of years, and was at length successful. Some of the manufacturers, who were greedy to profit by the new machinery without paying the inventor, got hold of Kay, who had quarrelled with Arkwright some time before, and found him a willing instrument in their hands. It would take too long to go over all the law processes which Arkwright had now to engage in to defend his rights. Kay got up a story that the real inventor was a poor reed maker named Highs, who had once employed him to make a model, the secret of which he had imparted to Arkwright; and this was a capital excuse for using the new machinery in defiance of the patent, although the evidence at the various trials is now held completely to vindicate Arkwright's title as inventor. One law plea was lost to him, on account of some technical omission in the specifications; another restored to him the enjoyment of his monopoly; and a third trial destroyed the patent, which Arkwright never took any steps to recover. Besides trying to defraud Arkwright of his patent-rights, the rival manufacturers, with jealous inconsistency, did their best to discountenance the use of the yarns he made, although much superior in quality to what was then in use. But Arkwright not only surmounted this obstacle, but turned it to good account, for it set him to manufacturing the yarn into stockings and calicoes, the duty on which being soon after lowered, in spite of the strenuous opposition of the manufacturers, turned out a very profitable speculation. For the first five years Arkwright's mills yielded little or no profit; but after that, the adverse tide against which he had struggled so bravely changed, and he followed a prosperous and honourable career till his death, which happened in 1792. He was knighted, not for being, as he was, a benefactor to his country, but because, in his capacity of high sheriff, he chanced to read some trumpery address to the king. He left behind a fortune of about half a million sterling. FOOTNOTES: [A] The founder of the family of Strutt of Belper, afterwards ennobled. III.--SAMUEL CROMPTON. Excellent as was the yarn produced by the spinning-jenny and the water-frame, compared with the old hand-spun stuff, it was coarse and full of knots; and when a demand arose for imitations of the fine India muslins, the weavers found they could produce but a very poor piece of work with such rough materials. Among those who were inconvenienced for want of a better sort of yarn was young Samuel Crompton, who lived with his widowed mother and two sisters in an old country house called Hall-in-the-Wood, near what was then the little rural town of Bolton in the Moors. When Samuel was only five years old his father died, and left his widow with the three children on her hands, to struggle through the world as best she could. A hard-working, energetic, God-fearing woman, she buckled to the fight with a stout heart and a resolute will. Her husband had been both farmer and weaver, like most of the men in that quarter; and she did her best to fill his place, looking after the little farm and the three cows, and working at the loom, the yarn for which she taught the bairns to spin. Whatever she took in hand she did with might and main, and the result was, her webs were the best woven, her butter the richest, her honey the purest, her home-made wines the finest flavoured of any in the district. Small as her means were, she gave her boy the best education that could be got in Bolton--first at a day-school, and afterwards, when he was old enough to take his place by day between the treadles, at a night-school. Rigid in her sense of duty, and resolute to do her own share of the work, she exacted the same from others, and kept her lad tightly to the loom. Every day he had to do a certain quantity of work; and there was no looking her in the face unless each evening saw it done, and well done too. Anxious to satisfy his mother, and yet get time for his favourite amusement of fiddle-making and fiddle-playing, Sam grew quickly sensitive of the imperfections of the machinery he had to work with. "He was plagued to deeath," he used to say, "wi' mendin' the broken threeads;" and could not help thinking many a time whether the jenny could not be improved so as to spin more quickly, and produce a better thread. By the time he came to man's estate, in 1774, his thoughts had settled so far into a track, that he was able to begin making a contrivance of his own, which he hoped would accomplish the object he had in view. He had a few common tools which had belonged to his father, but his own clasp-knife served nearly every purpose in his ready hands. He had his "bits of things" filed at the smithy, and to get money for materials, he fiddled at the theatre for 1s. 6d. a night. Every minute he could spare from the task-work of the day was spent in his little room over the porch of the hall in forwarding his invention. As it advanced, he grew more and more engrossed with it, and often the dawn found him still at work on it. The good folks down in Bolton were sorely puzzled to think what light it was that was so often seen glimmering at uncanny hours up at the old hall. The story went abroad that the place was haunted, and that the ghost of some former resident, uneasy from the sorrows or the sins of his past life, kept watch and ward till cock crow, with a spectral lamp. The mystery was cleared up at last. It was discovered that the ghost was only Sam Crompton "fashing himself over bits of wood and iron;" and Sam was pointed out as a "conjuror"--the cant term for inventor--when he walked through the town. The five years of labour and anxiety bore fruit in 1779, when the "mule-jenny" with its spindle carriage was finished and set to work. As its name indicates, it was an ingenious cross between the jenny and the water-frame, combining the best features of both with several novel ones, which rendered it a very valuable machine. Just as Crompton had put the finishing touches to his mule, the weavers and spinners broke out in open riot at Blackburn, and scoured the country with the cry, "Men, not machines;" breaking every machine they could lay hands on. To keep himself out of trouble and save his mule, Crompton took it to pieces, and hid it in the roof of the hall. When the storm had swept past, he brought it out, put it together, and began to use it in his daily work. The fine yarn he turned out made quite a sensation, and the fame of his invention spread far and wide. People came from all quarters to get a sight of it; and when denied admittance, brought ladders and harrows, and climbed up to the window of the room where it stood. One pertinacious fellow actually ensconced himself for several days in the cockloft, from which he watched Crompton at work in the room below, through a gimlet hole he bored in the ceiling. Crompton lost all patience with this constant espionage. "Why couldn't folk let him enjoy his machine by himself?" he asked. A friend, whose advice he asked, urged him not to think of taking out a patent, but to make a present of his invention to the community at large. Save me from my friends, Crompton might well have cried. Simple, guileless fellow that he was, he acted on his "friend's" advice, and on a number of manufacturers putting down their names for subscriptions varying from a guinea to a crown, threw open the invention to the world. When the time came for the subscriptions to be called in, some of the manufacturers actually were base enough to refuse payment of the paltry sums they had promised, and overwhelmed with abuse the man by the fruit of whose brain they were making their fortunes. When all the money was collected, it amounted to only £60, just as much as built Crompton a new machine, with no more than four spindles. Shy, simple, confiding, innocent of the cunning ways of the world, sadly backward in the study of mankind, and perhaps somewhat ungenial and unpractised to boot, Crompton, from the time when one would have thought he had set his foot on the first round of the ladder of fortune, went stumbling on from one misfortune to another, ill-used on every side, and unsuccessful in every effort to get on in the world. Wheedled out of his patent rights, cheated of the money promised him, his workmen lured away from him as soon as he had taught them the construction of the mule, he grew morbid and distrustful of everyone. He would have no more workmen; and as the production of his machines was thus restricted to the labours of his own hands, he could not compete with the large factories, who drew all the customers away from him. Peel, the father of the statesman, offered him first a lucrative place of trust, and afterwards a partnership; but he would not listen to him. He grew more wretched and discouraged every day. In despair he cut up his spinning machines, and hacked to pieces with an axe a carding machine he had invented, exclaiming bitterly, "They shall not have this too." He then retired into comparative obscurity at Oldham, where he drudged away at weaving, farming, cow-keeping, and overseeing the poor, and found it no easy matter withal to support his family, for he had married some years before. Afterwards he re-appeared at Bolton as a small manufacturer; and there was a brief interval of sunshine. The muslin trade was very brisk, and the weavers walked about with five-pound notes stuck in their hats, and dressed out in ruffled shirts and top boots, like fine gentlemen. While this lasted Crompton found abundant sale for his superior yarn. But trade grew depressed, and the gloom settled over Crompton's life to its close. The idea was started of getting Parliament to do something for him; but he was too independent to supplicate government officials in person. Spencer Perceval, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was willing to befriend him; but Crompton's ill luck was at his heels. On the 11th of May 1812, Crompton was talking with Peel and another gentleman in the lobby of the House of Commons, when Perceval walked up to them, saying, "You will be glad to know we mean to propose £20,000 for Crompton. Do you think it will be satisfactory?" Crompton walked away out of delicacy not to hear the answer. An instant afterwards there was a great shout, and a rush of people in alarm. Perceval lay bathed in his own blood, slain by the bullet of the assassin Bellingham. Crompton had lost his friend. When the subject of a grant to the inventor of the spinning-mule was brought up in the House a few days afterwards by Lord Stanley (now Lord Derby), only £5000 was proposed. No one thought of increasing it. "Let's give the man a £100 a-year," said an honourable member; "it's as much as he can drink." So the vote was agreed to; though at that very time the duty accruing to the revenue from the cotton wool imported to be spun upon the mule was £300,000 a-year, or more than £1000 a working day. The impulse which this invention gave to the cotton manufactures of Great Britain, and the commercial prosperity to which it led, enabled the country to bear the heavy drain of the war taxes; and it has been said, with no little truth, that Crompton contributed as much as Wellington to the downfall of Napoleon. As soon as it became known, the mule-spindle took the lead in cotton-spinning machines. In 1811 above 4,600,000 mule-spindles, made by his pattern, were in use. At the present time it is calculated that there are upwards of 30,000,000 in use in Great Britain; and the increase goes on at the rate of above 1,000,000 a-year. In France there were in 1850 about 3,000,000 spindles on Crompton's principle; and one firm of mule makers (Hibbert, Platt, and Company, of Oldham), make mules at the rate of 500,000 spindles a-year. The immense impetus given to trade, money, civilization, and comfort by this invention is almost incalculable. The grant of £5000 was soon swallowed up in the payment of his debts, and in meeting the losses of his business. "Nothing more was ever done for him. The king, who was fond of patronizing merit, took no notice of him; his eldest son was promised a commission, which he did not get; and some time after, when struggling through life on only £100 a-year, the post of sub-inspector of the factories in Bolton became vacant; though he applied for the office, for which he was eminently qualified, he was passed over in favour of the natural son of one of the ex-secretaries of state--a man who did not know a mule from a spinning-jenny."[B] Crompton spent his last days in poverty and privation, and died at the age of seventy-four, in 1827. FOOTNOTES: [B] Athenæum. IV.--DR. CARTWRIGHT. In the summer of 1784 a number of gentlemen were chatting, after dinner, in a country house at Matlock in Derbyshire. Some extensive cotton-mills had recently been set up in the neighbourhood, and the conversation turned upon the wonderful inventions which had been introduced for spinning cotton. There were one or two gentlemen present connected with the "manufacturing interest," who were very bitter against Arkwright and his schemes. "It's all very well," said one of the grumblers, "but what will all this rapid production of yarn lead to? Putting aside the ruin of the poor spinners, who will be starved because they haven't as many arms as these terrible machines, you'll find that it will end in a great deal more yarn being spun than can be woven into cloth, and in large quantities of yarn being exported to the Continent, where it will be worked up by foreign weavers, to the injury of our home manufacture. That will be the short and the long of it, mark my words." "Well, but, sir," remarked a grave, portly, middle-aged gentleman of clerical appearance, after a few minutes' reflection, "when you talk of the impossibility of the weaving keeping up with the spinning, you forget that machinery may yet be applied to the former as well as the latter. Why may there not be a loom contrived for working up yarn as fast as the spindle produces it. That long-headed fellow Arkwright must just set about inventing a weaving machine." "Stuff and nonsense," returned the "practical man" pettishly, as though it were hardly worth while noticing the remarks of such a dreamer. "You might as well bid Arkwright grow the cloth ready made. Weaving by machinery is utterly impossible. You must remember how much more complex a process it is than spinning, and what a variety of movements it involves. Weaving by machinery is a mere idle vision, my dear sir, and shows you know nothing about the operation." "Well, I must confess my ignorance on the subject of weaving," replied the clergyman; "but surely it can't be a more complex matter than moving the pieces in a game of chess. Now, there's an automaton figure now exhibiting in London, which handles the chess men, and places them on the proper squares of the board, and makes the most intricate moves, for all the world as if it were alive. If that can be done, I don't see why weaving should baffle a clever mechanist. A few years ago we should have laughed at the notion of doing what Arkwright has done; and I'm certain that before many years are over, we shall have 'weaving Johnnies,' as well as 'spinning Jennies.'" Dr. Cartwright, for that was the clergyman's name, confidently as he foretold that machine-weaving would be devised before long, little dreamt at that moment that he was himself to bring about the fulfilment of his own prediction. A quiet, country clergyman, of literary tastes, a scholar, and poetaster, he had spent his life hitherto in the discharge of his ministerial duties, writing articles and verses, and had never given the slightest attention to mechanics, theoretical or practical. He had never so much as seen a loom at work, and had not the remotest notion of the principle or mode of its construction. But the chance conversation at the Matlock dinner table suddenly roused his interest in the subject. He walked home meditating on what sort of a process weaving must be; brooded over the subject for days and weeks,--was often observed by his family striding up and down the room in a fit of abstraction, throwing his arms from side to side like a weaver jerking the shuttles,--and at last succeeded in evolving, as the Germans would say, from "the depths of his moral consciousness," the idea of a power-loom. With the help of a smith and a carpenter, he set about the construction of a number of experimental machines, and at length, after five or six months' application, turned out a rude, clumsy piece of work, which was the basis of his invention. "The warp," he says, "was laid perpendicularly, the reed fell with the force of at least half a hundredweight, and the springs which threw the shuttle were strong enough to have thrown a Congreve rocket. In short, it required the strength of two powerful men to work the machine at a slow rate, and only for a short time. This being done, I then condescended to see how other people wove; and you will guess my astonishment when I compared their easy modes of operation with mine. Availing myself of what I then saw, I made a loom in its general principles nearly as they are now made. But it was not till the year 1787 that I completed my invention." Having given himself to the contrivance of a loom that should be able to keep pace in the working up of the yarn with the jenny which produced it, solely from motives of philanthropy, he felt bound, now that he had devised the machine, to prove its utility, and bring it into use. To have stopped with the work of invention, would, he conceived, have been to leave the work half undone; and, therefore, at no slight sacrifice of personal inclination, and to the rupture of all old ties, associations, and ways of life, he quitted the ease and seclusion of his parsonage, abandoned the pursuits which had formerly been his delight, and devoted himself to the promotion of his invention. He set up weaving and spinning factories at Doncaster, and, bent on the welfare of his race, began the weary, painful struggle that was to be his ruin, and to end only with his life. "I have the worst mechanical conception any man can have," wrote his friend Crabbe, "but you have my best wishes. May you weave webs of gold." Alas! the good man wove for himself rather a web of dismal sack-cloth, sore and grievous to his peace, like the harsh shirts of hair old devotees used to vex their flesh with for their sins. The golden webs were for other folk's wear,--for those who toiled not with their brain as he had done, but who reaped what they had not sown. He had invented a machine that was to promote industry, and save the English weavers from being driven from the field, as was beginning to be the case, by foreign weavers; and masters and men were up in arms against him as soon as his design was known. His goods were maliciously damaged,--his workmen were spirited away from him,--his patent right was infringed. Calumny and hatred dogged his steps. After a succession of disasters, his prospects assumed a brighter aspect, when a large Manchester firm contracted for the use of four hundred looms. A few days after they were at work, the mill that had been built to receive them stood a heap of blackened ruins. Still, he would not give up till all his resources were exhausted,--and surely and not slowly that event drew nigh. The fortune of £30,000 with which he started in the enterprise melted rapidly away; and at length the day came when, with an empty purse, a frame shattered with anxiety and toil, but with a brave, stout heart still beating in his breast, Cartwright turned his back upon his mills, and went off to London to gain a living by his pen. As he turned from the scene of his misfortunes, he exclaimed,-- "With firm, unshaken mind, that wreck I see, Nor think the doom of man should be reversed for me." The lion that has once eaten a man has ever after, it is said, a wild craving after human blood. And it would seem that the faculty of invention, once aroused, its appetite for exercise is constant and insatiable. Cartwright having discovered his dormant powers, could no more cease to use them than to eat. A return to his quiet literary ways, fond as he still was of such pursuits, was impossible. An inventor he was, and an inventor he must continue till his eye was glazed, and his brain numbed in death. When a clergyman he set himself to study medicine, and acquired great skill and knowledge in the science, solely for the benefit of the poor parishioners, and now he gave himself up to the labours of invention with the same benevolent motives. Gain had not tempted him to enter the arena,--discouragement and ruin were not to drive him from it. The resources of his ingenuity seemed inexhaustible, and there was no limit to its range of objects. Wool-combing machines, bread and biscuit baking machines, rope-making machines, ploughs, and wheel carriages, fire-preventatives, were in turn invented or improved by him. He predicted the use of steam-ships, and steam-carriages,--and himself devised a model of the former (with clock-work instead of a steam-engine), which a little boy used to play with on the ponds at Woburn, that was to grow up into an eminent statesman--Lord John Russell. To the very last hour of his life his brain was teeming with new designs. He went down to Dover in his eightieth year for warm sea-bathing, and suggested to his bathman a way of pumping up the water that saved him the wages of two men; and almost the day before his death, he wrote an elaborate statement of a new mode he had discovered of working the steam-engine. Moved by an irresistible impulse to promote the "public weal," he truly fulfilled the resolution he expressed in verse,-- "With mind unwearied, still will I engage, In spite of failing vigour and of age, Nor quit the combat till I quit the stage." In 1808 he was rewarded by Parliament for his invention of the power-loom, and the losses it brought upon him, by a grant of £10,000. He died in October 1823. V.--SIR ROBERT PEEL. Cartwright's power-loom was afterwards taken in hand and greatly improved by other ingenious persons--mechanics and weavers. "The names of many clever mechanics," says a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, "who contributed to advance it, step by step, through failure and disappointment, have long been forgotten. Some broke their hearts over their projects when apparently on the eve of success. No one was more indefatigable in his endeavours to overcome the difficulties of the contrivance than William Radcliffe, a manufacturer at Mellor, near Manchester, whose invention of the dressing-machine was an important step in advance. With the assistance of an ingenious young weaver in his employment, named Johnson, he also brought out the dandy-loom, which effects almost all that can be done for the hand-loom as to motion. Radcliffe was not, however, successful as a manufacturer; he exhausted his means in experiments, of which his contemporaries and successors were to derive the benefit; and after expending immense labour, and a considerable fortune in his improvements, he died in poverty in Manchester only a few years ago." To the Peel family the cotton manufacture is greatly indebted for its progress. Robert Peel, the founder of the family, developed the plan of printing calico, and his successors perfected it in a variety of ways. While occupied as a small farmer near Blackburn, he gave a great deal of attention to the subject, and made a great many experiments. One day, when sketching a pattern on the back of a pewter dinner-plate, the idea occurred to him, that if colour were rubbed upon the design an impression might be printed off it upon calico. He tested the plan at once. Filling in the pattern with colour on the back of the plate, and placing a piece of calico over it, he passed it through a mangle, and was delighted with seeing the calico come out duly printed. This was his first essay in calico-printing; and he soon worked out the idea, patented it, and starting as a calico-printer, succeeded so well, that he gave up the farm and devoted himself entirely to that business. His sons succeeded him; and the Peel family, divided into numerous firms, became one of the chief pillars of the cotton manufacture. To such perfection has calico-printing now been brought, that a mile of calico can be printed in an hour, or three cotton dresses in a minute; and so extensive is the production of that article, that one firm alone--that of Hoyle--turns out in a year more than 10,000 miles of it, or more than sufficient to measure the diameter of our planet. It was a favourite saying of old Sir Robert Peel, in regard to the importance of commercial wealth in a national point of view, "that the gains of individuals were small compared with the national gains arising from trade;" and there can be no doubt that the success of the cotton trade has contributed essentially to the present affluence and prosperity of the United Kingdom. It has placed cheap and comfortable clothing within the reach of all, and provided well-paid employment for multitudes of people; and the growth of population to which it has led, and consequent increase in the consumption of the various necessaries and luxuries of life, have given a stimulus to all the other branches of industry and commerce. From one of the most miserable provinces in the land, Lancashire has grown to be one of the most prosperous. Within a hundred and fifty years the population has increased tenfold, and land has risen to fifty times its value for agricultural, and seventy times for manufacturing purposes. From an insignificant country town and a little fishing village have sprung Manchester and Liverpool; and many other towns throughout the country owe their existence to the same source. These are the great monuments to the achievements of Arkwright, Crompton, Peel, and the other captains of industry who wrought this mighty change, and the best trophies of their genius and enterprise. The Railway and the Locomotive. I.--"THE FLYING COACH." II.--THE STEPHENSONS: FATHER AND SON. III.--THE GROWTH OF RAILWAYS. The Railway and the Locomotive I.--"THE FLYING COACH." It is the grey dawn of a fine spring morning in the year 1669, and early though it be, there are many folks astir and gathering in clusters before the ancient, weather-stained front of All Souls' College, Oxford. The "Flying Coach" which has been so much talked about, and which has been solemnly considered and sanctioned by the heads of the University, is to make its first journey to the metropolis to-day, and to accomplish it between sunrise and sunset. Hitherto the journey has occupied two days, the travellers sleeping a night on the road; and the new undertaking is regarded as very bold and hazardous. A buzz rises from the knots of people as they discuss its prospects,--some very sanguine, some very doubtful, not a few very angry at the presumption of the enterprise. But six o'clock is on the strike--all the passengers are seated, some of them rather wishful to be safe on the pavement again--the driver has got the reins in his hand--the guard sounds his bugle, and off goes the "Flying Coach" at a rattling pace, amidst the cheering of the crowd and the benedictions of the university "Dons," who have come down to honour the event with their presence. Learned, liberal-minded men these "Dons" are for the times they live in; but only fancy what they would think if some old seer, whose meditation and research had "Pierced the future, far as human eye could see, Seen the vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be," were to come forth and tell them, that before two centuries were over men would think far less of travelling from Oxford to London in one hour than they then did of doing so in a day, by means of a machine of iron, mounted upon wheels, which should rush along the ground, and drag a load, which a hundred horses could not move, as though it were a feather. Roger Bacon had prophesied as much four centuries before; the Marquis of Worcester was propounding the same theory at that very day, and yet who can blame them if they treated the notion as the falsehood of an impostor, or the hallucination of a lunatic? In these days when railways traverse the country in every direction, and are still multiplying rapidly, when no two towns of the least size and consideration are unprovided with this mode of mutual communication--when we step into a railway carriage as readily as into an omnibus, and breakfasting comfortably in London, are whisked off to Edinburgh, almost in time for the fashionable dinner hour,--it requires no little effort to realize the incredulity and contempt with which the idea of superseding the stage-coach by the steam locomotive, and having lines of iron railways instead of the common highways, was regarded for many years after the beginning of the present century. Even after the practicability of the project had been proved, and steam-engines had been seen puffing along the rails, with a train of carriages attached, even so late as 1825, we find one of the leading periodicals--the _Quarterly Review_--denouncing the gross exaggeration of the powers of the locomotive which its promoters were guilty of, and predicting that though it might delude for a time, it must end in the mortification of all concerned. The fact was, said the writer, that people would as soon suffer themselves to be fired off like a Congreve rocket, as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate--the rate of eighteen miles an hour, which people now-a-days, accustomed to dash along in express trains at two or three times that speed, would deem a perfect snail-pace. The "railway" had the start of the locomotive by a couple of centuries, and derives its parentage from the clumsy wooden way-leaves or tram-roads which were laid down to lessen the labour of dragging the coal-waggons to and from the place of shipment in the Newcastle colleries. These were in use from the beginning of the seventeenth century, but it was not till the beginning of the nineteenth that the locomotive steam-engine made its appearance. Watt himself took out a patent for a locomotive in 1784, but nothing came of it; and the honour of having first proved the practicability of applying steam to the purposes of locomotion is due to a Cornishman named Trevithick, who devised a high-pressure engine of very ingenious construction, and actually set it to work on one of the roads in South Wales. At first, therefore, there was no alliance between the engine and the rail; and though afterwards Trevithick adapted it to run on a tram-way, something went wrong with it, and the idea was for the time abandoned. There was a long-headed engine-man in one of the Newcastle collieries about this time, in whose mind the true solution of the problem was rapidly developing, but Trevithick had nearly forestalled him. The stories of these two men afford a most instructive lesson. A man of undoubted talent and ingenuity, with influential friends both in Cornwall and London, Trevithick had a fair start in life, and every opportunity of distinguishing himself. But he lacked steadiness and perseverance, and nothing prospered with him. He had no sooner applied himself to one scheme than he threw it up, and became engrossed in another, to be abandoned in turn for some new favourite. He was always beginning some novelty, and never ending what he had begun, and the consequence was an almost constant succession of failures. He was always unhappy and unsuccessful. If now and then a gleam of success did brighten on his path, it was but temporary, and was speedily absorbed in the gloom of failure. He found a man of capital to take up his high-pressure engine, got his locomotive built and set to work, brought his ballast engine into use, and stood in no want of praise and encouragement; and yet, one after another his schemes went wrong. Not one of them did well, because he never stuck to any of them long enough. "The world always went wrong with him," he said himself. "He always went wrong with the world," said more truly those who knew him. His haste, impatience, and want of perseverance ruined him. After actually witnessing his steam engine at work in Wales, dragging a train of heavy waggons at the rate of five miles an hour, he lost conceit of his invention, went away to the West Indies, and did not return to England till Stephenson had solved the difficulty of steam locomotion, and was laying out the Stockton and Darlington Railway. The humble engine-man, without education, without friends, without money, with countless obstacles in his way, and not a single advantage, save his native genius and resolution, had won the day, and distanced his more favoured and accomplished rival. It was reserved for GEORGE STEPHENSON to bring about the alliance of the locomotive and the railroad--"man and wife," as he used to call them--whose union, like that of heaven and earth in the old mythology, was to bear an offspring of Titanic might--the modern railway. II.--THE STEPHENSONS: FATHER AND SON. Towards the close of the last century, a bare-legged herd-laddie, about eight years old, might have been seen, in a field at Dewley Burn, a little village not far from Newcastle, amusing himself by making clay-engines, with bits of hemlock-stalk for imaginary pipes. The child is father of the man; and in after years that little fellow became the inventor of the passenger locomotive, and as the founder of the gigantic railway system which now spreads its fibres over the length and breadth, not only of our own country, but of the civilized world, the true hero of the half-century. The second son of a fireman to one of the colliery engines, who had six children and a wife to support on an income of twelve shillings a-week, George Stephenson had to begin work while quite a child. At first he was set to look after a neighbour's cows, and keep them from straying; and afterwards he was promoted to the work of leading horses at the plough, hoeing turnips, and such like, at a salary of fourpence a-day. The lad had always been fond of poking about in his father's engine house; and his great ambition at this time was to become a fireman like his father. And at length, after being employed in various ways about the colliery, he was, at the age of fourteen, appointed his father's assistant at a shilling a-day. The next year he got a situation as fireman on his own account; and "now," said he, when his wages were advanced to twelve shillings a-week--"now I'm a made man for life." The next step he took was to get the place of "plugman" to the same engine that his father attended as fireman, the former post being rather the higher of the two. The business of the plugman, the uninitiated may be informed, is to watch the engine, and see that it works properly--the name being derived from the duty of plugging the tube at the bottom of the shaft, so that the action of the pump should not be interfered with by the exposure of the suction-holes. George now devoted himself enthusiastically to the study of the engine under his care. It became a sort of pet with him; and he was never weary of taking it to pieces, cleaning it, putting it together again, and inspecting its various parts with admiration and delight, so that he soon made himself thoroughly master of its method of working and construction. Eighteen years old by this time, George Stephenson was wholly uneducated. His father's small earnings, and the large family he had to feed, at a time when provisions were scarce and at war prices, prevented his having any schooling in his early years; and he now set himself to repair his deficiencies in that respect. His duties occupied him twelve hours a-day, so that he had but little leisure to himself; but he was bent on improving himself, and after the duties of the day were over, went to a night-school kept by a poor teacher in the village of Water-row, where he was now situated, on three nights during the week, to take lessons in reading and spelling, and afterwards in the science of pot-hooks and hangers as well; so that by the time he was nineteen he was able to read clearly, and to write his own name. Then he took to arithmetic, for which he showed a strong predilection. He had always a sum or two by him to work out while at the engine side, and soon made great progress. The next year he was appointed brakesman at Black Collerton Colliery, with six shillings added to his wages, which were now nearly a pound a-week, and he was always making a few shillings extra by mending his fellow-workmen's shoes, a job at which he was rather expert. Busy as he was with his various tasks, he found time to fall in love. Pretty Fanny Henderson, a servant at a neighbouring farm, caught his fancy; and getting her shoes to mend, it cost him a great effort to return them to the comely owner after they were patched up. He carried them about with him in his pocket for some time, and would pull them out, and then gaze fondly at them with as much emotion as the old story tells us the sight of the dainty glass slipper, which Cinderella dropped at the ball, excited in the breast of the young prince. Bent upon taking up house for himself, with Fanny as presiding genius, Stephenson now began to save up, and declared himself a "rich man" when he put his first guinea in the box. Instead of spending the Saturday afternoon with his fellow-workmen in the public-house, Stephenson employed himself in taking the engine to pieces, and cleaning it; but besides his attention to work, he was also remarkable for his skill at putting and wrestling, in which he beat most of his comrades. And he was not without pluck either, as he let a great hulking fellow, who was the bully of the village, know to his cost, by giving him such a drubbing as made him a "sadder and wiser man" for some time afterwards. He still continued his attendance at the night-school, till he had got out of the master as much instruction in arithmetic as he was able to supply. By the time he was of age he had saved up enough to take a little cottage and furnish it comfortably, though, of course, very humbly; and in the winter of 1802, Fanny, now Mrs. George Stephenson, rode home from church on horseback, seated on a pillion behind her husband, with her arms round his waist; and very proud and happy, we may be sure, he was that day, as the neighbours came to their doors to wish him "God speed" in his new mode of life. Having learned all he could from the village teacher, George Stephenson now began to study mensuration and mathematics at home by himself; but he also found time to make a number of experiments in the hope of finding out the secret of perpetual motion, and to make shoe-lasts and shoes, as well as mend them. At the end of 1803 his only son, Robert, was born; and soon after the family removed to Killingworth, seven miles from Newcastle, where George got the place of brakesman. They had not been settled long here when Fanny died--a loss which affected George deeply, and attached him all the more intensely to the offspring of their union. At this time everything seemed to go wrong with him. As if his wife's death was not grief enough, his father met with an accident which deprived him of his eye-sight, and shattered his frame; George himself was drawn for the militia, and had to pay a heavy sum of money for a substitute; and with his father, and mother, and his own boy to support, at a time when taxes were excessive and food dear, he had only a salary of £50 or £60 a-year to meet all claims. He was on the verge of despair, and would have emigrated to America, if, fortunately for our country, he had not been unable to raise sufficient money for his passage. So he had to stay in the old country, where a bright and glorious future awaited him, dark and desperate as the prospect then appeared. He still went on making models and experiments, and perfecting his knowledge of his own engine. To add to his earnings he also took to clock-cleaning, with the view of saving up enough to give his boy the best education it was in his power to bestow. "In the earlier period of my career," he used afterwards to say, "when Robert was a little boy, I saw how deficient I was in education, and I made up my mind that he should not labour under the same defect, but that I would put him to a good school, and give him a liberal training. I was, however, a poor man, and how do you think I managed? I betook myself to mending my neighbours' clocks and watches at nights, after my daily labour was done, and thus I procured the means of educating my son." George began by teaching his son to work with him; and when the little chap could not reach so high as to put a clock-hand on, would set him on a chair for the purpose, and very proud Robert was whenever he could "help father" in any of his jobs. About this time a new pit having been sunk in the district where he worked, the engine fixed for the purpose of pumping the water out of the shaft was found a failure. This soon reached George's ears. He walked over to the pit, carefully examined the various parts of the machinery, and turned the matter over in his mind. One day when he was looking at it, and almost convinced that he had discovered the cause of the failure, one of the workmen came up, and asked him if he could tell what was wrong. "Yes," said George; "and I think I could alter it, and in a week's time send you to the bottom." George offered his services to the engineer. Every expedient had been tried to repair the engine, and all had failed. There could be no harm, if no good, in Stephenson trying his hand at it. So he got leave, and set to work. He took the engine entirely to pieces, and in four days had repaired it thoroughly, so that the workmen could get to the bottom and proceed with their labours. George Stephenson's skill as an engine-doctor began to be noised abroad, and secured him the post of engine-wright at Killingworth, with a salary of £100 a-year. Robert was now old enough to go to school, and was sent to one in Newcastle, to which, dressed in a suit of coarse grey stuff cut out by his father, he rode every day upon a donkey. Robert spent much of his spare time in the Literary and Philosophical Institute of Newcastle; and would sometimes take home a volume from the library, which father and son would eagerly peruse together. Occasionally they tried chemical experiments together; and now and then Robert would try his hand by himself. On one occasion he electrified the cows in an adjacent enclosure by means of an electric kite, making the bewildered animals dash madly about the field, with their tails erect on end; and another time he administered a severe electric shock to his father's Galloway pony, which nearly knocked it over, and drew down upon him the affected wrath of his father, who, coming out at the instant, shook his whip at him and called him a mischievous scoundrel, though pleased all the while at the lad's ingenuity and enterprise. As an early proof of the former, there still stands over the cottage door at Killingworth a sun-dial, constructed by Robert when he was thirteen years old, with some little help from his father. The idea of constructing a steam-engine to run on the colliery tram-roads leading to the shipping-place was now receiving considerable attention from the engineering community. Several schemes had been propounded, and engines actually made; but none of them had been brought into use. A mistaken notion prevailed that the plain round wheels of an engine would slip round without catching hold of the rails, and that thus no progress would be made; but George Stephenson soon became convinced that the weight of the engine would of itself be sufficient to press the wheels to the rails, so that they could not fail to bite. He turned the subject over and over in his mind, tested his conceptions by countless experiments, and at length completed his scheme. Money for the construction of a locomotive engine on his plan having been supplied by Lord Ravensworth, one was made after many difficulties, and placed upon the tram-road at Killingworth, where it drew a load of 30 tons up a somewhat steep gradient at the rate of four miles an hour. Still there was very little saving in cost, and little advance in speed as compared with horse-power; but in a second one, which Stephenson quickly set about constructing, he turned the waste steam into the chimney to increase the draught, and thus puff the fuel into a brisker flame, and create a larger volume of steam to propel the locomotive. The fundamental principles of the engine thus formed remain in operation to this day; and it may in truth be termed the progenitor of the great locomotive family. In 1821 George Stephenson got the appointment of engineer, with £300 of salary, to the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company, in the Act of Parliament for which power was given to use locomotive engines, if needful, either for the conveyance of goods or passengers. When the line was opened, it was worked partly by horses and partly by locomotive and stationary engines. This led to a partnership between Mr. Edward Pease of Darlington, the chief projector of the line, and Stephenson, in a locomotive manufactory in Newcastle,--for many years the only one of the kind in existence. Meanwhile, young Robert Stephenson, having spent a year or two in gaining a practical acquaintance with the machinery and working of a colliery, went to the University of Edinburgh, where he spent a session in attending the courses of lectures on chemistry, natural philosophy, and geology. He made the best of his opportunities; and that he might profit to the utmost by the lectures, he studied short-hand, and took them all down _verbatim_, transcribing his notes every evening before he went to bed. Robert brought home the prize for mathematics, and showed he had made so much progress at college that, though the £80 which the session cost was a large sum to his father at that time, George never failed, then or afterwards, to declare that it was one of the best investments he had ever made. After a year or two in his father's locomotive factory, Robert spent two or three years in charge of the machinery of a mining company in Columbia, and returned to England at the close of 1827, to find the great question, "Whether locomotives can be successfully and profitably applied to passenger traffic?" hotly agitated, his father, almost alone, taking the side of the travelling, against that of the fixed engines, and insisting that the wheel and the rail were clearly and closely part of one system. The success of the Darlington line induced the Liverpool merchants to project a line between that town and Manchester; and George Stephenson was almost unanimously chosen engineer, though it was still undetermined whether the new line should be worked by steam or horse power. But, apart from that question, a great, and, as it appeared to most of the engineers of the time, an insurmountable difficulty existed in the quagmire of Chat Moss,--an enormous mass of watery pulp, which rose in height in wet, and sank in dry weather like a sponge, and over whose treacherous depths it was pronounced impossible to form a firm road. It was perfect madness to think of such a thing, said the engineers, and none of them would support Stephenson's scheme; but he resolved to see what could be done. Truck-load after truck-load of stuff was emptied into the moss, and still the insatiable bog kept gaping as though it had not had half a feed. The directors, alarmed, would have abandoned the project, had they not been so deeply involved that they were obliged to let Stephenson continue. But he never doubted himself--not for a moment. He only pushed on the works more vigorously; and, before six months were over, the directors found themselves whirling along over the very bog they expected all their capital was to be fruitlessly sunk to the bottom of. Still, no decision had been come to as to whether locomotive or fixed engines were to be adopted; and the Stephensons were still battling bravely in favour of the locomotive against a host of opponents. Robert did his father good service by the able and pithy pamphlets which he wrote on the subject; and at length their perseverance was rewarded by the directors consenting to employ a locomotive, if they could get one that would run at the rate of ten miles an hour, and not weigh more than six tons, including tender; and offering a reward of £500 for the best engine fulfilling these conditions. George Stephenson and his son set to work immediately, and the product of their united skill and ingenuity was the celebrated _Rocket_, which carried off the prize, and attained a speed of twenty-nine miles on the opening day. The practicability and success of the locomotive was now beyond a doubt; from that day forward public opinion began to turn. Of course, for many a long year afterwards there were not wanting numbers of bigoted men of the old school who cried down the new-fangled system, and would hear of no means of transit but the stage-coach and the canal-boat. But shrewd folk, like the old Duke of Bridgewater, whose faculties were sharpened by their pockets being in danger, could not help crying out, "There's mischief in these tram-ways! I wish the canals mayn't suffer;" and, within ten years of the day when the _Rocket_ went puffing triumphantly along the Liverpool and Manchester line, most sensible people had become convinced of the importance of the locomotive railway, and scarcely a principal town in the country but was supplied with a line. The Stephensons had fought a hard fight for their protegé, "rail and wheel," and now they were to reap the fruits of their enterprise and foresight. To nearly all the most important of the new lines George Stephenson acted as engineer; and thus, in the course of two years, above 321 miles of railway were constructed under his superintendence, at a cost of £11,000,000 sterling. Robert at first left his father to attend to the laying out of railways, and directed his attention to the improvement of the locomotive in all its details, experimenting incessantly, and trying now one new device, now another. "It was astonishing," says Mr. Smiles, "to observe the rapidity of the improvements effected,--every engine turned out of Stephenson's workshops exhibiting an advance upon its predecessor in point of speed, power, and working efficiency." By this time George had taken up his residence at Tapton House, near Chesterfield, where he continued to reside for the remainder of his life. Close by were some extensive coal-pits, which he had taken in lease, and from which he supplied London with the first coals sent by railway. He was now a man of wealth and fame, known and honoured throughout his own country, and in many foreign ones, and blessed with many a staunch, true friend. More than once he was offered knighthood by Sir Robert Peel, but declined the honour. As he grew up in years, he gradually abandoned his railway business to the charge of his son, and settled down into a quiet country gentleman of agricultural tastes. He was very fond of gardening and farming, and spent many a long day superintending the operations in the fields. When a boy, he had always been very fond of taming birds and rabbits, and had once had flocks of robins, which, in the hard winter, used to come hopping round his feet for crumbs. And now, in his old age, he had special pets among his dogs and horses, and was proud of his superior breed of rabbits. There was scarcely a nest on his estate that he was not acquainted with; and he used to go round from day to day to look at them, and see that they were kept uninjured. The year before his death he visited Sir Robert Peel at Drayton Manor. Dr. Buckland, the geologist, was of the party. One Sunday, as they were returning from church, they observed a train speeding along the valley in the distance. "Now, Buckland," said Mr. Stephenson, "I have a poser for you. Can you tell me what is the power that is driving that train?" "Well," said the other, "I suppose it is one of your big engines." "But what drives the engine?" "Oh, very likely a canny Newcastle driver." "What do you say to the light of the sun?" "How can that be?" asked the professor. "It is nothing else," said the engineer. "It is light bottled up in the earth for tens of thousands of years--light, absorbed by plants and vegetables, being necessary for the condensation of carbon during the process of their growth, if it be not carbon in another form; and now, after being buried in the earth for long ages in fields of coal, that latent light is again brought forth and liberated, made to work as in that locomotive, for great human purposes." On the 12th of August 1848, this great, good man--one of the truest heroes that ever lived, and one of the greatest benefactors of our country--passed from among us, leaving his son, Robert, to develop and extend the great work of which he had laid the foundation. Among one of the first railways of any extent of which Robert Stephenson had the laying out, was the London and Birmingham; and it is related, as an illustration of his conscientious perseverance in executing the task, that in the course of the examination of the country he walked over the whole of the intervening districts upwards of twenty times. Many other lines, in England and abroad, were executed by him in rapid succession; and it was stated a few years ago, that the lines of railway constructed under his superintendence had involved an outlay of £70,000,000 sterling. The three great works, however, with which his name will always be most intimately associated, and which are the grandest monuments of his genius, are the High Level Bridge at Newcastle, the Britannia Bridge across the Menai Straits, and the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence at Montreal. The first two are sufficiently well known--the one springing across the valley of the Tyne, between the busy towns of Newcastle and Gateshead; the other spanning, in mid air, a wide arm of the sea, at such a height that vessels of large burden in full sail can pass beneath. The third great effort of Robert Stephenson's prolific brain he did not live to see the completion of. The Victoria Bridge at Montreal is constructed on the same principle as the Britannia Bridge, but on a much larger scale. "The Victoria Bridge," says Mr. Smiles, "with its approaches, is only sixty yards short of two miles in length. In its gigantic strength and majestic proportions, there is no structure to compare with it in ancient or modern times. It consists of not less than twenty-five immense tubular bridges joined into one; the great central span being 332 feet, the others, 242 feet in length. The weight of the wrought iron on the bridge is about 10,000 tons, and the piers are of massive stone, containing some 8000 tons each of solid masonry." After the completion of the Britannia Bridge, and again after the opening of the High Level Bridge, Robert Stephenson was offered the honour of knighthood, which, like his father before him, he respectfully declined. In 1857 he received the title of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford; and for many years before his death he represented Whitby in Parliament. He was passionately fond of yachting, and almost immediately after a trip to Norway in the summer of 1859, he was seized with a mortal illness, and died in the beginning of October. On the 14th October he was buried in Westminster, amongst the illustrious dead of England. No man could be more beloved than Robert Stephenson was by a wide circle of friends, and none better deserved it. "In society," writes one who had opportunities of intercourse with him, "he was simply charming and fascinating in the highest degree, from his natural goodness of heart and the genial zest with which he relished life himself and participated its enjoyment with others. He was generous and even princely in his expenditure--not upon himself, but on his friends. On board the _Titania_, or at his house in Gloucester Square, his frequent and numerous guests found his splendid resources at all times converted to their gratification with a grace of hospitality which, although sedulous, was never oppressive. There was nothing of the patron in his manner, or of the Olympic condescension which is sometimes affected by much lesser men. A friend (and how many friends he had!) was at once his equal, and treated with republican freedom, yet with the most high-bred courtesy and happy considerateness.... His payment of half the debt of £6000, which weighed like an incubus on an institution at Newcastle, is generally known; but his private charities were as boundless as his nature was generous, and as quietly performed as that nature was unostentatious. Such, then, was Robert Stephenson, as complete a character in the multifarious relations of life as probably any man has met or will meet in the course of his experience. Not unlike, or rather exceedingly _like_, his father in some respects, especially in the easy, unimposing manner in which he went about his life's work, he was hardly to be accounted his father's inferior, except perhaps in the heroic quality of combativeness. Father and son, independently of each other, and both in conjunction, have left grand and beneficent results to posterity, and both recall to us Monckton Milnes's men of old, who "'Went about their gravest tasks Like noble boys at play.'" III.--THE GROWTH OF RAILWAYS. It was about the year 1818 that Thomas Gray of Nottingham, travelling in the north of England, happened to visit one of the collieries. As he stood watching a train of loaded waggons being propelled by steam along the tram-road which led from the mouth of the pit to the wharf where the coals were shipped, the idea flashed through his mind that the same system was applicable to the ordinary purposes of locomotion. "Why!" he exclaimed to the engineer who was showing him over the place,--"why are there not tram-roads laid down all over England so as to supersede our common roads, and steam engines employed to drag waggons full of goods, and carriages full of passengers along them, instead of horse-power?" "Propose that to the nation," replied his companion, "and see what you will get by it. Why, sir, you would be worried to death for your pains." Gray was not to be balked, however. The idea took firm possession of his mind, and became the one great subject of his thoughts and conversation. He talked about it to everybody whom he met, and who had patience to listen to him, wrote letters and memorials to public men, and afterwards appealed to the people at large. He was laughed at as a whimsical, crochetty fellow, and no one gave any serious attention to his views. Mr. Jones of Gromford Manor, and Mr. Pease of Darlington, also distinguished themselves by their agitation in favour of railways, at a time when they were regarded with suspicion and alarm. The growing trade of Liverpool and Manchester, and other large towns, however, spoke more imperatively and forcibly in favour of the new project than any amount of individual agitation. The means of communication between the various manufacturing towns had fallen far behind their wants; and it was at length felt that some new system must be adopted. The railroad and the locomotive got a trial; and before long the carriers' carts and the stage coaches were driven off the road for want of custom, although the conveyance of goods and passengers throughout the country went on multiplying an hundred-fold. One can fancy the astonishment and awe with which the country-folk watched the progress of the first railway train through their peaceful acres,--how old and young left their work and rushed out to see the marvellous spectacle,--how the "oldest inhabitants" shook their heads, and muttered about changed times,--how the horses in the field trembled with fear, and threw up their heels at their iron rival as it went snorting past--a strange, iron monster, the handicraft of man, able to drag the heaviest burdens, and yet outstrip _Flying Childers_ or _Eclipse_, as fresh at the end of a journey as at the beginning, and never to be tired out by any toil, if only kept in meat and drink. Just as in the days of Charles the First, honest, short-sighted folk prophesied the ruin of the empire and a judgment upon the use of coaches, and bewailed the misfortunes of the hundreds of able-bodied men who would be thrown out of employment; so in the early days of the railroad, great fears were entertained that the horses' occupation would be gone, and that the noble breed would quickly become extinct. There was no measure to the lamentations over the ruin of that great institution of English life--the stage-coach, with its gallant driver and guard, and spanking team. The extension of the railway system is one of the wonders of our time. The few score miles of railroad planted in 1825 have put forth offshoots and branches, till now a mighty net-work of some ten thousand miles in all, is spread over the three kingdoms, with many fresh shoots in bud. Up to the end of 1834, when not a hundred miles of railway were open, the annual average of travellers by coach was some six millions a year; ten years afterwards there were more than four times that number, and to-day the annual average is more than a hundred millions! The number of persons employed upon the working railroads of the United Kingdom amount to about one hundred and thirty thousand, while nearly half as many find employment in the construction of new lines. A few facts, stated by the late Mr. Robert Stephenson, illustrate in a very striking manner the gigantic proportion of the railway system of Great Britain:--The railway has pierced the earth with tunnels to the extent of more than fifty miles, and there are about twelve miles of viaducts in the vicinity of London alone. The earthworks which have been thrown up would measure 550,000,000 cubic yards, beside which St. Paul's would shrink to a pigmy, for it would form a pyramid a mile and a half high, with a base larger than the whole of St. James's Park. Every moment four tons of coal flashes into steam twenty tons of water--as much water as would suffice to supply the domestic and other wants of a town the size of Liverpool, and as much coal as equals half the consumption of the metropolis. The wear and tear is so great that twenty thousand tons of iron have to be replaced annually, and three hundred thousand trees, or as much as five thousand acres could produce, have to be felled for sleepers. When George Stephenson was planning the Liverpool and Manchester line, the directors entreated him, when they went to Parliament, not to talk of going at a faster rate than ten miles an hour, or he "would put a cross on the concern." George was sanguine, however, and spoke of fifteen miles an hour, to the astonishment of the committee, who began to think him crazy. The average speed is now twenty-five miles an hour, and a mile a minute can be done, if need be. The wind is hard pushed to keep ahead of a good engine at its fullest speed.[C] The express trains on the "broad gauge" of the Great Western travel at the rate of fifty-one miles an hour, or forty-three, including stoppages. To attain this rate, a speed of sixty miles an hour is adopted midway between some of the stations, and even seventy miles an hour have been reached in certain experimental trips. The engines on this line can draw a passenger-train weighing one hundred and twenty tons at a speed of sixty miles an hour, the engine and tender themselves weighing an additional fifty-two tons. The ordinary luggage-trains weigh some six hundred tons each. The locomotive, however, goes on the principle that the labourer is worthy of his hire; if it works hard, it eats voraciously. At ordinary mail speed the engine consumes about twenty lbs. of coke per mile; so that, costing £2500 to begin with, and spending an allowance of £2000 a year--as much as an under-secretary of state--the locomotive is rather an extravagant customer--only, it works very hard for the money, and earns it over and over again. With all its strength and size, the locomotive is a much more delicate concern than would be supposed; the 5416 different pieces of which it is composed must be put together as carefully as a watch, and, though guaranteed to go two years without a doctor, exacts the most devoted attention from its guardians to keep it in order. It would fill a volume of huge dimensions to dilate on all the phases of the social revolution which the modern railway has wrought in our own and other countries; how it is daily annihilating time and space, and making the Land's End and John o'Groat's House next door neighbours; rubbing down old prejudices and jealousies, both national and provincial, promoting commerce, developing manufacture, transforming poor little villages into flourishing towns, and industrious towns into mighty cities; carrying civilization into the heart of the jungle and the desert, and, with its twin-brother, the steam-ship, joining hands and hearts in peace and amity all the world over. After the wonders of the last thirty years, who can doubt that our children, at the close of the century, will regard us as little less backward than we now do our fathers at its dawn? FOOTNOTES: [C] The wind is calculated to travel at the rate of eighty-two feet in a second; the pace of a steam-engine, at the rate of sixty miles an hour, would be rather more. The Lighthouse. I.--THE EDDYSTONE. II.--THE BELL ROCK. III.--THE SKERRYVORE. The Lighthouse. "Far in the bosom of the deep, O'er these wild shelves my watch I keep: A ruddy gleam of changeful light, Bound on the dusky brow of night; The seaman bids my lustre hail, And scorns to strike his timorous sail."--SCOTT. I.--THE EDDYSTONE. When worthy Mr. Phillips, the Liverpool Quaker, taking thought in what way he could best benefit his fellow-creatures, built the beacon on the Smalls Rock in 1772, he could hardly have made a happier selection of "a great good to serve and save humanity." There are few enterprises more heroic or beneficent than those connected with the construction and management of lighthouses. From first to last, from the rearing of the column on the rock to the monotonous, nightly vigil in attendance on the lamps--from the setting to the rising of the sun--the valour, intrepidity, and endurance, of all concerned are called into play, and the wild perils and stirring adventures they experience impart to the story of their labours a thrilling and romantic interest. In the case of the Smalls Lighthouse, for instance, Whiteside, the self-taught engineer, and his party of Cornish miners had no sooner landed, and got a long iron shaft worked a few feet into the rock, than a storm arose that drove away their cutter, and kept them clinging with the tenacity of despair to the half-fastened rod for three days and two nights, when the wind fell and the sea calmed, and they were rescued, rather dead than alive, numbed from their long immersion in the water, which rose almost to their necks, and exhausted from want of food. And after the lighthouse had been erected, the engineer and some of his men again found themselves, as a paper in a bottle they had cast into the sea revealed to those on shore, in a "most dangerous and distressed condition on the Smalls," cut off from the mainland by the stormy weather, without fuel, and almost at the end of their stock of food and water--in which alarming situation they had to remain some time before their friends could get out to their relief. Most sea-girt beacons have their own legends of similar perils and fortitude; and the narratives of the erection of the three great lighthouses of Eddystone, Inchcape, and Skerryvore, which may be selected as the types of the rest, are full of incidents as exciting as any "hair breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach." About fourteen miles south from Plymouth, and ten from the Ram's Head, on the Cornish coast, lies a perilous reef of rocks, against which the long rolling swell of the Atlantic waves dashes with appalling force, and breaks up into those swirling eddies from which the reef is named--the Eddystone. Upon these treacherous crags many a gallant vessel has foundered and gone down within sight of the shore it had scarcely quitted or was just about to reach; and situated in the midst of a much frequented track, the rapid succession of calamities at the Eddystone was not long in awakening men's minds to the necessity of some warning light. The exposure of the reef to the wild fury of the Atlantic, and the small extent of the surface of the chief rock, however, rendered the construction of a lighthouse in such a situation a work of great and (as it was long considered) insuperable difficulty. The project was long talked of before any one was found daring enough to attempt the task; and when at length in 1696 Henry Winstanley stepped forward to undertake it, he might have been thought of all others the very last from whose brain so serious a conception would have emanated. The great hobby of his life had been to fill his house at Littlebury, in Essex, with mechanical devices of the most absurd and fantastic kind. If a visitor, retiring to his bedroom, kicked aside an old slipper on the floor, purposely thrown in his way, up started a ghost of hideous form. If, startled at the sight, he fell back into an arm chair placed temptingly at hand, a pair of gigantic arms would instantly spring forth and clasp him a prisoner in their rude embrace. Tired of these disagreeable surprises, the astonished guest perhaps took refuge in the garden, and sought repose in a pleasant arbour by the side of a canal; but he had scarcely seated himself, when he found himself suddenly set adrift on the water, where he floated about till his whimsical host came to his relief. Such was the man who now entered upon one of the most formidable engineering enterprises in the world. Although Winstanley's lighthouse was but a slight affair compared with its successors, it occupied six years in the erection--the frequent rising of the sea over the rock, and the difficulty and danger of passing to and from it greatly retarding the operations, and rendering them practicable only during a short summer season. For ten or fourteen days after a storm had passed, and when all was calm elsewhere, the ground-swell from the Atlantic was often so heavy among these rocks that the waves sprang two hundred feet, and more, in the air, burying the works from sight. The first summer was spent in boring twelve holes in the rock, and fixing therein twelve large irons as a holdfast for the works that were to be reared. The next season saw the commencement of a round pillar, which was to form the steeple of the tower, as well as afford protection to the workmen while at their labours. When Winstanley bade farewell to the rock for that year, the tower had risen to the height of twelve feet; and resuming operations next spring, he built at it till it reached the height of eighty feet. Having got the apartments fit for occupation, and the lantern set up, Winstanley determined to take up his abode there with his men, in order that no time might be lost in going to and from the rock. The first night they spent on the rock a great storm arose, and for eleven days it was impossible to hold any communication with the shore. "Not being acquainted with the height of the sea's rising," writes the architect, "we were almost drowned with wet, and our provisions in as bad a condition, though we worked night and day as much as possible to make shelter for ourselves." The storm abating, they went on shore for a little repose; but soon returning, set to work again with undiminished energy. On the 14th November of the same year (1698), Winstanley lighted his lantern for the first time. A long spell of boisterous weather followed, and it was not till three days before Christmas that they were able to quit their desolate abode, being "almost at the last extremity for want of provisions; but by good Providence then two boats came with provisions and the family that was to take care of the light; and so ended this year's work." It was soon found that the sea rose to a much greater height than had been anticipated, the lantern, although sixty feet above the rock, being often "buried under water." Winstanley was, therefore, under the necessity of enlarging the tower and carrying it to a greater elevation. The fourth season, accordingly, was spent in encasing the tower with fresh outworks, and adding forty feet to its height. This proved too high for its strength to bear; and in the course of three years the winds and waves had made sad havoc in the unstable fabric. In November 1703, Winstanley went out to the rock himself, accompanied by his workmen, to institute the repairs. As he was putting off in the boat from Plymouth, a friend who had for some time before been watching the condition of the lighthouse with much anxiety, mentioned to him his suspicion that it was in a bad way, and could not last long. Winstanley, full of faith in the stability of his work, replied that "he only wished to be there in the greatest storm that ever blew under the face of the heavens, that he might see what effect it would have on his structure." And with these words he shoved off from the beach, and made for the rock. With the last gleams of daylight, before the night fell and shrouded it from view, the tower was seen rising proudly from the midst of the waters. Before the dawn it had disappeared for ever, and the waves were lashing fiercely round the bare bleak ledge of the fatal rock. Poor Winstanley had had his presumptuous wish only too fully realized. The storm of the 26th November was one of the most fearful that ever ravaged our shores. The whole coast suffered severely from its fury, and when the morning came, not a sign remained of the lighthouse, architect, or workmen, save a fragment of chain-cable wedged firmly into a crevice of the rock. The disappearance of the warning light was quickly followed by the wreck of a large homeward-bound man-of-war, and the loss of nearly all her crew, upon the rocks. This first Eddystone lighthouse was a strange, fantastic looking structure, deficient in every element of stability, and the wonder was not that it fell in pieces as it did, but that it was able to withstand so long the boisterous weather of the Channel. But if of little merit as an architect, Winstanley at least deserves respect, as Smeaton remarks, for the heroism he displayed in undertaking "a piece of work that before had been looked on as impossible." For four years the Eddystone remained bare and untenanted, till, in the summer of 1706, the erection of a new lighthouse was commenced under the superintendence of John Rudyerd, by profession a silk-mercer in Ludgate Hill, but by natural genius an engineer of considerable merit. With such skill and energy did he apply himself to the work, that before two summers were over his tower was completed, and its friendly light beamed over the troubled waters and sunken crags. Rudyerd's lighthouse was entirely of wood, weighted at the base by a few courses of mason work, and 92 feet in height. In form, it was a smooth, solid cone of elegant simplicity, unbroken by any of those ornamental outworks, which offered the wind and sea so many points to lay hold of, in Winstanley's whimsical pagoda. Smeaton speaks of Rudyerd's tower as a masterly performance; and had it not been destroyed by fire, forty-six years after its erection, there seems little reason to suppose it might not have been standing to this day,--although no doubt the ravages of the worm in the wood would have demanded frequent repairs. On the 2d December 1755, some fishermen who happened to be on the beach very early in the morning preparing their nets, were startled by the sight of volumes of smoke issuing from the lighthouse. They instantly gave the alarm, and a boat was quickly manned for the relief of the sufferers. It did not reach the rock till about ten o'clock, and the fire had then been raging for eight hours. It was first discovered by the light-keeper upon watch who, going into the lantern about two o'clock in the morning to snuff the candles, found the place filled with smoke. He opened the door of the lantern into the balcony, and a mass of flame immediately burst from the inside of the cupola. He lost no time in seizing the buckets of water kept at hand, and dashing them over the fire, but without effect. His two companions were asleep, and it was some time before they heard his shouts for assistance. When at length they did bestir themselves, all the water in the house was exhausted. The light-keeper--an old man in his ninety-fourth year--urged them to replenish the buckets from the sea; but the difficulty of lowering the buckets to such a depth, and their confusion and terror at the sudden catastrophe and their impending fate, destroyed their presence of mind, and rendered them quite powerless. The old man did his best to prevent the advance of the flames; but, exhausted by the unavailing labour, and severely injured by the melting lead from the roof, he had to desist. As the fire spread from point to point, with rapid strides descending from the summit to the base, the poor wretches fled before it, retreating from room to room, till at last they were driven to seek shelter from the blazing timbers and red hot bars, in a cleft of the rock. There they were found by their preservers, crouching together half dead with suffering and fright. It was with the greatest difficulty that they were got into the boat; and they had no sooner reached the shore than one of them, crazed by the terrors he had undergone, ran away, and was never heard of more. The old man lingered on for a few days in great agony, and died from the injuries he had received. Such was the fate of the second lighthouse on the Eddystone,--one element revenging, as it were, the conquest over another. In spite of the fatality which seemed to attend these lighthouses, the lessees of the Eddystone--for it was then in private hands, and did not come into the hands of the Trinity House till many years after--resolved to make another attempt; and this time they selected as the architect one of the ablest professional men of the day, and with sagacious liberality, adopted his advice to build it of stone and granite. Smeaton truly belonged to the class of heaven-born engineers. From his earliest years the bent of his genius unmistakably revealed itself. Before he was six years old, he one day terrified his parents by climbing to the top of a barn to fix up some contrivance he had put together, after the fashion of a windmill; and another time he constructed a pump that raised water, after watching some workmen sinking one. And as he grew older, his efforts took a more ambitious range, and were all equally remarkable for their originality and success. His father destined him for the bar; but his inclination for engineering was so irresistible, that he allowed him to resign all chance of the woolsack, and set up in business as a mathematical instrument maker. He gradually advanced to the profession of civil engineering,--which he was the first man in England to pursue, and which he may be said to have created. It was in 1756 he commenced the construction of the great work which may be regarded as the monument of his fame. Having decided that his lighthouse should be of stone, the next point to be settled was its form. His thoughts, he tells us in his book, instinctively reverted to the analogy between a lighthouse shaft and the trunk of a stately oak. He remarked the spreading roots taking a broad, firm grip of the soil, the rise of the swelling base, gradually lessening in girth in a graceful curve, till a preparation being required for the support of the spreading boughs, a renewed swelling of diameter takes place; and he held that cutting off the branches we have, in the trunk of an oak, a type of such a lighthouse column as is best adapted to resist the influence of the winds and waves. Whether or not Smeaton arrived at the form of his lighthouse, which has since become the model for all others, from this fanciful analogy, its appearance rising from the rock presents a strong resemblance to a noble tree stripped of its boughs and foliage. Smeaton commenced the undertaking by visiting the rock in the spring of 1756, accurately measuring its very irregular surface, and in order to ensure exactness in his plans, making a model of it. In the summer of the same year he prepared the foundation by cutting the surface of the rock in regular steps or trenches, into which the blocks of stone were to be dovetailed. The first stone was laid in June 1757, and the last in August 1759. Of that period there were only 431 days when it was possible to stand on the rock, and so small a portion even of these was available for carrying on the work, that it is calculated the building in reality occupied but six weeks. The whole was completed without the slightest accident to any one; and so well were all the arrangements made, that not a minute was lost by confusion or delay amongst the workmen. The tower measures 86 feet in height, and 26 feet in diameter at the level of the first entire course, the diameter under the cornice being only 15 feet. The first twelve feet of the structure form a solid mass of masonry,--the blocks of stone being held together by means of stone joggles, dovetailed joints, and oaken tree-nails. All the floors of the edifice are arched; to counteract the possible outburst of which, Smeaton bound the courses of his stone work together by belts of iron chain, which, being set in grooves while in a heated state, by the application of hot lead, on cooling, of course, tightened their clasp on the tower. Throughout the whole work the greatest ingenuity is displayed in obtaining the greatest amount of resistance, and combining the two great principles of strength and weight,--technically speaking, cohesion and inertia. On the 16th October 1759, the warning light once more, after an interval of four years, shone forth over the troubled waters from the dangerous rock; but it was but a feeble illumination at the best, for it came from only a group of tallow candles. It was better than nothing, certainly; but the exhibition of a few glimmering candles was but a paltry conclusion to so stupendous an undertaking. For many years, however, no stronger light gleamed from the tower, till, in 1807, when it passed from the hands of private proprietors into the charge of the Trinity House, the mutton dips were supplanted by Argand burners, with silvered copper reflectors. Imperfect, however, as used to be the lighting apparatus, the Eddystone Beacon has always been a great boon to all those "that go down to the sea in great ships," and has robbed these perilous waters of much of their terror. We can readily sympathize with the exultation of the great engineer who reared it, when standing on the Hoe at Plymouth, he spent many an hour, with his telescope, watching the great swollen waves, in powerless fury, dash against his tower, and "fly up in a white column, enwrapping it like a sheet, rising at the least to double the height of the tower, and totally intercepting it from sight." It is now more than a hundred years since Smeaton's Lighthouse first rose upon the Eddystone; but, in spite of the many furious storms which have put its stability to rude and searching proof, it still lifts its head proudly over the waves, and shows no signs of failing strength. II.--THE BELL ROCK. The Inch Cape, or Bell Rock, is a long, narrow reef on the east coast of Scotland, at the mouth of the Frith of Tay, and some dozen of miles from the nearest land. At high water the whole ledge is buried out of sight; and even at the ebb the highest part of it is only three or four feet out of the water. In the days of old, as the tradition goes, one of the abbots of Arbroath, among many good works, exhibited his piety and humanity by placing upon a float attached to the perilous reef a large bell, so suspended as to be tolled by the rising and falling of the waves. "On a buoy, in the storm it floated and swung, And over the waves its warning rung." Many a storm-tossed mariner heard the friendly knell that warned him of the nearness of the fatal rock, and changed his course before it was too late, with blessings on the good old monk who had hung up the bell; but after some years, one of the pirates who infested the coast cut it down in wanton cruelty, and was one of the first who suffered from the loss. Not long after, he perished upon this very rock, which a dense fog shrouded from sight, and no bell gave timely warning of. "And even in his dying fear, One dreadful sound did the rover hear; A sound as if with the Inch Cape Bell, The devil below was ringing his knell." After the lapse of many years, two attempts were made to raise a beacon of spars upon the rock; but one after the other they fell a prey to the angry waves, and were hardly set up before they disappeared. It was not till the beginning of the century that the Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses took up the idea of erecting a lighthouse on this reef, the most dangerous on all the coast. Several years elapsed before they got the sanction of Parliament to the undertaking, and 1807 arrived before it was actually entered upon. Mr. Robert Stevenson, to whom the work was intrusted as engineer, had from a very early age been employed in connection with lighthouses. He went almost directly from school to the office of Mr. Thomas Smith of Edinburgh, and when that gentleman was appointed engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Commissioners, became his assistant, and afterwards successor. When only nineteen, Mr. Stevenson superintended the construction of the lighthouse on the island of Little Cumbray; and during the time he was engineer to the Commissioners, which post he held till 1842, he erected no fewer than forty-two lighthouses, and introduced a great many valuable improvements into the system. His reputation, however, will be chiefly perpetuated as the architect of the Bell Rock Lighthouse. On the 17th August 1807, Mr. Stevenson and his men landed on the rock, to the astonishment and discomposure of the seals who had, from time immemorial, been in undisturbed possession of it, and now floundered off into the water on the approach of the usurpers. The workmen at once set about preparing the rock for the erection of a temporary pyramid on which a barrack-house was to be placed for the reception of the workmen. They could only work on the rock for a few hours at spring-tide. As soon as the flood-tide began to rise around them, putting out the fire of the smith's forge, and gradually covering the rock, they had to gather up their tools and retreat to a floating barrack moored at a considerable distance, in order to reach which they had to row in small boats to the tender, by which they were then conveyed to their quarters. The operations of this first season were particularly trying to the men, on account of their having to row backwards and forwards between the rock and the tender at every tide, which in rough weather was a very heavy pull, and having often after that to work on the rock knee deep in water, only quitting it for the boats when absolutely compelled by the swelling waves. Sometimes the sea would be so fierce for days together that no boat could live in it, and the men had, therefore, to remain cooped up wearily on board the floating barrack. One day in September, when the engineer and thirty-one men were on the rock, the tender broke from its moorings, and began to drift away from the rock, just as the tide was rising. Mr. Stevenson, perched on an eminence above the rest, surveying them at their labours, was the first, and for a while, the men being all intent on their work, the only one, who observed what had happened. He said nothing, but went to the highest point of the rock, and kept an anxious watch on the progress of the vessel and the rising of the sea. First the men on the lower tier of the works, then by degrees those above them, struck work on the approach of the water. They gathered up their tools and made towards the spot where the boats were moored, to get their jackets and stockings and prepare for quitting the rock. What their feelings were when they found only a couple of boats there, and the tender drifting off with the other in tow, may be conceived. All the peril of their situation must have flashed across their minds as they looked across the raging sea, and saw the distance between the tender and the rock increasing every moment, while all around them the water rose higher and higher. In another hour, the waves would be rolling twelve feet and more above the crag on which they stood, and all hope of the tender being able to work round to them was being quickly dissipated. They watched the fleeting vessel and the rising tide, and their hearts sank within them, but not a word was uttered. They stood silently counting their numbers and calculating the capacity of the boats; and then they turned their eyes upon their trusted leader, as if their last hope lay in his counsel. Stevenson never forgot the appalling solemnity of the moment. One chance, and but a slender one, of escape alone occurred to him. It was that, stripping themselves of their clothes, and divesting the two boats, as much as possible, of everything that weighted and encumbered them, so many men should take their seats in the boats, while the others hung on by the gunwales; and that they should then work their way, as best they could, towards either the tender or the floating barrack. Stevenson was about to explain this to his men, but found that all power of speech had left him. The anxiety of that dreadful moment had parched his throat, and his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. He stooped to one of the little pools at his feet to moisten his fevered lips with the salt water. Suddenly a shout was raised, "A boat! A boat!" and through the haze a large pilot boat could dimly be discerned making towards the rock. The pilot had observed the _Smeaton_ drifting off, and, guessing at once the critical position of the workmen on the rock, had hastened to their relief. Next morning when the bell sounded on board the barrack for the return to the rock, only eight out of the twenty-six workmen, beside the foreman and seamen, made their appearance on deck to accompany their leader. Mr. Stevenson saw it would be useless to argue with them then. So he made no remark, and proceeded with the eight willing workmen to the rock, where they spent four hours at work. On returning to the barrack, the eighteen men who had remained on board appeared quite ashamed of their cowardice; and without a word being said to them, were the first to take their places in the boats when the bell rang again in the afternoon. At length the barrack was completed, and the men were then relieved from the toil of rowing backwards and forwards between the tender and the rock, as well as from the constant sickness which tormented them on board the floating barrack. They were now able to prolong their labours, when the tide permitted, into the night. At such times the rock assumed a singularly picturesque and romantic aspect--its surface crowded with men in all variety of attitudes, the two forges and numerous torches lighting up the scene, and throwing a lurid gleam across the waters, and the loud dong of the anvils mingling with the dashing of the breakers. On the 18th July 1808, the site having been properly excavated, the first stone of the lighthouse was laid by the Duke of Argyle; and by the end of the second season some five or six feet of building had been erected, and were left to the mercy of the waves till the ensuing spring. The third season's operations raised the masonry to a height of thirty feet above the sea, and the fourth season saw the completion of the tower. On the first night in February of the succeeding year (1811) the lamp was lit, and beamed forth across the waters. The Bell Rock Tower is 100 feet in height, 42 feet in diameter at the base, and 15 feet at the top. The door is 30 feet from the base, and the ascent is by a massive bronze ladder. The "light" is revolving, and presents a white and red light alternately, by means of shades of red glass arranged in a frame. The machinery which causes the revolution of the lamp is also applied to the tolling of two large bells, in order to give warning to the mariner of his approach to the rock in foggy weather, thus reviving the traditional practice from which the rock takes its name. III.--THE SKERRYVORE. "Having crept upon deck about four in the morning, I find we are beating to windward off the Isle of Tyree, with the determination on the part of Mr. Stevenson that his constituents should visit a reef of rocks called Skerry Vhor, where he thought it would be essential to have a lighthouse. Loud remonstrances on the part of the commissioners, who one and all declare they will subscribe to his opinion, whatever it may be, rather than continue this dreadful buffeting. Quiet perseverance on the part of Mr. Stevenson, and great kicking, bouncing, and squabbling upon that of the yacht, who seems to like the idea of Skerry Vhor as little as the commissioners. At length, by dint of exertion, came in sight of this long range of rocks (chiefly under water), on which the tide breaks in a most tremendous style. There appear a few low broad rocks at one end of the reef which is about a mile in length. These are never entirely under water, though the surf dashes over them. We took possession of it in the name of the commissioners, and generously bestowed our own great names on its crags and creeks. The rock was carefully measured by Mr. Stevenson. It will be a most desolate position for a lighthouse--the Bell Rock and Eddystone a joke to it, for the nearest land is the wild island of Tyree, at 14 miles distance." Such is an entry in the diary of Sir Walter Scott's Yacht Tour, on the 27th August 1814; but although the necessity of a lighthouse on the Skerry Vhor, or, as it is now generally called, Skerryvore, was fully acknowledged by the authorities, it was not till twenty-four years afterwards that the undertaking was actually commenced, under the superintendence of Mr. Alan Stevenson, the son of the eminent engineer who erected the Bell Rock Lighthouse. In the execution of this great work, if the son had, as compared with his father, certain advantages in his favour, he had also various disadvantages to contend with at Skerryvore from which the engineer of the Bell Rock was free. Mr. Alan Stevenson had steam power at his command, and the benefit of all the experience derived from the experiments of his predecessors in similar operations; but at the same time, the rock on which he had to work was at a greater distance from the land, and separated from it by a more dangerous passage than that of either the Bell or the Eddystone; and the geological formation of which the rock is composed, was much more difficult to work upon. The Skerryvore is distant from Tyree, the nearest inhabited island, about 11 miles; even in fine weather the intervening passage is a trying one, and in rough weather no ship can live in such a sea, studded as it is with treacherous rocks. The sandstone of the Bell Rock is worn into rugged inequalities, which favoured the operations of the engineer; but the action of the waves on the igneous formation of the Skerryvore has given it all the smoothness and slippery polish of a mass of dark coloured glass. Indeed, the foreman of the masons, on first visiting the rock, not unjustly compared the operation of ascending it to that of "climbing up the neck of a bottle." The 7th August 1838 was the first day of entire work on the rock, and with succeeding ones was spent in the erection of a temporary barrack of wood, for the men to lodge in on the rock. It was completed before the season closed; but one of the first heavy gales in November wrenched it from its holdings, and swept it into the sea, leaving nothing to mark the site but a few broken and twisted stanchions, attached to one of which was a portion of a great beam which had been shaken and rent, by dashing against the rocks, into a bundle of ribands. Thus in one night were obliterated the results of a whole season's toil, and with them, the hopes the men cherished of having a dwelling on the rock, instead of on board the brig, where they suffered intensely from the miseries of constant sickness. The excavation of the foundations occupied the whole of the summer season of 1839, from the 6th May to the 3d September. The hard, nitrified rock held out stoutly against the assaults of both iron and gunpowder; and much time was spent in hollowing out the basin in which the lighthouse was to be fixed. From the limited extent of the rock and the absence of any place of shelter, the blasting was an operation of considerable danger, as the men had no place to run to, and it had to be managed with great caution. Only a small portion of the rock could be blown up at a time, and care had to be taken to cover the part over with mats and nettings made of old rope to check the flight of the stones. The excavation of the flinty mass occupied nearly two summers. The operations of 1840 included, much to the delight of the workmen, the reconstruction of the barrack, to which they were glad to remove from the tossing vessel. The second edifice was more substantial than the first, and proved more enduring. Rude and narrow as it was, it offered, after the discomforts of the vessel, almost a luxurious lodging to its hardy inmates. "Packed 40 feet above the weather-beaten rock, in this singular abode," writes the engineer, Mr. Alan Stevenson, "with a goodly company of thirty men, I have spent many a weary day and night, at those times when the sea prevented any one going down to the rock, anxiously looking for supplies from the shore, and earnestly longing for a change of weather favourable to the recommencement of the works. For miles around nothing could be seen but white foaming breakers, and nothing heard but howling winds and lashing waves. Our slumbers, too, were at times fearfully interrupted by the sudden pouring of the sea over the roof, the rocking of the house on its pillars, and the spurting of water through the seams of the doors and windows; symptoms which, to one suddenly aroused from sound sleep, recalled the appalling fate of the former barrack, which had been engulphed in the foam not twenty yards from our dwelling, and for a moment seemed to summon us to a similar fate. On two occasions in particular, these sensations were so vivid as to cause almost every one to spring out of bed; and some of the men fled from the barrack by a temporary gangway to the more stable, but less comfortable shelter afforded by the bare walls of the lighthouse tower, then unfinished, where they spent the remainder of the night in the darkness and the cold." In spite of their anxiety to get on with the work, and their intrepidity in availing themselves of every opportunity, these gallant men were often forced by stress of weather into an inactivity which we may be sure they felt sadly irksome and against the grain. "At such seasons," says Mr. Stevenson, "much of our time was spent in bed, for there alone we had effectual shelter from the winds and the spray which reached every cranny in the walls of our barrack." On one occasion they were for fourteen days without communication with the shore, and when at length the seas subsided, and they were able to make the signal to Tyree that a landing at the rock was practicable, scarcely twenty-four hours' stock of provisions remained on the rock. In spite of hardships and perils, however, the engineer declares that "life on the Skerryvore Rock was by no means destitute of its peculiar pleasures. The grandeur of the ocean's rage--the deep murmur of the waves--the hoarse cry of the sea birds, which wheeled continually over us, especially at our meals--the low moaning of the wind--or the gorgeous brightness of a glossy sea and a cloudless sky--and the solemn stillness of a deep blue vault, studded with stars, or cheered by the splendours of the full moon,--were the phases of external things that often arrested our thoughts in a situation where, with all the bustle that sometimes prevailed, there was necessarily so much time for reflection. Those changes, together with the continual succession of hopes and fears connected with the important work in which we were engaged, and the oft recurring calls for advice or direction, as well as occasional hours devoted to reading and correspondence, and the pleasures of news from home, were more than sufficient to reconcile me to--nay, to make me really enjoy--an uninterrupted residence, on one occasion, of not less than five weeks on that desert rock." The Skerryvore Lighthouse was at length successfully completed. The height of the tower is 138 feet 6 inches, of which the first 26 feet is solid. It contains a mass of stone work of more than double the quantity of the Bell Rock, and nearly five times that of the Eddystone. The entire cost, including steam tug and the building of a small harbour at Hynish for the reception of the little vessel that now attends the lighthouse, was £86,977. The light is revolving, and reaches its brightest state once every minute. It is produced by the revolution of eight great annular lenses around a central light, with four wicks, and can be seen from the deck of a vessel at the distance of 18 miles. Mr. Alan Stevenson sums up his deeply interesting narrative in the following words: "In such a situation as the Skerryvore, innumerable delays and disappointments were to be expected by those engaged in the work; and the entire loss of the fruit of the first season's labour in the course of a few hours, was a good lesson in the school of patience, and of trust in something better than an arm of flesh. During our progress, also, cranes and other materials were swept away by the waves; vessels were driven by sudden gales to seek shelter at a distance from the rocky shores of Mull and Tyree; and the workmen were left on the rock desponding and idle, and destitute of many of the comforts with which a more roomy and sheltered dwelling, in the neighbourhood of friends, is generally connected. Daily risks were run in landing on the rock in a heavy surf, in blasting the splintery gneiss, or by the falling of heavy bodies from the tower on a narrow space below, to which so many persons were necessarily confined. Yet had we not any loss of either life or limb; and although our labours were prolonged from dawn to night, and our provisions were chiefly salt, the health of the people, with the exception of a few slight cases of dysentery, was generally good throughout the six successive summers of our sojourn on the rock. The close of the work was welcomed with thankfulness by all engaged in it; and our remarkable preservation was viewed, even by many of the most thoughtless, as, in a peculiar manner, the gracious work of Him by whom the very hairs of our heads are all numbered!" Steam Navigation. I.--JAMES SYMINGTON. II.--ROBERT FULTON. III.--HENRY BELL. IV.--OCEAN STEAMERS. Steam Navigation. I.--JAMES SYMINGTON. Of the many triumphs of enterprise achieved by the agency of that tremendous power which James Watt tamed and put in harness for his race, perhaps the greatest and most momentous is that which has reversed the old proverb, that "time and tide wait for no man," given ten-fold meaning to the truth that "seas but join the regions they divide," and enabled our ships to dash across the trackless deep in spite of opposing elements,-- "Against wind, against tide, Steadying with upright keel," in a fraction of the time, and with a fraction of the cost and peril of the old mode of naval locomotion. How amply realized has been James Bell's prediction more than half a century ago, "I will venture to affirm that history does not afford an instance of such rapid improvement in commerce and civilization, as that which will be effected by steam vessels!" Towards the close of the last century, a number of ingenious minds were in travail with the scheme of steam navigation. The Marquis de Jouffroy in France, and Fitch and Rumsey in America, were successful in experiments of its feasibility; but it is to the efforts of Miller and Symington in Scotland, followed up by those of Fulton and Bell, that we are chiefly and more immediately indebted for the practical development of the project. Having a natural bent for mechanical contrivances, and abundance of leisure and money to indulge his tastes, Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, in Dumfriesshire, somewhere about the year 1785, was full of schemes for driving ships by means of paddle-wheels,--by no means a novel idea, for it was known to the Romans, if not to the Egyptians, and had often been tried before. All he aimed at originally was, to turn the wheels by the power of men or horses; and this he managed to do successfully enough. Single, double, and treble boats were often to be seen driving along Dalswinton Lake, moved by paddle-wheels instead of oars. On one occasion, at Leith, one of the double boats, sixty feet long, propelled by two wheels, each of which was turned by a couple of men, was matched against a Custom-house boat, which was reckoned a fast sailer. The paddle-wheels did duty very well; but the men were soon knocked up with turning them, and the want of some other motive power was strongly felt. A young man named Taylor, who was tutor to Mr. Miller's boys, is said to have suggested the use of steam; but whether this be so or not, it was not till Miller met with James Symington that the idea assumed a practical form. In 1786 James Symington, then joint-engineer with his brother George, to the Wanlockhead Mines, was struck with the idea which, as we have seen, several other ingenious minds were also busy with about the same time,--of rendering the steam-engine available for locomotion both on land and sea. After much study and reflection, he succeeded in embodying the idea in a working model. It was supported on four wheels, which were moved in any direction by means of a small steam-engine, and could carry 16 cwt., besides coals, water, &c. It was exhibited in Edinburgh in the summer of 1786, and made a considerable sensation. Mr. Miller, fond of all such inventions, did not fail to get a sight of Symington's locomotive engine, the first time he was in town. He was delighted with its ingenuity and completeness, and procured an interview with the author. Of course, Miller was full of his own experiments, and told Symington the whole story of his efforts to propel vessels by paddle-wheels, and the want of some stronger, and more constant power than that of men to turn the capstan, upon which the motion of the wheels depended. Symington at once expressed the opinion he had formed,--that steam was equally available for vessels as for carriages, and showed him how the steam-engine which he had devised for his locomotive could be applied to the paddle-wheels. Miller was so much struck by his statements, which he illustrated by reference to the model, that he determined to have an engine made on the same plan, and fitted into one of his double boats. Accordingly, an engine was built under Symington's directions and superintendence, sent to Dalswinton, and put together in October 1788. The engine, in a strong oak frame, was placed in the one half of a double pleasure-boat, the boiler occupying the other half, and the paddle-wheels being fixed in the middle. The autumn was withering into winter, the yellow leaves were swirling to the ground with every little breath of wind, and the boughs were beginning to show forth bare and grim, when the little boat was launched upon the bosom of Dalswinton Loch. At length all the preparations were finished, and on the 14th November Mr. Miller had the delight of seeing the vessel gliding over the mimic waves of the lake at the rate of five miles an hour. The company on board the boat on that memorable occasion were--Mr. Miller himself, of course, nervous with pleasure and exultation; Taylor, the tutor; Alexander Nasmyth (the well-known landscape painter, and father of the man who, in the next generation, was to invent the wonderful steam-hammer, that knocks masses of iron about like putty, and can yet so moderate its force as to crack a nut without bruising the kernel); a brisk stripling with strongly marked features, by name Harry Brougham, afterwards to be Lord Chancellor of England, and perhaps the most many-sided genius of his time; and--last and greatest of the group--there was one of Mr. Miller's tenants, the farmer of Ellisland,--Robert Burns, the great bard of Scotland, enjoying to the full, no doubt, the novelty of the expedition, but, we must suppose, unconscious of its import and grand future consequences, since he has accorded it no commemorative verse. "Many a time," says Mr. James Nasmyth, son of the distinguished painter, "I have heard my father describe the delight which this first and successful essay at steam navigation yielded the party in question. I only wish Burns had immortalized it in fit, clinking rhyme, for, indeed, it was a subject worthy of his highest muse." The experiment was next tried on a large scale with a canal boat, on the Forth and Clyde Canal, but one of the wheels broke. Not to be balked, Symington had stronger wheels made, and the next time the steam was put on, the vessel went off at the rate of seven miles an hour. The experiment was several times repeated with success. The vessel, however, was so slight, that many more trips would have knocked it to pieces; and it was therefore dismantled. The fitting up of these vessels, and the working of them, formed a heavy drain upon Mr. Miller's purse; and having laid satisfactory proof before the world that the thing could be done, he relinquished the enterprise, and left it to be worked out by others. Just then, however, no one came forward to fill his place; and for some years the idea slumbered. In 1801 Symington could not afford to indulge in further efforts at his own expense, but he found a patron in Lord Dundas, who commissioned him to construct a steam-tug for dragging canal boats. A stout, serviceable tug was built; and a series of experiments entered upon to test her efficiency, which cost upwards of £3000. One bleak, stormy spring-day in 1802, the people on the banks of the Forth and Clyde Canal might have been seen staring with wonder, at the short, stumpy little tug pushing gallantly on at the rate of three or four miles an hour, with a strong wind right in her teeth, that no other vessel could make head against, and two loaded vessels (each of more than 70 tons burden) in tow. By itself, the tug could do six miles an hour without any great strain. The company made some objection, however, about the banks of the canal being injured, and the tug fell into disuse. It served an important end, though, in giving both Fulton and Bell a basis for their operations, and must be considered the parent of our modern steam-craft. II.--ROBERT FULTON. After Dr. Cartwright, the inventor of the power-loom, had retired penniless from his manufacturing enterprises, and had taken up his abode in London, one of the constant visitors at his modest residence in Marylebone Fields, was a thin, sharp-featured American, about twenty-eight years of age, an artist by profession, and formerly student of Benjamin West, who, however, was now much more interested in the art of engineering than the art of painting. From an early age he had shown a taste for mechanics, and was fond of spending his play-hours at school loitering about workshops and factories, watching the men at their work, and studying the machines and instruments they used. This sojourn in England had brought him into contact with the Duke of Bridgewater, the great canal projector, and Lord Stanhope, well known for his improvements in the printing press and other contrivances, in whose company his boyish bent towards mechanics was revived, and became quite a passion with him. He threw aside his brushes and palette, and applied himself to his favourite pursuit with heart and soul. Having formed the acquaintance of Cartwright, he became a daily visitor at his house, and the enthusiastic, good-natured doctor and he would sit debating for hours the great problem: "Whether it were practicable to move vessels by steam?" Fulton, eager, restless, vivacious, with pencil in hand, was perpetually sketching plans of paddle-wheels; while the doctor, calm, dignified, and earnest, equally engrossed in the subject, was contriving various modes of bringing steam to act upon them. Neither of them had any doubt that the thing could be done, but the "how" long baffled them; and even though the doctor constructed "the model of a boat, which, being wound up like a clock, moved on the water in a highly satisfactory manner," nothing practical came of their cogitations till some years after. While on a visit to Paris, Fulton was struck with the injury which standing navies of men-of-war inflicted on the mercantile marine, and gave his whole attention, as he says, "to find out the means of destroying such engines of oppression, by some method which would put it out of the power of any nation to maintain such a system, and compel every government to adopt the simple principles of education, industry, and a free circulation of its produce." The means presented itself to his mind in the shape of an explosive shell, called the torpedo, by which any ship of war could be blown to pieces; and for six or seven years he occupied himself in fruitless attempts to get first the government of France, and then that of England, to take up his project. He did not abandon his schemes with regard to steam-vessels, however; but, under the auspices of Mr. Livingstone, the American ambassador, made several experiments. One vessel of considerable size broke through the middle when the engines were placed on board, but a second one was rather more successful, though but a slow rate of movement was attained. His project came under the notice of Napoleon, then First Consul, who did not fail to appreciate its value. "It was," he said, "capable of changing the face of the world;" and he directed a commission to inquire into its merits. Nothing came of it, however. Shortly after, Fulton visited Scotland, and got an introduction to Symington, whom he pressed for a sight of his boat. Symington generously consented, and gave him a short sail on board the steam-tug. Fulton made no concealment of his intention of starting steamboats in his own country, whither he was about to return, and asked Symington to allow him to make a few notes of his observations on board. Symington had no objections; and, therefore, he says, "Fulton pulled out a memorandum book, and after putting several pointed questions respecting the general construction and effect of the machine, which I answered in a most explicit manner, he jotted down particularly everything then described, with his own remarks upon the boat while moving with him on board along the canal." Fulton was very liberal in his promises not to forget his assistance, if he got steamboats established in America; but Symington never heard anything more of him. Fulton was at New York in 1806, and busy getting a steamboat put together. It was a costly undertaking, and he had little spare cash of his own; so he offered shares in the concern to his friends, but no one would have anything to do with so ridiculous a scheme, as they thought. "My friends," says Fulton, "were civil, but shy. They listened with patience to my explanations, but with a settled cast of incredulity on their countenances. I felt the full force of the lamentation of the poet,-- 'Truths would you teach, to save a sinking land, All shun, none aid you, and few understand.' As I had occasion to pass daily to and from the building-yard while my boat was in progress, I have often loitered, unknown, near the idle groups of strangers, gathering in little circles, and heard various inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh rose at my expense, the dry jest, the wise calculation of losses and expenditure, the dull, but endless repetition of 'the Fulton Folly.' Never did a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, or a warm wish, cross my path." Let them laugh that win. The success which shortly attended Fulton's scheme turned the tables upon those who had mocked at him. The _Clermont_ was completed in August 1807, and the day arrived when the trial was to be made on the Hudson river. "To me," wrote Fulton, "it was a most trying and interesting occasion. I wanted some friends to go on board to witness the first successful trip. Many of them did me the favour to attend as a mark of personal respect; but it was manifest they did it with reluctance, fearing to be partners of my mortification, and not of my triumph. The moment arrived in which the word was to be given for the vessel to move. My friends were in groups on the deck. There was anxiety mixed with fear among them. They were silent, sad, and weary. I read in their looks nothing but disaster, and almost repented of my efforts. The signal was given, and the boat moved on a short distance, and then stopped and became immovable. To the silence of the preceding moment now succeeded murmurs of discontent and agitation, and whispers and shrugs. I could hear distinctly repeated--'I told you so; it is a foolish scheme; I wish we were well out of it.' I elevated myself on a platform, and stated that I knew not what was the matter; but if they would be quiet, and indulge me for half an hour, I would either go on or abandon the voyage. I went below, and discovered that a slight misadjustment was the cause. It was obviated. The boat went on; we left New York; we passed through the Highlands; we reached Albany! Yet even their imagination superseded the force of fact. It was doubted if it could be done again, or if it could be made, in any case, of any great value." The simple-minded country folk on the banks of the Hudson were almost frightened out of their wits at the awful apparition which they saw gliding along the river, and which, especially when seen indistinctly looming through the night, looked to their bewildered eyes, "a monster moving on the water, defying the winds and tide, and breathing flames and smoke." Pine-wood was used for fuel, and whenever the fire was stirred, a great burst of sparks issued from the chimney. "This uncommon light," says Colden, the biographer of Fulton, "first attracted the attention of the crews of other vessels. Notwithstanding the wind and tide were adverse to its approach, they saw with astonishment that it was rapidly coming towards them; and when it came so near that the noise of the machinery and paddles were heard, the crews in some instances shrunk beneath their decks from the terrific sight, and others left their vessels to go on shore; while others, again, prostrated themselves, and besought Providence to protect them from the approach of the horrible monster which was marching on the tides, and lighting its path by the fires which it vomited." With the novelty of the spectacle its terror died away, and people soon got tired of rushing out to see the remarkable machine that had once seemed so miraculous to them. The _Clermont_ soon began to travel regularly as a passage-boat between Albany and New York, other steam-vessels were constructed on its model, and by degrees the steam marine of America grew into the host it is at present. Thirty years after the first experiment on the Hudson, it was calculated 1300 steamboats had been built in the States. Fulton did not live long to enjoy his triumphs. He died in 1815, having been actively engaged in promoting steam navigation to his last hours. III.--HENRY BELL. The honour which in America attached to Fulton as the man who first brought the steamboat into use, and to the River Hudson as being the scene of the experiment, in our own country fell (in a somewhat less degree, being subsequent), to Henry Bell, and the River Clyde. Brought up as a millwright, Bell, from want of funds to start in business, was obliged for many years to gain his living as a common carpenter in Glasgow, where he was noted among the trade as being very fond of "schemes," and suspected on that account by narrow-minded folk of being not very reliable in the lower branches of his craft. Scheme after scheme issued from his fertile mind; but he was rash and hasty in working them out, and few proved of much worth. Steam navigation being one of the vexed problems of the time, had every fascination for his peculiar genius; and he seems to have been brooding over it as the last century was closing, and the present opening upon the world. When Fulton visited Symington's invention, Bell appears to have accompanied him, and to have afterwards corresponded with him on the subject. "This," he says, "led me to think of the absurdity of writing my opinions to other countries, and not putting it in practice myself in my own country; and from these considerations I was roused to set on foot a steamboat, for which I made a number of different models before I was satisfied." Having removed to the little village of Helensburgh, on the banks of the Clyde, and there established a hotel and bath-house, which his wife managed, he endeavoured to work the passage-boats by which visitors were brought to the place, by means of paddle-wheels worked by the hand, instead of oars; but the plan did not succeed very well, for the same reason that led to Mr. Miller's abandonment of it--the inefficiency of manual power, which could not be applied with sufficiently sustained and continuous force. He therefore gave it up, and turned his attention to the employment of steam power for the same purpose. Of course, he was laughed at for his pains; and Henry Bell's project for having steamers on the Clyde became a standing joke among the frequenters of the watering-place. Even after the permanent success of Fulton's scheme was known, people would not moderate their incredulity; but Bell's faith, which had never wavered, was now confirmed, and he set about the work with redoubled energy. In 1811, Bell, having procured the necessary funds, had a steam-boat built of twenty-five tons and four horse power. He named it the _Comet_, because a comet had just then appeared in the north-west of Scotland. The _Comet_ began to run regularly between Glasgow and Helensburgh in January 1812, and continued to ply successfully during the summer of that year. At first, however, she brought rather loss than gain to her projector. People were shy of trusting themselves on board, and parties interested in the stage-coaches and sailing vessels, spread all sorts of absurd reports about her. It was not till she had gone for some time without accident, that tourists began to think they might as well save their money and their time by patronizing the new mode of conveyance. In the second year Bell took the _Comet_ off the Clyde, and sent her on a tour round the open coasts of the three kingdoms. Before long the safety and utility of steam navigation was admitted on all hands, and numerous rival enterprises were on foot. In 1820 the _Comet_ was lost between Glasgow and Fort William; and in the following year another of Bell's vessels was burnt to the water-edge--two misfortunes that carried £3000 out of his pocket. His rivals, with abundant capital, soon drove him out of the field, and Bell sank into poverty and neglect. A small annuity from the Clyde trustees, and a subscription among his friends, to keep him from starving, were all the rewards he ever received for his enterprise and perseverance. He died in 1830 in the sixty-fourth year of his age. IV.--OCEAN STEAMERS. In the quarter of a century which elapsed between 1812, when the _Comet_ first began to churn the waters of the Clyde, and 1837, steam navigation progressed steadily and surely. At first, content with plying along rivers and quiet bays, steamers by-and-by ventured out upon the open sea. We owe the regular establishment of deep-sea packets to the courage and enterprise of Mr. David Napier of Glasgow, "who," says Mr. Scott Russell, "has effected more for the improvement of steam navigation than any other man." He was quick to appreciate the capabilities of steam-vessels, and saw that they were fit for something more than mere inland voyages. Before starting one of them upon the open sea, however, he carefully estimated the danger to be encountered and the difficulties to be overcome. He took passage at the worst season of the year in one of the sailing vessels which formerly plied between Glasgow and Belfast, and which often required a week to perform a journey that is now done by steam in a few hours. Stationing himself on an elevated part of the deck, he kept a close watch on the movements of the vessel, observing the tossing to which she was subjected by the waves, the extent of the dip when she sank into a trough, the height of elevation when lifted on the summit of a wave, and calculating in his mind how all this would tell on the paddle-wheels. Through the roughest of the storm, when the vessel was pitching worst, and the wind blowing at its fiercest, he kept his place on deck, regardless of the drenching spray and the blast that almost carried him off his legs. When at length he had satisfied himself by the observation of his own eyes and inquiries of the captain and crew, that there was nothing in the voyage which a steamer could not encounter, he retired contentedly to his cabin, leaving everybody astonished at his strange curiosity respecting the effect of rough weather on the ship. Not long after David Napier started the _Rob Roy_ steam-packet between Greenock and Belfast, and afterwards between Dover and Calais. In the course of two or three years more he had established steam communication between Holyhead and Dublin, Liverpool and Greenock, and various other parts. The length of each unbroken passage was then considered the great difficulty; but as steamers got improved both in form and machinery, passages of greater length were successfully accomplished. Steamers traversed in all directions the German Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and, in short, all the waters on the eastern side of the Atlantic; and were in use upon all the rivers and lakes of any size in Europe. At length, in 1836, the startling project was set on foot of superseding the far-famed New York and Liverpool packet ships by a fleet of steam-ships. Before this the _Savannah_, a steam vessel of 300 tons, had, in 1819, crossed from New York to Liverpool in twenty-six days, partly with sails and partly with steam; and another steam vessel had, in 1825, made the voyage from England to Calcutta; but one swallow does not make a summer, and many learned folks, on both sides of the Atlantic, shook their heads doubtfully at the daring scheme of regular steam communication across 13,000 miles of ocean. The experiment was to be made, however; and on the 4th April 1838, the _Sirius_, of 700 tons and 320 horse power, sailed from Cork for the far West. Four days after the _Great Western_ followed in her wake from Bristol. Great was the excitement in New York as the time drew nigh when the _Sirius_ was considered due. For days together the Battery was crowded with anxious watchers, from the first breaking of the cold, grey dawn till night dropped its dark curtain on the scene. At that time a telescope was a thing to be begged, borrowed, or stolen,--to be got, somehow or other, if only for a minute,--and a man who possessed one was to be looked up to, made much of, and, if possible, coaxed out of the loan of it. All day long a hundred telescopes swept the sea. The ocean steamer was the great topic of the hour, and "any appearance of her?" the constant question when two people met. On St. George's day, the 23d April, a dim, dusky speck on the far horizon grew under the eye of the thousands of breathless watchers into a long train of smoke, beneath which, as the hours wore on, appeared the black prow of a huge steam-boat. There she was, long looked for come at last; and with the American colours at the fore, and the flag of Old England rustling at the stern, the _Sirius_ swept into the harbour amidst the cheers of the multitude, the ringing of the city bells, and the firing of salutes. The excitement reached its climax, and the shouting and firing grew deafening, when, some few hours later on the same auspicious day, the _Great Western_ came to anchor alongside of her rival. Twenty-two years have passed since then, and the marvel of 1838 has become a mere everyday affair. There are some fourteen different lines of steamers, comprising more than fifty vessels, running between the United States and Europe, to say nothing of the magnificent steam fleets of the Peninsular and Oriental, the Royal West India, British and North American, Pacific, Australian, South Western, and other companies. The employment of iron in the construction of ships, thus securing at once lightness and strength, and the invention of the screw propeller, in 1836, by Mr. J. P. Smith, a farmer at Hendon, by means of which a vessel can combine all the qualities of a first-rate sailing ship with the use of steam power, gave a great impulse to steam navigation, which is still making steady and continuous progress. From one steam vessel in 1812 the number in the kingdom has risen successively to 20 in 1820, 824 in 1840, and over 2000 in 1860. During 1858, 153 steamers were built in the United Kingdom, of which 112 were of iron. It is interesting to observe the advance in size of the steam vessels from their first introduction on the Clyde. Length. Breadth. 1812. Comet 40 feet 10-1/2 feet. 1825. Enterprise (built expressly to go to India, coaling at intermediate stations) 122 " 27 " 1835. Tagus (for Mediterranean) 182 " 28 " 1838. Great Western (the first ship built expressly for Transatlantic service) 236 " 35-1/2 " 1844. Great Britain (the first large screw ship, and largest iron ship up to that time) 322 " 51 " 1853. Himalaya (iron) 370 " 43-1/2 " 1856. Persia (do.) 390 " 45 " 1859. Great Eastern (do.) 680 " 83 " In the interval between 1812 and 1870 the number of steamers in the United Kingdom has increased from one to nearly three thousand; and the ocean-going steamer of 1870 is nearly six times the length of that of 1825, and seventeen times the length of the _Comet_, while the difference in tonnage is still greater. How Fulton or Bell would open their eyes at the sight of a vast moving city, such as the Big Ship, an eighth of a mile in length, propelled by both paddle-wheels and screw, each worked by four huge engines! Iron Manufacture. HENRY CORT. Iron Manufacture. HENRY CORT. The multifarious use of iron in our day has given its name to the age. We have got far beyond the primitive applications of that metal--every day it is supplanting some other substance, and there is no saying where the wide-spread and varied service we exact from it will stop. The invention of the steam-engine, and the improvement of manufacturing machines, would be comparatively valueless, unless we had at command a cheap and abundant supply of iron for their construction. The land is covered with a net-work of iron rails, traversed by iron steeds--gulfs and valleys are spanned by iron arches and iron tubes--huge ships of iron ride upon the deep. Even stones and bricks are being discarded for this all-useful substance, and of iron we are building houses, palaces, theatres, churches, and spacious domes. There is no end to its uses. And yet, it is only between seventy and eighty years ago since Britain, the richest of all countries in native ore, was dependent upon others for her supply of the manufactured metal. We wanted but little iron in those days, compared with the present demand, and yet that little we could not furnish ourselves with. As much as a million and a half a-year went out of our pockets to purchase wrought iron from Sweden alone, and we were good customers to Russia as well. All the iron that our country could then produce was some 17,000 tons. The man who showed us how to turn our own ore to account, who rendered us independent of all other countries for our supply, and made us the great purveyors of wrought iron to the world, who opened up to us this great source of national wealth, was Henry Cort of Gosport. The great difficulty which he solved was how to get wrought iron out of the crude iron as it came from the smelting furnace, without using charcoal. With but a small tract of country, densely peopled, we had but a scant supply of wood at our command. The great forests which once overspread the land were gradually vanishing, partly before the spread of population and the growth of towns, and partly from the inroads made on them by the demand for timber. Formerly, the first transformation of the ore into pig iron (the crude form of the manufactured metal) was effected by means of wood; and the consumption was so great that an Act was passed in 1581 restraining its use. Soon afterwards Lord Dudley discovered that coal would answer the purpose just as well, and obtained a patent of monopoly. He reaped but little profit from his invention, however, for his iron-works were destroyed by a mob; and it was not till a century afterwards, when people got more alarmed at the growing scarcity of timber, and the increased demand for it, that the plan was generally adopted. This was one step in the right direction, but another yet remained to be made, for the manufacture was still hampered in our country by the want of wood for the second process--the conversion of crude into malleable iron, in which state alone it is fit for service. About the year 1785, Henry Cort, iron-master, of Gosport, after many years of patient and wearisome research, of anxious thought, and indefatigable experiment, in which he spent a private fortune of some £20,000, perfected a couple of inventions of priceless value. The first was the process of converting pig iron into wrought iron by the flame of pit coal in a puddling furnace, thus dispensing with the use of charcoal,--the cost and scarcity of which had before formed such a dead weight on the trade, and placed us at such a disadvantage compared with Sweden and Russia. The second was a further process for drawing the iron into bars by means of grooved rollers. Till then, this operation had to be performed with hammer and anvil, and was very tedious and laborious. The new system not only reduced the cost and labour of producing iron to one-twentieth of what they were previously, but greatly improved the quality of the article produced. It is not easy to estimate all that Henry Cort's inventions have done for this country. Without them we should have lost an overflowing and inexhaustible source of national wealth, and, moreover, large sums would have been taken out of the country in the purchase of wrought metal; we should never have been able to give full scope to the great mechanical inventions brought forth towards the close of the last, and the opening of the present century; we should have been debarred from taking rank as the great engineers and engine-makers for the rest of the world. The direct gain to this country from the inventions of Henry Cort, which enabled us to work up our own iron, has been calculated as equal by this time to not less than a hundred millions; and it is hardly possible to exaggerate the benefits which it has conferred. Lord Sheffield's prophecy, that the adoption of these processes would be worth more to Britain than a dozen colonies, may be said to have been fulfilled. Like many another benefactor of his country, Cort got little good out of his invention for himself. He took out a patent for his process, and arranged with the leading iron-masters to accept a royalty of ten shillings a ton for the use of them. With a large fortune in prospect, his purse was just then exhausted by the expenses he had incurred in experiments and researches; and he had to look out for a capitalist to aid him in working the patent on his own account. As ill luck would have it, he entered into partnership with a certain Adam Jellicoe, then deputy-paymaster of the navy. Jellicoe was considered a man of substance, and a "thoroughly respectable" character. He was to advance the ready money, and to receive in return half of the profits of the trade, Cort assigning to him, by way of collateral security, his patent rights. For a year or two all went well. The patent was everywhere adopted, and Cort's own iron works drove a lucrative and growing trade. He seemed in a fair way of getting back the fortune he had spent in bringing out the inventions, doubled or trebled, as he well deserved. The respectable Jellicoe was seized with a mortal sickness: at his death his desk was filled by another, his books were examined, and it turned out that he had been robbing the government for many a year back, and was a large defaulter. Cort, of course, had nothing to do with this villany, but he had to pay the penalty of it. As Jellicoe's partner he was responsible, in those days of unlimited liability, for all Jellicoe's debts; but that was not the worst of it. The treasurer of the navy was not content to exact only the payment of Jellicoe's defalcations, as he had no doubt a right to do, but confiscated the whole of Cort's patent rights, business, and property, which would have paid the debt seven or eight times over, had it been fairly valued. This incident has never been properly cleared up, but what glimpses of its secret passages have been obtained, seem to indicate clearly enough that poor Cort was the victim, not of one, but of two or more swindlers. To the day of his death he never could obtain a distinct account of the proceedings; and when, after his death, a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the matter, the treasurer of the navy and his deputy took care, a week or two before the Commission met, to indemnify each other by a joint release, and to burn their accounts for upwards of a million and a half of public money, for the application of which they were responsible, as well as all papers relating to Cort's case. When the Commission met, and the treasurer and his deputy were called before it, they refused to answer questions which would criminate themselves. His connection with Jellicoe was, of course, the ruin of Henry Cort. He had no means of re-establishing himself in business; he was robbed of all income from his patents; and he died ruined and broken-hearted ten years after, leaving a family of nine children, without a sixpence in the world. Four of these children now survive--old, infirm, and indigent--only saved from being dependent upon parish bounty by pensions, amounting in the aggregate to £90 per annum. Well may it be said, "There should be more gratitude in our Iron Age to the children of HENRY CORT." The Electric Telegraph. I.--MR. COOKE. II.--PROFESSOR WHEATSTONE. III.--THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH. The Electric Telegraph. "Speak the word and think the thought, Quick 'tis as with lightning caught-- Over, under lands or seas, To the far antipodes; Here again, as soon as gone, Making all the earth as one; Moscow speaks at twelve o'clock,-- London reads ere noon the shock." I.--MR. COOKE. Of all the marvels of our time, the most marvellous is the subjugation of the electric fluid, that potent elemental force,--twin brother of the fatal lightning,--to be our submissive courier, to bear our messages from land to land, and "put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes." The Prospero that tamed this Ariel was no individual genius, but "two single gentlemen rolled into one." The idea of employing the electric current for the conveyance of signals between distant points, can be traced pretty far back in date; but to Mr. Cooke and Professor Wheatstone is undoubtedly due the credit of having made the electric telegraph an actual and accomplished fact, and rendered it practicable for everyday uses. Having served for a number of years as an officer in our Indian army, Mr. Cooke came back to Europe to recruit his health in the beginning of 1836, and took up his abode at Heidelberg. He found agreeable occupation for his leisure in the study of anatomy, and in the construction of anatomical models for his father's museum at Durham, where he was a professor in the university. Entirely self-taught in this delicate art, Mr. Cooke applied himself to it with characteristic ardour, and attained remarkable skill. One day he happened to witness some experiments which were made by Professor Möncke, to illustrate the feasibility of electric signalling. A current of electricity was passed through a long wire, and set a magnetic needle at the end quivering under its influence. The experiment was a very simple one, and not at all novel; but Cooke had never paid any attention to the subject before, and was much struck with what he saw. He became strongly impressed with the possibility of employing electricity in the transmission of telegraphic intelligence between distant places. From the day he witnessed the experiments in Professor Möncke's classroom, he forsook the dissecting knife, threw aside his modelling tools, and applied himself to the realization of his conception. With such ardour and devotion did he labour, and such skill and ingenuity did he bring to the work, that within three weeks he had constructed a telegraph with six wires, forming three complete metallic currents, and influencing three needles, by the varied inclination of which twenty-six different signals were designated. In that short time he had also invented the detector, by which injuries to the wires, whether from water, fracture, or contact with substances capable of diverting the current, were readily traced, and the alarum, by which notice is given at one end of the wire that a message is coming from the other. Both these contrivances were of the utmost value,--indeed, without them electric telegraphy would be impracticable,--and are still in use. Possessing more of a mechanical than a scientific genius, Mr. Cooke bestowed more of his time and ingenuity on the perfection of a telegraph to be worked by clock mechanism, set in action by the withdrawal of a detent by an electro magnet than in the completion of the electric telegraph pure and simple. Soon after having invented his telegraph, he came over to London, and spent the rest of the year in making a variety of instruments, and in efforts to get his telegraph introduced on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. He found an obstacle to the complete success of his mechanical telegraph, in the difficulty of transmitting to a distance sufficient electric power to work the electro magnet upon which its action depended. A friend advised him to consult Professor Wheatstone, then known to be deeply engaged in electrical experiments, with a view to telegraphy; and accordingly, an interview between them took place in February 1837. II.--PROFESSOR WHEATSTONE. Mr. Charles Wheatstone, F.R.S., and Professor of Experimental Philosophy in King's College at the time of that interview, had made considerable advances in the scientific part of the enterprise. At the commencement of his career as a maker and seller of musical instruments in London, he was led to investigate the science of sound; and from his researches in that direction, he was led--much as Herschel was led--to devote himself to optics, and to study the philosophy of light. He was the first to point out the peculiarity of binocular vision, and to describe the stereoscope, which has since become so popular an instrument. Gradually, however, his thoughts and researches came to be steadfastly directed to the application of electricity to the communication of signals. In determining the rate at which the electric current travels through a wire he had laid down, he made an important stride towards the end in view. He proved by a series of most ingenious experiments, that one spark of electricity leaps on before another, and that its progress is a question of time. He found that electricity travels through a _copper_ wire as fast as, if not faster, than light, that is, at the rate of 200,000 miles in a second; but through an _iron_ wire, electricity moves at the rate of only 15,400 miles in a second. In 1836 Mr. Wheatstone had begun experiments in the vaults of King's College, with four miles of wire, properly insulated, and was working out the details of a telegraph, the scientific principles of which he had already laid down. He had discovered an original method of converting a few wires into a considerable number of circuits, so that the greatest number of signals could be transmitted by a limited number of wires, by the deflection of magnetic needles. Mr. Wheatstone, however, was somewhat backward in the mechanical parts of the scheme, and the meeting between him and Cooke was therefore of the greatest benefit to both, and an admirable illustration of the old proverb, that two heads are better than one. Had they never been brought together,--had they kept on working out their own ideas apart--each would, no doubt, have been able to produce an electric telegraph; but a great deal of time would have been lost, and their respective efforts less complete and valuable than the one they effected in conjunction. Cooke wanted sound, scientific knowledge; Wheatstone wanted mechanical ingenuity; and their union supplied mutual deficiencies. A partnership was immediately formed between them. Before their combined genius all difficulties vanished; and in the June of the same year they were able to take out a patent for a telegraph with five wires and five needles. Their respective shares in its invention are clearly marked out by Sir J. Brunel and Professor Daniell, who, as arbiters between the two upon that delicate question, gave the following award in 1841:-- "Whilst Mr. Cooke is entitled to stand alone as the gentleman to whom this country is indebted for having practically introduced and carried out the electric telegraph as a useful undertaking, promising to be a work of national importance; and Professor Wheatstone is acknowledged as the scientific man whose profound and successful researches had already prepared the public to receive it as a project capable of practical application,--it is to the united labours of two gentlemen so well qualified for mutual assistance, that we must attribute the rapid progress which this important invention has made during the five years since they have been associated." Shortly after the taking out of a patent, wires were laid down between Euston Square Terminus and Camden Town Station, on the North-Western Railway; and the new telegraph was subjected to trial. Late in the evening of the 25th July 1837, in a dingy little room in one of the Euston Square offices, Professor Wheatstone sat alone, with a hand on each handle of the signal instrument, and an anxious eye upon the dial, with its needles as yet in motionless repose. In another little room at the Camden Town Station, Mr. Cooke was seated in a similar position before the instrument at the other end of the wires, along with Mr., now Sir Charles Fox, Robert Stephenson, and some other gentlemen. It was a trying, agitating moment for the two inventors,--how Wheatstone's pulse must have throbbed, and his heart beat, as he jerked the handle, broke the electric current, and sent the needles quivering on the dial; in what suspense he must have spent the next few minutes, holding his breath as though to hear his fellow's voice, and almost afraid to look at the dial lest no answer should be made; with what a thrill of joy must each have seen the needles wag knowingly and spell out their precious message,--the "All's well; thank God," that flashed from heart to heart, along the line of senseless wire. "Never," said Wheatstone, "did I feel such a tumultuous sensation before, as when all alone in the still room I heard the needles click; and as I spelled the words, I felt all the magnitude of the invention now proved to be practicable beyond cavil or dispute." A few days before this trial of the telegraph in London, Steinheil, of Munich, is said to have had one of his own invention at work there; and it is a difficult question to decide whether he or Cooke and Wheatstone were the first inventors. It is, however, a question of no consequence, as each worked independently. Since the first English electric telegraph was patented, there have been a thousand and one other contrivances of a similar kind taken out; but it may be doubted whether, for practical purposes, the original apparatus, with the improvements which its own inventors have made on it, is not still the best of them all. From being used merely to carry railway messages, the telegraph was brought into the service of the general public; the advantages of such almost instantaneous communication were readily appreciated; and eight years after Messrs. Cooke and Wheatstone took out their patent, lines of telegraph to the extent of 500 miles were in operation in England upon the original plan. In 1855 telegraphic correspondence had become so general, that the Electric Telegraph Company was started to supply the demand. In that establishment the Needle Telegraph of Wheatstone and Cooke is the one generally used, with the Chemical Recording Telegraph of Bain for special occasions. By means of the latter, blue lines of various lengths, according to an alphabet, are drawn upon a ribbon of paper, and as many as 20,000 words can be sent in an hour, though the ordinary rate is 100 per minute. In the purchase of patent rights alone, the Company have spent £170,000, and they are every year adding to the length of their wires. In June 1850 they had 6730 miles of wires, and despatched 29,245 messages a year. In December 1853 they had 24,340 miles of wires, and despatched 212,440 messages a-year. Their lines now extend over a much larger mileage, and convey a greatly increased number of messages. The Magnetic Telegraph Company have also a large extent of wires, and do a considerable business. III.--THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH. The land telegraph having had such success, the next step was to carry the wires across the deep, and link continent to continent,--an all-important step for an island kingdom such as ours, with its legion of distant colonies. The success of a submerged cable between Gosport and Portsmouth, and of one across the docks at Hull, proved the feasibility of a water telegraph, at least on a small scale, and it was not long before more ambitious attempts were made. On the 28th of August 1850, a cable, 30 miles long, in a gutta percha sheathing, was stretched at the bottom of the straits between Dover and Cape Grisnez, near Calais. Messages of congratulation sped along this wire between England and France; and although a ridge of rocks filed the cable asunder on the French coast, the suspension of communication was only temporary. The link has once more been established, and is in daily use. The first news sent by the wire to England was of the celebrated _coup d'etat_ of the 2d December, which cleared the way for Louis Napoleon's ascent of the throne. Numerous other cables have since been sunk beneath the waters; complete telegraphic communication has just been established between England and India, and will, no doubt, before long be extended to Australia. The greatest enterprise of this kind, however, still remains unaccomplished--that is, the laying of the Atlantic cable. A company was started in 1856 to carry out this great enterprise, the governments of Great Britain and the United States engaging to assist them, not only with an annual subsidy of £10,000 a-year for twenty-five years, but to furnish the men and ships required for laying the cable from one side of the Atlantic to the other. The chief difficulty which engaged the attention of Mr. Wildman Whitehouse and the other agents of the notable enterprise was the enormous size of the cable which, it was thought, would be necessary. The general belief at that time was, that the greater the distance to be traversed, the larger must be the wire along which the electric current was to pass, and that the rate of speed would be in proportion to the size of the conductor. Mr. Whitehouse, however, thought it would be as well to begin by making sure that this was really the case, and that a monster cable was essential; and after some three thousand separate observations and experiments, was delighted to find that the difficulty which stared them in the face was imaginary. Instead of a large cable transmitting the current faster than a small one, he ascertained beyond a doubt, that the bigger the wire, the slower was the passage of the electricity. It would be needful, therefore, to make the cable only strong enough to stand the strain of its own weight, and heavy enough to sink to the bottom. A single wire would have been quite sufficient, but a strand of seven wires of the finest copper was used for the cable, so that the fracture of one of them might not interfere with the communication,--as long as one wire was left intact the current would proceed. A triple coating of gutta percha, to keep the sea from sucking out the electricity, and a thick coating of iron wire, to sink the cable to the bottom and give it strength, were added to the copper rope, and then the cable was complete. No less than 325,000 miles of iron and copper wire were woven into this great cable,--as much as might be wound thirteen times round the globe; and its weight was about a ton per mile. The length of the cable was 18,947 miles--some 600 miles being allowed to come and go upon, in case of accidents. The end of July 1857 was selected for the sailing of the ships that were to lay the cable, as fogs and gales were then out of season, and no icebergs to be met with. On the 8th of August, the _Agamemnon_ (English) and _Niagara_ (American), with four smaller steamers to attend them, and each with half of the mighty cable in her hold, got up their steam and left Valentia Harbour. One end of the cable was carried by a number of boats from the _Niagara_ on shore, where the Lord-Lieutenant was in waiting to receive it, and place it in contact with the batteries, which were arranged in a little tent upon the beach. A slight accident to the cable for a little while delayed the departure of the ships; but by the 10th they had got 200 miles out to sea, and so far the cable had been laid successfully. Messages passed and repassed between the ships and the shore. The next day the engineer discovering that too much cable was being paid out, telegraphed to the people on board to put a greater grip on it; the operation was clumsily managed, and the cable snapped, sinking to a depth of 12,000 feet. Not disheartened, however, the Company replaced the lost portion of the cable; the Government again furnished ships and men, and the cable was actually laid at the bottom of the Atlantic from Valentia Bay to Trinity Harbour. Addresses of congratulation passed between the Queen and the President of the States, and numerous messages were transmitted. But gradually the signals grew fainter and more faint, till they ceased altogether. The cable was stricken dumb. A little to the north of the fiftieth parallel of latitude, at the bottom of the Atlantic, where the plateau is unbroken by any great depression, some 1500 miles of the disabled cable were lying, on a soft bed of mud, which was constantly thickening, at a depth of from 10,000 to 15,000 feet. The importance of telegraphic communication between England and the United States was, however, so obvious that its projectors were not to be daunted by the failure they had sustained. Nor was it altogether a failure. They had proved that a cable _could_ be laid, and messages flashed through it. What was wanted was evidently a stronger cable, which should be less liable to injury, and more perfect in its insulation of the telegraphic wires. From 1858 to 1864, the Company were engaged in the difficult task of raising fresh funds, and in endeavouring to secure grants from the British and American Governments. Their men of science, meanwhile, were devising improvements in the form of cable, and contriving fresh apparatus to facilitate its submersion. Eventually the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, an union of the Gutta Percha Company with the celebrated firm of Glass and Elliott, constructed an entirely new cable, which was not only costlier, but thicker and stronger than the preceding one. The conductor, three hundred pounds per mile, and one-seventh of an inch thick, consisted of seven No. 18 copper wires, each one-twentieth of an inch in thickness. The core or heart of the cable, says a writer in "Chambers's Encyclopædia," was formed of four layers of gutta percha alternating with four of Chatterton's compound (a solution of gutta percha in Stockholm tar); the wire and conductor being seven hundred pounds per mile, and nine-twentieths of an inch thick. Outside this was a coating of hemp or jute yarn, saturated with a preservative composition; while the sheath consisted of ten iron wires, each previously covered with five tarred Manilla yarns. The whole cable was an inch and one eighth thick, weighed thirty-five and three-quarter hundredweights per mile, and was strong enough to endure a breaking strain of seven tons and three-quarters. During the various processes of manufacture, the electrical quality of the cable was tested to an unusual extent. The portions of finished core were tested by immersion in water at various temperatures; next submitted to a pressure of six hundred pounds to the square inch, to imitate the ocean pressure at so great depth; then the conducting power of the copper wire was tested by a galvanometer; and various experiments were also made on the insulating property of the gutta percha. The various pieces having been thus severely put to the proof, they were spliced end to end, and the joints or splicings tested. In a word, nothing was left undone that could insure the success or guarantee the stability of the new cable. When completed, the cable measured two thousand three hundred miles, and weighed upwards of four thousand tons. It was felt that such a burden could only be intrusted to Brunel's "big ship," the _Great Eastern_. For this purpose three huge iron tanks were built, in the fore, middle, and aft holds of the vessel, each from fifty to sixty feet in diameter, and each twenty and a half feet in depth; and in these the cable was deposited in three vast coils. On the 23rd of July 1865, the _Great Eastern_ left Valentia, the submarine cable being joined end to end to a more massive shore cable, which was hauled up the cliff at Foilhummerum Bay, to a telegraph-house at the top. The electric condition of the cable was continually tested during the ship's voyage across the Atlantic; and more than once its efficiency was disturbed by fragments of wire piercing the gutta percha and destroying the insulation. At length on August 2nd, the cable snapped by overstraining, and the end sank to the bottom in two thousand fathoms water, at a distance of one thousand and sixty-four miles from the Irish coast. Attempts were made to recover it by dredging. A five-armed grapnel, suspended to the end of a stout iron-wire rope five miles long, was flung overboard; and when it reached the bottom, the _Great Eastern_ steamed to and fro in the direction where the lost cable was supposed to be lying; but failure followed upon failure, and the cable was never once hooked. There remained nothing to be done but for the _Great Eastern_ to return to England with the news of her non-success, and leaving (including the failure of 1857-8) nearly four thousand tons of electric cable at the bottom of the ocean. The promoters of ocean telegraphy, however, were determined to be resolute to the end. A new Company was formed, new capital was raised, and a third cable manufactured, differing in some respects from the former. The outside jacket was made of hemp instead of jute; the iron wires of the sheath were galvanized, and the Manilla hemp which covered them was not tarred. Chiefly through the absence of the tar, the weight of the cable was diminished five hundred pounds per mile; while its strength or breaking strain was increased. A sufficient quantity of this improved cable was made to cross the Atlantic, with all due allowance for slack; and also a sufficient quantity of the 1865 cable to remedy the disaster of that year. On July 13th, 1866, the _Great Eastern_ once more set forth on her interesting voyage, accompanied by the steamers _Terrible_, _Medway_, and _Albany_, to assist in the submersion of the cable, and to act as auxiliaries whenever needed. The line of route chosen lay about midway between those of the 1858 and 1865 cables, but at no great distance from either. The _Great Eastern_ exchanged telegrams almost continuously with Valentia as she steamed towards the American continent; and great were the congratulations when she safely arrived in the harbour of Heart's Content, Newfoundland, on the 27th. Operations were next commenced to recover the end of the 1865 cable, and complete its submergence. The _Albany_, _Medway_, and _Terrible_ were despatched on the 1st of August, to the point where, "deep down beneath the darkling waves," the cable was supposed to be lying, and on the 9th or 10th they were joined by the _Great Eastern_, when grappling was commenced, and carried on through the remainder of the month. The cable was repeatedly caught, and raised to a greater or less height from the ocean bed; but something or other snapped or slipped every time, and down went the cable again. At last, after much trial of patience, the end of the cable was safely fished up on September 1st; and electric messages were at once sent through to Valentia, just as well as if the cable had not had twelve months' soaking in the Atlantic. An additional length having been spliced to it, the laying recommenced; and on the 8th the squadron entered Heart's Content, having thus succeeded in laying a second line of cable from Ireland to America. The two cables, the old and the new, continued to work very smoothly during the winter of 1866 and 1867; but in May 1867, the new cable was damaged by an iceberg, which drifted across it at a distance of about three miles from the Newfoundland shore. The injury was soon repaired; but again, in July 1867, the same cable broke at about fifty miles from Newfoundland. The earlier cable continued to work for several years, but both cables gave way towards the close of the autumn of 1870. No special inconvenience was felt, however, as two years ago a French line of cable was laid down between Europe and America; the _Great Eastern_ being again employed, and the operations being conducted under the superintendence of English electricians. The two British cables will probably be repaired in the spring of the present year (1871). Submarine cables have multiplied recently, and almost every ocean flows over the mysterious wires which flash intelligence beneath the rolling waters from point to point of the civilized world. By a telegraph-cable, which is partly submarine, the India Office in Westminster is united with the Governor-General and his Council at Calcutta. There is also communication between Singapore and Australia, and the network of ocean telegraphy is being so rapidly extended that, before long, the British Government in the metropolis will be enabled to convey its instructions in a few hours to the administrative authorities in every British colony. And thus the words which the poet puts into the mouth of "Puck" will be nearly realized in a sense the poet never dreamed of--"I'll put a girdle round about the world in forty minutes." The Silk Manufacture. I.--JOHN LOMBE. II.--WILLIAM LEE. III.--JOSEPH MARIE JACQUARD. The Silk Manufacture. I.--JOHN LOMBE. In the reign of the Emperor Justinian, a couple of Persian monks, on a religious mission to China, brought away with them a quantity of silkworms' eggs concealed in a piece of hollow cane, which they carried to Constantinople. There they hatched the eggs, reared the worms, and spun the silk,--for the first time introducing that manufacture into Europe, and destroying the close monopoly which China had hitherto enjoyed. From Constantinople the knowledge and the practice of the art gradually extended to Greece, thence to Italy, and next to Spain. Each country, as in turn it gained possession of the secret, strove to preserve it with jealous care; but to little purpose. A secret that so many thousands already shared in common, could not long remain so, although its passage to other countries might be for a time deferred. France and England were behind most of the other states of Europe in obtaining a knowledge of the "craft and mystery." The manufacture of silk did not take root in France till the reign of Francis I.; and was hardly known in England till the persecutions of the Duke of Parma in 1585 drove a great number of the manufacturers of Antwerp to seek refuge in our land. James I. was very anxious to promote the breed of silkworms, and the production of silken fabrics. During his reign a great many mulberry-trees were planted in various parts of the country--among others, that celebrated one in Shakspeare's garden at Stratford-on-Avon--and an attempt was made to rear the worm in our country, which, however, the ungenial climate frustrated. Silk-throwsters, dyers, and weavers were brought over from the Continent; and the manufacture made such progress that, by 1629, the silk-throwsters of London were incorporated, and thirty years after employed no fewer than 40,000 hands. The emigration from France consequent on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) added not only to the numbers engaged in the trade, but to the taste, skill, and enterprise with which it was conducted. It is not easy to estimate how deeply France wounded herself by the iniquitous persecution of the Protestants, or how largely the emigrants repaid by their industry the shelter which Britain afforded them. Although the manufacture had now become fairly naturalized in England, it was restricted by our ignorance of the first process to which the silk was subjected. Up till 1718, the whole of the silk used in England, for whatever purpose, was imported "thrown," that is, formed into threads of various kinds and twists. A young Englishman named John Lombe, impressed with the idea that our dependence on other countries for a supply of thrown silk prevented us from reaping the full benefit of the manufacture, and from competing with foreign traders, conceived the project of visiting Italy, and discovering the secret of the operation. He accordingly went over to Piedmont in 1715, but found the difficulties greater than he had anticipated. He applied for admittance at several factories, but was told that an examination of the machinery was strictly prohibited. Not to be balked, he resolved, as a last resort, to try if he could accomplish by stratagem what he had failed to do openly. Disguising himself in the dress of a common labourer, he bribed a couple of the workmen connected with one of the factories, and with their connivance obtained access in secret to the works. His visits were few and short; but he made the best use of his time. He carefully examined the various parts of the machinery, ascertained the principle of its operation, and made himself completely master of the whole process of throwing. Each night before he went to bed he noted down everything he had seen, and drew sketches of parts of the machinery. This plot, however, was discovered by the Italians. He and his accomplices had to fly for their lives, and not without great difficulty escaped to a ship which conveyed them to England. Lombe had not forgotten to carry off with him his note-book, sketches, and a chest full of machinery, and on his return home lost no time in practising the art of "throwing" silk. On a swampy island in the river Derwent, at Derby, he built a magnificent mill, yet standing, called the "Old Silk Mill." Its erection occupied four years, and cost £30,000. It was five storeys in height, and an eighth of a mile in length. The grand machine numbered no fewer than 13,384 wheels. It was said that it could produce 318,504,960 yards of organzine silk thread daily; but the estimate is no doubt exaggerated. While the mill was building, Lombe, in order to save time and earn money to carry on the works, opened a manufactory in the Town Hall of Derby. His machinery more than fulfilled his expectations, and enabled him to sell thrown silk at much lower prices than were charged by the Italians. A thriving trade was thus established, and England relieved from all dependence on other countries for "thrown" silk. The Italians conceived a bitter hatred against Lombe for having broken in upon their monopoly and diminished their trade. In revenge, therefore, according to William Hutton, the historian of Derby, they "determined _his_ destruction, and hoped that of his works would follow." An Italian woman was despatched to corrupt her two countrymen who assisted Lombe in the management of the works. She obtained employment in the factory, and gained over one of the Italians to her iniquitous design. They prepared a slow poison, and administered it in small doses to Lombe, who, after lingering three or four years in agony, died at the early age of twenty-nine. The Italian fled; the woman was seized and subjected to a close examination, but no definite proof could be elicited that Lombe had been poisoned. Lombe was buried in great state, as a mark of respect on the part of his townsmen. "He was," says Hutton, "a man of quiet deportment, who had brought a beneficial manufactory into the place, employed the poor, and at advanced wages,--and thus could not fail to meet with respect; and his melancholy end excited much sympathy." II.--WILLIAM LEE. In the Stocking Weavers' Hall, in Redcross Street, London, there used to hang a picture, representing a man in collegiate costume in the act of pointing to an iron stocking-frame, and addressing a woman busily knitting with needles by hand. Underneath the picture appeared the following inscription: "In the year 1589, the ingenious William Lee, A.M., of St. John's College, Cambridge, devised this profitable art for stockings (but, being despised, went to France), yet of iron to himself, but to us and to others of gold; in memory of whom this is here painted." As to who this William Lee was, and the way in which he came to invent the stocking-frame, there are conflicting stories, but the one most generally received and best authenticated is as follows:-- William Lee, a native of Woodborough, near Nottingham, was a fellow of one of the Cambridge Colleges. He fell in love with a young country lass, married her, and consequently forfeited his fellowship. A poor scholar, with much learning, but without money or the knowledge of any trade, he found himself in very embarrassed circumstances. Like many another "poor scholar," he might exclaim:-- "All the arts I have skill in, Divine and humane; Yet all's not worth a shilling; Alas! poor scholar, whither wilt thou go?" His wife, however, was a very industrious woman, and by her knitting contributed to their joint support. It is said--but the story lacks authentic confirmation--that when Lee was courting her, she always appeared so much more occupied with her knitting than with the soft speeches he was whispering in her ear, that her lover thought of inventing a machine that would "facilitate and forward the operation of knitting," and so leave the object of his love more leisure to converse with him. "Love, indeed," says Beckmann, "is fertile in invention, and gave rise, it is said, to the art of painting; but a machine so complex in its parts, and so wonderful in its effects, would seem to require longer and greater reflection, more judgment, and more time and patience than could be expected of a lover." But afterwards, when Lee, in his painfully enforced idleness, sat many a long hour watching his wife's nimble fingers toiling to support him, his mind again recurred to the idea of a machine that would give rest to her weary fingers. His cogitations resulted in the contrivance of a stocking-frame, which imitated the movements of the fingers in knitting. [Illustration: WILLIAM LEE, THE INVENTOR OF THE STOCKING-FRAME. Page 226.] Although the invention of this loom gave a great impulse to the manufacture of silk stockings in England, and placed our productions in advance of those of other countries, Lee reaped but little profit from it. He met with neglect both from Queen Elizabeth and James I.; and, not succeeding as a manufacturer on his own account, went to France, where he did very well until after the assassination of Henri IV., when he shared the persecutions of the Protestants, and died in great distress in Paris. III.--JOSEPH MARIE JACQUARD. Joseph Marie Jacquard, the inventor of the loom which bears his name, and to whom the extent and prosperity of the silk manufacture of our time is mainly due, was born at Lyons in 1752, of humble parents, both of whom were weavers. His father taught him to ply the shuttle; but for education of any other sort, he was left to his own devices. He managed to pick up some knowledge of reading and writing for himself; but his favourite occupation was the construction of little models of houses, towers, articles of furniture, and so on, which he executed with much taste and accuracy. On being apprenticed to a type-founder, he exhibited his aptitude for mechanical contrivances by inventing a number of improved tools for the use of the workmen. On his father's death he set up as a manufacturer of figured fabrics; but although a skilful workman, he was a bad manager, and the end of the undertaking was, that he had to sell his looms to pay his debts. He married, but did not receive the dowry with his wife which he expected, and to support his family had to sell the house his father had left him,--the last remnant of his little heritage. The invention of numerous ingenious machines for weaving, type-founding, &c., proved the activity of his genius, but produced not a farthing for the maintenance of his wife and child. He took service with a lime-maker at Brest, while his wife made and sold straw hats in a little shop at Lyons. He solaced himself for the drudgery of his labours by spending his leisure in the study of machines for figure-weaving. The idea of the beautiful apparatus which he afterwards perfected began to dawn on him, but for the time it was driven out of his mind by the stirring transactions of the time. The whirlwind of the Revolution was sweeping through the land. Jacquard ardently embraced the cause of the people, took part in the gallant defence of Lyons in 1793, fled for his life on the reduction of the city, and with his son--a lad of sixteen--joined the army of the Rhine. His boy fell by his side on the field of battle, and Jacquard, destitute and broken-hearted, returned to Lyons. His house had been burned down; his wife was nowhere to be heard of. At length he discovered her in a miserable garret, earning a bare subsistence by plaiting straw. For want of other employment he shared her labours, till Lyons began to rise from its ruins, to recover its scattered population, and revive its industry. Jacquard applied himself with renewed energy to the completion of the machine of which he had, before the Revolution, conceived the idea; exhibited it at the National Exposition of the Products of Industry in 1801; and obtained a bronze medal and a ten years' patent. During the peace of Amiens, Jacquard happened to take up a newspaper in a _cabaret_ which he frequented, and his eye fell on a translated extract from an English journal, stating that a prize was offered by a society in London for the construction of a machine for weaving nets. As a mere amusement he turned his thoughts to the subject, contrived a number of models, and at last solved the problem. He made a machine and wove a little net with it. One day he met a friend who had read the paragraph from the English paper. Jacquard drew the net from his pocket saying, "Oh! I've got over the difficulty! see, there is a net I've made." After that he took no more thought about the matter, and had quite forgotten it, when he was startled by a summons to appear at the Prefectal Palace. The prefect received him very kindly, and expressed his astonishment that his mechanical genius should so long have remained in obscurity. Jacquard could not imagine how the prefect had discovered his mechanical experiments, and began vaguely to dread that he had got into some shocking scrape. He stammered out a sort of apology. The prefect was surprised he should deny his own talent, and said he had been informed that he had invented a machine for weaving nets. Jacquard owned that he had. "Well, then, you're the right man, after all," said the prefect. "I have orders from the emperor to send the machine to Paris." "Yes, but you must give me time to make it," replied Jacquard. In a week or two Jacquard again presented himself at the palace with his machine and a half manufactured net. The prefect was eager to see how it worked. "Count the number of loops in that net," said Jacquard, "and then strike the bar with your foot." The prefect did so, and was surprised and delighted to see another loop added to the number. "Capital!" cried he. "I have his majesty's orders, M. Jacquard, to send you and your machine to Paris." "To Paris! How can that be? How can I leave my business here?" "There is no help for it; and not only must you go to Paris, but you must start at once, without an hour's delay." "If it must be, it must. I will go home and pack up a little bundle, and tell my wife about my journey, I shall be ready to start to-morrow." "To-morrow won't do; you must go to-day. A carriage is waiting to take you to Paris; and you must not go home. I will send to your house for any things you want, and convey any message to your wife. I will provide you with money for the journey." There was no help for it, so Jacquard got into the carriage, along with a gendarme who was to take charge of him, and wondered, all the way to Paris, what it all meant. On reaching the capital he was taken before Napoleon, who received him in a very condescending manner. Carnot, who was also present, could not at first comprehend the machine, and turning to the inventor, exclaimed roughly, "What, do you pretend to do what is beyond the power of man? Can you tie a knot in a stretched string?" Jacquard, not at all disconcerted, explained the construction of his machine so simply and clearly, as to convince the incredulous minister that it accomplished what he had hitherto deemed an impossibility. Jacquard was now employed in the Conservatory of Arts and Manufactures to repair and keep in order the models and machines. At this time a magnificent shawl was being woven in one of the government works for the Empress Josephine. Very costly and complicated machinery was employed, and nearly £1000 had already been spent on it. It appeared to Jacquard that the shawl might be manufactured in a much simpler and less expensive manner. He thought that the principle of a machine of Vaucousin's might be applied to the operation, but found it too complex and slow. He brooded over the subject, made a great many experiments, and at last succeeded in contriving an improved apparatus. He returned to Lyons to superintend the introduction of his machine for figure-weaving and the manufacture of nets. The former invention was purchased for the use of the people, and was brought into use very slowly. The weavers of Lyons denounced Jacquard as the enemy of the people, who was striving to destroy their trade, and starve themselves and families, and used every effort to prevent the introduction of his machine. They wilfully spoiled their work in order to bring the new process into discredit. The machine was ordered to be destroyed in one of the public squares. It was broken to pieces,--the iron-work was sold for old metal, and the wood-work for faggots. Jacquard himself had on one occasion to be rescued from the hands of a mob who were going to throw him into the Rhone. Before Jacquard's death in 1835, his apparatus had not only made its way into every manufactory in France, but was used in England, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and America. Even the Chinese condescended to avail themselves of this invention of a "barbarian." Jacquard's apparatus is, strictly speaking, not a loom, but an appendage to one. It is intended to elevate or depress, by bars, the warp threads for the reception of the shuttle, the patterns being regulated by means of bands of punched cards acting on needles with loops and eyes. At first applied to silk weaving only, the use of this machine has since been extended to the bobbin net, carpets, and other fancy manufactures. By its agency the richest and most complex designs, which could formerly be achieved only by the most skilful labourers, with a painful degree of labour, and at an exorbitant cost, are now produced with facility by the most ordinary workmen, and at the most moderate price. Of late years the silk manufacture has greatly improved, both in character and extent. The products of British looms exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1862 vied with those of the Continent. Every year upwards of £2,300,000 worth of silk is brought to England; and the silk manufacture engages some £55,000,000 of capital, and employs eleven to twelve hundred thousand of our population. The Potter's Art. I.--LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. II.--BERNARD PALISSY. III.--JOSIAH WEDGWOOD. The Potter's Art. I.--LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. There can be little doubt as to the antiquity of the pottery manufacture. It probably had its origin in that of bricks, which at a very early date men made for purposes of construction; but it is not impossible that he had previously contrived to fabricate the commoner articles of domestic economy, such as pans and dishes, of sun-dried clay. Bricks, as everybody knows, are fashioned out of a coarse clay, such as we meet with in very numerous localities. After mixing up with water a kind of paste out of these clayey earths, the moulder works up the paste into the shape of bricks, and they are then exposed to the heat of the kiln. Sometimes it was thought sufficient to dry these bricks in the rays of a burning sun; but, so dried, their solidity is very inconsiderable. Baked bricks owe their redness of colour to the oxide of iron which they contain. They are either moulded with the hand or cast in rectangular frames of wood, dusted with sand. To bake them, they are piled up in huge stacks, in which intervals are left for storing and kindling the fuel. They are also baked in kilns. The commoner pottery wares are manufactured with the coarse impure clays, which are allowed to rot in trenches for several years to render them more plastic. Flower-pots, sugar-pans, vases, and other and more graceful articles, are moulded on the potter's wheel. Now, this potter's wheel is one of the most ancient instruments of human industry, one of the earliest inventions by which man utilized and economized his labour. It consists of a large disc of wood, to which a rotatory motion is given by the workman's foot. A second and smaller disc, on which is placed the paste for working, is fixed upon the upper extremity of the vertical axis to which the larger and inferior disc is attached. Seated on his bench, the workman places in the centre of the disc a certain quantity of soft moist clay, and turning the wheel with his foot, moulds the said paste with both hands, until it assumes the desired shape. You can imagine no prettier spectacle than that of a skilful potter causing the clay, under his nimble fingers, to assume the most varied forms. It seems as if by miracle the vase was created suddenly, and the rude clay sprang into a life and beauty of its own. The Campanian potteries, improperly but commonly called the Etruscan, and the ancient Greek wares, belong to the class of soft and lustrous potteries which are no longer manufactured. The Etruscan vases are the most remarkable specimens of the ancient potter's art; pure, simple, and elegant in form, they cannot be surpassed by any efforts of the modern potter. The paste of which they are made is very fine and homogeneous, coated with a peculiar glassy lustre, which is thin but tenacious, red or black, and formed of silica rendered fusible by an alkali. They were baked at a low temperature. In this ware, which was in vogue between 500 and 320 B.C., the Aretine and Roman pottery originated. The former was manufactured at Arezzo or Arretium. The knowledge of glazes, which was acquired by the Egyptians and Assyrians, seems to have been handed down to the Persians, Moors, and Arabs. Fayences, and enamelled bricks and plaques, were commonly used among them in the twelfth century, and among the Hindus in the fourteenth. The celebrated glazed tiles, or _azulejos_, which contribute so much to the beauty of the Alhambra, were introduced into Spain by the Moors about 711 A.D. In Italy, it is supposed, they were made known as early as the conquest of Majorca by the Pisans, in 1115 A.D. But Brongniart places their introduction three centuries later, or in 1415, and says this peculiar kind of ware was called _Majolica_, from Majorica or Majorca. This, however, seems to have been the Italian enamelled fayence, which was used for subjects in relief by the celebrated Florentine sculptor, Luca della Robbia. Robbia had been bred to the trade of a goldsmith--in those days a trade of great distinction and opulence--but his artistic tastes could not be controlled, and he abandoned it to become a sculptor. A man of a singularly enthusiastic and ardent nature, he applied himself arduously to his new work. He worked all day with his chisel, and sat up, even through the night, to study. "Often," says Vasari, "when his feet were frozen with cold in the night time, he kept them in a basket of shavings to warm them, that he might not be compelled to discontinue his drawings." Such devotion could hardly fail to secure success. Luca was recognised as one of the first sculptors of the day, and executed a number of great works in bronze and marble. On the conclusion of some important commissions, he was struck with the disproportion between the payment he received and the time and labour he had expended; and, abandoning marble and bronze, resolved to work in clay. Before he could do that, however, it was necessary to discover some means of rendering durable the works which he executed in that material. Applying himself to the task with characteristic zeal and perseverance, he at length succeeded in discovering a mode of protecting such productions from the injuries of time, by means of a glaze or enamel, which conferred not only an almost eternal durability, but additional beauty on his works in terra cotta. At first this enamel was of a pure white, but he afterwards added the further invention of colouring it. The fame of these productions spread over Europe, and Luca found abundant and profitable employment during the rest of his days, the work being carried on, after his death, by brothers and descendants. II.--BERNARD PALISSY. The next great master in the art was Bernard Palissy,--a man distinguished not only for his artistic genius, but for his philosophical attainments, his noble, manly character, and zealous piety. Born of poor parents about the beginning of the sixteenth century, Bernard Palissy was taken as apprentice by a land-surveyor, who had been much struck with the boy's quickness and ingenuity. Land-surveying, of course, involved some knowledge of drawing; and thus a taste for painting was developed. From drawing lines and diagrams he went on to copy from the great masters. As this new talent became known he obtained employment in painting designs on glass. He received commissions in various parts of the country, and in his travels employed his mind in the study of natural objects. He examined the character of the soils and minerals upon his route, and the better to grapple with the subject, devoted his attention to chemistry. At length he settled and married at Staines, and for a time lived thriftily as a painter. One day he was shown an elegant cup of Italian manufacture, beautifully enamelled. The art of enamelling was then entirely unknown in France, and Palissy was at once seized with the idea, that if he could but discover the secret it would enable him to place his wife and family in greater comfort. "So, therefore," he writes, "regardless of the fact that I had no knowledge of clays, I began to seek for these enamels as a man gropes in the dark. I reflected that God had gifted me with some knowledge of drawing, and I took courage in my heart, and besought him to give me wisdom and skill." [Illustration: PALISSY THE POTTER. Page 242.] He lost no time in commencing his experiments. He bought a quantity of earthen pots, broke them into fragments, and covering them with various chemical compounds, baked them in a little furnace of his own construction, in the hope of discovering the white enamel, which he had been told was the key to all the rest. Again and again he varied the ingredients of the compositions, the proportions in which they were mixed, the quality of the clay on which they were spread, the heat of the furnace to which they were subjected; but the white enamel was still as great a mystery as ever. Instead of discouraging, each new defeat seemed to confirm his hope of ultimate success and to increase his perseverance. Painting and surveying he no longer practised, except when sheer necessity compelled him to resort to them to provide bread for his family. The discovery of the enamel had become the great mission of his life, and to that all other occupations must be sacrificed. "Thus having blundered several times at great expense and through much trouble, with sorrows and sighs, I was every day pounding and grinding new materials and constructing new furnaces, which cost much money, and consumed my wood and my time." Two years had passed now in fruitless effort. Food was becoming scarce in the little household, his wife worn and shrewish, the children thin and sickly. But then came the thought to cheer him,--when the enamel was found his fortune would be made, there would then be an end to all his privations, anxieties, and domestic unhappiness, Lisette would live at ease, and his children lack no comfort. No, the work must not be given up yet. His own furnace was clumsy and imperfect,--perhaps his compositions would turn out better in a regular kiln. So more pots were bought and broken into fragments, which, covered with chemical preparations, were fired at a pottery in the neighbourhood. Batch after batch was prepared and despatched to the kiln, but all proved disheartening failures. Still with "great cost, loss of time, confusion, and sorrow," he persevered, the wife growing more shrewish, the children more pinched and haggard. By good luck at this time came the royal commissioners to establish the gabelle or tax in the district of Saintonge, and Palissy was employed to survey the salt marshes. It was a very profitable job, and Palissy's affairs began to look more flourishing. But the work was no sooner concluded, than the "will o' the wisp," as his wife and neighbours held it, was dancing again before his eyes, and he was back, with redoubled energy, to his favourite occupation, "diving into the secret of enamels." Two years of unremitting, anxious toil, of grinding and mixing, of innumerable visits to the kiln, sanguine of success, with ever new preparations; of invariable journeys home again, sad and weary, for the moment utterly discouraged; of domestic bickerings; of mockery and censure among neighbours, and still the enamel was a mystery,--still Palissy, seemingly as far from the end as ever, was eager to prosecute the search. He appeared to have an inward conviction that he would succeed; but meanwhile the remonstrances of his wife, the pale, thin faces of his bairns, warned him he must desist, and resume the employments that at least brought food and clothing. There should be one more trial on a grand scale,--if that failed, then there should be an end of his experiments. "God willed," he says, "that when I had begun to lose my courage, and was gone for the last time to a glass-furnace, having a man with me carrying more than three hundred pieces, there was one among those pieces which was melted within four hours after it had been placed in the furnace, which trial turned out white and polished, in a way that caused me such joy as made me think I was become a new creature." He rushed home, burst into his wife's chamber, shouting, "I have found it!" From that moment he was more enthusiastic than ever in his search. He had discovered the white enamel. The next thing to be done was to apply it. He must now work at home and in secret. He set about moulding vessels of clay after designs of his own, and baked them in a furnace which he had built in imitation of the one at the pottery. The grinding and compounding of the ingredients of the enamel cost him the labour, day and night, of another month. Then all was ready for the final process. The vessels, coated with the precious mixture, are ranged in the furnace, the fire is lit and blazes fiercely. To stint the supply of fuel would be to cheat himself of a fortune for the sake of a few pence, so he does not spare wood. All that day he diligently feeds the fire, nor lets it slacken through the night. The excitement will not let him sleep even if he would. The prize he has striven for through these weary years, for which he has borne mockery and privation, is now all but within his grasp; in another hour or two he will have possessed it. The grey dawn comes, but still the enamel melts not. His boy brings him a portion of the scanty family meal. There shall soon be an end to that miserable fare! More faggots are cast on the fire. The night falls, and the sun rises on the third day of his tending and watching at the furnace door, but still the powder shows no signs of melting. Pale, haggard, sick at heart with anxiety and dread, worn with watching, parched and fevered with the heat of the fire, through another, and yet another and another day and night, through six days and six nights in all, Bernard Palissy watches by the glaring furnace, feeds it continually with wood, and still the enamel is unmelted. "Seeing it was not possible to make the said enamel melt, I was like a man in desperation; and although quite stupified with labour, I counselled to myself that in my mixture there might be some fault. Therefore I began once more to pound and grind more materials, all the time without letting my furnace cool. In this way I had double labour, to pound, grind, and maintain the fire. I was also forced to go again and purchase pots in order to prove the said compound, seeing that I had lost all the vessels which I had made myself. And having covered the new pieces with the said enamel, I put them into the furnace, keeping the fire still at its height." By this time it was no easy matter to "keep the fire at its height." His stock of fuel was exhausted; he had no money to buy any more, and yet fuel must be had. On the very eve of success--alas! an eve that so seldom has a dawn--it would never do to lose it all for want of wood, not while wood of any kind was procurable. He rushed into the garden, tore up the palings, the trellis work that supported the vines, gathered every scrap of wood he could find, and cast them on the fire. But soon again the deep red glow of the furnace began to fade, and still it had not done its work. Suddenly a crashing noise was heard; his wife, the children clinging to her gown, rushed in. Palissy had seized the chairs and table, had torn the door from its hinges, wrenched the window frames from their sockets, and broken them in pieces to serve as fuel for the all-devouring fire. Now he was busy breaking up the very flooring of the house. And all in vain! The composition would not melt. "I suffered an anguish that I cannot speak, for I was quite exhausted and dried up by the heat of the furnace. Further to console me, I was the object of mockery; even those from whom solace was due, ran, crying through the town that I was burning my floors. In this way my credit was taken from me, and I was regarded as a madman," if not, as he tells us elsewhere, as one seeking ill-gotten gains, and sold to the evil one for filthy lucre. He made another effort, engaged a potter to assist him, giving the clothes off his own back to pay him, and afterwards receiving aid from a friendly neighbour, and this time proved that his mixture was of the right kind. But the furnace having been built with mortar which was full of flints, burst with the heat, and the splinters adhered to the pottery. Sooner than allow such imperfect specimens of his art to go forth to the world, Palissy destroyed them, "although some would have bought them at a mean price." Better days, however, were at hand for himself and family. His next efforts were successful. An introduction to the Duke of Montmorency procured him the patronage of that nobleman, as well as of the king. He now found profitable employment for himself and food for his family. "During the space of fifteen or sixteen years in all," he said afterwards, "I have blundered on at my business. When I had learned to guard against one danger, there came another on which I had not reckoned. All this caused me such labour and heaviness of spirit, that before I could render my enamels fusible at the same degrees of heat, I verily thought I should be at the door of my sepulchre.... But I have found nothing better than to observe the counsel of God, his edicts, statutes, and ordinances; and in regard to his will, I have seen that he has commanded his followers to eat bread by the labour of their bodies, and to multiply their talents which he has committed to them." When the Reformation came, Palissy was an earnest reformer, on Sunday mornings assembling a number of simple, unlearned men for religious worship, and exhorting them to good works. Court favour exempted him from edicts against Protestants, but could not shield him from popular prejudice. His workshops at Saintes were destroyed; and to save his life and preserve the art he had invented, the king called him to Paris as a servant of his own. Thus he escaped the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Besides being a skilful potter, Palissy was a naturalist of no little eminence. "I have had no other book than heaven and earth, which are open to all," he used to say; but he read the wondrous volume well, while others knew it chiefly at second-hand, and hence his superiority to most of the naturalists of the day. He was in the habit of lecturing to the learned men of the capital on natural history and chemistry. When more than eighty years of age he was accused of heresy, and shut up in the Bastille. The king, visiting him in prison, said, "My good man, if you do not renounce your views upon religious matters, I shall be constrained to leave you in the hands of my enemies." "Sire," replied Palissy, "those who constrain you, a king, can never have power over me, because I know how to die." Palissy died in prison, aged and exhausted, in 1590, at the age of eighty. Before his death his wares had become famous, and were greatly prized. The enamel, which he went through so much toil and suffering to discover, was the foundation of a flourishing national manufacture. III.--JOSIAH WEDGWOOD. Josiah Wedgwood, whose name in connection with pottery-ware has become a household word amongst us, was the younger son of a potter at Burslem, in Staffordshire, who had also a little patch of ground which he farmed. When Josiah was only eleven years old, his father died, and he was thus left dependent upon his elder brother, who employed him as a "thrower" at his own wheel. An attack of smallpox, in its most malignant form, soon after endangered his life, and he survived only by the sacrifice of his left leg, in which the dregs of the disease had settled, and which had to be cut off. Weak and disabled, he was now thrown upon the world to seek his own fortune. At first it was very uphill work with him, and he found it no easy matter to provide even the most frugal fare. He was gifted, however, with a very fine taste in devising patterns for articles of earthenware, and found ready custom for plates, knife-handles, and jugs of fanciful shape. He worked away industriously himself, and was able by degrees to employ assistance and enlarge his establishment. The pottery manufactures of this country were then in a very primitive condition. Only the coarsest sort of articles were made, and any attempt to give elegance to the designs was very rare indeed. All the more ornamental and finer class of goods came from the Continent. Wedgwood saw no reason why we should not emulate foreigners in the beauty of the forms into which the clay was thrown, and made a point of sending out of his own shop articles of as elegant a shape as possible. This feature in his productions was not overlooked by customers, and he found a growing demand for them. The coarseness of the material was, however, a great drawback to the extension of the trade in native pottery; and it seemed almost like throwing good designs away to apply them to such rude wares. Wedgwood saw clearly that if earthenware was ever to become a profitable English manufacture, something must be done to improve the quality of the clay. He brooded over the subject, tested all the different sorts of earth in the district, and at length discovered one, containing silica, which, black in colour before it went into the oven, came out of it a pure and beautiful white. This fact ascertained, he was not long in turning it to practical account, by mixing flint powder with the red earth of the potteries, and thus obtaining a material which became white when exposed to the heat of a furnace. The next step was to cover this material with a transparent glaze; and he could then turn out earthenware as pure in quality as that from the Continent. This was the foundation not only of his own fortune, but of a manufacture which has since provided profitable employment for thousands of his countrymen, besides placing within the reach of even the humblest of them good serviceable earthenware for household use. The success of his white stoneware was such, that he was able to quit the little thatched house he had formerly occupied, and open shop in larger and more imposing premises. He increased the number of his hands, and drove an extensive and growing trade. He was not content to halt after the discovery of the white stoneware. On the contrary, the success he had already attained only impelled him to further efforts to improve the trade he had taken up, and which now became quite a passion with him. When he devoted himself to any particular effort in connection with it, his first thought was always how to turn out the very best article that could be made--his last thought was whether it would pay him or not. He stuck up for the honour of old England, and maintained that whatever enterprise could be achieved, that English skill and enterprise was competent to do. Although he had never had any education himself worth speaking of, his natural shrewdness and keen faculty of observation supplied his deficiencies in that respect; and when he applied himself, as he now did, to the study of chemistry, with a view to the improvement of the pottery art, he made rapid and substantial progress, and passed muster creditably even in the company of men of science and learning. He contributed many valuable communications to the Royal Society, and invented a thermometer for measuring the higher degrees of heat employed in the various arts of pottery. Again his premises proved too confined for his expanding trade, and he removed to a larger establishment, and there perfected that cream-coloured ware with which Queen Charlotte was so delighted, that she ordered a whole service of it, and commanding that it should be called after her--the Queen's Ware, and that its inventor should receive the title of the "Royal Potter." A royal potter Wedgwood truly was; the very king of earthenware manufactures, resolute in his determination to attain the highest degree of perfection in his productions, indefatigable in his labours, and unstinting in his outlay to secure that end. He invented altogether seven or eight different kinds of ware; and succeeded in combining the greatest delicacy and purity of material, and utmost elegance of design, with strength, durability, and cheapness. The effect of the improvements he successively introduced into the manufacture of earthenware is thus described by a foreign writer about this period: "Its excellent workmanship, its solidity, the advantage which it possesses of sustaining the action of fire, its fine glaze, impenetrable to acids, the beauty and convenience of its form, and the cheapness of its price, have given rise to a commerce so active and so universal, that in travelling from Paris to Petersburg, from Amsterdam to the furthest port of Sweden, and from Dunkirk to the extremity of the south of France, one is served at every inn with Wedgwood ware. Spain, Portugal, and Italy are supplied with it, and vessels are loaded with it for the East Indies, the West Indies, and the continent of America." Wedgwood himself, when examined before a committee of the House of Commons in 1785, some thirty years after he had begun his operations, stated that from providing only casual employment to a small number of inefficient and badly remunerated workmen, the manufacture had increased to an extent that gave direct employment to about twenty thousand persons, without taking into account the increased numbers who earned a livelihood by digging coals for the use of the potteries, by carrying the productions from one quarter to another, and in many other ways. Wedgwood did not confine himself to the manufacture of useful articles, though such, of course, formed the bulk of his trade, but published beautiful imitations of Egyptian, Greek, and Etruscan vases, copies of cameos, medallions, tablets, and so on. Valuable sets of old porcelain were frequently intrusted to him for imitation, in which he succeeded so well that it was difficult to tell the original from the counterfeit, except sometimes from the superior excellence and beauty of the latter. When the celebrated Barberini Vase was for sale, Wedgwood, bent upon making copies of it, made heavy bids against the Duchess of Portland for it; and was only induced to desist by the promise, that he should have the loan of it in order that he might copy it. Accordingly, the duchess had the vase knocked down to her at eighteen hundred guineas, and Wedgwood made fifty copies of it, which he sold at fifty guineas each, and was thus considerably out of pocket by the transaction. He did it, however, not for the sake of profit, but to show what an English pottery could accomplish. Besides copying from antique objects, Wedgwood tried to rival them in the taste and elegance of original productions. He found out Flaxman when he was an unknown student, and employed him, upon very liberal terms, to design for him; and thus the articles of earthenware which he manufactured proved of the greatest value in the art education of the people. We owe not a little of the improved taste and popular appreciation and enjoyment of the fine arts in our own day to the generous enterprise of Josiah Wedgwood, and his talented designs. In order to secure every access from the potteries to the eastern and western coasts of the island, Wedgwood proposed, and, with the aid of others whom he induced to join him, carried out the Grand Trunk Canal between the Trent and the Mersey. He himself constructed a turnpike road ten miles in length through the potteries, and built a village for his work-people, which he called Etruria, and where he established his works. He died there in 1795, at the age of sixty-five, leaving a large fortune and an honoured name, which he had acquired by his own industry, enterprise, and generosity. A remarkable memorial to the genius and artistic labours of Wedgwood was erected in 1863, and some reference to it should undoubtedly be made in these pages. It is a twofold memorial: a bronze statue at Stoke-upon-Trent, and a memorial institute, erected close to the birth-place of the Great Potter at Burslem. The foundation-stone was laid on the 26th of October by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the presence of a very large and enthusiastic assemblage. The Chancellor delivered a public address, which in eloquent terms did homage to Wedgwood's great mental qualities and his services to his country. He described as his most signal and characteristic merit, the firmness and fulness of his perception of the true law of what we term industrial art, or, in other words, of the application of the higher art to industry--the law which teaches us to aim first at giving to every object the greatest possible degree of fitness and convenience for its purpose, and next at making it the article of the highest degree of beauty, which compatibly with that fitness and convenience it will bear--which does not substitute the secondary for the primary end, but recognizes as part of the business the study to harmonize the two. Mr. Gladstone observed, that to have a strong grasp of this principle, and to work it out to its results in the details of a vast and varied manufacture, was a praise high enough for any man, at any time and in any place. But he thought it was higher and more peculiar in the case of Wedgwood than it could be in almost any other case. For that truth of art which he saw so clearly, and which lies at the root of excellence, is one of which England, his country, has not usually had a perception at all corresponding in strength and fulness with her other rare endowments. She has long taken a lead among the European nations for the cheapness of her manufactures, not so for their beauty. And if the day should arrive when she shall be as eminent for purity of taste as she is now for economy of production, the result will probably be due to no other single man in so remarkable a degree as to Josiah Wedgwood. * * * * * We conclude with a lively extract from the Chancellor's exhaustive and interesting address:-- "Wedgwood," he says, "in his pursuit of beauty, did not overlook exchangeable value or practical usefulness. The first he could not overlook, for he had to live by his trade; and it was by the profit derived from the extended sale of his humbler productions that he was enabled to bear the risks and charges of his higher works. Commerce did for him what the King of France did for Sèvres, and the Duke of Cumberland for Chelsea, it found him in funds. And I would venture to say that the lower works of Wedgwood are every whit as much distinguished by the fineness and accuracy of their adaptation to their uses as his higher ones by their successful exhibition of the finest arts. Take, for instance, his common plates, of the value of, I know not how few, but certainly of a very few pence each. They fit one another as closely as cards in a pack. At least, I for one have never seen plates that fit like the plates of Wedgwood, and become one solid mass. Such accuracy of form must, I apprehend, render them much more safe in carriage.... "Again, take such a jug as he would manufacture for the wash-stand table of a garret. I have seen these made apparently of the commonest material used in the trade. But instead of being built up, like the usual and much more fashionable jugs of modern manufacture, in such a shape that a crane could not easily get his neck to bend into them, and the water can hardly be poured out without risk of spraining the wrist, they are constructed in a simple capacious form, of flowing curves, broad at the top, and so well poised that a slight and easy movement of the hand discharges the water. A round cheese-holder or dish, again, generally presents in its upper part a flat space surrounded by a curved rim; but the cheese-holder of Wedgwood will make itself known by this--that the flat is so dead a flat, and the curve so marked and bold a curve; thus at once furnishing the eye with a line agreeable and well-defined, and affording the utmost available space for the cheese. I feel persuaded that a Wiltshire cheese, if it could speak, would declare itself more comfortable in a dish of Wedgwood's than in any other dish." * * * * * The worthiest successor to Wedgwood whom England has known was the late Herbert Minton, who was scarcely less distinguished than his predecessor for perseverance, patient effort, and artistic sentiment. We owe to him in a great measure the revival of the elegant art of manufacturing encaustic tiles. The principal varieties of ceramic ware now in use are:--1. Porcelain, which is composed, in England, of sand, calcined bones, china-clay, and potash; and, at Dresden, of kaolin, felspar, and broken biscuit-porcelain; 2. Parian, which is used in a liquid state, and poured into plaster-of-paris moulds; 3. Earthenware, the _Fayence_ of the Italians, and the _Delft_ of the Dutch, made of various kinds of clay, with a mixture of powdered calcined flint; and, 4. Stoneware, composed of several kinds of plastic clay, mixed with felspar and sand, and occasionally a little lime. It is estimated that our English potteries not only supply the demand of the United Kingdom, but export ware to the value of nearly a million and a half annually. The establishments are about 190 in number; employ 75,000 to 80,000 operatives; and export 90,000,000 pieces. The Miner's Safety Lamp. SIR HUMPHREY DAVY. The Miner's Safety Lamp. SIR HUMPHREY DAVY. "What's that? Is the house coming down?" cried Mr. Borlase, the surgeon-apothecary of Penzance, jumping out of his cozy arm-chair, as a tremendous explosion shook the house from top to bottom, making a great jingle among the gallipots in the shop below, and rousing him from a comfortable nap. "Please, sir," said Betty, the housemaid, putting her head into the room, "here's that boy Davy been a-blowing of hisself up agen. Drat him, he's always up to some trick or other! He'll be the death of all of us some day, that boy will, as sure as my name's Betty." "Bring him here directly," replied her master, knitting his brow, and screwing his mild countenance into an elaborate imitation of that of a judge he once saw at the assizes, with the black cap on, sentencing some poor wretch to be hanged. "Really, this sort of thing won't do at all." Only, it must be owned, Mr. Borlase had said that many times before, and put on the terrible judicial look too, and yet "that boy Davy" was at his tricks again as much as ever. "I'll bring as much as I can find of him, sir," said Betty, gathering up her apron, as if she fully expected to discover the object of her search in a fragmentary condition. Presently there was heard a shuffling in the passage, and a somewhat ungainly youth, about sixteen years of age, was thrust into the room, with the due complement of legs, arms, and other members, and only somewhat the grimier about the face for the explosion. His fingers were all yellow with acids, and his clothes plentifully variegated with stains from the same compounds. At first sight he looked rather a dull, loutish boy, but his sharp, clear eyes somewhat redeemed his expression on a second glance. "Here he is, sir," cried Betty triumphantly, as though she really had found him in pieces, and took credit for having put him cleverly together again. "Well, Humphrey," said Mr. Borlase, "what have you been up to now? You'll never rest, I'm afraid, till you have the house on fire." "Oh! if you please, sir, I was only experimenting in the garret, and there's no harm done." "No harm done!" echoed Betty; "and if there isn't it's no fault of yours, you nasty monkey. I declare that blow up gave me such a turn you could ha' knocked me down with a feather, and there's a smell all over the house enough to pison any one." "That'll do, Betty," said her master, finding the grim judicial countenance rather difficult to keep up, and anxious to pronounce sentence before it quite wore off. "I'll tell you what it is, young Davy, this sort of thing won't do at all. I must speak to Mr. Tonkine about you; and if I catch you at it again, you'll have to take yourself and your experiments somewhere else. So I warn you. You had much better attend to your work. It was only the other day you gave old Goody Jones a paperful of cayenne instead of cinnamon; and there's Joe Grimsly, the beadle, been here half a dozen times this day for those pills I told you to make up, and they're not ready yet. So just you take yourself off, mind your business, and don't let me have any more nonsense, or it'll be the worse for you." And so the culprit gladly backed out of the room, not a whit abashed by the reprimand, for it was no novelty, to begin his experiments again and again, and one day, by way of compensation for keeping his master's household in constant terror of being blown up, to make his name familiar as a household word, by the invention of a little instrument that would save thousands and thousands from the fearful consequences of coal-pit explosions. The Mr. Tonkine that his master referred to was the self-constituted protector of the Davy family. Old Davy had been a carver in the town, and dying, left his widow in very distressed circumstances, when this generous friend came forward and took upon himself the charge of the widow and her children. Young Humphrey, on leaving school, had been placed with Mr. Borlase to be brought up as an apothecary; but he was much fonder of rambling about the country, or experimenting in the garret which he had constituted his laboratory, than compounding drugs behind his master's counter. As a boy he was not particularly smart, although he was distinguished for the facility with which he gleaned the substance of any book that happened to take his fancy, and for an early predilection for poetry. As he grew up, the ardent, inquisitive turn of his mind displayed itself more strongly. He was very fond of spending what leisure time he had in strolling along the rocky coast searching for sea-drift and minerals, or reading some favourite book. "There along the beach he wandered, nourishing a youth sublime, With the fairy-tales of science, and the long result of time." In after life he used often to tell how when tired he would sit down on the crags and exercise his fancy in anticipations of future renown, for already the ambition of distinguishing himself in his favourite science had seized him. "I have neither riches, nor power, nor birth," he wrote in his memorandum-book, "to recommend me; yet if I live, I trust I shall not be of less service to mankind and my friends than if I had been born with all these advantages." He read a great deal, and though without much method, managed, in a wonderfully short time, to master the rudiments of natural philosophy and chemistry, to say nothing of considerable acquaintance with botany, anatomy, and geometry; so that though the pestle and mortar might have a quieter time of it than suited his master's notions, Humphrey was busy enough in other ways. [Illustration: HUMPHREY'S EXPERIMENTS ON THE DIFFUSION OF HEAT. Page 267.] In his walk along the beach, the nature of the air contained in the bladders of sea-weed was a constant subject of speculation with him; and he used to sigh over the limited laboratory at his command, which prevented him from thoroughly investigating the matter. But one day, as good luck would have it, the waves threw up a case of surgical instruments from some wrecked vessel, somewhat rusty and sand clogged, but in Davy's ingenious hands capable of being turned to good account. Out of an old syringe, which was contained in the case, he managed to construct a very tolerable air pump; and with an old shade lamp, and a couple of small metal tubes, he set himself to work to discover the causes of the diffusion of heat. At first sight the want of proper instruments for carrying on his researches might appear rather a hindrance to his progress in the paths of scientific discovery; but, in truth, his subsequent success as an experimentalist has been very properly attributed, in no small degree, to that necessity which is the parent of invention, and which forced him to exercise his skill and ingenuity in making the most of the scanty materials at his command. "Had he," says one of his biographers, "in the commencement of his career been furnished with all those appliances which he enjoyed at a later period, it is more than probable that he might never have acquired that wonderful tact of manipulation, that ability of suggesting expedients, and of contriving apparatus, so as to meet and surmount the difficulties which must constantly arise during the progress of the philosopher through the unbeaten track and unexplored regions of science!" While Davy was thus busily engaged qualifying himself for the distinguished career that awaited him, Gregory Watt, the son of the celebrated James Watt, being in delicate health, came to Penzance for change of air, and lodged with Mrs. Davy. At first he and Humphrey did not get on very well together, for the latter had just been reading some metaphysical works, and was very fond of indulging in crude and flippant speculations on such subjects, which rather displeased the shy invalid. But one day some chance remark of Davy's gave token of his extensive knowledge of natural history and chemistry, and thenceforth a close intimacy sprang up between them, greatly to the lad's advantage, for Watt's scientific knowledge set him in a more systematic groove of study, and encouraged him to concentrate his energies on his favourite pursuit. Another useful friend Davy also found in Mr. Gilbert, afterwards President of the Royal Society. Passing along one day, Mr. Gilbert observed a youth making strange contortions of face as he hung over the hutch gate of Borlase's house; and being told by a companion that he was "the son of Davy the carver," and very fond of making chemical experiments, he had a talk with the lad, and discovering his talents, was ever afterwards his staunch friend and patron. Through his two friends, Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Watt, Davy formed the acquaintance of Dr. Beddoes, who was just setting up at Bristol, under the title of Pneumatic Institution, an establishment for investigating the medical properties of different gases; and who, appreciating his abilities, gave him the superintendence of the new institution. Although only twenty years of age at this time, Davy was well abreast of the science of the day, and soon applied his vigorous and searching intellect to several successful investigations. His first scientific discovery was the detection of siliceous earth in the outer coating of reeds and grasses. A child was rubbing two pieces of bonnet cane together, and he noticed that a faint light was emitted; and on striking them sharply together, vivid sparks were produced just as if they had been flint and steel. The fact that when the outer skin was peeled off this property was destroyed, showed that it was confined to the skin, and on subjecting it to analysis silex was obtained, and still more in reeds and grasses. As superintendent of Dr. Beddoe's institution, his attention was, of course, chiefly directed to the subject of gases, and with the enthusiasm of youth, he applied himself ardently to the investigation of their elements and effects, attempting several very dangerous experiments in breathing gases, and more than once nearly sacrificing his life. In the course of these experiments he found out the peculiar properties of nitrous oxide, or, as it has since been popularly called, "laughing gas," which impels any one who inhales it to go through some characteristic action,--a droll fellow to laugh, a dismal one to weep and sigh, a pugnacious man to fight and wrestle, or a musical one to sing. At twenty-two years of age, such was the reputation he had acquired, that he got the appointment of lecturer at the Royal Institution, which was just then established, and found himself in a little while not only a man of mark in the scientific, but a "lion" in the fashionable world. Natural philosophy and chemistry had begun to attract a good deal of attention at that time; and Davy's enthusiasm, his clear and vivid explanations of the mysteries of science, and the poetry and imagination with which he invested the dry bones of scientific facts, caught the popular taste exactly. His lecture-room became a fashionable lounge, and was crowded with all sorts of distinguished people. The young lecturer became quite the rage, and was petted and feted as the lion of the day. It was only six years back that he was the druggist's boy in a little country town, alarming and annoying the household with his indefatigable experiments. He could hardly have imagined, as one of his day-dreams at the sea-side, that his fame would be acquired so quickly. In spite of all the flatteries and attentions which were showered upon him, Davy stuck manfully to his profession; and if his reputation was somewhat artificial and exaggerated at the commencement, he amply earned and consolidated it by his valuable contributions to science during the rest of his career. The name of Humphrey Davy will always be best known from its association with the ingenious safety lamp which he invented, and which well entitles him to rank as one of the benefactors of mankind. It was in the year 1815 that Davy first turned his attention to this subject. Of frequent occurrence from the very first commencement of coal-mining, the number of accidents from fire-damp had been sadly multiplied by the increase of mining operations consequent on the introduction of the steam engine. The dreadful character of some of the explosions which occurred about this time, the appalling number of lives lost, and the wide-spread desolation in some of the colliery districts which they had occasioned, weighed heavily on the minds of all connected with such matters. Not merely were the feelings of humanity wounded by the terrible and constant danger to which the intrepid miners were exposed, but it began to be gravely questioned whether the high rate of wage which the collier required to pay him not only for his labour, but for the risk he ran, would admit of the mines being profitably worked. It was felt that some strenuous effort must be made to preserve the miners from their awful foe. Davy was then in the plenitude of his reputation, and a committee of coal-owners besought him to investigate the subject, and if possible provide some preventative against explosions. Davy at once went to the north of England, visited a number of the principal pits, obtained specimens of fire-damp, analyzed them carefully, and having discovered the peculiarities of this element of destruction, after numerous experiments devised the safety-lamp as its antagonist. The principles upon which this contrivance rests, are the modification of the explosive tendencies of fire-damp (the inflammable gas in mines) when mixed with carbonic acid and nitrogen; and the obstacle presented to the passage of an explosion, if it should occur, through a hole less than the seventh of an inch in diameter; and accordingly, while the small oil lamp in burning itself mixes the surrounding gas with carbonic acid and nitrogen, the cylinder of wire-gauze which surrounds it prevents the escape of any explosion. It is curious that George Stephenson, the celebrated engineer, about the same time, hit on much the same expedient. To control a "power that in its tremendous effects seems to emulate the lightning and the earthquake," and to enclose it in a net of the most slender texture, was indeed a grand achievement; and when we consider the many thousand lives which it has been the means of saving from a sudden and cruel death, it must be acknowledged to be one of the noblest triumphs, not only of science, but of humanity, which the world has ever seen. Honours were showered upon Davy, from the miners and coal-owners, from scientific associations, from crowned heads; but all must agree with Playfair in thinking that "it is little that the highest praise, and that even the voice of national gratitude when most strongly expressed, can add to the happiness of one who is conscious of having done such a service to his fellow-men." Davy himself said he "valued it more than anything he ever did." When urged by his friends to take out a patent for the invention, he replied,--"No, I never thought of such a thing. My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity, and if I have succeeded, I am amply rewarded by the gratifying reflection of having done so." The honours of knighthood and baronetage were successively conferred on Davy as a reward for his scientific labours; and the esteem of his professional brethren was shown in his election to the President-ship of the Royal Institution, in which, oddly enough, he was succeeded by his old friend Mr. Gilbert, who had first taken him by the hand, and whom he had got ahead of in the race of life. Davy died at Geneva before he had completed his fifty-first year, no doubt from over-exertion and the unhealthy character of the researches he prosecuted so recklessly. Assiduous as he was in his devotion to his favourite science, he found time also to master several continental languages; to keep himself well acquainted with, and also to contribute to the literature of the day; and to indulge his passion for fly-fishing, at which he was a keen and practised adept. Eminent as were the talents of Sir Humphrey Davy, and valuable as his discovery of the safety-lamp has proved, it is but fair to own that his credit to the latter has been very openly denied. Two persons of scientific celebrity have been put forward as the real inventors of the safety-lamp--namely, Dr. Reid Clanny of Newcastle, and the great railway-engineer, George Stephenson. Of Clanny's safety-lamp a description appeared in the _Philosophical Transactions_ in 1813--that is, ten years before Sir Humphrey made his communication to the Royal Society. However, it was a complicated affair, which required the whole attention of a boy to work it, and was based on the principle of forcing in air through water by the agency of bellows. Stephenson's was a very different apparatus. In its general principle it resembled Davy's, the chief difference being, that he inserted a glass cylinder inside the wire-gauze cylinder, and inside the top of the glass cylinder a perforated metallic chimney--the supply of air being kept up through a triple circle of small holes in the bottom. Stephenson's claim has, of course, been disputed by the friends and admirers of Sir Humphrey Davy; but Mr. Smile has conclusively proved that his lamp, the "Geordy," was in use at the Killingworth collieries at the very time that Davy was conducting the experiments which led to his invention. It is not to be inferred, however, that Davy knew aught of what Stephenson had accomplished. It seems to be one of those rare cases in which two minds, working independently, and unknown each to the other, have both arrived simultaneously at the same result. Penny Postage. SIR ROWLAND HILL. Penny Postage. "He comes, the herald of a noisy world, News from all nations lumb'ring at his back,-- Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks; Births, deaths, and marriages; epistles wet With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks Fast as the periods of his fluent quill; Or charged with am'rous sighs of absent swains, Or nymphs responsive." COWPER. The growth of the postal system is a sure measure of the progress of industry, commerce, education, and all that goes to make up the sum of civilization; and there is no more striking illustration to be found of the strides which our country has made in that direction since the century began than the introduction of a cheap and rapid delivery of letters, and the craving which it has at once satisfied and augmented. Nothing gives us so forcible an idea of the difference between the Britain of the present day and the Britain of the Stuart or even of the Georgian period, than the contrast between the postal communication of these times and of our own. The itch of writing is now so strong in us, we are so constantly writing or receiving letters, our appetite for them is so ravenous, that we wonder how people got on in the days when the postman was the exclusive messenger of the king, and when even majesty was so badly served that, as one old postmaster[D] wrote in self-exculpation of some delay, "when placards are sent (to order the immediate forwarding of some state despatches) the constables many times be fayne to take the horses oute of plowes and cartes, wherein," he gravely adds, "can be no extreme diligence." It was a sure sign that the country was going ahead when Cromwell (1656) found it worth while to establish posts for the people at large, and was able to farm out the post office for £10,000 a year. The profits of that establishment were doubled by the time the Stuarts returned to the throne, and more than doubled again before the close of the seventeenth century. The country has kept on growing out of system after system, like a lad out of his clothes, and at different times has had new ones made to its measure. Brian Tuke's easy plan of borrowing farmers' horses on which to mount his emissaries, gave place to regular relays of post-boys and post-horses; and, in course of time, when the robbery of the mails by sturdy highwaymen had become almost the rule, and their safe conveyance the exception, post-boys were in turn supplanted by a system of stage-coaches, convoyed by an armed guard. This was thought a great advance; and so it was. A pushing, zealous man named Palmer originated the scheme. Amidst many other avocations, he found time to travel on the outside of stage-coaches, for the sake of talking with the coachmen and observing the routes, here, there, and everywhere all over England, and thus matured all the details of his plan from personal experience. "None but an enthusiast," said Sheridan in a rapture of admiration in the House of Commons, "could have conceived, none but an enthusiast could have practically entertained, none but an enthusiast could have carried out such a system." Still, in spite of the exactitude with which Palmer's scheme was declared to fit the wants of the country, it soon began to be grown out of like the rest. It became too short, too tight, too straitened every way, and impeded the circulation of correspondence,--no unimportant artery of our national system. The cost of postage was too high, the mode of delivery too slow, and the consequence was, that people either repressed their desire to write letters, or sent them through some cheaper and illegitimate channel. Sir Walter Scott knew a man who recollected the mail from London reaching Edinburgh with only a single letter. Of all the tens of thousands of the modern Babylon, only one solitary individual had got anything to say to anybody in the metropolis of the sister kingdom worth paying postage for. "We look back now," writes Miss Martineau, "with a sort of amazed compassion to the old crusading times, when warrior-husbands and their wives, grey-headed parents and their brave sons, parted with the knowledge that it must be months or years before they could hear of one another's existence. We wonder how they bore the depth of silence! And we feel the same now about the families of Polar voyagers. But, till a dozen years ago, it did not occur to many of us how like this was the fate of the largest class in our own country. The fact is, there was no full and free epistolary intercourse in the country, except between those who had the command of franks. There were few families in the wide middle class who did not feel the cost of postage a heavy item in their expenditure; and if the young people sent letters home only once a fortnight, the amount at the year's end was a rather serious matter. But it was the vast multitudes of the lower orders who suffered like the crusading families of old, and the geographical discoverers of all times. When once their families parted off from home it was a separation almost like that of death. The hundreds of thousands of apprentices, of shopmen, of governesses, of domestic servants, were cut off from family relations as if seas or deserts lay between them and home. If the shilling for each letter could be saved by the economy of weeks or months at first, the rarity of correspondence went on to increase the rarity; new interests hastened the dying out of old ones; and the ancient domestic affections were but too apt to wither away, till the wish for intercourse was gone. The young girl could not ease her heart by pouring out her cares and difficulties to her mother before she slept, as she can now, when the penny and the sheet of paper are the only condition of the correspondence. The young lad felt that a letter home was a serious and formal matter, when it must cost his parents more than any indulgence they ever thought of for themselves; and the old fun and light-heartedness were dropped off from such domestic intercourse as there was. The effect upon the morals of this kind of restraint is proved beyond a doubt by the evidence afforded in the army. It was a well-known fact, that in regiments where the commanding officer was kind and courteous about franking letters for the privates, and encouraged them to write as often as they pleased, the soldiers were more sober and manly, more virtuous and domestic in their affections, than where difficulty was made by the indolence or stiffness of the franking officer." Under the costly postal system, the revenue of the post office did not, as it had hitherto done, and should have continued to do, keep pace with the progress of the country. The appetite for communication between distant friends or men of business was evidently either decaying, or finding vent in an unlawful way. The latter was chiefly the case. There were vast numbers of people separated from each other by long weary miles, too many to permit of visits, who could not resist writing to each other,--the doating parent to the child, the lover to his mistress, the merchant to his agents, the lawyer to his clients. Those who could not afford postage, were the very class who could not get franks; for the principle was, that those who could best afford postage money should have plenty of franks, which were, of course, quite out of the way of poor, humble folks,--the fat sow had his ear well greased, the lean, starving one had to consume his own fat, like the bear, or go without. The consequence was, that those who were eager to write and could not get letters through the post, found other means of forwarding them to the evasion of the law. There was no limit to the exercise of ingenuity in this direction. Three or four letters were written on one piece of paper, to be cut up and distributed separately by one of the recipients; newspapers were turned into letters by underscoring or pricking with a pin the letters required to form the various words of the communication; some peculiarity in the style of address on the outside was arranged between correspondents, the sight of which was enough to indicate a message, and the letter was then rejected, having served its purpose; and so on, in a hundred other ways, fraudulent means were found of evading the law. Some carriers had a large and profitable business in smuggling letters. In many populous districts the number of letters conveyed by carriers at a penny each in an illegal way far exceeded those sent through the post. In Manchester, for every letter that went by the postman, six went by the carrier; and in Glasgow the proportion was as one to ten. All this was notorious. The most honourable people saw no great harm in cheating the post to send a word of comfort or encouragement to an absent friend,--it was a vice that leaned to virtue's side. But it was a bad thing for the country that people should be driven to such devices, in obeying a natural and proper impulse. The man who began by smuggling letters, might end by smuggling tobacco or brandy; and the system was morally pernicious. All felt the evil, but remedy seemed impossible. As the urgency for a change grew to a head, the man came to effect it,--a man "of open heart, who could enter into family impulses; a man of philosophical ingenuity, who could devise a remedial scheme; a man of business, who could fortify such a scheme with impregnable accuracy"--that man was Rowland Hill. When quite a young man, on a pedestrian excursion through the lake district, Rowland Hill, passing a cottage door, observed the postman deliver a letter to a woman, and overheard her, after looking anxiously at the envelope, and then returning it, say she had no money to pay the postage. The man was about to put it back in his wallet and pass on, for it was an every-day thing for him to receive such a reply from the poor countryfolk, when Mr. Hill in his goodness of heart, out of compassion for the woman, stepped forward and paid the shilling, regardless of many shakes of the head, and hints of remonstrance from her, which he interpreted as merely unwillingness to trespass on a stranger's bounty. As soon as the postman was out of sight she broke the seal, and showed him why she did not want him to pay for the letter. The sheet was a blank, and the envelope had served as a means of communication between her and her correspondent. It appeared that she had arranged with her brother, that as long as all went well with him he should send a blank sheet in that way once a quarter, and thus she had tidings of him without paying the postage. As he pursued his walk, Mr. Hill could not help meditating on the incident, which had made a deep impression on his mind. He could not blame the poor woman and her brother for the trick they had played upon the post office in order to correspond with each other; and yet he felt there must be something wrong in a system which put it out of their reach, and of others similarly circumstanced, to do so in a lawful manner. Every country post-master had a budget of touching stories of poor folk who were tantalized with the sight of a letter from some dear one, full, perhaps, of kind words and cheering news, or asking sympathy and condolence in misfortune, or transmitting money to help them in their straits; as well as of countless little frauds of the sort described, which they could not always harden themselves to circumvent and punish, so piteously eager did the poor souls appear to be to get word of their friends. And yet, in spite of all sorts of frauds, to people in humble life letters came like "angels' visits, few and far between." Mr. Hill asked himself whether there was no means of lessening the cost of postage, whether the government could not afford to charge a lower rate, or manage to get the work done more cheaply? Keeping his ears and eyes open, always on the alert to pick up a fact as regarded the present, or a hint for the future, examining the mode of carriage and delivery, the routes chosen, and the time occupied, Mr. Hill, after a while, arrived at the conviction, that the postage rates might not only be reduced, but that the transmission of letters might be more quickly performed by a remodelling of the system. He ascertained that the cost of mere transit incurred upon a letter sent from London to Edinburgh, a distance of 400 miles, was not more than a thirty-sixth part of a penny, and that, therefore, there was a margin, under the existing charge, of 11-35/36d. for extra expenses and profit. He observed that the twopenny posts of London and other large towns were found to answer very well, although people, being within easy distances of each other, did not need so much as in the country to correspond in writing, and that the carriers, in spite of the illegality of the traffic, had loads of letters to deliver at a penny each, and that penny paid them for their trouble, as well as their risk of detection. He therefore came to the conclusion, that what was wanted, and what it was quite possible to establish, was a uniform penny postage rate over the whole of the United Kingdom. He calculated that if that were adopted, the number of people then in the habit of writing letters would write a great many more than ever; that others, who had been precluded by the expense from corresponding, would come into the field; and that hundreds of letters forwarded illegally would now pass through the post, so that the number of letters sent by post would be increased fourfold, and the revenue, at first, perhaps a trifle curtailed, would soon mount up again. The post-office authorities were greatly shocked and disgusted at so audacious and utopian a proposal. But the public were greatly delighted with it, only doubting whether it was not too good news to be true. First by means of an anonymous pamphlet, then by direct and personal application to the government, Mr. Hill endeavoured to get his plans taken into consideration--no easy matter, for circumlocution officials had passed from contemptuous indifference to active hostility, as they gradually discovered how formidable an antagonist in the truth and accuracy of his calculations, the sincerity and earnestness of his purpose, they had to deal with. It was a great national cause Mr. Hill was fighting, and he was not to be put down. The people took his side, Parliament granted an inquiry, and the result was a report in favour of his scheme. On the 17th of August 1839--why is not the anniversary kept with rejoicings?--penny postage became the law of the land. During the last weeks of the year a uniform fourpenny rate was charged by way of accustoming people to the cheap system, and saving official feelings from the rude shock of a sudden descent from the respectable rate of a shilling, to the vulgar one of a penny. On the 10th January 1840 the penny system came into force. At first Mr. Hill availed himself of a suggestion thrown out some years before by Mr. Charles Knight, that the best way of collecting the penny postage on newspapers would be to have stamped covers; but subsequently stamped envelopes were done away with, and queen's heads introduced. The franking privilege, of course, died with the dear postage. Upon the adoption of the scheme, Mr. Hill received an appointment in the post office in order to superintend its working; but he had an uneasy berth of it. His plan was adopted only in part,--the postage rate was lowered, while the other compensating and essential features were thrown aside; official jealousy of reform showed itself in various attempts to thwart his efforts, and to fulfil its prediction of failure to the scheme. The consequence was, that the immediate results were not so satisfactory as could have been wished. The increase in the number of letters was certainly very great. During the last month of the old system the total number of letters passing through the post office was little more than two millions and a half, of which only a fifth were paid letters; while a twelvemonth after the introduction of the new system the total number of letters had risen to nearly six millions per month, of which the unpaid letters formed less than a twelfth part. Very heavy expenses, however, not connected with the new plan, had been incurred; and the consequence was, that the profits of the post office were only a fourth of what they had been. Advantage was taken of this to get Mr. Hill ousted from his post; but, after he had transferred his services for some years to the management of the London and Brighton Railway, the authorities were glad to receive him back again, to place the remodelling of the system in his hands, and to allow him to introduce the other parts of his scheme which had before been neglected. In this work Mr. Hill was busily engaged for a number of years, and most of his plans were gradually carried out with great advantage to the public. In 1846 a public testimonial of £13,360 was presented to Mr. Hill in acknowledgment of his distinguished services to the country; and at a later date he was made a Knight of the Bath. Cheap postage has now been fairly tried, and must be pronounced a grand success. It has become part and parcel of our national life, and has been found precious as the gift of a new faculty. We should miss the loss of cheap and rapid correspondence with our friends and acquaintances almost as much as the loss of speech or the loss of sight. The postman has now to find his way to the humblest, poorest districts, where twenty years back his knock was never heard; and what was once a rare luxury, has now come to be considered a common necessary of life. Instead of only seventy-six millions of letters passing through the post in a year, as in 1838, the number has risen to between seven and eight hundred millions. On the average every individual in England receives twenty-eight letters a-year (in London the individual average is forty-six), in Scotland eighteen, and in Ireland nine. The gross revenue derived from these sources is over four millions; and some of the railway companies each make more money out of the conveyance of the mails in a year, than the annual revenue of the whole kingdom in the days of William and Mary. The moral and social effects of the cheap postage are incalculable. It has tended to strengthen and perpetuate domestic ties, to bring the most scattered and distant members of a family under the benign influences of home, and to foster feelings of friendship and sympathy between man and man. Upon the education and intelligence of the people, too, it has had, concurrently with other causes, a marked effect. Many who looked upon the art of writing as only a temptation to forgery, were induced to take pen in hand and master the science of pot-hooks and hangers, for the sake of corresponding with their friends, and of being able to read the letters they received. In 1839 a third of the men and half of the women who were married, according to the registrar's returns, could not sign their own names; in 1857 that was the case with only a seventh of the men, and a fifth of the women; and not a little of this advanced education may be attributed to the impulse given by the introduction of cheap postage. Nor have the advantages derived from the post office by the great body of the public ended here. It has shown itself the most progressive department of the government, and has undertaken many benevolent branches of work which were never contemplated by Sir Rowland Hill. Thus it carries on an extensive savings-bank system, worked out by Mr. Frank Ives Scudamore, adopted by Mr. Gladstone when Chancellor of the Exchequer, and established by Act of Parliament in 1861. This valuable department, whose operations are now of a very extensive character, keeps a separate account for every depositor, acknowledges the receipt, and, on the requisite notice being furnished, sends out warrants authorizing post-masters to pay such sums as depositors may wish to withdraw. The deposits are handed over to the Commissioners for the reduction of the National Debt, and repaid to the depositors through the post office. The rate of interest payable to depositors is two and a half per cent. Each depositor has his savings-bank book, which is sent to him yearly for examination, and the increasing interest calculated and allowed. The post office now acts, too, as a life-insurance society, offering advantages to the operative which no other society can offer, and which the public are beginning to appreciate. In 1869 the entire telegraphic system of the United Kingdom passed into the hands of the post office, whose administrators have shown themselves anxious to offer increased facilities to the public for the transaction of business. The number of telegraphic stations has been greatly increased, and the rate reduced at which messages are flashed from one part of the island to the other. Finally, a recent innovation, made entirely in the interest of the public weal, is the introduction of _Halfpenny Post Cards_. On one side of these missives the sender writes the name and address of his correspondent; on the other, the communication intended for him. The card already bears a halfpenny stamp impressed, and nothing more remains to be done but to deposit it in the nearest office or pillar-post. We think, then, it may fairly be said that the post office has shown itself anxious to "keep abreast" with the ever-increasing wants of the commercial classes of Great Britain. * * * * * While these pages are passing through the press, the following particulars, apparently issued under official direction, have attracted our attention. We append them here, as they cannot fail to interest the reader:--"It appears that there are in the United Kingdom 6 miles 712 yards of _pneumatic tubes_ in connection with the postal telegraphic system (1871). Of these, 4 miles 638 yards exist in London, and 2 miles 74 yards in the provinces--the latter being confined to Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow. Of the total length of tubes now existing, only 2 miles 1324 yards existed prior to the transfer of the telegraphs to the post office; so that no less than 3 miles 1148 yards have been laid since that date; or, in other words, the system has been considerably more than doubled in less than a year. The total length of new tubes ordered and in progress exceeds 3 miles, and when these are completed, the system will be nearly 10 miles in length. All of the tubes in the provinces, and all but two of those in London, are worked on Clark's system. The two which form an exception are those between Telegraph Street and St. Martin's-le-Grand, which are worked on Siemens' system. The former are made of lead, with a diameter varying from 1-1/4 to 2-1/4 inches--the more frequent size being 1-1/2 inches. The latter are made of iron, and have a diameter of 3 inches. The idea of iron tubes worked on Siemens' principle is derived, we believe, from Berlin, where the system is entirely of this description; and of the new tubes in progress, that from St. Martin's-le-Grand to Temple Bar will be of this kind. All of the tubes now in existence are worked in both directions by means of alternate pressure and vacuum; the motive power, in the shape of a steam-engine, being stationed at the central office, with which the out-stations have communication by this means. It is interesting to note the difference of time occupied by the different tubes in London in passing the 'carriers' through from one end to the other--the speed being governed by the length and diameter of the tube, and by the circumstance whether it is carried in a straight line, or has to encounter sharp curves and bends on its way. The great advantage of this means of communication, for short distance, over the electric is, that the tubes are not liable to sudden blocks of work as the wires are, and that a dozen or more messages may be sent through, at one blow, if desired. For local telegraphs in great towns the pneumatic system is invaluable, and is certain to be greatly extended under the postal administration." FOOTNOTES: [D] Brian Tuke, master of the post to King Henry VIII. The Overland Route. LIEUTENANT WAGHORN. The Overland Route. LIEUTENANT WAGHORN. Worthy to stand on a par with, or at lowest, in the very next rank to, the men who originate great inventions, are those whose foresight and energy discover the means of extending their utility; and in shortening the journey between Europe and India, by the establishment of the overland route, Lieutenant Waghorn practically achieved as great a triumph over time and space, as if he had invented a machine for the purpose that would have traversed the old route in the same time. It was in 1827 that Thomas Waghorn first promulgated the idea of steam communication between our Eastern possessions and the mother country. He was then twenty-seven years of age, and had just returned to Calcutta from rough and arduous service in the Arracan war. When a midshipman of barely seventeen, he had passed the "navigation" examination for lieutenant,--the youngest, it appears, who ever did so; but although, consequently, eligible for that rank, he had never reached it up to this time, in spite of the distinction he had acquired in various actions. His health had been so much shattered by a fever caught in Arracan, that he had to return to England; but he did not leave Calcutta without communicating his design to the government there, and obtaining a letter of credence from Lord Combermere (then vice-president in council) to the East India Company, recommending him, in consequence of his meritorious conduct in the recent war, "as a fit and proper person to open steam navigation with India, _via_ the Cape of Good Hope." The idea, however, was just then in advance of the time, and all Waghorn's agitation in its favour proved of no avail. In the meantime, the idea of saving the time spent in "doubling the Cape," by means of a route through the Mediterranean, across the Isthmus of Suez, and down the Red Sea, had occurred to him; and in 1829 he procured a commission from the East India Directory to report on the probability of Red Sea navigation, and at the same time to convey certain despatches to Sir John Malcolm, Governor of Bombay. He got notice of this mission on the 24th October, and was desired to be at Suez by the 8th December, in order to catch the steamer _Enterprise_, and proceed in her to India. He took only four days to make ready for the journey, and on the 28th left London on the top of the _Eagle_ stage-coach from Gracechurch Street. Circumstances were anything but propitious all through this expedition of his; and yet he defied and disregarded them all. Bridges broke down at central points, falling avalanches had to be kept clear of, an accident disabled the steamer, and he had to go some hundred and thirty miles out of his way in consequence. In spite of all that, he dashed through five kingdoms, and reached Trieste in nine days, or little more than half the time occupied by the post-office mails on the same journey. Impatient of delay, he learned that an Austrian brig had left for Alexandria the night before, but the breeze had fallen, and she was still to be caught a glimpse of from the hill-tops. A fresh posting carriage was got out, and off he went in chase of the vessel, hoping to make up to her at Pesano, twenty miles down the Gulf of Venice. The calm still prevailed; and as he went dashing along he could catch sight, now and then, as the carriage passed some open part of the road and disclosed the sea, of the brig creeping lazily along. Every hour he gained on her; instead of a dull, black speck upon the horizon, he began to make out her hull, her sails, and rigging. He urged the post-boys with redoubled vehemence--kept them going at a furious pace. He was within three miles of the vessel--it was crawling, he was flying--another half hour would see him safe on board, and then heigh for India. But stay, surely that was the wind among the trees; could the breeze have risen? It had indeed. A strong northerly wind sprang up; gradually the sails of the brig swelled out before it, and poor Waghorn, with his panting, jaded horses, was left far behind. The chase was hopeless now--so he went back mournfully to Trieste--"exhausted in body with fatigue, and racked by disappointment after the previous excitement." The next ship, a Spanish one, was not to sail for three days. That was more than Waghorn could endure; he went to the captain, urged him, bribed him with fifty dollars to make it two days, instead of three, and succeeded. In eight and forty hours he was somewhat consoled for his former discouragement, to find himself at length at sea. In sixteen days he was at Alexandria, and after a rest of only five hours there, hired donkeys and was off to Rosetta. The donkeys were in the conspiracy against him, as well as the wind and the avalanches. The first day they trotted and walked along as brisk as may be, and our indefatigable traveller worked them well. It is well known that the donkey of the east is a paragon of wisdom, compared with his dunce of a brother in Europe; and upon a night's reflection, Mr. Waghorn's donkeys seem to have clearly perceived that he had no notion of easy stages, and was bent on keeping them going as fast as he could, and as long as daylight suffered. So the second day they managed to stumble, and limp, and fall down intentionally four or five times, and to put on a pitiful affectation of fatigue and weariness,--a common dodge, the drivers said, of those knowing animals. Fortunately he was soon able to dispense with the deceitful donkeys; and embarking on the Nile, undertook to navigate the boat himself, in order to take soundings and make observations in regard to the route. After brief repose at Rosetta, he set out for Cairo on a _cangé_, a sort of boat of fifteen tons burthen, with two large latteen sails. The captain undertook to land him at Cairo in three days and four nights; but the boat went aground on a shoal, and after tacking for five days and nights, Waghorn lost all patience, and proceeded to his destination upon donkeys. He crossed the desert from Cairo to Suez in four days, on two of which he travelled seventy-four miles. He was thus able to keep his appointment and be at Suez by the 8th December, but there was no sign of the steamer. The wind was blowing right in her teeth; so after waiting two days, with feverish impatience, Mr. Waghorn determined to sail down the centre of the Red Sea, in an open boat, in the hope of meeting the steamer somewhere above Cossier. All the seamen of the locality held up their hands at the proposal of the mad Englishman, and tried to dissuade him. It was the opinion, he knew, of nautical authorities at the time, that the Red Sea was not navigable. But he could not rest quiet at Suez; he had important despatches to deliver; he was commissioned to inquire into the navigability of these waters; and out he would go in an open boat, let folk say what they would, and so he did. "He embarked," says the narrator of his "Life and Labours," in _Household Words_,[E] "in an open boat, and without having any personal knowledge of the navigation of this sea, without chart, without compass, or even the encouragement of a single precedent for such an enterprise--his only guide the sun by day, and the north star by night--he sailed down the centre of the Red Sea. Of this most interesting and unprecedented voyage Mr. Waghorn gives no detailed account. All intermediate things are abruptly cut off with these very characteristic words: '_Suffice it_ to say, _I arrived_ at Juddah, 620 miles in six and a half days, in that boat!' You get nothing more than the sum total. He kept a sailor's log-journal; but it is only meant for sailors to read, though now and then you obtain a glimpse of the sort of work he went through. Thus: '_Sunday, 13th_--Strong, N.W. wind, half a gale, but scudding under storm-sail. Sunset, anchored for the night. Jaffateen Islands out of sight to the N. Lost two anchors during the night,' &c. The rest is equally nautical and technical. In one of the many scattered papers collected since the death of Mr. Waghorn, we find a very slight passing allusion to toils, perils, and privations, which, however, he calmly says, were 'inseparable from such a voyage under such circumstances,'--but not one touch of description from first to last. A more extraordinary instance of great practical experience and knowledge, resolutely and fully carrying out a project which must of necessity have appeared little short of madness to almost everybody else, was never recorded. He was perfectly successful, so far as the navigation was concerned, and in the course he adopted, notwithstanding that his crew of six Arabs mutinied. It appears (for he tells us only the bare fact) they were only subdued on the principle known to philosophers in theory, and to high-couraged men, accustomed to command, by experience,--namely, that the one man who is braver, stronger, and firmer than any individual of ten or twenty men, is more than a match for the ten or twenty put together. He touched at Cossier on the 14th, not having fallen in with the _Enterprise_. There he was told by the governor that the steamer was expected every hour. Mr. Waghorn was in no state of mind to wait very long; so, finding she did not arrive, he again put to sea in his open boat, resolved, if he did not fall in with her, to proceed the entire distance to Juddah--a distance of 400 miles further. Of this further voyage he does not leave any record, even in his log, beyond the simple declaration that he 'embarked for Juddah--ran the distance in three days and twenty-one hours and a quarter--and on the 23d anchored his boat close to one of the East India Company's cruisers, the _Benares_.' But now comes the most trying part of his whole undertaking--the part which a man of his vigorously constituted impulses was least able to bear as the climax of his prolonged and arduous efforts, privations, anxieties, and fatigue. Repairing on board the _Benares_ to learn the news, the captain informed him that, in consequence of being found in a defective state on her arrival at Bombay, 'the _Enterprise_ was not coming at all.' This intelligence seems to have felled him like a blow, and he was immediately seized with a delirious fever. The captain and officers of the _Benares_ felt great sympathy and interest in this sad result of so many extraordinary efforts, and detaining him on board, bestowed every attention on his malady." It was six weeks before he could proceed by sailing vessel to Bombay, where he arrived on the 21st March, having, in spite of all the drawbacks in his way, accomplished the journey in four months and twenty-one days--quite an extraordinary rapidity at that time. Had he escaped the fever at Juddah, and fallen in with the _Enterprise_ at the right time, nearly two months might have been saved. He had proved the practicability of the overland route, and he now devoted himself to its establishment. In an address to the Home Government and the East India Company, he thus expresses his views:-- "Of myself, I trust I may be excused when I say, that the highest object of my ambition has ever been an extensive usefulness; and my line of life--my turn of mind--my disposition, long ago impelled me to give all my leisure, and all my opportunities of observation, to the introduction of steam-vessels, and permanently establishing them as the means of communication between India and England including all the colonies on the route. The vast importance of three months' earlier information to his Majesty's government, and to the Honourable Company,--whether relative to a war or a peace--to abundant or to short crops--to the sickness or convalescence of a colony or district, and oftentimes even of an individual; the advantages to the merchant, by enabling him to regulate his supplies and orders according to circumstances and demands; the anxieties of the thousands of my countrymen in India for accounts, and further accounts, of their parents, children, and friends at home; the corresponding anxieties of those relatives and friends in this country;--in a word, the speediest possible transit of letters to the tens of thousands who at all times in solicitude await them, was, to my mind, a service of the greatest general importance; and it shall not be my fault if I do not, and for ever establish it." The scheme which he thus resolutely and enthusiastically declared his adoption of, he lived to carry out, but at the cost of years of weary advocacy, agitation for help, desperate attempts on his own account, or in conjunction with a few enterprising associates, in the teeth of constant discouragement, official indifference, jealousy, and disguised hostility. The East India Company told him there was no need of steam navigation to the East at all, ordered him to mind his own business and return to field service, circulated reports of his insanity through their agents in Egypt when Waghorn went there to enlist the Pasha in his cause. The overland route, however, was no theory, but an undoubted fact. Waghorn never for a moment relaxed his grasp of it, or doubted its value; and in the end, after unheard of difficulties, disappointments, and opposition, into the long, painful story of which we need not enter, succeeded in establishing the overland route. When he left Egypt in 1841, he had provided English carriages, vans, and horses, for the conveyance of passengers across the desert, placed small steamers on the Nile and Alexandrian Canal, and built the eight halting-places on the desert between Cairo and Suez. He also set up the three hotels in the same quarter "in which every comfort, and even some luxuries, were provided and stored for the passing traveller,--among which should be mentioned iron tanks with good water, ranged in cellars beneath;--and all this in a region which was previously a waste of arid sands and scorching gravel, beset with wandering robbers and their camels. These wandering robbers he converted into faithful guides, as they are now found to be by every traveller; and even ladies with their infants are enabled to cross and re-cross the desert with as much security as if they were in Europe." In acknowledgment of his services, Mr. Waghorn received the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Navy, a grant of £1500, and an annuity of £200 a-year from Government, and another annuity of £200 from the East India Company; but he did not live long to enjoy his well-earned rewards. The care, and anxiety, and fatigue he had undergone had shattered his constitution. Through some misunderstanding or mismanagement on the part of the East India Company, rivals were allowed to step in and carry off the chief profits of the overland system, and his last years were embittered by various disputes with the authorities. He died in the end of 1849, by years only in the prime of life; but old, and worn by his labours before his time. Such was the career of the "pioneer of the Overland Route." But in connection with England's route to India, the name of Monsieur de Lesseps must never be forgotten, nor the great enterprise which, at so much cost, and in spite of so many obstacles, he successfully carried out--the Suez Canal. When he first projected it he met with most of the obstacles which are thrown in the way of great inventions. England, jealous of a scheme which seemed likely to throw into the hands of a foreign power the nearest route to her beloved India, stood sullenly aloof, and refused to contribute moral or pecuniary support; while some of the most eminent English and foreign engineers openly declared that it could never be carried out. M. de Lesseps, however, was one of those men who, when they have seized a great idea, can never be thrown off it. It had taken full possession of his imagination, judgment, and intellect! he felt that it _could_, and he determined that it _should_ be realized. He conquered every difficulty: he raised funds; he secured the support of his own government; and in 1856 he obtained from the Pasha of Egypt the exclusive privilege of constructing a ship-canal from Tyneh, near the ruins of the ancient Pelusium, to Suez. M. de Lesseps determined that his canal should be cut in a straight line, with an average width of 330 feet, and at an uniform depth of 20 feet under low-water mark, while at each end was to be constructed a sluice-lock, 330 feet long by 70 wide. Further, at each end he proposed to execute a magnificent harbour; that at the Mediterranean end was to be extended five miles into the sea, so as to obtain a permanent depth of water for a ship drawing twenty-three feet, on account of the enormous quantity of mud annually silted up by the Nile; that at the Red Sea end was to be three miles long. In 1865 the great canal was begun. The Mediterranean entrance is at Port Said, about the middle of the narrow neck of land between Lake Menzaleh and the sea, in the eastern part of the Delta. Thence it is carried for about twenty miles across Menzaleh Lake, being 112 yards wide at the surface, 26 yards at the bottom, and 26 feet deep. On each side an artificial bank rises some 15 feet high. The distance thence to Abu Ballah Lake is 11 miles, through ground which varies from 15 to 30 feet above the level of the sea. This lake being traversed, there is land again--a troublesome and shifty soil--to Timsah Lake, the canal being cut at a depth below the sea-level of 50 to 100 feet. On the shore of Timsah Lake has risen a new and busy town, the central point of the canal, and named Ismailia, in honour of the present Pasha of Egypt. A space of eight miles intervenes between the Timsah Lake and the Bitter Lakes, and in this space the cuttings are very deep and difficult. The soil being almost purely sand, the constant labour of powerful dredging machines is constantly required, to prevent the channel from filling up. The deepest cutting occurs at El Guisr, or Girsch, and is no less than 85 feet below the surface: at the water-level it is 112 yards wide, at the summit-level 173 yards. In traversing the Bitter Lakes the course of the canal is marked by embankments. From the southern end of these lakes to Suez, a distance of about thirteen miles, the cuttings are heavy and deep. After many discouraging failures, M. de Lesseps' great work was completed last year, and the formal opening of the canal took place in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and a goodly number of princes, potentates, and distinguished personages. It is now open to navigation from end to end, and ships of considerable tonnage have successfully accomplished the passage. Whether the canal is a _commercial_ success may still be doubted. 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[Transcriber's Note: Ligature occurrences of oe have been represented as two separate letters, such as in "Koenig" and "Phoenicians". The following alterations have been made to the text as originally printed: Page 30: Changed quotes from double to single: 'Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye,' Page 64: "reader." changed to "reader," Page 65: "home," changed to "home." Page 128: Added closing quote: ... and working efficiency." Page 131: Added closing quote: ... of solid masonry." Page 136: "porportion" changed to "proportion" Page 166: "better then an arm" changed to "better than an arm" Page 187: "paddle-wheels Through" changed to "paddle-wheels. Through" Page 197: "a mortal sickness:" changed to "a mortal sickness;" Page 249: "own, Thus" changed to "own. Thus" Page 250: "condition Only" changed to "condition. Only" Page 295: Changed double quotes to single quotes: passing the 'carriers' through Page 295: Added closing quote: ... under the postal administration." Page 315: Added closing quote: ... present day." Page 316: "Dore" changed to "Doré" ] 
28553	----	Transcriber's Note The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Subscripts are represented as X_1. Superscripts are represented by X^1. HOW IT WORKS AUTHOR'S NOTE. I beg to thank the following gentlemen and firms for the help they have given me in connection with the letterpress and illustrations of "How It Works"-- Messrs. F.J.C. Pole and M.G. Tweedie (for revision of MS.); W. Lineham; J.F. Kendall; E. Edser; A.D. Helps; J. Limb; The Edison Bell Phonograph Co.; Messrs. Holmes and Co.; The Pelton Wheel Co.; Messrs. Babcock and Wilcox; Messrs. Siebe, Gorman, and Co.; Messrs. Negretti and Zambra; Messrs. Chubb; The Yale Lock Co.; The Micrometer Engineering Co.; Messrs. Marshall and Sons; The Maignen Filter Co.; Messrs. Broadwood and Co. [Illustration: ON THE FOOTPLATE OF A LOCOMOTIVE.] How It Works Dealing in Simple Language with Steam, Electricity, Light, Heat, Sound, Hydraulics, Optics, etc. and with their applications to Apparatus in Common Use By ARCHIBALD WILLIAMS Author of "The Romance of Modern Invention," "The Romance of Mining," etc., etc. THOMAS NELSON AND SONS London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and New York PREFACE. How does it work? This question has been put to me so often by persons young and old that I have at last decided to answer it in such a manner that a much larger public than that with which I have personal acquaintance may be able to satisfy themselves as to the principles underlying many of the mechanisms met with in everyday life. In order to include steam, electricity, optics, hydraulics, thermics, light, and a variety of detached mechanisms which cannot be classified under any one of these heads, within the compass of about 450 pages, I have to be content with a comparatively brief treatment of each subject. This brevity has in turn compelled me to deal with principles rather than with detailed descriptions of individual devices--though in several cases recognized types are examined. The reader will look in vain for accounts of the Yerkes telescope, of the latest thing in motor cars, and of the largest locomotive. But he will be put in the way of understanding the essential nature of _all_ telescopes, motors, and steam-engines so far as they are at present developed, which I think may be of greater ultimate profit to the uninitiated. While careful to avoid puzzling the reader by the use of mysterious phraseology I consider that the parts of a machine should be given their technical names wherever possible. To prevent misconception, many of the diagrams accompanying the letterpress have words as well as letters written on them. This course also obviates the wearisome reference from text to diagram necessitated by the use of solitary letters or figures. I may add, with regard to the diagrams of this book, that they are purposely somewhat unconventional, not being drawn to scale nor conforming to the canons of professional draughtsmanship. Where advisable, a part of a machine has been exaggerated to show its details. As a rule solid black has been preferred to fine shading in sectional drawings, and all unnecessary lines are omitted. I would here acknowledge my indebtedness to my draughtsman, Mr. Frank Hodgson, for his care and industry in preparing the two hundred or more diagrams for which he was responsible. Four organs of the body--the eye, the ear, the larynx, and the heart--are noticed in appropriate places. The eye is compared with the camera, the larynx with a reed pipe, the heart with a pump, while the ear fitly opens the chapter on acoustics. The reader who is unacquainted with physiology will thus be enabled to appreciate the better these marvellous devices, far more marvellous, by reason of their absolutely automatic action, than any creation of human hands. A.W. UPLANDS, STOKE POGES, BUCKS. CONTENTS. Chapter I.--THE STEAM-ENGINE. What is steam?--The mechanical energy of steam--The boiler--The circulation of water in a boiler--The enclosed furnace--The multitubular boiler--Fire-tube boilers--Other types of boilers--Aids to combustion--Boiler fittings--The safety-valve--The water-gauge--The steam-gauge--The water supply to a boiler 13 Chapter II.--THE CONVERSION OF HEAT ENERGY INTO MECHANICAL MOTION. Reciprocating engines--Double-cylinder engines--The function of the fly-wheel--The cylinder--The slide-valve--The eccentric--"Lap" of the valve: expansion of steam--How the cut-off is managed--Limit of expansive working--Compound engines--Arrangement of expansion engines--Compound locomotives--Reversing gears--"Linking-up"--Piston-valves--Speed governors--Marine-speed governors--The condenser 44 Chapter III.--THE STEAM TURBINE. How a turbine works--The De Laval turbine--The Parsons turbine--Description of the Parsons turbine--The expansive action of steam in a Parsons turbine--Balancing the thrust--Advantages of the marine turbine 74 Chapter IV.--THE INTERNAL-COMBUSTION ENGINE. The meaning of the term--Action of the internal-combustion engine--The motor car--The starting-handle--The engine--The carburetter--Ignition of the charge--Advancing the spark--Governing the engine--The clutch--The gear-box--The compensating gear--The silencer--The brakes--Speed of cars 87 Chapter V.--ELECTRICAL APPARATUS. What is electricity?--Forms of electricity--Magnetism--The permanent magnet--Lines of force--Electro-magnets--The electric bell--The induction coil--The condenser--Transformation of current--Uses of the induction coil 112 Chapter VI.--THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. Needle instruments--Influence of current on the magnetic needle--Method of reversing the current--Sounding instruments--Telegraphic relays--Recording telegraphs--High-speed telegraphy 127 Chapter VII.--WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY. The transmitting apparatus--The receiving apparatus--Syntonic transmission--The advance of wireless telegraphy 137 Chapter VIII.--THE TELEPHONE. The Bell telephone--The Edison transmitter--The granular carbon transmitter--General arrangement of a telephone circuit--Double-line circuits--Telephone exchanges--Submarine telephony 147 Chapter IX.--DYNAMOS AND ELECTRIC MOTORS. A simple dynamo--Continuous-current dynamos--Multipolar dynamos--Exciting the field magnets--Alternating current dynamos--The transmission of power--The electric motor--Electric lighting--The incandescent lamp--Arc lamps--"Series" and "parallel" arrangement of lamps--Current for electric lamps--Electroplating 159 Chapter X.--RAILWAY BRAKES. The Vacuum Automatic brake--The Westinghouse air-brake 187 Chapter XI.--RAILWAY SIGNALLING. The block system--Position of signals--Interlocking the signals--Locking gear--Points--Points and signals in combination--Working the block system--Series of signalling operations--Single line signals--The train staff--Train staff and ticket--Electric train staff system--Interlocking--Signalling operations--Power signalling--Pneumatic signalling--Automatic signalling 200 Chapter XII.--OPTICS. Lenses--The image cast by a convex lens--Focus--Relative position of object and lens--Correction of lenses for colour--Spherical aberration--Distortion of image--The human eye--The use of spectacles--The blind spot 230 Chapter XIII.--THE MICROSCOPE, THE TELESCOPE, AND THE MAGIC-LANTERN. The simple microscope--Use of the simple microscope in the telescope--The terrestrial telescope--The Galilean telescope--The prismatic telescope--The reflecting telescope--The parabolic mirror--The compound microscope--The magic-lantern--The bioscope--The plane mirror 253 Chapter XIV.--SOUND AND MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. Nature of sound--The ear--Musical instruments--The vibration of strings--The sounding-board and the frame of a piano--The strings--The striking mechanism--The quality of a note 270 Chapter XV.--WIND INSTRUMENTS. Longitudinal vibration--Columns of air--Resonance of columns of air--Length and tone--The open pipe--The overtones of an open pipe--Where overtones are used--The arrangement of the pipes and pedals--Separate sound-boards--Varieties of stops--Tuning pipes and reeds--The bellows--Electric and pneumatic actions--The largest organ in the world--Human reeds 287 Chapter XVI.--TALKING-MACHINES. The phonograph--The recorder--The reproducer--The gramophone--The making of records--Cylinder records--Gramophone records 310 Chapter XVII.--WHY THE WIND BLOWS. Why the wind blows--Land and sea breezes--Light air and moisture--The barometer--The column barometer--The wheel barometer--A very simple barometer--The aneroid barometer--Barometers and weather--The diving-bell--The diving-dress--Air-pumps--Pneumatic tyres--The air-gun--The self-closing door-stop--The action of wind on oblique surfaces--The balloon--The flying-machine 322 Chapter XVIII.--HYDRAULIC MACHINERY. The siphon--The bucket pump--The force-pump--The most marvellous pump--The blood channels--The course of the blood--The hydraulic press--Household water-supply fittings--The ball-cock--The water-meter--Water-supply systems--The household filter--Gas traps--Water engines--The cream separator--The "hydro" 350 Chapter XIX.--HEATING AND LIGHTING. The hot-water supply--The tank system--The cylinder system--How a lamp works--Gas and gasworks--Automatic stoking--A gas governor--The gas meter--Incandescent gas lighting 386 Chapter XX.--VARIOUS MECHANISMS. CLOCKS AND WATCHES:--A short history of timepieces--The construction of timepieces--The driving power--The escapement--Compensating pendulums--The spring balance--The cylinder escapement--The lever escapement--Compensated balance-wheels--Keyless winding mechanism for watches--The hour hand train. LOCKS:--The Chubb lock--The Yale lock. THE CYCLE:--The gearing of a cycle--The free wheel--The change-speed gear. AGRICULTURAL MACHINES:--The threshing-machine--Mowing-machines. SOME NATURAL PHENOMENA:--Why sun-heat varies in intensity--The tides--Why high tide varies daily 410 HOW IT WORKS. Chapter I. THE STEAM-ENGINE. What is steam?--The mechanical energy of steam--The boiler--The circulation of water in a boiler--The enclosed furnace--The multitubular boiler--Fire-tube boilers--Other types of boilers--Aids to combustion--Boiler fittings--The safety-valve--The water-gauge--The steam-gauge--The water supply to a boiler. WHAT IS STEAM? If ice be heated above 32° Fahrenheit, its molecules lose their cohesion, and move freely round one another--the ice is turned into water. Heat water above 212° Fahrenheit, and the molecules exhibit a violent mutual repulsion, and, like dormant bees revived by spring sunshine, separate and dart to and fro. If confined in an air-tight vessel, the molecules have their flights curtailed, and beat more and more violently against their prison walls, so that every square inch of the vessel is subjected to a rising pressure. We may compare the action of the steam molecules to that of bullets fired from a machine-gun at a plate mounted on a spring. The faster the bullets came, the greater would be the continuous compression of the spring. THE MECHANICAL ENERGY OF STEAM. If steam is let into one end of a cylinder behind an air-tight but freely-moving piston, it will bombard the walls of the cylinder and the piston; and if the united push of the molecules on the one side of the latter is greater than the resistance on the other side opposing its motion, the piston must move. Having thus partly got their liberty, the molecules become less active, and do not rush about so vigorously. The pressure on the piston decreases as it moves. But if the piston were driven back to its original position against the force of the steam, the molecular activity--that is, pressure--would be restored. We are here assuming that no heat has passed through the cylinder or piston and been radiated into the air; for any loss of heat means loss of energy, since heat _is_ energy. THE BOILER. The combustion of fuel in a furnace causes the walls of the furnace to become _hot_, which means that the molecules of the substance forming the walls are thrown into violent agitation. If the walls are what are called "good conductors" of heat, they will transmit the agitation through them to any surrounding substance. In the case of the ordinary house stove this is the air, which itself is agitated, or grows warm. A steam-boiler has the furnace walls surrounded by water, and its function is to transmit molecular movement (heat, or energy) through the furnace plates to the water until the point is reached when steam generates. At atmospheric pressure--that is, if not confined in any way--steam would fill 1,610 times the space which its molecules occupied in their watery formation. If we seal up the boiler so that no escape is possible for the steam molecules, their motion becomes more and more rapid, and _pressure_ is developed by their beating on the walls of the boiler. There is theoretically no limit to which the pressure may be raised, provided that sufficient fuel-combustion energy is transmitted to the vaporizing water. To raise steam in large quantities we must employ a fuel which develops great heat in proportion to its weight, is readily procured, and cheap. Coal fulfils all these conditions. Of the 800 million tons mined annually throughout the world, 400 million tons are burnt in the furnaces of steam-boilers. A good boiler must be--(1) Strong enough to withstand much higher pressures than that at which it is worked; (2) so designed as to burn its fuel to the greatest advantage. Even in the best-designed boilers a large part of the combustion heat passes through the chimney, while a further proportion is radiated from the boiler. Professor John Perry[1] considers that this waste amounts, under the best conditions at present obtainable, to eleven-twelfths of the whole. We have to burn a shillingsworth of coal to capture the energy stored in a pennyworth. Yet the steam-engine of to-day is three or four times as efficient as the engine of fifty years ago. This is due to radical improvements in the design of boilers and of the machinery which converts the heat energy of steam into mechanical motion. CIRCULATION OF WATER IN A BOILER. If you place a pot filled with water on an open fire, and watch it when it boils, you will notice that the water heaves up at the sides and plunges down at the centre. This is due to the water being heated most at the sides, and therefore being lightest there. The rising steam-bubbles also carry it up. On reaching the surface, the bubbles burst, the steam escapes, and the water loses some of its heat, and rushes down again to take the place of steam-laden water rising. [Illustration: FIG. 1.] [Illustration: FIG. 2.] If the fire is very fierce, steam-bubbles may rise from all points at the bottom, and impede downward currents (Fig. 1). The pot then "boils over." Fig. 2 shows a method of preventing this trouble. We lower into our pot a vessel of somewhat smaller diameter, with a hole in the bottom, arranged in such a manner as to leave a space between it and the pot all round. The upward currents are then separated entirely from the downward, and the fire can be forced to a very much greater extent than before without the water boiling over. This very simple arrangement is the basis of many devices for producing free circulation of the water in steam-boilers. We can easily follow out the process of development. In Fig. 3 we see a simple U-tube depending from a vessel of water. Heat is applied to the left leg, and a steady circulation at once commences. In order to increase the heating surface we can extend the heated leg into a long incline (Fig. 4), beneath which three lamps instead of only one are placed. The direction of the circulation is the same, but its rate is increased. [Illustration: FIG. 3.] A further improvement results from increasing the number of tubes (Fig. 5), keeping them all on the slant, so that the heated water and steam may rise freely. THE ENCLOSED FURNACE. [Illustration: FIG. 4.] [Illustration: FIG. 5.] Still, a lot of the heat gets away. In a steam-boiler the burning fuel is enclosed either by fire-brick or a "water-jacket," forming part of the boiler. A water-jacket signifies a double coating of metal plates with a space between, which is filled with water (see Fig. 6). The fire is now enclosed much as it is in a kitchen range. But our boiler must not be so wasteful of the heat as is that useful household fixture. On their way to the funnel the flames and hot gases should act on a very large metal or other surface in contact with the water of the boiler, in order to give up a due proportion of their heat. [Illustration: FIG. 6.--Diagrammatic sketch of a locomotive type of boiler. Water indicated by dotted lines. The arrows show the direction taken by the air and hot gases from the air-door to the funnel.] THE MULTITUBULAR BOILER. [Illustration: FIG. 7.--The Babcock and Wilcox water-tube boiler. One side of the brick seating has been removed to show the arrangement of the water-tubes and furnace.] To save room, boilers which have to make steam very quickly and at high pressures are largely composed of pipes. Such boilers we call multitubular. They are of two kinds--(1) _Water_-tube boilers; in which the water circulates through tubes exposed to the furnace heat. The Babcock and Wilcox boiler (Fig. 7) is typical of this variety. (2) _Fire_-tube boilers; in which the hot gases pass through tubes surrounded by water. The ordinary locomotive boiler (Fig. 6) illustrates this form. The Babcock and Wilcox boiler is widely used in mines, power stations, and, in a modified form, on shipboard. It consists of two main parts--(1) A drum, H, in the upper part of which the steam collects; (2) a group of pipes arranged on the principle illustrated by Fig. 5. The boiler is seated on a rectangular frame of fire-bricks. At one end is the furnace door; at the other the exit to the chimney. From the furnace F the flames and hot gases rise round the upper end of the sloping tubes TT into the space A, where they play upon the under surface of H before plunging downward again among the tubes into the space B. Here the temperature is lower. The arrows indicate further journeys upwards into the space C on the right of a fire-brick division, and past the down tubes SS into D, whence the hot gases find an escape into the chimney through the opening E. It will be noticed that the greatest heat is brought to bear on TT near their junction with UU, the "uptake" tubes; and that every succeeding passage of the pipes brings the gradually cooling gases nearer to the "downtake" tubes SS. The pipes TT are easily brushed and scraped after the removal of plugs from the "headers" into which the tube ends are expanded. Other well-known water-tube boilers are the Yarrow, Belleville, Stirling, and Thorneycroft, all used for driving marine engines. FIRE-TUBE BOILERS. Fig. 6 shows a locomotive boiler in section. To the right is the fire-box, surrounded on all sides by a water-jacket in direct communication with the barrel of the boiler. The inner shell of the fire-box is often made of copper, which withstands the fierce heat better than steel; the outer, like the rest of the boiler, is of steel plates from 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick. The shells of the jacket are braced together by a large number of rivets, RR; and the top, or crown, is strengthened by heavy longitudinal girders riveted to it, or is braced to the top of the boiler by long bolts. A large number of fire-tubes (only three are shown in the diagram for the sake of simplicity) extend from the fire-box to the smoke-box. The most powerful "mammoth" American locomotives have 350 or more tubes, which, with the fire-box, give 4,000 square feet of surface for the furnace heat to act upon. These tubes are expanded at their ends by a special tool into the tube-plates of the fire-box and boiler front. George Stephenson and his predecessors experienced great difficulty in rendering the tube-end joints quite water-tight, but the invention of the "expander" has removed this trouble. The _fire-brick arch_ shown (Fig. 6) in the fire-box is used to deflect the flames towards the back of the fire-box, so that the hot gases may be retarded somewhat, and their combustion rendered more perfect. It also helps to distribute the heat more evenly over the whole of the inside of the box, and prevents cold air from flying directly from the firing door to the tubes. In some American and Continental locomotives the fire-brick arch is replaced by a "water bridge," which serves the same purpose, while giving additional heating surface. The water circulation in a locomotive boiler is--upwards at the fire-box end, where the heat is most intense; forward along the surface; downwards at the smoke-box end; backwards along the bottom of the barrel. OTHER TYPES OF BOILERS. For small stationary land engines the _vertical_ boiler is much used. In Fig. 8 we have three forms of this type--A and B with cross water-tubes; C with vertical fire-tubes. The furnace in every case is surrounded by water, and fed through a door at one side. [Illustration: FIG. 8.--Diagrammatic representation of three types of vertical boilers.] The _Lancashire_ boiler is of large size. It has a cylindrical shell, measuring up to 30 feet in length and 7 feet in diameter, traversed from end to end by two large flues, in the rear part of which are situated the furnaces. The boiler is fixed on a seating of fire-bricks, so built up as to form three flues, A and BB, shown in cross section in Fig. 9. The furnace gases, after leaving the two furnace flues, are deflected downwards into the channel A, by which they pass underneath the boiler to a point almost under the furnace, where they divide right and left and travel through cross passages into the side channels BB, to be led along the boiler's flanks to the chimney exit C. By this arrangement the effective heating surface is greatly increased; and the passages being large, natural draught generally suffices to maintain proper combustion. The Lancashire boiler is much used in factories and (in a modified form) on ships, since it is a steady steamer and is easily kept in order. [Illustration: FIG. 9.--Cross and longitudinal sections of a Lancashire boiler.] In marine boilers of cylindrical shape cross water-tubes and fire-tubes are often employed to increase the heating surface. Return tubes are also led through the water to the funnels, situated at the same end as the furnace. AIDS TO COMBUSTION. We may now turn our attention more particularly to the chemical process called _combustion_, upon which a boiler depends for its heat. Ordinary steam coal contains about 85 per cent. of carbon, 7 per cent. of oxygen, and 4 per cent. of hydrogen, besides traces of nitrogen and sulphur and a small incombustible residue. When the coal burns, the nitrogen is released and passes away without combining with any of the other elements. The sulphur unites with hydrogen and forms sulphuretted hydrogen (also named sulphurous acid), which is injurious to steel plates, and is largely responsible for the decay of tubes and funnels. More of the hydrogen unites with the oxygen as steam. The most important element in coal is the carbon (known chemically by the symbol C). Its combination with oxygen, called combustion, is the act which heats the boiler. Only when the carbon present has combined with the greatest possible amount of oxygen that it will take into partnership is the combustion complete and the full heat-value (fixed by scientific experiment at 14,500 thermal units per pound of carbon) developed. Now, carbon may unite with oxygen, atom for atom, and form _carbon monoxide_ (CO); or in the proportion of one atom of carbon to _two_ of oxygen, and form _carbon dioxide_ (CO_2). The former gas is combustible--that is, will admit another atom of carbon to the molecule--but the latter is saturated with oxygen, and will not burn, or, to put it otherwise, is the product of _perfect_ combustion. A properly designed furnace, supplied with a due amount of air, will cause nearly all the carbon in the coal burnt to combine with the full amount of oxygen. On the other hand, if the oxygen supply is inefficient, CO as well as CO_2 will form, and there will be a heat loss, equal in extreme cases to two-thirds of the whole. It is therefore necessary that a furnace which has to eat up fuel at a great pace should be artificially fed with air in the proportion of from 12 to 20 _pounds_ of air for every pound of fuel. There are two methods of creating a violent draught through the furnace. The first is-- The _forced draught_; very simply exemplified by the ordinary bellows used in every house. On a ship (Fig. 10) the principle is developed as follows:--The boilers are situated in a compartment or compartments having no communication with the outer air, except for the passages down which air is forced by powerful fans at a pressure considerably greater than that of the atmosphere. There is only one "way out"--namely, through the furnace and tubes (or gas-ways) of the boiler, and the funnel. So through these it rushes, raising the fuel to white heat. As may easily be imagined, the temperature of a stokehold, especially in the tropics, is far from pleasant. In the Red Sea the thermometer sometimes rises to 170° Fahrenheit or more, and the poor stokers have a very bad time of it. [Illustration: FIG. 10.--Sketch showing how the "forced draught" is produced in a stokehold and how it affects the furnaces.] [Illustration: SCENE IN THE STOKEHOLD OF A BATTLE-SHIP.] The second system is that of the _induced draught_. Here air is _sucked_ through the furnace by creating a vacuum in the funnel and in a chamber opening into it. Turning to Fig. 6, we see a pipe through which the exhaust steam from the locomotive's cylinders is shot upwards into the funnel, in which, and in the smoke-box beneath it, a strong vacuum is formed while the engine is running. Now, "nature abhors a vacuum," so air will get into the smoke-box if there be a way open. There is--through the air-doors at the bottom of the furnace, the furnace itself, and the fire-tubes; and on the way oxygen combines with the carbon of the fuel, to form carbon dioxide. The power of the draught is so great that, as one often notices when a train passes during the night, red-hot cinders, plucked from the fire-box, and dragged through the tubes, are hurled far into the air. It might be mentioned in parenthesis that the so-called "smoke" which pours from the funnel of a moving engine is mainly condensing steam. A steamship, on the other hand, belches smoke only from its funnels, as fresh water is far too precious to waste as steam. We shall refer to this later on (p. 72). BOILER FITTINGS. The most important fittings on a boiler are:--(1) the safety-valve; (2) the water-gauge; (3) the steam-gauge; (4) the mechanisms for feeding it with water. THE SAFETY-VALVE. Professor Thurston, an eminent authority on the steam-engine, has estimated that a plain cylindrical boiler carrying 100 lbs. pressure to the square inch contains sufficient stored energy to project it into the air a vertical distance of 3-1/2 miles. In the case of a Lancashire boiler at equal pressure the distance would be 2-1/2 miles; of a locomotive boiler, at 125 lbs., 1-1/2 miles; of a steam tubular boiler, at 75 lbs., 1 mile. According to the same writer, a cubic foot of heated water under a pressure of from 60 to 70 lbs. per square inch has _about the same energy as one pound of gunpowder_. Steam is a good servant, but a terrible master. It must be kept under strict control. However strong a boiler may be, it will burst if the steam pressure in it be raised to a certain point; and some device must therefore be fitted on it which will give the steam free egress before that point is reached. A device of this kind is called a _safety-valve_. It usually blows off at less than half the greatest pressure that the boiler has been proved by experiment to be capable of withstanding. In principle the safety-valve denotes an orifice closed by an accurately-fitting plug, which is pressed against its seat on the boiler top by a weighted lever, or by a spring. As soon as the steam pressure on the face of the plug exceeds the counteracting force of the weight or spring, the plug rises, and steam escapes until equilibrium of the opposing forces is restored. On stationary engines a lever safety-valve is commonly employed (Fig. 11). The blowing-off point can be varied by shifting the weight along the arm so as to give it a greater or less leverage. On locomotive and marine boilers, where shocks and movements have to be reckoned with, weights are replaced by springs, set to a certain tension, and locked up so that they cannot be tampered with. [Illustration: FIG. 11.--A LEVER SAFETY-VALVE. V, valve; S, seating; P, pin; L, lever; F, fulcrum; W, weight. The figures indicate the positions at which the weight should be placed for the valve to act when the pressure rises to that number of pounds per square inch.] Boilers are tested by filling the boilers quite full and (1) by heating the water, which expands slightly, but with great pressure; (2) by forcing in additional water with a powerful pump. In either case a rupture would not be attended by an explosion, as water is very inelastic. The days when an engineer could "sit on the valves"--that is, screw them down--to obtain greater pressure, are now past, and with them a considerable proportion of the dangers of high-pressure steam. The Factory Act of 1895, in force throughout the British Isles, provides that every boiler for generating steam in a factory or workshop where the Act applies must have a proper safety-valve, steam-gauge, and water-gauge; and that boilers and fittings must be examined by a competent person at least once in every fourteen months. Neglect of these provisions renders the owner of a boiler liable to heavy penalties if an explosion occurs. One of the most disastrous explosions on record took place at the Redcar Iron Works, Yorkshire, in June 1895. In this case, twelve out of fifteen boilers ranged side by side burst, through one proving too weak for its work. The flying fragments of this boiler, striking the sides of other boilers, exploded them, and so the damage was transmitted down the line. Twenty men were killed and injured; while masses of metal, weighing several tons each, were hurled 250 yards, and caused widespread damage. The following is taken from a journal, dated December 22, 1895: "_Providence_ (_Rhode Island_).--A recent prophecy that a boiler would explode between December 16 and 24 in a store has seriously affected the Christmas trade. Shoppers are incredibly nervous. One store advertises, 'No boilers are being used; lifts running electrically.' All stores have had their boilers inspected." THE WATER-GAUGE. No fitting of a boiler is more important than the _water-gauge_, which shows the level at which the water stands. The engineer must continually consult his gauge, for if the water gets too low, pipes and other surfaces exposed to the furnace flames may burn through, with disastrous results; while, on the other hand, too much water will cause bad steaming. A section of an ordinary gauge is seen in Fig. 12. It consists of two parts, each furnished with a gland, G, to make a steam-tight joint round the glass tube, which is inserted through the hole covered by the plug P^1. The cocks T^1 T^2 are normally open, allowing the ingress of steam and water respectively to the tube. Cock T^3 is kept closed unless for any reason it is necessary to blow steam or water through the gauge. The holes C C can be cleaned out if the plugs P^2 P^3 are removed. Most gauges on high-pressure boilers have a thick glass screen in front, so that in the event of the tube breaking, the steam and water may not blow directly on to the attendants. A further precaution is to include two ball-valves near the ends of the gauge-glass. Under ordinary conditions the balls lie in depressions clear of the ways; but when a rush of steam or water occurs they are sucked into their seatings and block all egress. [Illustration: FIG. 12.--Section of a water-gauge.] On many boilers two water-gauges are fitted, since any gauge may work badly at times. The glasses are tested to a pressure of 3,000 lbs. or more to the square inch before use. THE STEAM-GAUGE. It is of the utmost importance that a person in charge of a boiler should know what pressure the steam has reached. Every boiler is therefore fitted with one _steam-gauge_; many with two, lest one might be unreliable. There are two principal types of steam-gauge:--(1) The Bourdon; (2) the Schäffer-Budenberg. The principle of the Bourdon is illustrated by Fig. 13, in which A is a piece of rubber tubing closed at one end, and at the other drawn over the nozzle of a cycle tyre inflator. If bent in a curve, as shown, the section of the tube is an oval. When air is pumped in, the rubber walls endeavour to assume a circular section, because this shape encloses a larger area than an oval of equal circumference, and therefore makes room for a larger volume of air. In doing so the tube straightens itself, and assumes the position indicated by the dotted lines. Hang an empty "inner tube" of a pneumatic tyre over a nail and inflate it, and you will get a good illustration of the principle. [Illustration: FIG. 13.--Showing the principle of the steam-gauge.] [Illustration: FIG. 14.--Bourdon steam-gauge. Part of dial removed to show mechanism.] In Fig. 14 we have a Bourdon gauge, with part of the dial face broken away to show the internal mechanism. T is a flattened metal tube soldered at one end into a hollow casting, into which screws a tap connected with the boiler. The other end (closed) is attached to a link, L, which works an arm of a quadrant rack, R, engaging with a small pinion, P, actuating the pointer. As the steam pressure rises, the tube T moves its free end outwards towards the position shown by the dotted lines, and traverses the arm of the rack, so shifting the pointer round the scale. As the pressure falls, the tube gradually returns to its zero position. The Schäffer-Budenberg gauge depends for its action on the elasticity of a thin corrugated metal plate, on one side of which steam presses. As the plate bulges upwards it pushes up a small rod resting on it, which operates a quadrant and rack similar to that of the Bourdon gauge. The principle is employed in another form for the aneroid barometer (p. 329). THE WATER SUPPLY TO A BOILER. The water inside a boiler is kept at a proper level by (1) pumps or (2) injectors. The former are most commonly used on stationary and marine boilers. As their mechanism is much the same as that of ordinary force pumps, which will be described in a later chapter, we may pass at once to the _injector_, now almost universally used on locomotive, and sometimes on stationary boilers. At first sight the injector is a mechanical paradox, since it employs the steam from a boiler to blow water into the boiler. In Fig. 15 we have an illustration of the principle of an injector. Steam is led from the boiler through pipe A, which terminates in a nozzle surrounded by a cone, E, connected by the pipe B with the water tank. When steam is turned on it rushes with immense velocity from the nozzle, and creates a partial vacuum in cone E, which soon fills with water. On meeting the water the steam condenses, but not before it has imparted some of its _velocity_ to the water, which thus gains sufficient momentum to force down the valve and find its way to the boiler. The overflow space O O between E and C allows steam and water to escape until the water has gathered the requisite momentum. [Illustration: FIG. 15.--Diagram illustrating the principle of a steam-injector.] [Illustration: FIG. 16.--The Giffard injector.] A form of injector very commonly used is Giffard's (Fig. 16). Steam is allowed to enter by screwing up the valve V. As it rushes through the nozzle of the cone A it takes up water and projects it into the "mixing cone" B, which can be raised or lowered by the pinion D (worked by the hand-wheel wheel shown) so as to regulate the amount of water admitted to B. At the centre of B is an aperture, O, communicating with the overflow. The water passes to the boiler through the valve on the left. It will be noticed that the cone A and the part of B above the orifice O contract downward. This is to convert the _pressure_ of the steam into _velocity_. Below O is a cone, the diameter of which increases downwards. Here the _velocity_ of the water is converted back into _pressure_ in obedience to a well-known hydromechanic law. An injector does not work well if the feed-water be too hot to condense the steam quickly; and it may be taken as a rule that the warmer the water, the smaller is the amount of it injected by a given weight of steam.[2] Some injectors have flap-valves covering the overflow orifice, to prevent air being sucked in and carried to the boiler. When an injector receives a sudden shock, such as that produced by the passing of a locomotive over points, it is liable to "fly off"--that is, stop momentarily--and then send the steam and water through the overflow. If this happens, both steam and water must be turned off, and the injector be restarted; unless it be of the _self-starting_ variety, which automatically controls the admission of water to the "mixing-cone," and allows the injector to "pick up" of itself. For economy's sake part of the steam expelled from the cylinders of a locomotive is sometimes used to work an injector, which passes the water on, at a pressure of 70 lbs. to the square inch, to a second injector operated by high-pressure steam coming direct from the boiler, which increases its velocity sufficiently to overcome the boiler pressure. In this case only a fraction of the weight of high-pressure steam is required to inject a given weight of water, as compared with that used in a single-stage injector. [1] "The Steam-Engine," p. 3. [2] By "weight of steam" is meant the steam produced by boiling a certain weight of water. A pound of steam, if condensed, would form a pound of water. Chapter II. THE CONVERSION OF HEAT ENERGY INTO MECHANICAL MOTION. Reciprocating engines--Double-cylinder engines--The function of the fly-wheel--The cylinder--The slide-valve--The eccentric--"Lap" of the valve: expansion of steam--How the cut-off is managed--Limit of expansive working--Compound engines--Arrangement of expansion engines--Compound locomotives--Reversing gears--"Linking-up"--Piston-valves--Speed governors--Marine-speed governors--The condenser. Having treated at some length the apparatus used for converting water into high-pressure steam, we may pass at once to a consideration of the mechanisms which convert the energy of steam into mechanical motion, or _work_. Steam-engines are of two kinds:--(1) _reciprocating_, employing cylinders and cranks; (2) _rotary_, called turbines. RECIPROCATING ENGINES. [Illustration: FIG. 17.--Sketch showing parts of a horizontal steam-engine.] Fig. 17 is a skeleton diagram of the simplest form of reciprocating engine. C is a _cylinder_ to which steam is admitted through the _steam-ways_[3] W W, first on one side of the piston P, then on the other. The pressure on the piston pushes it along the cylinder, and the force is transmitted through the piston rod P R to the _connecting rod_ C R, which causes the _crank_ K to revolve. At the point where the two rods meet there is a "crosshead," H, running to and fro in a guide to prevent the piston rod being broken or bent by the oblique thrusts and pulls which it imparts through C R to the crank K. The latter is keyed to a _shaft_ S carrying the fly-wheel, or, in the case of a locomotive, the driving-wheels. The crank shaft revolves in bearings. The internal diameter of a cylinder is called its _bore_. The travel of the piston is called its _stroke_. The distance from the centre of the shaft to the centre of the crank pin is called the crank's _throw_, which is half of the piston's _stroke_. An engine of this type is called double-acting, as the piston is pushed alternately backwards and forwards by the steam. When piston rod, connecting rod, and crank lie in a straight line--that is, when the piston is fully out, or fully in--the crank is said to be at a "dead point;" for, were the crank turned to such a position, the admission of steam would not produce motion, since the thrust or pull would be entirely absorbed by the bearings. [Illustration: FIG. 18.--Sectional plan of a horizontal engine.] DOUBLE-CYLINDER ENGINES. [Illustration: FIG. 19.] [Illustration: FIG. 20.] Locomotive, marine, and all other engines which must be started in any position have at least _two_ cylinders, and as many cranks set at an angle to one another. Fig. 19 demonstrates that when one crank, C_1, of a double-cylinder engine is at a "dead point," the other, C_2, has reached a position at which the piston exerts the maximum of turning power. In Fig. 20 each crank is at 45° with the horizontal, and both pistons are able to do work. The power of one piston is constantly increasing while that of the other is decreasing. If _single_-action cylinders are used, at least _three_ of these are needed to produce a perpetual turning movement, independently of a fly-wheel. THE FUNCTION OF THE FLY-WHEEL. A fly-wheel acts as a _reservoir of energy_, to carry the crank of a single-cylinder engine past the "dead points." It is useful in all reciprocating engines to produce steady running, as a heavy wheel acts as a drag on the effects of a sudden increase or decrease of steam pressure. In a pump, mangold-slicer, cake-crusher, or chaff-cutter, the fly-wheel helps the operator to pass _his_ dead points--that is, those parts of the circle described by the handle in which he can do little work. THE CYLINDER. [Illustration: FIG. 21.--Diagrammatic section of a cylinder and its slide-valve.] The cylinders of an engine take the place of the muscular system of the human body. In Fig. 21 we have a cylinder and its slide-valve shown in section. First of all, look at P, the piston. Round it are white grooves, R R, in which rings are fitted to prevent the passage of steam past the piston. The rings are cut through at one point in their circumference, and slightly opened, so that when in position they press all round against the walls of the cylinder. After a little use they "settle down to their work"--that is, wear to a true fit in the cylinder. Each end of the cylinder is closed by a cover, one of which has a boss cast on it, pierced by a hole for the piston rod to work through. To prevent the escape of steam the boss is hollowed out true to accommodate a _gland_, G^1, which is threaded on the rod and screwed up against the boss; the internal space between them being filled with packing. Steam from the boiler enters the steam-chest, and would have access to both sides of the piston simultaneously through the steam-ways, W W, were it not for the SLIDE-VALVE, a hollow box open at the bottom, and long enough for its edges to cover both steam-ways at once. Between W W is E, the passage for the exhaust steam to escape by. The edges of the slide-valve are perfectly flat, as is the face over which the valve moves, so that no steam may pass under the edges. In our illustration the piston has just begun to move towards the right. Steam enters by the left steam-way, which the valve is just commencing to uncover. As the piston moves, the valve moves in the same direction until the port is fully uncovered, when it begins to move back again; and just before the piston has finished its stroke the steam-way on the right begins to open. The steam-way on the left is now in communication with the exhaust port E, so that the steam that has done its duty is released and pressed from the cylinder by the piston. _Reciprocation_ is this backward and forward motion of the piston: hence the term "reciprocating" engines. The linear motion of the piston rod is converted into rotatory motion by the connecting rod and crank. [Illustration: FIG. 22.--Perspective section of cylinder.] The use of a crank appears to be so obvious a method of producing this conversion that it is interesting to learn that, when James Watt produced his "rotative engine" in 1780 he was unable to use the crank because it had already been patented by one Matthew Wasborough. Watt was not easily daunted, however, and within a twelvemonth had himself patented five other devices for obtaining rotatory motion from a piston rod. Before passing on, it may be mentioned that Watt was the father of the modern--that is, the high-pressure--steam-engine; and that, owing to the imperfection of the existing machinery, the difficulties he had to overcome were enormous. On one occasion he congratulated himself because one of his steam-cylinders was only three-eighths of an inch out of truth in the bore. Nowadays a good firm would reject a cylinder 1/500 of an inch out of truth; and in small petrol-engines 1/5000 of an inch is sometimes the greatest "limit of error" allowed. [Illustration: FIG. 23.--The eccentric and its rod.] THE ECCENTRIC is used to move the slide-valve to and fro over the steam ports (Fig. 23). It consists of three main parts--the _sheave_, or circular plate S, mounted on the crank shaft; and the two _straps_ which encircle it, and in which it revolves. To one strap is bolted the "big end" of the eccentric rod, which engages at its other end with the valve rod. The straps are semicircular and held together by strong bolts, B B, passing through lugs, or thickenings at the ends of the semicircles. The sheave has a deep groove all round the edges, in which the straps ride. The "eccentricity" or "throw" of an eccentric is the distance between C^2, the centre of the shaft, and C^1, the centre of the sheave. The throw must equal half of the distance which the slide-valve has to travel over the steam ports. A tapering steel wedge or key, K, sunk half in the eccentric and half in a slot in the shaft, holds the eccentric steady and prevents it slipping. Some eccentric sheaves are made in two parts, bolted together, so that they may be removed easily without dismounting the shaft. The eccentric is in principle nothing more than a crank pin so exaggerated as to be larger than the shaft of the crank. Its convenience lies in the fact that it may be mounted at any point on a shaft, whereas a crank can be situated at an end only, if it is not actually a V-shaped bend in the shaft itself--in which case its position is of course permanent. SETTING OF THE SLIDE-VALVE AND ECCENTRIC. The subject of valve-setting is so extensive that a full exposition might weary the reader, even if space permitted its inclusion. But inasmuch as the effectiveness of a reciprocating engine depends largely on the nature and arrangement of the valves, we will glance at some of the more elementary principles. [Illustration: FIG. 24.] [Illustration: FIG. 25.] In Fig. 24 we see in section the slide-valve, the ports of the cylinder, and part of the piston. To the right are two lines at right angles--the thicker, C, representing the position of the crank; the thinner, E, that of the eccentric. (The position of an eccentric is denoted diagrammatically by a line drawn from the centre of the crank shaft through the centre of the sheave.) The edges of the valve are in this case only broad enough to just cover the ports--that is, they have no _lap_. The piston is about to commence its stroke towards the left; and the eccentric, which is set at an angle of 90° in _advance_ of the crank, is about to begin opening the left-hand port. By the time that C has got to the position originally occupied by E, E will be horizontal (Fig. 25)--that is, the eccentric will have finished its stroke towards the left; and while C passes through the next right angle the valve will be closing the left port, which will cease to admit steam when the piston has come to the end of its travel. The operation is repeated on the right-hand side while the piston returns. [Illustration: FIG. 26.] It must be noticed here--(1) that steam is admitted at full pressure _all through_ the stroke; (2) that admission begins and ends simultaneously with the stroke. Now, in actual practice it is necessary to admit steam before the piston has ended its travel, so as to _cushion_ the violence of the sudden change of direction of the piston, its rod, and other moving parts. To effect this, the eccentric is set more than 90° in advance--that is, more than what the engineers call _square_. Fig. 26 shows such an arrangement. The angle between E and E^1 is called the _angle of advance_. Referring to the valve, you will see that it has opened an appreciable amount, though the piston has not yet started on its rightwards journey. "LAP" OF THE VALVE--EXPANSION OF STEAM. In the simple form of valve that appears in Fig. 24, the valve faces are just wide enough to cover the steam ports. If the eccentric is not _square_ with the crank, the admission of steam lasts until the very end of the stroke; if set a little in advance--that is, given _lead_--the steam is cut off before the piston has travelled quite along the cylinder, and readmitted before the back stroke is accomplished. Even with this lead the working is very uneconomical, as the steam goes to the exhaust at practically the same pressure as that at which it entered the cylinder. Its property of _expansion_ has been neglected. But supposing that steam at 100 lbs. pressure were admitted till half-stroke, and then suddenly cut off, the expansive nature of the steam would then continue to push the piston out until the pressure had decreased to 50 lbs. per square inch, at which pressure it would go to the exhaust. Now, observe that all the work done by the steam after the cut-off is so much power saved. The _average_ pressure on the piston is not so high as in the first case; still, from a given volume of 100 lbs. pressure steam we get much more _work_. HOW THE CUT-OFF IS MANAGED. [Illustration: FIG. 27.--A slide-valve with "lap."] [Illustration: FIG. 28.] Look at Fig. 27. Here we have a slide-valve, with faces much wider than the steam ports. The parts marked black, P P, are those corresponding to the faces of the valves shown in previous diagrams (p. 54). The shaded parts, L L, are called the _lap_. By increasing the length of the lap we increase the range of expansive working. Fig. 28 shows the piston full to the left; the valve is just on the point of opening to admit steam behind the piston. The eccentric has a throw equal to the breadth of a port + the lap of the valve. That this must be so is obvious from a consideration of Fig. 27, where the valve is at its central position. Hence the very simple formula:--Travel of valve = 2 × (lap + breadth of port). The path of the eccentric's centre round the centre of the shaft is indicated by the usual dotted line (Fig. 28). You will notice that the "angle of advance," denoted by the arrow A, is now very considerable. By the time that the crank C has assumed the position of the line S, the eccentric has passed its dead point, and the valve begins to travel backwards, eventually returning to the position shown in Fig. 28, and cutting off the steam supply while the piston has still a considerable part of its stroke to make. The steam then begins to work expansively, and continues to do so until the valve assumes the position shown in Fig. 27. If the valve has to have "lead" to admit steam _before_ the end of the stroke to the other side of the piston, the _angle of advance_ must be increased, and the eccentric centre line would lie on the line E^2. Therefore--total angle of advance = angle for _lap_ and angle for _lead_. LIMIT OF EXPANSIVE WORKING. Theoretically, by increasing the _lap_ and cutting off the steam earlier and earlier in the stroke, we should economize our power more and more. But in practice a great difficulty is met with--namely, that _as the steam expands its temperature falls_. If the cut-off occurs early, say at one-third stroke, the great expansion will reduce the temperature of the metal walls of the cylinder to such an extent, that when the next spirt of steam enters from the other end a considerable proportion of the steam's energy will be lost by cooling. In such a case, the difference in temperature between admitted steam and exhausted steam is too great for economy. Yet we want to utilize as much energy as possible. How are we to do it? COMPOUND ENGINES. In the year 1853, John Elder, founder of the shipping firm of Elder and Co., Glasgow, introduced the _compound_ engine for use on ships. The steam, when exhausted from the high-pressure cylinder, passed into another cylinder of equal stroke but larger diameter, where the expansion continued. In modern engines the expansion is extended to three and even four stages, according to the boiler pressure; for it is a rule that the higher the initial pressure is, the larger is the number of stages of expansion consistent with economical working. [Illustration: FIG. 29.--Sketch of the arrangement of a triple-expansion marine engine. No valve gear or supports, etc., shown.] In Fig. 29 we have a triple-expansion marine engine. Steam enters the high-pressure cylinder[4] at, say, 200 lbs. per square inch. It exhausts at 75 lbs. into the large pipe 2, and passes to the intermediate cylinder, whence it is exhausted at 25 lbs. or so through pipe 3 to the low-pressure cylinder. Finally, it is ejected at about 8 lbs. per square inch to the condenser, and is suddenly converted into water; an act which produces a vacuum, and diminishes the back-pressure of the exhaust from cylinder C. In fact, the condenser exerts a _sucking_ power on the exhaust side of C's piston. ARRANGEMENT OF EXPANSION ENGINES. In the illustration the cranks are set at angles of 120°, or a third of a circle, so that one or other is always at or near the position of maximum turning power. Where only two stages are used the cylinders are often arranged _tandem_, both pistons having a common piston rod and crank. In order to get a constant turning movement they must be mounted separately, and work cranks set at right angles to one another. COMPOUND LOCOMOTIVES. In 1876 Mr. A. Mallet introduced _compounding_ in locomotives; and the practice has been largely adopted. The various types of "compounds" may be classified as follows:--(1) One low-pressure and one high-pressure cylinder; (2) one high-pressure and two low-pressure; (3) one low-pressure and two high-pressure; (4) two high-pressure and two low-pressure. The last class is very widely used in France, America, and Russia, and seems to give the best results. Where only two cylinders are used (and sometimes in the case of three and four), a valve arrangement permits the admission of high-pressure steam to both high and low-pressure cylinders for starting a train, or moving it up heavy grades. REVERSING GEARS. [Illustration: FIGS. 30, 31, 32.--Showing how a reversing gear alters the position of the slide-valve.] The engines of a locomotive or steamship must be reversible--that is, when steam is admitted to the cylinders, the engineer must be able to so direct it through the steam-ways that the cranks may turn in the desired direction. The commonest form of reversing device (invented by George Stephenson) is known as Stephenson's Link Gear. In Fig. 30 we have a diagrammatic presentment of this gear. E^1 and E^2 are two eccentrics set square with the crank at opposite ends of a diameter. Their rods are connected to the ends of a link, L, which can be raised and lowered by means of levers (not shown). B is a block which can partly revolve on a pin projecting from the valve rod, working through a guide, G. In Fig. 31 the link is half raised, or in "mid-gear," as drivers say. Eccentric E^1 has pushed the lower end of the link fully back; E^2 has pulled it fully forward; and since any movement of the one eccentric is counterbalanced by the opposite movement of the other, rotation of the eccentrics would not cause the valve to move at all, and no steam could be admitted to the cylinder. Let us suppose that Fig. 30 denotes one cylinder, crank, rods, etc., of a locomotive. The crank has come to rest at its half-stroke; the reversing lever is at the mid-gear notch. If the engineer desires to turn his cranks in an anti-clockwise direction, he _raises_ the link, which brings the rod of E^1 into line with the valve rod and presses the block _backwards_ till the right-hand port is uncovered (Fig. 31). If steam be now admitted, the piston will be pushed towards the left, and the engine will continue to run in an anti-clockwise direction. If, on the other hand, he wants to run the engine the other way, he would _drop_ the link, bringing the rod of E^2 into line with the valve rod, and drawing V _forward_ to uncover the rear port (Fig. 32). In either case the eccentric working the end of the link remote from B has no effect, since it merely causes that end to describe arcs of circles of which B is the centre. "LINKING UP." If the link is only partly lowered or raised from the central position it still causes the engine to run accordingly, but the movement of the valve is decreased. When running at high speed the engineer "links up" his reversing gear, causing his valves to cut off early in the stroke, and the steam to work more expansively than it could with the lever at _full_, or _end_, gear; so that this device not only renders an engine reversible, but also gives the engineer an absolute command over the expansion ratio of the steam admitted to the cylinder, and furnishes a method of cutting off the steam altogether. In Figs. 30, 31, 32, the valve has no lap and the eccentrics are set square. In actual practice the valve faces would have "lap" and the eccentric "lead" to correspond; but for the sake of simplicity neither is shown. OTHER GEARS. In the Gooch gear for reversing locomotives the link does not shift, but the valve rod and its block is raised or lowered. The Allan gear is so arranged that when the link is raised the block is lowered, and _vice versâ_. These are really only modifications of Stephenson's principle--namely, the employment of _two_ eccentrics set at equal angles to and on opposite sides of the crank. There are three other forms of link-reversing gear, and nearly a dozen types of _radial_ reversing devices; but as we have already described the three most commonly used on locomotives and ships, there is no need to give particulars of these. Before the introduction of Stephenson's gear a single eccentric was used for each cylinder, and to reverse the engine this eccentric had to be loose on the axle. "A lever and gear worked by a treadle on the footplate controlled the position of the eccentrics. When starting the engine, the driver put the eccentrics out of gear by the treadle; then, by means of a lever he raised the small-ends[5] of the eccentric rods, and, noting the position of the cranks, or, if more convenient, the balance weight in the wheels, he, by means of another handle, moved the valves to open the necessary ports to steam and worked them by hand until the engine was moving; then, with the treadle, he threw the eccentrics over to engage the studs, at the same time dropping the small-ends of the rods to engage pins upon the valve spindles, so that they continued to keep up the movement of the valve."[6] One would imagine that in modern shunting yards such a device would somewhat delay operations! PISTON VALVES. In marine engines, and on many locomotives and some stationary engines, the D-valve (shown in Figs. 30-32) is replaced by a piston valve, or circular valve, working up and down in a tubular seating. It may best be described as a rod carrying two pistons which correspond to the faces of a D-valve. Instead of rectangular ports there are openings in the tube in which the piston valve moves, communicating with the steam-ways into the cylinder and with the exhaust pipe. In the case of the D-valve the pressure above it is much greater than that below, and considerable friction arises if the rubbing faces are not kept well lubricated. The piston valve gets over this difficulty, since such steam as may leak past it presses on its circumference at all points equally. SPEED GOVERNORS. [Illustration: FIG. 33.--A speed governor.] Practically all engines except locomotives and those known as "donkey-engines"--used on cranes--are fitted with some device for keeping the rotatory speed of the crank constant within very narrow limits. Perhaps you have seen a pair of balls moving round on a seating over the boiler of a threshing-engine. They form part of the "governor," or speed-controller, shown in principle in Fig. 33. A belt driven by a pulley on the crank shaft turns a small pulley, P, at the foot of the governor. This transmits motion through two bevel-wheels, G, to a vertical shaft, from the top of which hang two heavy balls on links, K K. Two more links, L L, connect the balls with a weight, W, which has a deep groove cut round it at the bottom. When the shaft revolves, the balls fly outwards by centrifugal force, and as their velocity increases the quadrilateral figure contained by the four links expands laterally and shortens vertically. The angles between K K and L L become less and less obtuse, and the weight W is drawn upwards, bringing with it the fork C of the rod A, which has ends engaging with the groove. As C rises, the other end of the rod is depressed, and the rod B depresses rod O, which is attached to the spindle operating a sort of shutter in the steam-pipe. Consequently the supply of steam is throttled more and more as the speed increases, until it has been so reduced that the engine slows, and the balls fall, opening the valve again. Fig. 34 shows the valve fully closed. This form of governor was invented by James Watt. A spring is often used instead of a weight, and the governor is arranged horizontally so that it may be driven direct from the crank shaft without the intervention of bevel gearing. [Illustration: FIG. 34.] The Hartwell governor employs a link motion. You must here picture the balls raising and lowering the _free end_ of the valve rod, which carries a block moving in a link connected with the eccentric rod. The link is pivoted at the upper end, and the eccentric rod is attached to the lower. When the engine is at rest the end of the valve rod and its block are dropped till in a line with the eccentric rod; but when the machinery begins to work the block is gradually drawn up by the governor, diminishing the movement of the valve, and so shortening the period of steam admission to the cylinder. Governors are of special importance where the _load_ of an engine is constantly varying, as in the case of a sawmill. A good governor will limit variation of speed within two per cent.--that is, if the engine is set to run at 100 revolutions a minute, it will not allow it to exceed 101 or fall below 99. In _very_ high-speed engines the governing will prevent variation of less than one per cent., even when the load is at one instant full on, and the next taken completely off. MARINE GOVERNORS. These must be more quick-acting than those used on engines provided with fly-wheels, which prevent very sudden variations of speed. The screw is light in proportion to the engine power, and when it is suddenly raised from the water by the pitching of the vessel, the engine would race till the screw took the water again, unless some regulating mechanism were provided. Many types of marine governors have been tried. The most successful seems to be one in which water is being constantly forced by a pump driven off the engine shaft into a cylinder controlling a throttle-valve in the main steam-pipe. The water escapes through a leak, which is adjustable. As long as the speed of the engine is normal, the water escapes from the cylinder as fast as it is pumped in, and no movement of the piston results; but when the screw begins to race, the pump overcomes the leak, and the piston is driven out, causing a throttling of the steam supply. CONDENSERS. The _condenser_ serves two purposes:--(1) It makes it possible to use the same water over and over again in the boilers. On the sea, where fresh water is not obtainable in large quantities, this is a matter of the greatest importance. (2) It adds to the power of a compound engine by exerting a back pull on the piston of the low-pressure cylinder while the steam is being exhausted. [Illustration: FIG. 35.--The marine condenser.] Fig. 35 is a sectional illustration of a marine condenser. Steam enters the condenser through the large pipe E, and passes among a number of very thin copper tubes, through which sea-water is kept circulating by a pump. The path of the water is shown by the featherless arrows. It comes from the pump through pipe A into the lower part of a large cap covering one end of the condenser and divided transversely by a diaphragm, D. Passing through the pipes, it reaches the cap attached to the other end, and flows back through the upper tubes to the outlet C. This arrangement ensures that, as the steam condenses, it shall meet colder and colder tubes, and finally be turned to water, which passes to the well through the outlet F. In some condensers the positions of steam and water are reversed, steam going through the tubes outside which cold water circulates. [3] Also called _ports_. [4] The bores of the cylinders are in the proportion of 4: 6: 9. The stroke of all three is the same. [5] The ends furthest from the eccentric. [6] "The Locomotive of To-day," p. 87. Chapter III. THE STEAM TURBINE. How a turbine works--The De Laval turbine--The Parsons turbine--Description of the Parsons turbine--The expansive action of steam in a Parsons turbine--Balancing the thrust--Advantages of the marine turbine. More than two thousand years ago Hero of Alexandria produced the first apparatus to which the name of steam-engine could rightly be given. Its principle was practically the same as that of the revolving jet used to sprinkle lawns during dry weather, steam being used in the place of water. From the top of a closed cauldron rose two vertical pipes, which at their upper ends had short, right-angle bends. Between them was hung a hollow globe, pivoted on two short tubes projecting from its sides into the upright tubes. Two little L-shaped pipes projected from opposite sides of the globe, at the ends of a diameter, in a plane perpendicular to the axis. On fire being applied to the cauldron, steam was generated. It passed up through the upright, through the pivots, and into the globe, from which it escaped by the two L-shaped nozzles, causing rapid revolution of the ball. In short, the first steam-engine was a turbine. Curiously enough, we have reverted to this primitive type (scientifically developed, of course) in the most modern engineering practice. HOW A TURBINE WORKS. In reciprocating--that is, cylinder--engines steam is admitted into a chamber and the door shut behind it, as it were. As it struggles to expand, it forces out one of the confining walls--that is, the piston--and presently the door opens again, and allows it to escape when it has done its work. In Hero's toy the impact of the issuing molecules against other molecules that have already emerged from the pipes was used. One may compare the reaction to that exerted by a thrown stone on the thrower. If the thrower is standing on skates, the reaction of the stone will cause him to glide backwards, just as if he had pushed off from some fixed object. In the case of the _reaction_--namely, the Hero-type--turbine the nozzle from which the steam or water issues moves, along with bodies to which it may be attached. In _action_ turbines steam is led through fixed nozzles or steam-ways, and the momentum of the steam is brought to bear on the surfaces of movable bodies connected with the shaft. THE DE LAVAL TURBINE. In its earliest form this turbine was a modification of Hero's. The wheel was merely a pipe bent in S form, attached at its centre to a hollow vertical shaft supplied with steam through a stuffing-box at one extremity. The steam blew out tangentially from the ends of the S, causing the shaft to revolve rapidly and work the machinery (usually a cream separator) mounted on it. This motor proved very suitable for dairy work, but was too wasteful of steam to be useful where high power was needed. [Illustration: FIG. 36.--The wheel and nozzles of a De Laval turbine.] In the De Laval turbine as now constructed the steam is blown from stationary nozzles against vanes mounted on a revolving wheel. Fig. 36 shows the nozzles and a turbine wheel. The wheel is made as a solid disc, to the circumference of which the vanes are dovetailed separately in a single row. Each vane is of curved section, the concave side directed towards the nozzles, which, as will be gathered from the "transparent" specimen on the right of our illustration, gradually expand towards the mouth. This is to allow the expansion of the steam, and a consequent gain of velocity. As it issues, each molecule strikes against the concave face of a vane, and, while changing its direction, is robbed of its kinetic energy, which passes to the wheel. To turn once more to a stone-throwing comparison, it is as if a boy were pelting the wheel with an enormous number of tiny stones. Now, escaping high-pressure steam moves very fast indeed. To give figures, if it enters the small end of a De Laval nozzle at 200 lbs. per square inch, it will leave the big end at a velocity of 48 miles per _minute_--that is, at a speed which would take it right round the world in 8-1/2 hours! The wheel itself would not move at more than about one-third of this speed as a maximum.[7] But even so, it may make as many as 30,000 revolutions per minute. A mechanical difficulty is now encountered--namely, that arising from vibration. No matter how carefully the turbine wheel may be balanced, it is practically impossible to make its centre of gravity coincide exactly with the central point of the shaft; in other words, the wheel will be a bit--perhaps only a tiny fraction of an ounce--heavier on one side than the other. This want of truth causes vibration, which, at the high speed mentioned, would cause the shaft to knock the bearings in which it revolves to pieces, if--and this is the point--those bearings were close to the wheel M. de Laval mounted the wheel on a shaft long enough between the bearings to "whip," or bend a little, and the difficulty was surmounted. The normal speed of the turbine wheel is too high for direct driving of some machinery, so it is reduced by means of gearing. To dynamos, pumps, and air-fans it is often coupled direct. THE PARSONS TURBINE. At the grand naval review held in 1897 in honour of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, one of the most noteworthy sights was the little _Turbinia_ of 44-1/2 tons burthen, which darted about among the floating forts at a speed much surpassing that of the fastest "destroyer." Inside the nimble little craft were engines developing 2,000 horse power, without any of the clank and vibration which usually reigns in the engine-room of a high-speed vessel. The _Turbinia_ was the first turbine-driven boat, and as such, even apart from her extraordinary pace, she attracted great attention. Since 1897 the Parsons turbine has been installed on many ships, including several men-of-war, and it seems probable that the time is not far distant when reciprocating engines will be abandoned on all high-speed craft. DESCRIPTION OF THE PARSONS TURBINE. [Illustration: FIG. 37.--Section of a Parsons turbine.] The essential parts of a Parsons turbine are:--(1) The shaft, on which is mounted (2) the drum; (3) the cylindrical casing inside which the drum revolves; (4) the vanes on the drum and casing; (5) the balance pistons. Fig. 37 shows a diagrammatic turbine in section. The drum, it will be noticed, increases its diameter in three stages, D^1, D^2, D^3, towards the right. From end to end it is studded with little vanes, M M, set in parallel rings small distances apart. Each vane has a curved section (see Fig. 38), the hollow side facing towards the left. The vanes stick out from the drum like short spokes, and their outer ends almost touch the casing. To the latter are attached equally-spaced rings of fixed vanes, F F, pointing inwards towards the drum, and occupying the intervals between the rings of moving vanes. Their concave sides also face towards the left, but, as seen in Fig. 38, their line of curve lies the reverse way to that of M M. Steam enters the casing at A, and at once rushes through the vanes towards the outlet at B. It meets the first row of fixed vanes, and has its path so deflected that it strikes the ring of moving (or drum) vanes at the most effective angle, and pushes them round. It then has its direction changed by the ring of F F, so that it may treat the next row of M M in a similar fashion. [Illustration: FIG. 38.--Blades or vanes of a Parsons turbine.] [Illustration: One of the low-pressure turbines of the _Carmania_, in casing. Its size will be inferred from comparison with the man standing near the end of the casing.] THE EXPANSIVE ACTION OF STEAM IN A TURBINE. On reaching the end of D^1 it enters the second, or intermediate, set of vanes. The drum here is of a greater diameter, and the blades are longer and set somewhat farther apart, to give a freer passage to the now partly expanded steam, which has lost pressure but gained velocity. The process of movement is repeated through this stage; and again in D^3, the low-pressure drum. The steam then escapes to the condenser through B, having by this time expanded very many times; and it is found advisable, for reasons explained in connection with compound steam-engines, to have a separate turbine in an independent casing for the extreme stages of expansion. The vanes are made of brass. In the turbines of the _Carmania_, the huge Cunard liner, 1,115,000 vanes are used. The largest diameter of the drums is 11 feet, and each low-pressure turbine weighs 350 tons. BALANCING OF THRUST. The push exerted by the steam on the blades not only turns the drum, but presses it in the direction in which the steam flows. This end thrust is counterbalanced by means of the "dummy" pistons, P^1, P^2, P^3. Each dummy consists of a number of discs revolving between rings projecting from the casing, the distance between discs and rings being so small that but little steam can pass. In the high-pressure compartment the steam pushes P^1 to the left with the same pressure as it pushes the blades of D^1 to the right. After completing the first stage it fills the passage C, which communicates with the second piston, P^2, and the pressure on that piston negatives the thrust on D^2. Similarly, the passage E causes the steam to press equally on P^3 and the vanes of D^3. So that the bearings in which the shaft revolves have but little thrust to take. This form of compensation is necessary in marine as well as in stationary turbines. In the former the dummy pistons are so proportioned that the forward thrust given by them and the screw combined is almost equal to the thrust aft of the moving vanes. [Illustration: One of the turbine drums of the _Carmania_. Note the rows of vanes. The drum is here being tested for perfect balance on two absolutely level supports.] ADVANTAGES OF THE MARINE TURBINE. (1.) Absence of vibration. Reciprocating engines, however well balanced, cause a shaking of the whole ship which is very unpleasant to passengers. The turbine, on the other hand, being almost perfectly balanced, runs so smoothly at the highest speeds that, if the hand be laid on the covering, it is sometimes almost impossible to tell whether the machinery is in motion. As a consequence of this smooth running there is little noise in the engine-room--a pleasant contrast to the deafening roar of reciprocating engines. (2.) Turbines occupy less room. (3.) They are more easily tended. (4.) They require fewer repairs, since the rubbing surfaces are very small as compared to those of reciprocating engines. (5.) They are more economical at high speeds. It must be remembered that a turbine is essentially meant for high speeds. If run slowly, the steam will escape through the many passages without doing much work. Owing to its construction, a turbine cannot be reversed like a cylinder engine. It therefore becomes necessary to fit special astern turbines to one or more of the screw shafts, for use when the ship has to be stopped or moved astern. Under ordinary conditions these turbines revolve idly in their cases. The highest speed ever attained on the sea was the forty-two miles per hour of the unfortunate _Viper_, a turbine destroyer which developed 11,500 horse power, though displacing only 370 tons. This velocity would compare favourably with that of a good many expresses on certain railways that we could name. In the future thirty miles an hour will certainly be attained by turbine-driven liners. [7] Even at this speed the wheel has a circumferential velocity of two-thirds that of a bullet shot from a Lee-Metford rifle. A vane weighing only 250 grains (about 1/2 oz.) exerts under these conditions a centrifugal pull of 15 cwt. on the wheel! Chapter IV. THE INTERNAL-COMBUSTION ENGINE. The meaning of the term--Action of the internal-combustion engine--The motor car--The starting-handle--The engine--The carburetter--Ignition of the charge--Advancing the spark--Governing the engine--The clutch--The gear-box--The compensating gear--The silencer--The brakes--Speed of cars. THE MEANING OF THE TERM "INTERNAL-COMBUSTION ENGINE." In the case of a steam-boiler the energy of combustion is transmitted to water inside an air-tight vessel. The fuel does not actually touch the "working fluid." In the gas or oil engine the fuel is brought into contact and mixed with the working fluid, which is air. It combines suddenly with it in the cylinder, and heat energy is developed so rapidly that the act is called an explosion. Coal gas, mineral oils, alcohol, petrol, etc., all contain hydrogen and carbon. If air, which contributes oxygen, be added to any of these in due proportion, the mixture becomes highly explosive. On a light being applied, oxygen and carbon unite, also hydrogen and oxygen, and violent heat is generated, causing a violent molecular bombardment of the sides of the vessel containing the mixture. Now, if the mixture be _compressed_ it becomes hotter and hotter, until a point is reached at which it ignites spontaneously. Early gas-engines did not compress the charge before ignition. Alphonse Beau de Rochas, a Frenchman, first thought of making the piston of the engine squeeze the mixture before ignition; and from the year 1862, when he proposed this innovation, the success of the internal-combustion engine may be said to date. [Illustration] [Illustration: FIG. 39.--Showing the four strokes that the piston of a gas-engine makes during one "cycle."] ACTION OF THE ENGINE. The gas-engine, the oil-engine, and the motor-car engine are similar in general principles. The cylinder has, instead of a slide-valve, two, or sometimes three, "mushroom" valves, which may be described as small and thick round plates, with bevelled edges, mounted on the ends of short rods, called stems. These valves open into the cylinder, upwards, downwards, or horizontally, as the case may be; being pushed in by cams projecting from a shaft rotated by the engine. For the present we will confine our attention to the series of operations which causes the engine to work. This series is called the Beau de Rochas, or Otto, cycle, and includes four movements of the piston. Reference to Fig. 39 will show exactly what happens in a gas-engine--(1) The piston moves from left to right, and just as the movement commences valves G (gas) and A (air) open to admit the explosive mixture. By the time that P has reached the end of its travel these valves have closed again. (2) The piston returns to the left, compressing the mixture, which has no way of escape open to it. At the end of the stroke the charge is ignited by an incandescent tube I (in motor car and some stationary engines by an electric spark), and (3) the piston flies out again on the "explosion" stroke. Before it reaches the limit position, valve E (exhaust) opens, and (4) the piston flies back under the momentum of the fly-wheel, driving out the burnt gases through the still open E. The "cycle" is now complete. There has been suction, compression (including ignition), combustion, and exhaustion. It is evident that a heavy fly-wheel must be attached to the crank shaft, because the energy of one stroke (the explosion) has to serve for the whole cycle; in other words, for two complete revolutions of the crank. A single-cylinder steam-engine develops an impulse every half-turn--that is, four times as often. In order to get a more constant turning effect, motor cars have two, three, four, six, and even eight cylinders. Four-cylinder engines are at present the most popular type for powerful cars. THE MOTOR CAR. [Illustration: FIG. 40.--Plan of the chassis of a motor car.] We will now proceed to an examination of the motor car, which, in addition to mechanical apparatus for the transmission of motion to the driving-wheels, includes all the fundamental adjuncts of the internal-combustion engine.[8] Fig. 40 is a bird's-eye view of the _chassis_ (or "works" and wheels) of a car, from which the body has been removed. Starting at the left, we have the handle for setting the engine in motion; the engine (a two-cylinder in this case); the fly-wheel, inside which is the clutch; the gear-box, containing the cogs for altering the speed of revolution of the driving-wheels relatively to that of the engine; the propeller shaft; the silencer, for deadening the noise of the exhaust; and the bevel-gear, for turning the driving-wheels. In the particular type of car here considered you will notice that a "direct," or shaft, drive is used. The shaft has at each end a flexible, or "universal," joint, which allows the shaft to turn freely, even though it may not be in a line with the shaft projecting from the gear-box. It must be remembered that the engine and gear-box are mounted on the frame, between which and the axles are springs, so that when the car bumps up and down, the shaft describes part of a circle, of which the gear-box end is the centre. An alternative method of driving is by means of chains, which run round sprocket (cog) wheels on the ends of a shaft crossing the frame just behind the gear-box, and round larger sprockets attached to the hubs of the driving-wheels. In such a case the axles of the driving-wheel are fixed to the springs, and the wheels revolve round them. Where a Cardan (shaft) drive is used the axles are attached rigidly to the wheels at one end, and extend, through tubes fixed to the springs, to bevel-wheels in a central compensating-gear box (of which more presently). Several parts--the carburetter, tanks, governor, and pump--are not shown in the general plan. These will be referred to in the more detailed account that follows. THE STARTING-HANDLE. [Illustration: FIG. 41.--The starting-handle.] Fig. 41 gives the starting-handle in part section. The handle H is attached to a tube which terminates in a clutch, C. A powerful spring keeps C normally apart from a second clutch, C^1, keyed to the engine shaft. When the driver wishes to start the engine he presses the handle towards the right, brings the clutches together, and turns the handle in a clockwise direction. As soon as the engine begins to fire, the faces of the clutches slip over one another. THE ENGINE. [Illustration: FIG. 42.--End and cross sections of a two-cylinder motor.] We next examine the two-cylinder engine (Fig. 42). Each cylinder is surrounded by a water-jacket, through which water is circulated by a pump[9] (Fig. 43). The heat generated by combustion is so great that the walls of the cylinder would soon become red-hot unless some of the heat were quickly carried away. The pistons are of "trunk" form--that is, long enough to act as guides and absorb the oblique thrust of the piston rods. Three or more piston rings lying in slots (not shown) prevent the escape of gas past the piston. It is interesting to notice that the efficiency of an internal-combustion engine depends so largely on the good fit of these moving parts, that cylinders, pistons, and rings must be exceedingly true. A good firm will turn out standard parts which are well within 1/5000 of an inch of perfect truth. It is also a wonderful testimony to the quality of the materials used that, if properly looked after, an engine which has made many millions of revolutions, at the rate of 1,000 to 2,000 per minute, often shows no appreciable signs of wear. In one particular test an engine was run _continuously for several months_, and at the end of the trial was in absolutely perfect condition. The cranks revolve in an oil-tight case (generally made of aluminium), and dip in oil, which they splash up into the cylinder to keep the piston well lubricated. The plate, P P, through a slot in which the piston rod works, prevents an excess of oil being flung up. Channels are provided for leading oil into the bearings. The cranks are 180° apart. While one piston is being driven out by an explosion, the other is compressing its charge prior to ignition, so that the one action deadens the other. Therefore two explosions occur in one revolution of the cranks, and none during the next revolution. If both cranks were in line, the pistons would move together, giving one explosion each revolution. [Illustration: FIG. 43.--Showing how the water which cools the cylinders is circulated.] The valve seats, and the inlet and exhaust pipes, are seen in section. The inlet valve here works automatically, being pulled in by suction; but on many engines--on all powerful engines--the inlet, like the exhaust valve, is lifted by a cam, lest it should stick or work irregularly. Three dotted circles show A, a cog on the crank shaft; B, a "lay" cog, which transmits motion to C, on a short shaft rotating the cam that lifts the exhaust valve. C, having twice as many teeth as A, revolves at half its rate. This ensures that the valve shall be lifted only once in two revolutions of the crank shaft to which it is geared. The cogs are timed, or arranged, so that the cam begins to lift the valve when the piston has made about seven-eighths of its explosion stroke, and closes the valve at the end of the exhaust stroke. THE CARBURETTER. A motor car generally uses petrol as its fuel. Petrol is one of the more volatile products of petroleum, and has a specific gravity of about 680--that is, volume for volume, its weight is to that of water in the proportion of 680 to 1,000. It is extremely dangerous, as it gives off an inflammable gas at ordinary temperatures. Benzine, which we use to clean clothes, is practically the same as petrol, and should be treated with equal care. The function of a _carburetter_ is to reduce petrol to a very fine spray and mix it with a due quantity of air. The device consists of two main parts (Fig. 44)--the _float chamber_ and the _jet chamber_. In the former is a contrivance for regulating the petrol supply. A float--a cork, or air-tight metal box--is arranged to move freely up and down the stem of a needle-valve, which closes the inlet from the tank. At the bottom of the chamber are two pivoted levers, W W, which, when the float rests on them, tip up and lift the valve. Petrol flows in and raises the float. This allows the valve to sink and cut off the supply. If the valve is a good fit and the float is of the correct weight, the petrol will never rise higher than the tip of the jet G. [Illustration: FIG. 44.--Section of a carburetter.] The suction of the engine makes petrol spirt through the jet (which has a very small hole in its end) and atomize itself against a spraying-cone, A. It then passes to the engine inlet pipe through a number of openings, after mixing with air entering from below. An extra air inlet, controllable by the driver, is generally added, unless the carburetter be of a type which automatically maintains constant proportions of air and vapour. The jet chamber is often surrounded by a jacket, through which part of the hot exhaust gases circulate. In cold weather especially this is a valuable aid to vaporization. [Illustration: FIG. 45.--Sketch of the electrical ignition arrangements on a motor car.] IGNITION OF THE CHARGE. All petrol-cars now use electrical ignition. There are two main systems--(1) by an accumulator and induction coil; (2) _magneto ignition_, by means of a small dynamo driven by the engine. A general arrangement of the first is shown in Fig. 45. A disc, D, of some insulating material--fibre or vulcanite--is mounted on the cam, or half-speed, shaft. Into the circumference is let a piece of brass, called the contact-piece, through which a screw passes to the cam shaft. A movable plate, M P, which can be rotated concentrically with D through part of a circle, carries a "wipe" block at the end of a spring, which presses it against D. The spring itself is attached to an insulated plate. When the revolution of D brings the wipe and contact together, current flows from the accumulator through switch S to the wipe; through the contact-piece to C; from C to M P and the induction coil; and back to the accumulator. This is the _primary, or low-tension, circuit_. A _high-tension_ current is induced by the coil in the _secondary_ circuit, indicated by dotted lines.[10] In this circuit is the sparking-plug (see Fig. 46), having a central insulated rod in connection with one terminal of the secondary coil. Between it and a bent wire projecting from the iron casing of the plug (in contact with the other terminal of the secondary coil through the metal of the engine, to which one wire of the circuit is attached) is a small gap, across which the secondary current leaps when the primary current is broken by the wipe and contact parting company. The spark is intensely hot, and suffices to ignite the compressed charge in the cylinder. [Illustration: FIG. 46.--Section of a sparking-plug.] ADVANCING THE SPARK. We will assume that the position of W (in Fig. 45) is such that the contact touches W at the moment when the piston has just completed the compression stroke. Now, the actual combustion of the charge occupies an appreciable time, and with the engine running at high speed the piston would have travelled some way down the cylinder before the full force of the explosion was developed. But by raising lever L, the position of W may be so altered that contact is made slightly _before_ the compression stroke is complete, so that the charge is fairly alight by the time the piston has altered its direction. This is called _advancing_ the spark. GOVERNING THE ENGINE. There are several methods of controlling the speed of internal-combustion engines. The operating mechanism in most cases is a centrifugal ball-governor. When the speed has reached the fixed limit it either (1) raises the exhaust valve, so that no fresh charges are drawn in; (2) prevents the opening of the inlet valve; or (3) throttles the gas supply. The last is now most commonly used on motor cars, in conjunction with some device for putting it out of action when the driver wishes to exceed the highest speed that it normally permits. [Illustration: FIG. 47.--One form of governor used on motor cars.] A sketch of a neat governor, with regulating attachment, is given in Fig. 47. The governor shaft is driven from the engine. As the balls, B B, increase their velocity, they fly away from the shaft and move the arms, A A, and a sliding tube, C, towards the right. This rocks the lever R, and allows the valves in the inlet pipe to close and reduce the supply of air and gas. A wedge, W, which can be raised or lowered by lever L, intervenes between the end of R and the valve stem. If this lever be lifted to its highest position, the governing commences at a lower speed, as the valve then has but a short distance to travel before closing completely. For high speeds the driver depresses L, forces the wedge down, and so minimizes the effect of the governor. THE CLUTCH. The engine shaft has on its rear end the fly-wheel, which has a broad and heavy rim, turned to a conical shape inside. Close to this, revolving loosely on the shaft, is the clutch plate, a heavy disc with a broad edge so shaped as to fit the inside of a fly-wheel. It is generally faced with leather. A very strong spring presses the plate into the fly-wheel, and the resulting friction is sufficient to prevent any slip. Projections on the rear of the clutch engage with the gear-box shaft. The driver throws out the clutch by depressing a lever with his foot. Some clutches dispense with the leather lining. These are termed _metal to metal_ clutches. THE GEAR-BOX. We now come to a very interesting detail of the motor car, the gear-box. The steam-engine has its speed increased by admitting more steam to the cylinders. But an explosion engine must be run at a high speed to develop its full power, and when heavier work has to be done on a hill it becomes necessary to alter the speed ratio of engine to driving-wheels. Our illustration (Fig. 48) gives a section of a gear-box, which will serve as a typical example. It provides three forward speeds and one reverse. To understand how it works, we must study the illustration carefully. Pinion 1 is mounted on a hollow shaft turned by the clutch. Into the hollow shaft projects the end of another shaft carrying pinions 6 and 4. Pinion 6 slides up and down this shaft, which is square at this point, but round inside the _loose_ pinion 4. Pinions 2 and 3 are keyed to a square secondary shaft, and are respectively always in gear with 1 and 4; but 5 can be slid backwards and forwards so as to engage or disengage with 6. In the illustration no gear is "in." If the engine is working, 1 revolves 2, 2 turns 3, and 3 revolves 4 idly on its shaft. [Illustration: FIG. 48.--The gear-box of a motor car.] To get the lowest, or "first," speed the driver moves his lever and slides 5 into gear with 6. The transmission then is: 1 turns 2, 2 turns 5, 5 turns 6, 6 turns the propeller shaft through the universal joint. For the second speed, 5 and 6 are disengaged, and 6 is moved up the page, as it were, till projections on it interlock with slots in 4; thus driving 1, 2, 3, 4, shaft. For the third, or "solid," speed, 6 is pulled down into connection with 1, and couples the engine shaft direct to the propeller shaft. The "reverse" is accomplished by raising a long pinion, 7, which lies in the gear-box under 5 and 6. The drive then is 1, 2, 5, 7, 6. There being an odd number of pinions now engaged, the propeller shaft turns in the reverse direction to that of the engine shaft. [Illustration: FIG. 49.] THE COMPENSATING GEAR. Every axle of a railway train carries a wheel at each end, rigidly attached to it. When rounding a corner the outside wheel has further to travel than the other, and consequently one or both wheels must slip. The curves are made so gentle, however, that the amount of slip is very small. But with a traction-engine, motor car, or tricycle the case is different, for all have to describe circles of very small diameter in proportion to the length of the vehicle. Therefore in every case a _compensating gear_ is fitted, to allow the wheels to turn at different speeds, while permitting them both to drive. Fig. 49 is an exaggerated sketch of the gear. The axles of the moving wheels turn inside tubes attached to the springs and a central casing (not shown), and terminate in large bevel-wheels, C and D. Between these are small bevels mounted on a shaft supported by the driving drum. If the latter be rotated, the bevels would turn C and D at equal speeds, assuming that both axles revolve without friction in their bearings. We will suppose that the drum is turned 50 times a minute. Now, if one wheel be held, the other will revolve 100 times a minute; or, if one be slowed, the other will increase its speed by a corresponding amount. The _average_ speed remains 50. It should be mentioned that drum A has incorporated with it on the outside a bevel-wheel (not shown) rotated by a smaller bevel on the end of the propeller shaft. THE SILENCER. The petrol-engine, as now used, emits the products of combustion at a high pressure. If unchecked, they expand violently, and cause a partial vacuum in the exhaust pipe, into which the air rushes back with such violence as to cause a loud noise. Devices called _silencers_ are therefore fitted, to render the escape more gradual, and split it up among a number of small apertures. The simplest form of silencer is a cylindrical box, with a number of finely perforated tubes passing from end to end of it. The exhaust gases pouring into the box maintain a constant pressure somewhat higher than that of the atmosphere, but as the gases are escaping from it in a fairly steady stream the noise becomes a gentle hiss rather than a "pop." There are numerous types of silencers, but all employ this principle in one form or another. THE BRAKES. Every car carries at least two brakes of band pattern--one, usually worked by a side hand-lever, acting on the axle or hubs of the driving-wheel; the other, operated by the foot, acting on the transmission gear (see Fig. 48). The latter brake is generally arranged to withdraw the clutch simultaneously. Tests have proved that even heavy cars can be pulled up in astonishingly short distances, considering their rate of travel. Trials made in the United States with a touring car and a four-in-hand coach gave 25-1/3 and 70 feet respectively for the distance in which the speed could be reduced from sixteen miles per hour to zero. SPEED OF CARS. As regards speed, motor cars can rival the fastest express trains, even on long journeys. In fact, feats performed during the Gordon-Bennett and other races have equalled railway performances over equal distances. When we come to record speeds, we find a car, specially built for the purpose, covering a mile in less than half a minute. A speed of over 120 miles an hour has actually been reached. Engines of 150 h.p. can now be packed into a vehicle scaling less than 1-1/2 tons. Even on touring cars are often found engines developing 40 to 60 h.p., which force the car up steep hills at a pace nothing less than astonishing. In the future the motor car will revolutionize our modes of life to an extent comparable to the changes effected by the advent of the steam-engine. Even since 1896, when the "man-with-the-flag" law was abolished in the British Isles, the motor has reduced distances, opened up country districts, and generally quickened the pulses of the community in a manner which makes it hazardous to prophesy how the next generation will live. _Note._--The author is much indebted to Mr. Wilfrid J. Lineham, M. Inst. C.E., for several of the illustrations which appear in the above chapter. [8] Steam-driven cars are not considered in this chapter, as their principle is much the same as that of the ordinary locomotive. [9] On some cars natural circulation is used, the hot water flowing from the top of the cylinder to the tank, from which it returns, after being cooled, to the bottom of the cylinder. [10] For explanation of the induction coil, see p. 122 Chapter V. ELECTRICAL APPARATUS. What is electricity?--Forms of electricity--Magnetism--The permanent magnet--Lines of force--Electro-magnets--The electric bell--The induction coil--The condenser--Transformation of current--Uses of the induction coil. WHAT IS ELECTRICITY? Of the ultimate nature of electricity, as of that of heat and light, we are at present ignorant. But it has been clearly established that all three phenomena are but manifestations of the energy pervading the universe. By means of suitable apparatus one form can be converted into another form. The heat of fuel burnt in a boiler furnace develops mechanical energy in the engine which the boiler feeds with steam. The engine revolves a dynamo, and the electric current thereby generated can be passed through wires to produce mechanical motion, heat, or light. We must remain content, therefore, with assuming that electricity is energy or motion transmitted through the ether from molecule to molecule, or from atom to atom, of matter. Scientific investigation has taught us how to produce it at will, how to harness it to our uses, and how to measure it; but not _what_ it is. That question may, perhaps, remain unanswered till the end of human history. A great difficulty attending the explanation of electrical action is this--that, except in one or two cases, no comparison can be established between it and the operation of gases and fluids. When dealing with the steam-engine, any ordinary intelligence soon grasps the principles which govern the use of steam in cylinders or turbines. The diagrams show, it is hoped, quite plainly "how it works." But electricity is elusive, invisible; and the greatest authorities cannot say what goes on at the poles of a magnet or on the surface of an electrified body. Even the existence of "negative" and "positive" electricity is problematical. However, we see the effects, and we know that if one thing is done another thing happens; so that we are at least able to use terms which, while convenient, are not at present controverted by scientific progress. FORMS OF ELECTRICITY. Rub a vulcanite rod and hold one end near some tiny pieces of paper. They fly to it, stick to it for a time, and then fall off. The rod was electrified--that is, its surface was affected in such a way as to be in a state of molecular strain which the contact of the paper fragments alleviated. By rubbing large surfaces and collecting the electricity in suitable receivers the strain can be made to relieve itself in the form of a violent discharge accompanied by a bright flash. This form of electricity is known as _static_. Next, place a copper plate and a zinc plate into a jar full of diluted sulphuric acid. If a wire be attached to them a current of electricity is said to _flow_ along the wire. We must not, however, imagine that anything actually moves along inside the wire, as water, steam, or air, passes through a pipe. Professor Trowbridge says,[11] "No other agency for transmitting power can be stopped by such slight obstacles as electricity. A thin sheet of paper placed across a tube conveying compressed air would be instantly ruptured. It would take a wall of steel at least an inch thick to stand the pressure of steam which is driving a 10,000 horse-power engine. A thin layer of dirt beneath the wheels of an electric car can prevent the current which propels the car from passing to the rail, and then back to the power-house." There would, indeed, be a puncture of the paper if the current had a sufficient voltage, or pressure; yet the fact remains that _current_ electricity can be very easily confined to its conductor by means of some insulating or nonconducting envelope. MAGNETISM. The most familiar form of electricity is that known as magnetism. When a bar of steel or iron is magnetized, it is supposed that the molecules in it turn and arrange themselves with all their north-seeking poles towards the one end of the bar, and their south-seeking poles towards the other. If the bar is balanced freely on a pivot, it comes to rest pointing north and south; for, the earth being a huge magnet, its north pole attracts all the north-seeking poles of the molecules, and its south poles the south-seeking poles. (The north-_seeking_ pole of a magnet is marked N., though it is in reality the _south_ pole; for unlike poles are mutually attractive, and like poles repellent.) There are two forms of magnet--_permanent_ and _temporary_. If steel is magnetized, it remains so; but soft iron loses practically all its magnetism as soon as the cause of magnetization is withdrawn. This is what we should expect; for steel is more closely compacted than iron, and the molecules therefore would be able to turn about more easily.[12] It is fortunate for us that this is so, since on the rapid magnetization and demagnetization of soft iron depends the action of many of our electrical mechanisms. THE PERMANENT MAGNET. Magnets are either (1) straight, in which case they are called bar magnets; or (2) of horseshoe form, as in Figs. 50 and 51. By bending the magnet the two poles are brought close together, and the attraction of both may be exercised simultaneously on a bar of steel or iron. LINES OF FORCE. In Fig. 50 are seen a number of dotted lines. These are called _lines of magnetic force_. If you lay a sheet of paper on a horseshoe magnet and sprinkle it with iron dust, you will at once notice how the particles arrange themselves in curves similar in shape to those shown in the illustration. It is supposed (it cannot be _proved_) that magnetic force streams away from the N. pole and describes a circular course through the air back to the S. pole. The same remark applies to the bar magnet. ELECTRICAL MAGNETS. [Illustration: FIG. 50.--Permanent magnet, and the "lines of force" emanating from it.] If an insulated wire is wound round and round a steel or iron bar from end to end, and has its ends connected to the terminals of an electric battery, current rotates round the bar, and the bar is magnetized. By increasing the strength and volume of the current, and multiplying the number of turns of wire, the attractive force of the magnet is increased. Now disconnect the wires from the battery. If of iron, the magnet at once loses its attractive force; but if of steel, it retains it in part. Instead of a simple horseshoe-shaped bar, two shorter bars riveted into a plate are generally used for electromagnets of this type. Coils of wire are wound round each bar, and connected so as to form one continuous whole; but the wire of one coil is wound in the direction opposite to that of the other. The free end of each goes to a battery terminal. In Fig. 51 you will notice that some of the "lines of force" are deflected through the iron bar A. They pass more easily through iron than through air; and will choose iron by preference. The attraction exercised by a magnet on iron may be due to the effort of the lines of force to shorten their paths. It is evident that the closer A comes to the poles of the magnet the less will be the distance to be travelled from one pole to the bar, along it, and back to the other pole. [Illustration: FIG. 51.--Electro-magnet: A, armature; B, battery.] Having now considered electricity in three of its forms--static, current, and rotatory--we will pass to some of its applications. THE ELECTRIC BELL. A fit device to begin with is the Electric Bell, which has so largely replaced wire-pulled bells. These last cause a great deal of trouble sometimes, since if a wire snaps it may be necessary to take up carpets and floor-boards to put things right. Their installation is not simple, for at every corner must be put a crank to alter the direction of the pull, and the cranks mean increased friction. But when electric wires have once been properly installed, there should be no need for touching them for an indefinite period. They can be taken round as many corners as you wish without losing any of their conductivity, and be placed wherever is most convenient for examination. One bell may serve a large number of rooms if an _indicator_ be used to show where the call was made from, by a card appearing in one of a number of small windows. Before answering a call, the attendant presses in a button to return the card to its normal position. In Fig. 52 we have a diagrammatic view of an electric bell and current. When the bell-push is pressed in, current flows from the battery to terminal T^1, round the electro-magnet M, through the pillar P and flat steel springs S and B, through the platinum-pointed screw, and back to the battery through the push. The circulation of current magnetizes M, which attracts the iron armature A attached to the spring S, and draws the hammer H towards the gong. Just before the stroke occurs, the spring B leaves the tip of the screw, and the circuit is broken, so that the magnet no longer attracts. H is carried by its momentum against the gong, and is withdrawn by the spring, until B once more makes contact, and the magnet is re-excited. The hammer vibrations recur many times a second as long as the push is pressed in. [Illustration: FIG. 52.--Sketch of an electric-bell circuit.] The electric bell is used for so many purposes that they cannot all be noted. It plays an especially important part in telephonic installations to draw the attention of the subscribers, forms an item in automatic fire and burglar alarms, and is a necessary adjunct of railway signalling cabins. THE INDUCTION OR RUHMKORFF COIL. Reference was made in connection with the electrical ignition of internal-combustion engines (p. 101) to the _induction coil_. This is a device for increasing the _voltage_, or pressure, of a current. The two-cell accumulator carried in a motor car gives a voltage (otherwise called electro-motive force = E.M.F.) of 4·4 volts. If you attach a wire to one terminal of the accumulator and brush the loose end rapidly across the other terminal, you will notice that a bright spark passes between the wire and the terminal. In reality there are two sparks, one when they touch, and another when they separate, but they occur so closely together that the eye cannot separate the two impressions. A spark of this kind would not be sufficiently hot to ignite a charge in a motor cylinder, and a spark from the induction coil is therefore used. [Illustration: FIG. 53.--Sketch of an induction coil.] We give a sketch of the induction coil in Fig. 53. It consists of a core of soft iron wires round which is wound a layer of coarse insulated wire, denoted by the thick line. One end of the winding of this _primary_ coil is attached to the battery, the other to the base of a hammer, H, vibrating between the end of the core and a screw, S, passing through an upright, T, connected with the other terminal of the battery. The action of the hammer is precisely the same as that of the armature of an electric bell. Outside the primary coil are wound many turns of a much finer wire completely insulated from the primary coil. The ends of this _secondary_ coil are attached to the objects (in the case of a motor car, the insulated wire of the sparking-plug and a wire projecting from its outer iron casing) between which a spark has to pass. As soon as H touches S the circuit is completed. The core becomes a powerful magnet with external lines of force passing from one pole to the other over and among the turns of the secondary coil. H is almost instantaneously attracted by the core, and the break occurs. The lines of force now (at least so it is supposed) sink into the core, cutting through the turns of the "secondary," and causing a powerful current to flow through them. The greater the number of turns, the greater the number of times the lines of force are cut, and the stronger is the current. If sufficiently intense, it jumps any gap in the secondary circuit, heating the intermediate air to a state of incandescence. THE CONDENSER. The sudden parting of H and S would produce strong sparking across the gap between them if it were not for the condenser, which consists of a number of tinfoil sheets separated by layers of paraffined paper. All the "odd" sheets are connected with T, all the "even" with T^1. Now, the more rapid the extinction of magnetism in the core after "break" of the primary circuit, the more rapidly will the lines of force collapse, and the more intense will be the induced current in the secondary coil. The condenser diminishes the period of extinction very greatly, while lengthening the period of magnetization after the "make" of the primary current, and so decreasing the strength of the reverse current. TRANSFORMATION OF CURRENT. The difference in the voltage of the primary and secondary currents depends on the length of the windings. If there are 100 turns of wire in the primary, and 100,000 turns in the secondary, the voltage will be increased 1,000 times; so that a 4-volt current is "stepped up" to 4,000 volts. In the largest induction coils the secondary winding absorbs 200-300 miles of wire, and the spark given may be anything up to four feet in length. Such a spark would pierce a glass plate two inches thick. It must not be supposed that an induction coil increases the _amount_ of current given off by a battery. It merely increases its pressure at the expense of its volume--stores up its energy, as it were, until there is enough to do what a low-tension flow could not effect. A fair comparison would be to picture the energy of the low-tension current as the momentum of a number of small pebbles thrown in succession at a door, say 100 a minute. If you went on pelting the door for hours you might make no impression on it, but if you could knead every 100 pebbles into a single stone, and throw these stones one per minute, you would soon break the door in. Any intermittent current can be transformed as regards its intensity. You may either increase its pressure while decreasing its rate of flow, or _amperage_; or decrease its pressure and increase its flow. In the case that we have considered, a continuous battery current is rendered intermittent by a mechanical contrivance. But if the current comes from an "alternating" dynamo--that is, is already intermittent--the contact-breaker is not needed. There will be more to say about transformation of current in later paragraphs. USES OF THE INDUCTION COIL. The induction coil is used--(1.) For passing currents through glass tubes almost exhausted of air or containing highly rarefied gases. The luminous effects of these "Geissler" tubes are very beautiful. (2.) For producing the now famous X or Röntgen rays. These rays accompany the light rays given off at the negative terminal (cathode) of a vacuum tube, and are invisible to the eye unless caught on a fluorescent screen, which reduces their rate of vibration sufficiently for the eye to be sensitive to them. The Röntgen rays have the peculiar property of penetrating many substances quite opaque to light, such as metals, stone, wood, etc., and as a consequence have proved of great use to the surgeon in localizing or determining the nature of an internal injury. They also have a deterrent effect upon cancerous growths. (3.) In wireless telegraphy, to cause powerful electric oscillations in the ether. (4.) On motor cars, for igniting the cylinder charges. (5.) For electrical massage of the body. [11] "What is Electricity?" p. 46. [12] If a magnetized bar be heated to white heat and tapped with a hammer it loses its magnetism, because the distance between the molecules has increased, and the molecules can easily return to their original positions. Chapter VI. THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. Needle instruments--Influence of current on the magnetic needle--Method of reversing the current--Sounding instruments--Telegraphic relays--Recording telegraphs--High-speed telegraphy. Take a small pocket compass and wind several turns of fine insulated wire round the case, over the top and under the bottom. Now lay the compass on a table, and turn it about until the coil is on a line with the needle--in fact, covers it. Next touch the terminals of a battery with the ends of the wire. The needle at once shifts either to right or left, and remains in that position as long as the current flows. If you change the wires over, so reversing the direction of the current, the needle at once points in the other direction. It is to this conduct on the part of a magnetic needle when in a "magnetic field" that we owe the existence of the needle telegraph instrument. NEEDLE INSTRUMENTS. [Illustration: FIG. 54.--Sketch of the side elevation of a Wheatstone needle instrument.] Probably the best-known needle instrument is the Cooke-Wheatstone, largely used in signal-boxes and in some post-offices. A vertical section of it is shown in Fig. 54. It consists of a base, B, and an upright front, A, to the back of which are attached two hollow coils on either side of a magnetic needle mounted on the same shaft as a second dial needle, N, outside the front. The wires W W are connected to the telegraph line and to the commutator, a device which, when the operator moves the handle H to right and left, keeps reversing the direction of the current. The needles on both receiving and transmitting instruments wag in accordance with the movements of the handle. One or more movements form an alphabetical letter of the Morse code. Thus, if the needle points first to left, and then to right, and comes to rest in a normal position for a moment, the letter A is signified; right-left-left-left in quick succession = B; right-left-right-left = C, and so on. Where a marking instrument is used, a dot signifies a "left," and a dash a right; and if a "sounder" is employed, the operator judges by the length of the intervals between the clicks. INFLUENCE OF CURRENT ON A MAGNETIC NEEDLE. [Illustration: FIGS. 55, 56.--The coils of a needle instrument. The arrows show the direction taken by the current.] Figs. 55 and 56 are two views of the coils and magnetic needle of the Wheatstone instrument as they appear from behind. In Fig. 55 the current enters the left-hand coil from the left, and travels round and round it in a clockwise direction to the other end, whence it passes to the other coil and away to the battery. Now, a coil through which a current passes becomes a magnet. Its polarity depends on the direction in which the current flows. Suppose that you are looking through the coil, and that the current enters it from your end. If the wire is wound in a clockwise direction, the S. pole will be nearest you; if in an anti-clockwise direction, the N. pole. In Fig. 55 the N. poles are at the right end of the coils, the S. poles at the left end; so the N. pole of the needle is attracted to the right, and the S. pole to the left. When the current is reversed, as in Fig. 56, the needle moves over. If no current passes, it remains vertical. METHOD OF REVERSING THE CURRENT. [Illustration: FIG. 57.--General arrangement of needle-instrument circuit. The shaded plates on the left (B and R) are in contact.] A simple method of changing the direction of the current in a two-instrument circuit is shown diagrammatically in Fig. 57. The _principle_ is used in the Wheatstone needle instrument. The battery terminals at each station are attached to two brass plates, A B, A^1 B^1. Crossing these at right angles (under A A^1 and over B B^1) are the flat brass springs, L R, L^1 R^1, having buttons at their lower ends, and fixed at their upper ends to baseboards. When at rest they all press upwards against the plates A and A^1 respectively. R and L^1 are connected with the line circuit, in which are the coils of dials 1 and 2, one at each station. L and R^1 are connected with the earth-plates E E^1. An operator at station 1 depresses R so as to touch B. Current now flows from the battery to B, thence through R to the line circuit, round the coils of both dials through L^1 A^1 and R to earth-plate E^1, through the earth to E, and then back to the battery through L and A. The needles assume the position shown. To reverse the current the operator allows R to rise into contact with A, and depresses L to touch B. The course can be traced out easily. In the Wheatstone "drop-handle" instrument (Fig. 54) the commutator may be described as an insulated core on which are two short lengths of brass tubing. One of these has rubbing against it a spring connected with the + terminal of the battery; the other has similar communication with the - terminal. Projecting from each tube is a spike, and rising from the baseboard are four upright brass strips not quite touching the commutator. Those on one side lead to the line circuit, those on the other to the earth-plate. When the handle is turned one way, the spikes touch the forward line strip and the rear earth strip, and _vice versâ_ when moved in the opposite direction. SOUNDING INSTRUMENTS. Sometimes little brass strips are attached to the dial plate of a needle instrument for the needle to strike against. As these give different notes, the operator can comprehend the message by ear alone. But the most widely used sounding instrument is the Morse sounder, named after its inventor. For this a reversible current is not needed. The receiver is merely an electro-magnet (connected with the line circuit and an earth-plate) which, when a current passes, attracts a little iron bar attached to the middle of a pivoted lever. The free end of the lever works between two stops. Every time the circuit is closed by the transmitting key at the sending station the lever flies down against the lower stop, to rise again when the circuit is broken. The duration of its stay decides whether a "long" or "short" is meant. TELEGRAPHIC RELAYS. [Illustration: FIG. 58.--Section of a telegraph wire insulator on its arm. The shaded circle is the line wire, the two blank circles indicate the wire which ties the line wire to the insulator.] When an electric current has travelled for a long distance through a wire its strength is much reduced on account of the resistance of the wire, and may be insufficient to cause the electro-magnet of the sounder to move the heavy lever. Instead, therefore, of the current acting directly on the sounder magnet, it is used to energize a small magnet, or _relay_, which pulls down a light bar and closes a second "local" circuit--that is, one at the receiver end--worked by a separate battery, which has sufficient power to operate the sounder. RECORDING TELEGRAPHS. By attaching a small wheel to the end of a Morse-sounder lever, by arranging an ink-well for the wheel to dip into when the end falls, and by moving a paper ribbon slowly along for the wheel to press against when it rises, a self-recording Morse inker is produced. The ribbon-feeding apparatus is set in motion automatically by the current, and continues to pull the ribbon along until the message is completed. The Hughes type-printer covers a sheet of paper with printed characters in bold Roman type. The transmitter has a keyboard, on which are marked letters, signs, and numbers; also a type-wheel, with the characters on its circumference, rotated by electricity. The receiver contains mechanisms for rotating another type-wheel synchronously--that is, in time--with the first; for shifting the wheel across the paper; for pressing the paper against the wheel; and for moving the paper when a fresh line is needed. These are too complicated to be described here in detail. By means of relays one transmitter may be made to work five hundred receivers. In London a single operator, controlling a keyboard in the central dispatching office, causes typewritten messages to spell themselves out simultaneously in machines distributed all over the metropolis. The tape machine resembles that just described in many details. The main difference is that it prints on a continuous ribbon instead of on sheets. Automatic electric printers of some kind or other are to be found in the vestibules of all the principal hotels and clubs of our large cities, and in the offices of bankers, stockbrokers, and newspaper editors. In London alone over 500 million words are printed by the receivers in a year. HIGH-SPEED TELEGRAPHY. At certain seasons, or when important political events are taking place, the telegraph service would become congested with news were there not some means of transmitting messages at a much greater speed than is possible by hand signalling. Fifty words a minute is about the limit speed that a good operator can maintain. By means of Wheatstone's _automatic transmitter_ the rate can be increased to 400 words per minute. Paper ribbons are punched in special machines by a number of clerks with a series of holes which by their position indicate a dot or a dash. The ribbons are passed through a special transmitter, over little electric brushes, which make contact through the holes with surfaces connected to the line circuit. At the receiver end the message is printed by a Morse inker. It has been found possible to send several messages simultaneously over a single line. To effect this a _distributer_ is used to put a number of transmitters at one end of the line in communication with an equal number of receivers at the other end, fed by a second distributer keeping perfect time with the first. Instead of a signal coming as a whole to any one instrument it arrives in little bits, but these follow one another so closely as to be practically continuous. By working a number of automatic transmitters through a distributer, a thousand words or more per minute are easily dispatched over a single wire. The Pollak Virag system employs a punched ribbon, and the receiver traces out the message in alphabetical characters on a moving strip of sensitized photographic paper. A mirror attached to a vibrating diaphragm reflects light from a lamp on to the strip, which is automatically developed and fixed in chemical baths. The method of moving the mirror so as to make the rays trace out words is extremely ingenious. Messages have been transmitted by this system at the rate of 180,000 words per hour. Chapter VII. WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY. The transmitting apparatus--The receiving apparatus--Syntonic transmission--The advance of wireless telegraphy. In our last chapter we reviewed briefly some systems of sending telegraphic messages from one point of the earth's surface to another through a circuit consisting partly of an insulated wire and partly of the earth itself. The metallic portion of a long circuit, especially if it be a submarine cable, is costly to install, so that in quite the early days of telegraphy efforts were made to use the ether in the place of wire as one conductor. When a hammer strikes an anvil the air around is violently disturbed. This disturbance spreads through the molecules of the air in much the same way as ripples spread from the splash of a stone thrown into a pond. When the sound waves reach the ear they agitate the tympanum, or drum membrane, and we "hear a noise." The hammer is here the transmitter, the air the conductor, the ear the receiver. In wireless telegraphy we use the ether as the conductor of electrical disturbances.[13] Marconi, Slaby, Branly, Lodge, De Forest, Popoff, and others have invented apparatus for causing disturbances of the requisite kind, and for detecting their presence. The main features of a wireless telegraphy outfit are shown in Figs. 59 and 61. THE TRANSMITTER APPARATUS. We will first consider the transmitting outfit (Fig. 59). It includes a battery, dispatching key, and an induction coil having its secondary circuit terminals connected with two wires, the one leading to an earth-plate, the other carried aloft on poles or suspended from a kite. In the large station at Poldhu, Cornwall, for transatlantic signalling, there are special wooden towers 215 feet high, between which the aërial wires hang. At their upper and lower ends respectively the earth and aërial wires terminate in brass balls separated by a gap. When the operator depresses the key the induction coil charges these balls and the wires attached thereto with high-tension electricity. As soon as the quantity collected exceeds the resistance of the air-gap, a discharge takes place between the balls, and the ether round the aërial wire is violently disturbed, and waves of electrical energy are propagated through it. The rapidity with which the discharges follow one another, and their travelling power, depends on the strength of the induction coil, the length of the air-gap, and the capacity of the wires.[14] [Illustration: FIG. 59.--Sketch of the transmitter of a wireless telegraphy outfit.] [Illustration: FIG. 60.--A Marconi coherer.] RECEIVING APPARATUS. The human body is quite insensitive to these etheric waves. We cannot feel, hear, or see them. But at the receiving station there is what may be called an "electric eye." Technically it is named a _coherer_. A Marconi coherer is seen in Fig. 60. Inside a small glass tube exhausted of air are two silver plugs, P P, carrying terminals, T T, projecting through the glass at both ends. A small gap separates the plugs at the centre, and this gap is partly filled with nickel-silver powder. If the terminals of the coherer are attached to those of a battery, practically no current will pass under ordinary conditions, as the particles of nickel-silver touch each other very lightly and make a "bad contact." But if the coherer is also attached to wires leading into the earth and air, and ether waves strike those wires, at every impact the particles will cohere--that is, pack tightly together--and allow battery current to pass. The property of cohesion of small conductive bodies when influenced by Hertzian waves was first noticed in 1874 by Professor D.E. Hughes while experimenting with a telephone. [Illustration: FIG. 61.--Sketch of the receiving apparatus in a wireless telegraphy outfit.] We are now in a position to examine the apparatus of which a coherer forms part (Fig. 61). First, we notice the aërial and earth wires, to which are attached other wires from battery A. This battery circuit passes round the relay magnet R and through two choking coils, whose function is to prevent the Hertzian waves entering the battery. The relay, when energized, brings contact D against E and closes the circuit of battery B, which is much more powerful than battery A, and operates the magnet M as well as the _tapper_, which is practically an electric bell minus the gong. (The tapper circuit is indicated by the dotted lines.) We will suppose the transmitter of a distant station to be at work. The electric waves strike the aërial wire of the receiving station, and cause the coherer to cohere and pass current. The relay is closed, and both tapper and Morse inker begin to work. The tapper keeps striking the coherer and shakes the particles loose after every cohesion. If this were not done the current of A would pass continuously after cohesion had once taken place. When the key of the transmitter is pressed down, the waves follow one another very quickly, and the acquired conductivity of the coherer is only momentarily destroyed by the tap of the hammer. During the impression of a dot by the Morse inker, contact is made and broken repeatedly; but as the armature of the inker is heavy and slow to move it does not vibrate in time with the relay and tapper. Therefore the Morse instrument reproduces in dots and dashes the short and long depressions of the key at the transmitting station, while the tapper works rapidly in time with the relay. The Morse inker is shown diagrammatically. While current passes through M the armature is pulled towards it, the end P, carrying an inked wheel, rises, and a mark is made on the tape W, which is moved continuously being drawn forward off reel R by the clockwork--or electrically-driven rollers R^1 R^2. SYNTONIC TRANSMISSION. If a number of transmitting stations are sending out messages simultaneously, a jumble of signals would affect all the receivers round, unless some method were employed for rendering a receiver sensitive only to the waves intended to influence it. Also, if distinction were impossible, even with one transmitter in action its message might go to undesired stations. There are various ways of "tuning" receivers and transmitters, but the principle underlying them all is analogous to that of mechanical vibration. If a weight is suspended from the end of a spiral spring, and given an upward blow, it bobs up and down a certain number of times per minute, every movement from start to finish having exactly the same duration as the rest. The resistance of the air and the internal friction of the spring gradually lessen the amplitude of the movements, and the weight finally comes to rest. Suppose that the weight scales 30 lbs., and that it naturally bobs twenty times a minute. If you now take a feather and give it a push every three seconds you can coax it into vigorous motion, assuming that every push catches it exactly on the rebound. The same effect would be produced more slowly if 6 or 9 second intervals were substituted. But if you strike it at 4, 5, or 7 second intervals it will gradually cease to oscillate, as the effect of one blow neutralizes that of another. The same phenomenon is witnessed when two tuning-forks of equal pitch are mounted near one another, and one is struck. The other soon picks up the note. But a fork of unequal pitch would remain dumb. Now, every electrical circuit has a "natural period of oscillation" in which its electric charge vibrates. It is found possible to "tune," or "syntonize," the aërial rod or wire of a receiving station with a transmitter. A vertical wire about 200 feet in length, says Professor J.A. Fleming,[15] has a natural time period of electrical oscillation of about one-millionth of a second. Therefore if waves strike this wire a million times a second they will reinforce one another and influence the coherer; whereas a less or greater frequency will leave it practically unaffected. By adjusting the receiving circuit to the transmitter, or _vice versâ_, selective wireless telegraphy becomes possible. ADVANCE OF WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY. The history of wireless telegraphy may be summed up as follows:-- 1842.--Professor Morse sent aërial messages across the Susquehanna River. A line containing a battery and transmitter was carried on posts along one bank and "earthed" in the river at each end. On the other bank was a second wire attached to a receiver and similarly earthed. Whenever contact was made and broken on the battery side, the receiver on the other was affected. Distance about 1 mile. 1859.--James Bowman Lindsay transmitted messages across the Tay at Glencarse in a somewhat similar way. Distance about 1/2 mile. 1885.--Sir William Preece signalled from Lavernock Point, near Cardiff, to Steep Holm, an island in the Bristol Channel. Distance about 5-1/2 miles. In all these electrical _induction_ of current was employed. 1886.--Hertzian waves discovered. 1895.--Professor A. Popoff sent Hertzian wave messages over a distance of 3 miles. 1897.--Marconi signalled from the Needles Hotel, Isle of Wight, to Swanage; 17-1/2 miles. 1901.--Messages sent at sea for 380 miles. 1901, Dec. 17.--Messages transmitted from Poldhu, Cornwall, to Hospital Point, Newfoundland; 2,099 miles. Mr. Marconi has so perfected tuning devices that his transatlantic messages do not affect receivers placed on board ships crossing the ocean, unless they are purposely tuned. Atlantic liners now publish daily small newspapers containing the latest news, flashed through space from land stations. In the United States the De Forest and Fessenden systems are being rapidly extended to embrace the most out-of-the-way districts. Every navy of importance has adopted wireless telegraphy, which, as was proved during the Russo-Japanese War, can be of the greatest help in directing operations. [13] Named after their first discoverer, Dr. Hertz of Carlsruhe, "Hertzian waves." [14] For long-distance transmission powerful dynamos take the place of the induction coil and battery. [15] "Technics," vol. ii. p. 566. Chapter VIII. THE TELEPHONE. The Bell telephone--The Edison transmitter--The granular carbon transmitter--General arrangement of a telephone circuit--Double-line circuits--Telephone exchanges--Submarine telephony. For the purposes of everyday life the telephone is even more useful than the telegraph. Telephones now connect one room of a building with another, house with house, town with town, country with country. An infinitely greater number of words pass over the telephonic circuits of the world in a year than are transmitted by telegraph operators. The telephone has become an important adjunct to the transaction of business of all sorts. Its wires penetrate everywhere. Without moving from his desk, the London citizen may hold easy converse with a Parisian, a New Yorker with a dweller in Chicago. Wonderful as the transmission of signals over great distances is, the transmission of human speech so clearly that individual voices may be distinguished hundreds of miles away is even more so. Yet the instrument which works the miracle is essentially simple in its principles. THE BELL TELEPHONE. [Illustration: FIG. 62.--Section of a Bell telephone.] The first telephone that came into general use was that of Bell, shown in Fig. 62. In a central hole of an ebonite casing is fixed a permanent magnet, M. The casing expands at one end to accommodate a coil of insulated wire wound about one extremity of a magnet. The coil ends are attached to wires passing through small channels to terminals at the rear. A circular diaphragm, D, of very thin iron plate, clamped between the concave mouthpiece and the casing, almost touches the end of the magnet. We will suppose that two Bell telephones, A and B, are connected up by wires, so that the wires and the coils form a complete circuit. Words are spoken into A. The air vibrations, passing through the central hole in the cover, make the diaphragm vibrate towards and away from the magnet. The distances through which the diaphragm moves have been measured, and found not to exceed in some cases more than 1/10,000,000 of an inch! Its movements distort the shape of the "lines of force" (see p. 118) emanating from the magnet, and these, cutting through the turns of the coil, induce a current in the line circuit. As the diaphragm approaches the magnet a circuit is sent in one direction; as it leaves it, in the other. Consequently speech produces rapidly alternating currents in the circuit, their duration and intensity depending on the nature of the sound. Now consider telephone B. The currents passing through its coil increase or diminish the magnetism of the magnet, and cause it to attract its diaphragm with varying force. The vibration of the diaphragm disturbs the air in exact accordance with the vibrations of A's diaphragm, and speech is reproduced. THE EDISON TRANSMITTER. The Bell telephone may be used both as a transmitter and a receiver, and the permanent magnetism of the cores renders it independent of an electric battery. But currents generated by it are so minute that they cannot overcome the resistance of a long circuit; therefore a battery is now always used, and with it a special device as transmitter. If in a circuit containing a telephone and a battery there be a loose contact, and this be shaken, the varying resistance of the contact will cause electrical currents of varying force to pass through the circuit. Edison introduced the first successful _microphone_ transmitter, in which a small platinum disc connected to the diaphragm pressed with varying force against a disc of carbon, each disc forming part of the circuit. Vibrations of the diaphragm caused current to flow in a series of rapid pulsations. [Illustration: FIG. 63.--Section of a granular carbon transmitter.] THE GRANULAR CARBON TRANSMITTER. In Fig. 63 we have a section of a microphone transmitter now very widely used. It was invented, in its original form, by an English clergyman named Hunnings. Resting in a central cavity of an ebonite seating is a carbon block, C, with a face moulded into a number of pyramidal projections, P P. The space between C and a carbon diaphragm, D, is packed with carbon granules, G G. C has direct contact with line terminal T, which screws into it; D with T^1 through the brass casing, screw S, and a small plate at the back of the transmitter. Voice vibrations compress G G, and allow current to pass more freely from D to C. This form of microphone is very delicate, and unequalled for long-distance transmission. [Illustration: FIG. 64.--A diagrammatic representation of a telephonic circuit.] GENERAL ARRANGEMENT OF A TELEPHONE CIRCUIT. In many forms of subscriber's instruments both receiver and transmitter are mounted on a single handle in such a way as to be conveniently placed for ear and mouth. For the sake of clearness the diagrammatic sketch of a complete installation (Fig. 64) shows them separated. The transmitters, it will be noticed, are located in battery circuits, including the primary windings P P_2 of induction coils. The transmitters are in the line circuit, which includes the secondary windings S S_2 of the coils. We will assume that the transmitters are, in the first instance, both hung on the hooks of the metallic switches, which their weight depresses to the position indicated by the dotted lines. The handle of the magneto-generator at the left-end station is turned, and current passes through the closed circuit:--Line A, E B_2, contact 10, the switch 9; line B, 4, the other switch, contact 5, and E B. Both bells ring. Both parties now lift their receivers from the switch hooks. The switches rise against contacts 1, 2, 3 and 6, 7, 8 respectively. Both primary and both secondary circuits are now completed, while the bells are disconnected from the line wires. The pulsations set up by transmitter T in primary coil P are magnified by secondary coil S for transmission through the line circuit, and affect both receivers. The same thing happens when T_2 is used. At the end of the conversation the receivers are hung on their hooks again, and the bell circuit is remade, ready for the next call. [Illustration: A TELEPHONE EXCHANGE.] DOUBLE-LINE CIRCUITS. The currents used in telephones pulsate very rapidly, but are very feeble. Electric disturbances caused by the proximity of telegraph or tram wires would much interfere with them if the earth were used for the return circuit. It has been found that a complete metallic circuit (two wires) is practically free from interference, though where a number of wires are hung on the same poles, speech-sounds may be faintly induced in one circuit from another. This defect is, however, minimized by crossing the wires about among themselves, so that any one line does not pass round the corresponding insulator on every pole. TELEPHONE EXCHANGES. In a district where a number of telephones are used the subscribers are put into connection with one another through an "exchange," to which all the wires lead. One wire of each subscriber runs to a common "earth;" the other terminates at a switchboard presided over by an operator. In an exchange used by many subscribers the terminals are distributed over a number of switchboards, each containing 80 to 100 terminals, and attended to by an operator, usually a girl. When a subscriber wishes to be connected to another subscriber, he either turns the handle of a magneto generator, which causes a shutter to fall and expose his number at the exchange, or simply depresses a key which works a relay at the exchange and lights a tiny electric lamp. The operator, seeing the signal, connects her telephone with the subscriber's circuit and asks the number wanted. This given, she rings up the other subscriber, and connects the two circuits by means of an insulated wire cord having a spike at each end to fit the "jack" sockets of the switchboard terminals. The two subscribers are now in communication. [Illustration: FIG. 65.--The headdress of an operator at a telephone exchange. The receiver is fastened over one ear, and the transmitter to the chest.] If a number on switchboard A calls for a number on switchboard C, the operator at A connects her subscriber by a jack cord to a trunk line running to C, where the operator similarly connects the trunk line with the number asked for, after ringing up the subscriber. The central exchange of one town is connected with that of another by one or more trunk lines, so that a subscriber may speak through an indefinite number of exchanges. So perfect is the modern telephone that the writer remembers on one occasion hearing the door-bell ring in a house more than a hundred miles away, with which he was at the moment in telephonic connection, though three exchanges were in the circuit. SUBMARINE TELEPHONY. Though telegraphic messages are transmitted easily through thousands of miles of cable,[16] submarine telephony is at present restricted to comparatively short distances. When a current passes through a cable, electricity of opposite polarity induced on the outside of the cable damps the vibration in the conductor. In the Atlantic cable, strong currents of electricity are poured periodically into one end, and though much enfeebled when they reach the other they are sufficiently strong to work a very delicate "mirror galvanometer" (invented by Lord Kelvin), which moves a reflected ray up and down a screen, the direction of the movements indicating a dot or a dash. Reversible currents are used in transmarine telegraphy. The galvanometer is affected like the coils and small magnet in Wheatstone's needle instrument (p. 128). Telephonic currents are too feeble to penetrate many miles of cable. There is telephonic communication between England and France, and England and Ireland. But transatlantic telephony is still a thing of the future. It is hoped, however, that by inserting induction coils at intervals along the cables the currents may be "stepped up" from point to point, and so get across. Turning to Fig. 64, we may suppose S to be on shore at the English end, and S_2 to be the _primary_ winding of an induction coil a hundred miles away in the sea, which magnifies the enfeebled vibrations for a journey to S_3, where they are again revived; and so on, till the New World is reached. The difficulty is to devise induction coils of great power though of small size. Yet science advances nowadays so fast that we may live to hear words spoken at the Antipodes. [16] In 1896 the late Li Hung Chang sent a cablegram from China to England (12,608 miles), and received a reply, in _seven minutes_. Chapter IX. DYNAMOS AND ELECTRIC MOTORS. A simple dynamo--Continuous-current dynamos--Multipolar dynamos--Exciting the field magnets--Alternating current dynamos--The transmission of power--The electric motor--Electric lighting--The incandescent lamp--Arc lamps--"Series" and "parallel" arrangement of lamps--Current for electric lamps--Electroplating. In previous chapters we have incidentally referred to the conversion of mechanical work into electrical energy. In this we shall examine how it is done--how the silently spinning dynamo develops power, and why the motor spins when current is passed through it. We must begin by returning to our first electrical diagram (Fig. 50), and calling to mind the invisible "lines of force" which permeate the ether in the immediate neighbourhood of a magnet's poles, called the _magnetic field_ of the magnet. Many years ago (1831) the great Michael Faraday discovered that if a loop of wire were moved up and down between the poles of an electro-magnet (Fig. 66) a current was induced in the loop, its direction depending upon that in which the loop was moved. The energy required to cut the lines of force passed in some mysterious way into the wire. Why this is so we cannot say, but, taking advantage of the fact, electricians have gradually developed the enormous machines which now send vehicles spinning over metal tracks, light our streets and houses, and supply energy to innumerable factories. [Illustration: FIG. 66.] The strength of the current induced in a circuit cutting the lines of force of a magnet is called its pressure, voltage, or electro-motive force (expressed shortly E.M.F.). It may be compared with the pounds-to-the-square-inch of steam. In order to produce an E.M.F. of one volt it is calculated that 100,000,000 lines of force must be cut every second. The voltage depends on three things:--(1.) The _strength_ of the magnet: the stronger it is, the greater the number of lines of force coming from it. (2.) The _length_ of the conductor cutting the lines of force: the longer it is, the more lines it will cut. (3.) The _speed_ at which the conductor moves: the faster it travels, the more lines it will cut in a given time. It follows that a powerful dynamo, or mechanical producer of current, must have strong magnets and a long conductor; and the latter must be moved at a high speed across the lines of force. A SIMPLE DYNAMO. In Fig. 67 we have the simplest possible form of dynamo--a single turn of wire, _w x y z_, mounted on a spindle, and having one end attached to an insulated ring C, the other to an insulated ring C^1. Two small brushes, B B^1, of wire gauze or carbon, rubbing continuously against these collecting rings, connect them with a wire which completes the circuit. The armature, as the revolving coil is called, is mounted between the poles of a magnet, where the lines of force are thickest. These lines are _supposed_ to stream from the N. to the S. pole. In Fig. 67 the armature has reached a position in which _y z_ and _w x_ are cutting no, or very few, lines of force, as they move practically parallel to the lines. This is called the _zero_ position. [Illustration: FIG. 67.] [Illustration: FIG. 68.] In Fig. 68 the armature, moving at right angles to the lines of force, cuts a maximum number in a given time, and the current induced in the coil is therefore now most intense. Here we must stop a moment to consider how to decide in which direction the current flows. The armature is revolving in a clockwise direction, and _y z_, therefore, is moving downwards. Now, suppose that you rest your _left_ hand on the N. pole of the magnet so that the arm lies in a line with the magnet. Point your forefinger towards the S. pole. It will indicate the _direction of the lines of force_. Bend your other three fingers downwards over the edge of the N. pole. They will indicate the _direction in which the conductor is moving_ across the magnetic field. Stick out the thumb at right angles to the forefinger. It points in the direction in which the _induced_ current is moving through the nearer half of the coil. Therefore lines of force, conductor, and induced current travel in planes which, like the top and two adjacent sides of a box, are at right angles to one another. While current travels from _z_ to _y_--that is, _from_ the ring C^1 to _y_--it also travels from _x_ to _w_, because _w x_ rises while _y z_ descends. So that a current circulates through the coil and the exterior part of the circuit, including the lamp. After _z y_ has passed the lowest possible point of the circle it begins to ascend, _w x_ to descend. The direction of the current is therefore reversed; and as the change is repeated every half-revolution this form of dynamo is called an _alternator_ or creator of alternating currents. A well-known type of alternator is the magneto machine which sends shocks through any one who completes the external circuit by holding the brass handles connected by wires to the brushes. The faster the handle of the machine is turned the more frequent is the alternation, and the stronger the current. [Illustration: FIG. 69.] CONTINUOUS-CURRENT DYNAMOS. An alternating current is not so convenient for some purposes as a continuous current. It is therefore sometimes desirable (even necessary) to convert the alternating into a uni-directional or continuous current. How this is done is shown in Figs. 69 and 70. In place of the two collecting rings C C^1, we now have a single ring split longitudinally into two portions, one of which is connected to each end of the coil _w x y z_. In Fig. 69 brush B has just passed the gap on to segment C, brush B^1 on to segment C^1. For half a revolution these remain respectively in contact; then, just as _y z_ begins to rise and _w x_ to descend, the brushes cross the gaps again and exchange segments, so that the current is perpetually flowing one way through the circuit. The effect of the commutator[17] is, in fact, equivalent to transposing the brushes of the collecting rings of the alternator every time the coil reaches a zero position. Figs. 71 and 72 give end views in section of the coil and the commutator, with the coil in the position of minimum and maximum efficiency. The arrow denotes the direction of movement; the double dotted lines the commutator end of the revolving coil. [Illustration: FIG. 70.] PRACTICAL CONTINUOUS-CURRENT DYNAMOS. The electrical output of our simple dynamo would be increased if, instead of a single turn of wire, we used a coil of many turns. A further improvement would result from mounting on the shaft, inside the coil, a core or drum of iron, to entice the lines of force within reach of the revolving coil. It is evident that any lines which pass through the air outside the circle described by the coil cannot be cut, and are wasted. [Illustration: FIG. 71.] [Illustration: FIG. 72.] The core is not a solid mass of iron, but built up of a number of very thin iron discs threaded on the shaft and insulated from one another to prevent electric eddies, which would interfere with the induced current in the conductor.[18] Sometimes there are openings through the core from end to end to ventilate and cool it. [Illustration: FIG. 73.] We have already noticed that in the case of a single coil the current rises and falls in a series of pulsations. Such a form of armature would be unsuitable for large dynamos, which accordingly have a number of coils wound over their drums, at equal distances round the circumference, and a commutator divided into an equal number of segments. The subject of drum winding is too complicated for brief treatment, and we must therefore be content with noticing that the coils are so connected to their respective commutator segments and to one another that they mutually assist one another. A glance at Fig. 73 will help to explain this. Here we have in section a number of conductors on the right of the drum (marked with a cross to show that current is moving, as it were, into the page), connected with conductors on the left (marked with a dot to signify current coming out of the page). If the "crossed" and "dotted" conductors were respectively the "up" and "down" turns of a single coil terminating in a simple split commutator (Fig. 69), when the coil had been revolved through an angle of 90° some of the up turns would be ascending and some descending, so that conflicting currents would arise. Yet we want to utilize the whole surface of the drum; and by winding a number of coils in the manner hinted at, each coil, as it passes the zero point, top or bottom, at once generates a current in the desired direction and reinforces that in all the other turns of its own and of other coils on the same side of a line drawn vertically through the centre. There is thus practically no fluctuation in the pressure of the current generated. The action of single and multiple coil windings may be compared to that of single and multiple pumps. Water is ejected by a single pump in gulps; whereas the flow from a pipe fed by several pumps arranged to deliver consecutively is much more constant. MULTIPOLAR DYNAMOS. Hitherto we have considered the magnetic field produced by one bi-polar magnet only. Large dynamos have four, six, eight, or more field magnets set inside a casing, from which their cores project towards the armature so as almost to touch it (Fig. 74). The magnet coils are wound to give N. and S. poles alternately at their armature ends round the field; and the lines of force from each N. pole stream each way to the two adjacent S. poles across the path of the armature coils. In dynamos of this kind several pairs of collecting brushes pick current off the commutator at equidistant points on its circumference. [Illustration: FIG. 74.--A Holmes continuous current dynamo: A, armature; C, commutator; M, field magnets.] EXCITING THE FIELD MAGNETS. Until current passes through the field magnet coils, no magnetic field can be created. How are the coils supplied with current? A dynamo, starting for the first time, is excited by a current from an outside source; but when it has once begun to generate current it feeds its magnets itself, and ever afterwards will be self-exciting,[19] owing to the residual magnetism left in the magnet cores. [Illustration: FIG. 75.--Partly finished commutator.] Look carefully at Figs. 77 and 78. In the first of these you will observe that part of the wire forming the external circuit is wound round the arms of the field magnet. This is called a _series_ winding. In this case _all_ the current generated helps to excite the dynamo. At the start the residual magnetism of the magnet cores gives a weak field. The armature coils cut this and pass a current through the circuit. The magnets are further excited, and the field becomes stronger; and so on till the dynamo is developing full power. Series winding is used where the current in the external circuit is required to be very constant. [Illustration: FIG. 76.--The brushes of a Holmes dynamo.] Fig. 78 shows another method of winding--the _shunt_. Most of the current generated passes through the external circuit 2, 2; but a part is switched through a separate winding for the magnets, denoted by the fine wire 1, 1. Here the strength of the magnetism does not vary directly with the current, as only a small part of the current serves the magnets. The shunt winding is therefore used where the voltage (or pressure) must be constant. [Illustration: FIG. 77.--Sketch showing a "series" winding.] [Illustration: FIG. 78.--"Shunt" winding.] A third method is a combination of the two already named. A winding of fine wire passes from brush to brush round the magnets; and there is also a series winding as in Fig. 77. This compound method is adapted more especially for electric traction. ALTERNATING DYNAMOS. These have their field magnets excited by a separate continuous current dynamo of small size. The field magnets usually revolve inside a fixed armature (the reverse of the arrangement in a direct-current generator); or there may be a fixed central armature and field magnets revolving outside it. This latter arrangement is found in the great power stations at Niagara Falls, where the enormous field-rings are mounted on the top ends of vertical shafts, driven by water-turbines at the bottom of pits 178 feet deep, down which water is led to the turbines through great pipes, or penstocks. The weight of each shaft and the field-ring attached totals about thirty-five tons. This mass revolves 250 times a minute, and 5,000 horse power is constantly developed by the dynamo. Similar dynamos of 10,000 horse power each have been installed on the Canadian side of the Falls. [Illustration: FIG. 79.] TRANSMISSION OF POWER. Alternating current is used where power has to be transmitted for long distances, because such a current can be intensified, or stepped up, by a transformer somewhat similar in principle to a Ruhmkorff coil _minus_ a contact-breaker (see p. 122). A typical example of transformation is seen in Fig. 79. Alternating current of 5,000 volts pressure is produced in the generating station and sent through conductors to a distant station, where a transformer, B, reduces the pressure to 500 volts to drive an alternating motor, C, which in turn operates a direct current dynamo, D. This dynamo has its + terminal connected with the insulated or "live" rail of an electric railway, and its - terminal with the wheel rails, which are metallically united at the joints to act as a "return." On its way from the live rail to the return the current passes through the motors. In the case of trams the conductor is either a cable carried overhead on standards, from which it passes to the motor through a trolley arm, or a rail laid underground in a conduit between the rails. In the top of the conduit is a slit through which an arm carrying a contact shoe on the end projects from the car. The shoe rubs continuously on the live rail as the car moves. To return for a moment to the question of transformation of current. "Why," it may be asked, "should we not send low-pressure _direct_ current to a distant station straight from the dynamo, instead of altering its nature and pressure? Or, at any rate, why not use high-pressure direct current, and transform _that_?" The answer is, that to transmit a large amount of electrical energy at low pressure (or voltage) would necessitate large volume (or _amperage_) and a big and expensive copper conductor to carry it. High-pressure direct current is not easily generated, since the sparking at the collecting brushes as they pass over the commutator segments gives trouble. So engineers prefer high-pressure alternating current, which is easily produced, and can be sent through a small and inexpensive conductor with little loss. Also its voltage can be transformed by apparatus having no revolving parts. THE ELECTRIC MOTOR. Anybody who understands the dynamo will also be able to understand the electric motor, which is merely a reversed dynamo. Imagine in Fig. 70 a dynamo taking the place of the lamp and passing current through the brushes and commutator into the coil _w x y z_. Now, any coil through which current passes becomes a magnet with N. and S. poles at either end. (In Fig. 70 we will assume that the N. pole is below and the S. pole above the coil.) The coil poles therefore try to seek the contrary poles of the permanent magnet, and the coil revolves until its S. pole faces the N. of the magnet, and _vice versâ_. The lines of force of the coil and the magnet are now parallel. But the momentum of revolution carries the coil on, and suddenly the commutator reverses its polarity, and a further half-revolution takes place. Then comes a further reversal, and so on _ad infinitum_. The rotation of the motor is therefore merely a question of repulsion and attraction of like and unlike poles. An ordinary compass needle may be converted into a tiny motor by presenting the N. and S. poles of a magnet to its S. and N. poles alternately every half-revolution. In construction and winding a motor is practically the same as a dynamo. In fact, either machine can perform either function, though perhaps not equally well adapted for both. Motors may be run with direct or alternating current, according to their construction. On electric cars the motor is generally suspended from the wheel truck, and a small pinion on the armature shaft gears with a large pinion on a wheel axle. One great advantage of electric traction is that every vehicle of a train can carry its own motor, so that the whole weight of the train may be used to get a grip on the rails when starting. Where a single steam locomotive is used, the adhesion of its driving-wheels only is available for overcoming the inertia of the load; and the whole strain of starting is thrown on to the foremost couplings. Other advantages may be summed up as follows:--(1) Ease of starting and rapid acceleration; (2) absence of waste of energy (in the shape of burning fuel) when the vehicles are at rest; (3) absence of smoke and smell. ELECTRIC LIGHTING. Dynamos are used to generate current for two main purposes--(1) To supply power to motors of all kinds; (2) to light our houses, factories, and streets. In private houses and theatres incandescent lamps are generally used; in the open air, in shops, and in larger buildings, such as railway stations, the arc lamp is more often found. INCANDESCENT LAMP. If you take a piece of very fine iron wire and lay it across the terminals of an accumulator, it becomes white hot and melts, owing to the heat generated by its resistance to the current. A piece of fine platinum wire would become white hot without melting, and would give out an intense light. Here we have the principle of the glow or incandescent lamp--namely, the interposition in an electric circuit of a conductor which at once offers a high resistance to the current, but is not destroyed by the resulting heat. In Fig. 80 is shown a fan propelling liquid constantly through a pipe. Let us assume that the liquid is one which develops great friction on the inside of the pipe. At the contraction, where the speed of travel is much greater than elsewhere in the circuit, most heat will be produced. [Illustration: FIG. 80.--Diagram to show circulation of water through a pipe.] In quite the early days of the glow-lamp platinum wire was found to be unreliable as regards melting, and filaments of carbon are now used. To prevent the wasting away of the carbon by combination with oxygen the filament is enclosed in a glass bulb from which practically all air has been sucked by a mercury pump before sealing. [Illustration: FIG. 81.--The electrical counterpart of Fig. 80. The filament takes the place of the contraction in the pipe.] The manufacture of glow-lamps is now an important industry. One brand of lamp[20] is made as follows:--First, cotton-wool is dissolved in chloride of zinc, and forms a treacly solution, which is squirted through a fine nozzle into a settling solution which hardens it and makes it coil up like a very fine violin string. After being washed and dried, it is wound on a plumbago rod and baked in a furnace until only the carbon element remains. This is the filament in the rough. It is next removed from the rod and tipped with two short pieces of fine platinum wire. To make the junction electrically perfect the filament is plunged in benzine and heated to whiteness by the passage of a strong current, which deposits the carbon of the benzine on the joints. The filament is now placed under the glass receiver of an air-pump, the air is exhausted, hydro-carbon vapour is introduced, and the filament has a current passed through it to make it white hot. Carbon from the vapour is deposited all over the filament until the required electrical resistance is attained. The filament is now ready for enclosure in the bulb. When the bulb has been exhausted and sealed, the lamp is tested, and, if passed, goes to the finishing department, where the two platinum wires (projecting through the glass) are soldered to a couple of brass plates, which make contact with two terminals in a lamp socket. Finally, brass caps are affixed with a special water-tight and hard cement. ARC LAMPS. In _arc_ lighting, instead of a contraction at a point in the circuit, there is an actual break of very small extent. Suppose that to the ends of the wires leading from a dynamo's terminals we attach two carbon rods, and touch the end of the rods together. The tips become white hot, and if they are separated slightly, atoms of incandescent carbon leap from the positive to the negative rod in a continuous and intensely luminous stream, which is called an _arc_ because the path of the particles is curved. No arc would be formed unless the carbons were first touched to start incandescence. If they are separated too far for the strength of the current to bridge the gap the light will flicker or go out. The arc lamp is therefore provided with a mechanism which, when the current is cut off, causes the carbons to fall together, gradually separates them when it is turned on, and keeps them apart. The principle employed is the effort of a coil through which a current passes to draw an iron rod into its centre. Some of the current feeding the lamp is shunted through a coil, into which projects one end of an iron bar connected with one carbon point. A spring normally presses the points together when no current flows. As soon as current circulates through the coil the bar is drawn upwards against the spring. SERIES AND PARALLEL ARRANGEMENT OF LAMPS. When current passes from one lamp to another, as in Fig. 82, the lamps are said to be in _series_. Should one lamp fail, all in the circuit would go out. But where arc lamps are thus arranged a special mechanism on each lamp "short-circuits" it in case of failure, so that current may pass uninterruptedly to the next. [Illustration: FIG. 82.--Incandescent lamps connected in "series."] Fig. 83 shows a number of lamps set _in parallel_. One terminal of each is attached to the positive conductor, the other to the negative conductor. Each lamp therefore forms an independent bridge, and does not affect the efficiency of the rest. _Parallel series_ signifies a combination of the two systems, and would be illustrated if, in Fig. 83, two or more lamps were connected in series groups from one conductor to the other. This arrangement is often used in arc lighting. [Illustration: FIG. 83.--Incandescent lamps connected in "parallel."] CURRENT FOR ELECTRIC LAMPS. This may be either direct or alternating. The former is commonly used for arc lamps, the latter for incandescent, as it is easily stepped-down from the high-pressure mains for use in a house. Glow-lamps usually take current of 110 or 250 volts pressure. In arc lamps fed with direct current the tip of the positive carbon has a bowl-shaped depression worn in it, while the negative tip is pointed. Most of the illumination comes from the inner surface of the bowl, and the positive carbon is therefore placed uppermost to throw the light downwards. An alternating current, of course, affects both carbons in the same manner, and there is no bowl. The carbons need frequent renewal. A powerful lamp uses about 70 feet of rod in 1,000 hours if the arc is exposed to the air. Some lamps have partly enclosed arcs--that is, are surrounded by globes perforated by a single small hole, which renders combustion very slow, though preventing a vacuum. ELECTROPLATING. Electroplating is the art of coating metals with metals by means of electricity. Silver, copper, and nickel are the metals most generally deposited. The article to be coated is suspended in a chemical solution of the metal to be deposited. Fig. 84 shows a very simple plating outfit. A is a battery; B a vessel containing, say, an acidulated solution of sulphate of copper. A spoon, S, hanging in this from a glass rod, R, is connected with the zinc or negative element, Z, of the battery, and a plate of copper, P, with the positive element, C. Current flows in the direction shown by the arrows, from Z to C, C to P, P to S, S to Z. The copper deposited from the solution on the spoon is replaced by gradual dissolution of the plate, so that the latter serves a double purpose. [Illustration: FIG. 84.--An electroplating outfit.] In silver plating, P is of silver, and the solution one of cyanide of potassium and silver salts. Where nickel or silver has to be deposited on iron, the article is often given a preliminary coating of copper, as iron does not make a good junction with either of the first two metals, but has an affinity for copper. [17] From the Latin _commuto_, "I exchange." [18] Only the "drum" type of armature is treated here. [19] This refers to continuous-current dynamos only. [20] The Robertson. Chapter X. RAILWAY BRAKES. The Vacuum Automatic brake--The Westinghouse air-brake. In the early days of the railway, the pulling up of a train necessitated the shutting off of steam while the stopping-place was still a great distance away. The train gradually lost its velocity, the process being hastened to a comparatively small degree by the screw-down brakes on the engine and guard's van. The goods train of to-day in many cases still observes this practice, long obsolete in passenger traffic. An advance was made when a chain, running along the entire length of the train, was arranged so as to pull on subsidiary chains branching off under each carriage and operating levers connected with brake blocks pressing on every pair of wheels. The guard strained the main chain by means of a wheel gear in his van. This system was, however, radically defective, since, if any one branch chain was shorter than the rest, it alone would get the strain. Furthermore, it is obvious that the snapping of the main chain would render the whole arrangement powerless. Accordingly, brakes operated by steam were tried. Under every carriage was placed a cylinder, in connection with a main steam-pipe running under the train. When the engineer wished to apply the brakes, he turned high-pressure steam into the train pipe, and the steam, passing into the brake cylinders, drove out in each a piston operating the brake gear. Unfortunately, the steam, during its passage along the pipe, was condensed, and in cold weather failed to reach the rear carriages. Water formed in the pipes, and this was liable to freeze. If the train parted accidentally, the apparatus of course broke down. Hydraulic brakes have been tried; but these are open to several objections; and railway engineers now make use of air-pressure as the most suitable form of power. Whatever air system be adopted, experience has shown that three features are essential:--(1.) The brakes must be kept "off" artificially. (2.) In case of the train parting accidentally, the brakes must be applied automatically, and quickly bring all the vehicles of the train to a standstill. (3.) It must be possible to apply the brakes with greater or less force, according to the needs of the case. At the present day one or other of two systems is used on practically all automatically-braked cars and coaches. These are known as--(1) The _vacuum automatic_, using the pressure of the atmosphere on a piston from the other side of which air has been mechanically exhausted; and (2) the _Westinghouse automatic_, using compressed air. The action of these brakes will now be explained as simply as possible. THE VACUUM AUTOMATIC BRAKE. Under each carriage is a vacuum chamber (Fig. 85) riding on trunnions, E E, so that it may swing a little when the brakes are applied. Inside the chamber is a cylinder, the piston of which is rendered air-tight by a rubber ring rolling between it and the cylinder walls. The piston rod works through an air-tight stuffing-box in the bottom of the casing, and when it rises operates the brake rods. It is obvious that if air is exhausted from both sides of the piston at once, the piston will sink by reason of its own weight and that of its attachments. If air is now admitted below the piston, the latter will be pushed upwards with a maximum pressure of 15 lbs. to the square inch. The ball-valve ensures that while air can be sucked from _both_ sides of the piston, it can be admitted to the lower side only. [Illustration: FIG. 85.--Vacuum brake "off."] [Illustration: FIG. 86.--Vacuum brake "on."] Let us imagine that a train has been standing in a siding, and that air has gradually filled the vacuum chamber by leakage. The engine is coupled on, and the driver at once turns on the steam ejector,[21] which sucks all the air out of the pipes and chambers throughout the train. The air is sucked directly from the under side of the piston through pipe D; and from the space A A and the cylinder (open at the top) through the channel C, lifting the ball, which, as soon as exhaustion is complete, or when the pressure on both sides of the piston is equal, falls back on its seat. On air being admitted to the train pipe, it rushes through D and into the space B (Fig. 86) below the piston, but is unable to pass the ball, so that a strong upward pressure is exerted on the piston, and the brakes go on. To throw them off, the space below the piston must be exhausted. This is to be noted: If there is a leak, as in the case of the train parting, _the brakes go on at once_, since the vacuum below the piston is automatically broken. [Illustration: FIG. 87.--Guard's valve for applying the Vacuum brake.] For ordinary stops the vacuum is only partially broken--that is, an air-pressure of but from 5 to 10 lbs. per square inch is admitted. For emergency stops full atmospheric pressure is used. In this case it is advisable that air should enter at _both_ ends of the train; so in the guard's van there is installed an ingenious automatic valve, which can at any time be opened by the guard pressing down a lever, but which opens of itself when the train-pipe vacuum is rapidly destroyed. Fig. 87 shows this device in section. Seated on the top of an upright pipe is a valve, _A_, connected by a bolt, B, to an elastic diaphragm, C, sealing the bottom of the chamber D. The bolt B has a very small hole bored through it from end to end. When the vacuum is broken slowly, the pressure falls in D as fast as in the pipe; but a sudden inrush of air causes the valve A to be pulled off its seat by the diaphragm C, as the vacuum in D has not been broken to any appreciable extent. Air then rushes into the train pipe through the valve. It is thus evident that the driver controls this valve as effectively as if it were on the engine. These "emergency" valves are sometimes fitted to every vehicle of a train. When a carriage is slipped, taps on each side of the coupling joint of the train pipe are turned off by the guard in the "slip;" and when he wishes to stop he merely depresses the lever E, gradually opening the valve. Under the van is an auxiliary vacuum chamber, from which the air is exhausted by the train pipe. If the guard, after the slip has parted from the train, finds that he has applied his brakes too hard, he can put this chamber into communication with the brake cylinder, and restore the vacuum sufficiently to pull the brakes off again. When a train has come to rest, the brakes must be sucked off by the ejector. Until this has been done the train cannot be moved, so that it is impossible for it to leave the station unprepared to make a sudden stop if necessary. THE WESTINGHOUSE AIR-BRAKE. This system is somewhat more complicated than the vacuum, though equally reliable and powerful. Owing to the complexity of certain parts, such as the steam air-pump and the triple-valve, it is impossible to explain the system in detail; we therefore have recourse to simple diagrammatic sketches, which will help to make clear the general principles employed. The air-brake, as first evolved by Mr. George Westinghouse, was a very simple affair--an air-pump and reservoir on the engine; a long pipe running along the train; and a cylinder under every vehicle to work the brakes. To stop the train, the high-pressure air collected in the reservoir was turned into the train pipe to force out the pistons in the coach cylinders, connected to it by short branch pipes. One defect of this "straight" system was that the brakes at the rear of a long train did not come into action until a considerable time after the driver turned on the air; and since, when danger is imminent, a very few seconds are of great importance, this slowness of operation was a serious fault. Also, it was found that the brakes on coaches near the engine went on long before those more distant, so that during a quick stop there was a danger of the forward coaches being bumped by those behind. It goes without saying that any coaches which might break loose were uncontrollable. Mr. Westinghouse therefore patented his _automatic_ brake, now so largely used all over the world. The brake ensures practically instantaneous and simultaneous action on all the vehicles of _a train of any length_. [Illustration: FIG. 88.--Diagrammatic sketch of the details of the Westinghouse air-brake. Brake "off."] The principle of the brake will be gathered from Figs. 88 and 89. P is a steam-driven air-pump on the engine, which compresses air into a reservoir, A, situated below the engine or tender, and maintains a pressure of from 80 to 90 lbs. per square inch. A three-way cock, C, puts the train pipe into communication with A or the open air at the wish of the driver. Under each coach is a triple-valve, T, an auxiliary reservoir, B, and a brake cylinder, D. The triple-valve is the most noteworthy feature of the whole system. The reader must remember that the valve shown in the section is _only diagrammatic_. Now for the operation of the brake. When the engine is coupled to the train, the compressed air in the main reservoir is turned into the train pipe, from which it passes through the triple-valve into the auxiliary reservoir, and fills it till it has a pressure of, say, 80 lbs. per square inch. Until the brakes are required, the pressure in the train pipe must be maintained. If accidentally, or purposely (by turning the cock C to the position shown in Fig. 89), the train-pipe pressure is reduced, the triple-valve at once shifts, putting B in connection with the brake cylinder D, and cutting off the connection between D and the air, and the brakes go on. To get them off, the pressure in the train pipe must be made equal to that in B, when the valve will assume its original position, allowing the air in D to escape. The force with which the brake is applied depends upon the reduction of pressure in the train pipe. A slight reduction would admit air very slowly from B to D, whereas a full escape from the train pipe would open the valve to its utmost. We have not represented the means whereby the valve is rendered sensitive to these changes, for the reason given above. [Illustration: FIG. 89.--Brake "on."] The latest form of triple-valve includes a device which, when air is rapidly discharged from the train pipe, as in an emergency application of the brake, opens a port through which compressed air is also admitted from the train pipe _directly_ into D. It will easily be understood that a double advantage is hereby gained--first, in utilizing a considerable portion of the air in the train pipe to increase the available brake force in cases of emergency; and, secondly, in producing a quick reduction of pressure in the whole length of the pipe, which accelerates the action of the brakes with extraordinary rapidity. It may be added that this secondary communication is kept open only until the pressure in D is equal to that in the train pipe. Then it is cut off, to prevent a return of air from B to the pipe. An interesting detail of the system is the automatic regulation of air-pressure in the main reservoir by the air-pump governor (Fig. 90). The governor is attached to the steam-pipe leading from the locomotive boiler to the air-pump. Steam from the boiler, entering at F, flows through valve 14 and passes by D into the pump, which is thus brought into operation, and continues to work until the pressure in the main reservoir, acting on the under side of the diaphragm 9, exceeds the tension to which the regulating spring 7 is set. Any excess of pressure forces the diaphragm upwards, lifting valve 11, and allowing compressed air from the main reservoir to flow into the chamber C. The air-pressure forces piston 12 downwards and closes steam-valve 14, thus cutting off the supply of steam to the pump. As soon as the pressure in the reservoir is reduced (by leakage or use) below the normal, spring 7 returns diaphragm 9 to the position shown in Fig. 90, and pin-valve 11 closes. The compressed air previously admitted to the chamber C escapes through the small port _a_ to the atmosphere. The steam, acting on the lower surface of valve 14, lifts it and its piston to the position shown, and again flows to the pump, which works until the required air-pressure is again obtained in the reservoir. [Illustration: FIG. 90.--Air-pump of Westinghouse brake.] [21] This resembles the upper part of the rudimentary water injector shown in Fig. 15. The reader need only imagine pipe B to be connected with the train pipe. A rush of steam through pipe A creates a partial vacuum in the cone E, causing air from the train pipe to rush into it and be expelled by the steam blast. Chapter XI. RAILWAY SIGNALLING. The block system--Position of signals--Interlocking the signals--Locking gear--Points--Points and signals in combination--Working the block system--Series of signalling operations--Single line signals--The train staff--Train staff and ticket--Electric train staff system--Interlocking--Signalling operations--Power signalling--Pneumatic signalling--Automatic signalling. Under certain conditions--namely, at sharp curves or in darkness--the most powerful brakes might not avail to prevent a train running into the rear of another, if trains were allowed to follow each other closely over the line. It is therefore necessary to introduce an effective system of keeping trains running in the same direction a sufficient distance apart, and this is done by giving visible and easily understood orders to the driver while a train is in motion. In the early days of the railway it was customary to allow a time interval between the passings of trains, a train not being permitted to leave a station until at least five minutes after the start of a preceding train. This method did not, of course, prevent collisions, as the first train sometimes broke down soon after leaving the station; and in the absence of effective brakes, its successor ran into it. The advent of the electric telegraph, which put stations in rapid communication with one another, proved of the utmost value to the safe working of railways. THE BLOCK SYSTEM. Time limits were abolished and distance limits substituted. A line was divided into _blocks_, or lengths, and two trains going in the same direction were never allowed on any one block at the same time. The signal-posts carrying the movable arms, or semaphores, by means of which the signalman communicates with the engine-driver, are well known to us. They are usually placed on the left-hand side of the line of rails to which they apply, with their arms pointing away from the rails. The side of the arms which faces the direction from which a train approaches has a white stripe painted on a red background, the other side has a black stripe on a white background. The distant and other signal arms vary slightly in shape (Fig. 91). A distant signal has a forked end and a V-shaped stripe; the home and starting signals are square-ended, with straight stripes. When the arm stands horizontally, the signal is "on," or at "danger"; when dropped, it is "off," and indicates "All right; proceed." At the end nearest the post it carries a spectacle frame glazed with panes of red and green glass. When the arm is at danger, the red pane is opposite a lamp attached to the signal post; when the arm drops, the green pane rises to that position--so that a driver is kept as fully informed at night as during the day, provided the lamp remains alight. [Illustration: FIG. 91.--Distant and home signals.] POSITION OF SIGNALS. On double lines each set of rails has its own separate signals, and drivers travelling on the "up" line take no notice of signals meant for the "down" line. Each signal-box usually controls three signals on each set of rails--the distant, the home, and the starting. Their respective positions will be gathered from Fig. 92, which shows a station on a double line. Between the distant and the home an interval is allowed of 800 yards on the level, 1,000 yards on a falling gradient, and 600 yards on a rising gradient. The home stands near the approach end of the station, and the starting at the departure end of the platform. The last is sometimes reinforced by an "advance starting" signal some distance farther on. It should be noted that the distant is only a _caution_ signal, whereas both home and starting are _stop_ signals. This means that when the driver sees the distant "on," he does not stop his train, but slackens speed, and prepares to stop at the home signal. He must, however, on no account pass either home or starting if they are at danger. In short, the distant merely warns the driver of what he may expect at the home. To prevent damage if a driver should overrun the home, it has been laid down that no train shall be allowed to pass the starting signal of one box unless the line is clear to a point at least a quarter of a mile beyond the home of the next box. That point is called the _standard clearing point_. Technically described, a _block_ is a length of line between the last stop signal worked from one signal-box and the first stop signal worked from the next signal-box in advance. [Illustration: FIG. 92.--Showing position of signals. Those at the top are "off."] INTERLOCKING SIGNALS. A signalman cannot lower or restore his signals to their normal positions in any order he likes. He is compelled to lower them as follows:--Starting and home; _then_ distant. And restore them--distant; _then_ starting and home. If a signalman were quite independent, he might, after the passage of a train, restore the home or starting, but forget all about the distant, so that the next train, which he wants to stop, would dash past the distant without warning and have to pull up suddenly when the home came in sight. But by a mechanical arrangement he is prevented from restoring the home or starting until the distant is at danger; and, _vice versâ_, he cannot lower the last until the other two are off. This mechanism is called _locking gear_. LOOKING GEAR. There are many different types of locking gear in use. It is impossible to describe them all, or even to give particulars of an elaborate locking-frame of any one type. But if we confine ourselves to the simplest combination of a stud-locking apparatus, such as is used in small boxes on the Great Western Railway, the reader will get an insight into the general principles of these safety devices, as the same principles underlie them all. [Illustration: FIG. 93.--A signal lever and its connections. To move the lever, C is pressed towards B raising the catch-rod from its nick in the rack, G G G, guides; R R, anti-friction rollers; S, sockets for catch-rod to work in.] The levers in the particular type of locking gear which we are considering have each a tailpiece or "tappet arm" attached to it, which moves backwards and forwards with the lever (Fig. 93). Running at right angles to this tappet, and close to it, either under or above, are the lock bars, or stud bars. Refer now to Fig. 94, which shows the ends of the three tappet arms, D, H, and S, crossed by a bar, B, from which project these studs. The levers are all forward and the signals all "on." If the signalman tried to pull the lever attached to D down the page, as it were, he would fail to move it on account of the stud _a_, which engages with a notch in D. Before this stud can be got free of the notch the tappets H and S must be pulled over, so as to bring their notches in line with studs _b_ and _c_ (Fig. 95). The signalman can now move D, since the notch easily pushes the stud _a_ to the left (Fig. 96). The signals must be restored to danger. As H and S are back-locked by D--that is, prevented by D from being put back into their normal positions--D must be moved first. The interlocking of the three signals described is merely repeated in the interlocking of a large number of signals. [Illustration: FIG. 94.] [Illustration: FIG. 95.] On entering a signal-box a visitor will notice that the levers have different colours:--_Green_, signifying distant signals; _red_, signifying home and starting signals; _blue_, signifying facing points; _black_, signifying trailing points; _white_, signifying spare levers. These different colours help the signalman to pick out the right levers easily. To the front of each lever is attached a small brass tablet bearing certain numbers; one in large figures on the top, then a line, and other numbers in small figures beneath. The large number is that of the lever itself; the others, called _leads_, refer to levers which must be pulled before that particular lever can be released. [Illustration: FIG. 96.] [Illustration: FIG. 97.--Model signal equipment in a signalling school. (By permission of the "G.W.R. Magazine").] POINTS. Mention was made, in connection with the lever, of _points_. Before going further we will glance at the action of these devices for enabling a train to run from one set of rails to another. Figs. 98 and 99 show the points at a simple junction. It will be noticed that the rails of the line to the left of the points are continued as the outer rails of the main and branch lines. The inner rails come to a sharp V-point, and to the left of this are the two short rails which, by means of shifting portions, decide the direction of a train's travel. In Fig. 98 the main line is open; in Fig. 99, the branch. The shifting parts are kept properly spaced by cross bars (or tie-rods), A A. [Illustration: FIG. 98.--Points open to main line.] [Illustration: FIG. 99.--Points open to branch line.] It might be thought that the wheels would bump badly when they reach the point B, where there is a gap. This is prevented, however, by the bent ends E E (Fig. 98), on which the tread of the wheel rests until it has reached some distance along the point of V. The safety rails S R keep the outer wheel up against its rail until the V has been passed. POINTS AND SIGNALS IN COMBINATION. Let us suppose that a train is approaching the junction shown in Figs. 98 and 99 from the left. It is not enough that the driver should know that the tracks are clear. He must also be assured that the track, main or branch, as the case may be, along which he has to go, is open; and on the other hand, if he were approaching from the right, he would want to be certain that no train on the other line was converging on his. Danger is avoided and assurance given by interlocking the points and signals. To the left of the junction the home and distant signals are doubled, there being two semaphore arms on each post. These are interlocked with the points in such a manner that the signals referring to either line can be pulled off only when the points are set to open the way to that line. Moreover, before any shifting of points can be made, the signals behind must be put to danger. The convergence of trains is prevented by interlocking, which renders it impossible to have both sets of distant and home signals at "All right" simultaneously. WORKING OF BLOCK SYSTEM. We may now pass to the working of the block system of signalling trains from station to station on one line of a double track. Each signal-box (except, of course, those at termini) has electric communication with the next box in both directions. The instruments used vary on different systems, but the principle is the same; so we will concentrate our attention on those most commonly employed on the Great Western Railway. They are:--(1.) Two tapper-bell instruments, connected with similar instruments in the adjacent boxes on both sides. Each of these rings one beat in the corresponding box every time its key is depressed. (2.) Two Spagnoletti disc instruments--one, having two keys, communicating with the box in the rear; and the other, in connection with the forward box, having no keys. Their respective functions are to give signals and receive them. In the centre of the face of each is a square opening, behind which moves a disc carrying two "flags"--"Train on line" in white letters on red ground, and "Line clear" in black letters on a white ground. The keyed instrument has a red and a white key. When the red key is depressed, "Train on line" appears at the opening; also in that of a keyless disc at the adjacent signal-box. A depression of the white key similarly gives "Line clear." A piece of wire with the ends turned over and passed through two eyes slides over the keys, and can be made to hold either down. In addition to these, telephonic and telegraphic instruments are provided to enable the signalmen to converse. SERIES OF SIGNALLING OPERATIONS. [Illustration: FIG. 100.--The signaling instruments in three adjacent cabins. The featherless arrows show the connection of the instruments.] We may now watch the doings of signalmen in four successive boxes, A, B, C, and D, during the passage of an express train. Signalman A calls signalman B's attention by one beat on the tapper-bell. B answers by repeating it to show that he is attending. A asks, "Is line clear for passenger express?"--four beats on the bell. B, seeing that the line is clear to his clearing point, sends back four beats, and pins down the white key of his instrument. "Line clear" appears on the opening, and also at that of A's keyless disc. A lowers starting signal. Train moves off. A gives two beats on the tapper = "Train entering section." B pins indicator at "Train on line," which also appears on A's instrument. A places signals at danger. B asks C, "Is line clear?" C repeats the bell code, and pins indicator at "Line clear," shown on B's keyless disc also. B lowers all signals. Train passes. B signals to C, "Train entering section." B signals to A, "Train out of section," and releases indicator, which returns to normal position with half of each flag showing at the window. B signals to C, "Train on line," and sets all his signals to danger. C pins indicator to "Train on line." C asks, "Is line clear?" But there is a train at station D, and signalman D therefore gives no reply, which is equivalent to a negative. The driver, on approaching C's distant, sees it at danger, and slows down, stopping at the home. C lowers home, and allows train to proceed to his starting signal. D, when the line is clear to his clearing point, signals "Line clear," and pins indicator at "Line clear." C lowers starting signals, and train proceeds. C signals to D, "Train entering section," and D pins indicator at "Train on line." C signals to B, "Train out of section," sets indicator at normal, and puts signals at danger. And so the process is repeated from station to station. Where, however, sections are short, the signalman is advised one section ahead of the approach of a train by an additional signal signifying, "Fast train approaching." The block indicator reminds the signalman of the whereabouts of the train. Unless his keyless indicator is at normal, he may not ask, "Is line clear?" And until he signals back "Line clear" to the box behind, a train is not allowed to enter his section. In this way a section of line with a full complement of signals is always interposed between any two trains. THE WORKING OF SINGLE LINES. We have dealt with the signalling arrangements pertaining to double lines of railway, showing that a system of signals is necessary to prevent a train running into the back of its predecessor. Where trains in both directions pass over a single line, not only has this element of danger to be dealt with, but also the possibility of a train being allowed to enter a section of line from each end _at the same time_. This is effected in several ways, the essence of each being that the engine-driver shall have in his possession _visible_ evidence of the permission accorded him by the signalman to enter a section of single line. A SINGLE TRAIN STAFF. The simplest form of working is to allocate to the length of line a "train staff"--a piece of wood about 14 inches long, bearing the names of the stations at either end. This is adopted where only one engine is used for working a section, such as a short branch line. In a case like this there is obviously no danger of two trains meeting, and the train staff is merely the authority to the driver to start a journey. No telegraphic communication is necessary with such a system, and signals are placed only at the ends of the line. TRAIN STAFF AND TICKET. On long lengths of single line where more than one train has to be considered, the line is divided into blocks in the way already described for double lines, and a staff is assigned to each, the staffs for the various blocks differing from each other in shape and colour. The usual signals are provided at each station, and block telegraph instruments are employed, the only difference being that one disc, of the key pattern, is used for trains in both directions. On such a line it is, of course, possible that two or more trains may require to follow each other without any travelling intermediately in the opposite direction. This would be impossible if the staff passed uniformly to and fro in the block section; but it is arranged by the introduction of a train staff _ticket_ used in conjunction with the staff. No train is permitted to leave a staff station unless the staff for the section of line to be traversed is at the station; and the driver has the strictest possible instructions that he must _see_ the staff. If a second train is required to follow, the staff is _shown_ to the driver, and a train staff ticket handed him as his authority to proceed. If, however, the next train over the section will enter from the opposite end, the staff is _handed_ to the driver. To render this system as safe as possible, train staff tickets are of the same colour and shape as the staff for the section to which they apply, and are kept in a special box at the stations, the key being attached to the staff and the lock so arranged that the key cannot be withdrawn unless the box has been locked. ELECTRIC TRAIN STAFF AND TABLET SYSTEMS. These systems of working are developments of the last mentioned, by which are secured greater safety and ease in working the line. On some sections of single line circumstances often necessitate the running of several trains in one direction without a return train. For such cases the train staff ticket was introduced; but even on the best regulated lines it is not always possible to secure that the staff shall be at the station where it is required at the right time, and cases have arisen where, no train being available at the station where the staff was, it had to be taken to the other station by a man on foot, causing much delay to traffic. The electric train staff and tablet systems overcome this difficulty. Both work on much the same principle, and we will therefore describe the former. [Illustration: FIG. 101.--An electric train staff holder: S S, staffs in the slot of the instrument. Leaning against the side of the cabin is a staff showing the key K at the end for unlocking a siding points between two stations. The engine driver cannot remove the staff until the points have been locked again.] At each end of a block section a train staff instrument (Fig. 101) is provided. In the base of these instruments are a number of train staffs, any one of which would be accepted by an engine-driver as permission to travel over the single line. The instruments are electrically connected, the mechanism securing that a staff can be withdrawn only by the co-operation of the signalman at each end of the section; that, when _all_ the staffs are in the instruments, a staff may be withdrawn at _either_ end; that, when a staff has been withdrawn, another cannot be obtained until the one out has been restored to one or other of the instruments. The safety of such a system is obvious, as also the assistance to the working by having a staff available for a train no matter from which end it is to enter the section. The mechanism of the instruments is quite simple. A double-poled electro-magnet is energized by the depression of a key by the signalman at the further end of the block into which the train is to run, and by the turning of a handle by the signalman who requires to withdraw a staff. The magnet, being energized, is able to lift a mechanical lock, and permits the withdrawal of a staff. In its passage through the instrument the staff revolves a number of iron discs, which in turn raise or lower a switch controlling the electrical connections. This causes the electric currents actuating the electro-magnet to oppose each other, the magnetism to cease, and the lock to fall back, preventing another staff being withdrawn. It will naturally be asked, "How is the electrical system restored?" We have said that there were a number of staffs in each instrument--in other words, a given number of staffs, usually twenty, is assigned to the section. Assume that there are ten in each instrument, and that the switch in each is in its lower position. Now withdraw a staff, and one instrument has an odd, the other an even, number of staffs, and similarly one switch is raised while the other remains lowered, therefore the electrical circuit is "out of phase"--that is, the currents in the magnets of each staff instrument are opposed to one another, and cannot release the lock. The staff travels through the section and is placed in the instrument at the other end, bringing the number of staffs to eleven--an odd number, and, what is more important, _raising_ the switch. Both switches are now raised, consequently the electric currents will support each other, so that a staff may be withdrawn. Briefly, then, when there is an odd number of staffs in one instrument and an even number in the other, as when a staff is in use, the signalmen are unable to obtain a staff, and consequently cannot give authority for a train to enter the section; but when there is either an odd or an even number of staffs in each instrument a staff may be withdrawn at either end on the co-operation of the signalmen. We may add that, where two instruments are in the same signal-box, one for working to the box in advance, the other to the rear, it is arranged that the staffs pertaining to one section shall not fit the instrument for the other, and must be of different colours. This prevents the driver accidentally accepting a staff belonging to one section as authority to travel over the other. INTERLOCKING. The remarks made on the interlocking of points and signals on double lines apply also to the working of single lines, with the addition that not only are the distant, home, and starting signals interlocked with each other, but with the signals and points governing the approach of a train from the opposite direction--in other words, the signals for the approach of a train to a station from one direction cannot be lowered unless those for the approach to the station of a train from the opposite direction are at danger, and the points correctly set. SIGNALLING OPERATIONS. In the working of single lines, as of double, the signalman at the station from which a train is to proceed has to obtain the consent of the signalman ahead, the series of questions to be signalled being very similar to those detailed for double lines. There is, however, one notable exception. On long lengths of single line it is necessary to make arrangements for trains to pass each other. This is done by providing loop lines at intervals, a second pair of rails being laid for the accommodation of one train while another in the opposite direction passes it. To secure that more than one train shall not be on a section of single line between two crossing-places it is laid down that, when a signalman at a non-crossing station is asked to allow a train to approach his station, he must not give permission until he has notified the signalman ahead of him, thus securing that he is not asking permission for trains to approach from both directions at the same time. Both for single and double line working a number of rules designed to deal with cases of emergency are laid down, the guiding principle being safety; but we have now dealt with all the conditions of everyday working, and must pass to the consideration of [Illustration: FIG. 102.--An electric lever-frame in a signalling cabin at Didcot.] "POWER" SIGNALLING. In a power system of signalling the signalman is provided with some auxiliary means--electricity, compressed air, etc.--of moving the signals or points under his control. It is still necessary to have a locking-frame in the signal-box, with levers interlocked with each other, and connections between the box and the various points and signals. But the frame is much smaller than an ordinary manual frame, and but little force is needed to move the little levers which make or break an electric circuit, or open an air-valve, according to the power-agent used. ELECTRIC SIGNALLING. Fig. 102 represents the locking-frame of a cabin at Didcot, England, where an all-electric system has been installed. Wires lead from the cabin to motors situated at the points and signals, which they operate through worm gearing. When a lever is moved it closes a circuit and sets the current flowing through a motor, the direction of the flow (and consequently of the motor's revolution) depending on whether the lever has been moved forward or backward. Indicators arranged under the levers tell the signalman when the desired movements at the points and signals have been completed. If any motion is not carried through, owing to failure of the current or obstruction of the working parts, an electric lock prevents him continuing operations. Thus, suppose he has to open the main line to an express, he is obliged by the mechanical locking-frame to set all the points correctly before the signals can be lowered. He might move all the necessary levers in due order, yet one set of points might remain open, and, were the signals lowered, an accident would result. But this cannot happen, as the electric locks worked by the points in question block the signal levers, and until the failure has been set right, the signals must remain at "danger." The point motors are connected direct to the points; but between a signal motor and its arm there is an "electric slot," consisting of a powerful electro-magnet which forms a link in the rod work. To lower a signal it is necessary that the motor shall revolve and a control current pass round the magnet to give it the requisite attractive force. If no control current flows, as would happen were any pair of points not in their proper position, the motor can have no effect on the signal arm to lower it, owing to the magnet letting go its grip. Furthermore, if the signal had been already lowered when the control current failed, it would rise to "danger" automatically, as all signals are weighted to assume the danger position by gravity. The signal control currents can be broken by the signalman moving a switch, so that in case of emergency all signals may be thrown simultaneously to danger. PNEUMATIC SIGNALLING. In England and the United States compressed air is also used to do the hard labour of the signalman for him. Instead of closing a circuit, the signalman, by moving a lever half-way over, admits air to a pipe running along the track to an air reservoir placed beside the points or signal to which the lever relates. The air opens a valve and puts the reservoir in connection with a piston operating the points or signal-arm, as the case may be. This movement having been performed, another valve in the reservoir is opened, and air passes back through a second pipe to the signal-box, where it opens a third valve controlling a piston which completes the movement of the lever, so showing the signalman that the operation is complete. With compressed air, as with electricity, a mechanical locking-frame is of course used. AUTOMATIC SIGNALLING. To reduce expense, and increase the running speed on lines where the sections are short, the train is sometimes made to act as its own signalman. The rails of each section are all bonded together so as to be in metallic contact, and each section is insulated from the two neighbouring sections. At the further end of a section is installed an electric battery, connected to the rails, which lead the current back to a magnet operating a signal stationed some distance back on the preceding section. As long as current flows the signal is held at "All right." When a train enters the section the wheels and axles short-circuit the current, so that it does not reach the signal magnet, and the signal rises to "danger," and stays there until the last pair of wheels has passed out of the section. Should the current fail or a vehicle break loose and remain on the section, the same thing would happen. The human element can thus be practically eliminated from signalling. To make things absolutely safe, a train should have positive control over a train following, to prevent the driver overrunning the signals. On electric railways this has been effected by means of contacts working in combination with the signals, which either cut the current off from the section preceding that on which a train may be, or raise a trigger to strike an arm on the train following and apply its brakes. Chapter XII. OPTICS. Lenses--The image cast by a convex lens--Focus--Relative position of object and lens--Correction of lenses for colour--Spherical aberration--Distortion of image--The human eye--The use of spectacles--The blind spot. Light is a third form of that energy of which we have already treated two manifestations--heat and electricity. The distinguishing characteristic of ether light-waves is their extreme rapidity of vibration, which has been calculated to range from 700 billion movements per second for violet rays to 400 billion for red rays. If a beam of white light be passed through a prism it is resolved into the seven visible colours of the spectrum--violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red--in this order. The human eye is most sensitive to the yellow-red rays, a photographic plate to the green-violet rays. All bodies fall into one of two classes--(1) _Luminous_--that is, those which are a _source_ of light, such as the sun, a candle flame, or a red-hot coal; and (2) _non-luminous_, which become visible only by virtue of light which they receive from other bodies and reflect to our eyes. THE PROPAGATION OF LIGHT. Light naturally travels in a straight line. It is deflected only when it passes from one transparent medium into another--for example, from air to water--and the mediums are of different densities. We may regard the surface of a visible object as made up of countless points, from each of which a diverging pencil of rays is sent off through the ether. LENSES. If a beam of light encounters a transparent glass body with non-parallel sides, the rays are deflected. The direction they take depends on the shape of the body, but it may be laid down as a rule that they are bent toward the thicker part of the glass. The common burning-glass is well known to us. We hold it up facing the sun to concentrate all the heat rays that fall upon it into one intensely brilliant spot, which speedily ignites any inflammable substance on which it may fall (Fig. 103). We may imagine that one ray passes from the centre of the sun through the centre of the glass. This is undeflected; but all the others are bent towards it, as they pass through the thinner parts of the lens. [Illustration: FIG. 103.--Showing how a burning-glass concentrates the heat rays which fall upon it.] It should be noted here that _sunlight_, as we call it, is accompanied by heat. A burning-glass is used to concentrate the _heat_ rays, not the _light_ rays, which, though they are collected too, have no igniting effect. In photography we use a lens to concentrate light rays only. Such heat rays as may pass through the lens with them are not wanted, and as they have no practical effect are not taken any notice of. To be of real value, a lens must be quite symmetrical--that is, the curve from the centre to the circumference must be the same in all directions. There are six forms of simple lenses, as given in Fig. 104. Nos. 1 and 2 have one flat and one spherical surface. Nos. 3, 4, 5, 6 have two spherical surfaces. When a lens is thicker at the middle than at the sides it is called a _convex_ lens; when thinner, a _concave_ lens. The names of the various shapes are as follows:--No. 1, plano-convex; No. 2, plano-concave; No. 3, double convex; No. 4, double concave; No. 5, meniscus; No. 6, concavo-convex. The thick-centre lenses, as we may term them (Nos. 1, 3, 5), _concentrate_ a pencil of rays passing through them; while the thin-centre lenses (Nos. 2, 4, 6) _scatter_ the rays (see Fig. 105). [Illustration: FIG. 104.--Six forms of lenses.] THE CAMERA. [Illustration: FIG. 105.] [Illustration: FIG. 106.] We said above that light is propagated in straight lines. To prove this is easy. Get a piece of cardboard and prick a hole in it. Set this up some distance away from a candle flame, and hold behind it a piece of tissue paper. You will at once perceive a faint, upside-down image of the flame on the tissue. Why is this? Turn for a moment to Fig. 106, which shows a "pinhole" camera in section. At the rear is a ground-glass screen, B, to catch the image. Suppose that A is the lowest point of the flame. A pencil of rays diverging from it strikes the front of the camera, which stops them all except the one which passes through the hole and makes a tiny luminous spot on B, _above_ the centre of the screen, though A is below the axis of the camera. Similarly the tip of the flame (above the axis) would be represented by a dot on the screen below its centre. And so on for all the millions of points of the flame. If we were to enlarge the hole we should get a brighter image, but it would have less sharp outlines, because a number of rays from every point of the candle would reach the screen and be jumbled up with the rays of neighbouring pencils. Now, though a good, sharp photograph may be taken through a pinhole, the time required is so long that photography of this sort has little practical value. What we want is a large hole for the light to enter the camera by, and yet to secure a distinct image. If we place a lens in the hole we can fulfil our wish. Fig. 107 shows a lens in position, gathering up a number of rays from a point, A, and focussing them on a point, B. If the lens has 1,000 times the area of the pinhole, it will pass 1,000 times as many rays, and the image of A will be impressed on a sensitized photographic plate 1,000 times more quickly. [Illustration: FIG. 107.] THE IMAGE CAST BY A CONVEX LENS. Fig. 108 shows diagrammatically how a convex lens forms an image. From A and B, the extremities of the object, a simple ray is considered to pass through the centre of the lens. This is not deflected at all. Two other rays from the same points strike the lens above and below the centre respectively. These are bent inwards and meet the central rays, or come to a focus with them at A^1 and B^1. In reality a countless number of rays would be transmitted from every point of the object and collected to form the image. [Illustration: FIG. 108.--Showing how an image is cast by a convex lens.] FOCUS. We must now take special notice of that word heard so often in photographic talk--"focus." What is meant by the focus or focal length of a lens? Well, it merely signifies the distance between the optical centre of the lens and the plane in which the image is formed. [Illustration: FIG. 109.] We must here digress a moment to draw attention to the three simple diagrams of Fig. 109. The object, O, in each case is assumed to be to the right of the lens. In the topmost diagram the object is so far away from the lens that all rays coming from a single point in it are practically parallel. These converge to a focus at F. If the distance between F and the centre of the lens is six inches, we say that the lens has a six-inch focal length. The focal length of a lens is judged by the distance between lens and image when the object is far away. To avoid confusion, this focal length is known as the _principal_ focus, and is denoted by the symbol f. In the middle diagram the object is quite near the lens, which has to deal with rays striking its nearer surface at an acuter angle than before (reckoning from the centre). As the lens can only deflect their path to a fixed degree, they will not, after passing the lens, come together until they have reached a point, F^1, further from the lens than F. The nearer we approach O to the lens, the further away on the other side is the focal point, until a distance equal to that of F from the lens is reached, when the rays emerge from the glass in a parallel pencil. The rays now come to a focus no longer, and there can be no image. If O be brought nearer than the focal distance, the rays would _diverge_ after passing through the lens. RELATIVE POSITIONS OF OBJECT AND IMAGE. [Illustration: FIG. 110.--Showing how the position of the image alters relatively to the position of the object.] From what has been said above we deduce two main conclusions--(1.) The nearer an object is brought to the lens, the further away from the lens will the image be. (2.) If the object approaches within the principal focal distance of the lens, no image will be cast by the lens. To make this plainer we append a diagram (Fig. 110), which shows five positions of an object and the relative positions of the image (in dotted lines). First, we note that the line A B, or A B^1, denotes the principal focal length of the lens, and A C, or A C^1, denotes twice the focal length. We will take the positions in order:-- _Position I._ Object further away than 2_f_. Inverted image _smaller_ than object, at distance somewhat exceeding _f_. _Position II._ Object at distance = 2_f_. Inverted image at distance = 2_f_, and of size equal to that of object. _Position III_ Object nearer than 2_f_. Inverted image further away than 2_f_; _larger_ than the object. _Position IV._ Object at distance = _f_. As rays are parallel after passing the lens _no_ image is cast. _Position V._ Object at distance less than _f_. No real image--that is, one that can be caught on a focussing screen--is now given by the lens, but a magnified, erect, _virtual_ image exists on the same side of the lens as the object. We shall refer to _virtual_ images at greater length presently. It is hoped that any reader who practises photography will now understand why it is necessary to rack his camera out beyond the ordinary focal distance when taking objects at close quarters. From Fig. 110 he may gather one practically useful hint--namely, that to copy a diagram, etc., full size, both it and the plate must be exactly 2_f_ from the optical centre of the lens. And it follows from this that the further he can rack his camera out beyond 2_f_ the greater will be the possible enlargement of the original. CORRECTION OF LENSES FOR COLOUR. We have referred to the separation of the spectrum colours of white light by a prism. Now, a lens is one form of prism, and therefore sorts out the colours. In Fig. 111 we assume that two parallel red rays and two parallel violet rays from a distant object pass through a lens. A lens has most bending effect on violet rays and least on red, and the other colours of the spectrum are intermediately influenced. For the sake of simplicity we have taken the two extremes only. You observe that the point R, in which the red rays meet, is much further from the lens than is V, the meeting-point of the violet rays. A photographer very seldom has to take a subject in which there are not objects of several different colours, and it is obvious that if he used a simple lens like that in Fig. 111 and got his red objects in good focus, the blue and green portions of his picture would necessarily be more or less out of focus. [Illustration: FIG. 111.] [Illustration: FIG. 112.] This defect can fortunately be corrected by the method shown in Fig. 112. A _compound_ lens is needed, made up of a _crown_ glass convex element, B, and a concave element, A, of _flint_ glass. For the sake of illustration the two parts are shown separated; in practice they would be cemented together, forming one optical body, thicker in the centre than at the edges--a meniscus lens in fact, since A is not so concave as B is convex. Now, it was discovered by a Mr. Hall many years ago that if white light passed through two similar prisms, one of flint glass the other of crown glass, the former had the greater effect in separating the spectrum colours--that is, violet rays were bent aside more suddenly compared with the red rays than happened with the crown-glass prism. Look at Fig. 112. The red rays passing through the flint glass are but little deflected, while the violet rays turn suddenly outwards. This is just what is wanted, for it counteracts the unequal inward refraction by B, and both sets of rays come to a focus in the same plane. Such a lens is called _achromatic_, or colourless. If you hold a common reading-glass some distance away from large print you will see that the letters are edged with coloured bands, proving that the lens is not achromatic. A properly corrected photographic lens would not show these pretty edgings. Colour correction is necessary also for lenses used in telescopes and microscopes. SPHERICAL ABERRATION. A lens which has been corrected for colour is still imperfect. If rays pass through all parts of it, those which strike it near the edge will be refracted more than those near the centre, and a blurred focus results. This is termed _spherical aberration_. You will be able to understand the reason from Figs. 113 and 114. Two rays, A, are parallel to the axis and enter the lens near the centre (Fig. 113). These meet in one plane. Two other rays, B, strike the lens very obliquely near the edge, and on that account are both turned sharply upwards, coming to a focus in a plane nearer the lens than A. If this happened in a camera the results would be very bad. Either A or B would be out of focus. The trouble is minimized by placing in front of the lens a plate with a central circular opening in it (denoted by the thick, dark line in Fig. 114). The rays B of Fig. 113 are stopped by this plate, which is therefore called a _stop_. But other rays from the same point pass through the hole. These, however, strike the lens much more squarely above the centre, and are not unduly refracted, so that they are brought to a focus in the same plane as rays A. [Illustration: FIG. 113.] [Illustration: FIG. 114.] DISTORTION OF IMAGE. [Illustration: FIG. 115.--Section of a rectilinear lens.] The lens we have been considering is a single meniscus, such as is used in landscape photography, mounted with the convex side turned towards the inside of the camera, and having the stop in front of it. If you possess a lens of this sort, try the following experiment with it. Draw a large square on a sheet of white paper and focus it on the screen. The sides instead of being straight bow outwards: this is called _barrel_ distortion. Now turn the lens mount round so that the lens is outwards and the stop inwards. The sides of the square will appear to bow towards the centre: this is _pin-cushion_ distortion. For a long time opticians were unable to find a remedy. Then Mr. George S. Cundell suggested that _two_ meniscus lenses should be used in combination, one on either side of the stop, as in Fig 115. Each produces distortion, but it is counteracted by the opposite distortion of the other, and a square is represented as a square. Lenses of this kind are called _rectilinear_, or straight-line producing. We have now reviewed the three chief defects of a lens--chromatic aberration, spherical aberration, and distortion--and have seen how they may be remedied. So we will now pass on to the most perfect of cameras, THE HUMAN EYE. The eye (Fig. 116) is nearly spherical in form, and is surrounded outside, except in front, by a hard, horny coat called the _sclerotica_ (S). In front is the _cornea_ (A), which bulges outwards, and acts as a transparent window to admit light to the lens of the eye (C). Inside the sclerotica, and next to it, comes the _choroid_ coat; and inside that again is the _retina_, or curved focussing screen of the eye, which may best be described as a network of fibres ramifying from the optic nerve, which carries sight sensations to the brain. The hollow of the ball is full of a jelly-like substance called the _vitreous humour_; and the cavity between the lens and the cornea is full of water. We have already seen that, in focussing, the distance between lens and image depends on the distance between object and lens. Now, the retina cannot be pushed nearer to or pulled further away from its lens, like the focussing screen of a camera. How, then, is the eye able to focus sharply objects at distances varying from a foot to many miles? [Illustration: FIG. 116.--Section of the human eye.] As a preliminary to the answer we must observe that the more convex a lens is, the shorter is its focus. We will suppose that we have a box camera with a lens of six-inch focus fixed rigidly in the position necessary for obtaining a sharp image of distant objects. It so happens that we want to take with it a portrait of a person only a few feet from the lens. If it were a bellows camera, we should rack out the back or front. But we cannot do this here. So we place in front of our lens a second convex lens which shortens its principal focus; so that _in effect_ the box has been racked out sufficiently. Nature, however, employs a much more perfect method than this. The eye lens is plastic, like a piece of india-rubber. Its edges are attached to ligaments (L L), which pull outwards and tend to flatten the curve of its surfaces. The normal focus is for distant objects. When we read a book the eye adapts itself to the work. The ligaments relax and the lens decreases in diameter while thickening at the centre, until its curvature is such as to focus all rays from the book sharply on the retina. If we suddenly look through the window at something outside, the ligaments pull on the lens envelope and flatten the curves. This wonderful lens is achromatic, and free from spherical aberration and distortion of image. Nor must we forget that it is aided by an automatic "stop," the _iris_, the central hole of which is named the _pupil_. We say that a person has black, blue, or gray eyes according to the colour of the iris. Like the lens, the iris adapts itself to all conditions, contracting when the light is strong, and opening when the light is weak, so that as uniform an amount of light as conditions allow may be admitted to the eye. Most modern camera lenses are fitted with adjustable stops which can be made larger or smaller by twisting a ring on the mount, and are named "iris" stops. The image of anything seen is thrown on the retina upside down, and the brain reverses the position again, so that we get a correct impression of things. THE USE OF SPECTACLES. [Illustration: FIG. 117_a_.] [Illustration: FIG. 117_b_.] [Illustration: FIG. 118_a_.] [Illustration: FIG. 118_b_.] The reader will now be able to understand without much trouble the function of a pair of spectacles. A great many people of all ages suffer from short-sight. For one reason or another the distance between lens and retina becomes too great for a person to distinguish distant objects clearly. The lens, as shown in Fig 117_a_, is too convex--has its minimum focus too short--and the rays meet and cross before they reach the retina, causing general confusion of outline. This defect is simply remedied by placing in front of the eye (Fig. 117_b_) a _concave_ lens, to disperse the rays somewhat before they enter the eye, so that they come to a focus on the retina. If a person's sight is thus corrected for distant objects, he can still see near objects quite plainly, as the lens will accommodate its convexity for them. The scientific term for short-sight is _myopia_. Long-sight, or _hypermetropia_, signifies that the eyeball is too short or the lens too flat. Fig. 118_a_ represents the normal condition of a long-sighted eye. When looking at a distant object the eye thickens slightly and brings the focus forward into the retina. But its thickening power in such an eye is very limited, and consequently the rays from a near object focus behind the retina. It is therefore necessary for a long-sighted person to use _convex_ spectacles for reading the newspaper. As seen in Fig. 118_b_, the spectacle lens concentrates the rays before they enter the eye, and so does part of the eye's work for it. Returning for a moment to the diagram of the eye (Fig. 116), we notice a black patch on the retina near the optic nerve. This is the "yellow spot." Vision is most distinct when the image of the object looked at is formed on this part of the retina. The "blind spot" is that point at which the optic nerve enters the retina, being so called from the fact that it is quite insensitive to light. The finding of the blind spot is an interesting little experiment. On a card make a large and a small spot three inches apart, the one an eighth, the other half an inch in diameter. Bring the card near the face so that an eye is exactly opposite to each spot, and close the eye opposite to the smaller. Now direct the other eye to this spot and you will find, if the card be moved backwards and forwards, that at a certain distance the large spot, though many times larger than its fellow, has completely vanished, because the rays from it enter the open eye obliquely and fall on the "blind spot." Chapter XIII. THE MICROSCOPE, THE TELESCOPE, AND THE MAGIC-LANTERN. The simple microscope--Use of the simple microscope in the telescope--The terrestrial telescope--The Galilean telescope--The prismatic telescope--The reflecting telescope--The parabolic mirror--The compound microscope--The magic-lantern--The bioscope--The plane mirror. In Fig. 119 is represented an eye looking at a vase, three inches high, situated at A, a foot away. If we were to place another vase, B, six inches high, at a distance of two feet; or C, nine inches high, at three feet; or D, a foot high, at four feet, the image on the retina would in every case be of the same size as that cast by A. We can therefore lay down the rule that _the apparent size of an object depends on the angle that it subtends at the eye_. [Illustration: FIG. 119.] To see a thing more plainly, we go nearer to it; and if it be very small, we hold it close to the eye. There is, however, a limit to the nearness to which it can be brought with advantage. The normal eye is unable to adapt its focus to an object less than about ten inches away, termed the "least distance of distinct vision." THE SIMPLE MICROSCOPE. [Illustration: FIG. 120.] A magnifying glass comes in useful when we want to examine an object very closely. The glass is a lens of short focus, held at a distance somewhat less than its principal focal length, F (see Fig. 120), from the object. The rays from the head and tip of the pin which enter the eye are denoted by continuous lines. As they are deflected by the glass the eye gets the _impression_ that a much longer pin is situated a considerable distance behind the real object in the plane in which the refracted rays would meet if produced backwards (shown by the dotted lines). The effect of the glass, practically, is to remove it (the object) to beyond the least distance of distinct vision, and at the same time to retain undiminished the angle it subtends at the eye, or, what amounts to the same thing, the actual size of the image formed on the retina.[22] It follows, therefore, that if a lens be of such short focus that it allows us to see an object clearly at a distance of two inches--that is, one-fifth of the least distance of distinct vision--we shall get an image on the retina five times larger in diameter than would be possible without the lens. The two simple diagrams (Figs. 121 and 122) show why the image to be magnified should be nearer to the lens than the principal focus, F. We have already seen (Fig. 109) that rays coming from a point in the principal focal plane emerge as a parallel pencil. These the eye can bring to a focus, because it normally has a curvature for focussing parallel rays. But, owing to the power of "accommodation," it can also focus _diverging_ rays (Fig. 121), the eye lens thickening the necessary amount, and we therefore put our magnifying glass a bit nearer than F to get full advantage of proximity. If we had the object _outside_ the principal focus, as in Fig. 122, the rays from it would converge, and these could not be gathered to a sharp point by the eye lens, as it cannot _flatten_ more than is required for focussing parallel rays. [Illustration: FIG. 121.] [Illustration: FIG. 122.] USE OF THE SIMPLE MICROSCOPE IN THE TELESCOPE. [Illustration: FIG. 123.] Let us now turn to Fig. 123. At A is a distant object, say, a hundred yards away. B is a double convex lens, which has a focal length of twenty inches. We may suppose that it is a lens in a camera. An inverted image of the object is cast by the lens at C. If the eye were placed at C, it would distinguish nothing. But if withdrawn to D, the least distance of distinct vision,[23] behind C, the image is seen clearly. That the image really is at C is proved by letting down the focussing screen, which at once catches it. Now, as the focus of the lens is twice _d_, the image will be twice as large as the object would appear if viewed directly without the lens. We may put this into a very simple formula:-- Magnification = focal length of lens -------------------- _d_ [Illustration: FIG. 124.] In Fig. 124 we have interposed between the eye and the object a small magnifying glass of 2-1/2-inch focus, so that the eye can now clearly see the image when one-quarter _d_ away from it. B already magnifies the image twice; the eye-piece again magnifies it four times; so that the total magnification is 2 × 4 = 8 times. This result is arrived at quickly by dividing the focus of B (which corresponds to the object-glass of a telescope) by the focus of the eye-piece, thus:-- 20 ____ = 8 2-1/2 The ordinary astronomical telescope has a very long focus object-glass at one end of the tube, and a very short focus eye-piece at the other. To see an object clearly one merely has to push in or pull out the eye-piece until its focus exactly corresponds with that of the object-glass. THE TERRESTRIAL TELESCOPE. An astronomical telescope inverts images. This inversion is inconvenient for other purposes. So the terrestrial telescope (such as is commonly used by sailors) has an eye-piece compounded of four convex lenses which erect as well as magnify the image. Fig. 125 shows the simplest form of compound erecting eye-piece. [Illustration: FIG. 125.] THE GALILEAN TELESCOPE. [Illustration: FIG. 126.] A third form of telescope is that invented by the great Italian astronomer, Galileo,[24] in 1609. Its principle is shown in Fig. 126. The rays transmitted by the object-glass are caught, _before_ coming to a focus, on a concave lens which separates them so that they appear to meet in the paths of convergence denoted by the dotted lines. The image is erect. Opera-glasses are constructed on the Galilean principle. THE PRISMATIC TELESCOPE. In order to be able to use a long-focus object-glass without a long focussing-tube, a system of glass reflecting prisms is sometimes employed, as in Fig. 127. A ray passing through the object-glass is reflected from one posterior surface of prism A on to the other posterior surface, and by it out through the front on to a second prism arranged at right angles to it, which passes the ray on to the compound eye-piece. The distance between object-glass and eye-piece is thus practically trebled. The best-known prismatic telescopes are the Zeiss field-glasses. [Illustration: FIG. 127.] THE REFLECTING TELESCOPE. We must not omit reference to the _reflecting_ telescope, so largely used by astronomers. The front end of the telescope is open, there being no object-glass. Rays from the object fall on a parabolic mirror situated in the rear end of the tube. This reflects them forwards to a focus. In the Newtonian reflector a plane mirror or prism is situated in the axis of the tube, at the focus, to reflect the rays through an eye-piece projecting through the side of the tube. Herschel's form of reflector has the mirror set at an angle to the axis, so that the rays are reflected direct into an eye-piece pointing through the side of the tube towards the mirror. THE PARABOLIC MIRROR. This mirror (Fig. 128) is of such a shape that all rays parallel to the axis are reflected to a common point. In the marine searchlight a powerful arc lamp is arranged with the arc at the focus of a parabolic reflector, which sends all reflected light forward in a pencil of parallel rays. The most powerful searchlight in existence gives a light equal to that of 350 million candles. [Illustration: FIG. 128.--A parabolic reflector.] THE COMPOUND MICROSCOPE. We have already observed (Fig. 110) that the nearer an object approaches a lens the further off behind it is the real image formed, until the object has reached the focal distance, when no image at all is cast, as it is an infinite distance behind the lens. We will assume that a certain lens has a focus of six inches. We place a lighted candle four feet in front of it, and find that a _sharp_ diminished image is cast on a ground-glass screen held seven inches behind it. If we now exchange the positions of the candle and the screen, we shall get an enlarged image of the candle. This is a simple demonstration of the law of _conjugate foci_--namely, that the distance between the lens and an object on one side and that between the lens and the corresponding image on the other bear a definite relation to each other; and an object placed at either focus will cast an image at the other. Whether the image is larger or smaller than the object depends on which focus it occupies. In the case of the object-glass of a telescope the image was at what we may call the _short_ focus. [Illustration: FIG. 129.--Diagram to explain the compound microscope.] Now, a compound microscope is practically a telescope with the object at the _long_ focus, very close to a short-focus lens. A greatly enlarged image is thrown (see Fig. 129) at the conjugate focus, and this is caught and still further magnified by the eye-piece. We may add that the object-glass, or _objective_, of a microscope is usually compounded of several lenses, as is also the eye-piece. THE MAGIC-LANTERN. The most essential features of a magic-lantern are:--(1) The _source of light_; (2) the _condenser_ for concentrating the light rays on to the slide; (3) the _lens_ for projecting a magnified image on to a screen. Fig. 130 shows these diagrammatically. The _illuminant_ is most commonly an oil-lamp, or an acetylene gas jet, or a cylinder of lime heated to intense luminosity by an oxy-hydrogen flame. The natural combustion of hydrogen is attended by a great heat, and when the supply of oxygen is artificially increased the temperature of the flame rises enormously. The nozzle of an oxy-hydrogen jet has an interior pipe connected with the cylinder holding one gas, and an exterior, and somewhat larger, pipe leading from that containing the other, the two being arranged concentrically at the nozzle. By means of valves the proportions of the gases can be regulated to give the best results. [Illustration: FIG. 130.--Sketch of the elements of a magic-lantern.] The _condenser_ is set somewhat further from the illuminant than the principal focal length of the lenses, so that the rays falling on them are bent inwards, or to the slide. The _objective_, or object lens, stands in front of the slide. Its position is adjustable by means of a rack and a draw-tube. The nearer it is brought to the slide the further away is the conjugate focus (see p. 239), and consequently the image. The exhibitor first sets up his screen and lantern, and then finds the conjugate foci of slide and image by racking the lens in or out. If a very short focus objective be used, subjects of microscopic proportions can be projected on the screen enormously magnified. During the siege of Paris in 1870-71 the Parisians established a balloon and pigeon post to carry letters which had been copied in a minute size by photography. These copies could be enclosed in a quill and attached to a pigeon's wing. On receipt, the copies were placed in a special lantern and thrown as large writing on the screen. Micro-photography has since then made great strides, and is now widely used for scientific purposes, one of the most important being the study of the crystalline formations of metals under different conditions. THE BIOSCOPE. "Living pictures" are the most recent improvement in magic-lantern entertainments. The negatives from which the lantern films are printed are made by passing a ribbon of sensitized celluloid through a special form of camera, which feeds the ribbon past the lens in a series of jerks, an exposure being made automatically by a revolving shutter during each rest. The positive film is placed in a lantern, and the intermittent movement is repeated; but now the source of illumination is behind the film, and light passes outwards through the shutter to the screen. In the Urban bioscope the film travels at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, upwards of one hundred exposures being made every second. The impression of continuous movement arises from the fact that the eye cannot get rid of a visual impression in less than one-tenth of a second. So that if a series of impressions follow one another more rapidly than the eye can rid itself of them the impressions will overlap, and give one of _motion_, if the position of some of the objects, or parts of the objects, varies slightly in each succeeding picture.[25] THE PLANE MIRROR. [Illustration: FIG. 131.] This chapter may conclude with a glance at the common looking-glass. Why do we see a reflection in it? The answer is given graphically by Fig. 131. Two rays, A _b_, A _c_, from a point A strike the mirror M at the points _b_ and _c_. Lines _b_ N, _c_ O, drawn from these points perpendicular to the mirror are called their _normals_. The angles A _b_ N, A _c_ O are the _angles of incidence_ of rays A _b_, A _c_. The paths which the rays take after reflection must make angles with _b_ N and _c_ O respectively equal to A _b_ N, A _c_ O. These are the _angles of reflection_. If the eye is so situated that the rays enter it as in our illustration, an image of the point A is seen at the point A^1, in which the lines D _b_, E _c_ meet when produced backwards. [Illustration: FIG. 132.] When the vertical mirror is replaced by a horizontal reflecting surface, such as a pond (Fig. 132), the same thing happens. The point at which the ray from the reflection of the spire's tip to the eye appears to pass through the surface of the water must be so situated that if a line were drawn perpendicular to it from the surface the angles made by lines drawn from the real spire tip and from the observer's eye to the base of the perpendicular would be equal. [22] Glazebrook, "Light," p. 157. [23] Glazebrook, "Light," p. 157. [24] Galileo was severely censured and imprisoned for daring to maintain that the earth moved round the sun, and revolved on its axis. [25] For a full account of Animated Pictures the reader might advantageously consult "The Romance of Modern Invention," pp. 166 foll. Chapter XIV. SOUND AND MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. Nature of sound--The ear--Musical instruments--The vibration of strings--The sounding-board and the frame of a piano--The strings--The striking mechanism--The quality of a note. Sound differs from light, heat, and electricity in that it can be propagated through matter only. Sound-waves are matter-waves, not ether-waves. This can be proved by placing an electric bell under the bell-glass of an air-pump and exhausting all the air. Ether still remains inside the glass, but if the bell be set in motion no sound is audible. Admit air, and the clang of the gong is heard quite plainly. Sound resembles light and heat, however, thus far, that it can be concentrated by means of suitable lenses and curved surfaces. An _echo_ is a proof of its _reflection_ from a surface. Before dealing with the various appliances used for producing sound-waves of a definite character, let us examine that wonderful natural apparatus THE EAR, through which we receive those sensations which we call sound. [Illustration: FIG. 133.--Diagrammatic sketch of the parts of the ear.] Fig. 133 is a purely diagrammatic section of the ear, showing the various parts distorted and out of proportion. Beginning at the left, we have the _outer ear_, the lobe, to gather in the sound-waves on to the membrane of the tympanum, or drum, to which is attached the first of a series of _ossicles_, or small bones. The last of these presses against an opening in the _inner ear_, a cavity surrounded by the bones of the head. Inside the inner ear is a watery fluid, P, called _perilymph_ ("surrounding water"), immersed in which is a membranic envelope, M, containing _endolymph_ ("inside water"), also full of fluid. Into this fluid project E E E, the terminations of the _auditory nerve_, leading to the brain. When sound-waves strike the tympanum, they cause it to move inwards and outwards in a series of rapid movements. The ossicles operated by the tympanum press on the little opening O, covered by a membrane, and every time they push it in they slightly squeeze the perilymph, which in turn compresses the endolymph, which affects the nerve-ends, and telegraphs a sensation of sound to the brain. In Fig. 134 we have a more developed sketch, giving in fuller detail, though still not in their actual proportions, the components of the ear. The ossicles M, I, and S are respectively the _malleus_ (hammer), _incus_ (anvil), and _stapes_ (stirrup). Each is attached by ligaments to the walls of the middle ear. The tympanum moves the malleus, the malleus the incus, and the incus the stapes, the last pressing into the opening O of Fig. 133, which is scientifically known as the _fenestra ovalis_, or oval window. As liquids are practically incompressible, nature has made allowance for the squeezing in of the oval window membrane, by providing a second opening, the round window, also covered with a membrane. When the stapes pushes the oval membrane in, the round membrane bulges out, its elasticity sufficing to put a certain pressure on the perilymph (indicated by the dotted portion of the inner ear). [Illustration: FIG. 134.--Diagrammatic section of the ear, showing the various parts.] The inner ear consists of two main parts, the _cochlea_--so called from its resemblance in shape to a snail's shell--and the _semicircular canals_. Each portion has its perilymph and endolymph, and contains a number of the nerve-ends, which are, however, most numerous in the cochlea. We do not know for certain what the functions of the canals and the cochlea are; but it is probable that the former enables us to distinguish between the _intensity_ or loudness of sounds and the direction from which they come, while the latter enables us to determine the _pitch_ of a note. In the cochlea are about 2,800 tiny nerve-ends, called the _rods of Corti_. The normal ear has such a range as to give about 33 rods to the semitone. The great scientist Helmholtz has advanced the theory that these little rods are like tiny tuning-forks, each responding to a note of a certain pitch; so that when a string of a piano is sounded and the air vibrations are transmitted to the inner ear, they affect only one of these rods and the part of the brain which it serves, and we have the impression of one particular note. It has been proved by experiment that a very sensitive ear can distinguish between sounds varying in pitch by only 1/64th of a semitone, or but half the range of any one Corti fibre. This difficulty Helmholtz gets over by suggesting that in such an ear two adjacent fibres are affected, but one more than the other. A person who has a "good ear" for music is presumably one whose Corti rods are very perfect. Unlucky people like the gentleman who could only recognize one tune, and that because people took off their hats when it commenced, are physically deficient. Their Corti rods cannot be properly developed. What applies to one single note applies also to the elements of a musical chord. A dozen notes may sound simultaneously, but the ear is able to assimilate each and blend it with its fellows; yet it requires a very sensitive and well-trained ear to pick out any one part of a harmony and concentrate the brain's attention on that part. The ear has a much larger range than the eye. "While the former ranges over eleven octaves, but little more than a single octave is possible to the latter. The quickest vibrations which strike the eye, as light, have only about twice the rapidity of the slowest; whereas the quickest vibrations which strike the ear, as a musical sound, have more than two thousand times the rapidity of the slowest."[26] To come to actual figures, the ordinary ear is sensitive to vibrations ranging from 16 to 38,000 per second. The bottom and top notes of a piano make respectively about 40 and 4,000 vibrations a second. Of course, some ears, like some eyes, cannot comprehend the whole scale. The squeak of bats and the chirrup of crickets are inaudible to some people; and dogs are able to hear sounds far too shrill to affect the human auditory apparatus. Not the least interesting part of this wonderful organ is the tympanic membrane, which is provided with muscles for altering its tension automatically. If we are "straining our ears" to catch a shrill sound, we tighten the membrane; while if we are "getting ready" for a deep, loud report like that of a gun, we allow the drum to slacken. The _Eustachian tube_ (Fig. 134) communicates with the mouth. Its function is probably to keep the air-pressure equal on both sides of the drum. When one catches cold the tube is apt to become blocked by mucus, causing unequal pressure and consequent partial deafness. Before leaving this subject, it will be well to remind our more youthful readers that the ear is delicately as well as wonderfully made, and must be treated with respect. Sudden shouting into the ear, or a playful blow, may have most serious effects, by bursting the tympanum or injuring the arrangement of the tiny bones putting it in communication with the inner ear. MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. These are contrivances for producing sonorous shocks following each other rapidly at regular intervals. Musical sounds are distinguished from mere noises by their regularity. If we shake a number of nails in a tin box, we get only a series of superimposed and chaotic sensations. On the other hand, if we strike a tuning-fork, the air is agitated a certain number of times a second, with a pleasant result which we call a note. We will begin our excursion into the region of musical instruments with an examination of that very familiar piece of furniture, THE PIANOFORTE, which means literally the "soft-strong." By many children the piano is regarded as a great nuisance, the swallower-up of time which could be much more agreeably occupied, and is accordingly shown much less respect than is given to a phonograph or a musical-box. Yet the modern piano is a very clever piece of work, admirably adapted for the production of sweet melody--if properly handled. The two forms of piano now generally used are the _upright_, with vertical sound-board and wires, and the _grand_, with horizontal sound-board.[27] THE VIBRATION OF STRINGS. As the pianoforte is a stringed instrument, some attention should be given to the subject of the vibration of strings. A string in a state of tension emits a note when plucked and allowed to vibrate freely. The _pitch_ of the note depends on several conditions:--(1) The diameter of the string; (2) the tension of the string; (3) the length of the string; (4) the substance of the string. Taking them in order:--(1.) The number of vibrations per second is inversely proportional to the diameter of the string: thus, a string one-quarter of an inch in diameter would vibrate only half as often in a given time as a string one-eighth of an inch in diameter. (2.) The length remaining the same, the number of vibrations is directly proportional to the _square root_ of the _tension_: thus, a string strained by a 16-lb. weight would vibrate four times as fast as it would if strained by a 1-lb. weight. (3.) The number of vibrations is inversely proportional to the _length_ of the string: thus, a one-foot string would vibrate twice as fast as a two-foot string, strained to the same tension, and of equal diameter and weight. (4.) Other things being equal, the rate of vibration is inversely proportional to the square root of the _density_ of the substance: so that a steel wire would vibrate more rapidly than a platinum wire of equal diameter, length, and tension. These facts are important to remember as the underlying principles of stringed instruments. Now, if you hang a wire from a cord, and hang a heavy weight from the wire, the wire will be in a state of high tension, and yield a distinct note if struck. But the volume of sound will be very small, much too small for a practical instrument. The surface of the string itself is so limited that it sets up but feeble motions in the surrounding air. Now hang the wire from a large board and strike it again. The volume of sound has greatly increased, because the string has transmitted its vibrations to the large surface of the board. To get the full sound-value of the vibrations of a string, we evidently ought to so mount the string that it may influence a large sounding surface. In a violin this is effected by straining the strings over a "bridge" resting on a hollow box made of perfectly elastic wood. Draw the bow across a string. The loud sound heard proceeds not from the string only, but also from the whole surface of the box. THE SOUNDING-BOARD AND FRAME OF A PIANO. A piano has its strings strained across a _frame_ of wood or steel, from a row of hooks in the top of the frame to a row of tapering square-ended pins in the bottom, the wires passing over sharp edges near both ends. The tuner is able, on turning a pin, to tension its strings till it gives any desired note. Readers may be interested to learn that the average tension of a string is 275 lbs., so that the total strain on the frame of a grand piano is anything between 20 and 30 _tons_. To the back of the frame is attached the _sounding-board_, made of spruce fir (the familiar Christmas tree). This is obtained from Central and Eastern Europe, where it is carefully selected and prepared, as it is essential that the timber should be sawn in such a way that the grain of the wood runs in the proper direction. THE STRINGS. These are made of extremely strong steel wire of the best quality. If you examine the wires of your piano, you will see that they vary in thickness, the thinnest being at the treble end of the frame. It is found impracticable to use wires of the same gauge and the same tension throughout. The makers therefore use highly-tensioned thick wires for the bass, and finer, shorter wires for the treble, taking advantage of the three factors--weight, tension, and length--which we have noticed above. The wires for the deepest notes are wrapped round with fine copper wire to add to their weight without increasing their diameter at the tuning-pins. There are about 600 yards (roughly one-third of a mile) of wire in a grand piano. THE STRIKING MECHANISM. We now pass to the apparatus for putting the strings in a state of vibration. The grand piano mechanism shown in Fig. 135 may be taken as typical of the latest improvements. The essentials of an effective mechanism are:--(1) That the blow delivered shall be sharp and certain; (2) that the string shall be immediately "damped," or have its vibration checked if required, so as not to interfere with the succeeding notes of other strings; (3) that the hammer shall be able to repeat the blows in quick succession. The _hammer_ has a head of mahogany covered with felt, the thickness of which tapers gradually and regularly from an inch and a quarter at the bass end to three-sixteenths of an inch at the extreme treble notes. The entire eighty-five hammers for the piano are covered all together in one piece, and then they are cut apart from each other. The consistency of the covering is very important. If too hard, it yields a harsh note, and must be reduced to the right degree by pricking with a needle. In the diagram the felt is indicated by the dotted part. [Illustration: FIG. 135.--The striking mechanism of a "grand" piano.] The _action carriage_ which operates the hammer is somewhat complicated. When the key is depressed, the left end rises, and pushes up the whole carriage, which is pivoted at one end. The hammer shank is raised by the jack B pressing upon a knob, N, called the _notch_, attached to the under side of the shank. When the jack has risen to a certain point, its arm, B^1, catches against the button C and jerks it from under the notch at the very moment when the hammer strikes, so that it may not be blocked against the string. As it rebounds, the hammer is caught on the _repetition lever_ R, which lifts it to allow of perfect repetition. The _check_ catches the tail of the hammer head during its descent when the key is raised, and prevents it coming back violently on the carriage and rest. The tail is curved so as to wedge against the check without jamming in any way. The moment the carriage begins to rise, the rear end of the key lifts a lever connected with the _damper_ by a vertical wire, and raises the damper of the string. If the key is held down, the vibrations continue for a long time after the blow; but if released at once, the damper stifles them as the hammer regains its seat. A bar, L, passing along under all the _damper lifters_, is raised by depressing the loud pedal. The _soft pedal_ slides the whole keyboard along such a distance that the hammers strike two only out of the three strings allotted to all except the bass notes, which have only one string apiece, or two, according to their depth or length. In some pianos the soft pedal presses a special damper against the strings; and a third kind of device moves the hammers nearer the strings so that they deliver a lighter blow. These two methods of damping are confined to upright pianos. A high-class piano is the result of very careful workmanship. The mechanism of each note must be accurately regulated by its tiny screws to a minute fraction of an inch. It must be ensured that every hammer strikes its blow at exactly the right place on the string, since on this depends the musical value of the note. The adjustment of the dampers requires equal care, and the whole work calls for a sensitive ear combined with skilled mechanical knowledge, so that the instrument may have a light touch, strength, and certainty of action throughout the whole keyboard. THE QUALITY OF A NOTE. If two strings, alike in all respects and equally tensioned, are plucked, both will give the same note, but both will not necessarily have the same quality of tone. The quality, or _timbre_, as musicians call it, is influenced by the presence of _overtones_, or _harmonics_, in combination with the _fundamental_, or deepest, tone of the string. The fact is, that while a vibrating string vibrates as a whole, it also vibrates in parts. There are, as it were, small waves superimposed on the big fundamental waves. Points of least motion, called _nodes_, form on the string, dividing it into two, three, four, five, etc., parts, which may be further divided by subsidiary nodes. The string, considered as halved by one node, gives the first overtone, or octave of the fundamental. It may also vibrate as three parts, and give the second overtone, or twelfth of the fundamental;[28] and as four parts, and give the third overtone, the double octave. Now, if a string be struck at a point corresponding to a node, the overtones which require that point for a node will be killed, on account of the excessive motion imparted to the string at that spot. Thus to hit it at the middle kills the octave, the double octave, etc.; while to hit it at a point one-third of the length from one end stifles the twelfth and all its sub-multiples. A fundamental note robbed of all its harmonics is hard to obtain, which is not a matter for regret, as it is a most uninteresting sound. To get a rich tone we must keep as many useful harmonics as possible, and therefore a piano hammer is so placed as to strike the string at a point which does not interfere with the best harmonics, but kills those which are objectionable. Pianoforte makers have discovered by experiment that the most pleasing tone is excited when the point against which the hammer strikes is one-seventh to one-ninth of the length of the wire from one end. The nature of the material which does the actual striking is also of importance. The harder the substance, and the sharper the blow, the more prominent do the harmonics become; so that the worker has to regulate carefully both the duration of the blow and the hardness of the hammer covering. [26] Tyndall, "On Sound," p. 75. [27] A Broadwood "grand" is made up of 10,700 separate pieces, and in its manufacture forty separate trades are concerned. [28] Twelve notes higher up the scale. Chapter XV. WIND INSTRUMENTS. Longitudinal vibration--Columns of air--Resonance of columns of air--Length and tone--The open pipe--The overtones of an open pipe--Where overtones are used--The arrangement of the pipes and pedals--Separate sound-boards--Varieties of stops--Tuning pipes and reeds--The bellows--Electric and pneumatic actions--The largest organ in the world--Human reeds. LONGITUDINAL VIBRATION. In stringed instruments we are concerned only with the transverse vibrations of a string--that is, its movements in a direction at right angles to the axis of the string. A string can also vibrate longitudinally--that is, in the direction of its axis--as may be proved by drawing a piece of resined leather along a violin string. In this case the harmonics "step up" at the same rate as when the movements were transverse. Let us substitute for a wire a stout bar of metal fixed at one end only. The longitudinal vibrations of this rod contain overtones of a different ratio. The first harmonic is not an octave, but a twelfth. While a tensioned string is divided by nodes into two, three, four, five, six, etc., parts, a rod fixed at one end only is capable of producing only those harmonics which correspond to division into three, five, seven, nine, etc., parts. Therefore a free-end rod and a wire of the same fundamental note would not have the same _timbre_, or quality, owing to the difference in the harmonics. COLUMNS OF AIR. In wind instruments we employ, instead of rods or wires, columns of air as the vibrating medium. The note of the column depends on its length. In the "penny whistle," flute, clarionet, and piccolo the length of the column is altered by closing or opening apertures in the substance encircling the column. RESONANCE OF COLUMNS OF AIR. Why does a tube closed at one end, such as the shank of a key, emit a note when we blow across the open end? The act of blowing drives a thin sheet of air against the edge of the tube and causes it to vibrate. The vibrations are confused, some "pulses" occurring more frequently than others. If we blew against the edge of a knife or a piece of wood, we should hear nothing but a hiss. But when, as in the case which we are considering, there is a partly-enclosed column of air close to the pulses, this selects those pulses which correspond to its natural period of vibration, and augments them to a sustained and very audible musical sound. [Illustration: FIG 136.--Showing how the harmonics of a "stopped" pipe are formed.] In Fig. 136, _1_ is a pipe, closed at the bottom and open at the top. A tuning-fork of the same note as the pipe is struck and held over it so that the prongs vibrate upwards and downwards. At the commencement of an outward movement of the prongs the air in front of them is _compressed_. This impulse, imparted to the air in the pipe, runs down the column, strikes the bottom, and returns. Just as it reaches the top the prong is beginning to move inwards, causing a _rarefaction_ of the air behind it. This effect also travels down and back up the column of air in the pipe, reaching the prong just as it arrives at the furthest point of the inward motion. The process is repeated, and the column of air in the pipe, striking on the surrounding atmosphere at regular intervals, greatly increases the volume of sound. We must observe that if the tuning-fork were of too high or too low a note for the column of air to move in perfect sympathy with it, this increase of sound would not result. Now, when we blow across the end, we present, as it were, a number of vibrating tuning-forks to the pipe, which picks out those air-pulses with which it sympathizes. LENGTH AND TONE. The rate of vibration is found to be inversely proportional to the length of the pipe. Thus, the vibrations of a two-foot pipe are twice as rapid as those of a four-foot pipe, and the note emitted by the former is an octave higher than that of the latter. A one-foot pipe gives a note an octave higher still. We are here speaking of the _fundamental_ tones of the pipes. With them, as in the case of strings, are associated the _overtones_, or harmonics, which can be brought into prominence by increasing the pressure of the blast at the top of the pipe. Blow very hard on your key, and the note suddenly changes to one much shriller. It is the twelfth of the fundamental, of which it has completely got the upper hand. We must now put on our thinking-caps and try to understand how this comes about. First, let us note that the vibration of a body (in this case a column of air) means a motion from a point of rest to a point of rest, or from node to node. In the air-column in Fig. 136, _1_, there is only one point of rest for an impulse--namely, at the bottom of the pipe. So that to pass from node to node the impulse must pass up the pipe and down again. The distance from node to node in a vibrating body is called a _ventral segment_. Remember this term. Therefore the pipe represents a semi-ventral segment when the fundamental note is sounding. When the first overtone is sounded the column divides itself into two vibrating parts. Where will the node between them be? We might naturally say, "Half-way up." But this cannot be so; for if the node were so situated, an impulse going down the pipe would only have to travel to the bottom to find another node, while an impulse going up would have to travel to the top and back again--that is, go twice as far. So the node forms itself _one-third_ of the distance down the pipe. From B to A (Fig. 136, _2_) and back is now equal to from B to C. When the second overtone is blown (Fig. 136, _3_) a third node forms. The pipe is now divided into _five_ semi-ventral segments. And with each succeeding overtone another node and ventral segment are added. The law of vibration of a column of air is that the number of vibrations is directly proportional to the number of semi-ventral segments into which the column of air inside the pipe is divided.[29] If the fundamental tone gives 100 vibrations per second, the first overtone in a closed pipe must give 300, and the second 500 vibrations. THE OPEN PIPE. A pipe open at both ends is capable of emitting a note. But we shall find, if we experiment, that the note of a stopped pipe is an octave lower than that of an open pipe of equal length. This is explained by Fig. 137, _1_. The air-column in the pipe (of the same length as that in Fig. 136) divides itself, when an end is blown across, into two equal portions at the node B, the natural point to obtain equilibrium. A pulse will pass from A or A^1 to B and back again in half the time required to pass from A to B and back in Fig. 136, _1_; therefore the note is an octave higher. [Illustration: FIG. 137.--Showing how harmonics of an open pipe are formed, B, B^1, and C are "nodes." The arrows indicate the distance travelled by a sound impulse from a node to a node.] THE OVERTONES OF AN OPEN PIPE. The first overtone results when nodes form as in Fig. 137, _2_, at points one-quarter of the length of the pipe from the ends, giving one complete ventral segment and two semi-ventral segments. The vibrations now are twice as rapid as before. The second overtone requires three nodes, as in Fig. 137, _3_. The rate has now trebled. So that, while the overtones of a closed pipe rise in the ratio 1, 3, 5, 7, etc., those of an open pipe rise in the proportion 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. WHERE OVERTONES ARE USED. In the flute, piccolo, and clarionet, as well as in the horn class of instrument, the overtones are as important as the fundamental notes. By artificially altering the length of the column of air, the fundamental notes are also altered, while the harmonics of each fundamental are produced at will by varying the blowing pressure; so that a continuous chromatic, or semitonal, scale is possible throughout the compass of the instrument. THE ORGAN. From the theory of acoustics[30] we pass to the practical application, and concentrate our attention upon the grandest of all wind instruments, the pipe organ. This mechanism has a separate pipe for every note, properly proportioned. A section of an ordinary wooden pipe is given in Fig. 138. Wind rushes up through the foot of the pipe into a little chamber, closed by a block of wood or a plate except for a narrow slit, which directs it against the sharp lip A, and causes a fluttering, the proper pulse of which is converted by the air-column above into a musical sound. [Illustration: FIG. 138.--Section of an ordinary wooden "flue" pipe.] In even the smallest organs more than one pipe is actuated by one key on the keyboard, for not only do pipes of different shapes give different qualities of tone, but it is found desirable to have ranks of pipes with their bottom note of different pitches. The length of an open pipe is measured from the edge of the lip to the top of the pipe; of a stopped pipe, from the lip to the top and back again. When we speak of a 16 or 8 foot rank, or stop, we mean one of which the lowest note in the rank is that produced by a 16 or 8 foot open pipe, or their stopped equivalents (8 or 4 foot). In a big organ we find 32, 16, 8, 4, and 2 foot stops, and some of these repeated a number of times in pipes of different shape and construction. THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE PIPES. We will now study briefly the mechanism of a very simple single-keyboard organ, with five ranks of pipes, or stops. [Illustration: FIG. 139.--The table of a sound-board.] It is necessary to arrange matters so that the pressing down of one key may make all five of the pipes belonging to it speak, or only four, three, two, or one, as we may desire. The pipes are mounted in rows on a _sound-board_, which is built up in several layers. At the top is the _upper board_; below it come the _sliders_, one for each stop; and underneath that the _table_. In Fig. 139 we see part of the table from below. Across the under side are fastened parallel bars with spaces (shown black) left between them. Two other bars are fastened across the ends, so that each groove is enclosed by wood at the top and on all sides. The under side of the table has sheets of leather glued or otherwise attached to it in such a manner that no air can leak from one groove to the next. Upper board, sliders, and table are pierced with rows of holes, to permit the passage of wind from the grooves to the pipes. The grooves under the big pipes are wider than those under the small pipes, as they have to pass more air. The bars between the grooves also vary in width according to the weight of the pipes which they have to carry. The sliders can be moved in and out a short distance in the direction of the axis of the rows of pipes. There is one slider under each row. When a slider is in, the holes in it do not correspond with those in the table and upper board, so that no wind can get from the grooves to the rank over that particular slider. Fig. 140 shows the manner in which the sliders are operated by the little knobs (also called stops) projecting from the casing of the organ within convenient reach of the performer's hands. One stop is in, the other drawn out. [Illustration: FIG. 140.] In Fig. 141 we see the table, etc., in cross section, with a slider out, putting the pipes of its rank in communication with the grooves. The same diagram shows us in section the little triangular _pallets_ which admit air from the _wind-chest_ to the grooves; and Fig. 142 gives us an end section of table, sliders, and wind-chest, together with the rods, etc., connecting the key to its pallet. When the key is depressed, the _sticker_ (a slight wooden rod) is pushed up. This rocks a _backfall_, or pivoted lever, to which is attached the _pulldown_, a wire penetrating the bottom of the wind-chest to the pallet. As soon as the pallet opens, wind rushes into the groove above through the aperture in the leather bottom, and thence to any one of the pipes of which the slider has been drawn out. (The sliders in Fig. 142 are solid black.) It is evident that if the sound-board is sufficiently deep from back to front, any number of rows of pipes may be placed on it. [Illustration: FIG. 141.] PEDALS. The organ pedals are connected to the pallets by an action similar to that of the keys. The pedal stops are generally of deep tone, 32-foot and 16-foot, as they have to sustain the bass part of the musical harmonies. By means of _couplers_ one or more of the keyboard stops may be linked to the pedals. SEPARATE SOUND-BOARDS. The keyboard of a very large organ has as many as five _manuals_, or rows of keys. Each manual operates what is practically a separate organ mounted on its own sound-board. [Illustration: FIG. 142.] [Illustration: FIG. 143.--General section of a two-manual organ.] The manuals are arranged in steps, each slightly overhanging that below. Taken in order from the top, they are:--(1.) _Echo organ_, of stops of small scale and very soft tone, enclosed in a "swell-box." (2.) _Solo organ_, of stops imitating orchestral instruments. The wonderful "vox humana" stop also belongs to this manual. (3.) _Swell organ_, contained in a swell-box, the front and sides of which have shutters which can be opened and closed by the pressure of the foot on a lever, so as to regulate the amount of sound proceeding from the pipes inside. (4.) _Great organ_, including pipes of powerful tone. (5.) _Choir organ_, of soft, mellow stops, often enclosed in a swell-box. We may add to these the _pedal organ_, which can be coupled to any but the echo manual. VARIETIES OF STOPS. We have already remarked that the quality of a stop depends on the shape and construction of the pipe. Some pipes are of wood, others of metal. Some are rectangular, others circular. Some have parallel sides, others taper or expand towards the top. Some are open, others stopped. The two main classes into which organ pipes may be divided are:--(1.) _Flue_ pipes, in which the wind is directed against a lip, as in Fig. 138. (2.) _Reed_ pipes--that is, pipes used in combination with a simple device for admitting air into the bottom of the pipe in a series of gusts. Fig. 144 shows a _striking_ reed, such as is found in the ordinary motor horn. The elastic metal tongue when at rest stands a very short distance away from the orifice in the reed. When wind is blown through the reed the tongue is sucked against the reed, blocks the current, and springs away again. A _free_ reed has a tongue which vibrates in a slot without actually touching the sides. Harmonium and concertina reeds are of this type. In the organ the reed admits air to a pipe of the correct length to sympathize with the rate of the puffs of air which the reed passes. Reed pipes expand towards the top. TUNING PIPES AND REEDS. [Illustration: FIG. 144.--A reed pipe.] Pipes are tuned by adjusting their length. The plug at the top of a stopped pipe is pulled out or pushed in a trifle to flatten or sharpen the note respectively. An open pipe, if large, has a tongue cut in the side at the top, which can be pressed inwards or outwards for the purpose of correcting the tone. Small metal pipes are flattened by contracting the tops inwards with a metal cone like a candle-extinguisher placed over the top and tapped; and sharpened by having the top splayed by a cone pushed in point downwards. Reeds of the striking variety (see Fig. 144) have a tuning-wire pressing on the tongue near the fixed end. The end of this wire projects through the casing. By moving it, the length of the vibrating part of the tongue is adjusted to correctness. BELLOWS. Different stops require different wind-pressures, ranging from 1/10 lb. to 1 lb. to the square inch, the reeds taking the heaviest pressures. There must therefore be as many sets of bellows and wind-chests as there are different pressures wanted. A very large organ consumes immense quantities of air when all the stops are out, and the pumping has to be done by a powerful gas, water, or electric engine. Every bellows has a reservoir (see Fig. 143) above it. The top of this is weighted to give the pressure required. A valve in the top opens automatically as soon as the reservoir has expanded to a certain fixed limit, so that there is no possibility of bursting the leather sides. [Illustration: FIG. 145.--The keyboard and part of the pneumatic mechanism of the Hereford Cathedral organ. C, composition pedals for pushing out groups of stops; P (at bottom), pedals; P P (at top), pipes carrying compressed air; M, manuals (4); S S, stops.] ELECTRIC AND PNEUMATIC ACTIONS. We have mentioned in connection with railway signalling that the signalman is sometimes relieved of the hard manual labour of moving signals and points by the employment of electric and pneumatic auxiliaries. The same is true of organs and organists. The touch of the keys has been greatly lightened by making the keys open air-valves or complete electric circuits which actuate the mechanism for pulling down the pallets. The stops, pedals, and couplers also employ "power." Not only are the performer's muscles spared a lot of heavy work when compressed air and electricity aid him, but he is able to have the _console_, or keyboard, far away from the pipes. "From the console, the player, sitting with the singers, or in any desirable part of the choir or chancel, would be able to command the working of the whole of the largest organ situated afar at the western end of the nave; would draw each stop in complete reliance on the sliders and the sound-board fulfilling their office; ... and--marvel of it all--the player, using the swell pedal in his ordinary manner, would obtain crescendo and diminuendo with a more perfect effect than by the old way."[31] In cathedrals it is no uncommon thing for the different sound-boards to be placed in positions far apart, so that to the uninitiated there may appear to be several independent organs scattered about. Yet all are absolutely under the control of a man who is sitting away from them all, but connected with them by a number of tubes or wires. The largest organ in the world is that in the Town Hall, Sydney. It has a hundred and twenty-six speaking stops, five manuals, fourteen couplers, and forty-six combination studs. The pipes, about 8,000 in number, range from the enormous 64-foot contra-trombone to some only a fraction of an inch in length. The organ occupies a space 85 feet long and 26 feet deep. HUMAN REEDS. The most wonderful of all musical reeds is found in the human throat, in the anatomical part called the _larynx_, situated at the top of the _trachea_, or windpipe. Slip a piece of rubber tubing over the end of a pipe, allowing an inch or so to project. Take the free part of the tube by two opposite points between the first fingers and thumbs and pull it until the edges are stretched tight. Now blow through it. The wind, forcing its way between the two rubber edges, causes them and the air inside the tube to vibrate, and a musical note results. The more you strain the rubber the higher is the note. The larynx works on this principle. The windpipe takes the place of the glass pipe; the two vocal cords represent the rubber edges; and the _arytenoid muscles_ stand instead of the hands. When contracted, these muscles bring the edges of the cords nearer to one another, stretch the cords, and shorten the cords. A person gifted with a "very good ear" can, it has been calculated, adjust the length of the vocal cords to 1/17000th of an inch! Simultaneously with the adjustment of the cords is effected the adjustment of the length of the windpipe, so that the column of air in it may be of the right length to vibrate in unison. Here again is seen a wonderful provision of nature. The resonance of the mouth cavity is also of great importance. By altering the shape of the mouth the various harmonics of any fundamental note produced by the larynx are rendered prominent, and so we get the different vocal sounds. Helmholtz has shown that the fundamental tone of any note is represented by the sound _oo_. If the mouth is adjusted to bring out the octave of the fundamental, _o_ results. _a_ is produced by accentuating the second harmonic, the twelfth; _ee_ by developing the second and fourth harmonics; while for _ah_ the fifth and seventh must be prominent. When we whistle we transform the lips into a reed and the mouth into a pipe. The tension of the lips and the shape of the mouth cavity decide the note. The lips are also used as a reed for blowing the flute, piccolo, and all the brass band instruments of the cornet order. In blowing a coach-horn the various harmonics of the fundamental note are brought out by altering the lip tension and the wind pressure. A cornet is practically a coach-horn rolled up into a convenient shape and furnished with three keys, the depression of which puts extra lengths of tubing in connection with the main tube--in fact, makes it longer. One key lowers the fundamental note of the horn half a tone; the second, a full tone; the third, a tone and a half. If the first and third are pressed down together, the note sinks two tones; if the second and third, two and a half tones; and simultaneous depression of all three gives a drop of three tones. The performer thus has seven possible fundamental notes, and several harmonics of each of these at his command; so that by a proper manipulation of the keys he can run up the chromatic scale. We should add that the cornet tube is an "open" pipe. So is that of the flute. The clarionet is a "stopped" pipe. [29] It is obvious that in Fig. 136, _2_, a pulse will pass from A to B and back in one-third the time required for it to pass from A to B and back in Fig. 136, _1_. [30] The science of hearing; from the Greek verb, [Greek: akouein], "to hear." [31] "Organs and Tuning," p. 245. Chapter XVI. TALKING-MACHINES. The phonograph--The recorder--The reproducer--The gramophone--The making of records--Cylinder records--Gramophone records. In the Patent Office Museum at South Kensington is a curious little piece of machinery--a metal cylinder mounted on a long axle, which has at one end a screw thread chased along it. The screw end rotates in a socket with a thread of equal pitch cut in it. To the other end is attached a handle. On an upright near the cylinder is mounted a sort of drum. The membrane of the drum carries a needle, which, when the membrane is agitated by the air-waves set up by human speech, digs into a sheet of tinfoil wrapped round the cylinder, pressing it into a helical groove turned on the cylinder from end to end. This construction is the first phonograph ever made. Thomas Edison, the "wizard of the West," devised it in 1876; and from this rude parent have descended the beautiful machines which record and reproduce human speech and musical sounds with startling accuracy. [Illustration: FIG. 146.--The "governor" of a phonograph.] We do not propose to trace here the development of the talking-machine; nor will it be necessary to describe in detail its mechanism, which is probably well known to most readers, or could be mastered in a very short time on personal examination. We will content ourselves with saying that the wax cylinder of the phonograph, or the ebonite disc of the gramophone, is generally rotated by clockwork concealed in the body of the machine. The speed of rotation has to be very carefully governed, in order that the record may revolve under the reproducing point at a uniform speed. The principle of the governor commonly used appears in Fig. 146. The last pinion of the clockwork train is mounted on a shaft carrying two triangular plates, A and C, to which are attached three short lengths of flat steel spring with a heavy ball attached to the centre of each. A is fixed; C moves up the shaft as the balls fly out, and pulls with it the disc D, which rubs against the pad P (on the end of a spring) and sets up sufficient friction to slow the clockwork. The limit rate is regulated by screw S. THE PHONOGRAPH. Though the recording and reproducing apparatus of a phonograph gives very wonderful results, its construction is quite simple. At the same time, it must be borne in mind that an immense amount of experimenting has been devoted to finding out the most suitable materials and forms for the parts. [Illustration: FIG. 147.--Section of an Edison Bell phonograph recorder.] The _recorder_ (Fig. 147) is a little circular box about one and a half inches in diameter.[32] From the top a tube leads to the horn. The bottom is a circular plate, C C, hinged at one side. This plate supports a glass disc, D, about 1/150th of an inch thick, to which is attached the cutting stylus--a tiny sapphire rod with a cup-shaped end having very sharp edges. Sound-waves enter the box through the horn tube; but instead of being allowed to fill the whole box, they are concentrated by the shifting nozzle N on to the centre of the glass disc through the hole in C C. You will notice that N has a ball end, and C C a socket to fit N exactly, so that, though C C and N move up and down very rapidly, they still make perfect contact. The disc is vibrated by the sound-impulses, and drives the cutting point down into the surface of the wax cylinder, turning below it in a clockwork direction. The only dead weight pressing on S is that of N, C C, and the glass diaphragm. [Illustration: FIG. 148.--Perspective view of a phonograph recorder.] As the cylinder revolves, the recorder is shifted continuously along by a leading screw having one hundred or more threads to the inch cut on it, so that it traces a continuous helical groove from one end of the wax cylinder to the other. This groove is really a series of very minute indentations, not exceeding 1/1000th of an inch in depth.[33] Seen under a microscope, the surface of the record is a succession of hills and valleys, some much larger than others (Fig. 151, _a_). A loud sound causes the stylus to give a vigorous dig, while low sounds scarcely move it at all. The wonderful thing about this sound-recording is, that not only are the fundamental tones of musical notes impressed, but also the harmonics, which enable us to decide at once whether the record is one of a cornet, violin, or banjo performance. Furthermore, if several instruments are playing simultaneously near the recorder's horn, the stylus catches all the different shades of tone of every note of a chord. There are, so to speak, minor hills and valleys cut in the slopes of the main hills and valleys. [Illustration: FIG. 149.--Section of the reproducer of an Edison Bell phonograph.] [Illustration: FIG. 150.--Perspective view of a phonograph reproducer.] The _reproducer_ (Fig. 149) is somewhat more complicated than the recorder. As before, we have a circular box communicating with the horn of the instrument. A thin glass disc forms a bottom to the box. It is held in position between rubber rings, R R, by a screw collar, C. To the centre is attached a little eye, from which hangs a link, L. Pivoted at P from one edge of the box is a _floating weight_, having a circular opening immediately under the eye. The link passes through this to the left end of a tiny lever, which rocks on a pivot projecting from the weight. To the right end of the lever is affixed a sapphire bar, or stylus, with a ball end of a diameter equal to that of the cutting point of the recorder. The floating weight presses the stylus against the record, and also keeps the link between the rocking lever of the glass diaphragm in a state of tension. Every blow given to the stylus is therefore transmitted by the link to the diaphragm, which vibrates and sends an air-impulse into the horn. As the impulses are given at the same rate as those which agitated the diaphragm of the recorder, the sounds which they represent are accurately reproduced, even to the harmonics of a musical note. THE GRAMOPHONE. This effects the same purpose as the phonograph, but in a somewhat different manner. The phonograph recorder digs vertically downwards into the surface of the record, whereas the stylus of the gramophone wags from side to side and describes a snaky course (Fig. 151_b_). It makes no difference in talking-machines whether the reproducing stylus be moved sideways or vertically by the record, provided that motion is imparted by it to the diaphragm. [Illustration: FIG. 151_a._] [Illustration: FIG. 151_b._] [Illustration: FIG. 151_c._--Section of a gramophone reproducer.] In Fig. 151_c_ the construction of the gramophone reproducer is shown in section. A is the cover which screws on to the bottom B, and confines the diaphragm D between itself and a rubber ring. The portion B is elongated into a tubular shape for connection with the horn, an arm of which slides over the tube and presses against the rubber ring C to make an air-tight joint. The needle-carrier N is attached at its upper end to the centre of the diaphragm. At a point indicated by the white dot a pin passes through it and the cover. The lower end is tubular to accommodate the steel points, which have to be replaced after passing once over a record. A screw, S, working in a socket projecting from the carrier, holds the point fast. The record moves horizontally under the point in a plane perpendicular to the page. The groove being zigzag, the needle vibrates right and left, and rotating the carrier a minute fraction of an inch on the pivot, shakes the glass diaphragm and sends waves of air into the horn. The gramophone is a reproducing instrument only. The records are made on a special machine, fitted with a device for causing the recorder point to describe a spiral course from the circumference to the centre of the record disc. Some gramophone records have as many as 250 turns to the inch. The total length of the tracing on a ten-inch "concert" record is about 1,000 feet. THE MAKING OF RECORDS. For commercial purposes it would not pay to make every record separately in a recording machine. The expense of employing good singers and instrumentalists renders such a method impracticable. All the records we buy are made from moulds, the preparation of which we will now briefly describe. CYLINDER, OR PHONOGRAPH RECORDS. First of all, a wax record is made in the ordinary way on a recording machine. After being tested and approved, it is hung vertically and centrally from a rotating table pivoted on a vertical metal spike passing up through the record. On one side of the table is a piece of iron. On each side of the record, and a small distance away, rises a brass rod enclosed in a glass tube. The top of the rods are hooked, so that pieces of gold leaf may be suspended from them. A bell-glass is now placed over the record, table, and rods, and the air is sucked out by a pump. As soon as a good vacuum has been obtained, the current from the secondary circuit of an induction coil is sent into the rods supporting the gold leaves, which are volatilized by the current jumping from one to the other. A magnet, whirled outside the bell-glass, draws round the iron armature on the pivoted table, and consequently revolves the record, on the surface of which a very thin coating of gold is deposited. The record is next placed in an electroplating bath until a copper shell one-sixteenth of an inch thick has formed all over the outside. This is trued up on a lathe and encased in a brass tube. The "master," or original wax record, is removed by cooling it till it contracts sufficiently to fall out of the copper mould, on the inside surface of which are reproduced, in relief, the indentations of the wax "master." Copies are made from the mould by immersing it in a tank of melted wax. The cold metal chills the wax that touches it, so that the mould soon has a thick waxen lining. The mould and copy are removed from the tank and mounted on a lathe, which shapes and smooths the inside of the record. The record is loosened from the mould by cooling. After inspection for flaws, it is, if found satisfactory, packed in cotton-wool and added to the saleable stock. Gramophone master records are made on a circular disc of zinc, coated over with a very thin film of acid-proof fat. When the disc is revolved in the recording machine, the sharp stylus cuts through the fat and exposes the zinc beneath. On immersion in a bath of chromic acid the bared surfaces are bitten into, while the unexposed parts remain unaffected. When the etching is considered complete, the plate is carefully cleaned and tested. A negative copper copy is made from it by electrotyping. This constitutes the mould. From it as many as 1,000 copies may be made on ebonite plates by combined pressure and heating. [32] The Edison Bell phonograph is here referred to. [33] Some of the sibilant or hissing sounds of the voice are computed to be represented by depressions less than a millionth of an inch in depth. Yet these are reproduced very clearly! Chapter XVII. WHY THE WIND BLOWS. Why the wind blows--Land and sea breezes--Light air and moisture--The barometer--The column barometer--The wheel barometer--A very simple barometer--The aneroid barometer--Barometers and weather--The diving-bell--The diving-dress--Air-pumps--Pneumatic tyres--The air-gun--The self-closing door-stop--The action of wind on oblique surfaces--The balloon--The flying-machine. When a child's rubber ball gets slack through a slight leakage of air, and loses some of its bounce, it is a common practice to hold it for a few minutes in front of the fire till it becomes temporarily taut again. Why does the heat have this effect on the ball? No more air has been forced into the ball. After perusing the chapter on the steam-engine the reader will be able to supply the answer. "Because the molecules of air dash about more vigorously among one another when the air is heated, and by striking the inside of the ball with greater force put it in a state of greater tension." If we heat an open jar there is no pressure developed, since the air simply expands and flows out of the neck. But the air that remains in the jar, being less in quantity than when it was not yet heated, weighs less, though occupying the same space as before. If we took a very thin bladder and filled it with hot air it would therefore float in colder air, proving that heated air, as we should expect, _tends to rise_. The fire-balloon employs this principle, the air inside the bag being kept artificially warm by a fire burning in some vessel attached below the open neck of the bag. Now, the sun shines with different degrees of heating power at different parts of the world. Where its effect is greatest the air there is hottest. We will suppose, for the sake of argument, that, at a certain moment, the air envelope all round the globe is of equal temperature. Suddenly the sun shines out and heats the air at a point, A, till it is many degrees warmer than the surrounding air. The heated air expands, rises, and spreads out above the cold air. But, as a given depth of warm air has less weight than an equal depth of cold air, the cold air at once begins to rush towards B and squeeze the rest of the warm air out. We may therefore picture the atmosphere as made up of a number of colder currents passing along the surface of the earth to replace warm currents rising and spreading over the upper surface of the cold air. A similar circulation takes place in a vessel of heated water (see p. 17). LAND AND SEA BREEZES. A breeze which blows from the sea on to the land during the day often reverses its direction during the evening. Why is this? The earth grows hot or cold more rapidly than the sea. When the sun shines hotly, the land warms quickly and heats the air over it, which becomes light, and is displaced by the cooler air over the sea. When the sun sets, the earth and the air over it lose their warmth quickly, while the sea remains at practically the same temperature as before. So the balance is changed, the heavier air now lying over the land. It therefore flows seawards, and drives out the warmer air there. LIGHT AIR AND MOISTURE. Light, warm air absorbs moisture. As it cools, the moisture in it condenses. Breathe on a plate, and you notice that a watery film forms on it at once. The cold surface condenses the water suspended in the warm breath. If you wish to dry a damp room you heat it. Moisture then passes from the walls and objects in the room to the atmosphere. THE BAROMETER. This property of air is responsible for the changes in weather. Light, moisture-laden air meets cold, dry air, and the sudden cooling forces it to release its moisture, which falls as rain, or floats about as clouds. If only we are able to detect the presence of warm air-strata above us, we ought to be in a position to foretell the weather. We can judge of the specific gravity of the air in our neighbourhood by means of the barometer, which means "weight-measurer." The normal air-pressure at sea-level on our bodies or any other objects is about 15 lbs. to the square inch--that is to say, if you could imprison and weigh a column of air one inch square in section and of the height of the world's atmospheric envelope, the scale would register 15 lbs. Many years ago (1643) Torricelli, a pupil of Galileo, first calculated the pressure by a very simple experiment. He took a long glass tube sealed at one end, filled it with mercury, and, closing the open end with the thumb, inverted the tube and plunged the open end below the surface of a tank of mercury. On removing his thumb he found that the mercury sank in the tube till the surface of the mercury in the tube was about 30 inches in a vertical direction above the surface of the mercury in the tank. Now, as the upper end was sealed, there must be a vacuum _above_ the mercury. What supported the column? The atmosphere. So it was evident that the downward pressure of the mercury exactly counterbalanced the upward pressure of the air. As a mercury column 30 inches high and 1 inch square weighs 15 lbs., the air-pressure on a square inch obviously is the same. [Illustration: FIG. 152.--A Fortin barometer.] FORTIN'S COLUMN BAROMETER is a simple Torricellian tube, T, with the lower end submerged in a little glass tank of mercury (Fig. 152). The bottom of this tank is made of washleather. To obtain a "reading" the screw S, pressing on the washleather, is adjusted until the mercury in the tank rises to the tip of the little ivory point P. The reading is the figure of the scale on the face of the case opposite which the surface of the column stands. [Illustration: FIG. 153.] THE WHEEL BAROMETER also employs the mercury column (Fig. 153). The lower end of the tube is turned up and expanded to form a tank, C. The pointer P, which travels round a graduated dial, is mounted on a spindle carrying a pulley, over which passes a string with a weight at each end. The heavier of the weights rests on the top of the mercury. When the atmospheric pressure falls, the mercury in C rises, lifting this weight, and the pointer moves. This form of barometer is not so delicate or reliable as Fortin's, or as the siphon barometer, which has a tube of the same shape as the wheel instrument, but of the same diameter from end to end except for a contraction at the bend. The reading of a siphon is the distance between the two surfaces of the mercury. A VERY SIMPLE BAROMETER is made by knocking off the neck of a small bottle, filling the body with water, and hanging it up by a string in the position shown (Fig. 154). When the atmospheric pressure falls, the water at the orifice bulges outwards; when it rises, the water retreats till its surface is slightly concave. [Illustration: FIG. 154.] THE ANEROID BAROMETER. On account of their size and weight, and the comparative difficulty of transporting them without derangement of the mercury column, column barometers are not so generally used as the aneroid variety. Aneroid means "without moisture," and in this particular connection signifies that no liquid is used in the construction of the barometer. Fig. 155 shows an aneroid in detail. The most noticeable feature is the vacuum chamber, V C, a circular box which has a top and bottom of corrugated but thin and elastic metal. Sections of the box are shown in Figs. 156, 157. It is attached at the bottom to the base board of the instrument by a screw (Fig. 156). From the top rises a pin, P, with a transverse hole through it to accommodate the pin K E, which has a triangular section, and stands on one edge. [Illustration: FIG. 155.--An aneroid barometer.] Returning to Fig. 155, we see that P projects through S, a powerful spring of sheet-steel. To this is attached a long arm, C, the free end of which moves a link rotating, through the pin E, a spindle mounted in a frame, D. The spindle moves arm F. This pulls on a very minute chain wound round the pointer spindle B, in opposition to a hairspring, H S. B is mounted on arm H, which is quite independent of the rest of the aneroid. [Illustration: FIG. 156. FIG. 157. The vacuum chamber of an aneroid barometer extended and compressed.] The vacuum chamber is exhausted during manufacture and sealed. It would naturally assume the shape of Fig. 157, but the spring S, acting against the atmospheric pressure, pulls it out. As the pressure varies, so does the spring rise or sink; and the slightest movement is transmitted through the multiplying arms C, E, F, to the pointer. A good aneroid is so delicate that it will register the difference in pressure caused by raising it from the floor to the table, where it has a couple of feet less of air-column resting upon it. An aneroid is therefore a valuable help to mountaineers for determining their altitude above sea-level. BAROMETERS AND WEATHER. We may now return to the consideration of forecasting the weather by movements of the barometer. The first thing to keep in mind is, that the instrument is essentially a _weight_ recorder. How is weather connected with atmospheric weight? In England the warm south-west wind generally brings wet weather, the north and east winds fine weather; the reason for this being that the first reaches us after passing over the Atlantic and picking up a quantity of moisture, while the second and third have come overland and deposited their moisture before reaching us. A sinking of the barometer heralds the approach of heated air--that is, moist air--which on meeting colder air sheds its moisture. So when the mercury falls we expect rain. On the other hand, when the "glass" rises, we know that colder air is coming, and as colder air comes from a dry quarter we anticipate fine weather. It does not follow that the same conditions are found in all parts of the world. In regions which have the ocean to the east or the north, the winds blowing thence would be the rainy winds, while south-westerly winds might bring hot and dry weather. THE DIVING-BELL. Water is nearly 773 times as heavy as air. If we submerge a barometer a very little way below the surface of a water tank, we shall at once observe a rise of the mercury column. At a depth of 34 feet the pressure on any submerged object is 15 lbs. to the square inch, in addition to the atmospheric pressure of 15 lbs. per square inch--that is, there would be a 30-lb. _absolute_ pressure. As a rule, when speaking of hydraulic pressures, we start with the normal atmospheric pressure as zero, and we will here observe the practice. [Illustration: FIG. 158.--A diving bell.] The diving-bell is used to enable people to work under water without having recourse to the diving-dress. A sketch of an ordinary diving-bell is given in Fig. 158. It may be described as a square iron box without a bottom. At the top are links by which it is attached to a lowering chain, and windows, protected by grids; also a nozzle for the air-tube. [Illustration: FIG. 159.] A simple model bell (Fig. 159) is easily made out of a glass tumbler which has had a tap fitted in a hole drilled through the bottom. We turn off the tap and plunge the glass into a vessel of water. The water rises a certain way up the interior, until the air within has been compressed to a pressure equal to that of the water at the level of the surface inside. The further the tumbler is lowered, the higher does the water rise inside it. Evidently men could not work in a diving-bell which is invaded thus by water. It is imperative to keep the water at bay. This we can do by attaching a tube to the tap (Fig. 160) and blowing into the tumbler till the air-pressure exceeds that of the water, which is shown by bubbles rising to the surface. The diving-bell therefore has attached to it a hose through which air is forced by pumps from the atmosphere above, at a pressure sufficient to keep the water out of the bell. This pumping of air also maintains a fresh supply of oxygen for the workers. [Illustration: FIG. 160.] Inside the bell is tackle for grappling any object that has to be moved, such as a heavy stone block. The diving-bell is used mostly for laying submarine masonry. "The bell, slung either from a crane on the masonry already built above sea-level, or from a specially fitted barge, comes into action. The block is lowered by its own crane on to the bottom. The bell descends upon it, and the crew seize it with tackle suspended inside the bell. Instructions are sent up as to the direction in which the bell should be moved with its burden, and as soon as the exact spot has been reached the signal for lowering is given, and the stone settles on to the cement laid ready for it."[34] For many purposes it is necessary that the worker should have more freedom of action than is possible when he is cooped up inside an iron box. Hence the invention of the DIVING-DRESS, which consists of two main parts, the helmet and the dress proper. The helmet (Fig. 161) is made of copper. A breastplate, B, shaped to fit the shoulders, has at the neck a segmental screw bayonet-joint. The headpiece is fitted with a corresponding screw, which can be attached or removed by one-eighth of a turn. The neck edge of the dress, which is made in one piece, legs, arms, body and all, is attached to the breastplate by means of the plate P^1, screwed down tightly on it by the wing-nuts N N, the bolts of which pass through the breastplate. Air enters the helmet through a valve situated at the back, and is led through tubes along the inside to the front. This valve closes automatically if any accident cuts off the air supply, and encloses sufficient air in the dress to allow the diver to regain the surface. The outlet valve O V can be adjusted by the diver to maintain any pressure. At the sides of the headpiece are two hooks, H, over which pass the cords connecting the heavy lead weights of 40 lbs. each hanging on the diver's breast and back. These weights are also attached to the knobs K K. A pair of boots, having 17 lbs. of lead each in the soles, complete the dress. Three glazed windows are placed in the headpiece, that in the front, R W, being removable, so that the diver may gain free access to the air when he is above water without being obliged to take off the helmet. [Illustration: FIG. 161.--A diver's helmet.] By means of telephone wires built into the life-line (which passes under the diver's arms and is used for lowering and hoisting) easy communication is established between the diver and his attendants above. The transmitter of the telephone is placed inside the helmet between the front and a side window, the receiver and the button of an electric bell in the crown. This last he can press by raising his head. The life-line sometimes also includes the wires for an electric lamp (Fig. 162) used by the diver at depths to which daylight cannot penetrate. The pressure on a diver's body increases in the ratio of 4-1/3 lbs. per square inch for every 10 feet that he descends. The ordinary working limit is about 150 feet, though "old hands" are able to stand greater pressures. The record is held by one James Hooper, who, when removing the cargo of the _Cape Horn_ sunk off the South American coast, made seven descents of 201 feet, one of which lasted for forty-two minutes. [Illustration: FIG. 162.--Diver's electric lamp.] A sketch is given (Fig. 163) of divers working below water with pneumatic tools, fed from above with high-pressure air. Owing to his buoyancy a diver has little depressing or pushing power, and he cannot bore a hole in a post with an auger unless he is able to rest his back against some firm object, or is roped to the post. Pneumatic chipping tools merely require holding to their work, their weight offering sufficient resistance to the very rapid blows which they make. [Illustration: FIG. 163.--Divers at work below water with pneumatic tools.] AIR-PUMPS. [Illustration: FIG. 164.] [Illustration: FIG. 165.] Mention having been made of the air-pump, we append diagrams (Figs. 164, 165) of the simplest form of air-pump, the cycle tyre inflator. The piston is composed of two circular plates of smaller diameter than the barrel, holding between them a cup leather. During the upstroke the cup collapses inwards and allows air to pass by it. On the downstroke (Fig. 165) the edges of the cup expand against the barrel, preventing the passage of air round the piston. A double-action air-pump requires a long, well-fitting piston with a cup on each side of it, and the addition of extra valves to the barrel, as the cups under these circumstances cannot act as valves. PNEUMATIC TYRES. [Illustration: FIG. 166.] [Illustration: FIG. 167.] The action of the pneumatic tyre in reducing vibration and increasing the speed of a vehicle is explained by Figs. 166, 167. When the tyre encounters an obstacle, such as a large stone, it laps over it (Fig. 166), and while supporting the weight on the wheel, reduces the deflection of the direction of movement. When an iron-tyred wheel meets a similar obstacle it has to rise right over it, often jumping a considerable distance into the air. The resultant motions of the wheel are indicated in each case by an arrow. Every change of direction means a loss of forward velocity, the loss increasing with the violence and extent of the change. The pneumatic tyre also scores because, on account of its elasticity, it gives a "kick off" against the obstacle, which compensates for the resistance during compression. [Illustration: FIG. 168.--Section of the mechanism of an air-gun.] THE AIR-GUN. This may be described as a valveless air-pump. Fig. 168 is a section of a "Gem" air-gun, with the mechanism set ready for firing. In the stock of the gun is the _cylinder_, in which an accurately fitting and hollow _piston_ moves. A powerful helical spring, turned out of a solid bar of steel, is compressed between the inside end of the piston and the upper end of the butt. To set the gun, the _catch_ is pressed down so that its hooked end disengages from the stock, and the barrel is bent downwards on pivot P. This slides the lower end of the _compressing lever_ towards the butt, and a projection on the guide B, working in a groove, takes the piston with it. When the spring has been fully compressed, the triangular tip of the rocking cam R engages with a groove in the piston's head, and prevents recoil when the barrel is returned to its original position. On pulling the trigger, the piston is released and flies up the cylinder with great force, and the air in the cylinder is compressed and driven through the bore of the barrel, blocked by the leaden slug, to which the whole energy of the expanding spring is transmitted through the elastic medium of the air. There are several other good types of air-gun, all of which employ the principles described above. THE SELF-CLOSING DOOR-STOP is another interesting pneumatic device. It consists of a cylinder with an air-tight piston, and a piston rod working through a cover at one end. The other end of the cylinder is pivoted to the door frame. When the door is opened the piston compresses a spring in the cylinder, and air is admitted past a cup leather on the piston to the upper part of the cylinder. This air is confined by the cup leather when the door is released, and escapes slowly through a leak, allowing the spring to regain its shape slowly, and by the agency of the piston rod to close the door. THE ACTION OF WIND ON OBLIQUE SURFACES. Why does a kite rise? Why does a boat sail across the wind? We can supply an answer almost instinctively in both cases, "Because the wind pushes the kite or sail aside." It will, however, be worth while to look for a more scientific answer. The kite cannot travel in the direction of the wind because it is confined by a string. But the face is so attached to the string that it inclines at an angle to the direction of the wind. Now, when a force meets an inclined surface which it cannot carry along with it, but which is free to travel in another direction, the force may be regarded as resolving itself into _two_ forces, coming from each side of the original line. These are called the _component_ forces. [Illustration: FIG. 169.] To explain this we give a simple sketch of a kite in the act of flying (Fig. 169). The wind is blowing in the direction of the solid arrow A. The oblique surface of the kite resolves its force into the two components indicated by the dotted arrows B and C. Of these C only has lifting power to overcome the force of gravity. The kite assumes a position in which force C and gravity counterbalance one another. [Illustration: FIG. 170.] A boat sailing across the wind is acted on in a similar manner (Fig. 170). The wind strikes the sail obliquely, and would thrust it to leeward were it not for the opposition of the water. The force A is resolved into forces B and C, of which C propels the boat on the line of its axis. The boat can be made to sail even "up" the wind, her head being brought round until a point is reached at which the force B on the boat, masts, etc., overcomes the force C. The capability of a boat for sailing up wind depends on her "lines" and the amount of surface she offers to the wind. THE BALLOON is a pear-shaped bag--usually made of silk--filled with some gas lighter than air. The tendency of a heavier medium to displace a lighter drives the gas upwards, and with it the bag and the wicker-work car attached to a network encasing the bag. The tapering neck at the lower end is open, to permit the free escape of gas as the atmospheric pressure outside diminishes with increasing elevation. At the top of the bag is a wooden valve opening inwards, which can be drawn down by a rope passing up to it through the neck whenever the aeronaut wishes to let gas escape for a descent. He is able to cause a very rapid escape by pulling another cord depending from a "ripping piece" near the top of the bag. In case of emergency this is torn away bodily, leaving a large hole. The ballast (usually sand) carried enables him to maintain a state of equilibrium between the upward pull of the gas and the downward pull of gravity. To sink he lets out gas, to rise he throws out ballast; and this process can be repeated until the ballast is exhausted. The greatest height ever attained by aeronauts is the 7-1/4 miles, or 37,000 feet, of Messrs. Glaisher and Coxwell on September 5, 1862. The ascent nearly cost them their lives, for at an elevation of about 30,000 feet they were partly paralyzed by the rarefaction of the air, and had not Mr. Coxwell been able to pull the valve rope with his teeth and cause a descent, both would have died from want of air. [Illustration: FIG. 171.] The _flying-machine_, which scientific engineers have so long been trying to produce, will probably be quite independent of balloons, and will depend for its ascensive powers on the action of air on oblique surfaces. Sir Hiram Maxim's experimental air-ship embodied the principles shown by Fig. 171. On a deck was mounted an engine, E, extremely powerful for its weight. This drove large propellers, S S. Large aeroplanes, of canvas stretched over light frameworks, were set up overhead, the forward end somewhat higher than the rear. The machine was run on rails so arranged as to prevent it rising. Unfortunately an accident happened at the first trial and destroyed the machine. In actual flight it would be necessary to have a vertical rudder for altering the horizontal direction, and a horizontal "tail" for steering up or down. The principle of an aeroplane is that of the kite, with this difference, that, instead of moving air striking a captive body, a moving body is propelled against more or less stationary air. The resolution of forces is shown by the arrows as before. Up to the present time no practical flying-machine has appeared. But experimenters are hard at work examining the conditions which must be fulfilled to enable man to claim the "dominion of the air." [34] The "Romance of Modern Mechanism," p. 243 Chapter XVIII. HYDRAULIC MACHINERY. The siphon--The bucket pump--The force-pump--The most marvellous pump--The blood channels--The course of the blood--The hydraulic press--Household water-supply fittings--The ball-cock--The water-meter--Water-supply systems--The household filter--Gas traps--Water engines--The cream separator--The "hydro." In the last chapter we saw that the pressure of the atmosphere is 15 lbs. to the square inch. Suppose that to a very long tube having a sectional area of one square inch we fit an air-tight piston (Fig. 172), and place the lower end of the tube in a vessel of water. On raising the piston a vacuum would be created in the tube, did not the pressure of the atmosphere force water up into the tube behind the piston. The water would continue to rise until it reached a point 34 feet perpendicularly above the level of the water in the vessel. The column would then weigh 15 lbs., and exactly counterbalance the atmospheric pressure; so that a further raising of the piston would not raise the water any farther. At sea-level, therefore, the _lifting_ power of a pump by suction is limited to 34 feet. On the top of a lofty mountain, where the air-pressure is less, the height of the column would be diminished--in fact, be proportional to the pressure. [Illustration: FIG. 172.] [Illustration: FIG. 173.] THE SIPHON is an interesting application of the principle of suction. By its own weight water may be made to lift water through a height not exceeding 34 feet. This is explained by Fig. 173. The siphon pipe, A B C D, is in the first instance filled by suction. The weight of the water between A and B counter-balances that between B and C. But the column C D hangs, as it were, to the heels of B C, and draws it down. Or, to put it otherwise, the column B D, being heavier than the column B A, draws it over the topmost point of the siphon. Any parting between the columns, provided that B A does not exceed 34 feet, is impossible, as the pressure of the atmosphere on the mouth of B A is sufficient to prevent the formation of a vacuum. THE BUCKET PUMP. We may now pass to the commonest form of pump used in houses, stables, gardens, etc. (Fig. 174). The piston has a large hole through it, over the top of which a valve is hinged. At the bottom of the barrel is a second valve, also opening upwards, seated on the top of the supply pipe. In sketch (_a_) the first upstroke is in progress. A vacuum forms under the piston, or plunger, and water rises up the barrel to fill it. The next diagram (_b_) shows the first downstroke. The plunger valve now opens and allows water to rise above the piston, while the lower closes under the pressure of the water above and the pull of that below. During the second upstroke (_c_) the water above the piston is raised until it overflows through the spout, while a fresh supply is being sucked in below. [Illustration: FIG. 174.] THE FORCE-PUMP. [Illustration: FIG. 175. Force-pump; suction stroke.] [Illustration: FIG. 176. Force-pump; delivery stroke.] For driving water to levels above that of the pump a somewhat different arrangement is required. One type of force-pump is shown in Figs. 175, 176. The piston now is solid, and the upper valve is situated in the delivery pipe. During an upstroke this closes, and the other opens; the reverse happening during a downstroke. An air-chamber is generally fitted to the delivery pipe when water is to be lifted to great heights or under high pressure. At each delivery stroke the air in the chamber is compressed, absorbing some of the shock given to the water in the pipe by the water coming from the pump; and its expansion during the next suction stroke forces the water gradually up the pipe. The air-chamber is a very prominent feature of the fire-engine. A _double-action_ force-pump is seen in Fig. 177, making an upward stroke. Both sides of the piston are here utilized, and the piston rod works through a water-tight stuffing-box. The action of the pump will be easily understood from the diagram. [Illustration: FIG. 177.] THE MOST MARVELLOUS PUMP known is the _heart_. We give in Fig. 178 a diagrammatic sketch of the system of blood circulation in the human body, showing the heart, the arteries, and the veins, big and little. The body is supposed to be facing the reader, so that the left lung, etc., is to his right. [Illustration: FIG. 178.--A diagrammatic representation of the circulatory system of the blood.] The heart, which forces the blood through the body, is a large muscle (of about the size of the clenched fist) with four cavities. These are respectively known as the right and left _auricles_, and the right and left _ventricles_. They are arranged in two pairs, the auricle uppermost, separated by a fleshy partition. Between each auricle and its ventricle is a valve, which consists of strong membranous flaps, with loose edges turned downwards. The left-side valve is the _mitral_ valve, that between the right auricle and ventricle the _tricuspid_ valve. The edges of the valves fall together when the heart contracts, and prevent the passage of blood. Each ventricle has a second valve through which it ejects the blood. (That of the right ventricle has been shown double for the sake of convenience.) The action of the heart is this:--The auricles and ventricles expand; blood rushes into the auricles from the channels supplying them, and distends them and the ventricles; the auricles contract and fill the ventricles below quite full (there are no valves above the auricles, but the force of contraction is not sufficient to return the blood to the veins); the ventricles contract; the mitral and tricuspid valves close; the valves leading to the arteries open; blood is forced out of the ventricles. THE BLOOD CHANNELS are of two kinds--(1) The _arteries_, which lead the blood into the circulatory system; (2) the _veins_, which lead the blood back to the heart. The arteries divide up into branches, and these again divide into smaller and smaller arteries. The smallest, termed _capillaries_ (Latin, _capillus_, a hair), are minute tubes having an average diameter of 1/3000th of an inch. These permeate every part of the body. The capillary arteries lead into the smallest veins, which unite to form larger and larger veins, until what we may call the main streams are reached. Through these the blood flows to the heart. There are three main points of difference between arteries and veins. In the first place, the larger arteries have thick elastic walls, and maintain their shape even when empty. This elasticity performs the function of the air-chamber of the force-pump. When the ventricles contract, driving blood into the arteries, the walls of the latter expand, and their contraction pushes the blood steadily forward without shock. The capillaries have very thin walls, so that fluids pass through them to and from the body, feeding it and taking out waste matter. The veins are all thin-walled, and collapse when empty. Secondly, most veins are furnished with valves, which prevent blood flowing the wrong way. These are similar in principle to those of the heart. Arteries have no valves. Thirdly, arteries are generally deeply set, while many of the veins run near the surface of the body. Those on the front of the arm are specially visible. Place your thumb on them and run it along towards the wrist, and you will notice that the veins distend owing to the closing of the valves just mentioned. Arterial blood is _red_, and comes out from a cut in gulps, on account of the contraction of the elastic walls. If you cut a vein, _blue_ blood issues in a steady stream. The change of colour is caused by the loss of oxygen during the passage of the blood through the capillaries, and the absorption of carbon dioxide from the tissues. The _lungs_ are two of the great purifiers of the blood. As it circulates through them, it gives up the carbon dioxide which it has absorbed, and receives pure oxygen in exchange. If the air of a room is "foul," the blood does not get the proper amount of oxygen. For this reason it is advisable for us to keep the windows of our rooms open as much as possible both day and night. Fatigue is caused by the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other impurities in the blood. When we run, the heart pumps blood through the lungs faster than they can purify it, and eventually our muscles become poisoned to such an extent that we have to stop from sheer exhaustion. THE COURSE OF THE BLOOD. It takes rather less than a minute for a drop of blood to circulate from the heart through the whole system and back to the heart. We may briefly summarize the course of the circulation of the blood thus:--It is expelled from the left ventricle into the _aorta_ and the main arteries, whence it passes into the smaller arteries, and thence into the capillaries of the brain, stomach, kidneys, etc. It here imparts oxygen to the body, and takes in impurities. It then enters the veins, and through them flows back to the right auricle; is driven into the right ventricle; is expelled into the _pulmonary_ (lung) _arteries_; enters the lungs, and is purified. It returns to the left auricle through the _pulmonary veins_; enters the left auricle, passes to left ventricle, and so on. A healthy heart beats from 120 times per minute in a one-year-old infant to 60 per minute in a very aged person. The normal rate for a middle-aged adult is from 80 to 70 beats. Heart disease signifies the failure of the heart valves to close properly. Blood passes back when the heart contracts, and the circulation is much enfeebled. By listening through a stethoscope the doctor is able to tell whether the valves are in good order. A hissing sound during the beat indicates a leakage past the valves; a thump, or "clack," that they shut completely. THE HYDRAULIC PRESS. It is a characteristic of fluids and gases that if pressure be brought to bear on any part of a mass of either class of bodies it is transmitted equally and undiminished in all directions, and acts with the same force on all equal surfaces, at right angles to those surfaces. The great natural philosopher Pascal first formulated this remarkable fact, of which a simple illustration is given in Fig. 179. Two cylinders, A and B, having a bore of one and two inches respectively, are connected by a pipe. Water is poured in, and pistons fitting the cylinders accurately and of equal weight are inserted. On piston B is placed a load of 10 lbs. To prevent A rising above the level of B, it must be loaded proportionately. The area of piston A is four times that of B, so that if we lay on it a 40-lb. weight, neither piston will move. The walls of the cylinders and connecting pipe are also pressed outwards in the ratio of 10 lbs. for every part of their interior surface which has an area equal to that of piston B. [Illustration: FIG. 179.] [Illustration: FIG. 180.--The cylinder and ram of a hydraulic press.] The hydraulic press is an application of this law. Cylinder B is represented by a force pump of small bore, capable of delivering water at very high pressures (up to 10 tons per square inch). In the place of A we have a stout cylinder with a solid plunger, P (Fig. 180), carrying the _table_ on which the object to be pressed is placed. Bramah, the inventor of the hydraulic press, experienced great difficulty in preventing the escape of water between the top of the cylinder and the plunger. If a "gland" packing of the type found in steam-cylinders were used, it failed to hold back the water unless it were screwed down so tightly as to jam the plunger. He tried all kinds of expedients without success; and his invention, excellent though it was in principle, seemed doomed to failure, when his foreman, Henry Maudslay,[35] solved the problem in a simple but most masterly manner. He had a recess turned in the neck of the cylinder at the point formerly occupied by the stuffing-box, and into this a leather collar of U-section (marked solid black in Fig. 180) was placed with its open side downwards. When water reached it, it forced the edges apart, one against the plunger, the other against the walls of the recess, with a degree of tightness proportionate to the pressure. On water being released from the cylinder the collar collapsed, allowing the plunger to sink without friction. The principle of the hydraulic press is employed in lifts; in machines for bending, drilling, and riveting steel plates, or forcing wheels on or off their axles; for advancing the "boring shield" of a tunnel; and for other purposes too numerous to mention. HOUSEHOLD WATER-SUPPLY FITTINGS. Among these, the most used is the tap, or cock. When a house is served by the town or district water supply, the fitting of proper taps on all pipes connected with the supply is stipulated for by the water-works authorities. The old-fashioned "plug" tap is unsuitable for controlling high-pressure water on account of the suddenness with which it checks the flow. Lest the reader should have doubts as to the nature of a plug tap, we may add that it has a tapering cone of metal working in a tapering socket. On the cone being turned till a hole through it is brought into line with the channel of the tap, water passes. A quarter turn closes the tap. [Illustration: FIG. 181.--A screw-down water cock.] Its place has been taken by the screw-down cock. A very common and effective pattern is shown in Fig. 181. The valve V, with a facing of rubber, leather, or some other sufficiently elastic substance, is attached to a pin, C, which projects upwards into the spindle A of the tap. This spindle has a screw thread on it engaging with a collar, B. When the spindle is turned it rises or falls, allowing the valve to leave its seating, V S, or forcing it down on to it. A packing P in the neck of B prevents the passage of water round the spindle. To open or close the tap completely is a matter of several turns, which cannot be made fast enough to produce a "water-hammer" in the pipes by suddenly arresting the flow. The reader will easily understand that if water flowing at the rate of several miles an hour is abruptly checked, the shock to the pipes carrying it must be very severe. THE BALL-COCK is used to feed a cistern automatically with water, and prevent the water rising too far in the cistern (Fig. 182). Water enters the cistern through a valve, which is opened and closed by a plug faced with rubber. The lower extremity of the plug is flattened, and has a rectangular hole cut in it. Through this passes a lever, L, attached at one end to a hollow copper sphere, and pivoted at the other on the valve casing. This casing is not quite circular in section, for two slots are cast in the circumference to allow water to pass round the plug freely when the valve is open. The buoyancy of the copper sphere is sufficient to force the plug's face up towards its seating as the valve rises, and to cut off the supply entirely when a certain level has been attained. If water is drawn off, the sphere sinks, the valve opens, and the loss is made good. [Illustration: FIG. 182.--An automatic ball-valve.] THE WATER-METER. [Illustration: FIG. 183.] Some consumers pay a sum quarterly for the privilege of a water supply, and the water company allows them to use as much as they require. Others, however, prefer to pay a fixed amount for every thousand gallons used. In such cases, a water-meter is required to record the consumption. We append a sectional diagram of Kennedy's patent water-meter (Fig. 183), very widely used. At the bottom is the measuring cylinder, fitted with a piston, (6), which is made to move perfectly water-tight and free from friction by means of a cylindrical ring of india-rubber, rolling between the body of the piston and the internal surface of the cylinder. The piston rod (25), after passing through a stuffing-box in the cylinder cover, is attached to a rack, (15), which gears with a cog, (13), fixed on a shaft. As the piston moves up and down, this cog is turned first in one direction, then in the other. To this shaft is connected the index mechanism (to the right). The cock-key (24) is so constructed that it can put either end of the measuring cylinder in communication with the supply or delivery pipes, if given a quarter turn (see Fig. 184). The weighted lever (14) moves loosely on the pinion shaft through part of a circle. From the pinion project two arms, one on each side of the lever. When the lever has been lifted by one of these past the vertical position, it falls by its own weight on to a buffer-box rest, (18). In doing so, it strikes a projection on the duplex lever (19), which is joined to the cock-key, and gives the latter a quarter turn. In order to follow the working of the meter, we must keep an eye on Figs. 183 and 184 simultaneously. Water is entering from A, the supply pipe. It flows through the cock downwards through channel D into the lower half of the cylinder. The piston rises, driving out the water above it through C to the delivery pipe B. Just as the piston completes its stroke the weight, raised by the rack and pinion, topples over, and strikes the key-arm, which it sends down till stopped by the buffer-box. The tap is then at right angles to the position shown in Fig. 184, and water is directed from A down C into the top of the cylinder, forcing the piston down, while the water admitted below during the last stroke is forced up the passage D, and out by the outlet B. Before the piston has arrived at the bottom of the cylinder, the lifter will have lifted the weighted lever from the buffer-box, and raised it to a vertical position; from there it will have fallen on the right-hand key-arm, and have brought the cock-key to its former position, ready to begin another upward stroke. [Illustration: FIG. 184.] The _index mechanism_ makes allowance for the fact that the bevel-wheel on the pinion shaft has its direction reversed at the beginning of every stroke of the piston. This bevel engages with two others mounted loosely on the little shaft, on which is turned a screw thread to revolve the index counter wheels. Each of these latter bevels actuates the shaft through a ratchet; but while one turns the shaft when rotating in a clockwise direction only, the other engages it when making an anti-clockwise revolution. The result is that the shaft is always turned in the same direction. WATER-SUPPLY SYSTEMS. The water for a town or a district supply is got either from wells or from a river. In the former case it may be assumed to be free from impurities. In the latter, there is need for removing all the objectionable and dangerous matter which river water always contains in a greater or less degree. This purification is accomplished by first leading the water into large _settling tanks_, where the suspended matter sinks to the bottom. The water is then drawn off into _filtration beds_, made in the following manner. The bottom is covered with a thick layer of concrete. On this are laid parallel rows of bricks, the rows a small distance apart. Then come a layer of bricks or tiles placed close together; a layer of coarse gravel; a layer of finer gravel; and a thick layer of sand at the top. The sand arrests any solid matter in the water as it percolates to the gravel and drains below. Even the microbes,[36] of microscopic size, are arrested as soon as the film of mud has formed on the top of the sand. Until this film is formed the filter is not in its most efficient condition. Every now and then the bed is drained, the surface mud and sand carefully drained off, and fresh sand put in their place. A good filter bed should not pass more than from two to three gallons per hour for every square foot of surface, and it must therefore have a large area. It is sometimes necessary to send the water through a succession of beds, arranged in terraces, before it is sufficiently pure for drinking purposes. THE HOUSEHOLD FILTER. When there is any doubt as to the wholesomeness of the water supply, a small filter is often used. The microbe-stopper is usually either charcoal, sand, asbestos, or baked clay of some kind. In Fig. 185 we give a section of a Maignen filter. R is the reservoir for the filtered water; A the filter case proper; D a conical perforated frame; B a jacket of asbestos cloth secured top and bottom by asbestos cords to D; C powdered carbon, between which and the asbestos is a layer of special chemical filtering medium. A perforated cap, E, covers in the carbon and prevents it being disturbed when water is poured in. The carbon arrests the coarser forms of matter; the asbestos the finer. The asbestos jacket is easily removed and cleansed by heating over a fire. [Illustration: FIG. 185.] The most useful form of household filter is one which can be attached to a tap connected with the main. Such a filter is usually made of porcelain or biscuit china. The Berkefeld filter has an outer case of iron, and an interior hollow "candle" of porcelain from which a tube passes through the lid of the filter to a storage tank for the filtered water. The water from the main enters the outer case, and percolates through the porcelain walls to the internal cavity and thence flows away through the delivery pipe. Whatever be the type of filter used it must be cleansed at proper intervals. A foul filter is very dangerous to those who drink the water from it. It has been proved by tests that, so far from purifying the water, an inefficient and contaminated filter passes out water much more highly charged with microbes than it was before it entered. We must not therefore think that, because water has been filtered, it is necessarily safe. The reverse is only too often the case. GAS TRAPS. Dangerous microbes can be breathed as well as drunk into the human system. Every communication between house and drains should be most carefully "trapped." The principle of a gas trap between, say, a kitchen sink and the drain to carry off the water is given in Fig. 186. Enough water always remains in the bend to rise above the level of the elbow, effectually keeping back any gas that there may be in the pipe beyond the bend. [Illustration: FIG. 186.--A trap for foul air.] WATER-ENGINES. Before the invention of the steam-engine human industries were largely dependent on the motive power of the wind and running water. But when the infant nursed by Watt and Stephenson had grown into a giant, both of these natural agents were deposed from the important position they once held. Windmills in a state of decay crown many of our hilltops, and the water-wheel which formerly brought wealth to the miller now rots in its mountings at the end of the dam. Except for pumping and moving boats and ships, wind-power finds its occupation gone. It is too uncertain in quantity and quality to find a place in modern economics. Water-power, on the other hand, has received a fresh lease of life through the invention of machinery so scientifically designed as to use much more of the water's energy than was possible with the old-fashioned wheel. [Illustration: FIG. 187.--A Pelton wheel which develops 5,000 horse-power. Observe the shape of the double buckets.] The _turbine_, of which we have already spoken in our third chapter, is now the favourite hydraulic engine. Some water-turbines work on much the same principle as the Parsons steam-turbine; others resemble the De Laval. Among the latter the Pelton wheel takes the first place. By the courtesy of the manufacturers we are able to give some interesting details and illustrations of this device. [Illustration: FIG. 188.--Pelton wheel mounted, with nozzle in position.] The wheel, which may be of any diameter from six inches to ten feet, has buckets set at regular intervals round the circumference, sticking outwards. Each bucket, as will be gathered from our illustration of an enormous 5,000 h.p. wheel (Fig. 187), is composed of two cups. A nozzle is so arranged as to direct water on the buckets just as they reach the lowest point of a revolution (see Fig. 188). The water strikes the bucket on the partition between the two cups, which turns it right and left round the inside of the cups. The change of direction transfers the energy of the water to the wheel. [Illustration: FIG. 189.--Speed regulator for Pelton wheel.] The speed of the wheel may be automatically regulated by a deflecting nozzle (Fig. 189), which has a ball and socket joint to permit of its being raised or lowered by a centrifugal governor, thus throwing the stream on or off the buckets. The power of the wheel is consequently increased or diminished to meet the change of load, and a constant speed is maintained. When it is necessary to waste as little water as possible, a concentric tapered needle may be fitted inside the nozzle. When the nozzle is in its highest position the needle tip is withdrawn; as the nozzle sinks the needle protrudes, gradually decreasing the discharge area of the nozzle. Pelton wheels are designed to run at all speeds and to use water of any pressure. At Manitou, Colorado, is an installation of three wheels operated by water which leaves the nozzle at the enormous pressure of 935 lbs. per square inch. It is interesting to note that jets of very high-pressure water offer astonishing resistance to any attempt to deflect their course. A three-inch jet of 500-lb. water cannot be cut through by a blow from a crowbar. In order to get sufficient pressure for working hydraulic machinery in mines, factories, etc., water is often led for many miles in flumes, or artificial channels, along the sides of valleys from the source of supply to the point at which it is to be used. By the time that point is reached the difference between the gradients of the flume and of the valley bottom has produced a difference in height of some hundreds of feet. [Illustration: FIG. 190.--The Laxey water-wheel, Isle of Man. In the top right-hand corner is a Pelton wheel of proportionate size required to do the same amount of work with the same consumption of water at the same pressure.] The full-page illustration on p. 380 affords a striking testimony to the wonderful progress made in engineering practice during the last fifty years. The huge water-wheel which forms the bulk of the picture is that at Laxey, in the Isle of Man. It is 72-1/2 feet in diameter, and is supposed to develop 150 horse-power, which is transmitted several hundreds of feet by means of wooden rods supported at regular intervals. The power thus transmitted operates a system of pumps in a lead mine, raising 250 gallons of water per minute, to an elevation of 1,200 feet. The driving water is brought some distance to the wheel in an underground conduit, and is carried up the masonry tower by pressure, flowing over the top into the buckets on the circumference of the wheel. The little cut in the upper corner represents a Pelton wheel drawn on the same scale, which, given an equal supply of water at the same pressure, would develop the same power as the Laxey monster. By the side of the giant the other appears a mere toy. THE CREAM SEPARATOR. In 1864 Denmark went to war with Germany, and emerged from the short struggle shorn of the provinces of Lauenburg, Holstein, and Schleswig. The loss of the two last, the fairest and most fertile districts of the kingdom, was indeed grievous. The Danish king now ruled only over a land consisting largely of moor, marsh, and dunes, apparently worthless for any purpose. But the Danes, with admirable courage, entered upon a second struggle, this time with nature. They made roads and railways, dug irrigation ditches, and planted forest trees; and so gradually turned large tracts of what had been useless country into valuable possessions. Agriculture being much depressed, owing to the low price of corn, they next gave their attention to the improvement of dairy farming. Labour-saving machinery of all kinds was introduced, none more important than the device for separating the fatty from the watery constituents of milk. It would not be too much to say that the separator is largely responsible for the present prosperity of Denmark. [Illustration: FIG. 191.--Section of a Cream Separator.] How does it work? asks the reader. Centrifugal force[37] is the governing principle. To explain its application we append a sectional illustration (Fig. 191) of Messrs. Burmeister and Wain's hand-power separator, which may be taken as generally representative of this class of machines. Inside a circular casing is a cylindrical bowl, D, mounted on a shaft which can be revolved 5,000 times a minute by means of the cog-wheels and the screw thread chased on it near the bottom extremity. Milk flows from the reservoir R (supported on a stout arm) through tap A into a little distributer on the top of the separator, and from it drops into the central tube C of the bowl. Falling to the bottom, it is flung outwards by centrifugal force, finds an escape upwards through the holes _a a_, and climbs up the perforated grid _e_, the surface of which is a series of pyramidical excrescences, and finally reaches the inner surface of the drum proper. The velocity of rotation is so tremendous that the heavier portions of the milk--that is, the watery--crowd towards the point furthest from the centre, and keep the lighter fatty elements away from contact with the sides of the drum. In the diagram the water is represented by small circles, the cream by small crosses. As more milk enters the drum it forces upwards what is already there. The cap of the drum has an inner jacket, F, which at the bottom _all but touches_ the side of the drum. The distance between them is the merest slit; but the cream is deflected up outside F into space E, and escapes through a hole one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter perforating the plate G. The cream is flung into space K and trickles out of spout B, while the water flies into space H and trickles away through spout A. THE "HYDRO.," used in laundries for wringing clothes by centrifugal force, has a solid outer casing and an inner perforated cylindrical cage, revolved at high speed by a vertical shaft. The wet clothes are placed in the cage, and the machine is started. The water escapes through the perforations and runs down the side of the casing to a drain. After a few minutes the clothes are dry enough for ironing. So great is the centrifugal force that they are consolidated against the sides of the cage, and care is needed in their removal. [35] Inventor of the lathe slide-rest. [36] Living germs; some varieties the cause of disease. [37] That is, centre-fleeing force. Water dropped on a spinning top rushes towards the circumference and is shot off at right angles to a line drawn from the point of parting to the centre of the top. Chapter XIX. HEATING AND LIGHTING. The hot-water supply--The tank system--The cylinder system--How a lamp works--Gas and gasworks--Automatic stoking--A gas governor--The gas meter--Incandescent gas lighting. HOT-WATER SUPPLY. A well-equipped house is nowadays expected to contain efficient apparatus for supplying plenty of hot water at all hours of the day. There is little romance about the kitchen boiler and the pipes which the plumber and his satellites have sometimes to inspect and put right, but the methods of securing a proper circulation of hot water through the house are sufficiently important and interesting to be noticed in these pages. In houses of moderate size the kitchen range does the heating. The two systems of storing and distributing the heated water most commonly used are--(1) The _tank_ system; (2) the _cylinder_ system. THE TANK SYSTEM is shown diagrammatically in Fig. 192. The boiler is situated at the back of the range, and when a "damper" is drawn the fire and hot gases pass under it to a flue leading to the chimney. The almost boiling water rises to the top of the boiler and thence finds its way up the _flow pipe_ into the hot-water tank A, displacing the somewhat colder water there, which descends through the _return pipe_ to the bottom of the boiler. Water is drawn off from the flow pipe. This pipe projects some distance through the bottom of A, so that the hottest portion of the contents may be drawn off first. A tank situated in the roof, and fed from the main by a ball-cock valve, communicates with A through the siphon pipe S. The bend in this pipe prevents the ascent of hot water, which cannot sink through water colder than itself. From the top of A an _expansion pipe_ is led up and turned over the cold-water tank to discharge any steam which may be generated in the boiler. A hot-water radiator for warming the house may be connected to the flow and return pipes as shown. Since it opens a "short circuit" for the circulation, the water in the tank above will not be so well heated while it is in action. If cocks are fitted to the radiator pipes, the amount of heat thus deflected can be governed. [Illustration: FIG. 192.--The "tank" system of hot-water supply.] A disadvantage of the tank system is that the tank, if placed high enough to supply all flows, is sometimes so far from the boiler that the water loses much of its heat in the course of circulation. Also, if for any reason the cold water fails, tank A may be entirely emptied, circulation cease, and the water in the boiler and pipes boil away rapidly. THE CYLINDER SYSTEM (Fig. 193) is open to neither of these objections. Instead of a rectangular tank up aloft, we now have a large copper cylinder situated in the kitchen near the range. The flow and return pipes are continuous, and the cold supply enters the bottom of the cylinder through a pipe with a siphon bend in it. As before, water is drawn off from the flow pipe, and a radiator may be put in the circuit. Since there is no draw-off point below the top of the cylinder, even if the cold supply fails the cylinder will remain full, and the failure will be discovered long before there is any danger of the water in it boiling away. [Illustration: FIG. 193.--The "cylinder" system of hot-water supply.] Boiler explosions are due to obstructions in the pipes. If the expansion pipe and the cold-water supply pipe freeze, there is danger of a slight accumulation of steam; and if one of the circulation pipes is also blocked, steam must generate until "something has to go,"[38] which is naturally the boiler. Assuming that the pipes are quite full to the points of obstruction, the fracture would result from the expansion of the water. Steam cannot generate unless there be a space above the water. But the expanding water has stored up the heat which would have raised steam, and the moment expansion begins after fracture this energy is suddenly let loose. Steam forms instantaneously, augmenting the effects of the explosion. From this it will be gathered that all pipes should be properly protected against frost; especially near the roof. Another cause of disaster is the _furring up_ of the pipes with the lime deposited by hard water when heated. When hard water is used, the pipes will sooner or later be blocked near the boiler; and as the deposit is too hard to be scraped away, periodical renewals are unavoidable. HOW A LAMP WORKS. From heating we turn to lighting, and first to the ordinary paraffin lamp. The two chief things to notice about this are the wick and the chimney. The wick, being made of closely-woven cotton, draws up the oil by what is known as _capillary attraction_. If you dip the ends of two glass tubes, one half an inch, the other one-eighth of an inch in diameter, into a vessel of water, you will notice that the water rises higher in the smaller tube. Or get two clean glass plates and lay them face to face, touching at one end, but kept slightly apart at the other by some small object. If they are partly submerged perpendicularly, the water will rise between the plates--furthest on the side at which the two plates touch, and less and less as the other edge is approached. The tendency of liquids to rise through porous bodies is a phenomenon for which we cannot account. Mineral oil contains a large proportion of carbon and hydrogen; it is therefore termed hydro-carbon. When oil reaches the top of a lighted wick, the liquid is heated until it turns into gas. The carbon and hydrogen unite with the oxygen of the air. Some particles of the carbon apparently do not combine at once, and as they pass through the fiery zone of the flame are heated to such a temperature as to become highly luminous. It is to produce these light-rays that we use a lamp, and to burn our oil efficiently we must supply the flame with plenty of oxygen, with more than it could naturally obtain. So we surround it with a transparent chimney of special glass. The air inside the chimney is heated, and rises; fresh air rushes in at the bottom, and is also heated and replaced. As the air passes through, the flame seizes on the oxygen. If the wick is turned up until the flame becomes smoky and flares, the point has been passed at which the induced chimney draught can supply sufficient oxygen to combine with the carbon of the vapour, and the "free" carbon escapes as smoke. The blower-plate used to draw up a fire (Fig. 194) performs exactly the same function as the lamp chimney, but on a larger scale. The plate prevents air passing straight up the chimney over the coals, and compels it to find a way through the fire itself to replace the heated air rising up the chimney. [Illustration: FIG. 194.--Showing how a blower-plate draws up the fire.] GAS AND GASWORKS. A lamp is an apparatus for converting hydro-carbon mineral oil into gas and burning it efficiently. The gas-jet burns gases produced by driving off hydro-carbon vapours from coal in apparatus specially designed for the purpose. Gas-making is now, in spite of the competition of electric lighting, so important an industry that we shall do well to glance at the processes which it includes. Coal gas may be produced on a very small scale as follows:--Fill a tin canister (the joints of which have been made by folding the metal, not by soldering) with coal, clap on the lid, and place it, lid downwards, in a bright fire, after punching a hole in the bottom. Vapour soon begins to issue from the hole. This is probably at first only steam, due to the coal being more or less damp. But if a lighted match be presently applied the vapour takes fire, showing that coal gas proper is coming off. The flame lasts for a long time. When it dies the canister may be removed and the contents examined. Most of the carbon remains in the form of _coke_. It is bulk for bulk much lighter than coal, for the hydrogen, oxygen, and other gases, and some of the carbon have been driven off by the heat. The coke itself burns if placed in a fire, but without any smoke, such as issues from coal. [Illustration: FIG. 195.--Sketch of the apparatus used in the manufacture of coal gas.] Our home-made gas yields a smoky and unsatisfactory flame, owing to the presence of certain impurities--ammonia, tar, sulphuretted hydrogen, and carbon bisulphide. A gas factory must be equipped with means of getting rid of these objectionable constituents. Turning to Fig. 195, which displays very diagrammatically the main features of a gas plant, we observe at the extreme right the _retorts_, which correspond to our canister. These are usually long fire-brick tubes of D-section, the flat side at the bottom. Under each is a furnace, the flames of which play on the bottom, sides, and inner end of the retort. The outer end projecting beyond the brickwork seating has an iron air-tight door for filling the retort through, immediately behind which rises an iron exit pipe, A, for the gases. Tar, which vaporizes at high temperatures, but liquefies at ordinary atmospheric heat, must first be got rid of. This is effected by passing the gas through the _hydraulic main_, a tubular vessel half full of water running the whole length of the retorts. The end of pipe A dips below the surface of the water, which condenses most of the tar and steam. The partly-purified gas now passes through pipe B to the _condensers_, a series of inverted U-pipes standing on an iron chest with vertical cross divisions between the mouths of each U. These divisions dip into water, so that the gas has to pass up one leg of a U, down the other, up the first leg of the second pipe, and so on, till all traces of the tar and other liquid constituents have condensed on the inside of the pipe, from which they drop into the tank below. The next stage is the passage of the _scrubber_, filled with coke over which water perpetually flows. The ammonia gas is here absorbed. There still remain the sulphuretted hydrogen and the carbon bisulphide, both of which are extremely offensive to the nostrils. Slaked lime, laid on trays in an air-tight compartment called the _lime purifier_, absorbs most of the sulphurous elements of these; and the coal gas is then fit for use. On leaving the purifiers it flows into the _gasometer_, or gasholder, the huge cake-like form of which is a very familiar object in the environs of towns. The gasometer is a cylindrical box with a domed top, but no bottom, built of riveted steel plates. It stands in a circular tank of water, so that it may rise and fall without any escape of gas. The levity of the gas, in conjunction with weights attached to the ends of chains working over pulleys on the framework surrounding the holder, suffices to raise the holder. [Illustration: FIG. 196.--The largest gasholder in the world: South Metropolitan Gas Co., Greenwich Gas Works. Capacity, 12,158,600 cubic feet.] Some gasometers have an enormous capacity. The record is at present held by that built for the South Metropolitan Gas Co., London, by Messrs. Clayton & Son of Leeds. This monster (of which we append an illustration, Fig. 196) is 300 feet in diameter and 180 feet high. When fully extended it holds 12,158,600 cubic feet of gas. Owing to its immense size, it is built on the telescopic principle in six "lifts," of 30 feet deep each. The sides of each lift, or ring, except the topmost, have a section shaped somewhat like the letter N. Two of the members form a deep, narrow cup to hold water, in which the "dip" member of the ring above it rises and falls. [Illustration: FIG. 197.--Drawing retorts. (_Photo by F. Marsh._)] AUTOMATIC STOKING. The labour of feeding the retorts with coal and removing the coke is exceedingly severe. In the illustration on p. 400 (made from a very fine photograph taken by Mr. F. Marsh of Clifton) we see a man engaged in "drawing" the retorts through the iron doors at their outer ends. Automatic machinery is now used in large gasworks for both operations. One of the most ingenious stokers is the De Brouwer, shown at work in Fig. 198. The machine is suspended from an overhead trolley running on rails along the face of the retorts. Coal falls into a funnel at the top of the telescopic pipe P from hoppers in the story above, which have openings, H H, controlled by shutters. The coal as it falls is caught by a rubber belt working round part of the circumference of the large wheel W and a number of pulleys, and is shot into the mouth of the retort. The operator is seen pulling the handle which opens the shutter of the hopper above the feed-tube, and switching on the 4 h.p. electric motor which drives the belt and moves the machine about. One of these feeders will charge a retort 20 feet long in twenty-two seconds. [Illustration: FIG. 198.--De Brouwer automatic retort charger.] A GAS GOVERNOR. Some readers may have noticed that late at night a gas-jet, which a few hours before burned with a somewhat feeble flame when the tap was turned fully on, now becomes more and more vigorous, and finally may flare up with a hissing sound. This is because many of the burners fed by the main supplying the house have been turned off, and consequently there is a greater amount of gas available for the jets still burning, which therefore feel an increased pressure. As a matter of fact, the pressure of gas in the main is constantly varying, owing partly to the irregularity of the delivery from the gasometer, and partly to the fact that the number of burners in action is not the same for many minutes together. It must also be remembered that houses near the gasometer end of the main will receive their gas at a higher pressure than those at the other end. The gas stored in the holders may be wanted for use in the street lamps a few yards away, or for other lamps several miles distant. It is therefore evident that if there be just enough pressure to give a good supply to the nearest lamp, there will be too little a short distance beyond it, and none at all at the extreme point; so that it is necessary to put on enough pressure to overcome the friction on all these miles of pipe, and give just enough gas at the extreme end. It follows that at all intermediate points the pressure is excessive. Gas of the average quality is burned to the greatest advantage, as regards its light-giving properties, when its pressure is equal to that of a column of water half an inch high, or about 1/50 lb. to the square inch. With less it gives a smoky, flickering light, and with more the combustion is also imperfect. [Illustration: FIG. 199.] Every house supply should therefore be fitted with a gas governor, to keep the pressure constant. A governor frequently used, the Stott, is shown in section in Fig. 199. Gas enters from the main on the right, and passes into a circular elbow, D, which has top and bottom apertures closed by the valves V V. Attached to the valve shaft is a large inverted cup of metal, the tip of which is immersed in mercury. The pressure at which the governor is to act is determined by the weights W, with which the valve spindle is loaded at the top. As soon as this pressure is exceeded, the gas in C C lifts the metal cup, and V V are pressed against their seats, so cutting off the supply. Gas cannot escape from C C, as it has not sufficient pressure to force its way through the mercury under the lip of the cup. Immediately the pressure in C C falls, owing to some of the gas being used up, the valves open and admit more gas. When the fluctuations of pressure are slight, the valves never close completely, but merely throttle the supply until the pressure beyond them falls to its proper level--that is, they pass just as much gas as the burners in use can consume at the pressure arranged for. Governors of much larger size, but working on much the same principle, are fitted to the mains at the point where they leave the gasometers. They are not, however, sensitive to local fluctuations in the pipes, hence the necessity for separate governors in the house between the meter and the burners. THE GAS-METER commonly used in houses acts on the principle shown in Fig. 200. The air-tight casing is divided by horizontal and vertical divisions into three gas-chambers, B, C, and D. Gas enters at A, and passes to the valve chamber B. The slide-valves of this allow it to pass into C and D, and also into the two circular leather bellows E, F, which are attached to the central division G, but are quite independent of one another. [Illustration: FIG. 200.--Sketch of the bellows and chambers of a "dry" gas meter.] We will suppose that in the illustration the valves are admitting gas to chamber C and bellows F. The pressure in C presses the circular head of E towards the division G, expelling the contents of the bellows through an outlet pipe (not shown) to the burners in operation within the house. Simultaneously the inflation of F forces the gas in chamber D also through the outlet. The head-plates of the bellows are attached to rods and levers (not shown) working the slide-valves in B. As soon as E is fully in, and F fully expanded, the valves begin to open and put the inlet pipe in communication with D and E, and allow the contents of F and C to escape to the outlet. The movements of the valve mechanism operate a train of counting wheels, visible through a glass window in the side of the case. As the bellows have a definite capacity, every stroke that they give means that a certain volume of gas has been ejected either from them or from the chambers in which they move: this is registered by the counter. The apparatus practically has two double-action cylinders (of which the bellows ends are the pistons) working on the same principle as the steam-cylinder (Fig. 21). The valves have three ports--the central, or exhaust, leading to the outlet, the outer ones from the inlet. The bellows are fed through channels in the division G. INCANDESCENT GAS LIGHTING. The introduction of the electric arc lamp and the incandescent glow-lamp seemed at one time to spell the doom of gas as an illuminating agent. But the appearance in 1886 of the Welsbach _incandescent mantle_ for gas-burners opened a prosperous era in the history of gas lighting. The luminosity of a gas flame depends on the number of carbon particles liberated within it, and the temperature to which these particles can be heated as they pass through the intensely hot outside zone of the flame. By enriching the gas in carbon more light is yielded, up to a certain point, with a flame of a given temperature. To increase the heat of the flame various devices were tried before the introduction of the incandescent mantle, but they were found to be too short-lived to have any commercial value. Inventors therefore sought for methods by which the emission of light could be obtained from coal gas independently of the incandescence of the carbon particles in the flame itself; and step by step it was discovered that gas could be better employed merely as a heating agent, to raise to incandescence substances having a higher emissivity of light than carbon. Dr. Auer von Welsbach found that the substances most suitable for incandescent mantles were the oxides of certain rare metals, _thorium_, and _cerium_. The mantle is made by dipping a cylinder of cotton net into a solution of nitrate of thorium and cerium, containing 99 per cent. of the former and 1 per cent. of the latter metal. When the fibres are sufficiently soaked, the mantle is withdrawn, squeezed, and placed on a mould to dry. It is next held over a Bunsen gas flame and the cotton is burned away, while the nitrates are converted into oxides. The mantle is now ready for use, but very brittle. So it has to undergo a further dipping, in a solution of gun-cotton and alcohol, to render it tough enough for packing. When it is required for use, it is suspended over the burner by an asbestos thread woven across the top, a light is applied to the bottom, and the collodion burned off, leaving nothing but the heat-resisting oxides. The burner used with a mantle is constructed on the Bunsen principle. The gas is mixed, as it emerges from the jet, with sufficient air to render its combustion perfect. All the carbon is burned, and the flame, though almost invisible, is intensely hot. The mantle oxides convert the heat energy of the flame into light energy. This is proved not only by the intense whiteness of the mantle, but by the fact that the heat issuing from the chimney of the burner is not nearly so great when the mantle is in position as when it is absent. The incandescent mantle is more extensively used every year. In Germany 90 per cent. of gas lighting is on the incandescent system, and in England about 40 per cent. We may notice, as an interesting example of the fluctuating fortunes of invention, that the once doomed gas-burner has, thanks to Welsbach's mantle, in many instances replaced the incandescent electric lamps that were to doom it. [38] If, of course, there is no safety-valve in proper working order included in the installation. Chapter XX. VARIOUS MECHANISMS. CLOCKS AND WATCHES:--A short history of timepieces--The construction of timepieces--The driving power--The escapement--Compensating pendulums--The spring balance--The cylinder escapement--The lever escapement--Compensated balance-wheels--Keyless winding mechanism for watches--The hour hand train. LOCKS:--The Chubb lock--The Yale lock. THE CYCLE:--The gearing of a cycle--The free wheel--The change-speed gear. AGRICULTURAL MACHINES:--The threshing-machine--Mowing-machines. SOME NATURAL PHENOMENA:--Why sun-heat varies in intensity--The tides--Why high tide varies daily. CLOCKS AND WATCHES. A SHORT HISTORY OF TIMEPIECES. The oldest device for measuring time is the sun-dial. That of Ahaz mentioned in the Second Book of Kings is the earliest dial of which we have record. The obelisks of the Egyptians and the curious stone pillars of the Druidic age also probably served as shadow-casters. The clepsydra, or water-clock, also of great antiquity, was the first contrivance for gauging the passage of the hours independently of the motion of the earth. In its simplest form it was a measure into which water fell drop by drop, hour levels being marked on the inside. Subsequently a very simple mechanism was added to drive a pointer--a float carrying a vertical rack, engaging with a cog on the pointer spindle; or a string from the float passed over a pulley attached to the pointer and rotated it as the float rose, after the manner of the wheel barometer (Fig. 153). In 807 A.D. Charlemagne received from the King of Persia a water-clock which struck the hours. It is thus described in Gifford's "History of France":--"The dial was composed of twelve small doors, which represented the division of the hours. Each door opened at the hour it was intended to represent, and out of it came a small number of little balls, which fell one by one, at equal distances of time, on a brass drum. It might be told by the eye what hour it was by the number of doors that were open, and by the ear by the number of balls that fell. When it was twelve o'clock twelve horsemen in miniature issued forth at the same time and shut all the doors." Sand-glasses were introduced about 330 A.D. Except for special purposes, such as timing sermons and boiling eggs, they have not been of any practical value. The clepsydra naturally suggested to the mechanical mind the idea of driving a mechanism for registering time by the force of gravity acting on some body other than water. The invention of the _weight-driven clock_ is attributed, like a good many other things, to Archimedes, the famous Sicilian mathematician of the third century B.C.; but no record exists of any actual clock composed of wheels operated by a weight prior to 1120 A.D. So we may take that year as opening the era of the clock as we know it. About 1500 Peter Hele of Nuremberg invented the _mainspring_ as a substitute for the weight, and the _watch_ appeared soon afterwards (1525 A.D.). The pendulum was first adopted for controlling the motion of the wheels by Christian Huygens, a distinguished Dutch mechanician, in 1659. To Thomas Tompion, "the father of English watchmaking," is ascribed the honour of first fitting a _hairspring_ to the escapement of a watch, in or about the year 1660. He also introduced the _cylinder escapement_ now so commonly used in cheap watches. Though many improvements have been made since his time, Tompion manufactured clocks and watches which were excellent timekeepers, and as a reward for the benefits conferred on his fellows during his lifetime, he was, after death, granted the exceptional honour of a resting-place in Westminster Abbey. THE CONSTRUCTION OF TIMEPIECES. A clock or watch contains three main elements:--(1) The source of power, which may be a weight or a spring; (2) the train of wheels operated by the driving force; (3) the agent for controlling the movements of the train--this in large clocks is usually a pendulum, in small clocks and watches a hairspring balance. To these may be added, in the case of clocks, the apparatus for striking the hour. THE DRIVING POWER. _Weights_ are used only in large clocks, such as one finds in halls, towers, and observatories. The great advantage of employing weights is that a constant driving power is exerted. _Springs_ occupy much less room than weights, and are indispensable for portable timepieces. The employment of them caused trouble to early experimenters on account of the decrease in power which necessarily accompanies the uncoiling of a wound-up spring. Jacob Zech of Prague overcame the difficulty in 1525 by the invention of the _fusee_, a kind of conical pulley interposed between the barrel, or circular drum containing the mainspring, and the train of wheels which the spring has to drive. The principle of the "drum and fusee" action will be understood from Fig. 201. The mainspring is a long steel ribbon fixed at one end to an arbor (the watchmaker's name for a spindle or axle), round which it is tightly wound. The arbor and spring are inserted in the barrel. The arbor is prevented from turning by a ratchet, B, and click, and therefore the spring in its effort to uncoil causes the barrel to rotate. [Illustration: FIG. 201.] A string of catgut (or a very fine chain) is connected at one end to the circumference of the drum, and wound round it, the other end being fixed to the larger end of the fusee, which is attached to the driving-wheel of the watch or clock by the intervention of a ratchet and click (not shown). To wind the spring the fusee is turned backward by means of a key applied to the square end A of the fusee arbor, and this draws the string from off the drum on to the fusee. The force of the spring causes the fusee to rotate by pulling the string off it, coil by coil, and so drives the train of wheels. But while the mainspring, when fully wound, turns the fusee by uncoiling the string from the smallest part of the fusee, it gets the advantage of the larger radius as its energy becomes lessened. The fusee is still used for marine chronometers, for some clocks that have a mainspring and pendulum, and occasionally for watches. In the latter it has been rendered unnecessary by the introduction of the _going-barrel_ by Swiss watchmakers, who formed teeth on the edge of the mainspring barrel to drive the train of wheels. This kind of drum is called "going" because it drives the watch during the operation of winding, which is performed by rotating the drum arbor to which the inner end of the spring is attached. A ratchet prevents the arbor from being turned backwards by the spring. The adoption of the going-barrel has been made satisfactory by the improvements in the various escapement actions. THE ESCAPEMENT. [Illustration: FIG. 202.] The spring or weight transmits its power through a train of cogs to the _escapement_, or device for regulating the rate at which the wheels are to revolve. In clocks a _pendulum_ is generally used as the controlling agent. Galileo, when a student at Pisa, noticed that certain hanging lamps in the cathedral there swung on their cords at an equal rate; and on investigation he discovered the principle that the shorter a pendulum is the more quickly will it swing to and fro. As has already been observed, Huygens first applied the principle to the governing of clocks. In Fig. 202 we have a simple representation of the "dead-beat" escapement commonly used in clocks. The escape-wheel is mounted on the shaft of the last cog of the driving train, the pallet on a spindle from which depends a split arm embracing the rod and the pendulum. We must be careful to note that the pendulum _controls_ motion only; it does not cause movement. The escape-wheel revolves in a clockwise direction. The two pallets _a_ and _b_ are so designed that only one can rest on the teeth at one time. In the sketch the sloping end of _b_ has just been forced upwards by the pressure of a tooth. This swings the pallet and the pendulum. The momentum of the latter causes _a_ to descend, and at the instant when _b_ clears its tooth _a_ catches and holds another. The left-hand side of _a_, called the _locking-face_, is part of a circle, so that the escape-wheel is held motionless as long as it touches _a_: hence the term, "dead beat"--that is, brought to a dead stop. As the pendulum swings back, to the left, under the influence of gravity, _a_ is raised and frees the tooth. The wheel jerks round, and another tooth is caught by the locking-face of _b_. Again the pendulum swings to the right, and the sloping end of _b_ is pushed up once more, giving the pendulum fresh impetus. This process repeats itself as long as the driving power lasts--for weeks, months, or years, as the case may be, and the mechanism continues to be in good working order. COMPENSATING PENDULUMS. Metal expands when heated; therefore a steel pendulum which is of the exact length to govern a clock correctly at a temperature of 60° would become too long at 80°, and slow the clock, and too short at 40°, and cause it to gain. In common clocks the pendulum rod is often made of wood, which maintains an almost constant length at all ordinary temperatures. But for very accurate clocks something more efficient is required. Graham, the partner of Thomas Tompion, took advantage of the fact that different kinds of metal have different ratios of expansion to produce a _self-compensating_ pendulum on the principle illustrated by Fig. 203. He used steel for the rod, and formed the _bob_, or weighted end, of a glass jar containing mercury held in a stirrup; the mercury being of such a height that, as the pendulum rod lengthened with a rise of temperature, the mercury expanded _upwards_ sufficiently to keep the distance between the point of suspension and the centre of gravity of the bob always the same. With a fall of temperature the rod shortened, while the mercury sank in the jar. This device has not been improved upon, and is still used in observatories and other places where timekeepers of extreme precision are required. The milled nut S in Fig. 203 is fitted at the end of the pendulum rod to permit the exact adjustment of the pendulum's length. For watches, chronometers, and small clocks THE SPRING BALANCE takes the place of the pendulum. We still have an escape-wheel with teeth of a suitable shape to give impulses to the controlling agent. There are two forms of spring escapement, but as both employ a hairspring and balance-wheel we will glance at these before going further. [Illustration: FIG. 203.] The _hairspring_ is made of very fine steel ribbon, tempered to extreme elasticity, and shaped to a spiral. The inner end is attached to the arbor of the _balance-wheel_, the outer end to a stud projecting from the plate of the watch. When the balance-wheel, impelled by the escapement, rotates, it winds up the spring. The energy thus stored helps the wheel to revolve the other way during the locking of a tooth of the escape-wheel. The time occupied by the winding and the unwinding depends upon the length of the spring. The strength of the impulse makes no difference. A strong impulse causes the spring to coil itself up more than a weak impulse would; but inasmuch as more energy is stored the process of unwinding is hastened. To put the matter very simply--a strong impulse moves the balance-wheel further, but rotates it quickly; a weak impulse moves it a shorter distance, but rotates it slowly. In fact, the principle of the pendulum is also that of the hairspring; and the duration of a vibration depends on the length of the rod in the one case, and of the spring in the other. Motion is transmitted to the balance by one of two methods. Either (1) directly, by a cylinder escapement; or (2) indirectly, through a lever. [Illustration: FIG. 204.--"Cylinder" watch escapement.] THE CYLINDER ESCAPEMENT is seen in Fig. 204. The escape-wheel has sharp teeth set on stalks. (One tooth is removed to show the stalk.) The balance-wheel is mounted on a small steel cylinder, with part of the circumference cut away at the level of the teeth, so that if seen from above it would appear like _a_ in our illustration. A tooth is just beginning to shove its point under the nearer edge of the opening. As it is forced forwards, _b_ is revolved in a clockwise direction, winding up the hairspring. When the tooth has passed the nearer edge it flies forward, striking the inside of the further wall of the cylinder, which holds it while the spring uncoils. The tooth now pushes its way past the other edge, accelerating the unwinding, and, as it escapes, the next tooth jumps forward and is arrested by the outside of the cylinder. The balance now reverses its motion, is helped by the tooth, is wound up, locks the tooth, and so on. THE LEVER ESCAPEMENT is somewhat more complicated. The escape-wheel teeth are locked and unlocked by the pallets P P^1 projecting from a lever which moves on a pivot (Fig. 205). The end of the lever is forked, and has a square notch in it. On the arbor of the balance-wheel is a roller, or plate, R, which carries a small pin, I. Two pins, B B, projecting from the plate of the watch prevent the lever moving too far. We must further notice the little pin C on the lever, and a notch in the edge of the roller. [Illustration: FIG. 205.--"Lever" watch escapement.] In the illustration a tooth has just passed under the "impulse face" _b_ of P^1. The lever has been moved upwards at the right end; and its forked end has given an impulse to R, and through it to the balance-wheel. The spring winds up. The pin C prevents the lever dropping, because it no longer has the notch opposite to it, but presses on the circumference of R. As the spring unwinds it strikes the lever at the moment when the notch and C are opposite. The lever is knocked downwards, and the tooth, which had been arrested by the locking-face _a_ of pallet P, now presses on the impulse face _b_, forcing the left end of the lever up. The impulse pin I receives a blow, assisting the unwinding of the spring, and C again locks the lever. The same thing is repeated in alternate directions over and over again. COMPENSATING BALANCE-WHEELS. The watchmaker has had to overcome the same difficulty as the clockmaker with regard to the expansion of the metal in the controlling agent. When a metal wheel is heated its spokes lengthen, and the rim recedes from the centre. Now, let us suppose that we have two rods of equal weight, one three feet long, the other six feet long. To an end of each we fasten a 2-lb. weight. We shall find it much easier to wave the shorter rod backwards and forwards quickly than the other. Why? Because the weight of the longer rod has more leverage over the hand than has that of the shorter rod. Similarly, if, while the mass of the rim of a wheel remains constant, the length of the spokes varies, the effort needed to rotate the wheel to and fro at a constant rate must vary also. Graham got over the difficulty with a rod by means of the compensating pendulum. Thomas Earnshaw mastered it in wheels by means of the _compensating balance_, using the same principle--namely, the unequal expansion of different metals. Any one who owns a compensated watch will see, on stopping the tiny fly-wheel, that it has two spokes (Fig. 206), each carrying an almost complete semicircle of rim attached to it. A close examination shows that the rim is compounded of an outer strip of brass welded to an inner lining of steel. The brass element expands more with heat and contracts more with cold than steel; so that when the spokes become elongated by a rise of temperature, the pieces bend inwards at their free ends (Fig. 207); if the temperature falls, the spokes are shortened, and the rim pieces bend outwards (Fig. 208).[39] This ingenious contrivance keeps the leverage of the rim constant within very fine limits. The screws S S are inserted in the rim to balance it correctly, and very fine adjustment is made by means of the four tiny weights W W. In ships' chronometers,[40] the rim pieces are _sub_-compensated towards their free ends to counteract slight errors in the primary compensation. So delicate is the compensation that a daily loss or gain of only half a second is often the limit of error. [Illustration: FIG. 206. FIG. 207. FIG. 208. A "compensating" watch balance, at normal, super-normal, and sub-normal temperatures.] KEYLESS WINDING MECHANISM FOR WATCHES. The inconvenience attaching to a key-wound watch caused the Swiss manufacturers to put on the market, in 1851, watches which dispensed with a separate key. Those of our readers who carry keyless watches will be interested to learn how the winding and setting of the hands is effected by the little serrated knob enclosed inside the pendant ring. There are two forms of "going-barrel" keyless mechanism--(1) The rocking bar; (2) the shifting sleeve. The _rocking bar_ device is shown in Figs. 209, 210. The milled head M turns a cog, G, which is always in gear with a cog, F. This cog gears with two others, A and B, mounted at each end of the rocker R, which moves on pivot S. A spring, S P, attached to the watch plate presses against a small stud on the rocking bar, and keeps A normally in gear with C, mounted on the arbor of the mainspring. [Illustration: FIG. 209.--The winding mechanism of a keyless watch.] To wind the watch, M is turned so as to give F an anti-clockwise motion. The teeth of F now press A downwards and keep it in gear with C while the winding is done. A spring click (marked solid black) prevents the spring uncoiling (Fig. 209). If F is turned in a clockwise direction it lifts A and prevents it biting the teeth of C, and no strain is thrown on C. To set the hands, the little push-piece P is pressed inwards by the thumb (Fig. 210) so as to depress the right-hand end of R and bring B into gear with D, which in turn moves E, mounted on the end of the minute-hand shaft. The hands can now be moved in either direction by turning M. On releasing the push-piece the winding-wheels engage again. The _shifting sleeve_ mechanism has a bevel pinion in the place of G (Fig. 209) gearing with the mainspring cog. The shaft of the knob M is round where it passes through the bevel and can turn freely inside it, but is square below. On the square part is mounted a little sliding clutch with teeth on the top corresponding with the other teeth on the under side of the bevel-wheel, and teeth similar to those of G (Fig. 209) at the end. The clutch has a groove cut in the circumference, and in this lies the end of a spring lever which can be depressed by the push-piece. The mechanism much resembles on a small scale the motor car changing gear (Fig. 49). Normally, the clutch is pushed up the square part of the knob shaft by the spring so as to engage with the bevel and the winding-wheels. On depressing the clutch by means of the push-piece it gears with the minute-hand pinion, and lets go of the bevel. [Illustration: FIG. 210.--The hand-setting mechanism in action.] In one form of this mechanism the push-piece is dispensed with, and the minute-wheel pinion is engaged by pulling the knob upwards. THE HOUR-HAND TRAIN. [Illustration: FIG. 211.--The hour-hand train of a clock.] The teeth of the mainspring drum gear with a cog on the minute-hand shaft, which also carries one of the cogs of the escapement train. The shaft is permitted by the escapement to revolve once an hour. Fig. 211 shows diagrammatically how this is managed. The hour-hand shaft A (solid black) can be moved round inside the cog B, driven by the mainspring drum. It carries a cog, C. This gears with a cog, D, having three times as many teeth. The cog E, united to D, drives cog F, having four times as many teeth as E. To F is attached the collar G of the hour-hand. F and G revolve outside the minute-hand shaft. On turning A, C turns D and E, E turns F and the hour-hand, which revolves 1/3 of 1/4 = 1/12 as fast as A.[41] * * * * * LOCKS. On these unfortunately necessary mechanisms a great deal of ingenuity has been expended. With the advance of luxury and the increased worship of wealth, it becomes more and more necessary to guard one's belongings against the less scrupulous members of society. [Illustration: FIG. 212.] The simplest form of lock, such as is found in desks and very cheap articles, works on the principle shown in Fig. 212. The bolt is split at the rear, and the upper part bent upwards to form a spring. The under edge has two notches cut in it, separated by a curved excrescence. The key merely presses the bolt upwards against the spring, until the notch, engaging with the frame, moves it backwards or forwards until the spring drives the tail down into the other notch. This primitive device affords, of course, very little security. An advance is seen in the TUMBLER LOCK. [Illustration: FIG. 213.] The bolt now can move only in a horizontal direction. It has an opening cut in it with two notches (Figs. 213, 214). Behind the bolt lies the _tumbler_ T (indicated by the dotted line), pivoted at the angle on a pin. From the face of the tumbler a stud, S, projects through the hole in the bolt. This stud is forced into one or other of the notches by the spring, S^1, which presses on the tail of the tumbler. [Illustration: FIG. 214.] In Fig. 213 the key is about to actuate the locking mechanism. The next diagram (Fig. 214) shows how the key, as it enters the notch on the lower side of the bolt to move it along, also raises the tumbler stud clear of the projection between the two notches. By the time that the bolt has been fully "shot," the key leaves the under notch and allows the tumbler stud to fall into the rear locking-notch. A lock of this type also can be picked very easily, as the picker has merely to lift the tumbler and move the bolt along. Barron's lock, patented in 1778, had two tumblers and two studs; and the opening in the bolt had notches at the top as well as at the bottom (Fig. 215). This made it necessary for both tumblers to be raised simultaneously to exactly the right height. If either was not lifted sufficiently, a stud could not clear its bottom notch; if either rose too far, it engaged an upper notch. The chances therefore were greatly against a wrong key turning the lock. [Illustration: FIG. 215.--The bolt of a Barron lock.] THE CHUBB LOCK is an amplification of this principle. It usually has several tumblers of the shape shown in Fig. 216. The lock stud in these locks projects from the bolt itself, and the openings, or "gates," through which the stud must pass as the lock moves, are cut in the tumblers. It will be noticed that the forward notch of the tumbler has square serrations in the edges. These engage with similar serrations in the bolt stud and make it impossible to raise the tumbler if the bolt begins to move too soon when a wrong key is inserted. [Illustration: FIG. 216.--Tumbler of Chubb lock.] Fig. 217 is a Chubb key with eight steps. That nearest the head (8) operates a circular revolving curtain, which prevents the introduction of picking tools when a key is inserted and partly turned, as the key slot in the curtain is no longer opposite that in the lock. Step 1 moves the bolt. [Illustration: FIG. 217.--A Chubb key.] In order to shoot the bolt the height of the key steps must be so proportioned to the depth of their tumblers that all the gates in the tumblers are simultaneously raised to the right level for the stud to pass through them, as in Fig. 218. Here you will observe that the tumbler D on the extreme right (lifted by step 2 of the key) has a stud, D S, projecting from it over the other tumblers. This is called the _detector tumbler_. If a false key or picking tool is inserted it is certain to raise one of the tumblers too far. The detector is then over-lifted by the stud D S, and a spring catch falls into a notch at the rear. It is now impossible to pick the lock, as the detector can be released only by the right key shooting the bolt a little further in the locking direction, when a projection on the rear of the bolt lifts the catch and allows the tumbler to fall. The detector also shows that the lock has been tampered with, since even the right key cannot move the bolt until the overlocking has been performed. [Illustration: FIG. 218.--A Chubb key raising all the tumblers to the correct height.] Each tumbler step of a large Chubb key can be given one of thirty different heights; the bolt step one of twenty. By merely transposing the order of the steps in a six-step key it is possible to get 720 different combinations. By diminishing or increasing the heights the possible combinations may be raised to the enormous total of 7,776,000! [Illustration: FIG. 219.--Section of a Yale lock.] THE YALE LOCK, which comes from America, works on a quite different system. Its most noticeable feature is that it permits the use of a very small key, though the number of combinations possible is still enormous (several millions). In our illustrations (Figs. 219, 220, 221) we show the mechanism controlling the turning of the key. The keyhole is a narrow twisted slot in the face of a cylinder, G (Fig. 219), which revolves inside a larger fixed cylinder, F. As the key is pushed in, the notches in its upper edge raise up the pins A^1, B^1, C^1, D^1, E^1, until their tops exactly reach the surface of G, which can now be revolved by the key in Fig. 220, and work the bolt through the medium of the arm H. (The bolt itself is not shown.) If a wrong key is inserted, either some of the lower pins will project upwards into the fixed cylinder F (see Fig. 221), or some of the pins in F will sink into G. It is then impossible to turn the key. [Illustration: FIG. 220.--Yale key turning.] There are other well-known locks, such as those invented by Bramah and Hobbs. But as these do not lend themselves readily to illustration no detailed account can be given. We might, however, notice the _time_ lock, which is set to a certain hour, and can be opened by the right key or a number of keys in combination only when that hour is reached. Another very interesting device is the _automatic combination_ lock. This may have twenty or more keys, any one of which can lock it; but the same one must be used to _un_lock it, as the key automatically sets the mechanism in favour of itself. With such a lock it would be possible to have a different key for every day in the month; and if any one key got into wrong hands it would be useless unless it happened to be the one which last locked the lock. [Illustration: FIG. 221.--The wrong key inserted. The pins do not allow the lock to be turned.] * * * * * THE CYCLE. There are a few features of this useful and in some ways wonderful contrivance which should be noticed. First, THE GEARING OF A CYCLE. To a good many people the expression "geared to 70 inches," or 65, or 80, as the case may be, conveys nothing except the fact that the higher the gear the faster one ought to be able to travel. Let us therefore examine the meaning of such a phrase before going farther. The safety cycle is always "geared up"--that is, one turn of the pedals will turn the rear wheel more than once. To get the exact ratio of turning speed we count the teeth on the big chain-wheel, and the teeth on the small chain-wheel attached to the hub of the rear wheel, and divide the former by the latter. To take an example:--The teeth are 75 and 30 in number respectively; the ratio of speed therefore = 75/30 = 5/2 = 2-1/2. One turn of the pedal turns the rear wheel 2-1/2 times. The gear of the cycle is calculated by multiplying this result by the diameter of the rear wheel in inches. Thus a 28-inch wheel would in this case give a gear of 2-1/2 × 28 = 70 inches. One turn of the pedals on a machine of this gear would propel the rider as far as if he were on a high "ordinary" with the pedals attached directly to a wheel 70 inches in diameter. The gearing is raised or lowered by altering the number ratio of the teeth on the two chain-wheels. If for the 30-tooth wheel we substituted one of 25 teeth the gearing would be-- 75/25 × 28 inches = 84 inches. A handy formula to remember is, gearing = T/_t_ × D, where T = teeth on large chain-wheel; _t_ = teeth on small chain-wheel; and D = diameter of driving-wheel in inches. Two of the most important improvements recently added to the cycle are--(1) The free wheel; (2) the change-speed gear. THE FREE WHEEL is a device for enabling the driving-wheel to overrun the pedals when the rider ceases pedalling; it renders the driving-wheel "free" of the driving gear. It is a ratchet specially suited for this kind of work. From among the many patterns now marketed we select the Micrometer free-wheel hub (Fig. 222), which is extremely simple. The _ratchet-wheel_ R is attached to the hub of the driving-wheel. The small chain-wheel (or "chain-ring," as it is often called) turns outside this, on a number of balls running in a groove chased in the neck of the ratchet. Between these two parts are the _pawls_, of half-moon shape. The driving-wheel is assumed to be on the further side of the ratchet. To propel the cycle the chain-ring is turned in a clockwise direction. Three out of the six pawls at once engage with notches in the ratchet, and are held tightly in place by the pressure of the chain-ring on their rear ends. The other three are in a midway position. [Illustration: FIG. 222.] When the rider ceases to pedal, the chain-ring becomes stationary, but the ratchet continues to revolve. The pawls offer no resistance to the ratchet teeth, which push them up into the semicircular recesses in the chain-ring. Each one rises as it passes over a tooth. It is obvious that driving power cannot be transmitted again to the road wheel until the chain-wheel is turned fast enough to overtake the ratchet. THE CHANGE-SPEED GEAR. A gain in speed means a loss in power, and _vice versâ_. By gearing-up a cycle we are able to make the driving-wheel revolve faster than the pedals, but at the expense of control over the driving-wheel. A high-geared cycle is fast on the level, but a bad hill-climber. The low-geared machine shows to disadvantage on the flat, but is a good hill-climber. Similarly, the express engine must have large driving-wheels, the goods engine small driving-wheels, to perform their special functions properly. In order to travel fast over level country, and yet be able to mount hills without undue exertion, we must be able to do what the motorist does--change gear. Two-speed and three-speed gears are now very commonly fitted to cycles. They all work on the same principle, that of the epicyclic train of cog-wheels, the mechanisms being so devised that the hub turns more slowly than, at the same speed as, or faster than the small chain-wheel,[42] according to the wish of the rider. We do not propose to do more here than explain the principle of the epicyclic train, which means "a wheel on (or running round) a wheel." Lay a footrule on the table and roll a cylinder along it by the aid of a second rule, parallel to the first, but resting on the cylinder. It will be found that, while the cylinder advances six inches, the upper rule advances twice that distance. In the absence of friction the work done by the agent moving the upper rule is equal to that done in overcoming the force which opposes the forward motion of the cylinder; and as the distance through which the cylinder advances is only half that through which the upper rule advances, it follows that the _force_ which must act on the upper rule is only half as great as that overcome in moving the cylinder. The carter makes use of this principle when he puts his hand to the top of a wheel to help his cart over an obstacle. [Illustration: FIG. 223.] [Illustration: FIG. 224.] [Illustration: FIG. 225.] Now see how this principle is applied to the change-speed gear. The lower rule is replaced by a cog-wheel, C (Fig. 223); the cylinder by a cog, B, running round it; and the upper rule by a ring, A, with internal teeth. We may suppose that A is the chain-ring, B a cog mounted on a pin projecting from the hub, and C a cog attached to the fixed axle. It is evident that B will not move so fast round C as A does. The amount by which A will get ahead of B can be calculated easily. We begin with the wheels in the position shown in Fig. 223. A point, I, on A is exactly over the topmost point of C. For the sake of convenience we will first assume that instead of B running round C, B is revolved on its axis for one complete revolution in a clockwise direction, and that A and C move as in Fig. 224. If B has 10 teeth, C 30, and A 40, A will have been moved 10/40 = 1/4 of a revolution in a clockwise direction, and C 10/30 = 1/3 of a revolution in an anti-clockwise direction. Now, coming back to what actually does happen, we shall be able to understand how far A rotates round C relatively to the motion of B, when C is fixed and B rolls (Fig. 225). B advances 1/3 of distance round C; A advances 1/3 + 1/4 = 7/12 of distance round B. The fractions, if reduced to a common denominator, are as 4:7, and this is equivalent to 40 (number of teeth on A): 40 + 30 (teeth on A + teeth on C.) To leave the reader with a very clear idea we will summarize the matter thus:--If T = number of teeth on A, _t_ = number of teeth on C, then movement of A: movement of B:: T + _t_: T. Here is a two-speed hub. Let us count the teeth. The chain-ring (= A) has 64 internal teeth, and the central cog (= C) on the axle has 16 teeth. There are four cogs (= B) equally spaced, running on pins projecting from the hub-shell between A and C. How much faster than B does A run round C? Apply the formula:--Motion of A: motion of B:: 64 + 16: 64. That is, while A revolves once, B and the hub and the driving-wheel will revolve only 64/80 = 4/5 of a turn. To use scientific language, B revolves 20 per cent. slower than A. This is the gearing we use for hill-climbing. On the level we want the driving-wheel to turn as fast as, or faster than, the chain-ring. To make it turn at the same rate, both A and C must revolve together. In one well-known gear this is effected by sliding C along the spindle of the wheel till it disengages itself from the spindle, and one end locks with the plate which carries A. Since B is now being pulled round at the bottom as well as the top, it cannot rotate on its own axis any longer, and the whole train revolves _solidly_--that is, while A turns through a circle B does the same. To get an _increase_ of gearing, matters must be so arranged that the drive is transmitted from the chain-wheel to B, and from A to the hub. While B describes a circle, A and the driving-wheel turn through a circle and a part of a circle--that is, the driving-wheel revolves faster than the hub. Given the same number of teeth as before, the proportional rates will be A = 80, B = 64, so that the gear _rises_ 25 per cent. By means of proper mechanism the power is transmitted in a three-speed gear either (1) from chain-wheel to A, A to B, B to wheel = _low_ gear; or (2) from chain-wheel to A and C simultaneously = solid, normal, or _middle_ gear; or (3) from chain-wheel to B, B to A, A to wheel = _high_ gear. In two-speed gears either 1 or 3 is omitted. * * * * * AGRICULTURAL MACHINES. THE THRESHING-MACHINE. Bread would not be so cheap as it is were the flail still the only means of separating the grain from the straw. What the cream separator has done for the dairy industry (p. 384), the threshing-machine has done for agriculture. A page or two ought therefore to be spared for this useful invention. [Illustration: FIG. 226.--Section of a threshing machine.] In Fig. 226 a very complete fore-and-aft section of the machine is given. After the bands of the sheaves have been cut, the latter are fed into the mouth of the _drum_ A by the feeder, who stands in the feeding-box on the top of the machine. The drum revolves at a very high velocity, and is fitted with fluted beaters which act against a steel concave, or breastwork, B, the grain being threshed out of the straw in passing between the two. The breastwork is provided with open wires, through which most of the threshed grain, cavings (short straws), and chaff passes on to a sloping board. The straw is flung forward on to the shakers C, which gradually move the straw towards the open end and throw it off. Any grain, etc., that has escaped the drum falls through the shakers on to D, and works backwards to the _caving riddles_, or moving sieves, E. The _main blower_, by means of a revolving fan, N, sends air along the channel X upwards through these riddles, blowing the short straws away to the left. The grain, husks, and dust fall through E on to G, over the end of which they fall on to the _chaff riddle_, H. A second column of air from the blower drives the chaff away. The heavy grain, seeds, dust, etc., fall on to I, J, and K in turn, and are shaken until only the grain remains to pass along L to the elevator bottom, M. An endless band with cups attached to it scoops up the grain, carries it aloft, and shoots it into hopper P. It then goes through the shakers Q, R, is dusted by the _back end blower_, S, and slides down T into the open end of the rotary screen-drum U, which is mounted on the slope, so that as it turns the grain travels gradually along it. The first half of the screen has wires set closely together. All the small grain that falls through this, called "thirds," passes into a hopper, and is collected in a sack attached to the hopper mouth. The "seconds" fall through the second half of the drum, more widely spaced, into their sack; and the "firsts" fall out of the end and through a third spout. MOWING-MACHINES. [Illustration: FIG. 227.] The ordinary _lawn--mower_ employs a revolving reel, built up of spirally-arranged knives, the edges of which pass very close to a sharp plate projecting from the frame of the mower. Each blade, as it turns, works along the plate, giving a shearing cut to any grass that may be caught between the two cutting edges. The action is that of a pair of scissors (Fig. 227), one blade representing the fixed, the other the moving knife. If you place a cylinder of wood in the scissors it will be driven forward by the closing of the blades, and be marked by them as it passes along the edges. The same thing happens with grass, which is so soft that it is cut right through. HAY-CUTTER. The _hay-cutter_ is another adaptation of the same principle. A cutter-bar is pulled rapidly backwards and forwards in a frame which runs a few inches above the ground by a crank driven by the wheels through gearing. To the front edge of the bar are attached by one side a number of triangular knives. The frame carries an equal number of spikes pointing forward horizontally. Through slots in these the cutter-bar works, and its knives give a drawing cut to grass caught between them and the sides of the spikes. * * * * * SOME NATURAL PHENOMENA. WHY SUN-HEAT VARIES IN INTENSITY. The more squarely parallel heat-rays strike a surface the greater will be the number that can affect that surface. This is evident from Figs. 228, 229, where A B is an equal distance in both cases. The nearer the sun is to the horizon, the more obliquely do its rays strike the earth. Hence midday is necessarily warmer than the evening, and the tropics, where the sun stands overhead, are hotter than the temperate zones, where, even in summer at midday, the rays fall more or less on the slant. [Illustration: FIG. 228.] [Illustration: FIG. 229.] The atmospheric envelope which encompasses the earth tends to increase the effect of obliquity, since a slanting ray has to travel further through it and is robbed of more heat than a vertical ray. THE TIDES. All bodies have an attraction for one another. The earth attracts the moon, and the moon attracts the earth. Now, though the effect of this attraction is not visible as regards the solid part of the globe, it is strongly manifested by the water which covers a large portion of the earth's surface. The moon attracts the water most powerfully at two points, that nearest to it and that furthest away from it; as shown on an exaggerated scale in Fig. 230. Since the earth and the water revolve as one mass daily on their axis, every point on the circumference would be daily nearest to and furthest from the moon at regular intervals, and wherever there is ocean there would be two tides in that period, were the moon stationary as regards the earth. (It should be clearly understood that the tides are not great currents, but mere thickenings of the watery envelope. The inrush of the tide is due to the temporary rise of level.) [Illustration: FIG. 230.] [Illustration: FIG. 231.] WHY HIGH TIDE VARIES DAILY. The moon travels round the earth once in twenty-eight days. In Fig. 231 the point _a_ is nearest the moon at, say, twelve noon. At the end of twenty-four hours it will have arrived at the same position by the compass, but yet not be nearest to the moon, which has in that period moved on 1/28th of a revolution round the earth.[43] Consequently high tide will not occur till _a_ has reached position _b_ and overtaken the moon, as it were, which takes about an hour on the average. This explains why high tide occurs at intervals of more than twelve hours. [Illustration: FIG. 232.--Relative positions of sun, moon, and earth at "spring" tides.] [Illustration: FIG. 233.--Relative positions of sun, moon, and earth at "neap" tides.] NEAP TIDES AND SPRING TIDES. The sun, as well as the moon, attracts the ocean, but with less power, owing to its being so much further away. At certain periods of the month, sun, earth, and moon are all in line. Sun and moon then pull together, and we get the highest, or _spring_ tides (Fig. 232). When sun and moon pull at right angles to one another--namely, at the first and third quarters--the excrescence caused by the moon is flattened (Fig. 233), and we get the lowest, or _neap_ tides. [39] In both Figs. 207 and 208 the degree of expansion is very greatly exaggerated. [40] As the sun passes the meridian (twelve o'clock, noon) the chronometer's reading is taken, and the longitude, or distance east or west of Greenwich, is reckoned by the difference in time between local noon and that of the chronometer. [41] For much of the information given here about clocks and watches the author is indebted to "The History of Watches," by Mr. J.F. Kendal. [42] We shall here notice only those gears which are included in the hub of the driving-wheel. [43] The original position of the moon is indicated by the dotted circle. INDEX. NOTE.--Figures in italics signify that an illustration of the thing referred to appears on the page. Aberration, spherical, of lens, 243. Acoustics, 294. Achromatic lens, 243. Action carriage of piano, 283. Advancing the spark, 102. Air-gun, _342_. Air-pump for cycle tyres, _340_; for Westinghouse brake, 199. Alternating currents, 164; dynamo, 164. Amperage, 125. Angle of advance, 57, 58; incidence, 268; reflection, 268. Aorta, 360. Arc lamp, 182. Archimedes, 412. Armature, 162. Arteries, 358. Arterial blood, 359. Atmospheric pressure, 350. Auditory nerve, 272. Automatic brakes, 188; signalling, 228; stoker, 399. Backfall, 298. Balance-wheel, 419. Ball cock, 366, _367_. Balloon, fire, 323; gas, 347. Barometer, aneroid, 328, _329_; and weather, 331; Fortin's, _326_; meaning of, 325; simple, _328_; wheel, _327_. Beau de Rochas, 89. Bell, diving, _332_; electric, 119, _120_. Bellows of organ, 303. Bioscope, 266. Blades, turbine, _81_, 83. Block system, 201, 212. Blood, arterial, 359; circulation of, _356_, _357_, 360; venous, 359. Blower-plate, 393, _394_. Boat, sails of, 346. Boiler, Babcock and Wilcox, _21_, 22; explosions, 34, 391; fire-tube, 21; fittings, 31; Lancashire, 25, _26_; locomotive, _20_, 23; multitubular, 21; principle of, 15; stored energy in, 32; vertical, _25_; water supply to, 39; water-tube, 21. Brakes, hydraulic, 188; motor car, 110; railway, 187; vacuum, 189, _190_, _191_; Westinghouse, 194, _195_, _197_. Bramah, 363, 437. Breezes, land and sea, 324. Brushes of dynamo, 161, _172_. Bunsen burner, 409. Burning-glass, 232. Camera, the, 233; pinhole, _234_, _235_. Canals, semicircular, 273. Capillary attraction, 392; veins, 358. Carbon dioxide, 27, 359; monoxide, 27. Carburetter, 98, _99_. Cardan shaft, 93. _Carmania_, the, 83. Centrifugal force, 382. Change-speed gear, 105, 442. Chassis of motor car, 92. Circulation of water in a boiler, _17_, _18_, _19_; of water in a motor car, 95, _97_. Clarionet, 308. Clock, first weight-driven, 412; water, 410. Clutch of motor car, 105. Coal, as fuel, 15; gas, 394; gas making, 394; gas plant, _396_; gas, purification of, 397. Cochlea, 273. Coherer, 140. Coil, Ruhmkorff, 121. Coke, 395. Combinations in Chubb lock, 436; Yale lock, 436. Combustion, 26, 393; perfect, 28. Compensating gear, 107, _108_. Compound engines, 59; arrangement of, 61; invention of, 59. Compound locomotives, 62. Compound microscope, 261. Condenser, marine, 71, _72_; of Ruhmkorff coil, 123. Conduit, 176. Convex lens, image cast by, _236_. Conjugate foci, 262. Cornet, 308. Corti, rods of, 274. Coxwell, 348. Cream separator, 381, _383_. Current, reversal of electric, _130_, 131; transformation of, 124. Cushioning of steam, 55. Cycle, gearing of, 439. Cylinder, hydraulic press, _363_; steam, _49_. Danes, 382. Dead point, 47. De Brouwer stoker, 401. Detector in Chubb lock, 435. Diving-bell, _332_; simple, _333_, _334_. Diving-dress, 335. Direction of current in dynamo circuit, 163. Diver's feats, 338; helmet, _336_; lamp, _338_. Donkey-engines, 68. Doorstop, self-closing, 344. Double-cylinder engines, 47. Draught, forced, 28, _29_; induced, 29. Drum and fusee, _414_. Durability of motor-car engine, 96. D-valve, 67. Dynamo, alternating, 164, 174; brushes, _172_; compound, 174; continuous-current, 165; multipolar, 169; series wound, _173_; shunt wound, _173_; simple, 161, _162_. Ear, the, _271_, _273_; a good, 274, 307; sensitiveness of, 275. Eccentric, _52_, 53; setting of, 53. Edison, Thomas, 310. Edison-Bell phonograph, 310. Electricity, current, 115; forms of, 113; nature of, 112; static, 114. Electric bell, 119, _120_; signalling, 225; slot, 226. Electroplating, 185, _186_. Electro-magnets, 117. Endolymph, 272. Engines, compound, 59; donkey, 68; double-cylinder, 47; internal-combustion, 87, 95; reciprocating, 44. Escapement of timepieces, 416; cylinder, _420_; lever, 421, _422_. Ether, 270. Eustachian tube, 276. Eye, human, 246, _247_; self-accommodation of, 248. Expansive working of steam, 56. Faraday, Michael, 159. Field, magnetic, 159; magnets, 171; ring, 174. Filters, 374; Maignen, _373_; Berkefeld, 374. Filtration beds, 372. Flute, 308. Flying-machines, 348. Fly-wheel, use of, 48. Focus, meaning of, 237; principal, 238. Foci, conjugate, 262. Force, lines of, 116. Forces, component, 345. Free wheel, _440_. Furring-up of pipes, 391. Fusee, drum and, 414. Galileo, 259, 325, 416. Galilean telescope, _259_. Gas, coal, 394; governor, 402; meter, 405; traps, 374; works, 394. Gasometer, 397; largest, _398_, 399. Gauge, steam, 36, _38_; water, 35, _36_. Gear, compensating, 107, _108_. Gear-box of motor car, 105. Gearing of cycle, 439. Glaisher, 348. Gland, 50, 363. Glass, flint and crown, 242. Going-barrel for watches, 415. Gooch reversing gear, 65. Governors, speed, 67; of motor car, 103, _104_. Graham, 418. Gramophone, 317; records, 319, 321; reproducer, _318_. Hairspring, 412. Hay-cutter, 451. Heart, the, 355; disease, 361; rate of pulsation of, 361; size of, 357. Heat of sun, 451. Hele, Peter, 412. Helmet, diver's, _336_. Helmholtz, 274, 308. Hero of Alexandria, 74. Herschel, 261. Hertz, Dr., 138. Hertzian waves, 138. Hot-water supply, 386. Hour-hand train in timepieces, _429_. Household water supply, 364. Hughes type-printer, 134. Hydraulic press, 361, _362_. Hydro, 385. Ignition of charge in motor-car cylinder, 100, _101_. Image and object, relative positions of, 239; distortion of, 245. Incandescent gas mantle, 407; electric lamp, 179. Incus, 272. Index mechanism of water-meter, 37. Indicator of electric bell, 119. Induction coil, 121; uses of, 125. Injector, 39; Giffard's, _41_; principle of, 40; self-starting, 42. Interlocking of signals, 204, 222. Internal-combustion engine, 87. Iris of eye, 249; stop, 249. Kelvin, Lord, 158. Keyless winding mechanism, 425, _426_, 428. Kite, 345. Lamp, arc, 182; how it works, 392; incandescent, 179; manufacture of incandescent lamps, 180. Lap of slide-valve, _57_, 59. Larynx, 306. Laxey wheel, _380_, 381. Leads, 208. Lenses, 231; correction of for colour, 240, _241_; focus of, 236; rectilinear, _245_; spherical aberration in, 243. Levers, signal, colours of, 208. Limit of error in cylinder, 52. Light, electric, 179; nature of, 230; propagation of, 231. Li Hung Chang, 157. Lindsay, James Bowman, 145. Lines of force, 116, 162. "Linking up," 65. Locks, 430; Barron, 433; Bramah, 437; Chubb, 433, 434; Hobbs, 437; simplest, _431_; tumbler, _432_; Yale, _436_. Locking gear for signals, 205. Locomotive, electric, 178; advantages of, 179. Lungs, 359. Magic-lantern, 263, _264_. Magnet, 115; permanent, 115, 116; temporary, 115. Magnetism, 115. Magnetic needle, influence of current on, 129. Mainspring, invention of, 412. Malleus, 272. Marconi, 140, 146. Marine chronometers, 415; delicacy of, 425. Marine speed governor, 71. Marine turbine, advantages of, 84. Maudslay, Henry, 363. Maxim, Sir Hiram, 348. Micrometer free wheel, 441. Micro-photography, 265. Microscope, 254; compound, 261, _263_; in telescope, 257; simple, _254_. Mineral oil, 392. Mirror, parabolic, 261, _262_; plane, _267_. Morse, 132, 145; code, 128; inker, 142; sounder, 132. Motor car, the, 92; electric, 177. Mouth, 307. Mowing-machines, 450. Musical sounds, 277. Nerve, auditory, 272; optic, 246. Nodes on a string, 285; column of air, 291. Note, fundamental, 285; quality of, 285. Niagara Falls, power station at, 174. Organ, the, 294, _300_; bellows, 303; console, 305; echo, solo, swell, great, and choir, 301; electric and pneumatic, 305; largest in the world, 306; pedals, 298; pipes, 295; pipes, arrangement of, 295; sound-board, _296_; wind-chest, 297. Otto cycle, 91. Overtones, 285. Pallets of organ, 297. Parallel arrangement of electric lamps, 184. Paris, siege of, 265. Pedals of organ, 298. Pelton wheel, _377_. Pendulum, 412; compensating, 418, _419_. Perilymph, 272. Perry, Professor, 16. Petrol, 98. Phonograph, 310; governor, _311_; recorder, 312, _313_; records, making of, 319; reproducer, 315; tracings on record of, _317_. Pianoforte, 277; sounding-board, 280; striking mechanism, 281; strings, 281. Piccolo, 308. Pipes, closed, 289; flue, 301; open, 292; organ, 295; reed, 301, _302_; tuning, 302. Piston valve, 67. Pneumatic tyres, 341. Poldhu, signalling station at, 138. Points, railway, 208, _210_; and signals in combination, 211. Poles of a magnet, 115. Popoff, Professor A., 138, 145. Power, transmission of, 175. Preece, Sir William, 145. Primary winding of induction coil, 122. Pump, air, 340; bucket, 352, _353_; force, 354; most marvellous, 355; Westinghouse air, 199. Railway brakes, 187; signalling, 200. Rays, converging and diverging, _256_; heat, concentrated by lens, _232_; light, 232, 235, 236, 237. Records, master, 319, 320. Reciprocation, 51. Reed, human, 306; pipes, 301, _302_. Reflecting telescope, 260. Relays, telegraphic, 133, 141. Retina, 247. Retorts, 395. Reversing gear, 62; Allan, 65; Gooch, 65; radial, 66. Rocking bar mechanism for watches, 425. Rods of Corti, 274. Ruhmkorff coil, 121, _122_. Safety-valve, 32, _33_, 391. Sand-glasses, 411. Scissors, action of, _450_. Secondary winding of induction coil, 122. Series arrangement of electric lamps, 183. Series winding of dynamo, _173_. Shunt wound dynamo, _173_. Sight, long and short, 250. Signalling, automatic, 228; electric, 225; pneumatic, 225; power, 225. Signal levers, _206_. Signals, interlocking of, 204; position of, 202; railway, 200; single line, 215. Silencer on motor cars, 109. Siphon, _351_. Slide-valve, 49, 50, 51; setting of, 53. Sliders, 297. Sound, nature of, 270; board of organ, 296; board of piano, 280. Spagnoletti disc instrument, 212. Sparking-plug, _102_. Spectacles, use of, 249. Spectrum, colours of, 230. Speed governors, 67, _68_, _69_; Hartwell, 70; marine, 71. Speed of motor cars, 110. Spot, blind, in eye, 251; yellow, in eye, 251. Spring balance for watches, 419; compensating, 423, _424_. Stapes, 272. Steam, what it is, 13; energy of, 14; engines, 44; engines, reciprocating, _45_; expansive working of, 59, 81; gauge, 36; gauge, principle of, 37; turbine, 74; turbine, De Laval, 76, _77_; turbine, Hero's, 74; turbine, Parsons, 79, _80_; volume of, as compared with water, 15. Stephenson, George, 63, 375. Stop, in lens, 244; iris, 249; use of, 244. Sun-dial of Ahaz, 410. Syntonic transmission of wireless messages, 143. Talking-machines, 310. Tapper in wireless telegraphy receiver, 141. Tappet arm, 205. Telegraph, electric, 127; insulator, _133_; needle, _128_; recording, 133; sounder, 132. Telegraphy, high-speed, 135; wireless, 137. Telephone, 147; Bell, _148_; circuit, double-line, 155; circuit, general arrangement, _152_, 153; exchange, _154_, 155. Telephony, submarine, 157. Telescope, 257; Galilean, _259_; prismatic, _260_; reflecting, 260; terrestrial, _259_. Threshing-machine, 447, _448_. Thurston, Professor, 31. Tides, 452; high, 453; neap and spring, 455. Timbre, 285. Tompion, Thomas, 412. Torricelli, 325. Trachea, 306. Train staff signalling, 216; single, 216; and ticket, 217; electric, 218. Transformation of current, 124, 176. Transmission of power, 174, _175_. Transmitter, Edison telephone, 150; granular carbon, 150, _151_. Triple-valve, 196. Trolley arm, 176. Turbines, steam, 74. _Turbinia_, the, 79. Tympanum, 137, 271, 272. Universal joint, 93. Vacuum brake, 189, _190_, _191_. Vacuum chamber of aneroid barometer, _330_. Valve, piston, 67; safety, 32; of internal-combustion engine, 89. Valves of the heart, 357. Veins, 358; capillary, 358; pulmonary, 361. Ventral segments, 291. Ventricles, 357. Vibration of columns of air, 288, 289; of rods, 287; of strings, 278; of strings, conditions regulating, 278. _Viper_, the, 86. Virag, Pollak--high-speed telegraphy, 136. Vitreous humour, 246. Voltage, 121, 161. Vowel sounds, 308. Wasborough, Matthew, 51. Watches, first, 412. Water cock, _365_; engines, 375; gauge, 35, _36_; jacket, 19, 95; meter, _368_; supply, 371; turbines, 174, 376; wheels, 375. Watt, James, 51, 69, 375. Welsbach incandescent mantle, 407. Westinghouse air-brake, 194, _195_, _197_; George, 194. Wheatstone needle instrument, 128, 131; automatic transmitter, 135. Wind, why it blows, 323; action of on kites, 345; on sails, 346. Windmills, 375. Window, oval, in ear, 272; round, in ear, 272. Wireless telegraphy, 137; advance of, 145; receiver, 140, 141; syntonic, 143; transmitter, 138, _139_. Yale lock, _436_, _437_. Yellow spot, in eye, 251. Zech, Jacob, 414. Zeiss field-glasses, 260. THE END. 
34527	----	Copyright (C) 2010 by Cory Doctorow. Makers Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com 186,000 words Tor Books: 978-0765312792 HarperCollins UK/Voyager: 978-0007325221 Last modified 21 Sept 2010 $$$$ About this download There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more, they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press. I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers. These people don't believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than publishing books has. Copyright law has *always* recognized your right to own your books. When copyright laws are made -- by elected officials, acting for the public good -- they always safeguard this right. But ebook publishers don't respect copyright law, and they don't believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you "buy" an ebook, you're really only *licensing* that book, and that copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal. (Of course, the button on their website says, "Buy this book" and they talk about "Ebook sales" at conferences -- no one says, "License this book for your Kindle" or "Total licenses of ebooks are up from 0.00001% of all publishing to 0.0001% of all publishing, a 100-fold increase!") I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright law's guarantee of ownership in your books. So you own this ebook. The license agreement (see below), is from Creative Commons and it gives you even *more* rights than you get to a regular book. Every word of it is a gift, not a confiscation. Enjoy. What do I want from you in return? Read the book. Tell your friends. Review it on Amazon or at your local bookseller. Bring it to your bookclub. Assign it to your students (older students, please -- that sex scene is a scorcher) (*now* I've got your attention, don't I?). As Woody Guthrie wrote: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." Oh yeah. Also: if you like it, buy it http://craphound.com/makers/buy or donate a copy to a worthy, cash-strapped institution. http://craphound.com/makers/donate Why am I doing this? Because my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks, @timoreilly for this awesome aphorism). Because free ebooks sell print books. Because I copied my ass off when I was 17 and grew up to spend practically every discretionary cent I have on books when I became an adult. Because I can't stop you from sharing it (zeroes and ones aren't ever going to get harder to copy); and because readers have shared the books they loved forever; so I might as well enlist you to the cause. I have always dreamt of writing sf novels, since I was six years old. Now I do it. It is a goddamned dream come true, like growing up to be a cowboy or an astronaut, except that you don't get oppressed by ranchers or stuck on the launchpad in an adult diaper for 28 hours at a stretch. The idea that I'd get dyspeptic over people -- *readers* celebrating what I write is goddamned *bizarre* So, download this book. Some rules of the road: It's kind of a tradition around here that my readers convert my ebooks to their favorite formats and send them to me here, and it's one that I love! If you've converted these files to another format, send them to me (doctorow@craphound.com, subject Makers Conversion) and I'll host them, but before you do, make sure you read the following: * Only one conversion per format, first come, first serve. That means that if someone's already converted the file to a Femellhebber 3000 document, that's the one you're going to find here. I just don't know enough about esoteric readers to adjudicate disputes about what the ideal format is for your favorite device. * Make sure include a link to the reader as well. When you send me an ebook file, make sure that you include a link to the website for the reader technology as well so that I can include it below. * No cover art. The text of this book is freely copyable, the cover, not so much. The rights to it are controlled by my publisher, so don't include it with your file. * No DRM. The Creative Commons license prohibits sharing the file with "DRM" (sometimes called "copy-protection") on it, and that's fine by me. Don't send me the book with DRM on it. If you're converting to a format that has a DRM option, make sure it's switched off. $$$$ A word to professors, librarians, and people who want to donate money to me Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audience I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop. But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I think I've found it. Here's the deal: there are lots of professors and librarians who'd love to get hard-copies of this book into their students' and patrons' hands, but don't have the budget for it. There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks. I'm proposing that we put them together. If you're a prof or librarian and you want a free copy of Makers, email freemakers@gmail.com with your name and the name and address of your school. It'll be posted below by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it. If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Makers and you want to donate something to say thanks, check below to find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to freemakers@gmail.com so that Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you on the donate page. Check http://craphound.com/makers/donate for profs, librarians and similar people seeking donations. $$$$ This file is licensed under a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You are free: * to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work * to Remix - to adapt the work Under the following conditions: * Attribution - You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). * Noncommercial - You may not use this work for commercial purposes. * Share Alike - If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. With the understanding that: * Waiver - Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. * Other Rights - In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license: * Your fair dealing or fair use rights; * The author's moral rights; * Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights. * Notice - For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. $$$$ Dedication: For "the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things." $$$$ PART I Suzanne Church almost never had to bother with the blue blazer these days. Back at the height of the dot-boom, she'd put on her business journalist drag -- blazer, blue sailcloth shirt, khaki trousers, loafers -- just about every day, putting in her obligatory appearances at splashy press-conferences for high-flying IPOs and mergers. These days, it was mostly work at home or one day a week at the San Jose Mercury News's office, in comfortable light sweaters with loose necks and loose cotton pants that she could wear straight to yoga after shutting her computer's lid. Blue blazer today, and she wasn't the only one. There was Reedy from the NYT's Silicon Valley office, and Tribbey from the WSJ, and that despicable rat-toothed jumped-up gossip columnist from one of the UK tech-rags, and many others besides. Old home week, blue blazers fresh from the dry-cleaning bags that had guarded them since the last time the NASDAQ broke 5,000. The man of the hour was Landon Kettlewell -- the kind of outlandish prep-school name that always seemed a little made up to her -- the new CEO and front for the majority owners of Kodak/Duracell. The despicable Brit had already started calling them Kodacell. Buying the company was pure Kettlewell: shrewd, weird, and ethical in a twisted way. "Why the hell have you done this, Landon?" Kettlewell asked himself into his tie-mic. Ties and suits for the new Kodacell execs in the room, like surfers playing dress-up. "Why buy two dinosaurs and stick 'em together? Will they mate and give birth to a new generation of less-endangered dinosaurs?" He shook his head and walked to a different part of the stage, thumbing a PowerPoint remote that advanced his slide on the jumbotron to a picture of a couple of unhappy cartoon brontos staring desolately at an empty nest. "Probably not. But there is a good case for what we've just done, and with your indulgence, I'm going to lay it out for you now." "Let's hope he sticks to the cartoons," Rat-Toothed hissed beside her. His breath smelled like he'd been gargling turds. He had a not-so-secret crush on her and liked to demonstrate his alpha-maleness by making half-witticisms into her ear. "They're about his speed." She twisted in her seat and pointedly hunched over her computer's screen, to which she'd taped a thin sheet of polarized plastic that made it opaque to anyone shoulder-surfing her. Being a halfway attractive woman in Silicon Valley was more of a pain in the ass than she'd expected, back when she'd been covering rustbelt shenanigans in Detroit, back when there was an auto industry in Detroit. The worst part was that the Brit's reportage was just spleen-filled editorializing on the lack of ethics in the valley's board-rooms (a favorite subject of hers, which no doubt accounted for his fellow-feeling), and it was also the crux of Kettlewell's schtick. The spectacle of an exec who talked ethics enraged Rat-Toothed more than the vilest baby-killers. He was the kind of revolutionary who liked his firing squads arranged in a circle. "I'm not that dumb, folks," Kettlewell said, provoking a stagey laugh from Mr Rat-Tooth. "Here's the thing: the market had valued these companies at less than their cash on hand. They have twenty billion in the bank and a 16 billion dollar market-cap. We just made four billion dollars, just by buying up the stock and taking control of the company. We could shut the doors, stick the money in our pockets, and retire." Suzanne took notes. She knew all this, but Kettlewell gave good sound-bite, and talked slow in deference to the kind of reporter who preferred a notebook to a recorder. "But we're not gonna do that." He hunkered down on his haunches at the edge of the stage, letting his tie dangle, staring spacily at the journalists and analysts. "Kodacell is bigger than that." He'd read his email that morning then, and seen Rat-Toothed's new moniker. "Kodacell has goodwill. It has infrastructure. Administrators. Physical plant. Supplier relationships. Distribution and logistics. These companies have a lot of useful plumbing and a lot of priceless reputation. "What we don't have is a product. There aren't enough buyers for batteries or film -- or any of the other stuff we make -- to occupy or support all that infrastructure. These companies slept through the dot-boom and the dot-bust, trundling along as though none of it mattered. There are parts of these businesses that haven't changed since the fifties. "We're not the only ones. Technology has challenged and killed businesses from every sector. Hell, IBM *doesn't make computers anymore*! The very idea of a travel agent is inconceivably weird today! And the record labels, oy, the poor, crazy, suicidal, stupid record labels. Don't get me started. "Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything. That's not to say that there's no money out there to be had, but the money won't come from a single, monolithic product line. The days of companies with names like 'General Electric' and 'General Mills' and 'General Motors' are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people. "We will brute-force the problem-space of capitalism in the twenty first century. Our business plan is simple: we will hire the smartest people we can find and put them in small teams. They will go into the field with funding and communications infrastructure -- all that stuff we have left over from the era of batteries and film -- behind them, capitalized to find a place to live and work, and a job to do. A business to start. Our company isn't a project that we pull together on, it's a *network* of like-minded, cooperating autonomous teams, all of which are empowered to do whatever they want, provided that it returns something to our coffers. We will explore and exhaust the realm of commercial opportunities, and seek constantly to refine our tactics to mine those opportunities, and fill our hungry belly. This company isn't a company anymore: this company is a network, an approach, a sensibility." Suzanne's fingers clattered over her keyboard. The Brit chuckled nastily. "Nice talk, considering he just made a hundred thousand people redundant," he said. Suzanne tried to shut him out: yes, Kettlewell was firing a company's worth of people, but he was also saving the company itself. The prospectus had a decent severance for all those departing workers, and the ones who'd taken advantage of the company stock-buying plan would find their pensions augmented by whatever this new scheme could rake in. If it worked. "Mr Kettlewell?" Rat-Toothed had clambered to his hind legs. "Yes, Freddy?" Freddy was Rat-Toothed's given name, though Suzanne was hard pressed to ever retain it for more than a few minutes at a time. Kettlewell knew every business-journalist in the Valley by name, though. It was a CEO thing. "Where will you recruit this new workforce from? And what kind of entrepreneurial things will they be doing to 'exhaust the realm of commercial activities'?" "Freddy, we don't have to recruit anyone. They're beating a path to our door. *This* is a nation of manic entrepreneurs, the kind of people who've been inventing businesses from video arcades to photomats for centuries." Freddy scowled skeptically, his jumble of grey tombstone teeth protruding. "Come on, Freddy, you ever hear of the Grameen Bank?" Freddy nodded slowly. "In India, right?" "Bangladesh. Bankers travel from village to village on foot and by bus, finding small co-ops who need tiny amounts of credit to buy a cellphone or a goat or a loom in order to grow. The bankers make the loans and advise the entrepreneurs, and the payback rate is fifty times higher than the rate at a regular lending institution. They don't even have a written lending agreement: entrepreneurs -- real, hard-working entrepreneurs -- you can trust on a handshake." "You're going to help Americans who lost their jobs in your factories buy goats and cellphones?" "We're going to give them loans and coordination to start businesses that use information, materials science, commodified software and hardware designs, and creativity to wring a profit from the air around us. Here, catch!" He dug into his suit-jacket and flung a small object toward Freddy, who fumbled it. It fell onto Suzanne's keyboard. She picked it up. It looked like a keychain laser-pointer, or maybe a novelty light-saber. "Switch it on, Suzanne, please, and shine it, oh, on that wall there." Kettlewell pointed at the upholstered retractable wall that divided the hotel ballroom into two functional spaces. Suzanne twisted the end and pointed it. A crisp rectangle of green laser-light lit up the wall. "Now, watch this," Kettlewell said. NOW WATCH THIS The words materialized in the middle of the rectangle on the distant wall. "Testing one two three," Kettlewell said. TESTING ONE TWO THREE "Donde esta el bano?" WHERE IS THE BATHROOM "What is it?" said Suzanne. Her hand wobbled a little and the distant letters danced. WHAT IS IT "This is a new artifact designed and executed by five previously out-of-work engineers in Athens, Georgia. They've mated a tiny Linux box with some speaker-independent continuous speech recognition software, a free software translation engine that can translate between any of twelve languages, and an extremely high-resolution LCD that blocks out words in the path of the laser-pointer. "Turn this on, point it at a wall, and start talking. Everything said shows up on the wall, in the language of your choosing, regardless of what language the speaker was speaking." All the while, Kettlewell's words were scrolling by in black block caps on that distant wall: crisp, laser-edged letters. "This thing wasn't invented. All the parts necessary to make this go were just lying around. It was *assembled*. A gal in a garage, her brother the marketing guy, her husband overseeing manufacturing in Belgrade. They needed a couple grand to get it all going, and they'll need some life-support while they find their natural market. "They got twenty grand from Kodacell this week. Half of it a loan, half of it equity. And we put them on the payroll, with benefits. They're part freelancer, part employee, in a team with backing and advice from across the whole business. "It was easy to do once. We're going to do it ten thousand times this year. We're sending out talent scouts, like the artists and representation people the record labels used to use, and they're going to sign up a lot of these bands for us, and help them to cut records, to start businesses that push out to the edges of business. "So, Freddy, to answer your question, no, we're not giving them loans to buy cellphones and goats." Kettlewell beamed. Suzanne twisted the laser-pointer off and made ready to toss it back to the stage, but Kettlewell waved her off. "Keep it," he said. It was suddenly odd to hear him speak without the text crawl on that distant wall. She put the laser pointer in her pocket and reflected that it had the authentic feel of cool, disposable technology: the kind of thing on its way from a startup's distant supplier to the schwag bags at high-end technology conferences to blister-packs of six hanging in the impulse aisle at Fry's. She tried to imagine the technology conferences she'd been to with the addition of the subtitling and translation and couldn't do it. Not conferences. Something else. A kids' toy? A tool for Starbucks-smashing anti-globalists, planning strategy before a WTO riot? She patted her pocket. Freddy hissed and bubbled like a teakettle beside her, fuming. "What a cock," he muttered. "Thinks he's going to hire ten thousand teams to replace his workforce, doesn't say a word about what *that* lot is meant to be doing now he's shitcanned them all. Utter bullshit. Irrational exuberance gone berserk." Suzanne had a perverse impulse to turn the wand back on and splash Freddy's bilious words across the ceiling, and the thought made her giggle. She suppressed it and kept on piling up notes, thinking about the structure of the story she'd file that day. Kettlewell pulled out some charts and another surfer in a suit came forward to talk money, walking them through the financials. She'd read them already and decided that they were a pretty credible bit of fiction, so she let her mind wander. She was a hundred miles away when the ballroom doors burst open and the unionized laborers of the former Kodak and the former Duracell poured in on them, tossing literature into the air so that it snowed angry leaflets. They had a big drum and a bugle, and they shook tambourines. The hotel rent-a-cops occasionally darted forward and grabbed a protestor by the arm, but her colleagues would immediately swarm them and pry her loose and drag her back into the body of the demonstration. Freddy grinned and shouted something at Kettlewell, but it was lost in the din. The journalists took a lot of pictures. Suzanne closed her computer's lid and snatched a leaflet out of the air. WHAT ABOUT US? it began, and talked about the workers who'd been at Kodak and Duracell for twenty, thirty, even forty years, who had been conspicuously absent from Kettlewell's stated plans to date. She twisted the laser-pointer to life and pointed it back at the wall. Leaning in very close, she said, "What are your plans for your existing workforce, Mr Kettlewell?" WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR YOUR EXISTING WORKFORCE MR KETTLEWELL She repeated the question several times, refreshing the text so that it scrolled like a stock ticker across that upholstered wall, an illuminated focus that gradually drew all the attention in the room. The protestors saw it and began to laugh, then they read it aloud in ragged unison, until it became a chant: WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS -- *thump* of the big drum -- FOR YOUR EXISTING WORKFORCE *thump* MR *thump* KETTLEWELL? Suzanne felt her cheeks warm. Kettlewell was looking at her with something like a smile. She liked him, but that was a personal thing and this was a truth thing. She was a little embarrassed that she had let him finish his spiel without calling him on that obvious question. She felt tricked, somehow. Well, she was making up for it now. On the stage, the surfer-boys in suits were confabbing, holding their thumbs over their tie-mics. Finally, Kettlewell stepped up and held up his own laser-pointer, painting another rectangle of light beside Suzanne's. "I'm glad you asked that, Suzanne," he said, his voice barely audible. I'M GLAD YOU ASKED THAT SUZANNE The journalists chuckled. Even the chanters laughed a little. They quieted down. "I'll tell you, there's a downside to living in this age of wonders: we are moving too fast and outstripping the ability of our institutions to keep pace with the changes in the world." Freddy leaned over her shoulder, blowing shit-breath in her ear. "Translation: you're ass-fucked, the lot of you." TRANSLATION YOUR ASS FUCKED THE LOT OF YOU Suzanne yelped as the words appeared on the wall and reflexively swung the pointer around, painting them on the ceiling, the opposite wall, and then, finally, in miniature, on her computer's lid. She twisted the pointer off. Freddy had the decency to look slightly embarrassed and he slunk away to the very end of the row of seats, scooting from chair to chair on his narrow butt. On stage, Kettlewell was pretending very hard that he hadn't seen the profanity, and that he couldn't hear the jeering from the protestors now, even though it had grown so loud that he could no longer be heard over it. He kept on talking, and the words scrolled over the far wall. THERE IS NO WORLD IN WHICH KODAK AND DURACELL GO ON MAKING FILM AND BATTERIES THE COMPANIES HAVE MONEY IN THE BANK BUT IT HEMORRHAGES OUT THE DOOR EVERY DAY WE ARE MAKING THINGS THAT NO ONE WANTS TO BUY THIS PLAN INCLUDES A GENEROUS SEVERANCE FOR THOSE STAFFERS WORKING IN THE PARTS OF THE BUSINESS THAT WILL CLOSE DOWN -- Suzanne admired the twisted, long-way-around way of saying, "the people we're firing." Pure CEO passive voice. She couldn't type notes and read off the wall at the same time. She whipped out her little snapshot and monkeyed with it until it was in video mode and then started shooting the ticker. BUT IF WE ARE TO MAKE GOOD ON THAT SEVERANCE WE NEED TO BE IN BUSINESS WE NEED TO BE BRINGING IN A PROFIT SO THAT WE CAN MEET OUR OBLIGATIONS TO ALL OUR STAKEHOLDERS SHAREHOLDERS AND WORKFORCE ALIKE WE CAN'T PAY A PENNY IN SEVERANCE IF WE'RE BANKRUPT WE ARE HIRING 50000 NEW EMPLOYEES THIS YEAR AND THERE'S NOTHING THAT SAYS THAT THOSE NEW PEOPLE CAN'T COME FROM WITHIN CURRENT EMPLOYEES WILL BE GIVEN CONSIDERATION BY OUR SCOUTS ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS A DEEPLY AMERICAN PRACTICE AND OUR WORKERS ARE AS CAPABLE OF ENTREPRENEURIAL ACTION AS ANYONE I AM CONFIDENT WE WILL FIND MANY OF OUR NEW HIRES FROM WITHIN OUR EXISTING WORKFORCE I SAY THIS TO OUR EMPLOYEES IF YOU HAVE EVER DREAMED OF STRIKING OUT ON YOUR OWN EXECUTING ON SOME AMAZING IDEA AND NEVER FOUND THE MEANS TO DO IT NOW IS THE TIME AND WE ARE THE PEOPLE TO HELP Suzanne couldn't help but admire the pluck it took to keep speaking into the pointer, despite the howls and bangs. "C'mon, I'm gonna grab some bagels before the protestors get to them," Freddy said, plucking at her arm -- apparently, this was his version of a charming pickup line. She shook him off authoritatively, with a whip-crack of her elbow. Freddy stood there for a minute and then moved off. She waited to see if Kettlewell would say anything more, but he twisted the pointer off, shrugged, and waved at the hooting protestors and the analysts and the journalists and walked off-stage with the rest of the surfers in suits. She got some comments from a few of the protestors, some details. Worked for Kodak or Duracell all their lives. Gave everything to the company. Took voluntary pay-cuts under the old management five times in ten years to keep the business afloat, now facing layoffs as a big fat thank-you-suckers. So many kids. Such and such a mortgage. She knew these stories from Detroit: she'd filed enough copy with varying renditions of it to last a lifetime. Silicon Valley was supposed to be different. Growth and entrepreneurship -- a failed company was just a stepping-stone to a successful one, can't win them all, dust yourself off and get back to the garage and start inventing. There's a whole world waiting out there! Mother of three. Dad whose bright daughter's university fund was raided to make ends meet during the "temporary" austerity measures. This one has a Down's Syndrome kid and that one worked through three back surgeries to help meet production deadlines. Half an hour before she'd been full of that old Silicon Valley optimism, the sense that there was a better world a-borning around her. Now she was back in that old rustbelt funk, with the feeling that she was witness not to a beginning, but to a perpetual ending, a cycle of destruction that would tear down everything solid and reliable in the world. She packed up her laptop and stepped out into the parking lot. Across the freeway, she could make out the bones of the Great America fun-park roller-coasters whipping around and around in the warm California sun. These little tech-hamlets down the 101 were deceptively utopian. All the homeless people were miles north on the streets of San Francisco, where pedestrian marks for panhandling could be had, where the crack was sold on corners instead of out of the trunks of fresh-faced, friendly coke-dealers' cars. Down here it was giant malls, purpose-built dot-com buildings, and the occasional fun-park. Palo Alto was a university-town theme-park, provided you steered clear of the wrong side of the tracks, the East Palo Alto slums that were practically shanties. Christ, she was getting melancholy. She didn't want to go into the office -- not today. Not when she was in this kind of mood. She would go home and put her blazer back in the closet and change into yoga togs and write her column and have some good coffee. She nailed up the copy in an hour and emailed it to her editor and poured herself a glass of Napa red (the local vintages in Michigan likewise left something to be desired) and settled onto her porch, overlooking the big reservoir off 280 near San Mateo. The house had been worth a small fortune at the start of the dot-boom, but now, in the resurgent property boom, it was worth a large fortune and then some. She could conceivably sell this badly built little shack with its leaky hot-tub for enough money to retire on, if she wanted to live out the rest of her days in Sri Lanka or Nebraska. "You've got no business feeling poorly, young lady," she said to herself. "You are as well set-up as you could have dreamed, and you are right in the thick of the weirdest and best time the world has yet seen. And Landon Kettlewell knows your name." She finished the wine and opened her computer. It was dark enough now with the sun set behind the hills that she could read the screen. The Web was full of interesting things, her email full of challenging notes from her readers, and her editor had already signed off on her column. She was getting ready to shut the lid and head for bed, so she pulled her mail once more. From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com To: schurch@sjmercury.com Subject: Embedded journalist? Thanks for keeping me honest today, Suzanne. It's the hardest question we're facing today: what happens when all the things you're good at are no good to anyone anymore? I hope we're going to answer that with the new model. You do good work, madam. I'd be honored if you'd consider joining one of our little teams for a couple months and chronicling what they do. I feel like we're making history here and we need someone to chronicle it. I don't know if you can square this with the Merc, and I suppose that we should be doing this through my PR people and your editor, but there comes a time about this time every night when I'm just too goddamned hyper to bother with all that stuff and I want to just DO SOMETHING instead of ask someone else to start a process to investigate the possibility of someday possibly maybe doing something. Will you do something with us, if we can make it work? 100 percent access, no oversight? Say you will. Please. Your pal, Kettlebelly She stared at her screen. It was like a work of art; just look at that return address, "kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com" -- for kodacell.com to be live and accepting mail, it had to have been registered the day before. She had a vision of Kettlewell checking his email at midnight before his big press-conference, catching Freddy's column, and registering kodacell.com on the spot, then waking up some sysadmin to get a mail server answering at skunkworks.kodacell.com. Last she'd heard, Lockheed-Martin was threatening to sue anyone who used their trademarked term "Skunk Works" to describe a generic R&D department. That meant that Kettlewell had moved so fast that he hadn't even run this project by legal. She was willing to bet that he'd already ordered new business-cards with the address on them. There was a guy she knew, an editor at a mag who'd assigned himself a plum article that he'd run on his own cover. He'd gotten a book-deal out of it. A half-million dollar book-deal. If Kettlewell was right, then the exclusive book on the inside of the first year at Kodacell could easily make that advance. And the props would be mad, as the kids said. Kettlebelly! It was such a stupid frat-boy nickname, but it made her smile. He wasn't taking himself seriously, or maybe he was, but he wasn't being a pompous ass about it. He was serious about changing the world and frivolous about everything else. She'd have a hard time being an objective reporter if she said yes to this. She couldn't possibly decide at this hour. She needed a night's sleep and she had to talk this over with the Merc. If she had a boyfriend, she'd have to talk it over with him, but that wasn't a problem in her life these days. She spread on some expensive duty-free French wrinkle-cream and brushed her teeth and put on her nightie and double-checked the door locks and did all the normal things she did of an evening. Then she folded back her sheets, plumped her pillows and stared at them. She turned on her heel and stalked back to her computer and thumped the spacebar until the thing woke from sleep. From: schurch@sjmercury.com To: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com Subject: Re: Embedded journalist? Kettlebelly: that is one dumb nickname. I couldn't possibly associate myself with a grown man who calls himself Kettlebelly. So stop calling yourself Kettlebelly, immediately. If you can do that, we've got a deal. Suzanne There had come a day when her readers acquired email and the paper ran her address with her byline, and her readers had begun to write her and write her and write her. Some were amazing, informative, thoughtful notes. Some were the vilest, most bilious trolling. In order to deal with these notes, she had taught herself to pause, breathe, and re-read any email message before clicking send. The reflex kicked in now and she re-read her note to Kettlebelly -- Kettlewell! -- and felt a crimp in her guts. Then she hit send. She needed to pee, and apparently had done for some time, without realizing it. She was on the toilet when she heard the ping of new incoming mail. From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com To: schurch@sjmercury.com Subject: Re: Embedded journalist? I will never call myself Kettlebelly again. Your pal, Kettledrum. Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit. She did a little two-step at her bed's edge. Tomorrow she'd go see her editor about this, but it just felt *right*, and exciting, like she was on the brink of an event that would change her life forever. It took her three hours of mindless Web-surfing, including a truly dreary Hot-Or-Not clicktrance and an hour's worth of fiddling with tweets from the press-conference, before she was able to lull herself to sleep. As she nodded off, she thought that Kettlewell's insomnia was as contagious as his excitement. # Hollywood, Florida's biggest junkyard was situated in the rubble of a half-built ghost-mall off Taft Street. Suzanne's Miami airport rental car came with a GPS, but the little box hadn't ever heard of the mall; it was off the map. So she took a moment in the sweltering parking-lot of her coffin hotel to call her interview subject again and get better coordinates. "Yeah, it's 'cause they never finished building the mall, so the address hasn't been included in the USGS maps. The open GPSes all have these better maps made by geohackers, but the rental car companies have got a real hard-on for official map-data. Morons. Hang on, lemme get my GPS out and I'll get you some decent lat-long." His voice had a pleasant, youthful, midwestern sound, like a Canadian newscaster: friendly and enthusiastic as a puppy. His name was Perry Gibbons, and if Kettlewell was to be believed, he was the most promising prospect identified by Kodacell's talent-scouts. The ghost-mall was just one of many along Taft Street, ranging in size from little corner plazas to gigantic palaces with broken-in atria and cracked parking lots. A lot of the malls in California had crashed, but they'd been turned into flea-markets or day-cares, or, if they'd been abandoned, they hadn't been abandoned like this, left to go to ruin. This reminded her of Detroit before she'd left, whole swaths of the inner city emptied of people, neighborhoods condemned and bulldozed and, in a couple of weird cases, actually *farmed* by enterprising city-dwellers who planted crops, kept livestock, and rode their mini tractors beneath the beam of the defunct white-elephant monorail. The other commonality this stretch of road shared with Detroit was the obesity of the people she passed. She'd felt a little self-conscious that morning, dressing in a light short-sleeved blouse and a pair of shorts -- nothing else would do, the weather was so hot and drippy that even closed-toe shoes would have been intolerable. At 45, her legs had slight cellulite saddlebags and her tummy wasn't the washboard it had been when she was 25. But here, on this stretch of road populated by people so fat they could barely walk, so fat that they were de-sexed marshmallows with faces like inflatable toys, she felt like a toothpick. The GPS queeped when she came up on the junkyard, a sprawling, half-built discount mall whose waist-high walls had been used to parcel out different kinds of sorted waste. The mall had been planned with wide indoor boulevards between the shops wide enough for two lanes of traffic, and she cruised those lanes now in the hertzmobile, looking for a human. Once she reached the center of the mall -- a dry fountain filled with dusty Christmas-tree ornaments -- she stopped and leaned on the horn. She got out of the car and called, "Hello? Perry?" She could have phoned him but it always seemed so wasteful spending money on airtime when you were trying to talk to someone within shouting range. "Suzanne!" The voice came from her left. She shielded her eyes from the sun's glare and peered down a spoke of mall-lane and caught her first glimpse of Perry Gibbons. He was standing in the basket of a tall cherry-picker, barechested and brown. He wore a sun-visor and big work gloves, and big, baggy shorts whose pockets jangled as he shinnied down the crane's neck. She started toward him tentatively. Not a lot of business-reporting assignments involved spending time with half-naked, sun-baked dudes in remote southern junkyards. Still, he sounded nice. "Hello!" she called. He was young, 22 or 23, and already had squint-creases at the corners of his eyes. He had a brace on one wrist and his steel-toed boots were the mottled grey of a grease-puddle on the floor of a muffler and brake shop. He grinned and tugged off a glove, stuck out his hand. "A pleasure. Sorry for the trouble finding this place. It's not easy to get to, but it's cheap as hell." "I believe it." She looked around again -- the heaps of interesting trash, the fountain-dish filled with thousands of shining ornaments. The smell was a mixture of machine-oil and salt, jungle air, Florida swamp and Detroit steel. "So, this place is pretty cool. Looks like you've got pretty much everything you could imagine." "And then some." This was spoken by another man, one who puffed heavily up from behind her. He was enormous, not just tall but fat, as big around as a barrel. His green tee-shirt read IT'S FUN TO USE LEARNING FOR EVIL! in blocky, pixelated letters. He took her hand and shook it. "I love your blog," he said. "I read it all the time." He had three chins, and eyes that were nearly lost in his apple cheeks. "Meet Lester," Perry said. "My partner." "Sidekick," Lester said with a huge wink. "Sysadmin slash hardware hacker slash dogsbody slashdot org." She chuckled. Nerd humor. Ar ar ar. "Right, let's get started. You wanna see what I do, right?" Perry said. "That's right," Suzanne said. "Lead the way, Lester," Perry said, and gestured with an arm, deep into the center of the junkpile. "All right, check this stuff out as we go." He stuck his hand through the unglazed window of a never-built shop and plucked out a toy in a battered box. "I love these things," he said, handing it to her. She took it. It was a Sesame Street Elmo doll, labeled BOOGIE WOOGIE ELMO. "That's from the great Elmo Crash," Perry said, taking back the box and expertly extracting the Elmo like he was shelling a nut. "The last and greatest generation of Elmoid technology, cast into an uncaring world that bought millions of Li'l Tagger washable graffiti kits instead after Rosie gave them two thumbs up on her Christmas shopping guide. "Poor Elmo was an orphan, and every junkyard in the world has mountains of mint-in-package BWEs, getting rained on, waiting to start their long, half-million-year decomposition. "But check this out." He flicked a multitool off his belt and extracted a short, sharp scalpel-blade. He slit the grinning, disco-suited Elmo open from chin to groin and shucked its furry exterior and the foam tissue that overlaid its skeleton. He slid the blade under the plastic cover on its ass and revealed a little printed circuit board. "That's an entire Atom processor on a chip, there," he said. "Each limb and the head have their own subcontrollers. There's a high-powered digital-to-analog rig for letting him sing and dance to new songs, and an analog-to-digital converter array for converting spoken and danced commands to motions. Basically, you dance and sing for Elmo and he'll dance and sing back for you." Suzanne nodded. She'd missed that toy, which was a pity. She had a five year old goddaughter in Minneapolis who would have loved a Boogie Woogie Elmo. They had come to a giant barn, set at the edge of a story-and-a-half's worth of anchor store. "This used to be where the contractors kept their heavy equipment," Lester rumbled, aiming a car-door remote at the door, which queeped and opened. Inside, it was cool and bright, the chugging air-conditioners efficiently blasting purified air over the many work-surfaces. The barn was a good 25 feet tall, with a loft and a catwalk circling it halfway up. It was lined with metallic shelves stacked neatly with labeled boxes of parts scrounged from the junkyard. Perry set Elmo down on a workbench and worked a miniature USB cable into his chest-cavity. The other end terminated with a PDA with a small rubberized photovoltaic cell on the front. "This thing is running InstallParty -- it can recognize any hardware and build and install a Linux distro on it without human intervention. They used a ton of different suppliers for the BWE, so every one is a little different, depending on who was offering the cheapest parts the day it was built. InstallParty doesn't care, though: one-click and away it goes." The PDA was doing all kinds of funny dances on its screen, montages of playful photoshopping of public figures matted into historical fine art. "All done. Now, have a look -- this is a Linux computer with some of the most advanced robotics ever engineered. No sweatshop stuff, either, see this? The solder is too precise to be done by hand -- that's because it's from India. If it was from Cambodia, you'd see all kinds of wobble in the solder: that means that tiny, clever hands were used to create it, which means that somewhere in the device's karmic history, there's a sweatshop full of crippled children inhaling solder fumes until they keel over and are dumped in a ditch. This is the good stuff. "So we have this karmically clean robot with infinitely malleable computation and a bunch of robotic capabilities. I've turned these things into wall-climbing monkeys; I've modded them for a woman from the University of Miami at the Jackson Memorial who used their capability to ape human motions in physiotherapy programs with nerve-damage cases. But the best thing I've done with them so far is the Distributed Boogie Woogie Elmo Motor Vehicle Operation Cluster. Come on," he said, and took off deeper into the barn's depths. They came to a dusty, stripped-down Smart car, one of those tiny two-seat electric cars you could literally buy out of a vending machine in Europe. It was barely recognizable, having been reduced to its roll-cage, drive-train and control-panel. A gang of naked robot Elmos were piled into it. "Wake up boys, time for a demo!" Perry shouted, and they sat up and made canned, tinny Elmo "oh boy" noises, climbing into position on the pedals, around the wheel, and on the gear-tree. "I got the idea when I was teaching an Elmo to play Mario Brothers. I thought it'd get a decent diggdotting. I could get it to speedrun all of the first level using an old paddle I'd found and rehabilitated, and I was trying to figure out what to do next. The dead mall across the way is a drive-in theater, and I was out front watching the silent movies, and one of them showed all these cute little furry animated whatevers collectively driving a car. It's a really old sight-gag, I mean, like racial memory old. I'd seen the Little Rascals do the same bit, with Alfalfa on the wheel and Buckwheat and Spanky on the brake and clutch and the doggy working the gearshift. "And I thought, Shit, I could do that with Elmos. They don't have any networking capability, but they can talk and they can parse spoken commands, so all I need is to designate one for left and one for right and one for fast and one for slow and one to be the eyes, barking orders and they should be able to do this. And it works! They even adjust their balance and centers of gravity when the car swerves to stay upright at their posts. Check it out." He turned to the car. "Driving Elmos, ten-HUT!" They snapped upright and ticked salutes off their naked plastic noggins. "In circles, DRIVE," he called. The Elmos scrambled into position and fired up the car and in short order they were doing donuts in the car's little indoor pasture. "Elmos, HALT" Perry shouted and the car stopped silently, rocking gently. "Stand DOWN." The Elmos sat down with a series of tiny thumps. Suzanne found herself applauding. "That was amazing," she said. "Really impressive. So that's what you're going to do for Kodacell, make these things out of recycled toys?" Lester chuckled. "Nope, not quite. That's just for starters. The Elmos are all about the universal availability of cycles and apparatus. Everywhere you look, there's devices for free that have everything you need to make anything do anything. "But have a look at part two, c'mere." He lumbered off in another direction, and Suzanne and Perry trailed along behind him. "This is Lester's workshop," Perry said, as they passed through a set of swinging double doors and into a cluttered wonderland. Where Perry's domain had been clean and neatly organized, Lester's area was a happy shambles. His shelves weren't orderly, but rather, crammed with looming piles of amazing junk: thrift-store wedding dresses, plaster statues of bowling monkeys, box kites, knee-high tin knights-in-armor, seashells painted with American flags, presidential action-figures, paste jewelry and antique cough-drop tins. "You know how they say a sculptor starts with a block of marble and chips away everything that doesn't look like a statue? Like he can *see* the statue in the block? I get like that with garbage: I see the pieces on the heaps and in roadside trash and I can just *see* how it can go together, like this." He reached down below a work-table and hoisted up a huge triptych made out of three hinged car-doors stood on end. Carefully, he unfolded it and stood it like a screen on the cracked concrete floor. The inside of the car-doors had been stripped clean and polished to a high metal gleam that glowed like sterling silver. Spot-welded to it were all manner of soda tins, pounded flat and cut into gears, chutes, springs and other mechanical apparatus. "It's a mechanical calculator," he said proudly. "About half as powerful as Univac. I milled all the parts using a laser-cutter. What you do is, fill this hopper with GI Joe heads, and this hopper with Barbie heads. Crank this wheel and it will drop a number of M&Ms equal to the product of the two values into this hopper, here." He put three scuffed GI Joe heads in one hopper and four scrofulous Barbies in another and began to crank, slowly. A music-box beside the crank played a slow, irregular rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel" while the hundreds of little coin-sized gears turned, flipping switches and adding and removing tension to springs. After the weasel popped a few times, twelve brown M&Ms fell into an outstretched rubber hand. He picked them out carefully and offered them to her. "It's OK. They're not from the trash," he said. "I buy them in bulk." He turned his broad back to her and heaved a huge galvanized tin washtub full of brown M&Ms in her direction. "See, it's a bit-bucket!" he said. Suzanne giggled in spite of herself. "You guys are hilarious," she said. "This is really good, exciting nerdy stuff." The gears on the mechanical computer were really sharp and precise; they looked like you could cut yourself on them. When they ground over the polished surfaces of the car-doors, they made a sound like a box of toothpicks falling to the floor: click-click, clickclickclick, click. She turned the crank until twelve more brown M&Ms fell out. "Who's the Van Halen fan?" Lester beamed. "Might as well jump -- JUMP!" He mimed heavy-metal air-guitar and thrashed his shorn head up and down as though he were headbanging with a mighty mane of hair-band locks. "You're the first one to get the joke!" he said. "Even Perry didn't get it!" "Get what?" Perry said, also grinning. "Van Halen had this thing where if there were any brown M&Ms in their dressing room they'd trash it and refuse to play. When I was a kid, I used to *dream* about being so famous that I could act like that much of a prick. Ever since, I've afforded a great personal significance to brown M&Ms." She laughed again. Then she frowned a little. "Look, I hate to break this party up, but I came here because Kettlebelly -- crap, Kettle*well* -- said that you guys exemplified everything that he wanted to do with Kodacell. This stuff you've done is all very interesting, it's killer art, but I don't see the business-angle. So, can you help me out here?" "That's step three," Perry said. "C'mere." He led her back to his workspace, to a platform surrounded by articulated arms terminated in webcams, like a grocery scale in the embrace of a metal spider. "three-d scanner," he said, producing a Barbie head from Lester's machine and dropping it on the scales. He prodded a button and a nearby screen filled with a three-dimensional model of the head, flattened on the side where it touched the surface. He turned the head over and scanned again and now there were two digital versions of the head on the screen. He moused one over the other until they lined up, right-clicked a drop-down menu, selected an option and then they were merged, rotating. "Once we've got the three-d scan, it's basically Plasticine." He distorted the Barbie head, stretching it and squeezing it with the mouse. "So we can take a real object and make this kind of protean hyper-object out of it, or drop it down to a wireframe and skin it with any bitmap, like this." More fast mousing -- Barbie's head turned into a gridded mesh, fine filaments stretching off along each mussed strand of plastic hair. Then a Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup label wrapped around her like a stocking being pulled over her head. There was something stupendously weird and simultaneously very comic about the sight, the kind of inherent comedy in a cartoon stretched out on a blob of Silly Putty. "So we can build anything out of interesting junk, with any shape, and then we can digitize the shape. Then we can do anything we like with the shape. Then we can output the shape." He typed quickly and another machine, sealed and mammoth like an outsized photocopier, started to grunt and churn. The air filled with a smell like Saran Wrap in a microwave. "The goop we use in this thing is epoxy-based. You wouldn't want to build a car out of it, but it makes a mean doll-house. The last stage of the output switches to inks, so you get whatever bitmap you've skinned your object with baked right in. It does about one cubic inch per minute, so this job should be almost done now." He drummed his fingers on top of the machine for a moment and then it stopped chunking and something inside it went *clunk*. He lifted a lid and reached inside and plucked out the barbie head, stretched and distorted, skinned with a Campbell's Soup label. He handed it to Suzanne. She expected it to be warm, like a squashed penny from a machine on Fisherman's Wharf, but it was cool and had the seamless texture of a plastic margarine tub and the heft of a paperweight. "So, that's the business," Lester said. "Or so we're told. We've been making cool stuff and selling it to collectors on the web for you know, gigantic bucks. We move one or two pieces a month at about ten grand per. But Kettlebelly says he's going to industrialize us, alienate us from the product of our labor, and turn us into an assembly line." "He didn't say any such thing," Perry said. Suzanne was aware that her ears had grown points. Perry gave Lester an affectionate slug in the shoulder. "Lester's only kidding. What we need is a couple of dogsbodies and some bigger printers and we'll be able to turn out more modest devices by the hundred or possibly the thousand. We can tweak the designs really easily because nothing is coming off a mold, so there's no setup charge, so we can do limited runs of a hundred, redesign, do another hundred. We can make 'em to order. " "And we need an MBA," Lester said. "Kodacell's sending us a business manager to help us turn junk into pesos." "Yeah," Perry said, with a worried flick of his eyes. "Yeah, a business manager." "So, I've known some business geeks who aren't total assholes," Lester said. "Who care about what they're doing and the people they're doing it with. Respectful and mindful. It's like lawyers -- they're not all scumbags. Some of them are totally awesome and save your ass." Suzanne took all this in, jotting notes on an old-fashioned spiral-bound shirt-pocket notebook. "When's he arriving?" "Next week," Lester said. "We've cleared him a space to work and everything. He's someone that Kettlewell's people recruited up in Ithaca and he's going to move here to work with us, sight unseen. Crazy, huh?" "Crazy," Suzanne agreed. "Right," Perry said. "That's next week, and this aft we've got some work to do, but now I'm ready for lunch. You guys ready for lunch?" Something about food and really fat guys, it seemed like an awkward question to Suzanne, like asking someone who'd been horribly disfigured by burns if he wanted to toast a marshmallow. But Lester didn't react to the question -- of course not, he had to eat, everyone had to eat. "Yeah, let's do the IHOP." Lester trundled back to his half of the workspace, then came back with a cane in one hand. "There's like three places to eat within walking distance of here if you don't count the mobile Mexican burrito wagon, which I don't, since it's a rolling advertisement for dysentery. The IHOP is the least objectionable of those." "We could drive somewhere," Suzanne said. It was coming up on noon and the heat once they got outside into the mall's ruins was like the steam off a dishwasher. She plucked at her blouse a couple of times. "It's the only chance to exercise we get," Perry said. "It's pretty much impossible to live or work within walking distance of anything down here. You end up living in your car." And so they hiked along the side of the road. The sidewalk was a curious mix of old and new, the concrete unworn but still overgrown by tall sawgrass thriving in the Florida heat. It brushed up against her ankles, hard and sharp, unlike the grass back home. They were walking parallel to a ditch filled with sluggish, brackish water and populated by singing frogs, ducks, ibises, and mosquitoes in great number. Across the way were empty lots, ghost-plazas, dead filling stations. Behind one of the filling stations, a cluster of tents and shacks. "Squatters?" she asked, pointing to the shantytown. "Yeah," Perry said. "Lots of that down here. Some of them are the paramilitary wing of the AARP, old trailer-home retirees who've run out of money and just set up camp here. Some are bums and junkies, some are runaways. It's not as bad as it looks -- they're pretty comfy in there. We bring 'em furniture and other good pickings that show up at the junkyard. The homeless with the wherewithal to build shantytowns, they haven't gone all animal like the shopping cart people and the scary beachcombers." He waved across the malarial ditch to an old man in a pair of pressed khaki shorts and a crisp Bermuda shirt. "Hey Francis!" he called. The old man waved back. "We'll have some IHOP for you 'bout an hour!" The old man ticked a salute off his creased forehead. "Francis is a good guy. Used to be an aerospace engineer if you can believe it. Wife had medical problems and he went bust taking care of her. When she died, he ended up here in his double-wide and never left. Kind of the unofficial mayor of this little patch." Suzanne stared after Francis. He had a bit of a gimpy leg, a limp she could spot even from here. Beside her, Lester was puffing. No one was comfortable walking in Florida, it seemed. It took another half hour to reach the IHOP, the International House of Pancakes, which sat opposite a mini-mall with only one still-breathing store, a place that advertised 99-cent t-shirts, which struck Suzanne as profoundly depressing. There was a junkie out front of 99-Cent Tees, a woman with a leathery tan and a tiny tank-top and shorts that made her look a little like a Tenderloin hooker, but not with that rat's-nest hair, not even in the 'Loin. She wobbled uncertainly across the parking lot to them. "Excuse me," she said, with an improbable Valley Girl accent. "Excuse me? I'm hoping to get something to eat, it's for my kid, she's nursing, gotta keep my strength up." Her naked arms and legs were badly tracked out, and Suzanne had a horrified realization that among the stains on her tank-top were a pair of spreading pools of breast milk, dampening old white, crusted patches over her sagging breasts. "For my baby. A dollar would help, a dollar." There were homeless like this in San Francisco, too. In San Jose as well, she supposed, but she didn't know where they hid. But something about this woman, cracked out and tracked out, it freaked her out. She dug into her purse and got out a five dollar bill and handed it to the homeless woman. The woman smiled a snaggletoothed stumpy grin and reached for it, then, abruptly, grabbed hold of Suzanne's wrist. Her grip was damp and weak. "Don't you fucking look at me like that. You're not better than me, bitch!" Suzanne tugged free and stepped back quickly. "That's right, run away! Bitch! Fuck you! Enjoy your lunch!" She was shaking. Perry and Lester closed ranks around her. Lester moved to confront the homeless woman. "The fuck you want lard ass? You wanna fuck with me? I got a knife, you know, cut your ears off and feed 'em to ya." Lester cocked his head like the RCA Victor dog. He towered over the skinny junkie, and was five or six times wider than her. "You all right?" he said gently. "Oh yeah, I'm just fine," she said. "Why, you looking for a party?" He laughed. "You're joking -- I'd crush you!" She laughed too, a less crazy, more relaxed sound. Lester's voice was a low, soothing rumble. "I don't think my friend thinks she's any better than you. I think she just wanted to help you out." The junkie flicked her eyes back and forth. "Listen can you spare a dollar for my baby?" "I think she just wanted to help you. Can I get you some lunch?" "Fuckers won't let me in -- won't let me use the toilet even. It's not humane. Don't want to go in the bushes. Not dignified to go in the bushes." "That's true," he said. "What if I get you some take out, you got a shady place you could eat it? Nursing's hungry work." The junkie cocked her head. Then she laughed. "Yeah, OK, yeah. Sure -- thanks, thanks a lot!" Lester motioned her over to the menu in the IHOP window and waited with her while she picked out a helping of caramel-apple waffles, sausage links, fried eggs, hash browns, coffee, orange juice and a chocolate malted. "Is that all?" he said, laughing, laughing, both of them laughing, all of them laughing at the incredible, outrageous meal. They went in and waited by the podium. The greeter, a black guy with corn-rows, nodded at Lester and Perry like an old friend. "Hey Tony," Lester said. "Can you get us a go-bag with some take-out for the lady outside before we sit down?" He recited the astounding order. Tony shook his head and ducked it. "OK, be right up," he said. "You want to sit while you're waiting?" "We'll wait here, thanks," Lester said. "Don't want her to think we're bailing on her." He turned and waved at her. "She's mean, you know -- be careful." "Thanks, Tony," Lester said. Suzanne marveled at Lester's equanimity. Nothing got his goat. The doggie bag arrived. "I put some extra napkins and a couple of wet-naps in there," Tony said, handing it to him. "Great!" Lester said. "You guys sit down, I'll be back in a second." Perry motioned for Suzanne to follow him to a booth. He laughed. "Lester's a good guy," he said. "The best guy I know, you know?" "How do you know him?" she asked, taking out her notepad. "He was the sysadmin at a company that was making three-d printers, and I was a tech at a company that was buying them, and the products didn't work, and I spent a lot of time on the phone with him troubleshooting them. We'd get together in our off-hours and hack around with neat little workbench projects, stuff we'd come up with at work. When both companies went under, we got a bunch of their equipment at bankruptcy auctions. Lester's uncle owned the junkyard and he offered us space to set up our workshops and the rest is history." Lester joined them again. He was laughing. "She is *funny*," he said. "Kept hefting the sack and saying, 'Christ what those bastards put on a plate, no wonder this country's so goddamned fat!'" Perry laughed, too. Suzanne chuckled nervously and looked away. He slid into the booth next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. "It's OK. I'm a guy who weighs nearly 400 pounds. I know I'm a big, fat guy. If I was sensitive about it, I couldn't last ten minutes. I'm not proud of being as big as I am, but I'm not ashamed either. I'm OK with it." "You wouldn't lose weight if you could?" "Sure, why not? But I've concluded it's not an option anymore. I was always a fat kid, and so I never got good at sports, never got that habit. Now I've got this huge deficit when I sit down to exercise, because I'm lugging around all this lard. Can't run more than a few steps. Walking's about it. Couldn't join a pick-up game of baseball or get out on the tennis court. I never learned to cook, either, though I suppose I could. But mostly I eat out, and I try to order sensibly, but just look at the crap they feed us at the places we can get to -- there aren't any health food restaurants in the strip malls. Look at this menu," he said, tapping a pornographic glossy picture of a stack of glistening waffles oozing with some kind of high-fructose lube. "Caramel pancakes with whipped cream, maple syrup and canned strawberries. When I was a kid, we called that *candy*. These people will sell you an eight dollar, 18 ounce plate of candy with a side of sausage, eggs, biscuits, bacon and a pint of orange juice. Even if you order this stuff and eat a third of it, a quarter of it, that's probably too much, and when you've got a lot of food in front of you, it's pretty hard to know when to stop." "Sure, will-power. Will-power *nothing*. The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me, years off our lives from all the fat -- that tells you that this isn't a will-power problem. We didn't get less willful in the last fifty years. Might as well say that all those people who died of the plague lacked the will-power to keep their houses free of rats. Fat isn't moral, it's *epidemiological*. There are a small number of people, a tiny minority, whose genes are short-circuited in a way that makes them less prone to retaining nutrients. That's a maladaptive trait through most of human history -- burning unnecessary calories when you've got to chase down an antelope to get more, that's no way to live long enough to pass on your genes! So you and Perry over here with your little skinny selves, able to pack away transfats and high-fructose corn-syrup and a pound of candy for breakfast at the IHOP, you're not doing this on will-power -- you're doing it by expressing the somatotype of a recessive, counter-survival gene. "Would I like to be thinner? Sure. But I'm not gonna let the fact that I'm genetically better suited to famine than feast get to me. Speaking of, let's eat. Tony, c'mere, buddy. I want a plate of candy!" He was smiling, and brave, and at that moment, Suzanne thought that she could get a crush on this guy, this big, smart, talented, funny, lovable guy. Then reality snapped back and she saw him as he was, sexless, lumpy, almost grotesque. The overlay of his, what, his *inner beauty* on that exterior, it disoriented her. She looked back over her notes. "So, you say that there's a third coming out to work with you?" "To *live* with us," Perry said. "That's part of the deal. Geek houses, like in the old college days. We're going to be a power-trio: two geeks and a suit, lean and mean. The suit's name is Tjan, and he's Singaporean by way of London by way of Ithaca, where Kettlebelly found him. We've talked on the phone a couple times and he's moving down next week." "He's moving down without ever having met you?" "Yeah, that's the way it goes. It's like the army or something for us: once you're in you get dispatched here or there. It was in the contract. We already had a place down here with room for Tjan, so we put some fresh linen on the guest-bed and laid in an extra toothbrush." "It's a little nervous-making," Lester said. "Perry and I get along great, but I haven't had such good luck with business-types. It's not that I'm some kind of idealist who doesn't get the need to make money, but they can be so condescending, you know?" Suzanne nodded. "That's a two-way street, you know. 'Suits' don't like being talked down to by engineers." Lester raised a hand. "Guilty as charged." "So what're you planning to do for the rest of the week?" It was Wednesday, and she'd counted on getting this part of the story by Saturday, but here she was going to have to wait, clearly, until this Tjan arrived. "Same stuff as we always do. We build crazy stuff out of junk, sell it to collectors, and have fun. We could go to the Thunderbird Drive In tonight if you want, it's a real classic, flea-market by day and drive in by night, practically the last one standing." Perry cut in. "Or we could go to South Beach and get a good meal, if that's more your speed." "Naw," Suzanne said. "Drive in sounds great, especially if it's such a dying breed. Better get a visit in while there's still time." They tried to treat her but she wouldn't let them. She never let anyone buy her so much as a cup of coffee. It was an old journalism-school drill, and she was practically the only scribbler she knew who hewed to it: some of the whores on the Silicon Valley papers took in free computers, trips, even spa days! -- but she had never wavered. # The afternoon passed quickly and enchantingly. Perry was working on a knee-high, articulated Frankenstein monster built out of hand-painted seashells from a beach-side kitsch market. They said GOD BLESS AMERICA and SOUVENIR OF FLORIDA and CONCH REPUBLIC and each had to be fitted out for a motor custom built to conform to its contours. "When it's done, it will make toast." "Make toast?" "Yeah, separate a single slice off a loaf, load it into a top-loading slice-toaster, depress the lever, time the toast-cycle, retrieve the toast and butter it. I got the idea from old-time backup-tape loaders. This plus a toaster will function as a loosely coupled single system." "OK, that's really cool, but I have to ask the boring question, Perry. Why? Why build a toast-robot?" Perry stopped working and dusted his hands off. He was really built, and his shaggy hair made him look younger than his crows-feet suggested. He turned a seashell with a half-built motor in it over and spun it like a top on the hand-painted WEATHER IS HERE/WISH YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL legend. "Well, that's the question, isn't it? The simple answer: people buy them. Collectors. So it's a good hobby business, but that's not really it. "It's like this: engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that doesn't go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit console that'll fit in 32K. Build the fastest airplane, or the one with the largest carrying capacity... But these days, there's not much traditional constraint. I've got the engineer's most dangerous luxury: plenty. All the computational cycles I'll ever need. Easy and rapid prototyping. Precision tools. "Now, it may be that there is a suite of tasks lurking *in potentia* that demand all this resource and more -- maybe I'm like some locomotive engineer declaring that 60 miles per hour is the pinnacle of machine velocity, that speed is cracked. But I don't see many of those problems -- none that interest me. "What I've got here are my own constraints. I'm challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these *trivial* problems, like car-driving Elmo clusters and seashell toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity, it's leftovers. There's enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a space-program, and that's by design. Remember the iPod? Why do you think it was so prone to scratching and going all gunky after a year in your pocket? Why would Apple build a handheld technology out of materials that turned to shit if you looked at them cross-eyed? It's because the iPod was only meant to last a year! "It's like tailfins -- they were cool in the Tailfin Cretaceous, but wouldn't it have been better if they could have disappeared from view when they became aesthetically obsolete, when the space age withered up and blew away? Oh, not really, obviously, because it's nice to see a well-maintained land-yacht on the highway every now and again, if only for variety's sake, but if you're going to design something that is meant to be *au fait* then presumably you should have some planned obsolescence in there, some end-of-lifing strategy for the aesthetic crash that follows any couture movement. Here, check this out." He handed her a white brick, the size of a deck of cards. It took her a moment to recognize it as an iPod. "Christ, it's *huge*," she said. "Yeah, isn't it just. Remember how small and shiny this thing was when it shipped? 'A thousand songs in your pocket!'" That made her actually laugh out loud. She fished in her pocket for her earbuds and dropped them on the table where they clattered like M&Ms. "I *think* I've got about 40,000 songs on those. Haven't run out of space yet, either." He rolled the buds around in his palm like a pair of dice. "You won't -- I stopped keeping track of mine after I added my hundred-thousandth audiobook. I've got a bunch of the Library of Congress in mine as high-rez scans, too. A copy of the Internet Archive, every post ever made on Usenet... Basically, these things are infinitely capacious, given the size of the media we work with today." He rolled the buds out on the workbench and laughed. "And that's just the point! Tomorrow, we'll have some new extra fat kind of media and some new task to perform with it and some new storage medium that will make these things look like an old iPod. Before that happens, you want this to wear out and scuff up or get lost --" "I lose those things all the time, like a set a month." "There you go then! The iPods were too big to lose like that, but just *look at them*." The iPod's chrome was scratched to the point of being fogged, like the mirror in a gas-station toilet. The screen was almost unreadable for all the scratches. "They had scratch-proof materials and hard plastics back then. They *chose* to build these things out of Saran Wrap and tin-foil so that by the time they doubled in capacity next year, you'd have already worn yours out and wouldn't feel bad about junking them. "So I'm building a tape-loading seashell robot toaster out of discarded obsolete technology because the world is full of capacious, capable, disposable junk and it cries out to be used again. It's a potlatch: I have so much material and computational wealth that I can afford to waste it on frivolous junk. I think that's why the collectors buy it, anyway." "That brings us back to the question of your relationship with Kodacell. They want to do what, exactly, with you?" "Well, we've been playing with some mass-production techniques, the three-d printer and so on. When Kettlebelly called me, he said that he wanted to see about using the scanner and so on to make a lot of these things, at a low price-point. It's pretty perverse when you think about it: using modern technology to build replicas of obsolete technology rescued from the dump, when these replicas are bound to end up back here at the dump!" He laughed. He had nice laugh-lines around his eyes. "Anyway, it's something that Lester and I had talked about for a long time, but never really got around to. Too much like retail. It's bad enough dealing with a couple dozen collectors who'll pay ten grand for a sculpture: who wants to deal with ten thousand customers who'll go a dollar each for the same thing?" "But you figure that this Tjan character will handle all the customer stuff?" "That's the idea: he'll run the business side, we'll get more time to hack; everyone gets paid. Kodacell's got some micro-sized marketing agencies, specialized PR firms, creative shippers, all kinds of little three-person outfits that they've promised to hook us up with. Tjan interfaces with them, we do our thing, enrich the shareholders, get stock ourselves. It's supposed to be all upside. Hell, if it doesn't work we can just walk away and find another dump and go back into the collectors' market." He picked up his half-finished shell and swung a lamp with a magnifying lens built into it over his workspace. "Hey, just a sec, OK? I've just figured out what I was doing wrong before." He took up a little tweezers and a plastic rod and probed for a moment, then daubed some solder down inside the shell's guts. He tweezed a wire to a contact and the shell made a motorized sound, a peg sticking out of it began to move rhythmically. "Got it," he said. He set it down. "I don't expect I'm going to be doing many more of these projects after next week. This kind of design, we could never mass-produce it." He looked a little wistful, and Suzanne suppressed a smile. What a tortured artiste this Florida junkyard engineer was! As the long day drew to a close, they went out for a walk in the twilight's cool in the yard. The sopping humidity of the day settled around them as the sun set in a long summer blaze that turned the dry fountain full of Christmas ornaments into a luminescent bowl of jewels. "I got some real progress today," Lester said. He had a cane with him and he was limping heavily. "Got the printer to output complete mechanical logical gates, all in one piece, Almost no assembly, just daisy-chain them on a board. And I've been working on a standard snap-on system for lego-bricking each gate to the next. It's going to make it a lot easier to ramp up production." "Yeah?" Perry said. He asked a technical question about the printer, something about the goop's tensile strength that Suzanne couldn't follow. They went at it, hammer and tongs, talking through the abstruse details faster than she could follow, walking more and more quickly past the vast heaps of dead technology and half-built mall stores. She let them get ahead of her and stopped to gather her thoughts. She turned around to take it all in and that's when she caught sight of the kids sneaking into Perry and Lester's lab. "Hey!" she shouted, in her loudest Detroit voice. "What are you doing there?" There were three of them, in Miami Dolphins jerseys and shiny bald-shaved heads and little shorts, the latest inexplicable rapper style which made them look more like drag queens in mufti than tough-guys. They rounded on her. They were heavyset and their eyebrows were bleached blond. They had been sneaking into the lab's side-door, looking about as inconspicuous as a trio of nuns. "Get lost!" she shouted. "Get out of here! Perry, Lester!" They were coming closer now. They didn't move so well, puffing in the heat, but they clearly had mayhem on their minds. She reached into her purse for her pepper spray and held it before her dramatically, but they didn't stop coming. Suddenly, the air was rent by the loudest sound she'd ever heard, like she'd put her head inside a foghorn. She flinched and misted a cloud of aerosol capsicum ahead of her. She had the presence of mind to step back quickly, before catching a blowback, but she wasn't quick enough, for her eyes and nose started to burn and water. The sound wouldn't stop, it just kept going on, a sound like her head was too small to contain her brain, a sound that made her teeth ache. The three kids had stopped and staggered off. "You OK?" The voice sounded like it was coming from far, far away, though Lester was right in front of her. She found that she'd dropped to her knees in the teeth of that astonishing noise. She let him help her to her feet. "Jesus," she said, putting a hand to her ears. They rang like she'd been at a rave all night. "What the hell?" "Anti-personnel sonic device," Lester said. She realized that he was shouting, but she could barely hear it. "It doesn't do any permanent damage, but it'll scare off most anyone. Those kids probably live in the shantytown we passed this morning. More and more of them are joining gangs. They're our neighbors, so we don't want to shoot them or anything." She nodded. The ringing in her ears was subsiding a little. Lester steadied her. She leaned on him. He was big and solid. He wore the same cologne as her father had, she realized. She moved away from him and smoothed out her shorts, dusting off her knees. "Did you invent that?" "Made it using a HOWTO I found online," he said. "Lot of kids around here up to no good. It's pretty much a homebrew civil defense siren -- rugged and cheap." She put a finger in each ear and scratched at the itchy buzzing. When she removed them, her hearing was almost back to normal. "I once had an upstairs neighbor in Cambridge who had a stereo system that loud -- never thought I'd hear it again." Perry came and joined them. "I followed them a bit, they're way gone now. I think I recognized one of them from the campsite. I'll talk to Francis about it and see if he can set them right." "Have you been broken into before?" "A few times. Mostly what we worry about is someone trashing the printers. Everything else is easy to replace, but when Lester's old employer went bust we bought up about fifty of these things at the auction and I don't know where we'd lay hands on them again. Computers are cheap and it's not like anyone could really *steal* all this junk." He flashed her his good-looking, confident smile again. "What time do the movies start?" Lester checked his watch. "About an hour after sunset. If we leave now we can get a real dinner at a Haitian place I know and then head over to the Thunderbird. I'll hide under a blanket in the back seat so that we can save on admission!" She'd done that many times as a kid, her father shushing her and her brother as they giggled beneath the blankets. The thought of giant Lester doing it made her chuckle. "I think we can afford to pay for you," she said. The dinner was good -- fiery spicy fish and good music in an old tiki bar with peeling grass wallpaper that managed to look vaguely Haitian. The waiters spoke Spanish, not French, though. She let herself be talked into two bottles of beer -- about one and a half more than she would normally take -- but she didn't get light-headed. The heat and humidity seemed to rinse the alcohol right out of her bloodstream. They got to the movies just at dusk. It was just like she remembered from being a little girl and coming with her parents. Children in pajamas climbed over a jungle-gym to one side of the lot. Ranked rows of cars faced the huge, grubby white projection walls. They even showed one of those scratchy old "Let's all go to the lobby and get ourselves a treat" cartoon shorts with the dancing hot-dogs before the movie. The nostalgia filled her up like a balloon expanding in her chest. She hadn't ever seen a computer until she was ten years old, and that had been the size of a chest-freezer, with less capability than one of the active printed-computer cards that came in glossy fashion magazines with come-ons for perfume and weight-loss. The world had been stood on its head so many times in the intervening thirty-plus years that it was literally dizzying -- or was that the beer having a delayed effect? Suddenly all the certainties she rested on -- her 401k, her house, her ability to navigate the professional world in a competent manner -- seemed to be built on shifting sands. They'd come in Lester's car, a homemade auto built around two electric Smart cars joined together to form a kind of mini-sedan with room enough for Lester to slide into the driver's perch with room to spare. Once they arrived, they unpacked clever folding chairs and sat them beside the car, rolled down the windows, and turned up the speakers. It was a warm night, but not sticky the way it had been that day, and the kiss of the wind that rustled the leaves of the tall palms ringing the theater was like balm. The movie was something forgettable about bumbling detectives on the moon, one of those trendy new things acted entirely by animated dead actors who combined the virtues of box-office draw and cheap labor. There might have been a couple of fictional actors in there too, it was hard to say, she'd never really followed the movies except as a place to escape to. There was real magic and escape in a drive-in, though, with the palpable evidence of all those other breathing humans in the darkened night watching the magic story flicker past on the screen, something that went right into her hindbrain. Before she knew it, her eyelids were drooping and then she found herself jerking awake. This happened a couple times before Lester slipped a pillow under her head and she sank into it and fell into sleep. She woke at the closing credits and realized that she'd managed to prop the pillow on Lester's barrel-chest. She snapped her head up and then smiled embarrassedly at him. "Hey, sleepyhead," he said. "You snore like a bandsaw, you know it?" She blushed. "I don't!" "You do," he said. "I do?" Perry, on her other side nodded. "You do." "God," she said. "Don't worry, you haven't got anything on Lester," Perry said. "I've gone into his room some mornings and found all the pictures lying on the floor, vibrated off their hooks." It seemed to her that Lester was blushing now. "I'm sorry if I spoiled the movie," she said. "Don't sweat it," Lester said, clearly grateful for the change of subject. "It was a lousy movie anyway. You drowned out some truly foul dialogue." "Well, there's that." "C'mon, let's go back to the office and get you your car. It's an hour to Miami from here." She was wide awake by the time she parked the rent-a-car in the coffin-hotel's parking lot and crawled into her room, slapping the air-con buttons up to full to clear out the stifling air that had baked into the interior during the day. She lay on her back in the dark coffin for a long time, eyes open and slowly adjusting to the idiot lights on the control panel, until it seemed that she was lying in a space capsule hurtling through the universe at relativistic speeds, leaving behind history, the world, everything she knew. She sat up, wide awake, on West Coast time suddenly, and there was no way she would fall asleep now, but she lay back down and then she did, finally. The alarm woke her seemingly five minutes later. She did a couple laps around the parking lot, padding around, stretching her legs, trying to clear her head -- her internal clock thought that it was 4AM, but at 7AM on the east coast, the sun was up and the heat had begun to sizzle all the available moisture into the air. She left the hotel and drove around Miami for a while. She needed to find some toiletries and then a cafe where she could sit down and file some copy. She'd tweeted a bunch of working notes and posted a few things to her blog the day before, but her editor expected something more coherent for those who preferred their news a little more digested. By the time she arrived at Perry's junkyard, the day had tipped for afternoon, the sun no longer straight overhead, the heat a little softer than it had been the day before. She settled in for another day of watching the guys work, asking the occasional question. The column she'd ended up filing had been a kind of wait-and-see piece, describing the cool culture these two had going between them, and asking if it could survive scaling up to mass production. Now she experimented with their works-in-progress, sculptures and machines that almost worked, or didn't work at all, but that showed the scope of their creativity. Kettlewell thought that there were a thousand, ten thousand people as creative as these two out there, waiting to be discovered. Could it be true? "Sure," Perry said, "why not? We're just here because someone dropped the barrier to entry, made it possible for a couple of tinkerers to get a lot of materials and to assemble them without knowing a whole lot about advanced materials science. Wasn't it like this when the Internet was starting out?" "Woah," Suzanne said. "I just realized that you wouldn't really remember those days, back in the early nineties." "Sure I remember them. I was a kid, but I remember them fine!" She felt very old. "The thing was that no one really suspected that there were so many liberal arts majors lurking in the nation's universities, dying to drop out and learn perl and HTML." Perry cocked his head. "Yeah, I guess that's analogous. The legacy of the dotcom years for me is all this free infrastructure, very cheap network connections and hosting companies and so on. That, I guess, combined with people willing to use it. I never really thought of it, but there must have been a lot of people hanging around in the old days who thought email and the net were pretty sketchy, right?" She waved her hands at him. "Perry, lad, you don't know the half of it. There are *still* executives in the rustbelt who spend bailout money on secretaries to print out their email and then dictate replies into tape recorders to be typed and sent." He furrowed his thick eyebrows. "You're joking," he said. She put her hand on her heart. "I kid you not. I knew people in the newsroom at the Detroit Free Press. There are whole industries in this country that are living in the last century.' "Well, for me, all that dotcommie stuff was like putting down a good base, making it easy for people like me to get parts and build-logs and to find hardware hackers to jam with." Perry got engrossed in a tricky bit of engine-in-seashell then and she wandered over to Lester, who was printing out more Barbie heads for a much larger version of his mechanical computer. "It'll be able to add, subtract, and multiply any two numbers up to 99," he said. "It took decades to build a vacuum-tube machine that could do that much -- I'm doing it with *switches* in just three revs. In your face, UNIVAC!" She laughed. He had a huge bag of laser-cut soda-can switches that he was soldering onto a variety of substrates from polished car-doors to a bamboo tiki-bar. She looked closely at the solder. "Is this what sweatshop solder looks like?" He looked confused, then said, "Oh! Right, Perry's thing. Yeah, anything not done by a robot has this artisanal quality of blobbiness, which I quite like, it's aesthetic, like a painting with visible brushstrokes. But Perry's right: if you see solder like this on anything that there are a million of, then you know that it was laid down by kids and women working for slave wages. There's no way it's cheaper to make a million solders by hand than by robot unless your labor force is locked in, force-fed amphetamine, and destroyed for anything except prostitution inside of five years. But here, in something like this, so handmade and one of a kind, I think it gives it a nice cargo-cult neoprimitive feel. Like a field of hand-tilled furrows." She nodded. Today she was keeping her computer out, writing down quotes and tweeting thoughts as they came. They worked side by side in companionable silence for a while as she killed a couple thousand spams and he laid down a couple dozen blobs of solder. "How do you like Florida?" he said, after straightening up and cracking his back. She barely stopped typing, deep into some email: "It's all right, I suppose." "There's great stuff here if you know where to look. Want me to show you around a little tonight? It's Friday, after all." "Sounds good. Is Perry free?" It took her a second to register that he hadn't answered. She looked up and saw he was blushing to the tips of his ears. "I thought we could go out just the two of us. Dinner and a walk around the deco stuff on Miami Beach?" "Oh," she said. And the weird thing was, she took it seriously for a second. She hadn't been on a date in something like a year, and he was a really nice guy and so forth. But professional ethics made that impossible, and besides. And besides. He was huge. He'd told her he weighed nearly 400 pounds. So fat, he was, essentially, sexless. Round and unshaped, doughy. All of these thoughts in an instant and then she said, "Oh, well. Listen, Lester, it's about professional ethics. I'm here on a story and you guys are really swell, but I'm here to be objective. That means no dating. Sorry." She said it in the same firm tones as she'd used to turn down their offer to treat her at the IHOP: a fact of life, something she just didn't do. Like turning down a glass of beer by saying, "No thanks, I don't drink." No value judgment. But she could see that she had let her thinking show on her face, if only for the briefest moment. Lester stiffened and his nostrils flared. He wiped his hands on his thighs, then said, in a light tone, "Sure, no problem. I understand completely. Should have thought of that. Sorry!" "No problem," she said. She pretended to work on her email a while longer, then said, "Well, I think I'll call it a day. See you Monday for Tjan's arrival, right?" "Right!" he said, too brightly, and she slunk away to her car. She spent the weekend blogging and seeing the beach. The people on the beach seemed to be of another species from the ones she saw walking the streets of Hollywood and Miami and Lauderdale. They had freakishly perfect bodies, the kind of thing you saw in an anatomical drawing or a comic-book -- so much muscular definition that they were practically cross-hatched. She even tried out the nude beach, intrigued to see these perfect specimens in the all-together, but she chickened out when she realized that she'd need a substantial wax-job before her body hair was brought down to norms for that strip of sand. She did get an eyeful of several anatomically correct drawings before taking off again. It made her uncomfortably horny and aware of how long it had been since her last date. That got her thinking of poor Lester, buried underneath all that flesh, and that got her thinking about the life she'd chosen for herself, covering the weird world of tech where the ground never stood still long enough for her to get her balance. So she retreated to blog in a cafe, posting snippets and impressions from her days with the boys, along with photos. Her readers were all over it, commenting like mad. Half of them thought it was disgusting -- so much suffering and waste in the world and these guys were inventing $10,000 toys out of garbage. The other half wanted to know where to go to buy one for themselves. Halfway through Sunday, her laptop battery finally died, needing a fresh weekly charge, so she retreated again, to the coffin, to wait for Monday and the new day that would dawn for Perry and Lester and Kodacell -- and her. Tjan turned out to be a lot older than she'd expected. She'd pictured him as about 28, smart and preppie like they all were when they were fresh out of B-school and full of Management Wisdom. Instead, he was about forty, balding, with a little pot-belly and thinning hair. He dressed like an English professor, blue-jeans and a checked shirt and a tweedy sports-coat that he'd shucked within seconds of leaving the terminal at Miami airport and stepping into the blast-furnace heat. They'd all come in Lester's big, crazy car, and squishing back in with Tjan's suitcases was like a geometry trick. She found herself half on Perry's lap, hugging half a big duffel-bag that seemed to be full of bricks. "Books," Tjan said. "Just a little personal library. It's a bad habit, moving the physical objects around, but I'm addicted." He had a calm voice that might in fact be a little dull, a prof's monotone. They brought him to Perry and Lester's place, which was three condos with the dividing walls knocked out in a complex that had long rust-streaks down its sides and rickety balconies that had been eaten away by salt air. There was a guardhouse at the front of the complex, but it was shuttered, abandoned, and graffiti tagged. Tjan stepped out of the car and put his hands on his hips and considered the building. "It could use a coat of paint," he said. Suzanne looked closely at him -- he was so deadpan, it was hard to tell what was on his mind. But he slipped her a wink. "Yeah," Perry said. "It could at that. On the bright side: spacious, cheap and there's a pool. There's a lot of this down here since the housing market crashed. The condo association here dissolved about four years ago, so there's not really anyone who's in charge of all the common spaces and stuff, just a few condo owners and speculators who own the apartments. Suckers, I'm thinking. Our rent has gone down twice this year, just for asking. I'm thinking we could probably get them to pay us to live here and just keep out the bums and stuff." The living quarters were nearly indistinguishable from the workshop at the junkyard: strewn with cool devices in various stages of disassembly, detritus and art. The plates and dishes and glasses all had IHOP and Cracker Barrel logos on them. "From thrift shops," Lester explained. "Old people steal them when they get their earlybird specials, and then when they die their kids give them to Goodwill. Cheapest way to get a matched set around here." Tjan circled the three adjoined cracker-box condos like a dog circling his basket. Finally, he picked an unoccupied master bedroom with moldy lace curtains and a motel-art painting of an abstract landscape over the headboard. He set his suitcase down on the faux-Chinoise chest of drawers and said, "Right, I'm done. Let's get to work." They took him to the workshop next and his expression hardly changed as they showed him around, showed him their cabinets of wonders. When they were done, he let them walk him to the IHOP and he ordered the most austere thing on the menu, a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich that was technically on the kids' menu -- a kids' menu at a place where the grownups could order a plate of candy! "So," Perry said. "So, Tjan, come on buddy, give it to me straight -- you hate it? Love it? Can't understand it?" Tjan set down his sandwich. "You boys are very talented," he said. "They're very good inventions. There are lots of opportunities for synergy within Kodacell: marketing, logistics, even packing materials. There's a little aerogel startup in Oregon that Kodacell is underwriting that you could use for padding when you ship." Perry and Lester looked at him expectantly. Suzanne broke the silence. "Tjan, did you have any artistic or design ideas about the things that these guys are making?" Tjan took another bite of sandwich and sipped at his milk. "Well, you'll have to come up with a name for them, something that identifies them. Also, I think you should be careful with trademarked objects. Any time you need to bring in an IP lawyer, you're going to run into huge costs and time delays." They waited again. "That's it?" Perry said. "Nothing about the designs themselves?" "I'm the business-manager. That's editorial. I'm artistically autistic. Not my job to help you design things. It's my job to sell the things you design." "Would it matter what it was we were making? Would you feel the same if it was toothbrushes or staplers?" Tjan smiled. "If you were making staplers I wouldn't be here, because there's no profit in staplers. Too many competitors. Toothbrushes are a possibility, if you were making something really revolutionary. People buy about 1.6 toothbrushes a year, so there's lots of opportunity to come up with an innovative design that sells at a good profit over marginal cost for a couple seasons before it gets cloned or out-innovated. What you people are making has an edge because it's you making it, very bespoke and distinctive. I think it will take some time for the world to emerge an effective competitor to these goods, provided that you can build an initial marketplace mass-interest in them. There aren't enough people out there who know how to combine all the things you've combined here. The system makes it hard to sell anything above the marginal cost of goods, unless you have a really innovative idea, which can't stay innovative for long, so you need continuous invention and re-invention too. You two fellows appear to be doing that. I don't know anything definitive about the aesthetic qualities of your gadgets, nor how useful they'll be, but I *do* understand their distinctiveness, so that's why I'm here." It was longer than all the speeches he'd delivered since arriving, put together. Suzanne nodded and made some notes. Perry looked him up and down. "You're, what, an ex-B-school prof from Cornell, right?" "Yes, for a few years. And I ran a company for a while, doing import-export from emerging economy states in the former Soviet bloc." "I see," Perry said. "So you're into what, a new company every 18 months or something?" "Oh no," Tjan said, and he had a little twinkle in his eye and the tiniest hint of a smile. "Oh no. Every six months. A year at the outside. That's my deal. I'm the business guy with the short attention span." "I see," Perry said. "Kettlewell didn't mention this." At the junkyard, Tjan wandered around the Elmo-propelled Smart car and peered at its innards, watched the Elmos negotiate their balance and position with minute movements and acoustic signals. "I wouldn't worry about it if I were you," he said. "You guys aren't temperamentally suited to doing just one thing." Lester laughed. "He's got you there, dude," he said, slapping Perry on the shoulder. Suzanne got Tjan out for dinner that night. "My dad was in import-export and we travelled a lot, all over Asia and then the former Soviets. He sent me away when I was 16 to finish school in the States, and there was no question but that I would go to Stanford for business school." "Nice to meet a fellow Californian," she said, and sipped her wine. They'd gone to one of the famed Miami deco restaurants and the fish in front of her was practically a sculpture, so thoroughly plated it was. "Well, I'm as Californian as..." "...as possible, under the circumstances," she said and laughed. "It's a Canadian joke, but it applies equally well to Californians. So you were in B-school when?" "Ninety eight to 2001. Interesting times to be in the Valley. I read your column, you know." She looked down at her plate. A lot of people had read the column back then. Women columnists were rare in tech, and she supposed she was good at it, too. "I hope I get remembered as more than the chronicler of the dot-com boom, though," she said. "Oh, you will," he said. "You'll be remembered as the chronicler of this -- what Kettlewell and Perry and Lester are doing." "What you're doing, too, right?" "Oh, yes, what I'm doing too." A robot rollerbladed past on the boardwalk, turning the occasional somersault. "I should have them build some of those," Tjan said, watching the crowd turn to regard it. It hopped onto and off of the curb, expertly steered around the wandering couples and the occasional homeless person. It had a banner it streamed out behind it: CAP'N JACKS PAINTBALL AND FANBOAT TOURS GET SHOT AND GET WET MIAMI KEY WEST LAUDERDALE. "You think they can?" "Sure," Tjan said. "Those two can build anything. That's the point: any moderately skilled practitioner can build anything these days, for practically nothing. Back in the old days, the blacksmith just made every bit of ironmongery everyone needed, one piece at a time, at his forge. That's where we're at. Every industry that required a factory yesterday only needs a garage today. It's a real return to fundamentals. What no one ever could do was join up all the smithies and all the smiths and make them into a single logical network with a single set of objectives. That's new and it's what I plan on making hay out of. This will be much bigger than dot-com. It will be much harder, too -- bigger crests, deeper troughs. This is something to chronicle all right: it will make dot-com look like a warm up for the main show. "We're going to create a new class of artisans who can change careers every 10 months, inventing new jobs that hadn't been imagined a year before." "That's a pretty unstable market," Suzanne said, and ate some fish. "That's a *functional* market. Here's what I think the point of a good market is. In a good market, you invent something and you charge all the market will bear for it. Someone else figures out how to do it cheaper, or decides they can do it for a slimmer margin -- not the same thing, you know, in the first case someone is more efficient and in the second they're just less greedy or less ambitious. They do it and so you have to drop your prices to compete. Then someone comes along who's less greedy or more efficient than both of you and undercuts you again, and again, and again, until eventually you get down to a kind of firmament, a baseline that you can't go lower than, the cheapest you can produce a good and stay in business. That's why straightpins, machine screws and reams of paper all cost basically nothing, and make damned little profit for their manufacturers. "So if you want to make a big profit, you've got to start over again, invent something new, and milk it for all you can before the first imitator shows up. The more this happens, the cheaper and better everything gets. It's how we got here, you see. It's what the system is *for*. We're approaching a kind of pure and perfect state now, with competition and invention getting easier and easier -- it's producing a kind of superabundance that's amazing to watch. My kids just surf it, make themselves over every six months, learn a new interface, a new entertainment, you name it. Change-surfers..." He trailed off. "You have kids?" "In St Petersburg, with their mother." She could tell by his tone that it had been the wrong question to ask. He was looking hangdog. "Well, it must be nice to be so much closer to them than you were in Ithaca." "What? No, no. The St Petersburg in *Russia*." "Oh," she said. They concentrated on their food for a while. "You know," he said, after they'd ordered coffee and desert, "it's all about abundance. I want my kids to grow up with abundance, and whatever is going on right now, it's providing abundance in abundance. The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we can't find room for -- that's superabundance." "I have a locker in Milpitas," she said. "There you go. It's a growth industry." He drank his coffee. On the way back to their cars, he said, "My daughter, Lyenitchka, is four, and my son, Sasha, is one. I haven't lived with their mother in three years." He made a face. "Sasha's circumstances were complicated. They're good kids, though. It just couldn't work with their mother. She's Russian, and connected -- that's how we met, I was hustling for my import-export business and she had some good connections -- so after the divorce there was no question of my taking the kids with me. But they're good kids." "Do you see them?" "We videoconference. Who knew that long-distance divorce was the killer app for videoconferencing?" "Yeah." That week, Suzanne tweeted constantly, filed two columns, and blogged ten or more items a day: photos, bits of discussion between Lester, Perry and Tjan, a couple videos of the Boogie Woogie Elmos doing improbable things. Turned out that there was quite a cult following for the BWE, and the news that there was a trove of some thousands of them in a Hollywood dump sent a half-dozen pilgrims winging their way across the nation to score some for the collectors' market. Perry wouldn't even take their money: "Fella," he told one persistent dealer, "I got forty *thousand* of these things. I won't miss a couple dozen. Just call it good karma." When Tjan found out about it he pursed his lips for a moment, then said, "Let me know if someone wants to pay us money, please. I think you were right, but I'd like to have a say, all right?" Perry looked at Suzanne, who was videoing this exchange with her keychain. Then he looked back at Tjan, "Yeah, of course. Sorry -- force of habit. No harm done, though, right?" That footage got downloaded a couple hundred times that night, but once it got slashdotted by a couple of high-profile headline aggregators, she found her server hammered with a hundred thousand requests. The Merc had the horsepower to serve them all, but you never knew: every once in a while, the web hit another tipping point and grew by an order of magnitude or so, and then all the server-provisioning -- calculated to survive the old slashdottings -- shredded like wet kleenex. From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com To: schurch@sjmercury.com Subject: Re: Embedded journalist? This stuff is amazing. Amazing! Christ, I should put you on the payroll. Forget I wrote that. But i should. You've got a fantastic eye. I have never felt as in touch with my own business as I do at this moment. Not to mention proud! Proud -- you've made me so proud of the work these guys are doing, proud to have some role in it. Kettlebelly She read it sitting up in her coffin, just one of several hundred emails from that day's blog-posts and column. She laughed and dropped it in her folder of correspondence to answer. It was nearly midnight, too late to get into it with Kettlewell. Then her computer rang -- the net-phone she forwarded her cellphone to when her computer was live and connected. She'd started doing that a couple years back, when soft-phones really stabilized, and her phone bills had dropped to less than twenty bucks a month, down from several hundred. It wasn't that she spent a lot of time within arm's reach of a live computer, but given that calls routed through the laptop were free, she was perfectly willing to defer her calls until she was. "Hi Jimmy," she said -- her editor, back in San Jose. 9PM Pacific time on a weeknight was still working hours for him. "Suzanne," he said. She waited. She'd half expected him to call with a little shower of praise, an echo of Kettlewell's note. Jimmy wasn't the most effusive editor she'd had, but it made his little moments of praise more valuable for their rarity. "Suzanne," he said again. "Jimmy," she said. "It's late here. What's up?" "So, it's like this. I love your reports but it's not Silicon Valley news. It's Miami news. McClatchy handed me a thirty percent cut this morning and I'm going to the bone. I am firing a third of the newsroom today. Now, you are a stupendous writer and so I said to myself, 'I can fire her or I can bring her home and have her write about Silicon Valley again,' and I knew what the answer had to be. So I need you to come home, just wrap it up and come home." He finished speaking and she found herself staring at her computer's screen. Her hands were gripping the laptop's edges so tightly it hurt, and the machine made a plasticky squeak as it began to bend. "I can't do that, Jimmy. This is stuff that Silicon Valley needs to know about. This may not be what's happening *in* Silicon Valley, but it sure as shit is what's happening *to* Silicon Valley." She hated that she'd cussed -- she hadn't meant to. "I know you're in a hard spot, but this is the story I need to cover right now." "Suzanne, I'm cutting a third of the newsroom. We're going to be covering stories within driving distance of this office for the foreseeable future, and that's it. I don't disagree with a single thing you just said, but it doesn't matter: if I leave you where you are, I'll have to cut the guy who covers the school boards and the city councils. I can't do that, not if I want to remain a daily newspaper editor." "I see," she said. "Can I think about it?" "Think about what, Suzanne? This has not been the best day for me, I have to tell you, but I don't see what there is to think about. This newspaper no longer has correspondents who work in Miami and London and Paris and New York. As of today, that stuff comes from bloggers, or off the wire, or whatever -- but not from our payroll. You work for this newspaper, so you need to come back here, because the job you're doing does not exist any longer. The job you have with us is here. You've missed the night-flight, but there's a direct flight tomorrow morning that'll have you back by lunchtime tomorrow, and we can sit down together then and talk about it, all right?" "I think --" She felt that oh-shit-oh-shit feeling again, that needing-to-pee feeling, that tension from her toes to her nose. "Jimmy," she said. "I need a leave of absence, OK?" "What? Suzanne, I'm sure we owe you some vacation but now isn't the time --" "Not a vacation, Jimmy. Six months leave of absence, without pay." Her savings could cover it. She could put some banner ads on her blog. Florida was cheap. She could rent out her place in California. She was six steps into the plan and it had only taken ten seconds and she had no doubts whatsoever. She could talk to that book-agent who'd pinged her last year, see about getting an advance on a book about Kodacell. "Are you quitting?" "No, Jimmy -- well, not unless you make me. But I need to stay here." "The work you're doing there is fine, Suzanne, but I worked really hard to protect your job here and this isn't going to help make that happen." "What are you saying?" "If you want to work for the Merc, you need to fly back to San Jose, where the Merc is published. I can't make it any clearer than that." No, he couldn't. She sympathized with him. She was really well paid by the Merc. Keeping her on would mean firing two junior writers. He'd cut her a lot of breaks along the way, too -- let her feel out the Valley in her own way. It had paid off for both of them, but he'd taken the risk when a lot of people wouldn't have. She'd be a fool to walk away from all that. She opened her mouth to tell him that she'd be on the plane in the morning, and what came out was, "Jimmy, I really appreciate all the work you've done for me, but this is the story I need to write. I'm sorry about that." "Suzanne," he said. "Thank you, Jimmy," she said. "I'll get back to California when I get a lull and sort out the details -- my employee card and stuff." "You know what you're doing, right?" "Yeah," she said. "I do." When she unscrewed her earpiece, she discovered that her neck was killing her. That made her realize that she was a forty-five-year-old woman in America without health insurance. Or regular income. She was a journalist without a journalistic organ. She'd have to tell Kettlewell, who would no doubt offer to put her on the payroll. She couldn't do that, of course. Neutrality was hard enough to maintain, never mind being financially compromised. She stepped out of the coffin and sniffed the salty air. Living in the coffin was expensive. She'd need to get a condo or something. A place with a kitchen where she could prep meals. She figured that Perry's building would probably have a vacancy or two. # The second business that Tjan took Perry into was even more successful than the first, and that was saying something. It only took a week for Tjan to get Perry and Lester cranking on a Kitchen Gnome design that mashed together some Homeland Security gait-recognition software with a big solid-state hard-disk and a microphone and a little camera, all packaged together in one of a couple hundred designs of a garden-gnome figurine that stood six inches tall. It could recognize every member of a household by the way they walked and play back voice-memos for each. It turned out to be a killer tool for context-sensitive reminders to kids to do the dishes, and for husbands, wives and roommates to nag each other without getting on each others' nerves. Tjan was really jazzed about it, as it tied in with some theories he had about the changing US demographic, trending towards blended households in urban centers, with three or more adults co-habitating. "This is a rich vein," he said, rubbing his hands together. "Living communally is hard, and technology can make it easier. Roommate ware. It's the wave of the future." There was another Kodacell group in San Francisco, a design outfit with a bunch of stringers who could design the gnomes for them and they did great work. The gnomes were slightly lewd-looking, and they were the product of a generative algorithm that varied each one. Some of the designs that fell out of the algorithm were jaw-droppingly weird -- Perry kept a three-eyed, six-armed version on his desk. They tooled up to make them by the hundred, then the thousand,then the tens of thousand. The fact that each one was different kept their margins up, but as the Gnomes gained popularity their sales were steadily eroded by knock-offs, mostly from Eastern Europe. The knockoffs weren't as cool-looking -- though they were certainly weirder looking, like the offspring of a Norwegian troll and an anime robot -- but they were more feature-rich. Some smart hacker in Russia was packing all kinds of functionality onto a single chip, so that their trolls cost less and did more: burglar alarms, baby-monitors, streaming Internet radio source, and low-reliability medical diagnostic that relied on quack analysis of eye pigment, tongue coating and other newage (rhymes with sewage) indicators. Lester came back from the Dollar Store with a big bag of trolls, a dozen different models, and dumped them out on Tjan's desk, up in old foreman's offices on the catwalk above the workspaces. "Christ, would you look at these? They're selling them for less than our cost to manufacture. How do we compete with this?" "We don't," Tjan said, and rubbed his belly. "Now we do the next thing." "What's the next thing?" Perry said. "Well, the first one delivered a return-on-investment at about twenty times the rate of any Kodak or Duracell business unit in the history of either company. But I'd like to shoot for thirty to forty times next, if that's all right with you. So let's go see what you've invented this week and how we can commercialize it." Perry and Lester just looked at each other. Finally, Lester said, "Can you repeat that?" "The typical ROI for a Kodacell unit in the old days was about four percent. If you put a hundred dollars in, you'd get a hundred and four dollars out, and it would take about a year to realize. Of course, in the old days, they wouldn't have touched a new business unless they could put a hundred million in and get a hundred and four million out. Four million bucks is four million bucks. "But here, the company put fifty thousand into these dolls and three months later, they took seventy thousand out, after paying our salaries and bonuses. That's a forty percent ROI. Seventy thousand bucks isn't four million bucks, but forty percent is forty percent. Not to mention that our business drove similar margins in three other business units." "I thought we'd screwed up by letting these guys eat our lunch," Lester said, indicating the dollar-store trolls. "Nope, we got in while the margins were high, made a good return, and now we'll get out as the margins drop. That's not screwing up, that's doing the right thing. The next time around, we'll do something more capital intensive and we'll take out an even higher margin: so show me something that'll cost two hundred grand to get going and that we can pull a hundred and sixty thou's worth of profit out of for Kodacell in three months. Let's do something ambitious this time around." Suzanne took copious notes. There'd been a couple weeks' awkwardness early on about her scribbling as they talked, or videoing with her keychain. But once she'd moved into the building with the guys, taking a condo on the next floor up, she'd become just a member of the team, albeit a member who tweeted nearly every word they uttered to a feed that was adding new subscribers by the tens of thousands. "So, Perry, what have you got for Tjan?" she asked. "I came up with the last one," he said, grinning -- they always ended up grinning when Tjan ran down economics for them. "Let Lester take this one." Lester looked shy -- he'd never fully recovered from Suzanne turning him down and when she was in the room, he always looked like he'd rather be somewhere else. He participated in the message boards on her blog though, the most prolific poster in a field with thousands of very prolific posters. When he posted, others listened: he was witty, charming and always right. "Well, I've been thinking a lot about roommate-ware, 'cause I know that Tjan's just crazy for that stuff. I've been handicapped by the fact that you guys are such excellent roomies, so I have to think back to my college days to remember what a bad roommate is like, where the friction is. Mostly, it comes down to resource contention, though: I wanna cook, but your dishes are in the sink; I wanna do laundry but your boxers are in the dryer; I wanna watch TV, but your crap is all over the living room sofa." Living upstairs from the guys gave her fresh insight into how the Kodacell philosophy would work out. Kettlewell was really big on communal living, putting these people into each other's pockets like the old-time geek houses of pizza-eating hackers, getting that in-the-trenches camaraderie. It had taken a weekend to put the most precious stuff in her California house into storage and then turn over the keys to a realtor who'd sort out leasing it for her. The monthly check from the realtor left more than enough for her to pay the rent in Florida and then some, and once the UPS man dropped off the five boxes of personal effects she'd chosen, she was practically at home. She sat alone over the guys' apartments in the evenings, windows open so that their muffled conversations could drift in and form the soundtrack as she wrote her columns. It made her feel curiously with, but not of, their movement -- a reasonable proxy for journalistic objectivity in this age of relativism. "Resource contention readily decomposes into a bunch of smaller problems, with distinctive solutions. Take dishes: every dishwasher should be designed with a 'clean' and a 'dirty' compartment -- basically, two logical dishwashers. You take clean dishes out of the clean side, use them, and put them into the dirty side. When the dirty side is full, the clean side is empty, so you cycle the dishwasher and the clean side becomes dirty and vice-versa. I had some sketches for designs that would make this happen, but it didn't feel right: making dishwashers is too industrial for us. I either like making big chunks of art or little silver things you can carry in your pocket." She smiled despite herself. She was drawing a half-million readers a day by doing near-to-nothing besides repeating the mind-blowing conversations around her. It had taken her a month to consider putting ads on the site -- lots of feelers from blog "micro-labels" who wanted to get her under management and into their banner networks, and she broke down when one of them showed her a little spreadsheet detailing the kind of long green she could expect to bring in from a couple of little banners, with her getting the right to personally approve every advertiser in the network. The first month, she'd made more money than all but the most senior writers on the Merc. The next month, she'd outstripped her own old salary. She'd covered commercial blogs, the flamboyant attention-whores who'd bought stupid cars and ridiculous bimbos with the money, but she'd always assumed they were in a different league from a newspaper scribbler. Now she supposed all the money meant that she should make it official and phone in a resignation to Jimmy, but they'd left it pretty ambiguous as to whether she was retiring or taking a leave of absence and she was reluctant to collapse that waveform into the certainty of saying goodbye to her old life. "So I got to thinking about snitch-tags, radio frequency ID gizmos. Remember those? When we started talking about them a decade ago, all the privacy people went crazy, totally sure that these things would be bad news. The geeks dismissed them as not understanding the technology. Supposedly, an RFID can only be read from a couple inches away -- if someone wanted to find out what RFIDs you had on your person, they'd have to wand you, and you'd know about it." "Yeah, that was bull," Perry said. "I mean, sure you can't read an RFID unless it's been excited with electromagnetic radiation, and *sure* you can't do that from a hundred yards without frying everything between you and the target. But if you had a subway turnstile with an exciter built into it, you could snipe all the tag numbers from a distant roof with a directional antenna. If those things had caught on, there'd be exciters everywhere and you'd be able to track anyone you wanted -- Christ, they even put RFIDs in the hundred-dollar bill for a while! Pickpockets could have figured out whose purse was worth snatching from half a mile a way!" "All true," Lester said. "But that didn't stop these guys. There are still a couple of them around, limping along without many customers. They print the tags with inkjets, sized down to about a third the size of a grain of rice. Mostly used in supply-chain management and such. They can supply them on the cheap. "Which brings me to my idea: why not tag everything in a group household, and use the tags to figure out who left the dishes in the sink, who took the hammer out and didn't put it back, who put the empty milk-carton back in the fridge, and who's got the TV remote? It won't solve resource contention, but it will limit the social factors that contribute to it." He looked around at them. "We can make it fun, you know, make cool RFID sticker designs, mod the little gnome dolls to act as terminals for getting reports." Suzanne found herself nodding along. She could use this kind of thing, even though she lived alone, just to help her find out where she left her glasses and the TV remote. Perry shook his head, though. "When I was a kid, I had a really bad relationship with my mom. She was really smart, but she didn't have a lot of time to reason things out with me, so often as not she'd get out of arguing with me by just changing her story. So I'd say, 'Ma, can I go to the mall this aft?' and she'd say, 'Sure, no problem.' Then when I was getting ready to leave the house, she'd ask me where I thought I was going. I'd say, 'To the mall, you said!' and she'd just deny it. Just deny it, point blank. "I don't think she even knew she was doing it. I think when I asked her if I could go, she'd just absentmindedly say yes, but when it actually came time to go out, she'd suddenly remember all my unfinished chores, my homework, all the reasons I should stay home. I think every kid gets this from their folks, but it made me fucking crazy. So I got a mini tape recorder and I started to *tape* her when she gave me permission. I thought I'd really nail her the next time she changed her tune, play her own words back in her ear. "So I tried it, and you know what happened? She gave me nine kinds of holy hell for wearing a wire and then she said it didn't matter what she'd said that morning, she was my mother and I had chores to do and no *how* was I going *anywhere* now that I'd started sneaking around the house with a hidden recorder. She took it away and threw it in the trash. And to top it off, she called me 'J. Edgar' for a month. "So here's my question: how would you feel if the next time you left the dishes in the sink, I showed up with the audit trail for the dishes and waved it in your face? How would we get from that point to a happy, harmonious household? I think you've mistaken the cause for the effect. The problem with dishes in the sink isn't just that it's a pain when I want to cook a meal: it's that when you leave them in the sink, you're being inconsiderate. And the *reason* you've left them in the sink, as you've pointed out, is that putting dishes in the dishwasher is a pain in the ass: you have to bend over, you have to empty it out, and so on. If we moved the dishwasher into the kitchen cupboards and turned half of them into a dirty side and half into a clean side, then disposing of dishes would be as easy as getting them out." Lester laughed, and so did Tjan. "Yeah, yeah -- OK. Point taken. But these RFID things, they're so frigging cheap and potentially useful. I just can't believe that they've never found a single really compelling use in all this time. It just seems like an opportunity that's going to waste." "Maybe it's a dead end. Maybe it's an ornithopter. Inventors spent hundreds of years trying to build an airplane that flew by flapping its wings, and it was all a rat-hole." "I guess," Lester said. "But I don't like the idea." "Like it or don't, " Perry said, "doesn't affect whether it's true or not." But Lester had a sparkle in his eye, and he disappeared into his workshop for a week, and wouldn't let them in, which was unheard of for the big, gregarious giant. He liked to drag the others in whenever he accomplished anything of note, show it off to them like a big kid. That was Sunday. Monday, Suzanne got a call from her realtor. "Your tenants have vanished," she said. "Vanished?" The couple who'd rented her place had been as reliable as anyone she'd ever met in the Valley. He worked at a PR agency, she worked in marketing at Google. Or maybe he worked in marketing and she was in PR at Google -- whatever, they were affluent, well-spoken, and had paid the extortionate rent she'd charged without batting an eye. "They normally paypal the rent to me on the first, but not this month. I called and left voicemail the next day, then followed up with an email. Yesterday I went by the house and it was empty. All their stuff was gone. No food in the fridge. I think they might have taken your home theater stuff, too." "You're fucking kidding me," Suzanne said. It was 11AM in Florida and she was into her second glass of lemonade as the sun began to superheat the air. Back in California, it was 8AM. Her realtor was pulling long hours, and it wasn't her fault. "Sorry. Right. OK, what about the deposit?" "You waived it." She had. It hadn't seemed like a big deal at the time. The distant owner of the condo she was renting in Florida hadn't asked for one. "So I did. Now what?" "You want to swear out a complaint against them?" "With the police?" "Yeah. Breach of contract. Theft, if they took the home theater. We can take them to collections, too." Goddamned marketing people had the collective morals of a snake. All of them useless, conniving, shallow -- she never should have... "Yeah, OK. And what about the house?" "We can find you another tenant by the end of the month, I'm sure. Maybe a little earlier. Have you thought any more about selling it?" She hadn't, though the realtor brought it up every time they spoke. "Is now a good time?" "Lot of new millionaires in the Valley shopping for houses, Suzanne. More than I've seen in years." She named a sum that was a third higher than the last time they'd talked it over. "Is it peaking?" "Who knows? It might go up, it might collapse again. But now is the best time to sell in the past ten years. You'd be smart to do it." She took a deep breath. The Valley was dead, full of venal marketing people and buck-chasers. Here in Florida, she was on the cusp of the next thing, and it wasn't happening in the Valley: it was happening everywhere *except* the Valley, in the cheap places where innovation could happen at low rents. Leaky hot tub, incredible property taxes, and the crazy roller-coaster ride -- up 20 percent this month, down forty next. The bubble was going to burst some day and she should sell out now. "Sell it," she said. "You're going to be a wealthy lady," the realtor said. "Right," Suzanne said. "I have a buyer, Suzanne. I didn't want to pressure you. But I can sell it by Friday. Close escrow next week. Cash in hand by the fifteenth." "Jesus," she said. "You're joking." "No joke," the realtor said. "I've got a waiting list for houses on your block." And so Suzanne got on an airplane that night and flew back to San Jose and took a pricey taxi back to her place. The marketdroids had left it in pretty good shape, clean and tidy, clean sheets in the linen cupboard. She made up her bed and reflected that this would be the last time she made this bed -- the next time she stripped the sheets, they'd go into a long-term storage box. She'd done this before, on her way out of Detroit, packing up a life into boxes and shoving it into storage. What had Tjan said? "The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we can't find room for -- that's superabundance." Before bed she posted a classified on Craigslist for a couple helpers to work on boxing stuff, emailed Jimmy to see if he wanted lunch, and looked up the address for the central police station to swear out her complaint. The amp, speakers, and A/V switcher were all missing from her home theater. She had a dozen helpers to choose from the next morning. She picked two who came with decent references, marveling that it was suddenly possible in Silicon Valley to get anyone to show up anywhere for ten bucks an hour. The police sergeant who took the complaint was sympathetic and agreed with her choice to get out of town. "I've had it with this place, too. Soon as my kids are out of high-school I'm moving back to Montana. I miss the weather." She didn't think of the marketdroids again until the next day, when she and her helpers were boxing up the last of her things and loading them into her U-Haul. Then a BMW convertible screeched around the corner and burned rubber up to her door. The woman marketdroid was driving, looking crazy and disheveled, eyes red-rimmed, one heel broken off of her shoes. "What the FUCK is your problem, lady?" she said, as she leapt out of her car and stalked toward Suzanne. Instinctively, Suzanne shrank back and dropped the box of books she was holding. It spilled out over her lawn. "Fiona?" she said. "What's happened?" "I was *arrested.* They came to my workplace and led me out in handcuffs. I had to make *bail*." Suzanne's stomach shrank to a little pebble, impossibly heavy. "What was I supposed to do? You two took off with my home theater!" "What home theater? Everything was right where you left it when I went. I haven't lived here in *weeks*. Tom left me last month and I moved out." "You moved out?" "Yeah, bitch, I *moved out*. Tom was your tenant, not me. If he ripped something off, that's between you and him." "Look, Fiona, wait, hold up a second. I tried to call you, I sent you email. No one was paying the rent, no one told me that you'd moved out, and no one answered when I tried to find out what had happened." "That sounds like an *explanation,* she said, hissing. "I'm waiting for a fucking *apology.* They took me to *prison*." Suzanne knew that the local lockup was a long way from prison. "I apologize," she said. "Can I get you a cup of coffee? Would you like to use the shower or anything?" The woman glared at her a moment longer, then slowly folded in on herself, collapsing, coughing and sobbing on the lawn. Suzanne stood with her arms at her sides for a moment. Her Craigslist helpers had gone home, so she was all alone, and this woman, whom she'd met only once before, in passing, was clearly having some real problems. Not the kind of thing she dealt with a lot -- her life didn't include much person-to-person hand-holding. But what can you do? She knelt beside Fiona in the grass and took her hand. "Let's get you inside, OK?" At first it was as though she hadn't heard, but slowly she straightened up and let Suzanne lead her into the house. She was twenty-two, twenty-three, young enough to be Suzanne's daughter if Suzanne had gone in for that sort of thing. Suzanne helped her to the sofa and sat her down amid the boxes still waiting to go into the U-Haul. The kitchen was packed up, but she had a couple bottles of Diet Coke in the cooler and she handed one to the girl. "I'm really sorry, Fiona. Why didn't you answer my calls or email?" She looked at Suzanne, her eyes lost in streaks of mascara. "I don't know. I didn't want to talk about it. He lost his job last month and kind of went crazy, told me he didn't want the responsibility anymore. What responsibility? But he told me to go, told me it would be best for both of us if we were apart. I thought it was another girl, but I don't know. Maybe it was just craziness. Everyone I know out here is crazy. They all work a hundred hours a week, they get fired or quit their jobs every five months. Everything is so expensive. My rent is three quarters of my salary." "It's really hard," Suzanne said, thinking of the easy, lazy days in Florida, the hackers' idyll that Perry and Lester enjoyed in their workshops. "Tom was on antidepressants, but he didn't like taking them. When he was on them, he was pretty good, but when he went off, he turned into... I don't know. He'd cry a lot, and shout. It wasn't a good relationship, but we moved out here from Oregon together, and I'd known him all my life. He was a little moody before, but not like he was here." "When did you speak to him last?" Suzanne had found a couple of blister-packs of anti-depressants in the medicine chest. She hoped that wasn't Tom's only supply. "We haven't spoken since I moved out." An hour later, the mystery was solved. The police went to Tom's workplace and discovered that he'd been fired the week before. They tried the GPS in his car and it finked him out as being in a ghost mall's parking lot near his old office. He was dead behind the wheel, a gun in his hand, shot through the heart. Suzanne took the call and though she tried to keep her end of the conversation quiet and neutral, Fiona -- still on the sofa, drinking the warm, flat Coke -- knew. She let out a moan like a dog that's been kicked, and then a scream. For Suzanne, it was all unreal, senseless. The cops told her that her home theater components were found in the trunk of the car. No note. "God, oh God, Jesus, you selfish shit fucking bastard," Fiona sobbed. Awkwardly, Suzanne sat down beside her and took her into a one-armed hug. Her helpers were meeting her at the self-storage the next day to help her unload the U-Haul. "Do you have someone who can stay with you tonight?" Suzanne asked, praying the answer was yes. She had a house to move out of. Christ, she felt so cold-blooded, but she was on a goddamned schedule. "Yes, I guess." Fiona scrubbed at her eyes with her fists. "Sure." Suzanne sighed. The lie was plain. "Who?" Fiona stood up and smoothed out her skirt. "I'm sorry," she said, and started for the door. Groaning inwardly, Suzanne blocked her. "You'll stay on the sofa," she said. "You're not driving in this state. I'll order in pizza. Pepperoni mushroom OK?" Looking defeated, Fiona turned on her heel and went back to the sofa. Over pizza, Suzanne pulled a few details out of her. Tom had fallen into a funk when the layoffs had started in his office -- they were endemic across the Valley, another bust was upon them. His behavior had grown worse and worse, and she'd finally left, or been thrown out, it wasn't clear. She was on thin ice at Google, and they were laying people off too, and she was convinced that being led out in handcuffs would be the straw that broke the camel's back. "I should move back to Oregon," she said, dropping her slice back on the box-top. Suzanne had heard a lot of people talk about giving up on the Valley since she'd moved there. It was a common thing, being beaten down by life in the Bay Area. You were supposed to insert a pep talk here, something about hanging in, about the opportunities here. "Yes," she said, "that's a good idea. You're young, and there's a life for you there. You can start something up, or go to work for someone else's startup." It felt weird coming out of her mouth, like a betrayal of the Valley, of some tribal loyalty to this tech-Mecca. But after all, wasn't she selling up and moving east? "There's nothing in Oregon," Fiona said, snuffling. "There's something everywhere. Let me tell you about some friends of mine in Florida," and she told her, and as she told her, she told herself. Hearing it spoken aloud, even after having written about it and written about it, and been there and DONE it, it was different. She came to understand how fucking *cool* it all was, this new, entrepreneurial, inventive, amazing thing she was engaged in. She'd loved the contrast of nimble software companies when compared with gigantic, brutal auto companies, but what her boys were doing, it made the software companies look like lumbering lummoxes, crashing around with their fifty employees and their big purpose-built offices. Fiona was disbelieving, then interested, then excited. "They just make this stuff, do it, then make something else?" "Exactly -- no permanence except for the team, and they support each other, live and work together. You'd think that because they live and work together that they don't have any balance, but it's the opposite: they book off work at four or sometimes earlier, go to movies, go out and have fun, read books, play catch. It's amazing. I'm never coming back here." And she never would. She told her editor about this. She told her friends who came to a send-off party at a bar she used to go to when she went into the office a lot. She told her cab driver who picked her up to take her to the airport and she told the bemused engineer who sat next to her all the way back to Miami. She had the presence of mind not to tell the couple who bought her house for a sum of money that seemed to have at least one extra zero at the end -- maybe two. And so when she got back to Miami, she hardly noticed the incredible obesity of the man who took the money for the gas in her leased car -- now that she was here for the long haul she'd have to look into getting Lester to help her buy a used Smart-car from a junker lot -- and the tin roofs of the shantytowns she passed looked tropical and quaint. The smell of swamp and salt, the pea-soup humidity, the bass thunder of the boom-cars in the traffic around her -- it was like some kind of sweet homecoming for her. Tjan was in the condo when she got home and he spotted her from the balcony, where he'd been sunning himself and helped her bring up her suitcases of things she couldn't bear to put in storage. "Come down to our place for a cup of coffee once you're settled in," he said, leaving her. She sluiced off the airplane grease that had filled her pores on the long flight from San Jose to Miami and changed into a cheap sun-dress and a pair of flip-flops that she'd bought at the Thunderbird Flea Market and headed down to their place. Tjan opened the door with a flourish and she stepped in and stopped short. When she'd left, the place had been a reflection of their jumbled lives: gizmos, dishes, parts, tools and clothes strewn everywhere in a kind of joyful, eye-watering hyper-mess, like an enormous kitchen junk-drawer. Now the place was *spotless* -- and what's more, it was *minimalist*. The floor was not only clean, it was visible. Lining the walls were translucent white plastic tubs stacked to the ceiling. "You like it?" "It's amazing," she said. "Like Ikea meets *Barbarella*. What happened here?" Tjan did a little two-step. "It was Lester's idea. Have a look in the boxes." She pulled a couple of the tubs out. They were jam-packed with books, tools, cruft and crud -- all the crap that had previously cluttered the shelves and the floor and the sofa and the coffee table. "Watch this," he said. He unvelcroed a wireless keyboard from the side of the TV and began to type: T-H-E C-O. . . The field autocompleted itself: THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, and brought up a picture of a beaten-up paperback along with links to web-stores, reviews, and the full text. Tjan gestured with his chin and she saw that the front of one of the tubs was pulsing with a soft blue glow. Tjan went and pulled open the tub and fished for a second before producing the book. "Try it," he said, handing her the keyboard. She began to type experimentally: U-N and up came UNDERWEAR (14). "No way," she said. "Way," Tjan said, and hit return, bringing up a thumbnail gallery of fourteen pairs of underwear. He tabbed over each, picked out a pair of Simpsons boxers, and hit return. A different tub started glowing. "Lester finally found a socially beneficial use for RFIDs. We're going to get rich!" "I don't think I understand," she said. "Come on," he said. "Let's get to the junkyard. Lester explains this really well." He did, too, losing all of the shyness she remembered, his eyes glowing, his sausage-thick fingers dancing. "Have you ever alphabetized your hard drive? I mean, have you ever spent any time concerning yourself with where on your hard drive your files are stored, which sectors contain which files? Computers abstract away the tedious, physical properties of files and leave us with handles that we use to persistently refer to them, regardless of which part of the hard drive currently holds those particular bits. So I thought, with RFIDs, you could do this with the real world, just tag everything and have your furniture keep track of where it is. "One of the big barriers to roommate harmony is the correct disposition of stuff. When you leave your book on the sofa, I have to move it before I can sit down and watch TV. Then you come after me and ask me where I put your book. Then we have a fight. There's stuff that you don't know where it goes, and stuff that you don't know where it's been put, and stuff that has nowhere to put it. But with tags and a smart chest of drawers, you can just put your stuff wherever there's room and ask the physical space to keep track of what's where from moment to moment. "There's still the problem of getting everything tagged and described, but that's a service business opportunity, and where you've got other shared identifiers like ISBNs you could use a cameraphone to snap the bar-codes and look them up against public databases. The whole thing could be coordinated around 'spring cleaning' events where you go through your stuff and photograph it, tag it, describe it -- good for your insurance and for forensics if you get robbed, too." He stopped and beamed, folding his fingers over his belly. "So, that's it, basically." Perry slapped him on the shoulder and Tjan drummed his forefingers like a heavy-metal drummer on the side of the workbench they were gathered around. They were all waiting for her. "Well, it's very cool," she said, at last. "But, the whole white-plastic-tub thing. It makes your apartment look like an Ikea showroom. Kind of inhumanly minimalist. We're Americans, we like celebrating our stuff." "Well, OK, fair enough," Lester said, nodding. "You don't have to put everything away, of course. And you can still have all the decor you want. This is about clutter control." "Exactly," Perry said. "Come check out Lester's lab." "OK, this is pretty perfect," Suzanne said. The clutter was gone, disappeared into the white tubs that were stacked high on every shelf, leaving the work-surfaces clear. But Lester's works-in-progress, his keepsakes, his sculptures and triptychs were still out, looking like venerated museum pieces in the stark tidiness that prevailed otherwise. Tjan took her through the spreadsheets. "There are ten teams that do closet-organizing in the network, and a bunch of shippers, packers, movers, and storage experts. A few furniture companies. We adopted the interface from some free software inventory-management apps that were built for illiterate service employees. Lots of big pictures and autocompletion. And we've bought a hundred RFID printers from a company that was so grateful for a new customer that they're shipping us 150 of them, so we can print these things at about a million per hour. The plan is to start our sales through the consultants at the same time as we start showing at trade-shows for furniture companies. We've already got a huge order from a couple of local old-folks' homes." They walked to the IHOP to have a celebratory lunch. Being back in Florida felt just right to her. Francis, the leader of the paramilitary wing of the AARP, threw them a salute and blew her a kiss, and even Lester's nursing junkie friend seemed to be in a good mood. When they were done, they brought take-out bags for the junkie and Francis in the shantytown. "I want to make some technology for those guys," Perry said as they sat in front of Francis's RV drinking cowboy coffee cooked over a banked wood-stove off to one side. "Room-mate-ware for homeless people." Francis uncrossed his bony ankles and scratched at his mosquito bites. "A lot of people think that we don't buy stuff, but it's not true," he said. "I shop hard for bargains, but there's lots of stuff I spend more on because of my lifestyle than I would if I had a real house and steady electricity. When I had a chest-freezer, I could bulk buy ground round for about a tenth of what I pay now when I go to the grocery store and get enough for one night's dinner. The alternative is using propane to keep the fridge going overnight, and that's not cheap, either. So I'm a kind of premium customer. Back at Boeing, we loved the people who made small orders, because we could charge them such a premium for custom work, while the big airlines wanted stuff done so cheap that half the time we lost money on the deal." Perry nodded. "There you have it -- roommate-ware for homeless people, a great and untapped market." Suzanne cocked her head and looked at him. "You're sounding awfully commerce-oriented for a pure and unsullied engineer, you know?" He ducked his head and grinned and looked about twelve years old. "It's infectious. Those little kitchen gnomes, we sold nearly a half-million of those things, not to mention all the spin-offs. That's a half-million *lives* -- a half-million *households* -- that we changed just by thinking up something cool and making it real. These RFID things of Lester's -- we'll sign a couple million customers with those. People will change everything about how they live from moment to moment because of something Lester thought up in my junkyard over there." "Well, there's thirty million of us living in what the social workers call 'marginal housing,'" Francis said, grinning wryly. He had a funny smile that Suzanne had found adorable until he explained that he had an untreated dental abscess that he couldn't afford to get fixed. "So that's a lot of difference you could make." "Yeah," Perry said. "Yeah, it sure is." That night, she found herself still blogging and answering emails -- they always piled up when she travelled and took a couple of late nights to clear out -- after nine PM, sitting alone in a pool of light in the back corner of Lester's workshop that she had staked out as her office. She yawned and stretched and listened to her old back crackle. She hated feeling old, and late nights made her feel old -- feel every extra ounce of fat on her tummy, feel the lines bracketing her mouth and the little bag of skin under her chin. She stood up and pulled on a light jacket and began to switch off lights and get ready to head home. As she poked her head in Tjan's office, she saw that she wasn't the only one working late. "Hey, you," she said. "Isn't it time you got going?" He jumped like he'd been stuck with a pin and gave a little yelp. "Sorry," he said, "didn't hear you." He had a cardboard box on his desk and had been filling it with his personal effects -- little one-off inventions the guys had made for him, personal fetishes and tchotchkes, a framed picture of his kids. "What's up?" He sighed and cracked his knuckles. "Might as well tell you now as tomorrow morning. I'm resigning." She felt a flash of anger and then forced it down and forcibly replaced it with professional distance and curiosity. Mentally she licked her pencil-tip and flipped to a blank page in her reporter's notebook. "Oh yes?" "I've had another offer, in Westchester County. Westinghouse has spun out its own version of Kodacell and they're looking for a new vice-president to run the division. That's me." "Good job," she said. "Congratulations, Mr Vice-President." He shook his head. "I emailed Kettlewell half an hour ago. I'm leaving in the morning. I'm going to say goodbye to the guys over breakfast." "Not much notice," she said. "Nope," he said, a note of anger creeping into his voice. "My contract lets Kodacell fire me on one day's notice, so I insisted on the right to quit on the same terms. Maybe Kettlewell will get his lawyers to write better boilerplate from here on in." When she had an angry interview, she habitually changed the subject to something sensitive: angry people often say more than they intend to. She did it instinctively, not really meaning to psy-ops Tjan, whom she thought of as a friend, but not letting that get in the way of the story. "Westinghouse is doing what, exactly?" "It'll be as big as Kodacell's operation in a year," he said. "George Westinghouse personally funded Tesla's research, you know. The company understands funding individual entrepreneurs. I'm going to be training the talent scouts and mentoring the financial people, then turning them loose to sign up entrepreneurs for the Westinghouse network. There's a competitive market for garage inventors now." He laughed. "Go ahead and print that," he said. "Blog it tonight. There's competition now. We're giving two points more equity and charging half a point less on equity than the Kodacell network." "That's amazing, Tjan. I hope you'll keep in touch with me -- I'd love to follow your story." "Count on it," he said. He laughed. "I'm getting a week off every eight weeks to scout Russia. They've got an incredible culture of entrepreneurship." "Plus you'll get to see your kids," Suzanne said. "That's really good." "Plus, I'll get to see my kids," he admitted. "How much money is Westinghouse putting into the project?" she asked, replacing her notional notebook with a real one, pulled from her purse. "I don't have numbers, but they've shut down the whole appliances division to clear the budget for it." She nodded -- she'd seen news of the layoffs on the wires. Mass demonstrations, people out of work after twenty years' service. "So it's a big budget." "They must have been impressed with the quarterlies from Kodacell." Tjan folded down the flaps on his box and drummed his fingers on it, squinting at her. "You're joking, right?" "What do you mean?" "Suzanne, they were impressed by *you*. Everyone knows that quarterly numbers are easy to cook -- anything less than two annual reports is as likely to be enronning as real fortune-making. But *your* dispatches from here -- they're what sold them. It's what's convincing *everyone*. Kettlewell said that three quarters of his new recruits come on board after reading your descriptions of this place. That's how *I* ended up here." She shook her head. "That's very flattering, Tjan, but --" He waved her off and then, surprisingly, came around the desk and hugged her. "But nothing, Suzanne. Kettlewell, Lester, Perry -- they're all basically big kids. Full of enthusiasm and invention, but they've got the emotional maturity and sense of scale of hyperactive five year olds. You and me, we're grownups. People take us seriously. It's easy to get a kid excited, but when a grownup chimes in you know there's some there there." Suzanne recovered herself after a second and put away her notepad. "I'm just the person who writes it all down. You people are making it happen." "In ten years' time, they'll remember you and not us," Tjan said. "You should get Kettlewell to put you on the payroll." Kettlewell himself turned up the next day. Suzanne had developed an intuitive sense of the flight-times from the west coast and so for a second she couldn't figure out how he could possibly be standing there -- nothing in the sky could get him from San Jose to Miami for a seven AM arrival. "Private jet," he said, and had the grace to look slightly embarrassed. "Kodak had eight of them and Duracell had five. We've been trying to sell them all off but no one wants a used jet these days, not even Saudi princes or Columbian drug-lords." "So, basically, it was going to waste." He smiled and looked eighteen -- she really did feel like the only grownup sometimes -- and said, "Zackly -- it's practically environmental. Where's Tjan?" "Downstairs saying goodbye to the guys, I think." "OK," he said. "Are you coming?" She grabbed her notebook and a pen and beat him out the door of her rented condo. "What's this all about," Tjan said, looking wary. The guys were hang-dog and curious looking, slightly in awe of Kettlewell, who did little to put them at their ease -- he was staring intensely at Tjan. "Exit interview," he said. "Company policy." Tjan rolled his eyes. "Come on," he said. "I've got a flight to catch in an hour." "I could give you a lift," Kettlewell said. "You want to do the exit interview between here and the airport?" "I could give you a lift to JFK. I've got the jet warmed up and waiting." Sometimes, Suzanne managed to forget that Kodacell was a multi-billion dollar operation and that Kettlewell was at its helm, but other times the point was very clear. "Come on," he said, "we'll make a day of it. We can stop on the way and pick up some barbecue to eat on the plane. I'll even let you keep your seat in the reclining position during take-off and landing. Hell, you can turn your cell-phone on -- just don't tell the Transport Security Administration!" Tjan looked cornered, then resigned. "Sounds good to me," he said and Kettlewell shouldered one of the two huge duffel-bags that were sitting by the door. "Hi, Kettlewell," Perry said. Kettlewell set down the duffel. "Sorry, sorry. Lester, Perry, it's really good to see you. I'll bring Suzanne back tonight and we'll all go out for dinner, OK?" Suzanne blinked. "I'm coming along?" "I sure hope so," Kettlewell said. Perry and Lester accompanied them down in the elevator. "Private jet, huh?" Perry said. "Never been in one of those." Kettlewell told them about his adventures trying to sell off Kodacell's private air force. "Send one of them our way, then," Lester said. "Do you fly?" Kettlewell said. "No," Perry said. "Lester wants to take it apart. Right, Les?" Lester nodded. "Lots of cool junk in a private jet." "These things are worth millions, guys," Kettlewell said. "No, someone *paid* millions for them," Perry said. "They're *worth* whatever you can sell them for." Kettlewell laughed. "You've had an influence around here, Tjan," he said. Tjan managed a small, tight smile. Kettlewell had a driver waiting outside of the building who loaded the duffels into the spacious trunk of a spotless dark town-car whose doors chunked shut with an expensive sound. "I want you to know that I'm really not angry at all, OK?" Kettlewell said. Tjan nodded. He had the look of a man who was steeling himself for a turn in an interrogation chamber. He'd barely said a word since Kettlewell arrived. For his part, Kettlewell appeared oblivious to all of this, though Suzanne was pretty sure that he understood exactly how uncomfortable this was making Tjan. "The thing is, six months ago, nearly everyone was convinced that I was a fucking moron, that I was about to piss away ten billion dollars of other people's money on a stupid doomed idea. Now they're copying me and poaching my best people. So this is good news for me, though I'm going to have to find a new business manager for those two before they get picked up for turning planes into component pieces." Suzanne's PDA vibrated whenever the number of online news stories mentioning her or Kodacell or Kettlewell increased or decreased sharply. She used to try to read everything, but it was impossible to keep up -- now all she wanted was to keep track of whether the interestingness-index was on the uptick or downtick. It had started to buzz that morning and the pitch had increased steadily until it was actually uncomfortable in her pocket. Irritated, she yanked it out and was about to switch it off when the lead article caught her eye. KODACELL LOSES TJAN TO WESTINGHOUSE The by-line was Freddy. Feeling like a character in a horror movie who can't resist the compulsion to look under the bed, Suzanne thumbed the PDA's wheel and brought up the whole article. :: Kodacell business-manager Tjan Lee Tang, whose adventures we've :: followed through Suzanne Church's gushing, besotted blog posts She looked away and reflexively reached toward the delete button. The innuendo that she was romantically involved with one or more of the guys had circulated on her blog's message boards and around the diggdots ever since she'd started writing about them. No woman could possibly be writing about this stuff because it was important -- she had to be "with the band," a groupie or a whore. Combine that with Rat-Toothed Freddy's sneering tone and she was instantly sent into heart-thundering rage. She deleted the post and looked out the window. Her pager buzzed some more and she looked down. The same article, being picked up on blogs, on some of the bigger diggdots, and an AP wire. She forced herself to re-open it. :: has been hired to head up a new business unit on behalf of the :: multinational giant Westinghouse. The appointment stands as more :: proof of Church's power to cloud men's minds with pretty empty :: words about the half-baked dot-com schemes that have oozed out of :: Silicon Valley and into every empty and dead American suburb. It was hypnotic, like staring into the eyes of a serpent. Her pulse actually thudded in her ears for a second before she took a few deep breaths and calmed down enough to finish the article, which was just more of the same: nasty personal attacks, sniping, and innuendo. Freddy even managed to imply that she was screwing all of them -- and Kettlewell besides. Kettlewell leaned over her shoulder and read. "You should send him an email," he said. "That's disgusting. That's not reportage." "Never get into a pissing match with a skunk," she said. "What Freddy wants is for me to send him mail that he can publish along with more snarky commentary. When the guy you're arguing with controls the venue you're arguing in, you can't possibly win." "So blog him," Kettlewell said. "Correct the record." "The record is correct," she said. "It's never been incorrect. I've written an exhaustive record that is there for everyone to see. If people believe this, no amount of correction will help." Kettlewell made a face like a little boy who'd been told he couldn't have a toy. "That guy is poison," he said. "Those quote-marks around blog." "Let him add his quote-marks," she said. "My daily readership is higher than the Merc's paid circulation this week." It was true. After a short uphill climb from her new URL, she'd accumulated enough readers that the advertising revenue dwarfed her old salary at the Merc, an astonishing happenstance that nevertheless kept her bank-account full. She clicked a little. "Besides, look at this, there are three dozen links pointing at this story so far and all of them are critical of him. We don't need to stick up for ourselves -- the world will." Saying it calmed her and now they were at the airport. They cruised into a private gate, away from the militarized gulag that fronted Miami International. A courteous security guard waved them through and the driver confidently piloted the car up to a wheeled jetway beside a cute, stubby little toy jet. On the side, in cursive script, was the plane's name: Suzanne. She looked accusatorially at Kettlewell. "It was called that when I bought the company," he said, expressionless but somehow mirthful behind his curved surfer shades. "But I kept it because I liked the private joke." "Just no one tell Freddy that you've got an airplane with my name on it or we'll never hear the fucking end of it." She covered her mouth, regretting her language, and Kettlewell laughed, and so did Tjan, and somehow the ice was broken between them. "No *way* flying this thing is cost-effective," Tjan said. "Your CFO should be kicking your ass." "It's a little indulgence," Kettlewell said, bounding up the steps and shaking hands with a small, neat woman pilot, an African-American with corn-rows peeking out under her smart peaked cap. "Once you've flown in your own bird, you never go back." "This is a *monstrosity*," Tjan said as he boarded. "What this thing eats up in hangar fees alone would be enough to bankroll three or four teams." He settled into an oversized Barcalounger of a seat and accepted a glass of orange juice that the pilot poured for him. "Thank you, and no offense." "None taken," she said. "I agree one hundred percent." "See," Tjan said. Suzanne took her own seat and her own glass and buckled in and watched the two of them, warming up for the main event, realizing that she'd been brought along as a kind of opening act. "They paying you more?" "Yup," Tjan said. "All on the back-end. Half a point on every dollar brought in by a team I coach or whose members I mentor." Kettlewell whistled. "That's a big share," he said. "If I can make my numbers, I'll take home a million this year." "You'll make those numbers. Good negotiations. Why didn't you ask us for the same deal?" "Would you have given it to me?" "You're a star," Kettlewell said, nodding at Suzanne, whose invisibility to the conversation popped like a bubble. "Thanks to her." "Thanks, Suzanne," Tjan said. Suzanne blushed. "Come on, guys." Tjan shook his head. "She doesn't really understand. It's actually kind of charming." "We might have matched the offer." "You guys are first to market. You've got a lot of procedures in place. I wanted to reinvent some wheels." "We're too *conservative* for you?" Tjan grinned wickedly. "Oh yes," he said. "I'm going to do business in *Russia*." Kettlewell grunted and pounded his orange juice. Around them, the jet's windows flashed white as they broke through the clouds and the ten thousand foot bell sounded. "How the hell are you going to make anything that doesn't collapse under its own weight in Russia?" "The corruption's a problem, sure," Tjan said. "But it's offset by the entrepreneurship. Some of those cats make the Chinese look lazy and unimaginative. It's a shame that so much of their efforts have been centered on graft, but there's no reason they couldn't be focused on making an honest ruble." They fell into a discussion of the minutiae of Perry and Lester's businesses, franker than any business discussion she'd ever heard. Tjan talked about the places where they'd screwed up, and places where they'd scored big, and about all the plans he'd made for Westinghouse, the connections he had in Russia. He even talked about his kids and his ex in St Petersburg, and Kettlewell admitted that he'd known about them already. For Kettlewell's part, he opened the proverbial kimono wide, telling Tjan about conflicts within the board of directors, poisonous holdovers from the pre-Kodacell days who sabotaged the company from within with petty bureaucracy, even the problems he was having with his family over the long hours they were working. He opened the minibar and cracked a bottle of champagne to toast Tjan's new job, and they mixed it with more orange juice, and then there were bagels and schmear, fresh fruit, power bars, and canned Starbucks coffees with deadly amounts of sugar and caffeine. When Kettlewell disappeared into the tiny -- but marble-appointed -- bathroom, Suzanne found herself sitting alone with Tjan, almost knee to knee, lightheaded from lack of sleep and champagne and altitude. "Some trip," she said. "You're the best," he said, wobbling a little. "You know that? Just the best. The stuff you write about these guys, it makes me want to stand up and salute. You make us all seem so fucking *glorious*. We're going to end up taking over the world because you inspire us so. Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, because you're not very self-conscious about it right now, but Suzanne, you won't believe it because you're so goddamned modest, too. It's what makes your writing so right, so believable --" Kettlewell stepped out of the bathroom. "Touching down soon," he said, and patted them each on the shoulder as he took his seat. "So that's about it, then," he said, and leaned back and closed his eyes. Suzanne was accustomed to thinking of him as twenty-something, the boyish age of the magazine cover portraits from the start of his career. Now, eyes closed on his private jet, harsh upper atmosphere sun painting his face, his crowsfeet and the deep vertical brackets around his mouth revealed him for someone pushing a youthful forty, kept young by exercise and fun and the animation of his ideas. "Guess so," Tjan said, slumping. "This has been one of the more memorable experiences of my life, Kettlewell, Suzanne. Not entirely pleasant, but pleasant on the whole. A magical time in the clouds." "Once you've flown private, you'll never go back to coach," Kettlewell said, smiling, eyes still closed. "You still think my CFO should spank me for not selling this thing?" "No," Tjan said. "In ten years, if we do our jobs, there won't be five companies on earth that can afford this kind of thing -- it'll be like building a cathedral after the Protestant Reformation. While we have the chance, we should keep these things in the sky. But you should give one to Lester and Perry to take apart." "I was planning to," Kettlewell said. "Thanks." Suzanne and Kettlewell got off the plane and Tjan didn't look back when they'd landed at JFK. "Should we go into town and get some bialy to bring back to Miami?" Kettlewell said, squinting at the bright day on the tarmac. "Bring deli to Miami?" "Right, right," he said. "Forget I asked. Besides, we'd have to charter a chopper to get into Manhattan and back without dying in traffic." Something about the light through the open hatch or the sound or the smell -- something indefinably New York -- made her yearn for Miami. The great cities of commerce like New York and San Francisco seemed too real for her, while the suburbs of Florida were a kind of endless summer camp, a dreamtime where anything was possible. "Let's go," she said. The champagne buzz had crashed and she had a touch of headache. "I'm bushed." "Me too," Kettlewell said. "I left San Jose last night to get into Miami before Tjan left. Not much sleep. Gonna put my seat back and catch some winks, if that's OK?" "Good plan," Suzanne said. Embarrassingly, when they were fully reclined, their seats nearly touched, forming something like a double bed. Suzanne lay awake in the hum of the jets for a while, conscious of the breathing human beside her, the first man she'd done anything like share a bed with in at least a year. The last thing she remembered was the ten thousand foot bell going off and then she slipped away into sleep. # :: Perry thought that they'd sell a million Home Awares in six :: months. Lester thought he was nuts, that number was too high. :: :: "Please," he said, "I *invented* these things but there aren't a :: million roommate households in all of America. We'll sell half :: a million tops, total. Lester always complained when she quoted him directly in her blog posts, but she thought he secretly enjoyed it. :: Today the boys shipped their millionth unit. It took six weeks. They'd uncorked a bottle of champagne when unit one million shipped. They hadn't actually shipped it, per se. The manufacturing was spread out across forty different teams all across the country, even a couple of Canadian teams. The RFID printer company had re-hired half the workers they'd laid off the year before, and had them all working overtime to meet demand. :: What's exciting about this isn't just the money that these guys :: have made off of it, or the money that Kodacell will return to :: its shareholders, it's the ecosystem that these things have :: enabled. There're at least ten competing commercial systems for :: organizing, tagging, sharing, and describing Home Aware objects. :: Parents love them for their kids. School teachers love them. :: Seniors' homes. The seniors' homes had been Francis's idea. They'd brought him in to oversee some of the production engineering, along with some of the young braves who ran around the squatter camps. Francis knew which ones were biddable and he kept them to heel. In the evenings, he'd join the guys and Suzanne up on the roof of the workshop on folding chairs, with beers, watching the sweaty sunset. :: They're not the sole supplier. That's what an ecosystem is all :: about, creating value for a lot of players. All this competition :: is great news for you and me, because it's already driven the :: price of Home Aware goods down by forty percent. That means that :: Lester and Perry are going to have to invent something new, soon, :: before the margin disappears altogether -- and that's also good :: news for you and me. "Are you coming?" Lester had dated a girl for a while, someone he met on Craigslist, but she'd dumped him and Perry had confided that she'd left him because he didn't live up to the press he'd gotten in Suzanne's column. When he got dumped, he became even touchier about Suzanne, caught at a distance from her that was defined by equal parts of desire and resentment. "Up in a minute," she said, trying to keep her smile light and noncommittal. Lester was very nice, but there were times when she caught him staring at her like a kicked puppy and it made her uncomfortable. Naturally, this increased his discomfort as well. On the roof they already had a cooler of beers going and beside it a huge plastic tub of brightly colored machine-parts. "Jet engine," Perry said. The months had put a couple pounds on him and new wrinkles, and given him some grey at the temples, and laugh lines inside his laugh lines. Perry was always laughing at everything around them ("They fucking *pay me* to do this," he'd told her once, before literally collapsing to the floor, rolling with uncontrollable hysteria). He laughed again. "Good old Kettlebelly," she said. "Must have broken his heart." Francis held up a curved piece of cowling. "This thing wasn't going to last anyway. See the distortion here and here? This thing was designed in a virtual wind-tunnel and machine-lathed. We tried that a couple times, but the wind-tunnel sims were never detailed enough and the forms that flew well in the machine always died a premature death in the sky. Another two years and he'd have had to have it rebuilt anyway, and the Koreans who built this charge shitloads for parts." "Too bad," Lester said. "It's pretty. Gorgeous, even." He mimed its curve in the air with a pudgy hand, that elegant swoop. "Aerospace loves the virtual wind-tunnel," Francis said, and glared at the cowling. "You can use evolutionary algorithms in the sim and come up with really efficient designs, in theory. And computers are cheaper than engineers." "Is that why you were laid off?" Suzanne said. "I wasn't laid off, girl," he said. He jiggled his lame foot. "I retired at 65 and was all set up but the pension plan went bust. So I missed a month of medical and they cut me off and I ended up uninsured. When the wife took sick, bam, that was it, wiped right out. But I'm not bitter -- why should the poor be allowed to live, huh?" His acolytes, three teenagers in do-rags from the shantytown, laughed and went on to pitching bottle-caps off the edge of the roof. "Stop that, now," he said, "you're getting the junkyard all dirty. Christ, you'd think that they grew up in some kind of zoo." When Francis drank, he got a little mean, a little dark. "So, kids," Perry said, wandering over to them, hands in pockets. Silhouetted against the setting sun, biceps bulging, muscular chest tapering to his narrow hips, he looked like a Greek statue. "What do you think of the stuff we're building?" They looked at their toes. "'S OK," one of them grunted. "Answer the man," Francis snapped. "Complete sentences, looking up and at him, like you've got a shred of self-respect. Christ, what are you, five years old?" They shifted uncomfortably. "It's fine," one of them said. "Would you use it at home?" One of them snorted. "No, man. My dad steals anything nice we get and sells it." "Oh," Perry said. "Fucker broke in the other night and I caught him with my ipod. Nearly took his fucking head off with my cannon before I saw who it was. Fucking juice-head." "You should have fucked him up," one of the other kids said. "My ma pushed my pops in front of a bus one day to get rid of him, guy broke both his legs and never came back." Suzanne knew it was meant to shock them, but that didn't take away from its shockingness. In the warm fog of writing and living in Florida, it was easy to forget that these people lived in a squatter camp and were technically criminals, and received no protection from the law. Perry, though, just squinted into the sun and nodded. "Have you ever tried burglar alarms?" The kids laughed derisively and Suzanne winced, but Perry was undaunted. "You could be sure that you woke up whenever anyone entered, set up a light and siren to scare them off." "I want one that fires spears," the one with the juice-head father said. "Blowtorches," said the one whose mother pushed his father under a bus. "I want a force-field," the third one said, speaking for the first time. "I want something that will keep anyone from coming in, period, so I don't have to sleep one eye up, 'cause I'll be safe." The other two nodded, slowly. "Damn straight," Francis said. That was the last time Francis's acolytes joined them on the rooftop. Instead, when they finished work they went home, walking slowly and talking in low murmurs. With just the grownups on the roof, it was a lot more subdued. "What's that smoke?" Lester said, pointing at the black billowing column off to the west, in the sunset's glare. "House-fire," Francis said. "Has to be. Or a big fucking car-wreck, maybe." Perry ran down the stairs and came back up with a pair of high-power binox. "Francis, that's your place," he said after a second's fiddling. He handed the binox to Francis. "Just hit the button and they'll self-stabilize." "That's my place," Francis said. "Oh, Christ." He'd gone gray and seemed to have sobered up instantly. His lips were wet, his eyes bright. They drove over at speed, Suzanne wedged into Lester's frankensmartcar, practically under his armpit, and Perry traveling with Francis. Lester still wore the same cologne as her father, and when she opened the window, its smell was replaced by the burning-tires smell of the fire. They arrived to discover a fire-truck parked on the side of the freeway nearest the shantytown. The fire-fighters were standing soberly beside it, watching the fire rage across the canal. They rushed for the footbridge and a firefighter blocked their way. "Sorry, it's not safe," he said. He was Latino, good looking, like a movie star, bronze skin flickering with copper highlights from the fire. "I live there," Francis said. "That's my home." The firefighter looked away. "It's not safe," he said. "Why aren't you fighting the fire?" Suzanne said. Francis's head snapped around. "You're not fighting the fire! You're going to let our houses burn!" A couple more fire-fighters trickled over. Across the river, the fire had consumed half of the little settlement. Some of the residents were operating a slow and ponderous bucket-brigade from the canal, while others ran into the unburned buildings and emerged clutching armloads of belongings, bits of furniture, boxes of photos. "Sir," the movie-star said, "the owner of this property has asked us not to intervene. Since there's no imminent risk to life and no risk of the burn spreading off his property, we can't trespass to put out the fire. Our hands are tied." "The owner?" Francis spat. "This land is in title dispute. The court case has been underway for twenty years now. What owner?" The movie-star shrugged. "That's all I know, sir." Across the canal, the fire was spreading, and the bucket brigade was falling back. Suzanne could feel the heat now, like putting your face in the steam from a boiling kettle. Francis seethed, looking from the firemen and their truck back to the fire. He looked like he was going to pop something, or start shouting, or charge into the flames. Suzanne grabbed his hand and walked him over to the truck and grabbed the first firefighter she encountered. "I'm Suzanne Church, from the San Jose Mercury News, a McClatchy paper. I'd like to speak to the commanding officer on the scene, please." She hadn't been with the Merc for months, but she hadn't been able to bring herself to say, *I'm Suzanne Church with SuzanneChurch.org.* She was pretty sure that no matter how high her readership was and how profitable her ad sales were, the fire-fighter wouldn't have been galvanized into the action that was invoked when she mentioned the name of a real newspaper. He hopped to, quickly moving to an older man, tapping him on the shoulder, whispering in his ear. Suzanne squeezed Francis's hand as the fire-chief approached them. She extended her hand and talked fast. "Suzanne Church," she said, and took out her notebook, the key prop in any set piece involving a reporter. "I'm told that you are going to let those homes burn because someone representing himself as the title-holder to that property has denied you entry. However, I'm also told that the title to that land is in dispute and has been in the courts for decades. Can you resolve this for me, Chief...?" "Chief Brian Wannamaker," he said. He was her age, with the leathery skin of a Florida native who spent a lot of time out of doors. "I'm afraid I have no comment for you at this time." Suzanne kept her face deadpan, and gave Francis's hand a warning squeeze to keep him quiet. He was trembling now. "I see. You can't comment, you can't fight the fire. Is that what you'd like me to write in tomorrow's paper?" The Chief looked at the fire for a moment. Across the canal, the bucket-brigaders were losing worse than ever. He frowned and Suzanne saw that his hands were clenched into fists. "Let me make a call, OK?" Without waiting for an answer, he turned on his heel and stepped behind the fire-engine, reaching for his cellphone. Suzanne strained to hear his conversation, but it was inaudible over the crackle of the fire. When she turned around again, Francis was gone. She caught sight of him again in just a moment, running for the canal, then jumping in and landing badly in the shallow, swampy water. He hobbled across to the opposite bank and began to laboriously climb it. A second later, Perry followed. Then Lester. "Chief!" she said, going around the engine and pointing. The Chief had the phone clamped to his head still, but when he saw what was going on, he snapped it shut, dropped it in his pocket and started barking orders. Now the fire-fighters *moved*, boiling across the bridge, uncoiling hoses, strapping on tanks and masks. They worked in easy, fluid concert, and it was only seconds before the water and foam hit the flames and the smoke changed to white steam. The shantytown residents cheered. The fire slowly receded. Perry and Lester had Francis, holding him back from charging into the fray as the fire-fighters executed their clockwork dance. The steam was hot enough to scald, and Suzanne pulled the collar of her blouse up over her face. Around her were the shantytowners, mothers with small children, old men, and a seemingly endless parade of thug-life teenagers, the boys in miniature cycling shorts and do-rags, the girls in bandeau tops, glitter makeup, and skirts made from overlapping strips of rag, like post-apocalyptic hula outfits. Their faces were tight, angry, smudged with smoke and pinkened by the heat. She saw the one whose father had reportedly been pushed under a bus by his mother, and he grimaced at her. "What we gonna do now?" "I don't know," she said. "Are you all right? Is your family all right?" "Don't got nowhere to sleep, nowhere to go," he said. "Don't even have a change of clothes. My moms won't stop crying." There were tears in his eyes. He was all of fifteen, she realized. He'd seemed much older on the roof. She gathered him into her arms and gave him a hug. He was stiff and awkward at first and then he kind of melted into her, weeping on her shoulder. She stroked his back and murmured reassuringly. Some of the other shantytowners looked at the spectacle, then looked away. Even a couple of his homeboys -- whom she'd have bet would have laughed and pointed at this show of weakness -- only looked and then passed on. One had tears streaking the smoke smudges on his face. *For someone who isn't good at comforting people, I seem to be doing a lot of it*, she thought. Francis and Lester and Perry found her and Francis gave the boy a gruff hug and told him everything would be fine. The fire was out now, the firefighter hosing down the last embers, going through the crowd and checking for injuries. A TV news crew had set up and a pretty black reporter in her twenties was doing a stand up. "The illegal squatter community has long been identified as a problem area for gang and drug activity by the Broward County Sheriff's office. The destruction here seems total, but it's impossible to say whether this spells the end of this encampment, or whether the denizens will rebuild and stay on." Suzanne burned with shame. That could have been her. When she'd first seen this place, it had been like something out of a documentary on Ethiopia. As she'd come to know it, it had grown homier. The residents built piecemeal, one wall at a time, one window, one poured concrete floor, as they could afford it. None of them had mortgages, but they had neat vegetable gardens and walkways spelled out in white stones with garden gnomes standing guard. The reporter was staring at her -- and naturally so; she'd been staring at the reporter. Glaring at her. "My RV," Francis said, pointing, distracting her. It was a charred wreck. He went to the melted doors and opened them, stepping back as a puff of smoke rose from the inside. A fire-fighter spotted it and diverted a stream of water into the interior, soaking Francis and whatever hadn't burned. He turned and shouted something at the fire-fighter, but he was already hosing down something else. Inside Francis's trailer, they salvaged a drenched photo-album, a few tools, and a lock-box with some of his papers in it. He had backed up his laptop to his watch that morning, so his data was safe. "I kept meaning to scan these in," he said, paging through the photos in the soaked album. "Should have done it." Night was falling, the mosquitoes singing and buzzing. The neat little laneways and homey, patchwork buildings lay in ruins around them. The shantytowners clustered in little groups or picked through the ruins. Drivers of passing cars slowed down to rubberneck, and a few shouted filthy, vengeful things at them. Suzanne took pictures of their license plates. She'd publish them when she got home. A light drizzle fell. Children cried. The swampy sounds of cicadas and frogs and mosquitoes filled the growing dark and then the streetlights flicked on all down the river of highway, painting everything in blue-white mercury glow. "We've got to get tents up," Francis said. He grabbed a couple of young men and gave them orders, things to look for -- fresh water, plastic sheeting, anything with which to erect shelters. Lester started to help them, and Perry stood with his hands on his hips, next to Suzanne. "Jesus Christ," he said. "This is a fucking disaster. I mean, these people are used to living rough, but this --" he broke off, waving his hands helplessly. He wiped his palms off on his butt, then grabbed Francis. "Get them going," he said. "Get them to gather up their stuff and walk them down to our place. We've got space for everyone for now at least." Francis looked like he was going to say something, then he stopped. He climbed precariously up on the hood of Lester's car and shouted for people to gather round. The boys he bossed around took up the call and it wasn't long before nearly everyone was gathered around them. "Can everyone hear? This is as loud as I go." There were murmurs of assent. Suzanne had seen him meet with his people before in the daylight and the good times, seen the respect they afforded to him. He wasn't the leader, per se, but when he spoke, people listened. It was a characteristic she'd encountered in the auto-trade and in technology, in the ones the others all gravitated to. Charismatics. "We've got a place to stay a bit up the road for tonight. It's about a half hour walk. It's indoors and there's toilets, but maybe not much to make beds out of. Take what you can carry for about a mile, you can come back tomorrow for the rest. You don't have to come, but this isn't going to be any fun tonight." A woman came forward. She was young, but not young enough to be a homegirl. She had long dark hair and she twisted her hands as she spoke in a soft voice to Francis. "What about our stuff? We can't leave it here tonight. It's all we've got." Francis nodded. "We need ten people to stand guard in two shifts of five tonight. Young people. You'll get flashlights and phones, coffee and whatever else we can give you. Just keep the rubberneckers out." The rubberneckers were out of earshot. The account they'd get of this would come from the news-anchor who'd tell them how dangerous and dirty this place was. They'd never see what Suzanne saw, ten men and women forming up to one side of the crowd. Young braves and homegirls, people her age, their faces solemn. Francis oversaw the gathering up of belongings. Suzanne had never had a sense of how many people lived in the shantytown but now she could count them as they massed up by the roadside and began to walk: a hundred, a little more than a hundred. More if you counted the surprising number of babies. Lester conferred briefly with Francis and then Francis tapped three of the old timers and two of the mothers with babes in arms and they crammed into Lester's car and he took off. Suzanne walked by the roadside with the long line of refugees, listening to their murmuring conversation, and in a few minutes, Lester was back to pick up more people, at Francis's discretion. Perry was beside her now, his eyes a million miles away. "What now?" she said. "We put them in the workshop tonight, tomorrow we help them build houses." "At your place? You're going to let them stay?" "Why not? We don't use half of that land. The landlord gets his check every month. Hasn't been by in five years. He won't care." She took a couple more steps. "Perry, I'm going to write about this," she said. "Oh," he said. They walked further. A small child was crying. "Of course you are. Well, fuck the landlord. I'll sic Kettlewell on him if he squawks." "What do you think Kettlewell will think about all this?" "This? Look, this is what I've been saying all along. We need to make products for these people. They're a huge untapped market." What she wanted to ask was *What would Tjan say about this?* but they didn't talk about Tjan these days. Kettlewell had promised them a new business manager for weeks, but none had appeared. Perry had taken over more and more of the managerial roles, and was getting less and less workshop time in. She could tell it frustrated him. In her discussions with Kettlewell, he'd confided that it had turned out to be harder to find suits than it was finding wildly inventive nerds. Lots of people *wanted* to run businesses, but the number who actually seemed likely to be capable of doing so was only a small fraction. They could see the junkyard now. Perry pulled out his phone and called his server and touch-toned the codes to turn on all the lights and unlock all the doors. They lost a couple of kids in the aisles of miraculous junk, and Francis had to send out bigger kids to find them and bring them back, holding the treasures they'd found to their chests. Lester kept going back for more old-timers, more mothers, more stragglers, operating his ferry service until they were all indoors in the workshop. "This is the place," Francis said. "We'll stay indoors here tonight. Toilets are there and there -- orderly lines, no shoving." "What about food?" asked a man with a small boy sleeping over his shoulder. "This isn't the Red Cross, Al," Francis snapped. "We'll organize food for ourselves in the morning." Perry whispered in his ear. Francis shook his head, and Perry whispered some more. "There will be food in the morning. This is Perry. It's his place. He's going to go to Costco for us when they open." The crowd cheered and a few of the women hugged him. Some of the men shook his hand. Perry blushed. Suzanne smiled. These people were good people. They'd been through more than Suzanne could imagine. It felt right that she could help them -- like making up for every panhandler she'd ignored and every passed-out drunk she'd stepped over. There were no blankets, there were no beds. The squatters slept on the concrete floor. Young couples spooned under tables. Children snuggled between their parents, or held onto their mothers. As the squatters dossed down and as Suzanne walked past them to get to her car her heart broke a hundred times. She felt like one of those Depression-era photographers walking through an Okie camp, a rending visual at each corner. Back at her rented condo, she found herself at the foot of her comfortable bed with its thick duvet -- she liked keeping the AC turned up enough to snuggle under a blanket -- and the four pillows. She was in her jammies, but she couldn't climb in between those sheets. She couldn't. And then she was back in her car with all her blankets, sheets, pillows, big towels -- even the sofa cushions, which the landlord was not going to be happy about -- and speeding back to the workshop. She let herself in and set about distributing the blankets and pillows and towels, picking out the families, the old people. A woman -- apparently able-bodied and young, but skinny -- sat up and said, "Hey, where's one for me?" Suzanne recognized the voice. The junkie from the IHOP. Lester's friend. The one who'd grabbed her and cursed her. She didn't want to give the woman a blanket. She only had two left and there were old people lying on the bare floor. "Where's one for me?" the woman said more loudly. Some of the sleepers stirred. Some of them sat up. Suzanne was shaking. Who the hell was she to decide who got a blanket? Did being rude to her at the IHOP disqualify you from getting bedding when your house burned down? Suzanne gave her a blanket, and she snatched one of the sofa cushions besides. *It's why she's still alive,* Suzanne thought. *How she's survived.* She gave away the last blanket and went home to sleep on her naked bed underneath an old coat, a rolled-up sweater for a pillow. After her shower, she dried herself on tee-shirts, having given away all her towels to use as bedding. The new shantytown went up fast -- faster than she'd dreamed possible. The boys helped. Lester downloaded all the information he could find on temporary shelters -- building out of mud, out of sandbags, out of corrugated cardboard and sheets of plastic -- and they tried them all. Some of the houses had two or more rickety-seeming stories, but they all felt solid enough as she toured them, snapping photos of proud homesteaders standing next to their handiwork. Little things went missing from the workshops -- tools, easily pawned books and keepsakes, Perry's wallet -- and they all started locking their desk-drawers. There were junkies in among the squatters, and desperate people, and immoral people, them too. One day she found that her cute little gold earrings weren't beside her desk-lamp, where she'd left them the night before and she practically burst into tears, feeling set-upon on all sides. She found the earrings later that day, at the bottom of her purse, and that only made things worse. Even though she hadn't voiced a single accusation, she'd accused every one of the squatters in her mind that day. She found herself unable to meet their eyes for the rest of the week. "I have to write about this," she said to Perry. "This is part of the story." She'd stayed clear of it for a month, but she couldn't go on writing about the successes of the Home Aware without writing about the workforce that was turning out the devices and add-ons by the thousands, all around her, in impromptu factories with impromptu workers. "Why?" Perry said. He'd been a dervish, filling orders, training people, fighting fires. By nightfall, he was hollow-eyed and snappish. Lester didn't join them on the roof anymore. He liked to hang out with Francis and some of the young men and pitch horseshoes down in the shantytown, or tinker with the composting toilets he'd been installing at strategic crossroads through the town. "Can't you just concentrate on the business?" "Perry, this *is* the business. Kettlewell hasn't sent a replacement for Tjan and you've filled in and you've turned this place into something like a worker-owned co-op. That's important news -- the point of this exercise is to try all the different businesses that are possible and see what works. If you've found something that works, I should write about it. Especially since it's not just solving Kodacell's problem, it's solving the problem for all of those people, too." Perry drank his beer in sullen silence. "I don't want Kettlewell to get more involved in this. It's going good. Scrutiny could kill it." "You've got nothing to be embarrassed about here," she said. "There's nothing here that isn't as it should be." Perry looked at her for a long moment. He was at the end of his fuse, trying to do too much, and she regretted having brought it up. "You do what you have to do," he said. :: The original shantytown was astonishing. Built around a nexus of :: trailers and RVs that didn't look in the least roadworthy, the :: settlers had added dwelling on dwelling to their little patch of :: land. They started with plastic sheeting and poles, and when they :: could afford it, they replaced the sheets, one at a time, with :: bricks or poured concrete and re-bar. They thatched their roofs :: with palm-leaves, shingles, linoleum, corrugated tin -- even :: plywood with flattened beer-cans. Some walls were wood. Some had :: windows. Some were made from old car-doors, with hand-cranked :: handles to lower them in the day, then roll them up again at :: night when the mosquitoes came out. Most of the settlers slept on :: nets. :: :: A second wave had moved into the settlement, just as I arrived, :: and rather than building out -- and farther away from their :: neighbors' latrines, water-pump and mysterious sources of :: electrical power -- they built *up*, on top of the existing :: structures, shoring up the walls where necessary. It wasn't :: hurricane proof, but neither are the cracker-box condos that :: "property owners" occupy. They made contractual arrangements with :: the dwellers of the first stories, paid them rent. A couple with :: second-story rooms opposite one another in one of the narrow :: "streets" consummated their relationship by building a sky-bridge :: between their rooms, paying joint rent to two landlords. :: :: The thing these motley houses had in common, all of them, was :: ingenuity and pride of work. They had neat vegetable gardens, :: flower-boxes, and fresh paint. They had kids' bikes leaned up :: against their walls, and the smell of good cooking in the air. :: They were homely homes. :: :: Many of the people who lived in these houses worked regular :: service jobs, walking three miles to the nearest city bus stop :: every morning and three miles back every evening. They sent :: their kids to school, faking local addresses with PO boxes. Some :: were retired. Some were just down on their luck. :: :: They helped each other. When something precious was stolen, the :: community pitched in to find the thieves. When one of them :: started a little business selling sodas or sandwiches out of her :: shanty, the others patronized her. When someone needed medical :: care, they chipped in for a taxi to the free clinic, or someone :: with a working car drove them. They were like the neighbors of :: the long-lamented American town, an ideal of civic virtue that is :: so remote in our ancestry as to have become mythical. There were :: eyes on the street here, proud residents who knew what everyone :: was about and saw to it that bad behavior was curbed before it :: could get started. :: :: Somehow, it burned down. The fire department won't investigate, :: because this was an illegal homestead, so they don't much care :: about how the fire started. It took most of the homes, and most :: of their meager possessions. The water got the rest. The fire :: department wouldn't fight the fire at first, because someone at :: city hall said that the land's owner wouldn't let them on the :: property. As it turns out, the owner of that sad strip of land :: between an orange grove and the side of a four-lane highway is :: unknown -- a decades-old dispute over title has left it in legal :: limbo that let the squatters settle there. It's suspicious all :: right -- various entities had tried to evict the squatters :: before, but the legal hassles left them in happy limbo. What the :: law couldn't accomplish, the fire did. :: :: The story has a happy ending. The boys have moved the squatters :: into their factory, and now they have "live-work" condos that :: look like something Dr Seuss designed [photo gallery]. Like the :: Central Park shantytown of the last century, these look like they :: were "constructed by crazy poets and distributed by a whirlwind :: that had been drinking," as a press account of the day had it. :: :: Last year, the city completed a new housing project nearby to :: here, and social workers descended on the shantytowners to get :: them to pick up and move to these low-rent high-rises. The :: shantytowners wouldn't go: "It was too expensive," said Mrs X, :: who doesn't want her family back in Oklahoma to know she's :: squatting with her husband and their young daughter. "We can't :: afford *any* rent, not if we want to put food on the table on :: what we earn." :: :: She made the right decision: the housing project is an urban :: renewal nightmare, filled with crime and junkies, the kind of :: place where little old ladies triple-chain their doors and order :: in groceries that they pay for with direct debit, unwilling to :: keep any cash around. :: :: The squatter village was a shantytown, but it was no slum. It was :: a neighborhood that could be improved. And the boys are doing :: that: having relocated the village to their grounds, they're :: inventing and remixing new techniques for building cheap and :: homey shelter fast. [profile: ten shanties and the technology :: inside them] The response was enormous and passionate. Dozens of readers wrote to tell her that she'd been taken in by these crooks who had stolen the land they squatted. She'd expected that -- she'd felt that way herself, when she'd first walked past the shantytown. But what surprised her more were the message-board posts and emails from homeless people who'd been living in their cars, on the streets, in squatted houses or in shanties. To read these, you'd think that half her readership was sleeping rough and getting online at libraries, Starbuckses, and stumbled wireless networks that they accessed with antique laptops on street-corners. "Kettlewell's coming down to see this," Perry said. Her stomach lurched. She'd gotten the boys in trouble. "Is he mad?" "I couldn't tell -- I got voicemail at three AM." Midnight in San Jose, the hour at which Kettlewell got his mad impulses. "He'll be here this afternoon." "That jet makes it too easy for him to get around," she said, and stretched out her back. Sitting at her desk all morning answering emails and cleaning up some draft posts before blogging them had her in knots. It was practically lunch-time. "Perry," she began, then trailed off. "It's all right," he said. "I know why you did it. Christ, we wouldn't be where we are if you hadn't written about us. I'm in no position to tell you to stop now." He swallowed. The month since the shantytowners had moved in had put five years on him. His tan was fading, the wrinkles around his eyes deeper, grey salting his stubbly beard and short hair. "But you'll help me with Kettlewell, right?" "I'll come along and write down what he says," she said. "That usually helps." # :: Kodacell is supposed to be a new way of doing business. :: Decentralized, net-savvy, really twenty-first century. The :: suck-up tech press and tech-addled bloggers have been trumpeting :: its triumph over all other modes of commerce. :: :: But what does decentralization really mean? On her "blog" this :: week, former journalist Suzanne Church reports that the inmates :: running the flagship Kodacell asylum in suburban Florida have :: invited an entire village of homeless squatters to take up :: residence at their factory premises. :: :: Describing their illegal homesteading as "live-work" condos that :: Dr Seuss might have designed, Kodacell shill Church goes on to :: describe how this captive, live-in audience has been converted to :: a workforce for Kodacell's most profitable unit ("most :: profitable" is a relative term: to date, this unit has turned a :: profit of about 1.5 million, per the last quarterly report; by :: contrast the old Kodak's most profitable unit made twenty times :: that in its last quarter of operation). :: :: America has a grand tradition of this kind of indentured living: :: the coal-barons' company towns of the 19th century are the :: original model for this kind of industrial practice in the USA. :: Substandard housing and only one employer in town -- that's the :: kind of brave new world that Church's boyfriend Kettlewell has :: created. :: :: A reader writes: "I live near the shantytown that was relocated :: to the Kodacell factory in Florida. It was a dangerous slum full :: of drug dealers. None of the parents in my neighborhood let their :: kids ride their bikes along the road that passed it by -- it was :: a haven for all kinds of down-and-out trash." :: :: There you have it, the future of the American workforce: :: down-and-out junkie squatters working for starvation wages. "Kettlewell, you can't let jerks like Freddy run this company. He's just looking to sell banner-space. This is how the Brit rags write -- it's all meanspirited sniping." Suzanne had never seen Kettlewell so frustrated. His surfer good looks were fading fast -- he was getting a little paunch on him and his cheeks were sagging off his bones into the beginnings of jowls. His car had pulled up to the end of the driveway and he'd gotten out and walked through the shantytown with the air of a man in a dream. The truckers who pulled in and out all week picking up orders had occasionally had a curious word at the odd little settlement, but for Suzanne it had all but disappeared into her normal experience. Kettlewell made it strange and even a little outrageous, just by his stiff, outraged walk through its streets. "You think I'm letting *Freddy* drive this decision?" He had spittle flecks on the corners of his mouth. "Christ, Suzanne, you're supposed to be the adult around here." Perry looked up from the floor in front of him, which he had been staring at intently. Suzanne caught his involuntary glare at Kettlewell before he dropped his eyes again. Lester put a big meaty paw on Perry's shoulder. Kettlewell was oblivious. "Those people can't stay, all right? The shareholders are baying for blood. The fucking liability -- Christ, what if one of those places burns down? What if one of them knifes another one? We're on the hook for everything they do. We could end up being on the hook for a fucking *cholera epidemic*." Irrationally, Suzanne burned with anger at Freddy. He had written every venal, bilious word with the hope that it would result in a scene just like this one. And not because he had any substantive objection to what was going on: simply because he had a need to deride that which others hailed. He wasn't afflicting the mighty, though: he was taking on the very meekest, people who had *nothing*, including a means of speaking up for themselves. Perry looked up. "You've asked me to come up with something new and incredible every three to six months. Well, this is new and incredible. We've built a living lab on our doorstep for exploring an enormous market opportunity to provide low-cost, sustainable technology for use by a substantial segment of the population who have no fixed address. There are millions of American squatters and billions of squatters worldwide. They have money to spend and no one else is trying to get it from them." Kettlewell thrust his chin forward. "How many millions? How much money do they have to spend? How do you know that any of this will make us a single cent? Where's the market research? Was there any? Or did you just invite a hundred hobos to pitch their tent out front of my factory on the strength of your half-assed guesses?" Lester held up a hand. "We don't have any market research, Kettlewell, because we don't have a business-manager on the team anymore. Perry's been taking that over as well as his regular work, and he's been working himself sick for you. We're flying by the seat of our pants here because you haven't sent us a pilot." "You need an MBA to tell you not to turn your workplace into a slum?" Kettlewell said. He was boiling. Suzanne very carefully pulled out her pad and wrote this down. It was all she had, but sometimes it was enough. Kettlewell noticed. "Get out," he said. "I want to talk with these two alone." "No," Suzanne said. "That's not our deal. I get to document everything. *That's* the deal." Kettlewell glared at her, and then he deflated. He sagged and took two steps to the chair behind Perry's desk and collapsed into it. "Put the notebook away, Suzanne, please?" She silently shook her head at him. He locked eyes with her for a moment, then nodded curtly. She resumed writing. "Guys, the major shareholders are going to start dumping their stock this week. A couple of pension funds, a merchant bank. It's about ten, fifteen percent of the company. When that happens, our ticker price is going to fall by sixty percent or more." "They're going to short us because they don't like what we've done here?" Perry said. "Christ, that's ridiculous!" Kettlewell sighed and put his face in his hands, scrubbed at his eyes. "No, Perry, no. They're doing it because they can't figure out how to value us. Our business units have an industry-high return on investment, but there's not enough of them. We've only signed a thousand teams and we wanted ten thousand, so ninety percent of the money we had to spend is sitting in the bank at garbage interest rates. We need to soak up that money with big projects -- the Hoover Dam, Hong Kong Disneyland, the Big Dig. All we've got are little projects." "So it's not our fault then, is it?" Lester said. Perry was staring out the window. "No, it's not your fault, but this doesn't help. This is a disaster waiting to turn into a catastrophe." "Calm down, Landon," Perry said. "Calm down for a sec and listen to me, OK?" Kettlewell looked at him and sighed. "Go ahead." "There are more than a billion squatters worldwide. San Francisco has been giving out tents and shopping carts ever since they ran out of shelter beds in the nineties. From Copenhagen to Capetown, there are more and more people who are going off the grid, often in the middle of cities." Suzanne nodded. "They farm Detroit, in the ruins of old buildings. Raise crops and sell them. Chickens, too. Even pigs." "There's something there. These people have money, like I said. They buy and sell in the stream of commerce. They often have to buy at a premium because the services and goods available to them are limited -- think of how a homeless person can't take advantage of bulk-packaged perishables because she doesn't have a fridge. They are the spirit of ingenuity, too -- they mod their cars, caves, anything they can find to be living quarters. They turn RVs into permanent homes. They know more about tents, sleeping bags and cardboard than any UN SHELTER specialist. These people need housing, goods, appliances, you name it. It's what Tjan used to call a green-field market: no one else knows it's there. You want something you can spend ungodly amounts of money on? This is it. Get every team in the company to come up with products for these people. Soak up every cent they spend. Better us providing them with quality goods at reasonable prices than letting them get ripped off by the profiteers who have a captive market. This plant is a living lab: this is the kind of market intelligence you can't buy, right here. We should set up more of these. Invite squatters all over the country to move onto our grounds, test out our products, help us design, build and market them. We can recruit traveling salespeople to go door to door in the shanties and take orders. Shit, man, you talk about the Grameen Bank all the time -- why not go into business providing these people with easy microcredit without preying on them the way the banks do? Then we could loan them money to buy things that we sell them that they use to better their lives and earn more money so they can pay us back and buy more things and borrow more money --" Kettlewell held up a hand. "I like the theory. It's a nice story. But I have to sell this to my Board, and they want more than stories: where can I get the research to back this up?" "We're it," Perry said. "This place, right here. There's no numbers to prove what I'm saying is right because everyone who knows it's right is too busy chasing after it and no one else believes it. But right here, if we're allowed to do this -- right here we can prove it. We've got the capital in our account, we're profitable, and we can roll those profits back into more R&D for the future of the company." Suzanne was writing so fast she was getting a hand cramp. Perry had never given speeches like this, even a month before. Tjan's leaving had hurt them all, but the growth it had precipitated in Perry was stunning. Kettlewell argued more, but Perry was a steamroller and Suzanne was writing down what everyone said and that kept it all civil, like a silent camera rolling in the corner of the room. No one looked at her, but she was the thing they were conspicuously not looking at. Francis took the news calmly. "Sound business strategy. Basically, it's what I've been telling you to do all along, so I'm bound to like it." It took a couple weeks to hive off the Home Aware stuff to some of the other Kodacell business-units. Perry flew a bunch, spending days in Minnesota, Oregon, Ohio, and Michigan overseeing the retooling efforts that would let him focus on his new project. By the time he got back, Lester had retooled their own workspace, converting it to four functional areas: communications, shelter, food and entertainment. "They were Francis's idea," he said. Francis's gimpy leg was bothering him more and more, but he'd overseen the work from a rolling ergonomic office-chair. "It's his version of the hierarchy of needs -- stuff he knows for sure we can sell." It was the first time the boys had launched something new without knowing what it was, where they'd started with a niche and decided to fill it instead of starting with an idea and looking for a niche for it. "You're going to underestimate the research time," Francis said during one of their flip-chart brainstorms, where they had been covering sheet after sheet with ideas for products they could build. "Everyone underestimates research time. Deciding what to make is always harder than making it." He'd been drinking less since he'd gotten involved in the retooling effort, waking earlier, bossing around his young-blood posse to get him paper, bricks, Tinkertoys. He was right. Suzanne steadily recorded the weeks ticking by as the four competing labs focus-grouped, designed, tested and scrapped all manner of "tchotchkes for tramps," as Freddy had dubbed it in a spiraling series of ever-more-bilious columns. But the press was mostly positive: camera crews liked to come by and shoot the compound. One time, the pretty black reporter from the night of the fire came by and said very nice things during her standup. Her name was Maria and she was happy to talk shop with Suzanne, endlessly fascinated by a "real" journalist who'd gone permanently slumming on the Internet. "The problem is that all this stuff is too specialized, it has too many prerequisites," Perry said, staring at a waterproof, cement-impregnated bag that could be filled with a hose, allowed to dry, and used as a self-contained room. "This thing is great for refugees, but it's too one-size-fits all for squatters. They have to be able to heavily customize everything they use to fit into really specialized niches." More squatters had arrived to take up residence with them -- families, friends, a couple of dodgy drifters -- and a third story was going onto the buildings in the camp. They were even more Dr Seussian than the first round, idiosyncratic structures that had to be built light to avoid crushing the floors below them, hanging out over the narrow streets, corkscrewing like vines seeking sun. He kept staring, and would have been staring still had he not heard the sirens. Three blue-and-white Broward County sheriff's cars were racing down the access road into their dead mall, sirens howling, lights blazing. They screeched to a halt at the shantytown's edge and their doors flew open. Four cops moved quickly into the shantytown, while two more worked the radios, sheltering by the cars. "Jesus Christ," Perry said. He ran for the door, but Suzanne grabbed him. "Don't run toward armed cops," she said. "Don't do anything that looks threatening. Slow down, Perry." He took a couple deep breaths. Then he looked around his lab for a while, frantically muttering, "Where the fuck did I put it?" "Use Home Aware," she said. He shook his head, grimaced, went to a keyboard and typed MEGAPHONE. One of the lab-drawers started to throb with a white glow. He pulled out the megaphone and went to his window. "ATTENTION POLICE," he said. "THIS IS THE LEASEHOLDER FOR THIS PROPERTY. WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AROUND WITH YOUR GUNS DRAWN? WHAT IS GOING ON?" The police at the cars looked toward the workshop, then back to the shantytown, then back to the workshop. "SERIOUSLY. THIS IS NOT COOL. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?" One of the cops grabbed the mic for his own loudhailer. "THIS IS THE BROWARD COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT. WE HAVE RECEIVED INTELLIGENCE THAT AN ARMED FUGITIVE IS ON THESE PREMISES. WE HAVE COME TO RETRIEVE HIM." "WELL, THAT'S WEIRD. NONE OF THE CHILDREN, CIVILIANS AND HARDWORKING PEOPLE HERE ARE FUGITIVES AS FAR AS I KNOW. CERTAINLY THERE'S NO ONE ARMED AROUND HERE. WHY DON'T YOU GET BACK IN YOUR CARS AND I'LL COME OUT AND WE'LL RESOLVE THIS LIKE CIVILIZED PEOPLE, OK?" The cop shook his head and reached for his mic again, and then there were two gunshots, a scream, and a third. Perry ran for the door and Suzanne chased after him, trying to stop him. The cops at the cars were talking intently into their radios, though it was impossible to know if they were talking to their comrades in the shantytown or to their headquarters. Perry burst out of the factory door and there was another shot and he spun around, staggered back a step, and fell down like a sack of grain. There was blood around his head. Suzanne stuck her hand in her mouth to stifle a scream and stood helplessly in the doorway of the workshop, just a few paces from Perry. Lester came up behind her and firmly moved her aside. He lumbered deliberately and slowly and fearlessly to Perry's side, knelt beside him, touched him gently. His face was grey. Perry thrashed softly and Suzanne let out a sound like a cry, then remembered herself and took out her camera and began to shoot and shoot and shoot: the cops, Lester with Perry like a tragic Pieta, the shantytowners running back and forth screaming. Snap of the cops getting out of their cars, guns in hands, snap of them fanning out around the shantytown, snap of them coming closer and closer, snap of a cop pointing his gun at Lester, ordering him away from Perry, snap of a cop approaching her. "It's live," she said, not looking up from the viewfinder. "Going out live to my blog. Daily readership half a million. They're watching you now, every move. Do you understand?" The officer said, "Put the camera down, ma'am." She held the camera. "I can't quote the First Amendment from memory, not exactly, but I know it well enough that I'm not moving this camera. It's live, you understand -- every move is going out live, right now." The officer stepped back, turned his head, muttered in his mic. "There's an ambulance coming," he said. "Your friend was shot with a nonlethal rubber bullet." "He's bleeding from the head," Lester said. "From the eye." Suzanne shuddered. Ambulance sirens in the distance. Lester stroked Perry's hair. Suzanne took a step back and panned it over Perry's ruined face, bloody and swollen. The rubber bullet must have taken him either right in the eye or just over it. "Perry Mason Gibbons was unarmed and posed no threat to Sheriff's Deputy Badge Number 5724 --" she zoomed in on it -- "when he was shot with a rubber bullet in the eye. He is unconscious and bloody on the ground in front of the workshop where he has worked quietly and unassumingly to invent and manufacture new technologies." The cop knew when to cut his losses. He turned aside and walked back into the shantytown, leaving Suzanne to turn her camera on Perry, on the EMTs who evacced him to the ambulance, on the three injured shantytowners who were on the ambulance with him, on the corpse they wheeled out on his own gurney, one of the newcomers to the shantytown, a man she didn't recognize. They operated on Perry all that night, gingerly tweezing fragments of bone from his shattered left orbit out of his eye and face. Some had floated to the back of the socket and posed a special risk of brain damage, the doctor explained into her camera. Lester was a rock, sitting silently in the waiting room, talking calmly and firmly with the cops and over the phone to Kettlewell and the specially impaneled board-room full of Kodacell lawyers who wanted to micromanage this. Rat-Toothed Freddy filed a column in which he called her a "grandstanding bint," and accused Kodacell of harboring dangerous fugitives. He'd dug up the fact that one of the newcomers to the shantytown -- not the one they'd killed, that was a bystander -- was wanted for holding up a liquor-store with a corkscrew the year before. Lester unscrewed his earphone and scrubbed at his eyes. Impulsively, she leaned over and gave him a hug. He stiffened up at first but then relaxed and enfolded her in his huge, warm arms. She could barely make her arms meet around his broad, soft back -- it was like hugging a giant loaf of bread. She squeezed tighter and he did too. He was a good hugger. "You holding in there, kiddo?" she said. "Yeah," he murmured into her neck. "No." He squeezed tighter. "As well as I need to, anyway." The doctor pried them apart to tell them that the EEG and fMRI were both negative for any brain-damage, and that they'd managed to salvage the eye, probably. Kodacell was springing for all the care he needed, cash money, no dorking around with the fucking HMO, so the doctors had put him through every machine on the premises in a series of farcically expensive tests. "I hope they sue the cops for the costs," the doctor said. She was Pakistani or Bangladeshi, with a faint accent, and very pretty even with the dark circles under her eyes. "I read your columns," she said, shaking Suzanne's hand. "I admire the work you do," she said, shaking Lester's hand. "I was born in Delhi. We were squatters who were given a deed to our home and then evicted because we couldn't pay the taxes. We had to build again, in the rains, outside of the city, and then again when we were evicted again." She had two brothers who were working for startups like Kodacell's, but run by other firms: one was backed by McDonald's, the other by the AFL-CIO's investment arm. Suzanne did a little interview with her about her brothers' projects -- a bike-helmet that had been algorithmically evolved for minimum weight and maximum protection; a smart skylight that deformed itself to follow light based on simple phototropic controllers. The brother working on bike-helmets was riding a tiger and could barely keep up with orders; he was consuming about half of the operational capacity of the McDonald's network and climbing fast. Lester joined in, digging on the details. He'd been following the skylights in blogs and on a list or two, and he'd heard of the doctor's brother, which really tweaked her, she was visibly proud of her family. "But your work is most important. Things for the homeless. We get them in here sometimes, hurt, off the ambulances. We usually turn them away again. The ones who sell off the highway medians and at the traffic lights." Suzanne had seen them, selling homemade cookies, oranges, flowers, newspapers, plasticky toys, sad or beautiful handicrafts. She had a carved coconut covered in intricate scrimshaw that she'd bought from a little girl who was all skin and bones except for her malnourished pot-belly. "They get hit by cars?" "Yes," the doctor said. "Deliberately, too. Or beaten up." Perry was moved out of the operating theater to a recovery room and then to a private room and by then they were ready to collapse, though there was so much email in response to her posts that she ended up pounding on her computer's keyboard all the way home as Lester drove them, squeezing the bridge of his nose to stay awake. She didn't even take her clothes off before collapsing into bed. # "They need the tools to make any other tools," is what Perry said when he returned from the hospital, the side of his head still swaddled in bandages that draped over his injured eye. They'd shaved his head at his insistence, saying that he wasn't going to try to keep his hair clean with all the bandages. It made him look younger, and his fine skull-bones stood out through his thin scalp when he finally came home. Before he'd looked like a outdoorsman engineer: now he looked like a radical, a pirate. "They need the tools that will let them build anything else, for free, and use it or sell it." He gestured at the rapid prototyping machines they had, the three-d printer and scanner setups. "I mean something like that, but I want it to be capable of printing out the parts necessary to assemble another one. Machines that can reproduce themselves." Francis shifted in his seat. "What are they supposed to do with those?" "Everything," Perry said, his eye glinting. "Make your kitchen fixtures. Make your shoes and hat. Make your kids' toys -- if it's in the stores, it should be a downloadable too. Make toolchests and tools. Make it and build it and sell it. Make other printers and sell them. Make machines that make the goop we feed into the printers. Teach a man to fish, Francis, teach a man to fucking *fish*. No top-down 'solutions' driven by 'market research'" -- his finger-quotes oozed sarcasm -- "the thing that we need to do is make these people the authors of their own destiny." They put up the sign that night: AUTHOR OF YOUR OWN DESTINY, hung over the workshop door. Suzanne trailed after Perry transcribing the rants that spilled out of his mouth as he explained it to Lester and Francis, and then to Kettlewell when he called, and then to the pretty young black lady from the TV who by now had figured out that there was a real story in her backyard, then to an NPR man on the phone, and then to a CNN crew who drove in from Miami and filmed the shantytown and the workshop like Japanese tourists at Disney World, never having ventured into the skanky, failed strip-mall suburbs just outside of town. Francis had a protege who had a real dab touch with the 3-D printers. The manufacturer, Lester's former employer, had been out of business for two years by then, so all the service on the machines had to be done on the premises. Francis's protege -- the one who claimed his mother had pushed his father under a bus, his name was Jason -- watched Lester work on recalcitrant machines silently for a couple days, then started to hand him the tool he needed next without having to be asked. Then he diagnosed a problem that had stumped Lester all morning. Then he suggested an improvement to the feedstock pump that increased the mean time between failures by a couple hours. "No, man, no, not like that," Jason said to one of the small gang of boys he was bossing. "Gently, or you'll snap it off." The boy snapped it off and Jason pulled another replacement part out of a tub and said, "See, like *this*," and snapped it on. The small gang of boys regarded him with something like awe. "How come no girls?" Suzanne said as she interviewed him while he took a smoke-break. Perry had banned cigarettes from all indoor workshops, nominally to keep flames away from the various industrial chemicals and such, but really just to encourage the shantytowners to give up the habit that they couldn't afford anyway. He'd also leaned on the shantytowners who'd opened up small shops in their houses to keep cigs out of the town, without a lot of success. "Girls aren't interested in this stuff, lady." "You think?" There was a time when she would have objected, but it was better to let these guys say it out loud, hear themselves say it. "No. Maybe where you come from, OK? Don't know. But here girls are different. They do good in school but when they have babies they're done. I mean, hey, it's not like I don't *want* girls in the team, they'd be great. I love girls. They fuckin' *work*, you know. No bullshit, no screwing around. But I know every girl in this place and none of 'em are even interested, OK?" Suzanne cocked one eyebrow just a little and Jason shifted uncomfortably. He scratched his bare midriff and shuffled. "I do, all of them. Why would they? One girl, a roomful of boys, it'd be gross. They'd act like jerks. There's no way we'd get anything done." Suzanne lifted her eyebrow one hair higher. He squirmed harder. "So all right, that's not their fault. But I got enough work, all right? Too much to do without spending time on that. It's not like any girls have *asked* to join up. I'm not keeping them out." Suzanne jotted a couple of notes, keeping perfectly mum. "Well, I'd like to have them in the workshop, OK? Maybe I should ask some of them if they'd come. Shit, if I can teach these apes, I can teach a girl. They're smart. Girls'd make this place a little better to work in. Lots of them trying to support their families, so they need the money, too." There was a girl there by the afternoon. The next day, there were two more. They seemed like quick studies, despite their youth and their lip-gloss. Suzanne approved. # Lester stayed long enough to see the first prototype printer-printers running, then he lit out with a duffel bag jammed into the back of his modded Smart car. "Where are you going?" Suzanne said as Perry looked on gloomily. "I'll come and visit you. I want to follow your story." Truth be told, she was sorry to see him go, very sorry. He was such a rock, such an anchor for Perry's new crazy pirate energy and for the madness around them. He hadn't given much notice (not to her -- Perry didn't seem that surprised). "I can't really talk about it," he said. "Nondisclosure." "So it's a new job," she said. "You're going to work for Tjan?" Tjan's Westinghouse operation was fully rocking. He had fifty teams up the eastern seaboard, ten in the midwest and was rumored to have twice as many in Eastern Europe. He grinned. "Oh, Suzanne, don't try to journalist me." He reached out and hugged her in a cloud of her father's cologne. "You're fantastic, you know that? No, I'm not going to a job. It's a thing that's an amazing opportunity, you know?" She didn't, but then he was gone and boy did she miss him. Perry and she went out for dinner in Miami the next night with a PhD candidate from Pepperdine's B-school, eating at the same deco patio that she'd dined at with Tjan. Perry wore a white shirt open to reveal his tangle of wiry chest hair and the waitress couldn't keep her eyes off of him. He had a permanent squint now, and a scar that made his eyebrow into a series of small hills. "I was just in Greensboro, Miss," the PhD candidate said. He was in his mid-twenties, young and slick, his only nod to academe a small goatee. "I used to spend summers there with my grandpa." He talked fast, flecks of spittle in the corners of his mouth, eyes wide, fork stabbing blindly at the bits of crab-cake on his plate. "There wasn't *anything* left there, just a couple gas-stations and a 7-Eleven, shit, they'd even closed the Wal-Mart. But now, but now, it's *alive* again, it's buzzing and hopping. Every empty storefront is full of people playing and tinkering, just a little bit of money in their pockets from a bank or a company or a fund. They're doing the dumbest things, mind you: tooled-leather laptop cases, switchblade knives with thumb drives in the handles, singing and dancing lawn-Santas that yodel like hillbillies." "I'd buy a tooled-leather laptop case," Perry said, swilling a sweaty bottle of beer. He waggled his funny eyebrow and rubbed his fuzzy scalp. "The rate of employment is something like ninety-five percent, which it hasn't been in like a hundred years. If you're not inventing stuff, you're keeping the books for someone who is, or making sandwiches for them, or driving delivery vehicles around. It's like a tiny, distributed gold rush." "Or like the New Deal," Suzanne said. That was how she'd come to invite him down, after she'd read his paper coining the term New Work to describe what Perry was up to, comparing it to Roosevelt's public-investment plan that spent America free of the Depression. "Yeah, exactly, exactly! I've got research that shows that one in five Americans is employed in the New Work industry. Twenty percent!" Perry's lazy eye opened a little wider. "No way," he said. "Way," the PhD candidate said. He finished his caipirinha and shook the crushed ice at a passing waiter, who nodded and ambled to the bar to get him a fresh one. "You should get on the road and write about some of these guys," he said to Suzanne. "They need some ink, some phosphors. They're pulling up stakes and moving to the small towns their parents came from, or to abandoned suburbs, and just *doing it*. Bravest fucking thing you've seen in your life." The PhD candidate stayed out the week, and went home with a suitcase full of the parts necessary to build a three-d printer that could print out all of the parts necessary to build a three-d printer. Lester emailed her from wherever it was he'd gone, and told her about the lovely time he was having. It made her miss him sharply. Perry was hardly ever around for her now, buried in his work, buried with the kids from the shantytown and with Francis. She looked over her last month's blogs and realized that she'd been turning in variations on the same theme for all that time. She knew it was time to pack a duffel bag of her own and go see the bravest fucking thing she'd seen in her life. "Bye, Perry," she said, stopping by his workbench. He looked up at her and saw the bag and his funny eyebrow wobbled. "Leaving for good?" he said. He sounded unexpectedly bitter. "No!" she said. "No! Just a couple weeks. Going to get the rest of the story. But I'll be back, count on it." He grunted and slumped. He was looking a lot older now, and beaten down. His hair, growing out, was half grey, and he'd gotten gaunt, his cheekbones and forehead springing out of his face. On impulse, she gave him a hug like the ones she'd shared with Lester. He returned it woodenly at first, then with genuine warmth. "I will be back, you know," she said. "You've got plenty to do here, anyway." "Yeah," he said. "Course I do." She kissed him firmly on the cheek and stepped out the door and into her car and drove to Miami International. # Tjan met her at Logan and took her bag. "I'm surprised you had the time to meet me," she said. The months had been good to him, slimming down his pot-belly and putting a twinkle in his eye. "I've got a good organization," he said, as they motored away toward Rhode Island, through strip-mall suburbs and past boarded-up chain restaurants. Everywhere there were signs of industry: workshops in old storefronts, roadside stands selling disposable music players, digital whoopee cushions, and so forth. "I barely have to put in an appearance." Tjan yawned hugely and constantly. "Jet-lag," he apologized. "Got back from Russia a couple days ago." "Did you see your kids?" she said. "How's business there?" "I saw my kids," he said, and grinned. "They're amazing, you know that? Good kids, unbelievably smart. Real little operators. The older one, Lyenitchka, is running a baby-sitting service -- not baby-sitting herself, you see, but recruiting other kids to do the sitting for her while she skims a management fee and runs the quality control." "She's your daughter all right," she said. "So tell me everything about the Westinghouse projects." She'd been following them, of course, lots of different little startups, each with its own blogs and such. But Tjan was quite fearless about taking her through their profits and losses and taking notes on it all kept her busy until she reached her hotel. Tjan dropped her off and promised to pick her up the next morning for a VIP tour of the best of his teams, and she went to check in. She was in the middle of receiving her key when someone grabbed her shoulder and squeezed it. "Suzanne bloody Church! What are you doing here, love?" The smell of his breath was like a dead thing, left to fester. She turned around slowly, not wanting to believe that of all the hotels in rural Rhode Island, she ended up checking into the same one as Rat-Toothed Freddy. "Hey, Freddy," she said. Seeing him gave her an atavistic urge to stab him repeatedly in the throat with the hotel stick-pen. He was unshaven, his gawky Adam's apple bobbing up and down, and he swallowed and smiled wetly. "Nice to see you." "Fantastic to see you, too! I'm here covering a shareholder meeting for Westinghouse, is that what you're here for, too?" "No," she said. She knew the meeting was on that week, but hadn't planned on attending it. She was done with press conferences, preferring on-the-ground reporting. "Well, nice to see you." "Oh, do stay for a drink," he said, grinning more widely, exposing those grey teeth in a shark's smile. "Come on -- they have a free cocktail hour in this place. I'll have to report you to the journalist's union if you turn down a free drink." "I don't think 'bloggers' have to worry about the journalist's union," she said, making sarcastic finger-quotes in case he didn't get the message. He still didn't. He laughed instead. "Oh, love, I'm sure they'll still have you even if you have lapsed away from the one true faith." "Good night, Freddy," was all she could manage to get out without actually hissing through her teeth. "OK, good night," he said, moving in to give her a hug. As he loomed toward her, she snapped. "Freeze, mister. You are not my friend. I do not want to touch you. You have poor personal hygiene and your breath smells like an overflowing camp-toilet. You write vicious personal attacks on me and on the people I care about. You are unfair, meanspirited, and you write badly. The only day I wouldn't piss on you, Freddy, is the day you were on fire. Now get the fuck out of my way before I kick your tiny little testicles up through the roof of your reeking mouth." She said it quietly, but the desk-clerks behind her overheard it anyway and giggled. Freddy's smile only wobbled, but then returned, broader than ever. "Well said," he said and gave her a single golf-clap. "Sleep well, Suzanne." She boiled all the way to her room and when she came over hungry, she ordered in room service, not wanting to take the chance that Rat-Toothed Freddy would still be in the lobby. # Tjan met her as she was finishing her coffee in the breakfast room. She hadn't seen Freddy yet. "I've got five projects slated for you to visit today," Tjan said, sliding into the booth beside her. Funnily now that he was in the cold northeast, he was dressing like a Floridian in blue jeans and a Hawai'ian barkcloth shirt with a bright spatter of pineapples and Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles. Back in Florida, he'd favored unflattering nylon slacks and white shirts with ironed collars. The projects were fascinating and familiar. The cultural differences that distinguished New England New Work from Florida New Work were small but telling: a lot more woodcraft, in a part of the country where many people had grown up in their grandfathers' woodworking shops. A little more unreflexive kitsch, like the homely kittens and puppies that marched around the reactive, waterproof, smash-proof screens integrated into a bio-monitoring crib. At the fourth site, she was ambushed by a flying hug. Tjan laughed as she nearly went down under the weight of a strong, young woman who flung her arms around Suzanne's neck. "Holy *crap* it's good to see you!" Suzanne untangled herself and got a look at her hugger. She had short mousy hair, twinkling blue eyes, and was dressed in overalls and a pretty flowered blouse, scuffed work boots and stained and torn work-gloves. "Uh..." she said, then it clicked. "Fiona?" "Yeah! Didn't Tjan tell you I was here?" The last time she'd seen this woman, she was weeping over pizza and getting ready to give up on life. Now she was practically vibrating. "Uh, no," she said, shooting a look at Tjan, who was smiling like the Buddha and pretending to inspect a pair of shoes with gyroscopically stabilized retractable wheels in the heels. "I've been here for months! I went back to Oregon, like you told me to, and then I saw a recruiting ad for Westinghouse and I sent them my CV and then I got a videoconference interview and then, bam, I was on an airplane to Rhode Island!" Suzanne blinked. *I* told you to go back to Oregon? Well, maybe she had. That was a lifetime ago. The workshop was another dead mall, this one a horseshoe of storefronts separated by flimsy gyprock. The Westinghousers had cut through the walls with drywall knives to join all the stores together. The air was permeated with the familiar Saran-Wrap-in-a-microwave tang of three-d printers. The parking lot was given over to some larger apparatus and a fantastical children's jungle-gym in the shape of a baroque, spired pirate fortress, with elegantly curved turrets, corkscrew sky-bridges, and flying buttresses crusted over with ornate, grotesque gargoyles. Children swarmed over it like ants, screeching with pleasure. "Well, you're looking really good, Fiona," Suzanne said. *Still not great with people*, she thought. Fiona, though, was indeed looking good, and beaming. She wasn't wearing the crust of cosmetics and hair-care products she'd affected in the corporate Silicon Valley world. She glowed pink. "Suzanne," Fiona said, getting serious now, taking her by the shoulders and looking into her eyes. "I can't thank you enough for this. This has saved my life. It gave me something to live for. For the first time in my life, I am doing something I'm proud of. I go to bed every night thankful and happy that I ended up here. Thank you, Suzanne. Thank you." Suzanne tried not to squirm. Fiona gave her another long hug. "It's all your doing," Suzanne said at last. "I just told you about it. You've made this happen for you, OK?" "OK," Fiona said, "but I still wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you. I love you, Suzanne." Ick. Suzanne gave her another perfunctory hug and got the hell out of Dodge. # "What's with the jungle-gym?" It really had been something, fun and Martian-looking. "That's the big one," Tjan said with a big grin. "Most people don't even notice it, they think it's daycare or something. Well, that's how it started out, but then some of the sensor people started noodling with jungle-gym components that could tell how often they were played with. They started modding the gym every night, adding variations on the elements that saw the most action, removing the duds. Then the CAD people added an algorithm that would take the sensor data and generate random variations on the same basis. Finally, some of the robotics people got in on the act so that the best of the computer-evolved designs could be instantiated automatically: now it's a self-modifying jungle-gym. The kids love it. It is the crack cocaine of jungle-gyms, though we won't be using that in the marketing copy, of course." "Of course," Suzanne said drily. She'd automatically reached for her notepad and started writing when Tjan started talking. Now, reviewing her notes, she knew that she was going to have to go back and get some photos of this. She asked Tjan about it. "The robots go all night, you know. Not much sleep if you do that." No going back to the hotel to see Freddy, what a pity. "I'll grab a couple blankets from the hotel to keep warm," she said. "Oh, you needn't," he said. "That crew has a set of bleachers with gas-heaters for the night crew and their family to watch from. It's pretty gorgeous, if you ask me." They had a hasty supper of burgers at a drive-through and then went back to the jungle-gym project. Suzanne ensconced herself at someone's vacated desk for a couple hours and caught up on email before finally emerging as the sun was dipping swollen and red behind the mall. She set herself up on the bleachers, and Fiona found her with a thermos of coffee and a flask of whisky. They snuggled under a blanket amid a small crowd of geeks, an outdoor slumber party under the gas-heaters' roar. Gradually, the robots made an appearance. Most of them humped along like inchworms, carrying chunks of new playground apparatus in coils of their long bodies. Some deployed manipulator arms, though they didn't have much by way of hands at their ends. "We just use rare-earth magnets," Fiona said. "Less fiddly than trying to get artificial vision that can accurately grasp the bars." Tjan nudged her and pointed to a new tower that was going up. The robots were twisting around themselves to form a scaffold, while various of their number crawled higher and higher, snapping modular pieces of high-impact plastic together with *snick* sounds that were audible over the whine of their motors. Suzanne switched on her camera's night-vision mode and got shooting. "Where did you get all these robots?" Tjan grinned. "It's an open design -- the EPA hired Westinghouse to build these to work on sensing and removing volatile organic compounds on Superfund sites. Because we did the work for the government, we had to agree not to claim any design copyright or patents in the outcome. There's a freaking warehouse full of this stuff at Westinghouse, all kinds of crazy things that Westinghouse abandoned because they weren't proprietary enough and they were worried that they'd have to compete on the open market if they tried to productize them. Suits us just fine, though." The field was aswarm with glinting metal inchworm robots now, shifting back and forth, boiling and roiling and picking up enormous chunks of climber like cartoon ants carrying away a picnic basket. The playground was being transformed before her eyes, in ways gross and subtle, and it was enchanting to watch. "Can I go out and have a look?" she said. "I mean, is it safe?" "Sure," Fiona said. "Of course! Our robots won't harm you; they just nuzzle you and then change direction." "Still, try to stay out of their way," Tjan said. "Some of that stuff they're moving around is heavy." So she waded out onto the playground and carefully picked her way through the robot swarm. Some crawled over her toes. A couple twined between her feet and nearly tripped her up and once she stepped on one and it went still and waited politely for her to step off. Once in the thick of it all, she switched on her video and began to record through the night filter. Standing there amid the whirl and racket and undulating motion of the jungle gym as it reconfigured itself, she felt like she'd arrived at some posthuman future where the world no longer needed her or her kind. Like humanity's creations had evolved past their inventors. She was going to have to do a *lot* of writing before bed. Freddy was checking out in the lobby when Tjan dropped her off at 5AM. It was impossible to sneak past him, and he gave her a nasty, bucktoothed smile as she passed by him. It distracted her and made the writing come more slowly, but she was a pro and her readers had sent in a lot of kind mail, and there was one from Lester, still away on his mysterious errand but sounding happier than he had in months, positively giddy. She set the alarm-clock so that she could be awake for her next stop, outside of North Carolina's Research Triangle, where some local millionaires had backed a dozen New Work teams. Another three weeks of this stuff and she'd get to go home -- Florida. The condo was home now, and the junkyard. Hot and sticky and inventive and ever-changing. She fell asleep thinking of it and smiling. It was two weeks more before Lester caught up with her, in Detroit of all places. Going back to the old place hadn't been her idea, she'd been dragged back by impassioned pleas from the local Ford and GM New Work teams, who were second-generation-unemployed, old rust-belt families who'd rebooted with money from the companies that had wrung their profit from their ancestors and abandoned them. The big focus in the rustbelt was eradicating the car. Some were building robots that could decommission leaky gas-stations and crater out the toxic soil. Some were building car-disassembly plants that reclaimed materials from the old beasts' interiors. Between the Ford and GM teams with their latest bail-out and those funded by the UAW out of the settlements they'd won from the auto-makers, Detroit was springing up anew. Lester emailed her and said that he'd seen on her blog that she was headed to Detroit, and did she want to meet him for dinner, being as he'd be in town too? They ate at Devil's Night, a restaurant in one of the reclaimed mansions in Brush Park, a neighborhood of wood-frame buildings that teenagers had all but burned to the ground over several decades' worth of Halloweens. In Detroit, Devil's Night was the pre-Halloween tradition of torching abandoned buildings, and all of Brush Park had been abandoned for years, its handsome houses attractive targets for midnight firebugs. Reclaiming these buildings was an artisanal practice of urethaning the charred wood and adding clever putty, cement, and glass to preserve the look of a burned out hulk while restoring structural integrity. One entire floor of the restaurant was missing, having been replaced by polished tempered one-way glass that let upstairs diners look down on the bald spots and cleavage of those eating below. Suzanne showed up a few minutes late, having gotten lost wandering the streets of a Detroit that had rewritten its map in the decades since she'd left. She was flustered, and not just because she was running late. There was a lingering awkwardness between her and Lester and her elation at seeing him again had an inescapable undercurrent of dread. When the waiter pointed out her table, she told him he was mistaken. Lester wasn't there, some stranger was: short-haired, burly, with a few days' stubble. He wore a smart blazer and a loose striped cotton shirt underneath. He was beaming at her. "Suzanne," he said. Her jaw literally dropped. She realized she was standing with her mouth open and shut it with a snap. "Lester?" she said, wonderingly. He got up, still smiling, even laughing a little, and gave her a hug. It was Lester all right. That smell was unmistakable, and those big, warm paws he called hands. When he let go of her, he laughed again. "Oh, Suzanne, I could *not* have asked for any better reaction than this. *Thank you*." They were drawing stares. Dazedly, she sat down. So did he. "Lester?" she said again. "Yes, it's me," he said. "I'll tell you about it over dinner. The waiter wants to take our drink orders." Theatrically, she ordered a double Scotch. The waiter rattled off the specials and Suzanne picked one at random. So did Lester. "So," he said, patting his washboard tummy. "You want to know how I got to this in ten weeks, huh?" "Can I take notes?" Suzanne said, pulling out her pad. "Oh by all means," he said. "I got a discount on my treatments on the basis that you would end up taking notes." The clinic was in St Petersburg, Russia, in a neighborhood filled with Russian dentists who catered to American health tourists who didn't want to pay US prices for crowns. The treatment hadn't originated there: The electromuscular stimulation and chemical therapy for skin-tightening was standard for rich new mothers in Hollywood who wanted to get rid of pregnancy bellies. The appetite-suppressing hormones had been used in the Mexican pharma industry for years. Stem-cells had been an effective substitute for steroids when it came to building muscle in professional athletic circles the world round. Genomic therapy using genes cribbed from hummingbirds boosted metabolism so that the body burned 10,000 calories a day sitting still. But the St Petersburg clinic had ripped, mixed and burned these different procedures to make a single, holistic treatment that had dropped Lester from 400 to 175 pounds in ten weeks. "Is that safe?" she said. "Everyone asks that," he said, laughing. "Yeah, it's safe if they're monitoring you and standing by with lots of diagnostic equipment. But if you're willing to take slower losses, you can go on a way less intensive regime that won't require supervision. This stuff is the next big grey-market pharma gold. They're violating all kinds of pharma patents, of course, but that's what Cuba and Canada are for, right? Inside of a year, every fat person in America is going to have a bottle of pills in his pocket, and inside of two years, there won't be any fat people." She shook her head. "You look... Lester, you look *incredible*. I'm so proud of you." He ducked his head. He really did look amazing. Dropping the weight had taken off ten years, and between that and the haircut and the new clothes, he was practically unrecognizable. "Does Perry know?" "Yeah," Lester said. "I talked it over with him before I opted for it. Tjan had mentioned it in passing, it was a business his ex-wife was tangled up with through her mafiyeh connections, and once I had researched it online and talked to some people who'd had the treatment, including a couple MDs, I decided to just do it." It had cost nearly everything he'd made from Kodacell, but it was a small price to pay. He insisted on getting dinner. Afterward, they strolled through the fragrant evening down Woodward Avenue, past the deco skyscrapers and the plowed fields and community gardens, their livestock pens making soft animal noises. "It's wonderful to see you again, Lester," she said truthfully. She'd really missed him, even though his participation on her message boards had hardly let up (though it had started coming in at weird hours, something explained by the fact that he'd been in Russia). Walking alongside of him, smelling his smell, seeing him only out of the corner of her eye, it was like nothing had changed. "It's great to see you again too." Tentatively, he took her hand in his big paw. His hand was warm but not sweaty, and she realized it had been a long time since anyone had held her hand. Heart pounding, she gave his hand a squeeze. Their conversation and their walk rambled on, with no outward acknowledgment of the contact of hand on hand, but her hand squeezed his softly now and again, or he squeezed hers, and then they were at her hotel. *How did that happen?* she asked herself. But then they were having a nightcap, and then he was in the elevator with her and then he was at the door of her room, and the blood was roaring in her ears as she stuck her credit-card in the reader to open it. *Wait*, she tried to say. *Lester, hang on a second,* is what she tried to say, but her tongue was thick in her mouth. He stepped through the door with her, then said, "Uh, I need to use the bathroom." With relief, she directed him to the small water closet. The room was basic -- now that she was her own boss, she wasn't springing for Crowne Plazas and Hiltons, this was practically a coffin -- and there was nowhere to sit except the bed. Her laptop was open and there was a lot of email in her inbox, but for once, she didn't care. She was keenly attuned to the water noises coming from behind the door, each new sound making her jump a little. What was he doing in there, inserting a fucking diaphragm? She heard him work the latch on the door and she put on her best smile. Her stomach was full of butterflies. He smiled back and sat down on the bed next to her, taking her hand again. His hand was moist from being washed, and a little slippery. She didn't mind. Wordlessly, she put her head on his barrel chest. His heart was racing, and so was hers. Gradually, they leaned back, until they were side by side on the bed, her head still on his chest. Moving like she was in a dream, she lifted her head from his chest and stared into his eyes. They were wide and scared. She kissed him, softly. His lips were trembling and unyielding. She kissed him more insistently, running her hands over his chest and shoulders, putting one leg over him. He closed his eyes and kissed her back. He wasn't bad, but he was scared or nervous and all jittery. She kissed his throat, breathing in the smell, savoring the rough texture of his three-day beard. Tentatively, he put his hands on her back, stroked her, worked gradually towards her bottom. Then he stopped. "What's wrong?" she said, propping herself up on her forearms, still straddling him. She saw that there were tears in his eyes. "Lester? What's wrong?" He opened his mouth and then shut it. Tears slid off his face into his ears. She blotted them with a corner of hotel-pillow. She stroked his hair. "Lester?" He gave out a choked sob and pushed her away. He sat up and put his face in his hands. His back heaved. She stroked his shoulders tentatively. Finally, he seemed to get himself under control. He sniffled. "I have to go," he said. "Lester, what's *wrong*?" "I can't do this," he said. "I..." "Just tell me," she said. "Whatever it is, tell me." "You didn't want me before." He said it simply without accusation, but it stung like he'd slapped her in the face. "Oh, Lester," she said, moving to hug him, but he pushed her away. "I have to go," he said, drawing himself up to his full height. He was tall, though he'd never seemed it before, but oh, he was tall, six foot four or taller. He filled the room. His eyes were red and swollen, but he put on a smile for her. "Thanks, Suzanne. It was really good to see you again. I'll see you in Florida." She stood up and moved quickly to him, stood on tiptoe to put her arms around his neck and hug him fiercely. He hugged her back and she kissed him on the cheek. "I'll see you in Florida," she said. And then he was gone. She sat on the edge of her bed and waited for tears, but they didn't come. So she picked up her laptop and started to work through her mountain of email. # When she saw him again, he was coming down the drive leading to the shantytown and the factory. She was having tea in the tea-room that had opened in a corkscrew spire high above the rest of the shantytown. The lady who operated it called herself Mrs Torrence, and she was exquisitely antique but by no means frail, and when she worked the ropes on her dumbwaiter to bring up supplies from the loading area on the ground, her biceps stood at attention like Popeye's. There was a rumor that Mrs Torrence used to be a man, or still was, under her skirts, but Suzanne didn't pay attention to it. Lester came down the drive grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Perry had evidently been expecting him, for he came racing through the shantytown and pelted down the roadway and threw himself at Lester, grabbing him in a crazy, exuberant, whooping hug. Francis gimped out a moment later and gave him a solemn handshake. She hadn't blogged their meeting in Detroit, so if Francis and Perry knew about Lester's transformation, they'd found out without hearing it from her. She finished recording the homecoming from Mrs Torrence's crow's nest, then paid the grinning old bag and took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to catch up with Lester and his crowd. Lester accepted her hug warmly but distantly, letting go a fraction of a second before she did. She didn't let it get to her. He had drawn a crowd now, with Francis's protege printer-techs in the innermost circle, and he was recounting the story of his transformation. He had them as spellbound as a roomful of Ewoks listening to C3PO. "Shit, why don't we sell that stuff?" Jason said. He'd taken a real interest in the business end of their three-d printer project. "Too much competition," Lester said. "There are already a dozen shops tooling up to make bathtub versions of the therapy here in America. Hundreds more in Eastern Europe. There just won't be any profit in it by the time we get to market. Getting thin on the cheap's going to be *easy*. Hell, all it takes to do it is the stuff you'd use for a meth lab. You can buy all that in a kit from a catalog." Jason nodded, but looked unconvinced. Suzanne took Lester's return as her cue to write about his transformation. She snapped more pics of him, added some video. He gave her ten minutes' description of the therapies he'd undergone, and named a price for the therapy that was substantially lower than a couple weeks at a Hollywood fat-farm, and far more effective. The response was amazing. Every TV news-crew in the greater Miami area made a pilgrimage to their factory to film Lester working in a tight t-shirt over a three-d printer, wrangling huge vats of epoxy-mix goop in the sun with sweat beading over his big, straining biceps. Her message boards exploded. It seemed that a heretofore unsuspected contingent of her growing readership was substantially obese. And they had friends. Lester eventually gave up on posting, just so he could get some work done. They had the printers to the point where they could turn out new printers, but the whole system was temperamental and needed careful nursing. Lester was more interested in what people had to say on the engineering message-boards than chatting with the fatties. The fatties were skeptical and hopeful in equal measures. The big fight was over whether there was anything to this, whether Lester would keep the weight off, whether the new skinny Lester was really Lester, whether he'd undergone surgery or had his stomach stapled. America's wallets had been cleaned out by so many snake-oil peddlers with a "cure" for obesity that no one could believe what they saw, no matter how much they wanted to. Lord, but it was bringing in the readers, not to mention the advertising dollars. The clearing price for a thousand weight-loss ads targeted to affluent, obese English-speakers was over fifty bucks, as compared with her customary CPM of three bucks a thou. Inside of a week, she'd made enough to buy a car. It was weird being her own circulation and ad-sales department, but it wasn't as hard as she'd worried it might be -- and it was intensely satisfying to have such a nose-to-tail understanding of the economics of her production. "You should go," Lester told her as she clicked him through her earnings spreadsheet. "Jesus, this is insane. You know that these fatties actually follow me around on the net now, asking me questions in message boards about engineering? The board moderators are asking me to post under an assumed name. Madame, your public has spoken. There is a dire need for your skills in St Petersburg. Go. They have chandeliers in the subways and caviar on tap. All the blini you can eat. Bear steaks." She shook her head and slurped at the tea he'd brought her. "You're joking. It's all mafiyeh there. Scary stuff. Besides, I'm covering this beat right now, New Work." "New Work isn't going anywhere, Suzanne. We'll be here when you get back. And this story is one that needs your touch. They're micro-entrepreneurs solving post-industrial problems. It's the same story you've been covering here, but with a different angle. Take that money and buy yourself a business-class ticket to St Petersburg and spend a couple weeks on the job. You'll clean up. They could use the publicity, too -- someone to go and drill down on which clinics are legit and which ones are clip-joints. You're perfect for the gig." "I don't know," she said. She closed her eyes. Taking big chances had gotten her this far and it would take her farther, she knew. The world was your oyster if you could stomach a little risk. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, hell yeah. You're totally right, Lester." "Zasterovyeh!" "What you said!" "It's cheers," he said. "You'll need to know that if you're going to make time in Petrograd. Let me go send some email and get you set up. You book a ticket." # And just like that she was off to Russia. Lester insisted that she buy a business-class ticket, and she discovered to her bemusement that British Airways had about three classes above business, presumably with even more exclusive classes reserved to royalty and peers of the realm. She luxuriated in fourteen hours of reclining seats and warm peanuts and in-flight connectivity, running a brief videoconference with Lester just because she could. Tjan had sent her a guide to the hotels and she'd opted for the Pribaltiyskaya, a crumbling Stalin-era four-star of spectacular, Vegasesque dimensions. The facade revealed the tragedy of the USSR's unrequited love-affair with concrete, as did the cracks running up the walls of the lobby. They checked her into the hotel with the nosiest questionnaire ever, a two-pager on government stationary that demanded to know her profession, employer, city of birth, details of family, and so forth. An American businessman next to her at the check-in counter saw her puzzling over it. "Just make stuff up," he said. "I always write that I come from 123 Fake Street, Anytown, California, and that I work as a professional paper-hanger. They don't check on it, except maybe the mob when they're figuring out who to mug. First time in Russia?" "It shows, huh?" "You get used to it," he said. "I come here every month on business. You just need to understand that if it seems ridiculous and too bad to be true, it is. They have lots of rules here, but no one follows 'em. Just ignore any unreasonable request and you'll fit right in." "That's good advice," she said. He was middle-aged, but so was she, and he had nice eyes and no wedding ring. "Get a whole night's sleep, don't drink the so-called 'champagne' and don't change money on the streets. Did you bring melatonin and modafinil?" She stared blankly at him. "Drugs?" "Sure. One tonight to sleep, one in the morning to wake up, and do it again tomorrow and you'll be un-lagged. No booze or caffeine, either, not for the first couple days. Melatonin's over the counter, even in the States, and modafinil's practically legal. I have extra, here." He dug in his travel bag and came up with some generic Walgreens bottles. "That's OK," she said, handing her credit card to a pretty young clerk. "Thanks, though." He shook his head. "It's your funeral," he said. "Jet-lag is way worse for you than this stuff. It's over the counter stateside. I don't leave home without it. Anyway, I'm in room 1422. If it's two in the morning and you're staring at the ceiling and regretting it, call me and I'll send some down." Was he hitting on her? Christ, she was so tired, she could barely see straight. There was no way she was going to need any help getting to sleep. She thanked him again and rolled her suitcase across the cavernous lobby with its gigantic chandeliers and to the elevators. But sleep didn't come. The network connection cost a fortune -- something she hadn't seen in years -- and the number of worms and probes bouncing off her firewall was astronomical. The connection was slow and frustrating. Come 2AM, she was, indeed, staring at the ceiling. Would you take drugs offered by a stranger in a hotel lobby? They were in a *Walgreens bottle* for chrissakes. How bad could they be? She picked up the house-phone on the chipped bedstand and punched his hotel room. "Lo?" "Oh Christ, I woke you up," she said. "I'm sorry." "'Sok. Lady from check-in, right? Gimme your room number, I'll send up a melatonin now and a modafinil for the morning. No sweatski." "Uh," she hadn't thought about giving a strange man her room number. In for a penny, in for a pound. "2813," she said. "Thanks." "Geoff," he said. "It's Geoff. New York -- upper West Side. Work in health products." "Suzanne," she said. "Florida, lately. I'm a writer." "Good night, Suzanne. Pills are en route." "Good night, Geoff. Thanks." "Tip the porter a euro, or a couple bucks. Don't bother with rubles." "Oh," she said. It had been a long time since her last visit overseas. She'd forgotten how much minutiae was involved. He hung up. She put on a robe and waited. The porter took about fifteen minutes, and handed her a little envelope with two pills in it. He was about fifteen, with a bad mustache and bad skin, and bad teeth that he displayed when she handed him a couple of dollar bills. A minute later, she was back on the phone. "Which one is which?" "Little white one is melatonin. That's for now. My bad." She saw him again in the breakfast room, loading a plate with hard-boiled eggs, potato pancakes, the ubiquitous caviar, salami, and cheeses. In his other hand he balanced a vat of porridge with strawberry jam and enough dried fruit to keep a parrot zoo happy for a month. "How do you keep your girlish figure if you eat like that?" she said, settling down at his table. "Ah, that's a professional matter," he said. "And I make it a point never to discuss bizniz before I've had two cups of coffee." He poured himself a cup of decaf. "This is number two." She picked her way through her cornflakes and fruit salad. "I always feel like I don't get my money's worth out of buffet breakfasts," she said. "Don't worry," he said. "I'll make up for you." He pounded his coffee and poured another cup. "Humanity returns," he said, rubbing his thighs. "Marthter, the creature waketh!" he said in high Igor. She laughed. "You are really into, uh, *substances*, aren't you?" she said. "I am a firm believer in better living through chemistry," he said. He pounded another coffee. "Ahhh. Coffee and modafinil are an amazing combo." She'd taken hers that morning when the alarm got her up. She'd been so tired that it actually made her feel nauseated to climb out of bed, but the modafinil was getting her going. She knew a little about the drug, and figured that if the TSA approved it for use by commercial pilots, it couldn't be that bad for you. "So, my girlish figure. I work for a firm that has partners here in Petersburg who work on cutting-edge pharma products, including some stuff the FDA is dragging its heels on, despite widespread acceptance in many nations, this one included. One of these is a pill that overclocks your metabolism. I've been on it for a year now, and even though I am a stone calorie freak and pack away five or six thousand calories a day, I don't gain an ounce. I actually have to remember to eat enough so that my ribs don't start showing." Suzanne watched him gobble another thousand calories. "Is it healthy?" "Compared to what? Being fat? Yes. Running ten miles a day and eating a balanced diet of organic fruit and nuts? No. But when the average American gets the majority of her calories from soda-pop, 'healthy' is a pretty loaded term." It reminded her of that talk with Lester, a lifetime ago in the IHOP. Slowly, she found herself telling him about Lester's story. "Wait a second, you're Suzanne *Church*? New Work Church? San Jose Mercury News Church?" She blushed. "You can't *possibly* have heard of me," she said. He rolled his eyes. "Sure. I shoulder-surfed your name off the check-in form and did a background check on you last night just so I could chat you up over breakfast." It was a joke, but it gave her a funny, creeped-out feeling. "You're kidding?" "I'm kidding. I've been reading you for freaking *years*. I followed Lester's story in detail. Professional interest. You're the voice of our generation, woman. I'd be a philistine if I didn't read your column." "You're not making me any less embarrassed, you know." It took an effort of will to keep from squirming. He laughed hard enough to attract stares. "All right, I *did* spend the night googling you. Better?" "If that's the alternative, I'll take famous, I suppose," she said. "You're here writing about the weight loss clinics, then?" "Yes," she said. It wasn't a secret, but she hadn't actually gone out of her way to mention it. After all, there might not be any kind of story after all. And somewhere in the back of her mind was the idea that she didn't want to tip off some well-funded newsroom to send out its own investigative team and get her scoop. "That is fantastic," he said. "That's just, wow, that's the best news I've had all year. You taking an interest in our stuff, it's going to really push it over the edge. You'd think that selling weight-loss to Americans would be easy, but not if it involves any kind of travel: 80 percent of those lazy insular fucks don't even have passports. Ha. Don't quote that. Ha." "Ha," she said. "Don't worry, I won't. Look, how about this, we'll meet in the lobby around nine, after dinner, for a cup of coffee and an interview?" She had gone from intrigued to flattered to creeped-out with this guy, and besides, she had her first clinic visit scheduled for ten and it was coming up on nine and who knew what a Russian rush-hour looked like? "Oh. OK. But you've got to let me schedule you for a visit to some of our clinics and plants -- just to see what a professional shop we run here. No gold-teeth-shiny-suit places like you'd get if you just picked the top Google AdWord. Really American-standard places, better even, Scandinavian-standard, a lot of our doctors come over from Sweden and Denmark to get out from under the socialist medicine systems there. They run a tight ship, ya shore, you betcha," he delivered this last in a broad Swedish bork-bork-bork. "Um," she said. "It all depends on scheduling. Let's sort it out tonight, OK?" "OK," he said. "Can't *wait*." He stood up with her and gave her a long, two-handed handshake. "It's a real honor to meet you, Suzanne. You're one of my real heros, you know that?" "Um," she said again. "Thanks, Geoff." He seemed to sense that he'd come on too strong. He looked like he was about to apologize. "That's really kind of you to say," she said. "It'll be good to catch up tonight." He brightened. It was easy enough to be kind, after all. She had the front desk call her a taxi -- she'd been repeatedly warned off of gypsy cabs and any vehicle that one procured by means of a wandering tout. She got into the back, had the doorman repeat the directions to Lester's clinic twice to the cabbie, watched him switch on the meter and checked the tariff, then settled in to watch St Petersburg go flying by. She switched on her phone and watched it struggle to associate with a Russian network. They were on the road for all of five minutes -- long enough to note the looming bulk of the Hermitage and the ripples left by official cars slicing through the traffic with their blue blinking lights -- when her phone went nutso. She looked at it -- she had ten texts, half a dozen voicemails, a dozen new clipped articles, and it was ringing with a number in New York. She bumped the New York call to voicemail. She didn't recognize the number. Besides, if the world had come to an end while she was asleep, she wanted to know some details before she talked to anyone about it. She paged back through the texts in reverse chronological -- the last five were increasingly panicked messages from Lester and Perry. Then one from Tjan. Then one from Kettlebelly. They all wanted to discuss "the news" whatever that was. One from her old editor at the Merc asking if she was available for comment about "the news." Tjan, too. The first one was from Rat-Toothed Freddy, that snake. "Kodacell's creditors calling in debts. Share price below one cent. Imminent NASDAQ de-listing. Comments?" Her stomach went cold, her breakfast congealed into a hard lump. The clipped articles had quotes from Kettlewell ("We will see to it that all our employees are paid, our creditors are reimbursed, and our shareholders are well-done-by through an orderly wind-down"), Perry ("Fuck it -- I was doing this shit before Kodacell, don't expect to stop now") and Lester ("It was too beautiful and cool to be real, I guess.") Where she was mentioned, it was usually in a snide context that made her out to be a disgraced pitchwoman for a failed movement. Which she was. Basically. Her phone rang. Kettlewell. "Hi, Kettlewell," she said. "Where have you been?" he said. He sounded really edgy. It was the middle of the night in California. "I'm in St Petersburg," she said. "In Russia. I only found out about ten seconds ago. What happened?" "Oh Christ. Who knows? Cascading failure. Fell short of last quarter's estimates, which started a slide. Then a couple lawsuits filed. Then some unfavorable press. The share price kept falling, and things got worse. Your basic clusterfuck." "But you guys had great numbers overall --" "Sure, if you looked at them our way, they were great. If you looked at them the way the Street looks at them, we were in deep shit. Analysts couldn't figure out how to value us. Add a little market chaos and some old score-settling assholes, like that fucker Freddy, and it's a wonder we lasted as long as we did. They're already calling us the twenty first century Enron." "Kettlewell," she said, "I lived through a couple of these, and something's not right. When the dotcoms were going under, their CEOs kept telling everyone everything was all right, right up to the last minute. They didn't throw in the towel. They stood like captains on the bridge of sinking ships." "So?" "So what's going on here. It sounds like you're whipped. Why aren't you fighting? There were lots of dotcoms that tanked, but a few of those deep-in-denial CEOs pulled it off, restructured and came out of it alive. Why are you giving up?" "Suzanne, oh, Suzanne." He laughed, but it wasn't a happy laugh. "You think that this happened overnight? You think that this problem just cropped up yesterday and I tossed in the towel?" Oh. "Oh." "Yeah. We've been tanking for months. I've been standing on the bridge of this sinking ship with my biggest smile pasted on for two consecutive quarters now. I've thrown out the most impressive reality distortion field the business world has ever seen. Just because I'm giving up doesn't mean I gave up without a fight." Suzanne had never been good at condolences. She hated funerals. "Landon, I'm sorry. It must have been very hard --" "Yeah," he said. "Well, sure. I wanted you to have the scoop on this, but I had to talk to the press once the story broke, you understand." "I understand," she said. "Scoops aren't that important anyway. I'll tell you what. I'll post a short piece on this right away, just saying, 'Yes, it's true, and I'm getting details.' Then I'll do interviews with you and Lester and Perry and put up something longer in a couple of hours. Does that work?" He laughed again, no humor in it. "Yeah, that'll be *fine*." "Sorry, Kettlewell." "No, no," he said. "No, it's OK." "Look, I just want to write about this in a way that honors what you've done over the past two years. I've never been present at the birth of anything remotely this important. It deserves to be described well." It sounded like he might be crying. There was a snuffling sound. "You've been amazing, Suzanne. We couldn't have done it without you. No one could have described it better. Great deeds are irrelevant if no one knows about them or remembers them." Her phone was beeping. She snuck a peek. It was her old editor. "Listen," she said. "I have to go. There's a call coming in I *have* to take. I can call you right back." "Don't," he said. "It's OK. I'm busy here anyway. This is a big day." His laugh was like a dog's bark. "Take care of yourself, Kettlewell," she said. "Don't let the bastards grind you down." "Nil carborundum illegitimis to you, too." She clicked over to her editor. "Jimmy," she said. "Long time no speak. Sorry I missed your calls before -- I'm in Russia on a story." "Hello, Suzanne," he said. His voice had an odd, strained quality, or maybe that was just her mood, projecting. "I'm sorry, Suzanne. You've been doing good work. The best work of your career, if you ask me. I follow it closely." It made her feel a little better. She'd been uncomfortable about the way she and Jimmy had parted ways, but this was vindicating. It emboldened her. "Jimmy, what the hell do I do now?" "Christ, Suzanne, I don't know. I'll tell you what not to do, though. Off the record." "Off the record." "Don't do what I've done. Don't hang grimly onto the last planks from the sinking ship, chronicling the last few struggling, sinking schmucks' demise. It's no fun being the stenographer for the fall of a great empire. Find something else to cover." The words made her heart sink. Poor Jimmy, stuck there in the Merc's once-great newsroom, while the world crumbled around him. It must have been heartbreaking. "Thanks," she said. "You want an interview?" "What? No, woman. I'm not a ghoul. I wanted to call and make sure you were all right." "Jimmy, you're a prince. But I'll be OK. I land on my feet. You've got someone covering this story, so give her my number and have her call me and I'll give her a quote." "Really, Suzanne --" "It's *fine*, Jimmy." "Suzanne," he said. "We don't cover that kind of thing from our newsroom anymore. Just local stuff. National coverage comes from the wires or from the McClatchy national newsroom." She sucked in air. Could it be possible? Her first thought when Jimmy called was that she'd made a terrible mistake by leaving the Merc, but if this was what the paper had come to, she had left just in time, even if her own life-raft was sinking, it had kept her afloat for a while. "The offer still stands, Jimmy. I'll talk to anyone you want to assign." "You're a sweetheart, Suzanne. What are you in Russia for?" She told him. Screw scoops, anyway. Not like Jimmy was going to send anyone to *Russia*, he couldn't even afford to dispatch a reporter to Marin County by the sounds of things. "What a story!" he said. "Man!" "Yeah," she said. "Yeah I guess it is." "You *guess*? Suzanne, this is the single most important issue in practically every American's life -- there isn't one in a thousand who doesn't worry endlessly about his weight." "Well, I have been getting really good numbers on this." She named the figure. He sucked air between his teeth. "That's what the whole freaking *chain* does on a top story, Suzanne. You're outperforming fifty local papers *combined.*" "Yeah?" "Hell yeah," he said. "Maybe I should ask you for a job." When he got off the phone, she spoke to Perry, and then to Lester. Lester said that he wanted to go traveling and see his old friends in Russia and that if she was still around in a couple weeks, maybe he'd see her there. Perry was morose and grimly determined. He was on the verge of shipping his three-d printers and he was sure he could do it, even if he didn't have the Kodacell network for marketing and logistics. He didn't even seem to register it when she told him that she was going to be spending some time in Russia. Then she had to go into the clinic and ask intelligent questions and take pictures and record audio and jot notes and pay attention to the small details so that she would be able to write the best account possible. They dressed well in Russia, in the clinics. Business casual, but well tailored and made from good material. The Europeans knew from textiles, and expert tailoring seemed to be in cheap supply here. She'd have to get someone to run her up a blue blazer and a white shirt and a decent skirt. It would be nice to get back into grown-up clothes after a couple years' worth of Florida casual. She'd see Geoff after dinner that night, get more detail for the story. There was something big here in the medical tourism angle -- not just weight loss but gene therapy, too, and voodoo stem-cell stuff and advanced prostheses and even some crazy performance enhancement stuff that had kept Russia out of the past Olympics. She typed her story notes and answered the phone calls. One special call she returned once she was sitting in her room, relaxed, with a cup of coffee from the in-room coffee-maker. "Hello, Freddy," she said. "Suzanne, darling!" He sounded like he was breathing hard. "What can I do for you?" "Just wanted a quote, love, something for color." "Oh, I've got a quote for you." She'd given the quote a lot of thought. Living with the squatters had broadened her vocabulary magnificently. "And those are your good points," she said, taking a sip of coffee. "Goodbye, Freddy." $$$$ PART II The drive from Orlando down to Hollywood got worse every time Sammy took it. The turnpike tolls went up every year and the road surface quality declined, and the gas prices at the clip-joints were heart-attack-inducing. When Sammy started at Disney Imagineering a decade before, the company had covered your actual expenses -- just collect the receipts and turn them in for cash back. But since Parks had been spun off into a separate company with its own shareholders, the new austerity measures meant that the bean-counters in Burbank set a maximum per-mile reimbursement and never mind the actual expense. Enough of this competitive intelligence work and Sammy would go broke. Off the turnpike, it was even worse. The shantytowns multiplied and multiplied. Laundry lines stretched out in the parking-lots of former strip-malls. Every traffic-light clogged with aggressive techno-tchotchke vendors, the squeegee bums of the twenty-first century, with their pornographic animatronic dollies and infinitely varied robot dogs. Disney World still sucked in a fair number of tourists (though not nearly so many as in its golden day), but they were staying away from Miami in droves. The snowbirds had died off in a great demographic spasm over the past decade, and their children lacked the financial wherewithal to even think of over-wintering in their parents' now-derelict condos. The area around the dead Wal-Mart was particularly awful. The shanties here rose three, even four stories into the air, clustered together to make medieval street-mazes. Broward County had long since stopped enforcing the property claims of the bankruptcy courts that managed the real-estate interests of the former owners of the fields and malls that had been turned into the new towns. By the time he pulled into the Wal-Mart's enormous parking lot, the day had heated up, his air-con had conked, and he'd accumulated a comet-tail of urchins who wanted to sell him a computer-generated bust of himself in the style of a Roman emperor -- they worked on affiliate commission for some three-d printer jerk in the shanties, and they had a real aggressive pitch, practically flinging their samples at him. He pushed past them and wandered through the open-air market stalls, a kind of cruel parody of the long-gone Florida flea-markets. These gypsies sold fabricated parts that could be modded to make single-shot zip guns and/or bongs and/or illegal-gain wireless antennae. They sold fruit smoothies and suspicious "beef" jerky. They sold bootleg hardcopies of Mexican fotonovelas and bound printouts of Japanese fan-produced tentacle-porn comics. It was all damnably eye-catching and intriguing, even though Sammy knew that it was all junk. Finally, he reached the ticket-window in front of the Wal-Mart and slapped down five bucks on the counter. The guy behind the counter was the kind of character that kept the tourists away from Florida: shaven-headed, with one cockeyed eyebrow that looked like a set of hills, a three-day beard and skin tanned like wrinkled leather. "Hi again!" Sammy said, brightly. Working at Disney taught you to talk happy even when your stomach was crawling -- the castmember's grin. "Back again?" the guy behind the counter laughed. He was missing a canine tooth and it made him look even more sketchy. "Christ, dude, we'll have to invent a season's pass for you." "Just can't stay away," Sammy said. "You're not the only one. You're a hell of a customer for the ride, but you haven't got anything on some of the people I get here -- people who come practically every day. It's flattering, I tell you." "You made this, then?" "Yeah," he said, swelling up with a little pigeon-chested puff of pride. "Me and Lester, over there." He gestured at a fit, greying man sitting on a stool before a small cocktail bar built into a scavenged Orange Julius stand -- God knew where these people got all their crap from. He had the look of one of the fatkins, unnaturally thin and muscled and yet somehow lazy, the combination of a ten kilocalorie diet, zero body-fat and non-steroidal muscle enhancers. Ten years ago, he would have been a model, but today he was just another ex-tubbalard with a serious food habit. Time was that Disney World was nigh-unnavigable from all the powered wheelchairs carting around morbidly obese Americans who couldn't walk from ride to ride, but these days it looked more like an ad for a gymnasium, full of generically buff fatkins in tight-fitting clothes. "Good work!" he said again in castmemberese. "You should be very proud!" The proprietor smiled and took a long pull off a straw hooked into the distiller beside him. "Go on, get in there -- flatterer!" Sammy stepped through the glass doors and found himself in an air-conditioned cave of seemingly infinite dimension. The old Wal-Mart had been the size of five football fields, and a cunning arrangement of curtains and baffles managed to convey all that space without revealing its contents. Before him was the ride vehicle, in a single shaft of spotlight. Gingerly, he stepped into it. The design was familiar -- there had been a glut of these things before the fatkins movement took hold, stair-climbing wheelchairs that used gyro-stabilizers to pitch, yaw, stand and sit in a perpetual controlled fall. The Disney World veterans of their heyday remembered them as failure-prone behemoths that you needed a forklift to budge when they died, but the ride people had done something to improve on the design. These things performed as well as the originals, though they were certainly knock-offs -- no*how* were these cats shelling out fifty grand a pop for the real deal. The upholstered seat puffed clouds of dust into the spotlight's shaft as he settled into the chair and did up his lap-belt. The little LCD set into the control panel lit up and started to play the standard video spiel, narrated in grizzled voice-over. WELCOME TO THE CABINET OF WONDERS THERE WAS A TIME WHEN AMERICA HELD OUT THE PROMISE OF A NEW WAY OF LIVING AND WORKING. THE NEW WORK BOOM OF THE TEENS WAS A PERIOD OF UNPARALLELED INVENTION, A CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION OF CREATIVITY NOT SEEN SINCE THE TIME OF EDISON -- AND UNLIKE EDISON, THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED THE NEW WORK REVOLUTION WEREN'T RIP-OFF ARTISTS AND FRAUDS. THEIR MARVELOUS INVENTIONS EMERGED AT THE RATE OF FIVE OR SIX PER WEEK. SOME DANCED, SOME SANG, SOME WERE HELPMEETS AND SOME WERE MERE JESTERS. TODAY, NEARLY ALL OF THESE WONDERFUL THINGS HAVE VANISHED WITH THE COLLAPSE OF NEW WORK. THEY'VE ENDED UP BACK IN THE TRASH HEAPS THAT INSPIRED THEM. HERE IN THE CABINET OF WONDERS, WE ARE PRESERVING THESE LAST REMNANTS OF THE GOLDEN AGE, A SINGLE BEACON OF LIGHT IN A TIME OF DARKNESS. AS YOU MOVE THROUGH THE RIDESPACE, PLEASE REMAIN SEATED. HOWEVER, YOU MAY PAUSE YOUR VEHICLE TO GET A CLOSER LOOK BY MOVING THE JOYSTICK TOWARD YOURSELF. PULL THE JOYSTICK UP TO CUE NARRATION ABOUT ANY OBJECT. MOVE THE JOYSTICK TO THE LEFT, TOWARDS THE MINUS-ONE, IF YOU THINK AN ITEM IS UGLY, UNWORTHY OR MISPLACED. MOVE THE JOYSTICK TO THE RIGHT, TOWARD THE PLUS-ONE, IF YOU THINK AN ITEM IS PARTICULARLY PLEASING. YOUR FEEDBACK WILL BE FACTORED INTO THE CONTINUOUS REARRANGEMENT OF THE CABINET, WHICH TAKES PLACE ON A MINUTE-BY-MINUTE BASIS, DRIVEN BY THE ROBOTS YOU MAY SEE CRAWLING AROUND THE FLOOR OF THE CABINET. THE RIDE LASTS BETWEEN TEN MINUTES AND AN HOUR, DEPENDING ON HOW OFTEN YOU PAUSE. PLEASE ENJOY YOURSELF, AND REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE GOLDEN. This plus-one/minus-one business was new to him. It had been a mere four days since he'd been up here, but like so many other of his visits, they'd made major rehabs to their ride in the amount of time it would have taken Imagineering to write a memo about the possibility of holding a design-review meeting. He velcroed his camera's wireless eye to his lapel, tapped the preset to correct for low light and motion, and hit the joystick. The wheelchair stood up with wobbly grace, and began to roll forward on two wheels, heeling over precipitously as it cornered into the main space of the ride. The gyros could take it, he knew, but it still thrilled him the way that a fast, out-of-control go-kart did, miles away from the safe rides back in Disney. The chair screeched around a corner and pulled into the first scene, a diorama littered with cross-sectioned cars. Each one was kitted out with different crazy technologies -- dashboard gods that monitored and transmitted traffic heuristics, parallel-parking autopilots, peer-to-peer music-sharing boxes, even an amphibious retrofit on a little hybrid that apparently worked, converting the little Bug into a water-Bug. The chair swooped around each one, pausing while the narration played back reminisces by the inventors, or sometimes by the owners of the old gizmos. The stories were pithy and sweet and always funny. These were artifacts scavenged from the first days of a better nation that had died a-borning. Then on to the kitchen, and the bathrooms -- bathroom after bathroom, with better toilets, better showers, better tubs, better floors and better lights -- bedrooms, kids' rooms. One after another, a hyper museum. The decor was miles ahead of where it had been the last time he'd been through. There were lots of weird grace-notes, like taxidermied alligators, vintage tourist pennants, chintz lamps, and tiny dioramae of action figures. He paused in front of a fabric printer surrounded by custom tees and knit caps and three-d video-game figurines machine-crocheted from bright yarns, and was passed by another chair. In it was a cute woman in her thirties, white-blond shaggy hair luminous in the spotlight over the soft-goods. She paused her chair and lovingly reached out to set down a pair of appliqued shorts with organic LEDs pulsing and swirling around the waistband. "Give it a plus-one, OK? These were my best sellers," she said, smiling a dazzling beach-bunny smile at him. She wheeled away and paused at the next diorama to set down a doll-house in a child's room diorama. Wow -- they were getting user-generated content in the *ride*. Holy crap. He finished out the ride with a keen hand on the plus-one/minus-one lever, carefully voting for the best stuff and against the stuff that looked out of place -- like a pornographic ceramic bong that someone had left in the midst of a clockwork animatronic jug-band made from stitched-together stuffed animals. Then it was over, and he was debarking in what had been the Wal-Mart's garden center. The new bright sun made him tear up, and he fished out his shades. "Hey, mister, c'mere, I've got something better than sunglasses for you!" The guy who beckoned him over to a market-stall had the look of an aging bangbanger: shaved head, tattoos, ridiculous cycling shorts with some gut hanging over them. "See these? Polarizing contact-lenses -- prescription or optically neutral. Everyone in India is into these things, but we make 'em right here in Florida." He lifted a half-sphere of filmy plastic from his case and peeled back his eyelid and popped it in. His whole iris was tinted black, along with most of the whites of his eyes. Geometric shapes like Maori tattoos were rendered in charcoal grey across the lenses. "I can print you up a set in five minutes, ten bucks for plain, twenty if you want them bit-mapped." "I think I'll stick with my shades, thanks," Sammy said. "C'mon, the ladies love these things. Real conversation starter. Make you look all anime and shit, guy like you can try this kind of thing out for twenty bucks, you know, won't hurt." "That's all right," Sammy said. "Just try a pair on, then, how about that. I printed an extra set last Wednesday and they've only got a shelf-life of a week, so these'll only be good for another day. Fresh in a sealed package. You like 'em. you buy a pair at full price, c'mon that's as good as you're going to get." Before Sammy knew it, he was taking receipt of a sealed plastic packet in hot pink with a perforated strip down one side. "Uh, thanks..." he said, as he began to tuck it into a pocket. He hated hard-sells, he was no good at them. It was why he bought all his cars online now. "Naw, that's not the deal, you got to try them on, otherwise how can you buy them once you fall in love with 'em? They're safe man, go on, it's easy, just like putting in a big contact lens." Sammy thought about just walking away, but the other vendors were watching him now, and the scrutiny sapped his will. "My hands are too dirty for this," he said. The vendor silently passed him a sealed sterile wipe, grinning. Knowing he was had, he wiped his hands, tore open the package, took out the lenses and popped them one at a time into his eyes. He blinked a couple times. The world was solarized and grey, like he was seeing it through a tinted windscreen. "Oh man, you look bad-*ass*," the vendor said. He held up a hand mirror. Sammy looked. His eyes were shiny black beads, like a mouse's eyes, solid save for a subtle tracery of Mickey Mouse heads at the corners. The trademark infringement made him grin, hard and spitless. He looked ten years younger, like those late-teen hipsters whose parents dragged them to Walt Disney World, who showed up in bangbanger threads and sneered and scratched their groins and made loud remarks about how suckballs it all was. His conservative buzz-cut looked more like a retro-skinhead thing, and his smooth-shaved, round cheeks made him boyish. "Those are good for two days tops -- your eyes start getting itchy, you just toss 'em. You want a pair that's good for a week, twenty dollah with the Mickeys. I got Donalds and Astro Boys and all kinds of shit, just have a look through my flash book. Some stuff I drew myself, even." Playing along now, Sammy let himself be led on a tour of the flash-book, which featured the kind of art he was accustomed to seeing in tattoo parlor windows: skulls and snakes and scorpions and naked ladies. Mickey Mouse giving the finger, Daisy Duck with a strap-on, Minnie Mouse as a dominatrix. The company offered a bounty for turning in trademark infringers, but somehow he doubted that the company lawyers would be able to send this squatter a cease-and-desist letter. In the end, he bought one of each of the Disney sets. "You like the mouse, huh?" "Sure," he said. "I never been. Too expensive. This is all the ride I want, right here." He gestured at the dead Wal-Mart. "You like that huh?" "Man, it's cool! I go on that sometimes, just to see what it's turned into. I like that it's always different. And I like that people add their own stuff. It makes me feel, you know..." "What?" Suddenly, the vendor dropped his hard-case bangbanger facade. "Those were the best days of my life. I was building three-d printers, making them run. My older brother liked to fix cars, and so did my old man, but who needs a car, where you going to go? The stuff I built, man, it could make *anything*. I don't know why or how it ended, but while it was going, I felt like the king of the goddamned world." It felt less fun and ironic now. There were tears bright on the vendor's black-bead eyes. He was in his mid-twenties, younger than he'd seemed at first. If he'd been dressed like a suburban home-owner, he would have looked like someone smart and accomplished, with lively features and clever hands. Sammy felt obscurely ashamed. "Oh," he said. "Well, I spent those years working a straight job, so it didn't really touch me." "That's your loss, man," the vendor said. The printer behind him was spitting out the last of Sammy's contact-lenses, in sealed plastic wrap. The vendor wrapped them up and put them in a brown liquor-store bag. Sammy plodded through the rest of the market with his paper bag. It was all so depressing. The numbers at Disney World were down, way down, and it was his job to figure out how to bring them up again, without spending too much money. He'd done it before a couple of times, with the live-action role-playing stuff, and with the rebuild of Fantasyland as an ironic goth hangout (being a wholly separate entity from the old Walt Disney Company had its advantages). But to do it a third time -- Christ, he had no idea how he'd get there. These weird-ass Wal-Mart squatters had seemed promising, but could you possibly transplant something like this to a high-throughput, professional location-based entertainment product? The urchins were still in the parking lot with their Roman emperor busts. He held his hands out to ward them off and found himself holding onto a bust of his own head. One of the little rats had gotten a three-d scan of his head while he was walking by and had made the bust on spec. He looked older in Roman emperor guise than he did in his mind's eye, old and tired, like an emperor in decline. "Twenty dollah man, twenty, twenty," the kid said. He was about 12, and still chubby, with long hair that frizzed away from his head in a dandelion halo. "Ten," Sammy said, clutching his tired head. It was smooth as epoxy resin, and surprisingly light. There was a lot of different goop you could run through those three-d printers, but whatever they'd used for this, it was featherweight. The kid looked shrewd. "Twenty dollah and I get rid of these other kids, OK?" Sammy laughed. He passed the kid a twenty, taking care to tuck his wallet deep into the inside pocket of his jacket. The kid whistled shrilly and the rest of the kids melted away. The entrepreneur made the twenty disappear, tapped the side of his nose, and took off running back into the market stalls. It was hot and muggy and Sammy was tired, and the drive back to Orlando was another five hours if the traffic was against him -- and these days, everything was against him. # Perry's funny eyebrow twitched as he counted out the day's take. This gig was all cream, all profit. His overheads amounted to a couple hundred a month to Jason and his crew to help with the robot and machinery maintenance in the Wal-Mart, half that to some of the shantytown girls to dust and sweep after closing, and a retainer to a bangbanger pack that ran security at the ride and in the market. Plus he got the market-stall rents, and so when the day was over, only the first hundred bucks out of the till went into overheads and the rest split even-steven with Lester. Lester waited impatiently, watching him count twice before splitting the stack. Perry rolled up his take and dropped it into a hidden pocket sewn into his cargo shorts. "Someday you're going to get lucky and some chick is going to reach down and freak out, buddy," Lester said. "Better she finds my bank-roll than my prostate," Perry said. Lester spent a lot of time thinking about getting lucky, making up for a lifetime of bad luck with girls. "OK, let's get changed," Lester said. As usual, he was wearing tight-fitting jeans that owed a little debt to the bangbanger cycling shorts, something you would have had to go to a gay bar to see when Perry was in college. His shirt clung to his pecs and was tailored down to his narrow waist. It was a fatkins style, the kind of thing you couldn't wear unless you had a uniquely adversarial relationship with your body and metabolism. "No, Lester, no." Perry said. "I said I'd go on this double date with you, but I didn't say anything about letting you dress me up for it." The two girls were a pair that Lester had met at a fatkins club in South Beach the week before, and he'd camera-phoned their pic to Perry with a scrawled drunken note about which one was his. They were attractive enough, but the monotonic fatkins devotion to sybartism was so tiresome. Perry didn't see much point in hooking up with a girl he couldn't have a good technical discussion with. "Come *on*, it's good stuff, you'll love it." "If I have to change clothes, I'm not interested." Perry folded his arms. In truth, he wasn't interested, period. He liked his little kingdom there, and he could get everything he needed from burritos to RAM at the market. He had a chest freezer full of bankruptcy sale organic MREs, for variety. "Just the shirt then -- I had it printed just for you." Perry raised his funny eyebrow. "Let's see it." Lester turned to his latest car, a trike with huge, electric blue back tires, and popped the trunk, rummaged, and proudly emerged holding a bright blue Hawai'ian print shirt. "Lester, are those . . . turds?" "It's transgressivist moderne," Lester said, hopping from foot to foot. "Saw it in the New York Times, brought the pic to Gabriela in the market, she cloned it, printed it, and sent it out for stitching -- an extra ten buck for same-day service." "I am *not* wearing a shirt covered in steaming piles of shit, Lester. No, no, no. A googol times no." Lester laughed. "Christ, I had you going, didn't I? Don't worry, I wouldn't actually have let you go out in public wearing this. But how about *this*?" he said with a flourish, and brought out another shirt. Something stretchy and iridescent, like an oil-slick. It was sleeveless. "It'll really work with your biceps and pecs. Also: looks pretty good compared to the turd shirt, doesn't it? Go on, try it on." "Lester Banks, you are the gayest straight man I know," Perry said. He shucked his sweaty tee and slipped into the shirt. Lester gave him a big thumbs-up. He examined his reflection in the blacked-out glass doors of the Wal-Mart. "Yeah, OK," he said. "Let's get this over with." "Your enthusiasm, your best feature," Lester said. Their dates were two brunettes with deep tans and whole-eye cosmetic contacts that hid their pupils in favor of featureless expanses of white, so they looked like their eyes had rolled back into their heads, or maybe like they were wearing cue-balls for glass eyes. Like most of the fatkins girls Perry had met, they dressed to the nines, ate like pigs, drank like fishes, and talked about nothing but biotech. "So I'm thinking, sure, mitochrondrial lengthening *sounds* like it should work, but if that's so, why have we been screwing around with it for thirty years without accomplishing anything?" His date, Moira, worked at a law office, and she came up to his chest, and it was hard to tell with those eyes, but it seemed like she was totally oblivious to his complete indifference to mitochondria. He nodded and tried not to look bored. South Beach wasn't what it had once been, or maybe Perry had changed. He used to love to come here to people-watch, but the weirdos of South Beach seemed too precious when compared with the denizens of his own little settlement out on the Hollywood freeway. "Let's go for a walk on the beach," Lester said, digging out his wallet and rubbing his card over the pay-patch on the table. "Good idea," Perry said. Anything to get off this patio and away from the insufferable club music thundering out of the speakers pole-mounted directly over their table. The beach was gorgeous, so there was that. The sunset behind them stained the ocean bloody and the sand was fine and clean. Around their feet, Dade County beachcombers wormed endlessly through the sand, filtering out all the gunk, cig butts, condoms, needles, wrappers, loose change, wedding rings, and forgotten sunglasses. Perry nudged one with his toe and it roombaed away, following its instinct to avoid human contact. "How do you figure they keep the vags from busting those open for whatever they've got in their bellies?" Perry said, looking over his date's head at Lester, who was holding hands with his girl, carrying her shoes in his free hand. "Huh? Oh, those things are built like tanks. Have to be to keep the sand out. You need about four hours with an air-hammer to bust one open." "You tried it?" Lester laughed. "Who, me?" Now it was Perry's date's turn to be bored. She wandered away toward the boardwalk, with its strip of novelty sellers. Perry followed, because he had a professional interest in the kind of wares they carried. Most of them originated on one of his printers, after all. Plus, it was the gentlemanly thing to do. "What have we here?" he said as he pulled up alongside her. She was trying on a bracelet of odd, bony beads. "Ectopic fetuses," she said. "You know, like the Christian fundies use for stem-cell research? You quicken an unfertilized egg in vitro and you get a little ball of fur and bone and skin and stem-cells. It can never be a human, so it has no soul, so it's not murder to harvest them." The vendor, a Turkish teenager with a luxurious mustache, nodded. "Every bead made from naturally occurring foetus-bones." He handed one to Perry. It was dry and fragile in his hand. The bones were warm and porous, and in tortured Elephant Man shapes that he recoiled from atavistically. "Good price," the Turkish kid said. He had practically no accent at all, and was wearing a Japanese baseball-team uniform and spray-on foot-coverings. Thoroughly Americanized. "Look here," he said, and gestured at a little corner of his table. It was covered in roses made from fabric -- small and crude, with pin-backs. Perry picked one up. It had a certain naive charm. The fabric was some kind of very delicate leather -- "It's skin," his date said. "Foetal skin." He dropped it. His fingers tingled with the echo of the feeling of the leather. *Jesus I hate biotech*. The rose fluttered past the table to the sandy boardwalk, and the Turkish kid picked it up and blew it clean. "Sorry," Perry said, sticking his hands in his pockets. His date bought a bracelet and a matching choker made of tiny bones and teeth, and the Turkish kid, leering, helped her fasten the necklace. When they returned to Lester and his date, Perry knew the evening was at a close. The girls played a couple rounds of eye-hockey, unreadable behind their lenses, and Perry shrugged apologetically at Lester. "Well then," Lester said, "it sure has been a nice night." Lester got smooched when they saw the girls off in a pedicab. In the buzz and hum of its flywheel, Perry got a damp and unenthusiastic handshake. "Win some, lose some," Lester said as the girls rolled away in a flash of muscular calves from the pair of beach-perfect cabbies pedaling the thing. "You're not angry?" Perry said. "Nah," Lester said. "I get laid too much as it is. Saps me of my precious bodily fluids. Gotta keep some chi inside, you know?" Perry raised up his funny eyebrow and made it dance. "Oh, OK," Lester said. "You got me. I'm meeting mine later, after she drops her friend off." "I'll get a cab home then, shall I?" "Take my car," Lester said. "I'll get a ride back in the morning. No way you'll get a taxi to take you to our neighborhood at this hour." Perry's car had been up on blocks for a month, awaiting his attention to its failing brakes and mushy steering. So it was nice to get behind the wheel of Lester's Big Daddy Roth trike and give it a little gas out on the interstate, the smell of the swamp and biodiesel from the big rigs streaming past the windscreen. The road was dark and treacherous with potholes, but Perry got into the rhythm of it and found he didn't want to go home, quite, so he kept driving, into the night. He told himself that he was scouting dead malls for future expansion, but he had kids who'd video-documented the status of all the likely candidates in the hood, and he kept tabs on his choicest morsels via daily sat photos that he subscribed to in his morning feed. What the hell was he doing with his life? The Wal-Mart ride was a lark -- it had been Lester's idea, but Lester had lost interest and Perry had done most of the work. They weren't quite squatting the Wal-Mart: Perry paid rent to a state commission that collected in escrow for the absentee landlord. It was a fine life, but the days blurred one into the next, directionless. Building the ride had been fun, setting up the market had been fun, but running them -- well, he might as well be running a laundromat for all the mental acuity his current job required. "You miss it," he said to himself over the whistle of the wind and the hiss of the fat contact-patches on the rear tires. "You want to be back in the shit, inventing stuff, making it all happen." For the hundredth time, he thought about calling Suzanne Church. He missed her, too, and not just because she made him famous (and now he was no longer famous). She put it all in perspective for him, and egged him on to greater things. She'd been their audience, and they'd all performed for her, back in the golden days. It was, what, 5AM in Russia? Or was it two in the afternoon? He had her number on his speed-dial, but he never rang it. He didn't know what he'd tell her. He could call Tjan, or even Kettlebelly, just ring them out of the blue, veterans together shooting the shit. Maybe they could have a Kodacell reunion, and get together to sing the company song, wearing the company t-shirt. He pulled the car off at a truck stop and bought an ice-cream novelty from a vending machine with a robotic claw that scooped the ice-cream, mushed it into the cone, then gave it a haircut so that it looked like Astro Boy's head, then extended the cone on a robotic claw. It made him smile. Someone had invented this thing. It could have been him. He knew where you could download vision-system libraries, and force-feedback libraries. He knew where you could get plans for the robotics, and off-the-shelf motors and sensors. Christ, these days he had a good idea where you could get the ice-cream wholesale, and which crooked vending-machine interests he'd have to grease to get his stuff into truck-stops. He was thirty four years old, he was single and childless, and he was eating an ice-cream in a deserted truck-stop at two in the morning by the side of a freeway in south Florida. He bossed a low-budget tourist attraction and he ran a pirate flea-market. What the hell was he doing with his life? Getting mugged, that's what. They came out of the woods near the picnic tables, four bangbangers, but young ones, in their early teens. Two had guns -- nothing fancy, just AK-47s run off a computer-controlled mill somewhere in an industrial park. You saw them all over the place, easy as pie to make, but the ammo was a lot harder to come by. So maybe they were unloaded. Speaking of unloaded. He was about to piss his pants. "Wallet," one of them said. He had a bad mustache that reminded him of the Turkish kid on the beach. Probably the same hormones that gave kids mustaches gave them bad ideas like selling fetus jewelry or sticking up people by the ice-cream machines at late night truck-stops. "Keys," he said. "Phone," he added. Perry slowly set down the ice-cream cone on the lid of the trash-can beside him. He'd only eaten one spike off Astro-Boy's head. His vision telescoped down so that he was looking at that kid, at his mustache, at the gun in his hands. He was reaching for his wallet, slowly. He'd need to hitch a ride back to town. Canceling the credit-cards would be tough, since he'd stored all the identity-theft passwords and numbers in his phone, which they were about to take off him. And he'd have to cancel the phone, for that matter. "Do you have an older brother named Jason?" his mouth said, while his hands were still being mugged. "What?" "Works a stall by the Wal-Mart ride, selling contact lenses?" The kid's eyes narrowed. "You don't know me, man. You don't want to know me. Better for your health if you don't know me." His hands were passing over his phone, his wallet, his keys -- Lester's keys. Lester would be glad to have an excuse to build a new car. "Only I own the Wal-Mart ride, and I've known Jason a long time. I gave him his first job, fixing the printers. You look like him." The kid's three buddies were beginning their slow fade into the background. The kid was visibly on the horns of a dilemma. The gun wavered. Perry's knees turned to water. "You're that guy?" the kid said. He peered closer. "Shit, you are." "Keep it all," Perry said. His mouth wasn't so smart. Knowing who mugged you wasn't good for your health. "Shit," the kid said. The gun wavered. Wavered. "Come *on*," one of his buddies said. "Come on, man!" "I'll be there in a minute," the kid said, his voice flat. Perry knew he was a dead man. "I'm really sorry," the kid said, once his friends were out of range. "Me too," said Perry. "You won't tell my brother?" Perry froze. Time dilated. He realized that his fists were clenched so tight that his knuckles hurt. He realized that he had a zit on the back of his neck that was rubbing against his collar. He realized that the kid had a paperback book stuck in the waistband of his bangbanger shorts, which was unusual. It was a fantasy novel. A Conan novel. Wow. Time snapped back. "I won't tell your brother," he said. Then he surprised himself, "But you've got to give me back the credit-cards and leave the car at the market in the morning." The kid nodded. Then he seemed to realize he was holding a gun on Perry. He lowered it. "Yeah, that's fair," he said. "Can't use the fucking cards these days anyway." "Yeah," Perry said. "Well, there's some cash there anyway." He realized he had five hundred bucks in a roll in a hidden pocket in his shorts. "You get home OK?" "I'll thumb a ride," Perry said. "I can call you a taxi," the kid said. "It's not safe to hang around here." "That's really nice of you," Perry said. "Thanks." The kid took out a little phone and prodded it for a minute. "On the way," he said. "The guns aren't loaded." "Oh, well," Perry said. "Good to know." An awkward silence spread between them. "Look, I'm really sorry," the kid said. "We don't really do this. It's our first night. My brother would really kill me." "I won't tell him," Perry said. His heart was beating again, not thundering or keeping ominously still. "But you know, this isn't smart. You're going to stick someone up who has bullets and he's gonna shoot you." "We'll get ammo," the kid said. "And shoot him? That's only a little better, you know." "What do you want me to say?" the kid said, looking young and petulant. "I apologized." "Come by tomorrow with the car and let's talk, all right?" Lester didn't even notice that his car was missing until the kid drove up with it, and when he asked about it, Perry just raised his funny eyebrow at him. That funny eyebrow, it had the power to cloud men's minds. "What's your name?" Perry asked the kid, giving him the spare stool by the ticket-window. It was after lunch time, when the punishing heat slowed everyone to a sticky crawl, and the crowd was thin -- one or two customers every half hour. "Glenn," the kid said. In full daylight, he looked older. Perry had noticed that the shantytowners never stopped dressing like teenagers, wearing the fashions of their youths forever, so that a walk through the market was like a tour through the teen fashions of the last thirty years. "Glenn, you did me a real solid last night." Glenn squirmed on his stool. "I'm sorry about that --" "Me too," Perry said. "But not as sorry as I might have been. You said it was your first night. Is that true?" "Car-jacking, sure," the kid said. "But you get into other shit, don't you? Mugging? Selling a little dope? Something like that?" "Everyone does that," Glenn said. He looked sullen. "Maybe," Perry said. "And then a lot of them end up doing a stretch in a work-camp. Sometimes they get bit by water-moccasins and don't come out. Sometimes, one of the other prisoners hits them over the head with a shovel. Sometimes you just lose three to five years of your life to digging ditches." Glenn said nothing. "I'm not trying to tell you how to run your life," Perry said. "But you seem like a decent kid, so I figure there's more in store for you than getting killed or locked up. I know that's pretty normal around here, but you don't have to go that way. Your brother didn't." "What the fuck do you know about it, anyway?" The kid was up now, body language saying he wanted to get far away, fast. "I could ask around the market," Perry said, as though the kid hadn't spoken. "Someone here has got to be looking for someone to help out. You could open your own stall." The kid said, "It's all just selling junk to idiots. What kind of job is that for a man?" "Selling people stuff they can't be bothered to make for themselves is a time-honored way of making a living. There used to be professional portrait photographers who'd take a pic of your family for money. They were even considered artists. Besides, you don't have to sell stuff you download. You can invent stuff and print that." "Get over it. Those days are over. No one cares about inventions anymore." It nailed Perry between the eyes, like a slaughterhouse bolt. "Yeah, yeah," he said. He didn't want to talk to this kid any more than this kid wanted to talk to him. "Well, if I can't talk you out of it, it's your own business. . ." He started to rearrange his ticket-desk. The kid saw his opportunity for freedom and bolted. He was probably headed for his brother's stall and then the long walk to wherever he planned on spending his day. Everything was a long walk from here, or you could wait for the busses that ran on the hour during business-hours. Perry checked out the car, cleaned out the empties and the roaches and twists from the back seat, then parked it. A couple more people came by to ride his ride, and he took their money. Lester had just finished his largest-ever flattened-soda-can mechanical computer, it snaked back and forth across the whole of the old Wal-Mart solarium, sheets of pressboard with precision-cut gears mounted on aviation bearings -- Francis had helped him with those. All day, he'd been listening to the racket of it grinding through its mighty 0.001KHz calculations, dumping carloads of M&Ms into its output hopper. You programmed it with regulation baseballs, footballs, soccer-balls, and wiffleballs: dump them in the input hopper and they would be sorted into the correct chutes to trigger the operations. With a whopping one kilobit of memory, the thing could best any of the early vacuum tube computers without a single electrical component, and Lester was ready to finally declare victory over the cursed Univac. Perry let himself be coaxed into the work-room, deputizing Francis to man the ticket-desk, and watched admiringly as Lester put the machine through its paces. "You've done it," Perry said. "Well, I gotta blog it," Lester said. "Run some benchmarks, really test it out against the old monsters. I'm thinking of using it to brute-force the old Nazi Enigma code. That'll show those dirty Nazi bastards! We'll win the war yet!" Perry found himself giggling. "You're the best, man," he said to Lester. "It's good that there's at least one sane person around here." "Don't flatter yourself, Perry." "I was talking about *you*, Lester." "Uh-oh," Lester said. He scooped a double handful of brown M&Ms up from the output hopper and munched them. "It's not a good sign when you start accusing me of being the grownup in our partnership. Have some M&Ms and tell me about it." Perry did, unburdening himself to his old pal, his roommate of ten years, the guy he'd gone to war with and started businesses with and collaborated with. "You're restless, Perry," Lester said. He put nine golf-balls, a ping-pong ball, and another nine golf balls in the machine's input hopper. Two and a third seconds later, eighty one M&Ms dropped into the output hopper. "You're just *bored*. You're a maker, and you're running things instead of making things." "No one cares about made things anymore, Les." "That's sort of true," Lester said. "I'll allow you that. But it's only sort of true. What you're missing is how much people care about organizations still. That was the really important thing about the New Work: the way we could all come together to execute, without a lot of top-down management. The bangbanger arms dealers, the bio-terrorists and fatkins suppliers -- they all run on social institutions that we perfected back then. You've got something like that here with your market, a fluid social institution that you couldn't have had ten or fifteen years ago." "If you say so," Perry said. The M&Ms were giving him heartburn. Cheap chocolate didn't really agree with his stomach. "I do. And so the answer is staring you right in the face: go invent some social institutions. You've got one creeping up here in the ride. There are little blogospheres of fans who coordinate what they're going to bring down and where they're going to put it. Build on that." "No one's going to haul ass across the country to ride this ride, Les. Get real." "Course not." Lester beamed at him. "I've got one word for you, man: franchise!" "Franchise?" "Build dupes of this thing. Print out anything that's a one of a kind, run them as franchises." "Won't work," Perry said. "Like you said, this thing works because of the hardcore of volunteer curators who add their own stuff to it -- it's always different. Those franchises would all be static, or would diverge... It'd just be boring compared to this." "Why should they diverge? Why should they be static? You could network them, dude! What happens in one, happens in all. The curators wouldn't just be updating one exhibit, but all of them. Thousands of them. Millions of them. A gigantic physical wiki. Oh, it'd be so very very very cool, Perry. A cool *social institution.*" "Why don't you do it?" "I'm gonna. But I need someone to run the project. Someone who's good at getting people all pointed in the same direction. You, pal. You're my hero on this stuff." "You're such a flatterer." "You love it, baby," Lester said, and fluttered his long eyelashes. "Like the lady said to the stamp collector, philately will get you everywhere." "Oy," Perry said. "You're fired." "You can't fire me, I'm a volunteer!" Lester dropped six golf-balls and a heavy medicine ball down the hopper. The machine ground and chattered, then started dropping hundred-loads of M&Ms -- 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700 -- then some change. "What operation was that?" Perry said. He'd never seen Lester pull out the medicine ball. "Figure it out," Lester said. Perry thought for a moment. Six squared? Six cubed? Log six? "Six *factorial*? My God you're weird, Les." "Genius is never appreciated." He scooped up a double-handful of brown M&Ms. "In your face, Von Neumann! Let's see your precious ENIAC top *this*!" # A month later, Perry was clearing security at Miami International, looking awkward in long trousers, closed-sole shoes, and a denim jacket. It was autumn in Boston, and he couldn't show up in flip-flops and a pair of cutoffs. The security guards gave his leathery, lopsided face a hard look. He grinned like a pirate and made his funny eyebrow twitch, a stunt that earned him half an hour behind the screen and a date with Doctor Jellyfinger. "What, exactly, do you think I've got hidden up there?" he asked as he gripped the railing and tried not to let the illegitimati carborundum. "It's procedure, sir." "Well, the doc said my prostate was the size of a guava about a month ago -- in your professional opinion, has it shrunk or grown? I mean, while you're up there." The TSA man didn't like that at all. A minute later, Perry was buckling up and leaving the little room with an exaggerated bowlegged gait. He tipped an imaginary hat at the guard's retreating back and said, "Call me!" in a stagey voice. It was the last bit of fun he had for the next four hours, crammed in the tin can full of recycled discount air-traveller flatulence and the clatter of fingers on keyboards and the gabble of a hundred phone conversations as the salarymen on the flight stole a few minutes of cramped productivity from the dead travel time. Touching down in Boston and getting his luggage, he felt like he'd landed on an alien planet. The feeling of disorientation and foreignness was new to Perry. He was used to being supremely comfortable, in control -- confident. But he was nervous now, maybe even scared, a little. He dialed Tjan. "I've got my bags," he said. "I'll be right around," Tjan said. "Really looking forward to seeing you." There were more cops than passengers in the arrivals area at Logan, and they watched Tjan warily as he pulled up and swung open a door of his little sports-car. "What the fuck is this, a Porsche?" Perry said as he folded himself awkwardly into the front seat, stepping in through the sun-roof, pulling his bag down into his lap after him. "It's a Lada. I had it imported -- they're all over Russia. Evolutionary algorithm used to produce a minimum-materials/maximum-strength chassis. It's nice to see you, Perry." "It's nice to see you, Tjan," he said. The car was so low to the ground that it felt like he was riding luge. Tjan hammered mercilessly on the gearbox, rocketing them to Cambridge at such speed that Perry barely had time to admire the foliage, except at stop-lights. They were around the campus now, taking a screeching right off Mass Ave onto a tree-lined street of homely two-storey brick houses. Tjan pulled up in front of one and popped the sun-roof. The cold air that rushed in was as crisp as an apple, unlike any breath of air to be had in Florida, where there was always a mushiness, a feeling of air that had been filtered through the moist lungs of Florida's teeming fauna. Perry climbed out of the little Russian sports-car and twisted his back and raised his arms over his head until his spine gave and popped and crackled. Tjan followed, and then he shut down the car with a remote that made it go through an impressive and stylish series of clicks, clunks and chirps before settling down over its wheels, dropping the chassis to a muffler-scraping centimeter off the ground. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you your room." Tjan's porch sagged, with a couple kids' bikes triple-locked to it and an all-covering chalk mosaic over every inch of it. The wood creaked and gave beneath their feet. The door sprang open and revealed a pretty little girl, nine or ten years old, in blue-jeans and a hoodie sweater that went nearly to her ankles, the long sleeves bunched up like beach-balls on her forearms. The hood hung down to her butt -- it was East Coast bangbanger, as reinterpreted through the malls. "Daddy!" she said, and put her arms around Tjan's waist, squeezing hard. He pried her loose and then hoisted her by the armpits up to eye-height. "What have you done to your brother?" "Nothing he didn't deserve," she said, with a smile that showed dimples and made her little nose wrinkle. Tjan looked over at Perry. "This is my daughter, Lyenitchka, who is about to be locked in the coal cellar until she learns to stop torturing her younger brother. Lyenitchka, this is Perry Gibbons, upon whom you have already made an irreparably bad first impression." He shook her gently Perrywards. "Hello, Perry," she said, giggling, holding out one hand. She had a faint accent, which made her sound like a tiny, skinny Bond villainess. He shook gravely. "Nice to meet you," he said. "You got your kids," Perry said, once she was gone. "For the school year. Me and the ex, we had a heart-to-heart about the Russian education system and ended up here: I get the kids from September to June, but not Christmases or Easter holidays. She gets them the rest of the time, and takes them to a family dacha in Ukraine, where she assures me there are hardly any mafiyeh kids to influence my darling daughter." "You must be loving this," Perry said. Tjan's face went serious. "This is the best thing that's ever happened to me." "I'm really happy for you, buddy." They had burgers in the back-yard, cooking on an electric grill that was caked with the smoking grease of a summer's worth of outdoor meals. The plastic table-cloth was weighed down with painted rocks and the corners blew up in the freshening autumn winds. Lyenitchka's little brother appeared when the burgers began to spit and smoke on the grill, a seven-year-old in metallic mesh trousers and shirt wrought with the logo of a cartoon Cossack holding a laser-sword aloft. "Sasha, meet Perry." Sasha looked away, then went off to swing on a tire-swing hanging from the big tree. "You've got good kids," Perry said, handing Tjan a beer from the cooler under the picnic table. "Yup," Tjan said. He flipped the burgers and then looked at both of them. Lyenitchka was pushing her brother on the swing, a little too hard. Tjan smiled and looked back down at his burgers. Tjan cut the burgers in half and dressed them to his kids' exacting standards. They picked at them, pushed them onto each other's plates and got some into their mouths. "I've read your briefing on the ride," Tjan said, once his kids had finished and eaten half a package of Chutney Oreos for dessert. "It's pretty weird stuff." Perry nodded and cracked another beer. The cool air was weirding him out, awakening some atavistic instinct to seek a cave. "Yup, weird as hell. But they love it. Not just the geeks, either, though they eat it up, you should see it. Obsessive doesn't begin to cover it. But the civilians come by the hundreds, too. You should hear them when they come out: 'Jee-zus, I'd forgotten about those dishwasher-stackers, they were wicked! Where can I get one of those these days you figger?' The nostalgia's thick enough to cut with a knife." Tjan nodded. "I've been going over your books, but I can't figure out if you're profitable." "Sorry, that's me. I'm pretty good at keeping track of numbers, but getting them massaged into a coherent picture --" "Yeah, I know." Tjan got a far-away look. "How'd you make out on Kodacell, Perry? Finance-wise?" "Enough to open the ride, buy a car. Didn't lose anything." "Ah." Tjan fiddled with his beer. "Listen, I got rich off of Westinghouse. Not fuck-the-service-here-I'm-buying-this-restaurant rich, but rich enough that I never have to work again. I can spend the rest of my life in this yard, flipping burgers, taking care of my kids, and looking at porn." "Well, you were the suit. Getting rich is what suits do. I'm just a grunt."" Tjan had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed. "Now here's the thing. I don't *have* to work, but, Perry, I have *no idea* what I'm going to do if I don't work. The kids are at school all day. Do you have any idea how much daytime TV sucks? Playing the stock market is completely nuts, it's all gone sideways and upside down. I got an education so I wouldn't *have* to flip burgers for the rest of my life." "What are you saying, Tjan?" "I'm saying yes," Tjan said, grinning piratically. "I'm saying that I'll join your little weird-ass hobby business and I'll open another ride here for the Massholes. I'll help you run the franchising op, collect fees, make it profitable." Perry felt his face tighten. "What? I thought you'd be happy about this." "I am," Perry said. "But you're misunderstanding something. These aren't meant to be profitable businesses. I'm done with that. These are art, or community, or something. They're museums. Lester calls them *wunderkammers* -- cabinets of wonders. There's no franchising op the way you're talking about it. It's ad hoc. It's a protocol we all agree on, not a business arrangement." Tjan grunted. "I don't think I understand the difference between a agreed-upon protocol and a business arrangement." He held up his hand to fend off Perry's next remark. "But it doesn't matter. You can let people have the franchise for free. You can claim that you're not letting anyone have anything, that they're letting themselves in for their franchise. It doesn't matter to me. "But Perry, here's something you're going to have to understand: it's going to be nearly impossible *not to* make a business out of this. Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It's like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit." "Tjan, I want you to come on board to help me create an octopus," Perry said. "I can try," Tjan said, "but it won't be easy. When you do cool stuff, you end up making money." "Fine," Perry said. "Make money. But keep it to a minimum, OK?" # The next time Perry turned up at Logan, it was colder than the inside of an icebox and shitting down grey snow with the consistency of frozen custard. "Great weather for an opening," he said, once he'd climbed through the roof of Tjan's car and gotten snow all over the leather upholstery. "Sorry about the car." "Don't sweat it, the kids are murder on leather. I should trade this thing in on something that's less of a deathtrap anyway." Tjan was balder than he'd been in September, and skinnier. He had a three-day beard that further hollowed out his normally round cheeks. The Lada sports-car fishtailed a little as they navigated the tunnels back toward Cambridge, the roads slick and icy. "We scored an excellent location," Tjan said. "I told you that, but check this out." They were right in the middle of a built-up area of Boston, something that felt like a banking district, with impressive towers. It took Perry a minute to figure out what Tjan was pointing at. "That's the site?" There was a mall on the corner, with a boarded up derelict Hyatt overtopping it, rising high into the sky. "But it's right in the middle of town!" "Boston's not Florida," Tjan said. "Lots of people here don't have cars. There were some dead malls out in Worcester and the like, but I got this place for nothing. The owners haven't paid taxes in the ten years since the hotel folded, and the only shops that were left open were a couple of Azerbaijani import-export guys, selling junky stuff from India. "We gutted the whole second floor and turned the ground-floor food-court into a flea-market. There's an old tunnel connecting this to the T and I managed to get it re-opened, so I expect we'll get some walk-in." Perry marveled. Tjan had a suit's knack for pulling off the ambitious. Perry had never tried to even rent an apartment in a big city, figuring that any place where land was at a premium was a place where people willing to spend more than him could be found. Give him a ghost-mall that was off the GPS grid anytime. "Have you managed to fill the flea market?" It had taken Perry a long time to fill his, and still he had a couple of dogs -- a tarot reader and a bong stall, a guy selling high-pressure spray-paint cans and a discount porn stall that sold naked shovelware by the petabyte. "Yeah, I got proteges up and down New England. A lot of them settled here after the crash. One place is as good as another, and the housing was wicked-cheap once the economy disappeared. They upped stakes and came to Boston as soon as I put the word out. I think everyone's waiting for the next big thing." "You think?" "Perry, New Work is the most important thing that ever happened to some of those people. It was the high-point of their lives. It was the only time they ever felt useful." Perry shook his head. "Don't you think that's sad?" Tjan negotiated a tricky tunnel interchange and got the car pointed to Cambridge. "No, Perry, I don't think it's sad. Jesus Christ, you can't believe that. Why do you think I'm helping you? You and me and all the rest of them, we did something *important*. The world changed. It's continuing to change. Have you stopped to think that one in five American workers picked up and moved somewhere else to do New Work projects? That's one of the largest American resettlements since the dustbowl. The average New Work collective shipped more inventions per year than Edison Labs at its peak. In a hundred years, when they remember the centuries that were America's, they'll count this one among them, because of what we made. "So no, Perry, I don't think it's sad." "I'm sorry. Sorry, OK? I didn't mean it that way. But it's tragic, isn't it, that the dream ended? That they're all living out there in the boonies, thinking of their glory days?" "Yes, that *is* sad. But that's why I agreed to do the ride -- not to freeze the old projects in amber, but to create a new project that we can all participate in again. These people uprooted their lives to follow us, it's the least we can do to give them something back for that." Perry stewed on that the rest of the way to Tjan's, staring at the sleet, hand resting against the icy window-glass. # Sammy checked in to a Comfort Inn tucked into the thirty-seventh storey of the Bank of America building in downtown Boston. The lobby was empty, the security-guard's desk unmanned. B of A was in receivership, and not doing so hot at that, as the fact that they had let out their executive floors to a discount business-hotel testified. The room was fine, though -- small and windowless, but fine: power, shower, toilet and bed, all he demanded in a hotel room. He ate the packet of nuts he'd bought at the airport before jumping on the T and then checked his email. He had more of it than he could possibly answer -- he didn't think he'd ever had an empty in-box. But he picked off anything that looked important, including a note from his ex-, who was now living in the Keys on a squatter beach and wanted to know if he could loan her a hundred bucks. No sense of how she'd pay him back without work. But Michelle was resourceful and probably good for it. He paypalled it to her, feeling like a sucker for hoping that she might repay it in person. He'd been single since she'd left him the year before and he was lonely and hard-up. He'd landed at two and by the time he was done with all the bullshit, it was after dinner time and he was hungry as hell. Boston was full of taco-wagons and kebab stands that he'd passed on the walk in, and he hustled out onto the street to see if any were still open. He got a huge garlicky kebab and ate it in the lee of a frozen ATM shelter, wolfing it without tasting it. He went and scouted the location of the new ride. He'd gotten wind of it online -- none of his idiot colleagues could be bothered to read the public email lists of the competitors they were supposedly in charge of oppo researching. Shaking loose the budget to get a discount flight to Boston had been a major coup, requiring horse-trading, blackmail, and passive-aggressive gaming of the system. With the ridiculously low per-diem and hotel allowance he'd still go home a couple hundred bucks out-of-pocket. Why did he even do his job? He should just play by the rules and get nothing done. And get fired. Or passed up for promotion, which was practically the same thing. The new ride was in an impressive urban mall. He'd spent his college years in Philly and had passed many a happy day in malls like this one, cruising for girls or camping out on a bench with his books and a smoothie. Unlike the crappy roadside malls of Florida, there had been nothing but the best stores in them, the property values too high to make anything but high-margin, high-turnover, high-ticket shops viable. So it was especially sad to see this mall turned over to the junky stalls and junkier ride -- like a fat, washed-up supermodel sentenced to a talk-show appearance for her shoplifting arrests. He approached the doors with trepidation. He was resolved not to buy anything from the market -- no busts or contact lenses -- and had stuck his wallet in his front pocket on the way over. The mall was like a sauna. He shucked his jacket and sweater and hung them over one arm. The whole ground floor had been given over to flimsy market-stalls. He skulked among them, trying to simultaneously take note of their contents and avoid their owners' notice. He came to realize that he needn't skulk. It seemed like half of Boston had turned out -- not just young people, either. There were plenty of tweedy academics, big working-class Southie boys with thick accents, recent immigrants with Scandie-chic clothes. They chattered and laughed and mixed freely and ate hot food out of huge cauldrons or off of clever electric grills. The smells made his stomach growl, even though he'd just polished off a kebab the size of his head. The buzz of the crowd reminded him of something, what was it? A premiere, that was it. When they opened a new ride or area at the Park, there was the same sense of thrilling anticipation, of excitement and eagerness. That made it worse -- these people had no business being this excited about something so. . . lowbrow? Cheap? Whatever it was, it wasn't worthy. They were shopping like fiends. A mother with a baby on her hip pushed past him, her stroller piled high with shopping bags screened with giant, pixellated Belgian pastries. She was laughing and the baby on her hip was laughing too. He headed for the escalator, whose treads had been anodized in bright colors, something he'd never seen before. He let it carry him upstairs, but looked down, and so he was nearly at the top before he realized that the guy from the Florida ride was standing there, handing out fliers and staring at Sammy like he knew him from somewhere. It was too late to avoid him. Sammy put on his best castmember smile. "Hello there!" The guy grinned and wiggled his eyebrow. "I know you from somewhere," he said slowly. "From Florida," Sammy said, with an apologetic shrug. "I came up to see the opening." "No *way*!" The guy had a huge smile now, looked like was going to hug him. "You're shitting me!" "What can I say? I'm a fan." "That's *incredible.* Hey, Tjan, come here and meet this guy. What's your name?" Sammy tried to think of another name, but drew a blank. "Mickey," he said at last, kicking himself. "Tjan, this is Mickey. He's a regular on the ride in Florida and he's come up here just to see the opening." Tjan had short hair and sallow skin, and dressed like an accountant, but his eyes were bright and sharp as they took Sammy in, looking him up and down quickly. "Well that's certainly flattering." He reached into his creased blazer and pulled out a slip of paper. "Have a couple comp tickets then -- the least we can do for your loyalty." The paper was festooned with holograms and smart-cards and raised bumps containing RFIDs, but Sammy knew that you could buy standard anti-counterfeiting stock like it from a mail-order catalog. "That's mighty generous of you," he said, shaking Tjan's dry, firm hand. "Our pleasure," the other guy said. "Better get in line, though, or you're gonna be waiting a long, long time." He had a satisfied expression. Sammy saw that what he'd mistaken for a crowd of people was in fact a long, jostling queue stretching all the way around the escalator mezzanine and off one of the mall's side corridors. Feeling like he'd averted a disaster, Sammy followed the length of the queue until he came to its end. He popped in a headphone and set up his headline reader to text-to-speech his day's news. He'd fallen behind, what with the air travel and all. Most of the stuff in his cache came in from his co-workers, and it was the most insipid crap anyway, but he had to listen to it or he'd be odd man out at the watercooler when he got back. He listened with half an ear and considered the gigantic crowd stretching away as far as the eye could see. Compared with the re-opening of Fantasyland, it was nothing -- goths from all over the world had flocked to central Florida for that, Germans and Greeks and Japanese and even some from Mumbai and Russia. They'd filled the park to capacity, thrilled with the delightful perversity of chirpy old Disney World remade as a goth theme park. But a line this long in Boston, in the dead of winter, for something whose sole attraction was that there was another one like it by a shitty forgotten b-road outside of Miami? Christ on an Omnimover. The line moved, just a little surge, and there was a cheer all down the mall's length. People poured past him headed for the line's tail, vibrating with excitement. But the line didn't move again for five minutes, then ten. Then another surge, but maybe that was just people crowding together more. Some of the people in line were drinking beers out of paper bags and getting raucous. "What's going on?" someone hollered from behind him. The cry was taken up, and then the line shuddered and moved forward some. Then nothing. Thinking, *screw this*, Sammy got out of line and walked to the front. Tjan was there, working the velvet rope, letting people through in dribs and drabs. He caught sight of Sammy and gave him a solemn nod. "They're all taking too long to ride," he said. "I tell them fifteen minutes max, get back in line if you want to see more, but what can you do?" Sammy nodded sympathetically. The guy with the funny eyebrow put in an appearance from behind the heavy black curtains. "Send through two more," he said, and grabbed Sammy, tugging him in. Behind the curtain, it was dim and spotlit, almost identical to Florida, and half a dozen vehicles waited. Sammy slid into one and let the spiel wash over him. THERE WAS A TIME WHEN AMERICA HELD OUT THE PROMISE OF A NEW WAY OF LIVING AND WORKING. THE NEW WORK BOOM OF THE TEENS WAS A PERIOD OF UNPARALLELED INVENTION, A CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION OF CREATIVITY NOT SEEN SINCE THE TIME OF EDISON -- AND UNLIKE EDISON, THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED THE NEW WORK REVOLUTION WEREN'T RIP-OFF ARTISTS AND FRAUDS. The layout was slightly different due to the support pillars, but as similar to the Florida version as geography allowed. Robots humped underfoot moving objects, keeping them in sync with the changes in Florida. He'd read on the message boards that Florida would stay open late so that the riders could collaborate with the attendees at the Boston premiere, tweeting back and forth to one another. The other chairs in the ride crawled around each exhibit, reversing and turning slowly. Riders brought their chairs up alongside one another and conferred in low voices, over the narration from the scenery. He thought he saw a couple making out -- a common enough occurrence in dark rides that he'd even exploited a few times when planning out rides that would be likely to attract amorous teenagers. They had a key demographic: too young to leave home, old enough to pay practically anything for a private spot to score some nookie. The air smelled of three-d printer, the cheap smell of truck-stops where vending machines outputted cheap kids' toys. Here it wasn't cheap, though: here it smelled futuristic, like the first time someone had handed him a printed prop for one of his rides -- it had been a head for an updated Small World ride. Then it had smelled like something foreign and new and exciting and frightening, like the first days of a different world. Smelling that again, remembering the crowds outside waiting to get in, Sammy started to get a sick feeling, the kebab rebounding on him. Moving as if in a dream, he reached down into his lap and drew out a small utility knife. There would be infrared cameras, but he knew from experience that they couldn't see through ride vehicles. Slowly, he fingered the access panel's underside until he found a loose corner. He snicked out the knife's little blade -- he'd brought an entire suitcase just so he could have a checked bag to store this in -- and tugged at the cables inside. He sawed at them with small movements, feeling the copper wires inside the insulation give way one strand at a time. The chair moved jerkily, then not at all. He snipped a few more wires just to be sure, then tucked them all away. "Hey!" he called. "My chair's dead!" He had fetched up in a central pathway where the chairs tried to run cloverleafs around four displays. A couple chairs swerved around him. He thumped the panel dramatically, then stepped out and shook his head. He contrived to step on three robots on the way to another chair. "Is yours working?" he asked the kid riding in it, all of ten years old and of indefinite gender. "Yeah," the kid said. It scooted over. "There's room for both of us, get in." *Christ, don't they have stranger-danger in the north?* He climbed in beside the kid and contrived to slide one sly hand under the panel. Teasing out the wires the second time was easier, even one-handed. He sliced through five large bundles this time before the chair ground to a halt, its gyros whining and rocking it from side-to-side. The kid looked at him and frowned. "These things are shit," it said with real vehemence, climbing down and kicking one of its tires, and then kicking a couple of the floor-level robots for good measure. They'd landed another great breakdown spot: directly in front of a ranked display of raygun-shaped appliances and objects. He remembered seeing that one in its nascent stage, back in Florida -- just a couple of toy guns, which were presently joined by three more, then there were ten, then fifty, then a high wall of them, striking and charming. The chair's breakdown position neatly blocked the way. "Guess we'd better walk out," he said. He stepped on a couple more robots, making oops noises. The kid enthusiastically kicked robots out of its way. Chairs swerved around them as other riders tried to navigate. They were approaching the exit when Sammy spotted a charge-plate for the robots. They were standard issue for robotic vacuum cleaners and other semi-autonomous appliances, and he'd had one in his old apartment. They were supposed to be safe as anything, but a friend's toddler had crawled over to his and shoved a stack of dimes into its recessed jack and one of them had shorted it out in a smoking, fizzing fireworks display. "You go on ahead, I'm going to tie my shoes." Sammy bent down beside the charge plate, his back to the kid and the imagined cameras that were capturing his every move, and slipped the stack of coins he'd taken from his pocket into the little slot where the robots inserted their charging stamen. The ensuing shower of sparks was more dramatic than he'd remembered -- maybe it was the darkened room. The kid shrieked and ran for the EXIT sign, and he took off too, at a good clip. They'd get the ride up and running soon enough, but maybe not tonight, not if they couldn't get the two chairs he'd toasted out of the room. There was the beginnings of chaos at the exit. There was that Tjan character, giving him an intense look. He tried to head for the down escalator, but Tjan cut him off. "What's going on in there?" "Damnedest thing," he said, trying to keep his face composed. "My chair died. Then another one -- a little kid was riding in it. Then there was a lot of electrical sparks, and I walked out. Crazy." Tjan cocked his head. "I hope you're not hurt. We could have a doctor look at you; there are a couple around tonight." It had never occurred to Sammy that professional types might turn out for a ride like this, but of course it was obvious. There were probably off-duty cops, local politicians, lawyers, and the like. "I'm fine," he said. "Don't worry about me. Maybe you should send someone in for the people still in there, though?" "That's being taken care of. I'm just sorry you came all the way from Florida for this kind of disappointment. That's just brutal." Tjan's measuring stare was even more intense. "Uh, it's OK. I had meetings here this week. This was just a cool bonus." "Who do you work for, Mickey?" Shit. "Insurance company," he said. "That'd be Norwich Union, then, right? They've got a headquarters here." Sammy knew how this went. Norwich Union didn't have headquarters here. Or they did. He'd have to outguess Tjan with his answer. "Are you going to stay open tonight?" Tjan nodded, though it wasn't clear whether he was nodding because he was answering in the affirmative or because his suspicions had been confirmed. "Well then, I should be going." Tjan put out a hand. "Oh, please stay. I'm sure we'll be running soon; you should get a whole ride through." "No, really, I have to go." He shook off the hand and pelted down the escalator and out into the freezing night. His blood sang in his ears. They probably wouldn't get the ride running that night at all. They probably would send that whole carnival crowd home, disappointed. He'd won some kind of little victory over something. He'd felt more confident of his victory when he was concerned with the guy with the funny eyebrow -- with Perry. He'd seemed little more than a bum, a vag. But this Tjan reminded him of the climbers he'd met through his career at Walt Disney World: keenly observant and fast formulators of strategies. Someone who could add two and two before you'd know that there was such a thing as four. Sammy walked back to his hotel as quickly as he could, given the icy sidewalks underfoot, and by the time he got to the lobby of the old office tower his face hurt -- forehead, cheeks and nose. He'd booked his return flight for a day later, thinking he'd do more reccies of the new site before writing his report and heading home, but there was no way he was facing down that Tjan guy again. What had prompted him to sabotage the ride? It was something primal, something he hadn't been in any real control of. He'd been in some kind of fugue-state. But he'd packed the little knife in his suitcase and he'd slipped it into his pocket before leaving the room. So how instinctive could it possibly have been? He had a vision of the carnival atmosphere in the market stalls outside and knew that even after the ride had broken down, the crowd had lingered, laughing and browsing and enjoying a night's respite from the world and the cold city. The Whos down in Who-ville had gone on singing even after he'd Grinched their ride. That was it. The ride didn't just make use of user-created content -- it *was* user-created content. He could never convince his bosses in Orlando to let him build anything remotely like this, and given enough time, it would surely overtake them. That Tjan -- someone like him wouldn't be involved if there wasn't some serious money opportunity on the line. He'd seen the future that night and he had no place in it. # It only took a week on the Boston ride before they had their third and fourth nodes. The third was outside of San Francisco, in a gigantic ghost-mall that was already being used as a flea-market. They had two former anchor-stores, one of which was being squatted by artists who needed studio space. The other one made a perfect location for a new ride, and the geeks who planned on building it had cut their teeth building elaborate Burning Man confectioneries together, so Perry gave them his blessing. The fourth was to open in Raleigh, in the Research Triangle, where the strip malls ran one into the next. The soft-spoken, bitingly ironic southerners who proposed it were the daughters of old IBM blue-tie stalwarts who'd been running a women's tech collective since they realized they couldn't afford college and dropped out together. They wanted to see how much admission they could charge if they let it be known that they would plow their profits into scholarship funds for local women. Perry couldn't believe that these people wanted to open their own rides, nor that they thought they needed his permission to do so. He was reminded of the glory days of New Work, when every day there were fifty New Work sites with a hundred new gizmos, popping up on the mailing lists, looking for distributors, recruiting, competing, swarming, arguing, forming and reforming. Watching Tjan cut the deals whereby these people were granted permission to open their own editions of the ride felt like that, and weirder still. "Why do they need our permission? The API's wide open. They can just implement. Are they sheep or something?" Tjan gave him an old-fashioned look. "They're being polite, Perry -- they're giving you face for being the progenitor of the ride." "I don't like it," Perry said. "I didn't get anyone's permission to include their junk in the ride. When we get a printer to clone something that someone brings here, we don't get their permission. Why the hell is seeking permission considered so polite? Shit, why not send me a letter asking me if I mind receiving an email? Where does it end?" "They're trying to be nice to you Perry, that's all." "Well I don't like it," Perry said. "How about this: from now on when someone asks for permission we tell them no, we don't give out *or* withhold permission for joining the network, but we hope that they'll join it anyway. Maybe put up a FAQ on the site." "You'll just confuse people." "I won't be confusing them, man! I'll be educating them!" "How about if you add a Creative Commons license to it? Some of them are very liberal." "I don't *want* to license this. You have to *own* something to license it. A license is a way of saying, 'Without this license, you're forbidden to do this.' You don't need a license to click a link and load a webpage -- no one has to give you permission to do this and no one could take it away from you. Licensing just gives people even worse ideas about ownership and permission and property!" "It's your show," Tjan said. "No it *isn't*! That's the *point*!" "OK, OK, it's not your show. But we'll do it your way. You are a lovable, cranky weirdo, you know it?" They did it Perry's way. He was scheduled to go back to Florida a few days later, but he changed his ticket to go out to San Francisco and meet with the crew who were implementing the ride there. One of them taught interaction design at SFSU and brought him in to talk to the students. He wasn't sure what he was going to talk to them about, but when he got there, he found himself telling the story of how he and Lester and Tjan and Suzanne and Kettlebelly had built and lost the New Work movement, without even trying. It was a fun story to tell from start to finish, and they talked through the lunch break and then a group of students took him to a bar in the Mission with a big outdoor patio where he went on telling war stories until the sun had set and he'd drunk so much beer he couldn't tell stories any longer. They were all ten or fifteen years younger than him, and the girls were pretty and androgynous and the boys were also pretty and androgynous, not that he really swung that way. Still, it was fine being surrounded by the catcalling, joking, bullshitting crowd of young, pretty, flirty people. They hugged him a lot, and two of the prettier girls (who, he later realized, were a lot more interested in each other than him) took him back to a capsule hotel built across three parking-spots and poured him into bed and tucked him in. He had a burrito the size of a football for breakfast, stuffed with shredded pig-parts and two kinds of sloppy beans. He washed it down with a quart of a cinnamon/rice drink called horchata that was served ice-cold and did wonders for his hangover. A couple hours' noodling on his laptop and a couple bags of Tecate later and he was feeling almost human. Early mariachis strolled the street with electric guitars that controlled little tribes of dancing, singing knee-high animatronics, belting out old Jose Alfredo Jimenez tunes. It was shaping up to be a good day. His laptop rang and he screwed in his headset and started talking to Tjan. "Man, this place is excellent," he said. "I had the best night I've had in years last night." "Well then you'll love this: there's a crew in Madison that want to do the same thing and could use a little guidance. They spoke to me this morning and said they'd be happy to spring for the airfare. Can you make a six o'clock flight at SFO?" They gave him cheese in Madison and introduced him to the biohackers who were the spiritual progeny of the quirky moment when Madison was one of six places where stem cells could be legally researched. The biohackers gave him the willies. One had gills. One glowed in the dark. One was orange and claimed to photosynthesize. He got his hosts to bring him to the ratskeller where they sat down to comedy-sized beers and huge, suspicious steaming wursts. "Where's your site?" "We were thinking of building one -- there's a lot of farmland around here." Either the speaker was sixteen years old or Perry was getting to be such a drunken old fart that everyone seemed sixteen. He wasn't old enough to shave, anyway. Perry tried to remember his name and couldn't. Jet-lag or sleepdep or whatever. "That's pretty weird. Everywhere else, they're just moving into spaces that have been left vacant." "We haven't got many of those. All the offices and stuff are being occupied by heavily funded startups." "Heavily funded startups? In this day and age?" "Superbabies," the kid said with a shrug. "It's all anyone here thinks about anymore. That and cancer cures. I think superbabies are crazy -- imagine being a twenty-year-old superbaby, with two-decade-old technology in your genes. In your germline! Breeding other obsolete superbabies. Crazy. But the Chinese are investing heavily." "So no dead malls? Christ, that's like running out of sand or hydrogen or something. Are we still in America?" The kid laughed. "The campus is building more student housing because none of us can afford the rents around here anymore. But there's lots of farmland, like I said. Won't be a problem to throw up a prefab and put the ride inside it. It'll be like putting up a haunted cornfield at Halloween. Used to do that every year to raise money for the ACLU, back in Nebraska." "Wow." He wanted to say, *They have the ACLU in Nebraska?* but he knew that wasn't fair. The midwesterners he'd met had generally been kick-ass geeks and hackers, so he had no call to turn his nose up at this kid. "So why do you want to do this?" The kid grinned. "Because there's got to be a way to do something cool without moving to New York. I like it around here. Don't want to live in some run-down defaulted shit-built condo where the mice are hunchbacked. Like the wide-open spaces. But I don't want to be a farmer or an academic or run a student bar. All that stuff is a dead-end, I can see it from here. I mean, who drinks beer anymore? There's much sweeter highs out there in the real world." Perry looked at his beer. It was in a themed stein with Germano-Gothic gingerbread worked into the finish. It felt like it had been printed from some kind of ceramic/epoxy hybrid. You could get them at traveling carny midways, too. "I like beer," he said. "But you're --" The kid broke off. "Old," Perry said. "'Sok. You're what, 16?" "21," the kid said. "I'm a late bloomer. Devoting resources to more important things than puberty." Two more kids slid into their booth, a boy and a girl who actually did look 21. "Hey Luke," the girl said, kissing him on the cheek. Luke, that was his name. Perry came up with a mnemonic so he wouldn't forget it again -- Nebraska baby-faced farm boy, that was like Luke Skywalker. He pictured the kid swinging a lightsaber and knew he'd keep the name for good now. "This is Perry Gibbons," Luke said. "Perry, this is Hilda and Ernie. Guys, Perry's the guy who built the ride I was telling you about." Ernie shook his hand. "Man, that's the coolest shit I've ever seen, wow. What the hell are you doing here? I love that stuff. Wow." Hilda flicked his ear. "Stop drooling, fanboy," she said. Ernie rubbed his ear. Perry nodded uncertainly. "Sorry. It's just -- well, I'm a big fan is all." "That's really nice of you," Perry said. He'd met a couple people in Boston and San Francisco who called themselves his fans, and he hadn't known what to say to them, either. Back in the New Work days he'd meet reporters who called themselves fans, but that was just blowing smoke. Now he was meeting people who seemed to really mean it. Not many, thank God. "He's just like a puppy," Hilda said, pinching Ernie's cheek. "All enthusiasm." Ernie rubbed his cheek. Luke reached out abruptly and tousled both of their hair. "These two are going to help me build the ride," he said. "Hilda's an amazing fundraiser. Last year she ran the fundraising for a whole walk-in clinic." "Women's health clinic or something?" Perry asked. He was starting to sober up a little. Hilda was one of those incredible, pneumatic midwestern girls that he'd seen at five minute intervals since getting off his flight in Madison. He didn't think he'd ever met one like her. "No," Hilda said. "Metabolic health. Lots of people get the fatkins treatment at puberty, either because their fatkins parents talk them into it or because they hate their baby fat." Perry shook his head. "Come again?" "You think eating ten thousand calories a day is easy? It's hell on your digestive system. Not to mention you spend a fortune on food. A lot of people get to college and just switch to high-calorie powdered supplements because they can't afford enough real food to stay healthy, so you've got all these kids sucking down vanilla slurry all day just to keep from starving. We provide counseling and mitigation therapies to kids who want it." "And when they get out of college -- do they get the treatment again?" "You can't. The mitigation's permanent. People who take it have to go through the rest of their lives taking supplements and eating sensibly and exercising." "Do they get fat?" She looked away, then down, then back up at him. "Yes, most of them do. How could they not? Everything around them is geared at people who need to eat five times as much as they do. Even the salads all have protein powder mixed in with them. But it is *possible* to eat right. You've never had the treatment, have you?" Perry shook his head. "Trick metabolism though. I can eat like a hog and not put on an ounce." Hilda reached out and squeezed his bicep. "Really -- and I suppose that all that lean muscle there is part of your trick metabolism, too?" She left her hand where it was. "OK, I do a fair bit of physical labor too. But I'm just saying -- if they get fat again after they reverse the treatment --" "There are worse things than being fat." Her hand still hadn't moved. He looked at Ernie, whom he'd assumed was her boyfriend, to see how he was taking it. Ernie was looking somewhere else, though, across the ratshkeller, at the huge TV that was showing competitive multiplayer gaming, apparently some kind of championships. It was as confusing as a hundred air-hockey games being played on the same board, with thousands of zipping, jumping, firing entities and jump-cuts so fast that Perry couldn't imagine how you'd make sense of it. The girl's hand was still on his arm, and it was warm. His mouth was dry but more beer would be a bad idea. "How about some water?" he said, in a bit of a croak. Luke jumped up to get some, and a silence fell over the table. "So this clinic, how'd you fundraise for it?" "Papercraft," she said. "I have a lot of friends who are into paper-folding and we modded a bunch of patterns. We did really big pieces, too -- bed-frames, sofas, kitchen-tables, chairs --" "Like actual furniture?" "Like actual furniture," she said with a solemn nod. "We used huge sheets of paper and treated them with stiffening, waterproofing and fireproofing agents. We did a frat house's outdoor bar and sauna, with a wind-dynamo -- I even made a steam engine." "You made a steam engine out of paper?" He was agog. "You mean to say that *you're* surprised by building stuff out of unusual materials?" Perry laughed. "Point taken." "We just got a couple hundred students to do some folding in their spare time and then sold it on. Everyone on campus needs bookshelves, so we started with those -- using accordion-folded arched supports under each shelf. We could paint or print designs on them, too, but a lot of people liked them all-white. Then we did chairs, desks, kitchenette sets, placemats -- you name it. I called the designs 'Multiple Origami.'" Perry sprayed beer out his nose. "That's awesome!" he said, wiping up the mess with a kleenex that she extracted from a folded paper purse. Looking closely, he realized that the white baseball cap she was wearing was also folded out of paper. She laughed and rummaged some more in her handbag, coming up with a piece of stiff card. Working quickly and nimbly, she gave it a few deft folds along pre-scored lines, and a moment later she was holding a baseball hat that was the twin of the one she was wearing. She leaned over the table and popped it on his head. Luke came back with the water and set it down between them, pouring out glasses for everyone. "Smooth lid," he said, touching the bill of Perry's cap. "Thanks," Perry said, draining his water and pouring another glass. "Well, you people certainly have some pretty cool stuff going on here." "This is a great town," Luke said expansively, as though he had travelled extensively and settled on Madison, Wisconsin as a truly international hotspot. "We're going to build a kick-ass ride." "You going to make it all out of paper?" "Some of it, anyway," Luke said. "Hilda wouldn't have it any other way, right?" "This one's your show, Luke," she said. "I'm just a fundraiser." "Anyone hungry?" Hilda said. "I want to go eat something that doesn't have unidentified organ-meat mixed in." "Go on without me," Ernie said. "I got money on this game." "Homework," Luke said. Perry had just eaten, and had planned on spending this night in his room catching up on email. "Yeah, I'm starving," he said. He felt like a high-school kid, but in a good way. They went out for Ukrainian food, which Perry had never had before, but the crepes and the blood sausage were tasty enough. Mostly, though, he was paying attention to Hilda, who was running down her war stories from the Multiple Origami fundraiser. There were funny ones, sad ones, scary ones, triumphant ones. Every one of her stories reminded him of one of his own. She was an organizer and so was he and they'd been through practically the same shit. They drank gallons of coffee afterward, getting chucked out when the restaurant closed and migrating to a cafe on the main drag where they had low tables and sofas, and they never stopped talking. "You know," Hilda said, stretching and yawning, "it's coming up on four AM." "No way," he said, but his watch confirmed it. "Christ." He tried to think of a casual way of asking her to sleep with him. For all their talking, they'd hardly touched on romance -- or maybe there'd been romance in every word. "I'll walk you to your hotel," she said. "Hey, that's really nice of you," he said. His voice sounded fakey and forced in his ears. All of a sudden, he wasn't tired at all, instead his heart was hammering in his chest and his blood sang in his ears. There was hardly any talk on the way back to the hotel, just the awareness of her steps and his in time with one another over the cold late-winter streets. No traffic at that hour, and hardly a sound from any of the windows they passed. The town was theirs. At the door to his hotel -- another stack of the ubiquitous capsules, these geared to visiting parents -- they stopped. They were looking at one another like a couple of googly-eyed kids at the end of a date in a sitcom. "Um, what's your major?" he said. "Pure math," she said. "I think I know what that is," he said. It was freezing out on the street. "Theory, right?" "Pure math as opposed to applied math," she said. "Do you really care about this?" "Um," he said. "Well, yes. But not very much." "I'll come into your hotel room, but we're not having sex, OK?" "OK," he said. There was room enough for the two of them in the capsule, but only just. These were prefabbed in bulk and they came in different sizes -- in the Midwest they were large, the ones stacked up in San Francisco parking spots were small. Still, he and Hilda were almost in each other's laps, and he could smell her, feel wisps of her hair tickling his ear. "You're really nice," he said. Late at night, his ability to be flippant evaporated. He was left with simple truths, simply declared. "I like you a lot." "Well then you'll have to come back to Madison and check in on the ride, won't you?" "Um," he said. He had a planning meeting with Luke and the rest of his gang the next day, then he was supposed to be headed for Omaha, where Tjan had set up another crew for him to speak to. At this rate, he would get back to Florida some time in June. "Perry, you're not a career activist, are you?" "Nope," he said. "I hadn't really imagined that there was such a thing." "My parents. Both of them. Here's what being a career activist means: you are on the road most of the time. When you get on the road, you meet people, have intense experiences with them -- like going to war or touring with a band. You fall in love a thousand times. And then you leave all those people behind. You get off a plane, turn some strangers into best friends, get on a plane and forget them until you come back into town, and then you take it all back up again. "If you want to survive this, you've got to love that. You've got to get off a plane, meet people, fall in love with them, treasure every moment, and know that moments are all you have. Then you get on a plane again and you love them forever. Otherwise, every new meeting is sour because you know how soon it will end. It's like starting to say your summer-camp goodbyes before you've even unpacked your duffel-bag. You've got to embrace -- or at least forget -- that every gig will end in a day or two." Perry took a moment to understand this, swallowed a couple times, then nodded. Lots of people had come in and out of his factory and his ride over the years. Lester came and went. Suzanne was gone. Tjan was gone but was back again. Kettlebelly was no longer in his life at all, a ghost of a memory with a great smile and good cologne. Already he was forgetting the faces in Boston, the faces in San Francisco. Hilda would be a memory in a month. Hilda patted his hand. "I have friends in practically every city in America. My folks campaigned for stem cells up and down every red state in the country. I even met superman before he died. He knew my name. I spent ten years on the road with them, back and forth. The Bush years, a couple years afterward. You can live this way and you can be happy, but you've got to have right mind. "What it means is you've got to be able to say things to people you meet, like, 'You're really nice,' and mean it, really mean it. But you've also got to be cool with the fact that really nice people will fall out of your life every week, twice a week, and fall back into it or not. I think you're very nice, too, but we're not gonna be a couple, ever. Even if we slept together tonight, you'd be gone tomorrow night. What you need to ask yourself is whether you want to have friends in every city who are glad to see you when you get off the plane, or ex-girlfriends in every city who might show up with their new boyfriends, or not at all." "Are you telling me this to explain why we're not going to sleep together? I just figured you were dating that guy, Ernie." "Ernie's my brother," she said. "And yeah, that's kind of why I'm telling you this. I've never gone on what you might call a date. With my friends, it tends to be more like, you work together, you hang out together, you catch yourself looking into one another's eyes a couple times, then you do a little circling around and then you end up in your bed or their bed having hard, energetic sex and then you sort out some details and then it lasts as long as it lasts. We've done a compressed version of that tonight, and we're up to the sex, and so I thought we should lay some things on the table, you should forgive the expression." Perry thought back to his double-date with Lester. The girl had been pretty and intelligent and would have taken him home if he'd made the least effort. He hadn't, though. This girl was inappropriate in so many ways: young, rooted to a city thousands of miles from home -- why had he brought her back to the hotel? A thought struck him. "Why do you think I'm going to be getting on and off planes for the rest of my life? I've got a home to get to." "You haven't been reading the message boards, have you?" "Which message boards?" "For ride-builders. There are projects starting up everywhere. People like what they've heard and what they've seen, and they remember you from the old days and want to get in on the magic you're going to bring. A lot of us know each other anyway, from other joint projects. Everyone's passing the hat to raise your airfare and arguing about who's sofa you're going to stay on." He'd known that they were there. There were always message-boards. But they were just talk -- he never bothered to read them. That was Lester's job. He wanted to make stuff, not chatter. "Jesus, when the hell was someone going to tell me?" "Your guy in Boston, we've been talking to him. He said not to bug you, that you were busy enough as it is." He did, did he? In the old days, Tjan had been in charge of planning and he'd been in charge of the ideas: in charge of what to plan. Had they come full circle without him noticing? If they had, was that so bad? "Man, I was really looking forward to spending a couple nights in my own bed." "Is it much more comfortable than this one?" She thumped the narrow coffin-bed, which was surprisingly comfortable, adjustable, heated, and massaging. He snorted. "OK, I sleep on a futon on the floor back home, but it's the principle of the thing. I just miss home, I guess." "So go home for a couple days after this stop, or the next one. Charge up your batteries and do your laundry. But I have a feeling that home is going to be your suitcase pretty soon, Perry my dear." Her voice was thick with sleep, her eyes heavy-lidded and bleary. "You're probably right." He yawned as he spoke. "Hell, I know you're right. You're a real smarty." "And I'm too tired to go home," she said, "so I'm a smarty who's staying with you." He was suddenly wide awake, his heart thumping. "Um, OK," he said, trying to sound casual. He turned back the sheets, then, standing facing into the cramped corner, took off his jeans and shoes and socks, climbing in between the sheets in his underwear and tee. There were undressing noises -- exquisite ones -- and then she slithered in behind him, snuggled up against him. With a jolt, he realized that her bare breasts were pressed to his back. Her arm came around him and rested on his stomach, which jumped like a spring uncoiling. He felt certain his erection was emitting a faint cherry-red glow. Her breath was on his neck. He thought about casually rolling onto his back so that he could kiss her, but remembered her admonition that they would not be having sex. Her fingertips traced small circles on his stomach. Each time they grazed his navel, his stomach did a flip. He was totally awake now, and when her lips very softly -- so softly he barely felt it -- brushed against the base of his skull, he let out a soft moan. Her lips returned, and then her teeth, worrying at the tendons at the back of his neck with increasing roughness, an exquisite pain-pleasure that was electric. He was panting, her hand was flat on his stomach now, gripping him. His erection strained toward it. Her hips ground against him and she moved her mouth toward his ear, nipping at it, the tip of her tongue touching the whorls there. Her hand was on the move now, sliding over his ribs, her fingertips at his nipple, softly and then harder, giving it an abrupt hard pinch that had some fingernail in it, like a bite from little teeth. He yelped and she giggled in his ear, sending shivers up his spine. He reached back behind him awkwardly and put his hand on her ass, discovering that she was bare there, too. It was wide and hard, foam rubber over steel, and he kneaded it, digging his fingers in. She groaned in his ear and tugged him onto his back. As soon as his shoulders hit the narrow bed, she was on him, her elbows on his biceps, pinning him down, her breasts in his face, fragrant and soft. Her hot, bare crotch ground against his underwear. He bit at her tits, hard little bites that made her gasp. He found a stiff nipple and sucked it into his mouth, beating at it with his tongue. She pressed her crotch harder against his, hissed something that might have been *yesssss*. She straightened up so that she was straddling him and looking imperiously down on him. Her braids swung before her. Her eyes were exultant. Her face was set in an expression of fierce concentration as she rocked on him. He dug his fingers into her ass again, all the way around, so that they brushed against her labia, her asshole. He pulled at her, dragging her up her body, tugging her vagina toward his mouth. Once she saw what he was after, she knee-walked up the bed in three or four quick steps and then she was on his face. Her smell and her taste and her texture and temperature filled his senses, blotting out the room, blotting out introspection, blotting out everything except for the sweet urgency. He sucked at her labia before slipping his tongue up her length, letting it tickle her ass, her opening, her clit. In response, she ground against him, planting her opening over his mouth and he tongue-fucked her in hard, fast strokes. She reached back and took hold of his cock, slipping her small, strong hand under the waistband of his boxers and curling it around his rigid shaft, pumping vigorously. He moaned into her pussy and that set her shuddering. Now he had her clit sucked into his mouth and he was lapping at its engorged length with short strokes. Her thighs were clamped over his ears, but he could still make out her cries, timed with the shuddering of her thighs, the spasmodic grip on his cock. Abruptly she rolled off of him and the world came back. They hadn't kissed yet. They hadn't said a word. She lay beside him, half on top of him, shuddering and making kittenish sounds. He kissed her softly, then more forcefully. She bit at his lips and his tongue, sucking it into her mouth and chewing at it while her fingernails raked his back. Her breathing became more regular and she tugged at the waistband of his boxers. He got the message and yanked them off, his cock springing free and rocking slightly, twitching in time with his pulse. She smiled a cat-ate-the-canary grin and went to work kissing his neck, his chest -- hard bites on his nipples that made him yelp and arch his back -- his stomach, his hips, his pubes, his thighs. The teasing was excruciating and exquisite. Her juices dried on his face, the smell caught in his nose, refreshing his eros with every breath. Her tongue lapped eagerly at his balls like a cat with a saucer of milk. Long, slow strokes, over his sack, over the skin between his balls and his thighs, over his perineum, tickling his ass as he'd tickled hers. She pulled back and spat out a pube and laughed and dove back in, sucking softly at his sack, then, in one swift motion, taking his cock to the hilt. He shouted and then moaned and her head bobbed furiously along the length of his shaft, her hand squeezing his balls. It took only moments before he dug his hands hard into the mattress and groaned through clenched teeth and fired spasm after spasm down her throat, her nose in his pubes, his cock down her throat to the base. She refused to let him go, swirling her tongue over the head while he was still super-sensitive, making him grunt and twitch and buck involuntarily, all the while her hand caressing his balls, rubbing at his prostate over the spot between his balls and his ass. Finally she worked her way back up his body licking her lips and kissing as she went. "Hello," she said as she buried her face in his throat. "Wow," he said. "So if you're going to be able to live in the moment and have no regrets, this is a pretty good place to start. It'd be a hell of a shock if we saw each other twice in the next year -- are we going to be able to be friends when we do? Will the fact that I fucked your brains out make things awkward?" "That's why you jumped me?" "No, not really. I was horny and you're hot. But that's a good post-facto reason." "I see. You know, you haven't actually fucked my brains out," he said. "Yet," she said. She retrieved her backpack from beside the bed, dug around it in, and produced a strip of condoms. "Yet." He licked his lips in anticipation, and a moment later she was unrolling the condom down his shaft with her talented mouth. He laughed and then took her by the waist and flipped her onto her back. She grabbed her ankles and pulled her legs wide and he dove between her, dragging the still-sensitive tip of his cock up and down the length of her vulva a couple times before sawing it in and out of her opening, sinking to the hilt. He wanted to fuck her gently but she groaned urgent demands in his ear to pound her harder, making satisfied sounds each time his balls clapped against her ass. She pushed him off her and turned over, raising her ass in the air, pulling her labia apart and looking over her shoulder at him. They fucked doggy-style then, until his legs trembled and his knees ached, and then she climbed on him and rocked back and forth, grinding her clit against his pubis, pushing him so deep inside her. He mauled her tits and felt the pressure build in his balls. He pulled her to him, thrust wildly, and she hissed dirty encouragement in his ear, begging him to fill her, ordering him to pound her harder. The stimulation in his brain and between his legs was too much to bear and he came, lifting them both off the bed with his spasms. "Wow," he said. "Yum," she said. "Jesus, it's 8AM," he said. "I've got to meet with Luke in three hours." "So let's take a shower now, and set an alarm for half an hour before he's due," she said. "Got anything to eat." "That's what I like about you Hilda," he said. "Businesslike. Vigorous. Living life to the hilt." Her dimples were pretty and luminous in the hints of light emerging from under the blinds. "Feed me," she said, and nipped at his earlobe. In the shoebox-sized fridge, he had a cow-shaped brick of Wisconsin cheddar that he'd been given when he stepped off the plane. They broke chunks off it and ate it in bed, then started in on the bag of soy crispies his hosts in San Francisco had given him. They showered slowly together, scrubbing one-another's backs, set an alarm, and sacked out for just a few hours before the alarm roused them. They dressed like strangers, not embarrassed, just too groggy to take much notice of one another. Perry's muscles ached pleasantly, and there was another ache, dull and faint, even more pleasant, in his balls. Once they were fully clothed, she grabbed him and gave him a long hug, and a warm kiss that started on his throat and moved to his mouth, with just a hint of tongue at the end. "You're a good man, Perry Gibbons," she said. "Thanks for a lovely night. Remember what I told you, though: no regrets, no looking back. Be happy about this -- don't mope, don't miss me. Go on to your next city and make new friends and have new conversations, and when we see each other again, be my friend without any awkwardness. All right?" "I get it," he said. He felt slightly irritated. "Only one thing. We weren't going to sleep together." "You regret it?" "Of course not," he said. "But it's going to make this injunction of yours hard to understand. I'm not good at anonymous one night stands." She raised one eyebrow at him. "Earth to Perry: this wasn't anonymous, and it wasn't a one-night stand. It was an intimate, loving relationship that happened to be compressed into a single day." "Loving?" "Sure. If I'd been with you for a month or two, I would have fallen in love. You're just my type. So I think of you as someone I love. That's why I want to make sure you understand what this all means." "You're a very interesting person," he said. "I'm smart," she said, and cuddled him again. "You're smart. So be smart about this and it'll be forever sweet." She left him off at the spot where he was supposed to meet Luke and the rest of his planning team to go over schematics and theory and practice. All of these discussions could happen online -- they did, in fact -- but there was something about the face-to-face connection. The meeting ran six hours before he was finally saved by his impending flight to Nebraska. Sleepdep came down on him like a hammer as he checked in for his flight and began the ritual security-clearing buck-and-wing. He missed a cue or two and ended up getting a "detailed hand search" but even that didn't wake him up. He fell asleep in the waiting room and in the plane, in the taxi to his hotel. But when he dropped down onto his hotel bed, he couldn't sleep. The hotel was the spitting image of the one he'd left in Wisconsin, minus Hilda and the musky smell the two of them had left behind after their roll in the hay. It had been years since he'd had a regular girlfriend and he'd never missed it. There had been women, high-libido fatkins girls and random strangers, some who came back for a date or two. But no one who'd meant anything or whom he'd wanted to mean anything. The closest he'd come had been -- he sat up with a start and realized that the last woman he'd had any strong feelings for had been Suzanne Church. # Kettlewell emerged from New Work rich. He'd taken home large bonuses every year that Kodacell had experienced growth -- a better metric than turning an actual ahem profit -- and he'd invested in a diverse portfolio that had everything from soybeans to software in it, along with real estate (oops) and fine art. He believed in the New Work, believed in it with every fiber of his being, but an undiverse portfolio was flat-out irresponsible. The New Work crash had killed the net worth of a lot of irresponsible people. Living in the Caymans got boring after a year. The kids hated the international school, scuba diving amazed him by going from endlessly, meditatively fascinating to deadly dull in less than a year. He didn't want to sail. He didn't want to get drunk. He didn't want to join the creepy zillionaires on their sex tours of the Caribbean and wouldn't have even if his wife would have stood for it. A year after the New Work crash, he filed a 1040 with the IRS and paid them forty million dollars in back taxes and penalties, and repatriated his wealth to an American bank. Now he lived in a renovated housing project on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, all upscale now with restored, kitschy window-bars and vintage linoleum and stucco ceilings. He had four units over two floors, with cleverly knocked-through walls and a spiral staircase. The kids freaking loved the staircase. Suzanne Church called him from SFO to let him know that she was on her way in, having cleared security and customs after a scant hour. He found himself unaccountably nervous about her now, and realized with a little giggle that he had something like a crush on her. Nothing serious -- nothing his wife needed to worry about -- but she was smart and funny and attractive and incisive and fearless, and it was a hell of a combination. The kids were away at school and his wife was having a couple of days camping with the girls in Yosemite, which facts lent a little charge to Suzanne's impending visit. He looked up the AirBART schedule and calculated how long he had until she arrived at the 24th Street station, a brisk 20 minute walk from his place. Minutes, just minutes. He checked the guest-room and then did a quick mirror check. His months in the Caymans had given him a deep tan that he'd kept up despite San Francisco's grey skies. He still looked like a surfer, albeit with just a little daddy-paunch -- he'd gained more weight through his wife's pregnancies than she had and only hard, aneurysm-inducing cycling over and around Potrero Hill had knocked it off again. His jeans' neat rows of pockets and Mobius seams were a little outdated, but they looked good on him, as did his Hawai'ian print shirt with its machine-screw motif. Finally he plopped down to read a book and waited for Suzanne, and managed to get through a whole page in the intervening ten minutes. "Kettlebelly!" she hollered as she came through the door. She took him in a hug that smelled of stale airplane and restless sleep and gave him a thorough squeezing. She held him at arm's length and they sized each other up. She'd been a well-preserved mid-forties when he'd seen her last, buttoned-down in a California-yoga-addict way. Now she was years older, and her time in Russia had given her a forest of smile-lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes. She had a sad, wise turn to her face that he'd never seen there before, like a painted Pieta. Her hands had gone a little wrinkly, her knuckles more prominent, but her fingernails were beautifully manicured and her clothes were stylish, foreign, exotic and European. She laughed huskily and said, "You haven't changed a bit." "Ouch," he said. "I'm older and wiser, I'll have you know." "It doesn't show," she said. "I'm older, but no wiser." He took her hand and looked at the simple platinum band on her finger. "But you're married now -- nothing wises you up faster in my experience." She looked at her hand. "Oh, that. No. That's just to keep the wolves at bay. Married women aren't the same kinds of targets that single ones are. Give me water, and then a beer, please." Glad to have something to do, he busied himself in the kitchen while she prowled the place. "I remember when these places were bombed-out, real ghettos." "What did you mean about being a target?" "St Pete's, you know. Lawless state. Everyone's on the make. I had a bodyguard most of the time, but if I wanted to go to a restaurant, I didn't want to have to fend off the dating-service mafiyeh who wanted to offer me the deal of a lifetime on a green-card marriage." "Jeez." "It's another world, Landon. You know what the big panic there is this week? A cult of ecstatic evangelical Christians who 'hypnotize' women in the shopping malls and steal their babies to raise as soldiers to the Lord. God knows how much of it is true. These guys don't bathe, and dress in heavy coats with big beards all year round. I mean, freaky, really freaky." "They hypnotize women?" "Weird, yeah? And the *driving*! Anyone over the age of fifty who knows how to drive got there by being an apparat in the Soviet days, which means that they learned to drive when the roads were empty. They don't signal, they straddle lanes, they can't park -- I mean, they *really* can't park. And drunk! Everyone, all the time! You've never seen the like. Imagine a frat party the next day, with a lot of innocent bystanders, hookers, muggers and pickpockets." Landon looked at her. She was animated and vivid, thin -- age had brought out her cheekbones and her eyes. Had she had a chin-tuck? It was common enough -- all the medical tourists loved Russia. Maybe she was just well-preserved. She made a show of sniffing herself. "Phew! I need a shower! Can I borrow your facilities?" "Sure," he said. "I put clean towels out in the kids' bathroom -- upstairs and second on the right." She came down with her fine hair slicked back over her ears, her face scrubbed and shining. "I'm a new woman," she said. "Let's go somewhere and eat something, OK?" He took her for pupusas at a Salvadoran place on Goat Hill. They slogged up and down the hills and valleys, taking the steps cut into the steep sides, walking past the Painted Ladies -- grand, gaudy Victorian wood-frames -- and the wobbly, heavy canvas bubble-houses that had sprung up where the big quake and landslides had washed away parts of the hills. "I'd forgotten that they had hills like that," she said, greedily guzzling an horchata. Her face was streaked with sweat and flushed -- it made her look prettier, younger. "My son and I walk them every day." "You drag a little kid up and down that every *day*? Christ, that's child abuse!" "Well, he poops out after a couple of peaks and I end up carrying him." "You *carry* him? You must be some kind of superman." She gave his bicep a squeeze, then his thigh, then slapped his butt. "A fine specimen. Your wife's a lucky woman." He grinned. Having his wife in the conversation made him feel less at risk. *That's right, I'm married and we both know it. This is just fun flirting. Nothing more.* They bit into their pupusas -- stuffed cornmeal dumplings filled with grilled pork and topped with shredded cabbage and hot sauce -- and grunted and ate and ordered more. "What are these called again?" "Pupusas, from El Salvador." "Humph. In my day, we ate Mexican burritos the size of a football, and we were grateful." "No one eats burritos anymore," he said, then covered his mouth, aware of how pretentious that sounded. "Dahling," she said, "burritos are *so* 2005. You *must* try a pupusa -- it's what all the most charming Central American peasants are eating now." They both laughed and stuffed their faces more. "Well, it was either here or one of the fatkins places with the triple-decker stuffed pizzas, and I figured --" "They really do that?" "The fatkins? Yeah -- anything to get that magical 10,000 calories any day. It must be the same in Russia, right? I mean, they invented it." "Maybe for fifteen minutes. But most of them don't bother -- they get a little metabolic tweak, not a wide-open throttle like that. Christ, what it must do to your digestive system to process 10,000 calories a day!" "Chacun a son gout," he said, essaying a Gallic shrug. She laughed again and they ate some more. "I'm starting to feel human at last." "Me too." "It's still mid-afternoon, but my circadian thinks it's 2AM. I need to do something to stay awake or I'll be up at four tomorrow morning." "I have some modafinil," he said. "Swore 'em off. Let's go for a walk." They did a little more hill-climbing and then headed into the Mission and window-shopped the North African tchotchke emporia that were crowding out the Mexican rodeo shops and hairdressers. The skin drums and rattles were laser-etched with intricate designs -- Coca Cola logos, the UN Access to Essential Medicines Charter, Disney characters. It put them both in mind of the old days of the New Work, and the subject came up again, hesitant at first and then a full-bore reminisce. Suzanne told him stories of the things that Perry and Lester had done that she'd never dared report on, the ways they'd skirted the law and his orders. He told her a few stories of his own, and they rocked with laughter in the street, staggering like drunks, pounding each other on the backs, gripping their knees and stomachs and doubling over to the curious glances of the passers-by. It was fine, that day, Landon thought. Some kind of great sorrow that he'd forgotten he'd carried lifted from him and his chest and shoulders expanded and he breathed easy. What was the sorrow? The death of the New Work. The death of the dot-coms. The death of everything he'd considered important and worthy, its fading into tawdry, cheap nostalgia. They were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park now, watching the dogs and their people romp among the robot pooper-scoopers. He had his arm around her shoulders, like war-buddies on a bender (he told himself) and not like a middle-aged man flirting with a woman he hadn't seen in years. And then they were lying down, the ache of laughter in their bellies, the sun on their faces, the barks and happy shouts around them. Their hands twined together (but that was friendly too, Arab men held hands walking down the street as a way of showing friendship). Now their talk had banked down to coals, throwing off an occasional spark when one or the other would remember some funny anecdote and grunt out a word or two that would set them both to gingerly chuckling. But their hands were tied and their breathing was in sync, and their flanks were touching and it wasn't just friendly. Abruptly, she shook her hand free and rolled on her side. "Listen, married man, I think that's enough of that." He felt his face go red. His ears rang. "Suzanne -- what --" He was sputtering. "No harm no foul, but let's keep it friendly, all right." The spell was broken, and the sorrow came back. He looked for the right thing to say. "God I miss it," he said. "Oh, Suzanne, God, I miss it so much, every day." Her face fell, too. "Yeah." She looked away. "I really thought we were changing the world." "We were," he said. "We did." "Yeah," she said again. "But it didn't matter in the end, did it? Now we're older and our work is forgotten and it's all come to nothing. Petersburg is nice, but who gives a shit? Is that what I'm going to do with the rest of my life, hang around Petersburg blogging about the mafiyeh and medical tourism? Just shoot me now." "I miss the people. I'd meet ten amazing creative geniuses every day -- at least! Then I'd give them money and they'd make amazing stuff happen with it. The closest I come to that now is my kids, watching them learn and build stuff, which is really great, don't get me wrong, but it's nothing like the old days." "I miss Lester. And Perry. Tjan. The whole gang of them, really." She propped herself up on one elbow and then shocked him by kissing him hard on the cheek. "Thanks, Kettlebelly. Thank you so much for putting me in the middle of all that. You changed my life, that's for sure." He felt the imprint of her lips glowing on his cheek and grinned. "OK, here's an idea: let's go buy a couple bottles of wine, sit on my patio, get a glow on, and then call Perry and see what he's up to." "Oh, that's a good one," she said. "That's a *very* good one." A few hours later, they sat on the horsehair club-sofa in Kettlewell's living room and hit a number he'd never taken out of his speed-dial. "Hi, this is Perry. Leave a message." "Perry!" they chorused. They looked at each other, at a loss for what to say next, then dissolved in peals of laughter. "Perry, it's Suzanne and Kettlebelly. What the hell are you up to? Call us!" They looked at the phone with renewed hilarity and laughed some more. But by the time the sun was setting over Potrero Hill and Suzanne's jet-lag was beating her up again, they'd both descended into their own personal funks. Suzanne went up to the guest room and put herself to bed, not bothering to brush her teeth or even change into her nightie. # Perry touched down in Miami in a near-coma, his eyes gummed shut by several days' worth of hangovers chased by drink. Sleep deprivation made him uncoordinated, so he tripped twice deplaning, and his voice was a barely audible rasp, his throat sore with a cold he'd picked up in Texas or maybe it was Oklahoma. Lester was waiting beyond the luggage carousels, grinning like a holy fool, tall and broad-shouldered and tanned, dressed in fatkins pimped-out finery, all tight stretch-fabrics and glitter. "Oh man, you look like shit," he said, breaking off from the fatkins girl he'd been chatting up. Perry noticed that he was holding his phone, a sure sign that he'd gotten her number. "Ten," Perry said, grinning through the snotty rheum of his cold. "Ten rides." "Ten rides?" Lester said. "Ten. San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis, Omaha, Oklahoma City, Madison, Bellingham, Chapel Hill and --" He faltered. "And -- Shit. I forget. It's all written down." Lester took his bag from him and set it down, then crushed him in an enormous, muscular hug that whiffed slightly of the ketosis fumes that all the fatkins exuded. "You did good, cowboy," he said. "Let's mosey back to the ranch, feed you and put you to bed, s'awright?" "Can I sleep in?" "Of course." "Until April?" Lester laughed and slipped one of Perry's arms over his shoulders and picked up his suitcase and walked them back through the parking lot to his latest hotrod. Perry breathed in the hot, wet air as they went, feeling it open his chest and nasal passages. His eyes were at half mast, but the sight of the sickly roadside palms, the wandering vendors on the traffic islands with their net bags full of ipods and vpods -- he was home, and his body knew it. Lester cooked him a huge plate of scrambled eggs with corned beef, pastrami, salami and cheese, with a mountain of sauerkraut on top. "There you go, fatten you up. You're all skinny and haggard, buddy." Lester was an expert at throwing together high-calorie meals on short order. Perry stuffed away as much as he could, then collapsed on his old bed with his old sheets and his old pillows, and in seconds he was sleeping the best sleep he'd had in months. When he woke the next day, his cold had turned into a horrible, wet, crusty thing that practically had his face glued to his pillow. Lester came in, took a good look at him, and came back with a quart of fresh orange juice, a pot of tea, and a stack of dry toast, along with a pack of cold pills. "Take *all* of this and then come down to the ride when you're ready. I'll hold down the fort for another couple days if that's what it takes." Perry spent the day in his bathrobe, shuttling between the living room and the sun-chairs on the patio, letting the heat bake some of the snot out of his head. Lester's kindness and his cold made him nostalgic for his youth, when his father doted on his illnesses. Perry's father was a little man. Perry -- no giant himself -- was taller than the old man by the time he turned 13. His father had always reminded him of some clever furry animal, a raccoon or badger. He had tiny hands and his movements were small and precise and careful. They were mostly cordial and friendly, but distant. His father worked as a CAD/CAM manager in a machine shop, though he'd started out his career as a plain old machinist. Of all the machinists he'd started with at the shop, only he had weathered the transition to the new computerized devices. The others had all lost their jobs or taken early retirement or just quit, but his father had taken to CAD/CAM with total abandon, losing himself in the screens and staggering home bleary after ten or fifteen hours in front of the screen. But that all changed when Perry took ill. Perry's father loved to play nurse. He'd book off from work and stay home, ferrying up gallons of tea and beef broth, flat ginger-ale and dry toast, cold tablets and cough syrup. He'd open the windows when it was warm and then run around the house shutting them at the first sign of a cool breeze. Best of all was what his father would do when Perry got restless: he and Perry would go down to the living-room, where the upright piano stood. It had been Perry's grandfather's, and the old man -- who'd died before Perry was born -- had been a jazz pianist who'd played sessions with everyone from Cab Calloway to Duke Ellington. "You ready, P?" his father would ask. Perry always nodded, watching his father sit down at the bench and try a few notes. Then his father would play, tinkling and then pounding, running up and down the keyboard in an improvised jazz recital that could go for hours, sometimes only ending once Perry's mom came home from work at the framing shop. Nothing in Perry's life since had the power to capture him the way his father's music did. His fingers danced, literally *danced* on the keys, walking up and down them like a pair of high-kicking legs, making little comedy movements. The little stubby fingers with their tufts of hair on the knuckles, like goat's legs, nimbly prancing and turning. And then there was the *music*. Perry sometimes played with the piano and he'd figured out that if you hit every other key with three fingers, you got a chord. But Perry's dad almost never made chords: he made anti-chords, sounds that involved those mysterious black keys and clashed in a way that was *precisely* not a chord, that jangled and jarred. The anti-chords made up anti-tunes. Somewhere in the music there'd be one or more melodies, often the stuff that Perry listened to in his room, but sometimes old jazz and blues standards. The music would settle into long runs of improvisational noise that wasn't *quite* noise. That was the best stuff, because Perry could never tell if there was a melody in there. Sometimes he'd be sure that he had the know of it, could tell what was coming next, a segue into "Here Comes the Sun" or "Let the Good Times Roll" or "Merrily We Roll Along," but then his father would get to that spot and he'd move into something else, some other latent pattern that was unmistakable in hindsight. There was a joke his dad liked, "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana." This was funny in just that way: you expected one thing, you got something else, and when your expectations fell apart like that, it was pure hilarity. You wanted to clutch your sides and roll on the floor sometimes, it was so funny. His dad usually closed his eyes while he played, squeezing them shut, letting his mouth hang open slightly. Sometimes he grunted or scatted along with his playing but more often he grunted out something that was kind of the *opposite* of what he was playing, just like sometimes the melody and rhythms he played on the piano were sometimes the opposite of the song he was playing, something that was exactly and perfectly opposite, so you couldn't hear it without hearing the thing it was the opposite of. The game would end when his dad began to improvise on parts of the piano besides the keys, knocking on it, reaching in to pluck its strings like a harp, rattling Perry's teacup on its saucer just so. Nothing made him feel better faster. It was a tonic, a fine one, better than pills and tea and toast, daytime TV and flat ginger-ale. As Perry got older, he and the old man had their share of fights over the normal things: girls, partying, school... But every time Perry took ill, he was transported back to his boyhood and those amazing piano recitals, his father's stubby fingers doing their comic high-kicks and pratfalls on the keys, the grunting anti-song in the back of his throat, those crazy finales with teacups and piano strings. Now he stared morosely at the empty swimming pool six stories below his balcony, filled with blowing garbage, leaves, and a huge wasps' nest. His father's music was in his ears, distantly now and fading with his cold. He should call the old man, back home in Westchester County, retired now. They talked only rarely these days, three or four times a year on birthdays and anniversaries. No fight had started their silence, only busy lives grown apart. He should call the old man, but instead he got dressed and went for a jog around the block, trying to get the wet sick wheeze out of his whistling breath, stopping a couple times to blow his nose. The sun was like a blowtorch on his hair, which had grown out of his normal duckling fuzz into something much shaggier. His head baked, the cold baked with it, and by the time he got home and chugged a quart of orange juice, he was feeling fully human again and ready for a shower, street clothes and a turn at the old ticket-window at work. The queue snaked all the way through the market and out to the street, where the line had a casual, party kind of atmosphere. The market kids were doing a brisk business in popsicles, homemade colas, and clever origami stools and sun-beds made from recycled cardboard. Some of the kids recognized him and waved, then returned to their hustle. He followed the queue through the stalls. The vendors were happier than the kids, if that was possible, selling stuff as fast as they could set it out. The queue had every conceivable kind of person in it: old and young, hipsters and conservative rawboned southerners, Latina moms with their babies, stone-faced urban homeboys, crackers, and Miami Beach queers in pastel shorts. There were old Jewish couples and smartly turned out European tourists with their funny two-tone shag cuts and the filter masks that they smoked around. There was a no-fooling Korean tour group, of the sort he'd seen now and again in Disney World, led by a smart lady in a sweltering little suit, holding an umbrella over her head. "Lester, what the *fuck*?" he said, grinning and laughing as he clapped Lester on the shoulder, taking a young mall-goth's five bucks out of a hand whose fingernails were painted with chipped black polish. "What the hell is going on here?" Lester laughed. "I was saving this for a surprise, buddy. Record crowds -- growing every day. There's a line up in the morning no matter how early I open and no matter what time I close, I turn people away." "How'd they all find out about it?" Lester shrugged. "Word of mouth," he said. "Best advertising you can have. Shit, Perry, you just got back from ten cities where they want to clone this thing -- how did *they* find out about it?" Perry shook his head and marveled at the queue some more. The Korean tour group was coming up on them, and Perry nudged Lester aside and got out his ticket-roll, the familiar movements lovely after all that time on the road. The tour guide put a stack of twenties down on the counter. "I got fifty of 'em," she said. "That's two hundred and fifty bucks." She had an American accent, somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line. Perry had been expecting a Korean accent, broken English. Perry riffled the bills. "I'll take your word for it." She winked at him. "They got off the plane and they were all like, 'Screw Disney, we have one of those in Seoul, what's *new*, what's *American*?' So I took them here. You guys totally rock." He could have kissed her. His heart took wing. "In you go," he said. "Lester will get you the extra ride vehicles." "They're all in there already," he said. "I've been running the whole fleet for two weeks and I've got ten more on order." Perry whistled. "You shoulda said," he said, then turned back to the tour guide. "It might be a little bit of a wait." "Ten, fifteen minutes," Lester said. "No *problem*," she said. "They'll wait till kingdom come, provided there's good shopping to be had." Indeed the tour group was at the center of a pack of vendor-kids, hawking busts and tattoos, contacts and action-figures, kitchenware and cigarette lighters. Once she was gone, Lester gave his shoulder another squeeze. "I hired two more kids to bring the ride cars back around to the entrance." When Perry had left, that had been a once-daily chore, something you did before shutting down for the night. "Holy crap," Perry said, watching the tour group edge toward the entrance, slip inside in ones and twos. "It's amazing, isn't it?" Lester said. "And wait till you see the ride!" Perry didn't get a chance to ride until much later that day, once the sun had set and the last market-stall had been shut and the last rider had been chased home, when he and Lester slugged back bottles of flat distilled water from their humidity-still and sat on the ticket counter to get the weight off their tired feet. "Now we ride," Lester said. "You're going to *love* this." The first thing he noticed was that the ride had become a lot less open. When he'd left, there'd been the sense that you were in a giant room -- all that dead Wal-Mart -- with little exhibits spread around it, like the trade-floor at a monster-car show. But now the exhibits had been arranged out of one another's sight-lines, and some of the taller pieces had been upended to form baffles. It was much more like a carny haunted house trade-show floor now. The car circled slowly in the first "room," which had accumulated a lot of junk that wasn't mad inventions from the heyday of New Work. There was a chipped doll-cradle, and a small collection of girls' dolls, a purse spilled on the floor with photos of young girls clowning at a birthday party. He reached for the joystick with irritation and slammed it toward minus one -- what the hell was this crap? Next was a room full of boys' tanks and cars and trading cards, some in careful packages and frames, some lovingly scuffed and beaten up. They were from all eras, and he recognized some of his beloved toys from his own boyhood among the mix. The items were arranged in concentric rings -- one of the robots' default patterns for displaying materials -- around a writhing tower of juddering, shuddering domestic robots that had piled one atop the other. The vogue for these had been mercifully brief, but it had been intense, and for Perry, the juxtaposition of the cars and the cards, the tanks and the robots made something catch in his throat. There was a statement here about the drive to automate household chores and the simple pleasure of rolling an imaginary tank over the imaginary armies of your imaginary enemies. So, too, something about the collecting urge, the need to get every card in a set, and then to get each in perfect condition, and then to arrange them in perfect order, and then to forget them altogether. His hand had been jerking the joystick to plus one all this time and now he became consciously aware of this. The next room had many of the old inventions he remembered, but they were arranged not on gleaming silver tables, but were mixed in with heaps of clothing, mountains of the brightly colored ubiquitous t-shirts that had gone hand in hand with every New Work invention and crew. Mixed in among them were some vintage tees from the dotcom era, and perched on top of the mountain, staring glassily at him, was a little girl-doll that looked familiar; he was almost certain that he'd seen her in the first doll room. The next room was built out of pieces of the old "kitchen" display, but there was disarray now, dishes in the sink and a plate on the counter with a cigarette butted out in the middle of it. Another plate lay in three pieces on the linoleum before it. The next room was carpeted with flattened soda tins that crunched under the chair's wheels. In the center of them, a neat workbench with ranked tools. The ride went on and on, each room utterly different from how he'd left it, but somehow familiar too. The ride he'd left had celebrated the New Work and the people who'd made it happen, and so did this ride, but this ride was less linear, less about display more -- "It's a story," he said when he got off. "I think so too," Lester said. "It's been getting more and more story-like. The way that doll keeps reappearing. I think that someone had like ten of them and just tossed them out at regular intervals and then the plus-oneing snuck one into every scene." "It's got scenes! That's what they are, scenes. It's like a Disney ride, one of those dark rides in Fantasyland." "Except those suck and our ride rocks. It's more like Pirates of the Caribbean." "Have it your way. Whatever, how freaking weird is that?" "Not so weird. People see stories like they see faces in clouds. Once we gave them the ability to subtract the stuff that felt wrong and reinforce the stuff that felt right, it was only natural that they'd anthropomorphize the world into a story." Perry shook his head. "You think?" "We have this guy, a cultural studies prof, who comes practically every day. He's been telling me all about it. Stories are how we understand the world, and technology is how we choose our stories. "Check out the Greeks. All those Greek plays, they end with the *deus ex machina* -- the playwright gets tired of writing, so he trots a god out on stage to simply point a finger at the players and make it all better. You can't do that in a story today, but back then, they didn't have the tools to help them observe and record the world, so as far as they could tell, that's how stuff worked! "Today we understand a little more about the world, so our stories are about people figuring out what's causing their troubles and changing stuff so that those causes go away. Causal stories for a causal universe. Thinking about the world in terms of causes and effects makes you seek out causes and effects -- even where there are none. Watch how gamblers play, that weird cargo-cult feeling that the roulette wheel came up black a third time in a row so the next spin will make it red. It's not superstition, it's kind of the *opposite* -- it's causality run amok." "So this is the story that has emerged from our collective unconscious?" Lester laughed. "That's a little pretentious, I think. It's more like those Japanese crabs." "Which Japanese crabs?" "Weren't you there when Tjan was talking about this? Or was that in Russia? Anyway. There are these crabs in Japan, and if they have anything that looks like a face on the backs of their shells, the fishermen throw them back because it's bad luck to eat a crab with a face on its shell. So the crabs with face-like shells have more babies. Which means that gradually, the crabs' shells get more face-like, since all non-face-like shells are eliminated from the gene-pool. This leads the fishermen to raise the bar on their selection criteria, so they will eat crabs with shells that are a little face-like, but not *very* face-like. So all the slightly face-like crab-shells are eliminated, leaving behind moderately face-like shells. This gets repeated over several generations, and now you've got these crabs that have vivid faces on their shells. "We let our riders eliminate all the non-story-like elements from the ride, and so what's left behind is more and more story-like." "But the plus-one/minus-one lever is too crude for this, right? We should give them a pointer or something so they can specify individual elements they don't like." "You want to encourage this?" "Don't you?" Lester nodded vigorously. "Of course I do. I just thought that you'd be a little less enthusiastic about it, you know, because so much of the New Work stuff is being de-emphasized." "You kidding? This is what the New Work was all about: group creation! I couldn't be happier about it. Seriously -- this is so much cooler than anything that I could have built. And now with the network coming online soon -- wow. Imagine it. It's going to be so fucking weird, bro." "Amen," Lester said. He looked at his watch and yelped. "Shit, late for a date! Can you get yourself home?" "Sure," Perry said. "Brought my wheels. See you later -- have a good one." "She's amazing," Lester said. "Used to weigh 900 pounds and was shut in for ten years. Man has she got an imagination on her. She can do this thing --" Perry put his hands over his ears. "La la la I'm not listening to you. TMI, Lester. Seriously. Way way TMI." Lester shook his head. "You are such a prude, dude." Perry thought about Hilda for a fleeting moment, and then grinned. "That's me, a total puritan. Go. Be safe." "Safe, sound, and slippery," Lester said, and got in his car. Perry looked around at the shuttered market, rooftops glinting in the rosy tropical sunset. Man he'd missed those sunsets. He snorted up damp lungsful of the tropical air and smelled dinners cooking at the shantytown across the street. It was different and bigger and more elaborate every time he visited it, which was always less often than he wished. There was a good barbecue place there, Dirty Max's, just a hole in the wall with a pit out back and the friendliest people. There was always a mob scene around there, locals greasy from the ribs in their hands, a big bucket overflowing with discarded bones. Wandering towards it, he was amazed by how much bigger it had grown since his last visit. Most buildings had had two stories, though a few had three. Now almost all had four, leaning drunkenly toward each other across the streets. Power cables, network cables and clotheslines gave the overhead spaces the look of a carelessly spun spider's web. The new stories were most remarkable because of what Francis had explained to him about the way that additional stories got added: most people rented out or sold the right to build on top of their buildings, and then the new upstairs neighbors in turn sold *their* rights on. Sometimes you'd get a third-storey dweller who'd want to build atop two adjacent buildings to make an extra-wide apartment for a big family, and that required negotiating with all of the "owners" of each floor of both buildings. Just looking at it made his head hurt with all the tangled property and ownership relationships embodied in the high spaces. He heard the easy chatter out the open windows and music and crying babies. Kids ran through the streets, laughing and chasing each other or bouncing balls or playing some kind of networked RPG with their phones that had them peeking around corners, seeing another player and shrieking and running off. The grill-woman at the barbecue joint greeted him by name and the men and women around it made space for him. It was friendly and companionable, and after a moment Francis wandered up with a couple of his proteges. They carried boxes of beer. "Hey hey," Francis said. "Home again, huh?" "Home again," Perry said. He wiped rib-sauce off his fingers and shook Francis's hand warmly. "God, I've missed this place." "We missed having you," Francis said. "Big crowds across the way, too. Seems like you hit on something." Perry shook his head and smiled and ate his ribs. "What's the story around here?" "Lots and lots," Francis said. "There's a whole net-community thing happening. Lots of traffic on the AARP message-boards from other people setting these up around the country." "So you've hit on something, too." "Naw. When it's railroading time, you get railroads. When it's squatter time, you get squats. You know they want to open a 7-Eleven here?" "No!" Perry laughed and choked on ribs and then guzzled some beer to wash it all down. Francis put a wrinkled hand over his heart. He still wore his wedding band, Perry saw, despite his wife's being gone for decades. "I swear it. Just there." He pointed to one of the busier corners. "And?" "We told them to fuck off," Francis said. "We've got lots of community-owned businesses around here that do everything a 7-Eleven could do for us, without taking the wealth out of our community and sending it to some corporate jack-off. Some soreheads wanted to see how much money we could get out of them, but I just kept telling them -- whatever 7-Eleven gives us, it'll only be because they think they can get more *out of us*.' They saw reason. Besides, I'm in charge -- I always win my arguments." "You are the most benevolent of dictators," Perry said. He began to work on another beer. Beer tasted better outside in the heat and the barbecue smoke. "I'm glad someone thinks so," Francis said. "Oh?" "The 7-Eleven thing left a lot of people pissed at me. There's plenty around here that don't remember the way it started off. To them, I'm just some alter kocker who's keeping them down." "Is it serious?" Perry knew that there was the potential for serious, major lawlessness from his little settlement. It wasn't a failing condo complex rented out to Filipina domestics and weird entrepreneurs like him. It was a place where the cops would love an excuse to come in with riot batons (his funny eyebrow twitched) and gas, the kind of place where there almost certainly were a few very bad people living their lives. Miami had bad people, too, but the bad people in Miami weren't his problem. And the bad people and the potential chaos were what he loved about the place, too. He'd grown up in the kind of place where everything was predictable and safe and he'd hated every minute of it. The glorious chaos around him was just as he liked it. The wood-smoke curled up his nose, fragrant and all-consuming. "I don't know anymore. I thought I'd retire and settle down and take up painting. Now I'm basically a mob boss. Not the bad kind, but still. It's a lot of work." "Pimpin' ain't easy." Perry saw the shocked look on Francis's face and added hastily, "Sorry -- not calling you a pimp. It's a song lyric is all." "We got pimps here now. Whores, too. You name it, we got it. It's still a good place to live -- better than Miami, if you ask me -- but it could go real animal. Bad, bad animal." Hard to believe, standing there in the wood-smoke, licking his fingers, drinking his beer. His cold seemed to have been baked out by the steamy swampy heat. "Well, Francis, if anyone knows how to keep peace, it's you." "Social workers come around, say the same thing. But there's people around here with little kids, they worry that the social workers could force them out, take away their children." It wasn't like Francis to complain like this, it wasn't in his nature, but here it was. The strain of running things was showing on him. Perry wondered if his own strain was showing that way. Did he complain more these days? Maybe he did. An uncomfortable silence descended upon them. Perry drank his beer, morosely. He thought of how ridiculous it was to be morose about the possibility that he was being morose, but there you had it. Finally his phone rang and saved him from further conversation. He looked at the display and shook his head. It was Kettlewell again. That first voicemail had made him laugh aloud, but when they hadn't called back for a couple days, he'd figured that they had just had a little too much wine and placed the call. Now they were calling back, and it was still pretty early on the West Coast. Too early for them to have had too much wine, unless they'd really changed. "Perry Perry Perry!" It was Kettlebelly. He sounded like he might be drunk, or merely punch-drunk with excitement. Perry remembered that he got that way sometimes. "Kettlewell, how are you doing?" "I'm here too, Perry. I cashed in my return ticket." "Suzanne?" "Yeah," she said. She too sounded punchy, like they'd been having a fit of the giggles just before calling. "Kettlewell's family have taken me in, wayward wanderer that I am." "You two sound pretty, um, happy." "We've been having an amazing time," Kettlewell said. His speakerphone made him sound like he was at the bottom of a well. "Mostly reminiscing about you guys. What the hell are you up to? We tried to follow it on the net, but it's all jumbled. What's this about a *story*?" "Story?" "I keep reading about this ride of yours and its story. I couldn't make any sense of it." "I haven't read any of this, but Lester and I were talking about some stuff to do with stories tonight. I didn't know anyone else was talking about this, though. Where'd you see it?" "I'll email it to you," Suzanne said. "I was going to blog it tonight anyway." "So you two are just hanging around San Francisco giggling and walking down memory lane?" "Well, yeah! It's about time, too. We've all been separated for too long. We want a reunion, Perry." "A reunion?" "We want to come down for a visit and see what you're doing and hang out. You wouldn't believe how much fun we've been having, Perry, seriously." Kettlewell sounded like he'd been huffing nitrous or something. "Have *you* been having fun?" He thought about the question. "Um, kind of?" He told them about his travels, a quick thumbnail sketch, struggling to remember which city he'd been to when, leaving out the crazy sex -- which came back to him in a rush, that night with Hilda in the coffin, like a warm hallucination. "On balance, yes. It's been fun." "Right, so we want to come down and have fun with you and Lester. He's still hanging around, right?" Lester had told him about the history he had with Suzanne, and there was something in the way she asked after Lester that suggested to Perry that there was still something there. "You kidding? You'd have to pry us apart with a crowbar." "See, I told you so," Suzanne said. "This guy thought that Lester might have gotten bored and wandered off." "Never! Plus anyone who follows his message board traffic and blogs would know that he was right here, minding the shop." And you're reading his blog, aren't you, Suzanne? He didn't need to say it. He could almost hear her blush over the line. "So how about tomorrow?" "For what?" "For us coming to town. I'll bring the wife and kids. We'll rent out a couple hotel rooms and spend a week there. It'll be a blast." "Tomorrow?" "We could get the morning flight and be there for breakfast. You got a good hotel? Not a coffin hotel, not with the kids." Perry's heart beat faster. He did miss these two, and they were so punchy, so gleeful. He'd love to see them. He muted his phone. "Hey, Francis? That guesthouse down the road, is it still running?" "Lulu's? Sure. They just built another storey and took over the top floor of the place next door." "Perfect." He unmuted. "How'd you like to stay in a squatter guesthouse in the shantytown?" "Um," Kettlewell said, but Suzanne laughed. "Oh hell *yes*," she said. "Get that look off your face, Kettlewell, this is an *adventure*." "We'd love it," Kettlewell said. "Great, I'll make you a reservation. How long are you staying?" "Until we leave," Suzanne said. "Right," Perry said and laughed himself. They were different people, these two, from the people he remembered, but they were also old friends. And they were coming to see him tomorrow. "OK, lemme go make your reservations." Francis walked him over and the landlord fussed over the two of them like they were visiting dignitaries. Perry looked the place over and it was completely charming. He spotted what he thought was probably a hooker and a trick taking a room for the night, but you got that at the Hilton, too. By the time he got home he was sure that he'd sleep like a log. He could barely keep his eyes open on the drive. But after he climbed into bed and closed his eyes, he found that he couldn't sleep at all. Something about being back in his own room in his own bed felt alien and exciting. He got up and paced the apartment and then Lester came home from his date with the fatkins nympho, full of improbable stories and covered in little hickeys. "You won't believe who's coming for a visit," Perry said. "Steve Jobs. He's come down from the lamasery and renounced Buddhism. He wants to give a free computer to every visitor." "Close," Perry said. "Kettlebelly and Suzanne Church. Coming *tomorrow* for a stay of unspecified duration. It's a reunion. It's a *reunion* you big sonofabitch! Woot! Woot!" Perry did a little two-step. "A reunion!" Lester looked confused for a second, and then for another second he looked, what, upset? and then he was grinning and jumping up and down with Perry. "Reunion!" He felt like he'd barely gotten to sleep when his phone rang. The clock showed six AM, and it was Kettlebelly and Suzanne, bleary, jet-lagged and grouchy from their one-hour post-flight security processing. "We want breakfast," Suzanne said. "We've gotta open the ride, Suzanne." "At six in the morning? Come on, you've got hours yet before you have to be at work. How about you and Lester meet us at the IHOP?" "Jesus," he said. "Come *on*! Kettlebelly's kids are dying for something to eat and his wife looks like she's ready to eat *him*. It's been years, dude! Get your ass in the shower and down to the International House of Pancakes!" Lester didn't rouse easy, but Perry knew all the tricks for getting his old pal out of bed, they were practically married after all. They arrived just in time for the morning rush but Tony greeted them with a smile and sent them straight to the front of the line. Lester ordered his usual ("Bring me three pounds of candy with a side of ground animal parts and potatoes") and they waited nervously for Suzanne and the clan Kettlewell to turn up. They arrived in a huge bustle of taxis and luggage and two wide-eyed, jet-lagged children hanging off of Kettlewell and Mrs Kettlewell, whom neither of them had ever met. She was a small, youthful woman in her mid-forties with artfully styled hair and big, abstract chunky silver jewelry. Suzanne had gone all Eurochic, rail-thin and smoking, with quiet, understated dark clothes. Kettlewell had a real daddy belly on him now, a little pot that his daughter thumped rhythmically from her perch on his hip. "Sit, sit," Perry said to them, getting up to help them stack their luggage at either end of the long table down the middle of the IHOP. Big family groups with tons of luggage were par for the course in Florida, so they didn't really draw much attention beyond mild irritation from the patrons they jostled as they got everyone seated. Perry was mildly amused to see that Lester and Suzanne ended up sitting next to one another and were already chatting avidly and close up, in soft voices that they had to lean in very tight to hear. He was next to Mrs Kettlewell, whose name, it transpired, was Eva -- "As in Extra-Vehicular Activity," she said, geeking out with him. Kettlewell was in the bathroom with his daughter and son, and Mrs Kettlewell -- Eva -- seemed relieved at the chance for a little adult conversation. "You must be a very patient woman," Perry said, laughing at all the ticklish noise and motion of their group. "Oh, that's me all right," Eva said. "Patience is my virtue. And you?" "Oh, patience is something I value very much in other people." Perry said. It made Eva laugh, which showed off her pretty laugh-lines and dimples. He could see how this woman and Kettlewell must complement each other. She rocked her head from side to side and took a long swig of the coffee that their waiter had distributed around the table, topping up from the carafe he'd left behind. "Thank God for legal stimulants." "Long flight?" "Traveling with larvae is always a challenge," she said. "But they dug it hard. You should have seen them at the windows." "They'd never been on a plane before?" "I like to go camping," she said with a shrug. "Landon's always on me to take the kids to Hawaii or whatever, but I'm always like, 'Man, you spend half your fucking life in a tin can -- why do you want to start your holidays in one? Let's go to Yosemite and get muddy.' I haven't even taken them to Disneyland!" Perry put the back of his hand to his forehead. "That's heresy around here," he said. "You going to take them to Disney World while you're in Florida? It's a lot bigger, you know -- and it's a different division. Really different feel, or so I'm told." "You kidding? Perry, we came here for *your* ride. It's famous, you know." "Net.famous, maybe. A little." He felt his cheeks burning. "Well, there will be one in your neck of the woods soon enough." He told her about the Burning Man collective and the plan to build one down the 101, south of San Francisco International. Kettlebelly returned then with the kids, and he managed to get them into their seats while sucking back a coffee and eating a biscuit from the basket in the center of the table, breaking off bits to shove in the kids' mouths whenever they protested. "These are some way tired kids," he said, leaning over to give his wife a kiss. Perry thought he saw Suzanne flick a look at them then, but it might have been his imagination. Suzanne and Lester were off in their own world, after all. "The plane almost crashed," said the little girl next to Perry. She had a halo of curly hair like a dandelion clock and big solemn dark eyes and a big wet mouth set between apple-round cheeks. "Did it really?" Perry said. She was seven or eight he thought, the bossy big sister who'd been giving orders to her little brother from the moment they came through the door. She nodded solemnly. He looked at Eva, who shrugged. "Really?" he said. "Really," she said, nodding vigorously now. "There were terrists on the plane who wanted to blow it up, but the sky marshas stopped them." "How could you tell they were 'terrists'?" She clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes. "They were *whispering*," she said. "Just like on *Captain President and the Freedom Fighters*." He knew something of this cartoon, mostly because of all the knock-off merch for sale in the market stalls in front of the ride. "I see," he said. "Well, I'm glad the Sky Marshas stopped them. Do you want pancakes?" "I want caramel apple chocolate pancakes with blueberry banana sauce," she said, rolling one pudgy finger along the description in the glossy menu, beneath an oozing food-porn photo. "And my brother wants a chocolate milkshake and a short stack of happy face clown waffles with strawberry sauce, but not too many because he's still a baby and can't eat much." "You'll become as fat as your daddy if you eat like that," Perry said. Eva snorted beside him. "No," she said. "I'm gonna be a fatkins." "I see," he said. Eva shook her head. "It's the goddamned fatkins agitprop games," Eva said. "They come free with everything now -- digital cameras, phones, even in cereal boxes. You have to eat a minimum number of calories per level or you starve to death. This one is a champeen." "I'm nationally ranked," the little girl said, not looking up from the menu. Perry looked across the table and discovered that Suzanne had covered Lester's hand with hers and that Lester was laughing along with her at something funny. Something about that made him a little freaked out, like Lester was making time with his sister or their mom. "Suzanne," he said. "What's happening with you these days, anyway?" "Petersburg is what's happening with me," she said, with a hoarse little chuckle. "Petersburg is like Detroit crossed with Paris. Completely decrepit and decadent. There's a serial killer who's been working the streets for five years there and the biggest obstacle to catching him is that the first cops on the scene let rubberneckers bribe them to take home evidence as souvenirs." "No way!" Lester said. "Oh, da, big vay," she said, dropping into a comical Boris and Natasha accent. "Bolshoi vay." "So why are you there?" "It's like home for me. It's got enough of Detroit's old brutal, earthy feel, plus enough of Silicon Valley's manic hustle, it just feels right." "You going to settle in there?" "Well, put that way, no. I couldn't hack it for the long term. But at this time in my life, it's been just right. But it's good to get back to the States, too. I'm thinking of hanging out here for a couple months. Russia's so cheap, I've got a ton saved up. Might as well blow it before inflation kills it." "You keep your money in rubles?" "Hell no -- no one uses rubles except tourists. I'm worried about another run of *US* inflation. I mean, have you looked around lately? You're living in a third world country, buddy." A waiter came between them, handing out heaping, steaming plates of food. Lester, who'd finished his first breakfast while they waited, had ordered a second breakfast, which arrived along with the rest of them. Mountains of food stacked up on the table, side-plates crowding jugs of apple juice and carafes of coffee. Incredibly, the food kept coming -- multiple syrup-jugs, plates of hash-browns, baskets of biscuits and bowls of white sausage gravy. Perry hadn't paid much attention when orders were being taken, but from the looks of things, he was eating with a bunch of IHOP virgins, unaccustomed to the astonishing portions to be had there. He cocked his funny eyebrow at Suzanne, who laughed. "OK, not quite a third-world country. But not a real industrial nation anymore, either. Maybe more like the end-days of Rome or something. Drowning in wealth and wallowing in poverty." She forked up a mouthful of hash browns and chased them with coffee. Perry attacked his own plate. Kettlewell fed the kids, sneaking bites in-between, while Eva looked on approvingly. "You're a good man, Landon Kettlewell," she said, slicing up her steak and eggs into small, precise cubes, wielding the knife like an artist. "You just enjoy your breakfast, my queen," he said, spooning oatmeal with raisins, bananas, granola and boysenberry jam into the little boy's mouth. "We got you presents," the little girl said, taking a break from shoveling banana-chocolate caramel apples into her mouth. "Really?" Perry raised his funny eyebrow and she giggled. He did it again, making it writhe like a snake. She snarfed choco-banana across the table, then scooped it up and put it back in her mouth. She nodded vigorously. "Dad, give them their presents!" Kettlewell said, "Someone has to feed your brother, you know." "I'll do it," she said. She forked up some of his oatmeal and attempted to get it into the little boy's face. "Presents!" Kettlewell dug through the luggage-cluster under the table and came up with an overstuffed diaper bag, then pawed through it for a long time, urged on by his daughter who kept chanting "Presents! Presents! Presents!" while attempting to feed her little brother. Eva and Lester and Suzanne took up the chant. They were drawing stares from nearby tables, but Perry didn't mind. He was laughing so hard his sides hurt. Finally Kettlewell held a paper bag aloft triumphantly, then clapped a hand over his daughter's mouth and shushed the rest. "You guys are really hard to shop for," he said. "What the hell do you get for two guys who not only have everything, but *make* everything?" Suzanne nodded. "Damned right. We spent a whole day looking for something." "What is it?" "Well," Kettlewell said. "We figured that it should be something useful, not decorative. You guys have decorative coming out of your asses. So that left us with tools. We wanted to find you a tool that you didn't have, and that you would appreciate." Suzanne picked up the story. "I thought we should get you an antique tool, something so well-made that it was still usable. But to be useful, it had to be something no one had improved on, and that had in fact been degraded by modern manufacturing techniques. "At first we looked at old tape-measures, but I remembered that you guys were mostly using keychain laser range-finders these days. Screwdrivers, pliers, and hammers were all out -- I couldn't find a damned thing that looked any better than what you had around here. The state of the art is genuinely progressing. "There were a lot of nice old brass spirit-levels and hand-lathed plumb-bobs but they were more decorative than useful by a damned sight. Great old steel work-helmets looked cool, but they weighed about a hundred times what the safety helmets around here weigh. "We were going to give in and try to bring you guys a big goddamned tube-amp, or maybe some Inuit glass knives, but I didn't see you having much of a use for either. "Which is how we came to give up on tools per se and switched over to leisure -- sports tools. There was a much richer vein. Wooden bats, oh yes, and real pigskin footballs that had nice idiosyncratic spin that you'd have to learn to compensate for. But when we found these, we knew we'd hit pay-dirt." She picked up Kettlewell's paper sack with a flourish and unzipped it. A moment later she presented them with two identical packages wrapped in coarse linen paper hand-stamped with Victorian woodcuts of sporting men swinging bats and charging the line with pigskins under their arms. "Ta-dah!" The kids echoed it. "These are the best presents," the little girl confided in Perry as he picked delicately at the exquisite paper. The paper gave way in folds and curls, and then he and Lester both held their treasures aloft. "Baseball gloves!" Perry said. "A catcher's mitt and a fielder's glove," Kettlewell said. "You look at that catcher's mitt. 1910!" It was black and bulbous, the leather soft and yielding, with a patina of fine cracks like an old painting. It smelled like oil and leather, an old rich smell like a gentleman's club or an expensive briefcase. Perry tried it on and it molded itself to his hand, snug and comfortable. It practically cried out to have a ball thrown at it. "And this fielder's glove," Kettlewell went on, pointing at the glove Lester held. It was the more traditional tan color, comically large like the glove of a cartoon character. It too had the look of ancient, well-loved leather, the same mysterious smell of hide and oil. Perry touched it with a finger and it felt like a woman's cheek, smooth and soft. "Rawlings XPG6. The Mickey Mantle. Early 1960s -- the ultimate glove." "You got the whole sales pitch, huh, darling?" Eva said, not unkindly, but Kettlewell flushed and glared at her for a moment. Perry broke in. "Guys, these are -- wow. Incredible." "They're better than the modern product," Suzanne said. "That's the point. You can't print these or fab these. They're wonderful because they're so well made *and so well-used*! The only way to make a glove this good would be to fab it and then give it to several generations of baseball players to love and use for fifty to a hundred years." Perry turned over the catcher's mitt. Over a hundred years old. This wasn't something to go in a glass case. Suzanne was right: this was a great glove because people had played with it, all the time. It needed to be played with or it would get out of practice. "I guess we're going to have to buy a baseball," Perry said. The little girl beside him started bouncing up and down. "Show him," Suzanne said, and the girl dove under the table and came up with two white, fresh hard balls. Once he fitted one to the pocket of his glove, it felt so perfectly right -- like a key in a lock. This pocket had held a lot of balls over the years. Lester had put a ball in the pocket of his glove, too. He tossed it lightly in the air and caught it, then repeated the trick. The look of visceral satisfaction on his face was unmistakable. "These are *great* presents, guys," Perry said. "Seriously. Well done." They all beamed and murmured and then the ball Lester was tossing crashed to the table and broke a pitcher of blueberry syrup, upset a carafe of orange juice, and rolled to a stop in the chocolate mess in front of the little girl, who laughed and laughed and laughed. "And *that* is why we don't play with balls indoors," Suzanne said, looking as stern as she could while obviously trying very hard not to bust out laughing. The waiters were accustomed to wiping up spills and Lester was awkwardly helpful. While they were getting everything set to rights again, Perry looked at Eva and saw her lips tightly pursed as she considered her husband. He followed Kettlebelly's gaze and saw that he was watching Suzanne (who was laughingly restraining Lester from doing any more "cleaning") intently. In a flash, Perry thought he had come to understanding. Oh dear, he thought. The kids loved the shantytown. The little girl -- Ada, "like the programming language," Eva said -- insisted on being set down so she could tread the cracked cement walkways herself, head whipping back and forth to take the crazy-leaning buildings in, eyes following the zipping motor-bikes and bicycles as they wove in and out of the busy streets. The shantytowners were used to tourists in their midst. A few yardies gave them the hairy eyeball, but then they saw Perry was along and they found something else to pay attention to. That made Perry feel obscurely proud. He'd been absent for months, but even the corner boys knew who he was and didn't want to screw with him. The guesthouse's landlady greeted them at the door, alerted to their coming by the jungle telegraph. She shook Perry's hand warmly, gave Ada a lollipop, and chucked the little boy (Pascal, "like the programming language," said Eva, with an eye-roll) under the chin. Check-in was a lot simpler than at a coffin-hotel or a Hilton: just a brief discussion of the available rooms and a quick tour. The Kettlewells opted for the lofty attic, which could fit two three-quarter width beds and a crib, and overlooked the curving streets from a high vantage; Suzanne took a more quotidian room just below, with lovely tile mosaics made from snipped-out sections of plastic fruit and smashed novelty soda bottles. (The landlady privately assured Perry that her euphemistic "hourly trade" was in a different part of the guesthouse altogether, with its own staircase). A few hours later, Perry was alone again, working his ticket counter. The Kettlewells were having naps, Lester and Suzanne had gone off to see some sights, and the crowd for the ride was already large, snaking through the market, thick with vendors and hustling kids trying to pry the visitors loose of their bankrolls. He felt like doing a carny barker spiel, *Step right up, step right up, this way to the great egress!* But the morning's visitors didn't seem all that frivolous -- they were serious-faced and sober. "Everything OK?" he asked a girl who was riding for at least the second time. She was a midwestern-looking giantess in her early twenties with big white front teeth and broad shoulders, wearing a faded Hoosiers ball-cap and a lot of coral jewelry. "I mean, you don't look like you're having a fun time." "It's the story," she said. "I read about it online and I didn't really believe it, but now I totally see it. But you made it, right? It didn't just... *happen*, did it?" "No, it just happened," Perry said. This girl was a little spooky-looking. He put his hand over his heart. "On my honor." "It can't be," she said. "I mean, the story is like *right there*. Someone must have made it." "Maybe they did," Perry said. "Maybe a bunch of people thought it would be fun to make a story out of the ride and came by to do it." "That's probably it," the girl said. "The other thing, that's just ridiculous." She was gone and on the ride before he could ask her what this meant, and the three bangbangers behind her just wanted tickets, not conversation. An hour later, she was back. "I mean the message boards," she said. "Don't you follow your referers? There's a guy in Osceola who says that this is, I don't know, like the story that's inside our collective unconsciousness." Perry restrained a smile at the malapropism. "Anyway a lot of people agree. I don't think so, though. No offense, mister, but I think that this is just a prank or something." "Something," Perry said. But she rode twice more that day, and she wasn't the only one. It was a day of many repeat riders, and the market-stall people came by to complain that the visitors weren't buying much besides the occasional ice-cream or pork cracklin. Perry shrugged and told them to find something that these people wanted to buy, then. One or two of the miniatures guys got gleams in their eyes and bought tickets for the ride (Perry charged them half price) and Perry knew that by the time the day was out, there'd be souvenir ride-replicas to be had. Lester and Suzanne came by after lunchtime and Lester relieved him, leaving him to escort Suzanne back to the shantytown and the Kettlewells. "You two seem to be getting on well," Perry said, jerking his head back at Lester as they walked through the market. Suzanne looked away. "This is amazing, Perry," she said, waving her hand at the market stalls, a gesture that took in the spires of the shantytown and the ride, too. "You have done something...stupendous, you know it? I mean, if you had a slightly different temperament, I'd call this a cult. But it seems like you're not in charge of anything --" "That's for sure!" "-- even though you're still definitely *leading* things." "No way -- I just go where I'm told. Tjan's leading." "I spoke to Tjan before we came out, and he points the finger at you. 'I'm just keeping the books and closing the contracts.' That's a direct quote." "Well maybe no one's leading. Not everything needs a leader, right?" Suzanne shook her head at him. "There's a leader, sweetie, and it's you. Have a look around. Last I checked, there were three more rides going operational this week, and five more in the next month. Just looking at your speaking calendar gave me a headache --" "I have a speaking calendar?" "You do indeed, and it's a busy one. You knew that though, right?" Tjan sent him email all the time telling him about this group or that, where he was supposed to go and give a talk, but he'd never seen a calendar. But who had time to look at the website anymore? "I suppose. I knew I was supposed to get on a plane again in a couple weeks." "So that's what a leader is -- someone who gets people mobilized and moving." "I met a girl in Madison, Wisconsin, you'd probably get along with." Thinking of Hilda made him smile and feel a little horny, a little wistful. He hadn't gotten fucked in mind and body like that since his twenties. "Maybe I'll meet her. Is she working on a local ride?" "You're going to go to the other rides?" "I got to write about something, Perry. Otherwise my pageviews fall off and I can't pay my rent. This is a story -- a big one, and no one else has noticed it yet. That kind of story can turn into the kind of money you buy a house with. I'm speaking from experience here." "You think?" She put her hand over her heart. "I'm good at spotting these. Man, you've got a cult on your hands here." "What?" "The story people. I've been reading the message boards and blogs. It's where I get all my best tips." Perry shook his head. Everyone else was more on top of this stuff than him. He was going to have to spend less time hacking the ride and more time reading the interweb, clearly. "It was all Lester's idea, anyway," he said. She looked down with an unreadable expression. He hazarded a guess as to what that was about. "Things are getting tight between you two, huh?" "Christ it doesn't show that much does it?" "No," he lied. "I just know Lester is all." "He's something else," she said. Suzanne needed some sundries, so he directed her to a little bodega in the back room of one of the houses. He told her he'd meet her at the guesthouse and took a seat in the lobby. He was still beat from the cold and the jet-lag, the work and the sheer exhaustion. On the road he'd had momentum dragging him from one thing to the next, flights to catch, speeches to make. Back at home, confronted with routine, it was like his inertia was disappearing. Eva Kettlewell thundered down the stairs three at a time with a sound like a barely controlled fall, burst into the lobby and headed for the door, her back rigid, her arms swinging, her face a picture of rage. She went out the door like a flash and then stood in the street for a moment before striking out, seemingly at random. Uh-oh, Perry thought. # Sammy didn't dare go back to the ride for weeks after the debacle in Boston. He'd been spotted by the Chinese guy and the bummy-looking guy who said he'd designed the ride, that much was sure. They probably suspected him of having sabotaged the Boston ride. But he couldn't stay away. Work was dismal. The other execs at Disney World were all amazingly petty, and always worse before the quarterly numbers came out. Management liked to chase any kind of bad numbers with a few ritual beheadings. The new Fantasyland had been a feather in Sammy's cap that had kept him safe from politics for a long time, but not anymore. Now it was getting run down: cigarette burns, graffiti, and every now and again someone would find a couple having pervy eyeliner sex in the bushes. He'd loved to work openings in Fantasyland's heyday. He'd stand just past the castle-gate and watch the flocking crowds of black-clad, lightly sweating, white-faced goth kids pour through it, blinking in the unnatural light of the morning. A lot of them took drugs and partied all night and then capped it off with an early morning at Fantasyland -- Disney had done focus groups, and they'd started selling the chewy things that soothed the clenched jaws brought on by dance-drugs. But now he hated the raven-garbed customers who sallied into his park like they owned the joint. A girl -- maybe 16 -- walked past on vinyl platform heels with two gigantic men in their thirties behind her, led on thin black leather leashes. A group of whippet-thin boys in grey dusters with impossibly high sprays of teased electric blue hair followed. Then a group of heavily pierced older women, their faces rattling. Then it was a river of black, kids in chains and leather, leathery grownups who dressed like surly kids. They formed neat queues by their favorite rides -- the haunted houses, the graveyard walk-through, the coffin coaster, the river of blood -- and puffed cloves through smokeless hookahs. At least he hoped it was cloves. The castmembers in Sammy's Fantasyland were no better than the guests. They were pierced, dyed, teased, and branded to within an inch of their lives, even gothier than the goths who made the long pilgrimages to ride his unwholesome rides. The worst of it was that there weren't *enough* of them anymore. The goth scene, which had shown every sign of surging and re-surging every five years, seemed finally to be dying. Numbers were down. A couple of goth-themed parks in the area had shuttered, as had the marshy one in New Orleans (admittedly that might have been more to do with the cholera outbreak). Last month, he'd shut down the goth toddler-clothing shop and put its wares on deep online discount. All his little nieces and nephews were getting bat-wing onesies, skull platform-booties and temporary hair-dye and tattoos for Christmas. Now he just had to get rid of the other ten million bucks' worth of merch. "Morning, Death," he said. The kid's real name was Darren Weinberger, but he insisted on being called Death Waits, which given his pudgy round cheeks and generally eager-to-please demeanor, was funny enough that it had taken Sammy a full year to learn to control his grin when he said it. "Sammy! Good morning -- how're you doing?" "The numbers stink," Sammy said. "You must have noticed." Death's grin vanished. "I noticed. Time for a new ride, maybe." No one called them "attractions" anymore -- all that old Orwellian Disneyspeak had been abolished. "They love the coaster and the free-fall. Thrill rides are always crowd-pleasers." Death Waits had worked at Disney for three years now, since the age of 16, and he had grown up coming to the park, one of the rare Orlando locals. Sammy had come to rely on him for what he thought of as insight into the "goth street." He never said that aloud, because he knew how much it sounded like "whatever you crazy kids are into these days." But this wasn't helpful. "I *know* that everyone likes thrill rides, but how the hell can you compete with the gypsy coasters?" They set up their coasters by the road and ran them until there was an injury serious enough to draw the law -- a week or two at best. You could order the DIY coaster kits from a number of suppliers across the US and Mexico, put them up with cranes and semi-skilled labor and wishful thinking, start taking tickets, and when the inevitable catastrophe ensued, you could be packed and on the lam in a couple hours. "Gypsy coasters? They suck. We've got theming. Our rides are *art*. That stuff is just *engineering*." Death Waits was a good kid, but he was a serious imbiber of the kool-aid. "Maybe try dance parties again?" They'd tried a string of all-night raves, but the fights, drugs, and sex were just too much for the upper management, no matter how much money they brought in. Sammy shook his head morosely. "I've told you that a company this size can't afford the risks from that sort of thing." A few more goths straggled in. They headed for the walk-through, which probably meant they planned to get high or make out, something he'd given up on trying to prevent. Anything to get the numbers up. He and the security staff had come to an understanding on this and no one was telling his boss or his colleagues. "I should just bulldoze the whole fucking thing and start over. What comes after goth, anyway? Are ravers back? Hippies? Punks? Chavs?" Death Waits was staring at him with round eyes. "You wouldn't really --" He waved at the kid. This was his whole life. "No, Death, no. We're not going to bulldoze this place. You've got a job for life here." It was a lie of such amazing callousness that Sammy felt a twinge of remorse while saying it. Those twinges didn't come often. But Death Waits looked a lot happier once the words were out of his mouth -- goths with big candy-apple cheeks were pretty unconvincing gloom-meisters. Sammy stalked back to the nearest utilidor entrance, over by what had been the Pinocchio Village Haus. He'd turned the redesign over to a designer who'd started out as a lit major and whose admiration for the dark and twisted elements of the original Pinocchio tale by Carlo Collodi shone through. Now it featured murals of donkeys being flensed by fish, hectic Pleasure Island. Hanged Pinocchio on his gibbet dangled over the condiment bar, twitching and thrashing. The smell of stale grease rose from it like a miasma, clashing with the patchouli they pumped out from the underground misters. Down into the tunnels and then into a golf cart and out to his office. He had time to paw desultorily at the mountain of merchandise samples that had come in over the week since he'd last tackled it -- every plaster-skull vendor and silver cross-maker in the world saw him as a ticket to easy street. None had twigged to the fact that they were *reducing* their goth-themed merch these days. Still, going through merch had been his task for three years now and it was a hard habit to break. He liked the lick-and-stick wounds with dancing maggots that were activated by body-heat. The skeletal bikers with flocking algorithms that led them into noisy demolition derbies were a great idea, too, since you'd have to buy another set after a couple hours' play. His desk was throbbing pink, which meant that he was late for something. He slapped at it, read the message that came up, remembered that there was a weekly status meeting for theme-leaders that he'd been specifically instructed to attend. He didn't go to these things if he could help it. The time-markers who ran Adventureland and Tomorrowland and so on were all boring curatorial types who thought that change was what you gave a sucker back from a ten at a frozen-banana wagon. The theme-leaders met in a sumptuous board-room that had been themed in the glory years of the unified Walt Disney Company. It had renewable tropical hardwood panelling, a beautiful garden and a koi pond, and an aviary that teemed with chirruping bright birds borrowed from the Animal Kingdom menagerie. The table was a slab of slate with a brushed finish over its pits and shelves, the chairs were so ergonomic that they had zero adjustment controls, because they knew much better than you ever could how to arrange themselves for your maximum comfort. He was the last one through the door, and they all turned to stare at him. They all dressed for shit, in old fashioned slacks and high-tech walking shoes, company pocket-tees or baseball jerseys. None of them had a haircut that was worth a damn, not even the two women execs who co-ran Main Street. They dressed like the Middle Americans they catered to, or maybe a little better. Sammy had always been a sharp dresser. He liked shirts that looked like good cotton but had a little stretch built into them so they rested tight at his chest, which was big, and tight at his waist, which was small. He liked jeans in whatever style jeans were being worn in Barcelona that year, which meant black jeans cut very square and wide-legged, ironed stiff without a crease. He had shades that had been designed to make his face look a little vulpine, a trait that he'd always known he had. It put people on edge if you looked a little wolfy. He stopped outside the door of the board-room and squared up his shoulders. He was the youngest person on the board, and he'd always been the biggest, cockiest bastard in the room. He had to remember that if he was going to survive this next hour. He came through the door and stopped and looked at the people around the table and waited for everyone to notice him. They looked so midwestern and goofy, and he gave them his wolfy smile -- hello, little piggies, here to blow your house down. "Hey, kids," he said, and grabbed the coffee carafe and a mug off the sideboard. He filled his cup, then passed the carafe off, as though every meeting began with the passing-around of the low-grade stimulants. He settled into his seat and looked around expectantly. "Glad you could make it, Sammy." That was Wiener, who generally chaired the meetings. Theoretically, it was a rotating chairship, but there's a certain kind of person who naturally ends up running every meeting, and Ron Wiener was that kind of person. He co-ran Tomorrowland with three faceless nonentities who had been promoted above their competence due to his inexplicable loyalty to them, and between the four of them, they'd managed to keep Tomorrowland the most embarrassingly badly themed part of the park. "We were just talking about you." "I love being the subject of conversation," Sammy said. He slurped loudly at his coffee. "What we were talking about was the utilization numbers from Fantasyland." Which sucked, Sammy knew. They'd been in free-fall for months now, and looking around at those cow-like midwestern faces, Sammy understood that it was time for the knives to come out. "They suck," Sammy said brightly. "That's why we're about to change things up." That preempted them. "Can you explain that some?" Wiener said, clicking his pen and squaring up his notepad. These jerks and their paper-fetish. Sammy did his best thinking on his feet and on the move. Confident. Wolfy. You're better than these jerks with their pads and their corn-fed notions. He sucked in a breath and began to pace and use his hands. "We're going to take out every under-utilized ride in the land, effective immediately. Lay off the dead-wood employees. We're going to get a couple off-the-shelf thrill rides and give them a solid working-over for theming -- build our own ride vehicles, queue areas and enclosures, big ones, weenies that will draw your eye from outside the main gate. But that's just a stopgap. "Next I'm going to start focus-grouping the fatkins. They're ready-made for this stuff. All about having fun. Most of those ex-fatties used to pack this place when they were stuck in electric wheelchairs, but now they're too busy --" he stopped himself from saying "fucking" -- "Having more adult fun to come back, but anyone who can afford fatkins has discretionary income and we should have a piece of it. "It's hard to say without research, but I'm willing to bet that these guys will respond strongly to nostalgia. I'm thinking of reinstating the old Fantasyland dark-rides, digging parts out of storage, whatever we haven't auctioned off on the collectibles market, anyway, and cloning the rest, but remaking them with a little, you know, darkness. Like the Pinocchio thing, but more so. Captain Hook's grisly death. Tinker Bell's inherent porniness. What kind of friendship did Snow White have with the dwarfs? You see where I'm going. Ironic -- we haven't done ironic in a long time. It's probably due for a comeback." They stared at him in shocked silence. "You say you're going to do this when?" Wiener said. He'd want to know so he could get someone senior to intervene. "You know, research first. We'll shut down the crap rides next week and can the dead-wood. Want to commission the research today if I can. Start work on the filler thrill-rides next week too." He sat down. They continued to boggle. "You're serious about this?" "About what? Getting rid of unprofitable stuff? Researching profitable directions? Yes and yes." There were other routine agenda items, which reminded Sammy of why he didn't come to these meetings. He spent the time surfing readymade coasters and checking the intranet for engineer availability. He was just getting into the HR records to see who he'd have to lay off when they finally wound down and he sauntered out, giving his wolfy grin to all, with a special flash of it for Wiener. # "Death, I'd like a word, please?" "I'd be delighted." Death talked like someone who'd learned to talk by being a precocious reader. He over-pronounced his words, spoke in complete sentences, and paused at the commas. Sammy knew that speech pattern well, since he'd worked hard to train himself out of it. It was a geek accent, and it made you sound like a smart-ass instead of a sharp operator. You got that way if you grew up trying to talk with a grown-up vocabulary and a child's control of your speech-muscles; you learned to hold your chin and cheeks still while you spoke to give you a little precision-boost. That was the geek accent. "Remember what we talked about this morning?" "Building a thrill ride?" "Yes," Sammy said. He'd forgotten that Death Waits had suggested that in the first place. Good -- that was a good spin. "I've decided to take your suggestion. Of course, we need to make room for it, so I'm going to shut down some of the crap -- you know which ones I mean." Death Waits was green under his white makeup. "You mean --" "All the walk-throughs. The coffin coaster, of course. The flying bats. Maybe one or two others. And I'm going to need to make some layoffs, of course. Gotta make room." "You're going to lay people off? How many people? We're already barely staffed." Death was the official arbiter of shift-changing, schedule-swapping and cross-scheduling. If you wanted to take an afternoon off to get your mom out of the hospital or your dad out of jail, he was the one to talk to. "That's why I'm coming to you. If I shut down six of the rides --" Death gasped. Fantasyland had 10 rides in total. "Six of the rides. How many of the senior staffers can I get rid of and still have the warm bodies to keep everything running?" Senior people cost a *lot* more than the teenagers who came through. He could hire six juniors for what Death cost him. Frigging Florida labor laws meant that you had to give cost-of-living raises every year, and it added up. Death looked like he was going to cry. "I've got my own estimates," Sammy said. "But I wanted to get a reality check from you, since you're right there, on the ground. I'd hate to leave too much fat on the bone." He knew what effect this would have on the kid. Death blinked back his tears, put his fist under his chin and pulled out his phone and started scribbling on it. He had a list of every employee in there and he began to transfer names from it to another place. "They'll be back, right? To operate the new rides?" "The ones we don't bring back, we'll get them unemployment counseling. Enroll them in a networking club for the jobless, one of the really good ones. We can get a group rate. A job reference from this place goes a long way, too. They'll be OK." Death looked at him, a long look. The kid wasn't stupid, Sammy knew. None of these people were stupid, not Wiener, not the kid, not the goths who led each other around Fantasyland on leashes. Not the fatkins who'd soon pack the place. They were none of them stupid. They were just -- soft. Unwilling to make the hard choices. Sammy was good at hard choices. # Perry got home that night and walked in on Lester and Suzanne. They were tangled on the living-room carpet, mostly naked, and Lester blushed right to his ass-cheeks when Perry came through the door. "Sorry, sorry!" Lester called as he grabbed a sofa cushion and passed it to Suzanne, then got one for himself. Perry averted his eyes and tried not to laugh. "Jesus, guys, what's wrong with the bedroom?" "We would've gotten there eventually," Lester said as he helped Suzanne to her feet. Perry pointedly turned to face the wall. "You were supposed to be at dinner with the gang," Lester said. "Close-up on the ride was crazy. Everything was changing and the printers were out of goop. Lots of action on the network -- Boston and San Francisco are introducing a lot of new items to the ride. By the time I got to the guest-house, the Kettlewells were already putting the kids to bed." He decided not to mention Eva's angry storm-out to Suzanne. No doubt she had already figured out that all was not well in the House of Kettlewell. Suzanne ahem'd. "Sorry, sorry," Lester said. "Let's talk about this later, OK? Sorry." They scurried off to Lester's room and Perry whipped out a computer, put on some short humor videos in shuffle-mode, and grabbed a big tub of spare parts he kept around to fiddle with. It could be soothing to take apart and reassemble a complex mechanism, and sometimes you got ideas from it. Five minutes later, he heard the shower running and then Suzanne came into the living room. "I'm going to order some food. What do you feel like?" "Whatever you get, you'll have to order it from one of the fatkins places. It's not practical to feed Lester any other way. Get me a small chicken tikka pizza." She pored over the stack of menus in the kitchen. "Does Food in Twenty Minutes really deliver in 20 minutes?" "Usually 15. They do most of the prep in the vans and use a lot of predictive math in their routing. There's usually a van within about ten minutes of here, no matter what the traffic. They deliver to traffic-jams, too, on scooters." Suzanne made a face. "I thought *Russia* was weird." She showed the number on the brochure to her phone and then started to order. Lester came out a minute later, dressed to the nines as always. He was barely capable of entering his bedroom without effecting a wardrobe change. He gave Perry a slightly pissed off look and Perry shrugged apologetically, though he didn't feel all that bad. Lester's fault. Christ on a bike, it was weird to think of the two of them together, especially going at it on the living room rug like a couple of horny teens. Suzanne had always been the grownup in their little family. But that had been back when there was a big company involved. Something about being a piece of a big company made you want to act like you'd always figured grownups should act. Once you were a free agent, there wasn't any reason not to embrace your urges. When the food came, the two of them attacked it like hungry dogs. It was clear that they'd forgotten their embarrassment and were planning another retreat to the bedroom once they'd refueled. Perry left. # "Hey, Francis." Francis was sitting on the second-storey balcony of his mayoral house, surveying the electric glow of the shantytown. As usual now, he was alone, without any of his old gang of boys hanging around him. He waved an arm toward Perry and beckoned him inside, buzzing him in with his phone. Perry tracked up the narrow stairs, wondering how Francis negotiated them with his bad knee and his propensity to have one beer too many. "What's the good word?" "Oh, not much," Perry said. He helped himself to a beer. They made it in the shantytown and fortified it with fruits, like a Belgian beer. The resulting suds were strong and sweet. This one was raspberry and it tasted a little pink, like red soda. "Your friends aren't getting along too good, is what I hear." "Really." Nothing was much of a secret in this place. "The little woman's taken a room of her own down the road. My wife did that to me once. Crazy broad. That's their way sometimes. Get so mad they just need to walk away." "I get that mad, too," Perry said. "Oh, hell, me too, all the time. But men usually don't have the guts to pack a suitcase and light out. Women have the guts. They're nothing but guts." Perry cursed. Why hadn't Kettlebelly called him? What was going on? He called Kettlebelly. "Hi, Perry!" "Hi, Landon. What's up?" "Up?" "Yeah, how are things?" "Things?" "Well, I hear Eva took off. That sort of thing. Anything we can talk about?" Kettlewell didn't say anything. "Should I come over?" "No," he said. "I'll meet you somewhere. Where?" Francis wordlessly passed Kettlewell a beer as he stepped out onto the terrace. "So?" "They're in a motel not far from here. The kids love coffins." Francis opened another beer for himself. "Hard to imagine a kid loved a coffin more than your kids loved this place this afternoon." "Eva's pretty steamed at me. It just hasn't been very good since I retired. I guess I'm pretty hard to live with all the time." Perry nodded. "I can see that." "Thanks," Kettlewell said. "Also." He took a pull off his beer. "Also I had an affair." Both men sucked air between their teeth. "With her best friend." Perry coughed a little. "While Eva was pregnant." "You're still breathing? Patient woman," Francis said. "She's a good woman," Kettlewell said. "The best. Mother of my children. But it made her a little crazy-jealous." "So what's the plan, Kettlewell? You're a good man with a plan," Perry said. "I have to give her a night off to cool down and then we'll see. Never any point in doing this while she's hot. Tomorrow morning, it'll come together." The next morning, Perry found himself desperately embroiled in ordering more goop for the three-d printers. *Lots more*. The other rides had finally come online in the night, after interminable network screw-ups and malfing robots and printers and scanners that wouldn't cooperate, but now there were seven rides in the network, seven rides whose riders were rearranging, adding and subtracting, and there was reconciling to do. The printers hummed and hummed. "The natives are restless," Lester said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at the growing queue of would-be riders. "We going to be ready to open soon?" Perry had fallen into a classic nerd trap of having almost solved a problem and not realizing that the last three percent of the solution would take as long as the rest of it put together. Meanwhile, the ride was in a shambles as robots attempted to print and arrange objects to mirror those around the nation. "Soon soon," Perry said. He stood up and looked around at the shambles. "I lie. This crap won't be ready for hours yet. Sorry. Fuck it. Open up." Lester did. "I know, I know, but that's the deal with the ride. It's got to get in sync. You know we've been working on this for months now. It's just growing pains. Here, I'll give you back your money you come back tomorrow, it'll all be set to rights." The angry rider was a regular, one of the people who came by every morning to ride before work. She was gaunt and tall and geeky and talked like an engineer, with the nerd accent. "What kind of printer?" Lester broke in. Perry hid his snicker with a cough. Lester would get her talking about the ins and outs of her printer, talking shop, and before you knew it she'd be mollified. Perry sold another ticket, and another. "Hi again!" It was the creepy guy, the suit who'd shown up in Boston. Tjan had a crazy theory about why he'd left the Boston launch in such a hurry, but who knew? "Hi there," Perry said. "Long time no see. Back from Boston, huh?" "For months." The guy was grinning and sweating and didn't look good. He had a fresh bruise on his cheek with a couple of knuckle prints clearly visible. "Can't wait to get back on the ride. It's been too long." # Sammy had been through a rehab and knew how they went. You laid off a bunch of people in one fast, hard big bang. Hired some unemployment coaches for the senior unionized employees, scheduled a couple of "networking events" where they could mingle with other unemployed slobs and pass around home-made business cards. You needed a Judas goat, someone who'd talk up the rehab to the other employees, whom you could rely on. Death Waits had been his Judas goat for the Fantasyland goth makeover. He'd tirelessly evangelized the idea to his co-workers, had found goth tru-fans who'd blog the hell out of every inch of the rehab, had run every errand no matter how menial. But his passion didn't carry over to dismantling the goth rehab. Sammy should have anticipated that, but he had totally failed to do so. He was just so used to thinking of Death Waits as someone who was a never-questioning slave to the park. "Come on, cheer up! Look at how cool these thrill rides are going to be. Those were your idea, you know. Check out the coffin-cars and the little photo-op at the end that photoshops all the riders into zombies. That's got to be right up your alley, right? Your friends are going to love this." Death moped as only a goth could. He performed his duties slowly and unenthusiastically. When Sammy pinned him down with a direct question, he let his bangs fall over his eyes, looked down at his feet, and went silent. "Come on, what the hell is going on? The fences were supposed to be up this morning!" The plan had been to get the maintenance crews in before rope-drop to fence off the doomed rides so that the dismantling could begin. But when he'd shown up at eight, there was no sign of the fences, no sign of the maintenance crews and the rides were all fully staffed. Death looked at his feet. Sammy bubbled with rage. If you couldn't trust your own people, you were lost. There were already enough people around the park looking for a way to wrong-foot him. "Death, I'm talking to you. For Christ's sake, don't be such a goddamned baby. You shut down the goddamned rides and send those glue-sniffers home. I want a wrecking crew here by lunchtime." Death Waits looked at his feet some more. His floppy black wings of hair covered his face, but from the snuffling noises, Sammy knew there was some crying going on underneath all that hair. "Suck it up," he said. "Or go home." Sammy turned on his heel and started for the door, and that was when Death Waits leapt on his back, dragged him to the ground and started punching him. He wasn't much of a puncher, but he did have a lot of chunky silver skull-rings that really stung. He pasted a couple good ones on Sammy before Sammy came to his senses and threw the skinny kid off of him. Strangely, Sammy's anger was dissipated by the actual, physical violence. He had never thrown a punch in his life and he was willing to bet the same was true of Death Waits. There was something almost funny about an actual punch-up. Death Waits picked himself up and looked at Sammy. The kid's eyeliner was in smears down his cheeks and his hair was standing up on end. Sammy shook his head slowly. "Don't bother cleaning out your locker. I'll have your things sent to you. And don't stop on your way out of the park, either." He could have called security, but that would have meant sitting there with Death Waits until they arrived. The kid would go and he would never come back. He was disgraced. And leave he did. Sammy had Death Wait's employee pass deactivated and the contents of his locker -- patchouli-reeking black tee-shirts and blunt eyeliner pencils -- sent by last-class mail to his house. He cut off Death Waits's benefits. He had the deadwood rides shuttered and commenced their destruction, handing over any piece recognizable as coming from a ride to the company's auction department to list online. Anything to add black to his bottom line. But his cheek throbbed where Death had laid into him, and he'd lost his fire for the new project. Were fatkins a decent-sized market segment? He should have commissioned research on it. But he'd needed to get a plan in the can in time to mollify the executive committee. Plus he knew what his eyes told him every day: the park was full of fatkins, and always had been. The ghost of Death Waits was everywhere. Sammy had to figure out for himself whom to fire, and how to do it. He didn't really know any of the goth kids that worked the rides these days. Death Waits had hired and led them. There were lots of crying fits and threats, and the kids he didn't fire acted like they were next, and if it hadn't been for the need to keep revenue flowing, Sammy would have canned all of them. Then he caught wind of what they were all doing with their severance pay: traveling south to Hollywood and riding that goddamned frankenride in the dead Wal-Mart, trying to turn it into goth paradise. Judging from the message-boards he surfed, the whole thing had been Death Waits's idea. Goddamn it. It was Boston all over again. He'd pulled the plug and the machine kept on moving. The hoardings went up and the rides came down, but all his former employees and their weird eyeliner pervert pals all went somewhere else and partied on just the same. His attendance numbers were way down, and the photobloggers posting shots of black clouds of goths at the frankenride made it clear where they'd all gone. *Fine*, he thought, *fine. Let's go have a look.* The guy with the funny eyebrow made him immediately, but didn't seem to be suspicious. Maybe they never figured out what he'd done in Boston. The goth kids were busy in the market stalls or hanging around smoking clove and patchouli hookahs and they ignored him as a square and beneath their notice. The ride had changed a great deal since his last fated visit. He'd heard about The Story, of course -- the dark-ride press had reported on it in an editorial that week. But now The Story -- which, as he could perceive it, was an orderly progression of what seemed to be someone's life unfolding from childhood naivete to adolescent exuberance to adult cynicism to a nostalgic, elderly delight -- was augmented by familiar accoutrements. There was a robot zombie-head from one of the rides he'd torn down yesterday. And here was half the sign from the coffin coaster. A bat-wing bush from the hedge-maze. The little bastards had stolen the deconstructed ride-debris and brought it here. By the time he got off the ride, he was grinning ferociously. By tomorrow there'd be copies of all that trademarked ride-stuff rolling off the printers in ten cities around the United States. That was a major bit of illegal activity, and he knew where he could find some hungry attack-lawyers who'd love to argue about it. He jumped on the ride again and got his camera configured for low-light shooting. # Eva showed up on Perry's doorstep that night after dinner. Lester and Suzanne had gone off to the beach and Perry was alone, updating his inventory of tchotchkes with a camera and an old computer, getting everything stickered with RFIDs. She had the kids in tow. Ada spotted the two old, lovely baseball mitts on the crowded coffee table and made a bee-line for them, putting one over each hand and walking around smacking them together to hear the leathery sound, snooping in drawers and peering at the business-end of an arc-welder that Perry hastily snapped up and put on a high shelf, which winked once to let him know that it had tracked the movement and noted the location of the tool. The little boy, Pascal, rode on his mother's hip. Eva had clearly had a bit of a cry, but had gotten over it. Now she was determined, with her jaw thrust out and her chin up-tilted. "I don't know what to do about him. He's been driving me crazy since he retired. You know he had an affair?" "He told me." She laughed. "He tells *everyone*. He's boasting, you know? Whatever. I know why he did it. Mid-life crisis. But before that, it was early-adulthood crisis. And adolescent crisis. That guy doesn't know what to do with himself. He's a good man, but he's out of his fucking mind if he's not juggling a hundred balls." Perry tried out a noncommittal shrug. "You're his buddy, I know. But you have to see that it's true, right? I love him, I really do, but he's got a self-destructive streak a mile wide. It doesn't matter how much he loves me or the kids, if he's not torturing himself with work, he's got to come up with something else to screw up his life. I thought that we were going to spend the next twenty years raising the kids, doing volunteer work, and traveling. Not much chance of that though. You saw how he was looking at Suzanne." "You think he and Suzanne --" "No, I asked him and he said no. Then I talked to *her* and she told me that she wouldn't ever let something like that happen. Her I believe." She sat down and dandled the little boy until he gurgled contentedly. Perry heard Ada going crazy in the kitchen with a mechanical sphincter he'd been building. "Rides are a lot of fun, Perry. Your ride, it's amazing. But I don't want to ride a ride for the rest of my life, and Landon is a ride that doesn't stop. You can't get off." Perry was at a loss. "I've never had a relationship that lasted more than six months, Eva. I've got no business giving you advice on this stuff. Kettlewell is pretty amazing, though. It sounds like you've got him pretty wired, right? You know that if he's busy, he's happy, and when he's slack, he's miserable. Sounds like if you keep him busy, he'll be the kind of guy you want him to be, even if you won't have much time to play with him." She unholstered a tit and stuck it in the boy's mouth and Perry looked at the carpet. She laughed. "You are such a geek," she said. "OK, fine. I hear what you're saying. So how do I get him busy again? Can you use him around here?" "Here?" Perry thought about it. "I don't think we need much empire building around here." "I thought you'd say that. Perry, what the hell am I going to do?" There was a tremendous crash from the kitchen, a shriek of surprise, then a small "oops." "Ada!" Eva called. "What now?" "I was playing ball in the house," Ada said in the same small voice. "Even though you have told me not to. And I broke something. I should have listened to you." Eva shook her head. "Plays me like a goddamned cello," she said. "I'm sorry, Perry. We'll pay for whatever it was." He patted her arm. "You forget who you're talking to. I love fixing stuff. Don't sweat it." "Whatever -- I'll buy you one and you can use it for parts. Ada! What did you break, anyway?" "Made of seashells, by the toaster. It's twitching." "Toast-making seashell robot," Perry said. "No sweat -- it was due for an overhaul, anyway." "Christ," she said. "Toast-making *seashell* robot?" "Kettlewell is why we gave up making that kind of thing," he said. "Have you seen him?" "I've seen him." "How penitent was he?" He thought back to Kettlewell's long puss on Francis's terrace. "Yeah, pretty penitent. He's pretty worried, I'd say." She nodded. "All right then. Maybe he's learned a lesson. Ada! Stop breaking things and get your shoes back on!" "We going back to Daddy?" "Yes," she said. "Good," Ada said. They were barely out the door when Suzanne and Lester came in. They nodded at Perry and disappeared into the bedroom. Ten minutes later, Suzanne stomped out again. She barely looked at Perry as she disappeared into the corridor, slamming the door behind her. Perry waited five minutes to see if Lester would come out on his own. This happened sometimes with the fatkins girls; love among the fatkins was stormy and unpredictable and Lester seemed to like bragging about the melt-downs they experienced, each one an oddity of sybaritic fatkins culture to boast about. But Lester didn't come out this time. Perry thought about calling him or sending him an email. Finally, Perry went and knocked at his door. "Oh, go back to the living room, I'll come out, I'll come out." Perry went back and moused desultorily at some ride-fan blogs for a while, listening for Lester's door opening. Finally, out he came, long-faced and puffy-eyed. Perry shook his head. Was everyone miserable tonight? "Hello, Lester," he said. "Something on your mind?" He barked a humorless laugh. "With her, I'm still fat." Perry nodded as though he understood, though he didn't. "Since fatkins, I've felt like, I don't know, a real person. When I was big, I was invisible and totally asexual. I didn't think about having sex with anyone and no one ever thought about having sex with me. When I felt something for a woman, it was more like a big, romantic love, like I was a beast and she was a beauty and we could enjoy some kind of chaste, spiritual love. "Fatkins made me...whole. A whole person, with a life below my belt as well as above my neck. I know it looks gross and desperate to you, but to me it's a celebration. Every time I get together with a fatkins girl and we're, you know, partying -- for both of us it becomes something really intimate. A denial of pain. A fuck you to the universe that made us so gross and untouchable." "And with her, you're still fat, huh?" Lester winced. "Yeah, it's my problem. I guess I really resent her for not wanting me when I was big, though I totally get why she wouldn't have." "Maybe you're angry that she wants you now." "Huh." Lester looked at his hands, which he was dry-washing in his lap. "OK, maybe. Why should she want me now? I'm the same person, after all." "Except that you're whole now." "Urk." Lester started pacing. "Who broke the toast-robot?" "Kettlewell's daughter, Ada. Eva was over with the kids. She moved out on Kettlebelly." He thought about whether he should tell Lester. What the hell. "She thinks he's in love with Suzanne." "Jesus," Lester said. "Maybe we should swap. I'll take Eva and he can take Suzanne." "You're such a pig," Perry said. "You know us fatkins -- fuck, food and folly." "So what's going on with you and Suzanne now?" "She's gone away until I can get naked around her without either bursting into tears or making sarcastic remarks." Jesus. Crying. Perry couldn't remember when he'd ever seen Lester cry. It was waterworks city these days around here. "Ah." Perry just wanted this day to be over. He missed Hilda, though he barely knew her. It would have been nice to have someone here at home with him, someone he could cuddle up to in bed and talk this all out with. Maybe he should call Tjan. He hit the button on his computer that made the TV blink the time in Morse code. It was 1AM. He'd have to be up in six hours to get the ride up and running. Screw all this, he was going to bed. He hadn't even gotten a single email from Hilda since he'd left Madison. Not that he'd sent one to her, of course. Lester was still snoring when Perry slipped out of the condo, a bulb of juice and a microwavable venison and quail-egg breakfast burrito under his arm. He had a little glove-box microwave and by the time he hit his first red light, the burrito was nuclear-hot and ready to eat. He gobbled it one-handed while he made his way to the ride. There were two cop cars at the end of the driveway leading to the parking lot. Broward County sheriff's deputy black-and-whites, parked horizontally to blockade the drive. Perry pulled over and got out of his car slowly, keeping his hands in plain sight. The doors of the cruisers opened, too. The deputies already had their mirrorshades on, though the sun was still rising, and they set down their coffees on the hood of the cars. "This yours?" A deputy said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the flea market and the ride. Perry knew better than to answer any questions. "Can I help you?" "We're shutting you down, buddy, sorry." The cop was young, Latina and female, her partner was older, white and male, with the ruddy complexion that Perry associated with old time Florida cops. "What's the charge?" "There's no charge," the male cop said. He sounded like he was angry already and anything Perry said would just make him angrier. "We charge you if we're going to arrest you. We're enforcing an injunction. Now, if you try to get past us, we'll come up with a charge and *then* we'll arrest you." "Can I see the injunction?" "Sure, you can go to the courthouse and see the injunction." "Aren't you supposed to have a copy of it to show to me?" "Am I?" The cop's grin was mean and impatient. "Can I go and get some stuff from my office?" "If you want to get arrested you can." He pulled a dyspeptic face and drank some coffee, then got back into his cruiser. The other cop had the grace to look faintly embarrassed at her asshole partner, but then she, too, got back in her car. Perry thought furiously about this. The cop was clearly itching to bust his ass. Maybe he hated the ride, or this duty, or maybe he hated Perry -- maybe he was one of the cops who had raided the shantytown all those years before. Perry had taken a pretty big settlement off the county over the shot in his head, and it was a sure bet that a lot of cops had suffered for it and now harbored some enmity for him. As bad as this was, it was about to get worse. The goth kids who'd been hanging around in droves lately -- they didn't seem like the sort with a lot of good instincts when it came to dealing with authority figures. Then there were the flea-market stall owners, who'd be coming over the road to open their shops in an hour or so. This could get really goddamned ugly. He needed a lawyer, and someone to front for him with the lawyer. He could call Tjan -- he would call him, in fact, but not just yet. There were limits to what Tjan could do from Boston, after all. He got back in his car and peeled across the road to the shantytown and the guesthouse. "Kettlewell!" He thumped the door. "Come on, Landon, it's me, Perry. It's an emergency." He heard Eva curse, then heard movement. "Whazzit?" "Sorry, man, I wouldn't have woken you but it's a real emergency." "Fire?" "No. Cops. They've shut down the ride." Kettlewell opened the door a crack and stared at him with a red-rimmed, hung-over eye. "Cops shut down the ride?" "Yeah, they say there's an injunction." "Gimme a sec, gotta put some pants on." He closed the door. As Perry listened to the sounds of him getting dressed, he reflected that he'd done Eva the favor she'd been seeking: he'd found something to keep Kettlewell busy. Kettlewell quizzed him intensely as they drove back across the road to the police-cars. He called Tjan and got voicemail, left a brief message, then got out of the car and stood still outside it, waving at the cop-cars. "What?" The male cop looked even more dyspeptic. "Hi there! I wondered if I could get you to explain what's going on here so we can open up shop again?" "We've shut you down to enforce an injunction." "What injunction is that?" "A court injunction." "Which court?" The cop looked really angry for a second, then he got back in his car and fished around. "Broward County." He sounded aggrieved. "Is that the injunction there?" Kettlewell said. "No," the cop said, too quickly. They both knew he was lying, jerking them around. "Can I see it? Does it have information about who to talk to to get the injunction lifted?" Kettlewell's tone was even, pleasant and very adult. The voice of someone used to being obeyed. "You'll have to go to the courthouse. They open in a couple hours." "I'd really like to see it." "Oh for chrissakes," the female cop said. "Just show it to them, Tom. God." She spat on the ground. Her partner gave her a look, then handed the paper over to Kettlewell, who pored over it intently. Perry shoulder surfed him and gathered that they were being shut down for infringing Disney Parks Company trademarks. That was weird. You could hardly go ten feet in Florida without tripping over a bootleg Mickey, so why should the market-stalls' Mickey designs trigger legal action? "All right, then," Kettlewell said. "Let's make some phone calls." They got in the car and drove across the road to the shantytown. There was a tea-house that opened early and they commandeered its window table and spread out their things. Perry called Lester and woke him up. It took two or three tries to get his head around it -- Lester couldn't figure out why they'd shut down the market-stalls, but once he got that the ride was down too, he woke up fast and promised to meet them. Kettlewell's conversation with Tjan was a lot more heated. Perry tried to eavesdrop but couldn't make any sense of it. "All the rides are down," he said once he'd dropped the phone to bounce a couple times on the tabletop, making the coffees shiver. "Every one of them was shut down by the cops this morning." "You're shitting me. But they don't all sell the same stuff." "They were shut down because of Disney trademarks in the ride itself, or so it seems. Now, what are we going to do? Tjan's hired a lawyer for the Boston group and we can hire one for here, but I don't think we're going to be able to hire fixers everywhere that there's a ride. That's going to be really expensive. Disney's filed all the injunctions at the state level -- they have an industry association they work through that has cooperating attorneys in every city in the country, so it was easy for them." "Holy crap." "Yeah. Who did you piss off, Perry?" Damned if he knew. He literally couldn't think of a single person who'd want to do this -- someone had convinced the Disney company to clobber him like Godzilla going after Tokyo. It just didn't make any sense. "So what do we do?" Kettlewell looked at him. "I have no clue, Perry. You aren't a company. You aren't a network of companies. You aren't an industry association. No one can speak for you. You can't lobby or even field a spokesman. I mean, none of that stuff works for you -- and that's the only way I know to fight back in court." "I thought we were immune to this stuff. If there's no one to sue, how can they sue us?" "If there's no one to sue, there's no one to show up in court and object, either." "Yeah." "I don't think we can incorporate you in time to make a difference," Kettlewell said. "So we need to think of something else." Suzanne slid into the booth beside them. Her hair was tied back and her makeup was spare and severe. She had on European-cut trousers, high like a bolero-dancer's, and a loose, flowing white cotton over-shirt on top of a luminescent pink tank. Perry couldn't tell whether it was formal or informal, but it looked good and a little intimidatingly foreign. She didn't meet Perry's eye. "Brief me," she said. She held out her phone and put it in record mode. Kettlewell ran it down quickly and she nodded, jotting notes. "So what happens next?" "Not much we can do," Kettlewell said. "The riders will be along shortly. Oh, and the merchants." Perry still couldn't catch her eye. "I'll go take some pictures," she said. "Be careful," Perry said. She mugged for him. "Sweetie, I take pictures of the mafiyeh." Then it was all right between them again, somehow. "Right," Kettlewell said. "How's our time looking?" "Got thirty minutes until the first of the merchants show up. An hour until the riders start turning up." "You don't have a lawyer, do you?" Perry quirked his funny eyebrow. "Stupid question. OK. Right, I'll make some more calls. Let's get some people out of bed." "What can I do?" Kettlewell looked at him. "Huh. Um. This is really my beat now. I suppose you could go keep Suzanne company." "Gee, thanks." "Something wrong with Suzanne?" "Nothing's wrong with Suzanne," he said. "OK, off I go." He set off on foot. The shantytown had woken up now, people getting ready for the hike to the early busses into places where the few remaining jobs were. He took his phone out and tossed it from hand to hand. Then he called the number that he'd programmed in all those days ago in Madison but had never bothered to call. He forgot until the ringing started that it was another time-zone there -- an hour or two earlier. But when Hilda answered, she sounded wide awake. "Nice of you to call," she said. "Nice of you to answer." Her voice sent a thrill up his spine. "We've got cops outside of the ride here," she said. "We've only been live for a week, too." "They're at every ride," he said. "They shut us down too." "Well, what are you going to do about it?" "What am *I* going to do about it?" "Sure, this is your thing, Perry. We woke up and discovered the cops this morning and the first thing everyone did was wonder when you'd call with the plan." "You're kidding. What do I know about cops?" "What do any of us know about cops? All we know is we built this thing after you came and talked to us about it and now it's been shut down, so we're waiting for you to tell us what to do next." He groaned and sat down on a curb. "Oh, crap." Then she sighed heavily at the other end. "OK, Perry, you need to pull it together. We need you now. We need something that explains what's going on, what to do next, and how to do it. There's a lot of energy out here, a lot of people ready to fight. Just point us in the right direction." "I have a guy who's trying to figure that out right now." "Perfect. Now you need to set up a conference call with every ride operator so we can talk this over. Get online and post a time and an address. I'll chat it up and make some calls. You make some calls too. Everyone likes to hear from you. They like to know you're on their side." "Right," he said, getting back to his feet, turning around to get his computer out of his trunk. "Right. That's totally the right thing to do. I'm on it." "Good man," she said. A little pause stretched between them. "So," he said. "How you doing, apart from all this?" Her laugh was merry. "I thought you'd never ask. I'm looking forward to your next visit, is how I'm doing." "Really?" "Of course really." "You sounded a little pissed at me there is all." He sounded like a lovesick teenager. "I mean --" He broke off. "Your ass needed kicking, was all." Pause. "I'm not pissed at you, though. When are you coming for a visit?" "Got me," he said. "I guess I should, right?" He really sounded like a teenager. "You need to visit all the sites, check in on how we're doing." Pause. "Plus you should come hang out with me some." He almost pointed out all her warnings about only having a one-night stand and not missing the people he was away from and so forth, but stayed his tongue. The fact that she wanted him to come for a visit was overshadowing everything, even the looming crisis with the cops. "It's a deal." "Deal." "Well, bye." "Bye." He almost said, "You hang up first," but that would have been too much. Instead he just kept the phone at his ear until he heard her click. Suzanne was pointing and shooting like mad. Perry sat down on the cracked pavement beside her and unfolded his computer and started sending out emails, setting up a conference-channel. He gave Suzanne a short version of his talk with Hilda, being careful not to give a hint of his feelings for her. "She sounds like a sensible girl," Suzanne said. "You should go and pay her another visit." He blushed and she socked him in the shoulder. "Take your call," she said. The cops were giving them the hairy eyeball, and Perry screwed in his headset. The conference channel was filling up. Perry checked off names as reps from all the rides came online. There was a lot of tight, tense chatter, jokes about the fuzz. "OK," Perry said. "Let's get it started. There's cops blockading every ride, right? Use the poll please." He posted a poll to the conference page and it quickly got to 100 percent green. "So I just found the cops outside of mine, too, and I'm not sure what to do about it. I've got some dough for a lawyer, but I can't afford lawyers for everyone. To make that work, we'd have to fly attorneys to every city with a ride in it, and that's not practical as I'm sure you can tell." A half-dozen flags went up in the conference page. "I need someone to play moderator, 'cause I can't talk and mod at the same time. How about you, Hilda?" "OK," she said. "I'm Hilda Hammersen, from the Madison group. Post one-line summaries of your points and I'll set a speaker order." The conference page filled up. There was the official back channel at the bottom where the text was spilling by too fast for Perry to parse, and he knew that there were lots of unofficial back-channels in use, too. He covered the mic and sighed. He had nothing to say to these people. He didn't have any answers. "Right. So who knows what we should do?" The back-channel went crazy. Hilda started green-lighting speakers with their flags up. "Why are you asking us, Perry? You've got to run this." The voice was petulant and Perry saw that it was one of the Boston crew, which made him wonder what Tjan was going to do when he discovered that Perry was doing this. The page pinkened and then sank into red. The other people on the call clearly thought this was BS, which was a relief to Perry. Hilda cued up the next speaker. "We could set up information pickets at the gates to each ride hitting people up for donations for our legal defense -- get the press to cover it and maybe we could bring in enough to fight all the injunctions." The pink lightened a little, went back to neutral white, turned a little green. Perry slowed down the back-channel a little and skimmed it: :: No way could we bring in enough, that's like 30 grand each I get a couple hundred people here in the morning and that would mean a hundred and fifty bucks each :: No no it's totally do-able we can raise that easy just set up some paypals and publicize the shit out of it The next speaker was talking. "What if we got the maintenance bots to break open the doors and carry the ride outside where everyone can see it?" Bright red. Dumb idea. Perry broke in. "I'm worried that when people show up it'll provoke some kind of confrontation with the law. It could get ugly here. How can we keep that cooled out?" Green. "That's totally got to be our top priority," Hilda said. Next speaker. "OK, so the best way to keep people calm is to tell them that there's an alternative to going nuts, which maybe could be raising money for a legal defense." Green-ish. "What about finding pro-bono lawyers? What about the ACLU or EFF?" Greener. The back-channel filled up with URLs and phone numbers and email addresses. "OK, time's running out here," Perry said. "You guys need to organize a call-around to those orgs and see if they'll help us out. Pass the hat at your rides, try to find lawyers. Everyone keep reporting in all day -- especially if you get a win anywhere. I'm going to go take care of things here." Hilda IMed him -- "Good luck, Perry. You'll kick ass." Perry started to IM back, but a shadow fell across his screen. It was Jason, who ran the contact-lens stall. He was staring at the two cop-cars quizzically, looking groggy but growing alarmed. Perry closed his lid and got to his feet. "Morning, Jason." Behind Jason were five or six other vendors. The sellers who lived in the shantytown and could therefore walk to work were always first in. Soon the commuters would start arriving in their beater cars. "Hey, Perry," Jason said. He was chewing on an unlit cigarette, a disgusting habit that was only marginally less gross than smoking them. He'd tried toothpicks, but nothing would satisfy his oral cravings like a filter-tip. At least he didn't light them. "What's up?" Perry told him what he knew, which wasn't much. Jason listened carefully, as did the other vendors who arrived. "They're fucking with you, man. The cops, Disney, all of them. Just fucking with you. You go ahead and hire a lawyer to go to the court for you and see how far it gets you. They're not playing by any rules, they're not interested in the law you broke or whatever. They just want to fuck with you." Suzanne appeared over Perry's shoulder. "I'm Suzanne Church, Jason. I'm a reporter." "Sure, I know you. You were there when they burned down the old place." "That was me. I think you're right. They're fucking with you guys. I want to report on that because it might be that exposing it makes it harder to continue. Can I record what you guys say and do?" Jason grinned and slid the soggy cig from one corner of his mouth to the other and back again. "Sure, that's cool with me." He turned to the other sellers: "You guys don't mind, do you?" They joked and laughed and said no. Perry let out a breath slowly. These guys didn't want a confrontation with the cops -- they knew better than him that they couldn't win that one. Suzanne started interviewing them. The cops got out of their cars and stared at them. The woman cop had her mirrorshades on now, and so the both of them looked hard and eyeless. Perry looked away quickly. The vendors with cars were pulling them around to the roadside leading up to the ride, unpacking merchandise and setting it out on their hoods. Vendors from the shantytown headed home and came back with folding tables and blankets. These guys were business-people. They weren't going to let the law stand in the way of putting food on the table for their families. The cops got back into their cars. Kettlewell worked his way cautiously across the freeway, climbing laboriously over the median. He had changed into a smart blazer and slacks, with a crisp white shirt that hid his incipient belly. He looked like the Kettlewell of old, the kind of man used to giving orders and getting respect. "Hey, man," Perry said. Kettlewell's easy smile was reassuring. "Perry," he said, throwing an arm around his shoulders and leading him away. "Come here and talk with me." They stood in the lee of one of the sickly palms that stood by the roadside. The day was coming up hot and Perry's t-shirt stuck to his chest, though Kettlewell seemed dry and in control. "What's going on, Perry?" "Well, we did a phoner this morning with all the ride operators. They're going to work on raising money for the defense and getting pro-bono lawyers from the EFF or the ACLU or something." Kettlewell did a double-take. "Wait, what? They're going to ask the ACLU? They can't be trusted, Perry. They're *impact litigators* -- they'll take cases to make a point, even when it's not in their clients' best interests." "What could be more in our interests than getting lawyers to fight these bogus injunctions?" Kettlewell blew out a long breath. "OK, table it. Table it. Here's what I've been pulling together: we've got a shitkicking corporate firm that used to handle the Kodacell business that's sending out a partner to go to the Broward County court this morning to get the injunction lifted. They're doing this as a freebie, but I told them that they could handle the business if we put together all the rides into one entity." Now it was Perry's turn to boggle. "What kind of entity?" "We have to incorporate them all, get them all under one umbrella so that we can defend them all in one go. Otherwise there's no way we're going to be able to save them. Without a corporate entity, it's like trying to herd cats. Besides, you need some kind of structure, a formal constitution or something for this thing. You've got a network protocol, and that's it. There's money at stake here -- potentially some big money -- and you can't run something like that on a handshake. It's too vulnerable. You'll get embezzled or sued into oblivion before you even have a chance to grow. So I've started the paperwork to get everything under one banner." Perry counted to ten, backwards. "Landon, I'm really thankful that you're helping us out here. You're probably going to save our asses. But you can't put everything under one banner -- you can't just declare to these people that their projects are ours --" "Of course they're yours. They're using your IP, your protocols, your designs.... If they don't come on board, you can just threaten to sue them --" "Landon! Please listen to me. We are not going to effect a hostile takeover of my friends. They are equal owners of everything we do here. And no offense, but if you ever mention suing other projects over our 'IP'" -- he made sarcastic finger quotes -- "then we're through having any discussions about this. OK?" Kettlewell snorted air through his nostrils. "My apologies, I didn't realize that this was such a sensitive area for you." Perry boggled at this -- lawsuits against ride operators! "But I can get that. Here's the thing, Perry. Without some kind of fast-moving structure you're going to be dead. Even if we repel the boarders this morning, they'll be back tomorrow and the day after. You need something stronger than a bunch of friends who have loose agreements. You need a legal entity that can speak for everyone. Maybe that's a co-op or a charity or something else, but it's got to exist. You may not think you have any say over these other rides, but does everyone else agree? What if you get sued for someone's bad deeds in Minneapolis? What if some ride operator sues *you* to put you out of business?" Perry's head swam. He hated conversations like this. He didn't have any good answer for Kettlewell's objections, but it was ridiculous. No one from a ride was going to sue him. Or maybe they would, if he got all grabby and went MINE MINE MINE and incorporated everything with him at the top. Hilda said he was the one they all looked to, but that was because he would never try to hijack their projects. "No." "No what?" "No to all of it. We have to defend this thing, but we're not going to do it by trying to tie everyone down to contracts and agreements where I get to control everything. Maybe a co-op is the right way to go, but we can't just declare a co-op and force everyone to be members. We have to get everyone to agree, everyone who's involved, and then they can elect a council or something and work out some kind of uniform agreement. I mean, that's how all the good free software projects work. There's authority, but it's not all unilateral and imperious. I'm not interested in that. I'd rather shut this down than declare myself pope-emperor of ride-land." Kettlewell scrubbed his eyes with his fists. Up close, the lines in his face were deep-sunk, his eyeballs bloodshot and hung over. "You're killing me, you know that? What good is principle going to do when they knock this fucking thing down and slap you with a gigantic lawsuit?" Perry shrugged. "I really appreciate what you've done, but I'd rather lose it than fuck it up." They stared at each other for a long time. Cars whizzed past. Perry felt like a big jerk. Kettlewell had done amazing work for him this morning, just out of the goodness of his own heart, and Perry had repaid him by being a stiff-necked dickwad. He felt an overwhelming desire to take it back, just put Kettlewell in charge and let him run the whole show. Just shrug his shoulders and abdicate. He looked down at the ground and up into the straggly palms, then heaved a sigh. "Landon, I'm sorry, OK, but that's just how it is. I totally dig that you're saying that we're risking everything by not doing it your way, but from my seat, doing it your way will kill it anyway. So we need a better answer." Kettlewell scrubbed his eyes some more. "You and my wife sound like you'd get along." Perry waited for him to go on, but it became clear he had nothing more to say. Perry went back to the cop cars just as the first gang of goths showed up to take a ride. $$$$ PART III Sammy had filled a cooler and stuck it in the back-seat of his car the night before, programmed his coffee-maker, and when his alarm roused him at 3AM, he hit the road. First he guzzled his thermos of lethal coffee, then reached around in back for bottles of icy distilled water. He kept the windows rolled down and breathed in the swampy, cool morning air, the most promising air of the Florida day, before it all turned to steam and sizzle. He didn't bother looking for truck-stops when he needed to piss, just pulled over on the turnpike's side and let fly. Why not? At that hour, it was just him and the truckers and the tourists with morning flights. He reached Miami ahead of schedule and had a diner-breakfast big enough to kill a lesser man, a real fatkins affair. He got back on the road groaning from the chow and made it to the old Wal-Mart just as the merchants were setting up their market on the roadside. When he'd done the Boston ride, he'd been discouraged that they'd kept on with their Who-ville Xmas even though he'd grinched away all their fun, but this time he was expecting something like this. Watching these guys sell souvenirs at the funeral for the ride made him feel pretty good this time around: their disloyalty had to be a real morale-killer for those ride-operators. The cops were getting twitchy, which made him grin. Twitchy cops were a key ingredient for bad trouble. He reached behind him and pulled an iced coffee from the cooler and cracked it, listening to the hiss as the embedded CO2 cartridge forced bubbles through it. Now here came a suit. He looked like a genuine mighty morphin' power broker, which made Sammy worry, because a guy like that hadn't figured into his plans, but look at that; he was having a huge fight with the eyebrow guy and now the eyebrow guy was running away from him. Getting the lawyers to agree to spring the budget to file in every location where there was a ride had been tricky. Sammy had had to fudge a little on his research, claim that they were bringing in real money, tie it to the drop in numbers in Florida, and generally do a song and dance, but it was all worth it. These guys clearly didn't know whether to shit or go blind. Now eyebrow man was headed for the cop-cars and the entrance, and there, oh yes, there it was. Five cars' worth of goths, lugging bags full of some kind of home-made or scavenged horror-memorabilia, pulling up short at the entrance. They piled out of their cars and started milling around, asking questions. Some approached the cops, who seemed in no mood to chat. The body-language could be read at 150 feet: Goth: But officer, I wanna get on this riiiiiide. Cop: You sicken me. Goth: All around me is gloom, gloom. Why can't I go on my riiiiiide? Cop: I would like to arrest you and lock you up for being a weird, sexually ambiguous melodramatic who's dumb enough to hang around out of doors, all in black, in *Florida*. Goth: Can I take your picture? I'm gonna put it on my blog and then everyone will know what a meanie you are. Cop: Yap yap yap, little bitch. You go on photographing me and mouthing off, see how long it is before you're in cuffs in the back of this car. Scumbag street-vendors: Ha ha ha, look at these goth kids mouthing off to the law, that cop must have minuscule testicles! Cop: Don't make me angry, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry. Eyebrow guy: Um, can everyone just be nice? I'd prefer that this all not go up in flames. Scumbags, goths: Hurr hurr hurr, shuttup, look at those dumb cops, ahahaha. Cops: Grrrr. Eyebrow: Oh, shit. Four more cars pulled up. Now the shoulder was getting really crowded and freeway traffic was slowing to a crawl. More goths piled out. Family cars approached the snarl, slowed, then sped up again, not wanting to risk the craziness. Maybe some of them would get on the fucking turnpike and drive up to Orlando, where the real fun was. The four-lane road was down to about a lane and a half, and milling crowds from the shantytown and the arriving cars were clogging what remained of the thoroughfare. Now goths were parking their cars way back at the intersection and walking over, carrying the objects they'd planned to sacrifice to the ride and smoking clove cigarettes. Sammy saw Death Waits before Death Waits turned his head, and so Sammy had time to duck down before he was spotted. He giggled to himself and chugged his coffee, crouched down below the window. The situation was heating up now. Lots of people were asking questions of the cops. People trying to drive through got shouted at by the people in the road. Sometimes a goth would slam a fist down on a hood and there'd be a little bit of back and forth. It was a powder-keg, and Sammy decided to touch it off. He swung his car out into the road and hit the horn and revved his engine, driving through the crowd just a hair faster than was safe. People slapped his car as it went by and he just leaned on the horn, ploughing through, scattering people who knocked over vendors' tables and stepped on their wares. In his rear-view, he saw the chaos begin. Someone threw a punch, someone slipped, someone knocked over a table of infringing merch. Wa-hoo! Party time! He hit the next left, then pointed his car at the freeway. He reached back and snagged another can of coffee and went to work on it. As the can hissed open, he couldn't help himself: he chuckled. Then he laughed -- a full, loud belly-laugh. # Perry watched it happen as though it were all a dream: The crowds thickening. The cops getting out of their cars and putting their hands on their belts. A distant siren. More people milling around, hanging out in the middle of the road, like idiots, *idiots*. Then that jerk in the car -- what the hell was he thinking, he was going to kill someone! And then it all exploded. There was a knot of fighting bodies over by the tables, and the knot was getting bigger. The cops were running for them, batons out, pepper-spray out. Perry shouted something, but he couldn't hear himself. In a second the crowd noises had gone from friendly to an angry roar. Perry spotted Suzanne watching it all through the viewfinder on her phone, presumably streaming it live, then shouted again, an unheard warning, as a combatant behind her swung wide and clocked her in the head. She went down and he charged for her. He'd just reached her when a noise went off that dropped him to his knees. It was their antipersonnel sound-cannon, which meant that Lester was around here somewhere. The sound was a physical thing, it made his bowels loose and made his head ring like a gong. Thought was impossible. Everything was impossible except curling up and wrapping your hands around your head. Painfully, he raised his head and opened his eyes. All around him, people were on their knees. The cops, though, had put giant industrial earmuffs on, the kind of thing you saw jackhammer operators wearing. They were moving rapidly toward... Lester who was in a pickup truck with the AP horn stuck in the cargo bed, wired into the cigarette lighter. They had guns drawn and Lester was looking at them wide-eyed, hands in the air. Their mouths were moving, but whatever they were saying was inaudible. Perry took his phone out of his pocket and aimed it at them. He couldn't move without spooking them and possibly knocking himself out from the sound, but he could rodneyking them as they advanced on Lester. He could practically read Lester's thoughts: *If I move to switch this off, they'll shoot me dead.* The cops closed on Lester and then the sour old male cop was up in the bed and he had Lester by the collar, throwing him to the ground, pointing his gun. His partner moved quickly and efficiently around the bed, eventually figuring out how to unplug the horn. The silence rang in his head. He couldn't hear anything except a dog-whistle whine from his abused eardrums. Around him, people moved sluggishly, painfully. He got to his feet as quick as he could and drunk-walked to the truck. Lester was already in plastic cuffs and leg-restraints, and the big, dead-eyed cop was watching an armored police bus roll toward them in the eerie silence of their collective deafness. Perry managed to switch his phone over to streaming, so that it was uploading everything instead of recording it locally. He faded back behind some of the cars for cover and kept rolling as the riot bus disgorged a flying squadron of helmeted cops who began to methodically and savagely grab, cuff, and toss the groaning crowd lying flat on the ground. He wanted to add narration, but he didn't trust himself to whisper, since he couldn't hear his own voice. A hand came down on his shoulder and he jumped, squeaked, and fell into a defensive pose, waiting for the truncheon to hit him, but it was Suzanne, grim faced, pointing her own phone. She had a laminated press-pass out in her free hand and was holding it up beside her head like a talisman. She pointed off down the road, where some of the goth kids who'd just been arriving when things went down were more ambulatory, having been somewhat shielded from the noise. They were running and being chased by cops. She made a little scooting gesture and Perry understood that she meant he should be following them, getting the video. He sucked in a big breath and nodded once and set off. She gave his hand a firm squeeze and he felt that her palms were slick with sweat. He kept low and moved slow, keeping the viewfinder up so that he could keep the melee in shot. He hoped like hell that someone watching this online would spring for his bail. Miraculously, he reached the outlier skirmish without being spotted. He recorded the cops taking the goths down, cuffing them, and hooding one kid who was thrashing like a fish on a hook. It seemed that he would never be spotted. He crept forward, slowly, slowly, trying to feel invisible and unnoticed, trying to project it. It worked. He was getting incredible footage. He was practically on top of the cops before anyone noticed him. Then there was a shout and a hand grabbed for his phone and the spell was broken. Suddenly his heart was thundering, his pulse pounding in his ears. He turned on his heel and ran. A mad giggle welled up in his chest. His phone was still streaming, presumably showing wild, nauseous shots of the landscape swinging past as he pumped his arm. He was headed for the ride, for the rear entrance, where he knew he could take cover. He felt the footsteps thud behind him, dimly heard the shouts -- but his temporary deafness drowned out the words. He had his fob out before he reached the doors and he badged in, banging the fob over the touch-plate an instant before slamming into the crash-bar and the doors swung open. He waited in agitation for the doors to hiss shut slowly after him and then it was the gloom of the inside of the ride, dark in his sun-adjusted eyesight. It was only when the doors shivered behind him that he realized what he'd just done. They'd break in and come and get him, and in the process, they'd destroy the ride, for spite. His eyes were adjusting to the gloom now and he made out the familiar/unfamiliar shapes of the dioramas, now black and lacy with goth memorabilia. This place gave him calm and joy. He would keep them from destroying it. He set his phone down on the floor, propped against a plaster skull so that the doorway was in the shot. He walked to the door and shouted as loud as he could, his voice inaudible in his own ears. "I'm coming out now!" he shouted. "I'm opening the doors!" He waited for a two-count, then reached for the lock. He turned it and let the door crash open as two cops in riot-visors came through, pepper-spray at the fore. He was down on the ground, writhing and clawing at his face in an instant, and the phone caught it all. # All Perry wanted was for someone to cut the plastic cuffs off so he could scrub at his eyes, though he knew that would only make it worse. The riot-bus sounded like an orgy, moaning and groaning with dozens of voices every time the bus jounced over a pothole. Perry was on the floor of the bus, next to a kid -- judging from the voice -- who cursed steadily the whole way along. One hard jounce made their heads connect and they both cussed, then apologized to one another, then laughed a little. "My name's Perry." His voice sounded like he was underwater, but he could hear. The pepper spray seemed to have cleared out his sinuses and given him back some of his hearing. "I'm Death Waits." He said it without any drama. Perry wasn't sure if he'd heard right. He supposed he had. Goth kids. "Nice to meet you." "Likewise." Their heads were banged together again. They laughed and cursed. "Christ my face hurts," Perry said. "I'm not surprised. You look like a tomato." "You can see?" "Lucky me, yup. I got a pretty good couple of whacks on the back and shoulders once I was down, but no gas." "Lucky you all right." "I'm more pissed that I lost the tombstone I brought down. It was a real rarity, and it was hard to get, too. I bet it got tromped." "Tombstone, huh?" "From the Graveyard Walk at Disney. They tore it down last week." "And you were bringing it to add it to the ride?" "Sure -- that's where it belongs." Perry's face still burned, but the pain was lessening. Before it had been like his face was on fire. Now it was like a million fire ants biting him. He tried to put it out of his mind by concentrating on the pain in his wrists where the plastic straps were cutting into him. "Why?" There was a long silence. "Has to go somewhere. Better there than in a vault or in the trash." "How about selling it to a collector?" "You know, it never occurred to me. It means too much to go to a collector." "The tombstone means too much?" "I know it sounds stupid, but it's true. You heard that Disney's tearing out all the goth stuff? Fantasyland meant a lot to some of us." "You didn't feel like it was, what, co-opting you?" "Dude, you can buy goth clothes at a chain of mall-stores. We're all over the mainstream/non-mainstream fight. If Disney wants to put together a goth homeland, that's all right with me. And that ride, it was the best place to remember it. You know that it got copied over every night to other rides around the country? So all the people who loved the old Disney could be part of the memorial, even if they couldn't come to Florida. We had the idea last week and everyone loved it." "So you were putting stuff from Disney rides into my ride?" "Your ride?" "Well, I built it." "No fucking way." "Way." He smiled and that made his face hurt. "Dude, that is the coolest thing ever. You built that? How did -- How do you become the kind of person who can build one of those things? I'm out of work and trying to figure out what to do next." "Well, you could join one of the co-ops that's building the other rides." "Sure, I guess. But I want to be the kind of person who invents the idea of making something like that. Did you get an electrical engineering degree or something?" "Just picked it up as I went along. You could do the same, I'm sure. But hang on a sec -- you were putting stuff from Disney rides into my ride?" "Well, yeah. But it was stuff they'd torn down." Perry's eyes streamed. This couldn't be a coincidence, stuff from Disney rides showing up in his ride and the cops turning up to enforce a court order Disney got. But he couldn't blame this kid, who sounded like a real puppy-dog. "Wait, you don't think the cops were there because --" "Probably. No hard feelings though. I might have done the same in your shoes." "Oh shit, I am *so sorry*. I didn't think it through at *all*, I can see that now. Of course they'd come after you. They must totally hate you. I used to work there, they just hate anything that takes a Florida tourist dollar. It's why they built the monorail extension to Orlando airport -- to make sure that from the moment you get off the plane, you don't spend a nickel on anything that they don't sell you. I used to think it was cool, because they built such great stuff, but then they went after the new Fantasyland --" "You can't be a citizen of a themepark," Perry said. The kid barked a laugh. "Man, how true is *that*? You've nailed it, pal." Perry managed to crack an eye, painfully, and catch a blurry look at the kid: a black Edward Scissorhands dandelion clock of hair, eyeliner, frock-coat -- but a baby-face with cheeks you could probably see from the back of his head. About as threatening as a Smurf. Perry felt a sudden, delayed rush of anger. How *dare* they beat up kids like this "Death Waits" -- all he wanted to do was ride a goddamned ride! He wasn't a criminal, wasn't out rolling old ladies or releasing malicious bioorganisms on the beach! The bus turned a sharp corner and their heads banged together again. They groaned and then the doors were being opened and Perry squeezed his eyes shut again. Rough hands seized him and marched him into the station house. The crowd susurrations were liquid in his screwed-up ears. He couldn't smell or see, either. He felt like he was in some kind of terrible sensory deprivation nightmare, and it made him jerky, so whenever a hand took him and guided him to another station in the check-in process (his wallet lifted from his pocket, his cheek swabbed, his fingers pressed against a fingerprint scanner) he flinched involuntarily. The hands grew rougher and more insistent. At one point, someone peeled open his swollen eyelid, a feeling like being stabbed in the eye, and his retina was scanned. He screamed and heard laughter, distant through his throbbing eardrums. It galvanized him. He forced his eyes open, glaring at the cops around him. Mostly they were Florida crackers, middle-aged guys with dead-eyed expressions of impersonal malevolence. There was a tiny smattering of brown faces and women's faces, but they were but a sprinkling when compared to the dominant somatype of Florida law. The next time someone grabbed him to shove him towards the next station on this quest, he jerked his arm away and sat down. He'd seen protestors do this before, and knew that it was hard to move a sitting man expeditiously or with dignity. Hands seized him by the arms, and he flailed until he was free, remaining firmly seated. The laughter was turning to anger now. Beside him, someone else sat. Death Waits, looking white-faced and round-eyed. More people hit the floor. A billy-club was shoved under his arm, which was then twisted into an agonizing position. He was suddenly ready to give up the fight and go along, but he couldn't get to his feet fast enough. With a sickening *crack*, his arm broke. He had a moment's lucid awareness that a bone had broken in his body, and then the pain was on him and he choked out a shout, then a louder one, and then everything went dark. # As it turned out, his prison infirmary time didn't last long at all. Kettlewell had faded fast from the riot, headed back to the guesthouse and got the lawyers on the phone. He'd shown them the stream off of Perry's phone and they were in front of a judge before Perry reached the jail. Perry was led out of the infirmary with his arm in a sling. His face was still painfully swollen, and he'd managed to turn an ankle as well. At least his hearing was coming back. Kettlewell took Perry's good arm and gave him a soulful hug that embarrassed him. Kettlewell led him outside, to where a big cab was waiting. In it were the family Kettlewell, Lester, and Suzanne. Lester had a couple bandages taped to his face and when Suzanne smiled, he saw her lips were stained red and one of her front teeth had been knocked out. He managed a brave smile. "Looks like you guys got the full treatment, huh?" Suzanne squeezed his hand. "Nothing that can't be fixed." Ada and Pascal looked goggle-eyed at them. Ada was popping Korean lotus-bean walnut cakes into her mouth from a greasy paper bag, and she offered them silently to Perry, who took one just to be polite, but found after the first bite that he wasn't really hungry after all. Kettlewell and Perry fought about what to do next, but Kettlewell prevailed. He took them to a private doctor who photographed them and examined them and x-rayed them, documenting everything while Ada Kettlewell played camera-woman with her phone, videoing it all. "I don't think suing the police is going to help, Landon," Perry said. Suzanne nodded vigorously. The three victims were in paper examining gowns, and the Kettlewells were still in street clothes, which gave them a real advantage in the self-confidence department. "It'll help if we cash out a big settlement -- it'll bankroll our defense against the Disney trademark claims. IP lawyers charge more than God per hour. I got the injunction lifted, but we're still going to have to go to court, and that's not going to be cheap." It needled Perry -- he didn't like the idea of being embroiled in the legal system in the first place, and while he could grudgingly admit a certain elegance in using cash settlements from the law to fund their defense in court, the whole business made him squirm. Eva sat down beside him. "I can tell this sucks for you, Perry." Ada whispered the word *sucks* and giggled, and Eva rolled her eyes. "But there's fifty people we *didn't* bail out in there, who are all of them going to have to figure out their own way through the legal system. You can't run a business if your customers risk a solid beating and jail time just for showing up." *I don't want to run a business,* he thought, but he knew that was petulant. He was the man with the roll of bills down his pants. "There are fifty people still in the slam?" Kettlewell nodded. Suzanne had her camera out and she was recording. It had been a long time since Perry had really felt the camera's eye on him. It was one thing to be recorded by some friends for remembrance, but now Suzanne's camera seemed like the gaze of posterity. He needed to rise to it, he knew. "Let's get them out. All of them." Kettlewell raised his eyebrows. "And how do you plan on doing that?" "We'll charge it to the business," Perry said. Lester chuckled and gave him a thump on the back. "It's a legit expense -- these are our *customers* after all." Kettlewell shook his head at all of them, then he left the doctor's office. He already had his phone stuck to his head and was talking with the lawyer before he got out of earshot. Perry and Lester and Suzanne and Eva exchanged mischievous glances, grinning with unexpected delight. Pascal, riding on Eva's hip, woke up and started crying and Eva handed him to Lester while she went for the diaper bag. "Here we go again," Lester said, wrinkling his nose and holding the wailing Pascal at arm's length. Suzanne got it all with her phone, then she flipped it shut and gave Lester a hard kiss on the cheek. "Fatherhood would suit you," she said. He went bright red. "Don't you get any ideas," he said. Suzanne laughed and skipped away, looking all of ten. Perry felt huge. Larger than life. The adventure was beginning anew, with these good people whom he loved like family. He had the work and the people, and who needed anything more. It was a feeling that lasted all the way back to the ride. But then he surveyed the ride itself and found it in utter ruins, far worse than it had been left when he'd been dragged out of it. Every single exhibit was smashed, strewn here and there. He couldn't believe it. He brought up the clean-up lights, flooding the place, and then he saw what he'd missed at first: the smashed exhibits were not smashed exhibits -- they were *replicas* of smashed exhibits. At every ride in the country, police had gone in smashing, and every other ride in the country had faithfully reproduced the damage, dutiful printers churning out replica detritus and dutiful robots placing it with micrometer precision. He began to laugh and couldn't stop. Lester came in and immediately got the joke and laughed along with him. They managed to stop laughing just long enough to explain it to Suzanne and Kettlewell, who didn't find it nearly as funny as they did. Suzanne took pictures. Finally he got down to business, opening the change-log and rolling the ride back through the "revisions" to its unsmashed state. It would take the robots a long time to set everything right again, but at least he didn't have to oversee it. Instead, he tracked down as many of the market-stall vendors as he could locate in the shantytown and made sure they were all right -- they were, though they'd lost some inventory. He comped them all a month's rent and made sure they knew that steps were being taken to keep it from happening again. He knew that they could make nearly as much money selling from a roadside or online, and he wanted to keep them happy. Besides, it wasn't their fault. He was exhausted and his arm was really starting to gripe him. He found himself stopping in the street every few steps to rub his eyes and force himself on. Francis came on him when he was like that, leaning against the prefab concrete wall of one of the tall, twisty shanties, and he took Perry's car-keys away and drove him home. Perry was in too much of a state by the time he got there to think about how Francis would get back -- he was already lying in bed before it occurred to him that the old man with the gimpy leg probably walked the ten miles home. He woke up later that night to sex noises from Lester's room and he recognized Suzanne's voice. Later, he woke again to hear the tail end of another argument between Lester and Suzanne, and then Suzanne storming out of the apartment. *Oh, goody*, he thought. He lay on his back, trying to find sleep again -- the clock said 3AM -- and found thoughts of Hilda drifting unbidden into his mind. It was silly -- they'd only spent one night together, and he had to admit that as great as the sex had been, he'd had better with the fatkins gymnasts you could pick up down on South Beach. She was too young for him. She lived in *Wisconsin*. But there were touches in the ride that had originated with her instantiation -- he looked over the logs every now and then -- and he found himself contemplating them with sentimental smiles. He fell asleep again and only woke when he rolled over on his bad arm and yelped himself awake. The smell of waffles, bacon and eggs was strong in the apartment. He couldn't be bothered to figure out how to shower with his cast on, so he pulled on a pair of shorts and let himself into the living room. Lester was at the stove, cooking up half a pig and pouring maple batter into the waffle-iron. He waved a spatula at him and pointed out at the terrace. Perry stepped out and saw Suzanne and Tjan and Tjan's little kids -- what were their names? Lyenitchka and the little boy? Man, the whole family was here. "Your arm is broken," Lyenitchka said, pointing at him. Perry nodded gravely. "That's true. Want to sign my cast?" He was pretty sure that he had a grease-pencil that would mark the surface, though the hospital had sworn that it would shed dirt, ink and anything else he threw at it. She nodded vigorously. Tjan looked him over and gave a little wave, then Perry went back into the living room and asked his computer to find the grease-pencil. "Thought you'd be busy in Boston," he said, while Lyenitchka painstakingly spelled out her name, going over the letters to get them to show up dark -- the cast surface really didn't want to suck up any tint. "Boston came out OK. We had lawyers on tap at the start and the vibe was cool. I incorporated there, so it was easier than you guys had it. But some of the others were hit bad, like San Francisco and Madison." "*Madison*?" Perry was alarmed by how alarmed he sounded. "Mass arrests. The cops there are real hard-cases, with all this antipersonnel gear left over from the stem-cell riots." Perry jerked and spoiled Lyenitchka's writing. He patted her head and set his arm back down where she could get at it. He groaned. "They're mostly still in. We're trying to get them bailed out, but the judge at the arraignment set bail pretty high." "I'll post it," Perry said. "I can put up my savings or something..." Tjan looked uncomfortable. "Perry, there are 250 people in the lockup in Wisconsin. Some of them are going to skip out, it's nearly a certainty. If you bail them all out, you'll go broke. I mean, it's good to see you and I'm sorry you got hurt and all respect, but don't be an idiot." Perry felt himself go belligerent. His hands went into fists and his broken wing protested. That brought him back to reality. He forced himself to smile. "There's a girl in Madison, I want to make sure she's OK." Tjan and Suzanne stared at him for a second. Then Lester clapped him across the back from behind him, startling him and making him squeak. "Big fella!" he crowed. "I should have known." Perry gave him a mock glare. "*You* have no right to say *anything* on this score." He darted a glance at Suzanne and saw that she was blushing. Tjan took this in and nodded, as though his suspicions had just been confirmed. "Fair enough," Tjan said. "Let's make some inquiries about the young lady. What's her name?" "Hilda Hammersen." Tjan's eyebrows shot up. "Hilda *Hammersen*? From the mailing lists? *That* Hilda?" Hilda was the queen of the mailing lists -- brash, quick, and argumentative, but never the kind of person who started flamewars. Hilda's arguments were hot and fast, and she always won. Perry had watched her admiringly from the sidelines, only weighing in occasionally, but he seemed to remember now that she'd taken Tjan to the cleaners once on an issue of protocol resolution. "That's the one," Perry said. "I always pictured her as being about fifty, with a machete between her teeth," Lester said. "No offense." "Lyenitchka, go get my phone from my bed-stand," Perry said, patting the girl on the shoulder. When she got back he went through his photos of Hilda with them. Lester made a wolf-whistle and Suzanne punched him in the shoulder and took the phone away. "She's very pretty," Suzanne said, disapprovingly. "And very young." "Oh yes, dating younger people is *so* sleazy," Lester said with a chuckle. Suzanne squirmed and even Perry had to laugh. "Guys, here it is. I need to spring Hilda, and we need to do something about all those customers and supporters and so on who went to jail today. We need to fight all the injunctions -- all of them -- and prevent them from recurring." "And we need to eat breakfast, which is ready," Lester said, gesturing at the table behind him, which was stacked high with waffles, sausages, eggs, toast, and pitchers of juice and carafes of coffee. Lyenitchka and Sasha looked at each other and ran to the table, taking seats next to one another. The adults followed and soon they were eating. Perry managed a waffle and a sausage, but then he went off to his room. Hilda was in the slam in Madison, and who the hell knew what the antipersonnel stuff the Madison cops used had done to her. He just wanted to get on a fucking plane and *go there*. Halfway through his shower, he knew that that was what he was going to do. He packed a shoulder-bag, took a couple more painkillers, and walked out into the living room. "Guys, I'm going to Madison. I'll be back in a day or two. We'll work everything out over the phone, OK?" Lester and Suzanne came over to him. "You going to be OK, buddy?" Lester said. "I'll be fine," he said. "We can spring her from here," Tjan said. "We have the Internet, you know." "I know," Perry said. "You do that, OK? And tell her I'll be there as soon as I can." The security at the airport went bonkers over him. The perfect storm: a fresh arrest, a suspicious cast, and a ticket bought with cash. He missed the first two flights to Chicago, but by mid-afternoon he was landing at O'Hare and submitting to an interim screening procedure before boarding for Madison. His phone rang in the middle of the screening, and the wrinkly old TSA goon-lady primly informed him that he might as well get that since once the phone rings, they have to start the procedure over again. "Tjan," he said. "They can't spring her today. Tomorrow, though." He closed his eyes and shut out the TSA goon. She had a huge bouffant of copper hair, and a midwesterner's sense of proportionality when it came to eye-shadow and rouge. She was the kind of woman who could call you "honey" and make it sound like "Islamofascist faggot." "Why not, Tjan?" There was a pause. "She's in the infirmary and they won't release her until tomorrow." "Infirmary." "Nothing serious -- she took a knock on the head and they want to hold her for observation." He pictured a copper's electrified billy-club coming down on shining blond hair and felt like throwing up. "Perry? Buddy. She's OK, really. I had our lawyer visit her in the prison infirmary and she swears she looks great. The lawyer's name is Candice -- take a cab to her office from the airport. OK?" "Why is she in the prison infirmary, Tjan? Why can't she be moved to a real hospital?" "It's just a liability thing. The police don't want to risk the suit if she goes complicated on them between hospitals." "Jesus." "Seriously, she's fine. We've got a good lawyer on the scene." But Perry had a bad feeling. The TSA goon picked up on it and gave him a little bit of extra attention. Acting nervous or agitated in an airport was a one-way ticket to a cavity search. But then he was lifting off and headed for Madison, and though the time crawled on the one-hour flight, it was, after all, only an hour. He even napped briefly, though a sky marshall woke him shortly after for a random bag-search. His fellow passengers -- badly dressed midwesterners and a couple of hipster students -- all turned their bags out in the cramped cabin and then got back in their seats for the landing. Perry had meant to phone in a car reservation at O'Hare, but the extra search had eaten up the time he'd allocated for it, and now all the rental counters were sold out. Reluctantly, he got into a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the office of the lawyers that Tjan had hired. The cabbie was a young African kid with a shaved head. He had a dent in one temple and more dents in one of his wrists, visible as he let his long hands drape over the steering wheel. "I know where it is," he said when Perry gave him the address. "That lawyer, she is very good. She helped me with the Homeland Security." The kid was young, 21 or 22, with a studious air, despite his old injuries. He reminded Perry of the shantytowners, people who didn't always get medical attention for their ailments, people who were often missing a tooth or two, who had mysterious lumps from badly-set bones or scars or funny eyebrows like his. The midwesterners on the plane had been flawless as action-figures, but Perry's friends and this African kid looked like something carved out of coal and chalk. Perry was one big jitter from the trip and the coffee and the pills for his arm, but he found himself drawn into conversation as they whizzed past the fields and malls, the factories and office-parks. "I'm from Gulu, in Uganda. There has been civil war there for thirty five years. I studied chemical engineering through the African Virtual University wiki-program, and qualified for a Chavez scholarship here in Madison." His accent was light but exotic, the African rolling of the Rs, the British-sounding vowel-shifts. "But the Homeland Security didn't want to renew my visa last year. They said I had financial irregularities. I was paypalling to a friend in Kampala who withdrew it in shillings and sent it to my family in giros. Homeland Security said that I was *money laundering*. I thought I'd be sent away or put in prison, but Ms Candice wrote them a letter and they vanished." He snapped his long, knuckly fingers for emphasis. "Jesus. Well, that's good. She's going to help me get my girlfriend out of jail." Perry realized he'd just called Hilda his girlfriend, which would be news to her, but there it was. "You don't need to worry. She'll get your friend free." Perry nodded and tried to close his eyes and relax. He couldn't. What the hell had happened to the world. It had seemed so exciting when his father was bringing home new shapes he'd spun off his CAD/CAM rig. When Perry had started to trade designs with people, to effortlessly find people on the net who wanted to collaborate with him and vice-versa. When Perry had started a business making cool art out of free junk and selling it off an Internet connection that was likewise free. Free, free, free. No need to talk to a government, or grovel for a curator, or put up with an agent or a boss. He'd just assumed all along that he'd end up living in a world where all those parasites and bullies and middlemen would just blow away in the wind. But they'd all found jobs in the new world. They weren't needed anymore, but that didn't mean that they went away. Now they were wanding him in airports and suing him for trademark infringement and busting his girlfriend and breaking his arm and giving hassle to this poor African kid who'd taught himself to be an engineer with a ferchrissakes *wiki*. He dry-swallowed another pain-killer and then remembered that taking the pills meant he wouldn't be able to get a drink, which he could sure as shit use. "My name's Perry," he said. "Richard," the driver said. "We're almost there, Perry. I wish you the very best of luck." "You too," he said. The driver shook his hand warmly after getting his luggage out of the trunk, a limp handshake by North American standards, but gentle and friendly nonetheless. His dented wrist flexed oddly as the half-knit bones there moved. The lawyer's office was not what Perry was expecting. It looked like someone's living room, with a couple of overstuffed sofas, a dozing cat, and the lawyer, Candice, who was a young-looking woman in her mid-twenties. She dressed in jeans and an oversized UW sweatshirt, with a laptop perched on one knee. She had a friendly, open face, framed with lots of curly brown hair. "You must be Perry," she said, setting the laptop down and giving him an unexpected hug. "That was from Hilda. I saw her a couple hours ago. She was very adamant that I pass it on to you." "Nice to meet you, he said, accepting a cup of tea from an insulated jug on a cardboard side-board. "Hilda is all right?" "Sit down," the lawyer said. Perry's stomach turned a somersault. "Hilda's all right?" "Sit." Perry sat. "She was gassed with a neurotoxin that has given her a temporary but severe form of Parkinson's disease. Normally it just renders people immobile, but one in a million has a reaction like this. It's just bad luck that Hilda was one of them." "She was *gassed*?" "They all were. There was a hell of a fight, as I understand it. It really looks like it was the cops' fault. Someone told them that there were printed guns in the ride-location and they used extreme and disproportionate force." "I see," Perry said. His blood whooshed in his ears. Printed guns? No frigging way. Sure, ray-guns in some of the exhibits. But nothing that fired anything. He felt tears begin to stream down his face. The lawyer moved to his sofa and put her arm around his shoulders. "She's going to be fine," Candice said. "The Parkinson's is rare, but it goes away in 100 percent of the the cases where it occurs. What this means is that we've got an amazing chance of taking a huge bite out of the local law that we can use to fund future defense. Tjan told me that that's the strategy and I think it's sound. Plus the harder we hit the law today, the more reluctant they'll be to rush off half-cocked the next time someone trumps up a BS trademark claim. It could be much worse, Perry. There's a kid who lost an eye to a rubber bullet." Perry fisted the tears away. "Let's go get her," he said. "They say she shouldn't be moved," Candice said. "What does our doctor say?" "I phoned a couple MDs this afternoon and got conflicting stories. Everyone agrees that not moving her is safer than moving her, though. The only disagreement is about how dangerous it would be to move her." "Let's go see her, then." "That we can do." Perry had trouble with the search at the prison hospital. His cast and their scanners didn't get along and they couldn't be satisfied with a hand search. For a couple minutes it looked like he was going to be kept out, but Candice -- who had changed into a power-suit before they left the office -- put on a stern voice and demanded to speak to the duty sergeant, and then to his commanding officer, and in ten minutes, they were on the hospital ward, where the metal-railed beds had prisoners handcuffed to them. "Hilda?" She looked sunken and sick, her face slack and her jaw askew. Her eyes opened and rolled crazily, they focused on him. Her body shook through two waves of tremors before she was able to raise a shaking hand toward him, trailing IV tubes. She was trying to say his name, but it wouldn't come out, just a series of plosive Ps. But then he took her hand and felt its fine warmth, the calluses he remembered from all those months ago, and he felt better. Actually better. Felt some peace for the first time in a long time. "Hello, Hilda," he said, and he was smiling so broadly his face hurt, and tears were running down his cheeks and dripping off his nose and running into his mouth. She was weeping, too, her head vibrating like a bobble-doll. He bent over her and took her head in his hands, burying them in her thick blond hair, and kissed her on the lips. She shook under him, but she kissed him back, he could feel her lips move on his. They kissed for a long time. He subconsciously took note of the fact that Candice had moved back, giving them some privacy. When the kiss broke, he had an overwhelming desire to tell her he loved her, but they hadn't taken that step yet, and maybe a prison hospital bed wasn't the right place to make pronouncements of love. "I love you," he said softly, in her ear, kissing the lobe. "I love you, Hilda." She cried harder, and made choking sobs. He hugged her as hard as he dared. Candice came back and stood by them. "They think that she'll be better in the morning. She's already much better off than she was just a couple hours ago. Sleep's the only thing for it. They've got her mildly sedated, too." Hilda smelled like he remembered, the undersmell beneath her shampoo and the chemicals clinging to her hair. It took him back to their night together, and he stroked her cheek. "I'll stay here," he said. "I don't think that they're going to let you do that, Perry. This is a prison, not a hospital." "I'll stay here," he said again. "Just make it happen, OK? We're going to sue them into a smoking hole, right? That's got to give us some leverage. I'll stay here." She sighed and looked at him for a long time, but he wouldn't take his eyes off of Hilda. His broken arm throbbed and he was out of painkillers. They'd have painkillers here. Candice went away, and then, a while later, she came back. "Stay here," she said. "I'll come and get you in the morning." "Thanks," he said. Then he thought that he should say something more, and he turned around, but the lawyer had gone. He fell asleep holding Hilda's hand with his good hand, and woke up with an unbelievable pain in his broken arm and couldn't find a nurse. He bit down on the pain and spent a long watch that night staring at Hilda, thinking of all she meant to him and how weird it was that she meant so much when they'd had so brief a moment together. They hadn't let him bring his phone in, or he'd have taken a thousand pictures of her face in repose. He nodded off again. He woke when she did, stirring in her bed. Her movements were still weak and feeble, but they lacked the uncontrolled tremors of the night before. He leaned in for a kiss, not caring about his sour breath or hers. "Good morning," he said. "Morning, gorgeous," she said, and took him in a soft, sleepy hug. Candice sprung them and took them across town to her doctor, a young man who took great care in examining Hilda, explaining patiently which fluids he was drawing and which tests he planned on running on them. Perry had noticed that midwesterners came in two flavors: big Scandinavian Aryans with giant shoulders and easy smiles, and exchange students and immigrants in varying shades of brown, who looked hurt and bent alongside of the natives -- looked like the people he knew from back home, people who didn't have ready access to medical care or good nutrition in their formative years. The doctor was Vietnamese, but he was at least a couple generations in, judging by his accent, and he had the same midwestern smile and seemed big and bulky compared with the Vietnamese people Perry knew in Florida. He watched the man peer intently at a screen after taping some electrodes to Hilda's head, and felt like he'd come to some land of Norse giants. The doctor eventually told Hilda to go home and rest, and she promised she would. Perry and she got into the back of Candice's car and cuddled up to one another, dozing. It wasn't until Perry got back with her to her apartment -- every stick of furniture made from clever cardboard -- and emptied out his pockets that he remembered to switch his phone on again. He was down to his boxers and she was in cotton PJs with sexy cowgirls printed on them, and when he powered the phone up, it went bonkers, lighting up like a Christmas tree, vibrating, and making urgent bleats. "Shit," he said, and began to sort through the alerts while his back and neck muscles tightened. He sat on the edge of the bed and prodded at the phone with his right hand, holding it awkwardly in his left hand, trying to work around the cast. Hilda took the phone and held it for him so he could work more freely and they both read what was going on. A second round of lawsuits had been filed that night, and the injunctions had been reinstated. The story about the rides being a source of printed arms and munitions had spread, and in San Francisco the ride had been taken apart by Homeland Security bomb robots that had detonated several key pieces of equipment. Three of the San Francisco ride-crew ended up in the hospital after clashes with overreacting cops. Hilda nodded and took the phone from him and set it down. "Right, what's the game-plan?" "How should I know?" Perry said. He could hear the whine in his voice. "I just build stuff. Tjan and Candice say that they think we can sue the cops over the brutality and use the money to fund legal defenses, but Disney's denial-of-service attacking us in the courtroom. They're also getting all this destruction dealt to us by the cops." "You know how you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Let's break this down into small component pieces and work on solutions to them, then call up the troops and let them know what's going on. I'll get a conference call set up while we chat." She was still moving slowly and weakly, and he tried to get her to put down her laptop and rest, but she wasn't having any of it. And so they worked, dividing the problem up into manageable pieces: incorporating a nonprofit co-op, writing the by-laws, getting the word out through the press, re-opening the rides, putting together scrapbooks of the carnage wrought. It all seemed do-able once it was reduced to its component parts. Perry put it all online and then conferenced Tjan and Kettlewell in. "Perry, do you think it's a good idea to tell our enemies how we plan to respond to them?" Hilda shook her head and put a hand on Perry's good arm to calm him down before he answered Kettlewell. "That's how we do it over on our side. Their side is all about secrecy. Our side trades the advantage of surprise for the advantage of openness. You watch -- by tonight we'll have by-laws drafted, press-releases, exhaustive documentation. You watch." On the screen, Lester's face suddenly hove into view, fish-eye distorted by his proximity to the lens. Hilda gave an amused squeak and pulled back. "So that's Yoko, huh?" Lester said, grinning. "Cute! Listen guys, don't let these suits talk you out of what you're doing. This is the right thing. I'm on all the message boards and stuff and they're all champing to do something for real." "Yoko?" Hilda said. She raised an adorable eyebrow. "Just a figure of speech," Lester said. "I'm Lester. You must be Hilda. Perry's told us practically nothing about you, which is probably a sign of something or other." Hilda regarded Perry with mock coolness. "Oh really?" "Lester," Perry said. "I love you like a brother. Shut the fuck up already." Lester made a little whipping motion. Suddenly he was gone from the picture, and they saw Suzanne pulling him away by one ear. Hilda snorted. "I like her," she said. Suzanne gave them a wave and Tjan and Kettlewell came back into frame. They made their goodbyes and hung up. Now Hilda and Perry were alone, together, in her bedroom, laptops shut, day done -- though it was hardly gone noon -- and the silence stretched. "Thanks for coming, Perry," she said. "I --" He broke off. He didn't know what to say. They had only known each other for a day, only had a one-night stand. She probably thought that he was a giant creep. "I was worried." he said. "Um. You should probably rest up some more, right?" He got up and headed for the door. "Where do you think you're going?" she said. "Figured I'd let you rest," he said with a half-shrug. "Get in this bed this instant, young man," she said, slapping the bed beside her. "And get those stinky clothes off before you do -- I won't have you getting my sheets all covered in your travel-grime." He felt the foolish grin spread across his face and he skinned out of his clothes as fast as he could with his cast on. # They didn't leave the house until suppertime, freshly showered (she'd been a delightful help in scrubbing those spots where the cast impeded access) and changed. Perry took a painkiller after the shower, which kicked in as they went out the door, and the autumn evening was crisp and sharp. They got as far as the corner before the man approached them. "Perry Gibbons, isn't it?" He had an English accent, and a little pot-belly, and a big white bubble-jacket and a scarf wound round his throat. "That's right," Perry said. He looked at the guy. "Do I know you?" "No, I don't think so. But I've followed you in the press. Quite remarkable." "Thanks," Perry said. Being recognized -- how weird was that. Cool that it happened in front of Hilda. "This is Hilda," he said. She took the man's hand, and he grinned, showing two long rat-like front teeth. "Fred," he said. "What an absolute delight running into you out here of all places. What are you doing in town?" "Just visiting with friends," Perry said. "Wasn't there some kind of dust-up at your place in Florida? I saw what they did to the ride here, what a bloody mess." "Yeah," Perry said. He pointed at his casted arm. "Seemed like a good time to get out of Dodge." Hilda said, "We're getting some dinner, if you'd like to come along." "I wouldn't want to intrude." "No, it's no sweat, we've got a whole bunch of people associated with the ride meeting us. You'd be more than welcome." "Goodness, that *is* hospitable of you. How can I refuse?" Luke and Ernie were there with their girlfriends, and there were more kids, midwestern and healthy even if they weren't necessarily all Scandic, some Vietnamese kids, some Hmong, some desis descended from the H1B diaspora. They had a gigantic meal in a student place that was heavy on the potatoes and beers the size of your head, which Perry resisted for a couple hours until he figured that he'd metabolized most of the painkiller and then started in, getting just short of roaring drunk. He told them war stories, told them about Death Waits, told them about the co-op and the plan to fight back. "That just doesn't sound right to me," said a friend of Luke's, a law-school grad student who had been bending Perry's ear all night with stories from his law-clinic work defending university students from music-industry lawsuits. "I mean, sure, go after the cops because they roughed you guys up, but how much money do the cops have? You gotta target some fat cash, and for that you want to go after Disney. Abuse of trademark, abuse of process, something like that. The standard's pretty high, but if you can get a judgement, the money is incredible. You could take them to the cleaners." Perry looked blearily at him. He was young, like all of them, but he had a good rhetorical style that Perry recognized as something born of real confidence. He knew his stuff, or thought he did. He had a strawberry mark on his high forehead that looked like a map of a distant island, and Perry thought that the mark probably threw off the kid's opponents. "So we sue Disney and five years from now we cash in -- how does that help us now?" The kid nodded. "I hoped you'd ask me that. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Here's what you need to do, dude, here's the fucking thing." The room had grown silent. Everyone leaned closer. Fred poured Perry another beer from the pitcher in the middle of the table. "Here's how you do it. You raise investment capital for it. There's a ton of money in this, a ton. Disney's got deep pockets and you've got a great case. "But like you say, it'll take ten, fifteen years to get the money out of them. And it'll cost a mil in legal fees on the way. So what you do is, you create an investment syndicate. You can maybe get thirty million out of Disney, plus whatever the jury awards in punitives, and if you keep half of it, you can deliver a fifteen-x return on investment. So go find a millionaire and borrow sixteen million, and turn the defense over to him." Perry was dumbstruck. "You're joking. How can that possibly work?" "It's how patent lawsuits work! Some dickhead engineer gets a bogus patent for his doomed startup, and as they're sinking into the mud, some venture capitalist comes and buys the company up just so it can go around and threaten other companies with real businesses for violating the patent. They ask for sums just below what it would cost to get the US Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate the patent, and everyone ponies up. Venture capitalism is the major source of funding for commercial lawsuits these days." Fred laughed and clapped. "Brilliant! Perry, that's just brilliant. Are you going to do it?" Perry looked at the table, doodling in the puddles of beer with a fingertip. "I just want to get back to making stuff, you know. This is nuts. Devoting ten years of my life to suing someone?" "You don't have to do the suing. That's the point. You outsource that. You get the money; someone else does the business stuff." Hilda put her arm around his shoulders. "Give the suits something to occupy themselves with -- otherwise they get antsy and stir up trouble." Perry and Hilda laughed like it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. Fred and the others joined in, and Perry scrawled a drunken note to Tjan and Kettlewell with the info. The party broke up not long after, amid much chortling and snorting, and they staggered home. Fred gave Perry a warm handshake and treated Hilda to a lingering, sloppy hug until she pushed him off, laughing even harder. "All right then," Perry said, "home again home again." Hilda gave his groin a friendly honk and then made a dash for it, and he gave chase. # PHOTO: A Drunken Perry Gibbons Gets a How's Your Father From Ride-Bride Hilda Hammersen MADISON, WI: Say you managed to inspire some kind of "movement" of techno-utopians who built a network of amusement park rides that guide their visitors through an illustrated history of the last dotcom bubble. Say that your merry band of unwashed polyamorous info-hippies was overtaken by jackbooted thugs from one of the dinosauric media empires of yesteryear, whose legal machinations resulted in nationwide raids, beatings, gassings, and the total shutdown of your "movement." What would you do? Sue? Call a press-conference? Bail your loyal followers out of the slam? Get laid, get shitfaced, and let a bunch of students spitball bullshit ideas for fighting back? If you picked the latter, you're in good company. Last night, Perry Gibbons, soi-disant "founder" of the rideafarian religious cult, was spotted out for drinks and cuddles with a group of twentysomething students in the backwater town of Madison, WI, a place better known for its cheddar than its activism. While Gibbons regaled the impressionable post-adolescents with tales of his derring-do, he avidly noted their strategic suggestions for solving his legal, paramilitary, and technical problems. One suggestion that drew Gibbons's attention and admiration was to approach venture capitalists and beg them for the capital to sue Disney and then use the settlements from the suits to pay back the VCs. This mind-croggling Ponzi scheme is the closest thing to a business model we've yet heard of from the chip-addled techno-hippies of the New Work and its post-boom incarnation. One can only imagine how our Ms Church will cover this in her fan-blog: breathless admiration for Mr Gibbons's cunning in soliciting yet more "way out of the box" thinking from the Junior Guevaras of the Great Midwest, no doubt. Perhaps Gibbons can be afforded a little sympathy, though. His latest encounter with Florida law left him with a broken arm and it may be that the pain medication is primarily responsible for Gibbons's fancy thinking. If that's the case, we can only hope that his young, blond Scandie nursie will carefully minister him back to health (while his comrades rot in gaol around the country). This organization needs to die before it gets someone killed. Comments? Write to Freddy at honestfred@techstink.co.uk # Lester interrupted Suzanne's phone-call to break in and announce that he'd run Rat-Toothed Freddy to ground: the reporter had caught the first flight from Madison to Chicago and then gone west to San Jose. The TSA had flagged him as a person-of-interest and were watching his movements, and a little digging on its website could cause it to disclose Freddy's every airborne movement. Suzanne relayed this to Perry. "Don't you go there," she said. "He's gunning for the San Francisco crew, and he's hoping for a confrontation or a denunciation so that he can print it. He gets idees fixes that he worries at like a terrier, going for more bile." "Is he a psycho? What the hell is his beef with me?" "I think that he thinks that technology hasn't lived up to its promise and that we should all be demanding better of our tech. So for him, that means that anyone who actually *likes* technology is the enemy, the worst villain, undermining the case for bringing tech up to its true potential." "Fuck, that is so twisted." "And given the kind of vile crap he writes, the only readers he has are nut-cases who get off on seeing people who are actually creating stuff flayed alive for their failures. They egg him on -- ever see one of his letters columns? If he changed to actual reportage, telling the balanced stories of what was going on in the world, they'd jump ship for some other hate-monger. He's a lightning-rod for assholes -- he's the king of the trolls." Perry looked away. "What do I do?" "You could try to starve him. If you don't show your head, he can't report on you, except by making stuff up -- and made-up stuff gets boring, even for the kinds of losers who read his stuff." "But I've got work to do." "Yeah, yeah you do. Maybe you've just got to take your lumps. Every complex ecosystem has parasites after all. Maybe you just call up San Francisco and brief them on what to expect from this guy and take it from there." Once they were off the line, Lester came up behind her and hugged her at the waist, squeezing the little love-handles there, reminding her of how long it had been since she'd made it to yoga. "You think that'll work?" "Maybe. I've been talking to the *New Journalism Review* about writing a piece on moral responsibility and paid journalism, and if I can bang it out this aft, I bet they'll publish it tomorrow." "What's that going to do?" "Well, it'll distract him from Perry, maybe. It might get his employer to take a hard look at what he's writing -- I mean that piece is just lies, mischaracterizations, and editorial masquerading as reportage." She put her lid down and paced around the condo, looking at the leaves floating in the pool. "It'll give me some satisfaction." Lester gave her a hug, and it smelled of the old days and the old Lester, the giant, barrel-chested pre-fatkins Lester. It took her back to a simpler time, when they'd had to worry about commercial competition, not police raids. She hugged him back. He was all hard muscle and zero body-fat underneath his tight shirt. She'd never dated anyone that fit, not even back in high-school. It was a little disorienting, and it made her feel especially old and saggy sometimes, though he never seemed to notice. Speaking of which, she felt his erection pressing against her midriff, and tried to hide her grin. "Gimme a couple hours, all right?" She dialed the NJR editor's number as she slid into her chair and pulled up a text-editor. She knew what she planned on writing, but it would help to be able to share an outline with the NJR if she was going to get this out in good time. Working with editors was a pain after years of writing for the blog, but sometimes you wanted someone else's imprimatur on your work. Five hours later, the copy was filed. She rocked back in her chair and stretched her arms high over her head, listening to the crackle of her spine. She'd been half-frozen by the air conditioning, so she'd turned it off and opened a window, and now the condo was hot and muggy. She stripped down to her underwear and headed for the shower, but before she could make it, she was intercepted by Lester. He fell on her like a dog on dinner, and hours slipped by as they made the apartment even muggier. Lester's athleticism in the sack was flattering, but sometimes boundless to the point of irritation. She was rescued from it this time by the doorbell. Lester put on a bathrobe and answered the door, and she heard the sounds of the family Kettlewell spilling in, the kids' little footfalls pounding up and down the corridors. Hurriedly, Suzanne threw on a robe and ducked across the corridor into the bathroom, but not before catching sight of Eva and Landon. Eva's expression was grimly satisfied; Landon looked stricken. Fuck it, anyway. She'd never given him any reason to hope, and he had no business hoping. Halfway through her shower, she heard someone moving around in the bathroom, and thinking it was Lester, she stuck her head around the curtain, only to find Ada on the pot, little jeans around her ankles. "I hadda make," Ada said, with a shrug. Christ. What was she doing back here, anyway? She'd missed it all so much from Petersburg. But she hadn't really bargained for this. It was only a matter of time until Tjan showed up too, surely they'd be wanting a council of war after Freddy's opening salvo. She waited for the little girl to flush (ouch! hot water!) and got dressed as discreetly as possible. By the time she got to the balcony where the council of war was under way, the two little girls, Lyenitchka and Ada, had gotten Pascal up on the sofa and were playing dress up with him, hot-gluing Barbie heads to his cheeks and arms and chubby knees, like vacantly staring warts. "Do you like him?" "I think he looks wonderful, girls. Is that glue OK for him, though?" Ada nodded vigorously. "I've been gluing things to my brother with that stuff forever. Dad says it's OK so long as I don't put it in his eyes." "Your dad's a smart man." "He's in love with you," Lyenitchka said, and giggled. Ada slugged her in the arm. "That's supposed to be a secret, stupid," Ada said. Flustered, Suzanne ducked out onto the patio and shut the door behind her. Eva and Tjan and Kettlewell all turned to look at her. "Suzanne!" Tjan said. "Nice article." "Is it up already?" "Yeah, just a couple minutes ago." Tjan held up his phone. "I've got a watch-list for anything to do with Freddy that gets a lot of link-love in a short period. Your piece rang the cherries." She took the phone from him and looked at the list of links that had been found to the *NJR* piece. Three of the diggdots had picked up the story, since they loved to report on anything that made fun of Freddy -- he was a frequent savager of their readers' cherished beliefs, after all -- and thence it had wormed its way all around the net. In the time she'd needed to take a shower, her story had been read by about three million people. She felt a twinge of regret for not publishing it on her blog -- that would have been some serious advertising coin. "Well, there you have it." "What do you suppose he'll come back with?" Kettlewell said, then looked uncomfortably at Eva. She pretended not to notice, and continued to stare at the grimy Hollywood palms, swimming pools and freeways. "Something nasty and full of lies, no doubt." # Nerd Groupie Church Finds Fatkins Love with Ride Sidekick Sources close to the Hollywood, Florida ride-cult have revealed that Suzanne Church, the celebrity blogger who helped inflate the New Work stock bubble, is in the midst of a romantic entanglement with one of the cult's co-founders. Church recently came out of retirement in St Petersburg, where she has been producing PR^H^H journalistic accounts of the new generation of Russian experimental plastic surgery butchers. Church was lured back by the promise of a story about the ride-network that was founded by her old pals from the New Work pump-and-dump, Lester Banks and Perry Gibbons. Now on the scene are more familiar faces: Landon Kettlewell, the disgraced former CEO of Kodacell, and Tjan Tang, the former business manager of the Banks/Gibbons scam. But not long after arriving on the scene, Church fell in with Banks, an early fatkins and stalwart of the New Work movement, a technologist who entranced his fellow engineers with his accounts of the New Work's many "inventions" -- prompting one message-board commenter to characterize him as "a cross between Steve Wozniak and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon." Now, eyewitness accounts have them going at it like shagging marmots, as the bio-enhanced Banks falls on Church's wrinkly carcass half a dozen times a day, apparently consummating a romance that blossomed while Banks was, to put it bluntly, a giant fat bastard. It seems that radical weight-loss has put Banks into the category of "blokes that Suzanne Church is willing to play hide the sausage with." All this would be mere sordid gossip but for the fact that Church is once again glowingly chronicling the adventures of the Florida cultists, playing journalist, without a shred of impartiality or disclosure. One can only imagine when the other, financial shoe will drop. For wherever Church goes, money isn't far behind: surely there's a financial aspect to this business with the ride. UPDATE: Indeed there is: further anonymous tipsterism reveals that papers have been filed to create a "co-operative" structured like a classic Ponzi scheme, in which franchise operators of the ride are expected to pay membership dues further up the ladder. All the romance of Church's accounts will certainly find a fresh batch of suckers -- if there's one thing we know about Suzanne Church, it's that she knows how to separate a mark from his money. # Lester ran the ride basically on his own that week, missing his workshop and his tinkering, thinking of Suzanne, wishing that Perry was back already. He wasn't exactly a people person, and there were a *lot* of people. "I brought some stuff," the goth kid said as he paid for his ticket, hefting two huge duffel bags. "That's still OK, right?" Was it? Damned if Lester knew. The kid had a huge bruise covering half of his face, and Lester thought he recognized him from the showdown -- Death Waits, that's what Perry had said. "Sure, it's fine." "You're Lester, right?" Christ, another one. "Yes, that's me." "Honest Fred is full of shit. I've been reading your posts since forever. That guy is just jealous because your girlfriend outed him for being such a lying asshole." "Yeah." Death Waits wasn't the first one to say words to this effect -- Suzanne had had that honor -- and he wouldn't be the last. But Lester wanted to forget it. He'd liked the moments of fame he'd gained from Suzanne's writing, from his work on the message boards. He'd even had a couple of fanboys show up to do a little interview for their podcast about his mechanical computer. That had been nice. But "blokes that Suzanne Church is willing to play hide the sausage with" -- ugh. Suzanne was holding it together as far as he could tell. But she didn't seem as willing to stick her neck out to broker little peaces between Tjan and Kettlewell anymore, and those two were going at it hammer and tongs now, each convinced that he was in charge. Tjan reasoned that since he actually ran one of the most-developed rides in the network that he should be the executive, with Kettlewell as a trusted adviser. Kettlewell clearly felt that he deserved the crown because he'd actually run global businesses, as opposed to Tjan, who was little more than a middle manager. Neither had said exactly that, but that was only because whenever they headed down that path, Suzanne interposed herself and distracted them. No one asked Lester or Perry, even though they were the ones who'd invented it all. It was all so fucked up. Why couldn't he just make stuff and do stuff? Why did it always have to turn into a plan for world domination? In Lester's experience, most world-domination plans went sour, while a hefty proportion of modest plans to Make Something Cool actually worked out pretty well, paid the bills, and put food on the table. The goth kid looked expectantly at him. "I'm a huge fan, you know. I used to work for Disney, and I was always watching what you did to get ideas for new stuff we should do. That's why it's so totally suckballs that they're accusing you of ripping them off -- we rip you off all the time." Lester felt like he was expected to do something with that information -- maybe deliver it to some lawyer or whatever. But would it make a difference? He couldn't get any spit in his mouth over legal fights. Christ -- legal fights! "Thanks. You're Death Waits, right? Perry told me about you." The kid visibly swelled. "Yeah. I could help around here if you wanted, you know. I know a lot about ride-operating. I used to train the ride-runners at Disney, and I could work any position. If you wanted." "We're not really hiring --" Lester began. "I'm not looking for a job. I could just, you know, help. I don't have a job or anything right now." Lester needed to pee. And he was sick of sitting here taking people's money. And he wanted to go play with his mechanical computer, anyway. "Lester? Who's the kid taking ticket money?" Suzanne's hug was sweaty and smelled good. "Look at this," Lester said. He flipped up his magnifying goggles and handed her the soda can. He'd cut away a panel covering the whole front of the can, and inside he'd painstakingly assembled sixty-four flip-flops. He turned the crank on the back of the can slowly, and the correct combination of rods extended from the back of the can, indicating the values represented on the flip-flops within. "It's a sixty-four bit register. We could build a shitkicking Pentium out of a couple million of these." He turned the crank again. The can smelled of solder and it had a pleasant weight in his hand. The mill beside him hummed, and on his screen, the parts he'd CADded up rotated in wireframe. Suzanne was at his side and he'd just built something completely teh awesome. He'd taken his shirt off somewhere along the afternoon's lazy, warm way and his skin prickled with a breeze. He turned to take Suzanne in his arms. God he loved her. He'd been in love with her for years now and she was his. "Look at how cool this thing is, just look." He used a tweezer to change the registers again and gave it a little crank. "I got the idea from the old Princeton Institute Electronic Computer Project. All these geniuses, von Neumann and Dyson, they brought in their kids for the summer to wind all the cores they'd need for their RAM. Millions of these things, wound by the kids of the smartest people in the universe. What a cool way to spend your summer. "So I thought I'd prototype the next generation of these, a 64-bit version that you could build out of garbage. Get a couple hundred of the local kids in for the summer and get them working. Get them to understand just how these things work -- that's the problem with integrated circuits, you can't take them apart and see how they work. How are we going to get another generation of tinkerers unless we get kids interested in how stuff works?" "Who's the kid taking ticket money?" "He's a fan, that kid that Perry met in jail. Death Waits. The one who brought in the Disney stuff." He gradually became aware that Suzanne was rigid and shaking in his arms. "What's wrong?" Her face was purple now, her hands clenched into fists. "What's wrong? Lester, what's wrong? You've left a total stranger, who, by his own admission, is a recently terminated employee of a company that is trying to bankrupt you and put you in jail. You've left him in charge of an expensive, important capital investment, and given him the authority to collect money on your behalf. Do you really need to ask me what's wrong?" He tried to smile. "It's OK, it's OK, he's only --" "Only what? Only your possible doom? Christ, Perry, you don't even have fucking *insurance* on that business." Did she just call him Perry? He carefully set down the Coke can and looked at her. "I'm down here busting my *ass* for you two, fighting cops, letting that shit Freddy smear my name all over the net, and what the hell are you doing to save yourself? You're in here playing with Coke cans!" She picked it up and shook it. He heard the works inside rattling and flinched towards it. She jerked it out of his reach and threw it, *threw it* hard at the wall. Hundreds of little gears and ratchets and rods spilled out of it. "Fine, Lester, fine. You go on being an emotional ten-year-old. But stop roping other people into this. You've got people all over the country depending on you and you are just *abdicating* your responsibility to them. I won't be a part of it." She was crying now. Lester had no idea what to say now. "It's not enough that Perry's off chasing pussy, you've got to pick this moment to take French leave to play with your toys. Christ, the whole bunch of you deserve each other." Lester knew that he was on the verge of shouting at her, really tearing into her, saying unforgivable things. He'd been there before with other friends, and no good ever came of it. He wanted to tell her that he'd never asked for the responsibility, that he'd lived up to it anyway, that no one had asked her to put her neck on the line and it wasn't fair to blame him for the shit that Freddy was putting her through. He wanted to tell her that if she was in love with Perry, she should be sleeping with Perry, and not him. He wanted to tell her that she had no business reaming him out for doing what he'd always done: sit in his workshop. He wanted to tell her that she had never once seen him as a sexual being when he was big and fat, but that he had no trouble seeing her as one now that she was getting old and a little saggy, and so where did she get off criticizing his emotional maturity? He wanted to say all of this, and he wanted to take back his 64-bit register and nurse it back to health. He'd been in a luminous creative fog when he'd built that can, and who knew if he'd be able to reconstruct it? He wanted to cry, to blubber at her for the monumental unfairness of it all. He stood stiffly up from his workbench and turned on his heel and walked out. He expected Suzanne to call out to him, but she didn't. He didn't care, or at least he didn't want to. # Sammy skipped three consecutive Theme-Leaders' meetings, despite increasingly desperate requests for his presence. The legal team was eating every spare moment he had, and he hadn't been able to get audience research to get busy on his fatkins project. Now he was behind schedule -- not surprising, given that he'd pulled his schedule out of his ass to shut up Wiener and co -- and dealing with lawyers was making him crazy. And to top it all off, the goddamned rides were back up and running. So the last thing he wanted was a visit from Wiener. "They're suing us, you know. They raised *venture capital* to sue us, because we have such deep pockets. You know that, Sammy?" "I know it, Wiener. People sue us all the time. Venture capitalists have deep pockets, too, you know -- when we win, we'll take them to the cleaners. Christ, why am I having this conversation with you? Don't you have something productive to do? Is Tomorrowland so fucking *perfect* that you've come around to help me with my little projects?" "Someone's a little touchy today," Wiener said, wagging a finger. "I just wanted to see if you wanted some help coming up with a strategy for getting out of this catastrophe, but since you mention it, I *do* have work I could be doing. I'll see you at the next Theme-Leaders' meeting, Sam. Missing three is grounds for disciplinary action, you know." Sammy sat back in his chair and looked coolly at Wiener. Threats now. Disciplinary action. He kept on his best poker face, looking past Wiener's shoulder (a favorite trick for staring down adversaries -- just don't meet their eyes). In his peripheral vision, he saw Wiener wilt, look away and then turn and leave the room. He waited until the door had shut, then slumped in his seat and put his face in his hands. God, and shit, and damn. How did it all go so crapola? How did he end up with a theme-area that was half-shut, record absenteeism, and even a goddamned *union organizer* just the day before, whom he'd had to have security remove. Florida laws being what they were, it was a rare organizer brave enough to try to come on an employer's actual premises to do his dirty work, no one wanted a two-year rap without parole for criminal trespass and interference with trade. The kid had been young, about the same age as Death Waits and the castmembers, and had clearly been desperate to collect his bounty from SEIU. He'd gone hard, struggling and kicking, shouting slogans at the wide-eyed castmembers and few guests who watched him go away. Having him taken away had given Sammy a sick feeling. They hadn't had one of those vultures on the premises in three years, and never on Sammy's turf. What next, what next? How much worse could it get? "Hi, Sammy." Hackelberg wasn't the head of the legal department, but he was as high up in the shadowy organization as Sammy ever hoped to meet. He was old and leathery, the way that natives to the Sunbelt could be. He loved to affect ice-cream suits and had even been known to carry a cane. When he was in casual conversation, he talked "normal" -- like a Yankee newscaster. But the more serious he got, the deeper and thicker his drawl got. Sammy never once believed that this was accidental. Hackelberg was as premeditated as they came. "I was just about to come over and see you," Sammy lied. Whatever problem had brought Hackelberg down to his office, it would be better to seem as though he was already on top of it. "I expect you were." *Were* came out *Wuh* -- when the drawl got that far into the swamps that quickly, disaster was on the horizon. Hackelberg let the phrase hang there. Sammy sweated. He was good at this game, but Hackelberg was better. Entertainment lawyers were like fucking vampires, evil embodied. He looked down at his desk. "Sammy. They're coming back after us --" *They-ah comin' back aft-ah us*. "Those ride people. They did what we thought they'd do, incorporating into a single entity that we can sue once and kill for good, but then they did something else. Do you know what they did, Sammy?" Sammy nodded. "They're countersuing. We knew they'd do that, right?" "We didn't expect they'd raise a war-chest like the one they've pulled together. They have a *business-plan* built around suing us for the next fifteen years, Sammy. They're practically ready to float an IPO. Have you seen this?" He handed Sammy a hardcopy of a chic little investment newsletter that was so expensive to subscribe to that he'd suspected until now that it might just be a rumor. HOW DO YOU GET RID(E) OF A BILLION? The Kodacell experiment recognized one fundamental truth: it's easy to turn ten thousand into two hundred thousand, but much harder to turn ten million into two hundred million. Scaling an investment up to gigascale is so hard, it's nearly impossible. But a new paradigm in investment that's unfolding around us that might actually solve the problem: venture-financed litigation. Twenty or thirty million sunk into litigation can bankrupt a twenty billion-dollar firm, transferring to the investors whatever assets remain after legal fees. It sounds crazy, and only time will tell whether it proves to be sustainable. But the founder of the strategy, Landon Kettlewell, has struck gold for his investors more than once -- witness the legendary rise and fall of Kodacell, the entity that emerged from the merger of Kodak and Duracell. Investors in the first two rounds and the IPO on Kodacell brought home 30X returns in three years (of course, investors who stayed in too long came away with nothing). Meanwhile, Kettlewell's bid to take down Disney Parks looks good -- the legal analysis of the vexatious litigation and unfair competition charges have legal scholars arguing and adding up the zeros. Most damning is the number of former Disney Parks employees (or "castmembers" in the treacly dialect of the Magic Kingdom) who've posted information about the company's long-term plan to sabotage Kettlewell's clients. Likewise fascinating is the question of whether the jury will be able to distinguish between Disney Parks, whose corporate citizenship is actually pretty good, from Disney Products, whose record has been tainted by a string of disastrous child-labor, safety, and design flaws (astute readers will be thinking of the "flammable pajamas" flap of last year, and CEO Robert Montague's memorable words, "Parents who can't keep their kids away from matches have no business complaining about *our* irresponsibility"). Punitive jury awards are a wild-card in this kind of litigation, but given the trends in recent years, things look bad for Disney Parks. Bottom line: should your portfolio include a litigation-investment component? Yes, unequivocally. While risky and slow to mature, litigation-investments promise a staggering return on investment not seen in decades. A million or two carefully placed with the right litigation fund could pay off enough to make it all worthwhile. This is creative destruction at its finest: the old dinosaurs like Disney Parks are like rich seams of locked-away capital begging to be liquidated and put to work at nimbler firms. How can you tell if you've got the right fund? Come back next week, when we'll have a Q&A with a litigation specialist at Credit Suisse/First Boston. # "There's litigation specialists at Credit Suisse?" He was big, Hackelberg, though he often gave the impression of being smaller through his habitual slouch. But when he pulled himself up, it was like a string in the center of the top of his head was holding him erect, like he was hovering off the ground, like he was about to leap across the desk and go for your throat. His lower jaw rocked from side to side. "They do now, Sammy. Every investment bank has one, including the one that the chairman of our board is a majority shareholder in." Sammy swallowed. "But they've got just as deep pockets as we do -- can't we just fight these battles out and take the money off of them when we win?" "If we win." Sammy saw his opportunity to shift the blame. "If we've been acting on good legal advice, why wouldn't we win?" Hackelberg inhaled slowly, his chest filling and filling until his ice-cream suit looked like it might pop. His jaw clicked from side to side. But he didn't say anything. Sammy tried to meet that cool gaze, but he couldn't out-stare the man. The silence stretched. Sammy got the message: this was not a problem that originated in the legal department. This was a problem that originated with him. He looked away. "How do we solve this?" "We need to raise the cost of litigation, Samuel. The only reason this is viable is that it's cost-effective to sue us. When we raise the cost of litigation, we reduce its profitability." "How do we raise the cost of litigation?" "You have a fertile imagination, Sammy. I have no doubt that you will be able to conceive of innumerable means of accomplishing this goal." "I see." "I hope you do. I really hope you do. Because we have an alternative to raising the cost of litigation." "Yes?" "We could sacrifice an employee or two." Sammy picked up his water-glass and discovered that it was empty. He turned away from his desk to refill it from his filter and when he turned back, the lawyer had gone. His mouth was dry as cotton and his hands were shaking. Raise the cost of litigation, huh? He grabbed his laptop. There were ways to establish anonymous email accounts, but he didn't know them. Figuring that out would take up the rest of the afternoon, he realized, as he called up a couple of FAQs. In the course of a career as varied and ambitious as Sammy's, it was often the case that you ran across an email address for someone you never planned on contacting, but you never knew, and a wise planner makes space for lots of outlier contingencies. Sammy hadn't written down these email addresses. He'd committed them to memory. # Death Waits was living the dream. He took people's money and directed them to the ride's entrance, making them feel welcome, talking ride trivia. Some of his pals spotted him at the desk and enviously demanded to know how he came to be sitting on the other side of the wicket, and he told them the incredible story of the fatkins who'd simply handed over the reins. This, this was how you ran a ride. None of that artificial gloopy sweetness that defined the Disney experience: instead, you got a personal, informal, human-scale experience. Chat people up, find out their hopes and dreams, make admiring noises at the artifacts they'd brought to add to the ride, kibbitz about where they might place them.... Around him, the bark of the vendors. One of them, an old lady in a blinding white sun-dress, came by to ask him if he wanted anything from the coffee-cart. There had been a time, those first days when they'd rebuilt Fantasyland, when he'd really felt like he was part of the magic. No, The Magic, with capital letters. Something about the shared experience of going to a place with people and having an experience with them, that was special. It must be why people went to church. Not that Disney had been a religion for him, exactly. But when he watched the park he'd grown up attending take on the trappings that adorned his favorite clubs, his favorite movies and games -- man, it had been a piece of magic. And to be a part of it. To be an altar boy, if not a priest, in that magical cathedral they'd all built together in Orlando! But it hadn't been real. He could see that now. At Disney, Death Waits had been a customer, and then an employee ("castmember" -- he corrected himself reflexively). What he wanted, though, was to be a *citizen*. A citizen of The Magic -- which wasn't a Magic Kingdom, since kingdoms didn't have citizens, they had subjects. He started to worry about whether he was going to get a lunch break by about two, and by three he was starving. Luckily that's when Lester came back. He thanked Death profusely, which was nice, but he didn't ask Death to come back the next day. "Um, when can I come back and do this some more?" "You *want* to do this?" "I told you that this morning -- I love it. I'm good at it, too." Lester appeared to think it over. "I don't know, man. I kind of put you in the hot-seat today, but I don't really have the authority to do it. I could get into trouble --" Death waved him off. "Don't sweat it, then," he said with as much chirp as he could muster, which was precious fucking little. He felt like his heart was breaking. It was worse than when he'd finally asked out a co-worker who'd worked the Pinocchio Village Haus and she had her looked so horrified that he'd made a joke out of it, worried about a sexual harassment complaint. Lester clearly caught some of that, for he thought some more and then waved his hands. "Screw her anyway. Meet me here at ten tomorrow. You're in." Death wasn't sure he'd heard him right. "You're kidding." "No man, you want it, you got it. You're good at it, like you said." "Holy -- thanks. Thank you so much. I mean it. Thank you!" He made himself stop blithering. "Nice to meet you," he said finally. "Have a great evening!" Yowch. He was speaking castmemberese. *Nice one, Darren*. He'd saved enough out of his wages from his first year at Disney to buy a little Shell electric two-seater, and then he'd gone way into debt buying kits to mod it to look like a Big Daddy Roth coffin-dragster. The car sat alone at the edge of the lot. Around him, a slow procession of stall-operators, with their arms full, headed for the freeway and across to the shantytown. Meanwhile, he nursed his embarrassment and tried to take comfort in the attention that his gleaming, modded car evinced. He loved the decorative spoilers, the huge rear tires, the shining muffler-pipes running alongside the bulging running-boards. He stepped in and gripped the bat-shaped gearshift, adjusted the headstone-shaped headrest, and got rolling. It was a long drive back home to Melbourne, and he was reeling from the day's events. He wished he'd gotten someone to snap a pic of him at the counter. Shit. He pulled off at a filling station after a couple hours. He needed a piss and something with guarana if he was going to make it the rest of the way home. It was all shut down, but the automat was still open. He stood before the giant, wall-sized glassed-in refrigerator and dithered over the energy-drinks. There were chocolate ones, salty ones, colas and cream sodas, but a friend had texted him a picture of a semi-legal yogurt smoothie with taurine and modafinil that sounded really good. He spotted it and reached to tap on the glass and order it just as the fat guy came up beside him. Fat guys were rare in the era of fatkins, it was practically a fashion-statement to be chunky, but this guy wasn't fashionable. He had onion-breath that Death could smell even before he opened his mouth, and he was wearing a greasy windbreaker and baggy jeans. He had a comb-over and needed a shave. "What the hell are you supposed to be?" "I'm not anything," Death Waits said. He was used to shit-kickers and tourists gawping at his shock of black hair with its viridian green highlights, his white face-paint and eyeliner, his contact lenses that made his whole eyes into zombie-white cue-balls. You just had to ignore them. "You don't look like nothing to me. You look like something. Something you'd dress up a six year old as for Halloween. I mean, what the fuck?" He was talking quietly and without rancor, but he had a vibe like a basher. He must have arrived at the deserted rest-stop while Death Waits was having a piss. Death Waits looked around for a security cam. These rest-stops always had a license-plate cam at the entrance and a couple of anti-stickup cams around the cashier. He spotted the camera. Someone had hung a baseball hat over its lens. He felt his balls draw up toward his abdomen and his breathing quicken. This guy was going to fucking mug him. Shit shit shit. Maybe take his *car*. "OK," Death said, "nice talking to you." He tried to step around the guy, but he side-stepped to block Death's path, then put a hand on Death's shoulder -- it was strong. Death had been mugged once before, but the guy hadn't touched him; he'd just told him, fast and mean, to hand over his wallet and phone and then had split. "I'm not done," the guy said. "Look, take my wallet, I don't want any trouble." Apart from two glorious sucker-punches at Sammy, Death had never thrown a punch, not since he'd flunked out of karate lessons at the local strip-mall when he was twelve. He liked to dance and he could run a couple miles without getting winded, but he'd seen enough real fights to know that it was better to get away than to try to strike out if you didn't know what you were doing. "You don't want any trouble, huh?" Death held out his wallet. He could cancel the cards. Losing the cash would hurt now that he didn't have a day-job, but it was better than losing his teeth. The guy smiled. His onion breath was terrible. "*I* want trouble." Without any pre-amble or wind-up, the guy took hold of the earring that Death wore in his tragus, the little knob of cartilage on the inside of his ear, and briskly tore it out of Death's head. It was so sudden, the pain didn't come at once. What came first was a numb feeling, the blood draining out of his cheeks and the color draining out of the world, and his brain double- and triple-checking what had just happened. *Did someone just tear a piece out of my ear? Tear? Ear?* Then the pain roared in, all of his senses leaping to keen awareness before maxing out completely. He heard a crashing sound like the surf, smelled something burning, a light appeared before his eyes, an acrid taste flooded his mouth and his ear felt like there was a hot coal nestled in it, charring the flesh. With pain came the plan: *get the fuck out of there*. He took a step back and turned to run, but there was something tangled in his feet -- the guy had bridged the distance between them quickly, very quickly, and had hooked a foot around his ankle. He was going to fall over. He landed in a runner's crouch and tried to start running, but a boot caught him in the butt, like an old-timey comedy moment, and he went sprawling, his chin smacking into the pavement, his teeth clacking together with a sound that echoed in his head. "Get the fuck up," the guy said. He was panting a little, sounding excited. That sound was the scariest thing so far. This guy wanted to kill him. He could hear that. He was some kind of truck-stop murderer. Death's fingers were encrusted in heavy silver rings -- stylized skulls, a staring eyeball, a coffin-shaped poisoner's ring that he sometimes kept artificial sweetener in, an ankh, an alien head with insectile eyes -- and he balled his hands into fists, thinking of everything he'd ever read about throwing a punch without breaking your knuckles. *Get close. Keep your fist tight, thumb outside. Don't wind up or he'll see it coming.* He slowly turned over. The guy's eyes were in shadow. His belly heaved with each excited pant. From this angle, Death could see the guy had a gigantic boner. The thought of what that might bode sent him into overdrive. He couldn't afford to let this guy beat him up. He backed up to the rail that lined the walkway and pulled himself upright. He cowered in on himself as much as he could, hoping that the guy would close with him, so he could get in one good punch. He muttered indistinctly, softly, hoping to make the man lean in. His ring-encrusted hands gripped the railings. The guy took a step toward him. His lips were wet, his eyes shone. He had a hand in his pocket and Death realized that getting his attacker close in wouldn't be smart if he had a knife. The hand came out. It was pudgy and stub-fingered, and the fingernails were all gnawed down to the quick. Death looked at it. Spray-can. Pepper-spray? Mace? He didn't wait to find out. He launched himself off the railing at the fat man, going for his wet, whistling cave of a mouth. The man nodded as he came for him and let him paste one on him. Death's rings drew blood on the fat cheek and rocked the guy's head back a bit. The man stepped back and armed away the blood with his sleeve. Death was running for his car, hand digging into his pocket for his phone. He managed to get the phone out and his hand on the door handle before the fat man caught up, breathing heavily, air whistling through his nose. He punched Death in the mouth in a vastly superior rendition of Death's sole brave blow, a punch so hard Death's neck made a crackling sound as his head rocked away, slamming off the car's frame, ringing like a gong. Death began to slide down the car's door, and only managed to turn his face slightly when the man sprayed him with his little aerosol can. Mace. Death's breath stopped in his lungs and his face felt as if he'd plunged it into boiling oil. His eyes felt worse, like dirty fingers were sandpapering over his eyeballs. He choked and fell over and heard the man laugh. Then a boot caught him in the stomach and while he was doubled over, it came down again on his skinny shin. The sound of the bone breaking was loud enough to be heard over the roaring of the blood in his ears. He managed to suck in a lungful of air and scream it out, and the boot connected with his mouth, kicking him hard and making him bite his tongue. Blood filled his mouth. A rough hand seized him by the hair and the rasping breath was in his ears. "You should just shut the fuck up about Disney on the fucking Internet, you know that, kid?" The man slammed his head against the pavement. "Just. Shut. The. Fuck. Up." Bang, bang, bang. Death thought he'd lose consciousness soon -- he'd had no idea that pain could be this intense. But he didn't lose consciousness for a long, long time. And the pain could be a lot more intense, as it turned out. # Sammy didn't want the writer meeting him at his office. His organization had lots of people who'd been loyal to the old gothy park and even to Death Waits. They plotted against him. They wrote about him on the fucking Internet, reporting on what he'd eaten for lunch and who'd shouted at him in his office and how the numbers were declining and how none of the design crews wanted to work on his new rides. The writer couldn't come to the office -- couldn't come within miles of the park. In fact, if Sammy had had his way, they would have done this all by phone, but when he'd emailed the writer, he'd said that he was in Florida already and would be happy to come and meet up. Of course he was in Florida -- he was covering the ride. The trick was to find a place where no one, but no one, from work would go. That meant going as touristy as possible -- something overpriced and kitschy. Camelot was just the place. It had once been a demolition derby stadium, and then had done turns as a skate-park, a dance-club and a discount wicker furniture outlet. Now it was Orlando's number two Arthurian-themed dining experience, catering to package-holiday consolidators who needed somewhere to fill the gullets of their busloads of tourists. Watching men in armor joust at low speed on glue-factory nags took care of an evening's worth of entertainment, too. Sammy parked between two giant air-conditioned tour coaches, then made his way to the entrance. He'd told the guy what he looked like, and the guy had responded with an obvious publicity shot that made him look like Puck from a boys'-school performance of *A Midsummer Night's Dream* -- unruly hair, mischievous grin. When he turned up, though, he was ten years older, a cigarette jammed in the yellowing crooked stumps of his teeth. He needed a shower and there was egg on the front of his denim jacket. "I'm Sammy," Sammy said. "You must be Freddy." Freddy spat the cigarette to one side and shook with him. The writer's palms were clammy and wet. "Pleasure to meet you," Freddy said. "Camelot, huh?" "Taste of home for you, I expect," Sammy said. "Tally ho. Pip pip." Freddy scrunched his face up in an elaborate sneer. "You are joking, right?" "I'm joking. If I wanted to give you a taste of home, I'd have invited you to the Rose and Crown Pub in Epcot: 'Have a jolly ol' good time at the Rose and Crown!'" "Still joking, I trust?" "Still joking," Sammy said. "This place does a decent roast beef, and it's private enough." "Private in the sense of full of screaming stupid tourists stuffing their faces?" "Exactly." Sammy took a step toward the automatic doors. "Before we go in, though," Freddy said. "Before we go in. Why are you talking to me at all, Mr Disney Parks Executive?" He was ready for this one. "I figured that sooner or later you'd want to know more about this end of the story that you've been covering. I figured it was in my employer's best interest to see to it that you got my version." The reporter's grin was wet and mean. "I thought it was something like that. You understand that I'm going to write this the way I see it, not the way you spin it, right?" Sammy put a hand on his heart. "Of course. I never would have asked anything less of you." The reporter nodded and stepped inside the air-conditioned, horsey-smelling depths of Camelot. The greeter had acne and a pair of tights that showed off his skinny knock-knees. He took off his great peaked cap with its long plume and made a stiff little bow. "Greetings, milords, to Camelot. Yon feast awaits, and our brave knights stand ready to do battle for their honor and your amusement." Freddy rolled his eyes at Sammy, but Sammy made a little scooting gesture and handed the greeter their tickets, which were ringside. If he was going to go to a place like Camelot, he could at least get the best seats in the house. They settled in and let the serving wench -- whose fancy contact lenses, piercings, and electric blue pony-tails were seriously off-theme -- take their roast beef orders and serve them gigantic pewter tankards of "ale"; Bud Light, and the logo was stamped into the sides of the tankards. "Tell me your story, then," Freddy said. The tourists around them were noisy and already a little drunk, their conversation loud to be heard over the looping soundtrack of ren faire polka music. "Well, I don't know how much you know about the new Disney Parks organization. A lot of people think of us as being just another subsidiary of the Mouse, like back in the old days. But since the IPO, we're our own company. We license some trademarks from Disney and operate rides based on them, but we also aggressively license from other parties -- Warners, Universal, Nintendo. Even the French comic-book publisher responsible for Asterix. That means that we get a lot of people coming in and out of the organization, contractors or consultants working on designing a single ride or show. "That creates a lot of opportunities for corporate espionage. Knowing what properties we're considering licensing gives the competition a chance to get there ahead of us, to land an exclusive deal that sets us back on square one. It's ugly stuff -- they call it 'competitive intelligence' but it's just spying, plain old spying. "All of our employees have been contacted, one time or another, by someone with an offer -- get me a uniform, or a pic of the design roughs, or a recording of the soundtrack, or a copy of the contracts, and I'll make it worth your while. From street-sweepers to senior execs, the money is just sitting there, waiting for us to pick it up." The wench brought them their gigantic pewter plates of roast-beef, Yorkshire pudding, parsnips, and a mountain of french fries, presumably to appease the middle-American appetites of the more unadventurous diners. Freddy sliced off a throat-plugging lump of beef and skewered it on his fork. "You're going to tell me that the temptation overwhelmed one of your employees, yes?" He shoved the entire lump into his mouth and began to masticate it, cheeks pouched out, looking like a kid with a mouthful of bubble-gum. "Precisely. Our competitors don't want to compete with us on a level playing field. They are, more than anything, imitators. They take the stuff that we carefully build, based on extensive research, design and testing, and they clone it for parking-lot amusement rides. There's no attention to detail. There's no attention to safety! It's all cowboys and gypsies." Freddy kept chewing, but he dug in the pockets of his sports-coat and came up with a small stubby notebook and a ball-point. He jotted some notes, shielding the pad with his body. "And these crass imitators enter into our story how?" Freddy asked around his beef. "You know about these New Work people -- they call themselves 're-mixers' but that's just a smokescreen. They like to cloak themselves in some post-modern, 'Creative Commons' legitimacy, but when it comes down to it, they made their fortune off the intellectual property of others, uncompensated use of designs and technologies that others had invested in and created. "So when they made a ride, it wasn't much of much. Like some kind of dusty Commie museum, old trophies from their last campaign. But somewhere along the way, they hooked up with one of these brokers who specializes in sneaking our secrets out of the park and into the hands of our competitors and quick as that, they were profitable -- nationally franchised, even." He stopped to quaff his Bud Light and surreptitiously checked out the journalist to see how much of this he was buying. Impossible to say. He was still masticating a cheekful of rare roast, juice overflowing the corners of his mouth. But his hand moved over his pad and he made an impatient go-on gesture with his head, swallowing some of his payload. "We fired some of the people responsible for the breaches, but there will be more. With 50,000 castmembers --" The writer snorted a laugh at the Disney-speak and choked a little, washing down the last of his mouthful with a chug of beer. "-- 50,000 *employees* it's inevitable that they'll find more. These ex-employees, meanwhile, have moved to the last refuge of the scoundrel: Internet message boards, petulant tweets, and whiny blogs, where they're busily running us down. We can't win, but at least we can stanch the bleeding. That's why we've brought our lawsuits, and why we'll bring the next round." The journalist's hand moved some more, then he turned a fresh page. "I see, I see. Yes, all fascinating, really. But what about these countersuits?" "More posturing. Pirates love to put on aggrieved airs. These guys ripped us off and got caught at it, and now they want to sue us for their trouble. You know how counter-suits work: they're just a bid to get a fast settlement: 'Well, I did something bad but so did you, why don't we shake hands and call it a day?'" "Uh huh. So you're telling me that these intellectual property pirates made a fortune knocking off your rides and that they're only counter-suing you to get a settlement out of you, huh?" "That's it in a nutshell. I wanted to sit down with you, on background, and just give you our side of things, the story you won't get from the press-releases. I know you're the only one trying to really get at the story behind the story with these people." Freddy had finished his entire roast and was working his way through the fries and limp Yorkshire pudding. He waved vigorously at their serving wench and hollered, "More here, love!" and quaffed his beer. Sammy dug into his cold dinner and speared up a forkful, waiting for Freddy to finish swallowing. "Well, that's a very neat little story, Mr Disney Executive off the record on background." Sammy felt a vivid twinge of anxiety. Freddy's eyes glittered in the torchlight. "Very neat indeed. "Let me tell you one of my own. When I was a young man, before I took up the pen, I worked a series of completely rubbish jobs. I cleaned toilets, I drove a taxi, I stocked grocery shelves. You may ask how this qualified me to write about the technology industry. Lots of people have, in fact, asked that. "I'll tell you why it qualifies me. It qualifies me because unlike all the ivory-tower bloggers, rich and comfortable geeks whose masturbatory rants about Apple not honoring their warranties are what passes for corporate criticism online, I've been there. I'm not from a rich family, I didn't get to go to the best schools, no one put a PC in my bedroom when I was six. I worked for an honest living before I gave up honest work to write. "As much as the Internet circle-jerk disgusts me, it's not a patch on the businesses themselves. You Disney people with your minimum wage and all the sexual harassment you can eat labor policies in your nice right-to-work state, you get away with murder. Anyone who criticizes you does so on your own terms: Is Disney exploiting its workers too much? Is it being too aggressive in policing its intellectual property? Should it be nicer about it? "I'm the writer who doesn't watch your corporations on your own terms. I don't care if another business is unfairly competing with your business. I care that your business is unfair to the world. That it aggressively exploits children to get their parents to spend money they don't have on junk they don't need. I care that your workers can't unionize, make shit wages, and get fired when they complain or when you need to flex your power a little. "I grew up without any power at all. When I was working for a living, I had no say at all in my destiny. It didn't matter how much shit a boss wanted to shovel on me, all I could do was stand and take it. Now I've got some power, and I plan on using it to setting things to rights." Sammy chewed his roast long past the point that it was ready to swallow. The fact that he'd made an error was readily apparent from the start of Freddy's little speech, but with each passing minute, the depth of his error grew. He'd really fucked up. He felt like throwing up. This guy was going to fuck him, he could tell. Freddy smiled and quaffed and wiped at his beard with the embroidered napkin. "Oh, look -- the jousting's about to start," he said. Knights in armor on horseback circled the arena, lances held high. The crowd applauded and an announcer came on the PA to tell them each knight's name, referring them to a program printed on their placemats. Sammy pretended to be interested while Freddy cheered them on, that same look of unholy glee plain on his face. The knights formed up around the ring and their pimply squires came out of the gate and tended to them. There was a squire and knight right in front of them, and the squire tipped his hat to them. Freddy handed the kid a ten-dollar bill. Sammy never tipped live performers; he hated buskers and panhandlers. It all reminded him of stuffing a stripper's G-string. He liked his media a little more impersonal than that. But Freddy was looking at him, so with a weak little smile, he handed the squire the smallest thing in his wallet -- a twenty. The jousting began. It was terrible. The "knights" couldn't ride worth a damn, their "lances" missed one another by farcical margins, and their "falls" were so obviously staged that even the chubby ten year old beside him was clearly unimpressed. "Got to go to the bathroom," he said into Freddy's ear. In leaning over, he contrived to get a look at the reporter's notebook. It was covered in obscene doodles of Mickey Mouse with a huge erection, Minnie dangling from a noose. There wasn't a single word written on it. What little blood was left in Sammy's head drained into his feet, which were leaden and uncoordinated on the long trip to the filthy toilets. He splashed cold water on his face in the sink, and then headed back toward his seat. He never made it. From the top of the stairs leading down to ringside, he saw Freddy quaffing more ale and flirting with the wench. The thunder of horse-hooves and the soundtrack of cinematic music drowned out all sounds, but nothing masked the stink of the manure falling from the horses, half of which were panicking (the other half appeared to be drugged). This was a mistake. He thought Freddy was a gossip reporter who liked juicy stories. Turned out he was also one of those tedious anti-corporate types who would happily hang Sammy out to dry. Time to cut his losses. He turned on his heel and headed for the door. The doorman was having a cigarette with a guy in a sports-coat who was wearing a manager badge on his lapel. "Leaving so soon? The show's only just getting started!" The manager was sweating under his sports-coat. He had a thin mustache and badly died chestnut hair cut like a Lego character's. "Not interested," Sammy said. "All the off-theme stuff distracted me. Nose-rings. Blue hair. Cigarettes." The doorman guiltily flicked his cigarette into the parking lot. Sammy felt a little better. "I'm sorry to hear that, sir," the manager said. He was prematurely grey under the dye-job, for he couldn't have been more than thirty-five. Thirty-five years old and working a dead-end job like this -- Sammy was thirty-five. This is where he might end up if his screw-ups came back to haunt him. "Would you like a comment-card?" "No," Sammy said. "Any outfit that can't figure out clean toilets and decent theming on its own can't benefit from my advice." The doorman flushed and looked away, but the manager's smile stayed fixed and calm. Maybe he was drugged, like the horses. It bothered Sammy. "Christ, how long until this place gets turned into a roller-derby again?" "Would you like a refund, sir?" the manager asked. He looked out at the parking lot. Sammy followed his gaze, looking above the cars, and realized, suddenly, that he was standing in a cool tropical evening. The sky had gone the color of a ripe plum, with proud palms silhouetted against it. The wind made them sway. A few clouds scudded across the moon's luminous face, and the smell of citrus and the hum of insects and the calls of night birds were vivid on the evening air. He'd been about to say something cutting to the manager, one last attempt to make the man miserable, but he couldn't be bothered. He had a nice screened-in porch behind his house, with a hammock. He'd sat in it on nights like this, years ago. Now all he wanted to do was sit in it again. "Good night," he said, and headed for his car. # Perry's cast *stank*. It had started to go a little skunky on the second day, but after a week it was like he had a dead animal stuck to his shoulder. A rotting dead animal. A rotting, itchy dead animal. "I don't think you're supposed to be doing this on your own," Hilda said, as he sawed awkwardly at it with the utility knife. It was made of something a lot tougher than the fiberglass one he'd had when he broke his leg falling off the roof as a kid (he'd been up there scouting out glider possibilities). "So you do it," he said, handing her the knife. He couldn't stand the smell for one second longer. "Uh-uh, not me, pal. No way that thing is supposed to come off anytime soon. If you're going to cripple yourself, you're going to have to do it on your own." He made a rude sound. "Fuck hospitals, fuck doctors, and fuck this fucking cast. My arm barely hurts these days. We can splint it once I get this off, that'll immobilize it. They told me I'd need this for *six weeks*. I can't wear this for six weeks. I'll go nuts." "You'll go lame if you take it off. Your poor mother, you must have driven her nuts." He slipped and cut himself and winced, but tried not to let her know, because that's exactly what she'd predicted would happen. After a couple days together, she'd become an expert at predicting exactly which of his escapades would end in disaster. It was a little spooky. Blood oozed out from under the cast and slicked his hand. "Right, off to the hospital. I told you you'd get this thing wet if you got in the shower. I told you that it would stink and rot and itch if you did. I told you to let me give you a sponge bath." "I'm not insured." "We'll go to the free clinic." Defeated, he let her lead him to her car. She helped him buckle in, wrinkling her nose. "What's wrong, baby?" she said, looking at his face. "What are you moping about?" "It's just the cast," he said, looking away. She grabbed him by the chin and turned him to face her. "Look, don't do that. Do *not* do that. If something's bothering you, we're going to talk about it. I didn't sign up to fall in love with the strong silent type. You've been sulking all day, now what's it about?" He smiled in spite of himself. "All right, I give in. I miss home. They're all in the middle of it, running the ride and stuff, and I'm here." He felt a moment's worry that she'd be offended. "Not that I don't love being here with you, but I'm feeling guilty --" "OK, I get it. Of course you feel guilty. It's your project, it's in trouble, and you're not taking care of it. Christ, Perry, is that all? I would have been disappointed if this wasn't worrying you. Let's go to Florida then." "What?" She kissed the tip of his nose. "Take me to Florida, let's meet your friends." "But..." Were they moving in together or something? He was totally smitten with this girl, but that was *fast*. Even for Perry. "Don't you need to be here?" "They can live without me. It's not like I'm proposing to move in with you. I'll come back here after a while. But I'm only doing two classes this term and they're both offered by distance-ed. Let's just go." "When?" "After the hospital. You need a new cast, stinkmeister. Roll down your window a little, OK? Whew!" The doctors warned him to let the new cast set overnight before subjecting it to the rigors of a TSA examination, so they spent one more night at Hilda's place. Perry spent it going over the mailing list traffic and blog posts, confirming the plane tickets, ordering a car to meet them at the Miami airport. He finally managed to collapse into bed at 3AM, and Hilda grabbed him, dragged him to her, and spooned him tightly. "Don't worry, baby. Your friends and I will get along great." He hadn't realized that he'd been worrying about this, but once she pointed it out, it was obvious. "You're not worried?" She ran her hands over his furry chest and tummy. "No, of course not. Your friends will love me or I'll have them killed. More to the point, they'll love me because you love me and I love you and they love you, too." "What does Ernie think of me?" he said, thinking of her brother for the first time since they'd hooked up all those months ago. "Oh, hum," she said. He stiffened. "No, it's OK," she said, rubbing his tummy some more. It tickled. "He's glad I'm with someone I care about, and he loves the ride. He's just, you know. Protective of his big sister." "What's he worried about?" "Just what you'd expect. We live thousands of miles apart. You're ten years older than me. You've been getting into the kind of trouble that attracts armed cops. Wouldn't you be protective if you were my bro?" "I was an only child, but sure, OK, I see that." "It's nothing," she said. "Really. Bring him a nice souvenir from Florida when we come back to Madison, take him out for a couple beers and it'll all be great." "So we're cool? All the families are in agreement? All the stars are in alignment? Everything is hunky and/or dory?" "Perry Gibbons, I love you dearly. You love me. We've got a cause to fight for, and it's a just one with many brave comrades fighting alongside of us. What could possibly go wrong?" "What could possibly go wrong?" Perry said. He drew in a breath to start talking. "It was rhetorical, goofball. It's also three in the morning. Sleep, for tomorrow we fly." # Lester didn't want to open the ride, but someone had to. Someone had to, and it wasn't Perry, who was off with his midwestern honey. Lester would have loved to sleep in and spend the day in his workshop rebuilding his 64-bit registers -- he'd had some good ideas for improving on the initial design, and he still had the CAD files, which were the hard part anyway. He walked slowly across the parking lot, the sunrise in his eyes, a cup of coffee steaming in his hand. He'd almost gone to the fatkins bars the night before -- he'd almost gone ten, fifteen times, every time he thought of Suzanne storming out of his lab, but he'd stayed home with the TV and waited for her to turn up or call or post something to her blog or turn up on IM, and when none of those things had happened by 4AM, he tumbled into bed and slept for three hours until his alarm went off again. Blearily, he sat himself down behind the counter, greeted some of the hawkers coming across the road, and readied his ticket-roll. The first customers arrived just before nine -- an East Indian family driving a car with Texas plates. Dad wore khaki board-shorts and a tank-top and leather sandals, Mom was in a beautiful silk sari, and the kids looked like mall-bangbangers in designer versions of the stuff the wild kids in the shantytown went around in. They came out of the ride ten minutes later and asked for their money back. "There's nothing in there," the dad said, almost apologetically. "It's empty. I don't think it's supposed to be empty, is it?" Lester put the roll of tickets into his pocket and stepped into the Wal-Mart. His eyes took a second to adjust to the dark after the brightness of the rising Florida sun. When they were fully adjusted, though, he could see that the tourist was right. Busy robots had torn down all the exhibits and scenes, leaving nothing behind but swarming crowds of bots on the floor, dragging things offstage. The smell of the printers was hot and thick. Lester gave the man his money back. "Sorry, man, I don't know what's going on. This kind of thing should be impossible. It was all there last night." The man patted him on the shoulder. "It's all right. I'm an engineer -- I know all about crashes. It just needs some debugging, I'm sure." Lester got out a computer and started picking through the logs. This kind of failure really should be impossible. Without manual oversight, the bots weren't supposed to change more than five percent of the ride in response to another ride's changes. If all the other rides had torn themselves down, it might have happened, but they hadn't, had they? No, they hadn't. A quick check of the logs showed that none of the changes had come from Madison, or San Francisco, or Boston, or Westchester, or any of the other ride-sites. Either his robots had crashed or someone had hacked the system. He rebooted the system and rolled it back to the state from the night before and watched the robots begin to bring the props back from offstage. How the hell could it have happened? He dumped the logs and began to sift through them. He kept getting interrupted by riders who wanted to know when the ride would come back up, but he didn't know, the robots' estimates were oscillating wildly between ten minutes and ten hours. He finally broke off to write up a little quarter-page flier about it and printed out a couple hundred of them on some neon yellow paper stock he had lying around, along with a jumbo version that he taped over the price-list. It wasn't enough. Belligerent riders who'd traveled for hours to see the ride wanted a human explanation, and they pestered him ceaselessly. All the hawkers felt like they deserved more information than the rubes, and they pestered him even more. All he wanted to do was write some regexps that would help him figure out what was wrong so he could fix it. He wished that Death kid would show up already. He was supposed to be helping out from now on and he seemed like the kind of person who would happily jaw with the marks until the end of time. Eventually he gave up. He set the sign explaining what had happened (or rather, not explaining, since he didn't fucking know yet) down in the middle of the counter, bolted it down with a couple of lock-bolts, and retreated to the ride's interior and locked the smoked-glass doors behind him. Once he had some peace and quiet, it took only him a few minutes to see where the changes had originated. He verified the info three times, not because he wasn't sure, but because he couldn't tell if this was good news or bad news. He read some blogs and discovered lots of other ride-operators were chasing this down but none of them had figured it out yet. Grinning hugely, he composed a hasty post and CCed it to a bunch of mailing lists, then went out to find Kettlebelly and Tjan. He found them in the guesthouse, sitting down to a working breakfast, with Eva and the kids at the end of the table. Tjan's little girl was trying to feed Pascal, but not doing a great job of it; Tjan's son sat on his lap, picking at his clown-face pancakes. "Morning guys!" Suzanne narrowed her eyes and looked away. The table fell quiet -- even the kids sensed that something was up. "Who's watching the ride, Lester?" Tjan asked, quietly. "It's shut," he said cheerfully. "*Shut*?" Tjan spoke loudly enough that everyone jumped a little. Lyenitchka accidentally stabbed Pascal with the spoon and he started to wail. Suzanne stood up from the table and walked quickly out of the guesthouse, holding on to her phone as a kind of thin pretense of having to take a call. Lester chose to ignore her. Lester held his hands out placatingly. "It's OK -- it's just down for a couple hours. I had to reset it after what happened last night." Lester waited. "All right," Eva said, "I'll bite. What happened last night?" "Brazil came online!" Lester said. "Like twenty rides opened there. But they got their protocol implementation a little wrong so when I showed up, the whole ride had been zeroed out. I'm sure I can help them get it right; in the meantime I've got the ride resetting itself and I've blackholed their changes temporarily." He grinned sunnily. "How fucking cool is that? Brazil!" They smiled weakly back. "I don't think I understand, Lester," Kettlewell said. "Brazil? We don't have any agreements with anyone in Brazil." "We have agreements with everyone in Brazil!" Lester said. "We've got an open protocol and a server that anyone can connect to. That's an agreement, that's all a protocol is." Kettlewell shook his head. "You're saying that all anyone needed to do to reprogram our ride --" "-- was to connect to it and send some changes. Trust is assumed in the system." "Trust is *assumed*? You haven't changed this?" Lester took a step back. "No, I haven't changed it. The whole system is open -- that's the point. We can't just start requiring logins to get on the network. The whole thing would collapse -- it'd be like putting locks on the bathroom and then taking the only key for yourself. We just can't do it." Kettlewell looked like he was going to explode. Tjan put a hand on his arm. Slowly, Kettlewell sat back down. Tjan took a sip of his coffee. "Lester, can you walk me through this one more time?" Lester rocked back and forth a little. They were all watching him now, except for Suzanne, who was fuming somewhere or getting ready to go home to Russia, or something. "We have a published protocol for describing changes to the ride -- it's built on Git3D's system for marking up and syncing three-d models of objects; it's what we used all through the Kodacell days for collaboration. The way you get a ride online is to sync up with our version-server and then instantiate a copy. Then any changes you make get synced back and we instantiate them. Everyone stays in sync, give or take a couple hours." "But you had passwords on the Subversion server for objects, right?" "Yeah, but we didn't design this one to take passwords. It's a lot more ad-hoc -- we wanted to be sure that people we didn't know could get in and play." Kettlewell put his face in his hands and groaned. Tjan rolled his eyes. "I think what Kettlewell's trying to say is that things have changed since those carefree days -- we're in a spot now where if Disney or someone else who hated us wanted to attack us, this would be a prime way of doing it." Lester nodded. "Yeah, I figured that. Openness always costs something. But we get a lot of benefits out of openness too. The way it works now is that no one ride can change more than five percent of the status quo within 24 hours without a manual approval. The problem was that the Brazilians opened, like, *fifty* rides at the same time, and each of them zeroed out and tried to sync that and between them they did way more than 100 percent. It'd be pretty easy to set things up so that no more than five percent can be changed, period, within a 24-hour period, without manual approval." "If you can do that, why not set every change to require approval?" Kettlewell said. "Well, for starters because we'd end up spending all our time clicking OK for five-centimeter adjustments to prop-positioning. But more importantly, it's because the system is all about community -- we're not in charge, we're just part of the network." Kettlewell made a sour face and muttered something. Tjan patted his arm again. "You guys *are* in charge, as much as you'd like not to be. You're the ones facing the legal hassles, you're the ones who invented it." "We didn't, really," Lester said. "This was a real standing on the shoulders of giants project. We made use of a bunch of stuff that was on the shelf already, put it together, and then other people helped us refine it and get it working well. We're just part of the group, like I keep saying." He had a thought. "Besides, if we were in charge, Brazil wouldn't have been able to zero us out. "You guys are being really weird and suit-y about this, you know? I've fixed the problem: no one can take us down like this again. It just won't happen. I've put the fix on the version-server for the codebase, so everyone else can deploy it if they want to. The problem's solved. We'll be shut for an hour or two, but who cares? You're missing the big picture: Brazil opened fifty rides *yesterday*! I mean, it sucks that we didn't notice until it screwed us up, but Brazil's got it all online. Who's next? China? India?" "Russia?" Kettlewell said, looking at the door that Suzanne had left by. He was clearly trying to needle Lester. Lester ignored him. "I'd love to go to Brazil and check out how they've done it. I speak a little Portuguese even -- enough to say, 'Are you 18 yet?' anyway." "You're *weird*," Lyenitchka said. Ada giggled and said, "Weird!" Eva shook her head. "The kids have got a point," she said. "You people are all a little weird. Why are you fighting? Tjan, Landon, you came here to manage the business side of things, and that's what you're doing. Lester, you're in charge of the creative and technical stuff and that's what you're doing. Without Lester, you two wouldn't have any business to run. Without these guys, you'd be in jail or something by now. Make peace, because you're on the same side. I've got enough children to look after here." Kettlewell snapped a nod at her. "Right as ever, darling. OK, I apologize, all right?" "Me too," Lester said. "I was kidding about going to Brazil -- at least while Perry's still away." "He's coming home," Tjan said. "He called me this morning. He's bringing the girl, too." "Yoko!" Lester said, and grinned. "OK, someone should get online and find out how all the other rides are coping with this. I'm sure they're going nutso out there." "You do that," Kettlewell said. "We've got another call with the lawyers in ten minutes." "How's all that going?" "Let me put it this way," Kettlewell said, and for a second he was back in his glory days, slick and formidable, a shark. "I liquidated my shares in Disney this morning. They're down fifty points since the NYSE opened. You wait until Tokyo wakes up, they're going to bail and bail and bail." Lester smiled back. "OK, well that's good, then." He hunkered down with a laptop and got his homebrew wireless rig up and running -- a card would have been cheaper, but his rig gave him lots of robustness against malicious interference, multi-path and plain old attenuation -- and got his headline reader running. He set to reading the posts and dispelling the popups that tried to call his attention to this or that. His filters had lots to tell him about, and the areas of his screen designated for different interests were starting to pinken as they accumulated greater urgency. He waved them away and concentrated on getting through to all the ride-maintainers who had questions about his patches. But there was one pink area that wouldn't go. It was his serendipity zone, where things that didn't match his filters but had lots of interestingness -- comments and reposts from people he paid attention to -- and some confluence with his keywords turned up. Impatiently, he waved it up, and a page made of bits of LiveJournals and news reports and photo-streams assembled itself. His eye fell first on the photos. But for the shock of black and neon green hair, he wouldn't have recognized the kid in the pictures as Death Waits. His face was a ruin. His nose was a bloody rose, his eyes were both swollen shut. One ear was ruined -- apparently he'd been dragged some distance with that side of his head on the ground. His cheeks were pulpy and bruised. Then he clicked through to the photos from where they'd found Death, before they'd cleaned him up in the ambulance, and he had to turn his head away and breathe deeply. Both legs and both arms were clearly broken, with at least one compound fracture. His crotch -- Jesus. Lester looked away again, then quickly closed the window. He switched to text accounts from Death's friends who'd been to see him in the hospital. He would live, but he might not walk again. He was lucid, and he was telling stories about the man who'd beaten him -- *You should just shut the fuck up about Disney on the fucking Internet, you know that, kid?* Lester got up and went to find Kettlewell and Tjan and Suzanne -- oh, especially Suzanne -- again. He didn't think for one second that Death would have invented that. In fact, it was just the sort of brave thing that the gutsy little kid might have had the balls to report on. Every step he took, he saw that ruin of a face, the compound fracture, the luminous blood around his groin. He made it halfway to the guesthouse before he found himself leaning against a shanty, throwing up. Tears and bile streaming down his face, chest heaving, Lester decided that this wasn't about fun anymore. Lester came to understand what it meant to be responsible for people's lives. When he stood up and wiped his face on the tail of his tight, glittering shirt, he was a different person. # Sweating in the suffocating afternoon heat, his re-casted arm on fire, Hilda had shown him the article about Death Waits while they were being screened for their connection at O'Hare. The TSA guy was swabbing his cast with a black-powder residue detector, and as Perry read it, he let out an involuntary yelp and a jump that sent him back for a full round of tertiary screening. No date with Dr. Jellyfinger, though it was a close thing. Hilda was deep in her own phone, probing ferociously at it, occasionally picking it up and talking into it, then poking at it some more. Neither of them looked out the windows much, though in his mind, Perry had rehearsed this homecoming as a kind of tour of his territory, picking out which absurd landmarks he'd point out, which funny stories he'd tell, pausing to nuzzle Hilda's throat. But by the time he'd absorbed the mailing-list traffic and done a couple phoners with the people back in Madison -- particularly Ernie, who was freaking about Death Waits and calling for tight physical security for all their people -- they were pulling in at the ride. The cabbie, a Turk, wasn't very cool about the neighborhood, and he kept slowing down on the side of the road and offering to let them out there, and Perry kept insisting that he take them all the way. "No, you can't just drop me here, man. For the tenth time, I've got a fucking *cast* on my *broken arm*. I'm not carrying my suitcase a mile from here. I live there. It's safe. God, it's not like I'm asking you to take me to a war-zone." He didn't want to tip the guy, but he did. The cabbie was just trying to play it safe. Lots of people tried to play it safe. It didn't make them assholes, even if it did make them ineffectual and useless. While Perry tipped him, Hilda pulled the suitcase out of the cab's trunk and she'd barely had time to shut the lid when the driver roared off like he was trying to outrun a sniper. Perry grimaced. This was supposed to be a triumphant homecoming. He was supposed to be showing off his toys, all he'd wrought, to this girl. The town was all around them and they were about to charge in without even pausing to consider its Dr Seuss wonderment. "Wait a sec," Perry said. He took her hand. "See that? That was the first shanty they built. Five stories now." The building was made of prefab concrete for the first couple stories, then successively lighter materials, with the roof-shack made of bamboo. "The designs are experimental, from the Army Corps of Engineers mostly, but they say they'll stand a force-five hurricane." He grimaced again. "Probably not the bamboo one, of course." "Of course," Hilda said. "What's that one?" She'd picked up on his mood, she knew he wanted to show her around before they ended up embroiled in ride-politics and work again. "You've got a good eye, my dear. That's the finest BBQ on the continent. See how the walls are a little sooty looking? That's carbonized ambrosia, a mix of fat and spice and hickory that you could scrape off and bottle as perfume." "Eww." "You haven't tried Lemarr's ribs yet," he said, and goosed her. She squeaked and punched him in the shoulder. He showed her the tuck-shops, the kids playing, the tutor's place, the day-care center, the workshops, taking her on a grand-circle tour of this place he'd help conjure into existence. "Now there's someone I haven't seen in far too long," Francis said. He'd aged something fierce in the last year, booze making his face subside into a mess of wrinkles and pouches and broken blood-vessels. He gave Perry a hard hug that smelled of booze, and it wasn't even lunchtime. "Francis, meet Hilda Hammersen; Hilda, meet Francis Clammer: aerospace engineer and gentleman of leisure." He took her hand and feinted a kiss at it, and Hilda good-naturedly rolled her eyes at this. "What do you think of our lovely little settlement, then, Ms Hammersen?" "It's like something out of a fairy-tale," she said. "You hear stories about Christiania and how good and peaceful it all was, but whenever you see squatters on TV, it's always crack houses and drive-bys. You've really got something here." Francis nodded. "We get a bad rap, but we're no different really from any other place where people take pride in what they own. I built my place, with my two hands. If Jimmy Carter had been there with Habitat for Humanity, we would have gotten no end of good press. Because we did it without a dead ex-president on the scene, we're crooks. Perry tell you about what the law does around here?' Perry nodded. "Yeah. She knows." Francis patted his cast. "Nice hardware, buddy. So when some Bible-thumping do-gooder gives you a leg up, you're a folk-hero. Help yourself, you're a CHUD. It's the same with you people and your ride. If you had the backing of a giant corporation with claws sunk deep into kids' brains, you'd be every package-tour operator's wet dream. Build it yourself in the guts of a dead shopping center, and you're some kind of slimy underclass." "Maybe that's true," said Hilda. "But it's not necessarily true. Back in Madison, the locals love us, they think we do great stuff. After the law came after us, they came by with food and money and helped us rebuild. Scrappy activists get a lot of love in this country, too. Not everyone wants a big corporation to spoon-feed them." "Off in hippie college-towns you'll always find people with enough brains to realize that their neighbors aren't the boogieman. But there ain't so many hippie college towns these days. I wish you two luck, but I think you'd be nuts to walk out the door in the morning expecting anything better than a kick in the teeth." That made Perry think of Death Waits, and the sense of urgency came back to him. "OK, we have to go now," he said. "Thanks, Francis." "Nice to meet you, young woman," he said, and when he smiled, it was a painful thing, all pouches and wrinkles and sags, and he gimped away with his limp more pronounced than ever. They tracked down the crew at the tea-house's big table. Everyone roared greetings at them when they came through the door, a proper homecoming, but when Perry counted heads, he realized that there was no one watching the ride. "Guys, who's running the ride?" They told him about Brazil then, and Hilda listened with her head cocked, her face animated with surprise, dismay, then delight. "You say there are *fifty* rides open?" "All at once," Lester said. "All in one go." "Holy mother of poo," Hilda breathed. Perry couldn't even bring himself to say *anything*. He couldn't even imagine Brazil in his head -- jungles? beaches? He knew nothing about the country. They'd built *fifty* rides, without even making contact with him. He and Lester had designed the protocol to be open because they thought it would make it easier for others to copy what they'd done, but he'd never thought -- It was like vertigo, that feeling. "So you're Yoko, huh?" Lester said finally. It made everyone smile, but the tension was still there. Something big had just happened, bigger than any of them, bigger than the beating that had been laid on Death Waits, bigger than anything Perry had ever done. From his mind to a nation on another continent -- "You're the sidekick, huh?" Hilda said. Lester laughed. "Touche. It's very nice to meet you and thank you for bringing him back home. We were starting to miss him, though God alone knows why." "I plan on keeping him," she said, giving his bicep a squeeze. It brought Perry back to them. The little girls were staring at Hilda with saucer eyes. It made him realize that except for Suzanne and Eva, their whole little band was boys, all boys. "Well, I'm home now," he said. He knelt down and showed the girls his cast. "I got a new one," he said. "They had to throw the old one out. So I need your help decorating this. Do you think you could do the job?" Lyenitchka looked critically at the surface. "I think we could do the gig," she said. "What do you think, partner?" Tjan snorted out his nose, but she was so solemn that the rest kept quiet. Ada matched Lyenitchka's critical posture and then nodded authoritatively. "Sure thing, partner." "It's a date," Perry said. "We're gonna head home and put down our suitcases and come back and open the ride if it's ready. It's time Lester got some time off. I'm sure Suzanne will appreciate having him back again." Another silence fell over the group, tense as a piano wire. Perry looked from Lester to Suzanne and saw in a second what was up. He had time to notice that his first emotional response was to be intrigued, not sorry or scared. Only after a moment did he have the reaction he thought he should have -- a mixture of sadness for his friend and irritation that they had yet another thing to deal with in the middle of a hundred other crises. Hilda broke the tension -- "It was great to meet you all. Dinner tonight, right?" "Absolutely," Kettlewell said, seizing on this. "Leave it to us -- we'll book someplace just great and have a great dinner to welcome you guys back." Eva took his arm. "That's right," she said. "I'll get the girls to pick it out." The little girls jumped up and down with excitement at this, and the baby brothers caught their excitement and made happy kid-screeches that got everyone smiling again. Perry gave Lester a solemn, supportive hug, kissed Suzanne and Eva on the cheeks (Suzanne smelled good, something like sandalwood), shook hands with Tjan and Kettlewell and tousled all four kids before lighting out for the ride, gasping out a breath as they stepped into the open air. # Death Waits regained consciousness several times over the next week, aware each time that he was waking up in a hospital bed on a crowded ward, that he'd woken here before, and that he hurt and couldn't remember much after the beating had started. But after a week or so, he found himself awake and aware -- he still hurt all over, a dull and distant stoned ache that he could tell was being kept at bay by powerful painkillers. There was someone waiting for him. "Hello, Darren," the man said. "I'm an attorney working for your friends at the ride. My name is Tom Levine. We're suing Disney and we wanted to gather some evidence from you." Death didn't like being called Darren, and he didn't want to talk to this dork. He'd woken up with a profound sense of anger, remembering the dead-eyed guy shouting about Disney while bouncing his head off the ground, knowing that Sammy had done this, wanting nothing more than to get ahold of Sammy and, and... That's where he ran out of imagination. He was perfectly happy drawing medieval-style torture chambers and vampires in his sketch book, but he didn't actually have much stomach for, you know, *violence*. Per se. "Can we do this some other time?" His mouth hurt. He'd lost four teeth and had bitten his tongue hard enough to need stitches. He could barely understand his own words. "I wish we could, but time is of the essence here. You've heard that we're bringing a suit against Disney, right?" "No," Death said. "Must have come up while you were out. Anyway, we are, for unfair competition. We've got a shot at cleaning them out, taking them for every cent. We're going through the pre-trial motions now and there's been a motion to summarily exclude any evidence related to your beating from the proceedings. We think that's BS. It's clear from what you've told your friends that they wanted to shut you up because you were making them look bad. So what we need is more information from you about what this guy said to you, and what you'd posted before, and anything anyone at Disney said to you while you were working there." "You know that that guy said he was beating me up because I talked about this stuff in the first place?" The lawyer waved a hand. "There's no way they'll come after you now. They look like total assholes for doing this. They're scared stupid. Now, I'm going to want to formally depose you later, but this is a pre-deposition interview just to get clear on everything." The guy leaned forward and suddenly Death Waits had a bone-deep conviction that the guy was about to punch him. He gave a little squeak and shrank away, then cried out again as every inch of his body awoke in hot agony, a feeling like grating bones beneath his skin. "Woah, take it easy there, champ," the lawyer said. Death Waits held back tears. The guy wasn't going to hit him, but just the movement in his direction had scared him like he'd leapt out holding an axe. The magnitude of his own brokenness began to sink in and now he could barely hold back the tears. "Look, the guys who run the ride have told me that I have to get this from you as soon as I can. If we're going to keep the ride safe and nail the bastards who did this to you, I need to do this. If I had my way, I wouldn't bug you, but I've got my orders, OK?" Death snuffled back the tears. The back of his throat felt like it had been sanded with a rusty file. "Water," he croaked. The lawyer shook his head. "Sorry buddy, just the IV, I'm afraid. The nurses were very specific. Let's start, OK, and then we'll be done before you know it." Defeated, Death closed his eyes. "Start," he said, his voice like something made from soft tar left too long in the sun. # Sammy knew he was a dead man. The only thing keeping him alive was legal's reluctance to read the net. Hackelberg had a couple of juniors who kept watch-lists running on hot subjects, but they liked to print them out and mark them up, and that meant that they lagged a day or two behind the blogosphere. The Death Waits thing was a freaking disaster. The guy was just supposed to put a scare into him, not cripple him for life. Every time Sammy thought about what would happen when the Death Waits thing percolated up to him, he got gooseflesh. Damn that idiot thug anyway. Sammy had been very clear. The guy who knew the guy who knew the guy had been reassuring on the phone when Sammy put in the order -- sure, sure, nothing too rough, just a little shoving around. And what's worse is the idiot kid hadn't gotten the hint. Sammy didn't get it. If a stranger beat him half to death and told him to stop hanging out in message-boards, well, the message-boards would go. Damned right they would. And with Freddy, there was a shoe waiting to drop. Freddy wouldn't report on their interview, he was pretty sure of that. "Off the record" means something, even to "journalists" like Honest Freddy. But Freddy wasn't going to be nice to him in follow-ups, that much was sure. And if -- when! -- Freddy got wind of the Death Waits situation... He began to hyperventilate. "I'm going to go check on the construction," he said to his personal assistant, a new girl they'd sent up when his last one had defected to work for Wiener (Wiener!) after Sammy'd shouted at her for putting through a press-call from some blogger who wanted to know when Fantasyland would be re-opening. It had been a mistake to shut down Fantasyland just to get the other managers off his back. Sure the rides were sick dogs, but there had been life in them still. Construction sites don't bring in visitors, and the numbers for the park were down and everyone was looking at him. Never mind that the only reason the numbers had been as high as they were was that Sammy had saved everyone's ass when he'd done the goth rehab. Never mind that the real reason that numbers were down was that no one else in management had the guts to keep the park moving and improving. He slowed his step on Main Street, USA, and forced himself to pay attention to his surroundings. The stores on Main Street had been co-opted into helping him dump all the superfluous goth merchandise, and it was in their windows and visible through their doors. The fatkins pizza-stands and ice-cream wagons were doing a brisk trade around the castle roundabout. The crowd was predominantly veering to the left, toward Adventureland and Frontierland and Liberty Square, while the right side of the plaza, which held the gateways to Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, was conspicuously sparse. He'd known that his numbers were down, but standing in the crowd's flow, he could feel it. He cleared the castle and stood for a moment at the brink of Fantasyland. It should be impossible to stand here at one in the afternoon -- there should be busy rushes of people pushing past to get on the rides and to eat and to buy stuff, but now there were just a few kids in eyeliner puffing cloves in smokeless hookahs and a wasteland of hoardings painted a shade Imagineering called "go-away green" for its ability to make the eye slide right past it. He'd left the two big coasters open, and they had decent queues, but that was it. No one was in the stores, and no one was bothering with the zombie maze. Clouds of dust and loud destruction noises rose over the hoardings, and he slipped into a staff door and threaded his way onto one of the sites, pausing to pick up a safety helmet with mouse-ears. At least these crews were efficient. He'd long ago impressed on the department that hired construction contractors the necessity of decommissioning old rides with extreme care so as to preserve as much of the collectible value of the finishings and trim as possible. It was a little weird -- Disney customers howled like stuck pigs when you shut down their rides, then fought for the chance to spend fortunes buying up the dismembered corpses of their favored amusements. He watched some Cuban kids carefully melting the hot glue that had held the skull trim-elements to the pillar of the Dia de los Muertos facade, setting them atop a large pile of other trim -- scythes, hooded figures, tombstones -- with a layer of aerogel beneath to keep the garriture from scratching. The whole area behind the hoardings was like this -- rides in pieces, towers of fiberglass detritus sandwiched between layers of aerogel. They'd done this before, when he'd taken Fantasyland down, and he'd fretted every moment about how long the tear-down was taking. There were exciting new plans lurking in the wings then, waiting to leap onstage and take shape. He'd had some of the ride components fabricated by a contractor in Kissimmee, but large chunks of the construction had to take place onsite. The advantage had been his: cheap fabricators, new materials, easy collaboration between remote contractors and his people on-site. No one had ever executed new rides as fast and as well as he had. The things had basically built themselves. Now the competition was using the same tech and it was a fucking disaster for him. Worse and worse: he had no plans for what was to come afterward. He'd thought that he'd just grab some of the audience research people, throw together a fatkins focus group or two, and give Imagineering two weeks to come up with some designs they could put up fast. He knew from past experience that design expanded to fill the time available to it, and that the best stuff usually emerged in the first ten days anyway, and after that it was all committee group-think. But no one from audience research wanted to return his calls, no one from Imagineering was willing to work for him, and no one wanted to visit a section of the park that was dominated by construction hoardings and demolition dust. What the hell was happening at the Miami ride, anyway? He could follow it online, run the three-d flythroughs of the ride as it stood, even download and print his own versions of the ride objects, but none of that told him what it *felt like* to get on the ride, to be in its clanking bowels, surrounded by other riders, pointing and marveling and laughing at the scenes and motion. Rides were things that you had to ride to understand. Describing a ride was like talking about a movie -- so abstract and remote. Like talking about sex versus having sex. Sammy loved rides. Or he used to, anyway. So much more than films, so much more than books -- so immersive and human, and the whole crowd thing, all the other people waiting to ride it or just getting off it. It had started with coasters -- doesn't every kid love coasters? -- but he'd ended up a connoisseur, a gourmand who loved every species of ride, from thrill-rides to monorails, carousels to dark-rides. There'd been a time when he'd ridden every ride in the park once a week, and every ride in every nearby park once a month. That had been years before. Now he sat in an office and made important decisions and he was lucky if he made it onto a ride once a week. Not that it mattered anymore. He'd screwed up so bad that it was only a matter of time until he ended up on the bread-line. Or in jail. He realized he was staring glumly at the demolition, and pulled himself upright, sucked in a few breaths, mentally kicked himself in the ass and told himself to stop feeling sorry for himself. A young woman pried loose another resin skull finial and added it to the pile, placed another sheet of aerogel on top of it. People loved these little tchotchkes. They had a relationship with Disney Parks that made them want to come again and again, to own a piece of the place. They came for visits and then they visited in their hearts and they came back to bring their hearts home. It was an extremely profitable dynamic. That's what those ride people up in the Wal-Mart were making their hay on -- anyone could replicate the ride in their back-yard. You didn't have to fly from Madison to Orlando to have a little refresher experience. It was right there, at the end of the road. If only there was some way to put his rides, his park, right there in the riders' homes, in their literal back-yards. Being able to look at the webcams and take a three-d fly-through was one thing, but it wasn't the physical, visceral experience of being there. The maintenance crew had finished all the trim and now they were going after the props and animatronics. They never used to sell these off, because manufacturing the guts of a robot was too finicky to do any more than you had to -- it was far better to repurpose them, like the America Sings geese that had all their skin removed and found a new home as smart-talking robots in the pre-show for the old Star Tours. But now it all could be printed to order, fabbed and shipped in. They weren't even doing their own machining at Imagineering anymore -- that was all mail-order fulfillment. Just email a three-d drawing to a shop and you'd have as many as you wanted the next day, FedEx guaranteed. Sammy's lips drew back from his teeth as he considered the possibility that the Wal-Mart ride people had ordered their parts from the same suppliers. Christ on a bike, what a mess. And there, in the pit of despair, at the bottom of his downward arc, Sammy was hit by a bolt of inspiration: Put Disney into people's living rooms! Put printers into their homes that decorated a corner of their rooms with a replica of a different ride every day. You could put it on a coffee table, or scale it up to fill your basement rumpus-room. You could have a magic room that was a piece of the park, a souvenir that never let go of Disney, there in your home. The people who were willing to spend a fortune on printed skull finials would cream for this! It would be like actually living there, in the park. It would be Imagineering Eye for the Fan Guy. He could think of a hundred ways to turn this into money. Give away the printers and sell subscriptions to the refresh. Sell the printers and give away the refreshes. Charge sponsors to modify the plans and target different product placements to different users. The possibilities were endless. Best of all, it would extend the reach of Disney Parks further than the stupid ride could ever go -- it would be there, on the coffee table, in the rumpus room, in your school gym or at your summer place. He loved it. Loved it! He actually laughed aloud. What a *great* idea! Sure he was in trouble -- big trouble. But if he could get this thing going -- and it would go, *fast* -- then Hackelberg would get his back. The lawyer didn't give a shit if Sammy lived or died, but he would do anything to protect the company's interests. Sure, no one from Imagineering had been willing to help him design new rides. They all had all the new ride design projects they could use. Audience research too. But this was new, *new new*, not old new, and new was always appealing to a certain kind of novelty junkie in Imagineering. He'd find help for this, and then he'd pull together a business-plan, and a timeline, and a critical path, and he'd start executing. He wanted a prototype out the door in a week. Christ, it couldn't be that hard -- those Wal-Mart ride assholes had published the full schematics for their toys already. He could just rip them off. Turnabout is fair play, after all. # Hilda left Perry after a couple hours working the ticket-booth together. She wanted to go for a shower and a bit of an explore, and it was a secret relief to both of them to get some time apart after all that time living in each others' pockets. They were intimate strangers still, not yet attuned to each others' moods and needs for privacy, and a little separation was welcome. Welcome, too, was Perry's old post there at the ticket counter, like Lucy's lemonade stand in Peanuts. The riders came on thick, a surprising number of them knew his name and wanted to know how his arm was. They were all watching the drama unfold online. They knew about the Brazilian rides coming online and the patch Lester had run. They all felt a proprietary interest in this thing. It made him feel good, but a little weird. He could deal with having friends, and customers, but fans? When he got off work, he wandered over to the shantytown with a bunch of the vendors, to have a customary after-work beer and plate of ribs. He was about to get his phone out and find Hilda when he spotted her, gnawing on a greasy bone with Suzanne and Eva. "Well, *hello*!" he said, delighted, skipping around the barbecue pit to collect a greasy kiss from Hilda, and more chaste but equally greasy pecks on the cheek from Suzanne and Eva. "Looks like you've found the best place in town!" "We thought we'd show her around," Suzanne said. She and Eva had positioned each other on either side of Hilda, using her as a buffer, but it was great to see that they were on something like speaking terms. Perry had no doubt that Suzanne hadn't led Kettlewell on (they all had crushes on her, he knew it), but that didn't mean that Eva wouldn't resent her anyway. If their positions were reversed, he would have had a hard time controlling his jealousy. "They've been wonderful," Hilda said, offering him a rib. He introduced her to the market-stall sellers who'd come over with him and there was more greasy handshaking and hugging, and the proprietor of the joint started handing around more ribs, more beers, and someone brought out a set of speakers and suction-cupped their induction-surfaces to a nearby wall, and Perry dropped one of his earbuds into them and set it to shuffle and they had music. Kids ran past them in shrieking hordes, playing some kind of big game that they'd all been obsessed with. Perry saw that Ada and Lyenitchka were with them, clutching brightly colored mobiles and trying to read their screens while running away from another gang of kids who were clearly "it," taking exaggerated care not to run into invisible obstacles indicated on the screens. "It was great to get back into the saddle," Perry said, digging into some ribs, getting sauce on his fingers. "I had no idea how much I'd been missing it." Hilda nodded. "I could tell, anyway. You're a junkie for it. You're like the ones who show up all googly-eyed about the 'story' that's supposedly in there. You act like that's a holy box." Suzanne nodded solemnly. "She's right. The two of you, you and Lester, you're so into that thing, you're the biggest fanboys in the world. You know what they call it, the fans, when they get together to chat about the stuff they love? Drooling. As in, 'Did you see the drool I posted this morning about the new girl's bedroom scene?' You drool like no one's business when you talk about that thing. It's a holy thing for you." "You guys sound like you've been comparing notes," Perry said, making his funny eyebrow dance. Eva arched one of her fine, high eyebrows in response. In some ways, she was the most beautiful of all of them, the most self-assured and poised. "Of course we were, sonny. Your young lady here needed to know that you aren't an axe-murderer." The women's camaraderie was almost palpable. Suzanne and Eva had clearly patched up whatever differences they'd had, which was probably bad news for Kettlewell. "Where is Lester, anyway?" He hadn't planned on asking, but Suzanne's mention of his name led him to believe he could probably get away with it. "He's talking to Brazil," Suzanne said. "It's all he's done, all day long." Talking to Brazil. Wow. Perry'd thought of Brazil as a kind of abstract thing, fifty rogue nodes on the network that had necessitated a hurried software patch. Not as a bunch of people. But of course, there they were, in Brazil, real people by the dozens, maybe even hundreds, building rides. "He doesn't speak Spanish, though," Perry said. "Neither do they, dork," Hilda said, giving him an elbow in the ribs. "Portuguese." "They all speak some English and he's using automated translation stuff for the hard concepts." "Does that work? I mean, any time I've tried to translate a web-page in Japanese or Hebrew, it's kind of read like noun noun noun noun verb noun random." Suzanne shook her head. "That's how most of the world experiences most of the net, Perry. Anglos are just about the only people on earth who don't read the net in languages other than their own." "Well, good for Lester then," he said. Suzanne made a sour face that let him know that whatever peace prevailed between her and Lester, it was fragile. "Good for him," she said. "Where are the boys?" "Landon and Tjan have them," Eva said. "They've been holed up with your lawyers going over strategy with them. When I walked out, they were trying to get the firm's partners to take shares in the corporation that owns the settlement in lieu of cash up front." "Man that's all too weird for me," Perry said. "I wish we could just run this thing like a business: make stuff people want to give us money for, collect the money, and spend it." "You are such a nerd fatalist," Suzanne said. "Getting involved in the more abstract elements of commerce doesn't make you into a suit. If you don't participate and take an interest, you'll always be out-competed by those who do." "Bull," Perry said. "They can get a court to order us to make pi equal to three, or to ensure that other people don't make Mickey heads in their rides, or that our riders don't think of Disney when they get into one of our chairs, but they'll never be able to enforce it." Suzanne suddenly whirled on him. "Perry Gibbons, you aren't that stupid, so stop acting like you are." She touched his cast. "Look at this thing on your arm. Your superior technology can *not* make inferior laws irrelevant. You're assuming that the machinery of state is unwilling to completely shut you down in order to make you comply with some minor law. You're totally wrong. They'll come after you and break your head." Perry rocked back on his heels. He was suddenly furious, even if somewhere in his heart of hearts he knew that she was right and he was mostly angry at being shown up in front of Hilda. "I've been hearing that all my life, Suzanne. I don't buy it. Look, it just keeps getting cheaper and easier to make something like what we've built. To get a printer, to get goop, to make stuff, to download stuff, to message and IM with people who'll help you make stuff. To learn how to make it. Look, the world is getting better because we're getting better at routing around the bullies. We can play their game, or we can invent a new game. "I refuse to be sucked into playing their game. If we play their game, we end up just like them." Suzanne shook her head sadly. "It's a good thing you've got Tjan and Kettlewell around then, to do the dirty work. I just hope you can spare them a little pity from atop your moral high-ground." She took Eva by the arm and led her away, leaving Perry, shaking, with Hilda. "Bitch," he said, kicking the ground. He balled his hands into fists and then quickly relaxed them as his broken arm ground and twinged from the sudden tensing. Hilda took him by the arm. "You two clearly have a *lot* of history." He took a couple deep breaths. "She was so out of line there. What the hell, anyway? Why should I have to --" He stopped. He could tell when he was repeating himself. "I don't think that she would be telling you that stuff if she didn't think you needed to hear it." "You sound like you're on her side. I thought you were a fiery young revolutionary. You think we should all put on suits and incorporate?" "I think that if you've got skilled people willing to help you, you owe it to them to value their contribution. I've heard you complain about 'suits' twenty times in the past week. Two of those suits are on your side. They're putting themselves on the line, just like you. Hell, they're doing the shit-work while you get to do all the inventing and fly around the country and get laid by hot groupies." She kissed his cheek, trying to make a joke of it, but she'd really hurt his feelings. He felt like weeping. It was all out of his control. His destiny was not his to master. "OK, let's go apologize to Kettlewell and Tjan." She laughed, but he'd only been halfway kidding. What he really wanted to do was have a big old dinner at home with Lester, just the two of them in front of the TV, eating Lester's fatkins cuisine, planning a new invention. He was tired of all these people. Even Suzanne was an outsider. It had just been him and Lester in the old days, and those had been the best days. Hilda put her arm around his shoulders and nuzzled his neck. "Poor Perry," she said. "Everyone picks on him." He smiled in spite of himself. "Come on, sulkypants, let's go find Lester and he can call me 'Yoko' some more. That always cheers you up." # It was two weeks before Death Waits could sit up and prod at a keyboard with his broken hands. Some of his pals brought a laptop around and they commandeered a spare dining tray to keep it on -- Death's lap was in no shape to support anything heavy with sharp corners. The first day, he was reduced to tears of frustration within minutes of starting. He couldn't use the shift key, couldn't really use the mouse -- and the meds made it hard to concentrate and remember what he'd done. But there were people on the other end of that computer, human friends whom he could communicate with if only he could re-learn to use this tool that he'd lived with since he was old enough to sit up on his own. So laboriously, peck by peck, key by key, he learned to use it again. The machine had a mode for disabled people, for *cripples*, and once he hit on this, it went faster. The mode tried to learn from him, learn his tremors and mis-keys, his errors and cursing, and so emerge something that was uniquely his interface. It was a kind of a game to watch the computer try to guess what was meant by his mashed keystrokes and spastic pointer-movements -- he turned on the webcam and aimed it at his eye, and switched it to retinal scanner mode, giving it control of the pointer, then watched in amusement as the wild leaping of the cursor every time a needle or a broken bone shifted inside his body was becalmed into a graceful, normalized curve. It was humiliating to be a high-tech cripple and the better the technology worked, the more prone it was to reducing him to tears. He might be like this for the rest of his life. He might never walk without a limp again. Might never dance. Might never be able to reach for and lift objects again. He'd never find a woman, never have a family, never have grandkids. But this was offset by the real people with their real chatter. He obsessively flew through the Brazilian mode, strange and wonderful but nowhere near what he loved from "his" variation on the ride. He could roll through all the different changes he'd made with his friends to the ride in Florida, and he became subtly attuned to which elements were wrong and which were right. It was on one of these flythroughs that he encountered The Story, leaping out of the ride so vividly that he yelped like he'd flexed his IV into a nerve again. There it was -- irrefutable and indefinable. When you rode through there was an escalating tension, a sense of people who belonged to these exhibits going through hard changes, growing up and out. Once he'd seen it, he couldn't un-see it. When he and his pals had started to add their own stuff to the ride, the story people had been giant pains in the ass, accusing them of something they called "narricide" -- destroying the fragile story that humanity had laid bare there. Now that he'd seen it too, he wanted to protect it. But he could see by skimming forward and back through the change-log and trying different flythroughs that the story wasn't being undermined by the goth stuff they were bringing in; it was being enhanced. It was telling the story he knew, of growing up with an indefinable need to be *different*, to reject the mainstream and to embrace this subculture and aesthetic. It was the story of his tribe and sub-species and it got realer the more he played it. God, how could he have *missed it*? It made him want to cry, though that might have been the meds. Some of it made him want to laugh, too. He tried, laboriously, to compose a message-board post that expressed what he was feeling, but every attempt came out sounding like those story mystics he'd battled. He understood now why they'd sounded so hippy-trippy. So he rode the ride, virtually, again and again, spotting the grace-notes and the sly wit and the wrenching emotion that the collective intelligence of all those riders had created. Discovered? It was like the story was there all along, lurking like the statue inside a block of marble. Oh, it was wonderful. He was ruined, maybe forever, but it was wonderful. And he'd been a part of it. He went back to writing that message-board post. He'd be laid in that bed for a long time yet. He had time to rewrite. # IF YOU CAN'T BEAT THEM, RIP THEM OFF A new initiative from the troubled Disney Parks corporation shows how a little imagination can catapult an ambitious exec to the top of the corporate ladder. Word has it that Samuel R.D. Page, the Vice President for Fantasyland (I assure you, I am NOT making that up) has been kicked upstairs to Senior Vice President for Remote Delivery of Park Experience (I'm not making that up, either). Insiders in the company tell us that "Remote Delivery of Park Experience" is a plan to convince us to give The Mouse a piece of our homes which will be constantly refreshed via a robot three-dimensional printer with miniatures of the Disney park. If this sounds familiar, it should. It's a pale imitation of the no-less-ridiculous (if slightly less evil) "rides" movement pioneered by Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, previously the anti-heroes of the New Work pump-and-dump scandal. Imitation is meant to be the sincerest form of flattery, and if so, Gibbons and his cultists must be blushing fire-engine red. This is cheap irony, Disney-style. After all, it's only been a month since the company launched ten separate lawsuits against various incarnations of the ride for trademark violation, and it's now trying to duck the punishing countersuits that have risen up in their wake. Most ironic of all, word has it that Page was responsible for both ends of this: the lawsuits against the ride and the decision to turn his company into purveyors of cheap knockoffs of the ride. Page is best known among Park aficionados for having had the "foresight" to gut the children's "Fantasyland" district in Walt Disney World and replace it with a jumped up version of Hot Topic, a goth-themed area that drew down the nation's eyeliner supply to dangerously low levels. It was apparently that sort of "way-out-of-the-box" "genius" that led Page to his latest round of disasters: the lawsuits, an abortive rebuilding of Fantasyland, and now this "Remote Delivery" scam. What's next? The Mouse has already shipped Disney Dollars, an abortive home-wares line, a disastrous fine-art chain, and oversaw the collapse of the collectible cel-art market. With "visionaries" like Page at the helm, the company can't help but notch up more "successes." # Death was deep into the story now. The Brazilians had forked off their own ride -- they'd had their own New Work culture, too, centered in the favelas, so they had different stories to tell. Some of the ride operators imported a few of their scenes, tentatively, and some of the ride fans were recreating the Brazil scenes on their own passes through the ride. It was all in there, if you knew where to look for it, and the best part was, no one had written it. It had written itself. The collective judgement of people who rode through had turned chaos into coherence. Or had it? The message-boards were rife with speculation that The Story had been planted by someone -- maybe the ride's creators, maybe some clan of riders -- who'd inserted it deliberately. These discussions bordered on the metaphysical: what was an "organic" ride decision? It made Death Waits's head swim. The thing that was really doing his head in, though, was the Disney stuff. Sammy -- he couldn't even think of Sammy without a sick feeling in his stomach, crashing waves of nausea that transcended even his narcotic haze -- Sammy was making these grotesque parodies of the ride. He was pushing them out to the world's living rooms. Even the deleted rides from the glory days of the goth Fantasyland, in time-limited miniature. If he'd still been at Disney Parks, he would have loved this idea. It was just what he loved, the knowledge that he was sharing experience with his people around the world, part of a tribe even if he couldn't see them. Now, in the era of the ride, he could see how dumb this was. How thin and shallow and commercial. Why should they have to pay some giant evil corporation to convene their community? He kept trying to write about The Story, kept failing. It wouldn't come. But Sammy -- he knew what he wanted to say about Sammy. He typed until they sedated him, and then typed some more when he woke up. He had old emails to refer to. He pasted them in. After three days of doing this, the lawyer came back. Tom Levine was dressed in a stern suit with narrow lapels and a tie pierced with some kind of frat pin. He wasn't much older than Death, but he made Death feel like a little kid. "I need to talk to you about your Internet activity," he said, sitting down beside him. He'd brought along a salt-water taffy assortment bought from the roadside, cut into double-helix molecules and other odd biological forms -- an amoeba, a skeleton. "OK?" Death said. They'd switched him to something new for the pain that day, and given him a rocker-switch he could use to drizzle it into his IV when it got bad. He'd hit it just before the lawyer came to see him and now he couldn't concentrate much. Plus he wasn't used to talking. Writing online was better. He could write something, save it, go back and re-read it later and clean it up if it turned out he'd gone off on a stoned ramble. "You know we're engaged in some very high-stakes litigation here, right, Darren?" He hated it when people called him Darren. "Death," he said. His toothless lisp was pathetic, like an old wino's. "Death, OK. This high-stakes litigation needs a maximum of caution and control. This is a fifteen-year journey that ends when we've broken the back of the company that did this to you. It ends when we take them for every cent, bankrupt their executives, take their summer homes, freeze their accounts. You understand that?" Death hadn't really understood that. It sounded pretty tiring. Exhausting. Fifteen years. He was only nineteen now. He'd be thirty-four, and that was only if the lawyer was estimating correctly. "Oh," he said. "Well, not that you're going to have to take part in fifteen years' worth of this. It's likely we'll be done with your part in a year, tops. But the point is that when you go online and post material that's potentially harmful to this case --" Death closed his eyes. He'd posted the wrong thing. This had been a major deal when he was at Disney, what he was and wasn't allowed to post about -- though in practice, he'd posted about everything, sticking the private stuff in private discussions. "Look, you can't write about the case, or anything involved with it, that's what it comes down to. If you write about that stuff and you say the wrong thing, you could blow this whole suit. They'd get away clean." Death shook his head. Not write about it at *all*? "No," he said. "No." "I'm not asking you, Death. I can get a court order if I have to. This is serious -- it's not some funny little game. There are billions on the line here. One wrong word, one wrong post and *pfft*, it's all over. And nothing in email, either -- it's likely everything you write is going to go through discovery. Don't write anything personal in any of your mail -- nothing you wouldn't want in a court record." "I can't do that," Death said. He sounded like a fucking retard, between talking through his mashed mouth and talking through the tears. "I can't. I live in email." "Well, now you'll have a reason to go outside. This isn't up for negotiation. When I was here last, I thought I made the seriousness of this case clear to you. I'm frankly amazed that you were immature and irresponsible enough to write what I've read." "I can't --" Death said. The lawyer purpled. He didn't look like a happy-go-lucky tanned preppie anymore. He looked Dad-scary, like one of those fathers in Disney who was about to seriously lose his shit and haul off and smack a whiny kid. Death's own Pawpaw, who'd stood in for his father, had gone red like that whenever he "mouthed off," a sin that could be committed even without opening his mouth. He had an instinctive curl-up-and-hide reaction to it, and the lawyer seemed to sense this, looming over him. He felt like he was about to be eaten. "You listen to me, *Darren* -- this is not the kind of thing you fuck up. This isn't something *I'm* going to fuck up. I win my cases and you're not going to change that. There's too much at stake here for you to blow it all with your childish, selfish --" He seemed to catch himself then, and he snorted a hot breath through his nose that blew over Death's face. "Listen, there's a lot on the line here. More money than you or I are worth. I'm trying to help you out here. Whatever you write, whatever you say, it's going to be very closely scrutinized. From now on, you should treat every piece of information that emanates from your fingertips as likely to be covered on the evening news and repeated to everyone you've ever met. No matter how private you think you're being, it'll come out. It's not pretty, and I know you didn't ask for it, but you're here, and there's nothing you can do to change that. He left then, embarrassed at losing his temper, embarrassed at Death's meek silence. Death poked at his laptop some. He thought about writing down more notes, but that was probably in the same category. He closed his eyes and now, *now* he felt the extent of his injuries, felt them truly for the first time since he'd woken up in this hospital. There were deep, grinding pains in his legs -- both knees broken, fracture in the left thigh. His ribs hurt every time he breathed. His face was a ruin, his mouth felt like he had twisted lumps of hamburger glued to his torn lips. His dick -- well, they'd catheterized him, but that didn't account for the feelings down there. He'd been kicked repeatedly and viciously, and they told him that the reconstructive surgeries -- surgeries, plural -- would take some time, and nothing was certain until they were done. He'd managed to pretend that his body wasn't there for so long as he was able to poke at the computer. Now it came back to him. He had the painkiller rocker-switch and the pain wasn't any worse than what passed for normal, but he had an idea that if he hit it enough times, he'd be able to get away from his body for a while again. He tried it. # Hilda and Lester sat uncomfortably on the sofa next to each other. Perry had hoped they'd hit it off, but it was clear after Lester tried his Yoko joke again that the chemistry wasn't there. Now they were having a rare moment of all-look-same-screen, the TV switched on like in an old comedy, no one looking at their own laptop. The tension was thick, and Perry was sick of it. He reached for his computer and asked it to find him the baseball gloves. Two of the drawers on the living-room walls glowed pink. He fetched the gloves down, tossed one to Lester, and picked up his ball. "Come on," he said. "TV is historically accurate, but it's not very social." Lester got up from the sofa, a slow smile spreading on his face, and Hilda followed a minute later. Outside, by the cracked pool, it was coming on slow twilight and that magic, tropical blood-orange sky like a swirl of sorbet. Lester and Perry each put on their gloves. Perry'd worn his now and again, but had never had a real game of catch with it. Lester lobbed an easy toss to him and when it smacked his glove, it felt so *right*, the sound and the vibration and the fine cloud of dust that rose up from the mitt's pocket, Christ, it was like a sacrament. He couldn't lob the ball back, because of his busted wing, so he handed the ball to Hilda. "You're my designated right arm," he said. She smiled and chucked the ball back to Lester. They played until the twilight deepened to velvety warm dark and humming bugs and starlight. Each time he caught a ball, something left Perry, some pain long held in his chest, evanesced into the night air. His catching arm, stiff from being twisted by the weight of the cast on his other hand, unlimbered and became fluid. His mind was becalmed. None of them talked, though they sometimes laughed when a ball went wild, and both Perry and Lester went "ooh," when Lester made a jump-catch that nearly tumbled him into the dry pool. Perry hadn't played a game of catch since he was a kid. Catch wasn't his dad's strong suit, and he and his friends had liked video-games better than tossing a ball, which was pretty dull by comparison. But that night it was magic, and when it got to full dark and they could barely see the ball except as a second moon hurtling white through the air, they kept tossing it a few more times before Perry dropped it into the pocket of his baggy shorts. "Let's get a drink," he said. Lester came over and gave him a big, bearish hug. Then Hilda joined them. "You stink," Lester said, "Seriously, dude. Like the ass of a dead bear." That broke them up and set them to laughing together, a giggling fit that left them gasping, Lester on all fours. Perry's arm forgot to hurt and he moved to kiss Hilda on the cheek and instead she turned her head to kiss him full on the lips, a real juicy, steamy one that made his ear-wax melt. "Drinks," Hilda said, breaking the kiss. They went upstairs, holding the mitts, and had a beer together on the patio, talking softly about nothing in particular, and then Lester hugged them good night and then they all went to bed, and Perry put his face into the hair at the back of Hilda's neck and told her he loved her, and Hilda snuggled up to him and they fell asleep. # A GAME OF CATCH Pop-quiz: Your empire is crumbling around your ears. Your supporters are hospitalized by jackboot thugs for sticking up for you. The lawsuits are mounting and fly-by-night MBAs have determined to use your non-profit, info-hippie ride project to get right by embarking on 20 years of litigation. What do you do? Well, if you're like Perry Gibbons, Lester Banks and Hilda Hammersen, you go out into the backyard and throw a ball around for a while, then you have a big cuddle and head inside. The pictures shown here were captured by a neighbor of the cult leaders last night, at their palatial condos in Hollywood, Florida. The three are ring-leaders of the loose-knit organization that manages the "rides" that dot ten cities in America and are present in fifty cities in Brazil. Their project came to national attention when Disney brought suit against them, securing injunctions against the rides that resulted in riots and bloodshed. One supporter of the group, the outspoken "Death Waits," a former Disney employee, has been hospitalized for over a week following a savage beating that he claims resulted from his Internet posting about the unhealthy obsession Disney executive Samuel R.D. Page (see previous coverage) bore for the ride. Everyone needs to unwind now and then, but sources at the hospital where Death Waits lies abed say that he has had no visits from the cult leaders since he took his beating in their service. No doubt these three have more important things to do -- like play catch. # Suzanne said, "Look, you can't let crazy people set your agenda. If you want to visit this Death kid, you should. If you don't, you shouldn't. But don't let Freddy psy-ops you into doing something you don't want to do. Maybe he does have a rat in your building. Maybe he's got a rat at the hospital. Maybe, though, he just scored some stills off a flickr stream, maybe he's watching new photos with some face-recognition stuff." Perry looked up from his screen, still scowling. "People do that?" "Sure -- stalkerware! I use it myself, just to see what photos of me are showing up online. I scour every photo-feed published for anything that appears to be a photo of me. Most of it's from blogjects, CCTV cameras and crap like that. You should see what it's like on days I go to London -- you can get photographed 800 times a day there without trying. So yeah, if I was Freddy and I wanted to screw with you, I'd be watching every image feed for your pic, and mine, and Lester's. We just need to assume that that's going on. But look at what he actually reported on: you went out and played catch and then hugged after your game. It's not like he caught you cornholing gators while smoking spliffs rolled in C-notes." "What does that guy have against us, anyway?" Suzanne sighed. "Well, at first I think it was that *I* liked you, and that you were trying to do something consistent with what he thought everyone should be doing. After all, if anyone were to follow his exhortations, they'd have to be dumb enough to be taking him seriously, and for that they deserve all possible disapprobation. "These days, though, he hates you for two reasons. The first is that you failed, which means that you've got to have some kind of moral deficiency. The second is that we keep pulling his pants down in public, which makes him even angrier, since pulling down people's pants is *his* job. "I know it's armchair psychology, but I think that Freddy just doesn't like himself very much. At the end of the day, people who are secure and happy don't act like this." Perry's scowl deepened. "I'd like to kick him in the fucking balls," he said. "Why can't he just let us be? We've got enough frigging problems." "I just want to go and visit this kid," Lester said, and they were back where they started. "But we know that this Freddy guy has an informant in the hospital, he about says as much in this article. If we go there, he wins," Perry said. Hilda and Lester just looked at him. Finally he smiled and relented. "OK, Freddy isn't going to run my life. If it's the right thing to visit this kid, it's the right thing. Let's do it." "We'll go after the ride shuts tonight," Lester said. "All of us. I'll buy him a fruit basket and bring him a mini." The minis were Lester's latest mechanical computers, built inside of sardine cans, made of miniaturized, printed, high-impact alloys. They could add and subtract numbers up to ten, using a hand crank on the side, registering their output on a binary display of little windows that were covered and uncovered by tiny shutters. He'd built his first the day before, using designs supplied by some of his people in Brazil and tweaking them to his liking. The day was as close to a normal day on the ride as Perry could imagine. The crowd was heavy from the moment he opened, and he had to go back into the depths and kick things back into shape a couple times, and one of the chairs shut down, and two of the merchants had a dispute that degenerated into a brawl. Just another day running a roadside attraction in Florida. Lester spelled him off for the end of the day, then they counted the take and said good night to the merchants and all piled into one of Lester's cars and headed for the hospital. "You liking Florida?" Lester called over the seat as they inched forward in the commuter traffic on the way into Melbourne. "It's hot; I like that," Hilda said. "You didn't mention the awesome aesthetics," Lester said. Suzanne rolled her eyes. "Ticky-tacky chic," she said. "I love it here," Lester said. "That contrast between crass, overdeveloped, cheap, nasty strip-malls and unspoiled tropical beauty. It's gorgeous *and* it tickles my funny bone." Hilda squinted out the window as though she were trying to see what Lester saw, like someone staring at a random-dot stereogram in a mall-store, trying to make the three-d image pop out. "If you say so," she said. "I don't find much attractive about human settlement, though. If it needs to be there, it should just be invisible as possible. We fundamentally live in ugly boxes, and efforts to make them pretty never do anything for me except call attention to how ugly they are. I kinda wish that everything was built to disappear as much as possible so we could concentrate on the loveliness of the world." "You get that in Madison?" Lester said. "Nope," she said. "I've never seen any place designed the way I'd design one. Maybe I'll do that someday." Perry loved her just then, for that. The casual "oh, yeah, the world isn't arranged to my satisfaction, maybe I'll rearrange it someday." The duty-nurse was a bored Eastern European who gave them a half-hearted hard time about having too many people visit Death Waits all at once, but who melted when Suzanne gave her a little talk in Russian. "What was that all about?" Perry whispered to her as they made their way along the sour-smelling ward. "Told her we would keep it down -- and complimented her on her manicure." Lester shook his head. "I haven't been in a place like this in so long. The fatkins places are nothing like it." Hilda snorted. "More upscale, I take it?" Lester and Hilda hadn't really talked about the fatkins thing, but Perry suddenly remembered the vehemence with which Hilda had denounced the kids who were talked into fatkins treatments in their teens and wondered if she and Lester should be clearing the air. "Not really -- but more functional. More about, I don't know, pursuing your hobby. Less about showing up in an emergency." Hilda snorted again and they were at Death's room. They walked past his roommates, an old lady with her teeth out, sleeping with her jaw sagging down, and a man in a body-cast hammering on a video-game controller and staring fixedly at the screen at the foot of his bed. Then they came upon Death Waits. Perry had only seen him briefly, and in bad shape even then, but now he was a wreck, something from a horror movie or an atrocity photo. Perry swallowed hard as he took in the boy's wracked, skinny body, the casts, the sunken eyes, the shaved head, the caved-in face and torn ears. He was fixedly watching TV, which seemed to be showing a golf show. His thumb was poised over a rocker-switch connected to the IV in his arm. Death looked at them with dull eyes at first, not recognizing them for a moment. Then he did, and his eyes welled up with tears. They streamed down his face and his chin and lip quivered, and then he opened his mouth and started to bawl like a baby. Perry was paralyzed -- transfixed by this crying wreck. Lester, too, and Suzanne. They all took a minute step backward, but Hilda pushed past them and took his hand and stroked his hair and went *shhh*, *shhh*. His bawling become more uncontrolled, louder, and his two roommates complained, calling to him to shut up, and Suzanne moved back and drew the curtains around each of their beds. Strangely, this silenced them. Gradually, Death's cries became softer, and then he snuffled and snorted and Hilda gave him a kleenex from her purse. He wiped his face and blew his nose and squeezed the kleenex tight in his hand. He opened his mouth, shut it, opened and shut it. Then, in a whisper, he told them his story. The man in the parking-lot and his erection. The hospital. Posting on the message boards. The lawyer. "*What*?" Perry said, loud enough that they all jumped and Death Waits flinched pathetically in his hospital bed. Hilda squeezed his arm hard. "Sorry, sorry," Perry muttered. "But this lawyer, what did he say to you?" Perry listened for a time. Death Waits spoke in a low monotone, pausing frequently to draw in shuddering breaths that were almost sobs. "Fucking *bastards*," Perry said. "Evil, corporate, immoral, sleazy --" Hilda squeezed his arm again. "Shh," she said. "Take it easy. You're upsetting him." Perry was so angry he could barely see, barely think. He was trembling, and they were all staring at him, but he couldn't stop. Death had shrunk back into himself, squeezed his eyes shut. "I'll be back in a minute," Perry said. He felt like he was suffocating. He walked out of the room so fast it was practically a jog, then pounded on the elevator buttons, waited ten seconds and gave up and ran down ten flights of stairs. He got outside into the coolness of the hazy night and sucked in huge lungsful of wet air, his heart hammering in his chest. He had his phone in his hand and he had scrolled to Kettlewell's number, but he kept himself from dialing it. He was in no shape to discuss this with Kettlewell. He wanted witnesses there when he did it, to keep him from doing something stupid. He went back inside. The security guards watched him closely, but he forced himself to smile and act calm and they didn't stop him from boarding the elevator. "I'm sorry," he said to all of them. "I'm sorry," he said to Death Waits. "Let me make something very, very clear: you are free to use the Internet as much as you want. You are free to tell your story to anyone you want to tell it to. Even if it screws up my case, you're free to do that. You've given up enough for me already." Death looked at him with watery eyes. "Really?" he said. It came out in a hoarse whisper. Perry moved the breakfast tray that covered Death's laptop, then opened the laptop and positioned it where Death could reach it. "It's all yours, buddy. Whatever you want to say, say it. Let your freak flag fly." Death cried again then, silent tears slipping down his hollow cheeks. Perry got him some kleenex from the bathroom and he blew his nose and wiped his face and grinned at them all, a toothless, wet, ruined smile that made Perry's heart lurch. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. What the hell was he doing? This kid -- he would never get the life he'd had back. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," Death said. "Please don't be grateful to me," Perry said. "We owe you the thanks around here. Remember that. We haven't done you any favors. All the favors around here have come from you. "Any lawyer shows up here again representing me, I want you to email me." In the car back, no one said anything until they were within sight of the shantytown. "Kettlewell isn't going to like this," Suzanne said. "Yeah, I expect not," Perry said. "He can go fuck himself." # Imagineering sent the prototype up to Sammy as soon as it was ready, the actual engineers who'd been working on it shlepping it into his office. He'd been careful to cultivate their friendship through the weeks of production, taking them out for beers and delicately letting them know that they were just the sort of people who really understood what Disney Parks was about, not like those philistines who comprised the rest of the management layer at Disney. He learned their kids' names and forwarded jokes to them by email. He dropped by their break-room and let them beat him at pinball on their gigantic, bizarre, multi-board homebrew machine, letting them know just how cool said machine was. Now it was paying off. Judging from the device he was looking at, a breadbox-sized, go-away-green round-shouldered smooth box that it took two of them to carry in. "Watch this," one of them said. He knocked a complicated pattern on the box's top and a hidden hatch opened out of the side, yawning out and forming a miniature staircase from halfway down the box's surface to the ground. There was soft music playing inside the box: a jazzy, uptempo futuristic version of *When You Wish upon a Star*. A little man appeared in the doorway. He looked like he was made of pipe-cleaners and he took the stairs in three wobbling strides. He ignored them as he lurched around the box's perimeter until he came to a far corner, then another hatch slid away and the little man reached inside and tugged out the plug and the end of the power-cord. He hugged the plug to his chest and began to wander around Sammy's desk, clearly looking for an electrical outlet. "It's a random-walk search algorithm," one of the Imagineers said. "Watch this." After a couple of circuits of Sammy's desk the little robot went to the edge and jumped, hanging on to the power-cable, which unspooled slowly from the box like a belay-line, gently lowering the man to the ground. A few minutes later, he had found the electrical outlet and plugged in the box. The music inside stilled and a fanfare began. The trumpeting reached a joyous peak -- "It's found a network connection" -- and then subsided into marching-band music. There was a smell like Saran-Wrap in the microwave. A moment later, another pipe-cleaner man emerged from the box, lugging a chunk of plastic that looked like the base of a rocket in an old-timey science fiction movie. The first pipe-cleaner man was shinnying up the power cable. He crested the desktop and joined his brother in ferrying out more parts. Each one snapped into the previous one with a Lego-like *click*. Taking shape on the desktop in slow stages, the original, 1955 Tomorrowland, complete with the rocket to the moon, the Clock of the World and -- "Dairy Farmers of America Present the Cow of Tomorrow?" Sammy said, peering at the little brass plaque on the matchbox-sized diorama, which showed a cow with an IV in her hock, watching a video of a pasture. "You're kidding me." "No!" one Imagineer said. "It's all for real -- the archives have all these tight, high-rez three-d models of all the rides the Park's ever seen. This is totally historically accurate." The Kaiser Aluminum Hall of Fame. The Monsanto Hall of Chemistry. Thimble Drome Flight Circle, with tiny flying miniature airplanes. "Holy crap," Sammy said. "People *paid* to see these things?" "Go on," the other Imagineer said. "Take the roof off the Hall of Chemistry." Sammy did, and was treated to a tiny, incredibly detailed three-d model of the Hall's interior exhibits, complete with tiny people in 1950s garb marveling at the truly crappy exhibits. "We print to 1200 dpi with these. We can put pupils on the eyeballs at that rez." The pieces were still trundling out. Sammy picked up the Monsanto Hall of Chemistry and turned it over and over in his hands, looking at the minute detail, admiring the way all the pieces snapped together. "It's kind of brittle," the first Imagineer said. He took it from Sammy and gave it a squeeze and it cracked with a noise like an office chair rolling over a sheet of bubble-wrap. The pieces fell to the desk. A pipe-cleaner man happened upon a shard after a moment and hugged it to his chest, then toddled back into the box with it. "There's a little optical scanner in there -- it'll figure out which bit this piece came from and print another one. Total construction of this model takes about two hours." "You built this entire thing from scratch in three weeks?" The Imagineers laughed. "No, no -- no way! No, almost all the code and designs came off the net. Most of this stuff was developed by New Work startups back in the day, or by those ride weirdos down in Hollywood. We just shoved it all into this box and added the models for some of our old rides from the archives. This was easy, man -- easy!" Sammy's head swam. Easy! This thing was undeniably super-cool. He wanted one. Everyone was going to want one! "You can print these as big as you want, too -- if we gave it enough time, space and feedstock, it'd run these buildings at full size." The miniature Tomorrowland was nearly done. It was all brave, sad white curves, like the set of a remake of Rollerball, and featured tiny people in 1950s clothes, sun-dresses and salaryman hats, black-rimmed glasses and scout uniforms for the boys. Sammy goggled at it. He moved the little people around, lifted off the lids. "Man, I'd seen the three-d models and flythroughs, but they're nothing compared to actually seeing it, owning it. People will want libraries of these things. Whole rooms devoted to them." "Umm," one of the Imagineers said. Sammy knew his name, but he'd forgotten it. He had a whole complicated scheme for remembering people's names by making up stories about them, but it was a lot of work. "Well, about that. This feedstock is very fast-setting, but it doesn't really weather well. Even if you stored it in a dark, humidity-controlled room, it'd start to delaminate and fall to pieces within a month or two. Leave it in the living room in direct sunlight and it'll crumble within a couple days." Sammy pursed his lips and thought for a while. "Please, please tell me that there's something proprietary we can require in the feedstock that can make us into the sole supplier of consumables for this thing." "Maybe? We could certainly tag the goop with something proprietary and hunt for it when we do the build, refuse to run on anyone else's goop. Of course, that won't be hard to defeat --" "We'll sue anyone who tries it," Sammy said. "Oh, boys, you've outdone yourselves. Seriously. If I could give you a raise, I would. As it is, take something home from the architectural salvage lot and sell it on eBay. It's as close to a bonus as this fucking company's going to pay any of us." They looked at him quizzically, with some alarm and he smiled and spread his hands. "Ha ha, only serious boys. Really -- take some stuff home. You've earned it. Try and grab something from the ride-system itself, that's got the highest book-value." They left behind a slim folder with production notes and estimates, suppliers who would be likely to bid on a job like this. He'd need a marketing plan, too -- but this was farther than he ever thought he'd get. He could show this to legal and to the board, and yes, to Wiener and the rest of the useless committee. He could get everyone lined up behind this and working on it. Hell, if he spun it right they'd all be fighting to have their pet projects instantiated with it. He fiddled with a couple of overnight shippers' sites for a while, trying to figure out what it would cost to sell these in the Park and have them waiting on the marks' doorsteps when they got back home. There were lots of little details like that, but ultimately, this was good and clean -- it would extend the Parks' reach right into the living rooms of their customers, giving them a new reason to think of the Park every day. # Kettlewell and Tjan looked up when Perry banged through the door of the tea-house they'd turned into their de facto headquarters. Perry had gone through mad and back to calm on the ride home, but as he drew closer to the tea-house, passing the people in the streets, the people living their lives without lawyers or bullshit, his anger came back. He'd even stopped outside the tea-house and breathed deeply, but his heart was pounding and his hands kept balling into fists and sometimes, man, sometimes you've just got to go for it. He got to the table and grabbed the papers there and tossed them over his shoulder. "You're fired," he said. "Pack up and go, I want you out by morning. You're done here. You don't represent the ride and you never will. Get lost." He didn't know he was going to say it until he said it, but it felt right. This was what he was feeling -- *his* project had been stolen and bad things were being done in *his* name and it was going to stop, right now. Tjan and Kettlewell got to their feet and looked at him, faces blank with shock. Kettlewell recovered first. "Perry, let's sit down and do an exit interview, all right? That's traditional." Perry was shaking with anger now. These two friends of his, they'd fucking screwed him -- committed their dirty work in his name. But Kettlewell was holding a chair out to him and the others in the tea-house were staring and he thought about Eva and the kids and the baseball gloves, and he sat down. He squeezed his thighs hard with his clenching hands, drew in a deep breath, and recited what Death Waits had told him in an even, wooden voice. "So that's it. I don't know if you instructed the lawyers to do this or only just distanced yourself enough from them to let them do this on their own. The point is that the way you're running this campaign is victimizing people who believe in us, making life worse for people who already got a shitty, shitty deal on our account. I won't have it." Kettlewell and Tjan looked at each other. They'd both stayed poker-faced through Perry's accusation, and now Kettlewell made a little go-ahead gesture at Tjan. "There's no excuse for what that lawyer did. We didn't authorize it, we didn't know it had happened, and we wouldn't have permitted it if we had. In a suit like this, there are a lot of moving parts and there's no way to keep track of all of them all of the time. You don't know what every ride operator in the world is up to, you don't even know where all the rides in the world *are*. That's in the nature of a decentralized business. "But here's the thing: the lawyer was at least partly right. Everything that kid blogs, emails, and says will potentially end up in the public record. Like it or not, that kid can no longer consider himself to have a private life, not until the court case is up. Neither can you or I, for that matter. That's in the nature of a lawsuit -- and it's not something any of us can change at this point." Perry heard him as from a great distance, through the whooshing of the blood in his ears. He couldn't think of anything to say to that. Tjan and Kettlewell looked at each other. "So even if we're 'fired' --" Tjan said at last, making sarcastic finger-quotes, "this problem won't go away. We've floated the syndicate and given control of the legal case to them. If you try to ditch it, you're going to have to contend with *their* lawsuits, too." "I didn't --" Perry started. But he had, he'd signed all kinds of papers: first, papers that incorporated the ride-runners' co-op; and, second, papers that gave legal representation over to the syndicate. "Perry, I'm the chairman of the Boston ride collective. I'm their rep on the co-op's board. You can't fire me. You didn't hire me. They did. So stop breathing through your nose like a locomotive and calm down. None of us wanted that lawyer to go after that kid." He knew they were making sense but he didn't want to care. He'd ended up in this place because these supposed pals of his had screwed up. He knew that he was going to end up making up with them, going to end up getting deeper into this. He knew that this was how good people did shitty things: one tiny rotten compromise at a time. Well, he wasn't going to go there. "Tomorrow morning," he said. "Gone. We can figure out by email how to have a smooth transition, but no more of this. Not on my head. Not on my account." He stalked away, which is what he should have done in the first place. Fuck being reasonable. Reasonable sucked. # Death found out about the Disney-in-a-Box printers seconds after they were announced. He'd been tuning his feed-watchers to give him news about the Disney Parks for nearly a decade, and this little PR item on the Disney Parks newswire rang all the cherries on his filters, flagging the item red and rocketing it to the top of his news playlist, making all the icons in the sides of his screen bounce with delight. The announcement made him want to throw up. They were totally ripping off the rides, and he knew for a fact that most of the three-d meshes of the old yesterland rides and even the contemporary ones were fan-made, so those'd be ripped off, too. And the worst part was, he could feel himself getting excited. This was just the kind of thing that would have given him major fanboy drool as recently as a month ago. He just stared angrily at his screen. Being angry made the painkillers wear off, so the madder he got the more he hurt. He could nail the rocker-switch and dose himself with more of whatever the painkiller plugged into his IV was today, but since Perry and Lester and their girlfriends (had that other one been Suzanne Church? It sure looked like her) had told him he could use his laptop again, he'd stayed off the juice as much as possible. The computer could make him forget he hurt. He looked at the clock. It was 4AM. The blinds on the ward were shut most of the time, and he kept to his own schedule, napping and then surfing, then nodding off and then surfing some more. The hospital staff just left his food on the table beside him if he was asleep when it arrived, though they woke him for his sponge baths and to stick fresh needles in his arms, which were filled with bruisey collapsed veins. There was no one he could tell about this. Sure, there were chat-rooms with 24/7 chatter from Disney freaks, but he didn't much want to chat with them. Some of his friends would still be up and tweaking, but Christ, who wanted to IM with a speed freak at four in the morning? His typing was down to less than 30 wpm, and he couldn't keep it up for long. What he really wanted was to talk to someone about this. He really wanted to talk to Perry about this. He should send him an email, but he had the inkling of an idea and he didn't want to put it in writing, because it was a deliciously naughty idea. It was dumb to even think about phoning him, he barely knew him, and no one liked to get calls at four am. Besides -- he'd checked -- Perry's number was unlisted. From: deathw@deathwait.er To: pgibbons@hollywood.ride Subject: What's your phone number? Perry, I know that it's presumptuous, but I'd really like to talk to you v2v about something important that I'd prefer not to put in writing. I don't have any right to impose on you, especially not after you've already done me the kindness of coming to see me in the hospital, but I hope you'll send me your number anyway. Alternatively, please call me on my enum -- 1800DEATHWAITS-GGFSAH. Your admirer, Death Waits It was five minutes later when his laptop rang. It was unnaturally loud on the ward, and he heard his roommates stir when the tone played. He didn't have a headset -- Christ, he was an idiot. Wait, there was one, dangling from the TV. No mic, but at least he could pair it with his laptop for sound. He stabbed at the mute button and reached for the headset and slipped it on. Then he held the computer close to his face and whispered "Hello?" into its little mic. His voice was a croak, his ruined mouth distorting the word. Why had he decided to call this guy? He was such an idiot. "This is Perry Gibbons. Is that Death Waits?" "Yes, sorry, I don't have a mic. Can you hear me OK?" "If I turn the volume all the way up I can." There was an awkward silence. Death tried to think of how to begin. "What's on your mind, Death?" "I didn't expect you to be awake at this hour." "I had a rough night," Perry said. It occurred to Death that he was talking to one of his heros, a man who had come to visit him in the hospital that day. He grew even more tongue-tied. "What happened?" "Nothing important," Perry said and swallowed, and Death suddenly understood that Perry had had a rough night because of *him*, because of what *he'd* told Perry. It made him want to cry. "I'm sorry," Death said. "What's on your mind, Death?" Perry said again. Death told him what he'd found, about the Disney printers. He read Perry the URLs so he could look them up. "OK, that's interesting," Perry said. Death could tell he didn't really think it was that interesting. "I haven't told you my idea yet." He groped for the words. His mouth had gone dry. "OK, so Disney's going to ship these things to tons of people's houses, they'll sell them cheap at the parks and mail them as freebies to Magic Kingdom Club gold-card holders. So in a week or two, there's going to be just, you know, tons of these across the country." "Right." "So here's my idea: what if you could get them to build non-Disney stuff? What if you could send them plans for stuff from the rides? What if you could just download your friends' designs? What if this was opened wide." Perry chuckled on the other end of the line, then laughed, full-throated and full of merriment. "I like the way you think, kid," he said, once he'd caught his breath. And then this amazing thing happened. Perry Gibbons *brainstormed* with him about the kinds of designs they could push out to these things. It was like some kind of awesome dream come true. Perry was treating him like a peer, loving his ideas, keying off of them. Then a dismal thought struck him. "Wait though, wait. They're using their own goop for the printers. Every design we print makes them richer." Perry laughed again, really merry. "Oh, that kind of thing never works. They've been trying to tie feedstock to printers since the inkjet days. We go through that like wet kleenex." "Isn't that illegal?" "Who the fuck knows? It shouldn't be. I don't care about illegal anymore. Legal gets you lawyers. Come on, dude -- what's the point of being all into some anti-authoritarian subculture if you spend all your time sucking up to the authorities?" Death laughed, which actually hurt quite a bit. It was the first laugh he'd had since he'd ended up in the hospital, maybe the first one since he'd been fired from Disney World, and as much as it hurt, it felt good, too, like a band being loosened from around his broken ribs. His roommates stirred and one of them must have pushed the nurse call button, because shortly thereafter, the formidable Ukrainian nurse came in and savagely told him off for disturbing the ward at five in the morning. Perry heard and said his goodbyes, like they were old pals who'd chatted too long, and Death Waits rang off and fell into a light doze, grinning like a maniac. # Hilda eyed Perry curiously. "That sounded like an interesting conversation," she said. She was wearing a long t-shirt of his that didn't really cover much, and she looked delicious in it. It was all he could do to keep from grabbing her and tossing her on the bed -- of course, the cast meant that he couldn't really do that. And Hilda wasn't exactly smiling, either. "Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up," he said. "It wasn't the talking that did it, it was you not being there in the first place. Gave me the toss-and-turns." She came over to him then, the lean muscles in her legs flexing as she crossed the living room. She took his laptop away and set it down on the coffee-table, then took off his headset. He was wearing nothing but boxers, and she reached down and gave his dick a companionable honk before sitting down next to him and giving him a kiss on the cheek, the throat and the lips. "So, Perry," she said, looking into his eyes. "What the fuck are you doing sitting in the living room at 5 am talking to your computer? And why didn't you come to bed last night? I'm not going to be hanging out in Florida for the rest of my life. I woulda thought you'd want to maximize your Hilda-time while you've got the chance." She smiled to let him know she was kidding around, but she was right, of course. "I'm an idiot, Hilda. I fired Tjan and Kettlewell, told them to get lost." "I don't know why you think that's such a bad idea. You need business-people, probably, but it doesn't need to be those guys. Sometimes you can have too much history with someone to work with him. Besides, anything can be un-said. You can change your mind in a week or a month. Those guys aren't doing anything special. They'd come back to you if you asked 'em. You're Perry motherfuckin' Gibbons. You rule, dude." "You're a very nice person, Hilda Hammersen. But those guys are running our legal defense, which we're going to need, because I'm about to do something semi-illegal that's bound to get us sued again by the same pack of assholes as last time." "Disney?" She snorted. "Have you ever read up on the history of the Disney Company? The old one, the one Walt founded? Walt Disney wasn't just a racist creep, he was also a mad inventor. He kept coming up with these cool high-tech ways of making cartoons -- sticking real people in them, putting them in color, adding sync-sound. People loved it all, but it drove him out of business. It was all too expensive. "So he recruited his brother, Roy Disney, who was just a banker, to run the business. Roy turned the business around, watching the income and the outgo. But all this came at a price: Roy wanted to tell Walt how to run the business. More to the point, he wanted to tell Walt that he couldn't just spend millions from the company coffers on weird-ass R&D projects, especially not when the company was still figuring out how to exploit the *last* R&D project Walt had chased. But it was Walt's company, and he'd overrule Roy, and Roy would promise that it was going to put them in the poorhouse and then he'd figure out how to make another million off of Walt's vision, because that's what the money guy is supposed to do. "Then after the war, Walt went to Roy and said, 'Give me $17 million, I'm going to build a theme-park. And Roy said, 'You can't have it and what's a theme-park?' Walt threatened to fire Roy, the way he always had, and Roy pointed out that Disney was now a *public* company with shareholders who weren't going to let Walt cowboy around and piss away their money on his toys." "So how'd he get Disneyland built?" "He quit. He started his own company, WED, for Walter Elias Disney. He poached all the geniuses away from the studios and turned them into his 'Imagineers' and cashed in his life-insurance policy and raised his own dough and built the park, and then made Roy buy the company back from him. I'm guessing that that felt pretty good." "It sounds like it must've," Perry said. He was feeling thoughtful, and buzzed from the sleepless night, and jazzed from his conversation with Death Waits. He had an idea that they could push designs out to the printers that were like the Disney designs, but weird and kinky and subversive and a little disturbing. "I can understand why you'd be nervous about ditching your suits, but they're just that, suits. At some level, they're all interchangeable, mercenary parts. You want someone to watch the bottom line, but not someone who'll run the show. If that's not these guys, hey, that's cool. Find a couple more suits and run them." "Jesus, you really *are* Yoko, aren't you?" Lester was wearing his boxers and a bleary grin, standing in the living room's doorway where Hilda had stood a minute before. It was past 6AM now, and there were waking up sounds through the whole condo, toilets flushing, a car starting down in the parking lot. "Good morning, Lester," Hilda said. She smiled when she said it, no offense taken, all good, all good. "You fired who now, Perry?" Lester dug a pint of chocolate ice-cream out of the freezer and attacked it with a self-heating ceramic spoon that he'd designed specifically for this purpose. "I got rid of Kettlewell and Tjan," Perry said. He was blushing. "I would have talked to you about it, but you were with Suzanne. I had to do it, though. I had to." "I hate what happened to Death Waits. I hate that we've got some of the blame for it. But, Perry, Tjan and Kettlewell are part of our outfit. It's their show, too. You can't just go shit-canning them. Not just morally, either. Legally. Those guys own a piece of this thing and they're keeping the lawyers at bay too. They're managing all the evil shit so we don't have to. I don't want to be in charge of the evil, and neither do you, and hiring a new suit isn't going to be easy. They're all predatory, they all have delusions of grandeur." "You two have the acumen to hire better representation than those two," Hilda said. "You're experienced now, and you've founded a movement that plenty of people would kill to be a part of. You just need better management structure: an executive you can overrule whenever you need to. A lackey, not a boss." Lester acted as though he hadn't heard her. "I'm being pretty mellow about this, buddy. I'm not making a big deal out of the fact that you did this without consulting me, because I know how rough it must have been to discover that this wickedness had gone down in our name, and I might have done the same. But it's the cold light of day now and it's time to go over there together and have a chat with Tjan and Kettlewell and talk this over and sort it out. We can't afford to burn all this to the ground and start over now." Perry knew it was reasonable, but screw reasonable. Reasonable was how good people ended up doing wrong. Sometimes you had to be unreasonable. "Lester, they violated our trust. It was their responsibility to do this thing and do it right. They didn't do that. They didn't look closely at this thing so that they wouldn't have to put the brakes on if it turned out to be dirty. Which do you think those two would rather have happen: we run a cool project that everyone loves, or we run a lawsuit that makes ten billion dollars for their investors? They're playing a different game from us and their victory condition isn't ours. I don't want to be reasonable. I want to do the right thing. You and me could have sold out a thousand times over the years and made money instead of doing good, but we didn't. We didn't because it's better to be right than to be reasonable and rich. You say we can't afford to get rid of those two. I say we can't afford not to." "You need to get a good night's sleep, buddy," Lester said. He was blowing through his nose, a sure sign that he was angry. It made Perry's hackles go up -- he and Lester didn't fight much but when they did, hoo-boy. "You need to mellow out and see that what you're talking about is abandoning our friends, Kettlewell and Tjan, to make our own egos feel a little better. You need to see that we're risking everything, risking spending our lives in court and losing everything we've ever built." A Zen-like calm descended on Perry. Hilda was right. Suits were everywhere, and you could choose your own. You didn't need to let the Roy Disneys of the world call the shots. "I'm sorry you feel that way, Lester. I hear everything you're saying, but you know what, it's going to be my way. I understand that what I want to do is risky, but there's no way I can go on doing what I'm doing and letting things get worse and worse. Making a little compromise here and there is how you end up selling out everything that's important. We're going to find other business-managers and we're going to work with them to make a smooth transition. Maybe we'll all come out of this friends later on. They want to do something different from what I want to do is all." This wasn't calming Lester down at all. "Perry, this isn't your project to do what you want with. This belongs to a lot of us. I did most of the work in there." "You did, buddy. I get that. If you want to stick with them, that's how it'll go. No hard feelings. I'll go off and do my own thing, run my own ride. People who want to connect to my network, no sweat, they can do it. That's cool. We'll still be friends. You can work with Kettlewell and Tjan." Perry could hardly believe these words were coming out of his mouth. They'd been buddies forever, inseparable. Hilda took his hand silently. Lester looked at him with increasing incredulity. "You don't mean that." "Lester, if we split, it would break my heart. There wouldn't be a day that went by from now to the end of time that I didn't regret it. But if we keep going down this path, it's going to cost me my soul. I'd rather be broke than evil." Oh, it felt so *good* to be saying this. To finally affirm through deed and word that he was a good person who would put ethics before greed, before comfort even. Lester looked at Hilda for a moment. "Hilda, this is probably something that Perry and I should talk about alone, if you don't mind." "*I* mind, Lester. There's nothing you can't say in front of her." Lester apparently had nothing to say to that, and the silence made Perry uncomfortable. Lester had tears in his eyes, and that hit Perry in the chest like a spear. His friend didn't cry often. He crossed the room and hugged Lester. Lester was wooden and unyielding. "Please, Lester. Please. I hate to make you choose, but you have to choose. We're on the same side. We've always been on the same side. Neither of us are the kind of people who send lawyers after kids in hospital. Never. I want to make it good again. We can have the kind of gig where we do the right thing and the cool thing. Come on, Lester. Please." He let go of Lester. Lester turned on his heel and walked back into his bedroom. Perry knew that that meant he'd won. He smiled at Hilda and hugged her. She was a lot more fun to hug than Lester. # Sammy was at his desk looking over the production prototype for the Disney-in-a-Box (R) units that Imagineering had dropped off that morning when his phone rang. Not his desk phone -- his cellular phone, with the call-return number blocked. "Hello?" he said. Not many people had this number -- he didn't like getting interrupted by the phone. People who needed to talk to him could talk to his secretary first. "Hi, Sammy. Have I caught you at a bad time?" He could hear the sneer in the voice and then he could see the face that went with the sneer: Freddy. Shit. He'd given the reporter his number back when they were arranging their disastrous face-to-face. "It's not a good time, Freddy," he said. "If you call my secretary --" "I just need a moment of your time, sir. For a quote. For a story about the ride response to your printers -- your Disney-in-a-Box Circle-R, Tee-Em, Circle-C." Sammy felt his guts tense up. Of course those ride assholes would have known about the printers. That's what press-releases were for. Somewhere on their message-boards he was sure that there was some discussion of them. He hadn't had time to look for it, though, and he didn't want to use the Disney Parks competitive intel people on this stuff, because after the Death Waits debacle (debacle on debacle, ack, he could be such a fuck-up) he didn't want to have any train of intel-gathering on the group pointing back to him. "I'm not familiar with any response," Sammy said. "I'm afraid I can't comment --" "Oh, it'll only take a moment to explain it," Freddy said and then launched into a high-speed explanation before Sammy could object. They were delivering their own three-d models for the printers, and had even gotten hold of one of the test units Disney had passed out last week. They claimed to have reverse-engineered the goop that it ran on, so that anyone's goop could print to it. "So, what I'm looking for is a quote from Disney on this. Do you condone this? Did you anticipate it? What if someone prints an AK-47 with it?" "No one's going to print a working AK-47 with this," Sammy said. "It's too brittle. AK-47 manufacturing is already sadly in great profusion across our inner cities, anyway. As to the rest of it --" He closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. "As to the rest of it, that would be something you'd have to speak to one of my legal colleagues about. Would you like me to put you through to them?" Freddy laughed. "Oh come on, Sammy. A little something on background, no attribution? You going to sue them? Have them beaten up?" Sammy felt his face go white. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about --" "Word has it that the Death Waits kid came up with this. He used to be your protege, no? And I hear that Kettlewell and Tjan have been kicked out of the organization -- no one around to call the lawyers out on their behalf. Seems like a golden opportunity to strike." Sammy seethed. He'd been concentrating on making new stuff, great stuff. Competitive stuff, to be sure, but in the end, the reason for making the Disney-in-a-Box devices had been to make them, make them as cool as he could imagine. To plus them and re-plus them, in the old slang of Walt Disney, making the thing because the thing could be made and the world would be a more fun place once it was. Now here was this troll egging him on to go to war again with those ride shit-heads, to spend his energies destroying instead of creating. The worst part? It was all his fault. He'd brought his own destruction: the reporter, Death Waits, even the lawsuit. All the result of his bad planning and dumb decisions. God, he was a total fuck-up. Disney-in-a-Box sat on his desk, humming faintly -- not humming like a fridge hums, but actually humming in a baritone hum, humming a medley of magic-users' songs from Disney movies, like a living thing. Every once in a while it would clear its throat and mutter and even snore a little. There would be happy rustles and whispered conversations from within the guts of the thing. It was plussed all the way to hell and back. It had been easy, as more and more Imagineers had come up with cool features to add to the firmware, contributing them to the versioning system, and he'd been able to choose from among them and pick the best of the lot, making a device that rivaled Walt's 1955 Disneyland itself for originality, excitement, and cool. "I'll just say you declined to comment, then?" Asshole. "You write whatever you need to write, Freddy," he said. A hatch opened a tiny bit on the top of the cube and a pair of eyes peered out, then it slammed shut and there was a round of convincing giggles and scurrying from within the box. This could be huge, if Sammy didn't fuck it up by worrying too much about what someone else was up to. "Oh, and one other thing: it looks like the Death Waits kid is going to be discharged from the hospital this week." # He wasn't ready to leave the hospital. For starters, he couldn't walk yet, and there were still times when he could barely remember where he was, and there was the problem of the catheter. But the insurance company and the hospital had concurred that he'd had all the treatment he needed -- even if his doctor hadn't been able to look him in the eye when this was explained -- and it was time for him to go home. Go away. Go anywhere. He'd put it all in his LJ, the conversation as best as he could remember it, the way it made him feel. The conversation he'd had with Perry and the idea he'd had for pwning Disney-in-a-Box. He didn't even know if his apartment was still there -- he hadn't been back in weeks and the rent was overdue. And the comments came flooding in. First a couple dozen from his friends, then hundreds, then thousands. Raging fights -- some people accused him of being a fakester sock-puppet aimed at gathering sympathy or donations (!) -- side-conversations, philosophical arguments. Buried in there, offers from real world and online friends to meet him at the hospital, to get him home, to take care of him. It was unbelievable. There was a small fortune -- half-a-year's wages at his old job -- waiting in his paypal, and if this was all to be believed, there was a cadre of people waiting just outside that door to meet him. The nurse who came to get him looked rattled. "Your friends are here," she said in her Boris-and-Natasha accent, and gave him a disapproving look as she disconnected his hoses and pipes so swiftly he didn't have time to register the pain he felt. She pulled on a pair of Salvation Army underpants -- the first pair he'd worn in weeks -- and a pair of new, dark blue-jeans and a Rotary picnic t-shirt dated three years before. The shirt was a small and it still hung from him like a tent. "You will use canes?" she asked. He'd had some physiotherapy that week and he could take one or two doddering steps on crutches, but canes? No way. "I can't," he said, picturing himself sprawled on the polished concrete floor, with what was left of his face bashed in from the fall. "Wheelchair," she said to someone in the hall, and an orderly came in pushing a chair with a squeaky wheel -- though the chair itself was a pretty good one, at least as good as the ones they rented at Disney, which were nearly indestructible. He let the nurse transfer him to it with her strong hands in his armpits and under his knees. A bag containing his laptop and a few cards and things that had shown up at the hospital was dumped into his lap and he clutched it to himself as he was wheeled to the end of the corridor and around the corner, where the nurse's station, the elevators, the common area and his *fans* were. They weren't just his pals, though there were a few of them there, but also a big crowd of people he'd never met, didn't recognize. There were goths, skinny and pale and draped in black, but they were outnumbered by the subculture civilians, normal-looking, slightly hippieish, old and young. When he hove into sight, they burst into a wild cheer. The orderly stopped pushing his chair and the nurse rushed forward to shush them sternly, but it barely dampened the calls. There were wolf whistles, cheers, calls, disorganized chants, and then two very pretty girls -- he hadn't thought about "pretty" anything in a long, long time -- unfurled a banner that said DEATH WAITS in glittery hand-drawn letters, with a little skull dotting the I in WAITS. The nurse read the banner and reached to tear it out of their hands, but they folded it back. She came to him and hissed in his ear, something about getting security to get rid of these people if they were bothering him, and he realized that she thought DEATH WAITS was a *threat* and that made him laugh so hard he choked, and she flounced off in a deeply Slavic huff. And then he was among his welcoming party, and it *was* a party -- there were cake and clove cigarettes in smoke-savers and cans of licorice coffee, and everyone wanted to talk with him and take their pictures with him, and the two pretty girls took turns making up his face, highlighting his scars to make him fit for a Bela Lugosi role. The were called Lacey and Tracey, and they were sisters who went to the ride every day, they said breathlessly, and they'd seen the story he'd described, seen it with their own eyes, and it was something that was as personal as the twin language they'd developed to communicate with one another when they were little girls. His old friends surrounded him: guys who marveled at his recovery, girls who kissed his cheek and messed up Tracey and Lacey's makeup. Some of them had new tattoos to show him -- one girl had gotten a full-leg piece showing scenes from the ride, and she slyly pulled her skirt all the way up, all the way up, to show him where it all started. Security showed up and threw them all out into the street, where the heat was oppressive and wet, but the air was fresh and full of smells that weren't sickness or medicine, which made Death Waits feel like he could get up and dance. Effervescent citrus and biodiesel fumes, moist vegetation and the hum of lazy high noon bugs. "Now, it's all arranged," one of the straight-looking ones told him. He'd figured out that these were the pure story people, who'd read his descriptions and concluded that he'd seen something more than anyone else. They all wanted a chance to talk to him, but didn't seem too put out that he was spending most of his time with his old mates. "Don't worry about a thing." Car after car appeared, taking away more of the party. "Here you go." Another car pulled up, an all-electric kneeling number with a huge cargo space. They wheeled the chair right into it, and then two of the story-hippies helped him transfer into the seat. "My mom was in a wheelchair for ten years before she passed," a hippie told him. He was older and looked like an English teacher Death Waits had quite liked in grade ten. He strapped Death Waits in like a pro and off they went. They were ten minutes into Melbourne traffic -- Death marveling at buildings, signs, people, in every color, without the oppressive white-and-gore colors of everything in the hospital -- when the English teacher dude looked shyly at Death. "You think it's real -- the Story, I mean -- don't you?" Death thought about this for a second. He'd been very focused on the Park-in-a-Box printers for the past week, which felt like an eternity to him, but he remembered his obsession with the story fondly. It required a kind of floaty non-concentration to really see it, a meditative state he'd found easy to attain with all the painkillers. "It's real," he said. The English teacher and two of his friends seemed to relax a little. "We think so too." They pulled up to his condo -- how'd they know where he lived? -- and parked right next to his car! He could see where the tow had kind of fucked-up the rear bumper, but other than that, it was just as he remembered it, and it looked like someone had given it a wash, too. The English teacher put his car in park and came around to open his door just as the rest of the welcoming party came out of his building, pushing -- A stair-climbing wheelchair, the same kind that they used in the ride. Death laughed aloud with delight when he saw it rolling toward him, handling the curb easily, hardly a bump, and the two pretty girls, Tracey and Lacey, transferred him into it, and both contrived to brush their breasts and jasmine-scented hair across his cheeks as they did so, and he felt the first stirrings in his ruined groin that he'd felt since before his beating. He laughed like a wild-man, and they all laughed with him and someone put a clove cigarette between his lips and he drew on it, coughed a little, and then had another drag before he rolled into the elevator. The girls put him to bed hours later. His apartment had been spotless and he had every confidence that it would be spotless again come night-time. The party had spent the rest of the day and most of the night talking about the story that they'd seen in the ride, where they'd seen it, what it meant. There was a lot of debate about whether they had any business rating things now that the story had shown itself to them. The story was the product of unconscious effort, and it should be left to unconscious effort. But the counter-argument was that they had a duty to garden the story, or possibly to sharpen its telling, or to protect it from people who couldn't see it or wouldn't see it. At first Death didn't know what to make of all this talk. At first he found it funny and more than a little weird to be taking the story this seriously. It was beautiful, but it was an accidental beauty. The ride was the important thing, the story was its effect. But these people convinced him that they were right, that the story *had* to be important. After all, it had inspired all of them, hadn't it? The ride was just technology -- the story was what the ride was *for*. His head swam with it. "We've got to protect it," he said finally, after listening to the argument, after eating the food with which they'd filled his fridge, after talking intensely with Tracey (or possibly Lacey) about their parents' unthinking blandness, after letting the English teacher guy (whose name was Jim) take him to the toilet, after letting his old goth pals play some music some mutual friends had just mixed. "We've got to protect it and sharpen it. The story wants to get out and there will be those who can't see it." He didn't care that his speech was mangled by his fucked-up face. He'd seen his face in the mirror and Tracey and Lacey had done a nice job in making it up -- he looked like a latter-day Marilyn Manson, his twisted mouth a ghoulish smear. The doctors had talked about giving him another series of surgeries to fix his lip, a set of implanted dentures to replace the missing teeth, had even mentioned that there were specialist clinics where he could get a new set budded and grown right out of his own gums. That had been back when the mysterious forces of the lawsuit and the ride were paying his bills. Now he contemplated his face in the mirror and told himself he'd get used to this, he'd come to like it, it would be a trademark. It would make him gothier than goth, for life, always an outsider, always one of the weird ones, like the old-timers who'd come to Disney with their teenaged, eye-rolling kids. Goths' kids were never goths, it seemed -- more like bang-bangers or jocky-looking peak-performance types, or hippies or gippies or dippies or tippies or whatever. But their parents were still proudly flying their freak-flags, weird to the grave. "We'll let everyone know about it," he said, thinking not of *everyone* but of all the cool subculture kids he'd grown up with and worshipped and been rejected by and dated and loved and hated -- "and we'll make it part of *everyone*'s story. We'll protect it, guys. Of course we'll protect it." That settled the argument. Death hadn't expected that. Since when did he get the last word on any subject? Since now. They were following his lead. And then the girls put him to bed, shyly helping him undress, each of them leaning over him to kiss him good night. Tracey's kiss was sisterly, on the cheek, her spicy perfume and her jet-black hair caressing him. Lacey's kiss was anything but sisterly. She mashed her breasts to his chest and thrust her tongue into his mouth, keeping her silver eyes open and staring deep into his, her fingers working busily in his hair. She broke the kiss off with a gasp and a giggle. She traced the ruin of his mouth with a fingertip, breathing heavily, and let it slide lower, down his chest. He found himself actually *hard*, the first pleasurable sensation he'd had in his dick since that fateful night. From the corridor came an impatient cough -- Tracey, waiting for Lacey to get going. Lacey rolled her eyes and giggled again and then slid her hand the rest of the way down, briefly holding his dick and then encircling his balls with her fingers before kissing him again on the twist of his lips and backing out of the room, whispering, "Sleep well, see you in the morning." Death lay awake and staring at the ceiling for a long time after they had gone. The English teacher dude had left him with a bedpan for the night and many of them had promised to return in rotations indefinitely during the days, helping him out with dressing and shopping and getting him in and out of his marvelous chair. He stared and stared at that ceiling, and then he reached for his laptop, there beside the bed, the same place it had lived when he was in the hospital. He fired it up and went straight to today's fly-throughs of the ride and ran through them from different angles -- facing backward and sideways, looking down and looking up, noting all the elements that felt like *story* and all the ones that didn't, wishing he had his plus-one/minus-one joystick with him to carve out the story he was seeing. # Lester wouldn't work the ride anymore, so Perry took it on his own. Hilda was in town buying groceries -- his chest-freezer of gourmet surplus food had blown its compressor and the contents had spoiled in a mess of venison and sour blueberry sauce and duck pancakes -- and he stood alone. Normally he loved this, being the carnival barker at the middle of the three-ring circus of fans, tourists and hawkers, but today his cast itched, he hadn't slept enough, and there were lawyers chasing him. Lots of lawyers. A caravan of cars pulled into the lot like a Tim Burton version of a funeral, a long train of funnycar hearses with jacked-up rear wheels and leaning chimney-pots, gargoyles and black bunting with super-bright black-light LEDs giving them a commercially eldritch glow. Mixed in were some straight cars, and they came and came and came, car on car. The hawkers got out more stuff, spread it out further, and waited while the caravan maneuvered itself into parking spots, spilling out into the street. Riders got out of the cars, mostly super-skinny goths -- a line of special low-calorie vegan versions of Victorian organ-meat delicacies had turned a mom-and-pop cafe in Portland, Oregon, into a Fortune 500 company a few years before -- in elaborate DIY costumery. It shimmered darkly, petticoats and toppers, bodices and big stompy boots and trousers cut off in ribbons at the knees. The riders converged on one of the straight cars, a beige mini-van, and crowded around it. A moment later, they were moving toward Perry's ticket-taking stand. The crowd parted as they approached and in Perry saw whom they'd been clustered around. It was a skinny goth kid in a wheelchair like the ones they kept in the ride -- they'd get that every now and again, a guest in his own chair, just needing a little wireless +1/-1 box. His hair was shaggy and black with green highlights, stuck out like an anime cosplayer's. He was white as Wonder Bread, with something funny about his mouth. His legs were in casts that had been wrapped with black gauze, and a pair of black pointy shoes had been slid over his toes, tipped with elaborate silver curlicues. The chair zipped forward and Perry recognized him in a flash: Death Waits! He felt his mouth drop open and he shut it and came around the stand. "No way!" he said, and grabbed Death's hand, encrusted in chunky silver jewelry, a different stylized animal skull on each finger. Death's ruined mouth pulled up in a kind of smile. "Nice to see you," he said, limply squeezing Perry's hand. "It was very kind of you to visit me in the hospital." Perry thought of all the things that had happened since then and wondered how much of it, if any, Death had a right to know about. He leaned in close, conscious of all the observers. "I'm out of the lawsuit. We are. Me and Lester. Fired those guys." Behind his reflective contacts, Death's eyes widened a touch. He slumped a little. "Because of me?" Perry thought some. "Not exactly. But in a way. It wasn't us." Death smiled. "Thank you." Perry straightened up. "Looks like you brought down a good crowd," he said. "Lots of friends!" Death nodded. "Lots of friends these days," he said. An attractive young woman came over and squeezed his shoulder. They were such a funny bunch in their DIY goth-frocks, micro-manufactured customized boots, their elaborate tattoos and implants and piercings, but for all that, cuddly and earnest with the shadows visible of the geeks they'd been. Perry felt he was smiling so broadly it almost hurt. "Rides are on me, gang," he said. "In you go. Your money's no good here. Any friend of Death Waits rides for free today." They cheered and patted him on the back as they went through, and Death Waits looked like he'd grown three inches in his wheelchair, and the pretty girl kissed Perry's cheek as she went by, and Death Waits had a smile so big you could hardly tell there was anything wrong with his mouth. They rode it through six times in a row, and as they came back around for another go and another, they talked intently about the story, the story, the story. Perry knew about the story, he'd seen it, and he and Lester had talked it over now and again, but he was still constantly amazed by its ability to inspire riders. Paying customers slipped in and out, too, and seemed to catch some of the infectious intensity of the story group. They went away in pairs, talking about the story, and shopped the market stalls for a while before coming back to ride again, to look for more story. They'd never named the ride. It had always been "the ride." Not even a capital "R." For a second, Perry wondered if they'd end up calling it "The Story" in the end. # Perry got his Disney-in-a-Box through a circuitous route, getting one of the hawkers' brothers to order it to a PO box in Miami, to which Perry would drive down to pick it up and take it back. Lester roused himself from the apartment when Perry told him it had arrived. Lester and Suzanne had been AWOL for days, sleeping in until Perry left, coming back after Perry came back, until it felt like they were just travelers staying in the same hotel. He hadn't heard a peep from Kettlewell or Tjan, either. He guessed that they were off figuring things out with their money people. The network of ride operators had taken the news with equanimity -- Hilda had helped him write the message so that it kind of implied that everything was under control and moving along nicely. But when Perry emailed Lester to say he was going to drive down to the PO box the next morning before opening the ride, Lester emailed back in minutes volunteering to come with him. He had coffee ready by the time Perry got out of the shower. It was still o-dark-hundred outside, the sun not yet risen, and they hardly spoke as they got into the car, but soon they were on the open road. "Kettlewell and Tjan aren't going to sue you," Lester said. There it was, all in a short sentence: *I've been talking to them. I've been figuring out if I'm with you or with them. I've been saving your ass. I've been deciding to be on your side.* "Good news," Perry said. "That would have really sucked." Perry waited for the rest of the drive for Lester to say something, but he didn't. It was a long drive. The whole way back, Lester talked about the Disney-in-a-Box. There'd been some alien autopsy videos of them posted online already, engineers taking them to bits, making guesses about and what they did and how. Lester had watched the videos avidly and he held his own opinions, and he was eager to get at the box and find answers for himself. It was the size of an ice-chest, too big to fit on his lap, but he kept looking over his shoulder at it. The box-art, a glossy pic of two children staring goggle-eyed at a box from which Disneoid marvels were erupting, looked a little like the Make Your Own Monster toy Perry'd had as a boy. It actually made his heart skip a beat the way that that old toy had. Really, wasn't that every kid's dream? A machine that created wonders from dull feedstock? They got back to the ride long before it was due to open and Perry asked Lester if he wanted to get a second breakfast in the tea-room in the shantytown, but Lester begged off, heading for his workshop to get to grips with the Box. So Perry alone waited for the ride to open, standing at his familiar spot behind the counter. The hawkers came and nodded hello to him. A customer showed up. Another. Perry took their money. The ticket-counter smelled of sticky beverages spilled and left to bake in the heat, a sour-sweet smell like bile. His chair was an uncomfortable bar-stool he'd gotten from a kitchen-surplus place, happy for the bargain. He'd logged a lot of hours in that chair. It had wreaked havoc on his lower spine and tenderized his ass. He and Lester had started this as a lark, but now it was a movement, and not one that was good for his mental health. He didn't want to be sitting on that stool. He might as well be working in a liquor store -- the skill-set was the same. Hilda broke his reverie by calling his phone. "Hey, gorgeous," she said. She bounded out of bed fully formed, without any intervening stages of pre-coffee, invertebrate, pre-shower, and Homo erectus. He could hear that she was ready to catch the world by the ankle and chew her way up its leg. "Hey," he said. "Uh oh. Mr Badvibes is back. You and Lester fight in the car?" "Naw," he said. "That was fine. Just..." He told her about the smell and the stool and working at a liquor store. "Get one of those home-slices running the market stalls to take over the counter, and take me to the beach, then. It's been weeks and I still haven't seen the ocean. I'm beginning to think it's an urban legend." So that's what he did. Hilda drove up in a bikini that made his jaw drop, and bought a pair of polarizing contacts from Jason, and Perry turned the till over to one of the more trustworthy vendors, and they hit the road. Hilda nuzzled him and prodded him all the way to the beach, kissing him at the red lights. The sky was blue and clear as far as the eye could see in all directions, and they bought a bag of oranges, a newspaper, beach-blankets, sun-block, a picnic lunch, and a book of replica vintage luggage stickers from hawkers at various stop-points. They unpacked the trunk in the parking garage and stepped out into the bright day, and that's when they noticed the wind. It was blowing so hard it took Hilda's sarong off as soon as she stepped out onto the street. Perry barely had time to snatch the cloth out of the air. The wind howled. They looked up and saw the palm-trees bending like drawn bows, the hot-dog vendors and shave-ice carts and the jewelry hawkers hurriedly piling everything into their cars. "Guess the beach is cancelled," Hilda said, pointing out over the ocean. There, on the horizon, was a wall of black cloud, scudding rapidly toward them in the raging wind. "Shoulda checked the weather." The wind whipped up stinging clouds of sand and debris. It gusted hard and actually blew Hilda into Perry. He caught her and they both laughed nervously. "Is this a hurricane?" she asked, joking, not joking, tension in her voice. "Probably not." He was thinking of Hurricane Wilma, though, the year he'd moved to Florida. No one had predicted Wilma, which had been a tropical storm miles off the coast until it wasn't, until it was smashing a 50km-wide path of destruction from Key West to Kissimmee. He'd been working a straight job as a structural engineer for a condo developer, and he'd seen what a good blow could do to the condos of Florida, which were built mostly from dreams, promises, spit, and kleenex. Wilma had left cars stuck in trees, trees stuck in houses, and it had blown just like this when it hit. There was a crackle in the air, and the sighing of the wind turned to groans, seeming to come from everywhere at once -- the buildings were moaning in their bones as the winds buffeted them. "We have to get out of here," Perry said. "Now." They got up to the second storey of the parking garage when the whole building moaned and shuddered beneath them, like a tremor. They froze on the stairwell. Somewhere in the garage, something crashed into something else with a sound like thunder, and then it was echoed with an actual thunder-crack, a sound like a hundred rifles fired in unison. Hilda looked at him. "No way. Not further up. Not in this building." He agreed. They pelted down the street and into the first sleeting showers coming out of a sky that was now dirty grey and low. A sandwich board advertising energy beverages spun through the air like a razor-edged frisbee, trailing a length of clothesline that had tethered it to the front of some beach-side cafe. On the beach across the road, beachcomber robots burrowed into the sand, trying to get safe from the wind, but were foiled again and again, rolled around like potato bugs into the street, into the sea, into the buildings. They seizured like dying things. Perry felt an irrational urge to rescue them. "High ground," Hilda said, pointing away from the beach. "High ground and find a basement. Just like a twister." A sheet of water lifted off the surface of the sea and swept across the road at them, soaking them to the skin, followed by a sheet of sand that coated them from head to toe. It was all the encouragement they needed. They ran. They ran, but the streets were running with rain now and more debris was rolling past them. They got up one block and sloshed across the road. They made it halfway up the next block, past a coffee shop and a surf-shop in low-slung buildings, and the wind literally lifted them off their feet and slammed them to the ground. Perry grabbed Hilda and dragged her into an alley behind the surf-shop. There were dumpsters there, and a recessed doorway, and they squeezed past the dumpster and into the doorway. Now in the lee, they realized how loud the storm had been. Their ears rang with it, and rang again with another thunderclap. Their chests heaved and they shivered, grabbing each other. The doorway stank of piss and the crackling ozone around them. "This place, holy fuck, it's about to lift off and fly away," Hilda said, panting. Perry's unbroken arm throbbed and he looked down to see a ragged cut running the length of his forearm. From the Dumpster? "It's a big storm," Perry said. "They come through now and again. Sometimes they blow away." "What do they blow away? Trailers? Apartment buildings?" They were both spitting sand and Perry's arm oozed blood. "Sometimes!" Perry said. They huddled together and listened to the wind lashing at the buildings around them. The Dumpster blocking their doorway groaned, and then it actually slid a few inches. Water coursed down the alley before them, with debris caught in it: branches, trash, then an electric motorcycle, scratching against the road as it rattled through the river. They watched it pass without speaking, then both of them screamed and scrambled back as a hissing, soaked house-cat scrambled over the dumpster, landing practically in their laps, clawing at them with hysterical viciousness. "Fuck!" Hilda said as it caught hold of her thumb with its teeth. She pushed at its face ineffectually, hissing with pain, and Perry finally worked a thumb into the hinge of its jaw and forced it open. The cat sprang away, clawing up his face, leaping back onto the Dumpster. Hilda's thumb was punctured many times, already running free with blood. "I'm going to need rabies shots," she said. "But I'll live." They cuddled, in the blood and the mud, and watched the river swell and run with more odd debris: clothes and coolers, beer bottles and a laptop, cartons of milk and someone's purse. A small palm-tree. A mailbox. Finally, the river began to wane, the rain to falter. "Was that it?" Hilda said. "Maybe," Perry said. He breathed in the moist air. His arms throbbed -- one broken, the other torn open. The rain was petering out fast now, and looking up, he could see blue sky peeking through the dirty, heavy clouds, which were scudding away as fast as they'd rolled in. "Next time, we check the weather before we go to the beach," he said. She laughed and leaned against him and he yelped as she came into contact with his hurt arm. "We got to get you to a hospital," she said. "Get that looked at." "You too," he said, pointing at her thumb. It was all so weird and remote now, as they walked through the Miami streets, back toward the garage. Other shocked people wandered the streets, weirdly friendly, smiling at them like they all shared a secret. The beach-front was in shambles, covered in blown trash and mud, uprooted trees and fallen leaves, broken glass and rolled cars. Perry hit the car radio before they pulled out of the garage. An announcer reported that Tropical Storm Henry had gone about three miles inland before petering out to a mere sun-shower, along with news about the freeways and hospitals being equally jammed. "Huh," Perry said. "Well, what do we do now?" "Let's find a hotel room," Hilda said. "Have showers, get something to eat." It was a weird and funny idea, and Perry liked it. He'd never played tourist in Florida, but what better place to do so? They gathered their snacks from the back of the car and used the first aid kit in the trunk to tape themselves up. They tried to reach Lester but no one answered. "He's probably at the ride," Perry said. "Or balls-deep in reverse-engineering the Disney Box thing. OK, let's find a hotel room." Everything on the beach was fully booked, but as they continued inland for a couple blocks, they came upon coffin hotels stacked four or five capsules high, painted gay Miami deco pastels, installed in rows in old storefronts or stuck in street-parking spots, their silvered windows looking out over the deserted boulevards. "Should we?" Perry said, gesturing at them. "If we can get an empty one? Damn right -- these things are going to be in serious demand in pretty short order." Stepping into the coffin hotel transported Perry back to his days on the road, his days staying at coffin hotel after coffin hotel, to his first night with Hilda, in Madison. One look at Hilda told him she felt the same. They washed each other slowly, as though they were underwater, cleaning out one-another's wounds, sluicing away the caked on mud and grime blown deep into their ears and the creases of their skin, nestled against their scalps. They lay down in bed, naked, together, spooned against one another. "You're a good man, Perry Gibbons," Hilda said, snuggling against him, hand moving in slow circles on his tummy. They slept that way and got back on the road long past dark, driving the blasted freeway slowly, moving around the broken glass and blown out tires that remained. The path of the hurricane followed the coast straight to Hollywood, a line of smashed trees and car wrecks and blown-off roofs that made the nighttime drive even more disorienting. They went straight back to the condo, but Lester wasn't there. Worry nagged at Perry. "Take me to the ride?" he said, after he'd paced the apartment a few times. Hilda looked up from the sofa, where she had collapsed the instant they came through the door, arm flung over her face. "You're shitting me," she said. "It's nearly midnight, and we've been in a hurricane." Perry squirmed. "I've got a bad feeling, OK? And I can't drive myself." He flapped his busted arm at her. Hilda looked at him, her eyes narrowed. "Look, don't be a jerk, OK? Lester's a big boy. He's probably just out with Suzanne. He'd have called you if there'd been a problem." He looked at her, bewildered by the ferocity of her response. "OK, I'll call a cab," he said, trying for a middle ground. She jumped up from the couch. "Whatever. Fine. Let me get my keys. Jesus." He had no idea how he'd angered her, but it was clear that he had, and the last thing he wanted was to get into a car with her, but he couldn't think of a way of saying that without escalating things. So they drove in white-lipped silence to the ride, Hilda tense with anger, Perry tense with worry, both of them touchy as cats, neither saying a word. But when they pulled up to the ride, they both let out a gasp. It was lit with rigged floodlights and car headlights, and it was swarming with people. As they drew closer, they saw that the market stalls were strewn across the parking lot, in smashed pieces. As they drew closer still, they saw that the ride itself was staring eyeless at them, window-glass smashed. Perry was out of the car even before it stopped rolling, Hilda shouting something after him. Lester was just on the other side of the ride-entrance, wearing a paper mask and rubber boots, wading in three-inch deep, scummy water. Perry splashed to a halt. "Holy shit," he breathed. The ride was lit with glow-sticks, waterproof lamps, and LED torches, and the lights reflected crazily from the still water that filled it as far as the eye could see, way out into the gloom. Lester looked up at him. His face was lined and exhausted, and it gleamed with sweat. "Storm broke out all the windows and trashed the roof, then flooded us out. It did a real number on the market, too." His voice was dead. Perry was wordless. Bits of the ride-exhibits floated in the water, along with the corpses of the robots. "No drainage," Lester said. "The code says drainage, but there's none here. I never noticed it before. I'm going to rig a pump, but my workshop's pretty much toast." Lester's workshop had been in the old garden-center at the side of the ride. It was all glass. "We had some pretty amazing winds." Perry felt like he should be showing off his wound to prove that he hadn't been fucking off while the disaster was underway, but he couldn't bring himself to do so. "We got caught in it in Miami," he said. "Wondered where you were. The kid who was minding the shop just cut and run when the storm rolled in." "He did? Christ, what an irresponsible asshole. I'll break his neck." A slimy raft of kitchen gnomes -- their second business venture -- floated past silently in the harsh watery light. The smell was almost unbearable. "It wasn't his job --" Lester's voice cracked on *job*, and he breathed deeply. "It wasn't his job, Perry. It was your job. You're running around, having a good time with your girlfriend, firing lawyers --" He stopped and breathed again. "You know that they're going to sue us, right? They're going to turn us into a smoking ruin because you fired them, and what the fuck are you going to do about that? Whose job is that?" "I thought you said they weren't going to sue," Perry said. It came out in an embarrassed mumble. Lester had never talked to him like this. Never. "Kettlewell and Tjan aren't going to sue," Lester said. "The lawyers you fired, the venture capitalists who backed them? They're going to turn us into paste." "What would you have preferred?" Hilda said. She was standing in the doorway, away from the flood, watching them intently. Her eyes were raccoon-bagged, but she was rigid with anger. Perry could hardly look at her. "Would you have preferred to have those fuckers go around destroying the lives of your supporters in order to enrich a few pig assholes?" Lester just looked at her. "Well?" "Shut up, Yoko," he said. "We're having a private conversation here." Perry's jaw dropped, and Hilda was already in motion, sloshing into the water in her sandals. She smacked Lester across the cheek, a crack that echoed back over the water and walls. Lester brought his hand up to his reddening face. "Are you done?" he said, his voice hard. Hilda looked at Perry. Lester looked at Perry. Perry looked at the water. "I'll meet you by the car," Perry said. It came out in a mumble. They held for a moment, the three of them, then Hilda walked out again, leaving Lester and Perry looking at one another. "I'm sorry," Perry said. "About Hilda? About the lawsuits? About skipping out?" "About everything," he said. "Let's fix this up, OK?" "The ride? I don't even know if I want to. Why bother? It'll cost a fortune to get it online, and they'll only shut it down again with the lawsuit. Why bother." "So we won't fix the ride. Let's fix us." "Why bother," Lester said, and it came out in the same mumble. The watery sounds of the room and the smell and the harsh reflected rippling light made Perry want to leave. "Lester --" he began. Lester shook his head. "There's nothing more we can do tonight, anyway. I'll rent a pump in the morning." "I'll do it," Perry said. "You work on the Disney-in-a-Box thing." Lester laughed, a bitter sound. "Yeah, OK, buddy. Sure." Out in the parking-lot, the hawkers were putting their stalls back together as best they could. The shantytown was lit up and Perry wondered how it had held together. Pretty good, is what he guessed -- they met and exceeded county code on all of those plans. Hilda honked the horn at him. She was fuming behind the wheel and they drove in silence. He felt numb and wrung out and he didn't know what to say to her. He lay awake in bed that night waiting to hear Lester come home, but he didn't. # Sammy loved his morning meetings. They all came to his office, all the different park execs, creatives, and emissaries from the old partner companies that had spun off to make movies and merch and educational materials. They all came each day to talk to him about the next day's Disney-in-a-Box build. They all came to beg him to think about adding in something from their franchises and cantons to the next installment. There were over a million DiaBs in the field now, and they weren't even trying to keep up with orders anymore. Sammy loved looking at the online auction sites to see what the boxes were going for -- he knew that some of his people had siphoned off a carload or two of the things to e-tail out the back door. He loved that. Nothing was a better barometer of your success than having made something other people cared enough about to steal. He loved his morning meetings, and he conducted them with the flair of a benevolent emperor. He'd gotten a bigger office -- technically it was a board-room for DiaB strategy, but Sammy *was* the DiaB strategy. He'd outfitted it with fan-photos of their DiaB shrines in their homes, with kids watching enthralled as the day's model was assembled before their eyes. The hypnotic fascination in their eyes was unmistakable. Disney was the focus of their daily lives, and all they wanted was more, more, more. He could push out five models a day, ten, and they'd go nuts for them. But he wouldn't. He was too cunning. One model a day was all. Leave them wanting more. Never breathe a hint of what the next day's model would be -- oh, how he loved to watch the blogs and the chatter as the models self-assembled, the heated, time-bound fights over what the day's model was going to be. "Good morning, Ron," he said. Wiener had been lobbying to get a Main Street build into the models for weeks now, and Sammy was taking great pleasure in denying it to him without shutting down all hope. Getting Ron Wiener to grovel before him every morning was better than a cup of coffee. "I've been thinking about what you said, and you're right," Wiener said. He always started the meeting by telling Sammy how right he was to reject his last idea. "The flag-pole and marching-band scene would have too many pieces. House cats would knock it over. We need something more unitary, more visually striking. So here's what I've been thinking: what about the fire-engine?" Sammy raised an indulgent eyebrow. "Kids *love* fire trucks. All the colors are in the printer's gamut -- I checked. We could create a Mickey-and-Friends fire-crew to position around it, a little barn for it." "The only thing I liked about firetrucks when I was a kid was that the word started with 'f' and ended with 'uck' --" Sammy smiled when he said it, and waited for Wiener to fake hilarity, too. The others in the room -- other park execs, some of their licensing partners, a few advertisers -- laughed too. Officially, this was a "brainstorming session," but everyone knew that it was all about getting the nod from Sammy. Wiener laughed dutifully and slunk away. More supplicants came forward. "How about this?" She was very cute -- dressed in smart, dark clothes that were more Lower East Side than Orlando. She smelled good, too -- one of the new colognes that hinted at free monomers, like hot plastic or a new-bought tire. Cat-slanted green eyes completed the package. "What you got there?" She was from an ad agency, someone Disney Parks had done business with at some point. Agencies had been sending their people to these meetings too, trying to get a co-branding coup for one of their clients. "It's a series of three, telling a little story. Beginning, middle and end. The first one is a family sitting down to breakfast, and you can see, it's the same old crap, boring microwave omelets and breakfast puddings. Mom's bored, dad's more bored, and sis and brother here are secretly dumping theirs onto mom's and dad's plates. All this stuff is run using the same printers, so it looks very realistic." It did indeed. Sammy hadn't thought about it, but he supposed it was only natural that the omelets were printed -- how else could General Mills get that uniformity? He should talk to some of the people in food services about getting some of that tech to work at the parks. "So in part two, they're setting up the kitchen around this mystery box -- one part Easy-Bake lightbulb oven, one part Tardis. You know what that is?" Sammy grinned. "Why yes, I believe I do." Their eyes met in a fierce look of mutual recognition. "It's a breakfast printer, isn't it?" The other supplicants in the room sucked in a collective breath. Some chuckled nervously. "It's about moving the apparatus to the edge. Bridging the last mile. Why not? This one will do waffles, breakfast cereals, bagels and baked goods, small cakes. New designs every day -- something for mom and dad, something for the kids, something for the sullen teens. We're already doing this at the regional plants and distributorships, on much larger scales. But getting our stuff into consumers' homes, getting them *subscribed* to our food --" Sammy held up a hand. "I see," he said. "And our people are already primed for home-printing experiences. They're right in your sweet spot." "Part three, Junior and little sis are going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but these things are shaped *like them*, with their portraits on each sugar-lump. Mom and dad are eating tres sophistique croissants and delicate cakes. Look at Rover here, with his own cat-shaped dog-biscuit. See how happy they all are?" Sammy nodded. "Shouldn't this all be under nondisclosure?" he said. "Probably, but what are you gonna do? You guys are pretty good at keeping secrets, and if you decide to shaft us by selling out to one of our competitors, we're probably dead, anyway. I'll be able to ship out half a million units in the first week, then we can ramp production if need be -- lots of little parts-and-assembly subcontractors will take the work if we offer." Sammy liked the way she talked. Like someone who didn't need to spend a lot of time screwing around, planning, like someone who could just make it happen. "You're launching when?" "Three days after you start running this campaign," she said, without batting an eyelash. "My name's Sammy," he said. "How's Thursday?" "Launch on Sunday?" She shook her head. "It's tricky, Sunday launches. Gotta pay everyone scale-and-a-half." She gave him a wink. "What the hell, it's not my money." She stuck out her hand. She was wearing a couple of nice chunky obsidian rings in abstract curvy shapes, looking a little porny in their suggestion of breasts and thighs. He shook her hand and it was warm and dry and strong. "Well, that's this week taken care of," Sammy said, and pointedly cleared the white-board surface running the length of the table. The others groaned and got up and filed out. The woman stayed behind. "Dinah," she said. She handed him a card and he noted the agency. Dallas-based, not New York, but he could tell she was a transplant. "You got any breakfast plans?" It was hardly gone 9AM -- Sammy liked to get these meetings started early. "I normally get something sent in, but your little prototypes there..." She laughed. It was a pretty laugh. She was a couple years older than him, and she wore it well. "Do I have breakfast plans? Sammy my boy, I'm nothing *but* breakfast plans! I have a launch on Sunday, remember?" "Heh. Oh yeah." "I'm on the next flight to DFW," she said. "I've got a cab waiting to take me to the airport." "I wonder if you and I need to talk over some details," Sammy said. "Only if you want to do it in the taxi." "I was thinking we could do it on the plane," he said. "You're going to buy a ticket?" "On my plane," he said. They'd given him use of one of the company jets when he started really ramping production on the DiaBs. "Oh yes, I think that can be arranged," she said. "It's Sammy, right?" "Right," he said. They left the building and had an altogether lovely flight to Dallas. Very productive. # Lester hadn't left Suzanne's apartment in days. She'd rented a place in the shantytown -- bemused at the idea of paying rent to a squatter, but pleased to have a place of her own now that Lester and Perry's apartment had become so tense. Technically, he was working on the Disney printers, which she found interesting in an abstract way. They had a working one and a couple of disassembled ones, and watching the working one do its thing was fascinating for a day or two, but then it was just a three-d TV with one channel, broadcasting one frame per day. She dutifully wrote about it, though, and about Perry's ongoing efforts to re-open the ride. She got the sense from him that he was heading for flat-ass broke. Lester and he had always been casual about money, but buying all new robots, more printers, replacement windows, fixing the roof -- none of it was cheap. And with the market in pieces, he wasn't getting any rent. She looked over Lester's shoulder for the fiftieth time. "How's it going?" "Don't write about this, OK?" He'd never said that to her. "I'll embargo it until you ship." He grunted. "Fine, I guess. OK, well, I've got it running on generic goop, that part was easy. I can also load my own designs, but that requires physical access to the thing, in order to load new firmware. They don't make it easy, which is weird. It's like they don't plan on updating it once it's in the field -- maybe they just plan on replacing them at regular intervals." "Why's the firmware matter to you?" "Well, that's where it stores information about where to get the day's designs. If we're going to push our own designs to it, we need to give people an easy way to tell it to tune in to our feed, and the best way to do that is to change the firmware. The alternative would be, oh, I don't know, putting another machine upstream of it to trick it into thinking that it's accessing their site when it's really going to ours. That means getting people to configure another machine -- no one but a few hardcore geeks will want to do that." Suzanne nodded. She wondered if "a few hardcore geeks" summed up the total audience for this project in any event. She didn't mention it, though. Lester's brow was so furrowed you could lose a dime in the crease above his nose. "Well, I'm sure you'll get it," she said. "Yeah. It's just a matter of getting at the boot-loader. I could totally do this if I could get at the boot-loader." Suzanne knew what a boot-loader was, just barely. The thing that chose which OS to load when you turned it on. She wondered if every daring, sexy technology project started like this, a cranky hacker muttering angrily about boot-loaders. Suzanne missed Russia. She'd had a good life there, covering the biotech scene. Those hackers were a lot scarier than Lester and Perry, but they were still lovable and fascinating in their own way. Better than the Ford and GM execs she used to have to cozy up to. She'd liked the manic hustle of Russia, the glamour and the squalor. She'd bought a time-share dacha that she could spend weekends at, and the ex-pats in Petersburg had rollicking parties and dinners where they took apart the day's experiences on Planet Petrograd. "I'm going out, Lester," she said. Lester looked up from the DiaB and blinked a few times, then seemed to rewind the conversation. "Hey," he said. "Oh, hey. Sorry, Suzanne. I'm just -- I'm trying to work instead of think these days. Thinking just makes me angry. I don't know what to do --" He broke off and thumped the side of the printer. "How's Perry getting on with rebuilding?" "He's getting on," Lester said. "As far as I know. I read that the Death Waits kid and his people had come by to help. Whatever that means." "He freaks me out," Suzanne said. "I mean, I feel terrible for him, and he seemed nice enough in the hospital. But all those people -- the way they follow him around. It's just weird. Like the charismatic cults back home." She realized she'd just called Russia "home" and it made her frown. Just how long was she going to stay here with these people, anyway? Lester hadn't noticed. "I guess they all feel sorry for him. And they like what he has to say about stories. I just can't get a lot of spit in my mouth over the ride these days, though. It feels like something we did and completed and should move on from." Suzanne didn't have anything to say, and Lester wasn't particularly expecting anything, he was giving off a palpable let-me-work vibe, so she let herself out of the apartment -- her apartment! -- and headed out into the shantytown. On the way to the ride, she passed the little tea-house where Kettlewell and Tjan had done their scheming and she suddenly felt very, very old. The only grownup on-site. She was about to cross the freeway to the ride when her phone rang. She looked at the face and then nearly dropped it. Freddy was calling her. "Hello, Suzanne," he said. The gloat in his voice was unmistakable. He had something really slimy up his sleeve. "How can I help you?" "I'm calling for comment on a story," he said. "It's my understanding that your lad, Perry, pitched a tantie and fired the business-managers of the ride, and has told the lawyers representing him against Disney that he intends to drop the suit." "Is there a question in there?" "Oh, there are many questions in there, my darling. For starters, I wondered how it could possibly be true if you haven't written about it on your little 'blog' --" even over the phone, she could hear the sarcastic quotes. "-- You seem to be quite comprehensive in documenting the undertakings of your friends down there in Florida." "Are you asking me to comment on why I haven't commented?" "For starters." "Have you approached Perry for a comment?" "I'm afraid he was rather abrupt. And I couldn't reach his Valkyrie of the Midwest, either. So I'm left calling on you, Suzanne. Any comment?" Suzanne stared across the road at the ride. She'd been gassed there, chased by armed men, watched a war there. "The ride doesn't have much formal decision-making process," she said finally. "That means that words like 'fired' don't really apply here. The boys might have a disagreement about the best way to proceed, but if that's the case, you'll have to talk to them about it." "Are you saying that you don't know if your boyfriend's best friend is fighting with his business partners? Don't you all live together?" "I'm saying that if you want to find out what Lester and Perry are doing, you'll have to ask Lester and Perry." "And the living together thing?" "We don't live together," she said. It was technically true. "Really?" Freddy said. "Do we have a bad connection?" "You don't live together?" "No." "Where do you live then?" "My place," she said. "Have your informants been misinforming you? I hope you haven't been paying for your information, Freddy. I suppose you don't, though. I suppose there's no end of cranks who really enjoy spiteful gossip and are more than happy to email you whatever fantasies they concoct." Freddy tsked. "And you don't know what's happened to Kettlewell and Tjan?" "Have you asked them?" "I will," he said. "But since you're the ranking reporter on the scene." "I'm just a blogger, Freddy. A busy blogger. Good afternoon." The call left her shaking, though she was proud of how calm she'd kept her voice. What a goddamned troll. And she was going to have to write about this now. There were ladders leaned up against the edge of the ride, and a motley crew of roofers and glaziers on them and on the roof, working to replace the gaping holes the storm had left. The workers mostly wore black and had dyed hair and lots of metal flashing from their ears and faces as they worked. A couple had stripped to the waist, revealing full-back tattoos or even more piercings and subcutaneous implants, like armor running over their spines and shoulder-blades. A couple of boom-boxes blasted out grinding, incoherent music with a lot of electronic screams. Around the ride, the market-stalls were coming back, rebuilt from a tower of fresh-sawed lumber stacked in the parking-lot. This was a lot more efficient, with gangs of vendors quickly sawing the lumber to standard sizes, slapping each one with a positional sensor, then watching the sensor's lights to tell them when it was properly lined up with its mates, and then slipping on corner-clips that held it all together. Suzanne watched as a whole market stall came together this way, in the space of five minutes, before the vendors moved on to their next stall. It was like a high-tech version of an Amish barn-raising, performed by bandanna-clad sketchy hawkers instead of bearded technophobes. She found Perry inside, leaning over a printer, tinkering with its guts, LED torches clipped to the temples of his glasses. He was hampered by having only one good arm, and he pressed her into service passing him tools for a good fifteen minutes before he straightened up and really looked at her. "You come down to help out?" "To write about it, actually." The room was a hive of activity. A lot of goth kids of various ages and degrees of freakiness, a few of the squatter kids, some people she recognized from the second coming of Death Waits. She couldn't see Death Waits, though. "Well, that's good." He powered up the printer and the air filled with the familiar smell of Saran-Wrap-in-a-microwave. She had an eerie flashback to her first visit to this place, when they'd showed her how they could print mutated, Warhol-ized Barbie heads. "How's Lester getting on with cracking that printer?" *Why don't you ask him yourself?* She didn't say it. She didn't know why Lester had come to her place after the flood instead of going home, why he stiffened up and sniffed when she mentioned Perry's name, why he looked away when she mentioned Hilda. "Something about firmware." He straightened his back more, making it pop and gave her his devilish grin, the one where his wonky eyebrow went up and down. "It's always firmware," he said, and laughed a little. Maybe they were both remembering those old days, the Boogie Woogie Elmos. "Looks like you've got a lot of help," Suzanne said, getting out a little steno pad and a pen. Perry nodded at it, and she was struck by how many times they'd stood like this, a few feet apart, her pen poised over her pad. She'd chronicled so much of this man's life. "They're good people, these folks. Some of them have some carpentry or electronics experience, the rest are willing to learn. It's going faster than I thought it would. Lots of support from out in the world, too -- people sending in cash to help with replacement parts." "Have you heard from Kettlewell or Tjan?" The light went out of his face. "No," he said. "How about from the lawyers?" "No comment," he said. It didn't sound like a joke. "Come on, Perry. People are starting to ask questions. Someone's going to write about this. Do you want your side told or not?" "Not," he said, and disappeared back into the guts of the printer. She stared at his back for a long while before turning on her heel, muttering, "Fuck," and walking back out into the sunshine. There'd been a musty smell in the ride, but out here it was the Florida smell of citrus and car-fumes, and sweat from the people around her, working hard, trying to wrest a living from the world. She walked back across the freeway to the shantytown and ran into Hilda coming the other way. The younger woman gave her a cool look and then looked away, and crossed. That was just about enough, Suzanne thought. Enough playtime with the kids. Time to go find some grownups. She wasn't here for her health. If Lester didn't want to hang out with her, if Perry had had enough of her, it was time to go do something else. She went back to her room, where Lester was still working on his DiaB project. She took out her suitcase and packed with the efficiency of long experience. Lester didn't notice, not even when she took the blouse she'd hand-washed and hung to dry on the back of his chair, folded it and put it in her suitcase and zipped it shut. She looked at his back working over the bench for a long time. He had a six-pack of chocolate pudding beside him, and a wastebasket overflowing with food wrappers and boxes. He shifted in his seat and let out a soft fart. She left. She paid the landlady through the end of the week. She could send Lester an email later. The cab took her to Miami. It wasn't until she got to the airport that she realized she had no idea where she was going. Boston? San Francisco? Petersburg? She opened her laptop and began to price out last minute tickets. The rush of travelers moved around her and she was jostled many times. The standby sites gave her a thousand options -- Miami to JFK to Heathrow to Petersburg, Miami to Frankfurt to Moscow to Petersburg, Miami to Dallas to San Francisco.... The permutations were overwhelming, especially since she wasn't sure where she wanted to be. Then she heard something homey and familiar: a large group of Russian tourists walking past, talking loudly in Russian, complaining about the long flight, the bad food, and the incompetence of their tour operator. She smiled to see the old men with their high-waisted pants and the old women with their bouffant hair. She couldn't help but eavesdrop -- at their volume, she would have been hard-pressed *not* to listen in. A little boy and girl tore ass around the airport, under the disapproving glares from DHS goons, and they screamed as they ran, "Disney World! Disney World! Disney World!" She'd never been -- she'd been to a couple of the kitschy Gulag parks in Russia, and she'd grown up with Six Flags coaster parks and Ontario Place and the CNE in Toronto, not far from Detroit. But she'd never been to The Big One, the place that even now managed to dominate the world's consciousness of theme-parks. She asked her standby sites to find her a room in a Disney hotel instead, looking for an inclusive rate that would get her onto the rides and pay for her meals. These were advertised at roadside kiosks at 100-yard intervals on every freeway in Florida, so she suspected they were the best deal going. A moment of browsing showed her that she'd guessed wrong. A week in Disney cost a heart-stopping sum of money -- the equivalent of six months' rent in Petersburg. How did all these Russians afford this trip? What the hell compelled people to part with these sums? She was going to have to find out. It was research. Plus she needed a vacation. She booked in, bought a bullet-train ticket, and grabbed the handle of her suitcase. She examined her welcome package as she waited for the train. She was staying at something called the Polynesian Resort hotel, and the brochure showed a ticky-tacky tiki-themed set of longhouses set on an ersatz white-sand beach, with a crew of Mexican and Cuban domestic workers in leis, Hawai'ian shirts, and lava-lavas waving and smiling. Her package included a complimentary luau -- the pictures made it clear this was nothing like the tourist luaus she'd attended in Maui. On top of that, she was entitled to a "character breakfast" with a wage-slave in an overheated plush costume, and an hour with a "resort counsellor" who'd help her plan her trip for maximal fun. The bullet-train came and took on the passengers, families bouncing with anticipation, joking and laughing in every language spoken. These people had just come through a US Customs checkpoint and they were acting like the world was a fine place. She decided there must be something to this Disney business. # Death Waits waited, and waited and waited for the ride to come back online. He split his days between hanging out at home, writing about the story, running the fly-throughs from the other rides, watching what was happening in Brazil, answering his fan-mail; the rest of the time he spent with his new friends down at the site of the ride, encouraging them to pitch in and help Perry and Lester to get the thing back up and running. Fast, please. It was driving him bonkers not to be able to ride any longer. After everything he'd been through, he deserved a ride. His friends were wonderful. Wonderful! Lacey especially. She was a nurse and a goddess of mercy. The money that flooded into his paypals whenever his friends let it be known that he needed more covered all his expenses. He never wanted for companionship, conversation, helpmeets, or respect. It was a wonderful life. If only the ride would come online. He woke next to Lacey, she asleep still, her hair spread out across the pillow in a fall of shiny black with blue highlights -- she'd given him a matching dye-job a few days before and they looked like a matched set now. He let his hands lazily trace her soft skin, the outlines of her tattoos, her implants and piercings. He felt a stirring between his legs. Lacey yawned and woke and kissed him. "Good morning, my handsome man," she said. "Good morning, my beautiful woman. What's the plan for today?" "Whatever you want," she said. "Breakfast, then down to the ride," he said. "I'll do my email and writing there today." "Something before breakfast?" she asked, with a lopsided smile that was adorable. "Oh yes, please," he said, his voice breathy. # The smell at the Wal-Mart was overpowering. It was one part sharp mold, one part industrial disinfectant, a citrus smell that made your eyes water and your sinuses burn. "I've rented some big blowers," Perry said. "They'll help air the place out. If that doesn't work, I might have to resurface the floor, which would be rough -- it could take a week to get that done properly." "A week?" Death said. Jesus. No way. Not another week. He didn't know it for sure, but he had a feeling that a lot of these people would stop showing up eventually if there was no ride for them to geek out over. He sure would. "You smell that? We can't close the doors and the windows and leave it like this." Death's people, standing around them, listening in, nodded. It was true. You'd melt people's lungs if you shut them up with these fumes. "How can I help?" Death said. It was his constant mantra with Perry. Sometimes he didn't think Perry liked him very much, and it was good to keep on reminding him that Death and his buddies were here to be part of the solution. That Perry needed them. "The roof is just about done, the robots are back online. The dividers should be done today. I've got the chairs stripped down for routine maintenance, I could use a couple people for that." "What's Lester working on?" Death said. "You'd have to ask him." Death hadn't seen Lester in days, which was weird. He hoped Lester didn't dislike him. He worried a lot about whether people liked him these days. He'd thought that Sammy liked him, after all. "Where is he?" "Don't know." Perry put dark glasses on. Death Waits took the hint. "Come on," he said to Lacey, who patted him on the hand as he lifted up in his chair and rolled out to the van. "Let's just call him." "Lo?" "It's Death Waits. We're down at the ride, but there's not much to do around here. I thought maybe we could help you with whatever you were working on?" "What do you know about what I'm working on?" Lester said. "Um. Nothing." "So how do you know you want to help?" Death Waits closed his eyes. He wanted to help these two. They'd made something important, didn't they know that? "What are you working on?" "Nothing," Lester said. "Come on," Death said. "Come on. We just want to pitch in. I love you guys. You changed my life. Let me contribute." Lester snorted. "Cross the road, go straight for two hundred yards, turn left at the house with the Cesar Chavez mural, and I'll meet you there." "You mean go into the --" Death didn't know what it was called. He always tried not to look at it when he came to the ride. That slum across the road. He knew it was somehow connected with the ride, but in the same way that the administrative buildings at Disney were connected with the parks. The big difference was that Disney's extraneous buildings were shielded from view by berms and painted go-away green. The weird town across the road was *right there*. "Yeah, across the road into the shantytown." "OK," Death said. "See you soon." He hung up and patted Lacey's hand. "We're going over there," he said, pointing into the shantytown. "Is it safe?" He shrugged. "I guess so." He loved his chair, loved how tall it made him, loved how it turned him into a half-ton cyborg who could raise up on his rear wheels and rock back and forth like a triffid. Now he felt very vulnerable -- a crippled cyborg whose apparatus cost a small fortune, about to go into a neighborhood full of people who were technically homeless. "Should we drive?" "I think we can make it across," he said. Traffic was light, though the cars that bombed past were doing 90 or more. He started to gather up a few more of his people, but reconsidered. It was a little scary to be going into the town, but he couldn't afford to freak out Lester by showing up with an entourage. The guardrail shielding the town had been bent down and flattened and the chair wheeled over it easily, with hardly a bump. As they crossed this border, they crossed over to another world. There were cooking smells -- barbecue and Cuban spices -- and a little hint of septic tank or compost heap. The buildings didn't make any sense to Death's eye, they curved or sloped or twisted or leaned and seemed to be made of equal parts pre-fab cement and aluminum and scrap lumber, laundry lines, power lines, and graffiti. Death was used to drawing stares, even before he became a cyborg with a beautiful woman beside him, but this was different. There were eyes everywhere. Little kids playing in the street -- hadn't these people heard of stranger danger -- stopped to stare at him with big shoe-button eyes. Faces peered out of windows from the ground on up to the third storey. Voices whispered and called. Lacey gave them her sunniest smile and even waved at the little kids, and Death tried nodding at some of the homeys staring at him from the window of what looked like a little diner. Death hadn't known what to expect from this little town, but he certainly hadn't pictured so many little shops. He realized that he thought of shops as being somehow civilized -- tax paying, license-bearing entities with commercial relationships with suppliers, with cash-registers and employees. Not lawless and wild. But every ground-floor seemed to have at least a small shop, advertised with bright OLED pixel-boards that showed rotating enticements -- *Productos de Dominica, Beautiful for Ladies, OFERTA!!!, Fantasy Nails*. He passed twenty different shops in as many steps, some of them seemingly nothing more than a counter recessed into the wall with a young man sitting behind it, grinning at them. Lacey stopped at one and bought them cans of coffee and small Mexican pastries dusted with cinnamon. He watched a hundred pairs of eyes watch Lacey as she drew out her purse and paid. At first he thought of the danger, but then he realized that if anyone was to mug them, it would be in full sight of all these people. It was a funny thought. He'd grown up in sparse suburbs where you'd never see anyone walking or standing on the sidewalks or their porches. Even though it was a "nice" neighborhood, there were muggings and even killings at regular, horrific intervals. Walking there felt like taking your life into your hands. Here, in this crowded place with a human density like a Disney park, it felt somehow safer. Weird. They came to what had to be the Cesar Chavez mural -- a Mexican in a cowboy hat standing like a preacher on the tailgate of a truck, surrounded by more Mexicans, farmer-types in cotton shirts and blue-jeans and cowboy hats. They turned left and rounded a corner into a little cul-de-sac with a confusion of hopscotches chalked onto the ground, ringed by parked bicycles and scooters. Lester stood among them, eating a churro in a piece of wax-paper. "You seem to be recovering quickly," he said, sizing up Death in his chair. "Good to see it." He seemed a little distant, which Death chalked up to being interrupted. "It's great to see you again," Death said. "My friends and I have been coming by the ride every day, helping out however we can, but we never see you there, so I thought I'd call you." "You'd call me." "To see if we could help," Death said. "With whatever you're doing." "Come in," Lester said. He gestured behind him and Death noticed for the first time the small sign that said *HOTEL ROTHSCHILD,* with a stately peacock behind it. The door was a little narrow for his rolling chair, but he managed to get it in with a little back-and-forth, but once inside, he was stymied by the narrow staircase leading up to the upper floors. The lobby -- such as it was -- was completely filled by him, Lacey and Lester, and even if the chair could have squeezed up the stairs, it couldn't have cornered to get there. Lester looked embarrassed. "Sorry, I didn't think of that. Um. OK, I could rig a winch and hoist the chair up if you want. We'd have to belt you in, but it's do-able. There are masts for pulleys on the top floor -- it's how they get the beds into the upper stories." "I can get up on canes," Death Waits said. "Is it safe to leave my chair outside, though?" Lester's eyebrows went up. "Well of course -- sure it is." Death felt weird for having asked. He backed the chair out and locked the transmission, feeling silly. Who was going to hot-wire a wheelchair? He was such a dork. Lacey handed him his canes and he stood gingerly. He'd been making his way to the bathroom and back on canes all week, but he hadn't tried stairs yet. He hoped Lester wasn't too many floors up. Lester turned out to be on the third floor, and by the time they reached it, Death Waits was dripping sweat and his eyeliner had run into his eyes. Lacey dabbed at him with her gauzy scarf and fussed over him. Death caught Lester looking at the two of them with a little smirk, so he pushed Lacey away and steadied his breathing with an effort. "OK," he said. "All done." "Great," Lester said. "This is what I'm working on. You talked to Perry about it before, right? The Disney-in-a-Box printers. Well, I've cracked it. We can load our own firmware onto it -- just stick it on a network with a PC, and the PC will find it and update it. Then it becomes an open box -- it'll accept anyone's goop. You can send it your own plans." Death hadn't seen a DiaB in person yet. Beholding it and knowing that he was the reason that Lester and Perry were experimenting with it in the first place made him feel a sense of excitement he hadn't felt since the goth rehab of Fantasyland began. "So how does this tie in to the ride?" Death asked. "I was thinking of building rides in miniature, but at that scale, will it really impress people? No, I don't think so. "So instead I was thinking that we could just push out details from the ride, little tabletop-sized miniatures showing a piece every day. Maybe whatever was newest. And you could have multiple feeds, you know, like an experimental trunk for objects that people in one region liked --" Lester was shaking his head and holding up his hands. "Woah, wait a second. No, no, no --" Death was used to having his friends hang on his every word when he was talking about ideas for the ride and the story, so this brought him up short. He reminded himself who he was talking to. "Sorry," he said. "Got ahead of myself." "Look," Lester said, prodding at the printer. "This thing is its own thing. We're about more than the ride here. I know you really like it, and that's very cool, but there's no way that everything I do from now on is going to be about that fucking thing. It was a lark, it's cool, it's got its own momentum. But these boxes are going to be their own thing. I want to show people how to take control of the stuff in their living rooms, not advertise my little commercial project to them." Death couldn't make sense out of this. It sounded like Lester didn't *like* the ride. How was that possible? "I don't get it," he said at last. Lester was making him look like an idiot in front of Lacey, too. He didn't like how this was going at all. Lester picked up a screwdriver. "You see this? It's a tool. You can pick it up and you can unscrew stuff or screw stuff in. You can use the handle for a hammer. You can use the blade to open paint cans. You can throw it away, loan it out, or paint it purple and frame it." He thumped the printer. "This thing is a tool, too, but it's not *your* tool. It belongs to someone else -- Disney. It isn't interested in listening to you or obeying you. It doesn't want to give you more control over your life. "This thing reminds me of life before fatkins. It was my very own personal body, but it wasn't under my control. What's the word the academics use? 'Agency.' I didn't have any agency. It didn't matter what I did, I was just this fat thing that my brain had to lug around behind it, listening to its never-ending complaints and aches and pains. "If you don't control your life, you're miserable. Think of the people who don't get to run their own lives: prisoners, reform-school kids, mental patients. There's something inherently awful about living like that. Autonomy makes us happy." He thumped the top of the printer again. "So here's this stupid thing, which Disney gives you for free. It looks like a tool, like a thing that you use to better your life, but in reality, it's a tool that Disney uses to control your life. You can't program it. You can't change the channel. It doesn't even have an *off switch*. That's what gets me exercised. I want to redesign this thing so it gets converted from something that controls to something that gives you control." Lester's eyes shone. Death hurt from head to toe, from the climb and the aftermath of the beating, and the life he'd lived. Lester was telling him that the ride wasn't important to him anymore, that he'd be doing this other thing with the printer next, and then something else, and then something else. He felt a great, unexpected upwelling of bitterness at the thought. "So what about the ride?" "The ride? I told you. I'm done with it. It's time to do the next thing. You said you wanted to help out, right?" "With the ride," Death said patiently, with the manner of someone talking to a child. Lester turned his back on Death. "I'm done with the ride," Lester said. "I don't want to waste your time." It was clear he meant, *You're wasting my time.* He bent over the printer. Lacey looked daggers at his shoulders, then turned to help Death down the stairs. His canes clattered on the narrow staircase, and it was all he could do to keep from crying. # Suzanne rode the bullet-train from Miami airport in air-conditioned amusement, watching the Mickey-shaped hang-straps rock back and forth. She'd bought herself a Mickey waffle and a bucket-sized Diet Coke in the dining car and fended off the offers of plush animatronic toys that were clearly descended from Boogie-Woogie Elmo. Now she watched the kids tear ass up and down the train, or sit mesmerized by the videos and interactives set up at the ends of the cars. The train was really slick, and judging from the brochure she found in the seat-pocket, there was another one from the Orlando airport. These things were like chutes leading from the luggage carousel straight into the parks. Disney had figured out how to make sure that every penny spent by its tourists went straight into its coffers. The voice-over announcements as they pulled into the station were in English, Chinese, Spanish, Farsi and Russian -- in that order -- and displayed on the porters' red coats with brass buttons were name-badges with the flags of many nations, denoting the languages they spoke. They wore mouse-ears, and Suzanne -- a veteran of innumerable hotels -- could not dissuade one from taking her suitcase. He brought her to a coach-station and saw her aboard a bus marked for the Polynesian, decorated with tiki-lamps, bamboo, and palm-fronds (she touched one and discovered that it was vinyl). He refused her tip as they saw her aboard, and then stood and waved her off with his white gloves and giant white smile. She had to chuckle as she pulled away, amazed at how effective these little touches were. She felt her muscles loosening, little involuntary chuckles rising in her throat. The coach was full of parents and children from all over the world, grinning and laughing and hugging and talking excitedly about the day ahead of them. The coach let them off to a group of Hawai'ian-shirt-clad staff who shouted "Aloha!" at them as they debarked, and picked up their luggage with swift, cheerful, relentless efficiency. Her check-in was so painless she wasn't sure it was over until a nice young lady who looked Chechen picked up her bag for her and urged her out to the grounds, which were green and lush, like nothing she'd seen since landing in Florida. She was surrounded by the hotel structures, long-houses decorated with Polynesian masks and stalked by leggy ibises and chirping tropical birds. Before her was a white-sand beach fronting onto an artificial lake ringed with other luxury hotels: a gigantic 1970s Soviet A-frame building and a gingerbread-choked Victorian hotel. The lake was ringed with a monorail track and plied by handsome paddle-wheeler ferry-boats. She stared gape-jawed at this until the bellhop gently tugged at her elbow, giving her a dazzling smile. Her room was the kind of thing you'd see Lucy and Ricky checking into on honeymoon in an old *I Love Lucy* episode -- wicker ceiling fans, bamboo furniture, a huge hot-tub shaped like a seashell. Outside, a little terrace looking over the lake, with a pair of cockatoos looking quizzically at her. The bellhop waved at them and they cawed at her and flew off. Suzanne must have made a disappointed noise, because the bellhop patted her on the arm and said, "Don't worry, we feed them here, they come back all the time. Greedy birdies!" She tipped the bellhop five bucks once she'd been given the grand tour of the room -- a tame Internet connection that was "kid-friendly" and a likewise censored video-on-demand service, delivery pizza or sushi, information on park hours, including the dazzling array of extras she could purchase. It turned out that resort guests were eligible to purchase priority passes for boarding rides ahead of the plebes, and for entering parks early and staying late. This made Suzanne feel right at home -- it was very Russian in its approach: the more you spent, the better your time was. She bought it all: all the fast-passes and priority cards, all of it loaded into a grinning Mickey on a lanyard, a wireless pendant that would take care of her everywhere she went in the park, letting her spend money like water. Thus girded, she consulted with her bellhop some more and laid out an itinerary. Once she'd showered she found she didn't want to wear any of her European tailored shorts and blouses. She wanted to disappear into the Great American Mass. The hotel gift shop provided her with a barkcloth Hawai'ian shirt decorated with tessellated Disney trademarks and a big pair of loose shorts, and once she donned them, she saw that she could be anyone now, any tourist in the park. A pair of cheap sunglasses completed the look and she paid for it all by waving her Mickey necklace at the register, spending money like water. She passed the rest of the day at the Magic Kingdom, taking a ferry from the hotel's pier to the Victorian wrought-iron docks on the other side of the little artificial lake. As she cleared the turnstiles into Main Street, USA, her heart quickened. Kids rushed past her, chased by their parents' laughing calls to slow down. Balloon sellers and old-fashioned popcorn machines jostled for space in the crowd, and a brass band was marching down the street in straw boaters and red striped jackets, playing a Sousa march. She ambled up the road, peering in the adorable little shop windows, like the shops in a fancy casino, all themed artificial facades that were, in back, all one shop, linked through the length of the street. She reached the castle before she realized it, and saw that it was shorter than it had appeared. Turning around and looking back down Main Street, she saw that the trees lining the sides of the street had been trimmed so they got progressively smaller from the gates to the castle, creating a kind of false perspective line. She laughed now, amused by the accomplishment of the little trompe l'oeil. She squeezed past the hordes of Asian tourists taking precisely the same picture of the castle, one after another, a phenomenon she'd observed at other famous landmarks. For some Japanese shutterbugs, the holiday photo experience was as formal as the Stations of the Cross, with each picture of each landmark rigidly prescribed by custom and unwritten law. Now she was under the castle and headed for what her map assured her was Fantasyland. Just as she cleared the archway, she remembered her conversations with that Death Waits kid about Fantasyland: this was the part that had been made over as a goth area, and then remade as the Happiest Construction Site on Earth. And so it was. The contrast was stark. From fairy castle to green-painted construction sidings. From smiling, well-turned out "castmembers" to construction workers with butt-crack-itis and grouchy expressions. Fantasyland was like an ugly scar on the blemish-free face of a Barbie doll. She liked it. Something about all that artifice, all that cunning work to cover up all the bodies a company like Disney would have buried under its manicured Main Street -- it had given her a low-level, tooth-grinding headache, a kind of anger at the falseness of it all. Here, she could see the bodies as they buried them. Out came her camera and she went on the prowl, photographing and photographing, seeking high ground from which to catch snaps over the siding. She'd look at the satellite pics of this spot later. Now she knew what her next project would be: she would document this scar. She'd dig up the bodies. Just for completeness' sake, she went on some of the rides. Her super-fancy pass let her sail past the long lines of bored kids, angry dads, exhausted moms. She captured their expressions with her camera. The rides were all right. She was sick of rides, truth be told. As an art-form, they were wildly overrated. Some of them made her sick and some of them were like mildly interesting trips through someone's collection of action-figures in a dark room. The Disney rides didn't even let you drive, like Lester's ride did, and you didn't get to vote on them. By the time the sun had gone down, she was ready to go back to the room and start writing. She wanted to get all this down, the beauty and the terror, the commerce lurking underneath the friendly facade. As the day lengthened into night, there were more and more screaming children, more angry parents. She caught parents smacking kids, once, twice, got her camera out, caught three more. They sent a big pupu platter up to her room with a dish of poi and a hollow pineapple filled with rum. She took her computer out onto her lanai and looked out over the lake. An ibis came by and demanded some of her dinner scraps. She obliged it and it gave her a cold look, as if determining whether she'd be good for dessert, then flew off. She began to write. # Something had changed between Kettlewell and Eva since they'd left Florida with the kids. It wasn't just the legal hassles, though there were plenty of those. They'd gone to Florida with a second chance -- a chance for him to be a mover again, a chance for her to have a husband who was happy with his life again. Now he found himself sneaking past her when she was in the living room and they slept back to back in bed with as much room between them as possible. Ada missed Lyenitchka and spent all her time in her bedroom IMing her friend or going questing with her in their favorite game, which involved Barbies, balrogs, and buying outfits. Pascal missed all the attention he had received as the designated mascot of the two little girls. It was not a high point in the history of the Kettlewell clan. "Hello?" "Landon Kettlewell?" "Hello, Freddy," he said. "My fame precedes me," the journalist said. Kettlewell could hear the grin in his voice. That voice was unmistakable -- Kettlewell had heard it in the occassional harassing voicemail that Suzanne forwarded on. "How are you?" "Oh, I'm very well sir, and kind of you to ask, yes indeed. I hear you're not doing so well, though?" "I can't complain." "I wish you would, though." You could tell, Freddy thought he was a funny son of a bitch. "Seriously, Mr Kettlewell. I'm calling to follow up on the story of the litigation that Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks are facing for unilaterally canceling the arrangement you'd made to finance their litigation. I'm hoping that you'll give me a quote that might put this into perspective. Is the defense off? Will Gibbons and Banks be sued? Are you a party to the suit?" "Freddy?" "Yes, Mr Kettlewell." "I am not a child, nor am I a fool, nor am I a sucker. I'm also not a hothead. You can't goad me into saying something. You can't trick me into saying something. I haven't hung up on you yet, but I will unless you can give me a single good reason to believe that any good could possibly come out of talking to you." "I'm going to write this story and publish it today. I can either write that you declined to comment or I can write down whatever comment you might have on the matter. You tell me which is fairer?" "Goodbye, Freddy." "Wait, wait! Just wait." Kettlewell liked the pleading note in Freddy's voice. "What is it, Freddy?" "Can I get you to comment on the general idea of litigation investment? A lot of people followed your lead in seeking out litigation investment opportunities. There's lots of money tied up in it these days. Do incidents like the one in Florida mean that litigation investment is a dead strategy?" "Of course not," Kettlewell snapped. He shouldn't be talking to this man, but the question drove him bonkers. He'd invented litigation investment. "Those big old companies have two common characteristics: they've accumulated more assets than they know what to do with, and they've got poisonous, monopolistic cultures that reward executives who break the law to help the company turn a buck. None of that's changed, and so long as that's all true, there will be little companies with legit gripes against big companies that can be used as investment vehicles for unlocking all that dead Fortune 100 capital and putting it to work." "But aren't Fortune 100 companies investing in litigation funds?" Kettlewell suppressed a nasty laugh. "Yeah, so what?" "Well, if this is about destroying Fortune 100 companies --" "It's about wringing positive social value out of the courts and out of investment. The way it used to work, there were only two possible outcomes when a big company did something rotten: either they'd get away scot-free or they'd make some lawyers very, very rich. Litigation funds fix that. They socialize the cost of bringing big companies to heel, and they free up the capital that these big companies have accumulated." "But when a big company invests in destroying another big company --" "Sometimes you get a forest where a few trees end up winning, they form a canopy that keeps all the sunlight from reaching the floor. Now, this is stable for forests, but stability is the *last* thing you want in a market. Just look at what happens when one of those big trees falls over: whoosh! A million kinds of life are spawned on the floor, fighting for the light that tree had hogged for itself. In a market, when you topple a company that's come to complacently control some part of the ecosystem, you free up that niche for new innovators." "And why is that better than stability? Don't the workers at these companies deserve the security that comes from their employers' survival?" "Oh come on, Freddy. Stop beating that drum. If you're an employee and you want to get a good deal out of an employer, you're better off if you've got fifty companies you could work for than just one." "So you're saying that if you destroy Disney with your lawsuit, the fifty thousand people who work at Walt Disney World will be able to, what, work for those little rides like your friends have built?" "They'll find lots of work, Freddy. If we make it possible for anyone to open an innovative little ride without worrying about getting clobbered by a big old monopolist. You like big corporations so much?" "Yes, but it's not little innovative startups that invest in these funds, is it?" "It's they who benefit once the fund takes up their cause." "And how's that working out for the ride people you're meant to be helping out? They rejected you, didn't they?" Kettlewell really hated Freddy, he realized. Not just a little -- he had a deep and genuine loathing. "Oh, for fuck's sake. You don't like little companies. You don't like big companies. You don't like workers' co-ops. What do you want us to do, Freddy? You want us to just curl up under a rock and die? You sit there and make up your funny names for things; you make your snarky little commentaries, but how much good have *you* done for the world, you complaining, sniping little troll?" The line got very quiet. "Can I quote you?" "You certainly can," Kettlewell huffed. In for a penny, in for a pound. "You can print that, and you can kiss my ass." "Thank you, Mr Kettlewell," Freddy said. "I'll certainly take the suggestion under advisement." Kettlewell stood in his home office and stared at the four walls. Upstairs, Pascal was crying. He did that a lot lately. Kettlewell breathed deeply and tried to chill out. Someone was knocking at his door, though. He answered it tentatively. The kid he found there was well-scrubbed, black, in his twenties, and smiling amiably. "Landon Kettlewell?" "Who's suing me?" Kettlewell could spot a process server a mile away. The guy shrugged and made a little you-got-me smile. "Couldn't say, sir," he said, and handed Kettlewell the envelope, holding it so that the header was clearly visible to the camera set into the lapel of his shirt. "You want me to sign something?" Kettlewell said. "It's all right, sir," the kid said and pointed at the camera. "It's all caught on video." "Oh, right," Kettlewell said. "Want a cup of water? Coffee?" "I expect you're going to be too busy to entertain, sir," the kid said, and ticked a little salute off his forehead. "But you seem like a nice guy. Good luck with it all." Kettlewell watched him go, then closed the door and walked back to his office, opening the envelope and scanning it. No surprises there -- the shareholders in the investment syndicate that had backed Lester and Perry were suing him for making false representations about his ability to speak for them. Tjan called him a minute later. "They got you too, huh?" Kettlewell said. "Just left. Wish I could say it was unexpected." "Wish I could say I blamed them," Kettlewell said. "Hey, you should see what the ride's been doing this week since Florida went down," Tjan said. "It's totally mutated. I think it's mostly coming from the Midwest, though those Brazilians seem to keep on logging in somehow too." "How many rides are there in South America, anyways?" "Brazilians of them!" Tjan said with a mirthless chuckle. "Impossible to say. They've got some kind of variant on the protocol that lets a bunch of them share one network address. I think some of them aren't even physical rides, just virtual flythroughs. Some are directly linked, some do a kind of mash-up between their current norms and other rides' current norms. It's pretty weird." Kettlewell paced. "Well, at least someone's having a good time." "They're going to nail us to the wall," Tjan said. "Both of us. Probably the individual ride-operators, too. They're out for blood." "It's not like they even lost much money." "They didn't need to -- they feel like they lost the money they might have won from Disney." "But that was twenty years away, and highly speculative." Tjan sighed heavily on the other end of the phone. "Landon, you're a very, very good finance person. The best I've ever met, but you really need to understand that even the most speculative investor is mostly speculating about how he's going to spend all the money you're about to make him. If investors didn't count their chickens before they hatched, you'd never raise a cent." "Yeah," Kettlewell said. He knew it, but he couldn't soak it in. He'd won and lost so many fortunes -- his own and others' -- that he'd learned to take it all in stride. Not everyone else was so sanguine. "So what do we do about it? I don't much want to lose everything." "You could always go back to Russia," Kettlewell said, suddenly feeling short-tempered. Why did he always have to come up with the plan? "Sorry. You know what the lawyers are going to tell us." "Yeah. Sue Perry and Lester." "And we told Lester we wouldn't do that. It was probably a mistake to do this at all, you know." "No, don't say that. The idea was a really good one. You might have saved their asses if they'd played along." "And if I'd kept the lawyers on a shorter leash." They both sat in glum silence. "How about if we defend ourselves by producing evidence that they reneged on a deal we'd made in good faith. Then the bastards can sue Perry and Lester and we'll still be keeping our promise." Kettlewell tried to picture Perry in a courtroom. He'd never been the most even-keeled dude and since he'd been shot and had his arm broken and been gassed, he was almost pathological. "I've got a better idea," he said, growing excited as it unfolded in his mind. He had that burning sensation he got sometimes when he knew he was having a real doozy. "How about if we approach each of the individual ride co-ops and see if they'll join the lawsuit separately from the umbrella org? Play it right and we'll have the lawsuit back on, without having to get our asses handed to us and without having to destroy Perry and Lester!" Tjan laughed. "That's -- that's... Wow! Genius. Yeah, OK, right! The Boston group is in, I'll tell you that much. I'm sure we can get half a dozen more in, too. Especially if we can get Perry to agree not to block it, which I'm sure he'll do after I have a little talk with him. This'll work!" "Sometimes the threat of total legal destruction can have a wonderful, clarifying effect on one's mind," Kettlewell said drily. "How're the kids?" "Lyenitchka is in a sulk. She wants to go back to Florida and she wants to see Ada some more. Plus she's upset that we never made it to Disney World." Kettlewell flopped down on his couch. "Have you seen Suzanne's blog lately?" Tjan laughed. "Yeah. Man, she's giving it to them with both barrels. Makes me feel sorry for 'em." "Um, you *do* know that we're suing them for everything they've got, right?" "Well, yes. But that's just money. Suzanne's going to take their balls." They exchanged some more niceties and promised that they'd get together face-to-face real soon and Kettlewell hung up. From behind him, he heard someone fidgeting. "Kids, you know you aren't supposed to come into my office." "Sounds like things have gotten started up again." It wasn't the kids, it was Eva. He sat up. She was standing with her arms folded in the doorway of his office, staring at him. "Yeah," he said, mumbling a little. She was really beautiful, his wife, and she put up with a hell of a lot. He felt obscurely ashamed of the way that he'd treated her. He wished he could stand up and give her a warm hug. He couldn't. Instead, she sat beside him. "Sounds like you'll be busy." "Oh, I just need to get all the individual co-ops on board, talk to the lawyers, get the investors off my back. Have a shareholders' meeting. It'll be fine." Her smile was little and sad. "I'm going, Landon," she said. The blood drained from his face. She'd left him plenty, over the years. He'd deserved it. But it had always been white-hot, in the middle of a fight, and it had always ended with some kind of reconciliation. This time, it had the feeling of something planned and executed in cold blood. He sat up and folded his hands in his lap. He didn't know what else to do. Her smile wilted. "It's not going to work, you and me. I can't live like this, lurching from crisis to crisis. I love you too much to watch that happen. I hate what it turns me into. You're only happy when you're miserable, you know that? I can't do that forever. We'll be part of each others' lives forever, but I can't be Mrs Stressbunny forever." None of this was new. She'd shouted variations on this at him at many times in their relationship. The difference was that now she wasn't shouting. She was calm, assured, sad but not crying. Behind her in the hallway, he saw that she'd packed her suitcase, and the little suitcases the kids used when they travelled together. "Where will you go?" "I'm going to stay with Lucy, from college. She's living down the peninsula in Mountain View. She's got room for the kids." He felt like raging at her, promising her a bitter divorce and custody suit, but he couldn't do it. She was completely right, after all. Even though his first impulse was to argue, he couldn't do it just then. So she left, and Kettlewell was alone in his nice apartment with his phone and his computer and his lawsuits and his mind fizzing with ideas. # The last thing Sammy wanted was a fight. Dinah's promo was making major bank for the company -- and he was taking more and more meetings in Texas with Dinah, which was a hell of a perk. They'd shipped two million of the DiaBs, and were projecting ten million in the first quarter. Park admission was soaring and the revenue from the advertising was going to cover the entire cost of the next rev of the DiaBs, which would be better, faster, smaller and cheaper. That business with Death Waits and the new Fantasyland and the ride -- what did it matter now? He'd been so focused on the details that he'd lost track of the big picture. Walt Disney had made his empire by figuring out how to do the next thing, not wasting his energy on how to protect the last thing. It had all been a mistake, a dumb mistake, and now he was back on track. From all appearances, the lawsuits were on the verge of blowing away, anyway. Fantasyland -- he'd turned that over to Wiener, of all people, and he was actually doing some good stuff there. Really running with the idea of restoring it as a nostalgia site aimed squarely at fatkins, with lots of food and romantic kiddie rides that no kid would want to ride in the age of the break-neck coaster. The last thing he wanted was a fight. What he wanted was to make assloads of money for the company, remake himself as a power in the organization. But he was about to have a fight. Hackelberg came into his office unannounced. Sammy had some of the Imagineers in, showing him prototypes of the next model, which was being designed for more reliable shipping and easier packing. Hackelberg was carrying his cane today, wearing his ice-cream suit, and was flushed a deep, angry red that seemed to boil up from his collar. One look from his blazing eyes was enough to send the Imagineers scurrying. They didn't even take their prototype with them. Hackelberg closed the door behind them. "Hello, Samuel," he said. "Nice to see you. Can I offer you a glass of water? Iced tea?" Hackelberg waved the offers away. "They're using your boxes to print their own designs," he said. "What?" "Those freaks with their home-made ride. They've just published a system for printing their own objects on your boxes." Sammy rewound the conversations he'd had with the infosec people in Imagineering about what countermeasures they'd come up with, what they were proof against. He was pissed that he was finding out about this from Hackelberg. If Lester and Perry were hacking the DiaBs, they would be talking about it nonstop, running their mouths on the Internet. Back when he was his own competitive intelligence specialist, he would have known about this project the second it began. Now he was trying to find a competitive intelligence person who knew his ass from his elbow, so far without success. "Well, that's regrettable, obviously, but so long as we're still selling the consumables..." The goop was a huge profit-maker for the company. They bought it in bulk, added a proprietary, precisely mixed chemical that the printer could check for in its hoppers, and sold it to the DiaB users for a two thousand percent markup. If you tried to substitute a competitor's goop, the machine would reject it. They shipped out new DiaBs with only half a load of goop, so that the first purchase would come fast. It was making more money, week-on-week, than popcorn. "The crack they're distributing also disables the checking for the watermark. You can use any generic goop in them." Sammy shook his head and restrained himself from thumping his hand down on the desk. He wanted to scream. "We're not suing them, are we?" "Do you think that's wise, Samuel?" "I'm no legal expert. You tell me. Maybe we can take stronger countermeasures with the next generation --" He gestured at the prototype on his desk. "And abandon the two million units we've shipped to date?" Sammy thought about it. Those families might hang on to their original two million forever, or until they wore out. Maybe he should be building them to fall apart after six months of use, to force updates. "It's just so unfair. They're ripping us off. We spent the money on those units so that we could send our message out. What the hell is wrong with those people? Are they compulsive? Do they *have* to destroy every money-making business?" Hackelberg sat back. "Samuel, I think it's time we dealt with them." Sammy's mind was still off on the strategies for keeping Lester and Perry at bay, though. Sure, a six-month obsolescence curve would do it. Or they could just charge money for the DiaBs now that people were starting to understand what they were for. Hell, they could just make the most compelling stuff for a DiaB to print and maybe that would be enough. Hackelberg tapped the tip of his cane once, sharply. Sammy came back to the conversation. "So that's settled. Filing suit today. We're going to do a discovery on them that'll split them open from asshole to throat. No more of this chickenshit police stuff -- we're going to figure out every source of income these bastards have, we're going to take away their computers, we're going down to their ISPs and getting their emails and instant messages. "And as we've seen, they're going to retaliate. That's fine. We're not treating these people as a couple of punk pirates who go down at the first sign of trouble. Not anymore. We know that these people are the competition. We're going to make an example of them. They're the first ones to attack on this front, but they won't be the last. We're vulnerable, Samuel, but we can contain that vulnerability with enough deterrent." Hackelberg seemed to be expecting something of Sammy, but Sammy was damned if he knew what it was. "OK," he said lamely. Hackelberg's smile was like a jack o'lantern's. "That means that we've got to be prepared for their discovery on *us*. I need to know every single detail of this DiaB project, including the things I'd find if I went through your phone records and your email. Because they *will* be going through them. They'll be putting you and your operation under the microscope." Sammy restrained his groan. "I'll have it for you," he said. "Give me a day or two." He saw Hackelberg out of his office as quickly as he could, then shut the door. Hackelberg wanted everything, and that meant *everything*, including his playmates from the advertising industry -- everything. He was becoming the kind of executive who emitted strategic intelligence, rather than the kind who gathered it. That wouldn't do. That wasn't the natural order of things. He sat down at his computer. Someone had to do the competitive intelligence work around here and it looked like it would have to be him. # What the World Can Learn from Disney Suzanne Church It's easy to dismiss Disney. They make more lawsuits than rides these days. They have a reputation for Polyannaish chirpiness. Their corporate communications veer from Corporate Passive Voice Third Person to a syrupy, condescending kiddee-speak that's calculated to drive children into a frenzy of parent-nagging screeches. But if you haven't been to a Disney Park in a while, you don't know what you're missing. I've been in Walt Disney World for a week now, and I'm here to tell you, it's pretty good. No, it's better than that -- it's *amazing*. You've probably heard about the attention to detail: the roofline over Fantasyland features sagging, Georgian tiles, crazy chimneys, and subtly animated gargoyles (left over from a previous, goth-ier incarnation of this part of the park). You don't see this unless you raise your eyes above the busy, intriguing facades that front the rides, above the masterfully painted signage, and higher still. In other words, unless you're someone like me, looking for details, you won't spot them. They're there as pure gold-plating, they're there because someone who took pride in his work *put them there*. It tells you something about the people behind the scenes here. People who care about their jobs work here. It's easy to forget that when you're thinking about Disney, a company whose reputation these days has more to do with whom they sue than with what they make. But oh, what they make. There's a safari park here, something like a zoo but without that stuff that makes you feel like you're participating in some terrible exercise that strips noble animals of their dignity for our amusement. Instead, the animals here roam free, near their hairless monkey cousins, separated from them by water features, camouflaged ditches, simulated ancient ruins [more details]. That's just one of six parks, each subdivided into six or seven "lands," each land with its own unique charm, culture, and customs. That's not counting the outlying areas: two new towns, golf courses, a velodrome, a preserved marshland that you can tour in a skiff with a local naturist. In these days of cheap fabrication, it's easy to forget what you can do with several billion dollars and the kind of hubris that leads you to dredge lakes, erect papier mache mountains, and create your own toy mass-transit system. Of course, Disney Parks are no strangers to small scale fabrication. See their tiny, clever Disney-in-a-Box devices, which I have chronicled here from the other side. On the one hand, these things are networked volumetric printers, but on the other, they are superb category-busters that have achieved an entirely justifiable -- yet still staggering -- market penetration in just a few months. I came here ready to be bored and disgusted and fleeced of every nickel. I am disappointed. The parks are tremendous at separating people from money, it's true. They've structured each promenade and stroll so that even a walk to the bathroom can create a Mommy-Daddy-Want-It-NOW situation. For such a happy place, there certainly are a lot of weepy children and frustrated parents. But it's hard to fault Disney for being a business that makes a lot of money. That's the point, after all. And it can't be cheap to keep the tens of thousands of "castmembers" (yes, they really do call them that, even when they're earning minimum wage and work jobs with all the glamour of a bathroom attendant) hanging around, picking up litter and confronting every new "guest" with eerily convincing cheer. As for "bored" and "disgusted" -- not yet. Bored -- it's impossible to imagine such a thing. For starters, the world's middle classes have converged here in a sort of bourgeois UN, and you can get a lot of pleasure out of watching a Chinese "little emperor" with doting parents in tow making friends with a tiny perfect Russian mafiyeh princess whose parents flick nervously at their nicotine inhalers and scout the building facades for hidden cameras. Of course, if people-watching isn't your thing, there are the rides themselves, which make art out of the shoebox diorama. There are luaus, indoor scuba diving with live sharks, and an island of genuinely sleazy nightclubs where you can get propositioned for some improbable acts that are hardly family friendly. These last appear to be largely populated by the "castmembers" seeking a little after-work action. Disgusted? I think if I were a parent, there'd be parts of the experience that drove me nuts. But once you get to know the rhythm of the place, you start to see that there are navigable pathways that don't lead through any commercial areas -- fantastic adventure playgrounds, nature hikes, petting zoos, horseback rides, sports training. And for every kid who's having a blood-sugar meltdown after consuming half a quart of high-fructose lube slathered on a cinnamon bun, there's another who is standing open-mouthed with complete bodily wonder, at some stupendous spectacle, clearly forming neuronal connections of a sort that will create the permanent predisposition to an appreciation of spectacle, wonder, and beauty. This is the kind of place where you have to love the sin and hate the sinner. The company may sue and resort to dirty tricks, but it's also chock full of real artists making real art. If you haven't been for a visit, you should. Honestly. Oh, by all means, also go somewhere unspoiled (if you can find it). Go camping. Go to one of the rides I've written so much about. But if you want to see the bright side of what billions can do -- the stuff you never get from outside the walls of this fortress of fun -- buy a ticket. # The barman at Suzanne's hotel started building her a Lapu-Lapu as she came up the stairs. The drink involved a hollow pineapple, overproof rum, and an umbrella, and she'd concluded that it contained the perfect dosage of liquid CNS depressant to unwind her after a day of battle at the parks. That day she'd spent following around the troupes of role-playing actors at Disney's Hollwood Studios: a cast of a hundred costumed players who acted out a series of interlocking comedies set in the black-and-white days of Hollywood. They were fearlessly cheeky, grabbing audience members and conscripting them in their plays. Now she was footsore and there was still a nighttime at Epcot in her future. The barman passed her the pineapple and she thumped her lanyard against the bar twice -- once to pay for the drink and once to give him a generous tip. He was gay as a goose, but fun to look at, and he flirted with her for kicks. "Gentleman caller for you, Suzanne," he said, tilting his head. "You temptress." She looked in the direction indicated and took in the man sitting on the bar-stool. He didn't have the look of a harried dad and he was too old to be a love-flushed honeymooner. In sensible tropical-weight slacks and a western shirt, he was impossible to place. He smiled and gave her a little wave. "What?" "He came in an hour ago and asked for you." She looked back at the man. "What's your take on him?" "I think he works here. He didn't pay with an employee card, but he acted like it." "OK," she said, "send out a search party if I'm not back in an hour." "Go get him, tiger," the barman said, giving her hand a squeeze. She carried her pineapple with her and drifted down the bar. "Hello there," she said. "Ms Church," the man said. He had a disarming, confident smile. "My name is Sammy Page." She knew the name, of course. The face, too, now that she thought about it. He offered her his hand. She didn't take it. He put it down, then wiped it on his trouser-leg. "Are you having a good time?" "A lovely time, thank you." She sipped her drink and wished it was a little more serious and intimidating. It's hard to do frosty when you're holding a rum-filled pineapple with a paper parasol. His smile faltered. "I read your article. I can't believe I missed it. I mean, you've been here for six days and I just figured it out today? I'm a pretty incompetent villain." She let a little smile slip out at that. "Well, it's a big Internet." "But I *love* your stuff. I've been reading it since, well, back when I lived in the Valley. I used to get the Merc actually delivered on paper." "You are a walking fossil, aren't you?" He bobbed his head. "So it comes down to this. I've been very distracted with making things besides lawsuits lately, as you know. I've been putting my energy into doing stuff, not preventing stuff. It's been refreshing." She grubbed in her pocket and came up with a little steno book and a pencil. "Do you mind if I take notes?" He gulped. "Can this all be on background?" She hefted her notebook. "No," she said finally. "If there's anything that needs publishing, I'm going to have to publish it. I can respect the fact that you're speaking to me with candor, but frankly, Mr Page, you haven't earned the privilege of speaking on background." He sipped at his drink -- a more grown-up highball, with a lone ice-cube in it, maybe a Scotch and soda. "OK, right. Well, then, on the record, but candorously. I loved your article. I love your work in general. I'm really glad to have you here, because I think we make great stuff and we're making more of it than ever. Your latest post was right on the money -- we care about our work here. That's how we got to where we are." "But you devote a lot of your resources to other projects here, don't you? I've heard about you, Mr Page. I've interviewed Death Waits." He winced and she scribbled a note, leaving him on tenterhooks while she wrote. Something cold and angry had hold of her writing arm. "I've interviewed him and heard what he has to say about this place, what you have done." "My hands aren't the cleanest," he said. "But I'm trying to atone." He swallowed. The barman was looking at them. "Look, can I take you for a walk, maybe? Someplace more private?" She thought about it. "Let me get changed," she said. "Meet you in the lobby in ten." She swapped her tennis shoes for walking sandals and put on a clean shirt and long slacks, then draped a scarf over her shoulders like a shawl. Outside, the sunset was painting the lagoon bloody. She was just about to rush back down to the lobby when she stopped and called Lester, her fingers moving of their own volition. "Hey, you," he said. "Still having fun in Mauschwitz?" "It keeps getting weirder here, let me tell you," she said. She told him about Sammy showing up, wanting to talk with her. "Ooh, I'm jealous," Lester said. "He's my arch-rival, after all." "I hadn't thought of it that way. He *is* kind of cute --" "Hey!" "In a slimy, sharky way. Don't worry, Lester. I miss you, you know?" "Really?" "Really. I think I'm about done here. I'm going to come home soon." There was a long pause, then a snuffling sound. She realized he was crying. He slurped. "Sorry. That's great, babe. I missed you." "I -- I missed you too. Listen, I've got to go meet this guy." "Go, go. Call me after dinner and tell me how it goes. Meanwhile, I'm going to go violate the DiaB some more." "Channel it, that's right." "Right on." Sammy met her in the lobby. "I thought we could go for a walk around the lake," he said. "There's a trail that goes all the way around. It's pretty private." She looked at the lake. At twelve o'clock, the main gates of the Magic Kingdom; at three, the retro A-frame Contemporary hotel, at nine, the wedding-cake Grand Floridian Resort. "Lead on," she said. He led her out onto the artificial white-sand beach and around, and a moment later they were on a pathway paved with octagonal tiles, each engraved with the name of a family and a year. "I really liked your article." "You said that." They walked a while longer. "It reminded me of why I came here. I worked for startups, and they were fun, but they were ephemeral. No one expected something on the Web to last for half a century. Maybe the brand survives, but who knows? I mean, who remembers Yahoo! anymore? But for sure, anything you built then would be gone in a year or two, a decade tops. "But here..." He waved his hands. They were coming around the bend for the Contemporary now, and she could see it in all its absurd glory. It had been kept up so that it looked like it might have been erected yesterday, but the towering white A-frame structure with the monorail running through its midriff was clearly of another era. It was like a museum piece, or a bit of artillery on the field at a civil war reenactment. "I see." "It's about the grandiosity, the permanence. The belief in doing something -- anything -- that will endure." "You didn't need to bring me someplace private to tell me that." "No, I didn't." He swallowed. "It's hard because I want to tell you something that will compromise me if I say it." "And I won't let you off the hook by promising to keep it confidential." "Exactly." "Well, you're on the horns of a dilemma then, aren't you?" The sun was nearly set now, and stones at their feet glittered from beneath, sprinkled with twinkling lights. It made the evening, scented with tropical flowers and the clean smell of the lake, even more lovely. A cool breeze fluffed her hair. He groaned. She had to admit it, she was enjoying this. Was it any less than this man deserved? "Let me try this again. I have some information that, if I pass it on to you, could save your friends down in Hollywood from terrible harm. I can only give you this information on the condition that you take great pains to keep me from being identified as the source." They'd come to the Magic Kingdom now. Behind them, the main gates loomed, and a pufferbelly choo-choo train blew its whistle as it pulled out of the station. Happy, exhausted children ran across the plaza, heading for the ferry docks and the monorail ramps. The stones beneath her feet glittered with rainbow light, and tropical birds called to each other from the Pirates of the Caribbean Adventure Island in the middle of the lake. "Hum," she said. The families laughed and jostled each other. "Hum. OK, one time only. This one is off the record." Sammy looked around nervously. "Keep walking," he said. "Let's get past here and back into the private spots." *But it's the crowds that put me in a generous mood.* She didn't say it. She'd give him this one. What harm could it do? If it was something she had to publish, she could get it from another source. "They're going to sue your friends." "So what else is new?" "No, personally. They're going to the mattresses. Every trumped up charge they can think of. But the point here isn't to get the cops to raid them, it's to serve discovery on every single communication, every document, every file. Open up everything. Root through every email until they find something to hang them with." "You say 'they' -- aren't *you* 'they'?" It was too dark to see his face now, but she could tell the question made him uncomfortable. "No. Not anymore." He swallowed and looked out at the lake. "Look, I'm doing something now -- something... *amazing*. The DiaB, it's breaking new ground. We're putting three-d printers into every house in America. What your friend Lester is doing, it's actually *helping* us. We're inventing a whole new --" "Business?" "No, not just a business. A world. It's what the New Work was missing -- a three-d printer in every living room. A killer app. There were personal computers and geeks for years before the spreadsheet came along. Then there was a reason to put one in every house. Then we got the Internet, the whole software industry. A new world. That's where we're headed. It's all I want to do. I don't want to spend the rest of my life suing people. I want to *do stuff*." He kicked at the rushes that grew beside the trail. "I want to be remembered for that. I want *that* to be my place in the history books -- not a bunch of lawsuits." Suzanne walked along beside him in silence for a time. "OK, so what do you want me to do about it?" "I thought that if --" He shut up. "Look, I tried this once before. I told that Freddy bastard everything in the hopes that he'd come onto my side and help me out. He screwed me. I'm not saying you're Freddy, but --" Suzanne stopped walking. "What do you want from me, sir? You have hardly been a friend to me and mine. It's true that you've made something very fine, but it's also true that you helped sabotage something every bit as fine. You're painting yourself as the victim of some mysterious 'them.' But as near as I can work out, the only difference between you and 'them' is that you're having a little disagreement with them. I don't like to be used as part of your corporate head-games and power-struggles." "Fine," he said. "Fine. I deserve that. I deserve no better. Fine. Well, I tried." Suzanne refused to soften. Grown men sulking did not inspire any sympathy in her. Whatever he wanted to tell her, it wasn't worth going into his debt. He gave a shuddering sigh. "Well, I've taken you away from your evening of fun. Can I make it up to you? Would you like to come with me on some of my favorite rides?" This surprised her a little, but when she thought about it, she couldn't see why not. "Sure," she said. # Taking a guest around Disney World was like programming a playlist for a date or a car-trip. Sammy had done it three or four times for people he was trying to win over (mostly women he was trying to screw) and he refined his technique every time. So he took her to the Carousel of Progress. It was the oldest untouched ride in the park, a replica of the one that Walt himself had built for GE at the 1964 World's Fair. There had been attempts to update it over the years, but they'd all been ripped out and the show restored to its mid-sixties glory. It was a revolving theater where robots danced and sang and talked through the American Century, from the last days of the coal stove up to the dawn of the space age. It had a goofy, catchy song, cornball jokes, and he relished playing guide and telling his charges about the time that the revolving theater had trapped a careless castmember in its carousel and crushed her to death. That juxtaposition of sunny, goofy American corporate optimism and the macabre realities of operating a park where a gang of half-literate minimum-wage workers spent their days shovelling the world's rich children into modified threshing machines -- it was delicious. Suzanne's body language told him the whole story from the second she sat down, arms folded, a barely contained smirk on her lips. The lights played over the GE logo, which had acquired an even more anachronistic luster since the last time he'd been. Now that GE had been de-listed from the NYSE, it was only a matter of time before they yanked the sponsorship, but for now, it made the ride seem like it was part time-machine. Transported back to the corporate Pleistocene, when giant dinocorps thundered over the plains. The theater rotated to the first batch of singing, wise-cracking robots. Her eyebrows shot up and she shook her head bemusedly. Out came the second batch, the third -- now they were in the fabulous forties and the Andrews Sisters played while grandma and grandpa robot watched a bulging fish-eye TV and sister got vibrated by an electric slimming belt. The jokes got worse, the catchy jingle -- "There's a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every daaaaay!" -- got repeated with more vigor. "It's like an American robot performance of *Triumph of the Will*," she whispered to him, and he cracked up. They were the only two in the theater. It was never full, and he himself had taken part in spitball exercises brainstorming replacements, but institutionally, Disney Parks couldn't bring itself to shut it down. There was always some excuse -- rabid fans, historical interest, competing priorities -- but it came down to the fact that no one wanted to bring the axe down on the robot family. The final segment now, the whole family enjoying a futuristic Christmas with a high-tech kitchen whose voice-activated stove went haywire. All the robots were on stage for the segment, and they exhorted the audience to sing and clap along. Sammy gave in and clapped, and a second later, Suzanne did, too, laughing at the silliness of it all. When the house lights came up and the bored -- but unsquashed -- castmember spieled them out of the ride, Sammy had a bounce in his step and the song in his head. "That was *terrible*!" Suzanne said. "Isn't it great?" "God, I'll never get that song out of my head." They moved through the flashing lights of Tomorrowland. "Look at that -- no line on Space Mountain," Sammy said, pointing. So they rode Space Mountain -- twice. Then they caught the fireworks. Then Sammy took her over to Tom Sawyer Island on a maintenance boat and they sat up in the tree house and watched as the park heaved and thronged, danced and ran, laughed and chattered. "Hear the rustling?" "Yeah, what is that, rabbits or something?" "Giant rats." Sammy grinned in the dark. "Giant, feral rats." "Come on, you're joking." "Cross my heart. We drain the lake every now and then and they migrate to the island. No predators. Lots of dropped french fries -- it's ratopia here. They get as big as cats. Bold little fuckers too. No one likes to be here alone at night." "What about us?" "We're together." The rustling grew louder and they held their breath. A bold rat like a raccoon picked its way across the path below them. Then two more. Suzanne shivered and Sammy did, too. They were huge, feral, menacing. "Want to go?" "Hell *yes*," she said. She fumbled in her purse and came out with a bright little torch that shone like a beacon. You weren't supposed to use bright lights on the island after hours while the rest of the park was open, but Sammy was glad of it. Back on the mainland, they rode Big Thunder Mountain and moseyed over to the new, half-rebuilt Fantasyland. The zombie maze was still open, and they got lost in it amid the groans, animatronic shamblers, and giggling kids running through the hedges. Something happened in the maze. Between entering it and leaving it, they lost their cares. Instead of talking about the park and Hackelberg, they talked about ways of getting out of the maze, talked about which zombie was coming next, about the best zombie movies they'd ever seen, about memorable Halloweens. As they neared the exit, they started to strategize about the best ride to go on next. Suzanne had done the Haunted Mansion twice when she first arrived and now -- "Come on, it's such a cliche," Sammy said. "Anyone can be a Haunted Mansion fan. It's like being a Mickey fan. It takes real character to be a Goofy fan." "You're a Goofy fan, I take it?" "Indeed. And I'm also a Jungle Cruise man." "More corny jokes?" "'We've been *dying* to have you' -- talk about cornball humor." They rode both. The park was closing, and all around them, people were streaming away from the rides. No lines at all, not even in front of the rollercoasters, not even in front of Dumbo, not even in front of the ultra-violent fly-over of the world of the zombies (nee Peter Pan's Flight, and a perennial favorite). "You know, I haven't just *enjoyed* the park like this in years." He was wearing a huge foam Goofy hat that danced and bobbed on his head, trying to do little pas-de-deux with the other Goofy hats in the vicinity. It also let out the occassional chuckle and snatch of song. "Shut up," Suzanne said. "Don't talk about magic. Live magic." They closed the park, letting themselves get herded off of Main Street along with the last stragglers. He looked over his shoulder as they moved through the arches under the train-station. The night crew was moving through the empty Main Street, hosing down the streets, sweeping, scrubbing. As he watched, the work lights came on, throwing the whole thing into near-daylight illumination, making it seem less like an enchanted wonderland and more like a movie set, an artifice. A sham. It was one in the morning and he was exhausted. And Hackelberg was going to sue. "Sammy, what do you want me to do, blackmail him?" "I don't know -- sure. Why not? You could call him and say, 'I hear you're working on this lawsuit, but don't you think it's hypocritical when you've been doing all this bad stuff --'" "I don't blackmail people." "Fine. Tell your friends, then. Tell some lawyers. That could work." "Sammy, I think we're going to have to fight this suit on its merits, not on the basis of some sneaky intel. I appreciate the risk you're putting yourself to --" "We ripped off some of Lester's code for the DiaB." He blurted it out, not believing he was hearing himself say it. "I didn't know it at the time. The libraries were on the net and my guys were in a hurry, and they just imported it into the build and left it there -- they rewrote it with the second shipment, but we put out a million units running a library Lester wrote for volumetric imaging. It was under some crazy viral open source license and we were supposed to publish all our modifications, and we never did." Suzanne threw her head back and laughed, long and hard. Sammy found himself laughing along with her. "OK," she said. "OK. That's a good one. I'll tell Lester about it. Maybe he'll want to use it. Maybe he'll want to sue." Sammy wanted to ask her if she'd keep his name out of it, but he couldn't ask. He'd gone to Hackelberg with the info as soon as he'd found out and they'd agreed to keep it quiet. The Imagineers responsible had had a very firm talking to, and had privately admitted to a curious and aghast Sammy over beers that everyone everywhere did this all the time, that it was so normal as to be completely unremarkable. He was pretty sure that a judge wouldn't see it that way. Suzanne surprised him by giving him a strong, warm hug. "You're not the worst guy in the world, Sammy Page," she said. "Thanks for showing me around your park." # Kettlewell had been almost pathetic in his interest in helping Lester out. Lester got the impression that he'd been sitting around his apartment, moping, ever since Eva had taken the kids and gone. As Lester unspooled the story for him -- Suzanne wouldn't tell him how she'd found this out, and he knew better than to ask -- Kettlewell grew more and more excited. By the time Lester was through, he was practically slobbering into the phone. "Oh, oh, oh, this is going to be a *fun* phoner," he said. "You'll do it, then? Even after everything?" "Does Perry know you've called me?" Lester swallowed. "No," he said. "I don't talk to Perry much these days." Kettlewell sighed. "What the hell am I going to do with you two?" "I'm sorry," Lester said. "Don't be sorry. Be happy. Someone should be happy around here." # Herve Guignol chaired the executive committee. Sammy had known him for years. They'd come east together from San Jose, where Guignol had run the entertainment side of eBay. They'd been recruited by Disney Parks at the same time, during the hostile takeover and breakup, and they'd had their share of nights out, golf games, and stupid movies together. But when Guignol was wearing his chairman's hat, it was like he was a different person. The boardroom was filled with huge, ergonomic chairs, the center of the table lined with bottles of imported water and trays of fanciful canapes in the shapes of Disney characters. Sammy sat to Guignol's left and Hackelberg sat to his right. Guignol brought the meeting to order and the rest of the committee stopped chatting and checking email and looked expectant. At the touch of a button, the door swung shut with an authoritative clunk and shutters slid down over the window. "Welcome, and thank you for attending on such short notice. You know Augustus Hackelberg; he has something to present to you." Hackelberg climbed to his feet and looked out at them. He didn't look good. "An issue has arisen --" Sammy loved the third person passive voice that dominated corporate meetings. Like the issue had arisen all on its own, spontaneously. "A decision that was taken has come back to bite us." He explained about the DiaBs and the code, laying it out more or less as it happened, though of course he downplayed his involvement in advising Sammy to go ahead and ship. The committee asked a few intense questions, none directed at Sammy, who kept quiet, though he instinctively wanted to defend his record. They took a break after an hour, and Sammy found himself in a corner with Guignol. "What do you think?" Sammy asked him. Guignol grimaced. "I think we're pretty screwed. Someone is going to have to take a fall for this, you know. It's going to cost us a fortune." Sammy nodded. "Well, unless we just settle with them," he said. "You know -- we drop the suit we just filed and they drop theirs...." He had hoped that this would come out on its own, but it was clear that Hackelberg wasn't going to offer it up himself. He was too in love with the idea of getting his hands on Perry and Lester. Guignol rocked his head from side to side. "You think they'd go for it?" Sammy dropped his voice to a whisper and turned away from the rest of the room to confound any lip-readers. "I think they've *offered* to do that." Guignol cut his eyes over to Hackelberg and Sammy nodded, imperceptibly. Guignol moved away, leaving Sammy to eat a Mickey head built from chunks of salmon and hamachi. Guignol moved among the committee, talking to a few members. Sammy recognized the behavior -- consolidating power. Hard to remember that this was the guy he'd played savage, high-stakes games of putt-putt golf with. The meeting reconvened. No one looked at Sammy. They all looked at Hackelberg. "What about trying to settle the suit?" Guignol said. Hackelberg flushed. "I don't know if that's possible --" "What about if we offer to settle in exchange for dropping the suit we've just filed?" Hackelberg's hands squeezed the side of the table. "I don't think that that would be a wise course of action. This is the opportunity we've been waiting for -- the chance to crack them wide open and see what's going on inside. Discover just what they've taken from us and how. Out them for all their bad acts." Guignol nodded. "OK, that's true. Now, as I understand it, every DiaB we shipped with this Banks person's code on it is a separate act of infringement. We shipped a million of them. What's the potential liability per unit?" "Courts usually award --" Guignol knocked quietly on the table. "What's the *potential liability* -- what's the size of the bill a court *could* hand down, if a jury was involved? If, say, this became part of someone's litigation portfolio." Hackelberg looked away. "It's up to five hundred thousand per separate act of infringement." Guignol nodded. "So, we're looking at a ceiling on the liability at $500 billion, then?" "Technically, yes. But --" "I propose that we offer a settlement, quid-pro-quo with this Banks person. We drop our suit if he indemnifies us from damages for his." "Seconded," said someone at the table. Things were picking up steam. Sammy bit the inside of his cheek to keep his smile in check. "Wait," Hackelberg said. "Gentlemen and lady, please. While it's true that damages can technically run to $500,000 per infringement, that simply isn't done. Not to entities like this firm. Listen, we *wrote* that law so we could sue people who took from *us*. It won't be used against us. We will face, at worst, a few hundred dollars per act of infringement. Still a sizable sum of money, but in the final analysis --" "Thank you," Guignol said. "All in favor of offering a settlement?" It was unanimous -- except for Hackelberg. # Sammy got his rematch with Hackelberg when the quarterly financials came out. It was all that black ink, making him giddy. "I don't want to be disrespectful," he said, knowing that in Hackelberg's books, there could be nothing more disrespectful than challenging him. "But we need to confront some business realities here." Hackelberg's office was nothing like Sammy had expected -- not a southern gentleman's study lined with hunting trophies and framed ancestral photos. It was as spare as the office of a temp, almost empty save for a highly functional desk, built-in bookcases lined with law-books, and a straight-backed chair. It was ascetic, severe, and it was more intimidating than any dark-wood den could hope to be. Hackelberg's heavy eyelids drooped a little, the corners of his eyes going down with them. It was like staring down a gator. Sammy resisted the urge to look away. "The numbers don't lie. DiaB is making us a fortune, and most of it's coming from the platform, not the goop and not the increased visitor numbers. We're making money because other people are figuring out ways to use our stuff. It's our fastest-growing revenue source and if it continues, we're going to end up being a DiaB company with a side-business in theme-parks. "That's the good news. The bad news is that these characters in the ghost mall have us in their crosshairs. They're prying us open faster than we can lock ourselves down. But here's another way of looking at it: every time they add another feature to the DiaB, they make owning a DiaB more attractive, which makes it easier for us to sell access to the platform to advertisers." Hackelberg held up his hands. "Samuel, I think I've heard enough. Your job is to figure out new businesses for us to diversify into. My job is to contain our liability and protect our brand and investors. It sounds a lot to me like you're saying that you want me to leave off doing my job so that you can do yours." Sammy squirmed. "No, that's not it at all. We both want to protect the business. I'm not saying that you need to give these guys a free ride. What I'm saying is, suing these guys is *not* good for our business. It costs us money, goodwill -- it distracts us from doing our jobs." Hackelberg leaned back and looked coolly into Sammy's eyes. "What are you proposing as an alternative, then?" The idea had come to Sammy in the shower one morning, as he mentally calculated the size of his coming quarterly bonus. A great idea. Out of the box thinking. The right answer to the question that no one had thought to ask. It had seemed so *perfect* then. Now, though -- "I think we should buy them out." Hackelberg's thin, mirthless grin made his balls shrivel up. Sammy held up his hands. "Here, look at this. I drew up some figures. What they're earning. What we earn from them. Growth estimates over the next five quarters. It's not just some random idea I had in the shower. This makes *sense*." He passed over a sheaf of papers, replete with pie-charts. Hackelberg set it down in the center of his desk, perfectly square to the corners. He flipped through the first five pages, then squared the stack up again. "You've done a lot of work here, Samuel. I can really see that." He got up from his straight-backed chair, lifted Sammy's papers between his thumb and forefinger, and crossed to the wall. There was a shredder there, its maw a wide rectangle, the kind of thing that you can stick entire hardcover books (or hard drives) into. Calmly, Hackelberg fed Sammy's paper into the shredder, fastidiously holding the paper-clipped corner between thumb and forefinger, then dropping the corner in once the rest had been digested. "I won't ask you for your computer," he said, settling back into his chair. "But I expect that you will back up your other data and then send the hard-drive to IT to be permanently erased. I don't want any record of this, period. I want this done by the end of business today." Sammy's mouth hung open. He shut it. Then he opened it again. Abruptly, Hackelberg stood, knocking his chair to the ground behind him. "Not one word, do you understand me? Not one solitary word, you goddamned idiot! We're in the middle of being sued by these people. I *know* you know this, since it's your fault that it's happening. I know that you know that the stakes are the *entire* company. Now, say a jury were to discover that we were considering buying these assholes out? Say a jury were to decide that our litigation was a base stratagem to lower the asking price for their, their *company* --" The word dripped with sarcasm -- "what do you suppose would happen? If you had the sense of a five year old, you'd have known better than to do this. Good Christ, Page, I should have security escort you to the gate. "Turn on your heel and go weep in the corridor. Don't stand in my office for one more second. Get your computer to IT by 2PM. I will check. That goes for anyone you worked with on this, anyone who has a copy of this information. Now, leave." Sammy stood rooted in place. "LEAVE, you ridiculous little dog's-pizzle, get out of my sight!" Sammy drew in a deep breath. He thought about saying something like, *You can't talk to me like that*, but it was very likely that Hackelberg could talk to him just like that. He felt light-headed and a little sick, and he backed slowly out of the office. Standing in the corridor, he began to shake. He pounded the elevator button, and felt the eyes of Hackelberg's severe secretary burning into his back. Abruptly, he turned away and yanked open the staircase door so hard it smashed into the wall with a loud bang. He took the stairs in a rush of desperate claustrophobia, wanting more than anything to get outside, to breathe in the fresh air. He stumbled on the way down, falling a couple of steps and smashing into the wall on the landing. He stood, pressed against the wall, the cold cinder block on his cheek, which felt like it might be bruised. The pain was enough to bring him back to his senses. This is ridiculous. He had the right answer. Hackelberg was wrong. Hackelberg didn't run the company. Yes, it was hard to get anything done without his sign-off, but it wasn't impossible. Going behind Hackelberg's back to the executive committee could cost him his job, of course. Of course. Sammy realized that he didn't actually *care* if he lost his job. Oh, the thought made his chest constrict and thoughts of living in a refrigerator box materialize in his mind's eye, but beyond that, he really didn't care. It was such a goddamned roller-coaster ride -- Sammy smiled grimly at the metaphor. You guess right, you end up on top. You guess wrong, you bottom out. He spent half his career lording it over the poor guessers and the other half panicking about a bad guess he'd made. He thought of Perry and Lester, thought of that night in Boston. He'd killed their ride and the party had gone on all the same. They had something, in that crazy shantytown, something pure and happy, some camaraderie that he'd always assumed he'd get someday, but that had never materialized. If this was his dream job, how much worse would unemployment really be? He would go to the executive committee. He would not erase his numbers. He set off for his office, moving quickly, purposefully, head up. A last stand, how exciting, why not? He piloted the little golf-cart down the back road and was nearly at his building's door when he spotted the security detail. Three of them, in lightweight Disney cop uniforms, wearing ranger hats and looking around alertly. Hackelberg must have sent them there to make sure that he followed through with deleting his data. He stopped the golf cart abruptly and reversed out of the driveway before the guards spotted him. He needed to get his files somewhere that Hackelberg wouldn't be able to retrieve them. He zipped down the service roads, thinking furiously. The answer occurred to him in the form of a road-sign for the Polynesian hotel. He turned up its drive and parked the golf-cart. As he stepped out, he removed his employee badge and untucked his shirt. Now he was just another sweaty fresh-arrived tourist, Dad coming in to rendezvous with Mom and the kids, back from some banal meeting that delayed his arrival, hasn't even had time to change into a t-shirt. He headed straight for the sundries store and bought a postage-paid Walt Disney World postcard with a little magnetic patch mounted on one corner. You filled up the memory with a couple hours' worth of video and as many photos as you wanted and mailed it off. The pixelated display on the front played a slide show of the images -- at least once a year, some honeymoon couple would miss this fact and throw a couple racy bedroom shots in the mix, to the perennial delight of the mail room. He hastily wrote some banalities about the great time he and the kids were having in Disney World, then he opened his computer and looked up the address that the Church woman had checked in under. He addressed it, simply, to "Suzanne," to further throw off the scent, then he slipped it into a mail-slot with a prayer to the gods of journalist shield laws. He walked as calmly as he could back to his golf-cart, clipping on his employee badge and tucking his shirt back in. Then he motored calmly to his office building. The Disney cops were sweating under the mid-day sun. "Mr Page?" "Yes," he said. "I'm to take your computer to IT, sir." "I don't think so," Sammy said, with perfect calm. "I think we'll GO up to my office and call a meeting of the executive committee instead." The security guard was young, Latino, and skinny. His short back-and-sides left his scalp exposed to the sun. He took his hat off and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, exposing a line of acne where his hat-band irritated the skin. It made Sammy feel sorry for the kid -- especially considering that Sammy earned more than 20 times the kid's salary. "This really isn't your job, I know," Sammy said, wondering where all this sympathy for the laboring classes had come from, anyway? "I don't want to make it hard for you. We'll go inside. You can hang on to the computer. We'll talk to some people. If they tell you to go ahead, you go ahead. Otherwise, we go see them, all right?" He held his computer out to the kid, who took it. "Let's go up to my office now," he said. The kid shook his head. "I'm supposed to take this --" "I know, I know. But we have a deal." The kid looked like he would head out anyway. "And there are backups in my office, so you need to come and get those, too." That did it. The kid looked a little grateful as they went inside, where the air conditioning was blowing icy cold. "You should have waited in the lobby, Luis," Sammy said, reading the kid's name off his badge. "You must be boiled." "I had instructions," Luis said. Sammy made a face. "They don't sound like very reasonable instructions. All the more reason to sort this out, right?" Sammy had his secretary get Luis a bottle of cold water and a little plate of grapes and berries out of the stash he kept for his visitors, then he called Guignol from his desk phone. "It's Sammy. I need to call an emergency meeting of the exec committee," he said without preamble. "This is about Hackelberg, isn't it?" "He's already called you?" "He was very persuasive." "I can be persuasive, too. Give me a chance." "You know what will happen if you push this?" "I might save the company." "You might," Guignol said. "And you might --" "I know," Sammy said. "What the hell, it's only a career." "You can't keep your data -- Hackelberg is right about that." "I can send all the backups and my computer to your office right now." "I was under the impression that they were all on their way to IT for disposal." "Not yet. There's a security castmember in my office with me named Luis. If you want to call dispatch and have them direct him to bring this stuff to you instead --" "Sammy, do you understand what you're doing here?" Sammy suppressed a mad giggle. "I do," he said. "I understand exactly what I'm doing. I want to help you all understand that, too." "I'm calling security dispatch now." A moment later, Luis's phone rang and the kid listened intently, nodding unconsciously. Once he'd hung up, Sammy passed him his backups, hardcopy and computer. "Let's go," he said. "Right," Luis said, and led the way. It was a short ride to the casting office building, where Guignol had his office. The wind felt terrific on his face, drying his sweat. It had been a long day. When they pulled up, Sammy let Luis lead the way again, badging in behind him, following him up to the seventh-floor board-room. at the end of the Gold Coast where the most senior offices were. Guignol met them at the door and took the materials from Luis, then ushered Sammy in. Sammy caught Luis's eye, and Luis surprised him by winking and slipping him a surreptitious thumbs-up, making Sammy feel like they shared a secret. There were eight on the executive committee, but they travelled a lot. Sammy had expected to see no more than four. There were two. And Hackelberg, of course. The lawyer was the picture of saurian calm. Sammy sat down at the table and helped himself to a glass of water, watching a ring pool on the table's polished and waxed wooden surface. "Samuel," Hackelberg said, shaking his head. "I hoped it wouldn't come to this." Sammy took a deep breath, looking for that don't-give-a-shit calm that had suffused him before. It was there still, not as potent, but there. He drew upon it. "Let's put this to the committee, shall we? I mean, we already know how we feel." "That won't be necessary," Hackelberg said. "The committee has already voted on this." Sammy closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked at Hackelberg, who was smiling grimly, a mean grin that went all the way to the corners of his eyes. Sammy looked around at Guignol and the committee members. They wouldn't meet his eye. Guignol gestured Luis into the room and handed him Sammy's computer, papers, and backups. He leaned in and spoke quietly to him. Luis turned and left. Guignol cleared his throat. "There's nothing else to discuss, then," he said. "Thank you all for coming." In his heart, Sammy had known this was coming. Hackelberg would beat him to the committee -- never let him present his side. Watching the lawyer get up stiffly and leave with slow, dignified steps, Sammy had a moment's intuition about what it must be like to be that man -- possessed of a kind of cold, furious power that came from telling everyone that not obeying you to the letter would put them in terrible danger. He knew that line of reasoning: It was the same one he got from the TSA at the airport before they bent him over and greased him up. *You can't understand the grave danger we all face. You must obey me, for only I can keep it at bay.* He waited for the rest of the committee to file out. None of them would meet his eye. Then it was just him and Guignol. Sammy raised his eyebrows and spread out his hands, miming *What happens now?* "You won't be able to get anything productive done until IT gets through with your computer. Take some time off. Call up Dinah and see if she wants to grab some holiday time." "We split," Sammy said. He drank his water and stood up. "I've just got one question before I go." Guignol winced but stood his ground. "Go ahead," he said. "Don't you want to know what the numbers looked like?" "It's not my job to overrule legal --" "We'll get to that in a second. It's not the question. The question is, don't you *want to know*?" Guignol sighed. "You know I want to know. Of course I want to know. This isn't about me and what I want, though. It's about making sure we don't endanger the shareholders --" "So ignoring this path, sticking our heads in the sand, that's *good* for the shareholders?" "No, of course it's not good for the shareholders. But it's better than endangering the whole company --" Sammy nodded. "Well, how about if we both take some time off and drive down to Hollywood. It'd do us some good." "Sammy, I've got a job to do --" "Yeah, but without your computer..." Guignol looked at him. "What did you do?" "It's not what I did. It's what I might have done. I'm going to be a good boy and give Hackelberg a list of everyone I might have emailed about this. All those people are losing their computers to the big magnet at IT." "But you never emailed me about this --" "You sure? I might have. It's the kind of thing I might have done. Maybe your spam-filter ate it. You never know. That's what IT's for." Guignol looked angry for a moment, then laughed. "You are such a shithead. Fuck that lawyer asshole anyway. What are you driving these days?" "Just bought a new Dell Luminux," Sammy said, grinning back. "Rag-top." "When do we leave?" "I'll pick you up at 6AM tomorrow. Beat the morning traffic." # Suzanne was getting sick of breakfast in bed. It was hard to imagine that such a thing was possible, but there it was. Lester stole out from between the covers before 7AM every day, and then, half an hour later, he was back with a laden tray, something new every day. She'd had steaks, burritos, waffles, home-made granola, fruit-salad with Greek yogurt, and today there were eggs Benedict with fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. The tray always came with a French press of fresh-ground Kona coffee, a cloth napkin, and her computer, so she could read the news. In theory, this was a warm ritual that ensured that they had quality time together every day, no matter what. In practice, Lester was so anxious about the food and whether she was enjoying it that she couldn't really enjoy it. Plus, she wasn't a fatkins, so three thousand calorie breakfasts weren't good for her. Most of all, it was the pressure to be a happy couple, to have cemented over the old hurts and started anew. She felt it every moment, when Lester climbed into the shower with her and soaped her back, when he brought home flowers, and when he climbed into bed with her in the morning to eat breakfast with her. She picked at her caviar and blini glumly and poked at her computer. Beside her, Lester hoovered up three thousand calories' worth of fried dough and clattered one-handed on his machine. "This is delicious, babe, thanks," she said, with as much sincerity as she could muster. It was really generous and nice of him to do this. She was just a bitter old woman who couldn't be happy no matter what was going on in her life. There was voicemail on her computer, which was unusual. Most people sent her email. This originated from a pay phone on the Florida Turnpike. "Ms Church, this is -- ah, this is a person whom you recently had the acquaintance of, while on your holidays. I have a confidential matter to discuss with you. I'm travelling to your location with a colleague today and should arrive mid-morning. I hope you can make some time to meet with me." She listened to it twice. Lester leaned over. "What's that all about?" "You're not going to believe it. I think it's that Disney guy, the guy I told you about. The one Death used to work for." "He's coming *here*?" "Apparently." "Woah. Don't tell Perry." "You think?" "He'd tear that guy's throat out with his teeth." Lester took a bite of blini. "I might help." Suzanne thought about Sammy. He hadn't been the sort of person she could be friends with, but she'd known plenty of his kind in her day, and he was hardly the worst of the lot. He barely rated above average on the corporate psychopath meter. Somewhere in there, there was a real personality. She'd seen it. "Well, then I guess I'd better meet with him alone." "It sounds like he wants a doctor-patient meeting anyway." "Or confessor-penitent." "You think he'll leak you something." "That's a pretty good working theory when it comes to this kind of call." Lester ate thoughtfully, then reached over and hit a key on her computer, replaying the call. "He sounds, what, giddy?" "That's right, he does, doesn't he. Maybe it's good news." Lester laughed and took away her dishes, and when he came back in, he was naked, stripped and ready for the shower. He was a very handsome man, and he had a devilish grin as he whisked the blanket off of her. He stopped at the foot of the bed and stared at her, his grin quirking in a way she recognized instantly. She didn't have to look down to know that he was getting hard. In the mirror of his eyes, she was beautiful. She could see it plainly. When she looked into the real mirror at the foot of the bed, draped with gauzy sun-scarves and crusted around the edges with kitschy tourist magnets Lester brought home, she saw a saggy, middle-aged woman with cottage-cheese cellulite and saddle-bags. Lester had slept with more fatkins girls than she could count, women made into doll-like mannequins by surgery and chemical enhancements, women who read sex manuals in public places and boasted about their Kegel weight-lifting scores. But when he looked at her like that, she knew that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever loved, that he would do anything for her. That he loved her as much as he could ever love anyone. *What the hell was I complaining about?* she thought as he fell on her like a starving man. # She met Sammy in their favorite tea-room, the one perched up on a crow's nest four storeys up a corkscrew building whose supplies came up on a series of dumbwaiters and winches that shrouded its balconies like vines. She staked out the best table, the one with the panoramic view of the whole shantytown, and ordered a plate of the tiny shortbread cakes that were the house specialty, along with a gigantic mug of nonfat decaf cappuccino. Sammy came up the steps red-faced and sweaty, wearing a Hawai'ian shirt and Bermuda shorts, like some kind of tourist. Or like he was on holidays? Behind him came a younger man, with severe little designer glasses, dressed in the conventional polo-shirt and slacks uniform of the corporate exec on a non-suit day. Suzanne sprinkled an ironic wave at them and gestured to the mismatched school-room chairs at her table. The waitress -- Shayna -- came over with two glasses of water and a paper napkin dispenser. The men thanked her and mopped their faces and drank their water. "Good drive?" Sammy nodded. His friend looked nervous, like he was wondering what might have been swimming in his water glass. "This is some place." "We like it here." "Is there, you know, a bathroom?" the companion asked. "Through there." Suzanne pointed. "How do you deal with the sewage around here?" "Sewage? Mr Page, sewage is *solved*. We feed it into our generators and the waste heat runs our condenser purifiers. There was talk of building one big one for the whole town, but that required way too much coordination and anyway, Perry was convinced that having central points of failure would be begging for a disaster. I wrote a series on it. If you'd like I can send you the links." The Disney exec made some noises and ate some shortbread, peered at the chalk-board menu and ordered some Thai iced tea. "Look, Ms Church -- Suzanne -- thank you for seeing me. I would have understood completely if you'd told me to go fuck myself." Suzanne smiled and made a go-on gesture. "Before my friend comes back from the bathroom, before we meet up with anyone from your side, I just want you to know this. What you've done, it's changed the world. I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for you." He had every appearance of being completely sincere. He was a little road-crazed and windblown today, not like she remembered him from Orlando. What the hell had happened to him? What was he here for? His friend came back and Sammy said, "I ordered you a Thai iced tea. This is Suzanne Church, the writer. Ms Church, this is Herve Guignol, co-director of the Florida regional division of Disney Parks." Guignol was more put-together and stand-offish than Sammy. He shook her hand and made executive sounding grunts at her. He was young, and clearly into playing the role of exec. He reminded Suzanne of fresh Silicon Valley millionaires who could go from pizza-slinging hackers to suit-wearing biz-droids who bullshitted knowledgeably about EBITDA overnight. *What the hell are you two here for?* "Mr Page --" "Sammy, call me Sammy, please. Did you get my postcard?" "That was from you?" She'd not been able to make heads or tails of it when it arrived in the mail the day before and she'd chucked it out as part of some viral marketing campaign she didn't want to get infected by. "You got it?" "I threw it out." Sammy went slightly green. "But it'll still be in the trash," she said. "Lester never takes it out, and I haven't." "Um, can we go and get it now, all the same?" "What's on it?" Sammy and Guignol exchanged a long look. "Let's pretend that I gave you a long run-up to this. Let's pretend that we spent a lot of time with me impressing on you that this is confidential, and not for publication. Let's pretend that I charmed you and made sure you understood how much respect I have for you and your friends here --" "I get it," Suzanne said, trying not to laugh. *Not for publication* -- really! "OK, let's pretend all that. Now I'll tell you: what's on that postcard is the financials for a Disney Parks buyout of your friends' entire operation here. DiaBolical, the ride, all of it." Suzanne had been expecting a lot of things, but this wasn't one of them. It was loopy. Daffy. Not just weird, but inconceivable. As though he'd said, "I sent you our plans to carve your portrait on the moon's surface with a green laser." But she was a pro. She kept her face still and neutral, and calmly swallowed her cappuccino. "I see." "And there are -- there are people at Disney who feel like this idea is so dangerous that it doesn't even warrant discussion. That it should be suppressed." Guignol cleared his throat. "That's the consensus," he said. "And normally, I'd say, hey, sure, the consensus. That's great. But I'll tell you, I drew up these numbers because I was curious, I'm a curious guy. I like to think laterally, try stuff that might seem silly at first. See where it goes. I've had pretty good instincts." Guignol and Suzanne snorted at the same time. "And an imperfect record," Sammy said. Suzanne didn't want to like him, but there was something forthright about him that she couldn't help warming to. There was no subtlety or scheming in this guy. Whatever he wanted, you could see it right on his face. Maybe he was a psycho, but he wasn't a sneak. "So I ran these numbers for my own amusement, to see what they would look like. Assume that your boys want, say, 30 times gross annual revenue for a buyout. Say that this settles our lawsuit -- not theirs, just ours, so we don't have to pay for the trademark suit to go forward. Assume that they generate one DiaBolical-scale idea every six months --" Suzanne found herself nodding along, especially at this last one. "Well, you make those assumptions and you know what comes out of it?" Suzanne let the numbers dance behind her own eyelids. She'd followed all the relevant financials closely for years, so closely that they were as familiar as her monthly take-home and mortgage payments had been, back when she had a straight job and a straight life. "Well, you'd make Lester and Perry *very* wealthy," she said. "After they vested out, they'd be able to live off the interest alone." Sammy nodded judiciously. His sidekick looked alarmed. "Yup. And for us?" "Well, assuming your last quarterly statement was accurate --" "We were a little conservative," Sammy said. The other man nodded reflexively. *You were very conservative,* she thought. *DiaB's making you a fortune and you didn't want to advertise that to the competition.* "Assuming that, well, you guys earn back your investment in, what, 18 months?" "I figure a year. But 18 months would be good." "If you vest the guys out over three years, that means --" "100 percent ROI, plus or minus 200 percent," Sammy said. "For less money than we'll end up spending on our end of the lawsuit." Guignol was goggling at them both. Sammy drank his Thai iced-tea, slurping noisily. He signalled for another one. "And you sent me these financials on a postcard?" "There was some question about whether they'd be erased before I could show them to anyone, and I knew there was no way I'd be given the chance to re-create them independently. It seemed prudent to have a backup copy." "A backup copy in my hands?" "Well, at least I knew you wouldn't give it up without a fight." Sammy shrugged and offered her a sunny smile. "We'd better go rescue that postcard from the basket before Lester develops a domestic instinct and takes out the trash, then," Suzanne said, pushing away from the table. Shayna brought the bill and Sammy paid it, overtipping by a factor of ten, which endeared him further to Suzanne. She couldn't abide rich people who stiffed on the tip. Suzanne walked them through the shantytown, watching their reactions closely. She liked to take new people here. She'd witnessed its birth and growth, then gone away during its adolescence, and now she got to enjoy its maturity. Crowds of kids ran screeching and playing through the streets, adults nodded at them from their windows, wires and plumbing and antennas crowded the skies above them. The walls shimmered with murals and graffiti and mosaics. Sammy treated it like he had his theme park, seeming to take in every detail with a connoisseur's eye; Guignol was more nervous, clearly feeling unsafe amid the cheerful lawlessness. They came upon Francis and a gang of his kids, building bicycles out of stiffened fabric and strong monofilament recycled from packing crates. "Ms Church," Francis said gravely. He'd given up drinking, maybe for good, and he was clear-eyed and charming in his engineer's coveralls. The kids -- boys *and* girls, Suzanne noted approvingly -- continued to work over the bikes, but they were clearly watching what Francis was up to. "Francis, please meet Sammy and his colleague, Herve. They're here for a story I'm working on. Gentlemen, Francis is the closest thing we have to a mayor around here." Francis shook hands all around, but Sammy's attention was riveted on the bicycles. Francis picked one up with two fingers and handed it to him. "Like it? We got the design from a shop in Liberia, but we made our own local improvements. The trick is getting the stiffener to stay liquid long enough to get the fabric stretched out in the right proportion." Sammy took the frame from him and spun it in one hand like a baton. "And the wheels?" "Mostly we do solids, which stay in true longer. We use the carbon stiffener on a pre-cut round of canvas or denim, then fit a standard tire. They go out of true after a while. You just apply some solvent to them and they go soft again and you re-true them with a compass and a pair of tailor's shears, then re-stiffen them. You get maybe five years of hard riding out of a wheel that way." Sammy's eyes were round as saucers. He took one of the proffered wheels and spun it between opposing fingertips. Then, grinning, he picked up another wheel and the bike-frame and began to *juggle* them, one-two-three, hoop-la! Francis looked amused, rather than pissed -- giving up drink had softened his temper. His kids stopped working and laughed. Sammy laughed too. He transferred the wheels to his left hand, then tossed the frame high the air, spun around and caught it and then handed it all back to Francis. The kids clapped and he took a bow. "I didn't know you had it in you," Guignol said, patting him on the shoulder. Sammy, sweating and grinning like a fool, said, "Yeah, it's not something I get a lot of chances to do around the office. But did you see that? It was light enough to juggle! I mean, how exciting is all this?" He swept his arm around his head. "Between the sewage and the manufacturing and all these kids --" He broke off. "What do you do about education, Suzanne?" "Lots of kids bus into the local schools, or ride. But lots more home-school these days. We don't get a very high caliber of public school around here." "Might that have something to do with all the residents who don't pay property tax?" Guignol said pointedly. Suzanne nodded. "I'm sure it does," she said. "But it has more to do with the overall quality of public education in this state. 47th in the nation for funding." They were at her and Lester's place now. She led them through the front door and picked up the trash-can next to the little table where she sorted the mail after picking it up from her PO box at a little strip mall down the road. There was the postcard. She handed it silently to Sammy, who held it for a moment, then reluctantly passed it to Guignol. "You'd better hang on to it," he said, and she sensed that there was something bigger going on there. "Now we go see Lester," Suzanne said. He was behind the building in his little workshop, hacking DiaBolical. There were five different DiaBs running around him, chugging and humming. The smell of goop and fuser and heat filled the room, and an air-conditioner like a jet-engine labored to keep things cool. Still, it was a few degrees warmer inside than out. "Lester," Suzanne shouted over the air-conditioner din, "we have visitors." Lester straightened up from his keyboard and wiped his palms and turned to face them. He knew who they were based on his earlier conversation with Suzanne, but he also clearly recognized Sammy. "You!" he said. "You work for Disney?" Sammy blushed and looked away. Lester turned to Suzanne. "This guy used to come up, what, twice, three times a week." Sammy nodded and mumbled something. Lester reached out and snapped off the AC, filling the room with eerie silence and stifling heat. "What was that?" "I'm a great believer in competitive intelligence." "You work for Disney?" "They both work for Disney, Lester," Suzanne said. "This is Sammy and Herve." *Herve doesn't do much talking,* she mentally added, *but he seems to be in charge*. "That's right," Sammy said, seeming to come to himself at last. "And it's an honor to formally meet you at last. I run the DiaB program. I see you're a fan. I've read quite a bit about you, of course, thanks to Ms Church here." Lester's hands closed and opened, closed and opened. "You were, what, you were sneaking around here?" "Have I mentioned that I'm a great fan of *your work*? Not just the ride, either. This DiaBolical, well, it's --" "What are you doing here?" Suzanne had expected something like this. Lester wasn't like Perry, he wouldn't go off the deep-end with this guy, but he wasn't going to be his best buddy, either. Still, someone needed to intervene before this melted down altogether. "Lester," she said, putting her hand on his warm shoulder. "Do you want to show these guys what you're working on?" He blew air through his nose a couple times, then settled down. He even smiled. "This one," he said, pointing to a DiaBolical, "I've got it running an experimental firmware that lets it print out hollow components. They're a lot lighter and they don't last as long. But they're also way less consumptive on goop. You get about ten times as much printing out of them." Suzanne noted that this bit of news turned both of the Disney execs a little green. They made a lot of money selling goop, she knew. "This one," Lester continued, patting a DiaB that was open to the elements, its imps lounging in its guts, "we mix some serious epoxy in with it, some carbon fibers. The printouts are practically indestructible. There are some kids around here who've been using it to print parts for bicycles --" "Those were printed on *this*?" Sammy said. "We ran into Francis and his gang," Suzanne explained. Lester nodded. "Yeah, it's not perfect, though. The epoxy clogs up the works and the imps really don't like it. I only get two or three days out of a printer after I convert it. I'm working on changing the mix to fix that, though." "After all," Guignol noted sourly, "it's not as if you have to pay for new DiaBs when you break one." Lester smiled nastily at him. "Exactly," he said. "We've got a great research subsidy around here." Guignol looked away, lips pursed. "This one," Lester said, choosing not to notice, "this one is the realization of an age-old project." He pointed to the table next to it, where its imps were carefully fitting together some very fine parts. Sammy leaned in close, inspecting their work. After a second, he hissed like a teakettle, then slapped his knee. Now Lester's smile was more genuine. He loved it when people appreciated his work. "You figured it out?" "You're printing DiaBs!" "Not the whole thing," Lester said. "A lot of the logic needs an FPGA burner. And we can't do some of the conductive elements, either. But yeah, about 90 percent of the DiaB can be printed in a DiaB." Suzanne hadn't heard about this one, though she remembered earlier attempts, back in the golden New Work days, the dream of self-replicating machines. Now she looked close, leaning in next to Sammy, so close she could feel his warm breath. There was something, well, *spooky* about the imps building a machine using another one of the machines. "It's, what, it's like it's alive, and reproducing itself," Sammy said. "Don't tell me this never occurred to you," Lester said. "Honestly? No. It never did. Mr Banks, you have a uniquely twisted, fucked up imagination, and I say that with the warmest admiration." Guignol leaned in, too, staring at it. "It's so obvious now that I see it," he said. "Yeah, all the really great ideas are like that," Lester said. Sammy straightened up and shook Lester's hand. "Thank you for the tour, Lester. You have managed to simultaneously impress and depress me. You are one sharp motherfucker." Lester preened and Suzanne suppressed a giggle. Sammy held his hand up like he was being sworn in. "I'm dead serious, man. This is amazing. I mean, we manage some pretty out-of-the-box thinking at Disney, right? We may not be as nimble as some little whacked out co-op, but for who we are -- I think we do a good job. "But you, man, you blow us out of the water. This stuff is just *crazy*, like it came down from Mars. Like it's from the future." He shook his head. "It's humbling, you know." Guignol looked more thoughtful than he had to this point. He and Lester stared at Sammy, wearing similar expressions of bemusement. "Let's go into the apartment," Suzanne said. "We can sit down and have a chat." They trooped up the stairs together. Guignol expressed admiration for the weird junk-sculptures that adorned each landing, made by a local craftswoman and installed by the landlord. They sat around the living room and Lester poured iced coffee out of a pitcher in the fridge, dropping in ice-cubes molded to look like legos. They rattled their drinks and looked uncomfortably at one another. Suzanne longed to whip out her computer and take notes, or at least a pad, or a camera, but she restrained himself. Guignol looked significantly at Sammy. "Lester, I'm just going to say it. Would you sell your business to us? The ride, DiaBolical, all of it? We could make you a very, very rich man. You and Perry. You would have the freedom to go on doing what you're doing, but we'd put it in our production chain, mass-market the hell out of it, get it into places you've never seen. At its peak, New Work -- which you were only a small part of, remember -- touched 20 percent of Americans. *90 percent* of Americans have been to a Disney park. We're a bigger tourist draw than *all of Great Britain.* We can give your ideas legs." Lester began to chuckle, then laugh, then he was doubled over, thumping his thighs. Suzanne shook her head. In just a few short moments, she'd gotten used to the idea, and it was growing on her. Guignol looked grim. "It's not a firm offer -- it's a chance to open a dialogue, a negotiation. Talk the possibility over. A good negotiation is one where we both start by saying what we want and work it over until we get to the point where we're left with what we both need." Lester wiped tears from his eyes. "I don't think that you grasp the absurdity of this situation, fellas. For starters, Perry will never go for it. I mean *never.*" Suzanne wondered about that. And wondered whether it mattered. The two had hardly said a word to each other in months. "What's more, the rest of the rides will never, never, *never* go in for it. That's also for sure. "Finally, what the fuck are you talking about? Me go to work for you? Us go to work for you? What will you do, stick Mickey in the ride? He's already in the ride, every now and again, as you well know. You going to move me up to Orlando?" Sammy waggled his head from side to side. "I have a deep appreciation for how weird this is, Lester. To tell you the truth, I haven't thought much about your ride or this little town. As far as I'm concerned, we could just buy it and then turn around and sell it back to the residents for one dollar -- we wouldn't want to own or operate any of this stuff, the liability is too huge. Likewise the other rides. We don't care about what you did *yesterday* -- we care about what you're going to do tomorrow. "Listen, you're a smart guy. You make stuff that we can't dream of, that we lack the institutional imagination to dream of. We need *that*. What the hell is the point of fighting you, suing you, when we can put you on the payroll? And you know what? Even if we throw an idiotic sum of money at you, even if you never make anything for us, we're still ahead of the game if you stop making stuff *against* us. "I'm putting my cards on the table here. I know your partner is going to be even harder to convince, too. None of this is going to be easy. I don't care about easy. I care about what's right. I'm sick of being in charge of sabotaging people who make awesome stuff. Aren't you sick of being sabotaged? Wouldn't you like to come work some place where we'll shovel money and resources at your projects and keep the wolves at bay?" Suzanne was impressed. This wasn't the same guy whom Rat-Toothed Freddy had savaged. It wasn't the same guy that Death Waits had described. He had come a long way. Even Guignol -- whom, she suspected, needed to be sold on the idea almost as much as Lester -- was nodding along by the end of it. Lester wasn't though: "You're wasting your time, mister. That's all there is to it. I am not going to go and work for --" a giggle escaped his lips "-- Disney. It's just --" Sammy held his hands up in partial surrender. "OK, OK. I won't push you today. Think about it. Talk it over with your buddy. I'm a patient guy." Guignol snorted. "I don't want to lean on you here." They took their leave, though Suzanne found out later that they'd taken a spin around the ride before leaving. Everyone went on the ride. Lester shook his head at the door behind them. "Can you believe that?" Suzanne smiled and squeezed his hand. "You're funny about this, you know that? Normally, when you encounter a new idea, you like to play with it, think it through, see what you can make of it. With this, you're not even willing to noodle with it." "You can't seriously think that this is a good idea --" "I don't know. It's not the dumbest idea I've ever heard. Become a millionaire, get to do whatever you want? It'll sure make an interesting story." He goggled at her. "Kidding," she said, thinking, *It would indeed make an interesting story, though.* "But where are you going from here? Are you going to stay here forever?" "Perry would never go for it --" Lester said, then stopped. "You and Perry, Lester, how long do you think that's going to last." "Don't you go all Yoko on me, Suzanne. We've got one of those around here already --" "I don't like this Yoko joke, Lester. I never did. Hilda doesn't want to drive Perry away from you. She wants to make the rides work. And it sounds like that's what Perry wants, too. What's wrong with them doing that? Especially if you can get them a ton of money to support it?" Lester stared at her, open-mouthed. "Honey --" "Think about it, Lester. Your most important virtue is your expansive imagination. Use it." She watched this sink in. It did sink in. Lester listened to her, which surprised her every now and again. Most relationships seemed to be negotiations or possibly competitions. With Lester it was a conversation. She gave him a hug that seemed to go on forever. # Sammy was glad he was driving. The mood Guignol was in, he'd have wrecked the car. "That was *not* the plan, Sammy," he said. "The plan was to get the data, talk it over --" "The first casualty of any battle is the battle-plan," Sammy said, threading them through the press of tourist busses and commuter cars. "I thought the first casualty was the truth." They'd spent too long at the ride, then gotten stuck in the afternoon rush hour out of Miami. "That too. Look, I'm proposing to spend a tenth of the profits from the DiaB on this venture. In any other circumstance, I would do it with a *purchase order*. The only reason it's a big deal is --" "That it carries enough legal liability to destroy the company. Sammy, didn't you listen to Hackelberg?" "The reason I still work at Disney is that it's the kind of company where the lawyers don't *always* set the agenda." Guignol drummed his hands on the dashboard. Sammy pulled over and gassed up. At the next pump was a minivan with Kansas plates. Dad was a dumpy Korean guy, Mom was a dumpy white midwesterner with a country-and-western denim jacket, and the back seat was filled with vibrating children, two girls and a boy. The kids were screaming and fighting, the girls trying to draw on the boy's face with candy-flavored lipstick and kiddie mascara, the boy squirming mightily and lashing out at them with his gameboy. Dad and Mom were having their own heated discussion as Dad gassed up, Sammy eavesdropped enough to hear that they were fighting over Dad's choice of taking the toll roads instead of the cheaper, slower alternative route. The kids were shouting so loud, though -- "You keep that up and we're not going to Disney World!" It was the magic sentence, the litmus test for Disney's currency. As it rose and fell, so did the efficacy of the threat. If Sammy could, he'd take a video of the result every time this was uttered. The kids looked at Dad and shrugged. "Who cares?" the eldest sister said, and grabbed the boy again. Sammy turned to Guignol and waggled his eyebrows. Once he was back in the car, he said, "You know, it's risky doing anything. But riskiest of all is doing nothing." Guignol shook his head and pulled out his computer. He spent a lot of time looking at the numbers while Sammy fought traffic. Finally he closed his computer, put his head back and shut his eyes. Sammy drove on. "You think this'll work?" Guignol said. "Which part? "You think if you buy these guys out --" "Oh, that part. Sure, yeah, slam dunk. They're cheap. Like I say, we could make back the whole nut just by settling the lawsuit. The hard part is going to be convincing them to sell." "And Hackelberg." "That's your job, not mine." Guignol slid the seat back so it was flat as a bed. "Wake me when we hit Orlando." # It took IT three days to get Sammy his computer back. His secretary managed as best as she could, but he wasn't able to do much without it. When he got it back at last, he eagerly downloaded his backlog of mail. It beggared the imagination. Even after auto-filtering it, there were hundreds of new messages, things he had to pay real attention to. When he was dealing with this stuff in little spurts every few minutes all day long, it didn't seem like much, but it sure piled up. He enlisted his secretary to help him with sorting and responding. After an hour she forwarded one back to him with a bold red flag. It was from Freddy. He got an instant headache, the feeling halfway between a migraine and the feeling after you bang your head against the corner of a table. :: Sammy, I'm disappointed in you. I thought we were friends. Why do I have to learn about your bizarre plan to buy out Gibbons and Banks from strangers. I do hope you'll give me a comment on the story? He'd left the financials with Guignol, who had been discreetly showing them around to the rest of the executive committee in closed door, off-site meetings. One of them must have blabbed, though -- or maybe it was a leak at Lester's end. He tasted his lunch and bile as his stomach twisted. It wasn't fair. He had a real chance of making this happen -- and it would be a source of genuine good for all concerned. He got halfway through calling Guignol's number, then put the phone down. He didn't know who to call. He'd put himself in an unwinnable position. As he contemplated the article that Freddy would probably write, he realized that he would almost certainly lose his job over this, too. Maybe end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit. Man, that seemed to be his natural state at Disney. Maybe he was in the wrong job. He groaned and thumped himself on the forehead. All he wanted to do was have good ideas and make them happen. Basically, he wanted to be Lester. Then he knew who he had to call. "Ms Church?" "We're back to that, huh? That's probably not a good sign." "Suzanne then." "Sammy, you sound like you're about to pop a testicle. Spit it out." "Do you think I could get a job with Lester?" "You're not joking, are you?" "Freddy found out about the buyout offer." "Oh." "Yeah." "So I'm gonna be in search of employment. All I ever wanted to do was come up with cool ideas and execute them --" "Shush now. Freddy found out about this, huh? Not surprising. He's got a knack for it. It's just about his only virtue." "Urgh." "However, it's also his greatest failing. I've given this a lot of thought, since my last run in with Rat-Toothed Freddy." "You call him that to his face?" "Not yet. But I look forward to it. Tell you what, give me an hour to talk to some people here, and I'll get back to you." An hour? "An hour?" "He'll keep you squirming for at least that long. He loves to make people squirm. It's good journalism -- shakes loose some new developments." "An hour?" "Have you got a choice?" "An hour, then." # Suzanne didn't knock on Lester's door. Lester would fall into place, once Perry was in. She found him working the ride, Hilda back in the maintenance bay, tweaking some of the robots. His arm was out of the cast, but it was noticeably thinner than his good left arm, weak and pale and flabby. "Hello, Suzanne." He was formal, like he always was these days, and it saddened her, but she pressed on. "Perry, we need to shut down for a while, it's urgent." "Suzanne, this is a busy time, we just can't shut down --" She thumped her hand on his lemonade-stand counter. "Cut it out, Perry. I have never been an alarmist, you know that. I understand intimately what it means to shut this place down. Look, I know that things haven't been so good between us, between *any* of us, for a long time. But I am your dear friend, and you are mine, no matter what's going on at this second, and I'm telling you that you need to shut this down and we need to talk. Do it, Perry." He gave her a long, considering look. "Please?" He looked at the little queue of four or five people, pretending not to eavesdrop, waiting their turn. "Sorry, folks, you heard the lady. Family emergency. Um, here --" He rummaged under the counter, came up with scraps of paper. "Mrs Torrence's tearoom across the street -- they make the best cappuccino in the hood, and the pastries are all baked fresh. On me, OK?" "Come on," Suzanne said. "Time's short." She accompanied him to the maintenance bay and they pulled the doors shut behind them. Hilda looked up from her robot, wiping her hands on her shorts. She was really lovely, and the look on her face when she saw Perry was pure adoration. Suzanne's heart welled up for the two of them, such a perfect picture of young love. Then Hilda saw Suzanne, and her expression grew guarded, tense. Perry took Hilda's hand. "What's this about, Suzanne?" he said. "Let me give this to you in one shot, OK?" They nodded. She ran it down for them. Sammy and Guignol, the postcard and the funny circumstances of their visit -- the phone call. "So here's the thing. He wants to buy you guys out. He doesn't want the ride or the town. He just wants -- I don't know -- the *creativity*. The PR win. He wants peace. And the real news is, he's over a barrel. Freddy's forcing his hand. If we can make that problem go away, we can ask for *anything*." Hilda's jaw hung slack. "You have to be kidding --" Perry shushed her. "Suzanne, why are you here? Why aren't you talking to Lester about this? Why hasn't Lester talked to me about this. I mean, just what the fuck is going on?" She winced. "I didn't talk to Lester because I thought he'd be easier to sell on this than you are. This is a golden opportunity and I thought that you would be conflicted as hell about it and I thought if I talked to you first, we could get past that. I don't really have a dog in this fight, except that I want all parties to end up not hating each other. That's where you're headed now -- you're melting down in slow motion. How long since you and Lester had a conversation together, let alone a real meal? How long since we all sat around and laughed? Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again. "You two *were* the New Work. Lots of people got blisteringly rich off of New Work, but not you. Here's a chance for you to get what you deserve for a change. You solve this -- and you *can* solve it, and not just for you, but for that Death kid, you can get him justice that the courts will take fifteen years to deliver." Perry scowled. "I don't care about money --" "Yes, that's admirable. I have one other thing; I've been saving it for last, waiting to see if you'd come up with it on your own." "What?" "Why is time of the essence?" "Because Freddy's going to out this dirtball --" "And how do we solve that?" Hilda grinned. "Oh, this part I like." Suzanne laughed. "Yeah." "What?" Perry said. "Freddy's good at intelligence gathering, but he's not so good at distinguishing truth from fiction. In my view, this presents a fascinating opportunity. Depending on what we leak to him and how, we can turn him into --" "A laughing stock?" "A puddle of deliquesced organ meat." Perry began to laugh. "You're saying that you think that we should do this deal for *spite*?" "Yeah, that's the size of it," Suzanne said. "I love it," he said. Hilda laughed too. Suzanne extended her hand to Perry and he shook it. Then she shook with Hilda. "Let's go find Lester." # By the time the call came, Sammy was ready to explode. He got in a golf cart and headed to the Animal Kingdom Lodge, which backed onto the safari park portion of the Animal Kingdom. He snuck himself onto the roof of the grand hotel, which had a commanding view of the artificial savanna. He watched a family of giraffes graze, using the zoom on his phone to resolve the hypnotic patterns of the little calf. It calmed him. But the sound of his phone ringing startled him so much he nearly did a half-gainer off the roof. Heart hammering, he answered it. "Is this Sammy?" "Yes," he said. "Landon Kettlewell," the voice on the other side said. Sammy knew the name, of course. But he hadn't been expecting a call from him. "Hello, Mr Kettlewell." "The boys have asked me to negotiate this deal for them. It makes sense -- it'll be hard to make this happen without my contributions. I hope you agree." "It does make sense," Sammy said noncommittally. This wasn't the best day of his life. The giraffes were moving off, but a flock of cranes was wheeling overhead in quiet splendor. "I'll tell you where we're at. We're going to do a deal with you, a fair one. But a condition of the deal is that we are going to destroy Freddy." "What?" "We're going to leak him bad intel on the deal. Lots of it. Give him a whole story. Wait until he publishes it, and then --" Sammy sat down on the roof. This was going to be a long conversation. # Perry ground his teeth and squeezed his beer. The idea of doing this in a big group had seemed like a good idea. Dirty Max's was certainly full of camaraderie, the smell of roasting meat and the chatter of nearly a hundred voices. He heard Hilda laughing at something Lester said to her, and there were Kettlewell and his kids, fingers and faces sticky with sauce. Lester had set up the projector and they'd hung sheets over one of the murals for a screen, and brought out a bunch of wireless speakers that they'd scattered around the courtyard. It looked, smelled, sounded, and tasted like a carnival. But Perry couldn't meet anyone's eye. He just wanted to go home and get under the covers. They were about to destroy Freddy, which had also seemed like a hell of a lark at the time, but now -- "Perry." It was Sammy, up from Orlando, wearing the classic Mickey-gives-the-finger bootleg tee. "Can you get fired for that?" Perry pointed. Sammy shook his head. "Actually, it's official. I had them produced last year -- they're a big seller. If you can't beat 'em... Here --" He dug in the backpack he carried and pulled out another. "You look like a large, right?" Perry took it from him, held it up. Shrugging, he put down his beer and skinned his tee, then pulled on the Mickey-flips-the-bird. He looked down at his chest. "It's a statement." "Have you and Lester given any thought to where you're going to relocate, after?" Perry drew in a deep breath. "I think Lester wants to come to Orlando. But I'm going to go to Wisconsin. Madison." "You're what now?" Perry hadn't said anything about this to anyone except Hilda. Something about this Disney exec, it made him want to spill the beans. "I can't go along with this. I'm going to bow out. Do something new. I've been in this shithole for what feels like my whole life now." Sammy looked poleaxed. "Perry, that wasn't the deal --" "Yeah, I know. But think about this: do you want me there if I hate it, resent it? Besides, it's a little late in the day to back out." Sammy reeled. "Christ almighty. Well, at least you're not going to end up my employee." Francis -- who had an uncanny knack for figuring out the right moment to step into a conversation -- sidled over. "Nice shirt, Perry." "Francis, this is Sammy." Francis had a bottle of water and a plate of ribs, so he extended a friendly elbow. "We've met -- showed him the bicycle factory." Sammy visibly calmed himself. "That's right, you did. Amazing, just amazing." "All this is on Sammy," Perry said, pointing at the huge barbecue smoker, the crowds of sticky-fingered gorgers. "He's the Disney guy." "Hence the shirts, huh?" "Exactly." "So what's the rumpus, exactly?" Francis asked. "It's all been hush-hush around here for a solid week." "I think we're about to find out," Perry said, nodding at the gigantic screen, which rippled in the sultry Florida night-breeze, obscured by blowing clouds of fragrant smoke. It was lit up now, showing CNNfn, two pan-racial anchors talking silently into the night. The speakers popped to life and gradually the crowd noises dimmed. People moved toward the screen, all except Francis and Perry and Sammy, who hung back, silently watching the screen. "-- guest on the show is Freddy Niedbalski, a technology reporter for the notorious British technology publication *Tech Stink*. Freddy has agreed to come on *Countdown* to break a story that will go live on *Tech Stink*'s website in about ten minutes." The camera zoomed out to show Freddy, sitting beside the anchor desk in an armchair. His paunch was more pronounced than it had been when Perry had seen him in Madison, and there was something wrong with his makeup, a color mismatch that made him look like he'd slathered himself with Man-Tan. Still, he was grinning evilly and looking like he could barely contain himself. "Thank you, Tania-Luz, it's a pleasure." "Now, take us through the story. You've been covering it for a long time, haven't you?" "Oh yes. This is about the so-called 'New Work' cult, and its aftermath. I've broken a series of scandals involving these characters over the years -- weird sex, funny money, sweatshop labor. These are the people who spent all that money in the New Work bubble, and then went on to found an honest-to-God slum that they characterized as a 'living laboratory.'" -- out came the sarcastic finger-quotes -- "but, as near as anyone can work out was more of a human subject experiment gone mad. They pulled off these bizarre stunts with the help of some of the largest investment funds on the planet." Perry looked around at the revellers. They were chortling, pointing at each other, mugging for the camera. Freddy's words made Perry uncomfortable -- maybe there was something to what he said. But there was Francis, unofficial mayor of the shantytown, smiling along with the rest. They hadn't been perfect, but they'd left the world a better place than they'd found it. "There are many personalities in this story, but tonight's installment has two main players: a venture capitalist named Landon Kettlewell and a Disney Parks senior vice president called Sammy Page. Technically, these two hate each others' guts --" Sammy and Kettlewell toasted each other through the barbecue smoke. "But they've been chumming up to one another lately as they brokered an improbable deal to shaft everyone else in the sordid mess." "A deal that you've got details on for us tonight?" "Exactly. My sources have turned up reliable memos and other intelligence indicating that the investors behind the shantytown are about to *take over Disney Parks*. It all stems from a lawsuit that was brought on behalf of a syndicate of operators of bizarre, trademark infringing rides that were raided off the backs of complaints from Disney Parks. These raids, and a subsequent and very suspicious beating of an ex-Disney Park employee, led to the creation of an investment syndicate to fund a monster lawsuit against Disney Parks, one that could take the company down. "The investment syndicate found an unlikely ally in the person of Sammy Page, the senior VP from Disney Parks, who worked with them to push through a plan where they would settle the lawsuit in exchange for a controlling interest in Disney Parks." The anchors looked suitably impressed. Around the screen, the partiers had gone quiet, even the kids, mesmerized by Freddy's giant head, eyes rolling with irony and mean humor. "And that's just for starters. The deal required securing the cooperation of the beaten-up ex-Disney employee, who goes by the name of 'Death Waits' -- no, really! -- and *he* required that he be made a vice president of the new company as well, running the 'Fantasyland' section of the Florida park. In the new structure, the two founders of the New Work scam, Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks are to oversee the Disneyfication of the activist rides around the country, selling out their comrades, who signed over control of their volunteer-built enterprises as part of the earlier lawsuit." The male anchor shook his head. "If this is true, it's the strangest turn in American corporate history." "Oh yes," Freddy said. "These people are like some kind of poison, a disease that affects the judgement of all those around them --" "If it's true," the male anchor continued, as if Freddy hadn't spoken. "But is it? Our next guest denies all of this, and claims that Mr Niedbalski has his facts all wrong. Tjan Lee Tang is the chairman of Massachusetts Ride Theorists, a nonprofit that operates three of the spin-off rides in New England. He is in our Boston studios. Welcome, Mr Tang." Freddy's expression was priceless: a mixture of raw terror and contempt. He tried to cover it, but only succeeded in looking constipated. On the other half of the split-screen, Tjan beamed sunnily at them. "Hi there!" he said. "Greetings from the blustery Northeast." "Mr Tang, you've heard what our guest has to say about the latest developments in the extraordinary story of the rides you helped create. Do you have any comment?" "I certainly do. Freddy, old buddy, you've been had. Whomever your leak was in Disney, he was putting you on. There is not one single word of truth to anything you had to say." He grinned wickedly. "So what else is new?" Freddy opened his mouth and Tjan held up one hand. "No, wait, let me finish. I know it's your schtick to come after us this way, you've been at it for years. I think it's because you have an unrequited crush on Suzanne Church. "Here's what's really happening. Lester Banks and Perry Gibbons have taken jobs with Disney Parks as part of a straightforward deal. They're going to do research and development there, and Disney is settling its ongoing lawsuit with us with a seventy million dollar cash settlement. Half goes to the investors. Some of the remainder will go to buy the underlying titles to the shantytown and put them in a trust to be managed by a co-operative of residents. The rest is going into another trust that will be disbursed in grants to people operating rides around the country. There's a non-monetary part of the deal, too: all rides get a perpetual, worldwide license on all Disney trademarks for use in the rides." The announcers smiled and nodded. "We think this is a pretty good win. The rides go on. The shantytown goes on. Lester and Perry get to do great work in a heavily resourced lab environment." Tania-Luz turned to Freddy. "It seems that your story is in dispute. Do you have further comment?" Freddy squirmed. A streak of sweat cut through his pancake makeup as the camera came in for a closeup. "Well, if this is true, I'd want to know why Disney would make such a generous offer --" "Generous?" Tjan said. He snorted. "We were asking for *eight billion* in punitive damages. They got off easy!" Freddy acted like he hadn't heard. "Unless the terms of this so-called deal are published and subject to scrutiny --" "We posted them about five minutes ago. You could have just asked us, you know." Freddy's eyes bugged out. "We have no way of knowing whether what this man is saying is true --" "Actually, you do. Like I say, it's all online. The deals are signed. Securities filings and everything." Freddy got up out of his seat. "*Would you shut up and let me finish?*" he screamed. "Sorry, sorry," Tjan said with a chuckle. He was enjoying this way too much. "Go on." "And what about Death Waits? He's been a pawn all along in this game you've played with other people's lives. What happens to him as you all get rich?" Tjan shrugged. "He got a large cash settlement too. He seemed pretty happy about it --" Freddy was shaking. "You can't just sell off your lawsuit --" "We were looking to get compensated for bad acts. We got compensated for them, and we did it without tying up the public courts. Everybody wins." He cocked his head. "Except you, of course." "This was a fucking ambush," Freddy said, pointing his fingers at the two coiffed and groomed anchors, who shied away dramatically, making him look even crazier. He stormed off the stage, cursing, every word transmitted by his still-running wireless mic. He shouted at an invisible security guard to get out of his way. Then they heard him make a phone-call, presumably to his editor, shouting at him to kill the article, nearly weeping in frustration. The anchors and Tjan pasted on unconvincing poker-faces, but around the BBQ pit, it was all howls of laughter, which turned to shrieks when Freddy finally figured out that he was still on a live mic. Perry and Sammy locked eyes and grinned. Perry ticked a little salute off his forehead at Sammy and hefted his tee. Then he turned on his heel and walked off into the night, the fragrant smell of the barbecue smoke and the sound of the party behind him. He parked his car at home and trudged up the stairs. Hilda had packed her suitcase that morning. He had a lot more than a suitcase's worth of stuff around the apartment, but as he threw a few t-shirts -- including his new fake bootleg Mickey tee -- and some underwear in a bag, he suddenly realized that he didn't care about any of it. Then he happened upon the baseball glove. The cloud of old leather smell it emitted when he picked it up made tears spring into his eyes. He hadn't cried through any of this process, though, and he wasn't about to start now. He wiped his eyes with his forearm and reverently set the glove into his bag and shut it. He carried both bags downstairs and put them in the trunk, then he drove to just a little ways north of the ride and called Hilda to let her know he was ready to go. She didn't say a word when she got in the car, and neither did he, all the way to Miami airport. He took his frisking and secondary screening in stoic silence, and once they were seated on the Chicago flight, he put his head down on Hilda's shoulder and she stroked his hair until he fell asleep. # Epilogue Lester was in his workshop when Perry came to see him. He had the yoga mat out and he was going through the slow exercises that his physiotherapist had assigned to him, stretching his crumbling bones and shrinking muscles, trying to keep it all together. He'd fired three physios, but Suzanne kept finding him new ones, and (because she loved him) prettier ones. He was down on all fours, his ass stuck way up in the air, when Perry came through the door. He looked back through his ankles and squinted at the upside-down world. Perry's expression was carefully neutral, the same upside-down as it would be right-side-up. He grunted and went down to his knees, which crackled like popcorn. "That doesn't sound good," Perry remarked mildly. "Funny man," Lester said. "Get over here and help me up, will you?" Perry went down in a crouch before him. There was something funny about his eye, the whole side of his head. He smelled a little sweaty and a little gamy, but the face was the one Lester knew so well. Perry held out his strong, leathery hands, and after a moment, Lester grasped them and let Perry drag him to his feet. They stood facing one another for an uncomfortable moment, hands clasped together. Then Perry flung his arms wide and shouted, "Here I am!" Lester laughed and embraced his old friend, not seen or heard from these last 15 years. # Lester's workshop had a sofa where he entertained visitors and took his afternoon nap. Normally, he'd use his cane to cross from his workbench to the sofa, but seeing Perry threw him for such a loop that he completely forgot until he was a pace or two away from it and then he found himself flailing for support as his hips started to give way. Perry caught him under the shoulders and propped him up. Lester felt a rush of shame color his cheeks. "Steady there, cowboy," Perry said. "Sorry, sorry," Lester muttered. Perry lowered him to the sofa, then looked around. "You got anything to drink? Water? I didn't really expect the bus would take as long as it did." "You're taking the bus around Burbank?" Lester said. "Christ, Perry, this is Los Angeles. Even homeless people drive cars." Perry looked away and shook his head. "The bus is cheaper." Lester pursed his lips. "You got anything to drink?" "In the fridge," Lester said, pointing to a set of nested clay pot evaporative coolers. Perry grinned at the jury-rigged cooler and rummaged around in its mouth for a while. "Anything, you know, buzzy? Guarana? Caffeine, even?" Lester gave an apologetic shrug. "Not me, not anymore. Nothing goes into my body without oversight by a team of very expensive nutritionists." "You don't look so bad," Perry said. "Maybe a little skinny --" Lester cut him off. "Not bad like the people you see on TV, huh? Not bad like the dying ones." The fatkins had overwhelmed the nation's hospitals in successive waves of sickened disintegrating skeletons whose brittle bones and ruined joints had outstripped anyone's ability to cope with them. The only thing that kept the crisis from boiling over entirely was the fast mortality that followed on the first symptoms -- difficulty digesting, persistent stiffness. Once you couldn't keep down high-calorie slurry, you just starved to death. "Not like them," Perry agreed. He had a bit of limp, Lester saw, and his old broken arm hung slightly stiff at his side. "I'm doing OK," Lester said. "You wouldn't believe the medical bills, of course." "Don't let Freddy know you've got the sickness," Perry said. "He'd love that story -- 'fatkins pioneer pays the price --'" "Freddy! Man, I haven't thought of that shitheel in -- Christ, a decade, at least. Is he still alive?" Perry shrugged. "Might be. I'd think that if he'd keeled over someone would have asked me to pitch in to charter a bus to go piss on his grave." Lester laughed hard, so hard he hurt his chest and had to sag back into the sofa, doing deep yoga breathing until his ribs felt better. Perry sat down opposite him on the sofa with a bottle of Lester's special thrice-distilled flat water in a torpedo-shaped bottle. "Suzanne?" he asked. "Good," Lester said. "Spends about half her time here and half on the road. Writing, still." "What's she on to now?" "Cooking, if you can believe it. Molecular gastronomy -- food hackers who use centrifuges to clarify their consomme. She says she's never eaten better. Last week it was some kid who'd written a genetic algorithm to evolve custom printable molecules that can bridge two unharmonius flavors to make them taste good together -- like, what do you need to add to chocolate and sardines to make them freakin' delicious?" "Is there such a molecule?" "Suzanne says there is. She said that they misted it into her face with a vaporizer while she ate a sardine on a slab of dark chocolate and it tasted better than anything she'd ever had before." "OK, that's just wrong," Perry said. The two of them were grinning at each other like fools. Lester couldn't believe how good it felt to be in the same room as Perry again after all these years. His old friend was much older than the last time they'd seen each other. There was a lot of grey in his short hair, and his hairline was a lot higher up his forehead. His knuckles were swollen and wrinkled, and his face had deep lines, making him look carved. He had the leathery skin of a roadside homeless person, and there were little scars all over his arms and a few on his throat. "How's Hilda?" Lester asked. Perry looked away. "That's a name I haven't heard in a while," he said. "Yowch. Sorry." "No, that's OK. I get email blasts from her every now and again. She's chipper and scrappy as always. Fighting the good fight. Fatkins stuff again -- same as when I met her. Funny how that fight never gets old." "Hardy har har," Lester said. "OK, we're even," Perry said. "One-one on the faux-pas master's tournament." They chatted about inconsequentialities for a while, stories about Lester's life as the closeted genius at Disney Labs, Perry's life on the road, getting itinerant and seasonal work at little micro-factories. "Don't they recognize you?" "Me? Naw, it's been a long time since I got recognized. I'm just the guy, you know, he's handy, keeps to himself. Probably going to be moving on soon. Good with money, always has a quiet suggestion for tweaking an idea to make it return a little higher on the investment." "That's you, all right. All except the 'keeps to himself' part." "A little older, a little wiser. Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." "Thank you, Mister Twain. You and Huck been on the river a while then?" "No Huck," he said. His smile got sad, heartbreakingly sad. This wasn't the Perry Lester knew. Lester wasn't the same person, either. They were both broken. Perry was alone, though -- gregarious Perry, always making friends. Alone. "So, how long are you staying?" "I'm just passing through, buddy. I woke up in Burbank this morning and I thought, 'Shit, Lester's in Burbank, I should say hello.' But I got places to go." "Come on, man, stay a while. We've got a guest-cottage out back, a little mother-in-law apartment. There are fruit trees, too." "Living the dream, huh?" He sounded unexpectedly bitter. Lester was embarrassed for his wealth. Disney had thrown so much stock at him in the beginning and Suzanne had sold most of it and wisely invested it in a bunch of micro-funds; add to that the money she was raking in from the affiliate sites her Junior Woodchucks -- kid-reporters she'd trained and set up in business -- ran, and they never had to worry about a thing. "Well, apart from dying. And working here." As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he could take them back. He never let on that he wasn't happy at the Mouse, and the dying thing -- well, Suzanne and he liked to pretend that medical science would cure what it had brought. Perry, though, he just nodded as if his suspicions were confirmed. "Must be hard on Suzanne." Now that was hitting the nail on the head. "You always were a perceptive son of a bitch." "She never said fatkins was good for you. She just reported the story. The people who blame her --" This was the elephant in the room whenever Lester and Suzanne talked about his health. Between the two of them, they'd popularized fatkins, sent millions winging to Russia for the clinics, fuelled the creation of the clinics in the US and Mexico. But they never spoke of it. Never. Now Perry was talking about it, still talking: "-- the FDA, the doctors. That's what we pay them for. The way I see it, you're a victim, their victim." Lester couldn't say anything. Words stoppered themselves up in his mouth like a cork. Finally, he managed to choke out, "Change the subject, OK?" Perry looked down. "Sorry. I'm out of practice with people." "I hope you'll stay with us," he said, thinking *I hope you leave soon and never come back*. "You miss it, huh?" "Sometimes." "You said working here --" "Working here. They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it's like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?" He snorted. "It's like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick." "I hate working with assholes." "They're not assholes, that's the thing, Perry. They're some really smart people. They're nice. We have them over for dinner. They're fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, *every single one of them feels the same way I do*. They *all* have cool shit they want to do, but they can't do it." "Why?" "It's like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit." "Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent -- 81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you'll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory. "Maybe people are like that. If you're 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who's 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that's 81 percent non-bogus." "I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But fuck me, it's depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others' flaws." "Well, maybe that's the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative." "So what are virtues?" "Additive, maybe. A shallower curve." "That'd be an interesting research project, if you could come up with some quantitative measurements." "So what do you do around here all day?" Lester blushed. "What?" "I'm building bigger mechanical computers, mostly. I print them out using the new volumetrics and have research assistants assemble them. There's something soothing about them. I have an Apple ][+ clone running entirely on physical gates made out of extruded plastic skulls. It takes up an entire building out on one of the lots and when you play Pong on it, the sound of the jaws clacking is like listening to corpse beetles skeletonizing an elephant." "I think I'd like to see that," Perry said, laughing a little. "That can be arranged," Lester said. They were like gears that had once emerged from a mill with perfectly precise teeth, gears that could mesh and spin against each other, transferring energy. They were like gears that had been ill-used in machines, apart from each other, until their precise teeth had been chipped and bent, so that they no longer meshed. They were like gears, connected to one another and mismatched, clunking and skipping, but running still, running still. # Perry and Lester rode in the back of the company car, the driver an old Armenian who'd fled Azerbaijan, whom Lester introduced as Kapriel. It seemed that Lester and Kapriel were old friends, which made sense, since Lester couldn't drive himself, and in Los Angeles, you didn't go anywhere except by car. The relationship between a man and his driver would be necessarily intimate. Perry couldn't bring himself to feel envious of Lester having a chauffeured car, though it was clear that Lester was embarrassed by the luxury. It was too much like an invalid's subsidy to feel excessive. "Kap," Lester said, stirring in the nest of paper and parts and empty health-food packages that he'd made of the back-seat. Kapriel looked over his shoulder at them. "Home now?" He barely had an accent, but when he turned his head, Perry saw that one ear had been badly mangled, leaving behind a misshapen fist of scar. "No," Lester said. "Let's eat out tonight. How about Musso and Frank?" "Ms Suzanne says --" "We don't need to tell her," Lester said. Perry spoke in a low voice, "Lester, I don't need anything special. Don't make yourself sick --" "Perry, buddy, shut the fuck up, OK? I can have a steak and a beer and a big-ass dessert every now and again. Purified medicated fatkins-chow gets old. My colon isn't going to fall out of my asshole in terror if I send a cheeseburger down there." They parked behind Musso and Frank and let the valet park the town car. Kapriel went over to the Walk of Fame to take pictures of the robotic movie stars doing acrobatic busking acts, and they went into the dark cave of the restaurant, all dark wood, dark carpets, pictures of movie stars on the walls. The maitre d' gave them a look, tilted his head, looked again. Calmly, Lester produced a hundred-dollar bill and slid it across the podium. "We'd like Orson Welles's table, please," he said. The maitre d' -- an elderly, elegant Mexican with a precise spade beard -- nodded affably. "Give me five minutes, gentlemen. Would you care to have a drink in the bar?" They sat at the long counter and Perry ordered a Scotch and soda. Lester ordered water, then switched his order to beer, then non-alcoholic beer, then beer again. "Sorry," he said to the waitress. "Just having an indecisive kind of night, I guess." Perry tried to figure out if Lester had been showing off with the c-note, and decided that he hadn't been. He'd just gone native in LA, and a hundred for the maitre d' when you're in a hurry can't be much for a senior exec. Lester sipped gingerly at his beer. "I like this place," he said, waving the bottle at the celebrity caricatures lining the walls. "It's perfect Hollyweird kitsch. Celebrities who usually eat out in some ultra-modern place come here. They come because they've always come -- to sit in Orson Welles's booth." "How's the food?" "Depends on what you order. The good stuff is great. You down for steaks?" "I'm down for whatever," Perry said. Lester was in his medium here, letting the waiter unfold his napkin and lay it over his lap without taking any special notice of the old man. The food was delicious, and they even got to glimpse a celebrity, though neither Perry nor Lester knew who the young woman was, nor what she was famous for. She was surrounded by children who came over from other tables seeking autographs, and more than one patron snapped a semi-subtle photo of her. "Poor girl," Perry said with feeling. "It's a career decision here. You decide to become famous because you want that kind of life. Sometimes you even kid yourself that it'll last forever -- that in thirty years, they'll come into Musso and Frank and ask for Miss Whatshername's table. Anyone who wants to know what stardom looks like can find out -- and no one becomes a star by accident." "You think?" Perry said. "I mean, we were celebs, kind of, for a while there --" "Are you saying that that happened by accident?" "I never set out to get famous --" "You took part in a national movement, Perry. You practically *founded* it. What did you think was going to happen --" "You're saying that we were just attention whores --" "No, Perry, no. We weren't *just* attention whores. We were attention whores *and* we built and ran cool shit. There's nothing wrong with being an attention whore. It's an attention economy. If you're going to be a working stiff, you should pick a decent currency to get paid in. But you can't sit there and tell me that it didn't feel good, didn't feel *great* to have all those people looking up to us, following us into battle, throwing themselves at us --" Perry held up his hands. His friend was looking more alive than he had at any time since Perry had been ushered into his workshop. He sat up straight, and the old glint of mischief and good humor was in his eye. "I surrender, buddy, you're right." They ordered desserts, heavy "diplomat puddings" -- bread pudding made with cake and cherries, and Lester dug in, after making Perry swear not to breathe a word of it to Suzanne. He ate with such visible pleasure that Perry felt like a voyeur. "How long did you say you were in town for?" "I'm just passing through," Perry said. He had only planned on maybe seeing Lester long enough for lunch or something. Now it seemed a foregone conclusion that he'd be put up in the "guest cottage." He thought about getting back on the road. There was a little gang in Oregon that made novelty school supplies, they were always ramping up for their busy season at this time of year. They were good people to work for. "Come on, where you got to be? Stay a week. I'll put you on the payroll as a consultant. You can give lunch-hour talks to the R&D team, whatever you want." "Lester, you just got through telling me how much you hate your job --" "That's the beauty of contracting -- you don't stick around long enough to hate it, and you never have to worry about the org chart. Come on, pal --" "I'll think about it." Lester fell asleep on the car ride home, and Kapriel didn't mind if Perry didn't want to chat, so he just rolled his windows down and watched the LA lights scream past as they hit the premium lanes on the crosstown freeways, heading to Lester's place in Topanga Canyon. When they arrived, Lester roused himself heavily, clutched his stomach, then raced for the house. Kapriel shook his head and rolled his eyes, then showed Perry to the front door and shook his hand. # In the morning, he prowled Lester and Suzanne's place like a burglar. The guesthouse had once served as Lester's workshop and it had the telltale leavings of a busy inventor -- drawers and tubs of parts, a moldy coffee-cup in a desk-drawer, pens and toys and unread postal spam in piles. What it didn't have was a kitchen, so Perry helped himself to the key that Lester had left him with the night before and wandered around the big house, looking for the kitchen. It turned out to be on the second floor, a bit of weird architectural design that was characteristic of the place, which had started as a shack in the hills on several acres of land and then grown and grown as successive generations of owners had added extensions, seismic retrofitting, and new floors. Perry found the pantries filled with high-tech MREs, each nutritionally balanced and fortified in ways calculated to make Lester as healthy as possible. Finally, he found a small cupboard clearly devoted to Suzanne's eating, with boxes of breakfast cereal and, way in the back, a little bag of Oreos. He munched thoughtfully on the cookies while drinking more of the flat, thrice-distilled water. He heard Lester totter into a bathroom on the floor above, and called "Good morning," up a narrow, winding staircase. Lester groaned back at him, a sound that Perry hadn't heard in years, that theatrical oh-my-shit-it's-another-day sound. He clomped down the stairs with his cane, wearing a pair of boxer-shorts and rubber slippers. He was gaunt, the hair on his sunken chest gone wiry grey, and the skin around his torso sagged. From the neck down, he looked a hundred years old. Perry looked away. "Morning, bro," Lester said, and took a vacuum-sealed pouch out of a medical white box over the sink, tore it open, added purified water, and put it in the microwave. The smell was like wet cardboard in a dumpster. Perry wrinkled his nose. "Tastes better than it smells. Or looks," Lester said. "Very easy on the digestion. Which I need. Never let me pig out like that again, OK?" He collapsed heavily into a stool and closed his sunken eyes. Without opening them, he said, "So, are you in?" "Am I in?" "You going to come on board as my consultant?" "You were serious about that, huh?" "Perry, they can't fire me. If I quit, I lose my health bennies, which means I'll be broke in a month. Which puts us at an impasse. I'm past feeling guilty about doing nothing much all day long, but that doesn't mean I'm not bored." "You make it sound so attractive." "You got something better to do?" "I'm in." # Suzanne came home a week later and found them sitting up in the living room. They'd pushed all the furniture up against the walls and covered the floor with board-game boards, laid edge-to-edge or overlapping. They had tokens, cards and money from several of the games laid out around the rims of the games. "What the blistering fuck?" she said good naturedly. Lester had told her that Perry was around, so she'd been prepared for something odd, but this was pretty amazing, even so. Lester held up a hand for silence and rolled two dice. They skittered across the floor, one of them slipping through the heating-grating. "Three points," Perry said. "One for not going into the grating, two for going into the grating." "I thought we said it was two points for not going into the grating, and one for dropping it?" "Let's call it 1.5 points for each." "Gentlemen," Suzanne said, "I believe I asked a question? To wit, 'What the blistering fuck --'" "Calvinball," Lester said. "Like in the old Calvin and Hobbes strips. The rules are, the rules can never be the same twice." "And you're supposed to wear a mask," Perry said. "But we kept stepping on the pieces." "No peripheral vision," Lester said. "Caucus race!" Perry yelled, and took a lap around the world. Lester struggled to his feet, then flopped back down. "I disbelieve," he said, taking up two ten-sided dice and rolling them. "87," he said. "Fine," Perry said. He picked up a Battleship board and said, "B7," and then he said, "What's the score, anyway?" "Orange to seven," Lester said. "Who's orange?" "You are." "Shit. OK, let's take a break." Suzanne tried to hold in her laughter, but she couldn't. She ended up doubled over, tears streaming down her face. When she straightened up, Lester hobbled to her and gave her a surprisingly strong welcome-home hug. He smelled like Lester, like the man she'd shared her bed with all these years. Perry held out his hand to her and she yanked him into a long, hard hug. "It's good to have you back, Perry," she said, once she'd kissed both his cheeks. "It's fantastic to see you, Suzanne," he said. He was thinner than she remembered, with snow on the roof, but he was still handsome as a pirate. "We missed you. Tell me everything you've been up to." "It's not interesting," he said. "Really." "I find that difficult to believe." So he told them stories from the road, and they were interesting in a kind of microcosm sort of way. Stories about interesting characters he'd met, improbable meals he'd eaten, bad working conditions, memorable rides hitched. "So that's it?" Suzanne said. "That's what you've done?" "It's what I do," he said. "And you're happy?" "I'm not sad," he said. She shook her head involuntarily. Perry stiffened. "What's wrong with not sad?" "There's nothing wrong with it, Perry. I'm --" she faltered, searched for the words. "Remember when I first met you, met both of you, in that ghost mall? You weren't just happy, you were hysterical. Remember the Boogie-Woogie Elmos? The car they drove?" Perry looked away. "Yeah," he said softly. There was a hitch in his voice. "All I'm saying is, it doesn't have to be this way. You could --" "Could what?" he said. He sounded angry, but she thought that he was just upset. "I could go work for Disney, sit in a workshop all day making crap no one cares about? Be the wage-slave for the end of my days, a caged monkey for some corporate sultan's zoo?" The phrase was Lester's, and Suzanne knew then that Perry and Lester had been talking about it. Lester, leaning heavily against her on the sofa (they'd pushed it back into the room, moving aside pieces of the Calvinball game), made a warning sound and gave her knee a squeeze. Aha, definitely territory they'd covered before then. "You two have some of the finest entrepreneurial instincts I've ever encountered," she said. Perry snorted. "What's more, I've never seen you happier than you were back when I first met you, making stuff for the sheer joy of it and selling it to collectors. Do you know how many collectors would pony up for an original Gibbons/Banks today? You two could just do that forever --" "Lester's medical --" "Lester's medical nothing. You two get together on this, you could make so much money, we could buy Lester his own hospital." *Besides, Lester won't last long no matter what happens*. She didn't say it, but there it was. She'd come to grips with the reality years ago, when his symptoms first appeared -- when *all* the fatkins' symptoms began to appear. Now she could think of it without getting that hitch in her chest that she'd gotten at first. Now she could go away for a week to work on a story without weeping every night, then drying her eyes and calling Lester to make sure he was still alive. "I'm not saying you need to do this to the exclusion of everything else, or forever --" *there is no forever for Lester* "-- but you two would have to be insane not to try it. Look at this board-game thing you've done --" "Calvinball," Perry said. "Calvinball. Right. You were made for this. You two make each other better. Perry, let's be honest here. You don't have anything better to do." She held her breath. It had been years since she'd spoken to Perry, years since she'd had the right to say things like that to him. Once upon a time, she wouldn't have thought twice, but now -- "Let me sleep on it," Perry said. Which meant no, of course. Perry didn't sleep on things. He decided to do things. Sometimes he decided wrong, but he'd never had trouble deciding. That night, Lester rubbed her back, the way he always did when she came back from the road, using the hand-cream she kept on her end-table. His hands had once been so *strong*, mechanic's hands, stubby-fingered pistons he could drive tirelessly into the knots in her back. Now they smoothed and petted, a rub, not a massage. Every time she came home, it was gentler, somehow more loving. But she missed her massages. Sometimes she thought she should tell him not to bother anymore, but she was afraid of what it would mean to end this ritual -- and how many more rituals would end in its wake. It was the briefest backrub yet and then he slid under the covers with her. She held him for a long time, spooning him from behind, her face in the nape of his neck, kissing his collar bone the way he liked, and he moaned softly. "I love you, Suzanne," he said. "What brought that on?" "It's just good to have you home," he said. "You seem to have been taking pretty good care of yourself while I was away, getting in some Perry time." "I took him to Musso and Frank," he said. "I ate like a pig." "And you paid the price, didn't you?" "Yeah. For days." "Serves you right. That Perry is *such* a bad influence on my boy." "I'll miss him." "You think he'll go, then?" "You know he will." "Oh, honey." "Some wounds don't heal," he said. "I guess." "I'm sure it's not that," Suzanne said. "He loves you. I bet this is the best week he's had in years." "So why wouldn't he want to stay?" Lester's voice came out in the petulant near-sob she had only ever heard when he was in extreme physical pain. It was a voice she heard more and more often lately. "Maybe he's just afraid of himself. He's been on the run for a long time. You have to ask yourself, what's he running from? It seems to me that he's spent his whole life trying to avoid having to look himself in the eye." Lester sighed and she squeezed him tight. "How'd we get so screwed up?" "Oh, baby," she said, "we're not screwed up. We're just people who want to do things, big things. Any time you want to make a difference, you face the possibility that you'll, you know, make a difference. It's a consequence of doing things with consequences." "Gak," he said. "You always get so Zen-koan when you're on the road." "Gives me time to reflect. Were you reading?" "Was I reading? Suzanne, I read your posts whenever I feel lonely. It's kind of like having you home with me." "You're sweet." "Did you really eat sardines on sorbet toast?" "Don't knock it. It's better than it sounds. Lots better." "You can keep it." "Listen to Mr Musso and Frank -- boy, you've got no business criticizing anyone else's food choices." He heaved a happy sigh. "I love you, Suzanne Church." "You're a good man, Lester Banks." # Perry met them at the breakfast table the next morning as Suzanne was fiddling with the espresso machine, steaming soy milk for her latte. He wore a pair of Lester's sloppy drawstring pants and a t-shirt for a motorcycle shop in Kansas City that was spotted with old motor-oil stains. "Bom dia," he said, and chucked Lester on the shoulder. He was carrying himself with a certain stiffness, and Suzanne thought, *Here it comes; he's going to say goodbye. Perry Gibbons, you bastard.* "Morning," Lester said, brittle and chipper. Perry dug around on Suzanne's non-medicated food-shelf for a while and came up with a bagel for the toaster and a jar of peanut butter. No one said anything while he dug around for the big bread knife, found the cutting board, toasted the bagel, spread peanut butter, and took a bite. Suzanne and Lester just continued to eat, in uncomfortable silence. *Tell him,* Suzanne urged silently. *Get it over with, damn you.* "I'm in," Perry said, around a mouthful of bagel, looking away. Suzanne saw that he had purple bags under his eyes, like he hadn't slept a wink all night. "I'm staying. If you'll have me. Let's make some stuff." He put the bagel down and swallowed. He looked back at Lester and the two old comrades locked eyes for a long moment. Lester smiled. "All right!" He danced a shuffling step, mindful of his sore hips. "All right, buddy, *fuckin' A*! Yeah!" Suzanne tried to fade then, to back out of the room and let them do their thing, but Lester caught her arm and drew her into an embrace, tugging on her arm with a strength she'd forgotten he had. He gave her a hard kiss. "I love you, Suzanne Church," he said. "You're my savior." Perry made a happy sound behind her. "I love you, too, Lester," she said, squeezing his skinny, brittle back. Lester let go of her and she turned to face Perry. Tears pricked his eyes, and she found that she was crying too. She gave him a hug, and felt the ways that his body had changed since she'd held him back in Florida, back in some forgotten time. He was thicker, but still solid, and he smelled the same. She put her lips close to his ear and whispered, "You're a good man, Perry Gibbons." # Lester gave his notice that morning. Though it was 8PM in Tehran when Lester called, Sammy was at his desk. "Why are you telling me this, Lester?" "It says in my contract that I have to give my notice to you, specifically." "Why the hell did I put that there?" Sammy's voice sounded far away -- not just in Iran. It sounded like he had travelled through time, too. "Politics, I think," he said. "Hard to remember. Probably wanted to be sure that someone like Wiener wouldn't convince you to quit, switch companies, and hire you again." "Not much risk of that now," Lester said. "Let's face it, Sammy, I don't actually do anything for the company." "Nope. That's right. We're not very good at making use of people like you." "Nope." "Well, email me your paperwork and I'll shove it around. How much notice are you supposed to give?" "Three months'." "Yowch. Whatever. Just pack up and go home. Gardening leave." It had been two years since Lester'd had any contact with Sammy, but it was clear that running Iranian ops had mellowed him out. Harder to get into trouble with women there, anyway. "How's Iran treating you?" "The Middle East operation is something else, boy. You'd like it here. The post-war towns all look like your squatter city -- the craziest buildings you ever saw. They love the DiaBs though -- we get the most fantastic designs through the fan channels...." He trailed off. Then, with a note of suspicion: "What are you going to do now?" Ah. No sense in faking it. "Perry and I are going to go into business together. Making kinetic sculptures. Like the old days." "No *way*! Perry *Gibbons*? You two are back together? Christ, we're all doomed." He was laughing. "Sculptures -- like that toast robot? And he wants to go into *business*? I thought he was some kind of Commie." Lester had a rush of remembrance, the emotional memory of how much he'd hated this man and everything he stood for. What had happened to him over the years that he counted this sneak, this thug, as his colleague? What had he sold when he sold out? "Perry Gibbons," Lester said, and drew in a breath. "Perry Gibbons is the sharpest entrepreneur I've ever met. He can't *help* but make businesses. He's an artist who anticipates the market a year ahead of the curve. He could be a rich man a hundred times over if he chose. Commie? Page, you're not fit to keep his books." The line went quiet, the eerie silence of a net-connection with no packets routing on it. "Goodbye, Lester," Sammy said at length. Lester wanted to apologize. He wanted *not* to want to apologize. He swallowed the apology and disconnected the line. # When it was time for bed, Suzanne shut her lid and put the computer down beside the sofa. She stepped carefully around the pieces of the Calvinball game that still covered the living room floor and stepped into a pair of slippers. She slid open the back door and hit the switch for the yard's flood-light. The last thing she wanted to do was trip into the pool. She picked her way carefully down the flagstones that led to the workshop, where the lights burned merrily in the night. There was no moon tonight, and the stars were laid out like a bag of synthetic diamonds arrayed on a piece of black velour in a street market stall. She peered through the window before she went around to the door, the journalist in her wanting to fix an image of the moment in her mind before she moved in and disturbed it. That was the problem with being a reporter -- everything changed the instant you started reporting on it. By now, there wasn't a person alive who didn't know what it means to be in the presence of a reporter. She was a roving Panopticon. The scene inside the workshop was eerie. Perry and Lester stood next to each other, cheek by jowl, hunched over something on the workbench. Perry had a computer open in front of him, and he was typing, Lester holding something out of sight. How many times had she seen this tableau? How many afternoons had she spent in the workshop in Florida, watching them hack a robot, build a sculpture, turn out the latest toy for Tjan's amusement, Kettlewell's enrichment? The postures were identical -- though their bodies had changed, the hair thinner and grayer. Like someone had frozen one of those innocent moments in time for a decade, then retouched it with wizening makeup and hair-dye. She must have made a noise, because Lester looked up -- or maybe it was just the uncanny, semi-psychic bond between an old married couple. He grinned at her like he was ten years old and she grinned back and went around to the door. "Hello, boys," she said. They straightened up, both of them unconsciously cradling their low backs, and she suppressed a grin. *My little boys, all grown up*. "Darling!" Lester said. "Come here, have a look!" He put his arm over her shoulders and walked her to the bench, leaning on her a little. It was in pieces, but she could see where it was going: a pair of familiar boxy shapes, two of Lester's mechanical computers, their cola-can registers spilling away in a long daisy-chain of worm-gears and rotating shafts. One figure was big and round-shouldered like a vintage refrigerator. The other was cockeyed, half its gears set higher than the other half. Each had a single, stark mechanical arm extended before it, and at the end of each arm was a familiar cracked and fragrant baseball glove. Lester put a ball into one of the gloves and Perry hammered away at the keyboard. Very, very slowly, the slope-shouldered robot drew its mechanical arm back -- "We used one of the open-source prosthestic plans," Lester whispered in the tense moment. Then it lobbed a soft underhand toss to the lopsided one. The ball arced through the air and the other bot repositioned its arm in a series of clattering jerks. It seemed to Suzanne that the ball would miss the glove and bounce off of the robot's carapace, and she winced. Then, at the very last second, the robot repositioned its arm with one more fast jerk, and the ball fell into the pocket. A moment later, the lopsided bot -- Perry, it was Perry, that was easy to see -- tossed the ball to the round-shouldered one, who was clearly her Lester, as she'd first known him. Lester-bot caught the ball with a similar series of jerks and returned the volley. It was magic to watch the robots play their game of catch. Suzanne was mesmerized, mouth open. Lester squeezed her shoulder with uncontained excitement. The Lester-bot lobbed one to Perry-bot, but Perry-bot flubbed the toss. The ball made a resounding gong sound as it bounced off of Perry-bot's carapace, and Perry-bot wobbled. Suzanne winced, but Lester and Perry both dissolved in gales of laughter. She watched the Perry-bot try to get itself re-oriented, aligning its torso to face Lester-bot and she saw that it *was* funny, very funny, like a particularly great cartoon. "They do that on purpose?" "Not exactly -- but there's no way they're going to be perfect, so we built in a bunch of stuff that would make it funnier when it happened. It is now officially a feature, not a bug." Perry glowed with pride. "Isn't it bad for them to get beaned with a baseball?" she asked as Lester carefully handed the ball to Perry-bot, who lobbed it to Lester-bot again. "Well, yeah. But it's kind of an artistic statement," Perry said, looking away from them both. "About the way that friendships always wear you down, like upper and lower molars grinding away at each other." Lester squeezed her again. "Over time, they'll knock each other apart." Tears pricked at Suzanne's eyes. She blinked them away. "Guys, this is great." Her voice cracked, but she didn't care. Lester squeezed her tighter. "Come to bed soon, hon," she said to Lester. "I'm going away again tomorrow afternoon -- New York, a restaurant opening." "I'll be right up," Lester said, and kissed the top of her head. She'd forgotten that he was that tall. He didn't stand all the way up. She went to bed, but she couldn't sleep. She crossed to the window and drew back the curtain and looked out at the backyard -- the scummy swimming pool she kept forgetting to do something about, the heavy grapefruit and lemon trees, the shed. Perry stood on the shed's stoop, looking up at the night sky. She pulled the curtains around herself an instant before he looked up at her. Their eyes met and he nodded slowly. "Thank you," she mouthed silently. He blew her a kiss, stuck out a foot, and then bowed slightly over his outstretched leg. She let the curtain fall back into place and went back to bed. Lester climbed into bed with her a few minutes later and spooned up against her back, his face buried in her neck. She fell asleep almost instantly. $$$$ Acknowledgements: Thanks to Andrew Leonard and Salon for publishing this when it was *Themepunks*. Thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Irene Gallo, Pablo Defendini, Justin Golenbock, Liz Gorinksy, Tom Doherty and the many wonderful people at Tor for their good work putting this book into the world. Likewise thanks to Sarah Hodgson, Alice Moss and Victoria Barnsley at HarperCollins for making this book happen in the UK. Thanks to my agents, Russell Galen, Danny Baror and Justin Manask. Thanks to my mother, Dr Roslyn Doctorow, who remains the sharpest proofer in the business. Thanks to my business partners at Boing Boing, the staff of MAKE: Magazine, and to all the makers who let me hold their skateboards while they welded the killer robots. And thanks, of course, to Alice and Poesy, who are the reason for all of it. $$$$ 
44097	----	file was produced from images generously made available by Biodiversity Heritage Library.) Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LIV NOVEMBER, 1898, TO APRIL, 1899 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. VOL. LIV. ESTABLISHED BY EDWARD L. YOUMANS. No. 3. APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. JANUARY, 1899. _EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS._ CONTENTS. PAGE I. The Evolution of Colonies. VI. Industrial Evolution. By JAMES COLLIER 289 II. The Mind's Eye. By Prof. JOSEPH JASTROW. (Illustrated.) 299 III. Nature Study in the Philadelphia Normal School. By L. L. W. WILSON, Ph. D. 313 IV. Principles of Taxation. XX. The Diffusion of Taxes. By the Late Hon. DAVID A. WELLS 319 V. Our Florida Alligator. By I. W. BLAKE. (Illustrated.) 330 VI. The Racial Geography of Europe. The Jews. II. By Prof. WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY. (Illustrated.) 338 VII. True Tales of Birds and Beasts. By DAVID STARR JORDAN 352 VIII. Glacial Geology in America. By Prof. DANIEL S. MARTIN 356 IX. Modern Studies of Earthquakes. By GEORG GERALAND 362 X. A Short History of Scientific Instruction. By Sir J. N. LOCKYER 372 XI. Should Children under Ten learn to Read and Write? By Prof. G. T. W. PATRICK 382 XII. Soils and Fertilizers. By CHARLES MINOR BLACKFORD, Jr., M. D. 392 XIII. Sketch of Friedrich August Kekulé. (With Portrait.) 401 XIV. Editor's Table: A Voice from the Pulpit.--Lessons of Anthropology.--An Example of Social Decadence.--The Advance of Science 409 XV. Scientific Literature 415 XVI. Fragments of Science 425 NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 72 FIFTH AVENUE. SINGLE NUMBER, 50 CENTS. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, $5.00. COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. Entered at the Post Office at New York, and admitted for transmission through the mails at second-class rates. [Illustration: AUGUST VON KEKULÉ.] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. JANUARY, 1899. THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. BY JAMES COLLIER. VI.--INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION. The earliest nomadic stage of mankind has left traces in many of the colonies. The first age of French Canada, of New York, of great part of North America, was one of hunters and trappers, and it has continued in the Northwest till recent times. The first brief period of Rhodesia was that of the big-game hunter. The Boers of the Transvaal are still as much hunters as farmers. The American backwoodsman who clears a patch, then sells his improvements to the first newcomer, and, placing his wife and children and scanty belongings on a cart, proceeds _da capo_ elsewhere, is a nomadic pioneer. The stage is in one way or another perpetual, for the class never quite dies out. The drunken English quarryman who, driven by a demon of restlessness, continually goes "on tramp," and in his wanderings covers on foot a space equal to twice the circumference of the globe, is a demi-savage whose nomadism is only checked by the "abhorred approaches of old age." If he emigrates, he repeats the old, wild life as a pick-and-shovel man in Queensland or a quarryman in New South Wales. The soberer colonial youth, who more luxuriously canters from farm to farm in New Zealand on the back of a scrub, is a tamer specimen who settles down when he marries. Nay, the "restless man" who periodically applies for leave of absence from a colonial legislature in order to travel in India, China, and Timbuctoo, is a still milder but not less incorrigible example of the same indestructible type. The pastoral stage is all but universal. Wherever grass grows (and there is wild grass almost everywhere) sheep can graze, and where there are succulent twigs cattle will fatten on them. The South American _estancias_ and the ranches of Colorado, the cattle runs of Queensland and northern New Zealand, the sheep runs of Victoria and New South Wales repeat and perpetuate this stage. The genesis of it may even now be daily observed. A Manchester accountant who has never before been astride a horse will in twelve months learn the mysteries of cattle and sheep farming, then purchase a hundred acres or two from the colonial Government, gradually clear it of timber, build of his own trees, with no skilled assistance, a weatherboard cottage, and take home a swiftly wooed wife to lead with him a rather desolate existence in "the bush." Or (on a larger scale) a squatter,[1] who is commonly a gentleman by birth and education, comes out from England with inherited wealth, buys or leases from the Government a large inland tract of grazing land, takes with him flocks and herds, shepherds and stockmen, builds a bark or wooden manor house, and settles down to the life of Abram on the plains of Mamre. In earlier days, when the colony was in its infancy, he would not have had to purchase or lease his "run." One country after another saw the golden age of a would-be landed aristocracy. As Norman William parceled out all England among his nobles and knights, rulers of conquered countries were then mighty free with what did not belong to them. Possessing the authority of a sovereign, Columbus made lavish grants of land, and thus pacified his rebels. Charles II presented Carolina to eight proprietors. Baronies of twelve thousand acres in South Carolina, manors of twenty thousand acres in Maryland, were dwarfed by territorial principalities of more than a million acres in New York. The absolute governors of early Australia gave away wide tracts. When land was not given it was taken, on Rob Roy's principle. During the interregnum that followed the recall of the first Governor of New South Wales, military robbers seized fifteen thousand acres, and under subsequent administrations they continued their depredations. Land was held on various tenures. The first American forms were varieties of belated feudalism; of a hundred often strange and ridiculous emblems of suzerainty perhaps a dozen repeated Old World customs.[2] Sir H. S. Maine has proved that nearly all the feudal exactions that maddened a whole people to mutiny in 1789 were then in force in England. How shadowy they must have grown is shown by the fact that none of them was transported to Botany Bay in that or later years. They were atrophied portions of the British land system when Australia was founded in 1788. For fully sixteen years the possession of lands granted or seized was as absolute as the English law ever allows it to be. Then the landholders, finding the large tracts already conceded insufficient for the development of the pastoral industry, applied for more, and themselves suggested in 1803 a plan of leasing crown lands which in the following year was legalized as "the first charter of squatterdom"; it was the beginning of a system that has brought under pastoral occupancy territories as extensive as the largest European countries. The land system formed part of or gave birth to a political organization. A host of so-called _seigneurs_ imported into old Canada as much of the _ancien régime_ as would bear the voyage. Manors in Maryland reproduced the feudal courts-baron and courts-leet. The great New York landowners, as inheriting both English and Dutch institutions, presided in such courts and were at the same time hereditary members of a powerful legislative order.[3] The courts were dropped on the way out to Australia, but the political influence of the English landed aristocracy inhered in their representatives at the antipodes. As the Southern slavearchy, through its Washingtons and Jeffersons, Clays and Calhouns, was for three quarters of a century the driving force in American politics, the Australian squatterarchy for one generation or more ruled the seven colonies with a sway that waxed as the absolute power of the governor waned. It composed the legislature, appointed the judges, controlled the executive, and if the governor was refractory it sent him home. In both southern countries social life reflected its tastes and was the measure of its grandeur. It constituted "society," ran the races, gave the balls, and kept open house; the surrounding villages lived in its sunshine. Why could not this patriarchal state last, as it has lasted in Arabia for thousands of years and in Europe for centuries? In the Southern States it was brought to bankruptcy by the civil war. In Australia it collapsed before two enemies as deadly--a succession of droughts and a fall in the price of wool. The banker has his foot on the squatter's neck. If one may judge from the published maps, three fourths of the freehold land in the older colonies is in the hands of the money lenders. The once lordly runholder, who would have excluded from his table, or at least from his visiting circle, any one engaged in commerce, is now the tenant of a mortgage company which began by using him too well and ended by crushing him unmercifully. It is also brought to a close by the rise of the agricultural stage. The colonial _latifundia_ gets broken up for the same economic reasons as that of the mother country. Whenever from the increase of population wheat-growing becomes more profitable than grazing, land rises in value, and vast sheep walks are subdivided into two-hundred-acre farms, which are put under the plow. The transition may be retarded in some countries and altogether arrested in others. Nasse has shown that, in consequence of the moisture of the climate, there was in the sixteenth century a continual tendency in England to revert from agriculture to pasture. The light rainfall, high temperatures, and unfertilized soil will forever keep nine tenths of Australia under grass. Most of the mountainous north and the glacier-shaved portions of the south of New Zealand must be perpetual cattle runs and sheep walks. A century or perhaps centuries will pass before much of the light soil of Tasmania, hardly enriched by the scanty foliage of the eucalyptus, is sufficiently fertilized by grazing to grow corn. Rich alluvial or volcanic lands are put under the plow, without passing through the pastoral stage, as soon as markets are created by the advent of immigrants. There is a cry for farm lands. Companies that have bought large estates break them up into allotments. When they or other large landholders still resist pressure, the radical colonial legislature accelerates their deliberations by putting on the thumbscrew of a statute which confiscates huge cantles of their land. Or the colonial Government, if socialist-democratic, purchases extensive properties, which it breaks up into farms and communistic village settlements. Over wide tracts the agriculturist, great and small, takes the place of the pastoralist. He holds his lands under a variety of tenures. New South Wales, in its search for an ideal form, has flowered into fifteen varieties. Other colonies are stumbling toward it more or less blindly through a succession of annual statutes. Where land is abundant the tenure will be easy. In North America nominal quitrents were general; the system was long since introduced into South Africa, and it has lately been imported into New Zealand in spite of all previous experience to the effect that such rents can not be collected. Mr. Eggleston remarks that in the United States the tendency was to "a simple and direct ownership of the soil by the occupant." Since those days Henry George has come and (alas!) gone. A craze for the nationalization of the land buzzes in the bonnets of all who have no land. There is an equal reluctance on the part of colonial legislatures to grant waste lands as freeholds and on the part of purchasers to accept them on any other terms. Hence the constant effort to devise a tenure which shall reserve the rights of the colony and yet not oppress the tenant. One legislature has blasphemed into the "eternal lease," which would seem to be almost preferable to absolute ownership in a country subject to earthquakes! But the tenure in the early days is unimportant. With a virgin soil yielding at first seventy and then regularly forty bushels to the acre, and high prices ruling, the farmer can stand any tenure. Seen at market or cattle show, his equine or bovine features and firm footing on mother earth suggest a sense of solidity in the commonwealth to which he belongs. He gives it its character. The legislature consists of his representatives. Laws are passed in his interest. He controls the executive. His sons fill the civil service. Judges sometimes come from his ranks, and lawyers easily fall back into them. He supports the churches and fills them. Small towns spring up in place of the pastoral villages to supply his wants. As the period of the Golden Fleece was the colonial age of gold, when Jason, the wool king, made a fortune, received a baronetcy, and, returning to the mother country, founded a county family and intermarried with the British aristocracy, so the agricultural stage is the colonial age of silver, in money as in morals. It lasted in England till well into the century, in Germany till the other day, in France till now. It is, in the main, the stage of contemporary colonies. What brings _it_ to an end? The soil gets exhausted, prices fall, and a succession of wet seasons in New Zealand or of dry seasons in Australia or South Africa sends the farmer into the money market. Nearly every province of almost every colony gets mortgaged up to the hilt. The foot of the land agent is on the neck of the farmer, who becomes his tenant or serf--_adscriptus glebæ_ as much as the Old English villeins who were the ancestors of the farmer, or the Virginia villeins who repeated in the seventeenth century the Old English status. But tenancy does not always arise out of bankrupt proprietorship. A capitalist may drain an extensive marsh (like that along the valley of the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales) and divide the rich alluvial soil into hundreds of profitable dairy farms. More inland marshes, like the Piako Swamp in New Zealand, have been so completely drained as to make the soil too dry to carry wheat, and so have swamped both capitalists and banker. Where the squatter owner keeps the land in his own hands, he may lease an unbroken-up tract for three or five years to a farmer who plows and fences it, takes off crops, pays a light rent of from five to fifteen bushels per acre, and leaves it in grass. On one tenure or another the whole colony gradually comes into cultivation. The predominance of the agricultural interest is long threatened and at length shaken by the rise of the industrial stage. It is partly evolved from the pastoral and agricultural stages and partly independent. Nor do these stages at once and necessarily give rise to collective industry. In all young colonies where the population is scanty and processes are simple there are no division and no association of labor. The account that one of the best of American historians gives of the Northwest Territory might be accepted as a description of this primitive state, and realizes Fichte's ideal of a _geschlossener Handelstaat_ (closed trade state). Shut in by mountains, the people raised their own flax and sometimes grew their own wool, which they spun and wove at home. They made their own spinning wheels and looms, as they made their own furniture. They tanned their own leather and cobbled rude shoes of it. Of Indian-corn husks they spun ropes and manufactured horse collars and chair bottoms. Barrels and beehives were formed of sawn hollow trees. They extracted sugar from the maple and tea from the sassafras root. Their boats were dug-out canoes. In colonies of later foundation this self-sufficing stage, which repeats an earlier period in the mother country than the time when the colony was given off, is dropped, though there are traces of it everywhere to be found. Sheep countries give birth to the woolen industry. New Zealand reduplicates the woolen manufactures of England and, owing to protective duties, has attained a deserved success. New South Wales, with finer wools, has not succeeded, for no other apparent reason than that she refuses to impose such duties. For it is to be observed that it is under legislative protection--bounties, bonuses, drawbacks, export and especially import duties--that almost every colonial industry has grown up, as the industries of the mother country grew up. Sometimes the profit in a particular undertaking is exactly equal to the amount of the import duty, and it is seldom greater. By taking extravagant advantage of the liberty long refused (as leave to manufacture was long refused to the North American colonies), but at length conceded, to impose import duties, an Australasian colony, misled as much by its own splendid energy as by evil counselors (Carlyle among them), built up a whole artificial system of industries which sank in ruinous collapse when the boom had passed. Independent industries spring first from the soil. Gold and silver mining lose their wild adventurous character, and become regular industries, worked by companies with extensive plants. The digging of gum in Auckland (bled from the gigantic Kauri pine) is operated by merchants who keep the gum diggers in a species of serfage. The discovery of coal makes native industries possible or remunerative, but till iron has been found the system is incomplete. All countries, and therefore all colonies, are late in reaching this stage; the most advanced contemporary colonies have not yet reached it. None the less have they followed England with swifter steps, if with less momentum, into the modern age of iron--that Brummagem epoch which has the creation of markets for its war cry, state socialism for its gospel, Joseph of Birmingham for its prophet, and the British Empire for its deity. The iron age is fitly inaugurated by the most degraded relationship that man can bear to man--that of slavery. Only the oldest of modern colonies imitate the mother countries in passing through this stage; in those of later foundation a mere shadow of it remains, or it takes other shapes. Colonists first enslave the natives of the country where they settle. In the South American colonies, where they went to find gold, they would work for no other purpose; they therefore needed the natives to till the soil; they needed them also as carriers. For these purposes they were used unscrupulously. They were distributed among the Spaniards under a system of _repartimientos_ which repeated the provisions of Greek and Roman slavery, and was itself reduplicated three centuries later in the convict assignment system of New South Wales. With such savage cruelty was it worked that, according to the testimony of Columbus, six sevenths of the population of Hispaniola died under it in a few years. The same form of slavery, but of a very different character, prevailed in Africa down almost to our own times. In the British colonies it was submerged in 1834, from causes exterior to itself, by the humanitarian wave that wrecked the West Indies; in the French colonies it was abolished by the revolutionary government of 1848; in the Dutch colonies it possibly subsists to this day. Theoretically abolished or not, the relationship between civilized whites and savage blacks must be everywhere a modified form of slavery; and a white colonization of the African tropics can only take place under conditions indistinguishable from a limited slavery. In colder or younger colonies, even if a more refined sentiment had permitted it, there could be no question of enslaving the fierce red Indians, the warlike Maoris, or the intractable Australian blacks. The Indians rendered some services to the northern colonists. The Maoris worked for the first immigrants into Canterbury, but as free laborers, and the phase soon passed away as more valuable labor arrived. Blacks were in the early years employed by the Australian settlers, but like nearly all savages they were found incapable of continuous industry. The next step is to import slaves. To lighten the oppression of the Mexicans, negroes were introduced, as they had previously been into Europe. There, and still more in the southern colonies of North America, they were the chief pioneers. They cut down forests, cleared the jungles, drained the swamps, and opened up the country. For the best part of two hundred years the world's sugar, rice, cotton, tobacco, and indigo were grown by negro labor. The effect on the negro himself has been to raise him one grade in the scale of being. If, as Mr. Galton believes, he is naturally two grades below the European, a place in the "organization of labor" will have to be found for him midway between the white workman and the slave. It is, indeed, being found. As a farmer the negro has totally failed. "But he is a good laborer under supervision. He is a success in the mines. He has found acceptance in the iron furnaces and about the coke ovens. He is in great demand in periods of railroad construction," and he is a Western pioneer. Above born and bred slaves for life there is the status of imported slaves for a term. For years Kanakas, hired or captured from the Melanesian Islands of the Pacific, were used as slaves by the sugar planters of Queensland, until the outcry in England put a stop to an ill-conducted traffic. It has since been resumed under humaner conditions, which make it as defensible as slavery can ever be. Coolies from India are imported into Fiji and Hongkong practically as free laborers. They are also employed on board the great liners that ply between India, China, Australia, and England, much to the discontent of the working class and to the great satisfaction of the well-to-do, who thus gain cheaper passages and lower freights. The radical opposition is no more likely to prevent this form of native labor from spreading to all suitable environments than the conservative opposition has prevented women from filling the employments within their improved capacities. The ubiquitous Chinaman, again, has imported himself into most colonies, and so long as he takes a place that the white laborer refuses to occupy, he will present the ugly problem of the coexistence of an indestructible alien race with a civilized people whose type of civilization and his are irreconcilable. European colonies have also known white slavery, as Greek and Roman colonies knew it, and slavery of their own race and nation, as European countries knew it. Its most degraded type has doubtless been Spanish, English, and French convictism. The Australian-English is the most familiar and the worst. The Australian convict was a slave for life or a long term. Like the slave, he was at the mercy of his master, excepting that corporal punishment could not be inflicted by the master's hands. The lash was none the less kept going; in a single year, in New South Wales, nearly three thousand floggings were administered. The Roman _ergastula_ were pleasure bowers compared with the convict hells of Parramatta, in New South Wales, and Port Arthur, in Tasmania. Marcus Clarke's terrible fiction proves to be still more terrible fact. Convicts were herded together like pigs; kindness was rare, oppression general, and many fine men died inch by inch. Such was the state of things even after the introduction of the assignment system. According to that system, convicts were assigned as agricultural laborers and shepherds to settlers who cried out for them, as the American planters did for slaves. Craftsmen were allotted to high officials in lieu of salary or to influential persons who hired them to others (herein repeating English serfdom) or permitted them to work for themselves, receiving a portion of their earnings (herein repeating Greek slavery). Mechanics were employed on public works, and hundreds of buildings were erected by convict masons, bricklayers, and carpenters. Day laborers were employed on roads, and hundreds of miles of solid highway are a durable monument to the memory of the convict. They were the true pioneers of the country, braving the dangers of the "bush," resisting the aborigines, clearing and cultivating the land, and developing the resources of the colonies. For themselves they did well and ill. Many reformed, and after manumission, which was at first special and at length general, became respectable citizens, dealers, and traders. Some grew to be prosperous merchants, wealthy squatters, editors, legislators, and all but ministers. Their sons are judges, legislators, solicitors, Government officials, newspaper proprietors. After lasting for sixty years the system of transportation was at length abolished in consequence of the opposition of the working class, who objected to competition, and of the respectable classes generally. The legislative body and the large landowners were rather in favor of its perpetuity, and there are still members of the old "slave-driving party" in Tasmania who regret its discontinuance. The bond servants, who were common in New England and at first more numerous than slaves in the Southern States, repeated the status of the English serfs. Their origin was various. Crime, debt, sale by parents, voluntary surrender, and kidnapping all contributed their quota. The period of indentured service was at first from seven to ten years, and was ultimately reduced to a fixed term of four years. They were exchanged and sold like any other commodity. Their treatment seems to have been often harsh. Like the Australian convicts, many of them prospered. Leading families in the United States trace their origin to bondmen. Not a few of the Southern overseers, free laborers, and small farmers are believed to be descended from them. The vagabond element in all the States, the "white trash" of the South, and the criminal and pauper inhabitants of certain regions in the North are also affiliated on the more degraded sections of the class.[4] The worst of modern inventions, it has been said, is the invention of the workingman. The workingman, however, has a pedigree; he is the son of the bondman or the serf, and the grandson of the slave, who would have been still more discreditable "inventions" if they had not been the outgrowth of their time and place. The servile character of the workman long survived in European countries; it was not till the beginning of this century that the last trades were emancipated in England. While in North America and New South Wales the transition is plainly traceable, all vestiges of it have disappeared in the younger colonies. In these, almost from the first, the mechanic is master of the situation. The carpenter who can put up a wooden cottage commands regular work and high wages, while the preacher who builds him a house not made with hands is starved. The anomaly is in perfect consistency with the biological analogy; the brain is everywhere of late development. As the colony grows, wages fall, and the position of professional men becomes more tolerable, but, _en revanche_, the workman acquires and at length almost monopolizes political power. The premier and cabinet ministers are sometimes former peddlers, gold diggers, coal miners, shepherds, etc. The legislative bodies consist largely of labor representatives. Laws are passed in the interest of labor. Not content with a share of political power out of all proportion to their numbers or importance, the regimented trades, under the command of unscrupulous leaders, deliver a pitched battle against the employers, with the object of gaining practical possession of the agencies of production and distribution. They are necessarily defeated. The value of labor and the importance of the mechanic decline with the application of machinery to all industrial processes. Accumulated wealth, subsidizing inventions, acquires an increasing ascendency. The industrial system is in no greater danger from the onslaughts of labor than civilized countries from the invasion of barbarians. Only the beginnings of the commercial epoch, or age of bronze, are to be found in colonies. In production we witness the same supersession of individual enterprise by the limited liability company. This is also the case in distribution, where many obsolete Old World stages are recapitulated. We may still see the long, slow bullock team, the wearied pack horse (the fur trade in Canada was carried on by "brigades of pack horses"), the hawker, purveyor of news and gossip. We easily trace the evolution of the shop: at first a ship, then landed, with everything inside--groceries, meat, bread, fruit, and vegetables, clothes, crockery, ironmongery, stationery, and tobacco; the butcher first hives off, then the baker, the grocer; in course of time reintegration takes place, and shops are to be found in the colonial cities which reduplicate Whiteley's in London, where everything may again be had as in the beginning. The processes of exchange likewise recapitulate the past. Barter is long universal, and is still common in colonial villages. Even then a standard is needed. In the Old English period the "currency" consisted of cattle, named by a facetious writer "the current _kine_ of the realm." In Virginia and Maryland tobacco was the circulating medium for a century and a half, supplemented in Maryland with hemp and flax; taxes were paid in tobacco, and rent in kind. In Illinois and Canada, skins and furs, with wampum for small coin; in New England the latter singular currency was used far into the eighteenth century. New South Wales has the demerit of inventing the destructive medium of rum; wages were paid in it or in wheat; meal or spirits were taken at the doors of theaters. Store receipts for produce were given by the Government and passed current, not without depreciation; military officers issued bills for all sums up to one hundred pounds; private individuals, in the lack of specie, gave promissory notes. Fixed prices were long unknown; extortioners in the early days of all the colonies made a profit of a thousand per cent; and in quite recent days usurious attorneys exacted interest at the rate of a hundred per cent. Colonies sometimes anticipate the development of the mother country. The communistic dreams of the forties in France and England were for a brief while realized in old Virginia, as they are at this hour being realized in the village settlements of South Australia; and the state socialism rendered popular by the German victories of 1870 was perhaps more thoroughly embodied in convict New South Wales than anywhere else outside of Peru under the Incas, as it is now sweeping all of the Australasian colonies onward to an unknown goal. FOOTNOTES: [1] In its primary American sense the word _squatter_ denotes the backwoodsman described in the foregoing paragraph. In its secondary Australian sense it means the large landholder now described. [2] See an instructive article by Mr. Edward Eggleston, Social Conditions in the Colonies. Century Magazine, 1884, pp. 849, 850. [3] Eggleston, _op. cit._, p. 850. [4] Eggleston, _op. cit._, p. 858. THE MIND'S EYE. BY JOSEPH JASTROW. HAMLET.--My father,--Methinks, I see my father. HORATIO.--O, where, my lord? HAMLET.--In my mind's eye, Horatio. It is a commonplace taught from nursery to university that we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and feel with the fingers. This is the truth, but not the whole truth. Indispensable as are the sense organs in gaining an acquaintance with the world in which we live, yet they alone do not determine how extensive or how accurate that acquaintance shall be. There is a mind behind the eye and the ear and the finger tips which guides them in gathering information, and gives value and order to the exercise of the senses. This is particularly true of vision, the most intellectual of all the senses, the one in which mere acuteness of the sense organ counts least and the training in observation counts most. The eagle's eye sees farther, but our eyes tell us much more of what is seen. The eye is often compared to a photographic camera, with its eyelid cap, its iris shutter, its lens, and its sensitive plate--the retina; when properly adjusted for distance and light, the image is formed on the retina as on the glass plate, and the picture is taken. So far the comparison is helpful; but while the camera takes a picture whenever and wherever the plate happens to be exposed, the complete act of seeing requires some co-operation on the part of the mind. The retina may be exposed a thousand times and take but few pictures; or perhaps it is better to say that the pictures may be taken, but remain undeveloped and evanescent. The pictures that are developed are stacked up, like the negatives in the photographer's shop, in the pigeonholes of our mental storerooms--some faded and blurred, some poorly arranged or mislaid, some often referred to and fresh prints made therefrom, and some quite neglected. In order to see, it is at once necessary that the retina be suitably exposed toward the object to be seen, and that the mind be favorably disposed to the assimilation of the impression. True seeing, observing, is a double process, partly objective or outward--the thing seen and the retina--and partly subjective or inward--the picture mysteriously transferred to the mind's representative, the brain, and there received and affiliated with other images. Illustrations of such seeing "with the mind's eye" are not far to seek. Wherever the beauties and conformations of natural scenery invite the eye of man does he discover familiar forms and faces (Fig. 1); the forces of Nature have rough-hewn the rocks, but the human eye detects and often creates the resemblances. The stranger to whom such curiosities of form are first pointed out often finds it difficult to discover the resemblance, but once seen the face or form obtrudes itself in every view and seems the most conspicuous feature in the outlook. The flickering fire furnishes a fine background for the activity of the mind's eye, and against this it projects the forms and fancies which the leaping flames and the burning embers from time to time suggest. Not all see these fire-pictures readily, for our mental eyes differ more from one another than the physical ones, and perhaps no two persons see the same picture in quite the same way. It is not quite true, however, as many have held, that in waking hours we all have a world in common, but in dreams each has a world of his own, for our waking worlds are made different by the differences in what engages our interest and our attention. It is true that our eyes when open are opened very largely to the same views, but by no one observer are all these views, though visible, really seen. [Illustration: FIG. 1.[5]--The man's face in the rocks is quite distinct, and is usually readily found when it is known that there is a face somewhere. (For this view from the Dalles of the St. Croix, Minn., I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. W. H. Dudley, of Madison, Wis.)] This characteristic of human vision often serves as a source of amusement. The puzzle picture with its tantalizing face, or animal, or what not, hidden in the trees, or fantastically constructed out of heterogeneous elements that make up the composition, is to many quite irresistible. We turn it about in all directions, wondering where the hidden form can be, scanning every detail of the picture, until suddenly a chance glimpse reveals it, plainly staring us in the face. When several persons are engaged in this occupation, it is amusing to observe how blind each is to what the others see; their physical eyes see alike, but their mental eyes reflect their own individualities. [Illustration: FIG. 2.--In order to see the lion's head, hold the dollar exactly inverted and the head will be discovered facing the left, as above outlined. It is clearer on the dollar itself than in this reproduction.] Thousands upon thousands of persons handle our silver dollar, but few happen to observe the lion's head which lies concealed in the representation of the familiar head of Liberty; frequently even a careful examination fails to detect this hidden emblem of British rule; but, as before, when once found, it is quite obvious (Fig. 2). For similar reasons it is a great aid in looking for an object to know what to look for; to be readily found, the object, though lost to sight, should be to memory clear. Searching is a mental process similar to the matching of a piece of fabric in texture or color, when one has forgotten the sample and must rely upon the remembrance of its appearance. If the recollection is clear and distinct, recognition takes place when the judgment decides that what the physical eye sees corresponds to the image in the mind's eye; with an indistinct mental image the recognition becomes doubtful or faulty. The novice in the use of the microscope experiences considerable difficulty in observing the appearance which his instructor sees and describes, and this because his conception of the object to be seen is lacking in precision. Hence his training in the use of the microscope is distinctly aided by consulting the illustrations in the text-book, for they enable his mental eye to realize the pictures which it should entertain. He may be altogether too much influenced by the pictures thus suggested to his mental vision, and draw what is really not under his microscope at all; much as the young arithmetician will manage to obtain the answer which the book requires even at the cost of a resort to very unmathematical processes. For training in correct and accurate vision it is necessary to acquire an alert mental eye that observes all that is objectively visible, but does not permit the subjective to add to or modify what is really present. [Illustration: FIG. 3.--Observe the appearance of these letters at a distance of eight to twelve feet. An interesting method of testing the activity of the mind's eye with these letters is described in the text.] [Illustration: FIG. 3_a_.] [Illustration: FIG. 3_b_.] The importance of the mind's eye in ordinary vision is also well illustrated in cases in which we see or seem to see what is not really present, but what for one cause or another it is natural to suppose is present. A very familiar instance of this process is the constant overlooking of misprints--false letters, transposed letters, and missing letters--unless these happen to be particularly striking. We see only the general physiognomy of the word and the detailed features are supplied from within; in this case it is the expected that happens. Reading is done largely by the mental eye; and entire words, obviously suggested by the context, are sometimes read in, when they have been accidentally omitted. This is more apt to occur with the irregular characters used in manuscript than in the more distinct forms of the printed alphabet, and is particularly frequent in reading over what one has himself written. In reading proof, however, we are eager to detect misprints, and this change in attitude helps to make them visible. It is difficult to illustrate this process intentionally, because the knowledge that one's powers of observation are about to be tested places one on one's guard, and thus suppresses the natural activity of the mind's eye and draws unusual attention to objective details. Let the reader at this point hold the page at some distance off--say, eight or twelve feet--and draw an exact reproduction of the letters shown in Fig. 3. Let him not read further until this has been done, and _perhaps_ he may find that he has introduced strokes which were not present in the original. If this is not the case, let him try the test upon those who are ignorant of its nature, and he will find that most persons will supply light lines to complete the contours of the letters which in the original are suggested but not really present; the original outline, Fig. 3_a_, becomes something like Fig. 3_b_, and so on for the rest of the letters. The physical eye sees the former, but the mental eye sees the latter. [Illustration: FIG. 4.--For description, see text.] I tried this experiment with a class of over thirty university students of Psychology, and, although they were disposed to be quite critical and suspected some kind of an illusion, only three or four drew the letters correctly; all the rest filled in the imaginary light contours; some even drew them as heavily as the real strokes. I followed this by an experiment of a similar character. I placed upon a table a figure (Fig. 4) made of light cardboard, fastened to blocks of wood at the base so that the pieces would easily stand upright. The middle piece, which is rectangular and high, was placed a little in front of the rest of the figure. The students were asked to describe precisely what they saw, and with one exception they all described, in different words, a semicircular piece of cardboard with a rectangular piece in front of it. In reality there was no half-circle of cardboard, but only parts of two quarter-circles. The students, of course, were well aware that their physical eyes could not see what was behind the middle cardboard, but they inferred that the two side pieces were parts of one continuous semicircle. This they saw, so far as they saw it at all, with their mind's eye. [Illustration: FIG. 5.--The black and white portions of this design are precisely alike, but the effect of looking at the figure as a pattern in black upon a white background, or as a pattern in white upon a black background, is quite different, although the difference is not easily described.] There is a further interesting class of illustrations in which a single outward impression changes its character according as it is viewed as representing one thing or another. In a general way we see the same thing all the time, and the image on the retina does not change. But as we shift the attention from one portion of the view to another, or as we view it with a different mental conception of what the figure represents, it assumes a different aspect, and to our mental eye becomes quite a different thing. A slight but interesting change takes place if we view Fig. 5 first with the conception that the black is the pattern to be seen and the white the background, and again try to see the white as the pattern against a black background. I give a further illustration of such a change in Fig. 6. In our first and natural view of this we focus the attention upon the black lines and observe the familiar illusion, that the four vertical lines seem far from parallel. That they are parallel can be verified by measurement, or by covering up all of the diagram except the four main lines. But if the white part of the diagram is conceived as the design against a black background, then the design is no longer the same, and with this change the illusion appears, and the four lines seem parallel, as they really are. It may require a little effort to bring about this change, but it is very marked when once realised. [Illustration: FIG. 6.--When this figure is viewed as a black pattern on a white background, the four main vertical lines seem far from parallel; when it is viewed as a white pattern on a black background this illusion disappears (or nearly so), and the black lines as well as the white ones seem parallel.] A curious optical effect which in part illustrates the change in appearance under different aspects is reproduced in Fig. 7. In this case the enchantment of distance is necessary to produce the transformation. Viewed at the usual reading distance, we see nothing but an irregular and meaningless assemblage of black and white blotches. At a distance of fifteen to eighteen feet, however, a man's head appears quite clearly. Also observe that after the head has once been realized it becomes possible to obtain suggestions of it at nearer distances. [Illustration: FIG. 7.--This is a highly enlarged reproduction taken from a half-tone process print of Lord Kelvin. It appeared in the Photographic Times.] A much larger class of ambiguous diagrams consists of those which represent by simple outlines familiar geometrical forms or objects. We cultivate such a use of our eyes, as indeed of all our faculties, as will on the whole lead to the most profitable results. As a rule, the particular impression is not so important as what it represents. Sense impressions are simply the symbols or signs of things or ideas, and the thing or the idea is more important than the sign. Accordingly, we are accustomed to interpret lines, whenever we can, as the representations of objects. We are well aware that the canvas or the etching or the photograph before us is a flat surface in two dimensions, but we see the picture as the representation of solid objects in three dimensions. This is the illusion of pictorial art. So strong is this tendency to view lines as the symbols of things that if there is the slightest chance of so viewing them, we invariably do so; for we have a great deal of experience with things that present their contours as lines, and very little with mere lines or surfaces. If we view outlines only, without shading or perspective or anything to definitely suggest what is foreground and what background, it becomes possible for the mind to supply these details and see foreground as background, and _vice versa_. [Illustration: FIG. 8.--This drawing may be viewed as the representation of a book standing on its half-opened covers as seen from the back of the book; or as the inside view of an open book showing the pages.] [Illustration: FIG. 9.--When this figure is viewed as an arrow, the upper or feathered end seems flat; when the rest of the arrow is covered, the feathered end may be made to project or recede like the book cover in Fig. 8.] [Illustration: FIG. 10.--The smaller square may be regarded as either the nearer face of a projecting figure or as the more distant face of a hollow figure.] [Illustration: FIG. 11.--This represents an ordinary table-glass, the bottom of the glass and the entire rear side, except the upper portion, being seen through the transparent nearer side, and the rear apparently projecting above the front. But it fluctuates in appearance between this and a view of the glass in which the bottom is seen directly, partly from underneath, the _whole_ of the rear side is seen through the transparent front, and the front projects above the back.] [Illustration: FIG. 12.--In this scroll the left half may at first seem concave and the right convex, it then seems to roll or advance like a wave, and the left seems convex and the right concave, as though the trough of the wave had become the crest, and _vice versa_.] A good example to begin with is Fig. 8. These outlines will probably suggest at first view a book, or better a book cover, seen with its back toward you and its sides sloping away from you; but it may also be viewed as a book opened out toward you and presenting to you an inside view of its contents. Should the change not come readily, it may be facilitated by thinking persistently of the appearance of an open book in this position. The upper portion of Fig. 9 is practically the same as Fig. 8, and if the rest of the figure be covered up, it will change as did the book cover; when, however, the whole figure is viewed as an arrow, a new conception enters, and the apparently solid book cover becomes the _flat_ feathered part of the arrow. Look at the next figure (Fig. 10), which represents in outline a truncated pyramid with a square base. Is the smaller square nearer to you, and are the sides of the pyramid sloping away from you toward the larger square in the rear? Or are you looking into the hollow of a truncated pyramid with the smaller square in the background? Or is it now one and now the other, according as you decide to see it? Here (Fig. 13) is a skeleton box which you may conceive as made of wires outlining the sides. Now the front, or side nearest to me, seems directed downward and to the left; again, it has shifted its position and is no longer the front, and the side which appears to be the front seems directed upward and to the right. The presence of the diagonal line makes the change more striking: in one position it runs from the left-hand _rear_ upper corner to the right-hand _front_ lower corner; while in the other it connects the left-hand _front_ upper corner with the right-hand _rear_ lower corner. [Illustration: FIGS. 13, 13_a_, and 13_b_.--The two methods of viewing Fig. 13 are described in the text. Figs. 13_a_ and 13_b_ are added to make clearer the two methods of viewing Fig. 13. The heavier lines seem to represent the nearer surface. Fig. 13_a_ more naturally suggests the nearer surface of the box in a position downward and to the left, and Fig. 13_b_ makes the nearer side seem to be upward and to the right. But in spite of the heavier outlines of the one surface, it may be made to shift positions from foreground to background, although not so readily as in Fig. 13.] [Illustration: FIG. 14.--Each member of this frieze represents a relief ornament, applied upon the background, which in cross-section would be an isosceles triangle with a large obtuse angle, or a space of similar shape hollowed out of the solid wood or stone. In running the eye along the pattern, it is interesting to observe how variously the patterns fluctuate from one of these aspects to the other.] [Illustration: FIGS. 15, 15_a_, and 15_b_.--The two views of Fig. 15 described in the text are brought out more clearly in Figs. 15_a_ and 15_b_. The shaded portion tends to be regarded as the nearer face. Fig. 15_a_ is more apt to suggest the steps seen as we ascend them. Fig. 15_b_ seems to represent the hollowed-out structure underneath the steps. But even with the shading the dual interpretation is possible, although less obvious.] Fig. 15 will probably seen at first glimpse to be the view of a flight of steps which one is about to ascend from right to left. Imagine it, however, to be a view of the under side of a series of steps; the view representing the structure of overhanging solid masonwork seen from underneath. At first it may be difficult to see it thus, because the view of steps which we are about to mount is a more natural and frequent experience than the other; but by staring at it with the intention of seeing it differently the transition will come, and often quite unexpectedly. [Illustration: FIG. 16.--This interesting figure (which is reproduced with modifications from Scripture--The New Psychology) is subject in a striking way to interchanges between foreground and background. Most persons find it difficult to maintain for any considerable time either aspect of the blocks (these aspects are described in the text); some can change them at will, others must accept the changes as they happen to come.] [Illustration: Fig. 17_a_.] [Illustration: Fig. 17_b_.] [Illustration: Fig. 17. FIGS. 17, 17_a_, and 17_b_.--How many blocks are there in this pile? Six or seven? Note the change in arrangement of the blocks as they change in number from six to seven. This change is illustrated in the text. Figs. 17_a_ and 17_b_ show the two phases of a group of any three of the blocks. The arrangement of a pyramid of six blocks seems the more stable and is usually first suggested; but hold the page inverted, and you will probably see the alternate arrangement (with, however, the black surfaces still forming the tops). And once knowing what to look for, you will very likely be able to see either arrangement, whether the diagram be held inverted or not. This method of viewing the figures upside down and in other positions is also suggested to bring out the changes indicated in Figs. 13, 13_a_, 13_b_, and in Figs. 15, 15_a_, 15_b_.] The blocks in Fig. 16 are subject to a marked fluctuation. Now the black surfaces represent the bottoms of the blocks, all pointing downward and to the left, and now the black surfaces have changed and have become the tops pointing upward and to the right. For some the changes come at will; for others they seem to come unexpectedly, but all are aided by anticipating mentally the nature of the transformation. The effect here is quite striking, the blocks seeming almost animated and moving through space. In Fig. 17 a similar arrangement serves to create an illusion as to the real number of blocks present. If viewed in one way--the black surface forming the tops of the blocks--there seem to be six arranged as in Fig. 18; but when the transformation has taken place and the black surfaces have become the overhanging bottoms of the boxes, there are seven, arranged as in Fig. 19. Somewhat different, but still belonging to the group of ambiguous figures, is the ingenious conceit of the duck-rabbit shown in Fig. 20. When it is a rabbit, the face looks to the right and a pair of ears are conspicuous behind; when it is a duck, the face looks to the left and the ears have been changed into the bill. Most observers find it difficult to hold either interpretation steadily, the fluctuations being frequent, and coming as a surprise. [Illustration: FIG. 18.] [Illustration: FIG. 19.] [Illustration: FIG. 20.--Do you see a duck or a rabbit, or either? (From Harper's Weekly, originally in Fliegende Blätter.)] All these diagrams serve to illustrate the principle that when the objective features are ambiguous we see one thing or another according to the impression that is in the mind's eye; what the objective factors lack in definiteness the subjective ones supply, while familiarity, prepossession, as well as other circumstances influence the result. These illustrations show conclusively that seeing is not wholly an objective matter depending upon what there is to be seen, but is very considerably a subjective matter depending upon the eye that sees. To the same observer a given arrangement of lines now appears as the representation of one object and now of another; and from the same objective experience, especially in instances that demand a somewhat complicated exercise of the senses, different observers derive very different impressions. Not only when the sense-impressions are ambiguous or defective, but when they are vague--when the light is dim or the forms obscure--does the mind's eye eke out the imperfections of physical vision. The vague conformations of drapery and make-up that are identified and recognized in spiritualistic _séances_ illustrate extreme instances of this process. The whitewashed tree or post that momentarily startles us in a dark country lane takes on the guise that expectancy gives it. The mental predisposition here becomes the dominant factor, and the timid see as ghosts what their more sturdy companions recognize as whitewashed posts. Such experiences we ascribe to the action of suggestion and the imagination--the cloud "that's almost in shape like a camel," or "like a weasel," or "like a whale." But throughout our visual experiences there runs this double strain, now mainly outward and now mainly inward, from the simplest excitements of the retina up to the realms where fancy soars freed from the confines of sense, and the objective finds its occupation gone. FOOTNOTE: [5] In order to obtain the effects described in the various illustrations it is necessary in several cases to regard the figures for a considerable time and with close attention. The reader is requested not to give up in case the first attempt to secure the effect is not successful, but to continue the effort for a reasonable period. Individuals differ considerably in the readiness with which they obtain such effects; in some cases, such devices as holding the diagrams inverted or at an angle or viewing them with the eyes half closed are helpful. NATURE STUDY IN THE PHILADELPHIA NORMAL SCHOOL. BY L. L. W. WILSON, PH. D. When it was first proposed to me to write for the Popular Science Monthly a brief account of the biological laboratories in the Philadelphia Normal School, and of the Nature work carried on under my direction in the School of Observation and Practice, I felt that I could not do justice either to the place or the work; for, in my judgment, the equipment of the laboratories and the work done in connection with them are finer than anything else of the kind either in this country or abroad--a statement which it seemed to me that I could not make with becoming modesty. But, after all, it is not great Babylon that I have built, but a Babylon builded for me, and to fail to express my sense of its worth is to fail to do justice to Dr. W. P. Wilson, formerly of the University of Pennsylvania, to whom their inception was due; to Mr. Simon Gratz, president of the Board of Education, who from the beginning appreciated their value, and without whose aid they never would have taken visible form; to the principals of the two schools, and, above all, to my five assistants, whose knowledge, zeal, and hard work have contributed more than anything else to the rapid building up of the work. THE LABORATORIES AND THEIR EQUIPMENT.--The rooms occupied by the botanical and zoölogical departments of the normal school measure each seventy by twenty feet. A small workroom for the teachers cuts off about ten feet of this length from each room. In the middle of the remaining space stands a demonstration table furnished with hot and cold water. Each laboratory is lighted from the side by ten windows. From them extend the tables for the students. These give plenty of drawer space and closets for dissecting and compound microscopes. Those in the zoölogical room are also provided with sinks. Each student is furnished with the two microscopes, stage and eyepiece micrometers, a drawing camera, a set of dissecting instruments, glassware, note-books, text-books, and general literature. The walls opposite the windows are in both rooms lined with cases, in which there is a fine synoptic series. In the botanical laboratory this systematic collection begins with models of bacteria and ends with trees. In other cases, placed in the adjoining corridor, are representatives, either in alcohol or by means of models, of most of the orders of flowering plants, as well as a series illustrating the history of the theory of cross-fertilization, and the various devices by which it is accomplished; another, showing the different methods of distribution of seeds and fruits; another, of parasitic plants; and still another showing the various devices by means of which plants catch animals. As an example of the graphic and thorough way in which these illustrations are worked out, the pines may be cited. There are fossils; fine specimens of pistillate and staminate flowers in alcohol; cones; a drawing of the pollen; large models of the flowers; models of the seeds, showing the embryo and the various stages of germination; cross and longitudinal sections of the wood; drawings showing its microscopic structure; pictures of adult trees; and samples illustrating their economic importance. For the last, the long-leaved pine of the South is used, and samples are exhibited of the turpentine, crude and refined; tar and the oil of tar; resin; the leaves; the same boiled in potash; the same hatcheled into wool; yarn, bagging and rope made from the wool; and its timber split, sawn, and dressed. The series illustrating the fertilization of flowers begins with a large drawing, adapted by one of the students from Gibson, showing the gradual evolution of the belief in cross-fertilization from 1682, when Nehemiah Grew first declared that seed would not set unless pollen reached the stigma, down to Darwin, who first demonstrated the advantages of cross-fertilization and showed many of the devices of plants by which this is accomplished. The special devices are then illustrated with models and large drawings. First comes the dimorphic primrose; then follows trimorphic _Lythrum_, to the beautiful model of which is appended a copy of the letter in which Darwin wrote to Gray of his discovery: "But I am almost stark, staring mad over Lythrum.... I should rather like seed of Mitchella. But, oh, Lythrum! "Your utterly mad friend, "C. DARWIN." Models of the cucumber, showing the process of its formation, and the unisexual flowers complete this series. Supplementing this are models and drawings of a large number of flowers, illustrating special devices by which cross-fertilization is secured, such as the larkspur, butter and eggs, orchids, iris, salvia, several composites, the milkweed, and, most interesting of all, the Dutchman's pipe. This is a flower that entices flies into its curved trumpet and keeps them there until they become covered with the ripe pollen. Then the hairs wither, the tube changes its position, the fly is permitted to leave, carrying the pollen thus acquired to another flower with the same result. Pictures and small busts of many naturalists adorn both of the rooms. Of these the most notable is an artist proof of Mercier's beautiful etching of Darwin. Every available inch of wall space is thus occupied, or else, in the botanical laboratory, has on it mounted fungi, lichens, seaweeds, leaf cards, pictures of trees, grasses, and other botanical objects. The windows are beautiful with hanging plants from side brackets meeting the wealth of green on the sill. Here are found in one window ferns, in another the century plant; in others still, specimens of economic plants--cinnamon, olive, banana, camphor. On the tables are magnificent specimens of palms, cycads, dracænas, and aspidistras, and numerous aquaria filled with various water plants. Most of these plants are four years old, and all of them are much handsomer than when they first became the property of the laboratory. How much intelligent and patient care this means only those who have attempted to raise plants in city houses can know. The zoölogical laboratory is quite as beautiful as the botanical, for it, too, has its plants and pictures. It is perhaps more interesting because of its living elements. Think of a schoolroom in which are represented alive types of animals as various as these: amoeba, vorticella, hydra, worms, muscles, snails and slugs of various kinds, crayfish, various insects, including a hive of Italian bees, goldfish, minnows, dace, catfish, sunfish, eels, tadpoles, frogs, newts, salamanders, snakes, alligators, turtles, pigeons, canaries, mice, guinea-pigs, rabbits, squirrels, and a monkey! Imagine these living animals supplemented by models of their related antediluvian forms, or fossils, by carefully labeled dissections, by preparations and pictures illustrating their development and mode of life; imagine in addition to this books, pamphlets, magazines, and teachers further to put you in touch with this wonderful world about us, and you will then have some idea of the environment in which it is the great privilege of our students to live for five hours each week. In addition to these laboratories there is a lecture room furnished with an electric lantern. Here each week is given a lecture on general topics, such as evolution and its problems, connected with the work of the laboratories. THE COURSE OF STUDY PURSUED BY THE NORMAL STUDENTS.--Botany: In general, the plants and the phenomena of the changing seasons are studied as they occur in Nature. In the fall there are lessons on the composites and other autumn flowers, on fruits, on the ferns, mosses, fungi, and other cryptogams. In the winter months the students grow various seeds at home, carefully drawing and studying every stage in their development. Meanwhile, in the laboratory, they examine microscopically and macroscopically the seeds themselves and the various food supplies stored within. By experimentation they get general ideas of plant physiology, beginning with the absorption of water by seeds, the change of the food supply to soluble sugar, the method of growth, the functions, the histology, and the modifications of stem, root, and leaves. In the spring they study the buds and trees, particularly the conifers, and the different orders of flowering plants. The particular merit of the work is that it is so planned that each laboratory lesson compels the students to reason. Having once thus obtained their information, they are required to drill themselves out of school hours until the facts become an integral part of their knowledge. For the study of fruits, for example, they are given large trays, each divided into sixteen compartments, plainly labeled with the name of the seed or fruit within. Then, by means of questions, the students are made to read for themselves the story which each fruit has to tell, to compare it with the others, and to deduce from this comparison certain general laws. After sufficient laboratory practice of this kind they are required to read parts of Lubbock's Flower, Fruit, and Leaves, Kerner's Natural History of Plants, Wallace's Tropical Nature, and Darwinism, etc. Finally, they are each given a type-written summary of the work, and after a week's notice are required to pass a written examination. Zoölogy: The course begins in the fall with a rather thorough study of the insects, partly because they are then so abundant, and partly because a knowledge of them is particularly useful to the grade teacher in the elementary schools. The locust is studied in detail. Tumblers and aquaria are utilized as vivaria, so that there is abundant opportunity for the individual study of living specimens. Freshly killed material is used for dissection, so that students have no difficulty in making out the internal anatomy, which is further elucidated with large, home-made charts, each of which shows a single system, and serves for a text to teach them the functions of the various organs as worked out by modern physiologists. They then study, always with abundant material, the other insects belonging to the same group. They are given two such insects, a bug, and two beetles, and required to classify them, giving reasons for so doing. While this work is going on they have visited the beehive in small groups, sometimes seeing the queen and the drone, and always having the opportunity to see the workers pursuing their various occupations, and the eggs, larvæ, and pupæ in their different states of development. Beautiful models of the bees and of the comb, together with dry and alcoholic material, illustrate further this metamorphosis, by contrast making clearer the exactly opposite metamorphosis of the locust. At least one member of each of the other orders of insects is compared with these two type forms, and, although only important points are considered at all, yet from one to two hours of laboratory work are devoted to each specimen. This leisurely method of work is pursued to give the students the opportunity, at least, to think for themselves. When the subject is finished they are then given a searching test. This is never directly on their required reading, but planned to show to them and to their teachers whether they have really assimilated what they have seen and studied. After this the myriapods, the earthworm, and peripatus are studied, because of their resemblance to the probable ancestors of insects. In the meantime they have had a dozen or more fully illustrated lectures on evolution, so that at the close of this series of lessons they are expected to have gained a knowledge of the methods of studying insects, whether living or otherwise, a working hypothesis for the interpretation of facts so obtained, and a knowledge of one order, which will serve admirably as a basis for comparison in much of their future work. They then take up, more briefly, the relatives of the insects, the spiders and crustaceans, following these with the higher invertebrates, reaching the fish in April. This, for obvious reasons, is their last dissection. But with living material, and the beautiful preparations and stuffed specimens with which the laboratory is filled, they get a very general idea of the reptiles, birds, and mammals. This work is of necessity largely done by the students out of school hours. For example, on a stand on one of the tables are placed the various birds in season, with accompanying nests containing the proper quota of eggs. Books and pamphlets relating to the subject are placed near. Each student is given a syllabus which will enable her to study these birds intelligently indoors and out, if she wishes to do so. In the spring are taken up the orders of animals below the insect, and for the last lesson a general survey of all the types studied gives them the relationships of each to the other. THE COURSE OF STUDY PURSUED IN THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICE.--In addition to the plants and animals about them, the children study the weather, keeping a daily record of their observations, and summarizing their results at the end of the month. In connection with the weather and plants they study somewhat carefully the soil and, in this connection, the common rocks and minerals of Philadelphia--gneiss, mica schist, granite, sandstone, limestones, quartz, mica, and feldspar. As in the laboratories, so here the effort is made to teach the children to reason, to read the story told by the individual plant, or animal, or stone, or wind, or cloud. A special effort is made to teach them to interpret everyday Nature as it lies around them. For this reason frequent short excursions into the city streets are made. Those who smile and think that there is not much of Nature to be found in a city street are those who have never looked for it. Enough material for study has been gathered in these excursions to make them a feature of this work, even more than the longer ones which they take twice a year into the country. Last year I made not less than eighty such short excursions, each time with classes of about thirty-five. They were children of from seven to fourteen years of age. Without their hats, taking with them note-books, pencils, and knives, they passed with me to the street. The passers-by stopped to gaze at us, some with expressions of amusement, others of astonishment; approval sometimes, quite frequently the reverse. But I never once saw on the part of the children a consciousness of the mild sensation that they were creating. They went for a definite purpose, which was always accomplished. The children of the first and second years study nearly the same objects. Those of the third and fourth years review this general work, studying more thoroughly some one type. When they enter the fifth year, they have considerable causal knowledge of the familiar plants and animals, of the stones, and of the weather. But, what is more precious to them, they are sufficiently trained to be able to look at new objects with a truly "seeing eye." The course of study now requires general ideas of physiology, and, in consequences, the greater portion of their time for science is devoted to this subject. I am glad to be able to say, however, that it is not "School Physiology" which they study, but the guinea-pig and The Wandering Jew! In other words, I let them find out for themselves how and what the guinea-pig eats; how and what he expires and inspires; how and why he moves. Along with this they study also plant respiration, transpiration, assimilation, and reproduction, comparing these processes with those of animals, including themselves. The children's interest is aroused and their observation stimulated by the constant presence in the room with them of a mother guinea-pig and her child. Nevertheless, I have not hesitated to call in outside materials to help them to understand the work. A series of lessons on the lime carbonates, therefore, preceded the lessons on respiration; an elephant's tooth, which I happened to have, helped to explain the guinea-pig's molars; and a microscope and a frog's leg made real to them the circulation of the blood. In spite of the time required for the physiology, the fifth-year children have about thirty lessons on minerals; the sixth-year, the same number on plants; and the seventh-year, on animals; and it would be difficult to decide which of these subjects rouses their greatest enthusiasm. PRINCIPLES OF TAXATION.[6] BY THE LATE HON. DAVID A. WELLS. XX.--THE LAW OF THE DIFFUSION OF TAXES. PART I. No attempt ought to be made to construct or formulate an economically correct, equitable, and efficient system of taxation which does not give full consideration to the method or extent to which taxes diffuse themselves after their first incidence. On this subject there is a great difference of opinion, which has occasioned, for more than a century, a vast and never-ending discussion on the part of economic writers. All of this, however, has resulted in no generally accepted practical conclusions; has been truthfully characterized by a leading French economist (M. Parieu) as marked in no small part by the "simplicity of ignorance," and from a somewhat complete review (recently published[7]) of the conflicting theories advanced by participants one rises with a feeling of weariness and disgust. The majority of economists, legislators, and the public generally incline to the opinion that taxes mainly rest where they are laid, and are not shifted or diffused to an extent that requires any recognition in the enactment of statutes for their assessment. Thus, a tax commission of Massachusetts, as the result of their investigations, arrived at the conclusion that "the tendency of taxes is that they must be paid by the actual persons on whom they are levied." But a little thought must, however, make clear that unless the advancement of taxes and their final and actual payment are one and the same thing, the Massachusetts statement is simply an evasion of the main question at issue, and that its authors had no intelligent conception of it. A better proposition, and one that may even be regarded as an economic axiom, is that, regarding taxation as a synonym for a force, as it really is, it follows the natural and invariable law of all forces, and distributes itself in the line of least resistance. It is also valuable as indicating the line of inquiry most likely to lead to exact and practical conclusions. But beyond this it lacks value, inasmuch as it fails to embody any suggestions as to the best method of making the involved principle a basis for any general system for correct taxation; inasmuch as "the line of least resistance" is not a positive factor, and may be and often is so arranged as to make levies on the part of the State under the name of taxation subservient to private rather than public interests. Under such circumstances the question naturally arises, What is the best method for determining, at least, the approximative truth in respect to this vexed subject? A manifestly correct answer would be: _first_, to avoid at the outset all theoretic assumptions as a basis for reasoning; _second_, to obtain and marshal all the facts and conditions incident to the inquiry or deducible from experience; _third_, recognize the interdependence of all such facts and conclusions; _fourth_, be practical in the highest degree in accepting things as they are, and dealing with them as they are found; and on such a basis attention is next asked to the following line of investigations. It is essential at the outset to correct reasoning that the distinction between _taxation_ and _spoliation_ be kept clearly in view. That only is entitled to be called a tax law which levies uniformly upon all the subjects of taxation; which does not of itself exempt any part of the property of _the same_ class which is selected to bear the primary burden of taxation, or by its imperfections to any extent permits such exemptions. All levies or assessments made by the State on the persons, property, or business of its citizens that do not conform to such conditions are spoliations, concerning which nothing but irregularity can be predicated; nothing positive concerning their diffusion can be asserted; and the most complete collection of experiences in respect to them can not be properly dignified as "a science." And it may be properly claimed that from a nonrecognition or lack of appreciation of the broad distinction between taxation and spoliation, the disagreement among economists respecting the diffusion of taxes has mainly originated. With this premise, let us next consider what facts and experiences are pertinent to this subject, and available to assist in reaching sound conclusions; proceeding very carefully and cautiously in so doing, inasmuch as territory is to be entered upon that has not been generally or thoroughly explored. The facts and experiences of first importance in such inquiry are that the examination of the tax rolls in any State, city, or municipality of the United States will show that surprisingly small numbers of persons primarily pay or advance any kind of taxes. It is not probable that more than one tenth of the adult population or about one twentieth of the entire population of the United States ever come in contact officially with a tax assessor or tax collector. It is also estimated that less than two per cent of the total population of the United States advance the entire customs and internal revenue of the Federal Government. In the investigations made in 1871, by a commission created by the Legislature of the State of New York to revise its laws relative to the assessment and collection of taxes, it was found that in the city of New York, out of a population of over one million in the above year, only 8,920 names, or less than one per cent of this great multitude of people, had "any household furniture, money, goods, chattels, debts due from solvent debtors, whether on account of contract, note, bond, or mortgage, or any public stocks, or stocks in moneyed corporations, or in general any personal property of which the assessors could take cognizance for taxation"; and further, that not over _four_ per cent, or, say, forty thousand persons out of the million, were subject to any primary tax in respect to the ownership of any property whatever, real or personal; while only a few years subsequent, or in 1875, the regular tax commissioners of New York estimated that of the property defined and described by the laws of the State as personal property, an amount approximating two thousand million dollars in value was held in New York city alone. Later investigations show that this state of things has continued. Thus, in 1895, out of a population of about two million, it was estimated that only seventy-nine thousand, or not over four per cent of the inhabitants of the city, were subject to primary taxation, and that one half the whole amount collected in that year was paid by less than a thousand persons. In the city of Boston, where the tax laws are executed in the most arbitrary manner, the ratio of population directly assessed is somewhat greater, but aside from the poll tax, which is a per capita and not a property tax, only 7.27 per cent of residents paid a property tax in 1895 out of a population of 494,205. In one of the smaller cities of Massachusetts, where persons and property are capable of more thorough supervision than larger numbers and areas--namely, the city of Springfield, with a population of about fifty thousand--the report of its tax officials shows that for the year 1894-'95 the number of persons and corporations assessed on property (mainly real estate) was 7,745, or one for every 6.4 of its citizens, while 10,560 other citizens were assessed for a poll tax of two dollars only. Of the total amount of taxes assessed--namely, $735,948--the above number, 10,560, paid only $21,120; and this is the experience generally throughout the United States, as it will be in every country under a free popular government, where arbitrary inquisitions and arrests of persons and seizures of property are not allowed, and where a soldier does not practically stand behind every tax assessor and collector. The time (1871) when the personal investigations above referred to were made was when the masses of the city of New York were moved with indignation at the misuse and private appropriation by a few officials (Tweed and his associates) of the municipal revenues raised by taxation, under cover of instituting public improvements, and which finally led to their prosecution, imprisonment, or self-imposed exile; and the questions which naturally suggested themselves were: If only some forty thousand of the million in New York city paid the taxes, what interest had the other nine hundred and sixty thousand who never saw the face of a tax assessor or collector in opposing corruption? What, in an honest administration of the city government and in a reduction of taxes? Must it not be for the interest of the many that the expenditures of the State shall always be as large as possible? Must they not be benefited by exorbitant taxes on the owners of property, and a distribution of the money collected, even if stolen by corruptionists, but spent by them lavishly on enterprises that will furnish new opportunities for employment or amusement for the masses? Clearly, so far as any personal experience growing out of any _direct_ assessment and levy was concerned, ninety-six per cent of the population of the city had no more cause of personal grievance by reason of the unlawful taking of money from the city treasury than they would have had at the taking of an equivalent amount from the municipal treasuries of London, Paris, or any other city. The answer to these questions is to be found in the fact, as John Adams once remarked, that "if the Creator had given man a reason that is fallible, he has also impressed upon him an instinct that is sure." And this instinct teaches the masses everywhere, though they have never read a book on political economy, or heard any one discourse learnedly on the principles of taxation, that if taxes are increased, either by a lawful or unlawful expenditure of public money, they can not in any possible way avoid paying some portion of its increase; or, in other words, that increased taxes meant increased cost of living, through increased rents, increased price of fuel, clothing, and provisions, and possibly diminished opportunity to labor through such increased cost of the products of labor as would limit and restrict markets or consumption. In short, that taxes inevitably fall upon them through the increased price of all they consume, even if they pay nothing to the tax collector directly. A large proportion of the masses of the city of New York in 1871-'72, who paid no taxes directly, accordingly and spontaneously joined hands with the comparatively few of their fellow-citizens who did pay in resisting extravagance and corruption.[8] We are thus led up and forced to the recognition of two propositions, or rather principles, in respect to taxation that can not be invalidated. The _first_ is, that it is not necessary that a tax assessor or collector should personally assess and levy upon every citizen of a State or community in order that all should be compelled to contribute of his property for the support of such State or community; _second_, that there is an inexorable law by which every man must bear a portion of the burden of public expenditures, even though the official assessors take no direct cognizance of him whatever. The following incident may here be cited as instructive: In one of the recent official hearings before a legislative committee of one of the States, a strenuous advocate of the popular doctrine that there was and could be no such thing as equality in taxation except by rigidly taxing everybody directly for all his property, of every description, both real and personal, and that to not tax immediately and directly was, in at least a great degree, to exempt from taxation, expressed himself as entirely opposed to any system of restricting assessments to a comparatively few things, on the ground that it would be a recognition in the United States of a system which in Great Britain had ground down the masses into poverty. He, however, obtained some new light on the subject of nondiffusion by being reminded that if the masses of England had been grievously oppressed by taxation, it had been under a system of many years' standing, which never in any way brings the tax collector in direct contact with nineteen twentieths of the entire population; the customs taxes of Great Britain being practically levied on only four articles--spirits, tea, coffee, and tobacco; and the inland revenue also on practically four--spirits, beer, legacies and successions, and stamps (on deeds, insurance policies, bills of exchange, receipts, drafts, etc.). Generalizing, then, on the basis of so broad a fact, how illogical and unscientific was the assumption that whatever persons, property, or business are not taxed directly are exempt from taxation!--and yet the practical exemplification of such a system, in the case of England, was a most efficient instrumentality for grinding the masses of her people down to poverty. On the other hand, to generalize from the experience of an individual or a class in place of that of a nation or community, let us take the case of a person who passes all the year _in transitu_--moving backward and forward, for example, in a boat on the line of the Erie Canal, or between the head waters of the Mississippi and its mouth; a citizen of no one State, a resident in no one town, and buying all that he eats, drinks, and wears wherever he can buy cheapest. Does this man escape taxation because he has no permanent _situs_ (residence as a citizen), and is unknown by any assessor? If he does, then his occupation is more profitable to the extent of the taxes he avoids than is that of the individual who, following analogous occupations, resides permanently in one location, and pays taxes regularly; or else some notable, easily discernible cause, as undue competition to obtain situations, will account for his exemption. Let us next consider how practical experience definitely indicates the line of least resistance, in conformity with which those contributions of property or service which the State requires its citizens to make for its support, and are worthy of designation as taxes, diffuse themselves. Let us take first that form of indirect taxation which is known as customs, or taxes on imports, one from which the Federal Government of the United States has derived in recent years more than half of its revenue, and Great Britain more than one fourth of its total receipts from all forms of imperial taxes. That all such taxes as a rule diffuse themselves, and ultimately fall upon and are paid by final consumers, is capable of demonstration by a great variety of evidence. Every remission of customs duties on the imports into any country of its staple articles of consumption is followed by a reduction of cost approximately equal to such reduction, and a consequent increase in consumption. On the other hand, nothing is better settled than that an increase in customs taxes on imported articles as a rule increases prices and tends to reduce consumption. When Great Britain, in 1863, reduced her taxes (duties) on her imports of tea from 1_s._ 5_d._ to 1_s._ per pound, her importation of tea increased from 114,000,000 pounds in 1862 to 139,000,000 in 1866, and her per capita consumption during the same period from 2.70 pounds to 3.42 pounds; and again, when the duty was further reduced in 1865 from 1_s._ to 6_d._ per pound, the annual importations increased from 139,000,000 in 1866 to 209,000,000 in 1881, and the per capita consumption from 3.42 pounds to 4.58. When by the act of October, 1890, the tax was removed from the imports of crude sugars into the United States, the price of the same went down almost immediately to an equal extent in all American markets; while the consumption of sugar in the country increased from an average of about fifty-four pounds per capita in 1890 to more than sixty-seven pounds in 1892. A like result has attended a similar experience in respect to this in other countries, and especially in Great Britain. Thus, the aggregate consumption of sugar by the British people in 1844 was returned at 237,143 tons. A reduction of taxes on its importation in 1864 increased its domestic use to 528,919 tons; a reduction of fifty per cent on existing rates in 1870 made it 695,029 tons; another reduction of fifty per cent in 1873 carried up consumption to 779,000 tons; and when, in 1874, all taxes on the imports of sugar were abolished, the annual domestic consumption increased in little more than a year's period to 930,000 tons. On the other hand, when by the tariff act of 1890 an additional tax of half a cent per pound was imposed on the import of tin plate into the United States, tin plate went up to an equal extent in price all over the country; and so also on pearl buttons, linen goods, and other articles of foreign production on the importations of which the tariff taxes were largely increased. By the tariff act of 1890, also, eggs, which could formerly be imported into the United States free of duty, were made subject to a tax of five cents per dozen. Since then the price of eggs imported from Canada into districts of the United States within the same sphere of territorial competition has been increased to the American consumers to almost exactly the extent of the import tax to which they are subjected. Thus, when the price of eggs was ten and a half cents per dozen in Toronto, they were sixteen cents in Buffalo and sixteen and a half to seventeen cents in New York. Such a result would be unaccountable if the Canadian farmers paid the duty on eggs sent by them to the United States. It is interesting to here ask attention to the opinions entertained and expressed by those whose situation and experience have qualified them to speak with authority: "The duty constitutes the price of the whole mass of the article in the market. It is substantially paid on the article of domestic manufacture, as well as that of foreign production" (John Quincy Adams). "I said it, and I stand by it, that as a general rule the duties paid on imports operate as a tax upon the consumer" (John Sherman). Mr. Blaine, in his Twenty Years in Congress, says, speaking of the increase of duties on imports by the tariff act of July 14, 1862, that it "shut out still more conclusively all competition from foreign fabrics. The increased cost was charged to the consumer." Mr. McKinley, in 1890, in a report introducing a bill for revision of the tariff of the United States, in the direction of increased rates of duties on imports, said it was not the intent of the bill "to further cut down prices," that the people were "already suffering from low prices," and would not be satisfied "with legislation which will result in lower prices." In an elaborate opinion given by the New York Court of Appeals in 1851 (see vol. iv, New York Reports), in which there was no suspicion of any issue of free trade or protection, the courts, in carefully considering the relative powers of the legislature and the judiciary in respect to taxation, assumed the proposition that "_all duties on imported goods are taxes on the class of consumers_" to be in the nature of a self-evident truth or economic axiom. Henry Clay, in a celebrated speech in the United States House of Representatives in 1833, in advocacy of a protective tariff policy, candidly admitted that "in general it may be taken as a rule that the duty upon an article forms a portion of its price." But he subsequently qualified such admission by claiming that it does not follow that any consequent enhancement of its price is a tax on consumers, inasmuch as "directly or indirectly, in one form or another, all consumers of protected articles, enhanced in price," will get an equivalent. But this may be equally affirmed of all necessary and equitable taxation, and does not in any way antagonize the theory that the final incidence of the class of taxes under consideration falls on consumption. But, notwithstanding these conclusions and the incontrovertible evidence by which they are supported, not a few persons occupying places of great legislative influence, and no small part of the general public, hold to the view that taxes on imports are really in the nature of premiums paid by foreigners for the privilege of selling their goods in the markets of the importing country, and do not fall on its people who consume them. That means that if the foreigner has a yard of cloth, or other commodity, which he sells at home for one dollar, and the United States imposes a tariff of fifty cents on it, he will then sell it for export to America at fifty cents. There is no instance mentioned in history where this has ever been done, but history unfortunately is rarely taken into account by the public in the discussion of these questions. In this connection the following historical incident is interesting and instructive: In 1782 an attempt by the Congress of the Confederation of the several American States to provide a system of revenue to defray the general expenses of the Confederation by duties on imports, which then was not permissible, was blocked by the refusal of the State of Rhode Island to concur in it, the Legislature of that State unanimously rejecting the measure for three reasons--one of which was that it would bear hardest on the few commercial States, particularly Rhode Island, which in virtue of their relations with foreign commerce monopolize imports, and lightest on the agricultural States, that directly imported little or nothing. Congress appointed Alexander Hamilton to draft a reply to Rhode Island, and in his answer he relied mainly on what he regarded as an incontrovertible fact, that duties on imports would not prove a charge on an importing State, but on the final consumers of imports, wherever they may be located. If the theory and assumption so confidently and generally asserted are to be accepted as correct, that the foreigner pays the protective taxes which a country levies on its imports, and that they do not fall upon or are not paid by its people who consume them, then it must follow that to the extent that a country taxes its imports it lives at the expense of foreign nations; and that, as Great Britain is the country with which the United States has the largest foreign trade, it must pay the largest share of the customs taxes of the United States, or a good share of its annual revenue from all sources. Attention is further asked to the exact practical application of this theory. Thus, the United States in 1895 imported $36,438,196 worth of woolen manufactures, on which it assessed and collected duties (taxes) to the amount of $20,698,264, or 56.80 per cent of the value of such imports. Certainly this was a pretty heavy tax on foreign nations in respect to the sales of only one class of these commodities; but it represented but a tithe of what the tariff taxes of the United States, if paid by foreigners, cost them. Thus they had to sell their woolens to the people of the latter country at less than half their value in order to compensate for the 56.8 per cent tax. But a nation engaged in foreign trade can not as a rule have two prices for the product of its industries; or one price for what it sells at home and another and different price for what it sells to foreigners. So the fifty-six per cent deducted from the cost of the woolens sold by foreigners to the United States necessarily had to be deducted not only from so much of their product consumed at home, but also from what they sent for sale to all foreign countries. A further practical application of this theory is worthy of consideration. As Great Britain imposes no protective duties or taxes on its imports, it evidently can not collect anything from other nations by the system of taxation under consideration. On the other hand, the aggregate value of its exports sent to foreign nations during the year 1892 was $1,135,000,000, and if these several nations taxed this value at the average rate which the United States imposed in 1894 on all its dutiable imports--namely, fifty per cent--Great Britain obviously had to pay some $557,000,000 in that year for the support of foreign governments; and while this has been the experience of Great Britain for more than forty years of this century, she has as a nation been increasing in wealth during this whole period. Some of the recent official experiences of the Government of the United States that are pertinent to the topic under consideration are sufficiently curious to make them worthy of an economic record. In a speech introducing a bill into the United States House of Representatives, which subsequently resulted in the tariff act of 1890, the then chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means laid down the following proposition: "The Government ought not to buy abroad what it can buy at home. Nor should it be exempted from the laws it imposes upon its citizens." This would seem to warrant the characterization of a discovery that the United States had some reliable and important source of revenue independent of taxation,[9] and that, by compelling the application of a part of this income to the payment of taxes to itself, the Government is placed upon an equality with the citizens. A legitimate criticism on this proposition is that the idea that all the income of the Treasury is derived from the people, and that to transfer portions of this income from one official recipient to another can have hardly any other result than an additional cost of bookkeeping, seems never to have entered the mind of the speaker. Again, the United States tariff act of 1883 contained in its free list a provision for the admittance of "articles imported for the use of the United States, provided that the price of the same did not include the duty" imposed on such importations. Under the tariff act of 1890 this provision was stricken out of the statute, with the result that when the Government imported any articles for its own use which were subject to duties (as, for example, materials to be used in the National Bureau of Printing and Engraving), it was obliged, in virtue of its nonexemption from the laws which it imposed on its own citizens, to pay such duties itself. But as the Government has no authority to expend money for any purpose without the authority of Congress, the latter body accordingly authorized the Federal Treasury to appropriate money from its tax receipts and make payments with the same to the customhouse, which the customhouse was to immediately pay back into the Treasury. Just what process was gone through with to effect such a result the public was not informed, but probably the collector of customs drew his warrant on the Treasury, had the amount credited to his account, and then recredited to the Treasury. But, be this as it may, it is clear that the Government, under the conditions above stated, paid the tax on its imports; that the tax may be regarded in the light of a penalty on the Government for importing articles for its own use; and that the action of Congress in authorizing the Treasury to appropriate money for the payment of such taxes was a recognition or admission by that body that a tax upon imports neither puts anything _in_ nor takes anything _from_ the pocket of the foreigner. Does it not, moreover, invest with a degree of comicality a law enacted by the Congress of the United States for the purpose of taxing foreign importers, which necessitated the enactment by it of another law appropriating money to enable the United States to pay customs taxes every time on everything that it may import for its own use?[10] Finally, if the foreigner and not our citizens pays our customs taxes on imports, what is the object of placing by specific statutes any article on the free list? Why not let him continue to pay millions of taxes for us, as, for example, on sugar? FOOTNOTES: [6] It is fortunate that Mr. Wells had practically completed his essays on taxation before death put an end to his activity. The manuscript of two chapters was found among his papers--one on the Best Methods of Taxation, and the other on the Law of the Diffusion of Taxes, begun in this number. The first manuscript has some pages missing, and it has been thought best to postpone its publication, in the hope that the missing pages may be found. It is evident that the last touches were yet to be put upon the chapter on the diffusion of taxes--a chapter that was to sum up the theory of taxation developed by the writer. So much of that summary is contained in it as to make the meaning of Mr. Wells unmistakable, and its publication is further amply justified by the number of practical illustrations and happy application of theory to fact, in the selection and explanation of which the author excelled. The entire series, which has been running in the Popular Science Monthly for more than three years, will now be collected in a volume--a worthy memorial to one whose powers of popular exposition of abstract problems placed him among the first of economists in the United States. [7] On the Shifting and Incidence of Taxation, by Prof. Edwin R. Seligman, 1892. [8] The assertion would not be warranted that the masses of New York were wholly unanimous in condemning Tweed, for a portion of them were undoubtedly well content with the situation. He had curried favor with the very poor and ignorant by distributing coal and flour, and making ostentatious presents of money; and these "charities" are remembered to this day in the poorer parts of New York city, and Tweed is esteemed by many as the victim of injustice, and a man who suffered because he was the friend of the people. [9] Of the net ordinary receipts of the Federal Government ($385,819,000) in 1893, only about $12,000,000 was derived from sources that could not be regarded as taxes, and were mainly receipts from the sales and surveys of public and Indian lands ($4,120,000) and of other Government property. [10] In 1897 the merchant tailors of the United States, who ought to know something about the incidence of a custom tax on imported clothing, united in a petition to Congress asking that Americans returning from Europe be permitted to introduce only two suits of foreign-made clothes free of duty; and in support of their request they comment as follows on a ruling of the Treasury in respect to this matter: "Under this ruling it was possible to enter free of duty vast quantities of foreign-made garments which had never been actually in use, and which were so imported solely because there exists a relative difference of at least fifty per cent in values between the cost of made-up garments in the United States and Europe, thus saving to the purchaser of garments abroad one half of their actual value upon arrival within the United States duty free." But if the foreigner who made and sold the goods in question was liable to pay the duty on dutiable clothing, and attended to his duty, there would be no profit to the returning tourist in importing clothing free of duty. It is further evident also that American tailors agree in opinion with Alexander Hamilton that the consumers of imported articles pay the customs taxes. The records of the commercial relations between the United States and Canada are exceedingly instructive on this matter. They all show that for the products which the Canadian sends to the United States, and on which somebody pays the duty, he receives exactly the same price as for those products which he sends to England, on which nobody pays any duty. This experience is exactly the same as that of the farmers of the Northwestern States of the Federal Union, who usually get the same price for their wheat furnished to a Minnesota flour mill, or for shipment to free-trade England, as to countries like France and Germany, where heavy duties are assessed upon its import. The term "usually" is employed, for producers in the United States and Canada alike do not always get as large a price for the articles they export as for the same articles they sell to their fellow-countrymen. Again, if it be true, as the advocates of extreme protection assert, that the foreign exporter and not the consumer pays the duties on goods sent by him for sale in this country, how does it happen that it is not true concerning the farm produce and live stock exported from Canada? And why should American farmers be exempt from this rule in sending their grain to Europe? Has anybody ever known of England buying American products any cheaper in New York than France or Germany, and is it not also true that the French or German or Italian consumer usually pays at least the amount of the duty levied by his Government more for American products than his English competitor has, whose imports are subjected to no duty? During the period from 1854 to 1866 there was, under the reciprocity treaty, practically free trade between Canada and the United States in live stock, wool, barley, rye, peas, oats, and other farm products, while subsequent to 1866, when the reciprocity treaty had been repealed, duties were imposed on all these articles on their import from Canada into the United States. During the first period Canadian horses, for example, sold under free trade for shipment to the United States at from sixty-five to eighty-five dollars each, while during the years next subsequent to 1866 the value of the Canadian horses imported into the United States was returned at from ninety-two to one hundred and four dollars each; thus showing that the United States tariff did not force the Canadian horse breeders to lower their prices in order to compensate American purchasers for the duties exacted. And as regards the other products mentioned, the official data show that in no case did the imposition of duties under the United States tariff reduce the prices paid by American purchasers to the Canadian farmers for their products. These are very commonplace, very familiar, and very convincing facts which ought to silence all this talk about the foreign exporter or anybody else but the consumer paying the duty; but it is not at all probable that they will. OUR FLORIDA ALLIGATOR. BY I. W. BLAKE. An alligator is not an attractive creature. He has not a single virtue that can be named. He is cowardly, treacherous, hideous. He is neither graceful nor even respectable in appearance. He is not even amusing or grotesque in his ungainliness, for as a brute--a brute unqualified--he is always so intensely real, that one shrinks from him with loathing; and a laugh at his expense while in his presence would seem curiously out of place. His personality, too, is strong. Once catch the steadfast gaze of a free, adult alligator's wicked eyes, with their odd vertical pupils fixed full upon your own, and the significance of the expression "evil eye," and the mysteries of snake-charming, hypnotism, and hoodooism will be readily understood, for his brutish, merciless, unflinching stare is simply blood-chilling. Zoölogically the alligator belongs to the genus _Crocodilus_, and he has all the hideousness of that family, lacking somewhat its bloodthirstiness, although the American alligator is carnivorous by nature, and occasionally cannibalistic. Strictly speaking, however, the true alligator is much less dangerous than his relatives of the Old World, and he is correspondingly less courageous. One would suppose the saurians, or crocodilians, from their general appearance to be huge lizards, but the resemblance is superficial. The whole internal structure differs widely, and, subdivided into gavials, crocodiles, and alligators, they form a family by themselves which is widespread, extending into considerable areas of the temperate regions. All crocodilians are great, ungainly reptiles, having broad, depressed bodies, short legs, and long, powerful, and wonderfully flexible tails which are compressed--that is, flattened sideways. Upon the upper surface of the tail lie two jagged or saw-toothed crests, which unite near the middle of the appendage, continuing in a single row to the extremity. All have thick necks and bodies protected by regular transverse rows of long, horny plates or shields, which are elevated in the center into keel-shaped ridges, forming an armor that is quite bullet-proof. The throat, the under side of the neck, and belly are not thus protected, and it is at these places, as well as at the eyes, and also just behind the ears, that the hunter directs his aim. The principal points of difference between a gavial and a crocodile are these: the former has very long, slender jaws, set with twenty-seven teeth in each side of the upper jaw and with twenty-five teeth in the under, while at the extremity of the snout there are two holes, through which pass upward the lower large front teeth, but all the remaining teeth are free, and slant well outward; whereas a crocodile has a head that is triangular, the snout being the apex; a narrow muzzle, and canine teeth in the lower jaw, which pass freely upward in the notches in the side of the upper jaw. An alligator has a broad, flat muzzle, and the canine teeth of the lower jaw fit into sockets in the under surface of the upper jaw. It is strictly an American form of the family. Its feet being much less webbed, its habits are also less perfectly aquatic, and, preferring still or stagnant fresh-water courses or swamps, it is rarely found in tide-water streams. The crocodile, on the contrary, is commonly found in swift-running, fresh and salt water rivers. He is a sagacious brute, and ferocious, often attacking human beings without provocation; but the alligator, as a rule, is not disposed to fight, although in South America, where it goes by the name of _caiman_ or _cayman_, it grows to an enormous size, and is said to be fully as dangerous as the crocodile. There is also a variety of the family--that is, a true crocodile--found in Florida, but it is very rare, and smaller than its Asiatic relative. The mouths of all these reptiles, which are large and extend beyond the ears, present a formidable array of sharp, conical teeth of different sizes, set far apart in the crocodile and the alligator, some being enlarged into tusks. All are implanted in separate sockets, and form a single row upon each jaw. When a tooth is shed or broken, a new one promptly comes up beneath the hollow base of the old one; and in this way, all ready for the need, sometimes three or four waiting teeth, packed together like a nest of thimbles, may be seen in the jaw of a dead alligator. [Illustration: YOUNG PET ALLIGATOR. From photograph by E. L. Russell, Palm Beach.] The alligator is at best an awkward brute. Slow and ungainly upon land--although even there his powerful tail can, when necessary, assist the scuffling paws to an astonishing extent if the creature is in haste--he shows to better advantage in the water. There he turns his clumsy body with wonderful dexterity and swiftness, when, at the sight of a swimming muskrat or a wading dog, he instantly changes from what has resembled a drifting log idly floating upon the calm surface of the swamp, into a thing of life--fierce and horrible. The general food of an alligator is fish, turtles, and frogs, with an occasional heedless dog or fowl. A number of adult alligators will quickly deplenish a small, clear-water lake of its finny inhabitants, which statement to would-be Florida fishermen will readily account for the lack in many localities. There is also a curious belief in the South that the creature has an especial liking for a "darkey steak," and for this reason he is feared by the negroes. That he becomes carnivorous to a dangerous extent when pressed by hunger, there is no doubt, for, the supply of fish exhausted, he must look for larger game. Partially concealed by rubbish, or floating idly close to the bank--always only a short distance from his retreat--he so closely resembles an old and weather-worn log that no suspicion is aroused. Presently a razorback comes down the narrow trail that meanders through the scrub and passes close to the reptile. Let it pass between the alligator and the water--that is, between the creature and his _cave_--and the end has come. An alligator seldom misses, and one spring, leap, or plunge, or whatever the swift, clumsy movement may be called, and the wretched animal is seized and held fast, either by the nose or leg, as a rule. Then the struggle begins, for the razorback loves its life, despised pig of the Florida flatwoods though it is. Alligators drown their prey. Their own nostrils and throats are so arranged that they themselves can sink to the bottom without danger of suffocation, although their mouths, or rather their jaws, may be widely stretched with the body of their victim. Indeed, they can reascend to the surface to breathe without releasing the prize; and, as this power is so closely connected with their method of killing the larger animals, a description of the latter, repulsive though it is, may not be out of place. The teeth of an alligator are better adapted for crushing and crunching than for biting. Therefore, for him to eat a struggling animal would be difficult. Instinct teaches him that it must first be killed. To dispose of a dog or a chicken is a small matter, for when the alligator meets it upon the bank one strong, far-reaching sweep of the powerful tail tosses it far out upon the lake. The alligator simply follows, grasps the half-stunned creature in his jaws, and disappears beneath the surface, where he remains until all is quiet. With a larger animal, however, he proceeds differently, for the reason that a yearling, a colt, or a razorback is not so easily handled. First, therefore, a description of an alligator's cave must be given, since it is to this grewsome retreat that the hideous brute takes his booty. Selecting some spot where the water is deep--usually beneath some overhanging bank--an alligator excavates what is called a "cave." Any one, standing upon the border of a lake or swamp in Florida, may, all unconsciously, be directly over one of these places. He makes it sufficiently large to accommodate one or more of his kind, by dragging out the mud and roots with the strong claws or nails that arm his fore paws or legs. These "caves" serve in winter for hibernation, and at other times for the purpose that will be explained. Once in the water, then--to return to the unhappy razorback--the alligator does not rely wholly upon his teeth and jaws to hold the desperate animal. He can not yet sink, for the victim is too strong. It must first be drowned, and a furious struggle for the mastery then begins. By degrees the brute finally succeeds in dragging the animal out into water sufficiently deep to suit his purpose, and then he clasps it firmly with his paws, precisely like the hugging of a bear. He then begins to roll over and over. Now beneath the surface, now out, he turns and turns, first the alligator uppermost, then his prey, alternately, until the poor animal is drowned literally by inches. Before long the razorback weakens, his struggles lessen, and then the alligator sinks to the bottom, and when all motion has ceased he deposits the body in his cave, well pleased with the prospect of a full larder for some time to come. One might naturally ask just here whether or not this scene would be the same were a human being the victim. The reply would be--precisely. The alligator undoubtedly prefers his food in a partly decomposed condition, although it is an undecided point whether this preference arises from a natural taste, or for the reason that food in that state is softer and more easily torn apart. Whichever may be the case, Nature unasked supplies the remedy, and the alligator takes advantage of her assistance, and deposits his victim in his hiding place, confident that at the proper time it will rise to the surface in the condition best adapted to his needs. Although by nature the alligator is amphibious, he passes the greater part of his time upon land during the breeding season. At such times, also, he migrates from one clear-water lake or swamp to another, should he not find a mate in his own locality, and he may not infrequently be met in his overland journeyings. Alligators are not strictly gregarious, although large numbers are found in the same body of water; while, on the contrary, there will often be but one or two that will haunt a certain tract for a long period. During this season the bull alligator is very noisy, and his deep bellowing may be heard for a long distance. To state that this noise causes the ground to vibrate may seem an exaggeration, but the fact may easily be proved by visiting a swamp where the reptiles have congregated. The water in the vicinity will plainly show the jarring of the ground. This bellow is a thundering, rumbling sound; and when it is combined with the startling hisses, blowings, sighs, and deep-breathed snorts which the creature can produce at will, no one will be likely to dispute that his collection of diabolical noises is quite complete. During the period of incubation the female alligator is a devoted mother. She does not desert her nest from the time that the eggs are laid until they are hatched--lying concealed in the scrub close by--and she is naturally, at this time, most dangerous to approach, although her vigilance does not always save a portion of her unhatched progeny from the numerous enemies that have a fondness for alligator omelet. [Illustration: GROUP OF CAPTIVE ALLIGATORS. From photograph by O. P. Hareus, Jacksonville.] The nest is a large, well-rounded heap or mound, composed of sand and rubbish, which she drags and pushes together with her claws. Throughout this mound she deposits her eggs, from forty to seventy and over. These eggs resemble those of a goose, only that they are larger; they have a thick, tough shell, and are of about the same size at both ends. In about sixty days, the heat of the sun, combined with the warmth and moisture generated by the fermentation of the rubbish, completes the process of incubation, and the little ones begin to come forth. Forcing their way through the sand, they hurry down the sloping sides of the mound, straightway seeking the water by instinct. While these baby 'gators are thus kicking and flinging off their shell overcoats as they emerge from their incubator, perfect little duplicates of their mother--only that they are rather pretty in their clean, glossy, black or dark-brown skins, which have orange-colored stripes that completely ring their miniature tails and bodies--she wanders anxiously about, probably wondering how many of her family will succeed in running the very uncertain gantlet of life. For, eaten while in the egg stage by birds and animals, and swallowed by open-mouthed, expectant fishes, and by other alligators--often led, if the truth must be told, by the interesting father himself--as soon as they reach the water, the early days of an alligator are full of trouble. That enough escape to prevent extinction, however, goes almost without saying. Alligators are hunted for their teeth, which find a ready market when made up into pretty ornaments; and of late years extensively for their hides, which make a very handsome leather. For this purpose the older specimens are not valuable, their hides being too gnarled, knotty, and moss-grown to tan well. After ten or fifteen years the hide coarsens. It is always the skin from the under side of the body and head which is used, that from the back being so heavily armored with tough, horny plates and shields as to be practically useless. The flesh for food finds but few admirers. Like the eggs, it is permeated by a strong, musky flavor, too rank to find appreciation from a refined palate; but in some places the steaks from the reptile are eaten by the negroes and pronounced good. To successfully hunt the alligator requires experience, for quick work is necessary, the brute disappearing at the least suspicion of danger. Hunting by "jack" is the usual method pursued, for the light seems to charm the creature, so that he may be more easily detained until a properly directed bullet speedily puts an end to his existence. A professional alligator hunter, or a "'gator man," as he is called, leads a life full of adventure, but his business is upon the wane, since the fad for alligator leather is being pushed aside to make way for something later and more novel. Nevertheless, a description of his outfit may not be uninteresting. A most important adjunct to this outfit is the man who usually accompanies the 'gator man upon his expeditions. He might properly be called the silent partner, for his duty is to instantly and silently obey the different hand signals, meaning "To the right," "To the left," "Stop," "Back," "Hurry," "Forward," "Spurt," "Slow," given by the hunter, while standing erect in the bow of the boat, when out with the "jack." Indeed, upon his alertness depends much of the success or failure of the night's work. The other tools used by the 'gator man are a light, strong boat, a pair of light oars and a broad-bladed paddle with a four-foot handle, neatly coiled rope, a jack lamp furnished with a powerful reflector, an axe, a long, keen-bladed hunting knife, two guns (twelve-bore breech-loaders, for a heavy charge at one delivery is absolutely necessary), bags of ammunition, some strong chains, rawhide rope, and a 'gator pole. This last-mentioned "tool" is a stout pole about ten feet long, armed with a heavy hook of quarter-inch iron, bearing a barbed shank of two inches or more, and it is used for hauling the dead alligators from the bottom, for the creatures sink as soon as killed. The brilliant rays from the "jack" reveal a curious and a grewsome sight when thrown upon a bank or island upon which a group of the creatures have congregated. The shining waters of the swamp, so still and black at that hour of midnight; the hideous tangle of huge gray forms, as a dozen or more alligators, fairly intoxicated by the gleam of the mysterious light, steadfastly watch its incomprehensible presence. Gazing intently, their evil eyes blood-red in the glare from the powerful reflector, some lie motionless, others roar and hiss and snort with thrilling fierceness as the mystery deepens, incessantly arching their bodies, then alternately depressing them to the ground. Still others, crawling from beneath their companions, scuffle angrily to the front, and stand with jaws partly open--now and then slowly inflating their lungs, until their throats and sides puff out like bellows. Yet, strange to say, instinct seems to warn the mother alligator, for there she may be seen quietly creeping away with her young. Then, the loud reports from the guns, and the mystery is dispelled! The island is deserted, and the work of raising the successfully shot saurians begins. * * * * * Boards of rural engineering, syndicates of specialists organized in several of the countries of northern Europe to look after drainage and irrigation, have rendered great services to the populations of the country districts. With their aid 591 villages in Alsace-Lorraine were provided with water between 1881 and 1895, and 516 communes in Baden have been benefited by their assistance. The expense of the improvement has not exceeded $6.61 (33 francs) per inhabitant. The Agricultural Bureau in Prussia has in the past five years drawn the plans and directed the work of 554 hydraulic syndicates, covering a total surface of more than 600,000 acres. A numerous body of these agricultural engineers is formed every year in Germany, 517 students having pursued the course of the section of rural engineering in 1893 in the agronomical institutes of Bonn and Berlin alone. It is generally accepted that the spider is a solitary animal, that will tolerate no companions, even the male being in danger of being devoured by his female. But a spider--the _Stregodyphus gregarius_--is described as living in the Transvaal in communities, including males and females, young and old. The nests are sometimes voluminous and have partitions and numerous passages running through them. The spiders usually escape observation by wrapping themselves in dry leaves that hang from stems. THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY. (_Lowell Institute Lectures, 1896._) BY WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, PH. D., ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY; LECTURER IN ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. SUPPLEMENT.--THE JEWS (_continued_). Tradition has long divided the Jewish people into two distinct branches: the Sephardim, or southern, and the Ashkenazim, or north, European. Mediæval legend among the Jews themselves traced the descent of the first from the tribe of Judah; the second, from that of Benjamin. The Sephardim are mainly the remnants of the former Spanish and Portuguese Jews. They constitute in their own eyes an aristocracy of the nation. They are found primarily to-day in Africa; in the Balkan states, where they are known as Spagnuoli; less purely in France and Italy. A small colony in London and Amsterdam still holds itself aloof from all communion and intercourse with its brethren. The Ashkenazim branch is numerically far more important, for the German, Russian, and Polish Jews comprise over nine tenths of the people, as we have already seen in our preceding article. Early observers all describe these two branches of the Jews as very different in appearance. Vogt, in his Lectures on Man, assumes the Polish type to be descended from Hindu sources, while the Spanish alone he held to be truly Semitic. Weisbach[11] gives us the best description of the Sephardim Jew as to-day found at Constantinople. He is slender in habit, he says; almost without exception the head is "exquisitely" elongated and narrow, the face a long oval; the nose hooked and prominent, but thin and finely chiseled; hair and eyes generally dark, sometimes, however, tending to a reddish blond. This rufous tendency in the Oriental Jew is emphasized by many observers. Dr. Beddoe[12] found red hair as frequent in the Orient as in Saxon England, although later results do not fully bear it out.[13] This description of a reddish Oriental type corresponds certainly to the early representations of the Saviour; it is the type, in features, perhaps, rather than hair, painted by Rembrandt--the Sephardim in Amsterdam being familiar to him, and appealing to the artist in preference to the Ashkenazim type. This latter is said to be characterized by heavier features in every way. The mouth, it is alleged, is more apt to be large, the nose thickish at the end, less often clearly Jewish, perhaps. The lips are full and sensual, offering an especial contrast to the thin lips of the Sephardim. The complexion is swarthy oftentimes, the hair and eyes very constantly dark, without the rufous tendency which appears in the other branch. The face is at the same time fuller, the breadth corresponding to a relatively short and round head. Does this contrast of the traditional Sephardim and Ashkenazim facial types correspond to the anthropometric criteria by means of which we have analyzed the various populations of Europe? And, first of all, is there the difference of head form between the two which our descriptions imply?[14] And, if so, which represents the primitive Semitic type of Palestine? The question is a crucial one. It involves the whole matter of the original physical derivation of the people, and the rival claims to purity of descent of the two branches of the nation. In preceding papers we have learned that western Asia is quite uniformly characterized by an exceeding broad-headedness, the cephalic index--that is to say, the breadth of the head in percentage of the length from front to back--often rising to 86. This is especially marked in Asia Minor, where some of the broadest and shortest crania in the world are to be found. The Armenians, for example, are so peculiar in this respect that their heads appear almost deformed, so flattened are they at the back. A head of the description appears in the case of our Jew from Ferghanah on our second portrait page, 344. On the other hand, the peoples of African or negroid derivation form a radical contrast, their heads being quite long and narrow, with indices ranging from 75 to 78. This is the type of the living Arab to-day. Its peculiarity appears in the prominence of the occipital region in our Arab and other African portraits. Scientific research upon these Arabs has invariably yielded harmonious results. From the Canary Islands,[15] all across northern Africa,[16] to central Arabia itself,[17] the cephalic indices of the nomadic Arabs agree closely. They denote a head form closely allied to that of the long-headed Iberian races, typified in the modern Spaniards, south Italians, and Greeks. It was the head form of the ancient Phoenicians and Egyptians also, as has recently been proved beyond all question.[18] Thus does the European Mediterranean type shade off in head form, as in complexion also, into the primitive anthropological type of the negro. The situation being thus clearly defined, it should be relatively easy to trace our modern Jews, if, indeed, as has so long been assumed, they have remained a pure and undefiled race during the course of their incessant migrations. We should be able to trace their origin if they possess any distinctive head form, either to the one continent or the other, with comparative certainty. -------------------------+--------------------+----------+------------ AUTHORITY. | Place. | Number. | Cephalic | | | Index. -------------------------+--------------------+----------+------------ Lombroso, 1894 a |Turin, Italy. | 112 | 82.0 Weisbach, '77 |Balkan states. | 19 | 82.2 Majer and Kopernicki, '77|Galicia. | 316 | 83.6 Blechmann, '82 |W. Russia. | 100 | 83.2 Stieda, '83 (Dybowski) |Minsk, Russia. | 67 | 82.2 Ikof, '84 |Russia. | 120 | 83.2 Ikof, '84 |Constantinople. |17 crania | 74.5 Ikof, '84 |Crimea. |30 crania | 83.3 | | (Karaim).| Majer and Kopernicki,'85 |Galicia. | 100 | 81.7 Jacobs, '90 |England. | 363 | 80.0 Jacobs, '90 |England (Sephardim).| 51 | Talko-Hyrncewicz, '92 |Lithuania. | 713 | Chantre, '95 |Caucasia. | 34 | 85.0 Weissenberg, '95 |South Russia. | 100 | 82.5 Weissenberg, '95 |South Russia. |50 women. | 82.4 Glück, '96 |Bosnia (Spagnuoli). | 55 | 80.1 Livi, '96 |Italy. | 34 | 81.6 Elkind, '97 |Poland. | 325 |{Men, 81.9 | | |{Women, 82.9 Deniker, '98 |Daghestan. | 19 | 87.0 -------------------------+--------------------+----------+------------ During the last quarter of a century about twenty-five hundred Jews have submitted their heads to scientific measurement. These have naturally for the most part been taken from the Great Russian and Polish branch; a few observers, as Lombroso, Ikof, Jacobs, Glück, and Livi, have taken observations upon a more or less limited number from southern Europe. For purposes of comparison we have reproduced in our footnote a summary of all the results obtained thus far. Inspection of the table shows a surprising uniformity. Ikof's limited series of Spagnuoli from Constantinople, and that of the Jews from Caucasia and Daghestan, are the only ones whose cephalic index lies outside the limits of 80 to 83. In other words, the Jews, wherever found in Europe, betray a remarkable similarity in head form, the crania being considerably broader than among the peoples of Teutonic descent. As we know, the extremes of head form in Europe, measured by the cephalic index, extend from 74 to 89; we thus observe that the Jews take a place rather high in the European series. They are about like the northern French and southern Germans. More important still, they seem to be generally very closely akin in head form to the people among whom they reside. Thus, in Russia and Poland scarcely an appreciable difference exists in this respect between Jews and Christians. The same is true in Turin, while in the direction of Asia our Jews are as bullet-headed as even the most typical Armenians and Caucasians round about them. [Illustration: ARAB. Index, 76. MUSSULMAN, TUNIS. Index, 75. JEW, TUNIS. Index, 75. AFRICAN SEMITIC TYPES.] This surprising similarity of head form between the Jews of North and South Europe bears hard upon the long-accepted theory that the Sephardim is dolichocephalic, thereby remaining true to the original Semitic type borne to-day by the Arabs. It has quite universally been accepted that the two branches of the Jews differed most materially in head form. From the facial dissimilarity of the two a correlative difference in head form was a gratuitous inference. Dr. Beddoe observes that in Turkey the Spagnuoli "seemed" to him to be more dolichocephalic. A few years later Barnard Davis (1867) "suspected" a diversity, but had only three Italian skulls to judge from, so that his testimony counts for little. Then Weisbach (1877) referred to the "exquisitely" long heads of the Spagnuoli, but his data show a different result. Ikof, with his small series of crania from Constantinople, is the only observer who got a result which accords in any degree with what we know of the head form of the modern Semitic peoples. On the other hand, Glück in Bosnia and Livi in Italy find no other sign of long-headedness than a slight drop in index of a point or two. Jacobs, in England, whose methods, as Topinard has observed, are radically defective, gives no averages for his Sephardim, but they appear to include about eleven per cent less pure long-headed types than even their Ashkenazim brethren in London. This, it will be noted, is the exact opposite of what might normally be expected. This tedious summary forces us inevitably to the conclusion that, while a long-headed type of Sephardim Jews may exist, the law is very far from being satisfactorily established. Thus, from a study of our primary characteristic--the proportions of the head--we find our modern Jews endowed with a relatively much broader head than that of the average Englishman, for example: while the best living representative of the Semitic race, the Arab, has a head which is even longer and narrower than our own type. It is, in short, one of the longest known, being in every way distinctly African. The only modern Jews who even approach this type would seem to be those who actually reside to-day in Africa, as in the case of our two portrait types from that region. Two possible explanations are open to us: either the great body of the Jews in Europe to-day--certainly all the Ashkenazim, who form upward of ninety per cent of the nation, and quite probably the Sephardim also, except possibly those in Africa--have departed widely from the parental type in Palestine; or else the original Semitic type was broad-headed, and, by inference, distinctly Asiatic in derivation; in which case it is the modern Arab which has deviated from its original pattern. Ikof is the only authority who boldly faces this dilemma, and chooses the Asiatic hypothesis with his eyes open.[19] Which, we leave it to the reader to decide, would be the more likely to vary--the wandering Jew, ever driven from place to place by constant persecution, and constantly exposed to the vicissitudes of life in densely populated cities, the natural habitat of the people, as we have said; or the equally nomadic Arab, who, however, seems to be invariable in type, whether in Algeria, Morocco, the Canary Islands, or Arabia Felix itself? There can be but one answer, it seems to us. The original Semitic stock must have been in origin strongly dolichocephalic--that is to say, African as the Arabs are to-day; from which it follows, naturally, that about nine tenths of the living Jews are as widely different in head form from the parent stock to-day as they well could be. The boasted purity of descent of the Jews is, then, a myth. Renan (1883) is right, after all, in his assertion that the ethnographic significance of the word Jew, for the Russian and Danubian branch at least, long ago ceased to exist. Or, as Lombroso observes, the modern Jews are physically more Aryan than Semitic, after all. They have unconsciously taken on to a large extent the physical traits of the people among whom their lot has been thrown. In Algiers they have remained long-headed like their neighbors, for, even if they intermarried, no tendency to deviation in head form would be provoked. If, on the other hand, they settled in Piedmont, Austria, or Russia, with their moderately round-headed populations, they became in time assimilated to the type of these neighbors as well. Nothing is simpler than to substantiate the argument of a constant intercourse and intermixture of Jews with the Christians about them all through history, from the original exodus of the forty thousand (?) from Jerusalem after the destruction of the second temple. At this time the Jewish nation as a political entity ceased to exist. An important consideration to be borne in mind in this connection, as Neubauer suggests very aptly, is that opposition to mixed marriages was primarily a prejudice of religion and not of race. It was dissipated on the conversion of the Gentile to Judaism. In fact, in the early days of Judaism marriage with a nonbeliever was not invalid at all, as it afterward became, according to the Jewish code. Thus Josephus, speaking of the Jews at Antioch, mentions that they made many converts, receiving them into their community. An extraordinary number of conversions to Judaism undoubtedly took place during the second century after Christ. As to the extent of intermarriage which ensued during the middle ages discussion is still rife. Renan, Neubauer, and others interpret the various rigid prohibitions against intermarriage of Jews with Christians--as, for example, at the church councils of 538, 589, at Toledo, and of 743 at Rome--to mean the prevalent danger of such practices becoming general; while Jacobs, Andree, and others are inclined to place a lower estimate upon their importance. Two wholesale conversions are known to have taken place: the classical one of the Khozars, in South Russia, during the reign of Charlemagne, and that of the Falashas, who were neighboring Arab tribes in Yemen. Jacobs has ably shown, however, the relatively slight importance of these. It is probable that the greatest amount of infusion of Christian blood must have taken place, in any event, not so much through such striking conversions, as insidiously through clandestine or irregular marriages. [Illustration: FERGHANAH, TURKESTAN. HÉRAULT, FRANCE. ELIZABETHGRAD, RUSSIA. SPAGNUOLI, BOSNIA. ELIZABETHGRAD, RUSSIA. JEWISH TYPES.] We find, for example, much prohibitive legislation against the employment of Christian servants by Jews. This was directed against the danger of conversion to Judaism, by the master, with consequent intermarriage. It is not likely that these prohibitions were of much avail, for, despite stringent laws in Hungary, for example, we find the archbishop of that country reporting in 1229 that many Jews were illegally living with Christian wives, and that conversions by thousands were taking place. In any case, no protection for slaves was ever afforded. The confinement of the Jews strictly to the Ghettos during the later centuries would naturally discourage such intermixture of blood, as also the increasing popular hatred between Jew and Christian; but, on the other hand, the greater degree of tolerance enjoyed by the Israelites even during this present century would be competent speedily to produce great results. Jacobs has strenuously, although perhaps somewhat inconclusively, argued in favor of a substantial purity of the Jews by means of a number of other data--such as, for example, by a study of the relative frequency of Jewish names, by the supposed relative infecundity of mixed marriages, and the like. Experience and the facts of everyday observation, on the other hand, tend to confirm us in the belief that racially no purity of descent is to be supposed for an instant. Consider the evidence of names, for example. We may admit a considerable purity, perhaps, to the Cohns and Cohens, legitimate descendants of the Cohanim, the sons of Aaron, early priests of the temple. Their marital relations were safeguarded against infusion of foreign blood in every possible way. The name is, perhaps, in its various forms, the most frequent among Jews to-day. But how shall we account for the equally pure Jewish names in origin, such as Davis, Harris, Phillips, and Hart? How did they ever stray so far from their original ethnic and religious significance, unless the marital bars were lowered to a large degree? Some of them certainly claim a foremost position numerically in our Christian English directories. We have an interesting case of indefinite Jewish delimitation in our portraits. The middle portrait at page 341 is certainly a Jewish type. Dr. Bertholon writes me that all who saw it immediately asserted it to be a Jew. Yet the man was a professed Mussulman, in fact, even though his face was against him. There is, as we have sought to prove, no single uniform type of head peculiar to the Jewish people which may be regarded as in any sense racially hereditary. Is this true also of the face? Our first statement encounters no popular disapproval, for most of us never, perhaps, happened to think of this head form as characteristic. But the face, the features! Is this another case of science running counter to popular belief? The first characteristic to impress itself upon the layman is that the Jew is generally a brunette. All scientific observers corroborate this impression, agreeing in that the dark hair and eyes of this people really constitute a distinct racial trait. About two thirds of the Ashkenazim branch in Galicia and Russia, where the general population is relatively quite blond, is of the brunette type, this being especially marked in the darker color of the hair. For example, Majer and Kopernicki,[20] in Galicia, found dark hair to be about twice as frequent as the light. Elkind,[21] in Warsaw, finds about three fifths of the men dark. In Bosnia, Glück's observations on the Sephardim type gave him only two light-haired men out of fifty-five. In Germany and Austria[22] this brunette tendency is likewise strongly emphasized. Pure brunette types are twice as frequent in the latter country, and three times as frequent in Germany, among Jewish as among Christian school children. Facts also seem to bear out the theory, to which we have already alluded, that the Oriental Jews betray a slightly greater blond tendency, thus inclining to rufous. In Germany also the blond tendency becomes appreciably more frequent in Alsace-Lorraine, a former center of gravity of the nation, as the map in our previous article has shown. This comparative blondness of the Alsatian Jew is not new, for in 1861 the origin of these same blondes was matter of controversy. Broca believed them to be of northern derivation, while Pruner Bey traced them from a blondish Eastern source. The English Jews seem also to be slightly lighter than their continental brethren, even despite their presumably greater proportion of Sephardim, who are supposed to be peculiarly dark. As to the relative red blondness of the Oriental Jew, the early observations of Dr. Beddoe, and those of Langerhans (1873) as to the blue eyes and red-brown hair of the Druses of Lebanon, do not seem to be borne out; or, as Jacobs puts it, the "argument may be dismissed with costs." Certainly the living Semites are dark enough in type, and the evidence of the sacred books bears out the same theory of an original dark type. Thus "black" and "hair" are commonly synonymous in the early Semitic languages. In any case, whatever the color in the past, we have seen that science corroborates the popular impression that the Jews as a people are distinctively of a brunette type. This constitutes one of the principal traits by which they may be almost invariably identified. It is not without interest to notice that this brunetteness is more accentuated, oftentimes, among the women, who are, the world over, persistent conservators of the primitive physical characteristics of a people.[23] Secondly, as to the nose. Popularly the humped or hook nose constitutes the most distinctive feature of the Jewish face. Observations among the Jews, in their most populous centers, do not, however, bear out the theory. Thus Majer and Kopernicki (1885), in their extended series, found only nine per cent of the hooked type--no greater frequency than among the Poles; a fact which Weissenberg confirms as to the relative scarcity of the convex nose in profile among his South Russian Jews. He agrees, however, that the nose is often large, thick, and prominent. Weisbach (1877) measured the facial features of nineteen Jews, and found the largest noses in a long series of people from all over the earth; exceeded in length, in fact, by the Patagonians alone. The hooked nose is, indeed, sometimes frequent outside the Jewish people. Olechnowicz found, for example, over a third of the noses of the gentry in southeast Poland to be of this hooked variety. Running the eye over our carefully chosen series of portraits, selected for us as typical from four quarters of Europe--Algeria, Russia, Bosnia, and the confines of Asia--representing the African, Balkan Spagnuoli, and Russian Ashkenazim varieties, visual impression will also confirm our deduction. The Jewish nose is not so often truly convex in profile. Nevertheless, it must be confessed that it gives a hooked impression. This seems to be due to a peculiar "tucking up of the wings," as Dr. Beddoe expresses it. Herein lies the real distinctive quality about it, rather than in any convexity of outline. In fact, it often renders a nose concave in profile, immediately recognizable as Jewish. Jacobs[24] has ingeniously described this "nostrility," as he calls it, by the following diagrams: Write, he says, a figure 6 with a long tail (Fig. 1); now remove the turn of the twist, and much of the Jewishness disappears; and it vanishes entirely when we draw the lower continuation horizontally, as in Fig. 3. Behold the transformation! The Jew has turned Roman beyond a doubt. What have we proved, then? That there is in reality such a phenomenon as a Jewish nose, even though it be differently constituted from our first assumption. A moment's inspection of our series of portraits will convince the skeptic that this trait, next to the prevalent dark hair and eyes and the swarthy skin, is the most distinctive among the chosen people. [Illustration: _Fig. 1._] [Illustration: _Fig. 2._] [Illustration: _Fig. 3._] Another characteristic of the Jewish physiognomy is the eyes. The eyebrows, seemingly thick because of their darkness, appear to be nearer together than usual, arching smoothly into the lines of the nose. The lids are rather full, the eyes large, dark, and brilliant. A general impression of heaviness is apt to be given. In favorable cases this imparts a dreamy, melancholy, or thoughtful expression to the countenance; in others it degenerates into a blinking, drowsy type; or, again, with eyes half closed, it may suggest suppressed cunning. The particular adjective to be applied to this expression varies greatly according to the personal equation of the observer. Quite persistent also is a fullness of the lips, often amounting in the lower one almost to a pout. The chin in many cases is certainly rather pointed and receding, Jacobs to the contrary notwithstanding. A feature of my own observation, perhaps not fully justified, is a peculiar separation of the teeth, which seem to stand well apart from one another. But a truce to speculations. Entering into greater detail, the flat contradictions of different observers show that they are vainly generalizing from an all too narrow base of observations. Even the fancied differences in feature between the two great branches of the Hebrew people seem to us to be of doubtful existence. Our portraits do not bear it out. It seems rather that the two descriptions of the Ashkenazim and Sephardim types which we have quoted denote rather the distinction between the faces of those of the upper and the lower classes. Enough for us to know that there is a something Jewish in these faces which we instantly detect. We recognize it in Rembrandt's Hermitage, or in Munkaczy's Christ before Pilate. Not invariable are these traits. Not even to the Jew himself are they always a sure criterion. Weissenberg gives an interesting example of this.[25] To a friend, a Jew in Elizabethgrad, he submitted two hundred and fifty photographs of Russian Jews and Christians in undistinctive costume. Seventy per cent of the Jews were rightly chosen, while but ten per cent of the Russians were wrongly classed as Jews. Of what concern is it whether this characterization be entirely featural, or in part a matter of expression? The first would be a matter of direct heredity, the second hypothesis partakes more of the nature of a characteristic acquired from the social environment. Some one--Jacobs, I think--speaks of it as the "expression of the Ghetto." It certainly appears in the remarkable series of composite Jewish portraits published in his monograph. It would not be surprising to find this true. Continued hardship, persecution, a desperate struggle against an inexorable human environment as well as natural one, could not but write its lines upon the face. The impression of a dreary past is deep sunk in the bodily proportions, as we have seen. Why not in the face as well? We are now prepared, in conclusion, to deal with what is perhaps the most interesting phase of our discussion. It is certainly, if true, of profound sociological importance. We have in these pages spoken at length of the head form--primary index of race; we have shown that there are Jews and Jews in this respect. Yet which was the real Jew it was not for us to decide, for the ninety-and-nine were broad-headed, while the Semite in the East is still, as ever, a long-headed member of the Africanoid races. This discouraged our hopes of proving the existence of a Jewish cephalic type as the result of purity of descent. It may indeed be affirmed with certainty that the Jews are by hereditary descent from early times no purer than most of their European neighbors. Then we discovered evidence that in this head form the Jews were often closely akin to the people among whom they lived. In long-headed Africa they were dolichocephalic. In brachycephalic Piedmont, though supposedly of Sephardim descent, they were quite like the Italians of Turin. And all over Slavic Europe no distinction in head form between Jew and Christian existed. In the Caucasus also they approximate closely the cranial characteristics of their neighbors. Hypnotic suggestion was not needed to find a connection here, especially since all history bore us out in our assumption of a large degree of intermixture of Gentile blood. Close upon this disproval of purity of type by descent came evidence of a distinct uniformity of facial type. Even so impartial an observer as Weissenberg--certainly not prejudiced in favor of cephalic invariability--confesses this featural unity. How shall we solve this enigma of ethnic purity, and yet impurity, of type? In this very apparent contradiction lies the grain of comfort for our sociological hypothesis. The Jew is radically mixed in the line of _racial descent_; he is, on the other hand, the legitimate heir to all Judaism as a matter of _choice_. It is for us a case of purely artificial selection, operative as ever only in those physical traits which appeal to the senses. It is precisely analogous to our example of the Basques in France and Spain. What we have said of them will apply with equal force here. Both Jews and Basques possessed in a high degree a "consciousness of kind"; they were keenly sensible of their social individuality. The Basques primarily owed theirs to geographical isolation and a peculiar language; that of the Jews was derived from the circumstances of social isolation, dependent upon the dictates of religion. Another case in point occurs to us in this connection. Chantre,[26] in a recent notable work, has shown the remarkable uniformity in physical type among the Armenians. They are so peculiar in head form that we in America recognize them at once by their foreshortened and sugar-loaf skulls, almost devoid of occiput. They too, like the Jews, have long been socially isolated in their religion. Thus in all these cases, Basques, Armenians, and Jews, we have a potent selective force at work. So far as in their power lay, the individuality of all these people was encouraged and perpetuated as one of their dearest possessions. It affected every detail of their lives. Why should it not also react upon their ideal of physical beauty? and why not influence their sexual preferences, as well as to determine their choice in marriage? Its results became thus accentuated through heredity. But all this would be accomplished, be it especially noted, only in so far as the physical traits were consciously or unconsciously impressed upon them by the facts of observation. There arises at once the difference between artificial selection in the matter of the head form and that concerning the facial features. One is an unsuspected possession of individuality, the other is matter of common notice and, it may be, of report. What Jew or Christian, till he became anthropologist, ever stopped to consider the shape of his head, any more than the addition of a number of cubits to his stature? Who has not, on the other hand, early acquired a distinct concept of a Jewish face and of a distinctly Jewish type? Could such a potent fact escape observation for a moment? We are confirmed in our belief in the potency of an artificial selection, such as we have described, to perpetuate or to evolve a Jewish facial type by reason of another observation. The women among the Jews, as Jacobs[27] notes, in confirmation of our own belief, betray far more constantly than the men the outward characteristics peculiar to the people. We have already cited Weissenberg's testimony that brunetteness is twice as prevalent among Russian Jewesses as among the men. Of course this may be a matter of anabolism, pure and simple. This would be perhaps a competent explanation of the phenomenon for physiologists like Geddes and Thompson. For us this other cause may be more directly responsible. Artificial selection in a social group, wherein the active choice of mates falls to the share of the male, would seem to tend in the direction of an accentuated type in that more passive sex on which the selective influence directly plays. At all events, observations from widely scattered sources verify the law that the facial individuality of a people is more often than otherwise expressed most clearly in the women. Thus, for example, the women betray the Mongol type more constantly than the men among the Asiatic tribes of eastern Russia.[28] On the other hand, Mainof, best of authority, confirms the same tendency among those of Finnic descent.[29] The _Setti Communi_ in northern Italy still preserve their German language as evidence of a historic Teutonic descent. They seem to have lost their identity entirely in respect of the head form,[30] but Ranke[31] states that among the women the German facial type constantly reappears. This, I confess, is not altogether easy to understand, unless the Lombards, of whom these colonies are supposedly the remnants, brought their native women with them across the Alps. Perhaps, however, not bringing their women, a new Teutonic resemblance has been evolved out of whole cloth. A better example than this is offered among the Hamitic peoples of Africa north of the Sahara. These peoples, from Abyssinia to Morocco, really belong to the white races of Europe. Among nearly all their tribes the negroid traits are far more accentuated among the women, according to Sergi.[32] It is not necessary to cite more specific testimony. The law occupies a respected place among anthropologists. That the Jews confirm it, would seem to strengthen our hypothesis at every point. Our final conclusion, then, is this: It is paradoxical, yet true, we affirm. The Jews are not a race, but only a people, after all. In their faces we read its confirmation, while in respect of their other traits we are convinced that such individuality as they possess--by no means inconsiderable--is of their own making from one generation to the next, rather than as a product of an unprecedented purity of physical descent. FOOTNOTES: [11] 1877, p. 214. [12] 1861 b, pp. 227 and 331. [13] Glück, 1896 a. Jacobs, 1890, p. 82, did not find a trace of it in the Sephardim congregation in London. See Andree, 1878, in this connection. [14] The cephalic index by which we measure the head-form is merely the breadth of the head in percentage of its length from front to back. The index rises as the head becomes relatively more broad. [15] Verneau, 1881 a, p. 500. [16] Pruner Bey, 65 b; Gillebert d'Hercourt, 1868, p. 9; and especially Collignon, 1887 a, pp. 326-339; Bertholon, 1892, p. 41; also Collignon, 1896 b. [17] Eliséev, 1883. [18] Bertholon, 1892, p. 43; Sergi, 1897 a, chapter i, and even more recently Fouquet, 1896 and 1897, on the basis of De Morgan's discoveries. [19] Compare Brinton, 1890 a, p. 132, and 1890 b, for interesting linguistic data on the Semites. [20] 1877, pp. 88-90; 1885, p. 84. [21] Centralblatt für Anthropologie, vol. iii, p. 66. [22] Virchow, 1886 b, p. 364; Schimmer, 1884, p. xxiii. [23] Weissenberg, 1895, p. 567, finds brunettes twice as frequent among the south Russian Jewesses as among the men. [24] 1886 a, p. xxxii. [25] 1895, p. 563. [26] Recherches anthropologiques dans l'Asie Occidentale (Archives du Museum d'histoire naturelle, Lyons, vol. vi, 1895). [27] 1886 a, p. xxviii. [28] Sommier, 1887, reprint, p. 116. Cf. Zograf, 1896, p. 50, on crania from the sixteenth century in Moscow. [29] Congrès int. des sciences géographiques, Paris, 1875, p. 268. [30] Livi, 1896 a, pp. 137 and 146. [31] Beiträge zur Anth. Bayerns, vol. ii, 1879, p. 75. [32] Africa, Antropologia della stirpe Camitica, Torino, 1897, p. 263. TRUE TALES OF BIRDS AND BEASTS. BY DAVID STARR JORDAN. I.--SEÑOR ALCATRAZ. He was just a bird when he was born, and a very ugly bird at that. For he had big splay feet, with all the toes turned forward and joined together in one broad web, and his wings were thick and clumsy, and underneath his long bill there was a big red sack that he could fill with fishes, and when it was full he could hardly walk or fly, so large the sack was and so great was his appetite. But he kept the sack well filled and he emptied it out every day into his stomach, and so he grew very soon to be a large bird, as big as a turkey, though not as fat, and each day uglier than ever. But one morning, when he was walking out on the sand flat of the Astillero at Mazatlan, Mexico, where he lived, he saw a big fish which had been left by the falling tide in a little pool of water. It was a blue-colored fish with a big bony head, and no scales, and a sleek, slippery skin. He did not know that it was a _bagre_, but he thought that all fishes were good to eat, so he opened his mouth and slipped the fish, tail first, down into his pouch. It went all right for a while, but when the fish woke up and knew he was being swallowed, he straightened out both of his arms, and there he was. For the bagre is a kind of catfish, and each arm is a long, stiff, sharp bone, or spine, with a saw edge the whole length of it. And all the bagre has to do is just to put this arm out straight and twist it at the shoulder and then it is set, and no animal can bend or break it. And it pierced right through the skin of the bird's sack, and the bird could not swallow it, nor make it go up nor down, and the bagre held on tight, for he knew that if he let go once he would be swallowed, and that would be the last of him. So the bird tried everything he could think of, and the fish held on, and they kept it up all day. In the afternoon a little boy came out on the sands. His name was Inocente, and he was the son of Ygnacio, the fisherman of Mazatlan. And Inocente took a club of mangrove and ran up to the struggling bird and struck it on the wing with the club. The blow broke the wing, and the bird lay down to die, for with a broken wing and a fish that would not go up nor down, there was no hope for him. When Inocente saw what kind of a fish it was, he knew just what to do. He reached down into the bird's sack and took hold of the fish's spines. He gave each one a twist so that it rolled over in its socket, the upper part toward the fish's head, and then they were not stiff any more, but lay flat against the side of the fish, just as they ought to lie. Then the fish knew that it had found a master, and lay perfectly still. So the bird gave a great gulp, and out the bagre went on the sand, and when the tide came up it swam away, and took care never to go again where a bird could get hold of it. And the bird with the broken wing had learned something about fishes, too. But he could not fly away, so he waited to see what the boy was going to do. The boy took the bird into his boat and brought him home. And old Ygnacio put a splint on his wing and covered it with salve, and by and by it healed. But the bone was set crooked, and the bird could not fly very well. So the boys called the bird Señor Alcatraz, which is the Spanish for Mr. Pelican, and Señor Alcatraz and all the boys and dogs and goats became good friends, and all ran about on the streets together. And when the boys would shout and the dogs bark, all Señor Alcatraz could do was to squawk and hiss and open his big mouth and show the inside of his red fish sack. And when the boys would go fishing on the wharf, Alcatraz would go, too, and he would stow away the fishes in his pouch as fast as the boys could catch them. But if they caught a bagre fish, he would turn his head the other way and then run away home just as fast as his splay feet would take him. And when the men drew the net on the beach Alcatraz would splash around inside the net, catching whatever he could, and having a great deal of fun in his clumsy pelican fashion. Then he would run along the street with the boys, squawking and flapping his wings and thinking that he was just like the rest of them. And if you ever go to Mazatlan, ask for Dr. Rogers, and he will show you the way to Ygnacio's cabin on the street they call Libertad. And there in the front yard, in a general scramble of dogs, goats, and little Indian boys, you will see Señor Alcatraz romping and squabbling like the best of them. And you will know which he is by the broken wing and the red sack under his throat. But if you say "Bagre" to him, he will run under the doorstep and hide his face till you go away. II.--THE LITTLE BLUE FOX. Once there was a little blue fox, and his name was Eichkao, and he was a thief. So he built his house down deep among the rocks under the moss on the Mist Island, and his little fox children used to stay down among the rocks. There they would gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, whenever they heard anybody walking over their heads. Eichkao and his fox wife used to run all round over the rocks to find something for them to eat, and whenever Eichkao saw anybody coming he would go clin-n-n-g, cling-g-g, and his voice was high and sharp, just like the voice of a buzz saw. One day he walked out on the rocks over the water and began to talk to the black sea parrot, whose name is Epatka, and who sits erect on his carelessly built nest with one egg in it, and wears a great big bill made of red sealing wax. He has a long white quill pen stuck over each ear, and over his face is a white mask, so that nobody can know what kind of a face he has, and all you can see behind the mask is a pair of little foolish twinkling white glass eyes. What the two said to each other I don't know, but they did not talk very long, for in a few minutes when I came back to his house among the rocks Eichkao was gone, and there lay out on the bank a bill made of red sealing wax, a white mask, and two little white quill pens. There were a few bones and claws and some feathers, but they did not seem to belong to anything in particular, and the little foxes in the rocks went gurgle, gurgle, gurgle. One day I lay down on the moss out by the old fox walk on the Mist Island, and Eichkao saw me there and thought I was some new kind of walrus which might be good to eat, and would feed all the little foxes for a month. So he ran around me in a circle, and then he ran around again, then again and again, always making the circle smaller, until finally the circle was so narrow that I could reach him with my hand. As he went around and around, all the time he looked at me with his cold, gray, selfish eye, and not one of all the beasts has an eye as cruel-cold as his. When he thought that he was near enough, he gave a snap with his jaws, and tried to bite out a morsel to take home to the little foxes; but all I offered him was a piece of rubber boot. And when I turned around to look at him he was running away as fast as he could, calling klin-n-g-g, klin-n-g, klin-n-g, like a scared buzz saw all the time as he went out of sight. And I think that he is running yet, while the little foxes still go gurgle, gurgle under the rocks. III.-HOW THE RED FOX WENT HUNTING. (_With acknowledgment to Mr. A. C. Bassett, of Menlo Park, California._) Once on a time there was a great tall rabbit, the kind the miners call a "narrow-gauge mule"; but he was not a mule at all, and his real name was "Jack Rabbit." His home was in Montana, and he lived by the river they call the Silver Bow. He could run faster than any of the other beasts, and he went lickety-clip, lickety-clip, bounding over the tops of the sagebrush, for he had no brush of his own to carry. And there was a red fox who lived on the Silver Bow, too, and he went hunting because he wanted rabbit for dinner. But while he could run very fast he could not bound over the tops of the sagebrush, for his own brush, which he always carried with him because he was so proud of it, would catch on the thorns of the other kinds of brush and so would keep him back. So he sent for his cousin, the coyote, to come and help him. Now, the coyote lived out in the country by Emigrant Mountain. He was not proud at all, for he hadn't much of a brush, and nobody flattered him for his beauty. But for all that the coyote could run very fast, as he had Indian blood in him. The only trouble was that his hind feet ran faster than his fore feet. So he had to stop every little while and run sidewise to unkink himself and give his fore feet a chance to catch up. When the coyote came up the rabbit was bounding along through the bushes, going around in a great circle so that he always came back to the same place, for that is the way of the rabbit-folk. So the fox lay low and hid his brush in the sage, and the coyote followed the rabbit around the circle. And he just kept up with the rabbit all the way, for the rabbit wasn't scared, and didn't run very fast. And when they had gone once around the circle the rabbit passed the hidden fox. Then the fox got up and chased him, and was only a few feet behind. And the coyote stopped and ran sidewise for a while to unkink himself, and then he lay down in the bushes and waited for the rabbit to come back. The rabbit was much scared when he saw the fox close behind him, so he ran and bounded very fast, and the fox kept falling behind because he had his long brush to carry. But he kept at it just the same, and when the rabbit came around the circle to where he started there was the coyote waiting for him. The rabbit had to make a great jump to get over the coyote's head. Then they went around again and the coyote kept close behind all the way, and the rabbit began to get tired. When the coyote's hind legs got tangled up then the fox was rested, and he took up the chase; and so they kept on, each one taking his turn, except the rabbit, who had to keep his own turn all the time. When the race was over there was nobody there to see how they divided up what they caught. But I saw the coyote the next day, and he looked so very empty that I think that the red fox must have taken all the rabbit meat for himself. Most likely he left his cousin just the ears for his part, with a rabbit's foot to carry in his pocket for good luck. GLACIAL GEOLOGY IN AMERICA. BY PROF. DANIEL S. MARTIN. Under this title the vice-president of Section E (Geology) of the American Association--Prof. Herman L. Fairchild, of the University of Rochester, New York--gave an admirable _résumé_ of the whole history, progress, and scope of the study of ice phenomena in North America, as the opening address before the section at the recent Boston meeting. Apart from the interest of the subject in itself considered, this address was a model of what such addresses should be. While strictly scientific, without the least attempt at rhetorical effect, it was at the same time so clear, so well arranged and so simple in language, that any intelligent auditor could enjoy it and grasp it, and carry away a distinct impression of the gradual development and present status of this great department of geological study. Professor Fairchild's choice of his subject was happy also in its fitness to the occasion, as covering almost exactly the half century of the life of the association, though going back indeed a few years further, into the period of the earlier society which developed into the association in 1848. The great body of phenomena comprised under the term "drift," and the smoothed and scratched surfaces of rock, etc., had been by no means unnoticed by the early students of American geology, but they were attributed to violent and widespread water action, and were spoken of in general as "diluvial" formations. When the agency of ice began to be recognized, it was regarded as that of floating and stranding bergs; and this view for a long time contended with the theory of glacial action, even when the latter had been adopted and advocated by eminent students of the subject. The first allusion to drifting ice as the agent of transportation of bowlders, etc., appears to have been made as early as 1825, by one Peter Dobson, of Connecticut, in a letter to Prof. Benjamin Silliman, of Yale College. Sir Roderick Murchison, who became the great champion of this view, credits Mr. Dobson's letter with giving him the first suggestion of it. Twelve years later, in 1837, T. A. Conrad made the earliest reference to land ice as the cause of our drift phenomena; he does this in very striking words when read in the light of the studies and determinations of later years, although of course imperfectly and vaguely. Meanwhile, however, Agassiz and others had been working among the glaciers of the Alps, and their views as to a great period of former extension, in Europe and the British Isles, were finding some acceptance abroad. In this country, Prof. Edward Hitchcock, in his address as retiring president of the Association of American Geologists, in 1841, gave a broad and careful review of the drift phenomena in eastern North America, and referred to the work of Agassiz, Buckland, and Lyell with great interest, as having given him "a new geological sense" in observing these phenomena, and said, with prophetic foresight, "Henceforth, glacial action must form an important chapter in geology." But the time was not ripe for the understanding and acceptance of the glacial theory as a later generation has come to know it. The studies of Agassiz and his _confrères_ had been among glaciers upon mountain slopes, and hence, while many of the drift phenomena were strikingly accounted for, others were not and could not be. So it came to pass that, while Professor Hitchcock and others in this country were strongly impressed, they were not satisfied, and held for years an uncertain position. The glacial indications conformed in some aspects to the theory, but not in others; the striæ and groovings, instead of following valleys, all had a general trend to the southward, and the bowlders were carried across great depressions and deposited upon heights. How could these conditions be due to glaciers? Could ice flow uphill, or move long distances over level areas? These and other phenomena, such as the peculiar distribution of drift material, in "drumlin" ridges and the like, had no explanation. Hence, notwithstanding President Hitchcock's utterances above quoted, and his similar Postscript on the subject of drift and moraines, appended in the same year to his volume on the Geology of Massachusetts, we find him in 1843, when again addressing the Association of Geologists, adopting a modified tone, dwelling upon these points of difficulty, and seeking a compromise view, which he called "glacio-aqueous." The great influence also of Murchison and Lyell had been thrown into the scale in favor of the iceberg theory, and this fact doubtless had much to do with the slow development of true conceptions. Lyell visited America in 1842, and was present at the American Geologists' meeting, advocating the floating-ice doctrine, to which most of our observers already leaned; and so the views of Agassiz and the glacial school had to wait for a decade before they found general acceptance or even audience. This, we may note in passing, is but one marked instance out of many in the history of science, wherein the personal influence of eminent leaders has obstructed and retarded the advance of true knowledge. The whole recognition of the Cambrian system, as pre-Silurian and distinct, was suppressed and prevented for many years by Murchison's intense opposition to the views of Sedgwick. Similar facts might be cited in this country, did we care to mention names. Science can not claim, as is sometimes asserted, that it possesses or imparts any entire exemption from the influence of authority, and bestows complete independence from the tendency to "swear to the words of a master." Of the New York geologists, Vanuxem alone, in his Geology of the Third District, 1842, inclined to the glacial theory; the others--Emmons, Mather, and Hall--advocated floating ice, the latter urging as a chief objection the absence of any great northern highlands from which glaciers could extend southward. Prof. Henry D. Rogers advocated De la Beche's view, of great catastrophic waves or _débacles_ of water and ice, produced by sudden uplifts of the floor of a circumpolar ocean, and sweeping southward with tremendous power over the middle latitudes. These views were presented by him in 1844, at the Washington meeting of the geologists, and are to us a most curious illustration of the old "cataclysmic" phase of geological conceptions. Two years later Agassiz came to America, and at once set about studying the ice evidences here, first in the White Mountains and then around the Great Lakes. At the first meeting of the American Association, in 1848, he presented his views as to the identity of our phenomena with those studied by himself, Desor, and Guyot abroad. His views were not very warmly received, however, and he did not attempt their public presentation again for some years, turning his attention more to the field of zoölogy. In 1850, in a work on Lake Superior, he refers somewhat sharply to the prejudice that seemed to prevail in relation to this subject. From this time, however, the aqueous theories began to be less strongly presented; and a new generation of geologists was coming on, largely under the training of Guyot and Agassiz, and more open to their observed results. C. B. Adams, in 1850, presented a view nearly akin to that adopted by Dana a few years later, of an elevation of the high northern latitudes, resulting in a southward-moving glacial sheet, and a subsequent depression connected with its retreat, to account for the stratified deposits. Professor Dana accepted this doctrine in his presidential address before the association in 1855, adding the "Terrace period" of partial re-elevation. From this time he became the leader of the American glacialists, and his great Manual, issued in 1862, carried these views into all the colleges of the country. In 1857 Prof. Edward Hitchcock published an important treatise on Surface Geology, particularly of the Connecticut Valley, in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. In this paper he noted the distinction, so important and now so familiar, between local striæ and those with the general southward course of the "drift." Two years later his son, Prof. C. H. Hitchcock, extended this distinction widely over New England. In 1863 the report of progress of the Geological Survey of Canada gave an extended review of the surface geology, by Prof. Robert Bell, in which he fully adopted the glacial theory. Meantime, also, Professor Ramsay, in England, had abandoned the iceberg doctrine for that of glaciers. In 1866 and 1867 important papers appeared by Charles Whittlesey, and one by Edward Hungerford; this last, read before the association, adopted the general views of Agassiz, with some important limitations now generally received. In the same year the revised edition of Dana's Manual gave yet fuller statement and wider diffusion to the generally accepted views as held to-day. Professor Fairchild sums up this historical sketch as comprising four periods--viz., prior to 1841, undisputed reign of diluvial hypotheses; 1841 to 1848, suggestion and discussion of glacial hypotheses; 1849 to 1866, gradual acceptance of the latter view; from 1867 onward, development of glacial geology. From this point, the address was occupied with consideration of the various aspects of the subject as studied and wrought out during the past twenty years by numerous observers. These are grouped under four main heads, each with various subdivisions--viz., (1) the ice sheet, as to its area, its thickness, its centers of dispersion, its migration of centers, etc.; (2) the ice period, as to its cause, its divisions, its duration, its distance in time; (3) the interpretation of special phenomena, such as moraines, drumlins, eskers, "kettles," and the like, valley drift, terraces, loess, etc.; and (4) existing glaciers, as discovered on our high mountains of the far West, and as studied in closer relation to the ancient phenomena in the great ice cap of Greenland and the immense glacier development in Alaska. It is impossible to go into a detailed review of the numerous points of interest covered in this discussion. Suffice it to say that one who heard or who reads it finds an admirably clear and condensed account of all the problems and phenomena that have been and that are now encountered in the study of glacial geology on this continent, and of their gradual interpretation and solution by the combined labors of many students. The progress of knowledge over this wide field, advancing step by step, amid conflicting views and perplexing conditions, is beautifully shown, and leaves a very striking impression on the mind, of the difficulties and the successes of scientific research. Nor is Professor Fairchild disposed to claim too much or assert too strongly. He recognizes that, with all that has been met and mastered, there are still questions unsolved, and laurels to be won by others. Among the facts brought out, a few may be briefly alluded to. The early abandonment of Agassiz's original view of a vast extension of the polar snow caps, and the recognition of separate centers of continental glaciation, now distinctly determined as three in number--a western, a central, and an eastern--the former being the earliest, and the others following in succession; the recognition by the Western geologists of the twofold character of the Glacial epoch, as also determined in western Europe, but less markedly traceable in our Eastern States, though now generally admitted; in close relation to this the determination of the line of the great terminal moraine, traced by successive observers from the Atlantic seaboard to Minnesota, and the subsequent recognition of an older, eroded, and fragmentary morainal "fringe," marking the line of the earlier ice sheet, somewhat beyond the later. With regard to the actual distance of the last glacial retreat, as expressed in years, Professor Fairchild is both cautious and frank. He notes the general consensus of recent observers toward a much shorter period than was formerly supposed--from five to ten or perhaps fifteen thousand years. At the same time, there are many elements of uncertainty involved, and the problem is by no means settled. The Niagara gorge, so long looked upon as a possible chronometer, grows more complicated as it is further studied; the rate of erosion has evidently varied much with the volume of water carried by the river; and this, in turn, has varied with the changes of level, and consequently of drainage routes, in the basin of the Great Lakes. There have been times when only the Erie waters flowed through the Niagara outlet, the upper lake drainage passing eastward independently, until a gradual northern rise of the land, which is proved to be still going on, turned the entire drainage into the present St. Clair route from Lake Huron into Lake Erie, and so through Niagara. This point leads us to digress for a moment from the address under consideration to allude to a very interesting department of study that is now growing into prominence--to wit, the restoration of pre-glacial geography and hydrography, and the genesis of our existing river and lake systems throughout the northern part of the country. The discussions and results in regard to Niagara and the Great Lakes are somewhat familiar, but the work on the rivers and smaller lakes is not so widely known. Professor Fairchild himself has done much in relation to the "central lakes" of New York State; and one very interesting paper of this kind on The Development of the Ohio River was read before the section by Prof. William G. Light, of Granville, Ohio, besides many papers by others on similar topics. The work done within a few years upon the glaciers of Arctic America has proved peculiarly fruitful in results. Here, again, the whole subject is reviewed historically, and the name and work of each observer are impartially noted. Much of the difficulty encountered by the glacial theory arose, as we have seen, from the fact that only mountain glaciers had been studied, so that many of the phenomena produced by continental ice could not be explained. Professor Fairchild says, as to this aspect: "More has been learned of the structure, behavior, and work of our ancient ice sheets by the study of the Alaskan glaciers during the last ten years, and especially by the study of the Greenland ice cap during the last four years, than by all the study of the Alpine glaciers for the seventy years since they have been observed." Prominent among those who have worked in this field are the names of Professors Chamberlain and Salisbury in Greenland, and Professors H. F. Reid and I. C. Russell in Alaska; other important contributors are Prof. W. P. Blake, the pioneer geologist in Alaska, 1867; Dall and Baker, who discovered and named the Malaspina Glacier in 1874; and John Muir, 1878, for whom the Muir Glacier was named; Wright, Baldwin, Schwatka, Libbey, and others, and Barton and Tarr in Greenland. Professor Russell, in 1891, recognized and named a type of glacier that was before unknown. In his studies on the Malaspina he found a condition that does not occur, so far as yet observed, anywhere else than on the northwest coast of America; this is where a number of mountain glaciers debouch upon a low, flat coast plain, and unite to form a great sluggishly moving sheet of ice. This particular development he called the Piedmont type. In closing his address, Professor Fairchild remarks that the word "theory," as applied to the glacial origin of the drift and its phenomena, may and should now be abandoned. The subject has passed beyond the stage of theory, and is as well understood and as clearly established as the volcanic origin of the cone of Vesuvius or the sedimentary origin of stratified rocks. * * * * * In the center of the artificial platforms or platform mounds, characteristic of many of the ancient Peruvian towns, Mr. Bandelier has observed features that recall forcibly the New Mexican Indian custom of giving to each inanimate object its heart. In some instances, says Mr. F. W. Hodge, in his paper, round columns formed a kind of an interior niche; in others, a small chamber contained urns or jars with maize meal. A remarkable and very significant feature was observed by the explorer in a partly ruined mound at Chanchan. The core of this structure when opened showed two well-preserved altars of adobe. In such interior apartments, figurines of metal, clay, or wood are almost invariably found; and the materially valuable finds made in Peruvian ruins in earlier times came from the "heart" of one or the other of the artificial elevations described. MODERN STUDIES OF EARTHQUAKES. BY GEORG GERALAND. The investigation of earthquakes, seismology, has become in the present day an independent subject of scientific interest. In lands where earthquakes are frequent, as in Italy and Japan, seismic observations have been officially systematized over the whole country, with central and branch stations at which the work is never still. A net of seismic observations of all nations is being more and more closely woven over the whole earth, and there are yearly and monthly collations of observations of even the slightest shocks. Seismic literature is, therefore, nearly inexhaustible, and theory and praxis are in constant vogue; in short, seismics has grown to be a separate branch of science, and to demand independent treatment, calling for the energy and labor of many students. What gives it so great importance? What is the condition of our present knowledge and its history? What will be reached in the future through the competition of the nations? These questions possess a high scientific as well as culture-historical interest. We here attempt to answer them. The first really scientific description of an earthquake--that of Lisbon--with its far-reaching accompanying phenomena, was the work of the greatest contemporary thinker, Kant, and it is not too much to say that his paper opened a new epoch in the knowledge of earthquakes. That terrible event and the extreme terror which it caused everywhere were followed in 1783 by the likewise extremely destructive earthquake of Calabria. The attention of the people was thus directed to this mysterious mighty activity of the earth, and was kept especially lively in Italy, the country of Europe most subject to earthquakes. The newly rising science of geology therefore found in the last third of the last century in these phenomena a problem of prominent importance. Geologists were the first to apply themselves to seismic studies, as the most widely current explanation of the phenomena is still a geological one. The scientific interest of the question prevailed over the practical. More attentive observation was given to earthquakes, the accounts of them scattered through the ancient chronicles were collated, and the already very numerous seismic notes of great earthquake manifestations--such as those by Hoff, Perry, Mallet, Volger, Fuchs, etc.--constituted a very important factor in the study. One of the earliest results of the inquiry was to show that directly perceptible earthquakes are not perceptible everywhere; that they are most common on the great upfoldings of the earth's crust on the mountain chains, such as the Andes, Alps, and Himalayas; and that, further, they are connected with the shores of the Pacific, the Antilles, and the Mediterranean, and with places also where great breaches and various disturbances are evident; that they are at home likewise in volcanoes; and that they are most frequent in the northern hemisphere, and when the earth is nearest to the sun. The descriptions of powerful shocks furnish us evidence of a double movement of the earth's crust--an alternate up-and-down vibration and an often very marked wave motion. The destruction which earthquake shocks and waves inflict on buildings, and the remarkably rapid and wide spread of the tremblings over the surface of the earth, have been very diligently inquired into; and when, in 1856, Naples and Calabria were visited by a great earthquake, an English investigator, Robert Mallet, made a full study of it, and believed that by comparing the direction of the rents in walls and buildings, which were assumed to correspond with that of the tremblings, he could identify the focus of the shocks in the earth's interior, and the course of the wave movement over its surface--a view which has long prevailed in seismology. Still more important was the work of the geologist Karl von Seebach, of Göttingen, on the great earthquake in central Germany, which kept the northern part of the plains of the upper Rhine, around Mayence, Grossgerau, and Darmstadt, disturbed for several years after 1869. Von Seebach's chief effort was to obtain the most exact data possible as to the time of the beginning of the shocks from as many places as possible, from which he might deduce the spot where the shocks began and were strongest, the epicenter which lay directly over the point in the earth's interior where the movement originated. From them he also deduced a series of localities where the shocks were simultaneous and of equal intensity, which could be connected by certain nearly circular lines called _homoseists_. As the distance of these from the epicenter increases, the undulations take place later and are weaker, and facts may be thus furnished from the velocity of propagation of the shocks can be computed. The observations are also important because von Seebach undertook through a simple mathematical calculation to determine from them the situation of the forces of the subterranean point where the undulations originated. With these investigations, the process of annihilating time and space by steam and the applications of electricity was also going on. By the effect of this great event, the conditions of earthquake investigation were revolutionized. A comparative study of the phenomena, fundamental and essential to a science of seismology, on the basis of material furnished from all the regions of the earth, was rendered possible. An earthquake service was organized in Japan, by J. Milne, of England; one had already been organized for a considerable time in Italy, and the results obtained at the two places of observation so widely separated corresponded. Japanese, Indian, and American earthquakes could be simultaneously studied in Italy, Russia, Germany, and England; and thus a new, hitherto undeveloped field was gained, the scope of which has already extended far beyond its merely geological aspect. This could have happened only through another advance that has been made in our century, which has first rendered a real seismology, a scientific knowledge of the seismic conditions of the earth, possible through the immense development of technics, by which a system of instrumental observation of earthquakes was established. Only through this could the acquisitions of recent times be utilized. While formerly observations were macroscopic and touched only earthquakes that could be directly felt, they now cover essentially microscopic tremors of the earth's crust, of less than a thousandth of a millimetre, that are wholly imperceptible to human senses; and we can read them, enlarged at our pleasure, on our photographically registering seismometers. We already had instruments which correctly indicated the time of the beginning and possibly the direction of a shock; but we needed and have invented new instruments--various sorts of horizontal and vertical pendulums--for the observation and representation of the whole course of the movement. The vertical indicating instruments are much used in Italy, and the horizontal ones almost exclusively in England, Japan, and Germany. The horizontal pendulum was invented in Germany in 1832 by Hengler, adapted to scientific use by Professor Zöllner, of Leipsic, and afterward applied in that form by English, German, and other observers. The most complete shape and the one best adapted to extremely delicate seismic observations was given to it by the late German astronomer and geographer Dr. Ernst von Rebeur Paschnitz, of Merseburg. Having undergone a few small changes, fixed in a threefold combination it serves as our most sensitive and accurate seismometer. Its movements and its very exact time markings are photographically represented. The pendulum box is only forty centimetres in diameter. In consequence of its convenience and cheapness, its self-action and its serviceability, it is becoming adopted more and more generally as an international instrument. Microseismic investigation and its wide extension over the earth have raised seismology another step during the last twenty years, so that it may be said that really exact seismic research began with it. Modern seismology has confirmed many of the older results, such as the localization of earthquakes on the shores of the Pacific, the Mediterranean and in the mountain chains of the earth, and also the importance of homoseists and the epicenter. It has, on the other hand, greatly modified the former estimates of the velocity of propagation of the shocks. It has cast much doubt on speculations as to the seasons in which earthquakes are more or less frequent; and it has demonstrated the inadequacy of former methods of determining the central focus. It has furthermore brought us much that is new. First is the momentous fact that the earth's crust is never at rest; that it undergoes a multitude of very diversified movements besides those of the earthquake. Thus a periodical swelling, a flood wave, is produced by the attraction of the moon; and other heavings are induced by the daily and annual course of the sun's heat. But such movements and other similar ones do not come within the scope of this article. Real earthquakes, or movements that originate in the depths of the earth, also appear in very different forms. First are the directly perceptible shocks, from the powerful ones that create great disturbances to the merely local ones often hardly remarked. Of the immediate workings of these shocks, microscopic instruments have taught us nothing essentially new. But very many macroscopic movements, often continuing for several hours, but which are not felt, have been revealed, that have been shown in many instances to be distant effects of other strong earthquakes; effects which are sometimes propagated over the whole surface of the earth. There is, furthermore, another series of movements, only partly explained as yet, of a peculiar sort: first, small, quickly passing disturbances, which appear in the photographic reproductions of the curves as larger or smaller knots, and which are regarded with great probability as distant effects of minor seismic movements most likely imperceptible anywhere. They can not be local earthquakes, for they give entirely different curves. There also appear, with considerable regularity, at certain seasons of the year, very slow movements of the ground, called pulsations; and finally the multitude of vibrations called tremors, which assume various forms. Sometimes they come as forerunners, accompaniments, or followers in close association with those great disturbances that originate in distant earthquakes; sometimes as shocks of minute intensity in separate groups, which it has not yet been possible to account for; and in other cases they are traced to the shaking of the ground by the wind. It is hardly necessary to observe that the seismic apparatus should be most carefully guarded against disturbance by the movements of trade, wagons, etc., so that the problem shall not be complicated by them. The theory of the nature of earthquake shocks, their transmission and their velocity, has been set in a new light by the labors of Augustus Smith, of Stuttgart. From some calculations of their velocity made by G. von Nebeur, it is found that the earthquake of April 17, 1889, in Tokio, Japan, was perceived in Potsdam, Prussia, nine thousand kilometres distant, in thirteen minutes; that of October 27, 1894, in Santiago, Chili, in Rome, eleven thousand five hundred kilometres distant, in seventeen minutes, and in Charkow, Russia, two thousand kilometres from Rome, between one and two minutes later. It reached Tokio at the same time, after a transit of seventeen thousand four hundred kilometres. Still another task of modern seismology is the investigation of earthquakes at sea, or seismic movements of the bottom of the ocean, and the manner in which they are propagated through the water, of which a very fine cartographic representation has been published by Dr. C. Rudolph, of Strasburg. The question of the origin of earthquakes stands in constant connection with this external development of seismology. It is significant and remarkable that the answers to it, though they may be given differently from different scientific points of view, are always consistent in one fact, that earthquakes are a phenomenon of the whole earth. Some of the investigators seek to explain them, aside from those that occur in volcanic regions, as a part of the great changes in the earth's crust which have taken place during the last geological epoch, and are still, perhaps, taking place; others find their seat and cause in the unstable condition of the interior of the earth, beneath its solid and red-hot envelope. The former explanation, the older and heretofore the prevalent one, is called the tectonic theory, because it is based, leaving out volcanic earthquakes, on the structure of the earth's crust; the second, which is gaining ground, and requires no separate explanation for volcanic earthquakes, may be called, reviving an expression used by L. Fr. Naumann, of Leipsic, the Plutonic theory, because it goes down into the unexplored depths of the earth. If seismic manifestations depend upon the action of the whole earth, a single explanatory principle, as is always the case with great natural phenomena, is not sufficient, and tectonic as well as Plutonic earthquakes must be recognized, and the reverse. The tectonic theory is of geological origin, and properly supplanted the older Plutonic theory of Humboldt, which was only an unverified supposition. As a whole it was first worked out by Otto Volger in 1858, after various similar hypotheses had been set forth by other investigators. He was confirmed by the independent researches of Rudolf Hoernes, Edouard Suess, and most of the German, French, and English seismologists. Their theory supposes that there are large hollow spaces in the crust of the earth, into which immense falls of material take place, and that these are the cause of a part of the earthquakes; that the crust of the earth is often and variously disturbed in consequence of the constant contraction dependent upon the cooling of the globe. It is broken up into separate masses which in their turn are dislocated horizontally or vertically; is lifted up and folded into immense mountain ranges, the arches of which, breaking, may again suffer dislocation. Thus continuous action in movement of masses and foldings is constantly going on in the earth. Edouard Suess, the distinguished Austrian geologist, has indeed constituted a special earthquake type to correspond with this type of mountain formation. Since, in consequence of this condition, tension is present everywhere in the crust of the earth, it may come to pass that it shall be relieved by a distant earthquake, and another earthquake, which may be called a relay or transmission earthquake, be produced thereby. Hence we have, besides the volcanic, the landfall, the tectonic (in the strict sense), and the transmission earthquakes. The sources of earthquake force lie, then, according to this theory, in the incompleteness of the earth's crust, the effects of gravity, and the earth's loss of heat. And is the supposition not very probable? Do we not see similar processes going on over the whole earth, in the shape of earthquakes, landslides, fissures, subsidences of land, and the like? And as the Alps were lifted up, and the plain of the Rhine was depressed between the Vosges and the Black Forest, may not mightier dislocations, breaches, and destruction occur? Why may not the processes which took place in the earlier epochs of the earth's history and were so powerful in the more recent Tertiary be still going on? All this seems so plausible that, with a few exceptions, the theory has been almost universally agreed in. I briefly mention here Falb's theory, which, accepting the earlier views, ascribes earthquakes to periodical swellings of the fiery fluid interior of the earth, only because of the effect it has had on the public in connection with some wholly unscientific predictions. More worthy of consideration is the theory of Daubrée, the late distinguished master of French and especially Alsatian geology, who did not attribute the similar phenomena of volcanic and nonvolcanic earthquakes to different causes, but maintained that all earthquakes were produced by superheated steam issuing from surface waters. But this theory needs no refutation. There are, however, some serious objections to the tectonic theory of earthquakes, plausible as it may seem. In order to weigh them as we ought, we must as briefly as possible construct a picture of the constitution of the earth's interior. The average distance from the earth's surface to its center is sixty-three hundred and seventy kilometres. The temperature of the earth increases with the depth, at the rate, on a moderate estimate, of about one degree centigrade for every forty metres. Hence, at a depth of one thousand kilometres we would have a temperature of 25,000° C.; even if we call it only 15,000°, we should expect to find there only gases, and those in a simple state, for with that heat all the compound gases would be dissociated. The zone of fluidity for all rocks lies at a depth of about one hundred kilometres, where the temperature is 2,500° C. While the crust of the earth is between 2.5 and three times as heavy as distilled water at 4° C., its specific gravity rises toward the center of the earth to more than eleven, or about fourfold. Iron has a specific gravity of 7.8, or about threefold that of the crust of the earth; but the specific gravity of the earth at the greatest depth is considerably higher than this. Hence must arise an enormous pressure, steadily increasing toward the center, where, according to the English geophysicist, the Rev. Osmond Fisher, it reaches about three million atmospheres to the English square inch. It results from these conditions that with the enormous pressure and heat, and specific gravity, the interior of the earth consists of dissociated gases compressed to great rigidity, which exert an immense counter-pressure--for their tendency is always to expand. They pass out continuously into a zone of fluid matter, and this again is held by the pressure of the interior gases in a like compact condition. Thus a very high pressure still prevails in the lower parts of the solid crust of the earth, which is so high that even the most solid rocks there are in a latent plastic condition--that is, they behave toward different forces like plastic clay, and like it can be deformed without breaking. Rents, slides, caves, and clefts are out of the question there; things of that kind can exist only in the upper strata. This fact constitutes a very strong objection to the tectonic theory of earthquakes, and thus the very depths of the earth speak against it. We have already mentioned that K. von Seebach estimated the depth of the earthquake focus from the movements of the waves, and found it not very great. But his estimates, as Prof. August Schmidt has shown, rest upon physically incorrect premises; according to Schmidt's more correct calculation, the center of the Charleston earthquake of 1886 lay at a depth of one hundred and twenty kilometres, where there can be no question of tectonic movements, because general fluidity is reached at one hundred kilometres. Further, the earthquake at Lisbon, if the tectonic theory is valid, might, taking the character of the region into consideration, have been occasioned by a slide. But how large must the plunging mass, how deep the plunge or slide have been to produce such shocks as destroyed Lisbon and shook Europe to beyond Bohemia! Where can we find room in the closely compressed interior of the earth for such irruptions? Even if such a sudden sinking had left no trace in the interior, it should have left its marks on the surface. Mr. John Milne counts up not less than 8,331 considerable earthquake shocks in Japan between 1885 and 1892; Julius Schmidt, former director of the observatory in Athens, enumerated three hundred severe and dangerous and fifty thousand light shocks for Phocis alone between 1870 and 1873, of which not a trace of land changes or depressions can be perceived, aside from superficial avalanches (on Parnassus, for example) and subsidence of meadows and other spongy soil, like the famous depression of the Molo at Lisbon. All this speaks so emphatically against the tectonic origin of earthquakes that it can not be considered as a general cause. Even the mighty disturbances and shocks of the times when such ranges as the Alps and Himalayas were lifted up can prove nothing for the present time; for the conditions, the mechanical work and acting forces, of the earth were quite different, and the latter much greater and more acute than in our time, as the number and magnitude of the volcanoes of those ages show, before which ours are almost as nothing. We have no adequate comprehension of the way that mechanical work was done. A depression like that of the plain of the Rhine could certainly not have taken place without severe earthquakes; but we do not know how they may have come to pass, for we have nothing analogous to them. The upper strata of the earth's crust are broken up, fissured, and cavernous; hence purely local minor earthquakes may undoubtedly be produced by cavings-in, landslides, and settlings of small extent. But this explanation, in view of the nature of the crust, is not possible for strong earthquakes, even in the upper layers, which send their waves far over the land; their origin must be, almost of necessity, in the greater deeps beneath the crust, far down where the immense gas globe of the interior is constantly forcing its way into the fluid band, and this into the solid stone; in those zones of changing conditions a mighty movement must be incessantly prevailing. The pressure upon the gases of the interior diminishes here, and the excessive temperature as well. This can not take place without changes. Temperature and pressure now fall, now rise again, but continue very high through it all. The dissociated gases unite and separate again, and most violent explosions are infallibly produced thereby. Water exists in the interior in immense masses, and that not solely in consequence of percolation from the surface. Vapor at very high pressure separates into its elements--hydrogen and oxygen--the reunion of which ensues with violent explosions, similar to our gas explosions, which must be very numerous in the interior of the earth, and accompanied with great development of force. The principal effect of such explosions is, of course, against the cooler and more weakly resisting sides, and therefore not toward the interior but toward the crust and the weakest parts of it, toward the rupture lines of the zones of disturbance, the synclinals. Such attacks, striking the earth's crust from within, occasion most earthquakes, especially violent, destructive, deep-seated outbursts like those of Lisbon and Charleston. The relation of the seismic and the volcanic phenomena is clearly to be seen. One series of seismic phenomena remains to be explained--the lighter undulations, the tremors, and the remarkable irregularity of the movements of the ground. The indications of the vertical pendulum apparatus which represent these movements form an inextricable tangle of lines running over and crossing one another. The late Japanese professor of seismology, Sekiya, prepared an enlarged model of the tracings of the seismic movements of a point of the earth's surface, which has been much copied. It represents an extremely confusing vibration of the lines. Now we have to confront a very important fact which adds much to the difficulty of seismic research. We never feel and observe the earthquake shocks themselves, never directly in their simplicity or multiplicity, but only the wave movements that are sent out from them in the elastic crust of the earth. These, however multifold their origin, proceed in an immense spherical wave which moves in more or less numerous repetitions through the earth's interior. It is this shaking of the earth by the spherical waves that our instruments represent as earthquakes. We can not include as the earth's crust the surface of the earth on which we live, and which consists of loose materials disintegrated by weathering, breaking, and numerous causes, but the solid crust, often lying at a considerable distance beneath us, which bears these materials, and from which the spherical waves emerge. As the waves of the sea, beating upon the coast, are turned, split up, divided, thrown up, etc., in their surging, so surge, too, the seismic waves upon the disintegrated surface of shingle, pebbles, broken rocks, sand, and earth, in clefts and gorges. We thus never observe the original spherical waves, but only their fragmentary derivative forms, their resolution into numerous single waves which come to us diverted into the most various directions. It is thus most plainly shown that Mallet's effort to determine the center and origin of the earthquake from the direction of the shock was futile. We can only draw scientific conclusions respecting the time of beginning, the duration, and force of the movement. It is thus evident that many of the tremors (not all, by any means) originate in this division; that a fixed point of the earth's surface must describe a very complicated path in so intricate a wave movement; that the division is less marked on firm ground than on loose; that the former, in consequence of the more evenly protracted movement, is less dangerous than the latter; and that multiplied waves interfere, overlay, weaken, or strengthen one another just as water waves do. Thus are explained the earthquake bridges or spots which always remain unmoved through repeated earthquakes, either because they are firmer, or because the progress of the waves is arrested at them by interference. The sounds, too, which so frequently accompany earthquakes are likewise simply results of this division of the waves and their escape into the air, for we perceive wave motions in the air as sound. The admirable delicacy of our sense of hearing is here manifested, for seismic movements are not rarely perceptible, or heard, as air waves, which we can not perceive as movements of the ground. Earthquake thunder is caused, like storm thunder, by shocks to the air, of which we hear the nearest and latest first, and the farthest and earliest last. The different tone shades of the earthquake sound depend upon their various sources, as from small, sharp fragments, clinking, rattling, and humming; from sand and earth, dull rumbling; from trees, whistling, etc. The echo in ravines not rarely operates to add strength to them. Earthquake sounds that seem to come out of the air from above are caused by earthquake waves reaching us by way of trees, houses, etc.; the different directions and degrees of force which they seem to indicate in different houses or in different rooms of the same house are explainable by the different elasticity conditions of the houses and rooms. But not the most insignificant conclusion can be drawn from these sounds concerning the nature and causes of earthquakes. It is important to emphasize this fact, for errors have often originated in conclusions drawn from such things.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Deutsche Rundschau._ * * * * * Examples of a race of curiously protectively colored mice which inhabit the sandy island, the North Bull, in the Bay of Dublin, were exhibited by Dr. H. Lyster Jameson in the Zoölogical Section of the British Association. A considerable percentage of them were distinctly lighter hued than the ancestral type of house mouse, though every possible gradation occurred between the typical house mouse and the palest examples. The speaker regarded the marked predominance of sand-colored specimens as due to the action of natural selection. The hawks and owls which frequent the island, and are the only enemies the mice have to compete against, most easily capture the darkest examples, or those that contrast most strongly with the color of the sand. Thus a protectively colored race is becoming established. The island came into existence only about a hundred years ago. Consequently it is possible to fix a time limit within which the sandy-colored race has been evolved. Its evolution also, as Professor Poulton observed in his comment on Dr. Jameson's paper, gives additional evidence to that afforded by the shore crabs described by Professor Weldon in his presidential address to the section, that the transmutation of species is not necessarily so slow as to be indiscernible. A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC INSTRUCTION[33] BY J. NORMAN LOCKYER, K. C. B., F. R. S. The two addresses by my colleagues, Professors Judd and Roberts-Austen, have drawn attention to the general history of our college and the details of one part of our organization. I propose to deal with another part, the consideration of which is of very great importance at the present time, for we are in one of those educational movements which spring up from time to time and mold the progress of civilization. The question of a teaching university in the largest city in the world, secondary education, and so-called technical education are now occupying men's minds. At the beginning it is imperative that I should call your attention to the fact that the stern necessities of the human race have been the origin of all branches of science and learning; that all so-called educational movements have been based upon the actual requirements of the time. There has never been an educational movement for learning's sake; but of course there have always been studies and students apart from any of those general movements to which I am calling attention; still we have to come down to the times of Louis Quatorze before the study of the useless, the _même inutile_, was recognized as a matter of national concern. It is perhaps the more necessary to insist upon stern necessity as being the origin of learning, because it is so difficult for us now to put ourselves in the place of those early representatives of our race that had to face the problems of life among conditionings of which they were profoundly ignorant: when night meant death; when there was no certainty that the sun would rise on the morrow; when the growth of a plant from seed was unrecognized; when a yearly return of seasons might as well be a miracle as a proof of a settled order of phenomena; when, finally, neither cause nor effect had been traced in the operations of Nature. It is doubtless in consequence of this difficulty that some of the early races have been credited by some authors with a special love of abstract science, of science for its own sake; so that this, and not stern necessity, was the motive of their inquiries. Thus we have been told that the Chaldeans differed from the other early races in having a predilection for astronomy, another determining factor being that the vast plains in that country provided them with a perfect horizon. The first historic glimpses of the study of astronomy we find among the peoples occupying the Nile Valley and Chaldea, say 6000 B. C. But this study had to do with the fixing of the length of the year, and the determination of those times in it in which the various agricultural operations had to be performed. These were related strictly to the rise of the Nile in one country and of the Euphrates in the other. All human activity was, in fact, tied up with the movements of the sun, moon, and stars. These, then, became the gods of those early peoples, and the astronomers, the seers, were the first priests; revered by the people because as interpreters of the celestial powers they were the custodians of the knowledge which was the most necessary for the purposes of life. Eudemus of Rhodes, one of the principal pupils of Aristotle, in his History of Geometry, attributes the origin of geometry to the Egyptians, "who were obliged to invent it in order to restore the landmarks which had been destroyed by the inundation of the Nile," and observes "that it is by no means strange that the invention of the sciences should have originated in practical needs."[34] The new geometry was brought from Egypt to Greece by Thales three hundred years before Aristotle was born. When to astronomy and geometry we add the elements of medicine and surgery, which it is known were familiar to the ancient Egyptians, it will be conceded that we are, in those early times, face to face with the cultivation of the most useful branches of science. Now, although the evidence is increasing day by day that Greek science was Egyptian in its origin, there is no doubt that its cultivation in Greece was more extended, and that it was largely developed there. One of the most useful and prolific writers on philosophy and science who has ever lived, Aristotle, was born in the fourth century B. C. From him, it may be said, dates a general conception of science based on _observation_ as differing from experiment. If you wish to get an idea of the science of those times, read his writings on Physics and on the Classification of Animals. All sought in Aristotle the basis of knowledge, but they only read his philosophy; Dante calls him the "master of those who know."[35] Why was Aristotle so careful to treat science as well as philosophy, with which his master, Plato, had dealt almost exclusively? The answer to this question is of great interest to our present subject. The late Lord Playfair[36] in a pregnant passage suggests the reason, and the later history of Europe shows, I think, that he is right. "We find that just as early nations became rich and prosperous, so did philosophy arise among them, and it declined with the decadence of material prosperity. In those splendid days of Greece when Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno were the representatives of great schools of thought, which still exercise their influence on mankind, _Greece was a great manufacturing and mercantile community_; Corinth was the seat of the manufacture of hardware; Athens that of jewelry, shipbuilding, and pottery. The rich men of Greece and all its free citizens were actively engaged in trade and commerce. The learned class were the sons of those citizens, and were in possession of their accumulated experience derived through industry and foreign relations. Thales was an oil merchant; Aristotle inherited wealth from his father, who was a physician, but, spending it, is believed to have supported himself as a druggist till Philip appointed him tutor to Alexander. Plato's wealth was largely derived from commerce, and his master, Socrates, is said to have been a sculptor. Zeno, too, was a traveling merchant. Archimedes is perhaps an exception, for he is said to have been closely related to a prince; but if so, he is the only princely discoverer of science on record." In ancient Greece we see the flood of the first great intellectual tide. Alas! it never touched the shores of western Europe, but it undoubtedly reached to Rome, and there must have been very much more observational science taught in the Roman studia than we generally imagine, otherwise how account for Pliny, the vast public works, their civilizing influence carried over sea and land from beyond Bab-el-Mandeb to Scotland? In some directions their applications of science are as yet unsurpassed. With the fall of the Roman Empire both science and philosophy disappeared for a while. The first wave had come and gone; its last feebler ripples seem to have been represented at this time by the gradual change of the Roman secular studia wherever they existed into clerical schools, the more important of which were in time attached to the chief cathedrals and monasteries; and it is not difficult to understand why the secular (or scientific) instruction was gradually replaced by one more fitted for the training of priests. It is not to be wondered at that the ceaseless strife in the center of Europe had driven what little learning there was to the western and southern extremities, where the turmoil was less--I refer to Britain and South Italy--while the exiled Nestorians carried Hellenic science and philosophy out of Europe altogether to Mesopotamia and Arabia. The next wave--it was but a small one--had its origin in our own country. In the eighth century England was at its greatest height, relatively, in educational matters, chiefly owing to the labors of two men. Beda, generally called the Venerable Bede, the most eminent writer of his age, was born near Monkwearmouth in 673, and passed his life in the monastery there. He not only wrote the history of our island and nation, but treatises on the nature of things, astronomy, chronology, arithmetic, medicine, philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, poetry, music, basing his work on that of Pliny. He died in 735, in which year his great follower was born in Yorkshire. I refer to Alcuin. He was educated at the Cathedral School at York under Archbishop Egbert, and, having imbibed everything he could learn from the writings of Bede and others, was soon recognized as one of the greatest scholars of the time. On returning from Rome, whither he had been sent by Eaubald to receive the pallium, he met Karl the Great, King of the Franks and Lombards, who eventually induced him to take up his residence at his court, to become his instructor in the sciences. Karl (or Charlemagne) then was the greatest figure in the world, and although as King of the Franks and Lombards, and subsequently Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, his court was generally at Aachen, he was constantly traveling throughout his dominions. He was induced, in consequence of Alcuin's influence, not only to have a school always about him on his journeys, but to establish, or foster, such schools wherever he went. Hence it has been affirmed that "France is indebted to Alcuin for all the polite learning it boasted of in that and the following ages." The universities of Paris, Tours, Fulden, Soissons, and others were not actually founded in his day, but the monastic and cathedral schools out of which they eventually sprang were strengthened, and indeed a considerable scheme of education for priests was established--that is, an education free from all sciences, and in which philosophy alone was considered. Karl the Great died in 814, and after his death the eastward traveling wave, thus started by Bede and Alcuin, slightly but very gradually increased in height. Two centuries later, however, the conditions were changed. We find ourselves in presence of interference phenomena, for then there was a meeting with another wave traveling westward, and this meeting was the origin of the European universities. The wave now manifested traveling westerly, spread outward from Arab centers first and finally from Constantinople, when its vast stores of Greek lore were opened by the conquest of the city. The first wavelet justified Eudemus's generalization that "the invention of the sciences originated in practical needs," and that knowledge for its own sake was not the determining factor. The year had been determined, stone circles erected almost everywhere, and fires signaled from them, giving notice of the longest and shortest days, so that agriculture was provided for, even away from churches and the festivals of the Church. The original user of geometry was not required away from the valleys of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates, and therefore it is now medicine and surgery that come to the front for the alleviation of human ills. In the eleventh century we find Salerno, soon to be famed throughout Europe as the great medical school, forming itself into the first university. And medicine did not exhaust all the science taught, for Adelard listened there to a lecture on "the nature of things," the cause of magnetic attraction being one of the "things" in question. This teaching at Salerno preceded by many years the study of the law at Bologna and of theology at Paris. The full flood came from the disturbance of the Arab wave center by the crusades, about the beginning of the twelfth century. After the Pope had declared the "Holy War," William of Malmesbury tells us "the most distant islands and savage countries were inspired with this ardent passion. The Welshman left his hunting, the Scotchman his fellowship with vermin, the Dane his drinking party, the Norwegian his raw fish." Report has it that in 1096 no less than six millions were in motion along many roads to Palestine. This, no doubt, is an exaggeration, but it reflects the excitement of the time, and prepares us for what happened when the crusaders returned. As Green puts it:[37] "The western nations, including our own, 'were quickened with a new life and throbbing with a new energy.' ... A new fervor of study sprang up in the West from its contact with the more cultured East. Travelers like Adelard, of Bath, brought back the first rudiments of physical and mathematical science from the schools of Cordova or Bagdad.... The long mental inactivity of feudal Europe broke up like ice before a summer's sun. Wandering teachers, such as Lanfranc or Anselm, crossed sea and land to spread the new power of knowledge. The same spirit of restlessness, of inquiry, of impatience with the older traditions of mankind, either local or intellectual, that drove half Christendom to the tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with thousands of young scholars hurrying to the chosen seats where teachers were gathered together." _Studium generale_ was the term first applied to a large educational center where there was a guild of masters, and whither students flocked from all parts. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the three principal studia were Paris, Bologna, and Salerno, where theology and arts, law and medicine, and medicine almost by itself, were taught respectively; these eventually developed into the first universities.[38] English scholars gathered in thousands at Paris round the chairs of William of Champeaux or Abélard, where they took their place as one of the "nations" of which the great middle-age university of Paris was composed. We have only to do with the arts faculty of this university. We find that the subject-matter of the liberal education of the middle age there dealt with varied very little from that taught in the schools of ancient Rome. The so-called "artiens," students of the arts faculty, which was the glory of the university and the one most numerously attended, studied the seven arts of the trivium and quadrivium--that is, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic and arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy.[39] This at first looks well for scientific study, but the mathematics taught had much to do with magic; arithmetic dealt with epacts, golden numbers, and the like. There was no algebra, and no mechanics. Astronomy dealt with the system of the seven heavens. Science, indeed, was the last thing to be considered in the theological and legal studia, and it would appear that it was kept alive more in the medical schools than in the arts faculties. Aristotle's writings on physics, biology, and astronomy were not known till about 1230, and then in the shape of Arab-Latin translations. Still, it must not be forgotten that Dante learned some of his astronomy, at all events, at Paris. Oxford was an offshoot of Paris, and therefore a theological studium, in all probability founded about 1167,[40] and Cambridge came later. Not till the Reformation (sixteenth century) do we see any sign of a new educational wave, and then we find the two which have had the greatest influence upon the history of the world--one of them depending upon the Reformation itself, the other depending upon the birth of experimental inquiry. Before the Reformation the universities were priestly institutions, and derived their authority from the Popes. The universities were for the few; the education of the people, except in the various crafts, was unprovided for. The idea of a general education in secular subjects at the expense of the state or of communities is coeval with the Reformation. In Germany, even before the time of Luther, it was undreamed of, or rather, perhaps, one should say, the question was decided in the negative. In his day, however, his zeal first made itself heard in favor of education, as many are now making themselves heard in favor of a better education, and in 1524 he addressed a letter to the councils of all the towns in Germany, begging them to vote money not merely for roads, dikes, guns, and the like, but for schoolmasters, so that all children might be taught; and he states his opinion that if it be the duty of a state to compel the able-bodied to carry arms, it is _a fortiori_ its duty to compel its subjects to send their children to school, and to provide schools for those who without such aid would remain uninstructed. Here we have the germ of Germany's position at the present day, not only in scientific instruction but in everything which that instruction brings with it. With the Reformation this idea spread to France. In 1560 we find the States-General of Orleans suggesting to Francis II a "levée d'une contribution sur les bénéfices ecclésiastiques pour raisonablement stipendier des pédagogues et gens lettrés, en toutes villes et villages, pour l'instruction de la pauvre jeunesse du plat pays, et soient tenus les pères et mères, à peine d'amende, à envoyer les dits enfants à l'école, et à ce faire soient contraints par les segnieurs et les juges ordinaires." Two years after this suggestion, however, the religious wars broke out; the material interests of the clerical party had predominated, the new spirit was crushed under the iron heel of priestcraft, and the French, in consequence, had to wait for three centuries and a revolution before they could get comparatively free. In the universities, or at all events alongside them, we find next the introduction not so much yet of science as we now know it, with its experimental side, as of the scientific spirit. The history of the Collége de France, founded in 1531 by Francis I, is of extreme interest. In the fifteenth century the studies were chiefly literary, and except in the case of a few minds they were confined merely to scholastic subtleties, taught (I have it on the authority of the Statistique de l'Enseignement Supérieur) in barbarous Latin. This was the result of the teaching of the faculties; but even then, outside the faculties, which were immutable, a small number of distinguished men still occupied themselves in a less rigid way in investigation; but still these studies were chiefly literary. Among those men may be mentioned Danès, Postel, Dole, Guillaume Budé, Lefèvre d'Étaples, and others, who edited with notes and commentaries Greek and Latin authors whom the university scarcely knew by name. Hence the renaissance of the sixteenth century, which gave birth to the Collége de France, the function of which, at the commencement, was to teach those things which were not in the ordinary curriculum of the faculties. It was called the Collége des Deux Langues, the languages being Hebrew and Greek. It then became the Collége des Trois Langues, when the king, notwithstanding the opposition of the university, created in 1534 a chair of Latin. There was another objection made by the university to the new creation: from the commencement the courses were free; and this feeling was not decreased by the fact that around the celebrated masters of the Trois Langues a crowd of students was soon congregated. The idea in the mind of Francis I in creating this Royal College may be gathered from the following edict, dated in 1545: "François, etc., savoir faisons à tous présents et à venir que Nous, considérant que le sçavoir des langues, qui est un des dons du Saint-Esprit, fait ouverture et donne le moyen de plus entière connaissance et plus parfaite intelligence de toutes bonnes, honnêtes, saintes et salutaires sciences.... Avons fait faire pleinement entendre à ceux qui, y voudraient vacquer, les trois langues principales, Hébraïque, Grecque, et Latine, _et les Livres esquels les bonnes sciences_ sont le mieux et le plus profondément traitées. A laquelle fin, et en suivant le décret du concile de Vienne, nous avons piéça ordonné et establi en nôtre bonne ville de Paris, un bonne nombre de personnages de sçavoir excellent, qui lisent et enseignent publiquement et ordinairement les dites langues et sciences, maintenant florissantautant ou plus qu'elles ne firent de bien longtemps ... auxquels nos lecteurs avons donné honnêtes gages et salaires, et iceux fait pourvoir de plusieurs beaux bénéfices pour les entretenir et donner occasion de mieux et plus continuellement entendre au fait de leur charge, ... etc." The Statistique, which I am following in this account, thus sums up the founder's intention: "Le Collége Royal avait pour mission de propager les nouvelles connaissances, les nouvelles découvertes. Il n'enseignait pas la science faite, il la faisait." It was on account of this more than on account of anything else that it found its greatest enemy in the university. The founding of this new college, and the great excitement its success occasioned in Paris, were, there can be little doubt, among the factors which induced Gresham to found his college in London in 1574. These two institutions played a great part in their time. Gresham College, it is true, was subsequently strangled, but not before its influence had been such as to permit the Royal Society to rise phoenixlike from its ashes; for it is on record that the first step in the forming of this society was taken after a lecture on astronomy by Sir Christopher Wren at the college. All connected with them felt in time the stupendous change of thought in the century which saw the birth of Bacon, Galileo, Gilbert, Hervey, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, and many others that might be named; and of these, it is well to remark, Gilbert,[41] Hervey, and Galileo were educated in medical schools abroad. Bacon was not only the first to lay down _regulæ philosophandi_, but he insisted upon the far-reaching results of research, not forgetting to point out that "_lucifera experimenta, non fructifera quærenda_,"[42] as a caution to the investigator, though he had no doubt as to the revolution to be brought about by the ultimate application of the results of physical inquiry. As early as 1560 the Academia Secretorum Naturæ was founded at Naples, followed by the Lincei in 1609, the Royal Society in 1645, the Cimento in 1657, and the Paris Academy in 1666. From that time the world may be said to have belonged to science, now no longer based merely on observation but on experiment. But, alas! how slowly has it percolated into our universities. The first organized endeavor to teach science in schools was naturally made in Germany (Prussia), where, in 1747 (nearly a century and a half ago), Realschulen were first started; they were taken over by the Government in 1832, and completely reorganized in 1859, this step being demanded by the growth of industry and the spread of the modern spirit. Eleven hours a week were given to natural science in these schools forty years ago. TEACHING THE TEACHERS.--Until the year 1762 the Jesuits had the education of France almost entirely in their hands, and when, therefore, their expulsion was decreed in that year, it was only a necessary step to create an institution to teach the future teachers of France. Here, then, we had the École Normale in theory; but it was a long time before this theory was carried into practice, and very probably it would never have been had not Rolland d'Erceville made it his duty for more than twenty years, by numerous publications, among which is especially to be mentioned his Plan d'Education, printed in 1783, to point out not merely the utility but the absolute necessity for some institution of the kind. As generally happens in such cases, this exertion was not lost, for in 1794 it was decreed that an École Normale should be opened at Paris, "ou seront appelés de toutes les parties de la République, des citoyens déjà instruits dans les sciences utiles, pour apprendre, sous les professeurs les plus habiles dans tous les genres, l'art d'enseigner." To follow these courses in the art of teaching, one potential schoolmaster was to be sent to Paris by every district containing twenty thousand inhabitants. Fourteen or fifteen hundred young men therefore arrived in Paris, and in 1795 the courses of the school were opened first of all in the amphitheater of the Museum of Natural History. The professors were chosen from among the most celebrated men of France, the sciences being represented by Lagrange, Laplace, Haüry, Monge, Daubenton, and Berthollet. While there was this enormous progress abroad, represented especially by the teaching of science in Germany and the teaching of the teachers in France, things slumbered and slept in Britain. We had our coal and our iron, our material capital, and no one troubled about our mental capital, least of all the universities, which had become, according to Matthew Arnold (who was not likely to overstate matters), mere _hauts lycées_, and "had lost the very idea of a real university";[43] and since our political leaders generally came from the universities, little more was to be expected from them. Many who have attempted to deal with the history of education have failed to give sufficient prominence to the tremendous difference there must necessarily have been in scientific requirements before and after the introduction of steam power. It is to the discredit of our country that we, who gave the perfected steam engine, the iron ship, and the locomotive to the world, should have been the last to feel the next wave of intellectual progress. All we did at the beginning of the century was to found mechanics' institutions. They knew better in Prussia, "a bleeding and lacerated mass";[44] after Jena (1806), King Frederick William III and his councilors, disciples of Kant, founded the University of Berlin, "to supply the loss of territory by intellectual effort." Among the universal poverty money was found for the Universities of Königsberg and Breslau, and Bonn was founded in 1818. As a result of this policy, carried on persistently and continuously by successive ministers, aided by wise councilors, many of them the products of this policy, such a state of things was brought about that not many years ago M. Ferdinand Lot, one of the most distinguished educationists of France, accorded to Germany "a supremacy in science comparable to the supremacy of England at sea." But this position has not been obtained merely by founding new universities. To Germany we owe the perfecting of the methods of teaching science. I have shown that it was in Germany that we find the first organized science teaching in schools. About the year 1825 that country made another tremendous stride. Liebig demonstrated that science teaching, to be of value, whether in the school or the university, must consist to a greater or less extent in practical work, and the more the better; that book work was next to useless. Liebig, when appointed to Giessen, smarting still under the difficulties he had had in learning chemistry without proper appliances, induced the Darmstadt Government to build a chemical laboratory in which the students could receive a thorough practical training. It will have been gathered from this reference to Liebig's system of teaching chemistry that still another branch of applied science had been created, which has since had a stupendous effect upon industry; and while Liebig was working at Giessen, another important industry was being created in England. I refer to the electric telegraph and all its developments, foreshadowed by Galileo in his reference to the "sympathy of magnetic needles." Not only then in chemistry, but in all branches of science which can be applied to the wants of man, the teaching must be practical--that is, the student must experiment and observe for himself, and he must himself seek new truths. It was at last recognized that a student could no more learn science effectively by seeing some one else perform an experiment than he could learn to draw effectively by seeing some one else make a sketch. Hence in the German universities the doctor's degree is based upon a research. Liebig's was the _fons et origo_ of all our laboratories--mechanical, metallurgical, chemical, physical, geological, astronomical, and biological.--_Nature._ [_To be continued._] FOOTNOTES: [33] An address delivered at the Royal College of Science on October 6, 1898. [34] Greek Geometry from Thales to Euclid, p. 2. Allman. [35] Inferno, canto iv, p. 130 _et seq._ [36] Subjects of Social Welfare, p. 206. [37] History of the English People, vol. i, p. 198. [38] See Histoire de l'Université de Paris. Crévier, 1791, _passim_. [39] Enumerated in the following middle-age Latin verse: "Lingua, tropus, ratio, numerus, tonus, angulus, astra." [40] Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, by Rashdall, vol. ii, p. 344. [41] William Gilbert, of Colchester, on the Magnet. Mittelag, p. x. [42] Novum Organum, vol. 1, p. 70. Fowler's edition, p. 255. [43] Schools and Universities on the Continent, p. 291. [44] University Education in England, France, and Germany, by Sir Rowland Blennerhassett, p. 25. SHOULD CHILDREN UNDER TEN LEARN TO READ AND WRITE? BY PROF. G. T. W. PATRICK. There are certain propositions about education so evidently true that probably no parent or teacher would question them. For instance, the best school is one in which the course of study is progressively adapted to the mental development of the children. Again, certain subjects are adapted to children of certain ages or stages of development, and others are not. One would not recommend the study of logic or of the calculus to the average child of ten, nor would the teaching of English be wisely deferred until the age of fifteen. Finally, if the courses of study in our present school system shall be found to be arranged without regard to the order of mental development, they will sooner or later be modified in accordance with it. Now the educational system in practice in the two or three hundred thousand public schools in the United States is a somewhat definite one, with a somewhat fixed order of studies through the different years or grades. In a majority of the States children are admitted to the schools at the age of six; in more than one third of the States children of five are admitted. In a general way we may say that during the first four years of school life the principal subjects occupying the time of the children are reading, writing, and arithmetic. To be more exact, we may cite, for instance, the city schools of Chicago.[45] Exclusive of recesses and opening exercises, there are in these schools thirteen hundred and fifty minutes of school work per week. Of this time, in the first and second grades, six hundred and seventy-five minutes are devoted to reading, seventy-five minutes to writing, and two hundred and twenty-five minutes to mathematics. Seventy-two per cent of the total time is therefore consumed by these subjects. In the third grade the proportion is the same; in the fourth grade it is somewhat more than fifty per cent. I have mentioned the Chicago schools because this is one of those school systems where a liberal introduction of other subjects, such as Nature study, physical culture, singing, and oral English, has somewhat lessened the time given to reading, writing, and arithmetic. Other cities, with few exceptions, will be found to give more rather than less time to these subjects. In the country schools, and indeed in a vast number of town and city schools, practically all the time during these early years is given to reading, writing, and arithmetic. We must conclude, therefore, if our educational system is a rational one, that reading, writing, and arithmetic are the subjects peculiarly adapted to the mind of the child between the ages of five and ten. It is worth while to inquire from the standpoint of child psychology whether this be true. It should be observed, in the first place, that the manner in which our educational system has grown up is no guarantee that it rests upon a psychological basis. Our schools are exceedingly conservative. Any innovations or radical changes are resisted by the parents of the children even more strenuously than by school boards, superintendents, and teachers. Notwithstanding numerous and important minor improvements, the school system as a whole remains unchanged. Our children of seven and eight years are learning to read and write because our grandfathers were so doing at that age. We can not here discuss the origin of our present school curriculum, but, as explaining the prominence given to reading, writing, and arithmetic, it is worthy of notice that originally the elementary school existed to teach just these three subjects. The primitive schoolmaster was not superior to the parents of the child, usually not their equal, in anything except his knowledge of "letters." So the child was sent to school for a short time to learn letters. It was not at all the function of the school to _educate_ the child in all that was necessary to fit him for the duties of life. Afterward, as the scope of the school was enlarged, other subjects were added, and these were put _after_ the original ones, and the schoolmaster, furthermore, came rather to take the place of an educator than a mere teacher of letters. It is conceivable, therefore, that the present accepted order of studies in our elementary schools rests upon an accidental rather than upon a psychological basis. It is true that modern educators have expressly considered the subject of the order and correlation of studies, as, for instance, in the case of the Committee of Fifteen, and that, while recommending minor changes in the school curriculum, they have not usually thought of questioning the position so long held by reading, writing, and arithmetic. In the report of the committee just referred to we find this expression: "The conclusion is reached that learning to read and write should be the leading study of the pupil in his first four years of school." But, again, it was not the function of this committee to suggest sweeping changes, nor to raise the inquiry whether the system itself rests upon a psychological basis. Even if it did not rest upon such a basis, expressions like the above would not be unnatural on the part of committees appointed by bodies representing the system as a whole. We may not, then, conclude _a priori_ that our system of primary education is a sound one. There have indeed been other wholly different systems giving excellent results in their time, as, for instance, that of the ancient Greeks, where music and gymnastics, not reading, writing, and arithmetic, were the principal subjects occupying the time of the pupils. Much attention has recently been given to the subjects of the physiology and psychology of children. These studies have been systematic, painstaking, and exact. It seems, indeed, to many people improbable that anything very new or very remarkable should just at this time be found out about children, and there have not been wanting either prominent educators or psychologists who have given public expression to warnings against the new "child study." But this, again, is not conclusive, for students of history may recall that every advance in science has met just such opposition--for instance, bacteriology, organic evolution, chemistry, and astronomy. Furthermore, when we reflect that scientific advance in this century has ever been, and inevitably, from the simple to the complex, and, further, that the brain of the child is the most complex thing in the whole range of natural history which science will ever have to attempt, it is not difficult to understand that scientific knowledge of it with its pedagogical implications has not belonged, at any rate, to the past. It will belong to the future, having, perhaps, its beginnings in the present. An educational system which has not reckoned with an accurate knowledge of the brain of the child may by accident be a correct one, but until such reckoning is made we can not be sure. Our increasing knowledge of the child's mind, his muscular and nervous system, and his special senses, points indubitably to the conclusion that reading and writing are subjects which do not belong to the early years of school life, but to a later period, and that other subjects now studied later are better adapted to this early stage of development. What is thus indicated of reading and writing may be affirmed also of drawing and arithmetic. The reasons leading to this conclusion can be only very briefly summarized here. As regards reading, writing, and drawing, they involve, in the first place, a high degree of motor specialization, which is not only unnatural but dangerous for young children. Studies in motor ability have shown that the order of muscular development is from the larger and coarser to the finer and more delicate muscles. The movements of the child are the large, free movements of the body, legs, and arms, such as he exhibits in spontaneous play. The movements requiring fine co-ordination, such as those of the fingers and the eyes, are the movements of maturer life. If we reverse this order and compel the child to hold his body, legs, and arms still, while he engages the delicate muscles of the eyes and fingers with minute written or printed symbols, we induce a nervous overtension, and incur the evils incident to all violation of natural order. The increasing frequency of nervous disorders among school children, particularly in the older countries, is probably due in part to these circumstances. If we consider the brain of the child of seven or eight years, our conclusions are strengthened that he should not be engaged in reading and writing. At this age the brain has attained almost its full weight, and is therefore large in proportion to the body. Its development is, however, very incomplete, particularly as regards its associative elements--that is, the so-called association fibers and apperception centers. Such a brain constantly produces and must expend a large amount of nervous energy, which can not be used centrally--that is, psychologically speaking--in comparison, analysis, thought, reflection. It must flow out through the motor channels, becoming muscular movement. The healthy child is therefore incessantly active in waking hours, the action being of the vigorous kind involving the larger members. Hence we can understand that, of all the ways in which a young child may receive instruction, the method through the printed book is pre-eminently the one ill fitted to him. The evil of this method is aggravated by the fact that, before the child can receive instruction through the book, a long time--several years, in fact--is spent in the confining task of learning to read. It comes about, therefore, that the child, at the very age when he should be leading a free and expansive life, is obliged to fix his eyes upon the narrow page of a book and decipher small printed symbols, in themselves devoid of life and interest. With respect to writing and learning to write the case is worse. A considerable amount of motor specialization is involved in forming letters upon the blackboard, but when the pencil and pen are used it becomes of an extreme kind. In the whole life history of the man there are no movements requiring finer co-ordination than those of writing with pencil or pen, yet our school system requires these of the child of six or seven years, makes them, indeed, a prominent part of elementary school life. In addition to the motor specialization of reading and writing is the physical confinement in the narrow seat and desk which is necessarily connected with them. The child of six or seven has not reached the age when such confinement is natural or safe. The injuries which I have mentioned relate to the nervous system as a whole. There are other injuries resulting from the reading habit in young children which concern the eyes directly. So much has been said and written lately about the increase of myopia and other defects of the eye among school children, that I shall merely refer to this subject here. Upon entering school, children are practically free from these defects. Upon leaving school, a strikingly large percentage are suffering from them, more, however, as yet, in European countries than in America. The causes are many, but it is scarcely doubted that the chief cause is found in bending over finely printed books and maps, and fine writing, pencil work, and drawing. If pencils, pens, paper, and books could be kept away from children until they are at least ten years of age, and their instruction come directly from objects and from the voice of the teacher, this evil could be greatly lessened. If the above reasons for not teaching reading and writing to young children were the only ones, the objections could to a certain extent be overcome. Writing might, for instance, be practiced only on the blackboard with large free-hand movements, and letters could be taught from large forms upon charts. But we have to consider the questions whether reading and writing are in themselves branches of instruction which belong to the early years of school life, whether they may not be acquired at a great disadvantage at this period, and whether more time is not spent upon them than is necessary. It is a well-known fact that a child's powers, whether physical or mental, ripen in a certain rather definite order. There is, for instance, a certain time in the life of the infant when the motor mechanism of the legs ripens, before which the child can not be taught to walk, while after that time he can not be kept from walking. Again, at the age of seven, for instance, there is a mental readiness for some things and an unreadiness for others. The brain is then very impressionable and retentive, and a store of useful material, both motor and sensory, may be permanently acquired with great economy of effort. The imagination is active, and the child loves to listen to narration, whether historical or mythical, which plays without effort of his will upon his relatively small store of memory images. The powers of analysis, comparison, and abstraction are little developed, and the child has only a limited ability to detect mathematical or logical relations. The power of voluntary attention is slight, and can be exerted for only a short time. All this may be stated physiologically by saying that the brain activity is sensory and motor, but not central. The sensory and motor mechanism has ripened, but not the associative. The brain is hardly more than a receiving, recording, and reacting apparatus. It would be inaccurate, however, to express this psychologically by saying that perception, memory, and will are the mental powers that have ripened at the age of seven. This would be true only if by perception we mean not apperception, which involves a considerable development of associative readiness, but mere passive apprehension through the senses, and if by memory we mean not recollection, but mere retentiveness for that which interests, and if by will we mean not volition, but only spontaneous movement and readiness to form habits of action, including a large number of instinctive movement psychoses, such as imitation, play, and language in its spoken form. Following out, then, somewhat as above, the psychology of the child, what kind of education would be particularly adapted to his stage of development? We ask not what _can_ the child be taught, but what studies are for him most natural and therefore most economical. In the first place, from the development of the senses and the perceptive power above described, we infer that the child is ready to acquire a knowledge of the world of objects around him through the senses of sight, hearing, touch, temperature, taste, and smell. His education will have to do with real things and their qualities, rather than with symbols which stand for things. If we wish a general term for this branch of instruction, we may call it natural science, or, to distinguish it from science in its more mature form as the study of laws and causes, we may call it natural history, or, more briefly, Nature study. Although the appropriateness and economy of this study for young children has been known and proclaimed for more than a century, it is still in practice the study of later years, while young children study _letters_. In the second place, from the development of the retentive powers of the child we infer that he is qualified to gain acquaintance not only with the real world around him, but with the real world of the past. We may call this history. History is now studied later by means of text-books. It may be studied with far greater economy during earlier years by means of direct narration by parent or teacher. It is wonderful how eagerly a child will listen to historical narration, and how easily he will retain it. This method of teaching history forms a striking contrast to the perfunctory manner in which it is often studied in the upper school grades, with the text-book "lesson," "recitation," and the "final examination." Upon the minds of many young people the study of history has a deadening effect when the history epoch is passed and the mathematical epoch has arrived. It has already been proposed, at a conference of educators lately held in Chicago, to extend the study of history downward into the lower grades, a proposition fully sanctioned by psychological pedagogy. In what I have here said about history for young people I refer not to the philosophy of history, which comes much later in the life of the student, but to history as a mere record of facts and events, the kind of history which is now studied in the grammar and high schools, the kind which many educators who would make all children philosophers are now saying should not be studied at all. In the third place, what studies correspond to the development of the will in the child from five to ten? It is the habit-forming epoch. It is the time when a large and useful store of motor memory images may be acquired, and when permanent reflex tracts may be formed in the spinal cord and lower brain centers. This is the time to teach the child to do easily and habitually a large number of useful things. If we use the term in its broadest sense, we may call this branch of instruction morals, but it will also include, besides habits of conduct, various bodily activities, certain manual dexterities, and correct habits of speech, expression, and singing. But here some restrictions must be observed. The habit-forming period begins at birth and continues far beyond the age of ten, and the period from five to ten is not the time for the formation of all habits. The order of muscular development must be observed, and all dexterities involving finely co-ordinated movements of the fingers, or strain of the eyes, should be deferred beyond this period, or at most begun only in the latter part of it; such, for instance, as writing, drawing, modeling, sewing, knitting, playing upon musical instruments, and minute mechanical work, as well, of course, as the plaiting, pricking, stitching, weaving, and other finger work still practiced in some kindergartens and primary schools. We have thus seen that there are certain branches of instruction for which the mind of the child from five to ten has ripened, and which may therefore be taught most economically and safely during this period. Concerning the teaching of language I shall speak presently, but thus far we have found that from the psychological standpoint there are at any rate three subjects which are strikingly adapted to this period, namely, natural science, history, and morals, using these terms with the latitude and restriction already explained. Certain branches of Nature study and one branch of what we have called morals--namely, manual training--have in recent years been introduced into our best elementary city schools, and in a few schools history is taught systematically in the lower grades by means of stories. They have not, however, crowded out reading, writing, and arithmetic so much as crowded into them. But if we consider the great mass of schools in city, town, and country throughout the land, the subjects which practically complete the elementary school curriculum--reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography--are, with the exception of the latter, found to be subjects which do not naturally belong to this period at all. Mathematics in every form is a subject conspicuously ill fitted to the child mind. It deals not with real things, but with abstractions. When referred to concrete objects, it concerns not the objects themselves, but their relations to each other. It involves comparison, analysis, abstraction. It calls for a fuller development of the association tracts and fibers of the cerebral hemispheres. The grotesque "number forms" which so many children have, and which originate in this period, are evidence of the necessity which the child feels of giving some kind of bodily shape to these abstractions which he is compelled to study. Under mathematics I do not of course include the mere mentioning or learning a number series, such as in the process called "counting," or the committing to memory of a multiplication table. Furthermore, in this and in all discussions of this kind it must be remembered that there are exceptional children in whom the mathematical faculty, or musical faculty, or literary faculty, develops much earlier than with the average child. If possible, they should have instruction suited to their peculiarities. But it is evident that, so long as children are educated in "schools," there must be a general plan of education, and that it can not be based upon exceptional children. What we learn from physiology and psychology about the ripening of the child's mind is confirmed by the theory of the "culture epochs." I can not discuss here the doctrine of "recapitulation," with its great truths and its minor exceptions, but it is well known that in a general way the development of the child, both physical and mental, is an epitome of the development of the race. If we compare the physical and mental activities of the modern civilized man with those of the more primitive member of the race, we may learn what forms of physical and mental activity are natural in the different periods of child life. Some of the things which are characteristic of the modern as contrasted with the primitive man are sedentary habits, manual dexterities requiring finely co-ordinated movements both of the eyes and fingers, increasing devotion to written language and books as contrasted with spoken language, the lessened dependence upon the memory, the increasing subjectivity of mental life as contrasted with the purely objective life of the savage, and the increased importance of reflection, deliberation, and reasoning, with decrease of impulsive and habitual action. These things, then, we should expect to belong to the later period of child life, and studied which involve these activities will not be economically pursued in the elementary school grades. These laws are wholly overlooked in our traditional school curriculum. In practice we are saying to the young child: "Man is a sedentary, reading, writing, thinking, reasoning being, possessing the power of voluntary attention. I am to educate you to be a man. Therefore you must learn to sit still, to read, write, think, reason, and give attention to your work." The child of six or eight years is therefore given a book or pen, and put into a closely fitting seat and left to give attention to his work. This is precisely as if the mother should say to the infant at the beginning of the period of creeping: "You are a man, not a brute. Men go upright, not on all fours. You must walk, not creep." I wish to call especial attention to the fact that it is only late in the history of the race that language has passed to its written form. Man is indeed now a reading and writing animal, but only recently has he become so. It is only since the invention of printing and the wide dissemination of books, magazines, and newspapers that reading has become a real determining factor in the life of the people. Even now the human organism is engaged in adapting itself to the new strain brought upon the eyes and fingers in reading and writing. We can understand, therefore, that it will demand a considerable maturity in the child before he is ready for that which has developed so late in the history of the race. The language of the child, like that of the primitive man, is the language of the ear and tongue. The child is a talking and hearing animal. He is ear-minded. There has been in the history of civilization a steady development toward the preponderating use of the higher senses, culminating with the eye. The average adult civilized man is now strongly eye-minded, but it is necessary to go back only to the time of the ancient Greeks to find a decided relative ear-mindedness. Few laboratory researches have been made upon the relative rapidity of development of the special senses in children, but such as have been made tend to confirm the indications of the "culture epochs" theory, and to show that the auditory centers develop earlier than the visual. More and more attention is given in our elementary schools to the subject of language--more, as some think, than the relative importance of the subject warrants; but without discussing this question, it is indubitably shown by child psychology that it is the spoken language which belongs to the elementary school. The ear is the natural medium of instruction for young children, and all the second-hand knowledge which it is necessary that the child should receive should come to him in this way. It should come from the living words of the living teacher or parent, not through the cold medium of the printed book. In the elementary school, then, the child may be instructed in language as it relates to the ear and the tongue, and this is the real language. He may be taught to speak accurately and elegantly, and he may be taught to listen and remember. He may study in this way the best literature of his mother tongue, and get a living sympathetic knowledge of it, such as can never come through the indirect medium of the book. Indeed, this language study need not be limited to the mother tongue. There is no age when a child may with so great economy of effort gain a lasting knowledge of a foreign language as when he is from seven to eleven years old. When the spoken language has been mastered in this way, and when the child has arrived at the reading and writing age, language in its written form may be acquired in a very short time, and that which now fills so many weary years of school life will sink into the position of comparative insignificance in which it rightfully belongs. Reading and writing have usurped altogether too much time. In the schools of to-day there is a worship of the reading book, spelling book, copy book, and dictionary not rightfully due them. By dropping the study of letters from the lower grades much needed time may be found for other timely and important subjects, such as Nature study, morals, history, oral language, singing, physical training, and play. One of the greatest goods which would follow the banishing of the book from the primary and elementary schools would be the cultivation of better mental habits. Children suffer lasting injury by being left with a book in their seats and directed to "study" at an age when the power of voluntary attention has not developed. They then acquire habits of listlessness and mind-wandering afterward difficult to overcome. They read over many times that which does not hold their attention and is not remembered. Lax habits of study are thus acquired, with the serious incidental result of weakening the retentive power which depends so much upon interest and concentration. With the substitution of the oral for the book method, reliance upon the memory during the memory period will permanently strengthen the child's power of retention. The period between the ages of five and ten years is an important one in the child's life. It is the time when the "let-alone" plan of education is of most value, for the reason that nearly all our educational devices beyond the kindergarten are more or less attempts to make men and women out of children. If the child at this age must be put into the harness of an educational system, his course of study will not be impoverished by the omission of reading and writing. To teach him to speak and to listen, to observe and to remember, to know something of the world around him, and instinctively to do the right thing, will furnish more than enough material for the most ambitious elementary school curriculum. FOOTNOTE: [45] See the article on Courses of Study in the Elementary Schools of the United States, by T. R. Crosswell, Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1897. SOILS AND FERTILIZERS.[46] BY CHARLES MINOR BLACKFORD, JR., M. D. The word "soil" is used in several arts and sciences to denote the material from which something derives nourishment. The meat broths and jellies on which bacteria are grown are soils for them, as the earth of a field is a soil for the ordinary farm crops; but in general we mean by soils the various mixtures of mineral and organic substances that make up the surface of the earth. The object of this paper is to show as briefly as possible the way it was formed, of what it is composed, the manner in which it nourishes plants, and the rules that should guide us in replenishing its nutritious matter when exhausted. So broad a field can be but lightly touched, and the effort will be to give only hints from which rules for specific cases may be deduced. When a sample of ordinary fertile soil is analyzed, it is found to consist of a number of minerals, of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus in various combinations, water, and certain other ingredients dependent on the locality. Among the minerals the most important are potassium, sodium, lime, iron, and silicon, and the history of these is of the greatest interest. Scientific students are generally agreed that the surface of the earth is but a shell inclosing a liquid, or at all events a highly heated interior. Originally the whole mass was fluid, but the surface has cooled more rapidly than the interior, and so a firm crust has been formed. As the central mass cooled, it contracted, and the crust became wrinkled and folded, as does the skin of an apple as its pulp dries, and, by this folding, great ridges were thrown up in some places and vast depressions formed in others. When the crust became cool enough for water to remain on it, most of the depressions were filled by it, and the "dry land appeared," not only on the crests of the ridges, but on the elevated plateaus about them, and thus oceans and continents were formed. Had one of us seen the earth at that time he would have been loath to select it as a residence. Rugged, rocky ranges of precipitous mountains surrounded by stretches of naked rock made the landscape. Dense clouds from the tepid oceans dashed against the icy peaks, and torrents of water rushed back to the sea. Where the slopes permitted, the glaciers spread over wide areas, for no vegetation checked the rapid radiation of heat, and night brought bitter cold. The crust waved and fluctuated over the liquid interior as does thin ice under a daring skater, and as it fell the sea rushed over the land, only to flow elsewhere as the depressed area rose again. The freezing and thawing and the effects of wind and water in time produced a change. The rocks were riven and broken to powder, their nearly vertical slopes became less steep, and instead of bare rock the earth showed dreary morasses and stretches of sand. Over these marshes vegetation began to thrive. In the sea there lived then, as now, a teeming population, animal, vegetable, and living beings that can with difficulty be assigned to either of these classes. Each of them, however, contained carbon, and many had built lime, phosphorus, nitrogen, and other valuable substances into their bodies. Where food was abundant these grew in vast numbers, and though many are infinitely small singly, their aggregate mass is enormous. Among the tiny organisms is one called the _Globigerina_, a being so small as to require a microscope to study it, but in the past, as now, growing in great numbers in the sea. The animal is soft and jellylike, but it forms an outside skeleton of shell of carbonate of calcium or chalk, a structure that protects it living, but entombs it dead. When death comes, the little _Globigerina_ sinks to the bottom, and its tiny shell helps to cover the sea floor. In the days of long ago these lived as now, and when some convulsion of Nature lifted the bottom of prehistoric seas, the _Globigerina_ ooze was lifted as well, and thus the "limestone" formed. In our land a bed of this kind extends from Alabama to Newfoundland; thence, as the "telegraphic plateau," it passes under the Atlantic, rising into the chalk downs and cliffs of England; then, again dipping under the sea, it passes through Europe, and finally furnishes the marble quarries of Greece. Heat, water, and chemical action give a ceaseless variety to the forms of the limestone, but wherever found it shows the former seat of an ocean. As soon as the "ooze" was lifted from below the sea it began to change. Some has been exposed to heat and has crystallized into marble, but for our purposes the most interesting changes have been wrought by water. Chalk, limestone, and marble--for these are chemically the same--are almost insoluble in pure water. But water is rarely pure; it dissolves many things, and among them the carbonic-oxide gas that every fire, every animal, every decaying scrap of wood is pouring into the atmosphere. The rain, charged with this gas, dissolves the limestone, but when the gas escapes the lime falls, as you know happens when "hard" water is boiled, for the heat drives off the gas. By this solution, however, the lime is scattered widely through the soil, and is rarely lacking in untilled earth. Besides lime, phosphorus is necessary in a good soil. This is widely spread in Nature, but its great reservoir is the ocean, that boundless mine of wealth. Many marine animals have the power of building it into their tissues, and the shells of oysters and other mollusks, the bones of nearly all animals, terrestrial and marine, and parts of other organisms, are composed of phosphates to a greater or less degree. In the ceaseless changes of level the primal oyster beds and coral reefs are raised to the surface or far above it, and the slow action of time begins to tear down the deposits and spread them wide-cast. Since that far-off time "in the beginning" no new matter has been put on earth save the small amounts of the meteorites, and the economy of Nature can allow not one atom to lie in idleness, but calls on each one to play its part ceaselessly, "without haste and without rest." A certain amount of a substance is disseminated through the earth; by rains it is washed into the streams, and thence to the sea. Here plants or animals eagerly await it, and by means of them it is again restored to the land, to begin again its endless round. The metals most necessary for plant life are potassium, sodium, and iron; indeed, the very name of the first shows its importance. If the ashes which contain all the mineral constituents of plants be put in a vessel and water poured on them, a solution of lye will percolate through the mass. The word lye is an abbreviation for alkali, and when chemistry became sufficiently advanced, a metal was discovered in this lye to which the name potassium--i. e., potash-metal--was given. If seaweeds be burned and leeched in the same way we can obtain from the lye another metal, sodium, that is much like potassium, and that is one of the most widely spread substances on earth as its chloride, or common salt. Potassium and sodium enter into the composition of many rocks, and as these become eroded by weather they are scattered through the soil, whence their salts are extracted by rootlets and enter into the formation of vegetable tissue. Behind these stands iron. The green coloring matter of plants is a very complex substance known as chlorophyll, the duty of which is to take carbonic oxide from the air, utilize the carbon, and restore the oxygen. Iron enters into the composition of chlorophyll, and to it is due the brown color of dead leaves. This metal is well-nigh universal, all the reds and browns in soils and rocks being made by it, and so it is rarely lacking anywhere. So much for the metals in soils; but, important as they are, plants can not live on them alone. Among the nonmetallic bodies phosphorus stands high among essentials, and for it we are indebted to the sea and the interior of the earth. Many living creatures extract phosphorus from the sea water--combine it chiefly with lime, and use the phosphate for making skeletons or shells, as the case may be. After the death of the possessors the bones or shells sink to the bottom, as do the _Globigerina_, and in time are either lifted up, as were the limestones, and form "phosphate beds" like those of Georgia and Florida, or are dredged up and ground into powder with bones of land animals. Much of the matter forced up from the interior of the earth contains phosphorus; indeed, it is the bane of Southern iron ores; but though iron masters dread it, farmers welcome it, as the rains and frosts crumble the phosphatic rocks and add them to the mass of _débris_ that forms our soil. Now let us take a test tube and put into it lime, potash, soda, iron, silicon, or sand, and phosphorus, add to it a grain of corn, and watch results. Under suitable conditions of warmth and moisture the grain will sprout, but when the store of food laid up in it is exhausted our little plant will die. It is obvious that something else is needed for a soil, and analysis shows that it is nitrogen, the gas that forms nearly four fifths of our atmosphere--a gas useless, as such, to animals, but essential to plants. Nitrogen is abundant in Nature. Besides being nearly four fifths of the air, it forms twenty-two per cent of nitric acid, forty-five per cent of saltpeter or niter, eighty-two per cent of ammonia, and about twenty-five per cent of sal ammoniac. Plants can not use nitrogen in its pure form, but one or another of these forms will be found in the soil, whence it may be extracted. Now we have the chief articles of plant food, and it is necessary to know how they are to be used. A plant usually consists of two parts, one that appears above ground, bearing branches, twigs, and leaves, and another that remains below ground. It is this latter that concerns us now, and it is worth study. This lower part consists of a number of twigs called rhizomes, from which proceed a vast number of fine, threadlike rootlets, and these are the mouths of the plant, through which it draws nourishment from the earth about it. Before any living thing can use nourishment from without, it must be dissolved, and this solution requires much preparation at times. Men, and other animals with a wide range of food stuffs, effect this by the secretions of the digestive organs; but most plants have no digestive apparatus, strictly speaking, and were they supplied with an abundance of the foods they most need, they would starve unless the food were in a suitable state for absorption. The way in which Nature effects this solution is the key to many of her secrets, and it has been understood only within the past few years. If we have a piece of meat freshly taken from an animal we find it firm, coherent, and almost odorless. If it be put into a warm, moist chamber for a few days a great change comes over it, and it becomes soft, offensive in odor, and liable to fall to pieces. We say that it is rotten or putrid. If a bit of it be put under a microscope, it is seen to be teeming with bacteria, and these are responsible for the decay. Now, if a specimen of earth be examined, we find that it contains bacteria, that attack all kinds of organic matter, tearing it to pieces to get their food, and making many different things out of what is left. There is one sort of ferment that grows in apple juice and splits the sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid, forming "hard cider," and if the fermentation stops at this point the well-known drink results. However, there is another ferment called "mother of vinegar" that may get in, and, if so, a different kind of fermentation is started that forms acetic acid instead of alcohol; or the bacteria of decomposition may come in and the whole go back to its elements. There is a wonderful provision of Nature shown in these stages. The bacteria--the organisms that produce decay--can not live in a strong sugar solution, but the ferments, like common yeast, can live in it, and they split the sugar into alcohol, carbonic oxide, and other things. In these another set can live, and when the first have died of starvation or from the alcohol they form, the second set step in and turn the weak alcohol into acetic acid. Acetic acid is a preserving agent, as our sour pickles show, but if it is not too strong there are some organisms that can live in it, and the whole process ends in decay. Now, it should be noticed that each of these organisms paves the way for the next by converting an unsuitable food stuff into a suitable one. This familiar example indicates the lines on which Nature works. It is the same everywhere, and shows the advantage of specialization, of allowing some one with peculiar facilities for performing an act to do that exclusively, that others may profit by his skill. So long as each man sought and killed his food, cooked his meals, made his own clothing, weapons, and implements--in a word, lived alone--advance was impossible. It was only when he who was most skillful with the needle made garments for the hunter in exchange for a haunch of venison, that the hunter could practice marksmanship, and the tailor design a new cut for the mantle with which the warrior might dazzle the daughter of the arrow maker. It is the same in Nature. Some organisms possess powers of elaborating certain materials of which others are quick to avail themselves. Plants can manufacture starch, an article needed by animals, but of which their own capacity, so far as producing it is concerned, is very limited, and thus animals find it advantageous to avail themselves of these stores instead of taxing their own resources. Similarly, plants need the organic matters of the animal bodies, and wise agriculture supplies carbon, nitrogen, and other articles of food in the shape of animal and vegetable refuse. But this matter requires digestion; it must be made soluble before it can be absorbed, and but few plants can effect this solution unaided. The "Venus's flytrap," the sundew, the wonderful "carrion plant," and others, are equipped with elaborate apparatus by which they are enabled to capture, kill, and literally digest the insects that supply them with nitrogeneous food, but these are exceptional cases. Nature usually employs other agents. The action of bacteria in causing decay has been said to be in general similar to fermentation--that it is effected by the bacteria in seeking their food. If oxygen be abundant, putrefaction occurs; if it be scant or absent, then fermentation takes place, for the tiny organisms require oxygen, and, if the air fails them, they pull to pieces the organic matters near them to obtain it. In doing this they get the nitrogen into such shape that the plants can use it, and thus digest their food for them. All organic matter contains carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen as a general rule, and to these are often united phosphorus, sulphur, nitrogen, and others, making very complex arrangements, veritable houses of cards, in fact, only held together by the strange power of life. When a leaf falls or a bird dies, some of these combinations are broken, and then the bacteria and other lowly organisms have full sway, for living matter is impregnable to all save a few of them. As oxygen or something else is taken out of the complex molecules, the compound falls to pieces, but as in the kaleidoscope the bits of colored glass tumble into endless varieties of symmetrical figures, so do the atoms fall into new combinations. If the keystone of an arch be removed, the stones fall apart; but atoms, unlike bricks or stones, can not stand alone as a rule; they must be united to something, and so, as soon as old associations are dissolved, new ones are formed. These new ones are those needed by plants, and thus is plant food digested. The term "plant food" has been frequently used, and should now be distinctly explained, for merely stating the chemical elements is not describing the food. When a physician tells a nurse to feed a patient he does not order so much carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and the like, but specifies a soup, certain vegetables, and so on, detailing every particular; and the same should be done for vegetable invalids. In medical practice a condition is recognized that is called scurvy. It is not exactly starvation, but is produced by lack of some food materials usually supplied by fresh vegetables. If scurvy appears at sea, no amount of meat, bread, cakes, or pastry will stop it; vegetables, and they only, will stay it. Sometimes a similar condition prevails among crops: some ingredient in a soil is lacking, and the others may be supplied indefinitely without giving the desired relief. To this may be attributed much of the fault found with fertilizers; for if the soil does not need a particular compound it is useless to apply it, and an excellent fertilizer is often blamed for not producing a crop on land already overstocked with it and crying for something else. Let us suppose a field on which cotton has been grown for many successive years until it has become exhausted. Analysis shows that a crop yielding one hundred pounds of lint to the acre removes from the soil: Nitrogen 20.71 pounds; Phosphoric acid 8.17 " Potash 13.06 " Lime 12.60 " Magnesia 4.75 " ----- Total 59.29 " The weight of the whole crop from which these figures were taken was eight hundred and forty-seven pounds, so that cotton exhausts land less than any staple crop, if the roots, stems, leaves, etc., be turned under and only the lint and seed be removed. Of these the lint (one hundred pounds) takes 1.17 pound from the soil, and the seed 13.89 pounds, making 15.06 pounds net loss.[47] But ignoring returns that may be made in the shape of cotton-seed meal, etc., and lime, with which our soils are abundantly supplied, we see that nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash have been removed. Suppose the owner puts bone meal on his exhausted land: the phosphoric acid in the bone will supply one need, and an improvement results. On the strength of this, bone meal will be loaded into the soil again, and let us suppose the deficit not yet made up, the crop again shows improvement. Now, phosphoric acid abounds in the soil, though the deficiency in nitrogen and potash has become steadily greater; so, when the customary bone meal is applied, the crop falls back, because the plants are starving for potash and nitrogen. They are like scurvy-smitten sailors, but many thoughtless farmers would attribute the decline to the maker of the bone meal, and say that its quality was not so high as formerly--an opinion similar to that of a sea captain who would ascribe to the poor quality of salt beef an outbreak of scurvy on his vessel. As crops of any description extract potash, nitrogen, and phosphoric acid from soils, the question how they are to be replaced is an important matter, and its answer may be most readily found by studying Nature's methods. In parts of the Old World there are fields that are fertile in the extreme after thousands of years of tillage, and it is apparent that mere cultivation does not prove injurious. The tropical forests have something growing wherever a plant can find foothold--a population in which the struggle for food is secondary to that for light and air, and yet the soil supporting this vegetation is marvelously rich. Every leaf that falls remains where it fell until in the warm, moist, half-lighted forest it becomes a little heap of mold. The bacteria of decomposition require warmth and moisture for their life; light is deleterious to them, but they thrive in the dense shade of the jungle. The tangled web of roots, weeds, and vines retains the rainfall, retarding evaporation, and preventing both droughts and freshets. Receiving dead and broken leaves, boughs, and other vegetable products, and spared the washing of violent torrents, the forest is inestimably fertile. On a smaller scale this goes on universally. The annual weeds, deciduous leaves, and such matter, fall prey to molds and bacteria, by which they are made soluble. Snows and rains bear the products into the soil, and there other bacteria, clustering around the roots, form the acids needed to complete solution. Every one knows that "well-rotted" manure is better than that which is fresh, and many wonder at this, but the reason is apparent. In feeding delicate patients, physicians often prescribe predigested foods or the digestive ferments to aid enfeebled assimilation; and similarly the manures that have been thoroughly acted on by bacteria, or containing those capable of producing the matters that plants need, are of most value for nourishing vegetation. In producing an article of any sort, the cheapness and ease with which it can be made is largely dependent on the shape in which the raw material reaches the factory. If a foundry can procure iron that needs only to be melted and cast, the owner can fill his orders more readily than would be possible if he had to reduce the metal from the ore; and Nature uses this principle over and over again. The importance of nitrogen to plants and its abundance in Nature have been mentioned, but it has also been said that plants can not use it directly, as most animals do with oxygen. The tiny bacteria intervene, and this they do in two ways: first, by causing decay of animal or vegetable matter containing nitrogen, and by this decay producing substances that plants can absorb; and, secondly, by producing little nodules or "tubercles" on the rootlets, through which the plant can take up nitrogen.[48] Now, when a plant is sated with nitrogen, it ceases to form these tubercles, and their formation is a sure sign that the plant is craving this article of food. When it is supplied, and its own life is ended, these form reservoirs from which other plants may be supplied, as new castings may be made from broken wheels. The great value of "green manuring" depends on the store of available nitrogen so laid up, but it is open to failure in one direction. The liability of fermentation to go to the acid stage from contamination with acid-forming ferments has been mentioned, an accident the possibility of which is impressed on us from time to time by sour bread; and similarly the organic matter turned under may undergo acid fermentation, rendering the ground "sour" and unfit for cultivation. The limits of this paper forbid the consideration of special fertilizers, but from the general principles laid down the rules for any special case may be deduced. A soil should contain a sufficient amount of potash, soda, lime, iron, and a few other minerals; phosphoric acid, nitrogen, organic matter, and, for some special crops, some other ingredients may be needed. When the soil needs renewing, there are two ways of accomplishing it. One way is to guess at what is needed; to buy fertilizers at high prices, without inquiring whether the soil needs the substances in that particular brand or not. Though very common, this is not a good plan. It is as though a physician were to give a patient any drug that was convenient, without inquiring into the disorder or the needs of the system, and it is followed by much the same result. That acid phosphate gave Farmer A a good crop, is no reason that Farmer B's land is also deficient in phosphorus. The same reasoning would teach that a heart stimulant that rouses a patient from shock would benefit one in danger of apoplexy, where the least increase in heart force might be fatal. A physician using such reasoning as the basis of his practice would not be considered a master of his art; and were he to attribute the fatal outcome of his logic to the poor quality of his stimulant, he would display criminal ignorance of drugs as well as disease; yet it is very common to see farmers put guano on a soil begging for potash, and then heap execration on the head of the dealer who sold the guano when the crop failed. To revert to a simile used above, a captain must not blame the salt pork for scurvy. The other way to buy and use fertilizers is to ascertain what a certain crop needs; then find out whether these be in the soil, and to what extent. With these data the deficiency may be made good without the wasteful cost of the former method. State and Federal Departments of Agriculture furnish their aid freely and gladly, and already the signs are seen of the day when agriculture will take its place among the semiexact sciences, and the present haphazard methods will become obsolete. FOOTNOTES: [46] An address delivered before the Richmond County (Georgia) Agricultural Society, on February 19, 1898. [47] United States Department of Agriculture. Farmers' Bulletin, No. 48. [48] Leguminous Plants for Green Manuring and for Feeding. E. W. Allen, Ph. D. United States Department of Agriculture. Farmers' Bulletin, No. 16. SKETCH OF AUGUST KEKULÉ. "This news," said Herr H. Landrelt, president, announcing Kekulé's death in the German Chemical Society at Berlin, "will be received with sorrow not only by our society but by the whole chemical world. Science has again lost one of its greatest representatives, one of those extremely rare spirits who were called upon to found a new epoch in it and push it mightily forward." FRIEDRICH AUGUST KEKULÉ was born at Darmstadt, September 7, 1829, and died, after a long illness, at Bonn, July 13, 1896. He was originally destined by his father for the profession of an architect; and some houses, he told his students in a festival address, still existed (in 1892) in Darmstadt of which he drew the plans when, a youth, he was attending the gymnasium. The leading events of his life were very tersely told by himself in an address responding to an ovation from the students of the University of Bonn on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his professorship there; a translation of which, from the _Kölnische Zeitung_, was published by Mr. J. E. Martin in Nature, June 30, 1892. At Giessen, he said, where he went to study architecture, he attended Liebig's lectures, and was thereby attracted to chemistry. But his relatives would not at first hear of his changing his profession, and he was given a half-year's grace to think over it. He spent his time in the Polytechnicum at Darmstadt. His first teacher in chemistry at Darmstadt was Moldenhauer, the inventor of lucifer matches. His leisure time was spent in modeling in plaster and at the lathe. He was then permitted to return to Giessen. "I attended," he said, "the lectures, first of Will and then of Liebig. Liebig was at work on a new edition of his letters on Chemistry, for which many experiments had to be carried out. I had to make estimations of ash, of albumen, to investigate gluten in plants, etc. The names of the young chemists who helped Liebig were mentioned in the book, among them mine. The proposal was then made to me, just at the time Liebig intended to make me his assistant, that I should go for a year abroad, either to Berlin, which was at that time to Giessen a foreign land, or to Paris. 'Go,' said Liebig, 'to Paris; there your views will be widened; you will learn a new language; you will get acquainted with the life of a great city; but you will not learn chemistry there.' In that, however, Liebig was wrong. I attended lectures by Frémy, Wurtz, Pouillet, Regnault; by Marchandis on physiology, and by Payen on technology. One day, as I was sauntering along the streets, my eyes encountered a large poster with the words _Leçons de philosophie chimique par Charles Gerhardt, ex-professeur de Montpellier_. Gerhardt had resigned his professorship at Montpellier, and was teaching philosophy and chemistry as _privat docent_ in Paris. That attracted me, and I entered my name on the list. Some days later I received a card from Gerhardt; he had seen my name in Liebig's Letters on Chemistry. On my calling upon him he received me with great kindness, and made me the offer, which I could not accept, that I should become his assistant. My visit took place at noon, and I did not leave his house till midnight, after a long talk on chemistry. These discussions continued between us at least twice a week for over a year. Then I received the offer of the post of assistant to von Plauter, at the Castle of Reichenau, near Chur, which I accepted, contrary to Liebig's wish, who recommended me as assistant to Fehling, at Stuttgart. So I went to Switzerland, where I had leisure to digest what I had learned in Paris during my intercourse with Gerhardt. Then I received an invitation from Stenhouse, in London, to become his assistant, an invitation I was loath to accept, since I regarded him, if I may be allowed the expression, as a _Schmierchemiker_. By chance, however, Bunsen came to Chur on a visit to his brother-in-law, at whose house I first met him. I consulted Bunsen as to Stenhouse's offer, and he advised me by all means to accept it. I should learn a new language, but I should not learn chemistry. So I came to London, where as Stenhouse's assistant I did not learn much. By means of a friend, however, I became acquainted with Williamson. The latter had just published his ether theory, and was at work on the polybasic acids (in particular on the action of PCl_{5} on H_{2}SO_{4}). Chemistry was at one of its turning points. The theory of polybasic radicals was being evolved. With Williamson was also associated Odling. Williamson insisted on plain, simple formulæ, without commas, without the buckles of Kolbe or the brackets of Gerhardt. It was a capital school to encourage independent thought. The wish was expressed that I should stay in England and become a technologist, but I was too much attached to home. I wished to teach in a German university. But where? In order to get acquainted with the circumstances at several universities, I became a traveling student. In this capacity I came, among other universities, to Bonn. Here there was no chemist of eminence, and hence there were no prospects. Nowhere did there seem so much promise and so great a future as at Heidelberg. I could ask no help of Bunsen. 'I can do nothing for you,' he said, 'at least not openly. I will not stand in your way, but more I can not promise.' I fitted up a small private laboratory in the principal street of Heidelberg at the house of a corn merchant--Gross, by name--a single room with an adjoining kitchen. I took a few pupils, among whom was Baeyer. In our little kitchen I finished my work on fulminate of silver, while Baeyer carried out the researches, which subsequently became famous, on cacodyl. That the walls were coated thick with arsenious acid, and that silver fulminate is explosive, we took no thought about. After two years and a half I received a call to Ghent as ordinary professor. There I stayed nine years, and had to lecture in French. With me to Ghent came Baeyer. Through the kindness of the then Prime Minister of Belgium, Rogier, I obtained the means to establish a small laboratory. I had there with me a number of students, among whom I may name Baeyer, Hübner, Ladenburg, Wichelhaus, Linnemann, Radzizewski. There was not so much a systematic course of instruction as a free and pleasant academic intercourse. After nine years' work I received the call to Bonn." Professor Kekulé concluded his address with some account of his work at Bonn, and of the great attention he had always received from his pupils. For a full account of Kekulé's scientific career and achievements, we are indebted to the memorial address made by President Landelt to the German Chemical Society on the occasion of his death, of which we translate the more important passages from the _Berichte_: "The works which Kekulé has left behind him belong, as we all know, to the bases of all chemistry. His teachings have so passed into our flesh and blood that it seems almost superfluous to remind a circle of professional chemists of them. I shall be able to present only in the most general outlines this evening the immense influence which the dead master has exercised upon science; a complete view of all his labors is a subject for a biography, which we must wait for. "Kekulé's scientific work began in 1854, with the discovery of thiacetic acid, by which he at once separated from the old school of chemistry that was still prevailing, and, founding a new one, revealed himself as an adherent of the new doctrine of types. After his habilitation at Heidelberg, which followed in 1856, came the essay on fulminating mercury, in which the view so important for the future was expressed, that to the three typical combinations of chlorhydrogen, water, and ammonia, hitherto recognized, might be added a fourth, marsh gas. In the next essay, on binary combinations and the theory of polyatomic radicals, he put forward the conception of mixed types, and first reached the knowledge of various atomicity or valency of the radicals. These researches were continued, and there appeared shortly afterward, in the spring of 1858, the two great treatises which have since exercised so powerful an influence on chemistry--that on the constitution and metamorphoses of chemical combinations, and that on the chemical nature of carbon. In these theses Kekulé passed from the valency of the radicals to that of the elements themselves, and showed that the composition of all those compounds that contain one atom of carbon lead to the conclusion that that element is quadrivalent; and that, further, the relations of combination of a complex of carbon atoms are explainable if we suppose that the latter are mutually bound by a certain number of their four unities of attraction. This idea was suggested very carefully, and the words which the author added at the end of his essay read very curiously to-day: 'Finally, I think I ought still to insist that I attach only little value to speculations of this sort. Since one delving in chemistry must once in a while, in the lack of exact scientific principles, content himself with probabilities and temporary hypotheses, it seems proper to communicate these conceptions, because, as it appears to me, they furnish a simple and fairly general expression for the newest discoveries, and because, therefore, the use of them may assist in the discovery of new facts.' How diffident the words sound, and how far have the expectations been exceeded! We all know that the theory of valency is to-day the leading guide through all our science; and, although another investigator had a share in its origination, no one disputes that its main foundation and its eminent value in organic chemistry are primarily due to Kekulé's idea of the quadrivalency of carbon. "After he was called to the University of Ghent, in 1858, Kekulé exhibited an indefatigable activity. He began the great series of investigations of the organic acids which, beginning with succinic acid, malic acid, and tartaric acid, and extending afterward to many others, have given complete conclusions as to the nature of these bodies. Contemporaneously, in 1860, appeared the first number of the _Lehrbuch der organischen Chemie_, which was soon followed by other numbers, so that the whole first volume was completed in 1861. All his fellow-chemists who are acquainted with the events of that period will remember the enthusiasm with which the work was received. For the first time, in place of the former system of organic chemistry based on the old radicals of Berzelius, a system of treatment appeared which in the dress of the theory of types had the doctrine of valency as its foundation, and exposed the construction as well as the isomeric relations of the numerous carbon compounds with wonderful clearness. The work, the first two published volumes of which contained the substances designated by Kekulé as the fatty compounds, is still recognized as the prototype of many text-books that followed it. "In 1855 Kekulé put forth the second of his great theories. First in the Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Paris, and afterward in fuller form in Liebig's _Annalen_, appeared the essay, Researches among the Aromatic Compounds, in which he showed that the substances so designated all contain six or more atoms of carbon, and that they could be described as derivatives of the simplest of them, benzene. He proposed two hypotheses to explain the constitution of this substance, one of which, the only one afterward pursued, supposed that the six carbon atoms are associated in a ring, and alternately linked by one and two valencies. By replacing the hydrogen atoms corresponding to each carbon atom by other elements or radicals one could arrive at the knowledge of the constitution of a large number of aromatic bodies which now figure as benzol derivatives. These considerations led, however, to another question--namely, whether or not the supplied places of the six hydrogen atoms are chemically equivalent. The question of space relations in chemistry first came up in connection with this investigation, and Kekulé at once endeavored to solve it. All these ideas were, however, expressed at first with reserve, and this essay closes with the words, 'I place no more value on these views than they are worth, and I believe that much labor must still be applied before such speculations can be regarded as anything else than more or less elegant hypotheses; but I believe, too, that at least experimental speculations of this kind must be used in chemistry.' "In this case, again, Kekulé's modest expectations have been surpassed. The wonderful results that have accrued from the benzol theory are patent to all of us. We know that it was the instigation to the carrying out of an innumerable multitude of researches which are still pursued with undiminished industry. Rarely has a thought exercised so fructifying and forwarding an influence on chemistry, and so redounded to the advantage of both pure science and art. Thankfulness for this gift, as you know, prompted our society to honor the author of the benzol theory and the twenty-fifth year of the announcement of it by a public festival; and the Kekulé celebration, which took place in this house on the 11th of March, 1890, is memorable to all for the brilliant and witty speech with which the master responded to the many addresses made to him. It is preserved in our reports (_Berichte_ 23, 1892), and the repeated reading of it always affords rich enjoyment." Kekulé assumed his last position, as professor at the University of Bonn, in the fall of 1867. He there devoted his attention for a period to the erection of a new institute building, but it was not long before numerous works began again to appear--some of them by himself alone, like the important investigation of the condensation products of aldehyde; and others in co-operation with his many students. The continuation of his _Lehrbuch_ was taken in hand at the same time. In 1867 he gratified his fellow-chemists by the publication of the first volume of his Chemistry of the Benzol Derivatives. This was followed from 1880 to 1887 by single numbers, prepared with the help of co-workers, of the second and third volumes. Prof. F. R. Japp, in the Kekulé memorial lecture before the Chemical Society of London, speaking of Kekulé's residence in that city, September, 1897, said that he always acknowledged the influence which Liebig and Odling and Williamson, with whom he became acquainted in London, exercised on the formation of his opinions. Kekulé's theories, Professor Japp said, were based on Gerhardt's type theory; on Williamson's theory of polyvalent radicals, which by their power of linking together other radicals render possible the existence of multiple types; and Odling's theory of mixed types, which was a deduction from Williamson's theory. Less consciously, perhaps, his opinions were influenced by E. Frankland's theory of the valency of elementary atoms, and by Kolbe's speculation on the constitution of organic compounds. Kekulé gathered together the various ideas which he found scattered throughout the writings of his predecessors, added to them, and welded the whole into the consistent system which forms our present theory of chemical structure. In 1857, in the course of a memoir on the constitution of fulminic acid, he gave a tabular arrangement of compounds formulated on the type of marsh gas, this being the earliest statement, though put forward only in an imperfect form, of the tetravalency of carbon. In the same year he published an important theoretical paper On the So-called Conjugated Compounds and the Theory of Polyatomic Radicals, which contains a complete system of multiple types and mixed types. In 1858 the celebrated paper, On the Constitution and Metamorphoses of Chemical Compounds, and on the Chemical Nature of Carbon, appeared. It embodies the fully developed doctrine of the tetravalency of carbon, together with Kekulé's views on the linking of atoms and on the valency of such chains of atoms, the foundation on which our modern system of constitutional chemistry rests. In 1865 Kekulé put forward his well-known benzene theory--pronounced by Professor Japp the crowning achievement, in his hands, of the doctrine of the linking of atoms, and the most brilliant piece of scientific prediction to be found in the whole range of organic chemistry. The conception of closed chains, or cycloids, which he thus introduced, has shown itself to be capable of boundless expansion. Kekulé's students all speak admiringly of his qualities as a teacher. The memorialist of the German Chemical Society said: "All of us who have attended his lectures or heard him in other places will ever remember what a teacher Kekulé was. With incomparable lucidity and sometimes with the happiest humor, he could go playfully through the theme he was considering, masterfully presenting it in new and often surprising aspects. The charm of his personality affected all who came in contact with him; it was the geniality which shone out of his whole being, and involuntarily commanded admiration. Numerous pupils flocked to him, and many of those who to-day fill chairs of chemistry in Germany and other countries have made his name highly honored." Professor Thorpe, of London, who spent a little time in Kekulé's laboratory, describes him as having been one of the very best expositors, with the single possible exception of Kirchhoff, to whom it had been his lot to listen. As a laboratory teacher he was excellent. He was a most severe judge of work, striving to exact the same high manipulative finish, the same neatness and order, which he invariably bestowed on everything he did, and he was absolutely intolerant of anything slovenly or "sloppy." "But it was as a lecturer that he was seen at his best. He was singularly luminous as a thinker, a close and accurate reasoner, with a remarkable power of concentrated expression.... His language was apt and well chosen, and his delivery easy and natural"; and his whole address showed that every detail had been carefully considered. At a distance of thirty years, Professor Dewar said, at the London memorial meeting, that to look back and call to mind the presence and personality of the great chemist as he knew him was indeed a pleasure. He was a man of noble mien, handsome, dignified, and yet of a homely and kindly disposition. He was a severe critic, having a haughty contempt for the accidental and bizarre in scientific work. His originality and suggestiveness seemed endless, so that he had no need to commit trespass or to follow just in the wake of other people's ideas. "Everything that passed through the Kekulé alembic was indeed transmuted into pure gold. His precision of thought and diction rendered his papers profoundly suggestive to other workers." "The last years of the master's life," his German eulogist says, "were often troubled by illness, but there were not wanting bright days which the love of his students and colleagues prepared for him." Such a one was the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his professorship at Bonn, June 1, 1892, in which the students and officers participated with cordial unanimity. The ceremony began in the morning with an enthusiastic ovation by the students. The chemical theater was decorated with plants; the benzene hexagon was figured on the blackboard with garlands of flowers, in the midst of which the letters A. K. were wrought in a monogram of roses. Alfred Helle, one of the chemical students, delivered a felicitous address, in which he congratulated his fellow-students on being privileged to sit at the feet of the greatest of living chemists, after which three cheers were given to the professor. Kekulé responded to the offering in an address giving some of the details of his life, from which we have already quoted. Kekulé's personal staff and the officers of the university then presented their congratulations. In the evening the students honored him with a torchlight procession, it being the third time he had received this, the most conspicuous honor which is bestowed by German students. The first occasion was in 1875, when he declined the professorship at Munich; the second was in 1878, when he was rector of the university, and was given in celebration of the restoration of unity among the students, after a long period of disunion. Among the torchbearers on that occasion was the present Emperor of Germany. During the later period of his life Kekulé was comparatively sterile. Those who knew him, however, Professor Thorpe says, "would be the first to affirm that this seeming apathy sprang from no natural indifference. There is no doubt that he suffered, even in the early period of middle life, from the intense stress and strain of his mental labors prior to the Ghent period. He too surely exemplified the sad truth of Liebig's saying that he who would become a great chemist must pay for his pre-eminence by the sacrifice of his health. There is reason to know that it was the consciousness of failing power which prevented him from finishing much to which he had put his hand, and that his fastidiousness and his sense of 'finish,' amounting almost to hypercriticism, restrained him from publishing much which he realized fell short of his ideal." The last time Kekulé's name was brought before the public was on the occasion of the renewal of the ancient title of nobility of his family, as August Kekulé von Stradowitz. Editor's Table. _A VOICE FROM THE PULPIT._ We called attention last month to a weak attack on the doctrine of evolution by a certain Mr. A. J. Smith, Superintendent of Public Schools in the city of St. Paul. The only thing which gave any consequence to the deliverance in question was that it was addressed to a large gathering of public-school teachers, who might possibly have been unduly influenced in their appreciation of it by the speaker's official position. We are glad now to learn that, very shortly after the publication of Superintendent Smith's address, an excellent statement of the true relation of the doctrine of evolution to education was made in one of the city pulpits by the Rev. S. G. Smith, who did not boast, as the superintendent had done, of having made an exhaustive study of the subject, but who, nevertheless, showed that he had a grasp of it which the other altogether lacked. The Rev. Mr. Smith's discourse would have merited attention wherever it might have been delivered; but, considered as a pulpit utterance, it seems to us to possess a special and very encouraging significance. We need hardly say that the pulpit has not always been friendly to broad scientific views, but in this case it has spoken with a candor, a breadth, and an intelligence which the lecture platform can not do more than equal, and which it would certainly be too much to look for in all our colleges. "The law of evolution," said the reverend gentleman, "is as universal in its application as the law of gravitation. It holds that in every realm the simple tends to become complex, and that the complex is more stable than the simple. Motion and matter have a history in which the simple and the indefinite take on variety of organization and definiteness of adaptation." This is a statement in which the author of the Synthetic Philosophy would probably have very little change to suggest. Mr. Smith does not, like so many who discuss the subject in a superficial manner, confound evolution with Darwinism. Darwinism, he recognizes, may, in its particular explanations as to the origin of species and the descent of life, be in error; but evolution is universal in its scope, and can only fail if it can be shown that the fundamental postulates on which it rests, such as the instability of the homogeneous, the continuity of motion, the law of rhythm, etc., are not to be depended on. Must a person have made the circle of the sciences and comprehended all knowledge before he can reasonably profess a belief in evolution? No, says Mr. Smith; when the foundations of a doctrine have been clearly laid, when they have been tested by many different investigators from many different points of view, and when these, almost without exception, affirm that the doctrine is not only in harmony with, but lends a new and deeper significance to, the several orders of fact with which they are individually concerned, any person of ordinary intelligence is justified in considering that doctrine as satisfactorily proved and giving it his personal adhesion. What chiefly excited the ire of Superintendent A. J. Smith was the contention of evolutionists that the modern child reflects the earlier stages of human development. He asked his audience if they really thought the children of to-day were young savages, and quoted Emerson and Longfellow as authorities on the question. The Rev. S. G. Smith takes up the point and expresses himself as follows: "When it is stated that the child has many points of contact with primitive man, it is not meant that the child is a savage, but that 'in its immaturity' we can learn much respecting it from the study of child races. The child has neither the virtues nor the vices of the savage, but he has many of the mental characteristics. Embryology does not teach that in prenatal life the child passes into the form of every animal in a menagerie, but that its life passes through the stages that mark the great subdivisions of all life. Nor do the comparisons of the child with primitive man imply that he must pass through all the activities of savage races, but that the development of his faculties, the tendencies of his desires, the state of his ignorance, all illustrate the history of the development of the race. Primitive man may be understood by a study of the child, and, conversely, the child may be illustrated by primitive man." It must be borne in mind that the child is in constant contact with its elders, that it is subject to the restraints which they impose, and that it lives more or less in an atmosphere of affection and care. There is excellent reason, therefore, why it should not resemble primitive man in all points. Its daily life is really controlled and guided by a higher power. In some cases there is even too much control and guidance; the conditions are made too artificial, and the development of the child's nature suffers in consequence. When the age of manhood or womanhood is reached there is something lacking, precisely because enough scope was not left for the primitive or, as we may very properly say, the "savage" instincts of childhood. A great French writer, Joseph de Maistre, quotes a popular saying to the effect that "spoilt children always turn out well."[49] So far as there is any truth in it, the explanation is that the spoilt child is one that has a great deal of its own way, and is left to work out the savage and so acquire a sounder foundation for its future life. In how many of us are there not chained savages that might have made their escape in earlier years if they had only been allowed! It is a dangerous thing to try to make little angels of children. The Rev. Mr. Smith is quite right in what he says as to the predominance of the imagination in children, this being another strong point of resemblance to primitive man. "The beginnings of history and institutions," he truly says, "can only be understood when we remember that races in their early development do not have clearly marked activities of imagination, reason, and memory. They mix the three. So legends, myths, and heroics are earnest efforts of the undeveloped mind to make objective the truth, and are not clumsy lies at all." Applying this to the child, the conclusion is that "he must be fed through his imagination or he will not grow." A very imaginative child is apt to be accused of falsehood, when he simply fails to distinguish between things imagined and things remembered. Neither the child nor the savage can concentrate his attention, and to force either to do so beyond a certain very limited measure is simply to injure and deform such natural powers as he possesses. The amount of mischief which a dogmatic and over-logical teacher, wholly ignorant of the psychology of the child, can do is beyond all calculation. It is needless, however, to pursue the parallel further, though the Rev. Mr. Smith very properly carries it into the region of morals, where it is no less close than in that of intellectual action. There is another interesting aspect of evolution which the reverend gentleman glances at, and that is its bearing on general courses of study. History and literature, considered as departments of research, it has largely transformed by substituting for conventional categories and abstract notions the perception of a genetic process pervading all the works of the human spirit and linking them into an organic unity. In conclusion, we may observe that, if Superintendent A. J. Smith had not made some foolish remarks in a rather ostentatious manner, it is probable the Rev. S. G. Smith would not have delivered the excellent discourse on which we have commented, and which we feel sure will far outweigh in general effect the performance which called it forth. The conclusions to be drawn are the pleasing ones that good may sometimes come out of evil, and that a free pulpit is admirably adapted to guard the interests of liberty and common sense. FOOTNOTE: [49] "Les enfans gâtés réussissent toujours." _LESSONS OF ANTHROPOLOGY._ The address delivered at the last meeting of the British Association by the president of the Anthropological Section contained nothing that was strikingly novel--it is not every year that striking novelties can be announced--but it dealt in an interesting manner with several phases of a most important subject. The speaker, Professor Brabrook, took the position that the order of the universe is expressed in continuity, not cataclysm, and that this principle will be found illustrated in every branch of anthropological research, in direct proportion to the completeness of the data obtained. He admitted the vastness of the gap which still separates the remains of palaeolithic from those of neolithic man, but expressed the belief that further explorations would bring intermediate relics to light. To quote the speaker's words: "The evidence we want relates to events which took place at so great a distance of time that we may well wait patiently for it, assured that somewhere or other these missing links must have existed, and probably are still to be found." Reference was made to the labors which are now being usefully expended in gathering what is called the folklore of various communities, and to the result which continually appears with fuller evidence, namely, that the tendency of mankind everywhere is to develop like fancies and ideas at a like stage of intellectual development. Full of detail as these stories are, they are found to contain but a few primitive ideas; and it seems not improbable that to a large extent they are essentially Nature myths. Mr. Brabrook happily quotes Lord Bacon's description of such narratives as "sacred relics, gentle whispers and the breath of better times." The "better times" are a part of the general system of myth; but who will deny that there is a special charm in these early documents of our race? "Let one of our literary exquisites," said a thoughtful French writer, "try to write a fairy tale which shall neither be a pretentious apologue nor a tiresome and transparent allegory, and he will soon feel that mere cleverness does not suffice to create these marvelous narratives, and will conceive a just admiration for those who constructed them, that is to say, everybody and nobody." The progress of anthropology, according to the president of the section, seems more and more to confirm the theory adopted by Fustel de Coulanges in France and Spencer in England, that the belief in spirits lies at the basis of all religious systems. We thus see, to use his words, "that the group of theories and practices which constitute the great province of man's emotions and mental operations expressed in the term 'religion' has passed through the same stages, and produced itself in the same way, from rude early beginnings, as every other mental exertion." Mr. Brabrook mentions a work lately published by "a distinguished missionary of the Evangelical Society of Paris," the Rev. Mr. Coillard, in which an account is given of the superstitions prevailing among the natives of the upper Zambesi. The reverend gentleman tells of their belief in witchcraft, and gives a story of a young woman who was condemned to penal labor on suspicion of having bewitched, or tried to bewitch, another young woman who had taken her husband from her; the evidence of the crime being found in a dead mouse, which had been discovered in the second young woman's chamber. The missionary says: "She was made a convict. A few years ago she would have been burned alive. Ah, my friends, paganism is an odious and a cruel thing!" On which the president of the Anthropological Section observes: "Ah, Mr. Coillard, is it many years ago that she would have been burned alive or drowned in Christian England or Christian America? Surely the odiousness and the cruelty are not special to paganism any more than to Christianity." This is much to the point. If witchcraft is no longer a recognized crime in England or America, it is not because these lands are Christian, but because science is mixed with their Christianity. Even missionaries ought to know this. A great many different sciences are grouped under the name "anthropology," but they all have their rallying point in man, whose nature and history they seek to explore. The fact is that all sciences should have the same rallying point; and we trust that the greater interest which is visibly being taken year by year in anthropological studies will tend to humanize in a beneficial degree the whole circle of human knowledge. _AN EXAMPLE OF SOCIAL DECADENCE._ That the incessant encroachment of the Government upon the rights of the individual will produce social decadence is a truth that most Americans have yet to learn. With a light heart they are constantly approving scheme after scheme for social regeneration that involves some restriction upon freedom, or an increase of taxation, or both. It is not perhaps singular that the history of similar schemes in the past should possess no lesson for them. When President Eliot, of Harvard University, says that the experience of the Italian republics has no value for us, it is not to be expected that persons with less capacity to interpret the records of other times should attach little or no importance to them. But they ought not most certainly to maintain the same attitude toward the experience of the nations of to-day. It is to blind their eyes to what does not rest upon hearsay or upon dubious documents--to what admits of the clearest demonstration at the hands of living witnesses. For this reason we urge upon all students of social science the study of the condition of the inhabitants of the black-earth region of Russia. In that field, one of the largest and most fruitful in the world for investigation, they will find the amplest evidence of the frightful havoc wrought by the abridgment of individual freedom and the seizure of private property in the form of taxes for public purposes. If it be said that Russia is an autocracy, and can not therefore furnish instruction to a democracy like the United States, the answer is easy, if not obvious. Despotism, like gravitation, is the same all over the world. It makes no difference in the long run whether a law abridging freedom issues from the palace of a czar or from the legislative halls of a popular assembly. The individual objecting to it is obliged to regulate his life, not in accordance with his own notions, but in accordance with the notions of some one else. It makes no difference, either, whether taxation is imposed by an imperial edict or by a legislative vote. The citizens that have to bear it against their will contribute money for purposes that some one else only approves of. The only difference between Russia and the United States is that this kind of despotism has been carried to much greater lengths in one country than in the other. If, therefore, we can find out what the effect has been in Russia, we will be able to predict what the effect will be in the United States. As every person familiar with Russia knows, the black-earth region is one of the richest and most productive in the world. It ought to be inhabited by one of the wealthiest and happiest of peoples. Yet such is not the case. According to Count Tolstoi, who contributed recently a letter to the London Times on the subject, the inhabitants are among the poorest and most miserable in the world. They are in a state of chronic starvation. They are obliged to content themselves with nearly a third less food than is sufficient to maintain normal health. The physical effect of this insufficiency of food is a decrease in vitality, a diminished stature, and a check to the growth of population. It is proved, first, by the failure of the peasants of the region to meet the requirements for military service, and, second, by the statistics of population, which show that the increase of births over deaths has fallen from the maximum reached twenty years ago to zero. But the mental effects of the destitution wrought by the robberies of the Government are more distressing even than the physical. It gives birth to a stolidity and despair that tend to paralyze all effort toward betterment. The people subjected to it come to feel that there is no use of making any struggle beyond the maintenance of mere existence. Whatever they get in excess of this requirement will be taken from them. "A peasant," says Tolstoi, illustrating this fact, "feels that his position as an agriculturalist is bad, but he believes that it can not be improved; and, consequently, adapting himself to this hopeless position, he no longer fights against it, but lives and acts only in so far as he is stirred by the instinct of self-preservation. Moreover, the very wretchedness of his condition increases still more his depression of spirit. The lower the economic condition of a population sinks, like a weight on a lever, the more difficult it becomes to raise it again; the peasants feel this, and, as it were, throw away the helve after the hatchet. 'Why should we trouble ourselves?' they say. 'We sha'n't get fat. If we can only keep alive.'" The fruits of this mental state are as palpable as those of the lack of food. They are to be found in every direction. In manners, habits, and customs the peasants are hopelessly conservative. They belong, not to the nineteenth century, but to the ninth. Instead of adopting new and improved methods of agriculture, they cling to those of the subjects of Rurik. They use the old plow, distribute tillage in three crops, and divide their fields into long, narrow strips. So slowly do they toil with primitive implements and debilitated animals, and so indifferent are they to what they are doing, that it takes them a day to do the work that a well-fed and alert peasant would do in half the time. A more deplorable sign of demoralization is the prevalence of family discord and loss of interest in a higher life. The aggressions of the state have stimulated selfishness, bad temper, and incipient rebellion. The children disobey their parents, the younger brothers reject the primacy of the older, and money earned elsewhere is kept from the family treasury. With the decadence of family life there is a decadence of religious life. Although the peasants are nominally orthodox, they care nothing for religion. Even the clergy confirm the fact that they are becoming more and more indifferent to the church. What they seek is not to penetrate the mysteries of life, but to obliterate consciousness of them. "Under these circumstances," says Tolstoi, alluding to the economic and mental decadence, "the craving for forgetfulness is natural, and accordingly spirits and tobacco are being consumed in ever greater and greater quantities." He adds that "even quite young boys drink and smoke." Since the loss of freedom due to the seizure of property is the same in the last analysis as that due to an abridgment of the right to think and act, the evils of ecclesiastical and bureaucratic despotism do not differ from those of excessive taxation. Nevertheless, they receive separate attention at the hands of Tolstoi. As a proof of the blight of a church that the peasants have no part in directing, he points to the profound and beneficent change wrought the moment they fall in with a sect of dissenters. "Their spirits at once rise," he says, "and at the same time the foundation of their material prosperity is laid." A blight of the same kind can be traced to the attempt of the state to play the paternal rôle. "Nominally," says Tolstoi again, "there exist for the peasants special laws with regard to the possession and division of land, to inheritance, and to all the duties connected with it, but in reality there is a kind of hodge-podge of regulations, explanation, customary laws, decrees of courts of cassation, and so on, which naturally makes the peasants feel their absolute dependence on the will of innumerable officials." Knowing that they are powerless to resist the Government, which is constantly flogging them for disobedience or stupidity, they comply as best they can with the thousand rules and regulations made for them. Seldom do they think of acting upon their own responsibility. Thus they lose the power of private initiative. What the impoverishment of taxation has not done to ruin them is left to ecclesiastical and bureaucratic despotism to complete. It is curious to note that Tolstoi's remedy for these evils is the one that Herbert Spencer himself might have suggested. With one stroke he dismisses the prescriptions that the social reformer in the United States as well as in Russia attaches so much importance to. It is not, in his opinion, "the ministry of agriculture, with all its contrivances," that will reclaim the peasants, nor is it "exhibitions nor schools for rural economy," nor that "unfailing" remedy "for all evils," i. e., parish schools. The thing they need is freedom. "It is necessary," says Tolstoi, "to give them religious liberty, to subject them to common instead of special laws--the will of rural officials; it is necessary to give them liberty of education, liberty of reading, liberty of moving about, and, above all, to remove the power to torture brutally by flogging grown-up people simply because they belong to the peasant class." But to give them such freedom means to deliver them not only from excessive taxation but from vexatious rules and regulations. It is to apply to them the same remedy that must be applied in the United States to save the American people, now so heavily taxed and so oppressed by countless laws, from the same social decadence that afflicts Russia. _THE ADVANCE OF SCIENCE._ The paper by Sir J. Norman Lockyer, which we publish in this number, recounts in an interesting manner the steps by which science gained a place for itself in the educational systems of the world. To us, in the latter years of the nineteenth century, it is apt to seem strange that the recognition of science as an essential element in all education should have come so late in the world's history; but reflection shows that it could not well have been otherwise. To view and examine any subject scientifically involves not only a deliberate and prolonged mental effort, but the holding in check of some of the most active propensities of the human mind, such as imagination and what Bagehot has called "the emotion of belief." In a certain sense imagination is the precursor of science; but, in the early stages of human development the precursor is mistaken for the true teacher. The lesson that there is no royal road to truth, nothing but a highway on which much wearisome plodding must be done, is one which human nature in general does not take to kindly. Even in the present day how many there are who chafe at the restraints which Science imposes on belief, whose disposition is to break her bonds asunder and have none of her reproof! When we think, indeed, of what the intellectual condition of the world is to-day, with the wonders which science has wrought raising their testimony on every hand, it is hardly surprising that, a couple of centuries ago, it was difficult to get any systematic provision made for the teaching of science. However, that battle has been fought and won, and Science has long since definitely entered on her career of beneficent conquest. Systems founded on imagination, or on merely abstract reasoning, come and go, wax and wane; but the empire of science once set up can never be subverted. We must hope that some day it will rule in the realm of morals as now it does in that of material things. Not till then will its perfect work be done. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. Prof. _Dean C. Worcester_, of the University of Michigan, spent eleven months, beginning in September, 1887, in the Philippine Islands in connection with the second scientific expedition of Dr. J. B. Steere. He went there again, with an expedition of which he was chief, in July, 1890, and spent two years and eight months. His object in both expeditions was the study of birds. In the course of them he visited twenty-two islands. The first expedition was unofficial and was regarded suspiciously by the authorities of the islands; the second was armed with a special permission from the Spanish Minister of the Colonies and enjoyed every advantage. The scientific results of both were reported to the United States National Museum, and the collections were deposited in its cabinet. The general results, the story of the adventures of the members of the expedition, with their observations on the geographical features of the islands, their peoples, and the social conditions prevailing there, are given in a popular style in the volume before us.[50] The account is preceded by a short sketch of the history of the islands, as an aid to the better comprehension of their present condition and the reasons for it. Of the natives, who form the bulk of the 8,000,000 of the population of the islands, there are more than eighty distinct tribes, each with its own peculiarities, scattered over hundreds of islands. The more important of these islands may be reached by lines of mail and merchant steamers, which afford tolerably frequent communication between them. The difficulties begin when one attempts to make his way into the interior of the large and less explored of them, or desires to reach ports at which vessels do not call. Roads are scarce and to a large extent impracticable, while enemies and dangers are many, and such boats as one can find off the regular routes are precarious. As to climate, if one is well, able to live as he pleases, and most scrupulously observes all sanitary rules, keeping the most healthy spots, he may escape disease; but if he steps a little aside at any point he is in danger. It is very doubtful, in the author's judgment, if many successive generations of European or American children could be reared there. Evidences of the action of earthquakes and volcanoes are seen almost everywhere, and elevation and subsidence are going on with great rapidity at the present time. Hence it is not safe to build substantial houses in Manila. The soil is astonishingly fertile: fruits--in about fifty varieties--are the chief luxury; the value of the forest products is enormous; the mineral wealth is great, but has never been developed. Professor Worcester speaks of five millions of civilized natives of the Philippines. They belong for the most part to three tribes: the Tagalogs, Ilocanos, and Visayans. Without drawing fine distinctions between these, they are regarded as showing sufficient homogeneity to be treated as a class. They have their bad qualities and their good, which are reviewed with an apparent inclination on the part of the author to like them, and the conclusion that, having learned something of their power, they will now be likely to take a hand in shaping their own future. There are also barbarians, of whom the Moros of Sulu are a type--bloodthirsty and faithless, and as careless of human life as one would be of weeds in a field; and savages of all degrees, down to the lowest. The government is various, according to the particular governor and the people he has to deal with, but all of the Spanish or Moro type. The clergy are the dominant class; and of these the friars or brethren of the orders exert an evil influence, while the Jesuits are believed to be a distinctive power for good. Much can be said in favor of the insurgents' demand that the friars be expelled from the colony and their places taken by secular clergymen not belonging to any order. Professor Worcester has made a very lively, interesting, and instructive book, which is marred, however, by occasional evidences that, while begun with serious purpose, it has been hurried to meet a passing demand, and by the too frequent intrusion of trivialities and slang. * * * * * We are often surprised at manifestations of individuality and intelligence in domestic animals and pets, and are accustomed to attribute extraordinary qualities to the beasts in which we perceive them; as if each animal could not have its peculiar traits and talents as well as each man. We hardly imagine that there are any special differences in wild animals, and that idiosyncrasies of character and diversities of gifts and powers of adaptation may run through the whole animal kingdom. A closer acquaintance with Nature would teach us better. Certain stories and myths of savages show that they had a fair appreciation of the individual peculiarities of animals, and farmers' boys, who live in natural surroundings, know something of these things. The subject is now presented to us in a fairly clear light by Mr. _Ernest Seton Thompson_, as illustrated in the careers of a number of typical specimens of animals and birds whose characters and acts, as they came under his observation, are related in _Wild Animals I have Known_.[51] The stories, he avers, are true; the animals in the book are all real characters. They lived the lives he has depicted, and showed the stamp of heroism and personality more strongly by far than it has been in the power of his pen to tell. Among them was Lobo, the wolf, of the Corrumpaw Cattle Range, New Mexico, the leader of a gang, who exhibited some of the qualities of an able general, and was a beast of influence, powerful, vigilant, crafty, and the terror of the settlement; and who was only trapped when grief for the loss of a female companion deprived him of the wit by which he had escaped all previous efforts to take him. Silverspot, the crow, was the leader of a large band. He had his calls, which the other crows obeyed, and was always to be seen at the head of his company in their incursions into the fields, and guiding them in their journeys northward and southward. Raggylug, the rabbit, is acknowledged to be a composite, embodying in one the ways of several rabbits, their nesting habits and ways of concealment and devices to baffle pursuers. Bingo, the dog, had associates as well as enemies among the wolves, and different characters by day and by night. In a similar way to these, the traits of the fox, the pacing mustang, other dogs than Bingo, and the partridge are portrayed. In all the stories the real personality of the individual and his view of life are the author's theme, rather than the ways of the race in general, as viewed by a casual and hostile human eye. The moral is suggested by the lives and emphasized by Mr. Thompson, that "we and the beasts are kin. Man has nothing that the animals have not at least a vestige of; the animals have nothing that man does not at least in some degree share. Since, then, the animals are creatures with wants and feelings differing only in degree from our own, they surely have their rights." It would be hard to speak too well of the graphic expressiveness of the illustrations. FOOTNOTES: [50] The Philippine Islands and their People. A Record of Personal Observation and Experiences, with a Short Summary of the More Important Facts in the History of the Archipelago. By Dean C. Worcester. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 529. Price, $4. [51] Wild Animals I have Known, and 200 Drawings. By Ernest Seton Thompson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 358. Price, $2. GENERAL NOTICES. "An unscientific account of a scientific expedition" is what Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd happily styles the story of the Amherst Eclipse Expedition, told in _Corona_ and _Coronet_[52]--"Corona" being what the expedition went to see, and "Coronet" the vessel that took it to the observing station. Professor Todd was the astronomer of the party, and Mrs. Todd, who has published a work on astronomy, was his companion. She believes that certain aspects of the trip, covering as it did more than ten thousand miles of sailing for the party, and at least forty-five thousand miles of deep-sea voyaging for the Coronet, were worthy of narration. The astronomical purposes of the expedition, the objects it sought to obtain, the scientific bearings of the observations, and the methods, are intelligibly set forth in the introduction to the book. The rest is devoted mostly to narrative, the social aspects of the voyage, and the incidents. A short sojourn was made at the Sandwich Islands, where the more interesting objects were visited. Mrs. Todd was with Kate Field when she died there, and gives an account of her last hours. A voyage of four weeks carried the party to Yokohama, whence some of the members went to the capital and other interesting points in Japan, while the rest were preparing the observing station at Esashi, eleven hundred miles north of Yokohama--"a village on the shores of the Sea of Okotsk, among the hairy Ainu," in a region so remote that the native steamers had only recently begun to go there at all. Besides the account of the observations, descriptions are given of such Japanese experiences as life in Kioto, cormorant fishing, yachting in the Inland Sea, the tidal wave, and observations among the Ainu, with a visit on the way home to an Arizona copper mine. The late Prof. _James D. Dana_ had begun a revision of his _Text-Book of Geology_ a short time before his death. Prof. William North Rice was requested by his family to complete the revision, and the result is the present volume.[53] It was intended in the original plan of revision to preserve as far as possible the distinctive characteristics of the book. It was to be brought down to date as regards its facts, but was still to express the well-known opinions of its author, with the general plan of arrangement kept unchanged. It soon became evident, however, that more and greater changes than had been contemplated would be required. The zoölogical and botanical classifications would have to be modified; the theory of evolution must have more recognition than it had received, especially as Professor Dana himself had adopted some of its features before his death; and the treatment of metamorphism was believed to require considerable modification. In the present edition the bearing of various events in geological history upon the theory of evolution is pointed out in the appropriate places, and the general bearing of paleontology upon evolution is discussed in the concluding chapter. All these changes seem to be in the line of continuing the usefulness of Professor Dana's most excellent and standard work, and of keeping his name before students as that of "one of the greatest of geologists and one of the noblest of men." A true son of Nature is Mr. _F. Schuyler Mathews_, and he shows himself at his best in his _Familiar Life in Field and Forest_.[54] "There are few things," he says, "more gratifying to the lover of Nature than these momentary glimpses of wild life which he obtains while passing through the field or forest. Wild animals do not confine themselves exclusively to the wilderness; quite frequently they venture upon the highway, and we are apt to regard the meeting of one of them there as a rare and fortunate occurrence. The daisy and the wild rose appear in their accustomed places on the return of summer, and the song sparrow sings in the same tree he frequented the year before; but the wood-chuck, the raccoon, and the deer are not so often found exactly where we think they belong. To seek an interview with such folk is like taking a chance in a lottery; there are numerous blanks and but few prizes. But because wild life is not in constant evidence, like the wild flower, is no proof that it is uncommon. To those who keep in touch with Nature, it becomes a very familiar thing, and to live a while where the wild creatures make their homes is to cross their paths continually." Mr. Mathews is in touch with Nature. He does not exactly know where to find the wild and shy, for they do not come at call, but he can put himself where he will meet them if they come around--and "one can never tell at what moment some surprising demonstration of wild life will occur at one's very doorstep." In this book Mr. Mathews records some of his meetings, at home and in his daily walks, offering as his excuse for the record, that he has lived long enough among wild animals to "respect their rights of life, and speak a good word for them when occasion offers." The _Short Manual of Analytical Chemistry_,[55] prepared by Mr. John Muter, follows the course of instruction given in the South London School of Pharmacy. Encouraged by the continued favor which the book has received in Great Britain, the author offers a special edition of it to American students, a concise and low-priced manual, designed to introduce them to the chief developments of analytical chemistry from the simplest operations upward. It includes many organic questions generally overlooked in initiatory books. By working through it the author claims the student may expect to become familiar with a great variety of processes, and to be in a position to use with satisfaction the more exhaustive treatises dealing with any special branch he may desire to follow. In preparing it for American students, the directions, wherever the British methods differ from the American, have been modified to agree with the latter. The processes given include the qualitative analysis, all the general operations and those relating to detection of the metals, of acid radicals and their separation, of unknown salts, of alkaloids and certain organic bodies used in medicine--with a general sketch of toxicological procedure; and in quantitative analysis, directions on weighing, measuring, and specific gravity; gravimetric analysis of metals and acids, ultimate organic analysis, special processes for the analysis of air, water, and food; analysis of drugs, urine, and calculi; and analysis of gases, polarization, spectrum analysis, etc. The pure geometry of position is mainly distinguished, according to Professor Reye's definition,[56] from the geometry of ancient times and from analytical geometry, in that it makes no use of the idea of measurement. Nothing is said in it "about the bisection of segments of straight lines, about right angles and perpendiculars, about ratios and proportions, about the computation of areas, and just as little about trigonometric ratios and the algebraic equations of curved lines, since all these subjects of the older geometry assume measurement.... We shall be concerned as little with isosceles and equilateral triangles as with right-angled triangles; the rectangle, the regular polygon, and the circle are likewise excluded from our investigations, except in the case of these applications to metric geometry. We shall treat of the center, the axes, and the foci of so-called curves of the second order, or conic sections, only as incidental to the general theory; but, on the other hand, shall become acquainted with many properties of these curves, more general and more important than those to which most text-books upon analytical geometry are restricted." Of all the other branches of geometry, the descriptive is the most helpful in facilitating the study of the geometry of position; and perspective or central projection plays an important part in it. It stands in a certain antithetical relation to analytical geometry on account of its method, which is synthetic, and whence it is sometimes known as synthetic geometry. Since metric relations are not considered in it, its theorems and problems are very general and comprehensive. As presented in von Standt's complete work, it is regarded by the author as an excellent aid to the exercise and development of the imagination; and the important graphical methods with which Professor Culmann has enriched the science of engineering in his work on graphical statistics, being based for the most part upon it, a knowledge of it has become important for students of that science. In the present work, the outgrowth of his lectures, Professor Reye has attempted to supply the want of a text-book which shall offer to the student the necessary material in a concise form. Prof. _Cyrus Thomas_ brings the qualification which a lifetime devoted to study of the subject develops, to the preparation of an _Introduction to the Study of North American Archæology_.[57] He is known to all students in this branch as a careful, judicious investigator whose work in the field has been supplemented by valuable contributions to its literature. In this volume he presents a brief summary of the progress that has been made in the investigation of American antiquities--which has been recently great indeed, and well calls for a new synopsis. His chief object has been to present the data and arrange them so as to afford the student some means of bringing his facts and materials into harmony, and of utilizing them. He presents the theories that have been advanced, and mentions opposing views; regarding it, he says, as important to the progress of the student to know which of the questions that arise have been answered, and which hypotheses have been eliminated from the class of possibilities. The materials for the study and the methods are first explained. The relics of ancient men and the mounds are then described as under three divisions--the Arctic, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. Local as well as regional characteristics and differences are pointed out; as in the mounds as a whole, the special class of animal mounds, the pueblos, the cliff dwellings, and the Mexican and Central American monuments, the peculiar features of each are pointed out, and their territorial limits are defined. All these various kinds of works are ascribed to substantially the same people, who are supposed to have come down from somewhere in the north or northwest (the extreme northwest Pacific coast), although the different immigrations may perhaps have arrived by various routes. The people were the present Indians or their ancestors; the time of the immigration was not extremely remote; and the "mound-building habit" is shown to have persisted and been practiced till since the advent of the Europeans. In entitling his book _The Art of Taxidermy_,[58] the chief of the Department of Taxidermy in the American Museum of Natural History evidently intends to use the word art in the high sense of a fine art; for he speaks of the enormous strides toward perfection which it has made from the former "trade of most inartistically upholstering a skin"--stuffing it, we used to call it--and of its study having been taken up of late years by a number of men of genius and education. It is largely owing to the exertions of these men that the taxidermy of the present day is so far in advance of what it was a decade since. The proverb says that art is long, and accordingly Mr. Rowley takes for the motto of his book a sentence from Thoreau, that "into a perfect work time does not enter." To the possible objection that some of his methods seem to involve considerable time and expense, the author replies in substance that if the work is not worth this, it is hardly worth while to take it up at all. If it is a proper work, and one has the proper degree of energy and enthusiasm, let him give the specimen all the time it demands. In preparing his treatise, the author has aimed to eliminate all extraneous matter, and to give mainly the results of his own experience, coupled with that of other taxidermists with whom he has come in contact. He begins with instructions about collecting tools and materials, and casting, and treats further of the preparation of birds, of mammals, and of fish, reptiles, and crustaceans; the cleansing and mounting of skeletons, and the reproduction of foliage for groups. The appendix contains addresses of reliable firms from whom tools and materials used in taxidermy may be purchased. The preparation of this book on _The Storage Battery_ was suggested to Mr. Treadwell[59] by his finding a lack in working on these machines of any compact data concerning their construction, and the paucity of reliable discharge curves; and he concluded that a book containing such data and curves, with rules for the handling and maintenance of cells, would be valuable to all interested in storage batteries as well as to the student and manufacturer. Among the points specially mentioned by the author are the lists of American and foreign patents given as footnotes for the various types, not complete but noticing the principal patents for each cell; the chapter on the chemistry of secondary batteries, which gives the latest and most generally accepted theory concerning the chemical reactions taking place in an accumulator, and which has been approved by Dr. Sewal Matheson; and, in the appendix, tables of data comprising figures of all the batteries, methods for the measurement of the E. M. F. and internal resistance of a storage battery; and data from which the theoretical and practical capacity of an accumulator may be determined. The _Natural Advanced Geography_[60] is a successful application of modern methods to the teaching of this science, and presents it with the interest undiminished which really appertains to it. While in the elementary book of this, the "natural" series, the pupil starts from his own home and is introduced to the study of man in relation to his environment, in the present work the fact is developed that environment itself is the chief factor in the various activities and economies of man. One of the salient features of the presentation of the subject, marked throughout the work, and one that commands high praise, is the arrangement of the facts into such order that their correlation may be perceived and the unity of Nature recognized. The isolated, barren, curt, unrelated statements that made the study of many of the old geographies hard and tedious are conspicuously absent, and the subject, studied in orderly sequence, "unfolds itself naturally and logically, each lesson preparing the way for those which follow." The first part of the work is devoted to a study of the world as a whole. The second part, comprising about three fourths of the volume, is an application of these laws to the various countries of the globe, beginning with the United States. In the United States, for instance, a general description of the whole is given, which presents a real, comprehensive mental picture of the country; and the process is repeated, in measure according to the conditions, for the several States, so that the pupil is taught what are the factors that give the characteristics and local features to each. A like method is pursued, on a more general scale, with other countries. The colored maps are drawn on a system of uniform scales, with reliefs plainly shown according to the accepted conventions; graphic charts or sketch maps showing the distribution of products and resources are employed; and pedagogical exercises and aids are afforded abundantly. A text-book on the _Differential and Integral Calculus_,[61] for students who have a working knowledge of elementary geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and analytical geometry, by Prof. _P. A. Lambert_, has the threefold object of inspiring confidence, by a logical presentation of principles, in the methods of infinitesimal analysis; of aiding, through numerous problems, in acquiring facility in the use of these methods; and, by applications to problems in physics, engineering, and other branches of mathematics, to show the practical value of the calculus. By a division of the matter according to classes of functions, it is made possible to introduce these applications from the start, and thereby to arouse the interest of the student. By simultaneous treatment of differentiation and integration and the use of trigonometric substitution to simplify integration it is sought to economize the time and effort of the student. _The Birds of Indiana_, by _Amos W. Butler_, lately published as part of Willis S. Blatchley's Twenty-second Annual Report on the Geology and Natural Resources of Indiana, is just at hand. It is one of the most accurate, detailed, and satisfactory local catalogues yet published. Three hundred and twenty-one species of birds have been taken in Indiana, and of each of these is given a detailed description, with a general account of its habits, song, migration, and nesting. In the case of the more rare species, full records of the dates and places of capture of the known specimens are appended. Analytical keys to genera and species are also given, so that every facility is furnished for the identification of species. This book is a model of its kind, and is a worthy fruit of Mr. Butler's twenty years of devoted study of the birds of his native State. _Robert H. Whitten_, in his monograph on _Public Administration in Massachusetts_--the relation of central to local activity--pursues a parallel course with that taken by Mr. John A. Fairlie in a similar essay on the Centralization of Administration in New York State, of this same series of Columbia University studies in History, Economics, and Public Law. Having found the systems and tendencies of administration in the early settlement of Massachusetts all for expansion and decentralization, Mr. Whitten now perceives the course altogether changed, and centralization more and more the rule. The change corresponds with changes in the conditions of life, and keeps track with them step by step. Of great dynamic forces which have been set to work and are bringing about a complete reconstruction of the social structure, improvements in transportation and communication were the most vital--first, turnpikes, then the steamboat, railroad, and telegraph; then the horse railway, cheap postage, the telephone, the electric railway, and the bicycle. The tendency at first was to bring about a concentration which was attended by the congestion of population in cities and the depopulation of the rural towns. "The electric railway, the telephone, and the bicycle came in to counteract these evils; while their tendency is strongly toward the centralization of bureaus, it is also toward the diffusion of habitations. These great socializing forces, going hand in hand with the development of the factory system and improvement of machinery, make possible a vastly higher organization of society than was possible under a stagecoach _régime_." The first volume of the Final Report of the State Geologist of New Jersey, on Topography, Magnetism, and Climate, was published in 1888. Other volumes embracing other topics have been published since, and in the meantime the supply of the first volume has been exhausted, while the demand has continued. It has been therefore necessary either to reprint the volume or to publish a new work which should include the important statistical matter of it. Accordingly, we have now _The Physical Geography of New Jersey_, prepared by Prof. _Rollin D. Salisbury_, with an appendix embodying "Data pertaining to the Physical Geology of the State," by Mr. C. C. Vermeule, who was formerly in charge of the topographic survey, and is author of the volume on water supply. The two parts of the volume treat of the topography of New Jersey as it now is, and the geological history of the topography. The report is accompanied by a relief map of the State, prepared by Mr. Vermeule on the basis of the topographical survey, and presenting, therefore, an accurate picture of the relief. It shows the great features of the State, its ranges of mountains, hills, tablelands, plains, marsh lands, streams, and water areas in their proper relations to one another; and it is contemplated to put it in every schoolhouse in the State as an aid in the study of geography. M. _Imbert de Saint-Amand's_ series of books about the Second French Empire furnish very interesting reading, are, so far as our recollection of events goes, historically accurate, and fill a gap which the literary world always has to suffer concerning any period too recently passed for a competent judicial mind to have appeared to tell its story. The second of the series--_Napoleon III and his Court_--takes Louis Napoleon at the height of his success and happiness, just after he had married the beautiful Eugénie, of whom the world has nothing harsh to say, and carries him through the period of his wonderful popularity and brilliant accomplishments to the close of the Crimean War and the birth of the prince whose fate was so unhappy. It deals, in a pleasant manner, and all favorable to Napoleon, but not adulatory, with affairs social, political, and military, in which it is hard to say whether the tact or the good fortune of the subject of the history shone most brilliantly. We are told how Eugénie won the French nation; of Napoleon's good will, especially manifested toward all that could contribute to his exaltation; of his dealings with the sovereigns around him, gradually winning their recognition, including that of Nicholas of Russia; of the darkening of the clouds of war, the Crimean campaigns; of the interchanges of courtesies, gradually rising into close, firm friendship, with the British court; and of the birth of the Prince Imperial. Think what we may of the character of the reign of Louis Napoleon and of its influence, it marked an epoch in nearly every line of development of the world's history, and was as distinctly separated from what came before it and from what followed it as if a broad line were drawn around it; and it left some important results that are not likely to be soon effaced. M. de Saint-Amand writes from personal knowledge, having witnessed or participated in much of what he describes, and has in Elizabeth Gilbert Martin a fully competent and acceptable translator. (Published by Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 407. Price, $1.50.) The paper of the late Dr. _Theodor Eimer_ on _Orthogenesis and the Impotence of Natural Selection in Species Formation_ is published by the Open Court Company, Chicago, as No. 29 of their Religion of Science Library. Pp. 56. Price, 25 cents. The second volume of Uncle Robert's Geography, of Appletons' Home-Reading Series--_On a Farm_--Mr. _Francis W. Parker_, the editor, and _Nellie Lathrop Helm_, emphasizes the importance of parents and teachers, giving full and complete recognition of the immense educational value of spontaneous activities as displayed in motive and interest; a recognition which "should be followed by active encouragement and direction of the child's play, work, and observations." The story deals entirely with the interests and life of children in the environment of the country. A little girl is in her playhouse in a Virginia fence corner, with her doll and mimic housekeeping. Her shy, retiring companions are the birds who peep into the playhouse, and, after she has gone away, come into it and pick up the crumbs she has left. This leads to talks about different birds and their nest building. A St. Bernard dog is introduced and furnishes the opportunity for bringing in stories of the Alps, their glaciers and snows, and the Hospice of St. Bernard, and then about other dogs. Susy makes a garden in the woods, and the wild flowers become the subjects of her spontaneous study. So with the rabbits, bread making and the grain that furnishes the material for the bread, and other incidents; with more birds' nests; the nature of bulbs, squirrels, etc.; and finally Uncle Robert sets the child to finding out how the animals in the woods spend the winter, and whether they are doing anything now in preparation for it. (New York: D. Appleton and Company. Price, 42 cents.) The _Thirty-fifth Annual Report_ of the Secretary of the State Board of Agriculture of Michigan includes the Ninth Annual Report of the Agricultural College Experiment Station, and is largely taken up with the work of the latter institution, reviewing the records of the college departments and presenting the reports and bulletins of the station. The record of meteorological observations, the Proceedings of the Farmers' Institutes, the Transactions of the Association of Breeders of Improved Live Stock, and the Transactions of the State Agricultural Society are also incorporated in the volume. An interesting feature of the publication is the insertion of a portrait and biographical notice of one of the pioneer farmers of the State, Enos Goodrich, who was also prominent in public life. The translation by _Eleanor Marx Aveling_ of Lissagaray's _History of the Commune of 1871_ was made many years ago at the request of the author from a contemplated second edition which the French Government would not allow published. The work having been revised and corrected by the translator's father, and for other reasons, no changes have been made to adapt it to the time of its issue from the press. The translator claims that Lissagaray's work is the only reliable and accurate history that has yet been written of the Commune. He has not attempted, she says, to hide the errors of his party, or to gloss over the fatal weakness of the revolution. Of course, a very different view of the movement is given from that presented in the French accounts, as well as that generally held by English and Americans; but the communists have a right to be represented and heard, and it is well that they have so competent a spokesman. (Published by the International Publishing Company, 23 Duane Street, New York.) FOOTNOTES: [52] Corona and Coronet: Being the Narrative of the Amherst Eclipse Expedition to Japan, in Mr. James's Schooner Yacht Coronet, to observe the Sun's Total Obscuration, August 9, 1896. By Mabel Loomis Todd. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 383. Price, $2.50. [53] Revised Text-Book of Geology. By James D. Dana, LL. D. Fifth edition, revised and enlarged. Edited by William North Rice. American Book Company. Pp. 482. [54] Familiar Life in Field and Forest. The Animals, Birds, Frogs, and Salamanders. By F. Schuyler Mathews. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 284. Price, $1.75. [55] A Short Manual of Analytical Chemistry, Qualitative and Quantitative, Inorganic and Organic. By John Muter. Second American edition. Illustrated. Adapted from the eighth British edition. Philadelphia: E. Blakiston, Son & Co. Pp. 228. Price, $1.25. [56] Lectures on the Geometry of Position. By Theodor R. Reye. Translated and edited by Thomas F. Halgate. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 148. Price, $2.25. [57] Introduction to the Study of North American Archæology. By Prof. Cyrus Thomas. Cincinnati: The Robert Clarke Company. Pp. 391. [58] The Art of Taxidermy. By John Rowley. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 244. Price, $2. [59] The Storage Battery. A Practical Treatise on the Construction, Theory, and Use of Secondary Batteries. By Augustus Treadwell. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 257. Price, $1.75. [60] Natural Advanced Geography. By Jacques W. Redway and Russell Hinman. American Book Company. Pp. 100. [61] Differential and Integral Calculus. For Technical Schools and Colleges. By R. A. Lambert. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 245. Price, $1.50. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Proceedings, 1898. Part II. April to September. Pp. 224, with plates. Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Cornell University: No. 152. Studies in Milk Secretion. By H. H. Wing and Leroy Anderson. Pp. 56; No. 153. Impressions of our Fruit-growing Industries. By L. H. Bailey. Pp. 18.--Iowa State College of Agriculture, etc.: No. 10. Anatomical and Histological Studies. Pp. 25, with plates.--New Hampshire College: No. 53. The Farm Water Supply. By Fred W. Morse. Pp. 12; The Winter Food of the Chickadee. By Clarence M. Weed. Pp. 16.--United States Department of Agriculture: The Chinch Bug. By F. M. Webster. Pp. 82; Some Books on Agriculture and Sciences related to Agriculture published in 1896-'98. Pp. 45; Forage Plants and Forage Resources of the Gulf States. By S. M. Tracy. Pp. 55; List of Publications relating to Forestry in the Department Library. Pp. 93.--University of Illinois: The Chemistry of the Corn Kernel. By C. G. Hopkins. Pp. 52. Austin, Herbert Ernest. Observation Blanks for Beginners in Mineralogy. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co. Pp. 80. 50 cents. Bailey, M. A. American Elementary Arithmetic. American Book Company. Pp. 205. Beddard, Frank E. The Structure and Classification of Birds. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 548. Barnes's National Vertical Penmanship. Nos. A and B, and 1 to 6. American Book Company. Bookseller, The, Newsdealer, and Stationer. Semimonthly. New York: 156 Fifth Avenue. Pp. 38. $1 a year. Boutwell, Hon. George S. Problems raised by the War. Boston: Woman's Educational and Industrial Union. Pp. 20. Bulletins, Reports, Proceedings, etc. Michigan Monthly Bulletin of Vital Statistics, October, 1898. Pp. 16.--National Pure Food and Drug Congress: Journal of Proceedings, March, 1898. Pp. 53.--United States Department of Labor: Bulletin No. 18, September, 1898. Pp. 124; No. 19, November, 1898. Pp. 42. Card, Fred W. Bush Fruits. A Horticultural Monograph of Raspberries, Blackberries, etc. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 537. $1.50. Carpenter, Frank G. Carpenter's Geographical Reader, North America. American Book Company. Pp. 352. Clark, William J. Commercial Cuba, with an Introduction by E. Sherman Gould. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 514 with maps. $4. Collyer, Rev. Robert. The Parable of "Lot's Wife." Pp. 13. 5 cents. Earl, Alfred. The Living Organism. An Introduction to the Principles of Biology. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 271. $1.75. Fisher, George E., and Schwatt, Isaac J. Text-Book of Algebra, with Exercises. Philadelphia: Fisher & Schwatt. Pp. 683. $1.75. Hall, Fred S. Sympathetic Strikes and Sympathetic Lockouts. Columbia University. (Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law) Pp. 118. Hill, Frank A. How far the Public High School is a Just Charge on the Public Treasury. Pp. 36. Holman, Silas W. Matter, Energy, Force, and Work. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 257. $2. Hornbrook, A. R. Primary Arithmetic. American Book Company. Pp. 253. Geikie, James. Rock Sculpture, or the Origin of Land Forms. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 397. $2. Hurley, Denis M. The Metric System of Weights and Measures in the Congress of the United States. Pp. 4. Inglis, George E., Editor. The Anglo-Saxon Monthly. Chicago: The Anglo-Saxon Publishing Company. 10 cents. $1 a year. Jackman, Wilbur S. Nature Study for Grammar Grades. Danville, Ill.: Illinois Printing Company. Pp. 407. Jenkins, C. Francis. Animated Pictures. Washington, D. C.: C. Francis Jenkins. Pp. 118. Jordan, David Starr. Footnotes to Evolution. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 392. $1.50. Lassalle, Ferdinand. The Workingman's Programme. New York: International Publishing Company. Pp. 62. Macmillan Company, The. Catalogue of Books, Section VII, Scientific, pp. 24; and Section IX, Classical and Educational, pp. 26. Makato, Tentearo. Japanese Notions of European Political Economy. Philadelphia. Pp. 42. Marshall, Henry Rutgers. Instinct and Reason. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 575. $3.50. Merriman, Mansfield. Elements of Sanitary Engineering. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 216. Metric System, The, of Weights and Measures. Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company. Pp. 196. Millennial Dawn, Vol. IV. The Day Of Vengeance. Allegheny, Pa.: The Tower Publishing Company. Pp. 668. 35 cents. Park. J. G. Language Lessons. American Book Company. Pp. 144. Payne, Frank Owen. Geographical Nature Studies. American Book Company. Pp. 144. 25 cents. Peabody, J. E. Laboratory Exercises in Anatomy and Physiology. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 79. 60 cents. Preece, W. H. President's Address before the Institution of Civil Engineers, November 1, 1898. Pp. 29. Reprints. Coulter, John M. The Origin of Gymnosperms and the Seed Habit. (Botanical Society of America.) Pp. 16.--Brinton, Daniel G. The Peoples of the Philippines. Pp. 16.--Eckles, C. H. The Relation of Certain Bacteria to the Production of Butter. Pp. 10.--Graziani, Dr. Giovanni. A Sensitive Test for Kryofine in the Urine, etc. Pp. 81.--Keen, W. W. The Advantages of a Permanent Abdominal Anus, etc., in Operations for Cancer of the Rectum. Pp. 11; The Advantages of the Trendelenburg Posture during Operations involving the Cavities of the Mouth, etc. Pp. 7; Removal of Angioma of the Liver, etc. Pp. 12.--Keen, W. W., and Spiller, W. G. On Resection of the Gasserian Ganglion, etc. Pp. 38, with plates.--Ladd, E. F. The Proteids of Cream. Pp. 3; and Humates and Soil Fertility. Pp. 7.--Lloyd, James Hendrie. A Study of the Lesions in a Case of Trauma of the Cervical Region of the Spinal Cord simulating Syringomyelia. Pp. 18.--Sherwood, W. L. The Frogs and Toads found in the Vicinity of New York City. Pp. 27.--Tromsdorff, Richard. Observations at the Clinic of Professor Ebstein on Kryofine. Pp. 12. Ripley, Frederic H., and Tappen, Thomas. A Short Course in Music. Book Two. American Book Company. Pp. 175. Russell, Israel C. Rivers of North America. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 327. $2. Sands, Maniel. Opposites in Religion. New York: Peter Eckler. (Library of Liberal Classics, Monthly). Pp. 138. 50 cents. Savage, M. J. The Word of God: The Evils of Religious and Political Pessimism. Boston: George H. Ellis. Pp. 18 each. Schimmel & Co., Leipzig and New York Semiannual Report (fine chemicals), October, 1898. Pp. 64, with map. Seymour, A. T., Editor. The Science Teacher. Monthly. Orange, N. J. Pp. 12. 15 cents. $1 a year. Smithsonian Institution and United States National Museum. Annual Report of the Board of Regents to July, 1896. Pp. 727.--Bean, Barton A. Notes on a Collection of Fishes from Mexico, etc. Pp. 4.--Cook, O. F. American Oniscoid Diploda, etc. Pp. 16, with plates.--Coquillet, D. W. Report on Japanese Diptera. Pp. 36.--Enkle, Arthur. Topaz Crystals in the Mineral Collection of the Museum. Pp. 10.--Gilbert, C. N. Caulolepis Longidens, Gill, on the Coast of California. P. 1.--Jordan, David Starr, and Evermann, Barton D. The Fishes of North and Middle America. Part III. Pp. 978.--Marlatt, C. L. Japanese Hymenoptera of the Family Teuthredonidæ. Pp. 16.--Mearns, Edgar A. Mammals of the Catskill Mountains. Pp. 20.--Moore, J. Percy. The Leeches of the United States National Museum. Pp. 20, with plates.--Oberholser, Harry C. Revision of the Wrens of the Genus Thryomanes, Sclater. Pp. 30.--Rathbun, Mary J. Brachyura Collected by the Steamer Albatross between Norfolk, Va., and San Francisco. Pp. 50, with plate; and Fresh-Water Crabs of America. Pp. 30.--Smith, Hugh M. Amphiura, or the Congo Snake, in Virginia. P. 1.--Smith, John B., and Dyar, Harrison G. The Lepidopterous Family Noctuidæ of Boreal North America, etc. Pp. 194, with plates.--Starks, Edwin C. Osteology and Relationships of the Family Zeidæ. Pp. 8, with plates.--Stearns, Robert E. C. A Species of Actæon from the Quaternary Deposits of Spanish Height, San Diego, Cal. Pp. 3; and Cythera (Tivala) Crassateloides, Conrad, etc. Pp. 8, with plate.--Stejneger, Leonhard. A New Species of Spiny-tailed Iguana from California. P. 1.--Test, Frederick C. Variations of the Tree Frog, Hyla Regilla. Pp. 16, with plate.--True, Frederick W. Nomenclature of the Whalebone Whales, etc. Pp. 20.--Walcott, C. D. Cambrian Brachiopoda, Obolus, and Singulella, etc. Pp. 36. Sue, Eugène. The Silver Cross, or the Carpenter of Nazareth. New York: International Publishing Company. Pp. 151. Sullivan, Christine Gordon. Elements of Perspective. American Book Company. Pp. 96. Terrestrial Magnetism. An International Quarterly Journal. L. A. Bauer and Thomas French, Jr., Editors. University of Cincinnati. Pp. 46, with plates. 60 cents. $2 a year. Vines, Sidney H. An Elementary Text-Book of Botany. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 611. $2.25. Volta Bureau, Washington, Publications of Catalogue of Books by Prof. A. Melville Bell.--Some Differences in the Education of the Deaf and the Hearing. Pp. 15.--International Reports of Schools for the Deaf. Pp. 27.--Bell, A. G. Methods of Instructing the Deaf in the United States. Pp. 4.--Gordon, J. C. The Difference between the Two Systems of Teaching Deaf-mutes the English Language. Pp. 4.--Gilman, Arthur. Miss Helen Adams Keller's First Year of College Preparatory Work. Pp. 14.--Bell, Mabel Gardiner. The Story of the Rise of the Oral Method in America as told in the Writings of the Hon. Gardiner G. Hubbard. Pp. 50. Voorhees, Edward B. Fertilizers. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 335. $1. Wadden Turner, Susan, Prof. William, and Jane. In Memoriam. By Caroline H. Dall. Pp. 19. Weysse, Arthur W. An Epitome of Human Histology. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 90. $1.50. Fragments of Science. =The Huxley Lecture.=--The Charing Cross Medical School in London, which had the good fortune some fifty-three years ago to number Huxley among its pupils, had largely through this fact the honor of being addressed on October 3d by Professor Virchow, the greatest living pathologist and one of the greatest of living scientists. There was a peculiar fitness in his delivering the Huxley lecture, for, while Professor Virchow's work has been chiefly that of the specialist, his co-operation with laborers in other fields, his continued efforts to popularize science, and the prominent position which he has occupied for the last thirty years in public life, have given him a standing in Germany somewhat akin to that of Huxley in England. His career is a striking illustration, as was also Huxley's, of the happy results to humanity from a combination in one man of great ability as an investigator with a facility for generalization and the practical application of scientific truths to the concrete problems of science and civilization. Professor Virchow is described as modest and unassuming, and very much of a contrast in all ways to the ordinary German professor. His address was on The Recent Advances in Science, and their Bearing on Medicine and Surgery. It was inevitable that he should refer to Huxley, of whom he was in some sense a pupil. In speaking of the rapid growth of the latter during his four years on the Beagle, he said: "How this was possible any one will readily understand who knows from his own experience how great is the value of personal observation.... Freed from the formalism of the schools, thrown upon his own intellect, compelled to test each single object as regards properties and history, we soon forget the dogmas of the prevailing system, and become first a skeptic and then an investigator." This paragraph is especially worthy of notice, because it points out one of the invariable characteristics of the great man. In whatever field his greatness may lie, he will be found to have broken away from the formalism and conservatism of the schools, and that his great work is based on personal observation and research. This was notably the case with Professor Virchow's establishment of the cellular pathology, as well as of Huxley's researches in comparative anatomy. Our present school system is lamentably weak in this particular, tending to stifle rather than stimulate originality and self-dependence. Professor Virchow's address was, of course, interesting and instructive, but, as he said, much too short for anything like an adequate treatment of the subject. The chief interest of the occasion lay in its associations. An address by Rudolph Virchow, at a meeting presided over by Lord Lister on an occasion commemorating Professor Huxley, left only one thing to be desired--the presence of the latter. For a biologist, or in fact a modern scientist of any description, one can not imagine a more delightful occasion. =The Climate of Cuba.=--Systematic records of weather appear to be wanting in Cuba. The meteorological observations kept up for several years by Andre Poey are not accessible, no need of their being published having been found. The chief source of information on the subject is the observations which have been kept up at Belen College, Havana, since 1859. From these and a few scattered observations of brief periods at other towns, and by comparison with notes taken at other West Indian stations, W. F. B. Phillips, of the United States Department of Agriculture, has attempted to describe the climate of Cuba. The average annual temperature of the past ten years at Havana was 77° F., and the difference between the highest and the lowest yearly means was only 1.1° F. The warmest month is July, with an average temperature of 82.7° F., and the coldest is January, with an average temperature of 70.3° F. The highest temperature recorded was 100.6° F., in July, 1891, and the lowest 49.6°. Brief intermittent records at Matanzas, more than sixty years old, give a mean annual temperature of about 78°, with 93° as the highest and 51° as the lowest. At Santiago the annual mean appears to be about 80°, and the difference between the warmest and coldest months about 6° F. Records of temperature in the interior, such as they are, give annual means of from 73.6° to 75°, apparently showing lower temperatures than on the coast. The average daily range of temperature is about 10°, the highest occurring between noon and two o'clock P. M., while sudden variations in the temperature of the day are not unknown. The average yearly rainfall at Havana is about fifty-two inches. The season of heavy rainfall begins in the latter part of May and first of June, and lasts till October, and during this period about sixty-three per cent of the year's rain is precipitated. Rain occurs on about one day in three, in heavy downpours of short duration. Notwithstanding the frequency of rain during the summer months, these do not present the greatest number of cloudy days. The days on which rain does not fall are usually perfectly cloudless, and, in general, no clouds are seen in summer except while the showers are falling; while in other months cloudy days sometimes occur without rain. The average velocity of the wind is about 7.5 miles an hour, with variations, according to the season, from 8.5 miles in winter to 6.5 miles in summer. The diurnal variation in wind velocity is much more pronounced than the seasonal variation. =The New Planet D Q.=--The number of minor planets discovered during the last few years, and their lack of practical importance in astronomy, has tended to distract astronomers' attention from the search for them, as unprofitable, and the announcement of a new one attracts little attention, as a rule. The planet D Q, however, discovered by Herr Witt, of the Urania Observatory, of Berlin, on August 13th last, has aroused from the first special attention through its remarkable behavior. The orbit is a very unusual one. Mars has always been considered our nearest neighbor, although it was known that some of the minor planets were slightly nearer to the sun when at perihelion than Mars is when at aphelion. But the mean distances of the latter were in all cases much greater than that of Mars; while that found for the new planet is only 1.46 as compared with 1.52 for Mars, and, as the eccentricity amounts to 0.23, the perihelion distance is only 1.13, and the least distance from the earth's orbit only 0.15 as compared with 0.27 for Venus in transit, and 0.38 for Mars in perihelion. The planet will thus be far closer to us than any other member of the solar system, and will afford a most excellent means of determining the sun's parallax. Its diameter is thought to be about seventeen miles. =Extra-Organic Factors of Evolution.=--Observing that our civilization has made advances or "strides" in recent years out of all proportion to any improvements that have taken place in our organic faculties, Arthur Allin has insisted, in Science, on the importance of extra-organic factors in human development. Our sense and motor organs, he says, are essentially instruments and tools, and so is the brain; and most if not all of the three hundred or more mechanical movements known in the arts are found exemplified in the human body. Our sense organs are thus indefinitely multiplied and extended by such extra-organic sense organs as the microscope, telescope, resonator, telephone, telegraph, thermometer, etc. Our motor organs are multiplied by such agencies as steam and electrical machines, etc., in the same manner. "The printing press is an extra-organic memory far more lasting and durable than the plastic but fickle brain. Fire provides man with a second digestive apparatus by means of which hard and stringy roots and other materials for food are rendered digestible and poisonous roots and herbs innocuous. Tools, traps, weapons, etc., are but extensions of bodily contrivances. Clothing, unlike the fur or layer of blubber of the lower animals, becomes a part of the organism at will. One finds himself more or less independent of seasons, climates, and geographical restrictions." By organic heredity or the transmission of the congenital characteristics of the parents to the children, working alone, all progress depends upon the transmission of variations occurring within the organism. "Moreover, these advantageous organic variations die with the individual, and must be born again, so to speak, with each new individual." This requires time, and progress depending on it would be indefinitely protracted. On the other hand, by means of social heredity, each new member of the race has handed to him at birth the accumulated organic advantageous variations of sense and motor organs, and the extra-organic adaptations that have multiplied so indefinitely in the age of civilized man. "The vast importance of accumulation of capital is obvious." =Fossils as criterions of Geological Ages.=--Prof. O. C. Marsh said in a paper on The Comparative Value of Different Kinds of Fossils in determining Geological Age, which was read at the meeting of the British Association, that the value of all fossils as evidence of geological age depends mainly upon their degree of specialization. In invertebrates, for example, a lingula from the Cambrian has reached a definite point of development from some earlier ancestor. One from the Silurian or Devonian, or even a later formation, shows, however, little advance. Even recent forms of the same or an allied genus have no distinctive characters sufficiently important to mark geological horizons. With ammonites the case is entirely different. From the earliest appearance of the family the members were constantly changing. The trilobites show a group of invertebrates ever subject to modification, from the earliest known forms in the Cambrian to the last survivors in the Permian. They are thus especially fitted to aid the geologist, as each has distinctive features and an abiding place of its own in geological time. In the fresh-water forms of mollusca--the Unios, for example--there is little evidence of change from the palæozoic forms to those still living, and we can therefore expect little assistance from them in noticing the succeeding periods during their life history. The same law as to specialization holds good among the fossil vertebrates. =Pedigree Photographs.=--Sir Francis Galton unfolded before the British Association a plan for the systematic collection of photographs of pedigree stock, particularly of cattle breeds, and of more information about them than is now obtainable. He believes that a system of this sort would greatly facilitate the study of heredity. The author had previously shown how the general knowledge that offspring can inherit peculiarities from their ancestry as well as from their parents was superseded by a general law the nature of which was first suggested to him by theoretical considerations, and this ancestral law proves the importance of a much more comprehensive system of records than now exists. The breeder should be able to compare the records of all the near ancestry of the animals he proposes to mate in respect to the qualities in which he is interested. No present source for such information is comparable with what the system proposed would furnish. A habitual study of the form of each pure-bred animal in connection with the portraits of all its nearest ancestry would test current opinions and decide between conflicting ones, and could not fail to suggest new ideas. Likenesses would be traced to prepotent ancestors, and the amount of their several prepotencies would be defined; forms and features that supplement one another or "nick in," and others that clash or combine awkwardly, would be observed and recorded; and conclusions based on incomplete and inaccurate memories of ancestry would give way to others founded on more exact data. The value of the ancestral law would be adequately tested, and it would be possible to amend it when required. =English Names for Plants.=--In the Proceedings of the Torrey Botanical Club, published in its journal for July, Dr. V. Havard suggested some principles which it would be well to follow in applying English names to plants, predicating that an authorized vernacular binomial should be assigned to each plant, so that ambiguity and confusion may be avoided. In the absence of suitable English names already recognized, it seems best to adopt the Latin genus name, if short and easy, like _Cicuta_, _Parnassia_, _Hibiscus_, or a close translation thereof, when possible, like astragal, chenopody, cardamin, while the specific English name should be an equivalent of the Latin one or a descriptive adjective. In case of all English binomials clearly applying to well-known individual species and no others, all substantives are capitalized without a hyphen, as in Witch Hazel, May Apple, and Dutchman's Pipe. In all genera in which two or more species must be designated, the genus name is compounded into one word without a hyphen, as Peppergrass, Sweetbrier, Goldenrod, Hedgenettle, etc.; except in long names, where the eye requires the hyphen, as Prairie-clover, Forget-me-not. Genus names in the possessive case (St. John's-wort) are written with the hyphen, followed by a lower-case initial. Plants commemorating individual men (Douglas Spruce, Coulter Pine) are written without the mark of the possessive. In specific names participial endings are suppressed, the participle becoming a substantive, which is added as a suffix without the hyphen; thus Heartleaved Willow is changed to Heartleaf Willow. In the discussion that followed this paper, President Addison Brown and Dr. T. F. Allen deprecated the manufacture of book names. The secretary defended the use of vernacular names, saying that they deserved more attention, and adding that in their absence the generic name should be used unchanged. Many Latin names, as _Portulacca_, win their way without change as soon as they are fairly made familiar. "Coined names seldom live. A name to be successful must be a growth, as language is." =Cooking Schools in Philadelphia.=--The establishment of schools in Philadelphia for the teaching of cookery is mentioned, in the Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools in that city, among the results of the general movement for manual training, as a means of mental development and practical knowledge. The teaching was introduced experimentally into the Girls' Normal School in 1887, and was in the following year made a regular branch of the course. It was later extended to other schools. There are now eight school kitchens under the department of Public Instruction, situated in different parts of the city. The question of the proper place for cookery in the school course has been solved, for Philadelphia, by putting it in the sixth school year, when the pupils are firmly established in the work of the grammar grades, and their attention has not yet been directed to preparation for admission to the High School. The course provides between twenty-five and thirty lessons, and is completed in a single year. It includes instruction in the care of the kitchen, and of the stove or range, general lessons in the classification and nutritive values of foods, the cooking of vegetables, breakfast cereals, bread, eggs, soups, meats, simple cakes and desserts, lessons in invalid cookery, and in table setting and serving. Special attention is given to the preparation of nutritious and savory dishes from inexpensive materials. About two thousand pupils, or less than one half of the number of girls of the sixth year now in the schools, are accommodated in the eight cookery schools. The pupils manifest an intelligent interest in the instruction, and spend the half day per week in the school kitchen without any appreciable loss in the other branches of study. "It comes as a period of relaxation." =A Trait Common to us All.=--The doctrine of the tendency of mankind to develop the like fancies and ideas at the like stage of intellectual infancy was mentioned by Mr. E. W. Brabrook in his presidential address before the Anthropological Section of the British Association, as a generalization for which we are fast accumulating material in folklore. It is akin to the generalization that individual savage races present in their intellectual development a marked analogy to the condition of the earlier races of mankind. The fancies and ideas of the child resemble closely the fancies and ideas of the savage and the fancies and ideas of primitive man. Mrs. Gomme has found that a great number of children's games consist of dramatic representations of marriage by capture and marriage by purchase, and that the idea of exogamy is distinctly embodied in them. There can be little doubt that they go back to a high antiquity, and there is much probability that they are founded upon customs actually existing, or just passing away, at the time they were first played. Upon the same principle, if we view children's stories in their wealth of details, we shall deem it impossible that they could have been disseminated over the world otherwise than by actual contact of the several peoples with each other. But if we view them in their simplicity of idea, we shall be more apt to think that the mind of man naturally produces the same result under like circumstances, and that it is not necessary to postulate any communication between the peoples to account for their identity. It does not surprise us that the same complicated physical operations should be performed by far-distant peoples without any communication with each other; why should it be surprising that mental operations, not nearly so complex, should be produced in the same order by different peoples without any such communication? =The Toes in Walking.=--An instructive discussion of the walking value of the lesser toes by Dr. Heather Bigg is given in a recent copy of the London Lancet. Dr. Bigg believes that the lesser toes of the human foot are of little importance in walking--the great toe constituting the important tread of the foot--and in proof of this he gives an account of a patient, all of whose lesser toes it was found necessary to amputate because of persistent contraction of the tendons. On November 10, 1894, the toes were removed, especial care being taken to keep the resulting scars well up on the dorsal aspect of the foot, so as to be well away from the subsequent tread. In three weeks the patient could stand on her feet, and, after her return home, sent the following record of her progress toward complete recovery: December 30, 1894: "I am able to walk perfectly on my feet with little or no pain, but can not yet wear either slippers or boots, as they are still tender."--January 15, 1895: "I managed to get on my slippers yesterday and wore them with ease for more than six hours."--January 28th: "I put on my boots to-day for the first time. It still pains me slightly to walk; otherwise my feet are going on all right."--February 18th: "I ought to say that the steel plates only half way answer splendidly."--March 24th: "You will be glad to hear that I can walk splendidly now, just like a proper human being; it is just eighteen weeks next Tuesday since the operation."--May 5th: "I have decided to come to town next Monday week to let you see how well I can walk."--June 17th: "I played two sets of tennis on Saturday, and my feet were none the worse afterward."--July 24th: "You will be surprised to hear that the big toes have lengthened half an inch since the operation, and I have had all my boots lengthened and the toe line made straighter."--August 30th: "I know that you will be interested to hear that I have just accepted an invitation to a dance on September 13th. Whether I shall dance comfortably or not is another thing."--September 14th: "I went to the dance on Tuesday evening and thoroughly enjoyed myself after not dancing for so long. My feet were on their best behavior, and did not pain me once during the evening. I never realized before that I had no toes until I began to dance; then it seemed so odd only to have one toe, but I suffered no inconvenience whatever from the loss of them."--December 5th: "I get on so well with my bicycle." Only two disadvantages showed themselves as the result of the operation and these were temporary. One was that the great toes tended to pervert themselves toward the middle line of the feet, a thing which was readily remedied by the use of single-toed stockings, and by packing the space in the boot left vacant by the missing toes with cotton wool; the other was a loss of local sense on the outer sides of the feet, which went to show that the lesser toes were missed rather as tactile organs than anything else. This failure of feeling righted itself in time, presumably by a vicarious and intenser sense being acquired by the skin of the outer side of the foot. In all other respects the loss of the toes discovered no inconvenience. =Animals' Bites.=--That there is something more serious than the mere wound in the bite even of a healthy animal is attested by Mr. Pagin Thornton, from a chapter in his own experience, and in the testimony of a number of his own friends who have suffered for weeks together from having been bitten. "And what is more surprising to me," he says, "is that some of us may have hands crippled for some time from bites of a man's teeth." Dog bites are always dangerous, but largely from the size of the wound which a dog biting in earnest will inflict. With men they usually fail to do their best. Animals recover from wounds more easily than men do; but Lord Ebrington says that deer bitten by the dogs in Exmoor hardly ever recover. Much of the poisoning caused by bites is supposed to be due to the state of the animal's teeth; and in this way the bite of a herbivorous animal, whose teeth are usually soiled, may cause worse after effects than that of a carnivore, whose wet mouth and wet tongue keep its teeth fairly clean. A similar difference is observable in the effects of being clawed and bitten by carnivora. Wounds made by the claws of leopards are poisonous, while those caused by the teeth are rarely septic. The force with which a bite in earnest is inflicted is an important element in its dangerous character. "It seems," says the London Spectator, "as if for the moment the animal threw all its force into the combination of muscular action which we call a 'bite.' In most cases the mere shock of impact, as the beast hurls itself on its enemy, is entirely demoralizing, or inflicts physical injury. A muzzled mastiff will hurl a man to the ground in the effort to fasten its teeth in his throat or shoulder. Then, the driving and crushing force of the jaw muscles is astonishing." Sir Samuel Baker noticed that the tiger usually seized an Indian native by the shoulder, and with one jaw on one side and the other on the other bit clean through chest and back. In nearly all cases the bite penetrates to the lungs. This kind of wound is characteristic of the bites of the _felidæ_. Hardly any bird recovers from a cat's bite, for the same reason. The canine teeth are almost instantly driven through the lung under the wing. =Doulton Potteries.=--Sir Henry Doulton, head of the Lambeth potteries, whose death, November 17, 1897, has been recorded in the Monthly, preferred devoting himself to the factory to engaging in the study of a learned profession for which his parents intended him, and himself did much of the largest work produced there in the earlier days of his connection with it. As the factory was enlarged, it made drain pipes, vessels and appliances of stoneware for chemical and other similar uses, for which it gained prizes at the great exhibitions of 1851 and 1862; ale pots and mugs of traditional and original designs; terra-cotta vases; and first exhibited articles of higher artistic merit at Paris in 1867. It showed a magnificent collection at Vienna in 1873, and its exhibit at Philadelphia in 1876 was one of the marked features of our Centennial. The chief styles of its work are the ornamental salt-glazed stoneware known as Doulton ware, and the underglaze-painted earthenware called "Lambeth faïence." Sir George Birdwood ascribes as the great merit of Sir Henry's life work his adherence to the two principles of making, as far as possible, every piece intended for decoration on the wheel, and of giving the utmost scope to the designer into whose hands the piece fell for ornamentation. Four hundred designers, mostly women, and some of them real artists, are engaged at the potteries, and each has her way and signs her name to her work; so that "Sir Henry Doulton succeeded in creating a most prolific school, or rather several schools, of English pottery, the influence of which has been felt in the revival of the ceramic arts in all the countries of the Old World"--where they had been demoralized by the use of machinery; and through the influence of his example, working since 1871, the United Kingdom now produces "the most artistic commercial pottery of any country in the world." MINOR PARAGRAPHS. A little over a year ago Professor Fraser published the results of some researches which showed that the bile of several animals possessed antidotal properties against serpents' venom, and against the toxines of such diseases as diphtheria and tetanus, and that the bile of venomous serpents is an antidote to their venom. The results from an extension of these first experiments have been recently published in the British Medical Journal. The most important conclusions are as follows: The bile of venomous serpents is the most powerful antidote to venom, and is closely followed in efficiency by the bile of innocuous serpents. Regarding the antidotal power of bile on the toxines of disease, Professor Fraser found that the bile of venomous serpents had more antidotal power than that of the majority of the other animals examined. It is curious that among the non-venomous animals the rabbit's bile is the most powerful in antidotal properties. Three ways are mentioned by Prof. W. A. Herdman in which disease may be communicated through oysters to the consumer; viz., by the presence in the animal of inorganic, usually metallic, poison; or of organic poison; or of a pathological organism or definite disease germ. From experiments in the inoculation and disinfection of oysters, it was found that all traces of these organisms could be removed by proper washing. Good currents passing the beds are an important factor in keeping the oyster healthy, and make it possible for the animal to absorb large quantities of sewage and dispose of it. The effect of this is to purify the water; but in the sifting process, while the sewage is passing through, the animal retains disease germs, and may pass them on to the consumer. Oysters should therefore be given an opportunity to purify themselves, as is done in France, where they are kept for a time in clean tanks before being sent to market. Oysters may be effectively washed in fresh water. Sea water is unfavorable to disease germs. Greenness in oysters is caused by food administered to improve their quality; by the presence of copper; and in some American oysters by an inflamed condition of the mantle. Green spots are also produced by wandering cells getting under the epithelium. These cells are loaded with granules which give a copper reaction. The most interesting result of the massacre and sack of Benin, the Saturday Review says, was the capture of a large series of brass plaques, statuettes, box lids, pipes, etc., which have been brought to England. The various articles are all castings, and their elaborate ornamentation bespeaks for their makers great skill in metal working. Most African tribes have smiths who hammer pieces of brass rod and wire into simple ornaments; but these Benin brasses represent a stage of metal working far more advanced than anything recorded for the native races of Africa. Nothing like them is being made by any negro race at present, and nothing is known that can be regarded as a precursor of them. A statuette in the Liverpool Museum of a negro holding a flint gun fixes their date as not earlier than about 1630. In trying to account for them, many think they were due to the influence of some comparatively advanced tribe that reached Benin from the central Soudan and brought with them a knowledge of brass work derived from early, possibly Egyptian, sources; and others attribute the work to some prisoner or trader who lived at Benin in the seventeenth century. NOTES. The Committee of the British Association on Meteorological Photography reported that the result of their determinations of the heights of clouds showed the existence of greater altitudes in hot weather under thunderstorm conditions, when clouds may occur at five or six different levels, extending as high as ninety thousand feet. A rise of cloud takes place in hot weather, also during the morning and early afternoons, while the lowest altitudes are found during cyclones. M. Maige, by varying the condition of exposure of plants to light, and keeping flowering branches in the dark, has succeeded in transforming the latter into sterile creeping or climbing branches. Inversely, he has been able, by means of the localized action of light, to transform creeping or climbing into flowering branches. These results were obtained at the vegetable biological laboratory of Fontainebleau. F. L. Washburn, of the State University of Oregon, reports that the condition of the Eastern oysters introduced to the Oregon coast waters two years ago leaves nothing to be desired. The specimens have withstood two winters successfully, and have made phenomenal growth, "far exceeding what they would have made in the same time in their native waters. Further, they spawned." The experiments in artificial fertilization were not so successful. The spawn suffer from the serious difficulties of sudden variations in the temperature and salinity of the water resulting from the change of tide and strong winds. It is hoped that better conditions may be found at Yaquina Bay. The population of Egypt has been gradually increasing during the past hundred years. It is stated to have been about two and a half million in 1800, and is now estimated at nearly ten million. There are about 112,000 foreigners, of whom 38,000 are Greeks; the remainder being chiefly Italians, 24,000; English, 19,000; French, 14,000; Austrians, 7,000; Russians, 3,000; and Persians and Germans, about 1,000 each. Only about five per cent of the population can read and write, and nearly two thirds are without any trade or profession. Our record of deaths among men known in science includes the names of Dr. Henriques de Castro, a Dutch archæologist of Portuguese descent, member of many learned societies of the Netherlands; John Eliza de Vry, of the Netherlands, one of the chief authorities on the chemistry and pharmacy of the cinchona alkaloids, at The Hague, July 30th, in the eighty-sixth year of his age; Dr. Eugenio Bettoni, director of the Fisheries Station at Brescia, Italy, August 5th, aged fifty-three years; Professor Arzruni, mineralogist in the Polytechnic Institute at Aix; Heinrich Theodor Richter, director of the School of Mines at Freiberg, Saxony; Dr. J. Crocq, professor of pathology in the University of Brussels; Dr. C. G. Gibelli, professor of botany and director of the Botanical Institute at Turin; Don Francisco Coello de Portugal, president of the Geographical Society of Madrid, and author of an atlas of Spain and its colonies; Dr. B. Kotula, author of Researches on the Distribution of Plants; Surgeon Major J. E. T. Aitchison, a distinguished botanist, particularly in the botany of India, and author of numerous papers on the subject, September 30th, in his sixty-fourth year; M. Thomas Frédéric Moreau, a French archæologist, author of a collection of Gallic, Gallo-Roman, and Merovingian antiquities, in his one hundred and first year; M. Gabriel de Mortillet, the eminent French anthropologist, in Paris, November 4th, aged sixty-seven years; Sir George Smyth Baden Powell, political economist, aged fifty-one years; Sir John Fowler, engineer in chief of the Forth Bridge, aged eighty-one years; Dr. James I. Peck, assistant professor of biology in Williams College, and assistant director of the Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole; George Vestal, professor of agriculture and horticulture at the New Mexico Agricultural College, October 24th, aged forty-one years; Dr. W. Kochs, docent for physiology at Bonn; M. J. V. Barbier, a distinguished French geographer; M. N. J. Raffard, an eminent French mechanical engineer, author of many valuable inventions; Latimer Clark, F. R. S., an eminent English electrician, one of the founders and a past president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, whose name is associated with the history of electric telegraphy and with many inventions, and author of several books that are standard with the profession, at Kensington, London, October 30th, in his seventy-sixth year; Count Michele Stefano de Rossi, a distinguished Italian seismologist; M. de Meritens, a French electrical engineer, inventor of one of the first practical dynamos, and of other valuable electrical apparatus, aged sixty-five years. Transcriber's Notes: Words surrounded by _ are italicized. Words surrounded by = are bold. Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent spellings have been kept. Illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text. 
44188	----	[Transcriber's Note: Underscores are used as delimiter for _italics_. Small capitals have been transcribed as all capitals.] BOYS' SECOND BOOK OF INVENTIONS [Illustration: G. Marconi] BOYS' SECOND BOOK OF INVENTIONS BY RAY STANNARD BAKER _Author of Boys' Book of Inventions, Seen in Germany_ [Illustration] FULLY ILLUSTRATED [Illustration] NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY MCMIX _Copyright, 1903, by_ McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. Published, November, 1903, N TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE THE MIRACLE OF RADIUM 3 Story of the Marvels and Dangers of the New Element Discovered by Professor and Madame Curie. CHAPTER II FLYING MACHINES 27 Santos-Dumont's Steerable Balloons. CHAPTER III THE EARTHQUAKE MEASURER 79 Professor John Milne's Seismograph. CHAPTER IV ELECTRICAL FURNACES 113 How the Hottest Heat is Produced--Making Diamonds. CHAPTER V HARNESSING THE SUN 153 The Solar Motor. CHAPTER VI THE INVENTOR AND THE FOOD PROBLEM 173 Fixing of Nitrogen--Experiments of Professor Nobbe. CHAPTER VII MARCONI AND HIS GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS 207 New Experiments in Wireless Telegraphy. CHAPTER VIII SEA-BUILDERS 255 The Story of Lighthouse Building--Stone-Tower Lighthouses, Iron Pile Lighthouses, and Steel Cylinder Lighthouses. CHAPTER IX THE NEWEST ELECTRIC LIGHT 293 Peter Cooper Hewitt and his Three Great Inventions --The Mercury Arc Light--The New Electrical Converter--The Hewitt Interrupter. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Page Guglielmo Marconi _Frontispiece_ M. Curie Explaining the Wonders of Radium at the Sorbonne 5 Dr. Danlos Treating a Lupus Patient with Radium at the St. Louis Hospital, Paris 13 Radium as a Test for Real Diamonds 19 _At the approach of Radium pure gems are thrown into great brilliancy, while imitations remain dull._ M. and Mme. Curie Finishing the Preparation of some Radium 25 M. Alberto Santos-Dumont 29 Severo's Balloon, the "Pax," which on its First Ascent at a Height of about 2,000 feet, Burst and Exploded, Sending to a Terrible Death both M. Severo and his Assistant 33 The Trial of Count Zeppelin's Air-Ship, July 2, 1900 37 M. Santos-Dumont at Nineteen 41 M. Santos-Dumont's First Balloon (Spherical) 43 M. Santos-Dumont's Workshop 45 "Santos-Dumont No. 1" 49 Basket of "Santos-Dumont No. 1" 52 _Showing propeller and motor._ "Santos-Dumont No. 1" 54 _Showing how it began to fold up in the middle._ "Santos-Dumont No. 5" Rounding Eiffel Tower, July 13, 1901 57 The Interior of the Aërodrome 61 _Showing its construction, the inflated balloon, and the pennant with its mystic letters._ The Fall into the Courtyard of the Trocadero Hotel 65 "_Santos-Dumont No. 5._" "Santos-Dumont No. 6"--The Prize Winner 69 Air-Ship Pointing almost Vertically Upward 73 Falling to the Sea 73 Just Before the Air-Ship Lost all its Gas 74 Losing its Gas and Sinking 74 The Balloon Falling to the Waves 75 Boats Around the Ruined Air-Ship 75 Manoeuvring Above the Bay at Monte Carlo 77 Professor John Milne 80 _From a photograph by S. Suzuki, Kudanzaka, Tokio._ Professor Milne's Sensitive Pendulum, or Seismograph, as it Appears Enclosed in its Protecting Box 81 The Sensitive Pendulum, or Seismograph, as it Appears with the Protecting Box Removed 81 Gifu, Japan, after the Earthquake of 1891 85 _This and the pictures following on pages 89, 101, 111, are from Japanese photographs reproduced in "The Great Earthquake in Japan, 1891," by John Milne and W. K. Burton._ The Work of the Great Earthquake of 1891 in Neo Valley, Japan 89 Diagram Showing Vertical and Horizontal Sections of the More Sensitive of Professor Milne's Two Pendulums, or Seismographs 93 Seismogram of a Borneo Earthquake that Occurred September 20, 1897 94 Effect of the Great Earthquake of 1891 on the Nagara Gawa Railway Bridge, Japan 101 Pieces of a Submarine Cable Picked Up in the Gulf of Mexico in 1888 108 _The kinks are caused by seismic disturbances, and they show how much distortion a cable can suffer and still remain in good electrical condition, as this was found to be._ Record made on a Stationary Surface by the Vibrations of the Japanese Earthquake of July 19, 1891 111 _Showing the complicated character of the motion (common to most earthquakes), and also the course of a point at the centre of disturbance._ Table of Temperatures 115 Mr. E. G. Acheson, One of the Pioneers in the Investigation of High Temperatures 125 The Furnace-Room, where Carborundum is Made 131 "_A great, dingy brick building, open at the sides like a shed._" Taking Off a Crust of the Furnace at Night 135 _The light is so intense that you cannot look at it without hurting the eyes._ The Interior of a Furnace as it Appears after the Carborundum has been Taken Out 143 Blowing Off 147 "_Not infrequently gas collects, forming a miniature mountain, with a crater at its summit, and blowing a magnificent fountain of flame, lava, and dense white vapour high into the air, and roaring all the while in a most terrifying manner._" Side View of the Solar Motor 155 Front View of the Los Angeles Solar Motor 159 The Brilliant Steam Boiler Glistens in the Centre 163 The Rear Machinery for Operating the Reflector 167 Trees Growing in Water at Professor Nobbe's Laboratory 187 Experimenting with Nitrogen in Professor Nobbe's Laboratory 191 Mr. Charles S. Bradley 198 Mr. D. R. Lovejoy 199 Eight-Inch 10,000-Volt Arcs Burning the Air for Fixing Nitrogen 200 Machine for Burning the Air with Electric Arcs so as to Produce Nitrates 201 Marconi. The Sending of an Epoch-Making Message 206 _January 18, 1903, marks the beginning of a new era in telegraphic communication. On that day there was sent by Marconi himself from the wireless station at South Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Mass., to the station at Poldhu, Cornwall, England, a distance of 3,000 miles, the message--destined soon to be historic--from the President of the United States to the King of England._ Preparing to Fly the Kite which Supported the Receiving Wire 213 _Marconi on the extreme left._ Mr. Marconi and his Assistants in Newfoundland: Mr. Kemp on the Left, Mr. Paget on the Right 217 _They are sitting on a balloon basket, with one of the Baden-Powell kites in the background._ Marconi Transatlantic Station at Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Mass. 229 At Poole, England 231 Nearer View, South Foreland Station 235 Alum Bay Station, Isle of Wight 237 Marconi Room, S.S. Philadelphia 241 Transatlantic High Power, Marconi Station at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia 247 Work on the Smith Point Lighthouse Stopped by a Violent Storm 254 _Just after the cylinder had been set in place, and while the workmen were hurrying to stow sufficient ballast to secure it against a heavy sea, a storm forced the attending steamer to draw away. One of the barges was almost overturned, and a lifeboat was driven against the cylinder and crushed to pieces._ Robert Stevenson, Builder of the Famous Bell Rock Lighthouse, and Author of Important Inventions and Improvements in the System of Sea Lighting 256 _From a bust by Joseph, now in the library of Bell Rock Lighthouse._ The Bell Rock Lighthouse, on the Eastern Coast of Scotland 257 _From the painting by Turner. The Bell Rock Lighthouse was built by Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, on the Inchcape Reef, in the North Sea, near Dundee, Scotland, in 1807-1810._ The Present Lighthouse on Minot's Ledge, near the Entrance of Massachusetts Bay, Fifteen Miles Southeast of Boston 260 "_Rising sheer out of the sea, like a huge stone cannon, mouth upward._"--Longfellow. The Lighthouse on Stannard Rock, Lake Superior 261 _This is a stone-tower lighthouse, similar in construction to the one built with such difficulty on Spectacle Reef, Lake Huron._ The Fowey Rocks Lighthouse, Florida 264 Fourteen-Foot Bank Light Station, Delaware Bay, Del. 268 The Great Beds Light Station, Raritan Bay, N. J. 270 _A specimen of iron cylinder construction._ A Storm at the Tillamook Lighthouse, in the Pacific, one mile out from Tillamook Head, Oregon 275 Saving the Cylinder of the Lighthouse at Smith Point, Chesapeake Bay, from being Swamped in a High Sea 279 _When the builders were towing the unwieldy cylinder out to set it in position, the water became suddenly rough and began to fill it. Workmen, at the risk of their lives, boarded the cylinder, and by desperate labours succeeded in spreading sail canvas over it, and so saved a structure that had cost months of labour and thousands of dollars._ Great Waves Dashed Entirely Over Them, so that They had to Cling for Their Lives to the Air-Pipes 285 _In erecting the Smith Point lighthouse, after the cylinder was set up, it had to be forced down fifteen and a half feet into the sand. The lives of the men who did this, working in the caisson at the bottom of the sea, were absolutely in the hands of the men who managed the engine and the air-compressor at the surface; and twice these latter were entirely deluged by the sea, but still maintained steam and kept everything running as if no sea was playing over them._ Peter Cooper Hewitt 292 _With his interrupter._ Watching a Test of the Hewitt Converter 299 _Lord Kelvin in the centre._ The Hewitt Mercury Vapour Light 305 _The circular piece just above the switch button is one form of "boosting coil" which operates for a fraction of a second when the current is first turned on. The tube shown here is about an inch in diameter and several feet long. Various shapes may be used. Unless broken, the tubes never need renewal._ Testing a Hewitt Converter 311 _The row of incandescent lights is used, together with a voltmeter and ammeter, to measure strength of current, resistance, and loss in converting._ BOYS' SECOND BOOK OF INVENTIONS CHAPTER I THE MIRACLE OF RADIUM _Story of the Marvels and Dangers of the New Element Discovered by Professor and Madame Curie_ No substance ever discovered better deserves the term "Miracle of Science," given it by a famous English experimenter, than radium. Here is a little pinch of white powder that looks much like common table salt. It is one of many similar pinches sealed in little glass tubes and owned by Professor Curie, of Paris. If you should find one of these little tubes in the street you would think it hardly worth carrying away, and yet many a one of them could not be bought for a small fortune. For all the radium in the world to-day could be heaped on a single table-spoon; a pound of it would be worth nearly a million dollars, or more than three thousand times its weight in pure gold. Professor and Madame Curie, who discovered radium, now possess the largest amount of any one, but there are small quantities in the hands of English and German scientists, and perhaps a dozen specimens in America, one owned by the American Museum of Natural History and several by Mr. W. J. Hammer, of New York, who was the first American to experiment with the rare and precious substance. [Illustration: M. Curie Explaining the Wonders of Radium at the Sorbonne.] And perhaps it is just as well, at first, not to have too much radium, for besides being wonderful it is also dangerous. If a pound or two could be gathered in a mass it would kill every one who came within its influence. People might go up and even handle the white powder without at the moment feeling any ill-effects, but in a week or two the mysterious and dreadful radium influence would begin to take effect. Slowly the victim's skin would peel off, his body would become one great sore, he would fall blind, and finally die of paralysis and congestion of the spinal cord. Even the small quantities now in hand have severely burned the experimenters. Professor Curie himself has a number of bad scars on his hands and arms due to ulcers caused by handling radium. And Professor Becquerel, in journeying to London, carried in his waistcoat pocket a small tube of radium to be used in a lecture there. Nothing happened at the time, but about two weeks later Professor Becquerel observed that the skin under his pocket was beginning to redden and fall away, and finally a deep and painful sore formed there and remained for weeks before healing. It is just as well, therefore, that scientists learn more about radium and how to handle and control it before too much is manufactured. But the cost and danger of radium are only two of its least extraordinary features. Seen in the daylight radium is a commonplace white powder, but in the dark it glows like live fire, and the purer it is the more it glows. I held for a moment one of Mr. Hammer's radium tubes, and, the lights being turned off, it seemed like a live coal burning there in my hand, and yet I felt no sensation of heat. But radium really does give off heat as well as light--and gives it off continually _without losing appreciable weight_. And that is what seems to scientists a miracle. Imagine a coal which should burn day in and day out for hundreds of years, always bright, always giving off heat and light, and yet not growing any smaller, not turning to ashes. That is the almost unbelievable property of radium. Professor Curie has specimens which have thus been radiating light and heat for several years, with practically no loss of weight; and no small amount of light and heat either. Professor Curie has found that a given quantity of radium will melt its own weight of ice every hour, and continue doing so practically for ever. One of his associates has calculated that a fixed quantity of radium, after throwing out heat for 1,000,000,000 years, would have lost only one-millionth part of its bulk. What is the reason for these extraordinary properties? Is it not "perpetual motion"? All the great scientists of the world have been trying in vain to answer these questions. Several theories have been advanced, of which I shall speak later, but none seems a satisfactory explanation. When we know more of radium perhaps we shall be better prepared to say what it really is, and we may have to unlearn many of the great principles of physics and chemistry which were seemingly settled for all time. Radium would seem, indeed, to defy the very law of the conservation of energy. The practical mind at once sees radium in use as a new source of heat and light for mankind, a furnace that would never have to be fed or cleaned, a lamp that would glow perpetually--and the time may really come, the inventor having taken hold of the wonder that the scientist has produced, when many practical applications of the new element may be devised. At present, however, the scarcity and cost and danger of radium will keep it in the hands of the experimenter. Another astonishing property of radium is its power of communicating some of its strange qualities to certain substances brought within its influence. Mr. Hammer kept his radium tubes for a time in a pasteboard box. This being broken, he removed the tubes and threw the pasteboard aside. Several days later, having occasion to turn off the lights in the laboratory, he found that the discarded box was glowing there in the dark. It had taken up some of the rays from the radium. Nearly everything that comes in contact with radium thus becomes "radio-active"--even the experimenter's clothes and hands, so that delicate instruments are disturbed by the invisible shine of the experimenter. Photographs can be taken with radium; it also makes the air around it a better conductor of electricity. And still more marvellous, besides being an agency for the destruction of life, as I shall show later, it can actually be used in other ways to prolong life, and the future may show many wonderful uses for it in the treatment of disease. Already, in Paris, several cases of lupus have been cured with it, and there is evidence that it will help to restore sight in certain cases of blindness. I held a tube of radium to my closed eye and was conscious of the sensation of light; the same sensation was present when the tube was held to my temple, thus showing that the radium has an effect on the optic nerve. A little blind girl in New York, who had never had the sensation of light, began to see a little after one treatment with radium, and experiments are still going on, but cautiously, for fear that injuries may result. We now come to the fascinating story of the discovery and manufacture of radium. It has long been known that certain substances are phosphorescent; that is, under the proper conditions they glow without apparent heat. Everybody has seen "fox-fire" in the damp and decaying woods--a cold light which scientists have never been able to explain. To M. Henri Becquerel of the French Institute is generally given the credit for having begun the real study of radio-activity, although, as in every great discovery and invention, many other scientists and practical electricians had paved the way by their investigations. In 1896 M. Becquerel was conducting some experiments with various phosphorescent substances. He exposed some salts of the metal uranium to the sunlight until they became phosphorescent, and then tried their effect upon a photographic plate. It rained, and he put the plate away in a drawer for several days. When he developed it he was surprised to find on it a better image than sunlight would have made. And thus, by a sort of accident, he led up to the discovery of the Becquerel rays, so called. Uranium is extracted from a metal or ore called uranite by mineralogists, and popularly known as pitch-blende. Every young college student who has studied geology or chemistry has heard of pitch-blende. Two years after Becquerel's discovery of the radio-activity of uranium Professor Pierre Curie and Madame Curie, of Paris, made the discovery that some of the samples of pitch-blende which they had were much more powerful than any uranium that they had used. Was there, then, something more powerful than uranium within the pitch-blende? They began to "boil down" the waste rock left at the uranium mines, and found a strange new element, related to uranium but different, to which Madame Curie gave the name polonium, after her native land, Poland. [Illustration: Dr. Danlos Treating a Lupus Patient with Radium at the St. Louis Hospital, Paris.] Then they did some more boiling down, and succeeded in isolating an entirely new substance, and the most radio-active yet discovered--radium. Shortly after that Debierne discovered still another radio-active substance, to which he gave the name actinium. Thus three new elements were added to the list of the world's substances, and the most wonderful of these is radium. In a day, almost, the Curies became famous in the scientific world, and many of the greatest investigators in the world--Lord Kelvin, Sir William Crookes, and others--took up the study of radium. Very rarely have a man and woman worked together so perfectly as Professor Curie and his wife. Madame Curie was a Polish girl; she came to Paris to study, very poor, but possessed of rare talents. Her marriage with M. Curie was such a union as _must_ have produced some fine result. Without his scientific learning and vivid imagination it is doubtful if radium would ever have been dreamed of, and without her determination and patience against detail it is likely the dream would never have been realised. One of the chief problems to be met in finding the secrets of radium is the great difficulty and expense, in the first place, of getting any of the substance to experiment with. The Curies have had to manufacture all they themselves have used. In the first place, pitch-blende, which closely resembles iron in appearance, is not plentiful. The best of it comes from Bohemia, but it is also found in Saxony, Norway, Egypt, and in North Carolina, Colorado, and Utah. It appears in small lumps in veins of gold, silver, and mica, and sometimes in granite. Comparatively speaking, it is easy to get uranium from pitch-blende. But to get the radium from the residues is a much more complicated task. According to Professor Curie, it is necessary to refine about 5,000 tons of uranium residues to get a kilogramme--or about 2.2 pounds--of radium. It is hardly surprising, therefore, considering the enormous amount of raw material which must be handled, that the cost of this rare mineral should be high. It has been said that there is more gold in sea-water than radium in the earth. Professor Curie has an extensive plant at Ivry, near Paris, where the refuse dust brought from the uranium mines is treated by complicated processes, which finally yield a powder or crystals containing a small amount of radium. These crystals are sent to the laboratory of the Curies where the final delicate processes of extraction are carried on by the professor and his wife. And, after all, pure metallic radium is not obtained. It could be obtained, and Professor Curie has actually made a very small quantity of it, but it is unstable, immediately oxidised by the air and destroyed. So it is manufactured only in the form of chloride and bromide of radium. The "strength" of radium is measured in radio-activity, in the power of emitting rays. So we hear of radium of an intensity of 45 or 7,000 or 300,000. This method of measurement is thus explained. Taking the radio-activity of uranium as the unit, as one, then a certain specimen of radium is said to be 45 or 7,000 or 300,000 times as intense, to have so many times as much radio-activity. The radium of highest intensity in this country now is 300,000, but the Curies have succeeded in producing a specimen of 1,500,000 intensity. This is so powerful and dangerous that it must be kept wrapped in lead, which has the effect of stopping some of the rays. Rock-salt is another substance which hinders the passage of the rays. English scientists have devised a curious little instrument, called the spinthariscope, which allows one actually to _see_ the emanations from radium and to realise as never before the extraordinary atomic disintegration that is going on ceaselessly in this strange metal. The spinthariscope is a small microscope that allows one to look at a tiny fragment of radium supported on a little wire over a screen. [Illustration: Radium as a Test for Real Diamonds. _At the approach of Radium pure gems are thrown into great brilliancy, while imitations remain dull._] The experiment must be made in a darkened room after the eye has gradually acquired its greatest sensitiveness to light. Looking intently through the lenses the screen appears like a heaven of flashing meteors among which stars shine forth suddenly and die away. Near the central radium speck the fire-shower is most brilliant, while toward the rim of the circle it grows fainter. And this goes on continuously as the metal throws off its rays like myriads of bursting, blazing stars. M. Curie has spoken of this vision, really contained within the area of a two-cent piece, as one of the most beautiful and impressive he ever witnessed; it was as if he had been allowed to assist at the birth of a universe. Radium emits radiations, that is, it shoots off particles of itself into space at such terrific speed that 92,500 miles a second is considered a small estimate. Yet, in spite of the fact that this waste goes on eternally and at such enormous velocity, the actual loss sustained by the radium is, as I have said, infinitesimal. We now come to one of the most interesting phases of the whole subject of radium--that is, the influence which its strange rays have upon animal life. Mr. Cleveland Moffett, to whom I am indebted for the facts of the following experiments, recently visited M. Danysz, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who has made some wonderful investigations in this branch of science. M. Danysz has tried the effect of radium on mice, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and other animals, and on plants, and he found that if exposed long enough they all died, often first losing their fur and becoming blind. But the most startling experiment performed thus far at the Pasteur Institute is one undertaken by M. Danysz, February 3, 1903, when he placed three or four dozen little larvæ that live in flour in a glass flask, where they were exposed for a few hours to the rays of radium. He placed a like number of larvæ in a control-flask, where there was no radium, and he left enough flour in each flask for the larvæ to live upon. After several weeks it was found that most of the larvæ in the radium flask had been killed, but that a few of them had escaped the destructive action of the rays by crawling away to distant corners of the flask, where they were still living. But _they were living as larvæ, not as moths_, whereas in the natural course they should have become moths long before, as was seen by the control-flask, where the larvæ had all changed into moths, and these had hatched their eggs into other larvæ, and these had produced other moths. All of which made it clear that the radium rays had arrested the development of these little worms. More weeks passed, and still three or four of the larvæ lived, and four full months after the original exposure one larva was still alive and wriggling, while its contemporary larvæ in the other jar had long since passed away as aged moths, leaving generations of moths' eggs and larvæ to witness this miracle, for here was a larva, venerable among his kind, that had actually lived through _three times the span of life accorded to his fellows_ and that still showed no sign of changing into a moth. It was very much as if a young man of twenty-one should keep the appearance of twenty-one for two hundred and fifty years! Not less remarkable than these are some recent experiments made by M. Bohn at the biological laboratories of the Sorbonne, his conclusions being that radium may so far modify various lower forms of life as to actually produce new species of "monsters," abnormal deviations from the original type of the species. Furthermore, he has been able to accomplish with radium what Professor Loeb did with salt solutions--that is, to cause the growth of unfecundated eggs of the sea-urchin, and to advance these through several stages of their development. In other words, he has used radium _to create life_ where there would have been no life but for this strange stimulation. So much for the wonders of radium. We seem, indeed, to be on the border-land of still more wonderful discoveries. Perhaps these radium investigations will lead to some explanation of that great question in science, "What is electricity?"--and that, who can say, may solve that profounder problem, "What is life?" At present there are two theories as to the source of energy in radium, thus stated by Professor Curie: "Where is the source of this energy? Both Madame Curie and myself are unable to go beyond hypotheses; one of these consists in supposing the atoms of radium evolving and transforming into another simple body, and, despite the extreme slowness of that transformation, which cannot be located during a year, the amount of energy involved in that transformation is tremendous. [Illustration: M. and Mme. Curie Finishing the Preparation of some Radium.] "The second hypothesis consists in the supposition that radium is capable of capturing and utilising some radiations of unknown nature which cross space without our knowledge." CHAPTER II FLYING MACHINES[A] _Santos-Dumont's Steerable Balloons_ Among the inventors engaged in building flying machines the most famous, perhaps, is M. Santos-Dumont, whose thrilling adventures and noteworthy successes have given him world-wide fame. He was the first, indeed, to build a balloon that was really steerable with any degree of certainty, winning a prize of $20,000 for driving his great air-ship over a certain specified course in Paris and bringing it back to the starting-point within a specified time. Another experimenter who has had some degree of success is the German, Count Zeppelin, who guided a huge air-ship over Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in 1901. [A] In the first "Boys' Book of Inventions," the author devoted a chapter entitled "Through the Air" to the interesting work of the inventors of flying machines who have experimented with aëroplanes; that is, soaring machines modelled after the wings of a bird. The work of Professor S. P. Langley with his marvellous Aërodrome, and that of Hiram Maxim and of Otto Lilienthal, were given especial consideration. In the present chapter attention is directed to an entirely different class of flying machines--the steerable balloons. Carl E. Myers, an American, an expert balloonist, has also built balloons of small size which he has been able to steer. And mention must also be made of M. Severo, the Frenchman, whose ship, Pax, exploded in the air on its first trip, dropping the inventor and his assistant hundreds of feet downward to their death on the pavements of Paris. It will be most interesting and instructive to consider especially the work of Santos-Dumont, for he has been not only the most successful in making actual flights of any of the inventors who have taken up this great problem of air navigation, but his adventures have been most romantic and thrilling. In five years' time he has built and operated no fewer than ten great air-ships which he has sailed in various parts of Europe and in America. He has even crowned his experiences with more than one shipwreck in the air, an adventure by the side of which an ordinary sea-wreck is tame indeed, and he has escaped with his life as a result not only of good fortune but of real daring and presence of mind in the face of danger. [Illustration: M. Alberto Santos-Dumont.] For an inventor, M. Santos-Dumont is a rather extraordinary character. The typical inventor--at least so we think--is poor, starts poor at least, and has a struggle to rise. M. Santos-Dumont has always had plenty of means. The inventor is always first a dreamer, we think. M. Santos-Dumont is first a thoroughly practical man, an engineer with a good knowledge of science, to which he adds the imagination of the inventor and the keen love and daring of the sportsman and adventurer, without which his experiments could never have been carried through. It would seem, indeed, that nature had especially equipped M. Santos-Dumont for his work in aërial navigation. Supposing an inventor, having all the mental equipment of Santos-Dumont, the ideas, the energy, the means--supposing such a man had weighed two hundred pounds! He would have had to build a very large ship to carry his own weight, and all his problems would have been more complex, more difficult. Nature made Santos-Dumont a very small, slim, slight man, weighing hardly more than one hundred pounds, but very active and muscular. The first time I ever saw him, in Crystal Palace, London, where he was setting up one of his air-ships in a huge gallery, I thought him at first glance to be some boy, a possible spectator, who was interested in flying machines. His face, bare and shaven, looked youthful; he wore a narrow-brimmed straw hat and was dressed in the height of fashion. One would not have guessed him to be the inventor. A moment later he had his coat off and was showing his men how to put up the great fan-like rudder of the ship which loomed above us like some enormous Rugby football, and then one saw the power that was in him. Brazilian by nationality, he has a dark face, large dark eyes, an alertness of step and an energetic way of talking. His boyhood was spent on his father's extensive coffee plantation in Brazil; his later years mostly in Paris, though he has been a frequent visitor to England and America. He speaks Spanish, French, and English with equal fluency. Indeed, hearing his English one would say that he must certainly have had his training in an English-speaking country, though no one would mistake him in appearance for either English or American, for he is very much a Latin in face and form. One finds him most unpretentious, modest, speaking freely of his inventions, and yet never taking to himself any undue credit. [Illustration: Severo's Balloon, the "Pax," which, on its First Ascent at a Height of about 2,000 feet, Burst and Exploded, Sending to a Terrible Death both M. Severo and his Assistant.] Santos-Dumont is still a very young man to have accomplished so much. He was born in Brazil, July 20, 1873. From his earliest boyhood he was interested in kites and dreamed of being able to fly. He says: "I cannot say at what age I made my first kites; but I remember how my comrades used to tease me at our game of 'Pigeon flies'! All the children gather round a table, and the leader calls out: 'Pigeon flies! Hen flies! Crow flies! Bee flies!' and so on; and at each call we were supposed to raise our fingers. Sometimes, however, he would call out: 'Dog flies! Fox flies!' or some other like impossibility, to catch us. If any one should raise a finger, he was made to pay a forfeit. Now my playmates never failed to wink and smile mockingly at me when one of them called 'Man flies!' For at the word I would always lift my finger very high, as a sign of absolute conviction; and I refused with energy to pay the forfeit. The more they laughed at me, the happier I was." Of course he read Jules Verne's stories and was carried away in imagination in that author's wonderful balloons and flying machines. He also devoured the history of aërial navigation which he found in the works of Camille Flammarion and Wilfrid de Fonvielle. He says, further: "At an early age I was taught the principles of mechanics by my father, an engineer of the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures of Paris. From childhood I had a passion for making calculations and inventing; and from my tenth year I was accustomed to handle the powerful and heavy machines of our factories, and drive the compound locomotives on our plantation railroads. I was constantly taken up with the desire to lighten their parts; and I dreamed of air-ships and flying machines. The fact that up to the end of the nineteenth century those who occupied themselves with aërial navigation passed for crazy, rather pleased than offended me. It is incredible and yet true that in the kingdom of the wise, to which all of us flatter ourselves we belong, it is always the fools who finish by being in the right. I had read that Montgolfière was thought a fool until the day when he stopped his insulters' mouths by launching the first spherical balloon into the heavens." [Illustration: The Trial of Count Zeppelin's Air-Ship, July 2, 1900.] Upon going to Paris Santos-Dumont at once took up the work of making himself familiar with ballooning in all of its practical aspects. He saw that if he were ever to build an air-ship he must first know all there was to know about balloon-making, methods of filling with gas, lifting capacities, the action of balloons in the air, and all the thousand and one things connected with ordinary ballooning. And Paris has always been the centre of this information. He regards this preliminary knowledge as indispensable to every air-ship builder. He says: "Before launching out into the construction of air-ships I took pains to make myself familiar with the handling of spherical balloons. I did not hasten, but took plenty of time. In all, I made something like thirty ascensions; at first as a passenger, then as my own captain, and at last alone. Some of these spherical balloons I rented, others I had constructed for me. Of such I have owned at least six or eight. And I do not believe that without such previous study and experience a man is capable of succeeding with an elongated balloon, whose handling is so much more delicate. Before attempting to direct an air-ship, it is necessary to have learned in an ordinary balloon the conditions of the atmospheric medium; to have become acquainted with the caprices of the wind, now caressing and now brutal, and to have gone thoroughly into the difficulties of the ballast problem, from the triple point of view of starting, of equilibrium in the air, and of landing at the end of the trip. To go up in an ordinary balloon, at least a dozen times, seems to me an indispensable preliminary for acquiring an exact notion of the requisites for the construction and handling of an elongated balloon, furnished with its motor and propeller." [Illustration: M. Santos-Dumont at Nineteen.] [Illustration: M. Santos-Dumont's First Balloon (Spherical).] His first ascent in a balloon was made in 1897, when he was 24 years old, as a passenger with M. Machuron, who had then just returned from the Arctic regions, where he had helped to start Andrée on his ill-fated voyage in search of the North Pole. He found the sensations delightful, being so pleased with the experience that he subsequently secured a small balloon of his own, in which he made several ascents. He also climbed the Alps in order to learn more of the condition of the air at high altitudes. In 1898 he set about experimentation in the building of a real air-ship or steerable balloon. Efforts had been made in this direction by former inventors, but with small success. As far back as 1852 Henri Gifford made the first of the familiar cigar-shaped balloons, trying steam as a motive power, but he soon found that an engine strong enough to propel the balloon was too heavy for the balloon to lift. That simple failure discouraged experimenters for a long time. In 1877 Dupuy de Lome tried steering a balloon by man power, but the man was not strong enough. In 1883 another Frenchman, Tissandier, experimented with electricity, but, as his batteries had to be light enough to be taken up in the balloon, they proved effective only in helping to weigh it down to earth again. Krebs and Renard, military aëronauts, succeeded better with electricity, for they could make a small circuit with their air-ship, provided only that no air was stirring. Enthusiasts cried out that the problem was solved, but the two aëronauts themselves, as good mathematicians, figured out that they would have to have a motor eight times more powerful than their own, and that without any increase in weight, which was an impossibility at that time. [Illustration: M. Santos-Dumont's Workshop.] Santos-Dumont saw plainly that none of these methods would work. What then was he to try? Why, simple enough: the petroleum motor from his automobile. The recent development of the motor-vehicle had produced a light, strong, durable motor. It was Santos-Dumont's first great claim to originality that he should have applied this to the balloon. He discovered no new principles, invented nothing that could be patented. The cigar-shaped balloon had long been used, so had the petroleum motor, but he put them together. And he did very much more than that. The very essence of success in aërial navigation is to secure _light weight with great strength and power_. The inventor who can build the lightest machine, which is also strong, will, other things being equal, have the greatest success. It is to Santos-Dumont's great credit that he was able to build a very light motor, that also gave a good horse-power, and a light balloon that was also very strong. The one great source of danger in using the petroleum motor in connection with a balloon is that the sparking of the motor will set fire to the inflammable hydrogen gas with which the balloon is filled, causing a terrible explosion. This, indeed, is what is thought to have caused the mortal mishap to Severo and his balloon. But Santos-Dumont was able to surmount this and many other difficulties of construction. The inventor finally succeeded in making a motor--remarkable at that time--which, weighing only 66 pounds, would produce 3-1/2 horse-power. It is easy to understand why a petroleum motor is such a power-producer for its size. The greater part of its fuel is in the air itself, and the air is all around the balloon, ready for use. The aëronaut does not have to take it up with him. That proportion of his fuel that he must carry, the petroleum, is comparatively insignificant in weight. A few figures will prove interesting. Two and one-half gallons of gasoline, weighing 15 pounds, will drive a 2-1/2 horse-power autocycle 94 miles in four hours. Santos-Dumont's balloon needs less than 5-1/3 gallons for a three hours' trip. This weighs but 37 pounds, and occupies a small cigar-shaped brass reservoir near the motor of his machine. An electric battery of the same horse-power would weigh 2,695 pounds. [Illustration: "Santos-Dumont No. 1."] Santos-Dumont tested his new motor very thoroughly by attaching it to a tricycle with which he made some record runs in and around Paris. Having satisfied himself that it was thoroughly serviceable he set about making the balloon, cigar-shaped, 82 feet long. "To keep within the limit of weight," he says, "I first gave up the network and the outer cover of the ordinary balloon. I considered this sort of second envelope, holding the first within it, to be superfluous, and even harmful, if not dangerous. To the envelope proper I attached the suspension-cords of my basket directly, by means of small wooden rods introduced into horizontal hems, sewed on both sides along the stuff of the balloon for a great part of its length. Again, in order not to pass the 66 pounds weight, including varnish, I was obliged to choose Japan silk that was extremely fine, but fairly resisting. Up to this time no one had ever thought of using this for balloons intended to carry up an aëronaut, but only for little balloons carrying light registering apparatus for investigations in the upper air. [Illustration: Basket of "Santos-Dumont No. 1." _Showing propeller and motor._] "I gave the order for this balloon to M. Lachambre. At first he refused to take it, saying that such a thing had never been made, and that he would not be responsible for my rashness. I answered that I would not change a thing in the plan of the balloon, if I had to sew it with my own hands. At last he agreed to sew and varnish the balloon as I desired." After repeated trials of his motor in the basket--which he suspended in his workshop--and the making of a rudder of silk he was able, in September, 1898, to attempt real flying. But, after rising successfully in the air, the weight of the machinery and his own body swung beneath the fragile balloon was so great that while descending from a considerable height the balloon suddenly sagged down in the middle and began to shut up like a portfolio. "At that moment," he said, "I thought that all was over, the more so as the descent, which had already become rapid, could no longer be checked by any of the usual means on board, where nothing worked. [Illustration: "Santos-Dumont No. 1." _Showing how it began to fold up in the middle._] "The descent became a rapid fall. Luckily, I was falling in the neighborhood of the soft, grassy _pélouse_ of the Longchamps race-course, where some big boys were flying kites. A sudden idea struck me. I cried to them to grasp the end of my 100-meter guide-rope, which had already touched the ground, and to run as fast as they could with it _against the wind_! They were bright young fellows, and they grasped the idea and the guide-rope at the same lucky instant. The effect of this help _in extremis_ was immediate, and such as I had expected. By this manoeuvre we lessened the velocity of the fall, and so avoided what would otherwise have been a terribly rough shaking up, to say the least. I was saved for the first time. Thanking the brave boys, who continued to aid me to pack everything into the air-ship's basket, I finally secured a cab and took the relic back to Paris." His life was thus saved almost miraculously; but the accident did not deter him from going forward immediately with other experiments. The next year, 1899, he built a new air-ship called Santos-Dumont II., and made an ascension with it, but it dissatisfied him and he at once began with Santos-Dumont III., with which he made the first trip around the Eiffel Tower. He now made ready to compete for the Deutsch prize of $20,000. The winning of this prize demanded that the trip from Saint-Cloud to the Eiffel Tower, around it and back to the starting place, a distance of some eight miles, should be made in half an hour. For this purpose he finished a much larger air-ship, Santos-Dumont V., in 1901. After a trial, made on July 12, which was attended by several accidents, the inventor decided to make a start early on the following morning, July 13. As early as four o'clock he was ready, and a crowd had begun to gather in the park. At 6.20 the great sliding doors of the balloon-house were pushed open, and the massive inflated occupant was towed out into the open space of the park. The big pointed nose of the balloon and its fish-like belly resembled a shark gliding with lazy craft from a shadow into light waters. In the basket of the car stood the coatless aëronaut, who laughed and chatted like a boy with the crowd around him. [Illustration: "Santos-Dumont No. 5" Rounding Eiffel Tower, July 13, 1901.] From the very first the conditions did not show themselves favourable for the attempt. The wind was blowing at the rate of six or seven yards a second. The change of temperature from the balloon-house to the cool morning air had somewhat condensed the hydrogen gas of the balloon, so that one end flapped about in a flabby manner. Air was pumped into the air reservoir, inside the balloon, but still the desired rigidity was not attained. But, more discouraging yet, when the motor was started, its continuous explosions gave to the practised ear signs of mechanical discord. Nevertheless, Santos-Dumont, with his sleeves rolled up, fixed himself in his basket. His eye took a careful survey of the entire air-ship lest some preliminary had been overlooked. He counted the ballast bags under his feet in the basket, he looked to the canvas pocket of loose sand at either hand, then saw to his guide-rope. There is a very great deal to look after in managing such a ship, and it requires a calm head and a steady hand to do it. "Near the saddle on which I sat," he writes, "were the ends of the cords and other means for controlling the different parts of the mechanism--the electric sparking of the motor, the regulation of the carburetter, the handling of the rudder, ballast, and the shifting weights (consisting of the guide-rope and bags of sand), the managing of the balloon's valves, and the emergency rope for tearing open the balloon. It may easily be gathered from this enumeration that an air-ship, even as simple as my own, is a very complex organism; and the work incumbent on the aëronaut is no sinecure." Several friends shook his hand, among them Mr. Deutsch. The place was very still as the man holding the guide-rope awaited the signal to let go. Then the little man in the basket above them raised his hands and shouted. [Illustration: The Interior of the Aërodrome. _Showing its construction, the inflated balloon, and the pennant with its mystic letters._] At first it did not look like a race against time. The balloon rose sluggishly, and Santos-Dumont had to dump out bag after bag of sand, till finally the guide-rope was clear of the trees. All this gave him no opportunity to think of his direction, and he was drifting toward Versailles; but while yet over the Seine he pulled his rudder ropes taut. Then slowly, gracefully, the enormous spindle veered round and pointed its nose toward the Eiffel Tower. The fans spun energetically, and the air-ship settled down to business-like travelling. It marked a straight, decided line for its goal, then followed the chosen route with a considerable speed. Soon the chug-chugging of the motor could be heard no longer by the spectators, and the balloon and car grew smaller and smaller in its halo of light smoke. Those in the park saw only the screw and the rear of the balloon, like the stern of a steamer in dry dock. Before long only a dot remained against the sky. Gradually he came nearer again, almost returning to the park, but the wind drove him back across the river Seine. Suddenly the motor stopped, and the whole air-ship was seen to fall heavily toward the earth. The crowd raced away expecting to find Santos-Dumont dead and his air-ship a wreck. But they found him on his feet, with his hands in his pockets, reflectively looking up at his air-ship among the top branches of some chestnut trees in the grounds of Baron Edmund de Rothschild, Boulevard de Boulogne. "This," he says, "was near the _hôtel_ of Princesse Ysabel, Comtesse d'Eu, who sent up to me in my tree a champagne lunch, with an invitation to come and tell her the story of my trip. "When my story was over, she said to me: "'Your evolutions in the air made me think of the flight of our great birds of Brazil. I hope that you will succeed for the glory of our common country.'" And an examination showed that the air-ship was practically uninjured. So he escaped death a second time. Less than a month later he had a still more terrible mishap, best related in his own words. He says: "And now I come to a terrible day--August 8, 1901. At 6.30 A.M., I started for the Eiffel Tower again, in the presence of the committee, duly convoked. I turned the goal at the end of nine minutes, and took my way back to Saint-Cloud; but my balloon was losing hydrogen through the automatic valves, the spring of which had been accidentally weakened; and it shrank visibly. All at once, while over the fortifications of Paris, near La Muette, the screw-propeller touched and cut the suspension-cords, which were sagging behind. I was obliged to stop the motor instantly; and at once I saw my air-ship drift straight back to the Eiffel Tower. I had no means of avoiding the terrible danger, except to wreck myself on the roofs of the Trocadero quarter. Without hesitation I opened the manoeuvre-valve, and sent my balloon downward. [Illustration: The Fall into the Courtyard of the Trocadero Hotel. "_Santos-Dumont No. 5._"] "At 32 metres (106 feet) above the ground, and with the noise of an explosion, it struck the roof of the Trocadero Hotels. The balloon-envelope was torn to rags, and fell into the courtyard of the hotels, while I remained hanging 15 metres (50 feet) above the ground in my wicker basket, which had been turned almost over, but was supported by the keel. The keel of the Santos-Dumont V. saved my life that day. "After some minutes a rope was thrown down to me; and, helping myself with feet and hands up the wall (the few narrow windows of which were grated like those of a prison), I was hauled up to the roof. The firemen from Passy had watched the fall of the air-ship from their observatory. They, too, hastened to the rescue. It was impossible to disengage the remains of the balloon-envelope and suspension apparatus except in strips and pieces. "My escape was narrow; but it was not from the particular danger always present to my mind during this period of my experiments. The position of the Eiffel Tower as a central landmark, visible to everybody from considerable distances, makes it a unique winning-post for an aërial race. Yet this does not alter the other fact that the feat of rounding the Eiffel Tower possesses a unique element of danger. What I feared when on the ground--I had no time to fear while in the air--was that, by some mistake of steering, or by the influence of some side-wind, I might be dashed against the Tower. The impact would burst my balloon, and I should fall to the ground like a stone. Though I never seek to fly at a great height--on the contrary, I hold the record for low altitude in a free balloon--in passing over Paris I must necessarily move above all its chimney-pots and steeples. The Eiffel Tower was my one danger--yet it was my winning-post! [Illustration: "Santos-Dumont No. 6"--The Prize Winner.] "But in the air I have no time to fear. I have always kept a cool head. Alone in the air-ship, I am always very busy. I must not let go the rudder for a single instant. Then there is the strong joy of commanding. What does it feel like to sail in a dirigible balloon? While the wind was carrying me back to the Eiffel Tower I realised that I might be killed; but I did not feel fear. I was in no personal inconvenience. I knew my resources. I was excessively occupied. I have felt fear while in the air, yes, miserable fear joined to pain; but never in a dirigible balloon." Even this did not daunt him. That very night he ordered a new air-ship, Santos-Dumont VI., and it was ready in twenty-two days. The new balloon had the shape of an elongated ellipsoid, 32 metres (105 feet) on its great axis, and 6 metres (20 feet) on its short axis, terminated fore and aft by cones. Its capacity was 605 cubic metres (21,362 cubic feet), giving it a lifting power of 620 kilos (1,362 pounds). Of this, 1,100 pounds were represented by keel, machinery, and his own weight, leaving a net lifting-power of 120 kilos (261 pounds). On October 19, 1901, he made another attempt to round the Eiffel Tower, and was at last successful in winning the $20,000 prize. Following this great feat, Santos-Dumont continued his experiments at Monte Carlo, where he was wrecked over the Mediterranean Sea and escaped only by presence of mind, and he is still continuing his work. The future of the dirigible balloon is open to debate. Santos-Dumont himself does not think there is much likelihood that it will ever have much commercial use. A balloon to carry many passengers would have to be so enormous that it could not support the machinery necessary to propel it, especially against a strong wind. But he does believe that the steerable balloon will have great importance in war time. He says: "I have often been asked what present utility is to be expected of the dirigible balloon when it becomes thoroughly practicable. I have never pretended that its commercial possibilities could go far. The question of the air-ship in war, however, is otherwise. Mr. Hiram Maxim has declared that a flying machine in South Africa would have been worth four times its weight in gold. Henri Rochefort has said: 'The day when it is established that a man can direct an air-ship in a given direction and cause it to manoeuvre as he wills ... there will remain little for the nations to do but to lay down their arms.'" [Illustration: Air-Ship Pointing almost Vertically Upward.] [Illustration: Falling to the Sea.] [Illustration: Just Before the Air-Ship Lost all its Gas.] [Illustration: Losing its Gas and Sinking.] [Illustration: The Balloon Falling to the Waves.] [Illustration: Boats Around the Ruined Air-Ship.] But such experiments as Santos-Dumont's, whether they result immediately in producing an air-ship of practical utility in commerce or not, have great value for the facts which they are establishing as to the possibility of balloons, of motors, of light construction, of air currents, and moreover they add to the world's sum total of experiences a fine, clean sport in which men of daring and scientific knowledge show what men can do. [Illustration: Manoeuvering Above the Bay at Monte Carlo.] CHAPTER III THE EARTHQUAKE MEASURER _Professor John Milne's Seismograph_ Of all strange inventions, the earthquake recorder is certainly one of the most remarkable and interesting. A terrible earthquake shakes down cities in Japan, and sixteen minutes later the professor of earthquakes, in his quiet little observatory in England, measures its extent--almost, indeed, takes a picture of it. Actual waves, not unlike the waves of the sea blown up by a hurricane, have travelled through or around half the earth in this brief time; vast mountain ranges, cities, plains, and oceans have been heaved to their crests and then allowed to sink back again into their former positions. And some of these earthquake waves which sweep over the solid earth are three feet high, so that the whole of New York, perhaps, rises bodily to that height and then slides over the crest like a skiff on an ocean swell. [Illustration: Professor John Milne. _From a photograph by S. Suzuki, Kudanzaka, Tokio._] At first glance this seems almost too strange and wonderful to believe, and yet this is only the beginning of the wonders which the earthquake camera--or the seismograph (earthquake writer, as the scientists call it)--has been disclosing. [Illustration: Professor Milne's Sensitive Pendulum, or Seismograph, as it Appears Enclosed in its Protecting Box.] [Illustration: The Sensitive Pendulum, or Seismograph, as it Appears with the Protecting Box Removed.] The earthquake professor who has worked such scientific magic is John Milne. He lives in a quaint old house in the little Isle of Wight, not far from Osborne Castle, where Queen Victoria made her home part of the year. Not long ago he was a resident of Japan and professor of seismology (the science of earthquakes) at the University of Tokio, where he made his first discoveries about earthquakes, and invented marvellously delicate machines for measuring and photographing them thousands of miles away. Professor Milne is an Englishman by birth, but, like many another of his countrymen, he has visited some of the strangest nooks and corners of the earth. He has looked for coal in Newfoundland; he has crossed the rugged hills of Iceland; he has been up and down the length of the United States; he has hunted wild pigs in Borneo; and he has been in India and China and a hundred other out-of-the-way places, to say nothing of measuring earthquakes in Japan. Professor Milne laid the foundation of his unusual career in a thorough education at King's College, London, and at the School of Mines. By fortunate chance, soon after his graduation, he met Cyrus Field, the famous American, to whom the world owes the beginnings of its present ocean cable system. He was then just twenty-one, young and raw, but plucky. He thought he was prepared for anything the world might bring him; but when Field asked him one Friday if he could sail for Newfoundland the next Tuesday, he was so taken with astonishment that he hesitated, whereupon Field leaned forward and looked at him in a way that Milne has never forgotten. "My young friend, I suppose you have read that the world was made in six days. Now, do you mean to tell me that, if this whole world was made in six days, you can't get together the few things you need in four?" [Illustration: Gifu, Japan, after the Earthquake of 1891. _This and the pictures following on pages 89, 101, 111, are from Japanese photographs reproduced in "The Great Earthquake in Japan, 1891," by John Milne and W. K. Burton._] And Milne sailed the next Tuesday to begin his lifework among the rough hills of Newfoundland. Then came an offer from the Japanese Government, and he went to the land of earthquakes, little dreaming that he would one day be the greatest authority in the world on the subject of seismic disturbances. His first experiments--and they were made as a pastime rather than a serious undertaking--were curiously simple. He set up rows of pins in a certain way, so that in falling they would give some indication as to the wave movements in the earth. He also made pendulums made of strings with weights tied at the end, and from his discoveries made with these elementary instruments, he planned earthquake-proof houses, and showed the engineers of Japan how to build bridges which would not fall down when they were shaken. So highly was his work regarded that the Japanese made him an earthquake professor at Tokio and supplied him with the means for making more extended experiments. And presently we find him producing artificial earthquakes by the score. He buried dynamite deep in the ground and exploded it by means of an electric button. The miniature earthquake thus produced was carefully measured with curious instruments of Professor Milne's invention. At first one earthquake was enough at any one time, but as the experiments continued, Professor Milne sometimes had five or six earthquakes all quaking together; and once so interested did he become that he forgot all about the destructive nature of earthquakes, and ventured too near. A ton or more of earth came crashing down around him, half burying him and smashing his instruments flat. All this made the Japanese rub their eyes with astonishment, and by and by the Emperor heard of it. Of course he was deeply interested in earthquakes, because there was no telling when one might come along and shake down his palace over his head. So he sent for Professor Milne, and, after assuring himself that these experimental earthquakes really had no serious intentions, he commanded that one be produced on the spot. So Professor Milne laid out a number of toy towns and villages and hills in the palace yard with a tremendous toy earthquake underneath. The Emperor and his gayly dressed followers stood well off to one side, and when Professor Milne gave the word the Emperor solemnly pressed a button, and watched with the greatest delight the curious way in which the toy cities were quaked to earth. And after that, this surprising Englishman, who could make earthquakes as easily as a Japanese makes a lacquered basket, was held in high esteem in Japan, and for more than twenty years he studied earthquakes and invented machines for recording them. Then he returned to his home in England, where he is at work establishing earthquake stations in various parts of the world, by means of which he expects to reduce earthquake measurement to an exact science, an accomplishment which will have the greatest practical value to the commercial interests of the world, as I shall soon explain. [Illustration: The Work of the Great Earthquake of 1891 in Neo Valley, Japan.] But first for a glimpse at the curious earthquake measurer itself. To begin with, there are two kinds of instruments--one to measure near-by disturbances, and the second to measure waves which come from great distances. The former instrument was used by Professor Milne in Japan, where earthquakes are frequent; the latter is used in England. The technical name for the machine which measures distant disturbances is the horizontal pendulum seismograph, and, like most wonderful inventions, it is exceedingly simple in principle, yet doing its work with marvellous delicacy and accuracy. In brief, the central feature of the seismograph is a very finely poised pendulum, which is jarred by the slightest disturbance of the earth, the end of it being so arranged that a photograph is taken of every quiver. Set a pendulum clock on the dining-table, jar the table, and the pendulum will swing, indicating exactly with what force you have disturbed the table. In exactly the same way the delicate pendulum of the earthquake measurer indicates the shaking of the earth. [Illustration: Diagram Showing Vertical and Horizontal Sections of the More Sensitive of Professor Milne's Two Pendulums, or Seismographs.] The accompanying diagram gives a very clear idea of the arrangement of the apparatus. The "boom" is the pendulum. It is customary to think of a pendulum as hanging down like that of a clock, but this is a horizontal pendulum. Professor Milne has built a very solid masonry column, reaching deep into the earth, and so firmly placed that nothing but a tremor of the hard earth itself will disturb it. Upon this is perched a firm metal stand, from the top of which the boom or pendulum, about thirty inches long, is swung by means of a "tie" or stay. The end of the boom rests against a fine, sharp pivot of steel (as shown in the little diagram to the right), so that it will swing back and forth without the least friction. The sensitive end of the pendulum, where all the quakings and quiverings are shown most distinctly, rests exactly over a narrow roll of photographic film, which is constantly turned by clockwork, and above this, on an outside stand, there is a little lamp which is kept burning night and day, year in and year out. The light from this lamp is reflected downward by means of a mirror through a little slit in the metal case which covers the entire apparatus. Of course this light affects the sensitive film, and takes a continuous photograph of the end of the boom. If the boom remains perfectly still, the picture will be merely a straight line, as shown at the extreme right and left ends of the earthquake picture on this page. But if an earthquake wave comes along and sets the boom to quivering, the picture becomes at once blurred and full of little loops and indentations, slight at first, but becoming more violent as the greater waves arrive, and then gradually subsiding. In the picture of the Borneo earthquake of September 20, 1897, taken by Professor Milne in his English laboratory, it will be seen that the quakings were so severe at the height of the disturbance that nothing is left in the photograph but a blur. On the edge of the picture can be seen the markings of the hours, 7.30, 8.30, and 9.30. Usually this time is marked automatically on the film by means of the long hand of a watch which crosses the slit beneath the mirror (as shown in the lower diagram with figure 3). The Borneo earthquake waves lasted in England, as will be seen, two hours fifty-six minutes and fifteen seconds, with about forty minutes of what are known as preliminary tremors. Professor Milne removes the film from his seismograph once a week--a strip about twenty-six feet long--develops it, and studies the photographs for earthquake signs. [Illustration: Seismogram of a Borneo Earthquake that Occurred September 20, 1897.] Besides this very sensitive photographic seismograph Professor Milne has a simpler machine, not covered up and without lamp or mirror. In this instrument a fine silver needle at the end of the boom makes a steady mark on a band of smoked paper, which is kept turning under it by means of clockwork. A glance at this smoked-paper record will tell instantly at any time of day or night whether the earth is behaving itself. If the white line on the dark paper shows disturbances, Professor Milne at once examines his more sensitive photographic record for the details. It is difficult to realise how very sensitive these earthquake pendulums really are. They will indicate the very minutest changes in the earth's level--as slight as one inch in ten miles. A pair of these pendulums placed on two buildings at opposite sides of a city street would show that the buildings literally lean toward each other during the heavy traffic period of the day, dragged over from their level by the load of vehicles and people pressing down upon the pavement between them. The earth is so elastic that a comparatively small impetus will set it vibrating. Why, even two hills tip together when there is a heavy load of moisture in a valley between them. And then when the moisture evaporates in a hot sun they tip away from each other. These pendulums show that. Nor are these the most extraordinary things which the pendulums will do. G. K. Gilbert, of the United States Geological Survey, argues that the whole region of the great lakes is being slowly tipped to the southwest, so that some day Chicago will sink and the water outlet of the great fresh-water seas will be up the Chicago River toward the Mississippi, instead of down the St. Lawrence. Of course this movement is as slow as time itself--thousands of years must elapse before it is hardly appreciable; and yet Professor Milne's instruments will show the changing balance--a marvel that is almost beyond belief. Strangely enough, sensitive as this special instrument is to distant disturbances, it does not swerve nor quiver for near-by shocks. Thus, the blasting of powder, the heavy rumbling of wagons, the firing of artillery has little or no effect in producing a movement of the boom. The vibrations are too short; it requires the long, heavy swells of the earth to make a record. Professor Milne tells some odd stories of his early experiences with the earthquake measurer. At one time his films showed evidences of the most horrible earthquakes, and he was afraid for the moment that all Japan had been shaken to pieces and possibly engulfed by the sea. But investigation showed that a little grey spider had been up to pranks in the box. The spider wasn't particularly interested in earthquakes, but he took the greatest pleasure in the swinging of the boom, and soon began to join in the game himself. He would catch the end of the boom with his feelers and tug it over to one side as far as ever he could. Then he would anchor himself there and hold on like grim death until the boom slipped away. Then he would run after it, and tug it over to the other side, and hold it there until his strength failed again. And so he would keep on for an hour or two until quite exhausted, enjoying the fun immensely, and never dreaming that he was manufacturing wonderful seismograms to upset the scientific world, since they seemed to indicate shocking earthquake disasters in all directions. Mr. Cleveland Moffett, to whom I am indebted for much of the information contained in this chapter, tells how the reporters for the London papers rush off to see Professor Milne every time there is news of a great earthquake, and how he usually corrects their information. In June, 1896, for instance, the little observatory was fairly besieged with these searchers for news. "This earthquake happened on the 17th," said they, "and the whole eastern coast of Japan was overwhelmed with tidal waves, and 30,000 lives were lost." "That last is probable," answered Professor Milne, "but the earthquake happened on the 15th, not the 17th;" and then he gave them the exact hour and minute when the shocks began and ended. "But our cables put it on the 17th." "Your cables are mistaken." And, sure enough, later despatches came with information that the destructive earthquake had occurred on the 15th, within half a minute of the time Professor Milne had specified. There had been some error of transmission in the earlier newspaper despatches. Again, a few months later, the newspapers published cablegrams to the effect that there had been a severe earthquake at Kobe, with great injury to life and property. "That is not true," said Professor Milne. "There may have been a slight earthquake at Kobe, but nothing that need cause alarm." And the mail reports a few weeks later confirmed his reassuring statement, and showed that the previous sensational despatches had been grossly exaggerated. Professor Milne is also the man to whose words cable companies lend anxious ear, for what he says often means thousands of dollars to them. Early in January, 1898, it was officially reported that two West Indian cables had broken on December 31, 1897. "That is very unlikely," said Professor Milne; "but I have a seismogram showing that these cables may have broken at 11.30 A.M. on December 29, 1897." And then he located the break at so many miles off the coast of Haiti. This sort of thing, which is constantly happening, would look very much like magic if Professor Milne had kept his secrets to himself; but he has given them freely to all the world. [Illustration: Effect of the Great Earthquake of 1891 on the Nagara Gawa Railway Bridge, Japan.] Professor Milne has learned from his experiments that the solid earth is full of movements, and tremors, and even tides, like the sea. We do not notice them, because they are so slow and because the crests of the waves are so far apart. Professor Milne likes to tell, fancifully, how the earth "breathes." He has found that nearly all earthquake waves, whether the disturbance is in Borneo or South America, reach his laboratory in sixteen minutes, and he thinks that the waves come through the earth instead of around it. If they came around, he says, there would be two records--one from waves coming the short way and one from waves coming the long way round. But there is never more than a single record, so he concludes that the waves quiver straight through the solid earth itself, and he believes that this fact will lead to some important discoveries about the centre of our globe. Professor Milne was once asked how, if earthquake waves from every part of the earth reached his observatory in the same number of minutes, he could tell where the earthquake really was. "I may say, in a general way," he replied, "that we know them by their signatures, just as you know the handwriting of your friends; that is, an earthquake wave which has travelled 3,000 miles makes a different record in the instruments from one that has travelled 5,000 miles; and that, again, a different record from one that has travelled 7,000 miles, and so on. Each one writes its name in its own way. It's a fine thing, isn't it, to have the earth's crust harnessed up so that it is forced to mark down for us on paper a diagram of its own movements?" He took pencil and paper again, and dashed off an earthquake wave like this: [Illustration] "There you have the signature of an earthquake wave which has travelled only a short distance, say 2,000 miles; but here is the signature of the very same wave after travelling, say, 6,000 miles:" [Illustration] "You see the difference at a glance; the second seismogram (that is what we call these records) is very much more stretched out than the first, and a seismogram taken at 8,000 miles from the start would be more stretched out still. This is because the waves of transmission grow longer and longer, and slower and slower, the farther they spread from the source of disturbance. In both figures the point A, where the straight line begins to waver, marks the beginning of the earthquake; the rippling line AB shows the preliminary tremors which always precede the heavy shocks, marked C; and D shows the dying away of the earthquake in tremors similar to AB. "Now, it is chiefly in the preliminary tremors that the various earthquakes reveal their identity. The more slowly the waves come, the longer it takes to record them, and the more stretched out they become in the seismograms. And by carefully noting these differences, especially those in time, we get our information. Suppose we have an earthquake in Japan. If you were there in person you would feel the preliminary tremors very fast, five or ten in a second, and their whole duration before the heavy shocks would not exceed ten or twenty seconds. But these preliminary tremors, transmitted to England, would keep the pendulums swinging from thirty to thirty-two minutes before the heavy shocks, and each vibration would occupy five seconds. "There would be similar differences in the duration of the heavy vibrations; in Japan they would come at the rate of about one a second: here, at the rate of about one in twenty or forty seconds. It is the time, then, occupied by the preliminary tremors that tells us the distance of the earthquake. Earthquakes in Borneo, for instance, give preliminary tremors occupying about forty-one minutes, in Japan about half an hour, in the earthquake region east of Newfoundland about eight minutes, in the disturbed region of the West Indies about nineteen or twenty minutes, and so on. Thus the earthquake is located with absolute precision." Most earthquakes occur in the deep bed of the ocean, in the vast valleys between ocean mountains, and the dangerous localities are now almost as well known as the principal mountain ranges of North America. There is one of these valleys, or ocean holes, off the west coast of South America from Ecuador down; there is one in the mid-Atlantic, about the equator, between twenty degrees and forty degrees west longitude: there is one at the Grecian end of the Mediterranean; one in the Bay of Bengal, and one bordering the Alps; there is the famous "Tuscarora Deep," from the Philippine Islands down to Java; and there is the North Atlantic region, about 300 miles east of Newfoundland. In the "Tuscarora Deep" the slope increases 1,000 fathoms in twenty-five miles, until it reaches a depth of 4,000 fathoms. [Illustration: Pieces of a Submarine Cable Picked Up in the Gulf of Mexico in 1888. _The kinks are caused by seismic disturbances, and they show how much distortion a cable can suffer and still remain in good electrical condition, as this was found to be._] And this brings us to the consideration of one of the greatest practical advantages of the seismograph--in the exact location of cable breaks. Indeed, a large proportion of these breaks are the result of earthquakes. In a recent report Professor Milne says that there are now about twenty-seven breaks a year for 10,000 miles of cable in active use. Most of these are very costly, fifteen breaks in the Atlantic cable between 1884 and 1894 having cost the companies $3,000,000, to say nothing of loss of time. And twice it has happened in Australia (in 1880 and 1888) that the whole island has been thrown into excitement and alarm, the reserves being called out, and other measures taken, because the sudden breaking of cable connections with the outside world has led to the belief that military operations against the country were preparing by some foreign power. A Milne pendulum at Sydney or Adelaide would have made it plain in a moment that the whole trouble was due to a submarine earthquake occurring at such a time and such a place. As it was, Australia had to wait in a fever of suspense (in one case there was a delay of nineteen days) until steamers arriving brought assurances that neither Russia nor any other possibly unfriendly power had begun hostilities by tearing up the cables. There have been submarine earthquakes in the Tuscarora, like that of June 15, 1896, that have shaken the earth from pole to pole; and more than once different cables from Java have been broken simultaneously, as in 1890, when the three cables to Australia snapped in a moment. And the great majority of breaks in the North Atlantic cables have occurred in the Newfoundland hollow, where there are two slopes, one dropping from 708 to 2,400 fathoms in a distance of sixty miles, and the other from 275 to 1,946 fathoms within thirty miles. On October 4, 1884, three cables, lying about ten miles apart, broke simultaneously at the spot. The significance of such breaks is greater when the fact is borne in mind that cables frequently lie uninjured for many years on the great level plains of the ocean bed, where seismic disturbances are infrequent. The two chief causes of submarine earthquakes are landslides, where enormous masses of earth plunge from a higher to a lower level, and in so doing crush down upon the cable, and "faults," that is, subsidences of great areas, which occur on land as well as at the bottom of the sea, and which in the latter case may drag down imbedded cables with them. It is in establishing the place and times of these breaks that Professor Milne's instruments have their greatest practical value; scientifically no one can yet calculate their value. [Illustration: Record Made on a Stationary Surface by the Vibrations of the Japanese Earthquake of July 19, 1891. _Showing the complicated character of the motion (common to most earthquakes), and also the course of a point at the centre of disturbance._] In addition to the first instrument set up by Professor Milne in Tokio in 1883, which is still recording earthquakes, there are now in operation about twenty other seismographs in various parts of the world, so that earthquake information is becoming very accurate and complete, and there is even an attempt being made to predict earthquakes just as the weather bureau predicts storms. In any event Professor Milne's invention must within a few years add greatly to our knowledge of the wonders of the planet on which we live. CHAPTER IV ELECTRICAL FURNACES _How the Hottest Heat is Produced--Making Diamonds_ No feats of discovery, not even the search for the North Pole or Stanley's expeditions in the heart of Africa, present more points of fascinating interest than the attempts now being made by scientists to explore the extreme limits of temperature. We live in a very narrow zone in what may be called the great world of heat. The cut on the opposite page represents an imaginary thermometer showing a few of the important temperature points between the depths of the coldest cold and the heights of the hottest heat--a stretch of some 10,461 degrees. We exist in a narrow space, as you will see, varying from 100° or a little more above the zero point to a possible 50° below; that is, we can withstand these narrow extremes of temperature. If some terrible world catastrophe should raise the temperature of our summers or lower that of our winters by a very few degrees, human life would perish off the earth. But though we live in such narrow limits, science has found ways of exploring the great heights of heat above us and of reaching and measuring the depths of cold below us, with the result of making many important and interesting discoveries. I have written in the former "Boys' Book of Inventions" of that wonderful product of science, liquid air--air submitted to such a degree of cold that it ceases to be a gas and becomes a liquid. This change occurs at a temperature 312° below zero. Professor John Dewar, of England, who has made some of the most interesting of discoveries in the region of great cold, not only reached a temperature low enough to produce liquid air, but he succeeded in going on down until he could freeze this marvellous liquid into a solid--a sort of air ice. Not content even with this astonishing degree of cold, Professor Dewar continued his experiments until he could reduce hydrogen--that very light gas--to a liquid, at 440° below zero, and then, strange as it may seem, he also froze liquid hydrogen into a solid. From his experiments he finally concluded that the "absolute zero"--that is, the place where there is no heat--was at a point 461° below zero. And he has been able to produce a temperature, artificially, within a very few degrees of this utmost limit of cold. [Illustration: | | DEGREES | | | | 10000 --+ +-- Conjectural heat | | of the sun. | | | | | | | | 7000 --+ +-- Highest heat | | yet obtained | | artificially. | | | | | | | | 3500 --+ +-- Steel boils. | | | | | | | | | | 212 --+ +-- Water boils. 0 --+=+-- Zero. 461 --+=+-- Prof. Dewar's |=| absolute zero. {===} | DEGREES | | 0 --+-- Zero. | 40 --+-- Mercury freezes. | | | | | | | 202 --+-- Alcohol freezes. | | | | 300 --+-- Oxygen boils. 312 --+-- Liquid air boils. 320 --+-- Nitrogen boils. | | | | | 440 --+-- Hydrogen boils. 461 --+-- Prof. Dewar's absolute zero.] Think what this absolute zero means. Heat, we know, like electricity and light, is a vibratory or wave motion in the ether. The greater the heat, the faster the vibrations. We think of all the substances around us as solids, liquids, and gases, but these are only comparative terms. A change of temperature changes the solid into the liquid, or the gas into the solid. Take water, for instance. In the ordinary temperature of summer it is a liquid, in winter it is a hard crystalline substance called ice; apply the heat of a stove and it becomes steam, a gas. So with all other substances. Air to us is an invisible gas, but if the earth should suddenly drop in temperature to 312° below zero all the air would fall in liquid drops like rain and fill the valleys of the earth with lakes and oceans. Still a little colder and these lakes and oceans would freeze into solids. Similarly, steel seems to us a very hard and solid substance, but apply enough heat and it boils like water, and finally, if the heat be increased, it becomes a gas. Imagine, if you can, a condition in which all substances are solids; where the vibrations known as heat have been stilled to silence; where nothing lives or moves; where, indeed, there is an awful nothingness; and you can form an idea of the region of the coldest cold--in other words, the region where heat does not exist. Our frozen moon gives something of an idea of this condition, though probably, cold and barren as it is, the moon is still a good many degrees in temperature above the absolute zero. Some of the methods of exploring these depths of cold are treated in the chapter on liquid air already referred to. Our interest here centres in the other extreme of temperature, where the heat vibrations are inconceivably rapid; where nearly all substances known to man become liquids and gases; where, in short, if the experimenter could go high enough, he could reach the awful degree of heat of the burning sun itself, estimated at over 10,000 degrees. It is in the work of exploring these regions of great heat that such men as Moissan, Siemens, Faure, and others have made such remarkable discoveries, reaching temperatures as high as 7,000, or over twice the heat of boiling steel. Their accomplishments seem the more wonderful when we consider that a temperature of this degree burns up or vaporises every known substance. How, then, could these men have made a furnace in which to produce this heat? Iron in such a heat would burn like paper, and so would brick and mortar. It seems inconceivable that even science should be able to produce a degree of heat capable of consuming the tools and everything else with which it is produced. The heat vibrations at 7,000° are so intense that nickel and platinum, the most refractory, the most unmeltable of metals, burn like so much bee's-wax; the best fire-brick used in lining furnaces is consumed by it like lumps of rosin, leaving no trace behind. It works, in short, the most marvellous, the most incredible transformations in the substances of the earth. Indeed, we have to remember that the earth itself was created in a condition of great heat--first a swirling, burning gas, something like the sun of to-day, gradually cooling, contracting, rounding, until we have our beautiful world, with its perfect balance of gases, liquids, solids, its splendid life. A dying volcano here and there gives faint evidence of the heat which once prevailed over all the earth. It was in the time of great heat that the most beautiful and wonderful things in the world were wrought. It was fierce heat that made the diamond, the sapphire, and the ruby; it fashioned all of the most beautiful forms of crystals and spars; and it ran the gold and silver of the earth in veins, and tossed up mountains, and made hollows for the seas. It is, in short, the temperature at which worlds were born. More wonderful, if possible, than the miracles wrought by such heat is the fact that men can now produce it artificially; and not only produce, but confine and direct it, and make it do their daily service. One asks himself, indeed, if this can really be; and it was under the impulse of some such incredulity that I lately made a visit to Niagara Falls, where the hottest furnaces in the world are operated. Here clay is melted in vast quantities to form aluminium, a metal as precious a few years ago as gold. Here lime and carbon, the most infusible of all the elements, are joined by intense heat in the curious new compound, calcium carbide, a bit of which dropped in water decomposes almost explosively, producing the new illuminating gas, acetylene. Here, also, pure phosphorus and the phosphates are made in large quantities; and here is made carborundum--gem-crystals as hard as the diamond and as beautiful as the ruby. An extensive plant has also been built to produce the heat necessary to make graphite such as is used in your lead-pencils, and for lubricants, stove-blacking, and so on. Graphite has been mined from the earth for thousands of years; it is pure carbon, first cousin to the diamond. Ten years ago the possibility of its manufacture would have been scouted as ridiculous; and yet in these wonderful furnaces, which repeat so nearly the processes of creation, graphite is as easily made as soap. The marvel-workers at Niagara Falls have not yet been able to make diamonds--in quantities. The distinguished French chemist Moissan has produced them in his laboratory furnaces--small ones, it is true, but diamonds; and one day they may be shipped in peck boxes from the great furnaces at Niagara Falls. This is no mere dream; the commercial manufacture of diamonds has already had the serious consideration of level-headed, far-seeing business men, and it may be accounted a distinct probability. What revolution the achievement of it would work in the diamond trade as now constituted and conducted no one can say. These marvellous new things in science and invention have been made possible by the chaining of Niagara to the wheels of industry. The power of the falling water is transformed into electricity. Electricity and heat are both vibratory motions of the ether; science has found that the vibrations known as electricity can be changed into the vibrations known as heat. Accordingly, a thousand horse-power from the mighty river is conveyed as electricity over a copper wire, changed into heat and light between the tips of carbon electrodes, and there works its wonders. In principle the electrical furnace is identical with the electric light. It is scarcely twenty years since the first electrical furnaces of real practical utility were constructed; but if the electrical furnaces to-day in operation at Niagara Falls alone were combined into one, they would, as one scientist speculates, make a glow so bright that it could be seen distinctly from the moon--a hint for the astronomers who are seeking methods for communicating with the inhabitants of Mars. One furnace has been built in which an amount of heat energy equivalent to 700 horse-power is produced in an arc cavity not larger than an ordinary water tumbler. On reaching Niagara Falls, I called on Mr. E. G. Acheson, whose name stands with that of Moissan as a pioneer in the investigation of high temperatures. Mr. Acheson is still a young man--not more than forty-five at most--and clean-cut, clear-eyed, and genial, with something of the studious air of a college professor. He is pre-eminently a self-made man. At twenty-four he found a place in Edison's laboratory--"Edison's college of inventions," he calls it--and, at twenty-five, he was one of the seven pioneers in electricity who (in 1881-82) introduced the incandescent lamp in Europe. He installed the first electric-light plants in the cities of Milan, Genoa, Venice, and Amsterdam, and during this time was one of Edison's representatives in Paris. [Illustration: Mr. E. G. Acheson, One of the Pioneers in the Investigation of High Temperatures.] "I think the possibility of manufacturing genuine diamonds," he said to me, "has dazzled more than one young experimenter. My first efforts in this direction were made in 1880. It was before we had command of the tremendous electric energy now furnished by the modern dynamo, and when the highest heat attainable for practical purposes was obtained by the oxy-hydrogen flame. Even this was at the service of only a few experimenters, and certainly not at mine. My first experiments were made in what I might term the 'wet way'; that is, by the process of chemical decomposition by means of an electric current. Very interesting results were obtained, which even now give promise of value; but the diamond did not materialise. "I did not take up the subject again until the dynamo had attained high perfection and I was able to procure currents of great power. Calling in the aid of the 6,500 degrees Fahrenheit or more of temperature produced by these electric currents, I once more set myself to the solution of the problem. I now had, however, two distinct objects in view: first, the making of a diamond; and, second, the production of a hard substance for abrasive purposes. My experiments in 1880 had resulted in producing a substance of extreme hardness, hard enough, indeed, to scratch the sapphire--the next hardest thing to the diamond--and I saw that such a material, cheaply made, would have great value. "My first experiment in this new series was of a kind that would have been denounced as absurd by any of the old-school book-chemists, and had I had a similar training, the probability is that I should not have made such an investigation. But 'fools rush in where angels fear to tread,' and the experiment was made." This experiment by Mr. Acheson, extremely simple in execution, was the first act in rolling the stone from the entrance to a veritable Aladdin's cave, into which a multitude of experimenters have passed in their search for nature's secrets; for, while the use of the electrical furnace in the reduction of metals--in the breaking down of nature's compounds--was not new, its use for synthetic chemistry--for the putting together, the building up, the formation of compounds--was entirely new. It has enabled the chemist not only to reproduce the compounds of nature, but to go further and produce valuable compounds that are wholly new and were heretofore unknown to man. Mr. Acheson conjectured that carbon, if made to combine with clay, would produce an extremely hard substance; and that, having been combined with the clay, if it should in the cooling separate again from the clay, it would issue out of the operation as diamond. He therefore mixed a little clay and coke dust together, placed them in a crucible, inserted the ends of two electric-light carbons into the mixture, and connected the carbons with a dynamo. The fierce heat generated at the points of the carbons fused the clay, and caused portions of the carbon to dissolve. After cooling, a careful examination was made of the mass, and a few small purple crystals were found. They sparkled with something of the brightness of diamonds, and were so hard that they scratched glass. Mr. Acheson decided at once that they could not be diamonds; but he thought they might be rubies or sapphires. A little later, though, when he had made similar crystals of a larger size, he found that they were harder than rubies, even scratching the diamond itself. He showed them to a number of expert jewellers, chemists, and geologists. They had so much the appearance of natural gems that many experts to whom they were submitted without explanation decided that they must certainly be of natural production. Even so eminent an authority as Geikie, the Scotch geologist, on being told, after he had examined them, that the crystals were manufactured in America, responded testily: "These Americans! What won't they claim next? Why, man, those crystals have been in the earth a million years." Mr. Acheson decided at first that his crystals were a combination of carbon and aluminium, and gave them the name carborundum. He at once set to work to manufacture them in large quantities for use in making abrasive wheels, whetstones, and sandpaper, and for other purposes for which emery and corundum were formerly used. He soon found by chemical analysis, however, that carborundum was not composed of carbon and aluminium, but of carbon and silica, or sand, and that he had, in fact, created a new substance; so far as human knowledge now extends, no such combination occurs anywhere in nature. And it was made possible only by the electrical furnace, with its power of producing heat of untold intensity. [Illustration: The Furnace-Room, where Carborundum is Made. "_A great, dingy brick building, open at the sides like a shed._"] In order to get a clear understanding of the actual workings of the electrical furnace, I visited the plant where Mr. Acheson makes carborundum. The furnace-room is a great, dingy brick building, open at the sides like a shed. It is located only a few hundred yards from the banks of the Niagara River and well within the sound of the great falls. Just below it, and nearer the city, stands the handsome building of the Power Company, in which the mightiest dynamos in the world whir ceaselessly, day and night, while the waters of Niagara churn in the water-wheel pits below. Heavy copper wires carrying a current of 2,200 volts lead from the power-house to Mr. Acheson's furnaces, where the electrical energy is transformed into heat. There are ten furnaces in all, built loosely of fire-brick, and fitted at each end with electrical connections. And strange they look to one who is familiar with the ordinary fuel furnace, for they have no chimneys, no doors, no drafts, no ash-pits, no blinding glow of heat and light. The room in which they stand is comfortably cool. Each time a furnace is charged it is built up anew; for the heat produced is so fierce that it frequently melts the bricks together, and new ones must be supplied. There were furnaces in many stages of development. One had been in full blast for nearly thirty hours, and a weird sight it was. The top gave one the instant impression of the seamy side of a volcano. The heaped coke was cracked in every direction, and from out of the crevices and depressions and from between the joints of the loosely built brick walls gushed flames of pale green and blue, rising upward, and burning now high, now low, but without noise beyond a certain low humming. Within the furnace--which was oblong in shape, about the height of a man, and sixteen feet long by six wide--there was a channel, or core, of white-hot carbon in a nearly vaporised state. It represented graphically in its seething activity what the burning surface of the sun might be--and it was almost as hot. Yet the heat was scarcely manifest a dozen feet from the furnace, and but for the blue flames rising from the cracks in the envelope, or wall, one might have laid his hand almost anywhere on the bricks without danger of burning it. [Illustration: Taking Off a Crust of the Furnace at Night. _The light is so intense that you cannot look at it without hurting the eyes._] In the best modern blast-furnaces, in which the coal is supplied with special artificial draft to make it burn the more fiercely, the heat may reach 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This is less than half of that produced in the electrical furnace. In porcelain kilns, the potters, after hours of firing, have been able to produce a cumulative temperature of as much as 3,300 degrees Fahrenheit; and this, with the oxy-hydrogen flame (in which hydrogen gas is spurred to greater heat by an excess of oxygen), is the very extreme of heat obtainable by any artificial means except by the electrical furnace. Thus the electrical furnace has fully doubled the practical possibilities in the artificial production of heat. Mr. Fitzgerald, the chemist of the Acheson Company, pointed out to me a curious glassy cavity in one of the half-dismantled furnaces. "Here the heat was only a fraction of that in the core," he said. But still the fire-brick--and they were the most refractory produced in this country--had been melted down like butter. The floors under the furnace were all made of fire-brick, and yet the brick had run together until they were one solid mass of glassy stone. "We once tried putting a fire-brick in the centre of the core," said Mr. Fitzgerald, "just to test the heat. Later, when we came to open the furnace, we couldn't find a vestige of it. The fire had totally consumed it, actually driving it all off in vapour." Indeed, so hot is the core that there is really no accurate means of measuring its temperature, although science has been enabled by various curious devices to form a fairly correct estimate. The furnace has a provoking way of burning up all of the thermometers and heat-measuring devices which are applied to it. A number of years ago a clever German, named Segar, invented a series of little cones composed of various infusible earths like clay and feldspar. He so fashioned them that one in the series would melt at 1,620 degrees Fahrenheit, another at 1,800 degrees, and so on up. If the cones are placed in a pottery kiln, the potter can tell just what degree of temperature he has reached by the melting of the cones one after another. But in Mr. Acheson's electrical furnaces all the cones would burn up and disappear in two minutes. The method employed for coming at the heat of the electrical furnace, in some measure, is this: a thin filament of platinum is heated red hot--1,800 degrees Fahrenheit--by a certain current of electricity. A delicate thermometer is set three feet away, and the reading is taken. Then, by a stronger current, the filament is made white hot--3,400 degrees Fahrenheit--and the thermometer moved away until it reads the same as it read before. Two points in a distance-scale are thus obtained as a basis of calculation. The thermometer is then tried by an electrical furnace. To be kept at the same marking it must be placed much farther away than in either of the other instances. A simple computation of the comparative distances with relation to the two well-ascertained temperatures gives approximately, at least, the temperature of the electrical furnace. Some other methods are also employed. None is regarded as perfectly exact; but they are near enough to have yielded some very interesting and valuable statistics regarding the power of various temperatures. For instance, it has been found that aluminium becomes a limpid liquid at from 4,050 to 4,320 degrees Fahrenheit, and that lime melts at from 4,940 to 5,400 degrees, and magnesia at 4,680 degrees. There are two kinds of electrical furnaces, as there are two kinds of electric lights--arc and incandescent. Moissan has used the arc furnace in all of his experiments, but Mr. Acheson's furnaces follow rather the principle of the incandescent lamp. "The incandescent light," said Mr. Fitzgerald, "is produced by the resistance of a platinum wire or a carbon filament to the passage of a current of electricity. Both light and heat are given off. In our furnace, the heat is produced by the resistance of a solid cylinder or core of pulverised coke to the passage of a strong current of electricity. When the core becomes white hot it causes the materials surrounding it to unite chemically, producing the carborundum crystals." The materials used are of the commonest--pure white sand, coke, sawdust, and salt. The sand and coke are mixed in the proportions of sixty to forty, the sawdust is added to keep the mixture loose and open, and the salt to assist the chemical combination of the ingredients. The furnace is half filled with this mixture, and then the core of coke, twenty-one inches in diameter, is carefully moulded in place. This core is sixteen feet long, reaching the length of the furnace, and connecting at each end with an immense carbon terminal, consisting of no fewer than twenty-five rods of carbon, each four inches square and nearly three feet long. These terminals carry the current into the core from huge insulated copper bars connected from above. When the core is complete, more of the carborundum mixture is shovelled in and tramped down until the furnace is heaping full. Everything is now ready for the electric current. The wires from the Niagara Falls power-plant come through an adjoining building, where one is confronted, upon entering, with this suggestive sign: DANGER 2,200 Volts. Tesla produces immensely higher voltages than this for laboratory experiments, but there are few more powerful currents in use in this country for practical purposes. Only about 2,000 volts are required for executing criminals under the electric method employed in New York; 400 volts will run a trolley-car. It is hardly comfortable to know that a single touch of one of the wires or switches in this room means almost certain death. Mr. Fitzgerald gave me a vivid demonstration of the terrific destructive force of the Niagara Falls current. He showed me how the circuit was broken. For ordinary currents, the breaking of a circuit simply means a twist of the wrist and the opening of a brass switch. Here, however, the current is carried into a huge iron tank full of salt water. The attendant, pulling on a rope, lifts an iron plate from the tank. The moment it leaves the water, there follow a rumbling crash like a thunder-clap, a blinding burst of flame, and thick clouds of steam and spray. The sight and sound of it make you feel delicate about interfering with a 2,200-volt current. [Illustration: The Interior of a Furnace as it Appears after the Carborundum has been Taken Out.] This current is, indeed, too strong in voltage for the furnaces, and it is cut down, by means of what were until recently the largest transformers in the world, to about 100 volts, or one-fourth the pressure used on the average trolley line. It is now, however, a current of great intensity--7,500 ampères, as compared with the one-half ampère used in an incandescent lamp; and it requires eight square inches of copper and 400 square inches of carbon to carry it. Within the furnace, when the current is turned on, a thousand horse-power of energy is continuously transformed into heat. Think of it! Is it any wonder that the temperature goes up? And this is continued for thirty-six hours steadily, until 36,000 "horse-power hours" are used up and 7,000 pounds of the crystals have been formed. Remembering that 36,000 horse-power hours, when converted into heat, will raise 72,000 gallons of water to the boiling point, or will bring 350 tons of iron up to a red heat, one can at least have a sort of idea of the heat evolved in a carborundum furnace. When the coke core glows white, chemical action begins in the mixture around it. The top of the furnace now slowly settles, and cracks in long, irregular fissures, sending out a pungent gas which, when lighted, burns lambent blue. This gas is carbon monoxide, and during the process nearly six tons of it are thrown off and wasted. It seems, indeed, a somewhat extravagant process, for fifty-six pounds of gas are produced for every forty of carborundum. "It is very distinctly a geological condition," said Mr. Fitzgerald; "crystals are not only formed exactly as they are in the earth, but we have our own little earthquakes and volcanoes." Not infrequently gas collects, forming a miniature mountain, with a crater at its summit, and blowing a magnificent fountain of flame, lava, and dense white vapour high into the air, and roaring all the while in a most terrifying manner. The workmen call it "blowing off." [Illustration: Blowing Off. "_Not infrequently gas collects, forming a miniature mountain, with a crater at its summit, and blowing a magnificent fountain of flame, lava, and dense white vapour high into the air, and roaring all the while in a most terrifying manner._"] At the end of thirty-six hours the current is cut off, and the furnace is allowed to cool, the workmen pulling down the brick as rapidly as they dare. At the centre of the furnace, surrounding the core, there remains a solid mass of carborundum as large in diameter as a hogshead. Portions of this mass are sometimes found to be composed of pure, beautifully crystalline graphite. This in itself is a surprising and significant product, and it has opened the way directly to graphite-making on a large scale. An important and interesting feature of the new graphite industry is the utilisation it has effected of a product from the coke regions of Pennsylvania which was formerly absolute waste. To return to carborundum: when the furnace has been cooled and the walls torn away, the core of carborundum is broken open, and the beautiful purple and blue crystals are laid bare, still hot. The sand and the coke have united in a compound nearly as hard as the diamond and even more indestructible, being less inflammable and wholly indissoluble in even the strongest acids. After being taken out, the crystals are crushed to powder and combined in various forms convenient for the various uses for which it is designed. I asked Mr. Acheson if he could make diamonds in his furnaces. "Possibly," he answered, "with certain modifications." Diamonds, as he explained, are formed by great heat and great pressure. The great heat is now easily obtained, but science has not yet learned nature's secret of great pressure. Moissan's method of making diamonds is to dissolve coke dust in molten iron, using a carbon crucible into which the electrodes are inserted. When the whole mass is fluid, the crucible and its contents are suddenly dashed into cold water or melted lead. This instantaneous cooling of the iron produces enormous pressure, so that the carbon is crystallised in the form of diamond. But whatever it may or may not yet be able to do in the matter of diamond-making, there can be no doubt that the possibilities of the electrical furnace are beyond all present conjecture. With American inventors busy in its further development, and with electricity as cheap as the mighty power of Niagara can make it, there is no telling what new and wonderful products, now perhaps wholly unthought-of by the human race, it may become possible to manufacture, and manufacture cheaply. CHAPTER V HARNESSING THE SUN _The Solar Motor_ It seems daring and wonderful enough, the idea of setting the sun itself to the heavy work of men, producing the power which will help to turn the wheels of this age of machinery. At Los Angeles, Cal., I went out to see the sun at work pumping water. The solar motor, as it is called, was set up at one end of a great enclosure where ostriches are raised. I don't know which interested me more at first, the sight of these tall birds striding with dignity about their roomy pens or sitting on their big yellow eggs--just as we imagine them wild in the desert--or the huge, strange creation of man by which the sun is made to toil. I do not believe I could have guessed the purpose of this unique invention if I had not known what to expect. I might have hazarded the opinion that it was some new and monstrous searchlight: beyond that I think my imagination would have failed me. It resembled a huge inverted lamp-shade, or possibly a tremendous iron-ribbed colander, bottomless, set on its edge and supported by a steel framework. Near by there was a little wooden building which served as a shop or engine-house. A trough full of running water led away on one side, and from within came the steady chug-chug, chug-chug of machinery, apparently a pump. So this was the sun-subduer! A little closer inspection, with an audience of ostriches, very sober, looking over the fence behind me and wondering, I suppose, if I had a cracker in my pocket, I made out some other very interesting particulars in regard to this strange invention. The colander-like device was in reality, I discovered, made up of hundreds and hundreds (nearly 1,800 in all) of small mirrors, the reflecting side turned inward, set in rows on the strong steel framework which composed the body of the great colander. By looking up through the hole in the bottom of the colander I was astonished by the sight of an object of such brightness that it dazzled my eyes. It looked, indeed, like a miniature sun, or at least like a huge arc light or a white-hot column of metal. And, indeed, it was white hot, glowing, burning hot--a slim cylinder of copper set in the exact centre of the colander. At the top there was a jet of white steam like a plume, for this was the boiler of this extraordinary engine. [Illustration: Side View of the Solar Motor.] "It is all very simple when you come to see it," the manager was saying to me. "Every boy has tried the experiment of flashing the sunshine into his chum's window with a mirror. Well, we simply utilise that principle. By means of these hundreds of mirrors we reflect the light and heat of the sun on a single point at the centre of what you have described as a colander. Here we have the cylinder of steel containing the water which we wish heated for steam. This cylinder is thirteen and one-half feet long and will hold one hundred gallons of water. If you could see it cold, instead of glowing with heat, you would find it jet black, for we cover it with a peculiar heat-absorbing substance made partly of lampblack, for if we left it shiny it would re-reflect some of the heat which comes from the mirrors. The cold water runs in at one end through this flexible metallic hose, and the steam goes out at the other through a similar hose to the engine in the house." Though this colander, or "reflector," as it is called, is thirty-three and one-half feet in diameter at the outer edge and weighs over four tons, it is yet balanced perfectly on its tall standards. It is, indeed, mounted very much like a telescope, in meridian, and a common little clock in the engine-room operates it so that it always faces the sun, like a sunflower, looking east in the morning and west in the evening, gathering up the burning rays of the sun and throwing them upon the boiler at the centre. In the engine-house I found a pump at work, chug-chugging like any pump run by steam-power, and the water raised by sun-power flowing merrily away. The manager told me that he could easily get ten horse-power; that, if the sun was shining brightly, he could heat cold water in an hour to produce 150 pounds of steam. [Illustration: Front View of the Los Angeles Solar Motor.] The wind sometimes blows a gale in Southern California, and I asked the manager what provision had been made for keeping this huge reflector from blowing away. "Provision is made for varying wind-pressures," he said, "so that the machine is always locked in any position, and may only be moved by the operating mechanism, unless, indeed, the whole structure should be carried away. It is designed to withstand a wind-pressure of 100 miles an hour. It went through the high gales of the November storm without a particle of damage. One of the peculiar characteristics of its construction is that it avoids wind-pressure as much as possible." The operation of the motor is so simple that it requires very little human labour. When power is desired, the reflector must be swung into focus--that is, pointed exactly toward the sun--which is done by turning a crank. This is not beyond the power of a good-sized boy. There is an indicator which readily shows when a true focus is obtained. This done, the reflector follows the sun closely all day. In about an hour the engine can be started by a turn of the throttle-valve. As the engine is automatic and self-oiling, it runs without further attention. The supply of water to the boiler is also automatic, and is maintained at a constant height without any danger of either too much or too little water. Steam-pressure is controlled by means of a safety-valve, so that it may never reach a dangerous point. The steam passes from the engine to the condenser and thence to the boiler, and the process is repeated indefinitely. Having now the solar motor, let us see what it is good for, what is expected of it. Of course when the sun does not shine the motor does not work, so that its usefulness would be much curtailed in a very cloudy country like England, for instance; but here in Southern California and in all the desert region of the United States and Mexico, to say nothing of the Sahara in Africa, where the sun shines almost continuously, the solar motor has its greatest sphere of usefulness, and, indeed, its greatest need; for these lands of long sunshine, the deserts, are also the lands of parched fruitlessness, of little water, so that the invention of a motor which will utilise the abundant sunshine for pumping the much-needed water has a peculiar value here. [Illustration: The Brilliant Steam Boiler Glistens in the Centre.] The solar motor is expected to operate at all seasons of the year, regardless of all climatic conditions, with the single exception of cloudy skies. Cold makes no difference whatever. The best results from the first model used in experimental work at Denver were obtained at a time when the pond from which the water was pumped was covered with a thick coating of ice. But, of course, the length of the solar day is longer in the summer, giving more heat and more power. The motor may be depended upon for work from about one hour and a half after sunrise to within half an hour of sunset. In the summer time this would mean about twelve hours' constant pumping. Think what such an invention means, if practically successful, to the vast stretches of our arid Western land, valueless without water. Spread all over this country of Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California, and other States are thousands of miles of canals to bring in water from the rivers for irrigating the deserts, and there are untold numbers of wind-mills, steam and gasoline pumps which accomplish the same purpose more laboriously. Think what a new source of cheap power will do--making valuable hundreds of acres of desert land, providing homes for thousands of busy Americans. Indeed, a practical solar motor might make habitable even the Sahara Desert. And it can be used in many other ways besides for pumping water. Threshing machines might be run by this power, and, converted into electricity and saved up in storage batteries, it might be used for lighting houses, even for cooking dinners, or in fact for any purpose requiring power. These solar motors can be built at no great expense. I was told that ten-horse-power plants would cost about $200 per horse-power, and one-hundred-horse-power plants about $100 per horse-power. This would include the entire plant, with engine and pump complete. When it is considered that the annual rental of electric power is frequently $50 per horse-power, whether it is used or not, it will be seen that the solar motor means a great deal, especially in connection with irrigation enterprises. [Illustration: The Rear Machinery for Operating the Reflector.] And the time is coming--long-headed inventors saw it many years ago--when some device for the direct utilisation of the sun's heat will be a necessity. The world is now using its coal at a very rapid rate; its wood, for fuel purposes, has already nearly disappeared, so that, within a century or two, new ways of furnishing heat and power must be devised or the human race will perish of cold and hunger. Fortunately there are other sources of power at hand; the waterfalls, the Niagaras, which, converted into electricity, may yet heat our sitting-rooms and cook our dinners. There is also wind-power, now used to a limited extent by means of wind-mills. But greater than either of these sources is the unlimited potentiality of the tides of the sea, which men have sought in vain to harness, and the direct heat of the sun itself. Some time in the future these will be subdued to the purpose of men, perhaps our main dependence for heat and power. When we come to think of it, the harnessing of the sun is not so very strange. In fact, we have had the sun harnessed since the dawn of man on the earth, only indirectly. Without the sun there would be nothing here--no men, no life. Coal is nothing but stored-up, bottled sunshine. The sunlight of a million years ago produced forests, which, falling, were buried in the earth and changed into coal. So when we put coal in the cook-stove we may truthfully say that we are boiling the kettle with million-year-old sunshine. Similarly there would be no waterfalls for us to chain and convert into electricity, as we have chained Niagara, if the sun did not evaporate the waters of the sea, take it up in clouds, and afterward empty the clouds in rain on the mountain-tops from whence the water tumbles down again to the sea. So no wind would blow without the sun to work changes in the air. In short, therefore, we have been using the sunlight all these years, hardly knowing it, but not directly. And think of the tremendous amount of heat which comes to the earth from the sun. Every boy has tried using a burning-glass, which, focusing a few inches of the sun's rays, will set fire to paper or cloth. Professor Langley says that "the heat which the sun, when near the zenith, radiates upon the deck of a steamship would suffice, could it be turned into work without loss, to drive her at a fair rate of speed." The knowledge of this enormous power going to waste daily and hourly has inspired many inventors to work on the problem of the solar motor. Among the greatest of these was the famous Swedish engineer, John Ericsson, who invented the iron-clad Monitor. He constructed a really workable solar motor, different in construction but similar in principle to the one in California which I have described. In 1876 Ericsson said: "Upon one square mile, using only one-half of the surface and devoting the rest to buildings, roads, etc., we can drive 64,800 steam-engines, each of 100 horse-power, simply by the heat radiating from the sun. Archimedes, having completed his calculation of the force of a lever, said that he could move the earth. I affirm that the concentration of the heat radiated by the sun would produce a force capable of stopping the earth in its course." A firm believer in the truth of his theories, he devoted the last fifteen years of his life and $100,000 to experimental work on his solar engine. For various reasons Ericsson's invention was not a practical success; but now that modern inventors, with their advancing knowledge of mechanics, have turned their attention to the problem, and now that the need of the solar motor is greater than ever before, especially in the world's deserts, we may look to see a practical and successful machine. Perhaps the California motor may prove the solution of the problem; perhaps it will need improvements, which use and experience will indicate; perhaps it may be left for a reader of these words to discover the great secret and make his fortune. CHAPTER VI THE INVENTOR AND THE FOOD PROBLEM _Fixing of Nitrogen--Experiments of Professor Nobbe_ No lad of to-day, ambitious to become a scientist or inventor, reading of all the wonderful and revolutionising discoveries and inventions of recent years, need fear for plenty of new problems to solve in the future. No, the great problems have not all been solved. We have the steam-engine, the electric motor, the telegraph, the telephone, the air-ship, but not one of them is perfect, not one that does not bring to the attention of inventors scores of entirely new problems for solution. The further we advance in science and mechanics the further we see into the marvels of our wonderful earth and of our life, and the more there is for us to do. As population increases and people become more intelligent there is a constant demand for new things, new machinery which will enable the human race to move more rapidly and crowd more work and more pleasure into our short human life. One man working to-day with machinery can accomplish as much as many men of a hundred years ago; he can live in a house that would then have been a palace; enjoy advantages of education, amusement, luxury, that would then have been possible only to kings and princes. And the very greatest of all the problems which the inventors and scientists of coming generations must solve is the question--seemingly commonplace--of food. We who live in this age of plenty can hardly realise that food could ever be a problem. But far-sighted scientists have already begun to look forward to the time when there will be so many people on the earth that the farms and fields will not supply food for every one. It is a well-known fact that the population of the world is increasing enormously. Think how America has been expanding; a whole continent overrun and settled almost within a century and a half! Nearly all the land that can be successfully farmed has already been taken up, and the land in some of the older settled localities, like Virginia and the New England States, has been so steadily cropped that it is failing in fertility, so that it will not raise as much as it would years ago. In Europe no crop at all can be raised without quantities of fertiliser. While there was yet new country to open up, while America and Australia were yet virgin soil, there was no immediate cause for alarm; but, as no less an authority than Sir William Crookes pointed out a few years ago in a lecture before the British Association, the new land has now for the most part been opened and tamed to the plough or utilised for grazing purposes. And already we are hearing of worn-out land in Dakota--the paradise of the wheat producer. The problem, therefore, is simple enough: the world is reaching the limits of its capacity for food production, while the population continues to increase enormously: how soon will starvation begin? Sir William Crookes has prophesied, I believe, that the acute stage of the problem will be reached within the next fifty years, a time when the call of the world for food cannot be supplied. If it were not for our coming inventors and scientists it would certainly be a gloomy outlook for the human race. But science has already foreseen this problem. When Sir William Crookes gave his address he based his arguments on modern agricultural methods; he did not look forward into the future, he did not show any faith in the scientists and inventors who are to come, who are now boys, perhaps. He did not even take cognisance of the work that had already been done. For inventors and scientists are already grappling with this problem of food. In a nutshell, the question of food production is a question of nitrogen. This must be explained. A crop of wheat, for instance, takes from the soil certain elements to help make up the wheat berry, the straw, the roots. And the most important of all the elements it takes is nitrogen. When we eat bread we take this nitrogen that the wheat has gathered from the soil into our own bodies to build up our bones, muscles, brains. Each wheat crop takes more nitrogen from the soil, and finally, if this nitrogen is not given back to the earth in some way, wheat will no longer grow in the fields. In other words, we say the farm is "worn out," "cropped to death." The soil is there, but the precious life-giving nitrogen is gone. And so it becomes necessary every year to put back the nitrogen and the other elements which the crop takes from the soil. This purpose is accomplished by the use of fertilisers. Manure, ground bone, nitrates, guano, are put in fields to restore the nitrogen and other plant foods. In short, we are compelled to feed the soil that the soil may feed the wheat, that the wheat may feed us. You will see that it is a complete circle--like all life. Now, the trouble, the great problem, lies right here: in the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient amount of fertiliser--in other words, in getting food enough to keep the soil from nitrogen starvation. Already we ship guano--the droppings of sea-birds--from South America and the far islands of the sea to put on our lands, and we mine nitrates (which contain nitrogen) at large expense and in great quantities for the same purpose. And while we go to such lengths to get nitrogen we are wasting it every year in enormous quantities. Gunpowder and explosives are most made up of nitrogen--saltpetre and nitro-glycerin--so that every war wastes vast quantities of this precious substance. Every discharge of a 13-inch gun liberates enough nitrogen to raise many bushels of wheat. Thus we see another reason for the disarmament of the nations. A prediction has been made that barely thirty years hence the wheat required to feed the world will be 3,260,000,000 bushels annually, and that to raise this about 12,000,000 tons of nitrate of soda yearly for the area under cultivation will be needed over and above the 1,250,000 tons now used by mankind. But the nitrates now in sight and available are estimated good for only another fifty years, even at the present low rate of consumption. Hence, even if famine does not immediately impend, the food problem is far more serious than is generally supposed. Now nitrogen, it will be seen, is one of the most precious and necessary of all substances to human life, and it is one of the most common. If the world ever starves for the lack of nitrogen it will starve in a very world of nitrogen. For there is not one of the elements more common than nitrogen, not one present around us in larger quantities. Four-fifths of every breath of air we breathe is pure nitrogen--four-fifths of all the earth's atmosphere is nitrogen. But, unfortunately, most plants are unable to take up nitrogen in its gaseous form as it appears in the air. It must be combined with hydrogen in the form of ammonia or in some nitrate. Ammonia and the nitrates are, therefore, the basis of all fertilisers. Now, the problem for the scientist and inventor takes this form: Here is the vast store-house of life-giving nitrogen in the air; how can it be caught, fixed, reduced to the purpose of men, spread on the hungry wheat-fields? The problem, therefore, is that of "fixing" the nitrogen, taking the gas out of the air and reducing it to a form in which it can be handled and used. Two principal methods for doing this have already been devised, both of which are of fascinating interest. One of these ways, that of a clever American inventor, is purely a machinery process, the utilisation of power by means of which the nitrogen is literally sucked out of the air and combined with soda so that it produces nitrate of soda, a high-class fertiliser. The water power of Niagara Falls is used to do this work--it seems odd enough that Niagara should be used for food production! The other method, that of a hard-working German professor, is the cunning utilisation of one of nature's marvellous processes of taking the nitrogen from the air and depositing it in the soil--for nature has its own beautiful way of doing it. I will describe the second method first because it will help to clear up the whole subject and lead up to the work of the American inventor and his extraordinary machinery. Nearly every farmer, without knowing it, employs nature's method of fixing nitrogen every year. It is a simple process which he has learned from experience. He knows that when land is worn out by overcropping with wheat or other products which draw heavily on the earth's nitrogen supply certain crops will still grow luxuriantly upon the worn-out land, and that if these crops are left and ploughed in, the fertility of the soil will be restored, and it will again produce large yields of wheat and other nitrogen-demanding plants. These restorative crops are clover, lupin, and other leguminous plants, including beans and peas. Every one who is at all familiar with farming operations has heard of seeding down an old field to clover and then ploughing in the crop, usually in the second year. The great importance of this bit of the wisdom of experience was not appreciated by science for many years. Then several German experimenters began to ask why clover and lupin and beans should flourish on worn-out land when other crops failed. All of these plants are especially rich in nitrogen, and yet they grew well on soil which had been robbed of its nitrogen. Why was this so? It was a hard problem to solve, but science was undaunted. Botanists had already discovered that the roots of the leguminous plants--that is, clover, lupin, beans, peas, and so on--were usually covered with small round swellings, or tumors, to which were given the name nodules. The exact purpose of these swellings being unknown, they were set down as a condition, possibly, of disease, and no further attention was paid to them until Professor Hellriegel, of Burnburg, in Anhalt, Germany, took up the work. After much experimenting, he made the important discovery that lupins which had nodules would grow in soil devoid of nitrogen, and that lupins which had no nodules would not grow in the same soil. It was plain, therefore, that the nodules must play an important, though mysterious, part in enabling the plant to utilise the free nitrogen of the air. That was early in the '80s. His discovery at once started other investigators to work, and it was not long before the announcement came--and it came, curiously enough, at a time when Dr. Koch was making his greatest contributions to the world's knowledge of the germ theory of disease--that these nodules were the result of minute bacteria found in the soil. Professor Beyerinck, of Münster, gave the bacteria the name Radiocola. It was at this time that Professor Nobbe took up the work with vigour. If these nodules were produced by bacteria, he argued that the bacteria must be present in the soil; and if they were not present, would it not be possible to supply them by artificial means? In other words, if soil, say worn-out farm-soil or, indeed, pure sand like that of the sea-shore could thus be inoculated, as a physician inoculates a guinea-pig with diphtheria germs, would not beans and peas planted there form nodules and draw their nourishment from the air? It was a somewhat startling idea, but all radically new ideas are startling; and, after thinking it over, Professor Nobbe began, in 1888, a series of most remarkable experiments, having as their purpose the discovery of a practical method of soil inoculation. He gathered the nodule-covered roots of beans and peas, dried and crushed them, and made an extract of them in water. Then he prepared a gelatine solution with a little sugar, asparagine, and other materials, and added the nodule-extract. In this medium colonies of bacteria at once began to grow--bacteria of many kinds. Professor Nobbe separated the Radiocola--which are oblong in shape--and made what is known as a "clear culture," that is, a culture in gelatine, consisting of billions of these particular germs, and no others. When he had succeeded in producing these clear cultures he was ready for his actual experiments in growing plants. He took a quantity of pure sand, and, in order to be sure that it contained no nitrogen or bacteria in any form, he heated it at a high temperature three different times for six hours, thereby completely sterilising it. This sand he placed in three jars. To each of these he added a small quantity of mineral food--the required phosphorus, potassium, iron, sulphur, and so on. To the first he supplied no nitrogen at all in any form; the second he fertilised with saltpetre, which is largely composed of nitrogen in a form in which plants may readily absorb it through their roots; the third of the jars he inoculated with some of his bacteria culture. Then he planted beans in all three jars, and awaited the results, as may be imagined, somewhat anxiously. Perfectly pure sterilised water was supplied to each jar in equal amounts and the seeds sprouted, and for a week the young shoots in the three jars were almost identical in appearance. But soon after that there was a gradual but striking change. The beans in the first jar, having no nitrogen and no inoculation, turned pale and refused to grow, finally dying down completely, starved for want of nitrogenous food, exactly as a man would starve for the lack of the same kind of nourishment. The beans in the second jar, with the fertilised soil, grew about as they would in the garden, all of the nourishment having been artificially supplied. But the third jar, which had been jealously watched, showed really a miracle of growth. It must be remembered that the soil in this jar was as absolutely free of nitrogen as the soil in the first jar, and yet the beans flourished greatly, and when some of the plants were analysed they were found to be rich in nitrogen. Nodules had formed on the roots of the beans in the third or inoculated jar only, thereby proving beyond the hope of the experimenter that soil inoculation was a possibility, at least in the laboratory. With this favourable beginning Professor Nobbe went forward with his experiments with renewed vigour. He tried inoculating the soil for peas, clover, lupin, vetch, acacia, robinia, and so on, and in every case the roots formed nodules, and although there was absolutely no nitrogen in the soil, the plants invariably flourished. Then Professor Nobbe tried great numbers of difficult test experiments, such as inoculating the soil with clover bacteria and then planting it with beans or peas, or vice versa, to see whether the bacteria from the nodules of any one leguminous plant could be used for all or any of the others. He also tried successive cultures; that is, bean bacteria for beans for several years, to see if better results could be obtained by continued use. Even an outline description of all the experiments which Professor Nobbe made in the course of these investigations would fill a small volume, and it will be best to set down here only his general conclusions. [Illustration: Trees Growing in Water at Professor Nobbe's Laboratory.] These wonderful nitrogen-absorbing bacteria do not appear in all soil, although they are very widely distributed. So far as known they form nodules only on the roots of a few species of plants. In their original form in the soil they are neutral--that is, not especially adapted to beans, or peas, or any one particular kind of crop. But if clover, for instance, is planted, they straightway form nodules and become especially adapted to the clover plant, so that, as every farmer knows, the second crop of clover on worn-out land is much better than the first. And, curiously enough, when once the bacteria have become thoroughly adapted to one of the crops, say beans, they will not affect peas or clover, or only feebly. Another strange feature of the life of these little creatures, which has a marvellous suggestion of intelligence, is their activities in various kinds of soil. When the ground is very rich--that is, when it contains plenty of nitrogenous matter--they are what Professor Nobbe calls "lazy." They do not readily form nodules on the roots of the plants, seeming almost to know that there is no necessity for it. But when once the nitrogenous matter in the soil begins to fail, then they work more sharply, and when it has gone altogether they are at the very height of activity. Consequently, unless the soil is really worn out, or very poor to begin with, there is no use in inoculating it--it would be like "taking owls to Athens," as Professor Nobbe says. [Illustration: Experimenting with Nitrogen in Professor Nobbe's Laboratory.] Having thus proved the remarkable efficacy of soil inoculation in his laboratory and greenhouses, where I saw great numbers of experiments still going forward, Professor Nobbe set himself to make his discoveries of practical value. He gave to his bacteria cultures the name "Nitragen"--spelled with an "a"--and he produced separate cultures for each of the important crops--peas, beans, vetch, lupin, and clover. In 1894 the first of these were placed on the market, and they have had a steadily increasing sale, although such a radical innovation as this, so far out of the ordinary run of agricultural operation, and so almost unbelievably wonderful, cannot be expected to spread very rapidly. The cultures are now manufactured at one of the great commercial chemical laboratories on the river Main. I saw some of them in Professor Nobbe's laboratory. They come in small glass bottles, each marked with the name of the crop for which it is especially adapted. The bottle is partly filled with the yellow gelatinous substance in which the bacteria grow. On the surface of this there is a mossy-like growth, resembling mould. This consists of innumerable millions of the little oblong bacteria. A bottle costs about fifty cents and contains enough bacteria for inoculating half an acre of land. It must be used within a certain number of weeks after it is obtained, while it is still fresh. The method of applying it is very simple. The contents of the bottle are diluted with warm water. Then the seeds of the beans, clover, or peas, which have previously been mixed with a little soil, are treated with this solution and thoroughly mixed with the soil. After that the mass is partially dried so that the seeds may be readily sown. The bacteria at once begin to propagate in the soil, which is their natural home, and by the time the beans or peas have put out roots they are present in vast numbers and ready to begin the active work of forming nodules. It is not known exactly how the bacteria absorb the free nitrogen from the air, but they do it successfully, and that is the main thing. Many German farmers have tried Nitragen. One, who was sceptical of its virtues, wrote to Professor Nobbe that he sowed the bacteria-inoculated seeds in the form of a huge letter N in the midst of his field, planting the rest in the ordinary way. Before a month had passed that N showed up green and big over all the field, the plants composing it being so much larger and healthier than those around it. The United States Government has recently been experimenting along the same lines and has produced a new form of dry preparation of the bacteria in some cakes somewhat resembling a yeast-cake. The possibilities of such a discovery as this seem almost limitless. Science predicts the exhaustion of nitrogen and consequent failure of the food supply, and science promptly finds a way of making plants draw nitrogen from the boundless supplies of the air. The time may come when every farmer will send for his bottles or cakes of bacteria culture every spring as regularly as he sends for his seed, and when the work of inoculating the soil will be a familiar agricultural process, with discussions in the farmers' papers as to whether two bottles or one is best for a field of sandy loam with a southern exposure. Stranger things have happened. But it must be remembered, also, that the work is in its infancy as yet, and that there are vast unexplored fields and innumerable possibilities yet to fathom. Wonderful as this discovery is, and much as it promises in the future, its efficacy, as soon as it becomes generally known, is certain to be overestimated, as all new discoveries are. Professor Nobbe himself says that it has its own limited serviceability. It will produce a bounteous crop of beans in the pure sand of the sea-shore if (and this is an important if) that sand also contains enough of the mineral substances--phosphorus, potassium, and so on--and if it is kept properly watered. A man with a worn-out farm cannot go ahead blindly and inoculate his soil and expect certain results. He must know the exact disease from which his land is suffering before he applies the remedy. If it is deficient in the phosphates, bacteria cultures will not help it, whereas if it is deficient in nitrogen, bacteria are just what it needs. And so agricultural education must go hand in hand with the introduction of these future preservers of the human race. It is safe to say that by the time there is a serious failure of the earth's soil for lack of nitrogen, science, with this wonderful beginning, will have ready a new system of cultivation, which will gradually, easily, and perfectly take the place of the old. Before leaving this wonderful subject of soil inoculation, a word about Professor Nobbe himself will surely be of interest. I visited his laboratory and saw his experiments. Tharandt, in Saxony, where Professor Nobbe has carried on his investigations for over thirty years, is a little village set picturesquely among the Saxon hills, about half an hour's ride by railroad from the city of Dresden. Here is located the Forest Academy of the Kingdom, with which Professor Nobbe is prominently connected, and here also is the agricultural experiment station of which he is director. He has been for more than forty years the editor of one of the most important scientific publications in Germany; he is chairman of the Imperial Society of Agricultural Station Directors, and he has been the recipient of many honours. We now come to a consideration of the other method--the fixing of nitrogen by machinery: a practical problem for the inventor. Every one has noticed the peculiar fresh smell of the air which follows a thunderstorm; the same pungent odour appears in the vicinity of a frictional electric machine when in operation. This smell has been attributed to ozone, but it is now thought that it may be due to oxides of nitrogen; in other words, the electric discharges of lightning or of the frictional machine have burned the air--that is, combined the nitrogen and oxygen of the air, forming oxides of nitrogen. [Illustration: Mr. Charles S. Bradley.] [Illustration: Mr. D. R. Lovejoy.] The fact that an electric spark will thus form an oxide of nitrogen has long been known, but it remained for two American inventors, Mr. Charles S. Bradley and Mr. D. R. Lovejoy, of Niagara Falls, N. Y., to work out a way by inventive genius for applying this scientific fact to a practical purpose, thereby originating a great new industry. I shall not attempt here to describe the long process of experimentation which led up to the success of their enterprise. Here was their raw material all around them in the air; their problem was to produce a large number of very hot electric flames in a confined space or box so that air could be passed through, rapidly burned, and converted into oxides of nitrogen (nitric oxides and peroxides), which could afterward be collected. They took the power supplied by the great turbine wheels at Niagara Falls and produced a current of 10,000 volts, a pressure far above anything ever used before for practical purposes in this country. This was led into a box or chamber of metal six feet high and three feet in diameter--the box having openings to admit the air. By means of a revolving cylinder the electric current is made to produce a rapid continuance of very brilliant arcs, exactly like the glaring white arc of the arc-lamp, only much more intense, a great deal hotter. The air driven in through and around these hot arcs is at once burned, combining the oxygen and nitrogen of which it is composed and producing the desired oxides of nitrogen. These are led along to a chamber where they are combined with water, producing nitric or nitrous acid; or if the gases are brought into contact with caustic potash, saltpetre is the result; if with caustic soda, nitrate of soda is the product--a very valuable fertiliser. And the inventors have been able to produce these various results at an expense so low that they can sell their output at a profit in competition with nitrates from other sources, thus giving the world a new source of fertiliser at a moderate price. [Illustration: Eight-Inch 10,000-Volt Arcs Burning the Air for Fixing Nitrogen.] [Illustration: Machine for Burning the Air with Electric Arcs so as to Produce Nitrates.] In this way the power of Niagara has become a factor in the food question, a defence against the ultimate hunger of the human race. And when we think of the hundreds of other great waterfalls to be utilised, and with our growing knowledge of electricity this utilisation will become steadily cheaper, easier, it would seem that the inventor had already found a way to help the farmer. Then there is the boundless power of the tides going to waste, of the direct rays of the sun utilised by some such sun motor as that described in another chapter of this book, which in time may be called to operate upon the boundless reservoir of nitrogen in the air for helping to produce the future food for the human race. [Illustration: MARCONI. The Sending of an Epoch-Making Message. _January 18, 1903, marks the beginning of a new era in telegraphic communication. On that day there was sent by Marconi himself from the wireless station at South Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Mass., to the station at Poldhu, Cornwall, England, a distance of 3,000 miles, the message--destined soon to be historic--from the President of the United States to the King of England._] CHAPTER VII MARCONI AND HIS GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS _New Experiments in Wireless Telegraphy_ No invention of modern times, perhaps, comes so near to being what we call a miracle as the new system of telegraphy without wires. The very thought of communicating across the hundreds of miles of blue ocean between Europe and America with no connection, no wires, nothing but air, sunshine, space, is almost inconceivably wonderful. A few years ago the mere suggestion of such a thing would have been set down as the wildest flight of imagination, unbelievable, perfectly impossible. And yet it has come to pass! Think for a moment of sitting here on the shore of America and quietly listening to words sent _through space_ across some 3,000 miles of ocean from the edge of Europe! A cable, marvellous as it is, maintains a real connection between speaker and hearer. We feel that it is a road along which our speech can travel; we can grasp its meaning. But in telegraphing without wires we have nothing but space, poles with pendent wires on one side of the broad, curving ocean, and similar poles and wires (or perhaps only a kite struggling in the air) on the other--and thought passing between! I have told in the first "Boys' Book of Inventions" of Guglielmo Marconi's early experiments. That was a chapter of uncertain beginnings, of great hopes, of prophecy. This is the sequel, a chapter of achievement and success. What was only a scientific and inventive novelty a few years ago has become a great practical enterprise, giving promise of changing the whole world of men, drawing nations more closely together, making us near neighbours to the English and the Germans and the French--in short, shrinking our earth. There may come a time when we will think no more of sending a Marconigram, or an etheragram, or whatever is to be the name of the message by wireless telegraphy, to an acquaintance in England than we now think of calling up our neighbour on the telephone. Every one will recall the astonishment that swept over the country in December, 1901, when there came the first meagre reports of Marconi's success in telegraphing across the Atlantic Ocean between England and Newfoundland. At first few would believe the reports, but when Thomas A. Edison, Graham Bell, and other great inventors and scientists had expressed their confidence in Marconi's achievement, the whole country, was ready to hail the young inventor with honours. And his successes since those December days have been so pronounced--for he had now sent messages both ways across the Atlantic and at much greater distances--have more than borne out the promise then made. Wireless telegrams can now be sent directly from the shore of Massachusetts to England, and ocean-going ships are being rapidly equipped with the Marconi apparatus so that they can keep in direct communication with both continents during every day of the voyage. On some of the great ships a little newspaper is published, giving the world's news as received from day to day. It was the good fortune of the writer to arrive in St. John's, Newfoundland, during Mr. Marconi's experiments in December, 1901, only a short time after the famous first message across the Atlantic had been received. Three months later it was also the writer's privilege to visit the Marconi station at Poldhu, in Cornwall, England, from which the message had been sent, Mr. Marconi being then planning his greater work of placing his invention on a practical basis so that his company could enter the field of commercial telegraphy. It was the writer's fortune to have many talks with Mr. Marconi, both in America and in England, to see him at his experiments, and to write some of the earliest accounts of his successes. The story here told is the result of these talks. Mr. Marconi kept his own counsel regarding his plans in coming to Newfoundland in December, 1901. He told nobody, except his assistants, that he was going to attempt the great feat of communicating across the Atlantic Ocean. Though feeling very certain of success, he knew that the world would not believe him, would perhaps only laugh at him for his great plans. The project was entirely too daring for public announcement. Something might happen, some accident to the apparatus, that would cause a delay; people would call this failure, and it would be more difficult another time to get any one to put confidence in the work. So Marconi very wisely held his peace, only announcing what he had done when success was assured. Mr. Marconi landed at St. John's, Newfoundland, on December 6, 1901, with his two assistants, Mr. Kemp and Mr. Paget. He set up his instruments in a low room of the old barracks on Signal Hill, which stands sentinel at the harbour mouth half a mile from the city of St. John's. So simple and easily arranged is the apparatus that in three days' time the inventor was prepared to begin his experiments. On Wednesday, the 11th, as a preliminary test of the wind velocity, he sent up one of his kites, a huge hexagonal affair of bamboo and silk nine feet high, built on the Baden-Powell model: the wind promptly snapped the wire and blew the kite out to sea. He then filled a 14-foot hydrogen balloon, and sent it upward through a thick fog bank. Hardly had it reached the limit of its tetherings, however, when the aërial wire on which he had depended for receiving his messages fell to the earth, the balloon broke away, and was never seen again. On Thursday, the 12th, a day destined to be important in the annals of invention, Marconi tried another kite, and though the weather was so blustery that it required the combined strength of the inventor and his assistants to manage the tetherings, they succeeded in holding the kite at an elevation of about 400 feet. Marconi was now prepared for the crucial test. Before leaving England he had given detailed instructions to his assistants for the transmission of a certain signal, the Morse telegraphic S, represented by three dots (...), at a fixed time each day, beginning as soon as they received word that everything at St. John's was in readiness. This signal was to be clicked out on the transmitting instruments near Poldhu, Cornwall, the southwestern tip of England, and radiated from a number of aërial wires pendent from masts 210 feet high. If the inventor could receive on his kite-wire in Newfoundland some of the electrical waves thus produced, he knew that he held the solution of the problem of transoceanic wireless telegraphy. He had cabled his assistants to begin sending the signals at three o'clock in the afternoon, English time, continuing until six o'clock; that is, from about 11.30 to 2.30 o'clock in St. John's. [Illustration: Preparing to Fly the Kite which Supported the Receiving Wire. _Marconi on the extreme left._] At noon on Thursday (December 12, 1901) Marconi sat waiting, a telephone receiver at his ear, in a room of the old barracks on Signal Hill. To him it must have been a moment of painful stress and expectation. Arranged on the table before him, all its parts within easy reach of his hand, was the delicate receiving instrument, the supreme product of years of the inventor's life, now to be submitted to a decisive test. A wire ran out through the window, thence to a pole, thence upward to the kite which could be seen swaying high overhead. It was a bluff, raw day; at the base of the cliff 300 feet below thundered a cold sea; oceanward through the mist rose dimly the rude outlines of Cape Spear, the easternmost reach of the North American Continent. Beyond that rolled the unbroken ocean, nearly 2,000 miles to the coast of the British Isles. Across the harbour the city of St. John's lay on its hillside wrapped in fog: no one had taken enough interest in the experiments to come up here through the snow to Signal Hill. Even the ubiquitous reporter was absent. In Cabot Tower, near at hand, the old signalman stood looking out to sea, watching for ships, and little dreaming of the mysterious messages coming that way from England. Standing on that bleak hill and gazing out over the waste of water to the eastward, one finds it difficult indeed to realise that this wonder could have become a reality. The faith of the inventor in his creation, in the kite-wire, and in the instruments which had grown under his hand, was unshaken. [Illustration: Mr. Marconi and his Assistants in Newfoundland: Mr. Kemp on the Left, Mr. Paget on the Right. _They are sitting on a balloon basket, with one of the Baden-Powell kites in the background._] "I believed from the first," he told me, "that I would be successful in getting signals across the Atlantic." Only two persons were present that Thursday noon in the room where the instruments were set up--Mr. Marconi and Mr. Kemp. Everything had been done that could be done. The receiving apparatus was of unusual sensitiveness, so that it would catch even the faintest evidence of the signals. A telephone receiver, which is no part of the ordinary instrument, had been supplied, so that the slightest clicking of the dots might be conveyed to the inventor's ear. For nearly half an hour not a sound broke the silence of the room. Then quite suddenly Mr. Kemp heard the sharp click of the tapper as it struck against the coherer; this, of course, was not the signal, yet it was an indication that something was coming. The inventor's face showed no evidence of excitement. Presently he said: "See if you can hear anything, Kemp." Mr. Kemp took the receiver, and a moment later, faintly and yet distinctly and unmistakably, came the three little clicks--the dots of the letter S, tapped out an instant before in England. At ten minutes past one, more signals came, and both Mr. Marconi and Mr. Kemp assured themselves again and again that there could be no mistake. During this time the kite gyrated so wildly in the air that the receiving wire was not maintained at the same height, as it should have been; but again, at twenty minutes after two, other repetitions of the signal were received. Thus the problem was solved. One of the great wonders of science had been wrought. But the inventor went down the hill toward the city, now bright with lights, feeling depressed and disheartened--the rebound from the stress of the preceding days. On the following afternoon, Friday, he succeeded in getting other repetitions of the signal from England, but on Saturday, though he made an effort, he was unable to hear anything. The signals were, of course, sent continuously, but the inventor was unable to obtain continuous results, owing, as he explains, to the fluctuations of the height of the kite as it was blown about by the wind, and to the extreme delicacy of his instruments, which required constant adjustment during the experiments. Even now that he had been successful, the inventor hesitated to make his achievement public, lest it seem too extraordinary for belief. Finally, after withholding the great news for two days, certainly an evidence of self-restraint, he gave out a statement to the press, and on Sunday morning the world knew and doubted; on Monday it knew more and believed. Many, like Mr. Edison, awaited the inventor's signed announcement before they would credit the news. Sir Cavendish Boyle, the Governor of Newfoundland, reported at once to King Edward; and the cable company which has exclusive rights in Newfoundland, alarmed at an achievement which threatened the very existence of its business, demanded that he desist from further experiments within its territory, truly an evidence of the belief of practical men in the future commercial importance of the invention. It is not a little significant of the increased willingness of the world, born of expanding knowledge, to accept a new scientific wonder, that Mr. Marconi's announcement should have been so eagerly and so generally believed, and that the popular imagination should have been so fired with its possibilities. One cannot but recall the struggle against doubt, prejudice, and disbelief in which the promoters of the first transatlantic cable were forced to engage. Even after the first cable was laid (in 1858), and messages had actually been transmitted, there were many who denied that it had ever been successfully operated, and would hardly be convinced even by the affidavits of those concerned in the work. But in the years since then, Edison, Bell, Röntgen, and many other famous inventors and scientists have taught the world to be chary of its disbelief. Outside of this general disposition to friendliness, however, Marconi on his own part had well earned the credit of the careful and conservative scientist; his previous successes made it the more easy to credit his new achievement. For, as an Englishman (Mr. Flood Page), in defending Mr. Marconi's announcement, has pointed out, the inventor has never made any statement in public until he has been absolutely certain of the fact; he has never had to withdraw any statement that he has made as to his progress in the past. And these facts unquestionably carried great weight in convincing Mr. Edison, Mr. Graham Bell, and others of equal note of the literal truth of his report. It was astonishing how overwhelmingly credit came from every quarter of the world, from high and low alike, from inventors, scientists, statesmen, royalty. Before Marconi left St. John's he was already in receipt of a large mail--the inevitable letters of those who would offer congratulations, give advice, or ask favours. He received offers to lecture, to write articles, to visit this, that, and the other place--and all within a week after the news of his success. The people of the "ancient colony" of Newfoundland, famed for their hospitality, crowned him with every honour in their power. I accompanied Mr. Marconi across the island on his way to Nova Scotia, and it seemed as if every fisher and farmer in that wild country had heard of him, for when the train stopped they came crowding to look in at the window. From the comments I heard, they wondered most at the inventor's youthful appearance. Though he was only twenty-seven years old, his experience as an inventor covered many years, for he began experimenting in wireless telegraphy before he was twenty. At twenty-two he came to London from his Italian home, and convinced the British Post-Office Department that he had an important idea; at twenty-three he was famous the world over. Following this epoch-making success Mr. Marconi returned to England, where he continued most vigorously the work of perfecting his invention, installing more powerful transmitters, devising new receivers, all the time with the intention of following up his Newfoundland experiments with the inauguration of a complete system of wireless transmission between America and Europe. In the latter part of the year 1902 he succeeded in opening regular communication between Nova Scotia and England, and January 18, 1903, marked another epoch in his work. On that day there was sent by Marconi himself from the wireless station at South Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Mass., to the station at Poldhu, Cornwall, England, a distance of 3,000 miles, the message--destined to be historic--from the President of the United States to the King of England. It will be interesting to know something of the inventor himself. He is somewhat above medium height, and, though of a highly strung temperament, he is deliberate in his movements. Unlike the inventor of tradition, he dresses with scrupulous neatness, and, in spite of being a prodigious worker, he finds time to enjoy a limited amount of club and social life. The portrait published with this chapter, taken at St. John's a few days after the experiments, gives a very good idea of the inventor's face, though it cannot convey the peculiar lustre of his eyes when he is interested or excited--and perhaps it makes him look older than he really is. One of the first and strongest impressions that the man conveys is that of intense nervous activity and mental absorption; he has a way of pouncing upon a knotty question as if he could not wait to solve it. He talks little, is straightforward and unassuming, submitting good-naturedly, although with evident unwillingness, to being lionised. In his public addresses he has been clear and sensible; he has never written for any publication; nor has he engaged in scientific disputes, and even when violently attacked he has let his work prove his point. And he has accepted his success with calmness, almost unconcern; he certainly expected it. The only elation I saw him express was over the attack of the cable monopoly in Newfoundland, which he regarded as the greatest tribute that could have been paid his achievement. During all his life, opposition has been his keenest spur to greater effort. Though he was born and educated in Italy, his mother was of British birth, and he speaks English as perfectly as he does Italian. Indeed, his blue eyes, light hair, and fair complexion give him decidedly the appearance of an Englishman, so that a stranger meeting him for the first time would never suspect his Italian parentage. His parents are still living, spending part of their time on their estate in Italy and part of the time in London. One of the first messages conveying the news of his success at St. John's went to them. He embarked in experimental research because he loved it, and no amount of honour or money tempts him from the pursuit of the great things in electricity which he sees before him. Besides being an inventor, he is also a shrewd business man, with a clear appreciation of the value of his inventions and of their possibilities when generally introduced. What is more, he knows how to go about the task of introducing them. No sooner had Marconi announced the success of his Newfoundland experiments than critics began to raise objections. Might not the signals which he received have been sent from some passing ship fitted with wireless-telegraphy apparatus? Or, might they not have been the result of electrical disturbances in the atmosphere? Or, granting his ability to communicate across seas, how could he preserve the secrecy of his messages? If they were transmitted into space, why was it not possible for any one with a receiving instrument to take them? And was not his system of transmission too slow to make it useful, or was it not rendered uncertain by storms? And so on indefinitely. An acquaintance with some of the principles which Marconi considers fundamental, and on which his work has been based, will help to clear away these objections and give some conception of the real meaning and importance of the work at St. John's and of the plans for the future development of the inventor's system. In the first place, Mr. Marconi makes no claim to being the first to experiment along the lines which led to wireless telegraphy, or the first to signal for short distances without wires. He is prompt with his acknowledgment to other workers in his field, and to his assistants. Professor S. F. B. Morse, the inventor of telegraphy; Dr. Oliver Lodge and Sir William Preece, of England; Edison, Tesla, and Professors Trowbridge and Dolbear, of America, and others had experimented along these lines, but it remained for Marconi to perfect a system and put it into practical working order. He took the coherer of Branley and Calzecchi, the oscillator of Righi, he used the discoveries of Henry and Hertz, but his creation, like that of the poet who gathers the words of men in a perfect lyric, was none the less brilliant and original. [Illustration: _MARCONI TRANSATLANTIC STATION AT SOUTH WELLFLEET, CAPE COD, MASS._] In its bare outlines, Marconi's system of telegraphy consists in setting in motion, by means of his transmitter, certain electric waves which, passing through the ether, are received on a distant wire suspended from a kite or mast, and registered on his receiving apparatus. The ether is a mysterious, unseen, colourless, odourless, inconceivably rarefied something which is supposed to fill all space. It has been compared to a jelly in which the stars and planets are set like cherries. About all we know of it is that it has waves--that the jelly may be made to vibrate in various ways. Etheric vibrations of certain kinds give light; other kinds give heat; others electricity. Experiments have shown that if the ether vibrates at the inconceivable swiftness of 400 billions of waves a second we see the colour red, if twice as fast we see violet, if more slowly--perhaps 230 millions to the second, and less--we have the Hertz waves used by Marconi in his wireless-telegraphy experiments. Ether waves should not be confounded with air waves. Sound is a result of the vibration of the air; if we had ether and no air, we should still see light, feel heat, and have electrical phenomena, but no sound would ever come to our ears. Air is sluggish beside ether, and sound waves are very slow compared with ether waves. During a storm the ether brings the flash of the lightning before the air brings the sound of thunder, as every one knows. [Illustration: AT POOLE, _ENGLAND_.] Electricity is, indeed, only another name for certain vibrations in the ether. We say that electricity "flows" in a wire, but nothing really passes except an etheric wave, for the atoms composing the wire, as well as the air and the earth, and even the hardest substances, are all afloat in ether. Vibrations, therefore, started at one end of the wire travel to the other. Throw a stone into a quiet pond. Instantly waves are formed which spread out in every direction; the water does not move, except up and down, yet the wave passes onward indefinitely. Electric waves cannot be seen, but electricians have learned how to incite them, to a certain extent how to control them, and have devised cunning instruments which register their presence. Electrical waves have long been harnessed by the use of wires for sending communications; in other words, we have had wire telegraphy. But the ether exists outside of the wire as well as within; therefore, having the ether everywhere, it must be possible to produce waves in it which will pass anywhere, as well through mountains as over seas, and if these waves can be controlled they will evidently convey messages as easily and as certainly as the ether within wires. So argued Mr. Marconi. The difficulty lay in making an instrument which would produce a peculiar kind of wave, and in receiving and registering this wave in a second apparatus located at a distance from the first. It was, therefore, a practical mechanical problem which Marconi had to meet. Beginning with crude tin boxes set up on poles on the grounds of his father's estate in Italy, he finally devised an apparatus from which a current generated by a battery and passing in brilliant sparks between two brass balls was radiated from a wire suspended on a tall pole. By shutting off and turning on this peculiar current, by means of a device similar to the familiar telegrapher's key, the waves could be so divided as to represent dashes and dots, and spell out letters in the Morse alphabet. This was the transmitter. It was, indeed, simple enough to start these waves travelling through space, to jar the etheric jelly, so to speak; but it was far more difficult to devise an apparatus to receive and register them. For this purpose Marconi adopted a device invented by an Italian, Calzecchi, and improved by a Frenchman, M. Branley, called the coherer, and the very crux of the system, without which there could be no wireless telegraphy. This coherer, which he greatly improved, is merely a little tube of glass as big around as a lead-pencil, and perhaps two inches long. It is plugged at each end with silver, the plugs nearly meeting within the tube. The narrow space between them is filled with finely powdered fragments of nickel and silver, which possess the strange property of being alternately very good and very bad conductors of electrical waves. The waves which come from the transmitter, perhaps 2,000 miles away, are received on a suspended kite-wire, exactly similar to the wire used in the transmitter, but they are so weak that they could not of themselves operate an ordinary telegraph instrument. They do, however, possess strength enough to draw the little particles of silver and nickel in the coherer together in a continuous metal path. In other words, they make these particles "cohere," and the moment they cohere they become a good conductor for electricity, and a current from a battery near at hand rushes through, operates the Morse instrument, and causes it to print a dot or a dash; then a little tapper, actuated by the same current, strikes against the coherer, the particles of metal are jarred apart or "decohered," becoming instantly a poor conductor, and thus stopping the strong current from the home battery. Another wave comes through space, down the suspended kite-wire, into the coherer, there drawing the particles again together, and another dot or dash is printed. All these processes are continued rapidly, until a complete message is ticked out on the tape. Thus Mr. Kemp knew when he heard the tapper strike the coherer that a signal was coming, though he could not hear the click of the receiver itself. And this is in bare outline Mr. Marconi's invention--this is the combination of devices which has made wireless telegraphy possible, the invention on which he has taken out more than 132 patents in every civilised country of the world. Of course his instruments contain much of intricate detail, of marvellously ingenious adaptation to the needs of the work, but these are interesting chiefly to expert technicians. [Illustration: NEARER VIEW OF _SOUTH FORELAND STATION_.] [Illustration: ALUM BAY STATION _ISLE OF WIGHT_.] In his actual transoceanic experiments of December, 1901, Mr. Marconi's transmitting station in England was fitted with twenty masts 210 feet high, each with its suspended wire, though not all of them were used. A current of electricity sufficient to operate some 300 incandescent lamps was used, the resulting spark being so brilliant that one could not have looked at it with the unshaded eye. The wave which was thus generated had a length of about a fifth of a mile, and the rate of vibration was about 800,000 to the second. Following the analogy of the stone cast in the pond with the ripples circling outward, these waves spread from the suspended wires in England in every direction, not only westward toward the cliff where Marconi was flying his kite, but eastward, northward, and southward, so that if some of Mr. Marconi's assistants had been flying kites, say on the shore of Africa, or South America, or in St. Petersburg, they might possibly, with a corresponding receiver, have heard the identical signals at the same instant. In his early experiments Marconi believed that great distances could not be obtained without very high masts and long, suspended wires, the greater the distance the taller the mast, on the theory that the waves were hindered by the curvature of the earth; but his later theory, substantiated by his Newfoundland experiments, is that the waves somehow follow around the earth, conforming to its curve, and the next station he establishes in America will not be set high on a cliff, as at St. John's, but down close to the water on level land. His Newfoundland experiments have also convinced him that one of the secrets of successful long-distance transmission is the use of a more powerful current in his transmitter, and this he will test in his next trials between the continents. And now we come to the most important part of Mr. Marconi's work, the part least known even to science, and the field of almost illimitable future development. This is the system of "tuning," as the inventor calls it, the construction of a certain receiver so that it will respond only to the message sent by a certain transmitter. When Marconi's discoveries were first announced in 1896, there existed no method of tuning, though the inventor had its necessity clearly in mind. Accordingly the public inquired, "How are you going to keep your messages secret? Supposing a warship wishes to communicate with another of the fleet, what is to prevent the enemy from reading your message? How are private business despatches to be secured against publicity?" Here, indeed, was a problem. Without secrecy no system of wireless telegraphy could ever reach great commercial importance, or compete with the present cable communication. The inventor first tried using a parabolic copper reflector, by means of which he could radiate the electric waves exactly as light--which, it will be borne in mind, is only another kind of etheric wave--is reflected by a mirror. This reflector could be faced in any desired direction, and only a receiver located in that direction would respond to the message. But there were grave objections to the reflector; an enemy might still creep in between the sending and receiving stations, and, moreover, it was found that the curvature of the earth interfered with the transmission of reflected messages, thereby limiting their usefulness to short distances. [Illustration: MARCONI ROOM _SS PHILADELPHIA_.] In passing, however, it may be interesting to note one extraordinary use for this reflecting system which the inventor now has in mind. This is in connection with lighthouse work. Ships are to be provided with reflecting instruments which in dense fog or storms can be used exactly as a searchlight is now employed on a dark night to discover the location of the lighthouses or lightships. For instance, the lighthouse, say, on some rocky point on the New England coast would continually radiate a warning from its suspended wire. These waves pass as readily through fog and darkness and storm as in daylight. A ship out at sea, hidden in fog, has lost its bearings; the sound of the warning horn, if warning there is, seems to come first from one direction, then from another, as sounds do in a fog, luring the ship to destruction. If now the mariner is provided with a wireless reflector, this instrument can be slowly turned until it receives the lighthouse warning, the captain thus learning his exact location; if in distress, he can even communicate with the lighthouse. Think also what an advantage such an equipment would be to vessels entering a dangerous harbour in thick weather. This is one of the developments of the near future. The reflector system being impracticable for long-distance work, Mr. Marconi experimented with tuning. He so constructed a receiver that it responds only to a certain transmitter. That is, if the transmitter is radiating 800,000 vibrations a second, the corresponding receiver will take only 800,000 vibrations. In exactly the same way a familiar tuning fork will respond only to another tuning fork having exactly the same "tune," or number of vibrations per second. And Mr. Marconi has now succeeded in bringing this tuning system to some degree of perfection, though very much work yet remains to be done. For instance, in one of his English experiments, at Poole in England, he had two receivers connected with the same wire, and tuned to different transmitters located at St. Catherine's Point. Two messages were sent, one in English and one in French. Both were received at the same time on the same wire at Poole, but one receiver rolled off its message in English, the other in French, without the least interference. And so when critics suggested that the inventor may have been deceived at St. John's by messages transmitted from ocean liners, he was able to respond promptly: "Impossible. My instrument was tuned to receive only from my station in Cornwall." Indeed, the only wireless-telegraph apparatus that could possibly have been within hundreds of miles of Newfoundland would be one of the Marconi-fitted steamers, and the "call" of a steamer is not the letter "S," but "U." The importance of the new system of tuning can hardly be overestimated. By it all the ships of a fleet can be provided with instruments tuned alike, so that they may communicate freely with one another, and have no fear that the enemy will read the messages. The spy of the future must be an electrical expert who can slip in somehow and steal the secret of the enemy's tunes. Great telegraph companies will each have its own tuned instruments, to receive only its own messages, and there may be special tunes for each of the important governments of the world. Or perhaps (for the system can be operated very cheaply) the time will even come when the great banking and business houses, or even families and friends, will each have its own wireless system, with its own secret tune. Having variations of millions of different vibrations, there will be no lack of tunes. For instance, the British navy may be tuned to receive only messages of 700,000 vibrations to the second, the German navy 1,500,000, the United States Government 1,000,000, and so on indefinitely. [Illustration: _TRANSATLANTIC HIGH POWER MARCONI STATION AT GLACE BAY, NOVA SCOTIA_] Tuning also makes multiplex wireless telegraphy a possibility; that is, many messages may be sent or received on the same suspended wire. Supposing, for instance, the operator was sending a hurry press despatch to a newspaper. He has two transmitters, tuned differently, connected with his wire. He cuts the despatch in two, sends the first half on one transmitter, and the second on the other, thereby reducing by half the time of transmission. A sort of impression prevails that wireless telegraphy is still largely in the uncertain experimental stage; but, as a matter of fact, it has long since passed from the laboratory to a wide commercial use. Its development since Mr. Marconi's first paper was read, in 1896, and especially since the first message was sent from England to France across the Channel in March, 1899, has been astonishingly rapid. Most of the ships of the great navies of Europe and all the important ocean liners are now fitted with the "wireless" instruments. The system has been recently adopted by the Lloyds of England, the greatest of shipping exchanges. It is being used on many lightships, and the New York _Herald_ receives daily reports from vessels at sea, communicated from a ship station off Nantucket. Were there space to be spared, many incidents might be told showing in what curious and wonderful ways the use of the "wireless" instruments has saved life and property, to say nothing of facilitating business. And it cannot now be long before a regular telegraph business will be conducted between Massachusetts and England, through the new stations. Mr. Marconi informed me that he would be able to build and equip stations on both sides of the Atlantic for less than $150,000, the subsequent charge for maintenance being very small. A cable across the Atlantic costs between $3,000,000 and $4,000,000, and it is a constant source of expenditure for repairs. The inventor will be able to transmit with single instruments about twenty words a minute, and at a cost ridiculously small compared with the present cable tolls. He said in a speech delivered at a dinner given him by the Governor at St. John's that messages which now go by cable at twenty-five cents a word might be sent profitably at a cent a word or less, which is even much cheaper than the very cheapest present rates in America for messages by land wires. It is estimated that about $400,000,000 is invested in cable systems in various parts of the world. If Marconi succeeds as he hopes to succeed, much of the vast network of wires at the bottom of the world's oceans, represented by this investment, will lose its usefulness. It is now the inventor's purpose to push the work of installation between the continents as rapidly as possible, and no one need be surprised if the year 1902 sees his system in practical operation. Along with this transatlantic work he intends to extend his system of transmission between ships at sea and the ports on land, with a view to enabling the shore stations to maintain constant communication with vessels all the way across the Atlantic. If he succeeds in doing this, there will at last be no escape for the weary from the daily news of the world, so long one of the advantages of an ocean voyage. For every morning each ship, though in mid-ocean, will get its bulletin of news, the ship's printing-press will strike it off, and it will be served hot with the coffee. Yet think what such a system will mean to ships in distress, and how often it will relieve the anxiety of friends awaiting the delayed voyager. Mr. Marconi's faith in his invention is boundless. He told me that one of the projects which he hoped soon to attempt was to communicate between England and New Zealand. If the electric waves follow the curvature of the earth, as the Newfoundland experiments indicate, he sees no reason why he should not send signals 6,000 or 10,000 miles as easily as 2,000. Then there is the whole question of the use of wireless telegraphy on land, a subject hardly studied, though messages have already been sent upward of sixty miles overland. The new system will certainly prove an important adjunct on land in war-time, for it will enable generals to signal, as they have done in South Africa, over comparatively long distances in fog and storm, and over stretches where it might be impossible for the telegraph corps to string wires or for couriers to pass on account of the presence of the enemy. [Illustration: Work on the Smith Point Lighthouse Stopped by a Violent Storm. _Just after the cylinder had been set in place, and while the workmen were hurrying to stow sufficient ballast to secure it against a heavy sea, a storm forced the attending steamer to draw away. One of the barges was almost overturned, and a lifeboat was driven against the cylinder and crushed to pieces._] CHAPTER VIII SEA-BUILDERS _The Story of Lighthouse Building--Stone-tower Lighthouses, Iron Pile Lighthouses, and Steel Cylinder Lighthouses_ A sturdy English oak furnished the model for the first of the great modern lighthouses. A little more than one hundred and forty years ago John Smeaton, maker of odd and intricate philosophical instruments and dabbler in mechanical engineering, was called upon to place a light upon the bold and dangerous reefs of Eddystone, near Plymouth, England. John Smeaton never had built a lighthouse; but he was a man of great ingenuity and courage, and he knew the kind of lighthouse _not_ to build; for twice before the rocks of Eddystone had been marked, and twice the mighty waves of the Atlantic had bowled over the work of the builders as easily as they would have overturned a skiff. Winstanley, he of song and story, designed the first of these structures, and he and all his keepers lost their lives when the light went down; the other, the work of John Rudyerd, was burned to the water's edge, and one of the keepers, strangely enough, died from the effects of melting lead which fell from the roof and entered his open mouth as he gazed upward. Both of these lighthouses were of wood, and both were ornamented with balconies and bay-windows, which furnished ready holds for the rough handling of the wind. [Illustration: Robert Stevenson, Builder of the Famous Bell Rock Lighthouse, and Author of Important Inventions and Improvements in the System of Sea Lighting. _From a bust by Joseph, now in the library of Bell Rock Lighthouse._] [Illustration: The Bell Rock Lighthouse, on the Eastern Coast of Scotland. _From the painting by Turner. The Bell Rock Lighthouse was built by Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, on the Inchcape Reef, in the North Sea, near Dundee, Scotland, in 1807-1810._] John Smeaton walked in the woods and thought of all these problems. He tells quaintly in his memoirs how he observed the strength with which an oak-tree bore its great weight of leaves and branches; and when he built his lighthouse, it was wide and flaring at the base, like the oak, and deeply rooted into the sea-rock with wedges of wood and iron. The waist was tapering and cylindrical, bearing the weight of the keeper's quarters and the lantern as firmly and jauntily as the oak bears its branches. Moreover, he built of stone, to avoid the possibility of fire, and he dovetailed each stone into its neighbour, so that the whole tower would face the wind and the waves as if it were one solid mass of granite. For years Smeaton's Eddystone blinked a friendly warning to English mariners, serving its purpose perfectly, until the Brothers of Trinity saw fit to build a larger tower in its place. In England the famous lighthouses of Bell Rock, built by Robert Stevenson, Skerryvore, and Wolf Rock are all stone towers; and in our own country, Minot's Ledge, off Boston Harbour, more difficult of construction than any of them, Spectacle Reef light in Lake Huron, and Stannard Rock light in Lake Superior are good examples of Smeaton's method of building. [Illustration: The Present Lighthouse on Minot's Ledge, near the Entrance of Massachusetts Bay, Fifteen Miles Southeast of Boston. "_Rising sheer out of the sea, like a huge stone cannon, mouth upward._"--Longfellow.] The mighty stone tower still remains for many purposes the most effective method of lighting the pathways of the sea, but it is both exceedingly difficult to build, and it is very expensive. Within comparatively recent years busy inventors have thought out several new plans for lighthouses, which are quite as wonderful and important in their way as wireless telegraphy and the telephone are in the realm of electricity. [Illustration: The Lighthouse on Stannard Rock, Lake Superior. _This is a stone-tower lighthouse, similar in construction to the one built with such difficulty on Spectacle Reef, Lake Huron._] One of these inventions is the iron-pile or screw-pile lighthouse, and the other is the iron cylinder lighthouse. I will tell the story of each of them separately. The skeleton-built iron-pile lighthouse bears much the same relation to the heavy stone tower lighthouse that a willow twig bears to a great oak. The latter meets the fury of wind and wave with stern resistance, opposing force to force; the former conquers its difficulties by avoiding them. A completed screw-pile lighthouse has the odd appearance of a huge, ugly spider standing knee-deep in the sea. Its squat body is the home of the keeper, with a single bright eye of light at the top, and its long spindly legs are the iron piles on which the structure rests. Thirty years ago lighthouse builders were much pleased with the ease and apparent durability of the pile light. An Englishman named Mitchell had invented an iron pile having at the end a screw not unlike a large auger. By boring a number of these piles deep into the sand of the sea-bottom, and using them as the foundation for a small but durable iron building, he was enabled to construct a lighthouse in a considerable depth of water at small expense. Later builders have used ordinary iron piles, which are driven into the sand with heavy sledges. Waves and tides pass readily through the open-work of the foundation, the legs of the spider, without disturbing the building overhead. For Southern waters, where there is no danger of moving ice-packs, lighthouses of this type have been found very useful, although the action of the salt water on the iron piling necessitates frequent repairs. More than eighty lights of this description dot the shoals of Florida and adjoining States. Some of the oldest ones still remain in use in the North, notably the one on Brandywine shoal in Delaware Bay; but it has been found necessary to surround them with strongly built ice-breakers. Two magnificent iron-pile lights are found on Fowey Rocks and American Shoals, off the coast of Florida, the first of which was built with so much difficulty that its story is most interesting. [Illustration: The Fowey Rocks Lighthouse, Florida.] Fowey Reef lies five miles from the low coral island of Soldier Key. Northern storms, sweeping down the Atlantic, brush in wild breakers over the reef and out upon the little key, often burying it entirely under a torrent of water. Even in calm weather the sea is rarely quiet enough to make it safe for a vessel of any size to approach the reef. The builders erected a stout elevated wharf and store-house on the key, and brought their men and tools to await the opportunity to dart out when the sea was at rest and begin the work of marking the reef. Before shipment, the lighthouse, which was built in the North, was set up, complete from foundation to pinnacle, and thoroughly tested. At length the workmen were able to remain on the reef long enough to build a strong working platform twelve feet above the surface of the water, and set on iron-shod mangrove piles. Having established this base of operations in the enemy's domain, a heavy iron disk was lowered to the reef, and the first pile was driven through the hole at its centre. Elaborate tests were made after each blow of the sledge, and the slightest deviation from the vertical was promptly rectified with block and tackle. In two months' time nine piles were driven ten feet into the coral rock, the workmen toiling long hours under a blistering sun. When the time came to erect the superstructure, the sea suddenly awakened and storm followed storm, so that for weeks together no one dared venture out to the reef. The men rusted and grumbled on the narrow docks of the key, and work was finally suspended for an entire winter. At the very first attempt to make a landing in the spring, a tornado drove the vessels far out of their course. But a crew was finally placed on the working platform, with enough food to last them several weeks, and there they stayed, suspended between the sea and the sky, until the structure was complete. This lighthouse cost $175,000. The famous Bug Light of Boston and Thimble Light of Hampton Roads, Va., are both good examples of the iron-pile lighthouse. Now we come to a consideration of iron cylinder lighthouses, which are even more wonderful, perhaps, than the screw-piles, and in constructing them the sea-builder touches the pinnacle of his art. Imagine a sandy shoal marked only by a white-fringed breaker. The water rushes over it in swift and constantly varying currents, and if there is a capful of wind anywhere on the sea, it becomes an instant menace to the mariner. The shore may be ten or twenty miles away, so far that a land-light would only lure the seaman into peril, instead of guiding him safely on his way. A lightship is always uncertain; the first great storm may drive it from its moorings and leave the coast unprotected when protection is most necessary. Upon such a shoal, often covered from ten to twenty feet with water, the builder is called upon to construct a lighthouse, laying his foundation in shifting sand, and placing upon it a building strong enough to withstand any storm or the crushing weight of wrecks or ice-packs. It was less than twenty years ago that sea-builders first ventured to grapple with the difficulties presented by these off-shore shoals. In 1881 Germany built the first iron cylinder lighthouse at Rothersand, near the mouth of the Weser River, and three years later the Lighthouse Establishment of the United States planted a similar tower on Fourteen-Foot Banks, over three miles from the shores of Delaware Bay, in twenty feet of water. Since then many hitherto dangerous shoals have been marked by new lighthouses of this type. [Illustration: Fourteen-Foot Bank Light Station, Delaware Bay, Del.] When a builder begins a stone tower light on some lonely sea-rock, he says to the sea, "Do your worst. I'm going to stick right here until this light is built, if it takes a hundred years." And his men are always on hand in fair weather or foul, dropping one stone to-day and another to-morrow, and succeeding by virtue of steady grit and patience. The builder of the iron cylinder light pursues an exactly opposite course. His warfare is more spirited, more modern. He stakes his whole success on a single desperate throw. If he fails, he loses everything: if he wins, he may throw again. His lighthouse is built, from foundation caisson to lantern, a hundred or a thousand miles away from the reef where it is finally to rest. It is simply an enormous cast-iron tube made in sections or courses, each about six feet high, not unlike the standpipe of a village water-works. The builder must set up this tube on the shoal, sink it deep into the sand bottom, and fill it with rocks and concrete mortar, so that it will not tip over. At first such a feat would seem absolutely impossible; but the sea-builder has his own methods of fighting. With all the material necessary to his work, he creeps up on the shoal and lies quietly in some secluded harbour until the sea is calmly at rest, suspecting no attack. Then he darts out with his whole fleet, plants his foundation, and before the waves and the wind wake up he has established his outworks on the shoal. The story of the construction of one of these lighthouses will give a good idea of the terrible difficulties which their builders must overcome. Not long ago W. H. Flaherty, of New York, built such a lighthouse at Smith's Point, in Chesapeake Bay. At the mouth of the Potomac River the opposing tides and currents have built up shoals of sand extending eight or ten miles out into the bay. Here the waves, sweeping in from the open Atlantic, sometimes drown the side-lights of the big Boston steamers. The point has a grim story of wrecks and loss of life; in 1897 alone, four sea-craft were driven in and swamped on the shoals. The Lighthouse Establishment planned to set up the light just at the edge of the channel, and 120 miles south of Baltimore. [Illustration: The Great Beds Light Station, Raritan Bay, N. J. _A specimen of iron cylinder construction._] Eighty thousand dollars was appropriated for doing the work. In August, 1896, the contractors formally agreed to build the lighthouse for $56,000, and, more than that, to have the lantern burning within a single year. By the last of September a huge, unwieldy foundation caisson was framing in a Baltimore shipyard. This caisson was a bottomless wooden box, 32 feet square and 12 feet high, with the top nearly as thick as the height of a man, so that it would easily sustain the weight of the great iron cylinder soon to be placed upon it. It was lined and caulked, painted inside and out to make it air-tight and water-tight, and then dragged out into the bay, together with half an acre of mud and dock timbers. Here the workmen crowned it with the first two courses of the iron cylinder--a collar 30 feet in diameter and about 12 feet high. Inside of this a second cylinder, a steel air-shaft, five feet in diameter, rose from a hole in the centre of the caisson, this providing a means of entrance and exit when the structure should reach the shoal. Upon the addition of this vast weight of iron and steel, the wooden caisson, although it weighed nearly a hundred tons, disappeared completely under the water, leaving in view only the great black rim of the iron cylinder and the top of the air-shaft. On April 7th of the next year the fleet was ready to start on its voyage of conquest. The whole country had contributed to the expedition. Cleveland, O., furnished the iron plates for the tower; Pittsburg sent steel and machinery; South Carolina supplied the enormous yellow-pine timbers for the caisson; Washington provided two great barge-loads of stone; and New York City contributed hundreds of tons of Portland cement and sand and gravel, it being cheaper to bring even such supplies from the North than to gather them on the shores of the bay. Everything necessary to the completion of the lighthouse and the maintenance of the eighty-eight men was loaded aboard ship. And quite a fleet it made as it lay out on the bay in the warm spring sunshine. The flagship was a big, double-deck steamer, 200 feet over all, once used in the coastwise trade. She was loaded close down to her white lines, and men lay over her rails in double rows. She led the fleet down the bay, and two tugs and seven barges followed in her wake like a flock of ducklings. The steamer towed the caisson at the end of a long hawser. In three days the fleet reached the lighthouse site. During all of this time the sea had been calm, with only occasional puffs of wind, and the builders planned, somewhat exultantly, to drop the caisson the moment they arrived. But before they were well in sight of the point, the sea awakened suddenly, as if conscious of the planned surprise. A storm blew up in the north, and at sunset on the tenth of April the waves were washing over the top of the iron cylinder and slapping it about like a boy's raft. A few tons of water inside the structure would sink it entirely, and the builder would lose months of work and thousands of dollars. From a rude platform on top of the cylinder two men were working at the pumps to keep the water out. When the edge of the great iron rim heaved up with the waves, they pumped and shouted; and when it went down, they strangled and clung for their lives. The builder saw the necessity of immediate assistance. Twelve men scrambled into a life-boat, and three waves later they were dashed against the rim of the cylinder. Here half of the number, clinging like cats to the iron plates, spread out a sail canvas and drew it over the windward half of the cylinder, while the other men pulled it down with their hands and teeth and lashed it firmly into place. In this way the cylinder shed most of the wash, although the larger waves still scuttled down within its iron sides. Half of the crew was now hurried down the rope-ladders inside the cylinder, where the water was nearly three feet deep and swashing about like a whirlpool. They all knew that one more than ordinarily large wave would send the whole structure to the bottom; but they dipped swiftly, and passed up the water without a word. It was nothing short of a battle for life. They must keep the water down, or drown like rats in a hole. They began work at sunset, and at sunrise the next morning, when the fury of the storm was somewhat abated, they were still at work, and the cylinder was saved. [Illustration: A Storm at the Tillamook Lighthouse, in the Pacific, one mile out from Tillamook Head, Oregon.] The swells were now too high to think of planting the caisson, and the fleet ran into the mouth of the Great Wicomico River to await a more favourable opportunity. Here the builders lay for a week. To keep the men busy some of them were employed in mixing concrete, adding another course of iron to the cylinder, and in other tasks of preparation. The crew was composed largely of Americans and Irishmen, with a few Norwegians, the ordinary Italian or Bohemian labourer not taking kindly to the risks and terrors of such an expedition. Their number included carpenters, masons, iron-workers, bricklayers, caisson-men, sailors, and a host of common shovellers. The pay varied from twenty to fifty cents an hour for time actually worked, and the builders furnished meals of unlimited ham, bread, and coffee. On April 17th, the weather being calmer, the fleet ventured out stealthily. A buoy marked the spot where the lighthouse was to stand. When the cylinder was exactly over the chosen site, the valves of two of the compartments into which it was divided were quickly opened, and the water poured in. The moment the lower edge of the caisson, borne downward by the weight of water, touched the shoal, the men began working with feverish haste. Large stones were rolled from the barges around the outside of the caisson to prevent the water from eating away the sand and tipping the structure over. In the meantime a crew of twenty men had taken their places in the compartments of the cylinder still unfilled with water. A chute from the steamer vomited a steady stream of dusty concrete down upon their heads. A pump drenched them with an unceasing cataract of salt water. In this terrible hole they wallowed and struggled, shovelling the concrete mortar into place and ramming it down. Every man on the expedition, even the cooks and the stokers, was called upon at this supreme moment to take part in the work. Unless the structure could be sufficiently ballasted while the water was calm, the first wave would brush it over and pound it to pieces on the shoals. [Illustration: Saving the Cylinder of the Lighthouse at Smith Point, Chesapeake Bay, from being Swamped in a High Sea. _When the builders were towing the unwieldy cylinder out to set it in position, the water became suddenly rough and began to fill it. Workmen, at the risk of their lives, boarded the cylinder, and by desperate labours succeeded in spreading sail canvas over it, and so saved a structure that had cost months of labour and thousands of dollars._] After nearly two hours of this exhausting labour the captain of the steamer suddenly shouted the command to cast away. The sky had turned black and the waves ran high. All of the cranes were whipped in, and up from the cylinder poured the shovellers, looking as if they had been freshly rolled in a mortar bed. There was a confused babel of voices and a wild flight for the steamer. In the midst of the excitement one of the barges snapped a hawser, and, being lightened of its load, it all but turned over in a trough of the sea. The men aboard her went down on their faces, clung fast, and shouted for help, and it was only with difficulty that they were rescued. One of the life-boats, venturing too near the iron cylinder, was crushed like an egg-shell, but a tug was ready to pick up the men who manned it. So terrified were the workmen by the dangers and difficulties of the task that twelve of them ran away that night without asking for their pay. On the following morning the builder was appalled to see that the cylinder was inclined more than four feet from the perpendicular. In spite of the stone piled around the caisson, the water had washed the sand from under one edge of it, and it had tipped part way over. Now was the pivotal point of the whole enterprise. A little lack of courage or skill, and the work was doomed. The waves still ran high, and the freshet currents from the Potomac River poured past the shoals at the rate of six or seven miles an hour. And yet one of the tugs ran out daringly, dragging a barge-load of stone. It was made fast, and although it pitched up and down so that every wave threatened to swamp it and every man aboard was seasick, they managed to throw off 200 tons more of stone around the base of the caisson on the side toward which it was inclined. In this way further tipping in that direction was prevented, and the action of the water on the sand under the opposite side soon righted the structure. Beginning on the morning of April 21st the entire crew worked steadily for forty-eight hours without sleeping or stopping for meals more than fifteen minutes at a time. When at last they were relieved, they came up out of the cylinder shouting and cheering because the foundation was at last secure. The structure was now about thirty feet high, and filled nearly to the top with concrete. The next step was to force it down 15-1/2 feet into the hard sand at the bottom of the bay, thus securing it for ever against the power of the waves and the tide. An air-lock, which is a strongly built steel chamber about the size of a hogshead, was placed on top of the air-shaft, the water in the big box-like caisson at the bottom of the cylinder was forced out with compressed air, and the men prepared to enter the caisson. No toil can compare in its severity and danger with that of a caisson worker. He is first sent into the air-lock, and the air-pressure is gradually increased around him until it equals that of the caisson below; then he may descend. New men often shout and beg pitifully to be liberated from the torture. Frequently the effect of the compressed air is such that they bleed at the ears and nose, and for a time their heads throb as if about to burst open. In a few minutes these pains pass away, the workers crawl down the long ladder of the air-shaft and begin to dig away the sand of the sea-bottom. It is heaped high around the bottom of a four-inch pipe which leads up the air-shaft and reaches out over the sea. A valve in the pipe is opened and the sand and stones are driven upward by the compressed air in the caisson and blown out into the water with tremendous force. As the sand is mined away, the great tower above it slowly sinks downward, while the subterranean toilers grow sallow-faced, yellow-eyed, become half deaf, and lose their appetites. When Smith's Point Light was within two feet of being deep enough the workmen had a strange and terrible adventure. Ten men were in the caisson at the time. They noticed that the candles stuck along the wall were burning a lambent green. Black streaks, that widened swiftly, formed along the white-painted walls. One man after another began staggering dizzily, with eyes blinded and a sharp burning in the throat. Orders were instantly given to ascend, and the crew, with the help of ropes, succeeded in escaping. All that night the men lay moaning and sleepless in their bunks. In the morning only a few of them could open their eyes, and all experienced the keenest torture in the presence of light. Bags were fitted over their heads, and they were led out to their meals. [Illustration: Great Waves Dashed Entirely Over Them, so that They had to Cling for Their Lives to the Air-Pipes. _In erecting the Smith Point lighthouse, after the cylinder was set up, it had to be forced down fifteen and a half feet into the sand. The lives of the men who did this, working in the caisson at the bottom of the sea, were absolutely in the hands of the men who managed the engine and the air-compressor at the surface; and twice these latter were entirely deluged by the sea, but still maintained steam and kept everything running as if no sea was playing over them._] That afternoon Major E. H. Ruffner, of Baltimore, the Government engineer for the district, appeared with two physicians. An examination of the caisson showed that the men had struck a vein of sulphuretted hydrogen gas. Here was a new difficulty--a difficulty never before encountered in lighthouse construction. For three days the force lay idle. There seemed no way of completing the foundation. On the fourth day, after another flooding of the caisson, Mr. Flaherty called for volunteers to go down the air-shaft, agreeing to accompany them himself--all this in the face of the spectacle of thirty-five men moaning in their bunks, with their eyes burning and blinded and their throats raw. And yet fourteen men stepped forward and offered to "see the work through." Upon reaching the bottom of the tower they found that the flow of gas was less rapid, and they worked with almost frantic energy, expecting every moment to feel the gas griping in their throats. In half an hour another shift came on, and before night the lighthouse was within an inch or two of its final resting-place. The last shift was headed by an old caisson-man named Griffin, who bore the record of having stood seventy-five pounds of air-pressure in the famous Long Island gas tunnel. Just as the men were ready to leave the caisson the gas suddenly burst up again with something of explosive violence. Instantly the workmen threw down their tools and made a dash for the air-shaft. Here a terrible struggle followed. Only one man could go up the ladder at a time, and they scrambled and fought, pulling down by main force every man who succeeded in reaching the rounds. Then one after another they dropped in the sand, unconscious. Griffin, remaining below, had signalled for a rope. When it came down, he groped for the nearest workman, fastened it around his body, and sent him aloft. Then he crawled around and pulled the unconscious workmen together under the air-shaft. One by one he sent them up. The last was a powerfully built Irishman named Howard. Griffin's eyes were blinded, and he was so dizzy that he reeled like a drunken man, but he managed to get the rope around Howard's body and start him up. At the eighteen-inch door of the lock the unconscious Irishman wedged fast, and those outside could not pull him through. Griffin climbed painfully up the thirty feet of ladder and pushed and pulled until Howard's limp body went through. Griffin tried to follow him, but his numbed fingers slipped on the steel rim, and he fell backward into the death-hole below. They dropped the rope again, but there was no response. One of the men called Griffin by name. The half-conscious caisson-man aroused himself and managed to tie the rope under his arms. Then he, too, was hoisted aloft, and when he was dragged from the caisson, more dead than alive, the half-blinded men on the steamer's deck set up a shout of applause--all the credit that he ever received. Two of the men prostrated by the gas were sent to a hospital in New York, where they were months in recovering. Another went insane. Griffin was blind for three weeks. Four other caisson-men came out of the work with the painful malady known as "bends," which attacks those who work long under high air-pressure. A victim of the "bends" cannot straighten his back, and often his legs and arms are cramped and contorted. These terrible results will give a good idea of the heroism required of the sea-builder. Having sunk the caisson deep enough the workmen filled it full of concrete and sealed the top of the air-shaft. Then they built the light-keeper's home, and the lantern was ready for lighting. Three days within the contract year the tower was formally turned over to the Government. And thus the builders, besides providing a warning to the hundreds of vessels that yearly pass up the bay, erected a lasting monument to their own skill, courage, and perseverance. As long as the shoal remains the light will stand. In the course of half a century, perhaps less, the sea-water will gnaw away the iron of the cylinder, but there will still remain the core of concrete, as hard and solid as the day on which it was planted. It is fitting that work which has drawn so largely upon the highest intellectual and moral endowments of the engineer and the builder should not serve the selfish interests of any one man, nor of any single corporation, nor even of the Government which provided the means, but that it should be a gift to the world at large. Other nations, even Great Britain, which has more at stake upon the seas than any other country, impose regular lighthouse taxes upon vessels entering their harbours; but the lights erected by the United States flash a free warning to any ship of any land. [Illustration: Peter Cooper Hewitt. _With his interrupter._] CHAPTER IX THE NEWEST ELECTRIC LIGHT _Peter Cooper Hewitt and His Three Great Inventions--The Mercury Arc Light--The New Electrical Converter--The Hewitt Interrupter_ It is indeed a great moment when an inventor comes to the announcement of a new and epoch-making achievement. He has been working for years, perhaps, in his laboratory, struggling along unknown, unheard of, often poor, failing a hundred times for every achieved success, but finally, all in a moment, surprising the secret which nature has guarded so long and so faithfully. He has discovered a new principle that no one has known before, he has made a wonderful new machine--and it works! What he has done in his laboratory for himself now becomes of interest to all the world. He has a great message to give. His patience and perseverance through years of hard work have produced something that will make life easier and happier for millions of people, that will open great new avenues for human effort and human achievement, build up new fortunes; often, indeed, change the whole course of business affairs in the world, if not the very channels of human thought. Think what the steam-engine has done, and the telegraph, and the sewing-machine! All this wonder lies to-day in the brain of the inventor; to-morrow it is a part of the world's treasure. Such a moment came on an evening in January, 1902, when Peter Cooper Hewitt, of New York City--then wholly unknown to the greater world--made the announcement of an invention of such importance that Lord Kelvin, the greatest of living electricians, afterward said that of all the things he saw in America the work of Mr. Hewitt attracted him most. On that evening in January, 1902, a curious crowd was gathered about the entrance of the Engineers' Club in New York City. Over the doorway a narrow glass tube gleamed with a strange blue-green light of such intensity that print was easily readable across the street, and yet so softly radiant that one could look directly at it without the sensation of blinding discomfort which accompanies nearly all brilliant artificial lights. The hall within, where Mr. Hewitt was making the first public announcement of his discovery, was also illuminated by the wonderful new tubes. The light was different from anything ever seen before, grateful to the eyes, much like daylight, only giving the face a curious, pale-green, unearthly appearance. The cause of this phenomenon was soon evident; the tubes were seen to give forth all the rays except red--orange, yellow, green, blue, violet--so that under its illumination the room and the street without, the faces of the spectators, the clothing of the women lost all their shades of red; indeed, changing the very face of the world to a pale green-blue. It was a redless light. The extraordinary appearance of this lamp and its profound significance as a scientific discovery at once awakened a wide public interest, especially among electricians who best understood its importance. Here was an entirely new sort of electric light. The familiar incandescent lamp, the invention of Thomas A. Edison, though the best of all methods of illumination, is also the most expensive. Mr. Hewitt's lamp, though not yet adapted to all the purposes served by the Edison lamp, on account of its peculiar colour, produces eight times as much light with the same amount of power. It is also practically indestructible, there being no filament to burn out; and it requires no special wiring. By means of this invention electricity, instead of being the most costly means of illumination, becomes the cheapest--cheaper even than kerosene. No further explanation than this is necessary to show the enormous importance of this invention. Mr. Hewitt's announcement at once awakened the interest of the entire scientific world and made the inventor famous, and yet it was only the forerunner of two other inventions equally important. Once discover a master-key and it often unlocks many doors. Tracing out the principles involved in his new lamp, Mr. Hewitt invented: A new, cheap, and simple method of converting alternating electrical currents into direct currents. An electrical interrupter or valve, in many respects the most wonderful of the three inventions. Before entering upon an explanation of these discoveries, which, though seemingly difficult and technical, are really simple and easily understandable, it will be interesting to know something of Mr. Hewitt and his methods of work and the genesis of the inventions. Mr. Hewitt's achievements possess a peculiar interest for the people of this country. The inventor is an American of Americans. Born to wealth, the grandson of the famous philanthropist, Peter Cooper, the son of Abram S. Hewitt, one of the foremost citizens and statesmen of New York, Mr. Hewitt might have led a life of leisure and ease, but he has preferred to win his successes in the American way, by unflagging industry and perseverance, and has come to his new fortune also like the American, suddenly and brilliantly. As a people we like to see a man deserve his success! The same qualities which made Peter Cooper one of the first of American millionaires, and Abram S. Hewitt one of the foremost of the world's steel merchants, Mayor of New York, and one of its most trusted citizens, have placed Mr. Peter Cooper Hewitt among the greatest of American inventors and scientists. Indeed, Peter Cooper and Abram S. Hewitt were both inventors; that is, they had the imaginative inventive mind. Peter Cooper once said: "I was always planning and contriving, and was never satisfied unless I was doing something difficult--something that had never been done before, if possible." The grandfather built the first American locomotive; he was one of the most ardent supporters of Cyrus Field in the great project of an Atlantic cable, and he was for a score of years the president of a cable company. His was the curious, constructive mind. As a boy he built a washing machine to assist his overworked mother; later on he built the first lawnmower and invented a process for rolling iron, the first used in this country; he constructed a torpedo-boat to aid the Greeks in their revolt against Turkish tyranny in 1824. He dreamed of utilising the current of the East River for manufacturing power; he even experimented with flying machines, becoming so enthusiastic in this labour that he nearly lost the sight of an eye through an explosion which blew the apparatus to pieces. [Illustration: Watching a Test of the Hewitt Converter. _Lord Kelvin in the centre._] It will be seen, therefore, that the grandson comes naturally by his inclinations. It was his grandfather who gave him his first chest of tools and taught him to work with his hands, and he has always had a fondness for contriving new machines and of working out difficult scientific problems. Until the last few years, however, he has never devoted his whole time to the work which best pleased him. For years he was connected with his father's extensive business enterprise, an active member, in fact, of the firm of Cooper, Hewitt & Co., and he has always been prominent in the social life of New York, a member of no fewer than eight prominent clubs. But never for a moment in his career--he is now forty-two years old, though he looks scarcely thirty-five--has he ceased to be interested in science and mechanics. As a student in Stevens Institute, and later in Columbia College, he gave particular attention to electricity, physics, chemistry, and mechanics. Later, when he went into business, his inventive mind turned naturally to the improvement of manufacturing methods, with the result that his name appears in the Patent Records as the inventor of many useful devices--a vacuum pan, a glue clarifier, a glue cutter and other glue machinery. He worked at many sorts of trades with his own hands--machine-shop practice, blacksmithing, steam-fitting, carpentry, jewelry work, and other work-a-day employments. He was employed in a jeweller's shop, learning how to make rings and to set stones; he managed a steam launch; he was for eight years in his grandfather's glue factory, where he had practical problems in mechanics constantly brought to his attention. And he was able to combine all this hard practical work with a fair amount of shooting, golfing, and automobiling. Most of Mr. Hewitt's scientific work of recent years has been done after business hours--the long, slow, plodding toil of the experimenter. There is surely no royal road to success in invention, no matter how well a man may be equipped, no matter how favourably his means are fitted to his hands. Mr. Hewitt worked for seven years on the electrical investigations which resulted in his three great inventions; thousands of experiments were performed; thousands of failures paved the way for the first glimmer of success. His laboratory during most of these years was hidden away in the tall tower of Madison Square Garden, overlooking Madison Square, with the roar of Broadway and Twenty-third Street coming up from the distance. Here he has worked, gradually expanding the scope of his experiments, increasing his force of assistants, until he now has an office and two workshops in Madison Square Garden and is building a more extensive laboratory elsewhere. Replying to the remark that he was fortunate in having the means to carry forward his experiments in his own way, he said: "The fact is quite the contrary. I have had to make my laboratory pay as I went along." Mr. Hewitt chose his problem deliberately, and he chose one of the most difficult in all the range of electrical science, but one which, if solved, promised the most flattering rewards. "The essence of modern invention," he said, "is the saving of waste, the increase of efficiency in the various mechanical appliances." This being so, he chose the most wasteful, the least efficient of all widely used electrical devices--the incandescent lamp. Of all the power used in producing the glowing filament in the Edison bulb, about ninety-seven per cent. is absolutely wasted, only three per cent. appearing in light. This three per cent. efficiency of the incandescent lamp compares very unfavourably, indeed, with the forty per cent. efficiency of the gasoline engine, the twenty-two per cent. efficiency of the marine engine, and the ninety per cent. efficiency of the dynamo. [Illustration: The Hewitt Mercury Vapour Light. _The circular piece just above the switch button is one form of "boosting coil" which operates for a fraction of a second when the current is first turned on. The tube shown here is about an inch in diameter and several feet long. Various shapes may be used. Unless broken, the tubes never need renewal._] Mr. Hewitt first stated his problem very accurately. The waste of power in the incandescent lamp is known to be due largely to the conversion of a considerable part of the electricity used into useless heat. An electric-lamp bulb feels hot to the hand. It was therefore necessary to produce a _cool light_; that is, a light in which the energy was converted wholly or largely into light rays and not into heat rays. This, indeed, has long been one of the chief goals of ambition among inventors. Mr. Hewitt turned his attention to the gases. Why could not some incandescent gas be made to yield the much desired light without heat? This was the germ of the idea. Comparatively little was known of the action of electricity in passing through the various gases, though the problem involved had long been the subject of experiment, and Mr. Hewitt found himself at once in a maze of unsolved problems and difficulties. "I tried many different gases," he said, "and found that some of them gave good results--nitrogen, for instance--but many of them produced too much heat and presented other difficulties." Finally, he took up experiments with mercury confined in a tube from which the air had been exhausted. The mercury arc, as it is called, had been experimented with years before, had even been used as a light, although at the time he began his investigations Mr. Hewitt knew nothing of these earlier investigations. He used ordinary glass vacuum tubes with a little mercury in the bottom which he had reduced to a gas or vapour under the influence of heat or by a strong current of electricity. He found it a rocky experimental road; he has called invention "systematic guessing." "I had an equation with a large number of unknown quantities," he said. "About the only thing known for a certainty was the amount of current passing into the receptacle containing the gas, and its pressure. I had to assume values for these unknown quantities in every experiment, and you can understand what a great number of trials were necessary, using different combinations, before obtaining results. I presume thousands of experiments were made." Many other investigators had been on the very edge of the discovery. They had tried sending strong currents through a vacuum tube containing mercury vapour, but had found it impossible to control the resistance. One day, however, in running a current into the tube Mr. Hewitt suddenly recognised certain flashes; a curious phenomenon. Always it is the unexpected thing, the thing unaccounted for, that the mind of the inventor leaps upon. For there, perhaps, is the key he is seeking. Mr. Hewitt continued his experiments and found that the mercury vapour was conducting. He next discovered that _when once the high resistance of the cold mercury was overcome, a very much less powerful current found ready passage and produced a very brilliant light: the glow of the mercury vapour_. This, Mr. Hewitt says, was the crucial point, the genesis of his three inventions, for all of them are applications of the mercury arc. Thus, in short, he invented the new lamp. By the use of what is known to electricians as a "boosting coil," supplying for an instant a very powerful current, the initial resistance of the cold mercury in the tube is overcome, and then, the booster being automatically shut off, the current ordinarily used in incandescent lighting produces an illumination eight times as intense as the Edison bulb of the same candle-power. The mechanism is exceedingly simple and cheap; a button turns the light on or off; the remaining apparatus is not more complex than that of the ordinary incandescent light. The Hewitt lamp is best used in the form of a long horizontal tube suspended overhead in a room, the illumination filling all the space below with a radiance much like daylight, not glaring and sharp as with the Edison bulb. Mr. Hewitt has a large room hung with green material and thus illuminated, giving the visitor a very strange impression of a redless world. After a few moments spent here a glance out of the window shows a curiously red landscape, and red buildings, a red Madison Square, the red coming out more prominently by contrast with the blue-green of the light. "For many purposes," said Mr. Hewitt, "the light in its present form is already easily adaptable. For shopwork, draughting, reading, and other work, where the eye is called on for continued strain, the absence of red is an advantage, for I have found light without the red much less tiring to the eye. I use it in my own laboratories, and my men prefer it to ordinary daylight." In other respects, however, its colour is objectionable, and Mr. Hewitt has experimented with a view to obtaining the red rays, thereby producing a pure white light. "Why not put a red globe around your lamp?" is a common question put to the inventor. This is an apparently easy solution of the difficulty until one is reminded that red glass does not change light waves, but simply suppresses all the rays that are not red. Since there are no red rays in the Hewitt lamp, the effect of the red globe would be to cut off all the light. But Mr. Hewitt showed me a beautiful piece of pink silk, coloured with rhodimin, which, when thrown over the lamp, changes some of the orange rays into red, giving a better balanced illumination, although at some loss of brilliancy. Further experiments along this line are now in progress, investigations both with mercury vapour and with other gases. [Illustration: Testing a Hewitt Converter. _The row of incandescent lights is used, together with a voltmeter and an ammeter, to measure strength of current, resistance, and loss in converting._] Mr. Hewitt has found that the rays of his new lamp have a peculiar and stimulating effect on plant growth. A series of experiments, in which seeds of various plants were sown under exactly the same conditions, one set being exposed to daylight and one to the mercury gaslight, showed that the latter grew much more rapidly and luxuriantly. Without doubt, also, these new rays will have value in the curing of certain kinds of disease. Further experimentation with the mercury arc led to the other two inventions, the converter and the interrupter. And first of the converter: _Hewitt's Electrical Converter._--The converter is simplicity itself. Here are two kinds of electrical currents--the alternating and the direct. Science has found it much cheaper and easier to produce and transmit the alternating current than the direct current. Unfortunately, however, only the direct currents are used for such practical purposes as driving an electric car or automobile, or running an elevator, or operating machine tools or the presses in a printing-office, and they are preferable for electric lighting. The power of Niagara Falls is changed into an alternating current which can be sent at high pressure (high voltage) over the wires for long distances, but before it can be used it must, for some purposes, be _converted_ into a direct current. The apparatus now in use is cumbersome, expensive, and wasteful. Mr. Hewitt's new converter is a mere bulb of glass or of steel, which a man can hold in his hand. The inventor found that the mercury bulb, when connected with wires carrying an alternating current, had the curious and wonderful property of permitting the passage of the positive half of the alternating wave when the current has started and maintained in that direction, and of suppressing the other half; in other words, of changing an alternating current into a direct current. In this process there was a loss, the same for currents of all potentials, of only 14 volts. A three-pound Hewitt converter will do the work of a seven-hundred-pound apparatus of the old type; it will cost dollars where the other costs hundreds; and it will save a large proportion of the electricity wasted in the old process. By this simple device, therefore, Mr. Hewitt has in a moment extended the entire range of electrical development. As alternating currents can be carried longer distances by using high pressure, and the pressure or voltage can be changed by the use of a simple transformer and then changed into a direct current by the converter at any convenient point along the line, therefore more waterfalls can be utilised, more of the power of coal can be utilised, more electricity saved after it is generated, rendering the operating of all industries requiring power so much cheaper. Every electric railroad, every lighting plant, every factory using electricity, is intimately concerned in Mr. Hewitt's device, for it will cheapen their power and thereby cheapen their products to you and to me. _Hewitt's Electrical Interrupter._--The third invention is in some respects the most wonderful of the three. Technically, it is called an electric interrupter or valve. "If a long list of present-day desiderata were drawn up," says the _Electrical World and Engineer_, "it would perhaps contain no item of more immediate importance than an interrupter which shall be ... inexpensive and simple of application." This is the view of science; and therefore this device is one upon which a great many inventors, including Mr. Marconi, have recently been working; and Mr. Hewitt has been fortunate in producing the much-needed successful apparatus. The chief demand for an interrupter has come from the scores of experimenters who are working with wireless telegraphy. In 1894 Mr. Marconi began communicating through space without wires, and it may be said that wireless telegraphy has ever since been the world's imminent invention. Who has not read with profound interest the news of Mr. Marconi's success, the gradual increases of his distances? Who has not sympathised with his effort to perfect his devices, to produce a tuning apparatus by means of which messages flying through space could be kept secret? And here at last has come the invention which science most needed to complete and vitalise Marconi's work. By means of Mr. Hewitt's interrupter, the simplicity of which is as astonishing as its efficiency, the whole problem has been suddenly and easily solved. Mr. Hewitt's new interrupter may, indeed, be called the enacting clause of wireless telegraphy. By its use the transmission of powerful and persistent electrical waves is reduced to scientific accuracy. The apparatus is not only cheap, light, and simple, but it is also a great saver of electrical power. The interrupter, also, is a simple device. As I have already shown, the mercury vapour opposes a high resistance to the passage of electricity until the current reaches a certain high potential, when it gives way suddenly, allowing a current of low potential to pass through. This property can be applied in breaking a high potential current, such as is used in wireless telegraphy, so that the waves set up are exactly the proper lengths, always accurate, always the same, for sending messages through space. By the present method an ordinary arc or spark gap--that is, a spark passing between two brass balls--is employed in sending messages across the Atlantic. Marconi uses a spark as large as a man's wrist, and the noise of its passage is so deafening that the operators are compelled to wear cotton in their ears, and often they must shield their eyes from the blinding brilliancy of the discharges. Moreover, this open-air arc is subject to variations, to great losses of current, the brass balls become eroded, and the accuracy of the transmission is much impaired. All this is obviated by the cheap, simple, noiseless, sparkless mercury bulb. "What I have done," said Mr. Hewitt, "is to perfect a device by means of which messages can be sent rapidly and without the loss of current occasioned by the spark gap. In wireless telegraphy the trouble has been that it was difficult to keep the sending and the receiving instruments attuned. By the use of my interrupter this can be accomplished." And the possibilities of the mercury tube--indeed, of incandescent gas tubes in general--have by no means been exhausted. A new door has been opened to investigators, and no one knows what science will find in the treasure-house--perhaps new and more wonderful inventions, perhaps the very secret of electricity itself. Mr. Hewitt is still busily engaged in experimenting along these lines, both in the realm of abstract science and in that of practical invention. He is too careful a scientist, however, to speak much of the future, but those who are most familiar with his methods of work predict that the three inventions he has already announced are only forerunners of many other discoveries. The chief pursuit of science and invention in this day of wonders is the electrical conquest of the world, the introduction of the electrical age. The electric motor is driving out the steam locomotive, the electric light is superseding gas and kerosene, the waterfall must soon take the place of coal. But certain great problems stand like solid walls in the way of development, part of them problems of science, part of mechanical efficiency. The battle of science is, indeed, not unlike real war, charging its way over one battlement after another, until the very citadel of final secret is captured. Mr. Hewitt with his three inventions has led the way over some of the most serious present barriers in the progress of technical electricity, enabling the whole industry, in a hundred different phases of its progress, to go forward. THE END [Transcriber's Note: Obvious punctuation errors have been silently repaired. The oe-ligatures have been replaced by "oe". All words printed in small capitals have been converted to uppercase characters. Inconsistencies, for example in hyphenation and spelling, have been retained. Page 182: "Burnburg" is actually called "Bernburg".] 
43391	----	file was produced from images generously made available by Biodiversity Heritage Library.) Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LIV NOVEMBER 1898 TO APRIL 1899 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1899 COPYRIGHT 1899 BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. VOL. LIV. ESTABLISHED BY EDWARD L. YOUMANS. NO. 2. APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. DECEMBER 1898. _EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS._ CONTENTS. PAGE I. Wheat-growing Capacity of the United States. By E. ATKINSON 145 II. The Racial Geography of Europe. The Jews. By Prof. WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY. (Illustrated.) 163 III. The Playgrounds of Rural and Suburban Schools. By I. G. OAKLEY 176 IV. Up the Skeena River. By GEORGE A. DORSEY Ph. D. (Illus.) 181 V. Light and Vegetation. By Prof. D. T. MACDOUGAL 193 VI. The Stone Age in Egypt. By J. DE MORGAN 202 VII. Superstition and Crime. By Prof. E. P. EVANS 206 VIII. A Geological Romance. By Prof. J. A. UDDEN. (Illustrated.) 222 IX. The Season of the Year. By GRANT ALLEN 230 X. Brain Weights and Intellectual Capacity. By JOSEPH SIMMS M. D. 243 XI. Speleology or Cave Exploration. By M. E. A. MARTEL 255 XII. Sketch of Charles Henry Hitchcock. (With Portrait.) 260 XIII. Editor's Table: Evolution and Education.--David Ames Wells.--A Borrowed Foundation 269 XIV. Scientific Literature 274 XV. Fragments of Science 282 NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 72 FIFTH AVENUE. SINGLE NUMBER 50 CENTS. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION $5.00. COPYRIGHT 1898 BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. Entered at the Post Office at New York and admitted for transmission through the mails at second-class rates. [Illustration: CHARLES H. HITCHCOCK.] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. DECEMBER 1898. THE WHEAT-GROWING CAPACITY OF THE UNITED STATES. BY EDWARD ATKINSON. In 1880 it happened to fall to me to make a forecast of the very great reduction in the price of wheat in Great Britain which could then be predicated on the lessening cost of transportation from Chicago to the seaboard thence to British ports which was then sure to be soon followed by a large reduction in the railway charges for bringing the wheat to Chicago from the other Western centers of distribution. I then alleged that the time was not far off when even if the price of wheat in Mark Lane were reduced from the then existing rate of fifty-two shillings per quarter to thirty-four shillings it would still yield as full a return to the Western farmer as it had yielded in previous years at fifty shillings and upward. This forecast attracted great attention and has since been made the subject of very much bitter controversy especially since the fall in prices was much more rapid than I then thought it could be and was carried to a much lower point than any one could have then anticipated. It will be remarked that thirty-four shillings in Mark Lane is at the rate of one dollar and three cents per bushel of sixty pounds. From time to time I have almost been forced to defend the position then taken notably when asked to appear before the Royal Commission on Depression in Agriculture at one of their sessions where I was kept upon the stand for two full days in the effort of the excellent English farmers and landowners to prove that the American farmer had been ruined by the reduction in the price of wheat which the majority of that commission attributed to the demonetization of silver. The whole tone of that investigation and of a large part of the treatment of the wheat question in Great Britain has been one of complaint and of alleged wrong to British agriculture because the United States had succeeded in supplying the masses of the people of the United Kingdom with cheap bread with sufficient profit to themselves to keep up the supply. Now comes what may be called a cry of alarm from a scientist of highest repute lest England may be deprived even of an adequate supply of wheat and lest the price should be forced to an exorbitant point. This view of the case was stated at great length by Sir William Crookes when assuming the presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at the recent meeting in Bristol. This address is published in full in the Times of September 8th the portion devoted to the wheat question filling three out of six columns of closely printed text; the other three are devoted to a complete review of the existing conditions of science. I venture to give a few extracts which will convey to the reader the aspect of the wheat question from this essentially British point of view. Sir William Crookes begins with a sort of apology which the writer can fully appreciate. He says: Statistics are rarely attractive to a listening audience, but they are necessary evils, and those of this evening are unusually doleful.... I am constrained to show that our wheat-producing soil is totally unequal to the strain put upon it. After wearying you with a survey of the universal dearth to be expected, I hope to point a way out of the colossal dilemma. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty. One of the singular facts which becomes quickly apparent to any one who deals with this subject in Great Britain is the inability of the English farmer to think about agriculture except in terms of wheat. Now we have an example of our English scientist of the highest repute who seems to ignore all other grain and to predict future starvation on an expected deficiency in the supply of wheat. Sir William Crookes proceeds: The consumption of wheat per head of the population (unit consumption) is over six bushels per annum; and, taking the population at 40,000,000, we require no less than 240,000,000 bushels of wheat, increasing annually by 2,000,000 bushels to supply the increase of population. Of the total amount of wheat consumed in the United Kingdom we grow twenty-five and import seventy-five per cent. He then deals with the impending scarcity saying: To arrest this impending danger it has been proposed that an amount of 64,000,000 bushels of wheat should be purchased by the state and stored in national granaries, not to be opened except to remedy deterioration of grain, or in view of national disaster rendering starvation imminent. This 64,000,000 bushels would add another fourteen weeks' life to the population. After dealing with the fact that while it might be possible for the United Kingdom to supply itself with its own wheat at an average of twenty-nine and a half bushels to the acre he goes on to say that this would require thirteen thousand square miles of British territory increasing at the rate of one hundred square miles per annum; but he says it would be clearly impossible to assign so large a proportion of the area of the United Kingdom to a single crop without suffering in other matters adding: In any case, owing to our cold, damp climate and capricious weather, the wheat crop is hazardous, and for the present our annual deficit of 180,000,000 bushels must be imported. A permanently higher price for wheat is, I fear, a calamity that ere long must be faced. I can imagine with what a relish the Royal Commission on the Depression of Agriculture would have received this prophecy of a permanently higher price for wheat. Sir William Crookes goes on to say: Wheat is the most sustaining food grain of the great Caucasian race, which includes the peoples of Europe, United States, British America, the white inhabitants of South Africa, Australasia, parts of South America, and the white population of the European colonies. He then points out how rapidly the consumers of wheat have increased yet failing to attribute this increase in part to the rapid reduction in the cost. He says: In 1871 the bread-eaters of the world numbered 371,000,000; in 1881, 416,000,000; in 1891, 472,600,000; and at the present time they number 516,500,000. The augmentation of the world's bread-eating population in a geometrical ratio is evidenced by the fact that the yearly aggregates grow progressively larger.... To supply 516,500,000 bread-eaters, if each bread-eating unit is to have his usual ration, will require a total of 2,324,000,000 bushels for seed and food. According to the best authorities, the total supplies from the 1897-'98 harvest are 1,921,000,000. It will be observed that while the English average consumption is said to be six bushels the average employed in this computation is four and a half bushels per head. He then remarks upon the large harvests for seven years saying: Bread-eaters have almost eaten up the reserves of wheat, and the 1897 harvest being under average, the conditions become serious.... It is clear we are confronted with a colossal problem that must tax the wits of the wisest. Up to recent years the growth of wheat has kept pace with demands. As wheat-eaters increased, the acreage under wheat expanded. We forget that the wheat-growing area is of strictly limited extent, and that a few million acres regularly absorbed soon amount to a formidable number. The present position being so gloomy, let us consider future prospects. He then deals successively with the United States Russia Canada and other countries. In regard to the United States he remarks: Practically there remains no uncultivated prairie land in the United States suitable for wheat-growing. The virgin land has been rapidly absorbed, until at present there is no land left for wheat without reducing the area for maize, hay, and other necessary crops. It is almost certain that within a generation the ever-increasing population of the United States will consume all the wheat grown within its borders, and will be driven to import, and, like ourselves, will scramble for a lion's share of the wheat crop of the world. It is difficult for a citizen of the United States who has given any attention to the potential of our land to conceive of such views being held by an Englishman of highest scientific intelligence. When I was in England last summer I had a long interview with the editor of one of the papers of widest influence in all Great Britain. I then remarked that there were forces in action in the United States in three or four different directions which would profoundly change all the conditions of British industry and render the English-speaking people of the United Kingdom and the United States more and more interdependent. It is seldom that one finds more than an occasional half a column in any great English paper devoted to the subject of our economic relations and to the development either of the American iron industry of its agriculture or of the cotton production and manufacture. Yet in all these branches of industry profound changes of world-wide importance and yet of greater importance to the people of Great Britain are now in progress. I may venture to say that this address of Sir William Crookes marks even a more profound ignorance of the forces in action in this country than even I had ever comprehended. Sir William Crookes next submits the following computation: The rate of consumption for seed and food by the whole world of bread-eaters was 4.15 bushels per unit per annum for the eight years ending 1878, and at the present time is 4.5 bushels.... Should all the wheat-growing countries add to their area to the utmost capacity, on the most careful calculation the yield would give us only an addition of some 100,000,000 acres, supplying at the average world yield of 12.7 bushels to the acre, 1,270,000,000 bushels, just enough to supply the increase of population among bread-eaters till the year 1931. At the present time there exists a deficit in the wheat area of thirty-one thousand square miles.... When provision shall have been made if possible to feed 230,000,000 units likely to be added to the bread-eating populations by 1931, by the complete occupancy of the arable areas of the temperate zone now partially occupied, where can be grown the additional 330,000,000 bushels of wheat required ten years later by a hungry world? If bread fails--not only us, but all the bread-eaters of the world--what are we to do? We are born wheat-eaters. Other races, vastly superior to us in numbers, but differing widely in material and intellectual progress, are eaters of Indian corn, rice, millet, and other grains; but none of these grains have the food value, the concentrated health-sustaining power of wheat, and it is on this account that the accumulated experience of civilized mankind has set wheat apart as the fit and proper food for the development of muscle and brains. Sir William then proceeds to deal with the salvation by chemistry. But before taking notes from that part of his address is it not singular to remark this tendency of the scientist as well as of the English farmer to think only in terms of wheat wholly ignoring other grains? It may be interesting to point out the exact difference in the nutrients. Wheat flour is analyzed in the following statement: Water 11.6 Protein 11.1 Fats 1.1 Carbohydrates 75.6 Mineral matters 0.6 ---- Total nutrients 88.4 Potential energy in one pound 1 660 calories. Corn or maize meal differs only as follows: Water 14.5 Protein 9.1 Fats 3.8 Carbohydrates 71.0 Mineral matters 1.6 ---- Total nutrients 85.5 Potential energy in one pound 1 650 calories. Oatmeal: Water 7.7 Protein 15.1 Fats 7.1 Carbohydrates 68.1 Mineral matters 2.0 ---- Total nutrients 92.3 Potential energy in one pound 1 845 calories. Rye flour: Water 13.1 Protein 6.7 Fats 0.8 Carbohydrates 78.7 Mineral matters 0.7 ---- Total nutrients 86.9 Potential energy in one pound 1 620 calories. It will be remarked that the difference between maize meal and wheat flour consists only in a slightly larger proportion of fats and a slightly less proportion of protein a matter very easily balanced by giving consideration to the other kinds of food which may be used by the bread-eater. Again it is hardly to be supposed that the Scotchmen who listened to Sir William Crookes admitted in their minds that wheat flour possessed any greater potential energy in the development either of muscle or of mind than the oatmeal to which they have been habituated for so many generations. I doubt if any New England Yankee who had been brought up on the diet of corn (maize) bread and baked beans the latter supplying the protein element in abundance would admit any greater development of the muscle or brain by exclusive dependence on wheat for the bread of life. It is not however my purpose to deal with the relative food values of wheat and other grains; it is simply to take up this extraordinary delusion of Sir William Crookes in respect to the potential of the wheat-producing area of this country. His theory is salvation by chemistry and he rightfully calls attention to the necessity for obtaining a cheap and abundant supply of nitrogen. All the other elements for fertilizing the soil are relatively abundant at low cost especially in this country. Our enormous supply of the phosphates of lime and potash gives assurance on this matter and our one deficiency or rather the one element heretofore of high cost has been the necessary proportion of nitrogen required to maintain an even balance in the soil. I am surprised that Sir William Crookes should attribute so little importance to the recent discovery of the influence of bacteria which living and dying in nodules attached to the stalks of the leguminous plants dissociate the nitrogen of the atmosphere where the supply is unlimited converting it to the nutrition of the plant and thence to the renovation of the soil. Sir William deals only with the renovating qualities of clover having apparently no comprehension of the existence of the cow-pea vine the soya bean the alfalfa and many other types of legumes by which the partially exhausted soil especially of the South is now being renovated with great rapidity at a low cost. Sir William's hopes of nitrogen seem to be based on some method being found to save the sewage of cities but mainly on the conversion of the water power of Niagara and other great falls to the generation of electricity and thence to the dissociation of the nitrogen of the atmosphere. The point to which I wish to direct attention and inquiry is this alleged nearly complete taking up of the land of the United States capable of producing wheat in paying quantities. The question which Sir William Crookes puts is this: He says there is a deficit in the wheat area of thirty-one thousand square miles which must be converted to wheat-growing in order to keep up with the increasing demand of the world to prevent wheat starvation in less than one generation. It will be observed that the present necessities of the world are computed by Sir William Crookes at 2 324 000 000 bushels of which this country will supply 600 000 000 to 700 000 000 bushels from an area of land devoted to wheat of 71 000 square miles a fraction over two per cent of the area of the United States omitting Alaska. The problem may then be stated in these terms: Given a demand of the wheat-consuming population of the world for this whole supply of 2 324 000 000 bushels this country could supply it at the present average per acre by devoting two hundred and fifty thousand square miles to this crop or less than ten per cent of the area omitting Alaska. We could supply the world's present demand but of course such computations are purely speculative. I venture to say that if a contract could be entered into by the bread-eaters of the world with the farmers of the United States giving them an assurance of a price equal to one dollar a bushel in London or a fraction under thirty-three shillings per quarter of eight bushels of sixty pounds each which would yield to the American farmer from sixty to eighty cents per bushel on the farm the land now under cultivation in wheat and not required for any other crop or for pasture would be opened in the United States which would be devoted to this service year by year as fast as the consumption called for it. In fact there are now fully one hundred thousand square miles of land 64 000 000 acres fully suitable to the production of wheat at fifteen bushels to the acre practically unoccupied in any branch of agriculture which would be devoted to wheat on an assured price of one dollar a bushel in Mark Lane yielding 960 000 000 bushels. Or to limit the question yet more: Sir William Crookes states the needs of the people of the United Kingdom at the present time to be 240 000 000 bushels increasing at a rate of less than two per cent per annum of which twenty-five per cent is derived from her own soil. If John Bull in place of building granaries could offer thirty-three shillings a quarter or one dollar a bushel in London as a permanent price for the next thirty years would not Uncle Sam accept the offer? and if Uncle Sam should then ask for bids among the States are there not several single States or Territories that would take the contract each for itself? Having put that question I now propose to submit an inquiry in due form in order to sustain my own belief that we can supply the whole present and the increasing demand of Great Britain for the next thirty years with six bushels of wheat per head at a dollar a bushel from land situated wholly in the Indian Territory not yet open to private entry but which may soon be open when the Indian titles have all been purchased. Or again I undertake to say that the State of Texas can meet this whole demand without impairing in the slightest degree its present products of grain cotton wool and meats and without appropriating the use of more than a small fraction of the area of that single State which has not yet been fenced in or subjected to the plow to the production of wheat. Perhaps it would be better to put a more simple proposition in order to bring out what would be perfectly feasible. Let it be assumed that the British public should really become so alarmed as to be willing to put up the granaries which have been suggested for storing fourteen weeks' consumption or 64 000 000 bushels. That would require a very large capital which would yield no income on which there would be a heavy loss of interest and a considerable risk of damage to the wheat during the period of storage. In place of this a feasible plan would be to put up the capital which would be required for building these granaries invest it in consols and pledge it as collateral security for the fulfillment of a contract running for thirty years for the annual purchase of 10 000 000 bushels of wheat per month or say 128 000 000 bushels a year or twice the quantity proposed to be stored. There are several large dealers in grain and provisions in the United States who would be ready to take this contract and to put up a sufficient sum of capital invested in United States bonds to serve as security for prompt delivery. An assured supply of 128 000 000 bushels in addition to the ordinary supply might allay the fear of scarcity and high price of bread. It may here be observed that the low average crop per acre of the United States has been due to the inclusion of wheat grown on land partially exhausted by cropping or not well adapted to this grain. The all-wheat as well as the all-cotton and all-tobacco methods of ignorant farming or cropping year after year are now very rapidly giving place to varied crops coupled with an increase of product per acre. No agency has been of such service in this matter as the Agricultural Experiment Stations now established in almost every State under the supervision of men of the highest capacity. Under this system wheat which requires a few days of machine work in the spring and autumn occupying very little time of the farmer himself is rapidly becoming the surplus or money crop of farms otherwise maintained on the alternate products. Under such cultivation an average crop of twenty bushels to the acre would be assured in many sections much more. One hundred and twenty-eight million bushels at twenty bushels per acre would require 6 400 000 acres or ten thousand square miles. As an alternate with other crops in a rotation of four this would call for only forty thousand square miles in varied farming. In order to satisfy the anxieties of Sir William Crookes lest land should be taken from other necessary work this area might be divided among several States and Territories say five thousand square miles among eight. Oklahoma (38 719 square miles) was opened to settlement only seven years since and has yet a great deal of unoccupied land. It will this year raise 13 000 000 bushels of wheat from 850 square miles devoted to the crop. Give Oklahoma five thousand square miles the unoccupied Indian Territory (30 272 square miles) would take all the rest as soon as open; but we may only assign five thousand square miles to that area. Five thousand more might be assigned to the limestone section of Virginia in the valley of the Shenandoah and its tributaries; five thousand each to Kentucky (40 400 square miles) and Tennessee (42 050 square miles) while the great wheat-growing States--Kansas (82 080 square miles) Nebraska (77 510 square miles) Minnesota (83 365 square miles) and the two Dakotas (148 445 square miles)--would compete for the contract each to open a little patch of five thousand square miles not yet adjacent to railways. We should thus have exhausted the area called for without regard to the instant competition which would come from California (158 360 square miles) Oregon (96 030 square miles) and Washington (69 180 square miles) and probably from Pennsylvania (45 215 square miles) and other Eastern or Southern States. At a dollar per bushel in London no difficulty would be found in placing this contract even without resort to Texas (265 780 square miles) which could take the whole on but a small portion of its area not yet under the plow. The only additional measure which would then be required would be one which must come in any event--namely the neutralization of the ports of export and import of food in the United States and Great Britain and in such other countries as may choose to join together with the neutralization of a ferry or sea way for the transportation of the food wherein no hostile shot should be fired and no seizure of private property permitted on the part of any nation the condition of this understanding being that if any other nation ventured to question or contest this dedication of a neutral way for the conveyance of food to the purposes of peace the navies of Great Britain and of the United States would be united to force its acceptance and to sweep from the ocean the fleet of every state or nation which ventured to contest this measure. That would be a suitable measure for beginning to make a right use of navies--for the protection of commerce and for the destruction of every fleet or vessel which did not accept the principle that private property not contraband of war should be exempt from seizure upon the high seas coupled with a declaration limiting contraband of war so that it may never be made to include customary articles of commerce especially food not now contraband. * * * * * The foregoing text was set in type and one hundred advance proof sheets were supplied which have been sent by the writer to the Secretaries of Agriculture and the chiefs of the Agricultural Experiment Stations in all the States to which we look for any considerable product of wheat. The replies are so complete and so numerous as to make it impossible to incorporate a full digest of the whole case within the limits of the present article. A supplement will be prepared for a later number of this journal in which this information will be tabulated. For the present purpose I may avail myself only of a part of the data which have been sent to me. 1. The evidence suffices to prove that there is not a State named above which could not set apart five thousand square miles for the cultivation of wheat in a rotation of four without trenching in the slightest degree upon any other crop. 2. In previous essays in which I have dealt with the potential of the agriculture of this country I have very guardedly computed but one half our total area of three million square miles (omitting Alaska) as being arable land suitable for the plow. The returns now in my hands would render it suitable to increase that area to two thirds or two million square miles subject to cultivation. 3. The area now under the plow for the production of our principal crops for the year 1897 is given in the table below. If miscellaneous crops be added to these principal crops the cultivated land of this country does not now exceed and in fact does not reach twenty per cent of the arable land while from the cultivated portion a progressive increase in product may be expected under the impetus of improved methods of farming on lessening areas in each farm. ------------+------------+------+-------------+-------+-------------- | Acreage. |Yield.| Product. |Price. | Value. ------------+------------+------+-------------+-------+-------------- | | Per | Bushels. |Cents. | | |acre. | | | Maize | 80 095 051 | 23.8 |1 902 967 933| 26.3 | $501 072 952 Wheat | 39 465 066 | 13.4 | 530 149 168| 80.8 | 428 547 121 Oats | 25 730 375 | 27.2 | 698 767 809| 21.2 | 147 974 719 Barley | 2 719 116 | 24.5 | 66 685 127| 37.7 | 25 142 139 Rye | 1 703 561 | 16.1 | 27 363 324| 44.7 | 12 239 647 Buckwheat | 717 836 | 20.9 | 14 997 451| 42.1 | 6 319 188 |------------+------+-------------+-------+-------------- All grain |150 431 005 | |3 240 930 812| |$1 121 295 766 Hay | 42 426 770 | 1.43 | 60 664 876| 6.62 | 401 390 728 Cotton | 23 273 209 | | 8 532 705| 6.78 | 291 811 564 |------------| | | |-------------- |216 130 984 | | | |$1 814 498 058 ------------+------------+------+-------------+-------+-------------- Maize 125 150 square miles; Wheat 61 660 " " Oats 40 200 " " Barley 4 250 " " Rye 2 660 " " Buckwheat 1 120 " " ------- 235 040 " " Hay 66 290 " " Cotton 36 520 " " ------- 337 850 " " The area under wheat in 1897 was a fraction under forty million acres or a little less than sixty-two thousand square miles. The high price secured for that crop has led to an increase in land under wheat in 1898 to a fraction under seventy-one thousand square miles (nine thousand square miles added) on which the largest crop ever known has doubtless been raised variously computed at the present time from 620 000 000 to 700 000 000 bushels. The area now under wheat is therefore less than four per cent of our arable land. In order to develop our potential in wheat it will be best to limit our present consideration to three States only--namely Minnesota North and South Dakota--from which we derive the greater part of our spring wheat. The area of these three States is two hundred and thirty-two thousand square miles disregarding fractions. The land which is deemed to be suitable for wheat growing is estimated by the officials from whom I have derived reports at one hundred and sixty thousand square miles. The crop of 1898 is computed at 190 000 000 bushels a quantity sufficient to supply Great Britain with all that she needs in addition to her domestic production. It has been grown on an area of less than twenty thousand square miles or upon one eighth part of the land of these three States only; the rest of the wheat land can be as surely and profitably devoted to the production of wheat as that part already under that crop. The fact may be recalled that the territory which now constitutes the two States of North and South Dakota began to be computed separately from other States only in 1880 when a little under 3 000 000 bushels were credited to that territory. The minimum product of these two States this year will be 100 000 000 bushels. One of the authorities upon whom I rested for absolute information is Mr. L. G. Powers chief of the Bureau of Labor of the State of Minnesota in whose Annual Report for 1896 is the most exhaustive study of the grain production of the Mississippi Valley that has ever been made. I therefore do not hesitate to incorporate in this article his comments upon the proof sheets sent to him: Duluth elevator and | | | | inspection charges | 0.80 | 0.80 | 0.80 | 0.80 Lake freight, Duluth to | | | | Buffalo | 1.40 | 1.25 | 1.25 | 1.75 Elevator charges and | | | | commission at Buffalo | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 Canal freight, Buffalo | | | | to New York | 3.00 | 3.00 | 2.75 | 2.50 Elevator charges, etc., | | | | in New York | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 Ocean freight, New York | | | | to Liverpool | 8.00 | 3.50 | 4.50 | 6.00 |---------|---------|-----------|------------- Totals | 25.50 | 20.85 | 21.00 | 22.75 -------------------------+---------+---------+-----------+------------- General average, 22.525 cents per bushel. It will be remarked that Mr. Powers says I am wrong in not asserting a sure continuation of the decline in the price of wheat which I predicted in 1880. In setting up one dollar a bushel in London as the standard of this inquiry, I had no thought that our farmers could be made happy for the next thirty years by any hope of securing so high a price. In my predictions in 1880 I said that the time was not then far off when the farmers of the Mississippi Valley would secure as large a remuneration from their wheat at thirty-four shillings per quarter in London as they had been gaining from a previous average of fifty-two shillings. I might then have fixed the lessened price at twenty-eight shillings, and at the present time I have a greater expectation of a reduction in the price of wheat in Mark Lane to less than twenty-eight shillings a quarter, or eighty-five cents a bushel, than I had in 1880 that it would so soon reach thirty-four shillings. I merely adopted a dollar a bushel as an arbitrary standard on which an abundant supply of bread at low cost would be absolutely assured to the people of England. In fact, as I stated before the Royal Commission on Depression of Agriculture, it is not probable that a reduction in the price of wheat to forty cents a bushel on Western farms or sixty-five to seventy cents a bushel in England would stop the growth of this grain, although it might check an increase. When the price went down to a very low point on the last excessive crop it is probable that 100,000,000 bushels of wheat were fed to swine and to cattle. It proved to make better pork and beef than maize or Indian corn, and, as the price of meat did not decline in anything like the proportion to the price of wheat, the farmers who thus fed their excess secured a profit which the sale of the crude grain might not have given. In this comment Mr. Powers deals with the reduction in the number of foreclosures in Minnesota. Attention should be called to the fact that the United States census investigation for which a million dollars was appropriated, for the purpose of recording farm mortgages in 1890, disclosed the fact that in the ten great grain-growing States of the middle West two thirds of the farms were then free of any mortgage of any kind, and were well stocked; the incumbrance on the remaining third being less than forty per cent of the computed value of the mortgaged farms. Since that date several State investigations have been made, leading to the conclusion that not exceeding twenty per cent of the farms in these States are now under any incumbrance of any kind. In the more prosperous parts of Minnesota and other wheat sections since the substitution of intelligent and varied agriculture for the single wheat crop, foreclosures have almost ceased, such as do occur being attributed to special causes; while such is the abundance of capital accumulated in this section that the rates of interest on safe investments, which but a few years since were nearly double those prevailing in the seaboard commercial cities, are now about even. When certain causes lately produced a short stringency in the money markets of the East, remittances were made from these Western cities for investment in Eastern commercial paper. In regard to wheat production at a fixed price in London, the Commissioner of Agriculture and Labor of North Dakota remarks: "Wheat at one dollar per bushel in London would net the North Dakota farmer on the average about seventy-five cents per bushel on the railroad track. At that price as a standard, every farmer in the State would utilize all the land he has, and buy up more of the land now lying idle and in the hands of speculators. It would increase immigration so that nearly all the vacant Government land would be taken up. We also have over one million acres of school and State land, of which at least eighty per cent is suitable for raising wheat. Such a price would give North Dakota a boom that never had its equal." A few words may be given to the report from Texas. The Secretary of the Board of Agriculture states that "the area of arable land of fair quality, including pasture that might be put under the plow in this State, is two hundred thousand square miles; about one hundred thousand square miles suitable for wheat and other grains lying north of parallel 31°; about one hundred thousand square miles lying south of that line adapted to cotton, sugar, fruits, and vegetables of all kinds." An unexpected reply comes from Idaho, as yet insignificant in wheat production, stating that the potential of that State under the conditions named might reach 400,000,000 bushels. Again, from Arkansas, to which State we have looked more for excellent cotton than for grain, "there are fifteen million acres of good wheat land; wheat is fast becoming a cash crop, displacing cotton--the capacity of a considerable part of the land at the beginning being forty bushels to the acre, which, being much better than five-cent cotton, is leading the farmers to take advantage of existing prices." Time has not sufficed since my questions were sent out for replies to reach me from Oregon, Washington, and Montana, where the potential in wheat production is probably equal to that of Minnesota, North and South Dakota combined. Sir William Crookes makes reference to the future necessity of providing fertilizers, a matter to which the closest attention is now being given by the cultivation of renovating crops. But regard must be given to the fact that we have the most complete and adequate supply of phosphate of lime and phosphate of potash in the vast deposits of bone or mineral phosphates of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida, while again we may look to nitrate of soda as a very inexpensive source of nitrogen, of which the most adequate supply can be assured at very low cost. Known methods are also being applied to saving the enormous waste of nitrogen from our coke ovens and iron furnaces. I almost feel it right to apologize to Sir William Crookes for the presentation of these facts. My function is that of the practical business man who deals with these economic problems wholly from that point of view, and not from the high standard of a complete mastery of the physical sciences. As I have stated, I happen to have dealt with this question several times at meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and in other ways in Great Britain as well as in this country. I deem it of the utmost importance at the present time that the interdependence of the English-speaking people should be brought into view in the most conspicuous manner. In their relative production and conditions the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the United States are the complement of each other. Their mutual relation or interdependence is now being recognized, and it can not be long before many of the legal obstructions to mutual service will be removed. The people of this country are now passing through a stage in their economic education closely corresponding to that through which Great Britain passed between 1840 and 1856 under the wise leadership of Sir Robert Peel, Richard Cobden, and William E. Gladstone. We move more quickly, not only in acts but in ideas, than we did fifty years ago. The revolution of ideas which has followed the revolution of institutions in the Southern States has made the people of this country into one homogeneous nation. A revolution of ideas in regard to the conditions of international commerce will presently bring the English-speaking people of the world into one homogeneous body governed by the same common law, the same common principles of action, and the same policy in the collection of revenue. When thus united, there can be no competition in the commerce of the world on the part of the continental states of Europe under their present burdens--the blood tax of standing armies and navies and the money tax of debts that can never be paid. There have been within a few months two witnesses to the growing influence and power of the English-speaking people when united for the maintenance of commerce and for the conduct of the works of peace, order, and industry: one is the warning of the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, calling upon the states of middle Europe to unite their forces in order to remain capable of maintaining government by privilege and taxation by force of arms; the other, the recent manifesto of the enlightened ruler of Russia, calling upon the states of continental Europe to disarm, lest they should hereafter be incapable of competition with the English-speaking people of the world when they become bound together by a union of mutual service and by community of interest which without any formal alliance will give to them the chief control in rendering service by the exchange of product for product to all other states and nations, to the mutual benefit of all who are thus joined in the bonds of peace. On my visit to Russia last year, to meet the leading economists and statisticians of Europe, it was stated to me by well-informed men that a plan had been considered by several continental states in the event of war to change the present international custom by making food products contraband of war, the purpose being to cripple England. To such desperate conditions have some of the European states been brought under the burden of the policy of blood and iron. My comment upon this insane proposal was that I hoped it might become a matter of public discussion, since nothing could so surely and quickly bring about a commercial union of the English-speaking people, to the end that, even if no other alliance were made, their navies might at any moment be combined for the protection of their commerce, and for the total cessation of any interference by war vessels or privateers with their traffic. The prime motive of this article is to remove from the minds of our English friends many false impressions which I have constantly met in my intercourse even among men who hold important positions, of which the address of Sir William Crookes is but an extreme expression, and to bring into common view a comprehension of the resources of this country and of the mutual dependence of the United Kingdom and the United States in the supply and consumption not only of wheat, but of all the other necessaries of life. THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY. (_Lowell Institute Lectures, 1896._) BY WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, PH. D., ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY; LECTURER IN ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. SUPPLEMENT.--THE JEWS.[1] Social solidarity, the clearest expression of which to-day is nationality, is the resultant of a multitude of factors. Foremost among these stand unity of language, a common heritage of tradition and belief, and the permanent occupation of a definite territory. The first two are largely psychological in essence. The third, a material circumstance, is necessary rather to insure the stability of the others than for its own sake; although, as we know, attachment to the soil may in itself become a positive factor in patriotism. Two European peoples alone are there which, although landless, have succeeded, notwithstanding, in a maintenance of their social consciousness, almost at the level of nationality. Both Gypsies and Jews are men without a country. Of these, the latter offer perhaps the most remarkable example, for the Gypsies have never disbanded tribally. They still wander about eastern Europe and Asia Minor in organized bands, after the fashion of the nomad peoples of the East. The Jews, on the other hand, have maintained their solidarity in all parts of the earth, even in individual isolation one from another. They wander not gregariously in tribes, often not even in families. Their seed is scattered like the plant spores of which the botanists tell us; which, driven by wind or sea, independently travel thousands of miles before striking root or becoming fecund. True, the Jews bunch wherever possible. This is often a necessity imposed for self-preservation; but in their enforced migrations their associations must change kaleidoscopically from place to place. Not all has been said even yet of the unique achievement of this landless people. That the Jews have preserved their individuality despite all mutations of environment goes without saying. They have done more. They have accomplished this without absolute unity of language. Forced of necessity to adopt the speech of their immediate neighbors, they have only where congregated in sufficient numbers been able either to preserve or to evolve a distinctive speech. In Spain and the Balkan states they make use of Spanish; in Russia and Poland they speak a corrupt German; and in the interior of Morocco, Arabic. Nevertheless, despite these discouragements of every kind, they still constitute a distinctive social unit wherever they chance to be. This social individuality of the Jews is of a peculiar sort. Bereft of linguistic and geographical support, it could not be political. The nineteenth century, says Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, is the age of nationality; meaning obviously territorial nationality, the product of contiguity, not birth. To this, he says, the Jew is indifferent, typifying still the Oriental tribal idea. As a result he is out of harmony with his environment. An element of dislike of a political nature on the part of the Christian is added to the irreconcilability of religious belief. It has ever been the Aryan versus the Semite in religion throughout all history, as Renan has observed; and to-day it has also become the people _versus_ the nation, as well as the Jew _versus_ the Christian. Granted that this political dissonance is largely the fault of the Gentile, its existence must be acknowledged, nevertheless. [Illustration: GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION of JEWS.] How has this remarkable result been achieved? How, bereft of two out of three of the essentials of nationality, has the Jew been enabled to perpetuate his social consciousness? Is the superior force of religion, perhaps abnormally developed, alone able to account for it all? Is it a case of compensatory development, analogous in the body to a loss of eyesight remedied through greater delicacy of finger touch? Or is there some hidden, some unsuspected factor, which has contributed to this result? We have elsewhere shown that a fourth element of social solidarity is sometimes, though rarely, found, in a community of physical descent. That, in other words, to the cementing bonds of speech, tradition, belief, and contiguity, is added the element of physical brotherhood--that is to say, of race. Can it be that herein is a partial explanation of the social individuality of the Jewish people? It is a question for the scientist alone. Race, as we constantly maintain, despite the abuses of the word, really is to be measured only by physical characteristics. The task before us is to apply the criteria of anthropological science, therefore, to the problems of Jewish derivation and descent. Only incidentally and as matters of contributory interest shall we consider the views of the linguists, the archæologists, and the students of religious traditions. Our testimony is derived from facts of shape of head, color of hair and eye, of stature, and the like. These alone are the data indicative of racial descent. To these the geographer may add the probabilities derived from present distribution in Europe. No more do we need to settle the primary racial facts. Further speculations concerning matters rather than men belong to the historian and the philologist. The number and geographical distribution of the chosen people of Israel is of great significance in its bearing upon the question of their origin.[2] While, owing to their fluid ubiquitousness, it is exceedingly difficult to enumerate them exactly, probability indicates that there are to-day, the world over, between eight and nine million Jews. Of these, six or seven million are inhabitants of Europe, the remainder being sparsely scattered over the whole earth, from one end to the other. Their distribution in Europe, as our map opposite shows, is exceedingly uneven. Fully one half of these descendants of Jacob reside in Russia, there being four or five million Jews in that country alone. Austria-Hungary stands next in order, with two million odd souls. After these two there is a wide gap. No other European country is comparable with them except it be Germany and Roumania with their six or seven hundred thousand each. The British Isles contain relatively few, possibly one hundred thousand, these being principally in London. They are very rare in Scotland and Ireland--only a thousand or fifteen hundred apiece. Holland contains also about a hundred thousand, half of them in the celebrated Ghetto at Amsterdam. Then follow France with eighty thousand more or less, and Italy with perhaps two thirds as many. From Scandinavia they have always been rigidly excluded, from Sweden till the beginning and from Norway until nearly the middle of this century. Spain, although we hear much of the Spanish Jew, contains practically no indigenous Israelites. It is estimated that there were once about a million there settled, but the persecutions of the fifteenth century drove them forth all over Europe, largely to the Balkan states and Africa. There are a good many along these Mediterranean shores of Africa, principally in Morocco and Tripoli. The number decreases as we approach Egypt and Palestine, the ancient center of Jewish dispersion. As to America, it is estimated, although we know nothing certainly, that there are about a half million Jews scattered through our cities in the United States. New York city, according to the last census, contained about eighty thousand Poles and Russians, most of whom, it may be assumed, were Jews. But they have come since in ever-increasing numbers, with the great exodus from Russia, at the rate of scores of thousands annually. A recent writer places their present number in New York city at a quarter of a million. The British provinces, on the other hand, do not seem to offer great attractions; as late as 1870, for example, the census in Nova Scotia could not discover a solitary Jew. A more suggestive index of the problems of Jewish distribution, however, is offered in the ratio of the number of Jews to the entire population. This is directly illustrated by our map. To be sure, this represents the situation twenty years ago, but no great change in relativity is to be suspected since that time. Even the wholesale exodus from Russia of recent years has not yet drawn off any large proportion of its vast body of population. Inspection of our map shows that the relative frequency of Jews increases in proportion to the progressive darkening of the tints. This brings out with startling clearness the reason for the recent anti-Semitic uprisings in both Russia, Austria, and the German Empire. A specific "center of gravity" of the Jewish people, as Leroy-Beaulieu puts it, is at once indicated in western Russia. The highest proportion, fifteen per cent, more or less, appears, moreover, to be entirely restricted to the Polish provinces, with the sole exception of the government of Grodno. About this core lies a second zone, including the other west Russian governments, as well as the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Germany, as it appears, is sharply divided from its eastern neighbors, all along the political frontier. Not even its former Polish territory, Posen, is to-day relatively thickly settled with Jews. Hostile legislation it is, beyond a doubt, which so rigidly holds back the Jew from immigration along this line. _Anti-Semitismus_ is not, therefore, to-day to any great extent an uprising against an existing evil; rather does it appear to be a protest against a future possibility. Germany shudders at the dark and threatening cloud of population of the most ignorant and wretched description which overhangs her eastern frontier. Berlin must not, they say, be allowed to become a new Jerusalem for the horde of Russian exiles. That also is our American problem. This great Polish swamp of miserable human beings, terrific in its proportions, threatens to drain itself off into our country as well, unless we restrict its ingress. As along the German frontier, so also toward the east, it is curious to note how rapidly the percentage of Jews decreases as we pass over into Great Russia. The governments of St. Petersburg, Novgorod, and Moscow have no greater Jewish contingent of population than has France or Italy; their Jewish problem is far less difficult than that of our own country is bound to be in the future. This clearly defined eastern boundary of _Judenthum_ is also the product of prohibitive legislation. The Jews are by law confined within certain provinces. A rigid law of settlement, intended to circumscribe their area of density closely, yields only to the persuasion of bribery. Not Russia, then, but southwestern Russia alone, is deeply concerned over the actual presence of this alien population. And it is the Jewish element in this small section of the country which constitutes such an industrial and social menace to the neighboring empires of Germany and Austria. In the latter country the Jews seem to be increasing in numbers almost four times as rapidly as the native population. The more elastic boundaries of Jewish density on the southeast, on the other hand, are indicative of the legislative tolerance which the Israelites there enjoy. Wherever the bars are lowered, there does this migratory human element at once expand. The peculiar problems of Jewish distribution are only half realized until it is understood that, always and everywhere, the Israelites constitute pre-eminently the town populations.[3] They are not widely disseminated among the agricultural districts, but congregate in the commercial centers. It is an unalterable characteristic of this peculiar people. The Jew betrays an inherent dislike for hard manual or outdoor labor, as for physical exercise or exertion in any form. He prefers to live by brain, not brawn. Leroy-Beaulieu seems to consider this as an acquired characteristic due to mediæval prohibition of land ownership or to confinement within the Ghetto. To us it appears to be too constant a trait the world over to justify such a hypothesis. Fully to appreciate, therefore, what the Jewish question is in Polish Russia, we must always bear this fact in mind. The result is that in many parts of Poland the Jews form an actual majority of the population in the towns. This is the danger for Germany also. Thus it is Berlin, not Prussia at large, which is threatened with an overload of Jews from the country on the east. This aggregation in urban centers becomes the more marked as the relative frequency for the whole country lessens. Thus in Saxony, which, being industrial, is not a favorite Jewish center, four fifths of all the Jewish residents are found in Dresden and Leipsic alone.[4] This is probably also the reason for the lessened frequency of Jews all through the Alpine highlands, especially in the Tyrol. These districts are so essentially agricultural that few footholds for the Jew are to be found. A small secondary center of Jewish aggregation appears upon our map to be manifested about Frankfort. It has a peculiar significance. The Hebrew settlers in the Rhenish cities date from the third century at least, having come there over the early trade routes from the Mediterranean. Germany being divided politically, and Russia interdicting them from 1110, a specific center was established, especially in Franconia, Frankfort being the focus of attraction. Then came the fearful persecutions all over Europe, attendant upon the religious fervor of the Crusades. The Polish kings, desiring to encourage the growth of their city populations, offered the rights of citizenship to all who would come, and an exodus in mass took place. They seem to have been welcomed, till the proportions of the movement became so great as to excite alarm. Its results appear upon our map. Thus we know that many of the Jews of Poland came to Russia as a troublesome legacy on the division of that kingdom. At the end of the sixteenth century but three German cities remained open to them--namely, Frankfort, Worms, and Furth.[5] Yet it was obviously impossible to uproot them entirely. To their persistence in this part of Germany is probably due the small secondary center of Jewish distribution, which we have mentioned, indicated by the darker tint about Frankfort, and including Alsace-Lorraine. Here is a relative frequency, not even exceeded by Posen, although we generally conceive of this former Polish province as especially saturated with Jews. It is the only vestige remaining to indicate what was at one time the main focus of Jewish population in Europe. It affords us a striking example of what legislation may accomplish ethnically, when supplemented, or rather aggravated, by religious and economic motives. Does it accord with geographical probability to derive our large dark area of present Jewish aggregation entirely from the small secondary one about Frankfort, which, as we have just said, is the relic of a mediæval center of gravity? The question is a crucial one for the alleged purity of the Russian Jew; for the longer his migrations over the face of the map, the greater his chance of ethnic intermixture. A moot point among Jewish scholars is, as to the extent of this exodus from Germany into Poland. Bershadski has done much to show its real proportions in history. Talko-Hryncewicz[6] and Weissenberg,[7] among anthropologists, seem to be inclined to derive this great body of Polish Jews from Palestine by way of the Rhone-Rhine-Frankfort route. They are, no doubt, partially in the right; but the mere geographer would rather be inclined to side with Jacques.[8] He doubts whether entirely artificial causes, even mediæval persecutions, would be quite competent for so large a contract. There is certainly some truth in Harkavy's theory, so ably championed by Ikof (1884), that a goodly proportion of these Jews came into Poland by a direct route from the East. Most Jewish scholars had placed their first appearance in southern and eastern Russia, coming around the Black Sea, as early as the eighth century. Ikof, however, finds them in the Caucasus and Armenia one or two centuries before Christ. Then he follows them around, reaching Ruthenia in the tenth and eleventh centuries, arriving in Poland from the twelfth to the fourteenth. The only difficulty with this theory is, of course, that it leaves the language of the Polish Jews out of consideration. This is, in both Poland and Galicia, a corrupted form of German, which in itself would seem to indicate a western origin. On the other hand, the probabilities, judging from our graphic representation, would certainly emphasize the theory of a more general eastern immigration directly from Palestine north of the Black and Caspian Seas. The only remaining mode of accounting for the large center of gravity in Russia is to trace it to widespread conversions, as the historic one of the Khozars. Whichever one of these theories be correct--and there is probability of an equal division of truth among them all--enough has been said to lead us geographically to suspect the alleged purity of descent of the Ashkenazim Jew. Let us apply the tests of physical anthropology. STATURE.--A noted writer, speaking of the sons of Judah, observes: "It is the Ghetto which has produced the Jew and the Jewish race; the Jew is a creation of the European middle ages; he is the artificial product of hostile legislation." This statement is fully authenticated by a peculiarity of the Israelites which is everywhere noticeable. The European Jews are all undersized; not only this, they are more often absolutely stunted. In London they are about three inches shorter than the average for the city. Whether they were always so, as in the days when the Book of Numbers (xiii, 33) described them "as grasshoppers in their own sight," as compared with the Amorites, sons of Anak, we leave an open question. We are certain, however, as to the modern Jew. He betrays a marked constancy in Europe at the bodily height of about five feet four inches (1.63 metre) for adult men. This, according to the data afforded by measurements of our recruits during the civil war, is about the average of American youth between the ages of fifteen and sixteen, who have still three, almost four, inches more to grow. In Bosnia, for example, where the natives range at about the American level--that is to say, among the very tallest in the world (1.72 metre)--the Jews are nearly three inches and a half shorter on the average.[9] If we turn to northern Italy, where Lombroso has recently investigated the matter, we apparently find the Jew somewhat better favored by comparison. He is in Turin less than an inch inferior to his Italian neighbors. But why? Not because taller than in the case of Bosnia, for his stature in both places is the same. The difference decreases, not because the Jew in Piedmont is taller, but solely because the north Italians are only of moderate height. So it goes all over Austria and Russia: the diminutiveness is plainly apparent.[10] There is in all Europe only a single exception to the rule we have cited. Anutchin finds them in Odessa and Riga slightly to exceed the Christians. In order to emphasize this point it will repay us to consider the adopted fatherland of the Jews a bit more in detail. [Illustration: STATURE POLAND.] Our map herewith shows a general average of stature for Poland by districts. This unhappy country appears to be populated by the shortest human beings north of the Alps; it is almost the most stunted in all Europe. The great majority of the districts, as our map shows, are characterized by a population whose adult men scarcely average five feet four inches (1.62 metre) in height. This is more than half a head shorter than the type of the British Isles or northern Germany. What is the meaning of this? Is it entirely the fault of the native Poles? We know that the northern Slavs are all merely mediocre in stature. But this depression is too serious to be accounted for in this way; and further analysis shows that the defect is largely due to the presence of the vast horde of Jews, whose physical peculiarity drags down the average for the entire population.[11] This has been proved directly. Perhaps the deepest pit in this great "misery spot," as we have termed such areas of dwarfed population elsewhere, is in the capital city of Warsaw, where Elkind found the average stature of two hundred male Jews to be less than five feet three inches and a half (1.61 metre).[12] The women were only four feet eleven inches tall on the average. Compare the little series of maps given on pages 172 and 173 if further proof of this national peculiarity be needed. Two of these, it will be observed, give the average height of Jews and Poles respectively, dividing the city into districts. The social status of these districts is shown upon our third map. Comparison of these three brings out a very interesting sociological fact, to which we have already called attention in our earlier papers.[13] The stature of men depends in a goodly measure upon their environment. In the wards of the city where prosperity resides, the material well-being tends to produce a stature distinctly above that of the slums. In both cases, Poles and Jews are shortest in the poorer sections of the city, dark tinted on the maps. The correspondence is not exact, for the number of observations is relatively small; but it indicates beyond a doubt a tendency commonly noticeable in great cities. But to return to our direct comparison of Poles and Jews; the deficiency of the latter, as a people, is perfectly apparent. The most highly favored Jewish population socially, in the whole city of Warsaw in fact, can not produce an average stature equal to that of the very poorest Poles; and this, too, in the most miserable section of the capital city of one of the most stunted countries in Europe. [Illustration: AVERAGE STATURE of POLES, WARSAW.] [Illustration: AVERAGE STATURE of JEWS, WARSAW.] We may assume it as proved, therefore, that the Jew is to-day a very defective type in stature. He seems to be susceptible to favorable influences, however; for in London, the West End prosperous Jews almost equal the English in height, while they at the same time surpass their East End brethren by more than three inches.[14] In Russia also they become taller as a class wherever the life conditions become less rigorously oppressive. They are taller in the fertile Ukraine than in sterile Lithuania; they sometimes boast of a few relatively tall men.[15] These facts all go to show that the Jew is short, not by heredity, but by force of circumstances; and that where he is given an even chance, he speedily recovers a part at least of the ground lost during many ages of social persecution. Jacobs mentions an interesting fact in this connection about his upper-class English Jews. Close analysis of the data seems to show that, for the present at least, their physical development has been stretched nearly to the upper limit; for even in individual cases the West End Jews of London manifest an inability to surpass the height of five feet nine inches. So many have been blessed by prosperity that the average has nearly reached that of the English; but it is a mean stature of which the very tall form no component part. Thus perhaps does the influence of heredity obstruct the temporary action of environment. Whether this short stature of the Jew is a case of an acquired characteristic which has become hereditary, we are content to leave an open question. All we can say is, that the modern Semites in Arabia and Africa are all of goodly size, far above the Jewish average.[16] This would tend to make us think that the harsh experiences of the past have subtracted several cubits from the stature of the people of Israel. In self-defense it must be said that the Christian is not entirely to blame for the physical disability. It is largely to be ascribed to the custom of early marriages among them. This has probably been an efficient cause of their present degeneracy in Russia, where Tschubinsky describes its alarming prevalence. Leroy-Beaulieu says that it is not at all uncommon to find the combined age of husband and wife, or even of father and mother, to be under thirty years. The Shadchan, or marriage broker, has undoubtedly been an enemy to the Jewish people within their own lines. In the United States, where they are, on the other hand, on the up grade socially, there are indications that this age of marriage is being postponed, perhaps even unduly.[17] [Illustration: SOCIAL STATUS WARSAW.] A second indication in the case of the Jew of uncommonly hard usage in the past remains to be mentioned. These people are, anthropologically as well as proverbially, narrow-chested and deficient in lung capacity. Normally the chest girth of a well-developed man ought to equal or exceed one half his stature, yet in the case of the Jews as a class this is almost never the case. Majer and Kopernicki[18] first established this in the case of the Galician Jews. Stieda[19] gives additional testimony to the same effect. Jacobs[20] shows the English Jews distinctly inferior to Christians in lung capacity, which is generally an indication of vitality. In Bosnia, Glück[21] again refers to it as characteristic. Granted, with Weissenberg,[22] that it is an acquired characteristic, the effect of long-continued subjection to unfavorable sanitary and social environment, it has none the less become a hereditary trait; for not even the perhaps relatively recent prosperity of Jacobs's West End Jews has sufficed to bring them up to the level of their English brethren in capacity of the lungs. At this point a surprising fact confronts us. Despite the appearances of physical degeneracy which we have noted, the Jew betrays an absolutely unprecedented tenacity of life. It far exceeds, especially in the United States, that of any other known people.[23] This we may illustrate by the following example: Suppose two groups of one hundred infants each, one Jewish, one of average American parentage (Massachusetts), to be born on the same day. In spite of all the disparity of social conditions in favor of the latter, the chances, determined by statistical means, are that one half of the Americans will die within forty-seven years; while the first half of the Jews will not succumb to disease or accident before the expiration of seventy-one years. The death rate is really but little over half that of the average American population. This holds good in infancy as in middle age. Lombroso has put it in another way. Of one thousand Jews born, two hundred and seventeen die before the age of seven years; while four hundred and fifty-three Christians--more than twice as many--are likely to die within the same period. This remarkable tenacity of life is well illustrated by the following table from a most suggestive article by Hoffmann.[24] We can not forbear from reproducing it in this place. _Death Rates per 1,000 Population in the Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth Wards of New York City, 1890, by Place of Birth._ ----------------+--------+-------------+--------+--------+------------- | |United States| | | Russia and AGES. | Total. | (includes |Ireland.|Germany.| Poland | | colored). | | |(mostly Jews). ----------------+--------+-------------+--------+--------+------------- Total | 26.25 | 45.18 | 36.04 | 22.14 | 16.71 Under 15 years | 41.28 | 62.25 | 40.71 | 30.38 | 32.31 15 to 25 years | 7.55 | 9.43 | 15.15 | 7.14 | 2.53 25 to 65 years | 21.64 | 25.92 | 39.51 | 21.20 | 7.99 65 and under | 104.72 | 105.96 | 120.92 | 88.51 | 84.51 ----------------+--------+-------------+--------+--------+------------- From this table it appears, despite the extreme poverty of the Russian and Polish Jews in the most densely crowded portions of New York; despite the unsanitary tenements, the overcrowding, the long hours in sweat shops; that nevertheless, a viability is manifested which is simply unprecedented. Tailoring is one of the most deadly occupations known; the Jews of New York are principally engaged in this employment; and yet they contrive to live nearly twice as long on the average as their neighbors, even those engaged in the outdoor occupations. Is this tenacity of life despite every possible antagonistic influence, an ethnic trait; or is it a result of peculiar customs and habits of life? There is much which points to the latter conclusion as the correct one. For example, analysis of the causes of mortality shows an abnormally small proportion of deaths from consumption and pneumonia, the dread diseases which, as we know, are responsible for the largest proportion of deaths in our American population. This immunity can best be ascribed to the excellent system of meat inspection prescribed by the Mosaic laws. It is certainly not a result of physical development, as we have just seen. Hoffmann cites authority showing that in London often as much as a third of the meats offered for sale are rejected as unfit for consumption by Jews. Is not this a cogent argument in favor of a more rigid enforcement of our laws providing for the food inspection of the poor? A second cause conducive to longevity is the sobriety of the Jew, and his disinclination toward excessive indulgence in alcoholic liquors. Drunkenness among Jews is very rare. Temperate habits, a frugal diet, with a very moderate use of spirits, render the proportion of Bright's disease and affections of the liver comparatively very small. In the infectious diseases, on the other hand, diphtheria and the fevers, no such immunity is betrayed. The long-current opinion that the Jews were immune from cholera and the other pestilences of the middle ages is not to-day accepted. A third notable reason for this low death rate is also, as Hoffmann observes, the nature of the employment customary among Jews, which renders the proportion of deaths from accidental causes exceedingly small. In conclusion, it may be said that these people are prone to nervous and mental disorders; insanity, in fact, is fearfully prevalent among them. Lombroso asserts it to be four times as frequent among Italian Jews as among Christians. This may possibly be a result of close inbreeding in a country like Italy, where the Jewish communities are small. It does not, however, seem to lead to suicide, for this is extraordinarily rare among Jews, either from cowardice, as Lombroso suggests; or more probably for the reason cited by Morselli--namely, the greater force of religion and other steadying moral factors. [_To be continued._] FOOTNOTES: [1] In the preparation of this article I have to acknowledge the courtesy of Mr. Joseph Jacobs, of London, whose works in this line are accepted as an authority. In its illustration I have derived invaluable assistance from Dr. S. Weissenberg, of Elizabethgrad, Russia, and Dr. L. Bertholon, of Tunis. Both these gentlemen have loaned me a large number of original photographs of types from their respective countries. Dr. Bertholon has also taken several especially for use in this way. The more general works upon which we have relied are: R. Andree, Zur Volkskunde der Juden, Bielefeld, 1881; A. Leroy-Beaulieu, Les Juifs et l'antisémitisme, Paris, 3e éd. 1893; and C. Lombroso, Gli Antisemitismo, Torino, 1894. For all other authorities to whom reference is made by name and year, consult our comprehensive Bibliography of the Anthropology and Ethnology of Europe, in a forthcoming Special Bulletin of the Boston Public Library. In its index under "Jews" and "Semites" will be found an exhaustive list of authorities given chronologically. [2] Andree, 1881, pp. 194 _et seq._, with tables appended; Jacobs, 1886 a, p. 24; and quite recently A. Leroy-Beaulieu, 1893, chapter i, are best on this. Tschubinsky, 1877, gives much detail at first hand on western Russia. In the Seventeenth Annual Report of the Anglo-Jewish Association, London, 1888, is a convenient census, together with a map of distribution for Europe. On America, no official data of any kind exist. The censuses have never attempted an enumeration of the Jews. Schimmer's results from the census of 1880 in Austria-Hungary are given in Statistische Monatsschrift, vii, p. 489 _et seq._ [3] This is clearly shown by Schimmer in Statistische Monatsschrift, vii, pp. 489 _et seq._ [4] See also map in Kettler, 1880. [5] J. C. Majer (1862) ascribes the shortness of stature in Furth to this Jewish influence. [6] 1892. [7] 1895, p. 577. [8] 1891. [9] Glück, 1896; and Weisbach, 1877 and 1895 a. [10] Majer and Kopernicki, 1877, p. 36, for Ruthenia; Stieda, 1883, p. 70; Anutchin, 1889, p. 114, etc. [11] Zakrezewski, 1891, p. 38. In the October Monthly our stature map of all Russia brings out the contrast very strongly. [12] Centralblatt für Anthropologie, iii, p. 66. Uke, cited by Andree, 1881, p. 32, agrees. [13] Popular Science Monthly, vol. li, p. 20 _et seq._ (May, 1897), and vol. lii, p. 602 (March, 1898). [14] Jacobs, 1889, p. 81. [15] Talko-Hryncewicz, 1892, pp. 7 and 58. [16] Collignon, 1887 a, pp. 211 and 326; and Bertholon, 1892, p. 41. [17] Jacobs, 1891, p. 50, shows it to be less common in other parts of Europe. In the United States, Dr. Billings finds the marriage rate to be only 7.4 per 1,000--about one third that of the Northeastern States. [18] 1877, p. 59. [19] 1883, p. 71. [20] 1889, p. 84. [21] 1896, p. 591. [22] 1895, p. 374. [23] On Jewish demography, consult the special appendix in Lombroso, 1874; Andree, 1881, p. 70; Jacobs, 1891, p. 49. Dr. Billings, in Eleventh United States Census, 1890, Bulletin No. 19, gives data for our country. On pathology, see Buschan, 1895. [24] The Jew as a Life Risk. The Spectator (an actuarial journal) 1895, pp. 222-224, and 233, 234. Lagneau, 1861, p. 411, speaks of a viability in Algeria even lower than that of the natives. THE PLAYGROUNDS OF RURAL AND SUBURBAN SCHOOLS. BY ISABELLA G. OAKLEY. While the officers and friends of education in large cities are exerting themselves to provide open-air playgrounds for the schools, the villages and smaller towns all over the East are reversing the case. Except in the small district schools, the children's playground has almost ceased to exist. This is an evil which has crept in with the tendency to centralize the schools. When in any place the schools begin to overflow, a movement to put up a larger building takes place, accompanied by an effort to create a high-school department; not so much the need of the community as the ambitious dream of some principal who would be superintendent, or some sort of central sun to a group of satellites. This dream is too easily realized, because it flatters the people. Then there rises a preposterous structure of stone and brick; a house of many gables, out of keeping with everything, either public or private, in the place; a temple of vanity. Now is rung the knell of the school playground, for the new "high school," although it will house all the children from five to fifteen, must needs be surrounded by a fine lawn, studded with shrubbery, and threaded by bluestone roads. The janitor has to employ an assistant to keep the grounds in order. A shut-in, penitentiarylike place has been evolved by the architect and school committee, gratifying to their pride and a deep wrong to the children. There are many wrongs about it; the one insisted upon here is the abolishing of the recess, that time-honored joy of the American schoolboy and schoolgirl. The cheerful sounds of play no more re-echo; the little ones march in "lock step" from the doors to the very curb of this immaculate ornate inclosure. If, on this beautiful lawn, any impulsive youngster is caught running, or performing an instinctive hopscotch or leapfrog, he is sure to be seen by a watching and powerful janitor and reported. Leapfrog and profanity, in the true Draconian spirit, are alike visited with the extreme penalty of a visit to the principal's office. However, in default of a playground, the new schoolhouse provides a gymnasium for physical culture. I speak now of a particular school, the pride of a simple village, and a type of many. This gymnasium is a costly room filled with elaborate apparatus, most of which is suited only to the high-school pupils, and never touched by the majority, who leave school at twelve or thirteen; their physical exercises have been chiefly provided for by a box of dumb-bells and wands. In many schools the "gymnasium" is a cavernous and ugly basement, a place full of shadows cast by the gloomy arches on which the building rests, with walls of brick and floors of asphalt. Little troops of silent, pale children arrive and depart all day for their _physical culture_, a dreary repetition of silent dumb-bell exercises. There is no speech nor language among them, no sound is heard but the jingle of the piano and the sharp tones of the monitor's counting. I have never heard the children count aloud or accompany the calisthenics by singing except in a private school. What an alternative for a free recess! No penitentiary drill could be more perfunctory, spiritless, dead. It must be said of the public schools that the thing they most seem to dread is the sound of a child's voice. The rude, untrained intonations, the slovenly speech, the slouching attitude remain rude, slovenly, and slouching, for all the school attempts to do for their improvement is infinitely little. Even the blessed relief of shaking the arm and hand to attract the teacher's attention has been reduced in some schools to lifting two fingers. The pupils generally hate their calisthenics, or, in the new phrase, physical culture exercises. And they would hate just as sincerely regulated games superintended by some impossible master of sports. What they want is spontaneity in play. Public money is wasted in providing these abhorrent alternatives. Poor little Carthusians as young as six and seven years are kept in their rooms, and principally in their seats, above two hours at each session, and often after that to atone for some delinquency, most likely for speaking. In many schools they do not leave the room for any kind of exercise. If they were capable of demanding their rights they would call for both the abolition of the school lawn and calisthenic basement, and the restoration of their playground and recess. From the cruelty of this repression nature finds a little way out; the children require of the neighbors what they have been deprived of by the school committee. All around the precincts of the temple of learning the trodden borders of the sidewalk, churned to mire in winter and trampled to rock in summer, speak of the victory of the boys. There are towns, perhaps, where they all go straight home, but in our town, they gather four times a day in knots of twenties and fifties for some kind of fun. The patient neighbors go on removing coats and dinner pails from the pickets, clearing away papers and missiles from their inclosures, yet I discover that even they would vote to keep the school lawn; it improves the town. Very true. But ingenuity could well contrive some way of uniting the playground and the school park. Spaces of grass to rest the eye and decorate the square could be interspersed with inclosures of asphalt, furnished with a few parallel bars and swings, without sacrifice of appearances. Often the school property is so large that it could include half a dozen such special playgrounds. We have but to begin it to find some feasible plan. If the palatial school and its park is reaction against the "ragged beggar" of Whittier's lovely poem, sunning in the midst of the blackberry vines of Hardscrabble Hill, it is a reaction that has gone too far to suit a generation which loves to read Hosea Bigelow: "So the old school'us is a place I choose Afore all others, ef I want to muse; I set down where I used to set, an' git My boyhood back, an' better things with it-- Faith, Hope, an' sunthin', ef it isn't Cherrity, It's want o' guile, an' thet's ez gret a rarity." If it may be replied, that is not the generation for whom schoolhouses are now built, it is one which may interpret the wants of its children by just such recollections. Another evil has grown out of the centralization of the schools. The smaller schoolhouses formerly stood within convenient reach, and by abandoning them we have forced many little children to walk farther than they are able to walk. In the absence of street cars and sidewalks this becomes a great hardship in extreme weather. In one village in New York, out of an enrollment of fourteen hundred, there was one month last year an average attendance of four hundred. The new school building, which had cost seventy-five thousand dollars, was more than two miles from some part of the district, and there were no sidewalks; neither were there paved streets or street lamps. In such circumstances a number of children are unable to get home to the noon meal, usually dinner, and most important. Where do they eat their luncheon? In their seats, watched by teachers, who are compelled unwillingly to take turns at this duty, and who have also to eat a cold, unpalatable lunch in bad air for a week at a time. After lunch there is an hour to be disposed of by the children, but there is no place to play in except the basement or the streets of the neighborhood. The teachers frequently read them a story, that they may stretch their minds a little if not their bodies. It is a painful sight--few more painful to me--to see a crowd of young children having their recreation in one of these basements. Running and loud talking are forbidden; a police of teachers armed with symbols of authority and punishment keep the restless little prisoners within bounds. Another objection to the central school is the rainy-day half-session. Though the daily instruction may be managed so that the pupils do not miss anything, it is still a fact that the majority of parents expect the school to take charge of their children, and are often much dissatisfied to have them thrown back upon their own hands on rainy days. How has it come about that the playground and school recess have been so generally given up? Is it altogether on account of appearances? Teachers plead that the children ought to be preserved from association with objectionable playmates. This may do for the touch-me-not, only child, but in American society it is never a strong plea. That small fraction which seeks to educate its children as a class can do so in a few schools limited to church, plutocracy, Quakerism, or some such narrow basis. But the schools of a free State are, above everything, founded on the essential equality of individuals in the State, and the possibility of every one to rise to a successful and honorable manhood. If there is one conviction above another strengthened by experience, it is that, in their choice of companions and susceptibility to influence, children are governed by their innate qualities, and these qualities are fixed by heredity and home influences long before the school age. In so large a community as a public school there is companionship for all, for it certainly represents the town itself. Let no one be afraid of the democratic instincts of childhood. I believe the playground is abolished because it interferes with that deadly order and craze for supervision which is sought for as the prime condition both inside and outside the schools. Order of a wholesome sort is not inconsistent with the free recess of a big school. I watched in Los Angeles a great school as it was marshaled out to play and back again at the sound of a drum. After a quarter of an hour of unrestrained sport, several hundreds were gathered in lines at the tap of the drum, facing the cheerful schoolhouse in the mild bright sun, their faces radiating contentment and good will while they straightened up at the mere hint of the teachers on duty. In San Francisco I once found a certain primary school keeping doll's day, when every girl brought her doll to school and exhibited her at recess. The school yard was a barren inclosure within a high board fence, but a joyful place to that young company. To what purpose are teachers urged to study psychology? The children in their seats are emptied of everything that pertains to their souls. Not to study, because the teacher will explain everything, and to behave just well enough to get safe out of school, is the simple code which covers the conduct of average children. To extend this code to ideas of social duty--the highest--is not possible while they do not form a society. Cultivation of friendship is just as much out of the case; awakening of ideals, an impossibility. But thrown together half an hour or more each day, the dead machinery that pulls the bells and adds the marks within the school walls gives way to life; and here a man who sympathizes with childhood has all the opportunity he needs, and probably much more than he can use, in providing for that life where a code of reciprocity and honor must be established. It is not as the magistrate he will successfully rule, but as the sympathetic general in the field, whose very name is a talisman and an inspiration to every man. In the school yard, the bully, who comes to the front in about every tenth child, needs to be repressed; the foul mouth must be cleansed; against these prevailing evils the playground has a protection the street can not possess. The boy's world is a peculiar world, certainly, making laws for itself as rigorous and about as barbarous as those of a gang of pirates; but it is through his _esprit du corps_ he can be uplifted and educated; the individual may be a selfish animal; as one of a body he is capable of heroism and devotion to a noble idea. He can be a friend; the playground is the field for the natural growth of friendships, and youth the generous time of their birth. I recall another scene in a schoolroom in a Western city long ago. A gentle girl, magnetic, deep-hearted, large-eyed, sat after school at her table in tears. On a seat in front of her platform were piles of slates which she had been correcting, for she instructed all day a succession of arithmetic classes coming to her from the different grades. At the same time she was in charge, for all particular purposes of their order and conduct, of about forty boys in their early teens. Her tears were in consequence of a quarrel at recess between two of her boys. They had settled their quarrel by a fight; not unlikely it was a wholesome fight, for they were not boys of the mean sort, and were friends. It is an affair of long ago, but of a time when, in a large city, a teacher shed her influence upon the school playground, and took account of its moral standards, its friendships and breaches of friendship. * * * * * Although white men, if they take due precautions, may live and do certain kinds of work in tropical Africa, it will never be possible, Mr. J. Scott Keltie concludes from the results of past experience and study, to colonize that part of the world with people from the temperate zone. Even in such favorable situations as Blantyre, a lofty region south of Lake Nyassa, children can not be reared beyond a certain age, but must be sent home to England; otherwise they will degenerate physically and morally. A plan has been proposed of bringing Europeans down into the tropical regions by degrees, and acclimatizing them by successive generations to more and more torrid conditions till they are finally settled in the heart of the continent. But the experiment would be a very long one, if tried; and the ultimate result would probably be a race deprived of all those characteristics which have made Europe what it is. UP THE SKEENA RIVER TO THE HOME OF THE TSIMSHIANS.[25] BY GEORGE A. DORSEY, PH. D., FIELD COLUMBIAN MUSEUM, CHICAGO, ILL. In a recent number of the Monthly I described some of the incidents of a visit to the Haida and Tlingit villages about Dixon's Entrance; now I am to speak of the Tsimshian villages on the Skeena River. The Tsimshian Indians are one of the five great stocks which make up the aboriginal population of the coast of British Columbia and southern Alaska. They are shut in by the Tlingits on the north and by the Kwakiutls on the south, while on the head waters of the Nass and Skeena Rivers they come in contact with the great Tinneh or Athabascan stock. The Tsimshians are probably the most progressive of all the coast Indians, and are one of a few stocks on the American continent which are holding their own in point of numbers. Desiring to visit those villages which are least contaminated by modern influence, we ascended the Skeena River to the village of Kitanmaksh or Hazelton. The Skeena is the historic river of British Columbia; its name signifies the "Water of Terrors." Nearly every rock, every bend, every cañon is the scene of some mythical tale. The scene of the birth of the Tsimshian nation lies in its valley; the rock is still revered upon which rested the Tsimshian ark after the flood, and the "Dum-lak-an," "the new home and place of dispersal," is still a Mecca to which pilgrimages are made. In the modern development of the Omenica and Cariboo gold fields the Skeena has been the highway to the sea. For hundreds of years canoes have been paddled up and down its waters; it has been the highway for intertribal trade from time immemorial, and when the Hudson Bay Company's post was established at Hazelton, and merchandise began to pour into the upper country in a steady stream, the Tsimshians with their canoes enjoyed for a long time a monopoly of the carrying trade. Gradually, as they learned the ways and methods of the white man, the price per ton of freight from the coast to Hazelton began steadily to rise, until in 1891 the tariff of sixty dollars a ton was declared ruinous by the company, and they decided to build their own steamer with which to carry their freight up the river. Port Essington is the chief port of the mouth of the Skeena, and in Essington we found ourselves on the twenty-third day of July. The Caledonia was up the river on her third trip, but was expected back any hour, but so delightfully uncertain is the river voyage that, as we were informed, "there was no telling when she would be down--in fact, she might be caught above the cañon and wouldn't be down for weeks." [Illustration: VIEW ON THE UPPER SKEENA RIVER; PEAK OF THE "FIVE VIRGINS" MOUNTAIN.] The town of Essington dates back to 1835, when the Hudson Bay Company established a post there. Its only rival for preeminence on the coast is Port Simpson. The town in summer is completely given over to fishing, the salmon cannery of Cunningham & Son being one of the largest on the coast, and the river for twenty miles is dotted with canneries. In one day, while we were in Essington, the catch of salmon on the river was ninety-two thousand fish. In addition to the cannery the town boasts of a good hotel and a Salvation Army. An Indian Salvation Army is worth going miles to see, for the Indian is a natural-born salvationist; the army permits him to make all the noise he chooses, sing as loudly as he pleases, and, best of all, he is entitled to make a speech every time it comes his turn. In the afternoon, about four o'clock, on the day after our arrival, a long, shrill blast of the whistle aroused the entire town, for the Caledonia was in sight. Down we went to the wharf, and the entire town followed. What a motley crowd you will find on one of these British Columbia wharves! What coloring, what a Babel of tongues--Tlingits from Alaska, Haidas from the Queen Charlotte Islands, Tsimshians from the Skeena, Kwakiutls from Vancouver, Chinamen, Japanese, Greeks, Scandinavians, Englishmen, and Yankees; men, women, children, dogs, and from two to six woolly bear cubs. The Caledonia is the exclusive property of the Hudson Bay Company; she is not a common carrier, and does not encourage either passengers or freight, as the tariff rates prove. There is a feverish haste and hustle about the movements of the steamer which are fairly contagious. She makes her first trip early in the spring, as soon as the ice has left the rivers, on the Stickene; then it is a wild, eager ambition of the company to have her make four trips up the Skeena before the river closes up in the fall. We had as passengers two prospectors from Spokane, a mining expert from Victoria, a native evangelist from Essington, and about fifty Indians, mostly women and children, each one with a varied assortment of boxes, bales, bundles, and dogs; the crew numbered twenty, and we had about one hundred tons of freight on board. From Essington to Hazelton is one hundred and fifty-two miles, a panorama of unending and unbroken beauty; never monotonous, always interesting, it presents a river voyage which is probably not equaled, certainly not excelled, by any other river voyage of the same length on the American continent or in the world. We began the voyage on Sunday morning, we tied up in front of Hazelton on Saturday night. To recount in detail the haps and mishaps of each day's progress would take more time than I can command. In one day we made forty-eight miles, on another day we made one hundred yards, on another day we didn't make a foot. With plenty of water under her keel the Caledonia could run twenty miles an hour; she could cut her way through a sand bar at the rate of a yard or so an hour; and at either rate of progress she burned each hour from one and a half to two cords of wood. For the first ten miles the scenery does not differ materially from that which we are accustomed to in the inland sea from Victoria to Alaska. Then we enter fresh water and for the next forty miles steam through one long mountain gorge, for here the river has cut completely through the Cascade Range. The mountains begin at the water's edge and rise almost perpendicularly to heights of from three to four thousand feet. Their lower limits are covered with dense green forests, which seem to grow out of the solid rock. The summits are smooth and glistening, and often covered with snow and ice. Here and there we can trace some tiny rivulet issuing from an ice bed high up among the clouds, and every portion of its course can be traced down the steep mountain wall until it gives one final and headlong plunge into the river. At times these streams, taking their rise in some extensive glacier, are of considerable magnitude, and fairly roar as they leap and hurl themselves downward from their dizzy height. And here we learned a curious fact about the river: in summer it falls when it rains, and rises when the sun shines, so rapidly do the pent-up snows of winter disappear and rush down the mountain sides under the heat of the spring sun. Until noon of the second day we had been making good time, but now the fun began, for we had left deep water and had arrived at the first flight of the eight-hundred-foot stairway which the Caledonia had to climb ere Hazelton could be reached. The river had been gradually widening as one island after another had been passed, until now it was nearly half a mile wide and flowed through four channels. The captain attempted one channel, but we couldn't gain an inch, and in drifting back again down the rapids the current carried the boat against the rocks and, with a crash and a lurch, but minus some woodwork, she was in the stream again. Then two other channels were tried, but without avail, although the wheel was throwing water and gravel over the pilot house. The fourth channel was next tried, but the current was too strong. Then we "lined her out," and this novel method of getting a huge steamboat up a stream soon became only too commonplace. The method of procedure is this: The boat is forced against a sand bar and allowed to rest while men go forward in a skiff with a long four-inch cable, which is made fast to a tree on the bank or to a "dead man," a long spar buried deep in the earth of a sand bar and heaped over with bowlders. When all is ready, the boat is attached to the capstan and the wheel begins to revolve. It is tedious work and often provoking, as when the cable parts, or the "dead man" gives up his hold, and the whole work must be done over again. The boat quivers from stem to stern, and the wheel, with all possible steam on, is simply one revolving ball of water. We fairly hold our breath as we listen to the dull vibration of the boat, the rumbling of the capstan, and the grating sound of the keel of the steamer as she is being dragged through the rapids over the bar; but above all can be heard the voice of Captain Bonser as he shouts to his Indian pilot, "Go 'head capstan," "Stop steamboat," "Stop capstan," "Go 'head steamboat," "Go 'head capstan!" In four hours we have made about fifty yards, but we are in open water again and the boat settles down to its regular chug, chug, chug. Eighty miles from Essington the Skeena in its flight to the sea makes its first plunge into the Cascade Mountains, and its entrance is indescribably grand. No pen or brush can do justice to the beauties of the Kitselas Cañon. At its mouth we are in a broad, deep basin, as if the river had felt depressed as it passed through the quarter-mile narrow gorge and had here spread itself out to breathe and rest before it started anew its downward journey to the sea. It was late in the afternoon, and the western sun threw long shadows of the lofty sky-crowned perpendicular walls of the left-hand side of the cañon over against the rocky islets and ragged, rock-bound eastern shore. Once we have entered, there is no faltering; "lining it out" is impossible here, and on and on the boat labors and climbs, twisting and turning through the narrow, tortuous channel. A quick eye and a steady nerve must command the wheel now, for a turn too much or too little would be fatal. One instinctively feels that the "Water of Terrors" is the proper name for this river, and with that feeling comes the other--that it was never intended for navigation. [Illustration: A SKEENA RIVER SALMON CANNERY.] After four days' grinding over sand bars and pounding against rocks we tie up for repairs. One of the boilers had sprung a leak which could be neglected no longer. The delay of thirty-six hours was not without compensation, for the country about was open, and proved a relief after the long ride through the high-walled river from the sea to the cañon. The banks were low or moderately high and of gravel or sand bluffs, and we could look off over a landscape broken here and there by solitary peaks or clustered mountains, their summits always covered with ice and snow. To the far east were the pure white peaks of the Five Virgins, their summits glistening under the bright sun. Even the character of the vegetation had changed, and the dense forests of somber firs, spruces, and cedars of the lower river had given way to great cottonwoods and underbrush of hazel and alder. In the afternoon we climbed a bluff near the river, from which we could look off over a country that was wild and extremely picturesque. To one side of us could be seen a great mountain, its summit covered by a mighty glacier whose blue-white ice gleamed and glistened in the sun. And there was no mistaking the power of the sun that day; its warm rays being especially welcome after some weeks of the cold, depressing gloom and fog of the coast. We were now really in the country of the Tsimshians, and every few hours we drew up in front of some quiet, peaceful village, its almost deserted cottages guarded by the totem poles of former days. In succession we pass Meamskinesht, Kitwangah, and Kitzegukla, with now and then a small salmon-fishing station. The villages proved disappointing both in their smallness and modernness, and none of them seemed worthy of any extended visit. From time to time we passed great black patches in the forest, the result of extensive fires, sure signs that the rainy coast was far away. On Friday night we tied up to the bank within five miles of our destination, but we had yet to pass Macintosh's Bar. That was accomplished on the following day, after eleven hours' hard work, and by five o'clock we had reached "The Forks," or the junction of the Skeena and Bulkley Rivers. Our course was to the left, up the Skeena for half a mile, and in a few moments more we tied up in front of the stockaded post of the Hudson Bay Company; we had reached Hazelton. The region about us was "Dum-lak-an," "what will be a good place," the home of the Tsimshians. Before 1870 the town was farther down the river, on the flat at the junction of the Bulkley and Skeena Rivers. It has had additions to its population from Kis-pi-yeoux, and from villages down the river. There are also to be numbered among the inhabitants the Indian agent, Mr. Loring, the Hudson Bay representative, Mr. Sargent, and his assistants, and Mr. Fields, the missionary. The Indian population numbers about two hundred and seventy-five. The town occupies a low, uneven plain, which, beginning at the water's edge, extends back for a quarter of a mile, where it is hemmed in by a high bluff on the face of the second river terrace. There are but few of the old houses left and still fewer totem poles, and they are without particular interest. Most prominent in the village is the warlike stockade of the company's post, with its two bastions at opposite corners, and the blockhouse in the center of the inclosure, but now hidden by the store which stands in front of it. The stockade was put up in 1891, when an Indian uprising was feared throughout the length of the river. Wherever you find a trading post and a missionary you can not hope to find people who retain much of their native life or who are of great value to anthropology. But still Hazelton was sufficiently primitive to be of interest in many respects. In matters of dress the Indians are almost on a footing with the whites, but they still make a curious garment for winter's use which is worn by nearly all of the interior tribes. This is a blanket made out of long, narrow strips of rabbit hide, and is warm, heavy, and extremely durable. We were fortunate enough to find a woman who was engaged in making one of these curious garments on a most rude and primitive loom. Other garments are still occasionally made of Indian hemp, which grows wild and in abundance. This is beaten and pounded and then spun into fine thread, and woven into the desired form. [Illustration: TSIMSHIAN SHAMAN'S CEREMONIAL BOW AND ARROW.] In former days the Indians used large quantities of the wool of the mountain sheep in making the beautiful _chilcat_ blankets that formed an important part of the chief's costume, but now the Indians buy most of their wool. Its chief uses are for sashes and belts, which are still worn and made after the fashion of former days. Of other garments of daily use, except moccasins, there is nothing remaining. There are a few remnants of ceremonial costumes still in existence, and by a bit of good fortune we were enabled to secure the complete paraphernalia of a shaman, or Indian doctor, who had only recently renounced his native practices and joined Mr. Fields's band of Christians. In the outfit thus acquired were rattles, charms, blankets, masks, and headdresses of various kinds. From another individual we secured the complete costume of a member of the fraternity, or secret society, of Dog Eaters. The Tsimshians have four such societies, and the Dog Eaters stand third in rank, being surpassed only by the Man Eaters or Cannibal Society. The chief object of this outfit, apart from the white and red cedar bark rings, was a long club, one side of which was ornamented by a fringe of red cedar tassels. Of interest also was the curious cap made of plaited bands of red cedar bark, and so ornamented as to represent the head of the owl. Another object secured from a shaman was a peculiar bow and arrow. These were purely ceremonials, and were only used in the dances of the secret societies. By an ingenious device the point of the arrow could be opened out, and in this position represented the open jaws of a serpent. On the bow were two fins, that could be lowered or raised at will by means of cords, which represented the fin-back whale. The bow itself is of light soft wood, and is bent by means of a string passing around the operator's body, the two ends of the bow being fastened to the body of the bow by leather hinges. In all the ceremonies, both religious and civil, an important part of the costume is the mask. These are generally of wood, and portray all manner of real and fanciful personages. Some of them are wonders of ingenuity, being so constructed that the eyes, mouth, and often the ears can be moved at the will of the wearer. Some of them are even double, and so arranged that by drawing open the outer mask, an inner one of an entirely different character can be revealed. One of the rarest masks which was ever brought out of the Tsimshian country is one in the possession of the museum, which was acquired some time ago. It is of bone and finely carved, while the teeth and tusks are those of animals. Hazelton is of much interest to the observer of the human countenance, for, while the residents of the town are Tsimshians, there is a village near by on the Bulkley River, the people of which belong to the great Tinneh or Athabascan stock, which extends from the Arctic Circle on the north to the Territories of Arizona and New Mexico on the south, where it is represented by the Apaches. In some respects the differences between the Tsimshians and Tinnehs, or Howgelgaits, as this branch is called, are quite marked, and these differences stand out in greater relief because more or less of the population of Howgelgait spend a part of their time in Hazelton, and so one sees representatives of the two stocks in close contact. The Tsimshians, like the Haidas, are great canoe people, and are rather short-legged, with great development of the chest and shoulders. Like the Haidas, also, they have strong, long arms, which bespeak familiarity with the paddle. The Howgelgaits, on the other hand, are a pure mountaineer people, and are tall, robust, and finely proportioned. Their hair is black, coarse, and abundant. The eyebrows are thick and remarkably wide at the outer side. This same peculiarity may be observed in the masks of this tribe. The beard is sparse, but it must be remembered that the hair is generally pulled out as it appears, particularly on the cheeks, while the mustache and the chin tuft are allowed to grow. Among the Tsimshians the face is wide and the cheek bones are prominent. The nose is narrow, with a depressed root. Neither the Tsimshians nor Tinneh practice artificial deformation of the head. With the Tinneh, or more exactly the Howgelgaits, the forehead is broad and less receding than is usual with the American aborigines. The face is full and broad and the cheek bones prominent, but the nose, unlike that of the Tsimshians, is well formed and generally aquiline, although occasionally it is thick and flattish. Their lips are also thick and the chin is more prominent than is usual among the Tsimshians. The eyes are large and of a deep black color; the jaws are generally very heavy and massive. Of traces of the ancient prevalent fashion in deformity we saw very little. One old woman still retained the labret, but it was only a shadow of the former labrets in size. Although the long, finely polished bone ornament which the men formerly wore in a hole through the septum of the nose has entirely disappeared, we saw a few old men in whom the pierced septum was still plainly visible. With the Howgelgaits it was formerly the custom to load down the ears with highly polished bits of abalone shells, which were suspended by means of brass rings inserted into holes one above the other on the outer margin of the ear, extending from the lobe around the entire helix. [Illustration: A STREET IN THE TSIMSHIAN CEMETERY AT HAZELTON, B. C.] Hazelton's "City of the Dead" stands on a high bluff overlooking the town and valley, and commands a view off over the broken forest-clad country which is as beautiful as well could be. A trail winds along the face of the bluff until the crest of the plateau is reached, where it divides into a right and left path leading through the main street of the silent city. The sight is strangely odd and picturesque. Over each grave has been erected a neat little frame house, often of considerable dimensions. All are painted with bright colors, and the effect is decidedly "mixed." In one of the houses, which was substantially built and neatly carpeted, I saw through a glass window two chairs, a washstand with full assortment of toilet articles, and an umbrella, while at the rear of the house stood a table on which was spread a neat cloth, and on the table was a lamp. On the floor was a new pair of shoes. Over the table hung a large crayon portrait of the departed occupant of the grave beneath. In another house I saw chests of clothing, and suspended from a cord were garments of various kinds, including a complete costume of the fraternity of the Dog Eaters. These five-feet-deep graves covered by little houses are not the usual manner of burial with the Tsimshians, for until within a very few years the dead were cremated Even to-day in the neighboring village of Kispiyeoux the dead are buried in shallow graves just in front of the house. Of the many charming spots about Hazelton which are well worthy of a visit, we had time for only one--a horseback ride to the Howgelgait Cañon. The ride was most enjoyable in every respect. The road leads from the town up over the plateau through the burying ground, and then on through a partly cleared forest of cottonwoods and maples. Then we plunge into a two-mile-long lane, the trail scarcely wide enough to admit of the passing of a horse, through a dense grove of hazel bushes, laden to their tips with unripe nuts still protected by their green fuzzy envelopes; and now we knew whence came the name "Hazelton." Suddenly the grove terminates, and after dismounting and walking forward a few steps we came to the face of the cañon. What a sight! On the opposite cliff, but on a higher level, stands the old deserted village of Howgelgait, with its great empty houses and skeleton totem poles. At our feet, down a sheer precipice almost a thousand feet below, the Bulkley River, set on edge, rushes and roars and foams through the rocky gorge to join the Skeena a mile away. Just by the mouth of the cañon, at the edge of the great whirlpool, and on a gravelly beach, stands the present town of Howgelgait. Hearing shouts, we looked closer, and far down we saw men moving about, their forms dwarfed to almost spiderlike dimensions. They were building a swinging bridge over the river, and the timbers already in place looked like the meshes of a spider's web. Looking up the cañon, we could see from the opposite wall near the water's edge, and far below us, a rude scaffolding suspended by bark ropes over the river, and from this Indians were lowering their nets and drawing up salmon. One man after another would leave for his home, his back bending under the weight of many fish, his place to be taken by another, who begins casting his nets. And so these rude scaffoldings here and all along the rivers are occupied by busy fishermen throughout the summer, for salmon is chief of the winter's food supply of these people. In one house we saw over a thousand salmon hung up to dry for use during the winter months. We left the cañon for the ride back to Hazelton with keen regret, for no more fascinating spot did we find on our entire journey than right here. On the way we encountered a woman of the Carrier tribe of the Tinnehs from Frazer's Lake, who was returning from Hazelton laden with provisions and cheap calicoes. We had scarcely entered Hazelton when the tinkling of the bell of the "lead horse" announced the arrival of the pack train. Second only in importance to the arrival of the Caledonia to the people of Hazelton is the arrival of the pack train, for it brings the news of the far interior. But of much greater importance and value is the cargo of furs which are brought out on every trip in exchange for supplies which are taken in. On that day there were fifty-seven mules, each laden with two bales of furs weighing two hundred and fifty pounds, and including beaver, mink, otter, sable, and bear, all destined for the Hudson Bay Company's house in London, there to be auctioned off in lots to the highest bidder, and then to be distributed to all parts of the civilized world. [Illustration: HAGIVILGAIT CA�ON, WITH INDIAN FISH WEIRS AT BOTTOM.] Within less than an hour's time the precious furs were aboard, and we bade farewell to Hazelton. The Caledonia drops back, is slowly turned around by the current, and with its steady chug, chug, we began our journey down the river, the power of the boat aided by the swiftly flowing water carrying us along at a rapid rate. If the slow, labored up journey was a revelation with its worries and anxieties, what can be said of the down journey with its kaleidoscopic panorama of sand bars, Indian villages, far-away snowy mountains, dense forests of mighty cottonwoods, lofty heights which tower above us clad to their very summits with eternal green, mountain streams, and innumerable waterfalls and cascades! And what shall one say of that memorable ride through the cañon, the wheel reversed and throwing water over the pilot house, the boat rocking and swaying to and fro! Before we were fairly aware of the fact we were out into that great, deep, silent basin again and off on the home stretch. Apart from taking on wood and stopping at one or two Indian villages, a delay of a few hours was made to permit some mining engineers to examine a mine. They had just come up from the coast and brought with them news of the gold excitement in the Yukon Valley, and now for the first time we heard that magic word "Klondike," which was soon to "electrify the world and put the gold fields of California, South Africa, and Australia to shame." At nine o'clock we were in Essington once more. "Klondike, Klondike!" on every side. The whole country seemed to have gone daft. One steamer after another went racing by the mouth of the Skeena on the way to Dyea and the Skagway Trail. But our fortunes lay in the other direction, and that night we were aboard the Islander, bound for Victoria and the south. FOOTNOTE: [25] From a lecture delivered at the Field Columbian Museum, November 13, 1897. LIGHT AND VEGETATION. BY D. T. MACDOUGAL, PH. D., PROFESSOR IN CHARGE OF PLANT PHYSIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA. Light is the most important of all the external agencies which influence the vegetal organism, and the sun's rays have been the most potent force in shaping the development of existent plant forms. The sunbeam stands in a manifold relation to the plant. First and foremost, light is the universal source of energy, by the aid of which the chlorophyll apparatus in green leaves builds up complex food substances from simple compounds obtained from the soil and air, a process necessary for the nutrition of the entire living world. Some obscure organisms, such as the "nitrosomonas," soil bacteria, are able to accomplish the construction of complex substances, by means of energy derived from other chemical compounds, which were, however, formed originally by green plants. These food-building processes are designated as photosynthesis, chemosynthesis, electrosynthesis, thermosynthesis, etc., according to the source of energy used. By photosynthesis, carbon dioxide from the air and water from the cell are combined in the green cells of leaves, forming sugar and possibly other substances. During this process an amount of oxygen approximately equal to that of the carbon dioxide taken up is exhaled. It will be of interest to note the relation of the living world to the atmosphere. Eight hundred to nine hundred grammes of carbon dioxide are produced in the respiration of a single person for a day, and the entire product of the human race for this period is twelve hundred million kilogrammes. In addition, large quantities of the gas result from the combustion of the four hundred and sixty millions of kilogrammes of coal and wood burned yearly. The lower animals, fungi, and green plants themselves contribute an amount which must bring the total to twice the immense sum named above. The atmosphere contains three or four hundredths of one per cent of carbon dioxide, or an amount of about two to three thousand billions of kilogrammes. No especial variation in this proportion has been detected since observations upon this point were first made. The fact that no increase takes place is partly due to the absorption of the gas by plants, and its replacement by oxygen, and also to certain geological processes in constant operation. Absorption takes place at the rate of about two and a half grammes for every square metre of leaf surface per hour, or about twenty-five to thirty grammes daily, since the process goes on only in daylight. It is to be seen that a single human being exhales as much carbon dioxide as may be removed from the air by thirty or forty square metres of leaf surface. According to Ebermayer, a hectare (2.47 acres) of forest would use eleven thousand kilogrammes of carbon dioxide yearly, and the amount used by plants is generally much in excess of that furnished by the activity of the inhabitants of any given area. Plants thrive and show increasing vigor as the amount of carbon dioxide in the air rises until two hundred times the present proportion is reached. An increase of the gas in the atmosphere would therefore be partly corrected by the absorption and by the stronger vegetation induced. Nothing short of a comprehensive cataclysm could work such disturbance to the composition of the air as to endanger the well-being of the animal inhabitants of the earth. The activity of a square metre of leaf surface results in the formation of one and a half to two grammes of solid substance per hour in sunlight. A vigorous sunflower with one hundred and forty-five leaves constructed thirty-six grammes of solid matter in a day, and a squash with one hundred and sixteen leaves one hundred and sixteen grammes in the same length of time. The amounts formed by such trees as the beech, maple, oak, poplar, elm, and horse-chestnut, with leaf surfaces aggregating three hundred to one thousand square metres, must be correspondingly large. A comparison of plants grown in strong sunlight, diffuse light, and darkness will reveal many differences in stature and internal structure. These differences are for the most part due to the _formative_ and _tonic_ effect of light. Otherwise expressed, the influence of variations of light upon plants causes adaptive reactions, and disturbances of the nutritive processes and growth. In consequence of these facts the reaction of any given organ to changes in the intensity of the illumination will depend upon its specific functions and relation to the remainder of the organism. The stems formed by seedlings and awakening underground organs are usually surrounded by plants or other objects which cut off more or less sunlight. The developing shoot can not spread its leaves to the light advantageously until it has outstripped or grown beyond the objects intervening between it and the light. This necessity is one of the most important conditions in the struggle for existence. To meet it, a very great majority of seed-forming plants have acquired the power of accelerated elongation of the stems when deprived of their normal amount of light. Very striking examples of this reaction are offered by the awakening corms of the Jack-in-the-pulpit (_Arisæma triphyllum_). The corms usually lie at a distance of five or six centimetres below the surface of the soil, and when the growth of the large bud begins in the spring the heavy sheathing scales elongate and pierce the soil, opening when the surface is reached at the distance of a few centimetres. If the corm should have been buried deeper in the substratum by floods or drifts of leaves, the growth of the bud scales will continue until the light is reached, though it may be a distance of twenty centimetres. Such growth may be seen if the corms are grown in a deep layer of sphagnum moss, or in a dark room. After the stems emerge from the "drawn" buds they show a similar attenuation, attaining a length of twice the normal. The excessive elongation of stems is accompanied by variations in the structure and contents of the tissues. The cells are generally longer, while the walls are thinner. In consequence, organs grown in darkness are very weak and easily bent or broken. Growth in darkness is attended by the non-formation of chlorophyll. This is replaced by etiolin, giving the plant a pale, waxy, yellow appearance. The adaptive elongation is not shown by all species, however. It has been found that stems of beet, hop, dioscorea, and a few others show no adaptations to diminished light. The adaptive modification of stems elongating in darkness is developed from the retarding influence exercised by light upon growth. Thus it is a well-known fact that the action of certain portions of the sun's rays actually impedes or checks the increase in volume known as growth, though it does not influence actual division of the cells to any great extent. When this retarding action is eliminated excessive elongation ensues. The behavior of leaves in illuminations below the normal depends upon the relation of these organs to the storage structures of the plant as well as upon other factors, and many types are dependent upon their own activity for plastic material necessary for growth. It is to be said in general that leaves of dicotyledonous plants are incapable of full development in darkness, though to this rule there are many exceptions. Thus the leaves of the beet develop normally, or nearly so, in darkness. On the other hand, leaves of monocotyledonous plants attain normal size in darkness, especially those with straight or curved parallel venation. Some, as the iris, swamp marigold, and onion, attain a greater length in darkness than in light. Here, as in stems, cell division is not modified, but the growth of the individual cell is increased. The growth of leaves in darkness may be easily observed if the underground perennial stems of common mandrake are placed in a dark chamber before the growth of the leaf buds has begun. The leaves are peltate, and in the bud are folded about the end of the petiole after the manner of an umbrella. Usually this umbrella expands as soon as it has pushed upward and become free from the soil, attaining a diameter of twenty-five to forty centimetres when outspread. In darkness, however, it refuses to unfold, the laminæ are pale yellow and retain the crumpled form of the bud, and as the petiole shows an exaggerated elongation the organ takes on the appearance of a very small parasol on a very long handle. The imperfect development of leaves and the rapid decay of aërial organs deprived of sunlight leads to the conclusion that the action of light is necessary to the health and normal activity of these organs, and the light therefore exercises a _tonic_ influence upon vegetation. Many species of plants are so plastic and capable of such ready response to variations in external conditions that they undergo distinct morphological changes in response to variations in the intensity of the light. The common potato is an example of this fact. The edible tubers are simply thickened stems, and the plant has the habit of storing starch in any stems not acted upon by the light. The branches arising from the base of the main stem are generally underneath the surface of the soil, and afford the proper conditions for tuber formation. Sugar is constructed in the leaves, carried down the length of the stem, and deposited in the underground branches as starch. Space is made for the accumulating store by the multiplication of the thin-walled cells of the pith. If any of the upper branches should become shaded, they become at once the focus of converging streams of sugar, and similar enlargement ensues, resulting in the formation of tubers. Such structures are occasionally observed in plants grown thickly together. Vöchting, by a number of most ingenious experiments, has succeeded in producing tubers on any branch of a potato plant by simply inclosing the branch in a small dark chamber. As the result of one experiment the entire main stem springing from a sprouting tuber was converted into a new tuber nearly as large as the first. The entire plant at the close of the experiment had the form of a dumb-bell, with the old tuber as one ball and the new tuber as the other. The same writer has described important results obtained from a study of the action of light upon the stems of cactus, consisting of a number of flattened internodes. When the growing tips of such plants were allowed to develop in a dark chamber the new internodes grown were cylindrical in form. Such behavior suggests that these plants were originally furnished with cylindrical stems and foliar leaves. The leaves at some time in the history of the plant were found unsuitable, and gradually atrophied, while the stems were flattened and extended to take up their functions. Some very striking adaptations of form of organs to the intensity of the light have been analyzed by Goebel. The common harebell (_Campanula rotundifolia_) has an upright stem twenty to sixty centimetres in height. The upper part of the stem bears sessile lanceolate leaves, decreasing in size from the base to the summit. The first leaves formed by the stem on its emergence from the soil are entirely different in construction, showing a heart-shaped lamina with a distinct petiole. These leaves are formed at the actual surface of the soil, are generally more or less shaded or covered by fallen leaves, and in fact are not known or seen by many collectors or observers of the plant. Goebel found that similar leaves might be formed on any part of the plant if it were shaded from the full glare of the sun's rays. The cordate leaves at the base of the stem were always produced, however, no matter to what intensity of illumination that part of the plant was subjected. It is therefore safe to conclude that the cordate leaves are inherited forms, and that the lanceolate organs are adaptations to light which may be shown by any individual of the species. In general it is to be said that the leaves of sun-loving species have a thick epidermis, entirely free from chlorophyll, with stomata on the lower side only, a firm consistence due to the formation of woody tissues, and are often provided with a coating of hairs. The leaves of shade-loving plants, on the other hand, have a thin-walled epidermis often containing chlorophyll, stomata on both sides, and are not so plentifully provided with hairs as those in exposed situations. The variations in external form described above are due to the intensity of the illumination. At the same time the structure and arrangement of the cells depend on the direction from which the light rays come. Thus, an organ receiving light from one side only will exhibit a structure different from an organ of the same kind receiving direct rays from two or more sides. Light, then, is a cause of dorsiventrality--that is, of the fact that the upper and lower sides of organs are not alike in structure. The leaf affords a splendid example of dorsiventrality as a result of the exposure of one side only to direct light. The upper side of a horizontal leaf, such as the oak, beech, or maple, contains one or two layers of cylindrical cells with their long axes perpendicular to the surface. In vertical leaves, such as the iris, these _palisade_ cells, as they are termed, are not so well defined, and in all leaves grown in darkness this tissue is very much reduced. If a young leaf not yet unfolded from the bud is fastened in such a position that the under side is uppermost, palisade cells will be formed on the side exposed to the direct rays of the sun. The influence of light upon the sporophylls, or reproductive organs of the seed-forming plants, is quite as well defined as upon the vegetative organs. In general it is to be said that stamens and pistils may reach functional maturity in darkness or diffuse light, and if pollination is provided for, seed and fruit formation may ensue. The diminution of light has the effect of transforming inflorescences into leafy shoots in some instances, however. The more common reaction consists of alterations in the size, form, and color of the perianth, and greater changes are induced in the petals than in the sepals. The corolla shows greater decrease in size in _Melandryum_ and _Silene_, in diffuse light, though the relative form is maintained. The writer has obtained most striking results from growing flowers of _Salvia_ (sage) in a dark chamber, inclosing the inflorescence only. In the normal flower the irregular scarlet corolla attains three times the length of the calyx, and two stamens extrude from under the upper lip. When grown in darkness, the corolla with the adherent stamens measure about three millimetres in length, or one twelfth the normal, and are scarcely more than half the size of the calyx, which is but two thirds the size of similar organs grown in the light. The color is entirely lacking from the corolla, and is found only along the veins of the calyx. In other instances in which the corolla is composed of separate members, an unequal reaction is exhibited. The corolla of nasturtium (_Tropæolum majus_) consists of five approximately equal petals. Flowers of this species grown in darkness show one of nearly normal stature, two of reduced size, while the remaining two take the form of club-shaped bracts. The diminished size of the perianth of cleistogamous flowers of such types as the violet is due directly to the action of diminished light upon the hidden or inclosed flower. The influence of light upon the structure, reproductive processes, and distribution of the lower forms brings about the most widely divergent reactions, which can not be described here. The distribution and color of marine algæ depend upon the depth of the water and the consequent intensity of the light. This gives rise to distinct zones of aquatic vegetation. Thus in one series of surveys the _littoral_ zone, the beach area covered at high water and exposed at low water, was found to furnish proper conditions for green, brown, and red algæ. The _sublittoral_ zone, extending to a depth of forty metres, is furnished with red algæ, increasing in number with the depth, and the brown algæ disappear; while the _elittoral_ zone, from forty to one hundred and ten metres, is inhabited by red algæ alone. The number of species of vegetal organisms below this depth is extremely small. An alga (_Halosphæria viridis_) has been brought up from depths of one thousand to two thousand metres. A very great number of bacteria are unfavorably affected by light, and find proper conditions at some depth in the soil or water. It is on account of this fact that the water of frozen streams becomes more thickly inhabited by certain organisms than in the summer time, and exposure to sunlight is adopted as a hygienic measure in freeing clothing and household effects from infection. Bacteria occur abundantly in sea water at depths of two hundred to four hundred metres, and quite a number of species are to be found at eight hundred to eleven hundred metres. The distribution of fungi follows the general habit of bacteria in that they thrive best in darkness. It is to be noticed in this connection that light is also a determining factor in the distribution of the higher land plants. Thus the amount of light received in polar latitudes is quite insufficient for the needs of many species, entirely irrespective of temperature. The retarding influence of light upon growth is even more marked in the lower forms than in the higher. Such action is the result of the disintegrating effect of the blue-violet rays upon ferments and nitrogenous plastic substances. The greater massiveness of the bodies of the higher plants enables them to carry on the chemical activities in which these substances are concerned in the interior, where the intense rays may not penetrate. The attenuated and undifferentiated fungi must seek the shade, to escape the dangers of strong light, against which they have no shield. The reproductive processes are particularly sensitive to illumination. The formation of zoöspores by green felt (_Vaucheria_) may occur only in darkness, at night, or in diffuse light, and these examples might be multiplied indefinitely. Many features of the germination of spores and the growth of _protonemæ_ or _prothallia_ among the mosses, liverworts, and ferns are determined by light. Perhaps the most striking reactions of plants to light are to be seen in locomotor and orientation movements. Locomotor movements are chiefly confined to lower forms, and are most noticeable in the "swarm spores," or zoöspores of the algæ, though exhibited by spermatozoöids as well. Zoöspores may be seen collected against the side of the vessel receiving direct sunlight, while the opposite side of the vessel will be free from them. The chlorophyll bodies of green cells arrange themselves similarly. The latter bodies may move away from the exposed side of the cell if the light exceeds a certain intensity. The typical plant may not move its body toward or away from the source of light, but it may secure the same end by dispositions of its surfaces to vary the angle at which the rays are received. This form of irritability is one of the most highly developed properties of the plant. Wiesner has found that a seedling of the vetch is sensitive to an amount of light represented by one ten-millionth of a unit represented by a Roscoe-Bunsen flame. The "sensitiveness" to light may take one of three forms: The organ may place its axis parallel and pointing toward the source of the rays, as in stems, when it is said to be _proheliotropic_; the axis of the organ may assume a position perpendicular to the rays, which is designated as _diaheliotropism_; or it may place its axis parallel to the rays and pointing away from the light, when it is said to be _apheliotropic_. Upright stems are proheliotropic, horizontal leaves and creeping stems are diaheliotropic, and roots and such stems as those of ivy are apheliotropic. Sunlight varies from zero to the full blaze of the noonday sun, and assumes its greatest intensity in the equatorial regions. The intensity in latitudes 40° to 45° north would be represented by 1.5 units, and at the equator by 1.6 units. Near the equator the intensity is so great that an ordinary leaf may not receive the full force of the noonday sun without damage. The injury would not result from the luminous rays, but from the temperatures, 40° to 50° C., arising from the conversion of light into heat. As an adaptation to this condition nearly all leaves have either a pendent or a vertical position, or the power of assuming this position by motor or impassive wilting movements. Among the plants of the temperate zone the so-called compass plants are examples of similar adaptations. The compass plants include, among others, the wild lettuce (_Lactuca scariola_) and rosin weed (_Silphium laciniatum_). These plants place the leaves in a vertical position with the tips pointing north and south in such manner that the direct rays of the morning and evening sun only may strike the surfaces at right angles, while the edges are presented to the fierce rays at noonday. That this arrangement is an adaptation against the intense light is evident when it is seen that specimens growing in shaded locations or in diffuse light place the leaves in the typical horizontal position. To meet the functional conditions, both sides of the compass leaves are almost equally provided with palisade cells for food formation and stomata for transpiration. The estimation of the light striking a compass leaf shows that it receives approximately the same amount of light as a horizontal leaf during the course of a day, but the two maxima of intensity, morning and evening, are much below that of the noon of horizontal leaves. The influence of light upon plants may be briefly summed as follows: Light is necessary for the formation of food substances by green plants, and it is an important factor in distribution in land and marine forms. Growth and reproduction are generally retarded by the action of the blue-violet rays. Light is fatal to certain bacteria and other low forms of vegetable life. Many plants have the power of accelerated growth of stems in diminished light as an adaptation for lifting the leaves above "shading" objects. The growth of many leaves and of the perianth of flowers is hindered in diminished light. The outward form of many organs, particularly leaves, is dependent upon the intensity of the light received. The internal structure of bilateral or dorsiventral organs is largely determined by the direction of the rays. Plants have the power of movement to adjust their surfaces to a proper angle with impinging light rays, as a protective adaptation. * * * * * Matches which do not contain any phosphorus and which take fire by friction on any surface--a match that has been long sought--have been prepared by Mr. S. A. Rosenthal and Dr. S. J. von Kornocki. It is represented that they can be manufactured as cheaply as ordinary matches. THE STONE AGE IN EGYPT. BY J. DE MORGAN. The investigation of the origin of man in Egypt is a very complex problem, belonging as much to geology as to archæology. The earliest evidences we have of human industry, in fact, go back to so remote a period that they should be regarded rather as fossils than as archæological documents. They are very coarsely worked flints, which are found near the surface of the ground among the pebbles of the Quaternary or Pleistocene epoch, and similar to those which occur abundantly in Europe, America, and Asia; but the study and collection of them have been pursued with less method than in those countries. The more recent monuments, so much more conspicuous and more easily accessible, have attracted most attention, while these have been left in the background. No region in the world presents a clearer and more distinct individual character than Egypt. Each village is a special world, each valley a universe that has developed its own life; and man has felt the special local impressions; and even in modern times, while all the Egyptian villages present a similar aspect, and although the fellah appears to be the same sort of a man everywhere, each locality has its special individual characteristics. One who knows how to observe men and things critically will find considerable differences. These dissimilarities are as old as Egypt itself. They have always existed, and are as much more intense as the communications between district and district were formerly more difficult. They are due to physical conditions special to each village, to the prevailing winds, the form and character of the mountains, the extent of cultivable lands, and the supply of water. A study of the detail of the country is a very important preliminary to the examination of Egyptian history. Every village and every nome had formerly its special divinity and its particular usages. Are we sure that the gods and customs were not imposed by local conditions? At Ombos two hostile gods were adored in the same temple. May we not see in this fact a recollection of the hostility which has always prevailed between the inhabitants of the two banks of the river, and still continues? Previous, however, to investigating these details which have been so influential on Egyptian civilization, we ought to dispel the darkness which hides from us the earliest traces of man in the valley of the Nile, and examine how man lived in his beginning, to study the geology of the country and its condition when it issued from the seas. As one of the results of this study we find that palæolithic man, known to us only through the rough-cut flints we find in the alluvions, made his first appearance. After this period of excavation came that of filling up with silt, which still continues. New evidences of man appear in his burial places and the ruins of his villages, the kitchen middens which he has left in his habitations of unburned brick and in his camps. This time he is more civilized; he chips his flints with a skill that is not surpassed in European neolithic implements; he makes vessels of stone and clay, covers them with rude paintings, sculptures animal forms of schist, and wears necklaces of the shells and the stones of the country. Then comes a foreign people to take possession of Egypt, bringing knowledge of metals, writing, hieroglyphics, painting, sculpture, new industries and arts that have nothing in common with the arts of the people it has overcome. The ancient Pharaonic empire begins, or perhaps the reign of the divine dynasties. The men with stone implements are the aborigines; the others are the conquering civilized Egyptians. Nothing can be more interesting than a comparison of the arts of the aborigines and those of the Egyptians of the earlier dynasties. Nearly all their characteristics are different, and it is impossible to regard them as of common origin. Yet some of the native forms persisted till the last days of the empire of the Pharaohs. These aborigines belonged to a race that is now extinct, they having been absorbed into the mass of the Egyptians and Nubians among whom they lived, and from this mixture the fellah of ancient times is derived. The origin of the conquering race--of the Egyptians as we know them--has not been precisely determined. The weight of evidence, so far as it has been obtained, and the balance of opinion, are in favor of an Asiatic origin and of primary relationship with the Shemites of Chaldea. In Egypt more than in any other country it is necessary to proceed with the most scrupulous circumspection in the examination of remote antiquities. The relics of thousands of years of human life have been piled one upon another and often intermixed. The questions they raise can not be answered in the cabinet or by the study of texts; but the inquiry must be prosecuted on the ground, by comparison of the deposits where they are found and in the deposits from which they are recovered. From my first arrival in Egypt, in 1892, my attention has been greatly occupied with the question of the origin of the relics of the stone age that have been found from time to time in that country. I have gathered up the scattered documents, explored a large number of sites, and have bought such flint implements as I have found on sale. I have gradually been led to believe that while some of these cut stones may possibly belong to the historical epoch, we shall have to attribute a much more remote antiquity to the most of them, and that evidences of a neolithic age in the valley of the Nile are more abundant than has generally been supposed. In many minds the historical antiquity of Egypt, the almost fabulous ages to which its civilization ascends, seem to challenge the history of other countries, and the land of the Pharaohs, rejecting all chronological comparison, to have appeared in the midst of the world as a single example of a land which savage life had never trodden. Yet what are the centuries since Menes ruled over the reclaimed valleys, the few thousand years of which we can calculate the duration, by the side of the incalculable lapse of time since man, struggling with the glaciers and the prehistoric beasts, began his conquest of the earth? The antiquity of Egypt, the eight thousand years (if it be as many) since the first Pharaoh, are only as an atom in the presence of these ages. We can assert some vague knowledge of these pre-Pharaonic inhabitants, for two hatchets of the Chellean pattern were found some time ago in the desert, one at Esnet, the other near the pyramids of Gizeh; and we can now affirm in the most positive manner that Quaternary man lived in the country which is now Egypt, and was then only preparing to be. Four palæolithic stations have been more recently discovered--at Thebes, Tukh, Abydos, and Daschur. Join these sites to the other two where isolated pieces were found, and we have the geography of what we know at present of Chellean man in the valley of the Nile. Doubtless continuous researches would result in similar discoveries at other points, for I have met these relics wherever I have been able to make a short sojourn. The Chellean implements are found in the gravels of the diluvium on the pebbly surface. They have been disturbed and probably scattered, but some places yield them more numerously than others--points possibly corresponding to the ancient workshops. I have found a considerable number of specimens at Deir-el-Medinet; M. Daressy, of the Bureau of Antiquities, found a perfectly characteristic Chellean hammer stone in the Yalley of the Queens at Gurneh, as perfectly worked as the best specimens found at Chelles, St. Acheul, and Moulin-Quignon. The finds are not very numerous at Tukh, but one may in a few hours make a collection there of hatchets (or hammer stones), scrapers, points, simple blades, and a large number of stones bearing indisputable marks of having been worked, but not presenting precise forms. The deposit at Abydos is in the bottom of a circle behind the ruins surrounding the Pharaonic necropolis. The specimens seem sufficient to prove the existence of Quaternary man in Egypt, while the search for them has hardly yet begun. In view of them it is extremely improbable that man did not also exist there during the long period that intervened between this primitive age and that of the earliest Egyptians who had metals. He did exist there then, and the evidences of it are found in neolithic remains between Cairo and Thebes, a distance of about eight hundred kilometres along the valley of the Nile, in the Fayum, and in Upper Egypt. Among these are the remarkable tombs at Abydos which have been explored by M. E. Amélineau, and of which he has published descriptions. They belong to a category which I have characterized as tombs of transition and as signalizing the passage from the use of polished stone to that of metals. Their archaic character can not be disputed, and their royal origin is probably certain. They may belong to aboriginal kings or to the earliest dynasties. They reveal a knowledge of brass and of the use of gold for ornament. At the necropolis of El-'Amrah, a few miles south of Abydos, are some archaic tombs, all of the same model, composed of an oval trench from five to six and a half feet deep. The body is laid on the left side, and the legs are doubled up till the knees are even with the sternum; the forearms are drawn out in front and the hands placed one upon the other before the face, while the head is slightly bent forward. Around the skeleton are vases, and large, rudely made urns, often filled with ashes or the bones of animals, and nearer to them are painted or red vessels with black or brown edges, vessels roughly shaped out of stone, and figurines in schist representing fishes or quadrupeds, cut flints, alabaster clubs, and necklaces and bracelets of shells. Bronze is rare, and found always in shape of small implements. Both purely neolithic tombs and burials of the transition period to metals occur at El-'Amrah. The most remarkable feature of the burials is the position of the corpse, totally unlike anything that is found of the Pharaonic ages. The Egyptian finds of stone implements present the peculiarity as compared with those of Europe, that types are found associated together belonging to what would be regarded in other countries as very different epochs. The time may come when subdivisions can be made of the Egyptian stone age, but the study has not yet been pursued far enough to make this practicable at present. Among these articles are hatchets showing the transitions, examples of which are wanting in Europe, from the rudest stone hammer to the polished neolithic implement; knives of various shape and some of handsome workmanship; scrapers, lance heads, arrowheads, saws, pins, bodkins, maces, beads, bracelets, and combs. The large number of instruments with toothed blades found at some of the stations may be regarded as pointing to a very extensive cultivation of cereals at the time they were in use. The deposits of Tukh, Zarraïdah, Khattarah, Abydos, etc., situated in regions suitable for growing grain, yield thousands of them, while they are very rare at the fishing station of Dimeh. That the use of sickles tipped with flint very probably lasted long after the introduction of metals seems to be proved by the hieroglyphics; but very few evidences of the existence of such tools are found after the middle empire. No traces of articles related to the religion of the Pharaohs are found in the burial places of the aborigines. In place of the statuettes and funerary divinities of later times are found rude figurines of animals cut in green schists. They represent fishes, tortoises with eyes adorned with hard stone or nacre, and numerous signs the origin of which is unknown, and were apparently regarded as fetiches or divinities. Articles of pottery are very numerous, very crude, and of a great variety of forms. It is not necessary to suppose that the people who have left these relics were savages or barbarians. History and even the present age afford instances of many peoples who have obtained considerable degrees of civilization while backward in some of the arts. It is hardly possible to achieve delicacy of design and finish without the use of metals. I believe I have shown that an age of stone once existed in Egypt, and that it furthermore played an important part, even in Pharaonic civilization.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Author's Recherches sur les Origines de l'Egypte._ SUPERSTITION AND CRIME. BY PROF. E. P. EVANS. In January, 1898, an elderly woman came in great anxiety to a priest of the Church of St. Ursula, in Munich, Bavaria, and complained that the devil haunted her house at night and frightened her by making a great noise. In explanation of this unseasonable and undesirable visit from the lower world she stated that a joint-stock company had been formed in Berlin, with a branch in Munich, for the purpose of discovering hidden treasures, and that in order to attain this object a human sacrifice must be made to the devil, and that she had been selected as the victim. A woman, whose husband was a stockholder in the aforesaid company, had kindly communicated to her this information, so that she might be prepared and have time to set her house in order. Satan, however, grew impatient of the promised sacrifice, and began to look after her. The priest sent one of his younger assistants at the altar to read appropriate prayers in the haunted house, and thus exorcise the evil spirit. We can hardly suppose that his reverence believed in the reality of the reported apparition, and yet he could not assert its impossibility by calling in question the existence of the devil or the actuality of diabolical agencies in human affairs without undermining the foundations of the ecclesiastical system, of which he was an acknowledged supporter. Such a declaration would "take away our hope," as the Scotchman said of the denial of a literal hell-fire and the doctrine of eternal punishment. It was for the same reason that the great body of the Catholic clergy, from Pope Leo XIII and the highest dignitaries of the church down to the humblest country vicar, so easily fell into the snares laid by Leo Taxil and accepted the signature of the devil Bitru as genuine, and his revelations concerning the pact of the freemasons with Satan as authentic. It is certainly somewhat startling to meet with such a case of gross superstition as the above-mentioned in one of the seats of modern science and centers of European civilization. In rural districts, remote from the influences of intellectual culture, however, instances of this kind are of quite frequent occurrence, and often result in the commission of crime. Human sacrifices to Satan are still by no means uncommon in many parts of Russia, and are supposed to be effective in warding off famine and in staying the ravages of pestilence. Even in Germany and other countries of western Europe the belief in their prophylactic virtue is remarkably prevalent, and would be often put into practice were it not for the stricter administration of justice and the greater terror of the law. In October, 1889, the criminal court in the governmental province of Archangelsk, in northern Russia, sentenced a Samoyede, Jefrern Pyrerka, to fifteen years' imprisonment with hard labor for the murder of a maiden named Ssavaney. His sole defense was that an unusually severe winter with a heavy fall of snow had produced a famine followed by scurvy, of which all his children had died. He therefore made an image of the devil out of wood, smeared its lips with fat, and set it up on a hillock. He then attempted to lasso one of his companions, Andrey Tabarey, and had already thrown the noose round his neck, when the energetic wife of the intended victim intervened and rescued her husband. Shortly afterward he succeeded in strangling the girl and offering her as a sacrifice to his idol. In the province of Novgorod, known as "the darkest Russia," it is a general custom among the country people to sacrifice some animal, usually a black cat, a black cock, or a black dog, by burying it alive, in order to check the spread of cholera. In the village of Kamenka, a peasant, whose son had died of this disease, interred with the body eight live tomcats. The immolation of dumb animals, however, is deemed less efficacious than that of human beings. On one occasion, when the cholera was raging severely, a deputation of peasants waited upon their parson, stating that they had determined to bury him alive in order to appease the demon of the plague. He escaped this horrible death only by apparently acceding to their wishes and craving a few days' respite in order to prepare for such a solemn ceremony; meanwhile he took the measures necessary to secure his safety and thwarted the purpose of his loving parishioners. In Okopovitchi, a village of the same province, the peasants succeeded in enticing an aged woman, Lucia Manjkov, into the cemetery, where they thrust her alive into the grave containing the bodies of those who had died of the epidemic, and quickly covered her up. When brought to trial they proved that they had acted on the advice of a military surgeon, Kosakovitch, who was therefore regarded as the chief culprit, and sentenced to be knouted by the hangman, and then to undergo twelve years' penal servitude in Siberia. We are indebted for these instances of barbarous superstition to the researches of Augustus Löwenstimm, associate jurisconsult in the department of justice at St. Petersburg, who has derived them from thoroughly authentic and mostly official sources. He reports several occurrences of a similar kind during the epidemics of cholera in 1831, 1855, and 1872. Indeed, it is very difficult to abolish such pagan practices so long as the clergy foster the notion that animal sacrifices are expiatory and propitiatory in their effects. In some parts of the province of Vologda it is still customary on the day dedicated to the prophet Elias (July 20th in the Greek calendar) to offer up bullocks, he-goats, or other quadrupeds within the precincts of the church. The animal is driven into the courtyard surrounding the sacred edifice and there slaughtered; the flesh is boiled in a large kettle, one half of it being kept by the peasants who provide the sacrifice, while the other half is distributed among the priests and sacristans.[26] The belief that the walls of dams, bridges, aqueducts, and buildings are rendered preternaturally strong by immuring a living human being within them still prevails in many countries of Christendom, and there is hardly an old castle in Europe that has not a legend of this sort connected with it. Usually a child is supposed to be selected for this purpose, and the roving bands of gypsies are popularly accused of furnishing the infant victims. The custom of depositing gold coins or other precious objects in the foundation stones of important public edifices is doubtless a survival of the ancient superstition.[27] Löwenstimm mentions a curious superstition of pagan origin still practiced in portions of Russia, and known as "_korovya smertj_" (cow-death) and "_opachivaniye_" (plowing roundabout). If pestilence or murrain prevails in a village, an old woman of repute as a seeress or fortune-teller enters the confines of the village at midnight and beats a pan. Thereupon all the women of the place assemble in haste, armed with divers domestic utensils--frying-pans, pokers, tongs, shovels, scythes, and cudgels. After shutting the cattle in their stalls, and warning the men not to leave their houses, a procession is formed. The seeress takes off her dress and pronounces a curse upon Death. She is then hitched to a plow, together with a bevy of virgins and a misshapen woman, if such a one can be found, and a continuous and closed furrow is drawn round the village three times. When the procession starts, the image of some saint suitable to the occasion, that of St. Blasius, for example, in the case of murrain, is borne in front of it; this is followed by the seeress, clad only in a shift, with disheveled hair and riding on a broomstick; after her come women and maidens drawing the plow, and behind them the rest of the crowd, shrieking and making a fearful din. They kill every animal they meet, and if a man is so unfortunate as to fall in with them he is mercilessly beaten, and usually put to death. In the eyes of these raging women he is not a human being, but Death himself in the form of a were-wolf, who seeks to cross their path and thus break the charm and destroy the healing virtue of the furrow. The ceremony varies in different places, and generally ends by burying alive a cat, cock, or dog. In some districts the whole population of the village, both men and women, take part in the procession, and are often attended by the clergy with sacred images and consecrated banners. During the prevalence of the pest in the province of Podolia, in 1738, the inhabitants of the village of Gummenez, while marching in procession through the fields, met Michael Matkovskij, a nobleman of a neighboring village, who was looking for his stray horses. The strange man, wandering about with an eager look and a bridle in his hand, was regarded as the incarnate pestilence, and was therefore seized and most brutally beaten and left lying half naked and half dead on the ground. At length he recovered his senses and succeeded with great difficulty in reaching his home. No sooner was it known that he was still alive than the peasants rushed into his house, dragged him to their village, subjected him to terrible tortures, and finally burned him. A curious feature of these remedial rites is the mixture of paganism and Christianity which characterizes them; and it is an unquestionable though almost incredible fact that their atoning efficacy is often quite as firmly believed in by the village priests of the Russian Church as by the most ignorant members of their flock. In the autumn of 1894 some Russian peasants in the district of Kazan slew one of their own number as a sacrifice to the gods of the Votiaks, a Finnish race dwelling on the Volga, Viatka, and Kama Rivers. Even orthodox Christians of the Greek Church, although regarding these gods as devils, fear and seek to propitiate them, especially in times of public distress. Still more widely diffused is the practice of infanticide as the sequence of superstition. The belief that dwarfs or gnomes, dwelling in the inner parts of the earth, carry off beautiful newborn babes and leave their own deformed offspring in their stead is not confined to any one people, but is current alike in Germanic, Celtic, Romanic, and Slavic countries, and causes a misshapen child to be looked upon with suspicion and subjected to cruel tortures and even killed. The supposed changeling is often severely beaten with juniper rods and the scourging attended with incantations, so as to compel the wicked fairies to reclaim their deformed bantling and restore the stolen child. If the castigation proves ineffective, more summary measures are frequently taken, and the supposititious suckling is thrown out of the window on a dunghill or immersed in boiling water. In 1877, in the city of New York, an Irish immigrant and his wife burned their child to death under the delusion that they were ridding themselves of a changeling. Cases of this kind are quite common in Ireland, where the victims are sometimes adults.[28] Not long since Magoney, an Irish peasant, had a sickly child, which the most careful nurture failed to restore to health and strength. The parents, therefore, became convinced that a changeling had been imposed upon them, and when the boy was four years old they resolved to have recourse to boiling water, in which he was kept, notwithstanding his shrieks and protestations that he was not an elf, but their own Johnny Magoney, until death released him from his torments. Wilhelm Mannhardt, the celebrated writer on folklore, states that when, in 1850, he was in Löblau, a village of West Prussia, he saw a man brutally maltreating a boy on the street. On inquiry he found that the lad had done nothing worthy of blame, but that his only fault was an exceptionally large head. This cranial peculiarity, offensively conspicuous in what seems to have been a narrow-headed family, was reason enough for the parents to disown their offspring, and to treat him as the counterfeit of a child foisted in by the fairies. At Hadersleben, a considerable market town of North Silesia, the wife of a farmer, in 1883, gave birth to a puny infant, which the parents at once assumed to be a changeling. In order to defeat the evil designs of the elves and to compel the restoration of their own child, they held the newborn over a bed of live coals on the hearth until it was covered with blisters and died in intense agony. In East Prussia, the Mazurs, a Polish race, whose only notable contribution to modern civilization and the gayety of nations is the mazurka, take precautionary measures by placing a book (usually the Bible, although any book will do) under the head of the newborn babe, so as to prevent the devil from spiriting it away and substituting for it one of his own hellish brood, thus unwittingly furnishing a marvelous illustration of the beneficent influence of the printing press and the magic power of literature. The Estonian inhabitants of the island of Oesel in Livonia refrain from kindling a fire in the house while the rite of baptism is being celebrated, lest the light of the flames should render it easier for Satan surreptitiously to exchange an imp for the infant. After the sacred ceremony has been performed there is supposed to be no danger of such a substitution. One of the most incredible instances of this extremely silly and surprisingly persistent superstition occurred in 1871 at Biskunizy, a village of Prussian Posen, where a laborer, named Bekker, had by industry and frugality gradually acquired a competence and been able to buy a house of his own, in which he led a happy domestic life with his wife and five children, of whom he was very fond. After fourteen years of unbroken felicity the wife's elder sister, Marianne Chernyak, came from Poland to pay them a visit. This woman was a crackbrained devotee, who spent half her time in going to mass and the other half in backbiting her neighbors. She also claimed that she could detect at once whether a person is in league with Satan, and could cast out devils. The villagers came to look upon her as a witch, and avoided all association with her, especially as her aberrations manifested themselves in exceedingly malevolent and mischievous forms. Unfortunately, she acquired complete ascendency over her younger sister, who accepted her absurd pretensions as real. On November 19, 1871, Marianne, after returning from confession, went to bed, but at midnight Mrs. Bekker, who slept with her youngest child, a boy about a year old, was awakened by a fearful shriek and lit the lamp. Thereupon the sister rushed into the room, crying: "The demons have stolen your child and put a changeling in your bed: beat him, beat him, if you wish to have your child again!" Under the influence of this suggestion, which seemed to be almost hypnotic in its character, the bewildered mother began to beat the boy. The aunt now seized him and swung him to and fro, as if she would fling him out of the window, at the same time calling out to Satan: "There! you have him; take your brat!" She then gave him back to his mother with the words: "Throw him to the ground, drub him, beat him to death; otherwise you will never recover your child." This advice was followed, and the boy severely strapped with a heavy girdle as he lay on the floor. Meanwhile Bekker, hearing the noise, got up and at first tried to intervene for the protection of his son, but was easily convinced by his wife that she was doing the right thing, and persuaded to aid her in discomfiting the devil by beating the boy with a juniper stick. The process of exorcism, thus renewed with increased vigor, soon proved fatal. At this juncture, as the son of the aunt, a lad of five years, threw himself down with loud lamentations beside the dead body of his little cousin, his mother cried out: "Beat him; he is not my child! Why should we spare him? We shall get other children!" Thereupon he, too, was maltreated in the same manner until he expired. The aunt then declared that the devil had crept into the stovepipe, and went to work to demolish the stove, but, when she was prevented from doing so, fled into the garden, where she was found the next morning by the school-teacher. By this time Bekker and his wife seem to have come to their senses, and were sitting by the corpses of the murdered children, weeping and praying, as the neighbors entered the house. The trial, which took place at Ostrov in January, 1872, led to the introduction of conflicting expert testimony concerning the mental soundness of the accused, and the matter was finally referred to a commission of psychiaters in Berlin, who decided that Bekker and his wife were not suffering from mental disease, and therefore not irresponsible, but that the aunt was subject to periodical insanity to such a degree as not to be accountable for her actions. Curiously enough, the jurors remained uninfluenced by this testimony, and pronounced her guilty of the crime laid to her charge, and in accordance with this verdict the court sentenced her to three years' imprisonment with hard labor. The jurors even went so far as to declare that she herself did not believe in the existence of elf children or satanic changelings, but made use of this popular superstition for her own selfish purposes, and that she guilefully denounced her own boy as an imp in order to get rid of him. In this verdict, or rather in the considerations urged in support of it, it is easy to perceive the effects of strong local prejudice against the accused, who had the reputation of being a lazy, malicious, and crafty person, and was therefore denied the extenuation of honest self-deception. Indeed, in such cases it is always more or less difficult to determine where sincere delusion ceases and conscious swindling begins. Just at this point the annals of superstition present many puzzling problems, the solution of which is of special interest as well as of great practical importance not only to the psychologist and psychiater, but also to the legislator and jurisprudent, who have to do with the enactment and administration of criminal laws. In the penal codes of the most civilized nations the agency of superstition as a factor in the promotion of crime is almost wholly ignored, and, as this was not the case in former times, the omission would seem to assume that the general diffusion of knowledge in our enlightened age had rendered all such specifications obsolete and superfluous. Only in the Russian penal code, especially in the sections _Ulosheniye_ and _Ustav_ on felonies and frauds, as cited by Löwenstimm, do we find a distinct recognition and designation of various forms of superstition as incentives to crime. Thus, in paragraph 1469 of the first of these sections, the murder of "monstrous births or misshapen sucklings" as changelings is expressly mentioned, and the penalty prescribed; and in other clauses of the code punishments are imposed for the desecration of graves and mutilation of corpses, in order to procure talismans or to prevent the dead from revisiting the earth as vampires, and for various offenses emanating from the belief in sorcery and diabolical possession. The practice of opening graves and mutilating dead bodies is quite common, and arises in general from the notion that persons who die impenitent and without extreme unction, including suicides and victims to delirium tremens, apoplexy, and other forms of sudden death, as well as schismatics, sorcerers, and witches, come forth from their graves and wander about as vampires, sucking the blood of individuals during sleep and inflicting misery upon entire communities by producing drought, famine, and pestilence. The means employed to prevent this dangerous metamorphosis, or at least to compel the vampire to remain in the grave, differ in different countries. In Russia the deceased is buried with his face downward, and an ashen stake driven through his back, while in Poland and East Prussia the corpse is wrapped up in a fish net and covered with poppies, owing, doubtless, to the soporific qualities of this plant. Preventive measures of this kind are often taken with the consent and co-operation of the clergy and local authorities. Thus, in 1849, at Mariensee, near Dantzig, in West Prussia, a peasant's wife came to the Catholic priest of the parish and complained that an old woman named Welm, recently deceased, appeared in her house and beat and otherwise tormented her child. The priest seems to have accepted the truth of her statement, since he ordered the corpse to be disinterred, decapitated, reburied at a cross-road, and covered with poppies. In 1851, during the prevalence of cholera in Ukraine, in the governmental province of Kiev, the peasants of Possady attributed the epidemic to a deceased sacristan and his wife, who were supposed to roam about at night as vampires and kill people by sucking their blood. In order to stay the ravages of the scourge the corpses of this couple were exhumed, their heads cut off and burned, and ashen stakes driven through their backs into the ground. In 1892 a peasant woman in the Russian province of Kovno hanged herself in a wood near the village of Somenishki. The priest refused her Christian burial because she had committed suicide, and was therefore given over to the devil. In order that she might rest quietly in her grave and not be changed into a vampire, her sons severed her head from her body and laid it at her feet. In thus refusing to perform religious funeral rites the priest obeyed the canons of the church and also the laws of the Russian Empire. Until quite recently a corner of unconsecrated ground next to the wall of the Russian cemetery was reserved as a sort of carrion pit for the corpses of self-murderers, and it is expressly prescribed in the _Svod Sakonov_[29] that they "shall be dragged to such place of infamy by the knacker, and there covered with earth." This treatment of a _felo-de-se_ by the ecclesiastical and civil authorities directly fosters popular superstition by tending to confirm the notion that there is something uncanny, eldritch, demoniacal, and preternaturally malignant inherent in his mortal remains, a notion still further strengthened by a most unjust paragraph (1472) in the Russian code, which declares the last will and testament of a suicide to have no legal validity. Drought, too, as well as pestilence, is ascribed to the evil agency of vampires, which "milk the clouds," and hinder the falling of the dew. In 1887 the South Russian province of Cherson began to suffer from drought soon after a peasant had hanged himself in the village of Ivanovka, the inhabitants of which, assuming a causative connection between the aridity and the self-homicide, poured water on the grave while uttering the following words: "I sprinkle, I pour; may God send a shower, bring on a little rainfall, and relieve us from misery!" As this invocation failed to produce the desired effect, the body was taken up and inhumed again in a gorge outside of the village. In some districts the corpse is disinterred, beaten on the head, and drenched with water poured through a sieve; in others it is burned. The records of the criminal courts in West Prussia during the last half century contain numerous instances of the violation of graves from superstitious motives. Thus in March, 1896, a peasant died in the village of Penkuhl; soon afterward his son was taken ill of a lingering disease, which the remedies prescribed by the country doctor failed to relieve. It did not take long for the "wise women" of the village to convince him that his father was a "nine-killer," and would soon draw after him into the grave nine of his next of kin. The sole means of depriving him of this fatal power would be to disinter him and sever his head from his body. In accordance with this advice the young man dug up the corpse by night and decapitated it with a spade. In this case the accused, if tried in court, might honestly declare that he acted in self-defense; indeed, he might plead in justification of his conduct that he thereby preserved not only his own life, but also the lives of eight of his nearest and dearest relations, and that he should be commended rather than condemned for what he had done. It is the possibility and sincerity of this plea that render it so difficult to deal with such offenses judicially and justly. Here is needed what Tennyson calls "The intuitive decision of a bright And thorough-edged intellect, to part Error from crime." Quite different, however, from a moral point of view, is the opening of graves in quest of medicaments, and especially of talismans, which are supposed to bring good luck to the possessor or to enable him to practice sorcery and to commit crime with impunity. In ancient times, and even in the middle ages, physicians sometimes prescribed parts of the human body as medicine, and in Franconia, North Bavaria, a peasant now occasionally enters an apothecary's shop and asks for "_Armensünderfett_," poor sinner's fat, obtained from the bodies of executed malefactors and prized as a powerful specific. The culprit was tried first for murder and then for lard, and thus made doubly conducive to the safety and sanitation of the community. Formerly many persons went diligently to public executions for the purpose of procuring a piece of the criminal as a healing salve, but since the hangman or headsman has generally ceased to perform his fearful functions in the presence of a promiscuous crowd, such loathsome remedies for disease are sought in churchyards. In May, 1865, a Polish peasant in Wyssokopiz, near Warsaw, discovered that the grave of his recently deceased wife had been opened and the corpse mutilated. Information was given to the police, and a shepherd's pipe, found in the churchyard, led to the detection of the culprit in the person of the communal shepherd, a man twenty-six years old, who on examination confessed that he, with the aid of two accomplices, had committed the disgustful deed. His object, he said, was to procure a tooth and the liver of a dead person. He intended to pulverize the tooth and after mixing it with snuff to give it to his brother-in-law in order to poison him. On perceiving, however, that the body was that of a woman, he did not take the tooth, because it would have no power to kill a man; but he cut out the liver for the purpose of burying it in a field where the sheep were pastured, and thus causing the death of the entire flock in case he should be superseded by another shepherd, which he feared might happen. All three were condemned to hard labor in Siberia. It is a quite prevalent notion that if any part of a corpse is concealed in a house, the inmates will have the corresponding bodily organs affected by disease and gradually paralyzed. A drastic example of this superstition occurred in May, 1875, at Schwetz, a provincial town of West Prussia, where a woman named Albertine Mayevski became the mother of a male child, which died soon after its birth. The father, to whom she was betrothed, refused to marry her, and to punish him for this breach of promise she disinterred the body of her babe, cut off its right hand at the wrist and the genitals, and hid them in the chimney of the house of her faithless lover, hoping thereby to cause the hand, with which he had pledged his vow, to wither away, and to render him impotent. All this she freely confessed when brought to trial, and was sentenced to two months' imprisonment. But such relics of the tomb are used, on the principle of _similia similibus_, not only for inflicting injury, but also for bringing luck. Thus members of the "light-fingered craft" carry with them the finger of a corpse in order to enhance their skill, success, and safety in thievery; if the finger belonged to an adroit thief or a condemned criminal its talismanic virtue is all the greater. It is also believed that a purse in which a finger joint is kept will contain an inexhaustible supply of money. The finger of a murdered man is greatly prized by burglars because it is supposed to possess a magic power in opening locks. The records of criminal courts prove that these absurd notions are generally entertained by common malefactors in East Prussia, Thuringia, Silesia, Bohemia, and Poland. A candle made of fat obtained from the human body is very frequently used by thieves on account of its supposed soporific power, since with such a taper, known in Germany as _Diebslicht_ or _Schlummerlicht_ (sloom-light in provincial English), they are confident of being able to throw all the inmates of the house into a deep sleep, and thus rummage the rooms at will and with perfect impunity. The danger of detection is also forestalled by laying a dead man's hand on a window sill; and in order to make assurance doubly sure, both preservatives are usually employed. Hence the proverbial saying, "He sleeps as though a dead hand had been carried round him." The desire to procure material for such candles often leads to the commission of crime. An Austrian jurist, Dr. Gross, in his manual for inquisitorial judges (_Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter_), and the folklorists Mannhardt and Jakushkin, give numerous instances of this kind, and there is no doubt that the many mysterious murders and ghastly mutilations, especially of women and children, so horrifying to the public and puzzling to the police, are due to the same cause. In most cases the prosecuting attorneys and judges are unable to discover the real motives of such bloody and brutal deeds because they are ignorant of the popular superstitions in which they have their origin, and, for lack of any better explanation, attribute them to mere brutishness, wantonness, homicidal mania, and other vague and unintelligible impulses, whereas in reality they spring from a supremely selfish but exceedingly definite purpose, are perpetrated deliberately, and with the normal exercise of the mental faculties, and can not be mitigated even by the extenuating plea of sudden passion. Crimes of this sort are of common occurrence not only in the semi-barbarous provinces of Russia, but also in Austria and Germany, justly reckoned among the most civilized countries of Christendom. On January 1, 1865, the house of a man named Peck, near Elbing in West Prussia, was entered during the absence of the family by a burglar, Gottfried Dallian, who killed the maid-servant, Catharina Zernickel, and ransacked the premises in search of money and other objects of value. Before carrying off his spoils he cut a large piece of flesh out of the body of the murdered girl in order to make candles for his protection on future occasions of this sort. The talismanic light, which he kept in a tin tube, did not prevent him from being caught in the act of committing another burglary about six weeks later. During the trial, which resulted in his condemnation to death, he confessed that he had eaten some of the maid-servant's flesh in order to appease his conscience. This disgusting method of alleviating the "compunctious visitings of Nature" would seem to confirm the suggestion of a writer in the _Russkiya Wjedomosti_ (Russian News, 1888, No. 359) that the thieves' candle is a survival of primitive cannibalism, distinct traces of which he also discovers in a Russian folk song which runs as follows: "I bake a cake out of the hands and feet, out of the silly head I form a goblet, out of the eyes I cast drinking glasses, out of the blood I brew an intoxicating beer, and out of the fat I mold a candle." It is certainly very queer to find such stuff constituting the theme of popular song within the confines of Christian civilization at the present day, a grewsome stuff more suitable as the staple of Othello's tales "--of the cannibals that each other eat, The anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders." In the burglary just mentioned the murder and mutilation of the maid were incidental to the robbery, and probably an afterthought, but there are on record numerous instances of persons being waylaid and killed for the sole purpose of making candles out of their adipose tissue. No longer ago than November 15, 1896, two peasants were convicted of this crime in Korotoyak, a city on the Don in South Russia. Their victim was a boy twelve years of age, whom they strangled and eviscerated in order to make candles from the fat of the caul and entrails. It would be superfluous and tedious to cite additional examples of this outrageous offense against humanity and common sense, for, like the devils that entered into the Gadarene swine, their name is Legion. A still more disgusting and dangerous superstition is the notion that supernatural powers are acquired by eating the heart of an unborn babe of the male sex, just as a savage imagines that by eating the heart of a brave foe he can become indued with his valor. The modern European cannibal believes that by eating nine hearts, or parts of them, he can make himself invisible and even fly through the air. He can thus commit crime without detection, and defy all efforts to arrest or imprison him, releasing himself with ease from fetters, and passing through stone walls. This horrible practice has been known for ages, and is still by no means uncommon. In the first half of the fifteenth century the notorious marshal of France, Gilles de Laval, Baron of Rayz, is said to have murdered in his castle near Nantes one hundred and fifty women in order to get possession of unborn babes. He was then supposed to have committed these atrocities from lewd motives, and was also accused of worshiping Satan. A mixed commission of civilians and ecclesiastics, appointed to examine into the matter, found him guilty and condemned him to be strangled and burned on October 25, 1440. In 1429, when he was thirty-three years of age, he had fought the English at Orleans by the side of Joan of Arc, and it was probably the desire to acquire supernatural powers in emulation of the maid that led him to perpetrate a succession of inhuman butcheries extending over a period of fourteen years, the real object of which seems to have been imperfectly understood by the tribunal which sentenced him to death.[30] Löwenstimm cites several instances of this crime. Thus, in 1577 a man was put to the rack in Bamberg, North Bavaria, for murdering and disemboweling three pregnant women. In the seventeenth century a band of robbers, whose chief was known as "King Daniel," created intense consternation among the inhabitants of Ermeland in East Prussia. For a long time these freebooters roved and spoiled with impunity, but were finally arrested and executed. They confessed that they had killed fourteen women, but, as the unborn infants proved to be female, their hearts were devoid of talismanic virtue. Indeed, they attributed their capture to this unfortunate and unforseeable circumstance, and posed as persons worthy of commiseration on account of their ill luck. One of the strangest features of this cruel and incredible superstition is its persistency in an age of superior enlightenment. Dr. Gross records two cases of comparatively recent occurrence in the very centers of modern civilization: one in 1879, near Hamburg, where a woman, great with child, was killed and cut open by a Swede named Andersen, and another of like character ten years later in Simmering, near Vienna. An ordeal very commonly practiced in the middle ages to determine the guilt or innocence of any one accused of theft was to give him a piece of consecrated cheese, which, if he were guilty, it would be impossible for him to swallow. Hence arose the popular phrase, "It sticks in his throat." Thus Macbeth says, after he had "done the deed": "But wherefore could not I pronounce amen? I had most need of blessing, and amen Stuck in my throat." Wuttke states that this custom still prevails in the Prussian province of Brandenburg, where a person suspected of larceny is made to swallow a piece of Dutch cheese on which certain magical letters and signs are scratched. His failure to do so is regarded as conclusive evidence of his guilt. Various other means of making inquest for the detection of crime are in vogue, some of them merely silly, and others mercilessly savage. Thus a mirror is laid for three successive nights in the grave of a dead man. It is placed there in the name of God, and taken out in the name of Satan. It is believed that by looking into such a mirror the person of the thief can be clearly seen. A bull belonging to a peasant not far from Perm, on the Kama, died suddenly. The owner declared that the death of the animal was due to witchcraft, and demanded that all the women of the village should be made to creep through a horse collar in order to discover the hag who had wrought the mischief. This plan was approved by his neighbors, and, although their wives protested against being subjected to the degrading and for corpulent women extremely difficult and even dangerous test, they finally submitted to it rather than remain under the suspicion of practicing the black art. This performance, which is unquestionably a relic of Uralian-Finnish paganism, took place on March 16, 1896. The following instance may serve as an example of the ruthless barbarity to which such delusions often lead: In December, 1874, a South Russian peasant in the vicinity of Cherson missed one hundred rubles and went to a weird woman in order to learn what had become of them. She consulted her cards and declared that the money had been stolen by a certain Marfa Artynov. The man was greatly astonished at this response, because the accused was a highly respected teacher of young children, and had the reputation of being thoroughly honest. Nevertheless, his credulity got the better of his common sense, and with the aid of his neighbors he seized Marfa and carried her to the churchyard, where he bound her to a cross and began to torture her, beating her with a knout, suspending her by her hands, and twisting and tearing her neck and tongue with a pincers. To her cries and entreaties her tormentors coolly replied, "If you are really innocent, what we are doing can cause you no pain!" Many of the persons who offer their services as clairvoyants and seers to a credulous and confiding public, and whose utterances are accepted as oracles, are professional swindlers. Thus a young lady moving in the higher circles of society in Vienna had a valuable set of diamonds stolen. By the advice of a trusted lackey she consulted a woman, who was reputed to have the power of divination, and who informed her, contrary to the strong suspicions of the police, that the theft had been committed, not by any member of the household, but by a stranger. The young lady was so firmly persuaded of the truth of this statement that, although urged by the court to prosecute the lackey, she refused to do so. The evidence against him, however, was so strong that he was finally tried and condemned. The pythoness, who had endeavored to exculpate him, proved to be his aunt and accomplice. A queer phase of superstition, which in many parts of Europe seriously interferes with the administration of justice, manifests itself in the various means of avoiding the evil consequences of perjury, at least so far as to soothe the pangs of conscience and to avert the divine anger. This immunity is secured in some provinces of Austria by carrying on one's person a bit of consecrated wafer, a piece of bone from the skeleton of a child, or the eyes of a hoopoe, holding a ducat or seven small pebbles in the mouth, pressing the left hand firmly against the side, crooking the second finger, or pulling off a button from the trousers while in the act of swearing, or spitting immediately after taking an oath. The Russian province of Viatka is settled by a people of Finnish origin, the majority of whom have been baptized and call themselves orthodox Christians, while the remainder are still nominally as well as really heathen. When they take an oath it is administered by a pope or priest, and a Russian jurist, J. W. Mjeshtshaninov, describes the method employed by them to forswear themselves with safety. When called upon to take an oath, the witness raises the right hand with the index finger extended; he then lays the left hand in the palm of the right hand with the index finger pointing downward, and by a crisscross combination of the other fingers, which probably works as a charm, the whole body is converted into a conductor, so that the oath entering through the index finger of the right hand passes through the index finger of the left hand into the earth like an electric current. The witness thus feels himself discharged of the binding influence of the oath, and may give false testimony without laying perjury upon his soul. The superstitions which encourage ignorant people to commit crime are handed down from generation to generation, and have in most cases a purely local character. In other words, the charms and sorceries and other magical arts employed to produce the same results differ in different places, and unless the judges are familiar with these various forms of superstition they will be unable to understand the exact nature of the offenses with which they have to deal, and their efforts to detect and punish violations of the law will be greatly hampered and sometimes completely thwarted. The subject here discussed has not only a speculative interest for ethnographers and students of folklore, but also, as already indicated, a practical importance for criminal lawyers and courts of justice in the Old World and even in the United States. The tide of immigration that has recently set in from the east and south of Europe has brought to our shores an immense number of persons strongly infected with the delusions which we have attempted to describe. Acts which would seem at first sight to have their origin in impulses of cruelty and brutality are found on closer investigation to be due to crass ignorance and credulity, and, although the ultimate motives are usually utterly selfish, there are rare instances in which the perpetrators of such deeds are thoroughly disinterested and altruistic, and do the most revolting things, not from greed of gain, but solely for the public good. In cases of this kind the most effective preventive of wrongdoing is not judicial punishment but intellectual enlightenment. FOOTNOTES: [26] Löwenstimm's studies, printed originally in the Journal of the Ministry of Justice in St. Petersburg, have been made accessible to a larger class of readers by being collected and translated into German in a volume entitled Aberglaube und Strafrecht (Berlin: Räde, 1897), with an introduction by Prof. Joseph Kohler, of the University of Berlin. [27] As the Siberian Railway approached the northern boundaries of the Chinese Empire and surveys were made for its extension through Manchuria to the sea, great excitement was produced in Pekin by the rumor that the Russian minister had applied to the Empress of China for two thousand children to be buried in the roadbed under the rails in order to strengthen it. Some years ago, in rebuilding a large bridge, which had been swept away several times by inundations in the Yarkand, eight children, purchased from poor people at a high price, were immured alive in the foundations. As the new bridge was firmly constructed out of excellent materials, it has hitherto withstood the force of the strongest floods, a result which the Chinese attribute, not to the solid masonry, but to the propitiation of the river god by an offering of infants. [28] See the case of Bridget Cleary, reported in Appletons' Popular Science Monthly for November, 1895, p. 86. We may add that her husband, Michael Cleary, was tried for murder and sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. [29] General Code, vol. xiii, edition of 1892, cited by Löwenstimm. [30] A full account of the trial is given in a Latin manuscript preserved in the city archives of Nantes. A GEOLOGICAL ROMANCE. BY J. A. UDDEN. A western naturalist once said that the geology of Kansas was monotonous. In one sense this remark is certainly justifiable, and the same may be said about the geology of some of the other States on the Western plains. The American continent is built on a comprehensive plan, and many of its formations can be followed for hundreds of miles without presenting much variation in general appearance. Occasionally, however, some feature of special interest crops out from the serene uniformity, and the very nature of its surroundings then makes it appear all the more striking. Minor accidents in the development of our extensive terranes sometimes stand out in bold relief, as it were, from the monotonous background. In their isolation from other details such features occasionally display past events with unusual clearness. Such is the case with a deposit of volcanic ash which has been discovered in the superficial strata on the plains.[31] It lies scattered in great quantities in a number of localities in Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, and Colorado, having been found in no less than twenty counties in the first-mentioned State. It measures from two to fourteen feet in thickness in different localities, and is mostly found imbedded in yellow marl and clay, and has a somewhat striking appearance in the field, due to its snowy whiteness and to the sharpness of the plane which separates it from the underlying darker materials. Many years before its real nature was known it had been noticed and described by Western geologists. Prof. O. T. St. John saw it many years ago in Kansas, where it appeared as "an exceedingly fine, pure white siliceous material," forming a separate layer of several feet, and set off by a sharp line from the buff clay-marl below. His words describe its usual appearance in other places (see Fig. 1). [Illustration: FIG. 1.--STRATIFIED VOLCANIC ASH NEAR MEADE, KANSAS. (From the University Geological Survey of Kansas, vol. ii.)] This ash occurs in several outcrops in McPherson County in the central part of Kansas, where the writer had an opportunity to study it somewhat in detail a few years ago. Some of the features of the dust at this place reveal the conditions under which it was formed with considerable distinctness, and the volcanic episode which produced it appears strikingly different from the dull monotony of the ordinary geological work recorded in the terranes of the plains. It may be said to consist of angular flakes of pumice, averaging one sixteenth of a millimetre in diameter, and having a thickness of about one three-hundredth of a millimetre. The most common shape of the flakes is that of a triangle, or rather of a spherical triangle, since the flakes are apt to be concave on one side and convex on the other. In the microscope they sometimes appear like splinters of tiny bubbles of glass, and this is really what they are (Fig. 2). [Illustration: FIG. 2.--FLAKES OF VOLCANIC ASH. Magnified about 100 diameters. A, flake with a branching rib; B, fragment of a broken hollow sphere of glass; C, fragment with drawn-out tubular vesicles; D and E, plain fragments of broken pumice bubbles. (From American Geologist, April, 1893.)] The explosive eruptions which give rise to showers of this kind of ash, or dust, are due to fusion and superheating of subterranean masses of rocks charged with more or less moisture. A part of this moisture escapes in the form of steam at the time of an eruption. But the viscidity of the ejected material prevents much of the steam from passing off, and such of the lava as cools most rapidly retains a certain quantity in solution, as it were. Obsidian is a rock which has been made in this way. It often contains much of the original water, which will cause it to swell up into a stony froth when fused. This volcanic dust has the same property. If one small particle of it be heated on a piece of platinum foil it is seen to swell up into a compound bubble of glass (Fig. 3). It is evident that this is due to the expansive force of the heated included moisture, to which the viscid half-molten glass readily yields. At the time of the eruption which produced this dust, subterranean heat was applied to the moisture-bearing rock until this was superheated to such an extent that the weight of the overlying material was insufficient to hold the water from expanding into steam. Then there was a tremendous explosion, and the molten magma was thrown up with such a force that it was shattered into minute droplets, in the same way as water does when it is thrown forcibly into the air. Being thus released from pressure, the steam inside of each little particle of the heated glass caused it to swell out into a tiny bubble. As this kept on expanding it was cooled, the thin glass wall of the bubble congealed, and finally burst from the pressure of the steam within. This is the reason why the little dust particles are thin, mostly triangular, and often slightly concave flakes with sharp angles. Sometimes the angles appear rounded, as if the fragments had been viscid enough to creep a little after the bubble burst. The study of one single little grain of dust, barely visible to the naked eye, thus makes clear the nature of a catastrophe which must have shaken a whole mountain, and which left its traces over a quarter of a continent. [Illustration: FIG. 3.--A PARTICLE OF VOLCANIC ASH SWELLED UP BY FUSION. Magnified 100 diameters.] That the dust was produced in this way is quite evident from other circumstances. If a handful from the dust of this place be thrown into water and gently stirred, it nearly all will settle after a while. But some rather large particles remain floating on the surface. If these are removed and examined under the microscope, they are seen to be hollow spheres (Fig. 2, _b_). These are some of the original bubbles that never burst, either because they contained too little steam or else because the steam was cooled before it had time to break the walls open. It is evident that not every droplet of the molten magma would form a single sphere, but that many also would swell up into a compound frothlike mass of pumice. A few such pieces may sometimes be observed in the deposit at this place, and that many more were made and broken is evident from the great number of glass fragments which have riblike edges on their flat sides (Fig. 3, _a_). The nature of the force which caused the eruption may thus be understood from the study of one little grain of the dust, but much more extended observations are needed in order to make out the place where the great convulsion took place. It will, perhaps, never be known what particular volcanic vent was the source of this ash. Different deposits may have come from different places. But it seems possible that it all came from the same eruption. There can be no doubt that the volcanic disturbances occurred to the west of the Great Plains. No recent extinct volcanoes are found in any other direction. This conclusion is corroborated by the fact that the dust is finer in eastern localities and coarser nearer the Rocky Mountains. In a bed near Golden, in Colorado, seventy-three per cent, by weight, of the dust consists of particles measuring from one fourth to one thirty-second of a millimetre, while some from Orleans, in Nebraska, contains seventy-four per cent of particles measuring from one sixteenth to one sixty-fourth of a millimetre in diameter. Still finer material comes from the bluffs of the Missouri River near Omaha. Evidently the coarser particles would settle first, and if the dust is finer toward the east, it must be because the wind which brought it blew from the west. Most likely the eruption occurred somewhere in Colorado or in New Mexico. It may be asked how it can be known that the dust was carried this long distance by the wind. May it not as well have been transported by water? The answer must be, in the first place, that showers of the same kind of material have been observed in connection with volcanic outbursts in other parts of the world. One such shower is known to have strewn the same kind of dust on the snow in Norway after a volcanic eruption in Iceland, and after the great explosion on Krakatoa, in 1883, such dust was carried by the wind several hundred miles, and scattered over the ocean. If this ash had been transported by water, it would not be found in such a pure state, but it would be mixed with other sediments. There would, no doubt, also be found coarser fragments of the volcanic products. On the contrary, it appears uniformly fine. No particles have been found which measure more than one millimetre in diameter, and less than one per cent of its weight consists of particles exceeding one eighth of a millimetre in diameter. In seven samples taken from different places the proportions of the different sizes of the grains were about as follows: A = Diameter of grains in millimetres B = Percentage of weight of each size ---+-------+-------+--------+---------+---------+----------+----------- A |1/2-1/4|1/4-1/8|1/8-1/16|1/16-1/32|1/32-1/64|1/64-1/128|1/128-1/256 B | 0.1 | 0.1 | 19 | 37 | 32 | 9 | 1 ---+-------+-------+--------+---------+---------+----------+----------- Flaky particles of this size are easily carried along by a moderate wind. In some places it appears as if the dust were resting on an old land surface where no water could have been standing when it fell. There is really no room for doubt that it was carried several hundred miles by the wind. It must have darkened the sky at the time, and it must have settled slowly and quietly over the wide plains, covering extensive tracts with a white, snowlike mantle several feet in thickness. What a desolate landscape after such a shower! What a calamity for the brute inhabitants of the land! Right here in McPherson County there was either a river or a lake at the time of the catastrophe. This is plainly indicated in several ways. In one place the dust rests on sand and clay, with imbedded shells of fresh-water clams. It is assorted in coarse and fine layers like a water sediment. Lowermost is a seam of very coarse grains. These must have settled promptly through the water, while the finer material was delayed. In another place it lies on higher ground, and here marks of sedges and other vegetation are seen extending up about a foot into the base of the deposit, from an underlying mucky clay. Bog manganese impregnates a thin layer just above the clay, indicating a marshy condition. Here also the material is somewhat sorted, but in a different way. It is ripple-bedded. The water was evidently shallow, if there was any water at all. A burrow like that of a crawfish extended down into the old clay bottom. On a slab of the volcanic ash itself some tracks appeared (Fig. 4). These were probably made by an individual of the same race in an effort to escape from the awful fate of being buried alive like the inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeii. [Illustration: FIG. 4.--TRACKS IN THE VOLCANIC DUST, PROBABLY MADE BY A CRAWFISH. Reduced to 2/8 diameter.] The shower must have lasted for a time of two or three days. I infer this from the nature of the wind changes, which are indicated by the ripples in the dust. These still lie in perfect preservation (Fig. 5), and may be studied by removing, inch by inch, the successive layers from above downward, for it is evident that as the direction of the wind changed, the ripples were also turned. The deciphering of this record must be made backward. The bottom layers were deposited first, and the excavation must begin on top. Otherwise the record is as perfect as if it had been taken down by an instrument when the shower occurred. It may be only local in its significance, for it shows the direction of the wind at this particular place alone. The wind may have been somewhat deflected from the general direction by local topographic peculiarities, though these appear to have been of small importance. In any case, the old legend is quite interesting to read, being, I believe, the only geological record ever found of the passing of a cyclone over the United States. [Illustration: FIG. 5.--RIPPLE MARKS IN THE VOLCANIC DUST. Reduced to 1/4 diameter.] [Illustration: FIG. 6.--PECULIAR ELEVATIONS CAUSED BY A CURRENT FROM THE SOUTHWEST TO THE NORTHEAST. Reduced to 1/2 diameter.] In the lowermost foot of the deposit no ripple marks can be seen. But there appear some marks of sedges and other vegetation, and these are inclined to the west, as if the plants had been bent by an east wind. Just above the height to which the imprints of the vegetation extend, ripple marks begin to appear, running on a northeast-southwest course. They were made by a southeast wind, for their northwest slopes are the steeper. A little above this height some peculiar small elevations appear on one of the bedding planes, and slightly raised ridges run for a short distance to the northeast from each elevation, vanishing in the same direction (Fig. 6). A southwesterly current was unmistakably obstructed by the little elevations, and left the small trails of dust in their lee. Six inches higher up the wind comes more from the south, and for the next foot the ripples continue to gradually turn still more in the same direction so as to at last record a due south wind. At this point it suddenly changed and set in squarely from the west, for the ripples are turned north and south, with the steeper slopes to the east. This direction seems to have prevailed as long as the dust kept on falling. It appears to me that these successive changes are best explained as attendant upon the passage of a cyclone, or of what our daily weather maps call a "low area." Going by from west to east, on the north, it would at first cause an east wind. This would then gradually be turned to the south and then to the west. One such rotation of the wind generally lasts a day or two. The shower must then have kept on at least for the same length of time, if not longer (Fig. 7). [Illustration: FIG. 7.--CHANGES IN THE WIND AS RECORDED BY THE RIPPLE MARKS.] There is reason to believe that this catastrophe occurred in summer. No crayfish would be out making tracks during the cold months, and the fossil vegetation could hardly have left such plain marks if it had been buried by the dust during the winter. The most conspicuous of these marks are some triangular and Y-shaped molds of the stems and leaves of sedges. Siliceous skeletons of _chara_ and filamentous algæ were also found upon a close examination in some of these molds. It is really difficult to appreciate the change such a shower must have produced in the appearance of the landscape, and the effect it must have had on animal and plant life. So far away from the volcanic source, the wind can not have laid down a layer of this dust several feet in thickness without scattering it far and wide all around. It must have covered tens of thousands of square miles. Just imagine, if you can, a whole State, clad in the verdure of summer, suddenly, in two or three days, covered over by a blanket of white volcanic ash! Many species of plants must have found it impossible to grow in such a soil. And what disaster it must have caused in the animal world! Grazing herds had their sustenance buried from their sight, and could save their lives only by traveling long distances in this loose dust. Many a creature must have had its lungs or its gills clogged with the glassy flakes floating in the water and in the air. The sudden disappearance of several mammal species near the beginning of the Quaternary age has been noted by paleontologists. Does it seem unlikely that an event like this, especially if repeated, may have hastened the extermination of some species of land animals? That many individuals must have perished there can be no doubt. Not very far away from that outcrop of the dust which I have described, one of the early settlers in this part of the State once made a deep well that penetrated the ash. Above the deposit, and some sixty feet below the surface of the prairie, he found what he described as "an old bone yard." In digging other wells in this vicinity mammal bones have been taken up by the settlers from about the same horizon. It is to be regretted that, with one exception, none of these fossils have been preserved for study, for it is likely that they were the remains of animals which were killed in the dust shower. In the absence of fossils definitely known to be connected with the ash, its exact age seems yet uncertain. In McPherson County it is underlaid by clay, gravel, and sand, which contain remains of the horse, of a megalonyx, and of bivalve mollusks of modern aspect. In the bluffs of the Missouri River near Omaha pockets of a similar ash rest on glacial clay under the loess. At the latter place it must belong to the Pleistocene age, and at the former it can not be older than the late Pleiocene. These two deposits may not belong to the same shower, but it appears, at any rate, that the volcanic disturbances which produced them occurred near the beginning of the Pleistocene age. In comparison with the slow and even tenor of the routine of geological history, the event here sketched appears so unique and so striking that it may well be called a geological romance. Modern science has taught us that the geological forces are slow and largely uniform in their work, and that most of the earth's features must be explained without taking recourse to theories involving any violent revolutions or general terrestrial cataclysms. While the making of this dust is not any real exception to the law of uniformity, we are here reminded that Nature is quite independent in her ways, and that even in her sameness there is room for considerable diversity. * * * * * Mr. William Ogilvie, of the Topographical Survey of Canada, estimates that there are more than 3,200 miles of fair navigation in the system of the Yukon River, of which Canada owns nearly forty-two per cent. A remarkable feature of the river, with its Lewes branch, is that it drains the Peninsula of Alaska and nearly cuts it in two, starting as it does less than fourteen miles, "as the crow flies," from the waters of the Pacific Ocean, at the extreme head of the Lewes branch, whence it flows 2,100 miles into the same ocean, or Bering Sea, which is a part of it. The drainage basin of the river occupies about 388,000 square miles, of which Canada owns 149,000 square miles, or nearly half, but that half is claimed to be the most important. As for the origin of the name Yukon, the Indians along the middle stretches of the river all speak the same language, and call the river the Yukonah; in English, "the great river" or "the river." The Canadian Indians in the vicinity of Forty Mile call it "Thetuh," a name of which Mr. Ogilvie could not learn the meaning. The correct Indian name of the Klondike is _Troandik_, meaning Hammer Creek, and refers to the barriers the Indians used to erect across the mouth of the stream to catch salmon, by hammering sticks into the ground. FOOTNOTE: [31] Dr. Samuel Aughey, Physical Geography of Nebraska, 1880. Prof. J. E. Todd, Science, April 23, 1886, and January 8, 1897. E. H. Barbour, Publication No. V, Nebraska Academy of Sciences. J. A. Udden, The American Geologist, June, 1891, and April, 1893. R. D. Salisbury, Science, December 4, 1896. G. P. Merril, Proceedings of the United States National Museum, 1885. THE SEASON OF THE YEAR. BY GRANT ALLEN. A year is, roughly speaking, the period which it takes the earth to perform one complete revolution round the sun. I say "roughly speaking" with due humility, having the fear of the expert ever before my eyes, because I know that if I do not sing small, that inconvenient person, the astronomical critic, will come down upon me at once like a wolf on the fold, with minute distinctions about the mean, the tropical, and the sidereal year; matters of immense importance at Greenwich Observatory, no doubt, but elsewhere of very little interest indeed, seeing that they differ from one another by so many minutes only. Let us leave the astronomers their own problems. The year with which I am going to deal humbly here is a much more commonplace, ordinary, and comprehensible year--the visible year of vegetation, of plant and animal life, of the four seasons; the year as roughly known to children and savages, and to the weeds, the flowers, the bees, and the squirrels. It has often struck me as curious that people took this complex concept of the year so much for granted--inquired so little into its origin and discovery. Yet it is by no means everywhere obvious. How did men first come to notice, in the tropics especially, that there was such a thing as the year at all? How did they first observe, save in our frozen north, any fixed sequence or order in the succession of Nature? How did they learn, even here, that spring would infallibly follow winter, and summer be succeeded in due course by autumn? And, to go a step farther back, how did the plants and animals, in all parts of the world alike, come originally to discover and adapt themselves to all these things? How did the bee know that she must "gather honey all the day from every opening flower," the summer through, in order to use it up as bodily fuel in winter? How did the plants learn when to blossom and produce seed? In one word, how did the seasons come to be automatically recognized? That they _are_ automatically recognized, even by plants, quite apart from the stimulus of heat or cold, drought or rain, a single fact (out of many like it) will sufficiently prove. Trees brought from Australia to England, where the seasons are reversed, try for two or three years to put forth leaves and flowers in October or November--the southern spring. It takes them several autumns before they learn that the year has been turned upside down--that June is now summer and December winter. This shows that life moves in regular cycles, adapted to the seasons, but not directly dependent upon them. The rhythm of the world has set up an organic rhythm which now spontaneously and automatically follows it. At first sight, to the dweller in the temperate zone at the present day, the questions I have put above may seem needless, not to say childish. But that is perhaps because we have all too much the habit of taking it for granted that what is true here and now has also been true everywhere and always. A first visit to the tropics often enough rudely disturbs this uninquiring attitude of mind. For in the tropics, and especially in the equatorial region, there is no winter and no summer, no spring and no autumn. The world wags wearily through an unending display of monotonous greenery. As far as temperature goes, the year is pretty much alike in all its months. Yet not only do equatorial men recognize the existence of the year as a natural epoch quite as much as other men--not only do equatorial savages celebrate annual feasts, count ages by years, and perform certain rites in certain months only--but also animal and vegetable nature recognizes the year; trees have their month for blossoming and fruiting, birds their month for assuming the plumage of courtship, for nesting and hatching, almost as markedly as elsewhere. The recognition of the year both by man and by Nature is not therefore entirely dependent upon the difference of summer and winter, as such. We must go deeper, and I think, when we come to consider geological time, much deeper, if we wish to understand the true character of yearliness--a word which I venture here to coin to express this meaning. Have you ever quite realized what the tropical year is like? Suppose you are living on or near the equator, then in December the sun is south of you and at its greatest distance away; you have, so to speak, a relative winter. But in March the sun is overhead; it is now full midsummer. By the end of June the sun has gone north, and is once more on a tropic; you have a second winter; not much of a winter, I admit, but still, a relative winter. By September he has returned overhead again, and you are enduring a second summer. In December he has once more retreated to the southern tropic (Capricorn), and it is comparative winter. Thus the equatorial year consists of four distinct seasons, in two of which the sun stands directly overhead, while in two he is at his northern or southern limit. I may add that the effect is always curious when, as you face the sun, you see that he is moving in his diurnal path, not from left to right ("the way of the sun," as we say), but from right to left (or "widdershins"). You are never till then aware how natural and inevitable has seemed the opposite direction: when you find it reversed the effect is surprising. Now, the distance to which the sun travels north or south of you, if you live on the equator--I use ordinary terms instead of astronomical ones for simplicity's sake--is so comparatively small that within the tropics themselves you never notice much difference as to the amount of heat between one period of the year and another. In equatorial countries the day and night temperature is much the same all the year round: if the country be plain, it is always hot; if mountainous, like the district about Bogotá, it is "a perpetual spring"; one day is always much the same as the one that went before and the one that comes after it. Even on the actual tropics, again, the difference is too slight to make any marked change in the temperature; people living on the northern tropic (Cancer), for example, have the sun vertical to them on June 21st, and some forty-three degrees south of them on December 21st. Nevertheless, the sun is still as near them and as powerful as he is at Milan or Venice in the height of summer; and the consequence is that, as a matter of fact, the thermometer within the tropics and at sea level seldom descends below 75° or 80°, even at midnight in the relative winters. For the heating power of the sun depends, of course, upon the directness of his rays, and lessens with their obliquity; in Venice and Milan they are strong enough to make the ground very hot in July and August, though it has been cooled before by a northern winter; much more than in Jamaica or Madagascar, which have never been cooled, does the accumulated heat keep everything warm even when the sun is most oblique--and he never reaches the same obliquity as in an English summer. The ground is hot, the houses are hot, wood and stone are hot, and they have all been hot from time immemorial. Yet tropical and equatorial trees and plants have their definite seasons to flower and fruit, just the same as elsewhere. This seems surprising at first when one visits the tropics. You can not see why everything should not flower and fruit the whole year round. And yet, at one time pineapples are "in," at another mangoes. And these seasons differ in the northern and southern hemispheres; what is mango winter in the one being mango summer in the other. I do not say the seasons anywhere in the tropics differ markedly; still, they do differ; the tropical year is divided into times and months for agriculture just as much as any other. Thus there are regular dates in each hemisphere for planting, tending, and cutting the sugar cane. Now, what is the reason of these changes in vegetation, when temperature remains so constant? Why do not trees and shrubs of each kind flower up and down throughout the year irregularly--now one individual and now another? Why are there seasons for things at all in the tropics? The answer is, because the same causes which produce summer and winter in temperate climate produce other changes of other sorts in the tropical region. The temperature, it is true, remains the same, or approximately the same; but the meteorological conditions vary. Even with ourselves, summer is not only hotter but also drier than winter; winter is marked by rain and snow as well as by lowered temperature. In the tropics, on the other hand, it is rather the summer or summers that are wet, for there is a certain moving zone of equatorial calms in which it practically keeps on raining always. But this zone is not fixed; it flits with the sun. When the sun goes northward for the northern summer the rainy zone goes with him; when he turns southward again the zone shifts after him. Thus places on or near the two tropics have one rainy season a year, while places on the equator have usually two. The intervening dry seasons are often very dry and parched, indeed; and where this is markedly the case, the rainy season acts just as spring does in the north, or as the inundation does in Egypt; it is the beginning of vegetation. The plants that were dry and dormant during the arid months wake up into fresh life; the branches put forth new leaves; the brown seeds germinate; the flowers appear; and in due time the fruit ripens. Everything in these cases depends upon the recurrence of the rainy season, just as everything in India depends upon the bursting of the monsoons, and everything in Egypt on the rising of the Nile. I have seen a dry plain in Jamaica bare and brown one day, and covered six or eight inches high with fresh green waving guinea-grass the day but one after. The rains had come meanwhile, and Nature had awaked with more than springlike awakening. In those hot climates everything grows by magic as soon as it gets the needed water. Indeed, we may say that in half the world the seasons, organically speaking--I mean, the seasons of plant and animal life--depend upon heat and cold, summer and winter, snow or sunshine; but in the other half they depend almost entirely upon drought and rainfall. Even as near home and as far north as Algeria, the summer is far too dry and dusty for agriculture; the autumn rains set in about October or November; they are immediately followed by the plowing; and the winter becomes for most purposes the practical summer. Fruits and vegetables are at their best in January and February; the fields are full of flowers up to March or April; in June, July, and August the country is an arid and weary desert. But the seasons for dates are almost reversed; they ripen in autumn. In Egypt again, where everything depends upon the inundation, the seasons are still more complicated; the inundation begins to subside in October; in Upper Egypt the winter season which follows is far the most important for agriculture, and crops sown as the water subsides are reaped from four to seven months after. But in the Delta, rice, cotton, and indigo are sown in the spring (March or April) and harvested in October, November, and December. Here, irrigation and temperature come in as disturbing elements, for the Delta feels something of the cold of winter. I could give many other instances, but these will suffice. As a general rule, we may say that in the temperate and frigid zones the seasons for plants and animals are ruled by heat and cold, but that in tropical and even in subtropical climates, rainfall and drought, themselves largely due to the same circumstances, are the ruling factors. Again, everybody knows that winter and summer, and the other phenomena which simulate or accompany them, such as wet and dry seasons, depend upon the fact that the earth's axis is not perpendicular to the plane in which the earth moves round the sun, but slightly inclined to it. Now, a year in itself, viewed as a measure of time, is merely the period which it takes the earth to perform one such complete revolution. During one half of each such revolution the north pole is turned at a considerable angle toward the sun, and during the other half, the south pole. When the north pole is so turned we call it summer in the northern hemisphere; when the south pole is being favored, and the north is receiving less light and heat, we call it winter. Let us suppose for a moment that the earth had not got this twist or kink in its axis; that the equator was always presented exactly toward the sun; what then would happen? Obviously, there would be no change of seasons. The day and night would have fixed lengths which never varied; climate would in each place be uniform and, barring accidents of elevation or distribution of land and water, the climate of each place would also depend entirely the whole year round on its distance from the equator. Roughly speaking, the temperature of a district would be the temperature it now possesses in March and September, only not quite so cold as March nor so warm as September, owing to the absence of accumulated heat from summer or of reserves of ice and snow from winter. In one word, under such conditions there would have been climates--marked belts of climate; but there would not have been seasons. Seasons, however, depend in great part, as Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace has ingeniously shown, on a great many things besides this mere inclination of one end or the other of the earth toward the sun in June and January. Much must be laid to the count of accumulated stores of heat or cold; and though accumulated cold is physically a misnomer, still for all practical purposes we may apply the words fairly enough to the ice caps of the pole and the glaciers of mountain systems. And here we come face to face with the very core of our problem: for the odd part of it is that seasons (at least as we know them) seem to be quite a recent and exceptional phenomenon in the history of our planet. So far as we can judge, geologically speaking, the earth during all its earlier life enjoyed, over all its surface, what we should now consider tropical or subtropical conditions. England--or rather the land that occupied the part of the earth's crust where England now stands--had a vegetation of huge tree ferns and palms and cycads during the Primary period; as late even as the middle Tertiaries it had a vegetation like that of South Carolina or Upper India. Greenland itself, in quite recent times, flourished like a green bay tree, and did not belie its odd modern name. The world as a whole enjoyed perpetual summer. In one word, except in something like the equatorial sense, there were practically no seasons. The sun went north and south, no doubt, as now, but the temperature, even in the relative winter, seems to have remained perennially mild and genial. It is true, occasional slight traces of glacial epochs, earlier than the great and well-known Glacial epoch, break here and there the almost continuous geological record of palmy and balmy world-wide summers; yet, taking the geological monuments as a whole, they show us few or no signs of anything worth calling a serious winter till quite recent periods. Large-leaved evergreens are still, in the day-before-yesterday of geology, the order of the day; magnolias and liquidambars, cinnamons and holly oaks, vines and rotang palms formed the forests even of Miocene Britain. The animals during all the Tertiary period were of what we now regard as tropical or subtropical types--lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, monkeys, or more antique races, equally southern in aspect. There could have been little change of winter and summer during this long warm spell; the variations can have been scarcely more than those of dry and rainy seasons. The trees never lost their leaves; the fruits and flowers never ceased to follow one another; no interruption of the food supply drove insects to hibernate in their silken cocoons, or squirrels and bears to lay by stores of food or fat for the cold and hungry winter. Nevertheless, taking the world round as it stands, we must believe that the distinction of seasons grew up, both for plants and animals, and for man or his ancestors, during this age of relatively unmarked summers and winters. For the tropics more than anywhere else preserve for us to-day the general features and aspect of this earlier time; they have never had the continuity of their stream of life rudely interrupted by the enormous changes of the Glacial epoch. Yet, even in the tropics, things, as we saw, have seasons. There are annuals and perennials there, as elsewhere. Each kind has its month for sprouting, for flowering, for fruiting, for shedding its seed; and men in the tropics, some of them long isolated in oceanic islands, or in great insulated regions like Australia or New Guinea, from the rest of their kind in the temperate regions, nevertheless know and observe the year, and perform all their functions, agricultural or religious, by yearly cycles. For example, there is among them all an annual feast for the dead, and widows mourn their husbands for one year from their burial. Observation of the year, therefore, both automatically by organisms at large and consciously by man, antedates and is independent of observation of the existence of summer or winter. I do not think, however, that man would have noted the merely astronomical year--the year of the sun's position--at least till a relatively late stage in culture, if he had not first noticed the organic year--the regular recurrence of plant and animal seasons. So many yams--that is to say, so many yam harvests--in other words, so many years, is a common savage way of reckoning times and ages. But they call it "yams," not summers or winters. And when I say yams, I give that merely as a single instance, for elsewhere the "seedtime and harvest" are reckoned indifferently in maize or millet, rice or barley, according to the agriculture of the particular people. Even hunting races know that at certain times of year certain foods abound; and this is true of equatorial savages and equatorial plants or animals, as well as of others. Moons are more obvious measures of time than suns, in the tropics at least--probably everywhere; for the waxing and waning of the moon mean much to people who live largely out of doors; and the month is, perhaps, the earliest fixed mode of reckoning time beyond a day or two. Most savages count time mainly by so many moons. But they must also have noticed early that after a certain number of moons (usually about thirteen), certain fruits or seeds were ripe again; especially must they have noticed it when this recurrence coincided with the return of the rainy season, or of some other annual meteorological phenomenon, like the bursting of the monsoon or the Nile inundation. Thus, even in the tropics, and before the coming on of the Glacial epoch, men or the ancestors of men (one can not draw precise lines here) must probably have observed a certain rough relation between the months and the vegetative cycles; after so many moons, about say thirteen, the yam, or the mangoes, or the grains are ripe again. These organic years, I take it, must have been noticed before the astronomical ones. For it is now beginning to be more and more believed that man is of preglacial origin; and even if something worth calling a man were not, then at least man's pre-human ancestors go back far into the Tertiary period. Only later would men begin to note that some thirteen moons, and the recurrence of a food stuff, concurred with a particular solar season. Indeed, if one comes to think of it, how much even now do any of us, save the most scientific, mean by the year, beyond the visible change of summer and winter? What we are thinking of is the leafless trees, the ice and snow, the green grass in spring, the flowers and warm days in summer, not the abstract astronomical fact of the earth's revolution round the sun, or the due succession of the signs of the zodiac. It is that visible organic year that must have counted most with man from the first; though no doubt its meaning and reality are much more vividly present since the coming on of the Glacial epoch, and the more so in proportion as we live nearer to the north or south pole; while at the equator the year is to the last a much more inconspicuous period--a largely artificial mode of reckoning. Still, from the very first, there was one element of diversity in the year which must have struck all men, in the temperate and frigid zones at least, perhaps even in a certain way in the tropics. I mean, the varying length of the day, always perceptible in the frigid and temperate zones; for as soon as men in these regions began to think and to observe at all, they must have noticed that the days increased in their summer and lessened in their winter; and they must have learned to correlate this waxing and waning of the day with the appearance or abundance of certain fruits, seeds, birds, fishes, game, roots and other food stuffs. It is at least certain that all the world over men do now celebrate the solstices and the equinoxes as special feasts; and the close similarity in most such celebrations leads one to suspect that the custom has been handed down from the very remote time when the human family was still a single continuous body. In the tropics, it is true, the days vary so little that this difference in itself is not likely to have struck primæval man. But there, another point would come in--the annual movement of the sun overhead from south to north and _vice versa_; and though this would be less directly important to human life than in temperate regions, it would still be indirectly important. It would bring the rain with it. In Europe, of course, and in temperate America, we can see at once that the return of the sun northward must always have meant spring, the increase of food stuffs, the promise of corn or maize, the suggestion of harvest; and we can therefore understand why the midwinter feast, when the sun after his long journey south begins to move visibly north again, should have been both in pagan and Christian times the great festival of rejoicing for the men of the north temperate region. Day by day they saw the sun recede and the cold deepen; at last, one evening, he sets a little nearer, and they know that he has not deserted them forever. Similarly, the promise made at Yule begins to be realized at that other great feast of the spring equinox, which we still call in England by its ancient heathen title of Easter; the day by that time has got the better of the night, and "the sun dances on Easter Sunday" in commemoration of his completed victory over the combined powers of winter and darkness. In the tropics, on the other hand, the connection is less clear; but even here the shifting of the sun's apparent place is closely correlated with the shifting of the rain zone; and therefore it would not be long (after man was man) before tropical savages began to perceive a constant relation between the movements of the sun to north or south, and the occurrence of the fertilizing rainy season. We must remember that savages, with their improvident habits, are much more dependent upon rain than we are, and that magical ceremonies for breaking up a drought are among their commonest and most universally diffused superstitions. On the whole, then, before the coming on of the Glacial epoch, we may be pretty sure that plants and animals on the one hand had learned organically and automatically to recognize the existence of the year and to adapt themselves to it; and that men or the progenitors of men on the other hand had also learned to correlate the recurrent seasons of food supply with the movements of the sun, though nothing equivalent to winter and summer as we know them to-day existed as yet on any part of our planet. I say advisedly "on any part of our planet," because even near the pole itself remains of a subtropical vegetation in Tertiary times have been amply indicated. Nevertheless, in all parts of the world then, as in the tropics now, we may gather that plants and animals ran through annual cycles--that the year, as I have put it, was organically recognized. Trees had their time to sprout, to bud, to flower, to fruit, to seed, to shed their leaves (in the evergreen way); birds had their time to nest and hatch out their young; insects had their fixed periods for laying, for larval life, for assuming the chrysalis form, for becoming winged beetles or bees or butterflies. In one word, the year is a terrestrial reality, not merely an astronomical fact, in the tropics now; it was a terrestrial reality over the whole planet in the Tertiary period. But it was hardly more marked, apparently, into distinct seasons than it is marked to-day in the equatorial region. Rainfall and drought must have had more to do in determining the annual cycles than winter and summer. From all this it must result that the conception of the year as an epoch at all (save for advanced astronomy) is almost or entirely due to that tilt of the earth's axis which causes the seasons--dry or wet, cold or hot. Without the seasons, in one form or other, we might have been ages longer in discovering the fact that the earth moved round the sun, and that some three hundred and sixty-five days (I omit those important fractions) were needed for its revolution. Certainly, without the seasons, at least to the extent that they occur in the tropics, plant and animal life could hardly have assumed its fixed annual cycles, nor could early men have caught at the idea of the year at all as a period of time, a unit of measurement. Before the Glacial epoch, in particular, the discovery of the year, organically or consciously, must have been much more difficult than it is now in high latitudes. It must have been almost as difficult in what are now the temperate zones as it is to-day in the tropics. Far north or south, of course, the length of the day would tell; and within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles the long night would form an unmistakable feature. But if the plane of the equator had always found itself vertical to the sun, there could have been no recognition of the year at all, either organic or conscious. In other words, from the point of view of organic life, the year does not mean the revolution of the earth round the sun: it means the apparent northward and southward movement of the sun on either side of the equator; it means the seasons, whether recognized as winter and summer, or as dry and wet periods. That is really the year as man knows it, as plants and animals have always known it. With the coming on of the great cold spell, however, the importance of the seasons in the temperate and frigid zones, perhaps also even in the tropics, became much more marked. I will not go here into the suggested reasons for that vast revolution, perhaps the greatest our planet has ever suffered. Most physicists now accept more or less the theory put forward with great ingenuity by Mr. Croll, which sets it down to a period of extreme eccentricity in the earth's orbit; but some weight must also be allowed, as Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace has clearly shown, to the local arrangement of land and water on the globe at the time of its origin, as well as to the occurrence of mountain ranges just then at the poles, and to other purely terrestrial causes. Never before, in all probability, had the poles been occupied by great glacier-clad mountains. It seems most likely, indeed, that we are now practically at the end of the Glacial epoch, and that if only we could once get rid of the polar ice caps, which keep a stock of chilliness always laid on (I speak the quite comprehensible language of everyday life), we might recur forthwith to the warm and almost imperceptible winters of the preglacial period. But, as things stand, the stock of ice at the poles never gets melted away in the existing northern or southern summer; fresh ice accumulates on top of the old mass with each winter; prevailing winds, blowing over this ice, chill regions lying much farther toward the tropics; icebergs detach themselves and float off, thus lowering the temperature of the sea in the middle zones; arctic or antarctic currents spread round the coasts and absorb the solar heat in enormous quantities. We have only to remember the trenchant difference in England between a parching cold east wind and a mild sou'wester to realize what an immense part these polar ice caps and frozen highlands play in the production of our existing winter. Alps, Pyrenees, Himalayas, Rocky Mountains, further assist in the same direction. On the other hand, currents in the sea may cut either way; the Gulf Stream makes England warm, while the arctic current makes Labrador, much farther south, practically uninhabitable. Ever since the Glacial epoch, therefore, it has been quite easy for man in the temperate and frigid zones to recognize the year as a natural reality. The annual cycles of heat and cold are far too marked to be overlooked by anybody. Organically, they made themselves felt at once by extraordinary changes induced in the fauna and flora. Before the steady advance of the annual cold wave, vegetation had perforce to alter its ways. The large-leaved evergreens went out altogether in frigid and high temperate regions; deciduous trees, or needle-leaved types like the pines and firs, took the place of the luxuriant Miocene foliage in Europe and North America. Every autumn the larger number of trees and shrubs learned to shed their leaves all together; every spring they came out anew in fresh green and in masses of blossom. Similarly with animals. Birds learned to migrate, or to accommodate themselves to the winter; insects learned to hibernate in the egg or the cocoon; pigs fattened themselves on mast against the frozen time; moles slept over winter; squirrels hoarded nuts for a store to bridge over heavy frosts; frogs retired to the warmer mud in the depths of ponds; adders coiled themselves in holes and dozed away the cold season. Innumerable adaptations sprang up at once, those species or individuals which failed to meet the new conditions perishing in the struggle. In proportion as we recede from the tropics, the more marked do the annual cycles of life thus induced become, many species practically ceasing to exist as such for several months of the year, and being only potentially represented by eggs, germs, or seeds, and sometimes by dormant pregnant females. At the same time, while the cause of the seasons as a whole is the obliquity of the earth's axis, with the resulting inclination of either pole toward the sun alternately, we must not forget that the seasons and the climate in each particular country depend in part upon many minor contributory causes. It is not merely nearness to or distance from the equator that counts; we have to consider also relative distribution of land and water, elevation, prevalent winds, exposure, condensation, and many other elements of a complex problem. In Ecuador, for example, whose very name means the equator, the plain is always in scorching summer, the mountains are always in perpetual spring. The monsoons, again, produce in other countries some curious results: they depend themselves on the change of relative temperature in sea and land at different seasons; and they break upon the Himalayas with this odd and unexpected effect, that the snow line on the southern side of that vast range goes very far down, owing to the immense rainfall (or rather snowfall) and the consequent spread of snow fields and glaciers; while on the northern side it descends but a very little way, owing to the extreme desert drought and the great summer heat of the central Asiatic table-land. We have thus the apparent paradox that millions of Tibetans occupy towns and cultivate farms to the north at a height from three to four thousand feet above the snow line on the southern slope of the same mountains. Looking at the matter broadly, then, and taking for granted the now generally accepted modern view that the great oceans and great continents have been relatively fixed (though liable to minor fluctuations and variations of outline) throughout all geological time, and that the earth's crust has not shifted from pole to equator or vice versa, we arrive at last at the following probable conclusions: There have always been seasons more or less marked, and these have been more or less organically answered by corresponding changes or cycles of change in plants and animals. Rain and drought have in many cases more to do with such changes than variations of temperature. The seasons, again, are less marked in the tropics than in temperate and circumpolar climates. Nevertheless, even near the equator, they exert and have always exerted certain organic influences-have resulted in annual cycles in the life of species. Even before the coming on of the Glacial epoch, the seasons were probably somewhat more marked in the temperate and polar regions than in the tropics, the longer day in summer and the greater directness of impact of the rays making the summer months always warmer. But for various reasons, among which we may presumably rank the absence in early ages of high land at the poles and of an accumulated polar ice cap, together with the existence of warm sea currents from the tropics to the poles, the winters of preglacial ages seem to have been relatively mild, perhaps (if we may judge by the types of plant life) milder than those of South Carolina and Georgia in our own period. No cold winds of importance seem then to have blown with blighting effect from glaciated or snow-clad districts. (Mars in our own time appears to enjoy winters somewhat of this character, though a little colder, with a temporary snow cap.) The seasons as we know them in temperate and arctic climates, however, seem to be largely the result of the glacial epoch, and its persistent legacy the arctic and antarctic ice caps. If we could once manage to get rid of those, it is possible that our planet might again enjoy in all its zones the mild and genial preglacial winters. These are rough notes, I know; mere adumbrations of a probable truth: but adequately to develop the subject would require a very big volume. My object here is simply to suggest that in many inquiries, both into human and animal or vegetable life, we must never take the existence of seasons as we know them for granted, except in very recent times. The year, for organic beings, means essentially the seasons; and the seasons may mean and have meant many separate things, as time and place vary--heat and cold, food and scarcity, foliage and leaflessness, drought and wet; longer or shorter days, the midnight sun and the winter darkness; hibernation and wakefulness; the egg, the cocoon, the seed, the plant, the flower, the fruit; dormancy or vitality. According as human life started at the poles or the equator, for instance, it would view in the beginning many things differently. All I wish to point out now is merely this, that we must bear such possibilities ever in mind; and that we must never take it for granted in any problem, human or biological, that the seasons were always just what we know them, or that the year to any organic being meant anything more than the seasonal cycle then and there prevalent.--_Longman's Magazine._ * * * * * In the excavations of the ancient cemetery of Antinoe, near Lyons, France, a "party dress" of the time of the Emperor Adrian, very fine silks, jewels, etc., have been discovered. One sarcophagus held the remains of a woman musician with a rose chemise, a cythara, pearls, castanets, etc.; in another was a child's costume with its little laced shoes, its vest ornamented with flowers _appliqués_, and its robe of gauffered crape. It appears that the women of sixteen hundred years ago dyed their hair with henna, and twisted ribbons round their heads. Nothing changes. M. A. Thieullen, publishing the results of fifteen years' studies among the flint implements of the French beds, draws the conclusions that the elaborate palæolithic flint axe and hammer and the typical neolithic implements were luxuries used by the more distinguished members or for the more important purposes of the flint-implement-using community, while the ruder implements which are found in enormous numbers were the objects of general and daily use throughout all the flint-using ages, whether palæolithic or neolithic. BRAIN WEIGHTS AND INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY. BY JOSEPH SIMMS, M. D. Having been for thirty years a lecturer on man and his character as evinced by his form, features, head, and gestures, and having made observations on the subject in all parts of North America, in continental Europe and Great Britain, and parts of Asia, Africa, and Australia, I should not be deemed presumptuous when I present a few facts regarding the relations of mind and the size and forms of heads and weights of brains. It has been observed by many persons versed in the branches relating to the subject that men with the largest brains are not those of most talent, power, or intellect; but many such have been only ordinary or inferior men, or even idiots; while some men of most powerful and comprehensive minds have had unusually small brains. Esquirol's assertion that no size or form of head or brain is incident to idiocy or to superior talent is borne out by my observations. After long and careful research in the great libraries and museums of the world, I have collected a table of brain weights of eminent men, along with which are entered, in my original document, the occupation of the subject, age at the time of determination, and the source whence the item is derived. These can not be given within the limits of this article, and only the briefest and most generalized summary of the main features can be indicated. The largest weight of brain in the whole list is that of the Russian novelist Turgenieff, whose brain weighed, at the time of his death, at sixty-five years of age, 71 ounces.[32] It is a considerable step from him to the next in order, the English mechanician and author, Knight, whose brain weight at the age of fifty-eight was 64 ounces. Then follow the Scottish physician Abercrombie, 63 ounces; General B. F. Butler, 62 ounces; and the Scottish general Abercromby, 62 ounces. Another group of nine, including weights from 58.6 ounces to 54 ounces, includes Jeffrey, Scottish judge and author, Thackeray, Cuvier, George Combe, United States Senator Atherton, Spurzheim, and the Scottish physician Simpson. The next group, 53.6 to 50, is larger, including twenty-one names, among which are Daniel Webster, Agassiz, Napoleon I, the Scottish divine Chalmers, the mathematicians De Morgan and Gauss, the anthropologist Broca, and the generals Skoboleff and Lamarque. The last group, 49.9 to 40 ounces, contains twenty-five names, including those of the philosopher Huber, Grote, Babbage, the anthropologist Bertillon, Whewell,[33] Liebig, Gall, Gambetta, and Bishop, the mind reader. Only one remove from the foot of the list is Gambetta, a man of indisputably high genius and ability, with a brain weighing only 40.9 ounces.[34] The table goes to illustrate a general rule which I discovered and published several years ago, that larger brains appertain to natives of colder climates. Dr. John Abercrombie, for instance, was born at Aberdeen, Scotland, on the German Sea, and farther north than any part of the United States. Sir Ralph Abercromby was born in the county of Clackmannan, Scotland, where it is far colder than any part of southern Europe. Lord Francis Jeffrey first saw light in Edinburgh. General Butler was born in Deerfield, New Hampshire. Ivan Turgenieff, with the heaviest brain of all, was a native of cold, inhospitable Russia. Dr. Franz Joseph Gall (brain weight 42.2 ounces)[35] was born in Würtemberg, in southern Germany, passed most of his life in Vienna and Paris, and, being a student, spent much of his time indoors. Gambetta was born at Cahors, France, of Italian parents. This climatological view of the size of brains is confirmed by a paper, "Crania," of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, which gives as the average size, in cubic inches, of the cranial cavities of various nationalities, taking the results of many measurements: Lapps, 102; Swedes, 100; Anglo-Saxons, 96; Finns, 95; Anglo-Americans, 94; Germans, 92; Celts, 88; Malays, 86; Chinese, 85; Tombs of Gizeh, 84; embalmed Semitic, 82; Egyptians, 80; Fellah, 79; Bengalese, 78. A table of average brain weights of various nationalities, compiled from Topinard's and Manouvrier's works and other standard anthropological publications, illustrates the same tendency toward greater brain weights in colder countries. One of its results is to show that the colder air of the United States produces larger brains in the negroes than the warm air of Africa. The table further shows, in the comparisons of Hindus and African negroes, that the brains are smallest in the warmest countries, irrespective of race or nation; and that the largest average attained is in Scotland, where it is never extremely warm. The measurement of the cranial cavity is a very uncertain gauge of the size of the brain, for the cerebro-spinal fluid may occupy a large share of the space. Weighing the brain is without doubt the only scientifically certain method of determining its size and mass. Perhaps the most remarkable case in the table of great men's brains is that of Gambetta, who was behind none of his compeers in ability, and yet had the smallest brain of all. The first table of the "Average Weight of the Human Body and Mind," compiled from Dr. Boyd's researches among the sane, which was based on more than two thousand post-mortem examinations, gives 45.9 ounces as the average brain weight of boys from seven to fourteen years of age, and 40.2 ounces as that of boys and 40.1 ounces of girls from four to seven years of age. And this little brain of 40.9 ounces appertained to a man, "a lofty, commanding, mental figure, standing out in bold relief from the crowd of mediocrities which he dwarfs and shadows," the embodiment of the French Republic, who steered it through one of its most perilous crises, "the foremost Frenchman of his time," who "established his claim to be placed in the very front rank of European statesmen," and whose untimely death was spoken of as "nothing less than the sudden extinction of a powerful individual force, one of the most powerful, indeed, of such forces hitherto operating in Europe." In illustration of the association of large brains with small minds, we have compiled from various sources of recognized authority a list of one hundred and twenty-five persons of ordinary or weak minds, idiots, imbeciles, and criminals, whose brains were generally larger than those of the distinguished men subjects of the preceding notes. Of these, Rustan, an ignorant and unknown workman, appears with a brain weighing 78.3 ounces;[36] the dwarfed Indian squaw who follows him, of 73.5 ounces;[37] an illiterate and weak-minded man had a brain of 71.3 ounces;[38] and a congenitally imbecile person cited by Dr. Ireland, with one of 70.5 ounces.[39] Another imbecile cited by Dr. Ireland had a brain of 63.2 ounces, and the brain of an idiot with a large head, eighteen years old, who had an idiotic sister, weighed 62.8 ounces. The brain of the idiot, No. 56 of the men in the table, 59.5 ounces, is exceeded in size by those of only five on the list of famous men, while eleven persons recorded as idiots, imbeciles, and children had brains heavier than his. An idiot boy of fourteen years, very malicious, who never spoke, and who nearly killed his sister with a pick, had a brain weight of 57.5 ounces. Thirty men out of three hundred and seventy-five examined in the West Riding Asylum gave brain weights of 55 ounces and upward, showing that such weights are not so rare as some have supposed. In another asylum in England one out of every dozen brains examined showed a weight of 55 ounces or more. In _Nachrichten_, of Göttingen, 1860, pp. 70-71, Dr. Rudolph Wagner gave a table of thirty-two persons whose brains he examined, among whom were five distinguished men; but the largest brain weight recorded in it, 55.9 ounces, has opposite to it the legend, "Idiotic grown man." To this list we might have added a large number of persons whose brains weighed less than 53 ounces. Yet the brains of Daniel Webster, Agassiz, Napoleon I, Lord Byron, Baron Dupuytren, General Skoboleff, and other famous men concerning whose large brains much has been said, weighed less than this; and we might have appended hundreds of brain weights of idiots, imbeciles, and other insignificant persons, from 53 ounces down to 49 ounces--probably about the average weight in central Europe. In support of our contention is, further, an observation by Dr. Rudolph Wagner in _Nachrichten_, February 29, 1860, pp. 71, 72, that "very intelligent men certainly do not differ strikingly in brain weight from less gifted men." Dr. Clendenning presents in the Croonian Lectures the following entries of brain weights of male subjects of different ages, the tendency of which is to show that the male encephalon loses, after it is grown, more than an ounce every ten years: 15 to 30 years 50.75 ounces. 30 to 50 " 49.66 " 50 to 70 " 47.1 " 70 to 100 " 41.5 " A number of other eminent anatomists have given similar evidence of decrease in brain weight as intellectual power increases. The "Professor at the Breakfast Table," the late Dr. O. W. Holmes, a learned man and experienced physician and professor of anatomy in Harvard University for thirty-five years, says: "The walls of the head are double, with a great chamber of air between them, over the smallest and most crowded organs. Can you tell me how much money there is in a safe, which also has thick walls, by kneading the knobs with your fingers? So, when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the organs of individuality, size, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt over the outside of my strong box, and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-dollar bill under this or that rivet. Perhaps there is, only he doesn't know anything about it. We will add that, even if he knows the inward dimensions of the strong box, he could not thence determine the amount of cash deposited in it." The internal size of Spurzheim's skull was in cubic inches exactly the same as that of the skull of Joachim, an imbecile six feet nine inches in height, with a brain weight of 61.2 ounces, whereas Spurzheim's brain weighed only 55 ounces. Whoever has examined heads in the dissecting room of a medical college knows that, except in rare cases of disease, the brain does not fit the skull, but is surrounded by three membranes and a watery fluid; and this liquid, it has been ascertained, is generally sufficient to admit of its performing certain movements. There can be no doubt that the brain moves in the skull, changing its position, according to the laws of gravitation, in much the same way as the lungs, heart, and liver do in the body. It has been observed many times to move, as well as to pulsate, when exposed to view during the life of the individual. It is subject to two regular and constant motions--one produced by the arteries, the other by respiration. It has also a third motion, discovered and described by Dr. M. Luys, who stated, in a paper read before the Academy of Medicine of Paris, that "the brain is subject to certain changes of position, dependent on the attitude of the body. Thus, if a man lies on his back or side, or stands on his head, the brain undergoes certain changes of position in obedience to the laws of gravity; the movements take place slowly, and the brain is five or six minutes in returning to its previous position." From these anatomical data M. Luys deduced some interesting and practical conclusions, by which he explained, for example, the symptoms of vertigo which feeble persons experience when suddenly rising from a horizontal position. He suggested whether the pains of meningitis may not be due to an interference with these normal movements, and urges the value of giving the brain the change produced by a horizontal position at night. The average cranial capacity is admitted to be 96 cubic inches in England and 94 in New York; and it is to the unusual quantity of fluid of some cases, and to the extraordinary thickness of the skull in others, that we are to attribute the frequent discrepancy between the external dimensions and the size of the encephalon. Daniel Webster's cranial capacity was 122 cubic inches, yet his brain of 53.5 ounces was just what George Combe has laid down as the average weight for an adult man. Water and lymph, we are told, filled the skull. Professor De Morgan's head, almost free from hair, measured 24.87 inches in circumference, and the dimensions were all those of a very large head, sufficient to contain from 65 to 70 ounces of brain, yet his brain weighed only 52.75 ounces, or little, if at all, above the average in the cold parts of the temperate zones. De Morgan was sixty-five years of age when he died. He was much emaciated, and "the brain was distinctly shrunken," not filling the interior cavity, where its place was supplied, as is usual in such cases, by serum or water. There is no known method whereby any man can determine whether brain or water fills the greater part of any living skull. A small orange may have a thin rind, and contain a good amount of eatable substance, while a large one may have so thick a skin that the fruit proves utterly disappointing. Another proof that the skull is formed without regard to the brain is the following: "The bony cabinet and its contents are developed, to a certain extent at least, independently. This is very clearly demonstrated by a fact which was observed by Gratiolet, and is too frequently forgotten. The subject is an infant in whom the cranium presented the normal conformation. The brain was, nevertheless, almost entirely wanting."[40] Dr. Gall was a poor arithmetician, and his biographer says that every kind of numerical calculation fatigued him. He could not go through a process of multiplication or division that was at all complicated, and knew nothing of geometry or of the problems of mathematics.[41] George Combe said of himself: "Arithmetic has always been to me a profound mystery, and to master the multiplication table an insurmountable task.... This faculty in me is, in fact, idiotic." Again he said: "When a boy, I never could learn arithmetic. At the end of five years' teaching I could not subtract, divide, or multiply any considerable number of figures with accuracy and facility, and can not now do so.... At the present day I can not sum a column of figures correctly."[42] With these facts in view, our wonder at finding the theories of these men at variance with all exact calculation is considerably diminished. We propose to test some of their theories by arithmetical processes. We found that the sixty famous men entered in the table of authenticated brain weights show an average of 51.3 ounces. We now take all the idiots and imbeciles in the table of "Large Brains and Small Minds," and find the average 59.4 ounces; so that the matter is left to stand thus: Ten idiots and five imbeciles average 59.2 ounces; sixty famous men average 51.39 ounces: in favor of idiocy and imbecility, 7.9 ounces. The heaviest brain in the table of small minds is that of Rustan, an ignorant and entirely unknown laborer. He was a healthy man, and his brain, when it was weighed, was in a healthy condition. Its weight was recorded by Dr. Carl A. Rudolphi, a Swedish naturalist and physiologist of Stockholm, who became professor of anatomy and physiology at Berlin in 1810. It reached the unexampled figure of 78.3 ounces; while the brain of Turgenieff, the heaviest among famous men, was 71 ounces--showing a difference of 7.3 ounces in behalf of the inferior mind. Since writing the above, the following appeared in Tit-Bits, a weekly paper published in London, England, March 19, 1898: "It must not be assumed, however, that intellect is in direct ratio to the weight of the brain; for while the brains of certain intellectual men, such as ... Dr. Abercromby, weighed more than 60 ounces, a certain Strand newspaper-boy, who was in intelligence almost an idiot, had a brain which weighed no less than 80 ounces." Dr. Austin Flint, of New York, in his Physiology, gives the average weight of the brains of men as 50.2 ounces. Dr. Peacock, of Great Britain, makes it 50 ounces 3 drachms between twenty-five and fifty years of age. Dr. Thurman gives 49 ounces as the average throughout Europe, while Dr. F. Tiedemann, a famous naturalist of Germany, reckons it at 53.2 ounces.[43] Dr. Krause, a learned German, places it still higher, at 55.4 ounces.[44] Now, if we strike a balance between the highest and the lowest of these estimates, the mean will be 52.2. Then, recalling the average of our sixty famous men, which we found to be 51.3 ounces, it is shown to be nine tenths of an ounce below the average of ordinary men. Our tables of national average brain weights do not quite agree, because some of the subjects had been wasted by disease for many months before death, whereby the brain was diminished along with other parts of the body. Those who, like Dr. Boyd's subjects, died in hospital, showed too light an average for healthy Englishmen. Dr. Krause's subjects may have been healthy men killed in battle, and those of Tiedemann persons who died suddenly. Executed criminals show a fairly high average of brain weight, because there has been in their case no diminution through long-continued illness.[45] We should recollect that Whewell, the famous English philosopher and head master of Trinity College, Cambridge, England, was in good health when killed by a fall from his horse; so was Gambetta, when his life was ended by a pistol shot. The brain, however, suffers less from the power of disease than the general bodily form. One month under the most wasting sickness would probably not diminish the brain more than an ounce or two, but a year or more would make a considerable difference. Taking, now, the sixty heaviest brains of persons not noted for intellectual greatness, we find the averages to be 63.2 ounces. Comparing this with the average of sixty famous men, 51.3 ounces, we find a difference in favor of imbeciles, idiots, criminals, and men of ordinary mind of 11.9 ounces. George Combe estimated that about 53.5 ounces was the average weight of the adult brain. Thus the average brain weight of all the eminent men whom we have brought into the comparison, 51.3 ounces, is below Combe's estimate of that of mankind in general. Again, the ten heaviest brains of our list of famous men give an average weight of 61.1 ounces, while the average given by the ten heaviest of the opposite class is 70.4 ounces, or 9.3 ounces greater. While our list of eminent men shows only five whose brains exceeded 58.6 ounces in weight, those of seventy-six of the common throng--seven of them idiots or imbeciles--rise above that figure. These figures augur badly for the doctrine that would attach importance to heavy brains for giving force and depth of individual character. Phrenologists assert that each organ of a mental faculty occupies a certain position perceptible on the outside of the brain, with a definite area which they have mapped out. They also hold that each of these organs extends to the center of the base of the brain, tapering to it somewhat like a cone, having its base turned toward the outer world. They make no account of the fissures, the intervening sulci and anfractuosities that must cut many of these supposed cones, some at right and some at oblique angles. Then the large, long cavities or ventricles intercept and would hinder many of them from reaching the central, basilar part of the brain. The anatomical structure of the brain thus appears fatal to this theory of the organs. Large and complicated convolutions of the brain with deep sulci have been regarded by some persons as inseparable from superior powers of mind. The supposition is erroneous and groundless. The rodents, such as beavers, squirrels, rats, mice, etc., have but little brain and no convolutions whatsoever;[46] yet the beaver exhibits great foresight, economy, industry, and mechanical skill in building his dam, erecting his house, and storing up bark as food for the winter. Moreover, these animals live in societies and labor in union by ingenious methods for a common purpose, with nice judgment. "So great a variety of labors," says Dr. Leuret, "is needed for the constructions carried on by the beaver; they include so many instances of well-made choice, so many accidental difficulties are surmounted by these animals, that it is impossible not to recognize in their actions the characteristics of a rather high intelligence."[47] The sheep has a much larger brain than the beaver, with numerous and complete convolutions, yet it is one of the most stupid of domestic animals. Again, though birds have convolutions in the cerebellum, they have none in the cerebrum, and yet they are more capable of education than any living beings except the human race. The eagle is complete master of the lamb; the magpie, the hawk, the raven, and the parrot with his talking powers, are not excelled in sagacity by the dog, the horse, or the elephant, notwithstanding the latter animals have brains of superior size and elaborate convolutions. Squirrels manifest foresight and economy in storing nuts for the winter's use; yet they have no brain convolutions. The cetacea, especially whales, have much larger brains than men, with more numerous and more complex convolutions and deeper sulci; yet their intelligence bears no comparison with that of the human race. Three eminent men are known to have had very small convolutions of the brain--viz., Louis Asseline, Dr. Tiedemann, and Baron von Liebig. We have to add to this remarkable list two, not named, but described by Dr. Wagner as having been very intelligent, who yet possessed very few convolutions in their very small brains.[48] As Wagner's book was printed before Liebig died, he could not have been one of the two to whom the author referred. Idiots often possess as large brains as men distinguished for intellectual power, and their brains have as deep sulci, and convolutions as fine, as large, and as complex. Our table of the common and weak-minded contains a mention of an idiot whose brain weighed 53 ounces, or exactly as much as Napoleon's, and had fine convolutions and a large frontal lobe, but who could never learn to speak. The elephant carries a far larger brain than man, finely formed, broad and high in front, with much more numerous and complex convolutions and deeper anfractuosities, and yet no intelligent person would for a moment claim that its mind excels or even equals that of man. It may be well here to allow some eminent physiologists to give their views on this subject. "The researches of anatomists have disposed of every point advanced by Gall. Curiously enough, M. Camille Dareste has placed beyond dispute the fact that the number and depth of the convolutions bear no direct proportion to the development of intelligence, whereas they do bear a direct proportion to the size of the animal.... It is notorious that the instinct of propagation, the instinct of destructiveness, the instinct of constructiveness, and other qualities are manifested by animals having no brains, nothing but simple ganglia."[49] Dr. Bastian demonstrates the convolutional theory thus: "In animals of the same group or order, the number and complexity of the convolutions increase with the size of the animal.... There can not, therefore, be among animals of the same order any simple or definite relation between the degree of intelligence of the creature and the number or disposition of its cerebral convolutions."[50] We have the following testimony in our favor from Dr. Rudolph Wagner, of Göttingen: "Examples of highly complicated convolutions I have never seen, even among eminent men whose brains I have examined.... Many convolutions and great brain weight often go together. Higher intelligence appears in both kinds of brains, where there are many or where there are few convolutions. It is not proved that special mental gifts go with many convolutions."[51] Another theory of mind is based on the gray matter of the brain, the amount of which has been supposed to be proportionate to mental capacity. As this gray matter, however, averages only about one fifth of an inch in thickness, it seems rather a thin foundation for the human intellect if the condition is good that "size is a measure of power." The late Dr. W. B. Carpenter stated the matter thus: "The cortical substance or gray matter of the hemispheres essentially consists of that vesicular nerve substance which, in the spinal cord as in the ganglionic masses generally, is found to occupy the interior. The usual thickness is about one fifth of an inch; but considerable variations present themselves in this respect, as also in the depth of the convolutions."[52] Daniel Webster's brain had gray substance to the depth only of one sixteenth of an inch.[53] It thus appears that his brain had a thinner layer of gray matter than the average of common-minded men--one among the many proofs that facts are against all theories that connect brain conditions with intellectual power. Dr. Ireland thus describes an idiot boy who, though thirteen or fourteen years of age, was only three feet eight inches in height: "In expression he was dull and inanimate, with an old face and a short, squat figure.... The convolutions were broad and simple, but not shallow. The gray matter was as broad as usual."[54] The writer has examined many brains of persons morally or intellectually below the average--such as murderers, negroes, and others sunk in ignorance. He has invariably found the layer of vesicular or gray matter to be thicker than that of Daniel Webster's brain. Elephants, porpoises, whales, dolphins, and the grampus all have this layer thicker than the most intellectual men. Another great objection to locating mind in the gray matter of the brain is that this substance is found in the interior part of the spinal cord, and in all the nerve centers throughout the body; so that, if mind is situated in it, it is not confined to the brain, but dwells in the spine also, and is distributed all through the human frame. Still another objection lies in the fact that wherever the gray matter exists near the surface of the brain, it consists of three distinct layers, separated by a white substance, and the outermost layer is white, not gray.[55] The _septum lucidum_ consists of gray matter. The _corpus striatum_, situated at the base of the lateral ventricles, nearly in the center of the brain, was from three eighths to half an inch in diameter in an ox which was dissected in Edinburgh. This is about the same amount as is found in the _corpus striatum_ of the human brain. There would be lively times if it were possible for a mental faculty to occupy at once all the localities where gray matter is found! None of the suppositions about certain qualities of mind inhering in particular portions of the brain have been proved, nor have they stood the tests of science. The theories which have assumed that the cultivation of the intellect gives shape and size to the brain within and consequently to the skull without, advocates of which have not been wanting, have been disproved by the collected facts. "There is no proof," says Dr. J. C. Nott, in his Types of Mankind, "of the theory that the cultivation of the mind or of one set of faculties can give expansion or increased size of brain. The Teutonic races, in their barbarous state, two thousand years ago, possessed brains as large as now, and so with other races." The St. Louis Globe Democrat of November 13, 1885, gives an account of some excavations on the Mount Ararat farm, east of Carrollton, Illinois, where the bones of thirty-two Indians or mound builders were unearthed. "They were not a diminutive race, as some people have supposed, some of the thigh bones being sixteen inches long, and some of the skulls twenty-four inches in circumference." A skull having a circumference of twenty-four inches means a head that measured from twenty-five to twenty-six and a half in life, when the cranium was covered with skin and muscles. The average head of white men in New York to-day is only twenty-two and a half inches round. So the culture of the white race for centuries has not developed their heads to near the size of those of the uncultured mound builders who inhabited America many centuries ago. Our own opinion is that cultivation by means of a thorough classical education, where the appetite is restrained, as usually occurs, tends rather to diminish the size of the head, by reducing the temporal muscles and the adipose tissue under the scalp. The Engis skull is one of the most ancient known to exist, and belonged to the stone age, or about the same time as the Neanderthal skull. Professor Huxley describes it as being well formed, and considerably larger than the average of European skulls to-day in the width and height of the forehead and in the cubic capacity of the whole. Quatrefages, in The Human Species, p. 312, says: "This skull (the Engis or Cro-Magnon), so remarkable for its fine proportion, is also remarkable for its capacity. According to M. Broca, who could only work under precautions calculated to diminish the amount, it is equal to at least 1,590 cubic centimetres (96.99 cubic inches). I have already remarked that this number is far higher than the mean taken from modern Parisians; it is equally so in comparison with other European nations." These facts all conspire to prove that the cultivation of thousands of years has not increased the size of human skulls. In 1886, we measured many of the skulls unearthed at Pompeii, the remains of Romans who lived nearly two thousand years ago, and we found them on the average larger in every way, but especially in the forehead, than the skulls of Romans of this century. In the museums of Switzerland we measured in 1887 several skulls of the ancient lake dwellers of that country, and found them larger in all respects, but particularly in the forehead, than those of the Swiss people of the last fifty years. The average circumference of the skulls we measured in the catacombs of Paris was twenty-one inches and a half, which is about an inch more than that of Parisians who have died within the past fifty years. "The average internal capacity of the Peruvian skull is only seventy-three cubic inches; that of Toltec skulls, seventy-seven inches, and that of barbarous tribes, eighty-two inches; so that the extraordinary anomaly is presented of a larger brain being possessed by the barbarous tribes than by the nations who achieved no mean degree of civilization in Central America and Peru. The average European skull is ninety-three inches in bulk."[56] The author was informed by Mr. Lucien Carr, of the Ethnological Museum of Harvard University, that the capacity of the Peruvian skulls was about one hundred centimetres smaller than that of the skulls of any other people living in America at the same time. Yet that small-headed people was the most highly civilized of all. FOOTNOTES: [32] Medical Times and Gazette, London, England, November 17, 1883. [33] Whewell also had "the scalp and skull thick." Brain weighed 49 ounces. The Lancet, London, England, March 17, 1866, p. 280. [34] Medical Times and Gazette, London, England, May 12, 1883, p. 525. [35] London Medical Gazette, London, England, September 13, 1828, p. 478. [36] Brain Weight of Man. By Dr. Bischoff. Bonn, Germany, 1880, p. 137. [37] Authority for this weight is the Medical Army Museum, Washington, D. C. [38] This brain is kept in and its weight is recorded on the glass jar in the Pathological Museum at Munich, Germany. [39] Idiocy and Imbecility. By Dr. Ireland. London, 1877, p. 75. [40] The Human Species. By A. De Quatrefages. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1884, p. 380. [41] Dr. Gall's works, Boston, Massachusetts, vol. i, p. 36. [42] Life of George Combe, London, 1878, vol. ii, p. 381. [43] Medical News and Gazette, London, June 16, 1888, p. 521. [44] Morning Herald, Sydney, Australia, February 23, 1884. [45] Eleven Chinamen, found by Dr. C. Clapham to afford an average of 50.4 ounces, had been killed in a typhoon, and were therefore in no wise wasted by disease. (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, London, England, vol. vii, p. 90.) [46] The Nervous System, London, 1834, p. 447. [47] Anatomie comparative du système nerveux, tome i, 1839, p. 506. [48] Ueber die typischen Verschiedenheiten der Windungen der Hemisphären und über die Lehre vom Hirngewicht, Göttingen, 1860. Also see Pathology and Therapeutics of Mental Diseases, London, 1870, p. 23. [49] History of Philosophy, London, 1867, vol. ii, p. 433. [50] The Brain as an Organ of Mind, London, 1880, pp. 276, 277. [51] Nachrichten, Göttingen, February 29, 1860, p. 75. [52] Carpenter's Principles of Human Physiology, London, 1881, p. 659. [53] Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 1853, vol. lxxix, p. 360. [54] Idiocy and Imbecility, London, 1877, pp. 216-219. [55] See The Brain as an Organ of Mind, London, 1880, p. 465; also, The Human Brain, London, 1847, pp. 288, 289. [56] Eclectic Magazine, December 14, 1863, p. 428. SPELEOLOGY, OR CAVE EXPLORATION.[57] BY M. E. A. MARTEL. The not very graceful word _speleology_ was composed a few years ago by M. �mile Rivière out of Greek elements, as a translation of the German _Höhlenkunde_, to signify the study of caves. The study claims a place among the sciences, and is, I believe, able to justify its claim. Caves have been subjects of interest and curiosity in all times and countries. In the primitive ages, when palæolithic man was obliged to defend himself against the large Quaternary wild beasts, and did not yet know how to construct cabins, he lived in the most inaccessible caves, or those easiest to close, which he could find. Afterward, when man had advanced in civilization to the neolithic stage, and had somewhat improved tools and arms, having learned to build huts and villages, caves became simply burial places. In the historical periods of antiquity they were transformed into pagan sanctuaries or temporary hiding places in times of revolt, civil war, or invasion. Down to the middle ages and the renascence, they shared this function with abandoned quarries. Through these changes they gradually became objects of popular fear and absurd legend. I have nearly everywhere in France found legendary and profound belief in some monstrous basilisk or dragon in the depths of dark caverns, guarding immense treasures; and woe to the rash adventurer who tried to steal these riches! In short, caves have suffered their vicissitudes; their use as habitations seems to be inversely proportioned to the degree of civilization. The miserable aborigines of Australia have not yet quite abandoned them; and in France the present occupation of the grottoes of Ezy, in the Eure, by some outcast families, who lead a sordid existence in them, indifferent to all social conventions, has recently been cited as an extremely curious anthropological phenomenon. Science, too, has laid its hold on caves only within a little more than a century; for it was not till 1774 that Esper recognized that the large bones taken from the caverns near Baireuth, in Bavaria, were not those of human giants, but of extinct animals, and he called them, they being petrified by limestone, _zoöliths_, or animal-stones; and it was his remarks upon them that drew Cuvier's attention to paleontology. Three sciences have of late years been advanced by the explorations of caves: paleontology; prehistory, or research among the remains of primitive men and their industries; and zoölogy, or the study of living beings. The animals of caverns--crustaceans, insects, batrachians, and fishes--constitute a special fauna, which has been for fifty years a subject of study to naturalists of various nations, and to the anatomy of which M. Armand Viré, of the Natural History Museum of Paris, has been giving special attention for five years past. There are other sciences the study of which in connection with caves, while capable of yielding valuable fruits, has been too long neglected: geology, for their origin and formation; mineralogy, for their relations to metallic veins; meteorology, for thermometrical and barometrical variations and the formation of carbonic acid; terrestrial physics, for the experiments on gravity that might be carried on in deep vertical pits, supplementing the observations of Foucault in the Pantheon at Paris, and Airy in the English mines; hydrology, which has hardly yet perceived that caves are predominantly great laboratories of springs; agriculture, which might transform them into reservoirs for times of drought or storage basins in case of flood; and public hygiene, which is just beginning to discover that they may harbor in their fissures hitherto unsuspected causes of contamination of the water of the springs that issue from them. The number and importance of these new problems that have arisen from the recent extension of underground investigations seem fully to justify the specialization of the science of caves--another creation of the Speleological Society, now four years old. This special interest in the science of caves began about fifteen years ago, when, in 1883, three members of the Austro-German Alpine Club--Herren Harske, Marinitsch, and Müller--resumed in the limestone plateaus of Istria and Carniola called the Karst, explorations which had been actively and profitably carried on in the middle of the century, from 1850 to 1857, by Dr. Adolf Schmidt, whose discoveries in the caves of Adelsberg, Planina, and St. Canzion won him a membership in the Vienna Academy of Sciences. Their efforts and those of Herr F. Kraus, who died last year, had the result of interesting the Austrian Government in the subject; and since 1886 various engineers have been commissioned by the Minister of Agriculture to make official explorations and construct economical works in the caves and underground rivers of Istria, Carniola, and Herzegovina. Credits are granted every year for enterprises which prove to be more useful than would at first be thought. It was at the same time, between 1883 and 1885, that I made my first investigation in the Causses of Lozère, Aveyron, and the adjoining departments of France, the results of which were to reveal for the first time to the public, and even to geographers, the picturesque beauties, then unknown, and now becoming the fashion, of the gorges of the Tarn, Jenta, and Dourbie, the rocks of Montpelier le Vieux, etc. In my excursions over the plateaus of the Causses I frequently met, at the level of the surface, open, dark holes, and mouths of vertical wells--_avens_--the depths of which no one had ever looked into, unsoundable, they said, which the peasants naturally took to be real mouths of hell. Recollecting what I had admired at Adelsberg and in various caves of the Pyrenees, I guessed these avens might also be doorways to subterranean splendors and scientific treasures. So I began in 1888 the methodical exploration of the unexamined natural cavities of my own land first, and then of other countries of Europe; and since then I have devoted several weeks every year to this work. These pits are simply horizontal holes opening upon the surface of the ground, of very different forms and dimensions. Herdsmen are very careful not to let their cattle go too near them, for they sometimes fall in. The diameter of these pits varies from a few inches to several hundred yards, and they are sometimes more than six hundred feet deep. It is not easy to go down into them, especially when they are on high levels away from habitations and roads. In such cases a considerable apparatus of ropes, rope ladders, telephone, portable boat, tent, etc., has to be taken along. The first measurement with the sounding line gives the depth only of the first pit--and there are often several succeeding one another. A rope ladder long enough to reach the bottom is then let down, and the man who descends has a rope tied about him for additional security, which is held by the people above. A great many pits are narrower at the top than lower down, forming something like a reversed speaking trumpet, so that the explorer finds it very difficult to make himself heard at the top; hence I have adopted the practice of taking a telephone along. The interior shapes of the pits are very diverse. The narrower ones are easiest to go down, because they permit one partly to support himself against their walls. The wider ones leave him hanging loose, in a position which he feels to be very precarious. When there is a second or third pit, and we have not ladders enough, we have to trust ourselves to a simple rope with a board fastened at the end of it for a seat. The _gouffre_ of Vigne Close, in Ardèche, which is about six hundred feet deep, has five successive pits, and its complete exploration required three days. The bottom of the pit may be a simple cleft in the rock, or an immense cathedral-like chamber; as at Rabanel, near Ganges, and Hérault, the deepest abyss in France, the vault of which expands into a gigantic nave, five hundred feet high, which is lighted by the beam of light that falls through the opening, presenting a grand and indescribable spectacle. Some pits of less depth, as the Tin doul de la Vayssière, in Aveyron, and the Padirac well, in Lot, both leading to underground rivers, enjoy a still more complete illumination. Considerable talus banks close the ends of these broad pits, and are generally produced by the caving in of the roofs of caves. Lively controversies and gross errors have prevailed concerning the geological formation of abysses. The abyss of Jean Nouveau, Vaucluse, among others, furnishes evidence against the false hypothesis that such pits are as a rule the results of cave-ins, whereas pits of that origin are rare and exceptional. These pits are for the most part fissures, the principal feature of which is their narrowness. At Jean Nouveau the greatest breadth is not more than about sixteen feet. It is the deepest vertical pit of a single shaft without intermediate terraces that we know of, and is about five hundred and thirty feet from the surface of the ground to its floor. The mass of stone rubbish at the bottom prevented our descending into a second pit. Pits composed, like Vigne Close, of several successive wells, destroy another hypothesis--that of the formation of _gouffres_ by the emissions from thermal springs. The greatest danger in descending these pits arises from the showers of stones that sometimes come down upon the head of the explorer. These are often started by his friends the hunters, or by their dogs gamboling around at will. While some of the caverns I have explored were stopped up by obstacles of one kind or another that prevented further progress, in others we found considerable rivers running a nearly free course. We rarely found pits formed by the collapse of the roofs of the cave in cases where the distance from the subterranean river which by its work of erosion provoked the catastrophe to the surface was more than one hundred metres. The pit of the Mas Raynal, Aveyron, is one hundred and six metres deep, and abuts upon a large subterranean river, which supplies the Sorgues of Saint-Affrique, one of the finest springs of France. When we explored it, in 1889, we could not pass the low chambers which occur in it because the water was too high, and we have not visited it since. Its exploration in a dry season might reveal many very interesting chambers. In the cave of Rabanel, the first well, which ends in a talus of fallen stones, furnishes an instance of a vertical fissure grafted, if we may use the word, upon an interior grotto that already existed. A stream runs through this grotto which falls into a second well twenty-six metres, and is then lost in smaller passages so nearly stopped up with earth that we were not able to follow it through its course of about a mile till it comes out at the Brissac spring. The cave of Trebiciano, in Istria, near Trieste, the deepest known, has a total depth of more than a thousand feet. It is not, however, entirely natural, but is composed of numerous vertical fissures which lead, at about eight hundred and fifty feet below the surface, to a large cavern, at the bottom of which flows the subterranean river Recca. The fissures do not naturally communicate directly with one another, but the engineer Lindner was commissioned in 1840-'41 by the city of Trieste to construct for the municipality a supply of potable water from the underground streams, and after eleven months of labor made artificial connections between the different parts of the chasm. These vertical pits are formed by the wearing down, from the top, by the waters which become ingulfed in them. This mode of their formation was demonstrated to me in 1895, when I was in Great Britain under a commission from the French Minister of Instruction. I then explored several caves in which the rivers were still running, and satisfied myself that the pits were simply absorbing wells. Such wells are not effective now in southern France and Austria, but in northern Europe, where rain is more abundant, they are still operative. I found the plainest evidence of this fact in Yorkshire, at the Gaping Ghyll, Ingleborough, where a river precipitates itself at one leap one hundred metres under the earth. English investigators and travelers had tried without success to descend into it in 1845, 1870, and 1894, having conquered only about one hundred and ninety-five feet of its total depth of two hundred and twenty-nine feet. It took me twenty-five minutes to go down upon a rope ladder which was suspended in the midst of the cascade. Fortunately, the pit had the daylight to the very bottom--a wonderful spectacle, compensating me for all my trouble and the long douche bath which greeted me at the end of the descent, where stretched an immense Roman nave nearly five hundred feet long, eighty feet wide, and ninety feet high, without any sustaining pillar. From the middle of the roof of this colossal cavern fell the cascade in a great nimbus of vapor and light--a wonderful fantastic scene, such as Gustave Doré or Jules Verne could never have imagined. The most pleasant feature of the whole of it, however, to me was the thought that I had succeeded where the English had failed, and on their own ground. The people were nevertheless very pleasant to me, and at my instance have continued the exploration and made some new discoveries.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique._ FOOTNOTE: [57] From an address before the Société des Amis des Sciences. SKETCH OF CHARLES HENRY HITCHCOCK. The name of Prof. Charles H. Hitchcock is closely associated with the progress of New England geology, especially with the discovery of the great terminal glacial moraine, and, in connection with the name of his father, Dr. Edward Hitchcock, with the study of the fossil bird tracks of the Connecticut River Valley. CHARLES HENRY HITCHCOCK was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, August 23, 1836, the son of Prof. Edward Hitchcock, the eminent geologist, who was afterward president of Amherst College. The family is of English origin, and was planted in America by two brothers who came over at nearly the same time and made homes for themselves in New Haven, removing later to towns near by. Luke Hitchcock, the ancestor of the subject of this sketch, came in 1695, and finally settled at Wethersfield, Connecticut. His descendants in the direct line lived at Springfield, Granville, Deerfield, and Amherst, Massachusetts. Professor Hitchcock is in the seventh generation from Luke, and is equally removed from Elder John White, his maternal ancestor, who came to Canton, Massachusetts, toward the end of the seventeenth century, and removed thence to the Connecticut Valley. Both lines of ancestry were purely English, and all the progenitors were men of integrity, regarded in their times as worthy to fill offices of trust in church and town. Two of them served in the Revolutionary army. The father of Professor Hitchcock was one of the most distinguished geologists and educators of his time, and his services, especially as State Geologist of Massachusetts, have already been described in the Popular Science Monthly.[58] His mother was the daughter of Jacob White, a well-to-do farmer of Amherst, who, believing in the education of women, had given her the best opportunities for study available at the time. She could read the Greek Testament and calculate eclipses, and was a gifted artist with pencil and brush. She prepared with her own hands many of the numerous illustrations in her husband's reports, and also diagrams for the lecture room. She took indefatigable pains with the education of her children, placing their moral and religious welfare first. Of the eight children of the family, six of whom reached maturity, the surviving brother is professor of physical culture, and, for the time being, acting president at Amherst College, and one of the two surviving sisters, the widow of the Rev. C. M. Terry, has been for several years matron of the Hubbard Cottage, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Beginning with 1835, the year before Professor Hitchcock was born, his father, Professor Edward Hitchcock, was largely occupied with the study of the "fossil bird tracks" in the New Red Sandstone of the Connecticut Valley, and with the discussions to which the investigation gave rise, the story of which has been told by Prof. C. H. Hitchcock himself in the Popular Science Monthly (vol. iii, August, 1873). Besides the search for the fossils and their collection and comparison, and the examination of the literature that might throw light on the subject, there were studies into the proper interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis, the debate with Prof. Moses Stewart, of Andover, and the gradual approach of the American clergy to general acquiescence in the belief that geology is not at variance with Scripture. Professor Hitchcock's childhood was largely spent under the influence of these studies and discussions. The boy seemed to be full of promise, and because of his observing ways and proneness to speculation was called "the young philosopher." He used to bring his mother the very small flowers of _Spergula rubra_, which are so obscure that older eyes often fail to notice them. He seemed to be fonder of his father than the other children, and was never so happy as with him. Through this constant intercourse Charles became absorbed in his father's pursuits, and grew up into a knowledge of geology from Nature and from verbal explanations--a more satisfactory method than that of learning from books; and he was associated with his father in all his geological work from the time when he was first old enough to be of service. Thus, before 1856 he was acquainted, from inspection, with the terraces and reputed beaches and drift phenomena of all western Massachusetts; he had handled every specimen of a foot mark in the Appleton Cabinet, and by 1861 was the principal assistant on the Vermont Survey, having prepared for the press the greater part of the matter of the report. He had enjoyed the best educational advantages of his day, having completed the classical and preparatory courses of Williston Seminary, and been graduated thence in 1852, then graduated from Amherst College in 1856, a short time before his twentieth birthday. Among his early classmates and college friends were Dr. Cyrus Northrup, president of Minnesota University; Dr. Richard Mather, professor of Greek at Amherst College; the Rev. Dr. Goodwin, of Chicago; and Dr. William Hayes Ward, editor of The Independent. After graduation he spent a year in special study of Hebrew and chemistry at Yale College, two years at Andover Theological Seminary, and one year in Europe, studying in the Royal School of Mines under Professor Huxley, and in the British Museum investigating the crustacea and trilobites. Here he enjoyed the friendship of Professor Richard Owen, and had the guidance of Dr. H. Woodward. In 1857 Mr. Hitchcock was appointed assistant geologist to the Geological Survey of Vermont. He served the full term of the survey, and had charge of the preparation of the report relating to the stratigraphical geology, the measurement and delineation of the sections, and the compilation of the geological map. In 1861 he received the appointment of State Geologist of Maine, in which service he spent two summers in field work, preparing two reports of progress, which were published in connection with the report of the secretary of the Board of Agriculture. Besides the general reconnoissance, he discovered the existence of large areas of Upper Silurian and Devonian terranes. He has embodied his views of the distribution of the formations in his general map of the United States. Having chosen the ministry for his profession, Mr. Hitchcock studied theology under Dr. E. A. Park, of Andover, and the Rev. Dr. Taylor, of New Haven. Questions of the relations of theology and science were attracting much attention, and he treated of them in two papers in the _Bibliotheca Sacra_, one of which was afterward used for the guidance of theological students in several seminaries. As more opportunities were offered for scientific work, the ministry was given up. This was the time when the doctrine of natural selection came to the front for investigation, and the early history of mankind was receiving increased attention. Mr. Hitchcock came home from Europe in 1867 convinced of the truth of some form of evolution, of a considerable antiquity of man, and of the probability of a plural origin of the human race. Finding that some of his views on these subjects were not acceptable to his associates, he ceased to make them prominent in his class instructions, and devoted his attention to the more technical details of geology. Since then general opinion has advanced so far on these subjects that the views he held at that time seem now really conservative. In 1868 he was appointed State Geologist for New Hampshire, and spent ten years in the survey of that State. The results of his work there were published in three large quarto volumes, with a folio atlas of maps, profiles, and sections. The rocks described consist principally of crystalline schists and marine igneous ejections. The geology of New Hampshire is of peculiar importance, because the situation of the State is such that a correct knowledge of its rocks promotes the understanding of many obscure terranes in the adjacent regions of Maine, Quebec, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Professor Hitchcock's report of the survey may justly be styled his chief work. The part best studied relates to the White Mountains and the Ammonoosuc mining district. Connected with the survey was the maintenance of a meteorological station throughout the year on the summit of Mount Washington. Daily statements of the weather conditions of this station during the winter of 1870-'71 were sent by telegraph to the principal newspapers, and called out much interest--before the United States Signal Service began its weather predictions. The catalogue of Professor Hitchcock's publications comprises more than one hundred and fifty titles of papers, reports, and books. Perhaps the earliest thorough study represented among them was that of the fossil footmarks. The first of the published papers on this subject related to the tracks of animals in alluvial clay, and was published in the American Journal of Science in 1855. For several years after this he assisted his father in arranging the museum and compiling tables for the Ichnology. He made a complete catalogue descriptive of the more than twenty thousand individual impressions preserved in the Appleton Cabinet, which was printed, with descriptions of a few new species of footmarks, in the Supplement to the Ichnology of Massachusetts, edited by him after the death of his father in 1865. Although circumstances have prevented him from paying much attention to ichnology in later years, he has prepared several papers on the subject, the most important of which was one on the Recent Progress of Ichnology, which was read before the Boston Society of Natural History about twelve years ago. In it the ichnites were carefully catalogued anew and classified in the light of our knowledge of the numerous dinosaurs of the West; and the results of some studies of the slabs exhumed at Wethersfield, Connecticut, are well known. The list of the Connecticut footmarks was increased from one hundred and nineteen in the Ichnology to one hundred and seventy; and facts were cited to show that the _Grallator_, the three-toed animal most allied to birds, possessed a caudal appendage of a reptilian nature. The Trias of New Jersey had been found to illustrate new features in the _Otozoum_, whose tracks are often ornithic in aspect. A comparison of the features of the Triassic skeletons described by Marsh from Connecticut (_Anchisaurus_) shows that the creatures were rather allied to the _Plesiornis_ than to the _Anomoepus_ of the Ichnology, because of the great size of the fore feet. Notes upon footmarks have been gathered also from illustrations in Pennsylvania, Nova Scotia, Kansas, Nevada, and Florida. Professor Hitchcock has studied the Quaternary or glacial deposits with great success. His first publication upon the terraces and allied phenomena of Vermont appeared while the old views of a submergence, with icebergs, prevailed, to account for the phenomena. A study of the glaciers of Switzerland in 1866 satisfied him of the truth of Agassiz's theory; and whenever the opportunity came for re-examination of the surface geology of northern New England, the facts were found to require a different theoretical explanation. He caused a thorough examination to be made of the Connecticut River terranes by Warren Upham in the New Hampshire Survey, and proved that all the high mountains of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine had been glaciated by a southeasterly movement. The ice came from the Laurentian highlands, pushed in a southern direction down the Champlain-Hudson Valley, with a southeasterly flow over New England and southwesterly over the Adirondacks; the last two courses having been subordinate to the first. At present the Laurentian hills are lower than the New England and New York mountains overridden by the ice, and probably the same was the case in the Glacial period. The best explanation of these paths is afforded by the suggestion that a gigantic ice cap accumulated north of the St. Lawrence, towering into the clouds so much that its overflow naturally descended over the White and Adirondack Mountains. That glaciers should accumulate terminal moraines is axiomatic, but no geologist before 1868 had ventured to suggest where moraines might be located in the United States. In that year Professor Hitchcock delivered a lecture before the Lyceum of Natural History in New York and the Long Island Historical Society in Brooklyn, in which he affirmed that the drift deposits from Prospect Park along the backbone of Long Island for its entire length constituted the terminal moraine of the great continental ice sheet. This declaration inaugurated a new era in the study of the age of ice. The geologists in their several States found the terminal moraines, and the various phenomena began to be classified according to new laws. The search for moraines has resulted in a restatement of the incident of the age of ice; more than a dozen successive terminal moraines have been mapped between New York and Montana, which suggest to us the existence of several glacial periods. In compiling a catalogue of observations of the course of glacial striæ by the United States Geological Survey, it was found that Professor Hitchcock had recorded for New England as many as all other geologists had observed for the whole country. _Eskers_ are another interesting class of phenomena, and were first described as _horsebacks_ in Maine, about seventy of them having been described in the report of 1861 and 1862. It was not till after the description of the Swedish �sar that the nature of these lines or ridges was understood; and now they were found in every prominent valley in New England, as attendant upon the recession of the ice sheet. Professor Hitchcock gave the correct name of these ridges in his Elementary Geology, 1860; while for many years subsequently they were erroneously called _kames_, even in the geology of New Hampshire. Professor Hitchcock gave the name of Champlain to the fossiliferous clays associated with the till of the Atlantic coast. The term has come into general use as connected with the melting of the ice in the latter part of the period. Because of the presence of boreal species, and of analogies with similar deposits in Europe, Professor Hitchcock has asked the question whether there may not have been a Champlain glacial epoch posterior to those named farther in the interior of the country, the Kansan, Iowan, and Illinoisian epochs. Those who explore the geology of northern New England have to deal with crystalline rocks of various ages, and the opinions of our best geologists have not been in agreement respecting them. Professor Hitchcock was the first to make a geological map of New Hampshire, and he also demonstrated the anticlinal nature of the Green Mountains of Vermont. His teachers had inculcated the view that these eminences belonged to a synclinal disposition, coupling this with theoretical assertions as to their age and metamorphism. Finding their main principle to be erroneous, he naturally disparaged their theories, though more recent studies are eliminating many of the schists from the Archæan. All the later explorers in the field--Canadians and members of the Geological Survey--accept a pre-Cambrian anticlinal in the heart of the Green Mountains. The distribution of the New Hampshire formations was made out for the most part before any assistance was derived from the labors of Dr. G. W. Hawes and other petrographers. Twenty years ago, at the date of the final publication of the New Hampshire maps, the doctrine of an igneous origin of the crystalline schist had hardly been hinted at. What seems elemental to the modern petrographer who has acquired his technical education since 1890 was unknown then, and the classification given in the report may not agree with that now taught. In the midst of the diverse views entertained, Professor Hitchcock classified the rocks of northern New England according to this principle: rocks that are identical in petrographical composition are assumed to have had the same origin, and to be synchronous. Professor Hitchcock was almost the first of American geologists to employ the petrographer as a help to the understanding of the crystallines--as was evident by the very valuable contributions to knowledge in Part IV of the New Hampshire Report as prepared by Dr. Hawes. A vexing question concerning what are now called Cambrian terranes divided geologists for a quarter of a century after 1857, and had to be considered in preparing the geology of Vermont in 1861. This was the Taconic controversy. Trilobites had been discovered in Vermont, which were misunderstood by most of the American geologists following Hall, Logan, Dana, and others. In giving the species the technical name first of _Barrandesi_ and then _Olenellus_, Prof. James Hall asserted its derivation from the Hudson River group--relying upon the stratigraphical determinations of Sir W. E. Logan. As soon as Barrandes's attention was called to these trilobites and the attendant publication, he wrote his famous letter to Logan in 1860, declaring that there must be a mistake somewhere. That error was discovered in time to be eliminated from the Vermont report of the following year. Professor Hitchcock had charge of the field work in this Cambrian district, and his views of the arrangement of the formations are in agreement with those of the latest workers in the field. He applied the term of _Georgia_ to one division of the terrane in 1860; and the designation has been generally adopted since that time. Jules Marcou claimed priority in the suggestion of the application of the term, but upon the publication of Professor Hitchcock's statement on the subject the credit of priority was awarded to him by Director Walcott, of the United States Geological Survey. Between 1860 and 1870 Professor Hitchcock was occupied largely as a mining geologist in the estimation of mineral deposits for mining companies, with his office in New York. In the prosecution of this business he traveled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Alabama. Subsequently, the study of the phosphate beds led him to the island of Redonda in the West Indies. He further visited the phosphate beds of South Carolina and Florida, the gold fields of eastern Oregon, the Chalcedony Park of Arizona, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, and the Yosemite and Yellowstone Parks. Studies made in the Hawaiian Islands and their volcanoes in 1883 and 1886 resulted in the contribution of important observations respecting those regions. At the present writing Professor Hitchcock is spending a year of further observations in those islands. Mr. Hitchcock was appointed, in 1858, lecturer in zoölogy and curator of the cabinet in Amherst College; an office which he filled for seven years, retiring after the death of his father. In 1866 he was elected professor of geology in Lafayette College, where he gave short courses of instruction to five successive classes. In 1868 he was called to the chair of geology in Dartmouth College, a position which he still occupies, receiving a year's leave of absence for 1898-'99 in consideration of thirty years of service. He taught geology and zoölogy as a provisional professor at Williams College in 1881, and in the following year in the Virginia College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, Blacksbury. He received the degree of M. A. in course at Amherst in 1859, the honorary degree of Ph. D. from Lafayette College in 1870, and that of LL. D. from Amherst College in 1896. Professor Hitchcock has been connected with the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1856, and a nearly constant attendant upon its meetings and participant in the proceedings. He is a member of local scientific societies in Portland, Me., Boston, Mass., New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, and also of the Imperial Geological Institute of Vienna. He was one of the most prominent movers in the inception and early history of the Geological Society of America, and had much to do with the organization of the International Congress of Geologists, and with the preparation of special reports for the several meetings between 1876 and 1890. The handsome geological map of small scale compiled for the United States was prepared by him and published in the Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers (1887), to illustrate the nomenclature and color scheme of the International Congress. Professor Hitchcock is best known to many by his geological maps. The first efforts at mapping the geology of the United States were made independently by Edward Hitchcock and Jules Marcou in 1883--the work of Mr. Marcou extending only to the plains. Prof. H. D. Rogers, five or six years later, prepared a map for Johnston's Physical Atlas. In 1872 Prof. C. H. Hitchcock and Prof. W. P. Blake compiled a map for the ninth census of the United States, and for R. W. Raymond's report upon the mineral resources of the country. The success of his small scale map led Professor Hitchcock to undertake the preparation of a map on a scale of twenty-five miles to the inch for the whole country. For this he consulted every work that had been printed upon the geology of the United States, and obtained the privilege of using many unpublished data collected by geologists of States and Territories in which the work had never been carried to actual completion. The map prepared by the General Land Office was used as the basis for the geological coloration, and the work appeared in 1881, of a size adapted to use in the classroom. Its compiler has never seen any criticism of its accuracy. The edition prepared for the Mining Institute embodies all the information acquired for the large map, with such additional facts as had been learned since that map was published. Prof. Hitchcock's services were called into requisition in the compilation of a similar map for the United States Geological Survey, which was published in its annual report for 1886, under the editorship of W. J. McGee; in fact, the two maps were printed from the same plates, but Dr. Hitchcock's contained certain features not found in the other one--the result of different interpretations--and was more complete. In the Government edition a system of coloration devised by Major J. W. Powell, which was afterward abandoned, was employed. Professor Hitchcock contributed extensively to the collection of State geological maps in the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, when large scale sheets of New England, and a large copy of the Hitchcock and Blake map of 1872, were exhibited. A medal was awarded for a sheet of thirteen sections illustrating the stratigraphy of Vermont and New Hampshire. The beginning of the measurement of sections was made for the Vermont Geological Report under the direction of Dr. Edward Hitchcock in 1861. Twelve lines of exploration across the entire State were determined upon, and specimens were collected to illustrate all the varieties of rock seen upon each. The specimens were arranged in the State Museum at Montpelier in geographical order. A similar plan of collection and arrangement was projected for the New Hampshire survey, but it was made to extend across the two States, from Maine to New York. Besides the two State reports, later publications were issued, descriptive of explorations and collections for the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the New Hampshire Agricultural Report for 1883. The work did not cease with these publications, for after the transfer of the collection of sections from the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts to Dartmouth College in 1894, additional explorations were made; the number of sections was increased to eighteen; improved drawings of the profiles, colored geologically, were prepared for the cases in the new Butterfield Museum; and the explanation of the details was further facilitated by the construction of a large relief map on the scale of one mile to the inch horizontally, twice as much vertically, and having colors corresponding to those on the profiles between the shelves. About five thousand specimens have been gathered to illustrate the profiles. The Dartmouth College Museum is filled with specimens accumulated by the energy of Professor Hitchcock. They concern geology, paleontology, petrography, economic botany, and conchology. FOOTNOTE: [58] Vol. xlvii, September, 1895. Editor's Table. _EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION._ Our attention has been drawn to a lively discussion that has lately taken place in the St. Paul papers over the utterances, on the subject of the doctrine of evolution in its relation to education, of a certain Mr. Smith, who was appointed not long since superintendent of the public schools of that city. What seems clear is that Mr. Smith is a very ignorant man, whose views in regard to education are of an altogether retrograde character. How he came to be appointed to his present position is a question which is being gravely pondered by many of the citizens; but probably the explanation is not very far to seek. The dispensers of patronage in State and municipal affairs are not always competent to make the best nominations to offices calling for high qualifications; and sometimes they do not even act up to their own indifferent lights. The man that has the pull is very apt to be the man that gets the office, and it is not often that the strongest pull goes with the highest professional fitness. However this may be, there Mr. Smith is, and what kind of a man he is may be judged from his utterances. It is thus that he refers to Mr. Spencer: "There is an old man in England who for years has spent all his time and devoted all his energies to the attempt to create a system which shall entirely ignore the name of the Deity. He will shortly die, and it shall not be remembered that he ever performed an act or said a word that blessed or comforted or relieved his suffering fellows." To further darken the picture, he contrasts Spencer with the late Cardinal Newman, who wrote the hymn "Lead, kindly light," and who, we are told, if he had done nothing more, would have been "followed by the blessings and the prayers of those whom he had comforted and saved." Again, dealing with the modern scientific view that, in the development of the human individual all antecedent stages of human development are, in a manner, passed through, he says: "Let us discard the primitive-man theory. You do not believe it. Rather shall we not hold with Emerson that every child born into the world is a new Messiah given into the arms of fallen humanity to lead them back to paradise?" It is no part of our purpose to defend Mr. Spencer against the attacks of so negligible an assailant as Mr. Smith, of Minnesota. The words that Mr. Spencer has spoken for truth, for justice, for humanity, for peace, are his sufficient commendation and vindication--were vindication needed--in the eyes of all who have any competent knowledge of contemporary thought. If these words do not help to make the world better we should feel little inclined to put our trust in the most skillfully constructed sacred lyric. Men do not always know their benefactors; and it is altogether possible, nay probable, that thousands who perhaps never heard Mr. Spencer's name have benefited through the greater consideration with which they have been treated by others, owing to his teaching. It is quite possible for men, yes, and women too, to sing "Lead, kindly light" with great unction, and yet to be the ardent abettors of warlike sentiments and warlike acts--to revel in a ruthless and immoral jingoism. Dryden was not referring to the adherents of any evolutionist philosophy when he wrote: "In lusts we wallow, and with pride we swell, And injuries with injuries repel; Prompt to revenge, not daring to forgive, Our lives unteach the doctrine we believe." "Not daring to forgive" is good, and nearly as true in the nineteenth century as it was in the seventeenth. The one English statesman who dared to forgive a defeat inflicted on English arms and to acknowledge an error, incurred by that single act a deeper hatred and contempt than he earned by anything else, or all else, in his long and storm-tossed career. We refer to the action taken by Gladstone after the battle of Majuba Hill. And we are much mistaken if the majority of those who execrated him most deeply for not crushing the Boers under England's overwhelming force were not immense admirers of the cardinal's hymn. What is certain is that they were not immense admirers of Spencer, and that Spencer did not immensely admire them. Superintendent Smith has quoted Emerson, but he does not occupy the standpoint that enables him to see Emerson in true perspective, or to feel what his philosophy lacks when confronted with the newer knowledge of the century. Mr. J. J. Chapman, in his recent memorable book of essays, gives us a better view. "A critic in the modern sense," Mr. Chapman says, "he (Emerson) was not. He lived too early and at too great a distance from the forum of European thought to absorb the ideas of evolution, and give place to them in his philosophy.... We miss in Emerson the underlying conception of growth, of development, so characteristic of the thought of our own day, and which, for instance, is found everywhere latent in Browning's poetry.... He is probably the last great writer to look at life from a stationary standpoint." That the doctrine of evolution constitutes to-day a most important guiding principle in education no competent educationist could be found to deny. It teaches us to deal with the young as in a very true sense the heirs of all the ages, to make due allowance in childhood for instincts and habits which partake of the earlier stages of human development, and to look forward with confidence to later and higher manifestations. We have less faith than our ancestors had in the rod, and more in the gradual unfolding of the powers and capacities of the mind, and therewith the enlargement and improvement of the moral nature. We do not believe as our forefathers did in breaking children's wills; nor do we view their peccadilloes in the lurid light of a gloomy theological creed. We recognize that veracity, in the sense of strict accuracy of speech, purged of all imaginative elements, is a virtue which not all adults are able to practice, and which is not a natural product of the child mind. We can not accept Emerson's doctrine of infant Messiahs, and yet we can recognize very fully the mission of the child in the home, the demand it makes for tenderness, for patience, for thoughtfulness on the part of parents, the hopes and fears and heart-searchings that it calls into play, the aspirations that it promotes toward the realization, if for its sake only, of a higher life. Froebel grasped a large measure of truth in regard to children, but too much of sentiment, in our opinion, entered into his treatment of them. In the full light of the doctrine of evolution we take them as they are, and help them to work out under favorable conditions that development of which they are capable. We are not imposed upon by childish imitations of mature virtues, and are rather disposed to repress recognized tendencies to precocity; but we believe that the germs of good are sown in every normal human being, and that, unless killed by most unwise treatment, they will fructify in due time. What we may well consider seriously is whether our modern modes of life enable us to do that justice to children which evolutionary teaching requires. Can true health of body and mind be conciliated with social ambition or with commercial ambition? Are we not hampered at every turn by false schemes of education, the object of which is to turn out certain conventional products? How many of us can rise up in effective rebellion against the very fashions that in our hearts we most condemn? Before there can be anything like a perfect education for the young there must be a much more fully developed sense of duty than we see as yet in the older generation. The doctrine of evolution is putting the key to a true system into our hands; but to use that key aright requires courage and high purpose--qualities that are not of everyday occurrence. Still, it is matter of congratulation that the truth is not far from us. It is well established in our theories, and one of these days we may hope it will gain a wide and secure footing in our practice. _DAVID AMES WELLS._ In the death of David A. Wells, which occurred at his home in Norwich, Connecticut, on the 5th of November, 1898, America has lost one of her ablest and most productive men of letters and science a distinguished representative. Out of a life of seventy years it may fairly be said that Mr. Wells gave fifty of them to intellectual pursuits, which were mainly devoted to the advance of science and its application to practical affairs. After passing the period of early study, and particularly since he became interested in economic questions, much of his work was in the line of original investigation, the results of which have from time to time been given to the public either through his books or in the magazines. Another and more conspicuous feature of his career, the one perhaps that made him best known at home and first gave him reputation abroad, was the valuable service that he rendered the country at large in straightening out the financial tangle the Government had got itself into during and after the civil war. In this undertaking his great store of learning, rare practical sagacity, and unwavering confidence in the final result, carried him through to a brilliant success, earning for him in high quarters the most flattering testimonials of admiration and respect. Looked at in the light of what he actually achieved, Mr. Wells's preparation for his life work seems to have been almost an ideal one. Gifted with a strong love of Nature and having a decidedly practical turn of mind, he early showed a fondness for the study of science. This led him, soon after graduating from Williams College in 1847, to enter the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University. Here he completed the course with the first class that was graduated by that institution in 1852. While studying in the scientific school young Wells became the special pupil of Agassiz, and, as the sequel shows, caught the enthusiasm with which that great master was wont to inspire the young men who were fortunate enough to come within the range of his influence. During this period Mr. Wells, in association with Mr. George Bliss, began the compilation and publication of the Annual of Scientific Discovery, which he continued for some sixteen years. That he was a clever student with quite exceptional endowments is seen in the circumstance that immediately after graduation he was appointed assistant professor in the scientific school and lecturer on physics and chemistry in Groton Academy, Massachusetts. He also, between 1857 and 1863, prepared a series of scientific school books embracing the subjects of physics, chemistry, and geology, and a volume on the Science of Common Things, all of which attained a wide circulation. Thus for a period of nearly fifteen years Mr. Wells had devoted himself assiduously to the cultivation of the physical sciences. Beginning with the practical operations of the laboratory, where the value of experiment and observation is made apparent, his work was continued in the strengthening and developing experiences of the teacher, and thence led up to that wider knowledge and that clearness of exposition which a bright mind would acquire in the preparation of a number of successful scientific class books. It may be presumed that by this time he was thoroughly acquainted with scientific method in its applications to the investigation and explanation of physical phenomena. With the results this had yielded in building up the great body of verified knowledge composing the several sciences he must also have been familiar. Mentally alert and with sharpened powers of observation, he was able to seize and classify the facts bearing upon the problem in hand, and subject them to systematic processes of scientific reasoning. Such, in brief, was the training and such the equipment brought by Mr. Wells to the study of economic questions when he first began to write upon them in 1864. A better preparation for the work to which he was to give the next thirty years of his life can scarcely be imagined. While it is quite true that in entering this new field he was to encounter a class of facts and variety of phenomena that were of a very different order from those with which he had previously been dealing, their apparently haphazard character did not deceive him. Well versed in the practice of tracing effects to causes, gifted with remarkable powers of insight, and thoroughly believing that the methods of science would prove as available in the study of economics as in other fields, he began his investigations without misgiving, patiently accumulated and studied the facts, and when conclusions were arrived at, no matter how contrary they might be to current teaching, fearlessly announced and defended them. Though half his life a firm believer in the doctrine of protection, when Mr. Wells went to Europe for the Government in 1867 to investigate the subject of tariff taxation, high and low tariff countries alike were visited, with the determination to leave nothing undone that would aid to a better understanding of the question. All the varied aspects of the problem were carefully studied in connection with the principal industries of the respective countries, and, finding reason in the facts thus obtained to revise his opinions, he came home a convert to free trade. For an account of what he had observed during the course of his investigations, and of the conclusions based thereon, the reader is referred to the fourth volume of his reports as commissioner of internal revenue, published in 1869. His book on Recent Economic Changes, and the papers on The Principles of Taxation, that have appeared in this magazine during the last two years, are records of equally painstaking research. Moreover, they are both excellent examples of what a strict adherence to scientific method has done and may yet be expected to do toward clearing up the knotty problems in economics that are now engaging public attention. United with his great learning, and a rare power of generalization, Mr. Wells possessed in full measure that intellectual honesty which is the indispensable characteristic of the true man of science. This enabled him to follow without doubt or hesitation wherever the facts might lead; and with his clear perception of their real import, joined to his habit of independent thought, traits that are displayed throughout all his more formal writings, they are what in our opinion constitute his title to distinction. They give to his teachings, which have already done more than any other agency that we know toward placing the subject of political economy on a sound scientific basis, a high and enduring character. _A BORROWED FOUNDATION._ "The central idea of Professor Giddings's Principles of Sociology, a work that has the honor of being the first independent attempt in English to treat of sociology as such, is that we must postulate on the part of human beings what he calls a _consciousness of kind_. Critics of his volume have naturally told him that this is essentially a philosophical idea, found in Hegel and in British ethical writers of the eighteenth century." We quote the above from an article by Professor Caldwell, entitled Philosophy and the Newer Sociology, in the October Contemporary. We are not prepared to dispute Professor Caldwell's statement that the idea of the "consciousness of kind" may be found in the writers to whom he refers; but it would have been very much to the point if he had mentioned that it is to be found most clearly enunciated in Mr. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology. In an article contributed to this magazine in December, 1896, Mr. Spencer took occasion to point out that what Professor Giddings seemed to regard as an _aperçu_ peculiar to himself had been distinctly formulated years before in his own writings. In proof of this he quoted the following passages: "Sociality having thus commenced, and survival of the fittest tending ever to maintain and increase it, it will be further strengthened by the inherited effects of habit. _The perception of kindred beings, perpetually seen, heard, and smelt, will come to form a predominant part of consciousness-_-so predominant that absence of it will inevitably cause discomfort." "Among creatures led step by step into gregariousness, there will little by little be established a pleasure in being together--a pleasure in the consciousness of one another's presence--a pleasure simpler than, and quite distinct from, those higher ones which it makes possible." The fact is that there is much more in Spencer than most recent writers have ever explored; and the newer sociologists would do well, before putting forward claims to originality, to make sure that they have not been anticipated by the veteran philosopher. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. In _The Play of Animals_[59] we are offered a book upon an essentially new topic; for, although much has been written concerning the habits and intelligence of animals, no special consideration has been given to their play or its psychic significance. The survey of this virgin territory seems to the critical reader to have disclosed such limitless area to Professor Groos that he fails to indicate its legitimate boundaries. He confesses himself overcome by a sense of its vastness, stating that the "versatility needed for a thorough investigation is so comprehensive that it is unattainable by an ordinary mortal." Play, he finds, is not "an aimless activity carried on for its own sake"; neither is it the product of surplus physical energy, as Mr. Spencer defines it, for in youth there is playfulness without this condition. Instincts useful in preserving the species appear before they are seriously needed, and are utilized in play, which serves as preparation for the tasks of life. "Animals do not play because they are young, but have a period of youth in order to play." The special ends accomplished by play are control of the body, command of the means of locomotion, agility in pursuit of prey and in escaping danger, and prowess in fighting. The games pursued in attaining these ends are classified in nine groups, beginning with those of experimentation and ending with those referred to curiosity. They include plays of movement, hunting, fighting, love, construction, nursing, and imitation. For all of these Professor Groos finds but one instinct of play responsible, supplemented by the instinct of imitation. He enters into an elaborate discussion of instinct, giving an outline of Weismann's theory of heredity and the views of various writers. He adopts Herbert Spencer's definition of instinct as a complex reflex act, referring its origin to the operation of natural selection, acknowledging the process to be beyond our grasp. In seeking to explain bird song and the love play of animals, the theory of sexual selection is not accepted by him without qualification; a modification of the Darwinian principle is suggested in which the female exerts an unconscious choice. The psychic characteristics of play are the pleasure following satisfaction of instinct, energetic action and joy in the acquirement of power. The animal at first masters its own bodily movements, then seeks the conquest of other animals and inanimate objects. When a certain facility in play has been gained a higher intellectual stage is entered upon, that of make-believe, or playing a part. This state of conscious self-illusion is reached by many of the higher animals. Psychically, it indicates a divided consciousness, and occupies a place between the ordinary state and the abnormal ones of hypnosis and hysteria. To this condition Professor Groos ascribes the genesis of artistic production, an hypothesis that he has elaborated more fully in _Einleitung in die Aesthetik_. The experimental plays of animals, divided into those of courtship, imitation, and construction, correspond to the principles of self exhibition, imitation, and decoration, which are claimed to be the motives of human art. The acquirement of power through play develops a feeling of freedom, and this the artist likewise seeks to realize in the world of ideals. Artists will not probably acknowledge that "life is earnest, art is playful," nor moralists agree that "man is only human when he plays, for there is no real freedom in the sphere of experience," yet both may find food for thought in Professor Groos's analysis of play. FOOTNOTE [59] The Play of Animals. By Karl Groos. Translated by Elizabeth L. Baldwin. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 341. Price, $1.75. * * * * * In the spasm of unreasoning hostility to Spain which has come over the people of the United States, succeeding a period of effusive admiration, the public are apt to forget that that nation has done anything creditable for the promotion of civilization. Yet, leaving out other fields of culture for the present, it has produced two painters who rank among the great masters, besides numerous secondary artists, rivals of any of that grade in the world, and a voluminous literature which George Ticknor thought it worth while to make the study of his life, and which inspired the pens of Irving, Longfellow and Lockhart. One of the works of this literature ranks among the world's greatest classics, and has been, perhaps, after the Bible and Shakespeare more universally read than any other book; and numerous other works--chiefly romances--have furnished patterns or themes for the poets, novelists, and dramatists of other nations. Mr. _Fitz Maurice Kelly's_ excellent and convenient _History of Spanish Literature_[60] therefore comes in good time to refresh our memories concerning these facts. One does not have to go very far in the history to find that of the great Latin writers of the age of the Cæsars, the two Senecas, Lucan the poet of Pharsalia, Martial the epigrammatist, and Quintilian the rhetorician--still an authority--and many minor writers, "were Spaniards as well as Romans." It also appears that of what Gibbon declared to have been the happiest epoch of man's history--from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus, seventy of the eighty years, if we take the liberty, as Mr. Kelly does, of counting Marcus Aurelius as a Cordovan, were passed beneath the scepter of the Spanish Cæsars. Prudentius, a distinguished Latin Christian writer of a succeeding age, was also a Spaniard. Although there were "archaic" works of _trovadors_ before that time, traditionally preserved by _juglars_, Spanish literature proper began in the twelfth century. It owed much to French and Italian, and in course of time gave much back to them. Among its earliest signs was the development of the romance (ballad), while Arab writers (whose work Mr. Kelly considers of doubtful value) and Jews, who are better spoken of, were early contributors to it. The earliest works of importance were the Mystery of the Magian Kings, one of the first plays in any modern language, and the great heroic poem of the Cid, both anonymous. The first Castilian poet whose name has reached us was Gonzalo de Berceo, 1198 to 1264, who wrote much, and was, "if not an inventor, the chief of a school." Permanent form was given to Spanish prose by King Alfonso the Learned, 1226 to 1284, who, "like Bacon, took all knowledge for his province, and in every department shone pre-eminent." He had numerous collaborators, and "his example in so many fields was followed"--among others (in some of them) by his son and successor, Sancho IV. The Infanta, Juan Manuel, nephew of Alfonso, in one of the stories of his Conde Lucanor--"one of the books of the world"--created the germ of the Taming of the Shrew. Passing a numerous list of writers of respectable merit, for whose names even we have not room, we come to the age of the Catholic kings and Charles V, when for a hundred and fifty years literature most flourished in Spain. Among the features of this period are the Amadis de Gaul--"the best in that kind"--which inspired Cervantes; Columbus, who, though of Italian birth, "was probably the truest Spaniard in all the Spains," the poet Garcilaso de la Vega, and Bernal Diaz and other historians whose names dot Prescott's books. Passing a large number of writers of mark whose works appeared in this age, and stopping only to mention Alonzo de Ercilla y Zuñiga's Araucana as the first literary work of real merit composed in either American continent, we come to the age of Cervantes, whose story of Don Quixote--"the friendless people's friend," as Browning styles him--is not more distinguished for its satirical wit and humor than for its kindly humanity; and Lope de Vega, that most prolific of all dramatic authors, who "left no achievement unattempted," and died lamented by a hundred and fifty-three Spanish and fifty Italian authors, who sang his praises. Among other of the most distinguished writers of this and succeeding periods are Mariana, "the greatest of all Spanish historians"; Góngora, a famous poet in his day; Quevedo; Tirse de Molina, the creator of Don Juan; Calderon, second as a dramatist among Spaniards, if second, only to Lope de Vega, and Alarcón his compeer; and Velasquez, great in art and not small in letters. An interregnum came in during the reign of Carlos II, and French influence made itself felt. The age of the Bourbons produced among others the Benedictine Sarmiento, who as a botanist "won the admiration and friendship of Linné." The present century has been marked by the names of many authors of merit, novelists known to us in translations, by an active movement of historical composition developing brilliant monographs, and by a marked advance of scholarship and tolerance, led by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo; with a tendency to produce "a breed of writers of the German type." FOOTNOTE: [60] A History of Spanish Literature. By James Fitz Maurice-Kelly. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (Literature of the World Series. Edited by Edmund Gosse.) Pp. 433. Price, $1.50. GENERAL NOTICES. The great importance of the problems of forestry and all that pertains to them can not fail to be appreciated by any one who has seen the devastation wrought in many sections of this country by the "wood chopper." Forestry is one of the subjects where natural science can step in and guide the way to economic success, and where, in default of scientific methods, economically fatal results inevitably ensue. The preservation of forests has been an important problem in Europe for many years, but until quite recently it has received little attention in the United States. One of the pioneers in the field of forestry in this country was Franklin B. Hough, whose Elements of Forestry is still a used and useful manual. Among his many schemes for attracting attention and study to this important subject was one of making actual sections of the wood of American trees, and arranging them in a compact and attractive manner for general distribution. This idea he never carried out, and it has remained for his son, Mr. R. B. Hough, to finally carry out the scheme, by publishing a complete series of such sections, carefully prepared and compactly bound.[61] In Part I of the series there are cuttings representing twenty-five species of American trees. The sections are sufficiently thin to allow of their study by transmitted light. There are three cuttings from each species, transverse, radial, and tangential to the grain. An accompanying text gives a condensed description of each tree, including its physical properties, uses, and habitat. These descriptions are preceded by a useful introduction to the study of general botany, describing the methods of distinguishing and naming the various parts of plants and trees, and giving an account of their structure and methods of growth. The actual wood sections, quite apart from their scientific value, are worthy of attention because of their great beauty. They are substantially mounted on black cardboard, each card containing the three sections of a species, and its common name in English, French, German, and Spanish. The thinness of the cuttings makes it possible to use them as transparencies, thus bringing out the texture of the wood in a very effective way. Prof. _Charles Reid Barnes_ is impressed with the fact that while laboratory work has become nearly universal in botany, and laboratory manuals are numerous, there is still a lack of books giving an elementary account of the form and functions of plants of all groups. To supply this want he offers _Plant Life_[62] as an attempt to exhibit the variety and progressive complexity of the vegetative body; to discuss the more important functions; to explain the unity of plan in both the structure and action of the reproductive organs; and to give an outline of the more striking ways in which plants adapt themselves to the world about them. He has made the effort to treat these subjects so that, however much the student may still have to learn, he will have little to unlearn. The book is not intended to be memorized and recited, but to be intelligible to pupils from thirteen to eighteen years of age who are engaged in genuine laboratory study under the direction "of a live teacher who has studied far more botany than he is trying to teach." It is adapted to use supplementarily to any laboratory guide or to the directions prepared by the teacher. The directions are made fullest in relation to cryptogams and physiology, because these fields are at present most unfamiliar to teachers. Attaching great importance to _Electro-Dynamics_, which he thinks will in the near future assume the same relation to the electric motor that the science of thermo-dynamics already bears to the steam engine, Mr. _Charles Ashley Carus-Wilson_ aims in the book of that name[63] to apply the principles of that science to the direct-current motor. Writing for electrical engineers particularly, he takes for granted a certain acquaintance with the use and design of motors, but avoids unexplained technicalities as far as possible. He has not deemed it necessary to deal with self-induction, except in connection with the question of sparking. The numerical accuracy attempted has been limited to that attainable with an ordinary ten-inch slide rule, on which all the examples have been worked out. Importance is attached to the graphic method of solution. Of Dr. _Frank Overton's_ three books on _Applied Physiology_,[64] the first or primary grade follows a natural order of treatment, presenting in each subject elementary anatomical facts in a manner that impresses function rather than form, and from the form described derives the function. The facts and principles are then applied to everyday life. The intermediate grade, besides being an introduction to the study of anatomy and physiology, is intended to be a complete elementary book in itself, giving a clear picture of how each organ of the body performs its work. The advanced grade book was suggested by a series of popular lectures in which the author presented the essential principles of physiology about which a physician is consulted daily. His explanations of many common facts were novel to his auditors, and it was found that the school books were silent upon many of these points, especially with regard to the cells. Throughout the series the fact that the cells are the units in which life exists and acts is emphasized. The author has endeavored to include all the useful points of the older text-books, and to add such new matter as the recent progress of physiological and hygienic science demands. Avoiding technical terms, he has sought to express the truths in simple language, "such as he would use in instructing a mother as to the nature of the sickness of her child." The subjects of alcohol and other narcotics are made prominent in all the books, and are discussed fully in the third of the series. The relation of respiration and oxidation to the disappearance of food, to the production of waste matters, and to the development of heat and force, is dwelt upon. Simple and easy demonstrations, many of them new, are provided at the ends of chapters. A chapter on Repairs of Injuries, or the restoration of the natural functions, when impaired, by the body, is new in a school textbook. In _Yetta Ségal_,[65] a slender thread of a story is used by Mr. _Rollin_ as the vehicle for a theory of "type fusion" or convergence which he thinks has not received sufficient attention from social or scientific students. There are a pair of lovers, one of whom is discovered at a critical period in the courtship to have negro blood in his veins, and a philosopher who comes forward to satisfy the parties (who hardly need it) that this is no serious matter, but is all according to human evolution and the destiny of the race. "You must be impressed," he says, "by the fact that there are a great many people here and there, of mixed blood, and that the number is increasing; ... it is well that not a few are indeed truly admirable specimens of the human race. Such phenomena must be interpreted in a way consistent with man's nature: if he is developmental; if he shall attain a higher status through struggle, or through means that are seemingly, or for the time, degrading; if he is moving from the simple to the complex, as to organization; if universal movement tends to unific existence--then race interchange, with elimination of peculiar characteristics, has probably made its appearance as a phase of infinite order, and for the benefit of future man.... It is presumptuous for the wisest to assert that the man of lower type has no element of strength peculiar to his race which the most advanced does not need in his present organization. It may be needed either for present protection in the way of re-enforcement, or as an element of strength for further advancement." Mr. Rollin does not advocate type fusion or wish to accelerate the movement, but presents it as a fact and factor in human evolution deserving more extensive and thorough study than it has received. The increasing attention which of late years has been given to the study of comparative anatomy has finally resulted in what promises to be a complete and detailed account of the structure of a subhuman mammal.[66] The author, Dr. _Jayne_, believes that a course in mammalian anatomy offers a valuable preliminary to the study of medicine, and this is the purpose for which the book has been made. This is to a certain extent true, especially where, as in the case of the cat, there is so close a similarity to the structure of the human body. But the chief scientific interest and value of such a work must lie in its broader philosophic aspects; in the aid which it can not but give in clearing up some of the many mooted points of evolutional biology, and in the stimulus which it will impart to the study of relationships among the lower animals. The present volume, the first of the series, deals only with the skeleton of the cat, each bone being first studied individually, then in its relations to other bones and to the muscular system and the skeleton as a whole, and finally in comparison with the corresponding portion of the human skeleton. There are 611 extremely good illustrations, and the printing of the volume is unusually clean and attractive. Among the articles of special value in recent numbers of the (bimonthly) _Bulletin of the Department of Labor_, under the editorial control of Commissioner _Carroll D. Wright_ and Chief Clerk _O. D. Weaver_, are those on Boarding Houses and Clubs for Working Women, by Mary S. Ferguson, in the March number; The Alaskan Gold Fields and the Opportunities they afford for Capital and Labor, by S. C. Durham, in the May number; Economic Aspects of the Liquor Problem; Brotherhood Relief and Insurance of Railway Employees, by E. R. Johnson, Ph. D.; and The Nations of Antwerp, by J. H. Gore, Ph. D., in the July number. Summaries of reports of labor statistics, of legislation and decisions of courts affecting labor, and of recent Government contracts constitute regular departments of the bulletin. (Washington.) For delicate humor and refined art of expression few writers can excel Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, but the sources of his rich flow of humor are so deeply hidden and his expression is so very subtle that the generality of those who attempt to read his works fail to appreciate him or even to understand him, and give him up. The pleasure of appreciating him is, however, worth the pains of learning to do so. Those who are willing to undertake this, and who read German, may find help in the _Selections from the Works of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter_, prepared by _George Stuart Collins_, and published by the American Book Company. The book is intended for students of German who have attained a certain mastery of the language. Pains have been taken to avoid such passages as might from their mere difficulty discourage the reader, and to choose such as would be complete in themselves. The selections are made from the shorter writings of the author, and each is intended to be representative of some feature of his manifold genius and style. A notice of the _Stenotypy_, or system of shorthand for the typewriter, of _D. A. Quinn_, was published in the Popular Science Monthly in March, 1896. It is really a system of phonography to be used with the typewriter whenever it is practicable to employ that instrument. A second edition of Mr. Quinn's manual and exercises for the practice of the system is published by the American Book Exchange, Providence, R. I. A paper on _Polished-Stone Articles used by the New York Aborigines before and during European Occupation_, published as a Bulletin of the New York State Museum, is complementary to a previous bulletin on articles of chipped stone. Both papers are by the Rev. Dr. _W. M. Beauchamp_, and are illustrated by figures from his large collection of original drawings, made in nearly all parts of New York, but mostly from the central portion. While the chipped implements are more numerous and widespread than those treated of in the present bulletin, the latter show great patience and skill in their higher forms and taste in selecting materials, and they give hints of superstitions and ceremonies not yet thoroughly understood. _Henry Goldman_ has invented, in the arithmachine, what he claims is a rapid and reliable computing machine of small dimensions and large capacity, with other advantages. He now offers, as a companion to it, _The Arithmachinist_, a book intended to serve as a self-instructor in mechanical arithmetic. It gives historical and technical chapters on the calculating machines of the past, describes the principles controlling the construction and operations, and furnishes explanations concerning the author's own device. (Published by the Office Men's Record Company, Chicago, for one dollar.) The _Bulletin from the Laboratories of Natural History of the State University of Iowa_, Vol. IV, No. 3, contains two technical articles: On the Actinaria, collected by the Bahama Expedition of the University, in 1891, by J. P. McMurrich, and the Brachyura of the Biological Expedition to the Florida Keys and the Bahamas in 1893, by Mary J. Rathbun; and a list of the coleoptera of Southern Arizona, by H. F. Wickham. Mr. Wickham observes that the insects of northern Arizona are widely different from those of the southern part, a fact which he ascribes to difference of altitude, and, consequently, in vegetation. The Bulletin is sold for fifty cents a copy. Two books in English--_Elementary English_ and _Elements of Grammar and Composition_--prepared by _E. Oram Lyte_, and published by the American Book Company, are intended to include and cover a complete graded course in language lessons, grammar, and composition for study in the primary and grammar grades of schools. The endeavor has been made to present the subject in such a way that the pupil shall become interested in the study from the first. The first book, Elementary English, is designed to furnish material for primary language work, and to show how this material can be used to advantage, embodying and representing the natural methods of language teaching. The child is given something to do--easy and practical--at every point, and is not troubled by formal definitions and rules to be committed to memory. The second book is also based on the principle that the best way to gain a working knowledge of the English language is by the working or laboratory method. It is therefore largely made up of exercises, and aims to teach through practice. The subject is unfolded from a psychological rather than a logical point of view. What is to be memorized is reduced to a minimum, and not presented till the pupil is ready for it. The lessons in literature and composition are designed to help the pupil to appreciate worth and beauty of literature, and lead him to fluent and accurate expression. _The Bulletin of the Geological Institution of the University of Upsala_ presents a series of special papers of much interest to students of that science, on studies in geology, largely of Scandinavia, but of other countries as well. Part 2 of Vol. III, now before us, has such papers on Silurian Coral Reefs in Gothland, by Carl Wiman; the Quaternary Mammalia of Sweden, by Rutger Sernander; Some Ore Deposits of the Atacama Desert, by Otto Nordenskiold; the Structure of some Gothlandish Graphites, by Carl Wiman; the Interglacial Submergence of Great Britain, by H. Munthe; Mechanical Disturbances and Chemical Changes in the Ribbon Clays of Sweden, by P. J. Holmquist; Some Mineral Changes, by A. G. Högborn; and the Proceedings of the Geological Section of the Students' Association of Natural Science, Upsala. The articles are in German, English, and (in previous numbers) French. Two Spanish-American works of very different character have come to us from Valparaiso, Chili. One is entitled _Literatura Arcaica--Estudios Criticos_, or critical studies of old Spanish literature, by _Eduardo de la Barra_, of the Royal Spanish Academy, which were communicated to the Latin-American Scientific Congress at Buenos Ayres. The author was invited to present to the congress the fruits of his extensive studies on the Poem of the Cid, but afterward modified his plan and gave these, the results of his more general investigations of the romances of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which Spanish critics regard as the most ancient they have, and other romances attributed to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with an article on the Cid. This work is published by K. Newman, Valparaiso. The other book is a volume of _Rrimas_, or rhymes, by _Gustabo Adolfo Béker_, published by Carlos Cabezon, at Valparaiso. The ordinary student might think that the Spanish language is one of those least in need of spelling reform, but not so the author and publisher of these poems, which are presented in the most radically "reformed" spelling, and with them comes a pamphlet setting forth the character and principles of "Ortografia Rrazional." The report of a study of seventy-three Irish and Irish-American criminals made at the Kings County Penitentiary, Brooklyn, N. Y., by Dr. _H. L. Winter_, and published as _Notes on Criminal Anthropology and Bio-Sociology_, contains numerous observations bearing upon the effect of hereditary influences in criminality, but hardly sufficient to justify the drawing of any general conclusions. The late Mr. Lewis M. Rutherfurd, in developing the art of astronomical photography, naturally gave much attention to the star 61 Cygni--which was the first to yield its parallax, and through which the possibility of measuring stellar distances was shown--and its neighbors. A number of the plates of this series were partially studied by Miss Ida C. Martin more than twenty years ago, and the study has now been carried out by _Herman S. Davis_, as part of the work of Columbia University Observatory. The results of Mr. Davis's labors are published by the observatory in three papers: _Catalogue of Sixty-five Stars near 61 Cygni_; _The Parallaxes of 61^1 and 61^2 Cygni_; and _Catalogue of Thirty-four Stars near "Bradley 3077"_; under a single cover. In a small work entitled _A Theory of Life deduced from the Evolution Philosophy_ a few thoughts are recorded by _Sylvan Drey_ relative to the manner in which, from central doctrines identical with the teachings of Herbert Spencer, a system of religion, an ideal society, a theory of ethics, and a political creed--the doctrine of social individualism--may be built up. The religion is to recognize an inexplicable and inconceivable energy revealing itself in the universe, of which the highest theistic conception possible to human beings, free from the supposition that it represents a likeness, is the only one that can be accepted. "Absolute truth is beyond the grasp of human beings; but for all practical purposes the teachings of the evolution philosophy, relative truths though they may be, may be regarded as final and conclusive." Mr. Drey's paper of thirty-four pages is published by Williams & Norgate, London. FOOTNOTES: [61] The American Woods. Exhibited by Actual Specimens. Part I, representing Twenty-five Species. By Romeyn B. Hough: Lowville, N. Y. The Author. [62] Plant Life considered with Special Reference to Form and Function. By Charles Reid Barnes. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 428. Price, $1.12. [63] Electro-Dynamics. The Direct-Current Motor. By Charles Ashley Carus-Wilson. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 298. [64] Applied Physiology. Including the Effects of Alcohol and Narcotics. By Frank Overton, M. D. Primary Grade. Pp. 128. Intermediate Grade. Pp. 188. Advanced Grade. Pp. 432. American Book Company. [65] Yetta Ségal. By Horace J. Rollin. New York: G. W. Dillingham & Co. Pp. 174. [66] The Mammalian Anatomy of the Cat. By Horace Jayne, M. D. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company. Illustrated. Pp. 816. Price, $5.00. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Adams, Alexander. Mechanical Flight on Beating Wings. The Solution of the Problem. Pp. 5. Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. New York: No. 143. A Destructive Beetle and a Remedy. By P. H. Hall and V. H. Lowe; No. 144. Combating Cabbage Pests. By F. H. Hall and F. A. Sirrine. Pp. 8.--Ohio: Newspaper, No. 186. Peach Yellows and Prevention of Smut in Wheat. Pp. 2; No. 24. The Maintenance of Fertility. Pp. 42.--United States Department of Agriculture: No. 9. Cuckoos and Shrikes in their Relation to Agriculture. By F. E. L. Beal and Sylvester D. Judd. Pp. 25; No. 10. Life Zones and Crop Zones of the United States. By C. Hart Merriam. Pp. 79; No. 11. The Geographic Distribution of Cereals in North America. By C. S. Plumb. Pp. 24; Division of Statistics: Crop Circular for October, 1898.--University of Illinois: No. 51. Variations in Milk and Milk Production. Summary. Pp. 40; No. 52. Orchard Cultivation. Pp. 24; No. 53. Abstract. The Chemistry of the Corn Kernel. Pp. 4. Allen, Alfred H. Commercial Organic Analysis. Second edition, revised and enlarged. Proteids and Albuminous Principles. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston's Son & Co. Pp. 584. $4.50. Atkinson, George Francis. Elementary Botany. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 444. $1.25. Bulletins, Proceedings, and Reports. American Chemical Society: Directory. Pp. 551.--Field Columbian Museum, Chicago. Publication 28: Ruins of X Kichmook, Yucatan. By Edward H. Thompson. Pp. 16, with 18 plates.--Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration: Report of the Fourth Annual Meeting, 1898. Pp. 116.--Maryland Geological Survey: Report on the Survey of the Boundary Line between Alleghany and Garrett Counties. By L. A. Bauer. Pp. 48, with 6 plates.--New York Academy of Sciences: Annals. Vol. X. Pp. 292, with 5 plates; Vol. XI, Part II. Pp. 168, with 20 plates.--Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis: Report for the Year ending April 13, 1898. Pp. 16.--The Philadelphia Museums: The Philadelphia Commercial Museum. Pp. 16.--United States Commissioner of Labor: Twelfth Annual Report, 1897. Economical Aspects of the Liquor Problem. Pp. 275.--University of Wisconsin: Bulletin No. 25. The Action of Solutions on the Sense of Taste. By Louis Kahlenberg. Pp. 82.--University of Chicago: Anthropology. III. The Mapa de Cuauhtlantzinco or Codice Campos. By Frederick Starr. Pp. 38, with plates.--University of Illinois: The New Requirements for Admission. By Stephen A. Forbes. Pp. 22. Bailey, L. H. Sketch of the Evolution of our Native Fruits. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 472. $2. Beddard, Frank E. Elementary Zoölogy. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 208. Brush, George J., and Penfield, Samuel L. Manual of Determinative Mineralogy, with an Introduction on Blowpipe Analysis. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Fifteenth edition. Pp. 312. Bryant, William M. Life, Death, and Immortality, with Kindred Essays. New York: The Baker & Taylor Company. Pp. 450. $1.75. Carborundum manufactured under the Acheson Patents. Illustrated Catalogue. Niagara Falls, N. Y.: The Carborundum Company. Pp. 61. Carnegie, The, Steel Company, Limited, Pittsburg. Ballistic Tests of Armor Plate. By W. R. Balsinger. Plates and letterpress descriptions. Dana, Edward Salisbury. A Text-Book of Mineralogy, with an Extended Treatise on Crystallography and Physical Mineralogy. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 593. $4. Darwin, George Howard. The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 378. $2. Giddings, Franklin Henry. The Elements of Sociology. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 353. $1.10. Guerber. H. A. The Story of the English. American Book Company. Pp. 356. Hough, Romeyn B. The American Woods. Exhibited by Actual Specimens and with Copious Explanatory Text. Part I. Representing twenty-five species. Second edition. Lowville, N. Y.: The author. Pp. 78, text. James, William. Human Immortality. Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 70. $1. Kunz, George F. The Fresh-Water Pearls and Pearl fisheries of the United States. United States Fish Commission. Pp. 52, with 22 plates. Le Bon, Gustave. The Psychology of Peoples. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 236. $1.50. Miller, Adam. The Sun an Electric Light, Chicago. Pp. 32. Needham, James G. Outdoor Studies. A Reading Book of Nature Study. American Book Company. Pp. 90. Newth, G. S. A Manual of Chemical Analysis, Qualitative and Quantitative. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 462. $1.75. Nipher, Francis E. An Introduction to Graphical Algebra. New York: H. Holt & Co. Pp. 61. 60 cents. Reprints. Gifford, John. Forestry on the Peninsula of Eastern Virginia. Pp. 3; Forestry in Relation to Physical Geography and Engineering. Pp. 19.--Hester, C. A. An Experimental Study of the Toxic Properties of Indol. Pp. 26, with tables.--Hoffmann, Fred. Fragmentary Notes from the Reports of Two Early Naturalists on North America. Pp. 18.--Johnson, J. B. A Higher Industrial and Commercial Education as an Essential Condition of our Future Material Prosperity. (An address.) Pp. 33.--Kain, Samuel W., and Others. Seismic and Oceanic Noises. Pp. 6.--Mayer, Hermann. Bows and Arrows in Central Brazil. Pp. 36, with plates.--Packard, Alpheus S. A Half Century of Evolution, with Special Reference to the Effect of Geological Changes on Animal Life. (Presidential address to American Association.) Pp. 48.--Rhees, William J. William Bower Taylor. Pp. 12.--Searcy, J. T., M. D. How Education fails. Pp. 81.--Shufeldt, R. W., M. D. On the Alternation of Sex in a Brood of Young Sparrow Hawks. Pp. 4.--Starr, Frederick. Notched Bones from Mexico. A Shell Inscription from Tula, Mexico. Pp. 10.--Woolman, Lewis. Report on Artesian Wells in New Jersey, etc. Pp. 84. Smithsonian Institution. United States National Museum. The Fishes of North and Middle America. By D. S. Jordan and B. W. Evermann. Part II. Pp. 942.--The Birds of the Kurile Islands. By Leonhard Stejneger. Pp. 28.--On the Coleopterous Insects of the Galapagos Islands. By Martin L. Linell. Pp. 20.--On Some New Parasitic Insects of the Subfamily Encystinæ. By L. O. Howard. Pp. 18.--Descriptions of the Species of Cycadeoidea, or Fossil Cycadean Trunks, thus far determined from the Lower Cretaceous Rim of the Black Hills. By Lester F. Ward. Pp. 36. Socialist, The, Almanac and Treasury of Facts. New York: Socialistic Co-operative Publishing Association. Prepared by Lucien Sanal. Pp. 232. (The People's Library. Quarterly. 60 cents a year.) Thompson, Ernest Seton. Wild Animals I have known, and Two Hundred Drawings. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 359. $2. Todd, Mabel Loomis. Corona and Coronet. Being a Narrative of the Amherst Eclipse Expedition to Japan, 1896, etc. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp 383. $2.50. Trowbridge, John. Philip's Experiments, or Physical Science at Home. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 228. $1. United States Geological Survey. Bulletin No. 88. The Cretaceous Foraminifera of New Jersey. By R. M. Bagg, Jr. Pp. 89, with 6 plates.--No. 89. Some Lava Flows from the Western Slope of the Sierra Nevada, California. Pp. 74.--No. 149. Bibliography and Index of North American Geology, Palæontology, Petrology, and Mineralogy for 1898. By F. B. Weeks. Pp. 152.--Monograph. Vol. XXX. Fossil Medusæ. By Charles Doolittle Walcott. Pp. 201, with 47 plates. Universalist Register, The, for 1898. Edited by Richard Eddy, D. D. Boston: Universalist Publishing House. Pp. 120. 20 cents. Warman, Cy. The Story of the Railroad. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (Story of the West Series.) Pp. 280. Waterloo, Stanley. Armageddon. A Tale of Love, War, and Invention. Pp. 259. Whiting Paper Company, Holyoke, Mass. The Evolution of Paper. Pp. 20. Chicago and New York: Rand, McNally & Co. Wilson, J. Self-Control, or Life without a Master. New York: Lemcke & Büchner. Worcester, Dean C. The Philippine Islands and their People. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 529. $4. Wyckoff, Walter A. The Workers. An Experiment in Reality. The West. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 378. $1.50. Fragments of Science. =Tree Planting in the Arid Regions.=--In planting the arid and subarid regions of the country, where no trees are growing naturally, Mr. B. E. Fernow says, in a review of the work of the Department of Forestry, different methods of cultivation from those given in the humid parts are necessary, and the plant material has to be selected with a view to a rigorous climate characterized by extreme ranges of temperature varying from -40° to +120° F. The requirements of the plants for moisture must be of the slightest, and they must be capable of responding to the demands of evaporation. At first, whatever trees will grow successfully from the start under such untoward conditions would have to be chosen, no matter what their qualities otherwise might be. The first settlers have ascertained by trials some of the species that will succeed under such conditions, but unfortunately most of them are of but small economic value, and some of them are only short-lived under the conditions in which they have to grow. A few years ago Mr. Fernow came to the conclusion that the conifers, especially the pines, would furnish more useful and otherwise serviceable material for the arid regions. Besides their superior economical value, they require less moisture than most of the deciduous trees that have been planted, and they would, if once established, persist more readily through seasons of drought and be longer lived. A small trial plantation on the sand hills of Nebraska lent countenance to this theory. It being vastly more difficult to establish the young plants in the first place than in the case of deciduous trees, much attention was given to the provision for protection of the seedlings from sun and winds; and they were planted in mixture with "nurse trees" that would furnish not too much and yet enough shade. "It can not be said that the success in using these species has so far been very encouraging; nevertheless, the failure may be charged rather to our lack of knowledge and to causes that can be overcome than to any inherent incapacity in the species." The experiments should therefore be continued. ="The Venerable Bede's" Chair.=--In an article in a recent issue of Architecture and Building, on Ancient and Modern Furniture, by F. T. Hodgson, the following interesting account of the chair of "the Venerable Bede" occurs: "Perhaps the best-known relic, so far as furniture is concerned of this early period, is the chair of 'the Venerable Bede,' which is still preserved in the vestry of Jassova Church, Northumberland, England. This chair is distinctively an ecclesiastical one--a throne, in fact, of some dignity. It is made of oak and is four feet ten inches high. There are many engravings of it, but I reproduce from one of the best. The chair is now well on to twelve hundred years old, and if cared for as it ought to be is good for several hundred years more. There is a popular tradition concerning this chair that is worthy of notice. It is said that to this ancient relic all the brides repair as soon as the marriage service is over, in order that they may seat themselves in it. This, according to the popular belief, will make them joyful mothers of children; and to omit this custom the expectant mothers would not consider the marriage ceremony complete, and in default thereof of being enthroned in 'the Venerable Bede's chair' barrenness and misery would surely follow. Like all other relics of the sort, it is subject to attacks of the sacrilegious penknives, together with the wanton depredations of relic hunters, and has been so shorn of its fair proportions that very soon there will be little of it left but its attenuated form if stricter watch is not kept over it." =The Physics of Smell.=--The principal subject of Prof. W. E. Ayrton's vice-presidential address on physics at the British Association was the physics of smell, which was presented as a subject that had been but little studied. In testing the generally accepted idea that metals have smell, based on the fact that a smell is perceived with most of the commercial metals when handled, the author had observed that when these metals were cleaned or made outwardly pure the smell disappeared. Yet it is shown that these metals acquire smells when they are handled or abraded by friction, which are characteristic and serve to distinguish them. This may be ascribed to chemical action, but not all chemical action in which metals may take part produces smell; for when they are rubbed with soda or with sugar no smell but that of soda or of sugar is perceived; nor is the metallic smell observed when dilute nitric acid is rubbed on certain metals, though the chemical action is very marked with some. But mere breathing on certain metals, even when they have been rendered practically odorless by cleaning, produces a very distinct smell, as also does touching them with the tongue. These smells have hitherto been attributed to the metals themselves, but Professor Ayrton looks for their source in the evolution of hydrogen, which carries with it impurities, hydrocarbons, especially paraffin, and "it is probable that no metallic particles, even in the form of vapor, reach the nose or even leave the metal. While smells usually appear to be diffused with great velocity, experiments prove that when the space through which they have to pass is free from draughts their progress is very slow, and it would therefore appear that the passage of a smell is far more due to the actual motion of the air containing it than to the diffusion of the odoriferous substance through the air." The power of a smell to cling to a substance does not appear to depend on its intensity or on the ease with which it travels through a closed space. Experiments to determine whether smells could pass through glass by transpiration either revealed flaws in the glass or ended in the breaking of the very thin bulbs and gave no answer. =The Cordillera Region of Canada.=--A length of nearly thirteen hundred miles of the great mountainous or Cordillera region of the Pacific coast is included in the western part of Canada. Most of this, Mr. George M. Dawson says, in a paper on the Physical Geography and Geology of Canada, is embraced in the province of British Columbia, where it is about four hundred miles wide between the Great Plains and the Pacific Ocean. To the north it is included in the Yukon district of the Northwest Territory till it reaches, in a less elevated and more widely spread form, the shores of the Arctic Ocean on one side and on the other passes across the one hundred and forty-first meridian of west longitude into Alaska. The orographic features of this region are very complicated in detail. No existing map yet properly represents even the principal physical outlines, and the impression gained by the traveler or explorer may well be one of confusion. There are, however, the two dominant mountain systems of the Rocky Mountains and the Coast Range. As a whole, the area of the Cordillera in Canada may be described as forest-clad, but the growth of trees is more luxuriant on the western slopes of each of the dominant mountain ranges, in correspondence with the greater precipitation occurring on these slopes. This is particularly the case in the coast region and on the seaward side of the Coast Range, where magnificent and dense forests of coniferous trees occupy almost the whole available surface. The interior plateau, however, constitutes the southern part of a notably dry belt, and includes wide stretches of open grass-covered hills and valleys, forming excellent cattle ranges. Farther north, along the same belt, similar open country appears intermittently, but the forest invades the greater part of the region. It is only toward the arctic coast, in relatively very high latitude, that the barren arctic tundra country begins, which, sweeping in wider development to the westward, occupies most of the interior of Alaska. With certain exceptions the farming land of British Columbia is confined to the valleys and tracts below three thousand feet, by reason of the summer frosts occurring at greater heights. There is, however, a considerable area of such land in the aggregate, with a soil generally of great fertility. In the southern valleys of the interior irrigation is necessary for the growth of crops. =The "Rabies" Bacillus.=--Ever since the discovery of Pasteur that an attenuated virus made from the medulla or spinal cord of a dog affected by rabies was, when administered in graduated doses, a specific against the disease, bacteriologists have been eagerly seeking to isolate the rabies bacillus. A number of observers, among them Toll, Rivolta, and San Felice, have succeeded in staining a bacillus which they claimed to be that of rabies. Memno, of Rome, confirmed the observations of the preceding, and proved the virulent character of the micro-organism, which he described as a blastomycete. He has quite recently succeeded in cultivating the bacillus in artificial media and producing typical rabies in dogs, rodents, and birds by inoculations. He found that the bacillus grew better in fluid than in solid media, the best being bouillon with glucose slightly acidulated with tartaric acid. The growth did not become manifest under a week, and was easily arrested by "air infection." It would thus seem that we have at last certainly established the bacterial origin of rabies. =The St. Kildans.=--St. Kilda, the farthest out to sea of all the British Isles, is a rounded mountain with "stack rocks" and islets round it, rises twelve hundred and twenty feet in height, and contains a settlement of about seventy-five men, women, and children--almost the only representatives left on the British Islands of man in the hunting age. On one of the subsidiary islands, Boreray, is gathered the main body of the sea birds for which the island is famous; and on a third, Soa, are the diminutive descendants of Viking sheep, left by old sea rovers. Mr. R. Kearton, who has recently visited the islands for recreation among the sea birds, represents that in the little community of its people the ordinary and extraordinary operations of life seem inverted. Sport is a serious work; sheep herding and shearing are an exciting sport. A St. Kildan qualifies for marriage by proving his courage and skill as a fowler, by standing on a dizzy precipice called Lover's Stone, and goes out bird snaring with a serious face. When he wants a sheep for the butcher, he asks his friends to a sheep hunt in the island of Soa, in which dogs and men pursue the animals from rock to rock. An offer made by a factor to supply the people with nets, so that they might catch the sheep with more humanity and less waste of life, was rejected by them. They preferred the old methods, which supplied plenty of danger and excitement. While the sheep are hunted, the cows are thoroughly spoiled. Every day the women are seen hard at work picking dock leaves and storing them in baskets for the cows at milking time, for they will not be milked unless they are fed. The sheep on Soa Island are plucked instead of being sheared, at the time when the wool would naturally be shed, and what wool will not come off in this way is cut off with a pocket knife. When the steamer with Mr. Kearton reached the island, no one came down to meet it till the whistle had been blown two or three times. "It was not etiquette to rush down like a parcel of savages," but the people "retire to tidy themselves, and then row out and call in proper form." =The Island of Sakhalin.=--Mr. Benjamin Howard, an English visitor at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, presented before Section E of that body an interesting account of the great but little-known island of Sakhalin, more generally spelled Saghalien in our geographies. Mr. Howard, however, strongly urged the former spelling, as most correctly representing the name, which is always pronounced by the Russians in three syllables, with the accent on the first. It is now used as a penal colony by the Russian Government, and a more hopelessly remote and inaccessible spot for such a purpose can hardly be found. To it are sent the hardest cases among the Siberian prisoners; and Mr. Howard spoke of becoming accustomed, during his stay there, to meeting scarcely any human beings but murderers, except, of course, the guards and officials. The island is extremely inaccessible; there is no commerce, and neither inducement nor opportunity for vessels to touch there, while much of the coast is ice-bound for a large part of the year. Mr. Howard, who was engaged in some scientific work on the island in the service of the Government, is one of the very few foreigners who have traveled or resided there at all. He predicts for Sakhalin, however, a future of considerable importance ultimately, though only after a long period of preliminary development and exploitation as a penal colony, which stage has but lately been begun. It has forest and mining resources--among the latter, coal; the deposits are near the surface, but thus far have been very little examined. He was unable to give any data as to their geological age or actual extent; but the Government will no doubt soon make investigations. The most remarkable possibilities, however, are in the line of fisheries, the coasts swarming with fish to an extent that is scarcely credible by one who has not seen them. Mr. Howard said jocosely that he would hardly dare to relate what he had personally witnessed, in view of the usual reputation of "fish stories." The climate is of course rigorous, under the influence of cold northern currents, and markedly in contrast with that of the same latitude on the American side of the Pacific, where the Japan current carries its modifying influence as the Gulf Stream does to northern Europe. Some agriculture, however, is possible during the short summer, and the penal colonists have made fair beginnings of self-support. He referred further to a remnant of native Aino population as very interesting from the fact that they have preserved their peculiarities of life and manners, and their purity of stock, much more completely through their isolation than the Ainos of the Japanese Islands, who have been modified more or less by association with the latter people. =Technical and Popular Names.=--In a paper criticising the multiplication of local names in geology, Prof. C. E. Keyes distinguishes between names devised with a conscientious desire to better the condition of a science by clothing the new ideas with simple words and those which are the product of a name-making mania. "The first can not be too highly commended, nor the second too deeply deplored." Every progressive science must discard the names that have served their purpose, and must be prepared to receive all of the new ones demanded. The sciences have each two phases, for each of which a terminology is demanded, in one of which the names must be technical and special, established primarily for the investigator, and in the other general, popular, simple, and free from technical appearance; but the distinction is rarely made. Those who object to the prevalence of technical names in other sciences seldom reflect that they have them in their own art. Yet if a man of science should desire to familiarize himself with the artisan's work, "he would be, after five minutes' talk with a machinist or electrician, confronted by so many unfamiliar terms--technical terms of everyday use--that he would at once cry out for greater simplicity of language." In the geological sciences the technicalities play the same part they do in the arts and in business. Every new name in geology, however, must be properly defined before it can be noticed, and its subsequent career will depend on its utility. It may be said that no greater boon to the working geologist has been devised than the plan of designating geographically geological units irrespective of exact position or age. Since its adoption a vast mass of valuable information has been obtained that was previously unthought of, and is in a shape to be always used; the other departments of geology have been much aided, and stratigraphical geology has been greatly helped. =The Origin of a Curious Habit.=--The following paragraphs are taken from a recent Nature. It is well known that the kea, or mountain parrot of New Zealand, has acquired the habit of attacking sheep, and making holes by means of its sharp and powerful beak in the backs of these animals for the purpose of abstracting the kidney fat, which appears to be esteemed as a luxurious diet. It is supposed that this peculiar habit or instinct was developed by the bird getting the fat from the skins of sheep that had been slaughtered, but this solution is not very satisfactory, as there appears nothing to connect the fat on the skins of sheep with the live animals. In a note published in the Zoölogist (May 16th), Mr. F. R. Godfrey, writing from Melbourne, offers the following solution of the mystery, which seemed to him to be simple and satisfactory, and more rational than the sheepskin theory: In the hilly districts of the middle island of New Zealand there is a great abundance of a white moss, or lichen, which exactly resembles a lump of white wool, at the roots of which are found small white fatty substances, supposed by some to be the seeds of the plant, and by others to be a grub or maggot which infests it, which is the favorite food of the kea. Probably the bird, misled by this resemblance, commenced an exploration in sheep, and this proving satisfactory, originated the new habit. In a note to this suggestion the editor points out that Mr. Godfrey is in agreement with another observer--Mr. F. R. Chapman--who in describing the hills of this island says: "A very interesting _raoulia_, or vegetable sheep, was very plentiful on steep, rocky places.... It is said that the keas tear them up with their powerful beaks, and that these birds learned to eat mutton through mistaking dead sheep for masses of _raoulia_." =Changes in Plant Characters.=--From experiments upon the cultural evolution of _Cyclamen latifolium_, W. T. Thiselton Dyer finds that, when once specific stability has been broken down in a plant, morphological changes of great variety and magnitude can be brought about in a comparatively short space of time. It appears that though sudden variations do occur, they are, as far as we know, slight as long as self-fertilization is adhered to. The striking results obtained by cultivators have been due to the patient accumulation by selection of gradual but continuous variation in any desired direction. The size which any variable organ can reach does not appear to be governed by any principle of correlation. Large flowers are not necessarily accompanied by large leaves. The general tendency of a plant varying freely under artificial conditions seems to be atavistic--or to shed adaptive modifications which have ceased to be useful, and to revert to a more generalized type, or to reproduce characters which are already present in other members of the same group. But this statement must be accepted with caution. The most remarkable phenomenon in the cultivation of the _Cyclamen_ is the development of a plume or crest on the inner surface of each corolla segment. This shows that the plant still possesses the power to strike out a new line and to develop characters which would even be regarded as having specific value. =Hanging an Elephant.=--One of the elephants in Barnum and Bailey's show, having repeatedly shown signs of insubordination and bad temper, it was finally decided to kill him. From a note in Nature we get the following account of his execution: After considerable discussion it was decided to strangle him. A new Manila rope was loosely wound three times around his neck, and his legs, fully stridden, were securely chained each to a post firmly driven into the ground alongside each limb. The animal was intentionally not isolated from his fellows, as it was feared that if placed by itself it would become restive and ill-tempered. The rope surrounding the beast's neck had one end secured to three strong pillars in the ground, some distance away and slightly in advance of the fore feet; and the other, which terminated in a loop, was hooked to a double series of pulleys, to the tackle of which ninety men were attached. When all was ready, the slack was gently, quietly, and without any apparent annoyance to the elephant--which kept on eating hay--taken in till the coils round its neck were just taut. The word was then given, "Walk away with the rope." Amid perfect silence the ninety men walked away, without apparently any effort. So noiselessly and easily did everything work that, unless with foreknowledge of what was going to take place, one might have been present without realizing what the march of these men meant. The elephant gave no sign of discomfort either by trunk or tail. Its fellows standing close by looked on in pachydermatous unconcern, and at the end of exactly thirty seconds it slowly collapsed and lay down as if of its own accord. There was absolutely no struggle and no motion, violent or otherwise, in any part of the body, nor the slightest indication of pain. In a few seconds more there was no response obtained by touching the eyeball. At the end of thirteen minutes after the order to "walk away" the eye had become rigid and dim. That no more humane, painless, and rapid method of taking the life of a large animal could be devised was the opinion of all the experts who witnessed the execution. MINOR PARAGRAPHS. Count Gleichen relates, in his story of the mission to Menelek, that besides the Maria Theresa 1780 dollars, the people of Abyssinia, for small change, use a bar of hard crystallized salt, about ten inches long and two inches and a half broad and thick, slightly tapered toward the end, five of which go to the dollar at the capital. People are very particular about the standard of fineness of the currency. "If it does not ring like metal when flicked with the finger nail, or if it is cracked or chipped, they won't take it. It is a token of affection also, when friends meet, to give each other a lick of their respective _amolis_, and in this way the material value of the bar is also decreased. For still smaller change cartridges are used, of which three go to one salt. It does not matter what sort they are. Some sharpers use their cartridges in the ordinary way, and then put in some dust and a dummy bullet to make up the difference, or else they take out the powder and put the bullet in again, so that possibly in the next action the unhappy seller will find that he has only miss-fires in his belt; but this is such a common fraud that no one takes any notice of it, and a bad cartridge seems to serve as readily as a good one." A study of problems in the Psychology of Reading, by J. O. Quantz, bore upon the questions of the factors which make a rapid reader, the relations of rapidity to mental capacity and alertness, quickness of visual perception, and amount of practice; and whether those who gain their knowledge principally through the eye or through the ear obtain and retain most from reading. The author finds that colors are more easily perceived than geometrical forms, isolated words than colors, and words in construction than disconnected words; that persons of visual type are slightly more rapid readers than those of the auditory type; that rapid readers, besides doing their work in less time, do superior work, retaining more of the substance of what is read and heard than do slow readers. Lip movement is a serious hindrance to speed, and consequently to intelligence, of reading. The disadvantage extends to reading aloud. Apart from external conditions, such as time of day, physical fatigue, etc., some of the influences contributing to rapidity of reading are largely physiological, as visual perception; others are of mental endowment, as alertness of mind; still others are matters of intellectual equipment rather than intellectual ability, as extent of reading and scholarly attainment. Mr. Merton L. Miller, of the University of Chicago, says, in his preliminary study of the Pueblo of Taos, New Mexico, that he was hampered in his researches there by a circumstance that illustrates very well certain characteristics of the Indian. About fifteen years ago representatives of the Government were at Sia making investigations, and had to ask many questions. Some time after they went away there was much sickness in the pueblo, and many people died. It occurred to the Sia people that the presence of those white men, asking so many questions, was the cause of all their trouble; so they sent men to the other pueblos to warn them against white men who came to find out about their customs and beliefs. These messengers also came to Taos, and the people remembered their warning well. If a Taos Indian is caught now teaching the language or telling any of the traditions to a white man, he is liable to a whipping and a fine. This, Mr. Miller believes, accounts for the fact that he could rarely learn anything from his friend when they were at the pueblo, although when away in the mountains he became much more open and communicative. NOTES. The cigarette has found friends. The Truth about Cigarettes embodies the substance of papers read and discussed at the Medico-legal Society of New York. The gist of the papers is to the effect that the stories of harm done by cigarettes are fictions or gross exaggerations; that they contain no opium, arsenic, or other poisons, but are the best pure tobacco (1.0926 grammes each) wrapped in pure paper (0.038 gramme); that they never caused a case of insanity; and that they are simply injurious in the same way and to a corresponding extent as other forms of tobacco. These statements are supported by certificates of physicians and by reviews of special cases of insanity charged to cigarettes, showing that the insanity had matured independently of them. The average annual temperature at Manila is given by Mr. W. F. R. Phillips, in a paper on the subject, as 80° F. April, May, and June are the hottest months, May being the hottest of the three, and December and January are the coolest. The highest thermometer reading recorded is 100° F. in May, and the lowest 74° in January. The average annual rainfall is 75.43 inches, more than 80 per cent of which descends in the months from June to October, inclusive. Departures from the average rainfall are sometimes excessive. For example, as much as 120.98 inches have fallen in one year, and as little as 35.65 inches in another. Still more remarkable were the fall of 61.43 inches in one September, and that of only two inches in another September. At the observatory of Yale University, as we learn from the annual report, a planned series of twelve measures each has been completed for eighty-four stars of large, proper motion, with a view to determinations of parallax, and it is expected shortly to bring the number up to one hundred. A series of measures on highly colored red stars has been begun, and is in progress for the purpose of testing the possibility of a systematic error due to the lesser refrangibility of their light. The photographic instrument has been put into use at every suitable period of meteorological displays of consequence. Preparations are already making for a more complete observation of the Leonid meteoric shower expected in 1899. The New York State College of Forestry, in connection with Cornell University, was presented by Professor Fernow, at the Boston meeting of the American Association, as a logical sequence to the policy to which the State of New York was committed in 1885 by the purchase of more than a million acres of forest land in the Adirondack Mountains, to be gradually increased to three million acres. A demonstration area of thirty thousand acres in the Adirondacks has since been provided for it. The courses leading to the degree of Bachelor in Forestry occupy four years, of which the first two are devoted to the studies in which mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, botany, entomology, political economy, etc., figure as fundamental and supplementary sciences, in addition to the professional courses; besides which two courses of a more or less popular character are contemplated. The discovery is announced in a preliminary communication by Dr. Issutschenko, of Russia, of a microbe pathogenic to rats. An epidemic having broken out among the rats kept for experimental purposes in the Government Agricultural Laboratory, a bacillus was isolated from the liver and spleen of affected animals that proved excessively fatal to rats and mice. Experiments in making the organism useful as a living rat poison have not yet, however, had an encouraging success. New Zealand has just definitely adopted a scheme of old-age pensions. In future the New Zealand workingman of sixty-five years of age, who has lived a life of honest toil, will be assured an income of one pound a week. The Wilde prize of the French Academy of Sciences has been awarded by that body to Charles A. Schott, chief of the Computation Division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, for his work on Terrestrial Magnetism. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious typographical errors were repaired. Archaic spellings retained. Illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text. Latin-1 file: P.211, "Marianne Chernyak"; original placed a macron over the "a" in Chernyak. Latin-1 file: Under General Notices, "The Parallaxes of 61^1 and 61^2 Cygni"; "^" indicates a superscript of the number following. 
40276	----	STORIES OF INVENTION _TOLD BY INVENTORS AND THEIR FRIENDS._ BY EDWARD E. HALE. [Illustration] BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1889. _Copyright, 1885_, BY ROBERTS BROTHERS. University Press: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. PREFACE. This little book closes a series of five volumes which I undertook some years since, in the wish to teach boys and girls how to use for themselves the treasures which they have close at hand in the Public Libraries now so generally opened in the Northern States of America. The librarians of these institutions are, without an exception, so far as I know, eager to introduce to the young the books at their command. From these gentlemen and ladies I have received many suggestions as the series went forward, and I could name many of them who could have edited or prepared such a series far more completely than I have done. But it is not fair to expect them, in the rush of daily duty, to stop and tell boys or girls what will be "nice books" for them to read. If they issue frequent bulletins of information in this direction, as is done so admirably by the librarians at Providence and at Hartford, they do more than any one has a right to ask them for. Such bulletins must be confined principally to helping young people read about the current events of the day. In that case it will only be indirectly that they send the young readers back into older literature, and make them acquainted with the best work of earlier times. I remember well a legend of the old Public Library at Dorchester, which describes the messages sent to the hard-pressed librarian from the outlying parts of the town on the afternoon of Saturday, which was the only time when the Library was open. "Mother wants a sermon book and another book." This was the call almost regularly made by the messengers. I think that many of the most accomplished librarians of to-day have demands not very dissimilar, and that they will be glad of any assistance that will give to either mother or messenger any hint as to what this "other book" shall be. It is indeed, of course, almost the first thing to be asked that boys and girls shall learn to find out for themselves what they want, and to rummage in catalogues, indexes, and encyclopædias for the books which will best answer their necessities. Mr. Emerson's rule is, "Read in the line of your genius." And the young man or maiden who can find out, in early life, what the line of his or her genius is, has every reason to be grateful to the teacher, or the event, or the book that has discovered it. I have certainly hoped, in reading and writing for this series, that there might be others of my young friends as sensible and as bright as Fergus and Fanchon, who will be found to work out their own salvation in these matters, and order their own books without troubling too much that nice Miss Panizzi or that omniscient Mrs. Bodley who manages the Library so well, and knows so well what every one in the town has read, and what he has not read. I had at first proposed to publish with each book a little bibliography on the subjects referred to, telling particularly where were the available editions and the prices at which they could be bought by young collectors. But a little experiment showed that no such supplement could be made, which should be of real use for most readers for whom these books are made. The same list might be too full for those who have only small libraries at command, and too brief for those who are fortunate enough to use large ones. Indeed, I should like to say to such young readers of mine as have the pluck and the sense to read a preface, that the sooner they find out how to use the received guides in such matters,--the very indexes and bibliographies which I should use in making such a list for them,--why, the better will it be for them. Such books as Poole's Index, Watt's and Brunet's Bibliographies, and the New American Indexes, prepared with such care by the Librarians' Association, are at hand in almost all the Public Libraries; and the librarians will always be glad to encourage intelligent readers in the use of them. I should be sorry, in closing the series, not to bear my testimony to the value of the Public Library system, still so new to us, in raising the standard of thought and education. For thirty years I have had more or less to do with classes of intelligent young people who have met for study. I can say, therefore, that the habit of thought and the habit of work of such young people now is different from what it was thirty years ago. Of course it ought to be. You can say to a young learner now, "This book says thus and so, but you must learn for yourself whether this author is prejudiced or ill-informed, or not." You can send him to the proper authorities. On almost any detail in general history, if he live near one of the metropolitan libraries, you can say to him, "If you choose to study a fortnight on this thing, you will very likely know more about it than does any person in the world." It is encouraging to young people to know that they can thus take literature and history at first hand. It pleases them to know that "the book" is not absolute. With such resources that has resulted which such far-seeing men as Edward Everett and George Ticknor and Charles Coffin Jewett hoped for,--the growth, namely, of a race of students who do not take anything on trust. As Professor Agassiz was forever driving up his pupils to habits of original observation in natural history, the Public Library provokes and allures young students to like courage in original research in matters of history and literature. EDWARD E. HALE. ROXBURY, April 1, 1885. CONTENTS. PAGE I. INTRODUCTION 9 II. ARCHIMEDES 20 III. FRIAR BACON 36 Of the Parents and Birth of Fryer Bacon, and how he addicted himself to Learning, 39. How Fryer Bacon made a Brazen Head to speak, by the which he would have walled England about with Brass, 41. How Fryer Bacon by his Art took a Town, when the King had lain before it three Months, without doing it any Hurt, 45. How Fryer Bacon burnt his Books of Magic and gave himself to the Study of Divinity only; and how he turned Anchorite, 49. How Virgilius was set to School, 53. Howe the Emperor asked Counsel of Virgilius, how the Night Runners and Ill Doers might be rid-out of the Streets, 55. How Virgilius made a Lamp that at all Times burned, 56. IV. BENVENUTO CELLINI 58 Life of Benvenuto Cellini, 59. Benvenuto's Autobiography, 60. V. BERNARD PALISSY 82 Bernard Palissy the Potter, 83. VI. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 97 Franklin's Method of Growing Better, 100. Musical Glasses, 112. VII. THEORISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 119 Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 119. Edgeworth's Telegraph, 124. Mr. Edgeworth's Telegraph in Ireland, 127. Mr. Edgeworth's Machine, 136. More of Mr. Edgeworth's Fancies, 140. Jack the Darter, 142. A One-wheeled Chaise, 144. VIII. JAMES WATT 146 The Newcomen Engine, 150. James Watt and the Steam-engine, 153. The Separate Condenser, 161. Completing the Invention, 164. Watt makes his Model, 167. IX. ROBERT FULTON 172 X. GEORGE STEPHENSON AND THE LOCOMOTIVE 193 George Stephenson, 194. XI. ELI WHITNEY 219 Eli Whitney, 222. XII. JAMES NASMYTH 237 The Steam-hammer, 237. James Nasmyth, 239. XIII. SIR HENRY BESSEMER 259 The Age of Steel, 259. Bessemer's Family, 261. Henry Bessemer, 264. Stamped Paper, 265. Gold Paint, 270. Bessemer Steel, 273. XIV. THE LAST MEETING 284 Goodyear, 284. STORIES OF INVENTION TOLD BY INVENTORS. I. INTRODUCTION. There is, or is supposed to be, somewhere in Norfolk County in Massachusetts, in the neighborhood of the city of Boston, a rambling old house which in its day belonged to the Oliver family. I am afraid they were most of them sad Tories in their time; and I am not sure but these very windows could tell the story of one or another brick-bat thrown through them, as one or another committee of the people requested one or another Oliver, of the old times, to resign one or another royal commission. But a very peaceful Rowland has taken the place of those rebellious old Olivers. This comfortable old house is now known to many young people as the home of a somewhat garrulous old gentleman whom they call Uncle Fritz. His real name is Frederick Ingham. He has had a checkered life, but it has evidently been a happy one. Once he was in the regular United States Navy. For a long time he was a preacher in the Sandemanian connection, where they have no ordained ministers. In Garibaldi's time he was a colonel in the patriot service in Italy. In our civil war he held a command in the national volunteer navy; and his scientific skill and passion for adventure called him at one time across "the Great American Desert," and at another time across Siberia, in the business of constructing telegraphs. In point of fact, he is not the relation of any one of the five-and-twenty young people who call him Uncle Fritz. But he pets them, and they pet him. They like to make him a regular visit once a week, as the winter goes by. And the habit has grown up, of their reading with him, quite regularly, on some subject selected at their first meeting after they return from the country. Either at Lady Oliver's house, as his winter home is called, or at Little Crastis, where he spends his summers, those selections for reading have been made, which have been published in a form similar to that of the book which the reader holds in his hand. The reader may or may not have seen these books,--so much the worse for him if he have not,--but that omission of his may be easily repaired. There are four of them: STORIES OF WAR told by Soldiers; STORIES OF THE SEA told by Sailors; STORIES OF ADVENTURE told by Adventurers; STORIES OF DISCOVERY told by Discoverers. Since the regular meetings began, of which these books are the history, the circle of visitors has changed more or less, as most circles will, in five years. Some of those who met are now in another world. Some of the boys have grown to be so much like men, that they are "subduing the world," as Uncle Fritz would say, in their several places, and that they write home, from other latitudes and longitudes, of the Discoveries and Adventures in which they have themselves been leaders. But younger sisters and brothers take the places of older brothers and sisters. The club--for it really is one--is popular, Lady Oliver's house is large, and Uncle Fritz is hospitable. He says himself that there is always room for more; and Ellen Flaherty, or whoever else is the reigning queen in the kitchen, never complains that the demand is too great for her "waffles." Last fall, when the young people made their first appearance, the week before Thanksgiving day, after the new-comers had been presented to Uncle Fritz, and a chair or two had been brought in from the dining-room to make provision for the extra number of guests, it proved that, on the way out, John Coram, who is Tom Coram's nephew, had been talking with Helen, who is one of the old Boston Champernoons, about the change of Boston since his uncle's early days. "I told her," said he to Uncle Fritz, "that Mr. Allerton was called 'the last of the merchants,' and he is dead now." "That was a pet phrase of his," said Uncle Fritz. "He meant that his house, with its immense resources, simply bought and sold. He was away for many years once. When he returned, he found that the chief of his affairs had made an investment, from motives of public spirit, in a Western railroad. 'I thought we were merchants,' said the fine old man, disapproving. As he turned over page after page of the account, he found at last that the whole investment had been lost. 'I am glad of that,' said he; 'you will remember now that we are merchants.'" "But surely my father is a merchant," said Julius. "He calls himself a merchant, he is put down as a merchant in the Directory, and he buys and sells, if that makes a man a merchant." "All that is true," said Uncle Fritz. "But your father also invests money in railroads; so far he is engaged in transportation. He is a stockholder and a director in the Hecla Woollen Mills at Bromwich; so far he is a manufacturer. He told me, the other day, that he had been encouraging my little friend Griffiths, who is experimenting in the conservation of electric power; so far he is an inventor, or a patron of inventions. "In substance, what Mr. Allerton meant when he said 'I thought we were merchants,' was this: he meant that that firm simply bought from people who wished to sell, and sold to people who wished to buy. "The fact, that almost every man of enterprise in Massachusetts is now to a certain extent a manufacturer, shows that a great change has come over people here since the beginning of this century." "Those were the days of Mr. Cleveland's adventures, and Mr. Forbes's," said Hugh. He alluded to the trade in the Pacific, in which these gentlemen shared, as may be read in STORIES OF ADVENTURE. Uncle Fritz said, "Yes." He said that the patient love of Great Britain for her colonies forbade us here from making so much as a hat or a hob-nail while we were colonies, as it would gladly do again now. He said that the New Englanders had a great deal of adventurous old Norse blood in their veins, that they had plenty of ship-timber and tar. If they could not make hob-nails they could make ships; and they made very good ships before they had been in New England ten years. Luckily for us, soon after the country became a country, near a hundred years ago, the quarrels of Europe were such, that if an English ship carried produce of the West Indies or China to Europe, France seized, if she could, ship and cargo; if a French ship carried them, English cruisers seized ship and cargo, if they could. So it happened that the American ships and the American sailors, who were not at war with England and were not at war with France, were able to carry the stores which were wanted by all the world. The wars of Napoleon were thus a steady bounty for the benefit of the commerce of America. When they were well over, we had become so well trained to commerce here, that we could build the best ships in the world; and we thought we had the best seamen in the world,--certainly there were no better. Under such a stimulus, and what followed it, our commerce, as measured by the tonnage of our ships, was as large as that of any nation, and, if measured by the miles sailed, was probably larger. All this prosperity to merchants was broken up by the War of 1812, between the United States and Great Britain. For two years and a half, then, our intercourse with Europe was almost cut off; for the English cruisers now captured our vessels whenever they could find them. At last we had to make our own hob-nails, our guns, our cannon, our cotton cloth, and our woollen cloth, if we meant to have any at all. The farmers' wives and daughters had always had the traditions of spinning and weaving. When Colonel Ingham said this, Blanche nodded to Mary and Mary to Blanche. "That means," said the Colonel, "that you have brought dear old mother Tucker's spinning-wheel downstairs, and have it in the corner behind your piano, does it not?" Blanche laughed, and said that was just what she meant. "It does very well in 'Martha,'" said the Colonel. "And can you spin, Blanche?" Blanche rather surprised him by saying that she could, and the Colonel went on with his lecture. Fergus, who is very proud of Blanche, slipped out of the room, but was back after a minute, and no one missed him. Here in Massachusetts some of the most skilful merchants--Appletons, Perkinses, and Lawrences--joined hand with brave inventors like Slater and Treadwell, and sent out to England for skilful manufacturers like Crompton and Boott; thus there sprung up the gigantic system of manufacture, which seems to you children a thing of course. Oddly enough, the Southern States, which had always hated New England and New England commerce, and had done their best to destroy it when they had a chance, were very eager to secure a home-market for Southern cotton; and thus, for many years after the war, they kept up such high protective duties that foreign goods were very dear in America, and the New England manufacturers had all the better prices. While Uncle Fritz was saying this in substance, Ransom, the old servant, appeared with a spinning-wheel from Colonel Ingham's music-room. The children had had it for some charades. Kate Fogarty, the seamstress of the Colonel's household, followed, laughing, with a great hank of flax; and when the Colonel stopped at the interruption, Fergus said,-- "I thought, Uncle Fritz, they would all like to see how well Blanche spins; so I asked Ransom to bring in the wheel." And Blanche sat down without any coaxing, and made her wheel fly very prettily, and spun her linen thread as well as her great-grandmamma would have done. Colonel Ingham was delighted; and so were all the children, half of whom had never seen any hand-spinning before. All of them had seen cotton and wool spun in factories; in fact, half of them had eaten their daily bread that day, from the profit of the factories that for ten hours of every day do such spinning. "Now, you see," said the well-pleased Colonel, "Blanche spins that flax exactly as her grandmother nine generations back spun it. She spins it exactly as Mrs. Dudley spun it in the old house where Dr. Paterson's church stands. It is strange enough, but for one hundred and fifty years there seems to have been no passion for invention among the New Englanders. Now they are called a most _inventive_ people, and that bad word has been coined for them and such as they. "But all this is of the last century. It was as soon as they were thrown on their own resources that they began to invent. Eli Whitney, a Worcester County boy, graduated at Yale College in 1791. He went to Georgia at once, to be a tutor in a planter's family; but before he arrived, the planter had another tutor. This was a fortunate chance for the world; for poor Whitney, disappointed, went to spend the winter at the house of Mrs. General Greene. One day, at dinner, some guests of hers said that cotton could never be exported with profit unless a machine could be made to separate the seeds from the 'wool.' 'If you want anything invented,' said Mrs. Greene, 'ask my young friend Mr. Whitney; he will invent anything for you.' Whitney had then never seen cotton unmanufactured. But he went to work; and before he was one year out of college, he had invented the cotton-gin, which created an enormous product of cotton, and, in fact, changed the direction of the commerce of the world. "Well, you know about other inventions. Robert Fulton, who built the first effective steamboat, was born in Pennsylvania the same year Whitney was born in Massachusetts. "Hector, you are fond of imaginary conversations: write one in which Whitney and Fulton meet, when each is twenty-one; let Daniel Boone look in on them, and prophesy to them the future of the country, and how much it is to owe to them and to theirs." "I think Blanche had better write it--in a ballad," said Hector, laughing. "It shall be an old crone spinning; and as she turns her wheel she shall describe the Ætna Factory at Watertown." "There shall be a _refrain_," said Wallace,-- "'Turn my wheel gayly; Spin, flax, spin.'" "No," said Hatty; "the refrain shall be 'Four per cent in six months, Eight per cent in twelve.' We are to go to Europe if the Vesuvius Mills pay a dividend. But if they _pass_, I believe I am to scrub floors in my vacation." "Very well," said Uncle Fritz, recalling them to the subject they had started on. "All this is enough to show you how it is that you, who are all New Englanders, are no longer seafaring boys or girls, exclusively or even principally. Your great-grandmother, Alice, saved the lives of all the crew of a Bristol trader, by going out in her father's boat and taking her through the crooked passage between the Brewsters. You would be glad to do it, but I am afraid you cannot." "I should rather encourage those who go to do it," said Alice, demurely, repeating one of their familiar jokes. "And your great-grandfather, Seth, is the Hunt who discovered Hunt's Reef in the Philippines. I am afraid you cannot place it on the map." "I know I cannot," said Seth, bravely. "No," said the old gentleman. "But all the same the reef is there. I came to an anchor in the 'Calypso,' waiting for a southwest wind, in sight of the breakers over it. And I wish we had the pineapples the black people sold us there. "All the same the New Englanders are good for something. Ten years hence, you boys will be doing what your fathers are doing,--subduing the world, and making it to be more what God wants it to be. And you will not work at arms' length, as they did, nor with your own muscles." "We have Aladdin's lamp," said Mary, laughing. "And his ring," said Susie. "I always liked the ring one better than the lamp one, though he was not so strong." "He is prettier in the pictures," said George. "Yes," said the Colonel; "we have stronger Genii than Aladdin had, and better machinery than Prince Camaralzaman." "I heard some one say that Mr. Corliss had added twenty-seven per cent to the working power of the world by his _cut-off_," said Fergus. The Colonel said he believed that was true. And this was a good illustration of what one persevering and intelligent man can do in bringing in the larger life and nobler purpose of the Kingdom of Heaven. Such a man makes men cease from _labor_, which is always irksome, and _work_ with God. This is always ennobling. "I am ashamed to say that I do not know what a _cut-off_ is," said Alice, who, like Seth, had been trained to "confess ignorance." "I was going to say so," said John Rodman. "And I,--and I,--and I," said quite a little chorus. "We must make up a party, the first pleasant day, and go and see the stationary engine which pumps this water for us." So the Colonel met their confessions. "But does not all this indicate that we might spend a few days in looking up inventions?" "I think we ought to," said Hatty. "Certainly we ought, if the Vesuvius pays. Imagine me at Manchester. Imagine John Bright taking me through his own mill, and saying to me, 'This is the rover we like best, on the whole. Do you use this in America?' Imagine me forced to reply that I do not know a rover when I see one, and could not tell a 'slubber' from a 'picker.'" The others laughed, and confessed equal ignorance. "Only, John Bright has no mills in Manchester, Hatty." "Well, they are somewhere; and I must not eat the bread of the Vesuvius slubbers, and not know something of the way in which slubbers came to be." "Very well," said Uncle Fritz, as usual recalling the conversation to sanity. "Whom shall we read about first?" "Tubal Cain first," said Fergus. "He seems to have been the first of the crew." "It was not he who found out witty inventions," said Fanchon, in a mock _aside_. "I should begin with Archimedes," said Uncle Fritz. "Excellent!" said Fergus; "and then may we not burn up old Fogarty's barn with burning-glasses?" The children dislike Fogarty, and his barn is an eyesore to them. It stands just beyond the hedge of the Lady Oliver garden. "I thank Archimedes every time I take a warm bath. Did he not invent hot baths?" "What nonsense! He was killed by Caligula in one." "You shall not talk such stuff.--Uncle Fritz, what books shall I bring you?" It would seem as if, perhaps, Uncle Fritz had led the conversation in the direction it had taken. At least it proved that, all together on the rolling book-rack which Mr. Perkins gave him, were the account of Archimedes in the Cyclopædia Britannica, the account in the French Universal Biography, the life in La Rousse's Cyclopædia, Plutarch's Lives, and a volume of Livy in the Latin. From these together, Uncle Fritz, and the boys and girls whom he selected, made out this little history of Archimedes. II. ARCHIMEDES. Archimedes was born in Syracuse in the year 287 B. C., and was killed there in the year 212 B. C. He is said to have been a relation of Hiero, King of Syracuse; but he seems to have held no formal office known to the politicians. Like many other such men, however, from his time down to Ericsson, he came to the front when he was needed, and served Syracuse better than her speech-makers. While he was yet a young man, he went to Alexandria to study; and he was there the pupil of Euclid, the same Euclid whose Geometry is the basis of all the geometry of to-day. While Archimedes is distinctly called, on very high authority, "the first mathematician of antiquity," and while we have nine books which are attributed to him, we do not have--and this is a great misfortune--any ancient biography of him. He lived seventy-five years, for most of that time probably in Syracuse itself; and it would be hard to say how much Syracuse owed to his science. At the end of his life he saved Syracuse from the Romans for three years, during a siege in which, by his ingenuity, he kept back Marcellus and his army. At the end of this siege he was killed by a Roman soldier when the Romans entered the city. The books of his which we have are on the "Sphere and Cylinder," "The Measure of the Circle," "Conoids and Spheroids," "On Spirals," "Equiponderants and Centres of Gravity," "The Quadrature of the Parabola," "On Bodies floating in Liquids," "The Psammites," and "A Collection of Lemmas." The books which are lost are "On the Crown of Hiero;" "Cochleon, or Water-Screw;" "Helicon, or Endless Screw;" "Trispaston, or Combination of Wheels and Axles;" "Machines employed at the Siege of Syracuse;" "Burning Mirror;" "Machines moved by Air and Water;" and "Material Sphere." As to the story of the bath-tub, Uncle Fritz gave to Hector to read the account as abridged in the "Cyclopædia Britannica." "Hiero had set him to discover whether or not the gold which he had given to an artist to work into a crown for him had been mixed with a baser metal. Archimedes was puzzled by the problem, till one day, as he was stepping into a bath, and observed the water running over, it occurred to him that the excess of bulk occasioned by the introduction of alloy could be measured by putting the crown and an equal weight of gold separately into a vessel filled with water, and observing the difference of overflow. He was so overjoyed when this happy thought struck him that he ran home without his clothes, shouting, 'I have found it, I have found it,'--[Greek: Eurêka, Eurêka.] "This word has been chosen by the State of California for its motto." To make the story out, it must be supposed that the crown was irregular in shape, and that the precise object was to find how much metal, in measurement, was used in its manufacture. Suppose three cubic inches of gold were used, Archimedes knew how much this would cost. But if three cubic inches of alloy were used, the king had been cheated. What the overflow of the water taught was the precise cubic size of the various ornaments of the crown. A silver crown or a lead crown would displace as much water as a gold crown of the same shape and ornament. But neither silver nor lead would weigh so much as if pure gold were used, and at that time pure gold was by far the heaviest metal known. Fergus, who is perhaps our best mathematician, pricked up his ears when he heard there was a treatise on the relation of the Circle to the Square. Like most of the intelligent boys who will read this book, Fergus had tried his hand on the fascinating problem which deals with that proportion. Younger readers will remember that it is treated in "Swiss Family." Jack--or is it perhaps Ernest?--remembers there, that for the ribbon which was to go round a hat the hat-maker allowed three times the diameter of the hat, and a little more. This "little more" is the delicate fraction over which Archimedes studied; and Fergus, after him. Fergus knew the proportion as far as thirty-three figures in decimals. These are 3.141,592,653,589,793,238,462,643,383,279,502. When Uncle Fritz asked Fergus to repeat these, the boy did it promptly, somewhat to the astonishment of the others. He had committed it to memory by one of Mr. Gouraud's "analogies," which are always convenient for persons who have mathematical formulas to remember. When those of the young people who were interested in mathematics looked at Archimedes's solution of the problem, they found it was the same as that they had themselves tried at school. But he carried it so far as to inscribe a circle between two polygons, each of ninety-six sides; and his calculation is based on the relation between the two. Taking the "Swiss Family Robinson" statement again, Archimedes shows that the circumference of a circle exceeds three times its diameter by a small fraction, which is less than 10/70 and greater than 10/71 and that a circle is to its circumscribing square nearly as 11 to 14. Those who wish to carry his calculations farther may be pleased to know that he found the figures 7 to 22 expressed the relation more correctly than 1 to 3 does. Metius, another ancient mathematician, used the proportion 113 to 355. If you reduce that to decimals, you will find it correct to the sixth decimal. Remember that Archimedes and Metius had not the convenience of the Arabic or decimal notation. Imagine yourselves doing Metius's sum in division when you have to divide CCCLV by CXIII. Archimedes, in fact, used the Greek notation,--which was a little better than the Roman, but had none of the facility of ours. For every _ten_, from 20 to 90, they had a separate character, and for every _hundred_, and for every _thousand_. The _thousands_ were the units with a mark underneath. Thus [Greek: a] meant 1, and [Greek: ,a] meant 1,000. To express 113, Archimedes would have written [Greek: rig]. To express 355, he would have written [Greek: tne]; and the place which these signs had in the order would not have affected their value, as they do with us. We cannot tell how the greater part of Archimedes's life was spent. But whether he were nominally in public office or not, it is clear enough that he must have given great help to Syracuse and her rulers, as an engineer, long before the war in which the Romans captured that great city. At that time Syracuse was, according to Cicero, "the largest and noblest of the Greek cities." It was in Sicily; but, having been built by colonists from Greece, who still spoke the Greek language, Cicero speaks of it among Greek cities, as he would have spoken of Thurii, or Sybaris, or the cities of "Magna Græcia,"--"great Greece," as they called the Greek settlements in southern Italy. In the Second Punic War Syracuse took sides against Rome with the Carthaginians, though her old king, Hiero, had been a firm ally of the Romans. The most interesting accounts that we have of Archimedes are in Livy's account of this war, and in Plutarch's Life of Marcellus, who carried it on on the Roman side. Livy says of Archimedes that he was-- "A man of unrivalled skill in observing the heavens and the stars, but more deserving of admiration as the inventor and constructor of warlike engines and works, by means of which, with a very slight effort, he turned to ridicule what the enemy effected with great difficulty. "The wall, which ran along unequal eminences, most of which were high and difficult of access, some low and open to approach along level vales, was furnished by him with every kind of warlike engine, as seemed suitable to each particular place. Marcellus attacked from the quinqueremes [his large ships] the wall of the Achradina, which was washed by the sea. From the other ships the archers and slingers and light infantry, whose weapon is difficult to be thrown back by the unskilful, allowed scarce any person to remain upon the wall unwounded. These soldiers, as they required some range in aiming their missiles upward, kept their ships at a distance from the wall. Eight more quinqueremes joined together in pairs, the oars on their inner sides being removed, so that side might be placed to side, and which thus formed ships [of double width], and were worked by the outer oars, carried turrets built up in stories, and other battering-engines. "Against this naval armament Archimedes placed, on different parts of the walls, engines of various dimensions. Against the ships which were at a distance he discharged stones of immense weight; those which were nearer he assailed with lighter and more numerous missiles. Lastly, in order that his own men might heap their weapons upon the enemy without receiving any wounds themselves, he perforated the wall from the top to the bottom with a great number of loop-holes, about a cubit in diameter, through which some with arrows, others with scorpions of moderate size, assailed the enemies without being seen. He threw upon their sterns some of the ships which came nearer to the walls, in order to get inside the range of the engines, raising up their prows by means of an iron grapple attached to a strong chain, by means of a _tolleno_ [or derrick], which projected from the wall and overhung them, having a heavy counterpoise of lead which forced the line to the ground. Then, the grapple being suddenly disengaged, the ship, falling from the wall, was by these means, to the utter consternation of the seamen, so dashed against the water that even if it came back to its true position it took in a great quantity of water." "Fancy," cried Bedford, "one of their double quinqueremes, when she had run bravely in under the shelter of the wall. Just as the men think they can begin to work, up goes the prow, and they all are tumbled down into the steerage. Up she goes, and fifty rowers are on each other in a pile; when the old pile-driver claw lets go again, and down she comes, splash into the sea. And then Archimedes pokes his head out through one of the holes, and says in Greek, 'How do you like that, my friends?' I do not wonder they were discouraged." The bold cliff of the water front of Syracuse gave Archimedes a particular advantage for defensive operations of this sort. They are described in more detail in Plutarch's Life of Marcellus, who was the Roman general employed against Syracuse, and who was held at bay by Archimedes for three years. Here is Plutarch's account:-- Marcellus, with sixty galleys, each with five rows of oars, furnished with all sorts of arms and missiles, and a huge bridge of planks laid upon eight ships chained together,[1] upon which was carried the engine to cast stones and darts, assaulted the walls. He relied on the abundance and magnificence of his preparations, and on his own previous glory; all which, however, were, it would seem, but trifles for Archimedes and his machines. These machines he had designed and contrived, not as matters of any importance, but as mere amusements in geometry,--in compliance with King Hiero's desire and request, some little time before, that he should reduce to practice some part of his admirable speculations in science, and by accommodating the theoretic truth to sensation and ordinary use, bring it more within the appreciation of people in general. Eudoxus and Archytas had been the first originators of this far-famed and highly prized art of mechanics, which they employed as an elegant illustration of geometrical truths, and as a means of sustaining experimentally, to the satisfaction of the senses, conclusions too intricate for proof by words and diagrams. As, for example, to solve the problem so often required in constructing geometrical figures, "Given the two extremes to find the two mean lines of a proportion," both these mathematicians had recourse to the aid of instruments, adapting to their purpose certain curves and sections of lines. But what with Plato's indignation at it, and his invectives against it as the mere corruption and annihilation of the one good of geometry, which was thus shamefully turning its back upon the unembodied objects of pure intelligence, to recur to sensation, and to ask help (not to be obtained without base subservience and depravation) from matter; so it was that mechanics came to be separated from geometry, and when repudiated and neglected by philosophers, took its place as a military art. Archimedes, however, in writing to King Hiero, whose friend and near relative he was, had stated that, given the force, any given weight might be moved; and even boasted, we are told, relying on the strength of demonstration, that if there were another earth, by going into it he could move this. Hiero being struck with amazement at this, and entreating him to make good this assertion by actual experiment, and show some great weight moved by a small engine, he fixed upon a ship of burden out of the king's arsenal, which could not be drawn out of the dock without great labor by many men. Loading her with many passengers and a full freight, sitting himself the while far off, with no great endeavor, but only holding the head of the pulley in his hand and drawing the cord by degrees, he drew the ship in a straight line, as smoothly and evenly as if she had been in the sea. The king, astonished at this, and convinced of the power of the art, prevailed upon Archimedes to make him engines accommodated to all the purposes, offensive and defensive, of a siege. These the king himself never made use of, because he spent almost all his life in a profound quiet and the highest affluence. But the apparatus was, in a most opportune time, ready at hand for the Syracusans, and with it also the engineer himself. When, therefore, the Romans assaulted the walls in two places at once, fear and consternation stupefied the Syracusans, believing that nothing was able to resist that violence and those forces. But when Archimedes began to ply his engines, he at once shot against the land forces all sorts of missile weapons, with immense masses of stone that came down with incredible noise and violence, against which no man could stand; for they knocked down those upon whom they fell in heaps, breaking all their ranks and files. In the mean time huge poles thrust out from the walls over the ships [these were the derricks, or _tollenos_, of Livy] sunk some by the great weights which they let down from on high upon them; others they lifted up into the air by an iron hand or beak like a crane's beak, and when they had drawn them up by the prow, and set them on end upon the poop, they plunged them to the bottom of the sea. Or else the ships, drawn by engines within, and whirled about, were dashed against the steep rocks that stood jutting out under the walls, with great destruction of the soldiers that were aboard them. A ship was frequently lifted up to a great height in the air (a dreadful thing to behold), and was rolled to and fro and kept swinging, until the mariners were all thrown out, when at length it was dashed against the rocks, or let fall. At the engine that Marcellus brought upon the bridge of ships,--which was called _Sambuca_ from some resemblance it had to an instrument of music of that name,--while it was as yet approaching the wall, there was discharged a piece of a rock of ten talents' weight,[2] then a second and a third, which, striking upon it with immense force and with a noise like thunder, broke all its foundation to pieces, shook out all its fastenings, and completely dislodged it from the bridge. So Marcellus, doubtful what counsel to pursue, drew off his ships to a safer distance, and sounded a retreat to his forces on land. They then took a resolution of coming up under the walls, if it were possible, in the night; thinking that as Archimedes used ropes stretched at length in playing his engines, the soldiers would now be under the shot, and the darts would, for want of sufficient distance to throw them, fly over their heads without effect. But he, it appeared, had long before framed for such occasion engines accommodated to any distance, and shorter weapons; and had made numerous small openings in the walls, through which, with engines of a shorter range, unexpected blows were inflicted on the assailants. Thus, when they, who thought to deceive the defenders, came close up to the walls, instantly a shower of darts and other missile weapons was again cast upon them. And when stones came tumbling down perpendicularly upon their heads, and, as it were, the whole wall shot out arrows against them, they retired. And now, again, as they were going off, arrows and darts of a longer range inflicted a great slaughter among them, and their ships were driven one against another, while they themselves were not able to retaliate in any way. For Archimedes had provided and fixed most of his engines immediately under the wall; whence the Romans, seeing that infinite mischiefs overwhelmed them from no visible means, began to think they were fighting with the gods. Yet Marcellus escaped unhurt, and, deriding his own artificers and engineers, "What," said he, "must we give up fighting with this geometrical Briareus, who plays pitch and toss with our ships, and with the multitude of darts which he showers at a single moment upon us, really outdoes the hundred-handed giants of mythology?" And doubtless the rest of the Syracusans were but the body of Archimedes's designs, one soul moving and governing all; for, laying aside all other arms, with his alone they infested the Romans and protected themselves. In fine, when such terror had seized upon the Romans that if they did but see a little rope or a piece of wood from the wall, instantly crying out that there it was again, that Archimedes was about to let fly some engine at them, they turned their backs and fled, Marcellus desisted from conflicts and assaults, putting all his hope in a long siege. Yet Archimedes possessed so high a spirit, so profound a soul, and such treasures of scientific knowledge, that though these inventions had now obtained him the renown of more than human sagacity, he yet would not deign to leave behind him any commentary or writing on such subjects; but, repudiating as sordid and ignoble the whole trade of engineering, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit, he placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life,--studies the superiority of which to all others is unquestioned, and in which the only doubt can be whether the beauty and grandeur of the subjects examined or the precision and cogency of the methods and means of proof most deserve our admiration. It is not possible to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid explanations. Some ascribe this to his natural genius; while others think that incredible toil produced these, to all appearance, easy and unlabored results. No amount of investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the proof; and yet, once seen, you immediately believe you would have discovered it,--by so smooth and so rapid a path he leads you to the conclusion required. And thus it ceases to be incredible that (as is commonly told of him) the charm of his familiar and domestic science made him forget his food and neglect his person to that degree that when he was occasionally carried by absolute violence to bathe, or have his body anointed, he used to trace geometrical figures in the ashes of the fire, and diagrams in the oil on his body, being in a state of entire preoccupation, and, in the truest sense, divine possession, with his love and delight in science. His discoveries were numerous and admirable; but he is said to have requested his friends and relations that when he was dead they would place over his tomb a sphere containing a cylinder, inscribing it with the ratio which the containing solid bears to the contained. The boys were highly edified by this statement of the difficulty which Archimedes's friends found in making him take a bath, and chaffed Jack, who had asked if he were not the inventor of bath-tubs. When the reading from Plutarch was over, Fergus asked if that were all, and was disappointed that there was nothing about the setting of ships on fire by mirrors. It is one of the old stories of the siege of Syracuse, that he set fire to the Roman ships by concentrating on them the heat of the sun from a number of mirrors. But this story is not in Livy, nor is it in Plutarch, though, as has been seen, they were well disposed to tell what they knew which was marvellous in his achievements. It is told at length and in detail by Zonaras and Tzetzes, two Greek writers of the twelfth century, who must have found it in some ancient writers whose works we do not now have. "Archimedes," says Zonaras,[3] "having received the rays of the sun on a mirror, by the thickness and polish of which they were reflected and united, kindled a flame in the air, and darted it with full violence upon the ships, which were anchored within a certain distance, in such a manner that they were burned to ashes." The same writer says that Proclus, a celebrated "mathematician" of Constantinople, in the sixth century, at the siege of Constantinople set fire to the Thracian fleet by means of brass mirrors. Tzetzes is yet more particular. He says that when the Roman galleys were within a bow-shot of the city walls, Archimedes brought together hexagonal specula (mirrors) with other smaller ones of twenty-four facets, and caused them to be placed each at a proper distance; that he moved these by means of hinges and plates of metal; that the hexagon was bisected by the meridian of summer and winter; that it was placed opposite the sun; and that a great fire was thus kindled, which consumed the ships. Now, it is to be remembered that these are the accounts of writers who were not so good mechanics as Archimedes. It should be remembered, also, that in the conditions of war then, the distance at which ships would be anchored in a little harbor like that of Syracuse was not great. By "bow-shot" would be meant the distance at which a bow would do serious damage. Doubtful as the story of Zonaras and Tzetzes seems, it received unexpected confirmation in the year 1747 from a celebrated experiment tried by the naturalist Buffon. After encountering many difficulties, which he had foreseen with great acuteness, and obviated with equal ingenuity, Buffon at length succeeded in repeating Archimedes's performance. In the spring of 1747 he laid before the French Academy a memoir which, in his collected works, extends over upwards of eighty pages. In this paper he described himself as in possession of an apparatus by means of which he could set fire to planks at the distance of 200 and even 210 feet, and melt metals and metallic minerals at distances varying from 25 to 40 feet. This apparatus he describes as composed of 168 plain glasses, silvered on the back, each six inches broad by eight inches long. These, he says, were ranged in a large wooden frame, at intervals not exceeding the third of an inch, so that, by means of an adjustment behind, each should be movable in all directions independent of the rest; the spaces between the glasses being further of use in allowing the operator to see from behind the point on which it behooved the various disks to be converged. In this last statement there is a parallel with that of Tzetzes, who speaks of the division of Archimedes's mirrors. At the present moment naturalists are paying great attention to plans for the using of the heat of the sun. It is said that on any county in the United States, twenty by thirty miles square, there is wasted as much heat of the sun as would drive, if we knew how to use it, all the steam-engines in the world. Fergus asked Uncle Fritz if he believed that Archimedes threw seven hundred pounds of stone from one of his machines. The largest modern guns throw shot of one thousand pounds, and it is only quite recently that any such shot have been used. Uncle Fritz told him that in the museum at St. Germain-en-Laye he would one day see a modern catapult, made by Colonel de Reffye from the design of a Roman catapult on Trajan's Column. This is supposed to be of the same pattern which is called an "Onager" in the Latin books. This catapult throws, when it is tested, a shot of twenty-four pounds, or it throws a sheaf of short arrows. In one catapult the power is gained by twisting ox-hide very tightly, and suddenly releasing it. Another is a very stout bow, worked with a small windlass. Of course this will give a great power. Seven hundred pounds, however, seems beyond the ability of any such machines as this; but from his higher walls Archimedes could, of course, have rolled such stones down on the decks of the ships below. And if he were throwing other stones or leaden balls to a greater distance with his _Onagers_, it may well be that Plutarch or Livy did not take very accurate account of the particular engine which threw one stone or another. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier, to the great grief of Marcellus, when the Romans finally took Syracuse. The city fell through drunkenness, which was, and is, the cause of more failure in the world than anything else which can be named. Marcellus, in some conversations about the exchange or redemption of a prisoner, observed a tower somewhat detached from the wall, which was, as he thought, carelessly guarded. Choosing the night of a feast of Diana, when the Syracusans were wholly given up to wine and sport, he took the tower by surprise, and from the tower seized the wall and made his way into the city. In the sack of the city by the soldiers, which followed, Archimedes was killed. The story is told in different ways. Plutarch says that he was working out some problem by a diagram, and never noticed the incursion of the Romans, nor that the city was taken. A soldier, unexpectedly coming up to him in this transport of study and meditation, commanded him to follow him to Marcellus; which he declining to do before he had worked out his problem to a demonstration, the soldier, enraged, drew his sword, and ran him through. "Others write that a Roman soldier, running upon him with a drawn sword, offered to kill him, and that Archimedes, looking back, earnestly besought him to hold his hand a little while, that he might not leave what he was then at work upon inconsequent and imperfect; but the soldier, not moved by his entreaty, instantly killed him. Others, again, relate that as Archimedes was carrying to Marcellus mathematical instruments, dials, spheres, and angles by which the magnitude of the sun might be measured to the sight, some soldiers, seeing him, and thinking that he carried gold in a vessel, slew him. "Certain it is, that his death was very afflicting to Marcellus, and that Marcellus ever after regarded him that killed him as a murderer, and that he sought for the kindred of Archimedes and honored them with signal honors." Archimedes, as has been said, had asked that his monument might be a cylinder bearing a sphere, in commemoration of his discovery of the proportion between a cylinder and a sphere of the same diameter. A century and a half after, when Cicero was quæstor of Sicily, he found this monument, neglected, forgotten, and covered with a rank growth of thistles and other weeds. "It was left," he says, "for one who came from Arpinas, to show to the men of Syracuse where their greatest countryman lay buried." III. FRIAR BACON. "All the world seems to have known of Columbus's discoveries as soon as he came home, but all the world did not know at once of Archimedes's inventions; indeed, I should think the world did not know now what all of them are." Hester Van Brunt was saying this in the hall, as the girls laid off their waterproofs, when they next met the Colonel. "I think that may often be said of what we call Inventions and what we call Discoveries," he said, "till quite recent times. When a man invented a new process, it was supposed that if he could keep the secret, it might be to him a very valuable secret. But when one discovered an island or a continent, it was almost impossible to keep the secret. They tried it sometimes, as you know. But there must be a whole ship's crew who know something of the new-found land, and from some of them the secret would leak out. "But there has been many a process in the arts lost, because the man who discovered the new quality in nature or invented the new method in manufacture kept it secret, so that he might do better work than his competitors. This went so far that boys were apprenticed to masters to learn 'the secrets of their trades.'" Fergus said that in old times inventors were not always treated very kindly. If people thought they were sorcerers, or in league with the Devil, they did not care much for the invention. Uncle Fritz said they would find plenty of instances of the persecution of inventors, even to quite a late date. It is impossible, of course, to say how many good things were lost to the world by the pig-headedness which discouraged new inventions. It is marvellous to think what progress single men made, who had to begin almost at the beginning, and learn for themselves what every intelligent boy or girl now finds ready for him in the Cyclopædia. It is very clear that the same beginnings were made again and again by some of the early inventors. Then, what they learned had been almost forgotten. There was no careful record of their experiments, or, if any, it was in one manuscript, and that was not accessible to people trying to follow in their steps. "I have laid out for you," said Uncle Fritz, "some of the early accounts of Friar Bacon,--Roger Bacon. He is one of the most distinguished of the early students of what we now call natural philosophy in England. It was in one of the darkest centuries of the Dark Ages. "But see what he did. "There are to be found in his writings new and ingenious views of Optics,--as, on the refraction of light, on the apparent magnitude of objects, on the magnified appearance of the sun and moon when on the horizon. He describes very exactly the nature and effects of concave and convex lenses, and speaks of their application to the purposes of reading and of viewing distant objects, both terrestrial and celestial; and it is easy to prove from his writings that he was either the inventor or the improver of the telescope. He also gives descriptions of the camera obscura and of the burning-glass. He made, too, several chemical discoveries. In one place he speaks of an inextinguishable fire, which was probably a kind of phosphorus. In another he says that an artificial fire could be prepared with saltpetre and other ingredients which would burn at the greatest distance, and by means of which thunder and lightning could be imitated. He says that a portion of this mixture of the size of an inch, properly prepared, would destroy a whole army, and even a city, with a tremendous explosion accompanied by a brilliant light. In another place he says distinctly that thunder and lightning could be imitated by means of saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal. As these are the ingredients of gunpowder, it is clear that he had an adequate idea of its composition and its power. He was intimately acquainted with geography and astronomy. He had discovered the errors of the calendar and their causes, and in his proposals for correcting them he approached very nearly to the truth. He made a corrected calendar, of which there is a copy in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In moral philosophy, also, Roger Bacon has laid down some excellent precepts for the conduct of life.[4] "Now, if you had such a biography of such a man now, you would know that without much difficulty you could find all his more important observations in print. So soon as he thought them important, he would communicate them to some society which would gladly publish them. In the first place, he would be glad to have the credit of an improvement, an invention, or a discovery. If the invention were likely to be profitable, the nation would secure the profit to him if he fully revealed the process. They would give him, by a 'patent,' the right to the exclusive profit for a series of years. The nation thus puts an end to the old temptation to secrecy, or tries to do so. "But if you will read some of the queer passages from the old lives of Bacon, you will see how very vague were the notions which the people of his own time had of what he was doing." Then Hester read some passages which Colonel Ingham had marked for her. OF THE PARENTS AND BIRTH OF FRYER BACON, AND HOW HE ADDICTED HIMSELF TO LEARNING. In most men's opinions he was born in the West part of _England_ and was son to a wealthy Farmer, who put him to School to the Parson of the Town where he was born: not with intent that he should turn Fryer (as he did), but to get so much understanding, that he might manage the better that wealth he was to leave him. But young _Bacon_ took his learning so fast, that the Priest could not teach him any more, which made him desire his Master that he would speak to his father to put him to _Oxford_, that he might not lose that little learning that he had gained: his Master was very willing so to do: and one day, meeting his father, told him, that he had received a great blessing of God, in that he had given him so wise and hopeful a Child as his son _Roger Bacon_ was (for so was he named) and wished him withal to doe his duty, and to bring up so his Child, that he might shew his thankfulness to God, which could not better be done than in making him a Scholar; for he found by his sudden taking of his learning, that he was a child likely to prove a very great Clerk: hereat old _Bacon_ was not well pleased (for he desired to bring him up to Plough and to the Cart, as he himself was brought) yet he for reverence sake to the Priest, shewed not his anger, but kindly thanked him for his paines and counsel, yet desired him not to speak any more concerning that matter, for he knew best what best pleased himself, and that he would do: so broke they off their talk and parted. So soon as the old man came home, he called to his son for his books, which when he had, he locked them up, and gave the Boy a Cart Whip in place of them, saying to him: "Boy, I will have you no Priest, you shall not be better learned than I, you can tell by the Almanack when it is best sowing Wheat, when Barley, Peas and Beans: and when the best libbing is, when to sell Grain and Cattle I will teach thee; for I have all Fairs and Markets as perfect in my memory, as Sir _John_, our Priest, has Mass without Book: take me this Whip, I will teach the use of it. It will be more profitable to thee than this harsh Latin: make no reply, but follow my counsel, or else by the Mass thou shalt feel the smart hand of my anger." Young _Bacon_ thought this but hard dealing, yet he would not reply, but within six or eight days he gave his Father the slip, and went to a Cloister some twenty miles off, where he was entertained, and so continued his Learning, and in small time came to be so famous, that he was sent for to the University of Oxford, where he long time studied, and grew so excellent in the secrets of Art and Nature, that not England only, but all Christendom, admired him. HOW FRYER BACON MADE A BRAZEN HEAD TO SPEAK, BY THE WHICH HE WOULD HAVE WALLED ENGLAND ABOUT WITH BRASS. Fryer _Bacon_, reading one day of the many conquests of England, bethought himself how he might keep it hereafter from the like conquests, and so make himself famous hereafter to all posterity. This (after great study) he found could be no way so well done as one; which was to make a head of Brass, and if he could make this head to speak (and hear it when it speaks) then might he be able to wall all England about with Brass. To this purpose he got one Fryer _Bungy_ to assist him, who was a great Scholar and a Magician, (but not to be compared to Fryer _Bacon_), these two with great study and pains so framed a head of Brass, that in the inward parts thereof there was all things like as in a natural man's head: this being done, they were as far from perfection of the work as they were before, for they knew not how to give those parts that they had made motion, without which it was impossible that it should speak: many books they read, but yet could not find out any hope of what they sought, that at the last they concluded to raise a spirit, and to know of him that which they could not attain to by their own studies. To do this they prepared all things ready and went one Evening to a wood thereby, and after many ceremonies used, they spake the words of conjuration, which the Devil straight obeyed and appeared unto them, asking what they would? "Know," said Fryer _Bacon_, "that we have made an artificial head of Brass, which we would have to speak, to the furtherance of which we have raised thee, and being raised, we will keep thee here, unless thou tell to us the way and manner how to make this Head to speak." The Devil told him that he had not that power of himself: "Beginner of lies," said Fryer _Bacon_, "I know that thou wouldst dissemble, and therefore tell it us quickly, or else we will here bind thee to remain during our pleasures." At these threatenings the Devil consented to do it, and told them, that with a continual fume of the six hottest simples it should have motion, and in one month space speak, the Time of the month or day he knew not: also he told them, that if they heard it not before it had done speaking, all their labour should be lost: they being satisfied, licensed the Spirit for to depart. Then went these two learned Fryers home again, and prepared the Simples ready, and made the fume, and with continual watching attended when this Brazen-head would speak: thus watched they for three weeks without any rest, so that they were so weary and sleepy, that they could not any longer refrain from rest: then called Fryer _Bacon_ his man _Miles_, and told him, that it was not unknown to him what pains Fryer _Bungy_ and himself had taken for three weeks space, only to make, and to hear the Brazen-head speak, which if they did not, then had they lost all their labour, and all England had a great loss thereby: therefore he entreated Miles that he would watch whilst that they slept, and call them if the Head speake. "Fear not, good Master," said Miles, "I will not sleep, but hearken and attend upon the head, and if it do chance to speak, I will call you: therefore I pray take you both your rests and let me alone for watching this head." After Fryer _Bacon_ had given him a great charge the second time, Fryer _Bungy_ and he went to sleep, and _Miles_, alone to watch the Brazen-head. _Miles_ to keep himself from sleeping, got a Tabor and Pipe, and being merry disposed sang him many a merry Song; and thus with his own Music and his Songs spent he his time, and kept from sleeping at last. After some noise the Head spake these two words: "_Time is_." Miles hearing it to speak no more, thought his Master would be angry if he waked him for that, and therefore he let them both sleep, and began to mock the Head in this manner: "Thou Brazen-faced Head, hath my Master took all this pains about thee, and now dost thou requite him with two words, _Time is_? had he watched with a Lawyer so long as he hath watched with thee, he would have given him more, and better words than thou hast yet. If thou canst speak no wiser, they shall sleep till doom's day for me. _Time is_: I know _Time is_, and that thou shall hear, good man Brazen face." And with this he sang him a song to his own music as to times and seasons, and went on, "Do you tell us, Copper-nose, when Time is? I hope we Scholars know our Times, when to drink drunk, when to kiss our hostess, when to go on her score, and when to pay it, that time comes seldom." After half an hour had passed, the Head did speak again, two words, which were these: "_Time was_." _Miles_ respected these words as little as he did the former, and would not wake them, but still scoffed at the Brazen head, that it had learned no better words, and have such a Tutor as his Master: and in scorn of it sung a Song to the tune of "A Rich Merchant man," beginning as follows: Time was when thou a kettle Wert filled with better matter: But Fryer _Bacon_ did thee spoil, When he thy sides did batter, with more to the same purpose. "_Time was_," said he, "I know that, Brazen face, without your telling, I know Time was, and I know what things there was when Time was, and if you speak no wiser, no Master shall be waked for me." Thus _Miles_ talked and sung till another half hour was gone, then the Brazen head spake again these words, "_Time is past_:" and therewith fell down, and presently followed a terrible noise, with strange flashes of fire, so that _Miles_ was half dead with fear. At this noise the two Fryers awaked, and wondered to see the whole room so full of smoke, but that being vanished they might perceive the Brazen head broken and lying on the ground: at this sight they grieved, and called _Miles_ to know how this came. Miles half dead with fear, said that it fell down of itself, and that with the noise and fire that followed he was almost frighted out of his wits: Fryer _Bacon_ asked him if he did not speak? "Yes," quoth _Miles_, "it spake, but to no purpose. I'll have a Parrot speak better in that time than you have been teaching this Brazen head." "Out on thee, villain," said Fryer _Bacon_, "thou hast undone us both, hadst thou but called us when it did speak, all England had been walled round about with Brass, to its glory, and our eternal fames: what were the words it spake?" "Very few," said _Miles_, "and those none of the wisest that I have heard neither: first he said, '_Time is_.'" "Hadst thou called us then," said Fryer _Bacon_, "we had been made for ever." "Then," said _Miles_, "half an hour after it spake again and said '_Time was_.'" "And wouldst thou not call us then?" said _Bungy_. "Alas!" said _Miles_, "I thought he would have told me some long Tale, and then I purposed to have called you: then half an hour after, he cried '_Time is past_,' and made such a noise, that he hath waked you himself, methinks." At this Fryer _Bacon_ was in such a rage, that he would have beaten his man, but he was restrained by _Bungy_: but nevertheless for his punishment, he with his Art struck him dumb for one whole month's space. Thus that great work of these learned Fryers was overthrown (to their great griefs) by this simple fellow. HOW FRYER BACON BY HIS ART TOOK A TOWN, WHEN THE KING HAD LAIN BEFORE IT THREE MONTHS, WITHOUT DOING IT ANY HURT. In those times when Fryer _Bacon_ did all his strange tricks, the Kings of _England_ had a great part of _France_ which they held a long time, till civil wars at home in this Land made them to lose it. It did chance that the King of England (for some cause best known to himself) went into _France_ with a great Army, where after many victories, he did besiege a strong Town, and lay before it full three months, without doing to the Town any great damage, but rather received the hurt himself. This did so vex the King, that he sought to take it in any way, either by policy or strength: to this intent he made Proclamation, that whosoever could deliver this Town into his hand, he should have for his pains ten thousand Crowns truly paid. This was proclaimed, but there was none found that would undertake it: at length the news did come into _England_ of this great reward that was promised. Fryer _Bacon_ hearing of it, went into _France_, and being admitted to the King's presence, he thus spake unto him: "Your Majesty I am sure hath not forgot your poor servant _Bacon_, the love that you showed to me being last in your presence, hath drawn me for to leave my Country and my Studies, to do your Majesty service: I beseech your Grace, to command me so far as my poor Art or life may do you pleasure." The King thanked him for his love, but told him that he had now more need of Arms than Art, and wanted brave Soldiers rather than learned Scholars. Fryer _Bacon_ answered, "Your Grace saith well; but let me (under correction) tell you, that Art oftentimes doth these things that are impossible to Arms, which I will make good in few examples. I will speak only of things performed by Art and Nature, wherein there shall be nothing Magical: and first by the figuration of Art, there may be made Instruments of Navigation without men to row in them, as great ships, to brook the Sea, only with one man to steer them, and they shall sail far more swiftly than if they were full of men: Also Chariots that shall move with an unspeakable force, without any living creature to stir them. Likewise, an Instrument may be made to fly withal, if one sit in the midst of the Instrument, and do turn an engine, by which the wings being Artificially composed, may beat air after the manner of a flying Bird. By an Instrument of three fingers high, and three fingers broad, a man may rid himself and others from all Imprisonment: yea, such an Instrument may easily be made, whereby a man may violently draw unto him a thousand men, will they, nill they, or any other thing. By Art also an Instrument may be made, wherewith men may walk in the bottom of the Sea or Rivers without bodily danger: this _Alexander_ the Great used (as the Ethnic philosopher reporteth) to the end he might behold the Secrets of the Seas. But Physical Figurations are far more strange: for by that may be framed Perspects and Looking-glasses, that one thing shall appear to be many, as one man shall appear to be a whole Army, and one Sun or Moon shall seem divers. Also perspects may be so framed, that things far off shall seem most nigh unto us: with one of these did _Julius Cæsar_ from the Sea coasts in _France_ marke and observe the situation of the Castles in _England_. Bodies may also be so framed, that the greatest things shall appear to be the least, the highest lowest, the most secret to be the most manifest, and in such like sort the contrary. Thus did _Socrates_ perceive, that the Dragon which did destroy the City and Country adjoining with his noisome breath, and contagious influence, did lurk in the dens between the Mountains: and thus may all things that are done in Cities or Armies be discovered by the enemies. Again, in such wise may bodies be framed, that venemous and infectious influences may be brought whither a man will: In this did _Aristotle_ instruct _Alexander_; through which instruction the poyson of a Basiliske, being lifted up upon the wall of a City, the poyson was conveyed into the City, to the destruction thereof: Also perspects may be made to deceive the sight, as to make a man believe that he seeth great store of riches when there is not any. But it appertaineth to a higher power of Figuration, that beams should be brought and assembled by divers flections and reflections in any distance that we will, to burne anything that is opposite unto it, as is witnessed by those Perspects or Glasses that burn before and behind. But the greatest and chiefest of all figurations and things figured, is to describe the heavenly bodies, according to their length and breadth in a corporal figure, wherein they may corporally move with a daily motion. These things are worth a kingdom to a wise man. These may suffise, my royal Lord, to shew what Art can do: and these, with many things more, as strange, I am able by Art to perform. Then take no thought for winning this Town, for by my Art you shall (ere many days be past) have your desire." The King all this while heard him with admiration: but hearing him now, that he would undertake to win the Town, he burst out in these speeches: "Most learned _Bacon_, do but what thou hast said, and I will give thee what thou most desirest, either wealth or honour, choose what thou wilt, and I will be as ready to perform, as I have been to promise." "Your Majesty's love is all that I seek," said the Fryer, "let me have that, and I have honour enough, for wealth, I have content, the wise should seek no more: but to the purpose. Let your Pioneers raise up a mount so high, (or rather higher), than the wall, and then you shall see some probability of that which I have promised." This Mount in two days was raised: then Fryer _Bacon_ went with the King to the Top of it, and did with a perspect shew to him the Town, as plainly as if he had been in it: at this the King did wonder, but Fryer _Bacon_ told him, that he should wonder more, ere next day noon: against which Time, he desired him to have his whole Army in readiness, for to scale the wall upon a signal given by him, from the Mount. This the King promised to do, and so returned to his Tent full of Joy, that he should gain this strong Town. In the morning Fryer _Bacon_ went up to the Mount and set his Glasses, and other Instruments up: in the meantime the King ordered his Army, and stood in a readiness for to give the assaults: when the signal was given which was the waving of a flag. Ere nine of the clock Fryer _Bacon_ had burnt the State-house of the Town, with other houses only by his Mathematical Glasses, which made the whole Town in an uproar, for none did know how it came: whilst that they were quenching of the same, Fryer _Bacon_ did wave his flag: upon which signal given, the King set upon the Town, and took it with little or no resistance. Thus through the Art of this learned man the King got this strong Town, which he could not do with all his men without Fryer _Bacon's_ help. HOW FRYER BACON BURNT HIS BOOKS OF MAGIC AND GAVE HIMSELF TO THE STUDY OF DIVINITY ONLY; AND HOW HE TURNED ANCHORITE. Now in a time when Fryer _Bacon_ kept his Chamber (having some great grief) he fell into divers meditations: sometimes into the vanity of Arts and Sciences: then would he condemn himself for studying of those things that were so contrary to his Order and Soul's health; and would say that Magic made a Man a Devil; sometimes would he meditate on Divinity; then would he cry out upon himself for neglecting the study of it, and for studying Magic: sometime would he meditate on the shortness of man's life, then would he condemn himself for spending a time so short, so ill as he had done his: so would he go from one thing to another and in all condemn his former studies. And that the world should know how truly he did repent his wicked life, he caused to be made a great fire; and sending for many of his Friends, Scholars, and others, he spake to them after this manner: "My good Friends and fellow Students, it is not unknown unto you, how that through my Art I have attained to that credit, that few men living ever had. Of the wonders that I have done, all England can speak, both King and Commons: I have unlocked the secret of Art and Nature, and let the world see those things, that have layen hid since the death of Hermes, that rare and profound Philosopher: My Studies have found the secrets of the Stars; the Books that I have made of them, do serve for Precedents to our greatest Doctors, so excellent hath my Judgement been therein. I likewise have found out the secrets of Trees, Plants and Stones, with their several uses; yet all this knowledge of mine I esteem so lightly, that I wish that I were ignorant, and knew nothing: for the knowledge of these things, (as I have truly found) serveth not to better a man in goodness, but only to make him proud and think too well of himself. What hath all my knowledge of nature's secrets gained me? Only this, the loss of a better knowledge, the loss of divine Studies, which makes the immortal part of man (his Soul) blessed. I have found, that my knowledge has been a heavy burden, and has kept down my good thoughts: but I will remove the cause which are these Books: which I do purpose here before you all to burn." They all intreated him to spare the Books, because in them there were those things that after-ages might receive great benefit by. He would not hearken unto them but threw them all into the fire, and in that flame burnt the greatest learning in the world. Then did he dispose of all his goods; some part he gave to poor Scholars, and some he gave to other poor folks: nothing he left for himself: then caused he to be made in the Church-wall a Cell, where he locked himself in, and there remained till his death. His time he spent in Prayer, Meditation and such Divine Exercises, and did seek by all means to persuade men from the study of Magic. Thus lived he some two years space in that Cell, never coming forth: his meat and drink he received in at a window, and at that window he did discourse with those that came to him; His grave he digged with his own nails, and was laid there when he dyed. Thus was the Life and Death of this famous Fryer, who lived the most part of his life a Magician, and died a true penitent sinner and an Anchorite. When Hester had finished reading, one of the boys said that if people believed such things as that, he thought the wonder was that they made any progress at all. Uncle Fritz said that in matters which make up what we call science, they did not make much progress. The arts of the world do not seem to have advanced much between the days of Solomon and those of William the Conqueror. "As you see," said Uncle Fritz, "an inventor was set down as a magician. I think you can remember more instances." Yes. Almost all the young people remember that in Marco Polo's day there was a distinguished Venetian engineer with the armies of Genghis Khan, whose wonderful successes gave rise, perhaps, to the story of Aladdin.[5] The scene of his successes was Pekin; and it is to be remembered that the story of Aladdin is not properly one of the Arabian Nights, and that the scene is laid in China. This led them to trying to match the wonders of Aladdin and of the Arabian Nights by the wonders of modern invention; and they pleased themselves by thinking of marvels they could show to unlearned nations if they had the resources of Mr. Edison's laboratory. "Aladdin rubbed his lamp," said Blanche. "You see, the lamp was his electrical machine; and when he rubbed it, the lightnings went flying hither and thither, and said, 'Here we are.'" "That is all very fine," said Jack Withers; "but I stand by the Arabian Nights, after all, and I think I shall, till Mr. Edison or the Taunton locomotive shop will make for me some high-stepper on whose back I may rise above the clouds, pass over the length and breadth of Massachusetts, descend in the garden where Blanche is confined by the hated mistress of a boarding-school in Walpole, and then, winning her ready consent, can mount again with her, and before morning descend in the garden of a beautiful cottage at Newport. We will spend six weeks in playing tennis in the daytime, dancing in the Casino in the evenings, and in sailing in Frank Shattuck's yacht between whiles. Then, and not till then, would I admit that the Arabian Nights have been outdone by modern science." They all laughed at Jack's extravaganza, which is of a kind to which they are beginning to be accustomed. But Mabel stuck to her text, and said seriously, that Uncle Fred had said that what people now called science sprung from the workshops of these very magicians. "The magicians then had all the science there was. And if magic had not got a bad name, should we not call the men of science magicians now?" Uncle Fritz said yes to all her questions, but he said that they did not cover the whole matter. The difference between a magician and a man of science involves these habits: the magician keeps secret what he knows, while the man of science discloses all he learns. Then the magician affected to have spiritual power at command, while the man of science only affects to use what he calls physical powers. Till either of them tell us how to distinguish spiritual forces from physical forces, the second distinction is of the less importance. But the other has made all the difference in the world between the poor magic-men and the science-men. For, as they had seen with Friar Bacon, the magic-men have had their stories told by most ignorant people, seeing they did not generally leave any records behind them; but the men of modern science, having chosen to tell their own stories, have had them told, on the whole, reasonably well, though generally stupidly. "What a pity we have not Solomon's books of science!" said John Tolman. "It is one of the greatest of pities that such books as those were not kept. It seems as if people would have built on such foundations, and that Science would have marched from step to step, instead of beginning over and over again. But we do have Pliny's Natural History, as he chose to call it. Far from building on that as a foundation, the Dark Ages simply accepted it. And there are blunders or sheer lies in that book, and in Aristotle's books, and Theophrastus's, and other such, which have survived even to our day." The children were peeping into the collection from which the Friar Bacon stories had been read, and they lighted on these scraps about the supposed life of Virgil. To the people of the Dark Ages Virgil was much more a man of magic than a poet. HOW VIRGILIUS WAS SET TO SCHOOL. As Virgilius was born, then the town of Rome quaked and trembled: and in his youth he was wise and subtle, and was put to school at Tolentin, where he studied diligently, for he was of great understanding. Upon a time the scholars had licence to go to play and sport them in the fields after the usance of the old time; and there was also Virgilius thereby also walking among the hills all about: it fortuned he spied a great hole in the side of a great hill wherein he went so deep that he could not see no more light, and then he went a little further therein, and then he saw some light again, and then went he forth straight: and within a little while after, he heard a voice that called, "Virgilius, Virgilius;" and he looked about, and he could not see no body; then Virgilius spake and asked, "Who calleth me?" Then heard he the voice again, but he saw nobody: then said he, "Virgilius, see ye not that little board lying beside you there, marked with that word?" Then answered Virgilius, "I see that board well enough." The voice said, "Do away that board, and let me out thereat." Then answered Virgilius to the voice that was under the little board, and said, "Who art thou that talkest me so!" Then answered the devil: "I am a devil, conjured out of the body of a certain man, and banished till the day of judgement, without I be delivered by the hands of men. Thus, Virgilius, I pray you to deliver me out of this pain, and I shall shew unto thee many books of necromancy, and how thou shalt come by it lightly and know the practise therein, that no man in the science of necromancy shall pass thee; and moreover I shall shew and inform you so that thou shalt have all thy desire, whereby methinks it is a great gift for so little a doing, for ye may also thus all your friends helpen, and make your enemies unmighty." Through that great promise was Virgil tempted; he had the fiend shew the books to him that he might have and occupy them at his will. And so the fiend shewed him, and then Virgilius pulled open a board, and there was a little hole, and thereat crawled the devil out like an eel, and came and stood before Virgilius like a big man; thereat Virgilius was astonished and marvelled greatly thereof that so great a man might come out at so little a hole; then said Virgilius, "should ye well pass into the hole that ye came out of?" "Yea, I shall well," said the devil.--"I hold the best pledge that I have, ye shall not do it." "Well," said the devil, "thereto I consent." And then the devil crawled into the little hole again, and as he was therein, Virgilius covered the hole again, and so was the devil beguiled, and might not there come out again, but there abideth still therein. Then called the devil dreadfully to Virgilius and said, "What have ye done?" Virgilius answered, "Abide there still to your day appointed." And from thenceforth abideth he there. And so Virgilius became very cunning in the practise of the black science. HOWE THE EMPEROR ASKED COUNSEL OF VIRGILIUS, HOW THE NIGHT RUNNERS AND ILL DOERS MIGHT BE RID-OUT OF THE STREETS. The emperor had many complaints of the night runners and thieves, and also of the great murdering of people in the night, in so much that the emperor asked counsel of Virgilius, and said: "That he hath great complaints of the thieves that runneth by night for they kill many men; what counsel, Virgilius, is best to be done?" Then answered Virgilius to the emperor, "Ye shall make a horse of copper and a copper man upon his back, having in his hands a flail of iron, and that horse, ye shall so bring afore the towne house, and ye shall let cry that a man from henceforth at ten of the clock should ring a bell, and he that after the bell was rung in the streets should be slain, no work thereof should be done." And when this cry was made the ruffians set not a point, but kept the streets as they did afore and would not let therefor; and as soon as the bell was rung at ten of the clock, then leaped the horse of copper with the copper man through the streets of Rome, insomuch that he left not one street in Rome unsought; and as soon as he found any man or woman in the street he slew them stalk dead, insomuch that he slew above two hundred persons or more. And this seeing, the thieves and night-runners how they might find a remedy therefor, thought in their minds to make a drag with a ladder thereon; and as they would go out by night they took their ladders with them, and when they heard the horse come, then cast they the drag upon the houses, and so went up upon their ladders to the top of the houses, so that the copper man might not touch them; and so abide they still in their wicked doing. Then came they again to the emperor and complained, and then the emperor asked counsel of Virgilius; and Virgilius answered and said, "that then he must get two copper hounds and set them of either side of the copper horse, and let cry again that no body after the bell is rung should depart out of their house that would live." But the night walkers cared not a point for that cry; but when they heard the horse coming, with their ladders climbed upon the houses, but the dogs leaped after and tore them all in pieces; and thus the noise went through Rome, in so much that nobody durst in the night go in the street, and thus all the night-walkers were destroyed. HOW VIRGILIUS MADE A LAMP THAT AT ALL TIMES BURNED. For profit of the common people, Virgilius on a great mighty marble pillar, did make a bridge that came up to the palace, and so went Virgilius well up the pillar out of the palace; that palace and pillar stood in the midst of Rome; and upon this pillar made he a lamp of glass that always burned without going out, and nobody might put it out; and this lamp lightened over all the city of Rome from the one corner to the other, and there was not so little a street but it gave such light that it seemed two torches there had stand; and upon the walls of the palace made he a metal man that held in his hand a metal bow that pointed ever upon the lamp for to shoot it out; but always burned the lamp and gave light over all Rome. And upon a time went the burgesses' daughters to play in the palace and beheld the metal man; and one of them asked in sport, why he shot not? And then she came to the man and with her hand touched the bow, and then the bolt flew out, and brake the lamp that Virgilius made; and it was wonder that the maiden went not out of her mind for the great fear she had, and also the other burgesses' daughters that were in her company, of the great stroke that it gave when it hit the lamp, and when they saw the metal man so swiftly run his way; and never after was he no more seen; and this foresaid lamp was abiding burning after the death of Virgilius by the space of three hundred years or more. It is on the wrecks and ruins recorded in such fables as these that modern science is builded. IV. BENVENUTO CELLINI. "Now we will leave the fairy tales," said Uncle Fritz, "and begin on modern times." "Modern times means since 1492," said Alice,--"the only date in history I am quite sure of, excepting 1866." "Eighteen-hundred and sixty-six," said John Goodrich,--"the _Annus Mirabilis_, celebrated for the birth of Miss Alice Francis and Mr. J. G." "Hush, hush! Uncle Fritz wants to say something." "We will leave the fairy tales," said poor chicken-pecked Uncle Fritz, "and begin with Benvenuto Cellini. Who has seen any of his work?" Several of the girls who had been in Europe remembered seeing gold and silver work of Benvenuto Cellini's in the museums. Uncle Fritz told them that the little hand-bell used on his own tea-table was modelled at Chicopee, in Massachusetts, from a bell which was the design of Benvenuto Cellini; and he sent for the bell that the children might see how ingenious was the ornamentation, and how simply the different designs were connected together. He told Alice she might read first from Vasari's account of him. Vasari's book, which the children now saw for the first time, is a very entertaining one. Vasari was himself an artist, of the generation just following Michael Angelo. He was, indeed, the contemporary of Raphael. But he is remembered now, not for his pictures, nor for his work in architecture, both of which were noted in his time, but for his lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors, and architects, which was first published in 1550. Benvenuto Cellini was born ten years before Vasari, and here is a part of Vasari's life of him. LIFE OF BENVENUTO CELLINI. Benvenuto Cellini, citizen of Florence, born in 1500, at present a sculptor, in his youth cultivated the goldsmith's business, and had no equal in that branch. He set jewels, and adorned them with diminutive figures, exquisitely formed, and some of them so curious and fanciful that nothing finer or more beautiful can be conceived. At Rome he made for Pope Clement VII. a button to be worn upon his pontifical habit, fixing a diamond to it with the most exquisite art. He was employed to make the stamps for the Roman mint, and there never have been seen finer coins than those that were struck in Rome at that period. After the death of Pope Clement, Benvenuto returned to Florence, where he made stamps with the head of Duke Alessandro, for the mint, wonderfully beautiful. Benvenuto, having at last devoted himself to sculpture and casting statues, made in France many works, while he was employed at the Court of King Francis I. He afterwards came back to his native country, where he executed in metal the statue of Perseus, who cut off Medusa's head. This work was brought to perfection with the greatest art and diligence imaginable. Though I might here enlarge on the productions of Benvenuto, who always shewed himself a man of great spirit and vivacity, bold, active, enterprising, and formidable to his enemies,--a man, in short, who knew as well how to speak to princes as to exert himself in his art,--I shall add nothing further, since he has written an account of his life and works, and a treatise on goldsmith's work as well as on casting statues and many other subjects, with more art and eloquence than it is possible for me to imitate. I shall therefore content myself with this account of his chief performances. Benvenuto was quite proud of his own abilities as a writer. Very fortunately for us he has left his own memoirs. Here is the introduction. BENVENUTO'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. "It is a duty incumbent on upright and credible men of all ranks, who have performed anything noble or praiseworthy, to record, in their own writing, the events of their lives; yet they should not commence this honorable task before they have passed their fortieth year. Such at least is my opinion, now that I have completed my fifty-eighth year, and am settled in Florence. "Looking back on some delightful and happy events of my life, and on many misfortunes so truly overwhelming that the appalling retrospect makes me wonder how I reached this age, in vigor and prosperity, through God's goodness, I have resolved to publish an account of my life. "My grandfather, Andrea Cellini, was still living when I was about three years of age, and he was then above a hundred. As they were one day removing a water-pipe, a large scorpion, which they had not perceived, came out of it. The scorpion descended upon the ground and had got under a great bench, when I, seeing it, ran and caught it in my hand. This scorpion was of such a size that whilst I held it in my little hand, it put out its tail on one side, and on the other darted its two mouths. I ran overjoyed to my grandfather, crying out, 'Grandfather, look at my pretty little crab!' The good old man, who knew it to be a scorpion, was so frightened, and so apprehensive for my safety, that he seemed ready to drop down dead, and begged me with great eagerness to give the creature to him; but I grasped it the harder and cried, for I did not choose to part with it. My father, who was in the house, ran to us upon hearing the noise, and, happening just at that instant to espy a pair of scissors, he laid hold of them, and, by caressing and playing with me, he contrived to cut off the head and tail of the scorpion. Then, finding I had received no harm from the venomous reptile, he pronounced it a happy omen." * * * * * His father taught him to play upon the flute, and wished him to devote himself to music; but his own inclinations were different. "Having attained the age of fifteen, I engaged myself, against my father's inclinations, with a goldsmith named Antonio di Sandro, an excellent artist and a very worthy man. My father would not have him allow me any wages; for this reason, that since I voluntarily applied myself to this art, I might have an opportunity to withdraw whenever I thought proper. So great was my inclination to improve, that in a few months I rivalled the most skilful journeyman in the business, and began to reap some fruits from my labor. I continued, however, to play sometimes, through complaisance to my father, either upon the flute or the horn; and I constantly drew tears and deep sighs from him every time he heard me. From a feeling of filial piety, I often gave him that satisfaction, endeavoring to persuade him that it gave me also particular pleasure. "Once when I was staying at Pisa, my father wrote to me in every letter exhorting me not to neglect my flute, in which he had taken so much pains to instruct me. Upon this, I entirely lost all inclination to return to him; and to such a degree did I hate that abominable flute, that I thought myself in a sort of paradise in Pisa, where I never once played upon that instrument." * * * * * At the age of twenty-three (in 1523), Cellini went to Rome, where he did much work for the Pope, Clement VII. "About this time so dreadful an epidemic disease prevailed in Rome, that several thousands died every day. Somewhat terrified at this calamity, I began to indulge myself in certain recreations, as the fancy took me. On holidays I amused myself with visiting the antiquities of that city, and sometimes took their figures in wax; at other times, I made drawings of them. As these antiquities are all ruinous edifices, where a number of pigeons build their nests, I had a mind to divert myself among them with my fowling-piece, and often returned home laden with pigeons of the largest size. But I never chose to put more than a single ball into my piece, and in this manner, being a good marksman, I procured a considerable quantity of game. The fowling-piece was, both on the inside and the outside, as bright as a looking-glass. I likewise made the powder as fine as the minutest dust, and in the use of it I discovered some of the most admirable secrets that ever were known till this time. When I had charged my piece with a quantity of powder equal in weight to the fifth part of the ball, it carried two hundred paces, point blank. "While I was enjoying these pleasures, my spirits suddenly revived. I no longer had my usual gloom, and I worked to more purpose than when my attention was wholly engrossed by business; on the whole, my gun turned rather to my advantage than the contrary. "All Italy was now up in arms, and the Constable Bourbon, finding there were no troops in Rome, eagerly advanced with his army towards that capital. Upon the news of his approach, all the inhabitants took up arms. I engaged fifty brave young men to serve under me, and we were well paid and kindly treated. "The army of the Duke of Bourbon having already appeared before the walls of Rome, Alessandro del Bene requested that I would go with him to oppose the enemy. I complied, and, taking one of the stoutest youths with us,--we were afterwards joined by another,--we came up to the walls of Campo Santo, and there descried that great army which was employing every effort to enter the town at that part of the wall to which we had approached. Many young men were slain without the walls, where they fought with the utmost fury; there was a remarkably thick mist. "Levelling my arquebuse where I saw the thickest crowd of the enemy, I discharged it with a deliberate aim at a person who seemed to be lifted above the rest; but the mist prevented me from distinguishing whether he were on horseback or on foot. I then cautiously approached the walls, and perceived that there was an extraordinary confusion among the assailants, occasioned by our having shot the Duke of Bourbon; he was, as I understood afterwards, that chief personage whom I saw raised above the rest." * * * * * The Pope was induced by an enemy of Benvenuto, the Cardinal Salviati, to send for a rival goldsmith, Tobbia, to come to Rome. On his arrival both were summoned into the Pope's presence. "He then commanded each of us to draw a design for setting a unicorn's horn, the most beautiful that ever was seen, which had cost 17,000 ducats. As the Pope proposed making a present of it to King Francis, he chose to have it first richly adorned with gold; so he employed us to draw the designs. When we had finished them we carried them to the Pope. Tobbia's design was in the form of a candlestick; the horn was to enter it like a candle, and at the bottom of the candlestick he had represented four little unicorns' heads,--a most simple invention. As soon as I saw it, I could not contain myself so as to avoid smiling at the oddity of the conceit. The Pope, perceiving this, said, 'Let me see that design of yours.' It was the single head of a unicorn, fitted to receive the horn. I had made the most beautiful sort of head conceivable, for I drew it partly in the form of a horse's head, and partly in that of a hart's, adorned with the finest sort of wreaths and other devices; so that no sooner was my design seen but the whole Court gave it the preference." * * * * * Benvenuto continued to make many beautiful things for Pope Clement VII. up to the time of his death. That Pope was succeeded in the papal chair by Cardinal Farnese (Paul III.), on the 13th of October, 1534. "I had formed a resolution to set out for France, as well because I perceived that the Pope's favor was withdrawn from me by means of slanderers who misrepresented my services, as for fear that those of my enemies who had most influence might still do me some greater injury. For these reasons I was desirous to remove to some other country, and see whether fortune would there prove more favorable to me. Leaving Rome, I bent my course to Florence, whence I travelled on to Bologna, Venice, and Padua." He reached Paris, with two workmen whom he took with him from Rome, "without meeting any ill accident, and travelling on in uninterrupted mirth." But being dissatisfied with his reception there, he returned instantly to Rome, where his fears were realized; for he was arrested by order of the Pope, and made a prisoner in the Castle of St. Angelo. "This was the first time I ever knew the inside of a prison, and I was then in my thirty-seventh year. The constable of the Castle of St. Angelo was a countryman of mine, a Florentine, named Signor Giorgio Ugolini. This worthy gentleman behaved to me with the greatest politeness, permitting me to walk freely about the castle on my parole of honor, and for no other reason but because he saw the severity and injustice of my treatment. "Finding I had been treated with so much rigor in the affair, I began to think seriously about my escape. I got my servants to bring me new thick sheets, and did not send back the dirty ones. Upon their asking me for them, I answered that I had given them away to some of the poor soldiers. I pulled all the straw out of the tick of my bed, and burned it; for I had a chimney in the room where I lay. I then cut those sheets into a number of slips each about one third of a cubit in width; and when I thought I had made a sufficient quantity to reach from the top to the bottom of the lofty tower of the Castle of St. Angelo, I told my servants that I had given away as much of my linen as I thought proper, and desired they would take care to bring me clean sheets, adding that I would constantly return the dirty ones. "The constable of the castle had annually a certain disorder which totally deprived him of his senses; and when the fit came upon him, he was talkative to excess. Every year he had some different whim: one time he fancied himself metamorphosed into a pitcher of oil; another time he thought himself a frog, and began to leap as such; another time he imagined he was dead, and it was found necessary to humor his conceit by making a show of burying him; thus he had every year some new frenzy. This year he fancied himself a bat, and when he went to take a walk, he sometimes made just such a noise as bats do; he likewise used gestures with his hands and body, as if he were going to fly. His physicians and his old servants, who knew his disorder, procured him all the pleasures and amusements they could think of, and as they found he delighted greatly in my conversation, they frequently came to me to conduct me to his apartment, where the poor man often detained me three or four hours chatting with him. "He asked me whether I had ever had a fancy to fly. I answered that I had always been very ready to attempt such things as men found most difficult; and that with regard to flying, as God had given me a body admirably well calculated for running, I had even resolution enough to attempt to fly. He then proposed to me to explain how I could contrive it. I replied that when I attentively considered the several creatures that fly, and thought of effecting by art what they do by the force of nature, I did not find one so fit to imitate as the bat. As soon as the poor man heard mention made of a bat, he cried out aloud, 'It is very true! a bat is the thing.' He then addressed himself to me, and said, 'Benvenuto, if you had the opportunity, would you have the heart to make an attempt to fly?' I answered that if he would give me leave, I had courage enough to attempt to fly by means of a pair of wings waxed over. He said thereupon, 'I should like to see you fly; but as the Pope has enjoined me to watch over you with the utmost care, I am resolved to keep you locked up with a hundred keys, that you may not slip out of my hands.' I said, before all present, 'Confine me as close as you please, I will contrive to make my escape, notwithstanding.'" At night, with a pair of pincers which he had secured, he removed the nails which fastened the plates of iron fixed upon the door, imitating with wax the heads of the nails he took out, so that their absence need not be seen. "One holiday evening, the constable being very much disordered, he scarce said anything else but that he was become a bat, and desired his people that if Benvenuto should happen to escape, they should take no notice of it, for he must soon catch me, as he should doubtless be better able to fly by night than I; adding, 'Benvenuto is only a counterfeit bat, but I am a bat in real earnest.' "As I had formed a resolution to attempt my escape that night, I began by praying fervently to Almighty God that it would please him to assist me in the enterprise. Two hours before daybreak, I took the iron plates from the door with great trouble. I at last forced the door, and having taken with me my slips of linen, which I had rolled up in bundles with the utmost care, I went out and got upon the right side of the tower, and leaped upon two tiles of the roof with the greatest ease. I was in a white doublet, and had on a pair of white half-hose, over which I wore a pair of little light boots, that reached half-way up my legs, and in one of these I put my dagger. I then took the end of one of my bundles of long slips, which I had made out of the sheets of my bed, and fastened it to one of the tiles of the roof that happened to jut out. Then letting myself down gently, the whole weight of my body being sustained by my arm, I reached the ground. It was not a moonlight night, but the stars shone with resplendent lustre. When I had touched the ground, I first contemplated the great height which I had descended with so much courage, and then walked away in high joy, thinking I had recovered my liberty. But I soon found myself mistaken, for the constable had caused two pretty high walls to be erected on that side. I managed to fix a long pole against the first wall, and by the strength of my arms to climb to the top of it. I then fastened my other string of slips, and descended down the steep wall. "There was still another one; and in letting myself down, being unable to hold out any longer, I fell, and, striking my head, became quite insensible. I continued in that state about an hour and a half, as nearly as I can guess. The day beginning to break, the cool breeze that precedes the rising of the sun brought me to my senses; but I conceived a strange notion that I had been beheaded, and was then in purgatory. I recovered by degrees my strength and powers, and, perceiving that I had got out of the castle, I soon recollected all that had befallen me. Upon attempting to rise from the ground, I found that my right leg was broken, three inches above the heel, which threw me into a terrible consternation. Cutting with my dagger the part of my string of slips I had left, I bandaged my leg as well as I could. I then crept on my hands and knees towards the gate with my dagger in my hand, and effected my egress. It was about five hundred paces from the place where I had had my fall to the gate by which I entered the city. It was then broad daylight. As I happened to meet with a water-carrier, who had loaded his ass, and filled his vessels with water, I called to him, and begged he would put me upon the beast's back, and carry me to the landing-place of the steps of St. Peter's Church. I offered to give him a gold crown, and, so saying, I clapped my hand upon my purse, which was very well lined. The honest waterman instantly took me upon his back, and carried me to the steps before St. Peter's Church, where I desired him to leave me and run back to his ass. "Whilst I was crawling along upon all four, one of the servants of Cardinal Cornaro knew me, and, running immediately to his master's apartment, awakened him out of his sleep, saying to him, 'My most reverend Lord, here is your jeweller, Benvenuto, who has made his escape out of the castle, and is crawling along upon all four, quite besmeared with blood.' The cardinal, the moment he heard this, said to his servants, 'Run, and bring him hither to my apartment upon your backs.' When I came into his presence the good cardinal bade me fear nothing, and immediately sent for an excellent surgeon, who set the bone, bandaged my leg, and bled me. The cardinal then caused me to be put into a private apartment, and went directly to the Vatican, in order to intercede in my behalf with the Pope. "Meanwhile the report of my escape made a great noise all over Rome; for the long string of sheeting fastened to the top of the lofty tower of the castle had excited attention, and the inhabitants ran in crowds to behold the sight. By this time the frenzy of the constable had reached its highest pitch; he wanted, in spite of all his servants, to fly from the same tower himself, declaring there was but one way to retake me, and that was to fly after me. He caused himself to be carried into the presence of his Holiness, and began a terrible outcry, saying that I had promised him, upon my honor, that I would not fly away, and had flown away notwithstanding." The Cardinal Cornaro, however, and others interceded for Benvenuto with the Pope, on account of his courage, and the extraordinary efforts of his ingenuity, which seemed to surpass human capacity. The Pope said he had intended to keep him near his person, and to prevent him from returning to France, adding, "I am concerned to hear of his sufferings, however. Bid him take care of his health; and when he is thoroughly recovered, it shall be my study to make him some amends for his past troubles." He was visited by young and old, persons of all ranks. After this, Benvenuto went once more to France, where he was received with high consideration by Francis I., who gave him, for his home and workshop in Paris, a large old castle called the Nesle, of a triangular form, close to the walls of the city. Here, with workmen brought with him from Italy, he began many great works. "Being thus become a favorite of the king, I was universally admired. As soon as I had received silver to make it of, I began to work on the statue of Jupiter, and took into my service several journeymen. We worked day and night with the utmost assiduity, insomuch that, having finished Jupiter, Vulcan, and Mars in earth, and Jupiter being pretty forward in silver, my shop began to make a grand show. Just about this time the king made his appearance at Paris, and I went to pay my respects to him. When his Majesty saw me, he called to me in high spirits, and asked me whether I had anything curious to show him at my shop, for he intended to call there. I told him of all I had done, and he expressed an earnest desire to see my performances; and after dinner that day, all the nobility belonging to the Court of France repaired to my shop. "I had just come home, and was beginning to work, when the king made his appearance at my castle gate. Upon hearing the sound of so many hammers, he commanded his retinue to be silent. All my people were at work, so that the king came upon us quite unexpectedly. As he entered the saloon, the first object he perceived was myself with a large piece of plate in my hand, which was to make the body of Jupiter; another was employed on the head, another again on the legs, so that the shop resounded with the beating of hammers. His Majesty was highly pleased, and returned to his palace, after having conferred so many favors on me that it would be tedious to enumerate them. "Having with the utmost diligence finished the beautiful statue of Jupiter, with its gilt pedestal, I placed it upon a wooden socle, which scarce made any appearance, and within that socle I fixed four little globes of wood, which were more than half hidden in their sockets, and so contrived that a little child could with the utmost ease move this statue of Jupiter backwards and forwards, and turn it about. I took it with me to Fontainebleau, where the King then resided. I was told to put it in the gallery,--a place which might be called a corridor, about two hundred paces long, adorned and enriched with pictures and pieces of sculpture, amongst them some of the finest imitations of the antique statues of Rome. Here also I introduced my Jupiter; and when I saw this great display of the wonders of art, I said to myself, 'This is like passing between the pikes of the enemy; Heaven protect me from all danger!' "This figure of Jupiter had a thunderbolt in his right hand, and by his attitude seemed to be just going to throw it; in his left I had placed a globe, and amongst the flames I had with great dexterity put a piece of white torch. On the approach of night I lighted the torch in the hand of Jupiter; and as it was raised somewhat above his head, the light fell upon the statue, and caused it to appear to much greater advantage than it would otherwise have done. When I saw his Majesty enter with several great lords and noblemen, I ordered my boy to push the statue before him, and this motion, being made with admirable contrivance, caused it to appear alive; thus the other figures in the gallery were left somewhat behind, and the eyes of all the beholders were first struck with my performance. "The king immediately cried out: 'This is one of the finest productions of art that ever was beheld. I, who take pleasure in such things and understand them, could never have conceived a piece of work the hundredth part so beautiful!'" * * * * * Cellini, however, who was exacting and sensitive, became dissatisfied with the treatment of the King of France; and, leaving his workmen at his tower of the Nesle, he returned to Italy, and engaged in the service of Cosmo de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who assigned him a house to work in. His chief performance here was a bronze statue of Perseus for the fine square before the Palazzo Vecchio. After many drawbacks, doubts, and difficulties,-- "I now took courage, resolving to depend on myself, and banished all those thoughts which from time to time occasioned me great inquietude, and made me sorely repent my ever having quitted France. I still flattered myself that if I could but finish my statue of Perseus, all my labors would be converted to delight, and meet with a glorious and happy reward. "This statue was intended to be of bronze, five ells in height, of one piece, and hollow. I first formed my model of clay, more slender than the statue was intended to be. I then baked it, and covered it with wax of the thickness of a finger, which I modelled into the perfect form of the statue. In order to effect in concave what the wax represented in convex, I covered the wax with clay, and baked this second covering. Thus, the wax dissolving, and escaping by fissures left open for the purpose, I obtained, between the first model and the second covering, a space for the introduction of the metal. In order to introduce the bronze without moving the first model, I placed the model in a pit dug under the furnace, and by means of pipes and apertures in the model itself, I meant to introduce the liquid metal. "After I had made its coat of earth, covered it well, and bound it properly with irons, I began by means of a slow fire to draw off the wax, which melted away by many vent-holes,--for the more of these are made, the better the moulds are filled; and when I had entirely stripped off the wax, I made a sort of fence round my Perseus, that is, round the mould, of bricks, piling them one upon another, and leaving several vacuities for the fire to exhale at. I next began gradually to put on the wood, and kept a constant fire for two days and two nights, till, the wax being quite off and the mould well baked, I began to dig a hole to bury my mould in, and observed all those fine methods of proceeding that are proscribed by our art. When I had completely dug my hole, I took my mould, and by means of levers and strong cables directed it with care, and suspended it a cubit above the level of the furnace, so that it hung exactly in the middle of the hole. I then let it gently down to the very bottom of the furnace, and placed it with all the care and exactness I possibly could. After I had finished this part of my task I began to make a covering of the very earth I had taken off; and in proportion as I raised the earth, I made vents for it, of a sort of tubes of baked earth, generally used for conduits, and other things of a similar nature. "I had caused my furnace to be filled with several pieces of brass and bronze, and heaped them upon one another in the manner taught us by our art, taking particular care to leave a passage for the flames, that the metal might the sooner assume its color, and dissolve into a fluid. Thus, with great alacrity, I excited my men to lay on the pine-wood, which, because of the oiliness of the resinous matter that oozes from the pine-tree and that my furnace was admirably well made, burned at such a rate that I was continually obliged to run to and fro, which greatly fatigued me. I, however, bore the hardship; but, to add to my misfortune, the shop took fire, and we were all very much afraid that the roof would fall in and crush us. From another quarter, that is, from the garden, the sky poured in so much rain and wind that it cooled my furnace. "Thus did I continue to struggle with these cross accidents for several hours, and exerted myself to such a degree that my constitution, though robust, could no longer bear such severe hardship, and I was suddenly attacked by a most violent intermitting fever; in short, I was so ill that I found myself under a necessity of lying down upon my bed. This gave me great concern, but it was unavoidable. I thereupon addressed myself to my assistants, who were about ten in number, saying to them: 'Be careful to observe the method which I have shown you, and use all possible expedition; for the metal will soon be ready. You cannot mistake; these two worthy men here will quickly make the orifices. With two such directors you can certainly contrive to pour out the hot metal, and I have no doubt but my mould will be filled completely. I find myself extremely ill, and really believe that in a few hours this severe disorder will put an end to my life.' Thus I left them in great sorrow, and went to bed. I then ordered the maids to carry victuals and drink into the shop for all the men, and told them I did not expect to live till the next morning. In this manner did I continue for two hours in a violent fever, which I every moment perceived to increase, and I was incessantly crying out, 'I am dying, I am dying.' "My housekeeper was one of the most sensible and affectionate women in the world. She rebuked me for giving way to vain fears, and at the same time attended me with the greatest kindness and care imaginable; however, seeing me so very ill, and terrified to such a degree, she could not contain herself, but shed a flood of tears, which she endeavored to conceal from me. Whilst we were both in this deep affliction, I perceived a man enter the room, who in his person appeared to be as crooked and distorted as a great S, and began to express himself in these terms, in a dismal and melancholy voice: 'Alas, poor Benvenuto, your work is spoiled, and the misfortune admits of no remedy.' "No sooner had I heard the words uttered by this messenger of evil, but I cried out so loud that my voice might be heard to the skies, and got out of bed. I began immediately to dress, and, giving plenty of kicks and cuffs to the maidservants and the boy as they offered to help me on with my clothes, I complained bitterly in these terms: 'Oh, you envious and treacherous wretches, this is a piece of villany contrived on purpose; but I will sift it to the bottom, and before I die give such proofs who I am as shall not fail to astonish the whole world.' Having huddled on my clothes, I went, with a mind boding evil, to the shop, where I found all those whom I had left so alert and in such high spirits, standing in the utmost confusion and astonishment. I thereupon addressed them thus: 'Listen, all of you, to what I am going to say; and since you either would not or could not follow the method I pointed out, obey me now that I am present. My work is before us; and let none of you offer to oppose or contradict me, for such cases as this require activity and not counsel.' Hereupon one of them had the assurance to say to me, 'Look you, Benvenuto, you have undertaken a work which our art cannot compass, and which is not to be effected by human power.' "Hearing these words, I turned round in such a passion, and seemed so bent upon mischief, that both he and all the rest unanimously cried out to me, 'Give your orders, and we will all second you in whatever you command; we will assist you as long as we have breath in our bodies.' These kind and affectionate words they uttered, as I firmly believe, in a persuasion that I was upon the point of expiring. I went directly to examine the furnace, and saw all the metal in it concreted. I thereupon ordered two of the helpers to step over the way to a butcher for a load of young oak which had been above a year drying, which had been already offered to me. "Upon his bringing me the first bundles of it, I began to fill the grate. This sort of oak makes a brisker fire than any other wood whatever; but the wood of elder-trees and pine-trees is used in casting artillery, because it makes a mild and gentle fire. As soon as the concreted metal felt the power of this violent fire, it began to brighten and glitter. In another quarter I made them hurry the tubes with all possible expedition, and sent some of them to the roof of the house to take care of the fire, which through the great violence of the wind had acquired new force; and towards the garden I had caused some tables with pieces of tapestry and old clothes to be placed in order to shelter me from the rain. As soon as I had applied the proper remedy to each evil, I with a loud voice cried out to my men to bestir themselves and lend a helping hand; so that when they saw that the concreted metal began to melt again, the whole body obeyed me with such zeal and alacrity that every man did the work of three. Then I caused a mass of pewter weighing about sixty pounds to be thrown upon the metal in the furnace, which, with the other helps, as the brisk wood-fire, and stirring it sometimes with iron and sometimes with long poles, soon became completely dissolved. Finding that, contrary to the opinion of my ignorant assistants, I had effected what seemed as difficult to raise as the dead, I recovered my vigor to such a degree that I no longer perceived whether I had any fever, nor had I the least apprehension of death. "Suddenly a loud noise was heard, and a glittering of fire flashed before our eyes, as if it had been the darting of a thunderbolt. Upon the appearance of this extraordinary phenomenon terror seized upon all present, and none more than myself. This tremendous noise being over, we began to stare at each other, and perceived that the cover of the furnace had burst and flown off, so that the bronze began to run. "I immediately caused the mouths of my mould to be opened; but, finding that the metal did not run with its usual velocity, and apprehending that the cause of it was that the fusibility of the metal was injured by the violence of the fire, I ordered all my dishes and porringers, which were in number about two hundred, to be placed one by one before my tubes, and part of them to be thrown into the furnace; upon which all present perceived that my mould was filling: they now with joy and alacrity assisted and obeyed me. I, for my part, was sometimes in one place, sometimes in another, giving my directions and assisting my men, before whom I offered up this prayer: 'O God, I address myself to thee. I acknowledge in gratitude this mercy, that my mould has been filled. I fall prostrate before thee, and with my whole heart return thanks to thy divine majesty.' "My prayer being over, I took a plate of meat which stood upon a little bench, and ate with a great appetite. I then drank with all my journeymen and assistants, and went joyful and in good health to bed; for there were still two hours of night, and I rested as well as if I had been troubled with no disorder. "My good housekeeper, without my having given any orders, had provided a good capon for my dinner. When I arose, which was not till about noon, she accosted me in high spirits, and said merrily, 'Is this the man that thought himself dying? It is my firm belief that the cuffs and kicks you gave us last night when you were quite frantic and possessed, frightened away your fever, which, apprehending you should fall upon it in the same manner, took to flight.' So my whole poor family, having got over such panics and hardships, without delay procured earthen vessels to supply the place of the pewter dishes and porringers, and we all dined together very cheerfully; indeed, I do not remember having ever in my life eaten a meal with greater satisfaction or a better appetite. After dinner, all those who had assisted me in my work came and congratulated me upon what had happened, returned thanks to the Divine Being for having interposed so mercifully in our behalf, and declared that they had in theory and practice learnt such things as were judged impossible by other masters. I thereupon thought it allowable to boast a little of my knowledge and skill in this fine art, and, pulling out my purse, satisfied all my workmen for their labor. "Having left my work to cool during two days after it was cast, I began gradually to uncover it. I first of all found the Medusa's head, which had come out admirably by the assistance of the vents. I proceeded to uncover the rest, and found that the other head--I mean that of Perseus--was likewise come out perfectly well. I went on uncovering it with great success, and found every part turn out to admiration, till I reached the foot of the right leg, which supports the figure. I found that not only the toes were wanting, but part of the foot itself, so that there was almost one half deficient. This occasioned me some new trouble; but I was not displeased at it, as I had expected this very thing. "It pleased God that as soon as ever my work, although still unfinished, was seen by the populace, they set up so loud a shout of applause, that I began to be somewhat comforted for the mortifications I had undergone; and there were sonnets in my praise every day upon the gate, the language of which was extremely elegant and poetical. The very day on which I exhibited my work, there were above twenty sonnets set up, containing the most hyperbolical praises of it. Even after I had covered it again, every day a number of verses, with Latin odes and Greek poems, were published on the occasion,--for it was then vacation at the University of Pisa, and all the learned men and scholars belonging to that place vied with each other in writing encomiums on my performance. But what gave me the highest satisfaction was that even those of the profession--I mean statuaries and painters--emulated each other in commending me. In fact, I was so highly praised, and in so elegant a style, that it afforded me some alleviation for my past mortification and troubles, and I made all the haste I could to put the last hand to my statue. "At last, as it pleased the Almighty, I completely finished my work, and on a Thursday morning exhibited it fully. Just before the break of day so great a crowd gathered about it, that it is almost impossible for me to give the reader an idea of their number; and they all seemed to vie with each other who should praise it most. The duke stood at a lower window of the palace, just over the gate, and, being half concealed within side, heard all that was said concerning the work. After he had listened several hours, he left the window highly pleased, and sent me this message: 'Go to Benvenuto, and tell him from me that he has given me higher satisfaction than I ever expected. Let him know at the same time that I shall reward him in such a manner as will excite his surprise.'" * * * * * The manuscript of Benvenuto's Life is not carried much farther. The narrative breaks off abruptly in 1562, when Cellini was in the sixty-second year of his age. He does not appear from this time to have been engaged in any work of much importance. After the execution of his grand achievement of the Perseus, the narrative of his life seems to have been the most successful of all the labors of his declining years. On the 15th day of February, 1570, this extraordinary man died. He was buried, by his own direction, with great funeral pomp. A monk who had been charged to compose the funeral sermon, in praise both of his life and works and of his excellent moral qualities, mounted the pulpit and delivered a discourse which was highly approved by the whole academy and by the people. They struggled to enter the chapter, as well to see the body of Benvenuto as to hear the commendation of his good qualities. V. BERNARD PALISSY. Two or three of the girls had dabbled a little in painting on porcelain, and several of them had become interested in various sorts of pottery. Mabel had been at Newburyport, on a visit with some friends who had a potter's wheel of their own; and she had turned for herself, and had had baked, some vases and dishes which she had brought home with her. This tempted them all to make a party, in which several of the boys joined, to go to the Art Museum and see the exquisite pottery there, of different sorts, ancient and modern. There they met one of the gentlemen of a large firm of dealers in keramics; and he asked them to go through their magnificent establishment, and see the collection, which is one of great beauty. It shows several of the finest styles of manufacture in very choice specimens. This prepared them to see Japanese work. And when Uncle Fritz heard of this, he asked Professor Morse, of Salem, if he would show them his marvellous collection of Japanese pottery. Professor Morse lived in Japan under very favorable auspices, and he made there a wonderful collection of the work of the very best artists. So five or six of the young people went down to Salem, at his very kind invitation, and saw there what is one of the finest collections in the world. All this interested them in what now receives a great deal of attention, the manufacture and ornament of pottery. The word _keramics_ is a word recently added to the English language to express the art of making pottery and of ornamenting it. When Uncle Fritz found that they really wanted to know about such things, he arranged that for one afternoon they should read about BERNARD PALISSY THE POTTER. Bernard Palissy was born, about 1510, in the little town of Biron, in Périgord, France. He became not only a great artist, but a learned physician, and a writer of merit. Born of poor parents of the working-class, he had to learn some trade, and early applied himself to working glass, not as a glazier, but staining it and cutting it up in little bits, to be joined together with lead for the colored windows so much used in churches. This was purely mechanical work; but Bernard's ambition led him to study drawing and color, that he might himself design and execute, in glass, scenes from the Bible and lives of the saints, such as he saw done by his superiors. When he was old enough, curious to see the world and learn new things, he took a journey on foot through several provinces of France, by observation thus supplying the defects of his early education, and reaping a rich harvest of facts and ideas, which developed the qualities of his intelligence. It was at this time that the Renaissance in Art was making itself felt throughout Europe. Francis I. of France encouraged all forms of good work by his patronage; and wherever he went the young Palissy was animated and inspired by the sight of beautiful things. _Faience_, an elegant kind of pottery, attracted his attention. This appeared first in the fourteenth century. The Arabs had long known the art of making tiles of clay, enamelled and richly ornamented. They brought it into Spain, as is shown in the decorations of the Alhambra at Seville and elsewhere. Lucca della Robbia in Italy first brought the art to perfection, by making figures and groups of figures in high relief, of baked clay covered with shining enamel, white, tinted with various colors. The kind of work called _majolica_ differed from the earlier faience by some changes in the material used for the enamel. In the middle of the sixteenth century remarkable historical paintings were executed in faience, upon huge _plaques_. All the cities of Italy vied with each other in producing wonders in this sort of work; it is from one of them, Faenza, that it takes its name. The method of making the enamel was a deep secret; but Bernard Palissy, with long patience and after many failures, succeeded in discovering it,--or, rather, in inventing for himself a new method, which in some respects excelled the old. Palissy was the author of several essays, or "Discourses;" and from one of these, written in quaint old French, we have his own account of his invention. He married and settled down in the year 1539 with a good income from his intelligent industry. He had a pleasant little house in the country, where, as he says, "I could rejoice in the sight of green hills, where were feeding and gambolling lambs, sheep, and goats." An incident, apparently slight, disturbed this placid domestic happiness. He came across a cup of enamelled pottery, doubtless from Italy. "This cup," he says, "was of such beauty, that, from the moment I saw it, I entered into a dispute with myself as to how it could have been made." Enamel is nothing more than a kind of glaze colored with metallic acids, and rendered opaque by the mixture of a certain quantity of tin. It is usually spread upon metal, when only it is properly called enamel; but this glaze can also be put upon earthenware. It makes vessels water-tight, and gives them brilliancy of surface. To find out how to do this was to make a revolution in the keramic art. In France, in the sixteenth century, the only vessels, such as jugs or vases, were made either of metal, wood, or coarse porous pottery, through which water could penetrate; like the goulehs of the Arabs, or the cantaras of the Moors, which are still used for fresh water to advantage, since the evaporation of the drops keeps the water cold. Many attempts had been made to imitate the beautiful and costly vases of China; but no one succeeded until the potters of Italy found out how to make faience. The discovery was hailed as a most valuable one. The princes who owned the works guarded their secret with jealous care,--to betray it would have been punished by death; so that Bernard Palissy had no hope of being taught how it was done, even if he should go to the places in Italy where the work was carried on. "But," he says, "what others had found out, I might also discover; and if I could once make myself master of the art of glazing, I felt sure I could elevate pottery to a degree of perfection as yet unknown. What a glory for my name, what a benefit to France, if I could establish this industry here in my own land!" He turned and turned the cup in his fingers, admiring the brilliant surface. "Yes," he said at last; "it shall be so, for I choose! I have already studied the subject. I will work still harder, and reach my aim at last." Exceptional determination of character was needed for such an object. Palissy knew nothing about the component parts of enamels; he had never even seen the process of baking clay, and he had to begin with the very simplest investigations. To study the different kinds of earth and clay, to acquire the arts of moulding and turning, and to gain some knowledge of chemistry, all these were necessary. But he did not flinch, and pursued his idea with indomitable perseverance. "Moving only by chance," he says, "like a man groping in the dark, I made a collection of all the different substances which seemed at all likely to make enamel, and I pounded them up fine; then I bought earthen pots, broke them into small bits, numbered these pieces, and spread over each of them a different combination of materials. Now I had to have a furnace in which to bake my experiments. I had no idea how furnaces were usually made; so I invented one of my own, and set it up. But I had no idea how much heat was required to melt enamels,--perhaps I heated my furnace too much, perhaps not enough; sometimes my ingredients were all burned up, sometimes they melted not at all; or else some were turned to coal, while others remained undisturbed by the action of the fire." Meanwhile the resources of the unlucky workman were fast diminishing; for he had abandoned his usual work, by which he earned his living, and kept making new furnaces, "with great expense and trouble, and a great consumption of time and firewood." This state of affairs much displeased his wife, who complained bitterly, and tried to divert her husband from an occupation which earned for him nothing but disappointment. The cheerful little household changed its aspect; the children were no longer well-dressed, and the shabby furniture and empty cupboards betrayed the decay which was falling upon the family. The father saw with profound grief the wants of his household; but success seemed ever so near to him, that he could not bear to give it up. His hope at that time was but a mirage; and for long afterwards, in this struggle between intelligence and the antagonism of material things, ill fortune kept the upper hand. One day, tired out by his failures, it occurred to him that a man brought up to baking pottery would know how to bake his specimens better than he could. "I covered three or four hundred bits of broken vase with different compounds, and sent them to a _fabrique_ about a mile and a half from my house. The potters consented to put my patterns with their batch for the oven. Full of impatience, I awaited the result of this experiment. I was on hand when my specimens came out. I looked them anxiously all over; not one was successful! "The heat had not been strong enough, but I did not know this; I saw only one more useless expense of money. One of the workmen came to me and said, 'You will never make anything out of this; you had better go back to your own business.'" Palissy shook his head; he had still in his possession some few valuable articles, souvenirs of happier days, which he could sell to renew his experiments. In spite of the reproaches of his wife, he bought more ingredients and more earthenware, and made new combinations. Failure again! However, he would not be beaten. Some friends lent him a little money; he sat up at night to make new mixtures of different substances, all prepared with such care that he felt sure some of them must be good. Then he carried them again to the potters, whom he urged to the greatest care. They only shrugged their shoulders, and called him "crack brain;" and when the batch was done, they brought the results to Palissy with jeers. Some of the pieces were dirty white; others green, red, or smoked by the fire; but all alike in being dull and worthless. It was over. Discouragement took possession of Palissy. "I returned home," he says, "full of confusion and sadness. Others might seek the secret of enamels. I must set to work and earn money to pay my debts and get bread for the family." Most luckily for him at this time, a task was given him by government, for which he was well suited, and which brought him good pay. The king, Francis I., having had, like many another sovereign, some difficulty with his faithful subjects in the matter of imposts, now found it necessary to make a new regulation of taxes; and for this, among other things, an inspection of the salt marshes on the coasts of France was needed, in order to name the right sums for taxation, and a knowledge of arithmetic was required as well. Palissy was appointed; and to the great delight of his family, who thought that his mind would now be forever diverted from the search for enamel, he set forth to explore the islands and the shores of France. He drew admirable outlines of the forms of the salt marshes, and wrote with eloquence upon the sublimity of the sea. Ease and comfort came back. His task was ended; but debts were paid, and plenty of money remained. The first thing he saw on returning home, alas! was the cup,--his joy and despair. "How beautiful it is! how brilliant!" he exclaimed; and once more he threw himself into the pursuit of the elusive enamel. It was easy to see that the so much admired faience of Italy was simply common baked clay, covered with some substance glazed by heat, but so composed as to adhere to the surface after it had cooled. But what substance? He had tried all sorts of materials; why had none of them melted? Palissy at length decided that the fault had been in using the common potter's furnace. Since the materials were to be vitrified by the process, they should be baked like glass. He broke up three dozen pots, pounded up a great quantity of different ingredients, and spread them with a brush on the fragments; then he carried them to the nearest glass-works. He was allowed to superintend the baking himself; he put the specimens in the oven, and passed the night attending the fire. In the morning he took them out. "Oh, joy! Some of the compounds had begun to melt; there was no perfect glaze, only a sign that I was on the right road." It was, however, still a long and weary one. After two more years, Palissy was still far from the discovery of enamelling, but during this time he was acquiring much knowledge. From a simple workman he had become a learned chemist. He says himself, "The mistakes I made in combining my enamels taught me more than the things which came right of themselves." There came a time, which he had once more resolved should be the last, when he repaired to the glass-works, accompanied by a man loaded with more than three hundred different patterns on bits of pottery. For four hours Bernard gloomily watched the progress of baking. Suddenly he started in surprise. Did his eyes deceive him? No! it was no illusion. One of the pieces in the furnace was covered with a brilliant glazing, white, polished, excellent. Palissy's joy was immense. "I thought I had become a new creature," he says. "The enamel was found; France enriched by a new discovery." Palissy now hastened to undertake a whole vase. For many and large pieces there was not room enough at his disposition in the ovens of the glass-works. He did not worry about that, for he was quite sure he could construct one of his own. He decided, too, at once to model and fashion his own vases; for those which he bought of the potters, made of coarse and heavy forms, no longer suited his ambition. He now designed forms, turned and modelled them himself. Thus passed seven or eight months. At last his vases were done, and he admired with pride the pure forms given to the clay by his hands. But his money was giving out again, and his furnace was not yet built. As he had nothing to pay for the work, he did all the work himself,--went after bricks and brought them himself on his back, and then built and plastered with his own hands. The neighbors looked on in pity and ridicule. "Look," they said, "at Master Bernard! He might live at his ease, and yet he makes a beast of burden of himself!" Palissy minded their sarcasms not at all. His furnace was finished in good time, and the first baking of the clay succeeded perfectly. Now the pottery was to be covered with his new enamel. Time pressed, for in a few days there would be no more bread in the house for his children. For a long time he had been living on credit, but now the butcher and baker refused to furnish anything more. All about him he saw only unfriendly faces; every one treated him as a fool. "Let him die of hunger," they said, "since he will not listen to reason." His wife was the worst of all. She failed to see any heroism in the obstinacy or perseverance of her husband,--no wonder, perhaps, with the sight of her suffering children before her eyes. She went about reciting her misfortunes to all the neighborhood, very unwisely, as she thus ruined the credit of her husband, his last and only resource. Palissy was already worn out by so much manual labor, to which he was little accustomed; nevertheless, he worked by night, and all night long, to pound up and prepare the materials for his white enamel, and to spread it upon his vases. A report went abroad, caused by the sight of his lamp constantly burning, that he was trying to coin counterfeit money. He was suspected, despised, and avoided, and went about the streets hanging his head because he had no answer to make to his accusers. The moment which was to decide his life arrived. The vases were placed in the furnace, and for six continuous days and nights he plied the glowing fire with fuel. The heat was intolerable; but the enamel resisted, nothing would melt, and he was forced to recognize that there was too little of the glazing substance in the combination to vitrify the others. He set to work to mix another compound, but his vases were spoiled; he borrowed a few common ones from the pottery. During all this delay he did not dare to let the fire go out, it would take so much wood to start it again. Once more the newly covered pots were placed in the intense furnace; in three or four hours the test would be completed. Palissy perceived with terror that his fuel was giving out. He ran to his garden, tore up fences, and cut down trees which he had planted himself, and threw all these into the two yawning mouths of the furnace. Not enough! He went into the house, and seized tables, chairs, and bureaus; but the house was but poorly furnished, and contained but little to feed the flames. Palissy returned. The rooms were empty, there was absolutely nothing more to take; then he fell to pulling up the planks of the floor. His wife, frightened to death, stood still and let him go on. The neighbors ran in, at the sound of the axe, and said, "He must be a fool!" But soon pity changed to admiration. When Palissy took the vases from the furnace, the common pots which all had seen before dull and coarse, were of a clear pearly white, covered with brilliant polish. So much emotion and fatigue had told upon the robust constitution of Palissy. "I was," he says, "all used up and dried up on account of such toil, and the heat of the furnace. It was more than a month since I had had a dry shirt on my body, and I felt as if I had reached the door of the sepulchre." In spite of the success which he had now attained, our potter had by no means reached the end of his misfortunes. He sold his vases, but could not get much for them, as there were but a few, of poor shapes; for those which he had modelled himself had all failed to take the enamel, and the successful ones were only common things, bought on credit. The small sum which he got by selling them was not enough by any means to cover his expenses, pay his debts, and restore order to the house from which pretty much everything was burned up for firewood in his furnace. However, he was supported and happy in the thought of his success. He said to himself: "Why be sad, when you have found what you were seeking for? Go on working, and you will put your enemies to shame." Once more he succeeded in borrowing a little money. He hired a man to help him; and for want of funds, he paid this man by giving him all his own good clothes, while he went himself in rags. The furnace he had made was coming to pieces on account of the intense heat he had maintained in it for six days and nights during his last experiment. He pulled it to pieces with his own hands, working with fingers bleeding and bound up in bandages. Then he fetched water, sand, lime, and stone, and built by himself a new furnace, "without any help or any repose. A feverish resolution doubled my strength, and made me capable of doing things which I should have imagined impossible." This time the oven heats admirably, the enamels appear to be melting. Palissy goes to rest, and dreams of his new vases, which must bring enough to pay all his debts; his impatient creditors come in the morning to see the things taken from the furnace. Palissy receives them joyfully; he would like to invite the whole town. When the pieces came out of the oven, they were shining and beautiful; but--always but!--an accident had deprived them of all value. Little stones, which formed a part of the mortar with which the furnace was built, had burst with the heat, and spattered the enamel all over with sharp fragments cutting like a razor, entirely spoiling it of course. Still, the vases were so lovely in form, and the glaze was so beautiful, that several people offered to buy them if they could have them cheap. This the proud potter would not bear. Seizing the vases, he dashed them to the ground; then utterly worn out, he went into the house and threw himself on the bed. His wife followed him, and covered him with reproaches for thus wasting the chance of making a few francs for the family. Soon he recovered his elasticity, reflecting "that a man who has tumbled into a ditch has but one duty, and that is to try to get out of it." He now set to work at his old business of painting upon glass, and after several months had earned enough to start another batch of vases. Of these, two or three were successful and sold to advantage; the rest were spoiled by ashes which fell upon the enamel in the furnace while it was soft. He therefore invented what he called a "lantern" of baked clay, to put over the vases to protect them in baking. This expedient proved so good that it is still used. The enamel once discovered, it would be supposed that all trouble was over; but it is not enough to invent a process,--to carry it out, all sorts of little things have to be considered, the least of which, if not attended to, may spoil all the rest. These multiplied accidents, with all the privations and sufferings he had undergone, were attacking the health of Palissy. He says in his simple style,-- "I was so used up in my person, that there was no shape or appearance of curve on my arms or legs; my so-called legs, indeed, were but a straight line, so that when I had gartered my stockings, as soon as I began to walk, they were down on my heels." His enamelled pottery now began to make a living for its inventor, but so poor a living that many things were wanting,--for instance, a suitable workshop. For five or six years he carried on the work in the open air; either heat, rain, or cold spoiled many of his vases, while he himself, exposed to the weather, "passed whole nights at the mercy of rain and cold, without any aid, comfort, or companionship except that of owls screeching on one side and dogs howling on the other. Sometimes," he continues, "winds and tempests blew with such violence inside and outside of my ovens, that I was obliged to leave, with a total loss of all they contained. Several times when I had thus left everything, without a dry rag upon me, on account of the rain, I came in at midnight or daybreak without any light, staggering like a drunken man, all broken down at the thought of my wasted toil; and then, all wet and dirty as I was, I found in my bedroom the worst affliction of all, which makes me wonder now why I was not consumed by grief." He means the scolding and reproaches of his wife. But the time came when his perseverance was rewarded, and his pottery brought him the fame and money he deserved. He was able to make new experiments, and add to the value of his discovery. Having obtained the white enamel, he had the idea of tinting it with all sorts of colors, which he did successfully. He then began to decorate his faience with objects modelled from nature, such as animals, shells, leaves, and branches. Lizards of a bright emerald color, with pointed heads and slender tails, and snakes gliding between stones or curled upon a bank of moss, crabs, frogs, and spiders, all of their natural colors, and disposed in the midst of plants equally well imitated, are the characteristic details of the work of Palissy. These perfect imitations of Nature were taken actually from Nature herself. Palissy prepared a group of real leaves and stones, putting the little insects or animals he wished to represent in natural attitudes amongst them. He fastened these reptiles, fishes, or insects in their places by fine threads, and then made a mould of the whole in plaster of Paris. When it was done, he removed the little animals from the mould so carefully that he could use them over and over again. Thus, after sixteen years passed in untiring energy, sixteen years of anxiety and privation, the artist triumphed over all the obstacles opposed to his genius. The humble potter, despised of all, became the most important man in his town. His productions were sought for eagerly, and his reputation established forever. His life henceforth was not free from events, but these were not connected with his invention. His fame came to the knowledge of the queen mother Catherine de Médicis; for Francis I. was no longer living, and Charles IX. had succeeded Francis II. upon the throne. He was summoned to Court, and employed to build grottos, decorated with his designs, by personages of distinction,--one especially for the queen herself, which he describes in his Discourse of the "Jardin Delectable." He was in Paris at the time of the terrible massacre of St. Bartholomew, where, as he was a Huguenot, he would doubtless have perished but for the protection of the queen, who helped him to escape with his family. Later, however, in the midst of the troubles and terrors of the time, he was thrown into the Bastille; and there he died, an old man of eighty years. VI. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. "We call the Americans a nation of inventors," said Fergus. "How long has this been true?" "That is a very curious question," said Uncle Fritz. "You remember we were talking of it before. When I go back to think of the hundred and fifty years before Bunker Hill, I think there must have been a great many inglorious Miltons hidden away in the New England towns. Really, the arts advanced very little between 1630 and 1775. Flint-locks had come in, instead of match-locks. But, actually, the men at Bunker Hill rested over the rail-fence old muskets which had been used in Queen Anne's time; and to this day a 'Queen's arm' is a provincial phrase, in New England, for one of these old weapons, not yet forgotten. That inability to improve its own condition comes to a people which lets another nation do its manufacturing for it. You see much the same thing in Turkey and French Canada. Just as soon as they were thrown on their own resources here, they began to invent." "But," said Fergus, "there was certainly one great American inventor before that time." "You mean Franklin,--the greatest American yet, I suppose, if you mean to measure greatness by intellectual power and intellectual achievement. Yes; Franklin's great discovery, and the inventions which followed on it, were made twenty-five years and more before Bunker Hill." "What is the association between Franklin and Robinson Crusoe?" asked Alice. "I never read of one but I think of the other." Uncle Fritz's whole face beamed with approbation. "You have started me upon one of my hobbies," said he; "but I must not ride it too far. Franklin says himself that De Foe's 'Essay on Projects' and Cotton Mather's 'Essay to do Good' were two books which perhaps gave him a turn of thinking which had an influence on some of the events in his after life. And you may notice how an 'Essay on Projects' might start his passion for having things done better than in the ways he saw. The books that he was brought up on and with were books of De Foe's own time,--none of them more popular among reading people of Boston than De Foe's own books, for De Foe was a great light among their friends in England. "If Robinson Crusoe, on his second voyage, which was in the year 1718, had run into Boston for supplies, as he thought of doing; and if old Judge Sewall had asked him to dinner,--as he would have been likely to do, for Robinson was a godly old gentleman then, of intelligence and fortune,--if there had been by accident a vacant place at the table at the last moment, Judge Sewall might have sent round to Franklin's father to ask him to come in. For the elder Franklin, though only a tallow-chandler,--and only Goodman Franklin, not _Mr._ Franklin,--was a member of the church, well esteemed. He led the singing at the Old South after Judge Sewall's voice broke down. "Nay, when one remembers how much Sewall had to do with printing, one might imagine that the boy Ben Franklin should wait at the door with a proof-sheet, and even take off his boy's hat as Robinson Crusoe came in." Here Bedford Long put in a remark:-- "There are things in Robinson Crusoe's accounts of his experiments in making his pipkins, which ought to bring him into any book of American inventors." "I never thought before," said Fergus, "that De Foe's experiences in making tiles and tobacco-pipes and drain-pipes fitted him for all that learned discussion of glazing, when Robinson Crusoe makes his pots and pans." "Good!" said Uncle Fritz; "that must be so.--Well, as you say, Alice, there are whole sentences in that narrative which you could suppose Franklin wrote, and in his works whole sentences which would fit in closely with De Foe's writing. The style of the younger man very closely resembles that of the older." "And Franklin would have been very much pleased to hear you say so." "He was forever inventing," said Uncle Fritz. "As I said, he was worried unless things could be better done. If he was in a storm, he wanted to still the waves. If the chimney smoked, he wanted to make a better fireplace. If he heard a girl play the musical-glasses, he must have and make a better set." "And if the house was struck by lightning, he went out and put up a lightning-rod." "He had a little book by which people should make themselves better; for he rightly considered that unless a man could do this, he could make no other improvement of much account." And when Uncle Fritz had said this, he found the passage, which he bade John read to them. FRANKLIN'S METHOD OF GROWING BETTER. "I made a little book in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. [He had classified the virtues and made a list of thirteen, which will be named below.] I ruled each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I crossed these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line and in its proper column I might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day. The thirteen virtues were: 1. TEMPERANCE; 2. SILENCE; 3. ORDER; 4. RESOLUTION; 5. FRUGALITY; 6. INDUSTRY; 7. SINCERITY; 8. JUSTICE; 9. MODERATION; 10. CLEANLINESS; 11. TRANQUILLITY; 12. CHASTITY; 13. HUMILITY. Each of these appears, by its full name or its initial, on every page of the book. But the full name of one only appears on each page. "My intention being to acquire the habitude of these virtues, I judged it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time, and when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another,--and so on, till I should have gone through the thirteen; and as the previous acquisition might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, I arranged them with that view. Temperance first, as it tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head which is so necessary where constant vigilance has to be kept up, and a guard maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits, and the force of perpetual temptations."[6] And so he goes on to show how Temperance would prepare for Silence, Silence for Order, Order for Resolution, and thus to the end. Here is the first page of the book, with the marks for the first six of the virtues. +--------------------------------+ | TEMPERANCE. | +--------------------------------+ | EAT NOT TO DULNESS. | | | | DRINK NOT TO ELEVATION. | +----+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | | S.| M.| T.| W.|Th.| F.| S.| | T. | | | | | | | | | S. | * | * | | * | | * | | | O. | * | * | * | | * | * | * | | R. | | | * | | | * | | | F. | | * | | | * | | | | I. | | | * | | | | | | S. | | | | | | | | | J. | | | | | | | | | M. | | | | | | | | | C. | | | | | | | | | T. | | | | | | | | | C. | | | | | | | | | H. | | | | | | | | +----+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ "I determined to give a week's strict attention to each of the virtues successively. Thus, in the first week my great guard was to avoid every the least offence against _Temperance_, leaving the other virtues to their ordinary chance, only marking every evening the faults of the day. Thus, if in the first week I could keep my first line, marked T, clear of spots, I supposed the habit of that virtue so much strengthened, and its opposite weakened, that I might venture extending my attention to include the next, and for the following week keep both lines clear of spots. Proceeding thus to the last, I could go through a course complete in thirteen weeks, and four courses in a year. And like him who having a garden to weed does not attempt to eradicate all the bad herbs at once, which would exceed his reach and his strength, but works on one of the beds at a time, and, having accomplished the first, proceeds to the second, so I should have, I hoped, the encouraging pleasure of seeing on my pages the progress I made in virtue, by clearing successively my lines of their spots, till in the end, by a number of courses, I should be happy in viewing a clean book, after a thirteen weeks' daily examination." Uncle Fritz said that this plan of Franklin's had been quite a favorite plan of different people at the end of the last century. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and Mr. Day, and a good many of the other reformers in England, and many in France, really thought that if people only knew what was right they would all begin and do it. They had to learn, by their own experience or somebody's, that the difficulty was generally deeper down. There was a man, named Droz, who published a little book called "The Art of being Happy," with tables on which every night you were to mark yourself, as a school-mistress marks scholars at school, 10 for truth, 3 for temper, 5 for industry, 9 for frugality, and so on.[7] "But in the long run," said Uncle Fritz, "there may be too much self-examination. If you really look up and not down, and look forward and not back, and loyally lend a hand, why, you can afford to look out and not in, in general." Fergus brought the talk back to the lightning-rod, and asked where was the earliest hint of it. The history seems to be this. In the year 1747 a gentleman named Collinson sent to Franklin, from England or Scotland, one of the glass tubes with which people were then trying electrical experiments. Franklin was very much interested. He went on repeating the experiments which had been made in England and on the Continent of Europe. With his general love of society in such things, he had other glass tubes made, and gave them to his friends. He had one immense advantage over the wise men of England and France, in the superior dryness of our air, which greatly favors such experiments. Almost any one of the young Americans who will read this book has tried the experiment of exciting electricity by shuffling across a Brussels carpet on a dry floor, and then lighting the gas from a gas-jet by the spark. But when you tell an Englishman in London that you have done this, he thinks at first that you are making fun of him. For it is very seldom that the air and the carpet and the floor are all dry enough for the experiment to succeed in England. This difference of climate accounts for the difficulty which the philosophers in England sometimes found in repeating Dr. Franklin's experiments. When it came to lightning and experiments about that, he had another very great advantage; for we have many more thunder-storms than they have. In the year 1752, when Mr. Watson was very eager to try the lightning experiments in England, he seems to have had, in all the summer, but two storms of thunder and lightning. Franklin made his apparatus on a scale which now seems almost gigantic. The "conductor" of an electrical machine such as you will generally see in a college laboratory is seldom more than two feet long. Franklin's conductor, which was hung by silk from the top of his room, was a cylinder ten feet long and one foot in diameter, covered with gilt paper. In his "Leyden battery" he used five glass jars, as big as large water-pails,--they held nine gallons each. One night he had arranged to kill a turkey by a shock from two of these. He received the shock himself, by accident, and it almost killed him. He had a theory that if turkeys were killed by electricity, the meat would perhaps be more tender. He acknowledges Mr. Collinson's present of the glass tube as early as March 28, 1747. On the 11th of July he writes to Collinson that they ("we") had discovered the power of points to withdraw electricity silently and continuously. On this discovery the lightning-rod is based. He describes this quality, first observed by Mr. Hopkinson, in the following letter:-- "The first is the wonderful effect of pointed bodies, both in _drawing off_ and _throwing off_ the electrical fire. "For example, place an iron shot, of three or four inches diameter, on the mouth of a clean, dry glass bottle. By a fine silken thread from the ceiling, right over the mouth of the bottle, suspend a small cork ball about the bigness of a marble; the thread of such a length, as that the cork ball may rest against the side of the shot. Electrify the shot, and the ball will be repelled to the distance of four or five inches, more or less, according to the quantity of electricity. When in this state, if you present to the shot the point of a long, slender, sharp bodkin, at six or eight inches distance, the repellency is instantly destroyed, and the cork flies to the shot. A blunt body must be brought within an inch and draw a spark, to produce the same effect. To prove that the electrical fire is _drawn off_ by the point, if you take the blade of the bodkin out of the wooden handle, and fix it in a stick of sealing-wax, and then present it at the distance aforesaid, or if you bring it very near, no such effect follows; but sliding one finger along the wax till you touch the blade, the ball flies to the shot immediately. If you present the point in the dark, you will see, sometimes at a foot distance and more, a light gather upon it, like that of a firefly or glow-worm; the less sharp the point, the nearer you must bring it to observe the light; and at whatever distance you see the light, you may draw off the electrical fire, and destroy the repellency. If a cork ball so suspended be repelled by the tube, and a point be presented quick to it, though at a considerable distance, it is surprising to see how suddenly it flies back to the tube. Points of wood will do near as well as those of iron, provided the wood is not dry; for perfectly dry wood will no more conduct electricity than sealing-wax. "To show that points will _throw off_ as well as _draw off_ the electrical fire, lay a long, sharp needle upon the shot, and you cannot electrize the shot so as to make it repel the cork ball. Or fix a needle to the end of a suspended gun-barrel or iron rod, so as to point beyond it like a little bayonet; and while it remains there, the gun-barrel or rod cannot, by applying the tube to the other end, be electrized so as to give a spark, the fire continually running out silently at the point. In the dark you may see it make the same appearance as it does in the case before mentioned." The next summer, that of 1748, the experiments went so far, that in a letter of Franklin's to Collinson he proposed the electrical dinner-party, which was such a delight to Harry and Lucy:-- "Chagrined a little that we have been hitherto able to produce nothing in this way of use to mankind, and the hot weather coming on when electrical experiments are not so agreeable, it is proposed to put an end to them for this season, somewhat humorously, in a party of pleasure on the banks of the _Skuylkill_. Spirits, at the same time, are to be fired by a spark sent from side to side through the river, without any other conductor than the water; an experiment which we some time since performed, to the amazement of many. A turkey is to be killed for our dinner by the _electrical shock_, and roasted by the _electrical jack_, before a fire kindled by the _electrified bottle_; when the healths of all the famous electricians in England, Holland, France, and Germany are to be drank in _electrified bumpers_, under the discharge of guns from the _electrical battery_." It was in a letter to Collinson of the next year, 1749,--as I suppose, though it is not dated,--that the project of the lightning-rod first appears. It is too long to copy. The paragraphs most important in this view are the following:-- "42. An electrical spark, drawn from an irregular body at some distance, is scarcely ever straight, but shows crooked and waving in the air. So do the flashes of lightning, the clouds being very irregular bodies. "43. As electrified clouds pass over a country, high hills and high trees, lofty towers, spires, masts of ships, chimneys, &c., as so many prominences and points, draw the electrical fire, and the whole cloud discharges there. "44. Dangerous, therefore, is it to take shelter under a tree during a thunder-gust. It has been fatal to many, both men and beasts. "45. It is safer to be in the open field for another reason. When the clothes are wet, if a flash in its way to the ground should strike your head, it may run in the water over the surface of your body; whereas, if your clothes were dry, it would go through the body, because the blood and other humors, containing so much water, are more ready conductors. "Hence a wet rat cannot be killed by the exploding electrical bottle, when a dry rat may." In a letter of 1750, based upon observations made in 1749, Franklin said distinctly, after describing some artificial lightning which he had made:-- "If these things are so, may not the knowledge of this power of points be of use to mankind, in preserving houses, churches, ships, &c., from the stroke of lightning, by directing us to fix, on the highest parts of these edifices, upright rods of iron made sharp as a needle, and gilded to prevent rusting, and from the foot of those rods a wire down the outside of the building into the ground, or down round one of the shrouds of a ship, and down her side till it reaches the water? Would not these pointed rods probably draw the electrical fire silently out of a cloud before it came nigh enough to strike, and thereby secure us from that most sudden and terrible mischief? "To determine the question whether the clouds that contain lightning are electrified or not, I would propose an experiment to be tried where it may be done conveniently. On the top of some high tower or steeple, place a kind of sentry-box, big enough to contain a man and an electrical stand. From the middle of the stand let an iron rod rise and pass bending out of the door and then upright twenty or thirty feet, pointed very sharp at the end. If the electrical stand be kept clean and dry, a man standing on it, when such clouds are passing low, might be electrified and afford sparks, the rod drawing fire to him from a cloud. If any danger to the man should be apprehended (though I think there would be none), let him stand on the floor of his box, and now and then bring near to the rod the loop of a wire that has one end fastened to the leads, he holding it by a wax handle; so the sparks, if the rod is electrified, will strike from the rod to the wire, and not affect him." The Royal Society "did not think these papers worth printing"! But, happily, Collinson printed them, and they went all over Europe. The demonstration of the lightning theory, which he had wrought out by his own experiments, was made in France, May 10, 1752; and in Philadelphia by Franklin with the kite in the next month, before he had heard of the success in France. Franklin's friend Dalibard tried the French experiment. Here is his account of it, as he sent it to the French Academy, as Roxana translated it for the young people:-- I have had perfect success in following out the course indicated by Mr. Franklin. I had set up at Marly-la-ville, situated six leagues from Paris, in a fine plain at a very elevated level, a round rod of iron, about an inch in diameter, forty feet long, and sharply pointed at its upper extremity. To secure greater fineness at the point, I had it armed with tempered steel, and then burnished, for want of gilding, so as to keep it from rusting; beside that, this iron rod is bent near its lower end into two acute but rounded angles; the first angle is two feet from the lower end, and the second takes a contrary direction at three feet from the first. * * * * * Wednesday, the 10th of May, 1752, between two and three in the afternoon, a man named Coiffier, an old dragoon, whom I had intrusted with making the observations in my absence, having heard rather a loud clap of thunder, hastened at once to the machine, took the phial with the wire, presented the loop of the wire to the rod, saw a small bright spark come from it, and heard it crackle. He then drew a second spark, brighter than the first and with a louder sound! He called his neighbors, and sent for the Prior. This gentleman hastened to the spot as fast as he could: the parishioners, seeing the haste of their priest, imagined that poor Coiffier had been killed by the thunder; the alarm was spread in the village; the hail-storm which began did not prevent the flock from following its shepherd. This honest priest approached the machine, and, seeing that there was no danger, went to work himself and drew strong sparks. The cloud from which the storm and hail came was no more than a quarter of an hour in passing directly over our machine, and only this one thunder-clap was heard. As soon as the cloud had passed, and no more sparks were drawn from the iron rod, the Prior of Marly sent off Monsieur Coiffier himself, to bring me the following letter, which he wrote in haste:-- I can now inform you, Sir, of what you are looking for. The experiment is completely successful. To-day, at twenty minutes past two, P. M., the thunder rolled directly over Marly; the clap was rather loud. The desire to oblige you, and my own curiosity, made me leave my arm-chair, where I was occupied in reading. I went to Coiffier's, who had already sent a child to me, whom I met on the way, to beg me to come. I redoubled my speed through a torrent of hail. When I arrived at the place where the bent rod was set up, I presented the wire, approaching it several times toward the rod. At the distance of an inch and a half, or about that, there came out of the rod a little column of bluish fire smelling of sulphur, which struck the loop of the wire with an extreme and rapid energy, and occasioned a sound like that which might be made by striking on the rod with a key. I repeated the experiment at least six times, in the space of about four minutes, in the presence of several persons; and each experiment which I made lasted the space of a _Pater_ and an _Ave_. I tried to go on; the action of the fire slackened little by little. I went nearer, and drew nothing more but a few sparks, and at last nothing appeared. The thunder-clap which caused this event was followed by no other; it all ended in a great quantity of hail. I was so occupied with what I saw at the moment of the experiment, that, having been struck on the arm a little above my elbow, I cannot say whether it was in touching the wire or the rod, I was not even aware of the injury which the blow had given me at the moment when I received it; but as the pain continued, on my return home I uncovered my arm before Coiffier, and we perceived a bruised mark winding round the arm, like what a wire would have made if my bare flesh had been struck by it. As I was going back from Coiffier's house, I met Monsieur le Vicaire, Monsieur de Milly, and the schoolmaster, to whom I related what had just happened. They all three declared that they smelt an odor of sulphur, which struck them more as they approached me. I carried the same odor home with me, and my servants noticed it without my having said anything to them about it. This, Monsieur, is an account given in haste, but simple and true, which I attest, and you may depend on my being ready to give evidence of this event on every opportunity. Coiffier was the first who made the experiment, and repeated it several times; it was only on account of what he had seen that he sent to ask me to come. If other witnesses than he and I are necessary, you will find them. Coiffier is in haste to set out. I am, with respectful consideration, Monsieur, Yours, &c., [Signed] RAULET, _Prior of Marly_. MAY 10, 1752. "I do not understand," said Uncle Fritz, "how it happened that no one attempted the experiment before. Franklin had proposed it, very distinctly, in 1750. His friend Dr. Stuber says that he was waiting for the erection of a steeple in Philadelphia. You see, the Quakers, who had founded this city, would have none; they derided what they called 'steeple-houses,' little foreseeing what advantage could be drawn from a steeple. "Meanwhile, in 1750, in October, he did take a view of New York from the 'Dutch Church steeple,' which had been struck by lightning in the spring of that year. And here he was able to confirm his theory, by seeing that 'wire is a good conductor of lightning, as it is of electricity.'" MUSICAL GLASSES. While some of the children were reading these electrical passages, others were turning over the next volume; and to their great delight, they found a picture of the "Musical Glasses." "I never had the slightest idea what musical glasses were," said Jack; and he spouted from Goldsmith the passage from "The Vicar of Wakefield," where the fashionable ladies from London talked about "Shakspeare and the musical glasses." "Were they Dr. Franklin's musical glasses?" "I never thought of that," said Uncle Fritz, well pleased; "but I think it is so. John, look and see what year 'The Vicar of Wakefield' was written in." John turned to the Cyclopædia, and it proved that Goldsmith wrote that book in 1766. "And you see," said Uncle Fritz, "that it was in 1762 that Franklin made his improvement, and that Mr. Puckeridge, the Irish gentleman, had arranged his glasses before. I think you would find that the instrument gradually worked its way into fashion,--slowly, as such things then did in England,--and that Goldsmith knew about Dr. Franklin's modification. "I do not now remember any other place where Goldsmith's life and his touched. But they must have known a great many of the same people. Franklin was all mixed up with the Grub Street people." Meanwhile John was following up the matter in the Cyclopædia. But he did not find "Armonica." Uncle Fritz bade him try in the "H" volume; and there, sure enough, was "Harmonica," with quite a little history of the invention. Mr. Puckeridge's fascinating name is there tamed down to Pochrich, probably by some German translator. Dr. Franklin's instrument is described, and the Cyclopædia man adds:-- "From the effect which it was supposed to have upon the nervous system, it has been suggested that the fingers should not be allowed to come in immediate contact with the glasses, but that the tones should be produced by means of keys, as with a harpsichord. Such an instrument has been made, and called the '_harpsichord harmonica_.' But these experiments have not produced anything of much value. It is impossible that the delicacy, the swell, and the continuation of the tone should be carried to such perfection as in the simpler method. The harmonica, however much it excels all other instruments in the delicacy and duration of its tones, yet is confined to those of a soft and melancholy character and to slow, solemn movements, and can hardly be combined to advantage with other instruments. In accompanying the human voice it throws it into the shade; and in concerts the other instruments lose in effect, because so far inferior to it in tone. It is therefore best enjoyed by itself, and may produce a charming effect in certain romantic situations." "'Romantic situations'! I should think so," said Mabel, laughing. "Is not that like the dear German man that wrote this? I see myself lugging my harmonica to the edge of the Kauterskill Falls." "How do you know he was a German?" said Alice. "Because, where John read 'the simpler method,' it says 'the before-mentioned method.' No Englishman or American in his senses ever said 'before-mentioned' if he could help himself." "Do let us see how dear Dr. Franklin made his machine." And the girls unfolded the old-fashioned picture, which is in the sixth volume of Sparks's Franklin, and read his description of it as he wrote it to Beccaria. "Is it the Beccaria who did about capital punishment?" asked Fergus. "No," Uncle Fritz said, "though they lived at the same time. They were not brothers. The capital-punishment man was the Marquis _of_ Beccaria, and that _of_ makes a great difference in Europe. This man 'did' electricity, as you would say; and his name is plain Beccaria without any _of_." Then Mabel, commanding silence, at last read the letter to Beccaria. And when she had done, Uncle Fritz said that he should think there might be many a boy or girl who could not buy a piano or what he profanely called a Yang-Yang,--by which he meant a reed organ,--who would like to make a harmonica. The letter, in a part not copied here, tells how to tune the glasses. And any one who lived near a glass-factory, and was on the good-natured side of a good workman, could have the glasses made without much expense. _Letter of Franklin to J. B. Beccaria._ LONDON, July 13, 1762. REVEREND SIR,--... Perhaps, however, it may be agreeable to you, as you live in a musical country, to have an account of the new instrument lately added here to the great number that charming science was already possessed of. As it is an instrument that seems peculiarly adapted to Italian music, especially that of the soft and plaintive kind, I will endeavor to give you such a description of it, and of the manner of constructing it, that you or any of your friends may be enabled to imitate it, if you incline so to do, without being at the expense and trouble I have been to bring it to its present perfection. You have doubtless heard of the sweet tone that is drawn from a drinking-glass by passing a wet finger round its brim. One Mr. Puckeridge, a gentleman from Ireland, was the first who thought of playing tunes formed of these tones. He collected a number of glasses of different sizes, fixed them near each other on a table, tuned them by putting into them water more or less, as each note required. The tones were brought out by passing his finger round their brims. He was unfortunately burned here, with his instrument, in a fire which consumed the house he lived in. Mr. E. Delaval, a most ingenious member of our Royal Society, made one in imitation of it, with a better form and choice of glasses, which was the first I saw or heard. Being charmed by the sweetness of its tones, and the music he produced from it, I wished only to see the glasses disposed in a more convenient form, and brought together in a narrower compass, so as to admit of a greater number of tones, and all within reach of hand to a person sitting before the instrument, which I accomplished, after various intermediate trials, and less commodious forms, both of glasses and construction, in the following manner. The glasses are blown as nearly as possible in the form of hemispheres, having each an open neck or socket in the middle. The thickness of the glass near the brim about a tenth of an inch, or hardly quite so much, but thicker as it comes nearer the neck, which in the largest glasses is about an inch deep, and an inch and a half wide within, these dimensions lessening as the glasses themselves diminish in size, except that the neck of the smallest ought not to be shorter than half an inch. The largest glass is nine inches diameter, and the smallest three inches. Between these two are twenty-three different sizes, differing from each other a quarter of an inch in diameter. To make a single instrument there should be at least six glasses blown of each size; and out of this number one may probably pick thirty-seven glasses (which are sufficient for three octaves with all the semitones) that will be each either the note one wants or a little sharper than that note, and all fitting so well into each other as to taper pretty regularly from the largest to the smallest. It is true there are not thirty-seven sizes, but it often happens that two of the same size differ a note or half-note in tone, by reason of a difference in thickness, and these may be placed one in the other without sensibly hurting the regularity of the taper form. The glasses being thus turned, you are to be provided with a case for them, and a spindle on which they are to be fixed. My case is about three feet long, eleven inches every way wide at the biggest end; for it tapers all the way, to adapt it better to the conical figure of the set of glasses. This case opens in the middle of its height, and the upper part turns up by hinges fixed behind. The spindle, which is of hard iron, lies horizontally from end to end of the box within, exactly in the middle, and is made to turn on brass gudgeons at each end. It is round, an inch in diameter at the thickest end, and tapering to a quarter of an inch at the smallest. A square shank comes from its thickest end through the box, on which shank a wheel is fixed by a screw. This wheel serves as a fly to make the motion equable, when the spindle with the glasses is turned by the foot like a spinning-wheel. My wheel is of mahogany, eighteen inches diameter, and pretty thick, so as to conceal near its circumference about twenty-five pounds of lead. An ivory pin is fixed in the face of this wheel, and about four inches from the axis. Over the neck of this pin is put the loop of the string that comes up from the movable step to give it motion. The case stands on a neat frame with four legs. To fix the glasses on the spindle, a cork is first to be fitted in each neck pretty tight, and projecting a little without the neck, that the neck of one may not touch the inside of another when put together, for that would make a jarring. These corks are to be perforated with holes of different diameters, so as to suit that part of the spindle on which they are to be fixed. When a glass is put on, by holding it stiffly between both hands, while another turns the spindle, it may be gradually brought to its place. But care must be taken that the hole be not too small, lest, in forcing it up, the neck should split; nor too large, lest the glass, not being firmly fixed, should turn or move on the spindle, so as to touch or jar against its neighboring glass. The glasses are thus placed one in another, the largest on the biggest end of the spindle, which is to the left hand; the neck of this glass is towards the wheel, and the next goes into it in the same position, only about an inch of its brim appearing beyond the brim of the first; thus proceeding, every glass when fixed shows about an inch of its brim (or three quarters of an inch, or half an inch, as they grow smaller) beyond the brim of the glass that contains it; and it is from these exposed parts of each glass that the tone is drawn, by laying a finger upon one of them as the spindle and glasses turn round. My largest glass is G, a little below the reach of a common voice, and my highest G, including three complete octaves. To distinguish the glasses the more readily to the eye, I have painted the apparent parts of the glasses withinside, every semitone white, and the other notes of the octave with the seven prismatic colors,--viz., C, red; D, orange; E, yellow; F, green; G, blue; A, indigo; B, purple; and C, red again,--so that glasses of the same color (the white excepted) are always octaves to each other. This instrument is played upon by sitting before the middle of the set of glasses, as before the keys of a harpsichord, turning them with the foot, and wetting them now and then with a sponge and clean water. The fingers should be first a little soaked in water, and quite free from all greasiness; a little fine chalk upon them is sometimes useful, to make them catch the glass and bring out the tone more readily. Both hands are used, by which means different parts are played together. Observe that the tones are best brought out when the glasses turn _from_ the ends of the fingers, not when they turn _to_ them. The advantages of this instrument are, that its tones are incomparably sweet, beyond those of any other; that they may be swelled and softened at pleasure by stronger or weaker pressure of the finger, and continued to any length; and that the instrument, being once well tuned, never again wants tuning. In honor of your musical language, I have borrowed from it the name of this instrument, calling it the Armonica. With great respect and esteem, I am, &c., B. FRANKLIN. VII. THEORISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. RICHARD LOVELL EDGEWORTH. At the next meeting there was a slight deviation from the absolutely expected. Bedford and Mabel desired to dispense with the regular order of the day, and moved for permission to bring in a new inventor, "invented by myself," said Mabel,--"entirely by myself, assisted by Bedford. Nobody that I know of ever heard of him before. He is a new discovery." "Who is he?" asked Horace, somewhat piqued that there should be any one interesting of whom he had not heard even the name. "What did he invent?" asked Emma. "Did he write memoirs?" asked Fergus. "Did you ever read 'Frank'?" asked Mabel, in what is known as the Socratic method. There was a slight stir at the mention of this little classic. Few seemed to be able to answer in the affirmative. "I have read 'Rollo,'" said Horace. "I have read 'Frank,'" said Will Withers, "and 'Harry and Lucy,' and the 'Parents' Assistant,' and 'Sandford and Merton,' and 'Henry Milner.' In fact, there are few of those books, all kindred volumes, which I have not read. They have had an important effect upon my later life." "Hinc illae lachrymae," in a low tone from Clem Waters. For Colonel Ingham, the turn taken by the conversation had a peculiar charm. He was of the generation before the rest, and what were to them but ghostly ideals were to him glad memories of a happy past. "Good!" said he. "'Frank' was, in a sense, the greatest book ever written. Do you remember that part where Frank lifted up the skirts of his coat when passing through the greenhouse?" he asked of Mabel. "I should think I did," said Mabel and Will. As for Bedford, he had only a vague recollection of it. The others considered the conversation to be trembling upon the verge of insanity. "Perhaps," said Florence, gently, "I might be allowed to suggest that although you have heard of 'Frank' and those other persons mentioned, we have not. I do not think that I ever heard of an inventor named Frank,--did he have any other name?--and I am usually considered," she went on modestly, "tolerably well informed. Therefore the present conversation, though probably edifying in a high degree to those who have read 'Frank,' or who have some interest in horticulture and greenhouses, can hardly fail to be very stupid to those of us who have not." "My dear child," said the Colonel, "you are right. Mabel and I, and Will and Bedford here, are of the generation that is passing off the stage. We look back to the things of our youth, hardly considering that there are those to whom that period suggests Noah and his ark." "But who is the inventor?" asked some one who thought that the conversation was gradually leaving the trodden path. "Oh, we had almost forgotten him," said Bedford. "The inventor," said Mabel, producing two volumes from under her arm, "is Mr. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the father of Maria Edgeworth." "What did he invent?" asked many of the company. "He invented the telegraph." "Well, I never knew that before." "I thought Morse invented the telegraph." "Didn't Dr. Franklin invent the telegraph?" "I thought Edison--" Other remarks were also made, showing a certain amount of incredulity. "You mistake," said Bedford, placidly; "you are all of you under a misapprehension. I think that you all of you allude to the electric telegraph,--an invention of a later date than that of Mr. Edgeworth, and one of more value, as far as practical affairs are concerned. No; Mr. Edgeworth invented, or thinks he invented, the telegraph as it was used in the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, sometimes named the Semaphore. It wasn't a difficult invention, and I don't believe it ever came to any very practical use as constructed by Edgeworth, though French telegraphs were very useful." "What kind of a telegraph was it?" "Well, it was just the kind of a telegraph that the conductor of a railroad train is when he waves his arms to the engineer to go ahead. There's an account of it by Edgeworth in one of these books, with pictures to it." "But my chief interest about Edgeworth," said Mabel, "is in his memoirs, which are written partly by himself and partly by his daughter. They are really very amusing. He was married five times,--once with a door-key when he was only fourteen." This startling intelligence roused even Colonel Ingham to demand particulars. Was he married to all five at once? to all of them when he was only fourteen? "No," admitted Mabel, with some regret; "he was married to them, all at different times, and he was divorced from the one he married at fourteen with the door-key." "They were only married for fun," said Bedford. "It was all a joke. They were at a wedding, and they thought it would be funny after the real marriage to have a mock one. So they did, and married Edgeworth to a girl who was there. It was a real marriage, for they were afterwards divorced." "Well," said Sam Edmeston, "I shall be glad to hear about this gentleman, I'm sure, though I never did hear of him before. But may I ask why it was necessary to introduce him by means of an allusion to 'Frank' and other works which we have few of us ever read, though it is very possible that we may some of us have heard of them?" "I see why Mabel spoke first of 'Frank,'" said Colonel Ingham. "And I think that she did very well to bring Edgeworth in as she has done. And Edgeworth, though I had not thought of him before, is very fit to be one of our inventors, not so much for his individual accomplishments, which were little more than curious,--telegraph and all,--as for being a good representative of his age. Those of you who know a little of the century between 1750 and 1850 know that it was an age to which many of the secrets of physical science were being opened for the first time. Everybody was going back to Nature to see what he could learn from her. This movement swept all over France and England. Every gentleman dabbled in the sciences, and made his experiments and inventions. Voltaire in France had a great laboratory made for him in which he passed some years in chemical experiments. It was the age, too, of great inventions,--of the application of physical forces to the life of man. The invention of the steam-engine by Watt, and the applications of it to the locomotive and the steamboat, came along toward the end of this period, and marked the work of the greatest men. But every one could not invent a steam-engine. So, by the hundreds of country gentlemen who studied science, chemistry, and astronomy, and the rest, there were constructed hundreds of orreries, globes, carriages, model-telegraphs, and such things; and it is of these men that Edgeworth is the best, or at least the most available, representative, on account of his very interesting memoirs. "Such books as 'Harry and Lucy' and 'Frank' are the mirror of this movement. But to this is joined something more, which John Morley speaks of in saying, 'An age touched by the spirit of hope turns naturally to the education of the young.' Then people knew that their own times were about as worthless as times could well be; but as they learned more, they began to hope that things were improving, and that the children might see better times than those in which the fathers lived. And as physical science was to them an all-important factor in this approaching millennium, they took pains to teach these things to the young. Any of you who have read 'Frank' or 'Sandford and Merton' will see what I mean. It was the hope that the children might be able to take the work where the fathers left it, and carry it on. And the children did. But I do not believe that any one of these eighteenth-century theorists had the first or vaguest idea of the point to which his children and grandchildren would carry his work. "So much for Mr. Edgeworth from my point of view," concluded the Colonel. "You will hear what he thought of himself from Bedford." EDGEWORTH'S TELEGRAPH. [DESCRIBED BY HIMSELF.] Bets of a rash or ingenious sort were in fashion in those days, and one proposal of what was difficult and uncommon led to another. A famous match was at that time pending at Newmarket between two horses that were in every respect as nearly equal as possible. Lord March, one evening at Ranelagh, expressed his regret to Sir Francis Delaval that he was not able to attend Newmarket at the next meeting. "I am obliged," said he, "to stay in London. I shall, however, be at the Turf Coffee House. I shall station fleet horses on the road to bring me the earliest intelligence of the event of the race, and shall manage my bets accordingly." I asked at what time in the evening he expected to know who was winner. He said about nine in the evening. I asserted that I should be able to name the winning horse at four o'clock in the afternoon. Lord March heard my assertion with so much incredulity as to urge me to defend myself; and at length I offered to lay five hundred pounds, that I would in London name the winning horse at Newmarket at five o'clock in the evening of the day when the great match in question was to be run. Sir Francis, having looked at me for encouragement, offered to lay five hundred pounds on my side; Lord Eglintoun did the same; Shaftoe and somebody else took up their bets; and the next day we were to meet at the Turf Coffee House, to put our bets in writing. After we went home, I explained to Sir Francis Delaval the means that I proposed to use. I had early been acquainted with Wilkins's "Secret and Swift Messenger;" I had also read in Hooke's Works of a scheme of this sort, and I had determined to employ a telegraph nearly resembling that which I have since published. The machinery I knew could be prepared in a few days. Sir Francis immediately perceived the feasibility of my scheme, and indeed its certainty of success. It was summer-time; and by employing a sufficient number of persons, we could place our machines so near as to be almost out of the power of the weather. When we all met at the Turf Coffee House, I offered to double my bet; so did Sir Francis. The gentlemen on the opposite side were willing to accept my offer; but before I would conclude my wager, I thought it fair to state to Lord March that I did not depend upon the fleetness or strength of horses to carry the desired intelligence, but upon other means, which I had, of being informed in London which horse had actually won at Newmarket, between the time when the race should be concluded and five o 'clock in the evening. My opponents thanked me for my candor and declined the bet. My friends blamed me extremely for giving up such an advantageous speculation. None of them, except Sir Francis, knew the means which I had intended to employ; and he kept them a profound secret, with a view to use them afterwards for his own purposes. With that energy which characterized everything in which he engaged, he immediately erected, under my directions, an apparatus between his house and part of Piccadilly,--an apparatus which was never suspected to be telegraphic. I also set up a night telegraph between a house which Sir F. Delaval occupied at Hampstead, and one to which I had access in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. This nocturnal telegraph answered well, but was too expensive for common use. Upon my return home to Hare Hatch, I tried many experiments on different modes of telegraphic communication. My object was to combine secrecy with expedition. For this purpose I intended to employ windmills, which might be erected for common economical uses, and which might at the same time afford easy means of communication from place to place upon extraordinary occasions. There is a windmill at Nettlebed, which can be distinctly seen with a good glass from Assy Hill, between Maidenhead and Henly, the highest ground in England south of the Trent. With the assistance of Mr. Perrot, of Hare Hatch, I ascertained the practicability of my scheme between these places, which are nearly sixteen miles asunder. I have had occasion to show my claim to the revival of this invention in modern times, and in particular to prove that I had practised telegraphic communication in the year 1767, long before it was ever attempted in France. To establish these truths, I obtained from Mr. Perrot, a Berkshire gentleman, who resided in the neighborhood of Hare Hatch, and who was witness to my experiments, his testimony to the facts which I have just related. I have his letter; and before its contents were published in the Memoirs of the Irish Academy for the year 1796, I showed it to Lord Charlemont, President of the Royal Irish Academy. MR. EDGEWORTH'S TELEGRAPH IN IRELAND. [DESCRIBED BY HIS DAUGHTER.] In August, 1794, my father made a trial of his telegraph between Pakenham Hall and Edgeworth Town, a distance of twelve miles. He found it to succeed beyond his expectations; and in November following he made another trial of it at Collon, at Mr. Foster's, in the county of Louth. The telegraphs were on two hills, at fifteen miles' distance from each other. A communication of intelligence was made, and an answer received, in the space of five minutes. Mr. Foster--my father's friend, and the friend of everything useful to Ireland--was well convinced of the advantage and security this country would derive from a system of quick and certain communication; and, being satisfied of the sufficiency of this telegraph, advised that a memorial on the subject should be drawn up for Government. Accordingly, under his auspices, a memorial was presented, in 1795, to Lord Camden, then Lord Lieutenant. His Excellency glanced his eye over the paper, and said that he did not think such an establishment necessary, but desired to reserve the matter for further consideration. My father waited in Dublin for some time. The suspense and doubt in which courtiers are obliged to live is very different from that state of philosophical doubt which the wise recommend, and to which they are willing to submit. My father's patience was soon exhausted. The county in which he resided was then in a disturbed state; and he was eager to return to his family, who required his protection. Besides, to state things exactly as they were, his was not the sort of temper suited to attendance upon the great. The disturbances in the County of Longford were quieted for a time by the military; but again, in the autumn of the ensuing year (September, 1796), rumors of an invasion prevailed, and spread with redoubled force through Ireland, disturbing commerce, and alarming all ranks of well-disposed subjects. My father wrote to Lord Carhampton, then Commander-in-Chief, and to Mr. Pelham (now Lord Chichester), who was then Secretary in Ireland, offering his services. The Secretary requested Mr. Edgeworth would furnish him with a memorial. Aware of the natural antipathy that public men feel at the sight of long memorials, this was made short enough to give it a chance of being read. (Presented, Oct. 6, 1796.) Mr. Edgeworth will undertake to convey intelligence from Dublin to Cork, and back to Dublin, by means of fourteen or fifteen different stations, at the rate of one hundred pounds per annum for each station, as long as Government shall think proper; and from Dublin to any other place, at the same rate, in proportion to the distance: provided that when Government chooses to discontinue the business, they shall pay one year's contract over and above the current expense, as some compensation for the prime cost of the apparatus, and the trouble of the first establishment. In a letter of a single page, accompanying this memorial, it was stated, that to establish a telegraphic corps of men sufficient to convey intelligence to every part of the kingdom where it should be necessary, stations tenable against a mob and against musketry might be effected for the sum of _six or seven thousand pounds_. It was further observed, that of course there must be a considerable difference between a partial and a general plan of telegraphic communication; that Mr. Edgeworth was perfectly willing to pursue either, or to adopt without reserve any better plan that Government should approve. Thanks were returned, and approbation expressed. Nothing now appeared in suspense except the _mode_ of the establishment, whether it should be civil or military. Meantime Mr. Pelham spoke of the Duke of York's wish to have a reconnoitring telegraph, and observed that Mr. Edgeworth's would be exactly what his Royal Highness wanted. Mr. Edgeworth in a few days constructed a portable telegraph, and offered it to Mr. Pelham. He accepted it, and at his request my brother Lovell carried it to England, and presented it to the Duke from Mr. Pelham. During the interval of my brother's absence in England, my father had no doubt that arrangements were making for a telegraphic establishment in Ireland. But the next time he went to the castle, he saw signs of a change in the Secretary's countenance, who seemed much hurried,--promised he would write,--wrote, and conveyed, in diplomatic form, a final refusal. Mr. Pelham indeed endeavored to make it as civil as he could, concluding his letter with these words:-- The utility of a telegraph may hereafter be considered greater; but I trust that at all events those talents which have been directed to this pursuit will be turned to some other object, and that the public will have the benefit of that extraordinary activity and zeal which I have witnessed on this occasion in some other institution which I am sure that the ingenuity of the author will not require much time to suggest. I have the honor to be, with great respect, &c, T. PELHAM. DUBLIN CASTLE, Nov. 17, 1796. Of his offer to establish a communication from the coast of Cork to Dublin, at _his own expense_, no notice was taken. "He had, as was known to Government, expended £500 of his own money; as much more would have erected a temporary establishment for a year to Cork. Thus the utility of this invention might have been tried, and the most prudent government upon earth could not have accused itself of extravagance in being partner with a private gentleman in an experiment which had, with inferior apparatus, and at four times the expense, been tried in France and England, and approved." The most favorable supposition by which we can account for the conduct of the Irish Government in this business is that a superior influence in England forbade them to proceed. "It must," said my father, "be mortifying to a viceroy who comes over to Ireland with enlarged views and benevolent intentions, to discover, when he attempts to act for himself, that he is peremptorily checked; that a circle is chalked round him, beyond which he cannot move." No personal feelings of pique or disgust prevented my father from renewing his efforts to be of service to his country. Two months after the rejection of his telegraph, on Friday the 30th of December, 1796, the French were on the Irish coasts. Of this he received intelligence late at night. Immediately he sent a servant express to the Secretary, with a letter offering to erect telegraphs, which he had in Dublin, on any line that Government should direct, and proposing to bring his own men with him; or to join the army with his portable telegraphs, to reconnoitre. His servant was sent back with a note from the Secretary, containing compliments and the promise of a speedy answer; no further answer ever reached him. Upon this emergency he could, with the assistance of his friends, have established an immediate communication between Dublin and the coast, which should not have cost the country one shilling. My father showed no mortification at the neglect with which he was treated, but acknowledged that he felt much "concern in losing an opportunity of saving an enormous expense to the public, and of alleviating the anxiety and distress of thousands." A telegraph was most earnestly wished for at this time by the best-informed people in Ireland, as well as by those whose perceptions had suddenly quickened at the view of immediate danger. Great distress, bankruptcies, and ruin to many families, were the consequences of this attempted invasion. The troops were harassed with contrary orders and forced marches, for want of intelligence, and from that indecision which must always be the consequence of insufficient information. Many days were spent in terror and in fruitless wishes for the English fleet. One fact may mark the hurry and confusion of the time; the cannon and the ball sent to Bantry Bay were of different calibre. At last Ireland was providentially saved by the change of wind, which prevented the enemy from effecting a landing on her coast. That the public will feel little interest in the danger of an invasion of Ireland which might have happened in the last century; that it can be of little consequence to the public to hear how or why, twenty years ago, this or that man's telegraph was not established,--I am aware; and I am sensible that few will care how cheaply it might have been obtained, or will be greatly interested in hearing of generous offers which were not accepted, and patriotic exertions which were not permitted to be of any national utility. I know that as a biographer I am expected to put private feelings out of the question; and this duty, as far as human nature will permit, I hope I have performed. The facts are stated from my own knowledge, and from a more detailed account in his own "Letter to Lord Charlemont on the Telegraph,"--a political pamphlet, uncommon at least for its temperate and good-humored tone. Though all his exertions to establish a telegraph in Ireland were at this time unsuccessful, yet he persevered in the belief that in future modes of telegraphic communication would be generally adopted; and instead of his hopes being depressed, they were raised and expanded by new consideration of the subject in a scientific light. In the sixth volume of the "Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy," he published an "Essay on the Art of Conveying Swift and Secret Intelligence," in which he gives a comprehensive view of the uses to which the system may be applied, and a description, with plates, of his own machinery. Accounts of his apparatus and specimens of his vocabulary have been copied into various popular publications, therefore it is sufficient here to refer to them. The peculiar advantages of his machinery consist, in the first place, in being as free from friction as possible, consequently in its being easily moved, and not easily destroyed by use; in the next place, on its being simple, consequently easy to make and to repair. The superior advantage of his vocabulary arises from its being undecipherable. This depends on his employing the numerical figures instead of the alphabet. With a power of almost infinite change, and consequently with defiance of detection, he applies the combination of numerical figures to the words of a common dictionary, or to any length of phrase in any given vocabulary. He was the first who made this application of figures to telegraphic communication. Much has been urged by various modern claimants for the honor of the invention of the telegraph. In England the claims of Dr. Hooke and of the Marquis of Worcester to the original idea are incontestable. But the invention long lay dormant, till wakened into active service by the French. Long before the French telegraph appeared, my father had tried his first telegraphic experiments. As he mentions in his own narrative, he tried the use of windmill sails in 1767 in Berkshire; and also a nocturnal telegraph with lamps and illuminated letters, between London and Hampstead. He refers for the confirmation of the facts to a letter of Mr. Perrot's, a Berkshire gentleman who was with him at the time. The original of this letter is now in my possession. It was shown in 1795 to the President of the Royal Irish Academy. The following is a copy of it:-- DEAR SIR,--I perfectly recollect having several conversations with you in 1767 on the subject of a speedy and secret conveyance of intelligence. I recollect your going up the hills to see how far and how distinctly the arms (and the position of them) of Nettlebed Windmill sails were to be discovered with ease. As to the experiments from Highgate to London by means of lamps, I was not present at the time, but I remember your mentioning the circumstance to me in the same year. All these particulars were brought very strongly to my memory when the French, some years ago, conveyed intelligence by signals; and I then thought and declared that the merit of the invention undoubtedly belonged to you. I am very glad that I have it in my power to send you this confirmation, because I imagine there is no other person now living who can bear witness to your observations in Berkshire. I remain, dear Sir, Your affectionate friend, JAMES L. PERROT. BATH, Dec. 9, 1795. Claims of priority of invention are always listened to with doubt, or, at best, with impatience. To those who bring the invention to perfection, who actually adapt it to use, mankind are justly most grateful, and to these, rather than to the original inventors, grant the honors of a triumph. Sensible of this, the matter is urged no farther, but left to the justice of posterity. I am happy to state, however, one plain fact, which stands independent of all controversy, that my father's was the _first_, and I believe the only, telegraph which ever spoke across the Channel from Ireland to Scotland. He was, as he says in his essay on this subject, "ambitious of being the first person who should connect the islands more closely by facilitating their mutual intercourse;" and on the 24th of August, 1794, my brothers had the satisfaction of sending by my father's telegraph four messages across the Channel, and of receiving immediate answers, before a vast concourse of spectators. _Edgeworth to Dr. Darwin._ EDGEWORTHTOWN, Dec. 11, 1794. I have been employed for two months in experiments upon a telegraph of my own invention. I tried it partially twenty-six years ago. It differs from the French in distinctness and expedition, as the intelligence is not conveyed alphabetically.... I intended to detail my telegraphs (in the plural), but I find that I have not room at present. If you think it worth while, you shall have the whole scheme before you, which I know you will improve for me. Suffice it, that by day, at eighteen or twenty miles' distance, I show, by four pointers, isosceles triangles, twenty feet high, on four imaginary circles, eight imaginary points, which correspond with the figures 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. So that seven thousand different combinations are formed, of four figures each, which refer to a dictionary of words that are referred to,--of lists of the navy, army, militia, lords, commons, geographical and technical terms, &c, besides an alphabet. So that everything one wishes may be transmitted with expedition. By night, white lights are used. _Dr. Darwin to Mr. Edgeworth._ DERBY, March 15, 1795. DEAR SIR,--I beg your pardon for not immediately answering your last favor, which was owing to the great influence the evil demon has at present in all affairs on this earth. That is, I lost your letter, and have in vain looked over some scores of papers, and cannot find it. Secondly, having lost your letter, I daily hoped to find it again--without success. The telegraph you described I dare say would answer the purpose. It would be like a giant wielding his long arms and talking with his fingers; and those long arms might be covered with lamps in the night. You would place four or six such gigantic figures in a line, so that they should spell a whole word at once; and other such figures in sight of each other, all round the coast of Ireland; and thus fortify yourselves, instead of Friar Bacon's wall of brass round England, with the brazen head, which spoke, "Time is! Time was! Time is past!" MR. EDGEWORTH'S MACHINE. Having slightly mentioned the contrivances made use of by the ancients for conveying intelligence swiftly, and having pointed out some of the various important uses to which this art may be applied, I shall endeavor to give a clear view of my attempts on this subject. Models of the French telegraph have been so often exhibited, and the machine itself is so well known, that it is not necessary to describe it minutely in this place. It is sufficient to say that it consists of a tall pole, with three movable arms, which may be seen at a considerable distance through telescopes; these arms may be set in as many different positions as are requisite to express all the different letters of the alphabet. By a successive combination of letters shown in this manner, words and sentences are formed and intelligence communicated. No doubt can be made of the utility of this machine, as it has been applied to the most important purposes. It is obviously liable to mistakes, from the number of changes requisite for each word, and from the velocity with which it must be moved to convey intelligence with any tolerable expedition. The name, however, which is well chosen, has become so familiar, that I shall, with a slight alteration, adopt it for the apparatus which I am going to describe. _Telegraph_ is a proper name for a machine which describes at a distance. _Telelograph_, or contractedly _Tellograph_, is a proper name for a machine that describes _words_ at a distance. Dr. Hooke, to whom every mechanic philosopher must recur, has written an essay upon the subject of conveying swift intelligence, in which he proposes to use large wooden letters in succession. The siege of Vienna turned his attention to the business. His method is more cumbrous than the French telegraph, but far less liable to error. I tried it before I had seen Hooke's work, in the year 1767 in London, and I could distinctly read letters illuminated with lamps in Hampstead Churchyard, from the house of Mr. Elers in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, to whom I refer for date and circumstance. To him and to Mr. E. Delaval, F.R.S., to Mr. Perrot, of Hare Hatch, and to Mr Woulfe the chemist, I refer for the precedency which I claim in this invention. In that year I invented the idea of my present tellograph, proposing to make use of windmill sails instead of the hands or pointers which I now employ. Mr. Perrot was so good as to accompany me more than once to a hill near his house to observe with a telescope the windmill at Nettlebed, which places are, I think, sixteen miles asunder. My intention at that time was to convey not only a swift but an unsuspected mode of intelligence. By means of common windmills this might have been effected, before an account of the French telegraph was made public. My machinery consists of four triangular pointers or hands [each upon a separate pedestal, ranged along in a row], each of which points like the hand of a clock to different situations in the circles which they describe. It is easy to distinguish whether a hand moving vertically points perpendicularly downwards or upwards, horizontally to the right or left, or to any of the four intermediate positions. The eye can readily perceive the eight different positions in which one of the pointers is represented [on the plate attached to the article in the "Transactions," but here omitted]. Of these eight positions seven only are employed to denote figures, the upright position of the hand or pointer being reserved to represent o, or zero. The figures thus denoted refer to a vocabulary in which all the words are numbered. Of the four pointers, that which appears to the left hand of the observer represents thousands; the others hundreds, tens, and units, in succession, as in common numeration. [By these means, as Mr. Edgeworth showed, numbers from 1 up to 7,777, omitting those having a digit above 7, could be displayed to the distant observer, who on referring to his vocabulary discovered that they meant such expressions as it might seem convenient to transmit by this excellent invention.] Although the electric telegraphs have long since superseded telegraphs of this class in public use, the young people of Colonel Ingham's class took great pleasure in the next summer in using Mr. Edgeworth's telegraph to communicate with each other, by plans easily made in their different country homes. It may interest the casual reader to know that the first words in the first message transmitted on the telegraph between Scotland and Ireland, alluded to above, were represented by the numbers 2,645, 2,331, 573, 1,113 244, 2,411, 6,336, which being interpreted are,-- "Hark from basaltic rocks and giant walls," and so on with the other lines, seven in number. This is Mr. Edgeworth's concise history of telegraphy before his time. The art of conveying intelligence by sounds and signals is of the highest antiquity. It was practised by Theseus in the Argonautic expedition, by Agamemnon at the siege of Troy, and by Mardonius in the time of Xerxes. It is mentioned frequently in Thucydides. It was used by Tamerlane, who had probably never heard of the black sails of Theseus; by the Moors in Spain; by the Welsh in Britain; by the Irish; and by the Chinese on that famous wall by which they separated themselves from Tartary. * * * * * All this detail about Mr. Edgeworth's telegraph resulted in much search in the older encyclopædias. Quite full accounts were found, by the young people, of his system, and of the French system afterwards employed, and worked in France until the electric telegraph made all such inventions unnecessary. Before the next meeting, Bedford Long, who lived on Highland Street in Roxbury, and Hugh, who lived on the side of Corey Hill, were able to communicate with each other by semaphore; and at the next meeting they arranged two farther stations, so that John, at Cambridge, and Jane Fortescue, at Lexington, were in the series. There being some half an hour left that afternoon, the children amused themselves by looking up some other of Mr. Edgeworth's curious experiments and vagaries. MORE OF MR. EDGEWORTH'S FANCIES. During my residence at Hare Hatch another wager was proposed by me among our acquaintance, the purport of which was that I undertook to find a man who should, with the assistance of machinery, walk faster than any other person that could be produced. The machinery which I intended to employ was a huge hollow wheel, made very light, withinside of which, in a barrel of six feet diameter, a man should walk. Whilst he stepped thirty inches, the circumference of the large wheel, or rather wheels, would revolve five feet on the ground; and as the machinery was to roll on planks and on a plane somewhat inclined, when once the _vis inertiæ_ of the machine should be overcome, it would carry on the man within it as fast as he could possibly walk. I had provided means of regulating the motion, so that the wheel should not run away with its master. I had the wheel made; and when it was so nearly completed as to require but a few hours' work to finish it, I went to London for Lord Effingham, to whom I had promised that he should be present at the first experiment made with it. But the bulk and extraordinary appearance of my machine had attracted the notice of the country neighborhood; and, taking advantage of my absence, some idle curious persons went to the carpenter I employed, who lived on Hare Hatch Common. From him they obtained the great wheel which had been left by me in his care. It was not finished. I had not yet furnished it with the means of stopping or moderating its motion. A young lad got into it; his companions launched it on a path which led gently down hill towards a very steep chalk-pit. This pit was at such a distance as to be out of their thoughts when they set the wheel in motion. On it ran. The lad withinside plied his legs with all his might. The spectators, who at first stood still to behold the operation, were soon alarmed by the shouts of their companion, who perceived his danger. The vehicle became quite ungovernable; the velocity increased as it ran down hill. Fortunately the boy contrived to jump from his rolling prison before it reached the chalk-pit; but the wheel went on with such velocity as to outstrip its pursuers, and, rolling over the edge of the precipice, it was dashed to pieces. The next day, when I came to look for my machine, intending to try it on some planks which had been laid for it, I found, to my no small disappointment, that the object of all my labors and my hopes was lying at the bottom of a chalk-pit, broken into a thousand pieces. I could not at that time afford to construct another wheel of this sort, and I cannot therefore determine what might have been the success of my scheme. As I am on the subject of carriages, I shall mention a sailing-carriage that I tried on this common. The carriage was light, steady, and ran with amazing velocity. One day, when I was preparing for a sail in it with my friend and schoolfellow Mr. William Foster, my wheel-boat escaped from its moorings just as we were going to step on board. With the utmost difficulty I overtook it; and as I saw three or four stage-coaches on the road, and feared that this sailing-chariot might frighten their horses, I, at the hazard of my life, got into my carriage while it was under full sail, and then, at a favorable part of the road, I used the means I had of guiding it easily out of the way. But the sense of the mischief which must have ensued if I had not succeeded in getting into the machine at the proper place and stopping it at the right moment was so strong as to deter me from trying any more experiments on this carriage in such a dangerous place. Such should never be attempted except on a large common, _at a distance from a high_ road. It may not, however, be amiss to suggest that upon a long extent of iron railway in an open country carriages properly constructed might make profitable voyages, from time to time, with sails instead of horses; for though a constant or regular intercourse could not be thus carried on, yet goods of a certain sort, that are salable at any time, might be stored till wind and weather were favorable. When Bedford had read this passage, John Fordyce said he had travelled hundreds of miles on the Western railways where Mr. Edgeworth's sails could have been applied without a "stage-coach" to be afraid of them. JACK THE DARTER. In one of my journeys from Hare Hatch to Birmingham, I accidentally met with a person whom I, as a mechanic, had a curiosity to see. This was a sailor, who had amused London with a singular exhibition of dexterity. He was called _Jack the Darter_. He threw his darts, which consisted of thin rods of deal of about half an inch in diameter and of a yard long, to an amazing height and distance; for instance, he threw them over what was then called the New Church in the Strand. Of this feat I had heard, but I entertained some doubts upon the subject. I had inquired from my friends where this man could be found, but had not been able to discover him. As I was driving towards Birmingham in an open carriage of a singular construction, I overtook a man who walked remarkably fast, but who stopped as I passed him, and eyed my equipage with uncommon curiosity. There was something in his manner that made me speak to him; and from the sort of questions he asked about my carriage, I found that he was a clever fellow. I soon learned that he had walked over the greatest part of England, and that he was perfectly acquainted with London. It came into my head to inquire whether he had ever seen the exhibition about which I was so desirous to be informed. "Lord! sir," said he, "I am myself Jack the Darter." He had a roll of brown paper in his hand, which he unfolded, and soon produced a bundle of the light deal sticks which he had the power of darting to such a distance. He readily consented to gratify my curiosity; and after he had thrown some of them to a prodigious height, I asked him to throw some of them horizontally. At the first trial he threw one of them eighty yards with great ease. I observed that he coiled a small string round the stick, by which he gave it a rotary motion that preserved it from altering its course; and at the same time it allowed the arm which threw it time to exercise its whole force. If anything be simply thrown from the hand, it is clear that it can acquire no greater velocity than that of the hand that throws it; but if the body that is thrown passes through a greater space than the hand, whilst the hand continues to communicate motion to the body to be impelled, the body will acquire a velocity nearly double to that of the hand which throws it. The ancients were aware of this; and they wrapped a thong of leather round their javelins, by which they could throw them with additional violence. This invention did not, I believe, belong to the Greeks; nor do I remember its being mentioned by Homer or Xenophon. It was in use among the Romans, but at what time it was introduced or laid aside I know not. Whoever is acquainted with the science of projectiles will perceive that this invention is well worthy of their attention. A ONE-WHEELED CHAISE. After having satisfied my curiosity about Jack the Darter, I proceeded to Birmingham. I mentioned that I travelled in a carriage of a singular construction. It was a one-wheeled chaise, which I had had made for the purpose of going conveniently in narrow roads. It was made fast by shafts to the horse's sides, and was furnished with two weights or counterpoises, that hung below the shafts. The seat was not more than eight and twenty or thirty inches from the ground, in order to bring the centre of gravity of the whole as low as possible. The footboard turned upon hinges fastened to the shafts, so that when it met with any obstacle it gave way, and my legs were warned to lift themselves up. In going through water my legs were secured by leathers, which folded up like the sides of bellows; by this means I was pretty safe from wet. On my road to Birmingham I passed through Long Compton, in Warwickshire, on a Sunday. The people were returning from church, and numbers stopped to gaze at me. There is, or was, a shallow ford near the town, over which there was a very narrow bridge for horse and foot passengers, but not sufficiently wide for wagons or chaises. Towards this bridge I drove. The people, not perceiving the structure of my one-wheeled vehicle, called to me with great eagerness to warn me that the bridge was too narrow for carriages. I had an excellent horse, which went so fast as to give but little time for examination. The louder they called, the faster I drove; and when I had passed the bridge, they shouted after me with surprise. I got on to Shipstone upon Stone; but before I had dined there I found that my fame had overtaken me. My carriage was put into a coach-house, so that those who came from Long Compton, not seeing it, did not recognize me. I therefore had an opportunity of hearing all the exaggerations and strange conjectures which were made by those who related my passage over the narrow bridge. There were posts on the bridge, to prevent, as I suppose, more than one horseman from passing at once. Some of the spectators asserted that my carriage had gone over these posts; others said that it had not wheels, which was indeed literally true; but they meant to say that it was without any wheel. Some were sure that no carriage ever went so fast; and all agreed that at the end of the bridge, where the floods had laid the road for some way under water, my carriage swam on the surface of the water. VIII. JAMES WATT. "Uncle Fritz," said Mabel Liddell, the next afternoon that our friends had gathered together for a reading, "would it not be well for us all to go down into the kitchen this afternoon, and watch the steam come out of the kettle as Ellen makes tea for us?" "Why should it be well, Mabel?" said Colonel Ingham. "For my part, I should prefer to remain in my own room, more especially as I consider my armchair to be more suited to the comfort of one already on the downward path in life than is the kitchen table, where we should have to sit should we invade the premises of our friends below." "I was thinking," said Mabel, "of the manner in which James Watt when a child invented the steam-engine, from observing the motion of the top of the teakettle; and as we are to read about Watt this afternoon I thought we might be in a more fit condition to understand his invention, and might more fully comprehend his frame of mind while perfecting his great work, should we also fix our eyes and minds on the top of the teakettle in Ellen's kitchen." "Mabel, my child," said Uncle Fritz, "you talk like a book, and a very interesting one at that; but I think, as the youngest of us would say, that you are just a little off in your remarks. And as I observe that Clem, who is going to read this afternoon, desires to deliver a sermon of which your conversation seems to be the text, I will request all to listen to him before we consider seriously vacating this apartment, however poor it may be,"--and he glanced fondly around at the comfortable arrangements that everywhere pervaded the study,--"and seek the regions below." "I only wanted to say," began Clem, "that although Watt did on one occasion (in his extreme youth) look at a teakettle with some interest, he was not in the habit, at the time when he devoted most thought to the steam-engine, of having a teakettle continually before him that he might gain inspiration from observing the steam issue from its nose. And, as Watt dispensed with this aid, I have no doubt that we may do so as well, contenting ourselves with the results of the experiments in the vaporization of water, which Ellen is now conducting in the form of tea. Besides all this, however, I do want to say some things, before we read aloud this afternoon (I hope this isn't really too much like a sermon), about the steam-engine and the part that Watt had in perfecting it." At this point the irrepressible Mabel was heard to whisper to Bedford, who sat next her: "Wasn't it curious that the same mind which grasped the immense capabilities of the steam-engine should have been able also to construct such a delicate lyric as 'How doth the little busy bee Improve each shining hour'?" "Mabel," said Colonel Ingham, "you are absolutely unbearable. If you do not keep in better order I shall be sorry that I dissuaded you from descending to the kitchen. I see nothing incongruous myself in indulging in mechanical experiments, and in throwing one's thoughts into the form of verse,"--here the old gentleman colored slightly, as though he recollected something of the sort,--"but it may be well to counteract the impression your conversation may have made by stating that Isaac Watts did not invent the steam-engine, nor did James Watt write the beautiful words you have just quoted.--Now, Clem, I believe you have the floor." "Well," said Clem, "I only want the floor for a short time in order to explain about Watt and the steam-engine, and how much he was the inventor of it, before we begin to read. "There are various points about the steam-engine which are really Watt's invention,--the separate condenser, for instance,--but the idea of the steam-engine was not original with him; that is, when he saw the steam in the teakettle raise the lid and drop it again, he was not the first to speculate on the power of steam." "Are you going to read us that part in the book, Clem?" asked Bedford, with some interest. "Yes, if you like," said Clem. "I guess it tells about it in Mr. Smiles's 'Life of Watt.'" So he began to overhaul the book he had brought, and shortly discovered the anecdote referred to by Mabel with such interest, and read it. "On one occasion he [James Watt] was reproved by Mrs. Muirhead, his aunt, for his indolence at the tea-table. 'James Watt,' said the worthy lady, 'I never saw such an idle boy as you are. Take a book, or employ yourself usefully; for the last hour you have not spoken one word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the steam, watching how it rises from the spout, catching and counting the drops it falls into.' In the view of M. Arago, the little James before the teakettle, becomes the great engineer, preparing the discoveries which were soon to immortalize him. In our opinion, the judgment of the aunt was the truest. There is no reason to suppose that the mind of the boy was occupied with philosophical theories on the condensation of steam, which he compassed with so much difficulty in his maturer years. This is more probably an afterthought borrowed from his subsequent discoveries. Nothing is commoner than for children to be amused with such phenomena in the same way that they will form air-bubbles in a cup of tea, and watch them sailing over the surface till they burst. The probability is that little James was quite as idle as he seemed." "That is very interesting," remarked Mabel. "Don't you think now, Uncle Fritz, we had better go into the kitchen?" And she looked appealingly at the old gentleman, who merely held up his finger for silence as Clem continued his lecture. "What I meant to say," Clem went on, "was that other people before Watt had found out the power of steam, and had used it too. There was one Hero of Alexandria, who lived about two thousand years ago, who used steam for many interesting purposes, notably for animating various figures that took part in the idolatrous worship of his time, and thus in deceiving the common people. But his contrivances, though engines which went by steam, would hardly be called steam-engines. Between Hero of Alexandria, of 160 B. C., and the Marquis of Worcester, of 1650 A. D., there does not seem to have been much doing in the way of inventing the steam-engine. But the Marquis of Worcester in Charles II.'s time was a great philosopher, and did nobody knows exactly what with steam. But though he did great things, he did not produce a particularly capable engine, though he seems to have known more about steam than anybody else did at his time. After the Marquis of Worcester and before Watt, there were three men who did much towards inventing and improving the steam-engine. Their names were Savery, Papin, and Newcomen. I don't propose to tell you about the inventions of each one; but it's well enough to remember that each one did important service in getting the steam-engine to the point where Watt took hold of it. As it was on Newcomen's engine that Watt made his first serious experiments, I think we should all like to know something about it." THE NEWCOMEN ENGINE. Newcomen's engine may be thus briefly described: The steam was generated in a separate boiler, as in Savery's engine, from which it was conveyed into a vertical cylinder underneath a piston fitting it closely, but movable upwards and downwards through its whole length. The piston was fixed to a rod, which was attached by a joint or chain to the end of a lever vibrating upon an axis, the other end being attached to a rod working a pump. When the piston in the cylinder was raised, steam was let into the vacated space through a tube fitted into the top of the boiler, and mounted with a stopcock. The pump-rod at the further end of the lever being thus depressed, cold water was applied to the sides of the cylinder, on which the steam within it was condensed, a vacuum was produced, and the external air, pressing upon the top of the piston, forced it down into the empty cylinder. The pump-rod was thereby raised; and, the operation of depressing it being repeated, a power was thus produced which kept the pump continuously at work. Such, in a few words, was the construction and action of Newcomen's first engine.[8] While the engine was still in its trial state, a curious accident occurred which led to a change in the mode of condensation, and proved of essential importance in establishing Newcomen's engine as a practical working power. The accident was this: in order to keep the cylinder as free from air as possible, great pains were taken to prevent it passing down by the side of the piston, which was carefully wrapped with cloth or leather; and, still further to keep the cylinder air-tight, a quantity of water was kept constantly on the upper side of the piston. At one of the early trials the inventors were surprised to see the engine make several strokes in unusually quick succession; and on searching for the cause, they found it to consist in _a hole in the piston_, which had let the cold water in a jet into the inside of the cylinder, and thereby produced a rapid vacuum by the condensation of the continued steam. A new light suddenly broke upon Newcomen. The idea of condensing by injection of cold water directly into the cylinder, instead of applying it on the outside, at once occurred to him; and he proceeded to embody the expedient which had thus been accidentally suggested as part of his machine. The result was the addition of the injection pipe, through which, when the piston was raised and the cylinder full of steam, a jet of cold water was thrown in, and, the steam being suddenly condensed, the piston was at once driven down by the pressure of the atmosphere. An accident of a different kind shortly after led to the improvement of Newcomen's engine in another respect. To keep it at work, one man was required to attend the fire, and another to turn alternately the two cocks, one admitting the steam into the cylinder, the other admitting the jet of cold water to condense it. The turning of these cocks was easy work, usually performed by a boy. It was, however, a very monotonous duty, though requiring constant attention. To escape the drudgery and obtain an interval for rest or perhaps for play, a boy named Humphrey Potter, who turned the cocks, set himself to discover some method of evading his task. He must have been an ingenious boy, as is clear from the arrangement he contrived with this object. Observing the alternate ascent and descent of the beam above his head, he bethought him of applying the movement to the alternate raising and lowering of the levers which governed the cocks. The result was the contrivance of what he called the _scoggan_ (meaning presumably the loafer or lazy boy), consisting of a catch worked by strings from the beam of the engine. This arrangement, when tried, was found to answer the purpose intended. The action of the engine was thus made automatic; and the arrangement, though rude, not only enabled Potter to enjoy his play, but it had the effect of improving the working power of the engine itself; the number of strokes which it made being increased from six or eight to fifteen or sixteen in the minute. This invention was afterward greatly improved by Mr. Henry Beighton, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, who added the plug-rod and hand-gear. He did away with the catches and strings of the boy Potter's rude apparatus, and substituted a rod suspended from the beam, which alternately opened and shut the tappets attached to the steam and injection cocks. Thus, step by step, Newcomen's engine grew in power and efficiency, and became more and more complete as a self-acting machine. It will be observed that, like all other inventions, it was not the product of any one man's ingenuity, but of many. One contributed one improvement, and another another. The essential features of the atmospheric engine were not new. The piston and cylinder had been known as long ago as the time of Hero. The expansive force of steam and the creation of a vacuum by its condensation had been known to the Marquis of Worcester, Savery, Papin, and many more. Newcomen merely combined in his machine the result of their varied experience; and, assisted by the persons who worked with him, down to the engine-boy Potter, he advanced the invention several important stages; so that the steam-engine was no longer a toy or a scientific curiosity, but had become a powerful machine capable of doing useful work. JAMES WATT AND THE STEAM-ENGINE. It was in the year 1759 that Robison[9] first called the attention of his friend Watt to the subject of the steam-engine. Robison was then only in his twentieth, and Watt in his twenty-third year. Robison's idea was that the power of steam might be advantageously applied to the driving of wheel-carriages; and he suggested that it would be the most convenient for the purpose to place the cylinder with its open end downwards to avoid the necessity of using a working-beam. Watt admits that he was very ignorant of the steam-engine at the time; nevertheless, he began making a model with two cylinders of tin plate, intending that the pistons and their connecting-rods should act alternately on two pinions attached to the axles of the carriage-wheels. But the model, being slightly and inaccurately made, did not answer his expectations. Other difficulties presented themselves, and the scheme was laid aside because Robison left Glasgow to go to sea. Indeed, mechanical science was not yet ripe for the locomotive. Robison's idea had, however, dropped silently into the mind of his friend, where it grew from day to day, slowly and at length fruitfully. At his intervals of leisure and in the quiet of his evenings, Watt continued to prosecute his various studies. He was shortly attracted by the science of chemistry, then in its infancy. Dr. Black was at that time occupied with the investigations which led to his discovery of the theory of latent heat, and it is probable that his familiar conversations with Watt on the subject induced the latter to enter upon a series of experiments with the view of giving the theory some practical direction. His attention again and again reverted to the steam-engine, though he had not yet seen even a model of one. Steam was as yet almost unknown in Scotland as a working power. The first engine was erected at Elphinstone Colliery, in Stirlingshire, about the year 1750; and the second more than ten years later, at Govan Colliery, near Glasgow, where it was known by the startling name of "The Firework." This had not, however, been set up at the time Watt had begun to inquire into the subject. But he found that the college possessed the model of a Newcomen engine for the use of the Natural Philosophy class, which had been sent to London for repair. On hearing of its existence, he suggested to his friend Dr. Anderson, Professor of Natural Philosophy, the propriety of getting back the model; and a sum of money was placed by the Senatus at the professor's disposal, "to recover the steam-engine from Mr. Sisson, instrument-maker in London." In the mean time Watt sought to learn all that had been written on the subject of the steam-engine. He ascertained from Desaguliers, Switzer, and other writers, what had been accomplished by Savery, Newcomen, Beighton, and others; and he went on with his own independent experiments. His first apparatus was of the simplest possible kind. He used common apothecaries' phials for his steam reservoirs, and canes hollowed out for his steam-pipes. In 1761 he proceeded to experiment on the force of steam by means of a small Papin's digester and a syringe. The syringe was only the third of an inch in diameter, fitted with a solid piston; and it was connected with the digester by a pipe furnished with a stopcock, by which the steam was admitted or shut off at will. It was also itself provided with a stopcock, enabling a communication to be opened between the syringe and the outer air to permit the steam in the syringe to escape. The apparatus, though rude, enabled the experimenter to ascertain some important facts. When the steam in the digester was raised and the cock turned, enabling it to rush against the lower side of the piston, he found that the expansive force of the steam raised a weight of fifteen pounds, with which the piston was loaded. Then on turning on the cock and shutting off the connection with the digester at the same time that a passage was opened to the air, the steam was allowed to escape, when the weight upon the piston, being no longer counteracted, immediately forced it to descend. Watt saw that it would be easy to contrive that the cocks should be turned by the machinery itself with perfect regularity. But there was an objection to this method. Water is converted into vapor as soon as its elasticity is sufficient to overcome the weight of the air which keeps it down. Under the ordinary pressure of the atmosphere water acquires this necessary elasticity at 212°; but as the steam in the digester was prevented from escaping, it acquired increased heat, and by consequence increased elasticity. Hence it was that the steam which issued from the digester was not only able to support the piston and the air which pressed upon its upper surface, but the additional load with which the piston was weighted. With the imperfect mechanical construction, however, of those days, there was a risk lest the boiler should be burst by the steam, which was apt to force its way through the ill-made joints of the machine. This, conjoined with the great expenditure of steam on the high-pressure system, led Watt to abandon the plan; and the exigencies of his business for a time prevented him from pursuing his experiments. At length the Newcomen model arrived from London; and in 1763 the little engine, which was destined to become so famous, was put into the hands of Watt. The boiler was somewhat smaller than an ordinary teakettle. The cylinder of the engine was only of two inches diameter and six inches stroke. Watt at first regarded it as merely "a fine plaything." It was, however, enough to set him upon a track of thinking which led to the most important results. When he had repaired the model and set it to work, he found that the boiler, though apparently large enough, could not supply steam in sufficient quantity, and only a few strokes of the piston could be obtained, when the engine stopped. The fire was urged by blowing, and more steam was produced; but still it would not work properly. Exactly at the point at which another man would have abandoned the task in despair, the mind of Watt became thoroughly roused. "Everything," says Professor Robison, "was to him the beginning of a new and serious study; and I knew that he would not quit it till he had either discovered its insignificance or had made something of it." Thus it happened with the phenomena presented by the model of the steam-engine. Watt referred to his books, and endeavored to ascertain from them by what means he might remedy the defects which he found in the model; but they could tell him nothing. He then proceeded with an independent course of experiments, resolved to work out the problem for himself. In the course of his inquiries he came upon a fact which, more than any other, led his mind into the train of thought which at last conducted him to the invention of which the results were destined to prove so stupendous. This fact was the existence of latent heat. In order to follow the track of investigation pursued by Watt, it is necessary for a moment to revert to the action of the Newcomen pumping-engine. A beam, moving upon a centre, had affixed to one end of it a chain attached to the piston of the pump, and at the other a chain attached to a piston that fitted into the steam-cylinder. It was by driving this latter piston up and down the cylinder that the pump was worked. To communicate the necessary movement to the piston, the steam generated in a boiler was admitted to the bottom of the cylinder, forcing out the air through a valve, where its pressure on the under side of the piston counterbalanced the pressure of the atmosphere on its upper side. The piston, thus placed between two equal forces, was drawn up to the top of the cylinder by the greater weight of the pump-gear at the opposite extremity of the beam. The steam, so far, only discharged the office of the air it displaced; but if the air had been allowed to remain, the piston once at the top of the cylinder could not have returned, being pressed as much by the atmosphere underneath as by the atmosphere above it. The steam, on the contrary, which was admitted by the exclusion of air, _could be condensed_, and a vacuum created, by injecting cold water through the bottom of the cylinder. The piston, being now unsupported, was forced down by the pressure of the atmosphere on its upper surface. When the piston reached the bottom, the steam was again let in, and the process was repeated. Such was the engine in ordinary use for pumping water at the time that Watt began his investigations. Among his other experiments, he constructed a boiler which showed by inspection the quantity of water evaporated in any given time, and the quantity of steam used in every stroke of the engine. He was astonished to discover that a _small_ quantity of water in the form of steam heated a large quantity of cold water injected into the cylinder for the purpose of cooling it; and upon further examination he ascertained that steam heated six times its weight of cold water to 212°, which was the temperature of the steam itself. "Being struck with this remarkable fact," says Watt, "and not understanding the reason of it, I mentioned it to my friend Dr. Black, who then explained to me his doctrine of latent heat, which he had taught for some time before this period (the summer of 1764); but having myself been occupied by the pursuits of business, if I had heard of it I had not attended to it, when I thus stumbled upon one of the material facts by which that beautiful theory is supported." When Watt found that water in its conversion into vapor became such a reservoir of heat, he was more than ever bent on economizing it; for the great waste of heat involving so heavy a consumption of fuel was felt to be the principal obstacle to the extended employment of steam as a motive power. He accordingly endeavored, with the same quantity of fuel, at once to increase the production of steam and to diminish its waste. He increased the heating surface of the boiler by making flues through it; he even made his boiler of wood, as being a worse conductor of heat than the brickwork which surrounds common furnaces; and he cased the cylinders and all the conducting pipes in materials which conducted heat very slowly. But none of these contrivances were effectual; for it turned out that the chief expenditure of steam, and consequently of fuel, in the Newcomen engine, was occasioned by the reheating of the cylinder after the steam had been condensed, and the cylinder was consequently cooled by the injection into it of the cold water. Nearly four fifths of the whole steam employed was condensed on its first admission, before the surplus could act upon the piston. Watt therefore came to the conclusion that to make a perfect steam-engine it was necessary that _the cylinder should be always as hot as the steam that entered it_; but it was equally necessary that the steam should be condensed when the piston descended, nay, that it should be cooled down below 100°, or a considerable amount of vapor would be given off, which would resist the descent of the piston, and diminish the power of the engine. Thus the cylinder was never to be at a less temperature than 212°, and yet at each descent of the piston it was to be less than 100°,--conditions which, on the very face of them, seemed to be wholly incompatible. Though still occupied with his inquiries and experiments as to steam, Watt did not neglect his proper business, but was constantly on the look-out for improvements in instrument-making. A machine which he invented for drawing in perspective proved a success; and he made a considerable number of them to order, for customers in London as well as abroad. He was also an indefatigable reader, and continued to extend his knowledge of chemistry and mechanics by perusal of the best books on these sciences. Above all subjects, however, the improvement of the steam-engine continued to keep the fastest hold upon his mind. He still brooded over his experiments with the Newcomen model, but did not seem to make much way in introducing any practical improvement in its mode of working. His friend Robison says he struggled long to condense with sufficient rapidity without injection, trying one experiment after another, finding out what would _not_ do, and exhibiting many beautiful specimens of ingenuity and fertility of resource. He continued, to use his own words, "to grope in the dark, misled by many an _ignis fatuus_." It was a favorite saying of his that "Nature has a weak side, if we can only find it out;" and he went on groping and feeling for it, but as yet in vain. At length light burst upon him, and all at once the problem over which he had been brooding was solved. THE SEPARATE CONDENSER. One Sunday afternoon, in the spring of 1765, he went to take an afternoon walk on the Green, then a quiet grassy meadow used as a bleaching and grazing ground. On week days the Glasgow lasses came thither with their largest kail-pots to boil their clothes in; and sturdy queans might be seen, with coats kilted, trampling blankets in their tubs. On Sundays the place was comparatively deserted; and hence Watt, who lived close at hand, went there to take a quiet afternoon stroll. His thoughts were as usual running on the subject of his unsatisfactory experiments with the Newcomen engine, when the first idea of the separate condenser suddenly flashed upon his mind. But the notable discovery is best told in his own words, as related to Mr. Robert Hart, many years after:-- "I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon. I had entered the Green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street, and had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking upon the engine at the time, and had gone as far as the herd's house, when the idea came into my mind that as the steam was an elastic body, it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it and might be then condensed without cooling the cylinder. I then saw that I must get rid of the condensed steam and the injection water if I used a jet, as in Newcomen's engine. Two ways of doing this occurred to me. First, the water might be run off by a descending pipe, if an off-let could be got at the depth of 35 or 36 feet, and any air might be extracted by a small pump. The second was to make the pump large enough to extract both water and air." He continued: "I had not walked farther than the Golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind." Great and prolific ideas are almost always simple. What seems impossible at the outset appears so obvious when it is effected, that we are prone to marvel that it did not force itself at once upon the mind. Late in life Watt, with his accustomed modesty, declared his belief that if he had excelled, it had been by chance, and the neglect of others. To Professor Jardine he said that when it was analyzed the invention would not appear so great as it seemed to be. "In the state," said he, "in which I found the steam-engine, it was no great effort of mind to observe that the quantity of fuel necessary to make it work would forever prevent its extensive utility. The next step in my progress was equally easy,--to inquire what was the cause of the great consumption of fuel: this, too, was readily suggested, viz., the waste of fuel which was necessary to bring the whole cylinder, piston, and adjacent parts from the coldness of water to the heat of steam, no fewer than from fifteen to twenty times in a minute." The question then occurred, How was this to be avoided or remedied? It was at this stage that the idea of carrying on the condensation in a separate vessel flashed upon his mind, and solved the difficulty. Mankind has been more just to Watt than he was to himself. There was no accident in the discovery. It had been the result of close and continuous study; and the idea of the separate condenser was merely the last step of a long journey, a step which could not have been taken unless the road which led to it had been traversed. Dr. Black says, "This capital improvement flashed upon his mind at once, and filled him with rapture,"--a statement which, in spite of the unimpassioned nature of Watt, we can readily believe. On the morning following his Sunday afternoon's walk on Glasgow Green, Watt was up betimes, making arrangements for a speedy trial of his new plan. He borrowed from a college friend a large brass syringe, an inch and a third in diameter, and ten inches long, of the kind used by anatomists for injecting arteries with wax previous to dissection. The body of the syringe served for a cylinder, the piston-rod passing through a collar of leather in its cover. A pipe connected with the boiler was inserted at both ends for the admission of steam, and at the upper end was another pipe to convey the steam to the condenser. The axis of the stem of the piston was drilled with a hole, fitted with a valve at its lower end, to permit the water produced by the condensed steam on first filling the cylinder to escape. The first condenser made use of was an improvised cistern of tinned plate, provided with a pump to get rid of the water formed by the condensation of the steam, both the condensing-pipes and the air-pump being placed in a reservoir of cold water. "The steam-pipe," says Watt, "was adjusted to a small boiler. When the steam was produced, it was admitted into the cylinder, and soon issued through the perforation of the rod and at the valve of the condenser; when it was judged that the air was expelled, the steam-cock was shut, and the air-pump piston-rod was drawn up, which leaving the small pipes of the condenser in a state of vacuum, the steam entered them, and was condensed. The piston of the cylinder immediately rose, and lifted a weight of about eighteen pounds, which was hung to the lower end of the piston-rod. The exhaustion-cock was shut, the steam was re-admitted into the cylinder, and the operation was repeated. The quantity of steam consumed and the weights it could raise were observed, and, excepting the non-application of the steam-case and external covering, the invention was complete in so far as regarded the savings of steam and fuel." COMPLETING THE INVENTION. But although the invention was complete in Watt's mind, it took him many long and laborious years to work out the details of the engine. His friend Robison, with whom his intimacy was maintained during these interesting experiments, has given a graphic account of the difficulties which he successively encountered and overcame. He relates that on his return from the country, after the college vacation in 1765, he went to have a chat with Watt and communicate to him some observations he had made on Desaguliers' and Belidor's account of the steam-engine. He went straight into the parlor, without ceremony, and found Watt sitting before the fire looking at a little tin cistern which he had on his knee. Robison immediately started the conversation about steam; his mind, like Watt's, being occupied with the means of avoiding the excessive waste of heat in the Newcomen engine. Watt all the while kept looking into the fire, and after a time laid down the cistern at the foot of his chair, saying nothing. It seems that Watt felt rather nettled that Robison had communicated to a mechanic of the town a contrivance which he had hit upon for turning the cocks of his engine. When Robison therefore pressed his inquiry, Watt at length looked at him and said briskly, "You need not fash yourself any more about that, man. I have now made an engine that shall not waste a particle of steam. It shall all be boiling hot,--ay, and hot water injected, if I please." He then pushed the little tin cistern with his foot under the table. Robison could learn no more of the new contrivance from Watt at that time; but on the same evening he accidentally met a mutual acquaintance, who, supposing he knew as usual the progress of Watt's experiments, observed to him, "Well, have you seen Jamie Watt?" "Yes." "He'll be in fine spirits now with his engine?" "Yes," said Robison, "very fine spirits." "Gad!" said the other, "the separate condenser's the thing; keep it but cold enough, and you may have a perfect vacuum, whatever be the heat of the cylinder." This was Watt's secret, and the nature of the contrivance was clear to Robison at once. It will be observed that Watt had not made a secret of it to his other friends. Indeed, Robison himself admitted that one of Watt's greatest delights was to communicate the results of his experiments to others, and set them upon the same road to knowledge with himself; and that no one could display less of the small jealousy of the tradesman than he did. To his intimate friend Dr. Black he communicated the progress made by him at every stage. The Doctor kindly encouraged him in his struggles, cheered him in his encounter with difficulty, and, what was of still more practical value at the time, helped him with money to enable him to prosecute his invention. Communicative though Watt was disposed to be, he learnt reticence when he found himself exposed to the depredations of the smaller fry of inventors. Robison says that had he lived in Birmingham or London at the time, the probability is that some one or other of the numerous harpies who live by sucking other people's brains would have secured patents for his more important inventions, and thereby deprived him of the benefits of his skill, science, and labor. As yet, however, there were but few mechanics in Glasgow capable of understanding or appreciating the steam-engine; and the intimate friends to whom he freely spoke of his discovery were too honorable to take advantage of his confidence. Shortly after Watt communicated to Robison the different stages of his invention, and the results at which he had arrived, much to the delight of his friend. It will be remembered that in the Newcomen engine the steam was only employed for the purpose of producing a vacuum, and that its working power was in the down stroke, which was effected by the pressure of the air upon the piston; hence it is now usual to call it the atmospheric engine. Watt perceived that the air which followed the piston down the cylinder would cool the latter, and that steam would be wasted by reheating it. In order, therefore, to avoid this loss of heat, he resolved to put an air-tight cover upon the cylinder, with a hole and stuffing-box for the piston-rod to slide through, and to admit steam above the piston, to act upon it instead of the atmosphere. When the steam had done its duty in driving down the piston, a communication was opened between the upper and lower part of the cylinder; and the same steam, distributing itself equally in both compartments, sufficed to restore equilibrium. The piston was now drawn up by the weight of the pump-gear; the steam beneath it was then condensed in the separate vessel so as to produce a vacuum, and a fresh jet of steam from the boiler was let in above the piston, which forced it again to the bottom of the cylinder. From an atmospheric engine it had thus become a true steam-engine, and with much greater economy of steam than when the air did half the duty. But it was not only important to keep the air from flowing down the inside of the cylinder; the air which circulated within cooled the metal and condensed a portion of the steam within; and this Watt proposed to remedy by a second cylinder, surrounding the first, with an interval between the two which was to be kept full of steam. One by one these various contrivances were struck out, modified, settled, and reduced to definite plans,--the separate condenser, the air and water pumps, the use of fat and oil (instead of water, as in the Newcomen engine) to keep the piston working in the cylinder air-tight, and the enclosing of the cylinder itself within another to prevent the loss of heat. These were all emanations from the first idea of inventing an engine working by a piston, in which the cylinder should be continually hot and perfectly dry. "When once," says Watt, "the idea of separate condensation was started, all these improvements followed as corollaries in quick succession, so that in the course of one or two days the invention was thus far complete in my mind." WATT MAKES HIS MODEL. The next step was to construct a model engine for the purpose of embodying the invention in a working form. With this object, Watt hired an old cellar, situated in the first wide entry to the north of the beef-market in King Street, and then proceeded with his model. He found it much easier, however, to prepare his plan than to execute it. Like most ingenious and inventive men, Watt was extremely fastidious; and this occasioned considerable delay in the execution of the work. His very inventiveness to some extent proved a hindrance; for new expedients were perpetually occurring to him, which he thought would be improvements, and which he, by turns, endeavored to introduce. Some of these expedients he admits proved fruitless, and all of them occasioned delay. Another of his chief difficulties was in finding competent workmen to execute his plans. He himself had been accustomed only to small metal work, with comparatively delicate tools, and had very little experience "in the practice of mechanics _in great_" as he termed it. He was therefore under the necessity of depending, in a great measure, upon the handiwork of others. But mechanics capable of working out Watt's designs in metal were then with difficulty to be found. The beautiful self-action and workmanship which have since been called into being, principally by his own invention, did not then exist. The only available hands in Glasgow were the blacksmiths and tinners, little capable of constructing articles out of their ordinary walks; and even in these they were often found clumsy, blundering, and incompetent. The result was, that in consequence of the malconstruction of the larger parts, Watt's first model was only partially successful. The experiments made with it, however, served to verify the expectations he had formed, and to place the advantages of the invention beyond the reach of doubt. On the exhausting-cock being turned, the piston, when loaded with eighteen pounds, ascended as quickly as the blow of a hammer; and the moment the steam-cock was opened, it descended with like rapidity, though the steam was weak, and the machine snifted at many openings. Satisfied that he had laid hold of the right principle of a working steam-engine, Watt felt impelled to follow it to an issue. He could give his mind to no other business in peace until this was done. He wrote to a friend that he was quite barren on every other subject. "My whole thoughts," said he, "are bent on this machine. I can think of nothing else." He proceeded to make another and bigger, and, he hoped, a more satisfactory engine in the following August; and with that object he removed from the old cellar in King Street to a larger apartment in the then disused pottery, or delftwork, near the Broomielaw. There he shut himself up with his assistant, John Gardiner, for the purpose of erecting his engine. The cylinder was five or six inches in diameter, with a two-feet stroke. The inner cylinder was enclosed in a wooden steam-case, and placed inverted, the piston working through a hole in the bottom of the steam-case. After two months continuous application and labor it was finished and set to work; but it leaked in all directions, and the piston was far from air-tight. The condenser also was in a bad way, and needed many alterations. Nevertheless, the engine readily worked with ten and a half pounds pressure on the inch, and the piston lifted a weight of fourteen pounds. The improvement of the cylinder and piston continued Watt's chief difficulty, and taxed his ingenuity to the utmost. At so low an ebb was the art of making cylinders that the one he used was not bored, but hammered, the collective mechanical skill of Glasgow being then unequal to the boring of a cylinder of the simplest kind; nor, indeed, did the necessary appliances for the purpose then exist anywhere else. In the Newcomen engine a little water was found upon the upper surface of the piston, and sufficiently filled up the interstices between the piston and the cylinder. But when Watt employed steam to drive down the piston, he was deprived of this resource, for the water and steam could not coexist. Even if he had retained the agency of the air above, the drip of water from the crevices into the lower part of the cylinder would have been incompatible with keeping the cylinder hot and dry, and, by turning into vapor as it fell upon the heated metal, it would have impaired the vacuum during the descent of the piston. While he was occupied with this difficulty, and striving to overcome it by the adoption of new expedients, such as leather collars and improved workmanship, he wrote to a friend, "My old white-iron man is dead;" the old white-iron man, or tinner, being his leading mechanic. Unhappily, also, just as he seemed to have got the engine into working order, the beam broke, and, having great difficulty in replacing the damaged part, the accident threatened, together with the loss of his best workman, to bring the experiment to an end. Though discouraged by these misadventures, he was far from defeated. But he went on as before, battling down difficulty inch by inch, and holding good the ground he had won, becoming every day more strongly convinced that he was in the right track, and that the important uses of the invention, could he but find time and means to perfect it, were beyond the reach of doubt. But how to find the means! Watt himself was a comparatively poor man; having no money but what he earned by his business of mechanical-instrument making, which he had for some time been neglecting through his devotion to the construction of his engine. What he wanted was capital, or the help of a capitalist willing to advance him the necessary funds to perfect his invention. To give a fair trial to the new apparatus would involve an expenditure of several thousand pounds; and who on the spot could be expected to invest so large a sum in trying a machine so entirely new, depending for its success on physical principles very imperfectly understood? There was no such help to be found in Glasgow. The tobacco lords,[10] though rich, took no interest in steam power; and the manufacturing class, though growing in importance, had full employment for their little capital in their own concerns. "How Watt succeeded in interesting Dr. Roebuck in his project, and thus obtained funds to continue his experiments; how he finally joined with Matthew Boulton in the great firm of Boulton and Watt, manufacturers of steam-engines; how they pumped out all the water in the Cornish mines; and how Watt finally attained prosperity as well as success,--is an interesting story, but rather too long for these winter afternoons; and as the story of the _invention_ of the steam-engine is substantially told in the foregoing pages, we must stop our reading here, more especially as it seems to be tea-time, and I hear Ellen ringing the bell for supper." IX. ROBERT FULTON. They were to continue their talk and reading by following along the developments in the use of steam. "Uncle Fritz," said Fanchon, "these agnostics make so much fun of our dear Harry and Lucy, that they will not let me quote from 'The Botanic Garden.'" Emma promised that they would laugh as little as they could. "'The Botanic Garden,'" said Fanchon, "was a stately, and I am afraid some of you would say very pompous, poem, written by Dr. Darwin." "Dr. Darwin write poetry!" "It is not the Dr. Charles Darwin whom you have heard of; it was his grandfather," said Uncle Fritz. And Fanchon went on: "All I ever knew of 'The Botanic Garden' was in the quotations of our dear Harry and Lucy and Frank. But dear Uncle Fritz has taken down the book for me, and here it is, with its funny old pictures of Ladies' Slippers and such things." "I do not see what Ladies' Slippers have to do with steam-engines," said Bedford Long, scornfully. "No!" said Fanchon, laughing; "but I do, and that is the difference between you and me. Because, you see, I have read 'Harry and Lucy,' and you have not." And she opened "The Botanic Garden" at the place where she had put in a mark, and read:-- "Pressed by the ponderous air, the piston falls Resistless, sliding through its iron walls; Quick moves the balance beam of giant birth, Wields its large limbs, and nodding shakes the earth. The giant power, from earth's remotest caves Lifts, with strong arm, her dark reluctant waves, Each caverned rock and hidden depth explores, Drags her dark coals, and digs her shining ores." "That is rather stilted poetry," said Uncle Fritz, "but a hundred years ago people were used to stilted poetry. It describes sufficiently well the original pumping-engine of Watt, and the lifting of coal from the shafts of the deep English mines. Now, it was not till Watt had made his improvements on the pumping-engine,--say in 1788,--that it was possible to go any farther in the use of steam than its application to such absolutely stationary purposes. It is therefore, I think, a good deal to the credit of Dr. Darwin, that within three years after Watt's great improvement in the condensing-engine the Doctor should have written this:-- 'Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar Drag the slow barge or drive the rapid car.' It was twelve years after he wrote this, that Fulton had an experimental steamboat on the river Seine in France. It was sixteen years after, that, with one of Watt's own engines, Fulton drove the 'Clermont' from New York to Albany in thirty-six hours, and revolutionized the world in doing it. "Poor James Mackintosh was in virtual exile in Calcutta at that time, and he wrote this in his journal: 'A boat propelled by steam has gone a hundred and fifty miles upon the Hudson in thirty-six hours. Four miles an hour would bring Calcutta within a hundred days of London. Oh that we had lived a hundred years later!' In less than fifty years after Mackintosh wrote those words, Calcutta was within thirty days of London. "When Harry and Lucy read these verses in 1825, the 'rapid car' was still in the future." "Yes," said Fanchon; "but Harry says, 'The rapid car is to come, and I dare say that will be accomplished soon, papa; do not you think it will?'" "I have sometimes wondered," said Uncle Fritz, "whether our American word 'car' where the English say 'wagon' did not come from the 'rapid car' of Dr. Darwin. Read on, Fanchon." And he put his finger on the lines which Fanchon read:-- "Or on wide waving wings, expanded, bear The flying chariot through the fields of air." "Monsieur ----, the French gentleman, tried a light steam-engine for the propulsion of a balloon in 1872; but it does not seem to have had power enough. Messrs. Renard and Krebs, in their successful flight of August last, used an electric battery. "But we are getting away from Fulton, who is really the first who drove the 'slow barge,' and indeed made it a very fast one." "Did you know him?" asked Emma Fortinbras, whose ideas of chronology are very vague. "Oh, no!" said Uncle Fritz; "he died young and before my time. But I did know a personal companion and friend, nay, a bedfellow of his, Benjamin Church, who was with him in Paris at one of the crises of his life. Fulton had a little steamboat on the river Seine, as I said just now; and he had made interest with Napoleon to have it examined by a scientific committee. Steam power was exactly what Napoleon wanted, to take his great army across from Boulogne to England. The day came for the great experiment. Church and Fulton slept, the night before, in the same bed in their humble lodgings in Paris. At daybreak a messenger waked them. He had come from the river to say that the weight of boiler and machinery had been too much for the little boat, that her timbers had given way, and that the whole had sunk to the bottom of the river. But for this misfortune, the successful steamboat would have sailed upon the Seine, and, for aught I know, Napoleon's grandchildren would now be emperors of England." Until Watt had completed the structure of the double-acting condensing-engine, the application of steam to any but the single object of pumping water had been almost impracticable. It was not enough, in order to render it applicable to general purposes, that the condensation of the water should take place in a separate vessel, and that steam itself should be used, instead of atmospheric pressure, as the moving power; but it was also necessary that the steam should act as well during the ascent as during the descent of the piston. Before steam could be used in moving paddle-wheels, it was in addition necessary that a ready and convenient mode of making the motion of the piston continuous and rotary, should be discovered. All these improvements upon the original form of the steam-engine are due to Watt, and he did not complete their perfect combination before the year 1786. Evans, who, in this country, saw the possibility of constructing a double-acting engine, even before Watt, and had made a model of his machine, did not succeed in obtaining funds to make an experiment upon a large scale before 1801. We conceive, therefore, that all those who projected the application of steam to vessels before 1786, may be excluded, without ceremony, from the list of those entitled to compete with Fulton for the honors of invention. No one, indeed, could have seen the powerful action of a pumping-engine without being convinced that the energy which was applied so successfully to that single purpose, might be made applicable to many others; but those who entertained a belief that the original atmospheric engine, or even the single-acting engine of Watt, could be applied to propel boats by paddle-wheels, showed a total ignorance of mechanical principles. This is more particularly the case with all those whose projects bore the strongest resemblance to the plan which Fulton afterwards carried successfully into effect. Those who approached most nearly to the attainment of success, were they who were farthest removed from the plan of Fulton. His application was founded on the properties of Watt's double-acting engine, and could not have been used at all, until that instrument of universal application had received the last finish of its inventor. In this list of failures, from proposing to do what the instrument they employed was incapable of performing, we do not hesitate to include Savery, Papin, Jonathan Hulls, Périer, the Marquis de Jouffroy, and all the other names of earlier date than 1786, whom the jealousy of the French and English nations have drawn from oblivion for the purpose of contesting the priority of Fulton's claims. The only competitor, whom they might have brought forward with some shadow of plausibility, is Watt himself. No sooner had that illustrious inventor completed his double-acting engine, than he saw at a glance the vast field of its application. Navigation and locomotion were not omitted; but living in an inland town, and in a country possessing no rivers of importance, his views were limited to canals alone. In this direction he saw an immediate objection to the use of any apparatus, of which so powerful an agent as his engine should be the mover; for it was clear, that the injury which would be done to the banks of the canal, would prevent the possibility of its introduction. Watt, therefore, after having conceived the idea of a steamboat, laid it aside, as unlikely to be of any practical value. The idea of applying steam to navigation was not confined to Europe. Numerous Americans entertained hopes of attaining the same object, but, before 1786, with the same want of any reasonable hopes of success. Their fruitless projects were, however, rebuked by Franklin, who, reasoning upon the capabilities of the engine in its original form, did not hesitate to declare all their schemes impracticable; and the correctness of his judgment is at present unquestionable. Among those who, before the completion of Watt's invention, attempted the structure of steamboats, must be named with praise Fitch and Rumsey. They, unlike those whose names have been cited, were well aware of the real difficulties which they were to overcome; and both were the authors of plans which, if the engine had been incapable of further improvement, might have had a partial and limited success. Fitch's trial was made in 1783, and Rumsey's in 1787. The latter date is subsequent to Watt's double-acting engine; but as the project consisted merely in pumping in water, to be afterwards forced out at the stern, the single-acting engine was probably employed. Evans, whose engine might have answered the purpose, was employed in the daily business of millwright; and although he might, at any time, have driven these competitors from the field, he took no steps to apply his dormant invention. Fitch, who had watched the graceful and rapid way of the Indian canoe, saw in the oscillating motion of the old pumping-engine the means of impelling paddles in a manner similar to that given them by the human arm. This idea is extremely ingenious, and was applied in a simple and beautiful manner. But the engine was yet too feeble and cumbrous to yield an adequate force; and when it received its great improvement from Watt, a more efficient mode of propulsion had become practicable, and must have superseded Fitch's paddles had they even come into general use. The experiments of Fitch and Rumsey in the United States, although generally considered unsuccessful, did not deter others from similar attempts. The great rivers and arms of the sea which intersect the Atlantic coast, and, still more, the innumerable navigable arms of the Father of Waters, appeared to call upon the ingenious machinist to contrive means for their more convenient navigation. The improvement of the engine by Watt was now familiarly known; and it was evident that it possessed sufficient powers for the purpose. The only difficulty which existed, was in the mode of applying it. The first person who entered into the inquiry was John Stevens, of Hokoken, who commenced his researches in 1791. In these he was steadily engaged for nine years, when he became the associate of Chancellor Livingston and Nicholas Roosevelt. Among the persons employed by this association was Brunel, who has since become distinguished in Europe as the inventor of the block machinery used in the British navy-yards, and as the engineer of the tunnel beneath the Thames. Even with the aid of such talent, the efforts of this association were unsuccessful,--as we now know, from no error in principle, but from defects in the boat to which it was applied. The appointment of Livingston as ambassador to France broke up this joint effort; and, like all previous schemes, it was considered abortive, and contributed to throw discredit upon all undertakings of the kind. A grant of exclusive privileges on the waters of the State of New York was made to this association without any difficulty, it being believed that the scheme was little short of madness. Livingston, on his arrival in France, found Fulton domiciliated with Joel Barlow. The conformity in their pursuits led to intimacy, and Fulton speedily communicated to Livingston the scheme[11] which he had laid before Earl Stanhope in 1793. Livingston was so well pleased with it that he at once offered to provide the funds necessary for an experiment, and to enter into a contract for Fulton's aid in introducing the method into the United States, provided the experiment were successful. Fulton had, in his early discussion with Lord Stanhope, repudiated the idea of an apparatus acting on the principle of the foot of an aquatic bird, and had proposed paddle-wheels in its stead. On resuming his inquiries after his arrangements with Livingston, it occurred to him to compose wheels with a set of paddles revolving upon an endless chain extending from the stem to the stern of the boat. It is probable that the apparent want of success which had attended the experiments of Symington[12] led him to doubt the correctness of his original views. That such doubt should be entirely removed, he had recourse to a series of experiments upon a small scale. These were performed at Plombières, a French watering-place, where he spent the summer of 1802. In these experiments the superiority of the paddle-wheel over every other method of propulsion that had yet been proposed, was fully established. His original impressions being thus confirmed, he proceeded, late in the year 1803, to construct a working model of his intended boat, which model was deposited with a commission of French _savans_. He at the same time began building a vessel sixty-six feet in length and eight feet in width. To this an engine was adapted; and the experiment made with it was so satisfactory, as to leave little doubt of final success. Measures were therefore immediately taken, preparatory to constructing a steamboat on a larger scale in the United States. For this purpose, as the workshops of neither France nor America could at that time furnish an engine of good quality, it became necessary to resort to England for that purpose. Fulton had already experienced the difficulty of being compelled to employ artists unacquainted with the subject. It is, indeed, more than probable, that, had he not, during his residence in Birmingham, made himself familiar, not only with the general features, but with the most minute details of the engine of Watt, the experiment on the Seine could not have been made. In this experiment, and in the previous investigations, it became obvious that the engine of Watt required important modifications in order to adapt it to navigation. These modifications had been planned by Fulton; but it now became important, that they should be more fully tested. An engine was therefore ordered from Watt and Boulton, without any specification of the object to which it was to be applied; and its form was directed to be varied from their usual models, in conformity to sketches furnished by Fulton. The order for an engine intended to propel a vessel of large size, was transmitted to Watt and Boulton in 1803. At about the same time, Chancellor Livingston, having full confidence in the success of the enterprise, caused an application to be made to the legislature of New York for an exclusive privilege of navigating the waters of that State by steam, that which was granted on a former occasion having expired. This privilege was granted with little opposition. Indeed, those who might have been inclined to object, saw so much of the impracticable and even of the ridiculous in the project, that they conceived the application unworthy of serious debate. The condition attached to the grant was, that a vessel should be propelled by steam at the rate of four miles an hour, within a prescribed space of time. This reliance upon the reserved rights of the States proved a fruitful source of vexation to Livingston and Fulton, and imbittered the close of the life of the latter, and reduced his family to penury. It can hardly be doubted that, had an expectation been entertained, that the grant of a State was ineffectual, and that the jurisdiction was vested in the general government, a similar grant might have been obtained from Congress. The influence of Livingston with the administration was deservedly high, and that administration was supported by a powerful majority; nor would it have been consistent with the principles of the opposition to vote against any act of liberality to the introducer of a valuable application of science. Livingston, however, confiding in his skill as a lawyer, preferred the application to the State, and was thus, by his own act, restricted to a limited field. Before the engine ordered from Watt and Boulton was completed, Fulton visited England, and thus had an opportunity of visiting Birmingham, and directing, in person, its construction. It could only have been at this time, if ever, that he saw the boat of Symington;[13] but a view of it could have produced no effect upon his own plans, which had been matured in France, and carried, so far as the engine was concerned, to such an extent as to admit of no alteration. The engine was at last completed, and reached New York in 1806. Fulton, who returned to his native country about the same period, immediately undertook the construction of a boat in which to place it. In ordering his engine and in planning the boat, Fulton exhibited plainly how far his scientific researches and practical experiments had placed him before all his competitors. He had evidently ascertained, what each successive year's experience proves more fully, the great advantages possessed by large steamboats over those of smaller size; and thus, while all previous attempts had been made in smaller vessels, he alone resolved to make his final experiment in one of great dimensions. That a vessel, intended to be propelled by steam, ought to have very different proportions, and lines of a character wholly distinct from those of vessels intended to be navigated by sails, was evident to him. No other theory, however, of the resistance of fluids was admitted at the time than that of Bossut, and there were no published experiments except those of the British Society of Arts. Judged in reference to these, the model chosen by Fulton was faultless, although it will not stand the test of an examination founded upon a better theory and more accurate experiments. The vessel was finished and fitted with her machinery in August, 1807. An experimental excursion was forthwith made, at which a number of gentlemen of science and intelligence were present. Many of these were either sceptical or absolute unbelievers. But a few minutes served to convert the whole party, and satisfy the most obstinate doubters, that the long-desired object was at last accomplished. Only a few weeks before, the cost of constructing and finishing the vessel threatening to exceed the funds with which he had been provided by Livingston, Fulton had attempted to obtain a supply by the sale of one third of the exclusive right granted by the State of New York. No person was found possessed of the faith requisite to induce him to embark in the project. Those who had rejected this opportunity of investment, were now the witnesses of the completion of the scheme, which they had considered as an inadequate security for the desired funds. Within a few days from the time of the first experiment with the steamboat, a voyage was undertaken in it to Albany. This city, situated at the natural head of the navigation of the Hudson, is distant, by the line of the channel of the river, rather less than one hundred and fifty miles from New York. By the old post-road, the distance is one hundred and sixty miles, at which that by water is usually estimated. Although the greater part of the channel of the Hudson is both deep and wide, yet for about fourteen miles below Albany this character is not preserved, and the stream, confined within comparatively small limits, is obstructed by bars of sand or spreads itself over shallows. In a few remarkable instances, the sloops, which then exclusively navigated the Hudson, had effected a passage in about sixteen hours; but a whole week was not unfrequently employed in the voyage, and the average time of passage was not less than four entire days. In Fulton's first attempt to navigate this stream, the passage to Albany was performed in thirty-two hours, and the return in thirty. Up to this time, although the exclusive grant had been sought and obtained from the State of New York, it does not appear that either he or his associate had been fully aware of the vast opening which the navigation of the Hudson presented for the use of steam. They looked to the rapid Mississippi and its branches, as the place where their triumph was to be achieved; and the original boat, modelled for shallow waters, was announced as intended for the navigation of that river. But even in the very first attempt, numbers, called by business or pleasure to the northern or western parts of the State of New York, crowded into the yet untried vessel; and when the success of the attempt was beyond question, no little anxiety was manifested, that the steamboat should be established as a regular packet between New York and Albany. With these indications of public feeling Fulton immediately complied, and regular voyages were made at stated times until the end of the season. These voyages were not, however, unattended with inconvenience. The boat, designed for a mere experiment, was incommodious; and many of the minor arrangements by which facility of working and safety from accident to the machinery were to be insured, were yet wanting. Fulton continued a close and attentive observer of the performance of the vessel; every difficulty, as it manifested itself, was met and removed by the most masterly as well as simple contrivances. Some of these were at once adopted, while others remained to be applied while the boat should be laid up for the winter. He thus gradually formed in his mind the idea of a complete and perfect vessel; and in his plan, no one part which has since been found to be essential to the ease of manoeuvre or security, was omitted. But the eyes of the whole community were now fixed upon the steamboat; and as all those of competent mechanical knowledge were, like Fulton himself, alive to the defects of the original vessel, his right to priority of invention of various important accessories has been disputed. The winter of 1807-8 was occupied in remodelling and rebuilding the vessel, to which the name "Clermont" was now given. The guards and housings for the wheels, which had been but temporary structures, applied as their value was pointed out by experience, became solid and essential parts of the boat. For a rudder of the ordinary form, one of surface much more extended in its horizontal dimensions was substituted. This, instead of being moved by a tiller, was acted upon by ropes applied to its extremity; and these ropes were adapted to a steering-wheel, which was raised aloft towards the bow of the vessel. It had been shown by the numbers who were transported during the first summer, that at the same price for passage, many were willing to undergo all the inconveniences of the original rude accommodations, in preference to encountering the delays and uncertainty to which the passage in sloops was exposed. Fulton did not, however, take advantage of his monopoly, but with the most liberal spirit, provided such accommodations for passengers, as in convenience and even splendor, had not before been approached in vessels intended for the transportation of travellers. This was, on his part, an exercise of almost improvident liberality. By his contract with Chancellor Livingston, the latter undertook to defray the whole cost of the engine and vessel, until the experiment should result in success; but from that hour each was to furnish an equal share of all investments. Fulton had no patrimonial fortune, and what little he had saved from the product of his ingenuity was now exhausted. But the success of the experiment had inspired the banks and capitalists with confidence, and he now found no difficulty in obtaining, in the way of loan, all that was needed. Still, however, a debt was thus contracted which the continued demands made upon him for new investments never permitted him to discharge. The "Clermont," thus converted into a floating palace, gay with ornamental painting, gilding, and polished woods, began her course of passages for the second year in the month of April. The first voyage of this year was of the most discouraging character. Chancellor Livingston, who had, by his own experiments, approached as near to success as any other person who, before Fulton, had endeavored to navigate by steam, and who had furnished all the capital necessary for the experiment, had plans and projects of his own. These he urged into execution in spite of the opposition of Fulton. The boiler furnished by Watt and Boulton was not adapted to the object. Copied from those used on the land, it required that its fireplace and flues should be constructed of masonry. These added so much weight to the apparatus, that the rebuilt boat would hardly have floated had they been retained. In order to replace this boiler, Livingston had planned a compound structure of wood and copper, which he insisted should be tried. It is only necessary for us to say, that this boiler proved a complete failure. Steam began to issue from its joints a few hours after the "Clermont" left New York. It then became impossible to keep up a proper degree of tension, and the passage was thus prolonged to forty-eight hours. These defects increased after leaving Albany on the return, and the boiler finally gave way altogether within a few miles of New York. The time of the downward passage was thus extended to fifty-six hours. Fulton was, however, thus relieved from all further interference; this fruitless experiment was decisive as to his superiority over his colleague in mechanical skill. He therefore immediately planned and directed the execution of a new boiler, which answered the purpose perfectly; and although there are many reasons why boilers of a totally different form and of subsequent invention should be preferred, it is, for its many good properties, extensively used, with little alteration, up to the present day. But a few weeks sufficed to build and set this boiler, and in the month of June the regular passages of the "Clermont" were renewed. In observing the hour appointed for departure, both from New York and Albany, Fulton determined to insist upon the utmost regularity. It required no little perseverance and resolution to carry this system of punctuality into effect. Persons accustomed to be waited for by packet-boats and stages, assented with great reluctance to what they conceived to be a useless adherence to precision of time. The benefits of this punctuality were speedily perceptible; the whole system of internal communication of the State of New York was soon regulated by the hours of arrival and departure of Fulton's steamboats; and the same system of precision was copied in all other steamboat lines. The certainty of conveyance at stated times being thus secured, the number of travellers was instantly augmented; and before the end of the second summer, the boat became far too small for the passengers, who crowded to avail themselves of this novel, punctual, and unprecedentedly rapid method of transport. Such success, however, was not without its alloy. The citizens of Albany and the river towns saw, as they thought, in the steamboat, the means of enticing their customers from their ancient marts to the more extensive market of the chief city; the skippers of the river mourned the inevitable loss of a valuable part of their business; and innumerable projectors beheld with envy the successful enterprise of Fulton. Among the latter class was one who, misled by false notions of mechanical principles, fancied that in the mere oscillations of a pendulum lay a power sufficient for any purpose whatever. Availing himself of a well-constructed model, he exhibited to the inhabitants of Albany a pendulum which continued its motions for a considerable time, without requiring any new impulse, and at the same time propelled a pair of wheels. These wheels, however, did not work in water. Those persons who felt themselves aggrieved by the introduction of steamboats, quickly embraced this project, prompted by an enmity to Fulton, and determined, if they could not defeat his object, at least to share in the profits of its success. It soon appeared, from preliminary experiments, made in a sloop purchased for the purpose, that a steam-engine would be required to give motion to the pendulum; and it was observed that the water-wheels, when in connection with the pendulum, had a very irregular motion. A fly-wheel was therefore added, and the pendulum was now found to be a useless incumbrance. Enlightened by these experiments, the association proceeded to build two boats; and these were exact copies, not only of the hull and all the accessories of the "Clermont," but the engine turned out to be identical in form and structure with one which Fulton was at the very time engaged in fitting to his second boat, "The Car of Neptune." The pretence of bringing into use a new description of prime mover was of course necessarily abandoned, and the owners of the new steamboats determined boldly to test the constitutionality of the exclusive grant to Fulton. Fulton and Livingston, in consequence, applied to the Court of Chancery of the State of New York for an injunction, which was refused. On an appeal to the Court of Errors this decision of the Chancellor was reversed; but the whole of the profits which might have been derived from the business of the year were prevented from accruing to Livingston and Fulton, who, compelled to contend in price with an opposition supported by popular feeling in Albany, were losers rather than gainers by the operations of the season. As no appeal was taken from this last decision, the waters of the State of New York remained in the exclusive possession of Fulton and his partner, until the death of the former. This exclusive possession was not, however, attended with all the advantages that might have been anticipated. The immense increase of travel which the facilities of communication created, rendered it imperative upon the holders of the monopoly to provide new facilities by the construction of new vessels. The cost of these could not be defrayed out of the profits. Hence new and heavy debts were necessarily contracted by Fulton, while Livingston, possessed of an ample fortune, required no pecuniary aid beyond what he was able to meet from his own resources. The most formidable opposition which was made to the privileges of Fulton, was founded upon the discoveries of Fitch. We have seen, that he constructed a boat which made some passages between Trenton and Philadelphia; but the method which he used, was that of paddles, which are far inferior to the paddle-wheel. Of the inferiority of the method of paddles, had any doubt remained, positive evidence was afforded in the progress of this dispute; for in order to bring the question to the test of a legal decision, a boat propelled by them was brought into the waters of the State of New York. The result of the experiment was so decisive, that when the parties engaged in the enterprise had succeeded in their designs, they made no attempt to propel their boats by any other method than that of wheels. Fulton, assailed in his exclusive privileges derived from State grants, took, for his further protection, a patent from the general government. This is dated in 1809, and was followed by another, for improvements upon it, in 1811. It now appeared, that the very circumstance in which the greatest merit of his method consists, was to be the obstacle to his maintaining an exclusive privilege. Discarding all complexity, he had limited himself to the simple means of adapting paddle-wheels to the crank of Watt's engine; and, under the patent laws, it seems hardly possible that such a simple yet effectual method could be guarded by a specification. As has been the case with many other important discoveries, the most ignorant conceived that they might themselves have discovered it; and those unacquainted with the history of the attempts at navigation by steam, were compelled to wonder that it had been left for Fulton to bring it into successful operation. Before the death of Fulton, the steamboats on the Hudson River were increased in number to five. A sixth was built under his direction for the navigation of the Sound; and, this water being rendered unsafe by the presence of an enemy's[14] squadron, the boat plied for a time upon the Hudson. In the construction of this boat he had, in his own opinion, exhausted the power of steam in navigation, having given it a speed of nine miles an hour; and it is a remarkable fact, which manifests his acquaintance with theory and skill in calculation, that he in all cases predicted with almost absolute accuracy, the velocity of the vessels he caused to be constructed. The engineers of Great Britain came, long after, to a similar conclusion in respect to the maximum of speed. It is now, however, well known, that, with a proper construction of prows, the resistance to vessels moving at higher velocities than nine miles an hour, increases in a much less ratio than had been inferred from experiments made upon wedge-shaped bodies; and that the velocity of the pistons of steam-engines may be conveniently increased beyond the limit fixed by the practice of Watt. For these important discoveries the world is indebted principally to Robert L. Stevens. That Fulton must have reached them in the course of his own practice can hardly be doubted, had his valuable life been spared to watch the performance of the vessels he was engaged in building at the time of his premature death.[15] These were, a large boat intended for the navigation of the Hudson, to which the name of his partner, Chancellor Livingston, was given, and one planned for the navigation of the ocean. The latter was constructed with the intention of making a passage to St. Petersburg; but this scheme was interrupted by his death, which took place at the moment he was about to add to his glory, as the first constructor of a successful steamboat, that of being the first navigator of the ocean by this new and mighty agent. X. GEORGE STEPHENSON AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. "What I say is this," said Nahum, "that all your Vesuvius dividends, and all your pickers and slobbers, and shirtings at four cents, and all the rest of your great cotton victory, depend on railroads. If your father could not go to Lewiston and see his foreman and people, and come back before you can say Jack Robinson, there would be no mills at Lewiston such as there are. There might be a poor little sawmill making shingles, as you free-traders want." This with scorn at Fergus, perhaps, or some one else suspected of views unfavorable to protection. Then Nahum shook hands with Uncle Fritz, and apologized for his zeal, adding: "I am telling the boys why I want to go to Altoona, and to become a railroad man. I say that the new plant in India might knock cotton higher than a kite, and that people might learn to live without novels or magazines, but that they must have transportation all the same. And I am going into the railroad business. I am going to hew down the mountains and fill up the valleys." The boy was fairly eloquent in his enthusiasm. "It is in your blood, my brave fellow," said Uncle Fritz. "People thought your grandfather was crazy when he said it, sixty years ago. But it proved he was the seer and the prophet, and they were the fools." "And who invented railroads?" asked Blanche. "As to that, the man invented a railroad who first put two boards down over two ruts to make a cart run easier. Almost as soon as there were mines, there must have been some sort of rail for the use of the wagons which brought out the ore. These rails became so useful that they were continued from the mine to the high-road, whatever it was. But it was not till the first quarter of this century, that rails were laid for general use. The earliest railroad in the United States was laid at the quarries in Quincy, in Massachusetts, in 1825." Uncle Fritz was so well pleased at their eagerness that he brought out for them some of the old books, and some of the new. In especial he bade them all read Smiles's "Life of Stephenson" before they came to him again. For to George Stephenson, as they soon learned, more than to any one man, the world owes the step forward which it made when locomotives were generally used on railroads. Since that time the improvements in both have gone on together. Before they met again, at Uncle Fritz's suggestion, Fergus and Hester prepared this sketch of the details of Stephenson's earlier invention, purposely that Uncle Fritz might use it when these papers should be printed together. GEORGE STEPHENSON. An efficient and economical working locomotive engine still remained to be invented, and to accomplish this object Stephenson now applied himself. Profiting by what his predecessors had done,--warned by their failures and encouraged by their partial successes,--he began his labors. There was still wanting the man who should accomplish for the locomotive what James Watt had done for the steam-engine, and combine in a complete form the best points in the separate plans of others, embodying with them such original inventions and adaptations of his own, as to entitle him to the merit of inventing the working locomotive, as James Watt is to be regarded as the inventor of the working condensing-engine. This was the great work upon which George Stephenson now entered, though probably without any adequate idea of the ultimate importance of his work to society and civilization. He proceeded to bring the subject of constructing a "Travelling Engine," as he denominated the locomotive, under the notice of the lessees of the Killingworth Colliery,[16] in the year 1813. Lord Ravensworth, the principal partner, had already formed a very favorable opinion of the new colliery engine-wright from the improvements which he had effected in the colliery engines, both above and below ground; and after considering the matter, and hearing Stephenson's explanations, he authorized him to proceed with the construction of a locomotive, though his lordship was by some called a fool for advancing money for such a purpose. "The first locomotive that I made," said Stephenson, many years after, when speaking of his early career at a public meeting in Newcastle, "was at Killingworth Colliery, and with Lord Ravensworth's money. Yes, Lord Ravensworth and partners were the first to intrust me, thirty-two years since, with money to make a locomotive engine. I said to my friends, there was no limit to the speed of such an engine, if the works could be made to stand." Our engine-wright had, however, many obstacles to encounter before he could get fairly to work upon the erection of his locomotive. His chief difficulty was in finding workmen sufficiently skilled in mechanics and in the use of tools to follow his instructions, and embody his designs in a practical shape. The tools then in use about the colliery were rude and clumsy, and there were no such facilities, as now exist, for turning out machinery of any entirely new character. Stephenson was under the necessity of working with such men and tools as were at his command, and he had in a great measure to train and instruct the workmen himself. The new engine was built in the workshops at the West Morr, the leading mechanic being John Thirlwall, the colliery blacksmith,--an excellent mechanic in his way, though quite new to the work now intrusted to him. In this first locomotive, constructed at Killingworth, Stephenson to some extent followed the plan of Blenkinsop's engine. The wrought-iron boiler was cylindrical, eight feet in length and thirty-four inches in diameter, with an internal flue-tube twenty inches wide passing through it. The engine had two vertical cylinders, of eight inches diameter and two feet stroke, let into the boiler, which worked the propelling gear with cross-heads and connecting-rods. The power of the two cylinders was combined by means of spur-wheels, which communicated the motive power to the wheels supporting the engine on the rail. The engine thus worked upon what is termed the second motion. The chimney was of wrought-iron, round which was a chamber extending back to the feed-pumps, for the purpose of heating the water previous to its injection into the boiler. The engine had no springs, and was mounted on a wooden frame supported on four wheels. In order to neutralize as much as possible the jolts and shocks which such an engine would necessarily encounter, from the obstacles and inequalities of the then very imperfect plate-way, the water-barrel, which served for a tender, was fixed to the end of a lever and weighted; the other end of the lever being connected with the frame of the locomotive carriage. By this means the weight of the two was more equally distributed, though the contrivance did not by any means compensate for the total absence of springs. The wheels of the locomotive were all smooth, Stephenson having satisfied himself by experiment that the adhesion between the wheels of a loaded engine and the rail would be sufficient for the purposes of traction.[17] The engine was, after much labor and anxiety, and frequent alterations of parts, at length brought to completion, having been about ten months in hand. It was placed upon the Killingworth Railway on the 25th of July, 1814, and its powers were tried on the same day. On an ascending gradient of 1 in 450, the engine succeeded in drawing after it eight loaded carriages, of thirty tons weight, at about four miles an hour; and for some time after it continued regularly at work. Although a considerable advance upon previous locomotives, "Blucher" (as the engine was popularly called) was nevertheless a somewhat cumbrous and clumsy machine. The parts were huddled together. The boiler constituted the principal feature; and, being the foundation of the other parts, it was made to do duty not only as a generator of steam, but also as a basis for the fixings of the machinery and for the bearings of the wheels and axles. The want of springs was seriously felt; and the progress of the engine was a succession of jolts, causing considerable derangement to the working. The mode of communicating the motive power to the wheels by means of the spur-gear also caused frequent jerks, each cylinder alternately propelling or becoming propelled by the other, as the pressure of the one upon the wheels became greater or less than the pressure of the other; and when the teeth of the cog-wheels became at all worn, a rattling noise was produced during the travelling of the engine. As the principal test of the success of the locomotive was its economy as compared with horse-power, careful calculations were made with the view of ascertaining this important point. The result was, that it was found the working of the engine was at first barely economical; and at the end of the year the steam-power and the horse-power were ascertained to be as nearly as possible upon a par in point of cost. We give the remainder of the history of George Stephenson's efforts to produce an economical working locomotive in the words of his son Robert, as communicated to Mr. Smiles in 1856, for the purposes of his father's "Life." "A few months of experience and careful observation upon the operation of this (his first) engine convinced my father that the complication arising out of the action of the two cylinders being combined by spur-wheels would prevent their coming into practical application. He then directed his attention to an entire change in the construction and mechanical arrangements, and in the following year took out a patent, dated Feb. 28, 1815, for an engine which combined in a remarkable degree the essential requisites of an economical locomotive,--that is to say, few parts, simplicity in their action, and great simplicity in the mode by which power was communicated to the wheels supporting the engine. "This second engine consisted, as before, of two vertical cylinders; which communicated directly with each pair of the four wheels that supported the engine by a cross-head and a pair of connecting-rods. But in attempting to establish a direct communication between the cylinders and the wheels that rolled upon the rails, considerable difficulties presented themselves. The ordinary joints could not be employed to unite the engine, which was a rigid mass, with the wheels rolling upon the irregular surface of the rails; for it was evident that the two rails of the line of railway could not always be maintained at the same level with respect to each other,--that one wheel at the end of the axle might be depressed into a part of the line which had subsided, while the other would be elevated. In such a position of the axle and wheels it was clear that a rigid communication between the cross-head and the wheels was impracticable. Hence it became necessary to form a joint at the top of the piston-rod where it united with the cross-head, so as to permit the cross-head always to preserve complete parallelism with the axle of the wheels with which it was in communication. "In order to obtain the flexibility combined with direct action, which was essential for insuring power and avoiding needless friction and jars from irregularities in the rail, my father employed the 'ball and socket joint' for effecting a union between the ends of the cross-heads, where they were united with the crank-pins attached to each driving-wheel. By this arrangement the parallelism between the cross-head and the axle was at all times maintained, it being permitted to take place without producing jar or friction upon any part of the machine. "The next important point was to combine each pair of wheels by some simple mechanism, instead of the cog-wheels which had formerly been used. My father began by inserting each axle into two cranks, at right angles to each other, with rods communicating horizontally between them. An engine was made upon this plan, and answered extremely well. But at that period (1815) the mechanical skill of the country was not equal to the task of forging cranked axles of the soundness and strength necessary to stand the jars incident to locomotive work; so my father was compelled to fall back upon a substitute which, though less simple and less efficient, was within the mechanical capabilities of the workmen of that day, either for construction or repair. He adopted a chain, which rolled over indented wheels placed on the centre of each axle, and so arranged that the two pairs of wheels were effectually coupled and made to keep pace with each other. But these chains after a few years' use became stretched, and then the engines were liable to irregularity in their working, especially in changing from working back to forward again. Nevertheless, these engines continued in profitable use upon the Killingworth Colliery Railway for some years. Eventually the chain was laid aside, and the wheels were united by rods on the _outside_ instead of rods and crank-axles inside, as specified in the original patent; and this expedient completely answered the purpose required, without involving any expensive or difficult workmanship. "Another important improvement was introduced in this engine. The eduction steam had hitherto been allowed to escape direct into the open atmosphere; but my father having observed the great velocity with which the smoke issued from the chimney of the same engine, thought that by conveying the eduction steam into the chimney, and there allowing it to escape in a vertical direction, its velocity would be imparted to the smoke from the engine, or to the ascending current of air in the chimney. The experiment was no sooner made than the power of the engine became more than doubled; combustion was stimulated, as it were, by a blast; consequently, the power of the boiler for generating steam was increased, and in the same proportion, the useful duty of the engine was augmented. "Thus, in 1815 my father had succeeded in manufacturing an engine which included the following important improvements on all previous attempts in the same direction: simple and direct communication between the cylinder and the wheels rolling upon the rails; joint adhesion of all the wheels, attained by the use of horizontal connecting-rods; and, finally, a beautiful method of exciting the combustion of fuel by employing the waste steam which had formerly been allowed to escape uselessly. It is perhaps not too much to say that this engine, as a mechanical contrivance, contained the germ of all that has since been effected. It may be regarded, in fact, as a type of the present locomotive engine. "In describing my father's application of the waste steam for the purpose of increasing the intensity of combustion in the boiler, and thus increasing the power of the engine without adding to its weight, and while claiming for this engine the merit of being a type of all those which have been successfully devised since the commencement of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, it is necessary to observe that the next great improvement in the same direction, the 'multitubular boiler,' which took place some years later, could never have been used without the help of that simple expedient, _the steam-blast_, by which power only, the burning of coke was rendered possible. "I cannot pass over this last-named invention of my father's without remarking how slightly, as an original idea, it has been appreciated; and yet how small would be the comparative value of the locomotive engine of the present day, without the application of that important invention. "Engines constructed by my father in the year 1818, upon the principles just described, are in use on the Killingworth Colliery Railway to this very day (1856), conveying, at the speed of perhaps five or six miles an hour, heavy coal-trains, probably as economically as any of the more perfect engines now in use." The invention of the steam-blast by George Stephenson in 1815 was fraught with the most important consequences to railway locomotion; and it is not saying too much to aver that the success of the locomotive has been in a great measure the result of its adoption. Without the steam-blast, by means of which the intensity of combustion is maintained at its highest point, producing a correspondingly rapid evolution of steam, high rates of speed could not have been kept up; the advantages of the multitubular boiler (afterward invented) could never have been fully tested; and locomotives might still have been dragging themselves unwieldily along at a rate of a little more than five or six miles an hour. As the period drew near for the opening of the line, the question of the tractive power to be employed was anxiously discussed. At the Brusselton decline, fixed engines must necessarily be made use of; but with respect to the mode of working the railway generally, it was decided that horses were to be largely employed, and arrangements were made for their purchase. Although locomotives had been regularly employed in hauling coal-wagons on the Middleton Colliery Railway, near Leeds, for more than twelve years, and on the Wylam and Killingworth Railways, near Newcastle, for more than ten years, great scepticism still prevailed as to the economy of employing them for the purpose in lieu of horses. In this case, it would appear that seeing was _not_ believing. The popular scepticism was as great at Newcastle, where the opportunities for accurate observation were the greatest, as anywhere else. In 1824 the scheme of a canal between that town and Carlisle again came up; and although a few timid voices were raised on behalf of a railway, the general opinion was still in favor of a canal. The example of the Hetton Railway, which had been successfully worked by Stephenson's locomotives for two years past, was pointed to in proof of the practicability of a locomotive line between the two places; but the voice of the press, as well as of the public, was decidedly against the "new-fangled roads." When such was the state of public opinion as to railway locomotion, some idea may be formed of the clear-sightedness and moral courage of the Stockton and Darlington directors in ordering three of Stephenson's locomotive engines, at a cost of several thousand pounds, against the opening of the railway. These were constructed after Stephenson's most matured designs, and embodied all the improvements which he had contrived up to that time. No. 1 engine, the "Locomotion," which was first delivered, weighed about eight tons. It had one large flue, or tube, through the boiler, by which the heated air passed direct from the furnace at the one end, lined with fire-bricks, to the chimney at the other. The combustion in the furnace was quickened by the adoption of the steam-blast in the chimney. The heat raised was sometimes so great, and it was so imperfectly abstracted by the surrounding water, that the chimney became almost red-hot. Such engines, when put to their speed, were found capable of running at the rate of from twelve to sixteen miles an hour; but they were better adapted for the heavy work of hauling coal-trains at low speed--for which, indeed, they were specially constructed--than for running at the higher speed afterward adopted. Nor was it contemplated by the directors as possible, at the time when they were ordered, that locomotives could be made available for the purposes of passenger travelling. Besides, the Stockton and Darlington Railway did not run through a district in which passengers were supposed to be likely to constitute any considerable portion of the traffic. We may easily imagine the anxiety felt by George Stephenson during the progress of the works toward completion, and his mingled hopes and doubts--though the doubts were but few--as to the issue of this great experiment. When the formation of the line near Stockton was well advanced, the engineer one day, accompanied by his son Robert and John Dixon, made a journey of inspection of the works. The party reached Stockton, and proceeded to dine at one of the inns there. After dinner, Stephenson ventured on the very unusual measure of ordering in a bottle of wine, to drink success to the railway. John Dixon relates with pride the utterance of the master on the occasion "Now, lads," said he to the two young men, "I venture to tell you that I think you will live to see the day when railways will supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country,--when mail-coaches will go by railway, and railroads will become the great highways for the king and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working man to travel on a railway than to walk on foot. I know there are great and almost insurmountable difficulties to be encountered, but what I have said will come to pass as sure as you now hear me. I only wish I may live to see the day, though that I can scarcely hope for, as I know how slow all human progress is, and with what difficulty I have been able to get the locomotive introduced thus far, notwithstanding my more than ten years' successful experiment at Killingworth." The result, however, outstripped even George Stephenson's most sanguine expectations; and his son Robert, shortly after his return from America in 1827, saw his father's locomotive generally adopted as the tractive power on mining-railways. Tuesday, the 27th of September, 1825, was a great day for Darlington. The railway, after having been under construction for more than three years, was at length about to be opened. The project had been the talk of the neighborhood for so long that there were few people within a range of twenty miles who did not feel more or less interested about it. Was it to be a failure or a success? Opinions were pretty equally divided as to the railway; but as regarded the locomotive, the general belief was that it would "never answer." However, there was the locomotive "No. 1" delivered upon the line, and ready to draw the first train of wagons on the opening day. A great concourse of people assembled on the occasion. Some came from Newcastle and Durham, many from the Aucklands, while Darlington held a general holiday and turned out all its population. To give _éclat_ to the opening, the directors of the company issued a programme of the proceedings, intimating the times at which the procession of wagons would pass certain points along the line. The proprietors assembled as early as six in the morning at the Brusselton fixed engine, where the working of the inclined planes was successfully rehearsed. A train of wagons laden with coals and merchandise was drawn up the western incline by the fixed engine, a length of nineteen hundred and sixty yards in seven and a half minutes, and then lowered down the incline on the eastern side of the hill, eight hundred and eighty yards, in five minutes. At the foot of the incline the procession of vehicles was formed, consisting of the locomotive engine No. 1, driven by George Stephenson himself; after it, six wagons loaded with coals and flour; then a covered coach containing directors and proprietors; next, twenty-one coal-wagons fitted up for passengers (with which they were crammed); and lastly, six more wagons loaded with coals. Strange to say, a man on a horse, carrying a flag with the motto of the company inscribed on it, _Periculum privatum utilitas publica_,[18] headed the procession! A lithographic view of the great event, published shortly after, duly exhibits the horseman and his flag. It was not thought so dangerous a place, after all. The locomotive was only supposed to be able to go at the rate of from four to six miles an hour, and an ordinary horse could easily keep ahead of that. Off started the procession, with the horseman at its head. A great concourse of people stood along the line. Many of them tried to accompany it by running, and some gentlemen on horseback galloped across the fields to keep up with the train. The railway descending with a gentle decline toward Darlington, the rate of speed was consequently variable. At a favorable part of the road Stephenson determined to try the speed of the engine, and he called upon the horseman with the flag to get out of his way! Most probably, deeming it unnecessary to carry his _periculum privatum_ farther, the horseman turned aside, and Stephenson "put on the steam." The speed was at once raised to twelve miles an hour, and, at a favorable part of the road, to fifteen. The runners on foot, the gentlemen on horseback, and the horseman with the flag were consequently soon left far behind. When the train reached Darlington, it was found that four hundred and fifty passengers occupied the wagons, and that the load of men, coals, and merchandise amounted to about ninety tons. At Darlington the procession was rearranged. The six loaded coal-wagons were left behind, and other wagons were taken on with a hundred and fifty more passengers, together with a band of music. The train then started for Stockton,--a distance of only twelve miles,--which was reached in about three hours. The day was kept throughout the district as a holiday; and horses, gigs, carts, and other vehicles, filled with people, stood along the railway, as well as crowds of persons on foot, waiting to see the train pass. The whole population of Stockton turned out to receive the procession, and, after a walk through the streets, the inevitable dinner in the Town Hall wound up the day's proceedings. The principal circumstances connected with the construction of the "Rocket," as described by Robert Stephenson to Mr. Smiles, may be briefly stated. The tubular principle was adopted in a more complete manner than had yet been attempted. Twenty-five copper tubes, each three inches in diameter, extended from one end of the boiler to the other, the heated air passing through them on its way to the chimney; and the tubes being surrounded by the water of the boiler. It will be obvious that a large extension of the heating surface was thus effectually secured. The principal difficulty was in fitting the copper tubes in the boiler ends so as to prevent leakage. They were manufactured by a Newcastle copper-smith, and soldered to brass screws which were screwed into the boiler ends, standing out in great knobs. When the tubes were thus fitted, and the boiler was filled with water, hydraulic pressure was applied; but the water squirted out at every joint, and the factory floor was soon flooded. Robert went home in despair; and in the first moment of grief he wrote to his father that the whole thing was a failure. By return of post came a letter from his father, telling him that despair was not to be thought of,--that he must "try again;" and he suggested a mode of overcoming the difficulty, which his son had already anticipated and proceeded to adopt. It was to bore clean holes in the boiler ends, fit in the smooth copper tubes as tightly as possible, solder up, and then raise the steam. This plan succeeded perfectly; the expansion of the copper completely filling up all interstices, and producing a perfectly water-tight boiler, capable of standing extreme external pressure. The mode of employing the steam-blast for the purpose of increasing the draught in the chimney, was also the subject of numerous experiments. When the engine was first tried, it was thought that the blast in the chimney was not sufficiently strong for the purpose of keeping up the intensity of the fire in the furnace, so as to produce high-pressure steam with the required velocity. The expedient was therefore adopted of hammering the copper tubes at the point at which they entered the chimney, whereby the blast was considerably sharpened; and on a farther trial it was found that the draught was increased to such an extent as to enable abundance of steam to be raised. The rationale of the blast may be simply explained by referring to the effect of contracting the pipe of a water-hose, by which the force of the jet of water is proportionately increased. Widen the nozzle of the pipe and the jet is, in like manner, diminished. So is it with the steam-blast in the chimney of the locomotive. Doubts were, however, expressed whether the greater draught obtained by the contraction of the blast-pipe were not counterbalanced in some degree by the pressure upon the piston. Hence a series of experiments was made with pipes of different diameters, and their efficiency was tested by the amount of vacuum that was produced in the smoke-box. The degree of rarefaction was determined by a glass tube fixed to the bottom of the smoke-box, and descending into a bucket of water, the tube being open at both ends. As the rarefaction took place, the water would of course rise in the tube, and the height to which it rose above the surface of the water in the bucket was made the measure of the amount of rarefaction. These experiments proved that a considerable increase of draught was obtained by the contraction of the orifice; accordingly, the two blast-pipes opening from the cylinders into either side of the "Rocket" chimney, and turned up within it, were contracted slightly below the area of the steam-ports; and before the engine left the factory, the water rose in the glass tube three inches above the water in the bucket. The other arrangements of the "Rocket" were briefly these: The boiler was cylindrical with flat ends, six feet in length, and three feet four inches in diameter. The upper half of the boiler was used as a reservoir for the steam, the lower half being filled with water. Through the lower part the copper tubes extended, being open to the fire-box at one end, and to the chimney at the other. The fire-box, or furnace, two feet wide and three feet high, was attached immediately behind the boiler, and was also surrounded with water. The cylinders of the engine were placed on each side of the boiler, in an oblique position, one end being nearly level with the top of the boiler at its after end, and the other pointing toward the centre of the foremost or driving pair of wheels, with which the connection was directly made from the piston-rod to a pin on the outside of the wheel. The engine, together with its load of water, weighed only four tons and a quarter; and it was supported on four wheels, not coupled. The tender was four-wheeled, and similar in shape to a wagon,--the foremost part holding the fuel, and the hind part a water-cask. When the "Rocket" was finished, it was placed upon the Killingworth Railway for the purpose of experiment. The new boiler arrangement was found perfectly successful. The steam was raised rapidly and continuously, and in a quantity which then appeared marvellous. The same evening Robert despatched a letter to his father at Liverpool, informing him to his great joy, that the "Rocket" was "all right," and would be in complete working trim by the day of trial. The engine was shortly after sent by wagon to Carlisle, and thence shipped for Liverpool. The time so much longed for by George Stephenson had now arrived, when the merits of the passenger locomotive were about to be put to the test. He had fought the battle for it until now, almost single-handed. Engrossed by his daily labors and anxieties, and harassed by difficulties and discouragements which would have crushed the spirit of a less resolute man, he had held firmly to his purpose through good and through evil report. The hostility which he had experienced from some of the directors opposed to the adoption of the locomotive, was the circumstance that caused him the greatest grief of all; for where he had looked for encouragement, he found only carping and opposition. But his pluck never failed him; and now the "Rocket" was upon the ground to prove, to use his own words, "whether he was a man of his word or not." Great interest was felt at Liverpool, as well as throughout the country, in the approaching competition. Engineers, scientific men, and mechanics arrived from all quarters to witness the novel display of mechanical ingenuity on which such great results depended. The public generally were no indifferent spectators, either. The populations of Liverpool, Manchester, and the adjacent towns felt that the successful issue of the experiment would confer upon them individual benefits and local advantages almost incalculable, while populations at a distance waited for the result with almost equal interest. On the day appointed for the great competition of locomotives at Rainhill, the following engines were entered for the prize:-- 1. Messrs. Braithwaite and Ericsson's "Novelty." 2. Mr. Timothy Hackworth's "Sanspareil." 3. Messrs. R. Stephenson & Co.'s "Rocket." 4. Mr. Burstall's "Perseverance." Another engine was entered by Mr. Brandreth, of Liverpool,--the "Cycloped," weighing three tons, worked by a horse in a frame,--but it could not be admitted to the competition. The above were the only four exhibited, out of a considerable number of engines constructed in different parts of the country in anticipation of this contest, many of which could not be satisfactorily completed by the day of trial. The day fixed for the competition was the 1st of October; but to allow sufficient time to get the locomotives into good working order, the directors extended it to the 6th. On the morning of the 6th the ground at Rainhill presented a lively appearance, and there was as much excitement as if the St. Leger were about to be run. Many thousand spectators looked on, among whom were some of the first engineers and mechanicians of the day. A stand was provided for the ladies; the "beauty and fashion" of the neighborhood were present, and the side of the railroad was lined with carriages of all descriptions. It was quite characteristic of the Stephensons that although their engine did not stand first on the list for trial, it was the first that was ready; and it was accordingly ordered out by the judges for an experimental trip. Yet the "Rocket" was by no means the "favorite" with either the judges or the spectators. Nicholas Wood has since stated that the majority of the judges were strongly predisposed in favor of the "Novelty," and that nine tenths, if not ten tenths, of the persons present were against the "Rocket" because of its appearance.[19] Nearly every person favored some other engine, so that there was nothing for the "Rocket" but the practical test. The first trip made by it was quite successful. It ran about twelve miles, without interruption, in about fifty-three minutes. The "Novelty" was next called out. It was a light engine, very compact in appearance, carrying the water and fuel upon the same wheels as the engine. The weight of the whole was only three tons and one hundred-weight. A peculiarity of this engine was that the air was driven or forced through the fire by means of bellows. The day being now far advanced, and some dispute having arisen as to the method of assigning the proper load for the "Novelty," no particular experiment was made farther than that the engine traversed the line by way of exhibition, occasionally moving at the rate of twenty-four miles an hour. The "Sanspareil," constructed by Mr. Timothy Hackworth, was next exhibited, but no particular experiment was made with it on this day. This engine differed but little in its construction from the locomotive last supplied by the Stephensons to the Stockton and Darlington Railway, of which Mr. Hackworth was the locomotive foreman. The contest was postponed until the following day; but before the judges arrived on the ground, the bellows for creating the blast in the "Novelty" gave way, and it was found incapable of going through its performance. A defect was also detected in the boiler of the "Sanspareil," and some farther time was allowed to get it repaired. The large number of spectators who had assembled to witness the contest were greatly disappointed at this postponement; but to lessen it, Stephenson again brought out the "Rocket," and attaching to it a coach containing thirty-four persons, he ran them along the line at the rate of from twenty-four to thirty miles an hour, much to their gratification and amazement. Before separating, the judges ordered the engine to be in readiness by eight o'clock on the following morning, to go through its definitive trial according to the prescribed conditions. On the morning of the 8th of October the "Rocket" was again ready for the contest. The engine was taken to the extremity of the stage, the fire-box was filled with coke, the fire lighted, and the steam raised until it lifted the safety-valve loaded to a pressure of fifty pounds to the square inch. This proceeding occupied fifty-seven minutes. The engine then started on its journey, dragging after it about thirteen tons weight in wagons, and made the first ten trips backward and forward along the two miles of road, running the thirty-five miles, including stoppages, in an hour and forty-eight minutes. The second ten trips were in like manner performed in two hours and three minutes. The maximum velocity attained during the trial trip was twenty-nine miles an hour, or about three times the speed that one of the judges of the competition had declared to be the limit of possibility. The average speed at which the whole of the journeys were performed was fifteen miles an hour, or five miles beyond the rate specified in the conditions published by the company. The entire performance excited the greatest astonishment among the assembled spectators; the directors felt confident that their enterprise was now on the eve of success; and George Stephenson rejoiced to think that, in spite of all false prophets and fickle counsellors, the locomotive system was now safe. When the "Rocket," having performed all the conditions of the contest, arrived at the "grand stand" at the close of its day's successful run, Mr. Cropper--one of the directors favorable to the fixed-engine system--lifted up his hands, and exclaimed, "Now has George Stephenson at last delivered himself." Neither the "Novelty" nor the "Sanspareil" was ready for trial until the 10th, on the morning of which day an advertisement appeared, stating that the former engine was to be tried on that day, when it would perform more work than any engine on the ground. The weight of the carriages attached to it was only seven tons. The engine passed the first post in good style; but in returning, the pipe from the forcing-pump burst and put an end to the trial. The pipe was afterward repaired, and the engine made several trips by itself, in which it was said to have gone at the rate of from twenty-four to twenty-eight miles an hour. The "Sanspareil" was not ready until the 13th; and when its boiler and tender were filled with water, it was found to weigh four hundred-weight beyond the weight specified in the published conditions as the limit of four-wheeled engines; nevertheless, the judges allowed it to run on the same footing as the other engines, to enable them to ascertain whether its merits entitled it to favorable consideration. It travelled at the average speed of about fourteen miles an hour with its load attached; but at the eighth trip the cold-water pump got wrong, and the engine could proceed no farther. It was determined to award the premium to the successful engine on the following day, the 14th, on which occasion there was an unusual assemblage of spectators. The owners of the "Novelty" pleaded for another trial, and it was conceded. But again it broke down. Then Mr. Hackworth requested the opportunity for making another trial of his "Sanspareil." But the judges had now had enough of failures, and they declined, on the ground that not only was the engine above the stipulated weight, but that it was constructed on a plan which they could not recommend for adoption by the directors of the company. One of the principal practical objections to this locomotive was the enormous quantity of coke consumed or wasted by it,--about six hundred and ninety-two pounds per hour when travelling,--caused by the sharpness of the steam-blast in the chimney, which blew a large proportion of the burning coke into the air. The "Perseverance" of Mr. Burstall was found unable to move at more than five or six miles an hour, and it was withdrawn from the contest at an early period. The "Rocket" was thus the only engine that had performed, and more than performed, all the stipulated conditions; and it was declared to be entitled to the prize of £500, which was awarded to the Messrs. Stephenson and Booth[20] accordingly. And farther to show that the engine had been working quite within its powers, George Stephenson ordered it to be brought upon the ground and detached from all incumbrances, when, in making two trips, it was found to travel at the astonishing rate of thirty-five miles an hour. The "Rocket" had thus eclipsed the performances of all locomotive engines that had yet been constructed, and outstripped even the sanguine expectations of its constructors. It satisfactorily answered the report of Messrs. Walker and Rastrick, and established the efficiency of the locomotive for working the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, and indeed all future railways. The "Rocket" showed that a new power had been born into the world, full of activity and strength, with boundless capability of work. It was the simple but admirable contrivance of the steam-blast, and its combination with the multitubular boiler, that at once gave locomotion a vigorous life, and secured the triumph of the railway system. As has been well observed, this wonderful ability to increase and multiply its powers of performance with the emergency that demands them, has made this giant engine the noblest creation of human wit, the very lion among machines. The success of the Rainhill experiment, as judged by the public, may be inferred from the fact that the shares of the company immediately rose ten per cent, and nothing farther was heard of the proposed twenty-one fixed engines, engine-houses, ropes, etc. All this cumbersome apparatus was thenceforth effectually disposed of. When the reading was over, Bedford said: "When I heard you were going to have George Stephenson this afternoon, I wrote to my cousin Prentiss Armstrong, who has been at the locomotive works at Altoona for several years, and asked him about locomotives nowadays, that I might be able to compare them with the locomotives of George Stephenson's time. This is his letter, which I'll read, if there be no objection:"-- DEAR BEDFORD,--Speaking roughly, a freight-engine of the "Consolidation" type (eight driving-wheels and two truck-wheels) weighs from forty-seven to forty-eight tons of two thousand pounds. On a road with no grades over twenty feet to the mile (1 in 250) it will haul over one thousand tons at fifteen miles an hour. If the train is of merchandise, it will be of say fifty cars, each weighing ten tons and carrying ten tons. If it is of coal or ore, the cars will each carry twenty or twenty-five tons. ["The 'Rocket,'" said Bedford, "which was the successful engine at the Rainhill competition, weighed a little over four tons and had four wheels. Dragging a weight of thirteen tons in wagons, it made thirty-five miles in about two hours."] Our Engine No. 2 [continued the letter] made a mile on a level in forty-three seconds with no train, but there are very few such records. Two of our fast trains (four cars each, weighing twenty-five tons) make a schedule in one place (level) of nine miles in eight minutes. I have seen a record of a run on the Bound Brook route of four cars, ten miles in eight minutes. I think this must have been down hill. I hope these facts will answer your views. If there's anything else that I can get up for you, I shall be glad to do it. Yours truly, PRENTISS ARMSTRONG. XI. ELI WHITNEY. The young people all came in laughing. "And what is it?" said Uncle Fritz, good-naturedly. "It is this," said Alice, "that I say that all this is very entertaining about Palissy the Potter and Benvenuto Cellini; and I have been boasting that I know as much of the steam-engine as Lucy did, who was 'sister to Harry.' But I do not see that this is going to profit Blanche when she shall make her celebrated visit to Mr. Bright, and when he asks her what is the last sweet thing in creels or in fly-frames." "Is it certain that Blanche is to go?" said Uncle Fritz, doubtfully. "Oh, dear, Uncle Fritz, do you know?" said Blanche, in mock heroics; "are you in the sacred circle which decides? Will the Vesuvius pass its dividend, or will it scatter its blessings right and left, so that we can go to Paris and all the world be happy?" "I wish I knew," said Colonel Ingham; "for on that same dividend depends the question whether I build four new rooms at Little Crastis for the accommodation of my young friends when they visit me there." "Could you tell us," said Fergus, "what is the cause of the depression in the cotton-manufacture?" "Don't tell him, Uncle Fritz," said Fanchon, "for the two best of reasons,--first, that half of us will not understand if you do; and second, that none of us will remember." Colonel Ingham laughed. "And third," he said, "that we are to talk about Inventions and Inventors, and we shall not get to Fergus's grand question till we come to the series on 'Political Economy and Political Economists.' "You are all quite right in all your suggestions and criticisms. It is quite time that you girls should know something of the industry which is important not only to all the Southern States, but to all the manufacturing States. Cotton is the cheapest article for clothing in the world, and the use of it goes farther and farther every year. The manufacture is also improving steadily. Thirty men, women, and children will make as much cotton cloth to-day as a hundred could make the year you were born, Hester. I saw cottons for sale to-day at four cents a yard which would have cost nearly three times that money thirty years ago. So I have laid out for you these sketches of the life of Eli Whitney, on whose simple invention, as you remember, all this wealth of production may be said to depend. You college boys ought to be pleased to know, that within a year after this man graduated from Yale College, he had made an invention and set it a going, which entirely changed the face of things in his own country. At that moment there was so little cotton raised in America, that Whitney himself had never seen cotton wool or cotton seed, when he was first asked if he could make a machine which would separate one from the other. It was so little known, indeed, that when John Jay of New York negotiated a treaty of commerce with England in 1794, the year after Whitney's invention, he did not know that any cotton was produced in the United States. The treaty did not provide for our cotton, and had to be changed after it was brought back to America. With this invention by Whitney, it was possible to clean cotton from the seed. The Southern States, which before had no staple of importance, had in that moment an immense addition to their resources. Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee, besides the States in the old thirteen, were settled almost wholly to call into being new lands for raising cotton. To these were afterwards added Arkansas, Florida, and Texas. With this new industry slave labor became vastly more profitable; and the institution of slavery, which would else have died out probably, received an immense stimulus. Fortunately for the country and the world, the Constitution had fixed the year 1808, as the end of the African slave trade. But, up to that date, slaves were pushed in with a constantly increasing rapidity, so that the new States were peopled very largely with absolute barbarians. There is hardly another instance in history where it is so easy to trace in a very few years, results so tremendous following from a single invention by a single man. "Fortunately for us, Miss Lamb has just published a portrait of Eli Whitney in the 'Magazine of History.' Here it is, in the October number of the 'Magazine of History.' "As to processes of manufacture, of course we can learn little or nothing about them here. But you had better read carefully this article in Ure's 'Dictionary of Arts,' though it is a little old-fashioned, and then you will be prepared to make up parties to go out to the Hecla, or up to Lowell or Lawrence, where you can see with your own eyes. "And now I will read you a little sketch of the life of Eli Whitney." ELI WHITNEY. Eli Whitney was born at Westborough, Worcester County, Massachusetts, Dec. 8, 1765. His parents belonged to the middle class in society, who, by the labors of husbandry, managed by uniform industry and strict frugality to provide well for a rising family. The paternal ancestors of Mr. Whitney emigrated from England among the early settlers of Massachusetts, and their descendants were among the most respectable farmers of Worcester County. His maternal ancestors, of the name of Fay, were also English emigrants, and ranked among the substantial yeomanry of Massachusetts. A family tradition respecting the occasion of their coming to this country may serve to illustrate the history of the times. The story is, that about two hundred years ago, the father of the family, who resided in England, a man of large property and great respectability, called together his sons and addressed them thus: "America is to be a great country. I am too old to emigrate myself; but if any one of you will go, I will give him a double share of my property." The youngest son instantly declared his willingness to go, and his brothers gave their consent. He soon set off for the New World, and landed in Boston, in the neighborhood of which place he purchased a large tract of land, where he enjoyed the satisfaction of receiving two visits from his venerable father. His son John Fay, from whom the subject of this memoir is immediately descended, removed from Boston to Westborough, where he became the proprietor of a large tract of land, since known by the name of the Fay Farm. From the sister of Mr. Whitney, we have derived some particulars respecting his childhood and youth, and we shall present the anecdotes to our readers in the artless style in which they are related by our correspondent, believing that they would be more acceptable in this simple dress than if, according to the modest suggestion of the writer, they should be invested with a more labored diction. The following incident, though trivial in itself, will serve to show at how early a period certain qualities of strong feeling tempered by prudence, for which Mr. Whitney afterward became distinguished, began to display themselves. When he was six or seven years old he had overheard the kitchen maid, in a fit of passion, calling his mother, who was in a delicate state of health, hard names, at which he expressed great displeasure to his sister. "She thought," said he, "that I was not big enough to hear her talk so about my mother. I think she ought to have a flogging; and if I knew how to bring it about, she should have one." His sister advised him to tell their father. "No," he replied, "it will hurt his feelings and mother's too; and besides, it is likely the girl will say she never said so, and that would make a quarrel. It is best to say nothing about it." Indications of his mechanical genius were likewise developed at a very early age. Of his early passion for such employments, his sister gives the following account: "Our father had a workshop, and sometimes made wheels of different kinds, and chairs. He had a variety of tools, and a lathe for turning chair-posts. This gave my brother an opportunity of learning the use of tools when very young. He lost no time; but as soon as he could handle tools, he was always making something in the shop, and seemed not to like working on the farm. On a time, after the death of our mother, when our father had been absent from home two or three days, on his return he inquired of the housekeeper what the boys had been doing. She told him what B. and J. had been about. 'But what has Eli been doing?' said he. She replied he had been making a fiddle. 'Ah,' said he, despondingly, 'I fear Eli will have to take his portion in fiddles.' He was at this time about twelve years old. His sister adds that this fiddle was finished throughout, like a common violin, and made tolerably good music. It was examined by many persons, and all pronounced it to be a remarkable piece of work for such a boy to perform. From this time he was employed to repair violins, and had many nice jobs, which were always executed to the entire satisfaction, and often to the astonishment, of his customers. His father's watch being the greatest piece of mechanism that had yet presented itself to his observation, he was extremely desirous of examining its interior construction, but was not permitted to do so. One Sunday morning, observing that his father was going to meeting, and would leave at home the wonderful little machine, he immediately feigned illness as an apology for not going to church. As soon as the family were out of sight, he flew to the room where the watch hung, and taking it down he was so delighted with its motions that he took it all to pieces before he thought of the consequences of his rash deed; for his father was a stern parent, and punishment would have been the reward of his idle curiosity, had the mischief been detected. He, however, put all the work so neatly together that his father never discovered his audacity until he himself told him, many years afterwards. "Whitney lost his mother at an early age, and when he was thirteen years old his father married a second time. His stepmother, among her articles of furniture, had a handsome set of table knives that she valued very highly. Whitney could not but see this, and said to her, 'I could make as good ones if I had tools, and I could make the necessary tools if I had a few common tools to make them with.' His stepmother thought he was deriding her, and was much displeased; but it so happened, not long afterwards, that one of the knives got broken, and he made one exactly like it in every respect except the stamp on the blade. This he would likewise have executed, had not the tools required been too expensive for his slender resources." When Whitney was fifteen or sixteen years of age he suggested to his father an enterprise, which was an earnest of the similar undertakings in which he engaged on a far greater scale in later life. This being the time of the Revolutionary War, nails were in great demand and bore a high price. At that period nails were made chiefly by hand, with little aid from machinery. Young Whitney proposed to his father to procure him a few tools, and to permit him to set up the manufacture. His father consented; and he went steadily to work, and suffered nothing to divert him from his task until his day's work was completed. By extraordinary diligence he gained time to make tools for his own use, and to put in knife-blades, and to perform many other curious little jobs which exceeded the skill of the country artisans. At this laborious occupation the enterprising boy wrought alone, with great success, and with much profit to his father, for two winters, pursuing the ordinary labors of the farm during the summers. At this time he devised a plan for enlarging his business and increasing his profits. He whispered his scheme to his sister, with strong injunctions of secrecy; and requesting leave of his father to go to a neighboring town, without specifying his object, he set out on horseback in quest of a fellow-laborer. Not finding one as easily as he had anticipated, he proceeded from town to town with a perseverance which was always a strong trait of his character, until, at a distance of forty miles from home, he found such a workman as he desired. He also made his journey subservient to his mechanical skill, for he called at every workshop on his way and gleaned all the information he could respecting the mechanical arts. At the close of the war the business of making nails was no longer profitable; but a fashion prevailing among the ladies of fastening on their bonnets with long pins, he contrived to make those with such skill and dexterity that he nearly monopolized the business, although he devoted to it only such seasons of leisure as he could redeem from the occupations of the farm, to which he now principally betook himself. He added to this article, the manufacture of walking-canes, which he made with peculiar neatness. In respect to his proficiency in learning while young, we are informed that he early manifested a fondness for figures and an uncommon aptitude for arithmetical calculations, though in the other rudiments of education he was not particularly distinguished. Yet at the age of fourteen he had acquired so much general information, as to be regarded on this account, as well as on account of his mechanical skill, a very remarkable boy. From the age of nineteen, young Whitney conceived the idea of obtaining a liberal education; but, being warmly opposed by his stepmother, he was unable to procure the decided consent of his father, until he had reached the age of twenty-three years. But, partly by the avails of his manual labor and partly by teaching a village school, he had been so far able to surmount the obstacles thrown in his way, that he had prepared himself for the Freshman Class in Yale College, which he entered in May, 1789. The propensity of Mr. Whitney to mechanical inventions and occupations, was frequently apparent during his residence at college. On a particular occasion, one of the tutors, happening to mention some interesting philosophical experiment, regretted that he could not exhibit it to his pupils, because the apparatus was out of order and must be sent abroad to be repaired. Mr. Whitney proposed to undertake this task, and performed it greatly to the satisfaction of the faculty of the college. A carpenter being at work upon one of the buildings of the gentleman with whom Mr. Whitney boarded, the latter begged permission to use his tools, during the intervals of study; but the mechanic, being a man of careful habits, was unwilling to trust them with a student, and it was only after the gentleman of the house had become responsible for all damages, that he would grant the permission. But Mr. Whitney had no sooner commenced his operations than the carpenter was surprised at his dexterity, and exclaimed, "There was one good mechanic spoiled when you went to college." Soon after Mr. Whitney took his degree, in the autumn of 1792, he entered into an engagement with a Mr. B. of Georgia, to reside in his family as a private teacher. On his way thither, he was so fortunate as to have the company of Mrs. Greene, the widow of General Greene, who, with her family, was returning to Savannah after spending the summer at the North. At that time it was deemed unsafe to travel through our country without having had the small-pox, and accordingly Mr. Whitney prepared himself for the excursion, by procuring inoculation while in New York. As soon as he was sufficiently recovered, the party set sail for Savannah. As his health was not fully re-established, Mrs. Greene kindly invited him to go with the family to her residence at Mulberry Grove, near Savannah, and remain until he was recruited. The invitation was accepted; but lest he should not yet have lost all power of communicating that dreadful disease, Mrs. Greene had white flags (the meaning of which was well understood) hoisted at the landing and at all the avenues leading to the house. As a requital for her hospitality, her guest procured the virus and inoculated all the servants of the household, more than fifty in number, and carried them safely through the disorder. Mr. Whitney had scarcely set his foot in Georgia, before he was met by a disappointment which was an earnest of that long series of adverse events which, with scarcely an exception, attended all his future negotiations in the same State. On his arrival he was informed that Mr. B. had employed another teacher, leaving Whitney entirely without resources or friends, except those whom he had made in the family of General Greene. In these benevolent people, however, his case excited much interest; and Mrs. Greene kindly said to him, "My young friend, you propose studying the law; make my house your home, your room your castle, and there pursue what studies you please." He accordingly began the study of the law under that hospitable roof. Mrs. Greene was engaged in a piece of embroidery in which she employed a peculiar kind of frame, called a _tambour_. She complained that it was badly constructed, and that it tore the delicate threads of her work. Mr. Whitney, eager for an opportunity to oblige his hostess, set himself to work and speedily produced a tambour-frame, made on a plan entirely new, which he presented to her. Mrs. Greene and her family were greatly delighted with it, and thought it a wonderful proof of ingenuity. Not long afterwards a large party of gentlemen, consisting principally of officers who had served under the General in the Revolutionary Army, came from Augusta and the upper country, to visit the family of General Greene. They fell into conversation upon the state of agriculture among them, and expressed great regret that there was no means of cleansing the green seed cotton, or separating it from its seed, since all the lands which were unsuitable for the cultivation of rice, would yield large crops of cotton. But until ingenuity could devise some machine which would greatly facilitate the process of cleaning, it was vain to think of raising cotton for market. Separating one pound of the clean staple from the seed was a day's work for a woman; but the time usually devoted to picking cotton was the evening, after the labor of the field was over. Then the slaves--men, women, and children--were collected in circles, with one whose duty it was to rouse the dozing and quicken the indolent. While the company were engaged in this conversation, "Gentlemen," said Mrs. Greene, "apply to my young friend Mr. Whitney; he can make anything." Upon which she conducted them into a neighboring room, and showed them her tambour-frame and a number of toys which Mr. Whitney had made or repaired for the children. She then introduced the gentlemen to Whitney himself, extolling his genius and commending him to their notice and friendship. He modestly disclaimed all pretensions to mechanical genius; and when they named their object, he replied that he had never seen either cotton or cotton seed in his life. Mrs. Greene said to one of the gentlemen, "I have accomplished my aim. Mr. Whitney is a very deserving young man, and to bring him into notice was my object. The interest which our friends now feel for him will, I hope, lead to his getting some employment to enable him to prosecute the study of the law." But a new turn, that no one of the company dreamed of, had been given to Mr. Whitney's views. It being out of season for cotton in the seed, he went to Savannah and searched among the warehouses and boats until he found a small parcel of it. This he carried home, and communicated his intentions to Mr. Miller, who warmly encouraged him, and assigned him a room in the basement of the house, where he set himself to work with such rude materials and instruments as a Georgia plantation afforded. With these resources, however, he made tools better suited to his purpose, and drew his own wire (of which the teeth of the earliest gins were made),--an article which was not at that time to be found in the market of Savannah. Mrs. Greene and Mr. Miller were the only persons ever admitted to his workshop, and the only persons who knew in what way he was employing himself. The many hours he spent in his mysterious pursuits, afforded matter of great curiosity and often of raillery to the younger members of the family. Near the close of the winter, the machine was so nearly completed as to leave no doubt of its success. Mrs. Greene was eager to communicate to her numerous friends the knowledge of this important invention, peculiarly important at that time, because then the market was glutted with all those articles which were suited to the climate and soil of Georgia, and nothing could be found to give occupation to the negroes and support to the white inhabitants. This opened suddenly to the planters boundless resources of wealth, and rendered the occupations of the slaves less unhealthy and laborious than they had been before. Mrs. Greene, therefore, invited to her house gentlemen from different parts of the State; and on the first day after they had assembled, she conducted them to a temporary building which had been erected for the machine, and they saw with astonishment and delight, that more cotton could be separated from the seed in one day, by the labor of a single hand, than could be done in the usual manner in the space of many months. Mr. Whitney might now have indulged in bright reveries of fortune and of fame; but we shall have various opportunities of seeing that he tempered his inventive genius with an unusual share of the calm, considerate qualities of the financier. Although urged by his friends to secure a patent and devote himself to the manufacture and introduction of his machines, he coolly replied that, on account of the great expenses and trouble which always attend the introduction of a new invention, and the difficulty of enforcing a law in favor of patentees, in opposition to the individual interests of so large a number of persons as would be concerned in the culture of this article, it was with great reluctance that he should consent to relinquish the hopes of a lucrative profession, for which he had been destined, with an expectation of indemnity either from the justice or the gratitude of his countrymen, even should the invention answer the most sanguine anticipations of his friends. The individual who contributed most to incite him to persevere in the undertaking, was Phineas Miller. Mr. Miller was a native of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale College. Like Mr. Whitney, soon after he had completed his education at college, he came to Georgia as a private teacher in the family of General Greene, and after the decease of the General, he became the husband of Mrs. Greene. He had qualified himself for the profession of the law, and was a gentleman of cultivated mind and superior talents; but he was of an ardent temperament, and therefore well fitted to enter with zeal into the views which the genius of his friend had laid open to him. He also had considerable funds at command, and proposed to Mr. Whitney to become his joint adventurer, and to be at the whole expense of maturing the invention until it should be patented. If the machine should succeed in its intended operation, the parties agreed, under legal formalities, "that the profits and advantages arising therefrom, as well as all privileges and emoluments to be derived from patenting, making, vending, and working the same, should be mutually and equally shared between them." This instrument bears date May 27, 1793; and immediately afterward they commenced business under the firm of Miller and Whitney. An invention so important to the agricultural interest (and, as it has proved, to every department of human industry) could not long remain a secret. The knowledge of it soon spread through the State, and so great was the excitement on the subject, that multitudes of persons came from all quarters of the State to see the machine; but it was not deemed safe to gratify their curiosity until the patent right had been secured. But so determined were some of the populace to possess this treasure, that neither law nor justice could restrain them; they broke open the building by night, and carried off the machine. In this way the public became possessed of the invention; and before Mr. Whitney could complete his model and secure his patent, a number of machines were in successful operation, constructed with some slight deviation from the original, with the hope of escaping the penalty for evading the patent right. As soon as the copartnership of Miller and Whitney was formed, Mr. Whitney repaired to Connecticut, where, as far as possible, he was to perfect the machine, obtain a patent, and manufacture and ship to Georgia such a number of machines as would supply the demand. Within three days after the conclusion of the copartnership, Mr. Whitney having set out for the North, Mr. Miller commenced his long correspondence relative to the cotton-gin. The first letter announces that encroachments upon their rights had already begun. "It will be necessary," says Mr. Miller, "to have a considerable number of gins made, to be in readiness to send out as soon as the patent is obtained, in order to satisfy the absolute demands, and make people's heads easy on the subject; _for I am informed of two other claimants for the honor of the invention of cotton-gins, in addition to those we knew before_." On the 20th of June, 1793, Mr. Whitney presented his patent to Mr. Jefferson, then Secretary of State; but the prevalence of the yellow fever in Philadelphia (which was then the seat of government) prevented his concluding the business relative to the patent until several months afterwards. To prevent being anticipated, he took, however, the precaution to make oath to the invention before the notary public of the city of New Haven, which he did on the 28th of October of the same year. Mr. Jefferson, who had much curiosity in regard to mechanical inventions, took a peculiar interest in this machine, and addressed to the inventor an obliging letter, desiring farther particulars respecting it, and expressing a wish to procure one for his own use.[21] Mr. Whitney accordingly sketched the history of the invention, and of the construction and performances of the machine. "It is about a year," says he, "since I first turned my attention to constructing this machine, at which time I was in the State of Georgia. Within about ten days after my first conception of the plan, I made a small though imperfect model. Experiments with this encouraged me to make one on a larger scale; but the extreme difficulty of procuring workmen and proper materials in Georgia prevented my completing the larger one until some time in April last. This, though much larger than my first attempt, is not above one third as large as the machines may be made with convenience. The cylinder is only two feet two inches in length, and six inches in diameter. It is turned by hand, and requires the strength of one man to keep it in constant motion. It is the stated task of one negro to clean fifty weight (I mean fifty pounds after it is separated from the seed) of the green cotton seed per day." In the year 1812 Mr. Whitney made application to Congress for the renewal of his patent for the cotton-gin. In his memorial he presented a history of the struggles he had been forced to encounter in defence of his right, observing that he had been unable to obtain any decision on the merits of his claim until he had been _eleven years_ in the law, and _thirteen years_ of his patent term had expired. He sets forth that his invention had been a source of opulence to thousands of the citizens of the United States; that, as a labor-saving machine, it would enable one man to perform the work of a thousand men; and that it furnishes to the whole family of mankind, at a very cheap rate, the most essential article of their clothing. Hence he humbly conceived himself entitled to a further remuneration from his country, and thought he ought to be admitted to a more liberal participation with his fellow-citizens in the benefits of his invention. Although so great advantages had been already experienced, and the prospect of future benefits was so promising, still, many of those whose interest had been most enhanced by this invention, had obstinately persisted in refusing to make any compensation to the inventor. The very men whose wealth had been acquired by the use of this machine, and who had grown rich beyond all former example, had combined their exertions to prevent the patentee from deriving any emolument from his invention. From that State in which he had first made and where he had first introduced his machine, and which had derived the most signal benefits from it, he had received nothing; and from no State had he received the amount of half a cent per pound on the cotton cleaned with his machines in one year. Estimating the value of the labor of one man at twenty cents per day, the whole amount which had been received by him for his invention was not equal to the value of the labor saved in _one hour_ by his machines then in use in the United States. "This invention," he proceeds, "now gives to the southern section of the Union, over and above the profits which would be derived from the cultivation of any other crop, an annual emolument of at least _three millions_ of dollars."[22] The foregoing statement does not rest on conjecture, it is no visionary speculation,--all these advantages have been realized; the planters of the Southern States have counted the cash, felt the weight of it in their pockets, and heard the exhilarating sound of its collision. Nor do the advantages stop here. This immense source of wealth is but just beginning to be opened. Cotton is a more cleanly and healthful article of cultivation than tobacco and indigo, which it has superseded, and does not so much impoverish the soil. This invention has already trebled the value of the land through a large extent of territory; and the degree to which the cultivation of cotton may be still augmented, is altogether incalculable. This species of cotton has been known in all countries where cotton has been raised, from time immemorial, but was never known as an article of commerce until since this method of cleaning it was discovered. In short (to quote the language of Judge Johnson), "if we should assert that the benefits of this invention exceed _one hundred millions of dollars_, we could prove the assertion by correct calculation." It is objected that if the patentee succeeds in procuring the renewal of his patent, he will be too rich. There is no probability that the patentee, if the term of his patent were extended for twenty years, would ever obtain for his invention one half as much as many an individual will gain by use of it. Up to the present time, the whole amount of what he has acquired from this source (after deducting his expenses) does not exceed one half the sum which a single individual has gained by the use of the machine in one year. It is true that considerable sums have been obtained from some of the States where the machine is used; but no small portion of these sums has been expended in prosecuting his claim in a State where nothing has been obtained, and where his machine has been used to the greatest advantage. There was much more which was curious, laid out in different books; but the call came for supper, and the young people obeyed. XII. JAMES NASMYTH. THE STEAM-HAMMER. "My dear Uncle Fritz, I have found something very precious." "I hope it is a pearl necklace, my dear," was his reply, "though I see no one who needs such ornaments less." Hester waltzed round the room, and dropped a very low courtesy before Uncle Fritz in acknowledgment of his compliment; and all the others clapped their hands. They asked her, more clamorously than Uncle Fritz, what she had found. "I have found a man--" "That is more than Diogenes could." "Horace, I shall send you out of the room, or back on first principles. Do you not know that it is not nice to interrupt?" "I have found a man, Uncle Fritz, who is an inventor, a great inventor; and he is very nice, and he likes people and people like him, and he always succeeds,--his things turn out well, like Dr. Franklin's; and he says the world has always been grateful to him. He never sulks or complains; he knows all about the moon, and makes wonderful pictures of it; and he's enormously rich, I believe, too,--but that's not so much matter. The best of all is, that he began just as we begin. He had a nice father and a nice mother and a good happy home, and was brought up like good decent children. Now really, Uncle Fritz, you mustn't laugh; but do you not think that most of the people whose lives we read have to begin horridly? They have to be beaten when they are apprentices, or their fathers and mothers have to die, or they have to walk through Philadelphia with loaves of bread under their arms, or to be brought up in poor-houses or something. Now, nothing of that sort happened to my inventor. And I am very much encouraged. For my father never beat me, and my mother never scolded me half as much as I deserved, and I never was in a poor-house, and I never carried a loaf of bread under my arm, and so I really was afraid I should come to no good. But now I have found my new moon-man, I am very much encouraged." The others laughed heartily at Hester's zeal, and Blanche asked what Hester's hero had invented, and what was his name. The others turned to Uncle Fritz half incredulously. But Uncle Fritz came to Hester's relief. "Hester is quite right," he said; "and his name it is James Nasmyth. He has invented a great many things, quite necessary in the gigantic system of modern machine-building. He has chosen the steam-hammer for his device. Here is a picture of it on the outside of his Life. You see I was ready for you, Hester." The children looked with interest on the device, and Fergus said that it was making heraldry do as it should, and speak in the language of the present time. Then Uncle Fritz bade Hester find for them a passage in the biography where Mr. Nasmyth tells how he changed the old motto of the family. Oddly enough, the legend says that the first Nasmyth took his name after a romantic escape, when one of his pursuers, finding him disguised as a blacksmith, cried out, "Ye're _nae smyth_." It is a little queer that this name should have been given to the family of a man, who, in his time, forged heavier pieces of iron than had ever been forged before, and, indeed, invented the machinery by which this should be done. The old Scotch family had for a motto the words "Non arte, sed Marte." With a very just pride, James Nasmyth has changed the motto, and made it "Non Marte, sed arte." That is, while they said, "Not by art, but by war," this man, who has done more work for the world, directly or indirectly, than any of Aladdin's genii, says, "Not by war, but by art." Hester was well pleased that their old friend justified her enthusiasm so entirely. He and she began dipping into her copy and his copy of the biography, which is one of the most interesting books of our time. JAMES NASMYTH. My grandfather, Michael Naesmyth, like his father and grandfather, was a builder and architect. The buildings he designed and erected for the Scotch nobility and gentry were well arranged, carefully executed, and thoroughly substantial. I remember my father pointing out to me the extreme care and attention with which he finished his buildings. He inserted small fragments of basalt into the mortar of the external joints of the stones, at close and regular distances, in order to protect the mortar from the adverse action of the weather; and to this day they give proof of their efficiency. The excellence of my grandfather's workmanship was a thing that my own father impressed upon me when a boy. It stimulated in me the desire to aim at excellence in everything that I undertook, and in all practical matters to arrive at the highest degree of good workmanship. I believe that these early lessons had a great influence upon my future career. My father, Alexander Nasmyth, was the second son of Michael Nasmyth. He was born in his father's house in the Grassmarket, on the 9th of September, 1758. I have not much to say about my father's education. For the most part he was his own schoolmaster. I have heard him say that his mother taught him his A B C, and that he afterward learned to read at Mammy Smith's. This old lady kept a school for boys and girls at the top of a house in the Grassmarket. There my father was taught to read his Bible and to learn his Carritch (the Shorter Catechism). My father's profession was that of a portrait-painter, to begin with; but later he devoted himself to landscape-painting. But he did not confine himself to this pursuit. He was an all-round man, with something of the universal about him. He was a painter, an architect, and a mechanic. Above all, he was an incessantly industrious man. I was born on the morning of the 19th of August, 1808, at my father's house in Edinburgh. I was named James Hall, after a dear friend of my father. My mother afterward told me that I must have been a "very noticin' bairn," as she observed me, when I was only a few days old, following with my little eyes any one who happened to be in the room, as if I had been thinking to my little self, "Who are you?" When I was about four or five years old I was observed to give a decided preference to the use of my left hand. At first everything was done to prevent my using it in preference to the right, until my father, after viewing a little sketch I had drawn with my left hand, allowed me to go on in my own way. I used my right hand in all that was necessary, and my left in all sorts of practical manipulative affairs. My left hand has accordingly been my most willing and obedient servant, and in this way I became ambidexter. In due time I was sent to school; and while attending the High School, from 1817 to 1820, there was the usual rage among boys for spinning-tops, "peeries," and "young cannon." By means of my father's excellent foot-lathe I turned out the spinning-tops in capital style, so much so that I became quite noted among my school companions. They all wanted to have specimens of my productions. They would give any price for them. The peeries were turned with perfect accuracy, and the steel-shod or spinning pivot was centred so as to correspond with the heaviest diameter at the top. They would spin twice as long as the bought peeries. When at full speed they would "sleep;" that is, turn round without a particle of wavering. This was considered high art as regarded top-spinning. Flying-kites and tissue-paper balloons were articles that I was also somewhat famed for producing. There was a good deal of special skill required for the production of a flying-kite. It must be perfectly still and steady when at its highest flight in the air. Paper messengers were sent up to it along the string which held it to the ground. The top of the Calton Hill was the most favorite place for enjoying this pleasant amusement. Another article for which I became equally famous was the manufacture of small brass cannon. These I cast and bored, and mounted on their appropriate gun-carriages. They proved very effective, especially in the loudness of the report when fired. I also converted large cellar-keys into a sort of hand-cannon. A touch-hole was bored into the barrel of the key, with a sliding brass collar that allowed the key-guns to be loaded and primed, ready for firing. The principal occasion on which the brass cannon and hand-guns were used was on the 4th of June,--King George the Third's birthday. This was always celebrated with exuberant and noisy loyalty. The guns of the Castle were fired at noon, and the number of shots corresponded with the number of years that the king had reigned. The grand old Castle was enveloped in smoke, and the discharges reverberated along the streets and among the surrounding hills. Everything was in holiday order. The coaches were hung with garlands, the shops were ornamented, the troops were reviewed on Bruntsfield Links, and the citizens drank the king's health at the Cross, throwing the glasses over their backs. The boys fired off gunpowder, or threw squibs or crackers, from morning till night. It was one of the greatest schoolboy events of the year. My little brass cannon and hand-guns were very busy that day. They were fired until they became quite hot. These were the pre-lucifer days. The fire to light the powder at the touch-hole was obtained by the use of a flint, a steel, and a tinder-box. The flint was struck sharply on the steel, a spark of fire consequently fell into the tinder-box, and the match (of hemp string, soaked in saltpetre) was readily lit and fired off the little guns. One of my attached cronies was Tom Smith. Our friendship began at the High School in 1818. A similarity of disposition bound us together. Smith was the son of an enterprising general merchant at Leith. His father had a special genius for practical chemistry. He had established an extensive color-manufactory at Portobello, near Edinburgh, where he produced white lead, red lead, and a great variety of colors,--in the preparation of which he required a thorough knowledge of chemistry. Tom Smith inherited his father's tastes, and admitted me to share in his experiments, which were carried on in a chemical laboratory situated behind his father's house at the bottom of Leith Walk. We had a special means of communication. When anything particular was going on at the laboratory, Tom hoisted a white flag on the top of a high pole in his father's garden. Though I was more than a mile away, I kept a lookout in the direction of the laboratory with a spy-glass. My father's house was at the top of Leith Walk, and Smith's house was at the bottom of it. When the flag was hoisted I could clearly see the invitation to me to come down. I was only too glad to run down the Walk and join my chum, to take part in some interesting chemical process. Mr. Smith, the father, made me heartily welcome. He was pleased to see his son so much attached to me, and he perhaps believed that I was worthy of his friendship. We took zealous part in all the chemical proceedings, and in that way Tom was fitting himself for the business of his life. Mr. Smith was a most genial-tempered man. He was shrewd and quick-witted, like a native of York, as he was. I received the greatest kindness from him as well as from his family. His house was like a museum. It was full of cabinets, in which were placed choice and interesting objects in natural history, geology, mineralogy, and metallurgy. All were represented. Many of these specimens had been brought to him from abroad by his ship-captains, who transported his color manufactures and other commodities to foreign parts. My friend Tom Smith and I made it a rule--and in this we were encouraged by his father--that, so far as was possible, we ourselves should actually _make_ the acids and other substances used in our experiments. We were not to buy them ready-made, as this would have taken the zest out of our enjoyment. We should have lost the pleasure and instruction of producing them by means of our own wits and energies. To encounter and overcome a difficulty is the most interesting of all things. Hence, though often baffled, we eventually produced perfect specimens of nitrous, nitric, and muriatic acids. We distilled alcohol from duly fermented sugar and water, and rectified the resultant spirit from fusel-oil by passing the alcoholic vapor through animal charcoal before it entered the worm of the still. We converted part of the alcohol into sulphuric ether. We produced phosphorus from old bones, and elaborated many of the mysteries of chemistry. The amount of practical information which we obtained by this system of making our own chemical agents, was such as to reward us, in many respects, for the labor we underwent. To outsiders it might appear a very troublesome and roundabout way of getting at the finally desired result; but I feel certain that there is no better method of rooting chemical or any other instruction deeply in our minds. Indeed, I regret that the same system is not pursued by the youth of the present day. They are seldom if ever called upon to exert their own wits and industry to obtain the requisites for their instruction. A great deal is now said about technical education; but how little there is of technical handiness or head work! Everything is _bought ready-made_ to their hands; and hence there is no call for individual ingenuity. I left the High School at the end of 1820. I carried with me a small amount of Latin and no Greek. I do not think I was much the better for my small acquaintance with the dead languages. By the time I was seventeen years old I had acquired a considerable amount of practical knowledge as to the use and handling of mechanical tools, and I desired to turn it to some account. I was able to construct working models of steam-engines and other apparatus required for the illustration of mechanical subjects. I began with making a small working steam-engine, for the purpose of grinding the oil-colors used by my father in his artistic work. The result was quite satisfactory. Many persons came to see my active little steam-engine at work; and they were so pleased with it that I received several orders for small workshop engines, and also for some models of steam-engines to illustrate the subjects taught at Mechanics' Institutions. I contrived a sectional model of a complete condensing steam-engine of the beam and parallel-motion construction. The model, as seen from one side, exhibited every external detail in full and due action when the fly-wheel was moved round by hand; while on the other, or sectional side, every detail of the interior was seen, with the steam-valves and air-pump, as well as the motion of the piston in the cylinder, with the construction of the piston and the stuffing-box, together with the slide-valve and steam-passages, all in due position and relative movement. I was a regular attendant at the Edinburgh School of Arts from 1821 to 1826, meanwhile inventing original contrivances of various sorts. About the year 1827, when I was nineteen years old, the subject of steam-carriages to run upon common roads occupied considerable attention. Several engineers and mechanical schemers had tried their hands, but as yet no substantial results had come of their attempts to solve the problem. Like others, I tried my hand. Having made a small working model of a steam-carriage, I exhibited it before the members of the Scottish Society of Arts. The performance of this active little machine was so gratifying to the Society, that they requested me to construct one of such power as to enable four or six persons to be conveyed along the ordinary roads. The members of the Society, in their individual capacity, subscribed £60, which they placed in my hands, as the means of carrying out their project. I accordingly set to work at once. I had the heavy parts of the engine and carriage done at Anderson's foundry at Leith. There was in Anderson's employment a most able general mechanic, named Robert Maclaughlan, who had served his time at Carmichael's, of Dundee. Anderson possessed some excellent tools, which enabled me to proceed rapidly with the work. Besides, he was most friendly, and took much delight in being concerned in my enterprise. This "big job" was executed in about four months. The steam-carriage was completed and exhibited before the members of the Society of Arts. Many successful trials were made with it on the Queensferry Road, near Edinburgh. The runs were generally of four or five miles, with a load of eight passengers, sitting on benches about three feet from the ground. The experiments were continued for nearly three months, to the great satisfaction of the members. The chief object of my ambition was now to be taken on at Henry Maudsley's works in London. I had heard so much of his engineering work, of his assortment of machine-making tools, and of the admirable organization of his manufactory, that I longed to obtain employment there. But I was aware that my father had not the means of paying the large premium required for placing me there, and I was also informed that Maudsley had ceased to take pupils, they caused him so much annoyance. My father and I went to London; and Mr. Maudsley received us in the most kind and frank manner, and courteously invited us to go round the works. When this was concluded I ventured to say to Mr. Maudsley that "I had brought up with me from Edinburgh some working models of steam-engines and mechanical drawings, and I should feel truly obliged if he would allow me to show them to him." "By all means," said he; "bring them to me to-morrow at twelve o'clock." I need not say how much pleased I was at this permission to exhibit my handiwork, and how anxious I felt as to the result of Mr. Maudsley's inspection of it. I carefully unpacked my working model of the steam-engine at the carpenter's shop, and had it conveyed, together with my drawings, on a handcart to Mr. Maudsley's, next morning, at the appointed hour. I was allowed to place my work for his inspection in a room next his office and counting-house. I then called at his residence, close by, where he kindly received me in his library. He asked me to wait until he and his partner, Joshua Field, had inspected my handiwork. I waited anxiously. Twenty long minutes passed. At last he entered the room, and from a lively expression in his countenance I observed in a moment that the great object of my long-cherished ambition had been attained. He expressed, in good round terms, his satisfaction at my practical ability as a workman, engineer, and mechanical draughtsman. Then, opening the door which led from his library into his beautiful private workshop, he said, "This is where I wish you to work, beside me, as my assistant workman. From what I have seen there is no need of an apprenticeship in your case." One of his favorite maxims was, "First _get a clear notion_ of what you desire to accomplish, and then in all probability you will succeed in doing it." Another was, "Keep a sharp lookout upon your materials; get rid of every pound of material you can _do without_; put to yourself the question, 'What business has it to be there?' avoid complexities, and make everything as simple as possible." Mr. Maudsley was full of quaint maxims and remarks,--the result of much shrewdness, keen observation, and great experience. They were well worthy of being stored up in the mind, like a set of proverbs, full of the life and experience of men. His thoughts became compressed into pithy expressions exhibiting his force of character and intellect. His quaint remarks on my first visit to his workshop and on subsequent occasions proved to me invaluable guides to "right thinking" in regard to all matters connected with mechanical structure. On the morning of Monday, May 30, 1829, I began my regular attendance at Mr. Maudsley's workshop, and remained with him until he died, Feb. 14, 1831. It was a very sad thing for me to lose my dear old master, who always treated me like a friend and companion. At his death I passed over into the service of his worthy partner, Joshua Field, until my twenty-third year, when I intended to begin business for myself. I first settled myself at Manchester, but afterwards established a large business outside of Manchester on the Bridgewater Canal. In August, 1836, the Bridgewater Foundry was in complete and efficient action. The engine ordered at Londonderry was at once put in hand, and the concern was fairly started in its long career of prosperity. The wooden workshops had been erected upon the grass, but the greensward soon disappeared. The hum of the driving-belts, the whirl of the machinery, the sound of the hammer upon the anvil, gave the place an air of busy activity. As work increased, workmen multiplied. The workshops were enlarged. Wood gave place to brick. Cottages for the accommodation of the work-people sprung up in the neighborhood, and what had once been a quiet grassy field became the centre of a busy population. It was a source of vast enjoyment to me, while engaged in the anxious business connected with the establishment of the foundry, to be surrounded with so many objects of rural beauty. The site of the works being on the west side of Manchester, we had the benefit of breathing pure air during the greater part of the year. The scenery round about was very attractive. Exercise was a source of health to the mind as well as the body. As it was necessary that I should reside as near as possible to the works, I had plenty of opportunities for enjoying the rural scenery of the neighborhood. I had the good fortune to become the tenant of a small cottage in the ancient village of Barton, in Cheshire, at the very moderate rental of fifteen pounds a year. The cottage was situated on the banks of the river Irwell, and was only about six minutes' walk from the works at Patricroft. It suited my moderate domestic arrangements admirably. On June 16, 1840, a day of happy memory, I was married to Miss Anne Hartop. I was present at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, on Sept. 15, 1830. Every one knows the success of the undertaking. Railways became the rage. They were projected in every possible direction; and when made, locomotives were required to work them. When George Stephenson was engaged in building his first locomotive, at Killingworth, he was greatly hampered, not only by the want of handy mechanics, but by the want of efficient tools. But he did the best that he could. His genius overcame difficulties. It was immensely to his credit that he should have so successfully completed his engines for the Stockton and Darlington, and afterward for the Liverpool and Manchester, Railway. Only a few years had passed, and self-acting tools were now enabled to complete, with precision and uniformity, machines that before had been deemed almost impracticable. In proportion to the rapid extension of railways the demand for locomotives became very great. As our machine tools were peculiarly adapted for turning out a large amount of first-class work, we directed our attention to this class of business. In the course of about ten years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, we executed considerable orders for locomotives for the London and Southampton, the Manchester and Leeds, and the Gloucester Railway Companies. The Great Western Railway Company invited us to tender for twenty of their very ponderous engines. They proposed a very tempting condition of the contract. It was that if, after a month's trial of the locomotives, their working proved satisfactory, a premium of £100 was to be added to the price of each engine and tender. The locomotives were made and delivered; they ran the stipulated number of test miles between London and Bristol in a perfectly satisfactory manner; and we not only received the premium, but, what was much more encouraging, we received a special letter from the board of directors, stating their entire satisfaction with the performance of our engines, and desiring us to refer other contractors to them with respect to the excellence of our workmanship. This testimonial was altogether spontaneous, and proved extremely valuable in other quarters. The date of the first sketch of my steam-hammer was Nov. 24, 1839. It consisted of, first, a massive anvil, on which to rest the work; second, a block of iron constituting the hammer, or blow-giving portion; and, third, an inverted steam cylinder, to whose piston-rod the hammer-block was attached. All that was then required to produce a most effective hammer, was simply to admit steam of sufficient pressure into the cylinder, so as to act on the under side of the piston, and thus to raise the hammer-block attached to the end of the piston-rod. By a very simple arrangement of a slide-valve under the control of an attendant, the steam was allowed to escape, and thus permit the massive block of iron rapidly to descend by its own gravity upon the work then upon the anvil. Thus, by the more or less rapid manner in which the attendant allowed the steam to enter or escape from the cylinder, any required number or any intensity of blows could be delivered. Their succession might be modified in an instant; the hammer might be arrested and suspended according to the requirements of the work. The workman might thus, as it were, _think in blows_. He might deal them out on to the ponderous glowing mass, and mould or knead it into the desired form as if it were a lump of clay, or pat it with gentle taps, according to his will or at the desire of the forgeman. Rude and rapidly sketched out as it was, this my first delineation of the steam-hammer will be found to comprise all the essential elements of the invention. There was no want of orders when the valuable qualities of the steam-hammer came to be seen and experienced; soon after I had the opportunity of securing a patent for it in the United States, where it soon found its way into the principal iron-works of the country. As time passed by, I had furnished steam-hammers to the principal foundries in England, and had sent them abroad even to Russia. * * * * * But the English Government is proverbially slow in recognizing such improvements. It was not till years had passed by, that Mr. Nasmyth was asked to furnish hammers to government works. Then he was invited to apply them to pile-driving. He says:-- My first order for my pile-driver was a source of great pleasure to me. It was for the construction of some great royal docks at Devonport. An immense portion of the shore of the Hamoaze had to be walled in so as to exclude the tide. When I arrived on the spot with my steam pile-driver, there was a great deal of curiosity in the dockyard as to the action of the new machine. The pile-driving machine-men gave me a good-natured challenge to vie with them in driving down a pile. They adopted the old method, while I adopted the new one. The resident managers sought out two great pile logs of equal size and length,-seventy feet long and eighteen inches square. At a given signal we started together. I let in the steam, and the hammer at once began to work. The four-ton block showered down blows at the rate of eighty a minute, and in the course of _four and a half minutes_ my pile was driven down to its required depth. The men working at the ordinary machine had only begun to drive. It took them upward of _twelve hours_ to complete the driving of their pile! Such a saving of time in the performance of similar work--by steam _versus_ manual labor--had never before been witnessed. The energetic action of the steam-hammer, sitting on the shoulders of the pile high up aloft, and following it suddenly down, the rapidly hammered blows keeping time with the flashing out of the waste steam at the end of each stroke, was indeed a remarkable sight. When my pile was driven the hammer-block and guide-case were speedily re-hoisted by the small engine that did all the laboring and locomotive work of the machine, the steam-hammer portion of which was then lowered on to the shoulders of the next pile in succession. Again it set to work. At this the spectators, crowding about in boats, pronounced their approval in the usual British style of "Three cheers!" My new pile-driver was thus acknowledged as another triumphant proof of the power of steam. * * * * * In the course of the year 1843 it was necessary for me to make a journey to St. Petersburg. My object was to endeavor to obtain an order for a portion of the locomotives required for working the line between that city and Moscow. The railway had been constructed under the engineership of Major Whistler, and it was shortly about to be opened. The Major gave me a frank and cordial reception, and informed me of the position of affairs. The Emperor, he said, was desirous of training a class of Russian mechanics to supply not only the locomotives, but to keep them constantly in repair. The locomotives must be made in Russia. I received, however, a very large order for boilers and other detail parts of the Moscow machines. I enjoyed greatly my visit to St. Petersburg, and my return home through Stockholm and Copenhagen. Travelling one day in Sweden, the post-house where I was set down was an inn, although without a sign-board. The landlady was a bright, cheery, jolly woman. She could not speak a word of English, nor I a word of Dannemora Swedish. I was very thirsty and hungry, and wanted something to eat. How was I to communicate my wishes to the landlady? I resorted, as I often did, to the universal language of the pencil. I took out my sketch-book, and in a few minutes I made a drawing of a table with a dish of smoking meat upon it, a bottle and a glass, a knife and fork, a loaf, a salt-cellar, and a corkscrew. She looked at the drawing and gave a hearty laugh. She nodded pleasantly, showing that she clearly understood what I wanted. She asked me for the sketch, and went into the back garden to show it to her husband, who inspected it with great delight. I went out and looked about the place, which was very picturesque. After a short time the landlady came to the door and beckoned me in, and I found spread out on the table everything that I desired,--a broiled chicken, smoking hot from the gridiron, a bottle of capital home-brewed ale, and all the _et ceteras_ of an excellent repast. I made use of my pencil in many other ways. I always found that a sketch was as useful as a sentence. Besides, it generally created a sympathy between me and my entertainers. As the Bridgewater Foundry had been so fortunate as to earn for itself a considerable reputation for mechanical contrivances, the workshops were always busy. They were crowded with machine tools in full action, and exhibited to all comers their effectiveness in the most satisfactory manner. Every facility was afforded to those who desired to see them at work; and every machine and machine tool that was turned out became in the hands of its employers the progenitor of a numerous family. Indeed, on many occasions I had the gratification of seeing my mechanical notions adopted by rival or competitive machine constructors, often without acknowledgment; though, notwithstanding this point of honor, there was room enough for all. Though the parent features were easily recognizable, I esteemed such plagiarisms as a sort of left-handed compliment to their author. I also regarded them as a proof that I had hit the mark in so arranging my mechanical combinations as to cause their general adoption; and many of them remain unaltered to this day. My favorite pursuit, after my daily excursions at the foundry, was astronomy. I constructed for myself a telescope of considerable power, and, mounting my ten-inch instrument, I began my survey of the heavens. I began as a learner, and my learning grew with experience. There were the prominent stars, the planets, the Milky Way,--with thousands of far-off suns,--to be seen. My observations were at first merely general; by degrees they became particular. I was not satisfied with enjoying these sights myself. I made my friends and neighbors sharers in my pleasure, and some of them enjoyed the wonders of the heavens as much as I did. In my early use of the telescope I had fitted the speculum into a light square tube of deal, to which the eyepiece was attached, so as to have all the essential parts of the telescope combined together in the most simple and portable form. I had often to move it from place to place in my small garden at the side of the Bridgewater Canal, in order to get it clear of the trees and branches which intercepted some object in the heavens which I wished to see. How eager and enthusiastic I was in those days! Sometimes I got out of bed in the clear small hours of the morning, and went down to the garden in my night-shirt. I would take the telescope in my arms and plant it in some suitable spot, where I might take a peep at some special planet or star then above the horizon. It became bruited about that a ghost was seen at Patricroft! A barge was silently gliding along the canal near midnight, when the boatman suddenly saw a figure in white. "It moved among the trees, with a coffin in its arms!" The apparition was so sudden and strange that he immediately concluded that it was a ghost. The weird sight was reported all along the canal, and also at Wolverhampton, which was the boatman's headquarters. He told the people at Patricroft, on his return journey, what he had seen; and great was the excitement produced. The place was haunted; there was no doubt about it! After all, the rumor was founded on fact; for the ghost was merely myself in my night-shirt, and the coffin was my telescope, which I was quietly shifting from one place to another, in order to get a clearer sight of the heavens at midnight. I had been for some time contemplating the possibility of retiring altogether from business. I had got enough of the world's goods, and was willing to make way for younger men. Many long years of pleasant toil and exertion had done their work. A full momentum of prosperity had been given to my engineering business at Patricroft. My share in the financial results accumulated, with accelerated rapidity, to an amount far beyond my most sanguine hopes. But finding, from long-continued and incessant mental efforts, that my nervous system was beginning to become shaken, especially in regard to an affection of the eyes, which in some respects damaged my sight, I thought the time had arrived for me to retire from commercial life. Behold us, then, settled down at Hammerfield for life. We had plenty to do. My workshop was fully equipped. My hobbies were there, and I could work them to my heart's content. The walls of our various rooms were soon hung with pictures and other works of art, suggestive of many pleasant associations of former days. Our library bookcase was crowded with old friends in the shape of books that had been read and re-read many times, until they had almost become part of ourselves. Old Lancashire friends made their way to us when "up in town," and expressed themselves delighted with our pleasant house and its beautiful surroundings. I was only forty-eight years old, which may be considered the prime of life. But I had plenty of hobbies, perhaps the chief of which was astronomy. No sooner had I settled at Hammerfield than I had my telescopes brought out and mounted. The fine, clear skies with which we were favored furnished me with abundant opportunities for the use of my instruments. I began again my investigations on the sun and the moon, and made some original discoveries. It is time to come to an end of my recollections. I have endeavored to give a brief _résumé_ of my life and labors. I hope they may prove interesting as well as useful to others. Thanks to a good constitution and a frame invigorated by work, I continue to lead, with my dear wife, a happy life. XIII. SIR HENRY BESSEMER. THE AGE OF STEEL. In intervals of the reading meetings so many of the children's afternoons with Uncle Fritz had been taken up with excursions to see machinery at work, that their next meeting at the Oliver House was, as it proved, the last for the winter. They had gone to the pumping-station of the waterworks, and had seen the noiseless work of the great steam-engine there. They had gone to the Ætna Mills at Watertown, and with the eye of the flesh had seen "rovers" and shuttles, and had been taught what "slobbers" are. They had gone to Waltham, and had been taught something of the marvellous skill and delicacy expended on the manufacture of watches. They had gone to Rand and Avery's printing-house; and here they not only saw the processes of printing, but they saw steam power "converted" into electricity. They had gone to the Locomotive Factory in Albany Street, and understood, much better than before, the inventions of George Stephenson, under the lead of the foremen in the shops, who had been very kind to them. On their last meeting Uncle Fritz reminded them of something which one of these gentlemen had taught them about the qualities of steel and iron; and again of what they had seen of steel-springs at Waltham, when they saw how the balances of watches are arranged. "Some bright person has called our time 'the Age of Steel,'" he said. "You know Ovid's division was 'the Age of Gold, the Age of Silver, the Age of Brass, the Age of Iron.' And Ovid, who was in low spirits, thought the Age of Iron was the worst of all. Now, we begin to improve if we have entered the Age of Steel; for steel is, poetically speaking, glorified iron. "Now the person to whom we owe it, that, in practice, we can build steel ships to-day where we once built iron ships, and lay steel rails to-day where even Stephenson was satisfied with iron, is Sir Henry Bessemer. The Queen knighted him in recognition of the service he had rendered to the world by his improvements in the processes of turning iron into steel. "It is impossible to estimate the addition which these improvements have made to the physical power of the world. I have not the most recent figures, but look at this," said Uncle Fritz. And he gave to John to read from a Life of Sir Henry Bessemer:-- "Prior to this invention the entire production of cast steel in Great Britain was only about fifty thousand tons annually; and its average price, which ranged from £50 to £600, prohibited its use for many of the purposes to which it is now universally applied. After the invention, in the year 1877, the Bessemer steel produced in Great Britain alone amounted to 750,000 tons, or fifteen times the total of the former method of manufacture, while the selling price averaged only £10 per ton, and the coal consumed in producing it was less by 3,500,000 tons than would have been required in order to make the same quality of steel by the old, or Sheffield, process. The total reduction of cost is equal to about £30,000,000 sterling upon the quantity manufactured in England during the year." The same book goes on to show that in other nations £20,000,000 worth of Bessemer steel was produced in the same year. "You see," said Uncle Fritz, "that here is an addition to the real wealth of the world such as makes any average fairy story about diamonds and rubies rather cheap and contemptible. "You will like Sir Henry Bessemer, Hester, because he was happily trained and had good chances when he was a boy. And you will be amused to see how his bright wife was brighter than all the internal-revenue people. She was so bright that she lost him the appointment which had enabled him to marry her. But I think he says somewhere, with a good deal of pride, that but for that misfortune, and the injustice which accompanied it, he should have probably never made his great inventions. It is one more piece of 'Partial evil,--universal good.'" Then the children, with Uncle Fritz's aid, began picking out what they called the plums from the accounts he showed them of Sir Henry Bessemer's life. BESSEMER'S FAMILY. At the time of the great Revolution of 1792 there was employed in the French mint a man of great ingenuity, who had become a member of the French Academy of Sciences at the age of twenty-five. When Robespierre became Dictator of France, this scientific academician was transferred from the mint to the management of a public bakery, established for the purpose of supplying the populace of Paris with bread. In that position he soon became the object of revolutionary frenzy. One day a rumor was set afloat that the loaves supplied were light in weight; and, spreading like wildfire, it was made the occasion of a fearful tumult. The manager of the bakery was instantly seized and cast into prison. He succeeded in escaping, but it was at the peril of his life. Knowing the peril he was in, he lost no time in making his way to England; and he only succeeded in doing so by adroitly using some documents he possessed bearing the signature of the Dictator. Landing in England a ruined man, his talents soon proved a passport to success. He was appointed to a position in the English mint; and by the exercise of his ingenuity in other directions, he ere long acquired sufficient means to buy a small estate at Charlton, in Hertfordshire. Such, in brief, were the circumstances that led to the settlement there of Anthony Bessemer, the father of Sir Henry Bessemer. The latter may be said to have been born an inventor. His father was an inventor before him. After settling in England, his inventive ingenuity was displayed in making improvements in microscopes and in type-founding, and in the discovery of what his son has happily described as the true alchemy. The latter discovery, which he made about the beginning of the present century, was a source of considerable profit to him. It is generally known that when gold articles are made by the jewellers, there are various discolorations left on their surface by the process of manufacture; and in order to clear their surface, they are put into a solution of alum, salt, and saltpetre, which dissolves a large quantity of the copper that is used as an alloy. Anthony Bessemer discovered that this powerful acid not only dissolved the copper, but also dissolved a quantity of gold. He accordingly began to buy up this liquor; and as he was the only one who knew that it contained gold in solution, he had no difficulty in arranging for the purchase of it from all the manufacturers in London. From that liquor he succeeded in extracting gold in considerable quantities for many years. By some means that he kept secret (and the secret died with him), he deposited the particles of gold on the shavings of another metal, which, being afterwards melted, left the pure gold in small quantities. Thirty years afterward the Messrs. Elkington invented the electrotype process, which had the same effect. Anthony Bessemer was also eminently successful as a type-founder. When in France, before the Revolution of 1792, he cut a great many founts of type for Messrs. Firmin Didot, the celebrated French type-founders; and after his return to England he betook himself, as a diversion, to type-cutting for Mr. Henry Caslon, the celebrated English type-founder. He engraved an entire series, from pica to diamond,--a work which occupied several years. The success of these types led to the establishment of the firm of Bessemer and Catherwood as type-founders, carrying on business at Charlton. The great improvement which Anthony Bessemer introduced into the art of type-making was not so much in the engraving as in the composition of the metal. He discovered that an alloy of copper, tin, and bismuth was the most durable metal for type; and the working of this discovery was very successful in his hands. The secret of his success, however, he kept unknown to the trade. He knew that if it were suspected that the superiority of his type consisted in the composition of the metal, analysis would reveal it, and others would then be able to compete with him. So, to divert attention from the real cause, he pointed out to the trade that the shape of his type was different, as the angle at which all the lines were produced from the surface was more obtuse in his type than in those of other manufacturers, at the same time contending that his type would wear longer. Other manufacturers ridiculed this account of Bessemer's type, but experience showed that it lasted nearly twice as long as other type. The business flourished for a dozen years under his direction, and during that period the real cause of its success was kept a secret. The process has since been re-discovered and patented. Such were some of the inventive efforts of the father of one of the greatest inventors of the present age. HENRY BESSEMER. The youngest son of Anthony Bessemer, Henry, was born at Charlton, in Hertfordshire, in 1813. His boyhood was spent in his native village; and while receiving the rudiments of an ordinary education in the neighboring town of Hitchin, the leisure and retirement of rural life afforded ample time, though perhaps little inducement, for the display of the natural bent of his mind. Notwithstanding his scanty and imperfect mechanical appliances, his early years were devoted to the cultivation of his inventive faculties. His parents encouraged him in his youthful efforts. At the age of eighteen he came to London, "knowing no one," he says, "and myself unknown,--a mere cipher in a vast sea of human enterprise." Here he worked as a modeller and designer with encouraging success. He engraved a large number of elegant and original designs on steel, with a diamond point, for patent-medicine labels. He got plenty of this sort of work to do, and was well paid for it. In his boyhood his favorite amusement was the modelling of objects in clay; and even in this primitive school of genius he worked with so much success that at the age of nineteen he exhibited one of his beautiful models at the Royal Academy, then held at Somerset House. STAMPED PAPER. Thus he soon began to make his way in the metropolis; and in the course of the following year he was maturing some plans in connection with the production of stamps which he sanguinely hoped would lead him on to fortune. At that time the old forms of stamps were in use that had been employed since the days of Queen Anne; and as they were easily transferred from old deeds to new ones, the Government lost a large amount annually by this surreptitious use of old stamps instead of new ones. The ordinary impressed or embossed stamps, such as are now employed on bills of exchange, or impressed directly on skins or parchment, were liable to be entirely obliterated if exposed for some months to a damp atmosphere. A deed so exposed would at last appear as if unstamped, and would therefore become invalid. Special precautions were therefore observed in order to prevent this occurrence. It was the practice to gum small pieces of blue paper on the parchment; and, to render it still more secure, a strip of metal foil was passed through it, and another small piece of paper with the printed initials of the sovereign was gummed over the loose end of the foil at the back. The stamp was then impressed on the blue paper, which, unlike parchment, is incapable of losing the impression by exposure to a damp atmosphere. Experience showed, however, that by placing a little piece of moistened blotting-paper for a few hours over the paper, the gum became so softened that the two pieces of paper and the slip of foil could be easily removed from an old deed and then used for a new one. In this way stamps could be used a second and third time; and by thus utilizing the expensive stamps on old deeds of partnerships that were dissolved, or leases that were expired, the public revenue lost thousands of pounds every year. Sir Charles Persley, of the Stamp Office, told Sir Henry Bessemer that the Government were probably defrauded of £100,000 per annum in that way. The young inventor at once set to work, for the express purpose of devising a stamp that could not be used twice. His first discovery was a mode by which he could have reproduced easily and cheaply thousands of stamps of any pattern. "The facility," he says, "with which I could make a permanent die from a thin paper original, capable of producing a thousand copies, would have opened a wide door for successful frauds if my process had been known to unscrupulous persons; for there is not a government stamp or a paper seal of a corporate body that every common office clerk could not forge in a few minutes at the office of his employer or at his own home. The production of such a die from a common paper stamp is a work of only ten minutes; the materials cost less than one penny; no sort of technical skill is necessary, and a common copying-press or a letter stamp yields most successful copies." To this day a successful forger has to employ a skilful die-sinker to make a good imitation in steel of the document he wishes to forge; but if such a method as that discovered and described by Sir Henry Bessemer were known, what a prospect it would open up! Appalled at the effect which the communication of such a process would have had upon the business of the Stamp Office, he carefully kept the knowledge of it to himself; and to this day it remains a profound secret. More than ever impressed with the necessity for an improved form of stamp, and conscious of his own capability to produce it, he labored for some months to accomplish his object, feeling sure that, if successful, he would be amply rewarded by the Government. To insure the secrecy of his experiments, he worked at them during the night, after his ordinary business of the day was over. He succeeded at last in making a stamp which obviated the great objection to the then existing form, inasmuch as it would be impossible to transfer it from one deed to another, to obliterate it by moisture, or to take an impression from it capable of producing a duplicate. Flushed with success and confident of the reward of his labors, he waited upon Sir Charles Persley at Somerset House, and showed him, by numerous proofs, how easily all the then existing stamps could be forged, and his new invention to prevent forgery. Sir Charles, who was much astonished at the one invention and pleased with the other, asked Bessemer to call again in a few days. At the second interview Sir Charles asked him to work out the principle of the new stamping invention more fully. Accordingly Bessemer devoted five or six weeks' more labor to the perfecting of his stamp, with which the Stamp Office authorities were now well pleased. The design, as described by the inventor, was circular, about two and a half inches in diameter, and consisted of a garter with a motto in capital letters, surmounted by a crown. Within the garter was a shield, and the garter was filled with network in imitation of lace. The die was executed in steel, which pierced the parchment with more than four hundred holes; and these holes formed the stamp. It is by a similar process that valentine makers have since learned to make the perforated paper used in their trade. Such a stamp removed all the objections to the old one. So pleased was Sir Charles with it that he recommended it to Lord Althorp, and it was soon adopted by the Stamp Office. At the same time Sir Henry was asked whether he would be satisfied with the position of Superintendent of Stamps with £500 or £600 per annum, as compensation for his invention, instead of a sum of money from the treasury. This appointment he gladly agreed to accept; for, being engaged to be married at the time, he thought his future position in life was settled. Shortly afterwards he called on the young lady to whom he was engaged, and communicated the glad tidings to her, at the same time showing her the design of his new stamp. On explaining to her that its chief virtue was that the new stamps thus produced could not, like the old ones, be fraudulently used twice or thrice, she instantly suggested that if all stamps had a date put upon them they could not be used at a future time without detection. The idea was new to him; and, impressed with its practical character, he at once conceived a plan for the insertion of movable dates in the die of his stamp. The method by which this is now done is too well known to require description here; but in 1833 it was a new invention. Having worked out the details of a stamp with movable dates, he saw that it was more simple and more easily worked than his elaborate die for perforating stamps; but he also saw that if he disclosed his latest invention it might interfere with his settled prospects in connection with the carrying out of his first one. It was not without regret, too, that he saw the results of many months of toil and the experiments of many lonely nights at once superseded; but his conviction of the superiority of his latest design was so strong, and his own sense of honor and his confidence in that of the Government was so unsuspecting, that he boldly went and placed the whole matter before Sir Charles Persley. Of course the new design was preferred. Sir Charles truly observed that with this new plan all the old dies, old presses, and old workmen could be employed. Among the other advantages it presented to the Government, it did not fail to strike Sir Charles that no Superintendent of Stamps would now be necessary,--a recommendation which the perforated die did not possess. The Stamp Office therefore abandoned the ingenuous and ingenious inventor. The old stamps were called in, and the new ones issued in a few weeks; the revenue from stamps grew enormously, and forged or feloniously used stamps are now almost unheard of. The Stamp Office reaped a benefit which it is scarcely possible to estimate fully, while Bessemer did not receive a farthing. Shortly after the new stamp was adopted by Act of Parliament, Lord Althorp resigned, and his successors disclaimed all liability. When the disappointed inventor pressed his claim, he was met by all sorts of half-promises and excuses, which ended in nothing. The disappointment was all the more galling because, if Bessemer had stuck to his first-adopted plan, his services would have been indispensable to its execution; and it was therefore through his putting a better and more easily worked plan before them that his services were coolly ignored. "I had no patent to fall back upon," he says, in describing the incident afterward. "I could not go to law, even if I wished to do so; for I was reminded, when pressing for mere money out of pocket, that I had done all the work voluntarily and of my own accord. Wearied and disgusted, I at last ceased to waste time in calling at the Stamp Office,--for time was precious to me in those days,--and I felt that nothing but increased exertions could make up for the loss of some nine months of toil and expenditure. Thus sad and dispirited, and with a burning sense of injustice overpowering all other feelings, I went my way from the Stamp Office, too proud to ask as a favor that which was indubitably my right." GOLD PAINT. Shortly after he had taken out his first patent for his improvement in type-founding, his attention was accidentally turned to the manufacture of bronze powder, which is used in gold-work, japanning, gold-printing, and similar operations. While engaged in ornamenting a vignette in his sister's album, he had to purchase a small quantity of this bronze, and was struck with the great difference between the price of the raw material and that of the manufactured article. The latter sold for 112_s._ a pound, while the raw material only cost 11_d._ a pound. He concluded that the difference was caused by the process of manufacture, and made inquiries with the view of learning the nature of the process. He found, however, that this manufacture was hardly known in England. The article was supplied to English dealers from Nuremberg and other towns in Germany. He did not succeed, therefore, in finding any one who could tell him how it was produced. In these circumstances he determined to try to make it himself, and worked for a year and a half at the solution of this task. Other men had tried it and failed, and he was on the point of failing too. After eighteen months of fruitless labor he came to the conclusion that he could not make it, and gave it up. But it is the highest attribute of genius to succeed where others fail, and, impelled by this instinct, he resumed his investigations after six months' repose. At last success crowned his efforts. The profits of his previous inventions now supplied him with funds sufficient to provide the mechanical appliances he had designed. Knowing very little of the patent law, and considering it so insecure that the safest way to reap the full benefit of his new invention was to keep it to himself, he determined to work his process of bronze-making in strict secrecy; and every precaution was therefore adopted for this purpose. He first put up a small apparatus with his own hands, and worked it entirely himself. By this means he produced the required article at 4_s._ a pound. He then sent out a traveller with samples of it, and the first order he got was at 80_s._ a pound. Being thus fully assured of success, he communicated his plans to a friend, who agreed to put £10,000 into the business, as a sleeping partner, in order to work the new manufacture on a larger scale. The entire working of the concern was left in the hands of Sir Henry, who accordingly proceeded to enlarge his means of production. To insure secrecy, he made plans of all the machinery required, and then divided them into sections. He next sent these sectional drawings to different engineering works, in order to get his machinery made piecemeal in different parts of England. This done, he collected the various pieces, and fitted them up himself,--a work that occupied him nine months. Finding everything at last in perfect working order, he engaged four or five assistants in whom he had confidence, and paid them very high wages on condition that they kept everything in the strictest secrecy. Bronze powder was now produced in large quantities by means of five self-acting machines, which not only superseded hand labor entirely, but were capable of producing as much daily as sixty skilled operatives could do by the old hand system. To this day the mechanical means by which his famous gold paint is produced remains a secret. The machinery is driven by a steam-engine in an adjoining room; and into the room where the automatic machinery is at work none but the inventor and his assistants have ever entered. When a sufficient quantity of work is done, a bell is rung to give notice to the engine-man to stop the engine; and in this way the machinery has been in constant use for over forty years without having been either patented or pirated. Its profit was as great as its success. At first he made 1,000 per cent profit; and though there are other products that now compete with this bronze, it still yields 300 per cent profit. "All this time," says the successful inventor thirty years afterward, "I have been afraid to improve the machinery, or to introduce other engineers into the works to improve them. Strange to say, we have thus among us a manufacture wholly unimproved for thirty years. I do not believe there is another instance of such a thing in the kingdom. I believe that if I had patented it, the fourteen years would not have run out without other people making improvements in the manufacture. Of the five machines I use, three are applicable to other processes, one to color-making especially; so much so that notwithstanding the very excellent income which I derive from the manufacture, I had once nearly made up my mind to throw it open and make it public, for the purpose of using part of my invention for the manufacture of colors. Three out of my five assistants have died; and if the other two were to die and myself too, no one would know what the invention is." Since this was said (in 1871), Sir Henry has rewarded the faithfulness of his two surviving assistants by handing over to them the business and the factory. BESSEMER STEEL. Sir Henry Bessemer was first led to turn his attention to the improvement of the manufacture of iron by a remark of Commander Minie, who was superintending certain trials of the results of Sir Henry's experiments in obtaining rotation of shot fired from a smooth-bore gun. "The shots," said Minie, "rotate properly; but if you cannot get stronger metal for your guns, such heavy projectiles will be of little use." At this time Sir Henry had no connection with the iron or steel trade, and knew little or nothing of metallurgy. But this fact he has always represented as being rather an advantage than a drawback. "I find," he says, "in my experience with regard to inventions, that the most intelligent manufacturers invent many small improvements in various departments of their manufactures,--but, generally speaking, these are only small ameliorations based on the nature of the operation they are daily pursuing; while, on the contrary, persons wholly unconnected with any particular business have their minds so free and untrammelled to new things as they are, and as they would present themselves to an independent observer, that they are the men who eventually produce the greatest changes." It was in this spirit that he began his investigations in metallurgy. His first business was to make himself acquainted with the information contained in the best works then published on the subject. He also endeavored to add some practical knowledge to what he learned from books. With this view he visited the iron-making districts in the north, and there obtained an insight into the working merits and defects of the processes then in use. On his return to London he arranged for the use of an old factory in St. Pancras, where he began his own series of experiments. He converted the factory into a small experimental "iron-works," in which his first object was to improve the quality of iron. For this purpose he made many costly experiments without the desired measure of success, but not without making some progress in the right direction. After twelve months spent in these experiments he produced an improved quality of cast iron, which was almost as white as steel, and was both tougher and stronger than the best cast iron then used for ordnance. Of this metal he cast a small model gun, which was turned and bored. This gun he took to Paris, and presented it personally to the Emperor,[23] as the result of his labors thus far. His Majesty encouraged him to continue his experiments, and desired to be further informed of the results. As Sir Henry continued his labors, he extended their scope from the production of refined iron to that of steel; and in order to protect himself, he took out a patent for each successive improvement. One idea after another was put to the test of experiment; one furnace after another was pulled down, and numerous mechanical appliances were designed and tried in practice. During these experiments he specified a multitude of improvements in the crucible process of making steel; but he still felt that much remained to be done. At the end of eighteen months, he says, "the idea struck me" of rendering cast iron malleable by the introduction of atmospheric air into the fluid metal. His first experiment to test this idea was made in a crucible in the laboratory. He there found that by blowing air into the molten metal in the crucible, by means of a movable blow-pipe, he could convert ten pounds or twelve pounds of crude iron into the softest malleable iron. The samples thus produced were so satisfactory in all their mechanical tests that he brought them under the notice of Colonel Eardley Wilmot, then the Superintendent of the Royal Gun Factories, who expressed himself delighted and astonished at the result, and who offered him facilities for experimenting in Woolwich Arsenal. These facilities were extended to him in the laboratory by Professor Abel, who made numberless analyses of the material as he advanced with his experiments. The testing department was also put at his disposal, for testing the tensile strength and elasticity of different samples of soft malleable iron and steel. The first piece that was rolled at Woolwich was preserved by Sir Henry as a memento. It was a small bar of metal, about a foot long and an inch wide, and was converted from a state of pig iron in a crucible of only ten pounds. That small piece of bar, after being rolled, was tried, to see how far it was capable of welding; and he was surprised to see how easily it answered the severest tests. After this he commenced experiments on a larger scale. He had proved in the laboratory that the principle of purifying pig iron by atmospheric air was possible; but he feared, from what he knew of iron metallurgy, that as he approached the condition of pure soft malleable iron, he must of necessity require a temperature that he could not hope to attain under these conditions. In order to produce larger quantities of metal in this way, one of his first ideas was to apply the air to the molten iron in crucibles; and accordingly, in October, 1855, he took out a patent embodying this idea. He proposed to erect a large circular furnace, with openings for the reception of melting-pots containing fluid iron, and pipes were made to conduct air into the centre of each pot, and to force it among the particles of metal. Having thus tested the purifying effect of cold air introduced into the melting iron in pots, he labored for three months in trying to overcome the mechanical difficulties experienced in this complicated arrangement. He wondered whether it would not be possible to dispense with the pipes and pots, and perform the whole operation in one large circular or egg-shaped vessel. The difficult thing in doing so, was to force the air all through the mass of liquid metal. While this difficulty was revolving in his mind, the labor and anxiety entailed by previous experiments brought on a short but severe illness; and while he was lying in bed, pondering for hours upon the prospects of succeeding in another experiment with the pipes and pots, it occurred to him that the difficulty might be got over by introducing air into a large vessel from below into the molten mass within. Though he entertained grave doubts as to the practicability of carrying out this idea, chiefly owing to the high temperature required to maintain the iron in a state of fluidity while the impurities were being burned out, he determined to put it to a working test; and on recovering health he immediately began to design apparatus for this purpose. He constructed a circular vessel, measuring three feet in diameter and five feet in height, and capable of holding seven hundred-weight of iron. He next ordered a small, powerful air-engine and a quantity of crude iron to be put down on the premises in St. Pancras, that he had hired for carrying on his experiments. The name of these premises was Baxter House, formerly the residence of old Richard Baxter; and the simple experiment we are now going to describe has made that house more famous than ever. The primitive apparatus being ready, the engine was made to force streams of air, under high pressure, through the bottom of the vessel, which was lined with fire-clay; and the stoker was told to pour the metal, when it was sufficiently melted, in at the top of it. A cast-iron plate--one of those lids which commonly cover the coal-holes in the pavement--was hung over the converter; and all being got ready, the stoker in some bewilderment poured in the metal. Instantly out came a volcanic eruption of such dazzling coruscations as had never been seen before. The dangling pot-lid dissolved in the gleaming volume of flame, and the chain by which it hung grew red and then white, as the various stages of the process were unfolded to the gaze of the wondering spectators. The air-cock to regulate the blast was beside the converting-vessel; but no one dared to go near it, much less deliberately to shut it. In this dilemma, however, they were soon relieved by finding that the process of decarburization or combustion had expended all its fury; and, most wonderful of all, the result was steel! The new metal was tried. Its quality was good. The problem was solved. The new process appeared successful. The inventor was elated, as well he might be! The new process was received with astonishment by all the iron-working world. It was approved by many, but scoffed at by others. As trials went on, however, the feeling against it increased. The iron so made was often "rotten," and no one could tell exactly why. Bessemer, however, continued to investigate everything for himself, regardless of all suggestions. Some ideas of permanent value were offered to him, but were set at nought. It was not till another series of independent experiments were made that he himself discovered the secret of failure. It then appeared that, by mere chance, the iron used in his first experiments was Blaenavon pig, which is exceptionally free from phosphorus; and consequently, when other sorts of iron were thrown at random into the converter, the phosphorus manifested its refractory nature in the unworkable character of the metal produced. Analyses made by Professor Abel for Sir Henry showed that this was the real cause of failure. Once convinced of this fact, Sir Henry set to work for the purpose of removing this hostile element. He saw how phosphorus was removed in the puddling-furnace, and he now tried to do the same thing in his converter. Another series of costly and laborious experiments was conducted; and first one patent and then another was taken out, tried, and abandoned. His last idea was to make a vessel in which the converting process did not take place, but into which he could put the pig iron as soon as it was melted, along with the same kind of materials that were used in the puddling-furnace. He was then of opinion that he must come as near to puddling as possible, in order to get the phosphorus out of the iron. Just as he was preparing to put this plan into operation, there arrived in England some pig iron which he had ordered from Sweden some months previously. When this iron, which was free from phosphorus, was put into the converter, it yielded, in the very first experiment, a metal of so high a quality that he at once abandoned his efforts to dephosphorize ordinary iron. The Sheffield manufacturers were then selling steel at £60 a ton; and he thought that as he could buy pig iron at £7 a ton, and by blowing it a few minutes in the converter could make it into what was being sold at such a high price, the problem was solved. But there was yet one thing wanting. He had now succeeded in producing the purest malleable iron ever made, and that, too, by a quicker and less expensive process than was ever known before. But what he wanted was to make steel. The former is iron in its greatest possible purity; the latter is pure iron containing a small percentage of carbon to harden it. There has been an almost endless controversy in trying to make a definition that will fix the dividing line that separates the one metal from the other.[24] For our present purpose, suffice it to quote the account given in a popular treatise on metallurgy, published at the time when Bessemer was in the midst of his experiments. "Wrought iron," it says, "or soft iron, may contain no carbon; and if perfectly pure, would contain none, nor indeed any other impurity. This is a state to be desired and aimed at, but it has never yet been perfectly attained in practice. The best as well as the commonest foreign irons always contain more or less carbon.... Carbon may exist in iron in the ratio of 65 parts to 10,000 without assuming the properties of steel. If the proportion be greater than that, and anywhere between the limits of 65 parts of carbon to 10,000 parts of iron and 2 parts of carbon to 100 of iron, the alloy assumes the properties of steel. In cast iron the carbon exceeds 2 per cent, but in appearance and properties it differs widely from the hardest steel. These properties, although we quote them, are somewhat doubtful; and the chemical constitution of these three substances may, perhaps, be regarded as still undetermined." Now, in the Bessemer converter the carbon was almost entirely consumed. In the small gun just described,[25] there were only 14 parts of carbon for 1,000,000 parts of iron. Bessemer's next difficulty was to carburize his pure iron, and thus to make it into steel. "The wrought iron," says Mr. I. L. Bell, "as well as the steel made according to Sir Henry Bessemer's original plan, though a purer specimen of metal was never heard of except in the laboratory, was simply worthless. In this difficulty, a ray of scientific truth, brought to light one hundred years before, came to the rescue. Bergmann was one of the earliest philosophers who discarded all theory, and introduced into chemistry that process of analysis which is the indispensable antecedent of scientific system. This Swedish experimenter had ascertained the existence of manganese in the iron of that country, and connected its presence with suitability for steel purposes." Manganese is a kind of iron exceptionally rich in carbon, and also exceptionally free from other impurities. Berzelius, Rinman, Karsten, Berthier, and other metallurgists had before now discussed its effect when combined with ordinary iron; and the French were so well aware that ferro-manganese ores were superior for steel-making purposes that they gave them the name of _mines d'acier_. So Bessemer, after many experiments, discovered a method whereby, with the use of ferro-manganese, he could make what is known as mild steel. The process of manufacture, when described by Sir Henry Bessemer at Cheltenham in 1856,[26] was so nearly complete, that only two important additions were made afterwards. One was the introduction of the ferro-manganese for the purpose of imparting to his pure liquid iron the properties of "mild steel." The other was an improvement in the mechanical apparatus. He found that when the air had been blown into the iron till all the carbon was expelled, the continuance of "the blow" afterward consumed the iron at a very rapid rate, and a great loss of iron thus took place. It was therefore necessary to cease blowing at a particular moment. At first he saw no practical way by which he could prevent the metal going into the air-holes in the bottom of the vessel below the level of the liquid mass, so as to stop them up immediately on ceasing to force the air through them; for if he withdrew the pressure of air, the whole apparatus would be destroyed for a time. Here, again, his inventive genius found a remedy. He had the converter holding the molten iron mounted on an axis, which enabled him at any moment he liked to turn it round and to bring the holes above the level of the metal; whenever this was done the process of conversion or combustion ceased of itself, and the apparatus had only to be turned back again in order to resume the operation. This turning on an axis of a furnace weighing eleven tons, and containing five tons of liquid metal, at a temperature scarcely approachable, was a system entirely different from anything that had preceded it; for it he took out what he considered one of his most important patents, "and," he says, "I am vain enough to believe that so long as my process lasts, the motion of the vessel containing the fluid on its axis will be retained as an absolute necessity for any form which the process may take at any future time." The patent for this invention was taken out about four years after his original patent for the converter. Uncle Fritz showed them a picture of this gigantic kettle, which holds this mass of molten metal and yet turns so easily. "But," said Helen, "you have a model of it here, Uncle Fritz." And she pointed to her Uncle Fritz's inkstand, which is something the shape of a fat beet-root, with the point turned up to receive the ink. Uncle Fritz nodded his approval. These inkstands, which turn over on a little brazen axis, were probably first made by some one who had seen the great eleven-ton converters. Uncle Fritz showed the children the picture in the "Practical Magazine," and they spent some time together in looking over the pages of the volume for 1876. The Bessemer process was now perfect. Nearly four years had elapsed since its conception and first application; and in addition to the necessary labor and anxiety he had experienced, no less than £20,000 had been expended in making experiments that were necessary to complete its success. It only remained to bring the process into general use. * * * * * The young people asked quite eagerly whether they could see the processes of "conversion" anywhere, and were glad to be told that Bessemer steel is made in many parts of America. One of their young friends, who was educated at the "Technology," is in charge of a department at Steelton, in Pennsylvania, and they have all written letters to him. The American steel-makers have a great variety of ores to choose from, and they have found it possible, by using different ores, to avoid the difficulties which Mr. Bessemer first met in using the ores of England. And so far are the processes now simplified, that in many American establishments the molten iron is received liquid from the blast furnaces, and does not have to be reduced a second time in a cupola furnace, as was the iron used by Mr. Bessemer. There is no cooling, in such establishments, between the ore and the finished steel. XIV. THE LAST MEETING. GOODYEAR. When the day for the next meeting came, Uncle Fritz had a large collection of books and magazines in the little rolling racks and tables where such things are kept. But no one of them was opened. No. The young people appeared in great strength, all at the same moment, and notified him that he was to put on his hat and his light overcoat, and go with them on what they called the first "Alp" of the season. For there is a pretence in the little company that they are an Alpine Club, and that for eight months of the year it is their duty to climb the highest mountains near Boston. Now, the very highest of these peaks is the summit hill of the Blue Hills, to which indeed Massachusetts owes its name. For "Matta" in the Algonquin tongue meant "great," and "Chuset" meant "a hill." And a woman who was living on a little hummock near Squantum, just before Winthrop and the rest landed, was the sacred Sachem of the Massachusetts Indians. Hence the name of Mattachusetts Bay; and then, by euphony or bad spelling, or both, Massachusetts. Uncle Fritz obeyed the rabble rout, as he is apt to do. He retired for a minute to put on heavier shoes, and, when he reappeared, he took the seat of honor in the leading omnibus. And a very merry expedition they had to the summit, where, as the accurate Fergus told them, they were six hundred feet above the level of the sea. There was but little wood, and they were able to lie and sit in a large group on the ground just on the lee side of the hill, where they could look off on the endless sea. "Whom should you have told us about, had it rained?" said Mabel Fordyce. "Oh! you were to have had your choice. There are still left many inventors. I had looked at Mr. Parton's Life of Goodyear, and the very curious brief prepared for the court about his patents. Half of you would not be here to-day but for that ingenious and long-suffering man." "Should not I have come?" said Gertrude, incredulously. "Surely not," said Uncle Fritz, laughing. "I saw your water-proof in your shawl-strap. I know your mamma well enough to know that you would never have been permitted to come so far from home without that ægis, or without those trig, pretty overshoes. You owe waterproof and overshoes both to the steady perseverance of Goodyear and to the loyal help of his wife and daughters. Some day you must read Mr. Webster's eulogy on him and them. Indeed, he is the American Palissy. You hear a good deal of woman's rights; but, really, modern women had no rights worth speaking of till Mr. Goodyear enabled them to go out-doors in all weathers. "I meant we should have an afternoon with the Goodyears. Then I meant that you should know, Gertrude, where that slice of bread came from." "Well," said she, "I do not know much, but I do know that. It came out of the bread-box." "Very good," said the Colonel, laughing. "But somebody put it into the bread-box. And it is quite as well that you should know who put it in. American girls and American boys ought to know that men's prayer for 'Daily Bread' is answered more and more largely every year. They ought to know why. Well, the great reason is that reaping and binding after the reapers, nay, that sowing the corn, and every process between sowing and harvest, has been wellnigh perfected by the American inventors. So I had wanted to give a day or two to reapers and binders, and the other machinery of harvesting. Indeed, if our winter had been as long as poor Captain Greely's was, and if you had met me every week, we should have had a new invention for each one. Here are the telephone and the telegraph. Here is the use of the electric light. Here is the sewing-machine, with all its nice details, like the button-hole maker. Nay, every button is made by its own machinery. Here are carpets one quarter cheaper than they were only four years ago; cotton cloths made more by machinery and less by hand labor; nay, they tell us that the cotton is to be picked by a machine before long. "But these are things you must work up for yourselves. You are on a good track now, and have learned some of the principles of such study. "Go to the originals whenever you can. Read what you understand, and fall back on what you did not understand at first, so as to try it again." "Do you not think that all the great things have been invented, Uncle Fritz?" This was John Angier's rather melancholy question. "Not a bit of it, my boy. Certainly not for as keen eyes as yours and as handy hands. Let me tell you what I heard President Dawson say. He is President of McGill University, and is counted one of the first physical philosophers in America. "He said this in substance: 'What will future times say of us, the men of the end of the nineteenth century? They will say, "What was the ban on those men, what numbed them or held them still, as if in fear? Why did they not apply in daily life their own great discoveries of the central laws of Nature? They were able to work out principles. Why could they not embody them in useful inventions? They discovered the Ocean of Truth, but they stood frightened on its shore. They found the great principles of science, and for their application they seem to have been satisfied when they had built the steam-engine, had devised the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, and when they had set the electric light a blazing."' "You see, John, that he thinks there is enough more for you and the rest to invent and to discover." Then Uncle Fritz took from his ulster pocket Mr. Parton's volume of biographical sketches. "It is all very fine for you, Miss Alice," he said, "to lie there on your waterproof, and to be sure that even mamma will not scold when you go home. But take the book, and read, and see who has wept and who has starved that you might lie there." And Alice read the passages he had marked for her. The difficulty of all this may be inferred when we state that at the present time it takes an intelligent man a year to learn how to conduct the process with certainty, though he is provided, from the start, with the best implements and appliances which twenty years' experience has suggested. And poor Goodyear had now reduced himself, not merely to poverty, but to isolation. No friend of his could conceal his impatience when he heard him pronounce the word "India-rubber." Business-men recoiled from the name of it. He tells us that two entire years passed, after he had made his discovery, before he had convinced one human being of its value. Now, too, his experiments could no longer be carried on with a few pounds of India-rubber, a quart of turpentine, a phial of aquafortis, and a little lampblack. He wanted the means of producing a high, uniform, and controllable degree of heat,--a matter of much greater difficulty than he anticipated. We catch brief glimpses of him at this time in the volumes of testimony. We see him waiting for his wife to draw the loaves from her oven, that he might put into it a batch of India-rubber to bake, and watching it all the evening, far into the night, to see what effect was produced by one hour's, two hours', three hours', six hours' baking. We see him boiling it in his wife's saucepans, suspending it before the nose of her teakettle, and hanging it from the handle of that vessel to within an inch of the boiling water. We see him roasting it in the ashes and in hot sand, toasting it before a slow fire and before a quick fire, cooking it for one hour and for twenty-four hours, changing the proportions of his compound and mixing them in different ways. No success rewarded him while he employed only domestic utensils. Occasionally, it is true, he produced a small piece of perfectly vulcanized India-rubber; but upon subjecting other pieces to precisely the same process, they would blister or char. Then we see him resorting to the shops and factories in the neighborhood of Woburn, asking the privilege of using an oven after working hours, or of hanging a piece of India-rubber in the "man-hole" of the boiler. The foremen testify that he was a great plague to them, and smeared their works with his sticky compound; but though they regarded him as little better than a troublesome lunatic, they all appear to have helped him very willingly. He frankly confesses that he lived at this time on charity; for although _he_ felt confident of being able to repay the small sums which pity for his family enabled him to borrow, his neighbors who lent him the money were as far as possible from expecting payment. Pretending to lend, they meant to give. One would pay his butcher's bill or his milk-bill; another would send in a barrel of flour; another would take in payment some articles of the old stock of India-rubber; and some of the farmers allowed his children to gather sticks in their fields to heat his hillocks of sand containing masses of sulphurized India-rubber. If the people of New England were not the most "neighborly" people in the world, his family must have starved, or he must have given up his experiments. But, with all the generosity of his neighbors, his children were often sick, hungry, and cold, without medicine, food, or fuel. One witness testifies: "I found, in 1839, that they had not fuel to burn nor food to eat, and did not know where to get a morsel of food from one day to another, unless it was sent in to them." We can neither justify nor condemn their father. Imagine Columbus within sight of the new world, and his obstinate crew declaring it was only a mirage, and refusing to row him ashore. Never was mortal man surer that he had a fortune in his hand, than Charles Goodyear was when he would take a piece of scorched and dingy India-rubber from his pocket and expound its marvellous properties to a group of incredulous villagers. Sure also was he that he was just upon the point of a practicable success. Give him but an oven and would he not turn you out fire-proof and cold-proof India-rubber, as fast as a baker can produce loaves of bread? Nor was it merely the hope of deliverance from his pecuniary straits that urged him on. In all the records of his career, we perceive traces of something nobler than this. His health being always infirm, he was haunted with the dread of dying before he had reached a point in his discoveries where other men, influenced by ordinary motives, could render them available. By the time that he had exhausted the patience of the foremen of the works near Woburn, he had come to the conclusion that an oven was the proper means of applying heat to his compound. An oven he forthwith determined to build. Having obtained the use of a corner of a factory yard, his aged father, two of his brothers, his little son, and himself sallied forth, with pickaxe and shovels, to begin the work; and when they had done all that unskilled labor could effect towards it, he induced a mason to complete it, and paid him in brick-layers' aprons made of aquafortized India-rubber. This first oven was a tantalizing failure. The heat was neither uniform nor controllable. Some of the pieces of India-rubber would come out so perfectly "cured" as to demonstrate the utility of his discovery; but others, prepared in precisely the same manner, as far as he could discern, were spoiled, either by blistering or charring. He was puzzled and distressed beyond description; and no single voice consoled or encouraged him. Out of the first piece of cloth which he succeeded in vulcanizing he had a coat made for himself, which was not an ornamental garment in its best estate; but, to prove to the unbelievers that it would stand fire, he brought it so often in contact with hot stoves, that at last it presented an exceedingly dingy appearance. His coat did not impress the public favorably, and it served to confirm the opinion that he was laboring under a mania. In the midst of his first disheartening experiments with sulphur, he had an opportunity of escaping at once from his troubles. A house in Paris made him an advantageous offer for the use of his aquafortis process. From the abyss of his misery the honest man promptly replied, that that process, valuable as it was, was about to be superseded by a new method, which he was then perfecting, and as soon as he had developed it sufficiently he should be glad to close with their offers. Can we wonder that his neighbors thought him mad? It was just after declining the French proposal that he endured his worst extremity of want and humiliation. It was in the winter of 1839-40; one of those long and terrible snowstorms for which New England is noted, had been raging for many hours, and he awoke one morning to find his little cottage half buried in snow, the storm still continuing, and in his house not an atom of fuel nor a morsel of food. His children were very young, and he was himself sick and feeble. The charity of his neighbors was exhausted, and he had not the courage to face their reproaches. As he looked out of the window upon the dreary and tumultuous scene,--"fit emblem of his condition," he remarks,--he called to mind that a few days before, an acquaintance, a mere acquaintance, who lived some miles off, had given him upon the road a more friendly greeting than he was then accustomed to receive. It had cheered his heart as he trudged sadly by, and it now returned vividly to his mind. To this gentleman he determined to apply for relief, if he could reach his house. Terrible was his struggle with the wind and the deep drifts. Often he was ready to faint with fatigue, sickness, and hunger, and he would be obliged to sit down upon a bank of snow to rest. He reached the house and told his story, not omitting the oft-told tale of his new discovery,--that mine of wealth, if only he could procure the means of working it. The eager eloquence of the inventor was seconded by the gaunt and yellow face of the man. His generous acquaintance entertained him cordially, and lent him a sum of money, which not only carried his family through the worst of the winter, but enabled him to continue his experiments on a small scale. O. B. Coolidge, of Woburn, was the name of this benefactor. On another occasion, when he was in the most urgent need of materials, he looked about his house to see if there was left one relic of better days upon which a little money could be borrowed. There was nothing but his children's school-books,--the last things from which a New Englander is willing to part. There was no other resource. He gathered them up, and sold them for five dollars, with which he laid in a fresh stock of gum and sulphur, and kept on experimenting. Alice and Hester looked over the rest of the story while the others packed up the wrecks of the picnic and prepared to go down the hill. Then they joined Uncle Fritz in the advance, and thanked him very seriously for what he had shown them. "Such a story as that," said Hester, "is worth more than anything about cut-offs or valves." "I think so too," said he. "I should like," said the girl, "to write to those children of his a letter to thank them for what they have done, and what he did for me, and a million girls like me." "It would be a good thing to do," said he, "and I think I can put you in the way." "And I do hope," said Alice, eagerly, "that if we are ever tested in that way we shall bear the test." "Dear Uncle Fritz, if we cannot invent a flying-machine, and have not learned how to close up rivets this winter, we have learned at least how to bear each other's burdens." FOOTNOTES: [1] These are the quinqueremes, fastened together, of the other account. [2] The estimates of a talent vary somewhat, but ten talents made about seven hundred pounds. [3] Quoted in Fabricius's Greek fragments. [4] Encyclopædia Americana: art. "Roger Bacon." [5] See "Stories of Adventure." [6] As St. James says, "The wisdom from above is _first_ pure." [7] Joseph Droz, born in 1773. His essay was published in 1806, and had come to its fourth edition in 1825. [8] The first-steam-engines were devised in order to supply some motor for the pumps which were necessary, all over England, to keep the mines free from water. The locomotive engine, as will be seen later, owes its birth to the efforts of colliery engineers to find some means of drawing coal better than the horse-power generally in use. [9] John Robison, at this time a student at Glasgow College, and afterwards Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh. He was at one time Master of the Marine Cadet Academy at Cronstadt. [10] The principal men of Glasgow were the importers of tobacco from Virginia. [11] Earl Stanhope, among other projects, had conceived "the hope of being able to apply the steam-engine to navigation by the aid of a peculiar apparatus modelled after the foot of an aquatic fowl." Fulton, on being consulted by the Earl, doubted the feasibility, and suggested the very means which he afterward made successful upon the Hudson. [12] Symington was an engineer who had been carrying out some experiments of Miller of Dalswinton in regard to the practicability of steam navigation. [13] Who subsequently made charge that Fulton, having seen his steamboat and made copious notes thereon, had thus been able to make his boat upon the Hudson. [14] This was in the course of the War of 1812. [15] Fulton died Feb. 24, 1815; he was born in 1765. [16] Killingworth is a town some seven or eight miles north of Newcastle, in Northumberland. George Stephenson was at this time the engine-wright of the colliery. It may be said here that the principal use for which the early locomotive engines and railroads were designed was to convey coal from the pit to a market. It was not till the success of the mining and quarrying railways led to the building of the Liverpool and Manchester Road, between two great cities, that the value of the railroad for the transfer of passengers was recognized. [17] It had been generally the opinion that cog-wheels must be used which should fit into cogs in the rail. Otherwise it was imagined the wheels would revolve without proceeding. [18] "The private risk is the public benefit." [19] It had a sort of resemblance to a grasshopper, caused by the angle at which the piston and cylinder were placed. [20] Mr. Henry Booth, secretary to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, suggested to Mr. Stephenson the idea of a multitubular boiler. [21] This letter is dated Nov. 24, 1793. [22] This was in 1812, twenty years after the invention of the gin. The saving in 1885 is enormously greater. [23] Napoleon III., under whose protection Bessemer had been experimenting in projectiles when his attention was turned to the manufacture of iron. [24] In Grüner's text-book on steel, he says: "In its properties, as well as in its manufacture, steel is comprised between the limits of cast and wrought iron. It cannot even be said where steel begins or ends. It is a series which begins with the most impure black pig iron, and ends with the softest and purest wrought iron. [Karsten stated this in these words in 1823.] Cast-iron passes into hard steel in becoming malleable (natural steel for wire-mills, the 'Wildstahl' of the Germans); and steel, properly so called, passes into iron, giving in succession mild steel, steel of the nature of iron, steely iron, and granular iron." [25] A small cannon cast by Sir Henry, the description of which we have omitted. [26] Immediately after his first successful experiment at St. Pancras, described above. INDEX. Abel, Professor, 275, 278 Althorp, Lord, 268 Anderson, 246 Archimedes, 18, 20 Bacon, Roger, 37 Barlow, Joel, 179 Baxter House, 277 Beccaria, 114 Bell, I. L., 280 Benvenuto Cellini, 58 Bernard Palissy, 82 Berthier, 281 Berzelius, 281 Bessemer, Andrew, 262 Bessemer, Sir Henry, 259 Bessemer and Catherwood, 263 Black, Dr., 165 Blue Hills, Mass., 284 Bossuet, 183 Boulton, Matthew, 171, 181 Bourbon, Constable, 63 Braithwaite and Ericsson, 212 Brandreth, 212 Bridgewater Foundry, 249, 255 Brunel, Isambert, 178 Bungy, Friar, 41 Burstall, 212, 216 Carriage, Sailing, 141 Car of Neptune, 189 Caslon, Henry, 263 Cellini, Benvenuto, 58 Chaise, One-wheeled, 144 Charles IX. of France, 96 Cheltenham, 281 Church, Benjamin, 174 Circle, The Square of, 22 Clement VII., 62 Condensation, 159 Conductors of Electricity, 105 Constable Bourbon, shot, 63 Coolidge, O. B., 292 Court of Chancery, N. Y., 189 Dalibard, 108 Darwin, Dr., 135 Dawson, President, 286 De Foe, Daniel, 99 Devonport, 252 Didot, Finnin, 263 Dixon, John, 205 Droz, François Xavier Joseph, 102 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 119 Edison's Laboratory, 51 Electricity, 103 Elkingtons, 263 Engines, Early Steam, 149 Euclid, 20 Evans, Oliver, 175 Experiment, The Great, 111 Field, Joshua, 249 Fitch, John, 177, 190 "Firework," The, 155 Francis I., 71 Franklin, Benjamin, 97, 177, 237 Fulton, Robert, 173 Gig, One-wheeled, 145 Glasses, Musical, 115-117 Gold Paint, 270 Goodyear, Charles, 285 Greene, Mrs. General, 227, 229 Grüner, 279 Gun Factories, 275 Hackworth, Timothy, 212 Hammerfield, 257 Harmonica, 113 Hart's Recollections, 161 Hartop, Annie (Mrs. Bessemer), 250 Helton Railway, 203 Hiero, 21 Hitchin, 264 Hooke, Dr. Robert, 137 Hulls, Jonathan, 176 Jack the Darter, 142 Jay, John, 220 Jefferson, Thomas, 233 Jouffroy, Marquis de, 176 Karsten, 281 Keramics, 82 Killingworth Colliery, 195 Latent Heat, 157 Lightning, 107 Livingston, Chancellor, 178 Mackintosh, James, 173 Maclaughlan, Robert, 246 Manchester, 249 Marcellus attacks Syracuse, 26 Massachusetts, Derivation of Name, 284 Maudsley, Henry, 247 Middleton Colliery Railway, 203 Miller, Phineas, 231 Minie, Commander, 273 Musical Glasses, 115 Napoleon I., 175 Napoleon III., 274 Nasmyth, James, 238 Newcomen Engine, 150, 167, 169 Nuremburg, 271 Palissy the Potter, 82 Papin, Denis, 176 Patricroft, 256 Périer, 176 Persley, Sir Charles, 266 Plombières, 180 Pope Clement VII., 62 Potter, Humphrey, 152 Practical Magazine, 282 Quincy, 194 Rastrick and Walker, 217 Ravensworth, Lord, 195 Renard and Krebs, 174 Resolution Book, 101 Rinman, 281 Robespierre, Max, 261 Robison, 154, 165 Roebuck, Dr., 171 Roger Bacon, 37 Roosevelt, Nicholas, 178 Royal Academy, 265 Royal Gun Factories, 275 Rumsey, James, 177 St. Pancras, 274 St. Petersburg, 192, 253 Savery, 176 Scottish Society of Arts, 246 Sharp Conductors, 105 Somerset House, 265 Sounds and Signals, 139 Stanhope, Earl, 179 Stamp Office, English, 266 Steam-Engines, Early, 149 Stephenson, George, 193 Stephenson, Robert, 208 Stevens, John, 178 Stevens, Robert L., 192 Sweden, 254 Symington, 180, 182 Syracuse, Siege of, 25 Telegraph, Edgeworth's, 124 Telegraph, English, 133 Telegraph, Irish, 127 Telegraph, Home, 139 Telegraphs, 125, 126 Tellograph, 137 Thirteen Virtues, 100 Travelling Engine, 195 Ugolini, Giorgio, 65 Virgil, 53 Walker and Rastrick, 217 Walking-machine, 140 Watt, James, 146 Whistler, Major G. 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The story is permeated with a spirit of glad-heartedness and elasticity which in this hurried, anxious, money-making age it is most refreshing to meet with in any one out of his teens; and the author's sympathy with, and respect for, the little romances of his young friends is most fraternal."--_New Church Magazine._ =SEVEN SPANISH CITIES=, and the Way to Them. 16mo. $1.25. "The Rev. E. E. Hale's 'Spanish Cities' is in the author's most lively style, full of fun, with touches of romance, glimpses of history, allusions to Oriental literature, earnest talk about religion, consideration of Spanish politics, and a rapid, running description of everything that observant eyes could possibly see. Mr. Hale makes Spain more attractive and more amusing than any other traveller has done, and he lavishes upon her epigram and wit."--_Boston Advertiser._ =CHRISTMAS EVE AND CHRISTMAS DAY.= Ten Stories. 16mo. $1.25. "Many an eye has moistened, and many a heart grown kindlier with Christmas thoughts over 'Daily Bread,' and some of the lesser stars which now shine in the same galaxy; and the volume which contains them will carry on their humane ministry to many a future Christmas time."--_Christian Register._ =IN HIS NAME.= A Story of the Waldenses, Seven Hundred Years ago. Square 18mo. Paper, 30 cents; cloth, $1.00. "A touching, almost a thrilling, tale is this by E. E. Hale, in its pathetic simplicity and its deep meaning. It is a story of the Waldenses in the days when Richard Coeur de Lion and his splendid following wended their way to the Crusades, and when the name of Christ inspired men who dwelt in palaces, and men who sheltered themselves in the forests of France. 'In his Name' was the 'Open Sesame' to the hearts of such as these, and it is to illustrate the power of this almost magical phrase that the story is written. That it is charmingly written, follows from its authorship. There is in fact no little book that we have seen of late that offers so much of so pleasant reading in such little space, and conveys so apt and pertinent a lesson of pure religion."--_N. Y. Commercial Advertiser._ "The very loveliest Christmas story ever written. It has the ring of an old Troubadour in it." =A SUMMER VACATION.= 16mo. 50 cents. "After Mr. Hale's return from Europe he preached to his people four sermons concerning his European experience. At the request of 'some who heard them,' Mr. Hale has allowed these sermons to be published with this title. They are full of vigorous thought, wide philanthropy, and practical suggestions, and will be read with interest by all classes."--_Boston Transcript._ _Sold everywhere. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of price, by the Publishers_, ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON. 
40782	----	The following applies to all of the Papers: Italic emphasis denoted as _Text_. Bold emphasis as =Text=. Whole numbers and fractions: shown as 1-1/2, 3-1/4, etc. Superscripts are ^{3} and subscripts are _{4} unless otherwise noted. All footnotes and any list of corrections were placed at the end of each individual Paper. Numerous minor typographical error were corrected. All obvious typographical errors corrected. Formatting inconsistancies and spelling were standardized. Paragraphs split by illustrations were rejoined. * * * * * CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 34 THE 1893 DURYEA AUTOMOBILE IN THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY _Don H. Berkebile_ EARLY AUTOMOTIVE EXPERIENCE 5 CONSTRUCTION BEGINS 6 DESCRIPTION OF THE AUTOMOBILE 16 [Illustration: FIGURE 1.--DURYEA AUTOMOBILE in the Museum of History and Technology, from an 1897 photograph. The gear-sprockets were already missing when this was taken, and the chain lies loosely on the pinion. Shown at the right, the Duryea vehicle following the recent restoration (Smithsonian photo 34183).] _Don H. Berkebile_ The 1893 Duryea Automobile _In the Museum of History and Technology_ _During the last decade of the nineteenth century a number of American engineers and mechanics were working diligently to develop a practical self-propelled vehicle employing an internal-combustion engine as the motive force. Among these men were Charles and Frank Duryea, who began work on this type of vehicle about 1892. This carriage was operated on the streets of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1893, where its trials were noted in the newspapers. Now preserved in the Museum of History and Technology, it is a prized exhibit in the collection of early automobiles._ _It is the purpose of this paper to present some of the facts discovered during the restoration of the vehicle, to show the problems that faced its builders, and to describe their solutions. An attempt also has been made to correlate all this information with reports of the now almost legendary day-to-day experiences of the Duryeas, as published by the brothers in various booklets, and as related by Frank Duryea during two interviews, recorded on tape in 1956 and 1957, while he was visiting the Smithsonian._ THE AUTHOR: _Don H. Berkebile is on the staff of the Museum of History and Technology, in the Smithsonian Institution's United States National Museum._ Of the numerous American automotive pioneers, perhaps among the best known are Charles and Frank Duryea. Beginning their work of automobile building in Springfield, Massachusetts, and after much rebuilding, they constructed their first successful vehicle in 1892 and 1893. No sooner was this finished than Frank, working alone, began work on a second vehicle having a two-cylinder engine. With this automobile, sufficient capital was attracted in 1895 to form the Duryea Motor Wagon Company in which both brothers were among the stockholders and directors. A short time after the formation of the company this second automobile was entered by the company in the Chicago Times-Herald automobile race on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1895, where Frank Duryea won a victory over the other five contestants--two electric automobiles and three Benz machines imported from Germany. In the year following this victory Frank, as engineer in charge of design and construction, completed the plans begun earlier for a more powerful automobile. During 1896 the company turned out thirteen identical automobiles, the first example of mass production in American automotive history.[1] Even while these cars were under construction Frank was planning a lighter vehicle, one of which was completed in October of 1896. This machine was driven to another victory by Frank Duryea on November 14, 1896, when he competed once again with European-built cars in the Liberty-Day Run from London to Brighton. The decision to race and demonstrate their autos abroad was the result of the company's desire to interest foreign capital, yet Frank later felt they might better have used their time and money by concentrating on building cars and selling them to the local market. Subsequently, in the fall of 1898, Frank arranged for the sale of his and Charles' interest in the company, and thereafter the brothers pursued separate careers. [Illustration: FIGURE 2.--WORKMEN IN THE DURYEA FACTORY in Springfield, Mass., working on some of the thirteen 1896 motor wagons. (Smithsonian photo 44062.)] Frank, in 1901, entered into a contract with the J. Stevens Arms and Tool Company, of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, which built automobiles under his supervision. This association led in 1904 to the formation of the Stevens-Duryea Company, of which Irving Page was president and Frank Duryea was vice president and chief engineer. This company produced during its 10-year existence a number of popular and well-known models, among them a light six known as the Model U, in 1907; a larger 4-cylinder called the Model X, in 1908; and a larger six, the Model Y, in 1909. In 1914 when Stevens withdrew from the company, Frank obtained control. The following year he sold the plants and machinery, liquidated the company, and, due to ill health, retired. Charles, in the meantime, located in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he built autos under the name of the Duryea Power Company.[2] Here, and later in Philadelphia under the name of the Duryea Motor Corporation and other corporate names, he continued for a number of years to build automobiles, vacuum cleaners and other mechanical devices. Until the time of his death in 1938, he practiced as a consulting engineer. [Illustration: Department of the Interior U.S. PATENT OFFICE, April 1, 1887 Admit Mr. Charles E. Duryea to this Office on all business days between the hours of 2 and 4 P.M. until otherwise ordered. [Signature] Chief Clerk Countersigned, [Signature] FIGURE 3.--ADMITTANCE CARD of C. E. Duryea to the U.S. Patent Office, 1887. (Gift of Rhea Duryea Johnson.)] Early Automotive Experience Born in 1861 near Canton, Illinois, Charles E. Duryea had learned the trade of a mechanic following his graduation from high school, and subsequently turned his interests to bicycle repair. He and his brother James Frank, eight years younger, eventually left Illinois and moved to Washington D.C., where they were employed in the bicycle shop of H. S. Owen, one of that city's leading bicycle dealers and importers. While in Washington, Charles became a regular reader of the Patent Office Gazette,[3] an act which undoubtedly influenced his later work with automobiles. A short time later, probably in 1889, Charles contracted with a firm in Rockaway, New Jersey, to construct bicycles for him, but their failure to make delivery as promised caused him to go to Chicopee, Massachusetts, where he contracted with the Ames Manufacturing Company to do his work. Moving there in 1890, he obtained for his brother a position as toolmaker with the Ames Company. Thus, Frank Duryea, as he was later known, also became located in Chicopee, a northern suburb of Springfield. [Illustration: FIGURE 4.--CHARLES E. DURYEA, about 1894, as drawn by George Giguere from a photograph. (Smithsonian photo 48335-A.)] During the summer, 1891, Charles found the bicycle business left him some spare time, and the gasoline-powered carriages he had read of earlier came constantly into his mind in these periods of idleness.[4] He and Frank studied several books on gasoline engines, among them one by an English writer (title and author now unknown);[5] this described the Otto 4-stroke cycle as now used. Some engineers, however, were concerned because this engine, on the completion of the exhaust stroke, had not entirely evacuated all of the products of combustion. The Atkinson engine, patented in 1887, was one of the attempts to solve this as well as several other problems, thus creating a more efficient cycle. This engine was designed so that the exhaust stroke carried the piston all the way to the head of the engine, while the compression stroke only moved the piston far enough to sufficiently compress the mixture. The unusual linkage necessary to create these unequal strokes in the Atkinson engine made it seem impractical for a carriage engine, where compactness was desired. [Illustration: _Agents Want{d}_ SYLPH CYCLES RUN EASY Pneumatics not enough; springs necessary for comfort & safety Sylph spring frame saves muscle & nerves & is perfection. All users delighted. Investigate. We also make a 30 lb. rigid Sylph. Cata. free. Rouse-Duryea Cycle Co. _Mfrs._ 16 G st., Peoria, Ill. FIGURE 5.--ADVERTISEMENT of Duryea bicycle company, _Scientific American_, September 9, 1893.] Going to Hartford, Connecticut, possibly on business relating to his bicycle work, Charles visited the Hartford Machine Screw Company where the Daimler-type engine was being produced,[6] but after examining it he felt it was too heavy and clumsy for his purpose. Also in Hartford he talked over the problem of a satisfactory engine with C. E. Hawley, an employee of the Pope Manufacturing Company, makers of the Columbia bicycle. Hawley, searching for a way to construct an engine that would perform in a manner similar to the Atkinson, yet would have the lightness and compactness necessary for a carriage engine, suggested an idea that Charles believed had some merit. This idea, involving the use of what the Duryeas later called a "free piston," was eventually to be incorporated in their first engine.[7] [Illustration: FIGURE 6.--J. FRANK DURYEA, about 1894, as drawn by George Giguere from a photograph. (Smithsonian photo 48335.)] Construction Begins Back in Chicopee again, Charles began planning his first horseless carriage. Frank later stated that they leaned heavily on the Benz patents in their work;[8] but while the later engine and transmission show evidence of this, only the Benz manner of placing the engine and the flywheel seem to have been employed in the original Duryea plan. Charles reversed the engine so that the flywheel was to the front, rather than to the rear as in the Benz patent, but made use of Benz' vertical crankshaft so that the flywheel rotated in a horizontal plane. Previously most engines had used vertical flywheels; Benz, believing that this practice would cause difficulty in steering a propelled carriage, explained his reason for changing this feature in his U.S. patent 385087, issued June 26, 1888: In motors hitherto used the fly-wheels have been attached to a horizontal shaft or axle, and have thus been made to revolve in a vertical plane, since the horizontal shaft is best adapted to the transmission of power. If, however, in this case we should use a heavy rotating mass, corresponding to the power employed and revolving rapidly in a vertical plane, the power to manage the vehicle or boat would become very much lessened, as the flywheel continues to revolve in its plane. I therefore so design the apparatus that its crank shaft x has a vertical position and its fly-wheel y revolves in a horizontal plane.... By this means the vehicle is not only easily controlled, but also the greatest safety is attained against capsizing. To the Duryea plan, Benz may also have contributed the idea for positioning the countershaft, though its location is sufficiently obvious that Charles may have had no need for copying Benz. Charles wisely differed from Benz in placing the flywheel forward, thus eliminating the need for the long driving belt of the Benz carriage. Yet he did reject the bevel gears used by Benz, which might well have been retained, as Frank was later to prove by designing a workable transmission that incorporated such bevel gears. The initial plan, as conceived by Charles, also included the details of the axles, steering gear, countershaft with its friction-drum, the 2-piece angle-iron frame upon which the countershaft bearings were mounted, and the free piston engine with its ignition tube, since hot-tube ignition was to be employed. No provision was made, however, for a burner to heat the tube; nor had a carburetor been designed, though it had been decided not to use a surface tank carburetor. The plans called for no muffler or starting arrangement.[9] Many engines of the period were started simply by turning the flywheel with the hands, and Charles felt this method was sufficient for his carriage. [Illustration: FIGURE 7.--DRAWING SHOWING PRINCIPLE of the Atkinson engine; this feature is what the Duryeas were trying to achieve with their free-piston engine, by substituting the free piston for the unusual linkage of the Atkinson. (Smithsonian photo H3263-A.)] [Illustration: FIGURE 8.--DRAWING OF 1885 BENZ engine, showing similarity in general appearance to Duryea engine. From Karl Benz und sein Lebenswerk, Stuttgart, 1953. (Daimler-Benz Company publication.)] The Ames plant customarily had a summer shutdown during August; thus, during August of 1891 Charles and Frank had access to a nearly empty plant in which they could carry on experiments and make up working drawings of the proposed vehicle. It cannot now be conclusively stated whether any parts were made for the car during August or the remainder of the year. It is more likely that the brothers attempted to complete a set of drawings. Frank Harrington, chief draftsman at Ames, may have helped out at this time; from Charles' statement of April 14, 1937, it is learned that he did prepare drawings during 1892. [Illustration: C. BENZ. SELF PROPELLING VEHICLE. No. 385,087. Patented June 26, 1888. FIGURE 9.--ILLUSTRATION FROM U.S. patent 385087, issued to Carl Benz, showing the horizontal plane of the flywheel, a feature utilized by the Duryeas in their machine.] The first contemporary record of any work on vehicles is a bill, dated January 21, 1892, for a drawing made by George W. Howard & Company. This drawing was made in the fall of 1891 by Charles A. Bartlett, a member of the Howard firm and a neighbor of Charles Duryea, according to a statement by Charles in the _Automobile Trade Journal_ of Jan. 10, 1925. He was then also of the opinion that this drawing may not have had anything to do with the carriage they were about to assemble, but a notation found by Charles at a later date has led him to believe that it possibly concerned a business type vehicle he had discussed with an unidentified Mr. Snow. By early 1892 Charles needed capital to finance his venture, an old carriage to attach his inventions to, a place to work, and a mechanic to do the work. On March 26, he stopped by the Smith Carriage Company and looked over a selection of used buggies and phaetons. He finally decided on a rather well-used ladies' phaeton which he purchased for $70. The leather dash was in so deplorable a state it would have to be recovered before the carriage went onto the road, and the leather fenders it once possessed had previously been removed; yet the upholstery appeared to be in satisfactory condition, and the candle lamps were intact. [Illustration: FIGURE 10.--PHANTOM ILLUSTRATION of Benz' first automobile. (From _Carl Benz, Father of the Automobile Industry_, by L. M. Fanning, New York, 1955.)] Two days later, Charles was able to interest Erwin F. Markham, of Springfield, sufficiently to obtain his financial aid in the project. A contract was drawn up between the two men, which stated that Mr. Markham was to put up $1000 for which he received a five-tenths share of the venture. When the $1000 had been used, he then had the option to continue his aid until the project had been carried to a successful climax, and retain his half share, or to refuse further funds and relinquish four of his five-tenths interest in the business.[10] Had he eventually chosen the latter, Charles would obviously have had to seek assistance elsewhere. [Illustration: FIGURE 11.--THE HOWARD & CO. BILL showing the first work performed toward a motor vehicle. While this may not refer specifically to the machine now in the museum, it is evidence of early work.] [Illustration: FIGURE 12.--THE SHOP OF JOHN RUSSELL & SONS. It was on the second floor of this building that Charles and Frank Duryea built their first motor vehicle. (Courtesy of the _Springfield Union_.)] That same day, March 28, Charles found working space and machinery available at John W. Russell & Sons Company in Springfield.[11] The Russells had recently completed a large government order of shells for the famous dynamite guns later used on board the cruiser _Vesuvius_ in the Spanish-American War, and this left an entire second floor, approximately 35 � 85 feet, virtually unoccupied, according to an affidavit of William J. Russell of April 30, 1926. Now ready to begin the actual work, Charles hired his brother Frank to start construction. Frank started about the first of April, receiving a raise of about 10 percent over the salary he had received at Ames. Before the vehicle was completed a number of other men performed work on some of the parts, among them William Deats who had been hired by Charles primarily to work on bicycles in the same area, but who occasionally assisted on the carriage. Russell Company records show time charged against Charles Duryea by six other Russell employees: W. J. Russell, P. Colgan, C. E. Merrick, T. Shea, L. J. Parmelee, and A. A. Poissant. [Illustration: FIGURE 13.--J. FRANK DURYEA looking over the Russell shop lathe on which he turned parts for the first Duryea vehicle. Photo taken about 1944. (Courtesy of the _Springfield Union_.)] It is Frank Duryea's remembrance that he started work on Monday, April 4. He first removed the body, with its springs, and placed it on a pair of wooden horses where it remained until the summer of the following year. The next step was to remove the rear axle and take it to a blacksmith shop where the old axle spindles were cut off and welded to a new drop-center axle. Following this the front axle spindles were removed, the ends of the axle slotted, and a webbed, C-shaped piece carrying the kingpin bearings was fitted into each slot, braced from underneath by short brackets which were riveted and brazed in place. The old spindles then were welded to the center of offset kingpins which in turn were mounted in their bearings in a manner similar to that in which the frame of the Columbia high-wheeled bicycle was mounted in its fork. Arms welded to the lower end of the kingpins were connected by the tie rods to an arm on the lower end of the vertical steering column, located on the center of the axle. [Illustration: FIGURE 14.--A PORTION of the Russell shop records showing charges made against Charles Duryea during 1893-1894.] While work on the running gear advanced, some progress was made in the construction of the engine. Patterns for the castings were fabricated, most of them by Charles Marshall on Taylor Street,[12] and castings were poured. The body or main casting of the engine resembled a length of cast-iron pipe: it had no bosses or lugs cast on, nor any water jacket, for they thought the engine would be kept cool merely by being placed in the open air. The front end of the engine was secured to the vehicle by four bolts which passed through the halves of the bearings and onto four projections on the open end of the engine. As the crankshaft of this engine was retained in constructing the present engine, it is logical to assume that the bearings were the same also. The head was cast as a thick disc, with both intake and exhaust valves located therein, and was bolted onto the flanged head end of the engine. Inside the cylinder was the strange arrangement previously suggested by C. E. Hawley. To the connecting rod was attached a rather ordinary ringed piston, over which was fitted a free, ringless piston, machined to fit closely the cylinder bore. This floating piston could move freely a distance equal to the compression space. The intention was that on the intake stroke, suction would open the intake valve, which had no positive opening arrangement, and draw in the mixture which then was compressed as in a regular Otto engine. Fired by the hot-tube ignition system, the force of the explosion would drive both pistons down, forcing the outer one tight against the head of the smaller one, and at the end of the stroke the longer wall of the outer piston would strike an arm projecting into the cylinder near the open end, moving forward the exhaust valve rod to which the arm was attached, thus pushing open the valve in the head.[13] On the exhaust stroke the unrestrained outer piston moved all the way to the head, expelling all of the products of combustion and pushing the exhaust valve shut again. With a bore of four inches or less, this engine, Charles believed, should develop about three horsepower and run at a speed between 350 to 400 revolutions per minute.[14] As no ignition system had yet been provided, they prepared a 4-1/2-inch length of one-quarter inch iron pipe, closed at one end, and screwed the open end into the head. Heating this tube with an alcohol burner would cause ignition of the mixture when a portion of it was forced into the heated tube toward the end of the compression stroke. No attempt was made at this time to use the electrical make-and-break circuit used in their second engine, as the free piston would have wrecked the igniter parts on the exhaust stroke, and the push rod located on the end of the piston would have prevented the piston from closing the exhaust valve. After keying the flywheel to the lower end of the crankshaft, Charles and Frank decided to make an attempt to run the engine. Carrying it into a back room, probably during July or August, 1892, they blocked it up on horses. A carburetor had not yet been constructed, so they attempted to start the engine by spinning the flywheel by hand, at the same time spraying gasoline through the intake valve with a perfume atomizer previously purchased at a drugstore in the Massasoit House. Repeated efforts of the two men to start the engine resulted in failure. [Illustration: FIGURE 15.--CONJECTURAL drawing of the free-piston engine used in the Museum vehicle prior to the present engine. (Drawing by A. A. Balunek.)] In the belief that the defects, whatever they might be, could be remedied after the engine was installed, the Duryeas went ahead and mounted the engine in the carriage. To do this they shortened the original reach of the carriage, allowing the engine itself to become the rear continuation of the reach. The four ears on the front, or open end of the engine, were bolted to the centrally located frame, with the bearing blocks in between. This frame, the same one now in the vehicle, was constructed of two pieces of angle iron, riveted and brazed together. Greater rigidity was obtained by a number of half-inch iron rods running from the frame to both front and rear axles. Because of the absence of any mounting brackets on the engine casting itself, a wooden block with a trough on top to receive the body of the engine was fitted between the engine and the axle, while two U-shaped rods secured it with clip bars and nuts underneath. Beneath the flywheel was mounted the friction transmission of Charles' design. This consisted of a large drum, perhaps 12 inches in diameter, equal in length to the diameter of the flywheel and keyed to a shaft directly under the center of the crankshaft and parallel to the axles. (Diameter of drum estimated by examination of existing features.) In view of the four projections of the frame extending downward and just in front of the jackshaft position, it is likely that these supported the four jackshaft bearings. Being a bicycle manufacturer, Charles saw the need for a differential or balance gear. Accordingly, he purchased from the Pope Manufacturing Company a very light unit of the type formerly used on Columbia tricycles, and installed it somewhere on the jackshaft. A small sprocket on each end of the shaft carried a chain from the larger sprockets clamped to the spokes of each rear wheel. The lower surface of the flywheel had been machined so as to form a friction disc, with a one-quarter inch depression 3 inches in diameter turned in the center. The drum was positioned so that its upper surface was one-quarter inch below the face of the flywheel. Hanging loosely around the drum was an endless belt, one and one-half inches wide, first made of rather soft rubber packing material. The belt lay on the drum surface between the fingers of a shipper fork. While it lay under the 3-inch depression in the center of the flywheel, the belt and the drum were at rest, but when it was moved away from that depression the belt wedged itself tightly between the drum and flywheel, the resulting friction causing the drum to turn and setting the vehicle into motion. The farther the belt was moved toward the outer edge of the wheel, the faster the drum and the vehicle moved. In September 1892, Charles, who had contracted with a Peoria, Illinois, firm to have bicycle parts manufactured, decided to move to that city. Departing on the 22d of September, he did not return to Springfield for over two years, and thus was not able to participate in the completion and testing of the carriage. At the time of his departure several units on the carriage were incomplete. A carburetor had not been built, nor had a satisfactory burner or belt-shifting device. Charles had experimented with various shifting levers just before leaving Springfield: however, as he reported later, he did not succeed in designing a workable mechanism.[15] Frank Duryea, now left to finish the work unassisted, continued the experiments with the belt shifter. He finally worked out a fork mounted on a carriage that was supported by two rods, each of which slid in two bearings. Although the short distance between the two bearings caused the shifter carriage to bind occasionally, the device was thought to be sufficient and was installed just in front of the frame. Connected to a system of cables, arms, and rods, possibly similar to the present cam-bar shifter, the shipper-fork carriage was moved from side to side by raising or lowering the tiller. [Illustration: FIGURE 16.--DRAWING of the carburetor used on both Duryea engines, 1893-1894, showing sight feed on left and choke mechanism on right. (Smithsonian photo 13455.)] Turning now to an efficient burner for heating the ignition tube, Frank started with an ordinary wick-type kerosene lamp with a small metal tank. Wishing to use gasoline in the lamp, he found it necessary to fabricate a number of burner units before he found a type that gave him a clean blue flame. He then found the flame to be very sensitive to drafts and easily extinguished, and devised a small shield or chimney to afford it some protection. Early in October, while still working with the burner, Frank developed a severe headache. He felt the fumes of the lamp had probably caused it, and went to his room in the home of a Mr. and Mrs. Patrick on Front Street in Chicopee. After he noticed no improvement, a doctor's examination showed he had typhoid fever, and on October 5 he was admitted to the Springfield Hospital. Here he remained for one month, being discharged on November 5. Returning to his room he was informed that because of the fear that he might be a typhoid carrier, the Patricks preferred him to find other lodgings. He readily accepted the invitation of Mr. and Mrs. D. H. Nesbitt of Chicopee to take a room with them. After several weeks recuperation in their home, he left Springfield to visit his mother in Wyoming, Illinois. After a restful visit at home Frank Duryea returned to Springfield and finished the work on his burner. Now only the lack of a carburetor prevented a trial of the vehicle. He recalls that he studied several gasoline-engine catalogs and in one of them, a Fairbanks catalog he believes,[16] he saw a design that seemed to suit his needs. He decided to simplify the construction and operation of his carburetor and had a small bronze casting made to form the body of it. Inside was a gasoline chamber with two tapped openings, one to receive a pipe from the 2-gallon gasoline tank mounted above the engine, the other taking a pipe to the overflow tank underneath the engine, thus maintaining the gasoline level without the use of a float valve. This latter tank had a hand pump on one end so that the overflow gasoline could at times be pumped again into the main tank. Gasoline passed from the carburetor chamber through a needle valve, adjusted by a knob on top, then through a tiny tube that entered the pipe leading to the intake valve. It is not certain whether this intake pipe was at first fitted with the choke arrangement later used with the second engine. Frank, hoping at last to be rewarded for his efforts by the sound of explosions from the engine, was ready to give the carriage an indoor trial. Standing astraddle of the reach and facing to the rear, he spun the flywheel with both hands, taking care not to get his hands caught between the wheel and the frame. His efforts were in vain, as there was complete failure to obtain ignition. He then made a new ignition tube, nearly twice as long as the original 4-1/2-inch tube, and turned down its wall as thin as he thought safety allowed. The thinner wall did not conduct the heat off so rapidly and thus kept the tube hot enough to permit ignition. After this slight change, he was able to get a few occasional explosions but he does not now believe that the engine ever operated continuously. Each explosion was accompanied by a loud knock, due, undoubtedly, to the movement of the free piston. Had the engine operated continuously, it is likely that the action of the free piston would have shortly wrecked the engine. Further efforts appeared unwarranted until alterations could be made. [Illustration: ALL AGREEMENTS CONTINGENT UPON STRIKES, ACCIDENTS AND OTHER CAUSES BEYOND OUR CONTROL CABL ADDRESS "MOTODURYEA," PHILADELPHIA WESTINGHOUSE AND W. U. CODES DURYEA LABORATORIES CHAS. E. DURYEA, CONSULTING ENG'R WE SOLV MECHANICAL AND OTHER PROBLEMS TESTS, SEARCHES, OPINIONS, EXPERT IN PATENT SUITS. DEVELOP INVENTIONS, ASSIST INVENTORS 35 YRS EXPERIENS. HEATING, GAS ENGIN, AUTO, ETC. FOR THINGS TO MAKE OR SEL CONSULT US A PRIDEWORTHY RECORD OF THINGS ACCOMPLISHT PHILADELPHIA, PA. 3528 N. 18TH ST. Dear Mr Mitman 24 Nov 1920 On the train I had some time to puzzle over that car. Been working nights to make up time lost in the day so did not hav much. I made a sketch for you but did not show the spring that holds the circuit breaker in contact with the spark point. That thin finger was part of it. A spring was wound spirally--not helically--around the projecting end of the breaker pivot and the end of the spring hookt over the thin finger. See sketch herwith. Just how the central end of the spring wire was fastened to the square of the pivot I do not kno. We did in some cases bore a hole thru and simply stick the spring thru but this put most of the action right at the bend in the wire and it broke quickly. So in other cases we fitted a light grooved spool or pulley and wound the spring around this and so avoided a sharp bend. If this was used it has been lost with the spring. A couple generations of boys playing in that barn was too many. The Haynes steering sketch also worries me. If that vertical post came up thru that slot in the floor the crank had to be long as the sketch shows in order to get over to the driver conveniently. Then if he tried to make a complete circle with it he could not reach far enuf forward to do it easily. And he had to make a turn or two be cause H shows bevel gears of about same size so the post had to make same number of turns the worm made. Sketch herewith to illustrate my thought. Yrs for the historical facts Chas. E. Duryea FIGURE 17.--LETTER EXPLAINING the circuit breaker spring and the brass projection on top of the ignition chamber. Mr. Mitman was, at the time, curator of engineering in the U.S. National Museum.] The two pistons were first pinned together into a single unit which was probably ringless, since it is believed the walls of the outer piston were too thin to admit rings. Because the piston no longer struck the exhaust valve, a short rod had to be screwed into the pistonhead; this pushed the valve shut at the completion of the exhaust stroke. The remaining problem, the opening of the exhaust valve, was solved by screwing a device to the side of the cylinder which operated from the sidewise motion of the connecting rod. This device shifted a small spacer between the piston and the striker arm of the exhaust-valve rod, permitting the piston to push open the exhaust valve. On alternating strokes the spacer shifted back out of the cylinder; therefore, no contact was made between piston and striker arm. Sometime in February 1893, the altered engine was successfully started. At last the transmission could be tested. Will Russell had come upstairs to watch the trial, and according to a statement by him, given April 30, 1926, Frank, standing to the right of the engine and behind the rear axle, reached forward and with the combination tiller-belt-shifter, moved the belt into driving position. The carriage started forward, but as it approached the wall of the building Frank discovered that he could not get the belt back into the neutral position. In desperation, he grasped the rear axle with both hands and was dragged a short distance, attempting to stop the machine, before it struck the wall. He had, however, sufficiently retarded it so that no damage was done. This short trial demonstrated some of the weaknesses in the friction transmission. Since the speed of the surface of the flywheel, in feet per second, increased in proportion to the distance of the point of contact from the center, the outer edge of the belt attempted to run faster than the inner edge. This conflict of forces not only put an undue load on the motor causing a great loss of power, but it also created a tendency for the belt to work towards the outer edge of the flywheel. Conversely, when the operator desired to return the belt to neutral, it strongly resisted any efforts to slide it toward the center of the wheel, as Frank had learned from the wall-bumping incident. Furthermore, the rubber belt on the friction drum had worn so badly that it had to be replaced at least once during the brief experiments. [Illustration: FIGURE 18.--IGNITION CHAMBER, switch, and breaker contacts of the present Duryea engine.] At this point, Frank and Markham felt that the carriage was anything but satisfactory. While they were trying to decide what steps should be taken next, Frank added one last improvement to the engine. Fearing that the uncooled cylinder might suffer damage from the excessive heat, he constructed a copper water jacket in two halves, drew them together around the cylinder with clamping rings and soldered the seams. Asbestos packing sealed the end joints where the jacket contacted the cylinder. Thinking back, Frank does not recall that he ever used a water tank with this engine, though he does remember adding water through the upper jacket opening. The engine was run only for a few brief periods following this addition. Obviously this collection of patchwork could not fulfill their needs for an engine. First, it would be next to impossible to start if the body was placed on the running gear, as the flywheel then would be practically inaccessible. The absence of rings on the piston caused a further loss of power to the already overloaded engine. The flywheel was too light. The absence of any form of governor left the operator with no control over the engine speed. Ignition was poor, partly owing to the hot-tube arrangement, and partly to the excessive distance between the engine and the carburetor. Frank wrote his brother Charles on February 6[17] that in his opinion the mixing chamber was so far from the engine that the gasoline could not be drawn into the cylinder as liquid, and it was too cold to vaporize and go in as gas. Thus he had difficulty in getting the engine started. When it did start the explosions were unmuffled. Less important to him than these defects, however, was the awkward and unsightly wooden engine mount. Description of the Automobile Sometime in the early part of March, Frank convinced Markham that he could construct a new and practical engine, using only previously tried mechanical principles.[18] Drawing up new plans for this engine, he took them to Charles Marshall who began work on the patterns for the new engine castings. After the patterns had been delivered to the foundry, Frank left Springfield for a short vacation in Groton, Connecticut, where he visited with his fiancée. On May 17, 1893, several weeks after his return to Springfield, they were married. The engine castings were undoubtedly received from the foundry prior to Frank Duryea's marriage, and the work of machining and assembling the parts went on through the spring and summer. This engine, still on the carriage in the Museum of History and Technology, is cased with a water jacket, and has bases on top to support the front and rear bearings of the starting crankshaft, and a base with port on the upper right side where the exhaust-valve housing was to be bolted. On the underside are two flanges, forming a base for seating the engine on the axle. A separate combustion chamber is cast and bolted to the head. Inside this chamber are located the igniter parts of Frank's electric ignition system. The fixed part, an insulated electrode, is screwed into the right side of the chamber and is connected with the ignition switch outside, to which one of the ignition wires is attached. A breaker arm inside is pinned to a small shaft extending through the top of the chamber. Around the breaker-arm shaft is a small coil spring (originally a spiral spring, according to the letter of Charles Duryea shown in fig. 17), anchored below to a thin brass finger extending toward the right side of the car, and above to a nut screwed tightly onto the shaft. This nut is also the terminal for the other ignition wire. The action of the spring keeps the breaker arm and the electrode in constant contact until the push rod on the end of the piston strikes the arm and separates the two parts. Breaking contact then produces the ignition spark. Since the mechanism would spark at the end of both the exhaust and compression strokes, the battery current is conserved by a contact strip, on the underside of the larger exhaust-valve gear, by means of which the flow of current is cut off during the greater part of the cycle. On the left side of the combustion chamber is bolted the housing containing the tiny intake valve. A comparatively weak spring seats this valve in order that the suction created by the piston can easily pull it open. Clamped onto the valve housing is the intake pipe, enclosing the choke and carrying the carburetor on its forward side. The choke consists of two discs which block the pipe, each with four holes at the edges and one in the center. Turning one disc by means of a small handle outside, so that the four outer holes cannot coincide with those in the other disc, decreases the flow of air and causes all air to rush through the center hole, where the tiny carburetor tube passes through. The present carburetor was transferred over from the first engine. When Frank later installed the engine on the carriage he noticed the close proximity of the intake pipe to the open end of the muffler. Believing that the fumes might choke the engine, he attached a long sheet-metal tube to the intake pipe so that fresh air would be drawn in from a point farther forward on the vehicle. Moving to the right side of the engine brings the exhaust-valve assembly into view. This valve is contained in a casting bolted over the exhaust port in the side of the cylinder, and from the casting a pipe leads to the muffler underneath. The valve is pushed open by a rod connected to a crank which is pinned to the lower end of a shaft carrying an iron gear on top. This gear is in mesh with a fiber gear, keyed to the upper end of the crankshaft, with half the number of teeth. This ratio permits the opening of the exhaust valve on every other revolution. The crankshaft of the first engine was retained for the new engine, thus giving the two engines the same stroke of 5-3/8 inches, but the bore was increased slightly to 4-3/8 inches. With this larger bore and with the engine speed increased to 500 rpm, Frank rated this engine at 4 hp.[19] A heavier flywheel, with a governor resting in the upper recess, was pressed onto the crankshaft. As the operator of the vehicle had no control over the carburetor once he climbed into the seat, this governor was necessary to maintain regular engine speed. Its function was to move a slide on the exhaust-valve unit to prevent the valve from closing. Thus the engine, with the suction broken, could not draw a charge on the next revolution. During the recent restoration of this carriage it was found that while most parts are still intact, nearly all of the governor parts are missing. A description of them must therefore be based on the recollections of Frank Duryea, along with certain evidences seen on the engine. [Illustration: FIGURE 19.--UNDER SIDE of exhaust valve mechanism showing electrical contacts that give spark only on every other revolution.] Just on top of the flywheel, and surrounding the crankshaft, rest two rings, 3-7/8 inches in diameter. Into the opposing surfaces of these rings are cut a series of small inclined planes, appertinent to each other. On the outer circumference of the upper ring two pins pass through a pair of lugs mounted in the flywheel, causing the ring to rotate with the flywheel, yet permitting vertical movement. Underneath, the other ring is allowed to turn slightly when, by means of two connecting links, the arms of the governor push against them. These two arms, each constructed like a right angle and pivoted at the apex, are arranged directly opposite each other far out in the flywheel recess. As a weight on one angle of the arm presses outward by centrifugal force against a spring, the other angle presses inward against the connecting link mentioned above. The turning of the lower set of inclined planes against the fixed set above raises the upper ring and the fork resting on it. The upward movement of this fork, which is a continuation of an arm pivoted to a bracket midway between the crankshaft and the slide carrying the exhaust valve stop, causes the other end of the arm to drop, pulling the slide down with it. In this manner the closing of the exhaust valve is blocked, preventing the intake of the next charge, and therefore the engine misses one or more explosions until it slows to its normal speed. A starting shaft is mounted above the engine casting by a cast-iron bracket on either end. The front end of the shaft has a bevel gear which is held by a coil spring behind the front bracket, just out of contact with a bevel gear pressed onto the upper end of the crankshaft. The short rear portion of the shaft is a tube which slides over the main shaft. Fitting the removable handcrank to the squared end of the hollow shaft and turning the crank clockwise, will advance the forward section of shaft through the medium of a pair of inclined collars. With the bevel gears now engaged the engine may be cranked. When ignition begins, the inclined collars slide back down each other's surfaces, the shaft is again shortened, and its bevel gear springs free of the one on the crankshaft. [Illustration: FIGURE 20.--PISTON AND CONNECTING ROD of second engine. Screw on rod is where oil is poured into connecting rod to lubricate wrist pin and crankshaft.] While Frank worked on his engine, he realized that certain parts of the old running gear would need to be altered or replaced. In view of the heavier and more powerful engine, he felt the old wheels, probably having compressed band hubs, were inadequate. He procured a set of new, heavier wheels[20] with Warner-type, cast-iron reinforced hubs. The angle iron frame, apparently sturdy enough to carry the added weight, was retained, but it was decided to install a heavier rear axle.[21] The front axle assembly was at first allowed to remain unchanged, as was the steering apparatus. A short time later when the engine and friction transmission were bolted in place on the running gear, Frank saw that the rigidity of the framework had an undesirable effect. When the vehicle passed over any unevenness in the shop floor, the framework was distorted and caused the jackshaft bearings to bind tightly enough on the shaft to prevent its being turned by hand. In order to provide the 3-point suspension necessary to eliminate this distortion, Frank attached the forward parts of the framework to an extra wooden spring bar, installing between this bar and the front axle a vertical fifth wheel of the type ordinarily used in a horizontal position in any light carriage. Frank next calculated that with the faster running engine the speed of the vehicle would be about 15 miles an hour, too much for the heavily loaded wheels. As he intended to make use of the original transmission, he decided to decrease the speed by increasing the size of the friction drum. He accomplished this by sliding a heavy fiber tube over the original drum, bringing its diameter to approximately 14 inches. The original shipper fork carriage was improved by separating the original bearings to a greater distance, and eliminating one of the two bearings on one end. This permitted a smooth and free operation of the small sliding carriage. In August 1893, possibly as a result of indoor experiments, Frank discovered that the chains running from the small 5-tooth[22] jackshaft sprockets to the large, bronze, wheel sprockets were tight at some times and loose at others. This caused considerable unnecessary noise. The difficulty apparently was the result of the sprockets being cast and not machined. The patternmaker had said he believed he could make the pattern accurately enough so that no machining of the castings would be necessary. Nice castings were produced, but "these sprockets were the reason why an unusual construction was put on the crankshaft [meaning jackshaft]," explained Frank Duryea during an interview at the National Museum on November 9, 1956. Elaborating further, in reply to the queries of E. A. Battison, of the Museum's division of engineering, Duryea told of the problem and the solution when he explained that the sprockets had places where the shrinkage was not even. The hot metal, contracting as it cooled, did not seem to contract uniformly, creating slightly unequal distances between teeth. This resulted in the chain hanging quite loose in some places and in others the tightness prevented adjustment. He contacted Will Russell, foreman of the Russell shop, where the automobile was made, and Russell showed him a device, built by George Warwick, who had made the Warwick bicycle. It was an internal-cut gear, according to Duryea's description, with sprocket teeth on its periphery. With sprockets outside and normal teeth inside, the wheels were about 6 inches in diameter, externally. These little internal-gear sprockets were hung on double-shrouded pinions secured to each end of the jackshaft. A solid disc or housing fitted against both ends of the pinion to prevent the internal gear from working off sideways. Duryea explained the function of these unique little parts: "as soon as tension came on that ring gear that we talked about, it not only tightened the chain hanging on this sprocket on the upper side, but it tightened it on both sides. [The sprocket] rocks right out: both sides of the chain are tight." This feature is one rarely encountered elsewhere, and Duryea, later in the interview said, "To tell you the truth, I think I was just a little bit ashamed about the thing, because I had to pull it off. I didn't like the looks of it after I got it on." Two small tanks, each with a capacity of approximately two gallons, were mounted over the engine in the positions they still occupy, the one on the left for gasoline,[23] the other for water. The small fitting under the gasoline tank has a thumbscrew shutoff and a glass-sight feed tube, leading to the carburetor. The water tank, an inch longer than the gasoline tank, communicates with the water jacket of the engine through two pieces of half-inch pipe, entering the jacket from above and below. The overflow tank, holding just over a gallon, is suspended between the rear axle and the flywheel. A number of mufflers were constructed for the engine.[24] The first experimental one was built of wood, being a box 6 � 6 � 15 inches with a hole for the exhaust pipe in one end and a series of small holes in the opposite end. Inside, Frank arranged metal plates which were somewhat shorter than the depth of the box. Every other one was attached to the bottom of the box; the intermediate plates were fastened to the top. This contrivance muffled the sound considerably, but, as might be expected, soon began to smoke. There can be little doubt that it was replaced before any of the outdoor trials began. Another type consisted of a cylindrical metal shell, perhaps six inches in diameter and ten or twelve inches long. Here a series of perforated baffle plates were inserted, with alternating solid plates having parts of their external edges cut away. Two bolts running the length of the muffler held on the cast-iron heads in a manner quite similar to the Model-T Ford mufflers of later years. Though partially satisfactory, Frank, in a November 6, 1957, interview, complained that it made a metallic sound. Perhaps this was the muffler he used from September to November 1893. [Illustration: FIGURE 21.--ILLUSTRATION OF THE NO. 2 SAMSON BATTERY used by the Duryeas in their vehicle. (Smithsonian photo 46858.)] On August 28 Frank wrote to Charles saying the carriage was almost ready for the road and that he hoped to take it out for a test on the coming Saturday, "off somewhere so no one will see us...."[25] There is no evidence showing whether the amount of remaining work permitted the proposed trial on September 2. The body was finally replaced on the running gear, at which time it was found necessary to raise the seat cushion several inches by the insertion of a framework made of old crating boards. This allowed sufficient room between the seat and the frame to suspend the batteries and coil. Six no. 2 Samson batteries were contained in this space, three on each side, in rows parallel to the side of the vehicle. The Samson battery consisted of a glass jar containing a solution of ammonia salts and water, with a carbon rod in the center, housing a zinc rod. It is difficult to understand why they used Samson batteries rather than dry cells; perhaps they were concerned with the mounting cost of the machine and were making use of parts already on hand.[26] A coil, possibly from an old gaslight igniter system, accompanied the Samson batteries under the seat. This original coil is now missing. The iron dash frame, previously recovered and provided with a rain apron to be pulled up over the knees in the event a heavy rain blew in under the carriage top, was bolted back in place. Frank and Mr. Markham gave the carriage a quick painting; later Frank admitted, "the machine never had a good job of painting."[27] Before the motor wagon actually got onto the road, a reporter on the _Springfield Evening Union_ got some statistics on it and an item appeared on September 16, giving the first public notice of the machine. [Illustration: NO USE FOR HORSES. Springfield Mechanics Devise a New Mode of Travel. Ingenious Wagon Now Being Made in This City for Which the Makers Claim Great Things. A new motor carriage, which, if the preliminary tests prove successful as is expected, will revolutionize the mode of travel on highways, and do away with the horse as a means of transportation, is being made in this city. It is quite probable that within a short time one may be able to see an ordinary carriage in almost every respect, running along the streets or climbing country hills without visible means of propulsion. The carriage is being built by J. F. Duryea, the designer and B. F. Markham, who have been at work on it for over a year. The vehicle was designed by C. E. Duryea, a bicycle manufacturer of Peoria, Ill., and he communicated his scheme to his brother, who is a practical machanic in this city. The propelling power is furnished by a two-horse power gasoline motor situated near the rear axle and which, when started, runs continuously to the end of the trip, notwithstanding the number of times the carriage may be stopped. The speed of the motor is uniform, being about 500 revolutions a minute, and is so arranged that it gives a multiplied power for climbing hills and the lower the rate of speed the greater power is furnished by the motor. The slowest that the carriage can be driven is three miles an hour and the speed can be increased to fourteen or fifteen miles an hour. The power is transferred from the driving wheel of the motor, which runs horizontally with the main shaft by an endless friction belt running on a drum wheel. The belt is controlled by a lever within easy reach of the driver and is shifted along the drum wheel to increase or decrease the speed. The driving wheel is about twenty inches in diameter, having in its center a depression to which the belt is shifted to stop the carriage. The carriage can be reversed by shifting the belt from the end of the drum, which gives the forward motion to the opposite side beyond the depression in the driving wheel. The power which has been transferred to the driving shaft from the motor is in turn transferred to the two rear wheels of the carriage by a combination gear and sprockets. An endless chain connects the sprockets on the carriage wheels to the sprocket wheels on the driving shaft. All of the motive power is located under the body of an ordinary phaeton, the hight of which is not increased by the machinery. The motor is started by a crank which is easily applied to a shaft in the rear of the carriage and the gasoline is ignited in the cylinder by electricity. An automatic device stops the flow of gasoline into the cylinder when the motor ceases running. The gasoline is carried in tanks, which hold about two gallons, and which will run the carriage for about eight hours. The wagon is guided by a bicycle bar, and the speed is also controlled by this bar. The method employed in this is as follows: To start the carriage press the lever down; to reverse it throw the lever up and to guide the wagon turn the lever either to the right or left. The front axle instead of turning horizontally plays up and down, in order that the machinery may be on a level with the rear wheels, while the front wheels are set on the axle by a pivotal joint and are connected with the guiding lever by bars with ball bearings. The carriage complete weighs about 220 pounds, and the essential features are already covered by patents while others are pending. It is estimated that the carriages can be sold for about $400, and a stock company will probably be formed to manufacture them. FIGURE 22.--FROM THE _Springfield Evening Union_, September 16, 1893.] Toward the latter part of the following week, Frank was ready to give the product of his labors its first road trial. On September 21 the completed carriage was rolled onto the elevator at Russell's shop. Seeing that the running gear was too long for the elevator, they raised the front of the machine, resting the entire weight of 750 pounds on the rear wheels. Once outside the building, they pushed it into an area between the Russell and Stacy buildings. After dark, "so no one will see," Will Bemis, Mr. Markham's son-in-law, brought a horse and they pulled the phaeton out to his barn on Spruce Street.[28] There, on Spruce and Florence Streets the first tests were made. The next day Frank wrote his brother saying, "Have tried it (the carriage) finally and thoroughly and quit trying until some changes are made. Belt transmission very bad.[29] Engine all right." He did admit the engine seemed to be well loaded most of the time. He also had an idea in mind to replace the poor transmission, explaining the plan to Charles: "The three gears[30] on secondary shaft have friction clutches, the two bevel gears on same shaft are controlled by a clutch which frees one and clutches the other at will. This provides a reverse." [Illustration: PRIMARY SPARK COILS. FOR ELECTRIC GAS LIGHTING. Cat. No. 48304. 8 inch Price, each, $3 20 " 50304. 10 " " 3 70 " 52304. 12 " " 4 30 " 54304. Detached Gas Lighting Relays " 2 75 For Spark Coils with Relay Attachment, add $2.50 to price for Spark Coil. FIGURE 23.--TYPE OF SPARK COIL the Duryeas are believed to have used in their electrical circuit, as shown in a catalog illustration. (Smithsonian photo 46858-A.)] The _Springfield Evening Union_ of September 22 carried a notice of the trial. This report, too, commented on the faulty transmission and the plan already in Frank's mind for the new transmission. ... The friction belt allowed of the speed being steadily increased or diminished at the will of the driver and caused no sudden forward motion of the carriage, but while this arrangement has many advantages it uses up the power so that the two-horse power furnished by the motor [somewhat less than the rating Frank gave the engine] was reduced to less than three-fourths horse power on reaching the main shaft. This would not be sufficient to propel the carriage up steep grades but would be sufficient to run the carriage on level road. The inventors will do away with this belt in favor of a clamp gear and will make the drum wheel smaller. By this means there will be very little power lost in transmission to the shaft and by a patented arrangement the carriage may be started gradually but the speed must be increased by shifting the clamp gear to a succession of gears on the driving wheel of the motor. The speed of the carriage will be fixed permanently according to the size of the gear that the smaller one is shifted to. The test of the machine with the gear arrangement will be made soon. In October Frank decided on another vacation and went to Chicago to see the Columbian Exposition. Charles had come up from Peoria to see the fair and the two talked over the progress on their motor wagon, and discussed the transmission problem. They gave particular attention to everything relating to engines and motor carriages, and Frank recalls seeing a Daimler quadricycle that impressed him with its performance.[31] Just what decisions the two might have made there are unknown, yet it is likely that they agreed to give the old transmission one more chance to prove itself. Returning to Springfield, probably in the first week of November, Frank gave the friction drive its final test, this time substituting a leather belt for the rubber one first used.[32] Mr. Markham, though intensely interested in the experiments, apparently was dubious concerning the safety of the carriage. It had no brakes, and fearing failure of the transmission on a downgrade, he was reluctant to ride in the machine. On November 9 he asked Will Bemis to try it for him. The following day the _Springfield Morning Union_ gave a description of the run: Residents in the vicinity of Florence street flocked to the windows yesterday afternoon astonished to see gliding by in the roadway a common top carriage with no shafts and no horse attached. The vehicle is operated by gasoline and is the invention of Erwin Markham and J. F. Duryea. It has been previously described in The Union and the trial yesterday was simply to ascertain the practical value of a leather friction surface which has been substituted for the rubber one previously used. The vehicle, which was operated by Mr. Bemis, started from the corner of Hancock avenue and Spruce street and went up the avenue, up Hancock street and started down Florence street, working finely, but when about half-way down the latter street it stopped short, refusing to move. Investigation showed that the bearing had been worn smooth by the friction and a little water sprinkled upon it put it in running condition again. The rest of the trip was made down Florence and down Spruce street, to the residence of the inventors. They hope to have the vehicle in good working condition soon. [Illustration: FIGURE 24.--RUNNING GEAR OF DURYEA VEHICLE, showing the second engine and other parts as used in January 1894.] The same evening, the late edition ran a brief paragraph stating that "the test was made to determine the value of a leather friction surface for propelling the wagon, that had been substituted in place of the rubber surface, used in the former test." Bemis, according to Frank Duryea's recollection, was not impressed with the performance of the machine, saying "the thing is absolutely useless," and for a time it appeared that further support from Markham would not be forthcoming. Frank, believing eventual success to be near, drew up plans showing his geared transmission, and with these managed to gain Markham's partial support. Money for material and use of the shop was to continue, but Frank was to complete the work on his own time. Now receiving no salary, Frank worked hurriedly on the transmission throughout late November, December, and the first two weeks of January. First discarding the old friction drum and shaft, and the shipper-fork carriage, he bolted a rawhide bevel gear to the lower surface of the flywheel. This turns two bevel gears, in opposite directions, on a countershaft directly underneath, approximately in the position of the old jackshaft. The right bevel gear is secured to the main countershaft on which two clutches are mounted, one on each side of the crankshaft. On a sleeve turning freely around the countershaft is mounted the reverse bevel gear and clutch. Three free-running clutch drums, the right one carrying the high-speed gear, the two on the left carrying the combination low speed and reverse gear between them, complete the countershaft assembly. The clutch assemblies are of Frank Duryea's design, having internal arms, expanding outward to press leather-faced shoes against the inner surface of the drum, thus securing the drum and its gear to the shaft. Behind this machinery is the jackshaft with its small differential on the right, two laminated rawhide gears[33] meshing with the iron gears of the countershaft, and the internal-gear sprockets hanging on the small pinions at either end. A sliding cam bar, mounted nearly in the position of the former shipper-fork carriage, is operated by the vertical movement of the tiller handle to engage any one of the three clutches. With the tiller depressed, the vehicle is in reverse. Elevating it slightly puts it into low gear, and raising it still higher runs the machine at its highest speed. [Illustration: FIGURE 25.--HALF OF JACKSHAFT, showing rawhide gears, double shrouded pinion and half of the Columbia differential.] [Illustration: FIGURE 26.--HALF OF JACKSHAFT showing double-shrouded pinion and half of the Columbia differential. [Illustration: FIGURE 27.--CAM BAR IN FOREGROUND, operated by tiller, actuates the various clutches of the transmission. The overflow gasoline tank with the hand pump can be seen in the rear.] [Illustration: UNITED STATES PATENT OFFICE. CHARLES E. DURYEA, OF PEORIA, ILLINOIS. ROAD-VEHICLE. SPECIFICATION forming part of Letters Patent No. 540,648, dated June 11, 1895. Application filed April 30, 1894. Serial No. 509,466. (No model.) _To all whom it may concern_: Be it known that I, CHARLES E. DURYEA, a citizen of the United States, residing at Peoria, in the county of Peoria and State of Illinois, have invented new and useful Improvements 5 in Road-Vehicles, of which the following is a specification. The object of this invention is to produce a road vehicle which shall be self-propelled, not unduly heavy, simple and easy of control and 10 comparatively inexpensive, together with such minor objects as will become hereinafter apparent. The invention more particularly relates to the construction and arrangement of parts for 15 constituting the driving gearing and to the means for controlling the action thereof; to an improved manner of mounting the front, or steering, wheels upon the front axle, and of mounting the said axle relative to the running 20 gear frame, and to the means for effecting the steering; to the appliances for the support of the motor and driving mechanism in an advantageous and efficient manner, and, generally, to improved and simplified details 25 of construction throughout the vehicle, all as will hereinafter be rendered more apparent, and the invention consists in constructions and combinations of parts, all substantially as will hereinafter fully appear and be set 30 forth in the claims. Reference is to be had to the accompanying drawings, in which-- Figure 1 is a sectional elevation from front to rear of the improved road-vehicle. Fig. 2 is 35 a plan view of the running and driving gear, the vehicle-body being understood as removed. Fig. 3 is a front elevation of the vehicle. Fig. 4 is a perspective view of the support and suspension devices for the driving mechanism. 40 Fig. 5 is a vertical sectional view, longitudinally, through the shiftable driving-gear, the controlling devices employed in conjunction with this mechanism being seen in side elevation. Figs. 6 and 7 show the above-mentioned 45 controlling devices as in operative relations differing the one from the other and also from that of Fig. 5. Similar letters of reference indicate corresponding parts in all of the views. 50 The parts will now be described in detail with reference to said drawings, and A represents the body which is spring supported on the frame, B, of the running gear. This frame, as shown, is rectangular, and has the 55 body-supporting springs, B{2}, similar to those found in common carriages. This frame has, affixed thereto, at its rear ends, sleeves, _a_, _a_, which loosely embrace the rear wheel axle, D, which is the driven axle of the vehicle. The 60 axle, E, for the front wheels is centrally secured to the running gear frame, B, by the horizontal king-bolt, _b_, whereby such axle may have a swinging movement relative to the frame in a vertical plane, but it has no 65 swinging movement horizontally, the wheels being swivel-mounted on the ends of this axle peculiarly, as will shortly hereinafter be set forth. The body, as shown, is in the form of an 70 inverted box, the motor, H, and driving gear being accommodated within the downwardly opening inclosure constituted thereby, and the body also has the upwardly open box-like forward extension, or pit, A{2}, for the accommodation 75 of the feet of the rider, the rider's seat being constituted by the top forward portion of the box body. Some other suitable design of body may, of course, be used in lieu of this one shown. 80 The front wheels, _d_, _d_, are hung to the front axle, E, so that the center of each wheel base is in a line coincident with the axis of the pivotal connection which is provided between the journals for the wheels and the axle, which 85 arrangement practically destroys any tendency to deflection from the course that might otherwise arise from striking an obstacle, and so renders the steering easier. In order to effect this the axle is formed with yoked 90 ends, the yoke members, _f_, _f_, being above and below the longitudinal line of the axle. The short journal, _g_, shown for each wheel, has at its inner end an upwardly and downwardly extended arm, _h_, which is return-bent to be 95 loosely embraced by the axle yoke, _f_, _f_. The cone pointed screws, _c_, passed through the yoke members, _f_, and into sockets therefor in the arms, _h_, of the journals, _g_, constitute the means for the swivel connection between said 100 parts. The lock-nuts, _c_{2}, manifestly, are employed with utility in this connection. It will be perceived that inasmuch as in the arrangement shown, the pivotal connections (No Model.) 4 Sheets--Sheet 2. C. E. DURYEA. ROAD VEHICLE. No. 540,648. Patented June 11, 1895. _Fig. 2._ _Witnesses_: J. D. Garfield K. I. Clemons _Inventor_, Chas. E. Duryea by Chaprictlo Attys. FIGURE 28.--A DRAWING AND THE FIRST PAGE of the specifications of the first patent issued to C. E. Duryea. It can be readily seen that this drawing was not made after the plan of the first vehicle.] As the work moved nearer completion Frank realized that the final tests would have to be conducted on roads made icy by falling snows. He had considerable doubt whether the narrow iron tires would have enough traction to move the phaeton. Soon he devised an expedient for this situation, communicating to Charles on December 22 that he was "having Jack Swaine [a local blacksmith] make a couple of clutch rims so we can get over this snow and ice.... Our detachable rims referred to will be of 1/8 iron 1-3/4 wide and drawn together at one point by two screws, one on either side of felloe. It will be studded with calks in two rows."[34] [Illustration: FIGURE 29.--MR. AND MRS. FRANK DURYEA examining vehicle in the Smithsonian Institution before restoration.] January 18, 1894, was a day of triumph for Frank Duryea. Writing Charles about his success the next day he said, "Took out carriage again last night and gave it another test about 9 o'clock." The only difficulty he mentioned was a slight irregularity in the engine, caused by the tiny leather pad in the exhaust-valve mechanism falling out.[35] Speaking of this trip, Frank recalled in 1956: When I got this car ready to run one night, I took it out and I had a young fellow with me; I thought I might need him to help push in case the car didn't work.... We ran from the area of the shop where it was built down on Taylor Street. We started out and ran up Worthington Street hill,[36] on top of what you might call "the Bluff" in Springfield. Then we drove along over level roads from there to the home of Mr. Markham who lived with his son-in-law, Will Bemis, and there we refilled this tank with water. [At this point he was asked if it was pretty well emptied by then.] Yes, I said in my account of it that when we got up there the water was boiling furiously. Well, no doubt it was. We refilled it and then we turned it back and drove down along the Central Street hill and along Maple, crossed into State Street, dropped down to Dwight, went west along Dwight to the vicinity where we had a shed that we could put the car in for the night. During that trip we had run, I think, just about six miles, maybe a little bit more. That was the first trip with this vehicle. It was the first trip of anything more than a few hundred yards that the car had ever made. [Illustration: DURYEA AUTOMOBILE BUILT BY J. F. AND C. E. DURYEA 1893 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM CAT. #307,199 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION SEPT. 1960 A. A. BALUNEK] Now Frank could give demonstration rides with the motor carriage, hoping to encourage more investors to back future work. Cautious Mr. Markham finally got his ride, though Frank had to assure him that the engine of the brakeless vehicle would hold them back on any hill they would descend. The carriage on which he had spent so many hours was to see little use after that. Its total mileage is probably less than a hundred miles. Little additional work is known to have been performed on the carriage after January 1894; there is, however, a letter[37] Frank sent his brother on January 19 which tells of contemplated muffler improvements. Another message was dispatched to Charles on March 22, mentioning the good performance of the phaeton on Harrison Avenue hill.[38] This was possibly the last run of the machine, for no further references have been discovered. Frank spent the months of February and March in preparing drawings, some of which accompanied their first patent application,[39] while others were to be used in the construction of an improved, 2-cylinder carriage. Work on the new machine started in April. The old phaeton, in the absence of used-car lots, was put into storage in the Bemis barn.[40] Later, on the formation of the Duryea Motor Wagon Company in 1895, it was removed to the barn of D. A. Reed, treasurer of the company.[41] There it remained until 1920, when it was obtained by Inglis M. Uppercu and presented to the U.S. National Museum. * * * * * Footnotes [1] S. H. OLIVER, _Automobiles and Motorcycles in the U.S. National Museum_ (U.S. National Museum Bulletin 213, Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1957), p. 24. [2] G. R. DOYLE, _The World's Automobiles_ (London: Temple Press Limited, 1959), p. 67. [3] Recorded interview with Frank Duryea in the U.S. National Museum, November 9, 1956. [4] Charles Duryea's statement to _Springfield Daily Republican_, April 14, 1937. [5] FRANK DURYEA, _America's First Automobile_ (Springfield, Mass.: Donald Macaulay, 1942), p. 4. [6] Letter from Charles Duryea to Alfred Reeves, March 25, 1920; copy in Museum files. [7] History notes dictated by Charles E. Duryea in the office of David Beecroft, editor of _Automobile Trade Journal_, on January 10, 1925. Copy in Museum files. Hereinafter, these notes are referred to as "history." [8] Frank Duryea in statement made to the Senate Committee on Public Administration of Massachusetts, February 9, 1952. [9] DURYEA, op. cit. (footnote 5), p. 6. [10] Copy of contract in Museum files. [11] Affidavit of William Rattman, March 19, 1943, states that the Russell ledgers give that date. [12] Recorded interview with Frank Duryea in U.S. National Museum, November 6, 1957. [13] Letter from Frank Duryea to David Beecroft, November 15, 1924; copy in Museum files. [14] Letter from Charles Duryea to C. W. Mitman, March 21, 1922; copy in Museum files. [15] See "history" (footnote 7), p. 6. [16] DURYEA, op. cit. (footnote 5), p. 8. [17] Copy of letter in Museum files. [18] DURYEA, op. cit. (footnote 5), p. 12. [19] Letter from Frank Duryea to Charles Duryea, November 3, 1893, states that the engine could be run at 700 as well as 500 rpm. Copy in Museum files. [20] DURYEA, op. cit. (footnote 5), p. 14. Also in letter from Charles Duryea to C. W. Mitman, January 11, 1922; copy in Museum files. [21] Letter from Charles Duryea to C. W. Mitman, January 11, 1922; also letter from Frank Duryea to David Beecroft, November 15, 1924. Copies in Museum files. [22] Letter from Charles Duryea to F. A. Taylor, December 5, 1936, says he "thought" they had five teeth. Copy in Museum files. [23] Frank later wrote his brother, January 1894, that he fixed the tank so it would not draw sediment from the bottom. Copy of letter in Museum files. [24] The number of mufflers Frank Duryea constructed is not known. He wrote Charles, December 22, 1893, that he "will try a new muffler also." [25] Selden Patent Evidence, vol. 9, p. 110. [26] See "history" (footnote 7), p. 2. Charles wrote, "Some parts of these [referring to the batteries], like the jars, I had on hand for six or eight years, and did not need to buy." [27] Ibid., p. 15. [28] Ibid., p. 15 [29] Frank stated in this letter that the friction drum originally had two belts, forward and reverse, but since they tended to foul each other, he removed the reverse belt and left the other to serve for both directions. How the shipper fork might have handled two belts is not understood. [30] As actually constructed there are only two gears on the secondary shaft. He obviously discovered that one gear secured to two clutches would serve for both forward and reverse. Space was also limited. [31] Recorded interview with Frank Duryea in U.S. National Museum, November 9, 1956. [32] Letter from Frank Duryea to Charles Duryea, November 8, 1893. Copy in Museum files. [33] Frank Duryea, in a recorded interview in the U.S. National Museum on November 6, 1957, said that he believed these had been purchased from Rochester Rawhide Company. [34] Letter from Frank Duryea to Charles Duryea, December 22, 1893. Also letter from Frank Duryea to David Beecroft, November 15, 1924. Copies in Museum files. [35] Telling of the first use of the car in later days, Frank Duryea mentions the many noises and vibrations that accompanied the trip: the vibrating tiller, the tinny sounding muffler, the clattering chains. He later reported speeds of 3 mph in low gear and 8 mph in high gear. [36] Letter from Frank Duryea to Charles Duryea, Jan. 19, 1894, says they went up hill via Summer and Armor Streets, then out Walnut to Bemis' at Central Street School. [37] The letter read: "I have designed a new muffler and we will proceed to make it before long, in a day or two. Instead of one shell 1/8-inch thick I shall put a shell 1/16-inch thick inside another of equal thickness, but about 1 inch greater diameter i.e., one chamber within another so as to cause sound to turn corners to get out. Still another shell will be added if it prove insufficient, making it turn about again--taking care in each case to give ample room for expansion--outer one need not be more than 1/32 inch possibly. Will let two threaded rods with nuts hold heads on both or on three cases, if the 3d be essential." [38] This letter gives further proof that the car never had a brake. Frank said the car came back down the hill with no brake, but that the engine held the vehicle back. [39] DURYEA, op. cit. (footnote 5), p. 37. [40] It is possible that a few parts were removed at this time to be used on the two-cylinder car. The muffler may have been one of these, and even more likely, the governor parts. Charles Duryea wrote to C. W. Mitman December 27, 1921, stating that his younger brother Otho and a Henry Wells had put in a battery and gasoline in 1897 and started the engine. Because the chains were not on the car they could not attempt to operate it; but the engine ran too fast, and finally something broke, probably the engine frame, found to be broken during the recent restoration. Charles thought the engine ran too fast because some of the governor parts were already missing. [41] Recorded interview with Frank Duryea in the U.S. National Museum, November 9, 1956. On the formation of the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, Mr. Markham was rewarded for his part of the venture. He had invested nearly $3000 in the work, and sold out his rights in the company for approximately a $2000 profit. * * * * * Paper 34 - Transcriber's Note The transcriptions retain all typographical and gramatical errors. * * * * * CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 35 THE BORGHESI ASTRONOMICAL CLOCK IN THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY by _Silvio A. Bedini_ DEVELOPMENT OF ASTRONOMICAL CLOCKS 32 DESIGNER BORGHESI 33 CLOCKMAKER BERTOLLA 34 FIRST BORGHESI CLOCK 38 SECOND BORGHESI CLOCK 41 BORGHESIAN THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE 54 LAST YEARS 57 THE CLOCKS OF BARTOLOMEO ANTONIO BERTOLLA 59 APPENDIX 71 BIBLIOGRAPHY 76 [Illustration: Figure 1.--THE DIAL PLATE of the Borghesi clock, showing the horary and astronomical indications which are automatically presented.] _Silvio A. Bedini_ _The Borghesi Astronomical Clock_ _In the Museum of History and Technology_ _The history of the 18th-century Borghesi astronomical clock is described here from contemporary source material. The evolution of its design by Father Francesco Borghesi and the building of the complex mechanism devised by the clockmaker, Bartolomeo Antonio Bertolla, is a story of the vision of one man turned into reality by another. The result of their collaboration is the unique, astronomical timepiece now in the Museum of History and Technology._ THE AUTHOR: _Silvio A. Bedini is curator of mechanical and civil engineering in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology._ "... All this work I had performed eagerly, so that, while in my room, I might contemplate leisurely, both during the day and in the night, the true face of the heavens and of the seas unobscured by clouds, even though I had no astronomical equipment."[1] With these words, Father Francesco Borghesi (1723-1802) of Mechel described the reasons which inspired him to invent a unique astronomical clock which is now in the horological collection of the Museum of History and Technology. This complicated mechanism, which performs a multitude of functions, was designed by Father Francesco Borghesi, a secular priest in Venezia Tridentina. It was constructed in 1764 under his direction by a provincial clockmaker named Bartolomeo Antonio Bertolla (1702-1789) of Mocenigo di Rumo. It was the second of two complicated astronomical clocks which Father Borghesi designed and which Bertolla constructed. According to contemporary sources, this clock was presented to the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria soon after its completion. Its history is rather hazy, except for the fact that in 1780 this second Borghesi timepiece was still in the Imperial Palace in Vienna. The clock was again noted in 1927 when it was sold at a public auction in New York.[2] Subsequently, it was acquired for the Smithsonian Institution. Development of Astronomical Clocks The history of the great theoretical and mechanical achievement which the Borghesi clock represents has been most adequately covered elsewhere.[3] Consideration of the development of equation and astronomical clocks is required here only for the purpose of relating the Borghesi timepiece with the other significant developments in this branch of horology. The invention of the anchor escapement in about 1670, and the consequent greater accuracy in time-telling, led to increased preoccupation with precision. Daily differences in time as recorded by sundials and clocks became more noticeable. Finally, in the second half of the 17th century, some attempt was made to construct mechanical clocks combined with sundials as well as astronomical clocks. With the improvement of precision time-telling, it became necessary to reconcile the actual difference between true and mean time. Although a great variety of time-equation tables were produced, there was a considerable margin for error in their use. This led to the construction of mechanical clocks in which the equation of time was automatically accomplished. A few were produced late in the 17th and early 18th century at considerable cost and, consequently, with little popularity. Equation sundials were also developed which were elaborately ingenious, but they were not completely practical. Inevitably, they were supplanted by the mechanical equation clock. Probably the first documented mention of an equation clock is in the diary of John Evelyn who recorded that in 1666 he visited the Royal Society where he witnessed a curious clock, which showed the equation of time, being presented by a certain Mercator. More data on the subject appeared in the first two decades of the 18th century, when Henry Sully, Joseph Williamson, Daniel Quare, and Thomas Tompion--who were among the foremost English clockmakers of all time--produced elaborate examples of these timepieces. Another significant maker was Dowe Williamson, who became Court Clockmaker to Emperor Charles VI of Austria. In London, Joseph Williamson produced some of the finest astronomical timepieces of this type that have been known. The interest in the subject next shifted to France where many fine examples were produced during the first half of the 18th century. Just after the middle of the 18th century, the subject of astronomical clocks suddenly became a major horological preoccupation in another region, namely, Austria, where the work in this field was apparently done exclusively by members of the clergy. The earliest was Father Philipp Matthäus Hahn (1739-1790) of Württemberg.[4] Father Hahn considered the equation of time as only one part of a plan to represent astronomical occurrences by means of clockwork. In addition to planetaria and similar mechanisms, Father Hahn produced two extraordinary astronomical, tall-case clocks, both of which survive in public museums. * * * * * ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to acknowledge the valuable assistance received from the following: DR. AMOS AVERY, Amherst, Massachusetts; MR. EDWIN A. BATTISON, curator of light machinery and horology, U.S. National Museum; DOTT. RICHARD BLAAS, Oesterreiches Staatsarchiv, Vienna; DOTT. ADOLFO CETTO, librarian, Biblioteca Comunale di Trento, who made copies of Borghesi's two volumes available; SIGNOR MARIO DI MARIO, editor of _La Clessidra_, Rome, who permitted several of the illustrations in Sig. Luigi Pippa's article to be used herein; MR. WALTER A. GILBERT, Norwich, Connecticut; DR. HEINRICH LINARDI, Uhrenmuseum der Stadt Wien, Vienna; SIGNOR LUIGI PIPPA, Milan, Italy; CAV. ING. GUIDO UCELLI DI NEMI, Presidente, and DOTT. FEDERICO MORELLI and CAV. ORAZIO CURTI of the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan, for their cooperation on the descriptions and illustrations of the restored clockshop of Bartolomeo Antonio Bertolla; and DR. EDWARD WATERS, Division of Music, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The translation from Francesco Borghesi's Latin texts, which made this study possible, were made by: REV. NEIL HERLIHY, S.J., REV. FRANCIS J. HEYDEN, S.J., and REV. STEPHEN X. WINTERS, S.J., Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.; and REV. DANIEL HUNTER, O.P., and REV. ROBERT STENGER, O.P., Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C. * * * * * [Illustration: Figure 2.--PORTRAIT OF FATHER FRANCESCO BORGHESI, inventor and designer of the astronomical clock in the Museum of History and Technology.] Another of the clerical clockmakers was Father Aurelianus à San Daniele (1728-1782), an Augustine monk in the monastery of the Imperial Court at Vienna.[5] His four complicated astronomical clocks, which exist in museums at present, are comparable to those produced by Father Hahn. The third cleric was Brother David à San Cajetano (1736-1796) in the same Augustine order to which Father Aurelianus belonged. He achieved note as the author of various publications, including _Neue Rädergebäude_[6] [New Construction of Wheels] relating to planet-wheels, or gear-trains containing epicyclic elements. He constructed a clock based on an elaborate astronomical design which was substantially different from the others. The fourth of the ecclesiasts who designed astronomical clocks in this period was Father Klein of Prague, who produced a complicated astronomical timepiece in about 1738. The fact that such important and outstanding examples of astronomical clocks were produced exclusively by ecclesiasts in Austria during the second half of the 18th century is especially significant. It is particularly so when a fifth cleric is added to the group, also an Austrian subject although Italian by heritage, in the person of Father Francesco Borghesi. Although only Father Borghesi's second astronomical clock is now known, it is apparent that this example in the Museum of History and Technology represents an experiment in astronomical time-telling comparable to any of the timepieces produced by Father Hahn, Father Aurelianus, Brother David à San Cajetano or Father Klein. This combination of five clerical clockmakers who lived in the same region during the same period of time is sufficiently unusual. However, the fact that each of them apparently worked without association with any of the others leads to the conjecture that a common factor must have led them to their individual preoccupation with astronomical horology. What the link may have been is not apparent from the surviving records of the lives and works of these clerics. Certainly it was not an interest in astronomy or clockmaking per se, because other than the astronomical clocks, none of these horological inventors--with the possible exception of Father Hahn--worked in any other aspect of the fields of astronomy or horology. However, after a comprehensive study of Father Borghesi's writings, there is little doubt of the religious basis of his own inspiration. Designer Borghesi Father Borghesi's story takes place in the picturesque mountainous region of what was then known as Venezia Tridentina (since 1947, Trentino-Alto Adige) in northern Italy, along the Tyrolean border of Austria. Because of its strategic position as the passage between Innsbruck and Verona, the possession of the Tridentina was contested again and again in the European wars, but during Father Borghesi's lifetime, the Tridentina was under Austrian domination. [Illustration: Figure 3.--PANORAMA of the village of Mechel in the valley of the Non, birthplace of Father Borghesi.] Deep within this mountainous district is the romantic valley of the Non, or Anáuni, with its great forests and ancient castles. Most maps do not mark it, and the tourist guides ignore it.[7] One of the chief communities is Cles, with its historic Renaissance buildings. The major city of the region is Trent on the Adige River, with its surviving Roman relics and Romanesque and Renaissance architecture. The little villages scattered throughout the valley of the Non played no part in history, but such names as Mechel and Mocenigo di Rumo reflect the interchange of sovereignty. It was in the little village of Mechel that Francesco Borghesi was born in 1723.[8] Local records are meager and inadequate, and many of the details of Borghesi's life must be assumed. Inasmuch as the village was in a rural, agricultural district, Borghesi may have come from a family of farmers, vintners, or village tradesmen. Borghesi sought an education by entering the priesthood and was ordained a secular priest in Salzburg. He was first assigned as curate to the village parish of Rumo in the valley of the Non, a short distance from his birthplace.[9] Later, he was transferred to his native Mechel. He was inherently a man of simple tastes and of great piety. He tended to the needs of his mountain villagers and attended the births, weddings and deaths of his parishioners. It was during his assignment in this tiny community that Father Borghesi met and became friendly with the clockmaker, Bartolomeo Antonio Bertolla of nearby Mocenigo di Rumo. Clockmaker Bertolla Bartolomeo Antonio Bertolla was born in Mocenigo di Rumo, a short distance from Mechel, in 1702.[10] Nothing is known of his boyhood, other than the fact that he was mechanically inclined. At the age of 17 he was apprenticed to become a clockmaker with the master, Johann Georg Butzjäger of Neulengbach, a small village on the edge of the great Vienna woods.[11] This region was then part of the domain of the Archduke of Austria, of which Sankt Pölten was the capital. [Illustration: Figure 4.--PORTRAIT OF BARTOLOMEO ANTONIO BERTOLLA, clockmaker, of Mocenigo di Rumo. The canvas in oils is owned by descendants. In the upper left-hand corner is an inscription, now hardly legible, indicating that the portrait may have been painted after Bertolla's death on January 15, 1789. Translated, it states: "Bartolomeo Antonio Bertola [sic] Celebrated Mechanician and Inventor of various Instruments. Repairer of the clocks of Venice, Verona, Trent, and other localities. Maker of the Work which combines the Copernican and Ptolemaic Systems devised by Father Francesco Borghesi of Mechel, Laureate Mathematician, and humbly offered to Her Imperial Majesty Maria Theresa. Died in piety in his home at Rumo on 15 January 1789 at the age of 86." (_Courtesy of Sig. Luigi Pippa of Milan._)] [Illustration: Figure 5.--THE VILLAGE OF MOCENIGO DI RUMO in the valley of the Non. Arrow points to Bertolla's home and workshop at far left.] [Illustration: Figure 6.--CERTIFICATE OF APPRENTICESHIP awarded to Bartolomeo Antonio Bertolla upon completion of his 3-year apprenticeship at Neulengbach, dated December 27, 1722.] Bertolla began his apprenticeship with Butzjäger under the auspices of the Corporation of Blacksmiths of Sankt Pölten in 1719. His training was supervised by two master locksmiths, Johann Christian Winz and Peter Wisshofer, who were members of the Corporation, and were assigned to serve as patrons for the apprentice. It was their obligation to make certain that he received good care and adequate instruction from his master. While he worked in Butzjäger's shop, Bertolla lived with the master's family in their home. Bertolla's 3 years at Neulengbach passed quickly as he sought to absorb all that his master could teach him. Butzjäger was considered to be a good craftsman in the region, yet today there is not even a mention of his name in the lists of clockmakers. He specialized in the production and repair of "great clocks" which included tall-case, domestic timepieces, and tower clocks. Butzjäger treated his apprentice well, and in return Bertolla rewarded him by being diligent and honest. His subsequent work is sufficient indication that he developed into an extremely skilled craftsman, and he became the equal of any clockmaker of his time. The 3 years of apprenticeship were completed and on December 27, 1722, Bertolla received a certificate from the Corporation of Blacksmiths which assured whomever it might concern of Bertolla's skill, diligence and honesty, and permitted him to open his own shop as a clockmaker under the auspices of the Corporation. This document, which has been preserved by Bertolla's descendants, is an interesting record of the organization of the trade guilds in the 18th century, and, for that reason, has been translated from the original German: We, the Superiors and other masters of the honorable corporation of municipal blacksmiths, armorers, and of smiths, in the Imperial City of St. Pölten in Austria by the river Enns, DECLARE BY THESE PRESENTS put in force by this document to anyone who waits to hear.... That the honorable and able BARTOLOMEO ANTONIO BERTOLLA of Rumo in Lentzberg, the Tyrol, on the 27th day of the month of December of the year 1719 was consigned as apprentice for three years, in the presence of two sponsoring masters for the purpose, the honorable Johann Christian Winz and Peter Wisshofer, both of them master locksmiths representing the entire honorable Corporation and others of open shop--to the honorable JOHANN GEORG BUTZJ�GER, incorporated with us, citizen and master clockmaker for large clocks in the merchant-village of Neulengbach in Wienerwald, as his master of the art, would have therefore perfectly and rightfully worked and learned, and that afterwards, on the day and year noted at the bottom, he will be newly declared free and independent before us, representative of an entire and honorable Corporation and with open shop, of his above-mentioned master and of the two sponsoring masters mentioned, and since he eagerly requested a truthful certificate of apprenticeship for his honest service as an apprentice and for his good behavior, and we having great pleasure as well as the duty of favoring the truth and well knowing that the aforesaid BARTOLOMEO ANTONIO BERTOLLA has learned honestly the art of clockmaking for great clocks from his aforesaid master, and that he has always behaved with honesty, obedience, faithfulness and diligence both towards his master and towards us to our complete satisfaction and, therefore, we cannot in any manner refuse his request, rather we wish to grant it with a clear conscience. WE THEREFORE ADDRESS TO EVERYONE and to anyone in whatever state and rank, but particularly to those interested in our branch of this art, our respectful and courteous entreaty and request to consider BARTOLOMEO ANTONIO BERTOLLA well recommended for his honest apprenticeship and his good behavior, and to desire to favor him in every way, in such a manner that will assure our gratitude whenever an occasion presents itself. For this purpose, we issue, as we have declared we wish to issue to you, BARTOLOMEO ANTONIO BERTOLLA, this certificate of apprenticeship, attaching to it the seal of our Corporation. Executed in the city of St. Pölten on 27 December 1722.[12] His apprenticeship over, Bertolla returned to his native region where he soon established a reputation for himself as one of the most skillful clockmakers in the Tridentina and produced timepieces of fine quality in some quantity. No records have survived concerning his personal life, but it is believed that he married probably soon after his return. He had no children of his own. To expand his business, he eventually took into his shop two nephews, the sons of a brother and a sister, as apprentices. Bertolla's work brought him a sufficient number of clients, and he produced elaborate clocks for his more wealthy patrons. In 1752, it is recorded that he repaired the great clock in the campanile of the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Cles, the regional capital of the valley of the Non. The clock dated probably from the 16th century, and it seems likely that Bertolla replaced the original two-wheel train with a three-wheel movement, and that he added the present anchor escapement.[13] It is not possible to determine when Father Borghesi first made Bertolla's acquaintance, but it may be assumed that they had become friends in the late 1750's. After he had come to know Bertolla, Father Borghesi apparently spent many hours in the clockmaker's shop. He was fascinated by mechanics in any form, and the complications of clockwork particularly intrigued him. Bertolla was patient with the young priest, explaining the tools he had and their uses, the clocks he produced or repaired, and the principles which were involved. Father Borghesi listened willingly and as his understanding of timepieces grew, his curiosity increased. In spite of himself, the priest could not be satisfied with the ordinary aspects of his friend's work and wanted to learn more. From a casual pastime, the study of time became an obsession with him. There was but one recourse: he went back to studying once again. This time it was not theology, however, but the sciences. Every moment he could spare went into the perusal of books on mathematics, astronomy, and associated subjects. He progressed rapidly, driven by his overpowering interest and aided by his quick intellect. Little by little, Borghesi managed to acquire the basic texts that explained this new world to him, probably borrowing them from old seminary friends. As each new book came into his hands, he devoured it in his desire to master its contents. He discussed each new principle or precept that he learned with Bertolla. Together, they attempted to apply his new learning to the calculations necessary for a timepiece which would demonstrate the astronomical theories in visual form. Borghesi taught himself slowly, step by step, and the result was a profound understanding of astronomical science. He conceived the project of constructing a great astronomical clock which he felt could be accomplished by combining Bertolla's mechanical skills with his own recent mastery of astronomy and mathematics. First Borghesi Clock It is not difficult to visualize the two men, the priest and the clockmaker, as they sat together night after night working out their plans. Father Borghesi would painstakingly outline the astronomical principles he wished to have the clock exhibit and the mathematical principles which would be involved to operate them. Bertolla concentrated on them and tried to transcribe the principles into functional mechanical terms, visualizing each operation in terms of wheels and gears. Little by little the two men coordinated the numerous elements and welded them into an operating entity. They adjourned either to the stark simplicity of the rectory or, probably more often, to Bertolla's little home workshop, the priest standing over his friend while the latter worked at his bench in the dark paneled interior illuminated only by the several lamps on the work benches. This first clock which the two men combined to create is a monument to the great scientific knowledge of the self-taught priest and the technical ability of the clockmaker--a unity combining astronomical science, mechanics, and artistry. The story of the project is told in a little book, _Novissima Ac Perpetua Astronomica..._, which Borghesi later published. Explaining the incentive which inspired him, and the premises from which he began his work, he wrote: From the foundation of astronomical science long ago, innumerable [and] repeated observations of both ancient and modern astronomers, emerged at last from their hiding places. Made light of by the jests of so many outstanding intellects, they have so successfully brought to light the paths of the stars and their motions, which are more complicated to us than the Gordian knots. Now it is possible for even an amateur in astronomy, sufficiently instructed, to predict for any given time not only the mean position of the planets, but also their true longitude and latitude, and even the true time of their conjunctions, and their ecliptic oppositions, with all the attendant circumstances. Yet, until now, no hypothesis has been devised which would force an automaton to show to us, before our very eyes, the eclipses of the planets in their true and certain times. For though there have been men seeking with all their might to bind by laws their artificial heavens, by I know not how many and how great calculations, and to systematize the complexities of the rotations of celestial bodies; nevertheless, all of them, as if by common agreement, considered themselves to have made great contributions to mechanico-theoretical astronomy. However, they have only attained, even though closely, the mean locations of the secondary mobiles, and those by a certain rather crude calculation. Some attained by more, some by less, but all by some degree of wandering from the truth, either worn out by the intricacies of the motions, or deceived and deceiving by the errors of their calculations. This fact those well know, who, setting about to collect information of this kind, even those publicized not long ago, with true astronomical calculation, have been bored to death while digging out by the most elementary and superficial arithmetical torture, the worst of fallacies spontaneously erupting from thence. It would seem that true calculations alone can be desired in mechanico-astronomics. Long study had not only convinced me that an automaton was within the realm of possibility, but that there were many mechanical systems by which it could be achieved. I girded myself for a new project and developed it theoretically from the ground up, but under such unhappy auspices that not only did all hope fail that anyone would ever appear who might have seemed willing to set his hand to the work, but that the new discovery itself was scoffed at by many as altogether a nightmarish delirium of an unbridled imagination. The first months of the project must have seemed like an inspired dream to the two men, and then must have followed a period of hopeless depression. Bertolla undoubtedly felt many times that the clock was an aspiration far beyond their combined abilities and means, but the priest would not be thwarted in his ambition and refused to abandon the project. He felt that it was a work that they were destined to produce. Many times, he wrote, he chided and begged and shamed his erstwhile partner into resuming the project where it had been last abandoned. Little by little, the first clock began to take form. As each new difficulty was encountered, the two men would go back over the notes and sketches to trace the problem to its source. Often a new part of the mechanism would nullify another which had thus far operated successfully, and a complete rearrangement would be required. [Illustration: Figure 7.--TITLE PAGE of Father Borghesi's first book. The translation in its entirety is: "The Most Recent, Perpetual, Astronomical Calendar Clock: Theoretical--Practical: by means of which besides the hours, the minutes and seconds; the current year, the month; the day of the month and the day of the week; the dominical letter, epact, and thence, the day of all the feastdays, both fixed and movable; the solar cycle; the golden number; the Roman indiction; the dominant planet of any year and its sign; the phases of the moon and its mean age: and all the motions of the sun and the moon as to longitude, latitude, eccentricity, etc., are immediately seen, so accurately that [not only] the true new full moons and the true quadrature, etc., of the sun and moon appear, but also, all solar and lunar eclipses--both visible and invisible; as in heaven, so on the clock, they are conspicuously celebrated in their true times, and those of the past and those of the future, with their circumstances of time and duration, magnitude, etc., can be quickly determined. All this was devised and brought to light by the author, Francesco Borghesi of Anáuni, a secular priest of Trent, A.A.L.L. & Doctor of Philosophy. (Trent: From the printshop of Giovanni Battista Monauni, With Permission of Superiors.)" (_Title page reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca della Citta di Trento._)] Again and again, Bertolla threw up his hands in despair and begged Father Borghesi to abandon the enterprise. He protested that he was not capable of producing such a complicated mechanism; he had neither the tools nor the skill. The priest wished to produce a clock such as the world had never seen before, such as the greatest scientists and clockmakers of all time had never been able to make. But Bertolla felt that he was only a provincial craftsman who could not hope to surpass them all with only his simple tools and training. In his book on the first clock, _Novissima Ac Perpetua Astronomica..._, Father Borghesi wrote that when he had finally come within a few weeks of the embryo stage in the development of his clock, he was faced with the problem of bolstering the sagging enthusiasm of Bertolla. The clockmaker's original enthusiasm had shown promise of great results, but as the days passed and the problems of the multiplex and generally unfamiliar apparatus to be forged for the workings of the automaton became more complex, his ardor decreased. Finally, Bertolla became so discouraged by the scoffers and frustrated by the fact that the work was insufficiently organized that Father Borghesi wrote that "it almost became a harder task for me to bolster up by daily opportunity and importunity the failing patience of the artisan, frightened away from the work already begun, than it was for me to extract from the inner recesses of mathematics and astronomy, without light and without a guide, the whole fabric of the machine itself!" In spite of Bertolla's protests, Father Borghesi prevailed, reviving his friend's interest once more until the two were deep in the project again. Months passed as they worked together on the mechanism and it seemed as if they lived for no other purpose. Inevitably, Bertolla's health began to suffer, undermined as it was by the constant nervous tension, and he eventually became ill from mental strain. He was forced to spend some time in bed, and for many weeks the subject of the clock was not discussed. Bertolla's other work, by which he made his living, suffered and it was several months before he was able to return to his little shop. One year passed into another and the work progressed slowly. The first clock, which easily should have been finished in less than a year, was not completed until after three full years had passed. However, when the priest and the clockmaker put the finishing touches to their great clock, the result surpassed the greatest possible expectations, for it was truly a masterpiece. Not only did it illustrate the ecliptic phenomena of the moon, the sun and earth occurring in their proper time, as well as many other things, but it showed these operations as they succeeded in proper order, taking place through the centuries. With mutual feelings of great pride, the two friends surveyed the result of their three years of endeavor. Bertolla realized that he had reached a point of maximum achievement in his work. He probably felt that now he could relax again, that his sleep would no longer be troubled by confused nightmares of wheels and gears that did not mesh together. Time was to prove otherwise. PUBLISHED DESCRIPTION OF THE FIRST CLOCK Father Borghesi soon came to the conclusion that it would be desirable to have a written description to explain the mechanism of the clock and its many indicators. He thereupon wrote out the story of how the clock was made, the reasons for embarking on the enterprise, the difficulties he had encountered, and the success which had crowned his and Bertolla's mutual labors. Finally, he described the operation of the clock's mechanism and the functions of its array of indicators. The little book was written in Latin and only a few copies were printed, presumably at the priest's own expense, on a handpress by Giovanni Battista Monauni, printer to the Bishop in Trent. The little volume was stated by contemporary writers to have been published in 1763, although no date appears on the title page. The title translated is, in part, _The Most Recent, Perpetual Astronomical Calendar Clock, Theoretical--Practical...._ The work begins with an introduction for the reader in which Father Borghesi stated that: ... the little work, which, as far as I was concerned could easily have been finished in a year, was only completed after about three years. Fortunately, however, it was so far beyond the expectations of most, that not only am I able to foretell with certainty all the lunar ecliptic phenomena and the solar, or rather terrestrial, phenomena, carefully worked out in their true periods, among many other matters exhibited by the machine; but also, within a few hours, I can exhibit by altogether tangible evidence to the skeptics and the doubting those very same phenomena, occurring within the space of many years, or even centuries, and succeeding one another in proper order, with their many attendant circumstances. I was not much concerned about the other eclipses, such as those of Mercury, Venus, and the other stars wandering through the zodiac, or about the other solar eclipses from the transit of Mercury or Venus, since they are altogether undiscernible to the naked eye, and very few compilers of ephemerides wish them to be noted, probably for the same reason. Do not, however, expect, star-loving reader, that here anything at all that you may wish can be drawn forth as from its source, for to demand this would be almost the same as to seek to drain as from a cup all the vast knowledge of the many arithmetical sciences from the narrow confines of one book. You will understand how impossible that is when, through prolonged labor, you have grown somewhat more mature in this kind of learning. Wherefore, rather fully, and out of consideration for you, I have decided, setting aside these prolixities, with completely synoptic brevity and with all possible clarity to expound for you simply the proportion of the movements, the description of the machine, and its usage. As a result, when you have progressed a little in theoretical mechanics, you will not only be able to reduce all these things to their astronomical principles, but you may find the way more smoothly laid out for you even for perfecting the machine itself. And, thus, you may be more effectively encouraged to a successful conclusion. Let it be so now for you through the following 10 chapters! After these rather hopeful assurances, Father Borghesi proceeded to provide a detailed description of the clock dial and functions in the 10 short chapters which he had promised, under a separate section entitled "Synopsis Totius Operis Mechanici," which is translated in its entirety in the appendix. As Father Borghesi prepared his little volume about his first clock, and described its unusual features and outlined its functions, which were primarily to place in evidence the celestial constellations, it occurred to him that it would now be easier after the experience he had acquired with his first timepiece, to construct another clock, which would present the motions of the two astronomical systems, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican. In this first book, he promised the reader that he would undertake the second project. It is fortunate that Father Borghesi undertook this project for the second clock is the only example of his work that is known to exist today. Extensive research has not shown what happened to the first clock, although several sources state that both timepieces were presented to Empress Maria Theresa sometime between 1764 and 1780. Second Borghesi Clock Father Borghesi lost no time in initiating the project of the second clock. The first and most important step was to inform Bertolla and enlist his assistance. Bertolla was adamant: he had had enough of complicated astronomical movements. He was delighted by the prospect of returning to his former simple life, producing simple, domestic, elementary movements for his country clients. Father Borghesi begged and cajoled. The second clock would be a much simpler one to construct, he persisted. After all, they had gained invaluable experience from the production of the first clock. Furthermore, he had already completed its design. Bertolla apparently wavered in his resolve and, unwillingly and against his better judgment, he allowed the priest's inducements to prevail. Once again, the two friends yielded their leisure hours to a study of the priest's books and drawings as Father Borghesi enthusiastically elaborated his design for the timepiece, and Bertolla attempted to transcribe astronomical indications into terms of wheel counts. The second clock was, as Borghesi had promised, much easier of execution. Within a year, it was completed and functioned with complete success. [Illustration: Figure 8.--THE BORGHESI CLOCK in the Museum of History and Technology, constructed in 1764 by Bartolomeo Antonio Bertolla of Mocenigo di Rumo from the designs of Father Francesco Borghesi of Rumo and Mechel.] [Illustration: Figure 9.--ANOTHER VIEW of the Borghesi clock.] This is the clock now in the Museum of History and Technology. It is housed in a tall case of dark-red mahogany veneered on oak, with restrained carving featuring ribands and foliate motifs. Gilt-brass decorations flank the face of the hood, which is surmounted by three gilt-brass finials in the form of orbs. A wide door in the waist may be opened to attend the weights. The case is 7 feet 8 inches high, 20-1/2 inches wide at the waist, and 14 inches in depth. The dial is of gilt brass, measuring 21 inches high and 15 inches in width, with a number of supplementary silvered dials visible through its openings. Instead of hands, the dial utilizes three concentric rings moving around a central disc, the indications of which are read at two bisecting gilt lines inscribed in the glass face. Twelve separate functions are performed by the chapter ring assembly alone, and there are 14 openings on the dial. It is estimated that the clock performs 30 separate functions, including striking and chiming. Of the multiple chapter rings, the outermost is 1-1/8 inches wide, the center ring is 3/8 inch wide, and the innermost ring measures 1-1/4 inches in width. THE DIAL-PLATE ENGRAVINGS The gilt dial is incised throughout with figures and inscriptions in engraving of the very finest quality, as is evidenced in the illustrations. The frontispiece is surmounted at its center by the crowned double eagle of the House of Hapsburg, indicating the identity of the sovereign in whose reign it was made, Emperor Francis I or the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Below the eagle at either side are flying cherubs supporting ribands with inscriptions. Centered at the bottom of the frontispiece immediately above the chapter rings is the moving silvered orb representing the sun. Surrounding it is a tableau of the Holy Trinity, with the Virgin Mary being crowned by Christ holding a cross at the left and God with a sword in hand at the right, and a dove representing the Holy Spirit hovering over the Virgin's head. Father S. X. Winters, S.J., considers it reminiscent of the triptych "The Coronation of the Virgin" by Fra Lippo Lippi. [Illustration: Figure 10.--DIAGRAM OF the dial plate.] [Illustration: Figure 11.--DIAL PLATE of the Borghesi clock.] KEY TO DIAGRAM OF THE DIAL PLATE A Dominating planet, represented by its symbol and its house; B Dominical letter (Lit. Dom.); C Epacts (Cyc. EpEC); D Roman indiction (Ind. Rom.), part of the reckoning of the Julian period; E Solar cycle, (Cyc. Sol.), part of the reckoning for the Julian period; F Golden number (Num. Aur.), part of the reckoning for the Julian period; G, H, I, J The era, or the current year; part of the six windows of the Iris, or rainbow; K Shuttered winding hole, for winding up the weights; part of the six windows of the Iris; L The era, or the month of the current year; part of the Iris, or six windows of the rainbow; M The sun in its epicycle; N The 12 signs of the sun's anomaly; O, P The first chapter ring representing the equatorial globe of the week, revolving from left to right; Q The coming day indicated through the window; R The second chapter ring; including the synodic-periodic measure of the tides, the days of the median lunar-synodic age, the signs and degrees of the signs for mean distance of the moon from the sun; S Epicycle of the moon with signs of its anomaly; T Head of the dragon (Cap. Draconis); U Tail of the dragon (Cauda Draconis), for measuring eclipses of the earth and of the moon; V Third chapter ring, with degrees of lunar latitude and some fixed stars; W Fourth chapter ring, showing firmament of fixed stars, signs of the zodiac and degrees of the signs, the months of the year, and days of the months, revolving left to right for the course of a mean astronomical year; X Adjustment marked _Claudit_ (it closes) and _Aperit_ (it opens) for disengaging dial work for the purpose of making astronomical experiments and computations; Y Adjustment marked _Concitat_ (it accelerates) and _Retardit_ (it retards) for fast and slow adjustments of the movement. In the upper spandrels of the dial are two more cherubs bearing ribands with inscriptions. In the lower left corner is a magnificent engraving of Atlas upholding the globe of the world, inscribed with the zodiac, over his head. The lower right corner features the figures of two noblemen apparently examining and discussing an orb upon a table, the significance of which is not clear. [Illustration: Figure 12.--EMPRESS MARIA THERESA, to whom Father Borghesi is stated to have presented his two astronomical clocks. The coin bearing her portrait is in the Museum of History and Technology.] THE INSCRIPTIONS Beginning with the uppermost part of the frontispiece, there are nine inscriptions in Latin on the dial plate. The topmost is _Franciscvs I sit plan. Dominator aeternvs._ The phrase has reference to Francis I, who was Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, from 1745-1765, and husband of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. The phrase may be translated as "May Francis I be the eternal ruler by favor of the planets" or more simply "Long Live Francis I, Emperor."[14] Although the dial plate of the Borghesi clock is inscribed with his name, the records indicate that the clock was presented to Maria Theresa. Francis I may have already died before the presentation was made. [Illustration: Figure 13.--PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, to whom Father Borghesi's astronomical clock in the Museum of History and Technology appears to have been inscribed.] From the left to right over the tableau of the Holy Trinity is the phrase "Lavs sacrosanctae Triadi Vni Deo, et Deiparae" (Praise [be] to the most Holy Trinity, to the one God, and to the Mother of God). Within the upper left and right spandrels is inscribed: Isthaec, Signum grande apparvit in Coelo * sancta Dei genitrix amicta sole * Illibato pede Lvnae et serpentis nigra premens Cornva * bis senis pvlcherrime Coronata syderibvs * Tempe indesinenter clavsa, scatvrigo signata * Cedrvs in Libano, Cypresvs in Monte Sion * Mater pvrae Dilectionis sanctaeqve spei * Chara patris aeterni proles, Verbi Mater, sponsaqve procedentis *, gratiae et gloriae circvmdata varietate. This inscription is a eulogy to the Virgin Mary assembled from the texts of Holy Scripture. In addition, each _lemma_, contained within asterisks, carries out the chronogram 1764, the year the clock was completed. Each _lemma_ is translated and identified from the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible: This woman: a great sign appeared in Heaven (Apocalypse 12:1) * The Holy Mother of God clothed with the sun (Apocalypse 12:1) * And with unharmed foot crushing the black horns of the moon (Apocalypse 12:1) and the serpent (Genesis 3:15) * Most beautifully crowned with twice-six (Apocalypse 12:1) * A garden [_Tempe_[15]] enclosed, sealed with a fountain [spring of water] (Song of Songs 4:12) * Like a cedar in Lebanon, and a cypress tree on Mount Zion; (Ecclesiasticus 24:17) * Mother of pure love and of holy hope: Beloved daughter of the Eternal Father, Mother of the Word, Spouse of the Holy Spirit: (Ecclesiasticus 24:24) * Surrounded with a diversity of grace and glory (Psalms 44:10). [Illustration: Figure 14.--THE BOTTOM RIGHT CORNER of the dial plate, showing two noblemen contemplating an orb, with the inscription "Diligit Avdaces Trepidos Fortvna Repellet." (Fortune favors the daring and rejects the timid.)] At the lower left corner below the figure of Atlas upholding the world is the phrase, _Assidvo proni donant di cvncta labori_. (The favorable gods willingly grant all things to the assiduous laborer.) The same phrase is quoted by Father Borghesi in the text of his second volume. The last inscription appears at the lower right corner under the figures of the two noblemen, _Diligit avdaces trepidos fortvna repellet_. (Fortune favors the daring and rejects the timid.) The last two inscriptions are in dactylic hexameter. They appear to be original compositions inasmuch as no classical prototypes have been identified. [Illustration: Figure 15.--THE BOTTOM LEFT CORNER of the dial plate, showing the engraving of Atlas, with the inscription "Assidvo proni donant di cvncta labori." (The favorable gods willingly grant all things to the assiduous laborer.)] CENTER DIAL INSCRIPTIONS [Illustration: Figure 16.--DETAIL OF FRONTISPIECE of the Borghesi clock, showing the apertures for calendar indicators and the details of the engraving.] In addition to the inscriptions previously noted on the outer dial plate, there are three major inscriptions in the central dial. The outermost states _Circulus horarius Soli_, _Lunae_, _Fixis_, _Nodis_, _Aestuique marino communis_ (the hour circle, common to the sun, the moon, the fixed stars, the nodes and to the sea tide). This inscription is divided into four parts by the insertion of four divisions for the day into canonical hours: [_Horae_] _Nocturnae_ (night hours); _Matutinae_ (morning hours); _Diurnae_ (daytime hours) and _Vespertinae_ (evening hours). The next section of the central dial is inscribed _Intumescite--Detumescite_ (rise and fall of the tides) repeated at intervals of approximately every six hours. Within the next section is the following inscription, inscribed continuously around the ring: Lege fluunt, refluunt, dormitant hac maris undae: Ad Phoebi et Phoebes concordia iussa moventur Aequora; discordi iussu suspensa quiescunt. Translated, this is: By this law the sea waves ebb and flow and lie dormant: When Phoebus and Diana agree in their commands, the waters are moved; when they disagree, the waters lie silent.[16] Within the central boss of the dial plate, the name of the maker is inscribed: Bvrghesio Doctore, et Bertolla Limatore Annaniensibvs* Translated, this is: [By] Doctor Borghesi and Bertolla, mechanician citizens of Anáuni. INDICATORS IN THE FRONTISPIECE There are 12 windows in the frontispiece, through each of which appears an indication relating to time. Beginning at the top of the frontispiece of the dial, the first opening occurs on the breast of the imperial eagle. This indicates the dominating planet, represented by its symbol, and its house. The opening in the eagle's left claw, labeled "Lit. Dom." is the dominical letter. The first seven days in the month of January are each assigned one of the letters _a_ through _g_ in order of appearance. The letter which coincides with the first Sunday within this period is called the dominical letter, and it serves for the following year. In leap year, two letters are required, one to February 29th and the letter next proceeding for the remainder of the year. This letter is used in connection with establishing the date of Easter Sunday. The date of Easter regulates the dates of the other movable feasts. The eagle's right claw is labeled "Cyc. EpEC" and represents the epact, or the age of the moon on January 1st. It serves to find the moon's age by indicating the number of days to be added to each lunar year in order to complete a solar year. Twelve lunar months are nearly 11 days short of the solar year, so that the new moons in one year fall 11 days earlier than they did the preceding year. However, 30 days are deducted as an intercalary month since the moon has made a revolution in that time, and the remainder, 3, would be the epact. Below the imperial eagle two winged cherubs support a riband with three indictions of the Julian period. This period of 7980 years is the product derived from multiplying together the sums of 28, which represents the cycle of the sun; 19, representing the cycle of the moon; and 15, which represents the Roman indiction. The Julian period is reckoned to have begun from 4713 B.C. so that the period will be completed in A.D. 3267. The first of the three openings is marked "Ind. Rom." or "Roman indiction," which was an edict by the Emperor Constantine in A.D. 312, providing for the assessment of a property tax at the beginning of each 15-year cycle. It continues to be used in ecclesiastical contracts. The second opening, which occurs immediately below the eagle, is marked "Cyc. Sol." (cycle of the sun). This cycle takes a period of 28 years, after which the days of the week once again fall upon the same days of the month as they did during the first year of the former cycle. There is no relationship with the course of the sun itself, but was invented for the purpose of determining the dominical letter which designates the days of the month on which the Sundays occur during each year of the cycle. Since cycles of the sun date from 9 years before the Christian era, it is necessary to add the digit 9 to the digits of the current year and then divide the result by 28. The quotient is the number of cycles which has passed, and the remainder will be the year of the cycle answering to the current year. The third opening on the riband is labeled "Num. Aur." (golden number). Meton, an astronomer of Athens, discovered in 432 B.C. that after a period of 19 years the new and the full moons returned on the same days of the month as they had before, and this is called the cycle of the moon. The Greeks were so impressed with this calculation that they had it inscribed in letters of gold upon stone, hence the golden number. The First Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325 determined that Meton's cycle was to be used to regulate the movable feasts of the Church. Immediately above the chapter rings is an opening through which the orb of the sun is visible. THE CHAPTER-RING ASSEMBLY In a separate chapter in his second volume, entitled "Descriptio Authomatis Summa totius Operis Mechanici" (Description of the Automaton--Summary of the Complete Mechanism), Father Borghesi provided a description of the functions of the various indicators, prefixing it with the short poem shown in figure 18. He then continues: In the middle of the frontispiece, as at the center of the universe, the terraqueous globe of the week revolves, with a daily motion turning from right to left, bringing with it from the round window the coming day and at the circumference the circle of hours common to the sun, to the moon, to the fixed stars, to the head and tail of the dragon, and to the raging sea. The second circle revolves the synodic-periodic measure of the raging sea, the days of the median lunar-synodic age, the signs and individual degrees of the signs of the distance of the moon from the middle of the sun within the time of 29 terrestrial revolutions, hours 12.44.3.13. This circle revolves likewise from right to left around the center of the earth. In this second circle, another little orb revolves, bringing with it the epicycle of the moon, in which the little circle of the moon (whose illuminated middle always faces towards the sun), running from left to right through the signs of the anomaly; within 13 revolutions of the earth, hours 18.39.16. It descends from apogee to perigee and in just as many others it returns from perigee to apogee, to be carried down thus to true, back and front from the longitude and distance from the sun and from the middle of the earth. The third circle (on which I have tried to indicate astronomically-geometrically in their places, the degrees of lunar latitude both in the south and in the north, and some fixed stars, those, namely, which can be separated by us from the moon which goes between) from left to right turns around the center of the earth, stretching out the head and tail of the dragon, on the inside above the second circle for noting and measuring the sun (but I should rather say the earth), and the eclipses of the moon, within 346 revolutions of the earth, hours 14.52.23. The fourth circle, in which the heaven of the fixed stars, reduced to the correct ascent of our times, the signs of the zodiac and the individual degrees of the signs, the months of the year and the single days of the month can be seen, likewise makes its journey around the earth from left to right in 365 terrestrial revolutions, hours 5.48.56.; that is, within a median astronomical year. Above this annual orb, the sun, in its small epicycle, gliding through the 12 signs of the anomaly, within the space of 182 terrestrial revolutions, hours 15.6.58., from left to right, falls from apogee to perigee; and, within the same time, rises from perigee to apogee, and brings with it, the index, namely its central radius, inhering to the axis of the equatorial orb and cutting the four greatest circles from the center. When the sun has been moved around, Iris shows from six windows the era, that is, the current year. Two winged youths take their place next to Iris, carrying the Julian period: namely, the Roman indiction, the cycle of the sun and the golden number, on a leaf of paper held between them. The imperial eagle stands out on top (as if added to the frontispiece) carrying on its breast the dominating planet and in its talons the ecclesiastical calends (that is, the dominical letter and the epact). ATTACHMENTS FOR ADJUSTMENT Two attachments, in the form of small superimposed dials are situated at the base of the dial plate, at either side and immediately below the fourth chapter ring. In his second volume, Father Borghesi stated that they "are not moved from inside the clock, but the one at the right [inscribed _concitat_ and _retardat_] serves for loosening [accelerating] and tightening [retarding] time; that is, the reins of the perpendicular." In other words, the purpose of this attachment is for adjusting the pendulum to make the clock operate fast or slow. The second attachment, which appears at the left, and which is inscribed "Claudit" (close) and "Aperit" (open) serves the purpose of "... preparing the mechanism in a moment, as swiftly as you wish, for sustaining the astronomical experiments of which you will hear later; when these things have been done, it restores the mechanism to its natural motion at the same speed." This adjustment relates to the final section of Father Borghesi's second book, entitled "Chronologo-Astronomicus Usus Authomatis" (Chronological-Astronomical Use of the Automaton), which is translated from the Latin in its entirety: With one glance at this automaton, you can quickly answer these questions: What hour the sun shows, the moon, any fixed star, the head and tail of the dragon. Is the sea swelling with periodic heat [at high tide?] or is it deflated [low tide], or quiescent? How many days is it from mean new moon or full moon? By how many signs and degrees is the moon distant from the sun, and from its nodes? What sign of the zodiac does the sun occupy, the moon, the head and tail of the dragon? Is the sun or the moon, in apogee or perigee, ascending or descending? What is the apparent speed of the sun and of the moon? What is the apparent magnitude of the solar and lunar diameter, and of the horizontal parallax of the umbra and penumbra of the earth? What is the latitude of the moon? Is it north or south? Does the moon hide [occult eclipse] any of the fixed stars from the earth dwellers, and which of these does it obscure? Is there a true new or full moon? Is the sun in eclipse anywhere on earth? What is the magnitude, and the duration of this eclipse, with respect to the whole earth? Can it be seen in the north or in the south? Is the moon in eclipse? Total or partial? Of what magnitude, etc.? What limb of the moon is obscured? How many years have passed from a given epoch? Is this year a leap year, or a common year--first, second, or third after leap year? What is the current month of the year, and what day of the month and of the week? Which of the planets is dominant? What days of the year do the various feasts fall on, and the movable feasts during the ecclesiastical year? And many other similar questions, which I pass over here for the sake of brevity. Besides, this device can be so arranged for any time whatsoever, past or future, and for the longitude of any region, and can be so manipulated by hand, that within the space of a very short time there can be provided in their proper order, the various orbits of the luminous bodies, their alternating eclipses, as many as have taken place through the course of many years, or even from the beginning of the world; or those that will be seen as long as the world itself shall last, with all their attendant circumstances (year, month, day, duration, magnitude, etc.). All these can be seen with great satisfaction of curiosity and of learning, and hence with great pleasure to the soul. In the meanwhile, the little bells continually play, at their proper, respective times. So that, all exaggeration aside, a thousand years pass, in the sight of this clock, as one day! I am aware of your complaints, O star-loving reader--that my description is too meager and too succinct. Lay the blame for this on those cares, hateful both to me and to you, more pressing, which forbid me and deprive you of a methodical explanation of the work. THE CLOCK MOVEMENT Father Borghesi specified that the entire mechanism was equal in weight to a seventh part of a _Centenarii Germanici_, a Germanic hundredweight. This is probably the Austrian centner which is equivalent to 123.4615 pounds. Therefore, the clock mechanism weighs approximately 17.6 pounds. The clock operated for a hundred days and more at a single winding, according to Father Borghesi, and by means of a pendulum with a leaden bob weighing 60 Viennese pounds, attached at a height of 5 feet. Father Borghesi stated the weight of the pendulum to be 60 _librarum Viennensium_, but the Viennese libra does not appear among the weights of the Austrian Empire. However, using the average libra, an ancient Roman unit of weight equal to 0.7221 pound, it may be assumed that the driving weight should be approximately 45 pounds. Father Borghesi, however, does not venture to provide any description whatsoever of the movement of his second clock in his book. He gave the following reasons: But beyond this, I entirely omit [a description of] the further apparatus of the very many wheels, etc., inside the clock which carry on its functions, lest I become too verbose for some persons. To explain more thoroughly the internal labyrinth of the entire mechanism, from which the movement of the circles or heavens, etc., are derived, would seem to entangle in too many complicated perplexities.... Therefore, that I might not delay longer, and perhaps to no purpose, I have thought it better to leave the whole work to the proportionate calculus of the arithmeticians and the technical skill of mechanics. If they have any desire to construct a similar mechanism, they will follow the aforesaid motions of the heavens, etc., not only by one means alone but by many, more swiftly through thoughtful study than by any amount of instruction. For whoever is well versed in the theory of calculus and sets to work at any given project, will discover any desired motion by a thousand and more ways, by one or another gearing of wheels; which an industrious mechanic will carry out in actuality and without too much difficulty. Nor is there any reason for anyone to be discouraged, so long as he is not disgusted by the amount of labor for there is nothing truer than the old saying "The favorable gods grant everything to the assiduous laborer." Nay, further, even this little work itself can be improved on and surpassed by new inventions. Otherwise that other old adage, almost as old as the world, would prove false, "What you have found already done, you can easily repeat, nor is it difficult to add to what has already been invented." Relying on this principle, I have already conceived some new things to be added to the present little work. [Illustration: Figure 17.--MOVEMENT OF BORGHESI CLOCK viewed from the right side, with details of chiming mechanism.] THE BELLS There is a discrepancy between Father Borghesi's written description in his second book of the number of bells and those which currently exist in the clock. At the present time, there are two sets of bells attached to the upper part of the movement. While Father Borghesi indicated that there were two sets of bells in the clock, he described the first set by stating that: ... there are three bells inside the clock: The largest, when struck by a little hammer at each mean new moon, signifies the new moon. The smallest indicates in the same way the full moon at the time of the mean full moon, by automatic sound. When on the equatorial earth, the sun appears anywhere in eclipse, two bells (the largest and the medium) sounding together automatically, announce that eclipse at the time of the mean new moon. (I think it is evident that eclipses of the sun occur at new moons and eclipses of the moon at full moon.) When the moon is eclipsed, the smallest and the medium bells, simultaneously and automatically, announce the event to the ear at the time of the mean full moon. Besides, at the proper time and automatically, the largest of these bells announces the current solar hour and the smallest bell strikes the quarter hours. In the clock today, the first set consists of a smaller bell fixed within a larger one. It is presumably these bells that indicate the eclipses and also strike the hours and quarter hours. A pull cord attached to the striking mechanism repeats the current hour and quarter hours at will. The second set consists of nine meshed bells struck with individual hammers operated by means of a pinned cylinder as in a music box. On the hour, the chimes play one of two melodies, which may be changed at will. While not identified, these appear to be Tyrolean folk melodies. The largest of this set of bells is dissimilar to the other chimes, and may be the third bell described by Father Borghesi to signify the new moon. CHRONOGRAMS One of the most curious aspects of the second clock produced by Father Borghesi and Bertolla, as well as of the second published volume, is the presence of chronograms which occur repeatedly on the clock dial and throughout the _Novissimum Theorico-Practicum Astronomicum Authoma_ from the title page to the end of the book. Interestingly enough, Father Borghesi did not utilize this device even once in his first little book. [Illustration: Figure 18.--A CHRONOGRAM in the text of Father Borghesi's second volume, indicating the year 1764. The poem is translated as: "In the Mount of 'Anáuni,' the inscrutable heavens are led, You learn from these all the labors of the sun and the moon. Here you are shown and hear the conjunction of the moon: And a bell brings to the ears by its sound, all eclipses."] Webster defines a chronogram as an inscription, sentence, or phrase in which certain letters express a date or epoch. The method used by Father Borghesi for forming chronograms was a simple one. He used combinations of uppercase and lowercase letters in two sizes in the inscriptions on the clock dial and in his writings. At first this curious combination in the inscriptions on the dial plate was a source of considerable speculation. The extremely fine quality of the engraving and artistry was such that these combinations could only be deliberate in nature and not the accidental whims or accidents of the engraver. Accordingly, they must be chronographic in intention. Such proved to be the case. Borghesi used the larger size of uppercase letters to form the chronogram, and each chronogram was complete within a phrase or line. He accomplished this by using for this purpose those letters of the alphabet which form the Roman numerals. The uppercase letters found within words are copied off in the order in which they appear in the inscription or phrase. These are then converted into their numerical equivalents, and totaled. Taking the uppermost inscription on the clock dial as the first example: FranCIsCVs I sIt pLan. DoMInator aeternVs The letters which are intended to form the chronogram are: C I C V I I L D M I V 100 1 100 5 1 1 50 500 1000 1 5 These figures added together total 1764. The second inscription on the clock dial which forms a chronogram is LaVs saCrosanCtae TrIaDI VnI Deo, et DeIparae L V C C I D I V I D D I 50 5 100 100 1 500 1 5 1 500 500 1 = 1764. The third inscription required a little more planning, because of its greater length. Accordingly, Father Borghesi divided it into nine parts, each of which is separated from the other by means of asterisks. Each of the nine parts of the inscription formed a chronogram which, in every instance, totals to the date 1764, the year in which the second clock was completed. The same procedure was followed with the inscriptions in the lower left and the lower right corners of the dial as well as with the maker's inscription within the central disk. This inscription is BVrghesIo DoCtore, et BertoLLa LIMatore AnnanIensIbVs V I D C L L L I M I I V 5 1 500 100 50 50 50 1 1000 1 1 5 = 1764. The inscriptions within the chapter ring are not utilized for chronograms, however. It is apparent that Father Borghesi was required to make a most careful selection of the texts for his inscriptions in order that none of the phrases included any additional letters which formed Roman numerals than would total to the date he desired to indicate, namely, 1764. Where it was necessary, he employed an asterisk to separate parts of texts so that each would produce the same total. Any letter that did not form a Roman numeral, even if capitalized or used in a larger size, did not interfere with the formation of the chronograms. In spite of his ingenuity in designing a text which would include only such of the letters representing the Roman numerals which would provide the chronograms for 1764, Father Borghesi experienced some difficulties, particularly in place names. He accordingly changed them in order to avoid the inclusion of letters that would have disturbed his totals. Examples are MEGGL instead of MECHL, which had an extra C, and RVNNO instead of RVMO, which had an extra M. PUBLISHED DESCRIPTION OF THE SECOND CLOCK When the clock had been completed and proved to work successfully, Borghesi once more reduced a description of the clock and its function to published form in a second little volume published by Monauni. This second work was also in Latin, the title of which is translated as _The Most Recent Theoretical-Practical Astronomical Clock According to the Equally Most Recent System of the World_. As with his first book, Father Borghesi devoted a number of pages to a preface addressed to the reader, which is translated from the Latin: This mechanical instrument was far from being ready for public notice. A great deal of time and work remained to produce a machine of this new system from the very foundations; then, by a most accurate calculation to bring the motions of many wheels up-to-date with the most recent astronomical observations; and, finally, to fashion it with the craftsman's file, often enough with a weary hand. All this work I had performed eagerly, so that, while in my room, I might contemplate leisurely, both day and night, the true face of the heavens and the seas unobscured by clouds, even though I had no astronomical equipment. But, then I remembered that, in my book on the first clock, I had promised a description of a new (at least, as far as is known to me) clock. Moreover, friends with astronomical interest, who took part in the oft-repeated astronomical experiments concerning this clock, persuaded me that the intellectual world would enjoy having a greater knowledge and a description of this work. However, it was not only the promises nor the desires of many which moved me to write this work, but I also thought it was necessary to set forth, before the description of the clock, an exposition of the astronomical system according to which this clock was constructed, so that the complete work would be evident to all. I was concerned about making this timepiece more acceptable and more understandable to those people who are far distant and unable to see it, so that this present exposition would obtain credulity among all. I could find no better method than to set forth for the reader the theory of the universe which I figured out after many sleepless nights. In testing this theory day after day, it not only appeared to be complete, and true, but each day it appeared more conformable to reality; it captured my mind in such a way that I finally adhered to it. I desired, while I lived, to erect this work as a monument to the theory. To do this, I digressed a bit from the true-to-life pattern to the mechanical order so that I could transfer all the movements of the heavens, etc. (which I enjoyed thinking about more), to the plane surface of the clock's face. In this way, the ecliptical spectacles of the stars, etc., would appear at their proper times clearly before the eyes of the viewer. I could also avoid many difficulties which otherwise, perhaps, even the hands of the most skillful craftsmen could never solve. [Illustration: Figure 19.--MOVEMENT OF THE BORGHESI CLOCK, viewed from the rear, showing rear of dial plate.] [Illustration: Figure 20.--TITLE PAGE of Father Borghesi's second book. The translation in its entirety is: "The Most Recent Theoretical-Practical Astronomical Clock According to the Equally Most Recent System of the World. Author: Francesco Borghesi of Mechel of Anáuni * Priest of Trent, Doctor of Philosophy * (The System of the Clock) Ingeniously connected to new theoretical laws published 1764: and the constructor, Bartholomeo Antonio Bertolla of Rumo, similarly from Anáuni * who skillfully produced this work * in this same current year of Our Lord * which is the year 5713 [sic] since God created this earth. (Trent: From the Printshop of Giovanni Battista Monauni, With Permission of the Superiors.)" (_Title page reproduced by courtesy of the Biblioteca della Citta di Trento._)] You ought to know, therefore, that as a result of my nightly meditations, I have rejected, after much consideration, all the explanations of the universe thus far published. All other theories of the make-up of the universe, however admirable, and however many there are, turn the sun and earth around in an ecliptic in an annual movement. Thus, Philolaus was the first to move the earth from the center of the universe and move it through the void; afterwards, Aristarchus of Samos and then Copernicus moved the earth with the moon. The Egyptians, as well as Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Tycho, Riciolus, Longomontanus, etc., thought that the sun moved through the degrees of the ecliptic each year. But I attributed this movement to neither earth nor sun for the movement of both is only apparent. I did not vainly surmise the annual equilibrium in all astronomical observations to be from the daily movement of the same axis moved at the poles of the heavens. Nor, in like manner, is there a better way to satisfy physical experiments. To you, then, most cultured reader: If you, perhaps, can make any use or draw pleasure from this most faithful description of my new theory and the mechanical instrument, refer it first to God on High from whom is everything that is best, and then to those avidly awaiting this little work. Lastly, if you find any statement less fitting; in your humanity, do not disdain to excuse it. Borghesian Theory of the Universe In Father Borghesi's second volume, there is a separate chapter entitled "An Exposition of the Latest Theory of the Universe." This follows the introduction to the reader, and in it Father Borghesi proposed: That you might rightly conceive my new system of the world and mechanically, as it were, construct it, imagine for yourself, beneath that most happy seat of the Blessed and above all other heavens, a kind of spherical convexity, everywhere equidistant from the center of the earth, and endowed with absolutely no motion. On the inside, at two points diametrically opposite each other, this convexity has two most sturdy poles (to speak mechanically), projecting towards the center (which you call the poles of the heavens), and the largest immobile semicircle, in some manner is drawn from the center of one pole to the center of the other. This semicircle in the middle, namely at a point equidistant from each pole, is thought to be secured by some sign, for example, by that "o," for arranging more perceptibly the seat of the sun (as will be shown later). This much must be conceived first. You must understand that imposed on these poles is the first mobile [Primum Mobile], everywhere convex, and divided, into 12 equal parts [Dodecatemoria], by the 6 greatest circles, intersecting each other at the centers of the poles. Then it is divided by another equally great circle, everywhere equidistant from the poles, into two hemispheres. One hemisphere of 12 parts, proceeding in order from west [setting] to east [rising] should be assigned the respective signs of the zodiac; that is, one to Aries, the next to Taurus, and so on, etc. The circle which cuts those 12 parts transversely in the middle, you call the ecliptic. Then, these capital spaces of the Primum Mobile are subdivided by degrees, minutes, etc., both in longitude and in latitude, so that this heaven represents a kind of great spherical net, extended to capture the longitude and latitude of the stars, and Mobile on the aforementioned poles. Note, however (and this is almost the leading point of the system), in that circle of longitude which divides the sign of Gemini from Cancer and Arcitenens [Sagittarius] from Capricorn, you must conceive two points, directly opposite each other and removed about twenty-three and a half degrees from the poles: Boreal [the northern] between Gemini and Cancer; Austral [the southern] between Sagittarius and Capricorn. These two points by some power (imagine it is magnetic power), equal between them, hold the terraqueous orb suspended in the middle, by acting on the axis of the same orb (imagine it is iron) in such a way that the earth is continually drawn to those two points as to two opposite centers. It is never nearer to one, for as it is about to move towards one, the opposite power is constantly drawing it back. Thus, both those points and the axis of the earth are always held in one common line, wherever those points happen to be carried by the rotation of this heaven. Again, it is necessary for you to conceive in this heaven, first, two great circles, bisecting each other at right angles in the centers of these two magnets. One of these circles, passing through the first point of Aries and Libra in the ecliptic, is called equinoctial colure: the other circle, passing consequently between the first point of Cancer and Capricorn, is called solstitial colure. Beneath these are likewise imagined many other great circles, in the centers of the magnets dividing crosswise in the shape of an "X." But if, receding from these magnets, you describe circles (parallel to each other and ever greater and greater, up to the greatest circle which you will perceive is called the equator), equidistant from each magnet and obliquely splitting the ecliptic in the equinoctial colure, you can then behold a great, new, woven net in this heaven of the Primum Mobile. This net most beautifully expands to extract the straight ascent and descent of the stars, etc., from the vast ocean of the heavens, catching the straight ascent in the greatest circles and, in other unequal circles, parallel to each other and obliquely cutting across, most safely catching the descent. Immediately below the Primum Mobile place the heaven of the fixed stars (and, that the idea might be clearer), revolving separately on the same poles on which the Primum Mobile revolves. Through this heaven, the filaments of the little nets, etc., seem to the eyes of you on earth as if they shine. In this heaven, you should conceive in their fixed places, the fixed stars, a proportionate, inviolable distance from each other, and, indeed, if you will, the heavenly images, etc., depicted, and all carried along at the same time with their heaven by one motion. Conceive a straight line running from the center of the earth to that sign "o" noted in the semicircle of the supreme immobile heaven. On this line, greatly below the heaven of the fixed stars, place the center of the solar epicycle, holding an area in common with the ecliptic and subject to absolutely no motions, but at such a distance from the center of the earth that the semidiameter of the earth has little, if any, proportion with the distance of the solar epicycle from the earth. Around the sun, moving continually in this epicycle (its immobile palace) through the degrees of the anomaly, you can revolve, with motions proportionate to the system, the five planets: Mercury and Venus (the nearest barons of the sun), then Mars, Jupiter and, most remote, Saturn, with its respective satellites, etc., eccentrically surrounding the earth itself and the moon in their immense ambit and wandering by their proper motions through the zodiac. Nevertheless, not far from the earth you should imagine fabricated, as from most refined crystal, the heaven of the moon everywhere equidistant from the center of the earth and revolving separately on the same poles (prolonged even to this place) on which the Primum Mobile and the heaven of the fixed stars revolve. In the middle of this, that is, in some point equally removed from the poles, you place the center of the lunar epicycle, movable also by the common rotation of the lunar heaven. I refrain from the other movements of the moon in latitude, etc., as also those of the five planets, etc., which the theory in no way excludes, lest by a variety of congested motions explained too abundantly, either you might be confused about the fundamental concept of the system or, while adorning the theory and trying to embellish the least things more widely, you might reject also the things which are capital. Here you already have the whole machine, but still inert and to be animated for the first time by motions accommodated to the system. Nevertheless, before I assign motion to the individual parts of the world, so that the thing might later appear more clearly to you, I arrange all things thus: first, as if by hand, I turn the Primum Mobile until the Boreal magnetic point comes to the level or the area of the semicircle described in the supreme immobile convexity; then I turn the heaven of the fixed stars until, for example, the heel of Castor (a star of the third magnitude), almost in the ecliptic and indeed in our time not far distant from the solstitial colure, likewise falls nearly at the level of the aforesaid semicircle. Later, I turn the lunar heaven until I bring the center of the lunar epicycle to the same level. Then, I turn the earth until some predetermined city, for example, Trent, situated in the northern zone with a latitude of about forty-six degrees, is brought to the oft-mentioned level. From things arranged in this way and from what has gone before, it is evident (with the motions of the luminaries in epicycles left out, however, lest you be distracted by the explanation) that at Trent, just as in the whole northern hemisphere, it is the summer solstice; and, conversely, in the southern hemisphere, it is the winter solstice. The reason is because the northern magnetic point together with the northern half of the earthly axis is at its highest point towards the sun, immovably residing in a line sent through the level of the highest semicircle; and, conversely, the southern magnetic point with the corresponding half of the axis is most removed from the same. It further follows, that noonday and the new moon coincide, and the heel of Castor almost reaches the summit, etc. Now, beginning from this hypothetical situation of the whole world as from the root of the motions, I move all things in their circles so that the earth turns on its axis with a revolving motion from west to east in each 24 hours of median time. The lunar heaven completes one circle around its poles likewise from west to east in the time of 29 terrestrial revolutions, hours 12.44.3.13.1. The sphere of the fixed stars on the same poles revolves once from east to west within 365 revolutions of the earth, hours 6.9.29.1. The Primum Mobile on the poles (common to the heaven of the fixed stars and the heaven of the moon), is moved once in the same way from east to west, a little faster, however, than the heaven of the fixed stars, yet within 365 revolutions of the earth, hours 5.48.56; that is, within a median astronomical year. Now, behold for yourself a new world supported on new poles and provided with new motions and laws. Now you, reader and lover of the stars, turn it, and revolve it as long as it pleases you, and compare it astronomically and physically with the Copernican or the Tychonian systems or with whatever one pleases you more, and judge which one seems more consonant with nature when all things are examined. But if you aren't able to reconcile this theory with some astronomical observations or physical experiments and think it should be eliminated from the group of theories, see that I might know this while life is still my companion, so that I might think with you, if this is possible. Also, so that, in gratitude for the detected or perhaps hidden error, I might speak or write, and you won't have to shout in vain in bold ridicule and with no applause after the fleeing shades of the dead and the mute ashes. But, if you object that the daily motion of the revolving earth and the annual motion of its whirling axis do not sufficiently agree with certain texts of Sacred Scripture, and if those things which the Copernicans and the Longomontanists say do not convince you, then reject my whole system as an old wives' tale. * * * * * GLOSSARY ANOMOLIA or anomaly, is the angular distance of a planet from its perihelion (that point of the orbit of a planet which is nearest to the sun) as seen from the sun. AEQUINOCTIUM or the equinox, is the time in which days and nights are equal in the space of hours. There are two equinoxes: the spring equinox--c. 8 calends of April in the sign of Aries; and the fall equinox--c. 10 calends of October in the sign of Libra. AERAS is derived from _aera_, _aerae_, which originally meant a given number, usually used in regard to money. The word was later extended to mean a number used in any calculation, and finally it came to mean a certain time from which subsequent times were counted, e.g., _Anno Domini_, after the Birth of Christ. COLURI or the Colures, which are two circles in the heavenly sphere, passing through the poles of the world and cutting each other at right angles: the one passes through the equinoctial points of Aries and Libra and is called _Colurus Aequinoctiorum_ or equinoctial colure; the other touches the _solstitialia_ of Cancer and Capricorn and is called _Colurus Solstitiorum_ or solstitial colure. They are called _Colurus_, which is translated as "mutilated tails," for the part which emerges in the Antarctic is not visible and is quasitruncated. ECLIPTICA or the ecliptic, is an imaginary line in the heavens in which the sun was supposed to have performed its annual course. EPICYCLUS or epicycle, is a small orb which, being fixed in the deferent of a planet, is carried along with its motion and yet, with its own peculiar motion, carries the body of the planet fastened to it round about its proper center. IRIS or the rainbow. In mythology, Iris was the daughter of Thaumatis and Electra, messenger of Juno of the goddesses and Jove of the gods. SOLSTITIUM or the solstice, is that time when the sun seems to stand still for a short time: when the sign of Cancer enters the month of June (equivalent to the summer solstice, when the sun begins to recede from us); and when the sign of Capricorn enters the month of December (equivalent to the winter solstice, when the sun begins to accede to us). * * * * * Last Years There is a break in the story of Borghesi and Bertolla for the next five years. The second clock may have been the last project on which the priest and the clockmaker worked together, for very good reasons. The two clocks must have represented a considerable financial investment in materials and in time, and neither of the men was in sufficiently affluent circumstances to undertake the luxury of such a hobby without some form of recompense. The publication of the two little volumes must have also been done at Father Borghesi's expense. The income of the parish priest in a small mountain village could not have been equal to the relatively great costs of the projects that had been completed. It seems probable that the priest attempted to sell his clocks to a wealthy patron, perhaps the Baron of Cles, or he may have attempted to obtain some form of recompense for the continuation of his research. However, no records can be found of such patronage if it existed. If Borghesi had received financial assistance while the projects were in progress, he would certainly have made adequate mention of the patron's name and assistance in one or the other of the two volumes which he published.[17] The next record relating to Borghesi which has been found is the description of a letter written by an anonymous mathematician late in 1768 or early in 1769. It was 28 pages in length, written in Latin, in the form of a reply to the writer's brother, on the subject of the clock invented by Borghesi. It consisted primarily of a criticism launched against Borghesi's first little volume published in 1763. The anonymous letter is without date, place, or signature. This writer claimed that Father Borghesi had made many errors in his book, presumably in the description of the clock's functions, and in the basic theories upon which the priest had predicated his research. No complete copy of the letter's text has been found for study, although it is described at length in Tovazzi's _Biblioteca Tirolese_. Tovazzi noted that four copies of the letter existed at that time, and that he personally had filed one in the Biblioteca di Cles in Trent. However, every attempt to locate a copy at the present time has been unsuccessful. If the anonymous letter was brought to the attention of Father Borghesi, it must have introduced a disturbing note into his life and cost the priest many unhappy moments. He was not, however, dissuaded from his preoccupation with horology. Several years later, in 1773, Father Borghesi was working on yet another astronomical clock, this time presumably without the assistance of Bertolla. This third clock was reported by Tovazzi to have been "of minimum expense but of maximum ingenuity." No subsequent information relating to it has come to light, and there is no record that it was actually completed. Again there is a period of silence in the life of Father Borghesi which no amount of research has yet been able to pierce. Whatever the circumstances may have been, it is reported by several of the sources noted that both the first and the second clock did, in fact, become the property of the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna. The presentation was made sometime during the period between the completion of the second clock in 1764 and the year 1780. There is some discrepancy in the contemporary accounts as to whether Father Borghesi presented one or two clocks to the Empress, but all the sources with but one exception record that both clocks were acquired by the Empress. It is doubtful that Father Borghesi had originally intended to give his clocks to the Empress at the time that they were made, for he would most certainly have made some mention of such an intention in the two little volumes which he published about them. If he saw the letter published by the anonymous mathematician in late 1768 or 1769, it is possible that he decided to make the presentation in expiation of his sense of guilt for the amount of his time which the creation of the timepieces had consumed. On the other hand, it is just as possible that Father Borghesi may have forwarded copies of his two little volumes to the Imperial Court at Vienna, and that the Empress expressed a desire to acquire the clocks. Father Tovazzi states that in 1780 "the clock invented by him [Borghesi] was preserved in Vienna, Austria, at the Imperial Court from which the inventor was receiving an annual pension of 400 florins." No records in the Palace archives relating to the clock have yet been found, nor records of payment of an annuity to Father Borghesi. However, a more exhaustive investigation of the Furniture Depository of the Imperial Court may bring forth related records. It was the implication in Father Tovazzi's account that the second clock had been presented to the Empress prior to the publication of the anonymous, critical letter in 1768 or 1769. He believed that it was envy of Father Borghesi's ingenuity, fame and financial benefit that had caused the anonymous mathematician to publish his letter, for Tovazzi asked "Who would have encountered opposition to such a marvel? Envy is not yet dead, and has always reigned." This last-mentioned theory about the presentation may be the most likely one. Some evidence may be found in the second clock itself which bears out this assumption. The multiple chapter ring, with its many inscriptions, is engraved and silvered in a relatively crude manner, presumably by Bertolla himself. The main dial plate, however, which is of gilt brass, is engraved with the utmost skill by one of the great masters of the art. The inscription below the Imperial Hapsburg eagle relates to Francis I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It is entirely possible that although Father Borghesi originally had no intention of giving the clock to the Emperor or the Empress at the time that it was made, he later changed his mind. Accordingly, he may have commissioned a master engraver, possibly in Trent or in Vienna itself, to produce a dial plate which would be of such a quality as to be worthy of the Emperor himself. If so, this was done shortly after the clock was completed, for the Emperor died in August of the following year. Perhaps by the time that the clock was ready, the Emperor had already died, and Father Borghesi gave the clock instead to Maria Theresa without revising the inscription. The acceptance of the clocks by the Empress, and the annuity which was his reward, would have constituted considerable honor even for one of the foremost clockmakers of the Empire, but for a humble parish priest in a little village, such notable Imperial recognition was overwhelming. Possibly as a result of it, a change was noted in Father Borghesi in the next few years. His conscience began to bother him, and he began to question whether he had done right in spending so much of his time and thought on his horological research. He became more and more confused in his own mind. Had he spent too much time in mechanical studies to the neglect of his ecclesiastical duties? If this had been the case, he had committed the most grievous sin. Exaggerated though these thoughts may appear, they were undoubtedly of the most critical importance to the middle-aged priest. His mental turbulence and confusion increased daily, and it soon became apparent to others around him. By June 1779, he was completely in the grip of his obsession, and his parishioners began to whisper amongst themselves that their pastor was being tortured by the devil. They were unable to help him, and he became more and more preoccupied with his problem. The years passed slowly as the pastor became more vague and more tortured by his conscience.[18] There probably was continued contact between Father Borghesi and Bertolla for at least some time after the development of his illness. Bertolla had retired from active work, but continued to pursue his interests in his clockshop as much as his health and advanced years permitted. A clock which he made at the age of 80 survives and is described and illustrated in the following section on "The Clocks of Bartolomeo Antonio Bertolla." Finally, on January 15, 1789, Bertolla passed away and Father Borghesi was left alone, deprived of the companionship he had enjoyed with the older man for the past two or three decades. One of Bertolla's nephews continued to work in the master clockmaker's workshop, but there did not appear to be any association between the younger man and Father Borghesi. At last, in 1794, Father Borghesi lost his sanity completely, and he was forced to relinquish his pastoral duties to a curate. For the remaining eight years of his life, he continued to live in the rectory of the little parish church in Mechel where most of his life had been spent, his needs undoubtedly attended by the parishioners he could no longer serve. During this period, until his death at the age of 79 on June 12, 1802, Father Borghesi lived on, oblivious of those around him. Seemingly, he retired to another world; perhaps to that universe which he had tried to reproduce in his second clock. The Clocks of Bartolomeo Antonio Bertolla The ingenuity displayed in the Borghesi clock by its constructor, Bartolomeo Antonio Bertolla, requires a consideration of the other examples of his work that have survived. The most important of his clocks are probably the one in the Episcopal Palace at Trent and another made for the Baron of Cles. The one which survives in the Episcopal Palace to the present time, is extremely tall and is housed in an elaborately decorated narrow case of black or ebonized wood approximately 9 to 10 feet in height. The upper part of the case is decorated with elaborately carved and gilt rococo motifs. The movement operates for one year at a winding, indicates and strikes the hours, and shows the lunar phases. It has an alarm, and will repeat the strike at will, indicating the number of the past hour and the quarters. The gilt brass dial is decorated with silver-foliated scrollwork in relief at the corners, inside the chapter ring, and within the broken arch. Featured above the chapter ring is the coat of arms, executed in silver, of the patron for whom the clock was made, Cristoforo Sizzo di Noris. Di Noris was Bishop of Trent for 13 years, from 1763 to 1776. The clock which Bertolla made for the Baron of Cles is a tall, narrow, case clock of ebony or ebonized pearwood which is approximately 9-1/2 feet in height. The decoration of the case is considerably more conservative than the one made for Di Noris, but the black wood is decorated with silver trim and carved designs in the wood itself. The dial is decorated with silver scrollwork and spandrels within and around a raised chapter ring. The clock operates for one month at each winding, has an alarm, indicates and strikes the hours, and will repeat the quarters. This handsome timepiece is still in the possession of the descendants of the Baron of Cles. [Illustration: Figure 21.--TALL-CASE CLOCK BY BERTOLLA in the Episcopal Palace in Trent, made for Bishop Cristoforo Sizzo di Noris. A striking and repeating clock with lunar phases. (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] [Illustration: Figure 22.--INTERIOR OF BERTOLLA'S WORKSHOP, showing detail of ceiling. (_Courtesy Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] [Illustration: Figure 23.--INTERIOR OF BERTOLLA'S WORKSHOP, showing the main workbench and the collection of clockmakers' tools. (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] [Illustration: Figure 24.--FUSEE CUTTER used by Bertolla. Now in the collection of the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan.] [Illustration: Figure 25.--INTERIOR OF BERTOLLA'S WORKSHOP, showing details of paneling and floor case with Bertolla manuscripts. (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] According to Pippa,[19] certain characteristics become apparent in a study of the surviving clocks by Bertolla. The tall-case clocks are narrow and range in height from 7-3/4 feet to 10-1/2 feet. The cases had this excessive height in order to obtain the greatest fall for the month and year movements which Bertolla constructed. For the weight assembly, he substituted a drum wound with a key at the point of the driving wheel in place of the customary pulley. The addition of an intermediate wheel augmented the drop of the weight. Bertolla's movements were solidly constructed from well-hammered brass and iron. He favored the recoil anchor escapement in his clocks and the Graham dead-beat anchor escapement with a seconds' pendulum. The escapement was not always placed in the traditional location in the upper center between the plates. Bertolla occasionally displaced the pendulum to one side, to the lower part of the movement or placed it entirely between two other small plates.[20] He utilized every type of striking work, including the music-box cylinder common in the clocks of the Black Forest and the rack and snail. Bertolla most frequently employed the hour strike and _grand sonnerie_. He often used a single hammer on two bells of different sound with the rack and snail. An example of this type is the clock he produced at the age of 80. To achieve the necessary axis of rotation for the hammer, which is perpendicular to the plate when it strikes the hours, it moves to an oblique position and displaces one of the two long pins in an elongated opening. Bertolla's dial plates were generally well executed, with a raised or separate chapter ring applied to a brass or copper plate, such as a copper-plate _repoussé_ and gilt with baroque motifs, or upon a smooth brass plate with spandrels of _repoussé_ work usually of silver, in relief and attached. The engraving of the chapter rings was excellent. The hands were well executed in steel or perforated bronze, and occasionally of _repoussé_ copper; gilt was applied to the hands made of forged steel. [Illustration: Figure 26.--DIAL PLATE of a brass lantern clock made by Bertolla, found in his workshop after his death. (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] In the course of time, Bertolla's home workshop passed from one generation to another within the family. Inevitably, it underwent many modifications until the only original part of the building that remained intact from Bertolla's time was his clockshop. [Illustration: Figure 27.--MOVEMENT of a brass lantern clock made by Bertolla. (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] Within the last few years, the workshop room was acquired complete with contents from Bertolla's descendants, and installed in the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica in Milan as an exhibit of a typical 18th-century clockmaker's shop. The original workshop was dismantled in Mocenigo di Rumo and completely rebuilt in the museum, including the walls, ceiling and floor. The paneling and woodwork of the walls and ceiling, which have been preserved intact, are hand-cut fir, with columns, trim and moldings carved by hand. A small painting is featured in the center of the coffered ceiling. The original shop benches and chests of drawers are set around the reconstructed shop and Bertolla's tools and equipment laid out as they had been originally. Other clockmaker's tools and equipment in the museum's collection are also displayed. Approximately 40 percent of the tools are the original items from Bertolla's shop. Parts of clocks and works in progress are on view on the benches as they were in Bertolla's time.[21] Also preserved in the museum are sketches found in Bertolla's manuscripts, some of which are reproduced on the following pages. [Illustration: Figure 28.--DETAIL OF WALL of Bertolla's workshop, with regulatory clock made by his nephew, Alessandro Bertolla of Venice. Note wheel layouts, etc., scribed in the paneling. (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] [Illustration: Figure 29.--TABLE CLOCK BY BERTOLLA in the collection of Doctor Vittorio dal Lago of Bergamo. The dial indicates the days of the week and of the month, the names of the months and lunar phases. The clock strikes the hours and quarters and repeats. (_Courtesy of Sig. Luigi Pippa of Milan._)] The shop contains two completed clocks made by Bertolla. One is a weight-driven lantern clock typical of the 18th century, Italian style with brass dial, plates and posts, anchor escapement, and striking work. The dial is engraved in the usual style of Bertolla's baroque design, and the hands are of pierced bronze. Another clock associated with Bertolla and found in the shop, was made by his nephew, Alessandro Bertolla, who worked in Venice after his apprenticeship with his uncle had been completed. This clock is a regulator with a seconds' pendulum and sweep hand on an enameled dial. The original case has not survived. [Illustration: Figure 30.--LAYOUT OF THE WHEELWORK of a clock made by Bertolla for His Excellency Paulo Dona, inscribed "Design No. 1." (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] [Illustration: Figure 31.--PENDULUM ARRANGEMENT SKETCH for an unidentified clock found in Bertolla's workshop. (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] [Illustration: Figure 32.--STRIKING CLOCK SKETCH found in Bertolla's manuscripts. (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] [Illustration: Figure 33.--FIFTEEN-DAY STRIKING CLOCK SKETCH, inscribed "Design No. 3," found in Bertolla's workshop. (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] [Illustration: Figure 34.--DIAL PLATE of a brass lantern clock made by Bertolla at the age of 80. (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] [Illustration: Figure 35.--MOVEMENT of brass lantern clock produced by Bertolla at the age of 80, showing details of movement and double bell. (_Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milan._)] One of the most interesting of Bertolla's clocks, and probably the last one which he produced, was found in his workshop. This timepiece indicates the hours, minutes and quarters by means of a single hand or index. The weight-driven clock strikes the hours and quarters on two bells with a single hammer. The chapter ring, which is soldered to the dial plate, is marked for the minutes on the outer rim and for the four quarters inside it. Over the center of it, is a semicircular opening in the dial plate through which is visible a revolving disk attached behind the dial plate. This disk is marked with the hours and revolves from right to left, the current hour being indicated by a projection from the minute ring. The brass dial plate is engraved with simple floral designs in the corners and around the broken arch. There is no comparison between this crude and simple decoration and the extremely fine quality of the engraving on the dial plate of the Borghesi clock, for instance. In the center of the dial plate is engraved the following: "Questo orologio l'ideai e lo feci nella mia avanzata età d'anni 80. Bart^{o} Ant^{o} Bertolla" (I designed and made this clock at my advanced age of 80 years. Bartolomeo Antonio Bertolla.) * * * * * FOOTNOTES [1] BORGHESI, _Novissimum Theorico-Practicum Astronomicum Authoma Juxta Pariter Novissimum Mundi Systema..._, pp. 8-9. [2] WENHAM, "Tall Case Clocks," p. 33. [3] VON BERTELE, "The Development of Equation Clocks," parts 1 through 5. [4] ENGELMANN, _Philipp Matthäus Hahn_; VISCHER, _Beschreibung mechanischer Kunstwerke..._. [5] LLOYD, _Some Outstanding Clocks Over Seven Hundred Years, 1250-1950_, pp. 116, 118, 120. [6] SAN CAJETANO, _Praktische Anleitung für Künstler..._. [7] FRANCH, _La Valle di Non_. [8] BONOMI, _Naturalisti, Medici e Tecnici Trentini_, p. 16 [9] AMBROSI, _Scrittori ed Artisti Trentini_, pp. 132, 525. [10] Ibid. [11] PIPPA, "Antonio Bartolomeo Bertolla," pp. 22-23. [12] Ibid., p. 22. [13] Ibid., p. 23. [14] The abbreviation in the inscription "pLan" is difficult to interpret. According to Father F. X. Winters, S.J., it may represent "sit planetis" or "sit planetarum." The use of an abbreviation was necessary to prevent the addition of another letter I or M, which would have disturbed the formation of the chronogram desired. Literally, "sit planetis" means "May he be eternal ruler _by_ [or _through_] favor of the planets," while "sit planetarum" is to be translated "May he be eternal ruler _of_ the planets." Father Winters considered both versions somewhat overexaggerated and proposed that the best translation might be "Long Live Francis I, Emperor." [15] The word "Tempe" refers to the Vale of Tempe, in Thessaly, through which the Peneus River flows. It is between Mounts Olympus and Ossa, and is situated between the town of Larissa and the sea. In mythology, it is told that these mounts were originally joined and Hercules separated them to allow the river to pass between them. The word "Tempe" is also used to mean any pleasant place. Thus, the inscription "Tempe indesinenter clausa, Scaturigo signata" is literally translated "Tempe always closed, A fount of water sealed up" or, freely translated, as "A garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up." [16] "Phoebi" or Phoebus, called Apollo, the sun god; Phoebes or Diana, the moon goddess, sister of Apollo. [17] PIPPA, op. cit. (footnote 11), pp. 23-25. [18] PERINI, _Statistica del Trentino, Biblioteca Communale del Trentino_, vol. 2, p. 57 (cons. 6, carta 9); TOVAZZI, _Biblioteca Tirolese_, pp. 406-407. [19] PIPPA, op. cit. (footnote 11), pp. 24-25. [20] PIAMONTE, _La Nauna Descritta al Viaggiattore_. [21] ESPOSTI, "La Sala 'Innocente Binda' al Museo della Scienza e della Tecnica di Milano," pp. 18-21. Appendix SYNOPSIS OF THE COMPLETE MECHANICAL WORKS OF THE FIRST CLOCK [Translated from the section entitled "Synopsis Totius Operis Mechanici" in Francesco Borghesi's first book _Novissima Ac Perpetua Astronomica Ephemeris Authomatica Theorico-Practica..._.] I Of three movable indices, the farthest from the center of the dial is fitted with an index on either side and marked with four segments of a circle. Immediately below are five numbers, divided into the days of setting the measure of the mean-synodic age of the moon, and into signs, degrees of the signs, and of the distance of the moon from the sun. These, in each revolution, revolve once around the solar disk superimposed on the mean synodic-lunar disk, and also around the lunar disk. The upper indices, meanwhile, in the two external greatest orbits, measure the time continuously, in the accustomed manner of the Germans--the middle index measuring by hours and the uppermost by the first minutes [of hours]. II Inside these three circles, perpendicular above their center, is a small index of the seconds of minutes. At each first minute of time, being the fastest of all, it describes the smallest orbit. Next to this are two other slightly larger circles divided into 30 degrees, one [rotating?] from the right, the other from the left. These two indices are arranged in such a fashion that the one rotating from the observer's left completes its period 12 times during one, mean, solar-astronomical year. The one [rotating] from the right likewise completes its cycle 12 times during the period of one mean-synodic moon. In between these, there is placed another small sphere, divided into 40 arbitrary parts, whose dial does not move automatically, but is moved by hand for speeding up or slowing down the course of the time, or of the perpendicular. III Diagonally from the sides of the center of the three larger indices, six other indices revolve: three on the left from one center, and three on the right from another. The uppermost of the three which are on the right of the observer [and which are] decorated with a small disk of the sun, runs its cycle once during a mean solar-astronomical year. The second measures the distance of the sun from its apogee. The third revolves 12 times, with each lunar revolution from one node to the same [repeated] node. Under the point of the uppermost index, first lie the months of the year which are inscribed, and the days of each month, but having only 28 days assigned to February; then the signs of the zodiac, and their several degrees. The circle corresponding to the middle index, extending through the first semicircle from apogee to the lower perigee and returning through the second semicircle to the upper locations of apogee, shows the true equation or eccentricity of the sun, joined with the little equation of the moon in syzygy. [These equations are] measured by geometric-astronomic proportion for each distance of the sun from its apogee or perigee in degrees, and in sufficiently small parts of degrees, with the title added above in their proper places, whether an addition is to be made to the mean location of the sun or a subtraction from the same, so that the true longitude of the sun may be calculated. Three circles are assigned to the lowest index, of which 30 degrees of distance of the moon from its nodes comprise the larger. The middle circle is based on the hypothesis of the mean invariable diameters (that is, of the sun, the moon, and the terrestrial shadow), and is divided into hours and quarters of duration. The last circle is divided by the trigonometric laws into the inches of magnitude of lunar eclipses. Lying between these circles, there is another eccentric circle (black with a spot) exhibiting the shadow of the earth, in which the little moon sinks itself, carried by the lowest index. In any ecliptic full moons, the patent number of inches of immersion somehow affects the minds of the cultured, but also the scheme of maximum obscuration affects the eyes of the illiterate themselves. IV Of the three indices which revolve from the left, the uppermost completes its cycle within 12 hours, just as the hour index. The middle one with two pointers on diametrically opposite sides, carries the marks of conjunction and opposition of the luminous bodies, with a movement equal to the course of the sun from lunar apogee or perigee. The lowest index, fitted with a single pointer, indicates the motion of the moon from its apogee or perigee. Under these three indices, there is situated a common circle, divided into 12 parts, each of which are further divided into 30 parts through its outer circumference. I have said a common circle, for, with respect to the first index, the division represents 12 hours, and the double subdivision representing the double set of minutes of the hours serves for an excitator for anytime at all, at will. For as often as the little index reaches the twelfth hour, first being moved by hand wherever you prefer, a little hammer strikes the little bell many times. But if you observe the second or the third index, the first division provides the signs, and the subdivision of the signs gives the individual degrees of the distance of the sun from the lunar apogee, or of the moon from its apogee, respectively. To this is added two other interior circles from the same center: to the larger is inserted the equation of the center of the moon in its conjunctions and oppositions; and on the smaller the equation of the same moon in its quarters, astronomically-geometrically proportioned to the distance of the moon from its apogee or perigee. In the first case, the equation is to be subtracted from the mean longitude of the moon, descending from apogee to perigee; in the second case, to be added to the mean longitude of the moon ascending from perigee to apogee; and, in the third semicircle of the index, as the rubric directs, common to both equations, added around the center. V Perpendicularly under the center of the machine, two other indices are carried about one and the same center. The one nearer to the observer--bearing in one of two points diametrically opposite the small disk of the sun, in the other the disk of the moon--runs a course equal to the motion of the sun from the head or the tail of the dragon (_Draco_). The other, of simple construction, marked with a small moon, signifies in like manner the motion of the moon from the head or the tail of the dragon. Immediately below, there is a larger circle, common [referring] to both these indices, which is divided into 12 parts. Each of these parts in turn, in the outer periphery, is subdivided further into 30 parts, which are the 12 signs of the zodiac and the individual degrees of the signs of distance of the sun and the moon from the head of the dragon. In the second circle is read the latitude of the moon, measured by degrees, etc., on a trigonometric scale, by signs and degrees of distance of the moon from its nodes, that is, from the head or tail of the dragon. When the second index is descending from the head of the dragon to the tail, the latitude will be to the north of the solar path; that is, the ecliptic. On the other hand, it will be south of the ecliptic when the same index is returning upward from the tail to the head of the dragon as advised by the title inscribed on the third circle. Finally, on the fourth and last circle are seen more prime minutes of the circle for reducing the orbit of the moon to the ecliptic. That the true longitude of the moon may be obtained more accurately, these must be subtracted from the longitude of the moon already calculated in the first and third quadrant of the circle of the second index. On the other hand, they are to be added to the same in the second and fourth quadrant, as is noted in their respective places, according to the theory of right ascensions. Here, then, [you have] as finally completed, delineation of the great index which was partially described before in this book. From two points of that index which perpendicularly correspond to the center of these circles, a pair of compasses, by an unvaried aperture up to the circumference of the first larger circle, has marked off four segments of a circle. The two larger segments, equal among themselves, in one aperture refer to the sun, and the two smaller in the other, likewise equal, refer to the moon. The one pointer is for determining the solar eclipses; the other, for lunar. Both segments of each division, like little wings of the index, stretch to the extent of the degree of distance of the moon from its nodes, and to which that determined latitude corresponds. On one side, that latitude precisely equals the radii of the earth, the sun, and the moon, as the termini of solar eclipses; and, on the other side, precisely equals the radii of the earth's shadow and of the moon, as the confines of lunar eclipses. The apexes of the last index, diametrically limited [opposite], indicate the age of the moon, and its mean distance from the sun; one pointer, upon which the sun sits, measuring the mean days and degrees from the full moon; the other, on which the moon sits, measuring the mean days and degrees from the new moon. VI Besides the larger and smaller indices already mentioned, all [of which] revolve within the periphery of the three largest circles, six dials in this clock also revolve within the same circles which are to be seen through six openings of the frontispiece. The first of these, intended to indicate the phases of the moon by an unusual method (completely black, and decorated with the characters of the principal aspects of the moon) continually revolves interiorly around the center of the machine and at the new moon, it completely removes from sight the face of the moon through the round window. It continually recedes through the first half of the circle until, at the time of the full moon, it restores the moon, looking out with a full star. Soon again, too slow to be observed, it returns through the other half of the circle, so that in the next conjunction, the whole face of the moon may have a covering of darkness, once again to be removed. The other dials are moved by spontaneous advances at stated times. The first of these shows, through a square opening, the day of the month; the second, through another opening, shows the current day of the week with the characters of the seven planets which, according to ancient superstition, preside over each day of the week (now, by a truer form of religion divided by the Church into ferias, etc.); that is, the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn, to which I have added the numbers of the ferias. These two little dials are advanced daily, by a sudden movement at midnight. The remaining three are changed automatically only once a year on the first of January. The first of these dials contains five little cells, opening from a common window: in the first cell, at the edge of the dial, is found the dominical letter; in the second, the cycle of the sun; in the third, the character; in the fourth, the sign; and, in the fifth, the house of the planet dominating the year. The second dial shows the epacts, with the golden number. The third, and last of all, shows the Roman cycle. Finally, as indicated by the epact and the dominical letter in an immovable table added outside, are the feastdays and other movable events of the year; that is, Easter, the four seasons, the Rogation Days, etc. VII But lest the various movements of the indices and the various beginnings of the divisions tend to cause some fatigue, the precaution has been taken, that all the indices by common law are moved from the top towards the right of the observer, and from thence all the arithmetic divisions of the circles take their beginning. And lest the multitude of different figures should deceive the eye, the larger divisions of the circles have been marked by Roman numbers, that is, by capital letters of the alphabet; others, in other places, by differently colored numbers. Thus, the movements of the indices, the distribution of the circles and the multitude of numbers not only do not disturb the eyes and the mind, but rather marvelously delight them. VIII After having completed briefly the description of the dial and the indices and their motions, I have not without reason delayed in satisfying the desires of many who wish to learn at least the method by which, from this mechanism, may be calculated the true times of new and full moons, and their ecliptics. In order to make these matters clearer, it is necessary that they be explained here at greater length. With the indices, then, adjusted astronomically-geographically to the longitude of any given region, and to the mean time whether past, present or future, and assuming the clock to be in normal operation (as at present it has been for a whole year and more), then the moon will be in conjunction with the sun in the heavens. When the equations on the mechanism are examined, the sun and moon shall be found to be in the same degree of longitude, and in the same part of a degree. There will also be an ecliptic new moon that is in conjunction with a solar eclipse, or rather with a terrestrial eclipse. This will occur if, at that time, both apexes of the first index, located below the center of the clock, are hidden by the two segments of the circle extending from the center of the mechanism through the lowest index. And the eclipse will be greater and greater and, consequently, visible in more regions of the earth, the more deeply the two pointers, indicating the distance of the sun from its apogee, are hidden in the center of the segments. But whether the eclipse takes place in the head or in the tail of the dragon, or whether it is north or south, is indicated by the small disk of the sun attached to one of the two pointers hidden by the segments of the circle. If, at that time, the little disk shall be found in the head of the dragon inscribed on the plane of the dial, then the sun has been snatched from the earth and ingloriously entombed, as it were, in the huge jaw of the dragon. Then, ... the heavens themselves will lend aid to the woeful pomp of the senseless funeral in full darkness by suddenly lighting the unhappy lamps of the fixed stars. However, if the little disk occupies the tail of the dragon on the mechanism, then the sun in the heavens also, as if freed from the toils of the immense dragon's tail, will emerge without difficulty. The center of the eclipse will traverse the hemisphere of the earth north of the solar path, always nearer to the pole of the ecliptic, in proportion to the inclination of the disk to the north. On the other hand, if the little disk inclines to the left semicircle, then the people south of the solar path will enjoy the spectacle of the total central eclipse. But if the little disk remains neutral (inclining neither way) and remains halfway between the two sections of the circle, then the greatest solar eclipse will take place at the equator and those who live near the poles of the ecliptic will not enjoy a trace of that eclipse. This is because the half of the equatorial diameter enormously outmeasures even the greatest apparent semidiameters of the sun and of the moon, even taking as a norm the smallest horizontal parallax of the moon. What has been said about the true new moon is to be understood also, proportionately, about the true full moon. For when, with respect to the equations of the centers, the moon shall be distant on the mechanism by a full semicircle from the sun (also in the heavens it will be truly in opposition to the sun) there will be a true full moon. Likewise, the moon in the heavens will be in eclipse if, at the time of opposition, the pointers of the little index (which we mentioned before) situated below the center of the clock are so far away from the belly of the dragon that they are forced to lie under the two smaller segments of the circle which, in all full moons, are always to be moved from the index of the synodic moon to the region of that little index. As a matter of fact, the closer the little pointers approach to the middle of the segments, the more obscured it will be. You will know, furthermore, that the eclipse of the moon occurs in the head of the dragon if the disk of the little moon, attached to the other point of the little index, is raised to the head of the dragon; conversely, when the little disk of the moon inclines to the tail, the eclipse is taking place in the tail of the dragon. And, accordingly, when you observe the little moon of the index inclined to one or other section of the circle, so also in the heavens, the eclipse of the moon is only partial and the northern or the southern part of the moon is illuminated. The current time will indicate whether the lunar eclipse is visible or not. As the new moon ecliptic falls during the day, the eclipse will not be visible, since the earth denies a sight of the moon which is below the horizon. But, conversely, if there are no clouds, the eclipse will be visible anywhere, if the luminous bodies are ecliptically in opposition at night. Since lunar eclipses appear to all people as being of the same magnitude and duration, and begin and dissipate at the same absolute moment of time, I decided to reveal another facet of this spectacle on the right side of the center of the clock (see chapter III above). There, at the time of the true ecliptic full moon, as the pointer of the third little index shows, you can ascertain the hours, etc., of duration, and the inches of greatest obscuration. The little moon attached to the index is a model of the actual eclipsed moon. IX Thus, with the aid of this machine, solar and lunar eclipses of the past can be recalled and future ones can be foreseen. Indeed, if the index of prime minutes is speeded up by hand, whose wheel imparts motion to the other indices and shields, then, the dials and openings will foretell the year, month, day, hour, etc., of any future eclipse. I foresaw that the times would thus be evolved too slowly, and that the clock wheels would be considerably worn by repeated experiments (if, for instance, by the rotation of the index of prime minutes, to whose period only a single hour corresponds, the future new and full moon ecliptics were being investigated). Therefore, I took care that the wheel which immediately communicates motion to the index of the synodic moon should be so fitted internally to the mechanism that by the reversal of any external index, the wheel would be removed from its proper position; whenever desired, it could be quickly and most accurately restored to its proper place. In this way, since the close meshing of the wheels is released, you can extend the experiment for many years, even for many centuries. You have only to guide with your hand the index of the synodic moon on the circles, always intently observing whether, in the passage which this index makes over the little index, both pointers of the little index are hidden by the segments of the circle. Having observed this, look at the index moved by hand, for if this has carried the solar disk halfway between the two larger segments of the circle to the region of the hidden little index, then you will know that eclipse will be a solar eclipse. On the other hand, you will know that it will be a lunar eclipse, if the index (moved by hand) has carried the moon, situated between the two smaller segments of the circle, to the same region (i.e., the hidden part of the circle). The solar disk and the lunar disk alternately will reveal to you the circumstances of both eclipses. The current year will be given by the Julian period, reducible to any desired epoch, and, contained in the solar cycle, the golden number and the Roman cycle. The month of the year and also the day of the month will be indicated by the pointer of the little index, first on the right side of the clock. And what I have said of future eclipses should be equally understood of past eclipses, so long as the index, which can be moved either way at will, is moved in reverse. Finally, though 55 wheels were employed to carry so many dials, all are driven by one source of power not exceeding the third part of a Germanic hundred-weight which, suspended at the geometric height of five feet (about the ordinary stature of a man), keeps the whole machine in operation for a hundred days and more. Although the machine repeats hours and quarter hours at will and, consequently, the number of wheels and the rest of the apparatus necessary for these functions is thereby increased, it has not grown to an unwieldy size, however much one might erroneously imagine it to be. It does not exceed the bulk of ordinary clocks hanging from a wall; indeed, it scarcely equals these. The entire machine, ready for operation, does not weigh more than 156 ounces, although it is made of steel or brass throughout and further weighted with two bells and a rather large brass dial-plate. Of course, there are many more things to be said, especially about the mechanical structure of the wheels, but fearing to tire my kind reader unduly by exceeding the bounds of a summary, I am forced to put an end, though unwillingly, to this sufficiently shortened explanation of the work. I have hope of giving satisfaction to many more when I shall have communicated to the learned world another and completely new automatic work, grander than this present one. It is already theoretically completed in all its calculations, but still to be worked out mechanically from the very beginning, if but God, thrice Best and Greatest, bless the undertaking and mercifully grant life and health--to whom be in, and from, and through all things, all honor and glory in eternity and beyond. BIBLIOGRAPHY The following works have been used in compiling the material for this paper. They are frequently referred to in the text in shortened form. AMBROSI, FRANCESCO. _Scrittori ed artisti Trentini._ Trent: Giovanni Zippel, 1883. BONOMI, L. _Naturalisti, medici e tecnici Trentini._ Trent: privately printed, 1930. BORGHESI, FRANCESCO. _Novissima ac Perpetua Astronomica Ephemeris Authomatica Theorico-Practica._ Trent: Giovanni Battista Monauni, 1763(?). ---- _Novissimum Theorico-Practicum Astronomicum Authoma Juxta Pariter Novissimum Mundi Systema._ Trent: Giovanni Battista Monauni, 1764. ENGELMANN, MAX. Philipp Matthäus Hahn. Berlin: Verlag Fischer, 1923. ESPOSTI, ALFREDO DEGLI. La sala 'Innocente Binda' al Museo della Scienza e della Tecnica di Milano. _La Clessidra_ (July 1960), anno 16, no. 7, pp. 18-21. FRANCH, LEONE. _La Valle di Non._ Trent, 1953. LLOYD, H. ALAN. _Some outstanding clocks over seven hundred years, 1250-1950._ London: Leonard Hill, 1958. MOSNA, EZIO. _Trento._ Trent, 1914. PERINI, AGOSTINO (compilatore). _Statistica del Trentino, Biblioteca Communale del Trentino._ Vol. 2, p. 57 (cons. 6, carta 9). PIAMONTE, GUISEPPE. _La nauna descritta al viaggiattore._ Milan, 1829. PIPPA, LUIGI. Antonio Bartolomeo Bertolla. _La Clessidra_ (January 1961), anno 17, no. 1, pp. 22-25. SAN CAJETANO, DAVID �. _Praktische Anleitung für Künstler, alle astronomische Perioden durch brauchbare bisher noch nie gesehene ganz neue Räderwerke mit Leichtigkeit vom Himmel unabweichlich genau auszuführen, sammt Erweiterung der Theorie des neuen Rädergebäudes._ Vienna: privately printed, 1793. TOVAZZI, GIANGRISOSTOMO. _Biblioteca Tirolese._ Vol. 2, art. 329, MS. 168, pp. 406-407. Trent, 1780. VISCHER, GEORGE F. _Beschreibung mechanischer Kunstwerke, welche unter der Direktion und Anweisung M. Philipp Matth. Hahn, Pfarrers in Kornwestheim..._. Stuttgart: Mezler, 1774. VON BERTELE, HANS. The development of equation clocks. _La Suisse Horologere_ (1959-1961), parts 1 through 5. WENHAM, EDWARD. Tall case clocks. _The Antiquarian Magazine_ (May 1927), vol. 8, no. 4, p. 33. [The Borghesi clock is illustrated only from a photograph of the Anderson Art Galleries in New York, and mislabeled "Astronomical Clock made in Jena, 1656, in elaborate mahogany case."] * * * * * CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 36 THE ENGINEERING CONTRIBUTIONS OF WENDEL BOLLMAN _Robert M. Vogel_ EARLY CAREER 80 THE BOLLMAN TRUSS 85 W. BOLLMAN AND COMPANY 91 FINAL USE OF THE BOLLMAN TRUSS 95 KNOWN BOLLMAN WORKS 99 BIBLIOGRAPHY 104 _Robert M. Vogel_ THE ENGINEERING CONTRIBUTIONS OF WENDEL BOLLMAN [Illustration: Figure 1.--WENDEL BOLLMAN, C.E. (1814-1884). (_Photo courtesy of Dr. Stuart Christhilf._)] _The development of structural engineering has always been as dependent upon the availability of materials as upon the expansion of theoretical concepts. Perhaps the greatest single step in the history of civil engineering was the introduction of iron as a primary structural material in the 19th century; it quickly released the bridge and the building from the confines of a technology based upon the limited strength of masonry and wood._ _Wendel Bollman, self-taught Baltimore civil engineer, was the first to evolve a system of bridging in iron to be consistently used on an American railroad, becoming one of the pioneers who ushered in the modern period of structural engineering._ THE AUTHOR: _Robert M. Vogel is curator of civil engineering in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology._ Wendel Bollman's name survives today solely in association with the Bollman truss, and even in this respect is known only to a few older civil and railroad engineers. The Bollman system of trussing, along with those of Whipple and Fink, may be said to have introduced the great age of the metal bridge, and thus, directly, the modern period of civil engineering. Bollman's bridge truss, of which the first example was built in 1850, has the very significant distinction of being the first bridging system in the world employing iron in all of its principal structural members that was used consistently on a railroad. The importance of the transition from wood to iron as a structural and bridge building material is generally recognized, but it may be well to mention certain aspects of this change. The tradition of masonry bridge construction never attained the great strength in this country which it held in Europe, despite a number of notable exceptions. There were several reasons for this. From the very beginning of colonization, capital was scarce, a condition that prevailed until well into the 19th century and which prohibited the use of masonry because of the extremely high costs of labor and transport. An even more important economic consideration was the rapidity with which it was necessary to extend the construction of railways during their pioneer years. Unlike the early English and European railways, which invariably traversed areas of dense population and industrial activity, and were thus assured of a significant financial return almost from the moment that the first rail was down, the Baltimore and Ohio and its contemporaries were launched upon an entirely different commercial prospect. Their principal business consisted not so much in along-the-line transactions as in haulage between principal terminals separated by great and largely desolate expanses. This meant that income was severely limited until the line was virtually complete from end to end, and it meant that commencement of return upon the initial investment was entirely dependent upon the speed of survey, graduation, tunneling, and bridging. [Illustration: Figure 2.--MODEL OF B. H. LATROBE'S TRUSS, built in 1838, over the Patapsco River at Elysville (now Daniels), Maryland. (_Photo courtesy of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad._)] The need for speed, the general attenuation of capital, and the simple fact that all the early railroads traversed thickly forested areas rendered wood the most logical material for bridge and other construction, both temporary and permanent. The use of wood as a bridge material did not, of course, originate with the railroads, or, for that matter, in this country. The heavily wooded European countries--Switzerland in particular--had a strong tradition of bridge construction in timber from the Renaissance on, and naturally a certain amount of this technique found its way to the New World with the colonials and immigrants. America's highway system was meager until about the time the railroad age itself was beginning. However, by 1812 there were, along the eastern seaboard, a number of fine timber bridges of truly remarkable structural sophistication and workmanship. It was just previous to the advent of the railroads that the erection of highway bridges in this country began to pass from an art to a science. And an art it had been in the hands of the group of skilled but unschooled master carpenters and masons who built largely from an intuitive sense of proportion, stress, and the general "fitness of things." It passed into an exact science under the guidance of a small number of men trained at first in the scientific and technical schools of Europe, and, after about 1820, in the few institutions then established in America that offered technical instruction. The increasing number of trained engineers at first affected highway bridge construction not so much in the materials used but in the way they were assembled. In a bridge designed by a self-taught constructor, the cheapness of wood made it entirely feasible to proportion the members by enlarging them to the point where there could be no question as to their structural adequacy. The trained engineer, on the other hand, could design from the standpoint of determining the entire load and then proportioning each element according to the increment of stress upon it and to the unit capacity of the material. By the time railroads had started expanding to the West there had been sufficient experience with the half dozen practical timber truss systems by then evolved, that there was little difficulty in translating them into bridges capable of supporting the initial light rail traffic. In spite of its inherent shortcomings, wood was so adaptable that it met almost perfectly the needs of the railroads during the early decades of their intense expansion, and, in fact, still finds limited use in the Northwest. Early Career Wendel Bollman was born in Baltimore of German parents in 1814. His father was a baker, who in the same year had aided in the city's defense against the British. Wendel's education, until about the age of 11, was more or less conventionally gained in public and private schools in Baltimore. He then entered into informal apprenticeship, first to an apothecary in Sheperdstown, Virginia (now West Virginia), and then to one in Harpers Ferry. In 1826 or 1827 he became ill and returned to Baltimore for cure. From that time on his education was entirely self-acquired. [Illustration: Figure 3.--TRUSSED BEAM.] It is of interest, in light of his later career, to note that on the Fourth of July 1828, he marched with other boys in a procession that was part of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's cornerstone-laying ceremony. Shortly afterward, he apprenticed himself to a carpenter for a brief time, but when the work slacked off he obtained work with the B. & O. The right-of-way had been graded for about five miles by that time, but no rail was down. The boy was at first given manual work, but soon advanced to rodman and rapidly rose as he gained facility with the surveying apparatus. In the fall of 1829 he participated in laying the first track. As his mother was anxious that he continue his education in carpentry, he left the railroad in the spring of 1830 to again enter apprenticeship. He finished, became a journeyman, helped build a planter's mansion in Natchez, and returned to Baltimore in 1837 to commence his own carpentry business. The next year, while building a house in Harpers Ferry, he was asked to rejoin the B. & O. to rebuild parts of its large timber bridge over the Potomac there, which had fallen victim to various defects after about a year's use. [Illustration: Figure 4.--SIMPLE BEAM of 50-foot span with three independent trussing systems. Bollman's use of this method of support led to the development of his bridge truss. This drawing is of a temporary span used after the timber bridge at Harpers Ferry was destroyed during the Civil War. (In Baltimore and Ohio Collection, Museum of History and Technology.)] Shortly after the Harpers Ferry bridge reconstruction, Bollman was made foreman of bridges. It is apparent that, on the basis of his practical ability, enhanced by the theoretical knowledge gained by intense self-study, he eventually came to assist Chief Engineer Benjamin H. Latrobe in bridge design. He later took this work over entirely as Latrobe's attentions and talents were demanded in the location and extension of the line between Cumberland and Wheeling. [Illustration: Figure 5.--BOLLMAN'S ORIGINAL PATENT DRAWING, 1851. (In National Archives, Washington, D.C.)] The B. & O. did not reach its logical destination, Ohio (actually Wheeling, West Virginia, on the east bank of the Ohio River) until 1853. In the years following Bollman's return to the railroad, the design of bridges was an occupation of the engineering staff second in importance only to the location of the line itself. During this time Bollman continued to rise and assume greater responsibilities, being appointed master of road by Latrobe in 1848. In this position he was responsible for all railroad property that did not move, principally the right-of-way and its structures, including, of course, bridges. The recognition of Bollman's abilities was in the well-established tradition of the B. & O., long known as America's first "school of engineering," having sponsored many early experiments in motive power, trackwork, and other fundamental elements of railroad engineering. It furnished the means of expression for such men as Knight, Wright, Whistler, Latrobe, and Winans. [Illustration: Figure 6.--PLAN OF HARPERS FERRY BRIDGE as built by Latrobe. The second Winchester track was later removed.] Of these pioneer civil and mechanical engineers, some were formally trained but most were self-taught. Bollman's career on the B. & O. is of particular interest not only because he was perhaps the most successful of the latter class but because he was probably also the last. He may be said to be a true representative of the transitional period between intuitive and exact engineering. Actually, his designing was a composite of the two methods. While making consistent use of mathematical analysis, he was at the same time more or less dependent upon empirical methods. For years, B. & O. employees told stories of his sessions in the tin shop of the railroad's main repair facility at Mount Clair in Baltimore, where he built models of bridges from scraps of metal and then tested them to destruction to locate weaknesses. It seems most likely, however, that the empirical studies were used solely as checks against the mathematical. [Illustration: Figure 7.--RECENT MODEL of Bollman's Winchester span. Only two of the three lines of trussing are shown. The model is based on Bollman's published description and drawings of the structure. (USNM 318171; Smithsonian photo 46941.)] In the period when Bollman began designing--about 1840--there were fewer than ten men in the country designing bridges by scientifically correct analytical methods, Whipple and Roebling the most notable of this group. By 1884, the year of Bollman's death, the age of intuitive design had been dead for a decade or longer. [Illustration: Figure 8.--THE BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD'S Potomac River crossing at Harpers Ferry, about 1860. Bollman's iron "Winchester span" of 1851 is seen at the right end of Latrobe's timber structure of 1836, which forms the body of the bridge. (_Photo courtesy of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park._)] The B. & O. was in every way a truly pioneer enterprise. It was the first practical railroad in America; the first to use an American locomotive; the first to cross the Alleghenies. The spirit of innovation had been encouraged by the railroad's directors from the outset. It could hardly have been otherwise in light of the project's elemental daring. The first few major bridges beyond the line's starting point on Pratt Street, in Baltimore, were of rather elaborate masonry, but this may be explained by the projectors' consciousness of the railroad's significance and their desire for permanence. However, the aforementioned economic factors shortly made obvious the necessity of departure from this system, and wood was thereafter employed for most long spans on the line as far as Harpers Ferry and beyond. Only the most minor culverts and short spans, and those only in locations near suitable quarries, were built of stone. In addition to the economic considerations which prompted the company to revert to timber for the major bridges, there were several situations in which masonry construction was unsuitable for practical reasons. If stone arches were used in locations where the grade of the line was a relatively short distance above the surface of the stream to be crossed, a number of short arches would have been necessary to avoid a very flat single arch. In arch construction, the smaller the segment of a circle represented by the arch (that is, the flatter the arch), the greater the stress in the arch ring and the resulting horizontal thrust on the abutments. [Illustration: Figure 9.--BOLLMAN SKEW BRIDGE at Elysville (now Daniels), Maryland, built in 1853-1854. (_Photo courtesy of Maryland Historical Society._)] The piers for the numerous arches necessary to permit an optimum amount of rise relative to the span would have presented a dangerous restriction to stream flow in time of flood. By the use of timber trusses such crossings could be made in one or two spans with, at the most, one pier in the stream, thus avoiding the problem. The principal timber bridges as far west as Cumberland were of Latrobe's design. These were good, solid structures of composite construction, in which a certain amount of cast iron was used in joints and wrought iron for certain tension members. They were, however, more empirical than efficient and, for the most part, not only grossly overdesigned but of decidedly difficult fabrication and construction. What is interesting about the Latrobian timber trusses, however, is the effect they appear to have had upon Bollman's subsequent work in the design of his own truss. This effect is evidenced by the marked analogy between the primary structural elements of the two types. The Latrobe truss at Elysville (fig. 2) was only partially a truss, inasmuch as the greater part of the load was not carried from panel to panel, finally to appear at the abutments as a pure vertical reaction, but was carried from each panel (except the four at the center) directly to the bearing points at the piers by heavy diagonal struts, after the fashion of the famous 18th-century Swiss trusses of the Grubenmanns. It was a legitimate structural device, and the simplest means of extending the capacity of a spanning system. However, it was defective in that the struts applied considerable horizontal thrust to the abutments, requiring heavier masonry than would otherwise have been necessary. It is quite likely that Latrobe did not have absolute confidence in the various pure truss systems already patented by Town, Long, and others, and preferred for such strategic service a structure in which the panel members acted more or less independently of one another. It will be seen that, similarly, the individual panel loads in Bollman's truss were carried to the ends of the frame by members acting independently of one another. The Bollman Truss There had never been any question about the many serious inadequacies of wood as a bridge material. Decay and fire risk, always present, were the principal ones, involving continuous expenditure for replacement of defective members and for fire watches. It was, in fact, understood by the management and engineering staff of the B. & O. that their timber bridge superstructures, though considered the finest in the country, were more or less expedient and were eventually to be replaced. In this regard it is not surprising that Latrobe, a man of considerable foresight, had, at an early date, given serious thought to the possible application of iron here. [Illustration: Figure 10.--POTOMAC RIVER CROSSING of the Baltimore and Ohio at North Branch, Maryland, built in 1856. There are three Bollman deck trusses. (_Photo courtesy of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad._)] [Illustration: Figure 11.--THE FINK TRUSS. (_Smithsonian photo 41436._)] [Illustration: WENDEL BOLLMAN'S Patent Iron Suspension Railroad Bridge. The undersigned would inform the officers of Railroads and others, that he is prepared to furnish Drawings and Estimates for Bridges, Roofs, etc., on the plan of Bollman's Patent. The performance of these bridges, some of which have been in use for six years, has given entire satisfaction. Their simplicity of construction renders repairs easy and cheap, and by a peculiar connection of the Main and Panel Rods at the bottom of the Posts, all danger from the effects of expansion, which has heretofore been the chief objection to Iron Bridges, is entirely removed. J. H. TEGMEYER, Baltimore, Md. Figure 12.--ADVERTISEMENT in the _Railroad Advocate_, August 1855.] The world's first major iron bridge, the famed cast-iron arch at Coalbrookdale, England, had been constructed in 1779. Its erection was followed by rather sporadic interest in this use of the material. The first significant use of iron in this country was in a series of small trussed highway arches erected by Squire Whipple over the Erie Canal in the early 1840's, over 60 years later. In these, as in most of the earlier iron structures, an arch of cast iron was the primary support. The thrust of the arches was counteracted by open wrought-iron links with other wrought- and cast-iron members contributing to the truss action. The Whipple bridges promoted a certain amount of interest in the material. In the B. & O.'s annual report for the fiscal year 1849 appears the first record of Latrobe's interest in this important matter. In the president's message is found the following, rather offhand, statement: $6,183.19 have been expended toward the renewal of the Stone Bridges on the Washington Branch, carried off by the flood of Oct. 7th, 1847. Preparations are made and contracts entered into, for the reconstruction of the large Bridges at Little Patuxent and at Bladensburg which will be executed in a few months.... It is proposed to erect a superstructure of Iron upon stone abutments, at each place--with increased span, for greater security against future floods. It is interesting to note that it was indeed Bollman trusses to which the president of the railroad had referred. How much earlier than this date Bollman had evolved his peculiar trussing system is not clear. The certain influence of Latrobe's radiating strut system of trussing has been mentioned. As likely an influence was another basic technique commonly used to increase the capacity of a simple timber beam--that of trussing--i.e., placing beneath the beam a rod of iron that was anchored at the ends of the beam and held a certain distance below it at the center by a vertical strut or post. This combination thus became a truss in that the timber portion was no longer subject to a bending stress but to a simple one of compression, the rod absorbing the tensile stress of the combination. The effect was to deepen the beam, increasing the distance between its extreme fibers and--by thus reducing the bending moment--reducing the stress in them (see fig. 3). [Illustration: Figure 13.--THE FOUR BOLLMAN SPANS at Harpers Ferry that survived the Civil War. The spans were completed in 1862-1863. (_Photo courtesy of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad._)] It apparently occurred to Bollman that by extending the number of rods in a longitudinal direction, this effect could be practically amplified to such an extent as to be capable of spanning considerable distances. He almost certainly did not at first contemplate an all-iron system, but rather a composite one such as described. It is entirely likely that such trussed beams, with multiple systems of tension rods, were used by Bollman as bridging in temporary trestlework along the line as early as 1845 (see fig. 4). It is impossible to say whether Bollman himself, or Latrobe, was struck with the logic of further elaborating upon the system and, simultaneously, translating the timber compression member into one of cast iron. Cast iron would naturally have been selected for a member that resisted a compressive stress, as it was considerably cheaper than wrought iron. But more important, at that time wrought iron was not available in shapes of sufficient sectional area to resist the appreciable buckling stresses induced in long compression members. The cost of building up members to sufficient size from the very limited selection of small shapes then rolled would have been prohibitive. The trussing rods, subjected to tension, were of wrought iron inasmuch as the sectional area had only to be sufficient to resist the primary axial stress. The first all-iron Bollman truss was constructed over the Little Patuxent River at Savage Factory, near Laurel, Maryland, in 1850. In the chief engineer's report for the year 1850, Latrobe was able to state that the truss had been completed and was giving "much satisfaction." He went on at some length to praise the "valuable mechanical features" embodied therein, and expressed great confidence that iron would become as important a material in the field of civil engineering as it was in mechanical engineering. [Illustration: Figure 14.--THE HARPERS FERRY BRIDGE as completed after the Civil War. It was used by the Baltimore and Ohio until 1894, and as a highway bridge until 1936. (Photo 690, Baltimore and Ohio Collection, Museum of History and Technology.)] The cost of this first major Bollman bridge was $23,825.00. Its span was 76 feet. Latrobe's confidence was well placed. The Savage span and another at Bladensburg may be considered successful pilot models, for, in spite of a certain undercurrent of mistrust of iron bridges within the engineering profession--due mainly to a number of failures of improperly designed spans--Latrobe felt there was sufficient justification for the unqualified adoption of iron in all subsequent major bridge structures on the B. & O. Almost immediately following completion of the Savage Bridge, Bollman undertook the design of replacements for the large Patapsco River span at Elysville (now Daniels), Maryland, and the so-called Winchester span of the B. & O.'s largest and most important bridge, that over the Potomac at Harpers Ferry. Harpers Ferry bridge, a timber structure, had been designed by Latrobe and built in 1836-1837 by the noted bridge constructor Lewis Wernwag. It was peculiar in having a turnout, near the Virginia shore, whereby a subsidiary road branched off to Winchester (see fig. 6). Only the single span on this line, situated between the midriver switch and the shore, was slated for replacement, as the other seven spans of the bridge had been virtually reconstructed in the decade or so of their history and were in sound condition at the time. The Winchester span (fig. 8), which was the first Bollman truss to embody sufficient refinement of detail to be considered a prototype, was completed in 1851. Bollman was extremely proud of the work, with perfect justification it may be said. The 124-foot span was fabricated in the railroad's extensive Mount Clair shops. It was subdivided into eight panels by seven struts and seven pairs of truss rods. An interesting difference between this span and Bollman's succeeding bridges was his use of granite rather than cast iron for the towers. The span consisted of three parallel lines of trussing to accommodate a common road in addition to the single-track Winchester line. The distinctive feature of the Bollman system was the previously mentioned series of diagonal truss links in combination with a cast-iron compression chord, which Bollman called the "stretcher." The spacing between the chord and the junction of each pair of links was maintained by a vertical post or strut, also cast. [Illustration: Figure 15.--NORTH STREET (now Guilford Avenue) bridge, Baltimore. In this transitional composite structure cast iron was used only in the relatively short sections of the upper chord. For the long unsupported compression members of the web system, standard wrought-iron angles and channels were built up into a large section. The decorative cast-iron end posts were non-structural. (Photo in the L. N. Edwards Collection, Museum of History and Technology.)] Much of the appeal of this design lay unquestionably in the sense of security derived from the fact that each of the systems acted independently to carry its load to the abutments. The lower chords, actually nonfunctional in the primary structure, were included merely to preserve the proper longitudinal spacing between the lower ends of the struts. A certain lack of rigidity was inherent in the system due to that very discontinuity which characterized its action; however, this was compensated for by a pair of light diagonal stay rods crossing each panel. These rods served the additional function of distributing concentrated loads to adjacent struts much in the manner of the bridging between floor joists in a building. In the Winchester span the floor system was of timber for reasons of economy. This was a very minor weakness inasmuch as any stick could be quickly replaced, and without disturbing the function of the structure. Bollman received a patent for his truss in January 1852, and in the same year published a booklet describing his system in general and the Harpers Ferry span in particular. Here, he first calls it a "suspension and trussed bridge," which is indeed an accurate designation for a system which is not strictly a truss because it has no active lower chord. (The analogy to a suspension bridge is quite clear, each pair of primary rods being comparable to a suspension cable.) Thereafter, Bollman's invention was generally termed a suspension truss. INFLUENCE OF THE TRUSS Bollman's 1852 publication was widely disseminated here and abroad and studied with respectful interest by the engineering profession. Its drawings of the structure were copied in a number of leading technical journals in England and Germany. Although there is no record that the type was ever reproduced in Europe, there can be little doubt that this successful structural use of iron by the most eminent railroad in the United States and its endorsement by an engineer of Latrobe's status gave great impetus to the general adoption of the material. This influence was certainly equal to that of Stephenson's tubular iron bridge of 1850 over the Menai Strait, or Roebling's iron-wire suspension bridge of 1855 over Niagara gorge. The Bollman design had perhaps even greater influence, as the B. & O. immediately launched the system with great energy and in great numbers to replace its timber spans; on the other hand, Roebling's structure was never duplicated in railroad service, and Stephenson's only once. [Illustration: Figure 16.--_Left:_ CONJECTURAL SECTION of Bollman's segmental wrought-iron column, about 1860, and section of the standard Phoenix column; _right:_ Phoenix column as used in truss-bridge compression members.] EVALUATION OF THE TRUSS By the late 1850's iron was well established as a bridge material throughout the world. Once the previous fears of iron had been stilled and the attention of engineers was directed to the interpretation of existing and new spanning methods into metal, the Bollman truss began to suffer somewhat from the comparison. Although its components were simple to fabricate and its analysis and design were straightforward, it was less economical of material than the more conventional panel trusses such as the Pratt and Whipple types. Additionally, there was the requisite amount of secondary metal in lower chords and braces necessary for stability and rigidity. A factor difficult to assess is Bollman's handling of his patent, which was renewed in 1866. There is sufficient evidence to conclude that he considered the patent valuable because it was based upon a sound design. Therefore, he probably established a high license fee which, with the truss's other shortcomings, was sufficient to discourage its use by other railroads. As patron, the B. & O. had naturally had full rights to its use. An additional defect, acknowledged even by Bollman, arose because of the unequal length of the links in each group except the center one. This caused an unevenness in the thermal expansion and contraction of the framework, with the result that the bridges were difficult to keep in adjustment. This had the practical effect of virtually limiting the system to intermediate span lengths, up to about 150 feet. For longer spans the B. & O. employed the truss of another of Latrobe's assistants, German-born and technically trained Albert Fink. The Fink truss was evolved contemporaneously with Bollman's and was structurally quite similar, being a suspension truss with no lower chord. The principal difference was the symmetry of Fink's plan, which was achieved by carrying the individual panel loads from the panel points to increasingly longer panel units before having them appear at the end bearings. This eliminated the weakness of unequal strains. The design was basically a more rational one, and it came to be widely used in spans of up to 250 feet, generally as a deck-type truss (see fig. 11). W. Bollman and Company Bollman resigned from the Baltimore and Ohio in 1858 to form, with John H. Tegmeyer and John Clark, two of his former B. & O. assistants, a bridge-building firm in Baltimore known as W. Bollman and Company. This was apparently the first organization in the United States to design, fabricate, and erect iron bridges and structures, pioneering in what 25 years later had become an immense industry. The firm had its foundation at least as early as 1855 when advertisements to supply designs and estimates for Bollman bridges appeared over Tegmeyer's name in several railroad journals (see fig. 12). Bollman's separation from the B. & O. was not a complete one. The railroad continued its program of replacing timber bridges with Bollman trusses, and contracted with W. Bollman and Company for design and a certain amount of fabrication. There is some likelihood that eventually fabrication was entirely discontinued at Mount Clair, and all parts subsequently purchased from Bollman. The firm prospered, erecting a number of major railroad bridges in Mexico, Cuba, and Chile. Operations ceased from 1861 to 1863 because of difficult wartime conditions in the border city of Baltimore. Following this, Bollman reentered business as sole proprietor of the Patapsco Bridge and Iron Works. [Illustration: QUINCY BAY BRIDGE Figure 17.--CHICAGO, BURLINGTON AND QUINCY RAILROAD BRIDGE over Quincy Bay (branch of the Mississippi River) at Quincy, Illinois. The pivot draw-span was formed of two Bollman deck trusses supported at their outer ends by hog chains. The bridge was built in 1867-1868 by the Detroit Bridge and Iron Co., Bollman licensee. (Clarke, _Account of the Iron Railway Bridge ... at Quincy, Illinois_.)] The most noteworthy of Bollman's works in this period was a series of spans at Harpers Ferry. The B. & O.'s timber bridge had been destroyed by Confederate forces in June 1861, and the crossing was thereafter made upon temporary trestlework. This was a constant source of trouble, with continuing interruptions of the connection from high water, washouts, and military actions. The annoyance and expense of this became so great that the company decided to risk an iron bridge at the crossing. In July and August 1862, two sections of Bollman truss, spans no. 4 and no. 5 were completed. As this occurred during the time when W. Bollman and Company was inoperative, the work was produced at Mount Clair to Bollman's design and, undoubtedly, erected under his supervision. Five weeks later, on September 24, these and Bollman's famous Winchester span of 1851 were blown up by the Confederates, and the line's business was again placed at the mercy of trestling. The spirit of the B. & O. administration indeed seems to have been unshakable when, in the face of such heartbreaking setbacks, it determined to again bridge the river with iron, even at the height of the hostilities. In November, span no. 5 was erected, and by April 1863 nos. 3, 4, and 6 also. These were the four straight spans in midriver between the "wide" (or "branch," or "wye") span and the span on the Maryland shore over the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (see fig. 13). Although the wood floor system of these spans was burned for strategic reasons by U.S. troops later in 1863, they survived the war. In 1868 the remaining trestlework was replaced with Bollman trusses. This magnificent structure served the railroad until 1894 when the right-of-way was realigned at Harpers Ferry. However, the half used by the common road remained in use until carried away by the disastrous flood in 1936. The piers may still be seen. During the prewar years, Bollman evolved a structural development of most profound importance, which is usually associated with the Phoenix Iron Works and its founder, Samuel J. Reeves. In the erection of a high trestlework viaduct for the Havana Railroad, Bollman apparently became concerned with the tensile weakness of cast iron when applied in long, unsupported columns. Although a column is normally subjected to compressive stresses, when the slenderness ratio--that is, the length divided by the radius of gyration of the cross section--becomes great, a secondary bending stress may be produced. If this stress becomes great enough, the value of the tensile stress in one side of the column may actually exceed the principal compressive stress, and a net effect of tension result. [Illustration: Figure 18.--OHIO RIVER CROSSING of the Baltimore and Ohio at Benwood, West Virginia, completed in 1870. Bollman deck trusses were used in the approaches on both sides. (Photo 693, Baltimore and Ohio Collection, Museum of History and Technology.)] [Illustration: Figure 19.--PATAPSCO RIVER crossing of the Baltimore and Ohio between Thistle and Ilchester, Maryland. (Photo 695, Baltimore and Ohio Collection, Museum of History and Technology.)] As already mentioned, the few available rolled-iron shapes were of relatively small area and quite unsuitable for use as columns unless combined and built up in complex fabrications. The normal practice at the time was to use cast compression members in iron bridges and structures, with their sectional area so proportioned to the length that a state of tension could not exist. In the case of long members, this naturally meant that an excessive amount of material was used. [Illustration: Figure 20.--TWO VIEWS OF BOLLMAN-BUILT "water-pipe truss" that carries Lombard Street over Jones Falls in Baltimore. Built in 1877.] Bollman was conscious of the problem from his experience with the stretchers and struts of his truss, and he must have been aware of the great advantage which would be obtained by a practical method of forming such members in wrought iron, the tensile resistance of which is equivalent to the compressive. He eventually developed the forerunner of what came to be known as the Phoenix form by having special segmental wrought-iron shapes rolled by Morris, Tasker and Company of Philadelphia, these shapes being combined into a circular section with outstanding flanges for riveting together. The circular section is theoretically the most efficient to bear compressive loading. A column of any required diameter could be produced by simply increasing the number of segments, the individual size of which never exceeded contemporary rolling mill capacity (see fig. 16). The design exhibits the inspired combination of functional perfection and simplicity that seems to characterize most great inventions. [Illustration: Figure 21.--THE HARPERS FERRY BRIDGE toward the end of its career, carrying a common road over the Potomac. The westernmost line of trussing and span no. 1 had been removed long before. View through the Winchester span looking toward Maryland in 1933. (_Photo courtesy of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park._)] It may have been because he had no facilities for rolling that Bollman communicated his idea to Reeves, although this seems illogical. At any rate, Reeves and his associates patented the system extensively, and the Phoenix column was eventually employed to the virtual exclusion of cast-iron and other types of wrought-iron columns. By the end of the 19th century it began to pass from use, as mills became capable of producing larger sections with properties relatively favorable to column use and more adaptable to connection with other members. Final Use of the Bollman Truss The Bollman truss found occasional use elsewhere than on the B. & O. lines, but generally only when erected on contract by Patapsco Bridge and Iron Works. However, the fact that Bollman could profitably erect this bridge in the severely competitive 1870's indicates that the harsh criticism of the system by authorities of such stature as Whipple was not necessarily justified. Bollman's advertisements, in fact, refer to the favorable recommendations of other such renowned engineers as Herman Haupt and M. C. Meigs. [Illustration: Figure 22.--BOLLMAN DECK TRUSSES in the North River Bridge built in 1873 at Mount Crawford, Virginia, on the Valley Railroad of Virginia (B. & O.). Each end span is 98 ft. 6 in.; the river span is 148 ft. 9 in. (Photo 756, Baltimore and Ohio Collection, Museum of History and Technology.)] An interesting application of the system was in a drawbridge, formed of two Bollman deck spans, over an arm of the Mississippi at Quincy, Illinois (see fig. 17). The first iron bridge in Mexico was erected by Bollman over the Medellín River about 1864. Another work of this period, which attracted considerable attention, was a pair of bridges that Bollman erected over North Carolina's Cape Fear River in 1867-1868. These bridges were notable for their foundation on cast-iron cylinders, sunk pneumatically. This was one of the first instances of the use of the process in America, and the depth of 80 feet below the water surface reached by one cylinder was considered remarkable for years afterward. In the last active decade or so of his career, Bollman produced hundreds of minor bridges and other structures. In 1873 he supplied the castings for the splendid iron dome of Baltimore's City Hall and erected the ingenious water-main truss which carries Lombard Street over Jones Falls in that city. In this structure the top and bottom chords of the central line of trussing are cast-iron water mains, bifurcated at the abutments, and joined by cast- and wrought-iron web members (see fig. 20). In the mid 1870's Bollman saw his truss pass into obsolescence. This was due primarily to the generally increasing distrust of cast iron for major structural members due to its brittleness, but advances in structural theory, availability of a greater variety of rolled structural shapes, and the increasing loading patterns of the period all contributed. [Illustration: Figure 23.--THE ONLY SURVIVING BOLLMAN TRUSS BRIDGE, at Savage, Maryland. The bridge was built elsewhere in 1852 and was moved to this now-abandoned Baltimore and Ohio industrial siding in about 1888.] Although no Bollman trusses were built by Bollman or the B. & O. after 1875, those in use were only removed as required by heavier motive power. The Harpers Ferry span, as noted, remained in full main-line service until 1894. Bollman trusses on feeder lines were continued in use until much later; a number of them on the Valley Railroad of Virginia (see fig. 22) were not removed until 1923. However, only on the most isolated spurs was the Bollman truss permitted to reach really ripe age. The sole known remaining example (fig. 23) stands on such a branch--ironically, at Savage, over the Little Patuxent, the site of the first Bollman span. This is not the 1850 bridge, but one built in 1852 and moved to the present site 30 years later. The fate of the first span is not known. [Illustration: Figure 24.--HOT-WATER AND CHOCOLATE PITCHERS of the 10-piece, silver tea service presented to Bollman by his fellow employees when he resigned from the Baltimore and Ohio in 1858. A railroad motif was used throughout, each piece being circled at top and bottom by a track, complete with rail of accurate section and ties. Spouts are in simulation of hexagonal sheet-iron chimneys, with seams riveted, and the handles are in the form of a surveyor's telescope. On the various pieces are engraved the designs of the more important B. & O. bridges. Throughout is a wonderful profusion of bits and objects of railroadiana in low relief, high relief, and fully modeled. In Board of Directors Room, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, Baltimore, Md. (_Photo courtesy of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad._)] Known Bollman Works (All B. & O. works listed were designed by Bollman and built by the railroad, unless otherwise indicated.) Dates of Location Type No. spans Remarks service / length of each 1850-? Savage, Md., Little Bollman 1/76' First Bollman truss Patuxent River through erected; granite towers; truss cost, $23,825. B. & O. RR. 1851-? Bladensburg, Md., Bollman 1/? Second Bollman truss Anacostia River through erected; granite towers; truss cost, $19,430. B. & O. RR. 1851-1862 Harpers Ferry, Va., Bollman 1/124' Winchester span; first Potomac River through major Bollman truss; three truss lines of truss; granite towers; blown up by Confederate Army on September 24, 1862. B. & O. RR. 1851-? Baltimore, Md., Trestle -- Wood trestle bents with Carey Street wrought-iron diagonals. First use of iron structural members in trestlework. Total length 76 feet. B. & O. RR. 1852- Savage, Md., Little Bollman 2/±80' Still standing. Moved to Patuxent River through Savage in 1888; original truss location unknown. This and succeeding Bollman trusses use iron towers. B. & O. RR. 1852 (or Marriottsville, Bollman 1/50' One of first Bollman 1853)-? Md., Patapsco River truss trusses with iron towers. B. & O. RR. 1853-? Zanesville, Ohio, Bollman 4/124' Double track, Central Ohio Muskingum River truss (or RR. Designed by Bollman; 5/160') built by Douglas, Smith & Co., Zanesville. 1854- Elysville (now Bollman 3/97'9" Upper bridge, skew. Cost, 1870(?) Daniels), Md., through $24,477.59. B. & O. RR. Patapsco River truss 1854-1862 Monocacy, Md., Bollman 3/119' Blown up September 8, Monocacy River truss 1862; rebuilt in 1864. Cost, $22,722.59. B. & O. RR. 1854-? Eastern Ohio Bollman 1/40' C. O. RR. Section 76 truss(?) adjacent to 300-ft. tunnel. 1855-? Bridgeville, Ohio, Bollman 1/71' C. O. RR. Salt Creek deck truss Pre-1855-? Buffalo, N.Y. -- -- Unidentified. Mentioned by George Vose in Railroad Advocate (June 9, 1855). 1856-? Elysville, Md., Bollman 3/111' Lower Bridge. B. & O. RR. about 1-1/4 miles through east of 1854 truss bridge, Patapsco River Pre-1856-? Marriottsville, Bollman 1/48'9" Referred to as "Tunnel Md. truss(?) Bridge" in B. & O. RR. annual report, 1856. 1856-? Near Ijamsville, "Iron 3/23'9" Possibly trussed beams; Md., Bush Creek girders" mentioned in B. & O. RR. annual report, 1856. 1856-? Near Ijamsville, "Iron 2/23'9" As above. Md., Bush Creek girders" 1856- North Branch, Md., Bollman 3/142' Partially destroyed in c.1862 Potomac River deck truss Civil War. B. & O. RR. 1860-1906 Chile, Angostura Bollman 4/115' Chilean Railways. River truss(?) Designed and built by Bollman. Replaced by bridge built by French firm of Schneider, Cruesot & Co. 1860-1910 Chile, Paine River Bollman 1/? As above. truss(?) Post- Ilchester, Md., Bollman 1/? B. & O. RR. 1860-? Patapsco River through truss Pre-1861-? Cuba Bridges -- All bridges on Havana and RR., including iron station station house and bridge house at Guines. Designed and built by Bollman. Pre-1861-? Cuba Bridges -- All bridges on Cienfuegos RR., Cárdenas RR., and Havana & Matanzas RR. Designed and built by Bollman. Pre-1861-? Cuba Trestle -- Trestle with wrought-iron columns (the first such ever constructed). Havana RR. Designed and built by Bollman. 1862-1862 Harpers Ferry, Va., Bollman 2/160' Span no. 3 (July 24) and Potomac River through span no. 4 (August 21). truss Blown up September 24, 1862. B. & O. RR. 1862-1936 Harpers Ferry, Va., Bollman 1/160' Span no. 5 (November). Potomac River through B. & O. RR. truss 1863-1936 Harpers Ferry, Va., Bollman 3/160' Spans nos. 3, 4, and 5. Potomac River through Constructed previous to truss April 1863. B. & O. RR. 1863-? Berwyn, Md., Paint Bollman ? Iron bridge mentioned in Branch truss(?) B. & O. RR. annual report, 1863. 1863(4?)-? Clinton, Iowa, Pivot 1/360' Built by Detroit Bridge Mississippi River draw & Iron Works. It was the longest in the world at time of completion. Designed by Bollman. 1864-? Laurel, Md., Bollman ? Replaced stone arch that Patuxent River truss had been washed out. B. & O. RR. c. 1864-? Near Veracruz, Bollman 1/115' Veracruz & Jucaro RR. Mexico, Medellín through First iron bridge in River truss Mexico. Designed and built by Bollman. 1864-? Near Point of Bollman 1/80'(?) Iron bridge mentioned in Rocks, Md., Back truss(?) B. & O. RR. annual Creek report, 1864. The span length given is that of previous stone arch. 1864-? Bladensburg, Md., Bollman 1/? Span for second track, to Anacostia River truss match 1851 span. B. & O. RR. 1868-? Cape Fear, N.C., Bollman 2/146'6" Wilmington Railway Bridge Northeast Branch, truss(?) 1/164' Co. This bridge was Cape Fear River pivot connected to that over draw/150' the Northwest Branch by 2-1/2 miles of timber trestling. Designed and built by Bollman. 1868-? Cape Fear, N.C., Bollman 1/217'(?) See above. Northwest Branch, truss(?) pivot Cape Fear River draw/150' 1868-? Quincy, Ill., Bollman 4/85' Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Bay (in deck pivot Quincy RR. The pivot draw Mississippi River) truss draw/190' was formed of two 85-ft. simple Bollman deck spans whose outer ends hung from hog chains. Designed by Bollman; built by Detroit Bridge & Iron Works. 1869- Baltimore, Md., Warren 2/100' North Avenue Bridge. c.1892 over Jones Falls, truss 2/55'6" Composite double B. & O. RR., and intersection truss; Northern Central timber top chord and RR. posts, wrought-iron lower chord and ties. In 55-ft. spans, both chords timber. Cost, $73,588. Built by Bollman. c.1869- Harpers Ferry, Va., Bollman 4/? Canal span (no. 8), Wide 1936 Potomac River through span (no. 2), Winchester truss span, and West End span. Destroyed by flood in 1936. B. & O. RR. 1870- Baltimore, Md., Iron 1/108' Charles Street Bridge. c.1895 Jones Falls "Isometrical Three lines of trussing. truss" Cost, $20,297. Built by (probably Bollman. Pratt type) 1870- Bellaire, Ohio- Bollman 9/107'- In approaches; 2 spans on 1893 & Benwood W. Va., deck 125' Ohio side; 7 on West 1900 Ohio River truss Virginia side. B. & O. RR. 1870- Belpre, Ohio- Bollman 16/? In approaches; 7 spans on c.1895 Parkersburg, W. deck Ohio side; 9 on West Va., Ohio River truss Virginia side. B. & O. RR. 1870-? Elysville, Md., Bollman 4/? Skew; replacement of Patapsco River through Upper Bridge(?). B. & O. truss RR. 1871- Baltimore, Md., Timber ? Decker Street (now c.1895 Jones Falls and iron Maryland Avenue) Bridge. truss Cost, $24,975. Built by Bollman. 1871- Baltimore, Md., Warren 1/100' North Avenue Bridge. c.1892 over Northern truss Composite double Central RR. at intersection truss; Jones Falls cast-iron top chord and posts; wrought-iron bottom chord and ties. West span. Built by Bollman. 1873-1923 Cave Station, Va., Bollman 1/98'7" Valley Railroad of Middle River deck 1/63'5" Virginia (B. & O.) Bridge truss no. 120. The main span was a Whipple deck truss. Replaced with plate girders. Designed by Bollman. 1873-1923 Mount Crawford, Bollman 2/98'6" Valley Railroad of Va., North River deck 1/148'9" Virginia (B. & O.) Bridge truss no. 117. Designed by Bollman. 1873-1923 Verona, Va., North Bollman 3/98'7" Valley Railroad of River deck Virginia (B. & O.) Bridge truss no. 129. The main span was a 147-ft. Whipple deck truss. Designed by Bollman. 1873-? Wadesville, Va., Bollman 1/147'8" Span length given is that Opequon Creek through of previous wood span truss that burned in 1862. B. & O. RR. c. 1873- Baltimore, Md. Iron roof ? First Presbyterian trusses Church. Built by Bollman; possibly designed by him. 1873- Baltimore, Md. Cast-iron City Hall. Cost, $12,840. stairs Designed by George A. Frederick, architect; built by Bollman. 1873- Baltimore, Md. Cast-iron Dome of the City Hall. framework Cost, $70,525. Designed by George A. Frederick; built by Bollman. 1875- Baltimore, Md., Iron truss 1/? Fayette Street Bridge. c.1913 Jones Falls Cost, $9,396. Built by Bollman. 1876- Baltimore, Md., "Single- 1/? Canton Avenue (now Fleet c.1913 Jones Falls beam iron Street) Bridge. Cost, bridge" $8,904. Built by Bollman. (truss?) 1876- Baltimore, Md., "Single- 1/? Eastern Avenue Bridge. c.1913 Jones Falls beam iron Cost, $12,382. Built by bridge" Bollman. (truss?) 1877- Baltimore, Md., Pratt and 1/88'6" Lombard Street Bridge. Jones Falls bowstring Three lines of truss; truss two outer trusses, composite cast- and wrought-iron polygonal Pratt type; center composite bowstring with Pratt-system web. Both chords are cast-iron water mains, bifurcated at the end bearings; cast-iron posts and wrought-iron ties. In service. Cost, $7,632. Designed by Jas. Curran, Baltimore water department; built by Bollman. 1877- Baltimore, Md., Iron truss 1/? Bath Street Bridge. Cost, c.1913 Jones Falls $4,172. Built by Bollman. 1879-? Baltimore, Md. Drawbridge 1/? Over entrance to City Dock. Cost, $13,182. Built by Bollman. 1879- Baltimore, Md., Warren 2/173'9" North Street (now c.1930 over Jones Falls truss Guilford Avenue) Bridge. and railroad Composite trusses; tracks cast-iron top chord and end posts; wrought-iron bottom chord and web members. Cost, $38,772.45. Built by Bollman; designed by Latrobe. 1881-1960 Baltimore, Md., Wrought- 1/? Union Avenue Bridge. (Woodberry), iron Pratt Built by Bollman; Jones Falls truss possibly designed by him. ?-? Harpers Ferry, Va., Bollman 1/148' Arsenal Branch, B. & O. Arsenal Canal through RR. Skew type. Span truss length is that of previous timber span. ?-? Baltimore, Md., Bollman 2/? B. & O. RR. Gwynns Falls through truss BIBLIOGRAPHY _A history and description of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad by a citizen of Baltimore._ Baltimore, 1853. Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company. _A list of the officers and employees of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad for November, 1857._ Baltimore, 1857. ----. _Third annual report of the president and directors to the stockholders of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road Company._ Baltimore: 1829. (Also the fourth through 38th annual reports. Baltimore, 1830-1864.) ----. _Baltimore and Ohio exhibits at the Century of Progress._ Chicago, 1934. _Biographical cyclopedia of representative men of Maryland and the District of Columbia._ Baltimore, 1879. BOLLMAN, WENDEL. _Iron suspension and trussed bridge as constructed for the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road Co. at Harper's Ferry, and on the Washington branch of this road._ Baltimore, 1852. ----. Letter to John W. Garrett dated June 17, 1862. In files of Division of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, United States National Museum, Washington, D.C. ----. _Report of Mr. Bollman in relation to Central Ohio Rail Road._ Baltimore, 1854. BRYANT, WILLIAM C. _Picturesque America._ New York, 1874. CLARKE, THOMAS CURTIS. _An account of the iron railway bridge across the Mississippi River at Quincy, Illinois._ New York, 1869. COLBURN, ZERAH. American iron bridges. _Minutes of the proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers_ (1863), vol. 22, pp. 540-573. CONDIT, CARL. _American building art:--The nineteenth century._ New York: Oxford Press, 1960. GRAY, GEORGE E. Notes on early practice in bridge building. _Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers_ (1897), vol. 37, pp. 2-16. GREINER, JOHN E. The American railroad viaduct--Its origin and evolution. _Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers_ (1891), vol. 25, pp. 349-372. LANG, PHILIP GEORGE. Bollman trusses on Valley of Virginia Branch will soon be memories. _Baltimore and Ohio Magazine_ (October 1923), pp. 18-19. ----. The old Baltimore and Ohio bridge crossing the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry, West [sic] Virginia. _Engineering News-Record_ (September 17, 1931), p. 446. MALEZIEUX, EMILE. _Travaux publics des Etats-Unis d'Amerique en 1870._ Paris, 1873. MCDOWELL, W. H. Unpublished engineer's report to the president and directors of Wilmington Railway Bridge Company, Wilmington, North Carolina, dated March 12, 1868. Typewritten copy in files of Division of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, U.S. National Museum, Washington, D.C. SMITH, CHARLES SHALER. _Comparative analysis of the Fink, Murphy, Bollman and triangular trusses._ Baltimore, 1865. SMITH, WILLIAM P. _The book of the great railway celebrations of 1857._ Baltimore, 1858. TYRRELL, HENRY G. _History of bridge engineering._ Chicago, 1911. WHIPPLE, SQUIRE. _Bridge building._ Albany, New York, 1869. * * * * * CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 37 SCREW-THREAD CUTTING BY THE MASTER-SCREW METHOD SINCE 1480 _Edwin A. Battison_ _Edwin A. Battison_ SCREW-THREAD CUTTING BY THE MASTER-SCREW METHOD SINCE 1480 _Among the earliest known examples of screw-thread cutting machines are the screw-cutting lathe of 1483, known only in pictures and drawings, and an instrument of the traverse-spindle variety for threading metal, now in the Smithsonian Institution, dating from the late 17th or early 18th century. The author shows clearly their evolution from something quite specialized to the present-day tool. He has traced the patents for these instruments through the early 1930's and from this research we see the part played by such devices in the development of the machine-tool industry._ THE AUTHOR: _Edwin A. Battison is associate curator of mechanical and civil engineering in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology._ Directness and simplicity characterize pioneer machine tools because they were intended to accomplish some quite specialized task and the need for versatility was not apparent. History does not reveal the earliest forms of any primitive machines nor does it reveal much about the various early stages in evolution toward more complex types. At best we have discovered and dated certain developments as existing in particular areas. Whether these forms were new at the time they were first found or how widely dispersed such forms may have been is unknown. Surviving evidence is in the form of pictures or drawings, such as the little-known screw-cutting lathe of 1483 (fig. 1) shown in _Das mittelalterliche Hausbuch_. This lathe shows that its builder had a keen perception of the necessary elements, reduced to bare essentials, required to accomplish the object. Present are the coordinate slides often credited to Henry Maudslay. His slides are not, of course, associated with the spindle; neither is there any natural law which compels them to guide the tool exactly parallel with the axis of revolution. In this sense the screw-cutting lathe in the _Hausbuch_ is superior because it is in harmony with natural law and can generate a true cylinder, whereas Maudslay's lathe can only transfer to the work whatever accuracy is built into it. In principle this machine shown in the _Hausbuch_ is very advanced as we see when we follow the design through to the present time. The artist, whose drawings give us our only knowledge of the machine, himself was obviously not very familiar with the details of its function. Reference to figure 1 shows that the threads on the lead screw and on the work, wind in opposite directions. This must be an error in delineation since the two are closely coupled together without any intervening mechanism so that the only possible result on the work must be a thread winding in the same direction as on the original screw. The work also is shown threaded for its entire length; this cannot be accomplished with any one location of the cross-slide. We are left with the question of whether this slide was used in two locations or whether the artist, possibly working from notes or an earlier rough sketch, failed to show an unthreaded portion on one end or the other of the work. [Illustration: Figure 1.--EARLIEST REPRESENTATION FOUND OF A MASTER-SCREW TYPE of thread-cutting machine. From the inconsistencies, such as right- and left-hand threads on master and work, it appears that the artist had scant insight into actual function. From plate 62 of _Das mittelalterliche Hausbuch, nach dem Originale im Besitze des Fürsten von Waldburg-Wolfegg-Waldsee, im Auftrage des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft, herausgegeben von Helmuth Th. Bossert und Willy F. Storck_ (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1912).] Of at least equal importance with the lead screw and work and their relationship to each other is the tool-support with its screw-adjusted cross-slide (fig. 2). Just how this was attached to the frame of the machine so that it placed the tool at a suitable radius is again a questionable point. The very well-developed cutting tool is sharpened to a thin, keen edge totally unsuited for cutting metal but ideal for use on a softer, fibrous substance: undoubtedly wood, in this instance. Unfortunately, the angle at which the artist chose to show us this cutter is not a view from which it is possible to judge whether or not the tool has been made to conform to the helix angle of the thread to be cut. This cross-slide, in conjunction with the traversing work spindle, gives us a machine having two coordinate slides yielding the same effect as the slide rest usually attributed to Henry Maudslay at the end of the 18th century. Actually, an illustration of coordinate slides independent of the spindle had been published as early as 1569 by Besson[1] and knowledge of them widely disseminated by his popular work on mechanics. These slides are shown as part of a screw-cutting machine with a questionably adequate connection, by means of cords, between the master screw and the work. It was the author's pleasure recently to obtain for the Smithsonian Institution and identify a small, nicely made, brass instrument which had been in two collections in this country and one collection in Germany as an unidentified locksmith's tool (fig. 3). This proved to be an instrument of the traverse-spindle variety for threading metal. Fortunately, all essential details were present including a cutter (A in figure 4); this instrument was identified by the signature "Manuel Wetschgi, Augspurg." The Wetschgis were a well-known family of gunsmiths and mechanics in Augsburg through several generations. Two bore the given name Emanuel: the earlier was born in 1678 and died in 1728. He was quite celebrated in his field of rifle making and became chief of artillery to the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel shortly before his death in his 51st year. Little is known of the later Emanuel Wetschgi except that he was at Augsburg in 1740. Tentative attribution of the instrument has been made to the earlier Emanuel, chiefly on the basis of his recognized position as an outstanding craftsman. [Illustration: Figure 2.--CROSS-SLIDE for the thread-cutting lathe of _Das mittelalterliche Hausbuch_, shown in figure 1. It is remarkable not only for its early date, but also for its high state of development with a crossfeed screw which had not become universally accepted 300 years later. The cutter, shown out of its socket, is obviously sharpened for use on wood.] In several respects this little machine differs from its predecessor of the _Hausbuch_, as might be expected when allowance is made for the generations of craftsmen who undoubtedly worked with such tools over the roughly 200 years of time separating them. Another factor to consider when comparing these two machines is that one was used on metal, the other probably only on wood. Therefore, it is not surprising to find on the later machine an outboard or "tailstock" support for the work. The spindle of this support has to travel in unison with the work-driving spindle so that it is not an unexpected discovery to find that it is spring-loaded. Figure 5 shows how this spring may be adjusted to accommodate various lengths of work by moving the attachment screw to various holes in both the spring and in the frame. Also visible in the same illustration is a rectangular projection at the other end of the spring which engages a mating hole in the "tailstock" spindle to prevent its rotation. [Illustration: Figure 3.--SMALL THREAD-CUTTING LATHE which was made to be held in a vise during use. It was found as shown here, with only the operating crank missing. The overall length is approximately 12 inches, depending on the adjustment of parts. (Smithsonian photo 46525B.)] Figure 6 shows the traversing spindle and nut removed from the machine. Provision has been made for doing this so easily that there is every reason to believe that, originally, there were various different spindle and nut units which could be interchangeably used in the machine. Additional evidence tending to support this concept exists in the cutting tool (fig. 4), which must have been intended for serious work as it has been carefully fitted in its unsymmetrical socket. The cutting blade of this tool, which works with a scraping rather than a true cutting action, is too wide to form a properly proportioned thread when used with the existing lead screw. This may well indicate that the tool was made for use with a lead of coarser pitch, now lost. [Illustration: Figure 4.--THE WORKING AREA of figure 3, showing the tool and signature. (Smithsonian photo 46525A.)] Perhaps the most startling feature of this machine when compared with the machine of the _Hausbuch_, is the absence of a cross-slide for adjusting the tool. Possibly this can be explained by the blunt scraping edge on the tool. In actual use, recently, to cut a sample screw, using a tool similar to the one found in the machine (fig. 7), it was found advantageous to be free of a cross-slide and thus be able to feed the tool into the work by feel rather than by rule, as would be done with a slide rest. In this way, it was possible to thread steel without tearing, as the cutting pressure could readily be felt and the tool could release itself from too heavy a cut. Size on several screws could be repeated by setting the tool to produce the desired diameter when its supporting arm came to rest against the frame of the machine. The screws used in the machine itself were apparently made in just such a way. They were not cut with a die as the thread blends very gradually into the body of the screw without the characteristic marks left by the cutting edges of a die. Threads cut with a single-point tool controlled by a cross-slide usually end even more abruptly than those cut by a die, while it would be quite simple with a machine of the nature we are considering to bring the thread to a gentle tapering end as seen in figure 8 (another view of the screw A in fig. 3) by gradually releasing the pressure necessary to keep the tool cutting as the end of the thread was approached. [Illustration: Figure 5.--SPRING FOR KEEPING THE FOLLOWER SPINDLE against the work, showing the method and range of adjustment. Note the rectangular projection to engage a mating socket in the spindle, to prevent spindle rotation. (Smithsonian photo 46525.)] [Illustration: Figure 6.--WORK SPINDLE AND ITS NUT removed from the machine to illustrate how easily another spindle and nut of different pitch could be substituted. (Smithsonian photo 46525C.)] That machines of this general type having the lead screw on the axis of the work were competitive with other methods and other types of machines over a long period of time may be seen from figures 9 and 10. The machine, left front in figure 9 and in more intimate detail in figure 10, can be seen to differ little from that shown in _Das mittelalterliche Hausbuch_ of 1483. The double work-support is, of course, a great improvement, while the tool-support is regressive since it lacks a feed screw. The development of engineering theory, coupled with the rising needs of industry, particularly with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, brought about accelerated development of screw-cutting lathes through the combination of screw-cutting machines with simple lathes as seen in figure 9 and in detail in figure 11. One important advance shown here is driving the machine by means of a cord or band so that any means of rotary power could be applied, not just hand or foot power. Of greater interest and technical importance to this study is the provision, seen to better advantage in figure 11, for readily changing from one master lead screw to another. This had already been achieved in the Manuel Wetschgi machine, as far as versatility is concerned, although not in quite such a convenient way. [Illustration: Figure 7.--THREAD OF MODERN FORM recently cut, using the old screw and nut but with a new tool. The material threaded is carbon-steel drill rod. (Smithsonian photo 49276A.)] Figure 12, the headstock of another and more advanced lathe than shown in figures 9 and 11 but of the same type, shows "keys" (D), each of which is a partial nut of different pitch to engage with a thread of mating pitch. The dotted lines in figure 13 show the engaged and disengaged positions of one of these keys, and figure 14 shows the spindle with the various leads, C. At D is a grooved collar to be engaged by the narrow key shown in operating position at the left in figure 12 for the purpose of controlling the endwise movement of the spindle when used for ordinary turning instead of thread-cutting. In return for greater convenience and freedom from the expense of the many separate spindles, as typified by the Wetschgi machine, a sacrifice has been made in the length of the thread which can be cut without interruption. [Illustration: Figure 8.--BINDING SCREW seen at A in figure 3, showing the long smooth fadeout of the thread below the shoulder. (Smithsonian photo 49276.)] [Illustration: Figure 9.--MAKING SCREWS IN FRANCE in the third quarter of the 18th century. From _L'Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers ... receuil de planches sur les sciences, les arts libéraux, et les arts méchaniques, avec leur explication_ (Paris: 1762-1772), vol. 9, plate 1.] [Illustration: Figure 10.--DETAILS OF THE MACHINE in the left foreground of figure 9, showing the crude tool-support without screw adjustment. From _L'Encyclopédie_, vol. 9, plate 2.] This reduction in the length that could conveniently be threaded was no great drawback on many classes of work. This can be realized from figure 16 which shows a traverse-spindle lathe headstock typical of the mid-19th century. During the years intervening between the machines of figures 12 and 16, the general design was greatly improved by removing the lead screws from the center of the spindle. This made possible a shorter, much stiffer spindle and supported both ends of the spindle in one frame or headstock rather than in separate pieces attached to the bed. The screws were now mounted outside of the spindle-bearings, one at a time, while the mating nuts were cut partially into the circumference of a disk which could be turned to bring any particular nut into working position as required. With this arrangement, a wide variety of leads either right or left hand could be provided and additional leads could be fitted at any future time. Screw-cutting lathes of this design were popular for a very long time with instrument makers and opticians who had little need to cut screws of great length. [Illustration: Figure 11.--DETAILS OF THE THREADING LATHE seen in the right foreground of figure 9 showing the method of drive and support for the work. From _L'Encyclopédie_, vol. 9, plate 1.] The demands of expanding industry for greater versatility in the production of engineering elements late in the 18th century set the stage for the evolution of more complex machines tending to place the threaded spindle lathes in eclipse. Maudslay's lathe of 1797-1800 (fig. 15) appeared at this time when industry was receptive to rapid innovation. Unfortunately, the gearing which once existed to connect the headstock spindle with the lead screw has long been lost. At this time it is quite difficult to say with certainty whether the original gear set offered a variety of ratios, as was true of slightly later Maudslay lathes, or a fixed ratio. The plausibility of the fixed ratio theory is supported by the very convenient means, seen in figure 15, for removing the lead screw in preparation for substitution of one of another pitch. All that is required is to back off its supporting center at the tailstock end and withdraw the screw from its split nut[2] and from the driving clutch near the headstock. This split nut also would have to be changed to one of a pitch corresponding to that of the screw. While more expensive than a solid nut, it neatly circumvents the need (and saves the time involved) to reverse the screw in order to get the tool back to the point of beginning preliminary to taking another cut. David Wilkinson's lathe of 1798 (fig. 17) which was developed in Rhode Island at the same time shows the same method of mounting and driving the master screw. At least in the United States, this method of changing the lead screw instead of using change gears remained popular for many years. Examples of this changeable screw feature are to be found in the lathes constructed for the pump factory of W. & B. Douglas Company, Middletown, Connecticut,[3] in the 1830's. Middletown, at that time one of the leading metal-working centers in one of the chief industrial States, had been for many years the site of the Simeon North arms factory which rivaled Whitney's. In this atmosphere, it is reasonable to expect that machinery constructed by local mechanics, as was the custom in those days, would reflect the most accepted refinements in machine design. [Illustration: Figure 12.--WELL-DEVELOPED EXAMPLE of lathe headstock having several leads on the spindle and provision for mounting the work or a work-holding chuck on the spindle. Adapted from _L'Encyclopédie_, vol. 10, plate 13.] [Illustration: Figure 13.--END VIEW OF THE HEADSTOCK seen in figure 12, showing the keys or half nuts which engage the threaded spindle, in engaged and disengaged positions. From _L'Encyclopédie_, vol. 10, plate 13.] [Illustration: Figure 14.--SPINDLE OF FIGURES 12 AND 13, showing the several leads and the many-sided seat for the driving pulley. Note the scale of feet. From _L'Encyclopédie_, vol. 10, plate 16.] Roughly twenty years later, Joseph Nason of New York patented[4] the commercially very important "Fox" brassworker's lathe (fig. 18). While this does have a ratio in the pair of gears connecting the work spindle and master screw, it is clear from the patent that various pitches are to be obtained by changing screws, not by changing gears. The patent sums it up as follows: A nut upon the end of the stud ... is unscrewed when the guide screw is to be removed or changed. The two wheels ... should have in their number of teeth a common multiple. They are seldom or never removed and their diameters are made dissimilar only for the purpose of giving to the guide screw a slower rate of motion than that of the mandrel whereby it may be made of coarser pitch than that of the screw to be cut and its wear materially lessened. The introduction of gearing between the spindle and the lead screw, for whatever purpose, could not help but introduce variable factors caused by inaccuracies in the gears themselves and in their mounting. These were of little consequence for common work, particularly when coupled to a screw which, itself, was of questionable accuracy. The increasing refinements demanded in scientific instruments and in machine tools themselves after they had reached a relatively stable form dictated that attention be dedicated to improved accuracy of the threaded components. [Illustration: Figure 15.--MAUDSLAY'S WELL-KNOWN screw-cutting lathe of 1797-1800, showing the method of mounting and driving changeable master screws. (_Photo courtesy of The Science Museum, London._)] [Illustration: Figure 16.--HEADSTOCK OF A GERMAN INSTRUMENT-MAKER'S LATHE, typical of the mid-19th century, showing the traverse spindle, interchangeable lead screws, and semicircumferential nut containing several leads. The nut may be brought into engagement by the lever at top rear of the headstock. This releases the end thrust control on the spindle simultaneously with engagement of the nut. (Smithsonian photo 49839.)] [Illustration: Figure 17.--DAVID WILKINSON'S SCREW-CUTTING LATHE, patented in the United States in 1798. Note the ready facility with which the lead screw may be exchanged for another and the same means of supporting and driving as in figure 15. (U.S. National Archives photo.)] An attack on this problem, which interestingly reverts to the fundamental principle of motion derived from a master screw without the intervention of other mechanism (fig. 19), is covered by a patent[5] issued to Charles Vander Woerd, one-time superintendent of the Waltham Watch Company. The problem is well stated in the patent: This invention relates to the manufacture of leading screws to be used for purposes requiring the highest attainable degree of correctness in the cutting of the screw-threads of said screw ... as, for example, in machines for ruling lines in glass plates to produce refraction [sic] gratings for the resolution of the lines of the solar spectrum, such machines being required to rule many thousands of lines on an inch of space by a marking device which is reciprocated over the glass plate and is fed by the action of a leading screw after the formation of each line. Great difficulty has been experienced in constructing a leading screw for this and other purposes, in which the thread is so nearly correct as to produce no perceptible variation in the microscopic spaces between the ruled lines or gratings.... Various causes prevent the formation of a thread on the rod or blank, which is absolutely uniform and accurate from end to end of the rod. Among other causes are the variations of temperature from time to time, the imperfections of the operating leading screw, the springing of the leading screw and of the rod that is being threaded, and other unavoidable causes, all of which, although apparently trivial and producing only slight variations in the thread at different parts of the rod or blank, are of sufficient moment to be seriously considered when a screw of absolute accuracy is desired. [Illustration: Figure 18.--NASON'S LATHE, patented in 1854, showing a master lead screw driven at less than work speed so that the master could be of a coarser and more durable pitch than the work. U.S. patent 10383.] It is interesting to note in figure 19 that Vander Woerd's machine, to avoid the problems outlined in his patent, has returned to a starkly simple design. We are not told, however, how he originated this master screw which is used to produce the accurately threaded work pieces. Later generations, in the search for ever-greater accuracy, also returned to the fundamental simplicity of a master screw as we shall see when we consider the refinements in mechanism necessary to the extended development of the automobile and the airplane. [Illustration: Figure 19.--VANDER WOERD'S PATENT, seen here, covered the combination of a master screw, toolslide and work in a rigid frame to be supported and driven by outside means of no required precision. U.S. patent 293930 dated February 1884.] As the power and speed of automobiles and aircraft increased, critical parts became more highly stressed. Gears and threaded parts were particularly troublesome details of the mechanism because of the stresses concentrated in them, and, in the case of gears, because of the internal and external stresses originating in minute deviations from the ideal of tooth form and spacing. The problems were not entirely new but had hitherto been solved by increasing the size of the parts, an avenue of limited utility to designers in these fields where total weight as well as the effects of mass and inertia are so important. By making these parts of heat-treated steel, the strength could be made suitable while the size and mass of the parts were kept within bounds. The necessary processes of heat-treating were not always applicable to finished parts as they sometimes destroyed both finish and accuracy. Grinding, which was well developed for the simple plane, cylindrical, and conical surfaces so widely used in mechanisms, had to be extended to threads and gears so that they could be finished after heat-treating. Sometimes the gear teeth themselves were ground; for other applications it was sufficient to improve the accuracy of the gear cutters. [Illustration: Figure 20.--A HOB-GRINDING MACHINE patented in 1932 and incorporating the master-screw principle. Carl G. Olson's U.S. patent 1874592.] Attempts to produce gear hobs free of the imperfections and distortions introduced by heat treatment led to another return to the use of the master lead screw. Figure 20 illustrates a machine having this feature which was patented in 1932 by Carl G. Olson.[6] In speaking of the spindle-driving mechanism disclosed in earlier patents, the patent goes on to say: This driving mechanism includes an integral spindle 20, one extremity thereof being designed for supporting a hob 22 and the other extremity thereof being formed so as to present a lead screw 24. The spindle 20 is mounted between a bearing 26 and a bearing 28, the latter bearing providing a nut in which the lead screw 24 rotates.... From the description thus far given it will be apparent that the rotation of the lead screw 24 within the bearing or nut 28 will cause the hob to be moved axially, the lead of the screw 24 being equal to the lead of the thread in the hob. Claim 8 which concludes the descriptive portion of the patent states in part: In a hob grinding machine of the class described, a rotary work supporting spindle, means for effecting longitudinal movement of the spindle, a tool holder for supporting a grinding wheel in operative position with respect to the work supported by the spindle during the rotary and longitudinal movement thereof, ... Even before this patent was applied for, another patent was pending for the purpose of modifying the pitch of the lead screw without the use of change gears in spite of the wide acceptance of such gear mechanisms for over a hundred years. [Illustration: Figure 21.--A HOB-GRINDING MACHINE OF 1933, showing use of the master screw with a modifier but without change gears. Carl G. Olson's U.S. patent 1901926.] [Illustration: Figure 22.--A SINE-BAR DEVICE to modify the effective lead of a master lead screw without introducing a complex mechanism which would be both difficult to make and to operate within the required close limits. Carl G. Olson's (1933) U.S. patent 1901926.] Figure 21 shows a plan view[7] of the machine, and figure 22 a detailed view of the sine-bar mechanism actuated by the master screw, 6, to modify the effective pitch of the lead screw in accordance with the realities of practice as stated in the preamble of the patent: This invention relates to material working machines, and particularly to machines such as hob grinders and the like, wherein the work is reciprocated through the agency of a lead screw. In the manufacture of hobs it is common practice to employ the same machine for grinding hobs of varied diameters, and in order to employ such a machine in this manner the pitch of the lead screw, thereof, which actuates the work carrier, must conform to the axial pitch of the hob to be ground. This will be readily apparent when it is understood that the helix angles of hobs vary in accordance with their diameters and, consequently, the difference between the normal pitch and the axial pitch correspondingly varies. While the requirement for the normal pitch may be the same for hobs of different diameters, it is necessary to change the axial pitch in accordance with a change in the hob diameter, and this axial pitch of the hob is equal to the pitch of the lead screw which actuates the work carrier in grinding machines heretofore used. Hence, in order to adapt such machines to cover a wide range of leads, it is necessary to provide a large number of interchangeable lead screws and obviously this represents a large investment, and the interchanging of these screws requires the expenditure of considerable time in setting up the machine for each job. Thread-grinding machines were being designed concurrent with the development of hob-grinding machines. Many were entirely concerned with features peculiar to the problems of wheel-dressing and to automatic characteristics. An invention to embody the use of a master screw and concerned with the precision grinding of worm threads, for use in gearing, was patented by Frederick A. Ward in this era.[8] That part of the invention pertaining to the use of a master screw, "a rotary work holder mounted on said carriage and provided with a driving spindle, an exchangeable master screw and stationary nut detachably secured to said spindle and head,..." is shown in figure 23. [Illustration: Figure 23.--DETAILS OF A WORK SPINDLE WITH WORK, showing the use of a master lead screw to control the pitch of a precision worm thread being ground. From the 1933 U.S. patent 1899654, of F. A. Ward's worm-grinding machine.] Machines embodying the principle of the master lead screw are found in constant use by industry at the present time for specialized application. Whenever technological changes again reopen the topic of thread-cutting to a new degree of accuracy or call for a reevaluation of popular methods for any other reason, we may expect to see another resurgence of the master-screw method, for no other design eliminates so many variables or rests on such firm and fundamental natural principles as the machine of _Das mittelalterliche Hausbuch_ of 1483, the earliest such machine now known. * * * * * FOOTNOTES [1] JACQUES BESSON, _Des instruments mathématiques, et méchaniques, servants à l'intelligence de plusiers choses difficiles, & necessaires à toutes républiques_, 1st ed. (Orleans, 1569). [Also available in later editions in French, German, and Spanish.] [2] J. FOSTER PETREE, introduction, _Henry Maudslay, 1771-1831, and Maudslay Sons and Field, Ltd._ (London: The Maudslay Society, 1949). [3] _American Machinist_ (September 28, 1916), vol. 45, no. 13, pp. 529-531. [4] U.S. patent 10383 issued to Joseph Nason of New York, January 3, 1854. [5] U.S. patent 293930 issued to Charles Vander Woerd of Waltham, Massachusetts, February 19, 1884. [6] U.S. patent 1874592, filed June 8, 1929, issued to C. G. Olson of Chicago, Illinois, August 30, 1932, and assigned to the Illinois Tool Works, also of Chicago. [7] U.S. patent 1901926, filed February 16, 1928, issued to C. G. Olson of Chicago, Illinois, March 21, 1933, and assigned to the Illinois Tool Works, also of Chicago. [8] U.S. patent 1899654, filed August 31, 1931, issued to F. A. Ward of Detroit, Michigan, February 28, 1933, and assigned to the Gear Grinding Company of Detroit, Michigan. * * * * * Typographical Corrections Page 107: "... servants à l'intelligence de plusieurs choses difficiles, & nécessaires ..." (had "a," "plusiers," "necessaires") * * * * * CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 38 THE EARLIEST ELECTROMAGNETIC INSTRUMENTS _Robert A. Chipman_ ELECTROSTATIC INSTRUMENTS BEFORE 1800 123 INSTRUMENTING VOLTAIC OR GALVANIC ELECTRICITY, 1800-1820 124 ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTATION, 1800-1820 125 OERSTED'S DISCOVERY 126 BEGINNINGS OF ELECTROMAGNETIC INSTRUMENTATION 126 CHRONOLOGY AND PRIORITY 127 ORIGINAL ELECTROMAGNETIC MULTIPLIERS 129 CONCLUSIONS 135 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 136 _Robert A. Chipman_ THE EARLIEST ELECTROMAGNETIC INSTRUMENTS [Illustration: Figure 1.--MODELS OF VARIOUS ELECTROMAGNETIC INSTRUMENTS created by Schweigger, Poggendorf and Cumming in 1821, made for an exhibit in the Museum of History and Technology, Smithsonian Institution. (Smithsonian photo 49493.)] _The history of the early stages of electromagnetic instrumentation is traced here through the men who devised the theories and constructed the instruments._ _Despite the many uses made of voltaic cells after Volta's announcement of his "pile" invention in 1800, two decades passed before Oersted discovered the magnetic effects of a voltaic circuit. As a result of this and within a five-month period, three men, apparently independently, announced the invention of the "first" electromagnetic instrument. This article details the merits of their claims to priority._ THE AUTHOR: _Robert A. Chipman is chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio, and consultant to the Smithsonian Institution._ Electrostatic Instruments before 1800 It is the fundamental premise of instrument-science that a device for detecting or measuring a physical quantity can be based on any phenomenon associated with that physical quantity. Although the instrumentation of electrostatics in the 18th century, for example, relied mainly on the phenomena of attraction and repulsion and the ubiquitous sparks and other luminosities of frictional electricity, even the physiological sensation of electric shock was exploited semiquantitatively by Henry Cavendish in his well-known anticipation of Ohm's researches. Likewise, Volta in 1800[1] described at length how the application of his pile to suitably placed electrodes on the eyelids, on the tongue, or in the ear, caused stimulation of the senses of sight, taste and hearing; on the other hand, he reported that electrodes in the nose merely produced a "more or less painful" pricking feeling, with no impression of smell. The discharges from the Leyden jars of some of the bigger frictional machines, such as van Marum's at Leyden, were found by 1785 to magnetize pieces of iron and to melt long pieces of metal wire.[2] The useful instruments that emerged from all of this experience were various deflecting "electrometers" and "electroscopes" (the words were not carefully distinguished in use), including the important goldleaf electroscope ascribed to Abraham Bennet in 1787.[3] In 1786, Galvani first observed the twitching of the legs of a dissected frog produced by discharges of a nearby electrostatic machine, thereby revealing still another "effect" of electricity. He then discovered that certain arrangements of metals in contact with the frog nerves produced the same twitching, implying something electrical in the frog-metal situation as a whole. Although Galvani and his nephew Aldini drew from these experiments erroneous conclusions involving "animal electricity," which were disputed by Volta in his metal-contact theory, it is significant from the instrumentation point of view that the frog's legs were unquestionably by far the most sensitive detector of metal-contact electrical effects available at the time. Without their intervention the development of this entire subject-area, including the creation of chemical cells, might have been delayed many years. Volta himself realized that the crucial test between his theory and that of Galvani required confirming the existence of metal-contact electricity by some electrical but nonphysiological detector. He performed this test successfully with an electroscope, using the "condensing" technique he had invented more than a decade earlier. Instrumenting Voltaic or Galvanic Electricity, 1800-1820 In his famous letter of March 20, 1800, written in French from Como, Italy, to the president of the Royal Society in London, Volta made the first public announcement of both his "pile" (the first English translator used the word "column"), and his "crown of cups" (the same translator used "chain of cups" for Volta's "couronne de tasses"). The former consisted of a vertical pile of circular disks, in which the sequence copper-zinc-pasteboard, was repeated 10 or 20 or even as many as 60 times, the pasteboard being moistened with salt water. The "crown of cups" could be most conveniently made with drinking glasses, said Volta, with separated inch-square plates of copper and zinc in salt water in each glass, the copper sheet in one glass being joined by some intermediate conductor and soldered joints to the zinc in the next glass. Volta considered the "crown of cups" and the "pile" to be essentially identical, and as evidences of the electrical nature of the latter, said: ... if it contains about 20 of these stories or couples of metal, it will be capable not only of emitting signs of electricity by Cavallo's electrometer, assisted by a condenser, beyond 10° or 15°, and of charging this condenser by mere contact so as to make it emit a spark, etc., but of giving to the fingers with which its extremities (the bottom and top of the column) have been touched several small shocks, more or less frequent, according as the touching has been repeated. Each of these shocks has a perfect resemblance to that slight shock experienced from a Leyden flask weakly charged, or a battery still more weakly charged, or a torpedo in an exceedingly languishing state, which imitates still better the effects of my apparatus by the series of repeated shocks which it can continually communicate.[4] The "effects" provided by Volta's pile and crown-of-cups are therefore electroscope deflection, sparks, and shocks. Later in the letter, he describes the stimulation of sight, taste, and hearing as noted earlier, but nowhere does he mention chemical phenomena of any kind, or the heating of a wire joining the terminals of either device. Hence, except for the additional physiological responses, he adds nothing to the catalog of observations on which instruments might be based. His familiarity with the moods of the torpedo (electric eel) seems to be intimate. The reading of Volta's letter to the Royal Society on June 26, 1800, its publication in the Society's _Philosophical Transactions_ (in French) immediately thereafter, and its publication in English in the _Philosophical Magazine_ for September 1800,[5] gave scientists throughout Europe an easily constructed and continuously operating electric generator with which innumerable new physical, chemical, and physiological experiments could be made. Editor-engineer William Nicholson read Volta's letter before its publication and, by the end of April, he and surgeon Anthony Carlisle had built a voltaic pile. Applying a drop of water to improve the "connection" of a wire lying on a metal plate, they happened to notice gas bubbles forming on the wire, and pursued the observation to the point of identifying the electrical decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen. Within two or three years innumerable electrochemical reactions had been described, some of which, one might think, could have served as operating principles for electrical instruments. Although the phenomena of gas formation and metal deposition were in fact widely used as crude indicators of the polarity and relative strength of voltaic piles and chemical cells during the period 1800-1820 (and the gas bubbles were made the basis of a telegraph receiver by S. T. Soemmering), the quantitative laws of electrolysis were not worked out by Faraday until after 1830, and not until 1834 was he satisfied that the electrolytic decomposition of water was sufficiently well understood to be made the basis for a useful measuring instrument. Describing his water-electrolysis device in that year, he wrote: The instrument offers the only _actual measurer_ [italics his] of voltaic electricity which we at present possess. For without being at all affected by variations in time or intensity, or alterations in the current itself, of any kind, or from any cause, or even of intermissions of actions, it takes note with accuracy of the quantity of electricity which has passed through it, and reveals that quantity by inspection; I have therefore named it a VOLTAELECTROMETER.[6] In passing, Faraday commented that the efforts by Gay-Lussac and Thenard to use chemical decomposition as a "measure of the electricity of the voltaic pile" in 1811 had been premature because the "principles and precautions" involved were not then known. He also noted that the details of _metal deposition_ in electrolysis were still not sufficiently understood to permit its use in an instrument.[7] The heating of the wires in electric circuits must have been observed so early and so often with both electrostatic and voltaic apparatus, that no one has bothered to claim or trace priorities for this "effect." The production of incandescence, however, and the even more dramatic combustion or "explosion" of metal-foil strips and fine wires has a good deal of recorded history. Among the first to burn leaf metal with a voltaic pile was J. B. Tromsdorff of Erfurt who noted in 1801 the distinctly different colors of the flames produced by the various common metals. In the succeeding few years, Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution frequently, in his public lectures, showed wires glowing from electric current. Early electrical instrumentation based on the heating effect took an unusual form. Shortly after 1800, W. H. Wollaston, an English M.D., learned a method for producing malleable platinum. He kept the process secret, and for several years enjoyed an extremely profitable monopoly in the sale of platinum crucibles, wire, and other objects. About 1810, he invented a technique for producing platinum wire as fine as a few millionths of an inch in diameter, that has since been known as "Wollaston wire." For several years preceding 1820, no other instrument could compare the "strengths" of two voltaic cells better than the test of the respective maximum lengths of this wire that they could heat to fusion. One can sympathize with Cumming's comment in 1821 about "the difficulty in soldering wires that are barely visible."[8] Electrical Instrumentation, 1800-1820 The 20 years following the announcement of the voltaic-pile invention were years of intense experimental activity with this device. Many new chemical elements were discovered, beginnings were made on the electrochemical series of the elements, the electric arc and incandescent platinum wires suggested the possibilities of electric lighting, and various electrochemical observations gave promise of other practical applications such as metal-refining, electroplating, and quantity production of certain gases. Investigators were keenly aware that all of the available means for measuring and comparing the _electrical_ aspects of their experiments (however vaguely these "electrical aspects" may have been conceived), were slow, awkward, imprecise, and unreliable. The atmosphere was such that prominent scientists everywhere were ready to pounce immediately on any reported discovery of a new electrical "effect," to explore its potentialities for instrumental purposes. Into this receptive environment came H. C. Oersted's announcement of the magnetic effects of a voltaic circuit, on July 21, 1820.[9] [Illustration: Figure 2.--"GALVANOMETER" WAS THE NAME given by Bischof to this goldleaf electrostatic instrument in 1802, 18 years before Ampère coupled the word with the use of Oersted's electromagnetic experiment as an indicating device.] Oersted's Discovery Many writers have expressed surprise that with all the use made of voltaic cells after 1800, including the enormous cells that produced the electric arc and vaporized wires, no one for 20 years happened to see a deflection of any of the inevitable nearby compass needles, which were a basic component of the scientific apparatus kept by any experimenter at this time. Yet so it happened. The surprise is still greater when one realizes that many of the contemporary natural philosophers were firmly persuaded, even in the absence of positive evidence, that there _must_ be a connection between electricity and magnetism. Oersted himself held this latter opinion, and had been seeking electromagnetic relationships more or less deliberately for several years before he made his decisive observations. His familiarity with the subject was such that he fully appreciated the immense importance of his discovery. This accounts for his employing a rather uncommon method of publication. Instead of submitting a letter to a scientific society or a report to the editor of a journal, he had privately printed a four-page pamphlet describing his results. This, he forwarded simultaneously to the learned societies and outstanding scientists all over Europe. Written in Latin, the paper was published in various journals in English, French, German, Italian and Danish during the next few weeks.[10] In summary, he reported that a compass needle experienced deviations when placed near a wire connecting the terminals of a voltaic battery. He described fully how the direction and magnitude of the needle deflections varied with the relative position of the wire, and the polarity of the battery, and stated "From the preceding facts, we may likewise collect that this conflict performs circles...." Oersted's comment that the voltaic apparatus used should "be strong enough to heat a metallic wire red hot" does not excuse the 20-year delay of the discovery. Beginnings of Electromagnetic Instrumentation The mere locating of a compass needle above or below a suitably oriented portion of a voltaic circuit created an electrical instrument, the moment Oersted's "effect" became known, and it was to this basic juxtaposition that Ampère quickly gave the name of galvanometer.[11] It cannot be said that the scientists of the day agreed that this instrument detected or measured "electric current," however. Volta himself had referred to the "current" in his original circuits, and Ampère used the word freely and confidently in his electrodynamic researches of 1820-1822, but Oersted did not use it first and many of the German physicists who followed up his work avoided it for several years. As late as 1832, Faraday could make only the rather noncommittal statement: "By current I mean anything progressive, whether it be a fluid of electricity or vibrations or generally progressive forces."[12] Nevertheless, whatever the words or concepts they used, experimenters agreed that Oersted's apparatus provided a method of monitoring the "strength" of a voltaic circuit and a means of comparing, for example, one voltaic battery or circuit with another. It was perfectly clear, from Oersted's pamphlet, that if a compass needle was deflected clockwise when the wire of a particular voltaic circuit lay above it in the magnetic meridian, the same needle would _also_ be deflected clockwise if the wire was turned end-for-end and placed _below_ the compass needle, without changing the rest of the circuit. Anyone perceiving this fact might deduce, as a matter of logic, that if the wire of the circuit was first passed above the needle, in the magnetic meridian, then folded and returned in a parallel path below the needle, the deflecting effect on the needle would be repeated, and a more sensitive indicator would result, assuming that any additional wire introduced has not affected the "circuit" excessively. Since 1821, historical accounts of the origins of electromagnetism seem to have limited their credit assignments for the conception and observation of this electromagnetic "doubling" effect (or "multiplying" effect, if the folding is repeated) to three persons. Almost without exception, however, these accounts have given no specific information as to precisely what each of these three accomplished, what physical form their respective creations took, what experiments they performed, and what functional understanding they apparently had of the situation. The usual statement is simply that a compass needle was placed in a coil of wire.[13] The main purpose of the present review is to recount some of these details. The following are the three candidates whose names are variously associated with the "invention" of the first constructed electromagnetic instrument, or "multiplier," or primitive galvanometer. JOHANN SALOMO CHRISTOPH SCHWEIGGER (1779-1857) in 1820 had already been editor for several years of the _Journal für Chemie und Physik_, and was professor of chemistry at the University of Halle. JOHANN CHRISTIAN POGGENDORF (1796-1877) in 1820 had only recently entered the University of Berlin as a student following several years as an apothecary's apprentice and a brief period as an apothecary. Four years later, he succeeded Gilbert as editor of the influential _Annalen der Physik_, a position he held for more than 50 years. JAMES CUMMING (1771-1861) in 1820 was professor of chemistry at Cambridge University. Chronology and Priority The earliest established date in the "multiplier" record is September 16, 1820, when Schweigger read his first paper to the Natural Philosophy Society of Halle. There seems to be no reason to doubt that this report justifies the frequently used label "Schweigger's multiplier." In an exuberant support of Schweigger's position, Speter[14] with no mention of Cumming and no hint of "invention" details, shows that Poggendorf in 1821 admitted Schweigger's priority, but suffered some lapse of memory 40 years later when writing sections of his biographical dictionary, leaving a distinct suggestion that the invention was his. Further confusion for later generations resulted from some ambiguous entries in the _Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie_ of 1888. The name "multiplier" seems not to have originated with Schweigger himself. Speter credits it to Meineke as "working" editor of Schweigger's _Journal_, but Seebeck seems to have used it much earlier.[15] Conceding priority of conception to Schweigger (Cumming has not been a real competitor on this point) does not alter the fact that all three seem to have reached their results independently of one another, that the first work of each on this subject was published within a period of five months, that there were significant differences in their conceptions of the uses and the optimum design of their devices and that between them they provided an adequate foundation for the subsequent development of the galvanometer to become the primary electrical-measuring instrument. In the matter of publication, Schweigger, as editor of what was popularly called Schweigger's _Journal_, had an obvious advantage, and presented his experiments beginnings on page 1 of the first volume of his _Journal_ for 1821, published January 1 of that year.[16] Oersted's paper had appeared two volumes previously. He began by referring to Oersted's discovery as "the most interesting to be presented in a thousand years of the history of magnetism." He was, in fact, so impressed with the epochal nature of Oersted's achievement that he commemorated it by giving his _Journal_ a second title so that "volume one" of the new title could begin in the year after Oersted's publication. Poggendorf, as a relatively junior student, had no such easy access to publicity, but he had a staunch admirer in one of his professors, Paul Erman at the University of Berlin. Erman added a seven-page postscript on Poggendorf's invention to his book _Outline of the Physical Aspects of the Electro-chemical Magnetism Discovered by Professor Oersted_, published before April 1821,[17] with an introductory paragraph: Herr Poggendorf, who is one of the most excellent ornaments of the lecture room and laboratory of the University here, carried out a very coherent and well-conceived investigation of electro-chemical magnetism, leading step-by-step to a method of amplifying this activity-phenomenon by means of itself. The postscript begins by referring to the "condenser [_Kondensator_] just brought to my attention by Herr Poggendorf" and explains that he cannot release his treatise "without preliminary announcement of this subject of the highest importance." (It can be inferred from the text that the name "condenser" was chosen because of the device's enhancing of magnetic measurements analogously to the enhancing of electric measurements by Volta's electrostatic "condenser.") Immediately on reading the book, Schweigger published extracts, mainly of the postscript, with indignant comments on Erman's remissness (or worse) in having failed to mention Schweigger's prior work.[18] However, Erman was not alone in his unawareness, if it was that, of Schweigger's discovery. Rival editor Gilbert of the _Annalen der Physik_ reviewed Erman at much greater length than Schweigger, reprinting most of the postscript with evident enthusiasm, and stating in his preamble that the invention is attributed to "a young physicist studying here in Berlin, Herr Poggendorf."[19] Only in a footnote is the reader directed to another footnote in the next article in the volume, where Gilbert finally states that he "cannot leave unmentioned the fact that this amplifying apparatus seems to be due to Herr Professor Schweigger." He then quotes rather fully from Schweigger's first two papers.[16] Oersted in 1823 explained the situation thus: "The work of M. Poggendorf, having been mentioned in a book on electromagnetism by the celebrated M. Erman published very shortly after its discovery, became known to many scientists before that of M. Schweigger. This is the reason for the same apparatus carrying different names."[20] The same confusion is well illustrated by the paper to which Gilbert attached his confessional footnote mentioned above. Written by Professor Raschig of Dresden, on April 3, 1821, the paper is entitled "Experiments with the Electro-magnetic Multiplier," but the device, throughout the paper, is repeatedly referred to in the phrase "Poggendorf's condenser, or rather multiplier," an awkward combination that suggests editorial intervention.[21] The work of James Cumming at Cambridge is described in two papers which he read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1821, which were then duly published in the _Transactions_ of that Society. The first, "On the Connexion of Galvanism and Magnetism," was read April 2, 1821,[22] and the second, "On the Application of Magnetism as a Measure of Electricity," was read a few weeks later on May 21st.[23] Though he quotes some unrelated 18th-century experiments by Ritter in Germany, an 1807 publication of Oersted's, and electromagnetic experiments with solenoids performed by Arago and Ampère in late 1820, Cumming makes no mention of Schweigger or Poggendorf, and never uses the word "multiplier." It, therefore, seems probable that his work was done without knowledge of the German publications or inventions. Original Electromagnetic Multipliers Of the three sets of instruments made, respectively, by Schweigger, Poggendorf and Cumming, those of Schweigger are the most elementary, and the least realistic from a practical point of view. He makes little effort to investigate the effect of any design parameters, but presents some odd conductor configurations that involve unimportant variations of the basic principle. The following extracts from his first three papers[13] contain the major references to his conception, construction, and use of his multiplier. PAPER READ IN HALLE, SEPTEMBER 16, 1820 That a powerful voltaic pile is required for these experiments (of Oersted) I have confirmed in my physics lectures, using an electric pile that was so strong it would easily produce potassium metal the second and third day after it was built. However, I soon saw that the electromagnetic effect was related, not to the pile, but to the simple circuit, and I was thereby led to perform the experiment with much greater sensitivity. To amplify these electromagnetic phenomena of the simple circuit it seemed to me necessary to adopt a different arrangement from that initiated by Volta, in order that the electrical phenomena of his simple circuit might be raised to a higher degree. Since a reversal of the effect occurs according to whether the connecting-wire lies over or under the needle, and likewise according to whether the wire leads from the positive or negative pole, thence I say it is an easy inference that a doubling of the effect is attainable, which is verified in practice. I present to the Society the simple "doubling apparatus" [_Verdoppelungs-Apparat_], where the compass is placed between two wires passing around it. A multiplication of the effect is easily obtained when the wire is not just once but many times wound around. A single turn suffices, however, to demonstrate Oersted's experiments, using small strips of zinc and copper dipped in ammonium-chloride solution. Amid innumerable, rambling theorizations (such as, that "hydrogenation affects magnetism as oxidation affects galvanism," or "sulphur, phosphorous and carbon are especially significant in magnetism, since iron in combination with any of these inflammable materials becomes a magnet-material"), Schweigger announces that he looked for the reactive force of the needle on the connecting wire in the simple Oersted experiment, and that he used his "amplifying apparatus" to look for magnetic effects from an electrostatic machine, but without success in both cases. He suggests that he will continue with many more electromagnetic experiments because "with the use of the doubling-apparatus, the needle, instead of needing for excitation a cell capable of generating sparks, approaches more closely the sensitivity of a twitching nerve." However, "additional special experiments are required to find to what limits the amplification can be increased by the method I have created in the construction of this doubling-apparatus, using multiple turns of wire." [Illustration: Figure 3.--THIS WIRE "BOW-PATTERN" was the first illustration Schweigger gave of his "doubling apparatus," though he had presented a verbal description of a single-coil arrangement somewhat earlier. The purpose of the bow pattern was to show that compass needles at the centers of the two loops deflected in opposite directions. (From _Journal für Chemie und Physik_.)] PAPER READ IN HALLE, NOVEMBER 4, 1820 [The first half of this paper describes successful observations of the reaction-force of a magnetic needle on the connecting wire of a voltaic circuit, achieved by pivoting the connecting wire in the form of brass needles above and below the compass needle. Though the multiplier configuration of needle and wire is in fact present here, Schweigger does not mention it, evidently regarding this as a separate project. He continues.] In my lecture of September 16th, I showed that Oersted's results depend, not on the voltaic cell, but only on the connecting circuit. The principle I have used for amplification of the effects, for the construction of an electromagnetic battery as it were, was the winding of wire around the compass, and I now present to the Society a bow-pattern of multiple-wound, wax-insulated wire, Figure 3. [There were no illustrations with Schweigger's first paper.] While a single wire, using the weak electric circuit here, deflects the magnetic needle only 30° or 40°, if the compass is placed in one of the openings of this pattern, the needle is deflected 90° to the east, or in the other opening 90° to the west, using the same weak electric circuit.... The "bow-pattern" device has novelty interest only, adding nothing to the elucidation of the multiplier phenomenon. The same is true of Schweigger's next proposal, shown in figure 4. "... I will now add another apparatus, which is just an extension of the previous one, whereby the needle can take up any angle from 0° to 180°." A short length of circular glass tubing, of inside diameter large enough to contain a compass needle, stands with its axis vertical and has single or multiple loops of wire wound on it in vertical diametral planes. In the illustration, successive plane coils are inclined at 30° to one another. "... the electric current flows through the whole wire, and the needle moves under all of these currents, and coming always into another loop can take any desired angle." With much further theorizing about "the correlation of magnetism with the cohesion of bodies," Schweigger states again his evaluation of his discovery: "Oersted succeeded in electromagnetic research by using a spark-producing cell, which could make a wire glow. My amplifying electromagnetic device needs only a weak circuit of copper, zinc, and ammonium chloride solution."[24] [Illustration: Figure 4.--SCHWEIGGER MADE THIS peculiar construction of wire coils, wound endwise on a short vertical section of glass tubing with a compass needle inside, merely to startle his Halle audience with the fact that the compass needle could rest in any of several stable positions. (From _Journal für Chemie und Physik_.)] [Illustration: Figure 5.--SCHWEIGGER'S SUGGESTION of one possible design for an amplifying electromagnetic indicator. The components are wooden rods and insulated wire. Position b referred to in the text is at the bottom of the diagram between the letters a and c. (From _Journal für Chemie und Physik_.)] "FURTHER WORDS ABOUT THE NEW MAGNETIC PHENOMENA" [This was presumably written between November 4, 1820, and the January 1, 1821, publication date of his _Journal_.] These wonderful new electrical effects[25] are most easily rendered perceptible with the help of the previously described wire loops. To focus attention on just one of the windings of Figure 3, we sketch a new drawing, Figure 5.... Since it is of major importance that these loops be made of silk-covered wire lying evenly on one another, it is convenient to wind the loops on two small slotted sticks of wood, although it is also possible to hold the wires together with wax or shellac, or to tie them together in an orderly manner with silk thread.... In Figure 5, Aa and Cc represent little slotted rods of wood on which the silk-covered wire is wound. Only three windings are shown in the figure, but I generally adopt three times that many. Now t is connected with the copper and d with the zinc, and the compass B set between the rods Aa and Cc with the coil perpendicular to the magnetic meridian and the terminals d, t at the east. The instant Z and K are dipped in the ammonium chloride solution, the needle turns around and stays with the north pole point south.... If now the compass is taken out of the coil and put in position b, all effects are reversed, and are considerably weaker, for obvious reasons.... It is of the same significance whether we bring the compass from B to b in Figure 5, or from mesh 1 to mesh 2 in Figure 3, only that in the latter case, because the compass is enclosed by the two sides, a stronger effect results.... If now the coil is rotated ... so that the face previously north now faces south, then on connecting the electric circuit there is absolutely no trace of effect on the needle, assuming that the terminal wires are not reversed.... It seems unnecessary to note that our magnetic coil can be placed in the direction of the magnetic meridian or at any arbitrary angle with it.... Following several pages of further talk about the relation of "cohesion to magnetism" and about "unipolar and bipolar conductors," the only additional item of interest is the observation that discharges of a Leyden jar (_Kleistichen Flasche_) strong enough to burn strips of leaf gold and to magnetize an iron rod in a coil, produced no compass-needle deflections, even with the help of the "amplifying apparatus." Schweigger, therefore, described the basic multiplier idea clearly enough in his first paper, but offered no sketch of the simplest construction until the third paper. In the second paper, meanwhile, he had illustrated two peculiar designs involving the principle in less elementary ways. His indifference to whether the wire loops lie _in_ the magnetic meridian (fig. 3) or perpendicular to it (fig. 5) or "at any other arbitrary angle to it," reveals a poor appreciation of the measuring-instrument potentialities. His conception seems to be primarily that of a detector. Poggendorf's invention, as first reported by Erman and presented to a wider audience by Gilbert[26] was described as consisting of typically 40 to 50 turns of 1/10-line diameter, silk-covered copper wire tied tightly together, with the whole pressed laterally to form an elliptical opening in which a pivoted compass needle could move freely while maintaining clearance of about 2 lines from the wire at all points.[27] "This magnetic condenser can be a great boon to electro-chemistry," said Erman, for "it avoids all the difficulties of electric condensers." He noted that, using the condenser, Poggendorf had already established the electric series for a great number of bodies, discovered various anomalies about conductivities, and found a way of detecting dissymmetry of the poles of a compass needle. On the other hand, even with the condenser, no magnetic effects have so far been obtainable from a strong tourmaline, or from a 12,000-pair, Zamboni dry cell. Poggendorf's own account of his work finally appeared as a very long article in the journal known as "Oken's Isis."[28] The editorial controversies mentioned earlier may have occasioned this use of a periodical of such minor status in the fields of physics and chemistry. The source of Poggendorf's vision of the multiplier principle was a little different from Schweigger's inspiration. Aiming at some detailed analysis of Oersted's observation, Poggendorf ran the connecting wire of his cell-circuit along a vertical line to just above or below the pivot-point of the compass needle, then, after a right-angle bend, horizontally above or below one of the poles of the needle. As he studied the deflections produced for all four possible positions of such a wire, with both cell polarities, he came to realize that if a rectangular wire loop in a vertical plane enclosed a compass needle, all parts of the horizontal sides of the loop would produce additive deflections. By a separate experiment, he showed that the vertical sides of the loop would also increase the deflections. He saw at the same time that the effect of additional turns would be cumulative. The multiple surrounding of the needle by a silk-covered wire, in a plane perpendicular to the long axis of the needle, affords the physicist a very simple and sensitive means of detecting the slightest trace of galvanism, or of magnetism produced by it, so that I have given the name of magnetic condenser to this construction, though I attach no special value to this name ... In analyzing the astonishingly increased power which the condenser gives to the magnetic effect of a circuit, the first question that arises is how the effect varies with the number of turns, whether it increases indefinitely or reaches a maximum beyond which additional turns have no effect. The answer to this first question is linked to the solution of another, viz, whether the degrees deflection are a direct expression of the measure of the magnetic force or not. To instruct myself on this point I made use of three separate circuits, each containing an 8-turn condenser, and put these as close together as possible in the magnetic meridian ... with the needle between the windings. Each single circuit ... gave a deflection of 45° ... When two were connected the deflection was 60°, and when finally all three were put in magnetic operation, the deflection grew to only 70°. It appears clearly from this that the angle of deflection is not in a simple ratio with the magnetic force acting on the needle.... Neither Poggendorf nor Schweigger seems to have ruled out, on logical grounds alone, the possibility of deflections greater than 90°, with the loop-plane in the magnetic meridian, though Poggendorf does add a vague note that if the needle deflected too far it would encounter forces of the opposing sign. Poggendorf experimented with the size of the circuit wires, finding that larger wires led to greater deflections. He noted that the size of the cell plates and the nature of the cell's moist conductors would certainly have a great effect, but that to investigate these in detail would take undue time, and he therefore proposed to keep this part of the apparatus constant, using one pair of zinc and copper plates 3.6 inches in diameter, separated by cloth soaked in ammonium-chloride solution. Poggendorf's principal quantitative study of his magnetic condenser used 13 identical coils, each with 100 turns. In order that the turns should all be at approximately the same distance from the needle, the coils were wound of the finest brass wire that could be silk-insulated, the wire diameter being 0.02 lines. On adding coils one at a time across the cell (i.e., connecting them in parallel), the deflections were as follows: Turns 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 Deflection in degrees 45 50 55 59-60 62 63 64 Turns 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 Deflection in degrees 65 65-1/2 66 66 66 66 Adding some coils with fewer turns, and connecting various combinations "as a _continuum_" (i.e., in series), the deflections using the same cell were: Turns 1 5 10 25 50 75 100 200 Deflection in degrees 10 22 27 30 35-40 40 40 40 Turns 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 Deflection in degrees 40 40 41 40 40 40 40 40 Making a few coils from wire with 1/8-line diameter, the deflections, again using the same cell were: Turns 5 25 50 100 Over 100 Deflection in degrees 20-22 40-45 45 65 65 Since the needle used in these experiments was almost as long as the inside clearance of the coils, no simple tangent law can be applied, and it is not possible to discover an equivalent circuit in modern terms. However, the constancy of the deflections for large numbers of turns in each case indicates that the cell voltage and resistance were fairly constant, and a rough estimate suggests that the cell resistance was comparable to the resistance of one of the 100-turn coils of fine wire. Such a value means that cell resistance limited the maximum deflections for the parallel-connected multipliers, while coil resistance fixed the limit in the series case. For all of these reasons, it was impossible that any useful functional law could be obtained from the data. Poggendorf concluded only that "the amplifying power of the condenser does not increase without limit, but has a maximum value dependent on the conditions of plate area and wire size." He added two other significant comments derived from various observations, that the basic Oersted phenomenon is independent of the earth's magnetism, and that the phenomenon is localized, i.e., is not affected by distant parts of the circuit. Only a small fraction of Poggendorf's paper is devoted to elucidating the properties of the condenser. A similar amount is concerned with refuting various proposals, such as those of Berzelius and Erman, about distributions of magnetic polarity in a conducting wire to account for Oersted's results. More than half of the paper describes results obtained by using the condenser to compare conductivities and cell polarities under conditions where no effect had previously been detectable. Notable is the observation of needle deflections in circuits whose connecting wires are interrupted by pieces of graphite, manganese dioxide, various sulphur compounds, etc., materials which had previously been considered as insulators in galvanic circuits. Poggendorf gives these the name of "semi-conductor" (_halb-Leiter_). [Illustration: Figure 6.--ELECTROMAGNETIC INSTRUMENTS OF JAMES CUMMING, used at Cambridge in 1821. One is a single-wire "galvanometer," following Ampère's definition. Cumming called the multiple-turn construction "galvanoscopes." He showed how to increase their sensitivity by partial cancellation of the earth's magnetism at the location of the compass needle. (From _Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society_, vol. 1, 1821.)] Cumming's first mention of the multiplier phenomenon, in his paper of April 2, 1821,[22] is quite casual, and describes only a one-turn construction. He speaks first of single-turn ring of thick, brass wire, and after noting that the sides of a circuit produce additive effects on a needle, he comments that a flattened rectangular loop produces nearly quadruple the effect of a single wire. The paper is primarily a review of Oersted's work, with references to electromagnetic observations before Oersted, and accounts of various related but nonmultiplier experiments that Cumming has made. His second paper, of May 21st, contains a fine plate (fig. 6) illustrating arrangements used in investigating the subject of the paper's title "The Application of Magnetism as a Measure of Electricity." (Neither Poggendorf nor any of his commentators ever illustrated his "condenser.") Although this plate is never referred to in the paper itself, a nearby "Description" gives a few comments. The two wire patterns shown are noted as simply "forms of spiral for increasing the electromagnetic intensity." The mounted wire loop, with enclosed compass needle and terminal mercury cups, is clearly identical in principle with the devices of Schweigger and Poggendorf, and is called a "galvanoscope." The largest structure illustrated does not involve the multiplying effect. It is called a "galvanometer," consistent with Ampère's definition of that word. To use it, two leads of a voltaic circuit are inserted into the mercury cups AC and BD, and the board EFGH carrying the cups is moved vertically until some "standard" deflection is obtained on the compass needle below. The relative "strength" of the circuit is then given by the calibrated position of the sliding section. Uncertainties are undoubtedly introduced by the arbitrary positions of the connecting wires from the test circuit to the mercury cups, but Cumming drew some interesting conclusions from various measurements he made. Observing needle deflections for various positions of the wire A-B, with a "constant" voltaic circuit, he found that "the tangent of the deviation varies inversely as the distance of the connecting wire from the magnetic needle." Here is a combination of the deflection law for a needle in a transverse horizontal field and the magnetic-force law for a long, straight wire. The latter had been determined experimentally by Biot and Savart, in November 1820, by timing the oscillations of a suspended magnet.[29] Cumming considers his straight-wire calibrated "galvanometer" to be a device for "measuring" galvanic electricity; on the other hand, his multiple-loop "galvanoscopes" are for "discovering" galvanic electricity. With the multiplier instrument, he found galvanic effects (i.e., needle deflections) using copper and zinc electrodes with several acids not previously known to create galvanic action. A potassium-mercury amalgam electrode created a powerful cell with zinc as the positive electrode, establishing both the metallic nature of potassium and the fact that it is the most negative of all metals. In a third paper, presented April 28, 1823,[30] Cumming reports use of the galvanoscope in experiments on the thermoelectric phenomena recently discovered by Seebeck. His note that "for the more minute effects a compass was employed in the galvanoscope, having its terrestrial magnetism neutralized ..." seems to be the earliest mention of this version of the astatic principle, a technique whose dramatic effects were especially valuable in low-resistance thermoelectric circuits, where the extra resistance of additional multiplier turns largely offsets their magnetic contribution. In detail, "the needle is neutralized by placing a powerful magnet North and South on a line with its center; and another, which is much weaker, East and West at some distance above it: by means of the first the needle is placed nearly at right angles to the meridian, and the adjustment is completed by the second." On varying the length of the connecting wire of the circuit, Cumming found the deflections of the multiplier needle to be in a nearly reciprocal relation. He speaks of the "conducting power of the wire," and seems not far from visualizing Ohm's law, of which no published form appeared until 1826. Ohm's own experiments were made with very similar apparatus. [Illustration: Figure 7.--"SCHWEIGGER MULTIPLIER" used by Oersted in 1823. A thin magnetic needle is held in a light, paper sling at F, suspended by a fine, vertical fiber. (From _Annales de Chimie et de Physique_.)] Conclusions An effort has been made to show that electrical experimenters prior to Oersted's discovery in 1820 were in desperate need of some electrical instrument for galvanic or voltaic circuits that would combine sensitivity, simplicity, reliability, and quick response. The nearly simultaneous creation by Schweigger, Poggendorf and Cumming of an arrangement consisting of a coil of wire and a compass needle provided the first primitive version of a device to fill that need. [Illustration: Figure 8.--COMPLETELY USELESS ARRANGEMENT of vertical coil and horizontal, unmagnetized needle, presented in the _Edinburgh Philosophical Journal_ of 1821 as "Poggendorf's Galvano-Magnetic Condenser." Almost every aspect of Poggendorf's instrument has been incorrectly represented.] It appears that Schweigger is clearly entitled to credit for absolute priority in the discovery, but the original sources suggest that both his understanding of the device and the subsequent researches he performed with it were markedly inferior to those of the other independent discoverers. In using the generic label, "Schweigger's Multiplier," there have been historical examples of attributing to Schweigger considerably more sophistication than is justified. Figure 7 shows an instrument designed by Oersted in 1823,[20] which he says "differs in only minor particulars from that of M. Schweigger." On comparing figure 7 with figures 3, 4, or 5, the remark seems overly generous. The history of the multiplier instruments has had its fair share of erroneous reports and misleading clues. A fine example is the illustration of figure 8, taken from what is often quoted as the first report in English on Poggendorf's "Galvano-Magnetic Condenser."[31] The sketch is the editor's interpretation of a verbal description given him by a visiting Danish chemist who, in turn, had received the information in a letter from Oersted. It incorporates, faithful to the description, a "spiral wire ... established vertically," with a needle "in the axis of the spiral," yet by misunderstanding of the axial relations and of the ratio of length to diameter for the coil, a completely meaningless arrangement has resulted. The confusion is compounded by the specifying of an _unmagnetized_ needle. Schweigger and Poggendorf, through their editorial positions, were among the best known of all European scientists for several decades. On one basis or another their reputations are firmly established. Comparison of the accounts of the early "multipliers," however, suggests that the Reverend James Cumming, professor of chemistry at the University of Cambridge, was a very perceptive philosopher. This was well understood by G. T. Bettany who wrote in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ that Cumming's early papers "though extremely unpretentious," were "landmarks in electromagnetism and thermoelectricity," and concluded that: "Had he been more ambitious and of less uncertain health, his clearness and grasp and his great aptitude for research might have carried him into the front rank of discoverers." ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Dr. Robert P. Multhauf, chairman of the Department of Science and Technology in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology, for encouragement in the writing of this paper and for the provision of opportunity to consult the appropriate sources. To Dr. W. James King of the American Institute of Physics, I am grateful for many provocative discussions on this and related topics. * * * * * FOOTNOTES [1] A. VOLTA, "On the Electricity Excited by the Mere Contact of Conducting Substances of Different Kinds," _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London_ (1800), vol. 90, pp. 403-431. [2] Some little-known but delightful observations in the prehistory of electromagnetism are described in a letter written by G. W. SCHILLING from London to the Berlin Academy on July 8, 1769, published as "Sur les phénomènes de l'Anguleil Tremblante" [_Nouveaux Mémoires de l'Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres_, 1770 (Berlin, 1772), pp. 68-74], translated to French from the original German. The letter recounts a multitude of experiments with various electric eels. The two observations of electromagnetic interest are that a piece of iron held by the hand in the eel's tank could be felt quivering even when the fish was stationary several inches away, and a compass needle showed a deflection, both in the water near the fish, and outside the tank, also with the fish stationary. [3] ABRAHAM BENNET, _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London_ (1787), p. 26. [4] Op. cit. (footnote 1), p. 403. [5] _Philosophical Magazine_ (1800), vol. 7, pp. 289-311. [For a facsimile reprint, see _Galvani-Volta_ (Bern Dibner's Burndy Library Publication No. 7), Norwalk, Connecticut, 1952.] [6] MICHAEL FARADAY, _Experimental Researches in Electricity_, vol. 1 (London, 1839), paragraph 739, dated January 1834. [7] Ibid., sec. 741. [8] JAMES CUMMING, "On the Application of Magnetism as a Measure of Electricity," _Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society_ (1821), vol. 1, pp. 282-286. [Also published in _Philosophical Magazine_ (1822), vol. 60, pp. 253-257.] [9] H. C. OERSTED, _Experimenta Circa Effectum Conflictus Electrici in Acum Magneticam_ (Copenhagen, July 21, 1820). [10] Full details of Oersted's work and publications are in _Oersted and the Discovery of Electromagnetism_ (Bern Dibner's Burndy Library Publication No. 18), Norwalk, Connecticut, 1961. The original Latin version and first English translation are reproduced in _Isis_ (1928), vol. 34, pp. 435-444. [11] A. M. AMP�RE, _Annales de Chimie et de Physique_ (1820), vol. 15, p. 67. The word "galvanometer" had been used much earlier by BISCHOF, "On Galvanism and its Medical Applications," _The Medical and Physical Journal_ (1802), vol 7, p. 529, for a form of goldleaf electroscope shown here in figure 2, but this use of the word does not seem to have been adopted by others. [12] Op. cit. (footnote 6), paragraph 283, dated January 1833. A similar attitude was expressed in the same year by CHRISTIE, _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London_ (1833), vol. 123, p. 96: "I adopt the word current as a convenient mode of expression, ... but I would not be considered as adopting any theoretical views on the subject...." [13] Some prominent examples of this brevity of treatment are in E. HOPPE, _Geschichte der Elektrizität_ (Leipzig, 1884); O. MAHR, _Geschichtliche Einzeldarstellungen aus der Elektrotechnik_ (Berlin, 1941); R. S. WHIPPLE, "The Evolution of the Galvonometer," _Journal of Scientific Instruments_ (1934), vol. 7, pp. 37-43; WILLIAM STURGEON, _Scientific Researches_ (Bury, 1850); A. W. HUMPHREYS, "The Development of the Conception and Measurement of Electric Current," _Annals of Science_ (1937), vol. 2, pp. 164-178. [14] M. SPETER, "Klärung der Multiplikator-Prioritätsfrage Schweigger-Poggendorf," _Zeitschrift für Instrumentenkunde_ (1937) vol. 57, pp. 29-32. [15] T. SEEBECK, "�ber den Magnetismus der Galvanischen Kette," _Abhandlungen der Koenigliche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin_ (1820-1821), pp. 289-346. The phrase "Schweigger's multiplier" is used on page 319. The many experiments described in this paper added little or nothing to contemporary appreciation of the multiplier as an instrument. [16] J. S. C. SCHWEIGGER, _Journal für Chemie und Physik_ (1821), vol. 31, pp. 1-18, 35-42. Pages 1-6 are the paper presented in Halle on September 16, 1820; pages 7-18 are the paper presented in Halle on November 4, 1820, and pages 35-42 are "a few additional words." The preface to the whole volume is dated January 1, 1821. A somewhat earlier public announcement referring to Schweigger's discovery appeared in the _Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung_ (November 1820), no. 296, cols. 622-624, but this was lacking in detail and seems not to have been noticed by any scientists. [17] P. ERMAN, _Umrisse zu den physischen Verhältnissen des von Herrn Prof. Oersted entdeckten elektro-chemischen Magnetismus_ (Berlin, 1821). Hoppe (footnote 13) states that Erman's book was published in May; however, it is referred to in a letter dated April 3, 1821, by RASCHIG, _Annalen der Physik_ (1821), vol. 67, pp. 427-436. [18] Op. cit. (footnote 16), vol. 32, pp. 38-50. [19] _Annalen der Physik_ (1821), vol. 67, pp. 382-426, and footnote on pages 429-430 of same volume. The footnote accompanies the article by Raschig mentioned in footnote 17. [20] H. C. OERSTED, "Sur le Multiplier electro-magnetique de M. Schweigger, et sur quelques applications qu'on en a faites," _Annales de Chimie et de Physique_ (1823), vol. 22, pp. 358-365. [21] "Versuche mit dem electrisch-magnetischen Multiplicator," _Annalen der Physik_ (1821), vol. 67, pp. 427-436. [22] _Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society_ (1821), vol. 1, pp. 269-278. [23] Op. cit. (footnote 8). [24] The German word _Kette_ has been translated as "circuit" throughout. Although the equivalence of these words is clear, for example, in Ohm's work of 1826, the context in which _Kette_ is sometimes used in 1820 and 1821 indicates that the concept of a "circuit," in the sense of the wiring external to the source of electricity, has not been established. The wiring is regarded more as something incidental, used to "close" the cell, the cell being considered essentially the whole of the apparatus. This view underlies the many attempts to correlate the Oersted phenomena with cell materials and design, and with the use of such terms as "chemical magnetism" by Erman and others. [25] The reference here is to the Oersted-type experiments described in two papers by authors other than Schweigger on pages 19 to 34 of the volume. [26] Op. cit. (footnote 19), pp. 422-426. [27] One "line" seems to have been about 1/12 inch. [28] J. G. POGGENDORF, "Physisch-chemische Untersuchungen zur näheren Kenntniss des Magnetismus der voltaischen Säule," _Isis von Oken_ (1821), vol. 8, pp. 687-710. Most of Poggendorf's numerical data is also in C. H. PFAFF, _Der Elektromagnetismus_ (Hamburg, 1824), along with some of Pfaff's own work. [29] Reported in _Annales de Chimie et de Physique_ (1820), vol. 15, pp. 222-223. [30] "On the Development of Electro-Magnetism by Heat," _Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society_ (1823), vol. 2, pp. 47-76. [31] "Account of the New Galvano-Magnetic Condenser invented by M. Poggendorf of Berlin," _Edinburgh Philosophical Journal_ (July 1821), vol. 5, pp. 112-113. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes. The following assumed typographical errors have been corrected: Page 125: J. B. [Johann Bartholomacus] Tromsdorff--should be Johann Bartholomäus Trommsdorff? Page 134: "paper of April 2, 1821,[22] is quite"--had "1921." Footnote 13: "_Geschichte der Elektrizität_"--had "Elektrizitat." Footnote 16: "_Journal für Chemie und Physik_"--had "and." One questionable spelling has been retained as follows: Footnote 20: "Sur le Multiplier electro-magnetique..."--should be "Multiplicateur"? * * * * * CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 39 FULTON'S "STEAM BATTERY": BLOCKSHIP AND CATAMARAN _Howard I. Chapelle_ SURVIVING DESIGNS FOR FLOATING BATTERIES 145 CONTROVERSIAL DESCRIPTIONS 147 COPENHAGEN PLANS 150 HISTORY OF DOUBLE-HULL CRAFT 152 SAIL AND INBOARD PLANS 157 RECONSTRUCTING THE PLANS 161 APPENDIX 167 FOOTNOTES _Howard I. Chapelle_ FULTON'S "STEAM BATTERY": BLOCKSHIP and CATAMARAN [Illustration: Figure 1.--SCALE MODEL of Fulton's _Steam Battery_ in the Museum of History and Technology. (Smithsonian photo P-63390-F.)] _Robert Fulton's "Steam Battery," a catamaran-type blockship, was built during the War of 1812. Until recently, not enough material has been available to permit a reasonably accurate reconstruction of what is generally acknowledged to be the first steam man-of-war._ _With the discovery, in the Danish Royal Archives at Copenhagen, of plans of this vessel, it is now possible to prepare a reconstruction and to build a model._ _This article summarizes the history of the vessel, describes the plans and the reconstruction, and also evaluates its design with particular attention to the double-hull construction._ THE AUTHOR: _Howard I. Chapelle is curator of transportation in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology._ The identity of the first steam man-of-war has been known for many years, and a great deal has been written and published on the history of this American vessel. Until recently, the only available drawing of the ship has been a patent drawing made for Robert Fulton. This does not comply with contemporary descriptions of the steamer and the drawing or plan is out of proportion with the known dimensions. The lack of plans has heretofore made it impossible to illustrate the vessel with any degree of precision, or to build a scale model. The discovery in 1960 of some of the plans of this historic ship in the Danish Royal Archives at Copenhagen now makes possible a reasonably accurate reconstruction of the vessel and also clarifies some of the incomplete and often confusing descriptions by contemporary writers. Of the numerous published accounts of the ship that are available, the most complete is David B. Tyler's "Fulton's Steam Frigate."[1] A contemporary description of the vessel by the British Minister to Washington, 1820-23, Stratford Canning, was published by Arthur J. May.[2] In _Naval and Mail Steamers of the United States_, by Charles B. Stuart,[3] and _The Steam Navy of the United States_, by Frank M. Bennett,[4] the history of the ship and some descriptive facts are given. Stuart, in an appendix, gives in full the report of the Supervisory Committee (set up to administer the building contract). Tyler and Stuart, and the Committee Report are the principal sources from which the following summary of the ship's history is drawn. [Text of Illustration: Plate N^o. 1. "DEMOLOGOS" Figure 1^st. _Transverse section A her Boiler. B the steam Engine. C the water wheel. E E her wooden walls 5 feet thick, diminishing to below the waterline as at F.F draught of water 9 feet D D her gun deck_ _Scale 1/12 inch=1 foot_ Waterline _Scale 1/24 inch=1 foot_ Figure II^d. _This shews her gun deck, 140 feet long 24 feet wide, mounting 20 guns. A the Water wheel_ Figure III^d _Side View_ _Scale 1/24 inch=1 foot_ ROBERT FULTON _November 1813._ _S M^c Elroy del._ _"Stuart's Naval & Mail Steamers U.S."_ _Sarony & Major. Eng. N.Y._] [Illustration: Figure 2.--"DEMOLOGOS," A WOOD ENGRAVING based on the sketch which Robert Fulton showed to President Madison in 1813. This wood engraving appears as plate 1 in Charles B. Stuart's _Naval and Mail Steamers of the United States_, and illustrates the section on Naval Steamers, from which the account "The Demologos; or, Fulton the First," is here reproduced (pp. 167-171). Stuart obtained the sketch, assumed to have been made for Fulton's patent on the design of the _Steam Battery_, from the files of the U.S. Navy Department.] On December 24, 1813, Robert Fulton invited a group of friends--prominent merchants, professional men and naval officers--to his home in New York City and there presented a proposal for a project of great local interest. At that time the War of 1812 was in its second year and the economic effect of the British naval blockade was being felt severely. The blockade cut off seaborne trade and posed a constant threat of attack upon New York and other important ports, particularly Baltimore. To defend the ports, it had been proposed to build mobile floating batteries or heavily built and armed hulks with small sailing rigs, but the high cost of these and their doubtful value in helping to break the blockade, compared to the value and action of a very heavy, large frigate, or a 74-gun ship, caused authorities to hesitate to proceed with the construction of any blockships or floating batteries. Fulton's proposal concerned a floating battery propelled by steam power. He believed that steam propulsion not only would give it effective maneuverability with no loss of gunpower, but also would allow a successful attack upon the Royal Navy blockading ships during periods of protracted calm, when sailing men-of-war were nearly helpless. The blockaders then could be attacked and picked off, one by one, by the heavily armed steamboat. Among those present at the meeting was Major General Henry Dearborn, a leading citizen and soldier who was later to become noted in American political history. The first step taken during this meeting was the founding of the Coast and Harbor Defense Company with Dearborn as president, Fulton as engineer, and Thomas Morris as secretary. Next, a committee was established to raise funds from Federal, State, and New York City governments as well as from individual contributors to build the battery. The members of this committee consisted of General Dearborn, Commodore Stephen Decatur, U.S.N.; General Morgan Lewis; Commodore Jacob Jones; U.S.N.; Noah Brown, shipbuilder; Samuel L. Mitchill; Henry Rutgers; and Thomas Morris. The committee proved cumbersome and was reduced to General Lewis, Issac Bronson, Henry Rutgers, Nathan Sanford, Thomas Morris, Oliver Wolcott, and John Jacob Astor. Known as the Coast Defense Society and with the name of _Pyremon_ given the ship in prospectus, they attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise funds privately. The estimated sums to build a battery 130 feet long, with a 50-foot beam, capable of a speed of 5 mph, and carrying 24 long guns (18-pdr.), was $110,000. Fulton, still the chief engineer, in an effort to interest the Federal Government, built a model of the proposed vessel and submitted it to some prominent naval officers--Commodore Stephen Decatur, Jacob Jones, James Biddle, Samuel Evans, Oliver Perry, Samuel Warrington, and Jacob Lewis. All gave their support to the Society in a written statement and this recommendation proved helpful to the project in Congress and in the Navy Department. In the process of passing a bill which went to the Senate Naval Affairs Committee calling for $250,000 for the construction of the floating battery, the sum was raised to $1,500,000 for the construction of "one or more" floating batteries and passed on March 9, 1814. To supervise the start of construction, the Coast Defense Society appointed a committee consisting of Dearborn, Wolcott, Morris, Mitchill, and Rutgers, with Fulton as engineer, and a model and drawing of the proposed vessel was submitted to the Patent Office. The Secretary of the Navy, although supporting the project, delayed action until he had weighed the importance of the batteries in relation to other war needs, for at this time the naval shipbuilding program on the Great Lakes was considered of prime importance. He also raised some technical questions concerning the design of the batteries, which Fulton answered with a description of the vessel as 138 feet on deck, 120 feet on the keel, 55 feet beam (each hull to have a 20-foot beam and the "race" between to be 15 feet wide), draft 8 or 9 feet loaded, and the intended speed was to be 4-1/2 to 5 mph. The ship was to carry 24 long guns (32-pdr.), the engine was to be 130 hp, and the total cost, $200,000. In his letters to the Secretary of the Navy, Fulton stated that Adam and Noah Brown would build the hull for $69,800 and that he would build the engine, machinery and boilers for $78,000, a total of $147,800. He intended to have the boilers, valves, fastenings, and air pumps of brass or copper, which would raise the machinery costs 59 percent above that of stationary engines and boilers then in use. On May 23, 1814, the Secretary of the Navy authorized the Coast Defense Society and its committee to act as Navy agents and to enter into the contracts required to build a vessel, and to draw on the Navy storekeepers or Navy Yard commandants for such stores or articles on hand needed for construction. The contracts were prepared and the committee now was officially empowered to act for the Society, with Rutgers, Wolcott, Morris, Dearborn, Mitchill, and Fulton. On June 4, Dearborn asked the Navy Department for $25,000 advance, for work had started. On the 6th, he informed the Secretary that he had been ordered to assume command of the defenses of Boston and that Rutgers had been appointed chairman of the construction committee in his place. It is apparent that the Navy Department was pressed for funds, due to the very extensive shipbuilding programs on Lakes Erie, Ontario, and Champlain in addition to the seagoing vessels being built in some of the coastal ports. This was certainly one cause for the Secretary of the Navy's reluctance to carry out the requirements of the bill passed by Congress immediately after its signature and, also, this reluctance caused the supervisory committee much embarrassment in its administration of the contract. Another factor which caused difficulty in the administration of the contract was the position of Adam and Noah Brown. The brothers were deeply involved in the shipbuilding program on the Lakes, in which they were associated at times with Henry Eckford. The Browns constructed a blockhouse, shops, and quarters at Erie; in addition to Perry's two brigs and five of his schooners, they also built some of the Lake Ontario vessels and, later, the _Saratoga_ on Lake Champlain. In their New York yard, whose operation continued throughout the war, they built some large letter-of-marques: the _General Armstrong_, _Prince de Neufchatel_, _Zebra_, _Paul Jones_, and some smaller vessels. They also cut down the 2-decked, merchant ship _China_ into a single flush-deck letter-of-marque, renamed _Yorktown_; and they had a contract to build the sloop-of-war _Peacock_. It is remarkable that the Browns could undertake and complete so much work between 1813 and 1815 and still be able to build the steam battery in a very short time. With the contracts in order, the Browns began building. The keels of the battery were laid June 20, 1814. It is apparent that the Browns prepared the original hull plans, undoubtedly before the building authority was obtained. The vessel required only about four months to build; she was launched October 29, 1814, at 9 a.m. This was an excellent performance, considering the size of the vessel, the amount of timber required and handled in her massive construction, and the other work being done by the builders. During the ship's construction, sightseers were a nuisance and finally guards had to be obtained. During the building of the steam battery, work had to be practically stopped on the sloop-of-war _Peacock_ at one period after she had been partially planked. There were difficulties in obtaining metalwork for the vessel during her construction, due to the blockade and the demand for such material for other shipbuilding at New York. On November 21, 1814, the ship was towed from the Browns' yard on the East River by Fulton's _Car of Neptune_ and _Fulton_, each lashed to the sides of the battery, and taken to Fulton's works on the North River. There Fulton supervised in person the completion of the vessel and construction of her machinery. Undoubtedly only a little of his time was required in inspection of the Browns' work on the battery, for the shipbuilders had been closely associated with Fulton throughout the life of the project and were fully capable as ship designers. The work on the machinery was another matter, however, for men capable of working metal were scarce and few workmen could read plans. Fulton had some of the work done outside of his own plant, particularly the brass and copper work (mostly by John Youle's foundry). As a result, Fulton was required to move from plant to plant, keeping each job under almost constant observation and personally supervising the workmen. The equipment then available for building a large engine was inadequate in many ways. The large steam cylinder presented a problem: it had to be recast several times and some of the other parts gave trouble, either in casting or in machining and fitting. [Illustration: Figure 3.--SCALE MODEL of _Steam Battery_, showing double hull, in the Museum of History and Technology. (Smithsonian photo P-63390-D.)] Guns for the battery were another problem. Only 3 long guns (32-pdr.), were available at the Navy Yard. The Secretary of the Navy promised some captured guns then at Philadelphia. Because of the blockade, these had to come overland to New York. The captured guns thus obtained were probably English, part of the cargo of the British ship _John of Lancaster_ captured by the frigate _President_ early in the war. Apparently 24 guns were obtained this way; only 2 were obtained from the Navy Yard. In July the Supervising Committee carried out some experimental damage studies, in which a 32-pdr. was fired at a target representing a section of the topsides of the battery. Drawings of the result were sent to the Secretary of the Navy. Further problems arose over the delays of the government in making payments: the banks discounted the Treasury notes, so the Committee members had to advance $5,000 out of their own pockets. There was fear that British agents might damage the vessel, and although the project was undoubtedly known to the British, no evidence of any act of sabotage was ever found. Captain David Porter was assigned to the command of the battery in November, and it was upon his request that the vessel was later rigged with sails. With the _Steam Battery_ approaching completion, the Secretary of the Navy became more enthusiastic and the construction of other batteries of this type was again proposed. Captain Stiles, a Baltimore merchant, offered to build a steam battery, the hull to cost $50,000; the entire cost of the vessel, $150,000, was raised in Baltimore and the frames of a battery erected. Another battery was projected at Philadelphia and the Secretary of the Navy wanted one or more built at Sackett's Harbor, but naval officers and Fulton objected. A bill put before Congress to authorize another half million to build steam batteries passed the first reading January 9, 1815, went to the House February 22, 1815, but the end of the war prevented any further action on it. On February 24, 1815, Fulton died. He had been to Trenton, New Jersey, to attend a hearing on the steamboat monopoly and, on the way back, the ferry on North River was caught in the ice. Fulton and his lawyer, Emmet, had to walk over the ice to get ashore. On the way, Emmet fell through and Fulton got wet and chilled while helping him. After two or three days in bed Fulton went to his foundry to inspect the battery's machinery causing a relapse from which he died. This resulted in some delay in completing the machinery and stopped work on the _Mute_, an 80-foot, manually propelled, torpedo boat that Fulton was having built in the Browns' yard. It was decided to suspend work on the Baltimore battery after an expenditure of $61,500, but the New York battery was to be completed to prove the project was practical. The final payment of $50,000 was made four months after it was requested. Charles Stoudinger, Fulton's foreman or superintendent, was able to complete and install the ship's machinery. On June 10, 1815, the vessel was given a short trial run in the harbor with Stoudinger and the Navy inspector, Captain Smith, on board. This trial revealed the need of some mechanical alterations; sails were not used, and it was found she could stem the strong tide and a fresh headwind. The vessel also was visited by the officers of French men-of-war at anchor in the harbor. On July 4, 1815, she was given another trial. She left Fulton's works at Corlear's Hook at 9 a.m., ran out to Sandy Hook Lighthouse, bore west and returned, a total of 53 miles under steam, reaching her slip at 5:20 p.m. She was found to steer "like a pilot boat." This prolonged trial revealed that the stokehold was not sufficiently ventilated and more deck openings were required. The windsails used in existing hatches were inadequate. The paddle wheel was too low and had to be raised 18 inches, and there were still some desirable modifications to be made in the machinery. On September 11, 1815, she was again given a trial run. All alterations had been made, including the addition of hatches and raising the paddle wheel, and her battery was on board with all stores, supplies, and equipment. She had 26 long guns (32-pdr.), mounted on pivoted carriages, and now drew 10 feet 4 inches. On this day she left her slip at 8:38 a.m. and went through the Narrows into the Lower Bay, where she maneuvered around the new frigate _Java_ at anchor there. The battery then was given a thorough trial under steam and sail and, with the ship underway, her guns were fired to see if concussion would damage the machinery. The vessel was found to be a practical one, capable of meeting the government's requirements in all respects; her speed was 5-1/2 knots. However, the stokehold temperature had reached 116° Fahrenheit! She returned to her slip at 7:00 p.m. On December 28, 1815, the Committee in a written report to the Secretary of the Navy,[5] gave a description of the vessel and praised her performance. At this time a set of plans was made by "Mr. Morgan," of whom no other reference has appeared, and sent to the Navy Department. These cannot now be found. The Committee recommended the battery be commissioned and used for training purposes. This suggestion was not followed. The ship remained in her slip during the winter, and in June 1816 she was turned over to the Navy and delivered to Captain Samuel Evans, commandant of the New York Navy Yard. Captain Joseph Bainbridge was assigned to her command. However, she was not commissioned and soon after her delivery she was housed over and placed "in ordinary," that is, laid up. The final settlement showed that the Committee, as Navy agents, had paid out $286,162.12 with $872.00 unpaid, as well as a claim for $3,364.00 by Adam and Noah Brown, making a total of $290,398.12. The following year, on June 18, 1817, she was unroofed and put into service with a small crew. With President James Monroe on board, she left the Navy Yard about noon for a short trip to the Narrows and then to Staten Island and returned in the evening. The next day she was again placed "in ordinary." Four years later, in 1821, when her guns and machinery were removed, it was found that she was rapidly becoming rotten. She was then utilized as a receiving ship. At 2:30 p.m. on June 4, 1829, she blew up, killing 24 men and 1 woman, with 19 persons listed as injured. Among those killed was one officer, Lt. S. M. Brackenridge. Two lieutenants and a Sailing Master were hurt, four midshipmen were severely injured, and five persons were listed as missing. The explosion of 2-1/2 barrels of condemned gunpowder was sufficient, due to her rotten condition, to destroy the ship completely. A Court of Inquiry blamed a 60-year-old gunner, who supposedly entered a magazine with a candle to get powder for the evening gun. It was stated to the court that about 300 pounds of powder in casks and in cartridges was on board the ship at the time.[3] She was not replaced until the coast-defense steamer _Fulton_ was built in 1837-38, though in 1822 the Navy purchased for $16,000 a "steam galliot" of 100 tons, the _Sea Gull_, to be used as a dispatch boat for the West Indian squadron engaged in suppressing piracy during 1823. In 1825 she was laid up at Philadelphia, and in 1840 she was sold for $4,750. It is a curious fact that the battery did not receive an official name, as did the sailing blockship on the ways at New Orleans, which at the end of the War of 1812 was officially listed as the _Tchifonta_. Nor was the battery given a number, as were the gunboats. In official correspondence and lists, the steam battery is referred to as the "Fulton Steam Frigate," or as the "Steam Battery," but in later years she was referred to as the "Fulton" or "Fulton the First." Perhaps the explanation is that as she was the only one of her kind she was not numbered, and as she was not considered fit for coastal or extended ocean voyages, she was not given a name. Surviving Designs for Floating Batteries The designs of American blockships that have survived are those of the _Tchifonta_,[6] 145 feet long, 43-foot moulded beam, 8-foot 6-inch depth in hold, and about 152 feet 9 inches on deck. She was to carry a battery of 22 long guns (32-pdr.), on the main deck 12 carronades (42-pdr.), on forecastle and quarter decks. She was to have been rigged to rather lofty and very square topgallant sails, and would have been capable of sailing fairly well, though of rather shoal draft, drawing only about 8 feet 6 inches when ready for service. She was sold on the stocks at the end of the war and her later history is not known. Another and earlier design for a blockship, or floating battery, was prepared by Christian Bergh for Captain Charles Stewart in 1806. This was a sailing vessel for the defense of the port of New York, planned to mount 40 guns (32-pdr.), on her two lower decks and 14 carronades (42-pdr.), on her spar deck. She was to be 103 feet 6 inches between perpendiculars, a 44-foot moulded beam, 10-foot depth of hold, and drawing about 9 feet when ready for service. She was intended to be ship-rigged, but was never built.[7] A few small sloop-rigged block vessels also were built during Jefferson's administration. The sloop-of-war _Saratoga_, built on Lake Champlain by the Browns, in 1813, was practically a blockship. A plan for a proposed "Guard Ship," or "Floating Battery," was made by James Marsh at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1814. This was an unrigged battery, 200 feet extreme length, 50-foot moulded beam, 9-foot depth of hold, to mount 32 guns (42-pdr.), on a flush deck, with a covering deck above.[8] [Illustration: Figure 4.--DESIGN FOR AN UNRIGGED FLOATING BATTERY proposed by James Marsh, Charleston, South Carolina, March 14, 1814.] Through the courtesy of the trustees of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England, the Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Statens Sjöhistoriska Museum, Stockholm, Sweden, the author has been able to illustrate in this article the designs of some of the early floating batteries. In the last quarter of the 18th century and later, the Danes had built sail-propelled floating batteries or blockships, which were employed in the defense of Copenhagen. The British built at least one sail-propelled battery, the _Spanker_, in 1794. This was a scow of very angular form with overhanging gun-deck, bomb-ketch-rigged, and about 120 feet overall 42-foot 4 inches moulded beam and 8-foot depth of hold. She is said to have been a failure due to her unseaworthy proportions and form; the overhanging gun deck and sides were objected to in particular. She is called a "Stationary Battery" in her plans, which are in the Admiralty Collection of Draughts, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Controversial Descriptions The contemporary descriptions of the Fulton _Steam Battery_ do not agree. This was in part due to differences between the dimensions given out by Fulton during the negotiations with the Federal Government, and after the ship's construction was authorized. From the context of various statements concerning the projected vessel, such as that of the naval officers, the changes in the intended dimensions of the ship can be seen. For example, the officers state the model and plan shown them would produce a battery carrying 24 guns (24- and 32-pdrs.), and a letter from Fulton to Jones,[9] shows she was to be 138 feet on deck and 55-foot beam. The final reported dimensions, given by the Supervisory Committee,[10] are 156 feet length, 56 feet beam, and 20 feet depth. In addition there are a few foreign accounts which give dimensions and descriptions. The most complete was probably that of Jean Baptiste Marestier, a French naval constructor who visited the United States soon after the end of the War of 1812 and published a report on American steamboats in 1824.[11] The _Steam Battery_ is barely mentioned though a drawing of one of her boilers is given. Marestier made another report on the American Navy, however. Extensive searches have been made for this in Paris over the last 14 years, but this paper has not been found in any of the French archives. References to the original text indicate that the naval report dealt very extensively with the _Steam Battery_. Some of his comments on the battery appeared in _Procès-verbaux des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences_.[12] Marestier considered the powers of the battery to have been overrated due to fanciful accounts of some laymen writers. He was aware of the shortcomings of the double hull in a steam vessel at the then-possible speeds, but he apparently thought two engines, one in each hull and each with its boilers would be better than Fulton's arrangement of boilers in one hull and engine in the other. He noted that the paddle wheel turned 16-18 rpm and that steam pressure sustained a column of mercury 25 to 35 centimeters. The safety valve was set at 50 centimeters. Fuel consumption was 3-5/8 cords of pine wood per hour. In view of the access Marestier is known to have had to American naval constructors, shipbuilders, and engineers, it is highly probable that he not only obtained the building plan of the ship but also some of the earlier project plans from the builders and from Fulton's superintendent, Stoudinger. It is, therefore, a great misfortune that his lengthy report on the _Battery_ cannot be produced. A French naval officer who investigated the ship, M. Montgéry, also wrote a description, published in "Notice sur la Vie et les Travaux de Robert Fulton."[13] [Illustration: Figure 5.--FLOATING BATTERY _Spanker_ built, in England by William Barnard, at Deptford on the Thames, and launched June 14, 1794. Rigged as a bomb ketch, its length is 111 feet 7 inches in the keel, extreme beam 42 feet 4 inches, depth of hold 8 feet. Upper deck plan also shown.] It should be noted in regard to what Montgéry wrote about the _Battery_, that in 1821 it had been considered desirable to disarm the ship. The engineer in charge, William Purcell, had reported that as there were not proper scuppers, dirt and water had entered the hull and had collected under the engine and boilers, causing damage to the hull, and also that with guns removed, the _Battery_ would float too high for the paddle wheel to propel the vessel; so it had been decided to remove all machinery as well as the armament. Montgéry's description, published in 1822, was taken from his report to the Minister of Marine and Colonies. It noted the battery was made of two hulls separated by a channel, or "race," 15-1/2 feet wide, running the full length of the vessel. The two hulls were joined by a deck just above the waterline, as well as by an upper deck, and also connected at their keels by means of 12 oak beams each 1 foot square. The vessel was 152 feet long, 57 feet beam, and 20 feet deep. Sides were 4 feet 10 inches thick, and the ends of the hull were rounded and alike. There were two rudders at each end, one on each hull, alongside the race. The eight paddle blades, each 14-1/2 feet by 3 feet, turned in either direction by stopping the engine piston at half-stroke and reversing the flow of steam. Rigged with two lateen sails and two jibs, the ship sailed either end first. The engine of 120 hp was in one hull and two boilers were in the other. Other sources, Marestier, and Colden in _Procès-verbaux des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences_,[14] gave additional information (some of it incorrect): the engine was inclined, with a 4-foot-diameter cylinder, 5-foot stroke, direct-connected to the paddle wheel, which was turned at 18 rpm. The boilers were 8 � 22 feet with the fireboxes in inside cylinders, each about 5 feet in diameter, and extending about half the length of the boiler from the fire doors. Two fire tubes, each about 3 feet in diameter, returned the gases from the inside end of the fireboxes to the stacks at the firing end. Except at the fire-door end, the firebox was completely surrounded by water. The boiler pressure of about 6 psi was not maintained, varying somewhat with each stroke of the engine. Water level in the boilers was indicated by try cocks. The safety valve was controlled by a counterbalanced lever. A jet of salt water was injected into the exhaust trunk to form a vacuum by condensation. An air pump transferred condensate and sea water into a tank from which it passed overboard. Only about a tenth of this water was returned to the boilers. Montgéry stated also that only the lower or gun deck was to be armed. No bulwarks were on the spar deck, only iron stanchions to which were fastened a breastwork of wet cotton bales when the _Steam Battery_ was in action. The _Battery_ was designed to carry 30 guns (32-pdr.), with 3 guns in each end and 12 on each side, but no guns in the wake of paddle wheel and machinery. Hatches to give air to the stokehold were located amidships. The _Battery_ was to have been supplemented at the ends of each hull by a Columbiad "submarine gun" (100-pdr.), Fulton's invention, but these were not fitted. Provision was to be made in the fireboxes for heating shot, and a force pump with a cylinder 33 inches in diameter was employed to throw a stream of cold water, about 60-80 gallons per minute, for a distance of about two hundred feet. This could be done only when the paddle wheel was not in operation. The paddle wheel was housed, the top fitted with stairs to the spar deck. The gun deck, over the race, was used in part for staterooms, of which the bulkheads were permanent. Hammocks for the complement of 500 men were to be slung on the rest of the gun deck. The ship drew 10 feet 4 inches, with the port sills about 5-1/2 feet above the loadline. Burning wood, the vessel could carry about 4 days' supply of fuel; burning coal, she carried 12 days' supply. Montgéry said that the vessel would be vulnerable to bombshells and hot shot, and that furthermore she could be boarded. The displacement of the ship, at service draft, was 1,450 tons, a figure Montgéry obtained from a copy of the original plan given him by Noah Brown. [Illustration: Figure 6.--FRENCH SKETCH, in Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen, of inboard profile and arrangement of Fulton's _Steam Battery_, showing details of the Fulton engine, probably taken from one of his preliminary designs.] In 1935, Lieutenant Ralph R. Gurley, USN, attempted a reconstruction in sketches of the vessel published in his article "The U.S.S. _Fulton_ the First" in the _U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings_.[15] This reconstruction was based on the Patent Office drawing prepared for Fulton, and published by Stuart and Bennett, and the foregoing French sources. The Patent Office drawing showed the engine was an inclined cylinder and Lt. Gurley shows this in his sketch; in his text (p. 323) he says, "The engine was an inclined, single-cylinder affair with a 4-foot base and a 5-foot stroke." Gurley's attempt to reconstruct the _Steam Battery_ is the only one known to the author. Copenhagen Plans In 1960, Kjeld Rasmussen, naval architect of the Danish Greenland Company, was requested by the author to inspect in the Danish Royal Archives at Copenhagen a folio of American ship plans, the index of which had listed some Civil War river monitors. Mr. Rasmussen found the monitor plans had been withdrawn but discovered that three plans of Fulton's _Steam Battery_ existed, as well as plans of the first _Princeton_, a screw sloop-of-war. Copies of the _Steam Battery's_ plans were obtained at Copenhagen in September 1960 through the courtesy of the archivist, and were found to consist of the lines, copied in 1817, an inboard profile and arrangement, and a sail and rigging plan. From these the reconstruction for a scale model was drawn and is presented here with reproductions of the original drawings upon which the reconstruction is based. It is apparent that Montgéry's description is generally accurate. The vessel is a catamaran, made of two hulls, double-ended and exactly alike. The outboard sides are "moulded," with round bilges, the inboard sides are straight and flat, as though a hull had been split along the middle line and then planked up flat where split. The hulls are separated by the race, in which the paddle wheel is placed at mid-length. The topsides are made elliptical at the ends, and the midsection shows a marked tumble-home over the thick topside planking but less on the moulded lines. [Illustration: Figure 6.] The lines plan agreed rather closely to Montgéry's description of the hull. After careful fairing it was found the lines drawing would produce a vessel 153 feet 2 inches overall outside the stems, or about 151 feet over the planked rabbets, with a moulded beam of 56 feet and extreme beam of 58 feet. The moulded depth was 22 feet 9 inches and the width of the race was 14 feet 10 inches, plank to plank. The room and space of framing shown was 2 feet. The designed draft appears to be 13 feet and this would bring the port sills 5 feet 6 inches above the loadline and the underside of the gun-deck beams about 2 feet 9 inches above the loadline. The lines plan is a Danish copy, probably of the building plan by Noah Brown, and may be based on the plan Montgéry obtained from Brown. The spar deck has the iron stanchions (Gurley translated these as "chandeliers") which are set inboard 4 feet from the plank-sheer. This gives room for cotton bales, outboard the stanchions, to form a barricade. As will be seen by comparing the original Danish drawing with the model drawing, the construction indicates that the iron stanchions should be carried around the ends of the hull in the same manner as along the sides, since the lower ends of the iron stanchions pass through the spar deck and are secured to the inside of the inner ceiling of the gun deck. The rudders are as shown in the Danish drawing, and it is supposed that they were operated ferryboat fashion, one at each end of the vessel. Hence, each pair of rudders was toggled together by a cross-yoke. This was probably operated by a tiller (possibly the cross-yokes and tillers were of iron) pivoted under the beams of the gun deck close to the ends of the ship. Tiller ropes led from a tackle under the gun-deck through trunks to the spar deck, where the wheels were placed. This allowed proper sweep to the tillers and operation of each pair of rudders. The paddle wheel was apparently of iron, with wooden blades, and agrees with Montgéry's description. In the plan for the model it is shown raised 18 inches above the original design position, to agree with trial requirements. [Illustration: Figure 7.--ORIGINAL LINES OF ROBERT FULTON'S _Steam Battery_, a Danish copy dated September 12, 1817; found in Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen.] It should be observed that the close CL-to-CL frame spacing created a hull having frames touching one another, at least to above the turn of the bilge, so the vessel was almost solid timber, before being planked and ceiled, from keel to about the loadline. The sides are not only heavily planked but, after the frames were ceiled with extraordinarily heavy, square timbering, a supplementary solid, vertical framing was introduced inboard and another ceiling added. The sides scale about 5 feet from outside the plank to the inboard face of the inner ceiling at the level of the gunports. The hulls were tied together athwartship by the deck beams of the gun deck and spar deck, except in the wake of the paddle wheel. Knees were placed along the sides of the race at alternate gun-deck beams. In addition, the 12 1-foot-square timbers, crossing the race at the rabbets of the hulls, (mentioned by Montgéry) are shown. These must have created extraordinary resistance, even at the low speed of this steamer. The deck details shown are the results of reconstruction of the inboard works. History of Double-Hull Craft The use of catamaran hulls, or "double-hulls," has been periodically popular with ship designers since the time of Charles II of England. The earliest of such vessels known in the present day were four sloops or shallops designed 1673-1687 by Sir William Petty, who was an inventor in the field of naval architecture and received some attention from Charles II and from the Royal Society. The first Petty experiment, the _Simon & Jude_, later called _Invention I_, was launched October 28, 1662. She was designed with two hulls cylindrical in cross section, each 2 feet in diameter, and 20 feet long. A platform connected the hulls, giving the boat a beam of a little over 9 feet. She had a 20-foot mast stepped on one of the crossbeams connecting the hulls, with a single gaff sail. In sailing trials she beat three fast boats: the King's barge, a large pleasure boat, and a man-of-war's boat. This "double-bottom," also called a "sluiceboat" or "cylinder," was later lengthened at the stern to make her 30 feet overall. [Illustration: Figure 7.] The King did not support Petty, to the latter's great disappointment, and Petty next built a larger double-bottom, _Invention II_. This catamaran was lapstrake construction. Not much is known of this boat except that she beat the regular Irish packet boat, running between Holyhead and Dublin, in a race each way, winning a £20 wager. She was launched in July 1663; what became of her was not recorded. A third and still larger boat, the _Experiment_, launched December 22, 1664, appears to have been a large sloop. This vessel sailed by way of the Thames in April 1665 and went to Oporto, Portugal. She left Portugal October 20, 1665, for home, but apparently went down with all hands in a severe storm. [Illustration: Figure 8.--DANISH COPY OF ORIGINAL SAIL PLAN of Robert Fulton's _Steam Battery_, dated September 12, 1817, in Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen.] [Illustration: Figure 9.--LINES OF FULTON'S _Steam Battery_, as reconstructed for a model in the Museum of History and Technology.] [Illustration: Figure 10.--A RECONSTRUCTION OF INBOARD WORKS of the _Steam Battery_, for construction of the model in the Museum of History and Technology.] For 18 years Petty did no more with the type, but finally, in July 1684, he laid down a still larger sloop with two decks and a mast standing 55 feet above her upper deck. She was named _St. Michael the Archangel_ and is probably the design in Pepys' _Book of Miscellaneous Illustrations_ in Magdalene College, Cambridge, England. This vessel proved unmanageable and was a complete failure. [Illustration: Figure 11.--MODEL LINES REDRAWN to outside of plank to show hydrodynamic form of the _Steam Battery_.] Though the double canoes of the Pacific Islands were probably known to some in Europe in 1662, there is no evidence that Petty based his designs on such craft. He appears to have produced his designs spontaneously from independent observations and resulting theories. Before Petty concluded his experiments, a number of double-hull craft had been produced by others; however, some "double" craft, such as "double shallops" may have been "double-enders," as shown by a "double-moses boat" of the 18th century and later.[16] The use of two canoes, joined by a platform or by poles was common in colonial times; in Maryland and Virginia, dugouts so joined were used to transport tobacco down the tidal creeks to vessels' loading. Such craft were also used as ferries. M. V. Brewington's _Chesapeake Bay Log Canoes_[17] and Paul Wilstack's _Potomac Landings_[18] illustrate canoes used in this manner. A catamaran galley, two round-bottom hulls, flat on the inboard side (a hull split along the centerline and the inboard faces planked up), 113 feet long and each hull a 7-foot moulded beam, 6-foot 6 inches moulded depth, and placed 13 feet apart, was proposed by Sir Sidney Smith, R.N., in the 1790's, and built by the British Admiralty. Named _Taurus_, she is shown by the Admiralty draught to have been a double-ender, with cabins amidships on the platform, an iron rudder at each end (between the hulls) steered with tillers (to unship), and with a ramp at one end. The plans are undated, signed by Captain Sir Sidney Smith, and a field-carriage gun is shown at the ramp end of the boat. This, and the heavy rocker in the keels, suggests the _Taurus_ was intended for a landing boat. No sailing rig is indicated, but tholes for 12 oars or sweeps on each side are shown. The oarsmen apparently sat on deck, or on low seats, with stretchers in hatches between each pair of tholes (Admiralty Collection of Draughts, The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England). [Illustration: Figure 12.--GENERAL PLAN of the _Taurus_, a catamaran galley gunboat proposed by Sir Sidney Smith, R.N., to the British Admiralty in the early years of the French Revolution. From the Admiralty Collection of Draughts, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.] Another experimenter with the double-hull type of vessel was a wealthy Scot named Patrick Miller who was particularly interested in manual propulsion of vessels, employing geared capstans to operate paddle wheels. In a letter dated June 9, 1790, Miller offered Gustav III of Sweden a design for a double-hulled 144-gun ship-of-the-line (rating as a 130-gun ship) propelled by manually operated capstans connected to a paddle wheel between the hulls. She was rigged to sail, with five masts and was to be 246 feet long, 63 feet beam, and 17 feet draft; the hulls were 16 feet apart. This project was submitted by the King to Fredrik Henrik af Chapman, the great Swedish naval architect, who made an adverse report. Chapman pointed out in great detail that the weight of the armament, the necessary hull structure, the stores, crew, ammunition, spars, sails, rigging and gear, would greatly exceed Miller's designed displacement. He also pointed out the prime fault of catamarans under sail--slow turning in stays. He suggested that the speed under sail would be disappointing. He doubted that a double-hull ship of such size could be built strong enough to stand a heavy sea. He remarked that English records showed that a small vessel of the catamaran type had been built between 1680 and 1700 which had sailed well (this may have been one of Petty's boats), and that "36 years ago" he had seen 8 miles from London, a similar boat that had been newly built by Lord Baltimore and was about 50 feet long; this was a failure and was discarded after one trial. Therefore, said Chapman, the Miller project was not new but rather an old idea. Chapman's final remark is perhaps the best illustration of his opinion of the catamaran, "Despite all this, two-hull vessels are completely sound when the theory can be properly applied; that is in vessels of very light weight, and of small size, with crews of one or two men." A "model" of such a double-hull ship--the _Experiment_, built at Leith, Scotland, in 1786 by J. Laurie--was sent to Sweden by Miller. She was 105 feet long, 31 feet beam, and cost £3000. This vessel arrived in the summer of 1790 and King Gustav in a letter dated July 26 ordered Col. Michael Anckerswärd to welcome the vessel at Stockholm. The King presented Miller with a gold snuffbox and a painting was made of the vessel. The _Experiment_ had five paddle wheels in tandem between her hulls, operated by geared capstans on deck. These gave her a speed of 5 knots but caused the crew to suffer from exhaustion in a short time. The vessel was badly strained in a storm and was finally abandoned at St. Petersburg, Russia.[19] [Illustration: Figure 12.] Miller later turned to the idea of employing steam instead of manual power and built a 25-foot double-hulled pleasure boat of iron fitted with a steam engine built by William Symington. Also named _Experiment_, she was an apparent success, so Miller had a 60-foot boat built of the double-hull design and fitted with an engine built by Symington. She reached a speed of 7 mph on the Forth and Clyde Canal. However, Miller lost interest when he found that the Symington engine was unreliable and that Great Britain showed very little public support for such projects. Fulton was acquainted with Symington's work and probably had heard of Miller's vessels. At any rate, he employed the double-hull principle in his steam ferryboats, the first of which was the _Jersey_, a 188-ton vessel built by Charles Browne, which began service July 2, 1812. The next year he had a sister ship built, the _York_. These vessels were based on his patent drawing of 1809. In 1814 he had another vessel of this type built, the _Nassau_. It was, therefore, logical that he should apply this design to the _Steam Battery_. The double-hull design had worked well in these ferries, and the design would give protection from shot to the paddle wheel. The _Battery_ would have the ability to run forward or astern so as not to be exposed to a raking fire from the enemy while maneuvering in action. The application of this "ferryboat" principle to the _Battery_ reduced the need for extreme maneuverability, the catamaran's weakest point, even at low speed. The resistance factors in the design are of relatively small importance, for the speed possible under steam in this period was very low. However, the plans show an apparently efficient hull form for the power available, aside from the drag of the beams across the race in the vicinity of the keel. The displacement was adequate. The height of the gun-deck above the water at the race made the _Battery_ unsuitable for rough-water operation, but there is no evidence that Fulton or the sponsors of the vessel considered the _Battery_ as a coastwise or seagoing steamer. However, the clearance of the gun deck above the water and the dip of the paddle wheel would have made the additional weight of an upper- or spar-deck battery prohibitive even had experience in action proven it desirable. Sail and Inboard Plans [Illustration: Figure 13.--LINES OF _Taurus_. From the Admiralty Collection of Draughts, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.] The sail and rigging plan is likewise a Danish copy and shows the two-masted lateen rig employed. The hull is shown with bulwarks and gunports on the spar deck but no other evidence that the _Battery_ was finished in this manner has been found. The rig resembles that of some of Josiah Fox's designs for Jeffersonian gunboats--double-enders designed to sail in either direction but without the jibs. The topmasts do not appear to be more than signal poles and apparently were not fitted with sails; however, some European lateeners did have triangular topsails over a lateen and it is possible the _Battery_ may have carried such sails. Considering the stability and displacement of the _Battery_, the rig is very small and not sufficiently effective. Shrouds were not required; the masts were supported by runners that were shifted when the yards were reversed, and in tacking. Apparently the jibstays also could be slacked off so that the lateen yards would not have to be dipped under them. [Illustration: Figure 14.--RUDDER DETAIL of _Taurus_. From the Admiralty Collection of Draughts, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.] The inboard profile is on tracing paper and the notes are in French. This drawing is of a simplified hull form having flat-bottom hulls with chines. It is possible that this is a tracing of a preliminary drawing obtained by Marestier or Montgéry, but no documentation can be found. Its importance is that it shows in some detail the engine and boilers, as well as the wheelbox, and another drawing of the paddle wheel, more or less duplicating the wheel shown in the Danish plan. No details of the deck arrangements are shown in any of the plans, except for the dome skylight over the fireroom in the boiler hull. Both the lines plan and the inboard drawing show construction midsections and hull connections. These plans show that the engine was not inclined, but rather was vertical, contrary to Fulton's patent drawing. The piston rod and the crosshead obviously passed through its gun deck in a large hatch. Also it is plain that there must have been large hatches afore and abaft the wheelbox to make the stepped wheelbox construction desirable. There also must have been a hatch in the gun deck under the domed skylight. It is improbable that the engine and skylight hatches were used for ladderways, passing scuttles, or companionways. The boilers are shown in the inboard profile about as described and drawn by Marestier but with two stacks on each boiler, one to each flue; Marestier's sketch in his report on American steamships shows the flues of each boiler trunked into a single stack. The battery had two boilers and the stacks are at the boilers' fire-door end. The steam lines came off the crown of the boilers and probably passed through the ends of the wheelbox to the engine; a trunk for the steam lines would undoubtedly have been necessary. [Illustration: Figure 15.--SKETCH OF 130-GUN SHIP proposed by Patrick Miller to King Gustav III of Sweden in 1790. In Statens Sjöhistoriska Museum, Stockholm.] [Illustration: Figure 16.--PATRICK MILLER'S manually propelled (paddle-wheel) catamaran ship _Experiment_, built at Leith, Scotland, 1786. Scale drawing in Statens Sjöhistoriska Museum, Stockholm.] The engine is shown to have had counterbalanced side levers, one on each side, and a single flywheel on the outboard side. The cylinder is over the condenser or "cistern," connected by the steam line and valve box on the side. The cylinder crosshead is shown in the inboard profile to have reached the underside of the beams of the upper deck. The crosshead was connected by two connecting rods to the side levers. These levers operated the paddle wheel by connecting rods to cranks on the paddle-wheel shaft. There is another pair of connecting rods from the side levers to the crosshead of the air pump. All connecting rods are on one arm of the side levers, the other end having only a counterbalance weight beyond the fulcrum bearing. The flywheel has a shaft fitted with two gears, and is driven through idler gears from gears on the paddle-wheel shaft; it turns at about twice the speed of the paddle wheel. No other pumps or fittings are shown in the engine hull, although manual pumps were probably fitted to fill and empty the boilers. Piping is not shown. [Illustration: Figure 17.--PAINTING OF THE _Experiment_ in the Statens Sjöhistoriska Museum, Stockholm.] The four rudders, toggled in pairs, are shown in both the lines and inboard drawings, but the shape is different in the two plans. Operation must have been by a tiller under the gun-deck beams. The outer end of the tiller may have been pivoted on the toggle bar and the inboard end fitted, as previously described, with steering cable or chain tackles. This seems to be the only practical interpretation of the evidence. Reconstructing the Plans In the model it was necessary to reconstruct the deck arrangements without enough contemporary description. The outboard appearance and hull form, rig, and arrangement of armament require no reconstruction, for all that is of importance is shown in the lines and rig drawings, or in the inboard profile. The masts are shown to have been stepped over the race on the gun deck. The iron stanchions are shown in the lines drawing and in the construction section. However, their position at the ends of the _Battery_ are apparently incorrectly shown in the original lines plan. The construction section shows these stanchions to have been stepped on the inside face of the inner ceiling and, as the ceiling structure was carried completely around the ship, the stanchions in the ends must have been placed inboard, as along the sides. The bowsprit was above deck and would probably be secured in the knighthead timbers at the ends of the hull, as well as by the heel bitts shown in the Danish lines drawing. With the riding bitts shown inboard of the heel bitts at each end of the vessel, it is obvious that she would work her ground tackle at both ends and would therefore require two capstans; the wheelbox would prevent effective use of a single one. The capstans might be doubleheaded, as in some large frigates and ships-of-the-line. [Illustration: Figure 18.--SAIL PLAN OF FULTON'S _Steam Battery_ as reconstructed for model in the Museum of History and Technology.] As to the remaining deck fixtures, hatches and fittings, these must be entirely a matter of speculation. Ladderways, passing scuttles, hatches, trunks, galley, heads and cabins were obviously required in a fighting ship and can only be located on the theory that, when completed, the _Battery_ was a practical vessel. It has been stated that the officers' cabins were over the race; the logical place for the heads, galley, wardroom and mess also would be over the race, giving the remaining part of the gun deck for the necessary hatches, ladderways, trunks, etc., in the two hulls, space required for armament, and to sling the hammocks of a watch below. As the vessel was never fully manned, apparently, the space for hammocks is not a serious problem in a reconstruction. If the vessel had been manned as proposed by 500 men, hammocks for over 200 would have been required, which would give very crowded quarters in view of the limited space available. Though no specific requirements were stated in the reports of the trials, it seems reasonable to suppose that additional hatches were cut in the decks to improve the fireroom ventilation. In the reconstruction drawings, these hatchways as well as the other deck openings and deck fittings--such as bilge pumps, companionways, skylights, binnacles, wheels and wheel-rope trunks, cable trunks, steampipe casings, and stack fiddleys--have been located in an effort to meet the imagined requirements of the working of a ship of this unusual form. [Illustration: Figure 19.--MODEL OF _Steam Battery_ in the Museum of History and Technology. (Smithsonian photo 63990-E.)] [Illustration: Figure 20.--LINES OF STEAMER _Congo_, built in 1815-1816 for the British Admiralty and converted to a sailing survey vessel. From Admiralty Collection of Draughts, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.] There are some unanswered questions that arose in the preparation of the reconstruction drawings. As has been shown, the original inboard arrangement plan found in Copenhagen shows four smokestacks, while Marestier's sketch of the vessel's boilers shows trunked flues indicating that two stacks were used. It is possible that the boilers were first fitted so that four stacks were required; alterations made as a result of steaming trials may well have included the introduction of trunked flues and the final use of two stacks in line fore-and-aft. This would have required a rearrangement of the fiddley hatches amidships. Another troublesome question was the doubtful arrangement of the four companionways on the spar deck. Perhaps only two were fitted, one on each side of the officers' staterooms while the ladderways at the crew's end of the ship were simple ladder hatches. The decision to use four bilge pumps is based upon the lack of drag in the keel of the hulls, which would prevent accumulation of bilge water at one end of the hull. The use of four single-barrel pumps instead of four double-barrel pumps may be questioned, for chain pumps requiring two barrels would have been practical. Allowance for stores was made by use of platforms in the hold. It is known from statements made to the Court of Inquiry, that the magazines were amidships and that a part of these was close to the boilers. Fuel and water would be in the lower hold under the platforms; hatches and ladderways are arranged to permit fueling the ship. A few prints or drawings of the ship, aside from the patent drawing, have been found. There are two prints that show the launch of the vessel. One, a print of 1815, is in possession of the Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Va., and is reproduced in Alexander Crosby Brown's _Twin Ships, Notes on the Chronological History of the Use of Multiple Hulled Vessels_.[20] A poor copy of this print appears on page 13 of Bennett's _Steam Navy of the United States_, and another and inaccurate sketch is shown on page 8. These pictures were of no use in the reconstruction as they show no details that are not in the Copenhagen plans. The patent drawing does not show deck details and in fact does not represent the vessel as built in any respect other than in being a catamaran with paddle wheel amidships between the hulls. The _Steam Battery_ did not have any particular influence on the design of men-of-war that followed her. In the first place, steampower was not viewed with favor by naval officers generally. This was without doubt due to prejudice, but engines in 1820-30 were still unreliable when required to run for long periods, as experienced by the early ocean-going steamers. The great weight of the early steam engines and their size in relation to power were important, and also important were practical objections that prevented the design of efficient naval ocean steamers until about 1840; even then, the paddle wheels made them very vulnerable in action. Until the introduction of the screw propellor it was not possible to design a really effective ocean-going naval steamer; hence until about 1840-45, sail remained predominant in naval vessels for ocean service, and steamers were accepted only in coast defense and towing services, or as dispatch vessels. No immediate use of the double hull in naval vessels of the maritime powers resulted from the construction of the _Steam Battery_. The flat-bottom chine-built design employed by Fulton in _North River_, _Raritan_, and other early steamboats was utilized in the design for a projected steamer by the British Admiralty in 1815-16. This vessel was about 76 feet overall, 16-foot beam, and 8-foot 10 inches depth in hold. Her design was for a flat-bottom, chine-built hull with no fore-and-aft camber in the bottom, a sharp entrance, and a square-tuck stern with slight overhang above the cross-seam. Her side frames were straight and vertical amidships, but curved as the bow and stern were approached. She was to be a side-paddle-wheel steamer, and her hull was diagonally braced; the wheel and engine were to be about amidships where she was dead flat for about 14 feet. However, the engine and boilers were not installed; the engine was utilized ashore for pumping, and the vessel was completed in the Deptford Yard as a sailing ship. Under the name _Congo_ she was employed in the African coast survey. Her plan is in the Admiralty Collection of Draughts, at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England. The double hull continued to be employed in both steam and team ferryboats in the United States and in England and France. A few river and lake steamers were also built with this design of hull. Continued efforts to obtain fast sailing by use of the double hull produced a number of sailing catamarans; of these the Herreshoff catamarans of the 1870's showed high speed when reaching in a fresh breeze. Designs for double-hulled steamers appeared during the last half of the 19th century; in 1874 the _Castalia_, a large, double-hull, iron, cross-channel steamer, was built by the Thames Iron-works Company at Blackwall, England. She was 290 feet long, and each hull had a beam of 17 feet. The paddle wheel was placed between the hulls and, ready for sea, she drew 6-1/2 feet. She ran the 22 miles between Dover and Calais in 1 hour and 50 minutes, a speed much slower than that of the paddle-wheel, cross-channel steamers having one hull. Another double-hull steamer was built for this service by Hawthorn, Leslie and Company, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Scotland, in 1877. First named _Express_, she was renamed _Calais-Douvres_ when she went into service in May 1878. Her length was 302 feet, her extreme beam 62 feet, and each hull had a beam of 18 feet, 3 inches. She drew 6-foot 7-1/2 inches ready for sea and the paddle wheel was between the hulls. On her trials she made 14 knots and burned coal excessively. Sold to France in 1880, she was taken out of service in 1889. Though popular, she was not faster than the single-hull steamers in this service and had been a comparatively expensive vessel to build and operate. The many attempts to produce a very fast double-hull steamer and large sailing vessels have led to disappointment for their designers and sponsors. In the history of naval architecture, since Petty's time, there have been a number of periods when the new-old idea of the double hull has become popular. Craft of this type have been commonly well publicized but, on the whole, their basic designs have followed the same principles over and over again and have not produced the sought-for increase in speed and handiness. In very recent years there has been a revival in interest in sailing double-hull boats that is enthusiastic as to very small craft and somewhat restrained as to large boats. A few projects are under development for double-hull craft, power and sail, of over 90-foot length, including an oceanographic research vessel. In general, however, the performance of double-hull boats has shown that Chapman's estimate of the type was reasonably correct and that there are limitations, particularly in maneuverability in the double-hull craft that could have been found by reference to the history of past experiments with the type. NAVAL STEAMERS. THE DEMOLOGOS; OR, FULTON THE FIRST. At the close of the year eighteen hundred and thirteen, Robert Fulton exhibited to the President of the United States, the original drawing from which the engraving on Plate One is sketched, being a representation of the proposed war-steamer or floating-battery, named by him, the Demologos. This sketch possesses more than ordinary interest, from the circumstance that it is, doubtless, the only record of the _first war-steamer in the world_, designed and drawn by the immortal Fulton, and represented by him to the Executive, as capable of carrying a strong battery, with furnaces for red hot shot, and being propelled by the power of steam, at the rate of _four_ miles an hour. It was contemplated that this vessel, besides carrying her proposed armament on deck, should also be furnished with submarine guns, two suspended from each bow, so as to discharge a hundred pound ball into an enemy's ship at ten or twelve feet below her water-line. In addition to this, her machinery was calculated for the addition of an engine which would discharge an immense column of water upon the decks, and through the port-holes of an enemy, making her the most formidable engine for warfare that human ingenuity has contrived. The estimated cost of the vessel was three hundred and twenty thousand dollars, nearly the sum requisite for a frigate of the first class. The project was zealously embraced by the Executive, and the national legislature in March, eighteen hundred and fourteen, passed a law, authorizing the President of the United States to cause to be built, equipped, and employed, one or more floating batteries, for the defense of the waters of the United States. The building of the vessel was committed by the Coast and Harbor Defense Association, to a sub-committee of five gentlemen, who were recognized by the Government as their agents for that purpose, and whose interesting history of the Steam Frigate is copied in Note A, of the Appendix to this volume. Robert Fulton, whose soul animated the enterprise, was appointed the engineer; and on the twentieth day of June, eighteen hundred and fourteen, the keel of this novel steamer was laid at the ship-yard of Adam and Noah Brown, her able and active constructors, in the city of New York, and on the twenty-ninth of the following October, or in little more than four months, she was safely launched, in the presence of multitudes of spectators who thronged the surrounding shores, and were seen upon the hills which limited the beautiful prospect around the bay of New York. The river and bay were filled with steamers and vessels of war, in compliment to the occasion. In the midst of these was the enormous floating mass, whose bulk and unwieldy form seemed to render her as unfit for motion, as the land batteries which were saluting her. In a communication from Captain David Porter, U. S. Navy, to the Hon. Secretary of the Navy, dated New York, October 29, 1814, he states,--"I have the pleasure to inform you that the "FULTON THE FIRST," was this morning safely launched. No one has yet ventured to suggest any improvement that could be made in the vessel, and to use the words of the projector, '_I would not alter her if it were in my power to do so._' "She promises fair to meet our most sanguine expectations, and I do not despair in being able to navigate in her from one extreme of our coast to the other. Her buoyancy astonishes every one, she now draws _only eight feet three inches water_, and her draft will only be _ten_ feet with all her guns, machinery, stores, and crew, on board. The ease with which she can now be towed with a single steamboat, renders it certain that her velocity will be sufficiently great to answer every purpose, and the manner it is intended to secure her machinery from the gunner's shot, leaves no apprehension for its safety. I shall use every exertion to prepare her for immediate service; her guns will soon be mounted, and I am assured by Mr. Fulton, that her machinery will be in operation in about six weeks." On the twenty-first of November, the Steam Frigate was moved from the wharf of Messrs. Browns, in the East River, to the works of Robert Fulton, on the North River, to receive her machinery, which operation was performed by fastening the steamboat "Car of Neptune," to her larboard, and the steamboat "Fulton," to her starboard side; they towed her through the water from three and a-half to four miles per hour. The dimensions of the "Fulton the First" were:-- Length, one hundred and fifty-six feet. Breadth, fifty-six feet. Depth, twenty feet. Water-wheel, sixteen feet diameter. Length of bucket, fourteen feet. Dip, four feet. Engine, forty-eight inch cylinder, and five feet stroke. Boiler, length, twenty-two feet; breath, twelve feet; and depth, eight feet. Tonnage, two thousand four hundred and seventy-five. By June, eighteen hundred and fifteen, her engine was put on board, and she was so far completed as to afford an opportunity of trying her machinery. On the first of June, at ten o'clock in the morning, the "Fulton the First," propelled by her own steam and machinery, left the wharf near the Brooklyn ferry, and proceeded majestically into the river; though a stiff breeze from the south blew directly ahead, she stemmed the current with perfect ease, as the tide was a strong ebb. She sailed by the forts and saluted them with her thirty-two pound guns. Her speed was equal to the most sanguine expectations; she exhibited a novel and sublime spectacle to an admiring people. The intention of the Commissioners being solely to try her enginery, no use was made of her sails. After navigating the bay, and receiving a visit from the officers of the French ship of war lying at her anchors, the Steam Frigate came to at Powles' Hook ferry, about two o'clock in the afternoon, without having experienced a single unpleasant occurrence. On the fourth of July, of the same year, she made a passage to the ocean and back, and went the distance, which, in going and returning, is fifty-three miles, in eight hours and twenty minutes, without the aid of sails; the wind and tide were partly in her favor and partly against her, the balance rather in her favor. In September, she made another trial trip to the ocean, and having at this time the weight of her whole armament on board, she went at an average of five and a half miles an hour, with and against the tide. When stemming the tide, which ran at the rate of three miles an hour, she advanced at the rate of two and a-half miles an hour. This performance was not more than equal to Robert Fulton's expectations, but it exceeded what he had premised to the Government, which was that she should be propelled by steam at the rate of from three to four miles an hour. The English were not uninformed as to the preparations which were making for them, nor inattentive to their progress. It is certain that the Steam Frigate lost none of her terrors in the reports or imaginations of the enemy. In a treatise on steam vessels, published in Scotland at that time, the author states that he has taken great care to procure _full_ and _accurate_ information of the Steam Frigate launched in New York, and which he describes in the following words:-- "Length on deck, _three hundred feet_; breadth, _two hundred feet_; thickness of her sides, _thirteen feet_ of alternate oak plank and cork wood--carries forty-four guns, four of which are _hundred pounders_; quarter-deck and forecastle guns, forty-four pounders; and further to annoy an enemy attempting to board, can discharge _one hundred gallons of boiling water in a minute_, and by mechanism, brandishes _three hundred cutlasses_ with the utmost regularity over her gunwales; works also an equal number of heavy iron pikes of great length, darting them from her sides with prodigious force, and withdrawing them every quarter of a minute"!! The war having terminated before the "_Fulton the First_" was entirely completed, she was taken to the Navy Yard, Brooklyn, and moored on the flats abreast of that station, where she remained, and was used as a receiving-ship until the fourth of June, eighteen hundred and twenty-nine, when she was blown up. The following letters from Commodore Isaac Chauncey (then Commandant of the New York Navy Yard) to the Honorable Secretary of the Navy, informing him of the distressing event, concludes this brief history of the _first steam vessel of war ever built_. * * * * * U. S. NAVY YARD, NEW YORK, _June 5th, 1829_. SIR: It becomes my painful duty to report to you a most unfortunate occurrence which took place yesterday, at about half past two o'clock, P. M., in the accidental blowing up of the Receiving Ship Fulton, which killed twenty-four men and a woman, and wounded nineteen; there are also five missing. Amongst the killed I am sorry to number Lieutenant S. M. Brackenridge, a very fine, promising officer, and amongst the wounded are, Lieutenants Charles F. Platt, and A. M. Mull, and Sailing-Master Clough, the former dangerously, and the two last severely; there are also four Midshipmen severely wounded. How this unfortunate accident occurred I am not yet able to inform you, nor have I time to state more particularly; I will, as soon as possible, give a detailed account of the affair. I have the honor to be, Sir, Very respectfully, J. CHAUNCEY. HON. JOHN BRANCH, _Secretary of the Navy, Washington._ U.S. NAVY YARD, NEW YORK, _June 8th, 1829_. Sir: I had been on board the "Fulton" all the morning, inspecting the ship and men, particularly the sick and invalids, which had increased considerably from other ships, and whom I had intended to ask the Department permission to discharge, as being of little use to the service. I had left the ship but a few moments before the explosion took place, and was in my office at the time. The report did not appear to me louder than a thirty-two pounder, although the destruction of the ship was complete and entire, owing to her very decayed state, for there was not on board, at the time, more than two and a-half barrels of damaged powder, which was kept in the magazine for the purpose of firing the morning and evening gun. It appears to me that the explosion could not have taken place from accident, as the magazine was as well, or better secured, than the magazines of most of our ships, yet it would be difficult to assign a motive to those in the magazine for so horrible an act, as voluntarily to destroy themselves and those on board. If the explosion was not the effect of design, I am at a loss to account for the catastrophe. I have the honor to be, Sir, Very respectfully, J. CHAUNCEY. HON. JOHN BRANCH, _Secretary of the Navy, Washington_. APPENDIX. NOTE A. STEAM FRIGATE. _Report of HENRY RUTGERS, SAMUEL L. MITCHEL, and THOMAS MORRIS, the Commissioners superintending the construction of a steam vessel of war, to the Secretary of the Navy._ NEW YORK, _December 28th, 1815_. SIR: The war which was terminated by the treaty of Ghent, afforded, during its short continuance, a glorious display of the valor of the United States by land and by sea--it made them much better known to foreign nations, and, what is of much greater importance, it contributed to make them better acquainted with themselves--it excited new enterprises--it educed latent talents--it stimulated to exertions unknown to our people before. A long extent of coast was exposed to an enemy, powerful above every other on the ocean. His commanders threatened to lay waste our country with fire and sword, and, actually, in various instances, carried their menaces into execution. It became necessary, for our defense, to resist, by every practicable method, such a formidable foe. It was conceived, by a most ingenious and enterprising citizen, that the power of Steam could be employed to propel a floating battery, carrying heavy guns, to the destruction of any hostile force that should hover on the shores, or enter the ports of our Atlantic frontier. The perfect and admirable success of his project for moving boats containing travelers and baggage by the same elastic agent, opened the way to its employment for carrying warriors and the apparatus for fighting. The plan was submitted to the consideration of the executive of an enlightened government. Congress, influenced by the most liberal and patriotic spirit, appropriated money for the experiment, and the Navy Department, then conducted by the honorable William Jones, appointed commissioners to superintend the construction of a convenient vessel under the direction of ROBERT FULTON, the inventor, as engineer, and Messrs. Adam and Noah Brown, as naval constructors. The enterprise, from its commencement, and during a considerable part of its preparatory operations, was aided by the zealous co-operation of Major General Dearborn, then holding his head-quarters at the city of New York, as the officer commanding the third military district. The loss of his valuable counsel in conducting a work which he had maturely considered, and which he strongly recommended, was the consequence of his removal to another section of the Union, where his professional talents were specially required. The keels of this steam-frigate were laid on the twentieth day of June, eighteen hundred and fourteen. The strictest blockade the enemy could enforce interrupted the coasting trade, and greatly enhanced the price of timber. The vigilance with which he guarded our coast against intercourse with foreign nations, rendered difficult the importation of copper and iron. The same impediment attended the supplies of coal heretofore brought to New York from Richmond and Liverpool. Lead, in like manner, was procured under additional disadvantages. These attempts of the enemy to frustrate the design, were vain and impotent. All the obstacles were surmounted. Scarcity of the necessary woods and metals were overcome by strenuous exertions; and all the blockading squadron could achieve, was not a disappointment in the undertaking, but merely an increase of the expense. So, in respect to tradesmen and laborers, there was an extraordinary difficulty. Shipwrights had repaired to the lakes, for repelling the enemy, in such numbers, that, comparatively speaking, few were left on the seaboard. A large portion of the men who had been engaged in daily work, had enlisted as soldiers, and had marched under the banners of the nation to the defense of its rights--yet amidst the scarcity of hands, a sufficient number were procured for the purpose which the Commissioners had in charge. An increase of wages was the chief impediment, and this they were enabled practically to overcome. By the exemplary combination of diligence and skill, on the part of the Engineer and Constructors, the business was so accelerated, that the vessel was launched on the twenty-ninth day of October, amidst the plaudits of an unusual number of citizens. Measures were immediately taken to complete her equipment; the boiler, the engine, and the machinery were put on board with all possible expedition. Their weight and size far surpassed any thing that had been witnessed before among us. The stores of artillery in New York not furnishing the number and kind of cannon which she was destined to carry, it became necessary to transport guns from Philadelphia. A prize, taken from the enemy, put some fit and excellent pieces at the disposal of the Navy Department. To avoid the danger of capture by the enemy's cruisers, these were carted over the miry roads of New Jersey. Twenty heavy cannon were thus conveyed by the strength of horses. Carriages of the most approved model were constructed, and every thing done to bring her into prompt action, as an efficient instrument of war. About this time, an officer, pre-eminent for bravery and discipline, was commissioned by the government to her command. Prior to this event, it had been intended by the Commissioners to finish her conformably to the plan originally submitted to the Executive. She is a structure resting upon two boats and keels, separated from end to end by a canal fifteen feet wide, and sixty-six long. One boat contained the caldrons of copper to prepare her steam. The vast cylinder of iron, with its piston, levers, and wheels, occupied a part of its fellow; the great water-wheel revolved in the space between them; the main or gun-deck supported her armament, and was protected by a bulwark four feet ten inches thick, of solid timber. This was pierced by thirty port-holes, to enable as many thirty-two pounders to fire red hot balls; her upper or spar deck was plain, and she was to be propelled by her enginery alone. It was the opinion of Captain Porter and Mr. Fulton, that the upper deck ought to be surrounded with a bulwark and stanchions--that two stout masts should be erected to support latteen sails--that there should be bowsprits for jibs, and that she should be rigged in a corresponding style. Under authorities so great, and with the expectation of being able to raise the blockade of New London, by destroying, taking, or routing the enemy's ships, all these additions were adopted and incorporated with the vessel. It must here be observed, that during the exhaustion of the treasury, and the temporary depression of public credit, the Commissioners were exceedingly embarrassed--their payments were made in treasury notes, which they were positively instructed to negotiate at par. On several occasions even these were so long withheld, that the persons who had advanced materials and labor were importunate for payment, and silently discontented. To a certain extent, the Commissioners pledged their private credit. Notwithstanding all this, the men, at one time, actually broke off. The work was retarded, and her completion unavoidably deferred, to the great disappointment of the Commissioners, until winter rendered it impossible for her to act. Under all this pressure, they, nevertheless, persevered in the important object confided to them. But their exertions were further retarded by the premature and unexpected death of the Engineer. The world was deprived of his invaluable labors before he had completed this favorite undertaking. They will not inquire, wherefore, in the dispensations of Divine Providence, he was not permitted to realize his grand conception. _His discoveries, however, survive for the benefit of mankind_, and will extend to unborn generations. At length all matters were ready for a trial of the machinery to urge such a bulky vessel through the water. This essay was made on the first day of June, eighteen hundred and fifteen. She proved herself capable of opposing the wind, and of stemming the tide, of crossing currents, and of being steered among vessels riding at anchor, though the weather was boisterous and the water rough. Her performance demonstrated that the project was successful--no doubt remained that a floating battery, composed of heavy artillery, could be moved by steam. The Commissioners returned from the exercise of the day, satisfied that the vessel would answer the intended purpose, and consoled themselves that their care had been bestowed upon a worthy object. But it was discovered, that various alterations were necessary. Guided by the light of experience, they caused some errors to be corrected, and some defects to be supplied. She was prepared for a second voyage with all practicable speed. On the fourth of July she was again put in action. She performed a trip to the ocean, eastward of Sandy Hook, and back again, a distance of fifty-three miles, in eight hours and twenty minutes. A part of this time she had the tide against her, and had no assistance whatever from sails. Of the gentlemen who formed the company invited to witness the experiment, not one entertained a doubt of her fitness for the intended purpose. Additional expedients were, notwithstanding, necessary to be sought for quickening and directing her motion. These were devised and executed with all possible care. Suitable arrangements having been made, a third trial of her powers was attempted on the eleventh day of September, with the weight of twenty-six of her long and ponderous guns, and a considerable quantity of ammunition and stores on board; her draft of water was short of eleven feet. She changed her course by inverting the motion of the wheel, without the necessity of putting about. She fired salutes as she passed the forts, and she overcame the resistance of the wind and tide in her progress down the bay. She performed beautiful man[oe]uvres around the United States' Frigate JAVA, then at anchor near the light-house. She moved with remarkable celerity, and she was perfectly obedient to her double helm. It was observed that the explosion of powder produced very little concussion. The machinery was not affected by it in the smallest degree. Her progress, during the firing, was steady and uninterrupted. On the most accurate calculations, derived from heaving the log, her average velocity was five and a-half miles per hour. Notwithstanding the resistance of currents, she was found to make headway at the rate of two miles an hour against the ebb of the East River, running three and a-half knots. The day's exercise was satisfactory to the respectable company who attended, beyond their utmost expectations. It was universally agreed that we now possessed a new auxiliary against every maratime invader. The City of New York, exposed as it is, was considered as having the means of rendering itself invulnerable. The Delaware, Chesapeake, Long Island Sound, and every other bay and harbor in the nation, may be protected by the same tremendous power. Among the inconveniences observable during the experiment, was the heat endured by the men who attended the fires. To enable a correct judgment to be formed on this point, one of the Commissioners (Dr. Mitchel) descended and examined, by a thermometer, the temperature of the hold, between the two boilers. The quicksilver, exposed to the radiant heat of the burning fuel, rose to one hundred and sixteen degrees of Fahrenheit's scale. Though exposed thus to its intensity, he experienced no indisposition afterwards. The analogy of potteries, forges, glass-houses, kitchens, and other places, where laborers are habitually exposed to high heats, is familiar to persons of business and of reflection. In all such occupations, the men, by proper relays, perform their services perfectly well. The Government, however, will understand that the hold of the present vessel could be rendered cooler by other apertures for the admission of air, and that on building another steam frigate, the comfort of the firemen might be provided for, as in the ordinary steamboats. The Commissioners congratulate the Government and the nation on the event of this noble project. Honorable alike, to its author and its patrons, it constitutes an era in warfare and the arts. The arrival of peace, indeed, has disappointed the expectations of conducting her to battle. That last and conclusive act of showing her superiority in combat, has not been in the power of the Commissioners to make. If a continuance of tranquillity should be our lot, and this steam vessel of war be not required for the public defense, the nation may rejoice that the fact we have ascertained is of incalculably greater value than the expenditure--and that if the present structure should perish, we have the information never to perish, how, on a future emergency, others may be built. The requisite variations will be dictated by circumstances. Owing to the cessation of hostilities, it has been deemed inexpedient to finish and equip her as for immediate and active employ. In a few weeks every thing that is incomplete could receive the proper adjustment. After so much has been done, and with such encouraging results, it becomes the Commissioners to recommend that the steam frigate be officered and manned for discipline and practice. A discreet commander, with a selected crew, could acquire experience in the mode of navigating this peculiar vessel. The supplies of fuel, the tending of the fire, the replenishing of the expended water, the management of the mechanism, the heating of shot, the exercise of the guns, and various matters, can only become familiar by use. It is highly important that a portion of seamen and marines should be versed in the order and economy of the steam frigate. They will augment, diffuse, and perpetuate knowledge. When, in process of time, another war shall call for more structures of this kind, men, regularly trained to her tactics, may be dispatched to the several stations where they may be wanted. If, on any such disposition, the Government should desire a good and faithful agent, the Commissioners recommend Captain Obed Smith to notice, as a person who has ably performed the duties of inspector from the beginning to the end of the concern. Annexed to the report, you will find, Sir, several statements explanatory of the subject. A separate report of our colleague, the honorable Oliver Wolcott, whose removal from New York precluded him from attending to the latter part of the business, with his accustomed zeal and fidelity, is herewith presented. A drawing of her form and appearance, by Mr. Morgan, as being like to give satisfaction to the department, is also subjoined, as are likewise an inventory of her furniture and effects, and an account of the timber and metals consolidated in her fabric. It is hoped these communications will evince the pains taken by the Commissioners, to execute the honorable and responsible trust reposed in them by the Government. SAMUEL L. MITCHEL. THOMAS MORRIS. HENRY RUTGERS. * * * * * FOOTNOTES [1] _The American Neptune_ (1946), vol. 6, pp. 253-274. [2] _The American Neptune_ (1944), vol. 4, pp. 327-329. [3] New York, 1853, pp. 13-17. [4] Pittsburgh, 1896, pp. 8-16. [5] See pages 172 through 176 for this report, which is reproduced from CHARLES B. STUART, _Naval and Mail Steamers of the United States_ (New York, 1853), app., pp. 155-159. [6] National Archives, Navy Records Plans, 80-7-14; and HOWARD I. CHAPELLE, _History of the American Sailing Navy_ (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1949), pp. 293-295. [7] National Archives, Navy Records Plans, 80-7-9; and CHAPELLE, _History of the American Sailing Navy_, pp. 226, 228. [8] National Archives, Navy Records Plans, 80-7-15. [9] National Archives, Naval Records Collection, Miscellaneous Letters, 1819, II. [10] See p. 169, reproduced from CHARLES B. STUART, _Naval and Mail Steamers of the United States_ (New York, 1853), p. 15. [11] JEAN BAPTISTE MARESTIER, _Mémoire sur les bateaux à vapeur des �tats-Unis d'Amérique, avec un appendice sur diverses machines relatives à la Marine_ (Paris: L'imprimerie Royal, 1824). [12] 1820-1823, vol. 7, p. 437. [13] _Annales de l'industrie nationale et étrangère, ou Mercure Technologique_ (Paris, 1822), pp. 760-762. [14] January 27, 1823, vol. 7, pp. 436-438. [15] January-March 1935, vol. 61, pp. 322-328. [16] HOWARD I. CHAPELLE, _American Small Sailing Craft_ (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1951), pp. 29, 31. [17] Newport News, Va.: The Mariners' Museum, 1937, p. 23. [18] Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1932, p. 291. [19] HENRY WILLIAM EDWARD, _The Double Bottom or Twin Hulled Ship of Sir William Petty_ (Oxford: The Roxburghe Club, 1931). [20] Publication No. 5 (Newport News: The Mariners' Museum, 1939), p. 22. * * * * * Typographical Corrections Pg. 152: "the _Simon & Jude_, later called _Invention I_" (was "latter"). * * * * * CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 40 HISTORY OF PHOSPHORUS _Eduard Farber_ THE ELEMENT FROM ANIMALS AND PLANTS 178 EARLY USES 181 CHEMICAL CONSTITUTION OF PHOSPHORIC ACIDS 182 PHOSPHATES AS PLANT NUTRIENTS 185 FROM INORGANIC TO ORGANIC PHOSPHATES 187 PHOSPHATIDES AND PHOSPHAGENS 189 NUCLEIN AND NUCLEIC ACIDS 192 PHOSPHATES IN BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES 197 MEDICINES AND POISONS 198 _Eduard Farber_ HISTORY OF PHOSPHORUS _The "cold light" produced by phosphorus caused it to be considered a miraculous chemical for a long time after its discovery, about 1669. During the intervening three centuries numerous other chemical miracles have been found, yet phosphorus retains a special aura of universal importance in chemistry. Many investigators have occupied themselves with this element and its diverse chemical compounds. Further enlightenment and insight into the ways of nature can be expected from these efforts._ _Not only is the story of phosphorus a major drama in the history of chemistry; it also illustrates, in a spectacular example, the growth of this science through the discovery of connections between apparently unrelated phenomena, and the continuous interplay between basic science and the search for practical usage._ THE AUTHOR: _Eduard Farber is a research professor at American University, Washington, D.C., and has been associated with the Smithsonian Institution as a consultant in chemistry._ When phosphorus was discovered, nearly three centuries ago, it was considered a miraculous thing. The only event that provoked a similar emotion was the discovery of radium more than two centuries later. The excitement about the _Phosphorus igneus_, Boyle's _Icy Noctiluca_, was slowly replaced by, or converted into, chemical research. Yet, if we would allow room for emotion in research, we could still be excited about the wondrous substance that chemical and biological work continues to reveal as vitally important. It is a fundamental plant nutrient, an essential part in nerve and brain substance, a decisive factor in muscle action and cell growth, and also a component in fast-acting, powerful poisons. The importance of phosphorus was gradually recognized and the means by which this took place are characteristic and similar to other developments in the history of science. This paper was written in order to summarize these various means which led to the highly complex ways of present research. The Element from Animals and Plants It was a little late to search for the philosophers' stone in 1669, yet it was in such a search that phosphorus was discovered. Wilhelm Homberg (1652-1715) described it in the following manner: Brand, "a man little known, of low birth, with a bizarre and mysterious nature in all he did, found this luminous matter while searching for something else. He was a glassmaker by profession, but he had abandoned it in order to be free for the pursuit of the philosophical stone with which he was engrossed. Having put it into his mind that the secret of the philosophical stone consisted in the preparation of urine, this man worked in all kinds of manners and for a very long time without finding anything. Finally, in the year 1669, after a strong distillation of urine, he found in the recipient a luminant matter that has since been called phosphorus. He showed it to some of his friends, among them Mister Kunkel [sic]."[1] Neither the name nor the phenomenon were really new. Organic phosphorescent materials were known to Aristotle, and a lithophosphorus was the subject of a book published in 1640, based on a discovery made by a shoemaker, Vicenzo Casciarolo, on a mountain-side near Bologna in 1630.[2] Was the substance new which Brand showed to his friends? Johann Gottfried Leonhardi quotes a book of 1689 in which the author, Kletwich, claims that this phosphorus had already been known to Fernelius, the court physician of King Henri II of France (1154-1189).[3] To the same period belongs the "Ordinatio Alchid Bechil Saraceni philosophi," in which Ferdinand Hoefer found a distillation of urine with clay and carbonaceous material described, and the resulting product named escarbuncle.[4] It would be worth looking for this source; although Bechil would still remain an entirely unsuccessful predecessor, it does seem strange that in all the distillations of arbitrary mixtures, the conditions should never before 1669 have been right for the formation and the observation of phosphorus. [Illustration: Figure 1.--THE ALCHEMIST DISCOVERS PHOSPHORUS. A painting by Joseph Wright (1734-1779) of Derby, England.] For Brand's contemporaries at least, the discovery was new and exciting. The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) considered it important enough to devote some of his time (between his work as librarian in Hanover and Wolfenbüttel, his efforts to reunite the Protestant and the Catholic churches, and his duties as Privy Councellor in what we would call a Department of Justice) to a history of phosphorus. This friend of Huygens and Boyle tried to prove that Kunckel was not justified in claiming the discovery for himself.[5] Since then, it has been shown that Johann Kunckel (1630-1703) actually worked out the method which neither Brand nor his friend Kraft wanted to disclose. Boyle also developed a method independently, published it, and instructed Gottfried Hankwitz in the technique. Later on, Jean Hellot (1685-1765) gave a meticulous description of the details and a long survey of the literature.[6] [Illustration: Figure 2.--GALLEY-OVEN, 1869. The picture is a cross section through the front of the oven showing one of the 36 retorts, the receivers for the distillate, and the space in the upper story used for evaporating the mixture of acid solution of calcium phosphate and coal. (According to ANSELME PAYEN, _Précis de Chimie industrielle_, Paris, 1849; reproduced from HUGO FLECK, _Die Fabrikation chemischer Produkte aus thierischen Abfällen_, Vieweg, Braunschweig, 1862, page 80 of volume 2, 2nd group, of P. BOLLEY'S _Handbuch der chemischen Technologie_.)] To obtain phosphorus, a good proportion of coal (regarded as a type of phlogiston) was added to urine, previously thickened by evaporation and preferably after putrefaction, and the mixture was heated to the highest attainable temperature. It was obvious that phlogiston entered into the composition of the distillation product. The question remained whether this product was generated _de novo_. In his research of 1743 to 1746, Andreas Sigismund Marggraf (1709-1782) provided the answer. He found the new substance in edible plant seeds, and he concluded that it enters the human system through the plant food, to be excreted later in the urine. He did not convince all the chemists with his reasoning. In 1789, Macquer wrote: "There are some who, even at this time, hold that the phosphorical ('phosphorische') acid generates itself in the animals and who consider this to be the 'animalistic acid.'"[7] Although Marggraf was more advanced in his arguments than these chemists, yet he was a child of his time. The luminescent and combustible, almost wax-like substance impressed him greatly. "My thoughts about the unexpected generation of light and fire out of water, fine earth, and phlogiston I reserve to describe at a later time." These thoughts went so far as to connect the new marvel with alchemical wonder tales. When Marggraf used the "essential salt of urine," also called _sal microcosmicum_, and admixed silver chloride ("horny silver") to it for the distillation of phosphorus, he expected "a partial conversion of silver by phlogiston and the added fine vitrifiable earth, but no trace of a more noble metal appeared."[8] Robert Boyle had already found that the burning of phosphorus produced an acid. He identified it by taste and by its influence on colored plant extracts serving as "indicators." Hankwitz[9] described methods for obtaining this acid, and Marggraf showed its chemical peculiarities. They did not necessarily establish phosphorus as a new element. To do that was not as important, at that time, as to conjecture on analogies with known substances. Underlying all its unique characteristics was the analogy of phosphorus with sulfur. Like sulfur, phosphorus can burn in two different ways, either slowly or more violently, and form two different acids. The analogy can, therefore, be extended to explain the results in both groups in the same way. In the process of burning, the combustible component is removed, and the acid originally combined with the combustible is set free. Whether the analogy should be pursued even further remained doubtful, although some suspicion lingered on for a while that phosphoric acid might actually be a modified sulfuric acid. Analogies and suspicions like these were needed to formulate new questions and stimulate new experiments. They are cited here for their important positive value in the historical development, and not for the purpose of showing how wrong these chemists were from our point of view, a point of view which they helped to create. The widespread interest in the burning of sulfur and of phosphorus, naturally, caught Lavoisier's attention. In his first volume of _Opuscules Physiques et Chimiques_ (1774), he devoted 20 pages to his experiments on phosphorus. He amplified them a few years later[10] when he attributed the combustion to a combination of phosphorus with the "eminently respirable" part of air. In the _Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique_ of 1787, the column of "undecomposed substances" lists sulfur as the "radical sulfurique," and phosphorus, correspondingly, as the "radical phosphorique." The acids are now shown to be compounds of the "undecomposed" radicals, the complete reversion of the previous concept of this relationship. A part of the old analogy remained as far as the acids are concerned: sulfuric acid corresponds to phosphoric; sulfurous acid to phosphorous acid with less oxygen than in the former.[11] Early Uses In the 18th century, phosphorus was a costly material. It was produced mostly for display and to satisfy curiosity. Guillaume François Rouelle (1703-1770) demonstrated the process in his lectures, and, as Macquer reports, he "very often" succeeded in making it.[12] Robert Boyle had the idea of using phosphorus as a light for underwater divers.[13] A century later, "instant lights" were sold, with molten phosphorus as the "igniter," but they proved cumbersome and unreliable.[14] Because white phosphorus is highly poisonous, an active development of the use in matches occurred only after the conversion of the white modification into the red had been studied by �mile Kopp (1844), by Wilhelm Hittorf (1824-1914) and, in its practical application, by Anton Schrötter (1802-1875).[15] [Illustration: Figure 3.--DISTILLATION APPARATUS (1849) for refining crude phosphorus. The crude phosphorus is mixed with sand under hot water, cooled, drained, and filled into the retort. The outlet of the retort, at least 6 cm. in diameter, is partially immersed in the water contained in the bucket. A small dish, made from lead, with an iron handle, receives the distilled phosphorus. (From HUGO FLECK, _Die Fabrikation chemischer Produkte ..._ page 90.)] The most exciting early use, however, was in medicine. It is not surprising that such a use was sought at that time. Any new material immediately became the hope of ailing mankind--and of striving inventors.[16] Phosphorus was prescribed, in liniments with fatty oils or as solution in alcohol and ether, for external and internal application. A certain Dr. Kramer found it efficient against epilepsy and melancholia (1730). A Professor Hartmann recommended it against cramps.[17] However, in the growing production of phosphorus for matches, the workers experienced the poisonous effects. In the plant of Black and Bell at Stratford, this was prevented by inhaling turpentine. Experiments on dogs were carried out to show that poisoning by phosphorus could be remedied through oil of turpentine.[18] [Illustration: Figure 4.--APPARATUS FOR CONVERTING WHITE PHOSPHORUS into the red allotropic form, 1851. Redistilled phosphorus is heated in the glass or porcelain vessel (g) which is surrounded by a sandbath (e) and a metal bath (b). Vessel (j) is filled with mercury and water; together with valve (k), it serves as a safety device. The alcohol lamp (l) keeps the tube warm against clogging by solidified vapors. Because of hydrogen phosphides, the operation, carried out at 260° C., had to be watched very carefully. (According to Arthur Albright, 1851; reproduced from HUGO FLECK, _Die Fabrikation chemischer Produkte ..._, page 112.)] Chemical Constitution of Phosphoric Acids In a long article on phosphorus, Edmond Willm wrote in 1876: "For a century, urine was the only source from which phosphorus was obtained. After Gahn, in 1769, recognized the presence of phosphoric acid in bones, Scheele indicated the procedure for making phosphorus from them."[19] Actually, Gahn used at first hartshorn (_Cornu cervi ustum_), and Scheele doubted, until he checked it himself, that his esteemed friend was right. A few years later, Scheele corrected Gahn's assumption that the _sal microcosmicum_ was an ammonia salt; instead, it is "a tertiary neutral salt, consisting of _alkali minerali fixo_ (i.e., sodium), _alkali volatili_, and _acido phosphori_."[20] In the years after 1770, phosphorus was discovered in bones and many other parts of various animals. Treatment with sulfuric acid decomposed these materials into a solid residue and dissolved phosphoric acid. Many salts of this acid were produced in crystalline form. Heat resistance had been considered one of the outstanding characteristics of phosphoric acid. Now, however, in the processes of drying and heating certain phosphates, it became clear that three kinds of phosphoric acids could be produced: _ortho_, _pyro_, and _meta_. Berzelius cited these acids as examples of compounds which are ISOMERIC. This word was intended to designate compounds which contain the same number of atoms of the same elements but combined in different manners, thereby explaining their different chemical properties and crystal forms. It was in 1830 that Berzelius propounded this companion of the concept, ISOMORPHISM, which was to collect all cases of equal crystal form in compounds in which equal numbers of atoms of different elements are put together in the same manner. Together, the two concepts of isomerism and isomorphism seemed to cover all the known exceptions from the simplest assumption as to specificity and chemical composition. However, only a few years later Thomas Graham (1805-1869) proved that the three phosphoric acids are not isomeric. He used the proportion of 2 P to 5 O in the oxide which Berzelius had thought justified at least until "an example of the contrary could be sufficiently established."[21] Refining the techniques of Gay-Lussac (1816) and several other investigators, Graham characterized the three phosphoric acids as "a terphosphate, a biphosphate, and phosphate of water." Actually, this was the wrong terminology for what he meant and formulated as trihydrate, bihydrate, and monohydrate of phosphorus oxide. In his manner of writing the formulas, each dot over the symbol for the element was to indicate an atom of oxygen; thus, he wrote: ... :: .. ... . . H^{3} P H^{2} P and H P.[22] [Illustration: Figure 5.--OVEN FOR THE CALCINATION OF BONES, about 1870. "The operation is carried out in a rather high oven, such as shown.... The fresh bones are thrown in at the top of the oven, B. First, fuel in chamber F is lighted, and a certain quantity of bones is burnt on the grid D. When these bones are burning well, the oven is gradually filled with bones, and the combustion maintains itself without addition of other fuel. A circular gallery, C, surrounds the bottom of the oven and carries the products of combustion into the chimney, H. The calcined bones are taken out at the lower opening, G, by removing the bars of grid B." (Translation of the description from FIGUIER, _Merveilles de l'industrie_, volume 3, 1874, page 537.)] [Illustration: Figure 6.--AN ADVERTISEMENT with view of plant for manufacturing superphosphate about 1867. (From E. T. FREEDLEY, _Philadelphia and its Manufacturers in 1867_, page 288.)] Graham had come to this understanding of the phosphoric acids through his previous studies of "Alcoates, definite compounds of Salts and Alcohol analogous to the Hydrates" (1831). Liebig started from analogies he saw with certain organic acids when he formulated the phosphoric acids with a constant proportion of water (aq.) and varying proportions of "phosphoric acid" (P) as follows: 2 P 3 aq. phosphoric acid 3 P 3 aq. pyrophosphoric acid 6 P 3 aq. metaphosphoric acid. [Illustration: Figure 7.--FLORIDA HARD-ROCK PHOSPHATE MINING. (From Carroll D. Wright, _The Phosphate Industry of the United States_, sixth special report of the Commissioner of Labor, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, plate facing page 43.)] Salts are formed when a "basis," i.e., a metal oxide, replaces water. When potassium-acid sulfate is neutralized by sodium base, the acid-salt divides into Glauber's salt and potassium sulfate, which proves the acid-salt to be a mixture of the neutral salt with its acid. Sodium-acid phosphate behaves quite differently. After neutralization by a potassium "base" (hydroxide), the salt does not split up; a uniform sodium-potassium phosphate is obtained. Therefore, phosphoric acid is truly three-basic![23] This result has later been confirmed, but the analogy by means of which it had been obtained was very weak, in certain parts quite wrong. The acids from the two lower oxides of phosphorus were also considered as three-basic. Adolphe Wurtz (1817-1884) formulated them in 1846, according to the theory of chemical types: (PO)··· O^{3} phosphoric acid H^{3} (PHO)·· O^{2} phosphorus acid H^{2} (PH^{2}O)· O hypophosphorous acid.[24] H Further proof for these constitutions was sought in the study of the esters formed when the acids react with alcohols. Among the analogies and generalizations by which the research on phosphoric acid was supported, and to the results of which it contributed a full share, was the new theory of acids. Not oxygen, Lavoisier's general acidifier, but reactive hydrogen determines the character of acids. In this brief survey, it seems sufficient just to mention this connection without describing it in detail. The study of phosphoric acids led to important new concepts in theoretical chemistry. The finding of polybasicity was extended to other acids and formed the model that helped to recognize the polyfunctionality in other compounds, like alcohols and amines. The hydrogen theory of acids was fundamental for further advance. In another dimension, it is particularly interesting to see that large-scale applications followed almost immediately and directly from the new theoretical insight. The first and foremost of these applications was in agriculture. Phosphates as Plant Nutrients One hundred years after the discovery of "cold light," the presence of phosphorus in plants and animals was ascertained, and its form was established as a compound of phosphoric acid. This knowledge had little practical effect until the "nature" of the acid, in its various forms, was explained through the work of Thomas Graham. From it, there started a considerable technical development. At about that time (1833), the Duke of Richmond proved that the fertilizing value of bones resided not in the gelatin, nor in the calcium, but in the phosphoric acid. Thus, he confirmed what Théodore de Saussure had said in 1804, that "we have no reason to believe" that plants can exist without phosphorus. Unknowingly at first, the farmer had supplied this element by means of the organic fertilizers he used: manure, excrements, bones, and horns. Now, with the value of phosphorus known, a search began for mineral phosphates to be applied as fertilizers. Jean Baptiste Boussingault (1802-1887), an agricultural chemist in Lyons, traveled to Peru to see the guano deposits. Garcilaso de la Vega (ca. 1540 to ca. 1616) noted in his history of Peru (1604) that guano was used by the Incas as a fertilizer. Two hundred years later, Alexander von Humboldt revived this knowledge, and Humphry Davy wrote about the benefits of guano to the soil. Yet, the application of this fertilizer developed only slowly, until Justus Liebig sang its praise. Imports into England rose and far exceeded those into France where, between 1857 and 1867, about 50,000 tons were annually received. The other great advance in the use of phosphatic plant nutrients started with Liebig's recommendation (1840) to treat bones with sulfuric acid for solubilization. This idea was not entirely new; since 1832, a production of a "superphosphate" from bones and sulfuric acid had been in progress at Prague. At Rothamsted in 1842, John Bennet Lawes obtained a patent on the manufacture of superphosphate. Other manufactures in England followed and were successful, although James Muspratt (1793-1886) at Newton lost much time and "some thousands of pounds" on Liebig's idea of a "mineral manure." [Illustration: Figure 8.--FLORIDA LAND-PEBBLE PHOSPHATE MINING. (From Carroll D. Wright, _The Phosphate Industry of the United States ..._, plate facing page 58.)] It was difficult enough to establish the efficacy of bones and artificially produced phosphates in promoting the growth of plants under special conditions of soils and climate; therefore, the question as to the action of phosphates in the growing plant was not even seriously formulated at that time. The beneficial effects were obvious enough to increase the use of phosphates as plant nutrients and to call for new sources of supply. Active developments of phosphate mining and treating started in South Carolina in 1867, and in Florida in 1888.[25] In a reciprocal action, more phosphate application to soils stimulated increasing research on the conditions and reactions obtaining in the complex and varying compositions called soil. The findings of bacteriologists made it clear that physics and chemistry had to be amplified by biology for a real understanding of fertilizer effects. After 1900, for example, Julius Stoklasa (1857-1936) pointed out that bacterial action in soil solubilizes water-insoluble phosphates and makes them available to the plants.[26] [Illustration: Figure 9.--FLORIDA RIVER-PEBBLE PHOSPHATE MINING. (From Carroll D. Wright, _The Phosphate Industry of the United States ..._, plate facing page 64.)] The insight into the importance of phosphorus in organisms, especially since Liebig's time, is reflected in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). This "re-valuator of all values" who modestly said of himself: "I am dynamite!" once explained the human temperaments as caused by the inorganic salts they contain: "The differences in temperament are perhaps caused more by the different distribution and quantities of the inorganic salts than by everything else. Bilious people have too little sodium sulfate, the melancholics are lacking in potassium sulfate and phosphate; too little calcium phosphate in the phlegmatics. Courageous natures have an excess of iron phosphate." (See volume 12 of _Nietzsche's Works_, edit. Naumann-Kröner, Leipzig, 1886.) In this strange association of inorganic salts with human temperaments, the role of iron phosphate as a producer of courage is particularly interesting. What would a modern philosopher conclude if he followed the development of insight into the composition and function of complex phosphate compounds in organisms? From Inorganic to Organic Phosphates By the middle of the 19th century, the source of phosphorus in natural phosphates and the chemistry of its oxidation products had been established. The main difficulty that had to be overcome was that these oxidation products existed in so many forms, not only several stages of oxidation, but, in addition, aggregations and condensations of the phosphoric acids. Once the fundamental chemistry of these acids was elucidated, the attention of chemists and physiologists turned to the task of finding the actual state in which phosphorus compounds were present in the organisms. It had been a great advance when it had been shown that plants need phosphates in their soil. This led to the next question concerning the materials in the body of the plant for which phosphates were being used and into which they were incorporated. Similarly, the knowledge that animals attain their phosphates from the digested plant food called, in the next step of scientific inquiry, for information on the nature of phosphates produced from this source. The method used in this inquiry was to subject anatomically separated parts of the organisms to chemical separations. The means for such separations had to be more gentle than the strong heat and destructive chemicals that had been considered adequate up to then. The interpretation of the new results naturally relied on the general advance of chemistry, the development of new methods for isolating substances of little stability, of new concepts concerning the arrangements of atoms in the molecules, and of new apparatus to measure their rates of change. In the system of chemistry, as it developed in the first half of the 19th century, the new development can be characterized as the turn from inorganic to organic phosphates, from the substance of minerals and strong chemical interactions to the components in which phosphate groups remained combined with carbon-containing substances. [Illustration: Figure 10.--ELECTRIC FURNACE FOR PRODUCING ELEMENTAL PHOSPHORUS, invented by Thomas Parker of Newbridge, England, and assigned to The Electric Construction Corporation of the same place. The drawing is part of United States patent 482,586 (September 13, 1892). The furnace was patented in England on October 29, 1889 (no. 17,060); in France on June 23, 1890 (no. 206,566); in Germany on June 17, 1890 (no. 55,700); and in Italy on October 23, 1890 (no. 431). The following explanation is cited from the U.S. patent: Figure 1 [shown here] is a vertical section of the furnace, and Fig. 2 is a diagram to illustrate the means for regulating the electro-motive force or quantity of current across the furnace. F is the furnace containing the charge to be treated. It has an inlet-hopper at _a_, with slides AA, by which the charge can be admitted without opening communication between the interior of the furnace and the outer air. B is a screw conveyer by which the charge is pushed forward into the furnace. _c´c´_ are the electrodes, consisting of blocks or cylinders or the like of carbon fixed in metal socket-pieces _c c_, to which the electric-circuit wires _d_ from the dynamo D are affixed. The current, as aforesaid, may be either continuous or alternating. _c^{2}c^{2}_ are rods of metal or carbon, which are used to establish the electric circuit through the furnace, the said rods being inserted into holes in conductors _c^{3}_ (in contact with the socket-pieces _c_) and in the furnace, as shown. _g_ is the outlet for the gas or vapor, _h_ the slag-tap hole, and _x_ the opening for manipulating the charge, the said openings being closed by clay or otherwise when the furnace is at work. I use coke or other form of carbon in the charge between the electrodes _c´_, the said coke being in contact with the said electrodes, so that complete incandescence is insured. A means for varying the electro-motive force or quantity of current across the furnace with the varying resistance of the charge is illustrated by the diagram, Fig. 2. _c´ c^{2}_ indicate the electrodes in the furnace, as in Fig. 1, and D is the dynamo and T its terminals. E represents the exciting-circuit. R R are resistances, and R S is the resistance-switch, which is operated to put in more or less resistance at R as the resistance of the charge in the furnace lessens or increases. This switch may be automatically operated, and a suitable arrangement for the purpose is a current-regulator such as is described in the specification of English Letters Patent No. 14,504, of September 14, 1889, granted to William Henry Douglas and Thomas Hugh Parker.] [Illustration: T. PARKER. ELECTRICAL FURNACE. Patented Sept. 13, 1892. FIG. 1.] [Illustration: FIG. 2. _Inventor Thomas Parker_ _By his attorneys Howson and Howson_ _Witnesses: George Baumann John Revell_] [Illustration: Figure 11.--DIPPING OF MATCHSTICKS in France, about 1870. The frame which holds the matches so that one end protrudes at the bottom, is lowered over a pan containing molten sulfur. The sulfur-covered matches are then dropped into a phosphorous paste. See figure 12. (From FIGUIER, _Merveilles de l'industrie_, volume 3, 1874, page 575.)] Phosphatides and Phosphagens The important phosphorus compounds in organisms are much more complex than the simple salts, to which Nietzsche attributed such influence on man's character. Long before he wrote, it was known that phosphoric acid combines not only with inorganic bases to form salts, but with alcohols to form esters. In the middle of the 19th century, Théophile Juste Pelouze (1807-1867) extended this knowledge to an ester of glycerol. This proved to be significant in several respects. Glycerol had been shown by Michel Chevreul (1786-1889) as the substance in fats that is released in the process of soap boiling, when the fatty acids are converted into their salts. That it has the nature of an alcohol had been demonstrated by Marcellin Berthelot. Instead of one "alcoholic" hydroxyl group, OH, like ethanol (the alcohol of fermentation), or two hydroxyl groups (like ethylene glycol), glycerol contains three such groups. It was the only "natural" alcohol known at that time. That this alcohol would combine with phosphoric acid could be predicted, but that the ester, as obtained by Pelouze, still contained free acidic functions and formed a water-soluble barium salt was a new experience. [Illustration: Figure 12.--PAN FOR DIPPING MATCHSTICKS into phosphorus paste, about 1870. The letters on the picture are: A, matches; B, water bath; C, frame; D, plate; E, phosphorus paste; F, oven. The phosphorus paste of Böttger, 1842, contained 10 phosphorus, 25 antimony sulfide, 12.5 manganese dioxide, 15 gelatin. According to Figuier (page 579), R. Wagner substituted lead dioxide for the manganese dioxide. (From FIGUIER, volume 3, 1874, page 576.)] ALCOHOLIC FERMENTATION (C_{6}H_{10}O_{5})_{_n_} C_{6}H_{12}O_{6} C_{6}H_{12}O_{6} glycogen glucose fructose ^| ^| ^| || H_{3}PO_{4} || <-- ATP || <--ATP |v |v |v ---------------+ ------+ H--C--OPO_{3}H_{2}| H--C--OH | H _{2}C--OH | | | | | H--C--OH | H--C--OH | C--(OH)--+ | | | | | | HO--C--H O <==> HO--C--H O <=======> HO--C--H | | | | | | O H--C--OH | H--C--OH | H--C--OH | | | | | | | H--C--------------+ H--C-----+ H--C--------+ | | | CH_{2}OH H_{2}C--OPO_{3}H_{2}+ADP H_{2}C--OPO_{3}H_{2}+ADP glucose-1-phosphate glucose-6-phosphate fructose-6-phosphate (Cori-ester) (Robison-ester) (Neuberg-ester) ^ | | | <-- ATP +----| | | +------| | | | v H_{2}C--OPO_{3}H_{2} | C(OH)--+ | | HO--C--H | fructose-1,6-diphosphate | O (Harden-Young-ester) H--C--OH | | | H--C------+ | H_{2}C--OPO_{3}H_{2} + ADP ^| || O || // CH_{2}OPO_{3}H_{2} || CH | |v | 3-phosphoglycer-aldehyde dihydroxyacetone-phosphate C=O <=============> CHOH (Fischer-ester) | | CH_{2}OH CH_{2}OPO_{3}H_{2} || + coenzyme + H_{3}PO_{4} O=C--OPO_{3}H_{2} | 1,3-diphosphoglyceric acid CHOH + dihydro-coenzyme (Negelein-ester) | CH_{2}OPO_{3}H ^| ADP --> || || O |v// C--OH | +---+ 3-phosphoglyceric acid CHOH + |ATP| (Nilsson-ester) | +---+ CH_{2}OPO_{3}H_{2} ^| |v COOH 2-phosphoglyceric acid | CHOPO_{3}H_{2} | CH_{2}OH ^| |v COOH | phosphopyruvic acid COPO_{3}H_{2} (enol-) || CH_2 ADP --> || COOH +------+ | +---+ |CO_{2}| + CH_3CHO <-------- C=O + |ATP| +------+ acetaldehyde | +---+ carbon | CH_{3} dioxide | + dihydro-coenzyme pyruvic acid | v +----------------+ | CH_{3}CH_{2}OH | + coenzyme +----------------+ ethyl alcohol [Illustration: Figure 13.--SURVEY OF ALCOHOLIC FERMENTATION, 1951. The "well-known scheme of alcoholic fermentation" according to Albert Jan Kluyver (1888-1956), presented before the Society of Chemical Industry in the Royal Institution, March 7, 1951. In _Chemistry & Industry_, 1952, page 136 ff., Kluyver restates that "... the fermentation of one molecule of glucose is indissolubly connected with the formation of two molecules of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) out of two molecules of adenosine diphosphate (ADP)."] Shortly after this experience had been gained, it became valuable for understanding the chemical nature of a new substance extracted from a natural organ. This substance was named lecithin by its discoverer, Nicolas Théodore Gobley[27] (1811-1876), because he obtained it from egg yolk (in Greek, _lékidos_). He used ether and alcohol for this extraction. Had he used water and mineral acid instead, he would not have found lecithin, but only its components. As Gobley and, slightly later, Oscar Liebreich (1839-1908), subjected lecithin to treatment with boiling water and acid, they separated it into three parts. One of them was the glycerophosphoric acid of Pelouze, the second was the well-known stearic acid of Chevreul, but the third was somewhat mysterious. This third substance was the same as one previously noticed when nerves had been subjected to an extraction by boiling water and acid and, therefore, called nerve-substance or neurine. Adolf Friedrich Strecker (1822-1871) established the identity of this neurine with a product he had extracted from bile and which went under the name of choline. Adolphe Wurtz (1817-1884) succeeded in synthesizing this substance from ethylene oxide, CH_2.O.CH_2 and trimethylamine N(CH_3)_3.[28] Thus, all three parts were identified, and Strecker put them together to construct a chemical formula for lecithin, glycerophosphoric acid combined with a fatty acid and with choline (a hydrate of neurine). { OH } N { (CH_3)_3 } Choline { C_2H_4O } C_18H_33O_2 } HO } } } PO C_16H_31O_2 } C_3H_5O } Fatty Acids Glycerophosphate \--------v-------/ Lecithin according to Strecker This formula was not quite correct. Richard Willstätter showed that an internal neutralization takes place between the amino group and the free acidic residue. This is expressed in his lecithin formula of 1918. CH_{2}·O·R | CH_{2}·O·R_2 | | O·CH_{2}·CH_{2} | / \ CH_{2}·O--P=O N(CH_{3})_{3} \ / \---O----/ [Illustration: Lecithin (1918)] When the aim was to distill elementary phosphorus out of an organic material, it did not matter whether this was fresh or putrified. For obtaining lecithin out of egg yolk and similar materials, it was essential to use it in fresh condition. Otherwise, enzymes would have decomposed it. Through more recent work, four enzymes have been separated, which act specifically in decomposing lecithin. Enzyme A removes one fatty acid and leaves a complex residue, called lysolecithin, intact. Enzyme B attacks this residue and splits off the remaining fatty acid group from it, enzyme C liberates only the choline from lecithin, and enzyme D opens lecithin at the ester bond between glycerol and phosphoric acid. This is shown in the following diagram. ENZYMATIC SPLITTING OF LECITHINS ENZYME SUBSTRATE PRODUCTS A Lecithin Lysolecithin and fatty acids. B Lysolecithin Glycero-phospho-choline and fatty acids. C Lecithin Phosphatidic acid and choline. D Lecithin Phosphoryl choline and diglyceride. Several fatty acids can be present in lecithin from various sources: palmitic and oleic acid, besides the stearic acid which at first had been thought the only one involved. In another group of extracts from brain or nerve tissue, amino-ethanol H_{2}NCH_{2}CH_{2}OH is found instead of the choline of lecithin. The variations include the alcohol, to which the fatty acids and choline phosphate are attached, for example, glycerol can be replaced by the so-called meat-sugar, inositol, which has six hydroxyl groups in its hexagon-shaped molecule C_{6}H_{6}(OH)_{6}. [Illustration: Figure 14.--EDUARD BUCHNER (1860-1917) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of cell-free fermentation, the first step in finding the role of phosphate in fermentations (1907).] The generally similar behavior of these phosphate-and fat-containing substances was emphasized by Ludwig Thudichum (1829-1901). He coined the name phosphatides for this group of substances from seeds and nerves.[29] His work on the phosphates in brain substance aroused particular interest. When William Crookes drew his highly imaginative picture of an "evolution" of the chemical elements, he put into it "phosphorus for the brain, salt for the sea, clay for the solid earth...."[30] But phosphatides occur in many places of organisms, in bacteria, in leaves and roots of plants, in fat and tissues of animals. And where phosphatides are found, there are also enzymes that specifically act on them. They are called phosphatases to imply that they split the phosphatides. In addition, enzymes are present, which transfer phosphate groups from one compound to another. They are more abundant in seeds of high fat content than in the more starch-containing seeds, but even potatoes and orange juice have phosphatases.[31] Thus, from phosphatides, phosphoric acid is generated, and they could also be called phosphagens. Since 1926, however, the name phosphagens has been reserved for a group of organic substances that release their phosphoric acid very readily. The link between phosphorus and carbon is provided by oxygen in the phosphatides, by nitrogen in the phosphagens. In vertebrates, the basis for the phosphoric acid is creatine, whereas invertebrates have arginine instead. H OH OH | / / N--P=O NH--P=O / \ / \ C=NH OH C=NH OH \ \ N--CH_{2}COOH NH | | CH_{3} CH_{2} | Creatine phosphate CH_{2} | CH_{2} | CHNH_{2} | COOH Arginine phosphate Nuclein and Nucleic Acids All parts of an organism are essential for life. Only with this in mind does it make sense to say that the most important part of the cell is its nucleus. From the nuclei of cells in pus and in salmon sperm, Johann Friedrich Miescher (1811-1887) obtained a peculiar kind of substance, which he named nuclein (1868). Its phosphate content was easily discovered, but to find the exact proportions and the nature of the other components required special methods of separation from phosphatides and other proteins. It was difficult to develop such methods at a time when little was known about the properties, and particularly the stability, of a nuclein. For preparing nuclein from yeast cells, Felix Hoppe-Seyler (1825-1895) described the following details: Yeast is dispersed in water to extract soluble materials, like salts or sugars. After a few hours, the insoluble material is separated, washed once more with water, and then extracted with a very dilute solution of sodium hydroxide. The slightly alkaline solution, freed from insoluble residues, is slowly added to a weak hydrochloric acid. A precipitate forms which is separated by filtration, washed with dilute acid, then with cold alcohol, and finally extracted by boiling alcohol. The dried residue is the nuclein.[32] It contains six percent phosphorus. A little more washing with water, a slightly longer treatment with acid or alcohol gives products of lower phosphorus content. Many experimental variations were necessary to establish the procedure that leads to purification without alteration of the natural substance. This was also true for the methods of chemical degradation, carried out in order to find the components of nucleins in their highest state of natural complexity. It was learned for example, that the special kind of carbohydrate present in nucleins was very susceptible to change under the conditions of hydrolysis by acids. Phoebus Aaron Theodor Levine (1869-1940), therefore, used the digestion by a living organism. With E. S. London, he introduced a solution of nucleic acid into, e.g., the gastrointestinal segment of a dog through a gastric fistula and withdrew the product of digestion through an intestinal fistula. Fortunately, the products obtained in such degradations were not new in themselves. The carbohydrate in this nucleic acid proved to be identical with D-ribose, which Emil Fischer had artificially made from arabinose and named ribose to indicate this relationship (1891). The nitrogenous products of the degradation were identical with substances previously prepared in the long study of uric acid. In the course of this study, Emil Fischer established uric acid and a number of its derivatives as having the elementary skeleton of what he called "pure uric acid," abbreviated to purine. Out of Adolf Baeyer's work on barbituric acid came the knowledge of pyrimidine and its derivatives. [Illustration: Figure 15.--ALBRECHT KOSSEL (1853-1927) received the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1910 for his work on nucleic substances, which contain a high proportion of phosphorus. The chemical bonds of this phosphorus in the molecules of nucleic substances were determined in later work. (_Photo courtesy National Library of Medicine, Washington, D.C._)] From these findings, together with what Oswald Schmiedeberg (1838-1921) had established concerning the presence of four phosphate groups in the molecule (1899), Robert Feulgen (1884-1955) constructed the following scheme of a nucleic acid. Feulgen's formula of 1918 is: Phosphoric acid--Carbohydrate--Guanine Phosphoric acid--Carbohydrate--Cytosine Phosphoric acid--Carbohydrate--Thymine Phosphoric acid--Carbohydrate--Adenine Of the four basic components on the right, thymine occurs in the nucleic acid from the thymus gland. Yeast contains uracil instead. The difference between these two bases is one methyl group: thymine is a 5-methyluracil. In all of these basic substances, the structure of urea NH_{2} / C=O \ NH_{2} is involved, and they form pairs of oxidized and reduced states: PURINE PYRIMIDINE (reduced) Adenine + (oxidized) Thymine (oxidized) Guanine + (reduced) Cytosine 3N = CH4 | | 2H--C CH5 || || 1N--CH6 Pyrimidine 1N==CH6 | | H | | 7/ N==C--NH_{2} 2H--C C--N | | || ||5 \ H--C C--NH || || \ || || \ || || CH8 || || CH || || // || || // 3N--C--N N--C--N 4 9 Adenine Purine HN--C=O | | NH_{2}--C C--NH N==C--NH_{2} H--N--C=O || || \ | | | | || || CH O=C C--H O=C CH || || // | || | || N--C--N H--N--CH HN--CH Guanine Cytosine Uracil The carbohydrate is ribose or deoxyribose. CHO CHO | | H--C--OH HO--C--H | | HO--C--H HO--C--H | | HO--C--H HO--C--H | | CH_{2}OH CH_{2}OH Arabinose L-Ribose Fischer and Piloty, 1891 H \(1)/-----O-----\(4) (5) C CH--CH_{2}OH / \(2) (3)/ HO CH_{2}--HC(OH) Deoxyribose The exact position of phosphoric acid was established after long work and verified by synthesis.[33] A compound of adenine, ribose, and phosphoric acid was found in yeast, blood, and in skeletal muscle of mammals. From 100 grams of such muscle, 0.35-0.40 grams of this compound were isolated. If the muscle is at rest, the compound contains three molecules of phosphoric acid, linked through oxygen atoms. It was named adenosine triphosphate or adenyltriphosphoric acid,[34] usually abbreviated by the symbol ATP. It releases one phosphoric acid group very easily and goes over in the diphosphate, ADP, but it can also lose 2 P-groups as pyrophosphoric acid and leave the monophosphate, AMP. N==C--NH_{2} | | HC C--N +----O----+ || || \\ | | || || CH | OH OH | H OH || || / | | | | | / N--C--N-----C--C---C--C--C--O--P=O | | | | | \ H H H H H OH \---------/\---------------/\--------/ Adenine D-Ribose Phosphoric acid This change of ATP was considered to be the main source of energy in muscle contraction by Otto Meyerhof.[35] The corresponding derivatives of guanine, cytosine, and uracil were also found, and they are active in the temporary transfer of phosphoric acid groups in biological processes. Thus, the study of organic phosphates progressed from the comparatively simple esters connected with fatty substances of organisms to the proteins and the nuclear substances of the cell. The proportional amount of phosphorus in the former was larger than in the latter; the actual importance and function in the life of organisms, however, is not measured by the quantity but determined by the special nature of the compounds. [Illustration: Figure 16.--OTTO MEYERHOF (1884-1951) received one-half of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1922 for his discovery of the metabolism of lactic acid in muscle, which involves the action of phosphates, especially adenosine duophosphates. (_Photo courtesy National Library of Medicine, Washington, D.C._)] [Illustration: Figure 17.--ARTHUR HARDEN (1865-1940), left, AND HANS A. S. VON EULER-CHELPIN (b. 1875), right, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1929. Harden received it for his research in fermentation, which showed the influence of phosphate, particularly the formation of a hexose diphosphate. Euler-Chelpin received his award for his research in fermentation. He found coenzyme A which is a nucleotide containing phosphoric acid.] [Illustration: Figure 18.--GEORGE DE HEVESY (b. 1885) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1943 for his research with isotopic tracer elements, particularly radiophosphorus of weight 32 (ordinary phosphorus is 31).] [Illustration: Figure 19.--CARL F. CORI (b. 1896) AND HIS WIFE, GERTY T. CORI (1896-1957) received part of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1947 for their study on glycogen conversion. In the course of this study, they identified glucose 1-phosphate, now usually referred to as "Cori ester," and its function in the glycogen cycle. (_Photo courtesy National Library of Medicine, Washington, D.C._)] The study of this function is the newest phase in the history of phosphorus and represents the culmination of the previous efforts. This newest phase developed out of an accidental discovery concerning one of the oldest organic-chemical industries, the production of alcohol by the fermentative action of yeast on sugar. A transition of carbohydrates through phosphate compounds to the end products of the fermentation process was found, and it gradually proved to be a kind of model for a host of biological processes. Specific phosphates were thus found to be indispensable for life. In reverse, the wrong kind of phosphates can destroy life. As a result, an important part of the new phase in phosphorus history consisted in the study--and use--of antibiotic phosphorus compounds. Phosphates in Biological Processes The first indication that phosphorus is important for life came from the experience that plants take it up from the substances in the soil. They incorporate it in their body substance. What makes phosphorus so important that they cannot grow without it? The next insight was that animals acquire it from their plant food. It is then found in bones, in fat and nerve tissue, in all cells and particularly in the cell nuclei. What are its functions there? The answers to such questions were developed from the study of a long-known process, the conversion of carbohydrates into carbon dioxide and alcohol by yeast. It started with Eduard Buchner's discovery of 1890, that fermentation is produced by a preparation from yeast in which all living cells have been removed. When yeast is dead-ground and pressed out, the juice still has the ability to produce fermentation. It is strange, but in many ways characteristic for the process of science, that the "riddle" of phosphorus in life was solved by first eliminating life. In such "lifeless" fermentations, Arthur Harden found that the conversion of sugar begins with the formation of a hexose phosphate (1904). The "ferment" of yeast, called zymase, proved to be a composite of several enzymes. Hans von Euler-Chelpin isolated one part of zymase, which remains active even after heating its solution to the boiling point. From 1 kilogram of yeast, he obtained 20 milligrams of this heat-stable enzyme, which he called cozymase and identified as a nucleotide composed of a purine, a sugar, and phosphoric acid.[36] In the years between the two World Wars, zymase was further resolved into more enzymes, one of them the coenzyme I, which was shown to be ADP connected with another molecule of ribose attached to the amide of nicotinic acid, or diphosphopyridine nucleotide: ^ NH_{2} / \\ | / \\ N ^ || |-CONH_{2} //\ / \\ || | | || N \ // | || | N_{+} N--+ | | | \// | | N H--C------+ H--C------+ | | | | H--C--OH | H--C--OH | | O | O H--C--OH | H--C--OH | | | | | H--C------+ O O H--C------+ | || || | CH_{2}--O--P--O--P--O--CH_{2} | | O- OH Coenzyme I [Illustration: Figure 20.--FRITZ A. LIPMANN (b. 1899) shared with Hans Adolf Krebs the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1953 for his work on coenzyme A. He discovered acetyl phosphate as the substance in bacteria, which transfers phosphate to adenylic acid.] [Illustration: Figure 21.--ALEXANDER R. TODD (b. 1907) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1957 for his research on nucleotides. He determined the position of the phosphate groups in the molecule and confirmed it by synthesis of dinucleotide phosphates.] Its function is connected with the transfer of hydrogen between intermediates formed through phosphate-transferring enzymes. Fermentation proceeds by a cascade of processes, in which phosphate groups swing back and forth, and equilibria between ATP with ADP play a major role. Many of the enzymes are closely related to vitamins. Thus, cocarboxylase A, which takes part in the separation of carbon dioxide from an intermediate fermentation product, is the phosphate of vitamin B_{1}. Others of the B vitamins contain phosphate groups, for example those of the B_{2} and B_{6} group, and in B_{12}, one lonely phosphate forms a bridge in the large molecule that contains one atom of cobalt: C_{63}H_{90}N_{14}O_{14}PCo. The formation of vitamin A from carotine occurs under the influence of ATP. The first stages in fermentation are like those in respiration, which ends with carbon dioxide and water. These two are the materials for the reverse process in photosynthesis. When light is absorbed by the chlorophyll of green plants, one of the initial reactions is a transfer of hydrogen from water to a triphosphopyridine nucleotide, which later acts to reduce the carbon dioxide. Under the influence of ATP, phosphoglyceric acid is synthesized and further built up by way of carbohydrate phosphates to hexose sugars and finally to starch. In many starchy fruits, a small proportion of phosphate remains attached to the end product. The synthesis of proteins is under the control of deoxyribonucleic acid or ribonucleic acid, abbreviated by the symbols DNA and RNA. The genes in the nucleus are parts of a giant DNA molecule. RNA is a universal constituent of all living cells. Where protein synthesis is intense, the content in RNA is high. Thus, the spinning glands of silkworms are extraordinarily rich in RNA.[37] In his research on the radioactive isotope P^32, George de Hevesy gained some insight into the surprising mobility of phosphates in organisms: "A phosphate radical taken up with the food may first participate in the phosphorylation of glucose in the intestinal mucose, soon afterwards pass into the circulation as free phosphate, enter a red corpuscle, become incorporated with an adenosine triphosphoric-acid molecule, participate in a glycolytic process going on in the corpuscle, return to circulation, penetrate into the liver cells, participate in the formation of a phosphatide molecule, after a short interval enter the circulation in this form, penetrate into the spleen, and leave this organ after some time as a constituent of a lymphocyte. We may meet the phosphate radical again as a constituent of the plasma, from which it may find its way into the skeleton."[38] Much has been added in the last 30 years to complete this picture in many details and to extend it to other biochemical processes, including even the changes of the pigments in the retina in the visual process, or in the conversion of chemical energy to light by bacteria and insects. Medicines and Poisons In the delicate balance of these processes, disturbances may occur which can be remedied by specific phosphate-containing medicines. Thus, adenosine phosphate has been recommended in cases of angina pectoris and marketed under trade names like sarkolyt, or in compounds named angiolysine. A considerable number of physiologically active organic phosphates can be found in the patent literature.[39] Yeast itself is considered to be a valuable food additive. On the other hand, there are phosphate compounds that act as poisons. One group of such compounds was discovered in 1929 by W. Lange, who wrote: "Of interest is the strong action of mono-fluorophosphate esters on the human body--the effect is produced by very small quantities."[40] Diisopropyl fluorophosphate has since become a potential agent for chemical warfare. It inactivates an enzyme which controls the transmission of nerve impulses to muscle, acetylcholine esterase. Organic esters of phosphoric acids are used as insecticides. The hexa-ethylester of tetraphosphoric acid, prepared by Gerhard Schrader by heating triethylphosphate with phosphorus oxychloride,[41] actually contains tetraethylpyrophosphate (TEPP) among others. Bayer's Dipterex, the dimethyl ester of 2,2,2-trichloro-1-hydroxyethyl-phosphonate, has been modified to dimethyl-2,2-dichlorovinyl-phosphate and is especially active against the oriental fruit fly.[42] [Illustration: Figure 22.--ARTHUR KORNBERG (b. 1918) AND SEVERO OCHOA (b. 1905) shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1959. Kornberg received it for research on the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid. In particular, he found that four triphosphate components and a small amount of the end product as a "template" had to be present for the enzymatic synthesis. Ochoa received his share of the prize for research in ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid. In particular, Ochoa synthesized polyribonucleotides and used the radioactive isotope, P^{32}. The synthetic polyribonucleotides were found to resemble the natural substances in all essentials.] Cl H O | | || OCH_{3} | | ||/ Cl--C--C--P Bayer's L 13/59 | | \ (Dipterex) | | OCH_{3} Cl OH (CH_{3})_{2}N O O N(CH_{3})_{2} \|| ||/ P--O--P Schradan / \ (CH_{3})_{2}N N(CH_{3})_{2} Octamethylpyrophosphoramide [Illustration: Figure 23.--MELVIN CALVIN (b. 1911) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1961 for his research in photosynthesis, in which he specified the function of phosphoglyceric acid as an intermediate in the synthesis of carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water by green plants.] The story of phosphorus, which began 300 years ago, has acquired new importance in this century. Many scientists have contributed to it: 13 of them have received Nobel Prizes for work directly bearing on the chemical and biological importance of phosphorus compounds. In chronological order, they are: Eduard Buchner, Albrecht Kossel, Otto Meyerhof, Arthur Harden, Hans von Euler-Chelpin, George de Hevesy, Carl F. Cori, Gerty T. Cori, Fritz Lipmann, Lord Alexander Todd, Arthur Kornberg, Severo Ochoa, and Melvin Calvin. The developers of industrial production and commercial utilization of phosphate compounds have had other rewards. Some impression of the continuing growth in this field[43] can be gained from the following data. PHOSPHATE ROCK annually "sold or used by producer" in the United States in million long tons (2,240 lbs.) 1880 0.2 1890 0.5 1900 1.5 1910 2.655 1920 4.104 1930 3.926 1940 4.003 1945 5.807 1950 11.114 1955 12.265 1955 (world: about 56) 1960 17.202 1962 19.060 Sources: U.S. Bureau of the Census. _Historical Statistics of the United States 1789-1945_ (1949); _Statistical Abstract of the United States._ ELEMENTAL PHOSPHORUS annually produced in the United States in short tons (2,000 lbs.) 1939 43,000 1944 85,679 1950 153,233 1956 312,200 1958 335,750 1959 366,350 1960 409,096 1961 430,617 1962 451,970 Source: U.S. Department of Commerce. * * * * * FOOTNOTES [1] WILHELM HOMBERG, _Mémoires Académie, 1666-1699_ (Paris, 1730), vol. 10, under date of April 30, 1692, pp. 57-61. [2] FORTUNIO LICETUS, _Lithiophosphorus sive de lapide Bononiensi_ (Venice, 1640). [3] Cited in PETER JOSEPH MACQUER _Chymisches Wörterbuch_, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1789), vol. 4, p. 508, footnote "c" as "Kletwich (de phosph. liqu. et solid. 1689, Thes. II)." [4] FERDINAND HOEFER, _Histoire de la Chimie_ (Paris, 1843), vol. 1, p. 339. [5] G. W. VON LEIBNIZ, _Mémoires Académie_ (Paris, 1682); _Akademie der Wissenschaften, Miscellanea Berolinensia_ (Berlin, 1710), vol. 1, p. 91. [6] JEAN HELLOT, _Mémoires Académie 1737_ (Paris, 1766), under date of November 13, 1737, pp. 342-378. [7] MACQUER, op. cit. (footnote 3), p. 551. [8] A. S. MARGGRAF, _Akademie der Wissenschaften, Miscellanea Berolinensia_ (Berlin, 1743), vol. 7, 342 ff.; see also WILHELM OSTWALD _Klassiker der Exakten Naturwissenschaften_ (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1913), no. 187. [9] G. HANCKEWITZ, [Hankwitz], _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London_, 1724-1734, abridged (London, 1809), vol. 7, pp. 596-602. [10] ANTOINE LAURENT LAVOISIER, "Sur la Combustion du Phosphore de Kunckel, Et sur la nature de l'acide qui resulte de cette Combustion," _Mémoires Académie 1777_, (Paris, 1780), pp. 65-78. [11] GUYTON DE MORVEAU and others, _Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique_, Proposée par MM. de Morveau, Lavoisier, Bertholet, & de Fourcroy (Paris, 1787), plate 9. [12] MACQUER, op. cit. (footnote 3), p. 513. [13] MARIE BOAS, _Robert Boyle and Seventeenth Century Chemistry_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 226; see also WYNDHAM MILES, "The History of Dr. Brand's Phosphorus Elementarus," _Armed Forces Chemical Journal_ (November-December 1958), p. 25. [14] ARCHIBALD CLOW and NAN L. CLOW, _The Chemical Revolution_ (London: Batchworth Press, 1952), p. 451. [15] �MILE KOPP, _Comptes-rendus hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences, Paris_ (1844), vol. 18, p. 871; WILHELM HITTORF, _Annalen der Chemie und Pharmazie_, suppl. to vol. 4, p. 37; ANTON SCHR�TTER, _Annales de Chimie et de Physique_, series 3, vol. 24 (1848), p. 406; see also Schrötter's report on "Phosphor und Zündwaaren" in A. W. VON HOFMANN, _Bericht über die Entwicklung der Chemischen Industrie_ (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1875), pp. 219-246. [16] R. GLAUBER, _Furni Novi Philosphici_ (Amsterdam, 1649), vol. 2, pp. 12 ff. [17] HERMANN SCHELENZ, _Geschichte der Pharmazie_ (Berlin: Springer, 1904), p. 598. [18] J. PERSONNE, _Comptes-rendus ..._, Paris (1869), vol. 68, pp. 543-546. [19] A. WURTZ, _Dictionnaire de Chimie_ (Paris, 1876), vol. 2, part 2, p. 951. [20] KARL W. SCHEELE, _Nachgelassene Briefe und Aufzeichnungen_, edit. A. E. Nordenskiöld (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1892), pp. 38, 144. [21] J. J. BERZELIUS, _Lehrbuch_, transl. F. Wöhler (Dresden, 1827), vol. 3, part 1, p. 96. [22] THOMAS GRAHAM, _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London_ (1833), pp. 253-284. [23] JUSTUS LIEBIG'S _Annalen der Pharmacie_ (1838), vol. 26, p. 113 ff. [24] A. WURTZ, _Annales de Chimie et de Physique_, series 3, vol. 16 (1846), p. 190. [25] CARROLL D. WRIGHT, _The Phosphate Industry in the United States_, sixth special report of the Commissioner of Labor (Washington, 1893). [26] J. STOKLASA, _Biochemischer Kreislauf des Phosphat-Ions im Boden, Centralblatt für Bakteriologie ..._ (Jena: Fischer, March 22, 1911), vol. 29, nos. 15-19. [27] N. T. GOBLEY, _Comptes-rendus_ ..., Paris (1845), vol. 21, p. 718. [28] A. WURTZ, _Comptes-rendus_ ..., Paris (1868), vol. 66, p. 772. [29] L. THUDICHUM, _Die chemische Constitution des Gehirns des Menschen und der Tiere_ (1901); see also H. WITTCOFF, THE PHOSPHATIDES (New York: Reinhold, 1951). [30] WILLIAM CROOKES, _British Association for the Advancement of Science, Reports_ (1887), sec. B, p. 573. [31] J. E. COURTOIS and A. LINO, _Progress in the Chemistry of Organic Natural Products_, edit. L. Zechmeister (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 1961), vol. 19, p. 316-373. [32] A. WURT, _Dictionnaire de Chimie_, supp. part 2, [n.d.] p. 1087; A. KOSSEL, _Zeitschrift für physiologische Chemie_, series 3 (1879), p. 284. [33] ALEXANDER TODD, _Les Prix Nobel en 1957_ (Stockholm). [34] HANS VON EULER-CHELPIN, _Les Prix Nobel en 1929_ (Stockholm). [35] O. MEYERHOF and E. LUNDSGAARD, _Naturwissenschaften_ (Berlin, 1930), vol. 18, pp. 330, 787. [36] K. LOHMANN, _Naturwissenschaften_ (Berlin, 1929), vol. 17, p. 624; C. H. FISKE and Y. SUBBAROW, _Science_ (Washington, 1929), vol. 70, p. 381 f. [37] J. BRACHET, _Scientia, Revista di Scienza_ (1960), vol. 95, p. 119. [38] GEORGE DE HEVESY, _Les Prix Nobel en 1940_ (Stockholm). See also EDUARD FARBER, _Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry_, 2nd ed. (New York: Schuman, 1963), p. 179. [39] See, e.g., _Chemical Week_, vol. 77 (September 3, 1955), p. 79 f.; J. BOLLE, _Chimie et Industrie_ (1960), vol. 83, p. 252. [40] W. LANGE, _Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft_ (Berlin, 1929), vol. 62, p. 793; vol. 65 (1932), p. 1598. [41] GERHARD SCHRADER, U.S. patent 2,336,302 of 1943 (priority in Germany, 1938); S. A. HALL and M. JACOBSON, _Industrial and Engineering Chemistry_ (1943), vol. 40, p. 694. [42] A. M. MATTSEN and others, _Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry_ (1955), vol. 3, p. 319. [43] JOHN B. VAN WAZER, _Phosphorus and its Compounds_, 2 vols. (vol. 1, _Chemistry_; vol. 2 _Technology, Biological Functions and Applications_, New York: Interscience, 1958, 1961. * * * * * Paper 40 - Transcriber's Note The following typographical errors have been corrected: Page 180 "Abfällen, Vieweg, Braunschweig," - had "Viewig". Page 188 "wires d from the dynamo D" - had "dynano". Page 192 "But phosphatides occur" - had "phosphatide soccur". Page 193 "the nucleic acid from the thymus" - had "nucleidic". Page 199 "acetylcholine esterase." - had "acetylcholin". Page 200 "George de Hevesy, Carl F. Cori," - comma added after Hevesy. Footnote 39: "See, e.g., Chemical Week, vol. 77" - had "See. e.g." The spelling of "Bertholet" [Claude Louis Berthollet] is as given on the original title page of the work referenced in this paper. Inconsistent hyphenation of chemical names has been retained. * * * * * CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY. PAPER 41 TUNNEL ENGINEERING--A MUSEUM TREATMENT _Robert M. Vogel_ INTRODUCTION 203 ROCK TUNNELING 206 SOFT-GROUND TUNNELING 215 BIBLIOGRAPHY 239 FOOTNOTES _Robert M. Vogel_ TUNNEL ENGINEERING--A MUSEUM TREATMENT [Illustration: Figure 1.--MINING BY EARLY EUROPEAN CIVILIZATIONS, using fire setting and hand chiseling to break out ore and rock. MHT model--3/4" scale. (Smithsonian photo 49260-H.)] _During the years from 1830 to 1900, extensive developments took place in the field of tunneling, which today is an important, firmly established branch of civil engineering. This paper offers a picture of its growth from the historical standpoint, based on a series of models constructed for the Hall of Civil Engineering in the new Museum of History and Technology. The eight models described highlight the fundamental advances which have occurred between primitive man's first systematic use of fire for excavating rock in mining, and the use in combination of compressed air, an iron lining, and a movable shield in a subaqueous tunnel at the end of the 19th century._ THE AUTHOR: _Robert M. Vogel is curator of heavy machinery and civil engineering, in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology._ Introduction With few exceptions, civil engineering is a field in which the ultimate goal is the assemblage of materials into a useful structural form according to a scientifically derived plan which is based on various natural and man-imposed conditions. This is true whether the result be, for example, a dam, a building, a bridge, or even the fixed plant of a railroad. However, one principal branch of the field is based upon an entirely different concept. In the engineering of tunnels the utility of the "structure" is derived not from the bringing together of elements but from the separation of one portion of naturally existing material from another to permit passage through a former barrier. In tunneling hard, firm rock, this is practically the entire compass of the work: breaking away the rock from the mother mass, and, coincidently, removing it from the workings. The opposite extreme in conditions is met in the soft-ground tunnel, driven through material incapable of supporting itself above the tunnel opening. Here, the excavation of the tunneled substance is of relatively small concern, eclipsed by the problem of preventing the surrounding material from collapsing into the bore. [Illustration: Figure 2.--HOOSAC TUNNEL. METHOD OF WORKING EARLY SECTIONS of the project; blast holes drilled by hand jacking. MHT model--1/2" scale. (Smithsonian photo 49260-L.)] In one other principal respect does tunnel engineering differ widely from its collateral branches of civil engineering. Few other physical undertakings are approached with anything like the uncertainty attending a tunnel work. This is even more true in mountain tunnels, for which test borings frequently cannot be made to determine the nature of the material and the geologic conditions which will be encountered. The course of tunnel work is not subject to an overall preliminary survey; the engineer is faced with not only the inability to anticipate general contingencies common to all engineering work, but with the peculiar and often overwhelming unpredictability of the very basis of his work. Subaqueous and soft-ground work on the other hand, while still subject to many indeterminates, is now far more predictable than during its early history, simply because the nature of the adverse condition prevailing eventually was understood to be quite predictable. The steady pressures of earth and water to refill the excavated area are today overcome with relative ease and consistency by the tunneler. In tunneling as in no other branch of civil engineering did empiricism so long resist the advance of scientific theory; in no other did the "practical engineer" remain to such an extent the key figure in establishing the success or failure of a project. The Hoosac Tunnel, after 25 years of legislative, financial, and technical difficulties, in 1875 was finally driven to successful completion only by the efforts of a group who, while in the majority were trained civil engineers, were to an even greater extent men of vast practical ability, more at home in field than office. DeWitt C. Haskin (see p. 234), during the inquest that followed the death of a number of men in a blowout of his pneumatically driven Hudson River Tunnel in 1880, stated in his own defense: "I am not a scientific engineer, but a practical one ... I know nothing of mathematics; in my experience I have grasped such matters as a whole; I believe that the study of mathematics in that kind of work [tunneling] has a tendency to dwarf the mind rather than enlighten it...." An extreme attitude perhaps, and one which by no means adds to Haskin's stature, but a not unusual one in tunnel work at the time. It would not of course be fair to imply that such men as Herman Haupt, Brunel the elder, and Greathead were not accomplished theoretical engineers. But it was their innate ability to evaluate and control the overlying physical conditions of the site and work that made possible their significant contributions to the development of tunnel engineering. Tunneling remained largely independent of the realm of mathematical analysis long after the time when all but the most insignificant engineering works were designed by that means. Thus, as structural engineering has advanced as the result of a flow of new theoretical concepts, new, improved, and strengthened materials, and new methods of fastening, the progress of tunnel engineering has been due more to the continual refinement of constructional techniques. A NEW HALL OF CIVIL ENGINEERING In the Museum of History and Technology has recently been established a Hall of Civil Engineering in which the engineering of tunnels is comprehensively treated from the historical standpoint--something not previously done in an American museum. The guiding precept of the exhibit has not been to outline exhaustively the entire history of tunneling, but rather to show the fundamental advances which have occurred between primitive man's first systematic use of fire for excavating rock in mining, and the use in combination of compressed air, iron lining, and a movable shield in a subaqueous tunnel at the end of the 19th century. This termination date was selected because it was during the period from about 1830 to 1900 that the most concentrated development took place, and during which tunneling became a firmly established and important branch of civil engineering and indeed, of modern civilization. The techniques of present-day tunneling are so fully related in current writing that it was deemed far more useful to devote the exhibit entirely to a segment of the field's history which is less commonly treated. [Illustration: Figure 3.--HOOSAC TUNNEL. WORKING OF LATER STAGES with Burleigh pneumatic drills mounted on carriages. The bottom heading is being drilled in preparation for blasting out with nitroglycerine. MHT model--1/2" scale. (Smithsonian photo 49260-M.)] The major advances, which have already been spoken of as being ones of technique rather than theory, devolve quite naturally into two basic classifications: the one of supporting a mass of loose, unstable, pressure-exerting material--soft-ground tunneling; and the diametrically opposite problem of separating rock from the basic mass when it is so firm and solid that it can support its own overbearing weight as an opening is forced through it--rock, or hard-ground tunneling. To exhibit the sequence in a thorough manner, inviting and capable of easy and correct interpretation by the nonprofessional viewer, models offered the only logical means of presentation. Six tunnels were selected, all driven in the 19th century. Each represents either a fundamental, new concept of tunneling technique, or an important, early application of one. Models of these works form the basis of the exhibit. No effort was made to restrict the work to projects on American soil. This would, in fact, have been quite impossible if an accurate picture of tunnel technology was to be drawn; for as in virtually all other areas of technology, the overall development in this field has been international. The art of mining was first developed highly in the Middle Ages in the Germanic states; the tunnel shield was invented by a Frenchman residing in England, and the use of compressed air to exclude the water from subaqueous tunnels was first introduced on a major work by an American. In addition, the two main subdivisions, rock and soft-ground tunneling, are each introduced by a model not of an actual working, but of one typifying early classical methods which were in use for centuries until the comparatively recent development of more efficient systems of earth support and rock breaking. Particular attention is given to accuracy of detail throughout the series of eight models; original sources of descriptive and graphic information were used in their construction wherever possible. In all cases except the introductory model in the rock-tunneling series, representing copper mining by early civilizations, these sources were contemporary accounts. The plan to use a uniform scale of reduction throughout, in order to facilitate the viewers' interpretation, unfortunately proved impractical, due to the great difference in the amount of area to be encompassed in different models, and the necessity that the cases holding them be of uniform height. The related models of the Broadway and Tower Subways represent short sections of tunnels only 8 feet or so in diameter enabling a relatively large scale, 1-1/2 inches to the foot, to be used. Conversely, in order that the model of Brunel's Thames Tunnel be most effective, it was necessary to include one of the vertical terminal shafts used in its construction. These were about 60 feet in depth, and thus the much smaller scale of 1/4 inch to the foot was used. This variation is not as confusing as might be thought, for the human figures in each model provide an immediate and positive sense of proportion and scale. Careful thought was devoted to the internal lighting of the models, as this was one of the critical factors in establishing, so far as is possible in a model, an atmosphere convincingly representative of work conducted solely by artificial light. Remarkable realism was achieved by use of plastic rods to conduct light to the tiny sources of tunnel illumination, such as the candles on the miners' hats in the Hoosac Tunnel, and the gas lights in the Thames Tunnel. No overscaled miniature bulbs, generally applied in such cases, were used. At several points where the general lighting within the tunnel proper has been kept at a low level to simulate the natural atmosphere of the work, hidden lamps can be operated by push-button in order to bring out detail which otherwise would be unseen. The remainder of the material in the Museum's tunneling section further extends the two major aspects of tunneling. Space limitations did not permit treatment of the many interesting ancillary matters vital to tunnel engineering, such as the unique problems of subterranean surveying, and the extreme accuracy required in the triangulation and subsequent guidance of the boring in long mountain tunnels; nor the difficult problems of ventilating long workings, both during driving and in service; nor the several major methods developed through the years for driving or constructing tunnels in other than the conventional manner.[1] Rock Tunneling While the art of tunneling soft ground is of relatively recent origin, that of rock tunneling is deeply rooted in antiquity. However, the line of its development is not absolutely direct, but is more logically followed through a closely related branch of technology--mining. The development of mining techniques is a practically unbroken one, whereas there appears little continuity or relationship between the few works undertaken before about the 18th century for passage through the earth. The Egyptians were the first people in recorded history to have driven openings, often of considerable magnitude, through solid rock. As is true of all major works of that nation, the capability of such grand proportion was due solely to the inexhaustible supply of human power and the casual evaluation of life. The tombs and temples won from the rock masses of the Nile Valley are monuments of perseverance rather than technical skill. Neither the Egyptians nor any other peoples before the Middle Ages have left any consistent evidence that they were able to pierce ground that would not support itself above the opening as would firm rock. In Egypt were established the methods of rock breaking that were to remain classical until the first use of gun-powder blasting in the 17th century which formed the basis of the ensuing technology of mining. Notwithstanding the religious motives which inspired the earliest rock excavations, more constant and universal throughout history has been the incentive to obtain the useful and decorative minerals hidden beneath the earth's surface. It was the miner who developed the methods introduced by the early civilizations to break rock away from the primary mass, and who added the refinements of subterranean surveying and ventilating, all of which were later to be assimilated into the new art of driving tunnels of large diameter. The connection is the more evident from the fact that tunnelmen are still known as miners. COPPER MINING, B.C. Therefore, the first model of the sequence, reflecting elemental rock-breaking techniques, depicts a hard-rock copper mine (fig. 1). Due to the absence of specific information about such works during the pre-Christian eras, this model is based on no particular period or locale, but represents in a general way, a mine in the Rio Tinto area of Spain where copper has been extracted since at least 1000 B.C. Similar workings existed in the Tirol as early as about 1600 B.C. Two means of breaking away the rock are shown: to the left is the most primitive of all methods, the hammer and chisel, which require no further description. At the right side, the two figures are shown utilizing the first rock-breaking method in which a force beyond that of human muscles was employed, the age-old "fire-setting" method. The rock was thoroughly heated by a fierce fire built against its face and then suddenly cooled by dashing water against it. The thermal shock disintegrated the rock or ore into bits easily removable by hand. [Illustration: Figure 4.--HOOSAC TUNNEL. Bottom of the central shaft showing elevator car and rock skip; pumps at far right. In the center, the top bench is being drilled by a single column-mounted Burleigh drill. MHT model--1/2" scale. (Smithsonian photo 49260-N.)] The practice of this method below ground, of course, produced a fearfully vitiated atmosphere. It is difficult to imagine whether the smoke, the steam, or the toxic fumes from the roasting ore was the more distressing to the miners. Even when performed by labor considered more or less expendable, the method could be employed only where there was ventilation of some sort: natural chimneys and convection currents were the chief sources of air circulation. Despite the drawbacks of the fire system, its simplicity and efficacy weighed so heavily in its favor that its history of use is unbroken almost to the present day. Fire setting was of greatest importance during the years of intensive mining in Europe before the advent of explosive blasting, but its use in many remote areas hardly slackened until the early 20th century because of its low cost when compared to powder. For this same reason, it did have limited application in actual tunnel work until about 1900. Direct handwork with pick, chisel and hammer, and fire setting were the principal means of rock removal for centuries. Although various wedging systems were also in favor in some situations, their importance was so slight that they were not shown in the model. HOOSAC TUNNEL It was possible in the model series, without neglecting any major advancement in the art of rock tunneling, to complete the sequence of development with only a single additional model. Many of the greatest works of civil engineering have been those concerned directly with transport, and hence are the product of the present era, beginning in the early 19th century. The development of the ancient arts of route location, bridge construction, and tunnel driving received a powerful stimulation after 1800 under the impetus of the modern canal, highway, and, especially, the railroad. The Hoosac Tunnel, driven through Hoosac Mountain in the very northwest corner of Massachusetts between 1851 and 1875, was the first major tunneling work in the United States. Its importance is due not so much to this as to its being literally the fountainhead of modern rock-tunneling technology. The remarkable thing is that the work was begun using methods of driving almost unchanged during centuries previous, and was completed twenty years later by techniques which were, for the day, almost totally mechanized. The basic pattern of operation set at Hoosac, using pneumatic rock drills and efficient explosives, remains practically unchanged today. The general history of the Hoosac project is so thoroughly recorded that the briefest outline of its political aspects will suffice here. Hoosac Mountain was the chief obstacle in the path of a railroad projected between Greenfield, Massachusetts, and Troy, New York. The line was launched by a group of Boston merchants to provide a direct route to the rapidly developing West, in competition with the coastal routes via New York. The only route economically reasonable included a tunnel of nearly five miles through the mountain--a length absolutely without precedent, and an immense undertaking in view of the relatively primitive rock-working methods then available. [Illustration: Figure 5.--BURLEIGH ROCK DRILL, improved model of about 1870, mounted on frame for surface work. (Catalog and price list: The Burleigh Rock Drill Company, 1876.)] The bore's great length and the desire for rapid exploitation inspired innovation from the outset of the work. The earliest attempts at mechanization, although ineffectual and without influence on tunnel engineering until many years later, are of interest. These took the form of several experimental machines of the "full area" type, intended to excavate the entire face of the work in a single operation by cutting one or more concentric grooves in the rock. The rock remaining between the grooves was to be blasted out. The first such machine tested succeeded in boring a 24-foot diameter opening for 10 feet before its total failure. Several later machines proved of equal merit.[2] It was the Baltimore and Ohio's eminent chief engineer, Benjamin H. Latrobe, who in his _Report on the Hoosac Tunnel_ (Baltimore, Oct. 1, 1862, p. 125) stated that such apparatus contained in its own structure the elements of failure, "... as they require the machines to do too much and the powder too little of the work, thus contradicting the fundamental principles upon which all labor-saving machinery is framed ... I could only look upon it as a misapplication of mechanical genius." [Illustration: Figure 6.--HOOSAC TUNNEL. Flash-powder photograph of Burleigh drills at the working face. (_Photo courtesy of State Library, Commonwealth of Massachusetts._)] Latrobe stated the basic philosophy of rock-tunnel work. No mechanical agent has ever been able to improve upon the efficiency of explosives for the shattering of rock. For this reason, the logical application of machinery to tunneling was not in replacing or altering the fundamental process itself, but in enabling it to be conducted with greater speed by mechanically drilling the blasting holes to receive the explosive. Actual work on the Hoosac Tunnel began at both ends of the tunnel in about 1854, but without much useful effect until 1858 when a contract was let to the renowned civil engineer and railroad builder, Herman Haupt of Philadelphia. Haupt immediately resumed investigations of improved tunneling methods, both full-area machines and mechanical rock drills. At this time mechanical rock-drill technology was in a state beyond, but not far beyond, initial experimentation. There existed one workable American machine, the Fowle drill, invented in 1851. It was steam-driven, and had been used in quarry work, although apparently not to any commercial extent. However, it was far too large and cumbersome to find any possible application in tunneling. Nevertheless, it contained in its operating principle, the seed of a practical rock drill in that the drill rod was attached directly to and reciprocated by a double-acting steam piston. A point of great importance was the independence of its operation on gravity, permitting drilling in any direction. While experimenting, Haupt drove the work onward by the classical methods, shown in the left-hand section of the model (fig. 2). At the far right an advance heading or adit is being formed by pick and hammer work; this is then deepened into a top heading with enough height to permit hammer drilling, actually the basic tunneling operation. A team is shown "double jacking," i.e., using two-handed hammers, the steel held by a third man. This was the most efficient of the several hand-drilling methods. The top-heading plan was followed so that the bulk of the rock could be removed in the form of a bottom bench, and the majority of drilling would be downward, obviously the most effective direction. Blasting was with black powder and its commercial variants. Some liberty was taken in depicting these steps so that both operations might be shown within the scope of the model: in practice the heading was kept between 400 and 600 feet in advance of the bench so that heading blasts would not interfere with the bench work. The bench carriage simply facilitated handling of the blasted rock. It was rolled back during blasts. [Illustration: Figure 7.--HOOSAC TUNNEL. GROUP OF MINERS descending the west shaft with a Burleigh drill. (_Photo courtesy of State Library, Commonwealth of Massachusetts._)] The experiments conducted by Haupt with machine drills produced no immediate useful results. A drill designed by Haupt and his associate, Stuart Gwynn, in 1858 bored hard granite at the rate of 5/8 inch per minute, but was not substantial enough to bear up in service. Haupt left the work in 1861, victim of intense political pressures and totally unjust accusations of corruption and mismanagement. The work was suspended until taken over by a state commission in 1862. Despite frightful ineptitude and very real corruption, this period was exceedingly important in the long history both of Hoosac Tunnel and of rock tunneling in general. The merely routine criticism of the project had by this time become violent due to the inordinate length of time already elapsed and the immense cost, compared to the small portion of work completed. This served to generate in the commission a strong sense of urgency to hurry the project along. Charles S. Storrow, a competent engineer, was sent to Europe to report on the progress of tunneling there, and in particular on mechanization at the Mont Cenis Tunnel then under construction between France and Italy. Germain Sommeiller, its chief engineer, had, after experimentation similar to Haupt's, invented a reasonably efficient drilling machine which had gone into service at Mont Cenis in March 1861. It was a distinct improvement over hand drilling, almost doubling the drilling rate, but was complex and highly unreliable. Two hundred drills were required to keep 16 drills at work. But the vital point in this was the fact that Sommeiller drove his drills not with steam, but air, compressed at the tunnel portals and piped to the work face. It was this single factor, one of application rather than invention, that made the mechanical drill feasible for tunneling. All previous effort in the field of machine drilling, on both sides of the Atlantic, had been directed toward steam as the motive power. In deep tunnels, with ventilation already an inherent problem, the exhaust of a steam drill into the atmosphere was inadmissible. Further, steam could not be piped over great distances due to serious losses of energy from radiation of heat, and condensation. Steam generation within the tunnel itself was obviously out of the question. It was the combination of a practical drill, and the parallel invention by Sommeiller of a practical air compressor that resulted in the first workable application of machine rock drilling to tunneling. [Illustration: Figures 8 & 9.--HOOSAC TUNNEL. CONTEMPORARY ENGRAVINGS. As such large general areas could not be sufficiently illuminated for photography, the Museum model was based primarily on artists' versions of the work. (_Science Record_, 1872; _Leslie's Weekly_, 1873.)] The Sommeiller drills greatly impressed Storrow, and his report of November 1862 strongly favored their adoption at Hoosac. It is curious however, that not a single one was brought to the U.S., even on trial. Storrow does speak of Sommeiller's intent to keep the details of the machine to himself until it had been further improved, with a view to its eventual exploitation. The fact is, that although workable, the Sommeiller drill proved to be a dead end in rock-drill development because of its many basic deficiencies. It did exert the indirect influence of inspiration which, coupled with a pressing need for haste, led to renewed trials of drilling machinery at Hoosac. Thomas Doane, chief engineer under the state commission, carried this program forth with intensity, seeking and encouraging inventors, and himself working on the problem. The pattern of the Sommeiller drill was generally followed; that is, the drill was designed as a separate, relatively light mechanical element, adapted for transportation by several miners, and attachable to a movable frame or carriage during operation. Air was of course the presumed power. To be effective, it was necessary that a drill automatically feed the drill rod as the hole deepened, and also rotate the rod automatically to maintain a round, smooth hole. Extreme durability was essential, and usually proved the source of a machine's failure. The combination of these characteristics into a machine capable of driving the drill rod into the rock with great force, perhaps five times per second, was a severe test of ingenuity and materials. Doane in 1864 had three different experimental drills in hand, as well as various steam and water-powered compressors. Success finally came in 1865 with the invention of a drill by Charles Burleigh, a mechanical engineer at the well-known Putnam Machine Works of Fitchburg, Massachusetts. The drills were first applied in the east heading in June of 1866. Although working well, their initial success was limited by lack of reliability and a resulting high expense for repairs. They were described as having "several weakest points." In November, these drills were replaced by an improved Burleigh drill which was used with total success to the end of the work. The era of modern rock tunneling was thus launched by Sommeiller's insight in initially applying pneumatic power to a machine drill, by Doane's persistence in searching for a thoroughly practical drill, and by Burleigh's mechanical talent in producing one. The desperate need to complete the Hoosac Tunnel may reasonably be considered the greatest single spur to the development of a successful drill. The significance of this invention was far reaching. Burleigh's was the first practical mechanical rock drill in America and, in view of its dependability, efficiency, and simplicity when compared to the Sommeiller drill, perhaps in the world. The Burleigh drill achieved success almost immediately. It was placed in production by Putnam for the Burleigh Rock Drill Company before completion of Hoosac in 1876, and its use spread throughout the western mining regions and other tunnel works. For a major invention, its adoption was, in relative terms, instantaneous. It was the prototype of all succeeding piston-type drills, which came to be known generically as "burleighs," regardless of manufacture. Walter Shanley, the Canadian contractor who ultimately completed the Hoosac, reported in 1870, after the drills had been in service for a sufficient time that the techniques for their most efficient use were fully understood and effectively applied, that the Burleigh drills saved about half the drilling costs over hand drilling. The per-inch cost of machine drilling averaged 5.5 cents, all inclusive, vs. 11.2 cents for handwork. The more important point, that of speed, is shown by the reports of average monthly progress of the tunnel itself, before and after use of the air drills. _Year_ _Average monthly progress in feet_ 1865 55 1866 48 1867 99 1868 -- 1869 138 1870 126 1871 145 1872 124 [Illustration: Figure 10.--TRINITROGLYCERINE BLAST at Hoosac Tunnel. (_Leslie's Weekly_, 1873.)] The right portion of the model (fig. 3) represents the workings during the final period. The bottom heading system was generally used after the Burleigh drills had been introduced. Four to six drills were mounted on a carriage designed by Doane. These drove the holes for the first blast in the center of the heading in about six hours. The full width of the heading, the 24-foot width of the tunnel, was then drilled and blasted out in two more stages. As in the early section, the benches to the rear were later removed to the full-tunnel height of about 20 feet. This operation is shown by a single drill (fig. 4) mounted on a screw column. Three 8-hour shifts carried the work forward: drilling occupied half the time and half was spent in running the carriage back, blasting, and mucking (clearing the broken rock). [Illustration: Figure 11.--HOOSAC TUNNEL survey crew at engineering office. The highest accuracy of the aboveground and underground survey work was required to insure proper vertical and horizontal alignment and meeting of the several separately driven sections. (_Photo courtesy of State Library, Commonwealth of Massachusetts._)] The tunnel's 1028-foot central shaft, completed under the Shanley contract in 1870 to provide two additional work faces as well as a ventilation shaft is shown at the far right side of this half of the model. Completed so near the end of the project, only 15 percent of the tunnel was driven from the shaft. The enormous increase in rate of progress was not due entirely to machine drilling. From the outset of his jurisdiction, Doane undertook experiments with explosives as well as drills, seeking an agent more effective than black powder. In this case, the need for speed was not the sole stimulus. As the east and west headings advanced further and further from the portals, the problem of ventilation grew more acute, and it became increasingly difficult to exhaust the toxic fumes produced by the black powder blasts. In 1866, Doane imported from Europe a sample of trinitroglycerine, the liquid explosive newly introduced by Nobel, known in Europe as "glonoïn oil" and in the United States as "nitroglycerine." It already had acquired a fearsome reputation from its tendency to decompose with heat and age and to explode with or without the slightest provocation. Nevertheless, its tremendous power and characteristic of almost complete smokelessness led Doane to employ the chemist George W. Mowbray, who had blasted for Drake in the Pennsylvania oil fields, to develop techniques for the bulk manufacture of the new agent and for its safe employment in the tunnel. Mowbray established a works on the mountain and shortly developed a completely new blasting practice based on the explosive. Its stability was greatly increased by maintaining absolute purity in the manufacturing process. Freezing the liquid to reduce its sensitivity during transport to the headings, and extreme caution in its handling further reduced the hazard of its use. At the heading, the liquid was poured into cylindrical cartridges for placement in the holes. As with the Burleigh drill, the general adoption of nitroglycerine was immediate once its qualities had been demonstrated. The effect on the work was notable. Its explosive characteristics permitted fewer blast holes over a given frontal area of working face, and at the same time it was capable of effectively blowing from a deeper drill hole, 42 inches against 30 inches for black powder, so that under ideal conditions 40 percent more tunnel length was advanced per cycle of operations. A new fuse and a system of electric ignition were developed which permitted simultaneous detonation and resulted in a degree of effectiveness impossible with the powder train and cord fusing used with the black powder. Over a million pounds of nitroglycerine were produced by Mowbray between 1866 and completion of the tunnel. [Illustration: Figure 12.--WORKS AT THE CENTRAL SHAFT, HOOSAC TUNNEL, for hoisting, pumping and air compressing machinery, and general repair, 1871. (_Photo courtesy of State Library, Commonwealth of Massachusetts._)] [Illustration: Figure 13.--HOOSAC TUNNEL. AIR-COMPRESSOR BUILDING on Hoosac River near North Adams. The compressors were driven partially by waterpower, derived from the river. (_Photo courtesy of State Library, Commonwealth of Massachusetts._)] [Illustration: Figure 14.--WEST PORTAL OF HOOSAC TUNNEL before completion, 1868, showing six rings of lining brick. (_Photo courtesy of State Library, Commonwealth of Massachusetts._)] When the Shanleys took the work over in 1868, following political difficulties attending operation by the State, the period of experimentation was over. The tunnel was being advanced by totally modern methods, and to the present day the overall concepts have remained fundamentally unaltered: the Burleigh piston drill has been replaced by the lighter hammer drill; the Doane drill carriage by the more flexible "jumbo"; nitroglycerine by its more stable descendant dynamite and its alternatives; and static-electric blasting machines by more dependable magnetoelectric. But these are all in the nature of improvements, not innovations. Unlike the preceding model, there was good documentation for this one. Also, the Hoosac was apparently the first American tunnel to be well recorded photographically. Early flashlight views exist of the drills working at the heading (fig. 6) as well as of the portals, the winding and pumping works at the central shaft, and much of the machinery and associated aspects of the project. These and copies of drawings of much of Doane's experimental apparatus, a rare technological record, are preserved at the Massachusetts State Library. Soft-Ground Tunneling So great is the difference between hard-rock and soft-ground tunneling that they constitute two almost separate branches of the field. In penetrating ground lacking the firmness or cohesion to support itself above an opening, the miner's chief concern is not that of removing the material, but of preventing its collapse into his excavation. The primitive methods depending upon brute strength and direct application of fire and human force were suitable for assault on rock, but lacked the artifice needed for delving into less stable material. Roman engineers were accomplished in spanning subterranean ways with masonry arches, but apparently most of their work was done by cut-and-cover methods rather than by actual mining. Not until the Middle Ages did the skill of effectively working openings in soft ground develop, and not until the Renaissance was this development so consistently successful that it could be considered a science. RENAISSANCE MINING From the earliest periods of rock working, the quest for minerals and metals was the primary force that drove men underground. It was the technology of mining, the product of slow evolution over the centuries, that became the technology of the early tunnel, with no significant modification except in size of workings. Every aspect of 16th century mining is definitively detailed in Georgius Agricola's remarkable _De re Metallica_, first published in Basel in 1556. During its time of active influence, which extended for two centuries, it served as the authoritative work on the subject. It remains today an unparalleled early record of an entire branch of technology. The superb woodcuts of mine workings and tools in themselves constitute a precise description of the techniques of the period, and provided an ideal source of information upon which to base the first model in the soft-ground series. [Illustration: Figure 15.--CENTERING FOR PLACEMENT OF FINISHED STONEWORK at west portal, 1874. At top-right are the sheds where the lining brick was produced. (_Photo courtesy of State Library, Commonwealth of Massachusetts._)] The model, representing a typical European mine, demonstrates the early use of timber frames or "sets" to support the soft material of the walls and roof. In areas of only moderate instability, the sets alone were sufficient to counteract the earth pressure, and were spaced according to the degree of support required. In more extreme conditions, a solid lagging of small poles or boards was set outside the frames, as shown in the model, to provide absolute support of the ground. Details of the framing, the windlass, and all tools and appliances were supplied by Agricola, with no need for interpretation or interpolation. The basic framing pattern of sill, side posts and cap piece, all morticed together, with lagging used where needed, was translated unaltered into tunneling practice, particularly in small exploratory drifts. It remained in this application until well into the 20th century. The pressure exerted upon tunnels of large area was countered during construction by timbering systems of greater elaboration, evolved from the basic one. By the time that tunnels of section large enough to accommodate canals and railways were being undertaken as matter-of-course civil engineering works, a series of nationally distinguishable systems had emerged, each possessing characteristic points of favor and fault. As might be suspected, the English system of tunnel timbering, for instance, was rarely applied on the Continent, nor were the German, Austrian or Belgian systems normally seen in Great Britain. All were used at one time or another in this country, until the American system was introduced in about 1855. While the timbering commonly remained in place in mines, it would be followed up by permanent masonry arching and lining in tunnel work. Overhead in the museum Hall of Civil Engineering are frames representing the English, Austrian and American systems. Nearby, a series of small relief models (fig. 19) is used to show the sequence of enlargement in a soft-ground railroad tunnel of about 1855, using the Austrian system. Temporary timber support of tunnels fell from use gradually after the advent of shield tunneling in conjunction with cast-iron lining. This formed a perfect support immediately behind the shield, as well as the permanent lining of the tunnel. BRUNEL'S THAMES TUNNEL The interior surfaces of tunnels through ground merely unstable are amenable to support by various systems of timbering and arching. This becomes less true as the fluidity of the ground increases. The soft material which normally comprises the beds of rivers can approach an almost liquid condition resulting in a hydraulic head from the overbearing water sufficient to prevent the driving of even the most carefully worked drift, supported by simple timbering. The basic defect of the timbering systems used in mining and tunneling was that there was inevitably a certain amount of the face or ceiling unsupported just previous to setting a frame, or placing over it the necessary section of lagging. In mine work, runny soil could, and did, break through such gaps, filling the working. For this reason, there were no serious attempts made before 1825 to drive subaqueous tunnels. In that year, work was started on a tunnel under the Thames between the Rotherhithe and Wapping sections of London, under guidance of the already famous engineer Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1849), father of I. K. Brunel. The undertaking is of great interest in that Brunel employed an entirely novel apparatus of his own invention to provide continuous and reliable support of the soft water-bearing clay which formed the riverbed. By means of this "shield," Brunel was able to drive the world's first subaqueous tunnel.[3] [Illustration: Figure 16.--WEST PORTAL UPON COMPLETION, 1876. (_Photo courtesy of New-York Historical Society._)] The shield was of cast-iron, rectangular in elevation, and was propelled forward by jackscrews. Shelves at top, bottom, and sides supported the tunnel roof, floor, and walls until the permanent brick lining was placed. The working face, the critical area, was supported by a large number of small "breasting boards," held against the ground by small individual screws bearing against the shield framework. The shield itself was formed of 12 separate frames, each of which could be advanced independently of the others. The height was 22 feet 3 inches: the width 37 feet 6 inches. The progress was piecemeal. In operation the miners would remove one breasting board at a time, excavate in front of it, and then replace it in the advanced position--about 6 inches forward. This was repeated with the next board above or below, and the sequence continued until the ground for the entire height of one of the 12 sections had been removed. The board screws for that section were shifted to bear on the adjacent frames, relieving the frame of longitudinal pressure. It could then be screwed forward by the amount of advance, the screws bearing to the rear on the completed masonry. Thus, step by step the tunnel progressed slowly, the greatest weekly advance being 14 feet. In the left-hand portion of the model is the shaft sunk to begin operations; here also is shown the bucket hoist for removing the spoil. The V-type steam engine powering the hoist was designed by Brunel. At the right of the main model is an enlarged detail of the shield, actually an improved version built in 1835. The work continued despite setbacks of every sort. The financial ones need no recounting here. Technically, although the shield principle proved workable, the support afforded was not infallible. Four or five times the river broke through the thin cover of silt and flooded the workings, despite the utmost caution in excavating. When this occurred, masses of clay, sandbags, and mats were dumped over the opening in the riverbed to seal it, and the tunnel pumped out. I. K. Brunel acted as superintendent and nearly lost his life on a number of occasions. After several suspensions of work resulting from withdrawal or exhaustion of support, one lasting seven years, the work was completed in 1843. Despite the fact that Brunel had, for the first time, demonstrated a practical method for tunneling in firm and water-bearing ground, the enormous cost of the work and the almost overwhelming problems encountered had a discouraging effect rather than otherwise. Not for another quarter of a century was a similar project undertaken. The Thames Tunnel was used for foot and light highway traffic until about 1870 when it was incorporated into the London Underground railway system, which it continues to serve today. The roofed-over top sections of the two shafts may still be seen from the river. A number of contemporary popular accounts of the tunnel exist, but one of the most thorough and interesting expositions on a single tunnel work of any period is Henry Law's _A Memoir of the Thames Tunnel_, published in 1845-1846 by John Weale. Law, an eminent civil engineer, covers the work in incredible detail from its inception until the major suspension in late 1828 when slightly more than half completed. The most valuable aspect of his record is a series of plates of engineering drawings of the shield and its components, which, so far as is known, exist nowhere else. These formed the basis of the enlarged section of the shield, shown to the right of the model of the tunnel itself. A vertical section through the shield is reproduced here from Law for comparison with the model (figs. 21 and 23). [Illustration: Figure 17.--SOFT-GROUND TUNNELING. The support of walls and roof of mine shaft by simple timbering; 16th century. MHT model--3/4" scale. (Smithsonian photo 49260-J.)] [Illustration: Figure 18.--SOFT-GROUND TUNNELING. The model of a 16th century mine in the Museum of History and Technology was constructed from illustrations in such works as G. E. von Löhneyss' _Bericht vom Bergwerck_, 1690, as well as the better known ones from _De re Metallica_.] [Illustration: Figure 19.--THE SUCCESSIVE STAGES in the enlargement of a mid-19th century railroad tunnel, using the Austrian system of timbering. MHT model.] [Illustration: Figure 20.--M. I. BRUNEL'S THAMES TUNNEL, 1825-1843, the first driven beneath a body of water. MHT model--1/4" scale. (Smithsonian photo 49260-F.)] THE TOWER SUBWAY Various inventors attempted to improve upon the Brunel shield, aware of the fundamental soundness of the shield principle. Almost all bypassed the rectangular sectional construction used in the Thames Tunnel, and took as a starting point a sectional shield of circular cross section, advanced by Brunel in his original patent of 1818. James Henry Greathead (1844-1896), rightfully called the father of modern subaqueous tunneling, surmised in later years that Brunel had chosen a rectangular configuration for actual use, as one better adapted to the sectional type of shield. The English civil engineer, Peter W. Barlow, in 1864 and 1868 patented a circular shield, of one piece, which was the basis of one used by him in constructing a small subway of 1350 feet beneath the Thames in 1869, the first work to follow the lead of Brunel. Greathead, acting as Barlow's contractor, was the designer of the shield actually used in the work, but it was obviously inspired by Barlow's patents. The reduction of the multiplicity of parts in the Brunel shield to a single rigid unit was of immense advantage and an advance perhaps equal to the shield concept of tunneling itself. The Barlow-Greathead shield was like the cap of a telescope with a sharpened circular ring on the front to assist in penetrating the ground. The diaphragm functioned, as did Brunel's breasting boards, to resist the longitudinal earth pressure of the face, and the cylindrical portion behind the diaphragm bore the radial pressure of roof and walls. Here also for the first time, a permanent lining formed of cast-iron segments was used, a second major advancement in soft-ground tunneling practice. Not only could the segments be placed and bolted together far more rapidly than masonry lining could be laid up, but unlike the green masonry, they could immediately bear the full force of the shield-propelling screws. Barlow, capitalizing on Brunel's error in burrowing so close to the riverbed, maintained an average cover of 30 feet over the tunnel, driving through a solid stratum of firm London clay which was virtually impervious to water. As the result of this, combined with the advantages of the solid shield and the rapidly placed iron lining, the work moved forward at a pace and with a facility in startling contrast to that of the Thames Tunnel, although in fairness it must be recalled that the face area was far less. The clay was found sufficiently sound that it could be readily excavated without the support of the diaphragm, and normally three miners worked in front of the shield, digging out the clay and passing it back through a doorway in the plate. This could be closed in case of a sudden settlement or break in. Following excavation, the shield was advanced 18 inches into the excavated area by means of 6 screws, and a ring of lining segments 18 inches in length bolted to the previous ring under cover of the overlapping rear skirt of the shield. The small annular space left between the outside of the lining and the clay by the thickness and clearance of the skirt--about an inch--was filled with thin cement grout. The tunnel was advanced 18 inches during each 8-hour shift. The work continued around the clock, and the 900-foot river section was completed in only 14 weeks.[4] The entire work was completed almost without incident in just under a year, a remarkable performance for the world's second subaqueous tunnel. [Illustration: Figure 21.--ENLARGED DETAIL of Brunel's tunneling shield, vertical section. The first two and part of the third of the twelve frames are shown. To the left is the tunnel's completed brick lining and to the right, the individual breasting boards and screws for supporting the face. The propelling screws are seen at top and bottom, bearing against the lining. Three miners worked in each frame, one above the other. MHT model--3/4" scale. (Smithsonian photo 49260-G.)] [Illustration: Figure 22.--BROADSIDE PUBLISHED AFTER COMMENCEMENT OF WORK on the Thames Tunnel, 1827. (MHT collections.) OPEN TO THE PUBLIC EVERY DAY (_Sundays excepted_) _from Seven in the Morning, until Eight in the Evening_, THE THAMES TUNNEL. Fig. 1 shows a transverse section of the Thames, and beneath it a longitudinal section of the Tunnel, as it will be when completed; with the ascents in the inclinations in which they will be finished. Fig. 2 shows the two arched entrances of the Tunnel from the shaft. Fig. 3 is a representation of the iron shield, and shows a workman in each of the compartments. The Entrance to the Tunnel is near to Rotherhithe Church, and nearly opposite to the London-Docks. The nearest landing place from the river is Church Stairs. The Greenwich and Deptford coaches which go the lower road, start hourly from Charing-cross, and Gracechurch-street, and pass close by the works at Rotherhithe. Books relative to the Tunnel may be had at the works. The Public may view the Tunnel every day (Sundays excepted) from Seven in the morning until Eight in the Evening, upon payment of One Shilling each Person. The extreme northern end of the Tunnel is for the present secured by a strong wall; but visitors will find a dry, warm, and gravelled promenade, as far as to almost the centre of the river, and brilliantly lighted with oil gas. The entrance is from Rotherhithe Street, and by a safe, commodious, and easy stair case. H. Teape & Son, Printers, Tower-hill, London.] [Illustration: Figure 23.--VERTICAL SECTION THROUGH BRUNEL'S SHIELD. The long lever, x, supported the wood centering for turning the masonry arches of the lining. (LAW, _A Memoir of the Thames Tunnel._)] [Illustration: Figure 24.--THAMES TUNNEL. SECTION THROUGH riverbed and tunnel following one of the break-throughs of the river. Inspection of the damage with a diving bell. (BEAMISH, _A Memoir of the Life of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel_.)] The Tower Subway at first operated with cylindrical cars that nearly filled the 7-foot bore; the cars were drawn by cables powered by small steam engines in the shafts. This mode of power had previously been used in passenger service only on the Greenwich Street elevated railway in New York. Later the cars were abandoned as unprofitable and the tunnel turned into a footway (fig. 32). This small tunnel, the successful driving due entirely to Greathead's skill, was the forerunner of the modern subaqueous tunnel. In it, two of the three elements essential to such work thereafter were first applied: the one-piece movable shield of circular section, and the segmental cast-iron lining. The documentation of this work is far thinner than for the Thames Tunnel. The most accurate source of technical information is a brief historical account in Copperthwaite's classic _Tunnel Shields and the Use of Compressed Air in Subaqueous Works_, published in 1906. Copperthwaite, a successful tunnel engineer, laments the fact that he was able to turn up no drawing or original data on this first shield of Greathead's, but he presents a sketch of it prepared in the Greathead office in 1895, which is presumably a fair representation (fig. 33). The Tower Subway model was built on the basis of this and several woodcuts of the working area that appeared contemporaneously in the illustrated press. In this and the adjacent model of Beach's Broadway Subway, the tunnel axis has been placed on an angle to the viewer, projecting the bore into the case so that the complete circle of the working face is included for a more suggestive effect. This was possible because of the short length of the work included. Henry S. Drinker, also a tunnel engineer and author of the most comprehensive work on tunneling ever published, treats rock tunneling in exhaustive detail up to 1878. His notice of what he terms "submarine tunneling" is extremely brief. He does, however, draw a most interesting comparison between the first Thames Tunnel, built by Brunel, and the second, built by Greathead 26 years later: FIRST THAMES TUNNEL SECOND THAMES TUNNEL (TOWER SUBWAY) Brickwork lining, 38 feet Cast-iron lining of 8 feet wide by 22-1/2 feet high. outside diameter. 120-ton cast-iron shield, 2-1/2-ton, wrought-iron shield, accommodating 36 miners. accommodating at most 3 men. Workings filled by irruption "Water encountered at almost of river five times. any time could have been gathered in a stable pail." Eighteen years elapsed between Work completed in about start and finish of work. eleven months. Cost: $3,000,000. Cost: $100,000. [Illustration: Figure 25.--TRANSVERSE SECTION THROUGH SHIELD, after inundation. Such disasters, as well as the inconsistency of the riverbed's composition, seriously disturbed the alignment of the shield's individual sections. (LAW, _A Memoir of the Thames Tunnel_.)] [Illustration: Figure 26.--LONGITUDINAL SECTION THROUGH THAMES TUNNEL after sandbagging to close a break in the riverbed. The tunnel is filled with silt and water. (LAW, _A Memoir of the Thames Tunnel_.)] [Illustration: Figure 27.--INTERIOR OF THE THAMES TUNNEL shortly after completion in 1843. (_Photo courtesy of New York Public Library Picture Collection._)] [Illustration: Figure 28.--THAMES TUNNEL in use by London Underground railway. (_Illustrated London News_, 1869?)] [Illustration: Figure 29.--PLACING A segment of cast-iron lining in Greathead's Tower Subway, 1869. To the rear is the shield's diaphragm or bulkhead. MHT model--1-1/2" scale. (Smithsonian photo 49260-B.)] BEACH'S BROADWAY SUBWAY Almost simultaneously with the construction of the Tower Subway, the first American shield tunnel was driven by Alfred Ely Beach (1826-1896). Beach, as editor of the _Scientific American_ and inventor of, among other things, a successful typewriter as early as 1856, was well known and respected in technical circles. He was not a civil engineer, but had become concerned with New York's pressing traffic problem (even then) and as a solution, developed plans for a rapid-transit subway to extend the length of Broadway. He invented a shield as an adjunct to this system, solely to permit driving of the tunnel without disturbing the overlying streets. An active patent attorney as well, Beach must certainly have known of and studied the existing patents for tunneling shields, which were, without exception, British. In certain aspects his shield resembled the one patented by Barlow in 1864, but never built. However, work on the Beach tunnel started in 1869, so close in time to that on the Tower Subway, that it is unlikely that there was any influence from that source. Beach had himself patented a shield, in June 1869, a two-piece, sectional design that bore no resemblance to the one used. His subway plan had been first introduced at the 1867 fair of the American Institute in the form of a short plywood tube through which a small, close-fitting car was blown by a fan. The car carried 12 passengers. Sensing opposition to the subway scheme from Tammany, in 1868 Beach obtained a charter to place a small tube beneath Broadway for transporting mail and small packages pneumatically, a plan he advocated independently of the passenger subway. [Illustration: Figure 30.--CONTEMPORARY ILLUSTRATIONS of Tower Subway works used as basis of the model in the Museum of History and Technology. (_Illustrated London News_, 1869.) ADVANCING THE SHIELD. FITTING THE CASTINGS.] [Illustration: Figure 31.--EXCAVATION IN FRONT OF SHIELD, Tower Subway. This was possible because of the stiffness of the clay encountered. MHT model--front of model shown in fig. 29. (Smithsonian photo 49260-A.)] Under this thin pretense of legal authorization, the sub-rosa excavation began from the basement of a clothing store on Warren Street near Broadway. The 8-foot-diameter tunnel ran eastward a short distance, made a 90-degree turn, and thence southward under Broadway to stop a block away under the south side of Murray Street. The total distance was about 312 feet. Work was carried on at night in total secrecy, the actual tunneling taking 58 nights. At the Warren Street terminal, a waiting room was excavated and a large Roots blower installed for propulsion of the single passenger car. The plan was similar to that used with the model in 1867: the cylindrical car fitted the circular tunnel with only slight circumferential clearance. The blower created a plenum within the waiting room and tunnel area behind the car of about 0.25 pounds per square inch, resulting in a thrust on the car of almost a ton, not accounting for blowby. The car was thus blown along its course, and was returned by reversing the blower's suction and discharge ducts to produce an equivalent vacuum within the tunnel. [Illustration: Figure 32.--INTERIOR OF COMPLETED TOWER SUBWAY. (THORNBURY, _Old and New London, 1887, vol. 1, p. 126_.)] The system opened in February of 1870 and remained in operation for about a year. Beach was ultimately subdued by the hostile influences of Boss Tweed, and the project was completely abandoned. Within a very few more years the first commercially operated elevated line was built, but the subway did not achieve legitimate status in New York until the opening of the Interborough line in 1904. Ironically, its route traversed Broadway for almost the length of the island. [Illustration: Figure 33.--VERTICAL SECTION through the Greathead shield used at the Tower Subway, 1869. The first one-piece shield of circular section. (COPPERTHWAITE, _Tunnel Shields and the Use of Compressed Air in Subaqueous Works_.)] The Beach shield operated with perfect success in this brief trial, although the loose sandy soil encountered was admittedly not a severe test of its qualities. No diaphragm was used; instead a series of 8 horizontal shelves with sharpened leading edges extended across the front opening of the shield. The outstanding feature of the machine was the substitution for the propelling screws used by Brunel and Greathead of 18 hydraulic rams, set around its circumference. These were fed by a single hand-operated pump, seen in the center of figure 34. By this means the course of the shield's forward movement could be controlled with a convenience and precision not attainable with screws. Vertical and horizontal deflection was achieved by throttling the supply of water to certain of the rams, which could be individually controlled, causing greater pressure on one portion of the shield than another. This system has not changed in the ensuing time, except, of course, in the substitution of mechanically produced hydraulic pressure for hand. [Illustration: Figure 34.--BEACH'S Broadway Subway. Advancing the shield by hydraulic rams, 1869. MHT model--1-1/2" scale. (Smithsonian photo 49260-E.)] [Illustration: Figure 35.--VERTICAL SECTION through the Beach shield used on the Broadway Subway, showing the horizontal shelves (C), iron cutting ring (B), hydraulic rams (D), hydraulic pump (F), and rear protective skirt (H). (_Scientific American_, March 5, 1870.)] Unlike the driving of the Tower Subway, no excavation was done in front of the shield. Rather, the shield was forced by the rams into the soil for the length of their stroke, the material which entered being supported by the shelves. This was removed from the shelves and hauled off. The ram plungers then were withdrawn and a 16-inch length of the permanent lining built up within the shelter of the shield's tail ring. Against this, the rams bore for the next advance. Masonry lining was used in the straight section; cast-iron in the curved. The juncture is shown in the model. [Illustration: Figure 36.--INTERIOR of Beach Subway showing iron lining on curved section and the pneumatically powered passenger car. View from waiting room. (_Scientific American_, March 5, 1870.)] Enlarged versions of the Beach shield were used in a few tunnels in the Midwest in the early 1870's, but from then until 1886 the shield method, for no clear reason, again entered a period of disuse finding no application on either side of the Atlantic despite its virtually unqualified proof at the hands of Greathead and Beach. Little precise information remains on this work. The Beach system of pneumatic transit is described fully in a well-illustrated booklet published by him in January 1868, in which the American Institute model is shown, and many projected systems of pneumatic propulsion as well as of subterranean and subaqueous tunneling described. Beach again (presumably) is author of the sole contemporary account of the Broadway Subway, which appeared in _Scientific American_ following its opening early in 1870. Included are good views of the tunnel and car, of the shield in operation, and, most important, a vertical sectional view through the shield (fig. 35). It is interesting to note that optical surveys for maintenance of the course apparently were not used. The article illustrated and described the driving each night of a jointed iron rod up through the tunnel roof to the street, twenty or so feet above, for "testing the position." THE FIRST HUDSON RIVER TUNNEL Despite the ultimate success of Brunel's Thames Tunnel in 1843, the shield in that case afforded only moderately reliable protection because of the fluidity of the soil driven through, and its tendency to enter the works through the smallest opening in the shield's defense. An English doctor who had made physiological studies of the effects on workmen of the high air pressure within diving bells is said to have recommended to Brunel in 1828 that he introduce an atmosphere of compressed air into the tunnel to exclude the water and support the work face. This plan was first formally described by Sir Thomas Cochrane (1775-1860) in a British patent of 1830. Conscious of Brunel's problems, he proposed a system of shaft sinking, mining, and tunneling in water-bearing materials by filling the excavated area with air sufficiently above atmospheric pressure to prevent the water from entering and to support the earth. In this, and his description of air locks for passage of men and materials between the atmosphere and the pressurized area, Cochrane fully outlined the essential features of pneumatic excavation as developed since. [Illustration: Figure 37.--THE GIANT ROOTS LOBE-TYPE BLOWER used for propelling the car.] In 1839, a French engineer first used the system in sinking a mine shaft through a watery stratum. From then on, the sinking of shafts, and somewhat later the construction of bridge pier foundations, by the pneumatic method became almost commonplace engineering practice in Europe and America. Not until 1879 however, was the system tried in tunneling work, and then, as with the shield ten years earlier, almost simultaneously here and abroad. The first application was in a small river tunnel in Antwerp, only 5 feet in height. This project was successfully completed relying on compressed air alone to support the earth, no shield being used. The importance of the work cannot be considered great due to its lack of scope. [Illustration: Figure 38.--TESTING ALIGNMENT of the Broadway Subway at night by driving a jointed rod up to street level. (_Scientific American_, March 5, 1870.)] In 1871 Dewitt C. Haskin (1822-1900), a west coast mine and railroad builder, became interested in the pneumatic caissons then being used to found the river piers of Eads' Mississippi River bridge at St. Louis. In apparent total ignorance of the Cochrane patent, he evolved a similar system for tunneling water-bearing media, and in 1873 proposed construction of a tunnel through the silt beneath the Hudson to provide rail connection between New Jersey and New York City. [Illustration: Figure 39.--HASKIN'S pneumatically driven tunnel under the Hudson River, 1880. In the engine room at top left was the machinery for hoisting, generating electricity for lighting, and air compressing. The air lock is seen in the wall of the brick shaft. MHT model--0.3" scale. (Smithsonian photo 49260.)] [Illustration: Figure 40.--ARTIST'S CONCEPTION OF MINERS escaping into the air lock during the blowout in Haskin's tunnel.] It would be difficult to imagine a site more in need of such communication. All lines from the south terminated along the west shore of the river and the immense traffic--cars, freight and passengers--was carried across to Manhattan Island by ferry and barge with staggering inconvenience and at enormous cost. A bridge would have been, and still is, almost out of the question due not only to the width of the crossing, but to the flatness of both banks. To provide sufficient navigational clearance (without a drawspan), impracticably long approaches would have been necessary to obtain a permissibly gentle grade. Haskin formed a tunneling company and began work with the sinking of a shaft in Hoboken on the New Jersey side. In a month it was halted because of an injunction by, curiously, the D L & W Railroad, who feared for their vast investment in terminal and marine facilities. Not until November of 1879 was the injunction lifted and work again commenced. The shaft was completed and an air lock located in one wall from which the tunnel proper was to be carried forward. It was Haskin's plan to use no shield, relying solely on the pressure of compressed air to maintain the work faces and prevent the entry of water. The air was admitted in late December, and the first large-scale pneumatic tunneling operation launched. A single 26-foot, double-track bore was at first undertaken, but a work face of such diameter proved unmanageable and two oval tubes 18 feet high by 16 feet wide were substituted, each to carry a single track. Work went forward with reasonable facility, considering the lack of precedent. A temporary entrance was formed of sheet-iron rings from the air lock down to the tunnel grade, at which point the permanent work of the north tube was started. Immediately behind the excavation at the face, a lining of thin wrought-iron plates was built up, to provide form for the 2-foot, permanent brick lining that followed. The three stages are shown in the model in about their proper relationship of progress. The work is shown passing beneath an old timber-crib bulkhead, used for stabilizing the shoreline. The silt of the riverbed was about the consistency of putty and under good conditions formed a secure barrier between the excavation and the river above. It was easily excavated, and for removal was mixed with water and blown out through a pipe into the shaft by the higher pressure in the tunnel. About half was left in the bore for removal later. The basic scheme was workable, but in operation an extreme precision was required in regulating the air pressure in the work area.[5] It was soon found that there existed an 11-psi difference between the pressure of water on the top and the bottom of the working face, due to the 22-foot height of the unlined opening. Thus, it was impossible to maintain perfect pneumatic balance of the external pressure over the entire face. It was necessary to strike an average with the result that some water entered at the bottom of the face where the water pressure was greatest, and some air leaked out at the top where the water pressure was below the air pressure. Constant attention was essential: several men did nothing but watch the behavior of the leaks and adjusted the pressure as the ground density changed with advance. Air was supplied by several steam-driven compressors at the surface. The air lock permitted passage back and forth of men and supplies between the atmosphere and the work area, without disturbing the pressure differential. This principle is demonstrated by an animated model set into the main model, to the left of the shaft (fig. 39). The variation of pressure within the lock chamber to match the atmosphere or the pressurized area, depending on the direction of passage, is clearly shown by simplified valves and gauges, and by the use of light in varying color density. In the Haskin tunnel, 5 to 10 minutes were taken to pass the miners through the lock so as to avoid too abrupt a physiological change. Despite caution, a blowout occurred in July 1880 due to air leakage not at the face, but around the temporary entrance. One door of the air lock jammed and twenty men drowned, resulting in an inquiry which brought forth much of the distrust with which Haskin was regarded by the engineering profession. His ability and qualifications were subjected to the bitterest attack in and by the technical press. There is some indication that, although the project began with a staff of competent engineers, they were alienated by Haskin in the course of work and at least one withdrew. Haskin's remarks in his own defense indicate that some of the denunciation was undoubtedly justified. And yet, despite this reaction, the fundamental merit of the pneumatic tunneling method had been demonstrated by Haskin and was immediately recognized and freely acknowledged. It was apparent at the same time, however, that air by itself did not provide a sufficiently reliable support for large-area tunnel works in unstable ground, and this remains the only major subaqueous tunnel work driven with air alone. [Illustration: Figure 41.--LOCATION OF HUDSON RIVER TUNNEL. (_Leslie's Weekly_, 1879.)] After the accident, work continued under Haskin until 1882 when funds ran out. About 1600 feet of the north tube and 600 feet of the south tube had been completed. Greathead resumed operations with a shield for a British company in 1889, but exhaustion of funds again caused stoppage in 1891. The tunnel was finally completed in 1904, and is now in use as part of the Hudson and Manhattan rapid-transit system, never providing the sought-after rail link. A splendid document of the Haskin portion of the work is S. D. V. Burr's _Tunneling Under the Hudson River_ published in 1885. It is based entirely upon firsthand material and contains drawings of most of the work, including the auxiliary apparatus. It is interesting to note that electric illumination (arc, not incandescent, lights) and telephones were used, unquestionably the first employment of either in tunnel work. [Illustration: Figure 42.--ST. CLAIR TUNNEL. View of front of shield showing method of excavation in firm strata. Incandescent electric illumination was used. 1889-90. MHT model--1" scale. (Smithsonian photo 49260-D.)] THE ST. CLAIR TUNNEL The final model of the soft-ground series reflects, as did the Hoosac Tunnel model for hard-rock tunneling, final emergence into the modern period. Although the St. Clair Tunnel was completed over 70 years ago, it typifies in its method of construction, the basic procedures of subaqueous work in the present day. The Thames Tunnel of Brunel, and Haskin's efforts beneath the Hudson, had clearly shown that by themselves, both the shield and pneumatic systems of driving through fluid ground were defective in practice for tunnels of large area. Note that the earliest successful works by each method had been of very small area, so that the influence of adverse conditions was greatly diminished. The first man to perceive and seize upon the benefits to be gained by combining the two systems was, most fittingly, Greathead. Although he had projected the technique earlier, in driving the underground City and South London Railway in 1886, he brought together for the first time the three fundamental elements essential for the practical tunneling of soft, water-bearing ground: compressed-air support of the work during construction, the movable shield, and cast-iron, permanent lining. The marriage was a happy one indeed; the limitations of each system were almost perfectly overcome by the qualities of the others. The conditions prevailing in 1882 at the Sarnia, Ontario, terminal of the Grand Trunk Railway, both operational and physical, were almost precisely the same as those which inspired the undertaking of the Hudson River Tunnel. The heavy traffic at this vital U.S.--Canada rail interchange was ferried inconveniently across the wide St. Clair River, and the bank and river conditions precluded construction of a bridge. A tunnel was projected by the railway in that year, the time when Haskin's tribulations were at their height. Perhaps because of this lack of precedent for a work of such size, nothing was done immediately. In 1884 the railway organized a tunnel company; in 1886 test borings were made in the riverbed and small exploratory drifts were started across from both banks by normal methods of mine timbering. The natural gas, quicksand, and water encountered soon stopped the work. [Illustration: Figure 43.--REAR VIEW OF ST. CLAIR SHIELD showing the erector arm placing a cast-iron lining segment. The three motions of the arm--axial, radial, and rotational, were manually powered. (Smithsonian photo 49260-C.)] It was at this time that the railway's president visited Greathead's City and South London workings. The obvious answer to the St. Clair problem lay in the successful conduct of this subway. Joseph Hobson, chief engineer of the Grand Trunk and of the tunnel project, in designing a shield, is said to have searched for drawings of the shields used in the Broadway and Tower Subways of 1868-9, but unable to locate any, he relied to a limited extent on the small drawings of those in Drinker's volume. There is no explanation as to why he did not have drawings of the City and South London shield at that moment in use, unless one considers the rather unlikely possibility that Greathead maintained its design in secrecy. [Illustration: Figure 44.--OPENING OF THE ST. CLAIR TUNNEL, 1891. (_Photo courtesy of Detroit Library, Burton Historical Collection._)] The Hobson shield followed Greathead's as closely as any other, in having a diaphragm with closable doors, but a modification of Beach's sharpened horizontal shelves was also used. However, these functioned more as working platforms than supports for the earth. The machine was 21-1/2 feet in diameter, an unprecedented size and almost twice that of Greathead's current one. It was driven by 24 hydraulic rams. Throughout the entire preliminary consideration of the project there was a marked sense of caution that amounted to what seems an almost total lack of confidence in success. Commencement of the work from vertical shafts was planned so that if the tunnel itself failed, no expenditure would have been made for approach work. In April 1888, the shafts were started near both riverbanks, but before reaching proper depth the almost fluid clay and silt flowed up faster than it could be excavated and this plan was abandoned. After this second inauspicious start, long open approach cuts were made and the work finally began. The portals were established in the cuts, several thousand feet back from each bank and there the tunneling itself began. The portions under the shore were driven without air. When the banks were reached, brick bulkheads containing air locks were built across the opening and the section beneath the river, about 3,710 feet long, driven under air pressure of 10 to 28 pounds above atmosphere. For most of the way, the clay was firm and there was little air leakage. It was found that horses could not survive in the compressed air, and so mules were used under the river. In the firm clay, excavation was carried on several feet in front of the shield, as shown in the model (fig. 42). About twelve miners worked at the face. However, in certain strata the clay encountered was so fluid that the shield could be simply driven forward by the rams, causing the muck to flow in at the door openings without excavation. After each advance, the rams were retracted and a ring of iron lining segments built up, as in the Tower Subway. Here, for the first time, an "erector arm" was used for placing the segments, which weighed about half a ton. In all respects, the work advanced with wonderful facility and lack of operational difficulty. Considering the large area, no subaqueous tunnel had ever been driven with such speed. The average monthly progress for the American and Canadian headings totaled 455 feet, and at top efficiency 10 rings or a length of 15.3 feet could be set in a 24-hour day in each heading. The 6,000 feet of tunnel was driven in just a year; the two shields met vis-a-vis in August of 1890. The transition was complete. The work had been closely followed by the technical journals and the reports of its successful accomplishment thus were brought to the attention of the entire civil engineering profession. As the first major subaqueous tunnel completed in America and the first in the world of a size able to accommodate full-scale rail traffic, the St. Clair Tunnel served to dispel the doubts surrounding such work, and established the pattern for a mode of tunneling which has since changed only in matters of detail. Of the eight models, only this one was built under the positive guidance of original documents. In the possession of the Canadian National Railways are drawings not only of all elements of the shield and lining, but of much of the auxiliary apparatus used in construction. Such materials rarely survive, and do so in this case only because of the foresight of the railway which, to avoid paying a high profit margin to a private contractor as compensation for the risk and uncertainty involved, carried the contract itself and, therefore, preserved all original drawing records. While the engineering of tunnels has been comprehensively treated in this paper from the historical standpoint, it is well to still reflect that the advances made in tunneling have not perceptibly removed the elements of uncertainty but have only provided more positive and effective means of countering their forces. Still to be faced are the surprises of hidden streams, geologic faults, shifts of strata, unstable materials, and areas of extreme pressure and temperature. BIBLIOGRAPHY AGRICOLA, GEORGIUS. _De re Metallica._ [English transl. H. C. and L. H. Hoover (_The Mining Magazine_, London, 1912).] Basel: Froben, 1556. BEACH, ALFRED ELY. _The pneumatic dispatch._ New York: The American News Company, 1868. BEAMISH, RICHARD. _A memoir of the life of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel._ London: Longmans, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1862. BURR, S. D. V. _Tunneling under the Hudson River._ New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1885. COPPERTHWAITE, WILLIAM CHARLES. _Tunnel shields and the use of compressed air in subaqueous works._ New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1906. DRINKER, HENRY STURGESS. _Tunneling, explosive compounds and rock drills._ New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1878. LATROBE, BENJAMIN H. Report on the Hoosac Tunnel (Baltimore, October 1, 1862). Pp. 125-139, app. 2, in _Report of the commissioners upon the Troy and Greenfield Railroad and Hoosac Tunnel_. Boston, 1863. LAW, HENRY. A memoir of the Thames Tunnel. _Weale's Quarterly Papers on Engineering_ (London, 1845-46), vol. 3, pp. 1-25 and vol. 5, pp. 1-86. The pneumatic tunnel under Broadway, N.Y. _Scientific American_ (March 5, 1870), pp. 154-156. _Report of the commissioners upon the Troy and Greenfield Railroad and Hoosac Tunnel to his excellency the governor and the honorable the executive council of the state of Massachusetts, February 28, 1863._ Boston, 1863. STORROW, CHARLES S. Report on European tunnels (Boston, November 28, 1862). Pp. 5-122, app. 1, in _Report of the commissioners upon the Troy and Greenfield Railroad and Hoosac Tunnel...._ Boston, 1863. The St. Clair Tunnel. _Engineering News_ (in series running October 4 to December 27, 1890). FOOTNOTES [1] There are two important secondary techniques for opening subterranean and subaqueous ways, neither a method truly of tunneling. One of these, of ancient origin, used mainly in the construction of shallow subways and utility ways, is the "cut and cover" system, whereby an open trench is excavated and then roofed over. The result is, in effect, a tunnel. The concept of the other method was propounded in the early 19th century but only used practically in recent years. This is the "trench" method, a sort of subaqueous equivalent of cut and cover. A trench is dredged in the bed of a body of water, into which prefabricated sections of large diameter tube are lowered, in a continuous line. The joints are then sealed by divers, the trench is backfilled over the tube, the ends are brought up to dryland portals, the water is pumped out, and a subterranean passage results. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel (1960-1964) is a recent major work of this character. [2] In 1952 a successful machine was developed on this plan, with hardened rollers on a revolving cutting head for disintegrating the rock. The idea is basically sound, possessing advantages in certain situations over conventional drilling and blasting systems. [3] In 1807 the noted Cornish engineer Trevithick commenced a small timbered drift beneath the Thames, 5 feet by 3 feet, as an exploratory passage for a larger vehicular tunnel. Due to the small frontal area, he was able to successfully probe about 1000 feet, but the river then broke in and halted the work. Mine tunnels had also reached beneath the Irish Sea and various rivers in the coal regions of Newcastle, but these were so far below the surface as to be in perfectly solid ground and can hardly be considered subaqueous workings. [4] Unlike the Brunel tunnel, this was driven from both ends simultaneously, the total overall progress thus being 3 feet per shift rather than 18 inches. A top speed of 9 feet per day could be advanced by each shield under ideal conditions. [5] Ideally, the pressure of air within the work area of a pneumatically driven tunnel should just balance the hydrostatic head of the water without, which is a function of its total height above the opening. If the air pressure is not high enough, water will, of course, enter, and if very low, there is danger of complete collapse of the unsupported ground areas. If too high, the air pressure will overcome that due to the water and the air will force its way out through the ground, through increasingly larger openings, until it all rushes out suddenly in a "blowout." The pressurized atmosphere gone, the water then is able to pour in through the same opening, flooding the workings. * * * * * CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 42 THE "PIONEER": LIGHT PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE OF 1851 IN THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY _John H. White_ THE CUMBERLAND VALLEY RAILROAD 244 SERVICE HISTORY OF THE "PIONEER" 249 MECHANICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE "PIONEER" 251 FOOTNOTES _John H. White_ The "PIONEER": LIGHT PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE of 1851 _In the Museum of History and Technology_ [Illustration: Figure 1.--THE "PIONEER," BUILT IN 1851, shown here as renovated and exhibited in the Museum of History and Technology, 1964. In 1960 the locomotive was given to the Smithsonian Institution by the Pennsylvania Railroad through John S. Fair, Jr. (Smithsonian photo 63344B.)] _In the mid-nineteenth century there was a renewed interest in the light, single-axle locomotives which were proving so very successful for passenger traffic. These engines were built in limited number by nearly every well-known maker, and among the few remaining is the 6-wheel "Pioneer," on display in the Museum of History and Technology, Smithsonian Institution. This locomotive is a true representation of a light passenger locomotive of 1851 and a historic relic of the mid-nineteenth century._ THE AUTHOR: _John H. White is associate curator of transportation in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology._ The "PIONEER" is an unusual locomotive and on first inspection would seem to be imperfect for service on an American railroad of the 1850's. This locomotive has only one pair of driving wheels and no truck, an arrangement which marks it as very different from the highly successful standard 8-wheel engine of this period. All six wheels of the _Pioneer_ are rigidly attached to the frame. It is only half the size of an 8-wheel engine of 1851 and about the same size of the 4--2--0 so common in this country some 20 years earlier. Its general arrangement is that of the rigid English locomotive which had, years earlier, proven unsuitable for use on U.S. railroads. These objections are more apparent than real, for the _Pioneer_, and other engines of the same design, proved eminently successful when used in the service for which they were built, that of light passenger traffic. The _Pioneer's_ rigid wheelbase is no problem, for when it is compared to that of an 8-wheel engine it is found to be about four feet less; and its small size is no problem when we realize it was not intended for heavy service. Figure 2, a diagram, is a comparison of the _Pioneer_ and a standard 8-wheel locomotive. Since the service life of the _Pioneer_ was spent on the Cumberland Valley Railroad, a brief account of that line is necessary to an understanding of the service history of this locomotive. _Exhibits of the "Pioneer"_ The _Pioneer_ has been a historic relic since 1901. In the fall of that year minor repairs were made to the locomotive so that it might be used in the sesquicentennial celebration at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. On October 22, 1901, the engine was ready for service, but as it neared Carlisle a copper flue burst. The fire was extinguished and the _Pioneer_ was pushed into town by another engine. In the twentieth century, the _Pioneer_ was displayed at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904, and at the Wheeling, West Virginia, semicentennial in 1913. In 1927 it joined many other historic locomotives at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's "Fair of the Iron Horse" which commemorated the first one hundred years of that company. From about 1913 to 1925 the _Pioneer_ also appeared a number of times at the Apple-blossom Festival at Winchester, Virginia. In 1933-1934 it was displayed at the World's Fair in Chicago, and in 1948 at the Railroad Fair in the same city. Between 1934 and March 1947 it was exhibited at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Cumberland Valley Railroad The Cumberland Valley Railroad (C.V.R.R.) was chartered on April 2, 1831, to connect the Susquehanna and Potomac Rivers by a railroad through the Cumberland Valley in south-central Pennsylvania. The Cumberland Valley, with its rich farmland and iron-ore deposits, was a natural north-south route long used as a portage between these two rivers. Construction began in 1836, and because of the level valley some 52 miles of line was completed between Harrisburg and Chambersburg by November 16, 1837. In 1860, by way of the Franklin Railroad, the line extended to Hagerstown, Maryland. It was not until 1871 that the Cumberland Valley Railroad reached its projected southern terminus, the Potomac River, by extending to Powells Bend, Maryland. Winchester, Virginia, was entered in 1890 giving the Cumberland Valley Railroad about 165 miles of line. The railroad which had become associated with the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1859, was merged with that company in 1919. By 1849 the Cumberland Valley Railroad was in poor condition; the strap-rail track was worn out and new locomotives were needed. Captain Daniel Tyler was hired to supervise rebuilding the line with T-rail, and easy grades and curves. Tyler recommended that a young friend of his, Alba F. Smith, be put in charge of modernizing and acquiring new equipment. Smith recommended to the railroad's Board of Managers on June 25, 1851, that "much lighter engines than those now in use may be substituted for the passenger transportation and thereby effect a great saving both in point of fuel and road repairs...."[1] Smith may well have gone on to explain that the road was operating 3- and 4-car passenger trains with a locomotive weighing about 20 tons; the total weight was about 75 tons, equalling the uneconomical deadweight of 1200 pounds per passenger. Since speed was not an important consideration (30 mph being a good average), the use of lighter engines would improve the deadweight-to-passenger ratio and would not result in a slower schedule. The Board of Managers agreed with Smith's recommendations and instructed him "... to examine the two locomotives lately built by Mr. Wilmarth and now in the [protection?] of Captain Tyler at Norwich and if in his judgment they are adequate to our wants ... have them forwarded to the road."[2] Smith inspected the locomotives not long after this resolution was passed, for they were on the road by the time he made the following report[3] to the Board on September 24, 1851: In accordance with a resolution passed at the last meeting of your body relative to the small engines built by Mr. Wilmarth I proceeded to Norwich to make trial of their capacity--fitness or suitability to the Passenger transportation of our Road--and after as thorough a trial as circumstances would admit (being on another Road than our own) I became satisfied that with some necessary improvements which would not be expensive (and are now being made at our shop) the engines would do the business of our Road not only in a manner satisfactory in point of speed and certainty but with greater ultimate economy in Expenses than has before been practised in this Country. [Illustration: Figure 2.--DIAGRAM COMPARING the _Pioneer_ (shaded drawing) with the _Columbia_, a standard 8-wheel engine of 1851. (Drawing by J. H. White.)] _Columbia_ Hudson River Railroad Lowell Machine Shop, 1852 Wt. 27-1/2 tons (engine only) Cyl. 16-1/2 x 22 inches Wheel diam. 84 inches _Pioneer_ Cumberland Valley Railroad Seth Wilmarth, 1851 12-1/2 tons 8-1/2 x 14 inches 54 inches After making the above trial of the Engines--I stated to your Hon. President the result of the trial--with my opinion of their Capacity to carry our passenger trains at the speed required which was decidedly in favor of the ability of the Engines. He accordingly agreed that the Engines should at once be forwarded to the Road in compliance with the Resolution of your Board. I immediately ordered the Engines shipped at the most favorable rates. They came to our Road safely in the Condition in which they were shipped. One of the Engines has been placed on the Road and I believe performed in such a manner as to convince all who are able to judge of this ability to perform--although the maximum duty of the Engines was not performed on account of some original defects which are now being remedied as I before stated. Within ten days the Engine will be able to run regularly with a train on the Road where in shall be enabled to judge correctly of their merits. An accident occurred during the trial of the Small Engine at Norwich which caused a damage of about $300 in which condition the Engine came here and is now being repaired--the cost of which will be presented to your Board hereafter. As to the fault or blame of parties connected with the accident as also the question of responsibility for Repairs are questions for your disposal. I therefore leave the matter until further called upon. The Expenses necessarily incurred by the trial of the Engines and also the Expenses of transporting the same are not included in the Statement herewith presented, the whole amount of which will not probably exceed $400.00. These two locomotives became the Cumberland Valley Railroad's _Pioneer_ (number 13) and _Jenny Lind_ (number 14). While Smith notes that one of the engines was damaged during the inspection trials, Joseph Winters, an employee of the Cumberland Valley who claimed he was accompanying the engine enroute to Chambersburg at the time of their delivery, later recalled that both engines were damaged in transit.[4] According to Winters a train ran into the rear of the _Jenny Lind_, damaging both it and the _Pioneer_, the accident occurring near Middletown, Pennsylvania. The _Jenny Lind_ was repaired at Harrisburg but the _Pioneer_, less seriously damaged, was taken for repairs to the main shops of the Cumberland Valley road at Chambersburg. [Illustration: Figure 3.--"PIONEER," ABOUT 1901, showing the sandbox and large headlamp. Note the lamp on the cab roof, now used as the headlight. (Smithsonian photo 49272.)] While there seems little question that these locomotives were not built as a direct order for the Cumberland Valley Railroad, an article[5] appearing in the _Railroad Advocate_ in 1855 credits their design to Smith. The article speaks of a 2--2--4 built for the Macon and Western Railroad and says in part: This engine is designed and built very generally upon the ideas, embodied in some small tank engines designed by A. F. Smith, Esq., for the Cumberland Valley road. Mr. Smith is a strong advocate of light engines, and his novel style and proportions of engines, as built for him a few years since, by Seth Wilmarth, at Boston, are known to some of our readers. Without knowing all the circumstances under which these engines are worked on the Cumberland Valley road, we should not venture to repeat all that we have heard of their performances, it is enough to say that they are said to do more, in proportion to their weight, than any other engines now in use. The author believes that the _Railroad Advocate's_ claim of Smith's design of the _Pioneer_ has been confused with his design of the _Utility_ (figs. 6, 7). Smith designed this compensating-lever engine to haul trains over the C.V.R.R. bridge at Harrisburg. It was built by Wilmarth in 1854. [Illustration: Figure 4.--MAP OF THE CUMBERLAND VALLEY Railroad as it appeared in 1919.] According to statements of Smith and the Board of Managers quoted on page 244, the _Pioneer_ and the _Jenny Lind_ were not new when purchased from their maker, Seth Wilmarth. Although of recent manufacture, previous to June 1851, they were apparently doing service on a road in Norwich, Connecticut. It should be mentioned that both Smith and Tyler were formerly associated with the Norwich and Worcester Railroad and they probably learned of these two engines through this former association. It is possible that the engines were purchased from Wilmarth by the Cumberland Valley road, which had bought several other locomotives from Wilmarth in previous years. It was the practice of at least one other New England engine builder, the Taunton Locomotive Works, to manufacture engines on the speculation that a buyer would be found; if no immediate buyers appeared the engine was leased to a local road until a sale was made.[6] [Illustration: Figure 5.--AN EARLY BROADSIDE of the Cumberland Valley Railroad.] Regarding the _Jenny Lind_ and _Pioneer_, Smith reported[7] to the Board of Managers at their meeting of March 17, 1852: The small tank engines which were purchased last year ... and which I spoke in a former report as undergoing at that time some necessary improvements have since that time been fairly tested as to their capacity to run our passenger trains and proved to be equal to the duty. The improvements proposed to be made have been completed only on one engine [_Jenny Lind_] which is now running regularly with passenger trains--the cost of repairs and improvements on this engine (this being the one accidentally broken on the trial) amounted to $476.51. The other engine is now in the shop, not yet ready for service but will be at an early day. [Illustration: Figure 6.--THE "UTILITY" AS REBUILT TO AN 8-WHEEL ENGINE, about 1863 or 1864. It was purchased by the Carlisle Manufacturing Co. in 1882 and was last used in 1896. (Smithsonian photo 36716F.)] [Illustration: Figure 7.--THE "UTILITY," DESIGNED BY SMITH A. F. and constructed by Seth Wilmarth in 1854, was built to haul trains across the bridge at Harrisburg, Pa.] [Illustration: Figure 8.--THE EARLIEST KNOWN ILLUSTRATION of the _Pioneer_, drawn by A. S. Hull, master mechanic of the Cumberland Valley Railroad in 1876. It depicts the engine as it appeared in 1871. (_Courtesy of Paul Westhaeffer._)] The _Pioneer_ and _Jenny Lind_ achieved such success in action that the president of the road, Frederick Watts, commented on their performance in the annual report of the Cumberland Valley Railroad for 1851. Watts stated that since their passenger trains were rarely more than a baggage car and two coaches, the light locomotives "... have been found to be admirably adapted to our business." The Cumberland Valley Railroad, therefore, added two more locomotives of similar design in the next few years. These engines were the _Boston_ and the _Enterprise_, also built by Wilmarth in 1854-1855. Watts reported the _Pioneer_ and _Jenny Lind_ cost $7,642. A standard 8-wheel engine cost about $6,500 to $8,000 each during this period. In recent years, the Pennsylvania Railroad has stated the _Pioneer_ cost $6,200 in gold, but is unable to give the source for this information. The author can discount this statement for it does not seem reasonable that a light, cheap engine of the pattern of the _Pioneer_ could cost as much as a machine nearly twice its size. [Illustration: Figure 9.--ANNUAL PASS of the Cumberland Valley Railroad issued in 1863.] [Illustration: Figure 10.--TIMETABLE OF THE Cumberland Valley Railroad for 1878.] Service History of the _Pioneer_ After being put in service, the _Pioneer_ continued to perform well and was credited as able to move a 4-car passenger train along smartly at 40 mph.[8] This tranquility was shattered in October 1862 by a raiding party led by Confederate General J. E. B. Stuart which burned the Chambersburg shops of the Cumberland Valley Railroad. The _Pioneer_, _Jenny Lind_, and _Utility_ were partially destroyed. The Cumberland Valley Railroad in its report for 1862 stated: The Wood-shop, Machine-shop, Black-smith-shop, Engine-house, Wood-sheds, and Passenger Depot were totally consumed, and with the Engine-house three second-class Engines were much injured by the fire, but not so destroyed but that they may be restored to usefulness. However, no record can be found of the extent or exact nature of the damage. The shops and a number of cars were burned so it is reasonable to assume that the cab and other wooden parts of the locomotive were damaged. One unverified report in the files of the Pennsylvania Railroad states that part of the roof and brick wall fell on the _Pioneer_ during the fire causing considerable damage. In June 1864 the Chambersburg shops were again burned by the Confederates, but on this occasion the railroad managed to remove all its locomotives before the raid. During the Civil War, the Cumberland Valley Railroad was obliged to operate longer passenger trains to satisfy the enlarged traffic. The _Pioneer_ and its sister single-axle engines were found too light for these trains and were used only on work and special trains. Reference to table 1 will show that the mileage of the _Pioneer_ fell off sharply for the years 1860-1865. TABLE 1.--YEARLY MILEAGE OF THE PIONEER (From Annual Reports of the Cumberland Valley Railroad) _Year_: _Miles_ 1852 3,182[a] 1853 20,722[b] 1854 18,087 1855 14,151 1856 20,998 1857 22,779 1858 29,094 1859 29,571 1860 4,824 1861 4,346 1862 ([c]) 1863 5,339 1864 224 1865 2,215 1866 20,546 1867 5,709 1868 13,626 1869 1,372 1870 ... 1871 2,102 1872 4,002 1873 3,721 1874 3,466 1875 636 1876 870 1877 406 1878 4,433 1879 ... 1880 8,306 1881 ([d]) --------- Total 244,727[e] FOOTNOTES TO TABLE 1: [a] Mileage 1852 for January to September (no record of mileage recorded in Annual Reports previous to 1852). [b] 15,000 to 20,000 miles per year was considered very high mileage for a locomotive of the 1850's. [c] No mileage reported for any engines due to fire. [d] Not listed on roster. [e] The Pennsylvania Railroad claims a total mileage of 255,675. This may be accounted for by records of mileages for 1862, 1870, and 1879. In 1871 the _Pioneer_ was remodeled by A. S. Hull, master mechanic of the railroad. The exact nature of the alterations cannot be determined, as no drawings or photographs of the engine previous to this time are known to exist. In fact, the drawing (fig. 8) prepared by Hull in 1876 to show the engine as remodeled in 1871 is the oldest known illustration of the _Pioneer_. Paul Westhaeffer, a lifelong student of Cumberland Valley R. R. history, states that according to an interview with one of Hull's descendants the only alteration made to the _Pioneer_ during the 1871 "remodeling" was the addition of a handbrake. The road's annual report of 1853 describes the _Pioneer_ as a six-wheel tank engine. The report of 1854 mentions that the _Pioneer_ used link motion. These statements are enough to give substance to the idea that the basic arrangement has survived unaltered and that it has not been extensively rebuilt, as was the _Jenny Lind_ in 1878. By the 1870's, the _Pioneer_ was too light for the heavier cars then in use and by 1880 it had reached the end of its usefulness for regular service. After nearly thirty years on the road it had run 255,675 miles. Two new passenger locomotives were purchased in 1880 to handle the heavier trains. In 1881 the _Pioneer_ was dropped from the roster, but was used until about 1890 for work trains. After this time it was stored in a shed at Falling Spring, Pennsylvania, near the Chambersburg yards of the C.V.R.R. Mechanical Description of the _Pioneer_ [Illustration: Figure 11.--"PIONEER," ABOUT 1901, scene unknown. (_Photo courtesy of Thomas Norrell._)] After the early 1840's the single-axle locomotive, having one pair of driving wheels, was largely superseded by the 8-wheel engine. The desire to operate longer trains and the need for engines of greater traction to overcome the steep grades of American roads called for coupled driving wheels and machines of greater weight than the 4--2--0. After the introduction of the 4--4--0, the single-axle engine received little attention in this country except for light service or such special tasks as inspection or dummy engines. [Illustration: Figure 12.--THE "PIONEER" IN CARLISLE, PA., 1901. (_Photo courtesy of Thomas Norrell._)] There was, however, a renewed interest in "singles" in the early 1850's because of W. B. Adams' experiments with light passenger locomotives in England. In 1850 Adams built a light single-axle tank locomotive for the Eastern Counties Railway which proved very economical for light passenger traffic. It was such a success that considerable interest in light locomotives was generated in this country as well as in England. Nearly 100 single-axle locomotives were built in the United States between about 1845-1870. These engines were built by nearly every well-known maker, from Hinkley in Boston to the Vulcan Foundry in San Francisco. Danforth Cooke & Co. of Paterson built a standard pattern 4--2--4 used by many roads. One of these, the _C. P. Huntington_, survives to the present time. The following paragraphs describe the mechanical details of the _Pioneer_ as it appears on exhibition in the Smithsonian Institution's new Museum of History and Technology. BOILER The boiler is the most important and costly part of a steam locomotive, representing one-fourth to one-third of the total cost. A poorly built or designed boiler will produce a poor locomotive no matter how well made the remainder of mechanism. The boiler of the _Pioneer_ is of the wagon-top, crownbar, fire-tube style and is made of a 5/16-inch thick, wrought-iron plate. The barrel is very small, in keeping with the size of the engine, being only 27 inches in diameter. While some readers may believe this to be an extremely early example of a wagon-top boiler, we should remember that most New England builders produced few locomotives with the Bury (dome) boiler and that the chief advocates of this later style were the Philadelphia builders. By the early 1850's the Bury boiler passed out of favor entirely and the wagon top became the standard type of boiler with all builders in this country. Sixty-three iron tubes, 1-7/8 inches by 85 inches long are used. The original tubes may have been copper or brass since these were easier to keep tight than the less malleable iron tubes. The present tube sheet is of iron but was originally copper. Its thickness cannot be conveniently measured, but it is greater than that of the boiler shell, probably about 1/2 to 5/8 inch. While copper tubes and tube sheets were not much used in this country after about 1870, copper was employed as recently as 1950 by Robert Stephenson & Hawthorns, Ltd., on some small industrial locomotives. The boiler shell is lagged with wooden tongue-and-groove strips about 2-1/2 inches wide (felt also was used for insulation during this period). The wooden lagging is covered with Russia sheet iron which is held in place and the joints covered by polished brass bands. Russia sheet iron is a planish iron having a lustrous, metallic gray finish. [Illustration: Figure 14.--THE "FURY," BUILT FOR THE Boston and Worcester Railroad in 1849 by Wilmarth. It was known as a "Shanghai" because of its great height. (Smithsonian Chaney photo 6443.)] [Illustration: Figure 15.--THE "NEPTUNE," BUILT FOR THE Boston and Worcester in 1847 by Hinkley and Drury. Note the similarity of this engine and the _Fury_.] [Illustration: Figure 16.--THE "PIONEER" AS FIRST EXHIBITED in the Arts and Industries building of the Smithsonian Institution prior to restoration of the sandbox. (Smithsonian photo 48069D.)] The steam dome (fig. 18) is located directly over the firebox, inside the cab. It is lagged and jacketed in an identical manner to the boiler. The shell of the dome is of 5/16-inch wrought iron, the top cap is a cast-iron plate which also serves as a manhole cover offering access to the boiler's interior for inspection and repair. [Illustration: Figure 17.--"PIONEER" locomotive. (Drawing by J. H. White.)] [Illustration: Figure 18.--"PIONEER" LOCOMOTIVE, (1) Safety valve, (2) spring balance, (3) steam jet, (4) dry pipe, (5) throttle lever, (6) throttle, (7) crown bar, (8) front tube sheet, (9) check valve, (10) top rail, (11) rear-boiler bracket, (12) pedestal, (13) rocker bearing, (14) damper, (15) grate, (16) bottom rail, (17) pump heater valve, (18) cylinder lubricator, (19) reversing lever, (20) brake shoe, (21) mud ring, (22) blowoff cock, (23) ashpan. (Drawing by J. H. White.)] A round plate, 20 inches in diameter, riveted on the forward end of the boiler, just behind the bell stand, was found when the old jacket was removed in May 1963. The size and shape of the hole, which the plate covers, indicate that a steam dome or manhole was located at this point. It is possible that this was the original location of the steam dome since many builders in the early 1850's preferred to mount the dome forward of the firebox. This was done in the belief that there was less danger of priming because the water was less agitated forward of the firebox. The firebox is as narrow as the boiler shell and fits easily between the frame. It is a deep and narrow box, measuring 27 inches by 28 inches by about 40 inches deep, and is well suited to burning wood. A deep firebox was necessary because a wide, shallow box suitable for coal burning, allowed the fuel to burn so quickly it was difficult to fire the engine effectively. With the deep, narrow firebox, wood was filled up to the level of the fire door. In this way, the fire did not burn so furiously and did not keep ahead of the fireman; at the same time, since it burned so freely, a good fire was always on hand. The _Pioneer_ burned oak and hickory.[14] For the firebox 5/16-inch thick sheet was used, for heavier sheet would have blistered and flaked off because of the intense heat of the fire and the fibrous quality of wrought-iron sheet of the period. Sheet iron was fabricated from many small strips of iron rolled together while hot. These strips were ideally welded into a homogeneous sheet, but in practice it was found the thicker the sheet the less sure the weld. The fire grates are cast iron and set just a few inches above the bottom of the water space so that the water below the grates remains less turbulent and mud or other impurities in the water settle here. Four bronze mud plugs and a blowoff cock are fitted to the base of the firebox so that the sediment thus collected can be removed (figs. 17, 18). The front of the boiler is attached to the frame by the smokebox, which is a cylinder, bolted on a light, cast-iron saddle (not part of the cylinder castings nor attached to them, but bolted directly to the top rail of the frame; it may be a hastily made repair put on at the shops of the C.V.R.R.). The rear of the boiler is attached to the frame by two large cast-iron brackets, one on each side of the firebox (fig. 18). These are bolted to the top rail of the frame but the holes in the brackets are undoubtedly slotted, so that they may slide since the boiler will expand about 1/4 inch when heated. In addition to the crown bars, which strengthen the crown sheet, the boiler is further strengthened by stay bolts and braces located in the wagon top over the firebox, where the boiler had been weakened by the large hole necessary for the steam dome. This boiler is a remarkably light, strong, and compact structure. BOILER FITTINGS Few boiler fittings are found on the _Pioneer_ and it appears that little was done to update the engine with more modern devices during its many years of service. With the exception of the steam gauge, it has no more boiler fitting than when it left the builder's shop in 1851. The throttle valve is a simple slide valve and must have been primitive for the time, for the balance-poppet throttle valve was in use in this country previous to 1851. It is located directly below the steam dome even though it was common practice to place the throttle valve at the front of the boiler in the smokebox. Considering the cramped condition inside the smokebox, there would seem to be little space for the addition of the throttle valve; hence its present location. The dry pipe projects up into the steam dome to gather the hottest, driest steam for the cylinders. The inverted, funnel-like cap on the top of the dry pipe is to prevent priming, as drops of water may travel up the sides of the pipe and then to the cylinders, with the possibility of great damage. After the steam enters the throttle valve it passes through the front end of the valve, through the top of the boiler via the dry pipe (fig. 18), through the front tube sheet, and then to the cylinders via the petticoat pipes. The throttle lever is a simple arrangement readily understood from the drawings. It has no latch and the throttle lever is held in any desired setting by the wingnut and quadrant shown in figure 18. The water level in the boiler is indicated by the three brass cocks located on the backhead. No gauge glass is used; they were not employed in this country until the 1870's, although they were commonly used in England at the time the _Pioneer_ was built. While two safety valves were commonly required, only one was used on the _Pioneer_. The safety valve is located on top of the steam dome. Pressure is exerted on the lever by a spring balance, fixed at the forward end by a knife-blade bearing. The pressure can be adjusted by the thumbscrew on the balance. The graduated scale on the balance gave a general but uncertain indication of the boiler pressure. The valve itself is a poppet held against the face of the valve seat by a second knife blade attached to the lever. The ornamental column forming the stand of the safety valve is cast iron and does much to decorate the interior of the cab. The pipe carrying the escaping steam projects through the cab roof. It is made of copper with a decorative brass band. This entire mechanism was replaced by a modern safety valve for use at the Chicago Railroad Fair (1949). Fortunately, the old valve was preserved and has since been replaced on the engine. The steam gauge is a later addition, but could have been put on as early as the 1860's, since the most recent patent date that it bears is 1859. It is an Ashcroft gauge having a handsome 4--4--0 locomotive engraved on its silver face. The steam jet (item 3, fig. 18) is one of the simplest yet most notable boiler fitting of the _Pioneer_, being nothing more than a valve tapped into the base of the steam dome with a line running under the boiler jacket to the smokestack. When the valve is opened a jet of steam goes up the stack, creating a draft useful for starting the fire or enlivening it as necessary. This device was the invention of Alba F. Smith in 1852, according to the eminent 19th-century technical writer and engineer Zerah Colburn.[15] The two feedwater pumps (fig. 20) are located beneath the cab deck (1, fig. 17). They are cast-iron construction and are driven by an eccentric on the driving-wheel axle (fig. 27). The airchamber or dome (1, fig. 27) imparts a more steady flow of the water to the boiler by equalizing the surges of water from the reciprocating pump plunger. A steam line (3, fig. 18), which heats the pump and prevents freezing in cold weather, is regulated by a valve in the cab (figs. 18, 27). Note that the line on the right side of the cab has been disconnected and plugged. The eccentric drive for the pumps is unusual, and the author knows of no other American locomotive so equipped. Eastwick and Harrison, it is true, favored an eccentric drive for feed pumps, but they mounted the eccentric on the crankpin of the rear driving wheel and thus produced in effect a half-stroke pump. This was not an unusual arrangement, though a small crank was usually employed in place of the eccentric. The full-stroke crosshead pump with which the _Jenny Lind_ (fig. 22) is equipped, was of course the most common style of feed pump used in this country in the 19th century. [Illustration: Figure 19.--BACKHEAD of the _Pioneer_. (Smithsonian photo 48069F.)] Of all the mechanisms on a 19th-century locomotive, the feed pump was the most troublesome. If an engineer could think of nothing else to complain about, he could usually call attention to a defective pump and not be found a liar. Because of this, injectors were adopted after their introduction in 1860. It is surprising that the _Pioneer_, which was in regular service as late as 1880 and has been under steam many times since for numerous exhibitions, was never fitted with one of these devices. Because its stroke is short and the plunger is in less rapid motion, the present eccentric arrangement is more complex but less prone to disorder than the simpler but faster crosshead pump. [Illustration: Figure 20.--FEEDWATER PUMP of the _Pioneer_. (Smithsonian photo 63344.)] The check valves are placed slightly below the centerline of the boiler (fig. 18). These valves are an unfinished bronze casting and appear to be of a recent pattern, probably dating from the 1901 renovation. At the time the engine was built, it was usual to house these valves in an ornamental spun-brass casing. The smokestack is of the bonnet type commonly used on wood-burning locomotives in this country between about 1845 and 1870. The exhaust steam from the cylinders is directed up the straight stack (shown in phantom in fig. 27) by the blast pipe. This creates a partial vacuum in the smokebox that draws the fire, gases, ash, and smoke through the boiler tubes from the firebox. The force of the exhausting steam blows them out the stack. At the top of the straight stack is a deflecting cone which slows the velocity of the exhaust and changes its direction causing it to go down into the funnel-shaped outer casing of the stack. Here, the heavy embers and cinders are collected and prevented from directly discharging into the countryside as dangerous firebrands. Wire netting is stretched overtop of the deflecting cone to catch the lighter, more volatile embers which may defy the action of the cone. The term "bonnet stack" results from the fact that this netting is similar in shape to a lady's bonnet. The cinders thus accumulated in the stack's hopper could be emptied by opening a plug at the base of the stack. While the deflecting cone was regarded highly as a spark arrester and used practically to the exclusion of any other arrangement, it had the basic defect of keeping the smoke low and close to the train. This was a great nuisance to passengers, as the low trailing smoke blew into the cars. If the exhaust had been allowed to blast straight out the stack high into the air, most of the sparks would have burned out before touching the ground. [Illustration: Figure 21.--"PIONEER" ON EXHIBIT in old Arts and Industries building of the Smithsonian Institution. In this view can be seen the bonnet screen of the stack and arrangement of the boiler-frame braces and other details not visible from the floor. (Smithsonian photo 48069A.)] [Illustration: Figure 22.--"JENNY LIND," SISTER ENGINE of the _Pioneer_, shown here as rebuilt in 1878 for use as an inspection engine. It was scrapped in March 1905. (_Photo courtesy of E. P. Alexander._)] [Illustration: Figure 23.--CYLINDER head with valve box removed.] [Illustration: Figure 24.--BOTTOM of valve box with slide valve removed.] [Illustration: Figures 25 and 26.--CYLINDER with valve box removed, showing valve face.] FRAME The frame of the _Pioneer_ defies an exact classification but it more closely resembles the riveted- or sandwich-type frame than any other (figs. 18, 27). While the simple bar frame enjoyed the greatest popularity in the last century, riveted frames were widely used in this country, particularly by the New England builders between about 1840 and 1860. The riveted frame was fabricated from two plates of iron, about 5/8-inch thick, cut to the shape of the top rail and the pedestal. A bar about 2 inches square was riveted between the two plates. A careful study of photographs of Hinkley and other New England-built engines of the period will reveal this style of construction. The frame of the _Pioneer_ differs from the usual riveted frame in that the top rail is 1-3/4 inches thick by 4-1/8 inches deep and runs the length of the locomotive. The pedestals are made of two 3/8-inch plates flush-riveted to each side of the top rail. The cast-iron shoes which serve as guides for the journal boxes also act as spacers between the pedestal plates. The bottom rail of the frame is a 1-1/8-inch diameter rod which is forged square at the pedestals and forms the pedestal cap. The frame is further stiffened by two diagonal rods running from the top of each truck-wheel pedestal to the base of the driving-wheel pedestal, forming a truss. Six rods, riveted to the boiler shell and bolted to the frame's top rail, strengthen the frame laterally. Four of these rods can be seen easily as they run from the frame to the middle of the boiler; the other two are riveted to the underside of the boiler. The attachment of these rods to the boiler was an undesirable practice, for the boiler shell was thus subjected to the additional strain of the locomotive's vibrations as it passed over the road. In later years, as locomotives grew in size, this practice was avoided and frames were made sufficiently strong to hold the engine's machinery in line without using the boiler shell. The front and rear frame beams are of flat iron plate bolted to the frame. The rear beam had been pushed in during an accident, and instead of its being replaced, another plate was riveted on and bent out in the opposite direction to form a pocket for the rear coupling pin. Note that there is no drawbar and that the coupler is merely bolted to the beams. Since the engine only pulled light trains, the arrangement was sufficiently strong. RUNNING GEAR The running gear is simply sprung with individual leaf springs for each axle; it is not connected by equalizing levers. To find an American locomotive not equipped with equalizers is surprising since they were almost a necessity to produce a reasonably smooth ride on the rough tracks of American railroads. Equalizers steadied the motion of the engine by distributing the shock received by any one wheel or axle to all the other wheels and axles so connected, thus minimizing the effects of an uneven roadbed. The author believes that the _Pioneer_ is a hard-riding engine. The springs of the main drives are mounted in the usual fashion. The rear boiler bracket (fig. 18) is slotted so that the spring hanger may pass through for its connection with the frame. The spring of the leading wheels is set at right angles to the frame (fig. 27) and bears on a beam, fabricated of iron plate, which in turn bears on the journal boxes. The springs of the trailing wheels are set parallel with the frame and are mounted between the pedestal plates (fig. 18). The center of the driving wheel is cast iron and has spokes of the old rib pattern, which is a T in cross section, and was used previous to the adoption of the hollow spoke wheel. In the mid-1830's Baldwin and others used this rib-pattern style of wheel, except that the rib faced inside. The present driving-wheel centers are unquestionably original. The sister engine _Jenny Lind_ (fig. 22) was equipped with identical driving wheels. The present tires are very thin and beyond their last turning. They are wrought iron and shrunk to fit the wheel centers. Flush rivets are used for further security. The left wheel, shown in figure 17, is cracked at the hub and is fitted with an iron ring to prevent its breaking. The truck wheels, of the hollow spoke pattern, are cast iron with chilled treads. They were made by Asa Whitney, one of the leading car-wheel manufacturers in this country, whose extensive plant was located in Philadelphia. Made under Whitney's patent of 1866, these wheels may well have been added to the _Pioneer_ during the 1871 rebuilding. Railroad wheels were not cast from ordinary cast iron, which was too weak and brittle to stand the severe service for which they were intended, but from a high-quality cast iron similar to that used for cannons. Its tensile strength, which ranged from 31,000 to 36,000 psi, was remarkably high and very nearly approached that of the best wrought-iron plate. The cylinders are cast iron with an 8-1/2-inch bore about half the size of the cylinders of a standard 8-wheel engine. The cylinders are bolted to the frame but not to the saddle, and are set at a 9 deg. angle to clear the leading wheels and at the same time to line up with the center of the driving-wheel axle. The wood lagging is covered with a decorative brass jacket. Ornamental brass jacketing was extensively used on mid-19th-century American locomotives to cover not only the cylinders but steam and sand boxes, check valves, and valve boxes. The greater expense for brass (Russia iron or painted sheet iron were a cheaper substitute) was justified by the argument that brass lasted the life of the engine, and could be reclaimed for scrap at a price approaching the original cost; and also that when brightly polished it reflected the heat, preventing loss by radiation, and its bright surface could be seen a great distance, thus helping to prevent accidents at grade crossings. The reader should be careful not to misconstrue the above arguments simply as rationalization on the part of master mechanics more intent on highly decorative machines than on the practical considerations involved. The valve box, a separate casting, is fastened to the cylinder casting by six bolts. The side cover plates when removed show only a small opening suitable for inspection and adjustment of the valve. The valve box must be removed to permit repair or removal of the valve. A better understanding of this mechanism and the layout of the parts can be gained from a study of figures 23-26, 28 (8, 8A, and 8B). [Illustration: Figure 27.--"PIONEER" LOCOMOTIVE. (1) Air chamber, (2) reversing lever, (3) counterweight, (4) reversing shaft, (5) link hanger, (6) rocker, (7) feedwater line to boiler, (8) link block, (9) link, (10) eccentric, (11) pump plunger, (12) pump steamheater line, (13) feedwater pump, (14) wire netting [bonnet], (15) deflecting cone, (16) stack, (17) stack hopper. (Drawing by J. H. White.)] [Illustration: Figure 28.--REAR ELEVATION of _Pioneer_ and detail of valve shifter; valve face and valve. (Drawing by J. H. White.)] Both crossheads were originally of cast iron but one of these has been replaced and is of steel. They run into steel guides, bolted at the forward end to the rear cylinder head and supported in the rear by a yoke. The yoke is one of the more finished and better made pieces on the entire engine (fig. 27). The main rod is of the old pattern, round in cross section, and only 1-1/2 inches in diameter at the largest point. VALVE GEAR The valve gear is of the Stephenson shifting-link pattern (see fig. 27), a simple and dependable motion used extensively in this country between about 1850 and 1900. The author believes that this is the original valve gear of the _Pioneer_, since the first mention (1854) in the _Annual Report_ of the Cumberland Valley Railroad of the style of valve gear used by each engine, states that the _Pioneer_ was equipped with a shifting-link motion. Assuming this to be the original valve gear of the _Pioneer_, it must be regarded as an early application, because the Stephenson motion was just being introduced into American locomotive practice in the early 1850's. Four eccentrics drive the motion; two are for forward motion and two for reverse. The link is split and made of two curved pieces. The rocker is fabricated of several forged pieces keyed and bolted together. On better made engines the rocker would be a one-piece forging. The lower arm of each rocker is curiously shaped, made with a slot so that the link block may be adjusted. Generally, the only adjustment possible was effected by varying the length of the valve stem by the adjusting nuts provided. A simple weight and lever attached to the reversing shaft serve as a counterbalance for the links and thus assist the engineer in shifting the valve motion. There are eight positions on the quadrant of the reversing lever. [Illustration: Figure 29.--"PIONEER" on exhibit in old Arts and Industries building, showing the tank and backhead. (Smithsonian photo 48069E.)] MISCELLANEOUS NOTES The cab is solid walnut with a natural finish. It is very possible that the second cab was added to the locomotive after the 1862 fire. A brass gong used by the conductor to signal the engineer is fastened to the underside of the cab roof. This style of gong was in use in the 1850's and may well be original equipment. The water tank is in two sections, one part extending below the deck, between the frame. The tank holds 600 gallons of water. The tender holds one cord of wood. The small pedestal-mounted sandbox was used on several Cumberland Valley engines including the _Pioneer_. This box was removed from the engine sometime between 1901 and 1904. It was on the engine at the time of the Carlisle sesquicentennial but disappeared by the time of the St. Louis exposition. Two small sandboxes, mounted on the driving-wheel splash guards, replaced the original box. The large headlamp (fig. 3) apparently disappeared at the same time and was replaced by a crudely made lamp formerly mounted on the cab roof as a backup light. Headlamps of commercial manufacture were carefully finished and made with parabolic reflectors, elaborate burners, and handsomely fitted cases. Such a lamp could throw a beam of light for 1000 feet. The present lamp has a flat cone-shaped piece of tin for a reflector. The brushes attached to the pilot were used in the winter to brush snow and loose ice off the rail and thus improve traction. In good weather the brushes were set up to clear the tracks. [Illustration: Figure 30.--RECONSTRUCTED SANDBOX replaced on the locomotive, August 1962. (Drawing by J. H. White.)] After the _Pioneer_ had come to the National Museum, it was decided that some refinishing was required to return it as nearly as possible to the state of the original engine. Replacing the sandbox was an obvious change.[20] The brass cylinder jackets were also replaced. The cab was stripped and carefully refinished as natural wood. The old safety valve was replaced, as already mentioned. Rejacketing the boiler with simulated Russia iron produced a most pleasing effect, adding not only to the authenticity of the display but making the engine appear lighter and relieving the somber blackness which was not characteristic of a locomotive of the 1850's. Several minor replacements are yet to be done; chiefly among these are the cylinder-cock linkage and a proper headlamp. The question arises, has the engine survived as a true and accurate representation of the original machine built in 1851? In answer, it can be said that although the _Pioneer_ was damaged en route to the Cumberland Valley Railroad, modified on receipt, burned in 1862, and operated for altogether nearly 40 years, surprisingly few new appliances have been added, nor has the general arrangement been changed. Undoubtedly, the main reason the engine is so little changed is that its small size and odd framing did not invite any large investment for extensive alteration for other uses. But there can be no positive answer as to its present variance from the original appearance as represented in the oldest known illustration of it--the Hull drawing of 1871 (fig. 8). There are few, if any, surviving 19th-century locomotives that have not suffered numerous rebuildings and are not greatly altered from the original. The _John Bull_, also in the U.S. National Museum collection, is a good example of a machine many times rebuilt in its 30 years of service.[21] Unless other information is uncovered to the contrary, it can be stated that the _Pioneer_ is a true representation of a light passenger locomotive of 1851. _Alba F. Smith_ Alba F. Smith, the man responsible for the purchase of the _Pioneer_, was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, June 28, 1817.[9] Smith showed promise as a mechanic at an early age and by the time he was 22 had established leadpipe works in Norwich. His attention was drawn particularly to locomotives since the tracks of the Norwich and Worcester Railroad passed his shop. His attempts to develop a spark arrester for locomotives brought Smith to the favorable attention of Captain Daniel Tyler (1799-1882), president of the Norwich and Worcester Railroad. When Tyler was hired by the Cumberland Valley Railroad in 1850 to supervise the line's rebuilding, he persuaded the managers of that road to hire Smith as superintendent of machinery.[10] Smith was appointed as superintendent of the machine shop of the Cumberland Valley Railroad on July 22, 1850.[11] On January 1, 1851, he became superintendent of the road. In March of 1856 Smith resigned his position with the Cumberland Valley Railroad and became superintendent of the Hudson River Railroad, where he remained for only a year. During that time he designed the coal-burning locomotive _Irvington_, rebuilt the Waterman condensing dummy locomotive for use in hauling trains through city streets, and developed a superheater.[12] After retiring from the Hudson River Railroad he returned to Norwich and became active in enterprises in that area, including the presidency of the Norwich and Worcester Railroad. While the last years of Smith's life were devoted to administrative work, he found time for mechanical invention as well. In 1862 he patented a safety truck for locomotives, and became president of a concern which controlled the most important patents for such devices.[13] Alba F. Smith died on July 21, 1879, in Norwich, Connecticut. [Illustration: UNION WORKS, SOUTH BOSTON, SETH WILMARTH, Proprietor, [Illustration] MANUFACTURER OF LOCOMOTIVES, STATIONARY STEAM ENGINES AND STEAM BOILERS, OF THE VARIOUS SIZES REQUIRED, _Parts connected with Railroads, including Frogs, Switches, Chairs and Hand Cars._ MACHINISTS' TOOLS, of all descriptions, including _TURNING LATHES_, of sizes varying from 6 feet to 50 feet in length, and weighing from 500 pounds to 40 tons each; the latter capable of turning a wheel or pulley, _thirty feet in diameter_. PLANING MACHINES, Varying from 2 feet to 60 feet in length, and weighing from 200 lbs. to 70 tons each, and will plane up to 55 feet long and 7 feet square. Boring Mills, Vertical and Horizontal Drills, Slotting Machines, Punching Presses, Gear and Screw Cutting Machines, &c. &c. Also, Mill Gearing and Shafting. JOBBING AND REPAIRS, and any kind of work usually done in Machine Shops, executed at short notice. Figure 13.--ADVERTISEMENT OF SETH WILMARTH appearing in Boston city directory for 1848-1849.] _Seth Wilmarth_ Little is known of the builder of the _Pioneer_, Seth Wilmarth, and nothing in the way of a satisfactory history of his business is available. For the reader's general interest the following information is noted.[16] Seth Wilmarth was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, on September 8, 1810. He is thought to have learned the machinist trade in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, before coming to Boston and working for the Boston Locomotive Works, Hinkley and Drury proprietors. In about 1836 he opened a machine shop and, encouraged by an expanding business, in 1841 he built a new shop in South Boston which became known as the Union Works.[17] Wilmarth was in the general machine business but his reputation was made in the manufacture of machine tools, notably lathes. He is believed to have built his first locomotive in 1842, but locomotive building never became his main line of work. Wilmarth patterned his engines after those of Hinkley and undoubtedly, in common with the other New England builders of this period, favored the steady-riding, inside-connection engines. The "Shanghais," so-called because of their great height, built for the Boston and Worcester Railroad by Wilmarth in 1849, were among the best known inside-connection engines operated in this country (fig. 14). While the greater part of Wilmarth's engines was built for New England roads, many were constructed for lines outside that area, including the Pennsylvania Railroad, Ohio and Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Erie. A comparison of the surviving illustrations of Hinkley and Wilmarth engines of the 1850's reveals a remarkable similarity in their details (figs. 14 and 15). Notice particularly the straight boiler, riveted frame, closely set truck wheels, feedwater pump driven by a pin on the crank of the driving wheel, and details of the dome cover. All of the features are duplicated exactly by both builders. This is not surprising considering the proximity of the plants and the fact that Wilmarth had been previously employed by Hinkley. In 1854 Wilmarth was engaged by the New York and Erie Railroad to build fifty 6-foot gauge engines.[18] After work had been started on these engines, and a large store of material had been purchased for their construction, Wilmarth was informed that the railroad could not pay cash but that he would have to take notes in payment.[19] There was at this time a mild economic panic and notes could be sold only at a heavy discount. This crisis closed the Union Works. The next year, 1855, Seth Wilmarth was appointed master mechanic of the Charlestown Navy Yard, Boston, where he worked for twenty years. He died in Malden, Massachusetts, on November 5, 1886. * * * * * FOOTNOTES [1] _Minutes of the Board of Managers of the Cumberland Valley Railroad._ This book may be found in the office of the Secretary, Pennsylvania Railroad, Philadelphia, Pa., June 25, 1851. Hereafter cited as "Minutes C.V.R.R." [2] Ibid. [3] Minutes C.V.R.R. [4] _Franklin Repository_ (Chambersburg, Pa.), August 26, 1909. [5] _Railroad Advocate_ (December 29, 1855), vol. 2, p. 3. [6] C. E. FISHER, "Locomotives of the New Haven Railroad," _Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin_ (April 1938), no. 46, p. 48. [7] Minutes C.V.R.R. [8] _Evening Sentinel_ (Carlisle, Pa.), October 23, 1901. [9] _Norwich Bulletin_ (Norwich, Conn.), July 24, 1879. All data regarding A. F. Smith is from this source unless otherwise noted. [10] _Railway Age_ (September 13, 1889), vol. 14, no. 37. Page 600 notes that Tyler worked on C.V.R.R. 1851-1852; Smith's obituary (footnote 9) mentions 1849 as the year; and minutes of C.V.R.R. mention Tyler as early as 1850. [11] Minutes C.V.R.R. [12] A. F. HOLLEY, _American and European Railway Practice_ (New York: 1861). An illustration of Smith's superheater is shown on plate 58, figure 13. [13] JOHN H. WHITE, "Introduction of the Locomotive Safety Truck," (Paper 24, 1961, in _Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology: Papers 19-30_, U.S. National Museum Bulletin 228; Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1963), p. 117. [14] _Annual Report_, C.V.R.R., 1853. [15] ZERAH COLBURN, _Recent Practice in Locomotive Engines_ (1860), p. 71. [16] _Railroad Gazette_ (September 27, 1907), vol. 43, no. 13, pp. 357-360. These notes on Wilmarth locomotives by C. H. Caruthers were printed with several errors concerning the locomotives of the Cumberland Valley Railroad and prompted the preparation of these present remarks on the history of Wilmarth's activities. Note that on page 359 it is reported that only one compensating-lever engine was built for the C.V.R.R. in 1854, and not two such engines in 1852. The _Pioneer_ is incorrectly identified as a "Shanghai," and as being one of three such engines built in 1871 by Wilmarth. [17] The author is indebted to Thomas Norrell for these and many of the other facts relating to Wilmarth's Union Works. [18] _Railroad Gazette_ (October 1907), vol. 43, p. 382. [19] _Boston Daily Evening Telegraph_ (Boston, Mass.), August 11, 1854. The article stated that one engine a week was built and that 10 engines were already completed for the Erie. Construction had started on 30 others. [20] The restoration work has been ably handled by John Stine of the Museum staff. Restoration started in October 1961. [21] S. H. OLIVER, _The First Quarter Century of the Steam Locomotive in America_ (U.S. National Museum Bulletin 210; Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1956), pp. 38-46. * * * * * PAPER 42: Typographical Corrections Page 259: "as late as 1880 and has been under steam" (was stream). Page 267: "made with parabolic reflectors" (was parobolic). * * * * * CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 43 HISTORY OF THE DIVISION OF MEDICAL SCIENCES by SAMI HAMARNEH SECTION OF MATERIA MEDICA (1881-1898) 272 DIVISION OF MEDICINE (1898-1939) 276 DIVISION OF MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH (1939-1957) 281 DIVISION OF MEDICAL SCIENCES (1957 TO PRESENT) 290 A NEW DIMENSION FOR THE HEALING ARTS 292 BIBLIOGRAPHY 297 FOOTNOTES _Sami Hamarneh_ HISTORY of the DIVISION of MEDICAL SCIENCES _In The Museum of History and Technology_ [Illustration: Figure 1.--EARLY VIEW OF THE UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM, known for the last quarter of a century as the Arts and Industries building. Completed in 1881, it housed the Division of Medical Sciences from its establishment in 1881 as a Section of Materia Medica to the time of the writing of this paper. While the medical collection remained in the Department of Arts and Industries, by the end of June 1912 practically all other collections belonging to the fields of natural history and anthropology were transferred to the then new Natural History building.] _This paper traces, for the first time, the history of the Division of Medical Sciences in the Museum of History and Technology from its small beginnings as a section of materia medica in 1881 to its present broad scope. The original collection of a few hundred specimens of crude drugs which had been exhibited at the centennial exhibition of 1876 at Philadelphia, has now developed into the largest collection in the Western Hemisphere of historical objects related to the healing arts._ THE AUTHOR: _Sami Hamarneh is the curator of the Division of Medical Sciences in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology._ By the early 1870's, leading figures from both the health professions and the general public had begun to realize the necessity for having the medical sciences represented in the Smithsonian Institution. The impetus behind this new feeling resulted from the action of a distinguished American physician, philanthropist, and author, Joseph Meredith Toner (1825-1896), and came almost a decade before the integration of a new section concerned with research and the historical and educational aspects of the healing arts in the Smithsonian Institution. In 1872, Dr. Toner established the "Toner Lectures" to encourage efforts towards discovering new truths "for the advancement of medical science ... for the benefit of mankind." To finance these lectures, he provided a fund worth approximately $3,000 to be administered by a board of trustees consisting of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the Surgeon General of the U.S. Navy, the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army (only in some years), and the president of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia. The interest from this fund was to compensate physicians and scholars who were to deliver "at least two annual memoirs or essays" based on original research on some branch of the medical sciences and containing information which had been verified "by experiments or observations."[1] The Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution agreed to have these lectures published by the Institution in its Miscellaneous Collections. The first lecture given by the Assistant Surgeon of the U.S. Army, "On the Structure of Cancerous Tumors and the Mode in which Adjacent parts are Invaded," deserves credit even by current standards of scientific research.[2] Only 10 lectures were given between 1873 and 1890 (see bibliography), despite the recommendation for at least two every year.[3] [Illustration: Figure 2.--DR. JOSEPH M. TONER, a leading physician in Washington, D.C., and founder of the "Toner Lectures" for the promotion and advancement of medical education and research. In 1873, Dr. Toner became president of the American Medical Association and, in 1874, he became president of the American Public Health Association. He was a physician to St. Joseph's Male Orphan Asylum and St. Ann's Infants' Asylum in Washington, D.C. In addition, he was instrumental in establishing Providence Hospital in the District of Columbia. He also provided a workable plan for the American Medical Association's library in Washington, D.C. (1868-1871). Among his several publications are: _Contributions to the Annals of Medical Progress and Medical Education in the United States before and during the War of Independence_ (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1874) and _Medical Men of the Revolution_ (1876). In 1882, he donated his large library, consisting of 44,000 books and pamphlets on topics related mainly to medicine and history, to the Library of Congress. (_Photo courtesy of National Library of Medicine._)] A more direct factor, which not only contributed to the establishment of a section on the healing arts, but also had a greater effect upon the Smithsonian Institution than any other event since its founding, was the 1876 centennial exhibition in Philadelphia. This magnificent international fair commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The finest exhibits of 30 foreign countries and various States of the Union participating in the fair were finally donated to the Smithsonian Institution as the official depository of historical and archeological objects for this country. As a result, the Institution's collections increased to an extent far beyond the capacity of the first Smithsonian building. This led to the erection of the National Museum, known for the last two decades and until date of publication as the Arts and Industries building, which was completed on March 4, 1881, and was used that evening for the inaugural reception of incoming President James A. Garfield. Section of Materia Medica (1881-1898) Throughout the 19th century, the study of _materia medica_ (dealing with the nature and properties of drugs of various kinds and origins, their collection and mode of administration for the treatment of diseases, and the medicinal utilization of animal products) held an increasingly important place among the medical sciences. In the United States, as in other civilized countries, this topic was greatly emphasized in the curriculum of almost every school teaching the health professions. Today, the subject matter contained in this branch of science is taught under the heading of several specialized fields, such as pharmacology, pharmacognosy, and drug analysis of various types. However, when the decision was made in 1881 to promote greater knowledge and interest in the healing arts by creating a section devoted to such pursuits in the U.S. National Museum, the title of Section of Materia Medica was adopted. Added to this, was the fact that the bulk of the first collections received in the Section was a great variety of crude drugs, which constituted much of the material then taught in the academic courses of _materia medica_. The new Section was included in the Department of Arts and Industries, then under the curatorship of Assistant Director G. Brown Goode. From its beginning and for two decades, however, the Section of Materia Medica was sponsored and supervised by the U.S. Navy in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution. For this reason, the Navy decided not to establish a similar bureau for a health museum as did the Army in starting the Medical Museum (of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology) in 1862 through the efforts of Dr. William Alexander Hammond. The Smithsonian did, however, provide a clerk to relieve the curator of much of the routine work. The Section's early vigorous activities were the result of the ingenuity of the first honorary curator, Dr. James Milton Flint (1838-1919), an Assistant Surgeon of the U.S. Navy. From the establishment of the Section, in 1881, to 1912, Dr. Flint was curator during separate periods for a total of nearly 25 years. For three of his tenures (1881-1884; 1887-1891; 1895-1900), he was detailed to the Smithsonian Institution by the Surgeon General of the U.S. Navy. During the interim periods, other naval doctors were detailed as curators. Finally, in 1900, Dr. Flint retired from the Navy with the rank of Rear Admiral and volunteered to continue his services to the National Museum. The proposal was gladly accepted and he continued as a curator until his retirement from the Smithsonian Institution in 1912. [Illustration: Figure 3.--REAR ADMIRAL JAMES M. FLINT, U.S. Navy surgeon and first honorary curator of the Section of Materia Medica. (_Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress._)] The Section commenced with a wealth of material. After the close of the 1876 centennial exhibition, its _materia medica_ collection had been stored with the other collections in a warehouse, awaiting an appropriation by Congress for transfer and installation. This collection was gradually brought into the new National Museum after that building's completion in 1881. Many other _materia medica_ specimens were transferred from the Department of Agriculture. In addition to these large collections of crude drugs, generous contributions came from several prominent pharmaceutical firms such as Parke, Davis & Company of Detroit, Michigan; Wallace Brothers of Statesville, North Carolina; and Schieffelin and Company of New York City. These manufacturing houses are mentioned here because they and their agents abroad were the first to take interest and donate to the Section, complete assortments of contemporary remedial agents then in common use throughout the United States and Europe, besides many hundreds of "rare and curious drugs." Thus, in spite of difficulties encountered from bringing several collections into the building at one time, the _materia medica_ exhibition got off to a good start. It was Dr. Flint, the first curator, who stated in 1883 that remedial agents used by a nation or a community are as indicative of the degree of their cultural development and standard of living as is the nature of their food, the character of their dwellings, and their social and religious traditions. Therefore, he felt that collections of drugs and medical, surgical and pharmaceutical instruments and appliances should not be thought of or designed as instructive to the specialist only, but should also possess a general interest for the public. Because of these objectives, Dr. Flint added, this section was conceived as a departmental division for the collecting and exhibiting of objects related to medicine, surgery, pharmacology, hygiene, and all material related to the health field at large.[4] During his first term of curatorship (1881-1884), Dr. Flint devoted much of his time to sorting, examining, identifying, and classifying the _materia medica_ specimens.[5] In 1881, he issued a memorandum of instructions to be followed by collectors of drugs and urged them to give detailed and accurate information regarding acquired specimens so that they might be "more than mere museum curiosities." In addition, in 1883, he prepared a brief manual of classification of the _materia medica_ collection in the Museum as well as a useful, detailed catalog of informational labels of the individual objects on exhibition. The unpublished catalog is still the property of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Division of Medical Sciences' Library. It was Dr. Flint's ambition to obtain a comprehensive, worldwide collection of all substances used as remedies. Then, in order to identify drugs from foreign countries, he tried to collect illustrated works on medical botany and printed pharmacopoeias of all nations having them. He rightly defined an official pharmacopoeia as "a book containing directions for the identification and preparation of medicines prepared and issued with the sanction of a government or organized and authorized medical and pharmaceutical societies. Its purpose is to establish uniformity in the nomenclature of remedies and in the character and potency of the pharmaceutical preparations. It is enacted by legislation, and thus becomes binding on all who prepare drugs or sell them for medication." By soliciting the help of various American consuls and Navy officers abroad, about 16 such official pharmacopoeias were collected, making an almost complete international representation of all available, official, drug standards. With these sources of information, Dr. Flint compiled and arranged an international list of _materia medica_ specimens, indicating the authorized preparations of each. By so doing, the first curator of this Section took the initiative at least in proposing and, to some extent acting, on the preparation of an international pharmacopoeia of drugs used in existing authorized formularies giving "official synonyms, and tables showing the constituents and comparative strength of all preparations."[6] This undertaking is of special importance in the history of American pharmacy, since it was probably the first attempt of its kind in the United States.[7] In addition, colored plates and photographs of medicinal plants were collected, forming the nucleus of the Division's current collection of pictorial and photographic material related to the history of the health field. Dr. Flint also put on exhibition 630 Chinese _materia medica_ specimens from the 1876 Philadelphia centennial. These had been collected originally by the Chinese Imperial Customs Commission for the centennial and were subsequently given to this country. In 1881, the numbered objects in the Section's register amounted to 1,574 entries. In the following year, 1,590 more specimens were added, most of them drugs in their crude state. By the end of 1883, the total collection had reached 4,037, out of which 3,240 individual drugs in good condition were classified and put on display. Of these, about 500 specimens with beautiful illustrations of parts of their original plants had been mounted for exhibition. The drug exhibitions also included materials transferred from the Department of Agriculture in 1881, which originally had been brought from Central America and South America for the 1876 centennial exhibition, a variety of opium specimens from Turkey, and a number of rare drugs listed in the official formulary which were acquired from the Museum of Karachi in what was then India. Dr. Flint commented in the _Smithsonian Annual Report_ for 1883 that the collection of cinchona barks was especially complete. It was comprised of specimens of nearly all the natural cinchona barks of South America and every known variety of the cultivated product from the British government plantations in India. In addition, there were specimens from Java, Ceylon, Mexico, and Jamaica. The Indian and Jamaican barks were accompanied by herbarium specimens of the leaf and flower (and, in some cases, the fruit) of each variety of tree from which the bark was obtained.[8] In an attempt to protect specimens liable to attack by insects, a small piece of blotting paper moistened with chloroform was inserted underneath the stopper in each bottle. Later on, bichloride of mercury was found to be a better insecticide. These early collections of the Section were brought into admirable condition and received compliments for their organization and completeness. In the _Smithsonian Annual Report_ for 1883, the collections were praised as "superior to any other in the United States and scarcely excelled by any in Europe." [Illustration: Figure 4.--DR. HENRY GUSTAV BEYER, the second honorary curator of the Section of Materia Medica (1884-1887). (_Photo courtesy of American Physiological Society._)] In spite of the apparent emphasis on the displaying of drugs, the first curator of the Section had envisioned that the exhibits eventually would embrace the entire field of the healing arts. In the _Smithsonian Annual Report_ for 1883, Dr. Flint noted that "in the establishment of a museum designed to illustrate man and his environment, it is proper that the materials and methods used for the prevention and cure of disease should have a place." However, his plans were temporarily interrupted when his first term as honorary curator ended in 1884. On June 4, 1884, Dr. Henry Gustav Beyer was detailed by the Department of the Navy to become the second honorary curator of the Section of Materia Medica. As a young man, Dr. Beyer (1850-1918) had come from Saxony, Germany, to the United States and, in due course, became a naturalized citizen. He was graduated from the Bellevue Hospital Medical College of New York City in 1876. Because of his interest in physiological experimental research, Dr. Beyer enrolled at the Johns Hopkins University, where he was awarded a Ph. D. degree in 1887. Unlike his predecessor, Dr. Beyer was primarily interested in carrying on research on the physiological action of certain drugs and in pharmacology. This was evident from the original scientific papers mentioned in the _Smithsonian Annual Reports_ and published by him during the period of his curatorship from 1884 to 1887. Despite the pressure of his postgraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Beyer helped in arranging and classifying the _materia medica_ collection without trying to extend materially the scope of the Section. After the term of Dr. Beyer expired in 1887, Dr. Flint returned to take charge of the Section. Surprisingly, at this time, it seems that he showed less enthusiasm and devotion to the work of the Museum which he had previously served so well. It could have been a disappointment resulting from a lack of evidence of any real progress in the Section since he had left it three years before. Whatever the reasons may have been, the _Smithsonian Annual Reports_ show that only a few hundred specimens were added to the _materia medica_ collections between 1887 and 1890, bringing the total to 5,915 preserved in good condition. Further curtailment of the Section's activities began in November 1891 when Dr. Flint was again transferred to other duties for the U.S. Navy. From November 1891 to May 24, 1895, curatorship of the Section was charged to five physicians of the U.S. Navy: Drs. John C. Boyd (from November 1891 to April 6, 1892); William S. Dixon (April 1892 to January 5, 1893); C. H. White (January 1893 to July 15, 1893); C. U. Gravatt (July 1893 to January 22, 1894); R. A. Marmion (January 22, 1894 to June 15, 1894); and to Medical Inspector Daniel McMurtrie (June 1894 to May 24, 1895). During this interim of nearly three and a half years, there were neither literary contributions nor additions made to the collections of the Section that were of any significance. The reason is obvious, for all of these curators averaged less than seven months of service which is not enough time, even for a well-trained individual, to accomplish very much in a museum. Therefore, it is easy to imagine that when the Secretary of the Navy detailed Dr. Flint for a third time to take charge of the Section, he was rather discouraged. Nevertheless, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, from September 18 to December 31, 1895, the _materia medica_ was represented by two displays: one on mineral waters and amounts of solid constituents in pure state; and another showing the quantities of minerals after analysis of the composition of the human body. A similar project was undertaken in 1897 at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition (May 1 to October 31) in Nashville, where there were two displays of _materia medica_. One showed several kinds of the cinchona barks and the medicinal preparations made from them, and another containing the commercial varieties of the alkaloids of opium. At this time, Dr. Flint's attention turned to a new phase of medical exhibition. He felt the need for a program of exhibits on the practice and the historical development of the healing arts. A change of the Section's name was deemed necessary and, thus, in 1898 the more comprehensive title of Division of Medicine was adopted. Division of Medicine (1898-1939) The statement by L. Emmett Holt of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, that before 1906, the Smithsonian Institution was never a beneficiary to medicine in any form,[9] is not entirely applicable. The previous discussion has clearly shown that the U.S. National Museum's cooperation with the Navy contributed materially towards encouraging and promoting medical knowledge. Furthermore, Dr. Flint tried to bring many of his plans for this medical division of the Museum to a practical fulfillment. He devised a program for presenting medical history in a way which would be of interest both to the public and to the profession. In order to best illustrate the history of the healing art, he divided his subject matter into five provisional classifications according to the _Report upon the Condition and Progress of the U.S. National Museum_ during 1898: 1. Magical medicine including exorcism, amulets, talismans, fetishes and incantation; 2. Psychical medicine including faith cures, and hypnotism; 3. Physical and external medicine including baths, exercise, electricity, massage, surgery, cautery, and blood-letting; 4. Internal medicine including medications and treatment used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Hindus, Arabians, and Chinese; and 5. Preventive medicine including beverages, food, soil, clothing and habitation. It is certainly to Dr. Flint's credit that from its early conception, first as Section of Materia Medica and thereafter as Division of Medicine, he planned for an all-embracing exhibition and reference collection of the medical sciences. Until the end of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century, crude drugs as well as primitive and magic medicine held a more prominent place than medical instruments in the exhibits and collections. In 1905, Flint issued his last, known, literary contribution, "Directions for Collecting Information and Objects Illustrating the History of Medicine," in Part S of _Bulletin of the U.S. National Museum_, no. 39. The emphasis he put upon this shows Dr. Flint's interest in collecting medical and pharmaceutical objects and equipment of historical value. Consequently, he arranged new exhibits including one on American Indian medicine. A medical historian, Fielding H. Garrison, inspected these about 1910 and, in his "An Introduction to the History of Medicine," wrote of their novelty and appeal. "In the interesting exhibit of folk medicine in the National Museum at Washington," he commented, "a buckeye or horse chestnut (_Aesculus flavus_), an Irish potato, a rabbit's foot, a leather strap previously worn by a horse, and a carbon from an arc light are shown as sovereign charms against rheumatism. Other amulets in the Washington exhibit," he added, "are the patella of a sheep and a ring made out of a coffin nail (dug out of a graveyard) for cramps and epilepsy, a peony root to be carried in the pocket against insanity, and rare and precious stones for all and sundry diseases." It had been Dr. Flint's intention, besides presenting an educational display on the history of the medical arts, to warn the public against the perils of quackery and the faults of folk medicine, as well as to expose evils in drug adulteration. Today, we can see actual fulfillment of these intentions in the present exhibit at the medical gallery which has been executed recently on the basis of scientific, historical research. After Dr. Flint's retirement from the Smithsonian Institution in 1912, there was no replacement for over five years. Therefore, the Division of Medicine was placed, for administrative purposes, under the supervision of the curator of the newly reestablished (1912) Division of Textiles, Frederick L. Lewton. During these years, he fought against the dispersal of the medical and _materia medica_ collections. Thus, for lack of a curator of its own, almost all new activities in the Division of Medicine were curtailed until 1917. On January 31, 1917, Lewton addressed members of the American Pharmaceutical Association inviting them to cooperate in gathering up and preserving at the National Museum the "many unique and irreplaceable objects" connected with the early history of pharmacy in this country which could still be saved.[10] Then, on March 14, 1917, an examination was announced by the Civil Service (held May 2) for an assistant curator for the Division of Medicine, and the position was filled by Joseph Donner on August 16, 1917. Donner was the first full-time employee paid by the Smithsonian Institution for the curatorship of this Division. He held the post until January 31, 1918, when he was inducted into the Sanitary Corps of the United States Army. No significant activities in the Division of Medicine were reported during these few months. Mr. Donner was followed by a second, full-time, museum officer who promoted a great amount of good will towards the Division during his curatorship of a little over 30 years. Dr. Charles Whitebread (1877-1963), the first pharmacist to head the Division, joined the Smithsonian in 1918 and remained until his retirement in 1948, the longest service, thus far, of any individual in the Division. Dr. Whitebread received his degree of Doctor of Pharmacy from the School of Pharmacy at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1911. He entered government service late in 1915, but it was not until April 2, 1918, that he agreed to become assistant curator of the Division of Medicine. Curator Whitebread's first year was an active and challenging one, for in this new position he began to develop a deep interest in the history of the healing arts. He made a number of important acquisitions, most of them pertaining to pharmaceutical products, synthetic chemicals and crude drugs. He found that many specimens from the older drug collections had deteriorated to such an extent as to be worthless, and he began replacing them with freshly marketed drugs. [Illustration: Figure 5.--CURATOR CHARLES WHITEBREAD inspecting, with admiration, five drug containers from the Squibb collection (1945). (_Photo courtesy of the American Pharmaceutical Association._)] Plans were completed for the opening of new medical exhibits and adopting, with some modifications and additions, earlier classifications set by Dr. Flint. Dr. Whitebread grouped these into the following classes: the evaluation of the healing arts; a picture display of medical men prominent in American history;[11] a _materia medica_ display including the history of pharmacy; and an exhibition on Sanitation and Public Hygiene[12] which was later to evolve into the Hall of Health. In 1920, Dr. Whitebread added a number of specimens of medical-dosage forms and pharmaceutical preparations to the Division's collections. He also acquired other gifts to complete existing exhibits illustrating the basic principles of the various schools of medicine, such as homeopathy and osteopathy--their methods, tools, and ways of thought. In 1921, a tablet machine by the Arthur Colton Company of Detroit, Michigan, was acquired, and an exhibit illustrating vaccine and serum therapy was installed in the medical gallery. This was followed, in 1922, by a collection arranged to tell the story of the prevention and cure of specific diseases by means of biological remedies. During the following two years, two more exhibits related to hospital supplies and sanitation were added to the rapidly developing Hall of Health exhibition which was opened in 1924. A third exhibit in 1925 consisted of 96 mounted color transparencies illustrating services provided by hospitals to promote public health. Plans for the further development of the Hall of Health continued during 1926, and contacts were made with organizations interested in the educational aspects of the healing arts. As a result, several new exhibits were added. In 1926, the American Optometric Association helped in the installation of an exhibit on conservation of vision or the care of the eyes under the slogan "Save your vision," as a phase of health work. Other exhibits in the Hall at this time were: what parasites are; water pollution and how to obtain pure water; waste disposal; ventilation and healthy housing, and the importance of recreation; purification of milk and how to obtain pure milk; transmission of diseases by insects and animals; how life begins; prenatal and postnatal care and preschool care; duties of the public health nurse; and social, oral and mental hygiene. With the acquiring of more medical appliances and the widening of the scope of the exhibits, more and more space was needed, and attention was turned to the area of the medical gallery which had been occupied by the _materia medica_ collection for almost four decades. To gain more exhibit space, it was decided that the greater part of the crude drugs should be removed from the exhibits and be kept as a reference collection and for research.[13] [Illustration: Figure 6.--EXHIBIT ON EGYPTIAN AND HEBREW MEDICINE, installed about 1924, which was illustrated by graphs and drugs mentioned in extant records of this ancient period. (Smithsonian photo 30796-C.)] [Illustration: Figure 7.--EXHIBIT ON MEDICAL HISTORY during the Greco-Roman period. (Smithsonian photo 30796-D.)] [Illustration: Figure 8.--EXHIBIT ON REMEDIES DERIVED FROM DRUGS of vegetable origin, displayed about mid-1930's. (Smithsonian photo 30439.)] In 1926, original patent models including those related to pharmacy, medicine, and dentistry, were transferred from the U.S. Patent Office to the National Museum. These patent models, together with other apothecary tools and the machines used in drug production took up most of the available space. This unfortunate situation led Dr. Whitebread to turn down significant medical and pharmaceutical collections offered the Museum between 1927 and 1930. Since the patent models were devised for inventions designed to simplify the practice of the health professions, three cases of these models were displayed in the medical gallery in the early 1930's. Other exhibits shown during this decade included the deception of folk medicine with warnings against superstitions, and an exhibition on osteopathy,[14] as well as dioramas on the manufacture of medicines and their use in scientific medical treatment. In the meantime, Dr. Whitebread was an active contributor to the literature of the health field in various periodicals, as well as in pamphlets issued by the Museum and other governmental agencies (see bibliography). His literary contributions, guided by the exhibits he designed and the collections he acquired, were focused on the Division's collections, such as primitive and psychic medicine and warnings against reliance on magic and superstitions in treatment, medical oddities, and the utilization of drugs of animal origin, both past and present. Division of Medicine and Public Health (1939-1957) After taking charge of the Division of Medicine in 1918, Dr. Whitebread gave special attention to public health displays. His activities in this area were accelerated after 1924 when the health exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution was inaugurated. As the exhibits in this field increased, the Division, in 1939, took the more comprehensive title of Division of Medicine and Public Health. Also, in 1939, Dr. Whitebread was promoted to the rank of associate curator. [Illustration: Figure 9.--EXHIBIT ON METHODS OF TREATMENT of diseases through mental impressions and psychic conditions as displayed about 1925. (Smithsonian photo 30796-B.)] [Illustration: Figure 10.--AN EXHIBIT ON SUPERSTITIONS, EMPIRICISM, magic, and faith healing in the light of scientific medicine, completed in 1962, is in sharp contrast with that shown in figure 9.] He continued his efforts to collect more specimens of interest to medical history and to contribute to the literature. Among exhibited specimens in 1941 were a powder paper-crimping machine, a portable drug crusher, an odd device for spreading plaster on cloth, a pill-coating apparatus, various suppository molds, a lozenge cutter, and an ingenious Seidlitz powder machine. The derivation of medicinal drugs from animal, vegetable, and mineral sources was also depicted, as were synthetic materials and their intermediates. Basic prescription materials were displayed, and rows of glass-enclosed cases held samples of crude botanical drugs from almost every part of the globe with explanatory cards giving brief, concise descriptions. The exhibition provided medical and pharmaceutical students about to take state-board examinations, the opportunity to study the subject in detail, especially the enormous collection of _materia medica_ samples.[15] Also in 1941, Eli Lilly and Company donated an exhibit on the medical treatment of various types of anemia. In the same year, a diorama including a hypochlorinator for purification of water on a farm was installed in the gallery. In 1942, the first Emerson iron lung (developed in 1931 by John Haven Emerson) for artificial respiration was acquired by the Division. The Division acquired, in 1944, the first portable x-ray machine known to have been operated successfully on the battlefield, as well as other x-ray equipment and early medicine chests. [Illustration: Figure 11.--OLD PUBLIC HEALTH EXHIBITION installed in the gallery about 1924. (Smithsonian photo 19952.)] [Illustration: Figure 12.--THE HALL OF HEALTH, reestablished and opened in November 1957. (Smithsonian photo 44931.)] [Illustration: Figure 13.--EARLY EXHIBIT ON HOMEOPATHY showing its history, methods and remedies which was installed about 1929. (Smithsonian photo 27049.)] Without a doubt, the most outstanding accession in the field of pharmaceutical history during Dr. Whitebread's years of service was the acquisition of the E. R. Squibb and Sons old apothecary shop. Most of the baroque fixtures, including the stained-glass windows with Hessian-Nassau coats of arms and wrought-iron frames, were part of the mid-18th-century cathedral pharmacy "Muenster Apotheke" in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. It was offered for sale in September 1930 by Dr. Jo Mayer of Wiesbaden, Germany, who was an enthusiastic collector of antiques, especially those related to the health professions. Earlier that year, a historian of pharmacy and chemistry, Fritz Ferchl of Mittenwald, Germany, had published a series of scholarly and informative articles on the Meyer collection in which the outstanding specimens were beautifully portrayed and thoroughly described (see bibliography). As a result of Dr. Mayer's efforts to sell his collection, the impact of Ferchl's illustrated articles, and the uniqueness of the collection, E. R. Squibb and Sons purchased it in 1932 and brought it to the United States "with the thought that it would provide for American pharmacy, its teachers and students, a museum illuminating the history, growth, and development of pharmacy, its interesting background and struggle through the ages." It was displayed at the Century of Progress exposition held in Chicago during 1933 and 1934; subsequently, it was assembled in the Squibb Building in New York City as a private museum where, for about 10 years, it was visited by many interested in pharmacy, ceramics, and art. Charles H. LaWall, who was originally engaged to prepare a descriptive catalog on the exhibit, gave it the title "The Squibb Ancient Pharmacy." Late in 1943, E. R. Squibb and Sons offered the collection as a gift to the American Pharmaceutical Association if the latter would provide museum space for it. The offer was accepted, but the Association finally found it difficult to spare the needed space for the collection and decided to take up the matter with the U.S. National Museum. [Illustration: Figure 14.--THIS EARLY EXHIBIT ON OSTEOPATHY was renovated several times prior to the early 1940's. (Smithsonian photo 19250.)] At this point, it should be stated that since 1883 the members of the American Pharmaceutical Association have been keenly interested in having the National Museum serve as the custodian for all collected objects and records of historical interest to pharmacy. In 1944, the Association officially offered to deposit on permanent loan, the Squibb's pharmacy collection in the Smithsonian Institution with the understanding that a suitable place would be provided for prompt and permanent display. The offer was accepted, and during April and May of 1945, the entire collection was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, and construction to recreate the original two rooms for the old, 18th-century, European "Apotheke" was underway. By August 1946, the exhibit was completed. In the large room where the pharmacist met his customers, the shelves were filled with 15th-to 19th-century, European pharmaceutical antiques. These included Renaissance mortars; 16th-and 17th-century nested weights; beautiful Italian, French, Swiss, and German majolica and faience drug jars; Dutch and English delft; drug containers made of flint or opal glass with fused-enamel labels with alchemical symbols; rare, 16th-century, wooden drug containers, each with the coat of arms of the city in which each was made; and two glass-topped, display tables contained franchises issued and signed by Popes or state rulers, medical edicts, dispensatories, herbals, pharmacopoeias, and pharmaceutical utensils. On the walls in the small laboratory room, which also had been used as a workshop and a study, were a stuffed crocodile, shark's head, tortoise, fish, and salamander, parts of which were utilized as remedial agents. Their presence provided tangible evidence that the pharmacy dispensed genuine drugs and not substitutes. The pharmaceutical profession in this country hailed the outstanding exhibition, and the November 1946 issue of the _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, Practical Pharmacy Edition_, devoted its front cover to depicting one corner of the study and laboratory room of the shop.[16] Also, in a letter dated January 2, 1947, addressed to Dr. Alexander Wetmore, then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Robert P. Fischelis, the secretary of the American Pharmaceutical Association, considered the completion of the deposited exhibition a triumph and "as one of the highlights of the accomplishments of the Association in 1946." [Illustration: Figure 15.--LATE 16TH-CENTURY, wooden drug container with coat-of-arms, in the Squibb collection. The inscription _Ungula Alcis_ (the hoof of the elk) suggests a superstitious attitude in medical practice and the wide use of animal organs in medical treatment. (_Courtesy of the American Pharmaceutical Association._)] From 1946 to 1948, the Division's collection was further enriched with a number of historical specimens, among which was a "grosse Flamme" x-ray machine with induction-coil tube and stand developed by Albert B. Koett. It is one of the earliest American-made machines of its kind, producing a 12-inch spark, the largest usable at that time with 180,000-volt capacity, and a forerunner of later autotransformers. Other accessions included two 19th-century drug mills, an electric belt used in quackery, two medicine chests, three sets of Hessian crucibles used in a pioneer drugstore in Colorado, a drunkometer, mineral ores, and purely produced chemical elements. [Illustration: Figure 16.--A RARE, ANTWERP, 16th-century drug jar in the Squibb collection deposited by the American Pharmaceutical Association.] In the spring of 1948, Associate Curator Whitebread retired after 30 years of service with the U.S. National Museum. He was a pioneer in the field of health museums and during his curatorship had developed a moribund section into a Division of field-wide importance. Dr. Whitebread was succeeded by George S. Thomas, also a pharmacist, who served as associate curator from August 1948 until early 1952. [Illustration: Figure 17.--THE APOTHECARY SHOP as seen in the Arts and Industries building (1946-1964). (_Courtesy of the American Pharmaceutical Association._)] [Illustration: Figure 18.--VIEW OF THE LABORATORY AND STUDY ROOM of the apothecary shop. On the left, the German-Swiss bronze mortar and pestle (1686) sign and above it an 18th-century German painting on canvas of Christ, "the apothecary of the soul." The drug containers represent "the fruits of the spirit," faith, patience, charity, etc., and the scales represent justice. Underneath is the verse from Matthew, 11:28, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (_Courtesy of the American Pharmaceutical Association._)] During his almost-three and a half years of service, Thomas acquired hearing-aid appliances from which he designed an exhibit on the development of these aids, surgical sutures, early samples of Aureomycin, and a static-electricity machine made by Henkel about 1840. He also published three short articles under the title, "Now and Then," in the _National Capital Pharmacist_ (1950), no. 1, pp. 8-9; no. 2, pp. 18-19, 29; and no. 3, pp. 15-16. In early 1952, Dr. Arthur O. Morton presented to the Division, a Swiss-made keratometer which he had purchased in 1907, and it is believed to be one of the first used in the United States to measure the curves of the cornea. The achievements of the Division reached their highest point, thus far, in significantly increasing the national collection, as well as in contributing to the scientific, historical, and professional literature, under the curatorships of George B. Griffenhagen (December 8, 1952, to June 27, 1959) and John B. Blake (July 1, 1957, to September 2, 1961). Their reorganization of exhibits and collections, their competence and industry, fulfilled the hopes, plans, and purposes laid down by earlier curators for the Division. Immediately after assuming the responsibilities of the Division and throughout 1953, Mr. Griffenhagen (M.S. in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of Southern California) undertook to develop the collections still further. He increased the emphasis not only on historical pharmacy, but also on medicine, surgery, and dentistry. He also renovated the exhibits in the medical gallery. In 1954, several antibiotics were donated to the Division including a mold of _Penicillium notatum_ prepared and presented to the Smithsonian Institution by Sir Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), the discoverer of penicillium (1929), and a few Petri dishes used by botanist Benjamin M. Daggar who, while working for Lederle Laboratories, developed Aureomycin (chlortetracycline) in 1948. The Forest D. Dodrill--G.M.R. mechanical heart (1952), the first machine reported to be used successfully for the complete bypass of one side of the human heart during a surgical operation,[17] was presented to the Smithsonian Institution. The following year, 1955, the Division acquired one of the earliest Einthoven string galvanometers (named after the Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven, 1860-1927) made in the United States in 1914 by Charles F. Hindle for an electrocardiograph. Also added to the Division's collections was the electrocardiograph used by Dr. Frank E. Wilson of the United States, a pioneer educator in this field. Two temporary exhibits on allergy and surgical dressings were installed in the gallery. In the same year, Curator Griffenhagen published _Early American Pharmacies_, a catalog on 28 pharmacy restorations in this country. In 1956, among many publications of interest in the fields of medical and pharmaceutical history, was Curator Griffenhagen's _Pharmacy Museum_, with a foreword by Laurence V. Coleman, who termed it a useful catalog and "a good reflection of the history of the museum movement at large." A third x-ray tube of Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen (1845-1922) was added to the collection in 1957 as well as a complete set of hospital-ward fixtures of about 1900 from the Massachusetts General Hospital, rare patent medicines, 18th-century microscopes, and a 13th-century mortar and pestle made in Persia. In 1957, Mr. Griffenhagen published a series of illustrated articles in the _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, Practical Pharmacy Edition_, which were later reprinted by the Association in a booklet entitled, _Tools of the Apothecary_. In it, he described several pharmaceutical specimens in the collection and their place in history. Division of Medical Sciences (1957 to Present) The U.S. National Museum was reorganized on July 1, 1957, into two units, the Natural History Museum and the Museum of History and Technology. At the same time, and in view of the widening scope of the Division, its more scientifically based planning, and the constantly increasing collection with equal emphasis on all branches of the healing arts, the Division's title was changed to the Division of Medical Sciences--the title it still bears in 1964. With the reorganization, the Department of Engineering and Industries, under which the Division fell administratively, was renamed the Department of Science and Technology of the Museum of History and Technology. It was also the first time since its establishment in 1881 that the Division had two curators, for on July 1, 1957, Dr. John B. Blake joined the staff. [Illustration: Figure 19.--CURATORS JOHN B. BLAKE AND GEORGE GRIFFENHAGEN examine the newly acquired (1957) electromagnetic, Morton-Wimshurst-Holz Influence Machine. It was manufactured by the Bowen Company of Providence, Rhode Island (1889). With the discovery of x-ray, it was used for making x-ray photographs until early in the 20th century.] As a result of these changes, the Division was subdivided into a Section of Pharmaceutical History and Health and a Section of Medical and Dental History. The former was planned to encompass the collections of _materia medica_, pharmaceutical equipment, and all material related to the history of pharmacy, toxicology, pharmacology, and biochemistry, as well as the Hall of Health which was opened November 2, 1957, and which emphasizes man's progressing knowledge of his body and the functions of its major organs.[18] The latter Section was planned to include all that belongs to the development of surgery, medicine, dentistry, and nursing, especially in relation to hospitals. In October 1957, the Division acquired a collection of rare, ceramic, drug jars which included two, 13th-century, North Syrian and Persian, albarello-shaped, majolica jars; a 15th-century, Hispano-Moresque drug container; and a 16th-century, Italian faience, dragon-spout ewer. During the following two years, Curator Griffenhagen periodically toured museums and medical and pharmaceutical institutions in this country, South America, and Europe gathering specimens and information for the Division and for publication, respectively. However, on June 27, 1959, he resigned his curatorship to join the staff of the American Pharmaceutical Association in Washington, D.C. Dr. Blake became the curator in charge of the Division and Mr. Griffenhagen was succeeded on September 24, 1959, by the author of this paper as associate curator in charge of the Section of Pharmaceutical History and Health. Dr. Blake, as curator of the Section of Medical and Dental History, acquired a large number of valuable and varied specimens for the Division's collections. They included optometric refracting instruments, an early 1920's General Electric, portable, x-ray machine, the Charles A. Lindbergh and Alexis Carrel pump (designed in 1935 to perfuse life-sustaining fluids to the organs of the body), the Sewell heart pump (1950) to control delivery of air pressure and suction to the pumping mechanism, and a large and valuable collection of dental equipment formerly at the universities of Pennsylvania and Illinois. Dr. Blake wrote the explanatory material and supervised the design and production of the majority of exhibits in the renovated hall of medical and dental history. He also contributed several scholarly articles and a book (see bibliography) on the history of the healing arts and public health in particular. He resigned on September 2, 1961, to join the staff of the National Library of Medicine as chief of the History of Medicine Division, and was succeeded by the author as curator of the Division. From the summer of 1962 to April 1964, the Division benefited from the expert advice of Dr. Alfred R. Henderson as consultant in the preparation and designing of the surgical and medical exhibits of the Museum of History and Technology. During the period from 1961 to May 1964, the Division's collections expanded greatly through its medical, dental, and pharmaceutical acquisitions. Specimens of antiques acquired from 1961 through 1963 numbered up to 1,539 and included gifts from leading institutions and individual philanthropists. The scope of these gifts and acquisitions ranges from electronic resuscitators, microscopes, x-ray equipment, and spectacles, to patent medicines, amulets, apothecary tools, dental instruments, and office material of practitioners. [Illustration: Figure 20.--EXHIBIT ON SPECTACLES, LORGNETTES, OPTOMETERS, and refraction, completed in 1960. It features a cross section of the Division's large collection of eyeglasses. (Smithsonian photo 47943-D.)] In the last decade, the interest in the national endeavor for promoting research and scholarship in the history of medicine has increased greatly. It was most appropriate, therefore, for the Smithsonian Institution to play host on May 2 for two sessions of the 37th annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine held in the Washington, D.C., area from April 30 through May 2, 1964. In welcoming the members to the morning session in the auditorium of the new Museum of History and Technology, Frank A. Taylor, director of the United States National Museum, expressed the feeling that the meeting of the Association was, in a sense, a dedication of the new auditorium and an opportunity for the Smithsonian to reaffirm its deep interest and commitment in fostering research and furthering the appreciation of scholarly endeavor in the history of the healing arts. A New Dimension For the Healing Arts "One day the United States will have a National Museum of science, engineering, and industry, as most large nations have." This was the prediction made in 1946 by the director of the U.S. National Museum, Mr. Frank A. Taylor, then curator of the Division of Engineering.[19] It was in 1963, that the new $36,000,000 building of the Museum of History and Technology was completed, and opened to the public in 1964. The offices of the Division of Medical Sciences as well as the reference and study collections were moved to the fifth floor of the new building. The exhibits, however, will be displayed in the gallery at the southwest corner of the first floor. These exhibits, it is hoped, will show a new dimension and an unprecedented approach in displaying the development of the healing arts throughout the ages and the instruments and equipment associated with health professions. They also present the expanding objectives and plans of the Division's growth as an integral part of the Smithsonian Institution. Conveniently, the exhibits form four, closely connected halls in one large gallery which will be open to the public in the summers of 1965 to 1966. [Illustration: Figure 21.--EXHIBIT ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF BLOOD-PRESSURE INSTRUMENTS and the early 20th-century sphygmomanometers which was completed in 1960. (Smithsonian photo 47943-M.)] 1. THE HALL OF HEALTH displays models and graphic and historical exhibit materials to demonstrate the function of the various healthy organs of the human body. The main topics emphasized are: embryology and childbirth; tooth structure; the heart and blood circulation; respiration; the endocrine glands; kidneys and the urinary-excretory system; the brain and the nervous system; the ear; and vision and the use of eyeglasses. The most appreciated exhibit of all in this Hall is the "transparent woman" figure which rotates, automatically, every 15 minutes with a recorded message describing the function of each major organ of the body at the same time that the organ is electronically lighted, so that the viewer can see its place in the body. [Illustration: Figure 22.--HEARING-AID EXHIBIT designed in 1962. It includes otologist Julius Lempert's personal memorabilia and original surgical instruments used in the fenestration operation for restoring hearing. (Smithsonian photo 49345-C.)] 2. THE HALL OF MEDICINE AND DENTISTRY will depict the history of these two sciences with exhibits of the equipment used through the centuries. In the medical field, early trephining and other surgical instruments will be displayed along with a diorama of an 1805 surgical operation performed by Dr. Philip Syng Physick in the amphitheater of the Pennsylvania Hospital. Diagnostic instruments such as stethoscopes, endoscopes, speculums, and blood-pressure measuring devices will be exhibited with a series of microscopes illustrating the development of these instruments. Exhibits of original galvanometers and other apparatus will trace the development of cardiography. The early use of anesthesia will be shown by apparatus of William Morton and Crawford W. Long, American pioneers in this field. The development of the devices of modern medicine and surgery will be shown by exhibits of the iron lung and x-ray tubes, including a tube used by W. K. Roentgen. Medicine chests and surgical kits of different periods will graphically summarize the state of medical science in the period each represents. Exhibits on the development of dentistry and dental surgery will display examples of tooth-filling and extracting tools, drilling apparatus from the early hand and foot engines to the first ultrasonic cutting instrument (1954), and the original contra-angle, hydraulic and air-turbine handpiece model[20] which revolutionized the field of instrumentation for dental surgery (with speeds of 200,000 to 400,000 rpm). This hydraulic turbine of Dr. Robert J. Nelson and associates of the National Bureau of Standards set the design pattern for the remarkable and successful high-speed, air-turbine handpiece developed by Paul H. Tanner and Oscar P. Nagel of the U.S. Naval Dental School in 1956. Also underway is the reconstruction of the offices of famous dentists such as G. V. Black and the father of American orthodontia, Edward H. Angle, using their original equipment and instruments. In addition, an exhibit is planned to include x-ray tubes and the electric dental engine, the first to be operated in a human mouth by the pioneer dentist on dental skiagraphy, Charles E. Kells (1856-1928).[21] [Illustration: Figure 23.--EXHIBIT ON NURSING BOTTLES and measures to promote child health to counteract the once-common diseases of childhood. This display was completed in 1962. (Smithsonian photo 49345-G.)] 3. THE HALL OF PHARMACEUTICAL HISTORY will feature exhibits on the reconstruction of two pharmacy shops: an 18th-century apothecary shop, originally from Germany, with a very elegant collection of drug jars, decorated medicinal bottles, balances, mortars and pestles, and other tools and documents pertaining to the apothecary art, and a late 19th-century American drugstore with shelves filled with patent medicines and drug containers of various sizes and shapes. The window will also feature symbols of pharmacy and beautiful show globes. Displays will show the development of antibiotics and the early tools used in the manufacture of the so-called "miracle drugs," including a mold from Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. In addition, a platform will be reconstructed to display a variety of pharmaceutical apparatus used in the preparation and manufacture of drugs, such as tablet and capsule machines and drug mills and percolators. Recently, with the assistance of Professor Glenn Sonnedecker, the Division acquired a fine collection of pharmaceutical equipment and devices from the School of Pharmacy of the University of Wisconsin. [Illustration: Figure 24.--THE ORIGINS OF DRUGS from the three natural kingdoms, drug synthesis, and the increase in the manufacture of vitamins. This display was completed in 1962 and is now on display at the Museum of History and Technology. (Smithsonian photo P6316.)] Since the Division houses the largest collection of _materia medica_ in the country, a representative cross section of crude drugs will be displayed in alphabetical order as well as a display illustrating the role of cinchona and antimalarial drugs in the fight against disease. An exhibit will portray the "origin of drugs" from the three natural kingdoms, animal, vegetable, and mineral, together with synthetic drugs including the manufacture of vitamins. Plans are being made for an elaborate exhibit of weights and balances used in many countries throughout the centuries, their impact on accuracy of dosage and weighing of drugs, and their use in the apothecary art. The Division will also display pictorial and printed materials, as well as artifacts from all periods and all countries. These collections are intended to help in presenting a more complete picture of the story of the medical sciences for educational purposes and research, and to increase man's knowledge in fighting disease and promoting health. Thus, from a few hundred specimens of crude drugs in the Section of Materia Medica of 83 years ago, there has developed a Museum Division today which embraces the evolution of the health professions through the ages. This Division now has the largest collection in the Western Hemisphere of historical objects which are related to the healing arts. The reference collections are available to the researcher and scholar, and the exhibits are intended for pleasure and educational purposes in these fields. The plans for expansion have no limitation as we keep pace with man's progress in the medical sciences and continue to collect materials that contributed to the historical development in the fight against diseases and the attempts to secure better health for everyone. BIBLIOGRAPHY The _Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution_ from 1872 to date and the _Proceedings of the United States National Museum_ from 1881 to date were used extensively as sources in this survey. In the latter, see in particular, the year 1881, pp. 545-546; 1882, pp. 1-2; and 1884, pp. 431-475. ATKINSON, WILLIAM B. _The physicians and surgeons of the United States._ Philadelphia, 1878. [On Dr. Toner.] BLAKE, JOHN B. Dental history and the Smithsonian Institution. _Journal of the American College of Dentists_ (1961), vol. 28, pp. 125-127. ---- _Public health in the town of Boston, 1630-1822._ Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959. [BRAISTED, WILLIAM C.] The biography of Dr. Beyer. Page 94 in _Dictionary of American medical biography_, by HOWARD A. KELLY and WALTER L. BURRAGE; NEW YORK: D. Appleton and Co., 1928. CLARK, LEILA F. The library of the Smithsonian Institution. _Science_ (1946), vol. 104, p. 143. COLEMAN, LAURENCE VAIL. _The museum in America: A critical study._ 3 vols. Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1939. [Printed for the American Association of Museums, Washington, D.C.] See vol. 1, pp. 3, 11-12, 32-33, 143-146, 222, 318; vol. 3, p. 471. DAUKES, S. H. _The medical museum: modern developments, organization and technical methods based on a new system of visual teaching._ London: Wellcome Foundation Ltd., 1929. DODRILL, FOREST D., and others. Pulmonary volvuloplasty under direct vision using the mechanical heart for a complete bypass of the right heart in a patient with congenital pulmonary stenosis. _Journal of Thoracic Surgery_ (1953), vol. 26, pp. 584-595. ---- Temporary mechanical substitution for the left ventricle in man. _Journal of the American Medical Association_ (1952), vol. 150, pp. 642-644. DUNGLISON, ROBLEY. _A dictionary of medical science._ Rev. ed. Pp. 629-630. Philadelphia: Lea, 1874. EDWARDS, J. J., and EDWARDS, M. J. _Medical museum technology._ London: Oxford University Press, 1959. [See in particular, pp. 33-62, 142-159.] FERCHL, FRITZ. Die Moerser der Sammlung Jo Mayer--Wiesbaden; Libri rari et curiosi der Sammlung Dr. Jo Mayer--Wiesbaden; Bildnisse und Bilder der Sammlung Jo Mayer--Wiesbaden; Kuriositaeten und Antiquitaeten der Sammlung Jo Mayer--Wiesbaden; and Glaeser, Majoliken und Faensen der Sammlung Jo Mayer--Wiesbaden. _Pharmazeutische Zeitung_ (Berlin, 1930), vol. 75: January 4, no. 2, pp. 19-24; February 15, no. 14, pp. 219-223; March 8, no. 20, pp. 309-314; April 19, no. 32, pp. 487-489; and June 21, no. 50, pp. 735-740. FLINT, JAMES M. Classification and arrangement of the materia medica collection. _Proceedings of the United States National Museum_ (1881), vol. 4, app. no. 6. ---- Classification of the materia medica collection of the United States National Museum, and catalogue of specimens. _Proceedings of the United States National Museum_ (1883), vol. 6, app. 19, pp. 431-475. ---- Directions for collecting information and objects illustrating the history of medicine. Part S of _Bulletin of the United States National Museum_ (1905). No. 39. ---- Memoranda for collectors of drugs for the materia medica section of the National Museum. _Proceedings of the United States National Museum_ (1881), vol. 4, app. 8. FOLEY, MATTHEW O. Smithsonian Institution devotes much space to hospital exhibit. _Hospital Management_ (April 1929), pp. 271-287. GALDSTON, IAGO. Research in the United States. _Ciba Symposia_ (June-July 1946), vol. 8, nos. 3 and 4, p. 366. GARRISON, FIELDING H. _An introduction to the history of medicine._ 2d ed. p. 38. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1917. GEBHARD, BRUNO. From medicine show to health museum. _Ciba Symposia_ (March 1947), vol. 8, no. 12, p. 579. GOODE, GEORGE BROWN. _The Smithsonian Institution (1846-1896): The history of its first half century._ Pp. 325-329, 362-363. Washington, 1897. GRIFFENHAGEN, GEORGE. _Pharmacy museums._ Madison, Wis.: American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, 1956. ---- and HUGHES, CALVIN H. The history of the mechanical heart. _Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the year ended June 30, 1955_ (Washington, 1956), pp. 339-356. HAMARNEH, SAMI. At the Smithsonian ... exhibits on pharmaceutical dosage forms. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association_ (1962), new ser., vol. 2, pp. 478-479. ----For the collector, facts and artifacts. _Pharmacy in History_ (1961), vol. 6, p. 48. ---- Historical and educational exhibits on dentistry at the Smithsonian Institution. _Journal of the American-Dental Association_ (July 1962), vol. 65, pp. 111-114. ---- New dental exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution. _Journal of the American Dental Association_ (May 1963), vol. 66, pp. 676-678. HAYNES, WILLIAM. Out of alchemy into chemistry. _The Scientific Monthly_ (November 1952), vol. 75, p. 268. HOLT, L. EMMETT. A sketch of the development of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. _Science_ (July 6, 1906), new ser., vol. 24, no. 601, p. 1. HOWELL, WILLIAM H. The American Physiological Society during its first twenty-five years. Pp. 21-22 [biography of Dr. Beyer] in _History of the American Physiological Society semicentennial, 1881-1937_; Baltimore, 1938. [KLEIN, ALLEN.] He directs pharmacy exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution. _Modern Pharmacy_ (July 1941), vol. 25, pp. 20-21. LAWALL, CHARLES H. Ancient pharmacy on display. _Pacific Drug Review_ (1933), vol. 45, p. 18. ---- _The curious lore of drugs and medicines._ Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing Co., Inc., 1927. [See p. 453 on Division of Medical Sciences' collection.] LEWTON, FREDERICK L. A national pharmaceutical collection. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association_ (1919), vol. 8, pp. 45-46. ---- The opportunity for developing historical pharmacy collections at the National Museum. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association_ (1917), vol. 6, pp. 259-262. LONG, ESMOND R. The Army Medical Museum. _Military Medicine_ (May 1963), vol. 128, pp. 367-369. MONELL, S. H. "Dental Skiagraphy" (pp. 313-336 in _A system in x-ray methods and medical uses of light hot-air, vibration and high-frequency currents_ by Monell; New York: Pelton, 1902). MURRAY, DAVID. _Museums, their history and their use._ Glasgow: MacLehose, 1904. [See vol. 1, pp. 13-77.] NELSON, ROBERT J.; PELANDER, CARL E.; and KUMPULA, JOHN W. Hydraulic turbine, contra-angle handpiece. _Journal of the American Dental Association_ (September 1953), vol. 47, pp. 324-329. _Official Catalogue of the Cotton States and International Exposition_: Atlanta, Georgia, September 18 to December 31, 1895. Atlanta: Claflin and Mellichamp, 1895. [See p. 204.] PACKARD, FRANCES R. _History of medicine in the United States._ New York, 1931. [See vol. 1, pp. 5-6, 37-51, 168-176, 602-607 on Dr. Toner.] PICKARD, MADGE E. Government and science in the United States: Historical background. _Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences_ (1946), vol. 1, nos. 2 and 3, pp. 265-266, 289, 446-447, 478. PURTLE, HELEN R. Notes on the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. _Bulletin of the Medical Library Association_ (1956), vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 300-305. RATHBUN, RICHARD. _A descriptive account of the building recently erected for the Departments of Natural History of the United States National Museum._ (U.S. National Museum Bulletin 80.) Washington, 1913. [See pp. 7-15.] RHEES, WILLIAM J. _The Smithsonian Institution; documents relative to its origin and history, 1835-1899._ 2 vols. (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections: vol. 42, _1835-1881_; vol. 43, _1881-1899_.) Washington, 1901. SHUFELDT, R. W. Suggestions for a national museum of medicine. _Medical Record_ (March 22, 1919), pp. 4-5. [Also reprinted, 1919, by William Wood and Co., New York.] SIGERIST, HENRY E. _Primitive and archaic medicine._ (Vol. 1 of _A history of medicine_, by Sigerist.) New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. [See pp. 525-531.] SILVER, EDWIN H. Description of the exhibit on conservation of vision placed in the United States Museum at Washington, D.C. _The Optical Journal and Review of Optometry_ (February 3, 1927), vol. 59, no. 5, pp. 39-40. [SONNEDECKER, GLENN.] Apothecary shop nears completion. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, Practical Pharmacy Edition_ (1946), vol. 7, pp. 157. ---- Dr. Charles Whitebread, pharmacist and museum curator. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, Practical Pharmacy Edition_ (1946), vol. 7, p. 203. ---- Old apothecary shop. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, Practical Pharmacy Edition_ (1945), vol. 6, pp. 184-187. ---- Old apothecary shop opened. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, Practical Pharmacy Edition_ (1946), vol. 7, p. 427. TAYLOR, FRANK A. A national museum of science, engineering and industry. _The Scientific Monthly_ (1946), vol. 63, pp. 359. ---- The background of the Smithsonian's Museum of Engineering and Industries. _Science_ (1946), vol. 104, no. 2693, pp. 130-132. Toner Lectures: 1. J. J. WOODWARD. On the structure of cancerous tumors and the mode in which adjacent parts are invaded. No. 266 in _Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_, vol. 15; Washington, 1878. [Lecture given on March 28, 1873.] 2. C. E. BROWN-SEQUARD. Dual character of the brain. No. 291 in _Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_, vol. 15; Washington, 1878. [Lecture given on April 22, 1874.] 3. J. M. DA COSTA. On strain and over-action of the heart. No. 279 in _Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_, vol. 15; Washington, 1878. [Lecture given on May 14, 1874.] 4. H. C. WOOD. A study of the nature and mechanism of fever. No. 282 in _Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_, vol. 15; Washington, 1878. [Lecture given on January 20, 1875.] 5. WILLIAM W. KEEN. On the surgical complications and sequels of the continued fevers. No. 300 in _Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_, vol. 15; Washington, 1878. [Lecture given on February 17, 1876.] 6. WILLIAM ADAMS. Subcutaneous surgery: Its principles, and its recent extension in practice. No. 302 in _Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_, vol. 15; Washington, 1878. [Lecture given on September 13, 1876.] 7. EDWARD O. SHAKESPEARE. The nature of reparatory inflammation in arteries after ligatures, acupressure, and torsion. No. 321 in _Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_, vol. 16; Washington, 1880. [Lecture given on June 27, 1878.] 8. GEORGE E. WARING. Suggestions for the sanitary drainage of Washington City. No. 349 in _Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_, vol. 26; Washington, 1883. [Lecture given on May 26, 1880.] 9. CHARLES K. MILLS. Mental over-work and premature disease among public and professional men. No. 594 in _Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_, vol. 34; Washington, 1893. [Lecture given on March 19, 1884.] 10. HARRISON ALLEN. A clinical study of the skull. No. 708 in _Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_, vol. 34; Washington, 1893. [Lecture given on May 29, 1889.] TRUE, WEBSTER P. _The Smithsonian Institution._ (Vol. 1 of the Smithsonian Scientific Series.) Washington, 1929. URDANG, GEORGE, and NITARDY, F. W. _The Squibb ancient pharmacy._ New York, 1940. [Out of print, but remaining catalogs were given to the Division of Medicine to "be reserved for pharmaceutical educators, foreign dignitaries, pharmacists of national and international reputation, and pharmaceutical historians," according to a letter from Mr. Nitardy in 1945.] WHITEBREAD, CHARLES. Animal pharmaceuticals of the past and present. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association_ (1933), vol. 22, pp. 431-437. ---- An old apothecary shop of 1750. _National Capital Pharmacist_ (September 1946), vol. 8, pp. 11-13, 35. ---- Early American pharmaceutical inventions. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association_ (1937), vol. 26, pp. 918-928. ---- _Handbook of the health exhibits of the United States National Museum._ Baltimore: Lord Baltimore Press [1924]. ---- Health superstitions. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, Practical Pharmacy Edition_ (1942), vol. 3, pp. 268-274. ---- Medicine making as depicted by museum dioramas. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association_ (January 1936), vol. 25, pp. 40-46. ---- Superstition, credulity and skepticism. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association_ (1933), vol. 22, pp. 1140-1145. ---- The Indian medical exhibit of the Division of Medicine in the United States National Museum. Article 10 in vol. 67 of _Proceedings of the U.S. National Museum_; Washington, 1926. ---- The magic, psychic, ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman medical collections of the Division of Medicine in the United States National Museum. Article 15 in vol. 65 of _Proceedings of the U.S. National Museum_; Washington, 1925. ---- The odd origin of medical discoveries. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, Practical Pharmacy Edition_ (1943), vol. 4, p. 321. ---- The United States National Museum pharmaceutical collection, its aims, problems, and accomplishments. _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association_ (1930), vol. 19, pp. 1125-1126. WINTERS, S. R. Magic medicine. _Hygeia_ (July 1937), vol. 15, pp. 630-633. * * * * * FOOTNOTES [1] _Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year 1882_ [hereinafter referred to as the _Smithsonian Annual Report_], pp. 101-103; and introductory "advertisement" to the lectures published by the Smithsonian Institution in its Miscellaneous Collections (see bibliography). [2] Dr. J. J. Woodward's lecture explained the progress of medical knowledge of morbid growth and cancerous tumors from 1865 to 1872. It cautioned that uncertain methods of diagnosis at that time allowed charlatans and uneducated practitioners to report cures of cancer in instances where nonmalignant growths were "removed by their caustic pastes and plasters." [3] The two longest intervals were in preparing the last two lectures: the ninth in 1884, and the tenth, 1889. Both came after the establishment in 1881 of the Section of Materia Medica in the U.S. National Museum, to display the development and progress of the health professions. [4] _Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy for the year 1883_, pp. 190, 614-615. [5] For classifying chemical compounds, Dr. Flint relied on the work of H. E. Roscoe and C. Schorlemmez, _A Treatise on Chemistry_, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1878-1800.) [6] _Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy for the year 1882_, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 100, 228, 656-657. Dr. Flint in his article "Report on Pharmacopoeias of All Nations," ibid., pp. 655-680, remarks that there were then 19 official pharmacopoeias in the world, besides three semiofficial formularies in certain localities in Italy. The pharmacopoeias collected represent Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Holland, India, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland (two), and the United States. [7] The _Universal Formulary_, by R. Eglesfeld Griffith, first edited in March 1850 (3rd ed. rev. and enlarged by John M. Maisch, Philadelphia: Lea, 1874) should not be considered an international drug standard. It was mainly concerned with compiling a great number of formulas and recipes, methods of preparing and administering official and other medicines, and tables on weights and measures for utilization by the U.S. practitioners of the time. [8] Other elaborate arrangements were also made to improve and expand the Section's activities and services, though some have never materialized. For example, a herbarium was suggested from which specimens could be obtained for display of the actual drug with painted pictures of its plant next to it. Consideration was given to displaying enlarged drawings to show the minute structure of the specimen for better identification. In addition, an exhibition of several 10-liter vessels of the most popular mineral waters was planned. The amount of saline substances which analysis had shown to be present in each vessel was to be listed in a table to be attached to that vessel, or the same amount of minerals was to be put in a small bottle beside it. This plan was carried out to the best advantage at the Cotton States and International Exposition held in 1895 in Atlanta, Georgia. [9] HOLT, "A Sketch of the Development of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research," p. 1. A similar comment was voiced by GALDSTON, "Research in the United States," p. 366. [10] _Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association_ (1918), vol. 7, pp. 376-377, 466. [11] Two decades later, Dr. Whitebread designed a panel showing photographs of famous medical pioneers of all nationalities. See his article, "The Odd Origin of Medical Discoveries," p. 321. [12] GEBHARD, "From Medicine Show to Health Museum," p. 579. The original plan for this Hall of Health was to feature exhibits on public health for popular educational purposes, including an illustrated exhibit on hospital care. See FOLEY, "Smithsonian Institution Devotes Much Space to Hospital Exhibit," pp. 43-44. [13] Lack of space notwithstanding, valuable accessions were added about 1930, including a collection of early x-ray tubes and personal memorabilia of Drs. William T. G. Morton (1819-1868), Crawford W. Long (1815-1878), and William Gorgas (1854-1920). [14] D. RILEY MOORE published a series of short reports under the title "Committee on Osteopathic Exhibits in the U.S. National Museum," in the _Journal of the American Osteopathic Association_ (1933-1946), vols. 33-46, regarding the exhibit on osteopathy. [15] [KLEIN], "He Directs Pharmacy Exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution," pp. 20-21. [16] Several other journals reported the exhibition with illustrations: _Drug Topics_ (July 8, 1946), vol. 90, no. 2, pp. 2, 79; _National Capital Pharmacist_ (September 1945), vol. 7, p. 11, and (September 1946), vol. 8, pp. 11-13; and _The Scientific Monthly_ (November 1952), vol. 75, p. 268. [17] DODRILL, and others, "Temporary Mechanical Substitution for the Left Ventricle in Man," pp. 642-644, and "Pulmonary Volvuloplasty under Direct Vision using the Mechanical Heart for a Complete Bypass of the Right Heart in a Patient with Congenital Pulmonary Stenosis," pp. 584-595. [18] For the design, expert arrangement of the exhibits, and the legends that accompany each exhibit in the Hall of Health, we are indebted to Drs. Bruno Gebhard, Richards H. Shryock, Thomas G. Hull, James Laster, Walle J. H. Nauta, Leslie W. Knott, Theodore Wiprud, and other physicians, dentists, and scholars who have offered their advice, assistance, and expert skills. [19] TAYLOR, "A National Museum of Science, Engineering and Industry," p. 359. [20] NELSON, PELANDER, and KUMPULA, "Hydraulic Turbine, Contra-angle Handpiece," pp. 324-329. [21] MONELL, "Dental Skiagraphy," pp. 313-336. * * * * * Paper 43 - Transcriber's Note Page 277: "the basis of scientific, historical" was "the bases of scientific, historical" * * * * * CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY: PAPER 44 DEVELOPMENT OF GRAVITY PENDULUMS IN THE 19TH CENTURY by Victor F. Lenzen and Robert P. Multhauf GALILEO, HUYGENS, AND NEWTON 304 FIGURE OF THE EARTH 306 EARLY TYPES OF PENDULUMS 309 KATER'S CONVERTIBLE AND INVARIABLE PENDULUMS 314 REPSOLD-BESSEL REVERSIBLE PENDULUM 320 PEIRCE AND DEFFORGES INVARIABLE, REVERSIBLE PENDULUMS 327 VON STERNECK AND MENDENHALL PENDULUMS 331 ABSOLUTE VALUE OF GRAVITY AT POTSDAM 338 APPLICATION OF GRAVITY SURVEYS 342 SUMMARY 346 _Victor F. Lenzen and Robert P. Multhauf_ DEVELOPMENT OF GRAVITY PENDULUMS IN THE 19th CENTURY [Illustration: Figure 1.--A STUDY OF THE FIGURE OF THE EARTH WAS one of the earliest projects of the French Academy of Sciences. In order to test the effect of the earth's rotation on its gravitational force, the Academy in 1672 sent Jean Richer to the equatorial island of Cayenne to compare the rate of a clock which was known to have kept accurate time in Paris. Richer found that the clock lost 2 minutes and 28 seconds at Cayenne, indicating a substantial decrease in the force of gravity on the pendulum. Subsequent pendulum experiments revealed that the period of a pendulum varied not only with the latitude but also regionally, under the influence of topographical features such as mountains. It became clear that the measurement of gravity should be made a part of the work of the geodetic surveyor.] _The history of gravity pendulums dates back to the time of Galileo. After the discovery of the variation of the force of gravity over the surface of the earth, gravity measurement became a major concern of physics and geodesy. This article traces the history of the development of instruments for this purpose._ THE AUTHORS: _Victor F. Lenzen is Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at the University of California at Berkeley and Robert P. Multhauf is Chairman of the Department of Science and Technology in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology._ The intensity of gravity, or the acceleration of a freely falling body, is an important physical quantity for the several physical sciences. The intensity of gravity determines the weight of a standard pound or kilogram as a standard or unit of force. In physical experiments, the force on a body may be measured by determining the weight of a known mass which serves to establish equilibrium against it. Thus, in the absolute determination of the ampere with a current balance, the force between two coils carrying current is balanced by the earth's gravitational force upon a body of determinable mass. The intensity of gravity enters into determinations of the size of the earth from the angular velocity of the moon, its distance from the earth, and Newton's inverse square law of gravitation and the laws of motion. Prediction of the motion of an artificial satellite requires an accurate knowledge of gravity for this astronomical problem. The gravity field of the earth also provides data for a determination of the figure of the earth, or geoid, but for this problem of geodesy relative values of gravity are sufficient. If g is the intensity of gravity at some reference station, and [Delta]g is the difference between intensities at two stations, the values of gravity in geodetic calculations enter as ratios ([Delta]g)/g over the surface of the earth. Gravimetric investigations in conjunction with other forms of geophysical investigation, such as seismology, furnish data to test hypotheses concerning the internal structure of the earth. Whether the intensity of gravity is sought in absolute or relative measure, the most widely used instrument for its determination since the creation of classical mechanics has been the pendulum. In recent decades, there have been invented gravity meters based upon the principle of the spring, and these instruments have made possible the rapid determination of relative values of gravity to a high degree of accuracy. The gravity meter, however, must be calibrated at stations where the absolute value of gravity has been determined by other means if absolute values are sought. For absolute determinations of gravity, the pendulum historically has been the principal instrument employed. Although alternative methods of determining absolute values of gravity are now in use, the pendulum retains its value for absolute determinations, and even retains it for relative determinations, as is exemplified by the Cambridge Pendulum Apparatus and that of the Dominion Observatory at Ottawa, Ontario. The pendulums employed for absolute or relative determinations of gravity have been of two basic types. The first form of pendulum used as a physical instrument consisted of a weight suspended by a fiber, cord, or fine wire, the upper end of which was attached to a fixed support. Such a pendulum may be called a "simple" pendulum; the enclosure of the word simple by quotation marks is to indicate that such a pendulum is an approximation to a simple, or mathematical pendulum, a conceptual object which consists of a mass-point suspended by a weightless inextensible cord. If l is the length of the simple pendulum, the time of swing (half-period in the sense of physics) for vibrations of infinitely small amplitude, as derived from Newton's laws of motion and the hypothesis that weight is proportional to mass, is T = [pi][sqrt](l/g). The second form of pendulum is the compound, or physical, pendulum. It consists of an extended solid body which vibrates about a fixed axis under the action of the weight of the body. A compound pendulum may be constituted to oscillate about one axis only, in which case it is nonreversible and applicable only for relative measurements. Or a compound pendulum may be constituted to oscillate about two axes, in which case it is reversible (or "convertible") and may be used to determine absolute values of gravity. Capt. Henry Kater, F.R.S., during the years 1817-1818 was the first to design, construct, and use a compound pendulum for the absolute determination of gravity. He constructed a convertible pendulum with two knife edges and with it determined the absolute value of gravity at the house of Henry Browne, F.R.S., in Portland Place, London. He then constructed a similar compound pendulum with only one knife edge, and swung it to determine relative values of gravity at a number of stations in the British Isles. The 19th century witnessed the development of the theory and practice of observations with pendulums for the determination of absolute and relative values of gravity. Galileo, Huygens, and Newton The pendulum has been both an objective and an instrument of physical investigation since the foundations of classical mechanics were fashioned in the 17th century.[1] It is tradition that the youthful Galileo discovered that the period of oscillation of a pendulum is constant by observations of the swings of the great lamp suspended from the ceiling in the cathedral of Pisa.[2] The lamp was only a rough approximation to a simple pendulum, but Galileo later performed more accurate experiments with a "simple" pendulum which consisted of a heavy ball suspended by a cord. In an experiment designed to confirm his laws of falling bodies, Galileo lifted the ball to the level of a given altitude and released it. The ball ascended to the same level on the other side of the vertical equilibrium position and thereby confirmed a prediction from the laws. Galileo also discovered that the period of vibration of a "simple" pendulum varies as the square root of its length, a result which is expressed by the formula for the time of swing of the ideal simple pendulum. He also used a pendulum to measure lapse of time, and he designed a pendulum clock. Galileo's experimental results are important historically, but have required correction in the light of subsequent measurements of greater precision. Mersenne in 1644 made the first determination of the length of the seconds pendulum,[3] that is, the length of a simple pendulum that beats seconds (half-period in the sense of physics). Subsequently, he proposed the problem to determine the length of the simple pendulum equivalent in period to a given compound pendulum. This problem was solved by Huygens, who in his famous work _Horologium oscillatorium_ ... (1673) set forth the theory of the compound pendulum.[4] Huygens derived a theorem which has provided the basis for the employment of the reversible compound pendulum for the absolute determination of the intensity of gravity. The theorem is that a given compound pendulum possesses conjugate points on opposite sides of the center of gravity; about these points, the periods of oscillation are the same. For each of these points as center of suspension the other point is the center of oscillation, and the distance between them is the length of the equivalent simple pendulum. Earlier, in 1657, Huygens independently had invented and patented the pendulum clock, which rapidly came into use for the measurement of time. Huygens also created the theory of centripetal force which made it possible to calculate the effect of the rotation of the earth upon the observed value of gravity. The theory of the gravity field of the earth was founded upon the laws of motion and the law of gravitation by Isaac Newton in his famous _Principia_ (1687). It follows from the Newtonian theory of gravitation that the acceleration of gravity as determined on the surface of the earth is the resultant of two factors: the principal factor is the gravitational attraction of the earth upon bodies, and the subsidiary factor is the effect of the rotation of the earth. A body at rest on the surface of the earth requires some of the gravitational attraction for the centripetal acceleration of the body as it is carried in a circle with constant speed by the rotation of the earth about its axis. If the rotating earth is used as a frame of reference, the effect of the rotation is expressed as a centrifugal force which acts to diminish the observed intensity of gravity. * * * * * GLOSSARY OF GRAVITY TERMINOLOGY ABSOLUTE GRAVITY: the value of the acceleration of gravity, also expressed by the length of the seconds pendulum. RELATIVE GRAVITY: the value of the acceleration of gravity relative to the value at some standard point. SIMPLE PENDULUM: see theoretical pendulum. THEORETICAL PENDULUM: a heavy bob (point-mass) at the end of a weightless rod. SECONDS PENDULUM: a theoretical or simple pendulum of such length that its time of swing (half-period) is one second. (This length is about one meter.) GRAVITY PENDULUM: a precisely made pendulum used for the measurement of gravity. COMPOUND PENDULUM: a pendulum in which the supporting rod is not weightless; in other words, any actual pendulum. CONVERTIBLE PENDULUM: a compound pendulum having knife edges at different distances from the center of gravity. Huygens demonstrated (1673) that if such a pendulum were to swing with equal periods from either knife edge, the distance between those knife edges would be equal to the length of a theoretical or simple pendulum of the same period. REVERSIBLE PENDULUM: a convertible pendulum which is also symmetrical in form. INVARIABLE PENDULUM: a compound pendulum with only one knife edge, used for relative measurement of gravity. * * * * * From Newton's laws of motion and the hypothesis that weight is proportional to mass, the formula for the half-period of a simple pendulum is given by T = [pi][sqrt](l/g). If a simple pendulum beats seconds, 1 = [pi][sqrt]([lambda]/g), where [lambda] is the length of the seconds pendulum. From T = [pi][sqrt](l/g) and 1 = [pi][sqrt]([lambda]/g), it follows that [lambda] = l/T^{2}. Then g = [pi]^{2}[lambda]. Thus, the intensity of gravity can be expressed in terms of the length of the seconds pendulum, as well as by the acceleration of a freely falling body. During the 19th century, gravity usually was expressed in terms of the length of the seconds pendulum, but present practice is to express gravity in terms of g, for which the unit is the gal, or one centimeter per second per second. [Illustration: Figure 2.--THIS DRAWING, FROM RICHER'S _Observations astronomiques et physiques faites en l'isle de Caienne_ (Paris, 1679), shows most of the astronomical instruments used by Richer, namely, one of the two pendulum clocks made by Thuret, the 20-foot and the 5-foot telescopes and the large quadrant. The figure may be intended as a portrait of Richer. This drawing was done by Sebastian Le Clerc, a young illustrator who made many illustrations of the early work of the Paris Academy.] Figure of the Earth A principal contribution of the pendulum as a physical instrument has been the determination of the figure of the earth.[5] That the earth is spherical in form was accepted doctrine among the ancient Greeks. Pythagoras is said to have been the first to describe the earth as a sphere, and this view was adopted by Eudoxus and Aristotle. The Alexandrian scientist Eratosthenes made the first estimate of the diameter and circumference of a supposedly spherical earth by an astronomical-geodetic method. He measured the angle between the directions of the rays of the sun at Alexandria and Syene (Aswan), Egypt, and estimated the distance between these places from the length of time required by a caravan of camels to travel between them. From the central angle corresponding to the arc on the surface, he calculated the radius and hence the circumference of the earth. A second measurement was undertaken by Posidonius, who measured the altitudes of stars at Alexandria and Rhodes and estimated the distance between them from the time required to sail from one place to the other. With the decline of classical antiquity, the doctrine of the spherical shape of the earth was lost, and only one investigation, that by the Arabs under Calif Al-Mamun in A.D. 827, is recorded until the 16th century. In 1525, the French mathematician Fernel measured the length of a degree of latitude between Paris and Amiens by the revolutions of the wheels of his carriage, the circumference of which he had determined. In England, Norwood in 1635 measured the length of an arc between London and York with a chain. An important forward step in geodesy was the measurement of distance by triangulation, first by Tycho Brahe, in Denmark, and later, in 1615, by Willebrord Snell, in Holland. Of historic importance, was the use of telescopes in the triangulation for the measurement of a degree of arc by the Abbe Jean Picard in 1669.[6] He had been commissioned by the newly established Academy of Sciences to measure an arc corresponding to an angle of 1 deg., 22', 55" of the meridian between Amiens and Malvoisine, near Paris. Picard proposed to the Academy the measurement of the meridian of Paris through all of France, and this project was supported by Colbert, who obtained the approval of the King. In 1684, Giovanni-Domenico Cassini and De la Hire commenced a trigonometrical measure of an arc south of Paris; subsequently, Jacques Cassini, the son of Giovanni-Domenico, added the arc to the north of Paris. The project was completed in 1718. The length of a degree of arc south of Paris was found to be greater than the length north of Paris. From the difference, 57,097 toises[7] minus 56,960 toises, it was concluded that the polar diameter of the earth is larger than the equatorial diameter, i.e., that the earth is a prolate spheroid (fig. 3). [Illustration: Figure 3.--MEASUREMENTS OF THE LENGTH of a degree of latitude which were completed in different parts of France in 1669 and 1718 gave differing results which suggested that the shape of the earth is not a sphere but a prolate spheroid (1). But Richer's pendulum observation of 1672, as explained by Huygens and Newton, indicated that its shape is that of an oblate spheroid (2). The disagreement is reflected in this drawing. In the 1730's it was resolved in favor of the latter view by two French geodetic expeditions for the measurement of degrees of latitude in the equatorial and polar regions (Ecuador--then part of Peru--and Lapland).] Meanwhile, Richer in 1672 had been sent to Cayenne, French Guiana, to make astronomical observations and to measure the length of the seconds pendulum.[8] He took with him a pendulum clock which had been adjusted to keep accurate time in Paris. At Cayenne, however, Richer found that the clock was retarded by 2 minutes and 28 seconds per day (fig. 1). He also fitted up a "simple" pendulum to vibrate in seconds and measured the length of this seconds pendulum several times every week for 10 months. Upon his return to Paris, he found that the length of the "simple" pendulum which beat seconds at Cayenne was 1-1/4 Paris lines[9] shorter than the length of the seconds pendulum at Paris. Huygens explained the reduction in the length of the seconds pendulum--and, therefore, the lesser intensity of gravity at the equator with respect to the value at Paris--in terms of his theory of centripetal force as applied to the rotation of the earth and pendulum.[10] A more complete theory was given by Newton in the _Principia_.[11] Newton showed that if the earth is assumed to be a homogeneous, mutually gravitating fluid globe, its rotation will result in a bulging at the equator. The earth will then have the form of an oblate spheroid, and the intensity of gravity as a form of universal gravitation will vary with position on the surface of the earth. Newton took into account gravitational attraction and centrifugal action, and he calculated the ratio of the axes of the spheroid to be 230:229. He calculated and prepared a table of the lengths of a degree of latitude and of the seconds pendulum for every 5 deg. of latitude from the equator to the pole. A discrepancy between his predicted length of the seconds pendulum at the equator and Richer's measured length was explained by Newton in terms of the expansion of the scale with higher temperatures near the equator. Newton's theory that the earth is an oblate spheroid was confirmed by the measurements of Richer, but was rejected by the Paris Academy of Sciences, for it contradicted the results of the Cassinis, father and son, whose measurements of arcs to the south and north of Paris had led to the conclusion that the earth is a prolate spheroid. Thus, a controversy arose between the English scientists and the Paris Academy. The conflict was finally resolved by the results of expeditions sent by the Academy to Peru and Sweden. The first expedition, under Bouguer, La Condamine, and Godin in 1735, went to a region in Peru, and, with the help of the Spaniard Ullo, measured a meridian arc of about 3 deg. 7' near Quito, now in Ecuador.[12] The second expedition, with Maupertuis and Clairaut in 1736, went to Lapland within the Arctic Circle and measured an arc of about 1 deg. in length.[13] The northern arc of 1 deg. was found to be longer than the Peruvian arc of 1 deg., and thus it was confirmed that the earth is an oblate spheroid, that is, flattened at the poles, as predicted by the theory of Newton. [Illustration: Figure 4.--THE DIRECT USE OF A CLOCK to measure the force of gravity was found to be limited in accuracy by the necessary mechanical connection of the pendulum to the clock, and by the unavoidable difference between the characteristics of a clock pendulum and those of a theoretical (usually called "simple") pendulum, in which the mass is concentrated in the bob, and the supporting rod is weightless. After 1735, the clock was used only to time the swing of a detached pendulum, by the method of "coincidences." In this method, invented by J. J. Mairan, the length of the detached pendulum is first accurately measured, and the clock is corrected by astronomical observation. The detached pendulum is then swung before the clock pendulum as shown here. The two pendulums swing more or less out of phase, coming into coincidence each time one has gained a vibration. By counting the number of coincidences over several hours, the period of the detached pendulum can be very accurately determined. The length and period of the detached pendulum are the data required for the calculation of the force of gravity.] The period from Eratosthenes to Picard has been called the spherical era of geodesy; the period from Picard to the end of the 19th century has been called the ellipsoidal period. During the latter period the earth was conceived to be an ellipsoid, and the determination of its ellipticity, that is, the difference of equatorial radius and polar radius divided by the equatorial radius, became an important geodetic problem. A significant contribution to the solution of this problem was made by determinations of gravity by the pendulum. An epoch-making work during the ellipsoidal era of geodesy was Clairaut's treatise, _Theorie de la figure de la terre_.[14] On the hypothesis that the earth is a spheroid of equilibrium, that is, such that a layer of water would spread all over it, and that the internal density varies so that layers of equal density are coaxial spheroids, Clairaut derived a historic theorem: If [gamma]_{E}, [gamma]_{P} are the values of gravity at the equator and pole, respectively, and c the centrifugal force at the equator divided by [gamma]_{E}, then the ellipticity [alpha] = (5/2)c - ([gamma]_{P} - [gamma]_{E})/[gamma]_{E}. Laplace showed that the surfaces of equal density might have any nearly spherical form, and Stokes showed that it is unnecessary to assume any law of density as long as the external surface is a spheroid of equilibrium.[15] It follows from Clairaut's theorem that if the earth is an oblate spheroid, its ellipticity can be determined from relative values of gravity and the absolute value at the equator involved in c. Observations with nonreversible, invariable compound pendulums have contributed to the application of Clairaut's theorem in its original and contemporary extended form for the determination of the figure and gravity field of the earth. Early Types of Pendulums The pendulum employed in observations of gravity prior to the 19th century usually consisted of a small weight suspended by a filament (figs. 4-6). The pioneer experimenters with "simple" pendulums changed the length of the suspension until the pendulum beat seconds. Picard in 1669 determined the length of the seconds pendulum at Paris with a "simple" pendulum which consisted of a copper ball an inch in diameter suspended by a fiber of pite from jaws (pite was a preparation of the leaf of a species of aloe and was not affected appreciably by moisture). A celebrated set of experiments with a "simple" pendulum was conducted by Bouguer[16] in 1737 in the Andes, as part of the expedition to measure the Peruvian arc. The bob of the pendulum was a double truncated cone, and the length was measured from the jaw suspension to the center of oscillation of the thread and bob. Bouguer allowed for change of length of his measuring rod with temperature and also for the buoyancy of the air. He determined the time of swing by an elementary form of the method of coincidences. The thread of the pendulum was swung in front of a scale and Bouguer observed how long it took the pendulum to lose a number of vibrations on the seconds clock. For this purpose, he noted the time when the beat of the clock was heard and, simultaneously, the thread moved past the center of the scale. A historic aspect of Bouguer's method was that he employed an "invariable" pendulum, that is, the length was maintained the same at the various stations of observation, a procedure that has been described as having been invented by Bouguer. Since T = [pi][sqrt](l/g), it follows that (T_{1})^{2}/(T_{2})^{2} = g_{2}/g_{1}. Thus, if the absolute value of gravity is known at one station, the value at any other station can be determined from the ratio of the squares of times of swing of an invariable pendulum at the two stations. From the above equation, if T_{1} is the time of swing at a station where the intensity of gravity is g, and T_{2} is the time at a station where the intensity is g + [Delta]g, then [Delta]g/g = (T_{1})^{2}/(T_{2})^{2} - 1. Bouguer's investigations with his invariable pendulum yielded methods for the determination of the internal structure of the earth. On the Peruvian expedition, he determined the length of the seconds pendulum at three stations, including one at Quito, at varying distances above sea level. If values of gravity at stations of different elevation are to be compared, they must be reduced to the same level, usually to sea level. Since gravity decreases with height above sea level in accordance with the law of gravitation, a free-air reduction must be applied to values of gravity determined above the level of the sea. Bouguer originated the additional reduction for the increase in gravity on a mountain or plateau caused by the attraction of the matter in a plate. From the relative values of gravity at elevated stations in Peru and at sea level, Bouguer calculated that the mean density of the earth was 4.7 times greater than that of the _cordilleras_.[17] For greater accuracy in the study of the internal structure of the earth, in the 19th century the Bouguer plate reduction came to be supplemented by corrections for irregularities of terrain and by different types of isostatic reduction. La Condamine, who like Bouguer was a member of the Peruvian expedition, conducted his own pendulum experiments (fig. 4). He experimented in 1735 at Santo Domingo en route to South America,[18] then at various stations in South America, and again at Paris upon his return to France. His pendulum consisted of a copper ball suspended by a thread of pite. For experimentation the length initially was about 12 feet, and the time of swing 2 seconds, but then the length was reduced to about 3 feet with time of swing 1 second. Earlier, when it was believed that gravity was constant over the earth, Picard and others had proposed that the length of the seconds pendulum be chosen as the standard. La Condamine in 1747 revived the proposal in the form that the length of the seconds pendulum at the equator be adopted as the standard of length. Subsequently, he investigated the expansion of a toise of iron from the variation in the period of his pendulum. In 1755, he observed the pendulum at Rome with Boscovich. La Condamine's pendulum was used by other observers and finally was lost at sea on an expedition around the world. The knowledge of the pendulum acquired by the end of the 18th century was summarized in 1785 in a memoir by Boscovich.[19] [Illustration: Figure 5.--AN APPARATUS FOR THE PRACTICE MEASUREMENT of the length of the pendulum devised on the basis of a series of preliminary experiments by C. M. de la Condamine who, in the course of the French geodetic expedition to Peru in 1735, devoted a 3-month sojourn on the island of Santo Domingo to pendulum observations by Mairan's Method. In this arrangement, shown here, a vertical rod of ironwood is used both as the scale and as the support for the apparatus, having at its top the brass pendulum support (A) and, below, a horizontal mirror (O) which serves to align the apparatus vertically through visual observation of the reflection of the pointer projecting from A. The pendulum, about 37 inches long, consists of a thread of pite (a humidity-resistant, natural fiber) and a copper ball of about 6 ounces. Its exact length is determined by adjusting the micrometer (S) so that the ball nearly touches the mirror. It will be noted that the clock pendulum would be obscured by the scale. La Condamine seems to have determined the times of coincidence by visual observation of the occasions on which "the pendulums swing parallel." (Portion of plate 1, _Memoires publies par la Societe francaise de Physique_, vol. 4.)] [Illustration: Figure 6.--THE RESULT of early pendulum experiments was often expressed in terms of the length of a pendulum which would have a period of one second and was called "the seconds pendulum." In 1792, J. C. Borda and J. D. Cassini determined the length of the seconds pendulum at Paris with this apparatus. The pendulum consists of a platinum ball about 1-1/2 inches in diameter, suspended by a fine iron wire. The length, about 12 feet, was such that its period would be nearly twice as long as that of the pendulum of the clock (A). The interval between coincidences was determined by observing, through the telescope at the left, the times when the two pendulums emerge together from behind the screen (M). The exact length of the pendulum was measured by a platinum scale (not shown) equipped with a vernier and an auxiliary copper scale for temperature correction. When, at the end of the 18th century, the French revolutionary government established the metric system of weights and measures, the length of the seconds pendulum at Paris was considered, but not adopted, as the unit of length. (Plate 2, _Memoires publies par la Societe francaise de Physique_, vol. 4.)] The practice with the "simple" pendulum on the part of Picard, Bouguer, La Condamine and others in France culminated in the work of Borda and Cassini in 1792 at the observatory in Paris[20] (fig. 6). The experiments were undertaken to determine whether or not the length of the seconds pendulum should be adopted as the standard of length by the new government of France. The bob consisted of a platinum ball 16-1/6 Paris lines in diameter, and 9,911 grains (slightly more than 17 ounces) in weight. The bob was held to a brass cup covering about one-fifth of its surface by the interposition of a small quantity of grease. The cup with ball was hung by a fine iron wire about 12 Paris feet long. The upper end of the wire was attached to a cylinder which was part of a wedge-shaped knife edge, on the upper surface of which was a stem on which a small adjustable weight was held by a screw thread. The knife edge rested on a steel plate. The weight on the knife-edge apparatus was adjusted so that the apparatus would vibrate with the same period as the pendulum. Thus, the mass of the suspending apparatus could be neglected in the theory of motion of the pendulum about the knife edge. [Illustration: Figure 7.--RESULTS OF EXPERIMENTS in the determination of the length of the seconds pendulum at Koenigsberg by a new method were reported by F. W. Bessel in 1826 and published in 1828. With this apparatus, he obtained two sets of data from the same pendulum, by using two different points of suspension. The pendulum was about 10 feet long. The distance between the two points of suspension (_a_ and _b_) was 1 toise (about six feet). A micrometric balance (_c_) below the bob was used to determine the increase in length due to the weight of the bob. He projected the image of the clock pendulum (not shown) onto the gravity pendulum by means of a lens, thus placing the clock some distance away and eliminating the disturbing effect of its motion. (Portion of plate 6, _Memoires publies par la Societe francaise de Physique_, vol. 4.)] In the earlier suspension from jaws there was uncertainty as to the point about which the pendulum oscillated. Borda and Cassini hung their pendulum in front of a seconds clock and determined the time of swing by the method of coincidences. The times on the clock were observed when the clock gained or lost one complete vibration (two swings) on the pendulum. Suppose that the wire pendulum makes n swings while the clock makes 2n + 2. If the clock beats seconds exactly, the time of one complete vibration is 2 seconds, and the time of swing of the wire pendulum is T = (2n + 2)/n = 2(1 + 1/n). An error in the time caused by uncertainty in determining the coincidence of clock and wire pendulum is reduced by employing a long interval of observation 2n. The whole apparatus was enclosed in a box, in order to exclude disturbances from currents of air. Corrections were made for buoyancy, for amplitude of swing and for variations in length of the wire with temperature. The final result was that the length of the seconds pendulum at the observatory in Paris was determined to be 440.5593 Paris lines, or 993.53 mm., reduced to sea level 993.85 mm. Some years later the methods of Borda were used by other French investigators, among whom was Biot who used the platinum ball of Borda suspended by a copper wire 60 cm. long. Another historic "simple" pendulum was the one swung by Bessel (fig. 7) for the determination of gravity at Koenigsberg 1825-1827.[21] The pendulum consisted of a ball of brass, copper, or ivory that was suspended by a fine wire, the upper end of which was wrapped and unwrapped on a horizontal cylinder as support. The pendulum was swung first from one point and then from another, exactly a "toise de Peru"[22] higher up, the bob being at the same level in each case (fig. 7). Bessel found the period of vibration of the pendulum by the method of coincidences; and in order to avoid disturbances from the comparison clock, it was placed at some distance from the pendulum under observation. Bessel's experiments were significant in view of the care with which he determined the corrections. He corrected for the stiffness of the wire and for the lack of rigidity of connection between the bob and wire. The necessity for the latter correction had been pointed out by Laplace, who showed that through the circumstance that the pull of the wire is now on one side and now on the other side of the center of gravity, the bob acquires angular momentum about its center of gravity, which cannot be accounted for if the line of the wire, and therefore the force that it exerts, always passed through the center. In addition to a correction for buoyancy of the air considered by his predecessors, Bessel also took account of the inertia of the air set in motion by the pendulum. [Illustration: Figure 8.--MODE OF SUSPENSION of Bessel's pendulum is shown here. The iron wire is supported by the thumbscrew and clamp at the left, but passes over a pin at the center, which is actually the upper terminal of the pendulum. Bessel found this "cylinder of unrolling" superior to the clamps and knife edges of earlier pendulums. The counterweight at the right is part of a system for supporting the scale in such a way that it is not elongated by its own weight. With this apparatus, Bessel determined the ratio of the lengths of the two pendulums and their times of vibration. From this the length of the seconds pendulum was calculated. His method eliminated the need to take into account such sources of inaccuracy as flexure of the pendulum wire and imperfections in the shape of the bob. (Portion of plate 7, _Memoires publies par la Societe francaise de Physique_, vol. 4.)] [Illustration: Figure 9.--FRIEDRICH WILHELM BESSEL (1784-1846), German mathematician and astronomer. He became the first superintendent of the Prussian observatory established at Koenigsberg in 1810, and remained there during the remainder of his life. So important were his many contributions to precise measurement and calculation in astronomy that he is often considered the founder of the "modern" age in that science. This characteristic also shows in his venture into geodesy, 1826-1830, one product of which was the pendulum experiment reported in this article.] The latter effect had been discovered by Du Buat in 1786,[23] but his work was unknown to Bessel. The length of the seconds pendulum at Koenigsberg, reduced to sea level, was found by Bessel to be 440.8179 lines. In 1835, Bessel determined the intensity of gravity at a site in Berlin where observations later were conducted in the Imperial Office of Weights and Measures by Charles S. Peirce of the U.S. Coast Survey. Kater's Convertible and Invariable Pendulums The systematic survey of the gravity field of the earth was given a great impetus by the contributions of Capt. Henry Kater, F.R.S. In 1817, he designed, constructed, and applied a convertible compound pendulum for the absolute determination of gravity at the house of Henry Browne, F.R.S., in Portland Place, London.[24] Kater's convertible pendulum (fig. 11) consisted of a brass rod to which were attached a flat circular bob of brass and two adjustable weights, the smaller of which was adjusted by a screw. The convertibility of the pendulum was constituted by the provision of two knife edges turned inwards on opposite sides of the center of gravity. The pendulum was swung on each knife edge, and the adjustable weights were moved until the times of swing were the same about each knife edge. When the times were judged to be the same, the distance between the knife edges was inferred to be the length of the equivalent simple pendulum, in accordance with Huygens' theorem on conjugate points of a compound pendulum. Kater determined the time of swing by the method of coincidences (fig. 12). He corrected for the buoyancy of the air. The final value of the length of the seconds pendulum at Browne's house in London, reduced to sea level, was determined to be 39.13929 inches. The convertible compound pendulum had been conceived prior to its realization by Kater. In 1792, on the occasion of the proposal in Paris to establish the standard of length as the length of the seconds pendulum, Baron de Prony had proposed the employment of a compound pendulum with three axes of oscillation.[25] In 1800, he proposed the convertible compound pendulum with knife edges about which the pendulum could complete swings in equal times. De Prony's proposals were not accepted and his papers remained unpublished until 1889, at which time they were discovered by Defforges. The French decision was to experiment with the ball pendulum, and the determination of the length of the seconds pendulum was carried out by Borda and Cassini by methods previously described. Bohnenberger in his _Astronomie_ (1811),[26] made the proposal to employ a convertible pendulum for the absolute determination of gravity; thus, he has received credit for priority in publication. Capt. Kater independently conceived of the convertible pendulum and was the first to design, construct, and swing one. [Illustration: Figure 10.--HENRY KATER (1777-1835), English army officer and physicist. His scientific career began during his military service in India, where he assisted in the "great trigonometrical survey." Returned to England because of bad health, and retired in 1814, he pioneered (1818) in the development of the convertible pendulum as an alternative to the approximation of the "simple" pendulum for the measurement of the "seconds pendulum." Kater's convertible pendulum and the invariable pendulum introduced by him in 1819 were the basis of English pendulum work. (_Photo courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London._)] After his observations with the convertible pendulum, Capt. Kater designed an invariable compound pendulum with a single knife edge but otherwise similar in external form to the convertible pendulum[27] (fig. 13). Thirteen of these Kater invariable pendulums have been reported as constructed and swung at stations throughout the world.[28] Kater himself swung an invariable pendulum at a station in London and at various other stations in the British Isles. Capt. Edward Sabine, between 1820 and 1825, made voyages and swung Kater invariable pendulums at stations from the West Indies to Greenland and Spitzbergen.[29] In 1820, Kater swung a Kater invariable pendulum at London and then sent it to Goldingham, who swung it in 1821 at Madras, India.[30] Also in 1820, Kater supplied an invariable pendulum to Hall, who swung it at London and then made observations near the equator and in the Southern Hemisphere, and at London again in 1823.[31] The same pendulum, after its knives were reground, was delivered to Adm. Luetke of Russia, who observed gravity with it on a trip around the world between 1826 and 1829.[32] [Illustration: Figure 11.--THE ATTEMPT TO APPROXIMATE the simple (theoretical) pendulum in gravity experiments ended in 1817-18 when Henry Kater invented the compound convertible pendulum, from which the equivalent simple pendulum could be obtained according to the method of Huygens (see text, p. 314). Developed in connection with a project to fix the standard of English measure, Kater's pendulum was called "compound" because it was a solid bar rather than the fine wire or string with which earlier experimenters had tried to approximate a "weightless" rod. It was called convertible because it is alternately swung from the two knife edges (_a_ and _b_) at opposite ends. The weights (_f_ and _g_) are adjusted so that the period of the pendulum is the same from either knife edge. The distance between the two knife edges is then equal to the length of the equivalent simple pendulum.] [Illustration: Figure 12.--THE KATER CONVERTIBLE PENDULUM in use is placed before a clock, whose pendulum bob is directly behind the extended "tail" of the Kater pendulum. A white spot is painted on the center of the bob of the clock pendulum. The observing telescope, left, has a diaphragm with a vertical slit of such width that its view is just filled by the tail of the Kater pendulum when it is at rest. When the two pendulums are swinging, the white spot on the clock pendulum can be seen on each swing except that in which the two pendulums are in coincidence; thus, the coincidences are determined. (Portion of plate 5, _Memoires publies par la Societe francaise de Physique_, vol. 4.)] [Illustration: Figure 13.--THIS DRAWING ACCOMPANIED John Goldingham's report on the work done in India with Kater's invariable pendulum. The value of gravity obtained, directly or indirectly, in terms of the simple pendulum, is called "absolute." Once absolute values of gravity were established at a number of stations, it became possible to use the much simpler "relative" method for the measurement of gravity at new stations. Because it has only one knife edge, and does not involve the adjustments of the convertible pendulum, this one is called "invariable." In use, it is first swung at a station where the absolute value of gravity has been established, and this period is then compared with its period at one or more new stations. Kater developed an invariable pendulum in 1819, which was used in England and in Madras, India, in 1821.] While the British were engaged in swinging the Kater invariable pendulums to determine relative values of the length of the seconds pendulum, or of gravity, the French also sent out expeditions. Capt. de Freycinet made initial observations at Paris with three invariable brass pendulums and one wooden one, and then carried out observations at Rio de Janeiro, Cape of Good Hope, Ile de France, Rawak (near New Guinea), Guam, Maui, and various other places.[33] A similar expedition was conducted in 1822-1825 by Captain Duperry.[34] During the years from 1827 to 1840, various types of pendulum were constructed and swung by Francis Baily, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, who reported in 1832 on experiments in which no less than 41 different pendulums were swung in vacuo, and their characteristics determined.[35] In 1836, Baily undertook to advise the American Lt. Charles Wilkes, who was to head the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, on the procurement of pendulums for this voyage. Wilkes ordered from the London instrument maker, Thomas Jones, two unusual pendulums, which Wilkes described as "those considered the best form by Mr. Baily for traveling pendulums," and which Baily, himself, described as "precisely the same as the two invariable pendulums belonging to this [Royal Astronomical] Society," except for the location of the knife edges. [Illustration: Figure 14.--VACUUM CHAMBER FOR USE with the Kater pendulum. Of a number of extraneous effects which tend to disturb the accuracy of pendulum observations the most important is air resistance. Experiments reported by the Greenwich (England) observatory in 1829 led to the development of a vacuum chamber within which the pendulum was swung.] The unusual feature of these pendulums was in their symmetry of mass as well as of form. They were made of bars, of iron in one case, and of brass in the other, and each had two knife edges at opposite ends equidistant from the center. Thus, although they resembled reversible pendulums, their symmetry of mass prevented their use as such, and they were rather equivalent to four separate invariable pendulums.[36] Wilkes was taught the use of the pendulum by Baily, and conducted experiments at Baily's house, where the latter had carried out the work reported on in 1832. The subsequent experiments made on the U.S. Exploring Expedition were under the charge of Wilkes, himself, who made observations on 11 separate occasions, beginning with that in London (1836) and followed by others in New York, Washington, D.C., Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Honolulu, "Pendulum Peak" (Mauna Loa), Mount Kanoha, Nesqually (Oregon Territory), and, finally, two more times in Washington, D.C. (1841 and 1845). Wilkes' results were communicated to Baily, who appears to have found the work defective because of insufficient attention to the maintenance of temperature constancy and to certain alterations made to the pendulums.[37] The results were also to have been included in the publications of the Expedition, but were part of the unpublished 24th volume. Fortunately they still exist, in what appears to be a printer's proof.[38] The Kater invariable pendulums were used to investigate the internal constitution of the earth. Airy sought to determine the density of the earth by observing the times of swing of pendulums at the top and bottom of a mine. The first experiments were made in 1826 at the Dolcoath copper mine in Cornwall, and failed when the pendulum fell to the bottom. In 1854, the experiments were again undertaken in the Harton coalpit, near Sunderland.[39] Gravity at the surface was greater than below, because of the attraction of a shell equal to the depth of the pit. From the density of the shell as determined from specimens of rock, Airy found the density of the earth to be 6-1/2 times greater than that of water. T. C. Mendenhall, in 1880, used a Kater convertible pendulum in an invariable manner to compare values of gravity on Fujiyama and at Tokyo, Japan.[40] He used a "simple" pendulum of the Borda type to determine the absolute value of gravity at Tokyo. From the values of gravity on the mountain and at Tokyo, and an estimate of the volume of the mountain, he estimated the mean density of the earth as 5.77 times greater than that of water. In 1879, Maj. J. Herschel, R.E., stated: The years from 1840 to 1865 are a complete blank, if we except Airy's relative density experiments in 1854. This pause was broken simultaneously in three different ways. Two pendulums of the Kater pattern were sent to India; two after Bessel's design were set to work in Russia; and at Geneva, Plantamour's zealous experiments with a pendulum of the same kind mark the commencement of an era of renewed activity on the European continent.[41] With the statement that Kater invariable pendulums nos. 4 and 6 (1821) were used in India between 1865 and 1873, we now consider the other events mentioned by Herschel. [Illustration: Figure 15.--ONE OF FRANCIS BAILY'S PENDULUMS (62-1/2 inches long), shown on the left, is now in the possession of the Science Museum, London, and, right, two views of a similar pendulum (37-5/8 inches long) made in the late 19th century by Edward Kuebel, Washington, D.C., which is no. 316,876 in the collection of the U.S. National Museum. Among a large number of pendulums tried by Baily in London (1827-1840), was one which resembles the reversible pendulum superficially, but which is actually an invariable pendulum having knife edges at both ends. The purpose was apparently economy, since it is equivalent to two separate invariable pendulums. This is the type of pendulum used on the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842. It is not known what use was made of the Kuebel pendulum.] Repsold-Bessel Reversible Pendulum As we have noted, Bessel made determinations of gravity with a ball ("simple") pendulum in the period 1825-1827 and in 1835 at Koenigsberg and Berlin, respectively. In the memoir on his observations at Koenigsberg, he set forth the theory of the symmetrical compound pendulum with interchangeable knife edges.[42] Bessel demonstrated theoretically that if the pendulum were symmetrical with respect to its geometrical center, if the times of swing about each axis were the same, the effects of buoyancy and of air set in motion would be eliminated. Laplace had already shown that the knife edge must be regarded as a cylinder and not as a mere line of support. Bessel then showed that if the knife edges were equal cylinders, their effects were eliminated by inverting the pendulum; and if the knife edges were not equal cylinders, the difference in their effects was canceled by interchanging the knives and again determining the times of swing in the so-called erect and inverted positions. Bessel further showed that it is unnecessary to make the times of swing exactly equal for the two knife edges. The simplified discussion for infinitely small oscillations in a vacuum is as follows: If T_{1} and T_{2} are the times of swing about the knife edges, and if h_{1} and h_{2} are distances of the knife edges from the center of gravity, and if k is the radius of gyration about an axis through the center of gravity, then from the equation of motion of a rigid body oscillating about a fixed axis under gravity (T_{1})^{2} = [pi]^{2}(k^{2} + (h_{1})^{2})/gh_{1}, (T_{2})^{2} = [pi]^{2}(k^{2} + (h_{2})^{2})/gh_{2}. Then (h_{1}(T_{1})^{2} - h_{2}(T_{2})^{2})/(h_{1} - h_{2}) = ([pi]^{2}/g)(h_{1} + h_{2}) = [tau]^{2}. [tau] is then the time of swing of a simple pendulum of length h_{1} + h_{2}. If the difference T_{1} - T_{2} is sufficiently small, [tau] = (h_{1}T_{1} - h_{2}T_{2})/(h_{1} - h_{2}). Prior to its publication by Bessel in 1828, the formula for the time of swing of a simple pendulum of length h_{1} + h_{2} in terms of T_{1}, T_{2} had been given by C. F. Gauss in a letter to H. C. Schumacher dated November 28, 1824.[43] The symmetrical compound pendulum with interchangeable knives, for which Bessel gave a posthumously published design and specifications,[44] has been called a reversible pendulum; it may thereby be distinguished from Kater's unsymmetrical convertible pendulum. In 1861, the Swiss Geodetic Commission was formed, and in one of its first sessions in 1862 it was decided to add determinations of gravity to the operations connected with the measurement--at different points in Switzerland--of the arc of the meridian traversing central Europe.[45] It was decided further to employ a reversible pendulum of Bessel's design and to have it constructed by the firm of A. Repsold and Sons, Hamburg. It was also decided to make the first observations with the pendulum in Geneva; accordingly, the Repsold-Bessel pendulum (fig. 16) was sent to Prof. E. Plantamour, director of the observatory at Geneva, in the autumn of 1864.[46] The Swiss reversible pendulum was about 560 mm. in length (distance between the knife edges) and the time of swing was approximately 3/4 second. At the extremities of the stem of the pendulum were movable cylindrical disks, one of which was solid and heavy, the other hollow and light. It was intended by the mechanicians that equality of times of oscillation about the knife edges would be achieved by adjusting the position of a movable disk. The pendulum was hung by a knife edge on a plate supported by a tripod and having an attachment from which a measuring rod could be suspended so that the distance between the knife edges could be measured by a comparator. Plantamour found it impracticable to adjust a disk until the times of swing about each knife edge were equal. His colleague, Charles Cellerier,[47] then showed that if (T_{1} - T_{2})/T_{1} is sufficiently small so that one can neglect its square, one can determine the length of the seconds pendulum from the times of swing about the knife edges by a theory which uses the distances of the center of gravity from the respective knife edges. Thus, a role for the position of the center of gravity in the theory of the reversible pendulum, which had been set forth earlier by Bessel, was discovered independently by Cellerier for the Swiss observers of pendulums. In 1866, Plantamour published an extensive memoir "Experiences faites a Geneve avec le pendule a reversion." Another memoir, published in 1872, presented further results of determinations of gravity in Switzerland. Plantamour was the first scientist in western Europe to use a Repsold-Bessel reversible pendulum and to work out methods for its employment. The Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences acquired two Repsold-Bessel pendulums, and observations with them were begun in 1864 by Prof. Sawitsch, University of St. Petersburg, and others.[48] In 1869, the Russian pendulums were loaned to the India Survey in order to enable members of the Survey to supplement observations with the Kater invariable pendulums nos. 4 and 6 (1821). During the transport of the Russian apparatus to India, the knives became rusted and the apparatus had to be reconditioned. Capt. Heaviside of the India Survey observed with both pendulums at Kew Observatory, near London, in the spring of 1874, after which the Russian pendulums were sent to Pulkowa (Russia) and were used for observations there and in the Caucasus. The introduction of the Repsold-Bessel reversible pendulum for the determination of gravity was accompanied by the creation of the first international scientific association, one for geodesy. In 1861, Lt. Gen. J. J. Baeyer, director of the Prussian Geodetic Survey, sent a memorandum to the Prussian minister of war in which he proposed that the independent geodetic surveys of the states of central Europe be coordinated by the creation of an international organization.[49] In 1862, invitations were sent to the various German states and to other states of central Europe. The first General Conference of the association, initially called _Die Mittel-Europaeische Gradmessung_, also _L'Association Geodesique Internationale_, was held from the 15th to the 22d of October 1864 in Berlin.[50] The Conference decided upon questions of organization: a general conference was to be held ordinarily every three years; a permanent commission initially consisting of seven members was to be the scientific organ of the association and to meet annually; a central bureau was to be established for the reception, publication, and distribution of reports from the member states. [Illustration: Figure 16.--FROM A DESIGN LEFT BY BESSEL, this portable apparatus was developed in 1862 by the firm of Repsold in Hamburg, whose founder had assisted Bessel in the construction of his pendulum apparatus of 1826. The pendulum is convertible, but differs from Kater's in being geometrically symmetrical and, for this reason, Repsold's is usually called "reversible." Just to the right of the pendulum is a standard scale. To the left is a "vertical comparator" designed by Repsold to measure the distance between the knife edges of the pendulum. To make this measurement, two micrometer microscopes which project horizontally through the comparator are alternately focused on the knife edges and on the standard scale.] Under the topic "Astronomical Questions," the General Conference of 1864 resolved that there should be determinations of the intensity of gravity at the greatest possible number of points of the geodetic network, and recommended the reversible pendulum as the instrument of observation.[51] At the second General Conference, in Berlin in 1867, on the basis of favorable reports by Dr. Hirsch, director of the observatory at Neuchatel, of Swiss practice with the Repsold-Bessel reversible pendulum, this instrument was specifically recommended for determinations of gravity.[52] The title of the association was changed to _Die Europaeische Gradmessung_; in 1886, it became _Die Internationale Erdmessung_, under which title it continued until World War I. On April 1, 1866, the Central Bureau of _Die Europaeische Gradmessung_ was opened in Berlin under the presidency of Baeyer, and in 1868 there was founded at Berlin, also under his presidency, the Royal Prussian Geodetic Institute, which obtained regular budgetary status on January 1, 1870. A reversible pendulum for the Institute was ordered from A. Repsold and Sons, and it was delivered in the spring of 1869. The Prussian instrument was symmetrical geometrically, as specified by Bessel, but different in form from the Swiss and Russian pendulums. The distance between the knife edges was 1 meter, and the time of swing approximately 1 second. The Prussian Repsold-Bessel pendulum was swung at Leipzig and other stations in central Europe during the years 1869-1870 by Dr. Albrecht under the direction of Dr. Bruhns, director of the observatory at Leipzig and chief of the astronomical section of the Geodetic Institute. The results of these first observations appeared in a publication of the Royal Prussian Geodetic Institute in 1871.[53] Results of observations with the Russian Repsold-Bessel pendulums were published by the Imperial Academy of Sciences. In 1872, Prof. Sawitsch reported the work for western Europeans in "Les variations de la pesanteur dans les provinces occidentales de l'Empire russe."[48] In November 1873, the Austrian Geodetic Commission received a Repsold-Bessel reversible pendulum and on September 24, 1874, Prof. Theodor von Oppolzer reported on observations at Vienna and other stations to the Fourth General Conference of _Die Europaeische Gradmessung_ in Dresden.[54] At the fourth session of the Conference, on September 28, 1874, a Special Commission, consisting of Baeyer, as chairman, and Bruhns, Hirsch, von Oppolzer, Peters, and Albrecht, was appointed to consider (under Topic 3 of the program): "Observations for the determination of the intensity of gravity," the question, "Which Pendulum-apparatuses are preferable for the determination of many points?" After the adoption of the Repsold-Bessel reversible pendulum for gravity determinations in Europe, work in the field was begun by the U.S. Coast Survey under the superintendency of Prof. Benjamin Peirce. There is mention in reports of observations with pendulums prior to Peirce's direction to his son Charles on November 30, 1872, "to take charge of the Pendulum Experiments of the Coast Survey and to direct and inspect all parties engaged in such experiments and as often as circumstances will permit, to take the field with a party...."[55] Systematic and important gravity work by the Survey was begun by Charles Sanders Peirce. Upon receiving notice of his appointment, the latter promptly ordered from the Repsolds a pendulum similar to the Prussian instrument. Since the firm of mechanicians was engaged in making instruments for observations of the transit of Venus in 1874, the pendulum for the Coast Survey could not be constructed immediately. Meanwhile, during the years 1873-1874, Charles Peirce conducted a party which made observations of gravity in the Hoosac Tunnel near North Adams, and at Northampton and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The pendulums used were nonreversible, invariable pendulums with conical bobs. Among them was a silver pendulum, but similar pendulums of brass were used also.[56] [Illustration: Figure 17.--REPSOLD-BESSEL REVERSIBLE PENDULUM apparatus as made in 1875, and used in the gravity work of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Continental geodesists continued to favor the general use of convertible pendulums and absolute determinations of gravity, while their English colleagues had turned to invariable pendulums and relative determinations, except for base stations. Perhaps the first important American contribution to gravity work was C. S. Peirce's demonstration of the error inherent in the Repsold apparatus through flexure of the stand.] [Illustration: Figure 18.--CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE (1839-1914), son of Benjamin Peirce, Perkins Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics at Harvard College. C. S. Peirce graduated from Harvard in 1859. From 1873 to 1891, as an assistant at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, he accomplished the important gravimetric work described in this article. Peirce was also interested in many other fields, but above all in the logic, philosophy, and history of science, in which he wrote extensively. His greatest fame is in philosophy, where he is regarded as the founder of pragmatism.] In 1874, Charles Peirce expressed the desire to be sent to Europe for at least a year, beginning about March 1, 1875, "to learn the use of the new convertible pendulum and to compare it with those of the European measure of a Degree and the Swiss and to compare" his "invariable pendulums in the manner which has been used by swinging them in London and Paris."[57] Charles S. Peirce, assistant, U.S. Coast Survey, sailed for Europe on April 3, 1875, on his mission to obtain the Repsold-Bessel reversible pendulum ordered for the Survey and to learn the methods of using it for the determination of gravity. In England, he conferred with Maxwell, Stokes, and Airy concerning the theory and practice of research with pendulums. In May, he continued on to Hamburg and obtained delivery from the Repsolds of the pendulum for the Coast Survey (fig. 17). Peirce then went to Berlin and conferred with Gen. Baeyer, who expressed doubts of the stability of the Repsold stand for the pendulum. Peirce next went to Geneva, where, under arrangements with Prof. Plantamour, he swung the newly acquired pendulum at the observatory.[58] In view of Baeyer's expressed doubts of the rigidity of the Repsold stand, Peirce performed experiments to measure the flexure of the stand caused by the oscillations of the pendulum. His method was to set up a micrometer in front of the pendulum stand and, with a microscope, to measure the displacement caused by a weight passing over a pulley, the friction of which had been determined. Peirce calculated the correction to be applied to the length of the seconds pendulum--on account of the swaying of the stand during the swings of the pendulum--to amount to over 0.2 mm. Although Peirce's measurements of flexure in Geneva were not as precise as his later measurements, he believed that failure to correct for flexure of the stand in determinations previously made with Repsold pendulums was responsible for appreciable errors in reported values of the length of the seconds pendulum. The Permanent Commission of _Die Europaeische Gradmessung_ met in Paris, September 20-29, 1875. In conjunction with this meeting, there was held on September 21 a meeting of the Special Commission on the Pendulum. The basis of the discussion by the Special Commission was provided by reports which had been submitted in response to a circular sent out by the Central Bureau to the members on February 26, 1874.[59] Gen. Baeyer stated that the distance of 1 meter between the knife edges of the Prussian Repsold-Bessel pendulum made it unwieldy and unsuited for transport. He declared that the instability of the stand also was a source of error. Accordingly, Gen. Baeyer expressed the opinion that absolute determinations of gravity should be made at a control station by a reversible pendulum hung on a permanent, and therefore stable stand, and he said that relative values of gravity with respect to the control station should be obtained in the field by means of a Bouguer invariable pendulum. Dr. Bruhns and Dr. Peters agreed with Gen. Baeyer; however, the Swiss investigators, Prof. Plantamour and Dr. Hirsch reported in defense of the reversible pendulum as a field instrument, as did Prof. von Oppolzer of Vienna. The circumstance that an invariable pendulum is subject to changes in length was offered as an argument in favor of the reversible pendulum as a field instrument. Peirce was present during these discussions by the members of the Special Commission, and he reported that his experiments at Geneva demonstrated that the oscillations of the pendulum called forth a flexure of the support which hitherto had been neglected. The observers who used the Swiss and Austrian Repsold pendulums contended, in opposition to Peirce, that the Repsold stand was stable. The outcome of these discussions was that the Special Commission reported to the Permanent Commission that the Repsold-Bessel reversible pendulum, except for some small changes, satisfied all requirements for the determination of gravity. The Special Commission proposed that the Repsold pendulums of the several states be swung at the Prussian Eichungsamt in Berlin where, as Peirce pointed out, Bessel had made his determination of the intensity of gravity with a ball pendulum in 1835. Peirce was encouraged to swing the Coast Survey reversible pendulum at the stations in France, England, and Germany where Borda and Cassini, Kater, and Bessel, respectively, had made historic determinations. The Permanent Commission, in whose sessions Peirce also participated, by resolutions adopted the report of the Special Commission on the Pendulum.[60] During the months of January and February 1876, Peirce conducted observations in the Grande Salle du Meridien at the observatory in Paris where Borda, Biot, and Capt. Edward Sabine had swung pendulums early in the 19th century. He conducted observations in Berlin from April to June 1876 and, by experiment, determined the correction for flexure to be applied to the value of gravity previously obtained with the Prussian instrument. Subsequent observations were made at Kew. After his return to the United States on August 26, 1876, Peirce conducted experiments at the Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he made careful measurements of the flexure of the stand by statical and dynamical methods. In Geneva, he had secured the construction of a vacuum chamber in which the pendulum could be swung on a support which he called the Geneva support. At the Stevens Institute, Peirce swung the Repsold-Bessel pendulum on the Geneva support and determined the effect of different pressures and temperatures on the period of oscillation of the pendulum. These experiments continued into 1878.[61] Meanwhile, the Permanent Commission met October 5-10, 1876, in Brussels and continued the discussion of the pendulum.[62] Gen. Baeyer reported on Peirce's experiments in Berlin to determine the flexure of the stand. The difference of 0.18 mm. in the lengths of the seconds pendulum as determined by Bessel and as determined by the Repsold instrument agreed with Peirce's estimate of error caused by neglect of flexure of the Repsold stand. Dr. Hirsch, speaking for the Swiss survey, and Prof. von Oppolzer, speaking for the Austrian survey, contended, however, that their stands possessed sufficient stability and that the results found by Peirce applied only to the stands and bases investigated by him. The Permanent Commission proposed further study of the pendulum. The Fifth General Conference of _Die Europaeische Gradmessung_ was held from September 27 to October 2, 1877, in Stuttgart.[63] Peirce had instructions from Supt. Patterson of the U.S. Coast Survey to attend this conference, and on arrival presented a letter of introduction from Patterson requesting that he, Peirce, be permitted to participate in the sessions. Upon invitation from Prof. Plantamour, as approved by Gen. Ibanez, president of the Permanent Commission, Peirce had sent on July 13, 1877, from New York, the manuscript of a memoir titled "De l'Influence de la flexibilite du trepied sur l'oscillation du pendule a reversion." This memoir and others by Cellerier and Plantamour confirming Peirce's work were published as appendices to the proceedings of the conference. As appendices to Peirce's contribution were published also two notes by Prof. von Oppolzer. At the second session on September 29, 1877, when Plantamour reported that the work of Hirsch and himself had confirmed experimentally the independent theoretical work of Cellerier and the theoretical and experimental work of Peirce on flexure, Peirce described his Hoboken experiments. During the discussions at Stuttgart on the flexure of the Repsold stand, Herve Faye, president of the Bureau of Longitudes, Paris, suggested that the swaying of the stand during oscillations of the pendulum could be overcome by the suspension from one support of two similar pendulums which oscillated with equal amplitudes and in opposite phases. This proposal was criticized by Dr. Hirsch, who declared that exact observation of passages of a "double pendulum" would be difficult and that two pendulums swinging so close together would interfere with each other. The proposal of the double pendulum came up again at the meeting of the Permanent Commission at Geneva in 1879.[64] On February 17, 1879, Peirce had completed a paper "On a Method of Swinging Pendulums for the Determination of Gravity, Proposed by M. Faye." In this paper, Peirce presented the results of an analytical mechanical investigation of Faye's proposal. Peirce set up the differential equations, found the solutions, interpreted them physically, and arrived at the conclusion "that the suggestion of M. Faye ... is as sound as it is brilliant and offers some peculiar advantages over the existing method of swinging pendulums." In a report to Supt. Patterson, dated July 1879, Peirce stated: "I think it is important before making a new pendulum apparatus to experiment with Faye's proposed method."[65] He wrote further: "The method proves to be perfectly sound in theory, and as it would greatly facilitate the work it is probably destined eventually to prevail. We must unfortunately leave to other surveys the merit of practically testing and introducing the new method, as our appropriations are insufficient for us to maintain the leading position in this matter, which we otherwise might take." Copies of the published version of Peirce's remarks were sent to Europe. At a meeting of the Academy of Sciences in Paris on September 1, 1879, Faye presented a report on Peirce's findings.[66] The Permanent Commission met September 16-20, 1879, in Geneva. At the third session on September 19, by action of Gen. Baeyer, copies of Peirce's paper on Faye's proposed method of swinging pendulums were distributed. Dr. Hirsch again commented adversely on the proposal, but moved that the question be investigated and reported on at the coming General Conference. The Permanent Commission accepted the proposal of Dr. Hirsch, and Prof. Plantamour was named to report on the matter at the General Conference. At Plantamour's request, Charles Cellerier was appointed to join him, since the problem essentially was a theoretical one. The Sixth General Conference of _Die Europaeische Gradmessung_ met September 13-16, 1880, in Munich.[67] Topic III, part 7 of the program was entitled "On Determinations of Gravity through pendulum observations. Which construction of a pendulum apparatus corresponds completely to all requirements of science? Special report on the pendulum." The conference received a memoir by Cellerier[68] on the theory of the double pendulum and a report by Plantamour and Cellerier.[69] Cellerier's mathematical analysis began with the equations of Peirce and used the latter's notation as far as possible. His general discussion included the results of Peirce, but he stated that the difficulties to be overcome did not justify the employment of the "double pendulum." He presented an alternative method of correcting for flexure based upon a theory by which the flexure caused by the oscillation of a given reversible pendulum could be determined from the behavior of an auxiliary pendulum of the same length but of different weight. This method of correcting for flexure was recommended to the General Conference by Plantamour and Cellerier in their joint report. At the fourth session of the conference on September 16, 1880, the problem of the pendulum was discussed and, in consequence, a commission consisting of Faye, Helmholtz, Plantamour (replaced in 1882 by Hirsch), and von Oppolzer was appointed to study apparatus suitable for relative determinations of gravity. The Permanent Commission met September 11-15, 1882, at The Hague,[70] and at its last session appointed Prof. von Oppolzer to report to the Seventh General Conference on different forms of apparatus for the determination of gravity. The Seventh Conference met October 15-24, 1883, in Rome,[71] and, at its eighth session, on October 22, received a comprehensive, critical review from Prof. von Oppolzer entitled "Ueber die Bestimmung der Schwere mit Hilfe verschiedener Apparate."[72] Von Oppolzer especially expounded the advantages of the Bessel reversible pendulum, which compensated for air effects by symmetry of form if the times of swing for both positions were maintained between the same amplitudes, and compensated for irregular knife edges by making them interchangeable. Prof. von Oppolzer reviewed the problem of flexure of the Repsold stand and stated that a solution in the right direction was the proposal--made by Faye and theoretically pursued by Peirce--to swing two pendulums from the same stand with equal amplitudes and in opposite phases, but that the proposal was not practicable. He concluded that for absolute determinations of gravity, the Bessel reversible pendulum was highly appropriate if one swung two exemplars of different weight from the same stand for the elimination of flexure. Prof. von Oppolzer's important report recognized that absolute determinations were less accurate than relative ones, and should be conducted only at special places. The discussions initiated by Peirce's demonstration of the flexure of the Repsold stand resulted, finally, in the abandonment of the plan to make absolute determinations of gravity at all stations with the reversible pendulum. [Illustration: Figure 19.--THREE PENDULUMS USED IN EARLY WORK at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Shown on the left is the Peirce invariable; center, the Peirce reversible; and, right, the Repsold reversible. Peirce designed the cylindrical pendulum in 1881-1882 to study the effect of air resistance according to the theory of G. G. Stokes on the motion of a pendulum in a viscous field. Three examples of the Peirce pendulums are in the U.S. National Museum.] Peirce and Defforges Invariable, Reversible Pendulums The Repsold-Bessel reversible pendulum was designed and initially used to make absolute determinations of gravity not only at initial stations such as Kew, the observatory in Paris, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., but also at stations in the field. An invariable pendulum with a single knife edge, however, is adequate for relative determinations. As we have seen, such invariable pendulums had been used by Bouguer and Kater, and after the experiences with the Repsold apparatus had been recommended again by Baeyer for relative determinations. But an invariable pendulum is subject to uncontrollable changes of length. Peirce proposed to detect such changes in an invariable pendulum in the field by combining the invariable and reversible principles. He explained his proposal to Faye in a letter dated July 23, 1880, and he presented it on September 16, 1880, at the fourth session of the sixth General Conference of _Die Europaeische Gradmessung_, in Munich.[73] As recorded in the Proceedings of the Conference, Peirce wrote: But I obviate it in making my pendulum both invariable and reversible. Every alteration of the pendulum will be revealed immediately by the change in the difference of the two periods of oscillation in the two positions. Once discovered, it will be taken account of by means of new measures of the distance between the two supports. Peirce added that it seemed to him that if the reversible pendulum perhaps is not the best instrument to determine absolute gravity, it is, on condition that it be truly invariable, the best to determine relative gravity. Peirce further stated that he would wish that the pendulum be formed of a tube of drawn brass with heavy plugs of brass equally drawn. The cylinder would be terminated by two hemispheres; the knives would be attached to tongues fixed near the ends of the cylinder. During the years 1881 and 1882, four invariable, reversible pendulums were made after the design of Peirce at the office of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington, D.C. The report of the superintendent for the year 1880-1881 states: A new pattern of the reversible pendulum has been invented, having its surface as nearly as convenient in the form of an elongated ellipsoid. Three of these instruments have been constructed, two having a distance of one meter between the knife edges and the third a distance of one yard. It is proposed to swing one of the meter pendulums at a temperature near 32 deg. F. at the same time that the yard is swung at 60 deg. F., in order to determine anew the relation between the yard and the meter.[74] The report for 1881-1882 mentions four of these Peirce pendulums. A description of the Peirce invariable, reversible pendulums was given by Assistant E. D. Preston in "Determinations of Gravity and the Magnetic Elements in Connection with the United States Scientific Expedition to the West Coast of Africa, 1889-90."[75] The invariable, reversible pendulum, Peirce no. 4, now preserved in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology (fig. 34), may be taken as typical of the meter pendulums: In the same memoir, Preston gives the diameter of the tube as 63.7 mm., thickness of tube 1.5 mm., weight 10.680 kilograms, and distance between the knives 1.000 meter. The combination of invariability and reversibility in the Peirce pendulums was an innovation for relative determinations. Indeed, the combination was criticized by Maj. J. Herschel, R.E., of the Indian Survey, at a conference on gravity held in Washington in May 1882 on the occasion of his visit to the United States for the purpose of connecting English and American stations by relative determinations with three Kater invariable pendulums. These three pendulums have been designated as nos. 4, 6 (1821), and 11.[76] [Illustration: Figure 20.--SUPPORT FOR THE PEIRCE PENDULUM, 1889. Much of the work of C. S. Peirce was concerned with the determination of the error introduced into observations made with the portable apparatus by the vibration of the stand with the pendulum. He showed that the popular Bessel-Repsold apparatus was subject to such an error. His own pendulums were swung from a simple but rugged wooden frame to which a hardened steel bearing was fixed.] Another novel characteristic of the Peirce pendulums was the mainly cylindrical form. Prof. George Gabriel Stokes, in a paper "On the Effect of the Internal Friction of Fluids on the Motion of Pendulums"[77] that was read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society on December 9, 1850, had solved the hydrodynamical equations to obtain the resistance to the motions of a sphere and a cylinder in a viscous fluid. Peirce had studied the effect of viscous resistance on the motion of his Repsold-Bessel pendulum, which was symmetrical in form but not cylindrical. The mainly cylindrical form of his pendulums (fig. 19) permitted Peirce to predict from Stokes' theory the effect of viscosity and to compare the results with experiment. His report of November 20, 1889, in which he presented the comparison of experimental results with the theory of Stokes, was not published.[78] Peirce used his pendulums in 1883 to establish a station at the Smithsonian Institution that was to serve as the base station for the Coast and Geodetic Survey for some years. Pendulum Peirce no. 1 was swung at Washington in 1881 and was then taken by the party of Lieutenant Greely, U.S.A., on an expedition to Lady Franklin Bay where it was swung in 1882 at Fort Conger, Grinnell Land, Canada. Peirce nos. 2 and 3 were swung by Peirce in 1882 at Washington, D.C.; Hoboken, New Jersey; Montreal, Canada; and Albany, New York. Assistant Preston took Peirce no. 3 on a U.S. eclipse expedition to the Caroline Islands in 1883. Peirce in 1885 swung pendulums nos. 2 and 3 at Ann Arbor, Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; and Ithaca, New York. Assistant Preston in 1887 swung Peirce nos. 3 and 4 at stations in the Hawaiian Islands, and in 1890 he swung Peirce nos. 3 and 4 at stations on the west coast of Africa.[79] The new pattern of pendulum designed by Peirce was also adopted in France, after some years of experience with a Repsold-Bessel pendulum. Peirce in 1875 had swung his Repsold-Bessel pendulum at the observatory in Paris, where Borda and Cassini, and Biot, had made historic observations and where Sabine also had determined gravity by comparison with Kater's value at London. During the spring of 1880, Peirce made studies of the supports for the pendulums of these earlier determinations and calculated corrections to those results for hydrodynamic effects, viscosity, and flexure. On June 14, 1880, Peirce addressed the Academy of Sciences, Paris, on the value of gravity at Paris, and compared his results with the corrected results of Borda and Biot and with the transferred value of Kater.[80] In the same year the French Geographic Service of the Army acquired a Repsold-Bessel reversible pendulum of the smaller type, and Defforges conducted experiments with it.[81] He introduced the method of measuring flexure from the movement of interference fringes during motion of the pendulum. He found an appreciable difference between dynamical and statical coefficients of flexure and concluded that the "correction formula of Peirce and Cellerier is suited perfectly to practice and represents exactly the variation of period caused by swaying of the support, on the condition that one uses the statical coefficient." Defforges developed a theory for the employment of two similar pendulums of the same weight, but of different length, and hung by the same knives. This theory eliminated the flexure of the support and the curvature of the knives from the reduction of observations. Pendulums of 1-meter and of 1/2-meter distance between the knife edges were constructed from Defforges' design by Brunner Brothers in Paris (fig. 21). These Defforges pendulums were cylindrical in form with hemispherical ends like the Peirce pendulums, and were hung on knives that projected from the sides of the pendulum, as in some unfinished Gautier pendulums designed by Peirce in 1883 in Paris. [Illustration: Figure 21.--REVERSIBLE PENDULUM APPARATUS of Defforges, as constructed by Brunner, Paris, about 1887. The clock and telescope used to observe coincidences are not shown. The telescope shown is part of an interferometer used to measure flexure of the support. One mirror of the interferometer is attached to the pendulum support; the other to the separate masonry pillar at the left.] [Illustration: Figure 22.--BECAUSE OF THE GREATER SIMPLICITY of its use, the invariable pendulum superseded the convertible pendulum towards the end of the 19th century, except at various national base stations (Kew, Paris, Potsdam, Washington, D.C., etc.). Shown here are, right to left, a pendulum of the type used by Peirce at the Hoosac Tunnel in 1873-74, the Mendenhall 1/2-second pendulum of 1890, and the pendulum designed by Peirce in 1881-1882.] [Illustration: Figure 23.--THE OVERALL SIZE of portable pendulum apparatus was greatly reduced with the introduction of this 1/2-second apparatus in 1887, by the Austrian military officer, Robert von Sterneck. Used with a vacuum chamber not shown here, the apparatus is only about 2 feet high. Coincidences are observed by the reflection of a periodic electric spark in two mirrors, one on the support and the other on the pendulum itself.] [Illustration: Figure 24.--THOMAS C. MENDENHALL (1841-1924). Although largely self-educated, he became the first professor of physics and mechanics at the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College (later Ohio State University), and was subsequently connected with several other universities. In 1878, while teaching at the Tokyo Imperial University in Japan, he made gravity measurements between Tokyo and Fujiyama from which he calculated the mean density of the earth. While superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1889-94, he developed the pendulum apparatus which bears his name.] Von Sterneck and Mendenhall Pendulums While scientists who had used the Repsold-Bessel pendulum apparatus discussed its defects and limitations for gravity surveys, Maj. Robert von Sterneck of Austria-Hungary began to develop an excellent apparatus for the rapid determination of relative values of gravity.[82] Maj. von Sterneck's apparatus contained a nonreversible pendulum 1/4-meter in length, and 1/2-second time of swing. The pendulum was hung by a single knife edge, which rested on a plate that was supported by a tripod. The pendulum was swung in a chamber from which air was exhausted and which could be maintained at any desired temperature. Times of swing were determined by the observation of coincidences of the pendulum with chronometer signals. In the final form a small mirror was attached to the knife edge perpendicular to the plane of vibration of the pendulum and a second fixed mirror was placed close to it so that the two mirrors were parallel when the pendulum was at rest. The chronometer signals worked a relay that gave a horizontal spark which was reflected into the telescope from the mirrors. When the pendulum was at rest, the image of the spark in both mirrors appeared on the horizontal cross wire in the telescope, and during oscillation of the pendulum the two images appeared in that position upon coincidence. In view of the reduced size of the pendulum, the chamber in which it was swung was readily portable, and with an improved method of observing coincidences, relative determinations of gravity could be made with rapidity and accuracy. By 1887 Maj. von Sterneck had perfected his apparatus, and it was widely adopted in Europe for relative determinations of gravity. He used his apparatus in extensive gravity surveys and also applied it in the silver mines in Saxony and Bohemia, by the previously described methods of Airy, for investigations into the internal constitution of the earth. On July 1, 1889, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall became superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Earlier, he had been professor of physics at the University of Tokyo and had directed observations of pendulums for the determination of gravity on Fujiyama and at Tokyo. Supt. Mendenhall, with the cooperation of members of his staff in Washington, designed a new pendulum apparatus of the Von Sterneck type, and in October 1890 he ordered construction of the first model.[83] Like the Von Sterneck apparatus, the Mendenhall pendulum apparatus employed a nonreversible, invariable pendulum 1/4-meter in length and of slightly more than 1/2-second in time of swing. Initially, the knife edge was placed in the head of the pendulum and hung on a fixed plane support, but after some experimentation Mendenhall attached the plane surface to the pendulum and hung it on a fixed knife edge. An apparatus was provided with a set of three pendulums, so that if discrepancies appeared in the results, the pendulum at fault could be detected. There was also a dummy pendulum which carried a thermometer. A pendulum was swung in a receiver in which the pressure and temperature of the air were controlled. The time of swing was measured by coincidences with the beat of a chronometer. The coincidences were determined by an optical method with the aid of a flash apparatus. [Illustration: Figure 25.--MENDENHALL'S 1/4-METER (1/2-SECOND) APPARATUS. Shown on the left is the flash apparatus and, on the right, the vacuum chamber within which the pendulum is swung. The flash apparatus consists of a kerosene lantern and a telescope, mounted on a box containing an electromagnetically operated shutter. The operation of the shutter is controlled by a chronograph (not shown), so that it emits a slit of light at regular intervals. The telescope is focused on two mirrors within the apparatus, one fixed, the other attached to the top of the pendulum. It is used to observe the reflection of the flashes from these mirrors. When the two reflections are aligned, a "coincidence" is marked on the chronograph tape. The second telescope attached to the bottom of the vacuum chamber is for observing the amplitude of the pendulum swing.] The flash apparatus was contained in a light metal box which supported an observing telescope and which was mounted on a stand. Within the box was an electromagnet whose coils were connected with a chronometer circuit and whose armature carried a long arm that moved two shutters, in both of which were horizontal slits of the same size. The shutters were behind the front face of the box, which also had a horizontal slit. A flash of light from an oil lamp or an electric spark was emitted from the box when the circuit was broken, but not when it was closed. When the circuit was broken a spring caused the arm to rise, and the shutters were actuated so that the three slits came into line and a flash of light was emitted. A small circular mirror was set in each side of the pendulum head, so that from either face of the pendulum the image of the illuminated slit could be reflected into the field of the observing telescope. A similar mirror was placed parallel to these two mirrors and rigidly attached to the support. The chronometer signals broke the circuit, causing the three slits momentarily to be in line, and when the images of the slit in the two mirrors coincided, a coincidence was observed. A coincidence occurred whenever the pendulum gained or lost one oscillation on the beat of the chronometer. The relative intensity of gravity was determined by observations with the first Mendenhall apparatus at Washington, D.C., at stations on the Pacific Coast and in Alaska, and at the Stevens Institute, Hoboken, New Jersey, between March and October 1891. [Illustration: Figure 26.--VACUUM RECEIVER within which the Mendenhall pendulum is swung. The pressure is reduced to about 50 mm. to reduce the disturbing effect of air resistance. When the apparatus is sealed, the pendulum is lifted on the knife edge by the lever _q_ and is started to swing by the lever _r_. The arc of swing is only about 1 deg. The stationary mirror is shown at _g_. The pendulum shown in outline in the center, is only about 9.7 inches long.] Under Supt. Mendenhall's direction a smaller, 1/4-second, pendulum apparatus was also constructed and tested, but did not offer advantages over the 1/2-second apparatus, which therefore continued in use. In accordance with Peirce's theory of the flexure of the stand under oscillations of the pendulum, determinations of the displacement of the receiver of the Mendenhall apparatus were part of a relative determination of gravity by members of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Initially, a statical method was used, but during 1908-1909 members of the Survey adapted the Michelson interferometer for the determinations of flexure during oscillations from the shift of fringes.[84] The first Mendenhall pendulums were made of bronze, but about 1920 invar was chosen because of its small coefficient of expansion. About 1930, Lt. E. J. Brown of the Coast and Geodetic Survey made significant improvements in the Mendenhall apparatus, and the new form came to be known as the Brown Pendulum Apparatus.[85] [Illustration: Figure 27.--THE MICHELSON INTERFEROMETER. The horizontal component of the force acting on the knife edge through the swinging pendulum causes the support to move in unison with the pendulum, and thereby affects the period of the oscillation. This movement is the so-called flexure of the pendulum support, and must be taken into account in the most accurate observations. In 1907, the Michelson interferometer was adapted to this purpose by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. As shown here, the interferometer, resting on a wooden beam, is introduced into the path of a light beam reflected from a mirror on the vacuum chamber. Movement of that mirror causes a corresponding movement in the interference fringes in the interferometer, which can be measured.] The original Von Sterneck apparatus and that of Mendenhall provided for the oscillation of one pendulum at a time. After the adoption of the Von Sterneck pendulum in Europe, there were developed stands on which two or four pendulums hung at the same time. This procedure provided a convenient way to observe more than one invariable pendulum at a station for the purpose of detecting changes in length. Prof. M. Haid of Karlsruhe in 1896 described a four-pendulum apparatus,[86] and Dr. Schumann of Potsdam subsequently described a two-pendulum apparatus.[87] [Illustration: Figure 28.--APPARATUS WHICH WAS DEVELOPED IN 1929 by the Gulf Research and Development Company, Harmarville, Pennsylvania. It was designed to achieve an accuracy within one ten-millionth of the true value of gravity, and represents the extreme development of pendulum apparatus for relative gravity measurement. The pendulum was designed so that the period would be a minimum. The case (the top is missing in this photograph) is dehumidified and its temperature and electrostatic condition are controlled. Specially designed pendulum-lifting and -starting mechanisms are used. The problem of flexure of the case is overcome by the Faye-Peirce method (see text) in which two dynamically matched pendulums are swung simultaneously, 180 deg. apart in phase.] The multiple-pendulum apparatus then provided a method of determining the flexure of the stand from the action of one pendulum upon a second pendulum hung on the same stand. This method of determining the correction for flexure was a development from a "Wippverfahren" invented at the Geodetic Institute in Potsdam. A dynamometer was used to impart periodic impulses to the stand, and the effect was observed upon a pendulum initially at rest. Refinements of this method led to the development of a method used by Lorenzoni in 1885-1886 to determine the flexure of the stand by action of an auxiliary pendulum upon the principal pendulum. Dr. Schumann, in 1899, gave a mathematical theory of such determinations,[88] and in his paper cited the mathematical methods of Peirce and Cellerier for the theory of Faye's proposal at Stuttgart in 1877 to swing two similar pendulums on the same support with equal amplitudes and in opposite phases. [Illustration: Figure 29.--THE GULF PENDULUM is about 10.7 inches long, and has a period of .89 second. It is made of fused quartz which is resistant to the influence of temperature change and to the earth's magnetism. Quartz pendulums are subject to the influence of electrostatic charge, and provision is made to counteract this through the presence of a radium salt in the case. The bearings are made of Pyrex glass.] In 1902, Dr. P. Furtwaengler[89] presented the mathematical theory of coupled pendulums in a paper in which he referred to Faye's proposal of 1877 and reported that the difficulties predicted upon its application had been found not to occur. Finally, during the gravity survey of Holland in the years 1913-1921, in view of instability of supports caused by the mobility of the soil, F. A. Vening Meinesz adopted Faye's proposed method of swinging two pendulums on the same support.[90] The observations were made with the ordinary Stueckrath apparatus, in which four Von Sterneck pendulums swung two by two in planes perpendicular to each other. This successful application of the method--which had been proposed by Faye and had been demonstrated theoretically to be sound by Peirce, who also published a design for its application--was rapidly followed for pendulum apparatus for relative determinations by Potsdam,[91] Cambridge (England),[92] Gulf Oil and Development Company,[93] and the Dominion Observatory at Ottawa.[94] Heiskanen and Vening Meinesz state: The best way to eliminate the effect of flexure is to use two synchronized pendulums of the same length swinging on the same apparatus in the same plane and with the same amplitudes but in opposite phases; it is clear then the flexure is zero.[95] In view of the fact that the symmetrical reversible pendulum is named for Bessel, who created the theory and a design for its application by Repsold, it appears appropriate to call the method of eliminating flexure by swinging two pendulums on the same support the Faye-Peirce method. Its successful application was made possible by Maj. von Sterneck's invention of the short, 1/4-meter pendulum. [Illustration: Figure 30.--THE ACCUMULATED DATA OF GRAVITY observations over the earth's surface have indicated that irregularities such as mountains do not have the effect which would be expected in modifying gravity, but are somehow compensated for. The most satisfactory solution to this still unanswered question has been the theory of isostasy, according to which variations in the density of the material in the earth's crust produce a kind of hydrostatic equilibrium between its higher and lower parts, as they "float" on the earth's fluid core. The metals of different density floating in mercury in this diagram illustrate isostasy according to the theory of Pratt and Hayford.] Absolute Value of Gravity at Potsdam The development of the reversible pendulum in the 19th century culminated in the absolute determination of the intensity of gravity at Potsdam by Kuehnen and Furtwaengler of the Royal Prussian Geodetic Institute, which then became the world base for gravity surveys.[96] We have previously seen that in 1869 the Geodetic Institute--founded by Lt. Gen. Baeyer--had acquired a Repsold-Bessel reversible pendulum which was swung by Dr. Albrecht under the direction of Dr. Bruhns. Dissatisfaction with this instrument was expressed by Baeyer in 1875 to Charles S. Peirce, who then, by experiment and mathematical analysis of the flexure of the stand under oscillations of the pendulum, determined that previously reported results with the Repsold apparatus required correction. Dr. F. R. Helmert, who in 1887 succeeded Baeyer as director of the Institute, secured construction of a building for the Institute in Potsdam, and under his direction the scientific study of the intensity of gravity was pursued with vigor. In 1894, it was discovered in Potsdam that a pendulum constructed of very flexible material yielded results which differed markedly from those obtained with pendulums of greater stiffness. Dr. Kuehnen of the Institute discovered that the departure from expectations was the result of the flexure of the pendulum staff itself during oscillations.[97] Peirce, in 1883, had discovered that the recesses cut in his pendulums for the insertion of tongues that carried the knives had resulted in the flexure of the pendulum staff.[98] By experiment, he also found an even greater flexure for the Repsold pendulum. In order to eliminate this source of error, Peirce designed a pendulum with knives that extended from each side of the cylindrical staff, and he received authorization from the superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic Survey to arrange for the construction of such pendulums by Gautier in Paris. Peirce, who had made his plans in consultation with Gautier, was called home before the pendulums were completed, and these new instruments remained undelivered. In a memoir titled "Effect of the flexure of a pendulum upon its period of oscillation,"[99] Peirce determined analytically the effect on the period of a pendulum with a single elastic connection between two rigid parts of the staff. Thus, Peirce discovered experimentally the flexure of the staff and derived for a simplified case the effect on the period. It is not known if he ever found the integrated effect of the continuum of elastic connections in the pendulum. Lorenzoni, in 1896, offered a solution to the problem, and Almansi, in 1899, gave an extended analysis. After the independent discovery of the problem at the Geodetic Institute, Dr. Helmert took up the problem and criticized the theories of Peirce and Lorenzoni. He then presented his own theory of flexure in a comprehensive memoir.[100] In view of the previous neglect of the flexure of the pendulum staff in the reduction of observations, Helmert directed that the Geodetic Institute make a new absolute determination of the intensity of gravity at Potsdam. For this purpose, Kuehnen and Furtwaengler used the following reversible pendulums which had been constructed by the firm of A. Repsold and Sons in Hamburg: 1. The seconds pendulum of the Geodetic Institute procured in 1869. 2. A seconds pendulum from the Astronomical Observatory, Padua. 3. A heavy, seconds pendulum from the Imperial and Royal Military-Geographical Institute, Vienna. 4. A light, seconds pendulum from the Imperial and Royal Military-Geographical Institute. 5. A 1/2-second, reversible pendulum of the Geodetic Institute procured in 1892. Work was begun in 1898, and in 1906 Kuehnen and Furtwaengler published their monumental memoir, "Bestimmung der Absoluten Groesze der Schwerkraft zu Potsdam mit Reversionspendeln." The acceleration of gravity in the pendulum room of the Geodetic Institute was determined to be 981.274 +- 0.003 cm/sec^{2}. In view of the exceptionally careful and thorough determination at the Institute, Potsdam was accepted as the world base for the absolute value of the intensity of gravity. The absolute value of gravity at some other station on the Potsdam system was determined from the times of swing of an invariable pendulum at the station and at Potsdam by the relation (T_{1})^{2}/(T_{2})^{2} = g_{2}/g_{1}. Thus, in 1900, Assistant G. R. Putnam of the Coast and Geodetic Survey swung Mendenhall pendulums at the Washington base and at Potsdam, and by transfer from Potsdam determined the intensity of gravity at the Washington base to be 980.112 cm/sec^{2}.[101] In 1933, Lt. E. J. Brown made comparative measurements with improved apparatus and raised the value at the Washington base to 980.118 cm/sec^{2}.[102] In view of discrepancies between the results of various relative determinations, the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1928 requested the National Bureau of Standards to make an absolute determination for Washington. Heyl and Cook used reversible pendulums made of fused silica having a period of approximately 1 second. Their result, published in 1936, was interpreted to indicate that the value at Potsdam was too high by 20 parts in 1 million.[103] This estimate was lowered slightly by Sir Harold Jeffreys of Cambridge, England, who recomputed the results of Heyl and Cook by different methods.[104] [Illustration: Figure 31.--MAP SHOWING THE DISTRIBUTION of gravity stations throughout the United States as of December 1908.] [Illustration: Figure 32.--MAP SHOWING THE DISTRIBUTION of gravity stations throughout the United States in 1923.] In 1939, J. S. Clark published the results of a determination of gravity with pendulums of a non-ferrous Y-alloy[105] at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, England, and, after recomputation of results by Jeffreys, the value was found to be 12.8 parts in 1 million less than the value obtained by transfer from Potsdam. Dr. Hugh L. Dryden of the National Bureau of Standards, and Dr. A. Berroth of the Geodetic Institute at Potsdam, have recomputed the Potsdam data by different methods of adjustment and concluded that the Potsdam value was too high by about 12 parts in a million.[106] Determination of gravity at Leningrad by Russian scientists likewise has indicated that the 1906 Potsdam value is too high. In the light of present information, it appears justifiable to reduce the Potsdam value of 981.274 by .013 cm/sec^{2} for purposes of comparison. If the Brown transfer from Potsdam in 1933 was taken as accurate, the value for the Washington base would be 980.105 cm/sec^{2}. In this connection, it is of interest to note that the value given by Charles S. Peirce for the comparable Smithsonian base in Washington, as determined by him from comparative methods in the 1880's and reported in the _Annual Report of the Superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic Survey for the year 1890-1891_, was 980.1017 cm/sec^{2}.[107] This value would appear to indicate that Peirce's pendulums, observations, and methods of reduction of data were not inferior to those of the scientists of the Royal Prussian Geodetic Institute at Potsdam. Doubts concerning the accuracy of the Potsdam value of gravity have stimulated many new determinations of the intensity of gravity since the end of World War II. In a paper published in June 1957, A. H. Cook, Metrology Division, National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, stated: At present about a dozen new absolute determinations are in progress or are being planned. Heyl and Cook's reversible pendulum apparatus is in use in Buenos Aires and further reversible pendulum experiments have been made in the All Union Scientific Research Institute of Metrology, Leningrad (V N I I M) and are planned at Potsdam. A method using a very long pendulum was tried out in Russia about 1910 and again more recently and there are plans for similar work in Finland. The first experiment with a freely falling body was that carried out by Volet who photographed a graduated scale falling in an enclosure at low air pressure. Similar experiments have been completed in Leningrad and are in progress at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (Brunswick) and at the National Research Council (Ottawa), and analogous experiments are being prepared at the National Physical Laboratory and at the National Bureau of Standards. Finally, Professor Medi, Director of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica (Rome), is attempting to measure the focal length of the paraboloidal surface of a liquid in a rotating dish.[108] Application of Gravity Surveys We have noted previously that in the ancient and early modern periods, the earth was presupposed to be spherical in form. Determination of the figure of the earth consisted in the measurement of the radius by the astronomical-geodetic method invented by Eratosthenes. Since the earth was assumed to be spherical, gravity was inferred to be constant over the surface of the earth. This conclusion appeared to be confirmed by the determination of the length of the seconds pendulum at various stations in Europe by Picard and others. The observations of Richer in South America, the theoretical discussions of Newton and Huygens, and the measurements of degrees of latitude in Peru and Sweden demonstrated that the earth is an oblate spheroid. [Illustration: Figure 33.--GRAVITY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GLOBE. Deductions as to the distribution of matter in the earth can be made from gravity measurements. This globe shows worldwide variations in gravity as they now appear from observations at sea (in submarines) as well as on land. It is based on data from the Institute of Geodesy at Ohio State University.] The theory of gravitation and the theory of central forces led to the result that the intensity of gravity is variable over the surface of the earth. Accordingly, determinations of the intensity of gravity became of value to the geodesist as a means of determining the figure of the earth. Newton, on the basis of the meager data available to him, calculated the ellipticity of the earth to be 1/230 (the ellipticity is defined by (a-b)/a, where a is the equatorial radius and b the polar radius). Observations of the intensity of gravity were made on the historic missions to Peru and Sweden. Bouguer and La Condamine found that at the equator at sea level the seconds pendulum was 1.26 Paris-lines shorter than at Paris. Maupertuis found that in northern Sweden a certain pendulum clock gained 59.1 seconds per day on its rate in Paris. Then Clairaut, from the assumption that the earth is a spheroid of equilibrium, derived a theorem from which the ellipticity of the earth can be derived from values of the intensity of gravity. [Illustration: Figure 34.--AN EXHIBIT OF GRAVITY APPARATUS at the Smithsonian Institution. Suspended on the wall, from left to right, are the invariable pendulums of Mendenhall (1/2-second), Peirce (1873-1874), and Peirce (1881-1882); the double pendulum of Edward Kuebel (see fig. 15, p. 319), and the reversible pendulum of Peirce. On the display counter, from left to right, are the vacuum chamber, telescope and flash apparatus for the Mendenhall 1/4-second apparatus. Shown below these are the four pendulums used with the Mendenhall apparatus, the one on the right having a thermometer attached. At bottom, right, is the Gulf apparatus (cover removed) mentioned in the text, shown with one quartz pendulum.] Early in the 19th century a systematic series of observations began to be conducted in order to determine the intensity of gravity at stations all over the world. Kater invariable pendulums, of which 13 examples have been mentioned in the literature, were used in surveys of gravity by Kater, Sabine, Goldingham, and other British pendulum swingers. As has been noted previously, a Kater invariable pendulum was used by Adm. Luetke of Russia on a trip around the world. The French also sent out expeditions to determine values of gravity. After several decades of relative inactivity, Capts. Basevi and Heaviside of the Indian Survey carried out an important series of observations from 1865 to 1873 with Kater invariable pendulums and the Russian Repsold-Bessel pendulums. In 1881-1882 Maj. J. Herschel swung Kater invariable pendulums nos. 4, 6 (1821), and 11 at stations in England and then brought them to the United States in order to make observations which would connect American and English base stations.[109] The extensive sets of observations of gravity provided the basis of calculations of the ellipticity of the earth. Col. A. R. Clarke in his _Geodesy_ (London, 1880) calculated the ellipticity from the results of gravity surveys to be 1/(292.2 +- 1.5). Of interest is the calculation by Charles S. Peirce, who used only determinations made with Kater invariable pendulums and corrected for elevation, atmospheric effect, and expansion of the pendulum through temperature.[110] He calculated the ellipticity of the earth to be 1/(291.5 +- 0.9). The 19th century witnessed the culmination of the ellipsoidal era of geodesy, but the rapid accumulation of data made possible a better approximation to the figure of the earth by the geoid. The geoid is defined as the average level of the sea, which is thought of as extended through the continents. The basis of geodetic calculations, however, is an ellipsoid of reference for which a gravity formula expresses the value of normal gravity at a point on the ellipsoid as a function of gravity at sea level at the equator, and of latitude. The general assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, which was founded after World War I to continue the work of _Die Internationale Erdmessung_, adopted in 1924 an international reference ellipsoid,[111] of which the ellipticity, or flattening, is Hayford's value 1/297. In 1930, the general assembly adopted a correlated International Gravity Formula of the form [gamma] = [gamma]_{E}(1 + [beta]sin^{2} [phi] + [epsilon]sin^{2} 2[phi]) where [gamma] is normal gravity at latitude [phi], [gamma]_{E} is the value of gravity at sea level at the equator, [beta] is a parameter which is computed on the basis of Clairaut's theorem from the flattening value of the meridian, and [epsilon] is a constant which is derived theoretically. The plumb line is perpendicular to the geoid, and the components of angle between the perpendiculars to geoid and reference ellipsoid are deflections of the vertical. The geoid is above the ellipsoid of reference under mountains and it is below the ellipsoid on the oceans, where the geoid coincides with mean sea level. In physical geodesy, gravimetric data are used for the determination of the geoid and components of deflections of the vertical. For this purpose, one must reduce observed values of gravity to sea level by various reductions, such as free-air, Bouguer, isostatic reductions. If g_{0} is observed gravity reduced to sea level and [gamma] is normal gravity obtained from the International Gravity Formula, then [Delta]g = g_{0} - [gamma] is the gravity anomaly.[112] In 1849, Stokes derived a theorem whereby the distance N of the geoid from the ellipsoid of reference can be obtained from an integration of gravity anomalies over the surface of the earth. Vening Meinesz further derived formulae for the calculation of components of the deflection of the vertical. Geometrical geodesy, which was based on astronomical-geodetic methods, could give information only concerning the external form of the figure of the earth. The gravimetric methods of physical geodesy, in conjunction with methods such as those of seismology, enable scientists to test hypotheses concerning the internal structure of the earth. Heiskanen and Vening Meinesz summarize the present-day achievements of the gravimetric method of physical geodesy by stating[113] that it alone can give: 1. The flattening of the reference ellipsoid. 2. The undulations N of the geoid. 3. The components of the deflection of the vertical [xi] and [eta] at any point, oceans and islands included. 4. The conversion of existing geodetic systems to the same world geodetic system. 5. The reduction of triangulation base lines from the geoid to the reference ellipsoid. 6. The correction of errors in triangulation in mountainous regions due to the effect of the deflections of the vertical. 7. Geophysical applications of gravity measurements, e.g., the isostatic study of the earth's interior and the exploration of oil fields and ore deposits. With astronomical observations or with existing triangulations, the gravimetric method can accomplish further results. Heiskanen and Vening Meinesz state: It is the firm conviction of the authors that the gravimetric method is by far the best of the existing methods for solving the main problems of geodesy, i.e., to determine the shape of the geoid on the continents as well as at sea and to convert the existing geodetic systems to the world geodetic system. It can also give invaluable help in the computation of the reference ellipsoid.[114] Summary Since the creation of classical mechanics in the 17th century, the pendulum has been a basic instrument for the determination of the intensity of gravity, which is expressed as the acceleration of a freely falling body. Basis of theory is the simple pendulum, whose time of swing under gravity is proportional to the square root of the length divided by the acceleration due to gravity. Since the length of a simple pendulum divided by the square of its time of swing is equal to the length of a pendulum that beats seconds, the intensity of gravity also has been expressed in terms of the length of the seconds pendulum. The reversible compound pendulum has served for the absolute determination of gravity by means of a theory developed by Huygens. Invariable compound pendulums with single axes also have been used to determine relative values of gravity by comparative times of swing. The history of gravity pendulums begins with the ball or "simple" pendulum of Galileo as an approximation to the ideal simple pendulum. Determinations of the length of the seconds pendulum by French scientists culminated in a historic determination at Paris by Borda and Cassini, from the corrected observations with a long ball pendulum. In the 19th century, Bessel found the length of the seconds pendulum at Koenigsberg and Berlin by observations with a ball pendulum and by original theoretical considerations. During the century, however, the compound pendulum came to be preferred for absolute and relative determinations. Capt. Henry Kater, at London, constructed the first convertible compound for an absolute determination of gravity, and then he designed an invariable compound pendulum, examples of which were used for relative determinations at various stations in Europe and elsewhere. Bessel demonstrated theoretically the advantages of a reversible compound pendulum which is symmetrical in form and is hung by interchangeable knives. The firm of A. Repsold and Sons in Hamburg constructed pendulums from the specifications of Bessel for European gravity surveys. Charles S. Peirce in 1875 received delivery in Hamburg of a Repsold-Bessel pendulum for the U.S. Coast Survey and observed with it in Geneva, Paris, Berlin, and London. Upon an initial stimulation from Baeyer, founder of _Die Europaeische Gradmessung_, Peirce demonstrated by experiment and theory that results previously obtained with the Repsold apparatus required correction, because of the flexure of the stand under oscillations of the pendulum. At the Stuttgart conference of the geodetic association in 1877, Herve Faye proposed to solve the problem of flexure by swinging two similar pendulums from the same support with equal amplitudes and in opposite phases. Peirce, in 1879, demonstrated theoretically the soundness of the method and presented a design for its application, but the "double pendulum" was rejected at that time. Peirce also designed and had constructed four examples of a new type of invariable, reversible pendulum of cylindrical form which made possible the experimental study of Stokes' theory of the resistance to motion of a pendulum in a viscous fluid. Commandant Defforges, of France, also designed and used cylindrical reversible pendulums, but of different length so that the effect of flexure was eliminated in the reduction of observations. Maj. Robert von Sterneck, of Austria-Hungary, initiated a new era in gravity research by the invention of an apparatus with a short pendulum for relative determinations of gravity. Stands were then constructed in Europe on which two or four pendulums were hung at the same time. Finally, early in the present century, Vening Meinesz found that the Faye-Peirce method of swinging pendulums hung on a Stueckrath four-pendulum stand solved the problem of instability due to the mobility of the soil in Holland. The 20th century has witnessed increasing activity in the determination of absolute and relative values of gravity. Gravimeters have been perfected and have been widely used for rapid relative determinations, but the compound pendulums remain as indispensable instruments. Mendenhall's replacement of knives by planes attached to nonreversible pendulums has been used also for reversible ones. The Geodetic Institute at Potsdam is presently applying the Faye-Peirce method to the reversible pendulum.[115] Pendulums have been constructed of new materials, such as invar, fused silica, and fused quartz. Minimum pendulums for precise relative determinations have been constructed and used. Reversible pendulums have been made with "I" cross sections for better stiffness. With all these modifications, however, the foundations of the present designs of compound pendulum apparatus were created in the 19th century. * * * * * FOOTNOTES [1] The basic historical documents have been collected, with a bibliography of works and memoirs published from 1629 to the end of 1885, in _Collection de memoires relatifs a la physique, publies par la Societe francaise de Physique_ [hereinafter referred to as _Collection de memoires_]: vol. 4, _Memoires sur le pendule, precedes d'une bibliographie_ (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1889); and vol. 5, _Memoires sur le pendule_, part 2 (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1891). Important secondary sources are: C. WOLF, "Introduction historique," pp. 1-42 in vol. 4, above; and GEORGE BIDDELL AIRY, "Figure of the Earth," pp. 165-240 in vol. 5 of _Encyclopaedia metropolitana_ (London, 1845). [2] Galileo Galilei's principal statements concerning the pendulum occur in his _Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences_, transl. from Italian and Latin into English by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1939), pp. 95-97, 170-172. [3] P. MARIN MERSENNE, _Cogitata physico-mathematica_ (Paris, 1644), p. 44. [4] CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS, _Horologium oscillatorium, sive de motu pendulorum ad horologia adaptato demonstrationes geometricae_ (Paris, 1673), proposition 20. [5] The historical events reported in the present section are from AIRY, "Figure of the Earth." [6] ABBE JEAN PICARD, _La Mesure de la terre_ (Paris, 1671). JOHN W. OLMSTED, "The 'Application' of Telescopes to Astronomical Instruments, 1667-1669," _Isis_ (1949), vol. 40, p. 213. [7] The toise as a unit of length was 6 Paris feet or about 1,949 millimeters. [8] JEAN RICHER, _Observations astronomiques et physiques faites en l'isle de Caienne_ (Paris, 1679). JOHN W. OLMSTED, "The Expedition of Jean Richer to Cayenne 1672-1673," _Isis_ (1942), vol. 34, pp. 117-128. [9] The Paris foot was 1.066 English feet, and there were 12 lines to the inch. [10] CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS, "De la cause de la pesanteur," _Divers ouvrages de mathematiques[mathematiques] et de physique par MM. de l'Academie Royale[Royal] des Sciences_ (Paris, 1693), p. 305. [11] ISAAC NEWTON, _Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica_ (London, 1687), vol. 3, propositions 18-20. [12] PIERRE BOUGUER, _La figure de la terre, determinee par les observations de Messieurs Bouguer et de La Condamine, envoyes par ordre du Roy au Perou, pour observer aux environs de l'equateur_ (Paris, 1749). [13] P. L. MOREAU DE MAUPERTUIS, _La figure de la terre determinee par les observations de Messieurs de Maupertuis, Clairaut, Camus, Le Monnier, l'Abbe Outhier et Celsius, faites par ordre du Roy au cercle polaire_ (Paris, 1738). [14] Paris, 1743. [15] GEORGE GABRIEL STOKES, "On Attraction and on Clairaut's Theorem," _Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal_ (1849), vol. 4, p. 194. [16] See _Collection de memoires_, vol. 4, p. B-34, and J. H. POYNTING and SIR J. J. THOMSON, _Properties of Matter_ (London, 1927), p. 24. [17] POYNTING and THOMSON, ibid., p. 22. [18] CHARLES M. DE LA CONDAMINE, "De la mesure du pendule a Saint Domingue," _Collection de memoires_, vol. 4, pp. 3-16. [19] PERE R. J. BOSCOVICH, _Opera pertinentia ad Opticam et Astronomiam_ (Bassani, 1785), vol. 5, no. 3. [20] J. C. BORDA and J. D. CASSINI DE THURY, "Experiences pour connaitre la longueur du pendule qui bat les secondes a Paris," _Collection de memoires_, vol. 4, pp. 17-64. [21] F. W. BESSEL, "Untersuchungen ueber die Laenge des einfachen Secundenpendels," _Abhandlungen der Koeniglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1826_ (Berlin, 1828). [22] Bessel used as a standard of length a toise which had been made by Fortin in Paris and had been compared with the original of the "toise de Peru" by Arago. [23] L. G. DU BUAT, _Principes d'hydraulique_ (Paris, 1786). See excerpts in _Collection de memoires_, pp. B-64 to B-67. [24] CAPT. HENRY KATER, "An Account of Experiments for Determining the Length of the Pendulum Vibrating Seconds in the Latitude of London," _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London_ (1818), vol. 108, p. 33. [Hereinafter abbreviated _Phil. Trans._] [25] M. G. DE PRONY, "Methode pour determiner la longueur du pendule simple qui bat les secondes," _Collection de memoires_, vol. 4, pp. 65-76. [26] _Collection de memoires_, vol. 4, p. B-74. [27] _Phil. Trans._ (1819), vol. 109, p. 337. [28] JOHN HERSCHEL, "Notes for a History of the Use of Invariable Pendulums," _The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India_ (Calcutta, 1879), vol. 5. [29] CAPT. EDWARD SABINE, "An Account of Experiments to Determine the Figure of the Earth," _Phil. Trans._ (1828), vol. 118, p. 76. [30] JOHN GOLDINGHAM, "Observations for Ascertaining the Length of the Pendulum at Madras in the East Indies," _Phil. Trans._ (1822), vol. 112, p. 127. [31] BASIL HALL, "Letter to Captain Kater Communicating the Details of Experiments made by him and Mr. Henry Foster with an Invariable Pendulum," _Phil. Trans._ (1823), vol. 113, p. 211. [32] See _Collection de memoires_, vol. 4, p. B-103. [33] Ibid., p. B-88. [34] Ibid., p. B-94. [35] FRANCIS BAILY, "On the Correction of a Pendulum for the Reduction to a Vacuum, Together with Remarks on Some Anomalies Observed in Pendulum Experiments," _Phil. Trans._ (1832), vol. 122, pp. 399-492. See also _Collection de memoires_, vol. 4, pp. B-105, B-112, B-115, B-116, and B-117. [36] One was of case brass and the other of rolled iron, 68 in. long, 2 in. wide, and 1/2 in. thick. Triangular knife edges 2 in. long were inserted through triangular apertures 19.7 in. from the center towards each end. These pendulums seem not to have survived. There is, however, in the collection of the U.S. National Museum, a similar brass pendulum, 37-5/8 in. long (fig. 15) stamped with the name of Edward Kuebel (1820-96), who maintained an instrument business in Washington, D.C., from about 1849. The history of this instrument is unknown. [37] See Baily's remarks in the _Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society_ (1839), vol. 4, pp. 141-143. See also letters mentioned in footnote 38. [38] This document, together with certain manuscript notes on the pendulum experiments and six letters between Wilkes and Baily, is in the U.S. National Archives, Navy Records Gp. 37. These were the source materials for the information presented here on the Expedition. We are indebted to Miss Doris Ann Esch and Mr. Joseph Rudmann of the staff of the U.S. National Museum for calling our attention to this early American pendulum work. [39] G. B. AIRY, "Account of Experiments Undertaken in the Harton Colliery, for the Purpose of Determining the Mean Density of the Earth," _Phil. Trans._ (1856), vol. 146, p. 297. [40] T. C. MENDENHALL, "Measurements of the Force of Gravity at Tokyo, and on the Summit of Fujiyama," _Memoirs of the Science Department, University of Tokyo_ (1881), no. 5. [41] J. T. WALKER, _Account of Operations of The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India_ (Calcutta, 1879), vol. 5, app. no. 2. [42] BESSEL, op. cit. (footnote 21), article 31. [43] C. A. F. PETERS, _Briefwechsel zwischen C. F. Gauss und H. C. Schumacher_ (Altona, Germany, 1860), _Band_ 2, p. 3. The correction required if the times of swing are not exactly the same is said to have been given also by Bohnenberger. [44] F. W. BESSEL, "Construction eines symmetrisch geformten Pendels mit reciproken Axen, von Bessel," _Astronomische Nachrichten_ (1849), vol. 30, p. 1. [45] E. PLANTAMOUR, "Experiences faites a Geneve avec le pendule a reversion," _Memoires de la Societe de Physique et d'histoire naturelle de Geneve, 1865_ (Geneva, 1866), vol. 18, p. 309. [46] Ibid., pp. 309-416. [47] C. CELLERIER, "Note sur la Mesure de la Pesanteur par le Pendule," _Memoires de la Societe de Physique et d'histoire naturelle de Geneve, 1865_ (Geneva, 1866), vol. 18, pp. 197-218. [48] A. SAWITSCH, "Les variations de la pesanteur dans les provinces occidentales de l'Empire russe," _Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society_ (1872), vol. 39, p. 19. [49] J. J. BAEYER, _Ueber die Groesse und Figur der Erde_ (Berlin, 1861). [50] _Comptes-rendus de la Conference Geodesique Internationale reunie a Berlin du 15-22 Octobre 1864_ (Neuchatel, 1865). [51] Ibid., part III, subpart E. [52] _Bericht ueber die Verhandlungen der vom 30 September bis 7 October 1867 zu Berlin abgehaltenen allgemeinen Conferenz der Europaeischen Gradmessung_ (Berlin, 1868). See report of fourth session, October 3, 1867. [53] C. BRUHNS and ALBRECHT, "Bestimmung der Laenge des Secundenpendels in Bonn, Leiden und Mannheim," _Astronomisch-Geodaetische Arbeiten im Jahre 1870_ (Leipzig: Veroeffentlichungen des Koeniglichen Preussischen Geodaetischen Instituts, 1871). [54] _Bericht ueber die Verhandlungen der vom 23 bis 28 September 1874 in Dresden abgehaltenen vierten allgemeinen Conferenz der Europaeischen Gradmessung_ (Berlin, 1875). See report of second session, September 24, 1874. [55] CAROLYN EISELE, "Charles S. Peirce--Nineteenth-Century Man of Science," _Scripta Mathematica_ (1959), vol 24, p. 305. For the account of the work of Peirce, the authors are greatly indebted to this pioneer paper on Peirce's work on gravity. It is worth noting that the history of pendulum work in North America goes back to the celebrated Mason and Dixon, who made observations of "the going rate of a clock" at "the forks of the river Brandiwine in Pennsylvania," in 1766-67. These observations were published in _Phil. Trans._ (1768), vol. 58, pp. 329-335. [56] The pendulums with conical bobs are described and illustrated in E. D. PRESTON, "Determinations of Gravity and the Magnetic Elements in Connection with the United States Scientific Expedition to the West Coast of Africa, 1889-90," _Report of the Superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1889-90_ (Washington, 1891), app. no. 12. [57] EISELE, op. cit. (footnote 55), p. 311. [58] The record of Peirce's observations in Europe during 1875-76 is given in C. S. PEIRCE, "Measurements of Gravity at Initial Stations in America and Europe," _Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey for 1875-76_ (Washington, 1879), pp. 202-337 and 410-416. Peirce's report is dated December 13, 1878, by which time the name of the Survey had been changed to U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. [59] _Verhandlungen der vom 20 bis 29 September 1875 in Paris Vereinigten Permanenten Commission der Europaeischen Gradmessung_ (Berlin, 1876). [60] Ibid. See report for fifth session, September 25, 1875. [61] The experiments at the Stevens Institute, Hoboken, were reported by Peirce to the Permanent Commission which met in Hamburg, September 4-8, 1878, and his report was published in the general _Bericht_ for 1878 in the _Verhandlungen der vom 4 bis 8 September 1878 in Hamburg Vereinigten Permanenten Commission der Europaeischen Gradmessung_ (Berlin, 1879), pp. 116-120. Assistant J. E. Hilgard attended for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. The experiments are described in detail in C. S. PEIRCE, "On the Flexure of Pendulum Supports," _Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1880-81_ (Washington, 1883), app. no. 14, pp. 359-441. [62] _Verhandlungen der vom 5 bis 10 Oktober 1876 in Brussels Vereinigten Permanenten Commission der Europaeischen Gradmessung_ (Berlin, 1877). See report of third session, October 7, 1876. [63] _Verhandlungen der vom 27 September bis 2 Oktober 1877 zu Stuttgart abgehaltenen fuenften allgemeinen Conferenz der Europaeischen Gradmessung_ (Berlin, 1878). [64] _Verhandlung der vom 16 bis 20 September 1879 in Genf Vereinigten Permanenten Commission der Europaeischen Gradmessung_ (Berlin, 1880). [65] _Assistants' Reports, U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1879-80._ Peirce's paper was published in the _American Journal of Science_ (1879), vol. 18, p. 112. [66] _Comptes-rendus de l'Academie des Sciences_ (Paris, 1879), vol. 89, p. 462. [67] _Verhandlungen der vom 13 bis 16 September 1880 zu Muenchen abgehaltenen sechsten allgemeinen Conferenz der Europaeischen Gradmessung_ (Berlin, 1881). [68] Ibid., app. 2. [69] Ibid., app. 2a. [70] _Verhandlungen der vom 11 bis zum 15 September 1882 im Haag Vereinigten Permanenten Commission der Europaeischen Gradmessung_ (Berlin, 1883). [71] _Verhandlungen der vom 15 bis 24 Oktober 1883 zu Rom abgehaltenen siebenten allgemeinen Conferenz der Europaeischen Gradmessung_ (Berlin, 1884). Gen. Cutts attended for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. [72] Ibid., app. 6. See also, _Zeitschrift fuer Instrumentenkunde_ (1884), vol. 4, pp. 303 and 379. [73] Op. cit. (footnote 67). [74] _Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1880-81_ (Washington, 1883), p. 26. [75] _Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1889-90_ (Washington, 1891), app. no. 12. [76] _Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1881-82_ (Washington, 1883). [77] _Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society_ (1856), vol. 9, part 2, p. 8. Also published in _Mathematical and Physical Papers_ (Cambridge, 1901), vol. 3, p. 1. [78] Peirce's comparison of theory and experiment is discussed in a report on the Peirce memoir by WILLIAM FERREL, dated October 19, 1890, Martinsburg, West Virginia. _U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Special Reports, 1887-1891_ (MS, National Archives, Washington). [79] The stations at which observations were conducted with the Peirce pendulums are recorded in the reports of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey from 1881 to 1890. [80] _Comptes-rendus de l'Academie des Sciences_ (Paris, 1880), vol. 90, p. 1401. HERVE FAYE's report, dated June 21, 1880, is in the same _Comptes-rendus_, p. 1463. [81] COMMANDANT C. DEFFORGES, "Sur l'Intensite absolue de la pesanteur," _Journal de Physique_ (1888), vol. 17, pp. 239, 347, 455. See also, DEFFORGES, "Observations du pendule," _Memorial du Depot general de la Guerre_ (Paris, 1894), vol. 15. In the latter work, Defforges described a pendulum "reversible inversable," which he declared to be truly invariable and therefore appropriate for relative determinations. The knives remained fixed to the pendulums, and the effect of interchanging knives was obtained by interchanging weights within the pendulum tube. [82] Papers by MAJ. VON STERNECK in _Mitteilungen des K. u. K. Militaer-geographischen Instituts, Wien_, 1882-87; see, in particular, vol. 7 (1887). [83] T. C. MENDENHALL, "Determinations of Gravity with the New Half-Second Pendulum...," _Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1890-91_ (Washington, 1892), part 2, pp. 503-564. [84] W. H. BURGER, "The Measurement of the Flexure of Pendulum Supports with the Interferometer," _Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1909-10_ (Washington, 1911), app. no. 6. [85] E. J. BROWN, _A Determination of the Relative Values of Gravity at Potsdam and Washington_ (Special Publication No. 204, U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey; Washington, 1936). [86] M. HAID, "Neues Pendelstativ," _Zeitschrift fuer Instrumentenkunde_ (July 1896), vol. 16, p. 193. [87] DR. R. SCHUMANN, "Ueber eine Methode, das Mitschwingen bei relativen Schweremessungen zu bestimmen," _Zeitschrift fuer Instrumentenkunde_ (January 1897), vol. 17, p. 7. The design for the stand is similar to that of Peirce's of 1879. [88] DR. R. SCHUMANN, "Ueber die Verwendung zweier Pendel auf gemeinsamer Unterlage zur Bestimmung der Mitschwingung," _Zeitschrift fuer Mathematik und Physik_ (1899), vol. 44, p. 44. [89] P. FURTWAENGLER, "Ueber die Schwingungen zweier Pendel mit annaehernd gleicher Schwingungsdauer auf gemeinsamer Unterlage," _Sitzungsberichte der Koeniglicher Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin_ (Berlin, 1902) pp. 245-253. Peirce investigated the plan of swinging two pendulums on the same stand (_Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1880-81_, Washington, 1883, p. 26; also in CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE, _Collected Papers_, 6.273). At a conference on gravity held in Washington during May 1882, Peirce again advanced the method of eliminating flexure by hanging two pendulums on one support and oscillating them in antiphase ("Report of a conference on gravity determinations held in Washington, D.C., in May, 1882," _Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1881-82_, Washington, 1883, app. no. 22, pp. 503-516). [90] F. A. VENING MEINESZ, _Observations de pendule dans les Pays-Bas_ (Delft, 1923). [91] A. BERROTH, "Schweremessungen mit zwei und vier gleichzeitig auf demselben Stativ schwingenden Pendeln," _Zeitschrift fuer Geophysik_, vol. 1 (1924-25), no. 3, p. 93. [92] "Pendulum Apparatus for Gravity Determinations," _Engineering_ (1926), vol. 122, pp. 271-272. [93] MALCOLM W. GAY, "Relative Gravity Measurements Using Precision Pendulum Equipment," _Geophysics_ (1940), vol. 5, pp. 176-191. [94] L. G. D. THOMPSON, "An Improved Bronze Pendulum Apparatus for Relative Gravity Determinations," [published by] _Dominion Observatory_ (Ottawa, 1959), vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 145-176. [95] W. A. HEISKANEN and F. A. VENING MEINESZ, _The Earth and its Gravity Field_ (McGraw: New York, 1958). [96] F. KUEHNEN and P. FURTWAENGLER, _Bestimmung der Absoluten Groesze der Schwerkraft zu Potsdam mit Reversionspendeln_ (Berlin: Veroeffentlichungen des Koeniglichen Preussischen Geodaetischen Instituts, 1906), new ser., no. 27. [97] Reported by Dr. F. Kuehnen to the fifth session, October 9, 1895, of the Eleventh General Conference, _Die Internationale Erdmessung_, held in Berlin from September 25 to October 12, 1895. A footnote states that Assistant O. H. Tittmann, who represented the United States, subsequently reported Peirce's prior discovery of the influence of the flexure of the pendulum itself upon the period (_Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1883-84_, Washington, 1885, app. 16, pp. 483-485). [98] _Assistants' Reports, U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1883-84_ (MS, National Archives, Washington). [99] C. S. PEIRCE, "Effect of the Flexure of a Pendulum Upon its Period of Oscillation," _Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1883-84_ (Washington, 1885), app. no. 16. [100] F. R. HELMERT, _Beitraege zur Theorie des Reversionspendels_ (Potsdam: Veroeffentlichungen des Koeniglichen Preussischen Geodaetischen Instituts, 1898). [101] J. A. DUERKSEN, _Pendulum Gravity Data in the United States_ (Special Publication No. 244, U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey; Washington, 1949). [102] Ibid., p. 2. See also, E. J. BROWN, loc. cit. (footnote 85). [103] PAUL R. HEYL and GUY S. COOK, "The Value of Gravity at Washington," _Journal of Research, National Bureau of Standards_ (1936), vol. 17, p. 805. [104] SIR HAROLD JEFFREYS, "The Absolute Value of Gravity," _Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Geophysical Supplement_ (London, 1949), vol. 5, p. 398. [105] J. S. CLARK, "The Acceleration Due to Gravity," _Phil. Trans._ (1939), vol. 238, p. 65. [106] HUGH L. DRYDEN, "A Reexamination of the Potsdam Absolute Determination of Gravity," _Journal of Research, National Bureau of Standards_ (1942), vol. 29, p. 303; and A. BERROTH, "Das Fundamentalsystem der Schwere im Lichte neuer Reversionspendelmessungen," _Bulletin Geodesique_ (1949), no. 12, pp. 183-204. [107] T. C. MENDENHALL, op. cit. (footnote 83), p. 522. [108] A. H. COOK, "Recent Developments in the Absolute Measurement of Gravity," _Bulletin Geodesique_ (June 1, 1957), no. 44, pp. 34-59. [109] See footnote 89. [110] C. S. PEIRCE, "On the Deduction of the Ellipticity of the Earth, from Pendulum Experiments," _Report of the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for 1880-81_ (Washington, 1883), app. no. 15, pp. 442-456. [111] HEISKANEN and VENING MEINESZ, op. cit. (footnote 95), p. 74. [112] Ibid., p. 76. [113] Ibid., p. 309. [114] Ibid., p. 310. [115] K. REICHENEDER, "Method of the New Measurements at Potsdam by Means of the Reversible Pendulum," _Bulletin Geodesique_ (March 1, 1959), no. 51, p.72. * * * * * Paper 44 - Transcriber's Note Formatting of equations has been altered from the original: variables are shown without italics; to display them 'in line'; and brackets have been added to clarify expressions where necessary. Typographical errors and inconsistencies have been corrected as follows: Page 320: 'difference T_{1} - T_{2} is sufficiently' had 'sufficlently.' Page 321: 'faites à Genève avec le pendule à réversion' had 'reversion.' Page 326: 'Schwere mit Hilfe verschiedener Apparate' had 'verschiedene.' Page 328: 'between the yard and the meter.' closing quote mark deleted. Page 334: 'Mendenhall apparatus were part of' 'was' changed to 'were.' Page 342: 'of the Geodetic Institute at Potsdam' had 'Postdam.' Page 345: 'The gravimetric methods of physical' had 'mtehods.' Footnote 1 'Société française de Physique' had 'Française.' Footnote 3 'Cogitata physico-mathematica' had 'physica.' Footnote 10 'mathématiques et de physique par MM. de l'Académie Royale' had 'mathematiques,' 'Royal.' Footnote 12 'par ordre du Roy au Pérou, pour observer' had 'Perou, pour observir.' Footnote 19 'Opticam et Astronomiam' had 'Astronomian.' Footnote 20 'connaître la longueur du pendule qui' had 'connaitre la longuer.' Footnote 21 'Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie' had 'Königliche.' Footnote 25 'pour déterminer la longueur du pendule' had 'longeur.' Footnote 41 'Survey of India (Calcutta, 1879)' had 'Surey.' Footnotes 45 and 47 'Société de Physique et d'histoire' had 'd'historire.' Footnote 49 '�ber die Grösse und Figur der Erde' had 'Grosse.' Footnote 53 'Bestimmung der Länge' had 'Lange'; 'Astronomisch-Geodätische Arbeiten' had 'Astronomische'; 'Veröffentlichungen des Königlichen' had 'Königliche.' Footnote 55 '(1768), vol. 58, pPage 3$1:-335.' had '329-235.' Footnote 66 'Comptes-rendus de l'Académie' had 'L'Académie.' Footnote 81 'Sur l'Intensité absolue' had 'l'Intensite.' Footnote 89 'Sitzungsberichte der Königlicher' had 'Königliche.' Footnote 100 'Veröffentlichungen des Königlichen' had 'Veröffentlichungen Königliche.' Capitalisation of 'Von'/'von' has been regulaized to 'von' for all personal names, except at the beginning of a sentence, and when referring to the Von Sterneck pendulum. * * * * * _Index_ A Adams, W. B., 252 Agricola, Georgius, 215, 216 Airy, G. B., 319, 324, 332 Albrecht, Karl Theodore, 322, 338 Aldini, Giovanni, 124 Al-Mamun, seventh calif of Bagdad, 306 Almansi, Emilio, 339 Ames Manufacturing Company, 5, 7 Ampère, André Marie, 127, 129 Anckerswärd, Col. Michael, 157 Angle, Edward H., 295 Arago, Dominique François Jean, 129 Aristarchus of Samos, 54 Aristotle, 179, 306 Astor, John Jacob, 141 B Baeyer, Adolf, 193 Baeyer, J. J., 321, 322, 324-327, 338, 346 Baily, Francis, 317 Baldwin, Matthias William, 264 Baltimore, Lord. _See_ Calvert. Barlow, Peter W., 221, 227 Bartlett, Charles A., 8 Basevi, James Palladio, 345 Battison, E. A., 18 Beach, Alfred Ely, 224, 227-229, 231, 237 Bechil, Achild, 179 Bemis, Will, 20-22, 27 Bennet, Abraham, 124 Bennett, Frank M., 139, 150, 165 Benz, Carl, 6, 7 Bergh, Christian, 145 Berroth, A., 342 Berthelot, Marcellin, 189 Bertolla, Alessandro, 65 Bertolla, Bartolomeo Antonio, 31, 34, 36-41, 47, 51, 52, 57-59, 62, 63 Berzelius, Jöns Jakob, 133, 182 Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm, 313, 314, 319, 320, 324, 325, 338, 346 Besson, Jacques, 107 Bettany, G. T., 136 Beyer, Dr. Henry Gustav, 275, 276 Biddle, James, 141 Biot, Jean Baptiste, 135, 325, 329 Black, G. V., 295 Black and Bell, plant at Stratford, 182 Blake, John B., 290, 291 Bohnenberger, Johann Gottlieb Friedrich, 315 Bollman, W., and Company, 91, 92 Bollman, Wendel, 79, 80-83, 85, 88-92, 94-97 Borda, J. C., 311, 312, 315, 325, 329, 346 Borghesi, Father Francesco, 31-59, 70, 71 Boscovitch, Père R. J., 310, 311 Boston Locomotive Works, 260 Bouguer, Pierre, 307, 309-311, 327, 343, 345 Boussingault, Jean Baptiste, 185 Boyd, John C., 276 Boyle, Robert, 178, 179 Brackenridge, S. M., 145 Brahe, Tycho, 54, 306 Brand, H., 178, 179 Brewington, M. V., 155 Brown, Adam and Noah, 141, 142, 145 Brown, Alexander Crosby, 165 Brown, E. J., 334, 339 Brown, Noah, 141, 150, 151 Browne, Charles, 157 Browne, Henry, 304, 314 Browns' yard, 142, 144 Bruhns, C., 322, 324, 338 Brunel, I. K., 217, 218 Brunel, Marc Isambard (the elder), 204, 205, 217, 218, 221, 224, 229, 231, 236 Brunner Brothers (Paris), 329 Buchner, Hans, 197, 200 Burleigh, Charles, 212, 213 Burleigh Rock Drill Company, 212 Burr, S. D. V., 236 Butzjäger, Johann Georg, 36, 37 C Calvert, George, Lord Baltimore, 156 Calvin, Melvin, 200 Canning, Stratford, 139 Carlisle, Anthony, 124 Carrel, Alexis, 291 Casciarolo, Vicenzo, 179 Cassini, Giovanni-Domenico, 306, 307 Cassini, Jacques, 306 Cassini de Thury, J. D., 311, 312, 315, 325, 329, 346 Cavallo, Tiberio, 124 Cavendish, Henry, 123 Cellérier, Charles, 320, 321, 325, 326, 329, 336 Chapman, Fredrik Henrik af, 156, 166 Charles II of England, 152, 153 Charles VI, Emperor of Austria, 32 Chevreul, Michel, 189 Clairaut, Alexis Claude, 308, 309, 343, 345 Clark, J. S., 342 Clark, John, 91 Clarke, A. R., 345 Cles, Baron of, 57, 59 Coast and Harbor Defense Company, 141 Coast Defense Society, 141, 142 Cochrane, Sir Thomas, 231, 232 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 306 Colburn, Zerah, 259 Colden, C. D., 149 Coleman, Laurence V., 290 Colgan, P., 10 Colton, Arthur, and Company, 278 Cook, A. H., 342 Cook, Guy S., 339, 342 Copernicus, 54 Copperthwaite, William Charles, 224 Cori, Carl F., 200 Cori, Gerti T., 200 Crookes, William, 192 Cummings, James, 125, 127-129, 133-136 D Dagger, Benjamin M., 290 Danforth Cooke & Co., 252 Danish Greenland Company, 150 Danish Royal Archives, 139, 150 Davy, Sir Humphry, 185 Dearborn, Henry, 141, 142 Deats, William, 9 Decatur, Stephen, 141 Defforges, C., 314, 329, 346 De Freycinet, Louis Claude de Saulses, 317 De Hevesy, George, 198, 200 De la Hire, Gabriel Philippe, 306 De la Vega, Garcilaso, 185 De Prony, M. G., 314 Deptford Yard (England), 165 De Saussure, Théodore, 185 Di Noris, Cristoforo Sizzo, 59 Dixon, William S., 276 Doane, Thomas, 210, 212, 213, 215 Dodrill, Forest D., 290 Donner, Joseph, 277 Douglas, W. & B., Company, 113 Drake, Edwin L., 213 Drinker, Henry S., 224, 237 Drury, Gardner P., 260 Dryden, Hugh L., 342 Du Buat, L. G., 314 Duperry, Capt. Louis Isidore, 317 Duryea, Charles, 3-13, 15, 16, 19-21, 26, 27 Duryea, J. Frank, 3-7, 9-13, 15-23, 26, 27 Duryea Motor Corporation, 5 Duryea Motor Wagon Company, 3, 27 Duryea Power Company, 5 E Eastwick, Andrew M., 259 Eckford, Henry, 142 Einthoven, Willem, 290 Emerson, John Haven, 285 Emmet, ----, 144 Eratosthenes, 306, 308, 342 Erman, Paul, 128, 129, 132, 133 Eudoxus of Cnidus, 306 Euler-Chelpin, Hans von, 197, 200 Evans, Samuel, 141, 145 Evelyn, John, 32 F Faraday, Michael, 125 Faye, Hervé, 325-327, 336-338, 346, 347 Ferchl, Fritz, 285 Fernel, Jean, 306 Fernelius, Jean, 179 Feulgen, Robert, 193 Fink, Albert, 79, 91 Fischelis, Robert P., 287 Fischer, Emil, 193 Fleming, Sir Alexander, 290, 295 Flint, James Milton, 273-278 Fox, Josiah, 157 Francis I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, 42, 44, 52, 58 Fulton, Robert, 139, 141, 142, 144, 147, 149, 150, 157, 159, 165 Furtwängler, P., 337-339 G Gahn, Johann Gottlieb, 182 Galilei, Galileo, 304, 305, 346 Galvani, Luigi, 124 Garfield, James A., 272 Garrison, Fielding H., 277 Gauss, C. F., 320 Gautier, P., 339 Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis, 125, 182 Gilbert, L. W., 127-129, 132 Gobley, Nicolas Théodore, 191 Godin, Louis, 307 Goldingham, John, 316, 345 Goode, G. Brown, 273 Graham, Thomas, 182, 183, 185 Gravatt, C. U., 276 Greathead, James Henry, 204, 218, 221, 224, 229, 231, 235-237 Greely, A. W., 329 Griffenhagen, George B., 290, 291 Grubenmann, Hans, 85 Grubenmann, Johann Ulrich, 85 Gulf Oil and Development Company, 338 Gurley, Ralph R. (USN), 150, 151 Gustav III of Sweden, 156, 157 Gwynn, Stuart, 210 H Hahn, Father Philipp Matthäus, 33 Haid, M., 335 Hall, Basil, 316 Hammond, William Alexander, 273 Hankwitz, Gottfried, 180 Harden, Arthur, 197, 200 Harrington, Frank, 7 Harrison, Joseph, Jr., 259 Hartford Machine Screw Company, 6 Hartmann, Immanuel Peter, 181 Haskin, DeWitt C., 204, 232, 234-236 Haupt, Herman, 96, 204, 209, 210 Hawley, C. E., 6, 11 Hawthorn, Leslie, and Company (Scotland), 166 Heaviside, W. J., 321, 345 Heiskanen, W. A., 338, 345, 346 Hellot, Jean, 180 Helmert, F. R., 338, 339 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 326 Henderson, Alfred R., 291 Henkel, Silon, 290 Henry II, King of France, 179 Herschel, John, 319, 328, 345 Heyl, Paul R., 339, 342 Hindle, Charles F., 290 Hinkley, Holmes, 252, 260, 263 Hirsch, Adolph, 322, 324-326 Hittorf, Wilhelm, 181 Hobson, Joseph, 237 Hoefer, Ferdinand, 179 Holmberg, Wilhelm, 178 Holt, L. Emmett, 276 Hoppe-Seyler, Felix, 193 Howard, George W., & Company, 8 Hull, A. S., 251, 268 Humboldt, Alexander von, 185 Huygens, Christiaan, 179, 304, 305, 307, 314, 342, 346 I Ibañez, Carlos, 325 Incas, 185 J Jefferson, Thomas, 145 Jeffreys, Sir Harold, 342 Jones, Jacob, 141 Jones, Thomas, 318 Jones, William, 147 K Kater, Henry, 304, 314-320, 325, 327, 329, 345, 346 Kells, Charles E., 295 Klein, Father ----, 33 Kletwich, Johann Christopher, 179 Knight, ----, 83 Koett, Albert B., 287 Koppe, �mile, 181 Kornberg, Arthur, 200 Kossel, Albrecht, 200 Kraft, Johann Daniel, 179 Kramer, Dr. ----, 181 Kühnen, F., 338, 339 Kunckel, Johann, 179 L La Condamine, Charles Marie de, 307, 310, 311, 343 Lange, W., 199 Laplace, Marquis Pierre Simon de, 309, 313, 320 Latrobe, Benjamin H., 82, 83, 85, 87-91, 208, 209 Laurie, J., 157 Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, 181, 185 Law, Henry, 218 LaWall, Charles H., 285 Laws, John Bennet, 186 Lederle Laboratories, 290 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 179 Lennox, Charles, third Duke of Richmond, 185 Leonhardi, Johann Gottfried, 179 Levine, Phoebus Aaron Theodor, 193 Lewis, Jacob, 141 Lewis, Morgan, 141 Lewton, Frederick L., 277 Liebig, Justus, 183, 185, 186 Liebreich, Oscar, 191 Lilly, Eli, and Company, 283 Lindbergh, Charles A., 291 Lipmann, Fritz, 200 Lippi, Fra Lippo, 42 London, E. S., 193 Long, Crawford W., 294 Long, Stephen H., 85 Longomontanus, Christian Severin, 54 Lorenzoni, Giuseppe, 336, 339 Lütke, Count Feodor Petrovich, 316, 345 M Macquer, Peter Joseph, 180 Marestier, Jean Baptiste, 147, 149, 159, 162 Marggraf, Andreas Sigismund, 180 Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, 31, 41, 42, 44, 57, 58 Mariners' Museum, 165 Markham, Erwin F., 8, 9, 15, 16, 19-22, 27 Marmion, R. A., 276 Marsh, James, 145 Marshall, Charles, 11, 16 Maudslay, Henry, 106, 113 Maupertius, P. L. Moreau de, 308, 343 Maxwell, James Clerk, 324 May, Arthur J., 139 Mayer, Jo, 285 McMurtrie, Daniel, 276 Medi, Enrico, 342 Meigs, M. C., 96 Meineke, ----, 128 Mendenhall, Thomas Corwin, 319, 331, 332, 334, 347 Merrick, C. E., 10 Mersenne, P. Marin, 305 Meton, 48 Meyerhof, Otto, 194, 200 Miescher, Johann Friedrich, 192 Miller, Patrick, 156, 157 Mitchill, Samuel L., 141, 142 Monauni, Giovanni Battista, 40, 52 Monroe, James, 145 Montgéry, M., 147, 149-152, 159 Morgan, "Mr.", 144 Morris, Tasker and Company, 94 Morris, Thomas, 141, 142 Morton, Arthur O., 290 Morton, William, 294 Mount Clair shops, 83, 89, 92 Mowbray, George W., 213, 215 Muspratt, James, 186 N Nagel, Oscar P., 295 Nason, Joseph, 114 National Maritime Museum (England), 147, 156, 165 Nelson, Robert J., 295 Nesbitt, Mr. and Mrs. D. H., 13 Newton, Sir Isaac, 303-305, 307, 308, 342, 343 Nicholson, William, 124 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 186, 187, 189 Nobel, Alfred B., 213 North, Simeon, arms factory, 114 Norwood, Richard, 306 O Ochoa, Severo, 200 Oersted, Hans Christian, 125-130, 132-136 Ohm, Georg Simon, 123, 135 Oken, Lorenz, 132 Olson, Carl G., 118 Oppolzer, Theodor von, 322, 324-327 Owen, H. S., 5 P Page, Irving, 4 Parke, Davis & Company, 273 Parmelee, L. J., 10 Patapsco Bridge and Iron Works, 92, 95 Patrick, Mr. and Mrs. ----, 13 Patterson, Carlile Pollock, 325, 326 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 314, 322-329, 332, 336-339, 342, 345-347 Pelouze, Théophile Juste, 189 Pepys, Samuel, 155 Perry, Oliver, 141 Peters, C. A. F., 322, 324 Petty, Sir William, 152, 153, 155, 166 Pfaff, Christian Heinrich, 132 Philolaus, 54 Phoenix Iron Works, 92 Physick, Philip Syng, 294 Picard, Abbé Jean, 306, 308-311, 342 Plantamour, E., 319-321, 324-326 Poggendorf, Johann Christian, 127-129, 132-134, 136 Poissant, A. A., 10 Pope Manufacturing Company, 6, 12 Porter, David, 144 Posidonius, 306 Pratt, Thomas W., 91 Preston, E. D., 328, 329 Ptolemy, 54 Purcell, William, 147 Putnam, G. R., 339 Putnam Machine Works, 212 Pythagoras, 54, 306 Q Quare, Daniel, 32 R Raschig, Christoph Eusebius, 129 Rasmussen, Kjeld, 150 Reed, D. A., 27 Reeves, Samuel J., 92, 95 Repsold, A., and Sons (Hamburg), 320, 322, 338, 339, 346 Richer, Jean, 307, 342 Richmond, Duke of. _See_ Lennox. Riciolus, 54 Rigsarkivet (Denmark), 147 Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 129 Roebling, John A., 83, 90 Roentgen, Wilhelm Konrad, 290, 294 Rouelle, Guillaume François, 181 Royal Society of London, 152 Russell, John W., & Sons Company, 9, 10, 18, 20 Russell, William J., 9, 10, 15, 18 Rutgers, Henry, 141, 142 S Sabine, Capt. Edward, 315, 325, 329, 345 San Cajetano, Brother David à, 33 San Daniele, Father Aurelianus à, 33 Savage Factory, 88 Savart, Felix, 135 Sawitsch, A., 321, 322 Scheele, Karl W., 182 Schieffelin and Company, 273 Schmiedeberg, Oswald, 193 Schrader, Gerhard, 199 Schrötter, Anton, 181 Schumacher, H. C., 320 Schumann, R., 335, 336 Schweigger, Johann Salomo Christoph, 127-130, 132-134, 136 Seebeck, T., 128, 135 Shanley, Walter, 212 Shanley Bros., 215 Shea, T., 10 Smith, ---- (Captain, USN), 144 Smith, Alba F., 244, 246, 247, 259 Smith, Sir Sidney (RN), 155 Smith Carriage Company, 8 Snell, Willebrord, 306 Snow, ----, 8 Soemmering, S. T., 125 Sommeiller, Germain, 210 Sonnedecker, Glenn, 296 Speter, M., 127, 128 Squibb, E. R., and Sons, 285, 286 Statens Sjöhistoriska Museum (Sweden), 147 Stephenson, Robert, 90 Stephenson, Robert, & Hawthorns, Ltd., 253 Sterneck, Robert von, 331, 332, 335, 338, 346 Stevens, J., Arms and Tool Company, 4 Stevens-Duryea Company, 4 Stewart, Charles, 145 Stiles, George, 144 Stokes, George Gabriel, 324, 328, 329, 345, 346 Stoklasa, Julius, 186 Storrow, Charles S., 210 Stoudinger, Charles, 144 Strecker, Adolf Friedrich, 191 Stuart, Charles B., 139, 150 Stuart, J. E. B., 249 Sully, Henry, 32 Swaine, Jack, 26 Symington, William, 157 T Tanner, Paul H., 295 Taunton Locomotive Works, 247 Taylor, Frank A., 292 Tegmeyer, John H., 91 Thames Iron-works Company (England), 165 Thenard, Louis Jacques, 125 Thomas, George S., 287 Thudichum, Ludwig, 192 Todd, Lord Alexander, 200 Tompion, Thomas, 32 Toner, Joseph Meredith, 271 Tovazzi, Giangrisostomo, 57, 58 Town, Ithiel, 85 Tromsdorff, Johann Bartholomacus, 125 Tweed, William Marcy (Boss), 229 Tyler, Daniel, 244, 253 Tyler, David B., 139 U Ulloa, Antonio de, 308 Union Works, 260 Uppercu, Inglis M., 27 V Vander Woerd, Charles, 116, 117 Van Marum, Martin, 123 Vening Meinesz, F. A., 337, 338, 345-347 Volet, Charles, 342 Volta, Alessandro, 123, 124, 127 Vulcan Foundry, 252 W Wallace Brothers, 273 Ward, Frederick A., 120 Warrington, Samuel, 141 Warwick, George, 18 Watts, Frederick, 249 Weale, John, 218 Wernwag, Lewis, 89 Westhaeffer, Paul, 251 Wetmore, Dr. Alexander, 287 Wetschgi, Emanuel, 108 Wetschgi, Manuel, 108, 111 Whipple, Squire, 79, 83, 87, 91, 95 Whistler, George W., 83 White, C. H., 276 Whitebread, Charles, 277, 278, 281, 283, 285, 287 Whitney arms factory, 114 Wilkes, Charles, 317, 318 Wilkinson, David, 113 Williamson, Dowe, 32 Williamson, Joseph, 32 Willm, Edmond, 182 Willstätter, Richard, 191 Wilmarth, Seth, 244, 246, 247, 249, 260 Wilson, Frank E., 290 Wilstack, Paul, 155 Winans, Ross, 83 Winters, Joseph, 244 Winters, Father S. X., S. J., 42 Winz, Johann Christian, 36, 37 Wisshofer, Peter, 36, 37 Wolcott, Oliver, 141, 142 Wollaston, W. H., 125 Wright, Benjamin, 83 Wurtz, Adolphe, 185, 191 Y Youle, John, foundry, 142 Z Zamboni, Giuseppe, 132 * * * * * Transcriber's Notes (Index) "Emmet, ----, 144" (was Emmett). * * * * * 
44297	----	file was produced from images generously made available by Biodiversity Heritage Library.) Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LIV NOVEMBER, 1898, TO APRIL, 1899 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. VOL. LIV. ESTABLISHED BY EDWARD L. YOUMANS. NO. 5. APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. MARCH, 1899. _EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS._ CONTENTS. PAGE I. The Evolution of Colonies. VII. Social Evolution. By J. COLLIER. 577 II. Politics as a Form of Civil War. By FRANKLIN SMITH. 588 III. My Pet Scorpion. By NORMAN ROBINSON. (Illustrated.) 605 IV. The Peoples of the Balkan Peninsula--The Greek, the Slav, and the Turk. By Prof. WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY. (Illustrated.) 614 V. Marvelous Increase in Production of Gold. By ALEXANDER E. OUTERBRIDGE, Jr. 635 VI. The California Penal System. By CHARLES HOWARD SHINN. (Illus.) 644 VII. The Scientific Expert and the Bering Sea Controversy. By GEORGE A. CLARK. 654 VIII. A School for the Study of Life under the Sea. By ELEANOR HODGENS PATTERSON. 668 IX. Science in Education. By Sir ARCHIBALD GEIKIE, F. R. S. 672 X. Shall we Teach our Daughters the Value of Money? By Mrs. GEORGE ELMORE IDE. 686 XI. Sketch of Clémence Royer. By M. JACQUES BOYER. (With Portrait.) 690 XII. Editor's Table: Words of a Master.--Fads and Frauds 699 XIII. Scientific Literature 704 XIV. Fragments of Science 712 NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 72 FIFTH AVENUE. SINGLE NUMBER, 50 CENTS. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, $5.00. COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. Entered at the Post Office at New York, and admitted for transmission through the mails at second-class rates. [Illustration: CLÉMENCE ROYER.] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. MARCH, 1899. THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. BY JAMES COLLIER. VII.--SOCIAL EVOLUTION. Perhaps there is no civilized institution to which, man has accommodated himself with so ill a grace as monogamy. Hardly a perversion of it has ever existed but may still be found. Polygamy is widely spread in the most advanced communities; temporary polyandrous _ménages à trois_ are known to exist elsewhere than among the Nairs and Tibetans and _ancient_ Britons; the matriarchate in one shape or another may be detected well outside the sixty peoples among whom Mr. Tylor has discovered it; and marriage by free choice is far from having superseded marriage by capture or by purchase. It is the less surprising that abnormal or ancient forms of the union should have been revived in colonies. In this relationship, as in most others, the colonist, like the sperm cell after its junction with the germ cell, sinks at once to a lower level, and the race has to begin life over again. The fall is inevitable. The earliest immigrants are all of them men. Everywhere finding indigenes in the newly settled country, they can usually count on the complaisance or the submissiveness of the tribesmen. Native women have a strange fascination for civilized men, even for those who have been intimate with the European aristocracies and have belonged to them. Adventurous Castins might find their account in a relationship that was in perfect keeping with the wild life they led. It is more strange that, enslaved by an appetite which sometimes rose to a collective if seldom to a personal passion, educated men, with a scientific or a public career flung open to them at their option, able men who have written the best books about the races they knew only too well, men of great position whose heroic deeds and winning manners made them adored by women of their own race, should have spoiled their prime, or inextricably entangled themselves, or wrecked their own roof-tree and incurred lifelong desertion by the wife of their youth. The bluest blood of Spain was not contaminated by an alliance with the Incas, but just ten years ago the direct line of an ancient English earldom was extinguished among the Kaffirs. The truth seems to be that while a woman will not as a rule accept a man who is her inferior in rank or refinement, a man easily contents himself for the time with almost any female. The Bantu woman and the Australian _zubra_ are not alluring, but they have never lacked suitors. Colonial women shrink (or profess to shrink) from the Chinaman; all colors--black, brown, red, and yellow--seem to be alike to the undiscriminating male appetite. Yet it has its preferences. The high official who stands unmoved before the cloudy attractions of the Zulu, surrenders at discretion to the soft-voiced, dark-eyed, plump-limbed daughters of Maoriland. In the last case a perverse theory (of the future amalgamation of the races) may have been "the light that led astray"; it certainly was used to justify their acts to the consciences of the doers. Romance had its share: Browning's Waring (who was premier as well as poet) threw a poetic glamour over the miscegenation, as another minister found in the race the Ossianesque attributes of his own Highlanders. It sometimes, even now, rises into passion: the colonial schoolmaster who marries a native girl will declare that his is a love match. But the chief reason at all times was "the custom of the country." "It was the regular thing," remarked an old legislator, looking ruefully back on his past. Nor is it to be harshly censured. Corresponding to the Roman slave-concubinage which Cato Major did not disdain to practice, it repeated a stage in the history of the mother country when the invading Angles allied themselves (as anthropology abundantly proves) with the native Britons. While making a kind of atonement to the indigenes, it was a solatium to the pioneer colonists for a life of hardship and privation. A higher grade was the concubinage of convictism, which was with women of the same race and was capable of rising into normal marriage. In the early days of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land it seems to have been almost universal, and it lasted for many years. Not one in ten of the officials lived with his legally married wife. In the latter colony it was suppressed by the governor, who ordered them to marry the women by whom they had families. In the former, if Dr. Lang's account of his exertions is accepted, it was put down by the exposure of guilty parties. It was accompanied by other features of a low social state. The public and private sale of wives was not infrequent. The colonial equivalent for a wife, in the currency of those days, was sometimes four gallons of rum, or five pounds sterling and a gallon, or twenty sheep and a gallon; one woman was sold for fifty sheep. Around gold and silver mining encampments nondescript relationships of a slightly higher order arise. They are with free women, though the women are apt to be of the same class as Bret Harte's Duchess of Poker Flat, answering to the Doll Tearsheets of hardly more civilized communities. They often issue in marriage. In mining townships, and even in colonial towns, professional men are to be found married to unpresentable women. In colonies of regular foundation normal marriages are contracted under difficulties. Few women at first go out, the emigrants intending to return when they have made their fortune. Women have accordingly to be sent. In the seventeenth century a number of girls of good repute were persuaded to emigrate to Virginia, a subscription being raised to defray the cost. In the following century wives were sent to settlers in French Louisiana on the same plan. To French Canada women were dispatched by shiploads. They were selected (according to Parkman) as butchers choose cattle: the plumpest were preferred, because they could stand the winter best and would stay at home. In Virginia women were offered for sale to eager colonists, who willingly paid one hundred pounds of tobacco for one, or as much as one hundred and fifty pounds for a very pretty girl; a debt incurred for the purchase of a wife being considered a debt of honor. In the early days of Canterbury, New Zealand, when a consignment of servant girls arrived, young farmers would ride over the Port hills and carry them off, though in the style rather of young Lochinvar than of the Sabine rape. Settlers have often requested the agent general for the colony or the mayor of their native town to send them out a wife. Wives so easily acquired are apt to be lightly parted with, and within the last few years, in colonial villages, amicable exchanges have been effected--one woman going with her children to the house of another man, whose wife and children made a reciprocal migration. Facts such as these (which might readily be multiplied) show how easily so-called civilized man sloughs off the conventions of ages and sinks to a primitive level. They soon disappear, however, and social colonial conditions rapidly assimilate themselves to those of the mother country. In most young colonies marriage is universal and it is early. After a few days' acquaintance couples rashly engage themselves, in utter ignorance of one another's character or of their own, and a precipitate marriage follows, with such results as might be expected. Statistics show that the age of marriage on the part of women is steadily rising. In the early days of each colony a girl was deemed _passée_ if she did not get married before she was twenty-one. In the decade that ended the first century of New South Wales the proportion of married women under that age fell from 28.17 to 23.55 per cent; in less prosperous Victoria, after only half a century, it fell from 21 to 17.4; in New Zealand there was a big drop from 29.4 to 19.7. The proportion of married women under twenty-five has also seriously declined. The decrease is noticeably correspondent with the increased number of young women who are gaining their own livelihood--largely as teachers and typewriters. On these lines the colonies are following the lead of the mother country. Long engagements, followed by late marriages with fewer children, take the place of short engagements with hasty marriages and larger families. Female celibacy is no longer dishonorable, and women are beginning to understand that they may be far happier single and self-supporting. The quality of marriage improves with its rarity. When an Australian M. A. marries an M. A., or the most brilliant of New Zealand professors marries one of his most distinguished students, we feel, as when a Dilke marries a Pattison, that the ideal of the union has been realized. The growth of the colonial house follows the development of the family and repeats the history of the race. The immigrant procures his abode, as he afterward buys his clothes, ready made. The ancient troglodyte lives to-day in the Derbyshire cave dweller; the original Romanist settlers of Maryland were driven to take refuge in cave houses in Virginia; and the New Zealand hermit, like "great Pæan's son" at Lemnos, "weeps o'er his wound" of the heart in a cave by the resounding sea. Where they can not be found ready dug they can be excavated, as they were by some early Pennsylvania colonists. Others in Virginia, New York, and New England found it easier to dig holes in the ground, thus imitating the Germans of Tacitus, whose winter residences are also repeated in those basements which form the wholesome abode of the London domestic servant. The wattle-and-daub house of the Anglo-Saxon villager has been everywhere reproduced in the colonies, and may still be abundantly found. If the occupation of caves and the burrowing of holes suggests man's distant affinity to the carnivora and lower quadrupeds, his simian origin is confirmed by the use he makes of the tree. In the infant city of Philadelphia there were "few mansions but hollow trees." A rude form of tent is the next stage, the canvas consisting (as may still be seen among the poorer campers-out) of clothes or rags. Then, as in the early days of Sydney, the tents were covered in with bushes and thatched over. Next (as may to-day be observed in the neighborhood of Coolgardie) a framework of branches is employed to support the canvas, and the tent is converted into a cabin. A stride toward the house is taken when the branches are replaced by a regular woodwork, with doors and windows; the envelope being still sometimes canvas, which is soon replaced by corrugated iron. The Brazilian country house where Darwin lodged sixty years ago was built of upright posts with interwoven boughs. Another line of development starts from the trunk of the tree. The early American colonists made bark wigwams. The Australian pastoralist "erected a temporary house, generally of large sheets of bark, in the first instance." In countries where the winter is more severe or the bark less substantial, the backwoodsman builds, as the early colonist built, a rude cabin of round logs. Then the logs are hewn, or they are split or sawn into planks, and built into the weatherboard houses still common in the rural parts of Australia, and general even in New Zealand towns. In their earliest stages they are still without a floor and are roofed with thatch or shingle. Towns often thus remain like early Sydney, "a mere assemblage of paltry erections intermediate between the hut and the house." The architecture is of the simplest. A "butt" and a "ben," with a "lean-to," form the prevailing type. As the family grows or its wealth increases, new portions are added, till many colonial houses look for all the world as if they had "come out in penny numbers." Even with a few stately structures--luxurious mansions, extensive government offices, Gothic parliamentary buildings--a wooden city has an indefinable meanness of appearance. It is improved out of existence by the dread agency of fire. Like Charles's London, New Orleans and many another colonial town have thus had an Augustan renewal. Houses are now built of brick, stone, or concrete; tile, slate, and iron replaced thatch and shingle; two stories were ventured on; chimneys were smaller but safer. They became susceptible of architecture: Spanish features were introduced into those of New Orleans; the more northern colonies copied the English country house, with modifications to suit the hotter or colder climate; and in New South Wales a taste for mansion-building came into vogue along with splendid equipages, liveried servants, and pedigrees. Such houses were at first arranged in all degrees of irregularity and confusion. The street is a modern invention. The cows returning from pasture laid out Boston, and the bullock teams climbing up from the harbor charted Sydney. Towns in manufactured colonies, as Savannah, Augusta, most South American cities, Christchurch and Invercargill in New Zealand, were planned before settlement and have their streets at right angles. A hundred years ago Talleyrand, exiled in the United States, described the journey from one of these cities to the interior as successively exhibiting all past stages of the human habitation from the mansion to the tent, and just a century later one of Talleyrand's countrymen, M. Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu, traveling in the reverse direction, from "the bush" to Coolgardie, witnessed the gradual transformation of the tent into the two-storied hotel. A great part of the history of the race in the matter of habitations is thus museumed in the space of a few miles. If the temple rises out of the tomb, is modeled on that, and remains to the last pre-eminently a place of sacrifice, the church is an enlarged dwelling house. It is the house of the god, as the fetichist called it--the house of God, as we still reverently call it; and in Romanist countries to this day it is in a manner the abode of two divine personages, who figure as dizened and painted dolls that are named respectively God and the Mother of God! Both lines of development are rapidly recapitulated in colonies. The temple appears as the cathedral, which has modest beginnings, but gradually assumes the architecture and proportions of Gothic cathedrals, losing relation to the primary wants of the worshipers--comfort and audibility--ministering mainly to their higher needs, and if used for preaching at all, reserved for such occasional and sensational pulpit oratory as that of Dominican monks like Lacordaire at Notre Dame in Paris, or of a Protestant Dominican like the late Canon Liddon at St. Paul's in London. The church, chapel, or meeting house may be found in colonial villages in its most rudimentary form, scarcely distinguishable in style from a dwelling house. According to the sect it belongs to, it develops in one of two opposite directions. The age of cathedrals is past, even in Roman Catholic countries, but the tendency of Anglican and allied churches is to simulate the old cathedral; high ritualistic sections mimic the gorgeous Madeleine. The more liberal denominations, on the other hand, develop downward; the colonial Baptist tabernacle is on the lines of Spurgeon's great building at Newington, but the ancient pulpit is widened into a platform and the seats slope upward as in a concert hall; it is a mere auditorium, in which the preacher is all. The development in this direction finds its extreme in the secularist hall, which is a mere concert room, with a piano in place of an organ. The ceremonial development is on the same lines--toward the gradual adoption of ancient rites by the older churches, toward more freedom in the younger sects. Many a colonial clergyman has wrecked himself or his congregation through too much ritualism; a few have injured themselves through an excess of liberalism. A parallel evolution takes place in church government. Where an organized settlement is made on political principles, congregations carry their minister with them, or rather the ministers carry their congregations. Where the colony is normally founded and grows up as the mother country grew, the first ministers, like the first preachers of Christianity itself, are often laymen. In an interior county of Virginia Morris read every Lord's day to his neighbors from the writings of Luther and Bunyan, and a meeting house was at length built for him; it is a typical instance of the beginnings of most churches. The part of laymen remains long prominent in colonies. The Anglican lay reader is everywhere a feature of colonial church life. In the more flexible churches a storekeeper or retired sea captain will read Spurgeon's sermons or preach excellent sermons of his own in an Otago village or the Australian bush. Where missionaries have been sent out to convert the heathen in a country afterward colonized, many of them remain as ministers, as did Augustin and his monks in England. The Presbyterian catechist likewise becomes a settled minister. Others arrive. Men of independent character, like Dr. Lang, of Sydney, resolve not to wait for any dead man's shoes in the kirk, but sail beyond the seas to colonies where there is no minister of their own denomination. Heretics, incompatibles, men who have failed, men whose health has given way, emigrate in increasing numbers. Still, the supply is long deficient. Clergymen were scarce in New York. A bounty was offered to immigrants in Virginia. Six years after the establishment of the Church of England in North Carolina there was only one clergyman in the country. The few there are repeat the history of the first Christian bishops and the early English monks in serving a circuit of two, three, or more churches. The state comes to the rescue by providing for their support. In England contributions were at first voluntary; by the eighth century tithes were levied, folk-land was granted, and private endowments were made. Just so was the Church of England established and endowed in New York, Virginia, and North Carolina; in Maryland a poll tax of forty pounds of tobacco was levied for its support. In Connecticut and Massachusetts a church was set up in each parish on Congregationalist principles by a vote of the people, who elected the minister and voted his salary. So uncertain was the tenure that in several States even the Anglican minister was hired from year to year; and quite lately an Anglican church in a British colony engaged its incumbent, as it might have engaged its organist, for a term. In 1791 the Church of England in Canada was partially established, and its clergy endowed with grants of land. The Australasian colonies have pursued a very various policy. By the Constitution Act of 1791 one seventh of the ungranted lands in New South Wales was set apart for the support of a Protestant clergy. An attempt to endow the Anglican Church in South Australia in the early forties was defeated by a radical governor. A recrudescence of the ecclesiastical principle permitted the church settlements of Otago and Canterbury in New Zealand to appropriate a portion of the funds derived from the sale of lands for the endowment of the Presbyterian and Anglican churches respectively. So far the colonies followed, latterly with halting steps, the history of the mother country. As in political, so in ecclesiastical government, they have anticipated that history. The American state churches did not survive the Revolution. In Canada the Presbyterians and other sects successfully asserted their claims to a share in the church endowments, which between 1840 and 1853 were distributed among the municipalities, all semblance of a connection between church and state being thus destroyed. New South Wales passed through a period of religious equality with concurrent endowment of the four most numerous denominations, and a long struggle against the principle of establishment was ended in 1879, when the reserves were devoted to the purposes of education. The practice of confiscating for the church a portion of the proceeds of the land sales was gradually dropped in Otago and Canterbury, probably more for commercial reasons than in consequence of the opposition of the democratic governor aforesaid, who spoked the wheel of the South Australians. Yielding to Nonconformist pressure, the liberal Government in 1869 enforced the principle of religious equality throughout the crown colonies, which were thus, willingly or not, made to follow the lead of the movement in Ireland. The internal organization of the colonial church is also anticipative. Fifty-two years ago Sir George Grey bestowed on the Anglican Church in New Zealand, then governed by him, a constitution modeled on that of the corresponding church in the United States, as the political constitution he drafted for the colony was modeled on the Constitution of the United States; and it has been imitated in other Australasian colonies, which have thus declared themselves independent of the mother church, while the colony is still politically dependent on the mother country. In yet another point the daughters have outstripped the parent. Three Presbyterian denominations still fissure the old home of Presbyterianism; only two have ever existed in the colonies, and for thirty years these two have been one. The four chief Methodist sects in Australia are also said to be on the point of amalgamating. The development of doctrine runs a fourth parallel to those of buildings, cult, and organization, and in a brief space it recapitulates a long history. In early colonial communities religious dogma is found in a state of "albuminous simplicity." "A healthy man," says Thoreau, "with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christianity." Nor will a bush-faller, at twenty-five shillings the acre. Distant from a church and a minister, he gets out of the way of attending the rare services brought within his reach, and forgets the religion in which he was nurtured. It does not mingle with his life. He is usually married at a registrar's. His children are unbaptized. His parents die unshriven. The dull crises of his mean existence come and go, and religion stands dumb before them. The inner spiritual realities fade from his view as their outward symbols disappear, and bit by bit the whole theological vesture woven by nineteen Christian centuries drops off him like Rip Van Winkle's rotten garments when he woke from his long sleep. In the matter of religion, as in almost all else, the colonist has to begin life again poor. As population grows and people come nearer to one another, two things happen. The churches push their skirmishers into the interior, plant stations, and have regular services. Gradually the old doctrines strike root in the new soil, and at length a creed answering to Evangelicalism is commonly held, thus repeating the first stage in the history of Christianity in Asia as in England. On the other hand, many of those whom neglect had softened into indifference or hardened into contempt assume a more decided attitude. With the spirit of independence which colonial life so readily begets, and stimulated by the skeptical literature of the day, they take ground against the renascent religion. Secularism, which denies what Evangelicalism affirms and is on a level with that, is born. It organizes itself, has halls and Sunday meetings, catechisms and children's teaching, newspapers, and a propaganda. For a while it is triumphant, openly contemptuous of the current religious mythology, and menacing toward its exponents. The Secularist leaders make their way to the bench and the legislature, the cabinet and the premiership. It is here the hitch arises. Some (by no means all) of these leaders are found to prefer power to principle, and prudently let their secularism go by the board when a wave of popular odium threatens to swamp the ship. Financial distress spreads. The movement loses _éclat_. As Bradlaugh's Hall of Science in London has been sold to the Salvation Army, the Freethought Hall in Sydney has been purchased by the Methodists, and in other colonial towns the cause has collapsed. But it always remains, whether patent or latent, as a needed counterpoise to the crudities of Evangelicalism, and it is the core of that increasing mass of religious indifferentism which strikes those who have been brought up in the old country. Statistics are said to prove that Australia is more addicted to church-going than England. If they prove any such thing, then statistics (as Mr. Bumble irreverently said of the British Constitution) are hasses and hidiots. You may sit down on any Sunday morning at a colonial table with a dozen highly respectable persons of both sexes and all ages, not one of whom has any thought of going to church that day. Such an experience would be impossible in England. The mistake has arisen from comparing England as a whole, which has classes below the line of church-going or indeed of civilization, with Australia as a whole, where such classes hardly exist. Compare Australia in this respect with the English middle classes, and the fallacy will be manifest. When a colony has hived off from the parent state at a time of religious excitement, and especially when it has religion for its _raison d'être_, it starts fully equipped on lines of its own, the earlier naturalistic stages being dropped. English theology and Puritan religion emigrated to North America in the seventeenth century, and there for two centuries they for the most part remained. Ever since, in New England and the States of the middle belt, religion has played the same high part as it did in old England under Oliver. There has, therefore, been a theological development in the United States to which, till fifty years ago, there was no antecedent parallel in the mother country. While it has produced no theologian or pulpit orator of the first rank--no Calvin, but only Jonathan Edwards; no Bossuet or Chalmers, but only Channing and Beecher--its theological literature compares favorably with that of England during the same period, and its preachers are acknowledged to be the best in Christendom. States and colonies that have grown up more normally get at length on the same lines, and as they put on civilization the tendency is to adopt ever more of the dogmatic system long inseparable from it. By a well-understood sociological law it generates its contradictory and corrective, and there springs up a higher type of denial than secularism--what Huxley felicitously named Agnosticism--the position of those who know nothing about the matters which theological dogma defines, not the position of those who say that nothing can be known. As the Evangelical develops into the High Churchman and he into the Catholic, the Secularist refines into the Agnostic and rarefies into the Unknowabilist. The literature of colonies is at first theological, as the literature of all countries is at first hieratic; the priest alone can write. But it is long before the stage of original production is reached, and books have to be imported before they can be written. The daughter must go to school with the mother, who supplies her with hornbooks. The continuity of the spiritual germ-plasm is insured by the transmission of books. Rome was thus initiated by Greece in every theoretical branch of knowledge. Rome thus educated early Europe. Chests of manuscripts from Thessalonica, Byzantium, and Crete were the precursors of the Renaissance. Books brought by Benedict to England formed the first English library. So is it long with all new countries. To this day the book circulation of the United States is largely English; in contemporary colonies it is overwhelmingly English, almost wholly Spanish, exclusively French or Dutch. The second stage also repeats the literary history of the mother countries. Colonial literature is a prolongation of the parental literature and is at first commentative and imitative of that. In a school at Canterbury founded by two foreign monks English written literature took its birth. The literature of mediæval Europe was a continuation of Roman literature. This stage may last long. Seventy or eighty years after the Declaration of Independence the literature of New England was still English literature of a subtler strain--perhaps lacking the strength of the old home-brew, but with a finer flavor. Naturally, in far younger Australia even popular poetry is still imitative--the hand is that of Gordon or of Kendall, but the voice is Swinburne's. The beginnings of a truly national literature are humble. They are never scholastic, but always popular. As chap-books, ballads, and songs were the sources of the æsthetic literature of modern Europe, the beginnings of general literature in the United States have been traced to the old almanacs which, besides medical recipes and advice to the farmer, contained some of the best productions of American authors. It is further evidence of the popular origin of native literature that some of its early specimens are works of humor. The most distinctive work of early Canadian and American authors is humorous, from Sam Slick to ----; but it would be rash to say _who_ is the last avatar of the genius of humor. If an alien may say so without offense, Walt Whitman's poems, with their profound intuitions and artless metre, seem to be the start of a new æsthetic, and recall ancient Beowulf. Australian literature, after a much shorter apprenticeship, has lately, in both fiction and verse, again of a popular character, made a new departure that is instinct with life and grace and full of promise. Literature and art have no independent value, but are merely the phonographic record of mental states, and would practically cease to exist (as they did during the middle ages) if these disappeared. The grand achievement of new, as of old, countries is man-making, and every colony creates a new variety. The chief agent is natural selection, of which the seamy side appears in vicissitudes of fortune. Here again the law prevails. These recapitulate those vicissitudes in early European societies which make picturesque the pages of Gregory of Tours. There are the same sudden rises, giddy prosperities, and inevitable falls. In the simple communities of ancient Greece the distance between antecedent and consequent was short, and the course of causation plain. Hence in myth and legend, in early historians like Herodotus, early poets like Pindar, early dramatists like Æschylus, we find a deep sense of the fateful working of the laws of life. The history of colonies is a sermon on the same text. Goodness is speedily rewarded; retribution no longer limps _claudo pede_, like Vulcan, but flies like Mercury with winged feet. In Europe a high-handed wrongdoer like Napoleon may pursue his career unchecked for fifteen years, or a high-handed rightdoer like Bismarck for five-and-twenty years; a would-be colonial Bismarck or Napoleon is commonly laid by the heels in the short duration of a colonial parliament. The vision of providential government, or the reign of law, in old countries is hard, because its course is long and intricate; in a colony it is so comparatively simple that all may understand it and find it (as Carlyle found it) "worthy of horror and worship." From witnessing the ending of a world Augustine constructed a theodicy, and so justified the ways of God to man. We may discover in the beginnings of a world materials for a cosmodicy which shall exhibit the self-operating justice inherent in the laws of the universe. POLITICS AS A FORM OF CIVIL WAR. BY FRANKLIN SMITH. Why is it that, in spite of exhortation and execration, the disinclination of people in all the great democracies of the world to take part in politics is becoming greater and greater? Why is it that persons of fine character, scholarly tastes, and noble aims, in particular, seek in other ways than association and co-operation with politicians to better the lot of their fellows? Why is it, finally, that with the enormous extension of political rights and privileges during the past fifty years, there has occurred a social, political, and industrial degeneration that fills with alarm the thoughtful minds of all countries? Aside from the demoralization due to the destructive wars fought since the Crimean, the answer to these questions is to be found in the fact that at bottom politics is a form of civil war, that politicians are a species of _condottieri_, and that to both may be traced all the ethics and evils of a state of chronic war itself. In the light of this truth, never so glaring as at present in the United States, the peril to civilization is divested of mystery; it is the peril that always flows from anarchy, and the refusal of enlightened men to-day to engage in politics is as natural as the refusal of enlightened men in other days to become brigands. The analogy between war and politics is not new. The very language in common use implies it. When people speak of "leaders," "rank and file," "party loyalty," "campaigns," "spoils of victory," etc., which figure so conspicuously and incessantly in political discussion, there is only a fit appropriation of the militant terms invented by one set of fighters to describe with vividness and precision the conduct of another set. What is new about the matter is the failure of thoughtful persons to perceive and to act upon their perception that in politics, as in war, vast economic, social, and political evils are involved. To be sure, lives are not often sacrificed, as in a battle, nor property destroyed, as in a siege or an invasion. But even here the analogy is not imperfect. Political riots have occurred that have brought out as completely as any struggle over a redoubt or barricade the savage traits of human nature. People were maimed and killed, and houses wrecked and burned. Especially was that the case in this country during the antislavery struggle and the period of reconstruction. Even in these days of more calm, political contests as fatal as the Ross-Shea _émeute_ in Troy are reported from time to time. Owing, however, to the advance in civilization since the sack of Antwerp and the siege of Saragossa, the devastation wrought by political warfare has assumed forms less deplorable. But in the long run they will be found to be just as fatal to everything that constitutes civilization, and just as productive of everything that constitutes barbarism. "Lawless ruffianism," says Carl Schurz, pointing out in his Life of Henry Clay the demoralizing effects of the fierce political struggles during Jackson's administrations, "has perhaps never been so rampant in this country as in those days. 'Many of the people of the United States are out of joint,' wrote Niles in August, 1835. 'A spirit of riot and a disposition to "take the law in their own hand" prevails in every quarter.' Mobs, riots, burnings, lynchings, shootings, tarrings, duels, and all sorts of violent excesses, perpetrated by all sorts of persons upon all sorts of occasions, seemed to be the order of the day.... Alarmingly great was the number of people who appeared to believe that they had the right to put down by force and violence all who displeased them by act or speech or belief in politics, or religion, or business, or in social life." It is only familiarity with such fruits of violent political activity, only a vision impaired by preconceived notions of the nature of politics, that blinds the public to their existence. To see why politics must be regarded as a form of civil war rather than as a method of business, as a system of spoliation rather than as a science to be studied in the public schools,[1] it is but needful to grasp the fundamental purpose of government as generally understood. It is not too much to say that nothing in sociology is regarded as more indicative of an unsound mind or of a mean and selfish disposition than the conception of government as a power designed to prevent aggression at home and abroad. Such a conception has been contemptuously called "the police conception." "Who would ever fight or die for a policeman?" cried an opponent of it, trying to reduce an adversary to ignominious silence. It was not sufficient to reply with the counter question, "Who would not die for justice?" and thus expose the fallacy of the crushing interrogation. "No one," came the retort, "could care for a country that only protected him against swindlers, robbers, and murderers. To merit his allegiance and to fire his devotion, she must do more than that; she must help to make his life easier, pleasanter, and nobler." Accordingly, the Government undertakes for him a thousand duties that it has no business with. It builds schools and asylums for him; it protects him against disease, and, if needful, furnishes him with physicians and medicines; it sees that he has good beef and pork, pure milk, and sound fruit; it refuses to permit him to drink what he pleases, though it be only the cheaper grades of tea, nor to eat chemical substitutes for butter and cheese, except they bear authorized marks; it transports his mails, supplies him with garden seeds, instructs him in the care of fowls, cattle, and horses, shows him how to build roads, and tells him what the weather will be; it insures him not only against incompetent plumbers, barbers, undertakers, horseshoers, accountants, and physicians, but also against the competition of the pauper labor of foreign countries; it creates innumerable offices and commissions to look after the management of his affairs, particularly to stand between him and the "rapacity" of the corporations organized to supply the necessaries of life at the lowest cost; it builds fleets of cruisers and vast coast fortifications to frighten away enemies that never think of assailing him, and to inspire them with the same respect for "the flag" that he is supposed to feel. Indeed, there is hardly a thing, except simple justice, cheap and speedy, that it does not provide to fill him with a love of his country, and to make him ready to immolate himself upon her altars. But I can not repeat with too much emphasis that every expenditure beyond that required to maintain order and to enforce justice, and every limitation of freedom beyond that needful to preserve equal freedom, is an aggression. In no wise except in method does it differ from the aggressions of war. In war the property of an enemy is taken or destroyed without his consent. In case of his capture his conduct is shaped in disregard of his wishes. The seizure of a citizen's property in the form of taxes for a purpose that he does not approve, and the regulation of any part of his conduct not violative of the rights of his neighbors, are precisely the same. If he is forbidden to carry the mails and thus earn a living, his freedom is restricted. If he can patronize no letter carrier but the Government, to which he must pay a certain rate, no matter how excessive, he has to a degree become a slave. The same is true if he can not employ whomever he pleases to cut his hair, or to fix his plumbing, or to prescribe for his health. Still truer is it if he is obliged to contribute to a system of public education which he condemns, or to public charities which he knows to be schools of pauperism, or to any institution or enterprise that voluntary effort does not sustain. In whatever way the Government may pounce upon him to force him to work for some one besides himself and to square his conduct with notions not his own, he is still a victim of aggression, and the aggression is none the less real and demoralizing because it is not committed amid the roar of cannon and the groans of the dying. To what extent the American people have become victims of this kind of aggression can not be determined with precision. Still, an idea may be had from the volume of laws enacted at every legislative session, and the amount of money appropriated to enforce them. A commonplace little appreciated is that every one of them, no matter what its ostensible object, either restricts or contributes to individual freedom. The examination of any statute-book will soon make painfully apparent the melancholy fact that the protection of individual freedom figures to the smallest extent in the considerations of the wise and benevolent legislator. Of the eight hundred enactments of the Legislature of the State of New York in 1897, for example, I could find only fifty-eight that had this supreme object in view. If we apply the same ratio to the work of all the legislatures of the country, and, allowing for biennial sessions, make it cover a period of two years--namely, 1896 and 1897--the astonishing result will be that, of the 14,718 laws passed, all but 1,030 aim, not to the liberation but to the enslavement of the individual. But to this restrictive legislation must be added the thousands of acts and ordinances of town, city, and county legislatures that are more destructive of freedom even than the State and Federal legislation. If not more numerous, they are certainly more minute, meddlesome, and exasperating. As to the amount of plunder passing through the hands of the modern _condottieri_, that is susceptible of an estimate much more accurate. If we take the expenditures of all the governments of the United States, Federal, State, municipal, county, and town, for a similar period of two years, they reach the enormous total of two billion dollars, equal to more than two thirds of the national debt at the close of the civil war.[2] Of this sum only about one hundred and twenty million dollars, or six per cent, are devoted to the legitimate functions of government--namely, the maintenance of police and courts--and one hundred and forty million dollars to the support of the military establishment.[3] All the rest is expenditure that should no more be intrusted to the Government--that is, subject to the application of political instead of business methods--than the expenditure of a household, or a farm, or a cotton mill, or an iron foundry. Even if it were a legitimate expenditure of the Government, it could not be collected nor expended without injustice. Tax laws have never been and never will be framed that will not permit some one to escape his share of the burdens of the community; and the heavier those burdens are, as they are constantly becoming to an alarming degree, the more desperate will be the effort to shirk them--the more lightly will they rest upon the dishonest and unworthy, and the more heavily upon the honest and worthy. Moreover, it has never been possible, and it never will be possible, to expend money by political methods without either waste or fraud, and most usually without both. Such a volume of legislation and taxation permits of the easy detection of the vital difference between the theory and practice of politics. According to the text-books and professors, politics is the science of government. In countries like the United States, where popular institutions prevail, the purpose of its study is the discovery and the application of the methods that shall enable all citizens, rich and poor, to share alike in the inestimable privilege of saying what laws they shall have, and bear in proportion to their means the burdens it entails. Such a privilege is supposed to confer innumerable benefits. Every one is assured of scrupulous justice. He is made to feel profound gratitude for his happy deliverance from the odious tyranny and discrimination of a monarchy or an aristocracy. The participation of everybody in the important and beneficent work of government possesses a rare educational value. It leads the ignorant and indifferent to take a deep interest in public questions, and to attempt, as their strength and ability allow, the promotion of the welfare of their beloved country. Thus they escape the deplorable fate of burial in the sordid and selfish pursuit of their own affairs, and the consequent dwarfing of their minds and emotions. Rising to broader views of life and duty, they become patriots, statesmen, and philanthropists. Enchanting as this picture is, one that can be found in the speeches of every demagogue, male and female, as well as in the works of every political philosopher of the orthodox faith, it has no sanction in the practice of politics. As long as the greater part of legislation and taxation has nothing whatever to do with government, properly speaking, politics can have no kinship with any pursuit held in esteem by men truly civilized. What it consists of may be reduced to a desperate and disgraceful struggle between powerful organizations, sometimes united, like the Italian _condottieri_ and the Spanish brigands, in the form of "rings," to get control of the annual collection and distribution of one billion dollars, and to reap the benefits that grow out of the concession of privileges. The legislation placing this vast power in the hands of the successful combatants is only an incident of their work. It simply enables them under the form of law to seize the taxpayer, bind him like another Gulliver with rules and regulations, and to take from him whatever they please to promote their political ambition and private interests. From this point of view it is easy to see that politics has no more kinship with science or justice than pillage. Nor is it likely to make people more patriotic, high-minded, and benevolent than the rapacity of Robin Hood or Fra Diavolo. However startling or repugnant may be this view, it is the only one that furnishes an adequate explanation of the practice of government as carried on in every democratic country in the world. The work of private business and philanthropy, the work in which modern democracies have come to be chiefly engaged, is not in itself productive of the ethics and evils of war. Contrary to the common belief, industrial competition, which is conducted by voluntary co-operation, tends to the supremacy of excellence, moral and material. In societies where civilization has made headway, a merchant or manufacturer does not seek to crush rivals by misrepresenting them or assailing them in other ways. His natural and constant aim is to have his goods so cheap and excellent that the public will patronize him rather than them. To be sure, the ethics of war often prevail in industrialism. They are not, however, one of its products; they are the fruits of militant ages and activities. But in political competition, which is coercive, the policy pursued is precisely the reverse. Not by proof of moral and material excellence does the politician establish his worth. Not by the superiority of his services or by his fidelity to obligations does he gain the esteem and patronage of the public. It is by the infliction of injury upon his rivals. He misrepresents them; he deceives them; he assails them in every way within his reach. When he triumphs over them he uses his power, not primarily for the benefit of the people whom he is supposed to serve, but to maintain his supremacy in order to pillage them. "Those who make war," says Machiavelli, whose famous book is a _vade mecum_ for a modern politician as well as for an unscrupulous and a tyrannical prince, "have always and very naturally designed to enrich themselves and impoverish the enemy. Neither is victory sought nor conquest desirable except to strengthen themselves and weaken the enemy." In the light of this truth the organization of powerful political parties becomes natural and inevitable. It is just as natural and inevitable that the more numerous the duties intrusted to the State--that is, the greater the spoil to be fought for in caucus and convention and on the floors of legislatures--the more powerful, dangerous, and demoralizing they are certain to be. Were these duties confined to the maintenance of order and the enforcement of justice, it would be an easy matter for the busiest citizen to give them the attention they required. So simple would they be that he could understand them, and so important that he would insist upon their proper performance. But when they become vast and complex, including such special and difficult work as the education of children; the care of idiots, lunatics, and epileptics; the supervision of the liquor traffic, the insurance business, and railroad transportation, and the regulation of the amount of currency needed in an industrial community, it is beyond the powers of any man, however able, to understand them all, and, no matter how much time he may have, to look after them as he ought. When to these duties are added the management of agricultural stations; the inspection of all kinds of food; the extirpation of injurious insects, noxious weeds, and contagious diseases; the licensing of various trades and professions; the suppression of quacks, fortune-tellers, and gamblers; the production and sale of sterilized milk, and the multitude of other duties now intrusted to the Government, it is no wonder that he finds himself obliged to neglect public questions and to devote himself more closely to his own affairs in order to meet the ever-increasing burdens of taxation. Neither is it any wonder that there springs up a class of men to look after the duties he neglects, and to make such work a means of subsistence. The very law of evolution requires such a differentiation of social functions and organs. The politician is not, therefore, the product of his own love of spoliation solely, but of the necessities of a vicious extension of the duties of the State. There is nothing more abnormal or reprehensible about his existence under the present _régime_ than there is about the physician or lawyer where disease and contention prevail. As long as the conditions are maintained that created him, so long will he ply his profession. When they are abolished he will be abolished. No number of citizens' unions, or nonpartisan movements, or other devices of hopeful but misguided reformers to abolish him, can modify or reverse this immutable decree of social science. Politics tends to bring to the front the same kind of men that other social disorders do. A study of political leaders in the democratic societies of the world discloses portraits that differ only in degree from those that hang in the galleries of history in Italy in the fifteenth century, in Germany during the Thirty Years' War, and in France at the height of the French Revolution. Although the men they represent may not be as barbarous as Galeazzo or Wallenstein or Robespierre, they are just as unscrupulous and despicable. Like their prototypes, some of them are of high birth; others are of humble origin; still others belong to the criminal class. They do not, of course, capture cities and towns and hold them for ransom, or threaten to burn fields of wheat and corn unless bribed to desist; still they practice methods of spoliation not less efficient. By blackmailing corporations and wealthy individuals, they obtain sums of money that would have filled with bitter envy the leaders of the famous or rather infamous "companies of adventurers." With the booty thus obtained they gather about them numerous and powerful bands of followers. In every district where their supremacy is acknowledged they have their lieutenants and sublieutenants that obey as implicitly as the subordinates in an army. Thus equipped like any of the great brigands of history, they carry caucuses and conventions, shape the party policy, and control the legislation proposed and enacted. To be sure, the economic devastation of politics is not as conspicuous as that of war. It does not take the tragic form of burning houses, trampled fields of grain, tumbling walls of cities, and vast unproductive consumption by great bodies of armed men. Yet it is none the less real. Not infrequently it is hardly less extensive when measured in dollars and cents. Seldom does an election occur, certainly not a heated congressional or presidential election, that the complaint of serious interference with business is not universal. So great has the evil become that, long before the meeting of the national conventions in 1896, a concerted movement on the part of the industrial interests of the country was started to secure an abbreviation of the period given up to political turmoil. Even more serious is the economic disturbance due to legislatures. As no one knows what stupendous piece of folly they may commit at any moment, there is constant apprehension. "The country," said the Philadelphia Ledger, a year ago, referring to the disturbance provoked by the Teller repudiation resolution in the Senate and the violent Cuban debate in the House, "has got Congress on its hands, and, after their respective fashions, Senate and House are putting enormous weight of disturbing doubts and fears upon it.... To a greater or less degree a meeting of Congress has been during recent years anticipated by the community of business with timidity which in some instances has amounted to trepidation." The State legislatures are hardly better. No great industry has any assurance that it will not find itself threatened with a violent and ruinous assault in some bill that a rapacious politician or misguided philanthropist has introduced. In New York the attacks of these modern brigands have become so frequent and so serious that many of the larger corporations have had to take refuge in adjacent States,[4] where they can enjoy greater, if not complete immunity. In a less degree the same is true of the minor legislatures--town, county, and municipal. Ordinances for pavements or sewers or in concession of valuable privileges keep the taxpayers in a state of constant anxiety. At the same time vast harm comes from the neglect of more important matters. The time of legislators is spent in intriguing and wrangling, and the millions of dollars that the sessions cost are as completely destroyed as though burned by invaders. Though seldom or never recognized, politics has the same structural effect upon society as war. The militant forces of the one, like the militant forces of the other, tend to the destruction of social mobility and the creation of social rigidity, making further social evolution difficult or impossible. There is a repression of the spirit of individual initiative, which calls into existence just such institutions as may be required at any moment and permits them to pass away as soon as they have served their purpose. There is an encouragement of the class and parasitic spirit, which produces institutions based upon artificial distinctions, and, like those in China, so tenacious of life as to defy either reform or abolition. To provide place and pelf for followers, political leaders, aided by the misdirected labors of social reformers, favor constantly the extension of the sphere of government in every direction. In New York, for example, during the past eighteen years, thirty-six additions to State offices and commissions have been made. Simultaneously, the expenditures on their account have grown from less than four thousand dollars a year to nearly seven million. This feudal tendency toward the bureaucracy that exists in France and Germany, and in every country cursed with the social structure produced by war, is not only the same in the other States, but in the Federal Government as well. Its latest manifestation is the amazing extension of the powers of the interstate commerce commission demanded in the Cullom bill, and the proposed establishment of a department of commerce to promote trade with foreign countries. As in New York, there has been an enormous increase in Federal expenditures. In the agricultural department it has been from $3,283,000 in 1887 to $23,480,000 in 1897. In other departments the increase has ranged from nineteen per cent in the legislative and twenty-three in the diplomatic and consular to seventy in the Indian, seventy-seven in the post office and river and harbor, and one hundred and thirty-three in the pension. Another manifestation is the pressing demand for the extension of the pension system to civil officials. Already the system has been extended to policemen and firemen. In some States the teachers in the public schools receive pensions, and in others the clamor for this form of taxation is loud and persistent. At the present time a powerful movement is in progress to pension the civil servants of the Government. Still another manifestation is the passage of laws in revival of the old trade and professional corporations. For a long time those in protection of the legal and medical professions have been on the statute-books, if not always in force. But, as always happens, these bad precedents have been used as arguments in favor of the plumbers, barbers, dentists, druggists, and other trades and professions. But the most absurd manifestation is the social classification of Government employees in accordance with the size of their salaries, a form of folly particularly apparent in Washington, and the establishment of patriotic and other societies, like the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, the Baronial Order of Runnymede, and the Royal Order of the Crown, that create social distinctions based, not upon character and ability, but upon heredity. Could anything be more un-American, to use the current word, or hostile to the spirit of a free democracy? In the intellectual domain politics works a greater havoc than in the social. Politicians can no more tolerate independence in thought and action than Charles V or Louis XIV or Napoleon I. "I have never had confidence in political movements which pretend to be free from politics," said the Governor of New York at the close of the campaign that restored Tammany Hall to power in the metropolis, showing that the intolerance of this form of warfare does not differ from that of any other. "A creed that is worth maintaining at all," he added, using an argument made familiar by the agents of bigotry everywhere, "is worth maintaining all the time.... Do not put your faith in those that hide behind the pretense of nonpartisanship," he continued, striking a deadly blow at all party traitors; "it is a device to trap the thoughtless and unsuspecting." As was shown during the Blaine-Cleveland campaign of 1884, politicians treat dissent as proof of unmistakable moral and intellectual baseness. Only the progress of civilization prevents them from pouncing upon such men as George William Curtis, Carl Schurz, and Wayne McVeagh with the ferocity of the familiars of the Inquisition. As it is, they are regarded with more abhorrence than the members of the opposition; they are treated with a greater wealth of contempt and hatred, and often pursued with the malignant vindictiveness of the cruelest savages. "I submit," said Mr. Wanamaker in one of his speeches against the Quay machine, "that the service of self-respecting men is lost to the Republican party by vile misrepresentations of reputable people, employment of bogus detectives, venomous falsifiers, a subsidized press, and conspirators who dare any plot or defilement, able to exert political control, and by protecting legislation and by domination of legal appointees of district attorneys and others not in elective but appointive offices." During the memorable campaign of 1896, when political bitterness and intolerance reached perhaps the highest point in the history of the United States, thousands of voters, driven by the scourge of "party regularity," either concealed or disavowed their convictions, and marched under banners that meant repudiation of public and private obligations. Even one of Mr. Cleveland's Cabinet officers, who had stood up bravely for the gold standard, succumbed to party discipline and became an apostate. The intolerant spirit of politics extends to dictation of instruction of students. The prolonged assaults of the protectionists upon Professor Perry and Professor Sumner are well known. The same spirit inspired the attack upon President Andrews, of Brown University, the dismissal of the anti-Populist professors in the Agricultural College of Kansas, and the populistic clamor against certain professors in the universities of Missouri and Texas. That politics produces the same contempt for culture and capacity that war does, evidence is not lacking. "There is," said Senator Grady, of Tammany Hall, apologizing for the appointment of some illiterate to office in New York city, "a class of persons, chiefly the educated, who thinks that if a man begins a sentence with a small letter, or uses a small 'i' in referring to himself, or misspells common words, that he is unfit for public office. Nothing could be further from the truth," he continues, using an argument that the barbarians that overran Europe might have made; "it is an idea that only the aristocracy of culture could hold.... We do not want the people ruled by men," he adds, giving a demagogic twist to his reasoning, "who are above them, or who fancy they are because they have wealth or learning or blood, nor by men who are below them, but we want them ruled in a genuine democracy by men who are the representatives in all their ways of thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting, of the average man." What is wanted, in other words, is not men anxious to acquit themselves with ability and fidelity to the public interests, but men that will look after the interests of their organization and do the other work of political _condottieri_. It can, of course, be a matter of no consequence whether such men spell or speak correctly, or whether they conduct themselves like boors and ruffians.[5] As implied in all that has been said, it is, however, upon morals that the effect of politics is the most deplorable. From the beginning of the discussion of the party platform and the nomination of the candidates to the induction of the successful combatants into office, the principles applied to the transaction of business play the smallest possible part. The principles observed are those of war. All the tactics needful to achieve success in the one are indispensable to success in the other. First, there is, as I have already said, an attempt to misrepresent and injure political opponents, and, next, to confuse, befool, and pillage the public. I shall not, however, describe the factional conflicts that precede a convention--the intrigue, the bribery, the circulation of false stories, and even the forgery of telegrams like the one that brought about the nomination and defeat of Secretary Folger. They exhibit only on a small scale the ethics of party warfare in general. More needful is it to illustrate these, and to make clear the vanity of any hope of moral reform through politics, or through any other agency, either religious, philanthropic, or pedagogic, as long as it remains a dominant activity of social life. "If Mr. Gage had been a politician as well as a banker," said Senator Frye, criticising the secretary's honesty and courage at a time when both were urgently needed, "he would not have insisted upon a declaration in favor of a single gold standard. It was all right for him to submit his scheme of finance, but hardly politic to be so specific about the gold standard." Always adjusted to this low and debased conception of duty, a party platform is seldom or never framed in accordance with the highest convictions of the most intelligent and upright men in the party. The object is not the proclamation of the exact truth, as they see it, but to capture the greatest number of votes. If there is a vital question about which a difference of opinion exists, the work of putting it into a form palatable to everybody is intrusted to some cunning expert in verbal juggling. A money plank, for instance, is drawn up in such a way that the candidate standing upon it may be represented by editors and orators of easy consciences as either for or against the gold standard. The same was true for years of the slave and tariff questions; it is still true of the temperance question, the question of civil-service reform, and of every other question that threatens the slightest party division. Again, questions are kept to the front that have no more vitality than the dust of Cæsar. Long after the civil war the issues of that contest formed the stock in trade of the politicians and enabled them to win many a battle that should have been fought on other grounds. If need be, the grossest falsehoods are embodied in the platform, and proclaimed as the most sacred tenets of party faith. When the campaign opens, the ethics of the platform assume a more violent and reprehensible shape. Not only are its hypocrisies and falsehoods repeated with endless iteration, but they are multiplied like the sands of the beach. Very few, if any, editors or orators pretend to discuss questions or candidates with perfect candor and honesty. Indeed, very few of them are competent to discuss them. Hence sophistry and vilification take the place of knowledge and reason. Were one party to adopt the Decalogue for a platform, the other would find nothing in it to praise; it would be an embodiment of socialism, or anarchism, or some other form of diabolism. If one party were to nominate a saint, the other would paint him in colors that Satan himself would hardly recognize. Not even such men as Washington and Lincoln are immune to the assaults of political hatred and mendacity. As the campaign draws to a close, we have a rapidly increasing manifestation of all the worst traits of human nature. In times of quiet, a confessed knave would scarcely be guilty of them. False or garbled quotations from foreign newspapers are issued. The old Cobden Club, just ready to give up the ghost, is galvanized into the most vigorous life, and made to do valiant service as a rich and powerful organization devoted to the subversion of American institutions. Stories like Clay's sale of the presidency are invented, and letters, like the Morey letter, are forged, and, despite the most specific denials of their truth, they are given the widest currency. Other forms of trickery, like the Murchison letter, written by the British minister during Mr. Cleveland's second campaign, are devised with devilish ingenuity, and made to contribute to the pressing and patriotic work of rescuing the country from its enemies. But this observation of the ethics of war does not stop with the close of the polls, where bribery, intimidation, and fraud are practiced, and the honest or dishonest count of the ballots that have been cast; it is continued with the same infernal industry in the work of legislation and administration. Upon the meeting of the statesmen that the people have chosen under "the most perfect system of government ever devised by man," what is the first thing that arrests their attention and absorbs their energies? More intriguing, bargaining, and bribery in a hundred forms, more or less subtle, to secure election and appointment to positions within the gift of the legislature. Little or no heed is given to the primary question of capacity and public interests. Political considerations--that is, ability to help or to harm some one--control all elections and appointments. What is the next thing done? It is the preparation, introduction, discussion, and passage of the measures thought to be essential to the preservation of civilization. Here again political considerations control action. Such measures are introduced as will strengthen members with their constituents, or promote "the general welfare" of the party. Very rarely have they "the general welfare" of the public in view. Sometimes they seek to change district boundaries in such a way as to keep the opposition in a perpetual minority. Sometimes they have no other motive than the extortion of blackmail from individuals or corporations. Sometimes their object is to throw "sop to Cerberus"--that is, to pacify troublesome reformers within the party, like the prohibitionists and the civil-service reformers. Sometimes they authorize investigations into a department or a municipality with the hope that discoveries will be made that will assist the party in power or injure the party out of power; it happens not infrequently that they are undertaken to smother some scandal, like the mismanagement of the Pennsylvania treasury, or to whitewash some rascal. Sometimes they create commissions, superintendents, or inspectors, or other offices to provide rewards for party hacks and heelers. Finally, there are the appropriation bills. Only a person ignorant of the ways of legislators could be so simple-minded as to imagine that they are miracles of economy, or that they are anything else but the products of that clumsy but effective system of pillaging known as log-rolling, which enables each to get what he wants with the smallest regard for the interests of the taxpayer. It is, however, during the debates over these wise and patriotic measures that the public is favored with the most edifying exhibition of the universal contempt of the legislator for its interests. They disclose all the scandalous practices of a political campaign. There are misrepresentations, recriminations, and not infrequently, as in the case of Sumner, personal assaults. A perverse inclination always exists toward those discussions that will put some one "in a hole," or enable some one to arouse party passion. For this purpose nothing is so effective as a foreign question, like a Cuban belligerency resolution, or a treaty for the annexation of Hawaii, or a domestic question, like responsibility for the crime of 1873, or the panic of 1893, or a comparison of party devotion to the interests of the "old soldier." Not the slightest heed, as has been shown on several occasions during the past few years, is paid to the shock that may be given to business or to the disturbance of pacific relations with foreign powers. In fact, the greater the danger involved in the discussion of a delicate question, the more prone are the demagogues to mouth it. To such questions as bankruptcy, railroad pooling, and currency reform will they give their time and wisdom only when business interests have almost risen in insurrection and compelled attention to them. The same policy of hypocrisy, deception, favoritism, and proscription is a dominant trait of the administration of the Government. The object almost invariably in mind is the welfare or injury of some party, or faction, or politician. The interests of the public are the last thing thought of, if thought of at all. Take dismissals and appointments. They may, as has been known to occur even in the United States, be made to better the public service. Even then a careful study of motive will disclose the characteristic purpose of the politician. In a choice between two men of equal ability, or rather of equal inability, which is more commonly the case, preference is given to the one with the stronger "pull." Often, as has been shown within the past year or two, convicted rascals are appointed at the behest of Congressmen and in defiance of the wishes of the business community, and, in spite of the civil-service laws, officials are dismissed because of their politics alone. In the letting of contracts it is not difficult to detect the observance of the same judicious rule. The virtuous formality of letting to the lowest bidder may be gone through with, and the public may be greatly pleased with this exhibition of official deference to its interests. Yet an examination of the work done under the supervision of complaisant inspectors, who may be blinded in various ways to the defects of that of a political friend, or made supernaturally alert to the defects of that of a political enemy, will reveal a trail that does not belong to scrupulous integrity. That is why dry docks, like that in Brooklyn, why harbor works, like those in Charleston, turn out defective; why the Government has to pay more for the transportation of the mails than a private corporation; why the cost of the improvement of the Erie Canal was concealed until nearly all the money voted for the folly had been expended; why of the money expended one million dollars was wasted, if not stolen; why so much of the State Capitol at Albany has been built over again; why the City Hall in Philadelphia has been an interminable job; why the supplies of prisons, asylums, and other public institutions are constantly proving to be inferior to those paid for--why, in a word, everything done by political methods is vitiated by the ethics of war. In the enforcement of laws very little justice or honesty can be found. As a rule, they bear much more harshly on the poor and weak, that is, those with small political influence, than on the rich and strong, that is, those with much political influence. Take the enforcement of liquor laws, health laws, factory laws, and compulsory school laws. If a man with political influence wishes to keep his children at home for any purpose, no truant officer is indiscreet enough to trouble him; if, however, a poor woman, just made a widow, wishes to have her oldest son work in disregard of the statute, in order to keep her and her younger children out of the poor-house, his official zeal is above criticism. Politics poisons even the fountains of justice. Criminals that have sufficient political influence can escape prosecution or obtain pardon after conviction. Prosecuting officers are importuned incessantly, even by "leading citizens," to abandon prosecution of them or to "let them off easily." In the appointment of receivers and referees, judges are much more inclined to give preference to political friends than to political enemies. Finally, if political exigencies require it, there is no hesitation to invoke the latent savagery of a nation. In proof, recall the Venezuelan message of Mr. Cleveland, which "dished" the Republican jingoes, and the German emperor's assault upon Hayti and China to secure the adoption of his naval bill. To make the record complete, I ought to add that for a purpose more odious--namely, the increase of sales--newspapers, always the ready recipients of political patronage, commit the same atrocious crime against civilization. Since politics is a form of civil war, involving aggressions upon person and property, any extension of its field of operation must be attended by precisely the same moral and economic effects that attend the pursuit of civil war itself. No concession of suffrage to women, nor any legal machinery, however ingenious, that may be invented, will alter that fact. Already we are confronted with alarming manifestations of the decadence of society that have always accompanied civil strife. The public burdens are becoming so great, equaling the per capita rate prevailing at the outbreak of the French Revolution, that people in cities as well as in the country are being driven from their homes by the sale of their property for unpaid taxes. Both classes are joining the ranks of "the disinherited," just as similar classes joined the brigands in France and Italy, and are clamoring for the trial of the thousand absurd schemes for social ills known as populism and socialism, all meaning an increase of the functions of government, still further aggressions upon persons and property, and an aggravation of the evils already complained of. At the same time the moral tone of society is rapidly sinking to a low level. "It is a melancholy reflection," says the report of the New York State tax commission, dwelling upon the desperate efforts of people to escape the aggressions committed on them and disclosing the observance of a code of ethics committed in every walk in life, "that in this Christian age neither the memory of early moral training, nor present religious profession, hopes or fears for the hereafter, the penalties of the law, nor any other possible considerations are sufficient to restrain the average possessor of personal property from forcing other men to pay the taxes for which he is justly liable, by methods unquestionably immoral, if not absolutely criminal." Further evidence of the same startling and deplorable fact, one recalling the cruel indifference of the privileged classes of the ancient _régime_ to the sufferings of the people that bore the burdens that they ought to have shared, is to be found in the universal tendency of people to get public improvements at the expense of others, such as free baths, normal schools, interoceanic canals, etc., and the shocking prevalence of crimes of violence in every part of the country. To be sure, there are coupled with this alarming decadence extraordinary religious, philanthropic, and pedagogic efforts to rescue society from the depths of degradation to which it is sinking. But, as is shown by the history of the unparalleled moral enthusiasm of thousands of ascetics and teachers of the highest character during the decadence of Rome and the disorders of the middle ages, they will be absolutely ineffective as long as the conditions prevail that engender envy, hatred, deception, plunder, and murder, destroying not only morality, but every vestige of fellow-feeling and patriotism. "There is a nation," says Mr. Bodley in his new book on France, bringing out this profound and important truth, "to the members of which Frenchmen are more revengeful than to the Germans, more irascible than to the Italians, more unjust than to the English. It is to the French that Frenchmen display animosity more savage, more incessant, and more inequitable than to any other race." Precisely the same effect is to be noticed in the United States--the inevitable effect of every form of aggression, even though it have the most benevolent object in view. Yet the conclusion is not that people should abstain from politics. That would involve greater evils than those that now prevail. It would be submission to aggression--freedom to predatory politicians to continue their pillage. The thing to be done is to take up arms against them, and to wage relentless war on them. But the object of the struggle must not be the substitution of one set of politicians for another, but to reduce to the smallest possible limits the sphere of all political activity. Until this is done there can be no release from so important a duty to self and to the community. FOOTNOTES: [1] An absurd suggestion made by the State Superintendent of New York. [2] In order to get at the full amount of plunder, I ought to know how much the beneficiaries of tariff and other laws pocket. But statistics on this point are unfortunately not to be had. The amount must, however, be very large. [3] These figures represent the expenditures before the war with Spain. That deplorable event will increase them considerably. [4] It has been suggested by J. Novicow that, by a competition of this kind among nations, an improvement in legislation might be forced upon them. [5] As in the demand of Johnny Powers, the great Chicago boss, for the removal of Hull House from his ward, politics often leads to hostility to the work of philanthropists to ameliorate the condition of the poor. Another striking example of the same evil was the failure of a Quay legislature to provide for the maintenance of the State charitable institutions of Pennsylvania, and its sham investigation of the pitiful condition of the inhabitants of a mining district. * * * * * SIR W. MARTIN CONWAY, with his two Swiss guides, Antoine Maquiguez and Louis Pellissier, on September 9, 1898, reached the top of Yllimani, Bolivian Andes, near La Paz. The party were five days reaching the summit, 22,500 feet above the sea, from the highest point of cultivation. The guides were the same who ascended Mount St. Elias in 1897 with Prince Luigi of Savoy. MY PET SCORPION. BY NORMAN ROBINSON. When I first came to Florida I heard terrible accounts of the deadly work of a poisonous "bug," popularly known as the "grampus" or "mule-killer." My first informant was a "Florida cracker," who seemed fairly intelligent, and whom I had employed in a little woodcraft. He happened to encounter one of those terrible creatures, and promptly "smashed" it with his axe. On expressing regret that I had no opportunity of seeing it before it was crushed into so shapeless a mass, he gravely assured me that he "didn't take no resks on them varmints. Them's the pisenest things in Floridy. Rattlers ain't nowhar! A man what gits bit by one of them critters--no medicine can't save him! We calls 'em mule-killers, cause they's wust on mules. A hoss nor a dog don't seem to mind 'em, but a mule is done dead when one of them varmints strikes 'em." I cross-questioned my informant a little as to his personal knowledge of the matter, and especially as to the fatal results following the bite of this very astonishing "bug." "Did you ever know," said I, "of a mule's dying from the bite of this 'mule-killer'?" "Oh, yes, I've knowed of several, and I hearn tell of lots. Ole man Jernigan, he loss a likely mule what got struck by one of them critters, and there was a man what died down to the Johnson place, bit by one of them things. They tells me he took whisky enough to kill two men, but it didn't do him no bit of good. He was powerful fond of whisky, anyway, and he died mighty easy." I subsequently made some inquiries in regard to these supposed casualties, and came to the conclusion that my informant's accounts of them were largely mythical. A mule had died in the neighborhood mentioned, but the "mule-killer" was colic; and in the case of the man, although he claimed to have been bitten by a "grampus," it was generally believed that the "serpent of the still" was the most deadly "varmint" he had recently encountered. I soon found, however, that the belief in the venomous character of this "whip scorpion," or _Thelyphonus giganteus_, as it proved to be, was almost universal. The negroes, especially, are in mortal terror of it. Only a few days since a colored boy that I had employed in hauling wood brought me a small specimen, completely crushed, with the triumphant announcement, "I've got him, but he like to done strike me 'fore I seed him." "But how do they bite?" I asked, "with their claws?" "Dey don't bite at all! Dey jes' strike you with de tail, and dey's a pizen juice comes out, and den no doctor kain't save you!" Newspaper stories confirming this belief occasionally go the rounds. I remember reading one particularly circumstantial account of the mishaps of a camping party somewhere in south Florida. "They were a long way," said this veracious chronicler, "from any human habitation, and the loss of their one mule from the bite of this pestiferous scorpion brought with it no end of inconvenience and trouble." The distressing story was told with great detail, and it was certainly not calculated to diminish the popular dread with which this supposed venomous creature is regarded. Even in scientific journals we find an occasional echo of this general belief. Dr. Packard, too, certainly good authority, in his Study of Insects accepts the current theory. In the Proceedings of the Washington (D. C.) Entomological Society there is an interesting discussion of this very question (vol. ii, No. 2). Professor Howard stated that a case of the bite of the _Thelyphonus_ with fatal results was vouched for by a Mr. Dunn, a professed naturalist, and that his testimony was entitled to weight. Mr. Ashmead and Mr. Banks, both of whom had been familiar with the _Thelyphonus_ in Florida, had handled them frequently, and believed them harmless. Dr. George Marx confirmed this view by stating that dissection failed to show the presence of any poison sac or fangs, a statement which it seems has been confirmed by subsequent investigations. Altogether here was a "muddle" of conflicting testimony, which could only be accounted for by supposing "some one had blundered." A few months since, for my own satisfaction, I determined to make a special study of our Florida "grampus." Not the least curious question that first suggests itself is how this name, "grampus" (French, _Grand poisson_, _great fish_), one of the _Cetaceæ_, ever got tacked on as a popular label for our Florida _Thelyphonus_. I am utterly at a loss to account for it. Before catching "my bird" I, of course, had to make a cage for it. This was constructed out of a large cigar box. About half of one end was removed and replaced by wire gauze. In addition to the hinged wooden cover, with which the box was furnished, I arranged a second one of wire gauze, hinged on the opposite side, and closing underneath the wooden one. This gave full control of light and air, both by day and night, without disturbing my future prisoner, and at the same time diminished the danger of his escape. I knew very well that the scorpion I was after was of a very modest and retiring disposition, and was never seen above ground in daylight except by accident or mistake. I was also under the impression that they were becoming rather rare, as it was more than a year since I had seen one. Still, it was with the most abundant confidence, to say nothing of the more prosaic requisites of a stout pair of gloves, a paper bag, and a hoe, that I started out one afternoon to find my _Thelyphonus_. I directed my course to the nearest wood, not for a moment doubting that a few hours' work would bring to light the object of my search. I labored faithfully until dark, overturning rotten logs, sticks, bark, old rails, and other field and woodland _débris_ under which my "grampus" would be likely to be hiding, but the search was altogether fruitless. I then concluded to try a plan which I have usually found quite successful. I told some of the bright boys in town what I wanted, and offered them a liberal price for every live "grampus" they would bring, cautioning them that their bite was said to be poisonous, and at the same time instructing them exactly how to catch and handle them. This scheme was also a failure. I then asked several friends who are interested in natural history to aid me in the search. One gentleman, who is a surveyor, and who in the pursuit of his profession passes much of his time in the woods, entered with special interest into my quest. These plans were all equally barren of results. One day, after I had practically given up the search, I was hoeing among the sprouts at the base of an old orange tree that had fallen a victim to the "big freeze" when, under a pile of chips at the base of the old stump, I suddenly unearthed my long-looked-for _Thelyphonus_. It was a fine, full-grown specimen, decidedly resentful at this sudden intrusion upon its privacy, and if a formidable pair of expanded claws, brandishing tail, and a generally vicious look meant anything, it was a customer that a prudent man would not care to pick up with bare hands. With the aid of a wide-mouthed preserving jar and a stick it was, however, soon secured, and in a short time transferred to the cage that had been so long waiting for its occupant. A few words may not be amiss concerning the great family of which my little captive is not the least interesting member. The _Thelyphonidæ_ belong to the great spider family, _Arachnida_, which includes not only the true spiders, but also the mites (_Acarids_), the ticks (_Ixodes_), the _Tartarides_, _Phrynides_, _Phalangides_, and other more or less related and mostly tropical groups. The whole subclass has certain pretty well-defined characteristics. They are almost without exception carnivorous (_insectivorous_). They are seldom subject to metamorphosis. The legs are usually eight in number. The eyes are always situated on the cephalo-thorax (head and breast plate), and not infrequently are the same in number as the legs. Not a few are fitted with poison sacs and fangs, and in the case of some of the larger true spiders and scorpions the venom is very virulent, and in some instances has proved fatal to human life. As this is hardly the place for a technical description of my _Thelyphonus_--a female--I shall content myself with a few facts and measurements. Those who are curious as to her personal appearance can consult the accompanying photograph. Most persons will conclude that her beauty is not even "skin deep." [Illustration: Photograph of a _Thelyphonus_] The following post-mortem data will perhaps aid in giving a clearer idea of this curious little creature. The length of the body from the front of the cephalo-thorax to the end of the last post-abdominal segment was fifty-two millimetres--a little more than two inches; the length of the tail was fifty millimetres, thus making the total length about four inches. The width of the abdomen in its widest part, near the center, was thirteen millimetres, or approximately half an inch. The claw-bearing palpi, or "feelers," which are large and very powerful, have an extreme expansion of fifty-eight millimetres, nearly two and a half inches. The tail is a curious organ, and consists of forty-four short, jointed sections of a pale wine color, with a light yellow ring at the base; a few short, scattered pointed hairs are found on each segment. It is about two thirds of a millimetre in thickness at the base and tapers to about half this diameter at the end. When alarmed, the _Thelyphonus_ holds it curved over forward after the manner of the true scorpions; a habit that probably points to some common ancestor. Its true function appears to be that of an extra palpus or "feeler." The _Thelyphonus_ is generally of a wine color. In some places, as on the cephalo-thorax, this color is black; around the mouth parts, the legs, the sternal plate, and the under side of the abdomen, this wine color is very pronounced. The eyes are eight in number. Two of them are close together, on opposite sides of a slightly elevated ridge at the front of the cephalo-thorax. These eyes are bright, black, and beadlike, and about two thirds of a millimetre in diameter. A little farther back, on the outer edges of the cephalo-thorax, are placed the remaining six eyes, three on a side, in a triangular group. These eyes are not quite as large as those in front, but they are of a shining yellow color, and altogether give the face of the whip scorpion a decidedly uncanny look. But to return to the history of my pet. As Madam Thelyphonus had obviously been accustomed to rather primitive furniture, I did not overburden her new apartments. A thickly sanded floor, a salt dish filled with fresh water, a square of pine bark the size of my hand, slightly elevated, with a few nice pieces of green moss to remind her of the country home she had left, and my involuntary guest was ready for housekeeping. She accepted her new quarters without question or examination, and promptly retired to her bedroom under the bark. But housekeeping, even for a whip scorpion, involves the food question. Here I was upon uncertain ground. The strictly nocturnal habits of the _Thelyphonus_ render all such investigations difficult. Naturally, the authorities on this point are somewhat indefinite or conflicting. The first things which I placed in the cage were a number of roaches of assorted sizes. One investigator claims that they are readily eaten by the _Thelyphonus_. Twenty-four hours passed and not a roach was missing. The matter, however, in which I felt a more immediate interest was the supposed venomous character of my new pet. My experiments were, therefore, especially directed to the settlement of this question. The next night a large, full-grown toad, that for some time had made his home in my back yard, was placed in the cage. The roaches were still there, and right here a very interesting thing happened. The largest cockroach, nearly two inches in length, was upon the side of the cage. The toad had hardly got comfortably seated immediately in front of him when the cockroach suddenly disappeared. I could not say that I saw him disappear. I was looking directly at both, but the "dissolving view" was too rapid for the eye to follow. To say that it was "quick as a flash" would depend somewhat on what kind of a "flash" was meant. I think nitroglycerin would undoubtedly have kept up with my _bufo_; but, judging from what I saw, or rather didn't see, I should say that this toad could have swallowed about six cockroaches while gunpowder was getting ready to go off! Any one who wishes to get an entirely new view of the meaning of the phrase "with neatness and dispatch" should by all means try this "lightning combination" of cockroaches and a Florida toad! And now I was all ready for the coming "battle royal" that I had reason to suppose would take place between my little captives. I cautiously removed the bark under which Madam Thelyphonus was hiding, and then awaited results. They didn't come. The _Thelyphonus_ kept perfectly still, ditto the toad. I must stir them up. With a stick I tried to irritate the scorpion. She proved a perfect marvel of patience. She wouldn't "irritate" worth a cent. I poked the toad over and on top of the supposed vicious and venomous creature. The latter crept out from under her unusual burden and crawled into a corner. The toad in a dazed sort of way pulled himself together and hopped off. I still kept up my pokings and proddings, thinking that possibly my "grampus" could at last be teased into some manifestation of her supposed deadly powers. It was a complete failure. Madam Thelyphonus proved to be a perfect model of patient endurance under persecution. All I could do, there was not a sign or motion of resentment. She could not be teased or tormented into biting, pinching, or fighting anything or anybody. My little captive had all the "ornaments of a meek and quiet spirit," and her only desire seemed to be to get out of the way. Now here was certainly a curious contrast between reputation and real character. A whole Stateful of slanderous natural history was disappearing under my very eyes! "Mule-killer," indeed! Why, my little captive couldn't be coaxed or goaded into harming a fly. In patient sufferance and persistent good nature she could have given points to "Uncle Toby," in his celebrated interview with that annoying insect. Still, although this first experiment quite convinced me that my _Thelyphonus_ was entirely harmless, I concluded to leave my captives together for the night. In the morning, as I expected, both were in the best of health and spirits, the toad eager to jump out, the scorpion eager to be let alone. The next night I tried a mouse. This sharp-toothed, frisky little rodent would, I thought, be likely to get into trouble if there was any to be found. The teasing process was not repeated, as it had proved such a complete failure. The mouse, however, ran round the cage, tumbling over the _Thelyphonus_, in the most rapid and reckless way. Every time the latter seemed to regard these awkward encounters as unavoidable accidents, and excused them accordingly. As to biting, pinching, or resenting them in any way, she showed not the slightest symptom of them. She simply crawled into a corner and kept as quiet as circumstances would permit. As in the case of the toad, both were left together overnight. All that really happened, so far as I could see, was that the mouse had nearly gnawed a hole through the cage; but evidently he was none the worse for having shared his bedroom with this terrible "mule-killer," "worse than a rattlesnake," according to the accepted belief. It is certainly a curious question how so perfectly harmless a creature can have acquired such a bad reputation. I know of no modern parallel. In Shakespeare's time a similar popular prejudice was entertained against one of the most useful servants that farmers and horticulturists possess. The well-known lines-- "The toad, ugly and venomous, Holds yet a precious jewel in its head"-- were but the echo of this crude and cruel fancy. So with our _Thelyphonus_. It is not only absolutely harmless, but, as I shall soon show, one of the most useful helps in keeping within bounds one of our most serious pests. The comment that I once heard, by a not over-intelligent and somewhat profane individual, upon seeing a dead whip scorpion--"Any ---- fool can see that that critter is rank pisin!"--probably partially explains the matter. It must be conceded that the looks of the _Thelyphonus_ are decidedly against it. Its long, frisky tail, its big, threatening claws, and its generally uncanny and vicious appearance are quite sufficient to inspire caution if not positive dread. It "looks pisin," and that settles it with the ignorant. With the better informed the fact that the creature belongs to a bad family, that its nearest relatives are unquestionably venomous, may help to explain, though it can hardly excuse, the widespread currency which even scientific men have helped to give to a most erroneous and slanderous belief. And now as to the food question. This, of course, was a very vital matter to my little prisoner, and one of great interest to me. After the failure of the cockroach diet, I next tried grasshoppers. These also have been declared to be greatly relished by the _Thelyphonus_. I did not find it so. The first one placed in the cage was, to be sure, partially eaten. But, unfortunately, a colony of ants had got into the cage, and were dining on my dead _Gryllus_. This left the matter a little uncertain. On fencing out these intruders, and repeating the experiment with the same and half a dozen other species, I became convinced that my _Thelyphonus_, at least, was not fond of grasshoppers. Then began a kind of general system, or no system, of haphazard feeding, or rather trials of food. My marketing range for my particular "boarder" was by no means a limited one. During the month of September, when most of these investigations were in progress, Florida is by no means deficient in insect life. Every day from two to ten new and different species were placed in the cage. A list was kept, to avoid repetition, until my captive was offered her choice of something over a hundred varieties of "bugs," worms, grubs, spiders, ants and their eggs, lizards, butterflies, etc.--everything, indeed, that I could think of or conveniently catch, which it seemed possible my little captive might fancy. Of all this heterogeneous collection, nothing, so far as I could see, was ever killed or eaten. A tiny piece of fresh beef, placed in her cage at night, was the only thing that I could persuade her to touch. Even of this I am not absolutely certain. In the morning these little pellets of fresh meat were usually found rolled in the sand and often apparently diminished in size. Several times they disappeared altogether. The presence, however, of other predatory insects sometimes left the matter a little in doubt. But, as my captive remained in good health for over a month while this plan of trial dieting was in progress, I am inclined to think that more or less of the fresh beef was really consumed by her. Still, she took the greatest care that I should never catch her eating, even when surprised with a sudden light at night, a time when she was always especially active. I was getting a little tired of this seemingly fruitless investigation, and had about concluded to persuade my _Thelyphonus_ to crawl into a bottle in company with a few drops of chloroform, to have her picture taken, and then forward the "embalmed remains" to the Museum of Natural History in Central Park, New York, to which they had already been promised. I concluded, however, to make one more effort. So the next day I spent some time in hunting for new and untried insects, of which I procured half a dozen or so, and among other things quite a lot of so-called "wood-lice," "white ants," _termites_, our only representative of a family that in most warm countries is so destructive to exposed wooden structures. All of these "finds" were tumbled, as usual, upon the floor of my captive's cage, and I left them with very little expectation that she would see among them anything that suited her fastidious taste. The next morning, to my surprise, every white ant had disappeared; nothing else was touched. The question was solved. For about three weeks my _Thelyphonus_ was supplied each day with a liberal allowance of what in this latitude, at least, seems to be its exclusive food. Now, this white ant (_Termes flavipes_) is in Florida one of our worst pests. Possibly there may be some compensating benefits which they confer, in the more rapid removal of decaying vegetable matter. In most respects, however, they are an unmitigated nuisance. The annual destruction of property, of fencing, building foundations, and exposed woodwork of every kind must be estimated at hundreds of thousands of dollars. The worst of it is, too, that it is impossible to know when they are at work. They are always hidden. In case they are compelled in their destructive labors to pass over the outside of anything, they always build a hard gallery of cemented sand or clay, under which they travel securely. Unfortunately, too, they do not always confine their ravages to dead wood. Every orange grower fears them, and if they once get a foothold the tree that they attack is often destroyed before anything is suspected to be the matter. They "love darkness rather than light," and "their deeds are evil." And it is these miserable pests that my little-appreciated and much-slandered _Thelyphonus_ has been all her life fighting! And those big, strong claws of hers, that look so formidable, what are they for but to tear down and break in pieces the hard, honeycombed structures in which her food is hidden? It was all plain enough now! I confess, when I first discovered these facts which turn popular natural history so completely topsy-turvy, I felt like taking off my hat and making my profoundest bow to my little captive, and in the name of justice and humanity asking pardon for all the slanders and indignities heaped upon her race. Since writing the above, a private note from Prof. L. O. Howard, chief of the Division of Entomology in the United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C., furnishes important additional testimony upon the question of the harmlessness of this arachnid. Professor Howard says, "The _Thelyphonus_ is not poisonous." Perhaps a way of reconciling at least some of the conflicting statements that have been made on the subject may be found in the facts revealed by modern bacteriological investigations. It is well known that under special conditions the bite of the most harmless animal may convey to the human system pathogenic germs which will speedily prove fatal. Most of the deaths reported in the newspapers from the bite of the _Thelyphonus_ are no doubt imaginary, or due entirely to other causes. Any well-authenticated case--if such there has been--is probably to be explained in the manner above indicated. This theory, too, helps to "let down easy" some prominent naturalists whose great names have served to give countenance to one of the most widespread and persistent errors in current natural history. * * * * * In a memorial address of the late Dr. James Hall, made at the recent meeting of the Geological Society of America, Secretary H. L. Fairchild referred to Dr. Hall's development as almost coeval with that of the science of geology in America, and his sixty-two years of activity as connecting the work of the self-taught pioneers in this branch with the widespread field of activity of to-day. Dr. Hall's accuracy and well-balanced observation had made his first work, a report on the Geology of Western New York, a classic of the science to-day. THE PEOPLES OF THE BALKAN PENINSULA--THE GREEK, THE SLAV, AND THE TURK.[6] BY WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, PH. D., ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY; LECTURER IN ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. The significant geography of the Balkan Peninsula may best be illustrated by comparing it with the other two south European ones, Italy and Spain. The first point to notice is that it is divided from the mainland by rivers and not by a well-defined mountain chain. Iberia begins definitely at the Pyrenees, and Italy proper is cut off from Europe by the Apennine chain. On the other hand, it is along the line of the Danube and of its western affluent, the Save (see map between pages 614 and 615), that we find the geographical limits of the Balkan Peninsula. This boundary, as will be observed, excludes the kingdom of Roumania, seeming to distinguish it from its trans-Danubian neighbor Bulgaria. This is highly proper, viewed from the standpoint of geography and topography. For Roumania is, for the most part, an extensive and rich alluvial plain; while the Balkan Peninsula, as soon as you leave the Bulgarian lowlands, is characteristically rugged, if not really mountainous. [Illustration: PEOPLES OF THE BALKAN PENINSULA After SAX '78] From Adrianople west to the Adriatic, and from the Balkan Mountains and the Save River south to the plains of Epirus and Thessaly, extends an elevated region upward of two thousand feet above the sea, breaking up irregularly into peaks often rising above five thousand feet. There is no system in these mountains. The land is rudely broken up into a multitude of little "gateless amphitheaters," too isolated for union, yet not inaccessible enough for individuality. As White observes, "If the peninsula, instead of being the highly mountainous and diversified district it is, had been a plateau, a very different distribution of races would have obtained at the present day." Nor can one doubt for a moment that this disordered topography has been an important element in the racial history of the region. In its other geographical characteristics this peninsula is seemingly more favored than either Spain or Italy. More varied than the former, especially in its union of the two flora of north and south; far richer in contour, in the possession of protected waters and good harbors than Italy; the Balkan Peninsula, nevertheless, has been, humanly speaking, unfortunate from the start. The reason is patent. It lies in its central or rather intermediate location. It is betwixt and between; neither one thing nor the other. Surely a part of Europe, its rivers all run to the east and south. "By physical relief it turns its back on Europe," continually inviting settlement from the direction of Asia. It is no anomaly that Asiatic religions, Asiatic institutions, and Asiatic races should have possessed and held it; nor that Europe, Christianity, and the Aryan-speaking races should have resisted this invasion of territory which they regarded in a sense as their own. In this pull and haul between the social forces of the two continents we finally discover the dominant influence, perhaps, which throughout history has condemned this region to political disorder and ethnic heterogeneity. As little racial as of topographical system can we discover in this Balkan Peninsula. Only in one respect may we venture upon a little generalization. This is suggested by the preliminary bird's-eye view which we must take as to the languages spoken in the peninsula. This was a favorite theme with the late historian Freeman. It is developed in detail in his luminous writings upon the Eastern question. The Slavs have in this part of Europe played a rôle somewhat analogous to, although less successful than, that of the Teutons in the west. They have pressed in upon the territory of the classic civilizations of Greece and Rome, ingrafting a new and physically vigorous population upon the old and partially enervated one. From some center of dispersion up north toward Russia, Slavic-speaking peoples have expanded until they have rendered all eastern Europe Slavic from the Arctic Ocean to the Adriatic and Ægean Seas. Only at one place is the continuity of Slavdom broken; but this interruption is sufficient to set off the Slavs into two distinct groups at the present day. The northern one, of which we have already treated,[7] consists of the Russians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks. The southern group, now before us, comprises the main body of the Balkan peoples from the Serbo-Croatians to the Bulgars, as shown upon the accompanying map. Between these two groups of Slavs--and herein is the significant point--is a broad belt of non-Slavic population, composed of the Magyars, linguistically now as always Finns; and the Roumanians, who have become Latin in speech within historic times. This intrusive, non-Slavic belt lies along or near the Danube, that great highway over which eastern peoples have penetrated Europe for centuries. The presence of this water way is distinctly the cause of the linguistic phenomenon. Rome went east; and the Finns, like the Huns, went west along it, with the result as described. Linguistically speaking, therefore, the boundary of the southern Slavs and that of the Balkan Peninsula, beginning, as we have said, at the Danube, are one and the same. We may best begin our ethnic description by the apportionment of the entire Balkan Peninsula into three linguistic divisions, viz., the Greeks, the Slavs, and the Tatar-Turks. Of these the second is numerically the most important, comprising the Serbo-Croatians, the Albanians, and, in a measure, the Bulgarians. Their distribution is manifested upon our map, to which we have already directed attention. These Slavic-speaking peoples form not far from half the entire population. Next in order come the Greeks, who constitute probably about a third of the total. As our map shows, this Greek contingent is closely confined to the seacoast, with the exception of Thessaly, which, as an old Hellenic territory, we are not surprised to find Greek in speech to-day. The Slavs, contrasted with the Greeks, are primarily an inland population; the only place in all Europe, in fact, where they touch the sea is along the Adriatic coast. Even here the proportion of Greek intermixture is more considerable than our map would seem to imply. The interest of this fact is intensified because of the well-deserved reputation as admirable sailors which the modern Dalmatians possess. They are the only natural navigators of all the vast Slavic world. Everywhere else these peoples are noted rather for their aptitude for agriculture and allied pursuits. There is still another important point to be noted concerning the Greeks. They form not only the fringe of coast population in Asiatic as well as in European Turkey; they, with the Jews, monopolize the towns, devoting themselves to commerce as well as navigation. Jews and Greeks are the natural traders of the Orient. Thus is the linguistic segregation between Greek and Slav perpetuated, if not intensified, by seemingly natural aptitudes. Perhaps the most surprising feature of our map of Turkey is the relative insignificance of the third element, the Turks. There were ten years ago, according to Couvreur, not above seven hundred and fifty thousand of them in all European Turkey. Bradaska estimated that they were outnumbered by the Slavs seven to one. Our map shows that they form the dominant element in the population only in eastern Bulgaria, where they indeed constitute a solid and coherent body. Everywhere else they are disseminated as a small minority among the Greeks or Slavs. Even about Constantinople itself the Greeks far outnumber them. In this connection we must bear in mind that we are now judging of these peoples in no sense by their physical characteristics, but merely by the speech upon their lips. Nowhere else in Europe, as we shall soon see, is this criterion so fallacious as in the Balkan states. Religion enters also as a confusing element. Sax's original map, from which ours is derived, distinguishes these religious affiliations as well as language. He was indeed the first to employ this additional test. The maze of tangled languages and religions upon his map proved too complicated for our imitative abilities. We were obliged to limit our cartography to languages alone. The reader who would gain a true conception of the ethnic heterogeneity of Turkey should consult his original map. The word Turk was for several centuries taken in a religious sense as synonymous with Mohammedan,[8] as in the Collect for Good Friday in its reference to "Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics." Thus in Bosnia, where in the fifteenth century many Slavs were converted to Mohammedanism, their descendants are still known as Turks, especially where they use the Turkish speech in their religion. Obviously in this case no Turkish blood need flow in their veins. It is the religion of Islam, acting in this way, which has served to keep the Turks as distinct from the Slavs and Greeks as they are to-day. Freeman has drawn an instructive comparison in this connection between the fate of the Bulgars, who, as we shall see, are merely Slavonized Finns, and the Turks, who have steadily resisted all attempts at assimilation. The first came, he says, as "mere heathen savages (who) could be Christianized, Europeanized, assimilated," because no antipathy save that of race and speech had to be overcome. The Turks, in contradistinction, came "burdened with the half-truth of Islam, with the half-civilization of the East." By the aid of these, especially the former, the Turk has been enabled to maintain an independent existence as "an unnatural excrescence" on this corner of Europe. Even using this word as in a measure synonymous with religious affiliations, the Turks form but a small and decreasing minority in the Balkan Peninsula. Couvreur affirms that not over one third of the population profess the religion of Islam, all the remainder being Greek Catholics. This being so, the query at once suggests itself as to the reason for the continued political domination of this Turkish minority, Asiatic alike in race, in speech, and in religion. The answer is certain. It depends upon that subtle principle, the balance of power in Europe. Is it not clear that to allow the Turk to go under, as numerically he ought to do, would mean to add strength to the great Slavic majority, affiliated as it is with Russia both by speech and religion? This, with the consent of the Anglo-Saxon and other Teutonic rivals of the Slav, could never be allowed. Thus does it come about that the poor Greek is ground between the upper Turkish and the nether Slavic millstone. "Unnatural disunion is the fate of the whole land, and the cuckoo-cry about the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire means, among the other evil things that it means, the continuance of this disunion." Let us turn from this distressing political spectacle to observe what light, if any, anthropology may shed upon the problem. * * * * * From the relative isolation of the Greeks at the extreme southern point of the peninsula and especially in the Peloponnesus, it would seem that they might be relatively free from those ethnic disturbances which have worked such havoc elsewhere in the Orient. Nevertheless, Grecian history recounts a continuous succession of inroads from the landward north, as well as from the sea. It would transcend the limits of our study to attempt any detailed analysis of the early ethnology of the country.[9] Examination of the relationship of the Pelasgi to their contemporaries we leave to the philologists. Positively no anthropological data on the matter exist. We are sufficiently grateful for the hundred or more well-authenticated ancient Greek crania of any sort which remain to us. It is useless to attempt any inquiry as to their more definite ethnic origin within the tribal divisions of the country.[10] The testimony of these ancient Greek crania is perfectly harmonious. All authorities agree that the ancient Hellenes were decidedly long-headed, betraying in this respect their affinity to the Mediterranean race, which we have already traced throughout southern Europe and Africa.[11] Whether from Attica; from Schliemann's successive cities excavated upon the site of Troy; or from the coast of Asia Minor; at all times from 400 B. C. to the third century of our era; it would seem proved that the Greeks were of this dolichocephalic type. Stephanos gives the average cranial index of them all as about 75.7, betokening a people like the present Calabrians in head form; and, for that matter, about as long-headed as the Anglo-Saxons in England and America. More than this concerning the physical traits of these ancient Greeks we can not establish with any certainty. No perfect skeletons from which we can ascertain their statures remain to us. Nor can we be more positive as to their brunetness. Their admiration for blondness in heroes and deities is well known. As Dr. Beddoe ('93) says, almost all of Homer's favorites were blond or chestnut-haired, as well as large and tall. Lapouge[12] seems inclined to regard this as proof that the Greeks themselves were of this type, a deduction which appears to us in no wise well founded.[13] As we shall see, every characteristic in their modern descendants and every analogy with the neighboring populations leads us to the conclusion that the classical Hellenes were distinctly of the Mediterranean racial types, little different from the Phoenicians, the Romans, or the Iberians. Since the Christian era, as we have said, a successive downpour of foreigners from the north into Greece has ensued.[14] In the sixth century came the Avars and the Slavs, bringing death and disaster. A more potent and lasting influence upon the country was probably produced by the slower and more peaceful infiltration of the Slavs into Thessaly and Epirus from the end of the seventh century onward. A result of this is that Slavic place names to-day occur all over the Peloponnesus in the open country where settlements could readily be made. The most important immigration of all is probably that of the Albanians, who, from the thirteenth century until the advent of the Turks, incessantly penetrated the land. As a result the Albanian language is spoken to-day over a considerable part of the Peloponnesus, especially in its northeastern corner, where it attaches to the mainland. Only one little district has preserved, it may be added, anything like the original classical Greek speech. The Tzakons, in a little isolated and very rugged district on the eastern coast, include a number of classical idioms in their language. Everywhere else, either in the names of rivers, mountains, and towns, or in borrowed words, evidence of the powerful influence of the Slavic infiltration occurs. This has induced Fallmerayer, Philippson, and others to assert that the Slavs have in fact submerged the original Greeks entirely.[15] Explicit rebuttal of this is offered by Hopf, Hertzberg, and Tozer, who admit the Slavic element, but still declare the Greeks to be Greek. This is a matter concerning which neither philologist nor geographer has a right to speak; the anthropological testimony is the only competent one. To this we turn. The modern Greeks are a very mixed people. There can be no doubt of this fact from a review of their history. In despite of this, they still remain distinctly true to their original Mediterranean ancestry. This has been most convincingly proved in respect of their head form.[16] The cephalic index of modern living Greeks ranges with great constancy about 81. This, it should be observed, betokens an appreciably broader head than in the case of the ancient Hellenes. Stephanos, who has measured several hundred recruits, finds dolichocephaly to be most prevalent in Thessaly and Attica; while broad-headedness, so characteristic, as we shall see, of the Albanians and other Slavs, is more accentuated toward the north, especially in Epirus. About Corinth also, where Albanian intermixture is common, the cephalic index rises above 83. The Peloponnesus has probably best preserved its early dolichocephaly, as we should expect. In Thessaly alone are the modern Greeks as purely Mediterranean as in classic times. There can be no doubt that in Asia Minor at least, the word Greek is devoid of any racial significance. It merely denotes a man who speaks Greek, or else one who is a Greek Catholic, converted from Mohammedanism. Greek, like Turk, has become entirely a matter of language and religion, as these people have intermingled. Thus in the southwest of Asia Minor, where Semitic influences have been strong, von Luschan[17] makes the pregnant observation that the Greeks, in the main, look like Jews and speak Turkish. Here, then, is proof positive that no Greeks of pure Mediterranean descent remain to represent the primitive Hellenic type in that region. But it is equally certain that in the main body of the Greeks at home in Greece, the original racial traits are still in the ascendant. The smoothly oval and long faces in our two Greek portraits are surely of Mediterranean type. To this, the ideal form, the purest elements in the nation still tend to revert. [Illustration: GREEKS. ROUMANIANS. County Hunyad, Hungary. BULGARIANS. County Temes, Hungary. BALKAN STATES.] Whatever may be thought of the ancients, the modern Greeks are strongly brunet in all respects. Ornstein ('79) found less than ten per cent of light hair, although blue and gray eyes were characteristic of rather more than a quarter of his seventeen hundred and sixty-seven recruits. This accords with expectation, for among the Albanians, next neighbors and most intrusive aliens in Greece, light eyes are quite common. Weisbach's ('82) data confirm this, ninety-six per cent of his Greeks being pure brunets.[18] In stature these people are intermediate between the Turks and the Albanians and Dalmatians, which latter are among the tallest of Europeans. In facial features Nicolucci's early opinion seems to be confirmed, that the Greek face is distinctively orthognathous--that is to say, with a vertical profile, the lower parts of the face being neither projecting nor prominent. The face is generally of a smooth oval, rather narrow and high, especially as compared with the round-faced Slavs. The nose is thin and high, perhaps more often finely chiseled and straight in profile. The facial features seem to be well demonstrated in the classic statuary, although it is curious, as Stephanos observes, that these ideal heads are distinctly brachycephalic. Either the ancient sculptors knew little of anthropology, or else we have again a confirmation of our assertion that, however conscious of their peculiar facial traits a people may be, the head form is a characteristic whose significance is rarely recognized. * * * * * Linguistically the pure Slavs in the Balkan states comprise only the Serbo-Croatians and the Albanians (see map), dividing between them the ancient territory of Illyria. This western half of the peninsula, rugged and remote, has been relatively little exposed to the direct ravages of either Finnic or Turkish invaders. Especially is this true of Albania. Nearly all authorities since Hahn are agreed in identifying these latter people--who call themselves Skipetars, by the way--as the modern representatives of the ancient Illyrians. They are said to have been Slavonized by the Serbo-Croatians, who have been generally regarded as descendants of the settlers brought by the Emperor Heraclius from beyond the Save. This he is said to have done in order to repopulate the lands devastated by the Avars and other Slavs who, Procopius informs us, first appeared in this region in the sixth century of our era. The settlers imported by Heraclius came, we are told, from two distant places: Old Servia, or Sorabia, placed by Freeman in modern Saxony; and Chrobatia, which, he says, lies in southwestern Poland. According to this view, the Serbo-Croatians are an offshoot from the northern Slavs, being divided from them to-day by the intrusive Hungarians, while the Albanians alone are truly indigenous to the country. The recent political fate of these Illyrian peoples has been quite various, the Albanians alone preserving their independence continually under the merely nominal rule of the Turks. Religion, also, has affected these Slavs in various ways. Servia owes much of its present peace and prosperity to the practical elimination of the Moslems. Bosnia is still largely Mohammedan, with about a third of its people, according to White ('86), still professing that religion. The significance of this is increased, since it was mainly the upper classes in Bosnia, according to Freeman, who embraced the religion of Islam in order to preserve their power and estates. The conversion was not national, as in the case of the Albanians. Thus social and religious segregation work in harmony to produce discord. With multitudes of Jews monopolizing the commerce of the country and the people thus divided socially as well as in religion, the political unrest in Bosnia certainly seems to require the strong arm of Austrian suzerainty to preserve order. Whatever the theory of the historians as to origins may be, to the anthropologist the modern Illyrians--Serbo-Croatians and Albanians alike--are physically a unit. Two characteristics render this ethnic group distinctive: first, that it comprises some of the tallest men in the world, comparing favorably with the Scotch in this respect; and, secondly, that the Illyrians tend to be among the broadest-headed people known. In general, it would appear that the people, of Herzegovina and northern Albania possess these traits to the most notable degree, while both in the direction of the Save and Danube and of the plains of Thessaly and Epirus they have been attenuated by intermixture. Presumably also toward the east among the Bulgarians in Macedonia and Thrace these characteristics diminish in intensity. Thus, for example, while the Herzegovinians, measured by Weisbach, yielded an average stature of five feet nine inches, the Bosnians were appreciably shorter; and the Dalmatians and Albanians were even more so. Nevertheless, as compared with the Greeks, Bulgars, Turks, or Roumanians, even the shortest of these Slavs stood high. From this specific center outward, especially around the head of the Adriatic Sea, over into Venetia, spreads the influence of this giantism. It confirms, as we have said, the classical theory of an Illyrian cross among the Venetians, extending well up into the Tyrol. As for the second trait, the exaggerated broad-headedness, it too, like the tallness of stature, seems to center about Herzegovina and Montenegro. Thus at Scutari, in the corner of Albania near this last-named country, Zampa[19] found a cranial index of 89; in Herzegovina the index upon the living head ranges above 87. It would be difficult to exceed this brachycephaly anywhere in the world. The square foreheads and broad faces of the people correspond in every way to the shape of the heads. Its significance appears immediately on comparison with the long oval faces of the Greeks. One more trait of the Balkan Slavs remains for us to note. The people are mainly pure brunets, as we might expect, but they seem to be less dark than either the Greeks or the Turks. Especially among the Albanians are light traits by no means infrequent. In this respect the contrast with the Greeks is apparent, as well as with the Dalmatians along the coast and the Italians in the same latitude across the Adriatic. Weisbach found nearly ten per cent of blond and red hair among his Bosnian soldiers, while about one third of the eyes were either gray or blue. The Herzegovinians are even lighter than the Bosnians, almost as much so as the Albanians. From consideration of these facts it would appear as if the harsh climate of these upland districts had been indeed influential in setting off the inland peoples from the Italian-speaking Dalmatians along the coast. For among the latter brunetness certainly increases from north to south, conformably to the general rule for the rest of Europe. In the interior, blondness apparently moves in the contrary direction, culminating in the mountain fastnesses of northern Albania and the vicinity. On the whole, we find also in this trait of brunetness competent evidence to connect these Illyrians with the great body of the Alpine race farther to the west. We have another illustration of its determined predilection for a mountainous habitat, in which it stoutly resists all immigrant tendencies toward variation from its primitive type. * * * * * The Osmanli Turks, who politically dominate the Balkan Peninsula, notwithstanding their numerical insignificance, are mainly distinctive among their neighbors by reason of their speech and religion. Turkish is the westernmost representative of a great group of languages, best known, perhaps, as the Ural-Altaic family.[20] This comprises all those of northern Asia even to the Pacific Ocean, together with that of the Finns in Russian Europe. Its members are by no means unified physically. All varieties of type are included within its boundaries, from the tall and blond one which we may call Finnic, prevalent about the Baltic; to the squat and swarthy Kalmucks and Kirghez, to whom we have in a physical sense applied the term Mongols. The Turkish branch of this great family of languages is to-day represented in eastern Europe by two peoples, whom we may roughly distinguish as Turks and Tatars.[21] The term Tatar, it should be observed, is entirely of European invention, like the similar word Hungarian. The only name recognized by the Osmanli themselves is that of Turk. This, by the way, seems quite aptly to be derived from a native root meaning "brigand," according to Chantre. They apply the word Tatar solely to the north Asiatic barbarians. By general usage this latter term, Tatar, has to-day become more specifically applied by ethnologists to the scattered peoples of Asiatic descent and Turkish speech who are mainly to be found in Russia and Asia Minor. [Illustration: UZBEG. Ferghanah. KIPTCHAK. KARA-KIRGHEZ. TURKOMAN TYPES.] Of the two principal physical types to-day comprised within the limits of the Ural-Altaic languages, the Turks and Tatars seem to be affiliated with the Mongol rather than the Finn, not physically alone, but in respect of language as well. As a matter of fact, they are racially nearer the Aryan-speaking Europeans than most people imagine, in everything except their speech. Their nearest relatives in Asia seem to be the Turkoman peoples, who, to the number of a million or more, inhabit the deserts and steppes of western Asia. It was from somewhere about this latter region, as we know, that the hordes of the Huns under Attila, and those of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, set forth to the devastation of Europe. The physical type of these inhabitants of Turkestan has been fairly well established by anthropologists. It persists throughout a great multitude of tribes of various names, among whom the Kara-Kirghez, Uzbegs, and Kiptchaks are prominent.[22] On page 625 we have portraits of these Turkoman types. The most noticeable feature of the portraits is the absence of purely Mongol facial characteristics. Except in the Kara-Kirghez the features are distinctly European. There is no squint-eye; the nose is well formed; the cheek bones are not prominent, although the faces are broad; and, most important of all, the beard is abundantly developed, both in the Uzbeg and the Kiptchak. The Kara-Kirghez, on the other hand, betrays unmistakably his Mongol derivation in every one of these important respects. One common trait is possessed by all three--to wit, extreme brachycephaly, with an index ranging from 85 to 89. The flatness of the occiput is very noticeable in our portraits in every case, giving what Hamy calls a "cuboid aspect" to the skull. These portraits, if typical, should be enough to convince us that the Turkoman of the steppes about the Aral and Caspian Seas is far from being a pure Mongol even in his native land, although a strain of Mongol blood is apparent in many of their tribes. The fact is that the Asiatic Turkomans, whence our Osmanli Turks are derived, are a highly composite type. A very important element in their composition is that of certain brachycephalic peoples of the Pamir, the Galchas and mountain Tadjiks. These are for all practical purposes identical with the Alpine type of western Europe. In their accentuated brachycephaly, their European facial features, their abundance of wavy hair and beard, and finally in their intermediate color of hair and eyes,[23] these latter peoples in the Pamir resemble their European prototypes, or perhaps we had better say, congeners. So close is this affiliation that the occurrence of this type in western Asia is the keystone in any argument for the Asiatic origin of the Alpine race of Europe. The significance of it for us in this connection is that it explains the European affinity of many of the Turkoman tribes, who are more strongly European than Mongol in their resemblances. It is highly important, we affirm, to fix this in mind, for the prevalent opinion seems to be that the Turks in Europe have departed widely from their ancestral Asiatic type, because of their present lack of Mongol characteristics, such as almond eyes, lank black hair, flat noses, and high cheek bones. [Illustration: NOMAD IVERVEK. Lycia, Asia Minor. TURK. Lycia, Asia Minor. TURK. Lycia, Asia Minor. TURKS.] Either the Osmanli Turks were never Mongols, or they have lost every trace of it by intermixture. Our portraits on the opposite page give little indication of Asiatic derivation except in their accentuated short-and broad-headedness. This is considerably more noticeable in Asia Minor than in European Turkey.[24] West of the Bosporus the Turks differ but little from the surrounding Slavs in head form. They have been bred down from their former extreme brachycephaly, which still rules to a greater degree in Asia Minor. In our portraits from this region the absence of occipital prominence is very marked. In addition to this, the Turks are everywhere, as Chantre observes, "incontestably brunet." The hair is generally stiff and straight. The beard is full. This latter trait is fatal to any assumption of a persistence of Kirghez blood, or of any Mongolic extraction, in fact. The nose is broad, but straight in profile. The eyes are perfectly normal, the oblique Mongol type no more frequent than elsewhere. In stature tallness is the rule, judging by Chantre's data, but in this respect social conditions are undoubtedly of great effect. On the whole, then, we may consider that the Turks have done fairly well in the preservation of their primitive characteristics. Chantre especially finds them quite homogeneous, considering all the circumstances. They vary according to the people among whom their lot is cast. Among the Armenians they become broader-headed, while among the Iranian peoples--Kurds or Persians--the opposite influence of intermixture at once is apparent. The Bulgarians are of interest because of their traditional Finnic origin and subsequent Europeanization. This has ensued through conversion to Christianity and the adoption of a Slavic speech. Our earliest mention of these Bulgars would seem to locate them between the Ural Mountains and the Volga.[25] The district was, in fact, known as Old Bulgaria till the Russians took it in the fifteenth century. As to which of the many existing tribes of the Volga Finns represent the ancestors of these Bulgarians, no one is, I think, competent to speak. Pruner Bey seems to think they were the Ostiaks and Voguls, since emigrated across the Urals into Asia; the still older view of Edwards and Klaproth made them Huns; Obédénare, according to Virchow, said they were Samoyeds or Tungus; while Howorth and Beddoe claim the honor for the Chuvashes. These citations are enough to prove that nobody knows very much about it in detail. All that can be affirmed is that a tribe of Finnic-speaking people crossed the Danube toward the end of the seventh century and possessed themselves of territory near its mouth. Remaining heathen for two hundred odd years, they finally adopted Christianity and under their great leaders, Simeon and Samuel, became during the tenth century a power in the land. Their rulers, styling themselves "Emperors of the Slavs," fought the Germans; conquered the Magyars as well as their neighbors in Thrace, receiving tribute from Byzantium; became allies of Charlemagne; and then subsided under the rule of the Turks. Since the practical demise of this latter power they have again taken courage, and in their semi-political independence in Bulgaria and northern Roumelia rejoice in an ever-rich and growing literature and sense of nationality. Bulgarian is spoken, as our map at page 614 indicates, far outside the present political limits of the principality--indeed, over about two thirds of European Turkey. Gop[vc]evi['c] has made a brilliant attempt to prove that Macedonia, shown by our map and commonly believed to be at bottom Bulgarian, is in reality populated mainly by Serbs.[26] The weakness of this contention was speedily laid bare by his critics. Political motives, especially the ardent desire of the Servians to make good a title to Macedonia before the disruption of the Ottoman Empire, can scarcely be denied. Servia needs an outlet on the Mediterranean too obviously to cloak such an attempted ethnic usurpation. As a fact, Macedonia, even before the late Greco-Turkish war, was in a sad state of anarchy. The purest Bulgarian is certainly spoken in the Rhodope Mountains; there are many Roumanians of Latin speech; the Greeks predominate all along the sea and throughout the three-toed peninsula of Salonica, while the Turks are sparsely disseminated everywhere. And as for religion--well, besides the severally orthodox Greeks and Turks, there are in addition the Moslem and apostate Bulgarians, known as Pomaks, who have nothing in common with their Greek Catholic fellow-Bulgars, together with the scattering Pindus Roumanians and Albanians in addition. This interesting field of ethnographic investigation is, even at this late day, practically unworked. As Dr. Beddoe writes--and his remarks are equally applicable to Americans--"here are fine opportunities for any enterprising Englishman with money and a taste for travel and with sufficient brains to be able to pick up a language. But, alas! such men usually seem to care for nothing but 'killing something.'" [Illustration: PEOPLES IN HUNGARY AND TRANSYLVANIA (SIEBENBÜRGEN) After Jekelfalussy, '85] The Roumanians, or Moldo-Wallachians, are not confined within the limits of that country alone. Their language and nationality cover not only the plains along the Danube and the Black Sea, but their speech extends beyond the Carpathian Mountains over the entire southeastern quarter of Hungary and up into the Bukovina. Transylvania is merely a German and Magyar islet in the vast extent of the Roumanian nation. There are more than a third as many Roumanians as there are Magyars in the Hungarian kingdom, according to the census of 1890. Politically it thus happens that these people are pretty well split up in their allegiance. Nor can this condition be other than permanent. For the Carpathian Mountains, in their great circle about the Hungarian basin, cut directly through the middle of the nation as measured by language. This curious circumstance can be accounted for only on the supposition that the disorder in the direction of the Balkan Peninsula, incident upon the Turkish invasion, forced the growing nation to expand toward the northwest, even over the natural barrier interposed between Roumania proper and Hungary. Geographical law, more powerful than human will, ordains that this latter natural area of characterization--the great plain basin of Hungary--should be the seat of a single political unit. There is no resource but that the Roumanians should in Hungary accept the division from their fellows over the mountains as final for all political purposes.[27] The native name of these people is Vlach, Wallach, or Wallachian. Various origins for the name have been assigned. Lejean asserts that it designates a nomad shepherd, in distinction from a tiller of the soil or a dweller in towns. Picot voices the native view as to ethnic origins by deriving the word Wallach from the same root as Wales, Walloon, etc., applied by the Slavs and Germans to the Celtic peoples as "foreigners." This theory is now generally discountenanced. Obédénare's attempt to prove such a Celtic relationship has met with little favor.[28] The western name Roumanian springs from a similarly exploded hypothesis concerning the Latin origin of these people. To be sure, Roumanian is distinctly allied to the other Romance languages in structure. It is an anomaly in the eastern Slavic half of Europe. The most plausible explanation for this phenomenon, and one long accepted, was that the modern Roumanians were descendants of the two hundred and forty thousand colonists whom the Emperor Trajan is said to have sent into the conquered province of Dacia. The earlier inhabitants of the territory were believed to have been the original Thracians. Since no two were agreed as to what the Thracians were like, this did not amount to much. Modern common sense has finally prevailed over attempts to display philological erudition in such matters. Freeman expresses this clearly. Roumania, as he says, lay directly in the pathway of all invasions from the East; the hold of the Romans upon Dacia was never firm; the province was the first to break away from the empire; and finally proof of a Latinization only at the late date of the thirteenth century is not wanting. The truth seems to be that two forces were contending for the control of eastern Europe. The Latin could prevail only in those regions which were beyond the potent influence of Greece. Dacia being remote and barbarian, this Latin element had a fighting chance for survival, and succeeded. Our ethnic map at page 614 shows a curious islet of Roumanian language in the heart of the Greek-speaking territory of Thessaly. There is little sympathy between the two peoples, according to Hellène. The occurrence of this Roumanian colony, so far removed from its base, has long puzzled ethnographers. Some believe the peoples were separately Romanized _in situ_; others that they were colonists from Dacia in the ninth and tenth centuries. At all events, these Pindus Roumanians are too numerous--over a million souls--to be neglected in any theory as to the origin of their language.[29] Another islet of quasi-Roumanian speech occurs in Istria, on the Adriatic coast. Its origin is equally obscure.[30] It is no contradiction that, in spite of the fact of our exclusion of Roumania from the Balkan Peninsula owing to its Latin affinities, thereby seeming to differentiate it sharply from Bulgaria, the latter of Finnic origin; that we now proceed to treat of the physical characteristics of the two nationalities, Roumanian and Bulgarian, together. Here is another example of the superficiality of language, of social and political institutions. They do not concern the fundamental physical facts of race in the least. At the same time we again emphasize the necessity of a powerful corrective, based upon purely natural phenomena, for the tendency of philologists and ethnographers to follow their pet theories far afield, giving precedence to analogies of language and customs over all the potent facts of geographical probability. Let us look at it in this light. Is there any chance that, on the opposite sides of the Danube, a few Finns and a few Romans respectively interposed among the dense population which so fertile an area must have possessed, even at an early time, could be in any wise competent to make different types of the two? There is nothing in our confessedly scanty anthropological data to show it, at all events. We must treat the lower Danubian plain as a unit, irrespective of the bounds of language, religion, or nationality. It was long believed that the Bulgarians were distinctive among the other peoples of eastern Europe by reason of their long-headedness. All the investigations upon limited series of crania pointed in that direction. This naturally was interpreted as a confirmation of the historic data as to a Finnic Bulgarian origin very distinct from that of the broad-headed Slavs. Several recent discoveries have put a new face upon the matter. In the first place, researches by Dr. Bassanovitch, of Varna, upon several thousand recruits from western Bulgaria prove that in the west these Bulgarians even outdo many of the Balkan Slavs in their broad-headedness.[31] At the same time it appears that the older authorities were right, after all, in respect of the eastern Bulgarians. Among them, and also over in eastern Roumelia, long heads are still the rule. The oval-faced Bulgarians among our portraits are probably of this dolichocephalic type. Their contrast facially with the broad-headed Roumanians is very marked. Thus it is established that the Bulgarian nation is by no means a unit in its head form. We should add also that, although not definitely proved as yet, it is highly probable that similar variations occur in Roumania. In the Bukovina brachycephaly certainly prevails. Our square-faced Roumanians on page 621 may presumably be taken to represent this type. This broad-headedness decreases apparently toward the east as we leave the Carpathian Mountains, until along the Black Sea it seems, as in Bulgaria, to give way to a real dolichocephaly.[32] How are we to account for the occurrence of so extended an area of long-headedness all over the great lower Danubian plain? Our study of the northern Slavs has shown that no such phenomenon occurs there among the Russians. It certainly finds no counterpart among the southern Slavs or the Turks. The only other people who resemble these Bulgars in long-headedness are the Greeks. Even they are far separated; and, in any event, but very impure representatives of the type. What shall we say? Two explanations seem to be possible, as Dr. Beddoe observes.[33] Either this dolichocephaly is due to the Finnicism of the original Bulgars, or else it represents a characteristic of the pre-Bulgarian population of the Danube basin. He inclines with moderation to the former view. The other horn of the dilemma is chosen by Anutchin[34] in a brilliant paper at the late Anthropological Congress at Moscow. According to his view--and we assent most heartily to it--this dolichocephaly along the Black Sea represents the last survival of a most persistent trait of the primitive inhabitants of eastern Europe. Referring again to our study of Russia,[35] we would call attention to the occurrence of a similar long-headed race underlying all the modern Slavic population. We are able to prove also that such a primitive substratum occurs over nearly all Europe. It has been unearthed not far from here, for example, at Glasinac in Bosnia. When archæological research is extended farther to the east, new light upon this point may be expected. It will be asked at once why this primitive population should still lie bare upon the surface, here along the lower Danube, when it has been submerged everywhere else in Central Europe. Our answer is ready. Here in this rich alluvial plain population might, expectedly, be dense at a very early period. As we have observed before, such a population, if solidly massed, opposes an enormous resistance to absorption by new-comers. A few thousand Bulgarian invaders would be a mere drop in the bucket of such an aggregation of men. We are strengthened in this hypothesis that the dolichocephaly of the Danubian plain is primitive, by reason of another significant fact brought out by Bassanovitch.[36] Long-headedness is overwhelmingly more prevalent among women than among men. The former represent more often what Bassanovitch calls the "dolichocephalic Thracian type." The oval-faced Bulgarian woman among our portraits would seem to be one of these. Now, in our treatment of the Jews,[37] we have sought to illustrate the principle that in any population the primitive type persists more often in the women. The bearing of such a law in the case of the Bulgars would seem to be definite. Their long-headedness, where it occurs, must date from a far more remote period than the historic advent of the few thousand immigrants who have given the name Bulgaria to the country. As for the other physical traits of the Bulgarians and Roumanians there is little to be added. It goes without saying that they are both deep brunets. Obédénare says the Roumanians are very difficult to distinguish from the modern Spaniards and Italians. This is probably true in respect of brunetness. The Oriental cast of features of our portraits, on the other hand, can not fail to attract attention. More than two thirds of Bassanovitch's nineteen hundred and fifty-five Bulgarians were very dark-haired. Light eyes were of course more frequent, nearly forty per cent being classed as blue or greenish. A few--about five per cent--were yellow or tawny-haired, these individuals being at the same time blue-eyed. This was probably Procopius's excuse for the assertion that the Bulgars were of fair complexion. He also affirmed that they were of goodly stature. This is not true of either the modern Roumanians or Bulgars. They average less than five feet five inches in height,[38] being considerably shorter than the Turks, and positively diminutive beside the Bosnians and other southern Slavs. The Bulgarians especially are correspondingly stocky, heavily boned and built. We may also affirm a real difference in temperament between the two nationalities, built up, as we assert, from the same foundation. The Wallachians are said to be more emotional and responsive; the Bulgarians inclined to heaviness and stolidity. Both are pre-eminently industrious and contented cultivators of the soil, with little aptitude for commerce, so it is said. We hesitate to pass judgment upon either in respect of their further aptitudes until fuller data can be provided than are available at the present time. FOOTNOTES: [6] Advance sheets from The Races of Europe, in press of D. Appleton and Company, many footnotes and detailed references being here omitted. [7] Popular Science Monthly, October, 1898. [8] Consult Taylor, 1890, p. 48; Von Luschan, 1889, p. 198; Sax, 1863, p. 97. [9] Consult Fligier, 1881. Stephanos, 1884, p. 430, gives a complete bibliography of the older works. Cf. also Reinach, 1893 b, in his review of Hesselmeyer; and on the supposed Hittites, the works of Wright, De Cara, Conder, etc. [10] Stephanos, 1884, p. 432, asserts the Pelasgi to have been brachycephalic, while Zampa, 1886 b, p. 639, as positively affirms the contrary view. [11] Nicolucci, 1865 and 1867; Zaborowski, 1881; Virchow, 1882 and 1893; Lapouge, 1896 a, pp. 412-419; and Sergi, 1895 a, p. 75, are best on ancient Greek crania. [12] 1896 a, p. 414. [13] Stephanos, 1884, p. 439. [14] Philippson, Zur Ethnographie des Peloponnes. Petermann, xxxvi, 1890, pp. 1-11, 33-41, with map, gives a good outline of these. Consult also Stephanos, 1884, pp. 422 _et seq._ [15] Cf. Couvreur, 1890, p. 514; and Freeman, 1877 d, p. 401. [16] Weisbach, 1882; Nicolucci, 1867; Apostolides in Bull. Soc. d'Anth., 1883, p. 614; Stephanos, 1884; Neophytos, 1891; Lapouge, 1896 a, p. 419. Von Luschan, 1889, p. 209, illustrates the similarity between the Greek and the Bedouin skull. [17] 1889, p. 209. [18] Neophytos finds 82.5 per cent of dark-brown or black hair, only five per cent blond or red; while seventeen per cent of the eyes were dark among two hundred individuals. [19] 1886 b, p. 637. [20] Vambéry, 1885, divides the Ural-Altaic family into five groups--viz., (1) Samoyed, (2) Tungus, (3) Finnic, (4) Mongolic, (5) Turkish or Tatar. [21] On terminology consult Vambéry, 1885, p. 60; Chantre, 1895, p. 199; Keane, 1897, p. 302. [22] Complete data on these people will be found in Ujfalvy, 1878-'80, iii, pp. 7-50; Les Aryens, etc., 1896, pp. 385-434; Bogdanof, 1888; Yavorski, 1897. [23] Ujfalvy (Les Aryens, etc., 1896, p. 428) found chestnut hair most frequent, with twenty-seven per cent of blondness, among some of the Tadjiks. The eyes are often greenish gray or blue (Ujfalvy, 1878-'80, iii, pp. 23-33, tables). [24] On the anthropology of European Turks, Weisbach, 1873, is the only authority. He found an average cephalic index of 82.8 in 148 cases. Elisyeef, 1890-'91, and Chantre, 1895, pp. 206-211, have worked in Anatolia, with indices of 86 for 143 individuals, and 84.5 for 120 men, respectively. Both von Luschan and Chantre give a superb collection of portrait types in addition. [25] Read Pruner Bey, 1860 b; Howorth; Obédénare, and especially Kanitz, 1875, for historic details. [26] 1889 a, with map, in Petermann, 1889 b. Cf. criticism of his contention by Oppel, 1890; Couvreur, 1890, p. 523; and Ghennadieff, 1890, p. 663. [27] Auerbach, 1898, p. 286, gives a full summary of the rival controversy between Roumanians and Hungarians as to priority of title in Transylvania. [28] Cf. Picot, 1883, in his review of Tocilescu; and Rosny, 1885, p. 83. [29] Picot, 1875, pp. 390 _et seq._ [30] Auerbach, 1898, p. 211. [31] 1891, p. 30. Dr. Bassanovitch has most courteously sent me a sketch map showing the results of these researches. Deniker, 1897, p. 203, and 1898 a, describes them also. [32] Deniker, 1898 a, p. 122; Weisbach, 1877, p. 238; Rosny, 1885, p. 85. [33] 1879, p. 233. [34] 1893, p. 282. [35] Popular Science Monthly, October, 1898, p. 734. [36] 1891, p. 31. Women dolicho-, twenty-five per cent; meso-, forty-two per cent; brachy-cephalic, thirty per cent; while among men the percentages are 3, 16, and 81 ± per cent respectively. [37] Popular Science Monthly, January, 1899, p. 350. [38] Bassanovitch's series of 1,955 individuals averages only 1.638 metre. _Op. cit._, p. 30. Auerbach, 1898, p. 259, gives an average of 1.63 metre for 880 Wallachians in Transylvania. Obédénare, 1876, p. 374, states brown eyes to be most frequent in Roumania. MARVELOUS INCREASE IN PRODUCTION OF GOLD. BY ALEXANDER E. OUTERBRIDGE, JR. The increasing annual production of gold in the world is a matter of such far-reaching economic importance, not only in the financial affairs of nations, but also in their industrial progress and in their civilization, that a vast amount of patient study has been given by eminent statisticians to the subject, and much time expended in compiling, from various historical records and other sources of information, statistical data which can be confidently accepted as approximately correct, showing the annual production of the precious metal from the time of the discovery of America down to the present day. A publication of the United States Treasury Department, issued in 1897, containing information respecting the production of precious metals, etc., gives statistical tables showing the annual production of gold in the world, commencing with the year 1493. The earlier records are taken from a table of averages for certain periods compiled by Dr. Adolph Soetbeer, and the later figures (from 1885 to 1896) are the annual estimates of the Bureau of the Mint. Other tables show the annual production of gold from the mines of the United States alone from 1845 to 1896, and it is from these official sources mainly that the information has been gathered for this article, supplemented, however, by a full and very interesting communication to the author from the Director of the Mint, giving the latest figures, not yet published, and containing the estimates and deductions of the director respecting the production of gold in the world in 1898. This information is so timely and valuable that the author is of the opinion that the courteous letter of the Director of the Mint in response to his inquiries, if appended to this article, may prove to be--like the postscript of a lady's correspondence--its most important feature. Students of political economy are well aware of the fact that some theorists have maintained that the annual production of gold in the world (apart from the phenomenal discoveries in California about the middle of the century, which were of an ephemeral character) does not keep pace with the natural increase in trade requirements, if gold is to maintain its position as the standard measure of value and the universal medium of exchange. This theory, after having passed through the various stages of _pro_ and _con_ argument in academic theses, became the "war cry" of a political party in this country composed of heterogeneous elements in the community, all inspired with one common idea that the balance of power in commercial transactions had been destroyed by the overwhelming force of concentration of capital and the "cornering" of the visible supply of gold in the world by a few enormously wealthy bankers. It was shown that, while the average annual production of gold in the world in five years from 1855 to 1860 exceeded $134,000,000, there was a constant decline thereafter, so that the annual average during five years from 1881 to 1885 barely exceeded $99,000,000, according to official estimates; also that the annual gold product of the mines of the United States declined from a value of $65,000,000 in 1853 to $33,000,000 in 1892. Furthermore, although a rising tendency was observed in each subsequent year, the production from the mines of this country in 1894 was still under $40,000,000, as was shown by the statistics of the United States Treasury Department. While admitting the general accuracy of these statements of fact, it is the purpose of this paper to endeavor to show that the conclusions drawn therefrom were entirely fallacious, because due cognizance was not taken of the wonderful progress that has been made in recent years in mining and metallurgical arts whereby countless millions of tons of ore containing gold in such a finely divided state, or in such a refractory condition, that it was formerly worthless (costing more to recover the gold than the value of the precious metal contained in the ore), have now rendered these low-grade ores the most stable sources of supply of gold. Metallurgists, having knowledge of these facts, have at various times during the past ten years predicted that a golden stream would soon begin to flow from these practically new and apparently inexhaustible sources; but the people at large were wholly incredulous, and they are now astounded at the magnitude of the production of gold in the world in the past two years; and more especially, perhaps, are they amazed at the increase of production in the United States, as shown by the official reports of the Director of the Mint. The gold production of the world in 1897 amounted in value, according to the most reliable estimates, to more than $237,000,000, and in 1898 to more than $280,000,000; and it is the opinion of the Director of the Mint that the final compilation of figures will show that the production was "somewhere between $290,000,000 and $300,000,000!" _Gold Production of the World._ ----------------+---------------------------------+--------------------------------- | 1897. | 1898. +----------+---------+------------+----------+---------+------------ COUNTRIES. | Fine | Kilo- | | Fine | Kilo- | | ounces. |grammes. | Value. | ounces |grammes. | Value. ----------------+----------+---------+------------+----------+---------+------------ | | | | | | _North America._| | | | | | United States | 2,774,935| 84,870.5| $59,210,795| 3,110,788| 95,200.7| $64,300,000 Canada | 299,467| 9,164.0| 6,190,000| 686,502| 22,071.1| 14,190,000 Newfoundland | 3,000| 93.3| 62,010| 3,000| 93.3| 62,010 Mexico | 344,498| 10,715.0| 7,121,189| 365,032| 11,354.0| 7,668,866 Central America | 25,399| 789.9| 525,000| 25,399| 789.9| 525,000 | | | | | | _South America._| | | | | | Argentina | 15,235| 473.8| 314,907| 15,235| 473.8| 314,907 Bolivia | 3,144| 98.0| 65,000| 3,144| 98.0| 65,000 Brazil | 70,732| 2,200.0| 1,462,120| 84,633| 2,591.0| 1,750,000 Chile | 68,096| 2,118.0| 1,407,544| 68,096| 2,118.0| 1,407,544 Colombia | 188,679| 5,868.7| 3,900,000| 188,679| 5,868.7| 3,900,000 Ecuador | 6,430| 199.9| 132,900| 6,430| 199.9| 132,900 Guiana (British)| 101,505| 3,156.9| 2,098,098| 88,617| 2,756.0| 1,861,393 Guiana (Dutch) | 32,983| 1,025.8| 681,748| 28,273| 865.3| 584,421 Guiana (French) | 59,859| 1,861.7| 1,237,310| 66,593| 2,038.0| 1,376,477 Peru | 5,787| 180.0| 119,628| 5,787| 180.0| 119,628 Uruguay | 6,880| 214.0| 114,600| 6,880| 214.0| 114,600 Venezuela | 39,384| 1,224.9| 814,067| 39,384| 1,224.9| 814,067 | | | | | | _Europe._ | | | | | | Austria-Hungary | 105,397| 3,278.2| 2,178,556| 105,397| 3,278.2| 2,178,556 France | 10,513| 327.0| 217,304| 10,513| 327.0| 217,304 Germany | 90,921| 2,780.9| 1,879,357| 90,921| 2,780.9| 1,879,357 Italy | 10,325| 316.0| 213,431| 10,325| 316.0| 213,431 Norway | 650| 20.0| 13,508| 653| 20.0| 13,508 Russia | 1,046,965| 32,408.2| 21,538,490| 1,216,100| 37,217.0| 25,136,994 Sweden | 3,702| 133.3| 76,524| 3,702| 133.3| 76,524 Turkey | 387| 12.0| 8,000| 387| 12.0| 8,105 United Kingdom | 2,032| 62.5| 42,001| 2,032| 62.5| 42,001 | | | | | | _Asia._ | | | | | | China | 321,296| 9,992.8| 6,641,190| 321,296| 9,992.8| 6,641,190 India (British) | 353,147| 10,983.4| 7,299,554| 369,018| 11,479.3| 7,753,150 Japan | 34,509| 1,073.3| 713,300| 34,509| 1,073.3| 713,300 Korea | 34,918| 1,086.0| 721,765| 34,918| 1,086.0| 721,765 Malay Peninsula | 25,000| 777.6| 516,750| 25,000| 777.6| 516,750 Borneo | 4,837| 150.6| 100,000| 4,837| 150.6| 100,000 | | | | | | _Africa._ | | | | | | Witwatersrand | 2,511,544| 78,112.6| 51,913,607| 3,554,746|108,790.0| 73,476,600 Other districts,| | | | | | S. A. R. | 232,466| 7,230.0| 4,805,072| 229,528| 7,024.3| 4,744,350 West Coast | 24,276| 755.0| 501,793| 24,276| 742.9| 501,793 Rhodesia | ...| ...| ...| 10,000| 306.3| 206,700 Madagascar | 19,351| 601.8| 400,000| 19,351| 601.8| 400,000 Australasia, | | | | | | 7 colonies | 2,520,333| 77,130.6| 52,095,338| 2,945,426| 91,024.7| 61,480,763 |----------+---------+------------+----------+---------+------------ Totals |11,399,475|351,486.2|$237,332,456|13,805,407|425,333.1|$286,218,954 ----------------+----------+---------+------------+----------+---------+------------ The above table, showing the estimated production of gold from all parts of the world in 1897 and 1898, is abstracted from the Annual Statistical Number of the Engineering and Mining Journal (January 1, 1899), and, although these figures may differ somewhat from those of the Director of the Mint, and from the final compilations, they are believed to be not very far from truth. It will be seen that the principal countries contributing to the grand total in both years were Africa, the United States of America, Australasia, Russia, Canada, Mexico, and India, the names being given in the order of the respective importance of these countries as gold producers in 1898. It may surprise many readers to observe that India is placed at the foot of the list, for we are accustomed to associate India with gold, Mexico with silver, and Russia with platinum; and it may also prove a surprise to find that the contribution of the Klondike region, which has created such a great sensation, is so trifling as compared to the grand total. In 1897 the Klondike was credited with an output of less than $3,000,000, and in 1898 of a little over $10,000,000. It will be observed in the estimates of the Government's agents (January 1, 1899) of the production of gold in the United States for 1898 (see the letter of the Director of the Mint, appended hereto) that the gold production of the State of Colorado was more than twice that of the Klondike region, and the production of California was nearly fifty per cent greater than that of the Klondike. Other surprising facts crop out in studying in detail the increasing production of gold, more especially in the United States. For example, California has always been regarded as pre-eminently the gold-giving State, and until 1897 she led all the other States in the value of gold annually produced. Colorado, on the other hand, was equally famous as a silver-producing State, and while still holding this leading position she has actually passed California in the production of gold. Colorado has thus taken the lead over all the States in the production of gold and silver. The output of gold in the United States in 1898 was more than twice that of 1890; and the production of gold in the world in 1898, at the lowest estimate, was much more than twice the estimated production in 1890. In the decade just prior to the California gold discoveries, in 1849, the average annual production in the world is estimated to have been less than $13,500,000. In the previous decade it was less than $10,000,000. Assuming these figures of Dr. Adolph Soetbeer (which are accepted by the nations of the world, and incorporated in many official documents) to be approximately correct, it appears that the estimated production of gold in the world in the first third of the present century was but little more than the production in the single year 1898! It is, indeed, difficult to comprehend the full significance of these figures at a glance: the production of gold in the past five years has amounted to more than $1,100,000,000; and if production should increase during the next five years in anything like the ratio of the past five years, it may be that a new economic problem, the very antithesis of that alluded to in the commencement of this paper, may present itself for solution. At all events, the cry of the Populists and others that increasing scarcity of gold is the cause of much of the poverty and of other ills of mankind, must surely be drowned in the golden stream now flowing from all quarters of the globe, almost threatening to become a rushing torrent, dangerous to the stable foundations of the world's commerce. That this, however, fortunately is an imaginary danger will appear from the following arguments: Modern gold-getting by scientific methods compels the permanent investment of an enormous amount of capital, and a moderate return only in dividend is looked for as a rule; thus the balance between acquisition and disbursement is likely to be maintained in the future. One of the chief causes of the extraordinary increase of production in very recent years is to be found in the application of the "cyanide process" to the recovery of gold from "tailings." This process is also largely applied to obtaining gold from very low-grade ores, that, in some cases, contain an average of less than one quarter of an ounce of gold distributed throughout a ton of ore! At the present time there are about twenty-five cyanide plants in this country, and over forty in the Transvaal, where the process has received its greatest development. Although the fact that cyanide of potassium would dissolve gold quite readily was known long ago, having been employed by Faraday in his experiments with thin films of transparent gold, and used very extensively in the making of solutions of gold for electroplating baths during fifty years past, the practical application of the solvent to obtaining gold from low-grade ores is less than ten years old. In Utah there is a dry bed of an ancient lake, the floor of which may be said to be carpeted with gold; according to a recent report this bed of limestone, eight miles by ten, varying from twenty to forty feet in thickness, and containing gold in proportion running from six to twenty dollars per ton, is an "ideal ore" for treatment by the cyanide process. A number of cyanide mills are now working the deposit, all paying dividends, and it is said that the only limit to output is the capacity of the mills. It is estimated that there are "5,000,000,000 tons of ore in the district, containing $50,000,000,000 worth of gold!" Although this statement is startling, the estimate is not a wild guess, for the blanket of ore has been cut in many places; hundreds of samples have been taken from different depths, and in all cases the finely distributed gold has been found, apparently having been deposited from solution in a mineral water which formed the lake in prehistoric times. A similar deposit of silver was found in New Mexico about twenty years ago and was christened the "Silver Lake" Mine. This was worked profitably until the great fall in price of silver made the operation a losing one. The "blanket" still contains millions of ounces of silver, and it is probable that cheaper methods of recovering the metal from the ore will be devised whenever the price of silver shall have fallen low enough to enable it to take its place among the so-called "economic" metals, having far wider application in the arts than have the precious metals. At present silver holds an unfortunate place "betwixt and between" the precious and the economic metals. Twenty years ago aluminum was more valuable than silver is to-day, and its production was correspondingly limited. Last year the price was reduced to a point which so widely extended its use that the production increased from 1,900 pounds in 1888 to more than 5,000,000 in 1898. Although the gold deposit in the Camp Floyd district in Utah already alluded to may actually contain several billions of dollars' worth of gold, it will cost some billions of dollars' worth of labor and capital to recover the precious metal and will consume much time in the process; so that there is little reason to fear that gold will become so plentiful on account of this discovery that it will cease to be regarded as a precious metal. About forty years ago the assayers of the United States Mint announced that the clay underlying the city of Philadelphia contained more gold than had been brought from California and Australia, and this remarkable statement has never been disproved or even questioned. The gold, however, still remains locked fast in the clay, and the value of the precious metal has not yet fallen in consequence of the announcement of this old discovery. At that time the idea of profitably recovering gold from low-grade ores had not been born, and it is an interesting fact to note that in California gold is now being obtained from clay (by hydraulic washing methods) in which there is but little more than the average proportion of gold to the ton that the assayers found in the clay under the streets of Philadelphia. This does not prove, however, that it will now pay to excavate under the streets of the Quaker City, and undermine the buildings in order to wash out this gold, and until Philadelphia shall be provided with a far more copious water supply the most sanguine or suave promoter of great undertakings would find it impossible to obtain subscriptions to any scheme to recover this fugitive gold, or even, perhaps, difficult to give away shares of stock to influential individuals either in or out of councils. An impression has prevailed that the production of gold in South Africa attained its maximum point in 1897, and that thenceforth the animal output would be smaller. On account of this fear the "Kaffirs" (South African gold-mining stocks) suffered a decline in the London stock market some months ago, but the statistics showed that the output during the first half of 1898 was larger than in the previous half year, and in the latter months of the year the increase was even more pronounced. In an address given before the Mining and Metallurgical Section of the Franklin Institute on Mining and Minting of Gold and Silver in November last, the writer said that the production of gold in South Africa in 1898 would not fall far short of $70,000,000, and would probably be nearer $80,000,000. The estimate of the Director of the Mint fixes the amount almost at the latter figure. The United States, in spite of the considerable increase over 1897, takes second place as a world's producer of gold, Africa having contributed in 1898 an amount equal to that of the United States and Canada (including the Klondike) combined. The startling announcements of discoveries of virgin gold in the Klondike and of rich placer gold deposits in other localities have had little to do with the enormous increase in production of gold in the world in recent years, though formerly such discoveries constituted the main source of supply of the precious metal. Digging for nuggets is a lottery pure and simple, in which a few prizes are obtained and many losses are suffered. It is said that for every dollar in gold taken out of the Klondike to date, two dollars have been carried in, and this is perhaps a conservative estimate. In fact, it is easy to prove by figures, if the value of labor be counted even at the lowest wage rate, say one dollar per diem, that far more money has been lost by the many gold-seekers than has been gained by the few fortunate ones in this twentieth-century search for the golden fleece. The business of extracting gold from low-grade ores by scientific methods on a large scale, where the precious metal is evenly distributed throughout the matrix or gangue, is a legitimate field for the investment of capital, because the element of chance is reduced to a minimum, and even may be eliminated altogether. The margin of profit per ton of ore is not large as a rule in these operations, and thus the stability of value of the product is assured, whatever the output may be. "TREASURY DEPARTMENT, BUREAU OF THE MINT, "WASHINGTON, D. C., _February 1, 1899_. "_Alexander E. Outerbridge, Jr., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania._ "SIR: In answer to the inquiries in your letter of January 31st, I take pleasure in sending you such information on the production of gold in the principal gold-producing countries in 1898 as is at this early day available, comparing it with the gold output of the same countries in 1897. And first of the United States: "Inclosed you will find an estimate made by the agents of the bureau of the gold yield of the several States and Territories in 1898. The aggregate outturn was $65,782,667. It must be clearly borne in mind that this is only an _estimate_, not the ascertained actual production. In 1897 the gold product of the United States was $57,363,000. Assuming the estimate of the gold product of the United States in 1898 to be correct, there was an increase in the latter year over the gold yield of 1897, in round numbers, of $8,420,000. "The gold product of the Witwatersrand in 1898 was 4,295,602 ounces crude, and of the whole of the South African Republic 4,555,009 ounces crude, representing a value of $79,801,025. "As the gold product of the Transvaal in 1897 was $57,633,861, the increase in 1898 was $22,167,164. The figures here given are those published in all the leading papers interested in such matters in England and on the European continent. They are not, any more than the figures given below, official to the Bureau of the Mint. "I have not yet seen any figures of the total gold product of Australia in 1898, but the output of five out of the seven colonies has been published. The figures are as follows: -------------------------+----------------+---------------- | 1897. | 1898. | Ounces crude. | Ounces crude. -------------------------+----------------+---------------- New South Wales | 292,217 | 341,722 New Zealand | 251,645 | 280,176 Queensland | 805,928 | 918,100 Victoria | 812,765 | 837,258 West Australia | 674,994 | 1,050,183 +----------------+---------------- Total | 2,837,549 | 3,527,439 | | 2,837,549 | +---------------- | | 689,890 -------------------------+----------------+---------------- "There was an increase in the gold product of these five colonies of $13,107,910, the ounce crude averaging about $19 in value. The total gold product of Australia in 1898 was, as I estimate it, about $67,792,000. In 1897 it was $55,684,182. As yet no figures of the gold output of the two Australian colonies--Tasmania and South Australia--have come under my observation. "Persons not connected with the bureau, but whose opinions are entitled to respect, have estimated the increase in India's gold output in 1898 at about $500,000, and in that of Canada (including the Klondike) at $8,000,000. I have thus far no data on which to predicate an increase or decrease in the gold yield of Russia. The product of these last-mentioned countries in 1897 was: India $7,247,500 Canada 6,027,100 Russia 23,245,700 "The increase in the principal countries mentioned above, of their gold product in 1898 over 1897, reduced to a table, gives a total of $52,195,000, as follows: United States $8,420,000 South African Republic 22,167,000 Australia 13,108,000 Canada 8,000,000 India 500,000 ----------- Total $52,195,000 "The world's product in 1897 was $237,504,800. In 1898 it will probably not be less than $289,699,800. My opinion is that it will be somewhere between $290,000,000 and $300,000,000. "If any further information reaches me within a week or two, I shall be glad to communicate it to you. "Respectfully yours, "GEORGE E. ROBERTS, _Director of the Mint_." _Agents' Estimate, January 1st, of the Production of Gold in the United States for 1898._ States and Territories. Gold. Alaska $2,039,930 Arizona 3,185,490 California 14,883,721 Colorado 24,500,000 Idaho 2,273,902 Michigan 65,000 Montana 5,209,302 Nevada 2,959,731 New Mexico 360,000 Oregon 1,343,669 South Dakota 5,841,406 Texas 7,500 Utah 2,170,543 Washington 599,483 Wyoming 5,168 South Appalachian States 337,832 ----------- Total $65,782,677 THE CALIFORNIA PENAL SYSTEM. BY CHARLES HOWARD SHINN. Theoretically every new commonwealth in organizing its institutions can measurably avoid the errors of older communities, and can venture upon promising experiments elsewhere untried. In practice, however, new States are usually compelled to face unforeseen difficulties, and although their various departments gain something in flexibility, they lose in systematic organization. They have the faults as well as the virtues of the pioneer. Penology, like every other department of human thought, is a battlefield of opposing principles. But I know of nothing in print more inspiring to the officers of the State engaged in prison and reform work than Herbert Spencer's Essay on Prison Ethics. It is likely that many of the people who should read it are not aware of its value and interest to themselves. Beginning at the foundations, Mr. Spencer makes a lucid exposition of the necessity of "a perpetual readjustment of the compromise between the ideal and the practicable in social arrangements." As he points out, gigantic errors are always made when abstract ethics are ignored. If society has the right of self-protection, it has, as Mr. Spencer asserts, the right to coerce a criminal. It has authority to demand restitution as far as possible, and to restrict the action of the offender as much as is needful to prevent further aggressions. Beyond this point absolute morality countenances no restraint and no punishment. The criminal does not lose all his social rights, but only such portion of those rights as can not be left him without danger to the welfare of the community. But absolute morality also requires that while living in durance the offender must continue to maintain himself. It is as much his business to earn his own living as it was before. All that he can rightfully ask of society is that he be given an opportunity to work, and to exchange the products of his labor for the necessaries of life. He has no right to eat the bread of idleness, and to still further tax the community against which he has committed an aggression. "On this self-maintenance equity sternly insists." If he is supported by the taxpayers the breach between himself and the true social order is indefinitely widened. Such principles as these could easily have been made a fundamental part of the California prison system when the State was organized, for the famous Code of Reform and Prison Discipline, prepared about 1826 by a New Orleans lawyer, Edward Livingston, was well known to some of the ablest men of pioneer California, and a strong effort was made to obtain its adoption in complete form. That remarkable code known as the Livingston system agrees with the Spencerian principles of ethics, and has been a source of inspiration for the most advanced penal legislation of recent years. Louisiana adopted it only in part, but Belgium has the Livingston code in its entirety. California, suffering under difficult local conditions, took a course in the liberal pioneer days that has for a time rendered progress along the lines of modern development extremely difficult. [Illustration: WARDEN W. E. HALE, of San Quentin.] California is a large and populous State, many portions of which are thinly settled and hard to reach. In early days it had many Spanish and Mexican outlaws, and became a refuge for criminals from all parts of the world. When the State was organized, money was extremely abundant, and every one had golden dreams. The idea of self-supporting prisons seemed absurd, not only because the rich young State seemed capable of supporting any expense, but also because no manufactures were yet established, and the most active penologist would have found it hard to find suitable employment for prisoners. As time went on, the very strong labor unions of California, aided by many newspapers and politicians, accepted the principle that every dollar a convict earned was taken from some citizen, and that the State was bound to support its criminals in idleness. Numbers of good and earnest men in the service of the State as prison commissioners, wardens, and other officials studying methods elsewhere and mindful of local conditions, have made untiring efforts to stir the public conscience, and to gain recognition of a criminal's right to earn his own living by productive labor. As long ago as 1872 Hon. E. T. Crane, of Alameda County, chairman of a joint Assembly and Senate committee, made an excellent and progressive report on prison reforms. Something has been gained since then, and, though working under adverse conditions, the prisons have been excellently managed. But these results are due to individuals, not to the system, nor to the well-meant but often injurious enactments of legislatures meeting biennially for only sixty days. Under the system of biennial State appropriations, nearly all institutions suffer at times from mistaken kindness, and at other times from undue parsimony. Since there is no general supervising board for the two State prisons and the two State reform schools, and no settled ratio of appropriation based upon the number of inmates, the friends of each institution naturally do their best to obtain as large appropriations as possible from each new legislature. Hence arise special visiting committees and combinations between legislators from different parts of the State to "take care of" institutions whose regular annual income should not be dependent in the least upon politics. The appropriations made by the last two legislatures for all purposes connected with prisons and reform schools, including salaries of officials, are shown in the following table: _State Appropriations from July 1, 1895, to July 1, 1899 (Forty-seventh to Fiftieth Fiscal Years, inclusive)._ ----------------------------+----------------+--------------- NAME OF INSTITUTION. | Sum granted. |Average yearly | | grants. ----------------------------+----------------+--------------- San Quentin Prison | $615,153.40 | $153,788.35 Folsom Prison | 488,000.00 | 109,500.00 Preston School of Industry | 237,000.00 | 59,250.00 Whittier State School | 403,000.00 | 100,750.00 Transportation of prisoners | 150,000.00 | 37,500.00 +----------------+-------------- Totals | $1,848,153.40 | $460,988.35 ----------------------------+----------------+-------------- Some small appropriations for improvements are necessarily included in these totals, but nothing more than may be expected every year or two. It is proper to rate the average annual expense of these institutions at nearly half a million dollars, nor can this sum be materially reduced until the State accepts the fundamental principle that prisons should be made nearly or quite self-supporting. San Quentin was once managed to some extent on the contract system. Furniture-makers and other manufacturers paid half a dollar a day for each convict employed, and at one time as many as eight hundred men were thus utilized, giving the prison an income of twenty-four hundred dollars a week. The system was so violently attacked by labor unions that it was finally abandoned, and now I am told that convict-made furniture, stoves, and other articles such as were formerly made at San Quentin are brought to California from Joliet, Illinois, and other places by the carload. Having abandoned the contract system, the State decided to make jute bags, chiefly for grain, and to sell them as nearly as possible at cost direct to the consumers, so as to help the agricultural classes. Machinery costing $400,000 was obtained in England, and after many difficulties a factory was established at San Quentin. The price of raw material fluctuates greatly, and the mill has sometimes lost money, sometimes made a somewhat nominal profit. During the fiscal year ending June 30, 1891, for instance, 2,574,254 pounds of goods were manufactured at a total operating expense of $160,684.07, and were sold at a price which nominally gave $40,275.07 profit. But no sinking fund was allowed for, to cover wear and tear of machinery, nor did the operating expenses include even the maintenance of the convicts while at work. The following fiscal year the profit estimated in the same way was $39,293.18. During the fiscal year 1893-'94 the loss on the jute mill was $14,660.22; in 1894-'95 there was a profit of $6,670.56; and in 1895-'96 a loss of $12,288.45. In five years, therefore, there was nominally a profit of about $60,000 in this department, but since neither interest, sinking fund, nor maintenance of the laborers is included among the expenses, the system can be looked upon only as a means of giving needed exercise to the prisoners and cheap grain sacks to the farmers. Financially it is a burden to the taxpayers. The old contract system had its drawbacks, but it at least afforded a profit, and gave convicts a chance of learning something about certain trades at which they could perhaps work when released; the jute mill not only offers no such opportunity, but is in other ways peculiarly unfit for modern prison requirements, since all operations in such mills can be stopped or delayed by the misbehavior of a few operatives. Far better are industries wherein small groups or individuals are engaged in various separate minor operations. Besides this, the sacks made by prison labor will probably have only local uses hereafter, because of a recent act of Parliament which is held to prevent wheat shipments in such sacks. The Folsom Prison owns a magnificent water power and enormous quarries of granite. Between 1888 and 1894 convict labor amounting to 683,555 days were expended upon a dam, canal, and powerhouse, and over 2,000 horse power can already be used. About 250 horse power is now utilized by the prison for electric lights, ice manufacture, and other purposes. The quarries are being worked to some extent, and crushed rock for roads is sold at cost or nearly so. There is a farm that supplies many articles at less cost than if purchased in the market. At Folsom, as at San Quentin, the authorities do all in their power to economize, and to utilize convict labor, but the policy of the State prevents definite progress. Meanwhile the reports of the prison directors and wardens and the messages of Governors have urged in the strongest terms a change. The biennial report of 1892-'93 and 1893-'94 says respecting the great Folsom water power: "If we can use this power solely with regard to profitable results to the State, we can return each year a surplus into the State treasury. We do not think that the State should refrain from working its convicts or utilizing its advantages because it may have some effect upon other businesses. All over the United States prisoners are engaged in manufacturing, and our investigations lead us to believe that the effect of prison competition, so called, is greatly overestimated." [Illustration: FOLSOM STATE PRISON.] The biennial report of 1894-'95 and 1895-'96 returns to the subject, states that the jute mills can not be a success under the restrictions of the present law, and urges that they should be run on a business basis, for a profit. It continues, "One source of profit would be to make use of the granite owned by the State" (at Folsom). It suggests a consolidation of the two prisons at Folsom, where, with prison labor and free power, and granite on the ground, a model prison could be constructed. Warden Aull, of Folsom Prison, in discussing the subject in 1896, said that for nine years the improvements there have employed the convicts, but now some new scheme must be devised. "The convicts must be kept at work. Every consideration of discipline, economy, reformation, and health demands this." But he believes that it will not pay the State to make shoes, blankets, clothing, brooms, tinware, etc. (as has been suggested at various times) for the eight thousand inmates of our State institutions. There are over two thousand convicts at Folsom and San Quentin. Only a small part of these, he says, could be utilized in making goods for State institutions, nor would there be any profit unless manufacturing was on a large scale for the outside markets as well. The experiment that New York is making will be watched with much interest here. The California labor unions recently adopted resolutions favoring "the quarrying of stone by convict labor, and the placing it upon market undressed at a low figure, in order to give employment to stone-cutters, stone-masons, and others employed on buildings." The State rock-crushing plant, if kept running, will utilize the labor of about two hundred and fifty convicts. Any advance beyond this point means open war with all the labor unions. Evidently the time when the prisons of California are to be entirely self-supporting is still remote, and the public as well as the union need much more education upon the subject. Some reduction of expenses, together with any utilization of convict labor that indirectly benefits a few classes, is all that can be hoped for at present, but ultimately the reformation of the criminal by making him capable of self-support as well as anxious to live in peace with society, will be recognized as the aim of wise penal legislation. There is no doubt but that many profitable industries can be found, as yet unnaturalized in California, and therefore coming only incidentally into competition with existing industries, but well adapted to prison labor. One of these industries is the growth and preparation of osier willows of many species, and their manufacture into many useful forms, especially into baskets for fruit pickers and for wine makers. Another possible industry is the growth and preparation of various semitropic species of grasses and fiber plants, from which hat materials, mattings, the baskets used in olive-oil manufacture and a multitude of other articles can be made. The sale of crushed rock at Folsom should, of course, be at a price which at least pays for the sustenance of the convicts employed. The enormous water power of the prison should ultimately be fully utilized for manufacturing purposes. Let us now turn to a consideration more in detail of the separate prisons, and to a brighter side--that which concerns the men who are doing the best they can with a bad system. San Quentin, the oldest of the two, has been for six years under the wardenship of an able and attractive man, William E. Hale, formerly Sheriff of Alameda County. Those who have read the wonderfully interesting reports of the National Prison Convention are familiar with his methods and views. The report for 1895 (Denver meeting) shows that Warden Hale, in the breadth and sanity of his views, easily takes rank among the best wardens of the country. He thoroughly understands California and the Californians, and while progressive has never attempted the impossible. In his various reports and addresses he especially urges more industrial schools, better care of children, and more kindergartens, such as those established in San Francisco by the late Sarah B. Cooper. And, indeed, who can read Kate Douglas Wiggin's story of Patsy without recognizing the value of kindergartens in the prevention of crime? The San Francisco police once traced the careers of nine thousand kindergarten pupils, and found that not one had ever become a law-breaker. Last summer San Quentin was the scene of an "epidemic of noise" on the part of many of its inmates. Some of the newspaper accounts of the affair were painfully exaggerated, and the prison management in consequence was severely criticised. The fact is that the outbreak was quelled rapidly and effectually, without outside help, with only a few days' interruption of work on the jute mill, and without injury to any person. A hose was simply turned into the noisy cells until their inmates were subdued. There have been very few escapes in the history of the prison, and none in recent years. Its situation, on the extreme eastern end of a rocky peninsula of Marin County, projecting into the bay of San Francisco, is extremely well chosen for safety and isolation. The State owns a large tract here, but it is very poor soil, and much of its surface clay has been stripped for brick-making, so that no income from it is possible unless more bricks can be made and sold. The prison accommodations are extremely cramped, and large quantities of brick should be used in needed extensions. Many small industries could be carried on here, if permitted, for water carriage to and from San Francisco is very cheap. Heavy manufactures requiring expensive steam power are not justified here. The abandonment of the large State improvements at San Quentin seems contrary to the dictates of economy. Equally unwise is the suggestion that it be made a prison to which only the most dangerous classes of criminals should be sent. On the other hand, Folsom, with its quarries and water power, seems fitted for a receiving prison, where all convicts, without exception, should be placed on indeterminate sentences at hard labor, and from which, on good behavior, on the credit system, they might be removed by the prison directors to San Quentin, there to work at more varied but no less self-supporting trades. The ponderous jute-mill machinery should all be transferred to Folsom, where power is now running to waste. At San Quentin, first, the State should adopt more advanced reformatory methods. Official statistics of the two prisons contain many interesting features. In mere numbers the increase during the past two decades has not kept pace with the increase in the State's population. San Quentin at present usually contains about fourteen hundred and Folsom about nine hundred, but an increase equal to the gain in population would give them three thousand instead of twenty-three hundred. Even during the so-called hard times of recent years there has been no marked additions to the criminal classes in California, and the two great strikes--that of the ironworkers and that of the railroad brakemen and firemen--led to surprisingly few violations of the laws. Close observers say that there has been a marked increase during the past decade in the number of tramps, and that petty criminals have increased everywhere. But there are no statistics of the county and township jails. It seems certain that many villages and small towns, even where incorporated, have increasing trouble with gangs of hoodlums who are rapidly fitting themselves for State prisons. The reform schools have been largely recruited from this semi-criminal element, but stronger laws, swifter punishment, more firmness in dealing with young offenders, and, in brief, a higher grade of public sentiment on the part of citizens of small towns is evidently necessary. According to recent discussions in the New York Evening Post, the same sort of thing occurs in staid New England, and there, as here, it is one of the most serious problems of the times. From such a class of idle and vicious boys the prisons will hereafter be recruited, rather than from newcomers. The nativity tables of both prisons show that the number of California-born convicts ranges in recent years from eighteen per cent in 1890 to nearly twenty-five per cent in 1895-'96. In that year in San Quentin, out of 819 American-born convicts, 314 were born in California, 68 in New York, 44 in Pennsylvania, 41 in Illinois, 36 in Ohio, and 35 each in Massachusetts and Missouri. Oregon sends 12, Arizona 10; Washington and Nevada are represented by only one apiece. The Southern States, excepting Kentucky and Virginia, send very few. Something the same proportion throughout holds at Folsom, and fairly indicates the States from which the population of California is chiefly drawn. The total of American nativity at San Quentin is sixty-four per cent; at Folsom, as last reported, it was about sixty-five per cent. Of the foreign born (thirty-six per cent at San Quentin), 99 out of 481 were Irish, 82 were Chinese, 56 were German, 49 were Mexican, and 44 were English. No one doubts that the laws are strictly enforced against the Chinese and the Mexicans (meaning Spanish-Californians); the other classes have votes and influence, and often have better chances for avoiding punishment for misdeeds. Japan contributes only one convict to San Quentin and two to Folsom. The Chinese as a rule go to prison for assaults upon each other ("highbinding"), for gambling, or similar offenses, but seldom for crimes against Americans. The Mexicans generally come to grief from an old-time _penchant_ for other people's horses, or from drunken "cutting scrapes." A racial classification attempted at Folsom showed that out of 905 convicts 704 were Caucasian, 89 Indian and Mexican, 62 Mongolian, and 50 negroid. I do not find this elsewhere, so it may stand alone as merely one year's observations. Of much more importance are the statistics of illiteracy, kept for a term of years. Warden Hale reports in 1896 that out of 1,287 prisoners, 120 can neither read nor write, 220 can read but can not write, and 947 can both read and write. Of course, many who are rated in the third class read and write very poorly, and a careful classification in terms of the public-school system is essential to clearness. Warden Aull, at Folsom, reports that out of 905 convicts, 6 are college men, 81 are from private schools, 53 from both public and private schools, 582 have attended public schools only, and 147 are illiterate, while the remaining 36 call themselves "self-educated." According to the evidence of the wardens, no full graduate of any American university has ever been an inmate of either prison. The so-called college men were men who had spent some time at a college of one kind or another. So-called professors appear among the convicts, but I have been unable to discover that any professor in an institution of standing has been at either San Quentin or Folsom since its establishment. The preceding statistics of illiteracy are defective, but some additional light can be had from the tables upon occupations. Among 905 prisoners at Folsom, 96 occupations were represented. In round numbers, thirty-four per cent were mechanics, twenty-nine per cent were rated as laborers, twenty per cent were in business, and seven per cent were agriculturists. But a closer analysis of the statistics on this point shows that nearly fifty-seven per cent of the entire number came from the following occupations: acrobat, barber, bar-tender, butler, cook, gardener, hackman, hostler, laborer, laundryman, mill-hand, miner, nurse, sailor, vaquero, and "no occupation" (22). The classification of crimes is very complete in all prison statistics, and usually follows the legal phraseology. Nearly all come under three great divisions--crimes against property, crimes of anger, and crimes which arise from a perverted sexuality. From year to year the proportion in these great divisions varies but little. In 1894 out of 1,287 convicts, 796 were sentenced for crimes against property, 358 of which were for burglary, 170 for grand larceny, and 39 for forgery; there were 343 commitments for assaults and murder, 188 of which were for murder in either the first or the second degree; lastly, there were 85 commitments for rape and other sex crimes. This was a typical year, and will serve to illustrate for all and at both prisons. The terms of imprisonment are long: out of 1,300 men in one annual report, 143 were for life, and 392 for ten years or more. Over 300 prisoners had served more than one term, and some were even serving their eighth term. Some at Folsom have reached their twelfth term. The ages of the prisoners have ranged from sixteen to eighty-six, but the danger period is evidently between eighteen and forty. All of the prison officers agree respecting the bad physical condition of the convicts. Many of them are weak and ill when they enter the prison; many are the victims of unnamable personal vices. The physicians at San Quentin in 1895 reported 27 cases of scrofula, 30 of syphilis, 22 of epilepsy, 29 of opium habit, 62 of rheumatism, 70 of typhus fever, and 124 of general debility. Medical statistics at Folsom show similar conditions, aggravated by the malarial climate of that locality. The death rate, formerly higher at Folsom than at San Quentin, is now considerably lower, owing to the much better accommodations for the prisoners, and the hard outdoor labor required. In 1896 it was but .79 of one per cent. It is gratifying to observe that the cost of maintenance of the prisoners has been gradually reduced. Nearly thirty years ago legislative committees reported that the cost of running the State's prisons was four or five times as much in proportion to the inmates as that of any other State in the Union, and that the prisoners lived better than the average landowner. More economical methods were gradually adopted, and by 1891 the cost per diem of a convict was 40 cents. This has been still further reduced; at San Quentin to 30.45 cents, and at Folsom to 32.50 cents. There will always be outside criticisms of the food supplied as "too good for convicts," but it is merely that of ordinary field laborers, with much less variety. Under California conditions it could not well be made cheaper. If the food statistics of the prisons were so compiled as to separate the butter, olives, raisins, canned fruit, etc., properly used on the tables of officers and wardens, from the articles purchased for the prisoners, much misapprehension would be prevented. As long as the State pays the entire expense bill, however, there will be a natural restiveness on the part of the taxpayers; the prison management, no matter how careful it is, must suffer for the sins of the system. The present directors and wardens are intelligent and honest men, who could put the prisons on a self-supporting basis if they had the authority and the necessary means for the plant required. A comparatively small amount of manufactures would pay the daily maintenance of the prisoners, and thus render the management much less subject to public criticism. This article is already as long as seems desirable, and I must close without describing the California reform schools, which are comparatively new, but have attracted much attention. At some future time I may have an opportunity to take up that subject. THE SCIENTIFIC EXPERT AND THE BERING SEA CONTROVERSY. BY GEORGE A. CLARK. In the November number of the Popular Science Monthly for 1897, Dr. Thomas C. Mendenhall reviews at some length the workings of the Bering Sea Commission of 1892. Dr. Mendenhall was himself a member of this commission, and his account of its inside history is interesting and instructive as throwing light upon the after-work of the Paris Tribunal of Arbitration for which it was to prepare the natural-history data. Dr. Mendenhall naturally finds little to commend in the work of his colleagues, the British experts, but he does not stop there, and proceeds to generalize in an uncomplimentary way regarding scientific experts as a class. For example, he lays down the following just and admirable rule for scientific investigation: "It should be commenced with no preconceived notions of how it is to come out, and judgment should wait upon facts," and then continues to say: "Justice to the man of science obliges the admission that, take him in his laboratory or library, with no end in view except that of getting at the truth, and he generally lives fairly up to this high standard; but transform him by the magic of a handsome retainer, or any other incentive, into a scientific expert, and he is a horse of another color." It is not the purpose of this article to argue the cause of the man of science, or to say whether or not this arraignment is just. It is the intention merely to bring into contrast with the notable example of failure which Dr. Mendenhall cites, an equally notable example of success on the part of the scientific expert. If I mistake not, this simple comparison will be all the vindication the man of science needs. To understand the full force of Dr. Mendenhall's article, it must be remembered that it appeared on the very eve of the meeting of a second Bering Sea Commission called to consider the selfsame issues which occupied the attention of the commission of 1892. The article therefore stands as a prediction of failure for the new commission. Nor does Dr. Mendenhall leave his meaning obscure in this regard. He says, "It is difficult to see what good will come from further discussions, investigations, or declarations"; and his conclusion is, "It will be impossible to know absolutely which group of scientific experts (American or British) was right in regard to pelagic sealing," this last subject being the rock on which the commission of 1892 split. It is not necessary here to go into the details of this first commission. These are given in Dr. Mendenhall's article. Two things only are essential to bring this meeting into contrast with the one of 1897. These are the instructions under which it was organized and its final report. Both are brief. The first is comprehended in the following statement, quoted from the Treaty of Arbitration of 1892: "Each Government shall appoint two commissioners to investigate conjointly with the commissioners of the other Government all facts having relation to seal life in Bering Sea, and the necessary measures for its protection and preservation." The commissioners duly visited the fur-seal islands in Bering Sea, made their investigations, and were called together at Washington to deliberate upon the results obtained, and to prepare a joint report for the guidance of the Tribunal of Arbitration then about to convene at Paris. With Dr. Mendenhall was associated, on behalf of the United States, Dr. C. Hart Merriam. Great Britain was represented by Sir George Baden-Powell and Dr. George M. Dawson. The commission began its labors on the 8th of February, and completed them on the 4th of March following. Its final report, shorn of verbiage, consists of the following colorless statement: "We find that since the Alaska purchase a marked diminution in the numbers of the seals on and habitually resorting to the Pribilof Islands has taken place; that it is cumulative in effect, and that it is the result of excessive killing by man." One half of the work set for the commission--namely, measures for protection--was left wholly untouched. In view of this meager and unsatisfactory result, it is perhaps not to be wondered at that Dr. Mendenhall should grow skeptical of the value of expert scientific evidence. But had he sought a cause of the failure of 1892 he might easily have found one more rational than the alleged "handsome retainer," or other "incentive." It is manifestly true that the man of science can legitimately appear as an "expert" only when his evidence is desired on some line along which he has done work. An invertebrate morphologist is not an expert in electricity; nor a physicist in the habits of pinnipeds. One only of the four gentlemen, called upon in 1892 without their own consent to act as experts, had even a passing knowledge of the life history of marine mammals. Dr. Mendenhall was a physicist, Dr. Dawson a geologist, and Sir Baden-Powell something of a sportsman. Dr. Merriam alone, a mammalogist of the first rank, was a scientific expert in any proper sense. Moreover, the investigations conducted by the two commissions were, from a scientific point of view, of the nature of a farce. Less than two weeks were spent upon the islands, and that at a date in the season least favorable of all for observations. This meant that the greater part of their information was got second-hand by the commissioners. In marked contrast to the findings of the joint meeting is the individual report of the American commission, prepared largely by Dr. Merriam. This stands out as a notable contribution to the subject of which it treats. Though largely a compilation, so well was the work of sifting and weighing evidence done, that not a single statement of fact in it has proved fallacious, and the more exhaustive investigations of 1896 and 1897 corroborate its conclusions in every particular. This was the work of the true "scientific expert," and he can ask no better vindication. The joint commission contained "experts" of another sort, and its report was necessarily different. The second Bering Sea Commission came into existence in much the same way as the first. An agreement was reached in 1896 between the two nations whereby the entire fur-seal question should become the subject of a new investigation. This agreement was the outgrowth of dissatisfaction on the part of the United States with the workings of the regulations of the Paris award. The new investigation was begun at once and extended through the seasons of 1896 and 1897, and again the experts were called together at Washington to agree, if possible, on a joint statement of fact. The scope of the investigation and the object of the joint meeting are succinctly stated in the following words quoted in the preamble of the commission's report: "To arrive, if possible, at correct conclusions respecting the numbers, conditions, and habits of the seals frequenting the Pribilof Islands at the present time as compared with the several seasons previous and subsequent to the Paris award." In the commission of 1897 the United States were represented by Dr. David S. Jordan and Hon. Charles S. Hamlin; Great Britain, by Prof. D'Arcy W. Thompson and Mr. James M. Macoun. It convened on the 10th of November and concluded its labors on the 17th, reaching a full and satisfactory agreement. It will best serve our purpose to give the final report of the commission of 1897 in full. Two reasons make this appropriate: First, the substance of the sixteen concisely worded propositions of which it is made up can scarcely be stated in fewer words than the original. In fact, instead of condensing them, it will be necessary to amplify and explain many of the points made in order to be sure that they are clear to the lay reader. Second, the report has for some reason received practically no notice in the American press, and it is to be feared that the importance of the document has not been fully appreciated by the American public. 1. There is adequate evidence that since the year 1884, and down to the date of the inspection of the rookeries in 1897, the fur-seal herd of the Pribilof Islands, as measured on either the hauling grounds or breeding grounds, has declined in numbers at a rate varying from year to year. This proposition is in effect a restatement of the first clause of the agreement of 1892, but it is much more definitely put. The decline is not made to date vaguely "since the Alaska purchase" (1867), but "since the year 1884." This latter date is significant for a number of things. Prior to it for a period of thirteen years there had been no difficulty in securing the normal quota of 100,000 skins annually. In other words, up to that time the herd had remained in a state of equilibrium, yielding a maximum product. Again, this date marks the advent of pelagic sealing in Bering Sea, and the beginning of that remarkable expansion of the industry which culminated ten years later in 1894. The decline of the herd is thus made synonymous with the rise of pelagic sealing. The real significance of this proposition, however, lies in the fact that the decline is declared to have been continuous to the present time. In other words, it did not stop or even slacken with the season of 1894. In this season, it will be remembered, the regulations of the Paris award, avowedly for the "protection and preservation of the fur-seal herd," went into effect. Translated into direct statement, this proposition is an admission that the regulations have failed of their object. 2. In the absence for the earlier years of actual counts of the rookeries such as have been made in recent years, the best approximate measure of decline available is found in these facts: _a._ About 100,000 male seals of recognized killable age were obtained from the hauling grounds each year from 1871 to 1889. The table of statistics given in Appendix I[39] shows, on the whole, a progressive increase in the number of hauling grounds driven and in the number of drives made, as well as a retardation of the date at which the quota was attained during a number of years prior to 1889. _b._ In the year 1896, 28,964 killable seals were taken after continuing the driving till July 27th, and in 1897 19,189 after continuing the driving till August 11th. We have no reason to believe that during the period 1896 and 1897 a very much larger number of males of recognized killable age could have been taken on the hauling grounds. The reduction between the years 1896 and 1897 in the number of killable seals taken, while an indication of decrease in the breeding herd, can not be taken as an actual measure of such decrease. A number of other factors must be taken into consideration, and the real measure of decrease must be sought in more pertinent statistics, drawn from the breeding rookeries themselves. We have already noted that in that portion of the period, 1871 to 1889, which falls prior to 1884, thirteen years in all, no difficulty was experienced in securing the full quota, and it may be added that this was completed not later than July 20th. A retardation of the date at which the quota can be filled is a direct indication of the degree of exhaustion of the hauling grounds. In marked contrast with these earlier years stand the conditions of 1896 and 1897, when greatly reduced quotas only were obtained, notwithstanding the unusual prolongation of the driving period. The statement here made that the difference between the quotas of 1896 and 1897 is not an actual measure of decline in the breeding herd requires explanation. The quota of any year is dependent upon the birth rate of three years previous, killable seals being males of approximately three years of age. The difference noted, therefore, while not indicative of the actual decrease for the seasons 1896 and 1897, is a direct measure of such decrease for the seasons of 1893 and 1894, when the seals in question were born. That the rate of decline as thus shown was greater in 1893-'94 than in 1896-'97 is explained by the fact that, whereas only 30,000 seals were taken at sea in 1893, 60,000 were taken in 1894; while in 1896 43,000 were taken as against only 25,000 in 1897. In other words, the pelagic catch of 1894 exceeded that of 1893 by one hundred per cent, while that of 1897 fell seventy-two per cent below that of 1896. It is not, therefore, strange that the quota of 1897 should show a reduction of thirty per cent as against one of twelve per cent in the breeding herd for the same year. 3. From these data it is plain that the former yield of the hauling grounds of the Pribilof Islands was from three to five times as great as in the years 1896 and 1897, and the same diminution to one third or one fifth of the former product may be assumed when we include also the results of the hunting at sea. This proposition needs little comment. It is a simple deduction from the conditions of the preceding paragraph. The minimum estimate of former conditions is the lowest possible figure that could be in any way defended. The larger figure is apparently more nearly correct. The quota of 1898, of which we now have the record also, was about 18,000. It is not so stated in this paragraph, but the inference is inevitable that what is thus given as the decline of the "yield of the hauling grounds" is equally the decline of the breeding herd. A breeding herd which yielded without difficulty annually 100,000 killable animals (superfluous males of three years of age) must be reduced to something like one fifth its former size when it is able only with extreme difficulty to yield a quota of 20,000 such animals. 4. The death rate among young fur seals, especially among the pups, is very great. While the loss among the pups prior to their departure from the islands has been found in the past two years to approach twenty per cent of the whole number born, and though the rate of subsequent mortality is unknown, we may gather from the number which return each year that from one half to two thirds have perished before the age of three years--that is to say, the killable age for the males and the breeding age for the females. The maximum and minimum figures here represent a division of opinion. The larger figure of two thirds would even seem to be a conservative estimate. The birth rate of 1897, as we know from close estimate, was approximately 130,000; it must have been greater in 1894, approaching 200,000. From this larger birth rate only about 20,000 males survived (the quota of 1897). There was doubtless a like number of females, the sexes being equal at birth and subject to like causes of natural loss. This gives a total of 40,000 in all, out of a birth rate of 200,000, which survived to the age of three years. This is one fifth, and it is evident that the mortality exceeds rather than falls below the maximum of two thirds. 5. The chief natural causes of death among pups, so far as known at present, are as follows, the importance of each being variable and more or less uncertain: _a._ Ravages of the parasitic worm _Uncinaria_; most destructive on sandy breeding areas and during the period from July 15th to August 20th. _b._ Trampling by fighting bulls or by moving bulls and cows, a source of loss greatest among young pups. _c._ Starvation of pups strayed or separated from their mothers when very young, or whose mothers have died from natural causes. _d._ Ravages of the great killer (_Orca_), known to be fatal to many of the young, and perhaps also to older seals. At a later period drowning in the storms of winter is believed, but not certainly known, to be a cause of death among the older pups. The causes of death here enumerated are natural and inherent in the conditions under which the herd exists. That some of them were not known or fully understood until the investigations of 1896 and 1897 does not make them new or recent in their action. They have been constant factors, acting with greater intensity in the past when the herd was larger and more crowded upon its breeding grounds. Photographs taken in 1891 and 1892 show that the parasitic worm was then doing its deadly work, and more extensively in proportion as the herd was larger. For 1,495 pups dead from this cause counted by us on Tolstoi sand flat in 1896, 4,000 were counted on the same ground by the British commissioner of 1892. Moreover, the bones of innumerable pups on ground already abandoned in that year by the declining herd attest the existence of this cause of death prior to that time. We have no reason to suppose that it has not always preyed upon the herd. Death by trampling must at present be at a minimum on account of the scattered condition of the rookeries. The storms of winter and pelagic enemies must, of course, take toll in proportion to the number of animals. But the significant fact shown by this proposition is that the gain of the herd must be small at best under such a natural death rate. We may suppose these natural losses to have been the checks which in a state of nature prevented the indefinite increase of the herd. When, therefore, to this total loss of from two thirds to four fifths of the entire birth rate before breeding age is attained, we add the tremendous artificial loss through the destruction of gravid and nursing females resulting from pelagic sealing, it is not to be wondered at that the equilibrium was broken and the herd sent on a rapid decline. 6. Counts of certain rookeries, with partial counts and estimates of others, show that the number of breeding females bearing pups on St. Paul and St. George Island was, in 1896 and 1897, between 160,000 and 130,000, more nearly approaching the higher figure in 1896 and the lower in 1897. These figures are based upon counts of all the breeding families on both islands for each season. On certain rookeries the live and dead pups were counted. In this way an average size of family was obtained which was used to complete the census where pups could not be counted. 7. On certain rookeries where pups were counted in both seasons, 16,241 being found in 1896 and 14,318 in 1897, or, applying a count adopted by Professor Thompson, 14,743 in the latter year, there is evident a decrease of nine to twelve per cent within the twelvemonth in question. The count of pups is the most trustworthy measure of numerical variation in the herd. The counts of harems, and especially of cows present, are much inferior in value. The latter counts, however, point in the same direction. The harems on all the rookeries were counted in both seasons. In 1896 there were 4,932; in 1897 there were 4,418, a decrease of 10.41 per cent. The cows actually present on certain rookeries at the height of the season were counted in both seasons. Where 10,198 were found in 1896, 7,307 were found in 1897, a decrease of 28.34 per cent. The important element in these special counts, undertaken with a view to determining the relative condition of the breeding herd for the two seasons, is the count of pups. All other classes of rookery population fluctuate from day to day, but the pups remain constantly on shore and near to the place of birth for the first six weeks of their lives, and it is merely a matter of patience and skill in counting them. Such a count on any rookery is an absolute record of the number of breeding females which has visited it for the season in question. The minimum figure of nine per cent adopted by Professor Thompson is based upon a recount of a single rookery made by himself under conditions less favorable for accuracy than in the case of the official counts, which give the larger figure of twelve per cent, and which were made jointly by representatives of both commissions. 8. It is not easy to apply the various counts in the form of a general average to all the rookeries of the islands. We recognize that a notable decrease has been suffered by the herd during the twelvemonth 1896 to 1897, without attempting, save by setting the above numbers on record, to ascribe to the decrease more precise figures. This is a rather extreme statement of the uncertainty which may be assumed to attach to these figures. The problem is not an easy one at best and its factors are complex. This should always be borne in mind, but not to the extent of doubting the value of the figures. The areas counted were large enough to be fairly typical. The counts were carefully done, and are accurate enough for all practical purposes. The probable error for the 15,000 more or less pups counted would not exceed 500. But as the counting was done in exactly the same manner and by the same persons for the two seasons, such errors as may exist are common to both counts and the relative conditions are unaltered. The figure of twelve per cent, moreover, must be taken as in itself a minimum, since it is the result of a number of individual counts varying in accuracy; and all in a sense underestimates, inasmuch as more animals are always overlooked among the rocks than are counted twice. But the exact percentage of decrease is immaterial. That it has been a "notable" decrease is sufficient, and this is unquestioned. It may be noted in passing that this unequivocal decrease occurs in two seasons during which there was perfect enforcement of the regulations of the Paris award. 9. The methods of driving and killing practiced on the islands, as they have come under our observation during the past two seasons, call for no criticism or objection. An adequate supply of bulls is present on the rookeries; the number of older bachelors rejected in the drives during the period in question is such as to safeguard in the immediate future a similarly adequate supply; the breeding bulls, females, and pups on the breeding grounds are not disturbed; there is no evidence or sign of impairment of virility of males; the operations of driving and killing are conducted skillfully and without inhumanity. It was agreed by the commission of 1892 that "excessive killing by man" was the cause of the decline of the herd. As to the "man" in question the two sets of commissioners differed diametrically. The Americans placed the responsibility with the pelagic sealer; the British, with the lessees through their methods of sealing on land. To any one who is at all familiar with the conspicuous part which the theories of close killing, and especially overdriving, played in the British contention before the Paris Tribunal of Arbitration, this full and frank vindication comes as a refreshing surprise. That it should be agreed to by British scientific experts ought to revive even Dr. Mendenhall's faith. It is true that the statement is carefully limited to the seasons under observation, but neither the principle nor the methods of land killing have been altered within the past half century except in so far as they have been improved. It was an absurd and foolish theory which ascribed to the treatment of the non-breeding and superfluous male life of a herd of polygamous animals responsibility for the decline of its breeding stock, but it served a purpose useful to Canadian interests before the Paris tribunal. It is now forever eliminated from the fur-seal question. 10. The pelagic industry is conducted in an orderly manner, and in a spirit of acquiescence in the limitations imposed by law. This statement is true, though wholly irrelevant to the question of the efficiency of the regulations themselves. Moreover, it stands as an implied impeachment of the active and efficient patrol fleet constantly maintained by the United States and Great Britain for the enforcement of the regulations governing the pelagic industry. For example, there were in 1896 five American and three British vessels engaged in active patrol of the waters of Bering Sea. One would think it a foregone conclusion that the pelagic industry should be law-abiding, whether of its own volition or not. In addition to all this, however, the regulations are as admirably suited to the needs of the pelagic sealer as if he had himself prepared them. There is, therefore, no reasonable incentive to violate them. Viewed in this light, this statement seems ludicrous, but it has a justification not evident at first sight. The British experts demanded this statement as a balm for the wounded feelings of the pelagic sealer, and, such being the fact, the American commissioners assumed that it could do no harm to place it on record that he has conformed to the requirements of the law. But from the American point of view this paragraph has a wider and deeper meaning. We have seen in the opening paragraph that the decline in the herd has been continuous and uninterrupted during the period of the Paris regulations. It is admitted in paragraph 8 that the decrease for this same period has been a "notable" one. The rate is specified in paragraph 7 as from "nine to twelve per cent" during two years when the regulations were rigidly enforced. It only requires the climax of paragraph 10, asserting the perfect observance of the regulations, to complete their condemnation. 11. Pelagic sealing involves the killing of males and females alike, without discrimination and in proportion as the two sexes coexist in the sea. The reduction of the males effected on the islands causes an enhanced proportion of females to be found in the pelagic catch; hence this proportion, if it vary from no other cause, varies at least with the catch on the islands. In 1895 Mr. A. B. Alexander, on behalf of the Government of the United States, found 62.3 per cent of females in the catch of the Dora Sieward in Bering Sea; and in 1896 Mr. Andrew Halkett, on behalf of the Canadian Government, found 84.2 per cent in the catch of the same schooner in the same sea. There are no doubt instances, especially in the season of migration and in the course of the migrating herds, of catches containing a different proportion of the two sexes. There are two ways and two alone whereby killing by man affects the fur-seal herd--namely, killing on land and killing at sea. Land killing has been vindicated in paragraph 9. We have here the necessary condemnation of pelagic killing expressed in equally full and frank terms. Land killing takes only males and leaves an adequate supply of bulls for breeding purposes; pelagic killing takes males and females alike, the latter sex constituting 62 to 84 out of every 100 killed. It is not a vital matter that the female sex should be found to predominate in the pelagic catch, except in so far as it proves the falsity of the returns made so persistently by the Canadian sealing captain that the sexes are taken in virtually equal proportion at sea. The essential thing is that females are killed at all. That three fourths of all the animals taken at sea (during one season 140,000 animals were so taken) are of this sex only emphasizes the destructive nature of this industry. 12. The large proportion of females in the pelagic catch includes not only adult females that are both nursing and pregnant, but also young seals that are not pregnant and others that have not yet brought forth young, with such also as have recently lost their young through the various causes of natural mortality. This statement is put in the mildest possible form out of consideration for the old-time British contentions that the breeding females did not leave the islands while their young were dependent upon them, and that those taken at sea were "barren." The investigations of 1896 and 1897 proved conclusively that every female of two years old and over taken at sea was pregnant, and that those over two years of age when taken in Bering Sea were in addition nursing, having dependent pups on the islands. The manner of statement seems to imply an equality in importance between "young" seals and "adults." As females are never killed on land, they are naturally of all ages when found at sea, and the young animals (yearlings and two-year-olds) are necessarily vastly in the minority. 13. The polygamous habit of the animal, coupled with an equal birth rate of the two sexes, permits a large number of males to be removed with impunity from the herd, while, as with other animals, any similar abstraction of females checks or lessens the herd's increase, or, when carried further, brings about an actual diminution of the herd. It is equally plain that a certain number of females may be killed without involving the actual diminution of the herd, if the number killed does not exceed the annual increment of the breeding herd, taking into consideration the annual losses by death through old age and through incidents of the sea. This paragraph is really supplementary to 9 and 11. Neither the methods nor yet the principle of land killing are at fault. The animal being polygamous, a part of its male life can be removed with impunity. On the other hand, the killing of females leads to disastrous results. The concluding sentence is a concession to diplomacy. It is true that a certain number of females may be killed without producing actual diminution. If pelagic sealing were stopped to-day the herd would naturally begin to increase. The measure of its increase would be the difference between the natural loss of adult breeders through old age and incidents of the sea, on the one hand, and the yearly accession of young breeders to bear their first pups, on the other. We can closely estimate the latter factor. It was equal, for example, to the quota of 20,000 in 1897, or sixteen and two thirds per cent of the birth rate. The quota was composed of males of approximately three years, and we may assume that a like number of three-year-old females entered the rookeries for the first time in the same season. We have then a gross gain to the breeding herd of sixteen and two thirds per cent. We have no means of exact estimate for the loss of adult females because we do not know the period of life in the female. If, however, we estimate it at thirteen years, which seems to be a conservative figure, the animal would have ten years of breeding life. Then, from old age alone, ten per cent of the adult breeding females must die annually. This leaves a net gain of six and two thirds per cent with accidental factors unaccounted for. The killing of females which does not produce actual diminution must come well within this margin of six and two thirds per cent. It only remains to be stated that the pelagic catch of 1897, which was the smallest on record since 1884, exceeded fourteen per cent. 14. While, whether from a consideration of the birth rate or from an inspection of the visible effects, it is manifest that the take of females in recent years has been so far in excess of the natural increment as to lead to the reduction of the herd in the degree related above, yet the ratio of the pelagic catch of one year to that of the following has fallen off more rapidly than the ratio of the breeding herd of one year to the breeding herd of the next. This paragraph corrects possible erroneous implications which might be drawn from the truism in the preceding paragraph. A certain number of females may be taken, etc., but so many in excess of the safety limit have been taken that the herd has been reduced "in the degree related above"--that is, for 1896-'97, nine to twelve per cent, and for 1884-'97, fifty to eighty per cent. Dr. Mendenhall said: "It will be impossible to know absolutely which group of scientific experts was right (in 1892) in regard to pelagic sealing." The admission made in this paragraph, taken together with other admissions made in paragraphs 11 and 12, effectually disproves this prediction. It ought to be a source of gratification to Dr. Mendenhall and to his colleague, Dr. Merriam, to find it thus clearly proved that they were right and their British associates wrong. The final clause is here again a diplomatic concession to take the sting out of the real admission. The rapid fall in the pelagic catch as compared with the more even decline of the breeding herd is a natural phenomenon. Pelagic sealing not only destroys the herd, but it is necessarily self-destructive because it preys upon its own capital. The more successful it is the sooner it must cease. With the decline of the herd it is itself declining, and the rapidity of its fall proves the nearness of the end. For the years since 1894 the pelagic catch has been 61,000, 56,000, 43,000, and 25,000 respectively. It is a significant fact that in four years, under regulations which permit the pelagic sealer to take all he can get, the product of his industry has fallen to less than one half. 15. In this greater reduction of the pelagic catch, compared with the gradual decrease of the herd, there is a tendency toward equilibrium, or a stage at which the numbers of the breeding herd would neither increase nor decrease. In considering the probable size of the herd in the immediate future, there remains to be estimated the additional factor of decline resulting from reductions in the number of surviving pups, caused by the larger pelagic catch of 1894 and 1895. The two statements in this paragraph are not related. The first is a part of the preceding paragraph and is self-evident. Should the pelagic catch continue to decrease, as it must, it will eventually come within the margin of six and two thirds per cent. It has yet to fall far before this end is reached. Then will come that much-mooted "equilibrium," when the herd will be too insignificant to be worthy of attack--the equilibrium of ruin. There is no comfort in this prospect, either for the pelagic sealer or for the owner of the herd, and it takes no note of the injury which has been accomplished in the past, much less of possible restoration in the future. The equilibrium here suggested is purely a figure of speech, another concession to diplomacy. The final statement of this paragraph is more important. The starvation of pups as a result of the killing of mothers at sea has been a fact strenuously denied from the first by the British side of the fur-seal controversy. After the actual counting of 16,000 of these starved pups in 1896, this position could no longer be maintained. At the same time a specific admission of the fact of starvation and of the destruction of unborn pups was too difficult a matter for the British experts to face. These facts are left to be inferred from the "reductions in surviving pups" here noted and from the admission that "nursing and pregnant females" are taken in the pelagic catch. Stated directly, it is here admitted that on account of "the larger pelagic catch of 1894 and 1895," numbers of pups starved to death on the rookeries or died unborn with their mothers which in the course of Nature should have reached the killable and breeding age. 16. The diminution of the herd is yet far from a stage which involves or threatens the actual extermination of the species, so long as it is protected in its haunts on land. It is not possible during the continuation of the conservative methods at present in force upon the islands, with the further safeguard of the protected zone at sea, that any pelagic killing should accomplish this final end. There is evidence, however, that in its present condition the herd yields an inconsiderable return either to the lessees of the islands or to the owners of the pelagic fleet. The statements of this concluding paragraph must be taken in close connection, and the "ifs" must be carefully noted if they are not to prove very misleading. The opening sentence refers to the biologic extinction of the herd as contrasted with its commercial ruin. The former is as yet far off, the latter is a matter of history, as is admitted in the concluding statement--"an inconsiderable return." This means simply that the herd has ceased to be a commercial factor, and henceforth under present conditions sealing, whether on land or at sea, must be conducted at a loss. This has an important bearing upon the suggested impossibility of bringing about the extinction of the species. It all depends upon whether present conditions are maintained. The breeding islands and the sixty-mile protected zone must be guarded. It cost the United States $175,000 for patrol in 1896. England's expense was less, but still considerable. It is beyond reason that this expensive protection should be continued at a loss or without hope of ultimate restoration of the herd. Remove the protection for a single season and the herd would be practically exterminated. A scattered remnant would doubtless escape to maintain a melancholy equilibrium, or perhaps to recuperate and again attract the cupidity of some adventurous sealing captain, but the herd as such would be at an end. Stated without reference to diplomatic necessities, this concluding paragraph admits two important things: first, that the herd of fur seals resorting to the Pribilof Islands is commercially ruined; second, that its extinction as a species only awaits the abandonment of certain arduous and costly measures of protection now maintained solely in the hope of more adequate protection and the ultimate restoration of the herd. Such was the work of the Conference of Fur-Seal Experts of 1897. The handwriting of diplomacy is mingled with that of science in its findings, but the resulting obscurity affects only minor matters. The important issues of the vexatious Bering Sea controversy are squarely met and finally settled. It is needless to say that there no longer exists a fur-seal question. It is merely a question of how to get rid of the destructive agency of pelagic sealing. This is a matter for diplomacy to adjust. Any odium which may have attached to the "man of science" as a result of the failure of the meeting of 1892 is effectually wiped out, and if the lesson is read aright by the nations, henceforth the scientific expert must be counted an essential factor in the settlement of governmental disputes. FOOTNOTE: [39] This table of statistics need not be quoted here in full. The following section, embracing the ten years prior to 1889 and including 1884, will suffice: -------+------------+---------+-----------+-----------+---------- | | Hauling | | | YEAR. | Date quota | grounds | Number of | Killed on | Killed at | filled. | driven. | drives. | land. | sea. -------+------------+---------+-----------+-----------+---------- 1879 | 16 | 71 | 36 | 110,411 | 8,557 1880 | 17 | 78 | 38 | 105,718 | 8,418 1881 | 20 | 99 | 34 | 105,063 | 10,382 1882 | 20 | 86 | 36 | 99,812 | 15,551 1883 | 19 | 81 | 39 | 79,509 | 16,557 1884 | 21 | 101 | 42 | 105,434 | 16,971 1885 | 27 | 106 | 63 | 105,024 | 23,040 1886 | 26 | 117 | 74 | 104,521 | 28,494 1887 | 24 | 101 | 66 | 105,760 | 30,628 1888 | 27 | 102 | 73 | 103,304 | 26,189 1889 | 81 | 110 | 74 | 102,617 | 29,858 -------+------------+---------+-----------+-----------+---------- * * * * * In a paper on the industrial applications of electro-chemistry, Mr. Thomas Ewan points out as among those that may yet be developed, that it is possible, by compressing sulphur dioxide and air into separate carbon tubes dipping in sulphuric acid, to cause the two gases to combine to form sulphuric acid, and at the same time furnish an electric current. "The alluring prospect," he says, "of obtaining electric energy as a by-product in a chemical works should be a sufficient incentive to efforts to overcome the numerous difficulties in the way." A SCHOOL FOR THE STUDY OF LIFE UNDER THE SEA. (_Naples Aquarium._) BY ELEANOR HODGEN PATTERSON. To go deep down under the sea, in the warm waters of the south, where exist not only the varieties of fish with which we are familiar, but thousands of jewel-like forms of animal life never seen by us, has hitherto been impossible to any but the boldest fishermen and divers. But of late years in the small aquarium at Naples the sea has been brought up, so to speak, upon the earth for us to see these strange creatures as they exist in their homes under the water, as they eat their food, as they love and hate, and prey upon each other. Small as the collection at first seems to be, there is no zoölogical station in the world to compare with it. Probably there never will be again. Because of its advantageous station on the shores of the Mediterranean, where it is claimed the waters which wash Italy and Sicily yield a greater variety of sea life than even tropical waters, and also its comparative accessibility to all countries, the scholars who come here from all over the world find that they are able to study here as they can nowhere else the strange habits of the tiny animals down at the bottom of the sea. There is no superfluous room taken up in the Naples aquarium for the fish that may be studied in aquariums elsewhere. Only the rarest, the strangest, the most curious creatures are here to be seen. But one room of the beautiful building devoted to the zoölogical station, which stands on that street of Naples running along the sea, is shown to the public. One walks into it from the level of the street, and the transition from the light outside to strange semi-darkness is as if one were to suddenly find himself walking upon the bottom of the sea. The light comes only from above, shining through water of many hundreds of cubic feet, on to what seems at first a garden of moving flowers behind tanks of clear glass, which seem, so complete is the illusion, not like glass at all, but water. The visitor walks along dark alleys lined on both sides with these brilliant tanks, and the beautiful sea animals are so close that it seems easy to touch them. It is like being in a narrow, dark theater with the stage all around and about, strangely illuminated, not by footlights, but by a radiance from above. There are about thirty tanks in all, and at the very first of these glass-walled vats we stopped entranced. Behind it were piles of rocks shining in the water, and from every crevice grew what seemed brilliant flowers, but of colors so soft and waxlike that they were almost more lovely than our flowers of earth. "Surely these deep red ones that cover the rocks to the left are a species of aster, and these are cacti, and these, yes, these reddish-brown one are chrysanthemums and nothing else." But even as we spoke we saw the petals of first one, then another, flower wave back and forth, and in and out, with curious curling movements, as none of our flowers do, even in the most various winds, and then from above a long pole was suddenly thrust down into the water, at the end of which was stuck a piece of raw red meat about as large as a walnut. It was the keeper come to feed his strange charges. Again and again were the bits of meat thrust down into the hearts of the sea flowers, and then we discovered with a kind of shock that these asters and cacti and chrysanthemums were not flowers at all, but flesh-eating animals, and that each waving petal was a mouth, by which the creature sucked in the blood of the meat. When all the juice had been extracted from the meat, the many mouths attached to each seeming flower, that had been tightly curled upon the raw flesh, now unfolded again into their petal-like positions in a circle, one over the other, and the meat, now but a tiny ball of dry pulp, slowly sank to the bottom of the tank. What the calyx was like, or whether it had any body at all, we could not see, so entirely hidden was it behind these many waving, armlike mouths. In the next tank several sea horses were swimming merrily in and out of rocks that were covered by a growth of miniature trees. They were smaller than the tiniest hobbyhorse that has ever been seen, as small almost as the toy horses in a "Noah's ark." The resemblance of these small fish, not larger than smelts or minnows, that have come to be known as "sea horses," to real horses is in the head only. The rest of the body tapers off into the ordinary fishlike form. I wondered, as I looked at these small horses of the sea, if it was from them that the old myth of the existence of mermaids arose. "Half fish, half women" were the mermaids, but "half fish, half horses" are these fish. They were lively little creatures, and swam in and out of the tiny forest as if they were playing a game of "tag." What a beautiful little forest it was to play in! The trees had brown trunks about the size of one's finger, and from the top a graceful, palmlike foliage branched out, but the foliage was not in greens, but deep, translucent reds, or coral pinks, or warm browns. While I was admiring one of the little coral pink trees, one of the sea horses swam straight into its foliage, when, to my amazement, and evidently to the amazement of the sea horse also, the foliage instantly disappeared down into the tree trunk, leaving only the brown stem standing. Aghast with surprise at the sudden revelation that this charming foliage, like the petals of the flowers in the last tank, was also a cluster of living suckers, I asked what name they were called by, and heard with disgust the answer "worms." These beautiful, curious creatures only the things we know by the loathsome word "worms!" These sea worms, or annelids, as the scientific scholars call them, build up for themselves the brown tubes that resemble the rough stems of pines or palms, and from the top they send out their worm-like bodies in clusters, where they wave back and forth in the water, to sweep in any food that may be near, always holding themselves in readiness to withdraw into their holes at danger. Whether the brilliant foliage of each tree was but the many tentacles of a single animal emerging from the tube, or whether it was a whole family of worms come up to the top of their home to gaze from the chimney, so to speak, we could not discover. But, strange to say, the grotesque little sea horse seemed to be trying to decide that question for himself, for, after swimming away a moment in fright at this sudden disappearance, he returned and appeared to be peeping down into the tube. The next tank revealed even greater surprise than we had yet seen. Here in the water long white gauze ribbons were waving, as if hung from above, and so transparent that we could see quite through them, almost as if they were composed of the white of an egg. It was only by looking closely that up near the top we could see a tiny black dot, like a pinhead, in each fleecy scarf. This was the head of the animal, or its eye, or mouth, or whatever such a delicate dot might be called. These are of the jellyfish family, and have only lately been added to the aquarium. Owing to the difficulty of procuring such pulplike masses, they are extremely rare specimens, and can be seen nowhere else. Surely nothing more frail, more delicately lovely exists on land or sea, in plant or animal life, than these gauzy living sashes of the sea. But not all the denizens of the tanks are beautiful to look upon. There is a tank near the door of entrance filled with objects so hideous that one starts away from them with horror. These are the octopi, or devilfish. Imagine the ugliest, biggest black spider that you ever saw, and enlarge it to the size of the largest turtle you ever saw, and on the end of each of the spider's legs fasten a wicked-looking mouth, and you can form some idea of how frightful an octopus can be. Several of these monsters were writhing near the glass wall, stretching out their long, boneless arms, and sometimes fastening their suckers upon the glass in the search for food, thus unconsciously showing off the ugliness of their mouths. It was now time for the keeper to come to them in his round of feeding. He put into the tank from above a number of crabs, when suddenly the whole tank seemed filled with octopi. They had been sleeping among the dark rocks, of which they were so much the color that we had not before observed them. The poor little crabs had probably been stunned, or perhaps killed, by the keeper, for they made no resistance when the octopi fastened upon them their long suckers in a death-grasp. The octopi fought with each other over the possession of the crabs, and for some moments there was a terrible waving to and fro of black suckers fully two yards in length. Beside this tank was another of clear water in which were some peaceful cuttlefish. The keeper, for a few coins, stirred these out of their quiet by moving his long stick after them. They swam about in fright for a moment or two, and then we saw them no more, for the clear water had suddenly become a thick black fluid. The cuttlefish had discharged their bags of ink to escape the pursuing enemy. The upper floors of the zoölogical station are seldom shown to visitors, but these are almost more interesting than the tank room below. Here the great scholars who make a life study of these strange inhabitants of the deep have their tables; here the dredgings of the sea are brought by fishermen and divers for them to assort; here sea animals are developed by them from the egg, and even from invisible germs. Each investigator into the strange lower world is furnished with his own aquaria, suited to the special branch he may be studying, for nearly all are interested in a special branch of zoölogy. One man has come a long distance to pursue the study of sponges, and he is furnished with a perfect garden of them, for they are brought up from this part of the Mediterranean in infinite variety. Another student is studying the habits of mollusks, and basins and jars of these and their eggs are near him. There are divers' costumes hanging on the walls in which the _savants_ may themselves descend to the bottom of the sea and study the inhabitants in their native houses. There are laboratories and libraries here, adapted to the most exhaustive study, and a fleet of small boats is also kept exclusively for the use of the zoölogical station. Fishermen constantly bring in baskets filled with what seems to be only wet rubbish, heaps of stones, and worthless bits of pulp. This is examined and assorted by trained eyes, and placed in tanks of water where siphons are constantly pouring fresh sea water, after which the rubbish is quietly left until accustomed to its new quarters. Then cautiously this rubbish begins to move, the stones stir, and the pulp opens into the beautiful colors, the plants, the gauzy scarfs, and the numerous other strange things afterward shown to the public in the aquarium below. Along the walls of these upper rooms are jars wherein are preserved many curious denizens of the sea that have been killed by powerful chemicals, which have surprised the delicate animals before their sensitive tentacles have had time to close, thus preserving to science many rare creatures impossible to keep long in captivity. The great cost of this establishment is maintained in several ways--by the issuing of publications and scientific papers in several languages, by the rents from the desks or tables used by the investigators, and by the unusually large price of admission demanded from the public at the aquarium entrance. In addition to this are the fees from the students who come from afar to study here. A payment of four hundred dollars each gives students the right to study in the Naples zoölogical station for ten months of the year. SCIENCE IN EDUCATION.[40] BY SIR ARCHIBALD GEIKIE, D. C. L., F. R. S. When the history of education during the nineteenth century comes to be written, one of its most striking features will be presented by the rise and growth of science in the general educational arrangements of every civilized country. At the beginning of the century our schools and colleges were still following, with comparatively little change, the methods and subjects of tuition that had been in use from the time of the middle ages. But the extraordinary development of the physical and natural sciences, which has done so much to alter the ordinary conditions of life, has powerfully affected also our system of public instruction. The mediæval circle of studies has been widely recognized not to supply all the mental training needed in the ampler range of modern requirement. Science has, step by step, gained a footing in the strongholds of the older learning. Not without vehement struggle, however, has she been able to intrench herself there. Even now, although her ultimate victory is assured, the warfare is by no means at an end. The jealousy of the older _régime_ and the strenuous, if sometimes blatant, belligerency of the reformers have not yet been pacified; and, from time to time, within our public schools and universities, there may still be heard the growls of opposition and the shouts of conflict. But these sounds are growing fainter. Even the most conservative don hardly ventures nowadays openly to denounce Science and all her works. Grudgingly, it may be, but yet perforce, he has to admit the teaching of modern science to a place among the subjects which the university embraces, and in which it grants degrees. In our public schools a "modern side" has been introduced, and even on the classical side an increasing share of the curriculum is devoted to oral and practical teaching in science. New colleges have been founded in the more important centers of population, for the purpose, more particularly, of enabling the community to obtain a thorough education in modern science. The mainspring of this remarkable educational revolution has, doubtless, been the earnest conviction that the older learning was no longer adequate in the changed and changing conditions of our time; that vast new fields of knowledge, opened up by the increased study of Nature, ought to be included in any scheme of instruction intended to fit men for the struggle of modern life, and that in this newer knowledge much might be found to minister to the highest ends of education. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that utilitarian considerations have not been wholly absent from the minds of the reformers. Science has many and far-reaching practical applications. It has called into existence many new trades and professions, and has greatly modified many of those of older date. In a thousand varied ways it has come into the ordinary affairs of everyday life. Its cultivation has brought innumerable material benefits; its neglect would obviously entail many serious industrial disadvantages, and could not fail to leave us behind in the commercial progress of the nations of the globe. So much have these considerations pressed upon the attention of the public in recent years that, besides all the other educational machinery to which I have referred, technical schools have been established in many towns for the purpose of teaching the theory as well as the practice of various arts and industries, and making artisans understand the nature of the processes with which their trades are concerned. That this educational transformation, which has been advancing during the century, has resulted in great benefit to the community at large can hardly be denied. Besides the obvious material gains, there has been a widening of the whole range and method of our teaching; the old subjects are better, because more scientifically taught, and the new subjects enlist the attention and sympathy of large classes of pupils whom the earlier studies only languidly interested. Nevertheless, it is incumbent on those who have advocated and carried out this change to ask themselves whether it has brought with it no drawbacks. They may be sure that no such extensive reform could possibly be accomplished without defects appearing somewhere. And it is well to look these defects in the face and, as far as may be possible, remove them. In considering how I might best discharge the duty with which I have been honored of addressing the students of Mason College this evening, I have thought that it might not be inappropriate if, as a representative of science, I were to venture to point out some of the drawbacks as well as the advantages of the position which science has attained in our educational system. At the outset no impartial onlooker can fail to notice that the natural reaction against the dominance of the older learning has tended to induce an undervaluing of the benefits which that learning afforded and can still bestow. In this college, indeed, and in other institutions more specially designed for instruction in science, provision has also been made for the teaching of Latin, Greek, and the more important modern languages and literatures. But in such institutions these subjects usually hold only a subordinate place. It can hardly be denied that generally throughout the country, even although the literary side of education still maintains its pre-eminence in our public schools and universities, it is losing ground, and that every year it occupies less of the attention of students of science. The range of studies which the science examinations demand is always widening, while the academic period within which these studies must be crowded undergoes no extension. Those students, therefore, who, whether from necessity or choice, have taken their college education in science, naturally experience no little difficulty in finding time for the absolutely essential subjects required for their degrees. Well may they declare that it is hopeless for them to attempt to engage in anything more, and especially in anything that will not tell directly on their places in the final class lists. With the best will in the world, and with even, sometimes, a bent for literary pursuits, they may believe themselves compelled to devote their whole time and energies to the multifarious exactions of their science curriculum. Such a result of our latest reformation in education may be unavoidable, but it is surely matter for regret. A training in science and scientific methods, admirable as it is in so many ways, fails to supply those humanizing influences which the older learning can so well impart. For the moral stimulus that comes from an association with all that is noblest and best in the literatures of the past, for the culture and taste that spring from prolonged contact with the highest models of literary expression, for the widening of our sympathies and the vivifying of our imagination by the study of history, the teaching of science has no equivalents. Men who have completed their formal education with little or no help from the older learning may be pardoned should they be apt to despise such help and to believe that they can very well dispense with it in the race of life. My first earnest advice to the science students of this college is, not to entertain this belief and to refuse to act on it. Be assured that, in your future career, whatever it may be, you will find in literature a source of solace and refreshment, of strength and encouragement, such as no department of science can give you. There will come times, even to the most enthusiastic among you, when scientific work, in spite of its absorbing interest, grows to be a weariness. At such times as these you will appreciate the value of the literary culture you may have received at school or college. Cherish the literary tastes you have acquired, and devote yourselves sedulously to the further cultivation of them during such intervals of leisure as you may be able to secure. Over and above the pleasure which communion with the best books will bring with it, two reasons of a more utilitarian kind may be given to science students why they should seek this communion. Men who have been too exclusively trained in science, or are too much absorbed in its pursuit, are not always the most agreeable members of society. They are apt to be somewhat angular and professional, contributing little that is interesting to general conversation, save when they get a chance of introducing their own science and its doings. Perhaps the greatest bore I ever met was a man of science, whose mind and training were so wholly mathematical and physical that he seemed unable to look at the simplest subject save in its physical relations, about which he would discourse till he had long exhausted the patience of the auditor whom he detained. There is no more efficacious remedy for this tendency to what is popularly known as "shop" than the breadth and culture of mind that spring from wide reading in ancient and modern literature. The other reason for the advice I offer you is one of which you will hardly, perhaps, appreciate the full force in the present stage of your career. One result of the comparative neglect of the literary side of education by many men of science is conspicuously seen in their literary style. It is true that in our time we have had some eminent scientific workers, who have also been masters of nervous and eloquent English. But it is not less true that the literature of science is burdened with a vast mass of slipshod, ungrammatical, and clumsy writing, wherein sometimes even the meaning of the authors is left in doubt. Let me impress upon you the obvious duty of not increasing this unwieldy burden. Study the best masters of style, and when once you have made up your minds what you want to say, try to express it in the simplest, clearest, and most graceful language you can find. Remember that, while education is the drawing out and cultivation of all the powers of the mind, no system has yet been devised that will by itself develop with equal success every one of these powers. The system under which we have been trained may have done as much for us as it can do. Each of us is thereafter left to supplement its deficiencies by self-culture. And in the ordinary science instruction of the time one of the most obvious of these inevitable deficiencies is the undue limitation or neglect of the literary side of education. But in the science instruction itself there are dangers regarding which we can not be too watchful. In this college and in all the other well-organized scientific institutions of the country the principles of science are taught orally and experimentally. Every branch of knowledge is expounded in its bearings on other branches. Its theory is held up as the first great aim of instruction, and its practical applications are made subsequent and subordinate. Divisions of science are taught here which may have few practical applications, but which are necessary for a comprehensive survey of the whole circle of scientific truth. Now, you may possibly have heard, and in the midst of a busy industrial community you are not unlikely to hear, remarks made in criticism of this system or method of tuition. The importance of scientific training will be frankly acknowledged and even insisted upon, but you will sometimes hear this admission coupled with the proviso that the science must be of a practical kind; must, in short, be just such and no other as will fit young men to turn it to practical use in the manufactures or industries to which they may be summoned. The critics who make this limitation boast that they are practical men, and that in their opinion theory is useless or worse for the main purposes for which they would encourage and support a great scientific school. Now I am quite sure that those science students who have passed even a single session in Mason College can see for themselves the utter fallacy of such statements and the injury that would be done to the practical usefulness of this institution and to the general progress of the industrial applications of science if such short-sighted views were ever carried into effect. There can be no thorough, adequate, and effective training in science unless it be based on a comprehensive study of facts and principles, altogether apart from any economic uses to which they may be put. Science must be pursued for her own sake, in the first instance, and without reference to any pecuniary benefits she may be able to confer. We never can tell when the most theoretical part of pure science may be capable of being turned to the most important practical uses. Who could have surmised, for instance, that in the early tentative experiments of Volta, Galvani, and others last century lay the germ of the modern world-grasping electric telegraph? Or when Wedgwood, at the beginning of this century, copied paintings by the agency of light upon nitrate of silver, who could have foretold that he was laying the foundations of the marvelous art of photography? There can be no more pernicious doctrine than that which would measure the commercial value of science by its immediate practical usefulness, and would restrict its place in education to those only of its subdivisions which may be of service to the industries of the present time. Such a curtailed method of instruction is not education in the true sense of the term. It is only a kind of cramming for a specific purpose, and the knowledge which it imparts, being one-sided and imperfect, is of little value beyond its own limited range. I by no means wish to undervalue the importance of technical instruction. By all means let our artisans know as much as can be taught them regarding the nature and laws of the scientific processes in which they are engaged. But it is not by mere technical instruction that we shall maintain and extend the industrial and commercial greatness of the country. If we are not only to hold our own, but to widen the boundaries of applied science, to perfect our manufactures, and to bring new departments of Nature into the service of man, it is by broad, thorough, untrammeled scientific research that our success must be achieved. When, therefore, you are asked to explain of what practical use are some of the branches of science in which you have been trained, do not lose patience with your questioner, and answer him as you think such a Philistine deserves to be answered. Give him a few illustrations of the thousands of ways in which science, that might have been stigmatized by him as merely abstract and theoretical, has yet been made to minister to the practical needs of humanity. Above all, urge him to attend some of the classes of Mason College, where he will learn, in the most effectual manner, the intimate connection between theory and practice. If he chances to be wealthy, the experiment may possibly open his eyes to the more urgent needs of the institution, and induce him to contribute liberally toward their satisfaction. Among the advantages and privileges of your life at college there is one, the full significance and value of which you will better appreciate in later years. You have here an opportunity of acquiring a wide general view of the whole range of scientific thought and method. If you proceed to a science degree you are required to lay a broad foundation of acquaintance with the physical and biological sciences. You are thus brought into contact with the subjects of each great department of natural knowledge, and you learn enough regarding them to enable you to understand their scope and to sympathize with the workers who are engaged upon them. But when your academical career is ended, no such chance of wide general training is ever likely to be yours again. You will be dragged into the whirl of life, where you will probably find little time or opportunity to travel much beyond the sphere of employment to which you may have been called. Make the most, therefore, of the advantages which in this respect you meet with here. Try to insure that your acquaintance with each branch of science embraced in your circle of studies shall be as full and accurate as lies in your power to make it. Even in departments outside the bounds of your own tastes and ultimate requirements, do not neglect the means provided for your gaining some knowledge of them. I urge this duty, not because its diligent discharge will obviously tell in your examinations, but because it will give you that scientific culture which, while enabling you to appreciate and enjoy the successive advances of other sciences than that which you may select for special cultivation, will at the same time increase your general usefulness and aid you in your own researches. The days of Admirable Crichtons are long since past. So rapid and general is the onward march of science that not only can no man keep pace with it in every direction, but it has become almost hopelessly impossible to remain abreast of the progress in each of the several subdivisions of even a single science. We are entering more and more upon the age of specialists. It grows increasingly difficult for the specialists, even in kindred sciences, to remain in touch with each other. When you find yourselves fairly launched into the vortex of life you will look back with infinite satisfaction to the time when you were enabled to lay a broad and solid platform of general acquirement within the walls of this college. Perhaps the most remarkable defect in the older or literary methods of education was the neglect of the faculty of observation. For the training of the other mental faculties ample provision was made, but for this, one of the most important of the whole, no care was taken. If a boy was naturally observant, he was left to cultivate the use of his eyes as he best might; if he was not observant, nothing was done to improve him in this respect, unless it were, here and there, by the influence of such an intelligent teacher as is described in Mrs. Barbauld's famous story of Eyes and No Eyes. Even when science began to be introduced into our schools, it was still taught in the old or literary fashion. Lectures and lessons were given by masters who got up their information from books, but had no practical knowledge of the subjects they taught. Class-books were written by men equally destitute of a personal acquaintance with any department of science. The lessons were learned by rote, and not infrequently afforded opportunities rather for frolic than for instruction. Happily, this state of things, though not quite extinct, is rapidly passing away. Practical instruction is everywhere coming into use, while the old-fashioned cut-and-dry lesson-book is giving way to the laboratory, the field excursion, and the school museum. It is mainly through the eyes that we gain our knowledge and appreciation of the world in which we live. But we are not all equally endowed with the gift of intelligent vision. On the contrary, in no respect, perhaps, do we differ more from each other than in our powers of observation. Obviously, a man who has a quick eye to note what passes around him must, in the ordinary affairs of life, stand at a considerable advantage over another man who moves unobservantly on his course. We can not create an observing faculty any more than we can create a memory, but we may do much to develop both. This is a feature in education of much more practical and national importance than might be supposed. I suspect that it lies closer than might be imagined to the success of our commercial relations abroad. Our prevalent system of instruction has for generations past done nothing to cultivate the habit of observation, and has thus undoubtedly left us at a disadvantage in comparison with nations that have adopted methods of tuition wherein the observing faculty is regularly trained. With our world-wide commerce we have gone on supplying to foreign countries the same manufactured goods for which our fathers found markets in all quarters of the globe. Our traders, however, now find themselves in competition with traders from other nations who have been trained to better use of their powers of observation, and who, taking careful note of the gradually changing tastes and requirements of the races which they visit, have been quick to report these changes and to take means for meeting them. Thus, in our own centers of trade, we find ourselves in danger of being displaced by rivals with sharper eyes and greater powers of adaptation. It is the special function of science to cultivate this faculty of observation. Here in Mason College, from the very beginning of your scientific studies you have been taught to use your eyes, to watch the phenomena that appear and disappear around you, to note the sequence and relation of these phenomena, and thus, as it were, to enter beneath the surface into the very soul of things. You can not, however, have failed to remark among your fellow-students great inequalities in their powers of observation, and great differences in the development of these powers under the very same system of instruction. And you may have noticed that, speaking generally, those classmates who have shown the best observing faculty have taken foremost places among their fellows. It is not a question of mere brain power. A man may possess a colossal intellect, while his faculty of observation may be of the feeblest kind. One of the greatest mathematicians of this century who, full of honors, recently passed away from us, had so little cognizance of his surroundings that many ludicrous stories are told of his childlike mistakes as to place and time. The continued development of the faculty of prompt and accurate observation is a task on which you can not bestow too much attention. Your education here must already have taught you its value. In your future career the use you make of this faculty may determine your success or your failure. But not only have your studies in this college trained your observing powers, they have at the same time greatly widened the range of your mental vision by the variety of objects which you have been compelled to look at and examine. The same methods which have been so full of benefit to you here can be continued by you in after life. And be assured that in maintaining them in active use you will take effective means for securing success in the careers you may choose to follow. But above and beyond the prospect of any material success there is a higher motive which will doubtless impel you. The education of your observing faculty has been carried on during your introduction to new realms of knowledge. The whole domain of Nature has been spread out before you. You have been taught to observe thousands of objects and processes of which, common though they may be, you had previously taken no note. Henceforth, wherever you may go, you can not wander with ignorant or unobservant eyes. Land and sea and sky, bird and beast and flower now awaken in you a new interest, for you have learned lessons from them that have profoundly impressed you, and you have discovered meanings in them of which you had never dreamed. You have been permitted to pass within the veil of Nature, and to perceive some of the inner mechanism of this world. Thus, your training in science has not only taught you to use your eyes, but to use them intelligently, and in such a way as to see much more in the world around you than is visible to the uninstructed man. This widened perception might be illustrated from any department of natural science. Let me take, by way of example, the relation of the student of science toward the features and charms of landscape. It may be said that no training is needed to comprehend these beauties; that the man in the street, the holiday maker from town, is just as competent as the man of science to appreciate them, and may get quite as much pleasure out of them. We need not stop to discuss the relative amounts of enjoyment which different orders of spectators may derive from scenery; but obviously the student of science has one great advantage in this matter. Not only can he enjoy to the full all the outward charms which appeal to the ordinary eye, but he sees in the features of the landscape new charms and interests which the ordinary untrained eye can not see. Your accomplished professor of geology has taught you the significance of the outer lineaments of the land. While under his guidance you have traced with delight the varied features of the lovely landscapes of the Midlands, your eyes have been trained to mark their connection with each other, and their respective places in the ordered symmetry of the whole scene. You perceive why there is here a height and there a hollow; you note what has given the ridges and vales their dominant forms and directions; you detect the causes that have spread out a meadow in one place and raised up a hill in another. Above and beyond all questions as to the connection and origin of its several parts, the landscape appeals vividly to your imagination. You know that it has not always worn the aspect which it presents to-day. You have observed in these ridges proofs that the sea once covered their site. You have seen the remains of long-extinct shells, fishes, and reptiles that have been disinterred from the mud and silt left behind by the vanished waters. You have found evidence that not once only, but again and again, after vast lapses of time and many successive revolutions, the land has sunk beneath the ocean and has once more emerged. You have been shown traces of underground commotion, and you can point to places where, over central England, volcanoes were once active. You have learned that the various elements of the landscape have thus been gradually put together during successive ages, and that the slow processes, whereby the characteristic forms of the ground have been carved out, are still in progress under your eye. While, therefore, you are keenly alive to the present beauty of the scene, it speaks to you, at every turn, of the past. Each feature recalls some incident in the strange primeval history that has been transacted here. The succession of contrasts between what is now and what has been fills you with wonder and delight. You feel as if a new sense had been given to you, and that with its aid your appreciation of scenery has been enlarged and deepened to a marvelous degree. And so, too, is it with your relation to all the other departments of Nature. The movements of the clouds, the fall of rain, the flow of brook and river, the changes of the seasons, the succession of calm and storm, do not pass before your eyes now as they once did. While they minister to the joy of life, they speak to you of that all-embracing system of process and law that governs the world. The wayside flower is no longer to your eyes merely a thing of beauty. You have found it to be that and far more--an exquisite organism in which the several parts are admirably designed to promote the growth of the plant and to perpetuate the life of the species. Every insect and bird is now to you an embodiment of the mystery of life. The forces of Nature, once so dark and so dreaded, are now seen by you to be intelligible, orderly, and capable of adaptation to the purposes of man. In the physical and chemical laboratories you have been brought into personal contact with these forces, and have learned to direct their operations, as you have watched the manifold effects of energy on the infinite varieties of matter. When you have completed your course of study and leave this college, crowned, I hope, with academic distinction, there will be your future career in life to choose and follow. A small number among you may, perhaps, be so circumstanced as to be able to devote yourselves entirely to original scientific research, selecting such branches of inquiry as may have specially interested you here, and giving up your whole time and energy to investigation. A much larger number will, no doubt, enter professions where a scientific training can be turned to practical account, and you may become engineers, chemists, or medical men. But in the struggle for existence, which every year grows keener among us, these professions are more and more crowded, so that a large proportion of your ranks may not succeed in finding places there, and may in the end be pushed into walks in life where there may be little or no opportunity for making much practical use of the knowledge in science which you have gained here. To those who may ultimately be thus situated it will always be of advantage to have had the mental training given in this institution, and it will probably be your own fault if, even under unfavorable conditions, you do not find, from time to time, chances of turning your scientific acquirements to account. Your indebtedness to your professors demands that you shall make the effort, and, for the credit of the college, you are bound to do your best. Among the mental habits which your education in science has helped to foster, there are a few which I would specially commend to your attention as worthy of your most sedulous care all through life. In the first place, I would put accuracy. You have learned in the laboratory how absolutely essential this condition is for scientific investigation. We are all supposed to make the ascertainment of the truth our chief aim, but we do not all take the same trouble to attain it. Accuracy involves labor, and every man is not gifted with an infinite capacity for taking pains. Inexactness of observation is sure sooner or later to be detected, and to be visited on the head of the man who commits it. If his observations are incorrect, the conclusions he has drawn from them may be vitiated. Thus all the toil he has endured in a research may be rendered of no avail, and the reputation he might have gained is not only lost but replaced by discredit. It is quite true that absolute accuracy is often unattainable; you can only approach it. But the greater the exertion you make to reach it, the greater will be the success of your investigations. The effort after accuracy will be transferred from your scientific work to your everyday life and become a habit of mind, advantageous both to yourselves and to society at large. In the next place, I would set thoroughness, which is closely akin to accuracy. Again, your training here has shown you how needful it is in scientific research to adopt thorough and exhaustive methods of procedure. The conditions to be taken into account are so numerous and complex, the possible combinations so manifold, before a satisfactory conclusion can be reached. A laborious collection of facts must be made. Each supposed fact must be sifted out and weighed. The evidence must be gone over again and yet again, each link in its chain being scrupulously tested. The deduction to which the evidence may seem to point must be closely and impartially scrutinized, every other conceivable explanation of the facts being frankly and fully considered. Obviously the man whose education has inured him to the cultivation of a mental habit of this kind is admirably equipped for success in any walk in life which he may be called upon to enter. The accuracy and thoroughness which you have learned to appreciate and practice at college must never be dropped in later years. Carry them with you as watchwords, and make them characteristic of all your undertakings. In the third place, we may take breadth. At the outset of your scientific education you were doubtless profoundly impressed by the multiplicity of detail which met your eye in every department of natural knowledge. When you entered upon the study of one of these departments, you felt, perhaps, almost overpowered and bewildered by the vast mass of facts with which you had to make acquaintance. And yet as your training advanced, you gradually came to see that the infinite variety of phenomena could all be marshaled, according to definite laws, into groups and series. You were led to look beyond the details to the great principles that underlie them and bind them into a harmonious and organic whole. With the help of a guiding system of classification, you were able to see the connection between the separate facts, to arrange them according to their mutual relations, and thus to ascend to the great general laws under which the material world has been constructed. With all attainable thoroughness in the mastery of detail, you have been taught to combine a breadth of treatment which enables you to find and keep a leading clew even through the midst of what might seem a tangled web of confusion. There are some men who can not see the wood for the trees, and who consequently can never attain great success in scientific investigation. Let it be your aim to master fully the details of the tree, and yet to maintain such a breadth of vision as will enable you to embrace the whole forest within your ken. I need not enlarge on the practical value of this mental habit in everyday life, nor point out the excellent manner in which a scientific education tends to develop it. In the fourth place, I would inculcate the habit of wide reading in scientific literature. Although the progress of science is now too rapid for any man to keep pace with the advance of all its departments, you should try to hold yourselves in touch with at least the main results arrived at in other branches than your own; while, in that branch itself, it should be your constant aim to watch every onward step that is taken by others, and not to fall behind the van. This task you will find to be no light one. Even were it confined to a survey of the march of science in your own country, it would be arduous enough to engage much of your time. But science belongs to no country, and continues its onward advance all over the globe. If you would keep yourselves informed regarding this progress in other countries, as you are bound to do if you would not willingly be left behind, you will need to follow the scientific literature of those countries. You must be able to read at least French and German. You will find in these languages a vast amount of scientific work relating to your own department, and to this accumulated pile of published material the journals of every month continue to add. In many ways it is a misfortune that the literature of science increases so fast; but we must take the evil with the good. Practice will eventually enable you to form a shrewd judgment as to which authors or papers you may skip without serious danger of losing any valuable fact or useful suggestion. In the fifth place, let me plead for the virtue of patience. In a scientific career we encounter two dangers, for the avoidance of which patience is our best support and guide. When life is young and enthusiasm is boundless; when from the details which we may have laboriously gathered together we seem to catch sight of some new fact or principle, some addition of more or less importance to the sum of human knowledge, there may come upon us the eager desire to make our discovery known. We may long to be allowed to add our own little stone to the growing temple of science. We may think of the pride with which we should see our names enrolled among those of the illustrious builders by whom this temple has been slowly reared since the infancy of mankind. So we commit our observations to writing, and send them for publication. Eventually we obtain the deep gratification of appearing in print among well-known authors in science. Far be it from me to condemn this natural desire for publicity. But, as your experience grows, you will probably come to agree with me that if the desire were more frequently and energetically curbed, scientific literature would gain much thereby. There is among us far too much hurry in publication. We are so afraid lest our observations or deductions should be forestalled--so anxious not to lose our claim to priority, that we rush before the world, often with a half-finished performance, which must be corrected, supplemented, or canceled by some later communication. It is this feverish haste which is largely answerable for the mass of jejune, ill-digested, and erroneous matter that cumbers the pages of modern scientific journals. Here it is that you specially need patience. Before you venture to publish anything, take the utmost pains to satisfy yourselves that it is true, that it is new, and that it is worth putting into print. And be assured that this reticence, while it is a kindness to the literature of science, will most certainly bring with it its own reward to yourselves. It will increase your confidence, and make your ultimate contributions more exact in their facts as well as more accurate and convincing in their argument. The other danger to which I referred as demanding patience is of an opposite kind. As we advance in our career, and the facts of our investigations accumulate around us, there will come times of depression when we seem lost in a labyrinth of detail out of which no path appears to be discoverable. We have, perhaps, groped our way through this maze, following now one clew, now another, that seemed to promise some outlet to the light. But the darkness has only closed around us the deeper, and we feel inclined to abandon the research as one in which success is, for us at least, unattainable. When this blankness of despair shall come upon you, take courage under it, by remembering that a patient study of any department of Nature is never labor thrown away. Every accurate observation you have made, every new fact you have established, is a gain to science. You may not for a time see the meaning of these observations, nor the connection of these facts. But their meaning and connection are sure in the end to be made out. You have gone through the labor necessary for the ascertainment of truth, and if you patiently and watchfully bide your time, the discovery of the truth itself may reward your endurance and your toil. It is by failures as well as by successes that the true ideal of the man of science is reached. The task allotted to him in life is one of the noblest that can be undertaken. It is his to penetrate into the secrets of Nature, to push back the circumference of darkness that surrounds us, to disclose ever more and more of the limitless beauty, harmonious order, and imperious law that extend throughout the universe. And while he thus enlarges our knowledge, he shows us also how Nature may be made to minister in an ever-augmenting multiplicity of ways to the service of humanity. It is to him and his conquests that the material progress of our race is mainly due. If he were content merely to look back over the realms which he has subdued, he might well indulge in jubilant feelings, for his peaceful victories have done more for the enlightenment and progress of mankind than were ever achieved by the triumphs of war. But his eye is turned rather to the future than to the past. In front of him rises the wall of darkness that shrouds from him the still unknown. What he has painfully accomplished seems to him but little in comparison with the infinite possibilities that lie beyond. And so he presses onward, not self-satisfied and exultant, but rather humbled and reverential, yet full of hope and courage for the work of further conquest that lies before him.--_Nature._ FOOTNOTE: [40] An address to the students of Mason University College, Birmingham, at the opening of the session, October 4, 1898. SHALL WE TEACH OUR DAUGHTERS THE VALUE OF MONEY? BY ALEXANDRA L. B. IDE. I am induced to write a few lines on this subject by a remark recently made to me by a widow of large property. In speaking about the management of her money she said: "As to myself, I leave everything to my business man or agent. I would not know if my tax bills were correct. He gives me plenty of money to spend on my charities; why should I trouble myself about the details?" Evidently it had never occurred to her that she might be spending her principal; that some day she might wake up to the fact that her fortune had been dissipated. Another rich woman, to whom I made the remark that certain bonds were bought at par, inquired, "Is that the same thing as buying them on a margin?" Now here were representative women of New York society, both belonging to excellent families, and to all appearances well educated. It is amazing that such profound ignorance on ordinary business matters exists. In conversation with many other wealthy women I discovered that it was very much the exception to find a woman who possessed the slightest knowledge of money matters. Now, why should these things be? The time has passed for a young girl to be brought up a "perfect fool." Let her not waste the beautiful morning of her life in profitless and frivolous occupations. The reason often given as excuse for the ignorance of many women is, so few comparatively have any money to keep, therefore it is useless to teach them. True, it is unusual to find a young girl with an independent fortune; but she may marry rich, and what a help she would be to a sensible man if she were capable of aiding him in his business affairs! Again, she might be left a widow, and have the entire direction of her husband's property. No knowledge is ever lost. The more one knows, the more one realizes how little one does know. I maintain that a woman's intellect is perfectly capable of coping with and understanding business affairs. In some matters she is far shrewder than the average man, and in many cases her quick insight sees at a glance that which man requires time to penetrate. Only give her half a chance. I do not wish for a moment to be understood as advocating women becoming stockbrokers or lawyers; nothing could be more unnatural or unsuitable. It seems to me only in accordance with the wishes of a reasonable woman to participate with her brothers in such rudimentary knowledge as will enable her to oversee or take the entire charge of her own property. Take, for example, a well-to-do New York business man. He has acquired through his own industry and shrewdness a large fortune. He maps out the education for his children. His sons are sent to the best schools, and afterward to college. He determines that no expense shall be spared to fit them for their future career. For his daughters expensive foreign governesses are engaged, who teach them the languages, music, and other accomplishments. Or the daughters are sent to some high-priced fashionable school, where they are put through a course of training to enable them to "shine in society." Having reached the age of eighteen, the daughter returns to the parental roof. What does she know in exchange for the large sum of money her education has cost? Usually her penmanship is bad and illegible. Her knowledge of arithmetic very slight. These two essentials of education are not her forte. But she is a good dancer, and perhaps at the assembly or some such function the father's heart has swelled with pride as he noticed how eagerly she was sought as a partner. She can sing French songs, probably those which are rather _risqué_. She can converse, perhaps, in two or three different modern languages. As a general rule her French can scarcely be understood by the foreign _attachés_ at Newport. The girl is absolutely unequipped for _real_ life, and the man of sense, who has passed the boyish age and is looking for a partner for life, knows _this_. Possibly this is one cause why there are comparatively few marriages in our best society. What man is less likely to seek as wife a woman who knows something about the care and value of money? It is strange that a father should be so blinded to the best interests of his daughter. Is it because he considers her intellect so far below that of his son that he makes no effort to instruct her in regard to the care of money? The only thing she knows about money is how to spend it--generally on herself, for clothes and jewels. Perhaps on the first of the month, when the bills for his daughter's extravagance pour in on him, he is vexed; but if his fortune is large, and it is no inconvenience for him to pay them, he generally does so without a murmur. "Let her have a good time while she is young," he soliloquizes. But stop a moment and consider. What you sow you reap is as true in this material concern as in the world of agriculture. The fond parent by his indulgence and neglect is sowing the seeds of extravagance, perhaps those of want. Years hence she may reap the fruit of his ill-judged kindness in fostering habits of reckless expenditure. In a few years the father dies; his property is divided; the daughter receives her share. If she is married to a good business man who has time to take charge of her fortune, possibly, during her husband's lifetime, the difficulty is bridged over. But the chances are she may not be married, or again the man she has selected as husband may be worthless as a business man. It is not to be expected that a brother (even if she is fortunate enough to possess one), however kind, will overburden himself with the manifold details of looking after the property of a sister. He has his own interests, which demand his attention. He thinks his duty accomplished when he has chosen a man to look after his sister's affairs whom he _believes_ to be reliable. The person whom he has appointed as guardian over his sister's interests may have an honest and high character, but that is no guarantee that in a moment of weakness he may not yield to the temptation of abusing the trust. He knows the woman is absolutely ignorant of how her affairs are being conducted, and in all probability would not be the wiser if he appropriated some of her fortune to his own uses. Her very ignorance is his security. Who can not recall several such cases? If each day for half an hour the father had instructed his child in the essentials of business--how to calculate interest quickly, the manner of filling out a lease in renting property, explaining about mortgages, and giving her a lesson as to what were the best investments--she would know enough to steer clear of the many sharks and vultures which usually find her a ready prey. The woman who does not know the difference between a registered and coupon bond should be ashamed to acknowledge such ignorance. A parent's neglect in teaching his child about monetary affairs is culpable, almost amounting to a crime. There is nothing so costly as ignorance. This very fortune which you have taken infinite pains to accumulate will be perhaps dissipated, owing to your want of forethought in imparting the requisite knowledge to your child. This information she will in after years buy for herself at a heavy premium. If knowledge is power in other matters, it is more than ever true in monetary affairs. Power to keep your fortune is a power worth having, and more difficult to acquire than to make a fortune. Let a girl but try to earn five dollars, and she will see the task is not an easy one. Then, unless she be a fool, she will realize that what is so difficult to obtain should not be wasted. I recall the case of a fashionable woman in New York society which came under my own observation. Her husband told me he had deposited in a bank a large sum of money for his wife to draw on, given her a bank and check book, explained and showed her how to draw checks. He very sensibly thought that it would be a far better plan for her to pay her bills herself, instead of coming to him every time she needed money. His relief from being her almoner was of short duration, for in less than a month she came to him, and, throwing the check and bank books on his library table, told him it was too much trouble--she could not make head or tail of it; she wished to return to the old system! He could pay her bills in future. This woman had been married twenty years. Too much trouble, is it? Yes, I believe this is the keynote why women are so ignorant. They are lazy, pure and simple. The details of business are too dry and uninteresting. It is so much easier to have some one else do the work for you. So much less exertion to read a novel, or ride the wheel with some attractive man. "How prosaic," you say, "to add up account books, balance check books, and calculate whether your tax bill is correct when your property is assessed at the rate of 2.01!" I believe, if the truth were told, half the divorces in which the reason given is incompatibility of temper arise from the fact that women know nothing of the value of money. I am not speaking entirely of women who have their own property, but also of those who are dependent on a husband's income. The wife has a vague idea that there is an inexhaustible supply of cash somewhere! What man can not tell you how worried and harassed he felt when his wife came to him for money to spend on nonessentials, and which he could ill afford? If he attempted to remonstrate with her he probably received a rude or angry reply! The wife, perhaps, had been used to an indulgent father, who gratified her every whim. She overlooks the fact that a father and husband are two vastly different beings, and require different treatment. To some women a husband's value decreases when he can no longer supply them with finery. Their alleged love soon wanes, and a divorce is sought on any pretext. It is easy to see that by a knowledge of business affairs a woman can dispense with the services of an agent or trust company, whose salary thus being saved is added to her income. In case a woman is fitted by a proper education for so doing, who could attend to her own interests better than herself, as she is the party interested? The phrase, "If you wish anything well done, do it yourself," is never better exemplified than in this case. Lastly, but not least, in saving our money it need not be from a miserly spirit; but the more we have, the more we can profitably give away. What pleasure equals that of relieving real distress, and of helping others? Did not our Saviour himself set the example of saving when, after performing the miracle where he fed the multitude with the loaves and fishes, he said: "Gather up the fragments that remain. Let nothing be lost." SKETCH OF CLÉMENCE ROYER. BY M. JACQUES BOYER. Madame Clémence Augustine Royer was born at Nantes, France, April 21, 1830, of an old Catholic family. When she reached a suitable age she was sent to school at the Sacré Coeur, where she received the most of her education. Very shortly after coming out of the convent she abandoned the religious doctrines they had tried to inculcate in her there, and, like so many young persons, was attracted to poetry. But her literary efforts as a whole received very little attention, and she would never have been successful if she had only teased the Muse. Happily, she applied herself, about 1850, to more serious studies, and went to England, where she spent several years and acquired a thorough knowledge of the language of Shakespeare. She removed thence to Switzerland, and there found her definite vocation. The natural sciences, philosophy, and political economy from that time engaged her attention. The opening of Madame Royer's course of lectures to women on logic at Lausanne in the winter of 1859 and 1860 attracted much notice. The first lecture was published under the title of an Introduction to Philosophy, and brought most flattering praise to the author from contemporary students. In an animated style the disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the apostle of bold and ingenious ideas, was already beginning to declare herself. In the meantime she collaborated on the journal The New Economist, which the historian and sociologist Pascal Duprat had just founded.[41] At the close of 1860, the Canton of Vaud having opened a competition on the Principles of Taxation, "the little lady with a straw hat," as her neighbors familiarly called her, handled the subject so thoroughly that her memoir, entitled _Théorie de l'Impôt et Dime sociale_ (Theory of the Impost and Social Tithe, 1862), won her the honor of dividing the prize with Proudhon. While not all the ideas set forth in this work were new, she took care at least to co-ordinate the systems of her predecessors, to select from the one and the other of them what was good in them, and to condense into a homogeneous whole works which were scattered hither and thither. But we will pass over these books of her youth to dwell more at large on that part of her work which will assure Madame Royer an honorable place among the most zealous promoters and ablest defenders of the Darwinian theories. Her first effort in this line was to translate into French, in 1862, the Origin of Species of the great English naturalist, preceding the work with a preface which in itself alone constituted an excellent summary of the doctrine of evolution. She pointed out the results which logically follow from the transformist theory. She did not conceal from herself that in doing thus she would be the object of attacks from the immobilist and ecclesiastical parties still so numerous thirty years ago in all civilized countries; but she flattered herself, too, and with just reason, that she would furnish the liberals and progressives of France with a powerful weapon. In this introductory chapter she characterized the original and strong personality of Darwin in appropriate terms, saying: "While he has not the brilliant qualities of a Cuvier as a writer or a professor, he is at least a worthy heir of the profoundly philosophical science of the two Geoffroys Saint-Hilaire ... one of those workmen who cut their stone with an indefatigable courage. But there are also thicker and heavier stones, without beauty or apparent grace, which are designed to be hidden at the base of an immense edifice, like the massive columns with which the architects of the middle ages decorated the crypts of their Gothic cathedrals. It is truth in the rough. He does not impose his condition, but communicates it and proves it. If it is certain, he affirms it; when he supposes, he says so; when he doubts, he acknowledges it." She then passes to the exposition of Darwinism as responding to one of the noblest aspirations of the mind, the preliminary step to the accounting for the world of organized beings, as astronomy, physics, and geology have explained the origin of inanimate substances. In effect, the illustrious Englishman, connecting the domain of botany and zoölogy with the action of second causes, sought first to comprehend the genesis, and then the evolution, in the same way that astronomers and geologists teach us concerning the origin of our globe and the successive phases through which its surface has passed. Not only did Madame Clémence Royer initiate us into transformism. In her masterly introduction she went still further. Carrying the exposition to its final consequences, she provoked a useful revolution in the ideas then current. She dared to say what many men of science would only have left to be inferred. Her translation, revealing the name of Darwin to the French public, who hardly knew of it at that period, gave the occasion for a very active conflict between the partisans of "creationism" and the Nantese philosophy. The success of this work was so great as to induce her to complete her preface by publishing a few years afterward a work wholly her own, _Origine de l'Homme et des Sociétés_ (Origin of Man and Societies, 1870), which, being her best production, deserves a special analysis. With the assistance of documents collected by the most famous anthropologists, Madame Royer reconstitutes the history of the primitive ages of mankind, and after studying its origins and development she seeks for the bonds that connect the great human family with the rest of living Nature; and finally forecasts its future from its past. In the first part she takes up the question of the origin of life and of its transformations upon the earth. The living species are grouped around man, who is the topmost shoot of the gigantic "tree of life." Two laws regulate the transmission of life--the law of heredity and the law of variability. The former assures the continuation of the type, and the latter variety in its modifications. The organic kingdom as a whole oscillates between these two contrary rules which fix limits each upon the other and which suffice to explain the successive appearance through the ages of different forms of life. The organic individual is thus the solution of a problem in algebra set to Nature. Atavism is the constant quantity, and the force of variation is the perpetually changing unknown factor. The problem is therefore complex, but the principles to which the variable is subject resolve themselves into a series of partial laws which are deduced from an aggregate of observations, and which, according to our author, one may summarize as he goes. Most of the variations reveal themselves in the embryo during the fætal period. But after its birth the young product is affected not only by the ambient medium, but also by the consequences of the reproductive act. The latter, in fact, having impressed the initial movement upon its organism, reacts incessantly against the modifying influences of the ambient, and atavism prevails as always the resultant unless important accidents come in to change the course. It is only necessary to add a few experimental considerations to complete a rapid sketch of the laws of variability. First, correlation of growth: Homologous organs tend to vary in the same direction, and together. Are the fingers joined or divided? The hand follows similar variations. Then there is a compensation of growth which prevents the excess of the preceding rule; when one organ is developed, another is atrophied. Also vital competition. Every organized being must be in harmony with the conditions of its existence or it will not subsist; the monster may appear, but will not live. Lastly, by virtue of natural selection, the individual must likewise possess the means of perpetuating its species. Otherwise, a series of transformations will come to pass in the course of successive generations, improving the organism and adapting it more and more to the exigencies of its habitat. The least prolific species of to-day fulfill these conditions so well that they of themselves alone would cover the surface of the earth if their multiplication was not checked by that of other species. But as only a limited quantity of life is possible on our planet, the less well-adapted organisms perish. The struggle therefore produces a selection. It is hence presumed that in the same species only varieties manifesting tendencies in most complete harmony with the method of their existence will be preserved, all the intermediate varieties being destroyed. Consequently, if we push the doctrine of Darwin to its extreme limits, we arrive at the idea, now rejected, that in the beginning only a single germ arose at one point on the globe. All the analogies, on the other hand, lead us to suppose that the earth was fruitful over its entire surface. This leads us to inquire how life appeared on the earth. The debate between the heterogenists and the panspermists has been long vain, because the question has been laid before them in insoluble terms. In order to resolve it, therefore, we must take ourselves back in thought thousands of thousands of centuries in the past. A thin crust of red-hot lava, hardly solidified, extended over the incandescent nucleus of our globe. An eternity then passed before the fiery sphere was forever confined within its coffin of granite. The metalloids dominant in this chaos of affinities and repulsions were then floating in an irrespirable atmosphere along with a mass of aqueous vapors. At the end of many millions of years, the waters definitely took their place around the globe. But who can ever tell what useless abortions, to be destroyed as soon as they were created, arose in these oceans saturated with anomalous substances? The first germs of life doubtless arose from the thick proliferous stratum which was developed under the pressure of a dense atmosphere in contact with liquids still warm, incessantly traversed by electric currents of unimaginable intensity. It was a sprout that arose everywhere at once. But in those innumerable spontaneous efforts, continued during the enormous length of time required to purify the atmosphere from its acrid vapors and the seas from their foreign matters, only a small number of these germs achieved a beginning of vegetation. This, according to Madame Royer's theory, was the way life began on the globe. The author next examines the complete series of the phases of evolution gone through by the species, and then the development of the mental faculties, the chief feature of difference which in the view of some thinkers creates a gap between man and the rest of the animal kingdom. She demonstrates that the primary qualities of mind are identical in all living creatures, even in those of least development. The intelligence of man is simply superior to the mental organism of the animal. This is, however, only a relative superiority, not differing in nature from the animal's intelligence, but only in form and intensity. After relating the history of man in prehistoric times, our philosopher gives, in the second part of her work, the present picture of the races as their physical characteristics and their social orders differentiate them so profoundly: At the top, the white race, the last flower of the genealogical tree, to which all the great nationalities belong. By the side of it, its two diverging branches, the Turanians (Hungarians, Finns, and Turks) and the Aramæans or Semites (Jews, Arabs, and Syrians). Then come the three--Hyperborean, Mongolian, and Sinitic--branches of the yellow stock, who inhabit eastern and northern Asia. We find also the Malays covering the surface of the two southern peninsulas of Asia and Oceania. They constitute a lateral ramification, which, together with the red or copper-colored race of North America, may have had the same point of departure as the Mongols. Lastly comes the negro race, which has been separated a much longer time from the common stock from which man has diverged. Further on, Madame Royer discusses the anatomical relations of man and the ape, with the conclusion deduced as resulting from phenomena of observation that the human family is only a term in a series of which the different primates are the other steps. In short, the further we go back in the past of primitive man, the more we meet manifestations of passions as ferocious as base. This is, moreover, easily conceivable. The savage, at war with Nature and his like, and placed in conditions of life common to the animal world, has in the beginning all its bad instincts. The end of the second part of _L'Origine de l'Homme et des Sociétés_ is devoted to the most complex problem of anthropology--that of the beginning of speech and the origin of language. Man, in the view of the author, first makes his wants and feelings known to other beings by a series of signs. The three primordial faculties--feeling, thinking, and wishing--were the point of departure, the cause and the rule of all languages that man has created in his entire progress. As his mind has shaped a new idea, it has found a new sign to express it; but the process varying with the race, time and the environment have produced the diversity of tongues which we observe. In the beginning a more or less complicated cry suffices to express the thought in its original syncretism. Then, under the influence of reflection continued through ages, from generation to generation, it becomes transformed and decomposed into various elements. Every noun was primarily an adjective-substantive. For example, thunder was designated by imitating it; the horse, by its neighing and the sound of galloping. The relations of place, possession, and those of many other kinds were probably expressed by the look, the attitude, a motion with the hand, etc. Ideas of number were developed slowly. The earliest languages contained only about a hundred words, and these sufficed for centuries for the needs of human thought, confined within the narrow experience of a generation. It results from these facts that in every sense the formation of languages is a consequence of social relations. But here rises a question as important as difficult to answer: When did man begin to speak? From the harmony between the anthropological classifications deduced from philological research and those drawn from the labors of the physiologists it appears evident that the spontaneous and primitive constitution of the first elements of language was, among all known human races, posterior to their geographical and ethnical separation. In other words, local varieties had already been formed, and men had acquired the anatomical differences that distinguish them to-day before they conquered the faculty of speech. However it may be with these hypotheses, we may assent fully to the conclusion of the chapter that man will never deserve the name of the reasoning animal till he shall possess a logical and single language for all the members of the great human association. May this dream be realized by the destruction of the barriers which now divide so many peoples! In the third part of the work, Madame Royer treats of the development of human society. Everything permits the supposition that from a very remote period the anthropoid primate that served as the root stock of man became omnivorous, with a predominance of carnivorous tastes. These conditions of life therefore invoked an at least rudimentary social instinct--that is, animals lived in troops collected under chiefs, with a tactics for mutual defense. The most ancient documents, in fact, show the human species living in rival or allied tribes. Hunting and fishing were the principal business of these primitive races, which relied for assistance at first on their agility, muscular strength, and arms of stone of a workmanship still in its infancy. Flint was then very roughly cut. But now a great advance was achieved for man, a step toward industry and civilization. This second stage was the discovery of fire, an immediate consequence of the cutting of flints, when sparks would fly out at each blow. Yet a later epoch probably had to be reached for the real employment of fire in cooking food. Previous to that it could serve man only for warming himself, or for protecting himself at night against wild beasts. Next came the earliest industries--the potter's art, the making of rude clothing, and the construction of habitations; and about this time the instinct of property begins to develop. For a long time there are no other securities than force. On the other hand, the diversities of the faculties, which are very unequally distributed among the various races, and even among the different individuals of each of them, create social inequalities, the chief cause of the crime, wars, and misery with which every page of the history of man is soiled, and from which the original organization of civil society sprang. At the close of her treatise the eminent anthropologist states the formula of the highest social prosperity: she believes that it resides in an equal liberty for each member of a national collectivity and in the free play of individual initiatives. Man will work in as large a sphere of action as the right of another leaves him, striving to broaden his place at the feast of life. Each one will climb the social ladder in his own way and will fix himself on the step on which his aptitudes will meet the best reward. Each individual will therefore gain a large sum of well-being, and the species will possess a total maximum of enjoyment. Such, in broad outline, is the substance of this book, which naturalists and philosophers have consulted now for many years. It is not within the province of our sketch to dwell upon any of the bold assertions and hypotheses in it that have been invalidated by later geological discoveries; and, notwithstanding a few errors in detail, almost inevitable in a book of the kind, the _Origine de l'Homme_ is, as a whole, a work as vigorously thought out as clearly and generously written. Madame Clémence Royer has further occupied herself with special researches on subjects of the same nature. Their results have been published in the highly esteemed review, the Bulletin of the Société d'Anthropologie. The most important of these memoirs relate to the Craniology of the Quaternary Period, the Celts, the Origin of the Different Human Races (1873), and the Domestication of Monkeys (1887). The last work was published at the time of the appearance of a book by M. Victor Meunier,[42] a believer in the possibility of domesticating the simian race. His proposition, received in France as a kind of a joke, taxed the genius of the Parisian caricaturists, because the author had suggested that newborn children be nursed by monkeys, whose milk was most like that of the human mother. Of course it was an easy subject to joke about. Madame Royer showed how little originality there was in this book. We might, she said, undoubtedly succeed in educating monkeys, and they would at the end of many generations be in certain cases superior to the dog and the horse. Unfortunately, the struggle for existence opposed the adoption of the Utopian idea. The place for each human recruit at the social table is now too narrow for any part of it to be left for "our lower brethren." Anthropological sciences were not the only ones to which the encyclopedic mind of our learned philosopher was attracted. A few years ago she returned to her earlier studies, and collaborated on the _Nouveau Dictionnaire d'Économie Politique_ of Léon Say (1891-'92). The most profound article she wrote for this work was that on the word positivism. According to it, the Positive Philosophy dates, not from Auguste Comte, who is believed to have introduced it, but from Bacon; for its essential features may be found in the _Novum Organum_ and the _Scientia nuova_. Furthermore, Madame Royer found that Comte "emasculated" the doctrine of the famous chancellor. The principal dogma of the system is the impossibility of knowledge of first causes by our reason. This is an error, says Madame Royer. Two distinct ideas have been confounded in the term first causes: first, the permanent cause of phenomena, their essential "substratum," the discovery of which man may perhaps some day reach; and, second, the supposed primary term of each phenomenal law. But if the world is eternal, this last does not exist, since "the eternity of the substantial involves the eternity of its effects." Yet, while she attacks Comte's errors in the sphere of sociology, she renders full justice to his Course of Positive Philosophy, which was often in advance of its time in respect to the exact sciences. Among other of Madame Royer's publications we may cite _Zoroastre, son Epoque et sa Doctrine_ (Zoroaster, his Epoch and his Doctrine, two volumes, 1875); _Les Ages Préhistoriques_ (The Prehistoric Ages, 1876); _La Terre et ses Anciens Habitants_ (The Earth and its Ancient Inhabitants, 1891), a sort of summary of recent progress in paleontology, and of facts that may be derived from the study of living beings; and _Les Variations Séculaires des Saisons_ (Secular Variation of the Seasons, 1892), a little work in which the author endeavors to confirm by observation a theory that climatic variations are dependent, in the meteorological sense, on planetary movements. She showed, for example, that in the cold winter of 1879-'80 the distribution of the planets around the sun was precisely that which should give the greatest degree of cold for our hemisphere. We notice also her occasional contributions to different periodicals: to _Le Temps_, the _Revue des Revues_, the _Journal des Économistes_, etc. Her last two treatises were published in 1895: _La Matière_ (or Matter), and _L'Inconnaissable_ (or The Unknowable). So great intellectual activity has given Madame Royer a first place among women as students of science. Hence, on March 10, 1897, her numerous admirers and friends offered her a jubilee banquet, under the chairmanship of M. Levasseur, member of the Institute of France. The toasts spoken to on this occasion retraced the brilliant career of the heroine of the feast; and, as the chairman justly declared, the occasion was "the glorification of woman's knowledge." Madame Clémence Royer is at present living a very retired life in the _Maison de Retraite_ founded by the Duchess Galigani at Neuilly, near Paris, where she enjoys the rest earned by a half century of persevering labor. Her body is feeble, but her ample brow and her yet lively eyes seem still to have preserved the recollections of the struggles of other days. FOOTNOTES: [41] Pascal Duprat, born at Hagetman (Department of the Landes), March 24, 1816, was professor of history at Algiers and at Paris. He took the direction of the _Revue independante_ in 1847; founded with Lamennais the journal _Le Peuple constituant_, and was an ardent promoter of the Revolution of 1848. Having became a member of the National Assembly, he opposed the _coup d'état_ of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Being obliged in consequence of this act to exile himself, he retired to Belgium and afterward to Lausanne. He did not return to France till after the war of 1870, and died in August, 1885. The most interesting of his works is the Historical Essay on the Races of Africa (_Essai historique sur les Races de l'Afrique_, 1845). [42] Les Singes domestiques. Paris, 1886. * * * * * DR. SHELDON JACKSON, superintendent of Government schools in Alaska, corrects a report that has been published, that his experiment in naturalizing reindeer in that Territory has failed. Three hundred and twelve of the five hundred and twelve head imported died, it is true, at Seattle and Haines, "because of a combination of circumstances and Government red tape," but the two hundred and twenty-eight deer that were allowed to reach the moss, fifty miles from the coast, are doing well, and will be used next winter in carrying the mails. Instead of scarcity of moss, the pasturage is more abundant than in Lapland or Siberia, and the reindeer thrive better than they did in their native habitat. Editor's Table. _WORDS OF A MASTER._ The address, which we print elsewhere, delivered by Sir Archibald Geikie to the students of Mason College, Birmingham, is one to which we feel it a duty to draw special attention. It would be difficult, we think, to state more lucidly than the eminent author has done the advantages to be derived from a course of scientific study, and the principles which must be kept in view, not only during the period of study, but through life, if a training in science is to have its best results. The address begins with a few words of caution as to the drawbacks which are apt to attend on the exclusive, or nearly exclusive, pursuit of science. In the reaction which the present age has witnessed against the old literary and linguistic curriculum of studies, a tendency is manifesting itself to undervalue the older learning. This Sir Archibald considers to be a matter for serious regret. He recognizes the impossibility of combining any large amount of literary or philological study with the requirements of an extensive scientific course; but he advises those who make choice of the latter to "cherish the literary tastes they have acquired, and to devote themselves sedulously to the further cultivation of them during such intervals of leisure as they may be able to secure." A training in science, he observes, "admirable as it is in many ways, fails to supply those humanizing influences which the older learning can so well impart." Times will therefore come, even to the most enthusiastic student, when "scientific work, in spite of its absorbing interest, grows to be a weariness"; and it is then that the value of any literary culture which may have been received at school or college will be appreciated. It is a quite true remark that "men who have been too exclusively trained in science, or are too much absorbed in its pursuit, are not always the most agreeable members of society." It is also true that "one result of the comparative neglect of the literary side of education by many men of science is conspicuously seen in their literary style," which is not infrequently so "slipshod, ungrammatical, and clumsy that even the meaning of the authors is left in doubt." This is a great evil under the sun: a man goes through a vast amount of labor to ascertain facts and discover their meaning; and when he is ready to transfer the knowledge that he has gained to other minds he lacks the skill to do it in any satisfactory manner. Yet so far is it from being the case that there is any necessary incompatibility between scientific and literary cultivation, that several of the most distinguished scientific investigators have ranked among the best writers of the day. We need only cite such names as Sir John Herschel, Lyell, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, and Sir Archibald Geikie himself: to read any of these is a pleasure from a literary no less than from a scientific point of view. No very satisfactory excuse can therefore be made for those scientific writers who can not compass a style of reasonable perspicuity and elegance. We can only think of them as having fallen victims to the hurtful error that literary style is of no advantage to a scientific man. The caution which the address contains against taking too utilitarian a view of science is timely and judicious. We do not believe the intention of the author is to encourage the prosecution of alleged scientific researches independently of all assignable human motive; but he would have all the main lines of scientific inquiry pursued in a liberal and disinterested spirit, in the belief that the enlargement of knowledge can not but subserve in some way or another, and sooner or later, the interests of the human race. He feels that the true scientific spirit is not one that makes pecuniary gain its chief object. True types of the scientific worker are to be found in Michael Faraday and the elder Agassiz, who was "too busy to make money"; and the student of science who can not to some extent work in the spirit of these men may as well recognize that it is not scientific truth he is after but money. The greatest advances in Science, it is almost needless to say, have been made by those who were serving her not for the lust of gain, but for the love of discovery--that is to say, by men like Copernicus, Galileo, Harvey, Cavendish, Newton, Franklin, Jenner, Watt, Darwin, and Pasteur; and if we would know what science is, it is the lives, characters, and labors of such men as these that we should study, and not the achievements of merely successful patentees. Another danger to which the student of science is exposed is that of paying little or no attention to any department of science save that of which he is making a specialty. It is therefore of great importance that the courses of study laid out in science colleges should at the outset be sufficiently broad to afford a thorough grounding in the leading principles of all the sciences and in the application of scientific method to every field of inquiry. Only in this way can a true sense of the power and universality of science as a method of thought and an engine of the human mind be obtained. Why is it that we are often so little impressed with the intellectual character of this or that noted specialist? The reason, we take it, is that his mind lacks breadth; he knows his own field of observation, but seems to have little sense or appreciation of what lies beyond it. It may have been some one of this type who suggested to Wordsworth his idea of an "ever-dwindling soul"; certain it is that a man may, by the too exclusive pursuit of a narrow line of thought and inquiry, fatally cramp his mind and dim his spiritual vision. The foundation of all science is observation, and Sir Archibald rightly dwells upon the supreme importance of cultivating and developing the observing faculty to the utmost extent. He states that a man may possess a colossal intellect while his faculty of observation may be of the feeblest kind, and gives as an example a very eminent mathematician, lately deceased, who used to make the most ludicrous mistakes as to time and place. Upon this point we feel like venturing a little dissent. We doubt whether there ever was a colossal intellect apart from a considerable development of the power of observation; and that a great mathematician should take very little notice of what was going on in the world about him would only show that his powers of observation were otherwise engaged. Take him in his own field, and what a multitude of things he would observe which a man of inferior intellect, occupied with the same studies, would overlook! It would be a somewhat rash thing to undertake to cure an Archimedes or a Newton of that absent-mindedness which, to the world at large, looks like a deficiency of observation. In such cases as these the mind that is absent here is present elsewhere; and what it is doing there the world will in due time find out. It is impossible, we hold, for any one man to be observant in all directions; if he is, it is certain he will not have a colossal intellect. Still, the truth which should be borne in upon every student's mind is that if he would make independent progress he must be an independent observer. He must take in once for all the truth that the materials needed for scientific construction lie afield, and that he must keep his eyes open in order to see and distinguish them. At every moment the man of science may say, "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of" in any philosophy yet formulated; and some of those things he should aim at discovering for himself. Any mind that is once thoroughly interested in any branch of study will be observant, and conversely a certain practice in observation may create an interest not before felt in a certain department of study. It may also be remarked that the dividing line between observation and deduction is very narrow and more or less shadowy; and therefore to cultivate the logical faculty is to create an appetite for observations, or at least for facts. The logical mind sees where facts are _wanting_, and will not be happy till it gets them. As might be expected, Sir Archibald Geikie makes a special application of what he has to say on the need of observation to his own science of geology--a study which is a constant challenge to the observing eye and the constructive intellect. He dwells impressively on the delight which the rational contemplation of Nature imparts to the student whose higher faculties have been awakened, and who has been taught what to see and how to consider it. "The movements of the clouds, the fall of rain, the flow of brook and river, the changes of the seasons, the succession of calm and storm, do not pass before your eyes now as once they did. While they minister to the joy of life, they speak to you of that all-embracing system of process and law that governs the world." Certainly this capacity for the higher enjoyment of Nature is the happiest result of scientific culture; and were it an invariable or even a very general result, there could never be any question as to the humanizing and liberalizing effect of devotion to scientific studies. If the result in question is not always attained, it is simply because the study of science has not been approached in a right spirit. It is not science that is at fault. Sir Archibald dwells finally on the need for _accuracy_, _thoroughness_, _breadth_, and _patience_ on the part of those who would worthily pursue a scientific career. If his words were duly heeded we should have more of generous co-operation and sympathy among scientific investigators, and less of selfish petty rivalry and clamorous contention in regard to questions of priority. The eminent author has nobly conceived the character and function of the man of science in the present age; and we can not but hope that his sage and earnest counsels to the rising generation of scientific workers will bear abundant fruit in days to come. _FADS AND FRAUDS._ We notice that a magistrate in a Canadian city has inflicted fines, under a "vagrant" act, upon two individuals who had been practicing the alleged art of palmistry. Both of these parties were proved to have told fortunes from the hand for pay; and, though one styled himself "professor" and the other was a "madame" and not a common wayside gypsy, they were both held guilty of common juggling and were punished accordingly. The public prosecutor said that he did not lay any stress on the fact that pay had been taken; he asked for a conviction simply on the ground that fortune-telling was against the law, and he carried his point. The judge observed that similar proceedings might be taken against young ladies who tell fortunes at church and charity bazaars; and the prosecutor admitted that such was very likely the case. These young ladies, he said, would have to look out for themselves. We must say that this action on the part of the Canadian authorities strikes us very favorably, and we should be greatly pleased if we could see similar proceedings taken nearer home. It is a lamentable fact that hundreds of persons who ought to know better amuse themselves by lending their countenance to the practitioners of all kinds of silly and dishonest arts, and so far assist them in practicing their frauds upon a more ignorant and helpless class. We are all familiar with the stories which pass current in private circles of the extraordinary revelations and predictions made by ladies and gentlemen who go off in trances and see the past and future unrolled before their upturned eyes with all the distinctness of an actual panorama. But there is one thing which these interesting and highly gifted individuals do not like, and that is to get into the courts, or anywhere where they can be called upon to give a succinct and definite account of their doings and pretensions. They are not ambitious of going into a trance before the magistrate, and giving an exhibition of the powers to which they lay claim in their advertisements, much as that might be expected to help their reputation and their business. For that very reason it would be an excellent thing to bring them where the light of common day could be thrown upon their performances; and, if there is no law under which this could be done, our legislators, who make so many needless laws, might very well pass one, the general effect of which would be to enforce the responsibility of all persons publicly pretending to the possession of any kind of supernatural power. It would tend to cool the faith of even the most benighted dupes to see their favorite seer cutting a foolish figure before a judge who simply wanted to know what it really was for which he charged money. In the Canadian cases both operators, when they got into court, showed a great disposition to minimize their claims to any power of foretelling events by palmistry or otherwise, and so it would be in every similar case. It is one thing to deal with a gullible maiden who wants to know the color of her future husband's hair, and quite another to converse with the officers of the law. Most of the frauds which have any continued success owe it, in part at least, to an undue faith in the personal integrity of the practitioner. It seems a rude as well as an unkind thing to suppose that So-and-so, whose demeanor is so modest and frank and simple, whose sentiments are so elevated, whose whole personality seems calculated to inspire confidence, is really an outrageous deceiver. In many cases people have said in effect that, if they had to choose between believing a miracle and doubting the veracity of this or that engaging individual, they would believe the miracle. Yet time and again the engaging individual has been proved to be an impostor, and the miracle has fallen to the ground. One of the most remarkable cases of the kind is furnished by the history of the Keeley motor, the absolutely fraudulent character of which has lately been brought to light. Keeley professed to transcend all the known laws of physics and mechanics, and he talked a jargon which all acknowledged to be unintelligible, but the unintelligibility of which was ascribed by his devotees to the fact that he was really working outside of known laws, and could not be expected to translate his ideas into the language of everyday science. In this way what was really an adjunct to the imposture he was practicing was counted as a proof of the truth of his ideas and the reality of his work. Yet now we know that the whole business was a matter of hidden tubes and wires and pulleys and double axles, one concealed within the other, with a water motor hidden under the floor. Thus it was that the "ætheric vibrations" and all the other mysterious phenomena were produced. We remember a sermon that was preached some years ago by an earnest divine, who professed to see in the alleged effects produced by Keeley an explanation of the miracle of the casting down of the walls of Jericho. Keeley would take his harmonium and, striking a certain chord, would cause his motor to revolve. In like manner Joshua with his trumpets and pitchers made precisely the kind of noise required to produce the ætheric vibrations necessary to level the walls of the beleaguered city--a wonderful case of the most advanced science coming to the support of a venerable religious tradition! Unfortunately, the walls of Jericho must now be got down in some other way, since it is proved that when Keeley worked the harmonium he also worked the bulb of an air tube placed under his foot in the floor. But Keeley was so honest a man, so devoted to his profound researches, so true a type of the indomitable experimenter, that it was impossible for his friends and admirers to doubt him, even when he spoke of "the sympathetic negative attraction of the triune polar stream." The lesson of it all is--investigate! _investigate!_ INVESTIGATE! The more honest a man is, the more he will court investigation. It is to the credit of humanity perhaps that so much reliance is placed upon estimates of personal character in these extraordinary cases; but where belief is demanded for anything that is absolutely beyond comprehension, character should be put out of court altogether, and the one question should be, What are the facts? In the Keeley case, unfortunately, men of science as well as others were among the deluded. They should have suspected fraud; at least they should have insisted on making such investigations as a suspicion of fraud would have suggested; and, if they were not allowed to make them, they should have refused all countenance to the business. As it is, many ignorant persons who lost money through Keeley's imposture will very properly cast blame on the presumedly competent mechanicians and physicists who went through the form of examining Keeley's apparatus and afterward spoke, however guardedly, of his extraordinary results. As an object lesson in regard to the need for uncompromising skepticism when facts which can not be accounted for on understood principles are presented for acceptance, the history of the Keeley motor should not soon be forgotten. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. Professor _Bailey_ shows, in his book on the _Evolution of Our Native Fruits_,[43] that the value of the native American species has not yet begun to be adequately estimated, and his narrative carries the conviction that the possibilities to be realized from their development are totally undreamed of. De Candolle made the astounding assertion, in his book on The Origin of Cultivated Plants, that the United States only yields as nutritious plants worth cultivating the Jerusalem artichoke and the gourds. "They had a few bulbs and edible berries, but have not tried to cultivate them, having early received the maize, which was worth far more." "And yet," Professor Bailey answers, "the American grapes have given rise to eight hundred domestic varieties, the American plums to more than two hundred, the raspberries to three hundred, and various other native fruits have a large progeny." Three motives, the author says, run through his book: An attempt to expound the progress of evolution in objects which are familiar and have not yet been greatly modified by man; an effort to make a simple historical record from unexplored fields; and a desire to suggest the treasures of experience and narrative which are a part of the development of agriculture. The studies of which the book is a fruit were begun more than ten years ago, and were pursued with original sources where they were accessible, and at the cost of much labor and travel. The story begins with the grapes. The cultivation of native grapes, which are singularly abundant and various in the wild condition, began after several attempts on the large and on the small scale to make foreign grapes profitable had failed. Nicholas Longworth, of Cincinnati, who did more than any other one man to promote it, sought for wine grapes. After several varieties had been tried with more or less success, the Catawba and the Concord were introduced, and the cultivation was established and became important, but no longer with wine-making as its chief object. Now we have a large variety of grapes--characteristic, finely flavored, and adapted to numerous uses in wines and desserts. Plums are mentioned in the early records nearly as frequently as grapes. There are five native types from which diverse varieties have arisen, the greater part of them of fortuitous origin. The native cherries have not yet been very hopeful of promise, except the dwarf species, which seem "destined to play an important part in the evolution of American fruit." Five types of native apples are known, from which a number of named and worthy varieties have arisen, by Nature's propagation, not man's; and the author anticipates great benefits to be derived from the very gradual and undemonstrative insinuation of native blood into the domestic sorts. The story of the cultivation of the raspberries, blackberries, dewberries, strawberries, gooseberries, currants, and mulberries tells of much patience and skill applied to the production of results in the benefits of which all may share, and which have undoubtedly added to the sum of human well-being. There remain still many fruits, the improvement of which has hardly begun, and which offer a promising field for experiment--the persimmon, pawpaw, whortleberry, buffalo berry, barberry, and nuts. The whole history of the improvement of American fruit is interpreted by Professor Bailey as showing that in nearly every case the amelioration has come from the force of circumstances, and not from the choice or design of man, principally because foreign species did not do well and something adapted to American conditions had to be found. Yet much skill has been shown in recognizing the good qualities of the native species, and in giving them conditions favorable to improvement. For the future the author believes that the best results at the amelioration of any species are to be expected by working with the highly improved forms rather than with the original wild stock. We need, he says, a greater range of variation, more divergent and widely unlike varieties, and more incidental or minor strains of the most popular and cosmopolitan sorts. Professor Bailey finds the greatest satisfaction in his book in the record of the men who have been instrumental in introducing the improved fruits. No men have been greater benefactors to our country than these, who have done the equivalent of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before, and have added to the healthful sum of pleasure and content. * * * * * As Professor Darwin truly says, a mathematical argument is, after all, only organized common sense; but, unfortunately, it is usually in such a highly organized form as to be beyond the intelligence of the average reader. In the present volume,[44] however, the author has wonderfully simplified a most intricate and difficult mathematical subject, and really seems to give some justification for the above generalization. The first chapter of _The Tides_ is devoted to defining them and describing methods of observation and study. The curious tidal movements in lakes, called _seiches_, which were first systematically studied by Professor Forel on the Lake of Geneva, are taken up in the second chapter; an account of Forel's work is given, and the statement made that similar researches are now under way on other lakes, notably that of Mr. Denison on Lake Huron in this country. Tides in rivers, including an account of the curious tidal phenomenon known as a "bore," are next described, the laws governing their variation and the ways in which they differ from the tides of the open sea being carefully laid down. A brief historical chapter, containing some curious extracts from Chinese and Icelandic literature, is rather instructive anthropologically than tidally. The three following sections are taken up by a study of tide generating and modifying forces, and include an interesting account of the experiments made some years ago by Dr. Darwin and his brother, in an effort to measure tidal forces by means of the bifilar pendulum, which is now such an important agent in seismological investigation. Chapters IX and X give an account of the equilibrium, and the dynamical theories of the tide-generating forces, and are chiefly accounts of the devices by which mathematicians have endeavored to bring artificial order out of the actual chaos. The great complexity of this portion of the subject; the variety of forces operating to produce the tides, the sun, the moon, the earth's rotation, etc.; and the number of retarding and confusing elements, friction, interposed land masses, river currents, air movements, depth of water, etc., render these theories practically valueless for use in tidal calculations. In the following section Dr. Draper shows how, by means of Lord Kelvin's "harmonic analysis," which separates the tide-generating forces of each kind into a number of ideal components, results of practical value are obtained. In Chapter XIII a very ingenious instrument for tide prediction which has been in use for some time by the Indian Government is described. The recording part of the machine is simply a paper-wound drum, on which a pencil point makes a graphic record. When the tides of a given port are desired, it is only necessary to set the instrument according to the tidal components, obtained by harmonic analysis and the time chosen for the beginning of the tide table, and then start it at the proper moment. It takes about four hours to run off the tidal curve for a year. This curve is then measured, and the year's tide table readily made out. Dr. Darwin informs us that a very similar instrument is now in course of construction for the United States Government. The remainder of the work consists of a more detailed discussion of the various disturbing influences which interfere with the simplicity of tidal movements--displacement of the earth's axis, earthquakes, etc, a long discussion of tidal friction, a study of the laws of rotating liquid masses, the nebular hypothesis, and finally a chapter on Saturn's rings. The text in many places will be found difficult to understand by the general reader, despite the author's efforts to fully and simply explain every point, and it seems questionable whether a thorough discussion of tidal phenomena can be made simple enough for the layman's comprehension. The volume can not be read by any one, however, without instruction, and is much the best general discussion of tidal phenomena which we have seen. FOOTNOTES: [43] Sketch of the Evolution of our Native Fruits. By L. H. Bailey, New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 472. Price, $2. [44] The Tides; and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System. The Lowell Institute Lectures for 1898. By George Howard Darwin. New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 378. $2. GENERAL NOTICES. The _Elementary Zoölogy_ of _Frank E. Beddard_[45] contains an account of a few types selected from the chief groups of the animal kingdom, followed and accompanied by a consideration of some of the more general conclusions of biology. A type system has to be used, but the author has endeavored to obviate the great fault of that method--the liability of the students conceiving that the characters of the species selected for description are distinctive of a wider assemblage of forms--by emphasizing here and there the differences between allied groups. The question arises whether to begin with the higher forms and go down to the lower, which some authorities believe to be the course easier of comprehension by the student, or to follow the inverse method. The author prefers to begin with the lower forms and gradually work to the higher as the course having the undoubted advantage of presenting the facts in a logical sequence. He accordingly begins with the amoeba and proceeds upward. The treatment is simple and lucid. Novelty has not been sought in the illustrations, though there are several new ones, but selections have been made from the best already drawn. _An Introductory Logic_[46] grew out of the lectures of the author, Prof. _J. E. Creighton_, to undergraduate classes in Cornell University; is intended primarily as a text-book for students, and aims at being both practical and theoretical. The broad view is taken in the definition of the subject that logic is the science of thought, or the science that investigates the process of thinking; and the author expresses himself convinced that, in spite of some difficulties, formal logic is one of the most valuable instruments in modern education for promoting clear thinking and for developing critical habits of mind. To doubters of the advisability of attempting to include a theory of thought or a philosophy of mind in an elementary course in logic, Professor Creighton replies that psychology having differentiated itself from philosophy and become a "natural" science, no longer undertakes to describe all that the mind is and does. "It belongs to logic to investigate intelligence as a knowing function, just as it is the task of ethics to deal with the practical or active mental faculties." Logic must first be a science before it can become an art, but it can not be regarded as an art in the sense that it furnishes a definite set of rules for thinking correctly. What it can do is to show the method by which new truths have been discovered and the general conditions that must always be fulfilled in reasoning correctly. The treatment in the text follows the usual order, except that the author, keeping clear of artificial diction, writes in talking English that is easy to be comprehended. There are no more vital problems in the evolution of society than those connected with the point of view, the outlook, of the great masses of the "working people." These people form the backbone, the potential energy of society; an acquaintance with their views of ethics and life, and manner of living, is of the utmost importance, not only _per se_, but especially because of the efficient direction which such a knowledge can give the attempts at improving these latter, and through them society at large. Mr. Walter Wyckoff has, apparently actuated by some such view as this, in combination perhaps with a desire for a novel experience, made a two years' trip across the continent, living chiefly among the lowest and most improvident class of manual laborers; making his own living by their methods, and, by means of the close contact, studying them from a vantage point of unusual value. The account of this expedition[47] is, as it could not fail to be, no matter who the traveler might have been, of great interest and value. But in Mr. Wyckoff's hands the story has an added attraction through the literary ability of the author. There is much material of practical scientific value in the volume; it should prove especially suggestive and useful to some of our charity organization workers who apparently find it so difficult to govern their work by reason rather than emotion. There are one or two rather unpleasant lapses, the most marked of which advertises in a Chicago police station Mr. Wyckoff's great linguistic attainments, but the work is generally free from this sort of weakness, and is on the whole very well worth reading for instruction as well as entertainment. The _Manual of Determinative Mineralogy_ of Professors _George J. Brush_ and _Samuel L. Penfield_[48] is intended primarily to be used in the identification of minerals, and that purpose has been kept prominently in view. The present edition is a complete revision of Professor Brush's original work, the value of which and the estimation in which it is held by its constituency are attested by the fact that fourteen editions of it have been issued since it first appeared in 1874. A revision of the parts devoted to blowpipe analysis and the chemical reactions of the elements was published in 1896. To the present edition a chapter is added on the physical properties of minerals, devoted chiefly to crystallography, in which the endeavor has been made to present the subject as simply as possible. Importance has been attached to the description of those forms which are of most frequent occurrence, and the examples chosen to illustrate the different systems represent, as a rule, the simple forms that prevail in specimens of common minerals, while rare and complex forms are treated very briefly. The introduction of a large number of species since 1874 has made a complete rearrangement necessary in the analytical tables; and they have been so developed that tests for characteristic chemical constituents furnish the chief means of identification. Stress is laid upon the importance of determining the chemical constituents as a factor in securing accuracy in identification. Demonstrator _G. S. Newth_ opens his _Manual of Chemical Analysis_[49] with a protest against the thought of "doing" analysis without learning more than the minimum amount of chemistry, and against teaching and practicing it in such a manner as to degrade it to the level "of a purely mechanical and often unintelligible series of rule-of-thumb operations." He says he has done his best to make it "as little of a cram book as possible," and has endeavored "to teach analytical chemistry as well as analysis"--that is, the theoretical as well as the practical side of the subject. He begins with emphasizing the importance of the student making himself _practically_ familiar with certain simple operations he will have to perform constantly, and gives clear, concise definitions of such terms as filtration, solution, evaporation, fusion, precipitation, ignition, etc., which relate to those operations. He condemns slovenly formulas and mechanical notes, but commends real notes of the student's own observations. In his treatment he excludes merely descriptive details that have no bearing on analysis; and in quantitative analysis, prefers describing fully a few typical methods and processes to covering much ground slightly. The Ingersoll Lectureship at Harvard University is constituted on a legacy by Miss Caroline H. Ingersoll, carrying out the wishes of her father, George G. Ingersoll, for the foundation of an annual lectureship on the "Immortality of Man," to which no conditions as to doctrine or method of treatment are attached. The purpose of the lectures, or perhaps their operation, as defined by Prof. _William James_, is that out of the series may emerge a collective literature worthy of the theme. Professor James took as the special subject of his lecture[50] the answer to two objections to the doctrine of immortality: first, the absolute dependence of our spiritual life, as we know it here, on the brain; and the second relating to "the incredible and intolerable number of beings which, with our modern imagination, we must believe to be immortal, if immortality be true." To the former objection the author replies that thought is not a productive but a permissive or transmissive function of the brain; when the brain decays, the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness is still intact, and the stream still goes on; to the second, that spiritual being is not as material being, that each new mind brings "its own edition of the universe of space" along with it, that there is no crowding or interference, and that the supply of individual life in the universe can never possibly exceed the demand. The first number of _In Lantern Land_, a monthly journal "devoted to literature, the fine arts, the play, with some discussion of passing events," _Charles Dexter Allen_ and _William Newnham Carleton_, editors, gives promise of a literary journal of elevated tone. It holds its aim to be unprejudiced and independent. (Published at Hartford, Conn., by Charles Dexter Allen, for one dollar a year.) Mr. _Henry Carr Pearson_ presents in his _Greek Prose Composition_ (American Book Company, 90 cents) results of his own experience in the class room. The aim of the book is to combine study of the essentials of Greek syntax with practice in translating connected English into Attic Greek, and to afford convenient practice in writing Greek at sight. The work is in three parts: Part I, containing, in graded lessons, the principal points of Greek syntax, designed for use at the beginning of the second year's study of Greek; Part II, short simple English sentences modeled after sentences in Xenophon's Anabasis, for daily use in connection with reading of the text; and Part III, connected English prose, graded, also based on the Anabasis. Review lessons are introduced, and a Greek-English vocabulary is provided. Mr. _James W. Crook_, in the introduction to his history of the development of _German Wage Theories_ (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law), remarks upon the slowness with which political economy, and particularly the study of questions concerning wages, has advanced in Germany. Hardly any original work on wages is to be found there for half a century after the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, although numerous text-books bearing upon the subject were issued--all for the most part only summarizing or slightly modifying the reasonings and conclusions of the English master. The conditions of economic life in the two countries were different, and the "industrial revolution was slow in developing on the Continent, and in Germany the old industrial order with its restrictions and conservative methods prevailed long after England had replaced the old with the new." These differences between the two countries may adequately account for the great disparity in theoretic development. And Germany is still largely dependent upon other countries in its discussions. In the present work, the chief object being to discover progress of thought on the subject, chronology had to be sacrificed, in some instances, to a logical treatment. Those writers are grouped who appear to show the largest number of points of contact, and this leads to placing all the German writers treated in two groups, in one of which a real unity of method and interest prevails, and Hermann is the most important center, while the other group includes von Thünen, Karl Marx, and Schulze-Gaevernitz, authors who do not belong together in the sense that the others do. Among the articles in the _Columbia University Bulletin_ for June, 1898, are those on the Department of History, the Preparatory Schools (by G. R. Carpenter), Columbia Non-Graduates (H. G. Paine), the Teaching of Anatomy (by George S. Huntington), and the second of Mr. H. A. Cushing's historical papers on King's College in the American Revolution. The report of _Filibert Noth_, special agent of the Division of Forestry, on _Forestry Conditions_ and _Interests of Wisconsin_, and the _Third Annual Report of the Chief Fire Warden of Minnesota, C. C. Andrews_, furnish many facts and suggestions of value to persons interested in the maintenance and protection of our forests. D. Appleton and Company publish as one of their Home Reading Books _The Story of Rob Roy_, by _Sir Walter Scott_, condensed for home and school reading by Edith D. Harris. The editor of the series, Dr. W. T. Harris, furnishes a preface, pointing out the essential qualities of Scott's works on which their fame rests, and analyzing the features of Scottish and English life of the age to which they relate and which give these stories of the border their interest and charm. In explanation of the plan and reason of the present condensation, he says that "it has been found possible to condense the Waverley novels by omitting all lengthy descriptions of scenery, historical disquisitions on the times, and a few passages of dialogue and monologue that do not contribute directly to the progress of the story, or throw light upon the character of the persons who enter upon the scene. It is believed that by this method the interest is preserved intact, and that after a year's interval the story in its unabridged form may be read with as lively an interest as the youth will feel in reading this version." Price, 60 cents. A paper, _Indices Ponderaux de la Crane_ (Weight Indexes of the Brain), in the Bulletin of the Anthropological Society of Paris, comprises the results of a study of the weight and capacity of the brain, the weight of the mandible, and the cranio-mandibular and cranio-cerebral indices, etc., made upon sixty-four heads of animals by _George Grant McCurdy_, of New Haven, with the collaboration of M. _Nicolas Mohyliansky_. The pamphlet embodying the _Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Session of the Association of American Anatomists_, held at Cornell University in December, 1897, contains a portrait and notice, with bibliography of the late Dr. Harrison Allen, the reports of the majority and the minority of the committee on anatomical nomenclature, and seventeen papers contributed by members of the association. The _University Geological Survey of Kansas_ is conducted under the authority of the Board of Regents of the State University, and has issued already several large and elegant volumes recording the operations and results of its work. The fourth volume, now before us, embraces the paleontology of the Upper Cretaceous, and is by _Samuel W. Williston_, paleontologist. Kansas is famous for its fossils, no equal area in the United States, perhaps, presenting such varied and remarkable records of this kind. Yet, while the State has furnished much of interest to the sciences of geology and paleontology, the published accounts in these departments are confined to scattered and abstruse papers accessible only to the specialist. The present publication is an effort to put this knowledge, so far as the particular formation to which it relates is concerned, within the reach of students. Professor Williston has been engaged for twelve years in the study of the geology and paleontology of the State, having spent more than three years in field exploration, and has been eight years collecting material for his book, enjoying the advantage of access to the very important collection of the university. Much of the information is here published for the first time. The fossils of the western part of the State only are described in it, for the sole reason that more preparatory work has been done on them in the university in recent years; but other departments are in preparation and will appear in due course. The fossils described are birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, mosasaurs, turtles, microscopic organizations, and invertebrates, all of the Upper Cretaceous. In a paper on _The Relations of the People of the United States to the English and the Germans_, read before the Thursday Club of Chicago, Mr. _William Vocke_ undertakes a defense of the Germans against a supposition that they are hostile to the United States. This is right, if the Germans need defense, which we doubt; but to give his thesis the shape of an attack on England, as is done in the paper, is unnecessary. The account of the investigations conducted by Dr. _D. N. Bergey_ under the supervision of Drs. J. S. Billings and S. Weir Mitchell, on the _Influence upon the Vital Resistance of Animals to the Micro-organisms of Disease, brought about by a Long Sojourn in Impure Atmosphere_, already referred to in the Monthly, is published under the Hodgkins Fund in the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Contributions. The _Report of the United States National Museum_ which we are called upon to notice is for the year 1895, and bears the signature of _G. Brown Goode_. It embraces accounts of the origin and development of the museum, its organization and scope, and its work in public education; reviews of the special topics in its operations for the year; synopses of the scientific work in various departments; the administrative reports; appendixes relating to accessions to the collections, lectures, meetings, etc.; and a number of special papers of great value and interest, including an account of the Kwakiutl Indians, by Franz Boas; The Graphic Art of the Eskimos, by W. J. Hoffman; The Geology and Natural History of Lower California, by G. P. Merrill; The Tongues of Birds, by F. A. Lucas; The Ontonagon Copper Bowlder in the United States Museum, by Charles Moore; The Antiquity of the Red Race in America, by Thomas Nilsen; and accounts of the Mineralogical Collections in the Museum, by Wirt Tassin, and of the Taxidermical Methods in the Leyden Museum, Holland, by Dr. Shufeldt. _The Dawn of the Twentieth Century_ is a poem, described by the author, _Charles P. Whaley_, as his first sermon, dedicated to rationalism. He describes himself as having recovered from "a severe attack of orthodoxy," which deprived him for the time of the power of logical reason, and to have at last discerned a theology, "founded upon absolute, demonstrable scientific facts," which is to prevail in the next century. His poem presents his view of that theology. In the September number of the Quarterly Review, _The New World_, an article by Prof. _Otto Pfleiderer_ on Evolution and Theology, defines the task of Ecclesiastical Protestantism after having abandoned the ethical ideals of mediæval Christianity, as being "for a still wider development, to strike off the dogmatic fetters of ecclesiastical criticism, and to clothe its religious principle in new forms of thought, which shall render for our age the same service that the Greek and Roman dogmas rendered for the earlier time." In an article on Social and Individual Evolution, Mr. _Henry Jones_ maintains that the social tendencies of the present day point to a limitation of individual independence and enterprise. A contribution to the anthropology of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, _Facial Paintings of the Indians of Northern British Columbia_, by _Franz Boas_, forms the first part of Volume II of the Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History. The Jesup expedition has been organized under the patronage of Mr. Morris K. Jesup, president of the museum, and under the direction of that institution, to study what relations may exist or may have existed between the natives of the northwest coasts of America and the peoples of the neighboring Asiatic coasts. The general likeness, in the midst of their special minor diversities, of all the Indians of the American continent points to an ultimately common origin for them, while the differences indicate that this may not have been precisely identical in time and place, and seem to have required a very long time for their development and establishment. The purpose of the expedition is to collect all the information that can be obtained by its method of exploration contributing to this end. The present contribution embodies the fruits of a study of the arts, as applied to facial decoration, of the Thompson River Indians, the Chilcotin, the Bella Coola, the Kakiutl, and the Nootka. This art is almost exclusively based on animal motives, is highly conventionalized, and has the unique peculiarity of seeking to fit the whole figure of the animal to the surface on which it is applied; whence it presents some curious effects. In this effort to illustrate the principles of its conventionalism Dr. Boas has selected as the most difficult and complicated surface the human face, of which he gives in six plates eighty-eight figures of as many different styles of decoration. FOOTNOTES: [45] Elementary Zoölogy. By Frank E. Beddard. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 208. Price, 90 cents. [46] An Introductory Logic. By James Edwin Creighton. New York: The Macmillan Company, pp. 392. $1.10. [47] The Workers: an Experiment in Reality. The West. By Walter A. Wyckoff. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 878. $1.50. [48] Manual of Determinative Mineralogy, with an Introduction on Blowpipe Analysis. By George J. Brush. Revised and enlarged, with entirely new tables for the identification of minerals. Fifteenth edition, first thousand. New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 312. [49] A Manual of Chemical Analysis, Qualitative and Quantitative. By G. S. Newth. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., pp. 462. $1.75. [50] Human Immortality. Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine. By William James. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., pp. 70. $1. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Cornell University: No. 154. Tables for Computing Rations for Farm Animals. By J. L. Stone. Pp. 20; No. 155. The San José Scale. By H. P. Gould. Pp. 12; No. 156. Potato Culture. By I. P. Roberts and L. A. Clinton. Pp. 12; No. 157. The Grapevine Flea Beetle. By M. V. Slingerland. Pp. 24; No. 158. Bacteria in Cheese Curd. By V. A. Moore and A. R. Ward. Pp. 20. with plate; No. 159. Report on Progress of Work. Pp. 32.--Hatch Station of Massachusetts Agricultural College: No. 56. Concentrated Feed Stuffs. Pp. 24.--New Jersey: No. 132. Fertilizer Analyses. Pp. 61.--Ohio: Seventeenth Annual Report for 1898. Pp. 48.--Purdue University: No. 73. Tests of Strawberries, Raspberries, Blackberries, and Grapes. Pp. 16; No. 74. A Native White Bedding Plant (Starry Grasswort). By J. C. Arthur. Pp. 12.--United States Department of Agriculture: No. 16. The Hessian Fly in the United States. By Herbert Osborn. Pp. 60, with plates; Miscellaneous Results of the Division of Entomology. Pp. 102.--University of Wyoming: No. 39. Alkali Studies. By E. E. Blosson and B. C. Buffum. Pp. 24. Allen, Alfred H., and Leffmann, Henry. Commercial Organic Analysis. Third edition. Revised. Vol. II, Part I. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Sons & Co. Pp. 387. $3.50. American, The, Kitchen Magazine. A Domestic Science Monthly, January, 1899. The Home Science Company, Boston, Mass. Monthly. 10 cents. $1 a year. Bailey, L. H., Editor. The Principles of Agriculture. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 300. $1.25. Bardeen, C. W. Commissioner Hume. A Story of the New York Schools. Syracuse, N. Y.: C. W. Bardeen. Pp. 210. $1.25. Bates, Frank Greene. Rhode Island and the Formation of the Union. New York: Columbia University (Studies in History, etc.). The Macmillan Company. Pp. 220. Brooks, William Keith. The Foundations of Zoölogy. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 339. $2.50. Bulletins, Reports, etc. Atlanta University: Some Efforts of American Negroes for their own Social Betterment (Report of the Third Atlanta Conference). Pp. 66.--Bruner, Lawrence, University of Nebraska: Some Notes on Nebraska Birds. Pp. 178.--City of Chicago: Report of the Educational Commission. Pp. 248.--Connecticut: Fourteenth Annual Report of the State Bureau of Labor Statistics. Pp. 234.--Harvard Astrophysical Conference, August, 1898. By M. B. Snyder. Pp. 33.--Harvard College Astronomical Observatory: Annual Report of the Director to September 30, 1898. By E. C. Pickering. Pp. 14.--Iowa State University: Bulletin from the Laboratories of Natural History, Vol. IV, No. 4. Pp. 96, with plates.--Jewish Training School of Chicago: Ninth Annual Report. Pp. 45.--Michigan: Thirtieth Annual Report of Registry and Return of Births, Marriages, and Deaths for 1896. By C. L. Wilbur. Pp. 188.--Model, the Gas and Gasoline Engine. Garrett Works, Indiana. Pp. 22.--New York State Museum: A Guide to the Geological Collections, By F. J. H. Merrill. Pp. 156, with plates.--Society of American Authors: Monthly, January, 1899. Pp. 12.--Tokio, Japan, Imperial University Calendar. Pp. 250, with map.--United States Commissioner of Education: Report for 1896-'97, Vol. II. Pp. 1260.--United States Fish Commission Bulletin, Vol. XVII, 1897. George M. Bowers, Commissioner. Pp. 436. Campbell, D. H. Lectures on the Evolution of Plants. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 319. $1.25. Clinical Excerpts. Vol. I, No. 10. Pp. 16. Coming Age, The. A Magazine of Constructive Thought. B. O. Flower and Mrs. C. K. Reifsinder, Editors. Vol. I, No. 1, January. 1899. Boston: The Coming Age Company. Pp. 122. 20 cents. $2 a year. Dabney, Charles W., Jr. University of Tennessee. The Old College and the New. Pp. 16.--A National Department of Science. Pp. 13. Elliott, A. G., Editor. Gas and Petroleum Engines. Translated and adapted from the French of Henry de Graffigny. New York: The Macmillan Company. 75 cents. Farrington, E. H., and Wall, F. W. Testing Milk and its Products. Madison, Wis.: The Mendota Book Company. Pp. 256, $1. Pp. 140, 75 cents. Haeckel, Ernst. The Last Link in our Present Knowledge of the Descent of Man. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 156. $1. Huntington, Harwood. The Yearbook for Colorists and Dyers. Vol. I. New York: The Author. Pp. 309.--Some Notes on Chemical Jurisprudence. 260 West Broadway, New York. Pp. 24. 85 cents. Index, The. Devoted to the Latest News and Gossip in the Field of Art and Letters. G. B. Rogers, Editor. Vol. I, No. 10. Cleveland and New York: The Hellman-Taylor Company. 50 cents a year. Lee, Sidney, Editor. Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. LVII. Tom to Tytler. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 461. $3.25. Luquer, L. M. Minerals in Rock Sections. The Practical Methods of Identifying Minerals in Rock Sections with the Microscope. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company. Pp. 117. Marr, J. E. The Principles of Stratigraphical Geology. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 304. $1.60. Martin, H. Newell. The Human Body. Fifth edition. Revised by G. W. Fitz. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 408. $1.20. Mervan, Rencelof Ermagine. What is This? Copyrighted by G. Washington Price. Pp. 272. Morehouse. G. W. The Wilderness of Worlds. The Evolution of Matter from Nebula to Man and Return. New York: Peter Eckler. Pp. 246. Nichols, E. L., and Franklin, W. S. The Elements of Physics, Vol. I. Mechanics and Heat. New edition, revised, with additions. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 219. $1.50. Ober, Frederick A. Puerto Rico and its Resources. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 282, with map. Ratzel, Prof. Friedrich. The History of Mankind. By A. J. Butler. Introduction by E. B. Tyler. Vol. III. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 599, with maps. $4. Reprints. Andrews, General C. C. Utilization of Our Waste Lands for Forestry Purposes. Pp. 10.--Bailey, Prof. E. H. S., Lawrence, Kan. The Proof of the Law of Similia (Homoeopathic) from the Electro-Chemico-Physiological Standpoint. Pp. 8.--Bangs, L. Bolton, New York. Illustrative Cases of Prostatitis. Pp. 24.--De Courcy, J. Osborne, East St. Louis, Ill. Diseases of the Alimentary Canal, Ulcers, Malignant Sore Throat. Pp. 24--Gilbert, G. K., Washington. Recent Earth Movements in the Great Lakes Region. Pp. 50.--Kakels, Sara W. Pregnancy in Women with Uterus Duplex.--Mayfield, R. N., New York. Catheters and Cystitis. Pp. 3.--Rotch, A. Lawrence. The Exploration of the Free Air by Means of Kites at Blue Hill Observatory, Massachusetts. Pp. 10. Sladen, Douglas, Editor. Who's Who? 1899. An Annual Biographical Dictionary. Fifty-first year. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 1014. $1.75. Smithsonian Institution. Adler, Cyrus, and Casanowicz, I. M. Exhibit of Biblical Antiquities at the Cotton States Exposition, Atlanta, Ga., 1895. Pp. 87, with plates.--Clark, Hubert L. The Feather Tracts of North American Grouse and Quail. Pp. 12, with plates.--Langley, S. P. Report of the Secretary for the Year ending June 30, 1898. Pp. 89. Starr, Frederick; American Indians. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co. Pp. 227. 45 cents. Stewart, Freeman. Shall we Grow the Sugar we Consume? Swarthmore, Pa.: R. S. Dare. 25 cents. Thompson, Sylvanus P. Michael Faraday: His Life and Work. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 308. $1.25. Whitaker, Herbert C. Elements of Trigonometry, with Tables. Philadelphia: Eldridge & Brother. Pp. 196. Wilson, L. L. W. Nature Study in Elementary Schools. First Reader. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 253. 35 cents. Fragments of Science. =Pre-Columbian Musical Instruments in America.=--In a recent article in the Popular Science Monthly (November, 1898), entitled Was Middle America Peopled from Asia? I insisted that if there had been any invasion, peaceful or otherwise, sufficient to have affected even in the slightest degree the arts, customs, and religious beliefs of middle America, then, associated with these influences, we should find traces of Asiatic utensils, implements, structures, such as sandals, weapons, pottery, wheels, plows, roofing tiles, etc.; in other words, just those objects most intimately associated with man. I especially considered the absence of stringed musical instruments and coincided with Dr. Otis T. Mason in the belief that there was no evidence of a pre-Columbian stringed musical device. This question has been variously discussed and the following references bear on the subject: A short note in the American Antiquarian for January, 1897, by Dr. D. G. Brinton, entitled Native American Stringed Musical Instruments. The author frankly admits, however, that the cases cited may all have been borrowed from the whites or negroes. Mr. M. H. Saville in the American Anthropologist for August, 1897, described A Primitive Maya Musical Instrument, though he makes no pronounced statement of its pre-Columbian origin. Dr. Mason, in the American Anthropologist for November, 1897, discusses the question under the title Geographical Distribution of the Musical Bow, and in this paper says, "I have come to the conclusion that stringed musical instruments were not known to any of the aborigines of the western hemisphere before Columbus." In my paper I insisted that "had this simple musical device been known anciently in this country, it would have spread so widely that its pre-Columbian use would have been beyond any contention." Mr. Saville finally, in the American Anthropologist for September, 1898, shows apparently the existence of a pre-Columbian stringed musical device in a paper entitled The Musical Bow in Ancient Mexico, and presents his proof in the form of a reproduction from an ancient Mexican codex of an orchestra of six performers. One of the figures, according to Mr. Saville's interpretation, is holding a musical bow in his left hand while with his right hand he is striking the cord with a forked stick. Claiming no skill in the interpretation of these quaint and concentrated Jack-of-heart figures, I readily yielded to the authority of Saville in this matter, and so acknowledged in a footnote in my paper which I was enabled to insert after the pages were made up. Within a few days I have received a letter from Mrs. Zelia Nuttall, the eminent American paleographist, to whom we are indebted for the most profound researches in connection with these ancient codices. In this letter Mrs. Nuttall refers to Sahagun's great manuscript, wherein she says: "The native musical instruments are repeatedly enumerated. The turtle's shell figures among them, _but there is no trace of a stringed musical instrument ever having been known or employed in ancient Mexico_." (The Italics are hers.) Mrs. Nuttall then says that the object held under the arm of the musician which has been recognized as a musical bow is undoubtedly a turtle's shell. In support of this view she sends me a tracing of the figure from the original manuscript which is now in Vienna, in which the entire object under the arm of the player as well as the forked stick is colored blue (Fig. 1). A photograph is also inclosed from another ancient Mexican manuscript in course of publication by Mrs. Nuttall. In this (Fig. 2) the player has the turtle's shell and is pounding on it with a pronged stick, horn, or branch, while in the other hand he holds a rattle and at the same time sings, the notes being graphically portrayed as they come from his mouth. It will be observed that it is the plastron or ventral surface that he is striking, as shown by the notches in its forward and hinder edges, though the plates are incorrectly drawn. In the figure given by Mr. Saville the player is holding the turtle's shell in precisely that position that would enable him to strike the plastron. Even in Mr. Saville's figure the marginal plates of the shell are plainly indicated. By holding the figure face downward the shell is thrown in a normal position with the back uppermost, and what was mistaken for the string of the instrument is the outline of the back of the turtle correctly delineated. With the above figures I give the outline of the left arm and body of a friend who posed for me while holding a large South American turtle under his arm. I have drawn the plates of the carapace to more clearly indicate the position of the turtle's shell. In the original codex, as before remarked, this portion is colored blue. In this attitude the flat plastron forms the drumhead, so to speak, the carapace acting as a resonator. I am sure that Mr. Saville will agree with me that Mrs. Nuttall's attribution is the correct one. [Illustration: FIG. 1.] [Illustration: FIG. 2.] [Illustration: FIG. 3.] EDWARD S. MORSE. =Rebreathed Air as a Poison.=--The following extracts are taken from an article by Dr. John Hartley, in the Lancet: "The fresh-air treatment of consumption" appears to be made up of three essential factors: (1) the discontinuance of the supply of bacilli from without; (2) the supply of an abundance of nutritive material to the tissues; and (3) the supply of an abundance of fresh air uncontaminated by the products of respiration. This seems to mean that the tissues, if not too enfeebled, may be trusted to deal with the bacilli already present if their metabolism is kept going at high pressure. Fresh air is now the "official" remedy in the treatment of tubercle. Why is it so ignored in the case of other diseases? Has the pneumonic or bronchitic no need of special ventilation because his microbe is of a different breed? The air was intended not only for phthisical patients or patients suffering from pneumonia but for _all_--diseased and healthy alike--and it is still the natural medium in which the poisonous products of tissue metabolism excreted by the lungs are further broken down and rendered harmless. Dr. A. Ransome has done great service not only by his onslaught on "air sewage" but also by his coinage of the term; for a thoroughly good opprobrious epithet resembles a good wall-poster in its power of arresting and enchaining the attention of the many. It was long ago pointed out that certain constituents of expired air are intensely powerful nerve poisons. These considerations should surely make us look on rebreathed air and sewer gas, not as mere carriers of accidental poisons, such as influenza and pneumonia and the like, but as _poisons per se_, and I wish to be allowed to record a few very imperfect observations made by myself during some years past chiefly on the subject of rebreathed air, with certain inferences which I think tend, however feebly and imperfectly, to show that the poisons we expire have _per se_ very definite effects on tissue metabolism and need not a mere perfunctory admixture with fresh air but very large and very continuous dilution before they are rendered innocuous--that is to say, innocuous to _all_; for while some persons appear to be almost immune, others seem intensely susceptible. The first observation I will allude to was made in the autumn of 1896, in cool weather. I had to take a long night journey by rail after a long and hard day's work. The train was full and the compartment I entered was close; so, as I was tired and fagged, I sat in the corridor by an open window, well rugged up, throughout the journey. The compartment was completely shut off from the corridor by a glass door and windows, through which I could freely inspect its occupants. Two remarkably fresh-complexioned, wholesome-looking young fellows got into the compartment at York. They formed a remarkable contrast to the pallid and fagged-looking travelers already there. The windows and ventilators were carefully closed, and the newcomers, with the rest, settled off to sleep and slept soundly for nearly four hours, with the exception of a few minutes' interval at Grantham. When aroused on nearing London they, like the other occupants of the compartment, were haggard and leaden-hued, their fresh color was entirely gone, and they looked and moved as if exhausted. I examined my own face in the lavatory mirror at the beginning and end of the journey and could see but little alteration in my color; if anything, it was rather improved by the end of the journey. The second case occurred early in 1897. I was asked to see a woman, aged about forty-eight years, who had been treated in a neighboring town for many weeks for bronchitis and asthma following influenza. She had relapsed about a week when I first saw her. She was then sitting up in bed; her face was leaden-colored, her skin was clammy and sweating, with a feeble, quick pulse, and the heart sounds were indistinguishable owing to wheezing; there was some crepitation at the bases. The temperature was about 101° F. The weather was cold, but after wrapping her up, with a hot bottle to her feet, the window was well opened. Her color improved in a few minutes and the sweating ceased soon after. But it and the blueness returned if the window was shut for any time. It was directed to be kept open night and day, and I could see from my house that this order was carried out. Although on one night the thermometer showed 14° F. of frost the chest was clear of noises and she was convalescent in eight days. If fresh air needs warming she ought to have died. Why do most men feel so tired after an afternoon's work in a crowded out-patient room? Why is a long journey in a full railway carriage, even with a comfortable seat, so exhausting to many people? Personally an hour or two in a full carriage with the windows shut will give me numbness in my feet and legs and knock me up for the day, while a railway journey in an empty carriage with open windows does not affect me at all. But most people will be willing to admit that any kind of crowd is tiring. It is to me difficult to resist the impression than an overdose of waste products, whether of one's own or other people's, must generally interfere with the metabolism of nerve tissue. Women as they grow older are apt to live much indoors. I believe the fat, flabby, paunchy woman, whether purple or pale, with feeble, irritable heart and "inadequate" kidneys, is usually the victim of rebreathed air. A "close" room will infallibly give me an abdominal distention and borborygmi within half an hour, and I am inclined to think the purity of the air breathed by the dyspeptic quite as important as his regimen or his teeth. It must, I think, sooner or later be recognized that many of the increasing ills which it has been the fashion to charge on the "hurry and brain fag" incidental to a high state of civilisation and a large population are in reality due to the greater contamination of the air we breathe by the waste products of that population, and that toxines excreted by the lungs will in time take high rank among these as both potent and insidious. If this should come to pass, the present ideas anent ventilation must be abandoned as utterly futile, and the need will be felt, not of letting a little air in, but of letting waste products out. =The Utilization of Wave Power.=--The utilization of the energy which goes to waste in the movement of water, in waves, tides, and waterfalls, has been a much-studied problem during recent years. The only one of these three phenomena which has as yet been at all extensively commercially harnessed is the waterfall. There have, however, been a number of wave and tide motors constructed. The most recent and perhaps the most promising of these is the type invented by Mr. Morley Fletcher, of Westminster, England. He has made a special study of the problem of motion of the sea, and has already successfully constructed a hydraulic pump, an electric motor, and a self contained siren buoy in which the energy is obtained entirely from wave motion. The great possibilities in this direction for cheap and efficient power plants have not been appreciated by seacoast towns, but it is stated in Industries and Iron, from which we have taken the above particulars, that Mr. Fletcher is at present devoting his attention to devising schemes and designing apparatus for pumping sea water for shore purposes, ore washing, driving electric machinery for town lighting and power plants, buoys for marking harbors with beacons and fog horns, and the many other purposes to which such a constant and inexhaustible source of energy is applicable. =Dispersal of Seeds.=--Having described in the Plant World some of the provisions of Nature for the dispersal of seeds, Prof. W. J. Beal adds that these various devices, besides serving to extend and multiply the species and promote its plantation on favorable soil, enable plants to flee from too great crowding of their own kind and from their plant rivals and parasites. "The adventurers among plants often meet with the best success, not because the seeds are larger or stronger or better, but because they find for a time more congenial surroundings. Our weeds, for instance, are carried for long distances by man and by him are planted in new ground that has been well prepared. Every horticulturist knows that apples grown in a new country, if suitable for apples, are fair and healthy, but the scab and codling moth and bitter rot and bark louse sooner or later arrive, each to begin its peculiar mode of warfare." So with peach trees and plums and their enemies. The surest way to grow a few cabbages, radishes, squashes, cucumbers, and potatoes is to plant them here and there in good soil at considerable distances from where any have heretofore been grown. "For a time enemies do not find them." Pear trees planted scatteringly are more likely to remain healthy than in orchards. "Perhaps one reason why plants have become extinct or nearly so is their lack of means of migration. As animals starve out in certain seasons when food is scarce, or more likely migrate to regions which can afford food, so plants desert worn-out land and seek fresh fields. As animals retreat to secluded and isolated spots to escape their enemies, so many plants accomplish the same thing by finding the best places with some of their seeds sown in many regions. Frequent rotations seem to be the rule for many plants when left to themselves in a state of nature. Confining to a permanent spot invites parasites and other enemies and a depleted soil, while health and vigor are secured by frequent migrations." =Commensals.=--Curious associations are formed among animals for mutual aid in the struggle for existence. Some of them are societies of the same species, like those of ants and bees; colonies in which many individuals--as ascidians and bryozoa--join into a single mass and act as one; and associations of animals of different species constituting commensalism where both are benefited, or parasitism, when the advantage accrues to only one of the parties. The hermit crab and certain ascidians furnish very fine examples of commensalism. The hermit crab is known as an inhabitant of shells bereft of their proper owners. Some sea anemones also fasten themselves on shells, and seem to prefer those which have been adopted by hermit crabs. The association is shown by M. Henri Coupan, in _La Nature_, to be one of mutual benefit. The actinia defends the crab and its home against all intruders by means of its tentacles--veritable batteries of prickly stings; while the crab, with its long claws reaching out to catch whatever is good to eat, brings food within reach of the ascidian. Mr. Percival Wright, having taken the crab from a shell to which an ascidian had attached itself, found that the latter abandoned the shell in a short time. M. L. Faunt reversed the experiment, taking the ascidian away, when the crab deserted its quarters, found a shell with the ascidian on it, and occupied it very quickly. He further observed the maneuvers executed by the crab to secure the attachment of an ascidian to its shell. Sometimes a large ascidian will wholly cover a shell; or several smaller ones will spread themselves over the same shell so as to form a continuous envelope over it. The ascidians become so attached to their commensals as to seem unable to live without them, and even to die soon after being separated from them. =Drift of Ocean Currents.=--Of sixteen hundred and seventy-five floats bearing requests to the finder to return them which Prince Albert of Monaco dropped into the Atlantic during three research cruises, with a view to learning something of the movements of surface currents, two hundred and twenty-six were returned to him up to the year 1892. By working the course which each of them had probably been following, the prince undertook to draw a definite map of the currents. As the elements employed were always numerous for each region, he thinks his results were near the truth in its general lines. The floats landed on almost all the shores of the North Atlantic, from the North Cape to the south of Morocco, along Central America, and on the islands of Canaries, Madeira, Azores, Antilles, Bermudas, Shetland, Hebrides, Orkneys, and Iceland. None appeared as far south as the Cape Verde Islands. The drifts seem to indicate an immense vortex, beginning toward the Antilles and Central America with the Gulf Stream and the equatorial current; passing the Banks of Newfoundland at a tangent, it turns to the east, approaches the European coasts, and runs southward from the English Channel to Gibraltar, after having sent a branch running along the coast of Ireland and the coast of Norway as far as the North Cape. It then returns to the west, encircling the Canaries. Its center oscillates somewhere to the southwest of the Azores. The author's observations enabled him also to establish a very good average for the speed at which these floats traveled in the different sections of the vortex, and for every twenty-four hours: Between the Azores, France, Portugal, and the Canaries, it was 5.18 miles; from the Canaries to the Antilles, the Bahamas, and as far as the Bermudas, 10.11 miles; from the Bermudas to the Azores, 6.42 miles. The mean speed for the North Atlantic was 4.48 miles. The figures are under rather than above the truth. =Winds of the Sahara.=--Some interesting meteorological observations, made in the Sahara during eight excursions between 1883 and 1896, have been published by M. F. Foureau. The most frequent winds are those from the northwest and the southeast. Every evening the wind goes down with the sun, or goes to bed, as the Chaambe express it; except the northeast wind, which the Arabs call _el chitâne_, or the devil, because it blows all night. Another wind, called the _chihithi_, has been mentioned by all travelers, and is the subject of numerous legends. It is a warm wind from the southwest, charged with electricity, and often carrying fine sand and darkening the atmosphere. The compasses are much disturbed by it, because, it has been suggested, of a special condition produced upon thin glass covers by the friction caused by the rubbing of the fine wind-carried sand upon them; but it has been observed that the spare compasses show the same disturbed condition as soon as they are taken out of their boxes. The disturbance ceases when the glasses are moistened, and does not appear again till they have dried. Several hailstorms were noticed, the hailstones being usually about as large as peas, but larger in the heavier storms. M. Foureau, not having gone as far as the central heights, observed no snow in the Sahara, but was informed that snow falls in the winter on the tops of the _Tassili des Azdjer_, about five thousand feet above the sea. Similar observations have been made by other travelers, and falls of temperature to about 21° F. have been noticed. Very curious mirage phenomena were sometimes observed. Observations of fulgurites, or instances in which the sand had been vitrified by lightning strokes, were not infrequent. =Evolution of Pleasure Gardens.=--A lesson in the evolution of pleasure resorts is suggested in a book by Mr. Warwick Wroth on the London pleasure gardens. The history of these places has in some cases a strong family resemblance. They usually began as tea gardens, with a bowling green, tea and coffee, hot loaves, and milk "fresh from the cow," as their chief attractions. If the business prospered, other amusements were added, such as music and dancing, with perhaps the exhibition of a giant or a fat woman. Equestrian performances were given in the more important gardens. The manager of one of them kept on the grounds a fine collection of rattlesnakes, one having nineteen rattles and "seven young ones." "Sixteen hundred visitors were present at another one day in August, 1744, to hear honest 'Jo Baker' beat a trevally on his side-drum as he did before the great Duke of Marlborough at the bloody battle of Malplaquet. It was not unusual, moreover, for the owner of a successful tavern to discover on his premises a mineral spring, of which a favorable analysis was easily obtained"--although the spring might be really a bad one. The Spa of Hampstead Wells enjoyed a delightfully pure and invigorating air on the open heath, and had a tavern with coffee rooms, a bowling green, raffling shops, and a chapel, which offered visitors an advantage possessed by no other gardens in London, as a clergyman was always in attendance, and a couple on presenting a license could be married at once on the payment of five shillings. Mr. Wroth suggests that the license was sometimes dispensed with, and the fee, moreover, was remitted if the wedded pair gave a dinner in the gardens. =A Library of Astronomical Photographs.=--The appointment of Mrs. M. P. Fleming as curator of astronomical photographs in the Harvard Observatory is noteworthy because hers is the first woman's name to be placed along with the officers in the university catalogue. It is more so as a recognition of Mrs. Fleming's proved abilities in certain lines of astronomical work. The astrophotographic building is not used for the taking of photographs, but as a peculiar kind of library where the plates secured by the astronomers at Cambridge and Arequipa are preserved, arranged, and catalogued, as is done with books. The duties of the curator are like those of a librarian. But instead of books, of which many copies exist, each of the treasures in the photographic collection is unique and can not be duplicated. Prints of them on paper are of little scientific value, because no paper copy can repeat all the minute accuracy of the original negative on glass; and prints are not taken from them for scientific use, but only for illustration. If one is destroyed it can never be replaced; and it is impossible to predict what fact one of them may embody of the greatest importance to the labors of some future astronomer desiring to compare the aspect of his special object of research at his period and ours. Mrs. Fleming's name is frequently mentioned in the reports of the observatory, and she has distinguished herself in several lines of stellar investigation. She has about a dozen women assistants, some of whom are computors of long experience, and some are known by the discoveries they have made. =Forest Planting on the Plains.=--Mr. Charles A. Keffer, in a report to the Forestry Division on Experimental Tree Planting in the Plains, defines the forestless region of America as including all the States between the Mississippi River north of the Ozark Mountains and eastern Texas and the Rocky Mountains, together with the plateau west of the Rocky Mountains. The possibilities of forest growth in this vast area are yet to be proved. Roughly speaking, any species that thrive in the adjacent wooded region can be grown in Iowa, the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota, the Sioux Valley of South Dakota and the eastern counties of Nebraska, and in the more southern States. We know that difficulties of cultivation increase as one goes westward, but we can not say where the western limit of successful tree culture is. We can not even define the limits of successful agriculture in the plains, for with increased facilities for irrigation splendid crops are now produced where only a few years ago it was thought desert conditions would forever prevail. It is admitted that forest planting, as a financial investment, will probably be profitable on the plains only in a limited degree. Favorable sites may enable the profitable raising of fence posts and other specialized tree crops, but the growing of timber on a commercial scale can hardly be expected. =A Siamese Geological Theory.=--The east coast of Siam as far south as Champawn is characterized by wide bays, with detached masses of limestone set on steep-sided islands or high-peaked promontories with serrated ridges, the most conspicuous of which is Sam Roi Yawt, or the three hundred peaks. The relations of these various rock masses to one another, Mr. H. Warington Smyth observed, in an address to the Royal Geographical Society, have been long ago lucidly set forth by Siamese geologists, who are unanimously agreed on the subject. "It appears that one Mong Lai and his wife once inhabited the neighborhood (they were giants), and each promised their daughter in marriage, unknown to the other, to a different suitor. At last the day of the nuptials arrived, and Chao Lai and the Lord of Mieang Chin (China) both arrived to claim the bride. When the horrified father found how matters stood--having a regard for the value of a promise, which is not too common in the East--he cut his daughter in half, so that neither suitor should be disappointed. Chao Lai, in the meantime, on finding that he had a rival, committed suicide, and the peak of Chaolai is the remains of his body. The unfortunate bride is to be found in the islands off Sam Roi Yawt, the peaks of which are the remains of the gifts which were to be made to the holy man who was to solemnize the wedding; while Kaw Chang and Kaw King, on the east side of the gulf, are the elephant and buffalo cart in which the presents were brought." ="The Hell of War."=--The Cost of a National Crime and The Hell of War and its Penalties are the appropriate names which Edward Atkinson has given to two essays bearing upon the craze for expansion in which the nation has been abruptly plunged. In them an evil which has not yet received due attention, if any, is presented as sure to be inflicted upon us if the policy of militarism is persisted in. "How much increase of taxation," Mr. Atkinson asks, "are you willing to bear, and how many of your neighbors' sons are you ready to sacrifice by fever, malaria, and venereal disease, in order to extend the sovereignty of the United States over the West Indies and the Philippine Islands?" Another question is put to the missionary enthusiasts: "It may be well to ask all who are imbued with this missionary sympathy, How many young men of your own brotherhood are you willing to sacrifice for each convert? How many of your own sons will you expose to sure infection and degeneration in the conduct of your philanthropic purpose? Or will you satisfy your own conscience by consenting to the necessary conscription of other people's sons when it presently becomes impossible to maintain our armed forces in those islands without a draft?" Mr. Atkinson says that his attention has been called to this phase of the evil attendant upon military occupation in the course of his social studies. "The greatest and most unavoidable danger," he writes to the commander in chief of our armies, "to which these forces will be exposed will be neither fevers nor malaria; it will be venereal diseases in their worst and most malignant form." MINOR PARAGRAPHS. A new and very ingenious method of space telegraphy is discussed at length in an article by Karl Zickler in the _Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift_. It depends on a phenomenon discovered by Hertz in 1887, viz., the influence of certain short wave-length light rays upon electrical discharges. The ultra-violet waves, which are obstructed by glass but transmitted by quartz, are the most effective. The source of light is an arc lamp. The light is passed through a lens of rock crystal to the receiver. The receiver is a glass vessel partially exhausted of air, one end of which consists of a truly parallel plate of rock crystal. In front of the receiver there is a condensing lens of rock crystal, and within the exhausted chamber are the two electrodes, one of which is an inclined disk and the other a small ball. The electrodes are connected with the secondary portion of an induction coil, and when the ultra-violet rays fall upon the inclined disk and are reflected to the ball, a discharge will be produced which may be read either with a telephone or a coherer. The signals are sent by alternately interposing a plate of glass in front of the rays issuing from the transmitter and removing it therefrom. Herr Zickler has made many experiments to verify his conclusions and appears to have demonstrated the feasibility of his idea in practice. Mr. Dawson Williams has announced in Nature the discovery in many susceptible persons of a periodicity in the effects that follow a sting. The immediate result, he says, is a small flattened wheal, pale and surrounded by a zone of pink injection. This is attended by itching, but both wheal and itching are gone in less than an hour. About twenty-four hours later the part begins to itch again, and in a few minutes a hard, rounded, deep-red papule appears, and is quickly surrounded by an area of oedematous skin. The formication is intense, and in the affected area, while the ordinary sensations of touch are dulled, those of temperature and painful feelings are exaggerated. In two or three hours the itching diminishes and the oedema disappears, leaving a small, red papule, which itches but little. The phenomena recur, with diminished intensity, in the course of another twenty-four hours, and may return in this way, growing fainter all the time, in four or five daily repetitions. After these returns have ceased, a small, indolent papule may persist for weeks or months. This periodicity is not observed in all subjects, but most generally in those who suffer most. Among the advantages of Linde's liquid-air process, Prof. J. A. Ewing, speaking at the English Society of Arts, claimed its giving a means of separating more or less completely the oxygen of the atmosphere from its associated nitrogen. After describing a process by which a liquid consisting largely of oxygen may be produced, the author said that the most interesting application of the liquid which had hitherto been tried on a commercial scale was to make an explosive by mixing it with carbon. When liquid air, enriched by the evaporation of a large part of the nitrogen, was mixed with powdered charcoal, it formed an explosive comparable in power to dynamite, and which, like dynamite, could be made to go off violently by using a detonator. The chief advantage of the explosive was its cheapness, the cost being only that of liquefying the air. Even the fact that after a short time the mixture ceased to be capable of exploding might be urged as a recommendation, for if a detonator hung fire, there was no danger of the charge going off accidentally some time after the explosion was due, nor was there any risk of its being purloined or used for criminal purposes. NOTES. According to the _Tribune de Genève_, twenty new hotels were opened in Switzerland in 1897, and twenty-five were enlarged, adding two thousand beds and making the whole number of beds about ninety thousand. The number of nights' lodgings furnished during the season is estimated at ten million. Supposing each guest to spend twelve francs a day, the total revenue from tourists would amount to one hundred and twenty million francs, or twenty four million dollars. Classifying the guests according to nationality, it is estimated that the Swiss constitute eighteen per cent of the whole, Germans thirty-four per cent, English sixteen per cent, French twelve per cent, Americans eight per cent, and those of other nations twelve per cent. A list of women astronomers, compiled by Herman S. Davis from Ribiere's _Les Femmes dans la Science_, contains as contemporary workers in the science the names of seventeen American women who have taken part in astronomical computations or are teachers of astronomy, and twelve who are working in the application of photography to astronomy. Of the women in the later list, Miss Ida C. Martin, Miss Dr. Dorothea Klumpke (now in the Paris Observatory), and Mrs. M. P. Fleming have attained distinction for successful original researches. The object of the Pure Food and Drug Congress, which met in Washington in March, 1898, with Joseph E. Blackburn, of Columbus, Ohio, as president, is declared in its resolutions to be to secure suitable national legislation to prevent the adulteration of food, drink, and drugs, to secure the enforcement of laws, and secure and promote uniformity of State legislation looking to that end; to create and maintain a high public sentiment on these subjects, to sustain public officers enforcing the laws respecting them; and to promote a more general intelligence concerning the injury to health and business interests resulting from food adulteration. In this work all are invited to join. The congress was in session four days, and several important papers were read to it. The large Atlantic coastal plain beginning with southern New Jersey, Mr. John Gifford affirms, in The Forester, would soon be capable, if protected from reckless devastation, of producing almost limitless quantities of the valuable smooth-bark or short leaf pine. In Northampton and Accomac Counties, Virginia, lying in this plain, the forests are already properly cared for and propagated without the aid of forest laws. This is done by insuring their freedom from fire, which is attended to purely as a matter of present economy. The value of the woods in holding the loose sandy soil and as windbreaks is recognized, and the litter of the pine trees is a precious dressing for the sweet potato fields. This litter, of pine "chats," "needles," or "browse," is carefully raked off every year and spread on the fields, and there is nothing left in which fire can start. The Lalande prize of the French Academy of Sciences has been conferred upon Prof. S. C. Chandler, of Cambridge, Mass., in recognition of "the splendor, the importance, and the variety" of his astronomical work; the Damoiseau prize upon Dr. George William Hill, of Washington, for his researches in mathematics and astronomy; and the Henry Wilde prize on Dr. Charles A. Schott, of Washington, for his researches in terrestrial magnetism. Prof. J. Mark Baldwin, of Princeton, author of the books The Development of the Child and the Race, Handbook of Psychology, and The Story of the Mind, has been elected a member of the French Institute of Sociology. Among the recent deaths of men associated with scientific pursuits we notice those of Charles Michel Brisse, professor at the Lycée Condorcet for twenty-five years, and professor at other French schools, author of papers on the displacement of figures and on the general theory of surfaces, and of other works in mathematics and mathematical physics, and a co-worker on the _Journal de Physique_, in his fifty-sixth year; Prof. H. Alleyn Nicholson, of the University of Aberdeen, author of books on zoölogy and geology; M. F. Gay, of the University of Montpellier, a student of the green algæ, aged forty years; Dr. Dumontpallier, of Paris, author of contributions to the pathology of the nervous system, aged seventy-four years; Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Pringle, of the British Army, author of papers on the hygiene and diseases of India; Pastor Christian Kaurin, of Norway, a student of Scandinavian mosses, aged sixty-six years; T. Carnel, professor of botany and director of the Botanic Garden, Florence; the Rev. Bartholomew Price, author of several elaborate works in mathematics, and secretary of the Oxford University Press, in his eighty-first year; Dr. Constantine Vousakis, professor of physiology in the University of Athens; William Dames, professor of geology and paleontology in the University of Berlin, and subeditor of the _Paläontologische Abhandlungen_, in his fifty-second year; and Dr. Gottlieb Gluge, emeritus professor of physiology and anatomy in the University of Berlin and author of an atlas of pathological anatomy, aged eighty-six years. Transcriber's Notes: Words surrounded by _ are italicized. Words surrounded by = are bold. Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent spellings have been kept, including inconsistent use of hyphen (e.g. "newcomers" and "new-comers"). Illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text. Caption "Photograph of a _Thelyphonus_" added to the captionless image on p. 608. [vc] means letter c with diacritical mark caron (v-shaped symbol) above it. ['c] means letter c with diacritical mark accute accent above it. 
44544	----	file was produced from images generously made available by Biodiversity Heritage Library.) Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LIV NOVEMBER, 1898, TO APRIL, 1899 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. VOL. LIV. ESTABLISHED BY EDWARD L. YOUMANS. NO. 6. APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. APRIL, 1899. _EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS._ CONTENTS. PAGE I. The Stuff that Dreams are made of. By HAVELOCK ELLIS 721 II. The Best Methods of Taxation. By the Late Hon. DAVID A. WELLS. Part I 736 III. Mental Defectives and the Social Welfare. By MARTIN W. BARR, M. D. (Illustrated.) 746 IV. The Wheat Problem again. By EDWARD ATKINSON 759 V. The Coming of the Catbird. By SPENCER TROTTER 772 VI. Guessing, as Influenced by Number Preferences. By F. B. DRESSLAR 781 VII. Concerning Weasels. By WILLIAM E. CRAM. (Illustrated.) 786 VIII. Care of the Throat and Ear. By W. SCHEPPEGRELL, M. D. 791 IX. The Physical Geography of the West Indies. I. The Mammals of the Antilles. By Dr. F. L. OSWALD 802 X. Iron in the Living Body. By M. A. DASTRE 807 XI. The Malay Language. By Prof. R. CLYDE FORD 813 XII. Life on a South Sea Whaler. By FRANK T. BULLEN 818 XIII. Sketch of Manly Miles. (With Portrait.) 834 XIV. Editor's Table: Science and Culture.--Survival of the Fittest 842 XV. Scientific Literature 845 XVI. Fragments of Science 854 XVII. Index to Vol. LIV 865 NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 72 FIFTH AVENUE. SINGLE NUMBER, 50 CENTS. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, $5.00. COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. Entered at the Post Office at New York, and admitted for transmission through the mails at second-class rates. [Illustration: MANLY MILES.] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. APRIL, 1899. THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF. BY HAVELOCK ELLIS. In our dreams we are taken back into an earlier world. It is a world much more like that of the savage, the child, the criminal, the madman, than is the world of our respectable civilized waking life. That is, in large part, it must be confessed, the charm of dreams. It is also the reason of their scientific value. Through our dreams we may realize our relation to stages of evolution we have long left behind, and by the self-vivisection of our sleeping life we may learn to know something regarding the mind of primitive man and the source of some of his beliefs, thus throwing light on the facts we obtain by ethnographic research. This aspect of dreams has not always been kept steadily in sight, though it can no longer be said that the study of dreams is neglected. From one point of view or another--not only by the religious sect which, it appears, constitutes a "Dream Church" in Denmark, but by such carefully inquisitive investigators as those who have been trained under the inspiring influence of Prof. Stanley Hall--dreaming is seriously studied. I need not, therefore, apologize for the fact that I have during many years taken note from time to time and recorded the details and circumstances of vivid dreams when I could study their mechanism immediately on awakening, and that I have occupied myself, not with the singularities and marvels of dreaming--of which, indeed, I know little or nothing--but with their simplest and most general laws and tendencies. A few of these laws and tendencies I wish to set forth and illustrate. The interest of such a task is twofold. It not only reveals to us an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts, but by helping us to attain a clear knowledge of the ordinary dream processes, it enables us in advance to deal with many of the extraordinary phenomena of dreaming, sometimes presented to us by wonder-loving people as awesomely mysterious, if not indeed supernatural. The careful analysis of mere ordinary dreams frequently gives us the key to these abnormal dreams. Perhaps the chief and most frequent tendency in the mechanism of dreaming is that by which isolated impressions from waking life flow together in dreams to be welded into a whole. There is then produced, in the strictest sense, a confusion. For instance, a lady, who in the course of the day has admired a fine baby and bought a big fish for dinner, dreams with horror and surprise of finding a fully developed baby in a large codfish. The confusion may be more remote, embodying abstract ideas and without reference to recent impressions. Thus I dreamed that my wife was expounding to me a theory by which the substitution of slates for tiles in roofing had been accompanied by, and intimately associated with, the growing diminution of crime in England. Amid my wife's rather contemptuous opposition, I opposed this theory, pointing out the picturesqueness of tiles, their cheapness, greater comfort both in winter and summer, but at the same time it occurred to me as a peculiar coincidence that tiles should have a sanguinary tinge suggestive of criminal bloodthirstiness. I need scarcely say that this bizarre theory had never suggested itself to my waking thoughts. There was, however, a real connecting link in the confusion--the redness--and it is a noteworthy point, of great significance in the interpretation of dreams, that that link, although clearly active from the first, remained subconscious until the end of the dream, when it presented itself as an entirely novel coincidence. The best simile for the mechanism of the most usual type of dream phenomena is the magic lantern. Our dreams are like dissolving views in which the dissolving process is carried on swiftly or slowly, but always uninterruptedly, so that, at any moment, two (often indeed more) incongruous pictures are presented to consciousness which strives to make one whole of them, and sometimes succeeds and is sometimes baffled. Or we may say that the problem presented to dreaming consciousness resembles that experiment in which psychologists pronounce three wholly unconnected words, and require the subject to combine them at once in a connected sentence. It is unnecessary to add that such analogies fail to indicate the subtle complexity of the apparatus which is at work in the manufacture of dreams. It is the presence of the strife I have just referred to between apparently irreconcilable groups of images, in the effort of overcoming the critical skepticism of sleeping consciousness--a feeble skepticism, it may be, but, as many people do not seem to recognize, a real skepticism--that the impressive emotional effects of dreams are often displayed. It sometimes happens that two irreconcilable groups of impressions reach sleeping consciousness, one flowing from a recent stratum of memories, the other from an older stratum. A typical form of this phenomenon often occurs in our dreams of dead friends. Professor Sully remarks that in dreams of the dead "awareness of the fact of death wholly disappears, or reduces itself to a vague feeling of something delightfully wonderful in the restored presence." That, however, as I have elsewhere shown,[1] is not the typical process in dreaming of the dead; although in the later dreams of those who often see their dead friends during sleep, the process is abbreviated, and the friend's presence is accepted without a struggle--a very interesting point, for it tends to show that in dreams, as in the hypnotic state, the recollection of previous similar states of consciousness persists, and the illusion is strengthened by repetition. In typical dreams of a dead friend there is a struggle between that stream of recent memories which represents him as dead and that older stream which represents him as living. These two streams are inevitably caused by the fact of death, which sets up a barrier between them and renders one set of memories incongruous with the other set. In dreams we are not able to arrange our memories chronologically, but we are perpetually reasoning and striving to be logical. Consequently the two conflicting streams of memories break against each other in restless conflict, and sleeping consciousness endeavors to propound some theory which will reconcile them. The most frequent theories are, as I have found, either that the news of the friend's death was altogether false, or that he had been buried alive by mistake, or else that having really died his soul has returned to earth for a brief space. The mental and emotional conflict which such dreams involve renders them very vivid. They make a profound impression even after awakening, and for some sensitive persons are too sacred to speak of. Even so cautious and skeptical a thinker as Renan, when, after the death of his beloved sister Henriette, he dreamed more than once that she had been buried alive, and that he heard her voice calling to him from her grave, had to still his horrible suspicions by the consideration that she had been tended by experienced doctors. On less well-balanced minds, and more especially in primitive stages of civilization, we can scarcely doubt that such dreams, resting as they do on the foundation of consciousness, have had a powerful influence in persuading man that death is but a transient fact, and that the soul is independent of the body. I do not wish to assert that they suffice to originate the belief.[2] While dreams are thus often formed by the molding together of more or less congruous images by a feeble but still intelligent sleeping activity, another factor is to be found in the involuntary wavering and perpetually mere meaningless change of dream imagery. Such concentration as is possible during sleep always reveals a shifting, oscillating, uncertain movement of the vision before us. We are, as it were, reading a sign-post in the dusk, or making guesses at the names of the stations as our express train flashes by the painted letters. Any one who has ever been subject to the hypnagogic imagery sometimes seen in the half-waking state, or who has ever taken mescal, knows that it is absolutely impossible to fix an image. It is this factor in dreams which causes them so often to baffle our analysis. In addition to the mere, as it were, mechanical flowing together of images and ideas, and the more or less intelligent molding of them into a whole, there is thus a failure of sleeping attention to fix definitely the final result--a failure which itself may evidently serve to carry on the dream process by suggesting new images and combinations. I dreamed once that I was with a doctor in his surgery, and saw in his hand a note from a patient saying that doctors were fools and did him no good, but he had lately taken some _selvdrolla_, recommended by a friend, and it had done him more good than anything, so please send him some more. I saw the note clearly, not, indeed, being conscious of reading it word by word, but only of its meaning as I looked at it; the one word I actually seemed to see, letter by letter, was the name of the drug, and that changed and fluctuated beneath my vision as I gazed at it, the final impression being _selvdrolla_. The doctor took from a shelf a bottle containing a bright yellow oleaginous fluid, and poured a little out, remarking that it had lately come into favor, especially in uric-acid disorders, but was extremely expensive. I expressed my surprise, having never before heard of it. Then, again to my surprise, he poured rather copiously from the bottle on to a plate of food, saying, in explanation, that it was pleasant to take and not dangerous. This was a vivid morning dream, and on awakening I had no difficulty in detecting the source of its various minor details, especially a note received on the previous evening and containing a dubious figure, the precise nature of which I had used my pocket lens to determine. But what was _selvdrolla_, the most vivid element of the dream? I sought vainly among my recent memories, and had almost renounced the search when I recalled a large bottle of salad oil seen on the supper table the previous evening; not, indeed, resembling the dream bottle, but containing a precisely similar fluid. _Selvdrolla_ was evidently a corruption of "salad oil." I select this dream to illustrate the uncertainty of dream consciousness, because it also illustrates at the same time the element of certainty in dream _subconsciousness_. Throughout my dream I remained, consciously, in entire ignorance as to the real nature of _selvdrolla_, yet a latent element in consciousness was all the time presenting it to me in ever-clearer imagery. While the confusions of dreaming are usually the union of unconnected streams of imagery which have, as it were, come from widely remote parts of the memory system to strike together at the narrow focus of shaping consciousness, in some rarer cases the fused images are really suggested by analogy and are not accidental. Maury records successions of dream imagery strung together by verbal resemblances; I have found such dreams rare, but other forms of association fairly common. Thus I once dreamed that I was with a dentist who was about to extract a tooth from a patient. Before applying the forceps he remarked to me (at the same time setting fire to a perfumed cloth at the end of something like a broomstick in order to dissipate the unpleasant odor) that it was the largest tooth he had ever seen. When extracted I found that it was indeed enormous, in the shape of a caldron, with walls an inch thick. Taking from my pocket a tape measure (such as I always carry in waking life) I founds the diameter to be not less than twenty-five inches; the interior was like roughly hewn rock, and there were sea-weeds and lichenlike growths within. The size of the tooth seemed to me large, but not extraordinarily so. It is well known that pain in the teeth, or the dentist's manipulations, cause those organs to seem of extravagant extent; in dreams this tendency rules unchecked; thus a friend once dreamed that mice were playing about in a cavity in her tooth. But for the dream first quoted there was no known dental origin; it arose solely or chiefly from a walk during the previous afternoon among the rocks of the Cornish coast at low tide, and the fantastic analogy, which had not occurred to waking consciousness, suggested itself during sleep. The following dream illustrates an association of quite a different order: I imagined I was sitting at a window, at the top of a house, writing. As I looked up from my table I saw, with all the emotions naturally accompanying such a sight, a woman in her night dress appear at a lofty window some distance off and throw herself down. I went on writing, however, and found that in the course of my literary employment--I am not clear as to its precise nature--the very next thing I had to do was to describe exactly such a scene as I had just witnessed. I was extremely puzzled at such an extraordinary coincidence: it seemed to me wholly inexplicable. Such dreams, reduplicating the imagery in a new sensory medium, are fairly common, with me at all events, though I can not easily explain them. The association is not so much of analogy as of sensory media, in this case the visual image becoming a verbal motor image. In other cases a scene is first seen as in reality, and then in a picture. It is interesting to observe the profound astonishment with which sleeping consciousness apperceives such simple reduplication. It sometimes happens that the confused imagery of dreams includes elements drawn from forgotten memories--that is to say, that sleeping consciousness can draw on faint impressions of the past which waking consciousness is unable to reach. This is a very important type of dream because of its bearing on the explanation of certain dream phenomena which we are sometimes asked to bow down before as supernatural. I may illustrate what I mean by the following very instructive case. I woke up recalling the chief items of a rather vivid dream: I had imagined myself in a large old house, where the furniture, though of good quality, was ancient, and the chairs threatened to give way as one sat on them. The place belonged to one Sir Peter Bryan, a hale old gentleman who was accompanied by his son and grandson. There was a question of my buying the place from him, and I was very complimentary to the old gentleman's appearance of youthfulness, absurdly affecting not to know which was the grandfather and which the grandson. On awaking I said to myself that here was a purely imaginative dream, quite unsuggested by any definite experiences. But when I began to recall the trifling incidents of the previous day I realized that that was far from being the case. So far from the dream having been a pure effort of imagination I found that every minute item could be traced to some separate source. The name of Sir Peter Bryan alone completely baffled me; I could not even recall that I had at that time ever heard of any one called Bryan. I abandoned the search and made my notes of the dream and its sources. I had scarcely done so when I chanced to take up a volume of biographies which I had glanced through carelessly the day before. I found that it contained, among others, the lives of Lord _Peter_borough and George _Bryan_ Brummel. I had certainly seen those names the day before; yet before I took up the book once again it would have been impossible for me to recall the exact name of Beau Brummel, and I should have been inclined to say that I had never even heard the name of Bryan. I repeat that I regard this as, psychologically, a most instructive dream. It rarely happens (though I could give one or two more examples from the experience of friends) that we can so clearly and definitely demonstrate the presence of a forgotten memory in a dream; in the case of old memories it is usually impossible. It so happened that the forgotten memory which in this case re-emerged to sleeping consciousness was a fact of no consequence to myself or any one else. But if it had been the whereabouts of a lost deed or a large sum of money, and I had been able to declare, as in this case, that the impression received in my dream had never to my knowledge existed in waking consciousness, and yet were to declare my faith that the dream probably had a simple and natural explanation, on every hand I should be sarcastically told that there is no credulity to match the credulity of the skeptic. The profound emotions of waking life, the questions and problems on which we spread our chief voluntary mental energy, are not those which usually present themselves at once to dream consciousness. It is, so far as the immediate past is concerned, mostly the trifling, the incidental, the "forgotten" impressions of daily life which reappear in our dreams. The psychic activities that are awake most intensely are those that sleep most profoundly. If we preserve the common image of the "stream of consciousness," we might say that the grave facts of life sink too deeply into the flood to reappear at once in the calm of repose, while the mere light and buoyant trifles of life, flung carelessly in during the day, at once rise to the surface, to dance and mingle and evolve in ways that this familiar image of "the stream of consciousness" will not further help us to picture. So far I have been discussing only one of the great groups into which dreams may be divided. Most investigators of dreams agree that there are two such groups, the one having its basis in memories, the other founded on actual physical sensations experienced at the moment of dreaming and interpreted by sleeping consciousness. Various names have been given to these two groups; Sully, for instance, terms them central and peripheral. Perhaps the best names, however, are those adopted by Miss Calkins, who calls the first group representative, the second group presentative. All writers on dreaming have brought forward presentative dreams, and there can be no doubt that impressions received during sleep from any of the external senses may serve as a basis for dreams. I need only record one example to illustrate this main and most obvious group of presentative dreams. I dreamed that I was listening to a performance of Haydn's Creation, the chief orchestral part of the performance seeming to consist chiefly of the very realistic representation of the song of birds, though I could not identify the note of any particular bird. Then followed solos by male singers, whom I saw, especially one who attracted my attention by singing at the close in a scarcely audible voice. On awakening the source of the dream was not immediately obvious, but I soon realized that it was the song of a canary in another room. I had never heard Haydn's Creation, except in fragments, nor thought of it at any recent period; its reputation as regards the realistic representation of natural sounds had evidently caused it to be put forward by sleeping consciousness as a plausible explanation of the sounds heard, and the visual centers had accepted the theory. It is a familiar fact that internal sensations also form a frequent basis of dreams. All the internal organs, when disturbed or distended or excited, may induce dreams, and especially that aggravated kind of dreaming which we call nightmare. This fact is so well known that such dreams are usually dismissed without further analysis. It is a mistake, however, so to dismiss them, for it seems probable that it is precisely here that we may find the most instructive field of dream psychology. On account of the profoundly emotional effect of such dreams they are very interesting to study, but this very element of emotion renders them somewhat obscure objects of study. I do not venture to offer with absolute certainty one or two novel suggestions which dream experiences have led me to regard as probable. Dreams of flying have so often been recorded--from the time of St. Jerome, who mentions that he was subject to them--that they may fairly be considered to constitute one of the commonest forms of dreaming. All my life, it seems to me, I have at intervals had such dreams in which I imagined myself rhythmically bounding into the air and supported on the air. These dreams, in my case at all events, are not generally remembered immediately on awakening (seeming to indicate that they depend on a cause which does not usually come into action at the end of sleep), but they leave behind them a vague but profound sense of belief in their reality and reasonableness.[3] Several writers have attempted to explain this familiar phenomenon. Gowers considers that a spontaneous contraction of the stapedius muscle of the ear during sleep causes a sensation of falling. Stanley Hall, who has himself from childhood had dreams of flying, boldly argues that we have here "some faint reminiscent atavistic echo from the primeval sea"; and that such dreams are really survivals--psychic vestigial remains--taking us back to the far past, in which man's ancestors needed no feet to swim or float. Such a theory may accord with the profound conviction of reality that accompanies such dreams, though this may be more simply accounted for, even by mere repetition, as with dreams of the dead; but it is rather a hazardous theory, and it seems to me infinitely more probable that such dreams are a misinterpretation of actual internal sensations. My own explanation was immediately suggested by the following dream. I dreamed that I was watching a girl acrobat, in appropriate costume, who was rhythmically rising to a great height in the air and then falling, without touching the floor, though each time she approached quite close to it. At last she ceased, exhausted and perspiring, and had to be led away. Her movements were not controlled by mechanism, and apparently I did not regard mechanism as necessary. It was a vivid dream, and I awoke with a distinct sensation of oppression in the chest. In trying to account for this dream, which was not founded on any memory, it occurred to me that probably I had here the key to a great group of dreams. The rhythmic rising and falling of the acrobat was simply the objectivation of the rhythmic rising and falling of my own respiratory muscles under the influence of some slight and unknown physical oppression, and this oppression was further translated into a condition of perspiring exhaustion in the girl, just as it is recorded that a man with heart disease dreamed habitually of sweating and panting horses climbing up hill. We may recall also the curious sensation as of the body being transformed into a vast bellows which is often the last sensation felt before the unconsciousness produced by nitrous oxide gas. When we are lying down there is a real rhythmic rising and falling of the chest and abdomen, centering in the diaphragm, a series of oscillations which at both extremes are only limited by the air. Moreover, in this position we have to recognize that the whole internal organism--the circulatory, nervous, and other systems--are differently balanced from what they are in the upright position, and that a disturbance of internal equilibrium always accompanies falling. Further, it is possible that the misinterpretation is confirmed to sleeping consciousness by sensations from without, by the absence of the tactile pressure produced by boots on the foot, or the contact of the ground with the soles; we are at once conscious of movement and conscious that the soles of the feet are in contact only with the air. Thus in normal sleep the conditions may be said to be always favorable for producing dreams of flying or of floating in the air, and any slight thoracic disturbance, even in healthy persons, arising from lungs, heart, or stomach, and serving to bring these conditions to sleeping consciousness, may determine such a dream. There is another common class of dreams which, it seems fairly evident to me, must also find their psychological explanation chiefly in the visceral sensations--I mean dreams of murder. Many psychologists have referred with profound concern to the facility and prevalence of murder in dreams, sometimes as a proof of the innate wickedness of human nature made manifest in the unconstraint of sleep, sometimes as evidence of an atavistic return to the modes of feeling of our ancestors, the thin veneer of civilization being removed during sleep. Maudsley and Mme. de Manacéïne, for example, find evidence in such dreams of a return to primitive modes of feeling. It may well be that there is some element of truth in this view, but even if so we still have to account for the production of such dreams. For this we must, in part at least, fall back upon the logical outcome of dream confusions, owing to which, for instance, a lady who has carved a duck at dinner may a few hours later wake up exhausted by the imaginary effort of cutting off her husband's head. But I think we may find evidence that the dream of murder is often a falsely logical deduction from abnormal visceral and especially digestive sensations. I may illustrate such dreams by the following example: A lady dreamed that her husband called her aside and said: "Now, do not scream or make a fuss; I am going to tell you something. I have to kill a man. It is necessary, to put him out of his agony." He then took her into his study and showed her a young man lying on the floor with a wound in his breast, and covered with blood. "But how will you do it?" she asked. "Never mind," he replied, "leave that to me." He took something up and leaned over the man. She turned aside and heard a horrible gurgling sound. Then all was over. "Now," he said, "we must get rid of the body. I want you to send for So-and-so's cart, and tell him I wish to drive it." The cart came. "You must help me to make the body into a parcel," he said to his wife; "give me plenty of brown paper." They made it into a parcel, and with terrible difficulty and effort the wife assisted her husband to get the body down stairs and lift it into the cart. At every stage, however, she presented to him the difficulties of the situation. But he carelessly answered all objections, said he would take the body up to the moor, among the stones, remove the brown paper, and people would think the murdered man had killed himself. He drove off and soon returned with the empty cart. "What's this blood in my cart?" asked the man to whom it belonged, looking inside. "Oh, that's only paint," replied the husband. But the dreamer had all along been full of apprehension lest the deed should be discovered, and the last thing she could recall, before waking in terror, was looking out of the window at a large crowd which surrounded the house with shouts of "Murder!" and threats. This tragedy, with its almost Elizabethan air, was built up out of a few commonplace impressions received during the previous day, none of which impressions contained any suggestion of murder. The tragic element appears to have been altogether due to the psychic influences of indigestion arising from a supper of pheasant. To account for our oppression during sleep, sleeping consciousness assumes moral causes which alone appear to it of sufficient gravity to be the adequate cause of the immense emotions we are experiencing. Even in our waking and fully conscious states we are inclined to give the preference to moral over physical causes, quite irrespective of the justice of our preferences; in our sleeping states this tendency is exaggerated, and the reign of purely moral causes is not disturbed by even a suggestion of mere physical causation. There is certainly no profounder emotional excitement during sleep than that which arises from a disturbed or distended stomach, and is reflected by the pneumogastric to the accelerated heart and the impeded respiration.[4] We are thereby thrown into a state of uninhibited emotional agitation, a state of agony and terror such as we rarely or never attain during waking life. Sleeping consciousness, blindfolded and blundering, a prey to these massive waves from below, and fumbling about desperately for some explanation, jumps at the idea that only the attempt to escape some terrible danger or the guilty consciousness of some awful crime can account for this immense emotional uproar. Thus the dream is suffused by a conviction which the continued emotion serves to support. We do not--it seems most simple and reasonable to conclude--experience terror because we think we have committed a crime, but we think we have committed a crime because we experience terror. And the fact that in such dreams we are far more concerned with escape from the results of crime than with any agony of remorse is not, as some have thought, due to our innate indifference to crime, but simply to the fact that our emotional state suggests to us active escape from danger rather than the more passive grief of remorse. Thus our dreams bear witness to the fact that our intelligence is often but a tool in the hands of our emotions.[5] I have had frequent occasion to refer to the objectivation of subjective sensations as a phenomenon of dreaming. It is, indeed, so frequent and so important a phenomenon that it needs some further reference. In hysteria (which by some of the most recent authorities, like Sollier, is regarded as a species of somnambulism), in "demon-possession," and many other abnormal phenomena it is well known that there is, as it were, a doubling of personality; the _ego_ is split up into two or more parts, each of which may act as a separate personality. The literature of morbid psychology is full of extraordinary and varied cases exhibiting this splitting up of personality. But it is usually forgotten that in dreams the doubling of personality is a normal and constant phenomenon in all healthy people. In dreaming we can divide our body between ourselves and another person. Thus a medical friend dreamed that in conversation with a lady patient he found his hand resting on her knee and was unable to remove it; awakening in horror from this unprofessional situation he found his own hand firmly clasped between his knees; the hand had remained his own, the knee had become another person's, the hand being claimed, rather than the knee, on account of its greater tactile sensibility. Again, we sometimes objectify our own physical discomforts felt during sleep in the emotions of some other person, or even in some external situations. And, possibly, every dream in which there is any dramatic element is an instance of the same splitting up of personality; in our dreams we may experience shame or confusion from the rebuke or the arguments of other persons, but the persons who administer the rebuke or apply the argument are still ourselves. When we consider that this dream process, with its perpetual dramatization of our own personality, has been going on as long as man has been man--and probably much longer, for it is evident that animals dream--it is impossible to overestimate its immense influence on human belief. Men's primitive conceptions of religion, of morals, of many of the mightiest phenomena of life, especially the more exceptional phenomena, have certainly been influenced by this constant dream experience. It is the universal primitive explanation of abnormal psychic and even physical phenomena that some other person or spirit is working within the subject of the abnormal experience. Certainly dreaming is not the sole source of such conceptions, but they could scarcely have been found convincing, and possibly could not ever have arisen, among races who were wholly devoid of dream experiences. A large part of all progress in psychological knowledge, and, indeed, a large part of civilization itself, lies in realizing that the apparently objective is really subjective, that the angels and demons and geniuses of all sorts that seemed at first to take possession of the feeble and vacant individuality are themselves but modes of action of marvelously rich and varied personalities. But in our dreams we are brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh. There is one other general characteristic of dreams that is worth noting, because its significance is not usually recognized. In dreams we are always reasoning. It is sometimes imagined that reason is in abeyance during sleep. So far from this being the case, we may almost be said to reason much more during sleep than when we are awake. That our reasoning is bad, even preposterous, that it constantly ignores the most elementary facts of waking life, scarcely affects the question. All dreaming is a process of reasoning. That artful confusion of ideas and images which at the outset I referred to as the most constant feature of dream mechanism is nothing but a process of reasoning, a perpetual effort to argue out harmoniously the absurdly limited and incongruous data present to sleeping consciousness. Binet, grounding his conclusions on hypnotic experiments, has very justly determined that reasoning is the fundamental part of all thinking, the very texture of thought. It is founded on perception itself, which already contains all the elements of the ancient syllogism. For in all perception, as he shows, there is a succession of three images, of which the first fuses with the second, which in its turn suggests the third. Now this establishment of new associations, this construction of images, which, as we may easily convince ourselves, is precisely what takes place in dreaming, is reasoning itself. Reasoning is a synthesis of images suggested by resemblance and contiguity, indeed a sort of logical vision, more intense even than actual vision, since it produces hallucinations. To reasoning all forms of mental activity may finally be reduced; mind, as Wundt has said, is a thing that reasons. When we apply these general statements to dreaming, we may see that the whole phenomenon of dreaming is really the same process of image-formation, based on resemblance and contiguity, which is at the basis of reasoning. Every dream is the outcome of this strenuous, wide-ranging instinct to reason. The supposed "imaginative faculty," regarded as so highly active during sleep, is simply the inevitable play of this automatic logic. The characteristic of the reasoning of dreams is that it is unusually bad, and this badness is due chiefly to the absence of memory elements that would be present to waking consciousness, and to the absence of sensory elements to check the false reasoning which without them appears to us conclusive. That is to say--to fall back on the excellent generalization which Parish has elaborately applied to all forms of hallucination--there is a process of dissociation by which ordinary channels of association are temporarily blocked and the conditions prepared for the formation of the hallucination. It is, as Parish has argued, in sleep and in those sleep-resembling states called hypnagogic that a condition of dissociation leading to hallucination is most apt to occur. The following dream illustrates the part played by dissociation: A lady dreamed that an acquaintance wished to send a small sum of money to a person in Ireland. She rashly offered to take it over to Ireland. On arriving home she began to repent of her promise, as the weather was extremely wild and cold. She began, however, to make preparations for dressing warmly, and went to consult an Irish friend, who said she would have to be floated over to Ireland tightly jammed in a crab basket. On returning home she fully discussed the matter with her husband, who thought it would be folly to undertake such a journey, and she finally relinquished it, with great relief. In this dream--the elements of which could all be accounted for--the association between sending money and postal orders which would at once occur to waking consciousness was closed; consciousness was a prey to such suggestions as reached it, but on the basis of these suggestions it reasoned and concluded quite sagaciously. The phenomena of dreaming furnish a delightful illustration of the fact that reasoning, in its rough form, is only the crudest and most elementary form of intellectual operation, and that the finer forms of thinking only become possible when we hold in check this tendency to reason. "All the thinking in the world," as Goethe puts it, "will not lead us to thought." It is in such characteristics as these--at once primitive, childlike, and insane--that we may find the charm of dreaming. In our sleeping emotional life we are much more like ourselves than we are in our sleeping intellectual life. It is a mistake to imagine that our moral and æsthetic instincts are abolished in dreams; they are often weakened, but by no means abolished. Such a result is natural when we remember that our emotions and instincts are both more primitive and less under the dominion of the external senses than are our ideas. Yet in both respects we are removed a stage backward in our dreams. The emotional intensity, the absurd logic, the tendency to personification--nearly all the points I have referred to as characterizing our dreams--are the characteristics of the child, the savage, and the madman. Time and space are annihilated, gravity is suspended, and we are joyfully borne up in the air, as it were, in the arms of angels; we are brought into a deeper communion with Nature, and in his dreams a man will listen to the arguments of his dog with as little surprise as Balaam heard the reproaches of his ass. The unexpected limitations of our dream world, the exclusion of so many elements which are present even unconsciously in waking life, imparts a splendid freedom and ease to the intellectual operations of the sleeping mind, and an extravagant romance, a poignant tragedy, to our emotions. "He has never known happiness," said Lamb, speaking out of his own experience, "who has never been mad." And there are many who taste in dreams a happiness they never know when awake. In the waking moments of our complex civilized life we are ever in a state of suspense which makes all great conclusions impossible; the multiplicity of the facts of life, always present to consciousness, restrains the free play of logic (except for that happy dreamer, the mathematician) and surrounds most of our pains and nearly all our pleasures with infinite qualifications; we are tied down to a sober tameness. In our dreams the fetters of civilization are loosened, and we know the fearful joy of freedom. At the same time it is these characteristics which make dreams a fit subject of serious study. It was not until the present century that the psychological importance of the study of insanity was recognized. So recent is the study of savage mind that the workers who have laid its foundation are yet all living. The systematic investigation of children only began yesterday. To-day our dreams begin to seem to us an allied subject of study, inasmuch as they reveal within ourselves a means of entering sympathetically into ideas and emotional attitudes belonging to narrow or ill-adjusted states of consciousness which otherwise we are now unable to experience. And they have this further value, that they show us how many abnormal phenomena--possession, double consciousness, unconscious memory, and so forth--which have often led the ignorant and unwary to many strange conclusions, really have a simple explanation in the healthy normal experience of all of us during sleep. Here, also, it is true that we ourselves and our beliefs are to some extent "such stuff as dreams are made of." FOOTNOTES: [1] On Dreaming of the Dead. Psychological Review, September, 1895. In this paper I reported several cases showing the nature and evolution of dreams concerning dead friends. I have since received evidence from various friends and correspondents, scientific and unscientific, of both sexes, confirming my belief in a frequency of this type of dream. Professor Binet (L'Année Psychologique, 1896) has also furnished a case in support of my view, and is seeking for further evidence. [2] In Japan stories of the returning of the dead are very common. Lafcadio Hearn gives one as told by a Japanese which closely resembles the type of dream I am discussing. "A lover resolves to commit suicide on the grave of his sweetheart. He found her tomb and knelt before it and prayed and wept, and whispered to her that which he was about to do. And suddenly he heard her voice cry to him 'Anata!' and felt her hand upon his hand; and he turned and saw her kneeling beside him, smiling and beautiful as he remembered her, only a little pale. Then his heart leaped so that he could not speak for the wonder and the doubt and the joy of that moment. But she said: 'Do not doubt; it is really I. I am not dead. It was all a mistake. I was buried because my parents thought me dead--buried too soon. Yet you see I am not dead, not a ghost. It is I; do not doubt it!'" [3] Many saints (Saint Ida, of Louvain, for example) claimed the power of rising into the air, and one asks one's self whether this faith may not be based on dream experiences mistranslated by a disordered brain. M. Raffaelli, the eminent French painter, who is subject to these sleeping experiences of floating on the air, confesses that they are so convincing that he has jumped out of bed on awaking and attempted to repeat the experience. "I need not tell you," he adds, "that I have never been able to succeed." [4] Other pains and discomforts--toothache, for instance--may, however, give rise to dreams of murder. [5] It may be added that they also present evidence--to which attention has not, I believe, been previously called--in support of the James-Lange or physiological theory of emotion, according to which the element of bodily change in emotion is the cause and not the result of the emotion. * * * * * The harmonious and equitable evolution of man, says President Dabney, of the University of Tennessee, "does not mean that every man must be educated just like his fellow. The harmony is within each individual. That community is most highly educated in which each individual has attained the maximum of his possibilities in the direction of his peculiar talents and opportunities." THE BEST METHODS OF TAXATION. BY THE LATE HON. DAVID A. WELLS. PART I. This historical survey of tax experience among peoples widely differing in their economic condition and social relations, and this examination of the scope and practice of taxation, with especial reference to the tax systems of the United States as defined and interpreted by judicial authority, prepare the way for a discussion of the best methods of taxation for a country situated as is the United States. General as are the theoretical principles underlying taxation, the application of these principles to existing conditions must be modified to meet the long usage and inherited prejudice of the people, and the form of production or manner of distributing wealth. This holds true in the face of appearances so opposed to it as to defy definition and acceptance. No less promising field for an income tax can be pictured than British India, and few more promising fields than France. Yet India has borne such a tax for years, while France will not permit a true tax on income to be adopted as a part of its revenue system. In the latter country the plea is made that the upper and middle classes already pay under other forms of taxation more than their due proportion of the public burdens, and an additional and necessarily discriminating duty laid upon them will only make this inequality the greater. Class interest may thus oppose its veto to a change that promises to reduce the burdens of one class of taxpayers at the expense of another; or may even oppose a change that offers the chance of collecting a larger revenue with less real difficulty and sacrifice on the part of the taxed. No opposition can set aside even temporarily the great rules that clearly define a tax from tribute, a legal and beneficial taking by the state of a certain part of the public wealth from a demand that involves waste or mischievous expenditure, for which the state or people derive no advantage commensurate with the cost, or from which individuals obtain a gain not defensible in justice, and at the expense of only one part of the community. After so many centuries of experiment, in which hardly a possible source of state revenue has escaped attention, some knowledge of the great principles of taxation might have been evolved. Unfortunately, the experience of one nation is not accepted as containing lessons applicable to the needs or conditions of another, and one generation rarely appeals to history save to defend its own experiments. Ignorance, half knowledge, which is quite as dangerous, and interest guide or influence legislation, and those who predict failure or danger are regarded as theorists, and denounced as unpractical. Nowhere is the tendency to move independent of enlightened knowledge more evident than in the United States. At every appearance of the tax question, State and national legislatures are overwhelmed with measures that have been tried in the past, and after a thorough test condemned beyond any hope of defense. Yet history shows the gradual disappearance of certain forms of taxation which enjoyed great popularity for a time, and accomplished the end of their creation in a crude and often cruel manner. Looking over long periods of time, it is seen that some advances have been made, rather from a change in the economic condition of the people than from a true appreciation of the principles in question. The development of popular liberty has been an essential factor, and the alterations in tax methods require a close analysis of the causes leading to the rise and dominance of political and constitutional principle. While it is true that a popular uprising against fiscal exactions usually marked the limit of endurance of an oppressive system, it is also true that the same uprisings marked the completion of one stage of political development, and the readiness or even the need of entering upon a new stage. In one sense the progress of a people toward civilization in its highest meaning may be illustrated by its fiscal machinery and methods of obtaining its revenue from the people. It will be of interest to glance at some of these passing phases which have generally come down to a late day, and are still to be found in activity in some of the most advanced states of Europe. The practice of farming out the revenues of a state or any part of it has become nearly obsolete, and where it does exist is the mark of a fiscal machinery as yet not fully developed. The opportunities and temptation which the contract system offered for oppressing the taxpayers were apparent long before the state was in a position to assert its ability to make its own collections. In France the _fermiers généraux_ were a political factor, standing between the king and his people, regarded as necessary to the former and as oppressors of the latter. Their unpopularity, in part justified by their conduct, was a not unimportant item in the arraignment of royalty by the people. Wherever introduced, the farming of taxes proved in the long run as unwise politically as it was unprofitable financially; and the only reasonable defense for adopting it was the want of strength in the state to command its own revenue--a want as likely to arise from the dishonesty of its agents as from a political weakness. In early times the most universal manner of supplying the treasury of the state, the farming of taxes has become so rare as to be classed as a curiosity. Italy still employs this machinery to collect her taxes on tobacco, and Spain from necessity has mortgaged her taxes to the bank, with the task of collecting them. Of the same general character are the state lotteries, of which some few and quite important instances may still be found in action. Of the immorality of these instruments there can be little doubt, and there is quite as unanimous an opinion as to their inefficiency as fiscal instruments. Yet it is only within very recent years that state lotteries have been discarded even in the most advanced countries. The machinery of lotteries has often been modified, but, no matter how altered in details, they all have appealed to the love of games of chance. Adam Smith asserted that the "absurd presumption" of men in their own good fortune is even more universal than the overweening conceit which the greater part of men have in their own abilities.[6] Yet another assertion of the same writer is as true: "The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery, or one in which the whole gain compensated the whole loss." Where the state undertakes it, there is a profit generally assured to the state, but that profit is by no means certain, and can not make good the demoralization introduced among the people. State lotteries are still a part of the revenue system in Italy and Austria (proper), where the receipts are important, but show a decided tendency to diminish; Hungary and Denmark, where they are of little moment; and in Spain, where they are retained because of the general incapacity of the administration to reach other and more profitable sources of revenue. The experience of the State of Louisiana in connection with a State lottery is too recent to require examination. It is not probable that once abandoned such an instrument for obtaining money from the people will be revived, save as a last resort. The state monopoly in the manufacture and sale of an article for fiscal purposes holds a place in European countries of high importance, and is met elsewhere under conditions not so favorable to its maintenance. As an example of the latter may be cited the colonial policy of the Dutch in their possessions in the East. After the termination of the trading companies, the Government undertook the entire control of the colonies, and sought to make them a source of revenue. The natives were to be taxed, but, having little of their own to be taxed, and practicing no occupation that could of its own volition become a profitable source of revenue, the state undertook to organize industry, and, by creating an opportunity for employing the labor of the natives, to receive the profits of production for its own uses. The native chiefs were made "masters of industry" and collectors of the revenue; and a certain part of the labor of the natives, one day in every five, was decreed to the state. In order to derive a profit, this labor must be bestowed in cultivating some product as find a market in international trade. Hence arose the importance of the sugar, coffee, tobacco, and spice crops of these Dutch islands, and for many years a handsome profit to the treasury was obtained from the management and sales of product. With the great fall in prices of sugar and coffee throughout the world, and the narrowing of the market for cane sugar, the Government obtained a less income each year, and has found it of advantage to relax the conditions surrounding cultivation, and to throw the management of the plantations more and more into private hands. To such an extent has this transition been effected that the state can no longer be considered as controlling a monopoly in product or sales, and is content with a revenue from other sources, one that does not even cover the expenses incurred in the colonial system. This experiment differs widely from those industries undertaken with the aid or encouragement of the state to be found in India. It was not with a fiscal object that they were established, and not infrequently the state sacrifices revenue by releasing them from tax burdens they would ordinarily endure. As one of the few remaining instances of the direct participation of a state in the production of products intended for foreign markets, yet undertaken and maintained for fiscal reasons, the history of the Dutch colonies in the East is instructive. In Prussia the working of certain mines is in the hands of the state, and was originally looked upon as an important contribution to the income of the state. As in the Dutch experience, the changes in production throughout the world have greatly reduced the returns and made the income variable; yet there is little disposition to dispose of these possessions. "The danger of mineral supplies being worked in a reckless and extravagant manner without regard to the welfare of future generations, and the dread of combinations by the producers of such commodities as tin, copper, and salt, with the aim of raising prices, have both tended to hinder the alienation of state mines."[7] The more common form of state monopoly is that which occupies a middle position, established for reasons of public safety or utility as well as of revenue. The salt monopoly enforced in Prussia was only abolished in 1867, and is still maintained in every canton of Switzerland. The strongest plea in its defense has been the guarantee by the state of the purity of the article sold, and this phase of the question has superseded the revenue aspect. Few articles of prime necessity, like salt, are subject to monopolies imposed by the state, and by a process of elimination it is only articles of luxury or voluntary consumption that are regarded as fit objects of monopoly for the benefit of the state. A tax imposed upon an article at a certain stage of its production or manufacture may enforce the expediency or necessity of a state monopoly. Where the supervision of the state agents must be so close as to interfere with the conduct of the industry, the state intervenes and itself controls the manufacture and sale. Tobacco has long been subject to this fiscal _régime_, and, proving so productive of revenue, there is little to be said against a monopoly by the state of its manufacture and sale. In Italy the tobacco monopoly is conceded to a company, but its return of net revenue to the state is nearly as large as the revenue derived from the taxes on real property (about thirty-eight million dollars a year). Prussia imposes a charge on the home-grown tobacco by a tax on the land devoted to its culture, but the return is very small, and Bismarck wished to introduce a true tobacco monopoly, modeled on that of France. But the conditions were opposed to his scheme, for the use of tobacco is general throughout the empire, and a proposition to increase its price by taxation or modify its free manufacture and distribution excited a widespread opposition. France maintains a full monopoly, and finds it too profitable to be lightly set aside unless some equally profitable source of revenue is discovered to make good the loss its abolition would involve. While historical support is given to the maintenance of a monopoly as in France, it is not probable that the system will find imitators in other states, however tempting the returns obtained might seem. Great Britain has by her insular position solved the problem in another way. By interdicting the domestic cultivation of tobacco, all that is consumed must be imported, and a customs duty offers a ready instrument for making the plant, in whatever form it enters, contribute its dues to the exchequer. In Russia, as in the United States, where tobacco is a domestic product, the tax is imposed upon its manufacture, and this method requires supervision but no monopoly of the state. The tobacco _régime_ is defended almost entirely on fiscal grounds, and as a monopoly, an extreme measure, has proved its value as an instrument of taxation. Other reasons, of a moral character, are urged to induce the state to monopolize the manufacture and sale of distilled spirits. Both France and Germany have considered this question, and, in spite of confident predictions of a large profit, have decided not to undertake it. Russia, on the other hand, has taken it up quite as much on social as on revenue grounds, and is gradually securing a monopoly of the trade in spirits. The initial cost of the undertaking is large, and, as the system has not yet been perfected, it is too early to give a judgment on its availability as a financial instrument. The transit dues, once commonly used by different countries, have been generally abandoned, and in China must they be sought for in their original forms of vexatious and unprofitable force. They arose from a desire to derive some benefit from a commerce permitted grudgingly, and rarely attaining any high results. The same end was sought by duties on exports, much employed when the country was supposed to be drained of its wealth by what was sent out of it. The conditions necessary for a successful duty on exports are not often found, and only in a few countries are they now existent. In Italy, South America, and Asia, exports of certain natural products are taxed, and, as in the case of Brazil, yield a notable revenue. In view of the rapid advancement of production in new countries and of inventions in the old, whereby many natural monopolies have been destroyed and competition made more general, such duties prove to be more obstructive to trade than productive of revenue, and are rapidly being abandoned. In spite of a formal prohibition of export duties in the Constitution of the United States, they are sometimes suggested in all seriousness. In thus clearing the path of what may be called dead or dying methods of recent tax systems, the advantages enjoyed by the United States in their freedom from such survivals become more evident. The practice of farming taxes never gained a foothold in any part of the country. Lotteries have been occasional, and with two exceptions have been conducted on a limited scale--that of Louisiana is well known; an earlier instance is less known. During the Revolution one of the means resorted to by the Continental Congress for income was a lottery, but the attempt proved disastrous to all concerned, and was finally abandoned even more thoroughly than was the continental currency. State monopolies of production and sale of any commodity have never met with favor, and stand condemned in the desire for individual initiative. As sources of revenue, the public lands, state control of the post office, and of such municipal undertakings as the water and, in a very few cases, the gas supply, has been employed, and in place of profit the mere cost of management is sought. More than any country of continental Europe, the United States has depended upon taxes, pure and simple, unsupported or modified by state domains, state mines, state manufactures, or state monopolies. Even Great Britain in her local taxation is bound and hampered by precedent, and pursues a system that is notoriously confused, costly, and vexatious. Long usage and the erection of independent and conflicting authorities on principles other than fiscal have imposed upon the local agents the duty of assessing and collecting county and borough taxes which are as indefensible in theory as they are difficult in practice. From this weight of tradition and precedent the United States has been almost entirely free, and it was possible to construct out of small beginnings systems of Federal and State taxation at least reasonable and consistent, producing an increasing revenue with the rapid development of wealth and the larger number of taxable objects; and so elastic as to adapt themselves to such changes as are inevitable in any progressive movement of commerce or industry. That no such system has resulted after a century of national life, and an even longer term of local (colonial and State) activities, these papers have tended to show. That the time is at hand when the problem of a thorough reform of both State and Federal taxation must be met, current facts prove beyond any doubt. If I have aided in a proper comprehension of these problems, and, by collecting certain experiences in taxation among other peoples and in different stages of civilization, contributed toward a proper solution, the end of this work will have been attained. It is not possible to introduce a complete change of policy at once; it is not only feasible but necessary to indicate the direction this change should take, and the ends to be secured in making them. And first as to Federal taxation: In a democracy like that of the United States, the continuance of a mixed system of direct and indirect taxes is a foregone conclusion. Not that there is an absence of change or modification in the details of this double system, or in the application or distribution of a particular impost or duty. To deny such modification is to deny any movement in the body politic, or any progress in the industrial and commercial economy of the people. There is a steady and continuous movement in every direction, and the mere effort to escape taxation results in a new adjustment of related facts. This development has, partly through necessity and partly through a rising consciousness of what a tax implies, been tending from indirect to direct taxes. Ever restive under a rigid supervision by the state of private concerns, there has been a wholesome opposition to inquisitorial taxes. But this opposition has been carried too far, and is due more to the ignorant and at times brutal disregard by the agents selected for enforcing the law than to an appreciation of the injustice of the tax. Whether in customs or excise, the same blunders of management have been committed, and created a spirit in the people that is injurious to their best interests. On the one hand, private enterprises have been unduly favored by the removal of foreign competition, a favor that is now disappearing through the remarkable development of domestic competition. Thus taxes have been extensively used for other purposes than to obtain revenue, and for private ends. On the other hand, there has been created the feeling that taxation is a proper instrument for effecting a more equal distribution of wealth among the people, and readily becomes an instrument of oppression. The almost absolute dependence of the Federal Government upon the customs duties for revenue through a great part of its existence was a striking fact. The simplicity of collection and the comparatively moderate scale of duties, although considered high at the time of imposition, gave this branch of the possible sources of revenue a magnified importance. The development of the country was slow, and at times greatly hampered by the tariff policy; but until about 1857 no other source of income was needed to meet the expenditures of the Government in a time of peace. In recent years this has all changed, and not for the better. The immense development in manufactures and financial ability accomplished since 1860 has made a tariff for protection an anachronism. The political features of customs legislation have been pushed so far as almost to overshadow the fiscal qualities. The wave of protectionism that followed the abrogation of the commercial treaties of Europe about 1880 has resulted in tariffs framed with the desire to injure the commerce of other states rather than to meet the needs of a treasury. In the United States this policy has been carried beyond that of Europe, and the tariff now in existence is more protective than any hitherto enforced, short of absolute prohibition of imports. In more respects than one the tariff law of 1897 was an extreme application of the protective policy. Each year the United States has demonstrated its ability not only to meet the industrial competition of the world on an equal footing, but to engage with it aggressively and with complete success. It is not necessary to give the figures of exports of manufactures to establish this fact; it is now beyond question. To frame a measure of extreme protection was, therefore, to overlook the most striking phase of the industrial situation existing in the United States. With an ability to manufacture cheaply and on a grand scale, and with a capacity to supply the demands of a market larger than any home market, there was no foreign competition to encounter, and the higher rates of duties meant nothing, either for protection or for revenue. In carrying further into action a tariff framed more for protection than for revenue, a twofold error was committed. The provisions were so complicated as to make the application difficult, and in applying these provisions inquisitorial and vexatious regulations were necessary to assure even a reasonable fulfillment of the requirements. In former tariff laws a general description carried a large class of articles, and a uniform duty, usually _ad valorem_, was collected. But under the demand for a more scientific tariff, these general classes were broken up into a number of enumerated articles, each one carrying a specific or mixed duty, and an omnium or basket clause at the end to catch any article that could not be included in any enumeration. This desire to fix specific rates upon each imported commodity has been applied more generally in the law of 1897 than in any previous tariff act. An examination of the imports of manufactures of textile fibers will illustrate this increase of complexity without any increase of revenue. Indeed, these classifications and rates, being suggested by interested parties, have for their object a reduction of imports, and as a rule a reduction in revenue from them follows. The second objection to the increasing complexity of the tariff laws is to be found in the petty annoyances imposed upon importers and others in enforcing the not always consistent provisions of the law. These vexations are made all the more telling by the fact that the administration of the law is apt to be in the hands of those who are openly hostile to foreign importations, and therefore regard the importer in an unfriendly spirit. The power given to the customs agents is enormous, and it is not remarkable that it is abused. The demand for samples, the appraisement of articles, the classification of new or compound commodities, all offer room for controversy, which is not always decided by an appeal to the courts of justice. In special instances, where a section of the law has been framed in behalf of a special interest, the attempt to enforce it becomes petty tyranny of the most intolerable kind. In operation the law soon exhibited its failure as a revenue measure. Although duties were generally increased, the more important articles taxed yielded a smaller revenue than under lower rates. The aggregate collections under the bill did not meet the expectations of its sponsors, and for two reasons: first, because the higher duties discouraged imports; and secondly, the demand for imported articles was steadily decreasing under the expanding ability of home manufactures to meet the needs of the market. No measure short of a direct encouragement to importations can change this situation, or prevent the further shrinkage in the use of foreign manufactures. It follows that the tariff, unless radically altered, can no longer be depended on for a return sufficient to defray one half of the rapidly increasing expenditures of the national Government. By refusing to impose moderate duties on articles of general consumption, revenue is sacrificed; by insisting upon imposing protective duties where little revenue can be had, the tariff is converted into a political weapon. Its dangerous qualities are strengthened by turning these duties against the products of certain countries, a policy specially fit to invite reprisals. Even the framers of this latest tariff entertained the belief that some provision should be made for breaking its full effect. The familiar scheme for reciprocity treaties, under which moderate concessions in some of the duties could be made, was retained; but France was the only power that could have an object in seriously entertaining the proposition to enter into a negotiation. No real reduction in duties could be given to Germany or any other country, and it has become a recognized fact that Germany does not hesitate to seize an opportunity to exclude the products of the United States, and on the same grounds as support the high duties in the American tariff. The system of drawbacks has ceased to be of much moment in our customs policy, and in the export interest in canned goods finds its chief exercise. Nor does a privilege to manufacture in bond affect more than one article of importance--ores of lead containing silver. No matter how it is regarded, the tariff of 1897 was not framed for revenue, and in experience has not proved sufficiently productive to meet its share of the expenditures of Government. The animus of its sponsors in attaining the immediate political object sacrificed the more important and permanent object of revenue. Were the true object of customs duties--revenue--to be kept in view in tariff legislation, it would be a simple matter to devise a measure that would be satisfactory and highly productive of revenue. In the fifteen hundred or more articles enumerated in the tariff schedules, more than fourteen hundred are nonproductive, or yield so small a return as to have in the aggregate no appreciable effect on the total receipts. The number left after so large an exclusion can be still further reduced without reducing the revenue one tenth; and it is from a small number of articles, hardly twenty-five, that the great part of the customs revenue is obtained. By reducing the rates of duties on these to a point of highest revenue efficiency, at which the import is not interfered with and yet not encouraged, a higher return could be had than from the existing complicated, overloaded, and political compilation of duties, usually imposed for any reason other than what they will bring into the treasury. When, therefore, the best methods of Federal taxation are broached, the reform of the tariff stands first in importance. It is necessary to bring it more into line with the industrial conditions of to-day, which call for foreign markets rather than a domestic or closed market; and for a liberal commercial policy in place of one that regards the products of other countries, whether imported in the crude or manufactured forms, as constituting a menace to American labor and American interests. It calls for a systematic and intelligent revision, which shall throw out such duties as are no longer of service even for protection, and to reduce those that are hostile to the products of other countries and bear in themselves the seeds of reprisals in the future. Now that the United States is going into the great markets with its manufactures, and obtaining a foothold against all competitors, the invitation to retaliation holds a danger far greater to its own interests than any that can be inflicted on other peoples. The greater the advances made the more readily will recourse be had to reprisals and hostile legislation; and in support of every act appeal may be had to examples set by the United States.[8] FOOTNOTES: [6] Wealth of Nations, vol. i, p. 112 (Rogers's edition). [7] Bastable. Public Finance, p. 181. [8] "The old protectionist, with the stock arguments about the influence of the tariff upon wages and all the rest of it, is beginning to die out. He told us all he had to say about the 'pauper labor' of Europe, by which he often meant the best educated and most skillful artisans of the world. We got tired of hearing about how the importer paid the tax, how it was Europe and England in particular that was all the time squeezing our lives out, till nearly all of us, being of English ancestry ourselves, wondered whether we, even, could be so good as we hoped we were, if we had sprung from something so essentially perverted and bad. We were told, too, that American tourists who went to Europe and spent money there which they ought to have squandered at home were not friends of their country, and that they did us a particularly hostile act when they brought clothing, statuary, or diamond rings back with them from foreign parts. A season of high prices was a real heaven, and wars and fires were good things because they destroyed property that would have to be replaced, and this would create that demand which, reacting on supply, would increase prices. To say that an article was cheap was to say that the political party in power was no longer worthy of public confidence. It was related that each government could make its people so rich, and the idea was thought to have been traced down from Henry C. Carey, that the rest of the world could be safely disregarded altogether. "Seriously, who believes any of this stuff nowadays? The protectionist is not reckoning with such popular impotency and stupidity. He believes in his fellow-man, and wants to give him a helping hand. He does not care what effect it has on England or Ireland. He is not sure that a protective tariff in and of itself will increase the wages of the workmen. He is even inclined to think that less wages and profits would do well enough for every man, if it were cheaper to live and there were not such extravagant demands upon every person from all sides--this without being a socialist. He is certain that 'a cheap coat' does not necessarily make 'a cheap man,' but the cheaper the coat the better it will be for the wearer. That is what we are all trying to do, improve our processes, increase our effective working power, which means, if you please, to make things cheaper."--_The Manufacturer_ (organ of the Manufacturers' Club of Philadelphia). MENTAL DEFECTIVES AND THE SOCIAL WELFARE. BY MARTIN W. BARR, M. D., CHIEF PHYSICIAN, PENNSYLVANIA TRAINING SCHOOL FOR FEEBLE-MINDED CHILDREN, ELWYN, PA. Periods of extraordinary efflorescence or fruitage are followed by exhaustion and sterility not infrequently demanding the free use of the pruning knife; and, just as we remark how frequent is idiocy the offspring of genius, so do we find the same seeming paradox, of mental defect in rank and increasing growth the product of this most wonderful nineteenth century. True, science has contributed to numbers by revealing as mental defectives the many "misunderstood," "the backward," "the feebly gifted," as well as by showing what was once esteemed moral perversion to be moral imbecility; but a truth to which science also attests is, that unstable nerve centers uniting and reacting through successive generations, producing various forms of neuroses, evidenced in insanity, moral and mental imbecility, idiocy and epilepsy, do show the influence of a highly nervous age. Our last census reports, although necessarily uncertain and unreliable, yet show ninety thousand mental defectives, not including the insane. Unrecognized and unacknowledged cases swell the number easily to one hundred thousand within our present borders--how many we are going to annex remains to be seen; but this is an enemy that attacks not our frontiers but our hearthstones. We have reached that point when we must conquer it, lest it should conquer us, and the means to this end may be summed up in three words--separation, asexualization, and permanent sequestration. "Diseases desperate grown by desperate appliances are relieved, or not at all," and we must recognize that heroic measures now are as essential to the welfare of the unfortunate as to society, which will then naturally adjust itself to new conditions. Viewing the separation and massing of these irresponsibles--innocent victims of ignorance, debauchery, or selfish lust--men will come to realize that a greater crime than taking is the giving of such life; and so a greater reverence for the sacredness of marriage, a deeper sense of the great responsibilities of parenthood, will do more to avert this evil than the most stringent marriage laws. That the present demands some restraint upon the ignorant and the indifferent there can be no doubt, and laws preventing the marriage of defectives and of their immediate descendants would go far to stem the tide of harmful heredity. But what to do with those now in our midst is the vital question! They must be provided for in a way that shall insure safety to society, economy to the State, and protection and happiness to the individual. The answer found in the experience of half a century is, briefly, asylums for the helpless--training schools and colonies for those capable of becoming helpful. These in very name and nature being widely separate, just as separate as titles and names indicate, should be their working systems. Work among the feeble-minded, a philanthropic movement directed first toward the idiot, soon found a limit in dealing with a subject not trainable and but slightly if at all improvable. Thence, diverging and broadening as idiocy became better understood and imbecility in various phases became recognized, it found its true province in strengthening and encouraging feeble intellects, arousing and stimulating indolent and weak wills, and in training and directing into healthful channels the abnormal energy of those destitute of the moral sense. How wide the divergence can readily be seen, as also how entirely incompatible with union must be work further apart in reality than is the training of an imbecile and a normal child. [Illustration: EXCITABLE IDIOT. Practically unimprovable. APATHETIC IDIOT. Practically unimprovable. IDIO-IMBECILE. But slight hope of improvement.] For the idiot, who not only can not be trained, but who in many cases is unimprovable even in the simplest matters of self-help, nothing is needed but that care and attention found in every well-regulated nursery of delicate children, the _sine qua non_ being regular hours, simple nourishing food, frequent baths, and tender mothering. As many are paralyzed, blind, lame, or epileptic, it is desirable that the dormitories, well ventilated, be on the same floor with the living rooms and of easy access to bathrooms and playgrounds. Covered and carefully guarded porches should afford the much-needed fresh air and outdoor life in all weathers. These, with cheerful, sunny playrooms, provided with simple toys and furnished with bright decorations varying with the season, will contribute the maximum of pleasure for this life of perpetual infancy. Low vitality, general poverty of the whole physical make-up, the prevalence of phthisis and epilepsy and kindred diseases require the daily inspection of a physician, while the comfort and well-being of the whole, both workers and children, are insured by a capable and sympathetic house mother. The character of attendants is of the first importance, as these are they who live with the children; it should combine that firmness, tenderness, and balance that constitute an even temperament, capable of recognizing and meeting an occasion without loss of self-control. The duties involve not only the care of the idiots, but the training and direction of idio-imbeciles as aids, and this dealing with natures often wholly animal, requires a certain refinement and dignity of character--at least an entire absence of coarseness--while a knowledge of the simpler manual arts, and if possible of drawing and music, will do much to soften and brighten these darkened natures. As these qualities are valuable as well as rare, the remuneration should be in proportion; certainly sufficient to induce permanency and to compensate for such isolation. A life of constant wear and tear demands also regular periods of rest, and the corps therefore should be sufficiently large to give relief hours daily as well as vacations. The idio-imbecile, but one remove from his weaker brother, to whose wants he may be trained to minister, finds here his fitting place, and the domestic service of these asylums may be largely drawn from this class and also from that of the low-grade imbecile. Working as an aid, never alone, always under direction, he finds in a monotonous round of the simplest daily avocations his life happiness, his only safety from lapsing into idiocy, and therefore his true home. The relief to the home, the actual benefit to the State in this housing and care of the idiot and idio-imbecile can never be fully estimated. It is reckoned, however, in a general way that for every idiot sequestrated the energies of two if not four normal persons are returned to society. Imbecility, mental or moral, congenital or accidental, is either an inherent defect or an irrecoverable loss, an incurable disease for which hospitals can do nothing, nor can reformatories form again that which never has been formed. Could language be made clear enough to enable the public mind to grasp this fact, the work of training schools, the only hope of the imbecile, would then be simplified, and people might be willing to accept what they can give, in the only way in which it can be given, to be of any permanent value. As it is, the few charlatans who profess to train and in a few years send out an imbecile ready to take a high-school or college course not only deceive those from whom they may gather a few thousands, but their representations, coupled with that of a sensational press, effectually impede the progress of a work which must eventually find its true place in the system of public education. Influenced by these misrepresentations, parents come with profound idiots and high hopes of a course of training (here is one of the misfortunes of an idiot asylum within a training school), and simply refuse to accept a negative to their expectations. Again--to waifs and strays, high-grade imbeciles, developing after years of labored training proficiency in music, drawing, or some one of the industrial arts, friends will suddenly crop up and, dazzled by what seems phenomenal genius, seek to withdraw them just as they become useful to the community. Little do they know of the weak will, indolent nature, and utter lack of "go," that forbid competition with normal labor and must forever be subject to the will of another; still less of the weak physical build that is kept intact only by watchful care, and which would succumb to any undue hardship. So much for the difficulties that beset the work. Now as to the work itself. As this must vary according to the status of the individual, a careful study and a correct diagnosis are of primary importance in order that the work may be fitted to the child, not the child to the work. The plan pursued is as follows: A thorough examination--physical, mental, and moral--is first made by the chief physician in connection with papers properly filled out giving personal and family history. He is then sent to the hospital for a fortnight to insure immunity from disease. There, while perfectly free and unrestrained among his fellows, he is under constant observation of the nurses; these observations, carefully noted, are returned to the chief physician, who turns both over to the principal of schools, designating the grade in which he is to enter for probation. Here under different environment he is again tested for some weeks and finally placed. [Illustration: HIGH-GRADE IMBECILE. HIGH-GRADE IMBECILE. Very improvable--can read, write, draw, etc. LOW-GRADE IMBECILE. Only slightly improvable.] It is hard for the uninitiated to understand that the grade, be it high, middle, or low, is not associated with promotion and advancement as in schools for normal children. On the contrary, it signifies the quality and status of the individual, his limitations, his possibilities, and consequently determines almost unfailingly the training for his life work; not by any hard-and-fast lines, but by a general mapping out of means which experience has proved will best insure his development, because best suited to his needs. Every latitude is allowed and, as the comfort of both the teacher and the entire class depends upon each going to his own place, there is easy and natural transference according to the necessity indicated by either progress or retrogression; but the varied occupations in each grade give ample scope for indulgence of individual proclivity in the means of development, and it is found that the original diagnosis, based upon experience, rarely errs. The motto of the schools--"We learn by doing; the working hand makes strong the working brain"--shows manual training to be the basis of the scheme of development, varied for each grade to suit the intelligence. Thus classified, various occupations are arranged and presented with the double intent of securing all-round development, and of giving at the same time opportunity for choice according to individual bent, the child being gradually permitted to devote himself more exclusively to that in which he shows a tendency to excel, and to gain a certain automatic ease in what shall prove the initial of a life employment. A knowledge of writing and of numbers is acquired incidentally as a necessary part of these occupations in daily practice, and arithmetic, taught with objects, is chiefly counting, separating into fractional parts, and practical measurements. Books are used rather as a convenient means of attracting and holding attention while inducing habits of consecutive thinking than for a knowledge of facts to be memorized. Those who can learn to read gain naturally a means of self-entertainment, of self-instruction, hence a certain amount of culture, so long as protected in an institution from indiscriminate and pernicious literature. The low-grade imbecile, but a slight degree removed from the idio-imbecile, is, like him, totally incapable of grasping artificial signs or symbols. He can therefore never learn to read or write; figures have no meaning for him, nor numbers, beyond the very simplest counting acquired in the daily repetition of some simple task such as knitting, netting, braiding rope, straw, or knotting twine. The excitation of interest in these, which will also give hand and arm power, the arousing of the sluggish, indolent will, through the stimulus of pleasurable emotions, the physical development by means of the various drills and the moral influence of refined, orderly surroundings--these, together with some practical work of house, garden, or farm, which forms part of the daily routine, are all that school life can do for him. [Illustration: MORAL IMBECILE OF HIGH GRADE. MORAL IMBECILE OF MIDDLE GRADE. MORAL IMBECILE, LOW GRADE.] From this preparation he passes to the industrial department, where he receives training in that occupation which the school has indicated for him, becoming in his limited way a useful and contented member of a community which should be his life home. As both of these types develop either extreme docility or perversity--the one quiet, gentle, obedient, following any suggestion even of a comrade's stronger will; the other obstinate, indolent, often brutal and cruel--the necessity for constant guardianship is therefore self-evident. When we consider that the training of a high-grade imbecile takes four times the period commonly allotted to a normal child, some idea of the vital energy expended on the training of the lower grades may be found in the following example: I find in our museum of educational work a little ball which I am inclined to regard the most valuable thing in the whole collection. The boy who made it was a low-grade imbecile. His hand against every man, he fancied every man's against him. Always under strict custodial care, that he might harm neither himself nor others, he would vent his spleen in tearing his clothing. His teacher, a woman of rare patience and devotedness, sat beside him one day, tearing strips of old linen and laying them in order. "See, Willie, let us make some pretty strips and lay them so." His wonder grew apace at seeing her doing what he had been reproved for doing; at once he responded, and a new bond of sympathy was established between them. She was playing his game--the only one, poor little lad, that he was capable of--and he joined in. "Now, we will draw out the pretty threads and lay them in rows." For weeks the boy found quiet pastime in this occupation, and the violent nature grew quieter in proportion. One day the teacher said, "Let us tie these threads together and make a long string." It took him months and months to learn to tie those knots, but meanwhile his attendants were having breathing space. "Now we will wind this into a pretty ball, and I will cover all you make for the boys to play with"; and a new occupation was added to his meager list. The next link in this chain of development was a lesson in knitting. Again, through months of patient teaching, it was at last accomplished, and the boy to the day of his death found his life happiness in knitting caps for the children, in place of tearing both them and their clothing. You see the teacher was wise enough to utilize the natural activities of the child and divert evil propensities into healthful channels. Had she brought knitting and bright yarn or anything foreign to him first, it would in truth have been fitting new cloth to old garments and the rent would have been widened: his obstinacy would have been aroused, and he would have continued to tear to the end of the chapter. [Illustration: HIGH-GRADE IMBECILES (FEEBLY GIFTED) AT SLOYD WORK.] The imbecile of middle grade receives that fuller presentation of work suited to fuller capacity. Some time is devoted to the three "Rs," as it is found that attention may be aroused and concentrated in the phonetic drills, more especially if associated with pictures, and the drawing of the objects named free-hand; thus eye, ear, and hand are encouraged to work simultaneously. Those who accomplish finally the reading of short simple stories not only enjoy evenings in the library, but may be enabled to glean suggestions for the various handicrafts for which they are being trained. This effort at quick observation and original thinking is further carried forward in the ambidextrous movements of free-hand drawing, designing, and sketching from life--finding ready and practical application in the daily use of tools. The value of the rule and the try-square is tested in the manufacture of the various useful articles in both paper and wood included under the head of sloyd, and "a boy can not learn to take a straight shaving off a plank," says Ruskin, "or to drive a fine curve without faltering, or to lay a brick level in the mortar, without learning a multitude of other matters which life of man could never teach him." Equally useful to the girl in the workroom as to the boy in the shop is this training of a ready eye, this quick intuition of balance and proportion, this practice of obedience of hand and arm to brain, until it becomes automatic. To both, therefore, the value of such preparation will be incalculable. It is noticeable that boys of this grade turn out as good workers in the ordinary crafts of shoemaking, carpentering, and house painting as those of higher grade who, although capable of grasping more intelligently the details of work, yet do not bring to it that energy and perseverance of one who finds in it "this one thing I do." With the imbecile of high grade, able to accomplish studies equal to about the first intermediate of the public schools, there is a diffusion of interest; the intelligence broadens rather than deepens during the school period in natural response to environment. With greater grasp of numerical values and of letters he attains proficiency impossible to the lower grades in drawing, in music, in printing, and in cabinet work. Other industries will probably be provided for him as the demand increases, for it must be remembered that this is a class whose needs have been the last to be recognized in a work begun, as I have before said, for the idiot. Regarded as queer, unlike other children--unable to keep up--he has, after an unsuccessful trial at school, been kept at home, in some cases an aid, in others a tyrant, to those relatives charged with his care. Changed conditions of both family and school, fortunately for him, combine to render this no longer possible, as absence of proper training is always certain to result in deterioration. The pressure upon the primary schools in the struggle for higher education leaves no time to contend with dull, backward children. In the family the care-takers grow fewer in proportion as the home-makers become home-winners, and so these feeble ones are a burden instead of an aid in the ordinary household offices. The next hope is a training school where, with false hopes fostered by ignorance and sensationalism, they are entered, and after a few years, a time all too short for any lasting benefit, a sentimentality equally stupid withdraws them from that guardianship absolutely essential, with just that little knowledge which will render them more dangerous to society, because less recognizable--an evil element perpetuating an evil growth. Under both conditions these unfortunates have suffered from that lack of constant care and supervision which should be theirs from the cradle to the grave. The separation of backward children in the schools and the placing of them in special classes for special training is the first step in the right direction. Here, after sufficient time for observation and diagnosing by teacher and physician, the defectives so adjudged will naturally drift to the training schools for the feeble-minded; these, if relieved of the odium as well as the care of their helpless population, will then be encouraged to arrange for this brighter class of defectives industries which will provide not only for development and happiness, but will largely aid in maintenance. The recognition of the necessity for this weeding out of the schools, having place first on the Continent, next in England, and later in our own country, marks an era in the national as well as in the special schools. Both will be benefited largely, and formal expression of this, found in the addition to our National Educational Association of a department representing the training of all classes of defectives, is one of the most encouraging signs of the times. [Illustration: MIDDLE-GRADE IMBECILES.] The same experience which dictates the separation of the idiot from the imbecile, the backward from the normal child, urges also that a permanent sequestration would tend alike to the safety and happiness of the normal and abnormal classes. The experiment made of preparing and sending out into the world these irresponsibles has proved, to say the least, not encouraging, and the advisability of their permanent detention has become self-evident. The heads of training schools here are a unit in urging that provision be made for those who have reached the limit of school progress. That experience has reached a similar conclusion in England is testified in the munificent gift lately made to the Royal Albert Asylum, and by the opinion of its superintendent, Dr. T. Telford-Smith, thus clearly expressed: "It is yearly more noticeable that the public mind is coming gradually but surely to recognize the threefold value of the work of such institutions as the Royal Albert Asylum. The educational and the custodial aspects early aroused the sympathies of the charitable; but the preventive aspect is another which must force itself upon all who thoughtfully consider the subject. The far-reaching and inexorable law of heredity is written large for those who study the imbecile." The following paragraph, from a daily paper, shows that, in America at least, public opinion and the acts of the legislature have become ripe for action: "The State of Connecticut is about to try a curious experiment in social legislation, having passed a law forbidding any man or woman, imbecile or feeble-minded, to marry under forty-five years of age, the penalty being imprisonment for not less than three years; and persons aiding and abetting are also liable. The hope of the legislature is to keep down dégenerate families." That this experiment is wise and justifiable who can doubt? [Illustration: LOW-GRADE IMBECILES. No. 1, obstinate, perverse, indolent; No. 2, gentle and obedient.] To glance at another and sadder, but not less real, side of the same question, can any one doubt but that the adolescent and adult female imbecile needs lifelong care and protection? Surely the noble gift to the asylum by Sir Thomas Storey of a home for forty such cases is a wise, far-seeing, and statesmanlike act. It is greatly to be hoped that this noble example may be speedily emulated on both sides of the sea, and that each State may shortly possess, in addition to its training school, its own colony farm with all the industries of a village, drawing its workers from the well-directed energies of a carefully guarded community. Cottages, each with its house mother, would insure that sense of home, and that affectionate and sympathetic oversight so essential to this society composed of those who are always children, while measures, which science has already pointed out and experience proved as advisable, might, if protected by wise legislation, permit less vigilance on the part of care-takers and consequent happiness because of greater freedom to its members. It is a happy coincidence that Massachusetts, the pioneer State in the work among the feeble-minded, should in its fifty-first year celebrate the beginning of its second half century by the inauguration of this most eventful step in the onward progress of the work. The training school at Waltham has lately purchased sixteen hundred and sixty acres of land for the establishment of a colony which is to have natural and healthful growth from the fostering care of the parent institution. As these colonies increase, drawing from society a pernicious element and transforming it under watchful care into healthful growth, may not in time the national Government, finding these homes of prevention a more excellent way than prison houses of cure for ill, be induced to provide a national colony for this race more to be commiserated because of a childhood more hopeless than that of the two others in our midst on whom so much has been expended? THE WHEAT PROBLEM AGAIN. BY EDWARD ATKINSON. In a recent article in the North American Review, Mr. John Hyde, the statistician of the United States Department of Agriculture, a gentleman of very high authority and repute, presents this problem in such terms as to throw a doubt upon the validity of any forecast of the potential increase in the product of wheat, or, in fact, of any crop in this country. Without referring to myself by name, he yet makes it very plain that he does not attach any value to my recent forecast of wheat production printed in the Popular Science Monthly for December, 1898. On the other hand, he rightly says that since Tyndall's address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874 no treatise presented to that association has excited so general an interest or provoked so much unfavorable criticism as Sir William Crookes's recent utterances on the subject of the approaching scarcity in the supply of wheat. Mr. Hyde disclaims any intention to give his own views, but yet no one can read his treatise without noting a substantial agreement with Sir William Crookes, perhaps almost unconsciously to himself. In his closing paragraph he says: "To discuss the extent to which under conceivable conditions the United States may, _notwithstanding the somewhat dubious outlook_, still continue to contribute to the food supply of other nations, would be little more than speculation." The Italics are my own. I venture to point out that the use of the word "speculation" is an example of many instances. Like a dog, one may give a word a bad name, yet it may be a good dog and a very good word when rightly used. In the true and very innocent meaning of the word "speculation" we find exactly what the public has a right to expect and even to demand from the Department of Agriculture. In Webster's Dictionary I find that, when used in such a connection as this problem of the potential of this country in farm productions, the word "speculation" stands for "a mental view of anything in its various aspects and relations; contemplation; intellectual examination." If any "mental view" has yet been taken in the Department of Agriculture of the proportion of the land of this country which may be termed "arable," I have yet to find the record. If any "contemplation" has been devoted to the proportions of this arable land which may be devoted to different crops in each section, I have been remiss in not securing the reports. If any "mental view" has been taken of the relative area now devoted to each principal crop, and that which may be so devoted hereafter in order to meet the prospective demand upon the land, either for the supply of our own population or of other nations, where is the record? If there is no such "speculation" now of record, is it not time that a true agricultural survey corresponding to our geologic and geodetic surveys should be entered upon? I have reason to believe that such surveys have been made by many European states in which all the arable land in some kingdoms is classified, listed, and so recorded that any one wishing to know the best place for any special product can get the information by reference to the proper department of the Government. I have had occasion to make several studies of this kind. In order to inform myself on the potential of the South in the production of cotton, I undertook a study of the physical geography and climatology of the cotton States and of other cotton-producing countries nearly forty years ago. The results of this research were first given in Cheap Cotton by Free Labor, published in 1861. In that pamphlet and in many treatises following, finally in an address in Atlanta, in 1880, a true forecast or "speculation" or "intellectual examination" will be found of the production of the cotton fiber, the potential of the future and of the cotton-seed-oil industry, then almost unheard of in this country. In 1880 I also entered upon my first "speculation" (not in the market) on the lines of a "contemplation" or forecast of the effect of agricultural machinery applied to our wheat land, coupled with the prospective reduction in the cost of carrying wheat to England, upon the condition of the American farmer and the British landlord. That forecast of prosperity to our farmers in the supply of bread at low cost to our kin beyond the sea has been justified at every point and in every detail. I therefore ventured to review Sir William Crookes's address, and I am well assured that what Mr. Hyde now calls a "somewhat dubious outlook" is subject to no doubt whatever as to our ability to continue our full supply for domestic consumption and export for the next century. Let me now repeat again what I have often said: statistics are good servants, but very bad masters. I long since ceased to put any great reliance upon averages of crops, wages, or products covering wide areas and varying conditions, unless I could find out, _first_, the personal equation of the man who compiled them; _second_, ascertain what he knew himself about the subject of which his statistics or figures were the symbols; and, _third_, unless I could verify these great averages from one or more typical areas of farm land, or from one or more representative factories or workshops, of the conditions of which I could myself obtain personal information. General statistics and averages of farm products and earnings I regard with more suspicion than almost any others because of the immense variation in conditions. I have sometimes almost come to the conclusion that so many of the figures of the United States census are mere statistical rubbish as to throw a doubt on nearly all the schedules. Yet without accurate statistics on many points, many of them yet to be secured, the conduct of our national affairs must become as uncertain as would be the conduct of any great business corporation without a true ledger account and a trial balance. Hence the necessity for a permanent census bureau and for a careful "speculation" or "intellectual" and intelligent examination and "contemplation" or study of the facts about our land by which our future welfare must be governed. A good beginning has been made by the authorities of many States, yet more by the body of well-trained men in charge of the Agricultural Experiment Station, in whose support too much can not be said. To them I appealed when trying to get an adequate conception of our potential in wheat. When we think of the blunders which have been made in very recent years, we may well have some suspicion that we may still be very ignorant on many points about our own country. Who really knows very much about the great middle section of the South, what is called the "Land of the Sky," comprising the upland plateaus and mountain sections of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, eastern Tennessee, and Kentucky? Within this area, as large as France and twice as large as Great Britain, will be found timber and minerals equal to both the countries named, and a potential in agriculture equal to either, as yet very sparsely populated. Yet under a craze for centrifugal expansion we are now in danger of trying to develop tropical islands far away, already somewhat densely peopled, where white men can not work and live, to our detriment, danger, and loss, while we fail to see that if we expand centripetally by the occupation and use of the most healthy and productive section of our own country, we may add immensely to our prosperity, our wealth, to our profit without cost and without militarism. This sparsely settled Land of the Sky is greater in area and far greater in its potential than the Philippine Islands, Cuba, and Porto Rico combined. Verily, it seems as if common sense were a latent and sluggish force, often endangered by the noisy and blatant influence of the venal politician and the greed of the unscrupulous advocates of vassal colonies who now attempt to pervert the power of government to their own purposes of private gain. Witness the blunders of the past: We nearly gave away Oregon because it was held not to be worth retaining. When the northern boundary of Wisconsin was being determined, it was put as far north as it was then supposed profitable farming could ever extend, excluding Minnesota, now one of our greatest sources of wheat. The Great American Desert in my own school atlas covered a large part of the most fertile land now under cultivation. What blunders are we now making for lack of "speculation" or "intellectual examination" as to the future of American farming and farm lands? On one point to which Mr. Hyde refers I must cry _peccavi_. He rebukes the editor of the Popular Science Monthly for admitting an article in which a potential of 400,000,000 bushels of wheat is attributed to the State of Idaho. The total depravity of the type-writing machine caused the mechanism to spell Montana in the letters I-d-a-h-o. What I imputed to Idaho is true of Montana, if the Chief of the Agricultural Experiment Stations of Montana is a competent witness, if all its arable land were devoted to wheat. It will be observed that I mentioned Idaho incidentally (meaning Montana), taking no cognizance of the estimate given, because it was at present of no practical importance. I have expressed my distrust of great averages in respect to agriculture and farm products. In illustration of this fallacy, the figures presented by Mr. Hyde will now be dealt with. It is held that in 1930, which is the year when Sir William Crookes predicts starvation among the bread-eating people of the world for lack of wheat (as if good bread could only be made from wheat), the population of this country may be computed at 130,000,000. The requirements of that year for our own consumption Mr. Hyde estimates at 700,000,000 bushels of wheat, 1,250,000,000 bushels of oats, 3,450,000,000 bushels of corn (maize), and 100,000,000 tons of hay; and, although other products are not named by him, we may assume a corresponding increase. Subsequently Mr. Hyde gives the present delusive average yields per acre of the whole country, and then throws a doubt on the future progress of agricultural science, saying, "Whatever agricultural science may be able to do in the next thirty years, up to the present time it has only succeeded in arresting that decline in the rate of production with which we have been continually threatened." Without dealing at present with this want of and true consideration of or "speculation" upon the progress made in the last decade under the lead of the experiment stations and other beginnings in remedying the wasteful and squalid methods that have been so conspicuous in pioneer farming, let us take Mr. Hyde's averages and see what demand upon land the requirements of 1930 will make, even at the present meager average product per acre. Mr. Hyde apparently computes this prospective product as one that will be required for the domestic consumption of 130,000,000 people by ratio to our present product. He ignores the fact that our present product suffices for 75,000,000, with an excess of live stock, provisions, and dairy products exported nearly equal in value to all the grain exported, and in excess of the exports of wheat. If we can increase proportionally in one class of products, why not in another? Whichever pays best will be produced and exported. _1897 and 1930 compared.--Data of 1897._ ------+------------------------+-----------------+---------------------- | Products. |Average per acre.| Area required. ------+------------------------+-----------------+---------------------- Maize | 1,902,967,933 bushels. | 23.8 bushels. | 125,150 square miles. Wheat | 530,149,168 " | 13.4 " | 61,660 " " Oats | 698,767,809 " | 27.2 " | 40,200 " " Hay | 60,664,770 tons. | 1.43 " | 66,290 " " | | |---------------------- Total in square miles | 293,300 square miles. -------------------------------------------------+---------------------- All other farm crops carry the total to less than 400,000 square miles now under the plow, probably not exceeding 360,000. Prospective demand of 1930, at the same meager average product per acre, without progress in agricultural science: ------+------------------------+---------------+---------------------- | Crop called for. | Per acre. | Area required. ------+------------------------+---------------+---------------------- Maize | 3,450,000,000 bushels. | 23.8 bushels. | 226,600 square miles. Wheat | 700,000,000 " | 13.4 " | 81,600 " " Oats | 1,250,000,000 " | 27.2 " | 70,800 " " Hay | 100,000,000 tons. | 1.43 " | 109,400 " " | | |---------------------- Total in square miles | 488,400 square miles. -----------------------------------------------+---------------------- Assuming all land under the plow in 1930 in the ratio as above, the area of all now in all crops 400,000 square miles--an excessive estimate--that year (1930) will call for 667,000 square miles of arable land in actual cultivation. I have been accustomed to consider one half our national domain, exclusive of Alaska, good arable land in the absence of any "speculation" on that point in the records of the Department of Agriculture; but from the returns given by the chiefs of the experiment stations and secretaries of agriculture of the States hereafter cited, that estimate may be increased probably to two thirds, or 2,000,000 square miles of arable land out of a total of 3,000,000 square miles, omitting Alaska. Assuming that we possess 2,000,000 square miles of arable land, capable at least of producing the present meager average product cited above, the conditions of 1930 will be graphically presented on the following diagram: _Prospective Use of Land in the Year 1930 on Present Crop Average._ [Sidenote: Arable land assumed to be 2,000,000 square miles in the outer lines of the diagram.] +----------+----------+----------+--------------+------------+----------+ | Oats, | Wheat, | Hay, |Miscellaneous.| Maize, | Wheat | | 70,800 | 81,600 | 109,400 |Roots, cotton,|Indian corn,| for | |sq. miles.|sq. miles.|sq. miles.|tobacco, etc.,| 226,600 | export, | +----------| | |168,600 sq. m.| sq. miles. | 143,000 | | +----------+----------| Excessive. | |sq. miles.| | +--------------+------------+----------+ |Arable land unassigned 1,200,000 square miles.| |Deduct for cities, towns, parks, | | and reserves of all kinds 200,000 " " | | --------- | | Reserve for future use 1,000,000 " " | | | | Forest, mountain, arid, etc., not counted, about 1,000,000 square | | miles, not included in these lines or squares. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ No reduction on area cultivated on prospective improvement in the present methods of farming, although it may be assumed that the prospective increase of crop per acre will exert great influence. If the facts should be in 1930 consistent with Mr. Hyde's "speculation" it would therefore appear that our ability to meet the domestic demand of 1930 with proportionate export of cattle, provisions, and dairy products, and to set apart a little patch of land for the export of 1,226,000,000 bushels of wheat raised at the rate of only 13.4 bushels per acre from 143,000 square miles of land will be met by the cultivation of not exceeding 700,000 square miles out of 2,000,000 available. I should not venture to question the conclusions emanating from the Department of Agriculture, or the deductions of so eminent a scientist as Sir William Crookes, had I not taken the usual precaution of a business man in studying a business question. I went to the men who know the subject as well as the figures on which statistics are to be compiled. Being supplied by the Popular Science Monthly with one hundred proofs of the first nine and a half pages of the December article in which the terms of the problem are stated, I sent those proofs to the chiefs of the experiment stations and to the secretaries of agriculture in all the States from which any considerable product of wheat is now or may be hereafter derived; also to many makers of wheat harvesters; to the secretaries of Chambers of Commerce, and to several economic students in the wheat-growing States. This preliminary study was accompanied by the following circular of inquiry: BOSTON, MASS., _October 5, 1898_. _To the Chiefs of the Agricultural Experiment Stations and others in Authority_: Calling your attention to the inclosed advance sheets of an article which will by and by appear in the Popular Science Monthly, I beg to put to you certain questions. If the matter interests you, will you kindly fill up the blanks below and let me have your replies within the present month of October, to the end that I may compile them and give a digest of the results? I shall state in the article that I am indebted to you and others for the information submitted. Area of the State of....................... square miles. 1. What proportion of this area do you believe to be arable land of fair quality, including pasture that might be put under the plow? Answer ................... square miles. 2. What proportion is now in forest or mountain sections which may not be available for agriculture for a long period? Answer ................... square miles. 3. What has been done or may be done by irrigation? ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ............................ 4. What proportion of the arable land above measured should you consider suitable to the production of wheat under general conditions such as are given in the text, say, a stable price of one dollar per bushel in London? Answer ................... square miles. 5. To what extent, in your judgment, is wheat becoming the cash or surplus crop of a varied system of agriculture as distinct from the methods which prevail in the opening of new lands of cropping with wheat for a term of years? .................................................................... What further remarks can you add which will enable me to elucidate this case, to complete the article and to convey a true impression of the facts to English readers? .................................................................... .................................................................... .................................................................... Your assistance in this matter will be gratefully received. Respectfully submitted, EDWARD ATKINSON. To this circular I received twenty-four detailed replies, containing statistics mostly very complete; also many suggestive letters, in every case giving full support to the general views which I had submitted in the proof sheets. It has been impossible for me to give individual credit within the limits of a magazine article to the gentlemen who have so fully supplied the data. Space will only permit me to submit a digest of the more important facts in a table derived from these replies: -------------+-----------------------------------------+------------- | FROM RETURNS MADE TO MY INQUIRY. |From United |----------------+----------+-------------|States report NAME. | Area of State. | Arable. | Suitable to | in wheat, | | | wheat. | 1897. -------------+----------------+----------+-------------+------------- Minnesota | 84,287 | 66,000 | 50,000 | 7,189 South Dakota | 76,000 | 42,500 | 40,000 | 4,187 North Dakota | 74,312 | 50,000 | 50,000 | 4,300 Illinois | 56,000 | 54,000 | 20,000 | 2,292 Missouri | 68,000 | 64,000 | 64,000 | 2,448 Wisconsin | 56,000 | 35,000 | 35,000 | 961 |----------------+----------+-------------+------------ | 414,599 | 311,500 | 259,000 | 21,372 |================+==========+=============+=========== Texas | 269,694 | 200,000 | 100,000 | 700 California | 158,360 | 54,000 | 30,000 | 5,062 Montana | 145,310 | 30,000 | 25,000 | 109 Idaho | 87,000 | 30,000 | 15,000 | 192 |----------------+----------+-------------+------------ | 660,364 | 314,000 | 170,000 | 6,063 |================+==========+=============+============ Total | 1,074,963 | 625,500 | 429,000 | 27,435 -------------+----------------+----------+-------------+------------ I do not give the data of the Eastern and Southern States, and I have selected only the most complete data of the other States, choosing the more conservative where two returns have been made from one State. The foregoing States produced a little over one third of the wheat crop of 1897. They comprise a little over one third the area of the land of the United States, excluding Alaska. The list covers States like Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, now very fully occupied relatively to Texas, Montana, and Idaho, as yet but sparsely settled. Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, and Washington combined far exceed the above list in wheat production; but, as I have no complete data from these States, I can only say that the national or census statistics, as far as they go, develop corresponding conditions to those above given. The very small product of Texas and Montana, even of Idaho, as compared with the claimed potential, will attract notice, and perhaps excite incredulity. But let it be remembered that in 1880 the Territory of Dakota yielded less than 3,000,000 bushels of wheat, while in 1898 the two States of North and South Dakota, formerly in one Territory, claim to have produced 100,000,000 bushels. Perhaps it will then be admitted that the potential of Montana, and even of Idaho, may be attained in some measure corresponding to the reports from those States; but as yet their product is a negligible quantity, as that of Dakota was only twenty years since.[9] Again, let it be remembered that Texas will produce a cotton crop, marketed in 1898-'99, above the average of the five ante-war crops of the whole country, and nearly equal to the largest crop ever grown in the United States before the war. Texas could not only produce the present entire cotton crop of the United States but of the world, on but a small part of her land which is well suited to cotton. When these facts are considered, perhaps the potential of that great State in wheat and other grain, in cattle and in sheep, as well as in cotton, may begin to be comprehended. The writer is well aware that this treatment of a great problem is very incomplete, but it is the best that the leisure hours of a very busy business life would permit. If it discloses the general ignorance of our resources, the total inadequacy of many of our official statistics, the lack of any real agricultural survey, and the necessity for a reorganization and concentration of the scientific departments of the Government as well as of a permanent census bureau, it will have served a useful purpose. If it also serves to call attention to the meager average crops and the poor quality of our agriculture as a whole down to a very recent period, it may suggest even to those to whose minds the statistics of the past convey but gloomy and "doubtful views" of the future, that the true progress in scientific agriculture could only begin when substantially all the fertile land in the possession of the Government had either been given away or otherwise distributed. So long as "sod crops" and the single-crop system yielded adequate returns to unskilled farmers, no true science of agriculture could be expected, any more than a large product of wool can be hoped for in States where it has been wittily said that "every poor man keeps one cur dog, and every d--d poor man keeps two or more." Finally, if I shall have drawn attention to the very effective work which is being done in the agricultural experiment stations by men of first-rate ability, I shall have drawn attention to a great fact. This work has already led to a complete revolution from the old practice of maltreating land, and to the renovation of soils that had been partially exhausted. Governor Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, long since condemned the old methods of Southern agriculture by telling his hearers, "The niggers skinned the land and the white men skinned the niggers." We are changing all that by new and progressive methods. I hope that in this recognition of the work of the experiment stations I shall have made some return for the attention which has been given to my inquiry by so many of my correspondents that the space assigned me forbids a list of my authorities being given by name. When the suggestion is made from the Department of Agriculture that all that science has yet accomplished has been to stop a tendency to a lessened production from the land now under the plow, and when it is even suggested that in 1930 the present meager average of crops per acre may still exist, it seems to me that little credit is given to the good work already accomplished in the short period in which the separate Department of Agriculture has been represented in the Cabinet, especially in the last five or six years, while the suggestion itself shows very little consideration of the great work of the experiment stations. Unless it can be proved that my correspondents and myself have entered into a conspiracy to mislead the public in dealing with the potential of this country in wheat production, nearly all the deductions from the figures of the past must be considered mere statistical rubbish. These statistics cover sections and States in which wheat should never be grown or attempted in competition with the true wheat soils and climate. As well might misplaced iron furnaces, built to boom city lots where there are no favorable conditions for the production of iron, be included in an average and held up as a standard of our potential in iron and steel production. In my efforts to discover the rule of progress in the arts and occupations of the people of this country, it has become plain that in ratio to the application of science and invention to every art the quantity of product is increased, the number of workmen is relatively diminished, the price of the product tends to diminish, while the wages or earnings of those who do the work are augmented. I have investigated many branches of industry, and find evidence conclusive to my own mind that such is the law of industrial development. This rule is subject to temporary variations under the restriction of statutes. In my own judgment, the so-called protective principle or policy of interference with commerce by imposing fines on foreign imports has retarded the progress of the specially protected arts, and has in some measure obstructed the diversity of manufactures; but the opposite policy of absolutely free trade in our domestic traffic over a greater area and among a much larger number of people than have elsewhere secured their own liberty has been so much more potent in its progressive influence as to have lessened the evils of the restrictions on foreign trade. According to my observation, all the efforts to regulate railroad charges by State legislation and under the interstate commerce act have greatly retarded the progress of the railway, and have deprived great States, notably Texas, of any service at all commensurate to the demand which might otherwise have been supplied to the mutual benefit of the owners of the railways and the inhabitants of the State. The most serious retarding influence, especially evil in its effect upon farmers, was the useless panic of 1893, caused by the silver craze--that is to say, by the effort to enact a force bill by which the producers of our great crops would have been compelled to accept money of half the purchasing power of that to which their industry had been long adjusted. This caused a temporary paralysis of industry, in which I think none suffered so much as the farmers of the country. But admitting these temporary variations, I find the same rule governing the products of the farm that governs the mine, the factory, and the workshop--namely, a lessening of the number occupied in ratio to the product; a great reduction in the cost of labor; an increased return in due proportion of the skill and intelligence of the farmer; a rapid reduction in the farm mortgages, ending at the present date in making the farmers of the grain-growing States the creditors of the world, especially those occupied upon wheat. But in the development of this progress we find the reverse of the practice in the factory and the workshop. The most important applications of science and invention led first to what might be called the manufacture of wheat on an extensive method of making a single crop on great areas of land. That phase has about spent its force; the great farms are in process of division; the single-crop system has about ended; the intensive system of making a larger product from a lessened area with alternation and variation in crops is rapidly taking the place of former methods. Therefore, while many branches of manufacturing tend more and more to the collective method, the tendency in agriculture is more and more to individualism in dealing with the land itself, coupled with collective ownership in the more expensive farm machinery, in creameries, cheese factories, and the like. We are apparently at a halfway stage in this revolution of agriculture. The intelligent and intensive methods of breeding cattle and sheep is also rapidly taking the place of the semibarbarous conditions of the ranch. If these points are well taken, the very suggestion that we must compute the land which should be under the plow in 1890 in order to supply the needs of 130,000,000 people on the basis of the imperfect statistics and inadequate data of the past, becomes almost an impertinence. It is much more probable that the 400,000 square miles which now meet the needs of 75,000,000 people, with an enormous excess for export, will in 1930 still suffice for the domestic supply of 130,000,000 people, with a proportionate export corresponding to the present. If the product of the farms of the West now yielding the largest crops, or of the renovated lands of the South now yielding the best crops, be taken as the average standard of the near future, as they should be, then it may be true in 1930, as it is now, that one fifth of the arable land of this country when put under the plow will still suffice for all existing demands, the remainder of our great domain extending the promise of future abundance and welfare to the yet greater numbers who will occupy the land a century hence. I may add that in the course of a very friendly correspondence with Sir William Crookes, while we are still at variance in our estimates of the area which may be converted to the production of wheat in this country without trenching upon any other product, we are wholly at an agreement on a most material point. I quote from one of his letters: "Under the present wasteful method of cultivation there will be in a limited number of years an insufficient supply of wheat. Apply artificial fertilizers judiciously, and the supply may be increased indefinitely." I would only venture to add to the judgment of so eminent a writer the words "or natural," to the end that the paragraph should read, "Apply artificial or natural fertilizers judiciously, and the supply can be increased indefinitely." Many years ago I was asked among others, "What would be the next great discovery of science or invention?" To which I replied, "A supply of nitrogen at low cost." Has not that discovery been made in the recent development of the functions of the bacteria which, living and dying upon the leguminous plants, dissociate the nitrogen of the atmosphere and convert it through the plant to the renovation of the soil? Is not the invention of methods of nitrifying the soil by distributing the germs of bacteria one of the most wonderful discoveries of science ever yet attained? Can any one yet measure the potential of any given area of land in any part of this country in the production of any one of its great crops? That there is a limit may be admitted. Can any one venture to say that any of our average crops yet approach beyond a small fractional measure the true limit of production, whatever it may be, either in cotton, maize, wheat, or any other product of the soil? In this, as in many other developments of the theory of evolution, the factor of mental energy, which is the prime factor in all material production, may have been or is almost wholly ignored. We are ceasing to treat the soil as a mine subject to exhaustion, but we have as yet made only a beginning in treating it as an instrument of production which will for a long period respond in its increasing product in exact ratio to the mental energy which is applied to the cultivation of the land. FOOTNOTE: [9] I have been permitted to review the detailed statements of the accounts of one of the great enterprises which I have called the manufacture of wheat on a large scale on various large farms, separated one from another but under one control, aggregating more than twenty thousand acres, in North Dakota. They are managed mainly from a long distance through agents and foremen, therefore at a relative disadvantage compared to a farmer owning his own land, acting as his own foreman, and saving heavily in expense. Such farmers, making no charge for their own time, are computed to have a cash advantage of one dollar an acre. A large part of this land has been cropped in wheat for twenty-four years, one farm of six thousand acres showing an average in excess of eighteen bushels per acre for the term of seventeen years. The details of the product of other farms are not given, but this may be considered a rule. Of course, this cropping can not be carried on indefinitely. The land is now being allowed to rest, and other crops, such as maize, oats, barley, millet, and timothy, are to some extent being raised in rotation, but not to the extent in which individual wheat farms are now passing into rotation, especially in Minnesota. In this enterprise the manufacture of wheat is the main purpose, but under the changed conditions on the small farms in Minnesota wheat is becoming rather the cash or excess crop in a rotation of four; at present, in North Dakota, wheat constitutes about three fourths the total product. In these accounts of this great farm are included all charges of every name and nature except what might be called the rent of land: the labor, the harvesting and thrashing, the general expense including the foreman and all other charges; the office expenses, the taxes, the insurance, and, when summer fallow is introduced, the cost of the summer fallow. Suffice it that these figures for 1898--a year of high charge for seed and one which yielded a fraction over the average in product--prove conclusively an average of all charges of less than five dollars an acre for the cost of the product. In different years under these conditions the cost of the wheat varies from a little over twenty cents to approximately thirty-five cents per bushel. The cost of oats, which are cultivated with the wheat mainly for use on the farms, ranges from ten to fifteen cents per bushel. These are facts. The pending question in this discussion is, How much land, occupied by owners but not now in use, is there in this section of the country on which similar results can be attained, with better results by individual farmers who possess mental energy and practical skill? The figures given by the chiefs of the agricultural experiment stations may rightly be taken in the solution of this question. THE COMING OF THE CATBIRD. BY SPENCER TROTTER. In southeastern Pennsylvania there comes a day in February that brings with it an indefinable sense of joyousness. A southerly wind wanders up the Delaware with a touch of the spring in its air that quickens, for the first time, the slumbering life. It is then that those mysterious forces in the cells of living things begin their subtle work--hidden in the dark, underground storehouses of plants and the sluggish tissues of animals buried in their winter sleep. On such a day the ground hog ventures from his burrow, some restless bee is lured from the hive to wander disconsolate over bare fields, a snake crawls from its hole to bask awhile in the sunshine, and one looks instinctively for the first breaking of the earth that tells of the early crocus and the peeping forth of daffodils. The southerly wind is more apt than not to be a telltale, for with all its springtime softness it is drawing toward some storm center, near or remote, that will inevitably follow with rough weather in its sweep. The country folk rightly call such a day a "weather breeder," and even the ground hog knows its portent in the very sign of his shadow. Come as it will, the day is really a day borrowed in advance from the spring, as though to hearten one through all the dreary days that will follow and, in starting the growing forces of vegetation, to make ready for the season's coming. With this forerunner of the year come the harbingers of the bird migration. With the rise of the temperature to sixty or over, a well-marked bird wave from the south spreads over the Delaware Valley. On this balmy, springlike day we hear for the first time since November the croaking of grackles as a loose flock wings overhead or scatters among the tree tops. A few robins may show themselves, and the mellow piping of bluebirds lends its sweet influence to the charm of such a day. There is a sense of uncertain whereabouts in the bluebird's note, a sort of hazy, in-the-air feeling that suggests sky space. It does not seem to have the tangible element by which we can locate the bird as in the voices of the robin and the song sparrow. It is on such a day as this that song sparrows are first heard--cheery ditties from the weather-beaten fences and the bare, brown tangle of brier patches. The day may close lurid with the frayed streamers of lofty cirrus clouds streaking across the sky--the vaporous overflow of a coming storm--or a week of the same bright weather may continue with the wind all the while blowing softly out of the south, but sooner or later the inevitable winter storm must close this foretaste of the spring. A decided wave of rising temperature usually reaches the Delaware Valley from the middle to the last of March, maintaining itself longer than the February rise, and ushering in a well-marked bird wave. It is about this time that the vanguard of the robin migration scatters over the country. The grackles or crow blackbirds, which have been more or less in evidence since their first appearance in February, begin renovating the old nests or laying the foundations of new ones in the tops of tall pines. The shrill call of the flicker sounds through the woods, and before the end of the month one is sure to hear the plaintive song of the field sparrow. This is about the time that the spicebush shows its yellow blossoms through the grays and browns of the spring underwoods, and the skunk cabbage unfolds its fresh, green leafage in rank abundance along the boggy course of woodland rills. A week earlier the streaked yellow and purple of its fleshy spathes shows here and there in the oozy ground by the side of the folded leaf spikes. It is just at this time, too, that one must go to the woods for the first spring wild flowers--bloodroot, hepatica, anemones, and the yellow dog-tooth violet--if one would get the real freshness of spring into his soul. The crows, that all through the winter filed away each evening in straggling lines of flight toward the distant roost, have broken ranks, and go rambling in small groups through the woods and over the fields of green winter wheat. Like the grackles, they have thoughts of courtship and the more earnest business of family cares. The liquid notes of meadow larks sound clear and sweet in the greening fields and pastures, and small flocks of vociferous killdeers scatter in wheeling flight over the newly plowed lands. In tangle covers the rustle of dead leaves here and there tells of the whereabouts of a flock of fox sparrows halting in their northward pilgrimage. The pewee is back, inspecting her last year's house under the span of some old bridge, and the melancholy voice of the dove is borne on the air from the fence rows and cedars along the farther side of fields. After the 1st of April the tide of migration sets in with force, and the earlier waves bring several species of summer birds--those that come to build and breed in our woods--that rarely if ever make their appearance before this time. It is an interesting fact that none of the migrants that make their first appearance in April are ever found in the Delaware Valley during the winter, though several, if not all, of the species that come on the March waves are occasionally met with in the winter months. It appears, further, that the winter quarters of certain birds which are summer residents with us and some that are transient, passing on to more northern breeding grounds, lie not so very far to the south. If the last of March has been marked by warm weather lapping over into the first days of April, then one may expect soon to hear the familiar notes of the chipping sparrow from the swelling branches of garden shrubbery and the trees about the lawn, and a brown thrasher is sure to be heard volubly proclaiming his arrival from some near-by tree top. Among the budding sprigs of thickets the elusive chewink breaks into occasional fragments of song, and from the red-blossomed maples and the jungle of pussy willows and alders that fringe the meadow brook the metallic creaking notes of the red-winged blackbirds sound not unpleasingly. This jargon of the red-wing has a true vernal ring about it, suggesting the fresh green of oozy bogs and the loosening up of sap. From the middle to the last of April there are several big waves of migration that bring many of the summer residents as well as some transient species, forerunning the greater waves that are to follow in May. On certain warm April days the barn and the bank swallows appear, and the chimney swifts are seen scurrying to and fro above the trees and house tops. These are genuine signs of the coming summer, for swallows and swifts feed only on the minute gnats and other ephemera that develop under conditions of warm temperature. Whoever knows of a martin box that year after year is visited by its colony has an unfailing source of delight at this time in watching the lovely birds. The martins are very prompt in their arrival, rarely coming before the 1st of April nor later than the 10th. We are aware for the first time that the house wren has come back by the voluble song that greets us some morning from the branches just beyond our window--a song that only the lover of his own rooftree can fully appreciate, for the wren's chant, more than any other bird song, seems to voice the home instinct in a man. By the last week of April the woods are fast closing up their vistas in a rich profusion of unfolding leafage. The umbrellalike leaves of the May apple are scattered everywhere through the woods and fields, forming conspicuous patches of green. During this last week of the month a few straggling thrushes make their appearance--the hermit thrush with its russet tail, the veery, and the wood thrush. The first two are transients, flitting through the underwoods or rustling among fallen leaves in search of their insect food. To hear the incomparable matins and vespers of the hermit one must follow to the bird's breeding range on the wooded slopes of the Appalachians or farther into the deep recesses of the Canadian forests. The wood thrush breeds with us, and the melody of its notes adds a peculiar charm to our groves and woodlands that would leave an unfilled blank in the choir if the bird were a transient like the hermit or the veery. From the 1st to the 10th of May a succession of bird waves comes from the south of such vast proportions as to the number of individuals and variety of species that all the previous migratory waves seem insignificant in comparison. It is the flood tide of the migration, bringing with it the host of warblers, vireos, orioles, tanagers, and thrushes that suddenly make our woods almost tropical in the variety of richly colored species and strange bird notes. It would take a volume to describe the wood warblers, sylvan nymphs of such bizarre color patterns and dainty forms that one is fain to imagine himself in the heart of some wondrous forest of a far-away land. Their curious dry notes, each different in its kind and expression, yet all of the same insectlike quality; their quick, active motions, now twisting head downward around the branches, prying into every nook and cranny in their eager search for food, or fluttering about the clusters of leaves, add to the strange effect. Their names, too, are richly stimulative to the color sense--the black-throated green, the black-throated blue, the chestnut-sided, the bay-breasted, the black and yellow, the cerulean, the Blackburnian, the blue-winged yellow, the golden-winged, the blue-yellow-backed or parula warbler, and the Maryland yellow-throat are each suggestive of a wealth of coloring. Others have names that carry us to southern realms, like the myrtle and the palm warblers; and others again tell of curious habits, as the worm-eating warbler, the hooded fly-catching warbler, and the black and white creeping warbler that scrambles about the tree trunks like a true creeper. There is nothing in all the year quite like the May woods. Then, if never again, you can step from your dooryard into an enchanted forest. The light yellowish effects of new green in the feathery masses of the oak catkins and the fresh, unfolding leafage of the forest trees are a rich feast to the eyes. Against this wealth of green the dogwood spreads its snow-white masses of bloom. In sunlit spaces of greenness the scarlet flash of a tanager, the rich blue coloring of the indigo bird, newly arrived from its winter quarters in South America, and the glimpse of a rose-breasted grosbeak among the high tree tops are strangely suggestive of a tropical forest. The ear, too, is charmed with a multitude of curious notes. The weird cries of the great-crested flycatcher among the topmost branches, and the loud chant of the ovenbird with its rising cadence coming from farther depths of the wood are two of the most characteristic bird voices of the May woodlands. If one would have the famous song of the mocking bird in this sylvan carnival he has only to loiter in the nearest grove to hear the wonderful performance of the catbird. The catbird is the real harbinger of summer. He is familiar throughout the countryside, liked or disliked according to the dispositions of folks, but when he appears amid the May-day throng every one knows that summer has come. As a countryman once said to me: "You can't place any dependence on the robin--it may snow the very day he comes; but a catbird never makes a mistake--it's summer with him for sure." The passing on of the great warbler waves to the north and the ending of the migration likewise mean the passing of the spring. It is summer any time after the 15th of May, or, to be more accurate, after the last of the migratory warblers, thrushes, and tanagers have passed beyond our woods. To a New-Englander summer will come a little later, nearer the true almanac date of June 1st. To a dweller in Virginia the last of April is the passing of spring and the advent of summer. Some ten or more years ago several enthusiastic ornithologists living in the neighborhood of Philadelphia began keeping records of the times of arrival of the different species of birds, and at the same time noted the conditions of temperature in relation to the abundance of individuals. After several years of these observations they were able to see clearly that these bird waves were directly related to the waves of rising temperature marking the advent of warm spells of weather. One of the most significant facts deduced from these observations was the remarkable regularity in the first appearance of certain species. For example, the Baltimore oriole in eight years of observation never arrived before the 1st of May, and only twice later than the 4th--viz., once on the fifth and once on the 7th. The list on the opposite page shows the date of first arrivals extending over a period of eight years, from 1885 to 1892.[10] -------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+ | 1885. | 1886. | 1887. | 1888. | -------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------| Flicker | April 10 | Mar. 24 | Mar. 26 | Mar. 30 | Chimney swift | April 22 | April 23 | April 22 | April 20 | Hummingbird | April 29 | May 12 | May 12 | May 14 | Kingbird | May 6 | May 11 | May 7 | May 6 | Crested flycatcher | May 2 | May 12 | May 3 | May 1 | Pewee | April 3 | Mar. 20 | Mar. 21 | Mar. 22 | Wood pewee | May 6 | May 15 | April 30 | May 13 | Red-winged | | | | | blackbird | Mar. 4 | Feb. 19 | Feb. 19 | Feb. 21 | Meadow lark | ....... | Feb. 10 | Mar. 19 | Mar. 21 | Baltimore oriole | May 5 | May 4 | May 2 | May 2 | Purple grackle | Mar. 16 | Mar. 7 | Feb. 19 | Feb. 21 | Chipping sparrow | April 8 | April 9 | April 8 | Mar. 31 | Field sparrow | April 11 | April 7 | April 9 | April 2 | Chewink | April 22 | April 23 | April 27 | April 18 | Indigo bird | May 16 | May 11 | May 7 | May 12 | Scarlet tanager | May 9 | May 12 | May 5 | May 8 | Barn swallow | April 22 | April 19 | April 21 | April 12 | Red-eyed vireo | May 7 | May 11 | May 4 | April 29 | Black-and-white | | | | | warbler | April 30 | May 4 | April 27 | April 21 | Yellow warbler | May 6 | May 4 | May 2 | May 5 | Myrtle warbler | May 2 | April 10 | May 2 | April 25 | Black-throated | | | | | green warbler | May 2 | May 11 | May 5 | April 26 | Ovenbird | April 30 | May 3 | April 29 | April 30 | Maryland | | | | | yellow-throat | April 29 | April 24 | April 28 | April 30 | Chat | May 2 | May 12 | May 5 | May 5 | Redstart | May 2 | May 4 | May 3 | May 1 | Catbird | May 2 | May 4 | May 3 | May 5 | Brown thrasher | April 24 | April 25 | April 28 | April 15 | House wren | May 3 | April 27 | April 24 | April 28 | Wood thrush | May 2 | May 1 | May 1 | May 1 | Veery | ....... | May 11 | April 25 | May 3 | Hermit thrush | April 13 | April 7 | April 9 | April 3 | Robin | Mar. 7 | Mar. 10 | Feb. 28 | Feb. 19 | Bluebird | Mar. 18 | ....... | Feb. 17 | Feb. 21 | -------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+ -------------------+----------+----------+----------+---------- | 1889. | 1890. | 1891. | 1892. -------------------+----------+----------+----------+---------- Flicker | Mar. 28 | Mar. 26 | Mar. 30 | April 2 Chimney swift | April 15 | April 22 | April 16 | April 27 Hummingbird | ....... | May 7 | May 11 | ....... Kingbird | May 6 | May 14 | May 1 | May 4 Crested flycatcher | May 8 | May 1 | April 30 | May 3 Pewee | Mar. 27 | Mar. 27 | Mar. 31 | April 3 Wood pewee | May 12 | May 14 | May 6 | May 17 Red-winged | | | | blackbird | Mar. 13 | Mar. 12 | Feb. 25 | Mar. 9 Meadow lark | Mar. 14 | Mar. 12 | Feb. 23 | Mar. 17 Baltimore oriole | May 7 | May 1 | May 1 | May 3 Purple grackle | Mar. 2 | Feb. 13 | Feb. 18 | Mar. 6 Chipping sparrow | Mar. 29 | April 8 | April 13 | April 4 Field sparrow | Mar. 29 | Mar. 13 | Mar. 15 | Mar. 26 Chewink | April 11 | May 1 | April 18 | April 24 Indigo bird | May 12 | May 10 | May 8 | May 10 Scarlet tanager | May 9 | May 4 | April 28 | May 3 Barn swallow | April 22 | April 19 | April 19 | April 24 Red-eyed vireo | May 5 | April 30 | May 2 | May 3 Black-and-white | | | | warbler | April 20 | April 30 | April 24 | May 1 Yellow warbler | May 11 | May 1 | May 8 | May 4 Myrtle warbler | April 20 | April 27 | April 18 | April 7 Black-throated | | | | green warbler | May 5 | May 2 | April 19 | April 30 Ovenbird | May 3 | May 3 | April 29 | April 30 Maryland | | | | yellow-throat | May 6 | April 30 | May 1 | May 3 Chat | May 11 | May 5 | May 1 | May 3 Redstart | May 4 | May 3 | April 29 | April 30 Catbird | May 5 | May 5 | May 4 | April 30 Brown thrasher | April 22 | April 30 | April 19 | April 30 House wren | April 14 | April 30 | April 19 | May 5 Wood thrush | May 3 | April 30 | April 23 | May 2 Veery | May 6 | May 2 | April 28 | May 4 Hermit thrush | April 10 | April 13 | April 12 | April 3 Robin | Mar. 7 | Feb. 26 | Feb. 24 | Mar. 9 Bluebird | Mar. 8 | Feb. 23 | Feb. 17 | Mar. 9 -------------------+----------+----------+----------+--------- Another fact of great interest which bears on the south-to-north movement of migrating birds, and which these observations very clearly brought out, was the earlier appearance of individuals of various species at points nearer the river, the first arrival of the same species at points back from the river being, in many instances, several days later. The first report of the arrival of a given species usually came from a low, marshy tract of land immediately bordering the western shore of the Delaware. The second report came from a locality several miles back of the eastern shore of the river, but situated in the low plain of the river valley and within tide-water limits. The third report came from a place some miles back from the river on the uplands, but near the head of a stream emptying into the Delaware from the west. The last two places to report arrivals were situated farther up the river and some distance back from it. All this confirms the general idea that in migrating most, if not all, of the various land birds follow river valleys and invade the upland districts, lying back from either side, by way of the smaller tributaries. The fact of greatest importance resulting from these observations was that relating to temperature. It was found that there was always a marked increase in the number of individuals of a given species following a warm wave of temperature as marked by a decided rise of the thermometer. The following graphic representation, based on the abundance from day to day of three common and easily observed species--the brown thrasher, chipping sparrow, and flicker--affords an interesting illustration of the relative movements of the two waves. It will be understood that the numbers in the extreme left-hand column refer to the relative abundance of individuals of the three species collectively. The inside column refers to temperature. The period of observation was twenty days, as shown by the line across the top of the figure.[11] [Illustration: A, migration; B, temperature.] The advent of spring is marked by the northward progression of the isotherm of 42.8° F., which is the initial temperature required to awaken the dormant reproductive and germinating activities in animals and plants. With the gradual invasion of the United States, from the south northward, by temperatures above this, there passes over the different regions the ever-old but ever-new panorama of the spring with its opening blossoms, its unfolding green, and its waves of migrating birds. The restlessness produced by the periodic development of the reproductive function under the stimulus of increased temperature causes the highly organized bird life to spread out from its winter quarters, wherever those may be, and follow the zone of new green that steadily widens northward with its increase of food supply in the form of myriads of insects. The comparative regularity in the recurrence of this phenomenon year after year is attested by the observations just noted. Each species has a certain, definite physiological relation to temperature, and its migratory movement toward the breeding ground is determined by the movement of the isotherm of this temperature. Just as warm a spell of weather may occur in early April as in the first week of May, but it does not represent the permanent summer rise; and the majority of the warblers, the catbird, the tanager, the rose-breasted grosbeak, the two species of oriole, the vireos, and the kingbird, are rarely if ever seen in abundance in the Delaware Valley before the 1st of May. The migratory movement of such species is as regular as any other periodic phenomenon in Nature. It is hard to realize the enormous multitude of birds that form a so-called "wave." During the whole period of migration there is a general northward movement of all the migratory species, but under the influence of warm spells of weather this more or less uniform movement rises into a vast wavelike sweep of birds. These bird waves, as already noted, _follow_ the rise of temperature appearing at any given locality about a day or two after the first day of the warm spell. Many species of land birds migrate at night--such, for example, as the orioles, tanagers, warblers, vireos, wrens, the majority of the finches, the woodpeckers, and the thrushes, excepting the robin. During the passing of one of the May waves the darkness overhead is alive with flying birds. One may stand for hours at a time and hear the incessant chirping and twittering of hundreds of birds calling to one another through the night as though to keep from getting separated. The great mass of individuals are probably guided by these call notes. The usually accepted notion that birds migrate from south to north in traveling to their breeding grounds is largely true of shore birds and waterfowl, but among many of the species of land birds conditions of topography tend to deflect a direct northward movement. The Atlantic coast plain, reaching up into southern New Jersey, and the Mississippi basin, each offers a broad south-to-north highway for birds leaving the Gulf shores of the United States on their northward journey in the spring. A great majority of species find in the wilderness of the Appalachian highland, from the Catskills to Georgia, breeding grounds quite as well adapted to their needs as the forests of Maine and Canada. Large numbers of birds, according to their regional relations, will constantly turn from the Atlantic coast plain up the numerous rivers, which become great highways of migration, leading to the highlands. The northward movement has thus a large westerly deflection on the Atlantic slope of the middle United States. It is also quite certain that many birds winter in favorable localities on the Atlantic coast plain much farther north than is generally supposed. This is especially true of the holly thickets among the coastwise sand dunes of southern New Jersey and the cedar swamps and pine barrens in the vicinity of Cape May. Many of the finches, the marsh wrens, red-winged blackbirds, meadow larks, thrashers, and myrtle warblers are frequently seen in these localities through the winter. I spent one first day of February some years ago among the dunes below Atlantic City, N. J. At Philadelphia that morning it was bleak winter weather, but two hours later we found ourselves in a warm expanse of sunlight on the seaward beaches. The balmy air was filled with bird notes, and the holly thickets and bay bushes fairly swarmed with myrtle warblers. It seems to be a fact that many birds thus make comparatively short migratory movements between the seacoast plain and the mountains, up and down the river valleys. The phenomenon of the migrating bird has always appealed in a wonderful manner to the human mind. The guiding geographical sense that all animals, and wild animals and birds in particular, possess is peculiarly attractive to men of civilized society, because they have largely lost this same natural instinct of direction, and now look upon it in wonderment. Birds have very sure landmarks; their senses are keen for noting features of topography. They undoubtedly know the Potomac, the Susquehanna, the Delaware, the Hudson, and the Connecticut, and never confuse one with another. They know to which side the sea lies and that the rivers flow down from a wild, wooded region where there are plenty of food and the best possible places to raise their young. All these facts get fixed in their brains. The bird's brain-cell structure is built on these lines and is only waiting to get the impressions of the first migratory experience. They keep in with one another, follow their chirpings in the night, learn to tell the Hudson from the Delaware, or where this or that stretch of woodland lies, just as they learned when first out of the nest how to tell good from bad sorts of food, or how to find their way about the home woods, and that an owl or a fox was an undesirable acquaintance. In the fall migration the young birds follow the older ones in the general movement southward, and are often belated, showing that the impulse to leave their birthplaces is forced upon them, rather from necessity than choice, and is not the well-developed instinct impressed by former experience which their elders seem to possess. The old birds who have bred and reared these young ones set the example of early departure which the birds of the year through inexperience are tardy in appreciating. The habit waits upon experience. Each year, from midwinter, when the first warmth of advancing sunlight calls to the sleeping life, on to the first fervid heat of the reproductive summer, we have the joyous pageant of the spring. This steady waxing of the new light appealed to the pagan mind of western Europe with a far deeper sense than the modern mind can appreciate. To our rude ancestors it was the goddess Eástre, bountiful in her gift of warmth and the magic of reproductive life, that each year came with the light to drive away the frost giants. And with the goddess, whom we still love to picture as a maiden tripping lightly through the budding groves in her wind-blown garments, came the birds. It was the cuckoo that brought the summer with "daisies pied and violets blue," and to-day, when its voice is heard for the first time in the year, every one knows that summer has come again to the hedgerows of England and the lands of the Rhine. So with us across the Atlantic, summer comes when the catbird first pours out its babel of sweet notes in green woodland ways and the tangled nooks of old gardens. FOOTNOTES: [10] The Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Prepared under the direction of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club. By Witmer Stone. Philadelphia, 1894. [11] Stone. The Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. GUESSING, AS INFLUENCED BY NUMBER PREFERENCES. BY F. B. DRESSLAR. About two years ago a certain progressive clothing company of Los Angeles, California, procured a very large squash--so large, indeed, as to attract much attention. This they placed uncut in a window of their place of business, and advertised that they would give one hundred dollars in gold to the one guessing the number of seeds it contained. In case two or more persons guessed the correct number, the money was to be divided equally among them. The only prerequisite for an opportunity to guess was that the one wishing to guess should walk inside and register his name, address, and his guess in the notebook kept for that purpose. The result of this offer was that 7,700 people registered guesses, and but three of these guessed 811, the number of seeds which the squash contained. It occurred to me that a study of these guesses would reveal some interesting number preferences, if any existed, for the conditions were unusually favorable for calling forth naïve and spontaneous results, there being no way of approximating the number of seeds by calculation, and very little or no definite experience upon which to rely for guidance. It seemed probable, therefore, that the guesses would cover a wide range, and by reason of this furnish evidence of whatever number preference might exist. It is undoubtedly safe to assume, too, that the guesses made were honest attempts to state as nearly as possible best judgments under conditions given; but even if some of the guesses were more or less facetiously made, the data would be equally valuable for the main purpose in hand. According to the theory of probability, had there been no preference at all for certain digits or certain combinations of digits within the limits of the guesses, one figure would occur about as often as another in units' or tens' place. It was argued, therefore, that any marked or persistent variation from such regularity in such a great number of cases would reveal what might be termed an unconscious preference for such numbers or digits for these places. The purpose of this study, then, was to determine whether or not there existed in the popular mind, under the conditions offered, any such preferences. After the very arduous and tedious task of collating and classifying all the guesses for men and women separately had been done, the following facts appeared: In the first place, marked preference is shown for certain digits both for units' and tens' places. This statement is based on a study of the 6,863 guesses falling below one thousand. Of these, 4,238 were made by men and 2,625 were made by women. By tabulations of the digits used in units' place by both men and women, the following facts have been determined: 800 used 9, while but 374 used 8; 1,070 used 7, and 443 preferred 6; 881 used 5, and only 295 preferred 4; 862 chose 3, while 331 used 2; 577 ended with 1, while 1,230 preferred 0 as the last figure. A tabulation of the figures used in tens' place shows, save in the case of 2 and 3, where 2 is used oftener than 3, the same curious preferences, but in a much less marked degree. To go into detail, 850 chose 9 for tens' place, while 559 took 8; 907 used 7, while only 637 selected 6; 748 took 5, while only 536 used 4; 601 used 3, and 634 chose 2; 728 used 1, as against 872 who used 0. Were it not that the selections here in the main correspond with the preferences shown in units' place, the significance of these figures would be much less important; but the evidence here can not wholly be ignored when taken in connection with the facts obtained in the preferences shown in the case of the figures occupying units' place. We are enabled, then, as a result of the study of these guesses, to say that under the conditions offered, aside from a preference of 0 over 1 to end the numbers selected, digits representing odd numbers are conspicuously preferred to those representing even numbers. How far this will hold under other conditions can not now be stated, but the facts here observed are of such a nature as to suggest the possibility of an habitual tendency in this direction. However, further investigations can alone determine whether or not this bias for certain numbers is potent in a general way. The curve on the next page, exhibiting the results noted above, shows at a glance the marked and persistent preference for the odd numbers. It will be noticed that of the digits preferred, 7 surpasses any of the others. Not only, then, do we tend to select an odd number for units' place when the guess ranges between one and a thousand, but of these digits 7 is much preferred. In connection with this fact one immediately recalls all he has heard about 7 as a sacred number, and its professed significance in the so-called "occult sciences." I think one is warranted in saying from an introspective point of view that there is a shadow of superstition present in all attempts at pure guessing. There appears to be some unexpressed feeling of lucky numbers or some mental easement when one unreasoned position is taken rather than any other. [Illustration: CHOICE OF DIGITS IN TENS' AND UNITS' PLACES (MEN AND WOMEN). Vertical distance shows the number of times the figure on the horizontal line immediately below was used.] It is impossible on the evidence furnished by this study to give more than hints at the probable reason for the preference here indicated. But it is worth while to glance backward to earlier conditions, when the scientific attitude toward all the facts of life and mind was far more subordinated to supernatural interpretations than it is to-day. In this way we may catch a thread which still binds us to habits formed in the indefinite past. The Greeks considered the even numbers as representative of the feminine principle, and as belonging and applying to things terrestrial. To them the odd numbers were endowed with a masculine virtue, which in time was strengthened into supernatural and celestial qualities. The same belief was prevalent among the Chinese. With them even numbers were connected with earthly things, partaking of the feminine principle of Yang. Odd numbers were looked upon as proceeding out of the divine and endued with the masculine principle. Thirty was called the number of earth, because it was made up by the addition of the even numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. On the other hand, 25, the sum of the five odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9, was called the number of heaven. It is generally true that, as lower peoples developed the need of numbers and the power to use them, certain of these numbers came to be surrounded with a superstitious importance and endued with certain qualities which led at once to numerical preferences more or less dominant in all their thinking connected with numbers. It would certainly be unjustifiable to conclude from the evidence at hand that the preferences shown in the guesses under consideration are directly traceable to some such superstition; and yet one can scarcely prevent himself from linking them vaguely together. Especially is this true when some consideration is given to a probable connecting link as shown in our modern superstitious notions. I have found through a recent study of these superstitions that where numbers are introduced, the odd are used to the almost complete exclusion of the even. For example, I have collected and tabulated a series of more than sixty different superstitions using odd numbers, and have found but four making use of the even. Besides these specific examples there are many more which in some form or another express the belief that odd numbers have some vital relation with luck both good and bad. It would be impossible to define precisely or even approximately just what sort of a mental state the word "luck" stands for, but one element in its composition is a more or less naïve belief in supernatural and occult influences which at one time work for and at another time against the believer. In its more pronounced forms, the belief in luck lifts itself into a sort of a blind dependence upon some ministering spirit which interposes between rational causes and their effects. In a way one may say that the more or less vague and shadowy notions of luck which float in the minds of people to-day are but the emaciated and famishing forms of a once all-embracing superstition, and that these shadows possess a potency over life and action oftentimes beyond our willingness to believe. There is another interesting and somewhat curious thing to be noticed in connection with these guesses. There is a persistent tendency to the duplication of digits, or, if one thinks of the numbers as at first conceived in terms of language, a tendency to alliteration. For example, the numbers 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, and 999 occur oftener by sixty-seven per cent than any other combination possible in the tens thus represented. That is to say, other things equal, one would have a right to expect 334 or 332 to occur as often as 333. But the fact is, in this particular case, 333 occurred forty-eight times, while the other two put together occurred only three times. Here, however, we have the combined influence of the preference for the odd over the even and the digital sequence. Still, if we select 444, we find that this number, made up though it is of three digits in general least selected of all, the preference for alliterative effect is strong enough to make the number occur 28 times to 14 times for both 443 and 445. If we take 777, we find that it was used more times than all the other combinations from 770 to 779 inclusive, put together. Therefore, under conditions similar to those presented for these guesses, one would be safe to expect these duplicative or alliterative numbers to occur much oftener than any other single number in the series. It would evidently be unsafe to generalize upon the basis of this study, notwithstanding the large number of guesses considered. However, it seems to me that the results here obtained at least suggest a field of inquiry which promises interesting returns. If it be true, as here suggested, that odd numbers are preferred by guessers, advantage could be taken of this preference in many ways. Furthermore, as I suspect, it may be that this probable preference points to a habit of mind which more or less influences results not depending strictly on guessing. It has been shown, for example, that the length of criminal sentences has been largely affected by preferences for 5 or multiples of 5--that is to say, where judges have power to fix the length of sentence within certain limits, there is a strong probability that they will be influenced in their judgments by the habitual use of 5 or its multiples. Here it would seem that unconscious preference overrides what one has a right to consider the most careful and impartial judgments possible, based upon actual and well-digested data.[12] Another thing is noticeable in these guesses. The consciousness of number beyond 1,000 falls off very rapidly. The difference in the values of 1,000 and 1,500 seems to have had less weight with the guessers than a difference of 50 had at any place below 1,000. And so, in a way, 1,000 seems to mark the limit of any sort of definite mental measurement. This fact is more and more emphasized as the numbers representing the guesses increase until one can see there exists absolutely no conception of the value of numbers. For example, many guessed 1,000,000, while several guessed more than 10,000,000. Guessing means, with many people, no attempt at any sort of reasonable measurement, but rather an attempt to express their guess in such a way as to afford them the greatest amount of mental relief. And this relief can not be wholly accomplished without satisfying number preferences. Therefore, guessing is likely to exhibit, in a greater or less degree, some habitual lines of preference subject to predetermination. It may be that much practical advantage has been taken of these facts in games of chance where number selections play an important part. FOOTNOTE: [12] See H. Le Poer. Influence of Number in Criminal Sentences. Harper's Weekly, May 14, 1896. CONCERNING WEASELS. BY WILLIAM E. CRAM. [Illustration: A Weasel standing on the ground] Why is it that while popular fancy has attributed all sorts of uncanny and supernatural qualities to owls and cats, and that no ghost story or tale of horrid murder has been considered quite complete without its rat peering from some dark corner, or spider with expanded legs suddenly spinning down from among the rafters, no such grewsome association has ever attached itself to the weasels, creatures whose every habit and characteristic would seem to suggest something of the sort? Now, fond as I am of cats, I should never think of denying that they are uncanny creatures, to say the least. But, suppose it was the custom of our domestic tabbies to vanish abruptly or even gradually on occasion, like the Cheshire cat after its interview with Alice, that would at least furnish some excuse for the general prejudice against them, but would really be no more than some of our commonest weasels do whenever it serves their purpose. I remember one summer afternoon I was trout-fishing along a little brook that ran between pine-covered hills. As I lay stretched on the bank at the foot of a great maple I saw a weasel run along in the brush fence some distance away. A few seconds later he was standing on the exposed root of the tree hardly a yard from my eyes. I lay motionless and examined the beautiful creature minutely, till suddenly I found myself staring at the smooth greenish-gray root of the maple with no weasel in sight. Judging from my own experience, I should say that this is the usual termination of any chance observations of either weasels or minks. Occasionally they may be seen to dart into the bushes or behind some log or projecting bank, but much more frequently they vanish with a suddenness that defies the keenest eyesight. [Illustration: A weasel lying on a branch] In all probability this vanishing is accomplished by extreme rapidity of motion, but if this is the case then the creature succeeds in doing something utterly impossible to any other warm-blooded animal of its size. Mice, squirrels, and some of the smaller birds are all of them swift enough at times, but except in the case of the humming bird none of them, I believe, succeed in accomplishing the result achieved by the weasels. The humming bird, in spite of its small size, leaves us a pretty definite impression of the direction it has taken when it darts away; but when a mink, half a yard in length and weighing several pounds, stands motionless before one with his dark coat conspicuous against almost any background, and the next instant is gone without a rustle or the tremor of a blade of grass, it leaves one with an impression of witchcraft difficult to dispel; and best appreciated when one sees it for one's self. Nor is the everyday life of the weasel quiet or commonplace; his one object in life apparently is to kill, first to appease his hunger, then to satisfy his thirst for warm blood, and after that for the mere joy of killing. [Illustration: A white weasel] The few opportunities I have had for observing these animals have never shown them occupied in any other way, nor can any hint of anything different be gained from the various writers on the subject, while accounts of their attacking and even killing human beings in a kind of blind fury are too numerous and apparently well authenticated to be entirely ignored. These attacks are said usually to be made by a number of weasels acting in concert, and the motive would appear to be revenge for some injury done to one of their number. There seems to be something peculiar about the entire family of weasels. The American sable or pine marten is said to have strange ways that have puzzled naturalists and hunters for years. In the wilderness no amount of trapping has any effect on their numbers, nor do they show any especial fear of man or his works, occasionally even coming into lumber camps at night and being especially fond of old logging roads and woods that have been swept by fire; but at the slightest hint of approaching civilization they disappear, not gradually, but at once and forever, and the woods know them no more. If there is anything in the theory of the survival of the fittest, why is it that not one marten has discovered that, like other animals of its size, it could manage to live comfortably enough in the vicinity of man? The mink and otter still follow the course of every brook and river and manage to avoid the keen eyes of the duck hunter, while for six months in the year their paths are sprinkled with steel traps set either especially for them or for the more plebeian muskrat. If a pair of sables could be persuaded to take up their quarters in some parts of New England they could travel for dozens of miles through dark evergreen woods with hollow and decaying trees in abundance, while at present there are almost no traps set in a manner that need disturb creatures of their habits. Partridges, rabbits, and squirrels, which form their principal food, are nearly if not quite as abundant as before the country was settled, so that it would certainly not require any very decided change of habits to enable them to exist, but evidently the root of the matter goes deeper than that, and, like some tribes of Indians, it is impossible for them to multiply or flourish except in the primeval forest. [Illustration: A weasel on the ground] The common weasel or ermine, which is the only kind I have seen hereabouts, would seem to have everything on its side in the struggle for existence, and when one happens to be killed by some larger inhabitant of the woods it must be due entirely to its own carelessness. Nevertheless, they do occasionally fall victims to owls and foxes, and I once shot a red-tailed hawk that was in the act of devouring one. Still, these casualties among weasels are probably few and far between. Fortunately, however, they never increase to any great extent. Occasionally in the winter the snow for miles will be covered with their tracks all made in a single night, and then for weeks not a track is to be seen; but usually they prefer to hunt alone, each having its beat a mile or more in length, over which it travels back and forth throughout the season, passing any given point at intervals of two or three days. This habit of keeping to the same route instead of wandering at random about the woods is characteristic of the family, the length of the route depending to a certain extent on the size of the animal. The mink is usually about a week in going his rounds, and may cover a dozen miles in that time, while the otter is generally gone a fortnight or three weeks. When it is possible the ermine prefers to follow the course of old tumble-down stone walls, and lays its course accordingly. In favorable districts he is able to keep to these for miles together, squeezing into the smallest crevices in pursuit of mice or chipmunks. All the weasels travel in a similar manner--that is, by a series of leaps or bounds in such a way that the hind feet strike exactly in the prints made by the fore paws, so that the tracks left in the snow are peculiar and bear a strong family resemblance. On soft snow the slender body of the ermine leaves its imprint extending from one pair of footprints to the next, and as these are from four to six feet apart, or even more, the impression left in the snow is like the track of some extremely long and slender serpent with pairs of short legs at intervals along its body. I have said that the ermine is the only true weasel I have found in this vicinity, but this is not strictly true, at least I hope not. One winter I repeatedly noticed the tracks of an exceedingly large weasel--so very large, in fact, that I was almost forced to believe them to be those of a mink. The impression of its body in the snow was quite as large as that made by a small mink, but the footprints themselves were smaller, and the creature appeared to avoid the water in a manner quite at variance with the well-known habits of its more amphibious cousin, while, unlike the common weasel, it never followed stone walls or fences. I put my entire mind to the capture of the little beast, and set dozens of traps, but it was well along in the month of March before I succeeded. It proved to be a typical specimen of the Western long-tailed weasel, though I can find no account of any other having been taken east of the Mississippi. Its entire length was about eighteen inches; the tail, which was a little over six, gave the effect at first glance of being tipped with gray instead of black, but a closer inspection showed that the black hairs were confined to the very extremity and were partly concealed by the overlying white ones; the rest of the fur was white, with a slight reddish tinge, and much longer and coarser than that of an ermine. Since then I have occasionally seen similar tracks, but have not succeeded in capturing a second specimen. In all probability the least weasel is also to be found here if one has the patience to search carefully enough; none, however, have come under my observation as yet. All the small weasels that I have seen have proved on close inspection to be young ermines with thickly furred black-tipped tails; in the least weasel the tail is thinly covered with short hair and without any black whatever. Late in the autumn or early in the winter the ermine changes from reddish-brown to white, sometimes slightly washed with greenish-yellow or cream color, and again as brilliantly white as anything in Nature or art; the end of the tail, however, remains intensely black, and at first thought might be supposed to make the animal conspicuous on the white background of snow, but in reality has just the opposite effect. Place an ermine on new-fallen snow in such a way that it casts no shadow, and you will find that the black point holds your eye in spite of yourself, and that at a little distance it is quite impossible to follow the outline of the weasel itself. Cover the tail with snow, and you can begin to make out the position of the rest of the animal, but as long as the tip of the tail is in sight you see that and that only. The ptarmigan and northern hare also retain some spot or point of dark color when they take on their winter dress, and these dark points undoubtedly serve the same purpose as in the case of the ermine. [Illustration: A weasel catching a bird] An old hunter, one of the closest observers of Nature I have ever known, once told me that female minks hibernated in winter in the same manner as bears, though it was his belief that, unlike the bears, they never brought forth their young at that season. At first I refused to take the slightest stock in what he said; the whole thing appeared so absurd and so utterly at variance with the teachings of those naturalists who have made the closest possible study of the habits of minks. Since then, however, I have kept my eyes open for any hint that might have the slightest bearing on the subject, and to my surprise have found many things that would seem to point to the correctness of the old hunter's theory. To begin with, he said that late in the winter he had repeatedly known female minks to make their appearance from beneath snow that had lain undisturbed for days or even weeks, the tracks apparently beginning where he first observed them, the difference in size between the two sexes being sufficient to make it easy to distinguish between their tracks at a glance; and, moreover, since he first began trapping he had noticed that while the sexes were about equally abundant in the autumn, the females always became very scarce at the approach of winter and remained so until spring, when they suddenly increased in numbers and became much the more abundant of the two. [Illustration: A weasel on a log] This is also the experience of trappers in general, and may be verified by any one who cares to take the trouble to look into the matter. Evidently no one has ever discovered a mink in a state of hibernation; at any rate, no such case appears ever to have been reported; but this does not necessarily prove that it is not a regular habit among them. The cry of the mink is seldom heard, even in places where they are fairly abundant, as they have evidently learned that the greatest safety lies in silence. It is a peculiarly shrill, rattling, whistlelike scream, that can be heard at a considerable distance. CARE OF THE THROAT AND EAR. BY W. SCHEPPEGRELL, A. M., M. D., PRESIDENT WESTERN OPTHALMOLOGIC AND OTO-LARYNGOLOGIC ASSOCIATION, NEW ORLEANS, LA. Hygiene is that branch of medical science which relates to the preservation and improvement of the health. As the prevention of disease is more important than its cure--in fact, superior to all methods for its cure--this is a subject which demands our most earnest attention. Hygiene is not limited to the preservation and improvement of the health of the individual, but includes that of whole communities. As, however, the health of a community depends upon the state of the health of the various families composing it, and this again of its members, the proper understanding of the hygienic laws by each individual is of the utmost importance. For some reason, however, the subject of hygiene or the prevention of disease does not create the enthusiasm caused by methods advocated for its cure. A Koch, who publishes to the world a supposed means of curing tuberculosis, or a Behring, who introduces the serum therapy of diphtheria, arouses an interest which is limited only by the four corners of the world. The modest worker in sanitation, however, who explains the means of the development of these diseases, and the conditions and laws by means of which they may be prevented, is looked upon without interest and frequently with disfavor. But in spite of these conditions, the laws of hygiene are gradually becoming more farspread, and their influence is felt more with each advancing year. The nose, throat, and ear are so intimately connected with the other parts of the body that their health depends to a large extent upon the condition of the system in general. The laws of hygiene and their application which refer to the body in general are also applicable to these parts, and whatever condition benefits the former will have a useful influence on the upper respiratory passages, and, inversely, any injurious effect will injure the health of these organs. The physiology of this region is of much importance. Formerly the nose was considered principally in its relation to the organ of smell. This is a most important function, as it is a constant sentinel over the air we breathe and the food we eat. It is a curious circumstance that many of the functions that are referred to the organ of taste really belong to that of smell. In eating ice cream, for instance, the sense of taste simply informs us that it is sweet or otherwise, but the flavor is perceived only by the sense of smell. A proof of this is that where this function is destroyed, all ability in this direction disappears, and the patient thus affected will frequently complain that his sense of taste is defective, not realizing that it is the sense of smell which performs this act. The nose, however, has a much more important function to perform--viz., in respiration. Strange to say, however, this has only recently been realized, and it is even yet not well understood. You have all observed that, when you had a severe "cold" which prevented nasal breathing, the next morning the mouth and throat were dry and parched and frequently inflamed, the voice sometimes hoarse, and there was a general feeling of depression. While the progress of the inflammatory process may be a factor in this, still the mechanical obstruction of the nose from any cause whatsoever will have a similar effect. In patients in whom, for various reasons, an artificial opening has been made in the trachea, the air of the room has to be heated to an almost intolerable point and saturated with moisture, or severe bronchial inflammation will soon develop in the patient, simply because the nose has not taken an active part in the act of respiration. These effects, therefore, clearly demonstrate that the nasal passages have an important function to perform in the breathing process. Summarized in a few words, it is simply to warm, moisten, and clean the air which we inhale. The healthy nostrils are anatomically and physiologically so formed that when the current of air passes through them it will have been freed of its mechanical impurities, warmed to within a few degrees of the temperature of the body, and moistened to saturation. This has been experimentally demonstrated. The opening of the passage of the ear into the throat has several objects, the most important being ventilation and the adjustment of the atmospheric equilibrium. This passage leads outward until it enters the cavity of the middle ear, which is closed by the drum on the outside, thus separating it from the external canal of the ear. We know that atmospheric pressure varies at different times and in different altitudes. It is much less, for instance, at the top of a mountain than at the seaside. The opening into the throat allows the air to enter, and adjusts the atmospheric pressure within the ear to these various external conditions. Those of you who have ascended Lookout Mountain by means of the incline cable car may have noticed the adjustment taking place by a peculiar click when different altitudes were reached. So intimately are the nose, throat, and ear connected that it is unusual to find one affected to any considerable extent without the others being involved. While the rules of hygiene in general are applicable to the nose, throat, and ear, there are certain special conditions which deserve consideration. One of the most common causes of injurious effects to the nose, throat, and ear is the so-called "cold." The cold in this connection is, of course, understood to be simply the cause, the condition itself being a peculiar inflammation of the parts concerned. As cold is so frequently a cause of diseases of these parts, it would be well to consider under what circumstances it develops and the best mode of prevention. I have often noticed that persons who suffer most frequently and severely from colds usually insist that they exercise the greatest care to avoid exposure. They have dressed in the warmest clothing, wrapped the neck in the heaviest mufflers, remained in the closest rooms, and avoided every draught, and yet they continually "take cold." The street urchin, on the other hand, with only two or three garments and without shoes, and who lives out of doors, suffers less frequently from this affection. "Colds" have truly been called a product of modern civilization. The trouble was rare among the aborigines and is more common among the cultured than among the laboring classes. If we make a plant an exotic, we must keep it in the conservatory, and even here it is not free from danger. On the other hand, if we wish to harden it and make it proof against atmospheric and climatic changes, we must prepare it by judicious exposure for these conditions. The warm clothing which is thought to be a protection against cold is frequently the most fertile cause. It relaxes the body, moistens the skin, and the perspiration which is induced especially prepares the unresisting body for its attacks. This applies especially to warm covering around the neck, to which the air has periodic access. Except in unusually severe weather, the throat requires no more covering or protection than the face. The method of having only two systems of underclothing, the heavy to be worn until it is quite warm, and _vice versa_, is also a source of danger. There should be three changes: one of the lightest texture for the warm weather of summer, a medium for spring and fall, and the pure wool for winter, which in this climate need not be very heavy. Waterproof shoes, rubbers, furs, etc., are not recommended for customary use, and should be worn only when absolutely indicated. The best preventive of recurrent colds is the judicious use of the sponge or cold shower bath. The ordinary bath should usually be of a temperature not disagreeable to the body, but after the question of cleanliness has been attended to, an application, either by means of a sponge or shower, of ordinary cold water should be made. This should be of short duration, and friction with a coarse towel follow at once. When properly conducted, a reaction sets in so that there is no danger from this, and the toning effect of the method is of the utmost value in the prevention of colds. This applies, of course, only to persons in ordinarily good health. Even in these cases there are rare occasions in which this method is not advisable, and it may on general principles be stated that it should not be used by persons who do not react promptly. As stated, however, the application of cold water should be only momentary. The daily application of cold water to the throat and chest is also a useful practice for strengthening these parts. In addition to these means there are certain injurious conditions that it would be well to avoid. One almost universally present in large cities is that of dust. The constant inhalation of the small particles of sand and of organic impurities of which dust is composed has an irritating effect on the delicate lining of the nose and throat, which may develop a chronic inflammation, resulting in injury to both the throat and ear. This evil, however, can be prevented by the artificial watering of our streets. Excessive tobacco smoking produces injurious effects in the nose and throat. Of all forms of smoking, the cigarette is the most injurious, and allowing the smoke to pass through the nostrils the most dangerous. Occasionally ladies inhale the smoke of a closed room where the male members of the household are smoking, and this is injurious to a delicate throat. Loud and excessive talking is sometimes a factor in throat diseases. The former is more apt to be exercised in transit in our steam or electric cars, and members of the theatrical profession realize this so well that they rarely use their voice while traveling. In excessive talking, in addition to the mechanical wear and tear of the throat, the respiration is usually spasmodic, a combination that is likely to lead to evil results. At puberty, when the voices of boys and girls are changing, the former sometimes almost an octave and the latter usually a note or two, special care should be taken of the voice, and singing or vocal exercises should be discontinued until the change has been finally established. The effect of singing on the throat is of much interest, but it is one of such an extensive character that it can be only casually referred to here. The exercise required in singing improves the healthy throat in the same manner that exercise benefits the body in general. The diseased throat, however, may be injured by this practice, as no form of vocal culture can remedy a mechanical interference in its action. The method of singing is also of the utmost importance; an erroneous one may not only injure a promising voice, but may also have a bad effect on a normal throat. The subject of register requires careful consideration. The placing of the voice in the wrong register is fruitful of evil; the ambition of the singer to reach a few notes higher or lower than her range may also work severe injury to the throat. The throat may be improved or strengthened by any of the forms of exercise, especially the out-of-door, which have been advised for the health in general. In addition to this, breathing exercises are of special value. These consist of taking deep inhalations through the nose, holding the breath for a few seconds and then gently expiring it, the body in the meanwhile being free from all restraint from tight clothing. The practice of this exercise for five minutes mornings and evenings will have a remarkable effect in developing the chest and throat. In order to anticipate serious complications, children should be taught to allow their mothers to examine their throats freely and without resistance. I feel especially the importance of this subject, as I have frequently seen children almost sacrificed on account of the nervous dread of having their throats examined, or by their inability to control themselves. The method is exceedingly simple: the child is placed facing a bright window, and the handle of a spoon placed on the tongue and so depressed that the posterior part of the throat can be distinctly seen. At first this may be difficult, but the child soon becomes accustomed to the manipulation and the throat may then be examined without difficulty. Another advantage of this procedure is that the mother becomes familiar with the normal appearance of the throat, and can easily note any change due to disease. In view of the important function of the nose in warming, cleaning, and moistening the inspired air, the greatest care should be taken to teach children to breathe through the nostrils. When only a portion of the air enters through the mouth, the irritation is not as marked as when all the air is inhaled in this manner, but it nevertheless develops a condition of chronic irritation which is easily recognized by one familiar with its appearance, and which may lead to important complications. In many cases, mouth breathing is not due to habit, but to some obstruction in the nostrils or throat. These cases form a proper subject for the consideration of the physician. After the removal of any existing obstruction, children will sometimes, from force of habit, continue to breathe through the mouth, but this can usually be overcome by attention and firmness on the part of the parents. The prevention of grave throat diseases, such as diphtheria, necessarily forms a subject of much interest to the public in general and to mothers in particular. The causation of this disease has been much cleared up in later years, and we now know that the important factor is a bacillus--a small organism of the vegetable kingdom--which is the cause of this disease and a necessary material for its propagation. Bacteriologic investigations have shown that the so-called "membranous croup" is in by far the largest number of cases identical with diphtheria, and the same precautions which apply to the latter should therefore also be carried out in this disease. As diphtheria is strictly an infectious disease, and one which must be directly or indirectly contracted from a similar case, there is no sanitary reason why this dreaded malady in the course of time should not be entirely eliminated from the earth. In view of the fact that diphtheria is so frequently present in our larger cities, this may appear at present a Utopian idea. It is not so many years ago, however, when smallpox was almost universal, and yet we now but rarely have it in our midst. Not only is this the case, but the health authorities are severely criticised when a number of these cases exist, as indicating that there has been a lack of watchfulness in carrying out certain well-known means of prevention. While we have at the present time no means of inoculation that will permanently protect against infection from diphtheria, still it is not of such an infectious character as smallpox, as the cases are usually limited to children, and its spread may therefore be more easily prevented. Not only should children who have had diphtheria be prevented from returning to school until infection is no longer possible, but other children of the same household should also be kept at home. A few years ago a certain school in this city was rarely without a case of diphtheria among its pupils for many months. I am convinced that had the principal of the school or the parents insisted upon the other children of the infected household remaining at home, the spread in this direction would have been arrested and much suffering avoided. When a patient has recovered from diphtheria, thorough disinfection is a most important measure. Unfortunately, however, many persons consider it a hardship if articles which can not be disinfected are destroyed, and many will even use every endeavor to prevent the representatives of the Board of Health from carrying out their regulations. In this way the germ of the disease remains on the premises, and under suitable conditions again finds another victim in the household. To illustrate this, I recall an instance some years ago in which I was called in consultation to see a most malignant case of diphtheria. The little patient fortunately recovered, and the premises were thoroughly disinfected, the parents being anxious to avoid any repetition of the dreaded malady. Five months later, however, a younger child became ill, and was found to have diphtheria. In view of the vigorous efforts which had been made to disinfect the house thoroughly, and of the fact that the child could not have contracted it elsewhere, not having left its home for several weeks, the cause at first appeared a mystery. Careful inquiry, however, soon elicited a fact which clearly explained the case. The first patient had used a mouth-organ just before its illness, and when this was abandoned, the toy was carelessly thrown on the top of a bookcase, the nature of the child's illness at the time not being known. The second child, just before its illness, had accidentally found this toy and used it frequently. This experience explains the necessity of disinfection in all its details, and also illustrates the tenacious character of the germ which produces this disease. Our knowledge of the specific cause of scarlet fever is not as complete as that of diphtheria, but we have much useful information which is of importance from a hygienic standpoint. As in diphtheria, the specific poison is probably produced in the throat of the patient, and may therefore be spread by the dried secretion from the mouth and throat. The most common means of contagion, however, is the skin, which peels off in the later stage of the disease, infection being produced by the inhalation into the nostrils of some of the diseased particles. A predisposing factor which applies alike to diphtheria and all other throat affections is the abnormal condition of the nose and throat. When these important parts are in an unhealthy condition, where mouth breathing exists and other conditions inimical to normal health, the patient is more predisposed to all forms of maladies of this region, and the attack when developed is more apt to be of a serious character. The more ordinary forms of sore throat, such as tonsilitis, are frequently due to defects in the sanitary conditions and surroundings of the home. While modern sanitary plumbing, when properly constructed, adds much to the convenience of the household, it is a certain menace to all its members if, through improper construction or defective ventilation, decomposing matter collects in the waste pipes and vitiates the atmosphere of the rooms. Many recurrent cases of tonsilitis are due to this cause. Even the ordinary stationary washstands may be a source of danger, especially in the bedroom, unless thoroughly ventilated and care exercised that the traps are not filled with decomposing matter. A physician of large experience in this city is so imbued with the danger of this form of plumbing that he condemns it _in toto_. When well constructed and well ventilated, however, they can not be the source of danger in the household. Tuberculosis, which is responsible for so enormous a mortality, frequently also affects the throat as well as the lungs. Although it usually originates within the chest, it sometimes finds its primary origin in the throat, and in a large percentage of cases the throat affection forms a complication of tuberculosis of the lungs. In spite of the numerous remedies which have been advocated for the cure of this disease, it must be admitted that our chief reliance is in proper nourishment and climatic effects, and that hygiene is the sheet-anchor which will eventually rescue us from this terrible foe of the human race. Recent investigations tend to prove more and more that tuberculosis is inherited in but rare cases; that inheritance is simply a predisposing factor, and that the real cause is infection. As an illustration of this, all have seen instances in which there had been apparently no cases in a family for ten or fifteen years, when from some cause one case develops, and this is soon followed by other cases in the same family. Whatever rôle heredity may play in these cases, this simply shows that the first case produced the infectious material which found a suitable soil in the other members of the family and developed a similar disease. The inheritance theory has been the source of much injury by causing members of the afflicted family to submit to the apparently inevitable instead of instituting measures for its prevention. The infectious product in tuberculosis is not the breath, as is so frequently believed by the laity, but simply the expectoration which comes from the diseased lungs or throat. When this is allowed to come in contact with clothing or other material in the room, it becomes dry and loads the atmosphere with a dust which contains the infectious bacillus, which may cause a similar disease in a person predisposed by heredity or sickness to this affection. The germ of tuberculosis is the seed, and the predisposed person the soil, and it requires a combination of both to develop the disease. To illustrate the necessity of suitable conditions for the development of plants--for it is now almost universally admitted that the germ of tuberculosis is a micro-organism which belongs to the vegetable kingdom--I remember some years ago, while in North Europe, seeing in a hothouse a plant which is here commonly known as the "four o'clock." The gardener in charge of the conservatory considered it a remarkable plant, but difficult to propagate, and stated that it was absolutely impossible to raise it out of doors. In this part of the world, however, we know that this plant grows so easily that once established in a garden it is difficult to keep it within limits. In both of the cases we have the same seed, the difference being only in the soil and the conditions favorable for its development. The absence of either the seed or the soil will absolutely prevent tuberculosis, and if the laws of hygiene are properly carried out, both in destroying the seed and in preventing the formation of a suitable soil, favorable effects will soon be shown. Hygiene in regard to patients demands simply that the infectious character of the expectoration be destroyed. The vessels for this purpose should contain some disinfecting solution, should be cleaned regularly, and handkerchiefs, towels, or other material with which the expectoration has come in contact should be sterilized by being placed for at least half an hour in boiling water. This is necessary not only for those in the same room with the patient, but also for the patient, as it is quite possible that a former expectoration may produce reinfection of the patient himself. Another method of contracting tuberculosis is by means of animals, such as cows, used for food and milking, which are known to be subject to this disease. It has been shown in some localities that one cow out of every twenty-five was affected with tubercular disease. This suggests the importance of having competent veterinarians to examine not only the meat which is sold, but also the cows used for milking purposes. Where there is the slightest doubt as to the nature of the meat or milk, the former should be thoroughly cooked and the latter sterilized before using. In this connection it would be well to refer to the subject of spitting in street cars and in public places. While this nuisance is the subject of danger to every one in the street cars, especially in winter, when the windows are closed and a large amount of impurities is inhaled, it is more particularly so to ladies, whose skirts, in spite of every care, are soiled by the filthy expectoration, thus making them subject not only to the inhalation in the car, but also to carrying the infectious material to their homes. The danger of this condition is not merely speculative. It has been bacteriologically demonstrated that the organisms of various contagious diseases thus find a lodging place in our cars and public places, and experiments on animals, in which the inoculation has developed diseases, have shown that these organisms retain their vitality in these places and may propagate disease under favorable conditions. A factor in the spread of diseases of the throat and mouth that should not be overlooked is kissing. Unfortunately, this matter has usually been treated with much levity, and where a sanitarian is bold enough to condemn the habit he is frequently made the subject of all forms of ridicule in the public press. The tender lining of the lips, mouth, and throat, and its large blood supply, make it peculiarly susceptible to contagion, and I have no doubt that the habit of kissing is responsible for many cases of infection. Last year I noticed a lady coming from a house from which a diphtheria flag was flying, who walked to the corner to take the street car, when a nurse with a small child approached. The lady without hesitation stooped down and kissed the little child. As it is well known that a healthy person may transmit a disease without incurring the disease himself, this lady voluntarily risked the danger of inflicting this disease upon the innocent child. It is not an uncommon thing for nurses to kiss the children under their charge, and here in New Orleans even the colored nurses sometimes practice this habit, occasionally with the permission of the parents. In fact, a fashionable lady on one occasion told me, when I remonstrated with her about this, that she feared to hurt the feelings of the old nurse, who had been a valuable servant in the family for many years. How often this habit is productive of evil results is of course only speculation. I recall, however, an instance in which two small children of one family developed a specific disease which originated in the mouth and affected the whole system. Examination proved this to have been caused by a nurse, a white woman, who had been in the habit of kissing the children. If women will voluntarily incur risks by using kissing as a form of salutation in all stages of acquaintanceship, I would at least request that the innocent children be spared the possible consequences. The subject of the hygiene of the ear is so intimately connected with conditions influencing the nose and throat, which have already been explained, that but few words are needed to cover this part of my subject. In general, the best care of the ear is to leave it alone. Ear scoops are injurious; the ear should be cleaned simply on the outside, and nothing, as a rule, should be inserted into the external canal. I have seen many cases of abscess and the most severe inflammation due to endeavors to clean the ear with the omnipresent hairpin and other objects used for this purpose. The use of cotton in the ear in general is to be condemned. It produces an artificial condition in the outer canal of the ear which reduces its physical resistance and makes it more liable to injury from exposure. The ear is sometimes injured by the entrance of cold water. This happens occasionally during ordinary bathing, but more frequently in outdoor bathing and in swimming. In surf bathing, where the water is thrown up with considerable force, it is much more liable to enter the external orifice of the ear, and severe inflammation may originate from this cause. Salt water has been claimed to be more injurious than fresh, but my personal experience leads me to believe that it is more a question of temperature than of the quality of the water. Some years ago a large reservoir was built by an educational institute near this city, the water, which was quite cold even in summer, being supplied by an artesian well. The tank was used for bathing purposes, but earache soon became so frequent among the boys that the use of the reservoir for this purpose had to be entirely abandoned. In ordinary bathing, the entrance of water into the ear can easily be avoided. In swimming or surf bathing it is advisable to use a pledget of lamb's wool to close the opening of the ears. Ordinary cotton soon becomes saturated and is of no use in this connection, but the wool, which is slightly oily, forms an excellent protection in these cases. The "running ear" is a diseased condition which should not be tampered with by the inexperienced, but which should not be neglected. The old idea that the child will outgrow it, or that it is a secretion of the head which if interfered with would prove dangerous, has been fruitful of many cases of deafness and even more serious complications. Another condition to which I would call your attention is the incipient development of deafness in children. Where the capacity of hearing is quickly lowered from the normal to fifty per cent, it is so striking that the patient is much distressed and even confused. But when this change takes place insidiously from day to day, it is frequently not observed by either the patient or those around him until it has greatly advanced. Children thus affected hear only with difficulty and by straining certain small muscles of the ear, which soon become fatigued, and the child becomes listless and inattentive. I have seen numerous cases in which children have been severely punished for inattention, when this was due to defective hearing. Watchfulness and early attention in these cases will frequently prevent the more serious forms of deafness. THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE WEST INDIES. BY F. L. OSWALD. I.--THE FAUNA OF THE ANTILLES: MAMMALS. The study of the geographical distribution of plants and animals has revealed facts almost as enigmatical as the origin of life itself. Water barriers, as broad as that of the Atlantic, have not prevented the spontaneous spread of some species, while others limit their habitat to narrowly circumscribed though not geographically isolated regions. Tapirs are found both in the Amazon Valley and on the Malay Peninsula; the brook trout of southern New Zealand are identical with those of the Austrian Alps. Oaks and _Ericacea_ (heather plants) cover northern Europe from the mouth of the Seine to the sources of the Ural; then suddenly cease, and are not found anywhere in the vast Siberian territories, with a north-to-south range rivaling that of all British North America. But still more remarkable is the zoölogical contrast of such close-neighborhood countries as Africa and Madagascar, or Central America and the West Indian archipelago. The Madagascar virgin woods harbor no lions, leopards, hyenas, or baboons, but boast not less than thirty-five species of mammals unknown to the African continent, and twenty-six found nowhere else in the world. Of a dozen different kinds of deer, abundant in North America as well as in Asia and Europe, not a single species has found its way to the West Indies. The fine mountain meadows of Hayti have originated no antelopes, no wild sheep or wild goats. In the Cuban sierras, towering to a height of 8,300 feet, there are no hill foxes. There are caverns--subterranean labyrinths with countless ramifications, some of them--but no cave bears or badgers, no marmots or weasels even, nor one of the numerous weasel-like creatures clambering about the rock clefts of Mexico. The magnificent coast forests of the Antilles produce wild-growing nuts enough to freight a thousand schooners every year, but--almost incredible to say--the explorers of sixteen generations have failed to discover a single species of squirrels. The Old-World tribes of our tree-climbing relatives are so totally different from those of the American tropics that Humboldt's traveling companion, Bonplant, renounced the theory of a unitary center of creation (or evolution), and maintained that South America must have made a separate though unsuccessful attempt to rise from lemurs to manlike apes and men. Of such as they are, Brazil alone has forty-eight species of monkeys, and Venezuela at least thirty. How shall we account for the fact that not one of the large West Indian islands betrays a vestige of an effort in the same direction? More monkey-inviting forests than those of southern Hayti can not be found in the tropics, but not even a marmoset or squirrel-monkey accepted the invitation. In an infinite series of centuries not one pair of quadrumana availed itself of the chance to cross a sea gap, though at several points the mainland approaches western Cuba within less than two hundred miles--about half the distance that separates southern Asia from Borneo, where fourhanders of all sizes and colors compete for the products of the wilderness, and, according to Sir Philip Maitland, the "native women avoid the coast jungles for fear of meeting Mr. Darwin's grandfather." The first Spanish explorers of the Antilles were, in fact, so amazed at the apparently complete absence of quadrupeds that their only explanation was a conjecture that the beasts of the forest must have been exterminated by order of some native potentate, perhaps the great Kubla Khan, whose possessions they supposed to extend _eastward_ from Lake Aral to the Atlantic. The chronicle of Diego Columbus says positively that San Domingo and San Juan Bautista (Porto Rico) were void of mammals, but afterward modifies that statement by mentioning a species of rodent, the _hutia_, or bush rat, that annoyed the colonists of Fort Isabel, and caused them to make an appropriation for importing a cargo of cats. Bush rats and moles were, up to the end of the sixteenth century, the only known indigenous quadrupeds of the entire West Indian archipelago, for the "Carib dogs," which Valverde saw in Jamaica, were believed to have been brought from the mainland by a horde of man-hunting savages. But natural history has kept step with the advance of other sciences, and the list of undoubtedly aboriginal mammals on the four main islands of the Antilles is now known to comprise more than twenty species. That at least fifteen of them escaped the attention of the Spanish creoles is as strange as the fact that the Castilian cattle barons of Upper California did not suspect the existence of precious metals, though nearly the whole bonanza region of the San Joaquin Valley had been settled before the beginning of the seventeenth century. But the conquerors of the Philippines even overlooked a variety of elephants that roams the coast jungles of Mindanao. Eight species of those West Indian _incognito_ mammals, it is true, are creatures of a kind which the Spanish zoölogists of Valverde's time would probably have classed with birds--bats, namely, including the curious _Vespertilio molossus_, or mastiff bat, and several varieties of the owl-faced _Chilonycteris_, that takes wing in the gloom preceding a thunderstorm, as well as in the morning and evening twilight, and flits up and down the coast rivers with screams that can be heard as plainly as the screech of a paroquet. The _Vespertilio scandens_ of eastern San Domingo has a peculiar habit of flitting from tree to tree, and clambering about in quest of insects, almost with the agility of a flying squirrel. There are times when the moonlit woods near Cape Rafael seem to be all alive with the restless little creatures; that keep up a clicking chirp, and every now and then gather in swarms to contest a tempting find, or to settle some probate court litigation. San Domingo also harbors one species of those prototypes of the harpies, the fruit-eating bats. It passes the daylight hours in hollow trees, but becomes nervous toward sunset and apt to betray its hiding place by an impatient twitter--probably a collocution of angry comments on the length of time between meals. The moment the twilight deepens into gloom the chatterers flop out to fall on the next mango orchard and eat away like mortgage brokers. They do not get fat--champion gluttons rarely do--but attain a weight of six ounces, and the Haytian darkey would get even with them after a manner of their own if their prerogatives were not protected by the intensity of their musky odor. The above-mentioned _hutia_ rat appears to have immigrated from some part of the world where the shortness of the summer justified the accumulation of large reserve stores of food, and under the influence of a hereditary hoarding instinct it now passes its existence constructing and filling a series of subterranean granaries. Besides, the females build nurseries, and all these burrows are connected by tunnels that enable their constructors to pass the rainy season under shelter. They gather nuts, _belotas_ (a sort of sweet acorns), and all kinds of cereals, and with their _penchant_ for appropriating roundish wooden objects on general principles would probably give a Connecticut nutmeg peddler the benefit of the doubt. They also pilfer raisins, and a colony of such tithe collectors is a formidable nuisance, for the _hutia_ is a giant of its tribe, and attains a length of sixteen inches, exclusive of the tail. It is found in Cuba, Hayti, Jamaica, Porto Rico, Antigua, Trinidad, the Isle of Pines, Martinique, and two or three of the southern Bahama Islands, and there may have been a time when it had the archipelago all to itself. The Lucayans had a tradition that their ancestors found it on their arrival from the mainland, and in some coast regions of eastern Cuba it may still be seen basking in the sunlight-- "Sole sitting on the shore of old romance," and wondering if there are any larger mammals on this planet. Its next West Indian congener is the Jamaica rice rat, and there are at least ten species of mice, all clearly distinct from any Old-World rodent, though it is barely possible that some of them may have stolen a ride on Spanish trading vessels from Central America. Water-moles burrow in the banks of several Cuban rivers, and two genera of aquatic mammals have solved the problem of survival: the bayou porpoise and the manatee, both known to the creoles of the early colonial era, and vaguely even to the first discoverers, since Columbus himself alludes to a "sort of mermaids (_sirenas_) that half rose from the water and scanned the boat's crew with curious eyes." Naturally the manatee is, indeed, by no means a timid creature, but bitter experience has changed its habits since the time when the down-town sportsmen of Santiago used to start in sailboats for the outer estuary and return before night with a week's supply of manatee meat. The best remaining hunting grounds are the reed shallows of Samana Bay (San Domingo) and the deltas of the Hayti swamp rivers. Old specimens are generally as wary as the Prybilof fur seal that dive out of sight at the first glimpse of a sail; still, their slit-eyed youngsters are taken alive often enough, to be kept as public pets in many town ponds, where they learn to come to a whistle and waddle ashore for a handful of cabbage leaves. Fish otters have been caught in the lagoons of Puerto Principe (central Cuba) and near Cape Tiburon, on the south coast of San Domingo, the traveler Gerstaecker saw a kind of "bushy-tailed dormouse, too small to be called a squirrel." But the last four hundred years have enlarged the list of indigenous mammals in more than one sense, and the Chevalier de Saint-Méry should not have been criticised for describing the bush dog of Hayti as a "_canis Hispaniolanus_." Imported dogs enacted a declaration of independence several centuries before the revolt of the Haytian slaves, and their descendants have become as thoroughly West Indian as the Franks have become French. A continued process of elimination has made the survivors climate-proof and self-supporting, and above all they have ceased to vary; Nature has accepted their modified type as wholly adapted to the exigencies of their present habitat. And if it is true that all runaway animals revert in some degree to the characteristics of their primeval relatives, the ancestor of the domestic dog would appear to have been a bush-tailed, brindle-skinned, and black-muzzled brute, intermittently gregarious, and combining the burrowing propensity of the fox with the co-operative hunting _penchant_ of the wolf. Fourteen years of bushwhacker warfare have almost wholly exterminated the half-wild cattle of the Cuban sierras, but the bush dog has come to stay. The yelping of its whelps can be heard in thousands of jungle woods and mountain ravines, both of Cuba and Hayti, and no variety of thoroughbreds will venture to follow these renegades into the penetralia of their strongholds. Sergeant Esterman, who shared the potluck of a Cuban insurgent camp in the capacity of a gunsmith, estimates the wild-dog population of the province of Santiago alone at half a million, and predicts that in years to come their raids will almost preclude the possibility of profitable cattle-breeding in eastern Cuba. Still, the _perro pelon_, or "tramp dog," as the creoles call the wolfish cur, is perhaps a lesser evil, where its activity has tended to check the over-increase of another assisted immigrant. Three hundred years ago West Indian sportsmen began to import several breeds of Spanish rabbits, and with results not always foreseen by the agricultural neighbors of the experimenters. Rabbit meat, at first a luxury, soon became an incumbrance of the provision markets, and finally unsalable at any price. Every family with a dog or a trap-setting boy could have rabbit stew for dinner six times a week, and load their peddlers with bundles of rabbit skins. The burrowing coneys threatened to undermine the agricultural basis of support, when it was learned that the planters of the Fort Isabel district (Hayti) had checked the evil by forcing their dogs to live on raw coney meat. The inexpensiveness of the expedient recommended its general adoption, and the rapidly multiplying quadrupeds soon found that "there were others." The Spanish hounds, too, could astonish the census reporter where their progeny was permitted to survive, and truck farmers ceased to complain. In stress of circumstances the persecuted rodents then took refuge in the highlands, where they can still be seen scampering about the grassy dells in all directions, and the curs of the coast plain turned their attention to _hutia_ venison and the eggs of the chaparral pheasant and other gallinaceous birds. On the seacoast they also have learned to catch turtles and subdivide them, regardless of antivivisection laws. How they can get a business opening through the armor of the larger varieties seems a puzzle, but the _canis rutilus_ of the Sunda Islands overcomes even the dog-resisting ability of the giant tortoise, and in Sumatra the bleaching skeletons of the victims have often been mistaken for the mementos of a savage battle. Near Bocanso in southeastern Cuba the woods are alive with capuchin monkeys, that seem to have escaped from the wreck of some South American trading vessel and found the climate so congenial that they proceeded to make themselves at home, like the ring-tailed colonists of Fort Sable, in the Florida Everglades. The food supply may not be quite as abundant as in the equatorial birthland of their species, but that disadvantage is probably more than offset by the absence of tree-climbing carnivora. Millions of runaway hogs roam the coast swamps of all the larger Antilles, and continue to multiply like our American pension claimants. The hunters of those jungle woods, indeed, must often smile to remember the complaint of the early settlers that the pleasure of the chase in the West Indian wilderness was modified by the scarcity of four-footed game, and in the total number (as distinct from the number of species) of wild or half-wild mammals Cuba and Hayti have begun to rival the island of Java. [_To be continued._] IRON IN THE LIVING BODY. BY M. A. DASTRE. Iron occurs, in small and almost infinitesimal proportions, in numerous organic structures, in which its presence may usually be detected by the high color it imparts; and in the animal tissues is an important ingredient, though far from being a large one. It is essential, however, that the animal tissues, and particularly the liquids that circulate through them, should be of nearly even weight, else the equilibrium of the body would be too easily disturbed, and disaster arising therefrom would be always imminent. Hence the iron is always found combined and associated with a large accompaniment of other lighter elements which, reducing or neutralizing its superior specific gravity, hold it up and keep it afloat. Thus the molecule of the red matter of the blood contains, for each atom of iron, 712 atoms of carbon, 1,130 of hydrogen, 214 of nitrogen, 245 of oxygen, and 2 of sulphur, or 2,303 atoms in all. Existing in compounds of so complex composition, iron can be present only in very small proportions to the whole. Though an essential element, there is comparatively but little of it. The whole body of man does not contain more than one part in twenty thousand of it. The blood contains only five ten-thousandths; and an organ is rich in it if, like the liver, it contains one and a half ten-thousandths. When, then, we seek to represent to ourselves the changes undergone by organic iron, we shall have to modify materially the ideas we have formed respecting the largeness and the littleness of units of measure and as to the meaning of the words abundant and rare. We must get rid of the notion that a thousandth or even a ten-thousandth is a proportion that may be neglected. The humble ten-thousandth, which is usually supposed not to be of much consequence, becomes here a matter of value. Chemists working with iron in its ordinary compounds may consider that they are doing fairly well if they do not lose sight of more than a thousandth of it; but such looseness would be fatal in a biological investigation, where accuracy is necessary down to the infinitesimal fraction. The balances of the biologists must weigh the thousandth of a milligramme, as their microscopes measure the thousandth of a millimetre. The great part performed by iron in organisms, what we may call its biological function, appertains to the chemical property it possesses of favoring combustion, of being an agent for promoting the oxidation of organic matters. The chemistry of living bodies differs from that of the laboratory in a feature that is peculiar to it--that instead of performing its reactions directly it uses special agents. It employs intermediaries which, while they are not entirely unknown to mineral chemistry, yet rarely intervene in it. If it is desired, for example, to add a molecule of water to starch to form sugar, the chemist would do it by heating the starch with acidulated water. The organism, which is performing this process all the time, or after every meal, does it in a different way, without special heating and without the acid. A soluble ferment, a diastase or enzyme, serves as the oxidizing agent to produce the same result. Looking at the beginning and the end, the two operations are the same. The special agent gives up none of its substance. It withdraws after having accomplished its work, and not a trace of it is left. Here, in the mechanism of the action of these soluble ferments, resides the mystery, still complete, of vital chemistry. It may be conceived that these agents, which leave none of their substance behind their operations, which suffer no loss, do not have to be represented in considerable quantities, however great the need of them may be. They only require time to do their work. The most remarkable characteristic of the soluble ferments lies, in fact, here, in the magnitude of the action as contrasted with infinitesimal proportion of the agent, and the necessity of having time for the accomplishment of the operation. Iron behaves in precisely the same way in the combustion of organic substances. These substances are incapable at ordinary temperatures of fixing oxygen directly, and will not burn till they are raised to a high temperature; but in the presence of iron they are capable of burning without extreme heat, and undergo slow combustion. And as iron gives up none of its substance in the operation, and acts, as a simple intermediary, only to draw oxygen from the inexhaustible atmosphere and present it to the organic substance, we see that it need not be abundant to perform its office, provided it have time enough. This action resembles that of the soluble ferments in that there is no mystery about it, and its innermost mechanism is perfectly known. Iron readily combines with oxygen--too readily, we might say, if we regarded only the uses we make of it. It exists as an oxide in Nature; and the metallurgy of it has no other object than to revivify burned iron, remove the oxygen from it, and extract the metal. Of the two oxides of iron, the ferrous, or lower one, is an energetic base, readily combining with even the weakest acids, and forming with them ferrous or protosalts. Ferric oxide, on the other hand, is a feeble base, which combines only slowly with even strong acids to form ferric salts or persalts, and not at all with weak acids like carbonic acid and those of the tissues of living beings. It is these last, more highly oxidized ferric compounds that provide organic substances with the oxygen that consumes them, when, as a result of the operation, they themselves return to the ferrous state. Facts of this sort are too nearly universal not to have been observed very long ago, but they were not fully understood till about the middle of this century. The chemists of the time--Liebig, Dumas, and especially Schönbein, Wöhler, Stenhouse, and many others--established the fact that ferric oxide provokes at ordinary temperatures a rapid action of combustion on a large number of substances: grass, sawdust, peat, charcoal, humus, arable land, and animal matter. A very common example is the destruction of linen by rust spots; the substance of the fiber is slowly burned up by the oxygen yielded by the oxide. About the same time, Claude Bernard inquired whether the process took place within the tissues, in contact with living matter in the same way as we have just seen it did with dead matter--the remains of organisms that had long since submitted to the action of physical laws--and received an affirmative answer. Injecting a ferric salt into the jugular vein of an animal, he found it excreted, deprived of a part of its oxygen, as a ferrous salt. This slow combustion of organic matter, living or dead, accomplished in the cold by iron, represents only one of the aspects of its biological function. A counterpart to it is necessary in order to complete the picture. It is easy to perceive that the phenomenon would have no bearing or consequence if it was limited to this first action. With the small provision of oxygen in the iron salt used up, and, if reduced to the minimum of oxidation, the source of oxygen being exhausted, the combustion of organic matter would stop. The oxidation obtained would be insignificant, while the oxidation should be indefinite and unlimited, and it is really so. There is a counterpart. The iron salt, which has gone back to the minimum of oxidation and become a ferrous salt, can not remain long in that state in contact with the air and with other sources of the gas to which it is exposed. It has always been known that ferrous compounds absorb oxygen from the air and pass into the ferric state; we might say that we have seen it done, for the transformation is accompanied by a characteristic change of color, by a transition from the pale green tint of ferrous bases to the ochery or red color of ferric compounds. We can understand now what should happen when the ferruginous compound is placed in contact alternately with organic matter and oxygen. In the former phase the iron will yield oxygen to the organic matter; in the second phase it will take again from the atmosphere the combustible which it has lost, and will be again where it started. The same series of operations may be continued a second time and a third time, and indefinitely, as long as the alternations of contact with organic matter and exposure to atmospheric oxygen are kept up, the iron simply performing the part of a broker. The same result will occur if atmospheric air and organic matter are constantly together; the consumption will continue indefinitely, and the iron will perform the part of an intermediary till one of the elements of the process is exhausted. This explanation was necessary to make clear the solution of the mystery of slow or cool combustion, the existence of which has been known since Lavoisier, without its mechanism being understood. That illustrious student gave out the theory that animal heat and the energy developed by vital action originated in the chemical reactions of the organism, and that, on the other hand, the reactions that produce heat consisted of simple combustions, slow combustions, that differed only in intensity from that of the burning torch. The development of chemistry has shown that this figure was too much simplified from the reality, and that most of these phenomena, while they are in the end equivalent to a combustion, differ greatly from it in mechanism and mode of execution. By this we do not mean to say that all the combustions are of this character, and that there do not exist in the organism a large number of such as Lavoisier understood, and of such as the combustions effected by the intervention of iron furnish the type of. Lavoisier's successors, Liebig among them, tried to find reactions conformed to this type. Their attempts were unsuccessful, but they had the happy result of revealing, if not the real function of iron in the blood, at least that of the red matter in which it is fixed. The question of the presence of iron in the coloring matter of the blood gave rise to long discussions. Vauquelin denied it. He made the mistake of looking for iron in the form of a known compound, in direct combination with the blood, while later researches have shown that it is found almost exclusively in the red matter that tinges the globules, in a complicated combination that escapes the ordinary tests; or, according to a usual method of expression, it is dissimulated. Liebig also failed to find this combination, and it was not till 1864 that Hoppe-Seyler succeeded in obtaining it pure and crystallized. But Liebig had already perceived its essential properties, and was able to point out approximately its functions as early as 1845; yet the single fact that there was no assimilation possible between this substance and the salts of iron, cut this question off into a kind of negative suspense. Different from these compounds, it could not behave like them, and accomplish slow combustions of the same type. It is a remarkable fact, and one that illustrates well how iron preserves through all its vicissitudes some trace of its fundamental property of favoring the action of oxygen on substances, that this composition, so special and so different from the salts of iron, behaves nearly as they do. While it is not of itself an energetic combustible, it is, according to Liebig's expression, "a transporter of oxygen"--a luminous view, which the future was destined to confirm. Although the transportation is not produced by the mechanism supposed by Liebig, but by another, the general result is very much the same from the point of view of the physiology of the blood. The coloring matter of the blood conveyed by the globules fixes oxygen in contact with the pulmonary air, and distributes it as it passes through the capillaries upon the tissues. The globule of blood brings nothing else and distributes nothing else, contrary to the opinion that had been held before. The theory of slow combustion effected through iron, while not absolutely contradicted in principle, was not entirely confirmed in detail, so far as concerned iron, or the more prominently ferruginous tissue. No search was made for other tissues or organs presenting more favorable conditions, for no others were known that had iron in themselves. The liver and the spleen were supposed to receive it from the blood under the complicated form in which it exists there, or under some equivalent form. It was not, therefore, supposed till within a very few years that the two conditions were realized in any organ that were required to secure a slow combustion by iron--that is, combinations resembling ferrous and ferric salts with a weak acid and a source of oxygen. The doubt has been resolved by recent studies. The liver fulfils the requirement. It contains iron existing under forms precisely comparable to the ferrous and ferric compounds, and is washed by the blood which carries oxygen in a state of simple solution in its plasma and of loose combination in its globules. Thus all the conditions necessary for the production of slow combustion are gathered here, and we can not doubt that it takes place. A new function is therefore assigned to the liver, and it becomes one of the great furnaces of the organism. Compounds of iron are so abundant in the ground and the water that we need not be surprised when we find them in various parts of plants, and particularly in the green parts. Their habitual presence does not, however, authorize the conclusion that this metal is necessary to the support and development of vegetable life. Some substances, evidently indifferent, foreign, and even injurious, if they exist abundantly in a soil, may be drawn into roots through the movement of the sap, and fix themselves in various organs. This occurs with copper in certain exceptional circumstances when the soil is saturated with its compounds, and if such a condition should be found to be repeated over a large extent of country, we might be led, by analysis alone of its vegetable productions, to the false conclusion that copper was an essential or even necessary constituent of them. But the value of the part performed by an element can not be determined by analysis alone. Direct proofs are necessary for that, methodical and comparative experiments in cultivation in mediums artificially deprived or furnished with the element the importance of which we wish to estimate. This has been done for combinations of iron, and the utility of that metal, especially to the higher plants, has been made thereby to appear. If iron is absent from the nutritive medium the plant will wither. If we sprout seeds in a solution from which this metal has been carefully excluded, the development will follow its regular course as long as the plant is in the condition properly called that of germination, or while it does not have to draw anything from the soil. The stem rises and the first leaves are formed as usual. But all these parts will continue pale, and the green matter, the granulation of chlorophyll, will not appear. Now, if we add a small quantity of salt of iron to the ground in which the roots are planted, or a much-diluted solution is sprinkled on the leaves and the stem, the chlorotic plant will recover its health and take on its normal coloration. Experiments of this sort make well manifest that iron is necessary to green plants, and they show, besides, the bearing of its action, and that what is most special and most characteristic in the phenomena of vegetable life may be traced exactly to the organization of that green matter. It was long thought that if iron was necessary for the formation of chlorophyll, it was because it had a part in its constitution. We know now that this is not so. The metal does nothing but accompany the chlorophyll in the granulation in which it is found. The influence which iron exerts in the development of the lower plants, like the muscidenes, was illustrated with great precision in a study made about thirty years ago by M. Raulin, who experimented with the common mold (_Aspergillus niger_), to determine the coefficient of importance of all the elements that have a part in its vegetation. When the iron was removed from a medium that had been shown capable of giving a maximum crop of that mold, the plants languished, and the return fell off immediately to one third. Estimating the quantity of metal that produces this effect, it was found that the addition of one part of iron was sufficient to determine the production of a weight of plant nearly nine hundred times as great. The suppression of the iron further caused an irreparable loss, for when it was sought to remedy the wilting of the plants by restoring the iron which had been taken from the medium--an experiment which had been successful with higher plants--the attempt was a failure, and the plants could not be prevented from perishing. These facts are full of interest in themselves, and they further show well the necessity or utility of iron in plant life, but they teach us no more. They reveal nothing of the mechanism of the action, and if we wish to penetrate further in the matter we always have to turn to animal physiology.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes._ THE MALAY LANGUAGE. BY R. CLYDE FORD, PROFESSOR OF GERMAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, ALBION COLLEGE. A gentleman who had lived for several years among the Indians of the Canadian northwest said that he went among them believing they were an untutored race. But when they told him of a dozen kinds of berries growing in a locality where he knew but two, brought him flowers he could not find after careful search, and around their council fires showed as deep an insight into the mysteries of life as the _savants_ of his university, then he concluded they could no longer be called untutored. And why should they be? Is there no culture or civilization outside of the enlightenment of Europe or America? And because a civilization does not exactly fit the grooves in which most of the world has moved, may it not be a real civilization for all that? If such is possible, then we vote the Malays a cultured people. Of course, their culture is not like our own; it knows no railroads, no telegraphs, boasts of no intricate political machinery, has no complicated social despotisms. Native princes rule for the most part over peaceful states, and politics means no more than the regulation of quiet village life. But what need of railroads, when the rivers are avenues of trade and communication? Why telegraphs, when the world is bounded by the jungle horizon? Or why, in short, severe civil and social enactments, when the common _Wahlspruch_ of life is, "Fear disgrace rather than death"? Such a civilization, we admit, is a humble one; but it also has the advantage of being a happy one. And where contentment dwells, where honesty prevails, where the home is a stronghold, there are culture and civilization, even though they may not coincide with our own. The Malays are not barbarians, and their language by its grace and adaptability has shown its right to be. To-day it is the mother tongue of more than forty millions of people, and the _lingua franca_ of Chinamen, Hindus, European, and natives. It is spoken from Madagascar to the distant islands of the Pacific, and from the Philippines to Australia. With it one can barter in Celebes and sell in Java; converse with a sultan in Sumatra or a Spaniard in Manila. Moreover, it is soft and melodious, rich in expression, poetical in idiom, and simple in structure--a language almost without grammar and yet of immense vocabulary, with subtle distinctions and fine gradations of thought and meaning; a language that sounds in one's ears long after _Tanah Malayu_ and the coral islands and the jungle strand have sunk into hazy recollection, just as they once dropped out of sight behind one's departing ship. Malay is written in the Arabic character, which was adopted with Mohammedanism, probably in the thirteenth century. Anciently, the Malays used a writing of their own, but it is not yet clearly settled what it was. There are now thirty-four characters employed, each varying in form, according as it is isolated, final, medial, or initial. Naturally, the Arabic influence over the language has been a marked one; the priest who dictates in the religion of a people is a molder and shaper of language. We have only to recall the Catholic Church and the influence of the Latin tongue in the mouths of her priests to know that this is so. Many Arabic words and phrases have been adopted, but more in the language of literature than in that of everyday speech. A large number of expressions of court and royalty, and terms of law and religion, are Arabic; also the names of months, days, and many articles of commerce and trade; nevertheless, the language of common speech is still Malay. Another influence, also, has been felt in the Malay--that of the Sanskrit language. The presence of many Sanskrit words has caused some very ingenious theories to be constructed in proof that the Malays were of Indian origin, and such word fragments the survival of the primitive tongue. Such theories, however, have not stood the test of philology, and the fact still remains that the language is essentially unique, with an origin lost in the darkness of remote antiquity. However, Sanskrit influence has been much greater, and has penetrated much deeper into the elemental structure of the language than the Arabic. In fact, the aboriginal language, before it felt the animating spirit of the Aryan tongue, must have been a barren one, the language of a primitive man, a fisherman, a hunter, a careless tiller of the soil. As Maxwell says in his Manual of the Malay Language, the Sanskrit word _hala_ (plow) marks a revolution in Malayan agriculture and, one may say further, Malayan civilization. What changed the methods of cultivating the soil, changed the people themselves. It is probable that this change came through contact with people to whom Sanskrit was a vernacular tongue, but whether through conquest by the sword or by religion is hard to tell. Perhaps it was by both. At any rate, it was deep and strong, and left a lasting impression on the language. Sanskrit names fastened on trees, plants, grain, fruits, household and agricultural implements, parts of the body, articles of commerce, animals, metals and minerals, time and its division and measurement, family relationships, abstract conceptions, warfare, and fundamental ideas of religion and superstition. Such a conquest must have been an early and tremendous one. Strangely enough, Malay is almost a grammarless tongue. It has no proper article, and its substantives may serve equally well as verbs, being singular or plural, and entirely genderless. However, adjectives and a process of reduplication often indicate number, and gender words are added to nouns to make sex allusions plain. Whatever there is of declension is prepositional as in English, and possessives are formed by putting the adjectives after the noun as in Italian. Nouns are primitive and derivative, the derivations being formed by suffixes or prefixes, or both, and one's mastery of the language may be gauged by the idiomatic way in which he handles these _Anhängsel_. Adjectives are uninflected. The use of the pronouns involves an extensive knowledge of Oriental etiquette--some being used by the natives among one another, some between Europeans and natives, some employed when an inferior addresses a superior and _vice versa_, some used only when the native addresses his prince or sovereign; and, last of all, some being distinctly literary, and never employed colloquially. Into this maze one must go undaunted, and trust to time and patience to smooth out difficulties. Verbs, like nouns, are primitive and derivative, with some few auxiliaries and a good many particles which are suffixed or prefixed to indicate various states and conditions. These things are apt to be confusing, and when the student learns that a verb may be past, present, or future without any change in form, he does not know whether to congratulate himself or not. Prepositions, too, are many and expressive; conjunctions, some colloquial, some pedantic. We now come to a peculiarity which Malay has in common with other Indo-Chinese languages--the "numeral co-efficients," as Maxwell calls them, which are always employed with a certain class of objects, just as we say "head" of horses, "sail" of ships, etc. They are very many as compared with English, and very idiomatic in their use. For instance, the Malay says, "Europeans, three _persons_," "cats, four _tails_," "ships, five _fruits_," "cocoanuts, three _seeds_," "spears, two _stems_," "planks, five _pieces_," "houses, two _ladders_," and so on to fifteen or twenty different classes of articles or objects. By some this has been regarded as a peculiarity of the languages of southeastern Asia; but the same thing may be noticed in the Indian languages of our own continent. As a language Malay is easily learned and has much to repay for so doing. It is full of wonders and surprises--among other things is the natural home of euphemism, where a spade is called anything but a spade. For instance, to die is beautifully expressed in Malay as a return to the mercy of Allah. The language is decidedly rich in poetical expression and imagery. A neighbor is one whom you permit to ascend the ladder of your cottage, and your friend is a sharer of your joys and sorrows. Interest is the flower of money, a spring is an eye of water, the sun the eye of day, and a policeman all eyes. A walk is a stroll to eat the wind, a man drunk is one who rides a green horse, and a coward a duck without spurs. A flatterer is one who has sugar cane on his lips, a sharper is a man of brains, a fool a brain-lacker. In his proverbs also the Malay shows a matchless use of metaphor and imagery, his words having the softness of the jungle breeze, and at the same time the grimness of the jungle shades. Nowhere does the nature of his race or the peculiar genius of his language show out better than in these terse, pithy sayings which the Malay uses to sweeten his speech or lend effectiveness to it. The real Malay is a creature of the forest or the sea, whence he draws his livelihood, and it is but natural that he should envelop his daily and perhaps dangerous life with homely philosophy. He loves the freedom which he enjoys; take him away from it and he eats his heart out in homesickness. "Though you feed a jungle fowl from a golden plate, it will return to the jungle again." In his humble life he has discovered that blood, be it good or bad, counts for something, and he thinks of the forest lairs; "a kitten and small, but a tiger's cub." He is beset with dangers by sea and land; often he is between the devil and the deep. "One may escape the tiger, and fall into the jaws of the crocodile." He recognizes the inevitable, and draws what consolation he can. "When the prow is wrecked the shark gets his fill"--a very stoical recognition of ill winds. "For fear of the ghost he hugs the corpse," is often the solution of his dilemma. Sometimes he indulges in drollery, but is never unphilosophical. "To love one's children, one must weep for them now and then; to love one's wife, one must leave her now and then." The language is full of such expressions; they are the natural products of the speech of a poetical and Nature-loving folk. Without attempting a classification we give a few of the most characteristic proverbs, drawing largely on a collection made in the Malay Peninsula by W. E. Maxwell, at one time British resident there: Will the crocodile respect the carcass? Follow your heart, death; follow your feelings, destruction. You find grasshoppers where you find a field. Earth does not become grain. Don't grind pepper for a bird on the wing. The flower comes, age comes. When the father is spotted, the son is spotted. The plant sprouts before it climbs. When he can't wring the ear, he pulls the horn. The creel says the basket is poorly made. Ask from one who has, Make vows at a shrine, Sulk with him who loves you. When the house is done the chisel finds fault. As the crow goes back to his nest (no richer, no poorer). Whoever eats chilies burns his mouth. Because of the mouth the body comes to harm. If you are at the river's mouth at nightfall, what's the use of talking of return? A broken thread may be mended, but charcoal never. The pea forgets its pod. As water rolls from a _kladi_ leaf. A shipwrecked vessel may float again, a heart once broken is broken forever. It is a project, and the result with God. He carries a torch in daylight. A slave who does well is never praised; if he does badly, never forgiven. It rains gold afar, but stone at home. What if you sit on a cushion of gold with an uneasy mind! When money leaves, your friend goes. If you dip your hand into the fish tub, go to the bottom. Whoever digs a hole falls into it himself. If your legs are long, have your blanket long. Like a frog under a cocoanut shell, he thinks he sees the sky. If you can't get rattan, bind with roots. The plantain does not bear twice. He sits like a cat, but leaps like a tiger. The tortoise lays a thousand eggs and tells no one; the hen lays a single egg and tells all the world. Those will die of thirst who empty the jar when it thunders in a dry time. Handsome as a princess, poisonous as a snake. Small as an ant, wise as a mouse-deer. LIFE ON A SOUTH SEA WHALER.[13] BY FRANK T. BULLEN. Cachalots, or sperm whales, must have been captured on the coasts of Europe in a desultory way from a very early date, by the incidental allusions to the prime products spermaceti and ambergris which are found in so many ancient writers. Shakespeare's reference--"The sovereign'st thing on earth was parmaceti for an inward bruise"--will be familiar to most people, as well as Milton's mention of the delicacies at Satan's feast--"Grisamber steamed"--not to carry quotation any further. But in the year 1690 the brave and hardy fishermen of the northeast coasts of North America established that systematic pursuit of the cachalot which has thriven so wonderfully ever since, although it must be confessed that the last few years have witnessed a serious decline in this great branch of trade. For many years the American colonists completely engrossed this branch of the whale fishery, contentedly leaving to Great Britain and the continental nations the monopoly of the northern or arctic fisheries, while they cruised the stormy, if milder, seas around their own shores. As, however, the number of ships engaged increased, it was inevitable that the known grounds should become exhausted, and in 1788, Messrs. Enderby's ship, the Emilia, first ventured round Cape Horn, as the pioneer of a greater trade than ever. The way once pointed out, other ships were not slow to follow, until, in 1819, the British whale ship Syren opened up the till then unexplored tract of ocean in the western part of the North Pacific, afterward familiarly known as the "Coast of Japan." From these teeming waters alone, for many years an average annual catch of forty thousand barrels of oil was taken, which, at the average price of £8 per barrel, will give some idea of the value of the trade generally. From the crushing blow of the civil war the American sperm-whale fishery has never fully recovered. When the writer was in the trade, some twenty-two years ago, it was credited with a fleet of between three and four hundred sail; now it may be doubted whether the numbers reach an eighth of that amount. A rigid conservatism of method hinders any revival of the industry, which is practically conducted to-day as it was fifty or even a hundred years ago; and it is probable that another decade will witness the final extinction of what was once one of the most important maritime industries in the world. In the following pages an attempt has been made--it is believed for the first time--to give an account of the cruise of a South Sea whaler from the seaman's standpoint. Its aim is to present to the general reader a simple account of the methods employed and the dangers met with in a calling about which the great mass of the public knows absolutely nothing. * * * * * At the age of eighteen, after a sea experience of six years from the time when I dodged about London streets, a ragged Arab, with wits sharpened by the constant fight for food, I found myself roaming the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts. My money was all gone, I was hungry for a ship; and so, when a long, keen-looking man with a goatlike beard, and mouth stained with dry tobacco juice, hailed me one afternoon at the street corner, I answered very promptly, scenting a berth. "Lookin' fer a ship, stranger?" said he. "Yes; do you want a hand?" said I anxiously. He made a funny little sound something like a pony's whinny, then answered: "Wall, I should surmise that I want between fifty and sixty hands, ef yew kin lay me onto 'em; but, kem along, every dreep's a drop, an' yew seem likely enough." With that he turned and led the way until we reached a building, around which was gathered one of the most nondescript crowds I had ever seen. There certainly did not appear to be a sailor among them--not so much by their rig, though that is not a great deal to go by, but by their actions and speech. However, I signed and passed on, engaged to go I knew not where, in some ship I did not know even the name of, in which I was to receive I did not know how much or how little for my labor, nor how long I was going to be away. From the time we signed the articles, we were never left to ourselves. Truculent-looking men accompanied us to our several boarding houses, paid our debts for us, finally bringing us by boat to a ship lying out in the bay. As we passed under her stern, I read the name Cachalot, of New Bedford; but as soon as we ranged alongside, I realized that I was booked for the sailor's horror--a cruise in a whaler. Badly as I wanted to get to sea, I had not bargained for this, and would have run some risks to get ashore again; but they took no chances, so we were all soon aboard. Before going forward, I took a comprehensive glance around, and saw that I was on board of a vessel belonging to a type which has almost disappeared off the face of the waters. A more perfect contrast to the trim-built English clipper ships that I had been accustomed to I could hardly imagine. She was one of a class characterized by sailors as "built by the mile, and cut off in lengths as you want 'em," bow and stern almost alike, masts standing straight as broomsticks, and bowsprit soaring upward at an angle of about forty-five degrees. She was as old-fashioned in her rig as in her hull. Right in the center of the deck, occupying a space of about ten feet by eight, was a square erection of brickwork, upon which my wondering gaze rested longest, for I had not the slightest idea what it could be. But I was rudely roused from my meditations by the harsh voice of one of the officers, who shouted, "Naow then, git below an' stow yer dunnage, 'n look lively up agin!" Tumbling down the steep ladder, I entered the gloomy den which was to be for so long my home, finding it fairly packed with my shipmates. The whole space was undivided by partition, but I saw at once that black men and white had separated themselves, the blacks taking the port side and the whites the starboard. Finding a vacant bunk by the dim glimmer of the ancient teapot lamp that hung amidships, giving out as much smoke as light, I hurriedly shifted my coat for a "jumper" or blouse, put on an old cap, and climbed into the fresh air again. Even _my_ seasoned head was feeling bad with the villainous reek of the place. I had hardly reached the deck when I was confronted by a negro, the biggest I ever saw in my life. He looked me up and down for a moment, then opening his ebony features in a wide smile, he said: "Great snakes! why, here's a sailor man for sure! Guess thet's so, ain't it, Johnny?" I said "yes" very curtly, for I hardly liked his patronizing air; but he snapped me up short with "yes, _sir_, when yew speak to me, yew blank limejuicer. I'se de fourf mate of dis yar ship, en my name's Mistah Jones, 'n yew jest freeze on to dat ar, ef yew want ter lib long 'n die happy. See, sonny?" I _saw_, and answered promptly, "I beg your pardon, sir, I didn't know." "Ob cawse yew didn't know, dat's all right, little Britisher; naow jest skip aloft 'n loose dat fore-taupsle." "Ay, ay, sir," I answered cheerily, springing at once into the fore-rigging and up the ratlines like a monkey, but not too fast to hear him chuckle, "Dat's a smart kiddy, I bet." On deck I could see a crowd at the windlass heaving up anchor. I said to myself, "They don't waste any time getting this packet away." Evidently they were not anxious to test any of the crew's swimming powers. They were wise, for had she remained at anchor that night I verily believe some of the poor wretches would have tried to escape. The anchor came aweigh, the sails were sheeted home, and I returned on deck to find the ship gathering way for the heads, fairly started on her long voyage. Before nightfall we were fairly out to sea, and the ceremony of dividing the crew into watches was gone through. I found myself in the chief mate's or "port" watch (they called it "larboard," a term I had never heard used before, it having long been obsolete in merchant ships), though the huge negro fourth mate seemed none too well pleased that I was not under his command, his being the starboard watch under the second mate. I was pounced upon next morning by "Mistah" Jones, the fourth mate, whom I heard addressed familiarly as "Goliath" and "Anak" by his brother officers, and ordered to assist him in rigging the "crow's-nest" at the main royal-mast head. It was a simple affair. There were a pair of cross-trees fitted to the mast, upon which was secured a tiny platform about a foot wide on each side of the mast, while above this foothold a couple of padded hoops like a pair of giant spectacles were secured at a little higher than a man's waist. When all was fast one could creep up on the platform, through the hoop, and, resting his arms upon the latter, stand comfortably and gaze around, no matter how vigorously the old barky plunged and kicked beneath him. From that lofty eerie I had a comprehensive view of the vessel. She was about three hundred and fifty tons and full ship-rigged--that is to say, she carried square sails on all three masts. Her deck was flush fore and aft, the only obstructions being the brick-built "try-works" in the waist, the galley, and cabin skylight right aft by the taffrail. Her bulwarks were set thickly round with clumsy-looking wooden cranes, from which depended five boats. Two more boats were secured bottom up upon a gallows aft, so she seemed to be well supplied in that direction. The weather being fine, with a steady northeast wind blowing, so that the sails required no attention, work proceeded steadily all the morning. The oars were sorted, examined for flaws, and placed in the boats; the whale line, Manilla rope like yellow silk, an inch and a half round, was brought on deck, stretched, and coiled down with the greatest care into tubs holding, some two hundred fathoms, and others one hundred fathoms each. New harpoons were fitted to poles of rough but heavy wood, without any attempt at neatness but every attention to strength. The shape of these weapons was not, as is generally thought, that of an arrow, but rather like an arrow with one huge barb, the upper part of which curved out from the shaft. The whole of the barb turned on a stout pivot of steel, but was kept in line with the shaft by a tiny wooden peg which passed through barb and shaft, being then cut off smoothly on both sides. The point of the harpoon had at one side a wedge-shaped edge, ground to razor keenness; the other side was flat. The shaft, about thirty inches long, was of the best malleable iron, so soft that it would tie into a knot and straighten out again without fracture. Three harpoons, or "irons" as they were always called, were placed in each boat, fitted one above the other in the starboard bow, the first for use being always one unused before. Opposite to them in the boat were fitted three lances for the purpose of _killing_ whales, the harpoons being only the means by which the boat was attached to a fish, and quite useless to inflict a fatal wound. These lances were slender spears of malleable iron about four feet long, with oval or heart-shaped points of fine steel about two inches broad, their edges kept keen as a surgeon's lancet. By means of a socket at the other end they were attached to neat handles, or "lance poles," about as long again, the whole weapon being thus about eight feet in length, and furnished with a light line, or "lance warp," for the purpose of drawing it back again when it had been darted at a whale. The other furniture of a boat comprised five oars of varying lengths from sixteen to nine feet, one great steering oar of nineteen feet, a mast and two sails of great area for so small a craft, spritsail shape; two tubs of whale line containing together eighteen hundred feet, a keg of drinking water, and another long, narrow one with a few biscuits, a lantern, candles and matches therein; a bucket and "piggin" for baling, a small spade, a flag or "wheft," a shoulder bomb gun and ammunition, two knives, and two small axes. A rudder hung outside by the stern. With all this gear, although snugly stowed, a boat looked so loaded that I could not help wondering how six men would be able to work in her; but, like most "deep-water" sailors, I knew very little about boating. I was going to learn. The reports I had always heard of the laziness prevailing on board whale ships were now abundantly falsified. From dawn to dark work went on without cessation. Everything was rubbed and scrubbed and scoured until no speck or soil could be found; indeed, no gentleman's yacht or man-of-war is kept more spotlessly clean than was the Cachalot. On the fourth day after leaving port we were all busy as usual except the four men in the "crow's-nests," when a sudden cry of "Porps! porps!" brought everything to a standstill. A large school of porpoises had just joined us, in their usual clownish fashion, rolling and tumbling around the bows as the old barky wallowed along, surrounded by a wide ellipse of snowy foam. All work was instantly suspended, and active preparations made for securing a few of these frolicsome fellows. A "block," or pulley, was bung out at the bowsprit end, a whale line passed through it and "bent" (fastened) on to a harpoon. Another line with a running "bowline," or slip noose, was also passed out to the bowsprit end, being held there by one man in readiness. Then one of the harpooners ran out along the back ropes, which keep the jib boom down, taking his stand beneath the bowsprit with the harpoon ready. Presently he raised his iron and followed the track of a rising porpoise with its point until the creature broke water. At the same instant the weapon left his grasp, apparently without any force behind it; but we on deck, holding the line, soon found that our excited hauling lifted a big vibrating body clean out of the smother beneath. "'Vast hauling!" shouted the mate, while, as the porpoise hung dangling, the harpooner slipped the ready bowline over his body, gently closing its grip round the "small" by the broad tail. Then we hauled on the noose line, slacking away the harpoon, and in a minute had our prize on deck. He was dragged away at once and the operation repeated. Again and again we hauled them in, until the fore part of the deck was alive with the kicking, writhing sea pigs, at least twenty of them. All hands were soon busy skinning the blubber from the bodies. Porpoises have no skin--that is, hide--the blubber or coating of lard which incases them being covered by a black substance as thin as tissue paper. The porpoise hide of the bootmaker is really leather, made from the skin of the _Beluga_, or "white whale," which is found only in the far north. The cover was removed from the "try-works" amidships, revealing two gigantic pots set in a frame of brickwork side by side, capable of holding two hundred gallons each--such a cooking apparatus as might have graced a Brobdingnagian kitchen. Beneath the pots was the very simplest of furnaces, hardly as elaborate as the familiar copper hole sacred to washing day. Square funnels of sheet iron were loosely fitted to the flues, more as a protection against the oil boiling over into the fire than to carry away the smoke, of which from the peculiar nature of the fuel there was very little. At one side of the try-works was a large wooden vessel, or "hopper," to contain the raw blubber; at the other, a copper cistern or cooler of about three hundred gallons capacity, into which the prepared oil was baled to cool off, preliminary to its being poured into the casks. Beneath the furnaces was a space as large as the whole area of the try-works, about a foot deep, which, when the fires were lighted, was filled with water to prevent the deck from burning. It may be imagined that the blubber from our twenty porpoises made but a poor show in one of the pots; nevertheless, we got a barrel of very excellent oil from them. The fires were fed with "scrap," or pieces of blubber from which the oil had been boiled, some of which had been reserved from the previous voyage. They burned with a fierce and steady blaze, leaving but a trace of ash. I was then informed by one of the harpooners that no other fuel was ever used for boiling blubber at any time, there being always amply sufficient for the purpose. We were now in the haunts of the sperm whale, or "cachalot," a brilliant lookout being continually kept for any signs of their appearing. One officer and a foremast hand were continually on watch during the day in the main crow's-nest, one harpooner and a seaman in the fore one. A bounty of ten pounds of tobacco was offered to whoever should first report a whale, should it be secured; consequently there were no sleepy eyes up there. At last, one beautiful day, the boats were lowered and manned, and away went the greenies on their first practical lesson in the business of the voyage. There were two greenies in each boat, they being so arranged that whenever one of them "caught a crab," which of course was about every other stroke, his failure made little difference to the boat's progress. They learned very fast under the terrible imprecations and storm of blows from the iron-fisted and iron-hearted officers, so that before the day was out the skipper was satisfied of our ability to deal with a "fish" should he be lucky enough to "raise" one. I was, in virtue of my experience, placed at the after oar in the mate's boat, where it was my duty to attend to the "main sheet" when the sail was set, where also I had the benefit of the lightest oar except the small one used by the harpooner in the bow. The very next day after our first exhaustive boat drill, a school of "blackfish" was reported from aloft, and with great glee the officers prepared for what they considered a rattling day's fun. The blackfish (_Phocæna sp._) is a small toothed whale, not at all unlike a miniature cachalot, except that its head is rounded at the front, while its jaw is not long and straight, but bowed. It is as frolicsome as the porpoise, gamboling about in schools of from twenty to fifty or more, as if really delighted to be alive. Its average size is from ten to twenty feet long and seven or eight feet in girth; weight, from one to three tons. Blubber about three inches thick, while the head is almost all oil, so that a good rich specimen will make between one and two barrels of oil of medium quality. We lowered and left the ship, pulling right toward the school, the noise they were making in their fun effectually preventing them from hearing our approach. It is etiquette to allow the mate's boat first place, unless his crew is so weak as to be unable to hold their own; but as the mate always has first pick of the men this seldom happens. So, as usual, we were first, and soon I heard the order given, "Stand up, Louey, and let 'em have it!" Sure enough, here we were right among them. Louis let drive, "fastening" a whopper about twenty feet long. The injured animal plunged madly forward, accompanied by his fellows, while Louis calmly bent another iron to a "short warp," or piece of whale line, the loose end of which he made a bowline with round the main line which was fast to the "fish." Then he fastened another "fish," and the queer sight was seen of these two monsters each trying to flee in opposite directions, while the second one ranged about alarmingly as his "bridle" ran along the main line. Another one was secured in the same way, then the game was indeed great. The school had by this time taken the alarm and cleared out, but the other boats were all fast to fish, so that didn't matter. Now, at the rate our "game" were going, it would evidently be a long while before they died, although, being so much smaller than a whale proper, a harpoon will often kill them at a stroke. Yet they were now so tangled or "snarled erp," as the mate said, that it was no easy matter to lance them without great danger of cutting the line. However, we hauled up as close to them as we dared, and the harpooner got a good blow in, which gave the biggest of the three "Jesse," as he said, though why "Jesse" was a stumper. Anyhow, it killed him promptly, while almost directly after another one saved further trouble by passing in his own checks. But he sank at the same time, drawing the first one down with him, so that we were in considerable danger of having to cut them adrift or be swamped. The "wheft" was waved thrice as an urgent signal to the ship to come to our assistance with all speed, but in the meantime our interest lay in the surviving blackfish keeping alive. Should _he_ die and, as was most probable, sink, we should certainly have to cut and loose the lot, tools included. We waited in grim silence while the ship came up, so slowly, apparently, that she hardly seemed to move, but really at a good pace of about four knots an hour, which for her was not at all bad. She got alongside of us at last, and we passed up the bight of our line, our fish all safe, very much pleased with ourselves, especially when we found that the other boats had only five between the three of them. Chain slings were passed around the carcasses, the end of the "fall," or tackle rope, was taken to the windlass, and we hove away cheerily, lifting the monsters right on deck. A mountainous pile they made. After dinner all hands turned to again to "flench" the blubber and prepare for trying out. This was a heavy job, keeping us busy until it was quite dark, the latter part of the work being carried on by the light of a "cresset," the flames of which were fed with "scrap," which blazed brilliantly, throwing a big glare over all the ship. The last of the carcasses was launched overboard by about eight o'clock that evening, but not before some vast junks of beef had been cut off and hung up in the rigging for our food supply. "Trying out" went on busily all night, and by nightfall of the next day the ship had resumed her normal appearance, and we were a tun and a quarter of oil to the good. Blackfish oil is of medium quality, but I learned that, according to the rule of "roguery in all trades," it was the custom to mix quantities such as we had just obtained with better class whale oil, and thus get a much higher price than it was really worth. We had now been eight days out, having had nothing, so far, but steady breezes and fine weather. As it was late autumn--the first week in October--I rather wondered at this, for even in my brief experience I had learned to dread a "fall" voyage across the "Western Ocean." Gradually the face of the sky changed, and the feel of the air, from balmy and genial, became raw and cheerless. The little wave tops broke short off and blew backward, apparently against the wind, while the old vessel had an uneasy, unnatural motion, caused by a long, new swell rolling athwart the existing set of the sea. We were evidently in for a fair specimen of Western Ocean weather, but the clumsy-looking, old-fashioned Cachalot made no more fuss over it than one of the long-winged sea birds that floated around, intent only upon snapping up any stray scraps that might escape from us. Higher rose the wind, heavier rolled the sea, yet never a drop of water did we ship, nor did anything about the deck betoken what a heavy gale was blowing. During the worst of the weather, and just after the wind had shifted back into the northeast, making an uglier cross sea than ever get up, along comes an immense four-masted iron ship homeward bound. She was staggering under a veritable mountain of canvas, fairly burying her bows in the foam at every forward drive, and actually wetting the clews of the upper topsails in the smothering masses of spray, that every few minutes almost hid her hull from sight. It was a splendid picture; but--for the time--I felt glad I was not on board of her. In a very few minutes she was out of our ken, followed by the admiration of all. Then came, from the other direction, a huge steamship, taking no more notice of the gale than as if it were calm. Straight through the sea she rushed, dividing the mighty rollers to the heart, and often bestriding three seas at once, the center one spreading its many tons of foaming water fore and aft, so that from every orifice spouted the seething brine. Compared with these greyhounds of the wave, we resembled nothing so much as some old lightship bobbing serenely around, as if part and parcel of the mid-Atlantic. The gale gradually blew itself out, leaving behind only a long and very heavy swell to denote the deep-reaching disturbance that the ocean had endured. And now we were within the range of the sargasso weed, that mysterious _fucus_ that makes the ocean look like some vast hayfield, and keeps the sea from rising, no matter how high the wind. It fell a dead calm, and the harpooners amused themselves by dredging up great masses of the weed, and turning out the many strange creatures abiding therein. We were all gathered about the fo'lk'sle scuttle one evening, a few days after the gale referred to above, and the question of whale-fishing came up for discussion. Until that time, strange as it may seem, no word of this, the central idea of all our minds, had been mooted. Every man seemed to shun the subject, although we were in daily expectation of being called upon to take an active part in whale-fighting. Once the ice was broken, nearly all had something to say about it, and very nearly as many addle-headed opinions were ventilated as at a Colney Hatch debating society. For we none of us _knew_ anything about it. It was Saturday evening, and while at home people were looking forward to a day's respite from work and care, I felt that the coming day, though never taken much notice of on board, was big with the probabilities of strife such as I at least had at present no idea of--so firmly was I possessed by the prevailing feeling. The night was very quiet. A gentle breeze was blowing, and the sky was of the usual "trade" character--that is, a dome of dark blue fringed at the horizon with peaceful cumulus clouds, almost motionless. I turned in at 4 A. M. from the middle watch and, as usual, slept like a babe. Suddenly I started wide awake, a long, mournful sound sending a thrill to my very heart. As I listened breathlessly, other sounds of the same character but in different tones joined in, human voices monotonously intoning in long-drawn-out expirations the single word "bl-o-o-o-ow." Then came a hurricane of noise overhead, and adjurations in no gentle language to the sleepers to "tumble up lively there, no skulking, sperm whales." At last, then, fulfilling all the presentiments of yesterday, the long-dreaded moment had arrived. Happily, there was no time for hesitation; in less than two minutes we were all on deck, and hurrying to our respective boats. The skipper was in the main crow's-nest with his binoculars. Presently he shouted: "Naow then, Mr. Count, lower away soon's y'like. Small pod o' cows, an' one 'r two bulls layin' off to west'ard of 'em." Down went the boats into the water quietly enough; we all scrambled in and shoved off. A stroke or two of the oars were given to get clear of the ship and one another, then oars were shipped and up went the sails. As I took my allotted place at the main-sheet, and the beautiful craft started off like some big bird, Mr. Count leaned forward, saying impressively to me: "Y'r a smart youngster, an' I've kinder took t'yer; but don't ye look ahead an' get gallied, 'r I'll knock ye stiff wi' th' tiller; y'hear me? N' don't ye dare to make thet sheet fast, 'r ye'll die so sudden y' won't know whar y'r hurted." I said as cheerfully as I could, "All right, sir," trying to look unconcerned, telling myself not to be a coward, and all sorts of things; but the cold truth is that I was scared almost to death, because I didn't know what was coming. However, I did the best thing under the circumstances, obeyed orders and looked steadily astern, or up into the bronzed impassive face of my chief, who towered above me, scanning with eagle eyes the sea ahead. The other boats were coming flying along behind us, spreading wider apart as they came, while in the bows of each stood the harpooner with his right hand on his first iron, which lay ready, pointing over the bow in a raised fork of wood called the "crutch." All of a sudden, at a motion of the chief's hand, the peak of our mainsail was dropped, and the boat swung up into the wind, laying "hove to," almost stationary. The centerboard was lowered to stop her drifting to leeward, although I can not say it made much difference that ever I saw. _Now_, what's the matter? I thought, when to my amazement the chief addressing me said, "Wonder why we've hauled up, don't ye?" "Yes, sir, I do," said I. "Wall," said he, "the fish hev sounded, an' 'ef we run over 'em, we've seen the last ov 'em. So we wait awhile till they rise agin, 'n then we'll prob'ly git thar' 'r thareabouts before they sound agin." With this explanation I had to be content, although if it be no clearer to my readers than it then was to me, I shall have to explain myself more fully later on. Silently we lay, rocking lazily upon the gentle swell, no other word being spoken by any one. At last Louis, the harpooner, gently breathed "Blo-o-o-w"; and there, sure enough, not half a mile away on the lee beam, was a little bushy cloud of steam apparently rising from the sea. At almost the same time as we kept away all the other boats did likewise, and just then, catching sight of the ship, the reason for this apparently concerted action was explained. At the mainmast head of the ship was a square blue flag, and the ensign at the peak was being dipped. These were signals well understood and promptly acted upon by those in charge of the boats, who were thus guided from a point of view at least one hundred feet above the sea. "Stand up, Louey," the mate murmured softly. I only just stopped myself in time from turning my head to see why the order was given. Suddenly there was a bump, at the same moment the mate yelled, "Give't to him, Louey, give't to him!" and to me, "Haul that main sheet, naow haul, why don't ye?" I hauled it flat aft, and the boat shot up into the wind, rubbing sides as she did so with what to my troubled sight seemed an enormous mass of black India rubber floating. As we _crawled_ up into the wind, the whale went into convulsions befitting his size and energy. He raised a gigantic tail on high, thrashing the water with deafening blows, rolling at the same time from side to side until the surrounding sea was white with froth. I felt in an agony lest we should be crushed under one of those fearful strokes, for Mr. Count appeared to be oblivious of possible danger, although we seemed to be now drifting back on to the writhing leviathan. In the agitated condition of the sea it was a task of no ordinary difficulty to unship the tall mast, which was of course the first thing to be done. After a desperate struggle, and a narrow escape from falling overboard of one of the men, we got the long "stick," with the sail bundled around it, down and "fleeted" aft, where it was secured by the simple means of sticking the "heel" under the after thwart, two thirds of the mast extending out over the stern. Meanwhile, we had certainly been in a position of the greatest danger, our immunity from damage being unquestionably due to anything but precaution taken to avoid it. By the time the oars were handled, and the mate had exchanged places with the harpooner, our friend the enemy had "sounded"--that is, he had gone below for a change of scene, marveling, no doubt, what strange thing had befallen him. Agreeably to the accounts which I, like most boys, had read of the whale-fishery, I looked for the rushing of the line round the loggerhead (a stout wooden post built into the boat aft), to raise a cloud of smoke with occasional bursts of flame; so, as it began to slowly surge round the post, I timidly asked the harpooner whether I should throw any water on it. "Wot for?" growled he, as he took a couple more turns with it. Not knowing "what for," and hardly liking to quote my authorities here, I said no more, but waited events. "Hold him up, Louey, hold him up, cain't ye?" shouted the mate, and to my horror, down went the nose of the boat almost under water, while at the mate's order everybody scrambled aft into the elevated stern sheets. The line sang quite a tune as it was grudgingly allowed to surge round the loggerhead, filling one with admiration at the strength shown by such a small rope. This sort of thing went on for about twenty minutes, in which time we quite emptied the large tub and began on the small one. Suddenly our boat fell backward from her "slantindicular" position with a jerk, and the mate immediately shouted, "Haul line, there! look lively, now! you--so on, etcetera, etcetera" (he seemed to invent new epithets on every occasion). The line came in hand over hand, and was coiled in a wide heap in the stern sheets, for, silky as it was, it could not be expected in its wet state to lie very close. As it came flying in, the mate kept a close gaze upon the water immediately beneath us, apparently for the first glimpse of our antagonist. When the whale broke water, however, he was some distance off, and apparently as quiet as a lamb. Now, had Mr. Count been a prudent or less ambitious man, our task would doubtless have been an easy one, or comparatively so; but, being a little over-grasping, he got us all into serious trouble. We were hauling up to our whale in order to lance it, and the mate was standing, lance in hand, only waiting to get near enough, when up comes a large whale right alongside of our boat, so close, indeed, that I might have poked my finger in his little eye, if I had chosen. The sight of that whale at liberty, and calmly taking stock of us like that, was too much for the mate. He lifted his lance and hurled it at the visitor, in whose broad flank it sank, like a knife into butter, right up to the pole-hitches. The recipient disappeared like a flash, but before one had time to think, there was an awful crash beneath us, and the mate shot up into the air like a bomb from a mortar. He came down in a sitting posture on the mast thwart; but as he fell, the whole framework of the boat collapsed like a derelict umbrella. Louis quietly chopped the line and severed our connection with the other whale, while in accordance with our instructions we drew each man his oar across the boat and lashed it firmly down with a piece of line spliced to each thwart for the purpose. This simple operation took but a minute, but before it was completed we were all up to our necks in the sea--still in the boat, it is true, and therefore not in such danger of drowning as if we were quite adrift; but, considering that the boat was reduced to a mere bundle of loose planks, I, at any rate, was none too comfortable. Now, had he known it, was the whale's golden opportunity; but he, poor wretch, had had quite enough of our company, and cleared off without any delay, wondering, no doubt, what fortunate accident had rid him of our very unpleasant attentions. I was assured that we were all as safe as if we were on board the ship, to which I answered nothing; but, like Jack's parrot, I did some powerful thinking. Every little wave that came along swept clean over our heads, sometimes coming so suddenly as to cut a breath in half. If the wind should increase--but no--I wouldn't face the possibility of such a disagreeable thing. I was cool enough now in a double sense, for, although we were in the tropics, we soon got thoroughly chilled. Help came at last, and we were hauled alongside. Long exposure had weakened us to such an extent that it was necessary to hoist us on board, especially the mate, whose "sudden stop," when he returned to us after his little aërial excursion, had shaken his sturdy frame considerably, a state of body which the subsequent soaking had by no means improved. In my innocence I imagined that we should be commiserated for our misfortunes by Captain Slocum, and certainly be relieved from further duties until we were a little recovered from the rough treatment we had just undergone. But I never made a greater mistake. The skipper cursed us all (except the mate, whose sole fault the accident undoubtedly was) with a fluency and vigor that was, to put it mildly, discouraging. A couple of slings were passed around the boat, by means of which she was carefully hoisted on board, a mere dilapidated bundle of sticks and raffle of gear. She was at once removed aft out of the way, the business of cutting in the whale claiming precedence over everything else just then. The preliminary proceedings consisted of rigging the "cutting stage." This was composed of two stout planks a foot wide and ten feet long, the inner ends of which were suspended by strong ropes over the ship's side about four feet from the water, while the outer extremities were upheld by tackles from the main rigging, and a small crane abreast the try-works. These planks were about thirty feet apart, their two outer ends being connected by a massive plank which was securely bolted to them. A handrail about as high as a man's waist, supported by light iron stanchions, ran the full length of this plank on the side nearest the ship, the whole fabric forming an admirable standing place whence the officers might, standing in comparative comfort, cut and carve at the great mass below to their hearts' content. So far the prize had been simply held alongside by the whale line, which at death had been "rove" through a hole cut in the solid gristle of the tail; but now it became necessary to secure the carcass to the ship in some more permanent fashion. Therefore, a massive chain like a small ship's cable was brought forward, and in a very ingenious way, by means of a tiny buoy and a hand lead, passed round the body, one end brought through a ring in the other, and hauled upon until it fitted tight round the "small" or part of the whale next the broad spread of the tail. The free end of the fluke chain was then passed in through a mooring pipe forward, firmly secured to a massive bitt at the heel of the bowsprit (the fluke-chain bitt), and all was ready. The first thing to be done was to cut the whale's head off. This operation, involving the greatest amount of labor in the whole of the cutting in, was taken in hand by the first and second mates, who, armed with twelve-foot spades, took their station upon the stage, leaned over the handrail to steady themselves, and plunged their weapons vigorously down through the massive neck of the animal--if neck it could be said to have--following a well-defined crease in the blubber. At the same time the other officers passed a heavy chain sling around the long, narrow lower jaw, hooking one of the big cutting tackles into it, the "fall" of which was then taken to the windlass and hove tight, turning the whale on her back. A deep cut was then made on both sides of the rising jaw, the windlass was kept going, and gradually the whole of the throat was raised high enough for a hole to be cut through its mass, into which the strap of the second cutting tackle was inserted and secured by passing a huge toggle of oak through its eye. The second tackle was then hove taut, and the jaw, with a large piece of blubber attached, was cut off from the body with a boarding knife, a tool not unlike a cutlass blade set into a three-foot-long wooden handle. Upon being severed the whole piece swung easily inboard and was lowered on deck. The fast tackle was now hove upon while the third mate on the stage cut down diagonally into the blubber on the body, which the purchase ripped off in a broad strip or "blanket" about five feet wide and a foot thick. Meanwhile the other two officers carved away vigorously at the head, varying their labors by cutting a hole right through the snout. This, when completed, received a heavy chain for the purpose of securing the head. When the blubber had been about half stripped off the body, a halt was called in order that the work of cutting off the head might be finished, for it was a task of incredible difficulty. It was accomplished at last, and the mass floated astern by a stout rope, after which the windlass pawls clattered merrily, the "blankets" rose in quick succession, and were cut off and lowered into the square of the main hatch or "blubber room." A short time sufficed to strip off the whole of the body blubber, and when at last the tail was reached, the backbone was cut through, the huge mass of flesh floating away to feed the innumerable scavengers of the sea. No sooner was the last of the blubber lowered into the hold than the hatches were put on and the head hauled up alongside. Both tackles were secured to it and all hands took to the windlass levers. This was a small cow whale of about thirty barrels--that is, yielding that amount of oil--so it was just possible to lift the entire head on board; but as it weighed as much as three full-grown elephants, it was indeed a heavy lift for even our united forces, trying our tackle to the utmost. The weather was very fine, and the ship rolled but little; even then, the strain upon the mast was terrific, and right glad was I when at last the immense cube of fat, flesh, and bone was eased inboard and gently lowered on deck. As soon as it was secured the work of dividing it began. From the snout a triangular mass was cut, which was more than half pure spermaceti. This substance was contained in spongy cells held together by layers of dense white fiber, exceedingly tough and elastic, and called by the whalers "white horse." The whole mass, or "junk," as it is called, was hauled away to the ship's side and firmly lashed to the bulwarks for the time being, so that it might not "take charge" of the deck during the rest of the operations. The upper part of the head was now slit open lengthwise, disclosing an oblong cistern or "case" full of liquid spermaceti, clear as water. This was baled out with buckets into a tank, concreting as it cooled into a waxlike substance, bland and tasteless. There being now nothing more remaining about the skull of any value, the lashings were loosed, and the first leeward roll sent the great mass plunging overboard with a mighty splash. It sank like a stone, eagerly followed by a few small sharks that were hovering near. As may be imagined, much oil was running about the deck, for so saturated was every part of the creature with it that it really gushed like water during the cutting-up process. None of it was allowed to run to waste, though, for the scupper holes which drain the deck were all carefully plugged, and as soon as the "junk" had been dissected all the oil was carefully "squeegeed" up and poured into the try-pots. Two men were now told off as "blubber-room men," whose duty it became to go below and, squeezing themselves in as best they could between the greasy mass of fat, cut it up into "horse-pieces" about eighteen inches long and six inches square. Doing this, they became perfectly saturated with oil, as if they had taken a bath in a tank of it; for as the vessel rolled it was impossible to maintain a footing, and every fall was upon blubber running with oil. A machine of wonderful construction had been erected on deck in a kind of shallow trough about six feet long by four feet wide and a foot deep. At some remote period of time it had no doubt been looked upon as a triumph of ingenuity, a patent mincing machine. Its action was somewhat like that of a chaff-cutter, except that the knife was not attached to the wheel, and only rose and fell, since it was not required to cut right through the "horse-pieces" with which it was fed. It will be readily understood that, in order to get the oil quickly out of the blubber, it needs to be sliced as thin as possible, but for convenience in handling the refuse (which is the only fuel used) it is not chopped up in small pieces, but every "horse-piece" is very deeply scored as it were, leaving a thin strip to hold the slices together. This, then, was the order of work: Two harpooners attended the try-pots, replenishing them with minced blubber from the hopper at the port side, and baling out the sufficiently boiled oil into the great cooling tank on the starboard. One officer superintended the mincing, another exercised a general supervision over all. So we toiled watch and watch, six hours on and six off, the work never ceasing for an instant night or day. Though the work was hard and dirty, and the discomfort of being so continually wet through with oil great, there was only one thing dangerous about the whole business. That was the job of filling and shifting the huge casks of oil. Some of these were of enormous size, containing three hundred and fifty gallons when full, and the work of moving them about the greasy deck of a rolling ship was attended with a terrible amount of risk. For only four men at most could get fair hold of a cask, and when she took it into her silly old hull to start rolling, just as we had got one halfway across the deck, with nothing to grip your feet, and the knowledge that one stumbling man would mean a sudden slide of the ton and a half weight, and a little heap of mangled corpses somewhere in the lee scuppers--well, one always wanted to be very thankful when the lashings were safely passed. The whale being a small one, as before noted, the whole business was over within three days, and the decks scrubbed and rescrubbed until they had quite regained their normal whiteness. The oil was poured by means of a funnel and long canvas hose into the casks stowed in the ground tier at the bottom of the ship, and the gear, all carefully cleaned and neatly "stopped up," stowed snugly away below again. FOOTNOTE: [13] From The Cruise of the Cachalot. By Frank T. Bullen. (Illustrated.) New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 379. SKETCH OF MANLY MILES. To Dr. Manly Miles belongs the distinction of having been the first professor of practical agriculture in the United States, as he was appointed to that then newly instituted position in the Michigan Agricultural College in 1865. Professor Miles was born in Homer, Cortland County, New York, July 20, 1826, the son of Manly Miles, a soldier of the Revolution; while his mother, Mary Cushman, was a lineal descendant of Miles Standish and Thomas Cushman, whose father, Joshua Cushman, joining the Mayflower colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621, left him there with Governor Bradford when he returned to England. When Manly, the son, was eleven years old, the family removed to Flint, Michigan, where he employed his time in farm work and the acquisition of knowledge, and later in teaching. He had a common-school education, and improved all the time he could spare from his regular occupations in reading and study. It is recorded of him in those days that he was always successful in whatever he undertook. In illustration of the skill and thoroughness with which he performed his tasks, his sister relates an incident of his sowing plaster for the first time, when his father expressed pleasure at his having distributed the lime so evenly and so well. It appears that he did not spare himself in doing the work, for so completely was he covered that he is said to have looked like a plaster cast, "with only his bright eyes shining through." A thrashing machine was brought on to the farm, and Manly and his brother went round thrashing for the neighbors. Industrious in study as well as in work, the boy never neglected his more prosaic duties to gratify his thirst for knowledge. He studied geometry while following the plow, drawing the problems on a shingle, which he tacked to the plow-beam. Whenever he was missed and inquiry was made about him, the answer invariably was, "Somewhere with a book." He was most interested in the natural sciences, particularly in chemistry in its applications to agriculture, and in comparative physiology and anatomy, and was a diligent student and collector of mollusks. Choosing the profession of medicine, Mr. Miles was graduated M. D. from Rush Medical College, Chicago, in 1850, and practiced till 1859. In the meantime he became greatly interested in the subject of a geographical survey of the State, for which an act was passed and approved in 1858. In the organization of the survey, in 1859, he was appointed Assistant State Geologist in the department of zoölogy; and in the next year was appointed professor of zoölogy and animal physiology in the State Agricultural College at Lansing. In his work as zoölogist to the State Geological Survey, in 1859, 1860, and 1861, he displayed rare qualities as a naturalist, so that Mr. Walter R. Barrows, in recording his death in the bulletin of the Michigan Ornithological Club, expresses regret that many of the years he afterward devoted to the development of experimental agriculture "were not spent in unraveling some of the important biological problems which the State afforded, which his skill and perseverance would surely have solved." He was a "born collector," Mr. Barrows adds, "as the phrase is, and his keen eyes, tireless industry, and mathematical precision led to the accumulation of thousands of valuable specimens and more valuable observations." Mr. Bryant Walker, of Detroit, who knew Professor Miles well in later years, and had opportunity to review his zoölogical work, regards the part he took during this service in developing the knowledge of the fauna of the State as having been very prominent. "The catalogues he published in the report for 1860 have been the basis for all work since that time." He kept in correspondence with the most eminent American naturalists of the period, including Cope, Prime, Lea, W. G. Binney, Baird, and Agassiz, and supplied them with large quantities of valuable material. From the many letters written by these naturalists which are in the possession of his friends, we take, as illustrating the character of the service he rendered and of the trust they reposed in him, even previous to his going on the survey, one from Agassiz, of February 4, 1856: "DEAR SIR: As you have already furnished me with invaluable materials for the natural history of the fishes of your State, I am emboldened to ask another favor of you. I am preparing a map of the Geographical Distribution of the Turtles of North America, and would be greatly indebted to you for any information respecting the range of those found in your State, as far as you have noticed them, even if you should know them only by their common names, my object being simply to ascertain how far they extend over different parts of the country. If you could add specimens of them, to identify them with precision, it would be, of course, so much the better; but as I am almost ready for the press, I could not for this paper await the return of spring, but would thank you for what you could furnish me now. I am particularly interested in ascertaining how far north the different species inhabiting this continent extend." On the back of this letter was Dr. Miles's indorsement that a box had been sent. A number of letters from Professor Baird, of 1860 and 1861, relate to the identification of specimens collected by Dr. Miles, and to the fishes of Michigan, and contain inquiries about gulls and eggs. Dr. Miles likewise supplied Cope with a considerable amount of material concerning Michigan reptiles and fishes. While mollusks were the favorite object of Dr. Miles's investigations, he also made studies and valuable collections of birds, mammals, reptiles, and fishes; and he seems, Mr. Barrows says, "to have possessed, in a high degree, that strong characteristic of a true naturalist, a full appreciation of the value of good specimens. Many of his specimens are now preserved at the Agricultural College, and among his shells are many which are of more than ordinary value from having served as types of new species, or as specimens from type localities, or as part or all of the material which has helped to clear up mistakes and misconceptions about species and their distribution." Mr. Walker speaks of his having done a great work in conchology. His catalogue, which contained a list of one hundred and sixty-one species, was by far the most complete published up to that time. "He described two new species--_Planorbis truncatus_ and _Unio leprosus_. The former is one of the few species which are, so far as known, peculiar to Michigan, and is a very beautiful and distinct form; while the latter, although now considered as synonymous with another species, has peculiarities which in the then slight knowledge of the variability of the species was a justification of his position. He was also the discoverer of two other forms which were named after him by one of our most eminent conchologists--viz., _Campeloma Milesii_ (Lea) and _Guiobasis Milesii_ (Lea)." Mr. Walker believes that "in general, it can be truthfully stated that Dr. Miles did more to develop the general natural history of that State (Michigan) than any other man either before or since he completed his work as State Geologist." As professor of zoölogy and animal physiology, Dr. Miles is described by one of his students, who afterward became a professor in the college and then its president, as having been thoroughly interested in the subjects he taught, and shown that interest in his work and in his treatment of his students. He labored as faithfully and industriously with the class of five to which President Clute belonged as if it "had numbered as many score." He supplemented the meager equipment of his department from his more extensive private apparatus and collections, which were freely used for class work; and, when there was need, he had the skill to prepare new pieces of apparatus. "He was on the alert for every chance for illustration which occasion offered: an animal slaughtered for the tables gave him an opportunity to lecture on its viscera; a walk over the drift-covered fields found many specimens of rock which he taught us to distinguish; the mud and the sand banks along the river showed how in the periods of the dim past were formed fossil footprints and ripples; the woods and swamps and lakes gave many useful living specimens, some of which became the material for the improvised dissecting room; the crayon in his hand produced on board or paper the chart of geologic ages, the table of classification, or the drawing of the part of an animal under discussion." Prof. R. C. Kedzie came to the college a little later, in 1863, when Dr. Miles had been for two years a professor, and found him then the authority "for professors and students alike on beasts, birds, and reptiles, on the stones of the field, and insects of the air," thorough, scholarly, and enthusiastic, and therefore very popular with his classes. The projection of agricultural colleges under the Agricultural College Land Grant Act of 1862 stimulated a demand for teachers of scientific agriculture, and it was found that they were rare. Of old school students of science there was no lack--able men, as President Clute well says, who were familiar with their little laboratories and with the old theories and methods, but who did not possess the new vision of evolution and the conservation of energy, men of the study rather than the field, and least of all men of the orchard and stock farm; and they knew nothing of the practical application of chemistry to fertilization and the raising of crops and the composition of feed stuffs, of physiology to stock-breeding, and of geology and physics to the study of the soils. With a thorough knowledge of science and familiarity with practical agriculture Professor Miles had an inclination to enter this field, and this inclination was encouraged by President Abbott and some of the members of the Board of Agriculture. He had filled the professorship of zoölogy and animal physiology with complete success, and had he consulted his most cherished tastes alone he would have remained there, but he gradually suffered himself to be called to another field. The duties of "acting superintendent of the farm" were attached to his chair in 1864. In 1865 he became professor of animal physiology and practical agriculture and superintendent of the farm; in 1869 he ceased to teach physiology, and gave his whole time to the agricultural branch of his work; and in 1875 the work of the superintendent of the farm was consigned to other hands, and he confined himself to the professorship proper of practical agriculture. The farm and its appurtenances, with fields cumbered with stumps and undrained, with inadequate and poorly constructed buildings, with inferior live stock, and everything primitive, were in poor condition for the teaching or the successful practice of agriculture. Professor Miles's first business was to set these things in order. Year by year something was done to remove evils or improve existing features in some of the departments of the life and management of the premises, till the concern in a certain measure approached the superintendent's ideal--as being a laboratory for teaching agriculture, conducting experiments, and training men, rather than a money-making establishment. In this new field, Professor Kedzie says, Professor Miles was even more popular than before with students, and created an enthusiasm for operations and labors of the farm which had been regarded before as a disagreeable drudgery. The students "were never happier than when detailed for a day's work with Dr. Miles in laying out some difficult ditch or surveying some field. One reason why he was so popular was that he was not afraid of soiling his hands. His favorite uniform for field work was a pair of brown overalls. The late Judge Tenney came to a gang of students at work on a troublesome ditch and inquired where he could find Dr. Miles. 'That man in overalls down in the quicksands of the ditch is Dr. Miles'; the professor of practical agriculture was in touch with the soil." Prof. Byron D. Halsted, of the New Jersey Agricultural College Experiment Station, who was an agricultural pupil of Dr. Miles in Lansing, characterizes him as having been a full man who knew his subjects deeply and fondly. "In those days I am safe in writing that he represented the forefront of advanced agriculture in America. He was in close touch with such men as Lawes and Gilbert, Rothamstead, England, the famous field-crop experimenters of the world, and as for his knowledge of breeds of live stock and their origin, Miles's Stock-Breeding is a classic work. Dr. Miles, in short, was a close student, a born investigator, hating an error, but using it as a stepping-stone toward truth. He did American farming a lasting service, and his deeds live after him." While loved by his students, most of whom have been successful and many have gained eminence as agricultural professors or workers in experiment stations, and while receiving sympathy and support from President Abbott, Dr. Miles was not appreciated by the politicians, or by all of the Board of Agriculture, or even by the public at large. Unkind and captious criticisms were made of his work, and it was found fault with on economical grounds, as if its prime purpose had been to make money. He therefore resigned his position in 1875, and accepted the professorship of agriculture in the Illinois State University. Thence he removed to the Houghton Farm of Lawson Valentine, near Mountainville, N. Y., where he occupied himself with scientific experimental investigation. He was afterward professor of agriculture in the Massachusetts Agricultural College, at Amherst. In announcing this appointment to the students, Dr. Chadbourne, then president of the institution, and himself a most successful teacher, stated that he considered Dr. Miles as the ablest man in the United States for that position. In 1886, shortly after Dr. Chadbourne's death, Dr. Miles returned to his old home in Lansing, Michigan, where he spent the rest of his life in study, research, and the writing of books and articles for scientific publications. During these later years of his life he took up again with what had been his favorite pursuit in earlier days, but with which he had not occupied himself for thirty years--the study of mollusks--with the enthusiasm of a young man, Mr. Walker says, who being interested in the same study, was in constant correspondence with him at this time; "and as far as his strength permitted labored with all the acumen and attention to details which were so characteristic of him. I was particularly struck with his familiarity with the present drift of scientific investigation and thought, and his thorough appreciation of modern methods of work. He was greatly interested in the work I was carrying on with reference to the geographical distribution of the mollusca, and, as would naturally be supposed from his own work in heredity in connection with our domestic animals, took great pleasure in discussing the relations of the species as they are now found and their possible lines of descent. He was a careful and accurate observer of Nature, and if he had not drifted into other lines of work would undoubtedly have made his mark as a great naturalist. As it is, his name will always have an honored place in the scientific history of Michigan." When Professor Miles began to teach in the Michigan Agricultural College, the "new education" was new indeed, and the textbook method still held sway. But the improved methods were gradually taking the place of the old ones, and Professor Miles was one of the first to co-operate in them, and he did it with effect. He used text-books, "but his living word," President Clute says, "supplemented the book; and the animal from the farm under his knife and ours, the shells which he led us to find under the rotten logs and along the rivers and lakes, the insects he taught us to collect and classify, the minerals and fossils he had collected on the geological survey of Michigan, all were used to instruct and inspire his students, to cultivate in them the scientific spirit and method." Among the more important books by Professor Miles are Stock-Breeding, which had a wide circulation and has been much used as a class-book; Experiments with Indian Corn, giving the results of some important work which he did at Houghton Farm; Silos and Ensilage, which helped much in diffusing knowledge of the silo in the times when it had to fight for recognition; and Land Drainage. Of his papers, he published in the Popular Science Monthly articles on Scientific Farming at Rothamstead; Ensilage and Fermentation; Lines of Progress in Agriculture; Progress in Agricultural Science; and How Plants and Animals Grow. To the American Association for the Advancement of Science he contributed papers on Energy as a Factor in Rural Economy; Heredity of Acquired Characters (also to the American Naturalist); Surface Tension of Water and Evaporation; Energy as a Factor in Nutrition; and Limits of Biological Experiments (also to the American Naturalist). Other articles in the American Naturalist were on Animal Mechanics and the Relative Efficiency of Animals as Machines. In the Proceedings of the American Educational Association is an address by him on Instruction in Manual Arts in Connection with Scientific Studies. The records of the U and I Club, of Lansing, of which he was a valued member for ten years, contain papers on a variety of scientific subjects which were read before it, and were highly appreciated. This list does not contain all of Professor Miles's contributions to the literature of science, for throughout his life he was a frequent contributor to the agricultural and scientific press, and a frequent speaker before associations and institutes, "where his lectures were able and practical." No special record is made of the work of Professor Miles in the American Agriculturist, but the correspondence of Professor Thurber with him furnishes ample proof that he was one of the most trusted advisers in the editorial conduct of that journal. The familiar tone of Professor Thurber's letters, and the undoubting assurance with which he asked for information and aid on various subjects, well demonstrate how well the editor knew whom he could rely upon in an emergency. In all his work the great desire of Professor Miles was to find and present the truth. His merits were recognized by many scientific societies. He was made a corresponding member of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences in 1862; a corresponding member of the Entomological Society of Philadelphia in January, 1863; a correspondent of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1864; a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1880, and a Fellow of the same body in 1890; and held memberships or other relations with other societies; and he received the degree of D. V. S. from Columbia Veterinary College, New York, in March, 1880. His students and friends speak in terms of high admiration of the genial qualities of Professor Miles as a companion. The resolutions of the U and I Club of Lansing describe him as an easy and graceful talker, a cheerful dispenser of his learning to others. "To spend an hour in his 'den,' and watch his delicate experiments with 'films,'" says President Clute, "and see the light in his eyes as he talked of them, was a delight." "He was particularly fond of boys," says another, "and never seemed happier than when in the company of boys or young men who were trying to study and to inform themselves, and if he could in any way assist them he was only too glad to do so"; and he liked pets and children. Incidents are related showing that he had a wonderful accuracy in noting and recollecting the minutest details that came under his observation--a power that he was able to bring to bear instantly when its exercise was called for. Dr. Miles kept up his habits of reading and study to the last days of his life; but all public work was made difficult to him in later years by an increasing deafness. He was tireless in investigation, patient, and always cheerful and looking for the bright side; and when one inquired of him concerning his health, his usual answer was that he was "all right," or, if he could not say that, that he would be "all right to-morrow." No sketch of Dr. Miles is complete without a word of tribute to his high personal character, his life pure and noble in every relationship, his unswerving devotion to truth, and the unfaltering loyalty to his friends, which make his memory a benediction and an inspiration to all who knew him well. He was married in 1851 to Miss Mary E. Dodge, who remained his devoted companion until his death, which occurred February 15, 1898. Editor's Table. _SCIENCE AND CULTURE._ We do not know from whom the philosopher Locke quotes the saying, "_Non vitæ sed scholæ discimus_," but he translates it well, "We learn not to live, but to dispute." The adage has reference to the old systems of education which had for their aim neither the discovery of truth nor the perfecting of the human faculties in any broad sense, but the fitting of the individual to take his place in a world of conventional ideas and discuss conventional topics upon conventional lines. In other words, the preparation was for school, not for life, the whole subsequent career of the individual being regarded simply as a prolongation of the intellectual influences and discipline of the school. That system, which was ecclesiastical in its origin, has now, save for strictly ecclesiastical purposes, passed away. We consider life as the end of school and not school as the end of life. It may be questioned, however, whether we have as yet thoroughly adapted our educational methods to this change of standpoint. Do we as yet take a sufficiently broad view of life? If we conceive life narrowly as essentially a business struggle, and adapt our procedure to that conception, the results will show very little relation to the larger and truer conception according to which life means development of faculty, activity of function, and a harmonious adjustment of relations between man and man. If, again, we make too much of knowledge that has only a conventional value, having little or no bearing on the understanding of things or the accomplishment of useful work, we are so far falling into the old error of "learning for school." The address by Sir Archibald Geikie, which we published last month, gives a useful caution against undervaluing "the older learning." The older learning can certainly be made an effective instrument for the cultivation of taste, of sympathy, and of intellectual accuracy along certain lines. It tends further, we believe, to promote a certain intellectual self-respect, which is a valuable quality. In the study of language and literature the human mind surveys, as it were, its own peculiar possessions, and thus acquires a sense of proprietorship which a study of the external world can hardly give. Still, it is well to cultivate a consciousness of the essentially limited and arbitrary nature of such knowledge. It is important, we may admit, to have a good text of such an author as Chaucer; but the minutiæ into which critics of his text enter can not be said to possess any broad human interest. Whether he wrote this word or that word, adopted this spelling or that, can not be a question on which much depends; and could one know the exact truth on a thousand such points, he would not really be much the wiser. Among Chaucer scholars he could speak with a good deal of confidence; but the knowledge of these details would not really help to round out any useful _system_ of knowledge, nor could any single fact possess the illuminating power which sometimes belongs to some single and, at first sight, unimportant fact in the realm of natural knowledge. This is not said with any intention of disparaging the culture that comes of literary study. It is a culture that tends to brighten human intercourse and to sweeten a man's own thoughts. It is a culture eminently favorable to flexibility of mind and quick insight into human character. So far it is a culture "for life"; but too often it tends to become a culture "for school"--that is to say, when things are learned simply to meet conventional demands and conform to the fashion of the time. A true and sufficient culture can never, as we conceive, be founded on literature and language alone. No mind can be truly liberalized without imbibing and assimilating the fundamental principles of science. There is darkness in the mind that believes that anything can come out of nothing and which has never obtained a glimpse of the exactness with which Nature solves her equations. In the region of mechanics alone there are a thousand beautiful and varied illustrations of the unfailing constancy of natural laws. It is a liberal education to trace the operation of one law under numberless disguises, and thus arrive at an ineradicable conviction that the same law must be reckoned with always and everywhere. The persistence of force, the laws of the composition and resolution of forces, the laws of falling bodies and projectiles, the conservation of energy, the laws of heat, to mention only a few heads of elementary scientific study, are capable, if properly unfolded and illustrated, of producing in any mind open to large thoughts a sense of harmony and a trust in the underlying reason of things, which are constitutive elements of the very highest culture. Only, care must be taken to approach these studies in a right spirit. There is a way of regarding the laws of Nature which tends to vulgarize rather than refine the mind. If we approach Nature merely as something to be exploited, we get no culture from the study of it; but if we approach it as the great men of old did, and feel that in learning its laws we are grasping the thoughts which went to the building of the universe, and, by so doing, are affirming our own high calling as intelligent beings, then every moment given to the study of Nature means intellectual, moral, and spiritual gain. When we look into literature there is much to charm, much to delight and satisfy; and doubtless, in relation to what any one man can accomplish, the field is infinite; but still we know we are looking into the limited. On the other hand, when we are face to face with Nature, we know we are looking into the infinite, and that, however many veils we may take away, there is still "veil after veil behind." It is needless to say that there are thousands of minds in the world possessed of good native power, but laboring under serious disability for the want of that culture which science alone can bestow. Some of these are sick with morbid longings for unattainable knowledge, and openly or secretly rebellious at the limitations of a Nature whose powers they have never even begun to explore. To such persons anything like an adequate insight into the harmony amid diversity of Nature's laws would come with all the force of a revelation, and would, we may well believe, clear their minds of the feverish fancies which have made them so restless and dissatisfied; but, alas! it is rarely that such enlightenment comes to those who have not in youth imbibed a portion of the scientific spirit. In this class are to be found the victims of spiritualism, of the Keeley motor, and even of that grotesque satire, the success of which we remember almost with fear and trembling, the "sympsychograph." Still, to all such we would say: "Come forth into the light of things; Let Nature be your teacher." The "Nature" which we require to teach us for the peace and tranquillity of our souls is the Nature of everyday phenomena, the Nature that forms the clouds and rounds the raindrops, that springs in the grass and pulses in the tides, that glances in the sunbeam and breathes in the flower, that works witchery in the crystal and breaks into glory in the sunset. The mind that knows what can be known of these things has feasted full of wonder and beauty, and makes no greedy demand for higher grace or mightier miracle. Then again there are those who for want of a little elementary scientific knowledge, and particularly for want of an assured conviction that Nature gives nothing for nothing, are continually attempting the impossible in the way of projected inventions. They catch at a phrase and think it must represent a fact; they fall victims to a verbal mythology of their own manufacture. If there was much hope of their learning anything of value through disappointment, they might be left to the teaching of experience, costly as the lessons of that master are. But they do not learn: their hopes are blasted, their fortunes, if they had any, are wrecked, but their infatuations survive. Where is the inventor of a perpetual motion who ever ceased to have confidence in his peculiar contrivance? The thing may be as motionless as a tombstone, save when urged by external force into a momentary lumbering activity; but all the same, it only needs, its misguided author thinks, a little doctoring, a trifling change here or there, to make it tear round like mad. And so with other inventors of the impossible: they take counsel not with Nature, but with their own wholly incorrect notions of what the operations of Nature are. The least power of truly analyzing a natural phenomenon, and separating the factors that produce it, would show them the falsity of their ideas; but that power they do not possess. We can not, then, plead too strongly for the teaching of science, not with a view to results in money, but with a view to the improvement of the mind and heart of the learner, or, in other words, as a source of culture. Literature introduces us to the world of human thought and action, to the kingdom of man; and science shows us how the thought and powers of man can be indefinitely enlarged by an ever increasing acquaintance with the laws of the universe. Literature alone leaves the mind without any firm grasp of the reality of things, and science alone tends to produce a hard, prosaic, and sometimes antisocial temper. Each helps to bring out the best possible results of the other; and it is only by their joint action that human faculties and human character can ever be brought to their perfection. _SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST._ It is singular what a propensity some writers have to misunderstand and misrepresent the views of Mr. Herbert Spencer, even upon points in regard to which he has made every possible effort to avoid occasion for misapprehension. The term "survival of the fittest" is one which Mr. Spencer himself introduced as being, perhaps, a little less open to misunderstanding than the Darwinian expression "natural selection." The latter seemed to imply purposive action, and Mr. Spencer thought that this implication would be less prominent if the phrase were changed to "survival of the fittest." From the very first, however, he recognized that the difference between the two terms in this respect was, if we may so express it, purely quantitative; and he took care to make it clear that by "the fittest" he did not in the least intend to signify any form of ideal or subjective fitness, but simply a superior degree of adaptation, as a matter of actual fact, to environing conditions. The conditions at any given moment are as they are, and the "fitness" of any particular organism is such a correspondence with those conditions as permits and favors its perpetuation. The conditions do not create fitness; they merely eliminate unfitness; nor does Mr. Spencer conceive any agency as producing _ab extra_ the fitness which enables an organism or a number of organisms to survive. He differs, however, from what is perhaps the dominant school of biology to-day, in holding that the higher forms of organic life are, as he expresses it, "directly equilibrated" with their surroundings through the inheritance of physical features resulting from effort and habit. To whatever cause it may be attributed, few writers whose intellectual activity has extended over so long a term of years as Mr. Spencer's have been so consistent in their utterances at different stages as he. The "Synthetic Philosophy" is the realization of a scheme of thought no less wonderful in its coherence and solidity than in its compass, the author having planted himself from the first at a point of view which gave him a clear command of his entire field. To say that no other system of thought equally comprehensive and equally coherent exists in the world to-day would be to make a statement which few competent and dispassionate authorities would deny. Notwithstanding this, there are writers not a few, particularly of the class "who write with ease," who, as we said at the outset, have a propensity for misunderstanding Mr. Spencer, and who consequently accuse him of inconsistencies and self-contradictions for which nothing that he has ever said affords any warrant. One of these gentlemen is the Duke of Argyll, who has lately offered the world another superfluous book under the title of Organic Evolution Cross-examined. The duke particularly concerns himself with Mr. Spencer's teaching in regard to the "survival of the fittest," and Mr. Spencer, in the columns of Nature, replies to him in a brief but sufficient manner. It is safe to say that Mr. Spencer's philosophy will show Cyclopean remains generations after the name of his ducal critic shall have passed forever into the mists of oblivion; and the "survival of the fittest" will thus be illustrated in a sense in which Mr. Spencer himself never used the words. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. The study of the methods through which the topographical features and rock forms of particular districts have been worked out, as presented in numerous popular monographs, is a fascinating one; and we can hardly doubt that many persons who would never otherwise have thought of it have been made interested in geology by some of these masterly picturesque descriptions of regions with which they were superficially familiar. Other treatises on the origin of surface features, dealing with the subject more fundamentally, but likewise of limited scope, are not wanting. Yet, as Prof. _James Geikie_ well says, there is no English work to which readers not skilled in geology can turn for a general account of the whole subject. Professor Geikie has therefore prepared his elaborate book on _Earth Sculpture_[14] to supply this want, to furnish an introductory treatise for those persons who may be desirous of acquiring some broad knowledge of the results arrived at by geologists as to the development of land forms generally. A vast number of geological questions are involved in the exhaustive treatment of the subject. All the forces with which geologists become acquainted in the study of the earth, and their operation, come into consideration. The effects of these forces assume aspects that vary according to the nature of the material on which they operate, and they are again modified according to the peculiar combinations of forces at work. The subject is therefore not the easy one it may be supposed at first sight to be, and the reader who peruses Professor Geikie's work with the intention of mastering it will find he has some studying to do. Yet Professor Geikie is clear, and it is only because he has gone deeper than the others that he may be harder. The first point he insists upon is that in the fashioning of the earth's surface no hard-and-fast line separates past and present. The work has been going on for a long time, and is still in progress, under a law of evolution as true for the crust of the globe as for the plants and animals. In setting out upon our inquiry we must in the first place know something about rocks and the mode of their arrangement, of the structure or architecture of the earth's crust. This leads to the distinction between the igneous and the subaqueous, the volcanic, plutonic, and metamorphic, and the derivative rocks on which epigene agencies have performed their shaping work. These rocks have been modified in various ways, and the surface appearance of the earth has been affected by forces operating from the interior, and by external factors, the work of which is called denudation. The agents of denudation are described--air, water, heat, frost, chemical action, plants, and animals--often so closely associated in their operations that their individual shares in the final result can hardly be determined. The various influences of these factors as exerted upon different forms of geological structure and different sorts of rocks are then taken up and described as applied to land forms in regions of horizontal, or gently inclined, and of highly folded and disturbed strata, and in regions affected by normal faults or vertical displacements. Land forms due directly or indirectly to igneous action and the influence of rock character on the determination of land forms are subjects of special chapters. Glacial action is one of the most important factors in modifying the forms of northern lands, and is treated with considerable fullness. �olian action--of the air and wind--has peculiar and important effects in arid regions, and underground water in limestone districts, and these receive attention. Then come basins--those due to crustal deformation, crater lakes, river lakes, glacial basins, and others, and coast lines. Finally, a classification is given of these land forms as plains or plateaus of accumulation and of erosion, original or tectonic and subsequent or relict hills and mountains, original or tectonic and subsequent or erosion valleys, basins, and coast lines, and the conclusions are reached that we do not know, except as a matter of probability, whether we have still visible any original wrinkles of the earth's crust; and that some of the estimates of the time it has taken to produce the changes of which we witness the results have been very much exaggerated. The curious conclusions obtained by Dr. _Le Bon_ in his psychological investigations,[15] delivered to us in startling language, are said to be the fruit of extensive travel and of the personal measurement of thousands of skulls. His memoir on cervical researches, published in 1879, upholds the theory that the volume of the skull varies with the intelligence. This theory has perhaps suffered a permanent adumbration. Facts seem to prove that the bony structure of the skull, or even its cranial capacity, gives no positive indication of intellect. In the present volume the theme of discussion is the soul of races. Anthropological classification is set aside and mankind is divided into four groups according to mental characteristics: the primitive, inferior, average, and superior races--the standard of judgment being the degree of their aptitude for dominating reflex impulses. It is perhaps worthy of note that while the Frenchman belongs to a superior race, the Semitic peoples are placed in the class below, or the average sort. For the primitive varieties it is not necessary to observe a South Sea islander, the lower strata of Europeans furnishing numerous examples. When greater differentiation is reached, the word "race" is used in a historical sense. It requires, however, more complete fusion than some nations exhibit to earn this title; for, although there are Germans and Americans, "it is not clear as yet that there are Italians." The race having been once evolved, acquires wondrous potentialities with Dr. Le Bon. He compares it to the totality of cells constituting a living organism, asserts that its mental constitution is as unvarying as its anatomical structure, that it is a permanent being independent of time and founded alone by its dead. It is a short step to endow this entity with a soul consisting of common sentiments, interests, and beliefs--what in brief, robbed of hyperbole, we should call national character. He states that the notion of a country is not possible until a national soul is formed. This, in time, like germ-plasm, becomes so stable that assimilation with foreign elements is impossible. Like natural species, it has secondary characteristics that may be modified, but its fundamental character is like the fin of the fish or the beak of the bird. The acquisition of this soul marks the apogee of the greatness of a people. Psychological species, however, are not eternal, but may decay if the functioning of their organs is troubled profoundly. The soul of the race is best expressed in its art, not in its history or institutions, and, as it can not bequeath its soul, so it can not impress its civilization or art upon an alien race. It was on account of this incompatibility of soul that Grecian art failed to be implanted in India. The unaltering constituent of the soul corresponds to character, while intellectual qualities are variable. By character is meant perseverance, energy, power of self-control, also morality. The latter is hereditary respect for the rules on which a society is based. This definition would make polygamy a moral notion for Mormons. The knowledge of character "can be acquired neither in laboratories nor in books, but only in the course of long travel." Whence it is learned that different races can not have mutual comprehension. Luckily for the student who is unable to travel, the same phenomenon may be observed in the gulf that separates the civilized man and woman. Although highly educated, "they might converse with each other for centuries without understanding one another." These differences between races and individuals demonstrate the falsity of the notion of equality. Indeed, through _science_ "man has learned that to be slaves is the natural condition of all human beings." Naturally he becomes dispirited, anarchy seizes upon the uneducated and sullen indifference the more cultivated. "Like a ship that has lost its compass, the modern man wanders haphazard through the spaces formerly peopled by the gods and rendered a desert by science." In France morality is gradually dying out, while the United States is threatened by a gigantic civil war. What to do is problematical, since we are informed "that people have never derived much advantage from too great a desire to reason and think," and what is most harmful to a people is to attain too high a degree of intelligence and culture, the groundwork of the soul beginning to decline when this level is reached. The remedy suggested to us is "the organization of a very severe military service and the permanent menace of disastrous wars." But if we fail to see the improving tendency of this advice, it is probably because we are like historians, "simple-minded," while Dr. Le Bon is much too complex for our understanding. According to his own theory, there is no hope that we may comprehend him, since the outpourings of a soul of the Latin race can not be transferred by a simple bridge of translation to the apprehension of an Anglo-Saxon mind, separated, as he would term it, by "the dead weight of thousands of generations." GENERAL NOTICES. In preparing the new edition of his _Text-Book of Mineralogy_[16] first published in 1877, Prof. _E. S. Dana_ has found it necessary to rewrite the whole as well as to add much new matter and many new illustrations. The work being designed chiefly for use in class or private instruction, the choice of topics discussed, the order and fullness of treatment, and the method of presentation have been determined by that object. The different types of crystal forms are described under the thirty-two groups now accepted, classed according to their symmetry. In the chapters on physical and chemical mineralogy, the plan of the former edition is retained of presenting somewhat fully the elementary principles of the science on which the mineral characters depend, and the author has tried to give the student the means of becoming practically familiar with the modern means of investigation. Especial attention is given to the optical qualities of crystals as revealed by the microscope; and frequent references are introduced to important papers on the different subjects discussed. The descriptive part of the volume is essentially an abridgment of the sixth edition of Dana's System of Mineralogy, published in 1892, to which the student is referred for fuller and supplementary information. A full topical index is furnished in addition to the usual index of species. The title, _The Story of the Railroad_,[17] carries with it the suggestion of an eventful history. The West, in the author's view, begins with the Missouri River. The story of its railroad is the story of the line, now very multiple, that leads to the Pacific Ocean. The beginning of white men's travels in these routes is traced by the editor to the Spanish adventurers of the sixteenth century, who made miserable journeys in search of gold or visionary objects, through regions now traversed by some of the more southern lines. Then came trappers; next costly and painfully undertaken Government expeditions into the then regions of the unknown, the stories of which were the boyhood delight of men now living. The period of practical traversing of the continent began with the raging of the California gold fever, when the journey of many weeks was tiresomely made with ox teams, in the face of actual perils of the desert, starvation, thirst, and the Indians. After California became important, stage and express lines were put on; but still, at the time Mr. Warman takes up the story, less than sixty years ago, the idea of building a railroad to the Pacific was regarded as too visionary to be entertained, and Asa Whitney sacrificed a fortune trying to induce somebody to take it up. The first dreams were for a short route to the Orient. Eventually the idea was developed that the American West might be worth going after, and then the idea of a railroad to it began to assume practical form. Young Engineer Dodge, afterward Major General, began surveys before the civil war; after it General Sherman gave the scheme a great impulse, and the Union Pacific Railroad was built--when and how are graphically and dramatically told in Mr. Warman's book. Next came the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé, and other transcontinental lines, the histories of all of which are related in similar style, with stories of adventures, perils encountered, and lively incidents, including the war between two of the lines for the possession of the Arkansas Cañon; financial mishaps, and political scandal. Then came the settlement of the plains, road-making in Mexico, and the opening of Oklahoma, all of which were made possible by the railroads, and have in turn contributed to support them. The beginnings and growth of the express business are described, and the later lines that have penetrated the plains are mentioned. Prof. _William Benjamin Smith's_ treatise on the _Infinitesimal Analysis_[18] has been written, the author says, on what appeared, in the light of ten years' experience in teaching the calculus, to be lines of least resistance. The aim has been, within a prescribed expense of time and energy, to penetrate as far as possible into the subject, and in as many directions, so that the student shall attain as wide knowledge of the matter, as full comprehension of the methods, and as clear consciousness of the spirit and power of this analysis as the nature of the case would admit. The author has accordingly often followed what seemed to be natural suggestions and impulses toward near-lying extensions or generalizations, and has even allowed them to direct the course of the discussion. In accordance with the plan and purpose of the book as given, "Weierstressian rigor" has been excluded from many investigations, and the postponement has been compelled of some important discussions, which were considered too subtle for an early age of study. Real difficulties, however, have not been knowingly disguised, and pains have been taken on occasion to warn the reader that the treatment given is only provisional, and must await further precision or delimitation. Where the subject has been found too large for the compass of the intended work, or too abstruse or difficult for the contemplated students, the treatment has been compressed or curtailed. The book is, in fact, written for such as feel a genuine interest in the subject; and the illustrations and exercises have been chosen with frequent reference to practical or theoretic importance or to historic interest. Mr. _George Jacob Holyoake_ has written with much enthusiasm the _Jubilee History of the Leeds Industrial Co-operative Society_.[19] Many schemes have been started on lines similar to those of this one, but very few besides it have grown from the very beginning, and, having become to all appearance a permanent institution, can look back upon a career of fifty years with complete satisfaction. The society began in times of public distress. The ground was prepared for it by the "Redemption" Society, which was founded at Leeds in 1845, by admirers of Robert Owen, after the experiment at Queenswood had failed. It practiced a kind of co-operation and had some distinguished friends to wish it well. Among the speakers at its meetings was Dr. Frederic Hollick, still living, now a resident of New York city. The co-operative society was started as a means of getting cheaper flour for its members. On February 25, 1847, an appeal headed "Holbeck Anti-Corn Mill Association" was issued to the working classes of Leeds and vicinity by the "working people of Messrs. Benyon & Co.'s mill," Holbeck, inviting combination and subscriptions for establishing a mill to be the property of the subscribers and their successors, "in order to supply them with flour and flour only." Meetings were held, an organization was effected, and the mill was started. The history of the society and how it grew, how "flour only" was stricken from its scheme and other things were added and it branched out, how co-operative stores were established, how it gained the confidence of the public and the respect of rivals in business, its successes and its mistakes, its triumphs and failures, are told by Mr. Holyoake, year by year, in a detail in which everything is set down and nothing covered up. In 1897 the cooperative society had productive departments of flour, bakery, bespoke clothing, boot and shoe factory, brush factory, cabinet making, building, millinery, and dressmaking, employing 541 hands and turning over £26,949; 80 large stores for the sale of these and various other kinds of goods in Leeds and vicinity; drapery branches and boot and shoe stores; 43 butchering branches; and 37,000 subscribing purchasers. Its capital stood at £447,000; and its sales for the year amounted to £1,042,616. D. Appleton and Company have added to their Home Reading Series _The Earth and Sky_, a primer of Astronomy for Young Readers, by Prof. _Edward S. Holden_. It is intended to be the first of a series of three or more volumes, all treating of astronomy in one form or another, and suited for reading in the school. The treatment is based on the principle that "it is not so simple as it appears to fix in the child's mind the fundamental fact that it is Nature which is true, and the book or the engraving which is a true copy of it. 'It says' is the snare of children as well as of their more sophisticated elders. The vital point to be insisted on is a constant reference from words to things." The volume is written as a conversation with a young lad. He is first shown how he may know for himself that the earth is not flat, though it certainly appears to be so. The next step is to show him that he may know that the earth is in fact round, and that it is a globe of immense size. Its situation in space is next considered, and the child's mind is led to some formal conclusions respecting space itself. It is then directed to the sun, to the moon and its changes, to the stars and their motions, to the revolution of the earth, etc. In 1887 _E. S. Holden_ published through the Regents of the University of California a list of recorded earthquakes on the Pacific coast, it being the first systematic publication of the sort. The purpose of it was to bring to light all the general facts about the various shocks, and enable studies to be made of particular earthquake phenomena. It was necessary at the Lick Observatory to keep a register of the times of occurrence of all shocks on account of their possible effects on the instruments. With this was associated in 1888, when the observatory began its active work, the collection of reports of shocks felt elsewhere on the Pacific coast. Mr. Holden now reprints this pamphlet through the Smithsonian Institution in _A Catalogue of Earthquakes felt on the Pacific Coast, 1769 to 1897_, with many corrections and additions, including a complete account of the earthquake observations at Mount Hamilton from 1887 to 1897, and an abstract of the great amount of information that has been collected regarding other Pacific coast earthquakes during the same interval. The _Psychologie als Erfahrungs-Wissenschaft_ of _Hans Cornelius_ is not intended for a complete account and review of the facts of psychical life, but rather to present the fundamentals of a purely empirical theory, excluding all metaphysical views. Such an account should not start from any arbitrary abstractions or hypotheses, but simply from actually ascertained, directly perceived psychical experiences. On the other hand, an empirical definition should be required for all the terms that are used in a comprehensive description of the experience; and no term should be used without the psychical manifestation described by it being pointed out. After an introduction in which the method and place of psychology, subjective and objective, physiological and genetic, are referred to, the elementary facts of consciousness are discussed. The coherency of knowledge is treated of in the next chapter, and in the third, Psychical Analysis and the conception of unobserved consciousness; and the succeeding chapters are devoted to Sensation, Memory, and Fancy; The Objective World, Truth and Error, and Feeling and Will. (Published at Leipsic, Germany: B. G. Teubner.) An extremely interesting book is given us in the publications of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Society of studies by _George W._ and _Elizabeth Peckham_, of the _Instincts and Habits of the Solitary Wasps_. These insects are familiar enough to us all, as we meet them or see their nests of one or a few cells every day, and then think no more of them. But Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, following them to their haunts and keeping company with them, have found them manifesting remarkable instincts and exercising curious customs, which they describe in the style of persons who are in love with their work. The opportunity for the studies was given in two gardens, one on the top of a hill and the other lower down, with an island in a lake close by and acres of woodland all about, offering a rich variety of nesting places. There are more than a thousand species of these solitary wasps in the United States, to only about fifty of the social ones, and they live without knowledge of their progenitors and without relations with others of their kind. The eighth volume of the report of the _Iowa Geological Survey_ comprises the accounts of surveys completed during 1897 in six counties, making up the whole number of twenty-six counties in which the areal work has been completed. This does not, however, represent the whole extent of the operations of the survey, for some work has been done in nearly every county in the State, and in many counties it will require but little additional work to make a complete report. In addition to the areal work, too, special studies of coal, clay, artesian waters, gypsum, lead, zinc, etc., have engaged attention. A growing public appreciation of the work of the survey as illustrated in the demand for the volumes of the reports and for special papers, is recognized by the State Geologist, Mr. _Samuel Calvin_; and an increasing use of the reports as works for reference and for general study in high schools and other educational institutions is observed. The survey is now collecting statistics of production of various minerals mined in the State. One of the features most likely to attract attention in the _Annual Report of the State Geologist_ of New Jersey for 1897 is the paper of Mr. C. C. Vermeule on the Drainage of the Hackensack and Newark Tide Marshes. In it a scheme is unfolded for the reclamation and diking of the flats, under which an ample navigable waterway shall be developed, and the cities which now stop at their edges may be extended and built up to the very banks of the new harbor, made a highway for ocean sailing vessels. An interesting paper is published by Lewis Woolman on Artesian and Bored and other Wells, in which many important wells are described with reference to the geological strata they penetrate. Other papers relate to iron mining and brick and clay industries, mineral statistics, and statistics of clays, bricks, and terra cotta. The field reports describe progress in the surveys of the surface geology, the Newark system, and the upper Cretaceous formations. On the basis of a reconnoissance made by him for Alexander Agassiz, Mr. _Robert T. Hill_ has published through the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Harvard University, a paper on _The Geological History of the Isthmus of Panama and Portions of Costa Rica_. He finds that there is considerable evidence that a land barrier in the tropical region separated the two oceans as far back as Jurassic time, and continued through the Cretaceous period. The geological structure of the Isthmus and Central American regions, so far as investigated, when considered aside from the paleontology, presents no evidence by which the former existence of a free communication of oceanic waters across the present tropical barriers can be established. The paleontological evidence indicates the ephemeral existence of a passage at the close of the Eocene period. All lines of inquiry give evidence that no communication has existed between the two oceans since the close of the Oligocene. The _Twenty-second Annual Report of the Department of Geology and Natural Resources_ of Indiana, _W. S. Blatchley_, State Geologist, embraces, in part, the results of the work of the several departments of the survey during 1897. These appear in the form of papers of economic importance on the petroleum, stone, and clay resources of the State, natural gases and illuminating oils, a description of the curious geological and topographical region of Lake and Porter Counties, and an extended paper on the Birds of Indiana, with specific descriptions. A large proportion of the energies of the department were employed during the year in gathering data for a detailed report on the coal area of the State, which is now in course of preparation. The _Report of the United States Commissioner of Education_ for 1896-'97 records an increase in the enrollment of schools and colleges of 257,586, the whole number of pupils being 14,712,077 in public institutions and schools, and 1,513,016 in private. The increase is confined to the public institutions, the private ones having suffered from "hard times." Among the numerous papers published in the volume containing the report are those on Education in Great Britain and Ireland, France, Denmark, Norway, Central Europe, and Greece; Commercial Education in Europe; the Teaching of Civics in France, Switzerland, and England; Sunday Schools, including accounts of the several denominational systems; the Legal Rights of Children; and sketches of Horace Mann and Henry Barnard and their work in furthering education. Mr. _David T. Day's_ report on the _Mineral Resources of the United States_ for 1896 appears as Part V of the Eighteenth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, in two volumes of fourteen hundred pages in all; the first of which is devoted to Metallic Products and Coal, and the second to Nonmetallic Products except Coal. The report covers the calendar year 1896, and shows only a slight increase in total values over 1895. Of some substances, however--gold, copper, aluminum, and petroleum being the most important ones--the value was the greatest ever attained. Of other substances, including lead, bituminous coal, building stones, mineral waters, salt, and pyrites, the product was increased in amount, but the value was less. A paper, by Mr. George F. Becker, on the Witwatersrand Banket, records observations made by him in the Transvaal gold fields. _A Geological Reconnoissance of the Coal Fields of the Indian Territory_, published in the Contributions to Biology of the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory of Leland Stanford Junior University, by _Noah Fields Drake_, is based upon a six months' examination made by the author during the spring, summer, and fall of 1896, of the larger part of the coal measures and adjacent formations of Indian and Oklahoma Territories. The best maps that could then be had being exceedingly inaccurate, sketch maps were made of areas that were especially important. On account of features of particular geological interest, nearly all the area south and east of the Canadian River and the bordering areas of the Boone chert and limestones were sketched and studied rather closely. The _American Catholic Historical Society_ at Philadelphia publishes in its _Quarterly Records_ much that, while it must be of deep interest to historical students holding the Roman Catholic faith, possesses, perhaps, a strong though more general interest to all students of American history; for the men of that faith have had no small part in the colonization and development of this country. The number for June, 1898, contains a portrait and a bibliographical sketch of the Rev. Peter Henry Lemke, O. S. B., of Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Elizabeth, N. J.; a poem on the Launch of the American Frigate United States, whose commander was a Catholic; articles on the Sir John James Fund, and Catholic Chronicles of Lancaster, Pa., and Extracts from the Diary of the Rev. Patrick Kenny. A memoir on _A Determination of the Ratio ([Greek: chi]) of the Specific Heats at Constant Pressure and at Constant Volume for Air, Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide, and Hydrogen_ gives the result of a series of investigations by Drs. _O. Lummer_ and _E. Pringshein_, of Charlottenburg, Germany, made with the aid of a grant from the Hodgkins Fund of the Smithsonian Institution. Besides being of exceptional importance in thermodynamics, the specific heat ratio is of interest as affording a clew to the character of the molecule. In the present investigation coincident results on the gases examined appear to have been reached for the first time. (Published by the Smithsonian Institution.) From the greater lightness of the air and the higher velocity of its currents, it is evident that the materials it may carry and deposit will be somewhat different in composition and structure from those which are laid down in water. They are as a rule finer, they exhibit a different bedding, and are more capriciously placed. Mr. _Johan August Udden_ has made a careful study of the subject, the results of which he publishes under the title of _The Mechanical Composition of Wind Deposits_, as the first number of the Augustana Library Series, at the Lutheran Augustana Book Concern, Rock Island, Ill. The _History Reader for Elementary Schools_ (The Macmillan Company, 60 cents), prepared by _L. L. W. Wilson_ and arranged with special reference to holidays, contains readings for each month of the school year, classified according to different periods and phases of American history generally, so chosen that some important topic of the group shall bear a relation to the month in which it is to be read. The groups concern the Indians, the Discovery of America, Thanksgiving, Other Settlements (than those of Virginia and the Pilgrims), Dr. Franklin, Lincoln and Washington, the Revolution, Arbor Day, and Brave Sea Captains, etc., closing with articles in reference to Flag Day. The insertion of an article on the War with Spain seems premature. Public sentiment is not yet at rest on the subject. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Cornell University: No. 160. Hints on Rural School Grounds. By L. H. Bailey. Pp. 20; No. 161. Annual Flowers. By G. N. Lanman and L. H. Bailey. Pp. 32; No. 162. The Period of Gestation in Cows. By H. H. Wing. Pp. 120.--Delaware College: No. 43 (abridged edition). The European and Japanese Chestnuts in the United States. By G. H. Powell. Pp. 16.--Michigan: Nos. 164 and 165. Methods and Results of Tillage, and Draft of Farm Implements. By M. W. Fulton. Pp. 24; Elementary Science Bulletin, No. 5. Branches of Sugar Maple and Beech as seen in Winter. By W. J. Beal. Pp. 4; do., No. 6. Potatoes, Rutabagas, and Onions. By W. J. Beal. Pp. 6.--New Jersey: No. 133. Peach Growing in New Jersey. By A. T. Jordan. Pp. 16; No. 134. Fermentation and Germ Life. By Julius Nelson. Pp. 24.--North Dakota: No. 15. Some Chemical Problems Investigated. Pp. 28.--Ohio: Newspaper Bulletin 188. Sugar Beets and Sorghum in Ohio. Pp. 2. Aston, W. G. A History of Japanese Literature. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 408. $1.50. Berry, Arthur. A Short History of Astronomy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 440. $1.50. Brush and Pencil. An Illustrated Magazine of the Arts and Crafts. Monthly. Chicago: Arts and Crafts Company. Pp. 64. 25 cents. $2.50 a year. Bulletins, Reports, etc. Colgate University, Department of Geology and Natural History: Announcement. Pp. 16.--Field Columbian Museum, Chicago: Annual Report of the Board of Directors for 1897-'98. Pp. 90, with plates.--Financial Reform Association: 1848 to 1898. Fifty Years' Retrospect. London. Pp. 54, with plates; Financial Reform Almanac for 1899. London. Pp. 316. 1 shilling.--New York State Library: Legislative Bulletin for 1898. Pp. 132. 25 cents.--New York University: Catalogue and Announcements for 1898-'99. Pp. 358.--Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind: Sixty-seventh Annual Report of the Trustees, to August 31, 1898. Pp. 305.--United States Department of Labor: Bulletin No. 20, January, 1899. Edited by Carroll D. Wright and Oren W. Weaver. Pp. 170. Byrd, Mary E. Laboratory Manual in Astronomy. Boston: Ginn & Co. Pp. 273. Cajori, Florian. A History of Physics in its Elementary Branches, including the Evolution of Physical Laboratories. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 323. $1.60. Callie, J. W. S. John Smith's Reply to "Merrie England, Defense of the Liberal Programme." London: John Heywood. Pp. 88. Sixpence. Chapman, Frank H., Editor. Bird Lore. February, 1898, Vol. I, No. 1. Bimonthly. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 32. 20 cents. $1 a year. Davenport, Charles B. Experimental Morphology. Part II. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 509. $2. Evans, A. H. Birds (The Cambridge Natural History, edited by S. F. Harmer and A. E. Shipley, Vol. IX). New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 635. $3.50. Egbert, Seneca. A Manual of Hygiene and Sanitation. Philadelphia: Lea Brothers & Co. Pp. 368. Foulke, William Dudley. Slav or Saxon: a Study of the Growth and Tendencies of Russian Civilization. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 141. $1. Huntington, Elon. The Earth's Rotation and its Interior Heat. Pp. 33. Janes, Lewis G. Our Nation's Peril. Social Ideas and Social Progress. Pp. 31. 25 cents. McLellan, J. A., and Ames, A. F. The Public School Mental Arithmetic. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 138. 25 cents. Boston: James H. West & Co. Maltbie, Milo Ray. Municipal Functions. A Study of the Development, Scope, and Tendency of Municipal Socialism. (Municipal Affairs, December, 1898.) New York: Reform Club, Committee of Municipal Administration. Pp. 230. 75 cents. Mason, Hon. William E. Speech in the United States Senate on the Government of Foreign Peoples. Pp. 26. Patten, Simon N. The Development of English Thought. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 415. $3. Pittsburg Press Almanac, The, for 1899. Quarterly. St. Louis: The Press Publishing Company. Pp. 536. Récéjac, E. Essay on the Basis of the Mystic Knowledge. Translated by Sera Carr Upton. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 287. $2.50. Reprints. Caldwell, Otis W. The Life History of Lemna Minor. Pp. 32.--Calkins, G. N. Some Hydroids from Puget Sound. Pp. 24, with six plates.--Cope, Edward D. Vertebrate Remains from the Port Kennedy Bone Deposit. Pp. 75, with plates.--Fitz, G. W. Play as a Factor in Development. Pp. 7; The Hygiene of Instruction in Elementary Schools. Pp. 7.--Howard, William Lee. Double Personality; Lenten Hysteria. Pp. 8.--Howe, R. H., Jr. North American Wood Frogs.--Hunt, Charles Wallace. The Engineer: His Work, his Ethics, his Pleasures. (President's Address, American Society of Mechanical Engineers.) Pp. 15.--Hunter, S. J. The Coccidæ of Kansas. Pp. 15, with plates.--Krauss, W. C. The Stigmata of Degeneration. Pp. 360.--Lichty, D. Thalassic Submersion a Means of Disposal of the Dead. Pp. 12.--McDonald, Arthur. Emile Zola. Pp. 16.--Phillips, W. B. Iron Making in Alabama. Montgomery. Pp. 380.--Saunders, De Alten. Phycological Memoirs. Pp. 20, with plates.--Schlicht, Paul J. A New Process of Combustion. Pp. 32.--Stevens, F. L. The Effect of Aqueous Solutions upon the Germination of Fungus Spores. Pp. 30.--Stock, H. H. The International Correspondence Schools, Scranton, Pennsylvania. Pp. 12.--Urn, The. Modern Thought on Modern Cremation. United States Cremation Company. Pp. 40.--Veeder, M. A. The Relative Importance of Flies and Water Supply in Spreading Disease. Pp. 8. Robinson, Albert Gardner. The Porto Rico of To-day. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 240, with maps. $1.50. Salazar, A. E. Kalkules de Kañerius de Agua (Calculations of Water Conduits). Santiago de Chile. Pp. 246. Schnabel, Dr. Carl. Handbook of Metallurgy. Translated by Henry Louis. 2 vols. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 876 and 732. $10. Seligman, E. R. A. The Shifting and Incidence of Taxation. Second edition. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 337. $3. Semon, Richard. In the Australian Bush and on the Coast of the Coral Sea. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 552. $6.50. Spencer, Baldwin, and Gillen, F. J. The Native Tribes of Central Australia. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 671, with plates. $6.50. Technology Review, The. A Quarterly Magazine relating to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. January, 1899. Pp. 143. 35 cents. United States National Museum. Annual Report for the Year ending June 30, 1896. (Smithsonian Institution.) Washington. Pp. 1107, with plates. Weir, James. The Dawn of Reason. Mental Traits in the Lower Animals. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 234. $1.25. Westcott, Edward N. David Harum. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 392. $1.50. Whipple, G. C. The Microscopy of Drinking Water. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 300, with nineteen plates. $3.50. Wilkinson, F. The Story of the Cotton Plant. (Library of Useful Stories.) New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 191. 40 cents. FOOTNOTES: [14] Earth Sculpture, or the Origin of Land Forms. By James Geikie. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 397. Price, $2. [15] The Psychology of Peoples. By Gustave Le Bon. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 236. Price, $1.50. [16] A Text-Book of Mineralogy, with an Extended Treatise on Crystallography and Physical Mineralogy. By Edmund Salisbury Dana. New edition, entirely rewritten and enlarged. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 593. $4. [17] The Story of the Railroad. By Cy Warman. New York: D. Appleton and Company (Story of the West Series). Pp. 280. Price, $1.50. [18] Infinitesimal Analysis. By William Benjamin Smith. Vol. I. Elementary; Real Variables. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 352. $3.25. [19] The Jubilee History of the Leeds Industrial Co-operative Society from 1847 to 1897. Traced Year by Year. By George Jacob Holyoake. Leeds (Eng.) Central Co-operative Office. Pp. 260. Fragments of Science. =The Nernst Electric Lamp.=--Prof. Walter Nernst, of the University of Göttingen, has recently devised an electric lamp which promises to be an important addition to our present methods of lighting. The part of the lamp which emits the light consists of a small rod of highly refractory material, said to be chiefly thoria, which is supported between two platinum electrodes. The rod is practically a nonconductor when cold, but by heating it (in the smaller sizes a match is sufficient) its conductivity is so raised that a current will pass through it; after the current is once started the heat produced by the resistance of the rod is sufficient to keep up its conductivity, and the latter is raised to a state of intense incandescence, and gives out a brilliant white light. As the preliminary heating by means of a match or other flame would in some cases be an inconvenience, Professor Nernst has devised a lamp which, by means of a platinum resistance attachment, can be started by simply turning a switch. The life of the rods is about five hundred hours. The lamps are said to work equally well with either alternating or direct currents, and there is no vacuum necessary. If this lamp proves a success as a commercial apparatus, it will be but another example of how slight a matter may make all the difference between success and failure. There have been numerous experimenters trying for the last ten years, and in fact ever since the appearance of the arc lamp, to utilize in an electric lamp the great light-giving power of the refractory earths in a state of incandescence; but, owing to their high resistance at ordinary temperatures, no results were obtained until Professor Nernst thought of heating his thoria rod, and this simple procedure seems to have solved the whole difficulty. It is claimed that the Nernst lamp is a much more economical transformer of electricity into light than the present incandescent electric lamps. An apparatus called a kaolin candle, which has been suggested as an anticipation of Professor Nernst's lamp, was constructed by Paul Jablochkoff in 1877 or 1878. It consisted of a strip of kaolin, along which ran a "match" of some conducting material. The current was passed through this "match" until the kaolin strip became heated sufficiently to become a conductor itself. The lamp did not, however, prove a commercial success. =Laws of Climatic Evolution.=--The problem of the laws of climatic evolution was characterized by Dr. Marsden Manson, in a paper read at the British Association, as one of the grandest and most far-reaching problems in geological physics, since it embraces principles and laws applicable to other planets than ours. After presenting a formulation of those laws, the author pointed out that in consequence of their working, a hot spheroid rotating in space and revolving about a central sun, and holding fluids of similar properties to water and air within the sphere of its control, must pass through a series of uniform climates at sea level, gradually decreasing in temperature and terminating in an ice age, and that this age must be succeeded by a series of zonal climates gradually increasing in temperature and extent. The conclusions thus reached were that in the case of the earth zonal distribution of climates was inaugurated at the culmination of the ice age, and is gradually increasing in temperature and extent by the trapping of the solar energy in the lower atmosphere, and that the rise has a moderate limit; that the ice age was unique and due to the physical properties of water and air, and to the difference in specific heat of land and water; and that prior to the ice age local formation of glaciers could occur at any latitude and period. Dr. Manson then observed that Jupiter was apparently in a condition through which the earth has already passed, and Mars was in one toward which the climatic evolution of the earth was tending. =Poisonous Plants.=--Statistics in regard to poisonous plants are lacking on account of a general ignorance of the subject, and it is therefore impossible to form even an approximate estimate of the damage done by them. Besides the criminal uses that may be made of them, there are some other problems connected with them that are of general public interest. The common law of England holds those who possess and cultivate such plants responsible for damages accruing from them; and a New York court has awarded damages in a case of injury from poison ivy growing in a cemetery. In order to obtain information on the subject, the botanical division of the Department of Agriculture arranged to receive notices through the clipping bureaus of the cases of poisoning recorded in the newspapers. Thus through the persons named in the articles or through the local postmaster it was put in correspondence with the physician in the case, who furnished the authentic facts. A large number of correct and valuable data were thus secured. It is proved by these facts that all poisonous plants are not equally injurious to all persons nor to all forms of life. Thus poison ivy has no apparent external effect upon animals, and a few of them eat its leaves with impunity; and it acts upon the skin of the majority of persons with varying intensity--on some hardly at all, while others are extremely sensitive to it. A similar variability is found in the effects of poisonous plants taken internally. In some cases often regarded as of that kind, death is attributable not to any poison which the plant contains, but to immoderate or incautious eating, or to mechanical injury such as is produced in horses by the hairs of crimson clover, or to the effect of parasitic growths, such as ergot on rye. Excluding all which operate in these ways, there are, however, a large number of really poisonous plants, the properties of which are comparatively unknown. It is concerning these that information has been sought by the botanical division. Its report contains descriptions of about forty plants, with figures, belonging to seventeen families. =The United States Biological Survey.=--The Biological Survey of the United States Department of Agriculture aims to define and map the agricultural belts of the country in order to ascertain what products of the soil can and what can not be grown successfully in each, to guide the farmer in the intelligent introduction of foreign crops, and to point out his friends and his enemies among the native birds and animals. For information on these subjects so important to him the farmer has had to rely on his own experiments or those of his neighbors, often carried on at enormous cost to persons little able to bear it. The Survey and its predecessor, the division of ornithology and mammology, have had small parties in the field traversing the public domain for the purpose of studying the geographic distribution of our native land animals and plants and mapping the boundaries of the areas they inhabit. It was early learned that North America is divisible into seven transcontinental belts or life zones and a much larger number of minor areas or _faunas_, each characterized by particular associations of animals and plants. The inference was natural and has been verified that these same zones and areas, up to the northern limit of profitable agriculture, are adapted to the needs of particular kinds or varieties of cultivated crops. The Survey is engaged in tracing as precisely as possible the actual boundaries of these belts and areas, and in finding out and designating the varieties of crops best adapted to each. In this undertaking it aims to point out such exotic products as, from their importance in other lands, are likely to prove of value if introduced on fit soils and under proper climatic conditions. The importance of this work will be realized when it is recollected that all the climatic life zones of the world, except the hottest tropical, are represented in our country. The colored maps prepared by the Survey furnish the best guide the farmer can have for judging what crops will be best adapted for his particular region; and in connection with the work of the entomologist, show the belts along which noxious insects are likely to spread. The report of the Survey, prepared under the direction of its chief, C. Hart Merriam, though full of valuable information not before presented consecutively, is preliminary and only touches the edge of a subject which is susceptible of copious elaboration, and is destined to be worked up with immense profit. =A Neolithic Lake Dwelling.=--A crannog, or lake dwelling, discovered in the summer of 1898 on the banks of the Clyde, has received much attention from English archæologists because of its unique situation on a tidal stream, and of its being apparently neolithic or far more ancient than any other crannog yet examined, in all others the relics being of the bronze age. Careful excavations have been made in it and are still in progress, and the refuse mound of the former settlement has been sifted, with results that have made it plain that there were design and execution in the building, and that it was occupied and inhabited for a long period. Positive evidence of fire is afforded in the shape of numerous firestones and calcined embers, and indications of the condition of life at the period are given by the implements, ornaments, and tools recovered. The crannog is about sixteen hundred yards east of the Castle Rock of Dumbarton, and about fifty yards from the river at low tide, but is submerged when the tide is in to a depth of from three to twelve feet, and is one hundred and eighty-four feet in circuit. The piles in the outer circle are of oak, which below the mud surface is still quite fresh. The transverse beams and pavement inside are of wood of the consistence of cheese--willow, alder, and oak--while the smaller branches are of fir, birch, and hazel, with bracken, moss, and chips. The stones in the outer circle and along the causeway leading to the dwelling place seem to have been set in a methodical order, most of the bowlders being about a lift for a man. The refuse mound extends for about twelve feet outside for the greater part of the circuit, and here most of the bone and flint implements have been discovered. The largest article found in the site was a very fine canoe, thirty-seven feet long and forty inches beam, dug out of a single oak tree, which lay in what has proved to have been a dock. A curious ladder was also found here, the rungs of which were cut out of the solid wood, and which has somewhat the general appearance of a post of a post-and-rail fence. The exploration of the site is much interfered with by the rising of the tide, which covers the crannog for a considerable time every day. All the relics found--consisting chiefly of objects of bone, staghorn, jet, chert, and cannel coal, with some querns, the canoe, ladder, etc.--have been placed in the museum at Glasgow. =Portland Cement.=--The following facts are taken from an address delivered before the Franklin Institute by Mr. Robert W. Lesley: "It was not until the end of the last century that the true principles of hydraulic cement were discovered by Smeaton, who, in the construction of the Eddystone Lighthouse, made a number of experiments with the English limestones, and laid down, as a result, the principle that a limestone yielding from fifteen to twenty-five per cent of residue when dissolved in hydrochloric acid will set under water. These limestones he denominated hydraulic limestones, and from the principle so laid down by him come the two great definitions of what we now know as cement, namely, the natural and artificial cements of commerce. The natural variety, such as the Rosendale, Lehigh, and Cumberland cements, was first made by Joseph Parker in 1796, who discovered what he called 'Roman cement,' based upon the calcination at low temperatures of the nodules found in the septaria geological formation in England. This was practically the first cement of commerce, and gave excellent results. Joseph Aspdin, a bricklayer or plasterer, took out a patent in England in 1824 on a high-grade artificial cement, and, at great personal deprivation, succeeded in manufacturing it on a commercial scale by combining English chalks with clay from the river beds, drying the mixed paste, and after calcining at high heat the material thus produced, grinding it to powder. This cement, which was the first Portland cement in the market, obtained its name from its resemblance when it became stone to the celebrated Portland stone, one of the leading building materials in England. The rocks used in the manufacture of Portland cement are very similar to those from which natural cement is made. The various layers in the natural rock may vary in size or stratification, so that the lime, alumina, and silica may not be in position to combine under heat, or there may be too much of one ingredient, or not enough of the others in close proximity to each other. In making Portland cement, these rocks, properly proportioned, are accordingly ground to an impalpable powder, the natural rock being broken down and the laminæ distributed in many small grains. This powder is then mixed with water, and is made into a new stone in the shape of the brick, or block, in which all the small grains formerly composing the laminæ of the original rock are distributed and brought into a close mechanical juxtaposition to each other. The new rock thus made is put into kilns with layers of coke, and is then calcined at temperatures from 1,600° to 1,800°. The clinker, as it comes from the kiln, is then crushed and ground to an impalpable powder, which is the Portland cement of commerce. Portland cement may be made from other materials, such as chalk and clay, limestone and clay, cement rock and limestone, and marls and clays. In every case the principle is the same, the breaking down and the redistributing of the materials so that the fine particles may be in close mechanical union when subjected to the heat of the kiln." =The French Nontoxic Matches.=--It is believed, by Frenchmen at least, that the problem long sought, of finding a composition for a match head in which all the advantages of white phosphorus shall be preserved while its deleterious qualities are eliminated or greatly reduced, has been solved in the new matches which the French Government has placed upon the market. These matches are marked S. C., by the initials of the inventors, MM. Sévène and Cahen, are made in the factories at Trélazé, Begles, and Samtines, and have been well received by the public. In preparing the composition, the chlorate of potash of the old flashing and safety matches has been retained, and the sesquisulphide of phosphorus is used instead of the white or red phosphorus of the old matches. The latter substance, besides the indispensable qualities of fixity and resistance to atmospheric influences, has the two important properties of inflaming at 95° C., much nearer the igniting point of white phosphorus (60° C.) than of red (260° C.), and being therefore easier to light; and of having a low latent or specific heat. With these properties embodied in the inflammable composition of the head, the new match is expected to be comparatively free from accidental explosions during manufacture and export, to take fire by friction, and to burn steadily and regularly. The expectation has so far been fulfilled. The phosphorus compound has a special odor, in which the sulphur characteristic predominates, but, not boiling under 380° C., does not become offensive in the shops; and the match heads made with it do not emit the phosphorescence which is often exhibited by matches made with white phosphorus. It is only feebly toxic by direct absorption, experiments on guinea pigs indicating that it is only about one tenth as much so as white phosphorus. =Trees as Land Formers.=--John Gifford, in a paper presented to the Franklin Institute on Forestry in Relation to Physical Geography and Engineering, mentions as illustrating the way forests counteract certain destructive forces, the mangrove tree as "the great land former which, supplementing the work of the coral polyp, has added to the warm seashore regions of the globe immense areas of land." The trees grow in salt water several feet deep, where their labyrinth of roots and branches collect and hold sediment and flotage. Thus the shore line advances. The seeds, germinating on the plant, the plantlets fall into the water, float away till their roots touch the bottom, and there form the nucleus of new islands and life. The forest constantly improves the soil, provided the latter is not removed or allowed to burn. The roots of trees penetrate to its deeper layers and absorb great quantities of mineral matters, a large percentage of which goes to the leaves, and is ultimately deposited on the surface. "The surface soil is both enriched by these mineral substances and protected by a mulch of humus in varying stages of decomposition. As the lower layers rot, new layers of leaves and twigs are being constantly deposited, so that the forest soil, in the course of time, fairly reeks with nourishing plant food, which seeps out more or less to enrich neighboring soils." The forest is also a soil former. "Even the most tender rootlet, because of its acidity, is able to dissolve its way through certain kinds of rock. This, together with the acids formed in the decomposition of humus, is a potent and speedy agent in the production of soil. The roots of many species of trees have no difficulty whatever in penetrating limestone and in disintegrating rocks of the granitic series. As the rock crumbles, solid inorganic materials are released, which enrich neighboring soils, especially those of the valleys in regions where the forest is relegated to the mountain sides and top, as should be the case in all mountainous regions. In view of the destruction caused by mankind, it is a consoling fact that Nature, although slowly, is gradually improving her waste lands. If not interrupted, the barest rock and the fallowest field, under conditions which may be called unfavorable, will become, in course of time, forest-clad and fertile. The most important function of the forest in relation to the soil, however, is in holding it in place and protecting it from the erosive action of wind and rain." =The Atlantic Slope.=--The Atlantic slope of the United States is described in the New Jersey State Geological Survey's report on the Physical Geography of the State as "a fairly distinct geographical province. Its eastern boundary is the sea; its western boundary on the north is the divide between the drainage flowing southeast to the sea and that flowing northeast to the St. Lawrence. Farther south its western limit is the divide between the streams flowing east to the Atlantic and those flowing west to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers." The line between it and the geographical province next west follows the watershed of the Appalachian system of mountains. It is divided, according to elevations, into several subprovinces, all of which elongate in a direction roughly parallel to the shore. Next to the coast there is usually a belt of lowland, few or many miles wide, called the _Coastal Plain_. Inland from the Coastal Plain is an intermediate height, between the Coastal Plain to the east and the mountains to the west, known in the South as the _Piedmont Plateau_. The mountainous part of the slope constitutes the third province, known as the _Appalachian Zone_. The Atlantic slope may be divided into two sections--a northern and a southern--in which the Coastal Plain is narrow and wide respectively. These two sections meet in New Jersey, where the division runs from the Raritan River, just below New Brunswick, to Trenton. South of this line the Coastal Plain expands, and all considerable elevations recede correspondingly from the shore. These three subprovinces are especially well shown in the southern section of the Atlantic slope. They are less well developed in the northern section, and even where the topography is comparable the underlying rock structure is different. In New Jersey a fourth belt, the Triassic formation, is interposed between the Coastal Plain and the Highlands corresponding to the Piedmont Plateau. North of New Jersey the Coastal Plain has little development, though Long Island and some small areas farther east and northeast are to be looked upon as parts of it. =American Fresh-water Pearls.=--The facts cited by Mr. George F. Kunz in his paper, published in the Report of the United States Fish Commission, on the Fresh-water Pearls and Pearl Fisheries of the United States, give considerable importance to this feature of our natural history. The mound explorations attest that fresh-water pearls were gathered and used by the prehistoric peoples of the country "to an extent that is astonishing. On the hearths of some of these mounds in Ohio the pearls have been found, not by hundreds, but by thousands and even by bushels--now, of course, damaged and half decomposed by centuries of burial and by the heat of superficial fires." The narratives of the early Spanish explorers make several mentions of pearls in the possession of the Indians. For a considerable period after the first explorations, however, American pearls attracted but little attention, and "for some two centuries the Unios [or 'fresh-water mussels'] lived and multiplied in the rivers and streams, unmolested by either the native tribes that had used them for food, or by the pioneers of the new race that had not yet learned of their hidden treasures." Within recent years the gathering of Unio pearls has attained such importance as to start economical problems warranting and even demanding careful and detailed inquiry. The first really important discovery of Unio pearls was made near Paterson, N. J., in 1857, in the form of the "queen pearl" of fine luster, weighing ninety-three grains, which was sold to Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, for twenty-five hundred dollars, and is now worth four times that amount. As a result the Unios at Notch Brook, where it was found, were gathered by the million and destroyed. Within a year fully fifteen thousand dollars' worth of pearls were sent to the New York market. Then the shipments gradually fell off. Some of the best American pearls that were next found were at Waynesville, Ohio, where Mr. Israel H. Harris formed an exceedingly fine collection. It contained more than two thousand specimens, weighing more than as many grains. Among them were one button-shaped on the back and weighing thirty-eight grains, several almost transparent pink ones, and one showing where the pearl had grown almost entirely through the Unio. In 1889 a number of magnificently colored pearls were found at different places in the creeks and rivers of Wisconsin, of which more than ten thousand dollars' worth were sent to New York within three months. These discoveries led to immense activity in pearl hunting through all the streams of the region, and in three or four seasons the shells were nearly exhausted. The pearl fisheries of this State have produced at least two hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of pearls since 1889. Another outbreak of the "pearl mania" occurred in Arkansas in 1897, and extended into the Indian Territory, Missouri, Georgia, and other States. =Distribution of Cereals in the United States.=--To inquiries made preparatory to drawing up a report on the Distribution of Cereals in North America (Department of Agriculture, Biological Survey), Mr. C. S. Plumb received one thousand and thirty-three answers, eight hundred and ninety-seven of which came from the United States and the rest from the Canadian provinces. These reports showed that in many localities, particularly in the East and South, but little attention is paid to keeping varieties pure, and many farmers use mixed, unknown, or local varieties of ordinary merit for seed. In New England but little grain is grown from sowing, owing to the cheapness of Western grain, and wheat is rarely reported. Oats are now mostly sown from Western seed, and the resulting crop is mown for hay, while most of the corn is cut for green fodder or silage. On certain fine lowlands--as, for example, in the Connecticut Valley--oats, and more especially corn, are often grown for grain. While reports on most of the cereals were rendered from the lower austral zone, or the region south of the Appalachians and the old Missouri Compromise line, this region, except where it merges with the upper austral or the one north of it, is apparently outside the area of profitable cultivation of wheat and oats. In Louisiana and most of the other parts of the lower austral, except in northern Texas and Oklahoma, wheat is almost an unknown crop. The warm, moist climatic conditions here favor the development of fungous diseases to such a degree that the plants are usually ruined or greatly injured at an early stage of growth. In Florida, as a rule, cereals are rarely cultivated except on the uplands at the northern end of the State. In a general way, corn and wheat are most successfully grown in the upper austral zone, or central States, while oats are best and most productive in the transition zone (or northern and Lake States and the Dakotas), or along the border of the upper austral and transition. The gradual acclimation of varieties of cereals, through years of selection and cultivation, has gone so far, however, that some varieties are now much better adapted to one zone than to another. =Spanish Silkworm Gut.=--The business of manufacturing silkworm gut in Spain is a considerable industry. The method of preparation is thus described in the Journal of the Society of Arts: After the silkworm grub has eaten enough mulberry leaves, and before it begins to spin, which is during the months of May and June, it is thrown into vinegar for several hours. The insect is killed and the substance which the grub, if alive, would have spun into a cocoon is drawn out from the dead worm into a much thicker and shorter silken thread, in which operation considerable dexterity and experience are required. Two thick threads from each grub are placed for about four hours in clear cold water, after which they are put for ten or fifteen minutes in a solution of some caustic. This loosens a fine outer skin on the threads, which is removed by the hands, the workman holding the threads in his teeth. The silk is then hung up to dry in a shady place, the sun rendering it brittle. In some parts of the country these silk guts are bleached with sulphur vapor, which makes them beautifully glossy and snow-white, while those naturally dried have a yellowish tint. The quality of the gut is decided according to the healthy condition of the worm, round indicating a good quality and flat an inferior one. =The Nests of Burrowing Bees.=--Prof. John B. Smith, having explained to his section of the American Association a method which has been successfully applied, of taking casts in plaster of Paris of the homes of burrowing insects, with their branchings, to the depth of six feet, described some of the results of its application. Bees, of the genus _Calletes_, dig vertically to the depth of eighteen inches or more, then burrow horizontally from two to five inches farther, and construct a thin, parchmentlike cell of saliva, in which the egg is deposited, with pollen and honey for the food of the larva. They then start a new horizontal burrow a little distance from the first, and perhaps a third, but no more. The vertical tubes are then filled up, so that when the bees come to life they must burrow from six to twenty-four inches before they can reach the surface. Another genus makes a twisted burrow; another makes a vertical burrow that may be six feet deep. About a foot below the surface it sends off a lateral branch, and in this it excavates a chamber from one to two and a half inches in diameter. Tubes are sent down from this chamber, as many perhaps as from six to twenty together, and these are lined with clay to make them water-tight. This bee, when it begins its burrow, makes an oblique gallery from four to six inches long before it starts in the vertical direction, and all the dirt is carried through this oblique gallery. Then the insect continues the tube vertically upward to just below the surface, and makes a small concealed opening to it here, taking care to pile no sand near it. This is the regular entrance to the burrow. MINOR PARAGRAPHS. In a report of an inspection of three French match factories, published as a British Parliamentary paper, Dr. T. Oliver records as his impressions and deductions that while until recently the match makers suffered severely from phosphorus poisoning, there is now apparently a reduction in the severe forms of the illness; that this reduction is attributable to greater care in the selection of the work people, to raising the age of admission into the factory, to medical examination on entrance, subsequent close supervision, and repeated dental examination; to personal cleanliness on the part of the workers; to early suspension on the appearance of symptoms of ill health; and to improved methods of manufacture. The French Government is furthering by all possible means new methods of manufacture in the hope of finding a safer one; and a match free from white phosphorus and still capable of striking anywhere is already manufactured. A mechanical and engineering section is to be organized in the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, to be devoted to the consideration of subjects bearing upon the mechanic arts and the engineering problems connected therewith. The growth of the various departments of this institution--which has been fitly termed a "democratic learned society," from the close affiliation in it of the men of the professions and the men of the workshops--by natural accretion, and the steadily growing demands for the extension of its educational work during the past decade, have increased the costs for maintenance and administration and have been the cause of a deficit in nearly every year. A movement is now on foot, approved by the board of managers, and directed by a special committee, to secure for it an endowment, toward which a number of subscriptions ranging from two hundred and fifty to twenty-five hundred dollars have already been received. The earthquake which took place in Assam, June 12, 1897, was described by Mr. R. D. Oldham in the British Association as having been the most violent of which there is any record. The shock was sensible over an area of 1,750,000 square miles, and if it had occurred in England, not a house would have been left standing between Manchester and London. Landslips on an unprecedented scale were produced, a number of lakes were formed, and mountain peaks were moved vertically and horizontally. Monuments of solid stone and forest trees were broken across. Bridges were overthrown, displaced, and in some places thrust bodily up to a height of about twenty feet, and the rails on the railroads were twisted and bent. Earth fissures were formed over an area larger than the United Kingdom, and sand rents, from which sand and water were forced in solid streams to a height of three or four feet above the ground, were opened "in incalculable numbers." The loss of life was comparatively small, as the earthquake occurred about five o'clock in the afternoon, and the damage done was reduced by the fact that there were no large cities within the area of greatest violence; but in extent and capacity of destruction, as distinguished from destruction actually accomplished, this earthquake surpassed any of which there was historical mention, not even excepting the great earthquake of Lisbon in 1755. The first section of the electric railway up the Jungfrau, which is intended to reach the top of the mountain, was opened about the first of October, 1898. The line starts from the Little Scheidegg station of the existing Wengern Alp Railway, 6,770 feet above the sea, and ascends the mountain masses from the north side, passing the Eiger Glacier, Eiger Wand, Eismeer, and Jungfraujoch stations, to Lift, 13,430 feet, whence the ascent is completed by elevator to the summit, 13,670 feet. The road starts on a gradient of ten per cent, which is increased to twenty per cent about halfway to the Eiger Glacier station, and to twenty-five per cent, the steepest, after passing that station. There are about 85 yards in tunnel on the section now opened, but beyond the Eiger Glacier the road will not touch the surface except at the stations. About 250 yards of the long tunnel have been excavated so far. The stations beyond Eiger Wand will be built within the rock, and will be furnished with restaurants and beds. At the Eiger Wand and Eismeer stations passengers will contemplate the view through windows or balconies from the inside; but at the Jungfraujoch station tourists will be able to go out and take sledges for the great Aletsch Glacier. The cars will accommodate forty passengers each, and the company expects to complete the railroad by 1904. Alexander A. Lawes, civil engineer, of Sydney, Australia, suggests a plan of mechanical flight on beating wings as presenting advantages that transcend all other schemes. He believes that the amount of power required to operate wings and the difficulty in applying it are exaggerated beyond all measure. The wings or sustainers of the bird in flight, he urges, are held in the outstretched position without any exertion on its part; and many birds, like the albatross, sustain themselves for days at a stretch. "This constitutes its aërial support, and is analogous to the support derived by other animals from land and water." The sole work done by the bird is propulsion and elevation by the beating action of the wings. Mr. Adams's machine, which he does not say he has tried, is built in conformity to this principle, and its sails are modeled as nearly as possible in form and as to action with those of the bird. The aid of an air cylinder is further called in, through which a pressure is exerted balancing the wings. The wings are moved by treadles, and the author's picture of the aëronaut looks like a man riding an aërial bicycle. Carborundum, a substance highly extolled by its manufacturers as an abrasive, is composed of carbon and silicon in atomic proportions--thirty parts by weight of carbon and seventy of silicon. It is represented as being next to the diamond in hardness and as cutting emery and corundum with ease, but as not as tough as the diamond. It is a little more than one and a fifth times the weight of sand, is infusible at the highest attainable heat, but is decomposed in the electric arc, and is insoluble in any of the ordinary solvents, water, oils, and acids, even hydrofluoric acid having no effect upon it. Pure carborundum is white. In the commercial manufacture the crystals are produced in many colors and shades, partly as the result of impurities and partly by surface oxidation. The prevailing colors are green, black, and blue. The color has no effect upon the hardness. Crude carborundum, as taken from the furnace, usually consists of large masses or aggregations of crystals, which are frequently very beautifully colored and of adamantine luster. A peculiarity of Old English literary usage is pointed out by Prof. Dr. L. Kellner, of Vienna, as illustrated in a sentence like "the mob is ignorant, and they are often cruel." This is considered a bad solecism in modern English, but in Old and Middle English constructions of exactly the same kind are so often met with that it is impossible to account for them as slips and mistakes. They may be brought under several heads, as, Number (the same collective noun used as a singular and a plural); Case (the same verb or adjective governing the genitive and accusative, the genitive and dative, or the dative and accusative); Pronoun ("thou" and "ye" used in addressing the same person); Tense (past and perfect, or past and historical present used in the same breath); Mood (indicative and subjunctive used in the same clause). Finite verb and infinitive dependent on the same verb; simple and prepositional infinitives dependent on the same verb; infinitive and verbal noun used side by side; different prepositions dependent on the same verb, like Caxton's "He was eaten by bears and of lions"; direct and indirect speech alternating in the same clause. These facts, which are met with as late as 1611 (Bible, authorized version), point to the conclusion that what to us appears as a grammatical inconsistency was once considered a welcome break in the monotony of construction. Mr. Fischer Sigwart is quoted in the _Revue Scientifique_ as having studied the life of frogs for thirty years, and found that they are night wanderers, keeping comparatively quiet during the day and seeking their prey after dark. In the fall they leave their hunting grounds in the fields and woods and take refuge near swamps and ponds, passing the winter in the banks of rivers or the mud in the bottoms of ponds, whence they come out in the spring, when the process of reproduction begins. The frog is not sexually mature till it is four or five years old. The coupling process lasts from three to thirty days. Between its spring wakening and spawning the frog eats nothing except, perhaps, its own skin, which it moults periodically. After spawning, frogs leave the water and go to the fields and woods. They can be fed, when kept captive, upon insects and earthworms. NOTES. A relation has been discovered by Professor Dolbear and Carl A. and Edward A. Bessey between the chirping of crickets and the temperature, the chirps increasing as frequently as the temperature rises. The Besseys relate, in The American Naturalist, that when, one cool evening, a cricket was caught and brought into a warm room, it began in a few minutes to chirp nearly twice as rapidly as the out-of-door crickets, and that its rate very nearly conformed to the observed rate maintained other evenings out of doors under the same temperature conditions. C. Drieberg, of Colombo, Ceylon, records, in Nature, a rainfall at Nedunkeni, in the northern province of Ceylon, December 15 and 16, 1897, of 31.76 inches in twenty-four hours. The highest previous records, as cited by him, are at Joyeuse, France, 31.17 inches in twenty-two hours; Genoa, 30 inches in twenty-six hours; on the hills above Bombay, 24 inches in one night; and on the Khasia Hills, India, 30 inches in each of five successive days. The average annual rainfall at Nedunkeni has been 64.70 inches, but in 1897 the total amount was 121.85 inches. The greatest annual rainfall is on the Khasia Hills, India, with 600 inches. The wettest station in Ceylon is Padupola, in the central province, with 230.85 inches as the mean of twenty-six years, but in 1897 the amount was 243.07 inches. The Korean postage stamps are printed in the United States. As explained in the United States consular reports, they are of four denominations, and all alike except in color and denomination. Of the inscriptions, the characters on the top are ancient Chinese, and those at the bottom, having the same meaning, are Korean; the characters on the right are Korean and those on the left are Chinese, both giving the denominations, with the English translation just below the center of the stamp. The plum blossom in each corner is the royal flower of the present Ye dynasty, which has been in existence more than five hundred years, and the figures at the corners of the center piece represent the four spirits that stand at the corners of the earth and support it on their shoulders. The national emblem in the center is an ancient Chinese phallic device. A paragraph in _La Nature_ calls to mind that the year 1898 was the "jubilee" of the sea serpent, the first mention of a sight of the monster--whether fabulous or not is still undecided--having been made by the captain and officers of the British ship Dædalus in 1848. They said they saw it between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena, and that it was about six hundred feet long. Since then views of sea serpents have been reported nearly every year, but none has ever been caught or seen so near or for so long a time as to be positively identified. There are several creatures of the deep which, seen for an instant, might be mistaken with the aid of an excited imagination for a marine serpent; and it is not wholly impossible that some descendants of the gigantic saurians of old may still be living in the ocean undetected by science. The results of a study of the winter food of the chickadee by Clarence M. Weed, of the New Hampshire College Agricultural Experiment Station, shows that more than half of it consists of insects, a very large proportion of which are taken in the form of eggs. Vegetation of various sorts made up a little less than a quarter of the food; but two thirds of this consisted of buds and bud scales that were accidentally introduced along with plant-lice eggs. These eggs made up more than one fifth of the entire food, and formed the most remarkable element of the bill of fare. The destruction of these eggs of plant lice is probably the most important service which the chickadee renders during its winter residence. Insect eggs of many other kinds were found in the food, among them those of the tent caterpillar and the fall cankerworm, and the larvæ of several kinds of moths, including those of the common apple worm. The Merchants' Association of San Francisco has been trying the experiment of sprinkling a street with sea water, and finds that such water binds the dirt together between the paving stones, so that when it is dry no loose dust is formed to be raised by the wind; that sea water does not dry so quickly as fresh water, so that it has been claimed when salt water has been used that one load of it is equal to three loads of fresh water. The salt water which is deposited on the street absorbs moisture from the air during the night, whereby the street is thoroughly moist during the early morning, and has the appearance of having been freshly sprinkled. The Tarahumare people, who live in the most inaccessible part of northern Mexico, were described by Dr. Krauss in the British Association as ignorant and primitive, and many still living in caves. What villages they have are at altitudes of about eight thousand feet above the sea level. They are a small and wiry people, with great powers of endurance. Their only food is _pinoli_, or maize, parched and ground. They have a peculiar drink, called _teshuin_, also produced from maize and manufactured with considerable ceremony, which tastes like a mixture of sour milk and turpentine. Their language is limited to about three hundred words. Their imperfect knowledge of numbers renders them unable to count beyond ten. Their religion seems to be a distorted and imperfect conception of Christian traditions, mixed with some of their own ideas and superstitions. The directory of the School of Anthropology of Paris, which consists chiefly of the professors in the institution, has chosen Dr. Capitan, professor of pathological anthropology, to succeed M. Gabriel de Mortillet, deceased, as professor of prehistoric anthropology. Dr. Capitan's former chair is suppressed. The highest cog-wheel railroad in Europe and probably in the world is the one from Zermatt, Switzerland, to the summit of the Görner Grat, upward of eleven thousand five hundred feet above the sea. It is between five and six miles long, and rises nearly fifty-two hundred feet, with a maximum grade of twenty per cent. There are two intermediate stations, at the Riffel Alp and the Riffelberg, and the ascent is made in ninety minutes. The height of this road will be surpassed by that of the one now being erected up the Jungfrau. Extraordinary advantages are claimed by Mrs. Theodore R. MacClure, of the State Board of Health, for Michigan as a summer and health-resort State. The State has more than sixteen hundred miles of lake line, the greater part of which is or can be utilized for summer-resort purposes; there are in its limits 5,173 inland lakes varying in size and having a total area of 712,864 square acres of water. The many rivers running through the State furnish on their banks delightful places for camping and for recreation. An action of bacteria on photographic plates was described by Prof. P. P. Frankland at the last meeting of the British Association. Ordinary bacterial cultures in gelatin and agar-agar are found to be capable of affecting the photographic film even at a distance of half an inch, while, when they are placed in contact with the film, definite pictures of the bacterial growths can be obtained. The action does not take place through glass, and therefore, as in the case of Dr. W. J. Russell's observations with some other substances, it is considered probably due to the evolution of volatile chemical materials which react with the sensitive film. Many varieties of bacteria exert the action, but to a different degree. Bacterial growths which are luminous in the dark are much more active than the non-luminous bacteria hitherto tried. Telephonic communication, it is said, has been established between a number of farms in Australia by means of wire fences. A correspondent of the Australian Agriculturist from a station near Colmar represents that it is easy to converse with a station eight miles distant by means of instruments connected on the wire fences, and that the same kind of communication has been established over a distance of eight miles. Several stations are connected in this way. We have to record the deaths of F. A. Obach, electrical engineer, at Grätz, Austria, December 27th, aged forty-six years. He was author of numerous papers on subjects of electrical science in English and German publications, and of lectures on the chemistry of India rubber and gutta percha; Dr. Reinhold Ehret, seismologist and author of books on earthquakes and seismometers, who died from an Alpine accident in the Susten Pass; Dr. Joseph Coats, professor of pathology at the University of Glasgow, and author of a manual of pathology, a work on tuberculosis, etc.; Thomas Hincks, F. R. S., author of books on marine zoölogy, February 2d; Major J. Hotchkiss, president in 1895 of the Geological Section of the American Association and author of papers on economic geology and engineering; Wilbur Wilson Thoburn, professor of biomechanics at Leland Stanford Junior University; Dr. Giuseppe Gibelli, professor of botany in the University of Turin; Dr. G. Wolffhüzel, professor of hygiene in the University of Göttingen; Dr. Dareste de Chavannes, author of researches in animal teratology, and formerly president of the French Society of Anthropology; Dr. Rupert Böck, professor of mechanics in the Technical Institute of Vienna; William Colenso, F. R. S., of New Zealand, naturalist and author of investigations of Maori antiquities and myths; Dr. Lench, assistant in the observatory at Zürich, Switzerland; Dr. Franz Lang, rector and teacher of natural history in the cantonal schools of Soleure, Switzerland, and one of the presidents of the Swiss Natural History Society, aged seventy-eight years; Dr. William Rutherford, professor of physiology in the University of Edinburgh, and author of several books in that science, February 21st, in his sixtieth year; and Sir Douglas Galton, president of the British Association in 1895 and an authority and author on sanitation, March 10th, in his seventy seventh year. INDEX. ARTICLES MARKED WITH AN ASTERISK ARE ILLUSTRATED. Academy della Crusca, The. (Frag.), 572 Adulteration of Butter with Glucose. (Frag.), 570 Allen, Grant. The Season of the Year, 230 America, Middle. Was it Peopled from Asia? E. S. Morse, 1 Animals' Bites. (Frag.), 430 Anthropology. Decorated Skulls and the Power ascribed to them (Frag.), 570 " Estrays from Civilization. (Frag.), 573 " Huichol Indians of Jalisco. (Frag.), 574 " Lessons of. (Table), 411 " Pre-Columbian Musical Instruments. E. S. Morse*, 712 " Superstitions, Aboriginal, about Bones. (Frag.), 572 " Superstition and Crime. E. P. Evans, 206 Archæology. Earliest Writing in France. G. de Mortillet, 546 " Lake Dwelling, A Neolithic, 856 " Stone Age in Egypt. J. de Morgan, 202 Architectural Forms in Nature. S. Dellenbaugh*, 63 Astronomical Photographs, A Library of. (Frag.), 717 Astronomy. Bombardment, The Great. C. F. Holder*, 506 Atkinson, E. Wheat-growing Capacity of the United States, 145 " " The Wheat Problem again, 759 Atlantic Slope, The. (Frag.), 858 Bactrian Camel for the Klondike. (Frag.), 136 Barr, M. W. Mental Defectives and the Social Welfare*, 746 Bede, Chair of the Venerable. (Frag.), 283 Bees, Burrowing, The Nests of. (Frag.), 860 Bering Sea Controversy and the Scientific Expert. G. A. Clark, 654 Biological Survey, The United States. (Frag.), 856 Blackford, Charles Minor, Jr. Soils and Fertilizers, 392 Blake, I. W. Our Florida Alligator*, 330 Bombardment, The Great. C. F. Holder*, 506 Books Noticed 126, 274, 415, 559, 704, 845 Agriculture. Michigan Board, Thirty-fifth Annual Report of, 423. Alexander, A. Theories of the Will in the History of Philosophy, 566. Andrews, C. M. The Historical Development of Modern Europe, 126. Anthropology. Indians of Northern British Columbia, Facial Paintings of. F. Boas, 710. Archæology, Introduction to the Study of North American. C. Thomas, 420. Arthur and Trembly. Living Plants and their Properties, 564. Astronomy, A Text-Book of Geodetic. J. F. Hayford, 129. -- Corona and Coronet. M. L. Todd, 418. -- Earth and Sky, The. E. S. Holden, 850. -- Tides, The. G. H. Darwin, 705. Bailey, L. H. Evolution of our Native Fruits, 704. Baldwin, J. M. The Story of the Mind, 565. Barnes, C. R. Form and Function of Plant Life, 277. Barra, Eduardo de la. Literature arcaica, 280. Beauchamp, W. M. Polished-Stone Articles used by New York Aborigines before and during European Occupation, 279. Beddard, F. E. Elementary Zoölogy, 706. Béker, G. A. Rrimas, 280. Binet, Alfred. L'Année Psychologique, 129. Björling, P. R. Mechanical Engineer's Pocketbook, 132. Boas, Franz. Facial Paintings of the Indians of Northern British Columbia, 710. Bolton, H. C. Catalogue of Scientific and Technical Periodicals (1665-1895), 566. Botany. Familiar Life in Field and Forest. F. S. Mathews, 418. -- Fossil Plants. A. C. Seward, 127. -- Fruits, The Evolution of our Native. L. H. Bailey, 704. -- Function and Forms of Plant Life. C. R. Barnes, 277. -- Les Végétaux et les Milieux Cosmiques, 132. -- Living Plants and their Properties. Arthur and Trembly, 564. -- Practical Plant Physiology, 128. Brain Weight, Indexes of. McCurdy and Mohyliansky, 709. Brush, George J. Manual of Determinative Mineralogy, 707. Butler, Amos W. The Birds of Indiana, 422. Carus-Wilson, C. A. Electro-Dynamics, 277. Catalogue of Scientific and Technical Periodicals (1665-1895). H. C. Bolton, 566. Chemical Analysis, Manual of. G. S. Newth, 708. Chemistry. Inorganic according to the Periodic Law. Venable and Howe, 567. -- Qualitative Analysis. E. A. Congdon, 567. -- Short Manual of Analytical. John Muter, 419. Clark, William J. Commercial Cuba, 564. Conant, F. S. Biographical Pamphlet, 132. Congdon, E. A. Brief Course in Qualitative Analysis, 567. Cornelius, Hans. Psychologie als Erfahrungs-wissenschaft, 850. Costantin, M. J. Les Végétaux et les Milieux Cosmiques, 132. Creighton, J. E. An Introductory Logic, 706. Crook, J. W. History of German Wage Theories, 708. Cuba, Commercial. William J. Clark, 564. Dana, E. S. Text-Book of Mineralogy, 848. Dana, James D. Revised Text-Book of Geology, 418. Darwin, George Howard. The Tides, 705. Davis, H. S. Star Catalogues, 280. Day, D. T. Mineral Resources of the United States, 852. Detmer, W. Practical Plant Physiology, 128. Drey, Sylvan. A Theory of Life, 280. Earthquakes of the Pacific Coast. E. S. Holden, 850. Economics. Commercial Cuba. William J. Clark, 564. -- German Wage Theories, History of. J. W. Crook, 708. -- Public Administration in Massachusetts. R. H. Whitten, 422. Education. Greek Prose. H. C. Pearson, 708. -- Handbook of Nature Study for Elementary Schools, 130. -- Harold's Rambles. J. W. Troeger, 567. -- On a Farm. N. L. Helm, 423. -- United States Commissioner's Report for 1896-'97, 852. Electricity. Electro-Dynamics. C. A. Carus-Wilson, 277. -- Industrial. A. G. Elliott, 132. -- The Discharge of, through Gases. J. J. Thomson, 565. -- The Storage Battery. A. Treadwell, 421. Elliott, A. G. Industrial Electricity, 132. Engineering. Mechanical Engineer's Pocketbook, 132. Ethnology. Explorations in Honduras. G. B. Gordon, 133. Forestry. American Woods. R. B. Hough, 276. -- Conditions in Wisconsin. F. Noth, 709. Geikie, James. Earth Sculpture, 845. Geography. Natural Advanced. Redway and Hinman, 421. -- Philippine Islands and their People. D. C. Worcester, 415. -- Physical, of New Jersey. R. D. Salisbury, 422. Geological Bulletin, Part II, Vol. III, of the University of Upsala, 280. Geological Survey of Kansas. Vol. IV. S. W. Williston, 709. Geology. Earth Sculpture. James Geikie, 845. -- Indiana, Twenty-second Annual Report of Department of, 852. -- Indian Territory, Reconnaissance of Coal Fields of. N. F. Drake, 852. -- Iowa Survey. Eighth volume, 851. -- Mineralogy, Manual of Determinative, 707. -- Mineralogy, Text-Book of. E. S. Dana, 848. -- Mineral Resources of the United States. D. T. Day, 852. -- New Jersey State Report for 1897, 851. -- Panama, Geological History of the Isthmus of. R. T. Hill, 851. -- Text-Book of. J. D. Dana, 418. Giddings, Franklin H. Elements of Sociology, 559. Goldman, Henry. The Arithmetician, 279. Goode, G. B. Report of United States National Museum for 1895, 710. Gordon, G. B. Ethnological Explorations in Honduras, 133. Groos, Karl. The Play of Animals, 274. Harris, Edith D. Story of Rob Roy, 709. Hayford, J. P. Text-Book of Geodetic Astronomy, 129. Helm, Nellie Lathrop. On a Farm, 423. Hill, R. T. Geological History of the Isthmus of Panama, 851. History. Commune, The. Lissagaray. Translated by E. M. Aveling, 423. -- Europe, The Historical Development of Modern. C. M. Andrews, 126. -- Napoleon III and his Court. Imbert de Saint-Amand, 422. -- Reader for Elementary Schools. L. L. W. Wilson, 853. -- Spanish Literature. J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, 275. Hoffman, F. S. The Sphere of Science, 128. Holden, E. S. Earthquakes of the Pacific Coast, 1769-1897, 850. -- The Earth and Sky, 850. Holyoake, G. J. Jubilee History of the Leeds Co-operative Society, 849. Hough, R. B. American Woods, 276. Iowa State University Bulletin, Vol. IV, No. 3, 279. James, William. Human Immortality, 708. Jayne, Horace. The Mammalian Anatomy of the Cat, 278. Jordan, D. S. Lest we Forget, 568. Keyser, L. S. News from the Birds, 567. Lambert, R. A. Differential and Integral Calculus, 421. Lange, D. Handbook of Nature Study for Elementary Schools, 130. Lantern Land, In. (Monthly.) Allen and Carleton, 708. Le Bon, Gustave. The Psychology of Peoples, 847. Leeds Industrial Co-operative Society, Jubilee History of. G. J. Holyoake, 849. Library Bulletin, No. 9, New York State, 133. Lissagaray. History of the Commune. Translated by E. M. Aveling, 423. Logic, An Introductory. J. E. Creighton, 706. Lyte, E. O. Elementary English, 279. McConachie, L. G. Congressional Committees, 131. Mathematics. Differential and Integral Calculus. R. A. Lambert, 421. -- Infinitesimal Analysis. William B. Smith, 849. -- Lectures on the Geometry of Position. T. R. Reye. Translated. Mathews, F. Schuyler. Familiar Life in Field and Forest, 418. Maurice-Kelly, James Fitz. History of Spanish Literature, 275. Meteorology. Wind Deposits, Mechanical Composition of. J. A. Udden, 853. Mills, Wesley. Nature and Development of Animal Intelligence, 562. Mivart, St. George. The Groundwork of Science, 563. Music, A Short Course in. Ripley and Tupper, 133. Muter, John. Manual of Analytical Chemistry, 419. Natural History. Animal Intelligence, Nature and Development of. Wesley Mills, 562. -- Birds, News from the. L. S. Keyser, 567. -- Birds of Indiana, 422. -- Four-footed Americans and their Kin. M. O. Wright, 563. -- Solitary Wasps, Habits of. G. W. and E. P. Peckham, 851. -- Taxidermy, The Art of. John Rowley, 420. -- Wild Animals I have Known. E. S. Thompson, 417. Newth, G. S. Manual of Chemical Analysis, 708. Ornithology. How to Name the Birds. H. E. Parkhurst, 131. Overton, Frank. Physiology, Applied, 277. -- Physiology for Advanced Grades, 566. Paleontology. Fossil Plants. A. C. Seward, 127. Parkhurst, H. E. How to Name the Birds, 131. Pearson, H. C. Greek Prose, 708. Peckham, G. W. and E. P. Habits of the Solitary Wasps, 851. Philosophy. Immortality, Human. William James, 708. Physiology, Applied. Frank Overton, 277. -- Applied, for Advanced Grades. F. Overton, 566. Psychology. Child, The Study of the. A. R. Taylor, 564. -- L'Année Psychologique, 129. -- Mind, The Story of the. J. M. Baldwin, 565. -- of Peoples. G. Le Bon, 847. -- Play of Animals, The. Karl Groos, 274. -- Psychologie als Erfahrungs-wissenschaft. Hans Cornelius, 850. -- Will, Theories of the, in the History of Philosophy. A. Alexander, 566. Quinn, D. A. Stenotypy. Second edition, 279. Redway, J. W., and Hinman K. Natural Advanced Geography, 421. Reye, Theodor R. Lectures on the Geometry of Position. Translated, 419. Rice, W., and Eastman Barrett. Under the Stars, and Other Verses, 134. Richter, J. P. F. Selections from the Works of, 279. Ripley, F. H., and Tupper, T. A Short Course in Music, 133. Rollin, H. J. Yetta Ségal, 278. Rowley, John. The Art of Taxidermy, 420. Saint-Amand, Imbert de. Napoleon III and his Court, 422. Salisbury, Rollin D. Physical Geography of New Jersey, 422. Science, Groundwork of, The. St. George Mivart, 563. -- Sphere of. F. S. Hoffman, 128. Seward, A. C. Fossil Plants, 127. Smith, William B. Infinitesimal Analysis, 849. Sociology. Congressional Committees. L. G. McConachie, 131. -- Currency Problems of the United States in 1897-'98. A. B. Stickney, 133. -- Elements of. F. H. Giddings, 559. -- The State. W. Wilson, 130. -- Workers, The. W. A. Wyckoff, 707. Stickney, A. B. Currency Problem of the United States in 1897-'98, 133. Still, A. Alternating Currents and the Theory of Transformers, 133. Story of the Railroad, The. Cy Warman, 848. Taylor, A. R. The Study of the Child, 564. Thomas, C. Introduction to North American Archæology, 129. Thompson, Ernest Seton. Wild Animals I have Known, 417. Thomson, J. J. The Discharge of Electricity through Gases, 565. Todd, Mabel L. Corona and Coronet, 418. Treadwell, Augustus. The Storage Battery, 421. Troeger, John W. Harold's Rambles, 567. Udden, J. A. Mechanical Composition of Wind Deposits, 853. United States National Museum, Report of, for 1895, 710. Venable and Howe. Inorganic Chemistry according to the Periodic Law, 567. Waring, George E., Jr. Street-Cleaning Methods in European Cities, 131. Warman, Cy. Story of the Railroad, 848. Whitten, Robert H. Public Administration in Massachusetts, 422. Wilson, L. L. W. History Reader, for Elementary Schools, 853. Wilson, Woodrow. The State, 130. Winter, H. L. Notes on Criminal Anthropology, 280. Worcester, Dean C. The Philippine Islands and their People, 415. Wright, Mabel Osgood. Four-footed Americans and their Kin, 563. Wyckoff, W. A. The Workers, 707. Zoölogy, Elementary. E. E. Beddard, 706. Botany. English Names for Plants. (Frag.), 428 " Forest Planting on the Plains. (Frag.), 718 " Light and Vegetation. D. T. MacDougall, 193 " Plant Characters, Changes in. (Frag.), 286 " Poisonous Plants. (Frag.), 855 " Seeds, Dispersal of. (Frag.), 715 Boyer, M. J. Sketch of Clémence Royer. (With Portrait), 690 Brain Weights and Intellectual Capacity. J. Simms, 243 Brooks, William Keith. Mivart's Groundwork of Science, 450 Bullen, Frank T. Life on a South Sea Whaler, 818 Canada, The Interior of. (Frag.), 141 Catbird, The Coming of the. S. Trotter, 772 Causses of Southern France, The. (Frag.), 138 Cereals in the United States. Distribution of. (Frag.), 859 Clarke, F. W. Sketch. (With Portrait), 110 Clark, George A. The Scientific Expert and the Bering Sea Controversy, 654 Climatic Evolution, Laws of. (Frag.), 855 Collier, J. The Evolution of Colonies, 52, 289, 577 Colonies, The Evolution of. J. Collier, 52, 289, 577 Commensals. (Frag.), 716 Cooking Schools in Philadelphia. (Frag.), 428 Cordillera Region of Canada. (Frag.), 283 Cram, W. E. Concerning Weasels*, 786 Criminology. California Penal System. C. H. Shinn*, 644 Cuba, The Climate of. (Frag.), 426 Curious Habit, Origin of a. (Frag.), 286 Dastre, M. Iron in the Living Body, 807 Dawson, E. R. The Torrents of Switzerland, 46 Death Gulch, a Natural Bear-Trap. T. A. Jaggar*, 475 Decorated Skulls and the Power ascribed to them. (Frag.), 570 Dellenbaugh, F. S. Architectural Forms in Nature*, 63 Dodge, C. R. Possible Fiber Industries of the United States*, 15 Dorsey, George A. Up the Skeena River*, 181 D Q, The New Planet. (Frag.), 426 Dream and Reality. M. C. Melinand, 96 " " " (Table), 103 Dreams, The Stuff of. Havelock Ellis, 721 Dresslar, F. B. Guessing as Influenced by Number Preferences, 781 Dutch Charity, A Practical. J. H. Gore, 103 Earliest Writing in France, The. G. de Mortillet, 542 Earthquakes, Modern Studies of. George Geraland, 362 Economics. Cereals, Distribution of, in the United States, 859 " Conquest, The Spirit of. J. Novicow, 518 " Gold, Marvelous Increase in Production of. A. E. Outerbridge, Jr., 635 " Wheat-growing Capacity of the United States. E. Atkinson, 145 " Wheat Problem, The. E. Atkinson, 759 Education and Evolution. (Smith.) (Corr.), 554 " and Evolution. (Table), 269 " German School Journeys. (Frag.), 573 " History of Scientific Instruction. J. N. Lockyer, 372, 529 " Nature Study in the Philadelphia Normal School. L. L. W. Wilson, 313 " Playgrounds of Rural and Suburban Schools. L. G. Oakley, 176 " Science and Culture. (Table), 842 " Science in. Sir A. Geikie, 672 " Series Method, The. A Comparison. Charlotte Taylor, 537 " Should Children under Ten learn to Read and Write? G. T. W. Patrick, 382 " The Goal of. (Table), 118 Electricity. The Nernst Electric Lamp. (Frag.), 854 Ellis, Havelock. The Stuff that Dreams are made of, 721 Emerson and Evolution. (Alexander.) (Corr.), 555 " " " (Table), 558 Estrays from Civilization. (Frag.), 573 Ethnology. Was Middle America Peopled from Asia? E. S. Morse, 1 Evans, E. P. Superstition and Crime, 206 Evolution and Education. (Smith.) (Corr.), 554 " and Education. (Table), 269 " Extra Organic Factors of. (Frag.), 427 " of Pleasure Gardens. (Frag.), 717 " Social. What is it? Herbert Spencer, 35 " Survival of the Fittest. (Table), 844 Fads and Frauds. (Table), 701 Fiber Industries of the United States. C. R. Dodge*, 15 Florida Alligator, Our. I. W. Blake*, 330 Ford, R. Clyde. The Malay Language, 813 Forest Planting on the Plains. (Frag.), 718 Fossils as Criterions of Geological Ages. (Frag.), 427 Foundation, A Borrowed. (Table), 273 French Science, Two Gifts to. M. H. de Parville*, 81 Galax and its Affinities. (Frag.), 571 Geikie, Sir A. Science in Education, 672 Geography. Atlantic Slope, The. (Frag.), 858 " West Indies, Physical, of. F. L. Oswald, 802 Geological Romance, A. J. A. Udden*, 222 Geology. Death Gulch, a Natural Bear-Trap. T. A. Jaggar*, 475 " Glacial, in America. D. S. Martin, 356 " Siamese Geological Theory, A. (Frag.), 718 Geraland, George. Modern Studies of Earthquakes, 362 German School Journeys. (Frag.), 573 Glacial Geology in America. D. S. Martin, 356 Glaciation and Carbonic Acid. (Frag.), 135 Gold, Marvelous Increase in Production of. A. E. Outerbridge, Jr., 635 Gore, J. H. A Practical Dutch Charity, 103 Guessing as Influenced by Number Preferences. F. B. Dresslar, 781 Hanging an Elephant. (Frag.), 286 Herrings at Dinner. (Frag.), 574 Hitchcock, Charles H., Sketch of*, 260 Holder, C. F. The Great Bombardment*, 506 Huichol Indians of Jalisco. (Frag.), 574 Huxley Lecture, The. (Frag.), 425 Hygiene. Rebreathed Air as a Poison. (Frag.), 714 " Throat and Ear, Care of the. W. Scheppegrell, 791 Ide, Mrs. G. E. Shall we Teach our Daughters the Value of Money?, 686 Indian Idea of the "Midmost Self." (Frag.), 136 Ireland, W. Alleyn. The Labor Problem in the Tropics, 481 Iron in the Living Body. M. Dastre, 807 Iztaccihuatl (the White Lady Mountain). (Frag.), 569 Jaggar, T. A. Death Gulch, a Natural Bear-Trap*, 475 Jastrow, Joseph. The Mind's Eye*, 289 Jordan, D. S. True Tales of Birds and Beasts, 352 Kekulé, Friedrich August. Sketch. (With Portrait), 401 Labor Problem in the Tropics. W. A. Ireland, 481 Lake Dwelling, A Neolithic. (Frag.), 856 Light and Vegetation. D. T. MacDougall, 193 Lockyer, J. N. A Short History of Scientific Instruction, 372, 529 MacDougall. Light and Vegetation, 193 Malay Language. R. C. Ford, 813 Martel, M. E. A. Speleology, or Cave Exploration, 255 Martin, D. S. Glacial Geology in America, 356 Melinand, M. C. Dream and Reality, 96 Mental Defectives and the Social Welfare. M. W. Barr*, 746 Meteorology, Climatic Evolution, Laws of, 855 " Sahara, Winds of. (Frag.), 717 Miles, Manly, Sketch of. (With Portrait), 834 Mind's Eye, The. Joseph Jastrow*, 289 Missouri Botanical Garden, Additions to. (Frag.), 135 Molecular Asymmetry and Life. (Frag.), 139 Mongoose in Jamaica, The. C. W. Willis*, 86 Moon and the Weather, The. G. J. Varney. (Corr.), 118 Morgan, J. de. Stone Age in Egypt, 202 Morse, E. S. Pre-Columbian Musical Instruments.* (Frag.), 712 " " Was Middle America Peopled from Asia?, 1 Mortillet, Gabriel de, Sketch of. (With Portrait), 546 " " " The Earliest Writing in France, 542 Names, Technical and Popular. (Frag.), 285 Naples Aquarium, The. (School for the Study of Life under the Sea.) E. H. Patterson, 668 Natural History. Catbird, The Coming of the. S. Trotter, 772 " " Commensals. (Frag.), 716 " " Herrings at Dinner. (Frag.), 574 " " Origin of a Curious Habit. (Frag.), 286 " " School for the Study of Life under the Sea. E. H. Patterson, 668 " " Scorpion, My Pet. Norman Robinson*, 605 " " Weasels. W. E. Cram*, 786 Natural Selection and Fortuitous Variation. (Frag.), 141 Nature Study in the Philadelphia Normal School. L. L. W. Wilson, 313 Nernst Electric Lamp, The. (Frag.), 854 Neufeld, Dr. (Frag.), 140 Nicaragua and its Ferns. (Frag.), 137 Nontoxic Matches, The French. (Frag.), 857 Novicow, J. The Spirit of Conquest, 518 Oakley, Isabella G. Playgrounds of Rural and Suburban Schools, 176 Observation, The Science of. C. L. Whittle*, 456 Ocean Currents, Drift of. (Frag.), 716 Oswald, F. L. Physical Geography of the West Indies, 802 Outerbridge, A. E., Jr. Marvelous Increase in Production of Gold, 635 Parville, M. H. de. Two Gifts to French Science*, 81 Patrick, G. T. W. Should Children under Ten learn to Read and Write?, 382 Patterson, Eleanor H. A School for the Study of Life under the Sea, 668 Pearls, American Fresh-Water. (Frag.), 859 Pedigree Photographs. (Frag.), 428 Physics. Utilization of Wave Power. (Frag.), 715 Physiology. Iron in the Living Body. M. Dastre, 807 Plant Characters, Changes in. (Frag.), 286 Plant Names, English. (Frag.), 428 Playgrounds of Rural and Suburban Schools. Isabella G. Oakley, 163 Pleasure Gardens, Evolution of. (Frag.), 717 Plumandon, J. R. The Cause of Rain, 89 Poisonous Plants. (Frag.), 855 Portland Cement. (Frag.), 856 Potteries, Doulton. (Frag.), 430 Pre-Columbian Musical Instruments. E. S. Morse*, 712 Psychology. Dreams. Havelock Ellis, 721 " Guessing as Influenced by Number Preferences. F. B. Dresslar, 781 Pulpit, A Voice from the. (Table), 409 Rabies Bacillus, The. (Frag.), 284 Racial Geography of Europe. W. Z. Ripley, 163, 338, 614 Rain, The Cause of. J. R. Plumandon, 89 Rebreathed Air as a Poison. (Frag.), 714 Ripley, W. Z. Racial Geography of Europe, 163, 338, 614 Robinson, Norman. My Pet Scorpion*, 605 Royer, Clémence, Sketch of. (With Portrait.) M. J. Boyer, 690 Russell's Photographic Researches. (Frag.), 139 Saghalin, The Island of. (Frag.), 285 St. Kildans, The. (Frag.), 284 Scheppegrell, W. Care of the Throat and Ear, 791 Science, A Doubtful Appendix to. (Table), 120 " and Culture. (Table), 842 " Christian. The New Superstition. (Table), 557 " Education in. (Words of a Master.) (Table), 699 " Mivart's Groundwork of. W. K. Brooks, 450 " The Advance of. (Table), 415 Scientific Instruction, A Short History of. J. N. Lockyer, 372, 529 Scorpion, My Pet. Norman Robinson*, 605 Seasons of the Year, The. Grant Allen, 230 Seeds, Dispersal of. (Frag.), 715 Series Method, The. A Comparison. Charlotte Taylor, 537 Shinn, Charles Howard. The California Penal System*, 644 Siamese Geological Theory, A. (Frag.), 718 Silkworm Gut, Spanish. (Frag.), 860 Simms, Joseph. Brain Weights and Intellectual Capacity, 243 Skeena River, Up the. George A. Dorsey*, 181 Smell, The Physics of. (Frag.), 283 Smith, Franklin. Politics as a Form of Civil War, 588 Smith, Stephen. Vegetation a Remedy for the Summer Heat of Cities*, 433 Social Decadence, An Example of. (Table), 412 Sociology. California Penal System. C. H. Shinn*, 644 " Mental Defectives and the Social Welfare. M. W. Barr*, 746 " Politics as a Form of Civil War. F. Smith, 588 " The Foundation of. (Giddings.) (Corr.), 553 Soils and Fertilizers. C. M. Blackford, Jr., 392 South Sea Whaler, Life on a. F. T. Bullen, 818 Spain's Decadence, The Cause of. (Table), 122 Speleology, or Cave Exploration. M. E. A. Martel, 255 Spencer, Herbert. What is Social Evolution?, 35 Spirit of Conquest, The. J. Novicow, 518 Stone Age in Egypt, The. J. de Morgan, 202 Submarine Telegraphy, Early. (Frag.), 569 Superstition and Crime. E. P. Evans, 206 " Aboriginal, about Bones. (Frag.), 572 " The New. (Table), 557 Survival of the Fittest. (Table), 844 Switzerland, The Torrents of. E. B. Dawson, 46 Taxation, Principles of. Hon. D. A. Wells, 319, 490, 736 Taylor, Charlotte. The Series Method, 537 Throat and Ear, Care of the. W. Scheppegrell, 791 Toes in Walking, The. (Frag.), 429 Trade Hunting, Scientific. (Frag.), 140 Trait, A, Common to us all. (Frag.), 429 Travel. Up the Skeena River. George A. Dorsey, 181 Tree Planting in Arid Regions. (Frag.), 282 Trees as Land Formers. (Frag.), 858 Trotter, Spencer. The Coming of the Catbird, 772 True Tales of Birds and Beasts. D. S. Jordan, 352 Udden, J. A. A Geological Romance*, 222 Varney, G. J. The Moon and the Weather. (Corr.), 118 Vegetation a Remedy against the Summer Heat of Cities. Dr. S. Smith, 433 War, The "Hell" of. (Frag.), 718 Wave Length and other Measurements. (Frag.), 137 Wave Power, The Utilization of. (Frag.), 715 Weasels, Concerning. W. E. Cram*, 786 Weir, J., Jr. The Herds of the Yellow Ant*, 75 Wells, David Ames, Death of. (Table), 271 " " " Principles of Taxation, 319, 490, 736 West Indies, Physical Geography of. F. L. Oswald, 802 Wheat-growing Capacity of the United States. E. Atkinson, 145 Wheat Problem, The, again. E. Atkinson, 759 White Lady Mountain, The. (Frag.), 569 Whittle, C. L. The Science of Observation*, 456 Willis, C. W. The Mongoose in Jamaica*, 86 Wilson, L. L. W. Nature Study in the Philadelphia Normal School, 313 Winds of the Sahara. (Frag.), 717 Words of a Master. (Table), 699 Yellow Ant, The Herds of the. J. Weir, Jr.*, 75 THE END. Transcriber's Notes: Words surrounded by _ are italicized. Words surrounded by = are bold. Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent spellings have been kept, including inconsistent use of hyphen (e.g. "co-operative" and "cooperative") and capitalisation (e.g. "Fresh-Water" and "Fresh-water"). Captions added to captionless illustrations. 
44725	----	Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LVI NOVEMBER, 1899, TO APRIL, 1900 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1900 COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. [Illustration: GEORGE M. STERNBERG.] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. NOVEMBER, 1899. THE REAL PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRACY. BY FRANKLIN SMITH. Much has been written of late about "the real problems of democracy." According to some "thinkers," they consist of the invention of ingenious devices to prevent caucus frauds and the purchase of votes, to check the passage of special laws as well as too many laws, and to infuse into decent people an ardent desire to participate in the wrangles of politics. According to others, they consist of the invention of equally ingenious devices to compel corporations to manage their business in accordance with Christian principles, to transform the so-called natural monopolies into either State or municipal monopolies, and to effect, by means of the power of taxation, a more equitable distribution of wealth. According to still others, they consist of the invention of no less ingenious devices to force people to be temperate, to observe humanity toward children and animals, and to read and study what will make them model citizens. It is innocently and touchingly believed that with the solution of these problems, by the application of the authority that society has over the individual, "the social conscience" will be awakened. But such a belief can not be realized. It has its origin in a conception of democracy that has no foundation either in history or science. What are supposed to be the real problems of democracy are only the problems of despotism--the problems to which every tyrant from time immemorial has addressed himself, to the moral and industrial ruin of his subjects. If democracy be conceived not as a form of political government under the _régime_ of universal suffrage, but as a condition of freedom under moral control, permitting every man to do as he likes, so long as he does not trench upon the equal right of every other man, deliverance from the sophistries and absurdities of current social and political discussion becomes easy and inevitable. Its real problems cease to be an endless succession of political devices that stimulate cunning and evasion, and countless encroachments upon individual freedom that stir up contention and ill feeling. Instead of being innumerable and complex, defying the solvent power of the greatest intellects and the efforts of the most enthusiastic philanthropists, they become few and simple. While their proper solution is beset with difficulties, these difficulties are not as hopeless as the framing of a statute to produce a growth of virtue in a depraved heart. Indeed, no such task has ever been accomplished, and every effort in that direction has been worse than futile. It has encouraged the growth of all the savage traits that ages of conflict have stamped so profoundly in the nervous system of the race. But let it be understood that the real problems of democracy are the problems of self-support and self-control, the problems that appeared with the appearance of human life, and that their sole solution is to be found in the application of precisely the same methods with which Nature disciplines the meanest of her creatures, then we may expect a measure of success from the efforts of social and political reformers; for freedom of thought and action, coupled with the punishment that comes from a failure to comply with the laws of life and the conditions of existence, creates an internal control far more potent than any law. It impels men to depend upon their own efforts to gain a livelihood; it inspires them with a respect for the right of others to do the same. Simple and commonplace as the traits of self-support and self-control may seem, they are of transcendent importance. Every other trait sinks into insignificance. The society whose members have learned to care for themselves and to control themselves has no further moral or economic conquests to make. It will be in the happy condition dreamed of by all poets, philosophers, and philanthropists. There will be no destitution, for each person, being able to maintain himself and his family, will have no occasion, except in a case of a sudden and an unforeseen misfortune, to look to his friends and neighbors for aid. But in thus maintaining himself--that is, in pursuing the occupation best adapted to his ability and most congenial to his taste--he will contribute in the largest degree to the happiness of the other members of the community. While they are pursuing the occupations best adapted to their ability and most congenial to their tastes, they will be able to obtain from him, as he will be able to obtain from them, those things that both need to supplement the products of their own industry. Since each will be left in full possession of all the fruits of his own toil, he will be at liberty to make just such use of them as will contribute most to his happiness, thus permitting the realization, in the only practicable way, of Bentham's principle of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Since all of them will be free to make such contracts as they believe will be most advantageous to them, exchanging what they are willing to part with for what some one else is willing to give in return, there will prevail the only equitable distribution of the returns from labor and capital. No one will receive more and no one less than he is entitled to. Thus will benefit be in proportion to merit, and the most scrupulous justice be satisfied. But this _régime_ of equity in the distribution of property implies, as I have already said, the possession of a high degree of self-control. Not only must all persons have such a keen sense of their own rights as will never permit them to submit to infringement, but they must have such a keen sense of the rights of others that they will not be guilty themselves of infringement. Not only will they refrain from the commission of those acts of aggression whose ill effects are immediate and obvious; they will refrain from those acts whose ill effects are remote and obscure. Although they will not, for example, deceive or steal or commit personal assaults, they will not urge the adoption of a policy that will injure the unknown members of other communities, like the Welsh tin-plate makers and the Vienna pearl-button makers that the McKinley Bill deprived of employment. Realizing the vice of the plea of the opponents of international copyright that cheap literature for a people is better than scrupulous honesty, they will not refuse to foreign authors the same protection to property that they demand. They will not, finally, allow themselves to take by compulsion or by persuasion the property of neighbors to be used to alleviate suffering or to disseminate knowledge in a way to weaken the moral and physical strength of their fellows. But the possession of a sense of justice so scrupulous assumes the possession of a fellow-feeling so vivid that it will allow no man to refuse all needful aid to the victims of misfortune. As suffering to others will mean suffering to himself, he will be as powerfully moved to go to their rescue as he would to protect himself against the same misfortune. Indeed, he will be moved, as all others will be moved, to undertake without compulsion all the benevolent work, be it charitable or educational, that may be necessary to aid those persons less fortunate than himself to obtain the greatest possible satisfaction out of life. But the methods of social reform now in greatest vogue do not contribute to the realization of any such millennium. They are a flagrant violation of the laws of life and the conditions of existence. They make difficult, if not impossible, the establishment of the moral government of a democracy that insures every man and woman not only freedom but also sustentation and protection. In disregard of the principles of biology, which demand that benefit shall be in proportion to merit, the feeble members of society are fostered at the expense of the strong. Setting at defiance the principles of psychology, which insist upon the cultivation of the clearest perception of the inseparable relation of cause and effect and the equally inseparable relation of aggression and punishment, honest people are turned into thieves and murderers, and thieves and murderers are taught to believe that no retribution awaits the commission of the foulest crime. Scornful of the principles of sociology, which teach in the plainest way that the institutions of feudalism are the products of war and can serve no other purpose than the promotion of aggression, a deliberate effort, born of the astonishing belief that they can be transformed into the agencies of progress, is made in time of peace to restore them to life. To the American Philistine nothing is more indicative of the marvelous moral superiority of this age and country than the rapid increase in the public expenditures for enterprises "to benefit the people." Particularly enamored is he of the showy statistics of hospitals, asylums, reformatories, and other so-called charitable institutions supported by public taxation. "How unselfish we are!" he exclaims, swelling with pride as he points to them. "In what other age or in what other country has so much been done for the poor and unfortunate?" Naught shall ever be said by me against the desire to help others. The fellow-feeling that thrives upon the aid rendered to the sick and destitute I believe to be the most precious gift of civilization. Upon its growth depends the further moral advancement of the race. As I have already intimated, only as human beings are able to represent to themselves vividly the sufferings of others will they be moved to desist from the conduct that contributes to those sufferings. But the system of public charity that prevails in this country is not charity at all; it is a system of forcible public largesses, as odious and demoralizing as the one that contributed so powerfully to the downfall of Athens and Rome. By it money is extorted from the taxpayer with as little justification as the crime of the highwayman, and expended by politicians with as little love as he of their fellows. What is the result? Precisely what might be expected. He is infuriated because of the growing burden of his taxes. Instead of being made more humane and sympathetic with every dollar he gives under compulsion to the poor and suffering, he becomes more hard-hearted and bitter toward his fellows. The notion that society, as organized at present, is reducing him to poverty and degradation takes possession of him. He becomes an agitator for violent reforms that will only render his condition worse. At the same time the people he aids come to regard him simply as a person under obligations to care for them. They feel no more gratitude toward him than the wolf toward the victim of its hunger and ferocity. Akin to public charity are all those public enterprises undertaken to ameliorate the condition of the poor--parks, model tenement houses, art galleries, free concerts, free baths, and relief works of all kinds. To these I must add all those Federal, State, and municipal enterprises, such as the post office with the proposed savings attachment, a State system of highways and waterways, municipal water, gas and electric works, etc., that are supposed to be of inestimable advantage to the same worthy class. These likewise fill the heart of the American Philistine with immense satisfaction. Although he finds, by his study of pleasing romances on municipal government in Europe, that we have yet to take some further steps before we fall as completely as the inhabitants of Paris and Berlin into the hands of municipal despotism, he is convinced that we have made gratifying headway, and that the outlook for complete subjection to that despotism is encouraging. But it should be remembered that splendid public libraries and public baths, and extensive and expensive systems of highways and municipal improvements, built under a modified form of the old _corvée_, are no measure of the fellow-feeling and enlightenment of a community. On the contrary, they indicate a pitiful incapacity to appreciate the rights of others, and are, therefore, a measure rather of the low degree of civilization. It should be remembered also, especially by the impoverished victims of the delusions of the legislative philanthropist, that there is no expenditure that yields a smaller return in the long run than public expenditure; that however honest the belief that public officials will do their duty as conscientiously and efficiently as private individuals, history has yet to record the fact of any bureaucracy; that however profound the conviction that the cost of these "public blessings" comes out of the pockets of the rich and is on that account particularly justifiable, it comes largely out of the pockets of the poor; and that by the amount abstracted from the income of labor and capital by that amount is the sum divided between labor and capital reduced. "But," interposes the optimist, "have the Americans not their great public-school system, unrivaled in the world, to check and finally to end the evils that appear thus far to be inseparably connected with popular government? Is there any truth more firmly established than that it is the bulwark of American institutions, and that if we maintain it as it should be maintained they will be able to weather any storm that may threaten?" Precisely the same argument has been urged time out of mind in behalf of an ecclesiastical system supported at the expense of the taxpayer. Good men without number have believed, and have fought to maintain their belief, that only by the continuance of this form of aggression could society be saved from corruption and barbarism. Even in England to-day, where freedom and civilization have made their most brilliant conquests, this absurd contention is made to bolster up the rotten and tottering union of Church and state, and to justify the seizure of the property of taxpayers to support a particular form of ecclesiastical instruction. But no fact of history has received demonstrations more numerous and conclusive than that such instruction, whether Protestant or Catholic, Buddhist or Mohammedan, in the presence of the demoralizing forces of militant activities, is as impotent as the revolutions of the prayer wheel of a pious Hindu. To whatever country or people or age we may turn, we find that the spirit of the warrior tramples the spirit of the saint in the dust. Despite the lofty teachings of Socrates and Plato, the Athenians degenerated until the name of the Greek became synonymous with that of the blackest knave. With the noble examples and precepts of the Stoics in constant view, the Romans became beastlier than any beast. All through the middle ages and down to the present century the armies of ecclesiastics, the vast libraries of theology, and the myriads of homilies and prayers were impotent to prevent the social degradation that inundated the world with the outbreak of every great conflict. Take, for example, a page from the history of Spain. At the time of Philip II, who tried to make his people as rigid as monks, that country had no rival in its fanatical devotion to the Church, or its slavish observance of the forms of religion. Yet its moral as well as its intellectual and industrial life was sinking to the lowest level. Official corruption was rampant. The most shameless sexual laxity pervaded all ranks. The name of Spanish women, who had "in previous times been modest, almost austere and Oriental in their deportment," became a byword and a reproach throughout the world. "The ladies are naturally shameless," says Camille Borghese, the Pope's delegate to Madrid in 1593, "and even in the streets go up and address men unknown to them, looking upon it as a kind of heresy to be properly introduced. They admit all sorts of men to their conversation, and are not in the least scandalized at the most improper proposals being made to them." To see how ecclesiastics themselves fall a prey to the ethics of militant activities, becoming as heartless and debauched as any other class, take a page from Italian history at the time of Pope Alexander VI. "Crimes grosser than Scythian," says a pious Catholic who visited Rome, "acts of treachery worse than Carthaginian, are committed without disguise in the Vatican itself under the eyes of the Pope. There are rapines, murders, incests, debaucheries, cruelties exceeding those of the Neros and Caligulas." Similar pages from the history of every other country in Europe given up to war, including Protestant England, might be quoted. But what is true of ecclesiastical effort in the presence of militant activities is true of pedagogic effort in the presence of political activities. For more than half a century the public-school system in its existing form has been in full and energetic operation. The money devoted to it every year now reaches the enormous total of one hundred and eighty million dollars. Simultaneously an unprecedented extension of secondary education has occurred. Since the war, colleges and universities, supported in whole or in part at the public expense, have been established in more than half of the States and Territories of the Union. To these must be added the phenomenal growth of normal schools, high schools, and academies, and of the equipment of the educational institutions already in existence. Yet, as a result, are the American people more moral than they were half a century ago? Have American institutions--that is, the institutions based upon the freedom of the individual--been made more secure? I venture to answer both questions with an emphatic negative. The construction and operation of the greatest machine of pedagogy recorded in history has been absolutely impotent to stem the rising tide of political corruption and social degeneration. If there are skeptics that doubt the truth of this indictment let them study the criminal history of the day that records the annual commission of more than six thousand suicides and more than ten thousand homicides, and the embezzlement of more than eleven million dollars. Let them study the lying pleas of the commercial interests of the country that demand protection against "the pauper labor of Europe," and thus commit a shameless aggression upon the pauper labor of America. Let them study the records of the deeds of intolerance and violence committed upon workingmen that refuse to exchange their personal liberty for membership of a despotic labor organization. Let them study the columns of the newspapers, crowded with records of crime, salacious stories, and ignorant comment on current questions and events that appeal to a population as unlettered and base as themselves. Let them study, finally, the appalling indictment of American political life, in a State where the native blood still runs pure in the veins of the majority of the inhabitants, that Mr. John Wanamaker framed in a great speech at the opening of his memorable campaign in Lancaster against the most powerful and most corrupt despotism that can be found outside of Russia or Turkey. "In the fourth century of Rome, in the time of Emperor Theodosius, Hellebichus was master of the forces," he said, endeavoring to describe a condition of affairs that exists in a similar degree in every State in the Union, "and Cæsarius was count of the offices. In the nineteenth century, M. S. Quay is count of the offices, and W. A. Andrews, Prince of Lexow, is master of forces in Pennsylvania, and we have to come through the iron age and the silver age to the worst of all ages--the degraded, evil age of conscienceless, debauched politics.... Profligacy and extravagance and boss rule everywhere oppress the people. By the multiplication of indictments your district attorney has multiplied his fees far beyond the joint salaries of both your judges. The administration of justice before the magistrates has degenerated into organized raids on the county treasury.... Voters are corruptly influenced or forcibly coerced to do the bidding of the bosses, and thus force the fetters of political vassalage on the freemen of the old guard. School directors, supervisors, and magistrates, and the whole machinery of local government, are involved and dominated by this accursed system." But Mr. Wanamaker might have added that the whole social and industrial life of the country is involved and dominated by the same system. It is a well-established law of social science that the evil effects of a dominant activity are not confined to the persons engaged in it. Like a contagion, they spread to every part of the social organization, and poison the life farthest removed from their origin. Yet the public-school system, so impotent to save us from social and political degradation and still such an object of unbounded pride and adulation, is, as Mr. Wanamaker, all unconscious of the implication of his scathing criticism, points out in so many words, an integral part of the vast and complex machinery that political despotism has seized upon to plunder and enslave the American people. As in the case of every other extension of the duties of government beyond the limits of the preservation of order and the enforcement of justice, it is an aggression upon the rights of the individual, and, as in the case of every other aggression, contributes powerfully to the decay of national character and free institutions. It adds thousands upon thousands to the constantly growing army of tax eaters that are impoverishing the people still striving against heavy odds to gain an honest livelihood. It places in the hands of the political despots now ruling the country, without the responsibility that the most odious monarchs have to bear, a revenue and an army of mercenaries that make more and more difficult emancipation from their shackles. It is doing more than anything else except the post-office department to teach people that there is no connection between merit and benefit; that they have the right to look to the State rather than to themselves for maintenance; that they are under no obligations to see that they do not take from others, in the form of salaries not earned nor intended to be earned, what does not belong to them. In the face of this wholesale destruction of fellow-feeling such as occurred in France under the old _régime_ and is occurring to-day in Italy and Spain, and the inculcation of the ethics of militant activities, such as may be observed in these countries as well as elsewhere in Europe, is it any wonder that the mind-stuffing that goes on in the public schools has no more effect upon the morals of the American people than the creeds and prayers of the mediæval ecclesiastics that joined in wars and the spoliation of oppressed populations throughout Europe? Since the path that all people under popular government as well as under forms more despotic are pursuing so energetically and hopefully leads to the certain destruction of the foundations of civilization, what is the path that social science points out? What must they do to prevent the extinction of the priceless acquisition of fellow-feeling, now vanishing so rapidly before the most unselfish efforts to promote it? The supposition is that the social teachings of the philosophy of evolution have no answer to these questions. Believing that they inculcate the hideous _laissez-faire_ doctrine of "each for himself and the devil take the hindmost," so characteristic of human relations among all classes of people in this country, the victims of this supposition have repudiated them. But I propose to show that they are the only teachings that give the slightest promise of social amelioration. Although they are ignorantly stigmatized as individualistic, and therefore necessarily selfish and inconsiderate of the welfare of others, they are in reality socialistic in the best sense of the word--that is, they enjoin voluntary, not coercive, co-operation, and insure the noblest humanity and the most perfect civilization, moral as well as material, that can be attained. Why a society organized upon the individualistic instead of the socialistic basis will realize every achievement admits of easy explanation. A man dependent upon himself is forced by the struggle for existence to exercise every faculty he possesses or can possibly develop to save himself and his progeny from extinction. Under such pitiless and irresistible pressure he acquires the highest physical and intellectual strength. Thus equipped with weapons absolutely indispensable in any state of society, whether civilized or uncivilized, he is prepared for the conquest of the world. He gains also the physical and moral courage needful to cope with the difficulties that terrify and paralyze the people that have not been subjected to the same rigid discipline. Energetic and self-reliant, he assails them with no thought of failure. If, however, he meets with reverses, he renews the attack, and repeats it until success finally comes to reward his efforts. Such prolonged struggles give steadiness and solidity to his character that do not permit him to abandon himself to trifles or to yield easily, if at all, to excitement and panic. He never falls a victim to Reigns of Terror. The more trying the times, the more self-possessed, clear-headed, and capable of grappling with the situation he becomes, and soon rises superior to it. With every triumph over difficulties there never fails to come the joy that more than balances the pain and suffering endured. But the pain and suffering are as precious as the joy of triumph. Indelibly registered in the nervous system, they enable their victim to feel as others feel passing through the same experience, and this fellow-feeling prompts him to render them the assistance they may need. In this way be becomes a philanthropist. Possessed of the abundant means that the success of his enterprises has placed in his hands, he is in a position to help them to a degree not within the reach nor the desires of the member of the society organized upon the socialistic basis. In the briefest appeal to history may be found the amplest support for these deductions from the principles of social science. Wherever the individual has been given the largest freedom to do whatever he pleases, as long as he does not trench upon the equal freedom of others, there we witness all those achievements and discover all those traits that indicate an advanced state of social progress. The people are the most energetic, the most resourceful, the most prosperous, the most considerate and humane, the most anxious, and the most competent to care for their less fortunate fellows. On the other hand, wherever the individual has been most repressed, deterred by custom or legislation from making the most of himself in every way, there are to be observed social immobility or retrogression and all the hateful traits that belong to barbarians. The people are inert, slavish, cruel, and superstitious. In the ancient world one type of society is represented by the Egyptians and Assyrians, and the other by the Greeks and Romans. In the modern world all the Oriental peoples, particularly the Hindus and Chinese, represent the former, and the Occidental peoples, particularly the Anglo-Saxons, represent the latter. So superior, in fact, are the Anglo-Saxons because of their observance of the sacred and fruitful principle of individual freedom that they control the most desirable parts of the earth's surface. If not checked by the practice of a philosophy that has destroyed all the great peoples of antiquity and paralyzed their competitors in the establishment of colonies in the New as well as the Old World, there is no reason to doubt that the time will eventually come when, like the Romans, there will be no other rule than theirs in all the choicest parts of the globe. It is the immense material superiority of the Anglo-Saxon peoples over all other nations that first arrests attention. No people in Europe possess the capital or conduct the enterprises that the English and Americans do. They have more railroads, more steamships, more factories, more foundries, more warehouses, more of everything that requires wealth and energy than their rivals. Though the fact evokes the sneers of the Ruskins and Carlyles, these enterprises are the indispensable agents of civilization. They have done more for civilization, for the union of distant peoples, and the development of fellow-feeling--for all that makes life worth living--than all the art, literature, and theology ever produced. Without industry and commerce, which these devotees of "the higher life" never weary of deprecating, how would the inhabitants of the Italian republics have achieved the intellectual and artistic conquests that make them the admiration of every historian? The Stones of Venice could not have been written. The artists could not have lived that enabled Vassari to hand his name down to posterity. The new learning would have been a flower planted in a barren soil, and even before it had come to bud it would have fallen withered. May we not, therefore, expect that in like manner the wealth and freedom of the Anglo-Saxon race will bring forth fruits that shall not evoke scorn and contempt? Already their achievements in every field except painting, sculpture, and architecture eclipse those of their rivals. Not excepting the literature of the Greeks, is any so rich, varied, powerful, and voluminous as theirs? If they have no Cæsar or Napoleon, they have a long list of men that have been of infinitely greater use to civilization than those two products of militant barbarism. If judged by practical results, they are without rivals in the work of education. By their inventions and their applications of the discoveries of science they have distanced all competitors in the race for industrial and commercial supremacy. In the work of philanthropy no people has done as much as they. The volume of their personal effort and pecuniary contributions to ameliorate the condition of the poor and unfortunate are without parallel in the annals of charity. Yet Professor Ely, echoing the opinion of Charles Booth and other misguided philanthropists, has the assurance to tell us that "individualism has broken down." It is the social philosophy that they are trying to thrust upon the world again that stands hopelessly condemned before the remorseless tribunal of universal experience. In the light thus obtained from science and history, the duty of the American people toward the current social and political philosophy and all the quack measures it proposes for the amelioration of the condition of the unfortunate becomes clear and urgent. It is to pursue without equivocation or deviation the policy of larger and larger freedom for the individual that has given the Anglo-Saxon his superiority and present dominance in the world. To this end they should oppose with all possible vigor every proposed extension of the duty of the state that does not look to the preservation of order and the enforcement of justice. Regarding it as an onslaught of the forces of barbarism, they should make no compromise with it; they should fight it until freedom has triumphed. The next duty is to conquer the freedom they still lack. Here the battle must be for the suppression of the system of protective tariffs, for the transfer to private enterprise and beneficence, the duties of the post office, the public schools, and all public charities, for the repeal of all laws in regulation of trade and industry as well as those in regulation of habits and morals. As an inspiration it should be remembered that the struggle is not only for freedom but for honesty. For the truth can not be too loudly or too often proclaimed that every law taking a dollar from a man without his consent, or regulating his conduct not in accordance with his own notions, but in accordance with those of his neighbors, contributes to the education of a people in idleness and crime. The next duty is to encourage on every hand an appeal to voluntary effort to accomplish all tasks too great for the strength of the individual. Whether those tasks be moral, industrial, or educational, voluntary co-operation alone should assume them and carry them to a successful issue. The government should have no more to do with them than it has to do with the cultivation of wheat or the management of Sunday schools or the suppression of backbiting. The last and final duty should be to cheapen and, as fast as possible, to establish gratuitous justice. With the great diminution of crime that would result from the observance of the duties already mentioned there would be much less occasion than now to appeal to the courts. But, whenever the occasion arises, it should involve no cost to the person that feels that his rights have been invaded. Thus will be solved indirectly all the problems of democracy that social and political reformers seek in vain to solve directly. With the diminution of the duties of the state to the preservation of order and the enforcement of justice will be effected a reform as important and far reaching as the suppression of chronic warfare. When politicians are deprived of the immense plunder now involved in political warfare, it will not be necessary to devise futile plans for caucus reform, or ballot reform, or convention reform, or charter reform, or legislative reform. Having no more incentive to engage in their nefarious business than the smugglers that the abolition of the infamous tariff laws banished from Europe, they will disappear among the crowd of honest toilers. The suppression of the robberies of the tax collectors and tax eaters, who have become so vast an army in the United States, will effect also a solution of all labor problems. A society that permits every toiler to work for whomsoever he pleases and for whatever he pleases, protecting him in the full enjoyment of all the fruits of his labor, has done for him everything that can be done. It has taught him self-support and self-control. In thus guaranteeing him freedom of contract and putting an end to the plunder of a bureaucracy and privileged classes of private individuals, the beneficiaries of special legislation, it has effected the only equitable distribution of property possible. At the same time it has accomplished a vastly greater work. As I have shown, the indispensable condition of success of all movements for moral reform is the suppression not only of militant strife, but of political strife. While they prevail, all ecclesiastical and pedagogic efforts to better the condition of society must fail. Despite lectures, despite sermons and prayers, despite also literature and art, the ethics controlling the conduct of men and women will be those of war. But with the abolition of both forms of militant strife it becomes an easy task to teach the ethics of peace, and to establish a state of society that requires no other government than that of conscience. All the forces of industrialism contribute to the work and insure its success. * * * * * "This thirst for shooting every rare or unwonted kind of bird," says the author of an article in the London Saturday Review, "is accountable for the disappearance of many interesting forms of life in the British Islands." AN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY. BY HERBERT STOTESBURY. [Illustration: MICHAEL FOSTER, K. C. B., M. A., F. R. S., Trinity. Professor of Physiology.] Most minds in America, as in England, if they think about the subject at all, impute to the two ancient centers of Anglo-Saxon learning--Oxford and Cambridge--an unquestionable supremacy. A halo of greatness surrounds these august institutions, none the less real because to the American mind, at least, it is vague. Half the books students at other institutions require in their various courses have the names of eminent Cambridge or Oxford men upon the fly leaf. Michael Foster's Physiology, Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics, and Bryce's American Commonwealth are recognized text-books wherever the subjects of which they treat are studied; while Sir G. G. Stokes, Jebb, Lord Acton, Caird, Max Müller, and Ray Lankester are as well known to students of Leland Stanford or Princeton as they are to Englishmen. One can scarcely read a work on English literature or open an English novel which does not make some reference to one or other of the great universities or their colleges, inseparably associated as they are with English life and history, past and present. Our oldest college owes its existence to John Harvard, of Emmanuel, Cambridge, and the name of the mother university still clings to her transatlantic offspring. The English institutions have become firmly associated in the vulgar mind with all that is dignified, venerable, and thorough in learning, but, beyond a vague sentiment of admiration, little adequate knowledge on the subject is abroad. American or German universities are organizations not very difficult to comprehend, and a vague knowledge of them is perhaps sufficient. The understanding, however, of those complicated academic communities, Oxford and Cambridge, is a matter of intimate experience. They differ widely from their sister institutions in other countries, and in attempting to give some conception of their peculiarities the writer proposes to restrict himself chiefly to Cambridge, because there are not very many striking differences between the latter and Oxford, and because the scientific supremacy of Cambridge is sufficiently established to render her an object of greater interest to the readers of the Science Monthly. [Illustration: The Right Hon. LORD ACTON, M. A., LL. D., Trinity. Professor of Modern History.] First of all, it must be borne in mind that throughout most of their history these institutions have been closely related, not to the body of the people, but to the aristocracy. This was not so much the case at first, before the university became an aggregate of colleges. Then a rather poor and humble class were enabled, through the small expense involved, to acquire the rudiments of an education, and even to become proficient in the scholastic dialectic. But ere long, and with the gradual endowment of different colleges, the expenses of a student became much greater, and, save where scholarships could be obtained, it required some affluence before parents could afford to give their sons an academic training. Hence, the more fortunate or aristocratic classes came in time to contribute the large majority of the student body. Those whose intellectual attainments were so unusual as to constitute ways and means have never been debarred, but impecunious mediocrity had and still has little place or opportunity. It is well to remember, in addition, that the Church fostered these universities in their infancy, that it deserves unqualified credit for having nursed them through their early months, and that it continues to have some considerable influence over the modern institutions. Finally, the growth of Cambridge and Oxford has largely been occasioned by lack of rivals in their own class. In this branch or that, other institutions have become deservedly famous. Edinburgh has a high reputation in moral science; Manchester is renowned for her physics, chemistry, and engineering; and London for her medical schools. But Oxford and Cambridge are strong in many branches. Financially powerful, they are able to attract the majority of promising and eminent men, whence has resulted that remarkable _coterie_ of unrivaled intellects through whom the above-named universities are chiefly known to the outer and foreign world. This characteristic has its opposite illustrated in the United States, where the tendency is centrifugal, no one or two universities or colleges having advantages so decided as inevitably to attract most of the best minds, and where, in consequence, the best minds are found scattered from California to Harvard and Pennsylvania. [Illustration: J. J. THOMSON, M. A., F. R. S., Trinity. Professor of Experimental Physics.] The characteristic peculiar to Cambridge and Oxford, and which distinguishes them not only from American but also from all other universities in England and elsewhere, is the college system. Thus Cambridge is a collection of eighteen colleges which, though nominally united to form one institution, are really distinct, inasmuch as each is a separate community with its own buildings and grounds, its own resident students, its own lecturers, and Fellows--a community which is supported by its own moneys without aid from the university exchequer, and which in most matters legislates for itself. The system is not unlike the American Union on a small scale, with its cluster of governments and their relation to a supreme center. The advantages of this scheme might theoretically be very great. With each college handsomely endowed and, though managing its own affairs, entering freely, in addition, into those relations of reciprocity which make for the good of the whole, one can readily imagine an ideal academic commonwealth. And while the present condition of the university can scarcely be said to approximate very closely to such an academic Utopia, it yet derives from its constitution numerous obvious advantages which universities otherwise constituted would and do undoubtedly lack. The chief evils besetting the university are perhaps more adventitious than inherent; they are largely financial, and arise from carrying the system of college individualism too far. A description of the college and university organization may make this apparent. By its endowment a college must support a certain number of Fellows and scholars. The latter form a temporary body, while the former are more or less permanent, and therefore upon them devolves the management of the college. Business is usually done by a council chosen from the Fellows, and the election of new Fellows to fill vacancies is made by this select body. The head of a college is known as the master; he is elected by the Fellows save in one or two cases, where his appointment rests with the crown or with certain wealthy individuals. He lives in the college lodge especially built for him, draws a salary large in proportion to the wealth of his college, and exerts an influence corresponding to his intelligence. [Illustration: G. H. DARWIN, M. A., F. R. S., Trinity. Plumian Professor of Astronomy.] The Fellows are in most cases chosen from those men who have achieved the greatest success in an honor course. At Cambridge College individualism has progressed so far that the Fellows of, say, Magdalen must be Magdalen men, the students of Queens', St Catherine's, or any other being ineligible save for their own fellowships. Oxford obtains perhaps better men on the whole by throwing open the fellowships of each particular college to the graduates of all, thus producing a wider competition. A fellowship until recently was tenable for life, but it has been reduced to about six years, the Fellows as a whole, however, retaining the power to extend the period of possession. And, further, the holding of a college office for fifteen years in general qualifies for the holding of a fellowship for life, and for a pension as lecturer or tutor. Thus a man is able to devote himself to research with little fear that at the latter end of his career he will lack the means of support. It is perhaps not too much to say that the offices of college dean, tutor, and lecturer are more perquisites than anything else. They are meant to keep and attract men of ability and parts. However, their existence reacts upon the student body by augmenting the expenses of the latter out of proportion to the benefits to be obtained. For instance, instead of utilizing one set of lecturers for one class of subjects, which all students could attend for a small fee, each of the larger colleges, at any rate, pays special lecturers, drawn from its own Fellows, to speak upon the same subjects each to a mere handful of men from their own college only. The tutor is another luxury inherited from the middle ages and therefore retained, and one for which the students have to pay dearly. The chief business of the tutor is not to teach, but to "look after" a certain number of students who are theoretically relegated to his charge. He looks up their lodgings for them, pays their bills at the end of the term, gets them out of scrapes, and draws a large salary. The tutorships seem to the writer to be a good illustration of how an office necessary to one period persists after that for which it was instituted has ceased to exist. When the students of Oxford and Cambridge were many of them thirteen and fourteen years of age, as in the fourteenth century, nurses were doubtless necessary, but they are still retained when the greater maturity of the students renders them not only unnecessary but at times even an impertinence. The dean is not, as with us, the head of a department; his functions are not so many, his tasks far less onerous. It is before a college dean that students are "hauled" for such offenses as irregularity at chapel, returning to the college after 12 P. M., smoking in college precincts, bringing dogs into the college grounds, and other villainous offenses against regulations. A dean must also attend chapel. Some colleges require two deans to struggle through these complicated and laborious duties, though some possessing only a few dozen students succeed in getting along with one. The line of demarcation between the university and the colleges is very distinct. The legislative influence of the former extends over a comparatively restricted field. All professorial chairs and certain lectureships belong to and are paid by the university; the latter has the arranging of the curricula, the care of the laboratories, the disposition of certain noncollegiate scholarships; but, broadly speaking, its two functions are the examination of all students and the conferring of degrees. The supreme legislative body is the senate, and it is composed of all masters of arts, doctors, and bachelors of divinity whose names still remain on the university books--that is, who continue to pay certain fees into the university treasury. In addition to the legislative body there is an executive head or council of nineteen, including the chancellor--at present the Duke of Devonshire--and the vice-chancellor. Both these bodies must govern according to the statutes, no alteration in which can be effected without recourse being had to Parliament. The senate is a peculiar body, and on occasions becomes somewhat unwieldy. It consists at present of some 6,800 members, of whom only 452 are in residence at Cambridge. Upon ordinary occasions only these 452 vote upon questions proposed by the council; but on occasions of great moment, as when the question of granting university degrees to women came up, some thousands or more of the nonresident members, who in many cases have lost touch with the modern university and modern systems of education, swarm to their alma mater, annihilate the champions of reform, and are hailed by their brethren as the saviors of their university. [Illustration: R. C. JEBB, Litt. D., M. P., Trinity. Regius Professor of Greek.] The university's exchequer is supplied partly by its endowment, but chiefly by an assessment on the college incomes, a capitation tax on all undergraduates, and the fees attending matriculation, examinations, and the granting of degrees. The examinations are numerous. Every student on entering is required to pass, or to claim exemption from, an entrance examination. In either case he pays £3 to the university, and upon admission to any honor course or "tripos" to qualify for the degree of Bachelor of Arts £3 more is exacted. The income of the university from these examination fees alone amounts to £9,400 per annum, £4,600 of which goes to pay the examiners. In America this is supposed to be a part of the professor's or instructor's duty, no additional remuneration is allowed, and hence it does not become necessary to make an additional tax upon the students' resources. The conferring of degrees is also made a very profitable affair. Each candidate for the degree of B. A. pays out £7 to the voracious 'varsity chest, and upon proceeding to the M. A. a further contribution of £12 is requested. In this way the university makes about £12,000 a year, and, as though this was not sufficient, she requires a matriculation fee of £5 for every student who becomes a member. By this means another annual £5,000 is obtained. It must be remembered that these fees are entirely separate from the college fees. When the £5 matriculation for the latter is taken into consideration and the £8 a term (at Trinity) for lectures, two thirds of which the student does not attend, when it is understood that all this and more does not include living expenses, which are by no means slight, and that there are three terms instead of two, as with us, it will be obvious that Cambridge adheres very closely to the rule that to them only who have wealth shall her refining influence be given. That the greatest universities in existence should render it almost totally impossible for aught but the rich to obtain the advantages of their unusual educational facilities jars with that idea of democracy of learning which an American training is apt to foster. But, as we shall point out later, an aristocracy of learning may also have its uses. [Illustration: HENRY SIDGWICK, Litt. D., Trinity. Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy.] With all the revenues the university collects from colleges and students, amounting in all to about £65,000, Cambridge still finds herself poor. Some of the colleges, notably King's and Trinity, are extremely wealthy, but the university remains, if not exactly impecunious, at least on the ragged edge of financial difficulties. The various regius and other professorships, inadequately endowed by the munificence of the crown and of individuals, have each to be augmented from the university chest. The continual repairing of the old laboratories and scientific apparatus, the salaries to lecturers, to proctors, bedells, and other officers, cause a continual drain on the exchequer, which, with the rapidly growing need for larger laboratories and newer apparatus, has finally resulted in an appeal to the country for the sum of half a million pounds. [Illustration: DONALD MACALISTER, M. A., M. D., St. Johns. Linacre Lecturer of Physics.] It has been seen that the drains on a student's pocket are very considerable at Cambridge, owing to the number of perquisites showered by the colleges on their Fellows, and it may appear that this state of things is unjust and wrong. At present Oxford and Cambridge are practically within the reach of only the moneyed population. According, however, to a plausible and frequently repeated theory, it is not the function of these universities to meet the educational needs of the mediocre poor. The writer's critical attitude toward the financial system in vogue at Cambridge is a proper one, only on the assumption that a maximum of education to all classes alike at a minimum of expense is the final cause and desideratum of a university's existence. But if one assumes that Oxford and Cambridge exist for a different purpose, that the chief end they propose to themselves is individual research, and the advancement, not the promulgation, of learning, it must be admitted that their system has little that is reprehensible. According to this standpoint the students only exist by courtesy of the dons (a name for the Fellows), who have a perfect right to impose upon the students, in return for the condescension which is shown them, what terms they see fit. And they argue that this view is the historic one. The colleges were originally endowed solely for the benefit of a certain limited number of Fellows and scholars. The undergraduate body, as it at present exists, is a later growth, whose eventual existence and the importance of which to the university was probably not anticipated by the college founders. Starting with this, the defenders of the present _régime_ would point out, in addition, that there are other English institutions where the poorer classes may be educated, that Cambridge and Oxford are not only not bound to take upon themselves this task, but that they actually subserve a higher purpose and one just as necessary to the development of English science and letters and to the education of the English intellect by specializing in another direction. The good of a philosopher's lifelong reflections, they would say, is not always manifest, but the teachers who instruct the nation's youth are themselves dependent for rational standpoints upon the labor of the greater teacher, and they act as the instruments of communication between the most learned and the unlettered. So Oxford and Cambridge are the sources from whose fountains of wisdom and culture flow streams supplying all the academic mills of Britain, which in their turn are enabled to feed the inhabitants. It would be absurd, they maintain, to insist that the streams and the mills could equally well fulfill the same functions. Cambridge and Oxford instruct just so far as so doing is compatible with what for them is the main end--the furthering of various kinds of research and the offering of all sorts of inducements in order to keep and attract the interested attention of classical butterflies and scientific worms. How well they succeed in this noble ambition is known throughout the civilized world. Mr. G. H. Darwin, a son of Charles Darwin, has recently had occasion to mention the enormous scientific output of Cambridge University. After saying that the Royal Society is the Academy of Sciences in England, and that in its publications appear accounts of all the most important scientific discoveries in England and most of those in Scotland, Ireland, and other parts of Europe, he goes on to state that he examined the Transactions of this society for three years and discovered that out of the 5,480 pages published in that time 2,418 were contributed by Cambridge men and 1,324 by residents. In view of these facts, and despite the shortcomings of this university as a teaching institution, it is to be hoped that private generosity will answer her appeal for financial assistance. Her laboratories are a mine of research, and it is in them and in the men who conduct them that Cambridge is perhaps most to be admired. [Illustration: SIR G. G. STOKES, Bart., M. A., LL. D., Sc. D., F. R. S., Pembroke. Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.] The Cavendish Laboratory of Physics, where Clerk-Maxwell and afterward Lord Rayleigh taught, and which is at present in the hand of their able successor, J. J. Thomson, is a building of considerable size and admirably fitted out, but the rapidly increasing number of young physicists who are being allured by the working facilities of the place, and by the fame of Professor Thomson, is rendering even this splendidly equipped hall of science inadequate. The physiological laboratories are many, they are completely furnished with appliances, and a large number of students are there trained annually under the supervision of one of England's most eminent living scientists, Michael Foster, and his scarcely less able associates--Langley, Hardy, and Gaskell. Chemistry, zoölogy, botany, anatomy, and geology have each their well-appointed halls and masterly exponents. The names MacAlister, Liveing, Dewar, Newton, Sedgwick, Marshall Ward, and Hughes are not easily matched in any other one institution. Indeed, it is when one stops to consider the intellects at Cambridge that it becomes a dangerous matter to institute comparisons, and to say that this discipline or that is most rich in eminent interpreters. In science, at any rate, and in all branches of science, Cambridge stands alone. Not even Oxford can be considered for a moment as in the same class with her. And of all the sciences it is undoubtedly in mathematics and astronomy that the supremacy of Cambridge is most pronounced. The names of Profs. Sir G. G. Stokes and Sir R. S. Ball will be familiar to every reader, while those of Profs. Forsythe and G. H. Darwin and Mr. Baker will be familiar to all mathematicians. In classics Cambridge, while not possessing a similar monopoly of almost all the talent, still holds her own even with Oxford. Professors Jebb, Mayor, and Ridgeway, and Drs. Verrall, Jackson, and Frazer constitute a group of men second to none in the subjects of which they treat. Professor Jebb is also one of the university's two representatives in Parliament. In philosophy Cambridge has two men, Henry Sidgwick and James Ward, the former of whom is perhaps by common consent the first living authority on moral science, while the latter ranks among the first of living psychologists. These men, while representing very different philosophical standpoints, unite in opposition not only to the Hegelian movement, which, led by Caird and Bradley of Oxford, Seth and Stirling of Edinburgh, threatens the invasion of England, but also to the Spencerian philosophy. The latter system has not many adherents at either university, but the writer has been told by Professor Sully that the ascendency of the neo-Hegelian and other systems is by no means so pronounced elsewhere in England. The Spencerian biology, on the contrary, has been largely defended at Cambridge, while Weismannism, for the most part, is repudiated there and at Oxford. The teaching at Cambridge, as at all universities, is of many grades. In many subjects the lectures are not meant to give a student sufficient material to get him through an examination, and a "coach" becomes requisite, or at any rate is employed. This system of coaching has attained large dimensions; its results are often good, but it means an additional expense and seems an incentive to laziness, making it unnecessary for a student to exert his own mental aggressiveness or powers of application as he who fights his own battles must do. The Socratic form of instruction, producing a more intimate and unrestricted relation between instructor and student, and which is largely in operation in the States, is little practiced in England. In science the methods of instruction at Cambridge are ideal. That practical acquaintance with the facts of Nature which Huxley and Tyndall taught is the only true means of knowing Nature, is the key according to which all biological and physical instruction at these institutions is conducted. [Illustration: JAMES WARD, Sc. D., Trinity. Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic.] In the last half dozen years two radical steps have been taken by both Oxford and Cambridge--steps leading, to many respectable minds, in diametrically opposite directions. The step backward (in the writer's view) occurred when the universities, after much excitement, defeated with slaughter the proposition granting university degrees to women. It was simply proposed that the students of Newnham and Girton, who should successfully compete with male students in an honor course, should have an equal right with the latter to receive the usual degrees from their alma mater. After industrious inquiry among those who were foremost in supporting and opposing this movement the writer has unearthed no objection of weight against the change. "If the women were granted degrees they would have votes in the senate," and "It never has been done"--these are the two reasons most persistently urged in defense of the conservative view; while justice and utility alike appear to be for once, at any rate, unequivocally on the side of the women. Prejudice defeated progress, and students celebrated the auspicious occasion with bonfires. The step forward was taken when the universities and their colleges decided to throw open their gates to the graduates of other universities in England, America, and elsewhere for the purpose of advanced study. But here, as in other things, Cambridge leads the way, and Oxford follows falteringly. The advanced students at Cambridge are treated like Cambridge men, they have the status of Bachelors of Arts, and possess in most respects the advantages, such as they are, of the latter; while at Oxford the advanced students are a restricted class, with restricted advantages, and their relation to the university is not that of the other students. In Cambridge the movement which has resulted in the present admirable condition of affairs was largely brought about by the zeal and enterprise of Dr. Donald MacAlister, of St. John's College, the University Lecturer in Therapeutics, a man of wide sympathies and ability, and whose name is closely associated with this university's metamorphosis into a more modern institution. THE WONDERFUL CENTURY.[1] A REVIEW BY W. K. BROOKS, PROFESSOR OF ZOÖLOGY IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. Every naturalist has in his heart a warm affection for the author of the Malay Archipelago, and is glad to acknowledge with gratitude his debt to this great explorer and thinker and teacher who gave us the law of natural selection independently of Darwin. When the history of our century is written, the foremost place among those who have guided the thought of their generation and opened new fields for discovery will assuredly be given to Wallace and Darwin. [1] Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1899. Few of the great men who have helped to make our century memorable in the history of thought are witnesses of its end, and all who have profited by the labors of Wallace will rejoice that he has been permitted to stand on the threshold of a new century, and, reviewing the past, to give us his impressions of the wonderful century. We men of the nineteenth century, he says, have not been slow to praise it. The wise and the foolish, the learned and the unlearned, the poet and the pressman, the rich and the poor, alike swell the chorus of admiration for the marvelous inventions and discoveries of our own age, and especially for those innumerable applications of science which now form part of our daily life, and which remind us every hour of our immense superiority over our comparatively ignorant forefathers. Our century, he tells us, has been characterized by a marvelous and altogether unprecedented progress in the knowledge of the universe and of its complex forces, and also in the application of that knowledge to an infinite variety of purposes calculated, if properly utilized, to supply all the wants of every human being and to add greatly to the comforts, the enjoyments, and the refinements of life. The bounds of human knowledge have been so far extended that new vistas have opened to us in nearly all directions where it had been thought that we could never penetrate, and the more we learn the more we seem capable of learning in the ever-widening expanse of the universe. It may, he says, be truly said of the men of science that they have become as gods knowing good and evil, since they have been able not only to utilize the most recondite powers of Nature in their service, but have in many cases been able to discover the sources of much of the evil that afflicts humanity, to abolish pain, to lengthen life, and to add immensely to the intellectual as well as the physical enjoyments of our race. In order to get any adequate measure for comparison with the nineteenth century we must take not any preceding century, but the whole preceding epoch of human history. We must take into consideration not only the changes effected in science, in the arts, in the possibilities of human intercourse, and in the extension of our knowledge both of the earth and of the whole visible universe, but the means our century has furnished for future advancement. Our author, who has borne such a distinguished part in the intellectual progress of our century, shows clearly that in means for the discovery of truth, for the extension of our control over Nature, and for the alleviation of the ills that beset mankind, the inheritance of the twentieth century from the nineteenth will be greater than our own inheritance from all the centuries that have gone before. Some may regret that, while only one third of Wallace's book is devoted to the successes of the wonderful century, the author finds the remaining two thirds none too much for the enumeration of some of its most notable failures; but it is natural for one who has borne his own distinguished part in all this marvelous progress to ask where the century has fallen short of the enthusiastic hopes of its leaders, what that it might have done it has failed to do, and what lies ready at the hand of the workers who will begin the new century with this rich inheritance of new thoughts, new methods, and new resources. The more we realize the vast possibilities of human welfare which science has given us the more, he says, must we recognize our total failure to make any adequate use of them. Along with this continuous progress in science, in the arts, and in wealth-production, which has dazzled our imaginations to such an extent that we can hardly admit the possibility of any serious evils having accompanied or been caused by it, there has, he says, been many serious failures--intellectual, social, and moral. Some of our great thinkers, he says, have been so impressed by the terrible nature of these failures that they have doubted whether the final result of the work of the century has any balance of good over evil, of happiness over misery, for mankind at large. Wallace is no pessimist, but one who believes that the first step in retrieving our failures is to perceive clearly where we have failed, for he says there can be no doubt of the magnitude of the evils that have grown up or persisted in the midst of all our triumphs over natural forces and our unprecedented growth in wealth and luxury, and he holds it not the least important part of his work to call attention to some of these failures. With ample knowledge of the sources of health, we allow and even compel the bulk of our population to live and work under conditions which greatly shorten life. In our mad race for wealth we have made gold more sacred than human life; we have made life so hard for many that suicide and insanity and crime are alike increasing. The struggle for wealth has been accompanied by a reckless destruction of the stored-up products of Nature, which is even more deplorable because irretrievable. Not only have forest growths of many hundred years been cleared away, often with disastrous consequences, but the whole of the mineral treasures of the earth's surface, the slow productions of long-past eras of time and geological change, have been and are still being exhausted with reckless disregard of our duties to posterity and solely in the interest of landlords and capitalists. With all our labor-saving machinery and all our command over the forces of Nature, the struggle for existence has become more fierce than ever before, and year by year an ever-increasing proportion of our people sink into paupers' graves. When the brightness of future ages shall have dimmed the glamour of our material progress he says that the judgment of history will surely be that our ethical standard was low and that we were unworthy to possess the great and beneficent powers that science had placed in our hands, for, instead of devoting the highest powers of our greatest men to remedy these evils, we see the governments of the most advanced nations arming their people to the teeth and expending most of the wealth and all the resources of their science in preparation for the destruction of life, of property, and of happiness. He reminds us that the first International Exhibition, in 1851, fostered the hope that men would soon perceive that peace and commercial intercourse are essential to national well-being. Poets and statesmen joined in hailing the dawn of an era of peaceful industry, and exposition following exposition taught the nations how much they have to learn from each other and how much to give to each other for the benefit and happiness of all. Dueling, which had long prevailed, in spite of its absurdity and harmfulness, as a means of settling disputes, was practically abolished by the general diffusion of a spirit of intolerance of private war; and as the same public opinion which condemns it should, if consistent, also condemn war between nations, many thought they perceived the dawn of a wiser policy between nations. Yet so far are we from progress toward its abolition that the latter half of the century has witnessed not the decay, but a revival of the war spirit, and at its end we find all nations loaded with the burden of increasing armies and navies. The armies are continually being equipped with new and more deadly weapons at a cost which strains the resources of even the most wealthy nations and impoverishes the mass of the people by increasing burdens of debt and taxation, and all this as a means of settling disputes which have no sufficient cause and no relation whatever to the well-being of the communities which engage in them. The evils of war do not cease with the awful loss of life and destruction of property which are their immediate results, since they form the excuse for inordinate increase of armaments--an increase which has been intensified by the application to war purposes of those mechanical inventions and scientific discoveries which, properly used, should bring peace and plenty to all, but which when seized upon by the spirit of militarism directly lead to enmity among nations and to the misery of the people. The first steps in this military development were the adoption of a new rifle by the Prussian army in 1846, the application of steam to ships of war in 1840, and the use of armor for battle ships in 1859. The remainder of the century has witnessed a mad race between the nations to increase the death-dealing power of their weapons and to add to the number and efficiency of their armies, while all the resources of modern science have been utilized in order to add to the destructive power of cannon and both the defensive and the offensive power of ships. The inability of industrious laboring men to gain any due share of the benefits of our progress in scientific knowledge is due, beyond everything else, to the expense of withdrawing great armies of men in the prime of life from productive labor, joined to the burden of feeding and clothing them and of keeping weapons and ammunition, ships, and fortifications in a state of readiness, of continually renewing stores of all kinds, of pensions, and of all the laboring men who must, besides making good the destruction caused by war, be withdrawn from productive labor and be supported by others that they may support the army. And what a horrible mockery is this when viewed in the light of either Christianity or advancing civilization! All the nations armed to the teeth and watching stealthily for some occasion to use their vast armaments for their own aggrandizement and for the injury of their neighbors are Christian nations, but their Christian governments do not exist for the good of the governed, still less for the good of humanity or civilization, but for the aggrandizement and greed and lust of the ruling classes. The devastation caused by the tyrants and conquerors of the middle ages and of antiquity has been reproduced in our times by the rush to obtain wealth. Even the lust of conquest, in order to obtain slaves and tribute and great estates, by means of which the ruling classes could live in boundless luxury, so characteristic of the earlier civilization, is reproduced in our time. Witness the recent conduct of the nations of Europe toward Crete and Greece, upholding the most terrible despotism in the world because each hopes for a favorable opportunity to obtain some advantage, leading ultimately to the largest share of the spoil. Witness the struggles in Africa and Asia, where millions of foreign people may be enslaved and bled for the benefit of their new rulers. The whole world, says Wallace, is but a gambling table. Just as gambling deteriorates and demoralizes the individual, so the greed for dominion demoralizes governments. The welfare of the people is little cared for, except so far as to make them submissive taxpayers, enabling the ruling and moneyed classes to extend their sway over new territories and to create well-paid places and exciting work for their sons and relatives. Hence, says Wallace, comes the force that ever urges on the increase of armaments and the extension of empire. Great vested interests are at stake, and ever-growing pressure is brought to bear upon the too-willing governments in the name of the greatness of the country, the extension of commerce, or the advance of civilization. This state of things is not progress, but retrogression. It will be held by the historian of the future to show that we of the nineteenth century were morally and socially unfit to possess the enormous powers for good and evil which the rapid advance of scientific discovery has given us, that our boasted civilization was in many respects a mere superficial veneer, and that our methods of government were not in accord with either Christianity or civilization. Comparing the conduct of these modern nations, who call themselves Christian and civilized, with that of the Spanish conquerors of the West Indies, Mexico, and Peru, and making some allowances for differences of race and public opinion, Wallace says there is not much to choose between them. Wealth and territory and native labor were the real objects in both cases, and if the Spaniards were more cruel by nature and more reckless in their methods the results were much the same. In both cases the country was conquered and thereafter occupied and governed by the conquerors frankly for their own ends, and with little regard for the feelings or the well-being of the conquered. If the Spaniards exterminated the natives of the West Indies, we, he says, have done the same thing in Tasmania and about the same in temperate Australia. Their belief that they were really serving God in converting the heathen, even at the point of the sword, was a genuine belief, shared by priests and conquerors alike--not a mere sham as ours is when we defend our conduct by the plea of "introducing the blessings of civilization." It is quite possible, says Wallace, that both the conquest of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards and our conquest of South Africa may have been real steps in advance, essential to human progress, and helping on the future reign of true civilization and the well-being of the human race. But if so, we have been and are unconscious agents in hastening the "far-off divine event." We deserve no credit for it. Our aims have been for the most part sordid and selfish, and our rule has often been largely influenced and often entirely directed by the necessity of finding well-paid places for young men with influence, and also by the constant demands for fresh markets by the influential class of merchants and manufacturers. More general diffusion of the conviction that while all share the burdens of war, such good as comes from it is appropriated by the few, will no doubt do much to discourage wars; but we must ask whether there may not be another incentive to war which Wallace does not give due weight--whether love of fighting may not have something to do with wars. As we look backward over history we are forced to ask whether the greed and selfishness of the wealthy and influential and those who hope to gain are the only causes of war. We went to war with Spain because our people in general demanded war. If we have been carried further than we intended and are now fighting for objects which we did not foresee and may not approve, this is no more than history might have led us to expect. War with Spain was popular with nearly all our people a year ago, and, while wise counsels might have stemmed this popular tide, there can be no doubt that it existed, for the evil passions of the human race are the real cause of wars. The great problem of the twentieth century, as of all that have gone before, is the development of the wise and prudent self-restraint which represses natural passions and appetites for the sake of higher and better ends. SPIDER BITES AND "KISSING BUGS."[2] BY L. O. HOWARD, CHIEF OF THE DIVISION OF ENTOMOLOGY, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. On several occasions during the past ten years, and especially at the Brooklyn meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1894, the writer has endeavored to show that most of the newspaper stories of deaths from spider bite are either grossly exaggerated or based upon misinformation. He has failed to thoroughly substantiate a single case of death from a so-called spider bite, and has concluded that there is only one spider in the United States which is capable of inflicting a serious bite--viz., _Latrodectus mactans_, a species belonging to a genus of world-wide distribution, the other species of which have universally a bad reputation among the peoples whose country they inhabit. In spite of these conclusions, the accuracy of which has been tested with great care, there occur in the newspapers every year stories of spider bites of great seriousness, often resulting in death or the amputation of a limb. The details of negative evidence and of lack of positive evidence need not be entered upon here, except in so far as to state that in the great majority of these cases the spider supposed to have inflicted the bite is not even seen, while in almost no case is the spider seen to inflict the bite; and it is a well-known fact that there are practically no spiders in our more northern States which are able to pierce the human skin, except upon a portion of the body where the skin is especially delicate and which is seldom exposed. There arises, then, the probability that there are other insects capable of piercing tough skin, the results of whose bites may be more or less painful, the wounds being attributed to spiders on account of the universally bad reputation which these arthropods seem to have. [2] A paper read before Section F of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the Columbus meeting in August, 1899. [Illustration: DIFFERENT STAGES OF CONORHINUS SANGUISUGUS. Twice natural size. (After Marlatt.)] These sentences formed the introduction to a paper read by the writer at a meeting of the Entomological Society of Washington, held June 1st last. I went on to state that some of these insects are rather well known, as, for example, the blood-sucking cone-nose (_Conorhinus sanguisugus_) and the two-spotted corsairs (_Rasatus thoracicus_ and _R. biguttatus_), both of which occur, however, most numerously in the South and West, and then spoke of _Melanotestis picipes_, a species which had been especially called to my attention by Mr. Frank M. Jones, of Wilmington, Del., who submitted the report of the attending physician in a case of two punctures by this insect inflicted upon the thumb and forefinger of a middle-aged man in Delaware. I further reported upon occasional somewhat severe results from the bites[3] of the old _Reduvius personatus_, now placed in the genus _Opsicostes_, and stated that a smaller species, _Coriscus subcoleoptratus_, had bitten me rather severely under circumstances similar to some of those which have given rise in the past to spider-bite stories. In the course of the discussion which followed the reading of this paper, Mr. Schwarz stated that twice during the present spring he had been bitten rather severely by _Melanotestis picipes_ which had entered his room, probably attracted by light. He described it as the worst biter among heteropterous insects with which he had had any experience, and said he thought it was commoner than usual in Washington during the present year. [3] When the word "bite" is used in connection with these bugs, it must be remembered that it is really a puncture made with the sharp beak or proboscis (see illustration). No account of this meeting was published, but within a few weeks thereafter several persons suffering from swollen faces visited the Emergency Hospital in Washington and complained that they had been bitten by some insect while asleep; that they did not see the insect, and could not describe it. This happened during one of the temporary periods when newspaper men are most actively engaged in hunting for items. There was a dearth of news. These swollen faces offered an opportunity for a good story, and thus began the "kissing-bug" scare which has grown to such extraordinary proportions. I have received the following letter and clipping from Mr. J. F. McElhone, of the Washington Post, in reply to a request for information regarding the origin of this curious epidemic: "WASHINGTON, D. C., _August 14, 1899_. "_Dr. L. O. Howard, Cosmos Club, Washington, D. C._ "DEAR SIR: Attached please find clipping from the Washington Post of June 20, 1899, being the first story that ever appeared in print, so far as I can learn, of the depredations of the _Melanotestis picipes_, better known now as the kissing bug. In my rounds as police reporter of the Post, I noticed, for two or three days before writing this story, that the register of the Emergency Hospital of this city contained unusually frequent notes of 'bug-bite' cases. Investigating, on the evening of June 19th I learned from the hospital physicians that a noticeable number of patients were applying daily for treatment for very red and extensive swellings, usually on the lips, and apparently the result of an insect bite. This led to the writing of the story attached. "Very truly yours, "James F. McElhone." [Illustration: The Washington Post. TUESDAY, JUNE 20, 1899. BITE OF A STRANGE BUG. Several Patients Have Appeared at the Hospitals Very Badly Poisoned. Lookout for the new bug. It is an insidious insect that bites without causing pain and escapes unnoticed. But afterward the place where it has bitten swells to ten times its normal size. The Emergency Hospital has had several victims of this insect as patients lately and the number is increasing. Application for treatment by other victims are being made at other hospitals, and the matter threatens to become something like a plague. None of those who have been bitten saw the insect whose sting proves so disastrous. One old negro went to sleep and woke up to find both his eyes nearly closed by the swelling from his nose and cheeks, where the insect had alighted. The lips seems to be the favorite point of attack. William Smith, a newspaper agent, of 327 Trumbull street, went to the Emergency last night with his upper lip swollen to many times its natural size. The symptoms are in every case the same, and there is indication of poisoning from an insect's bite. The matter is beginning to interest the physicians, and every patient who comes in with the now well-known marks is closely questioned as to the description of the insect. No one has yet been found who has seen it. ] It would be an interesting computation for one to figure out the amount of newspaper space which was filled in the succeeding two months by items and articles about the "kissing bug." Other Washington newspapers took the matter up. The New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore papers soon followed suit. The epidemic spread east to Boston and west to California. By "epidemic" is meant the _newspaper_ epidemic, for every insect bite where the biter was not at once recognized was attributed to the popular and somewhat mysterious creature which had been given such an attractive name, and there can be no doubt that some mosquito, flea, and bedbug bites which had by accident resulted in a greater than the usual severity were attributed to the prevailing osculatory insect. In Washington professional beggars seized the opportunity, and went around from door to door with bandaged faces and hands, complaining that they were poor men and had been thrown out of work by the results of "kissing-bug" stings! One beggar came to the writer's door and offered, in support of his plea, a card supposed to be signed by the head surgeon of the Emergency Hospital. In a small town in central New York a man arrested on the charge of swindling entered the plea that he was temporarily insane owing to the bite of the "kissing bug." Entomologists all through the East were also much overworked answering questions asked them about the mysterious creature. Men of local entomological reputations were applied to by newspaper reporters, by their friends, by people who knew them, in church, on the street, and under all conceivable circumstances. Editorials were written about it. Even the Scientific American published a two-column article on the subject; and, while no international complications have resulted as yet, the kissing bug, in its own way and in the short space of two months, produced almost as much of a scare as did the San José scale in its five years of Eastern excitement. Now, however, the newspapers have had their fun, the necessary amount of space has been filled, and the subject has assumed a castaneous hue, to Latinize the slang of a few years back. The experience has been a most interesting one. To the reader familiar with the old accounts of the hysterical craze of south Europe, based upon supposed tarantula bites, there can not fail to come the suggestion that we have had in miniature and in modernized form, aided largely by the newspapers, a hysterical craze of much the same character. From the medical and psychological point of view this aspect is interesting, and deserves investigation by competent persons. As an entomologist, however, the writer confines himself to the actual authors of the bites so far as he has been able to determine them. It seems undoubtedly true that while there has been a great cry there has been very little wool. It is undoubtedly true, also, that there have been a certain number of bites by heteropterous insects, some of which have resulted in considerable swelling. It seems true that _Melanotestis picipes_ and _Opsicostes personatus_ have been more numerous than usual this year, at least around Washington. They have been captured in a number of instances while biting people, and have been brought to the writer's office for determination in such a way that there can be no doubt about the accuracy of this statement. As the story went West, bites by _Conorhinus sanguisuga_ and _Rasatus thoracicus_ were without doubt termed "kissing-bug" bites. With regard to other cases, the writer has known of an instance where the mosquito bite upon the lip of a sleeping child produced a very considerable swelling. Therefore he argues that many of these reported cases may have been nothing more than mosquito bites. With nervous and excitable individuals the symptoms of any skin puncture become exaggerated not only in the mind of the individual but in their actual characteristics, and not only does this refer to cases of skin puncture but to certain skin eruptions, and to some of those early summer skin troubles which are known as strawberry rash, etc. It is in this aspect of the subject that the resemblance to tarantulism comes in, and this is the result of the hysterical wave, if it may be so termed. Six different heteropterous insects were mentioned in the early part of this article, and it will be appropriate to give each of them some little detailed consideration, taking the species of Eastern distribution first, since the scare had its origin in the East, and has there perhaps been more fully exploited. [Illustration: MELANOTESTIS ABDOMINALIS. Female at right; male at left, with enlarged beak at side. Twice natural size. (Original.)] [Illustration: HEAD AND PROBOSCIS OF CONORHINUS SANGUISUGUS. (After Marlatt.)] _Opsicostes personatus_, also known as _Reduvius personatus_, and which has been termed the "cannibal bug," is a European species introduced into this country at some unknown date, but possibly following close in the wake of the bedbug. In Europe this species haunts houses for the purpose of preying upon bedbugs. Riley, in his well-known article on Poisonous Insects, published in Wood's Reference Handbook of Medical Science, states that if a fly or another insect is offered to the cannibal bug it is first touched with the antennæ, a sudden spring follows, and at the same time the beak is thrust into the prey. The young specimens are covered with a glutinous substance, to which bits of dirt and dust adhere. They move deliberately, with a long pause between each step, the step being taken in a jerky manner. The distribution of the species, as given by Reuter in his Monograph of the Genus _Reduvius_, is Europe to the middle of Sweden, Caucasia, Asia Minor, Algeria, Madeira; North America, Canada, New York, Philadelphia, Indiana; Tasmania, Australia--from which it appears that the insect is already practically cosmopolitan, and in fact may almost be termed a household insect. The collections of the United States National Museum and of Messrs. Heidemann and Chittenden, of Washington, D. C., indicate the following localities for this species: Locust Hill, Va.; Washington, D. C.; Baltimore, Md.; Ithaca, N. Y.; Cleveland, Ohio; Keokuk, Iowa. [Illustration: CORISCUS SUBCOLEOPTRATUS: _a_, wingless form; _b_, winged form; _c_, proboscis. All twice natural size. (Original.)] The bite of this species is said to be very painful, more so than that of a bee, and to be followed by numbness (Lintner). One of the cases brought to the writer's attention this summer was that of a Swedish servant girl, in which the insect was caught, where the sting was upon the neck, and was followed by considerable swelling. Le Conte, in describing it under the synonymical name _Reduvius pungens_, gives Georgia as the locality, and makes the following statement: "This species is remarkable for the intense pain caused by its bite. I do not know whether it ever willingly plunges its rostrum into any person, but when caught or unskillfully handled it always stings. In this case the pain is almost equal to that of the bite of a snake, and the swelling and irritation which result from it will sometimes last for a week. In very weak and irritable constitutions it may even prove fatal."[4] [4] Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, vol. vii, p. 404, 1854-'55. The second Eastern species is _Melanotestis picipes_. This and the closely allied and possibly identical _M. abdominalis_ are not rare in the United States, and have been found all along the Atlantic States, in the West and South, and also in Mexico. They live underneath stones and logs, and run swiftly. Both sexes of _M. picipes_ in the adult are fully winged, but the female of _M. abdominalis_ is usually found in the short-winged condition. Prof. P. R. Uhler writes (in litt.): "_Melanotestis abdominalis_ is not rare in this section (Baltimore), but the winged female is a great rarity. At the present time I have not a specimen of the winged female in my collection. I have seen specimens from the South, in North Carolina and Florida, but I do not remember one from Maryland. I am satisfied that _M. picipes_ is distinct from _M. abdominalis_. I have not known the two species to unite sexually, but I have seen them both united to their proper consorts. Both species are sometimes found under the same flat stone or log, and they both hibernate in our valleys beneath stones and rubbish in loamy soils." Specimens in Washington collections show the following localities for _M. abdominalis_: Baltimore, Md.; Washington, D. C.; Wilmington, Del.; New Jersey; Long Island; Fort Bliss, Texas; Louisiana; and Keokuk, Iowa;, and for _M. picipes_, Washington, D. C.; Roslyn, Va.; Baltimore, Md.; Derby, Conn.; Long Island; a series labeled New Jersey; Wilmington, Del.; Keokuk, Iowa; Cleveland and Cincinnati, Ohio; Louisiana; Jackson, Miss.; Barton County, Mo.; Fort Bliss, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; Crescent City, Fla.; Holland, S. C. This insect has been mentioned several times in entomological literature. The first reference to its bite probably was made by Townend Glover in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for 1875 (page 130). In Maryland, he states, _M. picipes_ is found under stones, moss, logs of wood, etc., and is capable of inflicting a severe wound with its rostrum or piercer. In 1888 Dr. Lintner, in his Fourth Report as State Entomologist of New York (page 110), quotes from a correspondent in Natchez, Miss., concerning this insect: "I send a specimen of a fly not known to us here. A few days ago it punctured the finger of my wife, inflicting a painful sting. The swelling was rapid, and for several days the wound was quite annoying." Until recent years this insect has not been known to the writer as occurring in houses with any degree of frequency. In May, 1895, however, I received a specimen from an esteemed correspondent--Dr. J. M. Shaffer, of Keokuk, Iowa--together with a letter written on May 7th, in which the statement was made that four specimens flew into his window the night before. The insect, therefore, is attracted to light or is becoming attracted to light, is a night-flier, and enters houses through open windows. Among the several cases coming under the writer's observation of bites by this insect, one has been reported by the well-known entomologist Mr. Charles Dury, of Cincinnati, Ohio, in which this species (_M. picipes_) bit a man on the back of the hand, making a bad sore. In another case, where the insect was brought for our determination and proved to be this species, the bite was upon the cheek, and the swelling was said to be great, but with little pain. In a third case, occurring at Holland, S. C., the symptoms were more serious. The patient was bitten upon the end of the middle finger, and stated that the first paroxysm of pain was about like that resulting from a hornet or a bee sting, but almost immediately it grew ten times more painful, with a feeling of weakness followed by vomiting. The pain was felt to shoot up the arm to the under jaw, and the sickness lasted for a number of days. A fourth case, at Fort Bliss, Texas, is interesting as having occurred in bed. The patient was bitten on the hand, with very painful results and bad swelling. The third of the Eastern species, _Coriscus subcoleoptratus_, is said by Uhler to have a general distribution in the Northern States, and is like the species immediately preceding a native insect. There is no record of any bite by this species, and it is introduced here for the reason that it attracted the writer's attention crawling upon the walls of an earth closet in Greene County, New York, where on one occasion it bit him between the fingers. The pain was sharp, like the prick of a pin, but only a faint swelling followed, and no further inconvenience. The insect is mentioned, however, for the reason that, occurring in such situations, it is one of the forms which are liable to carry pathogenic bacteria. [Illustration: RASATUS BIGUTTATUS. Twice natural size. (Original.)] [Illustration: REDUVIUS (OPSICOSTES) PERSONATUS. Twice natural size. (Original.)] There remain for consideration the Southern and Western forms--_Rasatus thoracicus_ and _R. biguttatus_, and _Conorhinus sanguisugus_. The two-spotted corsair, as _Rasatus biguttatus_ is popularly termed, is said by Riley to be found frequently in houses in the Southern States, and to prey upon bedbugs. Lintner, referring to the fact that it preys upon bedbugs, says: "It evidently delights in human blood, but prefers taking it at second hand." Dr. A. Davidson, formerly of Los Angeles, Cal., in an important paper entitled So-called Spider Bites and their Treatment, published in the Therapeutic Gazette of February 15, 1897, arrives at the conclusion that almost all of the so-called spider bites met with in southern California are produced by no spider at all, but by _Rasatus biguttatus_. The symptoms which he describes are as follows: "Next day the injured part shows a local cellulitis, with a central dark spot; around this spot there frequently appears a bullous vesicle about the size of a ten-cent piece, and filled with a dark grumous fluid; a small ulcer forms underneath the vesicle, the necrotic area being generally limited to the central part, while the surrounding tissues are more or less swollen and somewhat painful. In a few days, with rest and proper care, the swelling subsides, and in a week all traces of the cellulitis are usually gone. In some of the cases no vesicle forms at the point of injury, the formation probably depending on the constitutional vitality of the individual or the amount of poison introduced." The explanation of the severity of the wound suggested by Dr. Davidson, and in which the writer fully concurs with him, is not that the insect introduces any specific poison of its own, but that the poison introduced is probably accidental and contains the ordinary putrefactive germs which may adhere to its proboscis. Dr. Davidson's treatment was corrosive sublimate--1 to 500 or 1 to 1,000--locally applied to the wound, keeping the necrotic part bathed in the solution. The results have in all cases been favorable. Uhler gives the distribution of _R. biguttatus_ as Arizona, Texas, Panama, Pará, Cuba, Louisiana, West Virginia, and California. After a careful study of the material in the United States National Museum, Mr. Heidemann has decided that the specimens of _Rasatus_ from the southeastern part of the country are in reality Say's _R. biguttatus_, while those from the Southwestern States belong to a distinct species answering more fully, with slight exceptions, to the description of Stal's _Rasatus thoracicus_. The writer has recently received a large series of _R. thoracicus_ from Mr. H. Brown, of Tucson, Arizona, and had a disagreeable experience with the same species in April, 1898, at San José de Guaymas, in the State of Sonora, Mexico. He had not seen the insect alive before, and was sitting at the supper table with his host--a ranchero of cosmopolitan language. One of the bugs, attracted by the light, flew in with a buzz and flopped down on the table. The writer's entomological instinct led him to reach out for it, and was warned by his host in the remarkable sentence comprising words derived from three distinct languages: "Guardez, guardez! Zat animalito sting like ze dev!" But it was too late; the writer had been stung on the forefinger, with painful results. Fortunately, however, the insect's beak must have been clean, and no great swelling or long inconvenience ensued. Perhaps the best known of any of the species mentioned in our list is the blood-sucking cone-nose (_Conorhinus sanguisugus_). This ferocious insect belongs to a genus which has several representatives in the United States, all, however, confined to the South or West. _C. rubro-fasciatus_ and _C. variegatus_, as well as _C. sanguisugus_, are given the general geographical distribution of "Southern States." _C. dimidiatus_ and _C. maculipennis_ are Mexican forms, while _C. gerstaeckeri_ occurs in the Western States. The more recently described species, _C. protractus_ Uhl., has been taken at Los Angeles, Cal.; Dragoon, Ariz.; and Salt Lake City, Utah. All of these insects are blood-suckers, and do not hesitate to attack animals. Le Conte, in his original description of _C. sanguisugus_,[5] adds a most significant paragraph or two which, as it has not been quoted of late, will be especially appropriate here: "This insect, equally with the former" (see above), "inflicts a most painful wound. It is remarkable also for sucking the blood of mammals, particularly of children. I have known its bite followed by very serious consequences, the patient not recovering from its effects for nearly a year. The many relations which we have of spider bites frequently proving fatal have no doubt arisen from the stings of these insects or others of the same genera. When the disease called spider bite is not an anthrax or carbuncle it is undoubtedly occasioned by the bite of an insect--by no means however, of a spider. Among the many species of _Araneidæ_ which we have in the United States I have never seen one capable of inflicting the slightest wound. Ignorant persons may easily mistake a _Cimex_ for a spider. I have known a physician who sent to me the fragments of a large ant, which he supposed was a spider, that came out of his grandchild's head." The fact that Le Conte was himself a physician, having graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1846, thus having been nine years in practice at the time, renders this statement all the more significant. The life history and habits of _C. sanguisugus_ have been so well written up by my assistant, Mr. Marlatt, in Bulletin No. 4, New Series, of the Division of Entomology, United States Department of Agriculture, that it is not necessary to enter upon them here. The point made by Marlatt--that the constant and uniform character of the symptoms in nearly all cases of bites by this insect indicate that there is a specific poison connected with the bite--deserves consideration, but there can be no doubt that the very serious results which sometimes follow the bite are due to the introduction of extraneous poison germs. The late Mr. J. B. Lembert, of Yosemite, Cal., noticed particularly that the species of _Conorhinus_ occurring upon the Pacific coast is attracted by carrion. Professor Toumey, of Tucson, Arizona, shows how a woman broke out all over the body and limbs with red blotches and welts from a single sting on the shoulders. Specimens of _C. sanguisugus_ received in July, 1899, from Mayersville, Miss., were accompanied by the statement--which is appropriate, in view of the fact that the newspapers have insisted that the "kissing bug" prefers the lip--that a friend of the writer was bitten on the lip, and that the effect was a burning pain, intense itching, and much swelling, lasting three or four days. The writer of the letter had been bitten upon the leg and arm, and his brother was bitten upon both feet and legs and on the arm, the symptoms being the same in all cases. [5] Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, vol. vii, p. 404 1854-'55. More need hardly be said specifically concerning these biting bugs. The writer's conclusions are that a puncture by any one of them may be and frequently has been mistaken for a spider bite, and that nearly all reported spider-bite cases have had in reality this cause, that the so-called "kissing-bug" scare has been based upon certain undoubted cases of the bite of one or the other of them, but that other bites, including mosquitoes, with hysterical and nervous symptoms produced by the newspaper accounts, have aided in the general alarm. The case of Miss Larson, who died in August, 1898, as the result of a mosquito bite, at Mystic, Conn., is an instance which goes to show that no mysterious new insect need be looked for to explain occasional remarkable cases. One good result of the "kissing-bug" excitement will prove in the end to be that it will have relieved spiders from much unnecessary discredit. THE MOSQUITO THEORY OF MALARIA.[6] BY MAJOR RONALD ROSS. I have the honor to address you, on completion of my term of special duty for the investigation of malaria, on the subject of the practical results as regard the prevention of the disease which may be expected to arise from my researches; and I trust that this letter may be submitted to the Government if the director general thinks fit. [6] A report, published in Nature, from Major Ronald Ross to the Secretary to the Director General, Indian Medical Service, Simla. Dated Calcutta, February 16, 1899. It has been shown in my reports to you that the parasites of malaria pass a stage of their existence in certain species of mosquitoes, by the bites of which they are inoculated into the blood of healthy men and birds. These observations have solved the problem--previously thought insolvable--of the mode of life of these parasites in external Nature. My results have been accepted by Dr. Laveran, the discoverer of the parasites of malaria; by Dr. Manson, who elaborated the mosquito theory of malaria; by Dr. Nuttall, of the Hygienic Institute of Berlin, who has made a special study of the relations between insects and disease; and, I understand, by M. Metchnikoff, Director of the Laboratory of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Lately, moreover, Dr. C. W. Daniels, of the Malaria Commission, who has been sent to study with me in Calcutta, has confirmed my observations in a special report to the Royal Society; while, lastly, Professor Grassi and Drs. Bignami and Bastianelli, of Rome, have been able, after receiving specimens and copies of my reports from me, to repeat my experiments in detail, and to follow two of the parasites of human malaria through all their stages in a species of mosquito called the _Anopheles claviger_. It may therefore be finally accepted as a fact that malaria is communicated by the bites of some species of mosquito; and, to judge from the general laws governing the development of parasitic animals, such as the parasites of malaria, this is very probably the only way in which infection is acquired, in which opinion several distinguished men of science concur with me. In considering this statement it is necessary to remember that it does not refer to the mere recurrences of fever to which people previously infected are often subject as the result of chill, fatigue, and so on. When I say that malaria is communicated by the bites of mosquitoes, I allude only to the original infection. It is also necessary to guard against assertions to the effect that malaria is prevalent where mosquitoes and gnats do not exist. In my experience, when the facts come to be inquired into, such assertions are found to be untrue. Scientific research has now yielded so absolute a proof of the mosquito theory of malaria that hearsay evidence opposed to it can no longer carry any weight. Hence it follows that, in order to eliminate malaria wholly or partly from a given locality, it is necessary only to exterminate the various species of insect which carry the infection. This will certainly remove the malaria to a large extent, and will almost certainly remove it altogether. It remains only to consider whether such a measure is practicable. Theoretically the extermination of mosquitoes is a very simple matter. These insects are always hatched from aquatic larvæ or grubs which can live only in small stagnant collections of water, such as pots and tubs of water, garden cisterns, wells, ditches and drains, small ponds, half-dried water courses, and temporary pools of rain-water. So far as I have yet observed, the larvæ are seldom to be found in larger bodies of water, such as tanks, rice fields, streams, and rivers and lakes, because in such places they are devoured by minnows and other small fish. Nor have I ever seen any evidence in favor of the popular view that they breed in damp grass, dead leaves, and so on. Hence, in order to get rid of these insects from a locality, it will suffice to empty out or drain away, or treat with certain chemicals, the small collections of water in which their larvæ must pass their existence. But the practicability of this will depend on circumstances--especially, I think, on the species of mosquito with which we wish to deal. In my experience, different species select different habitations for their larvæ. Thus the common "brindled mosquitoes" breed almost entirely in pots and tubs of water; the common "gray mosquitoes" only in cisterns, ditches, and drains; while the rarer "spotted-winged mosquitoes" seem to choose only shallow rain-water puddles and ponds too large to dry up under a week or more, and too small or too foul and stagnant for minnows. Hence the larvæ of the first two varieties are found in large numbers round almost all human dwellings in India; and, because their breeding grounds--namely, vessels of water, drains, and wells--are so numerous and are so frequently contained in private tenements, it will be almost impossible to exterminate them on a large scale. On the other hand, spotted-winged mosquitoes are generally much more rare than the other two varieties. They do not appear to breed in wells, cisterns, and vessels of water, and therefore have no special connection with human habitations. In fact, it is usually a matter of some difficulty to obtain their larvæ. Small pools of any permanence--such as they require--are not common in most parts of India, except during the rains, and then pools of this kind are generally full of minnows which make short work of any mosquito larvæ they may find. In other words, the breeding grounds of the spotted-winged varieties seem to be so isolated and small that I think it may be possible to exterminate this species under certain circumstances. The importance of these observations will be apparent when I add that hitherto the parasites of human malaria have been found only in spotted-winged mosquitoes--namely, in two species of them in India and in one species in Italy. As a result of very numerous experiments I think that the common brindled and gray mosquitoes are quite innocuous as regards human malaria--a fortunate circumstance for the human race in the tropics; and Professor Grassi seems to have come to the same conclusion as the result of his inquiries in Italy. But I wish to be understood as writing with all due caution on these points. Up to the present our knowledge, both as regards the habits of the various species of mosquito and as regards the capacity of each for carrying malaria, is not complete. All I can now say is that if my anticipations be realized--if it be found that the malaria-bearing species of mosquito multiply only in small isolated collections of water which can easily be dissipated--we shall possess a simple mode of eliminating malaria from certain localities. I limit this statement to certain localities only, because it is obvious that where the breeding pools are very numerous, as in water-logged country, or where the inhabitants are not sufficiently advanced to take the necessary precautions, we can scarcely expect the recent observations to be of much use--at least for some years to come. And this limitation must, I fear, exclude most of the rural areas in India. Where, however, the breeding pools are not very numerous, and where there is anything approaching a competent sanitary establishment, we may, I think, hope to reap the benefit of these discoveries. And this should apply to the most crowded areas, such as those of cities, towns and cantonments, and also to tea, coffee, and indigo estates, and perhaps to military camps. For instance, malaria causes an enormous amount of sickness among the poor in most Indian cities. Here the common species of mosquitoes breed in the precincts of almost all the houses, and can therefore scarcely be exterminated; but pools suitable for the spotted-winged varieties are comparatively scarce, being found only on vacant areas, ill-kept gardens, or beside roads in very exceptional positions where they can neither dry up quickly nor contain fish. Thus a single small puddle may supply the dangerous mosquitoes to several square miles containing a crowded population: if this be detected and drained off--which will generally cost only a very few rupees--we may expect malaria to vanish from that particular area. The same considerations will apply to military cantonments and estates under cultivation. In many such malaria causes the bulk of the sickness, and may often, I think, originate from two or three small puddles of a few square yards in size. Thus in a malarious part of the cantonment of Secunderabad I found the larvæ of spotted-winged mosquitoes only after a long search in a single little pool which could be filled up with a few cart-loads of town rubbish. In making these suggestions I do not wish to excite hopes which may ultimately prove to have been unfounded. We do not yet know all the dangerous species of mosquito, nor do we even possess an exhaustive knowledge of the haunts and habits of any one variety. I wish merely to indicate what, so far as I can see at present, may become a very simple means of eradicating malaria. One thing may be said for certain. Where previously we have been unable to point out the exact origin of the malaria in a locality, and have thought that it rises from the soil generally, we now hope for much more precise knowledge regarding its source; and it will be contrary to experience if human ingenuity does not finally succeed in turning such information to practical account. More than this, if the distinguishing characteristics of the malaria-bearing mosquitoes are sufficiently marked (if, for instance, they all have spotted wings), people forced to live or travel in malarious districts will ultimately come to recognize them and to take precautions against being bitten by them. Before practical results can be reasonably looked for, however, we must find precisely-- (_a_) What species of Indian mosquitoes do and do not carry human malaria. (_b_) What are the habits of the dangerous varieties. I hope, therefore, that I may be permitted to urge the desirability of carrying out this research. It will no longer present any scientific difficulties, as only the methods already successfully adopted will be required. The results obtained will be quite unequivocal and definite. But the inquiry should be exhaustive. It will not suffice to distinguish merely one or two malaria-bearing species of mosquito in one or two localities; we should learn to know all of them in all parts of the country. The investigation will be abbreviated if the dangerous species be found to belong only to one class of mosquito, as I think is likely; and the researches which are now being energetically entered upon in Germany, Italy, America, and Africa will assist any which may be undertaken in India, though there is reason for thinking that the malaria-bearing species differ in various countries. As each species is detected it will be possible to attempt measures at once for its extermination in given localities as an experiment. I regret that, owing to my work connected with _kala-azar_, I have not been able to advance this branch of knowledge as much during my term of special duty as I had hoped to do; but I think that the solution of the malaria problem which has been obtained during this period will ultimately yield results of practical importance. FOOD POISONING. BY VICTOR C. VAUGHAN, PROFESSOR OF HYGIENE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. Within the past fifteen or twenty years cases of poisoning with foods of various kinds have apparently become quite numerous. This increase in the number of instances of this kind has been both apparent and real. In the first place, it is only within recent years that it has been recognized that foods ordinarily harmless may become most powerful poisons. In the second place, the more extensive use of preserved foods of various kinds has led to an actual increase in the number of outbreaks of food poisoning. The harmful effects of foods may be due to any of the following causes: 1. Certain poisonous fungi may infect grains. This is the cause of epidemics of poisoning with ergotized bread, which formerly prevailed during certain seasons throughout the greater part of continental Europe, but which are now practically limited to southern Russia and Spain. In this country ergotism is practically unknown, except as a result of the criminal use of the drug ergot. However, a few herds of cattle in Kansas and Nebraska have been quite extensively affected with this disease. 2. Plants and animals may feed upon substances that are not harmful to them, but which may seriously affect man on account of his greater susceptibility. It is a well-known fact that hogs may eat large quantities of arsenic or antimony without harm to themselves, and thus render their flesh unfit for food for man. It is believed that birds that feed upon the mountain laurel furnish a food poisonous to man. 3. During periods of the physiological activity of certain glands in some of the lower animals the flesh becomes harmful to man. Some species of fish are poisonous during the spawning season. 4. Both animal and vegetable foods may become infected with the specific germs of disease and serve as the carriers of the infection to man. Instances of the distribution of typhoid fever by the milkman are illustrations of this. 5. Animals may be infected with specific diseases, which may be transmitted to man in the meat or milk. This is one of the means by which tuberculosis is spread. 6. Certain nonspecific, poison-producing germs may find their way into foods of various kinds, and may by their growth produce chemical poisons either before or after the food has been eaten. This is the most common form of food poisoning known in this country. We will briefly discuss some foods most likely to prove harmful to man. MUSSEL POISONING.--It has long been known that this bivalve is occasionally poisonous. Three forms of mussel poisoning are recognized. The first, known as _Mytilotoxismus gastricus_, is accompanied by symptoms practically identical with those of cholera morbus. At first there is nausea, followed by vomiting, which may continue for hours. In severe cases the walls of the stomach are so seriously altered that the vomited matter contains considerable quantities of blood. Vomiting is usually accompanied by severe and painful purging. The heart may be markedly affected, and death may result from failure of this organ. Examination after death from this cause shows the stomach and small intestines to be highly inflamed. The second form of mussel poisoning is known as _Mytilotoxismus exanthematicus_ on account of visible changes in the skin. At first there is a sensation of heat, usually beginning in the eyelids, then spreading to the face, and finally extending over the whole body. This sensation is followed by an eruption, which is accompanied by intolerable itching. In severe cases the breathing becomes labored, the face grows livid, consciousness is lost, and death may result within two or three days. The most frequently observed form of mussel poisoning is that designated as _Mytilotoxismus paralyticus_. As early as 1827 Combe reported his observations upon thirty persons who had suffered from this kind of mussel poisoning. The first symptoms, as a rule, appeared within two hours after eating the poisonous food. Some suffered from nausea and vomiting, but these were not constant or lasting symptoms. All complained of a prickly feeling in the hands, heat and constriction of the throat, difficulty of swallowing and speaking, numbness about the mouth, gradually extending over the face and to the arms, with great debility of the limbs. Most of the sufferers were unable to stand; the action of the heart was feeble, and the face grew pale and expressed much anxiety. Two of the thirty cases terminated fatally. Post-mortem examination showed no abnormality. Many opinions have been expressed concerning the nature of harmful mussels. Until quite recently it was a common belief that certain species are constantly toxic. Virchow has attempted to describe the dangerous variety of mussels, stating that it has a brighter shell, sweeter, more penetrating, bouillonlike odor than the edible kind, and that the flesh of the poisonous mussel is yellow; the water in which they are boiled becomes bluish. However, this belief in a poisonous species is now admitted to be erroneous. At one time it was suggested that mussels became hurtful by absorbing the copper from the bottoms of vessels, but Christison made an analysis of the mussels that poisoned the men mentioned by Combe, with negative results, and also pointed out the fact that the symptoms were not those of poisoning with copper. Some have held that the ill effects were due wholly to idiosyncrasies in the consumers, but cats and dogs are affected in the same way as men are. It has also been believed that all mussels are poisonous during the period of reproduction. This theory is the basis of the popular superstition that shellfish should not be eaten during the months in the name of which the letter "r" does not occur. At one time this popular idea took the form of a legal enactment in France forbidding the sale of shellfish from May 1st to September 1st. This widespread idea has a grain of truth in it, inasmuch as decomposition is more likely to alter food injuriously during the summer months. However, poisoning with mussels may occur at any time of the year. It has been pretty well demonstrated that the first two forms of mussel poisoning mentioned above are due to putrefactive processes, while the paralytic manifestations seen in other cases are due to a poison isolated a few years ago by Brieger, and named by him mytilotoxin. Any mussel may acquire this poison when it lives in filthy water. Indeed, it has been shown experimentally that edible mussels may become harmful when left for fourteen days or longer in filthy water; while, on the other hand, poisonous mussels may become harmless if kept four weeks or longer in clear water. This is true not only of mussels, but of oysters as well. Some years ago, many cases of poisoning from oysters were reported at Havre. The oysters had been taken from a bed near the outlet of a drain from a public water closet. Both oysters and mussels may harbor the typhoid bacillus, and may act as carriers of this germ to man. There should be most stringent police regulations against the sale of all kinds of mollusks, and all fish as well, taken from filthy waters. Certainly one should avoid shellfish from impure waters, and it is not too much to insist that those offered for food should be washed in clean water. All forms of clam and oyster broth should be avoided when it has stood even for a few hours at summer heat. These preparations very quickly become infected with bacteria, which develop most potent poisons. FISH POISONING.--Some fish are supplied with poisonous glands, by means of which they secure their prey and protect themselves from their enemies. The "dragon weaver," or "sea weaver" (_Trachinus draco_), is one of the best known of these fish. There are numerous varieties widely distributed in salt waters. The poisonous spine is attached partly to the maxilla and partly to the gill cover at its base. This spine is connected with a poisonous gland; the spine itself is grooved and covered with a thin membrane, which converts the grooves into canals. When the point enters another animal its membrane is stripped back and the poison enters the wound. Men sometimes wound their feet with the barbs of this fish while bathing. It also occasionally happens that a fisherman pricks his fingers with one of these barbs. The most poisonous variety of this fish known is found in the Mediterranean Sea. Wounds produced by these animals sometimes cause death. In _Synanceia brachio_ there are in the dorsal fin thirteen barbs, each connected with two poison reservoirs. The secretion from these glands is clear, bluish in color, and acid in reaction, and when introduced beneath the skin causes local gangrene and, if in sufficient quantity, general paralysis. In _Plotosus lineatus_ there is a powerful barb in front of the ventral fin, and the poison is not discharged unless the end of the barb is broken. The most poisonous variety of this fish is found only in tropical waters. In _Scorpæna scrofa_ and other species of this family there are poison glands connected with the barbs in the dorsal and in some varieties in the caudal fin. A disease known as _kakke_ was a few years ago quite prevalent in Japan and other countries along the eastern coast of Asia. With the opening up of Japan to the civilized world the study of this disease by scientific methods was undertaken by the observant and intelligent natives who acquired their medical training in Europe and America. In Tokio the disease generally appears in May, reaches its greatest prevalence in August, and gradually disappears in September and October. The researches of Miura and others have fairly well demonstrated that this disease is due to the eating of fish belonging to the family of _Scombridæ_. There are other kinds of fish in Japanese waters that undoubtedly are poisonous. This is true of the _tetrodon_, of which, according to Remey, there are twelve species whose ovaries are poisonous. Dogs fed upon these organs soon suffered from salivation, vomiting, and convulsive muscular contractions. When some of the fluid obtained by rubbing the ovaries in a mortar was injected subcutaneously in dogs the symptoms were much more severe, and death resulted. Tahara states that he has isolated from the roe of the tetrodon two poisons, one of which is a crystalline base, while the other is a white, waxy body. From 1885 to 1892 inclusive, 933 cases of poisoning with this fish were reported in Tokio, with a mortality of seventy-two per cent. Fish poisoning is quite frequently observed in the West Indies, where the complex of symptoms is designated by the Spanish term _siguatera_. It is believed by the natives that the poisonous properties of the fish are due to the fact that they feed upon decomposing medusæ and corals. In certain localities it is stated that all fish caught off certain coral reefs are unfit for food. However, all statements concerning the origin and nature of the poison in these fish are mere assumptions, since no scientific work has been done. Whatever the source of the poison may be, it is quite powerful, and death not infrequently results. The symptoms are those of gastro-intestinal irritation followed by collapse. In Russia fish poisoning sometimes causes severe and widespread epidemics. The Government has offered a large reward for any one who will positively determine the cause of the fish being poisonous and suggest successful means of preventing these outbreaks. Schmidt, after studying several of these epidemics, states the following conclusions: (_a_) The harmful effects are not due to putrefactive processes. (_b_) Fish poisoning in Russia is always due to the eating of some member of the sturgeon tribe. (_c_) The ill effects are not due to the method of catching the fish, the use of salt, or to imperfections in the methods of preservation. (_d_) The deleterious substance is not uniformly distributed through the fish, but is confined to certain parts. (_e_) The poisonous portions are not distinguishable from the nonpoisonous, either macroscopically or microscopically. (_f_) When the fish is cooked it may be eaten without harm. (_g_) The poison is an animal alkaloid produced most probably by bacteria that cause an infectious disease in the fish during life. The conclusion reached by Schmidt is confirmed by the researches of Madame Sieber, who found a poisonous bacillus in fish which had caused an epidemic. In the United States fish poisoning is most frequently due to decomposition in canned fish. The most prominent symptoms are nausea, vomiting, and purging. Sometimes there is a scarlatinous rash, which may cover the whole body. The writer has studied two outbreaks of this kind of fish poisoning. In both instances canned salmon was the cause of the trouble. Although a discussion of the treatment of food poisoning is foreign to this paper, the writer must call attention to the danger in the administration of opiates in cases of poisoning with canned fish. Vomiting and purging are efforts on the part of Nature to remove the poison, and should be assisted by the stomach tube and by irrigation of the colon. In one of the cases seen by the writer large doses of morphine had been administered in order to check the vomiting and purging and to relieve the pain; in this case death resulted. The danger of arresting the elimination of the poison in all cases of food poisoning can not be too emphatically condemned. MEAT POISONING.--The diseases most frequently transmitted from the lower animals to man by the consumption of the flesh or milk of the former by the latter are tuberculosis, anthrax, symptomatic anthrax, pleuro-pneumonia, trichinosis, mucous diarrhoea, and actinomycosis. It hardly comes within the scope of this article to discuss in detail the transmission of these diseases from the lower animals to man. However, the writer must be allowed to offer a few opinions concerning some mooted questions pertaining to the consumption of the flesh of tuberculous animals. Some hold that it is sufficient to condemn the diseased part of the tuberculous cow, and that the remainder may be eaten with perfect safety. Others teach that "total seizure" and destruction of the entire carcass by the health authorities are desirable. Experiments consisting of the inoculation of guinea pigs with the meat and meat juices of tuberculous animals have given different results to several investigators. To one who has seen tuberculous animals slaughtered, these differences in opinion and in experimental results are easily explainable. The tuberculous invasion may be confined to a single gland, and this may occur in a portion of the carcass not ordinarily eaten; while, on the other hand, the invasion may be much more extensive and the muscles may be involved. The tuberculous portion may consist of hard nodules that do not break down and contaminate other tissues in the process of removal, but the writer has seen a tuberculous abscess in the liver holding nearly a pint of broken-down infected matter ruptured or cut in removing this organ, and its contents spread over the greater part of the carcass. This explains why one investigator succeeds in inducing tuberculosis in guinea pigs by introducing small bits of meat from a tuberculous cow into the abdominal cavity, while another equally skillful bacteriologist follows the same details and fails to get positive results. No one desires to eat any portion of a tuberculous animal, and the only safety lies in "total seizure" and destruction. That the milk from tuberculous cows, even when the udder is not involved, may contain the specific bacillus has been demonstrated experimentally. The writer has suggested that every one selling milk should be licensed, and the granting of a license should be dependent upon the application of the tuberculin test to every cow from which milk is sold. The frequency with which tuberculosis is transmitted to children through milk should justify this action. That a profuse diarrhoea may render the flesh of an animal unfit food for man was demonstrated by the cases studied by Gärtner. In this instance the cow was observed to have a profuse diarrhoea for two days before she was slaughtered. Both the raw and cooked meat from this animal poisoned the persons who ate it. Medical literature contains the records of many cases of meat poisoning due to the eating of the flesh of cows slaughtered while suffering from puerperal fever. It has been found that the flesh of animals dead of symptomatic anthrax may retain its infection after having been preserved in a dry state for ten years. One of the most frequently observed forms of meat poisoning is that due to the eating of decomposed sausage. Sausage poisoning, known as _botulismus_, is most common in parts of Germany. Germans who have brought to the United States their methods of preparing sausage occasionally suffer from this form of poisoning. The writer had occasion two years ago to investigate six cases of this kind, two of which proved fatal. The sausage meat had been placed in uncooked sections of the intestines and alternately frozen and thawed and then eaten raw. In this instance the meat was infected with a highly virulent bacillus, which resembled very closely the _Bacterium coli_. In England, Ballard has reported numerous epidemics of meat poisoning, in most of which the meat had become infected with some nonspecific, poison-producing germ. In 1894 the writer was called upon to investigate cases of poisoning due to the eating of pressed chicken. The chickens were killed Tuesday afternoon and left hanging in a market room at ordinary temperature until Wednesday forenoon, when they were drawn and carried to a restaurant and here left in a warm room until Thursday, when they were cooked (not thoroughly), pressed, and served at a banquet in which nearly two hundred men participated. All ate of the chicken, and were more or less seriously poisoned. The meat contained a slender bacillus, which was fatal to white rats, guinea pigs, dogs, and rabbits. Ermengem states that since 1867 there have been reported 112 epidemics of meat poisoning, in which 6,000 persons have been affected. In 103 of these outbreaks the meat came from diseased animals, while in only five was there any evidence that putrefactive changes in the meat had taken place. My experience convinces me that in this country meat poisoning frequently results from putrefactive changes. Instances of poisoning from the eating of canned meats have become quite common. Although it may be possible that in some instances the ill effects result from metallic poisoning, in a great majority of cases the poisonous substances are formed by putrefactive changes. In many cases it is probable that decomposition begins after the can has been opened by the consumer; in others the canning is imperfectly done, and putrefaction is far advanced before the food reaches the consumer. In still other instances the meat may have been taken from diseased animals, or it may have undergone putrefactive changes before the canning. It should always be remembered that canned meat is especially liable to putrefactive changes after the can has been opened, and when the contents of the open can are not consumed at once the remainder should be kept in a cold place or should be thrown away. People are especially careless on this point. While every one knows that fresh meat should be kept in a cold place during the summer, an open can of meat is often allowed to stand at summer temperature and its contents eaten hours after the can has been opened. This is not safe, and has caused several outbreaks of meat poisoning that have come under the observation of the writer. MILK POISONING.--In discussing this form of food poisoning we will exclude any consideration of the distribution of the specific infectious diseases through milk as the carrier of the infection, and will confine ourselves to that form of milk poisoning which is due to infection with nonspecific, poison-producing germs. Infants are highly susceptible to the action of the galactotoxicons (milk poisons). There can no longer be any doubt that these poisons are largely responsible for much of the infantile mortality which is alarmingly high in all parts of the world. It has been positively shown that the summer diarrhoea of infancy is due to milk poisoning. The diarrhoeas prevalent among infants during the summer months are not due to a specific germ, but there are many bacteria that grow rapidly in milk and form poisons which induce vomiting and purging, and may cause death. These diseases occur almost exclusively among children artificially fed. It is true that there are differences in chemical composition between the milk of woman and that of the cow, but these variations in percentage of proteids, fats, and carbohydrates are of less importance than the infection of milk with harmful bacteria. The child that takes its food exclusively from the breast of a healthy mother obtains a food that is free from poisonous bacteria, while the bottle-fed child may take into its body with its food a great number and variety of germs, some of which may be quite deadly in their effects. The diarrhoeas of infancy are practically confined to the hot months, because a high temperature is essential to the growth and wide distribution of the poison-producing bacteria. Furthermore, during the summer time these bacteria grow abundantly in all kinds of filth. Within recent years the medical profession has so urgently called attention to the danger of infected milk that there has been a great improvement in the care of this article of diet, but that there is yet room for more scientific and thorough work in this direction must be granted. The sterilization and Pasteurization of milk have doubtlessly saved the lives of many children, but every intelligent physician knows that even the most careful mother or nurse often fails to secure a milk that is altogether safe. It is true that milk often contains germs the spores of which are not destroyed by the ordinary methods of sterilization and Pasteurization. However, these germs are not the most dangerous ones found in milk. Moreover, every mother and nurse should remember that in the preparation of sterilized milk for the child it is not only necessary to heat the milk, but, after it has been heated to a temperature sufficiently high and sufficiently prolonged, the milk must subsequently be kept at a low temperature until the child is ready to take it, when it may be warmed. It should be borne in mind that the subsequent cooling of the milk and keeping it at a low temperature is a necessary feature in the preparation of it as a food for the infant. CHEESE POISONING.--Under this heading we shall include the ill effects that may follow the eating of not only cheese but other milk products, such as ice cream, cream custard, cream puffs, etc. Any poison formed in milk may exist in the various milk products, and it is impossible to draw any sharp line of distinction between milk poisoning and cheese poisoning. However, the distinction is greater than is at first apparent. Under the head of milk poisoning we have called especial attention to those substances formed in milk to which children are particularly susceptible, while in cheese and other milk products there are formed poisonous substances against which age does not give immunity. Since milk is practically the sole food during the first year or eighteen months of life, the effect of its poisons upon infants is of the greatest importance; on the other hand, milk products are seldom taken by the infant, but are frequent articles of diet in after life. In 1884 the writer succeeded in isolating from poisonous cheese a highly active basic substance, to which he gave the name _tyrotoxicon_. The symptoms produced by this poison are quite marked, but differ in degree according to the amount of the poison taken. At first there is dryness of the mouth, followed by constriction of the fauces, then nausea, vomiting, and purging. The first vomited matter consists of food, then it becomes watery and is frequently stained with blood. The stools are at first semisolid, and then are watery and serous. The heart is depressed, the pulse becomes weak and irregular, and in severe cases the face appears cyanotic. There may be dilatation of the pupil, but this is not seen in all. The most dangerous cases are those in which the vomiting is slight and soon ceases altogether, and the bowels are constipated from the beginning. Such cases as these require prompt and energetic treatment. The stomach and bowels should be thoroughly irrigated in order to remove the poison, and the action of the heart must be sustained. At one time the writer believed that tyrotoxicon was the active agent in all samples of poisonous cheese, but more extended experimentation has convinced him that this is not the case. Indeed, this poison is rarely found, while the number of poisons in harmful cheese is no doubt considerable. There are numerous poisonous albumins found in cheese and other milk products. While all of these are gastro-intestinal irritants, they differ considerably in other respects. In 1895 the writer and Perkins made a prolonged study of a bacillus found in cheese which had poisoned fifty people. Chemically the poison produced by this germ is distinguished from tyrotoxicon by the fact that it is not removed from alkaline solution with ether. Physiologically the new poison has a more pronounced effect on the heart, in which it resembles muscarin or neurin more closely than it does tyrotoxicon. Pathologically, the two poisons are unlike, inasmuch as the new poison induces marked congestion of the tissues about the point of injection when used upon animals hypodermically. Furthermore, the intestinal constrictions which are so uniformly observed in animals poisoned by tyrotoxicon was not once seen in our work with this new poison, although it was carefully looked for in all our experiments. In 1898 the writer, with McClymonds, examined samples of cheese from more than sixty manufacturers in this country and in Europe. In all samples of ordinary American green cheese poisonous germs were found in greater or less abundance. These germs resemble very closely the colon bacillus, and most likely their presence in the milk is to be accounted for by contamination with bits of fecal matter from the cow. It is more than probable that the manufacture of cheese is yet in its infancy, and we need some one to do for this industry what Pasteur did for the manufacture of beer. At present the flavor of a given cheese depends upon the bacteria and molds which accidentally get into it. The time will probably come when all milk used for the manufacture of cheese will be sterilized, and then selected molds and bacteria will be sown in it. In this way the flavor and value of a cheese will be determined with scientific accuracy, and will not be left to accident. CANNED FOODS.--As has been stated, the increased consumption of preserved foods is accountable for a great proportion of the cases of food poisoning. The preparation of canned foods involves the application of scientific principles, and since this work is done by men wholly ignorant of science it is quite remarkable that harmful effects do not manifest themselves more frequently than they do. Every can of food which is not thoroughly sterilized may become a source of danger to health and even to life. It may be of interest for us to study briefly the methods ordinarily resorted to in the preparation of canned foods. With most substances the food is cooked before being put into the can. This is especially true of meats of various kinds. Thorough cooking necessarily leads to the complete sterilization of the food; but after this, it must be transferred to the can, and the can must be properly closed. With the handling necessary in canning the food, germs are likely to be introduced. Moreover, it is possible that the preliminary cooking is not thoroughly done and complete sterilization is not reached. The empty can should be sterilized. If one wishes to understand the _modus operandi_ of canning foods, let him take up a round can of any fruit, vegetable, or meat and examine the bottom of the can, which is in reality the top during the process of canning and until the label is put on. The food is introduced through the circular opening in this end, now closed by a piece which can be seen to be soldered on. After the food has been introduced through this opening the can and contents are heated either in a water bath or by means of steam. The opening through which the food was introduced is now closed by a circular cap of suitable size, which is soldered in position. This cap has near its center a "prick-hole" through which the steam continues to escape. This "prick-hole" is then closed with solder, and the closed can again heated in the water bath or with steam. If the can "blows" (if the ends of the can become convex) during this last heating the "prick-hole" is again punctured and the heated air allowed to escape, after which the "prick-hole" is again closed. Cans thus prepared should be allowed to stand in a warm chamber for four or five days. If the contents have not been thoroughly sterilized gases will be evolved during this time, or the can will "blow" and the contents should be discarded. Unscrupulous manufacturers take cans which have "blown," prick them to allow the escape of the contained gases, and then resterilize the cans with their contents, close them again, and put them on the market. These "blowholes" may be made in either end of the can, or they may be made in the sides of the can, where they are subsequently covered with the label. Of course, it does not necessarily follow that if a can has "blown" and been subsequently resterilized its contents will prove poisonous, but it is not safe to eat the contents of such cans. Reputable manufacturers discard all "blown" cans. Nearly all canned jellies sold in this country are made from apples. The apples are boiled with a preparation sold under the trade name "tartarine." This consists of either dilute hydrochloric or sulphuric acid. Samples examined by the writer have invariably been found to consist of dilute hydrochloric acid. The jelly thus formed by the action of the dilute acid upon the apple is converted into quince, pear, pineapple, or any other fruit that the pleasure of the manufacturer may choose by the addition of artificial flavoring agents. There is no reason for believing that the jellies thus prepared are harmful to health. Canned fruits occasionally contain salicylic acid in some form. There has been considerable discussion among sanitarians as to whether or not the use of this preservative is admissible. Serious poisoning with canned fruits is very rare. However, there can be but little doubt that many minor digestive disturbances are caused by acids formed in these foods. There has been much apprehension concerning the possibility of poisoning resulting from the soluble salts of tin formed by the action of fruit acids upon the can. The writer believes that anxiety on this point is unnecessary, and he has failed to find any positive evidence of poisoning resulting from this cause. There are two kinds of condensed milk sold in cans. These are known as condensed milk "with" and "without" sugar. In the preparation of the first-mentioned kind a large amount of cane sugar is added to condensed milk, and this acting as a preservative renders the preparation and successful handling of this article of food comparatively easy. On the other hand, condensed milk to which sugar has not been added is very liable to decomposition, and great care must be used in its preparation. The writer has seen several cases of severe poisoning that have resulted from decomposed canned milk. Any of the galactotoxicons (milk poisons) may be formed in this milk. In these instances the cans were "blown," both ends being convex. One of the most important sanitary questions in which we are concerned to-day is that pertaining to the subject of canned meats. It is undoubtedly true that unscrupulous manufacturers are putting upon the market articles of this kind of food which no decent man knowingly would eat, and which are undoubtedly harmful to all. The knowledge gained by investigations in chemical and bacteriological science have enabled the unscrupulous to take putrid liver and other disgusting substances and present them in such a form that the most fastidious palate would not recognize their origin. In this way the flesh from diseased animals and that which has undergone putrefactive changes may be doctored up and sold as reputable articles of diet. The writer does not believe that this practice is largely resorted to in this country, but that questionable preservatives have been used to some extent has been amply demonstrated by the testimony of the manufacturers of these articles themselves, given before the Senate committee now investigating the question of food and food adulterations. It is certainly true that most of the adulterations used in our foods are not injurious to health, but are fraudulent in a pecuniary sense; but when the flesh of diseased animals and substances which have undergone putrefactive decomposition can be doctored up and preserved by the addition of such agents as formaldehyde, it is time that the public should demand some restrictive measures. WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY. BY PROF. JOHN TROWBRIDGE, DIRECTOR OF JEFFERSON PHYSICAL LABORATORY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY. I never visit the historical collection of physical apparatus in the physical laboratory of Harvard University without a sense of wonderment at the marvelous use that has been made of old and antiquated pieces of apparatus which were once considered electrical toys. There can be seen the first batteries, the model of dynamo machines, and the electric motor. Such a collection is in a way a Westminster Abbey--dead mechanisms born to new uses and a great future. There is one simple piece of apparatus in the collection, without which telephony and wireless telegraphy would be impossible. To my mind it is the most interesting skeleton there, and if physicists marked the resting places of their apparatus laid to apparent rest and desuetude, this merits the highest sounding and most suggestive inscription. It is called a transformer, and consists merely of two coils of wire placed near each other. One coil is adapted to receive an electric current; the other coil, entirely independent of the first, responds by sympathy, or what is called induction, across the space which separates the coils. Doubtless if man knew all the capabilities of this simple apparatus he might talk to China, or receive messages from the antipodes. He now, by means of it, analyzes the light of distant suns, and produces the singular X rays which enable him to see through the human body. By means of it he already communicates his thoughts between stations thousands of miles apart, and by means of its manifestations I hope to make this article on wireless telegraphy intelligible. My essay can be considered a panegyric of this buried form--a history of its new life and of its unbounded possibilities. [Illustration: FIG. 1.--Disposition of batteries and coils at the sending station, showing the arrangement of the vertical wire and the spark gap.] For convenience, one of the coils of the transformer is placed inside the other, and the combination is called a Ruhmkorf coil. It is represented in the accompanying photograph (Fig. 1), with batteries attached to the inner coil, while the outer coil is connected to two balls, between which an electric spark jumps whenever the battery circuit is broken. In fact, any disturbance in the battery circuit--a weakening, a strengthening, or a break--provided that the changes are sudden, produces a corresponding change in the neighboring circuit. One coil thus responds to the other, in some mysterious way, across the interval of air which separates them. Usually the coils are placed very near to each other--in fact, one embraces the other, as shown in the photograph. The coils, however, if placed several miles apart, will still respond to each other if they are made sufficiently large, if they are properly placed, and if a powerful current is used to excite one coil. Thus, by simply varying the distance between the coils of wire we can send messages through the air between stations which are not connected with a wire. This method, however, does not constitute the system of wireless telegraphy of Marconi, which it is the object of this paper to describe. Marconi has succeeded in transmitting messages over forty miles between points not connected by wires, and he has accomplished this feat by merely slightly modifying the disposition of the coils, thus revealing a new possibility of the wondrous transformer. If the reader will compare the following diagram (Fig. 2) with the photograph (Fig. 1), he will see how simple the sending apparatus of Marconi is. [Illustration: FIG. 2.--Diagram of the arrangement of wires and batteries at the receiving station.] S is a gap between the ends of one coil, across which an electric spark is produced whenever the current from the batteries B flowing through the coil C is broken by an arrangement at D. This break produces an electrical pulsation in the coil C', which travels up and down the wire W, which is elevated to a considerable height above the ground. This pulsation can not be seen by the eye. The wire does not move; it appears perfectly quiescent and dead, and seems only a wire and nothing more. At night, under favorable circumstances, one could see a luminosity on the wire, especially at the end, when messages are being transmitted, by a powerful battery B. It is very easy to detect the electric lines which radiate from every part of such a wire when a spark jumps between the terminals S of the coil. All that is necessary to do is to pass the wire through a sensitive film and to develop the film. The accompanying photograph (Fig. 3) was taken at the top of such a wire, by means of a very powerful apparatus at my command. When the photograph is examined with a microscope the arborescent electric lines radiating from the wire, like the rays of light from a star, exhibit a beautiful fernlike structure. These lines, however, are not chiefly instrumental in transmitting the electric pulse across space. There are other lines, called magnetic lines of force, which emanate from every portion of the vertical wire W just as ripples spread out on the surface of placid water when it is disturbed by the fall of a stone. These magnetic ripples travel in the ether of space, and when they embrace a neighboring wire or coil they produce similar ripples, which whirl about the distant wire and produce in some strange way an electrical current in the wire. These magnetic pulsations can travel great distances. [Illustration: FIG. 2_a_ represents a more complete electrical arrangement of the receiver circuit. The vertical wire, W', is connected to one wire of the coherer, L. The other wire of the coherer is led to the ground, G. The wires in the coherer, L, are separated by fine metallic particles. B represents a battery. E, an electro-magnet which attracts a piece of iron, A (armature), and closes a local battery, B, causing a click of the sounder (electro-magnet), S. The magnetic waves (Fig. 5) embracing the wire, W', cause a pulsation in this wire which produces an electrical disturbance in the coherer analogous to that shown in Fig. 3, by means of which an electrical current is enabled to pass through the electro-magnet, E.] In the photographs of these magnetic whirls, Fig. 4 is the whirl produced in the circuit C' by the battery B (Fig. 2), while Fig. 5 is that produced by electrical sympathy, or as it is called induction, in a neighboring wire. These photographs were obtained by passing the circuits through the sensitive films, perpendicularly to the latter, and then sprinkling very fine iron filings on these surfaces and exposing them to the light. In order to obtain these photographs a very powerful electrical current excited the coil C (Fig. 2), and the neighboring circuit W' (Fig. 5) was placed very near the circuit W. When the receiving wire is at the distance of several miles from the sending wire it is impossible to detect by the above method the magnetic ripples or whirls. We can, however, detect the electrical currents which these magnetic lines of force cause in the receiving wire; and this leads me to speak of the discovery of a remarkable phenomenon which has made Marconi's system of wireless telegraphy possible. In order that an electrical current may flow through a mass of particles of a metal, a mass, for instance, of iron filings, it is necessary either to compress them or to cause a minute spark or electrical discharge between the particles. Now, it is supposed that the magnetic whirls, in embracing the distant receiving circuit, cause these minute sparks, and thus enable the electric current from the battery B to work a telegraphic sounder or bell M. The metallic filings are inclosed in a glass tube between wires which lead to the battery, and the arrangement is called a coherer. It can be made small and light. Fig. 6 is a representation in full size of one that has been found to be very sensitive. It consists of two silver wires with a few iron filings contained in a glass tube between the ends of the wires. It is necessary that this little tube should be constantly shaken up in order that after the electrical circuit is made the iron filings should return to their non-conducting condition, or should cease to cohere together, and should thus be ready to respond to the following signal. My colleague, Professor Sabine, has employed a very small electric motor to cause the glass tube to revolve, and thus to keep the filings in motion while signals are being received. Fig. 7 shows the arrangement of the receiving apparatus. [Illustration: FIG. 3.--Photograph of the electric lines which emanate from the end of the wire at the sending station, and which are probably reproduced among the metallic filings of the coherer at the receiving station.] The coherer and the motor are shown between two batteries, one of which drives the motor while the other serves to work the bell or sounder when the electric wire excites the iron filings. In Fig. 2 this receiving apparatus is shown diagrammatically. B is the battery which sends a current through the sounder M and the coherer N when the magnetic whirls coming from the sending wire W embrace the receiving wire W'. [Illustration: FIG. 4.--Magnetic whirls about the sending wire.] The term wireless telegraphy is a misnomer, for without wires the method would not be possible. The phenomenon is merely an enlargement of one that we are fully conscious of in the case of telegraph and telephone circuits, which is termed electro-magnetic induction. Whenever an electric current suddenly flows or suddenly ceases to flow along a wire, electrical currents are caused by induction in neighboring wires. The receiver employed by Marconi is a delicate spark caused by this induction, which forms a bridge so that an electric current from the relay battery can pass and influence magnetic instruments. Many investigators had succeeded before Marconi in sending telegraphic messages several miles through the air or ether between two points not directly connected by wires. Marconi has extended the distance by employing a much higher electro-motive force at the sending station and using the feeble inductive effect at a distance to set in action a local battery. It is evident that wires are needed at the sending station from every point of which magnetic and electric waves are sent out, and wires at the receiving station which embrace, so to speak, these waves in the manner shown by our photographs. These waves produce minute sparks in the receiving instrument, which act like a suddenly drawn flood gate in allowing the current from a local battery to flow through the circuit in which the spark occurs, and thus produce a click on a telegraphic instrument. [Illustration: FIG. 5.--Magnetic whirls about the receiving wire.] We have said that messages had been sent by what is called wireless telegraphy before Marconi made his experiments. These messages had also been sent by induction, signals on one wire being received by a parallel and distant wire. To Marconi is due the credit of greatly extending the method by using a vertical wire. The method of using the coherer to detect electric pulses is not due, however, to Marconi. It is usually attributed to Branly; it had been employed, however, by previous observers, among whom is Hughes, the inventor of the microphone, an instrument analogous in its action to that of the coherer. In the case of the microphone, the waves from the human voice shake up the particles of carbon in the microphone transmitter, and thus cause an electrical current to flow more easily through the minute contacts of the carbon particles. The action of the telephone transmitter, which also consists of minute conducting particles in which a battery terminals are immersed, and the analogous coherer is microscopic, and there are many theories to account for their changes of resistance to electrical currents. We can not, I believe, be far wrong in thinking that the electric force breaks down the insulating effect of the infinitely thin layers of air between the particles, and thus allows an electric current to flow. This action is doubtless of the nature of an electric spark. An electric spark, in the case of wireless telegraphy, produces magnetic and electric lines of force in space, these reach out and embrace the circuit containing the coherer, and produce in turn minute sparks. _Similia similibus_--one action perfectly corresponds to the other. The Marconi system, therefore, of what is called wireless telegraphy is not new in principle, but only new in practical application. It had been used to show the phenomena of electric waves in lecture rooms. Marconi extended it from distances of sixty to one hundred feet to fifty or sixty miles. He did this by lifting the sending-wire spark on a lofty pole and improving the sensitiveness of the metallic filings in the glass tube at the receiving station. He adopted a mechanical arrangement for continually tapping the coherer in order to break up the minute bridges formed by the cohering action, and thus to prepare the filings for the next magnetic pulse. The system of wireless telegraphy is emphatically a spark system strangely analogous to flash-light signaling, a system in which the human eye with its rods and cones in the retina acts as the coherer, and the nerve system, the local battery, making a signal or sensation in the brain. [Illustration: FIG. 6.--The coherer employed to receive the electric waves. (One and a third actual size.)] Let us examine the sending spark a little further. An electric spark is perhaps the most interesting phenomenon in electricity. What causes it--how does the air behave toward it--what is it that apparently flows through the air, sending out light and heat waves as well as magnetic and electric waves? If we could answer all these questions, we should know what electricity is. A critical study of the electric spark has not only its scientific but its practical side. We see the latter side evidenced by its employment in wireless telegraphy and in the X rays; for in the latter case we have an electric discharge in a tube from which the air is removed--a special case of an electric spark. In order to understand the capabilities of wireless telegraphy we must turn to the scientific study of the electric spark; for its practical employment resides largely in its strength, in its frequency in its position, and in its power to make the air a conductor for electricity. All these points are involved in wireless telegraphy. How, then, shall we study the electric spark? The eye sees only an instantaneous flash following a devious path. It can not tell in what direction a spark flies (a flash of lightning, for instance), or indeed whether it has a direction. There is probably no commoner fallacy mankind entertains than the belief that the direction of lightning, or any electric spark, can be ascertained by the eye--that is, the direction from the sky to the earth or from the earth to the sky. I have repeatedly tested numbers of students in regard to this question, employing sparks four to six feet in length, taking precautions in regard to the concealment of the directions in which I charged the poles of the charging batteries, and I have never found a consensus of opinion in regard to directions. The ordinary photograph, too, reveals no more than the eye can see--a brilliant, devious line or a flaming discharge. [Illustration: FIG. 7.--Arrangement of batteries of motor (to disturb the coherer) and the sounder by which the messages are received.] A large storage battery forms the best means of studying electric sparks, for with it one can run the entire gamut of this phenomenon--from the flaming discharge which we see in the arc light on the street to the crackling spark we employ in wireless telegraphy, and the more powerful discharges of six or more feet in length which closely resemble lightning discharges. A critical study of this gamut throws considerable light on the problem of the possibility of secret wireless telegraphy--a problem which it is most important to solve if the system is to be made practical; for at present the message spreads out from the sending spark in great circular ripples in all directions, and may be received by any one. [Illustration: FIG. 8.--Photograph of electrical pulses. The interval between the pulses is one millionth of a second.] Several methods enable us to transform electrical energy so as to obtain suitable quick and intense blows on the surrounding medium. Is it possible that there is some mysterious vibration in the spark which is instrumental in the effective transmission of electrical energy across space? If the spark should vibrate or oscillate to and fro faster than sixteen times a second the human eye could not detect such oscillations; for an impression remains on the eye one sixteenth of a second, and subsequent ones separated by intervals shorter than a sixteenth would mingle together and could not be separated. The only way to ascertain whether the spark is oscillatory, or whether it is not one spark, as it appears to the eye, but a number of to-and-fro impulses, is to photograph it by a rapidly revolving mirror. The principle is similar to that of the biograph or the vitoscope, in which the quick to-and-fro motions of the spark are received on a sensitive film, which is in rapid motion. One terminal of the spark gap, the positive terminal so called, is always brighter than the other. Hence, if the sensitive film is moved at right angles to the path of the discharge, we shall get a row of dots which are the images of the brighter terminal, and these dots occur alternately first on one terminal and then on the other, showing that the discharge oscillates--that is, leaps in one discharge (which seems but one to the eye) many times in a hundred thousandth of a second. In practice it is found better to make an image of the spark move across the sensitive film instead of moving the film. This is accomplished by the same method that a boy uses in flashing sunlight by means of a mirror. The faster the mirror moves the faster moves the image of the light. In this way a speed of a millionth of a second can be attained. In this case the distance between the dots on the film may be one tenth of an inch, sufficient to separate them to the eye. The photograph of electric sparks (Fig. 8) was taken in this manner. The distance between any two bright spots in the trail of the photographic images represents the time of the electric oscillation or the time of the magnetic pulse or wave which is sent out from the spark, and which will cause a distant circuit to respond by a similar oscillation. [Illustration: FIG. 9.--Photograph of a pilot spark, which is the principal factor in the method of wireless telegraphy.] At present the shortest time that can, so to speak, be photographed in this manner is about one two-millionth of a second. This is the time of propagation of a magnetic wave over four hundred feet long. The waves used in wireless telegraphy are not more than four feet in length--about one hundredth the length of those we can photograph. The photographic method thus reveals a mechanism of the spark which is entirely hidden from the eye and will always be concealed from human sight. It reveals, however, a greater mystery which it seems incompetent to solve--the mystery of what is called the pilot spark, the first discharge which we see on our photograph (Fig. 9) stretching intact from terminal to terminal, having the prodigious velocity of one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second. None of our experimental devices suffice to penetrate the mystery of this discharge. It is this pilot spark which is chiefly instrumental in sending out the magnetic pulses or waves which are powerful enough to reach forty or fifty miles. The preponderating influence of this pilot spark--so called since it finds a way for the subsequent surgings or oscillations--is a bar to the efforts to make wireless telegraphy secret. We can see from the photograph how much greater its strength is than that of the subsequent discharges shown by the mere brightening of the terminals. A delicate coherer will immediately respond to the influence of this pilot spark, and the subsequent oscillations of this discharge will have little effect. How, then, can we effectively time a receiving circuit so that it will respond to only one sending station? We can not depend upon the oscillatory nature of the spark, or adopt, in other words, its rate of vibration and form a coherer with the same rate. It seems as if it would be necessary to invent some method of sending pilot sparks at a high and definite rate of vibration, and of employing coherers which will only respond to definite powerful rates of magnetic pulsation. Various attempts have been made to produce by mechanical means powerful electric surgings, but they have been unsuccessful. Both high electro-motive force and strength of current are needed. These can be obtained by the employment of a great number of storage cells. The discharge from a large number of these cells, however, is not suitable for the purpose of wireless telegraphy, although it may possess the qualifications of both high electrical pressure and strength of current. The only apparatus we have at command to produce quick blows on the ether is the Ruhmkorf coil. This coil, I have said, has been in all our physical cabinets for fifty years. It contained within itself the germ of the telephone transmitter and the method of wireless telegraphy, unrecognized until the present. In its elements it consists, as we have seen, of two electrical circuits, placed near each other, entirely unconnected. A battery is connected with one of these circuits, and any change in the strength of the electrical current gives a blow to the ether or medium between the two circuits. A quick stopping of the electrical current gives the strongest impulse to the ether, which is taken up by the neighboring circuit. For the past fifty years very little advance has been made in the method of giving strong electrical impulses to the medium of space. It is accomplished simply by a mechanical breaking of the connection to the battery, either by a revolving wheel with suitable projections, or by a vibrating point. All the various forms of mechanical breaks are inefficient. They do not give quick and uniform breaks. Latterly, hopes have been excited by the discovery of a chemical break, called the Weynelt interrupter, shown in Fig. 1. The electrical current in passing through a vessel of diluted sulphuric acid from a point of platinum to a disk of lead causes bubbles of gas which form a barrier to its passage which is suddenly broken down, and this action goes on at a high rate of speed, causing a torrent of sparks in the neighboring circuit. The medium between the two circuits is thereby submitted to rapid and comparatively powerful impulses. The discovery of this and similar chemical or molecular interruptions marks an era in the history of the electrical transformer, and the hopes of further progress by means of them is far greater than in the direction of mechanical interruptions. We are still, however, unable to generate sufficiently powerful and sufficiently well-timed electrical impulses to make wireless telegraphy of great and extended use. Can we not hope to strengthen the present feeble impulses in wireless telegraphy by some method of relaying or repeating? In the analogous subject of telephony many efforts have also been made to render the service secret, and to extend it to great distances by means of relays. These efforts have not been successful up to the present. We still have our neighbors' call bells, and we could listen to their messages if we were gossips. The telephone service has been extended to great distances--for instance, from Boston to Omaha--not by relays, but by strengthening the blows upon the medium between the transmitting circuit and the receiving one, just as we desire to do in what is called wireless telegraphy, the apparatus of which is almost identical in principle to that employed in telephony. The individual call in telephony is not a success for nearly the same reasons that exist in the case of wireless telegraphy. Perfectly definite and powerful rates of vibration can not be sent from point to point over wires to which only certain definite apparatus will respond. There are so many ways in which the energy of the electric current can be dissipated in passing over wires and through calling bells that the form of the waves and their strength becomes attenuated. The form of the electrical waves is better preserved in free space, where there are no wires or where there is no magnetic matter. The difficulty in obtaining individual calls in wireless telegraphy resides in the present impossibility of obtaining sufficiently rapid and powerful electrical impulses, and a receiver which will properly respond to a definite number of such impulses. The question of a relay seems as impossible of solution as it does in telephony. The character of speech depends upon numberless delicate inflections and harmonies. The form, for instance, of the wave transmitting the vowel _a_ must be preserved in order that the sound may be recognized. A relay in telephony acts very much like one's neighbor in the game called gossip, in which a sentence repeated more or less indistinctly, after passing from one person to another, becomes distorted and meaningless. No telephone relay has been invented which preserves the form of the first utterance, the vowel _a_ loses its delicate characteristics, and becomes simply a meaningless noise. It is maintained by some authorities that such a relay can not be invented, that it is impossible to preserve the delicate inflections of the human voice in passing from one circuit to another, even through an infinitesimal air gap or ether space. It is well, however, to reflect upon Hosea Bigelow's sapient advice "not to prophesy unless you know." It was maintained in the early days of the telephone that speech would lose so many characteristics in the process of transmission over wires and through magnetic apparatus that it would not be intelligible. It is certain that at present long-distance transmission of speech can only be accomplished by using more powerful transmitters, and by making the line of copper better fitted for the transmission--just as quick transportation from place to place has not been accomplished by quitting the earth and by flying through space, but by obtaining more powerful engines and by improving the roadbeds. The hopes of obtaining a relay for wireless telegraphy seem as small as they do in telephony. The present method is practically limited to distances of fifty or sixty miles--distances not much exceeding those which can be reached by a search-light in fair weather. Indeed, there is a close parallelism between the search-light and the spark used in Marconi's experiments: both send out waves which differ only in length. The waves of the search-light are about one forty-thousandth of an inch long, while the magnetic waves of the spark, invisible to the eye, are three to four feet--more than a million times longer than the light waves. These very long waves have this advantage over the short light waves: they are able to penetrate fog, and even sand hills and masonry. One can send messages into a building from a point outside. A prisoner could communicate with the outer world, a beleaguered garrison could send for help, a disabled light-ship could summon assistance, and possibly one steamer could inform another in a fog of its course. Wireless telegraphy is the nearest approach to telepathy that has been vouchsafed to our intelligence, and it serves to stimulate our imagination and to make us think that things greatly hoped for can be always reached, although not exactly in the way expected. The nerves of the whole world are, so to speak, being bound together, so that a touch in one country is transmitted instantly to a far-distant one. Why should we not in time speak through the earth to the antipodes? If the magnetic waves can pass through brick and stone walls and sand hills, why should we not direct, so to speak, our trumpet to the earth, instead of letting its utterances skim over the horizon? In regard to this suggestion, we know certainly one fact from our laboratory experiences: that these magnetic waves, meeting layers of electrically conducting matter, like layers of iron ore, would be reflected back, and would not penetrate. Thus a means may be discovered through the instrumentality of such waves of exploring the mysteries of the earth before success is attained in completely penetrating its mass. EMIGRANT DIAMONDS IN AMERICA. BY PROF. WILLIAM HERBERT HOBBS. To discover the origin of the diamond in Nature we must seek it in its ancestral home, where the rocky matrix gave it birth in the form characteristic of its species. In prosecuting our search we should very soon discover that, in common with other gem minerals, the diamond has been a great wanderer, for it is usually found far from its original home. The disintegrating forces of the atmosphere, by acting upon the rocky material in which the stones were imbedded, have loosed them from their natural setting, to be caught up by the streams, sorted from their disintegrated matrix, and transported far from the parent rock, to be at last set down upon some gravelly bed over which the force of the current is weakened. The mines of Brazil and the Urals, of India, Borneo, and the "river diggings" of South Africa either have been or are now in deposits of this character. The "dry diggings" of the Kimberley district, in South Africa, afford the unique locality in which the diamond has thus far been found in its original home, and all our knowledge of the genesis of the mineral has been derived from study of this locality. The mines are located in "pans," in which is found the "blue ground" now recognized as the disintegrated matrix of the diamond. These "pans" are known to be the "pipes," or "necks," of former volcanoes, now deeply dissected by the forces of the atmosphere--in fact, worn down if not to their roots, at least to their stumps. These remnants of the "pipes," through which the lava reached the surface, are surrounded in part by a black shale containing a large percentage of carbon, and this is believed to be the material out of which the diamonds have been formed. What appear to be modified fragments of the black shale inclosed within the "pipes" afford evidence that portions of the shale have been broken from the parent beds by the force of the ascending current of lava--a common enough accompaniment to volcanic action--and have been profoundly altered by the high temperature and the extreme hydrostatic pressure under which the mass must have been held. The most important feature of this alteration has been the recrystallization of the carbon of the shale into diamond. [Illustration: GLACIAL MAP OF THE GREAT LAKES REGION Driftless Areas. Older Drift. Newer Drift. Moraines. Glacial Striae. Track of Diamonds. Diamond Localities E. Eagle O. Oregon K. Kohlsville D. Dowagiac M. Milford. P. Plum Crk. B. Burlington. We are indebted to the University of Chicago Press for the above illustration.] [Illustration: Copyright, 1899, by George F. Kunz. FIVE VIEWS OF THE EAGLE DIAMOND (sixteen carats); enlarged about three diameters. (Owned by Tiffany and Company.) We are indebted to the courtesy of Mr. G. F. Kunz, of Tiffany and Company, for the illustrations of the Oregon and Eagle diamonds.] This apparent explanation of the genesis of the diamond finds strong support in the experiments of Moissan, who obtained artificial diamond by dissolving carbon in molten iron and immersing the mass in cold water until a firm surface crust had formed. The "chilled" mass was then removed, to allow its still molten core to solidify slowly. This it does with the development of enormous pressures, because the natural expansion of the iron on passing into the solid condition is resisted by the strong shell of "chilled" metal. The isolation of the diamond was then accomplished by dissolving the iron in acid. The prevailing form of the South African diamonds is that of a rounded crystal, with eight large and a number of minute faces--a form called by crystallographers a _modified octahedron_. Their shapes would be roughly simulated by the Pyramids of Egypt if they could be seen, combined with their reflected images, in a placid lake, or, better to meet the conditions of the country, in a desert mirage. It is a peculiar property of diamond crystals to have convexly rounded faces, so that the edges which separate the faces are not straight, but gently curving. Less frequently in the African mines, but commonly in some other regions, diamonds are bounded by four, twelve, twenty-four, or even forty-eight faces. These must not, of course, be confused with the faces of cut stones, which are the product of the lapidary's art. Geological conditions remarkably like those observed at the Kimberley mines have recently been discovered in Kentucky, with the difference that here the shales contain a much smaller percentage of carbon, which may be the reason that diamonds have not rewarded the diligent search that has been made for them. Though now found in the greatest abundance in South Africa and in Brazil, diamonds were formerly obtained from India, Borneo, and from the Ural Mountains of Russia. The great stones of history have, with hardly an exception, come from India, though in recent years a number of diamond monsters have been found in South Africa. One of these, the "Excelsior," weighed nine hundred and seventy carats, which is in excess even of the supposed weight of the "Great Mogul." [Illustration: Copyright, 1899, by George F. Kunz. FOUR VIEWS OF THE OREGON DIAMOND; enlarged about three diameters. (Owned by Tiffany and Company.)] Occasionally diamonds have come to light in other regions than those specified. The Piedmont plateau, at the southeastern base of the Appalachians, has produced, in the region between southern Virginia and Georgia, some ten or twelve diamonds, which have varied in weight from those of two or three carats to the "Dewey" diamond, which when found weighed over twenty-three carats. It is, however, in the territory about the Great Lakes that the greatest interest now centers, for in this region a very interesting problem of origin is being worked out. No less than seven diamonds, ranging in size from less than four to more than twenty-one carats, not to mention a number of smaller stones, have been recently found in the clays and gravels of this region, where their distribution was such as to indicate with a degree of approximation the location of their distant ancestral home. In order clearly to set forth the nature of this problem and the method of its solution it will be necessary, first, to plot upon a map of the lake region the locality at which each of the stones has been found, and, further, to enter upon the same map the data which geologists have gleaned regarding the work of the great ice cap of the Glacial period. During this period, not remote as geological time is reckoned, an ice mantle covered the entire northeastern portion of our continent, and on more than one occasion it invaded for considerable distances the territory of the United States. Such a map as has been described discloses an important fact which holds the clew for the detection of the ancestral home of these diamonds. Each year is bringing with it new evidence, and we may look forward hopefully to a full solution of the problem. In 1883 the "Eagle Stone" was brought to Milwaukee and sold for the nominal sum of one dollar. When it was submitted to competent examination the public learned that it was a diamond of sixteen carats' weight, and that it had been discovered seven years earlier in earth removed from a well-opening. Two events which were calculated to arouse local interest followed directly upon the discovery of the real nature of this gem, after which it passed out of the public notice. The woman who had parted with the gem for so inadequate a compensation brought suit against the jeweler to whom she had sold it, in order to recover its value. This curious litigation, which naturally aroused a great deal of interest, was finally carried to the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin, from which a decision was handed down in favor of the defendant, on the ground that he, no less than the plaintiff, had been ignorant of the value of the gem at the time of purchasing it. The other event was the "boom" of the town of Eagle as a diamond center, which, after the finding of two other diamonds with unmistakable marks of African origin upon them, ended as suddenly as it had begun, with the effect of temporarily discrediting, in the minds of geologists, the genuineness of the original "find." Ten years later a white diamond of a little less than four carats' weight came to light in a collection of pebbles found in Oregon, Wisconsin, and brought to the writer for examination. The stones had been found by a farmer's lad while playing in a clay bank near his home. The investigation of the subject which was thereupon made brought out the fact that a third diamond, and this the larges of all, had been discovered at Kohlsville, in the same State, in 1883, and was still in the possession of the family on whose property it had been found. As these stones were found in the deposits of "drift" which were left by the ice of the Glacial period, it was clear that they had been brought to their resting places by the ice itself. The map reveals the additional fact, and one of the greatest significance, that all these diamonds were found in the so-called "kettle moraine." This moraine or ridge was the dumping ground of the ice for its burden of bowlders, gravel, and clay at the time of its later invasion, and hence indicates the boundaries of the territory over which the ice mass was then extended. In view of the fact that two of the three stones found had remained in the hands of the farming population, without coming to the knowledge of the world, for periods of eleven and seven years respectively, it seems most probable that others have been found, though not identified as diamonds, and for this reason are doubtless still to be found in many cases in association with other local "curios" on the clock shelves of country farmhouses in the vicinity of the "kettle moraine." The writer felt warranted in predicting, in 1894, that other diamonds would occasionally be brought to light in the "kettle moraine," though the great extent of this moraine left little room for hope that more than one or two would be found at any one point of it. [Illustration: THREE VIEWS OF THE SAUKVILLE DIAMOND (six carats); enlarged about three diameters. (Owned by Bunde and Upmeyer, Milwaukee.) We are indebted to the courtesy of Bunde and Upmeyer, of Milwaukee, for the illustrations showing the Burlington and Saukville diamonds.] In the time that has since elapsed diamonds have been found at the rate of about one a year, though not, so far as I am aware, in any case as the result of search. In Wisconsin have been found the Saukville diamond, a beautiful white stone of six carats' weight, and also the Burlington stone, having a weight of a little over two carats. The former had been for more than sixteen years in the possession of the finder before he learned of its value. In Michigan has been found the Dowagiac stone, of about eleven carats' weight, and only very recently a diamond weighing six carats and of exceptionally fine "water" has come to light at Milford, near Cincinnati. This augmentation of the number of localities, and the nearness of all to the "kettle moraines," leaves little room for doubt that the diamonds were conveyed by the ice at the time of its later invasion of the country. Having, then, arrived at a satisfactory conclusion regarding not only the agent which conveyed the stones, but also respecting the period during which they were transported, it is pertinent to inquire by what paths they were brought to their adopted homes, and whether, if these may be definitely charted, it may not be possible to follow them in a direction the reverse of that taken by the diamonds themselves until we arrive at the point from which each diamond started upon its journey. If we succeed in this we shall learn whether they have a common home, or whether they were formed in regions more or less widely separated. From the great rarity of diamonds in Nature it would seem that the hypothesis of a common home is the more probable, and this view finds confirmation in the fact that certain marks of "consanguinity" have been observed upon the stones already found. [Illustration: FOUR VIEWS OF THE BURLINGTON DIAMOND (a little over two carats); enlarged about three diameters. (Owned by Bunde and Upmeyer, Milwaukee.)] Not only did the ice mantle register its advance in the great ridge of morainic material which we know as the "kettle moraine," but it has engraved upon the ledges of rock over which it has ridden, in a simple language of lines and grooves, the direction of its movement, after first having planed away the disintegrated portions of the rock to secure a smooth and lasting surface. As the same ledges have been overridden more than once, and at intervals widely separated, they are often found, palimpsestlike, with recent characters superimposed upon earlier, partly effaced, and nearly illegible ones. Many of the scattered leaves of this record have, however, been copied by geologists, and the autobiography of the ice is now read from maps which give the direction of its flow, and allow the motion of the ice as a whole, as well as that of each of its parts, to be satisfactorily studied. Recent studies by Canadian geologists have shown that one of the highest summits of the ice cap must have been located some distance west of Hudson Bay, and that another, the one which glaciated the lake region, was in Labrador, to the east of the same body of water. From these points the ice moved in spreading fans both northward toward the Arctic Ocean and southward toward the States, and always approached the margins at the moraines in a direction at right angles to their extent. Thus the rock material transported by the ice was spread out in a great fan, which constantly extended its boundaries as it advanced. The evidence from the Oregon, Eagle, and Kohlsville stones, which were located on the moraine of the Green Bay glacier, is that their home, in case they had a common one, is between the northeastern corner of the State of Wisconsin and the eastern summit of the ice mantle--a narrow strip of country of great extent, but yet a first approximation of the greatest value. If we assume, further, that the Saukville, Burlington, and Dowagiac stones, which were found on the moraine of the Lake Michigan glacier, have the same derivation, their common home may confidently be placed as far to the northeast as the wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, since the Green Bay and Lake Michigan glaciers coalesced in that region. The small stones found at Plum Creek, Wisconsin, and the Cincinnati stone, if the locations of their discovery be taken into consideration, still further circumscribe the diamond's home territory, since the lobes of the ice mass which transported them made a complete junction with the Green Bay and Lake Michigan lobes or glaciers considerably farther to the northward than the point of union of the latter glaciers themselves. [Illustration: THREE VIEWS OF A LEAD CAST OF THE MILFORD STONE (six carats); enlarged about three diameters. We are indebted to the courtesy of Prof. T. H. Norton, of the University of Cincinnati, for the above illustrations.] If, therefore, it is assumed that all the stones which have been found have a common origin, the conclusion is inevitable that the ancestral home must be in the wilderness of Canada between the points where the several tracks marking their migrations converge upon one another, and the former summit of the ice sheet. The broader the "fan" of their distribution, the nearer to the latter must the point be located. It is by no means improbable that when the barren territory about Hudson Bay is thoroughly explored a region for profitable diamond mining may be revealed, but in the meantime we may be sure that individual stones will occasionally be found in the new American homes into which they were imported long before the days of tariffs and ports of entry. Mother Nature, not content with lavishing upon our favored nation the boundless treasures locked up in her mountains, has robbed the territory of our Canadian cousins of the rich soils which she has unloaded upon our lake States, and of the diamonds with which she has sowed them. [Illustration: COMMON FORMS OF QUARTZ CRYSTALS.] [Illustration: COMMON FORMS OF DIAMONDS. The African stones most resemble the figure above at the left (octahedron). The Wisconsin stones most resemble the figure above at the right (dodecahedron).] The range of the present distribution of the diamonds, while perhaps not limited exclusively to the "kettle moraine," will, as the events have indicated, be in the main confined to it. This moraine, with its numerous subordinate ranges marking halting places in the final retreat of the ice, has now been located with sufficient accuracy by the geologists of the United States Geological Survey and others, approximately as entered upon the accompanying map. Within the territory of the United States the large number of observations of the rock scorings makes it clear that the ice of each lobe or glacier moved from the central portion toward the marginal moraines, which are here indicated by dotted bands. In the wilderness of Canada the observations have been rare, but the few data which have been gleaned are there represented by arrows pointed in the direction of ice movement. There is every encouragement for persons who reside in or near the marginal moraines to search in them for the scattered jewels, which may be easily identified and which have a large commercial as well as scientific value. The Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey is now interesting itself in the problem of the diamonds, and has undertaken the task of disseminating information bearing on the subject to the people who reside near the "kettle moraine." With the co-operation of a number of mineralogists who reside near this "diamond belt," it offers to make examination of the supposed gem stones which may be collected. The success of this undertaking will depend upon securing the co-operation of the people of the morainal belt. Wherever gravel ridges have there been opened in cuts it would be advisable to look for diamonds. Children in particular, because of their keen eyes and abundant leisure, should be encouraged to search for the clear stones. The serious defect in this plan is that it trusts to inexperienced persons to discover the buried diamonds which in the "rough" are probably unlike anything that they have ever seen. The first result of the search has been the collection of large numbers of quartz pebbles, which are everywhere present but which are entirely valueless. There are, however, some simple ways of distinguishing diamonds from quartz. Diamonds never appear in thoroughly rounded forms like ordinary pebbles, for they are too hard to be in the least degree worn by contact with their neighbors in the gravel bed. Diamonds always show, moreover, distinct forms of crystals, and these generally bear some resemblance to one of the forms figured. They are never in the least degree like crystals of quartz, which are, however, the ones most frequently confounded with them. Most of the Wisconsin diamonds have either twelve or forty-eight faces. Crystals of most minerals are bounded by plane surfaces--that is to say, their faces are flat--the diamond, however, is inclosed by distinctly curving surfaces. The one property of the diamond, however, which makes it easy of determination is its extraordinary hardness--greater than that of any other mineral. Put in simple language, the hardness of a substance may be described as its power to scratch other substances when drawn across them under pressure. To compare the hardness of two substances we should draw a sharp point of one across a surface of the other under a pressure of the fingers, and note whether a permanent scratch is left. The harder substances will always scratch the softer, and if both have the same hardness they may be made to mutually scratch each other. Since diamond, sapphire, and ruby are the only minerals which are harder than emery they are the only ones which, when drawn across a rough emery surface, will not receive a scratch. Any stone which will not take a scratch from emery is a gem stone and of sufficient interest to be referred to a competent mineralogist. The dissemination of information regarding the lake diamonds through the region of the moraine should serve the twofold purpose of encouraging search for the buried stones and of discovering diamonds in the little collections of "lucky stones" and local curios which accumulate on the clock shelves of country farmhouses. When it is considered that three of the largest diamonds thus far found in the region remained for periods of seven, eight, and sixteen years respectively in the hands of the farming population, it can hardly be doubted that many other diamonds have been found and preserved as local curiosities without their real nature being discovered. If diamonds should be discovered in the moraines of eastern Ohio, of western Pennsylvania, or of western New York, considerable light would thereby be thrown upon the problem of locating the ancestral home. More important than this, however, is the mapping of the Canadian wilderness to the southeastward and eastward of James Bay, in order to determine the direction of ice movement within the region, so that the _tracking_ of the stones already found may be carried nearer their home. The Director of the Geological Survey of Canada is giving attention to this matter, and has also suggested that a study be made of the material found in association with the diamonds in the moraine, so that if possible its source may be discovered. With the discovery of new localities of these emigrant stones and the collection of data regarding the movement of the ice over Canadian territory, it will perhaps be possible the more accurately and definitely to circumscribe their home country, and as its boundaries are drawn closer and closer to pay this popular jewel a visit in its ancestral home, there to learn what we so much desire to know regarding its genesis and its life history. * * * * * William Pengelly related, in one of his letters to his wife from the British Association, Oxford meeting, 1860, of Sedgwick's presidency of the Geological Section, that his opening address was "most characteristic, full of clever fun, most imperative that papers should be as brief as possible--about ten minutes, he thought--he himself amplifying marvelously." The next day Pengelly himself was about to read his paper, when "dear old Sedgwick wished it compressed. I replied that I would do what I could to please him, but did not know which to follow, his precept or example. The roar of laughter was deafening. Old Sedgwick took it capitally, and behaved much better in consequence." On the third day Pengelly went to committee, where, he says, "I found Sedgwick very cordial, took my address, and talks of paying me a visit." NEEDED IMPROVEMENTS IN THEATER SANITATION. BY WILLIAM PAUL GERHARD, C. E., CONSULTING ENGINEER FOR SANITARY WORKS. Buildings for the representation of theatrical plays must fulfill three conditions: they must be (1) comfortable, (2) safe, and (3) healthful. The last requirement, of _healthfulness_, embraces the following conditions: plenty of pure air, freedom from draughts, moderate warming in winter, suitable cooling in summer, freedom at all times from dust, bad odors, and disease germs. In addition to the requirements for the theater audience, due regard should be paid to the comfort, healthfulness, and safety of the performers, stage hands, and mechanics, who are required to spend more hours in the stage part of the building than the playgoers. It is no exaggeration to state that in the majority of theater buildings disgracefully unsanitary conditions prevail. In the older existing buildings especially sanitation and ventilation are sadly neglected. The air of many theaters during a performance becomes overheated and stuffy, pre-eminently so in the case of theaters where illumination is effected by means of gaslights. At the end of a long performance the air is often almost unbearably foul, causing headache, nausea, and dizziness. In ill-ventilated theaters a chilly air often blows into the auditorium from the stage when the curtain is raised. This air movement is the cause of colds to many persons in the audience, and it is otherwise objectionable, for it carries with it noxious odors from the stage or under stage, and in gas-lighted theaters this air is laden with products of combustion from the footlights and other means of stage illumination. Attempts at ventilation are made by utilizing the heat due to the numerous flames of the central chandelier over the auditorium, to create an ascending draught, and thereby cause a removal of the contaminated air, but seldom is provision made for the introduction of fresh air from outdoors, hence the scheme of ventilation results in failure. In other buildings, openings for the introduction of pure air are provided under the seats or in the floor, but are often found stuffed up with paper because the audience suffered from draughts. The fear of draughts in a theater also leads to the closing of the few possibly available outside windows and doors. The plan of a theater building renders it almost impossible to provide outside windows, therefore "air flushing" during the day can not be practiced. In the case of the older theaters, which are located in the midst or rear of other buildings, the nature of the site precludes a good arrangement of the main fresh-air ducts for the auditorium. Absence of fresh air is not the only sanitary defect of theater buildings; there are many other defects and sources of air pollution. In the parts devoted to the audience, the carpeted floors become saturated with dirt and dust carried in by the playgoers, and with expectorations from careless or untidy persons which in a mixed theater audience are ever present. The dust likewise adheres to furniture, plush seats, hangings, and decorations, and intermingled with it are numerous minute floating organisms, and doubtless some germs of disease. Behind the curtain a general lack of cleanliness exists--untidy actors' toilet rooms, ill-drained cellars, defective sewerage, leaky drains, foul water closets, and overcrowded and poorly located dressing rooms into which no fresh air ever enters. The stage floor is covered with dust; this is stirred up by the frequent scene shifting or by the dancing of performers, and much of it is absorbed and retained by the canvas scenery. Under such conditions the state of health of both theater goers and performers is bound to suffer. Many persons can testify from personal experience to the ill effects incurred by spending a few hours in a crowded and unventilated theater; yet the very fact that the stay in such buildings is a brief one seems to render most people indifferent, and complaints are seldom uttered. It really rests with the theater-going public to enforce the much-needed improvements. As long as they will flock to a theater on account of some attractive play or "star actor," disregarding entirely the unsanitary condition of the building, so long will the present notoriously bad conditions remain. When the public does not call for reforms, theater managers and owners of playhouses will not, as a rule, trouble themselves about the matter. We have a right to demand theater buildings with less outward and inside gorgeousness, but in which the paramount subjects of comfort, safety, and health are diligently studied and generously provided for. Let the general public but once show a determined preference for sanitary conditions and surroundings in theaters and abandon visits to ill-kept theaters, and I venture to predict that the necessary reforms in sanitation will soon be introduced, at least in the better class of playhouses. In the cheaper theaters, concert and amusement halls, houses with "continuous" shows, variety theaters, etc., sanitation is even more urgently required, and may be readily enforced by a few visits and peremptory orders from the Health Board. When, a year ago, the writer, in a paper on Theater Sanitation presented at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, stated that "chemical analyses show the air in the dress circle and gallery of many a theater to be in the evening more foul than the air of street sewers," the statement was received by some of his critics with incredulity. Yet the fact is true of many theaters. Taking the amount of carbonic acid in the air as an indication of its contamination, and assuming that the organic vapors are in proportion to the amount of carbonic acid (not including the CO_{2} due to the products of illumination), we know that normal outdoor air contains from 0.03 to 0.04 parts of CO_{2} per 100 parts of air, while a few chemical analyses of the air in English theaters, quoted below, suffice to prove how large the contamination sometimes is: Strand Theater, 10 P. M., gallery 0.101 parts CO_{2} per 100. Surrey Theater, 10 P. M., boxes 0.111 " " " Surrey Theater, 12 P. M., boxes 0.218 " " " Olympia Theater, 11.30 P. M., boxes 0.082 " " " Olympia Theater, 11.55 P. M.., boxes 0.101 " " " Victoria Theater, 10 P. M., boxes 0.126 " " " Haymarket Theater, 11.30 P. M., dress circle 0.076 " " " City of London Theater, 11.15 P. M., pit 0.252 " " " Standard Theater, 11 P. M., pit 0.320 " " " Theater Royal, Manchester, pit 0.2734 " " " Grand Theater, Leeds, pit 0.150 " " " Grand Theater, Leeds, upper circle 0.143 " " " Grand Theater, balcony 0.142 " " " Prince's Theater, Manchester 0.11-0.17 " " (Analyses made by Drs. Smith, Bernays, and De Chaumont.) Compare with these figures some analyses of the air of sewers. Dr. Russell, of Glasgow, found the air of a well-ventilated and flushed sewer to contain 0.051 vols. of CO_{2}. The late Prof. W. Ripley Nichols conducted many careful experiments on the amount of carbonic acid in the Boston sewers, and found the following averages, viz., 0.087, 0.082, 0.115, 0.107, 0.08, or much less than the above analyses of theater air showed. He states: "It appears from these examinations that the air even in a tide-locked sewer does not differ from the standard as much as many no doubt suppose." A comparison of the number of bacteria found in a cubic foot of air inside of a theater and in the street air would form a more convincing statement, but I have been unable to find published records of any such bacteriological tests. Nevertheless, we know that while the atmosphere contains some bacteria, the indoor air of crowded assembly halls, laden with floating dust, is particularly rich in living micro-organisms. This has been proved by Tyndall, Miquel, Frankland, and other scientists; and in this connection should be mentioned one point of much importance, ascertained quite recently, namely, that the air of sewers, contrary to expectation, is remarkably free from germs. An analysis of the air in the sewers under the Houses of Parliament, London, showed that the number of micro-organisms was much less than that in the atmosphere outside of the building. In recent years marked improvements in theater planning and equipment have been effected, and corresponding steps in advance have been made in matters relating to theater hygiene. It should therefore be understood that my remarks are intended to apply to the average theater, and in particular to the older buildings of this class. There are in large cities a few well-ventilated and hygienically improved theaters and opera houses, in which the requirements of sanitation are observed. Later on, when speaking more in detail of theater ventilation, instances of well-ventilated theaters will be mentioned. Nevertheless, the need of urgent and radical measures for comfort and health in the majority of theaters is obvious. Much is being done in our enlightened age to improve the sanitary condition of school buildings, jails and prisons, hospitals and dwelling houses. Why, I ask, should not our theaters receive some consideration? The efficient ventilation of a theater building is conceded to be an unusually difficult problem. In order to ventilate a theater properly, the causes of noxious odors arising from bad plumbing or defective drainage should be removed; outside fumes or vapors must not be permitted to enter the building either through doors or windows, or through the fresh-air duct of the heating apparatus. The substitution of electric lights in place of gas is a great help toward securing pure air. This being accomplished, a standard of purity of the air should be maintained by proper ventilation. This includes both the removal of the vitiated air and the introduction of pure air from outdoors and the consequent entire change of the air of a hall three or four times per hour. The fresh air brought into the building must be ample in volume; it should be free from contamination, dust and germs (particularly pathogenic microbes), and with this in view must in cities be first purified by filtering, spraying, or washing. It should be warmed in cold weather by passing over hot-water or steam-pipe stacks, and cooled in warm weather by means of ice or the brine of mechanical refrigerating machines. The air should be of a proper degree of humidity, and, what is most important of all, it should be admitted into the various parts of the theater imperceptibly, so as not to cause the sensation of draught; in other words, its velocity at the inlets must be very slight. The fresh air should enter the audience hall at numerous points so well and evenly distributed that the air will be equally diffused throughout the entire horizontal cross-section of the hall. The air indoors should have as nearly as possible the composition of air outdoors, an increase of the CO_{2} from 0.3 to 0.6 being the permissible limit. The vitiated air should be continuously removed by mechanical means, taking care, however, not to remove a larger volume of air than is introduced from outdoors. Regarding the amount of fresh outdoor air to be supplied to keep the inside atmosphere at anything like standard purity, authorities differ somewhat. The theoretical amount, 3,000 cubic feet per person per hour (50 cubic feet per minute), is made a requirement in the Boston theater law. In Austria, the law calls for 1,050 cubic feet. The regulations of the Prussian Minister of Public Works call for 700 cubic feet, Professor von Pettenkofer suggests an air supply per person of from 1,410 to 1,675 cubic feet per hour (23 to 28 cubic feet per minute), General Morin calls for 1,200 to 1,500 cubic feet, and Dr. Billings, an American authority, requires 30 cubic feet per minute, or 1,800 cubic feet per hour. In the Vienna Opera House, which is described as one of the best-ventilated theaters in the world, the air supply is 15 cubic feet per person per minute. The Madison Square Theater, in New York, is stated to have an air supply of 25 cubic feet per person. In a moderately large theater, seating twelve hundred persons, the total hourly quantity of air to be supplied would, accordingly, amount to from 1,440,000 to 2,160,000 cubic feet. It is not an easy matter to arrange the fresh-air conduits of a size sufficient to furnish this volume of air; it is obviously costly to warm such a large quantity of air, and it is a still more difficult problem to introduce it without creating objectionable currents of air; and, finally, inasmuch as this air can not enter the auditorium unless a like amount of vitiated air is removed, the problem includes providing artificial means for the removal of large air volumes. Where gas illumination is used, each gas flame requires an additional air supply--from 140 to 280 cubic feet, according to General Morin. A slight consideration of the volumes of air which must be moved and removed in a theater to secure a complete change of air three or four times an hour, demonstrates the impossibility of securing satisfactory results by the so-called natural method of ventilation--i. e., the removal of air by means of flues with currents due either to the aspirating force of the wind or due to artificially increased temperature in the flues. It becomes necessary to adopt mechanical means of ventilation by using either exhaust fans or pressure blowers or both, these being driven either by steam engines or by electric motors. In the older theaters, which were lighted by gas, the heat of the flames could be utilized to a certain extent in creating ascending currents in outlet shafts, and this accomplished some air renewal. But nowadays the central chandelier is almost entirely dispensed with; glowing carbon lamps, fed by electric currents, replace the gas flames; hence mechanical ventilation seems all the more indicated. Two principal methods of theater ventilation may be arranged: in one the fresh air enters at or near the floor and rises upward to the ceiling, to be removed by suitable outlet flues; in this method the incoming air follows the naturally existing air currents; in the other method pure air enters at the top through perforated cornices or holes in the ceiling, and gradually descends, to be removed by outlets located at or near the floor line. The two systems are known as the "upward" and the "downward" systems; each of them has been successfully tried, each offers some advantages, and each has its advocates. In both systems separate means for supplying fresh air to the boxes, balconies, and galleries are required. Owing to the different opinions held by architects and engineers, the two systems have often been made the subject of inquiry by scientific and government commissions in France, England, Germany, and the United States. A French scientist, Darcet, was the first to suggest a scientific system of theater ventilation. He made use of the heat from the central chandelier for removing the foul air, and admitted the air through numerous openings in the floor and through inlets in the front of the boxes. Dr. Reid, an English specialist in ventilation, is generally regarded as the originator of the upward method in ventilation. He applied the same with some success to the ventilation of the Houses of Parliament in London. Here fresh air is drawn in from high towers, and is conducted to the basement, where it is sprayed and moistened. A part of the air is warmed by hot-water coils in a sub-basement, while part remains cold. The warm and the cold air are mixed in special mixing chambers. From here the tempered air goes to a chamber located directly under the floor of the auditorium, and passes into the hall at the floor level through numerous small holes in the floor. The air enters with low velocity, and to prevent unpleasant draughts the floor is covered in one hall with hair carpet and in the other with coarse hemp matting, both of which are cleaned every day. The removal of the foul air takes place at the ceiling, and is assisted by the heat from the gas flames. The French engineer Péclet, an authority on heating and ventilation, suggested a similar system of upward ventilation, but instead of allowing the foul air to pass out through the roof, he conducted it downward into an underground channel which had exhaust draught. Trélat, another French engineer, followed practically the same method. A large number of theaters are ventilated on the upward system. I will mention first the large Vienna Opera House, the ventilation of which was planned by Dr. Boehm. The auditorium holds about three thousand persons, and a fresh-air supply of about fifteen cubic feet per minute, or from nine hundred to one thousand cubic feet per hour, per person is provided. The fresh air is taken in from the gardens surrounding the theater and is conducted into the cellar, where it passes through a water spray, which removes the dust and cools the air in summer. A suction fan ten feet in diameter is provided, which blows the air through a conduit forty-five square feet in area into a series of three chambers located vertically over each other under the auditorium. The lowest of these chambers is the cold-air chamber; the middle one is the heating chamber and contains steam-heating stacks; the highest chamber is the mixing chamber. The air goes partly to the heating and partly to the mixing chamber; from this it enters the auditorium at the rate of one foot per second velocity through openings in the risers of the seats in the parquet, and also through vertical wall channels to the boxes and upper galleries. The total area of the fresh-air openings is 750 square feet. The foul air ascends, assisted by the heat of the central chandelier, and is collected into a large exhaust tube. The foul air from the gallery passes out through separate channels. In the roof over the auditorium there is a fan which expels the entire foul air. Telegraphic thermometers are placed in all parts of the house and communicate with the inspection room, where the engineer in charge of the ventilation controls and regulates the temperature. The Vienna Hofburg Theater was ventilated on the same system. The new Frankfort Opera House has a ventilation system modeled upon that of the Vienna Opera House, but with improvements in some details. The house has a capacity of two thousand people, and for each person fourteen hundred cubic feet of fresh air per hour are supplied. A fan about ten feet in diameter and making ninety to one hundred revolutions per minute brings in the fresh air from outdoors and drives it into chambers under the auditorium arranged very much like those at Vienna. The total quantity of fresh air supplied per hour is 2,800,000 cubic feet. The air enters the auditorium through gratings fixed above the floor level in the risers. The foul air is removed by outlets in the ceilings, which unite into a large vertical shaft below the cupola. An exhaust fan of ten feet diameter is placed in the cupola shaft, and is used for summer ventilation only. Every single box and stall is ventilated separately. The cost of the entire system was about one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars; it requires a staff of two engineers, six assistant engineers, and a number of stokers. Among well-ventilated American theaters is the Madison Square Theater (now Hoyt's), in New York. Here the fresh air is taken down through a large vertical shaft on the side of the stage. There is a seven-foot suction fan in the basement which drives the air into a number of boxes with steam-heating stacks, from which smaller pipes lead to openings under each row of seats. The foul air escapes through openings in the ceiling and under the galleries. A fresh-air supply of 1,500 cubic feet per hour, or 25 cubic feet per minute, per person is provided. The Metropolitan Opera House is ventilated on the plenum system, and has an upward movement of air, the total air supply being 70,000 cubic feet per hour. In the Academy of Music, Baltimore, the fresh air is admitted mainly from the stage and the exits of foul air are in the ceiling at the auditorium. Other theaters ventilated by the upward method are the Dresden Royal Theater, the Lessing Theater in Berlin, the Opera House in Buda-Pesth, the new theater in Prague, the new Municipal Theater at Halle, and the Criterion Theatre in London. The French engineer General Arthur Morin is known as the principal advocate of the downward method of ventilation. This was at that time a radical departure from existing methods because it apparently conflicted with the well-known fact that heated air naturally rises. Much the same system was advocated by Dr. Tripier in a pamphlet published in 1864.[7] The earlier practical applications of this system to several French theaters did not prove as much of a success as anticipated, the failure being due probably to the gas illumination, the central chandelier, and the absence of mechanical means for inducing a downward movement of the air. [7] Dr. A. Tripier. Assainissement des Théâtres, Ventilation, Éclairage et Chauffage. In 1861 a French commission, of which General Morin was a member, proposed the reversing of the currents of air by admitting fresh air at both sides of the stage opening high up in the auditorium, and also through hollow floor channels for the balconies and boxes; in the gallery the openings for fresh air were located in the risers of the steppings. The air was exhausted by numerous openings under the seats in the parquet. This ventilating system was carried out at the Théâtre Lyrique, the Théâtre du Cirque, and the Théâtre de la Gaieté. Dr. Tripier ventilated a theater in 1858 with good success on a similar plan, but he introduced the air partly at the rear of the stage and partly in the tympanum in the auditorium. He removed the foul air at the floor level and separately in the rear of the boxes. He also exhausted the foul air from the upper galleries by special flues heated by the gas chandelier. The Grand Amphitheater of the Conservatory of Arts and Industries, in Paris, was ventilated by General Morin on the downward system. The openings in the ceiling for the admission of fresh air aggregated 120 square feet, and the air entered with a velocity of only eighteen inches per second; the total air supply per hour was 630,000 cubic feet. The foul air was exhausted by openings in steps around the vertical walls, and the velocity of the outgoing air was about two and a half feet per second. The introduction of the electric light in place of gas gave a fresh impetus to the downward method of ventilation, and mechanical means also helped to dispel the former difficulties in securing a positive downward movement. The Chicago Auditorium is ventilated on this system, a part of the air entering from the rear of the stage, the other from the ceiling of the auditorium downward. This plan coincides with the proposition made in 1846 by Morrill Wyman, though he admits that it can not be considered the most desirable method. A good example of the downward method is given by the New York Music Hall, which has a seating capacity of three thousand persons and standing room for one thousand more. Fresh air at any temperature desired is made to enter through perforations in or near the ceilings, the outlets being concealed by the decorations, and passes out through exhaust registers near the floor line, under the seats, through perforated risers in the terraced steps. About 10,000,000 cubic feet of air are supplied per hour, and the velocity of influx and efflux is one foot per second. The air supplied per person per hour is figured at 2,700 cubic feet, and the entire volume is changed from four and a half to five times per hour. The fresh air is taken in at roof level through a shaft of seventy square feet area. The air is heated by steam coils, and cooled in summer by ice. The mechanical plant comprises four blowers and three exhaust fans of six and seven feet in diameter. The downward method of ventilation was suggested in 1884 for the improvement of the ventilation of the Senate chamber and the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol at Washington, but the system was not adopted by the Board of Engineers appointed to inquire into the methods. The downward method is also used in the Hall of the Trocadéro, Paris; in the old and also the new buildings for the German Parliament, Berlin; in the Chamber of Deputies, Paris; and others. Professor Fischer, a modern German authority on heating and ventilation, in a discussion of the relative advantages of the two methods, reaches the conclusion that both are practical and can be made to work successfully. For audience halls lighted by gaslights he considers the upward method as preferable. In arranging for the removal of foul air it is necessary, particularly in the downward system, to provide separate exhaust flues for the galleries and balconies. Unless this is provided for, the exhaled air of the occupants of the higher tiers would mingle with the descending current of pure air supplied to the occupants of the main auditorium floor. Mention should also be made of a proposition originating in Berlin to construct the roof of auditoriums domelike, by dividing it in the middle so that it can be partly opened by means of electric or hydraulic machinery; such a system would permit of keeping the ceiling open in summer time, thereby rendering the theater not only airy, but also free from the danger of smoke. A system based on similar principles is in actual use at the Madison Square Garden, in New York, where part of the roof consists of sliding skylights which in summer time can be made to open or close during the performance. From the point of view of safety in case of fire, which usually in a theater breaks out on the stage, it is without doubt best to have the air currents travel in a direction from the auditorium toward the stage roof. This has been successfully arranged in some of the later Vienna theaters, but from the point of view of good acoustics, it is better to have the air currents travel from the stage toward the auditorium. Obviously, it is a somewhat difficult matter to reconcile the conflicting requirements of safety from smoke and fire gases, good acoustics and perfect ventilation. The stage of a theater requires to be well ventilated, for often it becomes filled with smoke or gases due to firing of guns, colored lights, torches, representations of battles, etc. There should be in the roof over the stage large outlet flues, or sliding skylights, controlled from the stage for the removal of the smoke. These, in case of an outbreak of fire on the stage, become of vital importance in preventing the smoke and fire gases from being drawn into the auditorium and suffocating the persons in the gallery seats. Where the stage is lit with gaslights it is important to provide a separate downward ventilation for the footlights. This, I believe, was first successfully tried at the large Scala Theater, of Milan, Italy. The actors' and supers' dressing rooms, which are often overcrowded, require efficient ventilation, and other parts of the building, like the foyers and the toilet, retiring and smoking rooms, must not be overlooked. The entrance halls, vestibules, lobbies, staircases, and corridors do not need so much ventilation, but should be kept warm to prevent annoying draughts. They are usually heated by abundantly large direct steam or hot-water radiators, whereas the auditorium and foyers, and often the stage, are heated by indirect radiation. Owing to the fact that during a performance the temperature in the auditorium is quickly raised by contact of the warm fresh air with the bodies of persons (and by the numerous lights, when gas is used), the temperature of the incoming air should be only moderate. In the best modern theater-heating plants it is usual to gradually reduce the temperature of the air as it issues from the mixing chambers toward the end of the performance. Both the temperature and the hygrometric conditions of the air should be controlled by an efficient staff of intelligent heating engineers. But little need be said regarding theater lighting. Twice during the present century have the system and methods been changed. In the early part of the present century theaters were still lighted with tallow candles or with oil lamps. Next came what was at the time considered a wonderful improvement, namely, the introduction of gaslighting. The generation who can remember witnessing a theater performance by candle or lamp lights, and who experienced the excitement created when the first theater was lit up by gas, will soon have passed away. Scarcely twenty years ago the electric light was introduced, and there are to-day very few theaters which do not make use of this improved illuminant. It generates much less heat than gaslight, and vastly simplifies the problem of ventilation. The noxious products of combustion, incident to all other methods of illumination, are eliminated: no carbonic-acid gas is generated to render the air of audience halls irrespirable, and no oxygen is drawn to support combustion from the air introduced for breathing. It being now an established fact that the electric light increases the safety of human life in theaters and other places of amusement, its use is in many city or building ordinances made imperative--at least on the stage and in the main body of the auditorium. Stairs, corridors, entrances, etc., may, as a matter of precaution, be lighted by a different system, by means of either gas or auxiliary vegetable oil or candle lamps, protected by glass inclosures against smoke or draught, and provided with special inlet and outlet flues for air. Passing to other desirable internal improvements of theaters, I would mention first the floors of the auditorium. The covering of the floor by carpets is objectionable--in theaters more so even than in dwelling houses. Night after night the carpet comes in contact with thousands of feet, which necessarily bring in a good deal of street dirt and dust. The latter falls on the carpets and attaches to them, and as it is not feasible to take the carpets up except during the summer closing, a vast accumulation of dirt and organic matter results, some of the dirt falling through the crevices between the floor boards. Many theater-goers are not tidy in their habits regarding expectoration, and as there must be in every large audience some persons afflicted with tuberculosis, the danger is ever present of the germs of the disease drying on the carpet, and becoming again detached to float in the air which we are obliged to breathe in a theater. As a remedy I would propose abolishing carpets entirely, and using instead a floor covering of linoleum, or thin polished parquetry oak floors, varnished floors of hard wood, painted and stained floors, interlocked rubber-tile floors, or, at least for the aisles, encaustic or mosaic tiling. Between the rows of seats, as well as in the aisles, long rugs or mattings may be laid down loose, for these can be taken up without much trouble. They should be frequently shaken, beaten, and cleaned. Regarding the walls, ceilings, and cornices, the surfaces should be of a material which can be readily cleaned and which is non-absorbent. Stucco finish is unobjectionable, but should be kept flat, so as not to offer dust-catching projections. Oil painting of walls is preferable to a covering with rough wall papers, which hold large quantities of dust. The so-called "sanitary" or varnished wall papers have a smooth, non-absorbent, easily cleaned surface, and are therefore unobjectionable. All heavy decorations, draperies, and hangings in the boxes, and plush covers for railings, are to be avoided. The theater furniture should be of a material which does not catch or hold dust. Upholstered plush-covered chairs and seats retain a large amount of it, and are not readily cleaned. Leather-covered or other sanitary furniture, or rattan seats, would be a great improvement. In the stage building we often find four or five actors placed in one small, overheated, unventilated dressing room, located in the basement of the building, without outside windows, and fitted with three or four gas jets, for actors require a good light in "making up." More attention should be paid to the comfort and health of the players, more space and a better location should be given to their rooms. Every dressing room should have a window to the outer air, also a special ventilating flue. Properly trapped wash basins should be fitted up in each room. In the dressing rooms and in the corridors and stairs leading from them to the stage all draughts must be avoided, as the performers often become overheated from the excitement of the acting, and dancers in particular leave the heated stage bathed in perspiration. Sanitation, ventilation, and cleanliness are quite as necessary for this part of the stage building as for the auditorium and foyers. It will suffice to mention that defects in the drainage and sewerage of a theater building must be avoided. The well-known requirements of house drainage should be observed in theaters as much as in other public buildings.[8] [8] The reader will find the subject discussed and illustrated in the author's work, Sanitary Engineering of Buildings, vol. i, 1899. The removal of ashes, litter, sweepings, oily waste, and other refuse should be attended to with promptness and regularity. It is only by constant attention to properly carried out cleaning methods that such a building for the public can be kept in a proper sanitary condition. Floating air impurities, like dust and dirt, can not be removed or rendered innocuous by the most perfect ventilating scheme. Mingled with the dust floating in the auditorium or lodging in the stage scenery are numbers of bacteria or germs. Among the pathogenic germs will be those of tuberculosis, contained in the sputum discharged in coughing or expectorating. When this dries on the carpeted floor, the germs become readily detached, are inhaled by the playgoers, and thus become a prolific source of danger. It is for this reason principally that the processes of cleaning, sweeping, and dusting should in a theater be under intelligent management. To guard against the ever-present danger of infection by germs, the sanitary floor coverings recommended should be wiped every day with a moist rag or cloth. Carpeted floors should be covered with moist tea leaves or sawdust before sweeping to prevent the usual dust-raising. The common use of the feather duster is to be deprecated, for it only raises and scatters the dust, but it does not remove it. Dusting of the furniture should be done with a dampened dust cloth. The cleaning should include the hot-air registers, where a large amount of dust collects, which can only be removed by occasionally opening up the register faces and wiping out the pipe surfaces; also the baseboards and all cornice projections on which dust constantly settles. While dusting and sweeping, the windows should be opened; an occasional admission of sunlight, where practicable, would likewise be of the greatest benefit. The writer believes that a sanitary inspection of theater buildings should be instituted once a year when they are closed up in summer. He would also suggest that the granting of the annual license should be made dependent not only, as at present, upon the condition of safety of the building against fire and panic, but also upon its sanitary condition. In connection with the sanitary inspection, a thorough disinfection by sulphur, or better with formaldehyde gas, should be carried out by the health authorities. If necessary, the disinfection of the building should be repeated several times a year, particularly during general epidemics of influenza or pneumonia. Safety measures against outbreaks of fire, dangers from panic, accidents, etc., are in a certain sense also sanitary improvements, but can not be discussed here.[9] [9] See the author's work, Theater Fires and Panics, 1895. In order to anticipate captious criticisms, the writer would state that in this paper he has not attempted to set forth new theories, nor to advocate any special system of theater ventilation. His aim was to describe existing defects and to point out well-known remedies. The question of efficient theater sanitation belongs quite as much to the province of the sanitary engineer as to that of the architect. It is one of paramount importance--certainly more so than the purely architectural features of exterior and interior decoration. * * * * * In presenting to the British Association the final report on the northwestern tribes of Canada, Professor Tylor observed that, while the work of the committee has materially advanced our knowledge of the tribes of British Columbia, the field of investigation is by no means exhausted. The languages are still known only in outlines. More detailed information on physical types may clear up several points that have remained obscure, and a fuller knowledge of the ethnology of the northern tribes seems desirable. Ethnological evidence has been collected bearing upon the history of the development of the area under consideration, but no archæological investigations, which would help materially in solving these problems, have been carried on. THE NEW FIELD BOTANY. BY BYRON D. HALSTED, Sc. D., OF RUTGERS COLLEGE. There is something novel every day; were it not so this earth would grow monotonous to all, even as it does now to many, and chiefly because such do not have the opportunity or the desire to learn some new thing. Facts unknown before are constantly coming to the light, and principles are being deduced that serve as a stepping stone to other and broader fields of knowledge. So accustomed are we to this that even a new branch of science may dawn upon the horizon without causing a wonder in our minds. In this day of ologies the birth of a new one comes without the formal two-line notice in the daily press, just as old ones pass from view without tear or epitaph. _Phytoecology_ as a word is not long as scientific terms go, and the Greek that lies back of it barely suggests the meaning of the term, a fact not at all peculiar to the present instance. Of course, it has to do with plants, and is therefore a branch of botany. In one sense that which it stands for is not new, and, as usual, the word has come in the wake of the facts and principles it represents, and therefore becomes a convenient term for a branch of knowledge--a handle, so to say--by which that group of ideas may be held up for study and further growth. The word _ecology_ was first employed by Haeckel, a leading light in zoölogy in our day, to designate the environmental side of animal life. We will not concern ourselves with definitions, but discuss the field that the term is coined to cover, and leave the reader to formulate a short concise statement of its meaning. Within the last year a new botanical guide book for teachers has been published, of considerable originality and merit, in which the subject-matter is thrown into four groups, and one of these is Ecology. Another text-book for secondary schools is now before us in which ecology is the heading of one of the three parts into which the treatise is divided. The large output of the educational press at the present time along the line in hand suggests that the magazine press should sound the depths of the new branch of science that is pushing its way to the front, or being so pushed by its adherents, and echo the merits of it along the line. Botany in its stages of growth is interesting historically. It fascinated for a time one of the greatest minds in the modern school, and as a result we have the rich and fruitful history of the science as seen through eyes as great as Julius Sachs's, the master of botany during the last half century. From this work it can be gathered that early in the centuries since the Christian era botany was little more than herborizing--the collecting of specimens, and learning their gross parts, as size of stem and leaf and blossom. This branch of botany has been cultivated to the present day, and the result is the systematist, with all the refinements of species making and readjustment of genera and orders with the nicety of detail in specific descriptions that only a systematist can fully appreciate. Later on the study of function was begun, and along with it that of structure; for anatomy and physiology, by whatever terms they may be known, advance hand in hand, because inseparable. One worker may look more to the activities than another who toils with the structural relations and finds these problems enough for a lifetime. This botany of the dissecting table in contrast with that of the collector and his dried specimens grew apace, taking new leases of life at the uprising of new hypotheses, and long advances with the improvement of implements for work. It was natural that the cell and all that is made from it should invite the inspector to a field of intense interest, somewhat at the expense of the functions of the parts. In short, the field was open, the race was on, and it was a matter of self-restraint that a man did not enter and strive long and well for some anatomical prize. This branch of botany is still alive, and never more so than to-day, when cytology offers many attractive problems for the cytologist. What with his microtome that cuts his imbedded tissue into slices so thin that twenty-five hundred or more are needed to measure an inch in thickness, with his fixing solutions that kill instantly and hold each particle as if frozen in a cake of ice, and his stains and double stains that pick out the specks as the magnet draws iron filing from a bin of bran--with all these and a hundred more aids to the refinement of the art there is no wonder that the cell becomes a center of attraction, beyond the periphery of which the student can scarcely live. In our closing days of the century it may be known whether the blephroblasts arise antipodally, and whether they are a variation of the centrosomes or should be classed by themselves! One of the general views of phytoecology is that the forms of plants are modified to adapt them to the conditions under which they exist. Thus the size of a plant is greatly modified by the environment. Two grains of corn indistinguishable in themselves and borne by the same cob may be so situated that one grows into a stately stalk with the ear higher than a horse's head, while the other is a dwarf and unproductive. Below ground the conditions are many, and all subject to infinite variation. Thus, the soil may be deep or shallow, the particles small or large, the moisture abundant or scant, and the food elements close at hand or far to seek--all of which will have a marked influence upon the root system, its size, and form. Coming to the aërial portion, there are all the factors of weather and climate to work singly or in union to affect the above-ground structure of the plant. Temperature varies through wide ranges of heat and cold, scorching and freezing; while humidity or aridity, sunshine or cloudiness, prevailing winds or sudden tornadoes all have an influence in shaping the structure, developing the part, and fashioning the details of form of the aërial portions. Phytoecology deals with all these, and includes the consideration of that struggle for life that plants are constantly waging, for environment determines that the forms best suited to a given set of conditions will survive. This struggle has been going on since the vegetable life of the earth began, and as a result certain prevailing conditions have brought about groups of plants found as a rule only where these conditions prevail. As water is a leading factor in plant growth, a classification is made upon this basis into the plants of the arid regions called xerophytes. The opposite to desert vegetation is that of the fresh ponds and lakes, called hydrophytes. A third group, the halophytes, includes the vegetation of sea or land where there is an excess of various saline substances, the common salt being the leading one. The last group is the mesophytes, which include plants growing in conditions without the extremes accorded to the other three groups. This somewhat general classification of the conditions of the environment lends much of interest to that form of field botany now under consideration. As the grouping is made chiefly upon the aqueous conditions, it is fair to assume that plants are especially modified to accommodate themselves to this compound. Plants, for example, unless they are aquatics, need to use large quantities of water to carry on the vital functions. Thus the salts from the soil need to rise dissolved in the crude sap to the leaves, and in order that a sufficient current be kept up there is transpiration going on from all thin or soft exposed parts. The leaves are the chief organs where aqueous vapor is being given off, sometimes to the extent of tons of water upon an acre of area in a single day. This evaporation being largely surface action, it is possible for the plant to check this by reducing the surface, and the leaf is coiled or folded. Other plants have through the ages become adapted to the destructive actions of drought and a dry, hot atmosphere, and have only needle-shaped leaves or even no true ones at all, as many of the cacti in the desert lands of the Western plains. Again, the surface of the plant may become covered with a felt of fine hairs to prevent rapid evaporation, while other plants with ordinary foliage have the acquired power of moving the leaves so that they will expose their surfaces broadside to the sun, or contrariwise the edges only, as heat and light intensity determine. Phytoecology deals with all those adaptations of structure, and from which permit the plants to take advantage of the habits and wants of animals. If we are studying the vegetation of a bog, and note the adaptation of the hydrophytic plants, the chances are that attention will soon be called to colorations and structures that indicate a more complete and far-reaching adjustment than simply to the conditions of the wet, spongy bog. A plant may be met with having the leaves in the form of flasks or pitchers, and more or less filled with water. These strange leaves are conspicuously purplish, and this adds to their attractiveness. The upper portion may be variegated, resembling a flower and for the same purpose--namely, to attract insects that find within the pitchers a food which is sought at the risk of life. Many of the entrapped creatures never escape, and yield up their life for the support of that of the captor. Again, the mossy bog may glisten in the sun, and thousands of sundew plants with their pink leaves are growing upon the surface. Each leaf is covered with adhesive stalked glands, and insects lured to and caught by them are devoured by this insectivorous vegetation. In the pools in the same lowland there may be an abundance of the bladderwort, a floating plant with flowers upon long stalks that raise them into the air and sunshine. With the leaves reduced to a mere framework that bears innumerable bladders, water animals of small size are captured in vast numbers and provide a large part of the nourishment required by the highly specialized hydrophyte. These are but everyday instances of adaptation between plants and animals for the purpose of nutrition, the adjustment of form being more particularly upon the vegetative side. Zoölogists may be able to show, however, that certain species of animals are adapted to and quite dependent upon the carnivorous plants. An ecological problem has been worked out along the above line to a larger extent than generally supposed. If we should take the case of ants only in their relation to structural adaptations for them in plants, it would be seen that fully three thousand species of the latter make use of ants for purposes of protection. The large fighting ants of the tropics, when provided with nectar, food, and shelter, will inhabit plants to the partial exclusion of destructive insects and larger foraging animals. Interesting as all this is, it is not the time and place to go into the details of how the ant-fostering plants have their nectar glands upon stems or leaf, rich soft hairs in tufts for food, and homes provided in hollows and chambers. There is still a more intimate association of termites with some of the toadstool-like plants, where the ants foster the fungi and seem to understand some of the essentials of veritable gardening in miniature form. The most familiar branch of phytoecology, as it concerns adaptations for insect visitations, is that which relates to the production of seed. Floral structures, so wonderfully varied in form and color and withal attractive to every lover of the beautiful, are familiar to all, and it only needs to be said in passing that these infinite forms are for the same end--namely, the union of the seed germs, if they may be so styled, of different and often widely separated blossoms. Sweetness and beauty are not the invariable rule with insect-visited blossoms, for in the long ages that have elapsed during which these adaptations have come about some plants have established an unwritten agreement between beetles and bugs with unsavory tastes. Thus there are the "carrion flowers," so called because of their fetid odor, designed for the sense organs of carrion insects. The "stink-horn" fungi have their offensive spores distributed by a similar set of carrion carriers. Water and wind claim a share of the species, but here adaptation to the method of fertilization is as fully realized as when insects participate, and the uselessness of showy petals and fantastic forms is emphasized by their absence. Coming now to the fruits of plants, it is again seen that plants have adapted their offspring, the seed, to the surrounding conditions, not forgetting the wind, the waves, and the tastes and the exterior of passing animals. The breezes carry up and hurl along the light wing-possessed seeds, and the river and ocean bear these and many others onward to a distant land, while by grappling hooks many kinds cling to the hair of animals, or, provided with a pleasing pulp, are carried willingly by birds and other creatures. In short, the devices for seed dispersion are multitudinous, and they provide a large chapter in that branch of botany now styled phytoecology. How different is the old field botany from the new! Then there was the collector of plants and classifier of his finds, and an arranger of all he could get by exchange or otherwise. His success was measured by the size of his herbarium and his stock in trade as so many duplicates all taken in bloom, but the time of year, locality, and the various conditions of growth were all unknown. His implements for work were, first, a can or basket, a plant press, and a manual; and, secondly, a lot of paper, a paste pot, and some way of holding the mounts in packets or pigeonholes. The eyes grew keen as the hunter scoured the forest and field for some kind of plant he had not already possessed. There was a keen relish in discoveries, and it heightened into ecstasy when the specimen needed to be sent away for a name and was returned with his own Latinized and appended to that of the genus. This was all well and good so far as it went, but looked at from the present vantage ground there was not so much in it. However, his was an essential step to other things, as much so as that of the census taker. We need to know the species of plants our fair land possesses, and have them described and named. But when the nine hundred and ninety-nine are known, it is a waste of time to be continually hunting for the thousandth. Look for it, but let it be secondary to that of an actual study of the great majority already known. The older botany was a study of the dried plants in all those details that are laid down in the manuals. It lacked something of the true vitality that is inherent in a biological science, for often the life had gone out before the subject came up for study. To the phytoecologist it was somewhat as the shell without the meat, or the bird's nest of a previous year. Since those days of our forefathers there has come the minute anatomy of plants, followed closely by physiology; and now with the working knowledge of these two modern branches of botany the student has again taken to the field. He is making the wood-lot his laboratory, and the garden, so to say, his lecture room. He has a fair knowledge of systematic botany, but finds himself rearranging the families and genera to fit the facts determined by his ecological study. If two species of the same genus are widely separated in habitat, he is determining the factors that led to the separation. Why did one smart weed become a climber, another an upright herb, and a third a prostrate creeper, are questions that may not have entered the mind of the plant collector; but now the phytoecologist finds much interest in considering questions of this type. What are the differences between a species inhabiting the water and another of the same genus upon dry land, or what has led one group of the morning-glory family to become parasites and exist as the dodders upon other living plants? The older botanist held his subject under the best mental illumination of his time, but his physical light, that of a pine knot or a tallow dip, also contrasts strongly with that of the present gas jet and electric arc. The wonder should be that he saw so well, and all who follow him can not but feel grateful for the path he blazed through the dense forests of ignorance and the bridges he made over the streams of doubt in specific distinctions. It was a noble work, but it is nearly past in the older parts of our country; and while some of that school should linger to readjust their genera, make new combinations of species, and attempt to satisfy the claims of priority, the rank and file will largely leave systematic botany and the herborizing it embraces, and betake themselves to the open fields of phytoecology. It may be along the line of structural adaptations when we will have morphological phytoecology, or the adjustment of function to the environment when there will be physiological phytoecology. These two branches when combined to elucidate problems of relationship between the plant and its surroundings as involved in accommodation in its comprehensive sense there will be phytoecology with climate, geology, geography, or fossils as the leading feature, as the case may be. In the older botany the plant alone in itself was the subject of study. The newer botany takes the plant in its surroundings and all that its relationships to other plants may suggest as the subject for analysis. In the one case the plant was all and its place of growth accidental, a dried specimen from any unknown habitat was enough; but now the environment and the numerous lines of relationship that reach out from the living plant _in situ_ are the major subjects for study. The former was field botany because the field contained the plant, the latter is field botany in that the plant embraces in its study all else in the field in which it lives. The one had as its leading question, What is your name and where do you belong in my herbarium? while the other raises an endless list of queries, of which How came you here and when? Why these curious glands and this strange movement or mimicry? are but average samples. Every spot of color, bend of leaf, and shape of fruit raises a question. The collector of fifty years ago pulled up or cut off a portion of his plant for a specimen, and rarely measured, weighed, and counted anything about it. The phytoecologist to-day watches his subject as it grows, and if removed it is for the purpose of testing its vital functions under varying circumstances of moisture, heat, or sunlight, and exact recording instruments are a part of the equipment for the investigation. The underlying thought in the seashore school and the tropical laboratory in botany is this of getting nearer to the haunts of the living plant. Forestry schools that have for their class room the wooded mountains and the botanical gardens with their living herbaria are welcome steps toward the same end of phytoecology. In view of the above facts, and many more that might be mentioned did space permit, the writer has felt that the present incomplete and faulty presentation of the subject of the newer botany should be placed before the great reading public through the medium of a journal that has as its watchword Progress in Education. DO ANIMALS REASON? BY THE REV. EGERTON R. YOUNG. This interesting subject has been ably handled from the negative side by Edward Thorndike, Ph. D., in the August number of the Popular Science Monthly. Dr. Thorndike, with all his skill in treating this very interesting subject, seems to have forgotten one very important point. His expectation has not only been higher than any fair claim of an animal's reasoning power, but he has overlooked the fact that there are different ways of reasoning. Men of different races and those of little intelligence can be placed in new environments and be asked to perform things which, while utterly impossible to them, are simple and crude to those of higher intelligence and who have all their days been accustomed to high mental exercise. If such difference exists between the highest and most intelligent of the human race and the degraded and uncultured, vastly greater is the gulf that separates the lowest stratum of humanity from the most intelligent of the brute creation. The fair way to test the intelligence of the so-called lower orders of men is to go to their native lands and study them in their own environments and in possession of the equipments of life to which they have been accustomed. The same is true of the brute creation. Only the highest results can be expected from congenial environments. To pass final judgment upon the animal kingdom, having for data only the results of the doctor's experiments, seems to us manifestly unfair. He takes a few cats and dogs and submits them to environments which are altogether foreign to them, and then expects feats of mind from them which would be far greater than the mastering of the reason why two and two make four is to the stupidest child of man. As the doctor has been permitted to tell the results of his experiments, may I claim a similar privilege? While I did not use dogs merely to test their intelligence--my business demanding of myself and them the fullest use of all our energies and all the intelligence, be it more or less, that was possessed by man or beast--I had the privilege of seeing in my dogs actions that were, at least to me, convincing that they possessed the rudiments of reasoning powers, and, in the more intelligent, that which will be utterly inexplicable if it is not the product of reasoning faculties. For a number of years I was a resident missionary in the Hudson Bay Territories, where, in the prosecution of my work, I kept a large number of dogs of various breeds. With these dogs I traveled several thousands of miles every winter over an area larger than the State of New York. In summer I used them to plow my garden and fields. They dragged home our fish from the distant fisheries, and the wood from the forests for our numerous fires. They cuddled around me on the edges of my heavy fur robes in wintry camps, where we often slept out in a hole dug in the snow, the temperature ranging from 30° to 60° below zero. When blizzard storms raged so terribly that even the most experienced Indian guides were bewildered, and knew not north from south or east from west, our sole reliance was on our dogs, and with an intelligence and an endurance that ever won our admiration they succeeded in bringing us to our desired destination. It is conceded at the outset that these dogs of whom I write were the result of careful selection. There are dogs and dogs, as there are men and men. They were not picked up in the street at random. I would no more keep in my personal service a mere average mongrel dog than I would the second time hire for one of my long trips a sulky Indian. As there are some people, good in many ways, who can not master a foreign tongue, so there are many dogs that never rise above the one gift of animal instinct. With such I too have struggled, and long and patiently labored, and if of them only I were writing I would unhesitatingly say that of them I never saw any act which ever seemed to show reasoning powers. But there are other dogs than these, and of them I here would write and give my reason why I firmly believe that in a marked degree some of them possessed the powers of reasoning. Two of my favorite dogs I called Jack and Cuffy. Jack was a great black St. Bernard, weighing nearly two hundred pounds. Cuffy was a pure Newfoundland, with very black curly hair. These two dogs were the gift of the late Senator Sanford. With other fine dogs of the same breeds, they soon supplanted the Eskimo and mongrels that had been previously used for years about the place. [Illustration: JACK AND HIS MASTER.] I had so much work to do in my very extensive field that I required to have at least four trains always fit for service. This meant that, counting puppies and all, there would be about the premises from twenty to thirty dogs. However, as the lakes and rivers there swarmed with fish, which was their only food, we kept the pack up to a state of efficiency at but little expense. Jack and Cuffy were the only two dogs that were allowed the full liberty of the house. They were welcome in every room. Our doors were furnished with the ordinary thumb latches. These latches at first bothered both dogs. All that was needed on our part was to show them how they worked, and from that day on for years they both entered the rooms as they desired without any trouble, if the doors opened from them. There was a decided difference, however, in opening a door if it opened toward them. Cuffy was never able to do it. With Jack it was about as easily done as it was by the Indian servant girl. Quickly and deftly would he shove up the exposed latch and the curved part of the thumb piece and draw it toward him. If the door did not easily open, the claws in the other fore paw speedily and cleverly did the work. The favorite resting place of these two magnificent dogs was on some fur rugs on my study floor. Several times have we witnessed the following action in Cuffy, who was of a much more restless temperament than Jack: When she wanted to leave the study she would invariably first go to the door and try it. If it were in the slightest degree ajar she could easily draw it toward her and thus open it. If, on the contrary, it were latched, she would at once march over to Jack, and, taking him by an ear with her teeth, would lead him over to the door, which he at once opened for her. If reason is that power by which we "are enabled to combine means for the attainment of particular ends," I fail to understand the meaning of words if it were not displayed in these instances. Both Jack and Cuffy were, as is characteristic of such dogs, very fond of the water, and in our short, brilliant summers would frequently disport themselves in the beautiful little lake, the shores of which were close to our home. Cuffy, as a Newfoundland dog, generally preferred to continue her sports in the waves some time after Jack had finished his bath. As they were inseparable companions, Jack was too loyal to retire to the house until Cuffy was ready to accompany him. As she was sometimes whimsical and dilatory, she seemed frequently to try his patience. It was, however, always interesting to observe his deference to her. To understand thoroughly what we are going to relate in proof of our argument it is necessary to state that the rocky shore in front of our home was at this particular place like a wedge, the thickest part in front, rising up about a dozen feet or so abruptly from the water. Then to the east the shore gradually sloped down into a little sandy cove. When Jack had finished his bath he always swam to this sandy beach, and at once, as he shook his great body, came gamboling along the rocks, joyously barking to his companion still in the waters. When Cuffy had finished her watery sports, if Jack were still on the rocks, instead of swimming to the sandy cove and there landing she would start directly for the place where Jack was awaiting her. If it were at a spot where she could not alone struggle up, Jack, firmly bracing himself, would reach down to her and then, catching hold of the back of her neck, would help her up the slippery rocks. If it were at a spot where he could not possibly reach her, he would, after several attempts, all the time furiously barking as though expressing his anxiety and solicitude, rush off to a spot where some old oars, paddles, and sticks of various kinds were piled. There he searched until he secured one that suited his purpose. With this in his mouth, he hurried back to the spot where Cuffy was still in the water at the base of the steep rocks. Here he would work the stick around until he was able to let one end down within reach of his exacting companion in the water. Seizing it in her teeth and with the powerful Jack pulling at the other end she was soon able to work her way up the rough but almost perpendicular rocks. This prompt action, often repeated on the part of Jack, looked very much like "the specious appearance of reasoning." It was a remarkable coincidence that if Jack were called away, Cuffy at once swam to the sandy beach and there came ashore. Jack never had any special love for the Indians, although we were then living among them. He was, however, too well instructed ever to injure or even growl at any of them. The changing of Indian servant girls in the kitchen was always a matter of perplexity to him. He was suspicious of these strange Indians coming in and so familiarly handling the various utensils of their work. Not daring to injure them, it was amusing to watch him in his various schemes to tease them. If one of them seemed especially anxious to keep the doors shut, Jack took the greatest delight in frequently opening them. This he took care only to do when no member of the family was around. These tricks he would continue to do until formal complaints were lodged against him. One good scolding was sufficient to deter him from thus teasing that girl, but he would soon begin to try it with others. One summer we had a fat, good-natured servant girl whom we called Mary. Soon after she was installed in her place Jack began, as usual, to try to annoy her, but found it to be a more difficult job than it had been with some of her predecessors. She treated him with complete indifference, and was not in the least afraid of him, big as he was. This seemed to very much humiliate him, as most of the other girls had so stood in awe of the gigantic fellow that they had about given way to him in everything. Mary, however, did nothing of the kind. She would shout, "Get out of my way!" as quickly to "his mightiness" as she would to the smallest dog on the place. This very much offended Jack, but he had been so well trained, even regarding the servants, that he dare not retaliate even with a growl. Mary, however, had one weakness, and after a time Jack found it out. Her mistress observing that this girl, who had been transferred from a floorless wigwam into a civilized kitchen, was at first careless about keeping the floor as clean as it should be, had, by the promise of some desired gift in addition to her wages, so fired her zeal that it seemed as though every hour that could be saved from her other necessary duties was spent in scrubbing that kitchen floor. Mary was never difficult to find, as was often the case with other Indian girls; if missed from other duties, she was always found scrubbing her kitchen. In some way or other--how we do not profess to know--Jack discovered this, which had become to us a source of amusement, and here he succeeded in annoying her, where in many other ways which he had tried he had only been humiliated and disgraced. He would, when the floor had just been scrubbed, march in and walk over it with his feet made as dirty as tramping in the worst places outside could make them. At other times he would plunge into the lake, and instead of, as usual, thoroughly shaking himself dry on the rocks, would wait until he had marched in upon Mary's spotless floor. At other times, when Jack noticed that Mary was about to begin scrubbing her floor he would deliberately stretch himself out in a prominent place on it, and doggedly resist, yet without any growling or biting, any attempt on her part to get him to move. In vain would she coax or scold or threaten. Once or twice, by some clever stratagem, such as pretending to feed the other dogs outside or getting them excited and furiously barking, as though a bear or some other animal were being attacked, did she succeed in getting him out. But soon he found her out, and then he paid not the slightest attention to any of these things. Once when she had him outside she securely fastened the door to keep him out until her scrubbing would be done. Furiously did Jack rattle at the latch, but the door was otherwise so secured that he could not open it. Getting discouraged in his efforts to open the door in the usual way, he went to the woodpile and seizing a large billet in his mouth he came and so pounded the door with it that Mary, seeing that there was great danger of the panel being broken in, was obliged to open the door and let in the dog. Jack proudly marched in to the kitchen with the stick of wood in his mouth. This he carried to the wood box, and, when he had placed it there, he coolly stretched himself out on the floor where he would be the biggest nuisance. Seeing Jack under such circumstances on her kitchen floor, poor Mary could stand it no longer, and so she came marching in to my study, and in vigorous picturesque language in her native Cree described Jack's various tricks and schemes to annoy her and thus hinder her in her work. She ended up by the declaration that she was sure the _meechee munedoo_ (the devil) was in that dog. While not fully accepting the last statement, we felt that the time had come to interfere, and that Jack must be reproved and stopped. In doing this we utilized Jack's love for our little ones, especially for Eddie, the little four-year-old boy. His obedience as well as loyalty to that child was marvelous and beautiful. The slightest wish of the lad was law to Jack. As soon as Mary had finished her emphatic complaints, I turned to Eddie, who with his little sister had been busily playing with some blocks on the floor, and said: "Eddie, go and tell that naughty Jack that he must stop teasing Mary. Tell him his place is not in the kitchen, and that he must keep out of it." Eddie had listened to Mary's story, and, although he generally sturdily defended Jack's various actions, yet here he saw that the dog was in the wrong, and so he gallantly came to her rescue. Away with Mary he went, while the rest of us, now much interested, followed in the rear to see how the thing would turn out. As Eddie and Mary passed through the dining room we remained in that room, while they went on into the adjoining kitchen, leaving the door open, so that it was possible for us to distinctly hear every word that was uttered. Eddie at once strode up to the spot where Jack was stretched upon the floor. Seizing him by one of his ears, and addressing him as with the authority of a despot, the little lad said: "I am ashamed of you, Jack. You naughty dog, teasing Mary like this! So you won't let her wash her kitchen. Get up and come with me, you naughty dog!" saying which the child tugged away at the ear of the dog. Jack promptly obeyed, and as they came marching through the dining room on their way to the study it was indeed wonderful to see that little child, whose beautiful curly head was not much higher than that of the great, powerful dog, yet so completely the master. Jack was led into the study and over to the great wolf-robe mat where he generally slept. As he promptly obeyed the child's command to lie down upon it, he received from him his final orders: "Now, Jack, you keep out of the kitchen"; and to a remarkable degree from that time on that order was obeyed. We have referred to the fact that Jack placed the billet of wood in the wood box when it had served his purpose in compelling Mary to open the door. Carrying in wood was one of his accomplishments. Living in that cold land, where we depended entirely on wood for our fuel, we required a large quantity of it. It was cut in the forests, sometimes several miles from the house. During the winters it was dragged home by the dogs. Here it was cut into the proper lengths for the stoves and piled up in the yard. When required, it was carried into the kitchen and piled up in a large wood box. This work was generally done by Indian men. When none were at hand the Indian girls had to do the work, but it was far from being enjoyed by them, especially in the bitter cold weather. It was suggested one day that Jack could be utilized for this work. With but little instruction and trouble he was induced to accept of the situation, and so after that the cry, "Jack, the wood box is empty!" would set him industriously to work at refilling it. To us, among many other instances of dog reasoning that came under our notice as the years rolled on, was one on the part of a large, powerful dog we called Cæsar. It occurred in the spring of the year, when the snow had melted on the land, and so, with the first rains, was swelling the rivers and creeks very considerably. On the lake before us the ice was still a great solid mass, several feet in thickness. Near our home was a now rapid stream that, rushing down into the lake, had cut a delta of open water in the ice at its mouth. In this open place Papanekis, one of my Indians, had placed a gill net for the purpose of catching fish. Living, as he did, all winter principally upon the fish caught the previous October or November and kept frozen for several months hung up in the open air, we were naturally pleased to get the fresh ones out of the water in the spring. Papanekis had so arranged his net, by fastening a couple of ropes about sixty feet long, one at each end, that when it was securely fastened at each side of the stream it was carried out into this open deltalike space by the force of the current, and there hung like the capital letter U. Its upper side was kept in position by light-wooded floats, while medium-sized stones, as sinkers, steadied it below. Every morning Papanekis would take a basket and, being followed by all the dogs of the kennels, would visit his net. Placed as we have described, he required no canoe or boat in order to overhaul it and take from it the fish there caught. All he had to do was to seize hold of the rope at the end fastened on the shore and draw it toward him. As he kept pulling it in, the deep bend in it gradually straightened out until the net was reached. His work was now to secure the fish as he gradually drew in the net and coiled it at his feet. The width of the opening in the water being about sixty feet, the result was that when he had in this way overhauled his net he had about reached the end of the rope attached to the other side. When all the fish in the net were secured, all Papanekis had to do to reset the net was to throw some of it out in the right position in the stream. Here the force of the running waters acting upon it soon carried the whole net down into the open place as far as the two ropes fastened on the shores would admit. Papanekis, after placing the best fish in his basket for consumption in the mission house and for his own family, divided what was left among the eager dogs that had accompanied him. This work went on for several days, and the supply of fish continued to increase, much to our satisfaction. One day Papanekis came into my study in a state of great perturbation. He was generally such a quiet, stoical sort of an Indian that I was at once attracted by his mental disquietude. On asking the reason why he was so troubled, he at once blurted out, "Master, there is some strange animal visiting our net!" In answer to my request for particulars, he replied that for some mornings past when he went to visit it he found, entangled in the meshes, several heads of whitefish. Yet the net was always in its right position in the water. On my suggesting that perhaps otters, fishers, minks, or other fish-eating animals might have done the work, he most emphatically declared that he knew the habits of all these and all other animals living on fish, and it was utterly impossible for any of them to have thus done this work. The mystery continuing for several following mornings, Papanekis became frightened and asked me to get some other fisherman in his place, as he was afraid longer to visit the net. He had talked the matter over with some other Indians, and they had come to the conclusion that either a _windegoo_ was at the bottom of it or the _meechee munedoo_ (the devil). I laughed at his fears, and told him I would help him to try and find out who or what it was that was giving us this trouble. I went with him to the place, where we carefully examined both sides of the stream for evidences of the clever thief. There was nothing suspicious, and the only tracks visible were those of his own and of the many dogs that followed him to be fed each morning. About two or three hundred yards north of the spot where he overhauled the net there rose a small abrupt hill, densely covered with spruce and balsam trees. On visiting it we found that a person there securely hid from observation could with care easily overlook the whole locality. At my suggestion, Papanekis with his axe there arranged a sort of a nest or lookout spot. Orders were then given that he and another Indian man should, before daybreak on the next morning, make a long detour and cautiously reach that spot from the rear, and there carefully conceal themselves. This they succeeded in doing, and there, in perfect stillness, they waited for the morning. As soon as it was possible to see anything they were on the alert. For some time they watched in vain. They eagerly scanned every point of vision, and for a time could observe nothing unusual. "Hush!" said one; "see that dog!" It was Cæsar, cautiously skulking along the trail. He would frequently stop and sniff the air. Fortunately for the Indian watchers, the wind was blowing toward them, and so the dog did not catch their scent. On he came, in a quiet yet swift gait, until he reached the spot where Papanekis stood when he pulled in the net. He gave one searching glance in every direction, and then he set to work. Seizing the rope in his teeth, Cæsar strongly pulled upon it, while he rapidly backed up some distance on the trail. Then, walking on the rope to the water's edge as it lay on the ground, to keep the pressure of the current from dragging it in, he again took a fresh grip upon it and repeated the process. This he did until the sixty feet of rope were hauled in, and the end of the net was reached to which it was attached. The net he now hauled in little by little, keeping his feet firmly on it to securely hold it down. As he drew it up, several varieties of inferior fish, such as suckers or mullets, pike or jackfish, were at first observed. To them Cæsar paid no attention. He was after the delicious whitefish, which dogs as well as human beings prefer to those of other kinds. When he had perhaps hauled twenty feet of the net, his cleverness was rewarded by the sight of a fine whitefish. Still holding the net with its struggling captives securely down with his feet, he began to devour this whitefish, which was so much more dainty than the coarser fish generally thrown to him. Papanekis and his comrade had seen enough. The mysterious culprit was detected in the act, and so with a "Whoop!" they rushed down upon him. Caught in the very act, Cæsar had to submit to a thrashing that ever after deterred him from again trying that cunning trick. Who can read this story, which I give exactly as it occurred, without having to admit that here Cæsar "combined means for the attainment of particular ends"? On the previous visits which he made to the net the rapid current of the stream, working against the greater part of it in the water, soon carried it back again into its place ere Papanekis arrived later in the morning. The result was that Cæsar's cleverness was undetected for some time, even by these most observant Indians. Many other equally clever instances convince me, and those who with me witnessed them, of the possession, in of course a limited degree, of reasoning powers. Scores of my dogs never seemed to reveal them, perhaps because no special opportunities were presented for their exhibition. They were just ordinary dogs, trained to the work of hauling their loads. When night came, if their feet were sore they had dog sense enough to come to their master and, throwing themselves on their backs, would stick up their feet and whine and howl until the warm duffle shoes were put on. Some of the skulking ones had wit enough, when they did not want to be caught, in the gloom of the early morning, while the stars were still shining, if they were white, to cuddle down, still and quiet, in the beautiful snow; while the darker ones would slink away into the gloom of the dense balsams, where they seemed to know that it would be difficult for them to be seen. Some of them had wit enough when traveling up steep places with heavy loads, where their progress was slow, to seize hold of small firm bushes in their teeth to help them up or to keep them from slipping back. Some of them knew how to shirk their work. Cæsar, of whom we have already spoken, at times was one of this class. They could pretend, by their panting and tugging at their collars, that they were dragging more than any other dogs in the train, while at the same time they were not pulling a pound! Of cats I do not write. I am no lover of them, and therefore am incompetent to write about them. This lack of love for them is, I presume, from the fact that when a boy I was the proud owner of some very beautiful rabbits, upon which the cats of the neighborhood used to make disastrous raids. So great was my boyish indignation then that the dislike to them created has in a measure continued to this day, and I have not as yet begun to cultivate their intimate acquaintance. But of dogs I have ever been a lover and a friend. I never saw one, not mad, of which I was afraid, and I never saw one with which I could not speedily make friends. Love was the constraining motive principally used in breaking my dogs in to their work in the trains. No whip was ever used upon Jack or Cuffy while they were learning their tasks. Some dogs had to be punished more or less. Some stubborn dogs at once surrendered and gave no more trouble when a favorite female dog was harnessed up in a train and sent on ahead. This affection in the dog for his mate was a powerful lever in the hands of his master, and, using it as an incentive, we have seen things performed as remarkable as any we have here recorded. From what I have written it will be seen that I have had unusual facilities for studying the habits and possibilities of dogs. I was not under the necessity of gathering up a lot of mongrels at random in the streets, and then, in order to see instances of their sagacity and the exercise of their highest reasoning powers, to keep them until they were "practically utterly hungry," and then imprison them in a box a good deal less than four feet square, and then say to them, "Now, you poor, frightened, half-starved creatures, show us what reasoning powers you possess." About as well throw some benighted Africans into a slave ship and order them to make a telephone or a phonograph! My comparison is not too strong, considering the immense distance there is between the human race and the brute creation. And so it must be, in the bringing to light of the powers of memory and the clear exhibition of the reasoning powers, few though they be, that the tests are not conclusive unless made under the most favorable environment, upon dogs of the highest intelligence, and in the most congenial and sympathetic manner. Testing this most interesting question in this manner, my decided convictions are that animals do reason. SKETCH OF GEORGE M. STERNBERG. No man among Americans has studied the micro-organisms with more profit or has contributed more to our knowledge of the nature of infection, particularly of that of yellow fever, than Dr. GEORGE M. STERNBERG, of the United States Army. His merits are freely recognized abroad, and he ranks there, as well as at home, among the leading bacteriologists of the age. He was born at Hartwick Seminary, an institution of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (General Synod), Otsego, N. Y., June 8, 1838. His father, the Rev. Levi Sternberg, D. D., a graduate of Union College, a Lutheran minister, and for many years principal of the seminary and a director of it, was descended from German ancestors who came to this country in 1703 and settled in Schoharie County, New York. The younger Sternberg received his academical training at the seminary, after which, intending to study medicine, he undertook a school at New Germantown, N. J., as a means of earning a part of the money required to defray the cost of his instruction in that science. The record of his school was one of quiet sessions, thoroughness, and popularity of the teacher, and his departure was an occasion of regret among his patrons. When nineteen years old, young Sternberg began his medical studies with Dr. Horace Lathrop, in Cooperstown, N. Y. Afterward he attended the courses of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, and was graduated thence in the class of 1860. Before he had fairly settled in practice the civil war began, and the attention of all young Americans was directed toward the military service. Among these was young Dr. Sternberg, who, having passed the examination, was appointed assistant surgeon May 28, 1861, and was attached to the command of General Sykes, Army of the Potomac. He was engaged in the battle of Bull Run, where, voluntarily remaining on the field with the wounded, he was taken prisoner, but was paroled to continue his humane work. On the expiration of his parole he made his way through the lines and reported at Washington for duty July 30, 1861--"weary, footsore, and worn." Of his conduct in later campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, General Sykes, in his official reports of the battles of Gaines Mill, Turkey Ridge, and Malvern Hill, said that "Dr. Sternberg added largely to the reputation already acquired on the disastrous field of Bull Run." He remained with General Sykes's command till August, 1862; was then assigned to hospital duty at Portsmouth Grove, R. I., till November, 1862; was afterward attached to General Banks's expedition as assistant to the medical director in the Department of the Gulf till January, 1864; was in the office of the medical director, Columbus, Ohio, and in charge of the United States General Hospital at Cleveland, Ohio, till July, 1865. Since the civil war he has been assigned successively to Jefferson Barracks, Mo.; Fort Harker and Fort Riley, Kansas; in the field in the Indian campaign, 1868 to 1870; Forts Columbus and Hamilton, New York Harbor; Fort Warren, Boston Harbor; Department of the Gulf and New Orleans; Fort Barrancas, Fla.; Department of the Columbia; Department Headquarters; Fort Walla Walla, Washington Territory; California; and Eastern stations. He was promoted to be captain and assistant surgeon in 1866, major and surgeon in 1875, lieutenant colonel and deputy surgeon general in 1891, and brigadier general and surgeon general in 1893. He has also received the brevets of captain and major in the United States Army "for faithful and meritorious services during the war," and of lieutenant colonel "for gallant service in performance of his professional duty under fire in action against Indians at Clearwater, Idaho, July 12, 1877." In the discharge of his duties at his various posts Dr. Sternberg had to deal with a cholera epidemic in Kansas in 1867, with a "yellow-fever epidemic" in New York Harbor in 1871, and with epidemics of yellow fever at Fort Barrancas, Fla., in 1873 and 1875. He served under special detail as member and secretary of the Havana Yellow-Fever Commission of the National Board of Health, 1879 to 1881; as a delegate from the United States under special instructions of the Secretary of State to the International Sanitary Conference at Rome in 1885; as a commissioner, under the act of Congress of March 3, 1887, to make investigations in Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba relating to the etiology and prevention of yellow fever; by special request of the health officer of the port of New York and the advisory committee of the New York Chamber of Commerce as consulting bacteriologist to the health officer of the port of New York in 1892; and he was a delegate to the International Medical Congress in Moscow in 1897. Dr. Sternberg has contributed largely to the literature of scientific medicine from the results of his observations and experiments which he has made in these various spheres of duty. His most fruitful researches have been made in the field of bacteriology and infectious diseases. He has enjoyed the rare advantage in pursuing these studies of having the material for his experiments close at hand in the course of his regular work, and of watching, we might say habitually, the progress of such diseases as yellow fever as it normally went on in the course of Nature. Of the quality of his bacteriological work, the writer of a biography in Red Cross Notes, reprinted in the North American Medical Review, goes so far as to say that "when the overzeal of enthusiasts shall have passed away, and the story of bacteriology in the nineteenth century is written up, it will probably be found that the chief who brought light out of darkness was George M. Sternberg. He was noted not so much for his brilliant discoveries, but rather for his exact methods of investigation, for his clear statements of the results of experimental data, for his enormous labors toward the perfection and simplification of technique, and finally for his services in the practical application of the truths taught by the science. His early labors in bacteriology were made with apparatus and under conditions that were crude enough." His work in this department is certainly among the most important that has been done. Its value has been freely acknowledged everywhere, it has given him a world-wide fame, and it has added to the credit of American science. The reviewer in Nature (June 22, 1893) of his Manual of Bacteriology, which was published in 1892, while a little disposed to criticise the fullness and large size of the book, describes it as "the latest, the largest, and, let us add, the most complete manual of bacteriology which has yet appeared in the English language. The volume combines in itself not only an account of such facts as are already established in the science from a morphological, chemical, and pathological point of view, discussions on such abstruse subjects as susceptibility and immunity, and also full details of the means by which these results have been obtained, and practical directions for the carrying on of laboratory work." This was not the first of Dr. Sternberg's works in bacteriological research. It was preceded by a work on Bacteria, of 498 pages, including 152 pages translated from the work of Dr. Antoine Magnin (1884); Malaria and Malarial Diseases, and Photomicrographs and How to make Them. The manual is at once a book for reference, a text-book for students, and a handbook for the laboratory. Its four parts include brief notices of the history of the subject, classification, morphology, and an account of methods and practical laboratory work--"all clear and concise"; the biology and chemistry of bacteria, disinfection, and antiseptics; a detailed account of pathogenic bacteria, their modes of action, the way they may gain access to the system, susceptibility and immunity, to which Dr. Sternberg's own contributions have been not the least important; and saprophytic bacteria in water, in the soil, in or on the human body, and in food, the whole number of saprophytes described being three hundred and thirty-one. "The merit of a work of this kind," Nature says, "depends not less on the number of species described than on the clearness and accuracy of the descriptions, and Dr. Sternberg has spared no pains to make these as complete as possible." The bibliography in this work fills more than a hundred pages, and contains 2,582 references. A later book on a kindred subject is Immunity, Protective Inoculations, and Serum Therapy (1895). Dr. Sternberg has also published a Text-Book of Bacteriology. Bearing upon yellow fever are the Report upon the Prevention of Yellow Fever by Inoculation, submitted in March, 1888; Report upon the Prevention of Yellow Fever, illustrated by photomicrographs and cuts, 1890; and Examination of the Blood in Yellow Fever (experiments upon animals, etc.), in the Preliminary Report of the Havana Yellow-Fever Commission, 1879. Other publications in the list of one hundred and thirty-one titles of Dr. Sternberg's works, and mostly consisting of shorter articles, relate to Disinfectants and their Value, the Etiology of Malarial Fevers, Septicæmia, the Germicide Value of Therapeutic Agents, the Etiology of Croupous Pneumonia, the Bacillus of Typhoid Fever, the Thermal Death Point of Pathogenic Organisms, the Practical Results of Bacteriological Researches, the Cholera Spirillum, Disinfection at Quarantine Stations, the Infectious Agent of Smallpox, official reports as Surgeon General of the United States Army, addresses and reports at the meetings of the American Public Health Association, and an address to the members of the Pan-American Congress. One paper is recorded quite outside of the domain of microbes and fevers, to show what the author might have done if he had allowed his attention to be diverted from his special absorbing field of work. It is upon the Indian Burial Mounds and Shell Heaps near Pensacola, Fla. The medical and scientific societies of which Dr. Sternberg is a member include the American Public Health Association, of which he is also an ex-president (1886); the American Association of Physicians; the American Physiological Society; the American Microscopical Society, of which he is a vice-president; the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he is a Fellow; the New York Academy of Medicine (a Fellow); and the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States (president in 1896). He is a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society of London; an honorary member of the Epidemiological Society of London, of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Rome, of the Academy of Medicine of Rio de Janeiro, of the American Academy of Medicine, of the French Society of Hygiene, etc.; was President of the Section on Military Medicine and Surgery of the Pan-American Congress; was a Fellow by courtesy in Johns Hopkins University, 1885 to 1890; was President of the Biological Society of Washington in 1896, and of the American Medical Association in 1897; and has been designated Honorary President of the Thirteenth International Medical Congress, which is to meet in Paris in 1900. He received the degree of LL. D. from the University of Michigan in 1894, and from Brown University in 1897. Dr. Sternberg's view of the right professional standard of the physician is well expressed in the sentiment, "To maintain our standing in the estimation of the educated classes we must not rely upon our diplomas or upon our membership in medical societies. Work and worth are what count." He does not appear to be attached to any particular school, but, as his Red Cross Notes biographer says, "has placed himself in the crowd 'who have been moving forward upon the substantial basis of scientific research, and who, if characterized by any distinctive name, should be called _the New School of Scientific Medicine_.' He holds that if our practice was in accordance with our knowledge many diseases would disappear; he sees no room for creeds or patents in medicine. He is willing to acknowledge the right to prescribe either a bread pill or a leaden bullet. But if a patient dies from diphtheria because of a failure to administer a proper remedy, or if infection follows from dirty fingers or instruments, if a practitioner carelessly or ignorantly transfers infection, he believes he is not fit to practice medicine.... He rejects every theory or dictum that has not been clearly demonstrated to him as an absolute truth." While he is described as without assumption, Dr. Sternberg is represented as being evidently in his headquarters as surgeon general in every sense the head of the service, the chief whose will governs all. Modest and unassuming, he is described as being most exacting, a man of command, of thorough execution, a general whose eyes comprehend every detail, and who has studied the personality of every member of his corps. He is always busy, but seemingly never in a hurry; systematic, accepting no man's dictum, and taking nothing as an established fact till he has personal experimental evidence of its truth. He looks into every detail, and takes equal care of the health of the general in chief and of the private. His addresses are carefully prepared, based on facts he has himself determined, made in language so plain that they will not be misunderstood, free from sentiment, and delivered in an easy conversational style, and his writings are "pen pictures of his results in the laboratory and clinic room." * * * * * The thirty-first year of the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology was signalized by the transfer of its property to the corporation of Harvard College, whereby simplicity and greater permanence have been given to its management. The four courses of instruction in the museum were attended by sixteen students, and these, with others, make twenty-one persons, besides the curator, who are engaged in study or special research in subjects included under the term anthropology. Special attention is given by explorers in the service of the museum to the investigation of the antiquities of Yucatan and Central America, of which its publications on Copan, the caves of Loltun, and Labná, have been noticed in the Monthly. These explorations have been continued when and where circumstances made it feasible. Among the gifts acknowledged in the report of the museum are two hundred facsimile copies of the Aztec Codex Vaticanus, from the Duke of Loubat, an original Mexican manuscript of 1531, on agave paper, from the Mary Hemenway estate; the extensive private archæological collection of Mr. George W. Hammond; articles from Georgia mounds, from Clarence B. Moore, and other gifts of perhaps less magnitude but equal interest. Mr. Andrew Gibb, of Edinburgh, has given five pieces of rudely made pottery from the Hebrides, which were made several years ago by a woman who is thought to have been the last one to make pottery according to the ancient method of shaping the clay with the hands, and without the use of any form of potter's wheel. Miss Maria Whitney, sister of the late Prof. J. D. Whitney, has presented the "Calaveras skull" and the articles found with it, and all the original documents relating to its discovery and history. Miss Phebe Ferris, of Madisonville, Ohio, has bequeathed to the museum about twenty-five acres of land, on which is situated the ancient mound where Dr. Metz and Curator Putnam have investigated for several years, and whence a considerable collection has been obtained. Miss Ferris expressed the desire that the museum continue the explorations, and after completing convert the tract into a public park. Mr. W. B. Nicker has explored some virgin mounds near Galena, Ill., and a rock shelter and stone grave near Portage, Ill. The library of the museum now contains 1,838 volumes and 2,479 pamphlets on anthropology. Correspondence. DO ANIMALS REASON? _Editor Popular Science Monthly:_ DEAR SIR: In connection with the discussion of the interesting subject Do Animals Reason? permit me to relate the following incident in support of the affirmative side of the question: Some years ago, before the establishment of the National Zoölogical Park in this city, Dr. Frank Baker, the curator, kept a small nucleus of animals in the rear of the National Museum; among this collection were several monkeys. On a hot summer day, as I was passing the monkey cage I handed to one of the monkeys a large piece of fresh molasses taffy. The animal at once carried it to his mouth and commenced to bite it. The candy was somewhat soft, and stuck to the monkey's paws. He looked at his paws, licked them with his tongue, and then turned his head from side to side looking about the cage. Then, taking the candy in his mouth, he sprang to the farther end of the cage and picked up a wad of brown paper. This ball of paper he carefully unfolded, and, laying it down on the floor of the cage, carefully smoothed out the folds of the paper with both paws. After he had smoothed it out to his satisfaction, he took the piece of taffy from his mouth and laid it in the center of the piece of paper and folded the paper over the candy, leaving a part of it exposed. He then sat back on his haunches and ate the candy, first wiping one paw and then the other on his hip, just as any boy or man might do. If that monkey did not show reason, what would you call it? Yours etc., H. O. HALL, _Library Surgeon General's Office, United States Army._ WASHINGTON, D. C., _October 2, 1899_. Editor's Table. _HOME BURDENS._ The doctrine has gone abroad, suggested by the most popular poet of the day, that "white men" have the duty laid upon them of scouring the dark places of the earth for burdens to take up. Through a large part of this nation the idea has run like wildfire, infecting not a few who themselves are in no small degree burdens to the community that shelters them. The rowdier element of the population everywhere is strongly in favor of the new doctrine, which to their minds is chiefly illustrated by the shooting of Filipinos. We do not say that thousands of very respectable citizens are not in favor of it also; we only note that they are strongly supported by a class whose adhesion adds no strength to their cause. It is almost needless to remark that a very few years ago we were not in the way of thinking that the civilized nations of the earth, which had sliced up Asia and Africa in the interest of their trade, had done so in the performance of a solemn duty. The formula "the white man's burden" had not been invented then, and some of us used to think that there was more of the filibustering spirit than of a high humanitarianism in these raids upon barbarous races. Possibly we did less than justice to some of the countries concerned, notably Great Britain, which, having a teeming population in very narrow confines, and being of old accustomed to adventures by sea, had naturally been led to extend her influence and create outlets for her trade in distant parts of the earth. Be this as it may, we seemed to have our own work cut out for us at home. We had the breadth of a continent under our feet, rich in the products of every latitude; we had unlimited room for expansion and development; we had unlimited confidence in the destinies that awaited us as a nation, if only we applied ourselves earnestly to the improvement of the heritage which, in the order of Providence, had become ours. We thanked Heaven that we were not as other nations, which, insufficiently provided with home blessings, were tempted to put forth their hands and--steal, or something like it, in heathen lands. Well, we have changed all that: we give our sympathy to the nations of the Old World in their forays on the heathen, and are vigorously tackling "the white man's burden" according to the revised version. It is unfortunate and quite unpleasant that this should involve shooting down people who are only asking what our ancestors asked and obtained--the right of self-government in the land they occupy. Still, we must do it if we want to keep up with the procession we have joined. Smoking tobacco is not pleasant to the youth of fifteen or sixteen who has determined to line up with his elders in that manly accomplishment. He has many a sick stomach, many a flutter of the heart, before he breaks himself into it; but, of course, he perseveres--has he not taken up the white boy's burden? So we. Who, outside of that rowdy element to which we have referred, has not been, whether he has confessed it or not, sick at heart at the thought of the innocent blood we have shed and of the blood of our kindred that we have shed in order to shed that blood? Still, spite of all misgivings and qualms, we hold our course, Kipling leading on, and the colonel of the Rough Riders assuring us that it is all right. Revised versions are not always the best versions; and for our own part we prefer to think that the true "white man's burden" is that which lies at his own door, and not that which he has to compass land and sea to come in sight of. We have in this land the burden of a not inconsiderable tramp and hoodlum population. This is a burden of which we can never very long lose sight; it is more or less before us every day. It is a burden in a material sense, and it is a burden in what we may call a spiritual sense. It impairs the satisfaction we derive from our own citizenship, and it lies like a weight on the social conscience. It is the opprobrium alike of our educational system and of our administration of the law. How far would the national treasure and individual energy which we have expended in failing to subdue the Filipino "rebels" have gone--if wisely applied--in subduing the rebel elements in our own population, and rescuing from degradation those whom our public schools have failed to civilize? Shall the reply be that we can not interfere with individual liberty? It would be a strange reply to come from people who send soldiers ten thousand miles away for the express purpose of interfering with liberty as the American nation has always hitherto understood that term; but, in point of fact, there is no question of interfering with any liberty that ought to be respected. It is a question of the protection of public morals, of public decency, and of the rights of property. It is a question of the rescue of human beings--our fellow-citizens--from ignorance, vice, and wretchedness. It is a question of making us as a nation right with ourselves, and making citizenship under our flag something to be prized by every one entitled to claim it. It is not in the cities only that undesirable elements cluster. The editor of a lively little periodical, in which many true things are said with great force--The Philistine--has lately declared that his own village, despite the refining influences radiated from the "Roycroft Shop," could furnish a band of hoodlum youths that could give points in every form of vile behavior to any equal number gathered from a great city. He hints that New England villages may be a trifle better, but that the farther Western States are decidedly worse. It is precisely in New England, however, that a bitter cry on this very subject of hoodlumism has lately been raised. What are we to do about it? Manifestly the hoodlum or incipient tramp is one of two things: either he is a person whom a suitable education might have turned into some decent and honest way of earning a living, or he is a person upon whom, owing to congenital defect, all educational effort would have been thrown away. In either case social duty seems plain. If education would have done the work, society--seeing that it has taken the business of public education in hand--should have supplied the education required for the purpose, even though the amount of money available for waging war in the Philippines had been slightly reduced. If the case is one in which no educational effort is of avail, then, as the old Roman formula ran, "Let the magistrates see that the republic takes no harm." Before, therefore, our minds can be easy on this hoodlum question, we must satisfy ourselves thoroughly that our modes of education are not, positively or negatively, adapted to making the hoodlum variety of character. The hoodlum, it is safe to say, is an individual in whom no intellectual interest has ever been awakened, in whom no special capacity has ever been created. His moral nature has never been taught to respond to any high or even respectable principle of conduct. If there is any glory in earth or heaven, any beauty or harmony in the operations of natural law, any poetry or pathos or dignity in human life, anything to stir the soul in the records of human achievement, to all such things he is wholly insensible. Ought this to be so in the case of any human being, not absolutely abnormal, whom the state has undertaken to educate? If, as a community, we put our hands to the educational plow, and so far not only relieve parents of a large portion of their sense of responsibility, but actually suppress the voluntary agencies that would otherwise undertake educational work, surely we should see to it that our education educates. Direct moral instruction in the schools is not likely to be of any great avail unless, by other and indirect means, the mind is prepared to receive it. What is needed is to awaken a sense of capacity and power, to give to each individual some trained faculty and some direct and, as far as it goes, scientific cognizance of things. Does any one suppose that a youth who had gone through a judicious course of manual training, or one who had become interested in any such subject as botany, chemistry, or agriculture, or who even had an intelligent insight into the elementary laws of mechanics, could develop into a hoodlum? On the other hand, there is no difficulty in imagining that such a development might take place in a youth who had simply been plied with spelling-book, grammar, and arithmetic. Even what seem the most interesting reading lessons fall dead upon minds that have no hold upon the reality of things, and no sense of the distinctions which the most elementary study of Nature forces on the attention. But, as we have admitted, there may be cases where the nature of the individual is such as to repel all effort for its improvement. Here the law must step in, and secure the community against the dangers to which the existence of such individuals exposes it. There is a certain element in the population which wishes to live, and is determined to live, on a level altogether below anything that can be called civilization. Those who compose it are nomadic and predatory in their habits, and occasionally give way to acts of fearful criminality. It is foolish not to recognize the fact, and take the measures that may be necessary for the isolation of this element. To devise and execute such measures is a burden a thousand times better worth taking up than the burden of imposing our yoke upon the Philippine Islands and crushing out a movement toward liberty quite as respectable, to all outward appearance, as that to which we have reared monuments at Bunker Hill and elsewhere. The fact is, the work before us at home is immense; and it is work which we might attack, not only without qualms of conscience, but with the conviction that every unit of labor devoted to it was being directed toward the highest interests not of the present generation only, but of generations yet unborn. The "white man," we trust, will some day see it; but meanwhile valuable time is being lost, and the national conscience is being lowered by the assumption of burdens that are _not_ ours, whatever Mr. Kipling may have said or sung, or whatever Governor Roosevelt may assert on his word as a soldier. _SPECIALIZATION._ That division of labor is as necessary in the pursuit of science as in the world of industry no one would think of disputing; but that, like division of labor elsewhere, it has its drawbacks and dangers is equally obvious. When the latter truth is insisted on by those who are not recognized as experts, the experts are apt to be somewhat contemptuous in resenting such interference, as they consider it. An expert himself has, however, taken up the parable, and his words merit attention. We refer to an address delivered by Prof. J. Arthur Thompson, at the University of Aberdeen, upon entering on his duties as Regius Professor of Natural History, a post to which he was lately appointed. "We need to be reminded," he said, "amid the undoubted and surely legitimate fascinations of dissection and osteology, of section cutting and histology, of physiological chemistry and physiological physics, of embryology and fossil hunting, and the like, that the chief end of our study is a better understanding of living creatures in their natural surroundings." He could see no reason, he went on to say, for adding aimlessly to the overwhelming mass of detail already accumulated in these and other fields of research. The aim of our efforts should rather be to grasp the chief laws of growth and structure, and to rise to a true conception of the meaning of organization. The tendency to over-specialization is manifest everywhere; it may be traced in physics and chemistry, in mathematics, in archæology, and in philology, as well as in biology. We can not help thinking that there is a certain narcotic influence arising from the steady accumulation of minute facts, so that what was in the first place, and in its early stages, an invigorating pursuit becomes not only an absorbing, but more or less a benumbing passion. We are accustomed to profess great admiration for Browning's Grammarian, who-- "Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic _De_ Dead from the waist down," but really we don't feel quite sure that the cause for which the old gentleman struggled was quite worthy of such desperate heroism. The world could have got along fairly well for a while with an imperfect knowledge of the subtle ways of the "enclitic _De_," and indeed a large portion of the world has neither concerned itself with the subject nor felt the worse for not having done so. What we fear is that some people are "dead from the waist down," or even from higher up, without being aware of it, and all on account of a furious passion for "enclitic de's" or their equivalent in other lines of study. Gentlemen, it is not worth while! You can not all hope to be buried on mountain tops like the grammarian, for there are not peaks enough for all of you, and any way what good would it do you? There is need of specialization, of course; we began by saying that the drift of our remarks is simply this, that he who would go into minute specializing should be careful to lay in at the outset a good stock of common sense, a liberal dose (if he can get it) of humor, and _quantum suff_. of humanity. Thus provided he can go ahead. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. The comparison between the United States in 1790 and Australia in 1891, with which Mr. _A. F. Weber_ opens his essay on _The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century_[10] well illustrates how the tendency of population toward agglomeration in cities is one of the most striking social phenomena of the present age. Both countries were in nearly a corresponding state of development at the time of bringing them into the comparison. The population of the United States in 1790 was 3,929,214; that of Australia in 1891 was 3,809,895; while 3.14 per cent of the people of the United States were then living in cities of ten thousand or more inhabitants, 33.20 per cent of the Australians are now living in such cities. Similar conditions or the tendency toward them are evident in nearly every country of the world. What are the forces that have produced the shifting of population thus indicated; what the economic, moral, political, and social consequences of it; and what is to be the attitude of the publicist, the statesman, and the teacher toward the movement, are questions which Mr. Weber undertakes to discuss. The subject is a very complicated and intricate one, with no end of puzzles in it for the careless student, and requiring to be viewed in innumerable shifting lights, showing the case in changing aspects; for in the discussion lessons are drawn by the author from every country in the family of nations. Natural causes--variations in climate, soil, earth formation, political institutions, etc.--partly explain the distribution of population, but only partly. It sometimes contradicts what would be deduced from them. Increase and improvement in facilities for communication help the expansion of commercial and industrial centers, but also contribute to the scattering of population over wider areas. The most potent factors in attracting people to the cities were, in former times, the commercial facilities they afforded, with opportunities to obtain employment in trade, and are now the opportunities for employment in trade and in manufacturing industries. The cities, however, do not grow merely by accretions from the outside, but they also enjoy a new element of natural growth within themselves in the greater certainty of living and longer duration of life brought about by improved management and ease of living in them, especially by improved sanitation, and it is only in the nineteenth century that any considerable number of cities have had a regular surplus of births over deaths. Migration cityward is not an economic phenomenon peculiar to the nineteenth century, but is shown by the study of the social statistics and the bills of mortality of the past to have been always a factor important enough to be a subject of special remark. It is, however, a very lively one now, and "in the immediate future we may expect to see a continuation of the centralizing movement; while many manufacturers are locating their factories in the small cities and towns, there are other industries that prosper most in the great cities. Commerce, moreover, emphatically favors the great centers rather than the small or intermediate centers." In examining the structure of city populations, a preponderance of the female sex appears, and is explained by the accentuated liability of men over women in cities to death from dangers of occupation, vice, crime, and excesses of all kinds. There are also present in the urban population a relatively larger number of persons in the active period of life, whence an easier and more animated career, more energy and enterprise, more radicalism and less conservatism, and more vice, crime, and impulsiveness generally may be expected. Of foreign immigrants, the least desirable class are most prone to remain in the great cities; and with the decline of railway building and the complete occupation of the public lands the author expects that immigrants in the future will disperse less readily than in the past, but in the never-tiring energy of American enterprise this may not prove to be the case. As to occupation, the growth of cities is found to favor the development of a body of artisans and factory workmen, as against the undertaker and employer, and "that the class of day laborers is relatively small in the cities is reason for rejoicing." It is found "emphatically true that the growth of cities not only increases a nation's economic power and energy, but quickens the national pulse.... A progressive and dynamic civilization implies the good and bad alike. The cities, as the foci of progress, inevitably contain both." The development of suburban life, stimulated by the railroad and the trolley, and the transference of manufacturing industries to the suburbs, are regarded as factors of great promise for the amelioration of the recognized evils of city life and for the solution of some of the difficulties it offers and the promotion of its best results. [10] The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century. A Study in Statistics. By Adna Ferrln Weber. (Columbia University Studies In History, Economics, and Public Law.) New York: Published for Columbia University by the Macmillan Company. Pp. 495. Price, $3.50. * * * * * DR. _James K. Crook_, author of _The Mineral Waters of the United States and their Therapeutic Uses_,[11] accepts it as proved by centuries of experience that in certain disorders the intelligent use of mineral waters is a more potent curative agency than drugs. He believes that Americans have within their own borders the close counterparts of the best foreign springs, and that in charms of scenery and surroundings, salubrity of climate and facilities for comfort, many of our spas will compare as resorts with the most highly developed ones of Europe. The purpose of the present volume is to set forth the qualities and attractions of American springs, of which we have a large number and variety, and the author has aimed to present the most complete and advanced work on the subject yet prepared. To make it so, he has carefully examined all the available literature on the subject, has addressed letters of inquiry to proprietors and other persons cognizant of spring resorts and commercial springs, and has made personal visits. While a considerable number of the 2,822 springs enumerated by Dr. A. C. Peale in his report to the United States Geological Survey have dropped out through non-use or non-development, more than two hundred mineral-spring localities are here described for the first time in a book of this kind. Every known variety of mineral water is represented. The subject is introduced by chapters on what might be called the science of mineral waters and their therapeutic uses, including the definition, the origin of mineral waters, and the sources whence they are mineralized; the classification, the discussion of their value, and mode of action; their solid and gaseous components; their therapeutics or applications to different disorders; and baths and douches and their medicinal uses. The springs are then described severally by States. The treatise on potable waters in the appendix is brief, but contains much. [11] Mineral Waters of the United States and their Therapeutic Uses, with an Account of the Various Mineral Spring Localities, their Advantages as Health Resorts, Means of Access, etc.; to which is added an Appendix on Potable Waters. By James K. Crook. New York and Philadelphia: Lea Brothers & Co. Pp. 588. Price, $3.50. GENERAL NOTICES. In _Every-Day Butterflies_[12] Mr. _Scudder_ relates the story of the very commonest butterflies--"those which every rambler at all observant sees about him at one time or another, inciting his curiosity or pleasing his eye." The sequence of the stories is mainly the order of appearance of the different subjects treated--which the author compares to the flowers in that each kind has its own season for appearing in perfect bloom, both together variegating the landscape in the open season of the year. This order of description is modified occasionally by the substitution of a later appearance for the first, when the butterfly is double or triple brooded. As illustrations are furnished of each butterfly discussed, it is not necessary that the descriptions should be long and minute, hence they are given in brief and general terms. But it must be remembered that the describer is a thorough master of his subject, and also a master in writing the English language, so that nothing will be found lacking in his descriptions. They are literature as well as butterfly history. Of the illustrations, all of which are good, a considerable number are in colors. [12] Every-Day Butterflies. A Group of Biographies. By Samuel Hubbard Scudder. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 386. Price. $2. Dr. _M. E. Gellé's_ _L'Audition et ses Organes_[13] (The Hearing and its Organs) is a full, not over-elaborate treatise on the subject, in which prominence is given to the physiological side. The first part treats of the excitant of the sense of hearing--sonorous vibrations--including the vibrations themselves, the length of the vibratory phenomena, the intensity of sound, range of audition, tone, and timbre of sounds. The second chapter relates to the organs of hearing, both the peripheric organs and the acoustic centers, the anatomy of which is described in detail, with excellent and ample illustrations. The third chapter is devoted to the sensation of hearing under its various aspects--the time required for perception, "hearing in school," the influence of habit and attention, orientation of the sound, bilateral sensations, effects on the nervous centers, etc., hearing of musical sounds, oscillations and aberrations of hearing, auditive memory, obsessions, hallucinations of the ear, and colored audition. [13] L'Audition et ses Organes. By Dr. M. E. Gellé. Paris: Félix Alcan (Bibliothèque Scientifique). Pp. 326. Price, six francs. Prof. _Andrew C. McLaughlin's History of the American Nation_[14] has many features to recommend it. It aims to trace the main outlines of national development, and to show how the American people came to be what they are. These outlines involve the struggle of European powers for supremacy in the New World, the victory of England, the growth of the English colonies and their steady progress in strength and self-reliance till they achieved their independence, the development of the American idea of government, its extension across the continent and its influence abroad--all achieved in the midst of stirring events, social, political, and moral, at the cost sometimes of wars, and accompanied by marvelous growth in material prosperity and political power. All this the author sets forth, trying to preserve the balance of the factors, in a pleasing, easy style. Especial attention is paid to political facts, to the rise of parties, to the development of governmental machinery, and to questions of government and administration. In industrial history those events have been selected for mention which seem to have had the most marked effect on the progress and make-up of the nation. It is to be desired that more attention had been given to social aspects and changes in which the development has not been less marked and stirring than in the other departments of our history. Indeed, the field for research and exposition here is extremely wide and almost infinitely varied, and it has hardly yet begun to be worked, and with any fullness only for special regions. When he comes to recent events, Professor McLaughlin naturally speaks with caution and in rather general terms. It seems to us, however, that in the matter of the war with Spain, without violating any of the proprieties, he might have given more emphasis to the anxious efforts of that country to comply with the demands of the administration for the institution of reforms in Cuba; and, in the interest of historical truth, he ought not to have left unmentioned the very important fact that the Spanish Government offered to refer the questions growing out of the blowing up of the Maine to arbitration and abide by the result, and our Government made no answer to the proposition. [14] A History of the American Nation. By Andrew C. McLaughlin. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 587. Price, $1.40. Mr. _W. W. Campbell's Elements of Practical Astronomy_[15] is an evolution. It grew out of the lessons of his experience in teaching rather large classes in astronomy in the University of Michigan, by which he was led to the conclusion that the extensive treatises on the subject could not be used satisfactorily except in special cases. Brief lecture notes were employed in preference. These were written out and printed for use in the author's classes. The first edition of the book made from them was used in several colleges and universities having astronomical departments of high character. The work now appears, slightly enlarged, in a second edition. In the present greatly extended field of practical astronomy numerous special problems arise, which require prolonged efforts on the part of professional astronomers. While for the discussion of the methods employed in solving such problems the reader is referred to special treatises and journals, these methods are all developed from the _elements_ of astronomy and the related sciences, of which it is intended that this book shall contain the elements of practical astronomy, with numerous references to the problems first requiring solution. The author believes that the methods of observing employed are illustrations of the best modern practice. [15] The Elements of Practical Astronomy. By W. W. Campbell. Second edition, revised and enlarged. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 264. Price, $2. In _The Characters of Crystals_[16] Prof. _Alfred J. Moses_ has attempted to describe, simply and concisely, the methods and apparatus used in studying the physical characters of crystals, and to record and explain the observed phenomena without complex mathematical discussions. The first part of the book relates to the geometrical characteristics of crystals, or the relations and determination of their forms, including the spherical projection, the thirty-two classes of forms, the measurement of crystal angles, and crystal projection or drawing. The optical characters and their determination are the subject of the second part. In the third part the thermal, magnetic, and electrical characters and the characters dependent upon electricity (elastic and permanent deformations) are treated of. A suggested outline of a course in physical crystallography is added, which includes preliminary experiments with the systematic examination of the crystals of any substance, and corresponds with the graduate course in physical crystallography given in Columbia University. The book is intended to be useful to organic chemists, geologists, mineralogists, and others interested in the study of crystals. The treatment is necessarily technical. [16] The Characters of Crystals. An Introduction to Physical Crystallography. By Alfred J. Moses. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company. Pp. 211. Price, $2. A book describing the _Practical Methods of identifying Minerals in Rock Sections with the Microscope_[17] has been prepared by Mr. _L. McI. Luquer_ to ease the path of the student inexperienced in optical mineralogy by putting before him only those facts which are absolutely necessary for the proper recognition and identification of the minerals in thin sections. The microscopic and optical characters of the minerals are recorded in the order in which they would be observed with a petrographical microscope; when the sections are opaque, attention is called to the fact, and the characters are recorded as seen with incident light. The order of Rosenbusch, which is based on the symmetry of the crystalline form, is followed, with a few exceptions made for convenience. In an introductory chapter a practical elementary knowledge of optics as applied to optical mineralogy is attempted to be given, without going into an elaborate discussion of the subject. The petrographical microscope is described in detail. The application of it to the investigation of mineral characteristics is set forth in general and as to particular minerals. The preparation of sections and practical operations are described, and an optical scheme is appended, with the minerals grouped according to their common optical characters. [17] Minerals in Rock Sections; the Practical Method of identifying Minerals in Rock Sections with the Microscope. Especially arranged for Students in Scientific Schools. By Lea McIlvaine Luquer. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company. Pp. 117. Mr. _Herbert C. Whitaker's_ _Elements of Trigonometry_[18] is concise and of very convenient size for use. The introduction and the first five of the seven chapters have been prepared for the use of beginners. The other two chapters concern the properties of triangles and spherical triangles; an appendix presents the theory of logarithms; and a second appendix, treating of goniometry, complex quantities, and complex functions, has been added for students intending to take up work in higher departments of mathematics. For assisting a clearer understanding of the several processes, the author has sought to associate closely with every equation a definite meaning with reference to a diagram. Other characteristics of the book are the practical applications to mechanics, surveying, and other everyday problems; its many references to astronomical problems, and the constant use of geometry as a starting point and standard. [18] Elements of Trigonometry, with Tables. By Herbert C. Whitaker. Philadelphia: Eldredge & Brother. Pp. 200. A model in suggestions for elementary teaching is offered in _California Plants in their Homes_,[19] by _Alice Merritt Davidson_, formerly of the State Normal School, California. The book consists of two parts, a botanical reader for children and a supplement for the use of teachers, both divisions being also published in separate volumes. It is well illustrated, provided with an index and an outline of lessons adapted to different grades. The treatment of each theme is fresh, and the grouping novel, as is indicated by the chapter headings: Some Plants that lead Easy Lives, Plants that know how to meet Hard Times, Plants that do not make their own Living, Plants with Mechanical Genius. Although specially designed for the study of the flora of southern California, embodying the results of ten years' observation by the author, it may be recommended to science teachers in any locality as an excellent guide. The pupil in this vicinity will have to forego personal inspection of the shooting-star and mariposa lily, while he finds the century plant, yuccas, and cacti domiciled in the greenhouse. In addition to these, however, attention is directed to a sufficient number of familiar flowers, trees, ferns, and fungi for profitable study, and the young novice in botany can scarcely make a better beginning than in company with this skillful instructor. [19] California Plants in their Homes. By Alice Merritt Davidson. Los Angeles, Cal.: B .R. Baumgardt & Co. Pp. 215-133. * * * * * Prof. _John M. Coulter's Plant Relations_[20] is one of two parts of a system of teaching botany proposed by the author. Each of the two books is to represent the work of half a year, but each is to be independent of the other, and they may be used in either order. The two books relate respectively, as a whole, to ecology, or the life relations of surroundings of plants, and to their morphology. The present volume concerns the ecology. While it may be to the disadvantage of presenting ecology first, that it conveys no knowledge of plant structures and plant groups, this disadvantage is compensated for, in the author's view, by the facts that the study of the most evident life relations gives a proper conception of the place of plants in Nature; that it offers a view of the plant kingdom of the most permanent value to those who can give but a half year to botany; and that it demands little or no use of the compound microscope, an instrument ill adapted to first contacts with Nature. The book is intended to present a connected, readable account of some of the fundamental facts of botany, and also to serve as a supplement to the three far more important factors of the teacher, who must amplify and suggest at every point; the laboratory, which must bring the pupil face to face with plants and their structure; and field work, which must relate the facts observed in the laboratory to their actual place in Nature, and must bring new facts to notice which can be observed nowhere else. Taking the results obtained from these three factors, the book seeks to organize them, and to suggest explanations, through a clear, untechnical, compact text and appropriate and excellent illustrations. [20] Plant Relations. A First Book of Botany. By John M. Coulter. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (Twentieth Century Text Books.) Pp. 264. Price, $1.10. The title of _The Wilderness of Worlds_[21] was suggested to the author by the contemplation of a wilderness of trees, in which those near him are very large, while in the distance they seem successively smaller, and gradually fade away till the limit of vision is reached. So of the wilderness of worlds in space, with its innumerable stars of gradually diminishing degrees of visibility--worlds "of all ages like the trees, and the great deep of space is covered with their dust, and pulsating with the potency of new births." The body of the book is a review of the history of the universe and all that is of it, in the light of the theory of evolution, beginning with the entities of space, time, matter, force, and motion, and the processes of development from the nebulæ as they are indicated by the most recent and best verified researches, and terminating with the ultimate extinction of life and the end of the planet. In the chapter entitled A Vision of Peace the author confronts religion and science. He regards the whole subject from the freethinker's point of view, with a denial of all agency of the supernatural. [21] The Wilderness of Worlds. A Popular Sketch of the Evolution of Matter from Nebula to Man and Return. The Life-Orbit of a Star. By George W. Morehouse. New York: Peter Eckler. Pp. 246. Price, $1. In a volume entitled _The Living Organism_[22] Mr. _Alfred Earl_ has endeavored to make a philosophical introduction to the study of biology. The closing paragraph of his preface is of interest as showing his views regarding vitalism: "The object of the book will be attained if it succeeds, although it may be chiefly by negative criticism, in directing attention to the important truth that, though chemical and physical changes enter largely into the composition of vital activity, there is much in the living organism that is outside the range of these operations." The first three chapters discuss general conceptions, and are chiefly psychology. A discussion of the structures accessory to alimentation in man and the higher animals occupies Chapters IV and V. The Object of Classification, Certain General Statements concerning Organisms, A Description of the Organism as related to its Surroundings, The Material Basis of Life, The Organism as a Chemical Aggregate and as a Center for the Transformation of Energy, Certain Aspects of Form and Development, The Meaning of Sensation, and, finally, Some of the Problems presented by the Organism, are the remaining chapter headings. The volume contains many interesting suggestions, and might perhaps most appropriately be described as a Theoretical Biology. [22] The Living Organism. By Alfred Earl, M. A. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 271. Price, $1.75. "_Stars and Telescopes_,"[23] Professor _Todd_ says, "is intended to meet an American demand for a plain, unrhetorical statement of the astronomy of to-day." We might state the purpose to be to bring astronomy and all that pertains to it up to date. It is hard to do this, for the author has been obliged to put what was then the latest discovery, made while the book was going through the press, in a footnote at the end of the preface. The information embodied in the volume is comprehensive, and is conveyed in a very intelligible style. The treatise begins with a running commentary or historical outline of astronomical discovery, with a rigid exclusion of all detail. The account of the earth and moon is followed by chapters on the Calendar and the Astronomical Relations of Light. The other members of the solar system are described and their relations reviewed, and then the comets and the stars. Closely associated with these subjects are the men who have contributed to knowledge respecting them, and consequently the names of the great discoverers and others who have helped in the advancement of astronomy are introduced in immediate connection with their work, in brief sketches and often with their portraits. Much importance is attributed by Professor Todd to the instruments with which astronomical discovery is carried on, and the book may be said to culminate in an account of the famous instruments, their construction, mounting, and use. The devisers of these instruments are entitled to more credit than the unthinking are always inclined to give them, for the value of an observation depends on the accuracy of the instrument as well as on the skill of the observer, and the skill which makes the instrument accurate is not to be underrated. So the makers of the instruments are given their place. Then the recent and improved processes have to be considered, and, altogether, Professor Todd has found material for a full and somewhat novel book, and has used it to good advantage. [23] Stars and Telescopes A Handbook of Popular Astronomy. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Pp. 419. Price, $2. _Some Observations on the Fundamental Principles of Nature_ is the title of an essay by _Henry Witt_, which, though very brief, takes the world of matter, mind, and society within its scope. One of the features of the treatment is that instead of the present theory of an order of things resulting from the condensation of more rarefied matter, one of the organization of converging waves of infinitesimal atoms filling all space is substituted. With this point prominently in view, the various factors and properties of the material universe--biology, psychology, sociology, ethics, and the future--are treated of. Among the later monographs published by the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, is a paper in the Geological Series (No. 3) on _The Ores of Colombia, from Mines in Operation in 1892_, by _H. W. Nichols_. It describes the collection prepared for the Columbian Exposition by F. Pereira Gamba and afterward given to the museum--a collection which merits attention for the light it throws upon the nature and mode of occurrence of the ores of one of the most important gold-producing countries of the world, and also because it approaches more nearly than is usual the ideal of what a collection in economic geology should be. Other publications in the museum's Geological Series are _The Mylagauldæ, an Extinct Family of Sciuromorph Rodents_ (No. 4), by _E. S. Riggs_, describing some squirrel-like animals from the Deep River beds, near White Sulphur Springs, Montana; _A Fossil Egg from South Dakota_ (No. 5), by _O. C. Farrington_, relative to the egg of an anatine bird from the early Miocene; and _Contributions to the Paleontology of the Upper Cretaceous Series_ (No. 6), by _W. N. Logan_, in which seven species of _Scaphites_, _Ostrea_, _Gasteropoda_, and corals are described. In the Zoölogical Series, _Preliminary Descriptions of New Rodents from the Olympic Mountains_ (of Washington) (No. 11), by _D. G. Elliot_, relates to six species; _Notes on a Collection of Cold-blooded Vertebrates from the Olympic Mountains_ (No. 12), by _S. E. Meek_, to six trout and three other fish, four amphibia, and three reptiles; and a _Catalogue of Mammals from the Olympic Mountains, Washington_, with descriptions of new species (No. 13), by _D. G. Elliot_, includes a number of species of rodents, lynx, bear, and deer. _Some Notes on Chemical Jurisprudence_ is the title given by _Harwood Huntington_ (260 West Broadway, New York; 25 cents) to a brief digest of patent-law cases involving chemistry. The notes are designed to be of use to chemists intending to take out patents by presenting some of the difficulties attendant upon drawing up a patent strong enough to stand a lawsuit, and by explaining some points of law bearing on the subject. In most, if not all, cases where the chemist has devised a new method or application it is best, the author holds, to take out a patent for self-protection, else the inventor may find his device stolen from him and patented against him. A cave or fissure in the Cambrian limestone of Port Kennedy, Montgomery County, Pa., exposed by quarrymen the year before, was brought to the knowledge of geologists by Mr. Charles M. Wheatley in 1871, when the fossils obtained from it were determined by Prof. E. D. Cope as of thirty-four species. Attention was again called to the paleontological interest of the locality by President Dixon, of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, in 1894. The fissure was examined again by Dr. Dixon and others, and was more thoroughly explored by Mr. Henry C. Mercer. Mr. Mercer published a preliminary account of the work, which was followed by the successive studies of the material by Professor Cope preliminary to a complete and illustrated report to be made after a full investigation of all accessible material. Professor Cope did not live to publish this full report, which was his last work, prepared during the suffering of his final illness. It is now published, just as the author left it, as _Vertebrate Remains from the Port Kennedy Deposit_, from the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Four plates of illustrations, photographed from the remains, accompany the text. The machinery of Mr. _Fred A. Lucas's_ story of _The Hermit Naturalist_ reminds us of that of the old classical French romances, like Télémaque, and the somewhat artificial, formal diction is not dissimilar. An accident brings the author into acquaintance and eventual intimacy with an old Sicilian naturalist, who, migrating to this country, has established a home, away from the world's life, on an island in the Delaware River. The two find a congenial subject of conversation in themes of natural history, and the bulk of the book is in effect a running discourse by the old Sicilian on snakes and their habits--a valuable and interesting lesson. The hermit has a romance, involving the loss of his motherless daughter, stolen by brigands and brought to America, his long search for her and resignation of hope, and her ultimate discovery and restoration to him. The book is of easy reading, both as to its natural history and the romance. We have two papers before us on the question of expansion. One is an address delivered by John Barrett, late United States Minister to Siam, before the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce, and previous to the beginning of the attempt to subjugate the islands, on _The Philippine Islands and American Interests in the Far East_. This address has, we believe, been since followed by others, and in all Mr. Barrett favors the acquisition of the Philippine Islands on the grounds, among others, of commercial interests and the capacity of the Filipinos for development in further civilization and self-government; but his arguments, in the present aspect of the Philippine question, seem to us to bear quite as decidedly in the opposite direction. He gives the following picture of Aguinaldo and the Filipino government: "He (Aguinaldo) captured all Spanish garrisons on the island of Luzon outside of Manila, so that when the Americans were ready to proceed against the city they were not delayed and troubled with a country campaign. Moreover, he has organized a government which has practically been administering the affairs of the great island since the American occupation of Manila, and which is certainly better than the former administration; he has a properly formed Cabinet and Congress, the members of which, in appearance and manners, would compare favorably with Japanese statesmen. He has among his advisers men of ability as international lawyers, while his supporters include most of the prominent educated and wealthy natives, all of which prove possibilities of self-government that we must consider." This pamphlet is published at Hong Kong. The other paper is an address delivered before the New York State Bar Association, by _Charles A. Gardiner_, on _Our Right to acquire and hold Foreign Territory_, and is published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in the Questions of the Day Series. Mr. Gardiner holds and expresses the broadest views of the constitutional power of our Government to commit the acts named, and to exercise all the attributes incidental to the possession of acquired territory, but he thinks that we need a great deal of legal advice in the matter. A pamphlet, _Anti-Imperialism_, by _Morrison L. Swift_, published by the Public Ownership Review, Los Angeles, Cal., covers the subject of English and American aggression in three chapters--Imperialism to bless the Conquered, Imperialism for the Sake of Mankind, and Our Crime in the Philippines. Mr. Swift is very earnest in respect to some of the subjects touched upon in his essays, and some persons may object that he is more forcible--even to excess--than polite in his denunciations. To such he may perhaps reply that there are things which language does not afford words too strong to characterize fitly. Among the papers read at the Fourth International Catholic Scientific Congress, held at Fribourg, Switzerland, in August, 1897, was one by _William J. D. Croke_ on _Architecture, Painting, and Printing at Subiaco_ as represented in the Abbey at Subiaco. The author regards the features of the three arts represented in this place as evidence that the record of the activity of the foundation constitutes a real chapter in the history of progress in general and of culture in particular. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Benson, E. F. Mammon & Co. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 360. $1.50. Buckley, James A. Extemporaneous Oratory. For Professional and Amateur Speakers. New York: Eaton & Mains. Pp. 480. $1.50. Canada, Dominion of, Experimental Farms: Reports for 1897. Pp. 449; Reports for 1898. Pp. 429. Conn, H. W. The Story of Germ Life. (Library of Useful Stories.) New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 199. 40 cents. Dana, Edward S. First Appendix to the Sixth Edition of Dana's Mineralogy. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 75. $1. Franklin Institute, The Drawing School, also School of Elementary Mathematics: Announcements. Pp. 4 each. Ganong, William F. The Teaching Botanist. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 270. $1.10. Getman, F. H. The Elements of Blowpipe Analysis. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 77. 60 cents. Halliday, H. M. An Essay on the Common Origin of Light, Heat, and Electricity. Washington, D. C. Pp. 46. Hardin, Willett L. The Rise and Development of the Liquefaction of Gases. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 250. $1.10. Hillegas, Howard C. Oom Paul's People. A Narrative of the British-Boer Troubles in South Africa, with a History of the Boers, the Country, and its Institutions. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 308. $1.50. Ireland, Alleyne. Tropical Colonization. An Introduction to the Study of the Subject. New York: The Macmillan Company. $2. Kingsley, J. S. Text-Book of Elementary Zoölogy. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 439. Knerr, E. B. Relativity in Science. Silico-Barite Nodules from near Salina. Concretions. (Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science.) Pp. 24. Krõmskõp, Color Photography. Philadelphia: Ives Krõmskõp. Pp. 24. Liquid-Air Power and Automobile Company. Prospectus. Pp. 16. MacBride, Thomas A. The North American Slime Molds. Being a List of Species of Myxomycetes hitherto described from North America, Including Central America. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 231, with 18 plates. $2.25. Meyer, A. B. The Distribution of the Negritos in the Philippine Islands and Elsewhere. Dresden (Saxony): Stengel & Co. Pp. 92. Nicholson, H. H., and Avery, Samuel. Laboratory Exercises with Outlines for the Study of Chemistry, to accompany any Elementary Text. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 134. 60 cents. Scharff, R. P. The History of the European Fauna. New York: Imported by Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 354. $1.50. Schleicher, Charles, and Schull, Duren. Rhenish Prussia. Samples of Special Filtering Papers. New York: Eimer & Amend, agents. Sharpe, Benjamin F. An Advance in Measuring and Photographing Sounds. United States Weather Bureau. Pp. 18, with plates. Shinn, Milicent W. Notes on the Development of a Child. Parts III and IV. (University of California Studies.) Pp. 224. Shoemaker, M. M. Quaint Corners of Ancient Empires, Southern India, Burmah, and Manila. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 212. Smith, Orlando J. A Short View of Great Questions. New York: The Brandur Company, 220 Broadway. Pp. 75. Smith, Walter. Methods of Knowledge. An Essay in Epistemology. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 340. $1.25. Southern, The, Magazine. Monthly. Vol. I, No. 1. August, 1899. Pp. 203. 10 cents. $1 a year. Suter, William N. Handbook of Optics. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 209. $1. Tarde, G. Social Laws. An Outline of Sociology. With a Preface by James Mark Baldwin. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 213. $1.25. Uline, Edwin B. Higinbothamia. A New Genus, and other New Dioscoreaceæ, New Amaranthaceæ. (Field Columbian Museum, Chicago Botanical Series.) Pp. 12. Underwood, Lucien M. Molds, Mildews, and Mushrooms. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 227, with 9 plates. $1.50. United States Civil-Service Commission. Fifteenth Report, July 1, 1897, to June 30, 1898. Pp. 736. Washington. Fragments of Science. The Dover Meeting of the British Association.--While the attendance on the meeting of the British Association at Dover was not large--the whole number of members being 1,403, of whom 127 were ladies--the occasion was in other respects eventful and one of marked interest. The papers read were, as a rule, of excellent quality, and the interchange of visits with the French Association was a novel feature that might bear many repetitions. The president, Sir Michael Foster, presented, in his inaugural address, a picture of the state of science one hundred years ago, illustrating it by portraying the conditions to which a body like the association meeting then at Dover would have found itself subject, and suggesting the topics it would have discussed. The period referred to was, however, that of the beginning of the present progress, and, after remarking on what had been accomplished in the interval, the speaker drew a very hopeful foreview for the future. Besides the intellectual triumphs of science, its strengthening discipline, its relation to politics, and the "international brotherhood of science" were brought under notice in the address. In his address as president of the Physical Section, Prof. J. H. Poynting showed how physicists are tending toward a general agreement as to the nature of the laws in which they embody their discoveries, of the explanations they give, and of the hypotheses they make, and, having considered what the form and terms of this agreement should be, passed to a discussion of the limitations of physical science. The subject of Dr. Horace T. Brown's Chemical Section address was The Assimilation of Carbon by the Higher Plants. Sir William H. White, president of the Section of Mechanical Science, spoke on Steam Navigation at High Speeds. President Adam Sedgwick addressed the Zoölogical Section on Variation and some Phenomena connected with Reproduction and Sex; Sir John Murray, the Geographical Section on The Ocean Floor; and Mr. J. N. Langley, the Physiological Section on the general relations of the motor nerves to the several tissues of the body, especially of those which run to tissues over which we have little or no control. The president of the Anthropological Section, Mr. C. H. Read, of the British Museum, spoke of the preservation and proper exploration of the prehistoric antiquities of the country, and offered a plan for increasing the amount of work done in anthropological investigation by the use of Government aid. A peculiar distinction attaches to this meeting through its reception and entertainment of the French Association, and the subsequent return of the courtesy by the latter body at Boulogne. About three hundred of the French Associationists, among whom were many ladies, came over, on the Saturday of the meeting, under the lead of their president, M. Brouardel, and accompanied by a number of men of science from Belgium. They were met at the pier by the officers of the British Association, and were escorted to the place of meeting and to the sectional meetings toward which their several tastes directed them. The geological address of Sir Archibald Geikie on Geological Time had been appointed for this day out of courtesy to the French geologists, and in order that they might have an opportunity of hearing one of the great lights of British science. Among the listeners who sat upon the platform were M. Gosselet, president of the French Geological Society; M. Kemna, president of the Belgian Geological Society; and M. Rénard, of Ghent. Public evening lectures were delivered on the Centenary of the Electric Current, by Prof. J. A. Fleming, and (in French) on Nervous Vibration, by Prof. Charles Richet. Sir William Turner was appointed president for the Bradford meeting of the association (1900). The visit of the French Association was returned on September 22d, when the president, officers, and about three hundred members went to Boulogne. They were welcomed by the mayor of the city, the prefect of the department, and a representative of the French Government; were feasted by the municipality of Boulogne; were entertained by the members of the French Association; and special commemorative medals were presented by the French Association to the two presidents. The British visitors also witnessed the inauguration of a tablet in memory of Dr. Duchesne, and of a plaque commemorative of Thomas Campbell, the poet, who died in Boulogne. Artificial India Rubber.--A recent issue of the Kew Gardens Bulletin contains an interesting article on Dr. Tilden's artificial production of India rubber. India rubber, or caoutchouc, is chemically a hydrocarbon, but its molecular constitution is unknown. When decomposed by heat it is broken up into simpler hydrocarbons, among which is a substance called isoprene, a volatile liquid boiling at about 36° C. Its molecular formula is C_{5}H_{8}. Dr. Tilden obtained this same substance (isoprene) from oil of turpentine and other terpenes by the action of moderate heat, and then by treating the isoprene with strong acids succeeded, by means of a very slow reaction, in converting a small portion of it into a tough elastic solid, which seems to be identical in properties with true India rubber. This artificial rubber, like the natural, seems to consist of two substances, one of which is more soluble in benzene and carbon bisulphide than the other. It unites with sulphur in the same way as ordinary rubber, forming a tough, elastic compound. In a recent letter Professor Tilden says: "As you may imagine, I have tried everything I can think of as likely to promote this change, but without success. The polymerization proceeds _very_ slowly, occupying, according to my experience, several years, and all attempts to hurry it result in the production not of rubber, but of 'colophene,' a thick, sticky oil quite useless for all purposes to which rubber is applied." Dangers of High Altitudes for Elderly People.--"The public, and sometimes the inexperienced physician--inexperienced not in general therapeutics but in the physiological effects of altitude on a weak heart," says Dr. Findlater Zangger in the Lancet, "make light of a danger they can not understand. But if an altitude of from four thousand to five thousand feet above the sea level puts a certain amount of strain on a normal heart and by a rise of the blood-pressure indirectly also on the small peripheral arteries, must not this action be multiplied in the case of a heart suffering from even an early stage of myocarditis or in the case of arteries with thickened or even calcified walls? It is especially the rapidity of the change from one altitude to another, with differences of from three thousand to four thousand feet, which must be considered. There is a call made on the contractibility of the small arteries on the one hand, and on the amount of muscular force of the heart on the other hand, and if the structures in question can not respond to this call, rupture of an artery or dilatation of the heart may ensue. In the case of a normal condition of the circulatory organs little harm is done beyond some transient discomfort, such as dizziness, buzzing in the ears, palpitation, general _malaise_, and this often only in the case of people totally unaccustomed to high altitudes. For such it is desirable to take the high altitude by degrees in two or three stages, say first stage 1,500 feet, second stage from 2,500 to 3,000 feet, and third stage from 4,000 to 6,000 feet, with a stay of one or two days at the intermediate places. The stay at the health resort will be shortened, it is true, but the patient will derive more benefit. On the return journey one short stay at one intermediate place will suffice. Even a fairly strong heart will not stand an overstrain in the first days spent at a high altitude. A Dutch lady, about forty years of age, who had spent a lifetime in the lowlands, came directly up to Adelboden (altitude, 4,600 feet). After two days she went on an excursion with a party up to an Alp 7,000 feet high, making the ascent quite slowly in four hours. Sudden heart syncope ensued, which lasted the best part of an hour, though I chanced to be near and could give assistance, which was urgently needed. The patient recovered, but derived no benefit from a fortnight's stay, and had to return to the low ground the worse for her trip and her inconsiderate enterprise. Rapid ascents to a high altitude are very injurious to patients with arterio-sclerosis, and the mountain railways up to seven thousand and ten thousand feet are positively dangerous to an unsuspecting public, for many persons between the ages of fifty-five and seventy years consider themselves to be hale and healthy, and are quite unconscious of having advanced arterio-sclerosis and perchance contracted kidney. An American gentleman, aged fifty-eight years, was under my care for slight symptoms of angina pectoris, pointing to sclerosis of the coronary arteries. A two-months' course of treatment at Zurich with massage, baths, and proper exercise and diet did away with all the symptoms. I saw him by chance some months later. 'My son is going to St. Moritz (six thousand feet) for the summer,' said he; 'may I go with him?' 'Most certainly not,' was my answer. The patient then consulted a professor, who allowed him to go. Circumstances, however, took him for the summer to Sachseln, which is situated at an altitude of only two thousand feet, and he spent a good summer. But he must needs go up the Pilatus by rail (seven thousand feet), relying on the professor's permission, and the result was disastrous, for he almost died from a violent attack of angina pectoris on the night of his return from the Pilatus, and vowed on his return to Zurich to keep under three thousand feet in future. I may here mention that bad results in the shape of heart collapse, angina pectoris, cardiac asthma, and last, not least, apoplexy, often occur only on the return to the lowlands." The Parliamentary Amenities Committee.--Under the above rather misleading title there was formed last year, in the English Parliament, a committee for the purpose of promoting concerted action in the preservation and protection of landmarks of general public interest, historic buildings, famous battlefields, and portions of landscape of unusual scenic beauty or geological conformation, and also for the protection from entire extinction of the various animals and even plants which the spread of civilization is gradually pushing to the wall. In reality, it is an official society for the preservation of those things among the works of past man and Nature which, owing to their lack of direct money value, are in danger of destruction in this intensely commercial age. Despite the comparative newness of the American civilization, there are already many relics belonging to the history of our republic whose preservation is very desirable, as well as very doubtful, if some such public-spirited committee does not take the matter in hand; and, as regards the remains of the original Americans, in which the country abounds, the necessity is still more immediate. The official care of Nature's own curiosities is equally needed, as witness the way in which the Hudson River palisades are being mutilated, and the constant raids upon our city parks for speedways, parade grounds, etc. The great value of a parliamentary or congressional committee of this sort lies in the fact that its opinions are not only based upon expert knowledge, but that they can be to an extent enforced; whereas such a body of men with no official position may go on making suggestions and protesting, as have numerous such bodies for years, without producing any practical results. The matter is, with us perhaps, one of more importance to future generations; but as all Nature seems ordered primarily with reference to the future welfare of the race, rather than for the comfort of its present members, the necessity for such an official body, whose specific business should be to look after the preservation of objects of historical interest to the succeeding centuries, ought to be inculcated in us as a part of the general evolutionary scheme. Physical Measurements of Asylum Children.--Dr. Ales Hrdlicka has published an account of anthropological investigations and measurements which he has made upon one thousand white and colored children in the New York Juvenile Asylum and one hundred colored children in the Colored Orphan Asylum, for information about the physical state of the children who are admitted and kept in juvenile asylums, and particularly to learn whether there is anything physically abnormal about them. Some abnormality in the social or moral condition of such children being assumed, if they are also physically inferior to other children, they would have to be considered generally handicapped in the struggle for life; but if they do not differ greatly in strength and constitution from the average ordinary children, then their state would be much more hopeful. Among general facts concerning the condition of the children in the Juvenile Asylum, Dr. Hrdlicka learned that when admitted to the institution they are almost always in some way morally and physically inferior to healthy children from good social classes at large--the result, usually, of neglect or improper nutrition or both. Within a month, or even a week, decided changes for the better are observed, and after their admission the individuals of the same sex and age seem gradually, while preserving the fundamental differences of their nature, to show less of their former diversity and grow more alike. In learning, the newcomers are more or less retarded when put into the school, but in a great majority of cases they begin to acquire rapidly, and the child usually reaches the average standing of the class. Inveterate backwardness in learning is rare. Physically, about one seventh of all the inmates of the asylum were without a blemish on their bodies--a proportion which will not seem small to persons well versed in analyses of the kind. The differences in the physical standing of the boys and the girls were not so great or so general as to permit building a hypothesis upon them, though the girls came out a little the better. The colored boys seemed to be physically somewhat inferior to the white ones, but the number of them was not large enough to justify a conclusion. Of the children not found perfect, two hundred presented only a single abnormality, and this usually so small as hardly to justify excluding them from the class of perfect. Regarding as decidedly abnormal only those in whom one half the parts of the body showed defects, the number was eighty-seven. "Should we, for the sake of illustration, express the physical condition of the children by such terms as fine, medium, and bad, the fine and bad would embrace in all 192 individuals, while 808 would remain as medium." All the classes of abnormalities--congenital, pathological, and acquired--seemed more numerous in the boys than in the girls. The colored children showed fewer inborn abnormalities than the white, but more pathological and acquired. No child was found who could be termed a thorough physical degenerate, and the author concludes that the majority of the class of children dealt with are physically fairly average individuals. Busy Birds.--A close observation of a day's work of busy activity, of a day's work of the chipping sparrow hunting and catching insects to feed its young, is recorded by Clarence M. Weed in a Bulletin of the New Hampshire College Agricultural Experiment Station. Mr. Weed began his watch before full daylight in the morning, ten minutes before the bird got off from its nest, and continued it till after dark. During the busy day Mr. Weed says, in his summary, the parent birds made almost two hundred visits to the nest, bringing food nearly every time, though some of the trips seem to have been made to furnish grit for the grinding of the food. There was no long interval when they were not at work, the longest period between visits being twenty-seven minutes. Soft-bodied caterpillars were the most abundant elements of the food, but crickets and crane flies were also seen, and doubtless a great variety of insects were taken, but precise determination of the quality of most of the food brought was of course impossible. The observations were undertaken especially to learn the regularity of the feeding habits of the adult birds. The chipping sparrow is one of the most abundant and familiar of our birds. It seeks its nesting site in the vicinity of houses, and spends most of its time searching for insects in grass lands or cultivated fields and gardens. In New England two broods are usually reared each season. That the young keep the parents busy catching insects and related creatures for their food is shown by the minute record which the author publishes in his paper. The bird deserves all the protection and encouragement that can be given it. Park-making among the Sand Dunes.--For the creation of Golden Gate Park the park-makers of San Francisco had a series of sand hills, "hills on hills, all of sand-dune formation." The city obtained a strip of land lying between the bay and the ocean, yet close enough to the center of population to be cheaply and easily reached from all parts of the town. Work was begun in 1869, and has been prosecuted steadily since, with increasing appropriations, and the results are a credit to the city, Golden Gate Park, Mr. Frank H. Lamb says in his account of it in The Forester, having a charm that distinguishes it from other city parks. It has a present area of 1,040 acres, of which 300 acres have been sufficiently reclaimed to be planted with coniferous trees." It is this portion of the park which the visitor sees as one of the sights of the Golden Gate." As he rides through the park out toward the Cliff House and Sutro Heights by the Sea," he sees still great stretches of sand, some loose, some still held in place by the long stems and rhizomes of the sand grass (_Arundo arenaria_). This is the preparatory stage in park-making. The method in brief is as follows: The shifting sand is seeded with _Arundo arenaria_, and this is allowed to grow two years, when the ground is sufficiently held in place to begin the second stage of reclamation, which consists in planting arboreal species, generally the Monterey pine (_Pinus insignis_) and the Monterey cypress (_Cupressus macrocarpus_); with these are also planted the smaller _Leptospermum lævigatum_ and _Acacia latifolia_. These species in two or more years complete the reclamation, and then attention is directed to making up all losses of plants and encouraging growth as much as possible." The entire cost of reclamation by these methods is represented not to average more than fifty dollars per acre. A Fossiliferous Formation below the Cambrian.--Mr. George F. Matthew said, in a communication to the New York Academy of Sciences, that he had been aware for several years of the existence of fauna in the rocks below those containing _Paradoxides_ and Protolenus in New Brunswick, eastern Canada, but that the remains of the higher types of organisms found in those rocks were so poorly preserved and fragmentary that they gave a very imperfect knowledge of their nature. Only the casts of _Hyolithidæ_, the mold of an obolus, a ribbed shell, and parts of what appeared to be the arms and bodies of crinoids were known, to assure us that there had been living forms in the seas of that early time other than Protozoa and burrowing worms. These objects were found in the upper division of a series of rocks immediately subjacent to the Cambrian strata containing _Protolenus_, etc. As a decided physical break was discovered between the strata containing them and those having _Protolenus_, the underlying series was thought worthy of a distinctive name, and was called Etchemenian, after a tribe of aborigines that once inhabited the region. In most countries the basement of the Paleozoic sediments seems almost devoid of organic remains. Only unsatisfactory results have followed the search for them in Europe, and America did not seem to promise a much better return. Nevertheless, the indications of a fauna obtained in the maritime provinces of Canada seemed to afford a hope that somewhere "these basement beds of the Paleozoic might yield remains in a better state of preservation." The author, therefore, in the summer of 1898, made a visit to a part of Newfoundland where a clear section of sediments had been found below the horizons of _Paradoxides_ and _Agraulos strenuus_. These formations were examined at Manuel's Brook and Smith's Sound. In the beds defined as Etchemenian no trilobites were found, though other classes of animals, such as gastropods, brachiopods, and lamellibranchs, occur, with which trilobites elsewhere are usually associated in the Cambrian and later geological systems. The absence, or possibly the rarity of the trilobites appears to have special significance in view of their prominence among Cambrian fossils. The uniformity of conditions attending the depositions of the Etchemenian terrane throughout the Atlantic coast province of the Cambrian is spoken of as surprising and as pointing to a quiescent period of long continuance, during which the _Hyolithidæ_ and _Capulidæ_ developed so as to become the dominant types of the animal world, while the brachiopods, the lamellibranchs, and the other gastropods still were puny and insignificant. Mr. Matthew last year examined the red shales at Braintree, Mass., and was informed by Prof. W. O. Crosby that they included many of the types specified as characteristic of the Etchemenian fauna, and that no trilobites had with certainty been obtained from them. The conditions of their deposition closely resemble those of the Etchemenian of Newfoundland. The Paris Exposition, 1900, and Congresses.--The grounds of the Paris Exposition of 1900 extend from the southwest angle of the Place de la Concorde along both banks of the Seine, nearly a mile and a half, to the Avenue de Suffren, which forms the western boundary of the Champ de Mars. The principal exhibition spaces are the Park of the Art palaces and the Esplanade des Invalides at the east, and the Champ de Mars and the Trocadéro at the west. Many entrances and exits will be provided, but the principal and most imposing one will be erected at the Place de la Concorde, in the form of a triumphal arch. Railways will be provided to bring visitors from the city to the grounds, and another railway will make their entire circuit. The total surface occupied by the exposition grounds is three hundred and thirty-six acres, while that of the exposition of 1889 was two hundred and forty acres. Another area has been secured in the Park of Vincennes for the exhibition of athletic games, sports, etc. The displays will be installed for the most part by groups instead of nations. The International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archæology will be held in connection with the exposition, August 20th to August 25th. The arrangements for it are under the charge of a committee that includes the masters and leading representatives of the science in France, of which M. le Dr. Verneau, 148 Rue Broca, Paris, is secretary general. A congress of persons interested in aërial navigation will be held in the Observatory of Meudon, the director of which, M. Janssen, is president of the Organizing Committee. Correspondence respecting this congress should be addressed to the secretary general, M. Triboulet, Director de Journal l'Aeronaute, 10 Rue de la Pepinière, Paris. English Plant Names.--Common English and American names of plants are treated by Britton and Brown, in their Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada, and the British possessions, as full of interest from their origin, history, and significance. As observed in Britton and Holland's Dictionary, "they are derived from a variety of languages, often carrying us back to the early days of our country's history and to the various peoples who, as conquerors or colonists, have landed on our shores and left an impress on our language. Many of these Old-World words are full of poetical association, speaking to us of the thoughts and feelings of the Old-World people who invented them; others tell of the ancient mythology of our ancestors, of strange old mediæval usages, and of superstitions now almost forgotten." Most of these names, Britton and Brown continue in the preface to the third volume of their work, suggest their own explanation. "The greater number are either derived from the supposed uses, qualities, or properties of the plants; many refer to their habitat, appearance, or resemblance, real or fancied, to other things; others come from poetical suggestion, affection, or association with saints or persons. Many are very graphic, as the Western name prairie fire (_Castillea coccinea_); many are quaint or humorous, as cling rascal (_Galium sparine_) or wait-a-bit (_Smilax rotundifolia_); and in some the corruptions are amusing, as Aunt Jerichos (New England) for _Angelica_. The words horse, ox, dog, bull, snake, toad, are often used to denote size, coarseness, worthlessness, or aversion. Devil or devil's is used as a prefix for upward of forty of our plants, mostly expressive of dislike or of some traditional resemblance or association. A number of names have been contributed by the Indians, such as chinquapin, wicopy, pipsissewa, wankapin, etc., while the term Indian, evidently a favorite, is applied as a descriptive prefix to upward of eighty different plants." There should be no antagonism in the use of scientific and popular names, since their purposes are quite different. The scientific names are necessary to students for accuracy, "but the vernacular names are a part of the development of the language of each people. Though these names are sometimes indicative of specific characters and hence scientifically valuable, they are for the most part not at all scientific, but utilitarian, emotional, or picturesque. As such they are invaluable not for science, but for the common intelligence and the appreciation and enjoyment of the plant world." Educated Colored Labor.--In a paper published in connection with the Proceedings of the Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund, Mr. Booker T. Washington describes his efforts, made at the suggestion of the trustees, to bring the work done at the Tuskegee school to the knowledge of the white people of the South, and their success. Mr. Carver, instructor in agriculture, went before the Alabama Legislature and gave an exhibition of his methods and results before the Committee on Agriculture. The displays of butter and other farm products proved so interesting that many members of the Legislature and other citizens inspected the exhibit, and all expressed their gratification. A full description of the work in agriculture was published in the Southern papers: "The result is that the white people are constantly applying to us for persons to take charge of farms, dairies, etc., and in many ways showing that their interest in our work is growing in proportion as they see the value of it." A visit made by the President of the United States gave an opportunity of assembling within the institution five members of the Cabinet with their families, the Governor of Alabama, both branches of the Alabama Legislature, and thousands of white and colored people from all parts of the South. "The occasion was most helpful in bringing together the two sections of our country and the two races. No people in any part of the world could have acted more generously and shown a deeper interest in this school than did the white people of Tuskegee and Macon County during the visit of the President." Geology of Columbus, Ohio.--In his paper, read at the meeting of the American Association, on the geology of Ohio, Dr. Orton spoke of the construction of glacial drifts as found in central Ohio and the source of the material of the drift, showing that the bowlder clay is largely derived from the comminution of black slake, the remnants of which appear in North Columbus. He spoke also of the bowlders scattered over the surface of the region about Columbus, the parent rocks of which may be traced to the shores of the northern lakes, and of Jasper's conglomerate, picturesque fragments of which may be found throughout central Ohio. Some of these bowlders are known to have come from Lake Ontario. Bowlders of native copper also occur, one of which was found eight feet below the surface in excavations carried on for the foundations of the asylum west of the Scioto. Civilized and Savage.--Professor Semon, in his book In the Australian Bush, characterizes the treatment of the natives by the settlers as constituting, on the whole, one of the darkest chapters in the colonization of Australia. "Everywhere and always we find the same process: the whites arrive and settle in the hunting grounds of the blacks, who have frequented them since the remotest time. They raise paddocks, which the blacks are forbidden to enter. They breed cattle, which the blacks are not allowed to approach. Then it happens that these stupid savages do not know how to distinguish between a marsupial and a placental animal, and spear a calf or a cow instead of a kangaroo, and the white man takes revenge for this misdeed by systematically killing all the blacks that come before his gun. This, again, the natives take amiss, and throw a spear into his back when he rides through the bush, or invade his house when he is absent, killing his family and servants. Then arrive the 'native police,' a troop of blacks from another district, headed by a white officer. They know the tricks of their race, and take a special pleasure in hunting down their own countrymen, and they avenge the farmer's dead by killing all the blacks in the neighborhood, sometimes also their women and children. This is the almost typical progress of colonization, and even though such things are abolished in the southeastern colonies and in southeast and central Queensland, they are by no means unheard of in the north and west." MINOR PARAGRAPHS. In a brood of five nestling sparrow-hawks, which he had the opportunity of studying alive and dead, Dr. R. W. Shufeldt remarked that the largest and therefore oldest bird was nearly double the size of the youngest or smallest one, while the three others were graduated down from the largest to the smallest in almost exact proportions." It was evident, then, that the female had laid the eggs at regular intervals, and very likely three or four days apart, and that incubation commenced immediately after the first egg was deposited. What is more worthy of note, however, is the fact that the sexes of these nestlings alternated, the oldest bird being a male, the next a female, followed by another male, and so on, the last or youngest one of all five being a male. This last had a plumage of pure white down, with the pin feathers of the primaries and secondaries of the wings, as well as the rectrices of the tail, just beginning to open at their extremities. From this stage gradual development of the plumage is exhibited throughout the series, the entire plumage of the males and females being very different and distinctive." If it be true, as is possibly indicated, that the sexes alternate in broods of young sparrow-hawks as a regular thing, the author has no explanation for the fact, and has never heard of any being offered. Architecture and Building gives the following interesting facts regarding the building trades in Chicago: "Reports from Chicago are that labor in building lines is scarce. The scarcity of men is giving the building trades council trouble to meet the requirements of contractors. It is said that half a dozen jobs that are ready to go ahead are at a standstill because men can not be had, particularly iron workers and laborers--the employees first to be employed in the construction of the modern building. It is also said that wages have never been better in the building line. The following is the schedule of wages, based on an eight-hour day: Carpenters, $3.40; electricians, $3.75; bridge and structural iron workers, $3.60; tin and sheet-iron workers, $3.20; plumbers, $4; steam fitters, $3.75; elevator constructors, $3; hoisting engineers, $4; derrick men, $2; gas-fitters, $3.75; plasterers, $4; marble cutters, $3.50; gravel roofers, $2.80; boiler-makers, $2.40; stone sawyers and rubbers, $3; marble enamel glassworkers' helpers, $2.25; slate and tile roofers, $3.80; marble setters' helpers, $2; steam-fitters' helpers, $2; stone cutters, $4; stone carvers, $5; bricklayers, $4; painters, $3; hod carriers and building laborers, $2; plasterers' hod carriers, $2.40; mosaic and encaustic tile layers, $4; helpers, $2.40." In presenting the fourth part of his memoir on The Tertiary Fauna of Florida (Transactions of the Wagner Free Institute of Science, Philadelphia), Mr. William Healey Dall observes that the interest aroused in the explorations of Florida by the Wagner Institute and its friends and by the United States Geological Survey has resulted in bringing in a constantly increasing mass of material. The existence of Upper Oligocene beds in western Florida containing hundreds of species, many of which were new, added two populous faunas to the Tertiary series. It having been found that a number of the species belonging to these beds had been described from the Antillean tertiaries, it became necessary, in order to put the work on a sound foundation, besides the review of the species known to occur in the United States, to extend the revision to the tertiaries of the West Indies. It is believed that the results will be beneficial in clearing the way for subsequent students and putting the nomenclature on a more permanent and reliable basis. The numerical system of the natives of Murray Island, Torres Strait, is described by the Rev. A. E. Hunt, in the Journal of the Anthropological Society, as based on two numbers--_netat_, one, and _neis_, two. The numbers above two are expressed by composition--_neis-netat_, three; _neis i neis_, or two and two, four. Numbers above four are associated with parts of the body, beginning with the little and other fingers of the left hand, and going on to the wrist, elbow, armpit, shoulder, etc., on the left side and going down on the right side, to 21; and the toes give ten numbers more, to 31. Larger numbers are simply "many." President William Orton, of the American Association, in his address at the welcoming meeting, showed, in the light of the facts recorded in Alfred R. Wallace's book on The Wonderful Century, that the scientific achievements of the present century exceed all those of the past combined. He then turned to the purpose of the American Association to labor for the discovery of new truth, and said: "It is possible that we could make ourselves more interesting to the general public if we occasionally foreswore our loyalty to our name and spent a portion of our time in restating established truths. Our contributions to the advancement of science are often fragmentary and devoid of special interest to the outside world. But every one of them has a place in the great temple of knowledge, and the wise master builders, some of whom appear in every generation, will find them all and use them all at last, and then only will their true value come to light." NOTES. The number of broods of seventeen-year and thirteen-year locusts has become embarrassing to those who seek to distinguish them, and the trouble is complicated by the various designations different authors have given them. The usual method is to give the brood a number in a series, written with a Roman numeral. Mr. C. L. Marlatt proposes a regular and uniform nomenclature, giving the first seventeen numbers to the seventeen-year broods, beginning with that of 1893 as number I, and the next thirteen numbers (XVIII to XXX) to the thirteen-year broods, beginning with the brood of 1842 and 1855 as number XVIII. Experimenting on the adaptability of carbonic acid to the inflation of pneumatic tires, M. d'Arsonval, of Paris, has found that the gas acts upon India rubber, and, swelling its volume out enormously, reduces it to a condition like that following maceration in petroleum. On exposure to the air the carbonic acid passes away and the India rubber returns to its normal condition. Carbonic acid, therefore, does not seem well adapted to use in inflation. Oxygen is likewise not adapted, because it permeates the India rubber and oxidizes it, but nitrogen is quite inert and answers the purpose admirably. Mr. Gifford Pinchot, Forester of the Department of Agriculture, has announced that a few well-qualified persons will be received in the Division of Forestry as student-assistants. They will be assigned to practical field work, and will be allowed their expenses and three hundred dollars a year. They are expected to possess, when they come, a certain degree of knowledge, which is defined in Mr. Pinchot's announcement, of botany, geology, and other sciences, with good general attainments. In a communication made to the general meeting of the French Automobile Club, in May, the Baron de Zeylen enumerates 600 manufacturers in France who have produced 5,250 motor-carriages and about 10,000 motor-cycles; 110 makers in England, 80 in Germany, 60 in the United States, 55 in Belgium, 25 in Switzerland, and about 30 in the other states of Europe. The manufacture outside of France does not appear to be on a large scale, for only three hundred carriages are credited to other countries, and half of these to Belgium. The United States, however, promises to give a good account of itself next time. Mine No. 8 of the Sunday Creek Coal Company, to which the American Association made its Saturday excursion from Columbus, Ohio, has recently been equipped with electric power, which is obtained by utilizing the waste gas from the oil wells in the vicinity. This, the Ohio State Journal says, is the first mine in the State to make use of this natural power. In a bulletin relating to a "dilution cream separator" which is now marketed among farmers, the Purdue University Agricultural Experiment Station refers to the results of experiments made several years ago as showing that an increased loss of fat occurs in skim milk when dilution is practiced, that the loss is greater with cold than with warm water, and that the value of the skim milk for feeding is impaired when it is diluted. Similar results have been obtained at other experiment stations. The results claimed to be realized with the separators can be obtained by diluting the milk in a comparatively inexpensive round can. To our death list of men known in science we have to add the names of John Cordreaux, an English ornithologist, who was eminent as a student, for thirty-six years, of bird migrations, and was secretary of the British Association's committee on that subject, at Great Cotes House, Lincolnshire, England, August 1st, in his sixty-ninth year; he was author of a book on the Birds of the Humber District, and of numerous contributions to The Zoölogist and The Ibis; Gaston Tissandier, founder, and editor for more than twenty years, of the French scientific journal _La Nature_, at Paris, August 30th, in his fifty-seventh year; besides his devotion to his journal, he was greatly interested in aërial navigation, to which he devoted much time and means in experiments, and was a versatile author of popular books touching various departments of science; Judge Charles P. Daly, of New York, who, as president for thirty-six years of the American Geographical Society, contributed very largely to the encouragement and progress of geographical study in the United States, September 19th, in his eighty-fourth year; he was an honorary member of the Royal Geographical Society of London, of the Berlin Geographical Society, and of the Imperial Geographical Society of Russia; he was a judge of the Court of Common Pleas of New York from 1844 to 1858, and after that chief justice of the same court continuously for twenty-seven years, and was besides, a publicist of high reputation, whose opinion and advice were sought by men charged with responsibility concerning them on many important State and national questions; Henri Lévègne de Vilmorin, first vice-president of the Paris School of Horticulture; O. G. Jones, Physics Master of the City of London School, from an accident on the Dent Blanche, Alps, August 30th; Ambrose A. P. Stewart, formerly instructor in chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School, and afterward Professor of Chemistry in the Pennsylvania State College and in the University of Illinois, at Lincoln, Neb., September 13th; Dr. Charles Fayette Taylor, founder of the New York Orthopedic Dispensary, and author of articles in the Popular Science Monthly on Bodily Conditions as related to Mental States (vol. xv), Gofio, Food, and Physique (vol. xxxi), and Climate and Health (vol. xlvii), and of books relating to his special vocation, died in Los Angeles, Cal., January 25th, in his seventy-second year. Efforts are making for the formation of a Soppitt Memorial Library of Mycological Literature, to be presented to the Yorkshire (England) Naturalists' Union as a memorial of the services rendered to mycological science and to Yorkshire natural history generally, by the late Mr. H. T. Soppitt. The United States Department of Agriculture has published, for general information and in order to develop a wider interest in the subject, the History and Present Status of Instruction in Cooking in the Public Schools of New York City, by Mrs. Louise E. Hogan, to which an introduction is furnished by A. C. True, Ph. D. The United States Weather Bureau publishes a paper On Lightning and Electricity in the Air, by Alexander G. McAdie, representing the present knowledge on the subject, and, as supplementary to it or forming a second part, Loss of Life and Property by Electricity, by Alfred J. Henry. A gift of one thousand dollars has been made to the research fund of the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Mr. Emerson McMillin, of New York. 
44880	----	Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LV MAY TO OCTOBER, 1899 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. [Illustration: WILLIAM PENGELLY.] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. MAY, 1899. ALASKA AND THE KLONDIKE. A JOURNEY TO THE NEW ELDORADO. BY ANGELO HEILPRIN, PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AT THE ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES OF PHILADELPHIA, FELLOW OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. I.--IN BY THE WHITE PASS AND OUT BY THE CHILKOOT. Hardly two years ago the names Dawson and Klondike were entirely unknown to the outside world, and geographers were as ignorant of their existence as was at that time the less learned laity. To-day it may be questioned if any two localities of foreign and uncivilized lands are as well known, by name at least, as these that mark the approach to the arctic realm in the northwest of the American continent. One of those periodic movements in the history of peoples which mark epochs in the progress of the world, and have their source in a sudden or unlooked-for discovery, directed attention to this new quarter of the globe, and to it stream and will continue to stream thousands of the world's inhabitants. Probably not less than from thirty-five thousand to forty thousand people, possibly even considerably more, have in the short period following the discovery of gold in the Klondike region already passed to or beyond the portals of what has not inaptly been designated the New Eldorado. To some of these a fortune has been born; to many more a hope has been shattered in disappointment; and to still more the arbiter of fate, whether for good or for bad, has for a while withheld the issue. In its simplest geographical setting Dawson, this Mecca of the north, is a settlement of the Northwest Territory of Canada, situated at a point thirteen hundred miles as the crow flies northwest of Seattle. It is close to, if not quite on, the Arctic Circle, and it lies the better part of three hundred miles nearer to the pole than does St. Petersburg in Russia. By its side one of the mighty rivers of the globe hurries its course to the ocean, but not too swiftly to permit of sixteen hundred miles of its lower waters being navigated by craft of the size of nearly the largest of the Mississippi steamers, and five hundred miles above by craft of about half this size. In its own particular world, the longest day of the year drawls itself out to twenty-two hours of sunlight, while the shortest contracts to the same length of sun absence. During the warmer days of summer the heat feels almost tropical; the winter cold is, on the other hand, of almost the extreme Siberian rigor. Yet a beautiful vegetation smiles not only over the valleys, but on the hilltops, the birds gambol in the thickets, and the tiny mosquito, either here or near by, pipes out its daily sustenance to the wrath of man. The hungry forest stretches out its gnarled and ragged arms for still another hundred or even three hundred miles farther to the north. Up to within a few years the white man was a stranger in the land, and the Indian roamed the woods and pastures as still do the moose and caribou. To-day this has largely changed. The banks of the once silent river now give out the hum of the sawmill, the click of the hammer, and the blast of the time-whistle, commanding either to rest or to work. A busy front of humanity has settled where formerly the grizzly bear lapped the stranded salmon from the shore, and where at a still earlier period--although perhaps not easily associated with the history of man--the mammoth, the musk ox, and the bison were masters of the land. The red man is still there in lingering numbers, but his spirit is no longer that which dominates, and his courage not that of the untutored savage. The modern history of Dawson begins with about the middle of 1896, shortly after the "public" discovery of gold in the Klondike tract. Three or four months previous there was hardly a habitation, whether tent or of logs, to deface the landscape, and the voice of animate Nature was hushed only in the sound of many waters. At the close of the past year, as nearly as estimate can make it, there were probably not less than from fourteen thousand to fifteen thousand men, women, and children, settled on the strip of land that borders the Yukon, both as lowland and highland, for about two miles of its course near the confluence of the Klondike. Many of these have located for a permanence, others only to give way to successors more fortunate than themselves. Some of the richest claims of the Bonanza, now a famed gold creek of the world, are located hardly twelve miles distant, and the wealth of the Eldorado is discharged within a radius of less than twenty miles. Over the mountains that closely limit the head springs of Bonanza and Eldorado, Hunker, Dominion, and Sulphur Creeks thread their own valleys of gold in deep hollows of beautiful woodland--fascinating even to-day, but already badly scarred by the work that man has so assiduously pressed in the region. This is the Klondike, a land full of promise and of equal disappointment, brought to public notice in the early part of 1897, when intelligence was received by the outside world regarding the first important gold location on Bonanza Creek in August of the year previous. [Illustration: LOOKING DOWN THE LYNN CANAL--SKAGUAY RIVER, WITH SKAGUAY ON THE LEFT.] On the 24th of July of the past year I found myself on the principal thoroughfare of Skaguay, the ubiquitous Broadway, contemplating a journey to the new north. The route of travel had been determined for me in part by the non-arrival at Seattle of the expected steamers from the mouth of the Yukon River, and by that woeful lack of knowledge regarding "conditions" which so frequently distinguishes steamship companies. It was to be, therefore, the overland route, and from Skaguay it was merely the alternative between the White Pass and the Chilkoot Pass or Dyea trails. The two start from points barely four miles apart, cross their summits at very nearly the same distance from one another, and virtually terminate at the same body of inland water, Lake Lindeman, the navigable head of the great Yukon River. A more than generous supply of summer heat gave little warning of that bleak and severe interior with which the world had been made so well familiar during the last twelvemonth, and from which we were barely six hundred miles distant; nor did the character of the surroundings betray much of an approach to the Arctic Circle. Mountains of aspiring elevations, six thousand to seven thousand feet, most symmetrically separated off into pinnacles and knobs, and supporting here and there enough of snow to form goodly glaciers, look down upon the narrow trough which to-day is the valley of the Skaguay River. At the foot of this ancient fiord lies the boom town of Skaguay. Charming forests, except where the hand of man has leveled the work of Nature to suit the requirements of a constructing railway, yet clothe the mountain slopes and fill in the gap that lies between them, shadowing the dense herbage and moss which almost everywhere form an exquisite carpeting to the underlying rock. The ear may catch the strains of a few mosquitoes, or the mellow notes of the robin or thrush, but rising far above these in the majesty of tone and accent is the swish of the tumbling cataracts which bring the landscape of Norway to America. Man, it is claimed, is much the same the world over; but there is a limitation. The second habitation of white man in Skaguay was established less than a year before my visit; yet at that time, presumably to meet the demands of a resident population of nearly five thousand, and of the wandering hordes pressing to the interior, the destructive hand of the advertiser had already inscribed on the walls of rock, in characters twenty feet or more in height, and sufficiently elevated to make them nearly the most conspicuous elements of the landscape, the glories of cigars, the value of mental and physical specifics, and of other abominations which were contrived to fatten the Yankee pocket. [Illustration: A SUMMER DAY ON THE SKAGUAY.] Had it not been for the kindly advice of one who had just returned from the Klondike, and who claimed to have crossed both passes fifty times, I should almost unhesitatingly have taken the White Pass trail; but the representation that beyond the summit the mud would be neck-deep and virtually impenetrable for a distance of twenty miles or more, cast the decision in favor of the Chilkoot. The fortunate or unfortunate circumstance that a billowy sea made a landing of passengers at Dyea impossible on that day threw me back upon my first resource, and about two hours before midday of the 30th I was mounted on a horse following out the Skaguay trail. By seven o'clock in the evening of the following day I had reached Lake Lindeman, and about a half hour later Lake Bennett, the starting point of the lines of Upper Yukon steamers which had just recently been established. We had made the forty miles of the dreaded White Pass trail without serious hindrance or delay, up over the summit of 2,860 feet elevation, and down over a course which was depicted in colors of hardship that would have done more truthful service in describing a pass in the Himalayas. There was no mud, not a trace of snow or ice except on the mountain declivities, and had it not been for a horse that was both stiff and lame, and required my attention as pedestrian to an extent that had not been bargained for, the journey would have been an exceptionally delightful one. It is true that an unfortunate fall at one time almost deprived me of my animal, but the service of tackle soon put him to rights and to his feet, and but few blood marks were left on the rocks to tell of the struggle. The most disagreeable incident of the journey was a dense and shifting fog, which so blocked out the landscape of early evening as to necessitate "feeling" the brokenness of a glaciated country in order to ascertain wherein lay the trail. But beyond this there was a perpetual delight in the landscape--in the narrow rocky defile, the bursting torrent, the open meadows, with their carpet of green and variegated with fireweed, gentian, rose, and forget-me-not, which more than compensated for the little vexations that allied themselves with the journey. [Illustration: COMING DOWN THE WHITE PASS--WINTER.] It is not often that the selection of a route of travel is determined by the odorous or malodorous qualities which appertain thereto. Such a case was, however, presented here. It was not the depth of mud alone which was to deter one from essaying the White Pass route; sturdy pioneers who had toiled long and hard in opening up one or more new regions, laid emphasis upon the stench of decaying horse-flesh as a factor of first consideration in the choice of route. So far as stench and decaying horse-flesh were concerned, they were in strong evidence. The Desert of Sahara, with its lines of skeletons, can boast of no such exhibition of carcasses. Long before Bennett was reached I had taken count of more than a thousand unfortunates whose bodies now made part of the trail; frequently we were obliged to pass directly over these ghastly figures of hide, and sometimes, indeed, broke into them. Men whose veracity need not be questioned assured me that what I saw was in no way the full picture of the "life" of the trail; the carcasses of that time were less than one third of the full number which in April and May gave grim character to the route to the new Eldorado. Equally spread out, this number would mean one dead animal for every sixty feet of distance! The poor beasts succumbed not so much to the hardships of the trail as to the inhuman treatment, or lack of care and assistance, which they received on the part of their owners. Once out of the line of the mad rush, perhaps unable to extricate themselves from the holding meshes of soft snow and of quagmires, they were allowed to remain where they were, a food offering to the army of carrion eaters which were hovering about, only too certain of the meal which was being prepared for them. Oftentimes pack saddles, and sometimes even the packs, were allowed to remain with the struggling or sunken animal--such was the mad race which the greed of gold inspired. On October 9th I was again at Bennett, this time returning from my journey into the interior, and full of experience of what steam navigation on the upper six hundred miles of Yukon waters might mean. There was now a change in the sentiment regarding the quality of the two passes. The Pacific and Arctic Railway, the pioneer of Alaska steam railways, was operating twelve miles of track, and had thus materially reduced the "hardships" of the Skaguay trail; the Chilkoot, on the other hand, was represented to be in the worst of mood, and prepared to put the passing traveler into the same condition. It was more than late in the season, but the winter's blasts had been stayed off by a full month, and there were still no signs of their coming. A little ice had begun to form along the river's margin and over sheltered pools, and an occasional cool night made demands for moderately warm clothing proper; but, on the whole, the temperature was mild and balmy, and to its influence responded a vegetation which in its full glory might easily have called to mind the region of the Juniata. [Illustration: CUTTING GRADE FOR THE PACIFIC AND ARCTIC RAILWAY--TUNNEL MOUNTAIN, WHITE PASS ROUTE.] Although strongly warned against taking the Chilkoot Pass so late in the season, many of the outgoers, whose recollections of events in the early part of the year were still vividly fresh, and who could not be persuaded that the period of a few months had so effaced the conditions of the past as to permit a steam railway to enter for twelve miles into the region, chose it in preference to the White Pass. My own mind had been cast in the same direction; not, however, from a point of judicious preference, but merely because I was anxious to see for myself that which had become historic in the movement of 1898, and of instituting a direct comparison of the physical features and general characteristics of the two routes. With no serious hindrance, the journey from Bennett out was that of a full day only, and there was no particular reason to suspect that there would be delay. Snow had fallen on the summit and whitened all the higher points, but seemingly it hung in only a measurably thin crust, and with not enough to necessitate breaking a trail. A crude steam ferry across Lake Lindeman cuts off about six miles from the first part of the trail, after which a rapidly rising path, sufficiently distinct to permit it to be easily followed, winds over the rocks and among rock _débris_ to Long Lake, situated at an elevation of some twenty-six hundred feet, where night shelter is found in a fairly comfortable tent. Up to this point we had encountered but little snow, and the condition of the trail was such as to allow of rapid travel. A wise caution detained us here for the night, and the incoming of a solitary traveler warned us that a blizzard had struck the summit of the pass, and buried it beneath a heavy mantle of snow. Had we been a day earlier we might have crossed dry shod, a very exceptional condition at this time of the year, but now the possibilities of a struggle gravely presented themselves. A light frost of the night had fairly congealed the soil, but the lake did not carry enough surface ice to interfere with the progress of a scow, and we reached the farther end without difficulty. The two-mile portage to Crater Lake was largely a snow traverse, but an easy one; at this time, however, it began to snow heavily, and the immediate prospect was anything but cheerful. A low fog hung over the waters, but not so low or so dense as to prevent us from occasionally catching glimpses of the rocks which projected with disagreeable frequency from an assumed bottomless pit or "crater." The ascent from Crater Lake to the summit, somewhat less than three hundred and fifty feet, was made in about half an hour, and then began the steep and sudden plunge which marks the southern declivity of this famous mountain pass. Some little caution was here required to keep a foothold, and a too sudden break might have led to an exhilarating, even if not anxiously sought after, glissade; but in truth, to any one only moderately practiced in mountaineering, even this steep face, which descends for a thousand feet or more from a summit elevation of thirty-four hundred feet, presents little difficulty and hardly more danger. What there is of a trail zigzags in wild and rapid courses over an almost illimitable mass of rock _débris_, at times within sheltered or confined hollows, but more generally on the open face of the declivity. This it is more particularly that carries to many a certain amount of fear in the making of the passage, but, with proper caution and the right kind of boots, nothing of danger need be apprehended. Unfortunately for the enjoyment of the scenery of the pass, I could see but a modest part of it. Although snow was no longer falling, and the atmosphere had settled down to a condition of almost passive inactivity--much to the surprise, if not disappointment, of a few who had prophesied a stiff and biting wind the moment we passed the divide--heavy cloud banks hovered about the summits, and only at intervals did they afford glimpses of the majestic mountain peaks by which we were surrounded. Enough, however, could be seen to justify for the pass the claims of most imposing scenery, and its superiority in this respect over the White Pass. The temperature at the time of our crossing was a few degrees below freezing, perhaps 25° or 27° F., but our rapid walk brought on profuse perspiration, and it would have been a pleasure, if a sense of proper caution had permitted, to divest ourselves of mackinaws and travel in summer fashion. We made Sheep Camp, with its surroundings of beautiful woodland, shortly after noon, and Cañon City, which, as the terminus of a good coach road to Dyea, virtually marks the end or beginning of the Chilkoot trail, at two o'clock. [Illustration: THE FINAL ASCENT TO CHILKOOT SUMMIT--WINTER.] To a mountaineer or traveler of ordinary resource neither the White Pass nor the Chilkoot Pass will appear other than it actually is--i. e., a mountain pass, sufficiently rough and precipitous in places, and presenting no serious obstacle to the passage of man, woman, or child. True, I did not see them at their worst, but they were both represented to be frightfully bad even at the time of my crossing. The seasonal effects, doubtless, do much to modify the character of the trails, and even local conditions must mold them to a very considerable extent. It is not difficult to conceive of miry spots along the White Pass trail, or of snow-swept areas on the Chilkoot, and there certainly must be times when both trails are in a measure or way impassable. All trails are, however, subject to modifications in character, and even the best is at times sufficiently bad. Trains of pack animals cross the White Pass both winter and summer, and, even with the great loss to their "forefathers," their testimony of steady work is a recommendation of the class of service in which they are engaged. A limited number of cattle and horses have also found their way over the summit of the Chilkoot Pass--some crossing immediately after us--but the trail is too steep on the ocean side to fit it for animal service, although I strongly suspect that were the location in Mexico instead of in Alaska, there would be a goodly number of _caballeros_ and _arrieros_ to smile at the proposition of presented difficulties. Indian women seem to consider it no hardship to pack a fifty-pound sack of flour and more over the summit, and there are many men who do not hesitate to take double this load, and make several journeys during the same day. It is the load that kills, and it was, doubtless, this influence, united to a cruel method, which so strongly impressed the pioneers with the notion of extreme hardship. The most level and perfect road, to one carrying for miles a pack of from sixty to eighty pounds, soon begins to loom up a steep incline. Both the northern and southern slopes of the Chilkoot Pass are largely surfaced with shattered rocks, over which, with occasional deflections across more pleasant snow banks, a fairly well-defined trail mounts on either side to the summit. In its grim landscape effects, more particularly on the inner face, where a number of rock-bound tarns--Crater Lake, Long Lake, Deep Lake--afford a certain relief to the degree of desolation which the scene carries, it reminded me much of the famous Grimsel Pass, and here as well as there the modeling of the surface through glacial action was strongly in evidence. The vastly towering Alpine peaks were, however, wanting, and the glaciers that still appeared showed that they had long since passed their better days. The actual summit is trenched by a narrow rocky gap, roughly worn through walls of granite, and by it have passed the thousands who have pressed to the interior. There is no timber growth at or near this summit, nor is there soil sufficient to give support to an arboreal vegetation. Nearest to the top line a prostrate form of scrubby hemlock (_Tsuga Pattoniana_) alone makes pretense to being a tree, but below it of itself grows to majestic proportions, and about "Sheep Camp," with Menzie's spruce, a birch, and cottonwood (_Populus balsamifera_), forms part of the beautiful woodland, which with ever-increasing freshness descends to the lower levels. Lest I be accused of too freely seeing the beauties of the northern landscape, I venture in my defense the following graphic description of the Dyea Valley from the pen of another traveler and geologist, Prof. Israel Russell: "In the valley of the Taiya the timber line is sharply drawn along the bordering cliffs at an elevation of about twenty-five hundred feet. Above that height the mountain sides are stern and rugged; below is a dense forest of gigantic hemlocks, festooned with long streamers of moss, which grows even more luxuriantly than on the oaks of Florida. The ground beneath the trees and the fallen monarchs of the forest are densely covered with a soft, feathery carpet of mosses, lichens, and ferns of all possible tints of brown and green. The day I traversed this enchanted valley was bright and sunny in the upper regions, but the valley was filled with drifting vapors. At one minute nothing would be visible but the somber forest through which the white mist was hurrying; and the next the veil would be swept aside, revealing with startling distinctness the towering mountain spires, snowy pinnacles, and turquoise cliffs of ice towering heavenward. These views through the cloud rifts seemed glimpses of another world. Below was a sea of surging branches that filled all the valley bottom and dashed high on the bordering cliffs. Much space could be occupied with descriptions of the magnificent scenery about Lynn Canal, and of the wonderful atmospheric effects to be seen there, but the poetry of travel is foreign to these pages, and must be left for more facile pens." [Illustration: THE CHILKOOT TRAIL--POWER HOUSE OF THE AËRIAL TRAMWAY.] In its present condition the Chilkoot trail has the advantage over the Skaguay in its shorter length, the distance from Dyea to the head of Lake Lindeman, the virtual head of river navigation, being about twenty-four miles; from Skaguay to Bennett, along the usual White Pass trail, the distance is fully ten or twelve miles longer, although a cut-off by way of the summit lakes reduces the traverse considerably. At intervals along both routes fairly good accommodation can now be had. One condition of the Chilkoot Pass, and that a not altogether light one, places it during certain months at a disadvantage as compared with the White Pass. I refer to the dangers from avalanches. These are of the true Alpine type, having their source in the heavy beds of snow which cling with bare support to the steeply pitching mountain walls, in places along some of the narrowest parts of the pass. The appalling catastrophe of April, 1898, which caused the loss of sixty-three lives, and followed closely upon an earlier event of like nature, had its seat in the steep, rocky ledges of the east wall between Sheep Camp and the Scales. It is claimed that the Indians along the trail clearly foresaw the impending event, and announced it in unmistakable language, but their warnings were allowed to go unheeded. They themselves did not make the traverse on that day. The minor disaster of the following December (9th), when but six lives were sacrificed, took place on the steep declivity which faces Crater Lake, not far from the service house of the Chilkoot Pass Aërial Tramway Company. Here the mountain face is very precipitous and gives but insecure lodgment to the snow. The Indians carefully watch all natural signals and urge a rapid journey. However useful these trails may have been in the past, how well or how indifferently they may have met the wants of the pioneers of 1897 and 1898, they are destined before long to be thrown into that same obscurity which they held when the Indians and a few adventurous trappers and traders alone made use of them as avenues of communication between the inner and outer worlds. The advance of the iron horse is now an assured fact, and the Pacific and Arctic Railway, whose construction is engineered by some of the most experienced mechanical talent of Great Britain and America, will minister before many months not alone to the professional interlopers in the new land, but to hosts of tourists as well. The road, which in reaching White Pass summit will have a maximum gradient of a little more than five per cent, is of narrow-gauge construction, solidly supported on dressed ties brought from the forests of Oregon. No terminal appears to have been as yet definitely determined upon, although the charter act recites Fort Selkirk on the Yukon, about one hundred and sixty miles above Dawson, as such. Operating as it now does sixteen miles or more of road, it is already an extensive freight carrier; but until its completion to Bennett or to some point close to a navigable part of the Yukon River, the Chilkoot Pass tramway, a remarkable construction which crosses over the summit and deposits at Crater Lake, must continue to handle a large part of the business intended for the interior. [Illustration: SUMMIT OF THE CHILKOOT PASS, WITH IMPEDIMENTA OF PROSPECTORS, APRIL, 1898.] It is safe to say that the stirring scenes which were enacted on the passes during the winter of 1897-'98, when the impedimenta of travel and occupation were packed together in the manner of an army camp, will not be repeated again. The past history was a short one, and it gives way to one of greater promise. NOTE.--For most of the photographic illustrations the author is indebted to the work of Curtis, Barley, and E. A. Hegg; especially to the last-named gentleman, of Skaguay and Dawson, is he under obligations for permission to use several of the copyrighted views. THE ORIGIN OF EUROPEAN CULTURE.[A] BY WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, PH. D., ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, BOSTON, LECTURER IN ANTHROPOLOGY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK. Prehistoric archæology is possessed of a distinct advantage over linguistics in the investigation of racial problems; for human remains are often discovered in connection with the implements, utensils, or trinkets by which the civilization of an extinct people is archæologically determined. To attempt even an outline of the cultural history of Europe would be obviously impossible in this place. It would fill a complete volume by itself alone. Furthermore, the short span of forty years since the inception of archæological science has not sufficed to produce complete unanimity of opinion among the leading authorities. Many important questions, especially concerning eastern Europe, are still awaiting settlement. All that we can hope to do is to describe what may be termed a few fixed points in European cultural history. This, as in our discussion of physical origins,[B] we shall attempt to do by means of definite propositions, concerning which there is now substantial agreement. I. _In western and southern Europe an entirely indigenous culture gradually evolved during the later stone age. This was characterized by great technical advance in fashioning implements, carvings, and designs in stone, bone, ivory, and copper; by the construction of dolmens and habitations of stone; by pottery-making; and possibly even by a primitive system of writing._ A marked reaction has taken place during the last ten years among archæologists respecting the course of cultural development in France. It was long believed that after the first crude attempts of the palæolithic epoch an extended _hiatus_ ensued, followed by the sudden appearance of a more highly developed civilization, brought by an immigrant broad-headed race from the East. Two waves of invasion were described: the first bringing polished stone, a later one introducing bronze, cereals, agriculture, and the domestication of animals. Not even credit for the construction of the great stone dolmen tombs was granted to the natives in Gaul, for these were all ascribed to an invasion from the North. The undoubted submergence of the primitive long-headed population of France by a brachycephalic type from the East, to which we have already adverted, was held accountable for a radical advance in civilization. Even the existence of a bronze age was denied to this country, it being maintained that the introduction of bronze was retarded until both metals came in together from the Orient in the hands of the cultural deliverers of the land. The absence of a distinct bronze age was speedily disproved; but the view that France and western Europe were saved from barbarism only by a new race from the East still held sway. It is represented by the classical school of G. de Mortillet, Bertrand, Topinard, and a host of minor disciples. The new school, holding that a steady and uninterrupted development of culture _in situ_ was taking place, is represented notably by Reinach[C] in France and by Sergi[D] in Italy. Their proof of this seems to be unanswerable. Granting that it is easier to borrow culture than to evolve it, a proposition underlying the older view, it seems nevertheless that the West has too long been denied its rightful share in the history of European civilization. [Illustration: NEOLITHIC IVORY CARVING. Mas d'Azil. (By special permission. Further reproduction prohibited.)] A notable advance in the line of culture entirely indigenous to southwestern Europe has been lately revealed through the interesting discoveries by Piette at the station of Brassempuoy and in the grotto of Mas d'Azil. Carvings in ivory, designs upon bone, evidence of a numerical system, of settled habitations, and, most important of all, of a domestication of the reindeer, of the horse, and the ox in the pure stone age have been found; and that, too, in the uttermost southwestern corner of Europe. In the lake dwellings of Switzerland, as also in Scandinavia, a knowledge of agriculture, pottery, and the domestication of animals is evinced, likewise as a native discovery. From other quarters of the continent in the stone age comes similar testimony to a marked advance of man culturally. The justly celebrated carving of a reindeer from Thayngen, almost worthy of a modern craftsman, betrays no mean artistic ability. The man who drew it was far from being a savage, even if he knew no metals, and buried his dead instead of cremating them. The evidence as to early domestication of animals is perhaps the most startling. Carved horses' heads, with halters and rude bridles, have been surely identified by Piette and others. [Illustration: BONE CARVING. Thayngen. (After Bertrand, 1891.)] A system of writing seems also to have been invented in western Europe as far back as the stone age.[E] Letourneau and Bordier have advanced good evidence to this effect, although it is not yet incontestably proved. The Phoenicians were perhaps antedated in their noted invention by the dolmen builders, by the lake dwellers of the earliest times, and, according to Sergi, also by the people of the Villanova pre-Etruscan culture in Italy. In an earlier time still in the Po Valley, as far back as the stone-age _Terramare_ period, pottery was made, and that, too, of a very decent sort. And all this time there is not the slightest evidence of contact with or knowledge of the East. As Reinach says, in no dolmen, no lake station, no excavation of the stone age is there any trace of an Assyrian or Babylonian cylinder, or even an Egyptian amulet. Even the jade and nephrite found in western Europe from Switzerland to Norway, which has so long been regarded as evidence of early commerce with the East, he denies as proof of such contact. The case thus put may perhaps be over-strenuously stated, yet one can not but realize from it that western Europe has too long been libeled in respect of its native aptitude for civilization. This is not constituted of bronze alone, nor is its trade-mark cremation. Thus, while an intensive outbreak of culture of a high order may not have arisen west of the Alps, it can no longer be denied that the general standard of intelligence was surely rising of its own native volition. II. _Throughout the eastern Alpine highlands, a culture far more highly evolved than the neolithic one in the West, and betraying certain Oriental affinities, appears at a very early time, a thousand years or more before the Christian era. This prehistoric civilization represents a transitional stage between bronze and iron._ In a secluded valley in upper Austria, close to the border line of Salzburg, by the little Alpine hamlet of Hallstatt, a remarkable necropolis was discovered more than a half century ago, which marked an epoch in archæological research. Excavations at this place alone, far from any present considerable seat of population, have already revealed more than three thousand graves. The primitive culture here unearthed, represented by all kinds of weapons, implements, and ornaments, bore no resemblance to any of the then known classical ones of the Mediterranean basin. Its graves contained no Roman coins or relics. There was nothing Greek about it. It contained no trace either of writing or chronology. It was obviously prehistoric; there was no suggestion of a likeness to the early civilizations in Scandinavia. It was even more primitive than the Etruscan, and entirely different from it, especially in its lack of the beautiful pottery known to these predecessors of the Romans. Little wonder that von Sacken, who first adequately described it in 1868, and Hochstetter, who worthily carried on his researches, believed that Hallstatt represented an entirely indigenous and extinct Alpine civilization. On the other hand, so exceedingly rich and varied were the finds in this out-of-the-way corner of Europe, that another and quite different view seemed justifiable. Might this not be an entirely exotic culture? products gained by trade from all parts of the world, being here deposited with their dead by a people who controlled the great and very ancient salt mines hereabouts? Neither of these interpretations of this find at Hallstatt have been exactly verified by later researches, and yet its importance has not lessened in the least. By later discoveries all over eastern Europe south of the Danube, from the Tyrol over to the Balkan peninsula, as well as throughout northern Italy, Würtemberg, and even over into northeastern France, the wide extension of this civilization[F] proves that it must in a large measure have developed upon the spot, and not come as an importation from abroad. On the other hand, its affinity in many details with the cultures both of Italy and Greece proved that it had made heavy drafts upon each of these, profiting greatly thereby. The best opinion to-day is, that it constitutes a link in the chain of culture between eastern and western Europe. As such it is of primary importance in any study of European origins. [Illustration: BRONZE SITULA. Watsch, Austrian Tyrol.] The primitive stage of European civilization, to which the term Hallstatt is specifically applied by archæologists, is characterized by a knowledge both of bronze and iron, although the latter is relatively insignificant. Its rarity indicates that we have to do with the very beginnings of its use. In this early combination of bronze and iron the Hallstatt culture is in strong contrast with the rest of Europe. Almost everywhere else, as in Hungary for example, a pure bronze age--sometimes one even of copper also--intervenes between the use of stone and iron. Here, however, the two metals, bronze and iron, appear simultaneously. There is no evidence of a use of bronze alone. Bearing in mind, what we shall subsequently emphasize in the case of Scandinavia, that in that remote part of Europe man had to put up with the inferior metal for close upon a thousand years before the acquisition of a better substitute, it will be seen that at Hallstatt a remarkable foreshortening of cultural evolution had ensued. Iron, as we have said, was still comparatively rare. Only in the case of small objects, less often in the blades of bronze-handled swords, does this more precious metal appear. But it is far more common than in the earliest Greek civilizations made known to us by Schliemann and others. Pages of description would not give so clear an idea of this early civilization as the pictures of their lives, which the Hallstatt people have fortunately left to us. These are found in _repoussé_ upon their bronzes, and particularly upon their little _situlæ_, or metallic pails. These _situlæ_ are, in fact, the most distinctive feature among all the objects which they have left to us. By means of them their civilization has been most accurately traced and identified geographically. On the opposite page we have reproduced the design upon the most celebrated of these _situlæ_, discovered by Deschmann in 1882, at Watsch in the Tyrol. Another from Bologna, typical of the pre-Etruscan Italian time, will be found upon a later page. Upon each of these, the skill manifested in the representation of men and animals is no less remarkable than the civilization which it depicts. The upper zone of this _situla_ from Watsch apparently shows a festal procession, possibly a wedding, for a lady rides in the second chariot. The grooms and outriders betoken a party of distinction. As for the second zone, doubt as to its exact interpretation prevails. Hochstetter declares it to be a banquet, food and entertainment being offered to the personages seated upon chairs at the left. Bertrand is disposed to give it more of a religious interpretation. As for the contest between gladiators armed with the cestus, all is plain. The spectators, judges, even the ram and the helmet for reward of the victor, are all shown in detail. It is not necessary for us to cite more evidence. A civilization already far from primitive is surely depicted. As for its date, all are agreed that it is at least as early as ten centuries before Christ;[G] not far, that is to say, from the supposed Homeric epoch in Greece. [Illustration: BRONZE BREASTPLATE FROM OLYMPIA. (After Furtwaengler's Olympia, 1892.)] The Hallstatt civilizations betray unmistakable affinities with three other prehistoric European cultures, widely separated from one another. It contains many early Greek elements; it is very similar to a notable prehistoric culture in the Caucasus Mountains; and it resembles most nearly of all perhaps the pre-Etruscan civilization in Italy. With the third of these--the Italian--it seems to have been most nearly upon terms of equality, each borrowing from the other, after a fashion of which we shall have occasion to speak shortly. On the other hand, the relation of the Hallstatt culture to that of Greece and Caucasia seems to be somewhat more filial rather than fraternal. In describing the area of this civilization, we have seen how firmly it is intrenched all through the southern part of Austria-Hungary and well over into the north of the Balkan peninsula. A comparison of Furtwaengler's magnificent collection of objects from Olympia with those of Hallstatt instantly reveals their similarities. To make this clear, we have reproduced one of the Olympian breastplates, ornamented with figures, which at once suggest those upon the _situla_ from Watsch above described. This design is doubly interesting. It shows us a slightly higher stage of the art of figural representation, as well as of conventional design. Not only the men and horses, but the borders, are far better drawn. More than this, we begin to detect a distinctly Oriental motive in other details. The bulls and the lions--lions are not indigenous to Europe nowadays--at once remind us of their Babylonian and Assyrian prototypes. We have entered the sphere of Asiatic artistic influence, albeit very indistinctly. This design here represented, it should be said, is rather above the average of the Olympian finds of the earlier epoch. Many of the other objects, especially the little votive figures of beasts and men, are much more crude, although always characteristic and rudely artistic in many ways. Through this Olympian stage of culture we pass transitionally on to the Mycenæan, which brings us into the full bloom of the classic Greek. The Oriental affinities of the Hallstatt culture have been especially emphasized by recent archæological discoveries at Koban, in the Caucasus Mountains. A stage of culture transitional between bronze and iron, almost exactly equivalent to that of the eastern Alps, is revealed. Similarities in little objects, like fibulæ, might easily be accounted for as having passed in trade, but the relationship is too intimate to be thus explained. Hungary forms the connecting link between the two. In many respects its bronze age is different from that of Hallstatt, notably in that the latter seems to have acquired the knowledge of iron and of bronze at about the same time. In Hungary the pure bronze age lasted a long time, and attained a full maturity. A characteristic piece is represented herewith. In respect of the representation of figures of animals such as these, Hallstatt, Hungary, and Koban are quite alike. [Illustration: HUNGARIAN BRONZE VESSEL. (After Hampel, 1876.)] Have we proved that bronze culture came from Asia by reason of these recent finds in the Caucasus? Great stress has been laid upon them in the discussion of European origins. Are we justified in agreeing with Chantre that two currents of culture have swept from Asia into Europe--one by the Caucasus north of the Black Sea and up the Danube; the other across Asia Minor and into the Balkan peninsula, thence joining the first in the main center of Hallstatt civilization, east of the Alps? The point seems by no means established. Relationship does not prove parentage. Far more likely does it appear that the Koban culture is a relic or an offshoot rather than a cradle of bronze civilization. And even Chantre, ardent advocate as he is of Oriental derivations, seems to feel the force of this in his later writings, for he confesses that Koban is rather from Mediterranean European sources than that Europe is from Koban. Most probable of all is it, that both Hallstatt and Koban are alike derived from a common root in the neighborhood of Chaldea. III. _The Hallstatt (or Celtic?) civilization of bronze and iron roughly overlies the present area occupied by the broad-headed Alpine race; yet this type is not always identified with the Oriental culture. It seems to have appeared in Europe in a far lower stage of civilization, and to have subsequently made progress culturally upon the spot._ To trace any definite connection between race and civilization in Europe is rendered extremely hazardous scientifically by reason of the appearance along with bronze of the custom of burning instead of burying the dead, their ashes being disposed in cinerary urns, jars, or other receptacles. By this procedure all possible clew to the physical type of the people is, of course, annihilated at once. It has become almost an axiom among archæologists that bronze culture and incineration are constant companions. Wherever one appears, the other may confidently be looked for. Together they have long been supposed to be the special and peculiar attributes of a new broad-headed immigrant race from the East. To prove this conclusively is, of course, absolutely impossible for the above-mentioned reason. Of the two, it seems as if incineration would be a more reliable test of race than a knowledge of bronze; for burial customs, involving as they do the most sacred instincts and traditions of a people, would be most persistently maintained, even throughout long-continued migrations. The use of bronze, on the other hand, being a matter of obvious utility, and capable of widespread dissemination commercially, is seemingly of far less ethnic significance. To indicate the uncertainty of proof in these matters, let us suppose that the Hallstatt civilization, for example, is the result of an immigration of a brachycephalic Oriental civilized race overlying a primitive native long-headed one. That seems best to conform to the data, which northern Italy at least affords. Suppose the new people--call them Celts with the best authorities, if you please--brought not only bronze and iron, but the custom of incineration. Prior to their appearance inhumation was the rule. What would be the result if one attempted to determine the physical character of that people from a study of the remains in their necropoli? All the crania to be found in the graves with the precious objects of bronze would in no wise represent the people who brought that bronze. They burned their bridges behind them at death, and disappeared for good and all. And the remains left to the archæologist would represent precisely that class in the population which had nothing to do with the main characteristics of its civilization. And then, again, we must bear in mind that the interments in these necropoli as a whole, both with burned or buried dead, constitute a selected type. Neither Hallstatt, Watsch, nor any of the burial places of their type were open to the great mass of the common people. They were sacred spots, far removed among the mountains from any centers of population. Only the rich or powerful presumably had access to them. They are no more typical of the Hallstatt people, therefore, than interments in Westminster Abbey are representative of the English masses. All our data are necessarily drawn from a class within a class. Inductions from them must be very gingerly handled. The situation above described seems to prevail almost everywhere in the Hallstatt cultural area. Two distinct burial customs denote possibly two separate peoples, the inhumers being certainly the older. In the Hallstatt necropolis, for example, about one third of the graves once contained human remains, all the others containing mere ashes. So ancient are these graves that only eight crania from the hundreds of interments of the first class are available for study. These are of a pronounced long-headed type.[H] The modern populations of this part of Europe are, as we have seen, among the broadest-headed people in the world, as are also all the modern Illyrians. Yet from the great necropolis at Glasinac in Bosnia, with its twenty thousand tumuli, the meager Hallstatt returns are amply corroborated.[I] The ancient inhabitants were as long-headed as they are pronouncedly of the opposite type to-day. Up in Bohemia and Moravia also, according to Niederle, the first bronze-age people, such as we know them, were still dolichocephalic quite like their predecessors in the pure stone age. And here also is incineration just about frequent enough to make it uncertain whether the human remains are typical or not. Under these circumstances, three suppositions are open to us. We may hold that these long-headed crania of the Hallstatt people are worthless for any anthropological purposes whatever. This one would certainly be tempted to do were the testimony, such as it is, not so unanimous. Or, secondly, we may assume that these long-headed Hallstatt people belonged to a period subsequent to the appearance of the brachycephalic type in western Europe. If we do so, we place them in the same class with the Teutonic race which so certainly appears to overlie this one in the later iron age in Switzerland and throughout southern Germany; for the Helvetians and the _Reihengräber_ conquerors from the north surely imposed a novel culture, albeit a militant one, upon the long-settled Alpine people, racially speaking. The Hallstatt civilization is immeasurably too early to permit of this hypothesis. At this time the long-headed Teutonic peoples about Scandinavia were certainly vastly inferior in culture, as we shall attempt to prove shortly. Thus we are forced to the third conclusion if we admit the competency of our cranial evidence--namely, that the Hallstatt people in this early bloom of civilization in Europe were allied to the Mediterranean type of the south. No other source for such a dolichocephalic population is possible. Our stock of types of this kind is exhausted. It does not require a great credulity to admit of this hypothesis, that the Hallstatt people were of Mediterranean type. Were not the Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the Egyptians all members of this same race? One single difficulty presents itself. Over in Italy, throughout the valley of the Po, an entirely analogous civilization to that of the eastern Alps occurs. Hallstatt and Villanova, Watsch and Bologna, are almost identical culturally. And yet over here in Italy the new culture of bronze and of incineration seems to be borne by a broad-headed people of the same type as the modern one. Thus, for example, at Novilara so long as the bodies were all inhumed, the people were of the long-headed Mediterranean type once indigenous to the whole of Italy, now surviving, as we have seen, only in the southern half. On the other hand, when incineration begins to appear in this place, the human remains still left to us are of a mixed and far more broad-headed type. It would seem admissible to assume that when the modern brachycephalic Alpine race submerged the native one it brought new elements of civilization with it. Many Italian authorities, at all events, agree in ascribing the new culture--call it Umbrian with Sergi, or proto-Etruscan with Helbig--to a new race of Veneto-Illyrian or Alpine physical proclivities. What they have not definitely proved, however, is that any necessary connection between race and culture exists. There is much to show that the broad-headed race came in some time before the introduction of the new arts. Even in the later _Terramare_ period, preceding the Italian Hallstatt culture, when stone and copper only are in evidence, a change of physical type in the people apparently begins, just as also in France in the neolithic period. The most indubitable testimony that the Alpine race did not appear in western Europe, armed _cap-à-pie_ with bronze and other attributes of culture, is afforded by the lake dwellings of Switzerland. Here in the pile-built villages of the Swiss lakes we can trace an uninterrupted development of civilization from the pure stone age through bronze and into iron. Beginning at a stage of civilization about equal to that of the ancient Aryan-speaking peoples, judged by the root words known to us; not only knowledge of the metals, but of agriculture, of the domestication of animals, and of the finer arts of domestic life, have little by little been acquired. Equally certain is it that no change of physical type has occurred among these primitive Swiss, at least until the irruptions of the Teutonic Helvetians and others at the opening of the historic period. From the very earliest times in the stone age a broad-headedness no less pronounced than that of the modern Swiss prevailed among these people.[J] Here would seem to be pretty conclusive proof that the Alpine race entered Europe long before the culture with which its name has been all too intimately associated. In the outlying parts of Europe, perhaps even in Gaul, it is extremely doubtful whether any closer connection between race and culture exists than in the Alps. It has long been maintained that the brachycephalic people of the Round Barrows introduced bronze into Britain. Surely, as we have already shown, things point to that conclusion.[K] Beddoe, Dawkins, and other authorities maintain it at all events. Yet Canon Taylor makes it pretty evident that the new race arrived in Britain, as it certainly did in Gaul, considerably in advance of any knowledge of the metals. As for Scandinavia, much the same relation holds true. Both race and culture, as we shall see, came from the south, but it is by no means clear that they arrived at the same time or that one brought the other. In Spain, Siret has asserted that bronze came in the hands of a new immigrant broad-headed race, but the authoritative opinion of Cartailhac discovers no direct evidence to this effect. The final conclusions which would seem to follow from our tedious summary is this: That the nearly contemporaneous appearance of a brachycephalic race and the first knowledge of metals indicative of Oriental cultural influences in western Europe, is more or less a coincidence. The first civilized peoples of the Hallstatt period seem to have been closely allied, both in physical type and culture, with the Greeks and other peoples of the classic East. Among them, perhaps over them, swept the representatives of our broad-headed Alpine type who came from the direction of Asia. These invaders may have been the Scythians, although the matter is incapable of proof. Pressure from this direction set both culture and population in motion toward the west, in much the same way that the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century induced the Renaissance in Italy. IV. _The remarkable prehistoric civilization of Italy is due to the union of two cultures: one from the Hallstatt region having entered Europe by way of the Danube, the other coming from the southeast by sea being distinctly Mediterranean. From these evolved the Umbrian and the Etruscan civilizations, followed in the historic period by the early Latin._ The earliest culture in Italy worthy the name is found in the _palafitte_ or pile dwellings, in the northern lakes, and in the so-called _terramare_ settlements in the valley of the Po. The former are not distinguishable from similar structures in the Swiss lake dwellings, but the _terramare_ are entirely peculiar to Italy. Their like is not found anywhere else in Europe. Briefly described, they are villages built upon raised platforms of earth, encircled by a moat, and generally having a ditch or small pond in the middle, in which an altar is erected. These complicated structures are built upon the low, marshy, alluvial plains along the Po, but show many points of similarity with the true pile dwellings. The people of this early period were in the pure stone age, with few arts save that of making the coarser kinds of pottery. From their osseous remains, they seem to have been of a long-headed type, quite like their predecessors, who were cave dwellers. After a time, without any modification of the modes of construction of their settlements, new elements appear among these _terramare_ people, bringing bronze and introducing cremation. At about the same period, as we have said, the Alpine broad-headed race began its submergence of the primitive Ligurian type, leading to the formation of the north Italian population as we see it to-day. This type surely invaded Italy from the north and northeast. From the foregoing considerations it will appear that there were two constituent streams of culture and also of men here uniting in the valley of the Po and on the northern slopes of the Apennines. Possibly, as Chantre affirms, these two streams were from a common Oriental source, here being reunited after long and independent migrations. At all events, a remarkable advance in culture speedily ensued, superior to either of those from which its elements were derived. For the civilization unearthed at Villanova, in the Certosa at Bologna, at Este, and elsewhere, while in much of its bronze work similar to the Hallstatt types, contained a number of added features, obviously either indigenous or brought directly from the south. The Hallstatt affinities are especially revealed in the _situlæ_ to which we have already called attention. That of Arnoaldi, discovered at Bologna, betrays much the same grade of skill in manufacture as the one from Watsch. Its flat development is shown by the accompanying cut. The scenes represented are not dissimilar. The boxers armed with the cestus, the chariots, and horses closely resemble one another. No doubt of a close intercourse between the two regions of Bologna and Austria can possibly exist. [Illustration: ARNOALDI SITULA, BOLOGNA. (From Revue Archéologique, 1885, vol. ii, Plate XXV.)] The influence of the second or native element in prehistoric Italian civilization appears most clearly in the Etruscan period. Etruria, lying south of the Apennines, was more essentially Italian, as we might expect, than the region about Bologna, where the Umbro-Hallstatt or continental culture flourished. It is easy to note the superiority in the former case. It is most clearly indicated in the pottery. Here we find an art which is truly indigenous to the climate and soil of the Mediterranean. Popularly, the word "Etruscan" at once suggests the ceramic art; the progress effected in a short time was certainly startling. To give an idea of the sudden change, we have reproduced upon page 30 illustrations of typical bits of Italian pottery.[L] The first vase, prior to the full Etruscan culture, shows its crudity at once, both in its defects of form and the plainness and simplicity of its ornamentation. Such a vessel might have been made in Mexico or even by our own Pueblo Indians. In a century or two some teacher made it possible to produce the sample depicted in the next cut. Perfect in form, superb in grace of outline, its decoration is most effective; yet it betrays greater skill in geometrical design than in the representation of animate life. The dog drawn on the girdle is still far from lifelike. Then come--probably after inspiration from Greek art--the possibilities in complex ornamentation represented by our third specimen. Not more pleasing in form, perhaps less truly artistic because of its ornateness, it manifests much skill in the delineation of human and animal forms. The culture culminates at this point. From profusion of ornament and overloaded decoration, degeneracy begins. It is the old story of the life and decay of schools of art, time in and time out, the world over. [Illustration: EARLY ETRUSCAN. LATER ETRUSCAN. GREEK ETRUSCAN.] The advance in culture typified by our vases was equaled in all the details of life. The people built strongly walled cities; they constructed roads and bridges; their architecture, true predecessor of the Roman, was unique and highly evolved. All the plain and good things of life were known to these people, and their civilization was rich in its luxury, its culture and art as well. In costumes, jewelry, the paraphernalia of war, in painting and statuary they were alike distinguished. Their mythology was very complex, much of the Roman being derived from it. Most of our knowledge of them is derived from the rich discoveries in their chambered tombs, scattered all over Italy from Rome to Bologna. There can be no doubt of a very high type of civilization attained long before the Christian era. Roman history is merged in the obscurity of time, five or six hundred years later than this. The high antiquity of the Etruscan is therefore beyond question. But its highly evolved art and culture show that we have no longer to do with European origins; to discuss it further would lead us to trench upon the field of classical rather than prehistoric archæology. V. _The northwestern corner of Europe, including Scandinavia, Denmark, and the Baltic plain of Germany, throughout the prehistoric period has been characterized by backwardness of culture as compared with the rest of Europe. It was populated from the south, deriving a large part of such primitive civilization as it possessed from the south and the southeast as well._ That this region was necessarily uninhabited during the Glacial epoch, long after the advent of man in southern Europe, is indubitable. It is proved by the extent of the glaciated area, which extends on the mainland as far south as Hamburg, Berlin, and Posen, and over the entire British Isles at the same time.[M] It was by the melting of this vast sheet of ice that those high level river terraces in France and Belgium were formed, in which the most ancient and primitive implements of human manufacture occur. In the area beneath this ice sheet no trace of human occupation until long after this time occurs. This fact of itself, is not absolutely conclusive, for glaciation would have obliterated all traces of anterior habitation or activity. As to the possibility of a tertiary population before the Glacial epoch, it presents too remote a contingency for us to consider, although we do not deny its possibility. It too far antedates prehistory, so to speak. At the notable International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archæology at Stockholm in 1874 a landmark in these sciences was established by substantial agreement among the leading authorities from all over Europe upon the proposition now before us.[N] First of all, every one subscribed to the view that the palæolithic or oldest stone age was entirely unrepresented in Sweden. The earliest and simplest stone implements discovered in the southern part of that country betray a degree of skill and culture far above that so long prevalent in France and Germany. Stone is not only rubbed and polished into shape, but the complicated art of boring holes in it has been learned. Norway also seems to be lacking in similar evidence of a human population in the very lowest stage of civilization. Stone implements anterior to the discovery of the art of rubbing or polishing are almost unknown. Only about Christiania have any finds at all been made. In Denmark some few very rude implements have been found. They are so scarce as to suggest that they are mere rejects or half-finished ones of a later type. The kitchen middens, or shell heaps, of Jutland, for which the region is most notable, as described by Steenstrup, abound in stone implements. They all represent man in the neolithic age. Polished stones are as abundant as the rudely hammered ones are rare. From the absence of all the very early stone implements, and from the sudden appearance of others of a far more finished type, the possibility of a gradual evolution of culture about Scandinavia _in situ_ is denied on all hands. The art of working stone has surely been introduced from some more favored region. The only place to look for the source of this culture is to the south. [Illustration: FLINT DAGGER. (From Montelius, 1895 b.)] [Illustration: STONE AXE. (From Montelius, 1895 b.)] [Illustration: BRONZE AXE. (From Montelius, 1895 b.)] Tardy in its human occupation and its stone culture, Scandinavia was still more backward, as compared with the rest of Europe, in its transition to the age of bronze. This is all the more remarkable in view of the rich store of raw materials on every hand. Nowhere else in Europe does the pure stone age seem to have been so unduly protracted. A necessary consequence of this was that stone-working reached a higher stage of evolution here than anywhere else in the world save in America. In other parts of Europe the discovery of metal-working, of course, immediately put an end to all progress in this direction. The ultimate degree of skill to which they attained is represented in the accompanying cuts. The first, a flint poniard, shows the possibilities, both in the line of form and finish, of manufacture by the chipping process. To equal this example one must look to the most skillful of the American Indians, as in Tennessee, where they were too remote from mines of native copper to make use of a ready substitute for stone. Our second implement is an axe hammer, made of diorite. To shape, sharpen, bore, and polish a piece of stone like this certainly required a long apprenticeship in the art. [Illustration: BRONZE BRACELET: 650-500 B. C. (From Montelius, 1895 b.)] Bronze culture, when it did at last appear in this remote part of Europe, came upon the scene suddenly and in full maturity. Whether this was as early as the eighth to the tenth century, as Montelius avers, is disputed by many. All are nevertheless agreed that evidence is absolutely lacking that the art was of indigenous origin. From what part of the world this knowledge of bronze ultimately came we leave an open question, as also whether it came with Phoenician traders or direct from Greece, as Worsaae affirms. It was certainly introduced into Sweden, making its way into Norway about the same time directly from the peninsula of Jutland. Its first appearance is in a highly evolved state. Such crude attempts at manufacture as Chantre finds so long prevalent along the Rhone Valley, for example, are entirely absent. Both in form and ornamentation the hand of the master is apparent. This bronze age, like that of stone, lasted a very long time--far longer than anywhere else on the continent. Central Europe passed through three stages of metallic progress while Scandinavia was evolving two. Not until the second or third century of our era--not until the time of the Romans, it would appear--did iron begin to supplant bronze. History repeats itself. The excessive duration of the bronze age, as in the case of stone antecedently, led to the attainment of a remarkable skill. The two accompanying cuts are typical of the best work of this time. In the one case, merely superficial ornament, especially the skillful use of the spiral; in the other, real beauty of form in the bracelet, are clearly apparent. Possessed of such skill in the working of bronze, it is small wonder that the need of a better metal was not felt. Only when fashioned into weapons of war does iron reveal its supremacy over bronze. This, of course, with the campaigns of historical times, brings us to the end of our chronicle. The prehistoric experience of metal-working in Scandinavia is typical of the other details of its cultural evolution. In its earliest epoch no trace of domestic animals is present. It is rather a remarkable fact that even the reindeer seems to have been unknown.[O] What can Penka say to this in his positive affirmation that the original Aryans got up into Scandinavia, having followed the reindeer from central Europe north after the retreat of the ice sheet? The fact is, archæologically speaking, from the evidence furnished by the kitchen middens, that if they ever did this "they left a fine country, where deer were plenty, to subsist upon shellfish on the foggy coasts of Denmark."[P] The entire absence of economic motive for such a migration is at once apparent. Men seldom travel far under such conditions. Quite early, however, even in the stone age, do evidences of domestic animals occur, to the dog being added the ox, horse, swine, and sheep. Pottery in a rude form also follows. Finally, and in apparent coincidence with the bronze culture, comes a new custom of incineration. The dead are no longer buried, but burned. A profound modification of religious ideas is hereby implied. It seems to have been at about this time also that our Alpine racial type entered Scandinavia from Denmark, although, as we have already observed, it is yet far from certain that the new race was the active agent in introducing the new elements of culture. All that we know is that they both came from the south, and reached this remote region at about the same time. * * * * * That the origins of culture in Europe are certainly mixed would seem to be about the main conclusion to be drawn from our extended discussion. It has an iconoclastic tone. Yet we would not leave the matter entirely in the air, nor would we agree with Mantegazza (1884) in his conclusion that "Ignoramus" sums up our entire knowledge of the subject. There is some comfort to be drawn even from this mass of conflicting opinions. Our final destructive aim has been achieved if we have emphasized the danger of correlating data drawn from several distinct sciences, whose only bond of unity is that they are all concerned with the same object--man. The positive contribution which we would seek to make is that the whole matter of European origins is by no means so simple as it has too often been made to appear. It is not imperative that conclusions from all the contributory sciences of physical anthropology, philology, and cultural history should be susceptible of interweaving into a simple scheme of common origins for all. The order of races, for example, need mean nothing as respects priority of culture. Nor do the two sciences, philology and archæology, involve one another's conclusions so far as civilization is concerned. Language and industrial culture may have had very different sources; their migrations need stand in no relation to one another in the least. Each science is fully justified in its own deductions, but must be content to leave the results of others in peace. Such is the ultimate conclusion to which all the latest authority is tending. Only by a careful comparison of data from each sphere of investigation may we finally hope to combine them all in a composite whole, as many-sided and complex as the life and nature of man itself. FOOTNOTES: [A] Advance sheets from The Races of Europe, now in the press of D. Appleton and Company, to appear in May. Footnotes and references are herein largely omitted. [B] Popular Science Monthly, January, 1898, pp. 304-322. [C] Le Mirage Orientale, 1893 a; and in his admirable outline of sculptural origins in Europe (1894-'96). [D] Arii e Italici, Torino, 1898, especially pp. 199-220. [E] Reinach, 1893 a, pp. 543-548. G. de Mortillet, 1897, denies the claim. [F] Chantre, 1884; Hoernes, 1892; Bertrand and Reinach, 1894 a; Sergi, 1898 a; and Orsi (Bull. Paletnologia Italiana, xi, 1885, p. 1 _et seq._) are best authorities. See also Hallstatt in the subject index of our Bibliography, soon to be published as a Special Bulletin of the Boston Public Library. [G] Hoernes, 1892, p. 529; Bertrand, 1876 a, second edition, pp. 207-216, fixes about 800 B. C.; but 1894 a, p. 80, carries it back to 1200-1300 B. C. [H] Zuckerkandl, 1883, p. 96. [I] Weisbach, 1897 b. [J] This fact has been established beyond doubt by the recent great work of Studer and Bannwarth, Crania Helvetica Antiqua, 1894. _Vide_ p. 13. Sergi's attempt to interpret the data otherwise (1898 a, p. 67) is entirely erroneous. Gross's data apparently refer entirely to the later period of Teutonic invasions in the iron age (1883, p. 106). _Cf._ Munro, pp. 537 and 541. [K] Popular Science Monthly, December, 1897, p. 151. [L] From Montelius, 1897. [M] _Cf._ maps and data in J. Geikie, 1894; Penck, 1884; and Niederle, 1893, p. 25. [N] Bertrand, 1876 a and 1876 b, gives a full account of it. The best recent authorities upon Scandinavian culture are Sophus Mueller, 1897, and Montelius, 1895 b. Other works of reference are those of Worsaae, Nilsson, Hildebrand, Madsen and Rygh, full titles being given in our supplementary Bibliography of the Anthropology and Ethnology of Europe. Comprising nearly two thousand titles, it will be provided with a detailed subject index. [O] Bertrand, 1876 b, p. 40. [P] Reinach, 1892, pp. 72-78, for severe criticism of Penka's hypotheses. LIQUID AIR. BY IRA REMSEN, PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. Water, the substance most familiar to us, is known in the liquid, in the solid, and in the gaseous state. Everybody knows that by heating the solid it passes into the liquid state, and that by heating the liquid it passes into the form of gas or vapor. So also everybody knows that when the vapor of water is cooled it is liquefied, and that by cooling liquid water sufficiently it becomes solid or turns to ice. In the same way many of the substances that are known to us as liquids, such as alcohol and ether, can be converted into the form of gas or vapor by heat. In fact, this is true of most liquids. The temperature at which a solid passes into the liquid state is called its melting point, and the temperature at which a liquid passes into the gaseous state is called its boiling point. The boiling point of water, for example, is 100° C. (212° F.) in the open air. But the boiling point varies with the pressure exerted upon the surface. The pressure that we ordinarily have to deal with is that of the atmosphere. If the pressure is increased the boiling point is raised, and if the pressure is decreased the boiling point is lowered. In dealing, then, with the conversion of a gas into a liquid, or that of a liquid into a gas, both the temperature and the pressure have to be considered. Just as water is most familiar to us in the liquid form, so there are substances that are most familiar to us in the gaseous form. In fact, the only gaseous substances that can be said to be familiar to everybody are the gases contained in the air. The principal constituents of the air are nitrogen and oxygen, which form respectively about four fifths and one fifth of its bulk. Besides these gases, however, the air contains water vapor, carbonic-acid gas, ammonia, argon in small quantities, and many other substances in still smaller quantities. For the purposes of this article it is only necessary to have in mind the nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and carbonic acid. Of these, the water vapor is easily converted into liquid, as, for example, in the formation of rain, while the other constituents are liquefied with difficulty. The name "liquid air" is applied to the substance that is obtained by converting the air as a whole into a liquid; but in this process the water and the carbonic acid become solid and can be filtered from the liquid so that the latter consists almost wholly of oxygen and nitrogen. A few years ago this liquid was obtainable in only very small quantities. To-day, thanks especially to the efforts of Mr. Charles E. Tripler, of New York, it can be produced in any desired quantity, and at moderate cost. In consequence of this, it has come to be talked about in a familiar way, and many persons have had the privilege of seeing and feeling it, and of learning something about its wonderful properties. The object of this article is to explain the method employed in the production of liquid air, to give an account of some of its properties, and to indicate some of the uses to which it may possibly be put. In the older text-books of physics and of chemistry certain gases were classed as "permanent," under the impression that these could not be liquefied, and this impression was based upon the fact that all efforts to liquefy them had failed. A brief account of these efforts will be helpful. Among the so-called permanent gases was chlorine. An English chemist, Northmore, first succeeded, early in this century, in liquefying chlorine. His work was, however, lost sight of, and in 1823 Faraday at the Royal Institution showed independently that this transformation of gaseous chlorine into the liquid can be effected comparatively easily. The method used by him is this: When chlorine gas is passed into cold water it forms with the water a solid product known as chlorine hydrate. If kept well cooled this hydrate can be dried. If then its temperature is raised even to the ordinary temperature of the room, the solid hydrate is decomposed into liquid water and gaseous chlorine. Faraday put some of the solid hydrate into a stout glass tube sealed at one end and bent at the middle. The other end of the tube was then closed. The tube was then suspended so that the two ends were turned downward. On gently warming the end in which was the solid hydrate, this was decomposed into chlorine and water. But the gas given off would under ordinary conditions have occupied a much larger space than the solid hydrate. Being prevented from expanding by the tube in which it was inclosed, it was under very considerable pressure. The end of the tube that was not warmed was cooled, and in this end, in consequence of the pressure and the comparatively low temperature, chlorine, which is gaseous under the ordinary pressure of the air, appeared as a liquid. The general method made use of by Faraday in this classical experiment is that which is always made use of for the purpose of liquefying gases, but for some gases pressures very much higher and temperatures very much lower are required. Faraday himself succeeded in liquefying all the gases then known except oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, nitric oxide, and marsh gas. He subjected oxygen to a pressure of about one thousand pounds to the square inch, or nearly seventy atmospheres, but it showed no signs of liquefaction. Later experimenters increased the pressure to four thousand pounds to the square inch, with no better results, so that it is not surprising that it came to be held that some gases are permanent. Within comparatively recent years several gases have been liquefied on the large scale by means of pressure. These are ammonia, carbonic acid, nitrous oxide, and chlorine. Ammonia is used for producing low temperatures, as in breweries and in cold-storage plants and in the manufacture of ice; carbonic acid, for fire extinguishers and for charging beer with the gas; nitrous oxide, for producing anæsthesia; and chlorine in connection with several branches of chemical manufacture. The production of low temperatures by means of liquid ammonia and of liquid carbonic acid will be more fully dealt with further on, when the principles involved will be briefly presented. It is to be borne in mind that these substances are liquefied by means of pressure alone, at temperatures that are easily reached, so that it appears that by mechanical pressure it is possible to produce low temperatures. In 1869 an important fact was discovered by Andrews. It was that for every gas there is a temperature above which it is impossible to liquefy it by pressure. Thus, if chlorine is at any temperature above 146° C. (294° F.) it can not be liquefied. This temperature is called the "critical temperature" of chlorine. The pressure to which the gas must be subjected at the "critical temperature" in order that the gas may be liquefied is called the "critical pressure." In the case of chlorine this is 93.5 atmospheres. Now, the critical temperature of the gases that were called permanent gases are very low--lower than could be reached by the means at the command of earlier experimenters. The critical temperature of oxygen, for example, is -118.8° C. (-182° F.), while that of nitrogen is -146° C. (-230° F.). The critical pressures are 50.8 and 35 atmospheres respectively. As there is no difficulty in obtaining these pressures, the problem of liquefying oxygen and nitrogen and air resolves itself into finding a method of producing temperatures below the critical temperatures of these gases. It is well known that a temperature somewhat below the freezing point of water can be produced artificially by mixing ice and salt. The ordinary ice-cream freezer is a familiar application of this method of producing cold. Other freezing mixtures that are sometimes used consist of calcium chloride and snow, that gives the temperature -48° C. (-54.4° F.), and solid carbonic acid and ether, that is capable of lowering the temperature to -100° C. (-148° F.). But even with the latter mixture it is not possible to reach the critical temperature of oxygen or that of nitrogen. How, then, is it possible to reach these extremely low temperatures? In order to answer this question it will be necessary to take into consideration certain temperature changes that are observed when solids are melted and liquids are boiled, as well as when gases are liquefied and liquids are frozen. When heat is applied to a mass of ice at its melting point it melts and forms a mass of water having the same temperature. Heat disappears in the operation. It is stored up in the water. This disappearance of heat that accompanies the melting of ice can be shown in a very striking way by mixing a certain weight of ice with the same weight of water that has been heated to 80° C. (176° F.). The ice will melt and all the water obtained will be found to have the temperature of the melting ice--that is, 0° C. (32° F.). The water of 80° C. is thus cooled down to 0° by the melting of the ice. Again, when heat is applied to water its temperature rises until the boiling point is reached. Then it is converted into vapor, but this vapor has the temperature of the boiling water. During the process of boiling there is no rise in the temperature of the water or of the vapor. Heat disappears, therefore, or is used up in the process of vaporization. Similar phenomena are observed whenever a solid is melted or a liquid is boiled. When, however, a gas is liquefied it gives up again the heat that is absorbed by it when it is formed from a liquid; and so also when a liquid solidifies it gives up the heat it absorbs when it is formed from a solid. But it is not necessary that a gas should be converted into a liquid in order that it should give up heat. Whenever it is compressed it becomes warmer. Some of the heat stored up in it is, as it were, squeezed out of it. Conversely, whenever a gas expands, it takes up heat and, of course, surrounding objects from which the heat is taken become colder. Now, it is a comparatively simple matter to compress air. Every wheelman knows that, and he also knows that the process causes a rise in temperature; at least he knows it if he uses a small hand pump. With large pumps run by steam any desired pressure can be reached. This is simply a question of securing the proper engines, and vessels sufficiently strong to stand the pressure. It has already been pointed out that several gases are now liquefied on the large scale by means of pressure. It is to be noted that low temperatures can be produced by converting certain gases, such as ammonia and carbonic acid, into liquids, and by compressing certain gases, as, for example, air. When liquefied gases are used it is only necessary to allow them to pass rapidly into the gaseous state, when more or less heat is absorbed. This is the basis for the use of liquid ammonia in the manufacture of ice. A vessel containing the liquid ammonia is placed in another containing water. The inner vessel being opened, the liquid ammonia is rapidly converted into the gas; heat is absorbed from the water; it freezes. When a vessel containing liquid carbonic acid is opened so that the gas that is formed escapes through a small valve, so much heat is absorbed that a part of the liquid carbonic acid is itself frozen. In this case the substance is present in all three states of aggregation--the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous. The use of a mixture of ether and solid carbonic acid as a freezing mixture has already been referred to. Its value depends, of course, principally upon the fact that solid carbonic acid is liquefied, and the liquid then converted into gas, both of which operations involve absorption of heat. We are now prepared to understand the important experiments of Cailletet and of Pictet, the results of which were published in 1877. It should be said that they worked independently of each other--Cailletet in Paris and Pictet in Geneva. Pictet liquefied carbonic acid and sulphur dioxide by pressure. The liquid carbonic acid was passed through a tube that was surrounded by liquid sulphur dioxide boiling in a partial vacuum. The liquid carbonic acid thus cooled was then boiled under diminished pressure in a jacket surrounding a tube in which the gas to be liquefied was contained under high pressure. When this gas was allowed to escape from a small opening its temperature was so reduced by the expansion that a part of it was liquefied in the tube and passed off as a liquid. Cailletet worked in essentially the same way, but on a smaller scale. Neither of these experimenters liquefied oxygen or nitrogen on the large scale, but they pointed out the way that must be followed in order that success may be attained. They destroyed the belief in "permanent" gases. Later experimenters in this field are Wroblewski, Olszewski, and Dewar, who have been interested mainly in the purely scientific side of the problem, while Linde in Germany, Hampson in England, and Tripler in the United States have their minds on the practical side. Notwithstanding the low temperatures involved in the experiments, a number of heated discussions have been carried on in the scientific journals touching the question of priority. To the unprejudiced observer it appears that all of those named above are entitled to credit. They have all helped the cause along, but just how to apportion the credit no one knows. In a general way, however, some of the results obtained by each in turn should be given. Wroblewski and Olszewski have carried on the work begun by Cailletet and Pictet, and have produced lower temperatures. In the latest form of apparatus used by Olszewski, liquid ethylene is used as the cooling agent. Its boiling point is -102° C. (-151.6° F.). By causing it to boil rapidly under diminished pressure a temperature below the critical temperature of oxygen can be reached. As early as 1891 Olszewski obtained as much as two hundred cubic centimetres of liquid air by this method. Dewar has also made use of liquid ethylene. This was passed through a spiral copper tube surrounded by solid carbonic acid and ether. It was then passed into a cylinder surrounded by another cylinder containing solid carbonic acid and ether. A spiral copper tube, which runs through the outer cylinder and also through the inner cylinder in which the ethylene was boiling under diminished pressure, carried the air. This was liquefied and then collected in a vacuum vessel below. Later he found that air can be liquefied by using liquid carbonic acid alone as the cooling agent. A sectional drawing of his apparatus described in 1896 is given herewith. As he remarks: "With this simple machine, one hundred cubic centimetres of liquid oxygen can readily be obtained, the cooling agent being carbon dioxide, at the temperature of -79°. If liquid air has to be made by this apparatus, then the carbonic acid must be kept under exhaustion of about one inch of mercury pressure, so as to begin with a temperature of -115°." [Illustration: FIG. 1.--LABORATORY LIQUEFACTION APPARATUS OF DEWAR FOR THE PRODUCTION OF LIQUID OXYGEN, ETC. A, air or oxygen inlet; B, carbon-dioxide inlet; C, carbon-dioxide valve; D, regenerator coils; F, air or oxygen expansion valve; G, vacuum vessel with liquid oxygen; H, carbon-dioxide and air outlet; o, air coil; ø, carbon-dioxide coil.] The introduction of the vacuum vessel by Dewar has been of great service in all the work on liquefied gases. A vacuum vessel is a double-walled glass vessel, as shown in Fig. 1, G. The space between the inner and outer walls of the vessel is exhausted by means of an air pump before it is closed. The vessel is therefore surrounded by a vacuum. As heat is not conducted by a vacuum, it is possible to keep specimens of liquefied gases in such vessels for a surprisingly long time. Heat enough can not pass through the vacuum to vaporize the liquid rapidly. The most common form of these vessels is that of a globe. Such a vessel is known as a Dewar globe or bulb. It has been found that liquid air can be kept very well by putting it in a tin or galvanized iron vessel, which in turn is placed in a larger one, and then filling the space between the two with felt. Under these conditions vaporization takes place quite slowly, and it is possible to transport the liquid comparatively long distances. It has, for example, been transported from New York to Baltimore and Washington. In one case with which the writer is familiar two cans were taken from Mr. Tripler's laboratory in the morning, delivered at the Johns Hopkins University in the afternoon, and used to illustrate a lecture in the evening. After the lecture there was enough left for certain experiments that were carried on during the rest of the night. [Illustration: FIG. 2.--DIAGRAM SHOWING WORKING OF COMPRESSION APPARATUS FOR MAKING LIQUID AIR.] Tripler, Linde, and Hampson have all succeeded in devising forms of apparatus by means of which air can be liquefied without the aid of other cooling agents than the expanding air. In principle the methods employed by these three workers are essentially the same. It appears from the published statements that at the present time Tripler's plant is the most efficient. While a few years ago a half pint or so of liquid air is said to have cost five hundred dollars, now five gallons can be made for about twenty dollars, and probably much less. The general working of Tripler's apparatus can be made clear by the aid of the accompanying drawing, Fig. 2. A^1, A^2, A^3 represent steam compression pumps. Air is taken through I from above the roof of the laboratory. In the first pump it is compressed to sixty-five pounds to the square inch. It, of course, becomes heated as it is compressed. In order to cool it down again it is passed through a coil, B^1, which is surrounded by water of the ordinary temperature. This compressed and cooled air is then further compressed in the second pump, A^2, to four hundred pounds to the square inch. Again it is cooled in the same way as before by means of water which circulates around the coil B^2. Once more the air is compressed, this time in the cylinder A^3, in which it is subjected to a pressure of two thousand to twenty-five hundred pounds to the square inch; and then this compressed air is brought down to the ordinary temperature in the cooler B^3. The air under this great pressure is now passed through the purifier C, where it is freed from particles of dust and to a great extent from moisture. From C the air passes into the inner bent tube, about thirty feet in length, until it reaches D. This may be called the critical point of the apparatus. Here is situated a needle valve from which the air is allowed to escape. It, of course, expands enormously, and is correspondingly cooled. This very cold air passes into the space between the inner and outer tubes, and finally escapes at F. The result of this is that the compressed air in the inner tube is soon cooled down so far that a considerable part of the air that escapes at D appears in the liquid form. This collects in the lower part of the jacket, and on opening the stopcock at E the liquid escapes in a stream the size of one's finger. In Mr. Tripler's laboratory the liquid is collected in the cans already referred to. Although for the reasons mentioned the evaporation of the liquid is comparatively slow, it is constantly going on, and as the gas formed occupies a very much larger volume under the pressure of the atmosphere than the liquid from which it is formed, it is necessary to leave the cans loosely covered. Otherwise the pressure would increase to such an extent as to burst any but the strongest vessels. One cubic foot of liquid air gives at atmospheric pressure eight hundred cubic feet of gaseous air. Liquid air obtained as described is a turbid, colorless liquid. The turbidity is due to the presence of solid water and solid carbonic acid. By passing the liquid through a paper filter the solids are removed, and a transparent liquid is thus obtained. This, as already stated, consists mostly of nitrogen and oxygen in the proportion of about four fifths of the former to one fifth of the latter. Though it should not be forgotten that this liquid contains argon in small quantity, besides three or four other substances in still smaller quantities, as has recently been shown by Professor Ramsay, we may disregard everything except the nitrogen and oxygen. Liquid air is a _mixture_ of these two substances. They are not chemically combined as hydrogen and oxygen are, for example, in water. This mixture boils at -191° C. (-312° F.), which is the temperature of the liquid as it is in the cans. As the nitrogen boils at a lower temperature (-194° C. or 318° F.) than oxygen (-183° C. or 297° F.), more nitrogen is converted into gas in a given time than oxygen, and after a time the liquid that is left is much richer in oxygen than ordinary air. When liquid air is poured upon water it, being a little lighter than the water, floats, not quietly, to be sure, but in a very troubled way. Soon, however, the liquid sinks to the bottom because the nitrogen, which is the lighter constituent, passes into the gaseous state, and the liquid oxygen which is left is a little heavier than water. The experiment is a very beautiful one. A scientific poet could alone do justice to it. The beauty is enhanced by the fact that while liquid air is colorless, or practically so, liquid oxygen is distinctly blue. Although liquid air has the temperature -191° C. (-312° F.), one can without danger pass the hand through it rapidly. The sensation is a new one, but it is evanescent. Very serious results would follow if the hand were allowed to remain in the liquid even for a short time. The tissues would be killed. So also, it is possible to pass the hand rapidly through molten lead without injury. In the latter case the moisture on the hand is converted into vapor which forms a protecting cushion between the hand and the hot liquid; while, in the former case, the heat of the hand converts the liquid air immediately surrounding it into gas which prevents the liquid from coming in contact with the hand. When the liquid is poured out of a vessel in the air it is rapidly converted into gas. The great lowering in the temperature causes a condensation of the moisture of the air in the form of a cloud. The same thing is seen when the cover is removed from a can containing the liquid. Of course, this liquid does not wet things as water does. When, however, as happened in New York, the lecturer deliberately pours a dipperful of the liquid upon a priceless Worth gown, he may expect to hear expressions of horror from the owner. This experiment passed off most successfully. Every trace of the liquid air was converted into invisible gases before the fleeting agony of the sympathetic audience had passed away. The effects of very low temperature upon a number of substances have been studied, and some of them can easily be shown. Paraffin, resin, and rubber immersed in liquid air soon become very brittle, and the color of the resin is completely changed. A beefsteak or an onion also becomes brittle, and can be broken into small fragments by the blow of a hammer. A similar effect is produced in the case of some metals. Tin and iron, for example, become brittle, and the tenacity of the iron is greatly increased. A copper wire, however, retains its flexibility. At low temperatures the electric conductivity of all metals is increased. In general, the lower the temperature the greater the conductivity. If a copper wire could by any means be kept cold enough, electrical energy could be transmitted by it with but little loss--perhaps none. Mercury is easily frozen by surrounding it with liquid air, and the solid thus formed is very hard, though if it is cooled down sufficiently it becomes brittle. Alcohol can be frozen without difficulty by means of liquid air. By the aid of the lowest temperatures hitherto attainable it has only been possible to convert alcohol into a pasty mass. The frozen alcohol is as hard as ice. When alcohol is dropped into liquid air the drops retain the globular form. When taken out on a platinum loop the flame of a Bunsen burner does not set fire to it. Phosphorescence is greatly increased by cooling substances down to the temperature of liquid air. This has been shown by means of water, milk, paper, eggs, and feathers. An egg and a feather could be distinctly seen in a dark room. Scarlet iodide of mercury is converted into the yellow variety when it is subjected to the temperature of liquid air. Some other colors are changed under the same circumstances, but not enough is known of this subject to warrant a general statement. Attention has already been called to the fact that liquid air loses its nitrogen more rapidly than it does its oxygen, and that, after a time, the residue contains a large proportion of oxygen. As combustion is combination with oxygen, combustion or burning takes place more readily in contact with this liquid oxygen than it does in the air. If a lighted match is attached to the end of a steel watch spring, and this then plunged beneath the surface of liquid air, the spring will soon take fire and burn brilliantly, the sparks flying off for some distance in beautiful coruscations. Hair felt, which does not burn in the air, burns in a flash when soaked with liquid air. Finally, when liquid air is confined in any vessel not capable of sustaining an enormous pressure, say about ten thousand pounds to the square inch, the vaporization goes on until the vessel bursts or the stopper is forced out. It might therefore be used as an explosive without any addition, but its manipulation is not altogether simple. Now for the inevitable question: Of what use is liquid air likely to be? This is a perfectly proper question, and yet, if scientific workers always stopped to ask it, and would not work unless they could find a favorable answer, progress would, to say the least, be much slower than it is. Most great practical discoveries have necessarily passed through the plaything stage. Some of the most important discoveries have not even furnished playthings, and have found no practical applications as this expression is commonly understood. But the production of liquid air, while furnishing mankind with a beautiful and instructive plaything, seems likely to find practical applications. We may look for these in four directions, to each of which a short paragraph may be devoted: First, as a cooling agent. Low temperature is marketable. To be sure, the demand for the extremely low temperature that can be produced by liquid air does not exist to-day, but this concentrated low temperature can be diluted to suit conditions. The only question to be answered in this connection is, then, What is the cost of cold produced by liquid air? It is impossible for any one to answer this question at all satisfactorily at present. It can only be said that this is what experimenters are trying to find out. It appears, however, that they are on the way to cheap liquid air, and that as the processes are improved the price will become lower and lower. Second, for the construction of motors. There is no doubt that liquid air with its enormous power of expansion can be used as a source of motive power just as compressed air is. In the case of steam it is necessary to heat the water in order to convert it into steam, and to heat the steam to give it the power of expansion. The cost is, in the first instance, that of the fuel. Given a certain amount of heat, and a certain amount of work is obtained. If liquid air is used, the problem is much the same. Engines must be run in order to compress the air which is to be liquefied. Every gallon of liquid air has been produced at the expense of work of some kind. Now, the question arises at once, What proportion of the work that was put in that gallon of liquid air in the course of its production can be got out of it again? It is certain that all of it can not be got out unless all that we have ever learned about such matters goes for nothing. In dealing with the problem of the application of liquid air as a source of motive power we are therefore doubly handicapped. In the first place, we do not know the cost of the liquid when produced on the large scale; and, in the second place, _we_ do not know the probable efficiency of a liquid-air motor. I say "we do not know." Perhaps Mr. Tripler and the others engaged in the experiments on this subject do know approximately. We certainly can not blame them for not telling us all they know at this stage of the work. It is unfortunate, however, that such a statement as was recently published in a popular magazine should be allowed to gain currency--apparently with the sanction of Mr. Tripler. The statement referred to is to the effect that ten gallons of liquid air have been made by the use of three gallons of liquid air in the engine. If that means that the ten gallons of liquid air are made from air at the ordinary pressure, the statement is in direct conflict with well-established principles. If it means that the ten gallons of liquid air are made from air that has already been partly compressed, we must know how much work has been done before the liquid-air engine began. Leaving out of consideration the question of cost, it may be pointed out that liquid-air engines would have the advantage of compactness, though they would necessarily be heavy, as they would have to be strong enough to stand the great pressure to which they would be subjected. The third application of liquid air that has been suggested is in the preparation of an explosive. In fact, an explosive has been made and used for some time in which liquid air is one of the constituents. When the liquid from which a part of the nitrogen has boiled off is mixed with powdered charcoal, the mixture burns with great rapidity and great explosive force. "To make this explosive, Dr. Linde pours the liquid containing about forty or fifty per cent of oxygen on fragments of wood charcoal, two or four cubic millimetres in size. These are kept from scattering under the ebullition of the liquid by mixing them into a sort of sponge with about one third of their weight of cotton wool." Of course, this explosive must be made at or near the place where it is used. It has been in use in the way of a practical test in a coal mine at Pensberg, near Munich. It is claimed that the results were satisfactory. The chief advantage of the explosive is its cheapness, and the fact that it soon loses its power of exploding. Finally, the fourth application of liquid air is for the purpose of getting oxygen from the air. This can be accomplished by chemical means, but the chemical method is somewhat expensive. Oxygen has commercial value, and cheap oxygen would be a decided advantage in a number of branches of industry. It will be observed that it is the liquid oxygen that makes possible the preparation of the explosive described in the last paragraph. Oxygen as such in the form of gas is of value in Deacon's process for the manufacture of chlorine. In this process air and hydrochloric acid are caused to act upon each other so as to form water and chlorine. The nitrogen takes no part in the act, and it would be an advantage if it could be left out. It is only the oxygen that is wanted. There are many other possible uses for oxygen either in the liquid or in the gaseous form, but these need no mention here. In conclusion it may safely be said that it is highly probable that liquid air will be found to be a useful substance, but it is impossible at present to speak with any confidence of the particular uses that will be made of it. As work with it is being carried on energetically in at least three countries, we may confidently expect important developments in the near future. THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE WEST INDIES. BY F. L. OSWALD. II.--BIRDS. The abundance of birds on the four largest islands of the West Indian archipelago, where indigenous mammals are almost limited to rodents and bats, has often suggested the conjecture that the ancestors of those islanders must have been immigrants from the east coasts of the American mainland; and that theory seems to be confirmed by two facts: the identity, or similarity, of numerous Mexican and West Indian species, and the circumstance that those analogies include so many swift-winged birds. There are no woodpeckers in the forests of the Antilles, and only two species of large gallinaceous birds, but a prodigious variety of pigeons, swallows, finches, and crows. The _alcedos_ (kingfishers) are scarce, but the blackbirds so numerous that some of the countless species seem to claim a South American and even transatlantic ancestry. The restless _estornino_ of the Cuban highland forests, for instance, might be mistaken for a varnished starling, resembling the _Sturnus vulgaris_ of western Europe in everything but the more brilliant luster of its plumage. The curious _codornilla_, or dove quail, too, has its nearest relatives on the other side of the Atlantic, in Syria, Arabia, and the foothills of the Atlas. It builds its nest on the ground and, judging from its appearance, would seem to form a connecting link between the doves and small _gallinæ_; but its wings are those of a pigeon, and with the assistance of a northeast gale may possibly have carried it across the ocean. [Illustration: CROWN PIGEON.] In studying the geographical distribution of animals, we may estimate the prevalence of special genera by the number of their varieties, or by the aggregate sum of individuals, and in the latter sense the migratory pigeons of our forest States once nearly outnumbered all the other birds of North America, though the family is limited to five or six species. But in the West Indies the _Columbidæ_ predominate in both respects. Cuba is a country of wild pigeons as pre-eminently as South Africa is a land of pachyderms and Madagascar of night monkeys. The _Columba leucocephala_ (a congener of our ringdove) inhabits the mountain forests in countless swarms, and at the end of the rainy season visits grainfields in such numbers that hundreds are sometimes captured in nets, by means of corn scattered along the furrows. A closely allied variety is found in San Domingo, where in many upland regions a darkey, equipped with a shotgun and a supply of gunpowder, can dispense with agriculture and raise a family of anthropoids on pigeon pies and _tortillas_, compounded from the grain found in the crops of his victims. But the _tittyblang_ (_tête-blanc_) has scores of smaller and larger cousins, culminating in the Cuban primate of the family, the splendid _paloma real_, with its coronet of pearl-gray plumes and dark-blue wings. [Illustration: CRESTED CURASSOW.] [Illustration: PORTO RICO PARRAKEET.] Ducks, too, must number some twenty West Indian species, and one kind of wild geese often obliged the rice planters to employ mounted sharpshooters, who galloped up and down the long dikes, yelling blasphemies, and every now and then enforcing their quotations with a handful of buckshot. But, for all that, the planter could think himself lucky to gather a sixty-per-cent harvest of the total produce, for experience soon enabled the long-necked depredators to estimate the target range of the _cazador_ within a dozen yards and take wing in the nick of time, only to resume their feast at the other end of the plantation. [Illustration: VERVAIN HUMMING BIRD AND NEST.] A long-continued process of natural selection has also modified the habits of numerous species of West Indian parrots. Four hundred years ago, when Fernan Oviedo superintended the placer mines of Hayti, _loris_ were so abundant and tame that his assistants often amused themselves prowling about a thicket of berry bushes and capturing the chattering visitors by means of a common ring net. Nestlings could be taken from every hollow tree, and often from the thatchwork of deserted Indian cabins; but the overconfident specimens came to grief, and the survivors have learned to give the Caucasian varieties of the _Simia destructor_ a wide berth. They raise their young in the cavities of the tallest forest trees, and approach human habitations only at dawn of day and sometimes during the noonday heat, when creoles can be relied upon to indulge in a _siesta_ nap. In reliance on their protective colors, gray parrakeets frequent the dead timber of the coffee plantations, while the leaf-green Amazon parrot sticks to leaf trees. "When they alight on a dry branch," says Captain Gosse, in his Jamaica chronicle, "their emerald hue is conspicuous and affords a fair mark for the gunner, but in a tree of full foliage their color proves an excellent concealment. They seem aware of this, and their sagacity prompts them to rely on it for protection. Often we hear their voices proceeding from a certain tree, or have marked the descent of a flock, but on proceeding to the spot, though the eye has not wandered from it, we can not discover an individual; we go close to the tree, but all is silent; we institute a careful survey of every part with the eye, to detect the slightest motion, or the form of a bird among the leaves, but in vain, and we begin to think that they have stolen off unperceived, but on throwing a stone into the tree a dozen voices burst forth into cry, and as many green birds dart forth upon the wing." The gorgeous macaws, on the other hand, seem to owe their color contrasts to sexual selection. "Ya son vencidos los pavos de India"--"That does beat a Hindostan peacock"--exclaimed King Ferdinand, when Columbus introduced those most splendid products of the American tropics. Nor can the exigencies of protection have evolved the glaring colors of the West Indian hornbill. The _toco_ (toucan), as the Cubans call the yellow-billed species, can be descried from a distance of two hundred yards, and is, indeed, not anxious to be admired at close range. Old specimens get as wary as mountain ravens, but, like crows, become ridiculously tame in captivity, and will follow their proprietors with loud croaks, every now and then opening their lunch-trap to indicate their desire for refreshment. They are, on the whole, the hardiest of all tropical birds, and can weather the winters of our coast towns as far north as Wilmington, in open-air cages, owing perhaps to their habit of extending their excursions to the high mountain ranges of their native land. [Illustration: THE SMALLEST BIRD.] Economical Nature rarely wastes the gift of song on a bird of bright plumage, but it is less easy to understand why so many feathered beauties should have been afflicted with harsh and positively repulsive voices. The horrid screams of the peacocks, guinea hens, and macaws can hardly be supposed to charm their mates, and are too easily recognized to deter their natural enemies. But the roars (there is no more adequate word) of some species of hornbills would almost seem intended to serve the latter purpose. "The voice of the _Buceros bicornis_," says Wallace, "can be plainly heard at a distance of a mile, so that the amazement of travelers visiting its haunts seems explicable enough. Its screams may be described as something between the bray of a jackass and the shriek of a locomotive, and are not surpassed in power by any sound that an animal is capable of making. They re-echo through the hills to such a degree that it is difficult to assign the noise to a bird, and are sometimes kept up so continuously as to become absolutely unbearable." The condor and the harpy eagle have not found their way across the Caribbean Sea, but the West Indies boast three varieties of fish eagles, several species of mountain falcons, and a curious singing owl, the _oriya_, that chants its serenades in the plaintive strain of the whip-poor-will, and is dreaded by the Porto Rico darkeys as a bird of ill-omen: "Grita l'oriya: Venga amigo, Venga conmigo a mi patria, Venga te-digo!" Small hooting owls abound, and there are four species of sparrow hawks, one of them not much larger than a finch. It is probably the smallest bird of prey, and there is no doubt that one species of West Indian humming bird is the smallest bird on earth, the _Vervain colibri_, of Jamaica, that hides its nest under an orange leaf, and, though an insect-eater, could be easily overpowered by an able-bodied bumblebee. In beauty some of the south Cuban species rival those of the Amazon Valley, and frequent every flowering shrub from the jungles of the coast lands to the highland meadows of the Sierra Maestra. In Hayti there are parklike plateaus where they often appear in swarms at a time of the year when the forests of the foothills are drenched by the afternoon cloudbursts of the rainy season, and on some of the smaller Antilles they are seen only during the flowering period of special plants. In the solitudes of the Morne Range (San Domingo) mountain ravens rear their brood in the crevices of steep rocks, and fiercely attack birds of prey, not excepting the black-crested eagle, that now and then visits the sierras in quest of conies. But the winged constables of the highlands rarely leave their mountain reservation. Of Abd-el-Wahab, the Arabian heretic, it used to be said that "Mohammedan zealots shrank in affright from his superior fanaticism," and on the midway terraces of the Dominican sierras the persecution mania of the giant crow yields to that of the great shrike, the _Lanius rufus_, that operates pairwise and assails all winged comers with absolutely reckless courage. The raven of the Mornes seems to be identical with the cosmopolitan forager that is found in the uplands of the eastern continent from the bleak summit regions of the Hindu-Kush to the sierras of Portugal, and from the Atlas to the Norwegian Alps; but there are several exclusively West Indian species of the genus _Corvus_, including a steel-blue rook that flits about the Cuban coffee plantations and has a curious habit of perching on a stump and talking to itself in a sort of croaking chuckle for half hours together. The _gallinæ_, as might be expected from their limited wing-power, are well represented in the number of individuals, rather than of species. Turkeys, though abundant in the coast forests of Central America, are not found wild in any part of the West Indies, where the perennial presence of berries would be as inviting as the absence of foxes. [Illustration: THE CARIBBEAN ALBATROSS.] In the mountains some species of curassow have, however, developed into a stately game bird, the _Oreophasis niger_, or highland "pheasant," that lays a dozen large eggs, and in its courtship season becomes so infatuated that it can be approached and killed with a common walking-stick. The consequent persecution has made it rather scarce in famine-stricken Cuba, but in Hayti it can still be seen in troops of a dozen or more, scratching up the dry leaves of the sierra forests, or pecking at insect-haunted shrubs, exactly like a flock of Tennessee turkeys. There are also several varieties of true pheasants, and two species of quail (besides the above-mentioned _codornilla_), and in eastern Cuba numerous barnyard chickens have taken to the woods and become so shy that it seems a puzzle how their ancestors in the coast range of Burmah could ever be captured and domesticated. They still practice polygamy, combined with a system of co-operative housekeeping, to judge from the number of eggs that are often found in one nest. At the approach of an unfeathered biped the hen bird takes wing with a screech, and is apt to vanish for the rest of that day. The roosters are rarely seen, their glaring colors having faded into more protective shades of olive and brown, but at dawn of day their shrill reveille can be heard from afar in the heart of the pathless jungle woods. [_To be continued._] INSANE CHARACTERS IN FICTION AND THE DRAMA. BY PROF. CESARE LOMBROSO. One of the things that most strikes one who compares the ancient theater, and even the theater of a few years ago, with the modern theater, is the enormous difference in the character of the personages, and particularly the curious frequency of insane as principal personages in the modern theater. We have come to such a point that one may be almost sure that in reading over a new play, by Ibsen, for example, he will find three or four insane personages in it, if, the characters are not all so. These madmen have characteristics so particularized as to seem as if they might have been depicted by an alienist. If the protagonists are not mad, they are agitated by such violent and strange passions as the ordinary world never meets in life; which it therefore refuses to accept when they are described in a scientific book, but nevertheless receives them when it sees them in the scenes or meets them in the romances of the great modern novelists. Ibsen, for example, has made a most exact picture of the progressive general paralysis which arises, precisely as he depicts it, in men of genius, of great mental activity, who have wasted their hereditary power in pleasures or excessive work; and there is in them both impulsiveness and want of will power, complete perversion of all the instincts, and mental confusion, alternating here and there with genial flashes; but he is wrong in accumulating in a single subject the maladies of a large number of diseased, and therefore exaggerating their eccentricities--as he exaggerates atavism and heredity of disease when he makes the morbid son repeat the same incoherent phrases as the father from whom he inherits his disorder used. Just and true, however, is that other form of heredity under which from a father corrupted by licentious indulgence and by alcohol, and criminally vicious, is born, besides a paresic son, a lascivious and criminal daughter, who throws herself into prostitution at the first opportunity without any special cause. So, too, that love of art existing now as only a dream, and that egotistic good nature which enjoys the advantages of a mother's care without gratitude, those short accesses of genial eloquence followed by fury which burst out from the midst of apathy, and which are drowned in the intoxication of alcohol with a complete, immediate forgetfulness of everything, are specific traits of paralytic dementia. Ibsen, in Hedda Gabler, describes to us a neurotic woman who, being pregnant, and therefore suffering more acute attacks, avenges herself, though married, upon her former lover, who had left her, by burning the manuscripts which he expected to make him famous. Virile, like all criminals, she nursed her resentment from youth. In the Pillars of Society the great political characters are rogues and neurotics. In Berkmann the true criminal banker comes into play. He does not kill or ravish, but appropriates the money belonging to his bank under the illusion that he will be able to make great gains with it through the accomplishment of wonderful things that will secure to him his single joy--power; and that he can then restore the sum with redoubled interest. This case is of a kind of very frequent occurrence, and shows a complete absence in the banker of affection and of moral sense. He sacrifices the woman who loves him to further the desires of an accomplice. He has a faithful friend who, robbed by him, continues to visit him every day and give him the solace of admiration even when all despise him; and he repels him when he fails to absolve him and to believe in the possibility of his return to power. Later the defaulter pretends that he has studied his own case, and has probed it in every way, with the result of a complete acquittal of himself. And why all this? Because he has used the money of others for great purposes: to connect seas, to excavate the millions that are shut up in the bosom of the earth and are crying out to be brought into the light. Thus it is that with the combined genius and delirium of megalomaniacs he hears the call of the minerals and the groaning of the ships longing to be set free. Conscience, duty, and probity do not exist for him. He believes that his quality as a man of genius permits him everything; therefore he sacrifices to his chimeras the beings who love him most. "I am," he says, "like a Napoleon disabled by a shot in his first battle"; and he does not perceive that he has grown old, that he has a mortal heart disease; and he dreams of returning to power and of hearing men ask the benefit of his advice, and no longer talks with anybody, because there is nobody but his old lover who does not believe him guilty. Finally, repulsed by all, he plunges into the whirl of life and the torment of the mountain, and dies at last of syncope; while his equally egotistical son deserts the mother who adores him to go to the south with the wealthy Amasia, daughter of his father's enemy. In Dostoievski, madmen, especially epileptics, constitute the absolute majority of the characters; or else they are born criminals, such as my school has attempted to identify by the figures on the hand. "This strange family," he writes in The House of the Dead, "had an air which attracted notice at the first glance." All the prisoners were melancholy, envious, terribly vain, presumptuous, susceptible, and formal in the highest degree. Vanity ruled always, without the least sign of shame or repentance or the least sorrow over the commission of an offense. Nearly all the convicts dreamed aloud or raved during sleep. Most usually they spoke words of abuse and slang, talked of knife and axe. "We are a ruined people," they said; "we have no bowels; therefore we cry out in the night." This impossibility of feeling remorse or penitence, along with vanity and exaggerated love of pomp, are characteristics well known to all observers. But other traits were manifested perhaps more conspicuous, and such as are common to children. On feast days the more elegant ones dressed gorgeously, and could be seen parading themselves through the barracks. Pleasure in being well dressed amounted to childishness in them. Reasoning has no power upon men like Petroff, because they have not any decisive will. If they have, there are no longer obstacles to it. Such persons are born with an idea that moves them unconsciously all their lives hither and thither. They are quiet till they have found some object that strongly arouses their desire; then they no longer spare even their heads. "More than once have I wondered to see how Petroff robbed me in spite of the affection he had for me. This happened to him at intervals, when he had a strong desire to drink. A person like him is capable of assassinating a man for twenty-five soldi, only to drink a litre; on other occasions he would scorn thousands of rubles. He often confessed his thefts to me, lamenting that I no longer had the objects, but showed no penitence for having stolen them; bore reproofs because he thought they were inevitable, or because he deserved to receive them; because I ought to punish him to compensate myself for the things I had lost, but thought within himself that they were trifles that one ought to be above speaking of." Further on the novelist speaks of the smuggler by profession, a pleasant fellow, condemned for life for his offenses, who could not lose the instinct for smuggling brandy into the prison. He received only a ridiculous profit, was greatly afraid of the rod, although he had rarely passed under it, wept, swore that he would not offend any more, and then fell down. Zola also reproduces my epileptic moral madman in _La Bête Humaine_, in the alcoholic in _L'Assommoir_, the paranoiac in Work, and himself confesses to having taken the brief of his immortal chain of romances, Rougon, from a study made by Aubry in a provincial family celebrated for its richness in degenerates, criminals, and insane, all derived from a dull, neurotic Keratry. Daudet depicts in Jack a series of _mattoidi_, that particular species of insane which I first discovered, that occupies a position between paranoiacs, geniuses, and imbeciles. ANCIENT ROMANCE AND THEATER.--We turn now to the ancient theater and romance. All the Roman novels of Petronius and Apuleius are rich in obscene, mythological, and magical adventures, most improbable and satirical, without ever defining a character or including a real madman. In the ancient Greek theater, while the idea of heredity is discernible under the form of fate, while violent passion is every now and then depicted under marvelous forms, while anomalies strike us, and furies of Ajax and Dejanira, of Orestes and Oedipus, and the melancholy of Philoctetes, they all still have a common type, which is not perceived in ordinary life. They are madmen who do not exist in any asylum, who seem symbolical, and have little correspondence with the men of the mythological and heroic epoch to which they all belonged; they never, except in Euripides, present a specific personage, nor ever, unless with rare exceptions--as in the Persians of Æschylus and a few other lost works, like the Siege of Miletus--deal with contemporary historical facts. These poets were concerned with the symbol, the moral, the tradition, and, if I may be permitted the term, the blasphemy, the declamation, rather than with depicting the person. This is further seen in the comedy of the Greek decadence, and still further in that of the Romans, in which, except in the political squibs, the same personages nearly always appear, as well as showing out of the masks intended for the common people--and these figures have come down to us. There are nearly always the old miser or rake, the go-between slave, the braggart soldier. The plots were likewise the same: changed children, reconciled lovers, except in the Greek political satires, in which the demerits of the adversary were exaggerated into the most atrocious caricature, and which became like real humorous journals of the political trifles of the day. Yet these highly cultivated peoples, agitated by grand public passions, had absorbing, moving controversies--the struggles of the Gracchi, the banishment of Themistocles and Aristides, and the varying fortunes of Marius, of which no trace is found. Nor, for the rest, did the Latins, who were our masters, and were, as we are after them, copyists, followers in the footsteps of their Greek predecessors, readapt contemporary events to their dramatic lines. We in our turn, down to Goldoni and Molière, and even to this very century, have copied those ancient comic and tragic writers, warming them up afresh from Orestes and Clytemnestra, and from events which had not the least echo among us. Trissin, Maffei, and Alfieri delineated more or less, on one side tyrants, on the other tyrannicides, which have little to distinguish them from one another. So in Schiller and Goethe, all the passions are of the scene rather than of personages. Thus Faust, for example, and Margaret, are not persons who have a special character. They are, in fact, personages who cover a symbol, who would tell the story of literature, the story of the beautiful, the skepticism of knowledge, but they tell it with a number of interesting, moving facts, without delineating an individuality. Faust is neither very good nor very bad, since he with his easy way of speaking commits rogueries of every kind till finally he is redeemed. He is a scientific student with a passion for investigation, but in his enthusiasm, instigated by the devil or by doubt, he too often deserts the search for the truth for that of pleasure, too often forsakes the studies that had ennobled his life from youth, and as a man to enjoy the nights of the Brocken, and worse, the favors of Margaret, of Helen, till the moment when he redeems himself by saving a people; but he does this at the last instant, when he is about to die, and has nothing more to enjoy. Margaret, too, is a child like other children, who, like so many others, suffers herself to be beguiled by manly beauty, and has no good qualities except that of being able to die with fortitude, hoping with the penalty to expiate the sin, which is, in fact, more the devil's than hers. The elder Dumas invented an immense diverting confusion of facts, but his personages are always the same, and are the occasion, the instrument, the setting of the adventures. THE REASONS FOR THIS ABSENCE.--The inquiry into the reasons of this absence of insane persons in the older romances and dramas is a curious one. The first cause lies evidently in the law of proceeding in every organism as in every work from the simple to the complex. As in penal law, not the criminal but the crime was studied at first, while now both are studied together; as in primordial medicine only the disease was studied, while now the patient is studied first of all; so in the drama and in comedy, in the measure that the thought has become discriminating, it has substituted or rather associated with observation of the fact _per se_, that of the author of the fact. The study, of course, exacts more acumen, but it also better satisfies our reinvigorated culture and opens broader horizons to us. We have thus done more than abandon the pedantesque scale of the old time and the mere study of the fact; we have introduced characters into the personages, which, while they correspond to living and real characters that we have under our eyes, attempt to resolve a problem and teach us a moral, and go so far as to represent to us a symbolical idea which is a pure abstraction of the author's, reaching thence the maximum of complication. Naturally, such salient characters as madmen, eccentrics, and criminals would not be likely to escape the notice of the dramatist, who finds in them motives for great effects without departing from truth and probability. But there is another more material reason for the recent introduction of insane characters into the theater, and for their greater frequency and participation in real life. It has been remarked that insane persons have multiplied a hundredfold with civilization, to such an extent that where a few years ago one madhouse was enough, now five hundred and six are needed. Taking, for example, the statistics of the most progressive country in the world, those of the United States, furnished by its invaluable census report,[A] we see that the number of insane persons, which was 15,610 in 1850, 24,042 in 1860, and 37,432 in 1870, rose in 1880 to 91,994; while the population, from 23,191,876 in 1850, increased to 38,558,371 in 1870, to 50,155,783 in 1880--that is, while the population doubled in a little more than thirty years, the insane increased sixfold; so, in the last decade the increase in population was thirty per cent, and that of insane one hundred and fifty-five per cent. In France[B] there were 131.1 insane per 100,000 inhabitants in 1883, 133 in 1884, 136 in 1888. These figures indicate that the number of insane is larger in the most civilized countries, and is increasing every year. It may indeed be said that many of these insane are not produced but are only revealed by civilization, and that the opening of the large asylums has caused a considerable number to be brought into the light who were not known of before. It is true that the greater care we give now to the insane, as well as to consumptives, makes them longer-lived. And it is true that as the mind grows enlightened criminals come to be regarded as insane and thus increase the apparent number of such. But all this is not sufficient to explain a doubling in a decade, a tenfold increase in twenty years. We know, too, that civilization has brought on the development of new forms of disease, which hardly existed before. For example, general progressive paralysis was formerly so rare that no special name was given to it till our time, while now it forms the larger quota of the maladies of the wealthy, of thinkers, and of military men. Epilepsy has greatly increased in its psychical form, so that what are called psychical and obscure epilepsy are a revelation of our times, and that its close association with crime (which I believe to be one of the sure facts of modern psychiatry) is still accepted by only a very few alienists, not to say that it is rejected with indignation, and, I will remark, with profound ignorance, by most modern jurists. Alcoholism, too, has taken on enormous proportions. Not that the ancients did not drink, but rather that pure alcohol had not yet been introduced; while in the middle ages it passed for one of the most efficacious remedies--_aqua vita_, living water. Dr. Beard has made a most judicious observation in America which I have been able to verify in Sicily--that there must be a very advanced degree of civilization, or rather of degeneracy produced by civilization, for inebriety to be transformed into that aggregation of disasters, especially of the nervous system, which is called alcoholism. Now we have not alcoholism only, but morphinism, cocainism, all stimuli of the nervous system, which are used by barbarians as potent excitants, but not to the point of producing stable alterations except in rare cases, like the _amuck_ of the Malays. And now, we all of us, at least in the capitals and the great centers, find ourselves consumed by a feverish activity which makes the mind labor much more than Nature intended it should, under which is produced all this mass of neurasthenics, hystericals, besides the multitudes of moral insane, profoundly egotistical persons, without affection and wholly directed by a powerful passion for gold, for which they sacrifice everything, even salvation! And, finally, we have that group of semi-insane, which I call _mattoidi_, and who are known as _détraqués_ in France and _cranks_ in North America--that is, those who have the livery of genius with a substratum of weakness and the practical cunning of the average man, who betray their errors only when they write, who hardly exist save among males (with a few exceptions, like Michel) and in the great centers. I have never seen them in the country. Civilization is now depopulating the country and building up the cities, as it is also augmenting physical excitants with alcoholism, morphinism, etc. Civilization emblazons the baton of the marshal, and not only of the marshal but of the president of the republic, in the eyes of everybody who can read and write. Why, then, should we not suppose that civilization can further derange the equilibrium of mental labor and, indirectly, therefore cause an increase of insanity? Not only has the number of insane increased, but their importance in society has multiplied fourfold; for which reason we can not fail to give them attention. The morally insane in politics and the megalomaniac insane in the bank who inspired Ibsen are to be found walking around in every country. The blood-criminal, transmuted into the forger and the bankrupt, penetrates into our houses, and we suffer from him every day; while the insane man at first was not regarded, or was adored under the form of a saint or hated as a wizard, possessed of the devil always, or seemed a phenomenon strange to society, a species of extraplanetary meteor. If we add that the degeneration provoked by the abuses of civilization has begotten a multitude of forms akin to madness which afford a field for combinations now tragic, now strangely comic--like the phobia by which one is afraid to cross a room, or avoids a certain group of words, or refuses to know how many doors and windows there are on the street, or can not be at ease without saying sexual pacifying formulas; a class who with their perverted tastes form a real new world apart; and they all may inspire new dramatic settings forth. As a third cause we add that in our age psychology has penetrated into all departments. There are psychologies of the senses, of the sentiments, of the will, the psychology of the crowd, of the insane, of criminals, and finally the psychology of the cell, or at least of the infusoria (Binet). Therefore, as statistics is applied to history, to politics, to religion, in the same way psychology has at last entered into romance and the drama, and has taken the lion's share. And, far from being repelled by the public, the authors who use it or abuse it, like Euripides and to a certain point Shakespeare, win the admiration of the public; and we are proud to see Zola taking from _L'Uomo delinquente_ the Jacques of his _Bête humaine_ to make an immortal figure of him, and Dostoiewski depicting innate criminals in his House of the Dead, and the criminaloid in his Crime and Punishment; and we do not despise Bourget when, making more a caricature of psychology than a psychology, he assumes to apply it to the toilets of women and the Parisian _cocottes_ under the form of a psychology of love. It may at first sight seem a contradiction that we have shown that there were also found in antiquity at great intervals dramatic poets and romancers like Shakespeare, Dante, and Euripides who, led by the observing and creative instinct, did not confine themselves to events, but studied characters too, and, keenly perceiving the dramatic potencies in the character of insanity, treasured it up in their works. Thus Euripides depicts Helena, vain even into her old age, saving a part of the hair she was offering at the tomb of her sister so as not to lose what remained of her former beauty; and Orestes has not the simple bestial fury depicted by Æschylus, but has choreic movements, genial intervals, and a tendency to suicide, which show that the author had attained a true conception of the maniac. In the Mahabharata the maiden Damaianti is described as made insane by love (Book II, st. iii) and Nalo, who, possessed by the demon Kali, stakes his kingdom on the dice, and, denying his wife, abandons her in the wood: "And with soul slave to the thought, discolored face, and all absorbed in sighs, now lifting up the head, now musing, bereft of sense, you would say; a sudden pallor came on. With mind occupied with one desire, nor sleep, nor the table, nor the sight of familiar friends afforded pleasure, nor day nor night gave repose. Ah! poor miserable one! thus exclaiming and bursting into tears, by that lament, by those soul-sick acts, she was recognized by her friends." Niceforus has shown how Dante in his Inferno has delineated in the damned the characteristics which my school gives to the born criminal. Shakespeare has done better, and has divined many criminal characteristics through the greater intensity of the crime in the criminal woman. Virile even when compared with the criminal man, Lady Macbeth is crueler than her husband, and, more than that, has many of the characteristics of men: "Bring forth men-children only, For thy undaunted mettle should compose Nothing but males." And Macbeth, as cool in the crime as the artful contriver of it, is hysterical and hypnotic, and in the accesses reproduces the acts and words of the tragedy, showing that the author knew that hysterics and somnambulists often repeat the acts and the emotions which mark the climax of their malady. Hamlet has the folly of doubts and hallucinations, simulates the ravings of a madman, but in his suspicious cunning discovers and anticipates what is contemplated to his harm, is homicidal through fear, and is yet often discreet, and a good lover, save that his love vanishes before the fixed idea. In Ophelia, disappointed love, the contact with a madman or a pretended one, the death of her father almost under her very eyes, provoke a species of madness which would now be called mental confusion, with vague ideas of persecution, dim recollections of love betrayed and of her father, incoherent and confused expressions ending in automatic suicide. This confirms our conclusions. Genius has also anticipated an epoch in the use and abuse of lunatics, just because time is canceled for genius, because genius anticipates the future work of centuries. But on this subject the inquiry is pertinent why, while in the complaisant literary world such creations as the Argenson of Daudet, the Jack of Zola, and the Eliza of Goncourt find, if not an immediate, a kindly and ready acceptance--while all the great artists, even the most ancient ones, have given the type which I assign to the born delinquents to executioners and criminals--the world has refused to accept the existence of the criminal type of insanity in genius, and the relations in criminals between epilepsy and crime which are nevertheless received in romance and the drama. It is because when we are in the presence of true figures, made to move before us under a strong light by the great artists, the consciousness of the truth which lies dormant in all of us, smothered and broken under distortion by the schools, reawakens, and rebels against the conventional forms which they have imposed; all the more so because the charm of art has vastly magnified the lines of the truth, has rendered them more evident, and has thus much diminished the effort required to master them. If, on the other hand, we base our conclusion upon cold statistics and what I should call a skeleton study of the facts, we find the old views rising in confusion with those of sentiment and the artistic sense, and we arrive at nothing. FOOTNOTES: [A] Compendium of the Tenth Census of the United States, Part II, p. 1659. See documents in the new statistical laboratory, the only one in Italy, of Professor Cognetti, recently published at Turin. [B] Bodio. Bulletin de l'Institut international de Statistique, 1889, pp. 112 and 128. See some Sanitary Statistics in Italy and other European States, by Dr. Rasori. COLONIAL EXPANSION AND FOREIGN TRADE. BY JACOB SCHOENHOF. Fifty years have elapsed since the adoption of free trade by England. It was hoped that the free entrance of commodities extended to all the world would pave the way to an era of mutual peace and good will. But, judging by the political situation, and taking the armaments as an outward sign of good intentions, the era of peace and good will among nations is certainly far off. To get a trading advantage here and a concession from a semibarbarous country there is still the ambitious striving of the cabinets and the diplomacy of Europe. To give the striving emphasis, industry is taxed to the breaking point and labor to the starving point. Russia exhausts her resources in a railroad through the Siberian waste in her endeavor to obtain an outlet to the sea, which is jealously closed to her at the southwestern end of her dominions by England. The trader of Manchester, fearing for his markets, grows frantic at the prospect of Russian cotton goods being brought to China or to India. The mere acquisition of a port in Manchuria by Russia threatens to seal his doom. But he might look on with complacency. Russia's labor is very dear, capital is dear, wages are on the Asiatic level, famine still stalks through the land, intercommunication is made difficult by the lack of roads, and her wonderful natural resources lie unimproved because the eyes of greed, like those of the dog crossing the stream, are turned on the coveted piece of meat he sees reflected in the water, and to grasp which he drops the one he holds in his mouth. France bristles with bayonets, and is constantly at pains to increase her naval armaments, about whose seaworthiness her own minister of marine expresses suspicions, in obedience to a nervous restlessness for foreign acquisition. England, after her feat in civilizing savages and barbarians in the customary fashion, shown again at Omdurman, is ready to turn her war dogs on France, because the latter has the temerity to demand a slice of Soudanese territory. Well might she have given as hush-money, or for the mere grace of the action, a few thousand square miles of a country closed to access except by the permission of Great Britain, which has successfully pre-empted every desirable bit of land in sight. Germany, instead of using her newly liberated energies at home in an endeavor to elevate the miserable condition of her working classes, taxes their bread and meat, never too freely supplied, to increase the size of her armies and the number of her battle ships. The defense and expansion of her colonial empire is her leading thought. A strange paradox: The workingman and the peasant are overburdened with taxes on the necessaries of life, so as to procure markets for a limited quantity of factory products outside of the field secured in open competition. While professing friendship and brotherly love, they all have their eyes on their neighbor's throat, fearful only lest the other might clutch first. As we are in danger of being drawn into this vortex, it is well to examine the range of possibilities and see what the trade amounts to, to obtain which the scientific intellect of Europe and America has been strained to its limits to discover new means of destruction for attack and defense unknown to the other brothers in the common bond of civilization. It is a matter of course that trade among European nations does not come within this circle, nor of European nations with the United States. It does not depend on battle ships. In the annexed tables I have classified the countries in three classes: (1) Independent states; (2) colonies of European countries, populated by people of European stock; and (3) colonies and dependencies of European countries, but of non-European stock. I have reduced the values of imports and exports of the different countries, published in their own currencies, to American dollars. As the values are paper currencies, silver currencies, or conventional values, and of fluctuating rates, I have in such instances taken a yearly average, which will be found in the footnotes of the tables. _I. Trade of Independent Countries other than of Europe and North America._ Key: (A) Number of inhabitants. (B) Importations. Thousands of dollars. (C) Exportations. Thousands of dollars. (D) Imports per capita. Dollars. (E) Exports per capita. Dollars. ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------ NAMES OF COUNTRIES. | (A) | (B) | (C) | (D) | (E) ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------ _Asia_ (1895). | | | | | | | | | | China[A] | 383,253 | 128,772 | 107,499 | .34 | .28 Japan[B] | 42,270 | 90,681 | 62,443 | 2.14 | 1.47 All other states | 27,000 | 30,000 | 82,000 | 1.10 | 1.18 | | | | | _America._ | | | | | | | | | | Argentina[C] | 4,000 | 103,058 | 108,671 | 26.50 | 27.17 Brazil[D] | 16,000 | 96,000 | 97,000 | 6.00 | 6.06 Chile[E] | 2,700 | 69,200 | 72,900 | 25.62 | 27.00 Peru[F] | 2,600 | 7,560 | 9,000 | 2.90 | 3.30 Mexico[G] | 12,600 | 42,000 | 22,000 | 3.32 | 1.76 Uruguay[H] | 800 | 25,000 | 30,000 | 31.25 | 37.50 Venezuela[I] | 2,300 | 17,000 | 22,000 | 7.40 | 9.56 All other states | 11,300 | 34,000 | 46,800 | 3.00 | 4.14 | | | | | _South Africa_ | | | | | | | | | | Independent states | 1,000 | 75,000 | 12,000 | 75.00 | 12.00 +---------+---------+---------+ | Total independent states | 505,800 | 718,271 | 622,313 | | +=========+=========+=========+ | Asiatic states | 452,500 | 249,453 | 201,942 | | American and South African | 53,300 | 468,818 | 420,371 | | ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------ FOOTNOTES: [A] Haikwan tael, 74.9 cents. [B] Yen, 52.9 cents. [C] Peso, gold, 96.5 cents. [D] Milreis, paper (1896), 20-1/2 cents. [E] Peso, gold. [F] Soler, 43 cents. [G] Dollar (47 cents) for exports, gold dollar for imports. [H] Peso, $1. [I] Bolivar, 19.3 cents. The year is 1896, and where a different one is taken it is so marked against the country in the table. The figures only represent the direct merchandise trade. All specie and bullion shipments are eliminated from the account. _II. Trade of India and Dependencies and of Colonies and other Possessions of the United Kingdom (Year ending March, 1897)._ Key: (A) Number of inhabitants. (B) Importations. Thousands of dollars. (C) Exportations. Thousands of dollars. (D) Imports per capita. Dollars. (E) Exports per capita. Dollars. ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------ NAMES OF COLONIES AND | | | | | OTHER POSSESSIONS. | (A) | (B) | (C) | (D) | (E) ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------ India and its | | | | | dependencies[A] | 290,690 | 284,026 | 378,732 | .97 | 1.30 | | | | | _Colonies._ | | | | | | | | | | Cape Colony | 1,820 | 91,800 | 39,000 | 50.04 | 20.15 Natal | 778 | 18,000 | 6,500 | 23.15 | 8.20 Gold Coast and other | | | | | Central African | | | | | possessions | 36,700 | 19,000 | 17,000 | .52 | .46 Canada | 5,125 | 118,000 | 121,000 | 23.05 | 24.04 West Indies | 3,614 | 30,000 | 25,000 | 8.33 | 6.94 Australasia and Oceanica | 4,793 | 204,500 | 210,000 | 42.65 | 43.75 +---------+---------+---------+ | Trade of all countries | | | | | under British flag | 343,520 | 765,326 | 797,232 | | +=========+=========+=========+ | Trade of colonies with | | | | | white population | 16,130 | 461,320 | 411,584 | | Trade of Asiatic | | | | | dependencies | 290,690 | 284,026 | 378,732 | | ---------------------------+---------+---------+---------+-------+------ FOOTNOTE: [A] Rupee, 32 cents. For Straits Settlement and Ceylon, Mexican dollars @ 47 cents. _III. Trade of Foreign Possessions of all other Countries than the United Kingdom._ Key: (A) Number of inhabitants in thousands. (B) Importations in thousands of dollars. (C) Exportations in thousands of dollars. (D) Imports per capita. Dollars. (E) Exports per capita. Dollars. ------------------------+--------+--------+--------+-------+------- COUNTRIES AND THEIR | (A) | (B) | (C) | (D) | (E) COLONIAL POSSESSIONS. | | | | | ------------------------+--------+--------+--------+-------+------- _A. France_ (1894). | | | | | | | | | | Asia | 21,821 | 16,000 | 25,000 | .73 | 1.14 Africa, outside of | | | | | Algeria and Tunis | 24,500 | 13,000 | 22,000 | .53 | .50 America and Oceanica | 460 | 14,500 | 12,600 | 31.50 | 27.40 | | | | | _B. Germany_ (1897). | | | | | | | | | | Africa | 10,200 | 2,189 | 1,078 | .21 | .10 New Guinea | 400 | 72 | 50 | .18 | .12 | | | | | _C. Italy._ | | | | | | | | | | Africa | 400 | 5,600 | 3,000 | | | | | | | _D. Netherlands_ (1895).| | | | | | | | | | East India | 34,000 | 61,000 | 89,600 | 1.80 | 2.63 | | | | | _E._ | | | | | | | | | | Philippines | 7,600 | 11,000 | 20,000 | 1.50 | 2.63 ------------------------+--------+--------+--------+-------+------- _Summary of Statistical Tables of the Trade of Colonies and Dependencies of European States and of Independent States other than of Europe and the United States._ Key: (A) Number of inhabitants in thousands. (B) Importations. Thousands of dollars. (C) Exportations. Thousands of dollars. (D) Inhabitants. Per cent to total. (E) Imports. Per cent to total. (F) Exports. Per cent to total. ----------------------+----------+---------+---------+-----+-----+----- NAMES OF DIVISIONS BY | | | | | | COUNTRIES, COLONIES, | (A) | (B) | (C) | (D) | (E) | (F) AND RACES. | | | | | | ----------------------+----------+---------+---------+-----+-----+----- Totals of tabulations | | | | | | I, II, and III |1,584,099 |1,587,758|1,540,858|100 |100 |100.0 | | | | | | Under British flag | 343,520 | 765,320| 797,232| 36 | 48.3| 50.0 | | | | | | Under all other flags | 605,180 | 818,779| 790,527| 64 | 51.7| 49.8 | | | | | | Peoples of European | | | | | | descent | 69,430 | 909,020| 831,984| 7.3| 57.4| 52.4 | | | | | | Peoples of other races| 879,271 | 675,079| 755,774| 92.7| 42.6| 47.6 | | | | | | Anglo-Saxon | 17,130 | 519,300| 407,584| 1.8| 32.8| 25.7 | | | | | | Latin-American | 52,300 | 389,700| 424,400| 5.5| 24.6| 26.7 | | | | | | Asiatic races | 806,611 | 618,079| 706,274| 85.0| 39.0| 44.0 | | | | | | African races | 72,500 | 57,000| 49,500| 7.7| 3.6| 3.6 | | | | | | States and colonies, | | | | | | wool chief export | 11,100 | 441,300| 394,500| 1.2| 27.8| 24.9 ----------------------+----------+---------+---------+-----+-----+----- In examining these tables carefully the reader can form an idea as to how the world's trade is divided, and see what the world is arming to its teeth about. The only Asiatic country about whose trade the possibilities of war may be entertained is China. Japan has shown her teeth and claws. The history of Poland, Port Arthur, or Kiao-tchow is not likely to find repetition on her territory. Only the defenseless tempt the avidity of the civilizing nations. The import trade of China, an empire with one fourth the population of the entire world, is but half as much again as that of Japan, with but one ninth of the population of the Celestial Empire. Japan's trade has trebled within the last dozen years. Her imports of merchandise are over two dollars _per capita_. Those of China are thirty-four cents. It will be said that China parceled out to modern nations will vastly extend in trading opportunities. So it may. We have, however, national disposition to take into consideration. England has devoted her best efforts to India. After a century spent in bringing the various races to submission, the process of "benevolent assimilation" is helped along by a never-ending flow of capital from England. She has become the teacher and administrator of the people of Hither and Farther India. It is doubtful whether under existing conditions any better government for their three hundred millions could be devised by any outer force. Though England does her utmost, as she understands it, to make the people under her dominion happy and prosperous, although the rule of law and a degree of local independence are established, yet she finds small thanks from her wards. They have their own notions of happiness, and seem to prefer misery of their selection to the advantages of the white man's ordering. The fact is, the brown man and the yellow man have different notions and desires from the white man. No amount of jostling, pushing, and urging will make them take up our views, our tastes, our working methods, except in the due development of time. Our ideas as to necessaries of life and theirs are widely different. Their simple needs are easily supplied from native hands, who understand far better than our potters do the clay they have to deal with. The progress in trade will not be rapid, and will certainly be disappointing to those who expect to see it extend into general lines of merchandise. The import trade of India and its dependencies (1897) is $284,000,000, inclusive of Ceylon and the net trade of the Straits Settlements. This amount, directly catering to the wants of fully three hundred millions of people, is but about one third more than the net import trade of Australasia, with a population of less than five millions of people. The _per-capita_ consumption of imported merchandise of the Asiatic possessions of England is ninety-seven cents; of Australasia, $41.66. I must say here in explanation that the values of importations of merchandise, as published in the English returns and lately reproduced by the Bureau of Statistics of the Treasury Department, Colonial Systems of the World, is $305,000,000, which would make a showing of $63.33 _per capita_. But in the English returns the intercolonial trade figures are included. The Treasury Bureau did not mention this in its publication, and gave thereby a basis for erroneous deductions. I have deducted all the intercolonial trade figures of imports and exports from the returns of each of the Australian colonies, so as to bring the figures to a basis of parity with the accounts of Canada, and other colonies and dependencies where no duplications of this kind are possible. The figures of importations remaining over are reduced by this process to £40,500,000, or about $200,000,000--$41.66 _per capita_. The inhabitants of the Anglo-Saxon colonies of the world number but seventeen million. Their net imports of merchandise are $460,000,000. The seven hundred and thirty millions of Hindu and Mongolian populations import $530,000,000. These are the lands of fabled wealth. Antiquity and the middle ages dreamed of riches inexhaustible in connection with their names. To-day still the popular belief is that the wealth of nations is dependent on the conduct of direct trade with the far East. The country can not be rich whose millions find happiness in a sufficient supply of millet or rice, whatever the wealth of a small favored class may be. But these nations were the teachers of the barbarians whose descendants now populate America and Europe. The disciples have improved on the masters. We have improved the tools which they invented and applied new forces of production. We have cheapened the processes of production. We have quintupled, we have decupled time. But whatever our improvements in the tools, they are still our masters in the work. Any one who would endeavor to substitute the product of our mills in cotton, in silk, in wool, in wood, iron, clay, in lacquer, cloisonné, or enamel, for theirs, and not see at a glance the hopelessness, would indeed prove his incapacity for grasping the situation. Our best producers study with profit the work of China and, chiefly, of Japan, and are grateful for the inspiration they derive from it. But they do not attempt to copy. Neither in color effect nor design could they stand the test of comparison. Five thousand years have been recovered from the sepulcher under which they had been sleeping. But the oldest traces unearthed in the valley of the Euphrates still take us back to the farthest East as the originator of what we cover by the term "civilization." The Mongolian shares the lot of all who have benefited the race. If we can not expect great openings for our mill products in Asia, Africa is a new field for the civilizing efforts of Europe, and will repay cultivating, perhaps. The negro has neither factories nor workshops. There at least is an unlimited field for trade expansion. Germany, the latest comer, with the zeal of all fresh missionaries, is eagerly taking up her colonizing mission. The result is not very encouraging. There is a fine set of buildings with garden spots and harbor improvements in the settlement at Cameroon, and a well-stocked graveyard of what were once good German boys, victims of the deadly climate and of the expansion fever. So far this is the only net showing to the credit side of the ledger. The territory in Africa covers nearly one million square miles. The possession of such an empire is worth a sacrifice, apparently, and Germany is not parsimonious in this direction. The contribution of the German Government to the administration fund of the African colonies was $2,194,000 in 1896-'97. This does not include the expense of maintaining the military and naval forces stationed in the African settlements. The annual importations of all the colonies amounted (in 1897) to $2,261,000, inclusive of New Guinea. So it costs the Government more than one dollar to enable its citizens to do a dollar's worth of trade. The population is estimated at 10,200,000. What possibilities stretch out before us, if they could be made to wear shirts or uniforms like the native police force, which has been organized at Cameroon! The extent of the territory, however, precludes the possibility of successfully conducting the missionary effort to induce them to wear clothes. The question also remains open what return could be made, even if the recipients could be brought to appreciate the advantage of a fuller covering of their nakedness than the traditional one. France is in possession of territories in Africa, the population of which is on a more advanced status. The territories of the Senegal have been under French dominion for a period of two hundred years and more, and trade relations with the Senegal and Soudan have been assiduously cultivated. In Asia, Tonquin and Annam were to open the road to a very active trade with China. She has held undisputed lodgment since 1814 in Pondicherry and other towns in India that remained over to her from her East Indian empire conquered by Dupleix and abandoned by Louis XV's weak policy. Still, with all the tender care and an expenditure for the colonial service, as per budget of 1898, of about 80,000,000 francs, and not counting the colonial expense _êtat_ of the ministry of war and of the navy, the entire export trade of France to her Asiatic possessions is 35,000,000 francs; to her African dominions, outside of Algiers, 22,000,000 francs; and to her American possessions, with barely five hundred thousand inhabitants, 35,000,000 francs. The territories to which this trade caters have a population of about twenty-two million in Asia and twenty-five million in Africa. If we include the French islands in America and French Guiana, the exports of French merchandise to all her colonies amount to about 95,000,000 francs. If we include the allowance for colonial service from the naval and military budget, France has an expense that exceeds the amount of her colonial export trade. How much better off France would be if she would drop this burden! She could do the same trading and save her money, annually wasted, and her men annually slaughtered to the mania of colonial expansion. The forty-five millions peopling the French possessions in Asia and tropical Africa consume altogether about $30,000,000 worth of foreign imports. The French share of this is about $11,000,000, or a little over one third--eleven millions of trade against fourteen millions of direct expense. The contributions to the American colonies are but $2,000,000, inclusive of about $1,000,000 to the penal establishment at Cayenne. Italy's demonstration of the extent to which this madness can carry otherwise sane statesmen is fresh in everybody's memory. Outside of Russia, the poor--meaning the working classes--are in no country of Europe as poor as in Italy. If we take the production per acre in all the cereals as a gauge of interior development, then no European country west of Russia, not excepting Spain, is in a more backward state. Wise statesmanship would have found here a field for cultivation sufficiently large to tax all its energies. The peaceful acquisitions of industry did not satisfy the ambition of the Government. Conquests in equatorial Africa were deemed more essential to the kingdom's material welfare, but lately freed from the deadening grasp of clericalism and absolutism, than the improvement of opportunities lavishly present at home. What she has cultivated at an enormous expense of blood and treasure has borne the ordinary harvest of failure and disaster. The entire import trade of Massowah, to which the whole world contributed, and which is largely a transit trade, amounts to about $5,000,000. The expenditure on account of her Red Sea possessions for the year 1895-'96 is given in the Statesman's Year Book as 123,738,064 lires ($24,000,000). The contribution to the maintenance of this her "white man's burden," from 1882 to 1895, was 303,905,926 lires. At present (1897-'98), after the sobering lesson received in 1896, the net expense is about $3,500,000 (17,000,000 lires). The three powers--France, Italy, and Germany--point a lesson of unmistakable significance. The figures speak for themselves. No amount of expense can make the African and the Asiatic consume an appreciable amount of European merchandise. No amount of cultivation can make the tropics endurable to the northern man. Labor and exertion on his part under the rays of a deadly sun and a miasma-breeding soil are entirely out of the question. Those who would make the endeavor in the manner of the temperate zone would only succeed the sooner in reaching the end of white man's settlement in the tropics, disease and death. Many point to the Dutch East India settlements as a successful commercial enterprise. But, taking the best construction given to the story from the trader's point of view, the present satisfactory conditions have been reached after a great deal of disappointment, loss, and bloodshed. A large revenue is acquired from Government sales of colonial produce; still, with all this added to the other revenues from land tax, excise, and other duties, the Government has a deficiency of over 10,000,000 florins a year in her East India possessions. The budget for 1898 shows an expense _état_ of 146,150,164 florins, which is met by a revenue from all sources of but 135,204,203 florins. This is the richest part of the Malay world, and for centuries has been in the possession of Europe's most enlightened people. The results, if the _per-capita_ unit of imports and exports is taken as a criterion, are not different from those shown in the account of the Philippines, governed for centuries by Spain. The loss of their colonies is ascribed to the oppressive rule which the Spaniards exercised. The Netherlands, devoting all their efforts to the development of the resources of the islands, at least during the greater part of this century, do not show much better results. The imports _per capita_ of the Dutch possessions are $1.80, and the exports $2.63. The imports of the Philippines are $1.50 and the exports $2.63 _per capita_. From this we may be permitted to deduce that the Malay Islands are not likely to prove a more thankful field for cultivation by our traders than to the extent indicated in the trade reports set forth above. Under the conditions here delineated, it would be inviting all the risks and dangers connected with expansion and colonization, while nothing is to be gained in a commercial sense that can not be realized by the means now in our hands. All the ends of trade can be attained without territorial expansion. The trade in the hands of peoples under English sovereignty is open to all commerce on equal terms. Not even the sovereign country, except in the recent concessions by Canada, receives a preference. The protection of the British flag is tendered gratis to the colonies and dependencies. The imports of these countries cover about one half of the trade of all the world, outside of Europe and the United States. Though they have but 4.67 per cent of the population, the Anglo-Saxon colonies do sixty-nine per cent of the trade of all the colonies and dependencies of the British Empire. South and Central America absorb about one fourth--24.6 per cent of imports and 26.7 per cent of exports--of the world's trade here summarized. The colonies peopled by Anglo-Saxon population and the Latin-American states together, though but 7.3 per cent of the inhabitants, do an importing trade of 57.4 per cent of the trade of the world here reviewed. The countries trading under the protection of the British flag and the Latin-American states combined have about seventy-three per cent of that trade among them. All this trade, as well as by far the greatest part of the rest, is incontestably accessible to-day on an equal basis to all the world. The key to it lies in the best terms, the best value. The trader and not the admiral governs the field. Prince Heinrich will not succeed better than Admiral von Diederichs in convincing China of the advantages Germany can offer if Mr. Carnegie's rails are cheaper than Mr. Krupp's. A whole fleet of American battle ships will not convince the Asiatics that our cotton goods are as desirable as the English so long as the latter make goods suitable to their markets, and the Americans offer only products calculated to cover the home demands. The golden rule is a more effective trade opener than the cannon's mouth. Fair and square dealing among nations does not entail expense, but brings in good returns. Our national policy, however, has been one studiously calculated to array the world against us. Like every policy in behalf of a selfish interest, it injures the foreign people against which it is directed far less than the nation which devises it. The trade of Australasia, Argentina, and Uruguay, and the Cape is based chiefly on wool and hides. The imports of these countries, numbering but eleven million inhabitants, amount to $440,000,000, equaling in amount the trade of China, Japan, Persia, and India, with their seven hundred and fifty million inhabitants. Though but 1.2 per cent of the population of the world (outside of Europe and the United States), their imports are 27.8 per cent of the totals of the figures in the tables. In exports they do about $400,000,000, or 24.9 per cent of the total sum of exports here given. It would be worth cultivating friendly relations with them. They are inhabited by people of European stock, and come nearer to the standard of life of Americans than any of the other nations of the globe. Our latest effort to draw them closer to us was the Dingley tariff, with its duty of eleven cents a pound on greasy wool and of fifteen per cent on raw hides. The action can not be construed as a very friendly one. But neither is the effect as calculated by the wise heads who insisted on the provisions of the wool tariff, the woolen and worsted manufacturers of the East, and the wool raisers of the West. The wool and woolen trade of America has suffered many vicissitudes during the thirty-five years of high tariffs. It has gone through many periods of depression. But it is doubtful whether at any time more disastrous conditions existed than have marked the twelve months ending at this writing (March, 1899). The situation can be appreciated from the fact that wool, imported prior to the passing of the Dingley tariff, is being reshipped to England, where it is bringing better prices than can be obtained here under the ægis of the protective duty of eleven cents a pound. Three and a half million pounds were shipped in the seven months ending January 31st. We should profit by this experience, try to cultivate friendly relations in parts of the world where advantageous trade connections can be established, instead of following the _ignis fatuus_ of Asiatic expansion. THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. BY EDMUND NOBLE. It is an interesting and suggestive fact in Nature study that at the outset man was thrown utterly upon himself for the very vocabulary of the world-puzzle which presented itself to him for solution. He had not only to unriddle his "inscription in an unknown tongue," but to evolve even the possibility of an explanation out of his inner consciousness. His first theories of the universe were based, not on anything which the cosmos was, independently of him, but upon his own nature and activities as a living animal. This resort to himself as his chief means of interpretation resulted from the very nature of the knowing process; for knowledge of things is never in any absolute sense what things are, but is rather what they are like. When we cognize an object we do it by referring that object to the class of objects which in one or more respects it resembles. And as in this process we draw from the objects most familiar to us the principle of explanation which we need for the less familiar things that have not yet become part of our mental possessions, much depends upon priority in the setting up of mental classes, as well as on the strength of the impression which they make upon the mind. The earliest and deepest class impressions are necessarily those which arise out of man's knowledge of himself--of his body and the parts thereof, of his corporeal activities, and of his feelings and thoughts; next, of the bodies of other men and of their movements; finally, in the order of vividness, of the animate and inanimate objects most nearly related to his life. It is these classes which, by virtue of their priority and strength, naturally acquire dominating influence over all later acquirements, and it is to them that the mind refers the impressions gained from the more remote inorganic world. Among the simpler illustrations of the effort man makes to assimilate the external system to himself are those with which we are more or less familiar in the domain of language. We find them first in the forms for gender by which, in all inflectional tongues, inanimate objects are to this extent likened to living animals. A similar tendency is at work in the widespread lingual habit of naming things after parts of the body, as in the case of "door," called the "eye of the house" by the native of Banks' Island; of "son-tree," the term applied by the Siamese to "fruit"; of the Malay's use of the noun "child" for "lock"; of "house-belly," the African Mandingo's equivalent for "in the house"; and of "hair," often used for "leaf" or "feather" in many Melanesian languages.[A] In more modern forms of speech the process is suggested by such expressions as the _head_ of a bridge, the _eye_ of a needle, the _mouth_ of a river, the _neck_ of an estuary, the _trunk_ and _arms_ of a tree, the _lungs_ of a bellows, the _bones_ of an umbrella, the _nose_ of a promontory, the _ears_ of a book, the _fingers_ of a clock, the _legs_ of a table, the _veins_ of marble, the _foot_ of a mountain. Then there are analogies based on the activities of the human body, for when we describe things as standing, sitting, or lying; as rising, falling, running, or climbing--when we use expressions like "striking clock," "dancing light," "sleeping lake," "yawning precipice," "laughing skies," "babbling brooks," "raging billows," we are applying to the objects named terms originally used to describe our own acts. The sense of hearing, again, is utilized in such expressions as _taube Nuss_ ("with nothing in the shell") and _taube Kohlen_ ("those which have burned out"). So the defect of blindness is objectified in the _cæcum vallum_ of Roman speech, in _ciego_, said in Spanish of cheese that "has no eyes," and in the _blinder Schuss_ of the Germans, whose more familiar _Augenblick_ everybody recalls. Not less suggestive are the numerous expressions which project conceptions of life and death into the environment, such as the _caput mortuum_ (_tête morte_) of chemistry, _eau vive_ (_Quellwasser_), "dead water" (turn of the tide), _todte Farbe_ and _lebhafte Farbe_, _vivus lapis_ (firestone), "quicksand" and "quicksilver," the "dead of night," "dead weight," a "dead level," and _todtes Kapital_. Nor must we forget that the reading of vitality into inorganic objects, common enough among savages, has by no means disappeared from civilized races. Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries have shown that out of forty-eight children just attaining school age, twenty believed the moon and stars to be alive, fifteen thought a doll and sixteen thought flowers would suffer pain if burned. One pupil described the crescent moon as "half stuck" or "half buttoned" into the sky; the spluttering of coals in a fire was called "barking" by a girl four years and a half old. Miss Ingelow says that when over two years old, and for about a year after, she had the habit of attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures, but even to stones and manufactured articles. This projection of words originally descriptive of the human body or of its activities into the objective world of Nature finds its richest illustrations in poetry,[B] where it may be held to represent less the elaborate artifice of a cultured mind than one of the most primitive tendencies of that mind powerfully swayed by emotion. Yet the process belongs equally to the more prosaic efforts which man puts forth to utilize the objects of his environment in the interests of self-maintenance. One of the earliest of these is seen in the use of words describing parts of the body to facilitate the description of the external world in its numerical aspects. Thus the Chinese use for "two" certain syllables (_ny_ and _ceul_) which originally mean "ears," the Hottentots employing the word for "hand" in the same sense. In middle high German the word for "sheaf" (_Schock_) signifies sixty, and is applied in that sense to all kinds of objects. The Letts, owing to their habit of throwing fish three at a time, employ the word _mettens_, "a throw," in the sense of "three." Among the same people flounders are tied in lots of thirty, whence has arisen the practice of designating thirty by the word _kahlis_, meaning "cord." The Quichuas attach the significance of ten to the word _chuncu_, "heap." The Gallas word for "half" has been traced to the verb _chaba_, "to break," and is the equivalent of our own word "fraction." So in a large number of languages the term for hand signifies "five," "two hands" meaning ten, and "man" ("two hands and two feet") twenty. A like origin must be claimed for the measures of space and weight needed by man in his industrial and commercial activities. The finger, the thumb, the hand, the palm, the forearm, the foot--the extended arms, as in the ancient _orgya_, and the extended legs, as in the modern yard--have all played a fundamental part in determining the standard measures of the civilized world. To the same class belong the [Greek: gyê], the extent of field that could be worked by a laborer in one day; the _stade_, the distance which a good runner could traverse without stopping to take rest; also measures of time, such as the old division of the day based on the length of a man's shadow. The human body was thus of primary importance as a means of comprehending and coming into relations with the external world. But men also sought to make the environment intelligible to them by projecting into it the images gained from the more general aspects of their life. Such phrases as "pig of iron," "monkey wrench," "battering ram," "lifting crane," remind us of a period in which objects were actually shaped so as to enable the mind to accommodate itself more completely to the thought of their vitality. The Greek sailing vessel, for example, was so constructed--with the body of a bird, with cheeks, eyes, and projecting ears--as to make it seem to the navigators of the time as almost alive. And the dolphins, eagles, ravens, and dragons which threatened England from the prows of the invading Danish fleet have had their prototypes in almost every nation that has betaken itself to the sea. Not less suggestive are the more general aspects of the process. Our ancestor called the earth's satellite the "moon," or "measurer," because it served him as a divider of time. The familiar grains of wheat and barley which he harvested became the units of his measures. So the names of his seasons were based on the fall of the leaves, the reappearance of particular stars, or the periodical inundations upon which he depended for his food. The most primitive method in chronology is that which enables man to orient himself in the world of time by associating particular lunations with vicissitudes of weather, with seasonal aspects of vegetation, and with the constantly changing sights and sounds of the animal world. In the calendar of the Crees,[C] for example, we find such designations as "duck-month," "frog-moon," "leaf-moon," "berries-ripe-month," "buffalo-rutting moon," "leaves-entirely-changed," "leaves-in-the-trees," "fish-catching-moon," "moon-that-strikes-the-earth cold," "coldest-moon," "ice-thawing-moon," "eagles-seen-moon." So in the calendars of Central America and Mexico,[D] the months are named variously after the arrival of birds, the blossoming of flowers, the blowing of winds, the return of mosquitoes, and the appearance of fishes. The Greeks constantly used the movements of birds to mark the seasons; the arrival of the swallow and kite were thus noted. Hesiod tells us how the cry of the crane signaled the departure of winter, while the setting of the Pleiades gave notice to the plowman when to begin his work. The Incas[E] called Venus "the hairy," on account of the brightness of her rays, just as the Peruvians named her the "eight-hour torch," or "the twilight lamp," from the time of her shining. One at least of the three portions into which the Greeks divided their night received its name--[Greek: peri lychnôn haphas]--from the social custom of lighting the lamps at dusk. For whole races the departure of the sun made night a time of danger, and man did his best to lessen the mystery of the heavens by filling their obscure depths with the figures of animals and heroes, or by likening their shining lines of cosmic cloud to a road or highway for the march of beings celestial and terrestrial. Thus, for the speakers of Sanskrit the Milky Way was "The Path of the Gods"; the Lithuanians dubbed it "The Bird Road"; in Low German it is known as "The Way of Cows"; the Cymris associated it with the course of the wind; for Scandinavians it was "The Road of Winter"; the Persians viewed it as the route along which the straw carrier drew his burden; to this day the Winnebagoes call it "The Way of the Chiefs."[F] Science itself is indebted to terms and phrases in which outer realities are assimilated to the circumstances of the life lived by man and by the societies which he forms. Such words as "attraction," "repulsion," "resistance," "nature," "body," "atom," "current," contain obviously anthropomorphic elements. The human origin of the idea conveyed by the term "inertia" may be more or less veiled by unfamiliar Latin elements, yet it is recovered for us again in _Trägheit_, "idleness," the German form of the word. The phrase "natural selection" contains a teleological element which has more than once been used to throw discredit on the process which it describes. And when one observes how persistently such an anthropopathic expression as "affinity" is still applied to chemical reaction, or with what _naïveté_ the term "law" is transferred from the realm of human jurisprudence into the domain of natural processes, one ceases to wonder at the constant confusions of outer with inner in which so much of the psychomorphism of the time has had its origin. It would be strange, then, if, seen in so many of man's efforts to interpret the inanimate things around him, this process of self-projection should not also be valid for the larger relations of his mental activity to the universe. It is but a step, in fact, from the application of anthropomorphic words to the objects and processes of Nature, to the employment regarding such processes of anthropomorphic thought. As the child finds the satisfaction of its fancy in the discovery of some strange face as suggested to him in the decorations of the wall paper which surrounds his sick-bed, or in tracing out from the contours of clothes hung up within range of his vision the preposterous outline or figure of some human likeness or caricature, so the savage, with a deeper purpose born of necessity, traces out from the larger patterns of the moving world about him the organic shapes, embodying will and personality, that are to serve him as explanations of the external power which touches his existence for good or for evil, and which, thus serving him, enable him to come into relations with that power. It is the deepest interests of human life which make this process necessary, and it is of the very nature of the process that the characters thus projected into the environment must always--throughout the history of human ascent, and at every particular stage of it--be closely and definitely correlated with the degree and kind of the self-knowledge which is its source. The earliest of the animal characters displaying this correlation, and used as a means of understanding the environment, could not well have been other than that of motion. That by the higher mammals, at any rate, moving things, even when inorganic, are generally regarded as alive, is a view rendered probable by a large body of evidence.[G] But when man finally appeared on the scene, a new element came in to complicate the merely animal attitude in which vitality was attributed to inanimate objects in motion. By contemplating the phenomena of his subjective life, and observing analogous phenomena in his fellow-beings--through the consideration of dreams, swoons, even death itself--our ancestor discovered in himself a character deeper than that of vitality; came to recognize that the living creature, animal and human, possesses an inner principle or essence underlying its activities; is not only "alive," but also "animated." At first the conception of vitality was one with the conception of bodily activity; at last man learned to differentiate the movements of the body from an inner essence to which he believed them to be due--learned, in a word, to distinguish between the corporeal existence and the soul. And having effected this first rude division of the characters of soul from the merely physical attributes of life, our ancestor soon projected the new view which he had reached of himself into the objects of his environment. The beneficent influences of Nature, so necessary to his life, he now invested with the good purposes of the better nature within him; in the maleficent forces of the cosmos he read the malignant will of his own angry passions. But it is not as mere phenomena that these powers, thus finally ensouled and regarded as personal, can be thought about. In the beginning the human mind carries on its mental processes largely with the aid of images--recovered images of something seen, heard, felt, or tasted--and is yet far off from the stage of scientific thought in which abstract concepts take the place of the recovered mental pictures which have been yielded through the senses. Man thus needed concrete images with which to think about the personal powers of the external world, and he naturally found them in the animal and human shapes already familiar to him. Discovering some likeness between a Nature force and some animal, he henceforth associated the two, and recalled the image of the animal as the more concrete means of mental recovery when he wished to think of the abstract Nature power. Or, associating some departed ancestor, relative, hero, or king with the Nature force--an association which would be greatly strengthened by belief in the survival of the soul after death--he gradually confounded the disembodied human power with the soul of the Nature power, and through the law of least effort, used the concrete image of the departed human being to stand in his mental processes for the much more difficult thought of the Nature force. But, whatever the process, animal shapes were obviously needed to reduce the Nature powers to such a degree of concreteness as would make it possible for primitive man to deal with them as objects of thought. And it is not less certain that while, for some races, the earliest shapes thus utilized were those of the lower animals, the final form for all races was that of man himself. In the anthropomorphic stage, then, there is the same effort to understand the external system by assimilating it to something with which man is already familiar. The worshiped deities may be many or few, numberless as the Nature forces, polytheistic as among the Greeks and Romans, or one as in the monotheism of the Semite. Man likens them to himself, attributes to them not only his outward shape, but also his failings and virtues, making his Pantheon resemble not only the social order, but also the political system under which he happens to live. It is the completeness of this assimilation which made anthropomorphism the most persistent aspect of man's intellectual growth the world has known. Yet the view could linger only as the possession of the intellectually slothful and immature. The inadequacy, the crudeness, of the conception in which Deity was imaged as a gigantic man gradually forced itself upon the attention of the more thoughtful. Increased mental activity, a better acquaintance with natural processes, brought the idea of a power above Nature rather than merely superior to man; and as the human mind passed from the conception of the superhuman to that of the supernatural--as, moreover, the thought of merely local gods gave way to the idea of gods not limited in their functions to particular areas--the anthropomorphic shapes naturally fell away from the powers they could no longer adequately represent. Then other changes, strictly correlated with man's advancing knowledge of himself, ushered in the latest stage of his attitude toward the external system. For in the same mind which had been compelled to reject crude anthropomorphism, there had been growing the consciousness of man as something more than a mere compound of vitality, consciousness, and will--something more than a set of bodily and mental capacities essential to the work of self-maintenance--the thought that man was the sum of his higher, not of his lower qualities, that henceforth he must be measured by the activities which he carried on in the domain of pure thought. And this recognition of mental attributes as the most worthy, the most exalted characters of human personality, could not fail to impress itself upon the conception of deity already undergoing deanthropomorphization. More and more, therefore, in the higher mind of the race, the Divine Being, not only losing his former bodily form, but yielding even the grosser attributes of personality with which he has been invested, becomes for the thought of man a psychical being in the deepest sense of that term. Anthropomorphism, or man-likening, passes away, and in its place comes psychomorphism, or mind-likening. Two aspects are thus recognizable in the mental interpretation of the environment: on the one hand an aspect which may be called causal, since it seeks the source of the power exerted by Nature forces and objects; on the other, an aspect which is obviously formal, its main significance being that it condenses, so to speak, groups of qualities into a single mental sign. The causal aspect yields, in howsoever simple or complex a form, a theory of the cosmos or of its parts; the formal aspect is no more than a means, ready at hand, in the visible bodies of animals and men for facilitating the use of that theory in processes of thought. Hence we may regard vitalism, animism, psychomorphism as so many stages of man's attitude toward the external system, corresponding with the degree of his power to apprehend the more abstract as distinguished from the more particular and superficial characters of things that come within the range of his knowledge. In the first, he explicitly recognizes vitality, the most obvious character of Nature force; in the second, subsuming vitalism, he raises the soul life to the place of honor; in the third, subsuming both vitalism and animism, he emphasizes in psychomorphism the highest human qualities which his mind enables him to recognize. The passage from the idea of multiplicity to that of unity is itself an inseparable part of the total process. As at the beginning man reads vitality into the separate objects and forces of Nature, without any thought of their underlying unity, so he regards as discrete, unconnected, objectively unrelated, the multifarious souls with which, in his thought, these various powers of the environment have come to be animated. But in course of time, by an inner necessity of intellectual growth, relations come to be perceived between the forces of Nature, likenesses are recognized between the functions of spirits and deities--between the powers put forth and the results achieved. The result is a process of coalescence which, to describe it in the briefest way, first merges a large number of spirit-evolved gods into a smaller number of relatively independent divinities, forms these into pantheons of gods each subordinated to a superior, and finally unites all beings regarded as divine in the single, all-comprehending, omniscient and omnipotent Deity of monotheism. In all this advance, moreover, we find that the process illustrated by the changing phases of man's mental attitude toward Nature also holds good of the multifarious acts by which, in what is known as religion, man has sought to realize that attitude in conduct. For, in seeking to adjust himself to the system of Power, man has been forced to conceive of his Pantheon in terms as well of his social arrangements as of the political system under which he happened to be living. The spirit world of a horde of savages could only reflect the indefiniteness and disunion of the nomads whose imagination it satisfied. But as the household made its appearance, as a definite social structure arose, and the straggling tribes began to be united into nations, the gods themselves took on the characters of an analogous transformation. The divine selfishness--the "_remota ab nostris rebus_"--long ago satirized by the poet Lucretius, obviously correlated with the attitude of man toward man, just as naturally gave way, with the growth of the social sympathies, to the thought of that more active concern in human affairs which is one of the salient characters of the later phases of monotheism. The original indifference of Deity toward ethical issues--a widespread feature of the earlier religious conceptions--could not but pass away with the moral stagnation of the ancient communities out of which it had arisen. So the comparatively new thought of a God definitely identified in his aims and activities with the cause of moral reform is no less obviously a result of the new attitude of man himself toward problems of social improvement; while the persistence with which, in human thought, morals remain associated with religion sufficiently illustrates the extent to which man's view of each has been determined by the self-knowledge which underlies his attitude toward both. Note also, finally, the manifest relation in which our human thought regarding mind and body has always stood toward conceptions of a world-soul, and then the dependence of man's view of the relation of God to the world upon the knowledge of his own planet and of its place in the universe. For as long as our ancestor held the old geocentric theory of the cosmos--regarded the heavens as a set of spheres revolving around a flat earth--the thought of a deity outside the world related to it as a mechanician might be to a cunningly devised piece of clockwork which he had brought into existence, was inevitable. But when the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth century co-operated with the revelations of Galilei to secure the final triumph of the Copernican over the Ptolemaic theory of the world-order, the ancient view of Deity as external to his creation gave place to the essentially modern conception of his immanence. If now we attentively examine the progress above described, we shall find that the earliest attitude of the human mind toward the external system tends in the latest to repeat itself on a higher plane and with a richer content. Thus vitalism, by the process of unification and intensification, culminates in anthropomorphic monotheism, while animism, through the coalescence of objects and forces at first believed to be separately animated, finally develops into pantheism. These two lines of thought, moreover, tend themselves to converge, or, at any rate, to become interchangeable, since monotheism, by deanthropomorphizing itself, approximates to pantheism, as is well seen in the Christian theologies and ethical religions of the world; while pantheism, by emphasizing the characters of intelligence and will, is sometimes hardly to be distinguished from those modern forms of monotheism which teach the doctrine of immanence. The intellectual outcome of the whole movement, embodying the modern attitude in Nature philosophy, is thus no longer anthropomorphism, but psychomorphism, since it reads into the universe, not the characters which distinguish human beings from the lower animals, but the highest manifestation of the characters recognized to be common to both, namely, psychic characters--the characters, in a word, of mind. For the deepest reaches of human thought, the process of man-likening has thus given way to the process of mind-likening. On the subjective side of mental inquiry we get psychomorphic monotheism, or what may be called theological pantheism; while on the objective side we reach scientific pantheism, or monism. It is true that the psychomorphism of scientific monism is reached by a process different from that which has culminated in the mind-likening of theological pantheism. Yet in both cases there is the same projection of intelligence into the external system as a means of comprehending it. And as the intelligence of atoms implies their vitality, we really return in scientific monism to the vitalistic attitude of the primitive observer of Nature. The salient difference between the two views is this: that while early man subsumed under his concept of vitality only the rudest characters thereof, the terms in the mind of the monist connotes in all their richness the ideas associated with mind. Enough has now been said to show the basis on which rests the whole superstructure, of man's mental attitude toward the cosmos. Despite all uncertainties regarding the details of the process, we may be assured of its fundamental nature, and are thus compelled to recognize the dependence of the forms of man's mental attitude toward the universe upon his knowledge of himself. It is because his own actions have their source in a personal will that he refers external movements to will. He is conscious of his own acts, and the world around him can not be devoid of a like illumination. Does he himself plan? Nature must also be intelligent. And the highest qualities which he can discover in himself he reads unhesitatingly into the cosmos. At first sight, then, knowledge may seem inextricably involved in the process here described. If man can not know the external system to which he must adapt himself save by assimilating it to himself--save by interpreting it on the basis of analogies which he discovers between his own body and its activities, and the world with its activities--are we not committed by our very nature as organisms to all the errors which that nature imposes upon us? If, in other words, every effort to view the universe as it is, independently of us, be rendered impossible by the very nature of the knowing process, with what chance of success shall we seek to eliminate those vitalistic and psychomorphic characters which seem to belong to that process as its very warp and woof? In reality our knowledge inflicts upon us no such dilemma. Man is the helpless "measure of the universe" only to the extent that his reasoning processes are undeveloped. That knowledge must always have a subjective element is undoubted, but that man must always mistake the subjective vesture with which things are clothed by the senses for the things themselves is an inference which the whole history of thought negatives. While his life remained simple, primitive man could regard appearances as realities without prejudicing the overplus of utility brought to him by his knowledge. Yet as his relation to the natural surroundings grew in complexity, the importance of the reasoning process, with its veto power over the deliverances of the senses, began to assert itself. At first accepted with little or no demur, these deliverances came more and more to be challenged in the interest of self-maintenance; and finally, by expansion of a germ possessed by the mind in the beginning, there was developed that way of dealing with the testimony of appearances which we call the objective method. The evidence previously accepted had been, though on the whole useful, in large measure misleading. For in appearances men saw and felt mainly what Nature was for them, and only to a minor degree what the external world was for and in itself. The great need of the investigator of Nature is to know what things are independently of man, in order to know how they act on one another, as a means of knowing how they will act on the human organism, and how that organism may react on them in the interest of its own life. The prejudice done by implicit reliance on sense testimony arose out of the fact that it presented objects as largely unrelated to each other--as so much being, rather than as so much doing, acting and interacting, determining and interdetermining. It became the function of reason to develop, out of the material furnished by the senses, a knowledge of the true nature of the system external to man and involving him in its scope which we call universe. In the carrying out of this function the analogical process has remained, but the analogies utilized, from being likenesses between what things seem to be to the senses, have more and more become analogies between propositions made regarding what things do, regarding how things act upon, are related to and determine each other. Our knowledge of Nature, therefore, illustrates progress from a stage in which external objects are viewed as so much doing--from a stage in which they seem more or less isolated, more or less independent of each other--to a stage in which we know them as acting and interacting, and therefore, by virtue of this action and interaction, as interrelated and interdependent. It was because man had to begin with the thought of the world around him as a series of unconnected aspects that he fell into the error of regarding every object as containing within itself the powers which it put forth; it was by gradually progressing to the knowledge of the external system as a process that he discovered how inextricably the smallest "flower in the crannied wall" is linked to its vastest environment, and how dependent must be the mechanism of the molecule, as well as of the solar system, upon the whole universe Power which we call cosmos. Thus also is it with man's method of interpreting the external world system. At first unable to fully perceive his own relation to that system, as part of his inability to perceive general cosmic relations, and therefore viewing himself as more or less independent of Nature--as something imposed upon it rather than as something arising out of it--he naturally sought to force it for purposes of explanation into the narrow limits of his knowledge of himself, of his feelings, his thoughts, his institutions. But as he grew in the power to comprehend his place in the system of things--to understand the way in which the objects and forces of the world were related to each other, together with the way in which he, as knowing organism, was related to the universe--he gradually ceased from his vain striving to subject the cosmos to himself, and at last learned not only to subordinate himself to the cosmos, but to trace to it unreservedly the whole method and meaning of his origin as a living, thinking organism. Man in the beginning could be no more than the measure of the universe. That he has come at last, wielding the objective method, to be its measurer, is the culmination of a struggle between false and true ways of interpreting Nature which has had the whole history of human thought for its arena, and for its final triumph the establishment of the objective or scientific method of investigation upon impregnable foundations. FOOTNOTES: [A] Codrington. The Melanesian Languages. [B] See Henle. Poetische Personification. [C] Contributions to the Ethnology and Philology of the Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley. Dr. F. V. Hayden, 1862. [D] The Native Calendars of Central America and Mexico. Daniel G. Brinton. [E] Popular Science Monthly, vol. xlv, article Astronomy of the Incas. [F] Les Origines Indo-Européennes. Pictet, p. 568. [G] See a paper by G. K. Schneider in vol. ii of Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie. FROM SERFDOM TO FREEDOM. BY EDWARD BICKNELL. However keen our interest in the problems arising out of the recent Spanish war, and however earnest our study of the policy to be pursued toward our new dependencies, we should not forget that the problems pressing for a solution before the war are still with us. The labor question, which then commanded so much of our thought, is still unsettled, and is by no means dwarfed by the subjects now upon every lip. Rather, as has been shown in an article in a recent number of this magazine, this question really forms one of the most important elements of the present situation, and should not be lost sight of in shaping public policy. We are entering upon an untilled field as far as our institutions are concerned, and we have the opportunity to start on a higher level in treating the relations of capital and labor in our new possessions, if we have the wisdom to know how, and the courage to do as well as we know. It will help us in a consideration of the present status of the laborer and of his future if we study his past, beginning, if not with Adam, at least with the laborer's entrance into English history as a distinct class. Any one at all familiar with Green's Short History of the English People will see how much use I have made of that instructive and fascinating work. And if I tell only an old story, it may still be of value to many of us in recalling facts almost forgotten, and a help to others whose vision into the past is limited. Brushing away the cobwebs in the old attic of our father's house usually brings to light treasures the recollection of which had slipped from our minds. The free laborer, the man who works for wages, for whom and where he chooses, did not exist as a class until within about six hundred years. In the early days the laborer was tied to the soil where he was born. Such a thing as a laborer going about to seek work where he would, or having much to say about his master or his wages, was usually out of the question. At a very early day the towns or boroughs of England had preserved old rights, or regained them, which the rural part of England had lost, and in general serfage could not exist there as it did in the country round them. Trade and manufacture, such as they were in that day, did not make the demand for labor which was made by the agricultural pursuits of the country or in the castles of the nobility. So we do not find in the towns of the eleventh or twelfth century the large labor class we do to-day. In general we may fairly say that the labor class began in the country. The manorial system had divided the rural part of England for cultivation and general order into large estates. The lord of the manor occupied a part of the estate for his own demesne and divided the rest among his villeins or serfs, who in return were obliged to render services to him. It is not necessary for my purpose to enter into any long description or discussion of the different relations existing between different tenants and their overlord, or the differences existing under Saxon or Norman rule. The general relation of lord of the manor and his tenants or villeins or serfs is the main point to be observed. The villeins or serfs of the manor cultivated the lord's home farm or demesne, filled his barn, cut his wood, and did all his work. "These services were the labor rent by which they held their lands." Some of these tenants, the villeins, were obliged to work on the lord's demesne at harvest only and to help plow and sow, while the others, the serfs, to speak in general terms, were obliged to help on the home farm or in the castle the year round. In course of time the use of a certain parcel of land by the tenant and a right to pasturage and so forth on the one hand, and the amount and kind of service required on the other, became definitely regulated by custom; and instead of the use of the land being a mere indulgence given to the tenant to be taken away from him on any whim of his lord, it became a definite right in the land which must be respected and could be pleaded at law. "The number of teams," and so forth, "the services that a lord could claim, at first mere matter of oral tradition, came to be entered on the court roll of the manor, a copy of which became the title deed of the villein." So after a while instead of "villein" he became a "copyholder." As time went on it grew to be customary, instead of rendering services for the use of the land held by copyhold, to pay a money rent. In other words, the system of leasing the little farms came into use, and from that came the tenant farmer. This left the other laborers about the lord's demesne or his castle as before. While the class of villeins, who did only occasional services, although definite as to amount and time, gradually commuted these services into money payments, and became farmers, the other serfs still remained on the manor, liable to do their work when and where it was customary. This rise of the wealthier tenants made a new class between the large proprietors, the lords of the manor, and the tenants or serfs still bound by custom to work for their lords. But the same process which freed the farmer from personal service in time became the chief way of freeing the serf also. Until this came about the serf or laborer, whatever other rights he might have, and he was not a slave, was born to his holding and his lord. He could choose neither master nor place of work. "He paid head money for license to remove from the estate in search of trade or hire, and a refusal to return on recall by his owner would have ended in his pursuit as a fugitive outlaw." But the advance of society silently worked to free the laborer from this local bondage. The runaway serf gained freedom by residence in a chartered town for a year and a day. The influence of the church was directed toward his emancipation, at least on all estates outside of its own, but the main cause was the growing tendency to commute labor services for money payments. As Mr. Green says: "The luxury of the castle hall, the splendor and pomp of chivalry, the cost of campaigns, drained the purses of knight and baron, and the sale of freedom to a serf or exemption from services to a villein afforded an easy and tempting mode of refilling them. In this process even kings took part. Edward III sent commissioners to royal estates for the especial purpose of selling manumissions to the king's serfs, and we still possess the names of those who were enfranchised with their families by a payment of hard cash in aid of the exhausted exchequer." The Crusades, whatever else they may have accomplished, aided in this freedom for the serf. Those costly expeditions dissipated the estates of the barons, and, to use Hume's somewhat strained expression, "Their poverty extorted from their pride those charters of freedom which unlocked the fetters of the slave." And so, following the rise of the farmer, came this new class--the free laborer. By the latter part of the fourteenth century labor was no longer, as a rule, "bound to one spot or one master; it was free to hire itself to what employer and to choose what field of employment it would." This is the beginning of the labor class as we know it. In those times labor was abundant and therefore cheap. The landowners in the country and the craftsmen in the town found plenty of help, and the new class then coming upon the stage could go where it was needed. From a serf the common laborer had become his own master as far as choosing his own employer and the place of his employment. But just at this time a condition of affairs arose which put an end to this state of things. In 1348 came the Great Plague. That swept away more than half of the three or four millions who then made up the population of England. The plague and the sudden rise of wages which followed, although coupled with an increase in the cost of living, quite naturally brought on an outburst of lawless self-indulgence which told especially upon the laborer looking for work. He easily became the "sturdy beggar" or "bandit of the woods." While harvests rotted to the ground from lack of hands, in the towns labor was just as scarce and equally as independent. The landowners and wealthier craftsmen were startled and terrified by "what seemed in their age the extravagant demands of the new labor classes." Here we have the labor problem at once and at the beginning. And from that time to this that problem has been with us. With the capitalist one person and the laborer another there has been always more or less discord. As Richard T. Ely has somewhere said, although in theory capital and labor should be allies and not enemies, the interests of those furnishing capital or labor are not precisely identical. But five hundred years ago the labor class of to-day had just come into existence. It had no organization then, and its members few political rights. The landowners and craftsmen could appeal effectively to the crown and Parliament through their wealth, their political power, and the craftsmen, especially, through their organizations. The laborer had only himself and brute force. As a result, the legislation of that day reflects the demands of the upper and middle classes only. The laboring class was considered only as it affected the landowners and craftsmen. So the labor troubles of that day were met with the Statute of Laborers. "Every man or woman," runs this famous provision, "of whatsoever condition, free or bond, able in body, and within the age of threescore years, ... and not having of his own about the tillage of which he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and shall take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighborhood where he is bound to serve" two years before the plague began. A refusal to obey was punished by imprisonment. Here was an attempt to fix the rate of wages by statute, and to fix them very much lower than a fair market rate; and, further, to force the unemployed laborer to serve any man who first demanded it. The statute failed in its object, naturally, and so sterner measures were adopted. "Not only was the price of labor fixed by Parliament in the next statute of 1351, but the labor class was once more tied to the soil." It was made the servant not of one master but of a class--the employers. "The laborer was forbidden to quit the parish where he lived in search of better-paid employment; if he disobeyed, he became a 'fugitive,' and subject to imprisonment at the hands of the justices of the peace." Provisions had risen so that a day's work at the legal wages would not purchase enough for a man's support, and therefore no such law could be enforced literally. Still, the landowners persisted in trying, and at last the runaway laborer, the man looking for better wages, was branded on the forehead with a hot iron, while the harboring of serfs in towns was rigorously put down. As the landowners wanted all the labor they could get, the commutation of labor service for money payments ceased, and every effort was made and every quibble taken advantage of to annul manumissions previously made. In the towns, under the pressure of the craftsmen, the system of forced labor was applied with even more rigor than in the country, and strikes and combinations became frequent. That is the state of things in free England at a time when labor was not strong enough to protect itself--called upon by the law of the land to work for less than living wages or be branded as cattle! The irrepressible conflict between capital and labor began with the very beginning of the existence of the labor class. In such a condition of things as here indicated, is it any wonder that there were labor disturbances in those days--that there was a peasant revolt? Already the doctrine of the equality of man and social inequality was being preached to the lower classes. In 1360 John Ball--"a mad priest in Kent," as Froissart calls him--preached such a communistic sermon as this to the sturdy yeomen of that day: "Good people, things will never go well in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are clothed in velvet, and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we oatcake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labor, the rain and wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." That is the same cry against the inequality of property and social condition which we hear to-day. And we may thank him, and men like him and with his inspiration, that the conditions of five hundred years ago have changed, and that the dawn of a better and higher humanity has broken upon us. Filled with socialism and communism as the words are, they still have a truth which appeals to every sympathetic and thoughtful man. And it was in those early days that the old rhyme was heard all over the land: "When Adam delved and Eve span. Who was then the gentleman?" The sermon was preached against the tyranny of property, the rhyme was full of the democracy of the coming years. I do not imagine that the instigators of such laws as the Statute of Laborers were hard men as men go. They could see only their side of the case. The laborer had become a necessity for them, and they rather believed that the Almighty had put him on earth for their advantage. I am afraid that something of that spirit still is left among us. The feeling still exists that the employer and capitalist can take care of and provide for the employees better than they can themselves; that they should be very thankful when out of his abundance the employer builds them a library or permits them to live in some finely ordered village as he directs. But somehow the feeling is growing now that if the wage-earner had a larger and fairer share in the profits he could take care of himself better in the end and grow faster, because he would be more his own master; and that the good things now and then given him with more or less ostentation as gifts are bought with the money he really ought to have and in the future hopes to have himself. Well, the result of such laws and the general social discontent and the levy of new taxes upon even the lower classes brought about the Peasant Revolt in 1381. Of course, the power of the upper classes, aided by the courage of Richard II, then only a boy, put down the revolt, but not until the king had promised amnesty and emancipation to the serfs. Death on the scaffold and in the field soon showed the participants how little such promises were worth. The serfs were subdued, but strife between the laborers and employers was not ended. The legislation still reflects the terror and greed of the landowners, for, in spite of all, labor was in demand and had the market at its feet. Legislation forbade "the child of any tiller of the soil to be apprenticed in a town," and the landowners "prayed Richard to ordain 'that no bondman or bondwoman shall place their children at school, as has been done, so as to advance their children in the world by their going into the church.'" But villeinage continued to disappear, and within the next hundred and fifty years it had become "an antiquated thing." The failure of the landowners to again fasten labor to the soil and to fix low wages drove their energies in a new direction. "Sheep farming required fewer hands than tillage, and the scarcity and high price of labor tended to throw more and more land into sheep farms." As personal service died away it became the interest of the lord to unite the small holdings on his estate into larger ones. The evictions consequent upon this course threw many laborers upon the market, and the sheep farms diminished the number required, while the smaller amount of holdings devoted to agriculture increased the price of food. And so it is not surprising that within the course of a comparatively few years, instead of a scarcity there was a glut of labor; that pauperism increased, and social discontent continued; that vagabondage with its dangers to society at large became a difficult problem. Indeed, the poor have always been with us, but those of us who find so much to depress us in these modern days can get new courage by looking back to those old days and can see the real progress which has been made. The whole lower class in England down to the time of Elizabeth stood looking into the face of want. Henry VIII confiscated the monasteries, but put nothing in their place, and in a measure by so doing deprived the poor of some relief from the wealth of the church. But Elizabeth inaugurated a system of poor-laws which, although crude and somewhat hard, still served to ward off some of the social danger. The course of events, however, and the rise of new industries did more to make life for the laborer, the landless man, less bitter. With the discovery of America and the opening of fisheries in these western waters, and the adventurous and buccaneering voyages of Drake and his compeers, came the gradual development of manufacture, and a "more careful and constant cultivation of the land." All these were new and larger avenues for the employment of labor. By this time the laborer had grown entirely away from serfage, had been freed from the terrible grasp of a hopeless future, and the possibility of a degree of comfort and independence had come into existence. We need not linger longer over his early days. The laborer still had his peculiar trials and hardships, but he had a future. From a subject class, the terror as well as necessity of its employers, he has grown to be their equal before the law, and this by his own efforts, aided, of course, by the advance of society and the broader humanity of mankind. The increase of manufacture brought with it a new danger to the working class as we reach our times, and brought about a state of things which gave rise to trades unions. Manufacture naturally in the beginning was carried on in a small way, but in modern times, especially as we get into this century, the small concerns grew into large ones. Instead of one man or partnership with a comparatively small amount of capital, the corporation or joint-stock company with its large aggregation of capital carries on the business of manufacture and trade. This aggregation of capital has made an entire change in the relation between employer and employee. The corporation came in the line of progress. Consolidation of capital has come to stay, and properly so, but it brought with it dangers, just as every step in advance has done. It was to meet the new dangers to the wage-earners that trades unions came into being, for trades unions and labor unions are really only organizations of labor as corporations are aggregations of capital. When industrial establishments were small, the owner, whether in trade or manufacture, had practically absolute direction of his business. In the industrial world what corresponds to an unlimited monarchy in the political world has been the system. As establishments grew larger, the autocratic power of the owner passed to the manager acting for the owners. As one writer puts it: "Huge industrial establishments are under the unrestrained control of a single man. At his will they are set in motion; at his will they stand still; at his will capital and labor unite and are fruitful; at his will they are parted and remain barren. Men come and go at his bidding. He knows no superior and recognizes no limitations. He calls an attempt at control 'dictation' and resents it with anger." That is the extreme case, and is industrial despotism. While the results doubtless are good in many cases, and the laborer receives fair and decent treatment in most cases, that is owing to the temperament or prudence and good judgment of the master and not to the system. Such a condition of things is becoming more and more modified. We have reached in many cases a condition which may be said to correspond to a monarchy with constitutional limitations--the master is restrained in the exercise of his power by public opinion, the strength of the workingmen, and in some cases by legal limitations. The organization of boards of arbitration, and the recognition of the right of the employee to a share in the profits, are daily extending. The tendency toward giving the wage-earners a share in the business, some modified form of co-operation, is daily extending. The trend is toward what may be called industrial democracy, just as in the political world real democracy is fast becoming the universal principle, whatever the style of the government may be. This advance in the industrial world has come about through the agitation and power of labor organizations, of which, as they exist now, trades unions were the early manifestation. The employer, as a rule, looked after his own interests mainly, and the employee alone by himself had to take what he could get and do as he was told. Just as the people, after they sunk into subjection in the earlier days, had little political power as against the nobility until they were strong enough to take it, so the laborer still would be of little account except as a more or less intelligent machine unless he had proved himself a man, with a man's aspirations and a man's energy. Labor organizations or trades unions came into existence in England. The democratic spirit, the spirit of liberty, the Saxon spirit of independence, which wrested from kings and the nobility all the rights which the common people enjoy, has been doing in the industrial world only what it did in the political world years before. We may say that trades unions find their prototype in the _frith guilds_ or _peace guilds_ of the Anglo-Saxon. A few words in general about them and their successors and the spirit pervading them, the causes of their existence and decay, will have a bearing on labor organizations, which are like them in "being founded on similar mental faculties and desires and as contemplating similar purposes." These _frith guilds_ seem to have been associations of neighbors for mutual help and protection. They replaced the older brotherhood of kinsfolk, which had existed among the German races, "by a voluntary association of neighbors for the same purposes of order and self-defense." An isolated existence for a man, even a freeman, was one of danger, especially when the feudal temper of the nobles increased and the Danish incursions broke over England. The ties of kindred had become weakened, and the frith guild took the place of the family. A mutual oath bound the members together, and the monthly guild feast became the substitute for the old gathering round the family hearth. A member could call upon the guild in case of violence or wrong; when charged with crime, the guild answered for him, and when guilty, punished him; when poor, it supported him; and when dead, buried him. When these guilds were located in towns rather than in the country, they inevitably tended in time to combine, and eventually the town passed from a collection of guilds into one large guild, and we have the _town guild_. The word "town" is used in contradistinction from the word "country," just as we say "town and country," "going to town," and so on. The spirit of independence and freedom, kept alive in our town meetings here, and in our local self-government, has come down to us through those old town guilds and the boroughs of England. It is to the towns of England and not to the country that we owe much of our liberty to-day. So these guilds in towns, by joining together and making a town guild, became quite strong communities. They made demands upon the crown itself, and took upon themselves the government of the towns where they were located. Their members were the landowners of the town, and the other people who came there to settle, no matter how numerous, had no part in the government. From being democratic in the beginning, as the frith guilds were, the towns became oligarchies. In the course of time the differences between town and country became more marked. The town guilds began to have less and less to do with agriculture, although at first they were interested in it. The wealth in the town is turned to trade and manufacture, such as there was in those days. So, by the time of the Norman conquest, in 1066, we hear little of town guilds, but in almost every case _merchant guilds_. The _town guild_ has become a _merchant guild_, although composed of the same constituency. The commercial spirit has become the ruling spirit of the town. As time went on and life and property became safer and trade increased, the consequent accumulation of wealth in towns produced important results in the character of these municipal institutions. "In becoming a merchant guild the body of citizens who formed" the government of "the town enlarged their powers of civic legislation by applying them to the control of their internal trade." No longer confining themselves to providing for public order or protection from unjust oppression or dangers from without, they began to legislate for their own immediate advancement and for their own pockets. "It became their especial business to obtain from the crown or from their lords wider commercial privileges, rights of coinage, grants of fairs, and exemptions from tolls; while within the town itself they framed regulations as to the sale and quality of goods, the control of markets, and the recovery of debts." And further, the members of the guild withdrew from the humbler trades to confine themselves to the larger business of commerce or trades requiring large capital, leaving the trades and traffic given up to their poorer neighbors. This ruling class comprised only a part of the inhabitants, only the members of the merchant guild. The great mass of the people, the artisans and the poor, the men without land, the serfs escaped from the country and gaining their freedom in the town, all had no voice in the government whatever. They lived and worked and earned their daily bread practically by permission or at least under the direct control of the merchant guild. From a simple association, the guilds in towns had become the governing body, and a government in the hands of a few at that. From the need of protection on account of individual weakness, the members of the guilds had grown to be in need of repression; and with the demand for repression came the instrument of repression--the _craft guild_. Against the autocratic power of the merchant guild arose the craft guilds, or associations of workers in the various trades, those trades abandoned by the merchants, and these guilds "soon rose into dangerous rivalry with the original merchant guild of the town." These craft guilds in the old English towns, in order to attain their objects, considered it necessary to compel the whole body of craftsmen belonging to the trade to join the guild of that craft or trade; and further, that the guild should have legal control over the trade itself--who should be admitted to it, and so forth. "A royal charter was indispensable for these purposes, and over the grant of these charters took place the first struggle with the merchant guild, which had till then solely exercised jurisdiction over trade within the borough." The struggle was a fierce one and long continued, but the spread of the craft guilds went steadily on, and the control of trade passed into their hands. Then the next step--a share in the government of the borough itself--was taken, and the government of the towns passed from an oligarchy into the hands of the middle classes. The craft guild came into being just as its predecessor had, from the necessity of association for protection, and like it was democratic at first; and, again like it, became in time an oligarchy as narrow as that which it had deposed. The craft guild arose because the artisans and tradesmen had grown to a position where they could recognize the injustice and oppression of the merchant guild, and were strong enough and persistent enough to assert themselves, and as long as the craft guilds were democratic in spirit and were true to the needs for which they were organized they flourished. But with age and success came narrowness and bigotry and opposition to progress. They became monopolies of employment and societies of greedy capitalists, and in England withered away before the growth of the modern vast industrial establishment. I have ventured to give this general sketch of these guilds because the same spirit and necessities which inspired them brought the trades union into being. The trades union or labor organization was created to protect the laborer and gain for him a better position in life, to raise his standard of living. It is like the old guilds in being subject to the same dangers as they were, and when it proves false to its true objects it will pass away as did the old guilds. It will last only so long as there is a necessity for its existence, as long as it does the work it is born to do. And when it has come to deny freedom, to refuse another's rights, and to repress industry, the seeds of dissolution are already sown. Trades unions or labor unions arose from the necessity of organization among the laborers or wage-earners if they were to hold their own against the aggregation of capital. The craft guild arose at a time when trading and manufacturing concerns were small, when the interest of both master and workman in a business were alike joined in opposition to the exactions of a superior class--the merchant guild; while the trades union came upon the field to protect the laborer against his employer. Whatever other objects and aims it may have had do not enter into my purposes in this paper. The personal relation which had existed between the master and servant, the employer and his few employees, the manufacturer and his half dozen workmen or apprentices, no longer existed when the workers became scores and hundreds, and the owner of the business was replaced by the manager or superintendent. That personal relation was in some measure a protection for both, but when that disappeared the temptation to gratify owners and stockholders with big dividends became too strong to be overcome. Against organized capital there was absolute need of organized labor, and trades unions and labor unions and such organizations came into existence. There was no possibility of their existence until the laborer had become intellectually and socially capable of organization, and until the divine spirit of discontent drove him to association with his brother worker. During all the years from the time of his serfdom up to the time these organizations began he had been slowly growing in development and gaining something in political position, but it was not until political power came nearer and nearer to him that he gained the strength to raise his standard of living, to make a stand for himself. He knew the struggle would be a hard one, for everything he gained seemed to be something taken away from those who held themselves above him and better than he. As a rule, we are very well content to let things alone if we ourselves are fairly comfortable, and especially are we blind to another's ills if the remedy for them is found in a renunciation of part of that which we have always considered our own. There is nothing particularly new in this. We easily can imagine some worthy burgher in the olden time expostulating at the demand of the craft guild even to be allowed to exist, and I do not imagine his language varied much in spirit from the indignant disgust shown by some large employer of labor to-day when he talks of labor unions. Doubtless these unions to-day seem to him to have the same dangerous tendencies which the craft guilds were talked of as having eight hundred years ago. If there were no wrongs to right, if selfishness did not exist, if there were a real belief in the brotherhood of man, and life were in accordance with that belief, such organizations might not be necessary, or if they existed have other aims; but until all men have an equal chance for self-development, and a chance for something more than a mere existence, labor unions or something to take their place must exist. And so we stand to-day with labor unions and the labor problem, so called, with us. The laboring class is discontented. Men claim as rights what their fathers would have been glad to get as favors. There are violence and bad blood and waste, and so there have been from the beginning. But there have been also injustice and oppression and greed from the beginning. While we may condemn strongly much of the violence and wrongdoing of labor organizations, we can find many extenuating circumstances. The same spirit of independence, the same desire for equal justice which animated the old guilds of England, and which have made the Englishman and those who have sprung from him the freest as well as most law-abiding people on the earth, are found within the organizations of labor. We in this country hardly can find only danger in the spirit which impels the workingman to resist every encroachment upon his rights, to strive for that better future to which he believes he is entitled. There were many things done in the youth of our history which in our manhood we regret, and I hardly think, as a nation, our own robe is so unspotted that we must draw it round us lest it be soiled by the violence of a perhaps uneducated and inadvisable but still earnest effort after higher and better conditions of life. Let us read and ponder over our histories anew, and with humble hearts try to find a better way both for the laborer and ourselves. I have said that it was through his organization that the laborer has made the industrial and social advance he certainly has made in the last century. The trades unions, like the guilds before them, had to struggle for a legal existence, and their early days were full of violence. Dr. Brentano, in his work on Trades Unions, says: "They have fought contests quite as fierce as those of the old craftsmen against the patricians, if not fiercer. The history of their sufferings since the end of the eighteenth century, and of the privations endured for their independence, is a real record of heroism." May not we hope with him that now they may cease using the arms of violence which belong to former times and use the legal means which belong to our days? We can not approve of their violence, but let us not be unduly alarmed by it. If society becomes so ossified in its usages and habits and thinking that a newer and better thought can not get in, a nobler way of living for all be entered upon, it sometimes seems as if in the very nature of things violence must come to rend away the obstructions. I believe that labor organizations are as much the instruments of progress as the town guilds and craft guilds of old. They will do their work, and the world will be the better for it. They tend to make society more democratic industrially as well as politically, as their predecessors did, and therefore better. For what is democracy but a practical recognition of the brotherhood of man? If Christianity amounts to anything, what higher aim should we have than that? Many students of the problems involved state that in the long run labor still does not receive its full share of the profits; that in order to keep up the standard of living which the wage-earner already has reached he must have a larger reserve fund. In other words, he must be able to save more. To do that and still live as he claims he ought, his share in the profits, his wages, must be larger than now. We can not claim that the standard is too high because admittedly it is higher than ever before. Hon. Carroll D. Wright, in a recent address, says: "Under the iron law of wages as announced by Ricardo, it [the labor question] is a struggle simply to secure barely enough of food and raiment and shelter to preserve the working physical machine, the rule being that wages ought not to be paid over the bare necessities. To-day the standard of living of the ordinary wage receiver involves margins above the iron law of from ten to fifteen per cent, out of which margin is to be found what are now called spiritual necessities, means of leisure, reading, music, recreation, etc., so that the demand of the worker in all civilized countries is for the expansion of this margin. He feels entitled to this because society has insisted upon educating him, giving him a taste for higher things, making him a social and political factor; in fact, fitting him for membership in a democratic community." Labor organizations, in spite of much extravagant language and many ill-advised acts, certainly aim at a better condition for the wage-earner. We fail to see the intelligence underlying industrial controversies because progress has been so rapid. Some of the methods of labor organizations are violent and the weapons used are in a great measure strikes and boycotts. That is industrial warfare and is as costly and wasteful and cruel in many ways as any warfare is, but very often these organizations seem to have no other method of making their power felt; no other way of bringing about a needed reform. And we can not say that all strikes have been or are necessarily wrong, except in the same way that all warfare is an evil. The very readiness to strike will effect a reform which a known weakness or lack of courage on the part of the organization would have prevented. Such an authority as John Stuart Mill says that "strikes, therefore, and the trade societies which render strikes possible, are for these various reasons not a mischievous, but, on the contrary, a valuable part of the existing machinery of society." Whether in a particular case a strike or boycott is right or wrong depends upon the facts of that case, and whether we have reached a point where strikes are no longer right, no matter what may have been the case in the past, is another question. Let us hope we are nearer that time, at any rate. It will depend upon the attitude of employers as well as employees. Out of strikes themselves comes a remedy. Daniel J. Ryan, in his article on Arbitration, records that "for sixteen years the disputes of labor and capital in the rolling mills of England have been settled by arbitration, and it has been an era remarkably free from strikes. The Board of Arbitration for the north of England iron business was, as all efforts of this kind usually are, the outgrowth of a strike." Now, in this part of England before the formation of this board, strikes were chronic. The works in that section recently had 1,913 puddling furnaces--more than in all Pennsylvania, and half as many as in the entire United States. The limits of this article will not allow a discussion of voluntary or involuntary arbitration, but let me say that in the above case we see that a simple arrangement between the parties changed all the strife to peace. Will society long tolerate a continuance of industrial warfare when it has in its own hands a preventive? For its own protection will it not tell employer and laborer, "You must settle your differences quietly by mutual agreement, or, if you can not, I will settle them for you"? It says this now to the individual. Men and women are not allowed in these days to settle their rights and wrongs by brute force. That method passed away long years ago in civilized communities. And society must continue to suffer from the violence and waste of strikes until it teaches employers and workingmen and itself a higher and better way. May not it be possible that the outcome will be that associations of wage-earners are to be treated as the equals of the employer? Will not the democratic spirit of the age to come so permeate the industrial as well as the political world that the laborer and the employer will each have a share in the business they together carry on? I have tried to make a very broad sketch of the change which has taken place in the condition of the laborer, with a consideration of some of the means by which that has come about. No longer is he a serf--no longer even the servant of a ruling class. He at length has risen to a share in the government of his town and country. No longer are laws passed against him specially, but in his favor. The laborer has become free--free to follow along the path of his predecessors, to gain full justice, but not to oppress others. Before the law at least he is the equal of his employer. I have implied at least that he has but followed the spirit which led his older brother of the middle class up from practical subjection to power. The craft guilds of the one, the labor unions of the other, are in the same line as the old town guilds. They all are manifestations of that democratic independence which seems necessary for political freedom. They all imply the capacity for organization as they all have shown its power. Let us believe that, like the old guilds, these labor organizations are helpful parts of the machinery of human progress. They force upon us the fact that there have been and are injustices which must be righted. We are beginning to learn that we can not depend upon one side alone for our political economy or our facts; that we need an organization strong enough to compel respect in order to protect those who without it would be, as they have been, helpless. All the smoke and clash of industrial warfare seem terrifying; the innocent victims shock our sense of justice, but it is leading to the perfect peace. The true democracy--the brotherhood of man--is forcing itself upon mankind. If we in our prejudice, our selfishness, our ignorance, defy the signs of its coming, try to prevent its growth, or find only license in liberty, we shall continue to suffer all the ills which an obstruction of progress or a violation of its laws always brings with it. Is it not true that never in the history of the world has there been an agrarian rising, a peasant revolt, a labor war, that back of it we do not find as a main cause the injustice, the oppression, the selfishness of a more powerful class? And will there be perfect peace, perfect prosperity, until the divine harmony--the real brotherhood of man--is the rule of life? Wrong always breeds violence. But out of that violence, when the wrong is made right, comes peace. Massachusetts in her motto declares that "by the sword she seeks peace," and, to use Richard T. Ely's words, "the Prince of Peace proclaimed, 'Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword'; and yet truly was he called the Prince of Peace." Often is war the price of peace. And no one, no class of men, deserve their freedom unless, when all other means fail, they have the courage and energy to pay the price. Therefore, we will not be alarmed at struggles which in the end will bring about a better condition of life for all. Rather let us try to end those struggles by pushing bravely on toward the end mankind is striving for. We, with such a past as ours, must not be false to the ideal which is our birthright; we should not be incapable of finding the true way. If we will forget our merely partisan strife, our petty jealousies, our class distinctions, and have only one aim, justice for all, an equal chance for self-development for all, whether he be born rich or poor, the ruling spirit of the next century will keep America still true to her high calling, and mankind still will find in her the inspiration to raise the disheartened and lowly of other lands. The truest patriotism is broad enough to help the unfortunate everywhere, and with courage, intelligence, and a faith in true democracy we shall not fail. THE BERING SEA CONTROVERSY ONCE MORE. BY PROF. T. C. MENDENHALL. Mr. Clark's interesting and, on the whole, fair review of my article on Expert Testimony in the Bering Sea Controversy, printed in this journal in 1897, might be allowed to stand, without comment, as the best possible vindication of the work of the Bering Sea Commission of 1891-'92, and as strong corroborative evidence of the soundness of the position taken in the article referred to. One or two quotations which he makes, however, are placed in such relation to other parts of the paper as to imply meanings which a reading of the article as a whole will show were never intended. This is notably true of the description of the frame of mind in which a scientific man should approach or conduct any investigation, which Mr. Clark quotes, and the further statement that, unfortunately, he often fails to come up to the standard set, and especially when his own interests are involved. It might easily be inferred that these remarks were meant to have special application to the members of one or both Bering Sea commissions, while as a matter of fact they were a part of the general introduction, occurring some time before any reference is made to the commissions. I should greatly regret having any one understand that there was the slightest intimation of the existence of a "handsome retainer," or anything of the sort, in connection with any or all of the Bering Sea investigations. As far as the American representatives on the first commission are concerned, it is no harm to say that the pecuniary residual was unfortunately affected by the wrong sign, and this was doubtless the case as well with Dr. Jordan and his colleagues. As to the truth of the statement regarding the "scientific expert," no evidence need be offered here, for it is furnished by every court in the land, and not a day passes that does not witness a struggle between "experts" who have nearly always started from the same premises, but whose conclusions are diametrically opposed to each other. What I do want to say is that this is quite consistent with the perfect honesty and good intent of the experts themselves. It is the result of the limitations to which the operations of the human intellect are still subjected, and it is a fact always to be reckoned with in matters of this kind. There should be no skepticism as to the honesty and frankness of Sir George Baden-Powell and Dr. George M. Dawson in assuming an attitude so opposed to that of the American commissioners in 1892. Mr. Clark regards my article of 1897 as a "prediction of failure for the new commission," an assumption quite unjustified and unsustained by the article itself, in which the fullest recognition is shown of the great value of the work of Dr. Jordan and his colleagues. Indeed, the article was purposely prepared and published before the meeting of the second commission, that it might not seem to be in any way a criticism upon its work. Now that both commissions have made public their findings, the whole matter is easily accessible, but Mr. Clark is hardly just to the first commissioners on either side, by the slight reference he makes to their separate reports to their respective governments. A more careful study of both might have led to some modification of his views, even concerning the partition of authorship which he has ventured to make. It is no mean compliment, however, to find him admitting, in regard to the report of the American commissioners, that "not a single statement of fact in it has proved fallacious, and the more exhaustive investigations of 1896 and 1897 corroborate its conclusions in every particular." And this admission lies adjacent to his assertion that "the investigations conducted by the two commissions [of 1891] were, from a scientific point of view, of the nature of a farce." The fact is, Mr. Clark seems to have strangely misunderstood the character of the investigations which were contemplated and desired. The natural history of the fur seal was not the question submitted to the joint commission, except in so far as it specially affected seal life in Bering Sea and the measures necessary for its proper protection and preservation. "Facts, causes, and remedies" were the subjects to be considered. There is an old saying that the flavor of the pudding may often be revealed by chewing the string, and no long and exhaustive investigation was necessary to enable the American commissioners to arrive at what Mr. Clark admits to be the "facts, causes, and remedies" for the Bering Sea problem. Not many weeks were occupied in the field, it is true, for the commission was delayed in its appointment and notification, and the season was nearly over when it reached the islands. But, as Mr. Clark justly remarks, one member of the commission, Dr. Merriam, was already exceptionally well informed concerning the habits of the fur seal, and some things may be so in evidence that even a physicist can see them. It is true that the _joint_ report of the commission of 1891-'92 was meager, and the explanation lies close at hand in the unwillingness of the American commissioners to swerve from what they were convinced was absolutely true. Mr. Clark will look in vain for the "handwriting of diplomacy mingled with that of science," for the appearance of which in the report of the commission of 1897 he offers apologies, except, indeed, it be the diplomacy of going straight at the facts without concealment or evasion, on which Americans have sometimes prided themselves. The joint report was limited to that, and only that, on which the commissioners were actually agreed, and the American commissioners have explained in their separate report that had they been willing to concede certain points the joint report would have been greatly augmented in volume. Mr. Clark has reviewed the conclusions of the commission of 1897, which he justly considers a most important and valuable document. It has not escaped his attention that in a number of the paragraphs of this report the American commissioners have committed themselves to the approval of several doubtful statements, such as that "the pelagic industry is conducted in an orderly manner, and in a spirit of acquiescence in the limitations imposed by law"; that a certain number of females may be killed without involving the actual diminution of the herd; the "tendency toward equilibrium theory"; that the herd is still far from a stage that threatens extermination, and others. These statements he excuses as "balm for the wounded feelings of the pelagic sealer"; "a concession to diplomacy"; "a diplomatic concession to take the sting out of the real admission"; "another concession to diplomacy," etc. I do not wish to be understood as questioning the necessity or wisdom of inserting these paragraphs in the joint report, but is it not a little strange that with them in, and apologizing for them as he does, Mr. Clark should have selected this as a model of what the report of a scientific commission ought to be and sufficient of itself to forever fix the value of the scientific expert in the settlement of government disputes? As I have already intimated, no one appreciates more highly than I the great work done by Dr. Jordan and his associates in the study of the natural history of the seal. May not the work of the two commissions, as _bearing on the problem of the fur-seal industry_, be summed up about as follows?--The report of the American members of the first commission related facts, declared causes, and proposed remedies. The American case at the Paris arbitration rested on these. As almost universally happens, arbitration resulted in compromise, unsatisfactory to both parties, and, as has since turned out, decidedly unfavorable to one. The commission of 1897 has made a joint report of considerable length and much importance, in which the "facts, causes, and remedies" of the report of 1892 are in a sense confirmed, but with a number of concessions that do not strengthen the American contention regarding pelagic sealing, the justice of which seems to be admitted by Mr. Clark. But the practical question is, What has been the effect of either or both of these commissions upon the fur-seal industry? It would be unkind to press this question upon one who characterizes the work of the first commission as above quoted, and who speaks of the second as having, after being in joint session one week, "concluded its labors, reaching a full and satisfactory agreement." If he really wishes to know what progress is being made under such an agreeable state of affairs, let him inquire of the International Joint Commission, which is endeavoring to arrange all outstanding differences between this country and Canada. CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF INSANITY. BY SMITH BAKER, M. D. It is being found out that cases of insanity may of themselves fall naturally into two classes: the first comprising those who get well, and the second those who do not. To the first class belong the deliriums of fevers and other like diseases, and also certain acute manias and melancholias and the so-called generalized insanities. In the second class are included the insanities which last indefinitely, or, if seemingly cured, which, in the proportion of from twelve to fourteen per cent, come back again one or more times, and finally do not recover. Says Regis: "Out of all forms of mental alienation or insanity only the generalized types--i. e., mania and melancholia--are curable. The systematized insanities are essentially chronic and recover only exceptionally" (Practical Manual of Mental Medicine, page 54). The latter are known by such specific names as paranoia, chronic mania, chronic melancholia, insanity of doubt, circular insanity, hereditary insanity, and the like. What makes such a division of insanities into these two classes significant is not only that those of the first class get well and the others do not, but that, generally speaking, these latter are so founded in the constitution of the individual that they can not recover, let everything as yet possible be done for them as it may. Probably there are exceptions to this; but, if so, they are not very often met with. All these cases seem to be doomed from the very first either to follow a slowly downward grade to the very end, or else to manifest a series of alternate better and worse stages, which, while giving rise to bright hopes of ultimate recovery, nevertheless just as surely tend more or less rapidly downward, in pretty strict accordance with the rule. In passing, it may be noted that not only the tragedy of such alternations of emphatic despair and delusive hope constitutes not the least of the wretchedness involved in the history of these cases, but that it is by no means the easiest thing about them to manage; for, in the earlier stages, it is almost impossible to make associates or relatives understand the full meaning of the disease, or to take a correct view of its probable outcome. Even much later on they cling to the possibility of recovery, which is as delusive as it is painful, for the disease goes on, nevertheless, with varying stride and manifestation, until it finally becomes evident that hope is almost absolutely without any real foundation. Now, when a case of persistent or recurrent but really irrecoverable insanity is studied, with respect not only to the life of the individual affected but to the lives of his ancestors, both remote and near, and in sufficient detail, it is seen that the causes of the present breakdown have been long and surely operative in those from whom he has inherited certain unfavorable characteristics, and at whose hands he has had his bringing up and education; and this even much more weightily than in himself or the life which he has lived. So far as the patient's own responsible life is concerned, the common causes, such as accident, infection, overwork, mental and moral strain--in fact, all the usual forms of stress--have, of course, been just as variously to blame, and in just the same way as they have been in the production of insanities in other individuals who finally recover. But even in respect to these latter, it probably may be most frequently discovered that the harmful effects of certain so-called exciting causes have been experienced, not because of the common emergencies and exigencies of life so much as because of some peculiar but unrevealed characteristics which have produced and maintained a sort of vicious maelstrom into which have been attracted all the detrimental influences that have accidentally or intentionally come within reach. For instance, such persons are almost always predetermined to grow up into harmful bodily and mental habits. Says Peterson: "Among all degenerates there is a taste or appetite for certain foods or drugs which tend to favor their dissolution (alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and the like)" (State Hospitals Bulletin, vol. i, p. 372). So also are they apt to be wrongly educated, or to draw around them harmful associates; to develop the most wearying and exhausting enthusiasms, or to choose a business and place of residence to which they are not adapted; to marry some one who will chiefly wear and burden them; to assume responsibilities and positions out of keeping with their native strength and endurance; in fact, to get entangled in all the affairs of life in just the very way calculated to bring about the one thing which should have been, by every known means, sought to be avoided. It is in this way that "physiological fate" unconsciously spins the web which ultimately fastens its own doom. That such a pernicious course should eventually result in disaster is no wonder at all; for when investigated deeply and comprehensively enough, it is seen that of all possible persons, such are, by birth, the very least calculated to endure the wear and tear thus engendered and maintained; while, as scarcely a word is ever heard and scarcely an effort is ever made as to the necessity for so training and educating and inspiring these people that the defects of heredity will be remedied, it follows that the most ordinary ventures of commonplace life are by far more dangerous to them than to their better-endowed fellows.[A] When properly endowed by heredity, and adequately bred and educated, it is almost beyond wonder, the amount and character of persistent stress which human nature can triumphantly endure. When otherwise, however, it is no wonder at all that sooner or later serious breakdown comes to pass. The importance of saying this is obvious when we consider that as a rule active life is allowed to be entered upon without adequate preparation and intelligent adaptation of either bodily or mental strength to the stress that is likely to be encountered. Always it is asked, if anything is asked at all, "Has he the skill to make his way?" instead of, "Has he the prospective endurance required by what he purposes undertaking?" while, if the latter chances to be considered at all, the conclusion is most usually based upon present appearances rather than upon past tendencies or actual developments. Elsewhere I have said: "In almost every instance (of breakdown) I have come across the result of some big educational blunder, owing either to the system in vogue or else to those who execute it." (See Steps toward Insanity, New York Medical Journal, August 14, 1897.) There is one fact about heredity which seems not to be commonly considered--namely, that each individual is really the descendant of not only his immediate parents, but of the two lines of ancestry indefinitely far back and widespread. Thus, in many instances, the dominating characteristics are not those of father and mother, but of grandparents, or of some other antecedent or collateral relatives instead. In fact, each individual in its development from the germ to adulthood passes through not only many animal forms, but through many ancestral phases of character as well. And, as in the first case, the size and strength of adult physical features depend on the stage at which growth becomes abnormally extended, perverted, or arrested, so, with regard to mental and moral qualities and their persistence under stress, the outcome mostly if not entirely depends upon the extent to which they are allowed or constrained to develop, or the reverse. Here we often see the absolutely limiting influence of "atavism," or what is characterized as "reversion," to generations further removed than the parental, but which really is the result of an exaggeration or a stoppage, or a perversion of development before the stage of parental dominance is finally reached. In this way the featural and mental characteristics of relatives as far removed as great-grandparents or great-granduncles, as well as grandparents and uncles, are seen to appear in children even when young, to be finally either accentuated and made prominent, or else possibly outgrown or otherwise overcome as the years go by, and as the later parental determining powers and the corresponding environment come to manifest their influence. With this view of heredity in mind, it is easy to see how the real basis of every mental breakdown may be and probably is simply an overdoing or perversion or other irregularity at some premature or "atavistic" stage of development; and that anything and everything which may have had to do in causing this should be considered as a primary step toward the insanity itself. But easy as it is to see this theoretically, it does not necessarily follow that it is easy to get hold of the real facts or to help the matter in any given case. Many times families are loath to reveal things which might indicate such a basis of the dreaded disease. Many times they do not recognize the necessity of telling what they would otherwise be willing enough to reveal. Many things are absolutely forgotten or have been at best only vaguely comprehended. Sometimes conscious deception is practiced; at others, the party who really has known the facts is dead or is otherwise inaccessible. But more often, and more interfering still, is the unconscious perversion of facts, either from the false meanings which, owing to specific views and predilections and fears, are read into them, not only by the laity, but often by the profession, or else from the wrong deductions derived from actual facts clearly understood. Try as one may, it is often most difficult to get a sufficient number of clearly defined facts to enable even the most expert to form a true and comprehensive idea of the case in hand.[B] This leads to the remark that what is now absolutely needed is some form of record-keeping which shall become a general practice on the part of heads of families and their physicians, and which may be handed down from generation to generation; and not only this, but that these shall be so accurately and fully kept that they may be worthy of consideration as the best and in fact the only basis of a scientific generalization in case of mental or moral emergency. That people as a rule would probably resent this, as constituting an undue interference with the sanctity of personal and family rights, while undoubtedly rendering it practically nugatory for the time being, does not in any good sense militate against either the scientific need or the great good which would accrue from the use of such family records faithfully and intelligently kept. It is encouraging to note that already the way for such records is being opened in the demands made by the various _questionnaires_ sent out by Dr. G. Stanley Hall and others who are interested in the scientific study of children. (See various issues of the American Journal of Psychology, and of the Pedagogical Seminary, for pertinent suggestions and results. Also an article by Dr. William H. Thomson, in the Yale Medical Journal for April, 1898.) Much more useful and in general satisfactory would this be than the blind staggering after elusory causation now so universally and yet so futilely pursued. And the same may be said with reference to statistics as commonly tabulated. These having reference but to the surface showings, the after-the-mischief-is-done results, and so often obtained under misleading constraint or other unfavorable influences, are scarcely capable of even hinting the significance of real conditions, and especially of tendencies that have existed antecedent to the individual breakdown. For instance, such statistics as those compiled by Dr. Wise (see State Hospitals Bulletin, vol. i, page 157), when subjected to the requirements of an accurate causative consideration, easily lend themselves to the criticism made by the author himself, who says, "The careful inquirer can receive no reliable information from the study of insane hospital statistics except the bare fact of the number of insane persons under care and treatment." Yet a glance at his tables shows that forty-two per cent of the cases admitted to the New York State hospitals for the year ending September 30, 1895, are to be noted as suffering from constitutional degeneracies, and so presumably to be incurable. The more than twenty per cent of cases of insanity reported to have had hereditary antecedents, although undoubtedly as accurate as possible under the circumstances, merely chronicle the more obvious matters, and must necessarily have left out of account all the less obvious but in many respects even more important ones. And so with all the other series thus far published. They are good as indicating where we are to look for some of the steps toward insanity, but for the most part they are quite inadequate for a basis of comprehensive discussion or anything like accurate conclusion. The pressing need, then, is that there shall be obtained a series of statistics which shall be founded upon the most definite, penetrating, and far-reaching studies of cases that it is possible for the trained scientist, with the help of an intelligent, willing laity, to make. In this respect it may be said that the assistance of the latter is just as essential as the painstaking devotion of the former; for it is upon the facts which an intelligent laity can observe and report that the scientist can bring his training to bear in such a way as to arrive eventually at accurate and therefore most useful generalizations. But such concurrent observation and study will never be until the public shall have come to look upon insanity as merely an unfortunate disease instead of a stigmatized disgrace, which, with certain exceptions, it should not be considered to be. Nor will this be the case until professional examiners in lunacy shall regularly ask for such family records, and thus create a need for their being made. When both the public as well as the profession lay aside entirely the common notions of a transcendental origin of insanity, and set to work to study the perfectly natural steps through which degeneration and breakdown eventually come to be, all will see the desirability of such health records being accurately and fully kept, not only as a help toward determining the nature and prospects of any given case, but also toward preventing the development of those constitutional tendencies which lead to trouble, as well as in helping on those that provide against it. When we come to study the causes of insanity with a view to successfully preventing it, we are led to the supposition that the nearer to very first steps we can push our investigations the greater will be our service. Remembering that the well-born, well-bred personality generally bears almost every sort of stress with comparative impunity, it becomes us to ask just how does the opposite--the ill-born, ill-bred--constitution come so to be, and hence to break down so easily. Certainly, the weak, easily breaking strains must have their origin and growth just as definitely as the more enduring ones, and if we can get an accurate notion of such origin and the conditions of subsequent growth, it seems probable that useful knowledge will thus be attained. With this object in view an investigation was undertaken which should cover the life histories of a series of families with sufficient detail and extension to warrant at least tentative conclusions as well as also to indicate probable lines for future work. So far as possible, inquiries were pushed along collateral as well as direct lines of ancestry; and not only ill health but common habits and experiences were, so far as possible, given the consideration strictly their due. In every way the attempt was made to properly estimate the factors appertaining to the more intimate personal life as well as those that were more obvious and impersonal. Often, however, the completed record proved to be more or less broken; more often still, important items--the most important of all, in fact--could only be obtained under promise of absolute secrecy as to future use. So, as matters of absolute science, the following conclusions must stand chiefly as challenges for future confirmation or change. But, so far as they can be allowed to go, they may be accepted as pretty thoroughly based in ascertained fact and legitimate generalization. The very first conclusion, so far as the natural history of the steps toward insanity is concerned, is that the weak constitutional strands and tendencies have their beginnings in those ancestral marriages which, chiefly for educational reasons, I have chosen to call "unphysiological."[C] By an unphysiological marriage one need not mean a marriage between people obviously deformed or imbecile or insane, or otherwise permanently unfitted, but rather between people who are found to be not well adapted to each other in some important sense. Thus, too great physical disproportion; too great disparity of age, or of temperament, or of family or of natural tendencies; or, on the other hand, too near a sameness, either through consanguinity or other sources; or too fixed constitutional characteristics; or even too great differences of education, religion, taste, or ambition. In fact, it seems probable that anything and everything which difficultly amalgamates in marriage, and as surely fails to blend in progeny, may be considered as unphysiological in this connection. As I have said elsewhere: "The parties entering into such an unphysiological marriage may both be normal individually, but yet not physiologically marriageable, because they are either too distantly or too nearly, or in fact too unphysiologically, related, either physically or psychically. In such cases the ultimate outcome is almost absolutely certain, and is noted chiefly by a definite class of tensions and reactions of both mind and body which invariably impress themselves upon progeny, and which for the most part are made obvious in this particular way. No matter how unphysiological such marriages may be, however, they do not necessarily or very often result in the evolution of insanity in the parties contracting them, but rather they do lay the foundation of degenerative tendencies which almost invariably predetermine the development of this affection in more or less remote succeeding generations. Nor do the children of such marriages necessarily or generally become insane, although they sometimes do; but, impressed as these are by the degenerative malnutritions and tensions and reactions of their parents, they tend to exhibit arrests and eccentricities of development, which in turn become intensified in the next, and again, in turn, in all the generations following, until the instability becomes so marked that explosion occurs. In passing, it may be said that the most frequent source of the initiatory tensions and reactions resulting from unphysiological marriage is undoubtedly found in abnormal cohabitation, and the unrest and unsatisfaction and exhaustion resulting therefrom. Such a condition of things begets in perfectly normal people an irritating, nagging, exhausting, persistent erethism, which in time involves the whole organism and deflects it from its norm. Two people enmeshed in such a bond always go to excesses and irregularities, either in abstinence or indulgence; or, if not this, then the whole matter becomes aversional, with straining antipathy, perverting practices, and ideational distrusts and loathings more and more predominating. No wonder that such people predetermine succeeding generations to abnormal sensitiveness, irregular growth, and erratic manifestations in both mental and physical spheres." (See New York Medical Journal for August 14, 1897; also Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, vol. xvii, page 669.) Now, the outcome of such marriages seems to be a vitiated stream of tendency, which carries with it in its progress from generation to generation certain elements which predetermine to still fuller vitiation, even with incurable insanity, as noted above. Thus, people endowed with such natural characteristics, being altogether too prone to gravitate toward each other, eventually marry, and thus emphasize in progeny the vitiation already doubly initiated. Nature's course demands that such people marry, if at all, into the healthiest, most corrective stock possible. But here immediately there arises not only a scientific prohibition, but an ethical question which should be heeded: Should such people really marry even the best of stock, with the probability of thus vitiating a stream which until this time has evidently been becoming clearer and stronger? Again, people who are constitutionally tending to mental breakdown are very apt to load themselves down with duties and get themselves into situations which must necessarily prove to be too onerous and too perplexing for their poorly developed strength and skill. Of course, circumstances often require this. Many times, however, there is a kind of impulsive restlessness coupled with a short-sighted optimism, both constitutional, which, altogether more than ordinary circumstances, are to blame for undue assumption of work or care, and whose effect is, perhaps, best seen in the persistent tendency of such people to originate and perpetuate exhausting habits, both of mind and body. Thus, the habit of self-poisoning from poorly digested and poorly assimilated food is easily acquired by such people, and always becomes a source of progressive brain starvation and often of consequent mental breakdown. Says Dr. A. S. Thayer (Journal of Medicine and Science, vol. iii, page 173), "There is ground for belief that exhaustion--fatigue--is dependent upon poisoning of the cells of the brain, muscles, and other tissues by the waste products of functional activity."[D] Again, as already noted, perversions of the natural instincts--of appetite for food, of desire for gain, of social or other ambitions, and especially of the sexual impulse and its habitual indulgence--fasten themselves upon such individuals with a permanence and destructiveness that must almost of necessity lead to disaster.[E] And so we may see that as a most natural, although often a far-removed, result of unphysiological marriages, proceeding through generations which have been thus predestinated to weakening choices and practices, insanity finally appears to mark the ultimate extent both of the mental disorganization and bodily inefficiency, which extent is owing not only to the original initiating steps, but also to subsequent stages of causation, progressively developed from generation to generation. Another great source of vitiation of the stream of tendency is found in two people who marry in a truly enough physiological sense, but who find or force themselves in lives of wear and tear which progressively unfit them for childbearing and child nurture. Poorly calculated ambitions, unexpected difficulties to be surmounted, depressing oppositions, with perhaps more or less actual disease or accident, largely account for this in a general way. Obviously, during the child-rearing age, the effect of what parents are obliged to endure and execute upon the fortunes of progeny becomes a matter of far-reaching importance. That anything which persistently exhausts or overstrains the parents must tell in the later dynamic tendency and development is premised at least by certain recent studies, especially those of Hodge on the influence of fatigue, and of Van Gieson on the effects of exhaustion and intoxication upon the nervous elements. (See also Peterson, _op. cit._) In no sense can parents be said to live for themselves chiefly. Always the influence of their own health, happiness, and prosperity upon their children should be remembered, and should be made as constructive as possible. That this can be consciously attempted with commensurate results is more or less evidenced not only by common observation but by investigation. Not, however, in the sense that parents are always able to endow children with some particular, much-wished-for characteristic, as so many suppose--for it must be remembered that perhaps pretty fixed tendencies for several generations may have to be overcome and reversed before such special results can be obtained, but in the much better sense of giving such an impetus healthward and strengthward and lifeward as may later on be the beginning of a constitutional foundation that shall support many generations of full health and longevity. If, then, the first steps--and, generally speaking, the most important steps--are discovered in the unphysiological marriage and its influence upon the bearing and rearing of progeny, then it is obvious enough that prevention of incurable insanity should begin with giving adequate attention to this phase of the subject, and this first and emphatically. Already the law says that certain peculiarly afflicted individuals can not marry; and probably this is about as far as the law can helpfully go until, at least, public intelligence as well as private sentiment will sustain it in going further. So we must look to these latter--a widespread intelligence and a corresponding earnest sentiment founded upon such intelligence--for the means of making progress toward the prevention of insanity. But how can this needed knowledge and helpful sentiment come to be? Certainly not by perpetuating the present notions of so-called "modesty" and "purity," which, as now held, must always interfere with the study and practice necessary for ascertaining the truth, and for applying it to the needs of race-building. The time ought to come soon, very soon, when matters of such serious content shall not be so absolutely subject to the dominance of conventionality and guesswork and recklessness as now, but shall instead be subject to the sway of accurate science and its careful adaptation to human conditions. Every marriage now is at best but an experiment--blind and chance-taking often, in a most wasteful and dangerous sense. Let it remain, if it must, an experiment still, but one which shall be henceforth conducted with such foresight and skill, and withal with such intelligent purpose, as shall certainly point to improved results from generation to generation. Experience shows that it is comparatively easy to ascertain what marriages, generally speaking, are prone to result in obviously vitiated progeny; or if not in these, then, to some extent at least, in the progeny which, being unnaturally constituted, are prone to develop their weaker strands of personality, and so to break down in the end. But to this course neither prudery nor superstition nor selfishness will ever assent; it must be pursued in spite of these, and by the only method which science now recognizes--namely, accurate observation, careful record, and the most comprehensive, skillful comparison, all in order that truthful inductions may be finally secured. That parents should train up their children to look forward to marriage not as the acme of personal indulgence and satisfaction, but as a most responsible partnership for the developmental keeping of unborn fortunes, and the proper nurturing of the children that may come to them, is no longer speculation, but a science-founded fact. Undoubtedly the highest state of adult satisfaction will always be closely associated with what may be characterized as child completion. Moreover, that an educational system which so thoroughly ignores this most important of all educational subjects must, in time, be subjected to the criticism which science may justly develop, is amply borne out by the cases studied. Often, indeed, has it appeared that had a modicum of real knowledge been at hand, most disastrous results would naturally have been obviated. Educators lead the day; why not they lead in directions which shall most truly correct the results of physiological ignorance and daring? That no man or woman should go forth from college with such vital knowledge unlearned is probably the first and most important means of preventing incurable insanity conceivable; and that these in turn should never hesitate to diffuse popularly that which they have been so favored in the learning, implies a duty which the intelligence itself makes clear. So, too, if persistent overstrain and exhaustion of parents, either prospective or actual, leads directly to starvation of their own structural elements, how probable that the initiating and bearing and nurturing of children is to a like extent detrimentally interfered with in any given case through the development of an "erratic cell growth." Certain it is that completeness of development depends on two things--namely, nutrition and exercise. In a biological sense both these are dependent upon a right adjustment of supply to demand. Hence starvation or engorgement, inactivity or overwork, each may lead to the same dynamic result--that is to say, to an interference with the proper growth of the organism. That due heed, then, should always be given to the necessary health preservation of those who essay to become parents, not only in preparation for but during the whole so-called childbearing period, is so scientifically deducible that it may be for all practical purposes considered as axiomatic. The way to have healthy, long-lived, and happy children is for parents to be healthful and intelligently careful themselves; while the whole science of health must eventually consist in the science of such symmetrical and high development as will enable individuals to endure necessary strain, resist disease, and rapidly and fully recover from accident and infection. FOOTNOTES: [A] "It is perfectly certain that two in every three children are irretrievably damaged or hindered in their mental and moral development in the schools; but I am not sure that they would fare better if they stayed at home."--Baldwin, in _Mental Development_, p. 38. [B] See an instance clearly elucidative of this in an account of the Kelly murder trial, given by Dr. Walter Channing in the American Journal of Insanity for January, 1898, page 385. [C] See New York Medical Journal for August 14, 1897. [D] See also Dr. Edward Cowles. Shattuck Lecture on Neurasthenia. [E] See Peterson. The Stigmata of Degeneration. State Hospitals Bulletin, vol. i, p. 327. SKETCH OF WILLIAM PENGELLY. The name of William Pengelly is most closely associated with the explorations of caves in England containing relics of men together with the remains of extinct animals, the results of which, confirming similar conclusions that had been reached in France, convinced English geologists of man's extreme antiquity. Speaking of him at the time of his death as one of the last survivors of the heroes who laid the foundation of geological science, Prof. T. G. Bonney said, "He has left behind an example of what one man can do in advancing knowledge by energy and perseverance." WILLIAM PENGELLY was born at East Looe, a fishing village in Cornwall, England, January 12, 1812, and died in Torquay, March 16, 1894. The name of Pengelly is not uncommon in Cornwall, and has figured in English history--among others, in the person of Sir Thomas Pengelly, who was chief baron of the exchequer, and left certain sums for the discharge of debtors from the jails of Bodmin and Launceston. His father was captain of a small coasting vessel, and he acquired a strong attachment to the sea. He was sent to the Dame's School in his native village when very young, and before he was five years old had made so rapid progress that his mother applied to the master of a school for larger boys to receive him as a pupil. The master declined to take him, but, hearing him reading as he passed the door of the house not long afterward, concluded to grant the mother's request. At school he soon gained such a reputation for scholarship that the boys made him spend all his play hours helping them in their lessons. His school days ended when he was twelve years old, and he accompanied his father to sea, making, however, voyages that were seldom more than three days long, most of the work of which consisted in taking in and taking out cargo. The sailors soon discovered his clerkly gifts and employed him to write their letters, but did not so well appreciate his excellent conversational powers. On "tailoring days" it was understood that his clothes should be repaired for him, while he read aloud for the general benefit, and the sailors would amuse themselves by finding solutions to questions in Walkingham's Arithmetic. His seafaring life closed in his sixteenth year, when the death of a brother made it desirable that he should remain at home. Though working hard all the day for a mere support, young Pengelly managed to spend several hours every night in study, seeking to master mathematics. He had no tutor and no really good text-books, but made such progress in his studies that in a comparatively short time he became "a mathematical tutor of no mean order." He bought his first Euclid of a peddler who occasionally visited the place; then, having saved up a little money for the purpose, it was a happy day for him when he walked thirty miles to Devonport and back, bearing, on his return, twenty volumes in a bundle over his shoulder; among them were the works of some of the standard authors, for he cultivated a literary as well as a mathematical taste. He received his first lesson in geology while he was still a sailor boy, at Lyme Regis--a spot exceedingly rich in fossils. A laborer whom he was observing broke a stone, the opening of which disclosed a fine ammonite. To his question as to what the fossil was, the laborer replied that if he had read his Bible he would have known; that there was once a flood that covered all the world; the things that were drowned were buried in the mud, and this was a snake which had suffered that fate. "A snake! but where's his head?" He was again referred to the Bible, which would tell him why the snakes in the rocks had no heads. "We're told there that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head. That's how 'tis." The second lesson came a few years later, in a reading club of which Pengelly was a member. They were reading Dick's Christian Philosopher, and came to a geological section, when the reader remarked that "as geology was very likely to be extremely dry, and as many good people thought it dangerous if not decidedly infidel in its teachings, he would propose that the selection should not be read. This was passed by acclamation, and the reader passed on to astronomy." While still young, Pengelly removed to Torquay, where he spent the remainder of his life. Shortly after arriving there, he opened a small day school on the Pestalozzian system, into which he introduced the novelty of the use of chalk and the blackboard in giving instruction. Beginning with six pupils, the school grew rapidly. He had private pupils, too, and in 1846 these had become so numerous that he gave up his school, and as a special tutor in mathematics and the natural sciences found his life occupation. Some of his pupils became distinguished in after life; while others, like the two Russian princes, nephews of the Czar Alexander II, and Princess Mary, of the Netherlands, all of whom became much attached to him, were famous by reason of their position. His attention was brought for a third time to geology while looking over some books which he thought might be useful to his pupils, when he found one published by the brothers Chambers, which contained a chapter on that science. This was not much, but it was enough to inform him how much had already been done in geology, and, perhaps, to give him a hint of some of the possibilities that lay in it. From this time on, he was ardently interested in geology. The journal of his first visit to London and the British Museum, in 1843, attests how he was becoming absorbed in it. He spent his holidays in geological explorations and in excursions which gradually grew larger, until his position as a geologist was recognized, and he became an authority respecting all points and phenomena which had come under his personal knowledge. A hint dropped to him by Professor Jameson as he was about to visit the Isle of Arran taught him to make his notes of observations on the spot, and greatly helped, his daughter Hester observes in the biography on which we have drawn very largely, "to form those habits of extreme accuracy which characterized all his scientific work." In 1837 Mr. Pengelly assisted in the reorganization of the Torquay Mechanics' Institute, with which he maintained a connection for more than twenty years, and before which he delivered many lectures. In 1844 he participated in the organization of the Torquay Natural History Society, of which he became, in 1851, honorary secretary, and remained so for more than thirty-nine years. "Under his guidance it became a scientific power in the country. Year after year he lectured there, tincturing the locality with his own enthusiasm; and from the society there ultimately sprang the museum in Babbacombe Road, with its admirable collections." His lectures, delivered gratuitously at Torquay, were very popular, and were attended by large audiences. The fame of them spread, and he was called to other places--Exeter, Exmouth, and larger towns and farther off, and to the great learned societies--where he lectured, always with success, and to the satisfaction and delight of his audiences. "Those persons living, and they are many," says Mr. F. S. Ellis in the preface to Hester Pengelly's biography of her father, "who had the good fortune to hear Pengelly lecture will bear ready witness to the complete mastery he always had of his subject, and of the faculty of imparting his knowledge. Even when speaking upon abstruse subjects to a mixed audience, he would make the matter perfectly clear without in any degree appearing to talk down to the capacity of those he was addressing.... His manner was no less pleasing and attractive than the language in which he clothed his ideas was grateful to the ear." Geology and astronomy furnished the subjects of the lectures. It would be impracticable in a brief sketch to follow the detail of Pengelly's geological investigations previous to his engaging in systematic cave exploration. They embraced fields chiefly in Devonshire and Cornwall, and afforded subjects for correspondence and discussion with many of the most eminent British geologists, and some of other countries than England. A study of some fossil fish, first observed by Mr. Charles W. Peach in Cornwall, furnished the occasion for one of his first recorded papers, On the Ichthyolites of East Cornwall, in the Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of East Cornwall, 1849-'50; and a single volume--the seventh--of these Transactions contains nine of his papers. Another subject of interest was the beekites, curious formations of chalcedonic silica on the limestone fragments in the New Red Sandstone of Devonshire, first observed by Dr. Beek, of Bristol, concerning which he read a paper at the Cheltenham meeting of the British Association, the first which he attended, in 1856. In 1860 he completed the formation of a collection of Devonian fossils from Devon and Cornwall, which was presented by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts to the new museum of the University of Oxford, in connection with the foundation of a geological scholarship, and was named "the Pengelly Collection." The first of the more important geological researches with which Pengelly's name is intimately associated was the exploration of the peculiar formation at Bovey Tracey, for the identification of its fossils and the determination of its age. The plain in which the formation lay had an aspect suggesting the basin of an ancient lake, and its deposits, "very different from the solid rocks of the surrounding hills," confirmed the suggestion. They consisted of gravels, sands, and clays, distinctly stratified, with seams of lignite, for which they had been worked. The pits had already attracted some notice, and the deposits had been mentioned in scientific literature, but very little had been learned concerning their age. In 1860 the subject was mentioned by the late Dr. Falconer, an eminent paleontologist, to Miss Burdett-Coutts as one the investigation of which would be a boon to science. Miss Coutts supplied the money that was needed, and the direction of the systematic investigation was intrusted to Pengelly; on learning which, Sir Charles Lyell wrote to him: "I am very glad of the prospect of our knowing something of the Bovey coal plants. It is almost a reproach to English geology that they have been so little explored, as they are perhaps the only fossils of the Tertiary period to which they belong." In order to determine accurately the nature, thickness, and order of the successive beds, and to make a satisfactory collection of fossils, a new section of the deposit was made, measuring one hundred and twenty-five feet, down to the bottom of a seam of lignite four feet in thickness, the "last bed" of the workmen, but not at the actual base of the deposit. Thirteen of the thirty-one beds of lignite which were cut through, and two of the beds of clay, yielded distinguishable plant remains. These were sent to Dr. Oswald Heer, of Switzerland, for examination; and he determined from the collection fifty species, including ferns, conifers, figs, cinnamon trees, an oak, a laurel, vines, andromedas, a bilberry, a gardenia, a water lily, and some leguminous plants. Heer referred the group to the Lower Miocene period, but some modification was afterward made in this determination in the light of a fuller knowledge of the Tertiary flora. The deposits and work at Bovey Tracey were the subject of a memoir to the Royal Society by Sir Charles Lyell; and Dr. Heer's account of his work--The Fossil Flora of Bovey Tracey--was published in 1863. While this investigation was going on, Lyell was preparing the fifth edition of his Manual of Geology. He invited Pengelly to suggest corrections to the text, saying that, besides positive mistakes, he would "be glad of any hints and suggestions made freely, which your knowledge of the manner in which beginners are struck may enable you to send us." The criticisms supplied by Mr. Pengelly were adopted by Lyell except where they had already been made unnecessary. On the accidental discovery by workmen, in 1858, of a cavern in Windmill Hill, overhanging the town of Brixham, Pengelly at once thought of finding what was in it, and what story it might have to tell. He visited the place and applied to the owner for permission to explore it in behalf of the Torquay Natural History Society. But on consultation with Dr. Hugh Falconer it was decided that as that society probably had not means sufficient to bear the expense of the exploration, the Royal and Geographical Societies should be applied to for a grant. This was obtained, and the work was carried on under the superintendence of Professor Prestwich and Mr. Pengelly, on whom, as a resident of the place, the burden substantially fell. The decision to explore the cave was brought about largely by the fact that it was a virgin cave which had been inaccessibly closed during an incalculably long period, the last previous event in its history having been the introduction of a reindeer antler, which was found attached to the upper surface of the stalagmitic floor. It was therefore free from the objection urged against Kent's Cavern that, having been long known and open, it had probably been ransacked again and again. A thorough method of exploration was determined upon, beginning with the examination and removal of the stalagmitic floor; after which the upper bed should be dealt with in a similar manner horizontally throughout the entire length of the cavern, or so far as practicable; then the next lower bed, and so on, till all the deposits had been removed. By this method the general stratigraphical order of the deposits and their characteristics could be learned, all their fossils secured, and the highest possible exactness attained. The excavations were continued through twelve months, at the end of which the cave had been practically emptied. Besides furnishing interesting indications relative to its physical history, the cave yielded sixteen hundred and twenty-one bones and thirty-six flints. While most of the flints were flakes, some of which possibly might not be artificial, three were fairly well made implements of paleolithic type; and it was therefore concluded that man either frequented or at any rate sometimes entered the Brixham Cave while Devonshire was inhabited by various mammals which are now extinct. Previous to the execution of this work, all geological evidence as to the antiquity of man had been received, even by English geologists of the first rank, with what Pengelly called apathy and skepticism. After the work it soon became evident, Pengelly said in an address to the Section of Anthropology of the British Association, in 1883, that this geological apathy had been more apparent than real. "In fact, geologists were found to have been not so much disinclined to entertain the question of human antiquity, as to doubt the trustworthiness of the evidence which had previously been offered to them on the subject." The discoveries are thought to have had a considerable share in disposing Mr. Prestwich to undertake the investigation of the remains at Amiens and Abbeville in France and Hoxne in England, "which added to his own great reputation and rescued M. Boucher de Perthes from undeserved neglect." Prof. Boyd Dawkins says that they established beyond all doubt the existence of paleolithic man in the Pleistocene age, and caused the whole of the scientific world to awake to the fact of the vast antiquity of the human race. Of course, they aroused a theological controversy which was long and bitter, and has only recently died out. Pengelly had no trouble through it all. "Geologists," he said, "see no mode of reconciling the Mosaic account of creation with geological science.... For myself, I am satisfied that science can do nothing for the salvation of the soul, and that the Bible is able, through God's grace, to make us wise unto salvation." No doubts or difficulties could ever undermine his faith as a Christian. The evidence accumulated at Brixham suggested the propriety of a re-examination of other evidences of man's antiquity, and particularly, in England, of those from Kent's Hole, or Cavern, at Torquay. The existence of this cave had been known from time immemorial, but the first recorded exploration of it was made in 1824 by Mr. Northmore, of Cleve, looking for organic remains and an ancient temple of Mithras. Mr. W. C. Trevelyan followed him, and first obtained results of value to science. The Rev. J. MacEnery, a Roman Catholic priest, began a four years' exploration of the cave in 1825, and prepared a narrative of his work, which was not published for several years after his death, having been lost, and found by Pengelly after a long search. He showed that the cave had been inhabited, practically at the same time, by man and various extinct animals; but the antiquity of man not being yet a live subject, little regard was paid to his evidences. With a grant of a hundred pounds from the British Association, the work was begun under the direction of a committee of which Pengelly was the leading spirit and the working member. It opened a new chapter in his life, his daughter says, "for he not only superintended the exploration of the cavern, but undertook its entire management, throwing himself, heart and soul, into the numerous duties which it entailed. The labor was arduous, and severely taxed his energies for fifteen years; but it was a congenial employment, and most faithfully performed.... After undertaking the exploration, Pengelly became such an enthusiast in the progress made that, when in Torquay, he never (unless prevented by illness) failed on a single week day to visit the cavern, while he devoted many hours at home in the examination of the specimens exhumed. He even abridged his short holidays, and all idea of living in London was abandoned on this account." In the investigation, the surface accumulations having been removed and preserved for examination, the floor of granular stalagmite was stripped off, so as to lay bare the cave earth, and this was dug out ultimately to a depth of four feet in a series of prismatic blocks, a yard long and a foot square in section, layer by layer. This material was examined in the cave by candlelight, then at the door by daylight. A box was appropriated to each "yard," in which all the objects of interest found in that particular earth were put. The boxes, with the record of what they contained, were sent daily to Pengelly, who cleaned the articles and repacked them, and kept regular records of his day's works. Other materials were dealt with with similar thoroughness in ways according to their nature. "Whatever was discovered beneath the stalagmite flooring must have been sealed up by it for, at the very least, two thousand years, probably for a much longer time." The exploration was completed June 19, 1880. The more than seventy-three hundred prisms of material which proved productive yielded, besides fifty thousand bones examined by Prof. Boyd Dawkins, numerous implements, including those of bone, the work of man. Two deposits were evident, one of "cave earth," and one of breccia beneath it. A glance at the implements from them showed that they were very dissimilar. Those from the breccia were more massive and ruder in every way than the others, and none of them were of bone. "In short, the stone tools, though both sets were unpolished and coeval with extinct mammals, represent two distinct civilizations. It is equally clear that the ruder men were the more ancient, for their tools were lodged in a deposit which, whenever the two occurred in the same vertical section, was invariably the undermost." Various conditions in the deposits united in indicating that the interval between them must have been very considerable. Other caves were examined by Pengelly, but his most important discoveries were made in those of Brixham and Kent. A third section of Pengelly's scientific work reviewed by Prof. T. G. Bonney in the summary he has added to Miss Pengelly's biography, from which we have quoted freely, includes miscellaneous papers on geology and kindred subjects, relating almost exclusively to the southwest of England. As a rule, the papers are comparatively short, being the fruits of researches which either did not demand a long time, or could be carried on at intervals as circumstances allowed, and appeared mostly in the transactions of local societies. Pengelly was one of the prime movers and a leading spirit in the organization, in 1862, of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature, and Art, at Plymouth, and was its president in 1867-'68. The objects of the association were "to give a stronger impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific inquiry in Devonshire, and to promote the intercourse of those who cultivate science, literature, or art in different parts of the country." It worked according to the methods of the British Association, with literature and art added to its objects, besides giving some attention to history and archæology. The first meeting was held under the presidency of Sir John Bowring. In 1872 the president was the bishop of the diocese, Dr. Temple, now Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1863 Pengelly was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. From 1856, when he read a paper at the Cheltenham meeting, Mr. Pengelly was almost a constant attendant upon the meetings of the British Association, and gained, as the years advanced, a prominent position among its leading members. He was president of the Geological Section at the Plymouth meeting, 1877. At the jubilee meeting of the association, held at York in 1880, he made the acquaintance of Prof. Asa Gray, which ripened into a friendship and resulted in a visit of Professor Gray and Mrs. Gray to Torquay. He met another distinguished American man of science, Prof. O. C. Marsh, recently deceased, at the International Geological Congress in London, in 1888. In 1801 he received a visit from Prof. G. F. Wright. He opposed the transference of the meeting of the British Association to Montreal in 1884, on account of the expense and the sacrifice of time which he thought many who would like to attend could not afford, and did not go himself. In March, 1874, he was visited at Torquay by Professor Phillips and others in behalf of a number of members of the British Association, and presented with an illuminated parchment containing the signatures of the contributors and a check, as a testimonial "in recognition of his long and valued services to science in general, and more especially for the exploration of Kent's Cavern. Replying to the addresses, he said he had done the work in connection with Kent's Cavern simply because he liked it.... He had experienced intense pleasure in it, and he could assure them that, on his finding a _Machairodus latidus_, after seven years and a half exploration, the discovery of that one tooth, in his opinion, was worth all the money that had been spent in the exploration of the cavern." Besides geology, Mr. Pengelly had a living concern with astronomy, on subjects of which he lectured and read papers, and in folklore, and was "extremely interested" in the religious history of Cornwall. He became a member of the Society of Friends about 1853, and married his second wife, Lydia Spriggs, in that body. She assisted him in his scientific work, preparing diagrams. Of Pengelly's character as a man, Professor Bonney speaks of the great charm in his personality, and the union in him of "such strong mental powers, and no less strong sense of what was just, true, and right, to such genuine humor and hearty enjoyment of wit." Sir Archibald Geikie speaks of his "genial, kindly, and helpful nature, and his invariably bright, cheery, and witty talk." Prof. Rupert Jones characterizes him as "a good example of a religious man--earnest, persevering, and exact in scientific research." The Rev. Robert Hardy says, "He did not obtrude his theological opinions, but it was easy to perceive that he was a man of true religious character." Sir Joseph Lister, looking back to the times of his acquaintance with him, recalled "vividly the impression of his great intellectual powers, his genial benevolence, and his sparkling humor." As a lecturer his style is described as having been "most attractive. It is incisive, clear, and at times there are touches of humor. His perfect knowledge of the subject, combined with intense earnestness, clothed his lecture with genuine eloquence." Miss Pengelly's biography abounds with illustrations of her father's rare faculty of attracting and interesting workingmen. A letter from one such man expresses gratitude, mingled with great pleasure, for the lasting happiness he was "so anxious and constant to impart to us young men during the Young Men's Society and afterward at the Mechanics' Institute, ... and I have often felt and said I owe more gratitude for the small amount of knowledge I possess, to Mr. Pengelly, of Torquay, than to any living man, and I think there are a few now in Torquay who might truly say so too." Editor's Table. _KINDERGARTENIZED CHILDREN._ We do not know whether the verb "to kindergartenize" has yet crept into the language, but, after reading the article of Miss Marion Hamilton Carter in the March Atlantic on The Kindergarten Child--after the kindergarten, one is disposed to think that such a verb is a present necessity. The question as to whether the kindergarten on the whole is a good institution is too wide for discussion within the restricted limits of the Table; but no one can read Miss Carter's article without being forced to the conclusion that, in some of its aspects, kindergarten work is of very doubtful utility. That lady found by actual experience with two or three successive levies of kindergarten children that they seemed to have an impaired rather than an improved faculty of acquiring knowledge, that their infancy seemed to have been artificially prolonged, that they had become accustomed to a nauseating amount of endearment in the language addressed to them by their instructors, that they seemed to expect to be continually amused, and that a certain drill through which they had been put for the alleged purpose of developing their powers of imagination had gone a long way toward making them incapable of speaking of things simply as they found them. All this is set forth in Miss Carter's article in a manner which leaves little doubt that she has described things substantially as they fell under her observation. There is one important principle in education which it seems to us the kindergarten system too much ignores, if it does not completely set it at defiance, and that is that very young children require a great deal of letting alone. The spontaneous activity of the little ones--and they are sure to be active if they get the chance--is worth more for their education than any amount of directed activity. Their imaginations, too, will take care of themselves much better than we can take care of them. Nothing is less favorable to the development of imagination in a child than constant intercourse with grown people who have passed the imaginative stage, and whose daily duty it is to lay out ordered knowledge for assimilation by these babes. It is no wonder that part of the system should consist of special exercises for the cultivation of the very faculty which the system as a whole is so adapted to dull and to weaken. Anything much more silly, however, than the method described by Miss Carter it would be difficult to imagine. The great popularity of the kindergarten is due in large measure to the fact that it relieves mothers during part of the day of the care of their small children. That it does this in very many cases at the expense of weakening the tie between mother and child there is too much reason to fear. The State has been stepping in more and more between parents and children, until now it lays its hand almost upon the cradle. The mothers of the republic are giving way, so far as influence over the rising generation is concerned, to the schoolmarms; but it is idle to expect that the latter can take the place of the mothers we used to know. The kindergarten constitutes a vast extension of the educational machinery previously in operation, and machinery is always impressive, especially to those who do not understand it. What people see is that the system works very smoothly and uniformly and rhythmically, and that it saves, or seems to save, them a great deal of trouble; and that it is enough to make them think it something very fine. Whether it is really saving trouble in the end is a question which we consider quite open to discussion. There is room, in our opinion, to inquire whether the stimulus of society is not too early and too systematically brought to bear on the infants who throng the educational nursery--whether it is well for children of three and four to be brought every day under the eye of, and more or less into competition with, a large number of companions of their own age. We doubt much whether it tends to simplicity of character, and we can not but regard it as distinctly unfavorable to the development of individuality. The rule of fashion begins at once to operate with great intensity, and the child loses the power of conceiving life except in the herd. As to whether trouble on the whole is being saved to parents by the new system, the question could best be answered by ascertaining whether, in the long run, parents have more or less trouble with their children now than formerly. We should be surprised to hear any one maintaining that they had less. We are aware that parents, for the most part, enthusiastically testify that their children enjoy the kindergarten very much; but may it not be possible for children, as well as their elders, to like what is not altogether for their good? We do not consider that we can safely follow all a child's likes and dislikes in the matter of diet, or companionship, or hours for going to bed and rising. Sensible people do not think that everything children crave should be given to them, or that more than a limited number of excitements should be thrown in their way. It is one of the drawbacks to wealth that the possessors of it can hardly refrain from half burying their children beneath a profusion of toys, and crowding upon them such a multitude of distractions, in the way of travel, shows of all kinds, and society, that all chance of development from within is well-nigh destroyed. It has been remarked by many that the children of to-day who rarely read a story that is not illustrated, have much less imagination than the children of former days, who in reading had to make and did make their own mental pictures. Yet what pampered child ever said he or she was pampered too much? What overflattered child ever asked for a surcease of flattery? What child suffering from an excessive amount of social excitement ever requested that it might have less of such unhealthy stimulation? The inference we draw is that it does not settle the question finally in favor of the kindergarten to say that children enjoy it. If Miss Carter's experience is to be depended on, the result at least of some kindergarten training is to stimulate the vanity of the little ones and give them a quite undue sense of their self-importance. They would enjoy that while it lasted, poor little things! but it would be a bad preparation for the subsequent work of education. One broad fact stares the educational world in the face, and that is that the average child has to-day, at a given age, a less capacity for learning than the average child of twenty-five or thirty years ago. What share the kindergarten may have had in this retardment of intellectual development is a question which deserves investigation. Messrs. McLellan and Dewey, in their work on The Psychology of Number (International Education Series), say (page 154): "We have known the seven-year-old 'head boy' of a kindergarten, conducted by a noted kindergarten teacher, who could not recognize a quantity of three things without counting them by ones.... There is surely something lacking either in the kindergarten as a preparation for the primary school, or in the primary school as a continuation of the kindergarten, when a child, after full training in the kindergarten, together with two years' work in the primary school, is considered able to undertake nothing (in arithmetic) beyond the number twenty." These authors enter into a very elaborate analysis of the number concept, and lay down with extreme care what they conceive to be the best lines of approach to the youthful mind in the teaching of arithmetic. It seems to us, however, that the number concept will dawn upon the youthful mind without much effort on the part of teachers when the time arrives for it to be of use. In most childish games the element of number is involved. The smallest girl with a skipping rope will get into the way of counting her skips with a more or less distinct conception of the difference between one number and another. So in the matter of "turns" in any game in which two or more are engaged: if one child wants to have more "turns" than it is entitled to, the others have to be very young indeed not to protest. In a tug-of-war with, say, four on each side, the addition of a fifth to one side without permission would make trouble in the camp. When candies are being distributed the arithmetical sense is generally keenly alive. We conclude by commending Miss Carter's article to the careful consideration of all who are interested in educational problems. She writes with a certain tinge of vexation, and, without meaning it, may have somewhat forced the case against her kindergarten children. The Atlantic Monthly deserves credit, we must add, for the many able and timely articles which it has lately been publishing on educational topics--articles stamped by the breadth of thought and high culture which are characteristic of our contemporary, and eminently adapted to assist in delivering our educational methods from bondage to a mechanical routine, and bringing them nearer to the simplicity and freedom of Nature. _IS FREEDOM LIMITED BY CLIMATE?_ Since the United States turned its ambition toward the tropics, the question as to whether its political institutions can be extended to the inhabitants there has been widely discussed. As might be expected, the philanthropic advocates of expansion have insisted that "the blessings of freedom and civilization" are not limited by latitude or longitude. Any other position would, of course, have involved them in the charge of inconsistency and hypocrisy. But certain philosophic expansionists, as they may be politely called, have taken the opposite view. "It is a cardinal fact," they say, quoting the language of a recent essay of Mr. Benjamin Kidd, "that in the tropics the white man lives and works only as a diver lives and works under water.... Neither physically, morally, nor politically can he be acclimatized in the tropics." Still quoting his language, they say again that "a clearer insight into the laws that have shaped the course of human evolution must bring us to see that the process which has gradually developed the energy, enterprise, and social efficiency of the race northward, and which has left less richly endowed in this respect the people inhabiting the regions where the conditions of life are easiest, is no passing accident, nor the result of circumstances changeable at will, but part of the cosmic order of things which we have no power to alter." Whether Mr. Kidd recognizes the odious significance of his captivating speculation or not, it is certainly a plea and an apology for slavery and political despotism in the tropics. Most welcome will it be to all those nations and people of easy conscience and measureless greed that now hold in bondage of greater or less intensity millions of the inhabitants of that rich and splendid region. But there is reason to believe that it must be relegated to the limbo of a kindred and popular superstition. Within the past year much has been said about the genius of the Anglo-Saxon for freedom and the ethnic incapacity of the Latins for that boon of civilization. Even so great a scholar as Guizot encourages this extraordinary theory. Again and again does he point out in his History of Civilization how the spirit of freedom may be traced to the Teutonic hordes that swarmed the forests of Germany. He does so despite the overwhelming evidence against him to be found in his own pages even. In apology for his misinterpretation of social phenomena there can be urged his ignorance of the law of evolution and of the hardly less important law of the militant origin of despotism and the pacific origin of freedom. No such apology can, however, be made in behalf of Mr. Kidd, or of any other apostle of imperialism. Not only have they at command all the generalizations of social science, but all the facts upon which those generalizations are based, to prove that neither climate nor race is a limitation upon freedom. If climate determined the character of the political institutions of a people, many questions would be suggested at once that would be beyond solution. Why, for instance, should a certain freedom have existed in Athens, and the most intolerable despotism in Sparta? Again, why should there be despotism in Russia and Germany as well as in Morocco and Egypt? Another series of questions equally perplexing can be raised. Why should there be more freedom in England to-day than six hundred or even one hundred years ago? The climate has not changed in the interval. Why should the institutions of Spain in the thirteenth century have been more liberal than in the seventeenth? Why was it that the freedom that existed in Germany before the Thirty Years' War had virtually ceased to exist at the Peace of Westphalia? Here also the climate had not changed. Why, finally, was there a reaction toward despotism in France after the French Revolution, in Germany after the disturbances of 1848, in England after the Crimean War, and in the United States after the rebellion? The only satisfactory answer to these questions is to be found in the fact that militant activities always lead to despotism, and pacific activities always to freedom. When people get into war, the central power must exercise all the authority over life and property essential to success in battle. The impulse thus given to despotism spreads to every part of the social fabric. When people are devoted to the pursuits of peace, the forces that make for freedom transform their ideas, feelings, morals, and institutions, political, industrial, and social. Whether despotism exists, as Mr. Kidd and his followers assume, among all the indigenous populations of the tropics, only a careful investigation of the subject would permit one to say. But that it must, as they contend, always exist there, none of the laws of social evolution gives the slightest warrant. Wherever it does exist, it had the same origin that it had in England, and in obedience to the same forces of peace and industry that operated against it in that country, it must pass away. The struggles between clans and tribes for the possession of desirable territory, or for the capture of food or slaves, or for the gratification of predatory and belligerent instincts, gave rise to the permanent chief, to the ruling hierarchy, and to all the other characteristics of a militant society. The degree of heat or humidity or the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics had no more to do with this political organization than the degree of cold, or the dryness of the atmosphere, or the comparative poverty of the soil of some of the Western States with the similar political organization of the Indians that roamed over them. None of these physical characteristics can prevent the play of those forces that drive people eventually to the adoption of that form of social organization that will best promote their happiness. As the social philosophy of evolution shows, the social organization best fitted for this purpose is the one where the largest individual freedom prevails. Since the abolition of slavery and serfdom and many other forms of despotism has been found necessary for the best interests of society in Europe, we have a right to believe that the abolition of the same forms of despotism will be found necessary for the best interests of society in the tropics. It is true that in the tropics the white man has found it uncomfortable to work, and has often reduced the indigenes to a kind of slavery. But that either is inevitable and unavoidable because of the laws of social evolution, or any more than a temporary reversion, there is no reason for holding. Alfred Russel Wallace, who spent twelve years in the tropics, says in a recent article that the white man can and does work in every part of them. If he does not work, it is simply for the same reason that he does not work in Europe or the United States--namely, because he does not have to. When, however, necessity lays its heavy hands on him, driving him to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, he does it in the tropical region quite as well as he does in the temperate. That is shown particularly in Queensland. But when natives can be reduced to slavery the crime is committed with slight compunction, and defended on the same ground that it was defended in the South and elsewhere. The time must come, however, as it came in Brazil and in other countries where slave labor was found too wasteful and demoralizing, when it will be displaced with free labor. The time must come, too, when free institutions will be found as essential under the equator as farther north. Without them social evolution can not reach its highest point, nor man attain to his greatest happiness, a state that he is always seeking, no matter where he lives. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. The famous discovery in Java, by Dubois, of the skullcap, femur, and two teeth in the upper Tertiary rocks has led to many interesting discussions, among which was a paper read by Ernst Haeckel before the International Congress of Zoölogists, held in Cambridge, England, last year. In this paper Haeckel contended that in these remains we had at last the long-sought-for missing link.[A] This paper excited much interest, which led to a request for its publication. The intelligent public, without knowing much about the value of the osteological points under discussion, were ready to grant that here indeed was the missing link, since the highest authorities in science were divided in opinion as to whether the remains belonged to a very low member of the human race or a very high member of the manlike apes. The conclusion would naturally follow that it made but little difference whether the remains proved to be those of man or monkey, as here was a creature so intermediate in structure that it stood on the dividing line, so to speak. In this little book Haeckel presents the old evidences as to the structural similarities between man and the higher apes, and places the Java remains (_Pithicanthropus erectus_) as the last link in the chain of descent. He also traces the ancestors of the apes through the mammalian series down, step by step, to the lowest vertebrates, and on through the invertebrates to the lowest forms of life. The suggestions are in many cases hypothetical yet instructive, as showing the possible lines of descent. The unaccountable attitude of the distinguished Virchow in the presence of these remains is in harmony with his uncompromising and, one might say, unreasoning attitude in regard to the derivative theory. Haeckel shows this up very clearly in the following, which we quote: "Virchow went to the Leyden Congress with the set purpose of disproving that the bones found by Dubois belonged to a creature which linked together apes and man. First, he maintained that the skull was that of an ape, while the thigh belonged to man. This insinuation was at once refuted by the expert paleontologists, who declared that without the slightest doubt the bones belonged to one and the same individual. Next, Virchow explained that certain exostoses or growths observable on the thigh proved its human nature, since only under careful treatment the patient could have healed the original injury. Thereupon Professor Marsh, the celebrated paleontologist, exhibited a number of thigh bones of wild monkeys which showed similar exostoses, and had healed without hospital treatment. As a last argument the Berlin pathologist declared that the deep constriction behind the upper margin of the orbits proved that the skull was that of an ape, as such never occurred in man. It so happened that a few weeks later Professor Nehring, of Berlin, demonstrated exactly the same formation on a human prehistoric skull received by him from Santos, in Brazil." * * * * * Mr. _Russell_ expresses a hope that the review of some of the characteristics of rivers given in one of the chapters of his _Rivers of North America_[B] may stimulate a desire in American students "to know more of the many and varied charms of their native land." The study of rivers is an alluring one, whether pursued upon the little local stream of one's neighborhood or upon the grand rivers that form systems and determine geographical districts; whether made with the assistance of a fishing-rod or of a steamboat. It can not fail to be promoted by Mr. Russell's instructive book, which the local student or the excursionist may consult with profit, while the geographer and geologist will find it a convenient manual. A river, when we come to think of it, means a great deal. Economically, it is the most valuable topographical feature a country can possess; geologically and geographically, it is a result of prominent features of the earth's structure, and is the cause of modifications in its surface which in time may revolutionize the topographical conditions and produce climatic and physical changes. All these characteristics of rivers are systematically and comprehensively set forth in Mr. Russell's book, where the life-history of the stream is presented, from its beginning in a little mountain torrent or hillside rill, through its course as it descends to the plain, wearing and tearing and deepening its channel. In the plain its character and action are modified under the new conditions in which it finds itself, and gradually, as it approaches its mouth, it deposits, whereas it had torn away at its beginning, and shows contrasts quite as marked as those between youth and old age. Rivers have their growth in time, too, and a stream that has been carrying on its work for long ages presents different characteristics throughout its course from one that comes fresh to its task, and these differences are pointed out. We are told, too, how rivers grow, drawing new affluents to themselves and extending their sources backward, and how when the sources of streams on different sides of a watershed approach on the summit, there is a struggle for the mastery. These are only a few of the new suggestions which the book offers us. Coming to the more matter-of-fact details, the laws governing streams and their course; the influence of inequalities and the hardness of rocks, especially on riverside scenery; and the office of rivers as carriers of material in suspension and in solution, are considered; then their deposits, under various heads and aspects, and the effects of changes in the elevation of the land, of variations in the load of material and of changes of climate upon them; the origin and characteristics of stream terraces and stream development, the topics concerning which are too many and varied to bear more than a passing reference. The more salient characteristics of American rivers are discussed as to the nine drainage slopes--the Atlantic, St. Lawrence, Hudson Bay, Arctic, Bering, Pacific, Great Basin, Gulf, and Caribbean--each slope presenting its own general characteristics, with varieties in detail almost as numerous as the rivers. The whole is briefly summarized in the last chapter, The Life History of a River. We have given merely the tamest inventory of only a part of the topics of Mr. Russell's book. As the subject is treated by the author with careful attention to specific features, as the magnitude of our river systems is indicated, and as rivers with different or contrasting characteristics--the St. Lawrence and the Colorado, for example--are compared with one another, the subject takes on an aspect that is really grand. FOOTNOTES: [A] The Last Link. Our Present Knowledge of the Descent of Kan. By Ernst Haeckel. Adam and Charles Black. 1898. [B] Rivers of North America. A Reading Lesson for Students of Geography and Geology. By Israel C. Russell. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 327. Price, $2. GENERAL NOTICES. An unfulfilled intention entertained by two successive prosectors of the London Zoölogical Society--the late Professor Garrod and the late W. A. Forbes--of writing a treatise on bird anatomy, is carried out in the present work[A] by their successor, _Frank E. Beddard_. Professor Garrod had nearly completed an account of the Anatomy of the Fowl, which was to be followed by a presentation of the anatomical characters of the different groups. Professor Forbes died before he was able to add anything to the manuscripts left by Professor Garrod. In the instance of the present work the detailed account of _Gallus_, with which Professor Garrod intended to preface his book, has been rendered unnecessary by Dr. Shufeldt's monograph on the Raven, dealing with one particular bird type. Accepting this as a sufficient presentation of that feature of the subject, Mr. Beddard begins with a general sketch of bird structure, purposely avoiding histological detail and the elaborate description of anatomical facts, which in the present state of our knowledge are not of great use in classification. The main part of the book is the account of the structure of the different groups of birds, which is treated of to a considerable extent; and a large number of facts, some of which are recorded for the first time, are incorporated in the systematic part of the book. While all the principal facts pertaining to the subject are believed to have been given, and nothing of importance to have been left out, references are made in each section to most of the memoirs already published. The majority of the facts of bird structure have been verified by the author, especially those relating to osteology and anatomy, and he has drawn liberally on the notebooks of his two predecessors. The book gives first an account of the general structure of birds; next of the reproductive and renal organs, the circulatory, respiratory, and muscular systems, osteology, brain and nervous system, and affinities of birds, and, finally, the classification. _Bush Fruits_[B] is the first of a proposed series of monographs on the various types of American fruits, to be published under the editorial direction of Prof. L. H. Bailey. Its purpose is to present both the practical and the technical phases of all the important questions concerned in the cultivation and domestication of the fruits that grow on bushes; and the attempt is made to present these two sides separate from the details of history, botany, and entomology, so that the practical reader may be introduced at once to the information he is seeking. The aim is made to treat general truths and principles rather than mere details of practice, leaving the reader to think out and solve the local problems for himself. The author, Mr. _F. W. Card_, who presented the work originally as a Cornell University thesis, was first a bush-grower, and then a student and teacher, acquiring first the practice and then the theory. The fruits treated of are raspberries, blackberries, dewberries, currants, gooseberries, buffalo berry, gounie, huckleberries, Juneberries, the cranberry, barberry, and sand cherry--all, as to their important types, except the currants, evolutions from the species of our own woods. A useful list of American books on bush fruits is given in the appendix. _The History of the World, from the Earliest Historical Time to the Year 1898_,[C] is the latest addition to the Concise Knowledge Library, "a series of volumes on great subjects, containing in an abridged form a wealth of exact information which can be thoroughly relied upon by the student, and yet of such a popular character as to meet the needs of the general reader." This compact volume of 790 pages presents a complete survey of the world's history. After a brief introduction describing the various races that have furthered civilization, ancient history proper begins with the Egyptians, the people of whom we possess the earliest records, and who were the first to emerge out of the darkness of prehistoric times. Closely connected with them, both by racial affinities and political ties, were the other great empires in the southwestern part of Asia that one after the other rose, flourished, and fell into decay. The interesting part of the book here is the constant reference to the familiar facts of the Bible, the connection of the known with the unknown. The rise and development of Greece and Rome, following in due course, bring us down to the middle ages. Mediæval history has for its stage Europe, and for its argument the upbuilding of the states on which our modern political institutions rest. Modern history, dating from the discovery of America, then turns the eyes of the nations westward, to found empires beyond the sea. Nor is the East forgotten. Asia, the cradle of man, and Africa, where he first rose into consciousness of himself and recorded his deeds, again claim the historian's attention. But now it is China and Japan on the one continent, and the conquests and colonies of the Europeans on the other. Neither is the country youngest in civilization, Australasia, passed by. And the history of all these countries, whether east or west, is brought down to date. Even our recent war with Spain is briefly told. Indeed, the value of the book as a work of reference lies in the fact that it encompasses _all_ the world's history, giving in compact, handy form the chief data in the progress of the human race, that otherwise must be sought for in a dozen different places. Another valuable feature of the book, attainable only on the plan of rigid selection of salient points, is the connection between the different peoples. Their interdependence, the sequence of their appearance on the stage of action, and their decline, are most vividly realized in such a bird's-eye view. The book has maps and a full index. The essays comprised in Mr. _William M. Bryant's_ volume entitled _Life, Death, and Immortality, and Kindred Essays_[D] have developed, as he expresses it, one by one during a number of years past. The term developed is a happy one, for the papers were certainly not made to order, but read like results of systematic, continuous thinking. They concern the religious aspect of human nature. The author thinks that negative criticism has for the time being exhausted its resources, and the time has come for further positive interpretation of the fundamental conceptions of the Christian doctrine as to man's nature and destiny. A reference to a few of the points in the first essay, which gives the title to the book, will afford a view of the author's method. Men of science are constantly insisting that the total quantity of energy is changeless, and nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away. What are the "total quantity of energy" and the "great first cause" but the same, to the activity of which is due every phase of reality? This being changeless, it could not at some period "have created a world and afterward left it to spin on of its own accord 'without interference.'" Mind is a form of energy, consequently indestructible and undying, and the question of immortality is reduced to the form "whether in respect of man's essential nature as a thinking unit, death can ever be more than transition from one to another grade of life." Other essays are on Oriental Religions, Church Organization, The Heresy of Non-Progressive Orthodoxy, Christian Ethics and those of other religions, and Eternity. Professor _Merriman's_ _Elements of Sanitary Engineering_[E] is a thoroughly practical treatise setting forth the principal rules and laws relating to sanitation, both individual and municipal, as it is practiced to-day. A brief historical introduction is followed by a classification of diseases, and a general consideration of such questions as filth and disease, impure air and disease, drinking water and disease, etc. The second chapter takes up the question of the purification of water. Chapter III discusses the practical aspects, for a municipality, of water-supply systems. Consumption of water, capacity of storage reservoirs, pipe lines, pumping engines, tanks and stand pipes and street mains are among the special headings. Sewerage systems are next dealt with. A discussion of questions connected with the disposal of garbage and sewage forms the fifth and last chapter of the book. An item which adds value to the volume is the series of exercises and problems, practically applying the laws set forth, which follows each chapter. _An Epitome of Human Histology_[F] has been written by Mr. _Weysse_ to meet the difficulty in which the conscientious student of microscopic anatomy is placed who finds himself in possession of a great many isolated facts about the minute structure of the body, but with rather an indefinite conception of the relation of those facts to one another and of the subject as a whole. In the writing the author has sought to present all the facts that are of real importance to the student; to express them in the briefest and clearest language, omitting whatever is not strictly required; and to arrange them in such a way that the reader, in considering any organ, may, if he will, actually sketch each part as he proceeds, and thus make a diagrammatic plan or picture of the entire structure. The book is not for idle students, but for serious ones, and it is not a text-book or intended to take the place of one; and it can serve its true purpose only when used by students who have had laboratory practice as well as lectures in histology, and have thus examined the actual structures. In his work on _Elementary Botany_,[G] Professor _Atkinson_ introduces the method which he has found successful in teaching beginners. Many of the newer botanical text-books, in reacting against the plan of presenting first the higher types of plant life, overwhelm the student not only with a multitude of unfamiliar forms, but demand from him powers of comparison and analysis that are generally the result of much scientific discipline. In this book the pupil receives some preliminary guidance in habits of correct induction. By studying the processes of transpiration, nutrition, growth, and irritability in plants belonging to higher as well as lower groups, he learns the universality of these life principles, and is led to see the foundations for sound generalization. This the author considers vastly more important than the knowledge of individual plants. The student, however, in this investigation becomes acquainted with special forms among the lower plants, and is thus prepared to take up morphology systematically. This topic begins with the study of Spirogyra, and ends with an outline of twenty lessons in the angiosperms. The final third of the book is devoted to ecology, the study of plants in their natural surroundings and of their modifying factors--climate, soil, topography, etc. The illustrations, which are above the average throughout the work, are in this division exceedingly good. The descriptive text of the same section is entertaining enough to be used as a class reader, and would interest those unfamiliar with botany. There are several slight errors to be corrected in a future edition. In the table of measures a kilometre is made to equal one hundred instead of one thousand metres, and the references to plates are occasionally wrong. On page 345 the reference should be 449, and on page 349 should be 458 in place of 457. In describing pollination of the skunk cabbage, the words "rub off" are ambiguous. The uninitiated might suppose that the insect obtained pollen from the stigmas instead of depositing it there. The book is not intended for recitation, but for reference and as a guide in study. It is supplied with an appendix upon the collection and preservation of material, and an index. A notice of a book[H] of this nature is justified in this column, since it contains much that will be of interest to the student of ethnology, folklore, and cognate subjects. It is interesting to get a glimpse of matters pertaining to social customs, ways of thinking, and the occurrences which animated these ways among the Japanese a thousand and more years ago. The author says, "It is a remarkable and, I believe, an unexampled fact that a very large and important part of the best literature which Japan has produced was written by women." The preparation of his _Elementary Text-Book of Botany_[I] was undertaken by Mr. _Vines_ to meet a demand which appeared to exist for a less bulky and expensive volume than his Students' Text-Book. A more important feature than the diminution of the bulk is claimed in the simplification which the contents have undergone from the omission of certain difficult and still debatable topics. The usual divisions into morphology, anatomy, physiology, and systematic botany are followed; but the caution is appended that it must not be forgotten that these are all parts of one subject, different methods of studying one object--the plant. Hence they must be pursued together. "For instance, the morphology of the leaf can not be profitably studied without a knowledge of its structure and functions; and it is also important to know what is the systematic position of each of the various plants whose leaves afford the material for study. In a word, the student should not attempt to read the book straight through from the beginning as if it were a novel. On the contrary, he may begin with any one of the four parts as his main subject; but that part must be studied in close relation with the other three parts"; and this method of proceeding is facilitated by the insertion of a large number of cross-references in the text. A satisfactory account is given by _C. Francis Jenkins_ in _Animated Pictures_[J] of the development and present state of chronophotography, or the art of "conveying by persistence of vision a counterfeit impression of objects in motion through the display in rapid succession of a series of related pictures." The story shows very clearly that this, like most other inventions of consequence, is no sudden discovery, but is the culmination of a very long series of experiments. The principle of it is embodied in the toy, the zoetrope, the origin of which is not known, though a citation from Lucretius indicates that something of the kind existed in his time. With the discovery of instantaneous photography, a new application of the principle of the zoetrope was found. Muybridge and Marey were pioneers in this development with their photographs of the motions of animals valuable in sciences. Since their work was begun the photographic processes and apparatus have been greatly improved. Mr. Jenkins forecasts a brilliant and useful future for the art, which he hopes will be prosecuted along the line of other than its present most popular uses. The book is practical as well as historical and prophetic, and contains an account of Mr. Jenkins's phantoscope as the first successful "moving picture projecting apparatus," for which he received the Elliott Cresson medal from the Franklin Institute. _The Metric System of Weights and Measures_, prepared by Mr. _A. D. Risteen_, and published by the Hartford Steam-Boiler Inspection Company, Hartford, Connecticut (price, $1.25), gives what has long been wanted--a neat volume, convenient for the pocket and durably bound, furnishing tables for instantly converting all the metrical units up to one hundred of each into those of the English weights and measures, and _vice versa_. Calculation, being needed only for the numbers above one hundred, for which there are already short devices, is reduced to the lowest possible limit. _Terrestrial Magnetism_, an international quarterly journal, edited by _L. A. Bauer_ and _Thomas French, Jr._, and published at the University of Cincinnati, is the recognized organ of the International Conference on Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity. The September number, 1898, contains the proceedings of the conference, which met in connection with the last Bristol meeting of the British Association. It contains in full the welcoming address of Prof. W. E. Ayrton, the opening address of A. W. Rücker, president of the conference, and ten of the papers read at the meeting. The name of Prof. _John Trowbridge_ as author of such a book as _Philip's Experiments; or, Physical Science at Home_ (D. Appleton and Company, $1) is a sure guarantee of its scientific value. The author has given a chapter substantially out of his own experience, for he says his taste for science and for drawing were stimulated by his father in the manner here described. His object in publishing it is "to show that a few moments devoted each day at home to simple investigations can result in habits of self-reliance in the acquirement of a modern language and in the study of the art of drawing." He endeavors also to show how to cultivate a taste for mathematics by studying practical problems in surveying and in sailing a boat; and how much a parent can accomplish in the formation of a son's tastes without special knowledge, and without the expenditure of much time and money. The account is in the form of letters from the father to a friend, describing his experiments with his son Philip in this method of teaching. He has always cultivated fellowship with the boy; and, finding him inclined to improve and add to the designs on the wall-paper, puts objects to be drawn and copied in his way, and induces him to go out and draw from Nature. So the boy learns to study forms and observe. To teach language he gives him regularly the daily German newspaper, to pick out what he can from it, and joins him in the sport. In a similar way he introduces Philip to surveying and physics, and other branches of science. The plan is a success; Philip attracts attention by the ingenuity which his training has enabled him to develop, and going to college is graduated with credit and in possession of a live as well as a book knowledge of what he has studied. In _The Story of the English_ (American Book Company) the more prominent facts of English history from the beginning to the present time are related by _H. A. Guerber_ in simple, brief narratives. A commendable feature of the book is the insistence in the preface of the essential oneness of the English and American people--an idea that can hardly be too sedulously cultivated. The author's principal object has been to render pupils so familiar with the prominent characters of English history that they shall henceforth seem like old acquaintances, and, in addition, to make the story attractive; but it is a fact to be regretted that he has regarded the growth of English law and liberty and the changes in religion as too unintelligible and uninteresting to be more than touched upon "very briefly and in the most simple way." The growth of law and liberty are the very things that it is most important to fix the attention of children upon, and it is only because they have suffered comparative neglect in the education of teachers in favor of stories of war and intrigue that they are not the most intelligible and interesting branch of the subject. Prof. _Francis E. Nipher_, of Washington University, having been called upon to present a paper to an educational convention on the Greater Efficiency of Science Instruction, undertook to show how such changes as were adapted to promote that end might be accomplished without radical departures from present methods; and the _Introduction to Graphical Algebra_ (Henry Holt & Co., New York, 60 cents) is the result of that effort. The author believes that the study of algebra and geometry as distinct subjects having no relation to each other gives the pupil a false idea of the intellectual situation of to-day; that by injecting here and there into the ordinary instruction in algebra such material as is found in his book, new meaning will be given to the operations involved in the solution of equations, and new interest in the subject may be aroused; and that as scientific investigators are making much use of other methods than Euclid's, while the study of his geometry should not be banished from our schools, some of the time given to it might be usefully spent in elementary analytical geometry or graphical algebra. The treatise is brief and convenient in size and composed in clear language. _The New Man, a Chronicle of the Modern Time_ (Philadelphia: The Levytype Company), is a story written by _Ellis Paxson Oberholzer_ with reference to that expansion of women's education and sphere of action which is suggested by the phrase "the new woman." In it "the new woman is developed to her logical conclusion, and the new man as he must needs become under the reaction of her influence," and it deals with "men and women imbued with the modern university spirit, whose emotional natures are developed under the scientific impulse of our time, and whose thoughts and actions reflect that impulse in the midst of all the varied realities of our modern life." _Armageddon_ (Rand, McNally & Co.), to the plot of which the author's name of _Stanley Waterloo_ seems curiously appropriate, is possibly a specimen of a class of literature to which we are likely to be treated in abundance for a few years to come. The spoliation of the Spanish Egyptians by the Americans having come to a halt with the gain of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the great Anglo-American alliance enters upon the view and is made a fact, though informally. The two nations together build the Nicaragua Canal, and are about to celebrate its completion, when they are anticipated by the precipitation of the war of the nations through the simultaneous occurrence of a number of slight international quarrels in different parts of the world. Germany, Russia, the Scandinavians, and the Latins are pitted on one side, and the British and Americans, assisted by the British colonies and the Japanese, on the other; and the battle of the combined fleets occurs near the Canaries. The hero of the story has invented an air ship which carries terrible explosives to be dropped from a great height into the midst of the enemy. This engine does its work at the decisive moment, and then follows the grab game of negotiations, in which might rules, and Germany joins the Anglo-Saxon alliance against the rest of the world. Finally, the air-ship engine of destruction has rendered war henceforth forever impossible. Mr. _James Reid Cole_, president of a classical and military school at Dallas, Texas, has published under the title of _Miscellany_ what is substantially a picture or transcript of his own life. It contains a variety of articles--literary essays, school addresses, and even schoolboy compositions--the chief interest of which is to the author and his close friends. Other papers, such as A Bird's-eye View of Johnston's Surrender, the sketches of the Life of Lieutenant C. C. Cole, the Looking Backward over the course of the author's own life, and political and legislative speeches may have a more general value as partial reflections of the times to which they relate, more intimate than are usually to be derived from ordinary sketches and histories. The publications of the _New York Academy of Sciences_ now consist of two series--the _Annals_ (8vo) and the _Memoirs_ (4to). The Transactions, in which the shorter papers and business reports have hitherto appeared, are abolished, and the matter appears in the Annals. This publication, which was begun in 1824, contains the scientific contributions and reports of researches, together with the reports of meetings. The complete volumes will hereafter coincide with the calendar year. Vol. X, Nos. 1 to 12, contains three papers by H. S. Davis and one by Frank Schesinger based on the Rutherfurd photographs of the stars; The Nature and Origin of Stipules, by A. A. Tyler, and an examination of the Ascidian Half-Embryo, by H. E. Crampton, Jr. Vol. XI, Part II, contains the annual address of retiring President J. J. Stevenson, February 28, 1898, on the Debt of the World to Pure Science, and six articles on special subjects in biology. The Commissioner of Labor was authorized by Congress in 1895 to make an investigation, so far as it could be done within the limits of the regular appropriations to his department, relative to the economic aspects of the liquor traffic. He interpreted such an investigation to include the consideration of monetary conditions; of the agricultural and other products used in the production of liquors; of the manufacture of liquors as a distinct industry; of transportation, consumption, and the traffic in them; of the revenue derived from them and the laws regulating its collection; and of the experience and practice of employers in relation to the use of intoxicants. In some of these phases of the subject the facts were not separable from those relating to other matters; in others, they were to be found in the reports of other departments; and original inquiry was necessary only with reference to the last three items of the category. The results of this inquiry are given in the _Twelfth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1897_, under the heading of _Economic Aspects of the Liquor Problem_. _A New Story of the Stars_ is an essay in which _A. W. Bickerton_, professor of chemistry and physics in Christ Church College, New Zealand, sets forth a theory of the origin of universes or of parts of universes by impact. Nebulæ already existing--but how existing we are not informed--careering through space, are supposed to collide, whereby heat and light are developed. They may meet in face, and would then probably coalesce, but more likely the impact would be a grazing one, when three bodies would be produced; a portion, or slice, as the author calls it, of each of the colliding bodies would be sheared off, forming an intensely hot and bright new star, while the original masses would go on their course, having the parts that had been in contact heated and made brilliant, so as to present in their revolutions the aspect of variable stars. The author's attention was drawn to this subject by the appearance of a new star in Cygnus in 1877. A little while afterward Nova Aurigæ appeared, presenting exactly the phenomena he had predicted. Professor Bickerton writes as one who understands his subject; there is nothing in his speculations, so far as we have observed, that grates harshly with known facts, and it can be read, as he reads it, to account plausibly for some of the facts--just as can several other theories of the formation of the universe which are still only speculations. The problem is yet far from comprehension, and is one of the legacies which the nineteenth century is destined to bequeath to the twentieth. (Published at Christ Church, New Zealand.) FOOTNOTES: [A] The Structure and Classification of Birds. By Frank E. Beddard. London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 548. [B] Bush Fruits. A Horticultural Monograph of Raspberries, Blackberries, Dewberries, Currants, Gooseberries, and other Shrublike Fruits. By Fred W. Card. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 537. Price, $1.50. [C] The History of the World, from the Earliest Historical Time to the Year 1898. By Edgar Sanderson. With Maps. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 1898. [D] Life, Death, and Immortality, and Kindred Essays. By William M. Bryant. New York: The Baker & Taylor Company. [E] Elements of Sanitary Engineering. By Mansfield Merriman. New York: John Wiley & Sons. London: Chapman & Hall, Limited. Pp. 216. $2. [F] An Epitome of Human Histology. By Arthur W. Weysse. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 90. Price, $1.50. [G] Elementary Botany. By George Francis Atkinson, Ph. D. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 444. Price, $1.25. [H]: A History of Japanese Literature. By W. G. Aston, Late Japanese Secretary to H. M. Legation, Tokyo. D. Appleton and Company. [I] An Elementary Text-Book of Botany. By Sydney H. Vines. London: Swan, Sonnenschein & Co. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 611. Price, $2.25. [J] Animated Pictures. An Exposition of the Historical Development of Chronophotography, its Present Scientific Application and Future Possibilities, and of the Methods and Apparatus employed in the Entertainment of Large Audiences by Means of Projecting Lanterns to give the Appearance of Objects in Motion. Washington, D. C.: C. Francis Jenkins. Pp. 118, with plates. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Connecticut: Twenty-second Annual Report, for 1898, Part I, Fertilizers. Pp. 101.--Cornell University: No. 163. Three Important Fungous Diseases of the Sugar Beet. By B. M. Duggar. Pp. 30; No. 164. Peach-Leaf Cure, etc. By B. M. Duggar. Pp. 20.--Massachusetts Agricultural College (Hatch Station): No. 58. Manurial Requirements of Crops. Pp 16.--New Jersey: No. 135. Poisonous Plants. By Byron D. Halsted. Pp. 28.--North Dakota Weather and Crop Service, Fifth Annual Report. B. H. Bronson, section director. Pp. 78; Monthly Reports for October and November, 1898. Pp. 8 each.--Ohio: No. 96. The Army Worm and Other Insects. By P. M. Webster and C. W. Mally. Pp. 26; No. 97. Some Diseases of Wheat and Oats. By A. D. Selby. Pp. 32; No. 98. Small Fruits. By W. J. Green. Pp. 146.--West Virginia: No. 53. Commercial Fertilizers. By J. H. Stewart and B. H. Hite. Pp. 36. American Asiatic Association, Journal of the. Vol. I, No. 5. John Foord, editor. Pp. 16. Ayer, N. W., and Son. American Newspaper Annual, 1899. Philadelphia. Pp. 1400. Berea Quarterly, February, 1899. Berea College, Kentucky. Pp. 28. 30 cents. $1 a year. Berry, Arthur. A Short History of Astronomy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (University Series). Pp. 440. $1.50. Bradford, Gamaliel. The Lesson of Popular Government. New York: The Macmillan Company. 2 vols. Pp. 520 and 590. $4. Brown, William Harvey. On the South African Frontier. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 430, with map. $3. Buckley, Arabella B. The Fairy-Land of Science. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Clayton, C. Helm. Studies of Cyclonic and Anti-Cyclonic Phenomena with Kites. Blue Hill (Massachusetts) Meteorological Observatory. Pp. 15, with plates. Force, General Manning F. General Sherman. New York: D. Appleton and Company (Great Commanders Series). Pp. 353. Guignet, E., and Gamier, Edouard. La Céramique, Ancienne et Modern (Ceramics, Ancient and Modern). Paris: Félix Alcan. (Bibliothèque Scientifique Internationale.) Pp. 311. 6 francs. Gellé, Le Dr. M. E. L'Audition et ses Organes (Hearing and Its Organs). Paris: Félix Alcan. (Bibliothèque Scientifique Internationale.) Pp. 326. 6 francs. Hancock, James Denton. The Louisiana Purchase treated in its Relations to the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence. Pp. 8. Herzberg, Henry. True _versus_ False Education. Pp. 20. Hinsdale, Guy, M. D. Acromegaly. Detroit: William M. Warren. Pp. 88. $1.50. International Correspondence School, Scranton, Pennsylvania. Short Courses in English Branches, Bookkeeping, Stenography, and Mechanical and Ornamental Drawing. Pp. 16. Jacobs, Joseph. The Story of Geographical Discovery. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (Library of Useful Stories.) Pp. 200. 40 cents. Kingsley, Mary H. West African Studies. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 633, with maps. $5. Library Notes, Vol. IV, No. 16. Edited by Melvil Dewey. Simplified Library School Rules. Pp. 72. Quarterly. 50 cents. $1 a year. Lille, Société Photographique de. Le Nord Photographie. January, 1899. (Sixth year.) Lille, France. Pp. 20. Mason, William P. Examination of Water (Chemical and Bacteriological). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 135. $1.25. Macalaster, The. Monthly. February, 1899. St. Paul, Minnesota, Macalaster College. Pp. 32. 15 cents. $1 a year. Parsons, Frances Theodora. How to Know the Ferns. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 215. $1.50. Rafinesque, C. S. Ichthyologia Ohioensis; or, Natural History of the Fishes inhabiting the River Ohio and its Tributary Streams. A reprint of the original, with life, etc. By R. Ellsworth Call. Cleveland, Ohio: The Burrows Brothers Company. Pp. 175. $4. Reprints. Ashmead, Albert S., M. D. No Evidence in America of Pre-Columbian Leprosy. Pp. 10.--Grant, Sir James. The Alimentary Canal and Human Decay In Relation to the Neurons. Pp. 8.--Hopkins, Thomas C. Clays and Clay Industries of Pennsylvania; I, Clays of Western Pennsylvania (in part). Pp. 183.--Howard, L. O. The Economic Status of Insects as a Class. Pp. 33.--Jackman, Wilbur S. Constructive Work in the Common Schools. Pp. 18. Russell, Frank. Explorations in the Far North. University of Iowa. Pp. 290. Schiavone, Mario. Il Principio della dirigibilita orizzontalie degli aerostate ed Binaerostato (The Principle of the Horizontal Dirigibility of Aërostats and the Binaërostat). Potenza, Italy. Pp. 48. Schubert, Hermann. Mathematical Essays and Recreations. Translated by T. J. McCormack. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company. Pp. 149. 75 cents. Scrutten, Percy E. Electricity in Town and Country Houses. Second edition. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 148. $1. Sloyd Bulletin No. 2, March, 1899. Boston: Sloyd Training School. Pp. 21. Smithsonian Institution publications: Annual Report of the Board of Regents to July, 1896. Pp. 727; do. to July, 1897. Pp. 686.--Bolton, H. C. A Select Bibliography of Chemistry, 1492 to 1897. First Supplement. Pp. 489.--Cook, O. F. African Diplopoda of the Genus Pachybolus. Pp. 10, with plates. Society of American Authors. Monthly Bulletin. March, 1899. Pp. 16. United States Commissioner of Education (W. T. Harris). Report for 1896-'97, Vol. II. Pp. 1245. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 400. $2. Waddell, John. The Arithmetic of Chemistry. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 137. 90 cents. Wickersham, James. Major Powell's Inquiry, "Whence came the American Indians?" An Answer. Tacoma, Washington: Allen and Lamborn Printing Company. Pp. 28. Writt, Henry. Some Observations on the Fundamental Principles of Nature. Chicago: P. O., Station N. Pp. 32. 25 cents. Fragments of Science. =Death of Professor Marsh.=--Othniel C. Marsh, professor of paleontology in Yale University, and curator of the geological collection of that institution, died of pneumonia at his home in New Haven, Connecticut, March 18th. He had not been in good health for several years, and succumbed to the effects of a cold which he had caught before wholly recovering from a previous cold. A sketch of his life up to that time, embracing the most active parts of his career as a geological explorer, in which he gained great renown, was given, with a portrait, in the Popular Science Monthly for September, 1878. During the period that has intervened he made studies of the results of his explorations and other geological work, and published papers of very high scientific value. About a year ago he transferred his extensive and famous collections at the Peabody Museum to the university. These collections were among the finest of their kind in the world, and were especially remarkable for their fossils of immense animals exhumed from the Western plains. They were greatly admired by Professor Gaudry, the eminent French geologist, who spoke of them in terms of high praise in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of October 15, 1898. It was through his efforts that the funds were obtained from George Peabody, his uncle, for the construction of the Peabody Museum, a part of which has been built. His health having apparently improved for a few months previous to his death, he had been working with renewed activity at the museum, and had recently written articles on paleontological subjects. Having considerable means of his own, he served the university without salary, and carried on his explorations mostly at his own cost, paying large sums to assistants and for other items in the work. He left ten thousand dollars to the National Academy of Sciences, of which he was one of the founders and was for several years president, and all of the rest of his estate, estimated to be worth nearly one hundred thousand dollars, to Yale University. =Popular Co-operation in Health Work.=--In a review of A Quarter Century of Public Health Work in Michigan, Mr. Theodore R. MacClure, chief clerk of the State Board of Health office, says that experience in the State has indicated that it is necessary to have the co-operation of the people if the dangerous communicable diseases are to be restricted and prevented. In order to accomplish this result, the State Board of Health has published leaflets relating to the modes of spreading and the best methods for the restriction and prevention of such diseases. These leaflets have been printed by tens of thousands, and whenever a dangerous disease is reported to the central office several copies of the leaflet relating to the disease in question are usually sent to the local health officer. He is requested to place one of these instructive publications with the family where the disease exists, and a copy with each neighbor of the infected premises. The instruction comes at a time when people are interested to know about the disease in question, and in this way their general co-operation is sought and secured. Citizens are thus educated and become familiar with their duties in the premises, are taught wherein the dangers lie and how to avoid them, and are prompted by the strongest considerations to do their part in the matter. =Death of Prof. Oliver Marcy.=--Dr. Oliver Marcy, professor of natural science in Northwestern University, who died February 19th, in the eightieth year of his age, was a native of Coleraine, Massachusetts; was graduated from Wesleyan University in 1846, became teacher of mathematics in Wilbraham Academy, Massachusetts, and later professor of geology, etc., in that institution. In 1862 he was appointed professor of geology in Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, but taught in addition, at times, other branches of science and even some branches in other lines. He was twice acting president of the university. In conjunction with Prof. Alexander Winchell, he prepared a monograph on Fossils from the Niagara Limestone of Chicago, which was read to the Boston Society of Natural History. In 1866 he was naturalist to a Government expedition to the Bitter Root Mountains in Idaho and Montana, in which he collected scientific material, and of which he published an account in 1867. He wrote papers concerning the geology of the shore of Lake Michigan and of the region about Chicago; brought two fossil trees found in the university grounds to scientific notice; and contributed considerably to geological publications. He was curator to the natural history collection of his university for nearly thirty years. Two fossil species and a mountain in Montana have been named after him. =Which is the Fittest to Survive?=--Prof. A. W. Rücker spoke in his opening address at the recent meeting of the International Magnetic Conference in Bristol, England, of what seems to be a law of Nature, that the products of an organism are fatal to itself; in accordance with which, he said, pure science is threatened by the very success of its practical applications. The smoke of our cities blots the stars from the vision of the astronomer, and now the science of terrestrial magnetism is threatened by the artificial earth currents of the electric railway. Prof. W. E. Ayrton, in his welcoming address, took another view of the subject and answered the reference the electrical engineers make to the principle of the survival of the fittest when they are told of the ruin their wires are bringing upon magnetic observatories--"So much the worse for the observatories"--"Can the system of electric traction that has already destroyed the two most important magnetic observatories in the United States and British North America be the best and fittest to survive? Again, do we take such care and spend such vast sums in tending the weak and nursing the sick because we are convinced that they are the fittest to survive? May it not be perhaps because we have an inherent doubt about the justice of the survival of the strongest, or perhaps because even the strongest of us feels compelled modestly to confess his inability to pick out the fittest, that modern civilization encourages, _not_ the destruction but the preservation of what has obvious weakness, on the chance that it may have unseen strength? When the electrical engineer feels himself full of pride at the greatness, the importance, and the power of his industry, and when he is inclined to think slightingly of the deflection of a little magnet compared with the whirl of his one-thousand-horse-power dynamo, let him go and visit a certain dark storeroom near the entrance hall of the Royal Institution, and while he looks at some little coils there, ponder on the blaze of light that has been shed over the whole world from the dimly lighted cupboard in which these coils now lie. Then he may realize that while the earth as a magnet has endured for all time, the earth as a tramway conductor may at no distant date be relegated to the class of temporary makeshifts, and that the raids of the feudal baron into the agricultural fields of his neighbors were not more barbarous than the alarms and excursions of the tramway engineer into the magnetic fields of his friends." =Teaching the Teachers.=--The following suggestive paragraph is taken from the inaugural address of William Henry Preece, president of the British Institution of Civil Engineers: "Our educational methods have begun at the wrong end. We ought to teach the masters first and then the men. Moreover, we have to teach the teachers and those who have control of the purse-strings. The County Councils of England are scarcely qualified as yet to discharge the very serious duty of properly dealing with a question so few of them understand--though many of them have tackled the matter manfully, especially the London County Council, through its Technical Education Board, on which a large proportion of co-opted experts have seats, who, by supporting existing institutions, have contributed toward the supply of teachers. But how are we to approach the masters? A fault once discovered is halfway to repair. It is difficult to remove the scales from the eyes of the man who has been successful in business and knows not of his blindness; but the coming generation will be more enlightened, and the future masters better educated. We are suffering from a lack of competent teachers. A teacher who has had no training in the practical world is worse than useless, for he imparts ideas derived from his inner consciousness or from the false teaching of his own abstract professor, which lead to mischief. In my own experience I have met with very serious inconveniences from this cause. The ideal professor of pure abstract science is a very charming personage, but he is a very arrogant and dogmatic individual, and, being a sort of little monarch in his own laboratory and lecture room, surrounded by devoted subjects, his word is law, and he regards the world at large, especially the practical world, as outside his domain and beneath his notice. He is generally behind the age. These are not the men for technical institutes. Such teachers should possess the diploma of this institution." =The People of India and the Missionaries.=--In the light of three months' special observation, J. T. Sunderland has reviewed in the New World Magazine the prospects of the success of Christian missions in India. There are several causes that hinder their progress, among which the author mentions as more important the number of Christian sects and denominations; the character of the doctrines preached, in that in many aspects they do not appeal to Hindu or Mohammedan faith or modes of thought, and in some contradict them, and as to those points are a serious hindrance to the progress of Christianity; and the vices of many Europeans, creating a prejudice against their professed religion that is not wholly contradicted by the testimonies and examples of the missionaries and men of nobler stamp. To the last objection the answer is easy, though it may not always be convincing, that these wicked men sin not because they are natural products of Christianity, but because they disobey it. A strong factor in disarming prejudice against Christianity and winning favor for it is the fact that through it, directly or indirectly, certain very important kinds of good are coming to India--education, schools, books, science, invention. The contact of India with Christian lands, civilization, thought, and life, is steadily telling upon Indian thought. Further, "it is to be said to the honor of all the Protestant missions of India, at least, of whatever name, that they are helping, instructing, and lifting up the lower classes, and offering them hopes and prospects such as they could not have had under their old faiths. This is much, very much." The very presence of the missionary in a community is likely to be an enlightening influence. He is a man of more than common education, and "has brought with him to India something of the thought, the culture, the ideals of life, the habits and customs of the Western world. He introduces higher standards of living. He gives his influence in favor of better public sanitation, better homes for the people, better streets and public buildings, better public improvements generally. His home and family life, in which the wife receives the same consideration as her husband, and the daughters are educated with the same care as the sons, becomes a valuable object lesson in the community where he dwells." The missions as a whole are regarded by the author as an important factor in a great religious evolution. The precise form and direction which this evolution will take seem to be a matter yet to be determined. =Weeds under Cultivation.=--For several years past the botanical department of Michigan Agricultural College has maintained a "weed garden," and has grown a hundred or more species of the most troublesome weeds in plots. Some curious results from the experiments are recorded by Prof. W. J. Beal in a paper read at the meeting, 1897, of the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science. The most vigorous and aggressive weeds seem to take on under cultivation the weakness and capriciousness of delicate cultivated plants. "It is very instructive," Professor Beal says, "to note how much better many of these plants thrive when they get away from the spot where they have been confined for from two to several years. Seedlings of Jamestown weed were larger in the plantain bed than in their own. After three years the plantain nearly ran out and _Amaranthus albus_ entirely disappeared. One species of pigweed grew finely for two years, but afterward made a small display; and another variety did not seem very persistent for a plant that ranked among the weeds, but shied off from its home ground 'as if searching for fresh fields.' Barnyard grass (_Panicum crusgalli_) behaved like pigweed, and 'needed considerable attention.' The little round-leaved mallow, which roots deeply about rubbish piles in mellow soil, was grown of respectable proportions in the garden with considerable difficulty, and with no more ease in the bottom lands of other parts of the botanic garden. Considerable pains is required every year to keep on hand even fairly well-grown specimens of mullein. Knotgrass, which thrives with abuse and seems to enjoy trampling by feet, was grown with difficulty in the plots. 'Insects prey upon it; rust causes it to dwindle and disappear.' 'Motherwort grows rank four feet high near the barnyard fence, and the flowers are covered with bees, but when kept several years in the same bed it goes off into the sulks as though neglected.' Shepherd's purse is often disturbed by a parasitic fungus, and it is difficult to grow nice plants long in the same place. Cocklebur, if found long in the same spot, is troubled sadly with a mildew, and more recently also with a rust." =Operations against Woodchucks.=--Prof. F. H. Storer records in the Bulletin of the Bussey Institution, Harvard University, the results of his experiments in the destruction of woodchucks, which, besides being very injurious to lands he had under cultivation, appeared to be increasing. Smothering by a volatile liquid driven into the burrow has been suggested by Professor Hilgard, who recommends bisulphide of carbon. Professor Bussey finds that liquid not wholly satisfactory and liable to objections, and prefers a preparation of naphtha or other volatile liquid. In any event, some device seems to be needed for forcing a considerable quantity of the vapor into the very end of the burrow. Poisons are dangerous because of the probability that the animal would bring the food on which they are placed to the mouth of the burrow for eating, where children or useful animals might get it. While experimenting with burning Cayenne pepper or sulphur on touch paper, in order to smoke out the burrows, the author became acquainted with the "woodchuck torches" of Mr. B. M. Wedger, of Roslindale, Massachusetts. These consist of nitrate of soda, sulphur, mealed gunpowder, and sulphide of antimony, so packed into a tube like a Roman candle that on burning the fuse the vapors would be forced by great pressure to the farthest recesses of the burrow. They proved effectual, and it was indeed rare that any woodchuck to which they were applied ever reported himself again. Professor Storer also describes some experiments he made in burning sulphur in the burrows, with special expedients for insuring more rapid and perfect combustion of the sulphur; these promised fairly well. Mr. Henry Stewart has described in the Country Gentleman an effectual method of destroying woodchucks with blasting powder or dynamite. =Evolution in Lamps.=--The story of lamps from Herodotus down to 1830, Mr. Henry C. Mercer says, in an instructive study on Light and Light Making in the contributions of the Bucks County (Pa.) Historical Society, is not one of development. In principle and form they remain the same, whether as the tin cylindrical or boat-shaped cups on candlestick pedestals and the round tin cups with hemispherical lids, or the lidless cups resting on wooden stands such as were recently rescued by the author from the garret rubbish of old Bucks County. And before Herodotus, as we follow the lamp back into the tombs of the Old World, we find the boat-shaped form of earthenware preceding the boat-shaped form of iron and possibly even that of bronze. The chalk-cup lamp found by Canon Greenwell in the neolithic flint mines at Grimes Graves, England, perhaps the oldest wick-floating lamp in the world, is not essentially different from the oyster shell filled with lard and provided with wicks that may be found among Virginia negroes to-day. The Egyptian, Grecian, Phoenician, and Roman lamps, as they have been found in the tombs and as we see them in the museums, are not unlike the lard lamps that were most in use early in the nineteenth century. Then crude grease gave way to sperm oil and lard oil, with especial adaptations of the lamps that made them more convenient and improved the light; and burning fluids that were convenient and clean and gave a brilliant light, but were dangerous; and kerosene, with other improvements in the lamps and refinements in the oil that enabled it to give the most perfect artificial light yet found and to keep up the fight for quality with gas and electricity--all these having come in within the life-time of men still among us. Besides the old lamps, our ancestors had candles, molded when the price of tin, the material for the molds, did not forbid the luxury, and before them tallow dips; a suspended wick was dipped into a pot of hot tallow, on a cold day, and the operation was repeated till layer after layer of grease hardened, and the candle was thick enough. These candles were, however, troublesome in hot weather, on account of their propensity to yield to the temperature and fall over. "Who shall say, however, that candle-dipping is older than molding, when we know ... that they molded candles in County Galway, Ireland, in late years by punching holes in peat and pouring in tallow on the down-hung wick of twisted flax fiber?" The Irish had, too, as had the negroes, the rush light, a greased rush set in a hole in a wooden block serving as a candlestick; or rushes joined in a triple twist which flies apart when lighted, increasing the blaze. From this Mr. Mercer passes to forms of candlesticks and torches and cressets and methods of producing fire, whither we can not follow him, for the multitude of details he notices, which will not bear abstracting. =Inconsistent Philozoists.=--In his address at the opening of the physiological and pathological laboratories at Belfast, Ireland, Lord Lister took occasion to give some illustrations, drawn from practice, of the value of pathological research. "There are people," he said, "who do not object to eating a mutton chop--people who do not even object to shooting a pheasant with a considerable chance that it may be only wounded and may have to die after lingering in pain, unable to obtain its proper nutriment--and yet who consider it something monstrous to introduce under the skin of a guinea-pig a little inoculation of some microbe to ascertain its action. These seem to me to be most inconsistent views. If these experiments upon the lower animals were made for the mere sport of the thing, they would be indeed to be deprecated and decried; but if they are made with the wholly noble object of not only increasing human knowledge, but also of diminishing human suffering, then I hold that such investigations are deserving of all praise. Those little know who lightly speak on these matters how much self-denial is required in the prosecution of such researches when they are conducted, as indeed they always are, as far as I am aware, with the object of establishing new truth." =The Ruins of Xkichmook, Yucatan.=--The group of ruins in Yucatan called Xkichmook was discovered by Mr. Edward H. Thompson in 1888, when he read a paper before the American Antiquarian Society embodying his first impressions of it. He has since made studies of it extending over a period of seven years. The group is about one hundred and forty miles south of Merida and forty or fifty miles east of Campeche, situated in a narrow valley between a series of rocky hills, and has to be approached by precipitous paths over the hillsides, and thence down the beds of dry _arroyos_ whose yearly freshets wash away all vegetation. Ten buildings, including one called the Palace, and two mounds were explored, and some miscellaneous excavations were made--all of which are described in the author's paper (Field Columbian Museum), with figures of the buildings and objects. Pottery and flaked stone implements were plentiful, but polished implements and specimens of sculpture were exceedingly rare. The flat under surfaces of the ceiling stones of the vaulted chambers seem to have contained very elaborate designs; in another chamber portions of a painting were still partly preserved; in another, curious drawings or glyphs in strong black lines once existed; in another was a painted human figure, of which only the flowing headdress, a portion of the face, and certain devices issuing from the mouth and probably indicating speech, now remain. The mysterious red hand was found painted in various places, and in one a human hand in blue pigment was found, the impression of which was so fresh and perfect in places that even the minute lines of the skin were visible. In ten years of investigation among the ruins of Yucatan and Campeche not as many specimens of worked obsidian were found as could be picked up in half an hour among certain Mexican ruins; but traces of ancient fabrication of flint implements were more plentiful than anywhere else. =The Seventeen-Year and the Thirteen-Year Locusts.=--The periodical cicada, or seventeen-year locust, as it is called, is distinctly American, and has the longest life period of any known insect. It is especially remarkable, Mr. C. L. Marlatt observes in his memoir upon it, in its adolescent period, the features of particular divergence from other insects being its long subterranean life of thirteen or seventeen years, and the perfect regularity with which at the end of these periods every generation, though numbering millions of individuals, attains maturity almost at the same moment. At this moment the brood issue from the ground, leaving innumerable exit holes, and swarm over trees and shrubs, filling the air with their strident calls, and laying their eggs in slits which they cut in the trees. The larvæ, when hatched, fall to the ground, and quickly burrow out of sight, each "forming for itself a little subterranean chamber over some rootlet, where it remains through winter and summer, buried from sun, light, and air, and protected in a manner from cold and frost.... It lives thus alone in its moist earthen chamber," rarely changing its position unless some accident to the nourishing rootlet may necessitate its seeking another, passing the thirteen or seventeen years of its hypogeal existence in slow growth and preparation for a few weeks only of winged life in the air and light. Other cicadas appear every year, usually in comparatively small numbers. They are probably equally long in maturing, but the periods of their lives have from some cause or another been cast in "off" years. The thirteen-year broods are southern, and the shortening of their periods of development may possibly be accounted for by the longer season of warmth in the southern year giving them the number of hours or of aggregate degrees of warmth in thirteen years that the more northern broods can not receive in less than seventeen years. This, however, is only speculation, and there are difficulties in applying the supposition to make it fit all the facts; and many believe that the two races are specifically different. The late Prof. Charles V. Riley distinguished twenty-two different broods of cicadas in the United States, seven of which appertain to the thirteen-year period (_Cicada tredecem_). MINOR PARAGRAPHS. The Bureau of Nature Study of Cornell University is making a praiseworthy effort to interest children in caring for birds, or, as its circular has it, treating them as "summer boarders." It publishes a leaflet entitled The Birds and I, which it sends free to teachers who ask for it and who will give it to their pupils. It has pictures of various styles of bird houses, which may serve as patterns for the construction of homes for the summer guests. "The kind of birds," the interesting circular of the bureau says, "that will set up housekeeping in the homes that you provide will harm no one. They are never cross, never throw stones or rob us, but are always happy and have cheerful songs. We are always kind to people having such dispositions, and why should we not be so to birds as well?" The bureau invites correspondence from boys and girls disposed to entertain birds. The National Geographic Society offers prizes of one hundred and fifty dollars and seventy-five dollars severally for the first and second best essays relating to pre-Columbian discoveries and settlements of the Norsemen on the mainland of North America, and the location of the lands mentioned in the Icelandic Sagas, the competition to close December 31, 1899. The essays sent in should be typewritten in the English language, not exceeding six thousand words in length, and may be accompanied by maps and illustrations for explanation of the text, but not for embellishment. The committee of awards consists of Mr. Henry Gannett, Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart, Mrs. Anita Newcomb McGee, Prof. John Bach McMaster, and Coast Survey Superintendent Henry S. Pritchet. Experiments by a German naturalist, Herr Albrecht Bethe, summarized in the _Revue Scientifique_, upon recognition of one another by ants, confirm the opinions of Lubbock, McCook, Forel, and others that they are guided by the sense of smell. Herr Bethe found that an ant "whitewashed" with liquid of ants of its own nest was well received by its fellows when it went among them; but when the liquid of ants of a different nest was applied it was attacked at once. An ant washed with alcohol, next with water, and then with the liquid of a strange species was well received in a nest of that species, although it was much smaller than any of the individuals composing it. Another ant washed with alcohol and water, dried, and immediately returned to its fellows of its own nest, was attacked by them; but when kept for twenty-four hours after drying, or long enough to recruit itself, was received by them. The following tables are taken from a paper by Dr. J. Richardson Armstrong in a recent Lancet, describing his experience with diphtheria antitoxine in private practice in treating one hundred and twenty-two cases of diphtheria: ------------------------+------+----------+-------- | |Recovered.| Died. ------------------------+------+----------+-------- 1. | | | Total number of cases | | | treated from June | | | 21 to Dec. 17, 1897 | 42 | 36 | 6 Severe cases; antitoxine| | | injected | 22 | 20 | 2 Mild cases; antitoxine | | | not injected | 20 | 16 | 4 +======+==========+======== 2. | | | Total number of cases | | | treated, January 1 | | | to December 31, | | | 1898 | 80 | 77 | 3 Severe cases, injected | 55 | 54 | 1 Mild cases, non-injected| 25 | 23 | 2 ------------------------+------+----------+-------- In answer to the question, Should every case of diphtheria be treated with antitoxine, Dr. Armstrong says: "Some of the cases are sufficiently mild not to need it, so I will not go so far as to say that it is absolutely essential to inject in every case, although I would call it an excellent practice to do so, and the patients would make much more rapid recoveries. I think that injection ought to be insisted upon as early as possible in every case that is at all severe or likely to prove so, and I think that the medical man who does not employ antitoxine and who loses a large proportion of his cases is incurring a responsibility which is almost criminal. The earlier a patient is injected the greater is the chance of recovery, and the more rapid is the recovery." Among the leading principles of forestry, as defined by the chief fire warden of Minnesota, are that the best agricultural land should not be devoted to forest while wood and timber can be profitably grown on soil that is unfit for farming purposes; that the management should be continuous, and no more timber should be taken out of the forest in one year, or in a series of ten or twenty years, than grows in the entire forest in the same period; that the cutting of timber should be in blocks or strips, so as to facilitate reproduction on the clear areas by seeds falling from the trees left standing; and that the forest, when young, must have in numbers vastly more trees than when it is mature. To make good timber, the forest, when young, must be crowded so as to secure height growth. Mixed wood, managed on forestry principles in the Black Forest of Germany, has per acre, at the age of twenty years, 3,960 trees; at the age of one hundred years, 262 trees. A new process for the production of a textile material is thus described in Industries and Iron: "It consists of 'squirting,' in a fashion similar to that of making electric incandescent carbons, pure gelatin in threads of about one thousandth part of an inch in diameter, the thread being taken away on revolving tapes. The threads are wound upon reels and exposed to formalin vapor, which exercises a most remarkable effect on the gelatin, rendering it insoluble in any medium yet applied to it. The tensile qualities of the thread are also increased, while, in opposition to that produced under the Lehner process (which is simply forming nitrated cellulose into threads for weaving), it is capable of taking up any dye desired; and it is, of course, impervious to any hygroscopic influence." NOTES. Prof. E. C. Pickering, of the Harvard College Observatory, announces the discovery by Mrs. Fleming of a new variable star in Sagittarius. It was found on eight of the photographs in her large collection. On March 8, 1898, it was of the fifth magnitude, and on April 29, 1898, of the eighth magnitude. A plate taken on March 9, 1899, shows it still visible and of the tenth magnitude. Its spectrum resembles that of other new stars. The entire number of new stars discovered since 1885 is six, of which five have been found by Mrs. Fleming. Because of the great loss by fire which occurs every year in the Russian villages, the government is making efforts to induce the peasantry, says the _Saturday Review_, to employ some less dangerous material than straw thatch for the roofing of their _izbas_. There has already been a large increase in the use of shingle, and this has led to a considerable importation from Belgium and Germany, and also from the United States, of simple and inexpensive shingle making machines, for use in rural districts. German manufacturers, whose "commercial intelligence department" is remarkably well informed, are now making redoubled efforts to meet the immense demand anticipated. An improved and inexpensive hand fire engine is also being provided. Roofing felt or paper is very generally used under the shingle, and the demand for this is also increasing. A fourth specimen of the _Notornis Mantelli_, a bird of New Zealand supposed to have become extinct, was captured in August last, and has been prepared for the museum by Mr. W. B. Benham. The first specimen was obtained, recently slain, by Mr. W. Mantell, in 1849, and is preserved in the British Museum; the second was killed by Maoris in 1851, and is in the Colonial Collection; and the third, now in the Dresden Museum, was taken in 1879. All these birds were found in a single denuded region of the country. The present specimen was caught by a dog in the bushes near Lake Te Anan, still in the same region, and is a very fine young female. A plant growing in the dense jungles of Langsuam, Siam, was described by H. Warington Smyth, in an address to the Royal Geographical Society, as having the property of setting up a great irritation in the skin of any person coming in contact with it. "It has a large, broad leaf, and the Siamese declare that, after being badly stung by it, the only remedy is the heat of a fire; to bathe in a stream, which is the natural impulse, is considered absolutely fatal. A spot on the Kra-Champawn trail is known as _Burmatai_, from the fact that a party of Burmese, coming across to harry their neighbors in the old fighting days, are said to have got into a thick growth of this plant, and to have bathed in the stream to allay the agony, with the result that they all died there." The Siamese call the plant _kalang-ton chang_. In the western part of Belgium the dog has been employed as a beast of burden from time immemorial. The Belgian dog (known only by this name) is a large, compactly built animal, measuring from twenty to thirty inches in height; the hair is smooth and short, generally tan or dark brown in color. It is the custom to crop both ears and tail. The dogs are usually driven before carts weighing from one hundred to one hundred and twenty pounds, in teams of from two to six abreast. A harness very similar in arrangement to that of the horse is used. Six of these animals will draw from six to eight hundred pounds. They are put to work when about a year old. They vary in price from twenty-five to sixty shillings. There are over two thousand dogs in Ghent licensed as draught animals. A plant described by M. Henri Chantrey as most probably answering to the manna found by the Hebrews in the desert is the thallophyte _Canona esculenta_, or edible lichen, which grows in the deserts of Persia, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Sahara. It is a grayish cryptogam of about the size of a pea, bearing short bracteate appendages on its top; when cut, it resembles a mass of dull white flour paste. It is an ephemeral substance, and must be collected the morning it appears, as it will soon dry up; but when properly prepared it can be kept in a close vessel. It is highly appreciated by the wandering Arabs, who have often been saved by it from starvation, and they lay up stores of it when opportunity offers. It is easily collected, for it never adheres to any foreign body, and, so far as appearance goes, seems as if it might have been thrown on the ground. There is but little suggestion of the mushroom in its taste, which is rather starchy, with a slight flavor of sugar. Cattle are very fond of it. The Arabs boil it into a gelatinous paste, which they serve in various ways. They preserve it by drying it in the shade and pack it in bladders or skins. It is not a complete first-class food, but is very good for a few days till something better can be got. The Jernkontoret of Sweden is an ironmasters' exchange at Stockholm, which was founded in 1747 for the financial convenience of the subscribers, and now possesses a reserve fund of about $1,500,000. The functions of the society have been considerably enlarged since its institution. It has organized a corps of mining engineers and metallurgists, who receive salaries from it, and further from manufacturers whom they may serve. They are often commissioned to go abroad and obtain information and practical hints bearing upon their profession. The institution is supported by a light assessment on the production of its constituency. It has a fine building, and publishes an annual volume in _Jernkontorets Annalen_, containing original memoirs and reports from technical agents, which is sent gratuitously to all the masters of forges in Sweden, and is sold abroad. In a number of glass mirrors of the third and fourth centuries, examined by M. Berthelot, the glass was coated with a metallic substance and with a layer of whitish material. The metal proved to be lead, with no trace of gold, silver, copper, tin, antimony, or mercury, and no sign of organic substance was present. It was thus shown that no extraneous material was used to cement the lead to the glass. The mirrors appeared to have been cut from hollow blown glass globes, and it is possible that before the globe was cut the molten lead had been poured into the interior, and had adhered to the previously warmed glass. The whitish layer consisted of lead carbonate and lead oxide formed by the oxidation of the lead coating and calcium carbonate, which had been deposited from the water of the district in which the mirrors were found. The list of recent deaths among men known in connection with science and its applications includes the names of Prof. Karl Müller, botanist, one of the founders of the German scientific weekly, _Die Natur_, February 9th, aged eighty-one years; Sir John Struthers, emeritus professor of anatomy in the University of Aberdeen, in his sixty-seventh year; John Kreusi, mechanical engineer and inventor, at Schenectady, N. Y., January 22d, aged fifty-six years; Thomas Cook, teacher of anatomy and author of works on the subject, in London, February 8th; Dr. A. Veitmeyer, civil engineer, in Berlin; Dr. Carl Schoenlein, of the Zoölogical Station at Naples, aged forty years; Major-General Joseph J. Reynolds, of the United States Army, formerly professor of mechanics and engineering at Washington University, St. Louis, February 26th, aged seventy-seven years; Dr. Alexandre Laboulbène, professor of the history of medicine in the University of Paris, and author of a treatise on pathological anatomy and a book on French entomological fauna, aged seventy-three years; Dr. Philipp J. J. Valentini, Americanist and student of ancient Mexican and Central American monuments and codices, in New York, March 16th, in his seventy-first year; Gustave Wiedmann, professor of physics and chemistry in the University of Leipsic, and writer on electricity and magnetism; and Major J. Evans, professor of pathology in the Calcutta Medical College, March 13th. Transcriber's Notes: Words surrounded by _ are italicized. Words surrounded by = are bold. Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent spellings have been kept, including inconsistent use of hyphen (e.g. "air ship" and "air-ship"), diacritical marks (e.g. "êtat" and "état"), and proper names (e.g. "Dostoievski" and "Dostoiewski"). Captions added to captionless illustrations. Some illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text. 
45115	----	Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LV MAY TO OCTOBER, 1899 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. [Illustration: THOMAS EGLESTON.] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. JUNE, 1899. NEW METHOD OF ESTIMATING THE AGE OF NIAGARA FALLS. BY G. FREDERICK WRIGHT. Both the interest and the importance of the subject make it worth while to follow out every clew that may lead to the approximate determination of the age of Niagara Falls. During this past season, in connection with some work done for the New York Central Railroad upon their branch line which runs along the eastern face of the gorge from Bloody Run to Lewiston, I fortunately came into possession of data from which an estimate of the age of the falls can be made entirely independent of those which have heretofore been current. The bearing and importance of the new data can best be seen after a brief _résumé_ of the efforts heretofore made to solve this important problem. [Illustration: FIG. 1.--Looking north from below the Whirlpool, showing the electric road at the bottom of the east side of the gorge, and the steam road descending the face about halfway to the top.] In 1841 Sir Charles Lyell and the late Prof. James Hall visited the falls together; but, having no means of determining the rate of recession, except from the indefinite reports of residents and guides, they could place no great confidence in the "guess," made by Sir Charles Lyell, that it could not be more than one foot a year. As the length of the gorge from Lewiston up is about seven miles, the time required for its erosion at this rate would be thirty-five thousand years. The great authority and popularity of Lyell led the general public to put more confidence in this estimate than the distinguished authors themselves did. Mr. Bakewell, another eminent English geologist, at about the same time estimated the rate of the recession as threefold greater than Lyell and Hall had done, which would reduce the time to about eleven thousand years. But, to prepare the way for a more definite settlement of the question, the New York Geological Survey, under Professor Hall's direction, had a careful trigonometric survey of the Horseshoe Fall made in 1842, erecting monuments at the points at which their angles were taken, so that, after a sufficient lapse of time, the actual rate of recession could be more accurately determined. In 1886 Mr. Woodward, of the United States Geological Survey, made a new survey, and found that the actual amount of recession in the center of the Horseshoe Fall had proceeded at an average rate of about five feet per annum. The subject was thoroughly discussed by Drs. Pohlman and Gilbert, at the Buffalo meeting of the American Association in 1886, when it was proved, to the satisfaction of every one, that, if the supply of water had been constant throughout its history, the whole work of eroding the gorge from Lewiston to the Falls would have been accomplished, at the present rate of recession, in about seven thousand years. But the question was immediately raised, Has the supply of water in Niagara River been constant? It was my privilege, in the autumn of 1892 (see Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, vol. iv, pp. 421-427), to bring forth the first positive evidence that the water pouring over Niagara had for a time been diverted, having been turned through Lake Nipissing down the valley of the Mattawa into the Ottawa River, following nearly the line of Champlain's old trail and of the present Canadian Pacific Railroad. The correctness of this inference has been abundantly confirmed by subsequent investigations of Mr. F. B. Taylor and Dr. Robert Bell.[A] The occasion of this diversion of the drainage of the Great Lakes from the Niagara through the Ottawa Valley was the well-known northerly subsidence of the land in Canada at the close of the Glacial period. When the ice melted off from the lower part of the Ottawa Valley the land stood five hundred feet lower than it does now, but the extent of this subsidence diminished both to the south and the west, making it difficult to estimate just how great it was at the Nipissing outlet. A subsidence of one hundred feet at that point, however, would now divert the waters into the Ottawa River. That it actually was so diverted is shown both by converging high-level shore lines at the head of the Mattawa Valley and by the immense delta deposits at its junction with the Ottawa, to which attention was first called in my paper referred to above. [Footnote A: See article by Mr. Taylor on The Scoured Bowlders of the Mattawa Valley, in the American Journal of Science, March, 1897, pp. 208-218.] The indeterminate question which remained was, At what rate did this postglacial elevation of land which has brought it up to its present level proceed? Dr. Gilbert, Professor Spencer, and Mr. Taylor have brought forth a variety of facts which, according to their interpretation, show that this rate of elevation was so slow that from twenty thousand to thirty thousand years was required to restore to the Niagara River its present volume of water. Their arguments are based upon the varying width and depth of the Niagara gorge, proving, as they think, the presence of a smaller amount of water during the erosion of some portions. Dr. Gilbert has also brought forward some facts concerning the extent of supposed erosion produced by the diverted waters of Niagara when passing over an intermediate outlet between Lake Simcoe and Lake Nipissing. But the difficulty of obtaining any safe basis for calculation upon these speculative considerations has increased the desire to find a means of calculation which should be independent of the indeterminate problems involved. That I think I have found, and so have made a beginning in obtaining desired results. _The new evidence lies in the extent of the enlargement of the mouth of the Niagara gorge at Lewiston since the recession of the falls began._ It is evident that the oldest part of the Niagara gorge is at its mouth, at Lewiston, where the escarpment suddenly breaks down to the level of Lake Ontario. The walls of the gorge rise here to a height of three hundred and forty feet above the level of the river. It is clear that from the moment the recession of the falls began at Lewiston the walls of the gorge on either side have been subject to the action of constant disintegrating agencies, tending to enlarge the mouth and make it V-shaped. What I did last summer was to measure the exact amount of this enlargement, and to obtain an approximate estimate of the rate at which it is going on.[B] As this enlargement proceeds wholly through the action of atmospheric agencies, the conditions are constant, and it is hoped that sufficiently definite results have been obtained to set some limits to the speculations which have been made upon more indefinite grounds. [Footnote B: For opportunity to do this work I am indebted to the interest of President S. R. Callaway, of the New York Central Railroad. The measurements were made by Mr. George S. Tibbits, engineer of the western division. The photographs were taken by Mr. C. F. Dutton, of Cleveland.] [Illustration: FIG. 2.--View looking east across the gorge near the mouth, showing the railroads and the outcrops of Clinton and Niagara limestones above the steam road.] The face on the east side of the gorge presents a series of alternate layers of hard and soft rocks, of which certain portions are very susceptible to the disintegrating agencies of the atmosphere. The summit consists of from twenty to thirty feet of compact Niagara limestone, which is underlaid by about seventy feet of Niagara shale; which in turn rests upon a compact stratum of Clinton limestone about twenty feet thick, which again is underlaid by a shaly deposit of seventy feet, resting upon a compact stratum of Medina sandstone twenty feet thick, below which a softer sandstone, that crumbles somewhat readily, extends to the level of the river. [Illustration: FIG. 3.--Looking up the gorge from near Lewiston, showing on the left the exposed situation of the eastern face of the gorge at the extreme angle, where the measurements were made.] The present width of the river at the mouth of the gorge is seven hundred and seventy feet. It is scarcely possible that the original width of the gorge was here any less than this, for in the narrowest places above, even where the Niagara limestone is much thicker than at Lewiston, it is nowhere much less than six hundred feet in width. Nor is it probable that the river has to any considerable extent enlarged its channel at the mouth of the gorge at the water level. On the contrary, it is more probable that the mouth has been somewhat contracted, for the large masses of Niagara and Clinton limestone and Medina sandstone which have fallen down as the shales were undermined have accumulated at the base as a talus, which the present current of the river is too feeble to remove. This talus of great blocks of hard stone has effectually riprapped the banks, and really encroached to some extent upon the original channel. We may therefore assume with confidence that the enlargement, under subaërial agencies, of the mouth of the gorge at the top of the escarpment has been no greater than the distance from the present water's edge to the present line of the escarpment at the summit of the Niagara limestone. This we found to be three hundred and eighty-eight feet--that is, the upper stratum of hard rock on the east side of the gorge had retreated that distance, through the action of atmospheric agencies, since the formation of the gorge first began. The accompanying photogravures and diagram will present the facts at a glance. The total work of enlargement on the east side of the gorge has been the removal of an inverted triangular section of the rock strata three hundred and forty feet high and three hundred and eighty-eight feet base, which would be the same as a rectangular section of one hundred and ninety-four feet base. From this one can readily see that if the average erosion has been at the rate of one quarter of an inch per annum, the whole amount would have fallen down in less than ten thousand years; while if the time is lengthened, as some would have it, to forty thousand years, the rate would be reduced to one sixteenth of an inch per year. Fortunately, the construction of the railroad along the face of the eastern wall of the gorge affords opportunity to study the rate of erosion during a definite period of time. The accompanying photogravures will illustrate to the eye facts which it is hard to make impressive by words alone. The course of the road is diagonally down the face of the gorge from its summit for a distance of about two miles, descending in that space about two hundred feet to the outcrop of hard quartzose Medina sandstone. The lower mile of this exposure presents the typical situation for making an estimate of the rate at which the face is crumbling away. [Illustration: FIG. 4.--Nearer view of the upper portion of the face near the mouth, showing the exposure of the situation at that point.] Beginning at what used to be known as the "Hermit's Cave," near the Catholic College grounds, where the Niagara shale is well exposed, and extending to the outer limit of the gorge, the height of the face above the railroad averages one hundred and fifty feet. Now, the crumbling away of the superincumbent cliffs gives continual trouble to the road. Three watchmen are constantly employed along this distance to remove the _débris_ which falls down, and to give warning if more comes down than they can remove before trains are due. The seventy feet of Niagara shale, and the equal thickness of shaly Medina rock which underlies the Clinton limestone, are constantly falling off, even in fair weather, as any one can experience by walking along the bank; while after storms, and especially in the spring, when the frost is coming out, the disintegration proceeds at a much more rapid rate. Sometimes two or three days are required by the whole force of section hands to throw over the bank the result of a single fall of material. At a rate of one quarter of an inch of waste each year the amount of _débris_ accumulating for removal on the track along this distance would be only six hundred and ten cubic yards per annum--that is, if six hundred and ten cubic yards of material falls down from one mile of the face of the wall where it is a hundred and fifty feet high, the whole amount of enlargement of the mouth of the gorge would be accomplished in less than ten thousand years. Exact accounts have not been kept by the railroad; but even a hasty examination of the face of the wall makes it sure that the actual amount removed has been greatly in excess of six hundred yards annually. This estimate is based partly on the impression of the railroad officials as to the cost of removal, and partly on the impressions of the watchmen who spend their time in keeping guard and in the work of removing it. [Illustration: FIG. 5.--Showing extent of erosion at base of the Niagara shale since 1854. (See description in the text.)] But that is not all. The accompanying photogravures indicate an actual amount of removal over a part of the area enormously in excess of the rate supposed. Fig. 5 shows a portion of the precipice, a hundred feet high, where the road first comes down to the level of the Clinton limestone, and where, consequently, the whole thickness of the Niagara shale is accessible to examination. Fortunately, Patrick MacNamara, the watchman at this station, was a workman on the road at the time of its construction in 1854, and has been connected with the road ever since, having been at his present post for twelve years. We have therefore his distinct remembrance, as well as the appearance of the bank, to inform us where the face of the original excavation then was. In the picture he is standing at the original face, while the other figure is nearly at the back of the space which has been left empty by the crumbling away of the shale. The horizontal distance is fully twenty feet, and the rocks overhang to that amount for the whole distance exposed in the photograph. All this amount of shale has fallen down in forty-four years, making a rate many times larger than the highest we have taken as the basis of our estimate. Of course, this rate for the crumbling away of the Niagara shale on its fresh exposure is much in excess of the average rate for a long period of time; but it is clear that the rate of erosion at the base of the Niagara limestone at the mouth of the gorge can never have been sufficiently slow to reduce the total average much below the assumed rate of a quarter of an inch a year. To impress the truth of this statement it is only necessary to follow the progress, in imagination, of the crumbling process which has brought the side of the gorge to its present condition. At first the face of the gorge was perpendicular, the plunging water making the gorge as wide at the bottom as at the top. At successive stages the strata of shale on the side would crumble away, as is shown in our photograph, and undermine the strata of hard rock. The large fragments would fall to the bottom, and, being too large to be carried away by the current, would form the talus to which we have already referred, which would grow in height with every successive century. The actual progress of the enlargement would thus be periodic, and not capable of measurement by decades; but after centuries the progress would be clearly marked, and especially whenever there was a falling away of the lower stratum of compact Medina sandstone, which is about two hundred feet below the top, would a new cycle of rapid disintegrations in the superincumbent strata follow. [Illustration: FIG. 6.--Section, drawn to equal vertical and horizontal scale, showing enlargement of Niagara gorge on the east side at its mouth at Lewiston: 1, Niagara limestone, 20 to 30 feet; 2, Niagara shale, 70 feet; 3, Clinton limestone, 20 to 30 feet; 4, Clinton and Medina shale, 70 feet; 5, Quartzose Medina sandstone, 20 to 30 feet; 6, softer Medina sandstone, 120 feet above water level.] An important point to be noticed, and which is evident from two of the reproduced photographs (Figs. 3 and 4), is that the talus has never reached up so high as to check the disintegration at the mouth of the gorge of the Niagara shale and limestone which form the upper one hundred feet of the face, and which exhibit the maximum amount of enlargement which has taken place. The thickness of the Niagara limestone is here so small that it has not been so important an element in forming the talus as it has been farther up the stream, where it is two or three times as thick. Now, while our original supposition was that one quarter of an inch annually was eroded from the upper two hundred feet, this would involve the erosion of a half inch per annum over the top of the gorge to bring the calculation within the limit of ten thousand years. It certainly is difficult for one who examines the facts upon the ground to believe that the crumbling away of this exposed Niagara shale could have been at any less rate than that; so that the estimate of about ten thousand years for the date of that stage of the Glacial period in which Niagara River first began its work of erosion at Lewiston (an estimate which is supported by a great variety of facts independent of those relating to the Niagara gorge) is strongly confirmed by this new line of evidence. So far as I can see, the only question of serious doubt that can be raised respecting this calculation will arise from the possible supposition that, when the eastern drainage over the Niagara channel began, the land stood at such a relatively lower level as would reduce the height of the fall to about half that of the present escarpment at that point; when it might be supposed that a protecting talus had accumulated which would interrupt the lateral erosion for the indefinite period when the drainage was being drawn around by way of the recently opened Lake Nipissing and Mattawa outlet. Then, upon the resumption of the present line of drainage, with the land standing at nearly its present level, the talus may have been undercut, and so fallen down to leave the upper strata exposed as at present. But there does not seem to be sufficient warrant for such a supposition to make it necessary seriously to entertain it, while the objections to it are significant and serious. First, the present narrowness of the river at the water level is such that it does not give much opportunity for enlargement after the first formation of the gorge; secondly, the Niagara limestone at the mouth of the gorge is so thin (stated by Hall to be twenty feet thick) that it would not form a protecting talus, even at half its present height. * * * * * P. S.--Since the above was written there has been reported in the papers an immense fall of rock from the east side of the gorge, near the head of the Whirlpool rapids. The estimate made of the amount is one hundred thousand tons. If that estimate is correct, it is a very impressive illustration of how the average fall of material from the side of the gorge is occasionally increased by a single instance. In making our calculations above, the total amount of material annually falling off from the portion of the side of the gorge under consideration amounted only to 1,237 tons, while the amount of material was 611 cubic yards. But the 100,000 tons which came off in a single slide a few weeks ago would be equal to twenty inches in thickness from the whole face of the cliff, where our estimate was only a quarter of an inch. N. B.--In the diagram (Fig. 6) extend the Niagara shale (2) up to occupy lower two layers of (1), thus making Niagara limestone (1) half as thick as now. * * * * * A piece of skin which the authors maintained to be of great antiquity and to have belonged to the extinct mylodon or ground sloth, found in a cave in Patagonia, was recently exhibited to the London Zoölogical Society by Mr. A. Smith Woodward and Dr. F. P. Moreno. ABUSE OF PUBLIC CHARITY. BY BIRD S. COLER, COMPTROLLER OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK. Ten per cent of all the human beings who die in New York city are buried in Potter's Field at public expense; but the records of organized charity, official and semiofficial, show that less than one per cent of the living are paupers or dependent persons. There are two explanations of the difference between the number of living poor and penniless dead. The chief one is that abuse of public charity has grown to such proportions that the city has become the Mecca of the chronic idlers and tramps of the entire country. It is easier for an industrious and shrewd professional beggar to live in luxury in New York than to exist in any other city in the world. No magic wand of ancient fable was ever more potent to unlock the gates of castle or prison than the name of charity is to open a way to the public treasury. The liberal and well-nigh indiscriminate giving of the money of the taxpayers for the relief of sickness and poverty has been commanded by law, sanctioned by custom, and approved by public opinion until the possibility of checking or reforming the abuse grows more and more remote as the burden increases and the evil results multiply. The city of New York gives annually to public charity more than $5,000,000, and contributes indirectly $2,000,000 more. Of the money raised by taxation for city purposes proper (State taxes, interest, and county expenses eliminated), almost twelve per cent is properly chargeable to relief of poverty and sickness. Of this expenditure more than $3,000,000 is paid to private institutions and societies over which the city authorities have no control or supervision. The payments are made in compliance with the provisions of acts of the State Legislature. The only provision in these laws that enables the city officers to protect the treasury from fraud is a clause under which the comptroller is permitted to verify the bills of the institutions for the care of committed persons. There is a constitutional safeguard against outright swindling of the city, in the requirement that charitable institutions shall be inspected and their bills approved by the State Board of Charities, but the system is open to many abuses where the public officers are powerless. The present comptroller of the city has found that a number of alleged charitable institutions and societies receiving money from the city apply nearly all their funds to the payment of salaries of officers and employees, while their relief work is very limited and of doubtful character. Other societies, he found upon investigation, really encourage professional beggars without in any case relieving deserving poor. A few cases were so flagrant in their abuse of public charity that the further payment of city money to the societies was refused. In one case he found that a society which claimed a board of directors and numerous officers was really managed by one person, who in one year had received $1,500 from the city and $70 from all other sources, and had expended $1,300 of the amount for salaries and $40 for the relief of the destitute. The Department of Public Charities, for the maintenance of which the sum of $1,941,215 is appropriated for the year 1899, is controlled entirely by the city. The balance of the $5,000,000 appropriated annually for the same general purpose is divided among more than two hundred societies and institutions managed by corporations or private individuals. In theory none of these private institutions is supported by the city, the municipality merely paying to them a fixed sum, which is supposed to be supplemented by private donations. In reality nine tenths of them could not exist six months without the money they receive from the public treasury. Very few of these semipublic charities have an income from all other sources equal to the appropriation from the city. The city pays for the support of a child in a private institution the sum of $110 a year, and the average allowance for the maintenance of an adult is $150. The percentage of children among the dependent persons is almost three to one, so the $5,000,000 public charity fund would feed and clothe more than forty thousand persons each year if applied directly to that purpose. In the distribution of this great sum of public money, however, fully $2,000,000 of the amount is absorbed in the payment of salaries and expenses, and therein exists an abuse of public charity so great that the present comptroller of the city some months ago appealed to the Legislature for relief in the form of legislation which would enable the local authorities to stop payments to many societies. There are numerous small institutions, some of them having the indorsement and moral support of leading citizens, that spend from sixty to eighty per cent of all the money they receive in the payment of salaries, and in one case discovered by the comptroller the expenses absorbed ninety-four per cent of the total income of the society! There is no evidence that any of these societies are deliberately dishonest in their dealings with the city and the public. They are as a rule conducted by men and women whose motives are good, but who have no experience or practical knowledge to fit them for the management of a charitable institution. They are easily imposed upon by professional beggars, and in most cases fail in their well-meant efforts to reach and relieve the deserving who are in actual need. Most of the small organizations that waste public money in misdirected charity are controlled by women of eminent respectability, but with no knowledge whatever of the details of the work they have undertaken. The result in many cases has been that they employ enough help to absorb the bulk of the money received without realizing that they are doing more harm than good. The city does not spend its own money cheaply. Of the appropriation of $1,941,215 for the support of the Department of Charities for the current year the sum of $529,626 is allowed for the payment of salaries of commissioners and employees. No private business could long endure if conducted on such a basis. Some of the institutions where hundreds of homeless waifs from the streets are cared for--institutions semipublic in character, managed by men of more than local reputation as experts in such work, societies founded by men and women whose lives have been devoted to doing good--show by their annual reports that more than half their income is paid out in salaries. One institution that received $30,000 from the city in 1898 and $20,000 from all other sources, reported a salary account of $31,000. Another, receiving $100,000 from the city and $120,000 in donations, had a salary account of $115,000. For every five persons supported by public charity there are three persons employed on salary in the work of relief. Of every five dollars paid out by the city treasury to relieve the sick and destitute, two dollars is absorbed by the salary and expense accounts. The theory of the law under which city money is paid to private charitable institutions is that they relieve the municipal authorities of the care of a certain number of persons who would otherwise become public charges to be maintained in the hospitals, asylums, or homes owned by the city. It is also a popular theory that young children who have become a public charge will receive better care and training in a home controlled by a private society than they would in a public institution. Appropriations and legislation are also obtained by private organizations on the representation that for every dollar paid to them by the city or State an equal amount will be contributed by founders and subscribers. This representation is not always true, and in many cases it happens that when a society begins to receive money from the city private contributions fall off. When the city authorities first took up the question of caring for homeless and destitute persons and found that they had to deal with a grave problem, some of the private charitable institutions were already in existence and came forward with offers to share the burden. At that time it was considered a good business arrangement for the city to use private societies in the work of relief. This plan, it was expected, would save the city considerable money, because the officers of the societies would contribute their services, and the cost of applying public charity to necessary relief would in that way be reduced to a minimum. That expectation has not been realized. With the rapid increase of necessity and demand for public relief the expenses of administration of the societies have increased out of all proportion to the work accomplished. In the beginning the city authorities shirked a public duty, and by giving city money to private persons who were willing to relieve them of a burden they invited the creation of new societies and a steadily increasing demand for more funds. Of the two hundred and twenty charitable societies that receive money from the city more than one hundred have been organized during the past ten years. The records of the finance department and the annual reports of these new organizations show that many of them have received from the city sixty to ninety per cent of all the funds they have handled, and that almost the same percentage of their total income was charged to expenses, the chief item of expense in every case being the payment of salaries to officers. Year after year the promoters and officers of these small organizations appear before the city authorities when the annual budget is to be passed, and, attempting to excuse the poor showing they make, say, in pleading for a larger appropriation, "We hope to do better next year." The most liberal-minded defender of indiscriminate public charity would find it difficult to excuse the existence of some of these societies. There are scores of small organizations helping to spend public money that are unknown to the general public. In fact, some of them are never heard of except when their officers appear before the Board of Estimate once a year to ask for more money. There is a society, organized for the purpose of supplying clothing to shipwrecked sailors, which for several years obtained a small appropriation from the city. When the officers requested an increase of the amount allowed, the city authorities asked for some particulars of the work done. The report submitted in reply showed that the society had received, in addition to the money obtained from the city, several donations of second-hand clothing and one box of wristlets (knit bands to be worn on the wrists); had sent to a sailor shipwrecked on the coast of Oregon a suit of underwear, a pair of hose, and a rubber coat; to a crew wrecked on the reefs of Florida some shoes and oilskin caps. There was no report of relief or clothing supplied to a sailor or any other person in the city or State of New York, but there was a charge for salaries that almost balanced the amount received from the city treasury. Another of the minor institutions is a society that is engaged in an original method of charitable work. The agents of this society, or the members themselves, go out into the slums of the city on Sunday mornings and gather in a number of tramps. The homeless wanderers are assembled in a room hired for the purpose and supplied with a warm breakfast, after which they are compelled to listen to a sermon and a lecture. They are then allowed to depart and live as best they can until the following Sunday. For a number of years this society has received a small appropriation from the city on the ground that it is a useful public charity. To all of these small societies, no matter what may be their alleged field of charitable work, city money is appropriated without specific knowledge of the exact purpose to which it is applied. By legislation or petition, backed by the influence of prominent citizens, scores of these petty organizations, some of them merely a fad or whim of an idle man or woman, have been placed on the list of semipublic charities to be aided at the expense of the taxpayers, and there they remain year after year without so much as a serious inquiry as to their merits or the work they accomplish. The city authorities who grant the appropriations do not and can not know how the money they give to such societies is to be expended, because they have no legal authority to investigate the conduct of such institutions. The city officers, therefore, are not to blame. The fault seems to rest primarily upon that condition of public opinion that is cheerfully tolerant of any fraud committed in the name of charity, and secondly upon the members of the Legislature who vote without question or investigation for all legislation asked for by any benevolent person or society. To the large charitable and correctional institutions of established reputation, to which children or pauper adults are committed by the local authorities, city money is appropriated on a business basis. A fixed sum is paid for the support of each committed person, and the taxpayers may know what they are getting for their money. While the city authorities can not regulate the expenses or salaries in these institutions, they know that the city is paying for a specific service and that the work is performed. That it might be done better or more cheaply need not concern them. But to the institutions and societies that do not undertake to support dependent persons, but engage in indiscriminate charitable work, the giving of city money is as doubtful a method of relieving the deserving poor as throwing coin in the streets. The appropriation of city money made for 1899 direct to two hundred and fifteen charitable and correctional institutions and societies amounts to $1,784,846. The appropriations from the excise funds to institutions that support pauper children and adults will slightly exceed $1,000,000. The county of New York pays to State and private charitable institutions for the same period the sum of $118,682; Kings County, $82,669; and Richmond County, $4,845; all of which comes out of the general treasury. The money received for licenses for theaters, concert and music halls, amounting to $50,000 a year, is divided among eighty-two private societies and institutions. This makes an aggregate of $3,000,000 paid out of the city treasury annually and expended under the direction of private organizations. With the exception of less than $100,000 it is all appropriated under the provisions of special acts of the Legislature, or sections of the city charter, and the city officers have no control whatever over the methods of expenditure or the work undertaken by the societies that receive the money. Under such a system the possibilities for abuse of public charity are well-nigh unlimited. These direct appropriations of money do not represent all of the city's contribution to the cause of charity. The property of all the charitable institutions and societies is exempt from taxation and from assessments for public improvements. The tax commissioners report that the assessed value of the property of such organizations is $70,781,990. At the present rate of taxation this means a loss to the city of more than $1,400,000 a year. The assessments upon the same property for public improvements exceed $100,000 a year, which is paid by the city. These exemptions materially affect the tax rate as well as the bonded indebtedness and annual interest charges of the city, so that the yearly contribution of the taxpayers of New York to charity is nearly if not quite $7,000,000, or about fifteen per cent of the direct expenses of the city government. Some figures from the budget for 1899 will show the relative cost of caring for the poor. The city will pay for public education $13,040,052; for police, $11,797,596; for the fire department, $4,443,664; for the health department, $1,110,538; for lighting, $2,000,000; for water, $1,450,817; for cleaning the streets, $4,575,800; for parks, $1,729,235; for paving and repaving streets, $2,520,099; and for charity direct and indirect, $7,000,000. The chief abuses of the present system of public charity are the extravagant expenditures for salaries and the steady and rapid increase of pauperism due to the misdirected efforts of the inexperienced persons who control so many of the smaller societies that receive city money. One of the oldest and most important charitable organizations in the city is the Children's Aid Society. The report of the treasurer for 1898 shows the following expenditures: Industrial schools-- Salaries of superintendent and teachers $106,265.71 Rent of schoolrooms 5,119.26 Books and school supplies 5,178.54 Provisions 8,509.70 Clothing and special relief 5,512.56 Fuel, gas, repairs, etc. 20,497.88 --------- Sick Children's Mission $655.48 Children's Summer Home 9,405.37 Health Home 8,307.45 Farm for Boys--Summer Charities 2,719.59 Brace Memorial Lodging House 12,914.13 Elizabeth Home for Girls 10,366.33 Tompkins Square Lodging House 7,546.38 West Side Lodging House 9,079.26 East Side Lodging House 1,848.06 Forty fourth Street Lodging House 7,948.56 Fogg Lodging House 1,942.26 Brace Farm School 12,150.64 Reading rooms 402.96 Medical examinations 312.00 Salaries, executive officers 8,659.92 Immigration, fares, food, clothing, etc. 30,162.69 Reinvestment, bonds sold 29,902.50 Amount due treasurer, November 1, 1898 435.71 Printing, stationery, car fares, and incidental expenses 3,551.85 -------- $309,394.79 This shows a total salary account of $114,925.63, or about thirty-seven per cent of the expenditure. The society received from the city $100,764, and from general subscriptions and donations $119,768. The balance of the income was derived from legacies, endowments, special trust funds, and sale of bonds. One of the private institutions in the city for the instruction of deaf-mutes receives city, State, and county pupils under the provisions of special acts of the Legislature. The report of the treasurer for the fiscal year ending September 30, 1898, shows the following receipts: Balance on hand, October 1, 1897 $2,885.03 New York State 44,216.74 New York County 27,179.54 Kings County 12,697.05 Queens County 1,217.19 Westchester County 1,060.94 Various other counties 2,727.02 Paying pupils 791.75 Donations 11,754.46 All other sources 613.89 -------- $105,143.61 The expenditures for the same period were $102,570.64, of which $33,613.56 was for salaries and wages. This is a private institution exempt from city or State control, subject to no governmental supervision except examination by the State Board of Charities, yet ninety per cent of its income is public money, and almost one third of the cost of maintenance is charged to salaries and wages. These two cases are mentioned not in criticism of the work or methods of the institutions, but as representing a fair average of the salary account of all the larger private charitable societies. They also fairly represent the two extremes in the source of their income, one receiving ninety per cent of public money, the other a little more than thirty per cent. Recent investigations conducted by the city comptroller and supplemented by the agents of the State Board of Charities disclose abuses in the expenditure of public money by certain small societies so flagrant that the appropriations for the current year have been withheld. In these cases the salary account was always the chief expenditure, but it was also discovered that whatever relief got beyond the headquarters of the societies went to professional beggars, who had no difficulty in deceiving the persons in charge. It was found that persons in good health had lived comfortably for months, perhaps for years, on public charity dispensed through private organizations. These professional beggars would obtain food at one place, clothing at another, coal at a third, small sums of money from all three perhaps, then reverse the order of application or appeal to newer organizations if detection threatened. Relief was extended in many instances with little or no effort on the part of the societies to ascertain the merits of a case or the honesty of an applicant. One small society was found to have expended practically all of the money received from the city in the payment of the living expenses of the person who had the entire management of the organization. The charitable work of a year consisted in the distribution of a small quantity of cast-off clothing and a few bushels of potatoes. The reports of the society contained the names of directors who had never served and knew nothing of the true condition of the organization. They had merely consented that their names might be used as a guarantee of reliability and to aid in the work of soliciting contributions. One case has been found where a mother and daughter lived comfortably by selling coal given to them by charitable societies. One private institution, now abolished, boarded committed children and received two dollars a week from the city for each child. The children were fed on fish and potatoes at a cost of forty-four cents each per week. After these facts were discovered the city authorities could not remove the children until the Board of Health condemned and closed the building under the provisions of the sanitary code. The minor abuses in the way of aiding undeserving persons extend to nearly all the private societies that receive city money. Those that exercise care and have been long established are often deceived by professional beggars. After his investigation of the subject the city comptroller established in his office a bureau of examination for the purpose of placing a check on the many small societies that indulge in indiscriminate charity at the expense of the city, but he soon found that he was powerless to correct all abuses. The present condition can not be corrected and public charity placed upon a practical basis and limited to the real necessities of the deserving poor until the city government begins to deal with each society and institution upon its merits. Changes and reforms to the present system will come in time, but progress will be slow because charity is a valid excuse at the bar of public opinion for the reckless expenditure of city money, and for that reason it appeals strongly to the average politician and lawmaker. Charity will cover with a mantle of commendation a multitude of abuses and crave pardon for gross frauds. It is the pastime of the rich and their gratuity to the poor. The magic of the word seems to move a Legislature and open the treasure vaults of city and State. ALASKA AND THE KLONDIKE. A JOURNEY TO THE NEW ELDORADO. BY ANGELO HEILPRIN, PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AT THE ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES OF PHILADELPHIA, FELLOW OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. II.--SAN FRANCISCO OF THE NORTH. [Illustration: DAWSON AND KLONDIKE CITY (SOUTH DAWSON) IN SEPTEMBER, 1898.] A first impression of Dawson, in August, 1898, could not be other than one calculated to bring up comparisons with strange and foreign lands. As we saw it, approaching from the water side, it persistently suggested the banks of the Yang-tse-kiang, or of some other Chinese river, on which a densely apportioned population had settled. Hundreds--one is almost tempted to say thousands--of boats were lined up against the river front, and so packed in rows back of one another that exit from the inner line was made possible only by a passive accommodation from the outside. There were steam craft, house-boats, scows, and a variety of minor bottoms, ranging from the hay-packed raft to the graceful Peterboro canoe. Many had canvas spread over them, giving house quarter to those who preferred the economy of an owned estate to the high-priced cabins of log huts and hotels, and the purity of the open air to what was at least considered to be the polluted atmosphere of the stable city. It would be far from the truth to assume that this floating population was composed exclusively of men, women, and children; there were dogs galore, abundant by both presence and voice, horses and mules, and an occasional goat betrayed itself munching among hay-packs and the usual combination of simple and hard things which make up goat food. One canvas bore the tempting inscription "Hot and Cold River Baths," several carried legends of variously designated laundries, and a few even invited to "Board and Lodging, Cheap." Of course, the word cheap had here a special etymologic significance, and bore little relation to the same form of word which is current in lexicons. [Illustration: SOME MUD IN THE MAIN STREET--FIRST AVENUE.] The first favorable impression of dry land in Dawson was tempered by a knowledge that even here were many moist spots. The mud lay in great pools along the main street--First Avenue or Front Street--but hardly in sufficient depth to make walking dangerous. Dogs and goats could alone drown in it. It is true that an occasional wading burro or even a mule would find a dangerously low level, but I am not aware that any in this condition had added to a list of serious casualties. No mention is made in this connection of cats, for, in truth, only two specimens of the feline family had up to this time reached Dawson--one, a blue-ribboned kitten, which was endearingly received as the mascot of the Yukon Mining Exchange. [Illustration: THE MAIN STREET IN A SPRING FRESHET.] The Dawsonites are not entirely oblivious to the discomforts of mud, for an effort is being made to block it out with sawdust, of which the three or four sawmills in the town furnish a goodly supply. In some parts a rough corduroy has been attempted, but the price of lumber, two hundred dollars per thousand linear feet, renders this form of construction too expensive for general use, especially in a community all of whose members, female as well as male, are prepared to stem the tide with high-top boots. About one half the street length shows the pretense of wooden sidewalks, but no one has yet recognized a special responsibility for repairs, or seemingly considered that a continuous walk requires a continuous support. Walking is a succession of ups and downs; boards are missing here, other are smashed elsewhere, and the whole walk gives the impression of having been in existence for centuries rather than for the period of a short twelvemonth. It was not difficult to determine what, perhaps, the majority of the sixteen thousand inhabitants of Dawson were doing at the time of our arrival. They were simply loitering, and the streets were packed with humanity. This was not strange, either, for it must have been difficult to resist the enjoyment of that open sunshine, that soft, warm atmosphere which is the delight of the summer climate of the far North. Never had I experienced anything comparable, and others who had traveled much agreed with my experience. On my way to the hotel, the "Fair View," which had been strongly recommended for its _cuisine_ and the circumstance that it was "brand" new in its appointments--having only come into existence a few days before--I caught a good general glimpse of the town, the dominant features of which were registered in the two sides of the main thoroughfare along the river front. A nearly continuous row of one-story, or at the utmost two-story, frame shacks or booths, many of them still in canvas form, and most of them supported over the river's bank by pile proppings, built up the river side of this First Avenue. All manner of articles, both serviceable and unserviceable, for the Klondike business were displayed, mostly in cramped quarters. The variety of things that had in so brief a period found their way to this region was truly astonishing, and one marveled at the mental ingenuity which spirited some of these articles to a _champ de vente_. Surely nothing but "manifest destiny" could have placed a mammoth's molar on sale for a hundred dollars, when it was thought that a period of starvation was reigning in the town. And yet almost alongside of it were posters announcing that four loaves of bread could be purchased for one dollar--in another place "six loves" for the same price--and that "half an ounce" of gold dust, the equivalent of eight dollars, would gain admission to the best seat witnessing a boxing and wrestling contest. In addition to the booths doing a regular merchandise business, there were those whose masters ministered to a specialty--druggists and doctors, photographers, auctioneers, and brokers of one kind or another. "Bartlett Bros., Packers" served the inner core of the gold regions by means of long trains of pack-mules, but they were not the only ones to whom the _cargador_ was an officer militant. Dog teams there were as well as mule teams, and the majesty of the law was hardly considered invaded when the former effected a junction with man in the capacity of common carriers. One of the most interesting sights was to me the large number of letters awaiting ownership which were tacked up to the fronts and sides of different buildings, in the most public way petitioning for rapid delivery. My first letter in Dawson was obtained by stripping it from a door-jamb, but it was three weeks before my attention had been directed to it by a friendly discoverer. To obtain anything from the post office was a most exhaustive process, and usually required a long wait, sometimes of a day, or even of two days, before entry could be obtained into the small room where the sorting, distribution, and dispensation of mail matter were being effected. Even when finally issued, this matter was usually of several weeks' antiquity of arrival, the sorting of tons of substance being much beyond the capacity of the few official hands that were engaged in the work. [Illustration: DOG-TEAM EXPRESS--DAWSON.] By far the most imposing side of the street was that which faced the river. Here, at least, were real buildings. The stately depots of the Alaska Commercial and North America Trading and Transportation Companies, with their outer casing of corrugated iron, would have done credit to a town of larger capacity than Dawson, and in regions much more accessible to civilization than the Northwest Territory. Farther on, the signs of a number of well-built saloons--"The Dominion," "The Pioneer," etc.--attract attention, not by the supposition that they are alone in the business, since they are supported by probably not less than two or three score others of their kind, but by their specially distinctive interiors; one of these is embellished inside by a series of four mural decorations in oil or distemper, representing a range of subject from Morro Castle, Havana, to a "Moonlight on the Yukon," for which a resident artist "of promise," whose work was done in an open lot, received the handsome compensation of eight hundred dollars. They were befitting the place which they graced. [Illustration: JUNCTION OF THE KLONDIKE WITH THE YUKON.] A more intimate acquaintance with these saloons made it plain that they were patronized both for the drinks which were sold over the bar for fifty cents or more and for the gaming tables which in open evidence betrayed a surpassingly strong interest in faro, _rouge et noir_, and roulette. Crowds were watching the fortunes of the play at every turn. From the front entrance quite to the rear some of the more favored halls were packed, but with an element that seemed little disposed to disturbance of any kind. While the drinking of spirituous liquors is very largely indulged in, I believe that during all my stay in Dawson only three cases of obtrusive drunkenness were brought to my attention; and of riotism my experience was wholly negative. Life and property are considered safe even in the most doubtful establishments, and it is not uncommon for a man to pass hours in a crowded dance hall with virtually all his possessions, possibly a few hundred dollars, or it may be thousands, carried in the form of gold dust in his trousers pockets. Two main factors are involved in this condition of security or in the feeling that it exists. The first of these is, perhaps, a wholesome dread of the Canadian Mounted Police, whose efficiency in the direction of controlling order is conceded by every one; and the second, the circumstance that the inhabitants of Dawson and of the adjoining Klondike region are not, as is so largely supposed, a mere assortment of rough prospectors, intent upon doing anything for the sake of acquiring gold, but a fair representation of good and indifferent elements borrowed from all professions and stations of life, and not from one country alone, but from nearly all parts of the civilized globe. During my brief stay I stumbled upon "counts," "sirs," military and naval officers, scientists, lawyers, newspaper men, promoters, and others of broad and liberal standing; and if some of these were undistinguishable in external garb from their brethren in mustard-colored mackinaws whose sole resource was digging for gold, their polished and intellectual method was evidence enough that civilization was present in good quantity along the upper Yukon. The fact that there are three weekly newspapers published in Dawson--the Nugget, Midnight Sun, and Dawson Miner, the first two selling for fifty cents a copy and the last for twenty-five cents--can hardly be considered to prove this condition, although favoring it; for, though the substance and especially the typography of the journals are quite good, the demand for reading matter is such that almost anything could realize a subscription list. The long-belated New York journals seem to command a steady sale on the news stands, where one also sees displayed the small and (in our country) gratuitously distributed scenic book of the transcontinental railways put up for fifty cents. The Argosy, Strand, Munsey's, and Cosmopolitan were the ruling magazines during my visit, and each of these could be had for seventy-five cents a number. Regretfully must it be said that the female portion of the population does not sustain the male either in character or diversity. I tried in various ways to ascertain the number of women who represented the community, but failed to obtain a satisfactory accounting. A large proportion of those who are in evidence, and perhaps even by far the greater number, belong to the "red" aristocracy, or at least to that side where steady principles are treated with little consideration and respect. I use the word aristocracy advisedly, for it is a notorious fact that an amount of deference is paid to these creatures of shame which is not given to the virtuous or self-respecting woman; and that they themselves, recognizing their standing, are apt to look down upon the rest of their kin, and to even question their proper privileges. A large part of the broadly capacious Second Avenue, together with equally conspicuous sections of the town elsewhere, is given up to the public display of the inmates of neatly constructed log cabins bearing such devices as "Saratoga," "Bon-Ton," "The Lucky Cigar Store," "Green Tree," etc. The number of open houses is probably less than in most mining camps, and far below what it is in some places. In deference to a demand tax of fifty dollars, levied on each member of the profession to pay part costs of two fire engines which had been brought to the town, there was a response of only sixty-nine, and this was considered a sufficiently close representation not to press the matter any further. A community of this kind must necessarily have its dance halls and places of amusement. The latter consisted at the time of my arrival of four "theatres" or "opera houses"--the "Combination," "Monte Carlo," "Mascot," and "Pavilion," two of which suspended or closed up before the "season" had fairly opened. Ordinarily, the price of a drink at the bar of entrance paid for admission to the performance with seat, and many will agree with me in believing that the admission was fully paid. The acting need not be worse at any theater, and the singing could hardly be surpassed in its eccentricities; yet the performances appeared to satisfy a general demand, as ordinarily the houses were packed to their full capacity evening after evening. Needless is it to say that the performances are not intended for women in good standing, and few such are ever present, unless heavily screened behind the curtains of the "boxes." The plays are all of a low order, but the worst is not much worse than some of the plays that are tolerated in all their nastiness in some of our own legitimate theaters. It is singular and interesting as showing the influence of necessity that a sacred Sunday concert in aid of the fire department was successfully carried through in the capacious halls of one of the most notorious dancing resorts. There are now two banks in Dawson--the Bank of British North America and the Canadian Bank of Commerce. In the early days of August the first of these was still housed in a tent, and before the end of the month a stately wooden structure with flagstaff, and with commodious quarters for the representing officers and accountants, gave dignity to the institution, while it lent style to the corner upon which it was erected. Adjoining it now is the architecturally most imposing but by no means largest building in Dawson--the three-storied, bow-windowed log cabin of Alexander McDonald, the recognized "King of the Klondike"--intended primarily as an office building. It is a truly fine expression of the art of log-cabin building. In many ways one of the most interesting buildings, if such it can be called, was the air space, with canvas top, which adjoined one of the theaters and was used by Signor Gandolfo for a fruit store. There was no architectural quality to commend this space; nor, indeed, was there anything else in its favor, except that it was in the right place and brought both lessor and lessee fortunes. For the privileges of this space of five feet width the occupant paid the handsome rental of one hundred and twenty dollars a month, or twenty-four dollars per single foot of frontage; his profits were, however, such as to justify this payment, and before leaving he confided to me his plan of renting one half of the establishment. Conceive of the character of a store five feet wide, the opposite sides of which are devoted to quite distinct interests! Other sites rent for very little less, and the singular part of it is that much of the rental goes to the pockets of certain assumed owners, whose actual rights are largely in the nature of a "grab" or of squatter sovereignty alone. [Illustration: ARRIVAL OF THE "SUSIE" FROM "DOWN THE RIVER."] Dawson extends up the river for about two miles, virtually coalescing with and taking in what has been euphoniously called Lousetown and also Klondike City. These more southerly parts carry with them certain characteristics which are either wanting in the main city or are there but feebly represented. The closely packed tents remind one of an army gathering or of the furniture of some religious camp meeting; walking between them might almost be considered to be a branch of navigation. Inscriptions on the canvas tell us of certain "brothers from St. Louis" being occupants here, and of "the Jolly Four from----" occupants elsewhere. Representatives of the press, physicians, and attorneys all have their inscriptions. But the most interesting constructions, picturesque as much as they are instructive, are the elevated platform _caches_, diminutive log cabins, which on high stilts store a multitude of articles in safe keeping and beyond reach of the army of hungry dogs which are everywhere prowling about and carousing upon all manner of odds and ends. Their appearance, especially where they are placed among trees and bushes, is such that the observer can hardly resist the feeling that he is traveling in a region of primitive pile-dwellings--it may be the interior of New Guinea or the forest tract of one of the Guianas. Dawson, which now owns the right to celebrate its third anniversary, is destined before long to assume a modern garb. It already has its electric plant, and before many months have passed electric illumination will lift the burden of the dark winter night. It is believed, too, that an electric railroad for freight and passenger service will be constructed in the course of the present year into the heart of the adjoining gold region. The tiresome accounts of bad trails will then be a thing of the past. In its business aspects Dawson does not materially differ from the majority of the boom towns of the United States, though of course it has its peculiarities. In the period of little more than a year it has gathered to itself, besides the usual class of merchants, representatives of a number of professions, such as doctors, lawyers, chemists, and assayers, most of whom, especially of the first two classes, appeared to be doing at least fairly well. Mine brokers, or simply venders of claims, are numerous, but their service does not in most cases sustain confidence; the display of posters announcing "bonanzas" in mining properties may be effective at times, but ordinarily the investor turns either to the Mining Exchange, a reasonably well-conducted private enterprise, or to claim-holders on the ground. The auction of claims at the Exchange was always largely attended at the times of my visits, and the bidding was frequently very spirited. The allowance of a time limit of ten days in which to make an examination of properties purchased and of the titles thereto before payment, beyond a forfeit of ten per cent, was exacted, naturally inspired confidence in the method of the transaction, and there is no question that a considerable number of good properties were parted over the boards here, and with eminent satisfaction to the purchasers. The practice of medicine is necessarily governed by the laws which are in effect in the Dominion of Canada, and it requires the possession on the part of the practitioner of a diploma properly accredited from some recognized college of medicine in Canada. Graduation with diploma from the best medical schools in the United States is not considered to meet the requirement--nor, for that matter, is the diploma of any but a British school. This restriction also applies in the case of professional trained nurses. A number of cases closely bordering on litigation, and at one time even threatening to bring about international complications, have arisen in connection with practice violating this law; but despite the overwhelmingly large number of foreigners who are resident in the region, and who, it was thought by some, had the right to consult practitioners of their own nationality or choice, there is now a peaceful submission to the reading of the statute. The exaction is in no way intended to legislate against foreigners, but is simply a provision of the Dominion laws, similar to that which requires a "Dominion surveyor" who intends doing official survey work in British Columbia to be properly accredited with a special paper of that section of Canada (as distinguished from the Northwest Territory, etc.). Like the physicians, all surveyors giving out work under their names must be officially licensed from the Dominion, although those not thus certificated are permitted to do office or field work for others who are. A field of labor that has already been entered upon by women is stenography and typewriting. There has been considerable demand for this kind of work, and there will continue to be much more, but it may be doubted if profits arising from it will ever equal what has been attained in millinery and the sale of fancy dress goods. One of the earliest milliners to come out of Dawson told me at Bennett that she had disposed of a hat which brought her two hundred and eighty dollars (in April, 1898), and its only ornamentation was two black ostrich feathers! Such prices are to-day a thing away in the past, but fur capes or circulars are still marketable for three hundred dollars and upward. Toward a more intimate acquaintance with the methods and lines of business now followed in Dawson we subjoin a facsimile of portions of the advertising page of the Yukon Midnight Sun, bearing date of September 3, 1898. [Illustration: FACSIMILE OF PART OF YUKON MIDNIGHT SUN, SEPTEMBER 3, 1898.] THE NEGRO QUESTION. BY J. L. M. CURRY, LL.D., GENERAL AGENT OF THE PEABODY EDUCATION FUND AND OF THE JOHN F. SLATER EDUCATION FUND; LATE MINISTER TO SPAIN. The negro question is not of recent origin. The Iliad of our woes began in 1620, when negroes were first brought to the colony of Virginia and sold as slaves. Slavery antedates history. The traffic of Europeans in negroes existed a half century before the discovery of America. The very year in which Charles V sailed with a powerful expedition against Tunis to check the piracies of the Barbary states, and to emancipate enslaved Christians in Africa, he gave an open legal sanction to the African slave trade. When independence was declared in 1776 all the colonies held slaves. Slavery, said the late Senator Ingalls, disappeared from the Northern States "by the operation of social, economic, and natural laws," and "the North did not finally determine to destroy this system until convinced that its continuance threatened not only their industrial independence but their political importance." In course of years "the peculiar institution" assumed a sectional character. The war between the States precipitated a crisis. President Lincoln began then the work of emancipation. "As commander-in-chief of the army and navy in time of war, I suppose I have the right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy.... I view the measure [the Proclamation] as a practical war measure according to the advantages or disadvantages it will offer to the suppression of the rebellion." Senator Ingalls's testimony is as follows: "It may be admitted that the emancipation of the slaves was not contemplated by any considerable portion of the American people when the war for the Union began, and it was not brought to pass until the fortunes of war became desperate, and was then justified and defended upon the plea of military necessity." The Southern States ratified the amendments to the Constitution under penalty of otherwise remaining out of the Union and in political and military vassalage. The abolition of slavery has the assent of all sane men. Apart from ethical considerations, the subjection of the will, thought, or labor of a mature human being to the whim, caprice, or legal right of another is a gross political and economical blunder, unwise and indefensible. After emancipation came citizenship and enfranchisement of the freedmen, and the punitive measures of reconstruction, which were the outcome of hatred, revenge, desire for party ascendency, and which no good man can now approve. No conquering nation ever inflicted on a conquered people more cruel injustice than the disfranchisement of the most capable citizens and the enfranchisement of liberated slaves. Certain great civil rights are the necessary and proper consequences of freedom. Suffrage is not a natural right, nor a legal, political, or general result of freedom or citizenship. The large majority of citizens do not and can not vote. The liberation of millions of slaves was the most gigantic and, in itself, one of the most beneficent acts of this century. Nothing is comparable to it as a triumph of the inalienable rights of man. Humanity and justice demanded emancipation. Re-enslavement no one proposes or desires. All would rejoice in the prosperity and progress of the Afro-American, but with freedom came citizenship and suffrage, and these revolutionized our Government. Elements undreamed of were introduced as constituents. When the Constitution and the resulting Union were formed, such a citizenship with franchise was not proposed, and if proposed would not have been listened to for a moment. The most infatuated negrophilist would not stultify himself by asserting that the Union of States would or could have been consummated with the present incongruous, heterogeneous citizenship. From these and other facts has been evolved what has been called the negro problem. In the discussion, it is best to eliminate all extraneous considerations, all issues which, as the lawyers say, are "_dehors_ the record." Government is a very practical business. The end is the securing and preserving the peace, safety, and well-being of the State. Civil government has no mission of general philanthropy. This problem, while of terrific importance in the South, where the black population is persistently congestive, is not, in its ramifications or direct effects, local or sectional. It affects every community and every section. It is of paramount national importance, complex, and involving social, moral, and political considerations. Its gravity can not be exaggerated. It compels the attention and demands all the resources of patriots, philanthropists, statesmen. It thrusts itself, uninvited and unwelcomed, into religious and social assemblies and legislative councils. It is pervasive, continuing, vital. It is better to look it full in the face and give it dispassionate thought. It need scarcely be said that in this discussion no hostile reference is made to individuals. Some negroes are men of intelligence, integrity, patriotism, and stand on a plane with our best citizens in virtues and mental qualifications.[C] The gist of this contention is not based on special exceptions, but on the race in the aggregate. [Footnote C: Such an extraordinary man as Booker T. Washington is an honor to any country and worthy of unlimited confidence and regard.] We find in the South the presence of two distinct peoples, with irreconcilable racial characteristics and diverse historical antecedents. The Caucasian and the negro are not simply unlike, but they are contrasted, and are as far apart as any other two races of human beings. They are unassimilable and immiscible without rapid degeneracy. Ethnologically they are nearly polar opposites. With the Caucasian progress has been upward. Whatever is great in art, invention, literature, science, civilization, religion, has characterized him. In his native land the negro has made little or no advancement for nearly four thousand years. Surrounded by and in contact with a higher civilization, he has not invented a machine, nor painted a picture, nor written a book, nor organized a stable government, nor constructed a code of laws. He has not suppressed the slave trade, which, according to recent testimony, was never more flourishing. He has no monuments nor recorded history. For thousands of years there lies behind the race one dreary, unrelieved, monotonous chapter of ignorance, nakedness, superstition, savagery. All efforts to reclaim, civilize, Christianize, have been disastrous failures, except what has been accomplished in this direction in the United States. It need not be disguised, for it is the ever-present, indisputable fact, that while there are alleviations of the unpleasantness, the relations between the negroes and their co-citizens of the Caucasian race are strained and unsatisfactory. The friction, the prejudice, the cleavage, is not between Teutonic and Latin on the one side and Semitic on the other, nor between Saxon and Celt; it lies deeper, yields less readily to palliatives and remedies, and seems a matter of adjustment for the remotest future. It may help to understand the situation if we analyze its causes. The great revolution suddenly transformed the customs, traditions, and conditions of the two races. Ownership gave way to freedom; compulsory and wage-unrewarded labor to absolute control of person; inequality, inferiority, subjection, to equality in the eye of the law; restrained locomotion to license of movement; kindness, interest in life, wealth, and physical welfare, to suspicion, distress, alienation. With property in man, regulated and enforced by laws in the interest of the master, labor was organized, directed by intelligent control to the development of agricultural resources and to the building up of a society which for refinement of manners, hospitality, and administrative capacity, has elicited praise from disinterested travelers and investigators. The negro, whatever he may have attained from the discipline of slavery, was not cultivated in intelligence, in manual skill, in forethought, power of initiative, in thrift, and the comforts and graces of home life. When freed, many were deluded by deceptive promises. They construed freedom to mean a division of property. Release from bondage led to intemperance and extravagance. Accustomed to control, unaccustomed to self-reliance, having others to think, plan, buy, and sell for them, to supply wants, to watch over them from the cradle to the coffin, many, when left to themselves, reverted to primitive habits, and became idle and worthless. Slavery had cursed the South with ignorant, unskilled, uninventive labor. Freedom did not change its character. The war, liberation of slaves, the sudden extinguishment of millions of property, bankrupted the South. Subsistence, recovery of means of living, rehabilitation, reorganization of those agencies, which are, with intelligent work, the chief means of the wealth of civilized peoples, became the first duty after hostilities ceased. This demanded steady, persistent industry, the change of former methods of agriculture, subdivision of farms, diversification of pursuits, opening of academies and colleges, and establishment of public schools for free and universal education. The contrast between the wealth and prosperity of the North and South presents an appalling picture. Naturally, the Southern people were in despair, and too often they vented their dissatisfaction, their rage, upon the irresponsible and unoffending negro. Slavery _per se_ is not conducive to self-restraint of the enslaved, to high ethical standards, and the best types of human life. When the interest and authority of owners were removed and former religious instruction was crippled or withdrawn, the negroes fell rapidly from what had been attained in slavery to a state of immorality, and, in some cases, to original fetichism. Some remained immovable in their former faith, but many, especially of the younger generation, of both sexes, gave proof of what degeneracy can accomplish in a quarter of a century. It is very common for them to divorce religion and piety. Artificial excitement, passionate emotion, was substituted for a faith which should be the product of a knowledge of and deep reverence for the Word of God. The danger of doing harm, or injustice, restrains my pen from disclosing a mass of disgusting material which could only shock sensibilities and stagger credulity. It is, besides, very easy to magnify our own virtues and others' vices. It is a prevalent mode of religiousness to repent of other people's sins, and to get superfluous merit by showing how others fall short of our attainments. Lowell said, "Everybody has a mission (with a capital M) to attend to everybody else's business," and "to make his own whim the law, and his own range the horizon of the universe." We have all read of the philanthropic Mrs. Jelliby neglecting home and children to sweeten the lot of the unregenerate natives of Borrioboola Gha. Still, testimony, to satisfy the most skeptical, could be adduced _ad nauseam_, from men and women doing educational and missionary work among the colored people, to show the deplorable depths into which multitudes have sunk. Under the Reconstruction Acts there was a deliberate, predetermined attempt and purpose to put the freedmen in control of the Southern States. The late slaves were enfranchised; the best class of white men were disfranchised. The law presumes that a man or a State intends the logical consequence of acts done. In South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana a majority of the voters, under the coerced policy, were negroes. In other States they were so numerous that a combination with a small fraction of white voters would give the ascendency. In Virginia, a coalition between non-taxpaying white people and negroes, under skilled and bold leadership, accomplished partial repudiation of the State debt. Superadd to this undisguised Federal intent the hungry adventurers who, as governors, judges, marshals, district attorneys, etc., flocked like vultures around the carcass, the horde of persons whose object was to pilfer and plunder, who played upon the ignorance, the superstitions, and gratitude of the negro and made the credulous victims believe that their former masters were not to be trusted in elections, and you have a picture which imagination fails to realize. The negroes, neither by apprenticeship, nor political education, not intellectual culture, were prepared for the boon, and their unscrupulous friends organized them into secret societies and inflamed hopes and expectations of wealth and dominancy. Casper Hauser transferred from a dungeon to a throne would be a fit illustration of this defiance of all the teachings of the past. Suffrage was a wrong to the nation, to the States, to the white and black races, and especially to the negro. Negro suffrage is a farce, a burlesque on elections, and only evil. The negroes generally vote as puppets, as machines, and have not the remotest conception of the character or effect of the act they are ignorantly performing, or of the issues involved in the contest, or of the functions or duties of the officers voted for. Huxley says, "Voting power as a means of giving effect to opinion is more likely to prove a curse than a blessing to the voter, unless that opinion is the result of a sound judgment operating upon sound knowledge." This premature investiture of the negro with suffrage reciprocally provoked alienation, bitterness, strife, and a resolute purpose on the part of the white people not to submit to the misrule and tyranny of ignorance and pauperism, but to resort to all necessary methods to defeat such a result. It is needless to recapitulate the facts of many thousand years in order to raise the inference of racial difference between the Caucasian and the negro. The immigration to our country is the proof of antagonism of races. The foreigner stays away from the South; so in a large degree does the Northern man. Notwithstanding the unsurpassed climate, the rivers and gulf and mountains, the fertile soil, the varied products, the hospitable welcome, the territory occupied by the negro is persistently avoided. By the census of 1880 the proportion of foreign-born in all the former slave States was 3.5 per cent; in the Northern States about twenty per cent; in eight Southern States, where the negroes abound, there was in 1880 only one and a third per cent who were of foreign birth. Mr. Lincoln, in 1858, in accounting for the repulsion, said: "There is a physical difference between the two races which will probably forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.... I am not, or ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor of intermarrying with white people." Absorption, assimilation, is not to be dreamed of. The negro is no nearer common fellowship, equality of association, than he was in 1865. Reconstruction measures, constitutional amendments, sword and bayonet, ecclesiastical anathemas, fulminations of press and pulpit, all power of church and state and public opinion, have not altered, can not alter, what seems ineradicable. Race antagonism reaches deeper than political affiliation. If every negro at the South were to vote the Democratic ticket in every subsequent election, the race division would remain the same. Can these differences be effaced, alienations be healed, and overshadowing perils be averted? What concerns the patriot is to find a solution for this gigantic and appalling problem. The statesman has not yet arisen, disposed to grapple with the problem, or capable of suggesting a feasible and efficacious remedy. With the least hardship to the negro, proper recognition of his rights as a man, due regard to the just ends of our Government, and the purposes of its founders, some scheme, if possible, wise, adequate, and comprehensive, should be devised. Whatever hitherto has been suggested has been met with opposition and is justly liable to criticism. The most obvious remedy, and which has been tried with some success, is to uplift the race by means of public schools and proper religious instruction. All honor to the schools that train the youth into self-respecting manhood and womanhood! All honor for the efforts that are making to correct the debasement of slavery, to unite faith and practice, to infuse religious life with an ethical Christianity, and to form a moral basis for life and character! The crimes of both races in the South, pushed within the last few years to most brutal atrocities, show that there can be no safety for free institutions, no guarding against savage degradation, if either race be kept in crass ignorance. Both must suffer. It would be some relief from ballot-box evils and perils if the examples of New England and of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina were followed by all the States. As "universal suffrage has no anchorage except in the people's intelligence," Massachusetts requires of voters a prepayment of taxes, and voting and office-holding are limited to those who can read the Constitution in the English language and write their names. What has been done by States, denominations, and individuals through schools is not discouraging to larger and better efforts, but is a stimulus to and an assurance of excellent results. The plantation system of the South, when land was in the hands of a few territorial magnates, was of very doubtful utility. A bold peasantry is a country's pride, and a small farmer should take the place of the large landed proprietor. If the negroes should acquire and hold more real estate, they would be of more value as citizens, and would have increased interest in the stability of laws, enforcing of contracts, and the preservation of State honor. An enlargement of the number of those who have a solid stake in the well-being of the country would be adding to the ranks of natural supporters of law and honor, and strengthening the true foundations on which the stability of a republican government must rest. The congestion of the negroes aggravates the difficulties and dangers of the problem. The area of the States holding slaves in 1860 was 901,740 square miles, and of the Northern States, excluding Alaska, 2,123,860 square miles. By the census of 1890, the total population of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, was 37.3 per cent of negroes and 62.7 per cent of whites; or, including Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, 30.7 per cent of negroes and 69.3 per cent of whites. The African citizens are localized within a narrow area. A French statesman said, "Cross the Pyrenees and Africa begins." Cross Mason and Dixon's line, or the Ohio and Potomac Rivers, and in a truer sense Africa begins, for south of that line the negroes are massed. It has been nearly forty years since slavery existed, for no one born since 1860 was ever practically a slave, and yet freedom has not diffused the seven million and a half of Africans. Despite all the traditions of bondage, all the misrepresentations of modern literature, all the exaggerated accounts of intimidation and cruelty, the South remains the home of the negro. When he is told that equality, friendship, political sympathy, and good wages may be secured by passing an invisible geographical line, he persistently refuses to be seduced across. Senator Windom, of Minnesota, advocated a plan for distributing by assisted emigration, but nothing came of it. Senator Edmunds, in discussing the Chinese question, said: "The people of Massachusetts would not be hungry for an eruption of a million of the inhabitants of Africa, ... because they believe, either by instinct or education, that it is not good for the two races to be brought into that kind of contact in that place.... The fundamental idea of a prosperous republic must be a homogeneity of its people." Colonization as a remedy has had many strong advocates. As early as 1800 the Assembly of Virginia, in secret session, instructed the Governor to correspond with the President with the object of procuring a colony to which the negroes could be sent. Jefferson began the correspondence. The Legislature resumed the question, and expressed its preference for "Africa or any of the Spanish or Portuguese settlements in South America" as the place "to which free negroes or mulattoes, and such negroes or mulattoes as may be emancipated," might be sent or choose to remove. In 1805 the members of Congress were instructed to endeavor to procure suitable territory in Louisiana. In 1811, being asked his opinion as to a settlement on the coast of Africa, Jefferson replied that "nothing is more to be wished than that the United States would themselves undertake to make such an establishment on the coast of Africa." In 1813 the Legislature openly and almost unanimously adopted, for the third time, resolutions similar to those of 1800. The same year the Colonization Society was formed, out of which grew the Republic of Liberia. President Lincoln, in his first annual message, December, 1861, referring to the two classes of liberated persons that might be thrown upon Congress for their disposal, recommended "that in any event steps be taken for colonizing both classes at some place or places in a climate congenial to them. It might be well to consider, too, whether the free colored people already in the United States could not be included in such colonization." Congress responded by voting one hundred thousand dollars for the voluntary emigration of freedmen from the District of Columbia to Haiti or Liberia, and later, in July, 1862, gave five hundred thousand dollars for the colonization of negroes in some tropical country beyond the limits of the United States. Mr. Lincoln continued to favor the policy of removal to another country, and five days after signing the above act he read to his Cabinet a proposed order for "the colonization of negroes in some tropical country." Burdened with this great question, amid the exigencies of the mighty war, he continued to push the matter, and had Secretary Seward send a circular letter to England, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark, with regard to colonizing the negroes in some of their tropical possessions. Offers came from the Danish West Indies, Dutch Surinam, British Guiana, Honduras, Haiti, New Granada, and Ecuador. Mr. Lincoln considered the offers from New Granada and an island off Haiti, and even sent a colony to the latter. Again, in his annual message in 1862, he argued for colonization, and asked for an appropriation, but, under the passions of the terrible conflict then raging, the Congress, instead of heeding the request, repealed the former act appropriating five hundred thousand dollars. The Indians, against their will, were transported, by coercive measures, to allotted lands beyond the Mississippi, but that was before the modern discovery that the United States should grant "fraternity and assistance to all people" under other than republican governments, and that universal suffrage was the infallible expedient for civilizing semibarbarous peoples. President Harrison, in his letter of acceptance, writing on another subject, says, "We are already under a duty to defend our civilization by excluding alien races whose ultimate assimilation with our people is neither possible nor desirable." Remedies, strong and adequate and feasible, may not be found readily, but there are gentler and quieter agencies which may be used by both races to mutual advantage. The white people, in accepting the legitimate consequences of defeat, in vigorous efforts to restore antebellum prosperity, in establishing schools, in reconstructing shattered society, have done nobly, but they are not without sin. Laws, general and wise and impartial, on the statute-book need for their enforcement a sustaining public opinion, but this has not always been forthcoming. Lawless and violent proceedings, always unnecessary and demoralizing, sometimes as brutal as the crimes which excited horror; harsh and unjust contracts; interferences in elections; false registration and counting of votes, and other acts which the plea of self-preservation did not justify, have evinced the harshness and injustice of dominant power, and have not tended to soften prejudices or make the situation more tolerable. Each race is fortunately improving in intercourse and in dealings with the other, and time and sober judgment are, in a sensible degree, removing causes of alienation which are not inherent and incurable. * * * * * "What a blessing," said President Sir John Lubbock, at the late meeting of the International Congress of Zoölogists, "it would be for mankind if we could stop the enormous expenditure on engines for the destruction of life and property, and spend the tenth, the hundredth, even the thousandth part on scientific progress! Few people seem to realize how much science has done for man, and still fewer how much more it would still do if permitted. More students would doubtless have devoted themselves to science if it were not so systematically neglected in our schools; if men and boys were not given the impression that the field of discovery is well-nigh exhausted. We, gentlemen, know how far that is from being the case. Much of the land surface of the globe is still unexplored; the ocean is almost unknown; our collections contain thousands of species waiting to be described; the life-histories of many of our commonest species remain to be investigated, or have only recently been discovered." THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS AND AMERICAN CAPITAL. BY J. RUSSELL SMITH. That the Philippine Islands are of value as a place for investment is an unexplained generalization that is now being used to tempt business men. The object of this article is to discuss this generalization. The idea that the Philippine Islands are of importance to us, as a new field for our industrial developments, depends upon two assumptions: First, that we need to go beyond the bounds of the United States; second, that the Philippines offer the best available field for the satisfaction of that need. As to the first assumption, the occasion and origin of the demand for the retention of the Philippines furnish presumptive evidence that it represents no real economic want of the American people. No one ever thought of it until we heard the boom of Dewey's guns at Manila. The demands that then arose for Eastern territory were the natural result of a just pride in the amazing triumph of our navy. Before the battle of Manila a suggestion that we should take the Philippines and RECEIVE $20,000,000 as a bonus we would have deemed preposterous. Before that battle, one idea was uppermost in the minds of the American people--namely, the development of the American continent. And yet, along with the enthusiasm over the accomplishments of our army and navy, the idea has crept into some minds that we are in need of more land to develop, and that we must find it in the Eastern Hemisphere. Examination of the internal condition of the United States does not seem to indicate such need. Our exports are an index to our condition. In 1872 we exported merchandise to the value of $522,000,000; in 1898 the amount had swelled to $1,230,000,000, an increase of two hundred and thirty-five per cent. No European nation has shown such progress. Despite their colonial empires, their armies and navies, their chartered companies, their spheres of influence, and all their elaborate paraphernalia, we are competing with them in their own markets. We have pursued a policy the opposite of theirs and are outstripping them in the race for a share of the world's trade. It is not compatible with industrial wisdom to change and adopt the policy of our less successful rivals just as the success of our own policy is being fully demonstrated. A nation's commercial supremacy rests upon the same principles as a business man's leadership in his trade--namely, superiority of production. It does not require a citation of evidence to say that the producers of Europe are staggering under the burden of their armies and navies. While they are thus handicapped, we have nothing to fear unless we inflict upon ourselves a similar burden. We have succeeded by attending to our own industries, by developing our natural resources, by producing things that the people of other nations must have. That development is but begun. Even England, the ruler of the greatest colonial empire the world has ever known, the greatest manufacturing nation, the mistress of the seas, stands with almost stationary exports. The United States, the nation with a small navy, the nation that never really had a colony, the so-called isolated nation, has come by rapid strides to the point where she is the leading exporter of the world. There is no reason why the progress of the United States should be checked. England has demonstrated the fact that the nation that has the iron and coal is the commercial mistress of the world. The United States is continuing, and will continue the demonstration. England has but 900 square miles of much-used coal lands, and she gets her iron ore from Spain. We have over 200,000 square miles[D] of untouched coal lands; an almost continuous bed of iron ore, reaching from Lake Ontario to Alabama.[E] Beside this great ore bed is the Appalachian coal field, with coal mines in every State between New York and Alabama. There are mountains of iron ore in Missouri and Michigan. By the special lines of lake steamers the iron ore of Lake Superior is taken to Chicago and Cleveland, and thence carried by rail to Pittsburg. There the eastern coal completes the conditions for the most economical production of iron and steel. That gives the United States the basis for our export trade in iron, steel, and machinery. We are capturing the iron markets of the world, and, judging by our supplies, can hold them for ages. As our iron and coal are the basis of all manufacturing industry, continued attention to them will give us the control of the world's trade. [Footnote D: The last United States census puts our coal lands at something more than 225,000 square miles.] [Footnote E: "This deposit occurs as far north as the southern shores of Lake Ontario, and thence extends in an almost continuous manner through Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee to central Alabama."--_N. S. Shaler's The United States of America, vol. i, p. 432._] There are many other lines of our internal development that are yet barely begun. Irrigation is an example of this. The report of John W. Noble, Secretary of the Interior for 1891, said, "One hundred and twenty million acres that are now desert may be redeemed by irrigation so as to produce the cereals, fruits, and garden products possible in the climate where the lands are located." That is an area nearly twice as large as the Philippine Islands, and it is open to the American settler, while there is an indication that the Philippines may be inaccessible on account of their climate. Moreover, they are four times as densely populated as is the United States; and while we deem the Chinese so undesirable that we exclude him from our shores, all authorities agree that his race is superior to that of the Malays, Tagals, and Negritos who inhabit the Philippines. The irrigable area is much larger than the States of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Massachusetts combined. Those States at the present time are supporting a population of over seventeen millions, and many authorities claim that they will in the future support at least fifty millions. The regions of scanty rainfall that can be irrigated are fairly crusted with potash and other soluble mineral ingredients that nourish plant life, and give to the valleys already irrigated their astonishing fertility. This enables the farmers to support themselves on such small areas that the life is almost a communal one. The irrigated West can sustain a population as great as that sustained on an equal area in the East, or even greater.[F] For years that dry climate has been a health restorer to the sojourner there. This is not claimed for the Philippine Islands. The building up of this Western empire with its canals and irrigating ditches, its railroads and cities, will absorb a vast amount of capital, and it is a natural and easy line of development for us. Mr. Irwin has said, "To capital seeking investment in a large way, irrigation enterprises in the West offer a most solid, lucrative, and tempting field."[G] Secretary Noble has said, "No one can now compute the money value that will concentrate in these reservoirs and canals and ditches, carrying water to the fields of the husbandman, and upon which the people must depend for their prosperity."[H] [Footnote F: If we accept the reclaimable area given above as approximately correct, and apply a system of irrigation, it can be cultivated, "and made the happy home of an industrious people more than equaling in number the inhabitants of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland."--_J. N. Irwin, in Forum, vol. i, p. 742._] [Footnote G: Forum, vol. xii, p. 750.] [Footnote H: Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1891.] Five centuries ago large parts of eastern and western England were impenetrable morasses. These have entirely disappeared before the skill of the engineer. N. S. Shaler says, "The total area of the inundated lands of the United States probably exceeds 115,000 square miles, counting only those flooded areas which are at present unsuited by their excessive humidity for agricultural use, but which may be won to the service by engineering devices such as have been applied in the regions occupied by older civilizations."[I] This is more than 73,000,000 acres of drainable swamps and marshes. Lands more easy of access have, in the past, so occupied our attention that these lowlands have thus far been almost entirely neglected. They are located along our northern, eastern, and southern borders in close proximity to water transportation and to the large cities of the seaboard. They can be drained, as were the swamps of England. Their fertility will make this profitable, and they will support a large population. [Footnote I: The United States of America, vol. i, p. 382.] The public highways of the United States are, on the whole, in anything but a desirable condition, and their improvement is a good investment for the commonwealth. We have railroads to build, harbors to deepen, and canals to dig. The United States is young yet, and tremendous tasks await her labor and capital. In this country, so full of promise for the future, we are still using borrowed foreign capital. In The Forum for February, 1895, Mr. Alfred S. Lauterbach said, "That the people of the United States require European capital for the full development of the great resources of our country there can be no doubt." The same author made a "very conservative estimate," and said that we owed to Europe annually: "For dividends and interest upon American securities still held abroad, minimum $75,000,000 "For profits of foreign corporations doing business here, and of non-residents, derived from real estate, investments, partnership profits, etc., about 75,000,000 ------------ $150,000,000" That is to say, we were paying a five-per-cent interest on $3,000,000,000 of foreign money. As to the second assumption: It is claimed by some that we should have the Philippines because they will furnish us the tropical products that we are using in ever-increasing quantities. Two things are revealed in the examination of our needs of tropic products and a comparison of the Philippines with the American tropics: 1. That the Philippines are at a great disadvantage in location. 2. That America is of sufficient area and natural wealth to meet all our needs, and more. As to location: It is a first principle of commerce to get supplies where they are most accessible. It is about ten thousand miles from New York to Manila, twelve hundred to Havana, and eighteen hundred to the continent of South America. Under these conditions the freight rates must always discriminate in favor of tropic America. The disadvantage of the Philippines is increased by the fact that the ships going from San Francisco or Panama to Manila are compelled to carry their coal three thousand four hundred miles at one stretch--from Honolulu to Yokohama, the most available route. Then, again, a large part of our tropic trade, and one that shows promise of the most growth, is in the green fruits, such as cocoanuts, pineapples, lemons, oranges, and bananas. Of the last article our imports have doubled every five years since 1865. On account of distance it is not practicable to bring any of these fruits from the Philippines, but there is no limit to the amount of trade that can grow up on the lines that are now beginning to form between us and our southern neighbors. As to the fitness of tropic America to supply our needs: There are Central America, South America, and the West Indies. An examination of their area and productiveness shows that there is little to induce American industry to control any part of the Eastern Hemisphere. Of the 17,000,000 square miles that make up the Western Continent, the tropics make up 5,000,000 square miles--an area sufficient to make more than one hundred States as large as Pennsylvania; an area nearly fifty times as great as the Philippines. The variety of its productions is scarcely excelled even by the East Indies. There are only two important tropic products imported into the United States that are not already largely produced on this continent. They are Manila hemp and tea, and it would appear that the reason they come from the East is because of present labor conditions there. Manila hemp is a sort of half-wild product that may yet have an introduction to our rich tropics just as the potato was introduced into Europe, and many of our crops have been introduced from Europe. Even the tea plant thrives in the warm regions of America as far north as Tennessee. Small quantities of tea are now grown in various parts of America,[J] but the cheap labor of the East has made it unprofitable here. We are at the present time getting nine tenths of our tea from India, where Anglo-Saxon care has developed the industry and is fast driving China out of the tea market of the world. [Footnote J: United States Report on Commerce and Navigation for 1897.] There is a difference when it comes to the two great tropic staples of coffee and sugar. Our imports of these two articles in 1897 were valued at $180,000,000, while the imports of tea were less than one twelfth as much. At the present time nearly all the coffee used in the United States comes from Central and South America, whence also comes the greater part of the world's supply. The declining price of coffee indicates that we shall get it under more favorable terms in the future. We import about $100,000,000 worth of sugar per annum.[K] Approximately two fifths of it is beet sugar and comes from the continent of Europe, and the rest is cane sugar from scattered sources in the tropics. Only one sixth comes from the Eastern Hemisphere. We are getting sugar from Europe, not because it is the natural development of the industry, but because those countries are willing to give an export bounty on all that is exported. This makes exportation possible. Meanwhile the American sugar industry is left to unprogressive and slovenly methods, but it needs only a reasonable addition of capital and labor to enable it to supply the markets of the world. An Englishman of much experience in the sugar-growing colonies of Great Britain says that by the introduction of improved methods all the sugar that we use in this country could be grown on one half of the little island of Porto Rico.[L] This would cause heavy complaint from the sugar-cane region of Louisiana, and from those sections of our country that are beginning to hope for a future in the beet-sugar industry. Certainly America can supply herself in this particular. [Footnote K: Ibid.] [Footnote L: W. Allyne Ireland, in an address before the University of Pennsylvania.] India rubber is another of our tropic imports that promises to increase in importance with improvements in our ability to use it. Nearly the whole supply comes from the American tropics. There it thrives everywhere. We are importing it from almost all of our sister republics, and although it responds readily to cultivation and yields a profitable crop,[M] the main supply is yet taken from the wild trees of the forests. Like the other products it waits for the capital which it will well repay. [Footnote M: See Coffee and India-Rubber Culture in Mexico. By Matias Romero, late Mexican minister to the United States.] By a comparison of the average yields per acre of the leading tropic imports with the amounts of those imports, we shall find the area of the territories that are in cultivation to meet our present needs.[N] In 1897 we imported into this country from all sources the crops that would be yielded by 1,400 square miles of coffee, 30 of bananas, 40 of cocoa beans, 60 of India rubber, 10 of oranges; a total of 1,540 square miles. Add to that the area that will be needed for our sugar, and the result does not equal the whole of Porto Rico. The area of Porto Rico is less than 4,000 square miles. Multiply these crop areas by ten, to make allowance for crop rotation and for the time taken for new plantations to come into bearing. The result will be less than 40,000 square miles, a territory not half as great as the area of the West India islands. They in their turn do not comprise the fiftieth part of the area of tropic America. [Footnote N: The average yields of tropic produce were made out with the assistance of the Cyclopædia Britannica, Coffee and India-Rubber Culture in Mexico (Romero), and statistics obtained at the Philadelphia Commercial Museums. The amounts of the imports were taken from the United States Report on Commerce and Navigation for 1897.] When the time comes that American industry needs to develop more lands, there they lie. They are our opportunity. They have an almost virgin soil, because we have been too busy with our own internal development to give them needed attention. They need capital, and we have been borrowing money abroad to meet our needs at home. Their inhabitants are idle for lack of employment; they will respond to our capital. The United States is the natural market for the West Indies; they lie close to our shores, and when the Nicaragua Canal comes they will be but islands in an American lake--parts of the industrial unit of Greater America. They can give us the things that are needed to round out our consumption, and we can do the same for them. It is illogical and unlike American shrewdness to go seven thousand miles for tropic lands when an equally valuable, a more valuable, area is within seven hundred miles of us. The comparison becomes even more striking when it is remembered that the control of the Philippines brings to us a burden of problems from which industrial development in this country is free. The Government at Washington may spend our millions and establish government in the Philippines, but will American capital go there? Will our citizens invest their money seven thousand miles away while tropic America is so much nearer, and is, moreover, an equally rich and far more extended field? This does not assume the conquest of American regions. It is not necessary to have governmental control in order to profit by the industries of a country. The conditions of modern industry prove this most conclusively. But for this fact the progress of the world would have been much less rapid. We have an example of this in American railroads: they have been largely built by English capital; the same is also true to a greater or less degree of many of our other industries. What England has done in North America without governmental control, we can do in Central and South America when our industrial condition demands new areas to work over. By the modernized Monroe doctrine our supremacy in this hemisphere is assured, and we have the guarantee of a clear field. Our interests are also furthered by our friendly relations with the American peoples and by our nearness to them. The American policy of our forefathers is the one for us, even from the industrial point of view. America is an industrial unit, an economic unit, full of undeveloped possibilities that await the hand of American enterprise. Our resources can abundantly provide for our material needs. The continent is controlled by the most ingenious of all the races, and is dominated by the highest political ideals known to man. What need have we to reach out across seven thousand miles of ocean to take lands populous with millions of barbarians? THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE WEST INDIES. BY F. L. OSWALD. III.--REPTILES AND FISHES. The present fauna of our planet includes many varieties of mammals and reptiles, and a few kinds of birds, that are found only on certain islands--a fact which seemed rather to justify the once universal belief in the origin of species by separate acts of creation. A different theory of explanation has, however, been suggested by the discovery of fossil remains, proving the former existence of closely allied forms on continents where their battle for existence had to be fought against beasts of prey and competitors for a limited food supply. The supposed products of an island genesis by the fiat of supernatural agencies, demanding recognition in mental penance and the payment of tithes, may thus be simply animal Crusoes, favored by the positive or negative advantages of their surroundings. The dodo, in its struggle for survival, would have had no chance against South American tiger-cats. Not one of the twenty-odd species of Madagascar lemurs could have held its own against the competition of the African daylight monkeys. Yet there was a time when night apes and large ground birds seem to have had things all their own way, the world over, and Central America may have afforded a chance for existence to several species of reptiles which at present are found only on the West Indian islands. The Cuban bush tortoise (_Emys nigra_) is found only in the forests of Santiago and Puerto Principe, and there only on the south coasts. It is the most sluggish creature of its genus, and does not seem to have had enterprise enough to crawl around the sand belt of Cape Maysi and colonize the jungles of the north side provinces. It is as helpless as a hedgehog, _minus_ its bristles. The darkeys of the Cuban planters crack its armor with home-made hammers, and the _tortuga prieta_, or prieta, as they call it for short, forms a factor of holiday _menus_ as frequently as 'possum pie in southern Georgia. Swift-flowing rivers bear it away as they would a floating log, and it is wholly incredible that its ancestors should have crossed the Caribbean Sea in quest of a more congenial home; but it is possible enough that its eggs may have been ferried across on one of the driftwood islands which the Sumasinta River often tears from the coast swamps of southern Mexico and carries into the current of the Gulf Stream. The evolution of the South American giant cats was probably the death warrant of its continental relatives, but in Cuba it had no four-footed enemies except the _hutia_, or jungle rat, that now and then destroys its eggs. An equally favored islander is the grayish-yellow rock lizard, abounding in the uplands of Cuba and Hayti. The lizard-killing cranes of Honduras have not found their way to the Antilles, and the _lagartilla_ still basks in the sun that once smiled upon the indolence of the naked Lucayans. The _toco_, or Cuban hornbill, however, devours small reptiles of all sorts, and the West Indian tree lizards have become almost as nimble as squirrels. They dodge behind branches and wait to ascertain the origin of every flitting shadow, but from imminent danger save themselves by a swift descent, followed by a bold leap into the thickets of the underbrush. Their courtship is quite as grotesque as that of the strutting bush pheasants. The males will swing their heads up and down and puff up their throat-bags till their skin seems on the point of disruption, while the objects of their rivalry sit blinking, reluctant to risk an open manifestation of preference. Some gorgeously beautiful varieties are found in Jamaica: greenish-blue, with a metallic luster, and rows of bright crimson spots, as if the design of protective colors had been patterned after the flower shrubs of the tropics. [Illustration: IGUANA.] The word _iguana_ is of Mexican origin, and rarely used in the Spanish West Indies, but the animal itself is--for culinary purposes, though the Haytian negroes do not go quite as far as the mongrels of Yucatan, where iguana farmers fatten the defenseless reptiles with cornmeal, in wickerwork baskets, that are brought to market as a New England poultry fancier would fetch in a crateful of spring chickens. But, prejudice aside, there is no harm in an iguana fricassee; the meat is white and insipid, but takes the flavor of every spice, and is far more digestible than such hyperborean delicacies as fried eels and pork fritters. There are two species--one in eastern Cuba, with spines all the way down to its tail-tip, and in Hayti a smaller one, with a smoother tail, but with an exaggerated throat-bag and wattles like a turkey gobbler. _Lagartos vastecos_, or "tree alligators," the Cuban creoles call the scampering forest dwellers, that attain a length of four feet, and can stampede foreigners by leaping to terra firma with an _aplomb_ that scatters the dry leaves in all directions. If chased, they will take to water like frogs. They are first-class swimmers, their throat-bag serving the purpose of a float, and once in the ripple of the stream are hard to keep in sight, as they have a trick of keeping their legs close to the body and navigating by means of their submerged tails. Like the rainbow hues of the coryphene (miscalled dolphin), the bright colors of the iguana soon fade after death, and the shriveled greenish-brown specimens of our taxidermists give no idea of the appearance of the living animal in the sunlight of its native land. The _Iguana tuberculata_ (eastern Cuba) is velvet-green above, with saffron flanks, ringed with blue, black, and brown stripes, and the pet specimens, basking on the porch of a coffee planter, can challenge comparison with the paroquets that flutter about the eaves of the outbuildings like swifts around a martin box. Cuba has also acclimatized a horned frog, and one species of those curious half-lizards whose shapes may have suggested the dragon fables of antiquity. The "basilisk" (_Cyclura carinata_) is only half a yard long, but can erect its crest and raise its pronged tail in a manner that will make a dog leap back in affright. It has no goiter-bag, but the skin of its throat is elastic, and can be made to swell out like that of the East Indian cobra, while its multiplex spines vibrate ominously. The little monster is, nevertheless, one of the most harmless reptiles of the tropics, and subsists on succulent leaves, with occasional _entremets_ of small grubs and insects. In that case, however, Nature has rather overdone its efforts at protective ugliness, and the creoles kill the poor simulator of terrors as the Mexican rustics would a horned toad. A plurality of the zoölogical immigrants of the West Indies seem to have come from Mexico, and it is a suggestive fact that the number of reptiles steadily decreases from west to east. Cuba, with its western headland approaching the east coast of Yucatan, thus came in for a lion's share of lizards, tortoises, and ophidians. Hayti, though only one fourth smaller, experienced a seventy-five-per-cent discount, and all natives and travelers agree on the _curiosum_ that there is _not a single species of serpent_ on the island of Porto Rico. Trinidad, with an area of only fifteen hundred square miles, but laved by the giant current of the Orinoco, boasts twenty-eight species of land serpents, besides several pythons and swamp vipers. The Trinidad museum of venomous ophidians does not, however, include the dreaded fer-de-lance, which infests the woods near Samana Bay on the south coast of San Domingo. The _Bothrops lanceolatus_ is larger than a rattlesnake, and its bite, though not always fatal, causes fearful inflammation, but its aggressive disposition has been greatly exaggerated. Like most venomous serpents, it is a sluggish brute, relying on its ability to crouch motionless till its prey comes in range, then get in a snap bite and shrink back to wait till the virus begins to take effect, and the victim, in its fever spasms, betrays its helplessness by those eccentricities of conduct which are apt to be misinterpreted by the dupes of the "serpent-charm" superstition. [Illustration: FER-DE-LANCE.] The fer-de-lance is found also on the islands of Martinique and Santa Lucia, where the natives counteract its virus with a decoction of jungle hemlock, and the basis of its grewsome reputation seems to be the fact that it does not warn the intruders of its haunts, after the manner of the cobra or the rattlesnake, but flattens its coils and, with slightly vibrating tail, awaits events. If the unsuspecting traveler should show no sign of hostile intent he may be allowed to pass unharmed within two yards of the coiled matador, but a closer approach is apt to be construed as a challenge, and the _vivoron_, suddenly rearing its ugly head, may scare the trespasser into some motion of self-defense--he may lift his foot or brandish his stick in a menacing manner. If he does he is lost. The lower coils will expand, bringing the business end, neck and all, a few feet nearer; the head "points," like a leveled rifle, then darts forward with electric swiftness, guided by an unerring instinct for the selection of the least-protected parts of the body. And the vindictive brute is ready to repeat its bite. For a moment it rears back, trembling with excitement, and, if felled by a blow of its victim's stick, will snap away savagely at stumps and stones, or even, like a wounded panther, at its own body. A very curious adaptation of means to ends in the modification of the virus is its swiftly fatal effect on birds. A stricken child, though half crazed with fear, may run a distance of three miles before paralysis begins to impede its motions; a squirrel will escape to its nest in the top of the tree, only to come forth again and topple down in its delirium; but a bird drops as if he had swallowed a dose of prussic acid. Serpent virus is specifically a bird poison; in other words, it acts instantaneously in cases where a few moments' delay would defeat the purpose of the snap bite. Wounded rodents will not run very far and can be relied upon to come out of their holes; but a bitten bird, unless promptly paralyzed, would fly out of sight and drop in distant thickets, beyond the ken of its destroyer. And of all bird-killing reptiles the fer-de-lance is the most destructive. The Spaniards have varied its bill of fare by importing the wherewithal of an occasional rabbit stew, but during the preceding ages it had to subsist on poultry, like a popular circuit preacher--the _hutia_ rat having developed a talent for avoiding its haunts. The alleged _horror naturalis_ of serpents is perhaps not more deep-rooted than the aversion to cats; at all events, the West Indians have overcome it sufficiently to prefer rat-killing snakes to tabbies. In thousands of rancho cabins a pet serpent of the genus _coluber_ may be seen gliding noiselessly along the rafters, or slip through the crack of a floor plank to reach the penetralia of the basement, where the death shriek of rodents soon after announces the result of its activity. Aristocratic Creoles relegate it to their stables, but the tenants of numerous backwood _casuchas_ furnish it a cotton-stuffed bed box, and reward its services with a weekly dish of milk. There are several species of large river serpents, and one true boa, the Cuban _matapollos_, or chicken-killer, that attains a length of eighteen feet, and has been known to use its supernumerary coils for the purpose of cracking the ribs of a hound flying to the assistance of the barnyard rooster. In addition to the above-mentioned jungle tortoise there are several land turtles of the genus _chlemmys_, and thousands of chelidonians are annually caught on Samana Bay, southern Porto Rico, St. Vincent, the Isle of Pines, and the north coast of Matanzas, Cuba. Those of Santiago Bay have gradually been exterminated, but a large number of West Indian fishing waters are practically inexhaustible. A specialist like Agassiz might haul nondescripts from scores of Haytian coast rivers, and the angle fishers of the Cuban sierra brooks can hook an equally interesting reproduction of an Appalachian species. "Some of our companions had to eke out a haul with crawfish," says the traveler Esterman, "but our own string of sundries included a puzzle for naturalists. We had caught some twenty brook trout, absolutely indistinguishable from the species found in the head waters of the Tennessee River. Where did they come from? Had they crossed the Gulf of Mexico and ascended the rapids of half a hundred rivers, or had Nature copied her own handiwork in such details as the small dark dots below each red spot, and the occasional breaks in the lines of the silver-white keel streaks?" The perch of the forest rivers include several nest-building varieties, and the sportsmen of Kingston, Jamaica, often amuse themselves with target practice at a species of rock fish that come clear out of the water and bask, like coots, on the harbor cliffs. With every mile farther south the number and variety of the finned aborigines become more infinite, and the fishermen of the estuary of San Juan de Porto Rico alone catch pompanos, mullets, cavalli, red snappers, chiquillos (a kind of sardelles), sea bass, dorados, skip-jack, angelfish, skate, ray, sheepshead, garfish, torpedo-fish, devilfish or giant ray, cobia, hogfish, croakers, shark, and coryphenes. [Illustration: FLYING FISH (_Exocoetus volitans_); FLYING GURNARD OR FLYING ROBIN (_Cephalacanthus volitans_). (From Baskett's Story of the Fishes.)] The tiger of the sea, the great white shark, occasionally visits the harbor waters of Cuba, and has been known to seize barefooted peons, surf-bathing horses in the next neighborhood of Morro Castle, and drag them under so suddenly that their companions were unable to account for their disappearance till the foam of the breakers became flecked with blood. [Illustration: BUTTERFLY FISH.] That champion of marine man-eaters is as smooth as a hypocrite, and hides its double row of horrible fangs under a slippery nose, while the little butterfly fish tries its best to disguise its helplessness with a crest of spiny fins. Its length rarely exceeds four inches, and it can be handled with impunity, but its spines are just rigid enough to entangle it in tufts of gulf weed, and in company of equally tiny sea horses and goldfish, it can often be seen in the aquariums of the Jamaica seaport towns. [_To be continued._] A STUDY OF LUIGI LUCCHENI (ASSASSIN OF THE EMPRESS OF AUSTRIA). BY CESARE LOMBROSO. [Illustration: FIG. 1.--LUIGI LUCCHENI.] There is not an enlightened person in the world who does not deplore the anarchist crime committed last summer by Luccheni in Geneva upon the unfortunate Empress of Austria. With grief is associated the duty of inquiring what could have been the origin of a misdeed which besides being cruel had the vice of being absurd, falling as it did upon a poor woman near the tomb, who was ready to welcome death, and who had no political influence, by an assassin who had not suffered any offense from her or from her government, and who further had the impudence to boast of his crime as if it had been a heroic act. We begin our inquiry by seeking for an explanation of the act by means of a study of the person of the murderer in conformity with the rules of the anthropological school. Luigi Luccheni is the illegitimate son of a Parmesan servant now living in America, and her master, who lived in the Parmesan territory, a priest, unbalanced and intemperate, who sent her when she was pregnant to Paris to be confined. There she abandoned her newborn babe to a foundling asylum. The child was sent thence to his native country and placed, till he was nine years old, with a Parmesan family named Monici, of whom the father was a shoemaker, very poor and intemperate, and the mother immoral. After he was nine years old he was put with a family named Nicasi, good people, but very poor--peasants, or rather mendicants, so that he too became a mendicant, wandering with his comrades through the streets and pilfering till he was thirteen years old. It appears from what Dr. Guerini, of Parma, writes me that during this time he had epileptic fits. When twelve years old he went to school, where he appeared bright but impulsive, and on one occasion in his anger destroyed the portrait of the king. From the age of fourteen to that of nineteen he was a servant, and had two masters, and wandered in Liguria, Switzerland, and Austria, where he was arrested, sent back to his country, and prohibited from showing himself in the east. He then entered the military service, where he conducted himself very well, incurring only light punishments for assaulting a comrade and for helping a sergeant get out of the barracks at night. He was so liked by his superiors and comrades that when, three years afterward, in 1897, he left the army, Captain the Prince de Vera engaged him as his servant. In this service he exhibited great affection for children, and, what is strange, he was so good a monarchist that he was scandalized that at the commemoration of the deceased Cavolotti, in Naples, the orator was permitted to praise him as a political man without interruption from the delegate. One day, irritated because he had been denied some permission, he abruptly took his leave, declaring that he was not born to be a servant, and returned to Switzerland to work as a marble polisher. But even from Switzerland he kept continually imploring his old employer to take him back, declaring in a letter which revealed symptoms of a persistent delirium that "he probably would not receive him again because he did not go to mass"; which indicates substantially that he had not that repugnance for the anti-anarchical life of a servant which he manifested previously and afterward.[O] [Footnote O: It appears that he afterward made the strange request for an anarchist to be appointed guard of the prison, and was irritated when it was denied. (See A. Gautier, Le procès Luccheni. Vienna, 1899.)] Whether all at once or not he became an extreme anarchist. He signed and composed anarchist hymns. Suspected by his comrades of not being zealous enough, and also perhaps of being a spy, he decided to strike a blow against some prince; he chose the empress as his victim possibly because he had suffered his first annoyance in Austria. He, who had never killed a fly, had a rude instrument prepared--a file; practiced for a considerable time, perhaps a month, at striking with it, and having committed the crime, tried to escape. When stopped by two citizens he did not resist, and behaved in a very different way from common criminals, therein exhibiting a tinge of insanity. He, for example, although he knew French very well, denied it and demanded an interpreter in the interrogations. He sang and laughed continually, and was glad that he had dealt his victim a good blow, and that he had struck deep with the instrument, boasting that he had used a file instead of a dagger. He was, besides, solicitous of publicity, declaring to the reporters and the judges that he had done the deed all alone, that he had left his captain to accomplish his idea, that he had been an anarchist for thirteen years, etc. In two ungrammatical and very long letters to the journal _Don Marzio_, in Naples, chosen evidently because he had seen it at his master's, he declared that he was not a criminal born, as Lombroso would have it, nor a madman, and that he had not been incited by misery but by conviction, because, if all would do as he had done, middle-class society would soon disappear. He knew that this single assassination would be of no avail, but he had, nevertheless, committed it for an example. [Illustration: FIG. 2.--EXTRACT FROM A LETTER BY LUCCHENI.] He wrote to the President of the Swiss Confederation that he would rather be tried at Lucerne, because the death penalty was in force there, and repeated the statement to the judges; he wrote to his master that he was more worthy of him than ever; he replied to the reporters and the judges who reproached him with having killed a helpless woman, that as for that, if she had been a child, but a prince, he would have killed her all the same. At another time he said, in a wild way: "I killed her because she did not work; whoever does not work should not eat, and I was not going to work for her"--a reason which would be as good for the slaughter of several million persons. Curious and important is the remark of Luccheni that "Crispi would not have killed her because he was a thief"; an evident proof of the complete lack of moral sense in anarchists,[P] who like primitive men confound the crime with the deed, and regard criminality as a sort of merit, a seal of fraternity; which demonstrates that the anarchistic practice, if not its theory, is an equivalence of crimes. [Footnote P: See my Delitto politico, Part III, and Gli Anarcici, second edition.] When asked if he had never committed blood-crimes, he replied that he had never had anything to do with courts, not even as a witness--which was found to be true--but "I entertained the idea this time, and acted upon it." Luccheni is a man of medium stature, about 1.63 metre, with very thick, light chestnut hair, stout, with dark-gray, half-closed eyes, roundish ears, heavy eyebrows, voluminous cheek bones and jaw prognatic, low forehead, very brachycephalic (cephalic index 88). He has, therefore, a number of characteristics of degeneration common to epileptics and insane criminals. On the other hand, his handwriting, with its minute characters, especially in the writing of past years, indicates a mild feminine disposition, with little energy of character. This is especially seen in an autograph of 1896, which was procured for me by Dr. Guerini, who got it from his patient (see Fig. 2). This characteristic, which was extremely conspicuous in Caserio when he was near his crime, was also apparent in the assailant of General Rocha. I have likewise observed it to be very conspicuous in epileptics and hysterical persons; and it corresponds, according as they are in their psychical spasm or out of it, with a real double personality provoked by their disease. In one, as I have shown in _L'Uomo Delinquente_, they write signatures that cover a whole page in their larger diameter, while the signature in the normal state is often smaller than the average (see Fig. 3). [Illustration: FIG. 3.--MACROGRAPHIC AND MICROGRAPHIC WRITING BY THE SAME EPILEPTIC.] The same double personality that is apparent in the writing is attested in the psychology. We have seen that Luccheni was kind to children, that he was a good servant, characteristics quite opposed to the anarchistic nature, and a genial companion; a man who in Africa was enthusiastically fond of military life; who, a little while before, when he was in the service of the captain, had expressed extreme monarchical sentiments; and finally, when he had become an anarchist, again asked his master to be restored to his service. This double personality is another of the essential characteristics of hysteria and epilepsy. I have recently studied an epileptoid degenerate who has a sound mind, and, at least in his normal state, is quiet and gentle. But as soon as he has taken hardly more than ninety grammes of alcohol (96° proof) he becomes a wild anarchist, with fierce impulses and hallucinations, of which he has no recollection two hours afterward, or even charges them to his comrades. In this case a double personality is revealed, the demonstration of which is completed by alterations of the visual field and of the touch. We have, then, in Luccheni a degenerate and probably epileptic person descended from an alcoholic father. Although he affirms that he is not insane or a criminal born, he is a little of both, for he is epileptic and hysterical, so that his denial is already a beginning of a proof of disease. Luccheni also confirms what I have tried to demonstrate in my _Delitto politico_--that the most frequent organic cause of similar morbid impulses of a political character is hystero-epilepsy; for not only do the declarations of some of his countrymen point to epilepsy, and the characteristics of degeneration in the skull confirm it, but his inheritance from an alcoholic father and that impulsiveness and that double personality, which make him pass from the gentlest of men to the cruelest, and which is reflected in the macrography alternating with the micrography of the intervals between the spasms, are accumulative evidence of it. I have demonstrated the hysterical and epileptic basis in the anarchists and regicides Felicot, Monges, and Caserio, and particularly in a vagabond anarchist, full of cranial anomalies, who told me, when I questioned him concerning political reforms, "Do not speak to me of them, for as soon as I begin to think about them I am taken with a vertigo and fall down"; so that it seems to me possible to establish a psycho-epileptic equivalent in extreme political innovators, an equivalent which is further manifest in their vanity, rising sometimes to megalomania, in their intermittent geniality, and especially in their great impulsiveness. There was also latent in Luccheni an indirect disposition to suicide, which I have found in other political criminals, like Oliva, Nobiling, and Passananti,[Q] who, having conceived a dislike for the king, made an attempt on his life; and especially in Henry, who rejected the defense of his advocate and his mother based on the insanity of his father, remarking that it was the advocate's business to defend, his to die; and in that Roumanian who was photographed in a portrait that I have reproduced, in the act of committing suicide.[R] Luccheni, too, believed he would be condemned to death, and was much disappointed when he learned that there was no such penalty in the canton where he committed the crime. [Footnote Q: See my Delitto politico, 1890.] [Footnote R: Ibid.] It may have been morbid vanity that prompted the exclamation he was heard to make, "I wanted to kill some great person, so as to get my name in the papers" (Gautier). But while an organic, individual cause was good for a third in Luccheni's crime, he was much more influenced by the atmosphere in which he lived. An illegitimate child, left in one of those nurseries which are real nests of crime and graver disorders, then consigned to a very poor and not always moral family of mendicant habits, having learned nothing except to beg and wander, he found such modes of subsistence as he could (notice the uncertainty and plurality of his occupations, indicating lack of assiduity--servant, soldier, marble polisher, and in the beginning peasant); he found, we might say, as the most constant condition the infelicity which radiated around him from every quarter, and, reflecting the worst, urged him to this way of suicide. We should recollect, too, what Frattini said: "Was it hunger brought me to this?" and the anarchist whom Hamon speaks of: "When I began to question the unfortunates of the hospital, it had a frightful effect on me; I comprehended the need of solidarity and became an anarchist"; and as another one said to the same Hamon: "I became an anarchist when I saw my comrades begging for work with their faces bathed in tears, and was indignant over it." Caserio wept when he thought of the lot of his Lombard companions in misery. These criminals by passion, by altruism, are, as Burdeau wrote, veritable philanthropic assassins. They kill recklessly for the love of men. Epilepsy and hysteria in Luccheni are explained by his abrupt passage from one condition to the other, and by the conversion of factional passion in him into a criminal act. But there are epileptics and criminals everywhere; yet persons thus disordered in Norway and Sweden are not transformed into anarchists; nor in Switzerland and England, whither people resort from all parts of the world, and where, when anarchy shows itself, it is like a meteor falling to the earth from the extra-planetary regions--wholly isolated and opposed to the world around it. The most important cause of this transformation is the misery that weighs upon our unfortunate country, evidence of which comes in from every side even upon those who are not miserable themselves. If even in the latest days Luccheni had been living comfortably, he could not, with the excessively morbid altruism that dominated him, have failed to feel this misery, which is so profound and general in Italy. Not much erudition is required to demonstrate the immense economical embarrassment of Italy as contrasted with other countries when it is known that we pay about five hundred times its value for salt, that bread is growing dearer every day, and that the amount consumed diminishes one tenth every year in these lands. It was, therefore, with justice that Scarfoglio said in explaining the origin of anarchism, "A good fifth of the population of Italy are still living in a savage state, dwelling in cabins that the Papuans would not live in, accommodating themselves to a food which the Shillooks would refuse, having a vision and an idea of the world not much more ample than that of the Kaffirs, and running over the land desiring and seeking servitude." It may be added that it is because of this condition--that is, of the defective civilization that results from it--that there is everywhere a weakened revulsion and diminished horror at blood-crimes, so that there are now sixty homicides for every one hundred thousand inhabitants. We may learn from this what the true remedies should be. The idea of conquering anarchy by killing anarchists is not valid, because every epileptic has another ready to take his place, because anarchistic crimes are to a great extent simply indirect suicides, and because anarchists think as little of their own lives as of the life of another. It is rather necessary to change the direction of the disease by changing the miserable conditions in which it originates. Not for humanity, therefore, not for exalted social theories, but in our direct interest, we ought to make a complete change. The suppression of a dozen anarchists is like killing a thousand microbes without disinfecting the surroundings that contain milliards of them; it is that we should look, if we want to be better, to breaking up the large estates, and ameliorating the conditions of agriculture and operative industry, and this in the interest of the governing classes. Typhus, cholera, and plague, it is true, attack chiefly the poor, but from these the contagion extends also to the rich; and from the unhealthy habitations in which the rich man permits beggars to crowd and suffer, the miasm, as if in revenge, is propagated to marble palaces. That imbecile idea of some European nations, who, instead of disinfecting the medium, find it better to put down the doctors who propose remedies, can not make itself at home except among peoples who are destined to perish.[S]--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Archives di Psichiatria._ [Footnote S: To the charges made against me by M. Gautier (Le procès Luccheni, 1899) of having formulated a diagnosis without seeing the patient, which was therefore inexact, and of having described characteristics of degeneration which did not exist, I answer with the pages of Forel, certainly the most eminent alienist of our time, who had him under his eyes during the whole process, and whose diagnosis differs but little from mine.] TENDENCIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE.[T] SUGGESTED BY PROFESSOR DOWDEN'S RECENT BOOK. BY PELHAM EDGAR, PH. D. [Footnote T: A History of French Literature. By Edward Dowden, D. Lit., LL. D., etc. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 1897.] "To present Victor Hugo in a few pages is to carve a colossus on a cherry stone." Thus Professor Dowden prefaces his ten admirable pages on the great French poet; and with equal appropriateness we might assign the phrase as a motto for the whole undertaking. The subject is too vast to cope with adequately in the limits of a slender volume, the tendencies too complex; and the appeal from human interest, which since the days of Sainte-Beuve and Taine has formed such an important element in scientific criticism, had to be abandoned in favor of generalized views of literary conditions and tendencies necessarily abstract or impersonal in character. Yet, despite these evident restrictions which the requirements of his task imposed upon him, Professor Dowden has produced a work of extraordinary merit, a masterpiece indeed in its kind. If we were not assured that everything which the eminent critic writes is its own sufficient justification, we might be inclined to question the necessity of the present volume, in view of the painstaking and conscientious treatise that Mr. Saintsbury gave to the public some sixteen years ago, and which has deservedly remained until the present time the most reliable English text-book upon the subject of French literature. With no desire to disparage Mr. Saintsbury's scholarly contribution, the present work does in truth supply a need which the earlier book, in spite of its abundant merit, failed to satisfy. It is not harsh criticism to state that Mr. Saintsbury's volume, crammed as it is with a plethora of dates and titles, is at best a compendium for convenient reference, and consequently quite unreadable as a book. Professor Dowden, on the other hand, has conquered the dry-as-dust problem with admirable skill, and the charm of his diction and the easy sequence of his ideas lead the reader insensibly on to the close of a delightful volume. Nor is the book lacking in instructive value of a highly reliable kind, for, in addition to an intimate knowledge of French criticism, Professor Dowden is evidently familiar at first hand with all the more important works of which he treats, and not infrequently proffers fertile suggestions upon debated questions. Having avowed, therefore, a genuine admiration of Professor Dowden's book, will it be thought a graceless task if, with the proverbial perversity of critics, I endeavor to point out here and there questions of importance that may seem to have merited more attention than the author was perhaps able to afford to them within his restricted space? The mediæval portion of Professor Dowden's book is valuable not for its originality, but rather as the reflection of advanced modern criticism in France. Therefore, in this brief review the mediæval period may be neglected, and turning to the second book, which deals with the sixteenth century, the first writer of capital importance whom we encounter is Clément Marot. The author has justly indicated the decrepit conditions of poetry in Marot's youth in the degenerate hands of the Rhétoriqueurs, and also the powerful attraction which the allegorizing mania exercised on the poet's early work. His later manner is justly emphasized, and his prowess in the lighter familiar forms of verse; but it is only by inference that we apprehend the comparative neglect of his work until the later classical reaction restored him to favor. Professor Dowden, indeed, throughout his book has hardly conveyed a proper idea of the reactionary shocks by which French literature has invariably advanced. Thus the Pléiade, in the enthusiasm of their rupture with middle-age traditions, were blind to the Renaissance elements in Marot's work, and seeking as they did to elevate poetry to nobler themes and a nobler manner, his easy familiar grace was distasteful to them. Rabelais, of course, is another "colossus on a cherry stone," and the purport of his message is epitomized in a few luminous sentences. The elements of contrast in the man, and his full-blooded joy in living, which was the sign-manual of the Renaissance upon him, are indicated as follows: "Below his laughter lay wisdom; below his orgy of grossness lay a noble ideality; below the extravagances of his imagination lay the equilibrium of a spirit sane and strong. The life that was in him was so abounding and exultant that it broke all dikes and dams; and laughter for him needed no justification, it was a part of this abounding life. After the mediæval asceticism and the intellectual bondage of scholasticism, life in Rabelais has its vast outbreak and explosion; he would be no fragment of humanity, but a complete man." Proceeding to the Pléiade, we find its doctrine admirably enunciated, and one point of literary history is well brought out--namely, that to the Pléiade, and not to Malherbe alone, belongs the honor of establishing the bases of classicism in France, the difference chiefly residing in the fact that the programme of the Pléiade was one of expansion in matters of language and prosody, whereas it is precisely in these points that Malherbe and Boileau are concerned with restrictive refinements. Again Professor Dowden, following perhaps in the wake of M. Brunetière, characterizes the conditions of the time as being unfavorable to lyrical expansiveness. "Ronsard's genius was lyrical and elegiac, but the tendencies of a time when the great affair was the organization of social life, and as a consequence the limitation of individual and personal passions, were not favorable to the development of lyrical poetry." These words are ripe with suggestiveness, and duly weighed, they afford the true solution of the oratorical and impersonal character of French literature for two long centuries, when the social _genres_ in prose and poetry usurped dominion over the national mind. With our eye then upon the social conditions in France, the often-quoted words "Malherbe a tué le lyrisme" mean nothing more than that he struck a prostrate body. Before turning from the sixteenth century it should perhaps be observed that in discussing the comedy of that period the author might have amplified his statement of Italian influences by at least a reference to the _Commedia dell' Arte_ which we find established in France in 1576, with its traditional repertory of stock characters, whose antiquity ascends to the venerable times of the early Latin farces, and whose survival the work of Molière, nay, even of Beaumarchais, will adequately attest. The last great figure that greets us in the sixteenth century is Montaigne, and we feel a sense of disappointed curiosity when he is relentlessly dismissed at the end of the five pages to which he is entitled here. This singularly modern doubter still smiles inscrutably at us through the misty centuries that flow between us, and we would prefer to loiter with him by the way rather than pass him with a curt nod of recognition. But Montaigne is more important in the history of thought than in the history of literature, so, crossing the threshold of the sixteenth century, we meet the great lawgiver Malherbe, a Moses who really entered the promised land. Professor Dowden is eminently just and appreciative in his judgment of this pedantic and unsympathetic figure, estimating his merits and impartially noting his defects without presuming in his character as literary historian to stamp them as such. Malherbe undeniably eliminated personality from poetry. Shall we regard this as a defect? A century's masterpieces of objective art survive to say us nay, and if the critic's personal sympathies sway him to the side of lyric eloquence, the historian of literature observing without prejudice judges without rancor. "The processes of Malherbe's art were essentially oratorical; the lyrical cry is seldom audible in his verse; it is the poetry of eloquence thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of the seventeenth century in France, its odes, its satires, its epistles, its noble dramatic scenes, and much of its prose literature, are of the nature of oratory; and for the progress of such poetry, and even of such prose, Malherbe prepared a highway." And now in the wake of Malherbe so thick do the great names throng that I must perforce touch swiftly only on what seems to demand amplification rather than dwell at length, as it would be much less difficult to do, on the many admirable views the book contains. And first as regards the literary significance of René Descartes. Professor Dowden places himself in accord with the customary views of criticism in assigning to Descartes a preponderating influence on the literary art of his century. "The spirit of Descartes's work was in harmony with that of his time, and reacted upon literature. He sought for general truths by the light of reason; he made clearness a criterion of truth; he proclaimed man a spirit; he asserted the freedom of the will. The art of the classical period sought also for general truths, and subordinated imagination to reason. It turned away from ingenuities, obscurities, mysteries; it was essentially spiritualist; it represented the crises and heroic victories of the will." This sounds reasonable, and is indeed in large measure in accordance with the actual conditions observable in the seventeenth century. Yet there is no doubt that the literature of Louis XIV is more intimately penetrated by the ascetic spirit of Jansenism as conveyed in the famous doctrines of Port-Royal, and it is to Jansenism, and emphatically not to Cartesianism, that the literature of the seventeenth century owes that aspect of grandeur and moral serenity which characterizes it. To quote Brunetière: "Pendant plus de cinquante ans, la conscience française, si l'on peut ainsi dire, incarnée dans le jansénisme, et rendue par lui à elle-même, a fait contre la frivolité naturelle de la race le plus grand effort qu'elle eut fait depuis les premiers temps de la réforme ou du calvinisme." Indeed, the tenaciously religious Jansenist spirit of the "grand siècle" would have been universal were it not that Molière and La Fontaine were apathetically indifferent, nay, sometimes actively hostile, to the general enthusiasm. Let us, however, examine in all brevity the fundamental doctrines of Cartesianism. The terms are familiar enough. The identity of being and of thought. The objectivity of science. The all-powerfulness of reason. Progress to infinity. Optimism at all times. We can not fail to observe the significance of these categories, and how they contain the germs of almost every great subject debated by the leviathians of the eighteenth century. Yet the nation struggled long before it had strength to shake the incubus of Jansenism from its back, and the stimulating work of Bayle had to be supported by events of actual political significance before the stringent and constraining dogmas of catholicism relaxed their grasp on thought and conduct. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Quietistic movement with its unseemly attendant episcopal quarrels, and finally the actual persecution of the Jansenists, all pointed inevitably in one direction, and stimulating the anti-religious sentiment and opening the flood gates to immorality, induced a potent reaction of Cartesianism in the fundamental theories of the eighteenth century. In his treatment of Corneille, Professor Dowden "opens his hands only sufficiently to let out a portion of the truth he holds," but what he says is admirable to a degree. Of his diction he writes: "His mastery in verse of a masculine eloquence is unsurpassed; his dialogue of rapid statement and swift reply is like a combat with Roman short swords; in memorable single lines he explodes, as it were, a vast charge of latent energy, and effects a clearance for the progress of his action." This is well said, but hardly indicates how Corneille soared so often in the region of Spanish bombast, or crept among the insipid flowers of Italian preciosity; defects from which Racine's severer Greek taste held him free. It is refreshing when we come to Boileau to find an English mind impartial enough to do justice to the much-abused "lawgiver of Parnassus." Criticism has for so long deplored his narrowness that we relish an encomium on his good sense. But beyond this there is an opinion which the general reader would be reluctant to admit, but which Professor Dowden has had the courage and the discernment to enforce, when he writes as follows: "But for Paris itself, its various aspects, its life, its types, its manners, he had the eye and the precise rendering of a realist in art; his faithful objective touch is like that of a Dutch painter." Let the incredulous merely turn to the satires to appreciate the scope and truth of the remark. It is difficult to imagine that a more brilliant and effective account of Boileau's work and influence could be presented within so limited a space; yet might not the author have added that whereas Malherbe is the representative of the aristocratic element in literature, Boileau is the first great incarnation in modern times of the bourgeois spirit? With regard to La Fontaine it need only be observed that Professor Dowden recognizes what French critics with repeated insistence emphasize, the cunning harmonies of his verse. Much space is of right devoted to Molière, who with La Fontaine has ever been a stumbling-block to English criticism. Professor Dowden voices our national feeling in refusing to consider him as a poet, preferring to emphasize his profound and healthy philosophy of life. _Tartufe_ he considers to be an attack on religious hypocrisy merely. Is not the interpretation perhaps correct which regards it as an attack on the intolerance and Puritanism of all religion, even the most sincere? Once again, in dealing with Racine, the author shows that subtle discernment in which his criticism abounds. He penetrates to the heart of the secret reason for the cabals that harassed Racine in the later years of his dramatic activity, and which doubtless had their influence in enforcing his retirement. Have we ever sufficiently realized that Boileau, Molière, and Racine were waging constant war against a rebirth of the _précieux_ spirit which threatened not only society with ridiculousness but literature with ruin? Such, indeed, was the case, and in the eyes of the super-refined coterie that grouped itself round the Duchesse de Bouillon, Boileau and his fellow-workers were innovators of a dangerous and revolutionary order. Does not this idea carry us far from our preconceived notions of the narrow conservatism that dominated the leaders of classical thought? Referring to the disastrous check of Racine's _Phèdre_, the author writes: "It is commonly said that Racine wrote in the conventional and courtly taste of his own day. In reality his presentation of tragic passions in their terror and their truth shocked the aristocratic proprieties which were the mode. He was an innovator, and his audacity at once conquered and repelled." The point of view may seem extreme to us, and this vaunted realism may show pale and weakly when contrasted with the grossness of much of the realism that prevails at the present day, or with the graphic directness of the best examples of the type. But the words ring true if we are willing to accept the refined psychological realism of Racine as equally worthy to the title with the physiological naturalism of our more scientific age. Our whole conception of Racine's art falls into line with this view, and his constant solicitude for an easy and natural intrigue in the structure of his tragedies may be brought home to the same healthy impulse of his mind. Was it not Faguet who maintained that so natural indeed were the processes of his plots that a happy ending would have alone been needed to make any of his tragedies, with some added modicum of wit, in all essential features a comedy that Molière might have penned? Mr. Saintsbury, on the other hand, in dealing with Racine is seemingly swayed by some innate prejudice, or he could hardly have denied the poet a high moral character, merely granting him the possession of great shrewdness and discernment. True passion, he remarks, was not popular with the crowd, but "love-making, on the contrary, would draw, and love-making accordingly is the staple of all his plays." It is against this view, and against Mr. Saintsbury's further opinion that the tragedy of Racine is at the furthest remove from an imitation of Nature, that Professor Dowden makes a strong and timely protest. While applauding, however, the value of such novel opinions in English criticism at least, we may suspect that in his desire to clinch his arguments the author may have driven the nail too ruthlessly home. And so it would appear when we seek in vain for any statement which contains the shadow of a justification for the existence of that powerful _précieux_ spirit against which the greater classicists rebelled. We are too inclined to take Molière's word for it that they were solely ridiculous, forgetting the explicit reserve of his preface--"aussi les véritables précieuses auraient tort de se piquer lorsqu'on joue les ridicules qui les imitent mal." So let us then give the _Précieuses_ credit for what they did confer to the advantage of letters amid so much folly, and, weighing the matter carefully, their gift to literature amounts to this: First, amid much linguistic and metaphorical pedantry they were free from the equally damaging and ridiculous pedantry of a labored erudition which pervaded the literature of the day. In the second place, whether we regard it as an advantage or the contrary, their influence made directly _against_ the licentiousness of the _esprit gaulois_, and _for_ politeness and decency in expression; and as a third count in their favor can we doubt that straining as they did to express the _nuances_ of sentiment and gallantry, they were instrumental in stimulating that ardor of mental analysis which is of all things the distinguishing mark of the century? A word finally might have been said with a view to elucidating the inherent divergence of the _précieux_ spirit from our own Euphuism, from the Marinism of Italy, or the Gongorism of Spain; a divergence due certainly to the fact that the _précieuses_ allied themselves to, and accordingly strengthened, that spirit of social coherence so characteristic of the life and letters of the time in France, whereas the influences of similar movements abroad were more transitory, inasmuch as in some degree more isolated and tentative. The chapter devoted to the seventeenth century closes with a critical review of the series of great preachers and theologians who have left their mark more or less upon the development of thought, while their literary significance can be comparatively slighted in a history of this kind; and the chapter which discusses the transition to the eighteenth century broaches questions of such large issue that an exhaustive treatment of them was not to be expected. Such are the memorable quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, and the _philosophe_ idea of perfectibility and human progress. The chapter closes with an account of the great protagonist and pioneer in the warfare against Christianity, the patient, plodding, dangerous Pierre Bayle. So effectually was his teaching absorbed by Voltaire and the encyclopedists that he is read no longer; but low as his flame has sunk, he remains one of the beacons lighting us over the lurid threshold of the century of strife. We are in safe hands when it is Professor Dowden who guides us on the highways and bypaths of the eighteenth century, but by very reason of his accurate knowledge of the ground whereon he treads we are disappointed when he fails to point out to us some special feature of the landscape. Beauties we could hardly hope to meet with on our journey. There was not sap enough in that arid soil to nourish flowers, or send a flush of living green over hill and valley. The most serious omission is to have left entirely out of account the exceedingly interesting reactionary influences that leaped back and forth across the Channel when Marivaux's romances were devoured in England, and Richardson's _Pamela_ was in every French pocket large enough to hold it. It is in itself still an open question which of these two authors exerted the initial influence on the other, although eighteenth-century criticism invariably held that in _Marianne_ Richardson found his inspiration. A great deal of interest attaches to an explanation of the causes of Le Sage's decline in popularity, and this question likewise Professor Dowden has not adequately presented. Le Sage saw the imperative need of mediating between the stilted heroic romances _à la Scudéry_ and the grotesque travesties of Scarron and Furetière. Inspired by the picaroon romances of Spain, he produced, amid much inferior work, _Gil Blas_, a masterpiece in its kind. The plot is loose-jointed, the composition _nil_, but the book teems with such verve and vigor that it still pulses with an abounding life when Marivaux and Richardson slumber on our shelves. Yet we must admit that the characters are vagabonds, and the sentiment not without coarseness. Love when not slighted is ridiculed, and metaphysical analysis and moral disquisitions are both refreshingly absent from the book. Hence Le Sage's claims on our consideration as the progenitor of naturalism in romance, but on this account also the reactionary wave against which he had to buffet in his declining years. Marivaux, on the other hand, saw the need of mediating between the stilted heroics of Scudéry and what he deemed the ignoble realism of Le Sage. In this resolve he elevated the characters to _bourgeois_ rank, and abandoning the empty love rhetoric of the old romances, he brought the acuteness of an analytic mind to bear on the exploitation of the tender passion; and a conscientious though desultory effort is made to study subtle phases of character in the light of surrounding circumstances. Despite the artificial _précieuse_ qualities of his style, and the unfinished condition of his novels, Marivaux enjoyed an extraordinary popularity in his day. The same problem repeats itself on a larger scale when we transfer our attention to Richardson, whose works, translated and popularized by Prévost, were read with the greatest avidity in France. Were not these such influences as Professor Dowden's profound knowledge of English literature would have qualified him to illustrate with more precision than has yet been brought to bear upon them; and was it not in point of fact almost imperative for him to deal seriously with such an important theme in the international literary history of nations? The pages which Professor Dowden devotes to Voltaire, although brilliant, are not sufficiently suggestive of the extraordinary influence which that most celebrated of writers exercised. It was in no uncritical spirit that Mr. Morley wrote: "The existence, character, and career of this extraordinary person constituted in themselves a new and prodigious era. The peculiarities of his individual genius changed the mind and spiritual conformation of France, and in a less degree of the whole of the West, with as far-spreading and invincible an effect as if the work had been wholly done, as it was actually aided, by the sweep of deep-lying collective forces. A new type of belief, and of its shadow, disbelief, was stamped by the impression of his character and work into the intelligence and feeling of his own and modern times." Nor will Villemain be accused of rapt enthusiasm when he writes, "C'est le plus puissant renovateur des esprits depuis Luther, et l'homme qui a mis le plus en commun les idées de l'Europe par sa gloire, sa longue vie, son merveilleux esprit et son universelle clarté." The strangest fact to contemplate with regard to this unrivaled popularity, this astonishing range of influence, is that it truly constitutes an apotheosis of superficiality. And this in no disparaging spirit of Carlylese disdain for clear ideas around which hang no mists of oracular obscurity, but rather by way of tribute to a heart that beat responsively to human suffering, to a mind keenly sensible of human wrongs. Voltaire rejected the subtleties of metaphysical thought, was indeed incapable of attaining to the heights of speculative contemplation; he was only preternaturally sensitive to the moral defects of this imperfect world, and determined to bend all his efforts to the alleviation of injustice and of crime. As a further concession to his superficiality as a thinker we may frankly admit his incapacity to originate new ideas. His mind indeed was extraordinarily receptive, his intellectual curiosity unlimited, and hostile critics have availed themselves of this very receptivity as a medium of attack upon his originality. They are free to pursue him on that score, but it does not appreciably detract from his greatness in the eyes of posterity to recognize that Bayle before him had preached the doctrine of toleration; that Montesquieu had advocated the abolition of torture and of slavery, and the sanctity of social institutions, or that Boileau forsooth had upheld the dignity of classical formulas in matters literary. It is rather in the mobility of his mind and in the impressionability of his temperament that we should seek for an explanation of a philosophical disturbance in his ideas. It is not an actual mental confusion that I refer to, for his diction is never more limpid than in the expression of his easy personal beliefs; but a certain intellectual inconsistency in his habits of thought makes it impossible for us to hold him down to any definite set of opinions which we can regard as a genuine confession of faith. And this is a vital characteristic of skeptical minds of his stamp, swiftly receptive, and as open as the day to each new intellectual impulse as it arises. Thus we must attribute to his capacity for mental development, as well as to the narrowness of his philosophical range, the many contradictions which his writings exhibit in such matters of intellectual belief as are wont to give a permanent bias of thought to minds less volatile and alert. Are we to regard him as an optimist or a pessimist? a believer in immortality or devotee of annihilation? a fatalist or spiritualist in history? an advocate of free will or determinism? We can not say, and M. Faguet has amused himself with supporting each of these opinions in turn upon its appropriate text, whose clearness is beyond dispute. If there was one set of opinions to which Voltaire may be said to have somewhat consistently adhered I may instance his vague and insipid deism, which relegated to God the rôle of an absentee landlord in this poor world which he created and governs by absolute law, but in whose affairs he only intervenes when the death rent is to be collected. He infers a creative God from the argument of the clockmaker and the clock, but takes extreme pleasure in showing how sadly the poor machine is out of order. His idea of the social utility of an avenging and rewarding God must of course be regarded as a freak of intellectual caprice, and yet his timid political instincts made him regard the terrorizing influence of the doctrine of hell with some complacency as a restraining force upon the unthinking masses. The story is well known of the atheistic conversation between D'Alembert and Condorcet at Voltaire's table, who summarily dismissed the servants from the room with the remark: "Maintenant, messieurs, vous pouvez continuer. Je craignais seulement d'être égorgé cette nuit." The _Dictionnaire philosophique_ confirms the flippant utilitarian point of view, which we must beware of regarding as a personal conviction. "I insist particularly on the immortality of the soul, because there is nothing to which I hold more than the idea of hell. We have to do with a host of rogues who have never thought; a crowd of petty people, brutes and drunkards and thieves. Preach to them if you will that there is no hell and that the soul is mortal. As for me I will cry in their ears that they are damned if they rob me." It is needless to add that convictions of this eminently practical nature did not seriously hamper Voltaire in his anti-religious crusade. To every branch of letters Voltaire brought the same splendid qualities of mind, and need I add the same defective qualities of conscience and carelessness of the truth when his personal glory or his material advancement were concerned? The sordid pages of his life would weary us in the turning, yet his native generosity and sympathy incline us to charity; and it is wonderful how his never-failing wit can temper his vindictiveness for us, now that the sting has lost its living poison. I have referred to Professor Dowden's unsatisfactory treatment of the international reactions which characterize the literary history of the eighteenth century. There is another omission which I have remarked in the book on a reperusal of the pages devoted to Rousseau and the encyclopedists. It might have been easily within the scope of a literary story of even moderate dimensions to have more explicitly accounted for the crumbling of the old classical ideal, to have shown that the once impregnable citadel of classical art was rotten at the base, and that those who still defended the imaginary stronghold were themselves the unconscious agents of its destruction. With reference to the irreligious influences of Cartesianism and the philosophical system of Bayle I shall say no more, save that the evident loss in prestige of the traditional religious faith, combined as it was with the rapid decentralization of the sovereign power in the state, must perforce make impossible the survival of literature on the old national basis. Again, in point of pure art a decline was inevitable in connection with the revival of Cartesianism among writers of the stamp of Fontenelle; for their prestige was synchronous with the triumph of the modern party in the famous quarrel; and no student of the _Art Poétique_ will fail to appreciate the æsthetical significance of an abandonment of classical standards of taste as an unimpeachable canon of art. Defending as Boileau did the supreme value of reason and good sense, what justification could he have found for poetry unless he had proved to the satisfaction of his generation that poetry better than any other mode of expression could render permanent the promptings of the diviner reason, as witness the eternal monuments of ancient art in the domain of poetry? The triumph of the moderns then turned men's faces in other directions, and whether literary art should henceforward advance or decline, it must at least strike root in a newer soil. The inroads of sensibility into French literature, as exemplified in Marivaux and Prévost in the thirties, followed swiftly by the rank and file, also wrought havoc in the old classical method, though this fact may not without further reflection be conceded. But in the broad realm of psychological observation, where classic art had reigned supreme, the influx of a certain morbid sensibility strangely warped the mental vision of the observer. Diderot, a veritable sinner himself in this respect, admits as much in an unguarded moment: "L'homme sensible est trop abandonné à la merci de son diaphragme ... pour être un profond observateur et conséquemment un sublime imitateur de la nature." Every one knows Voltaire's naïve statement which bears condemnatory evidence to the bluntness of his psychology. "La nature est partout la même." And is it not, we ask, this enigmatical typical man, out of space and out of time, for whom the chimerical theories of universal perfectibility were soon to be woven? It is incontestably true, then, that the character of human observation undergoes a sensible alteration in the course of the century, and that whereas the individual man had been heretofore studied inasmuch as he was in himself of typical value, henceforward not man the individual will be the object of study, but the observation of human relations will usurp the field, and psychological analysis will yield to social investigation. I would add a word or two by way of conclusion to illustrate how the encyclopedists in their propaganda, aided in part by the coincident influence of Rousseau, established ideals of thought and conduct which were in the most violent contrast to the ideals cherished in the preceding century. Of course, we readily understand that the encyclopedists threw to the four corners of heaven the outworn respect of religious and political tradition. Furthermore, we may ask ourselves what it is which in a sense makes Molière and La Fontaine isolated in their century; and the answer will not be far to seek when we realize that these two alone of all their fellows urged the suspected authority of instinct as a sufficient guide for conduct. Yet how far were not even these bolder spirits from the natural man of Rousseau or of Diderot? The views of the two centuries concerning the authority of reason seem at first sight to coincide, yet, while bearing Boileau in mind, we can confidently assert that the doctrine of the sovereignty of reason was not established as a principle of thought until the culminating years of the eighteenth century. Pascal's "taisez-vous raison imbécile" indicates how attempered and attenuated by spiritual faith were the dictates of pure reason in his day, and the reason of Boileau, as I have already observed, was strongly tinged with æstheticism. I need not, with reference to eighteenth-century reason worship, go further than to refer the curious of enlightenment on the subject to the masterly works of Morley on the period in question, in which it is precisely this unflinching devotion to reason or unreason (if the sage of Chelsea will have it thus) which stimulates his calm and logical temperament to positive enthusiasm. A last element of contrast between the centuries is of interest in connection with the habitual mode of thought which Godwin and his political disciple Shelley borrowed from eighteenth-century French sources with reference to the true relations subsisting between laws and morals. The seventeenth-century mind held tenaciously enough to the theory that it is the _moeurs_ of a nation that inspire the laws, but the encyclopedists were inspired in their undying hope of amelioration and human progress to perfectibility by the contrary theory that men, after all, are only bad because the laws have made them so. It may be conceded, then, that these broad relations of literary movements one with the other, the conflict of converging tendencies, and the more evident causes of the growth and decay of powerful manifestations of a nation's thought, are of quite sufficient moment to have merited fuller treatment at the hands of the eminent critic who has in all other respects fulfilled his task so admirably, that having regard to the necessary conditions of the subject, it would be above criticism if anything could be. THE BOTANY OF SHAKESPEARE. BY THOMAS H. MACBRIDE. The universality of Shakespeare is the common remark of critics. Other great men have been versatile; Shakespeare alone is universal. He alone of all great men seems to have been able to follow his own advice, "to hold as it were the mirror up to Nature." On the clear surface of his thought, as on a deep Alpine lake, the whole shore lies reflected--not alone the clouds, the sky, the woods, the castles, the rocks, the mountain path by which the shepherd strolls; not alone the broad highway by which may march the king in splendor the peasant with his wain; but even the humbler objects by the still water's edge, the trodden grass, the fluttering sedge, the broken reed, the tiniest flower, all things, all Nature in action or repose finds counterpart within the glassy depths. Hence it is that no man, at least no English-speaking man, reads Shakespeare wrong. Everybody understands him. Here is a sort of Anglo-Saxon Bible in which, so far as the world goes, every soul finds himself, with all his hopes, his doubts, his whims, depicted. We are therefore not surprised that everybody claims a share in Shakespeare; rather claims the poet as his own. The Protestant is sure that Shakespeare despised the hierarchy; the Romanist is quite as certain that he loved the Church. There exists an essay to prove him a Presbyterian; another to show that the great dramatist was a Universalist. A volume has been written to prove the man a soldier; another that he was a lawyer, a printer, a fisherman, a freemason; and here are five or six articles to show that Shakespeare was a gardener.[U] [Footnote U: In preparation of this article the author has consulted chiefly the following: John Gerarde, The Herball or General Historie of Plants, 1597; Shakspere, Edward Dowden, 1872; William Shakespeare, Works, Globe edition, 1867; Natural History of Shakespeare, Bessie Mayou, 1877; Shakespeare's England, William Winter, 1894; The Plant lore and Garden-craft of Shakespeare, H. F. Ellacombe, 1896; The Gardener's Chronicle, sundry pamphlets, and shorter articles.] All this simply means that the poet had a marvelous faculty for close observing; that his vision was accurate, his instinct wonderfully true. It may be therefore worth our while to study for a little this remarkable man from the standpoint of a naturalist, to see how he who so vividly paints a passion can paint a flower; how the man who limns a character, till beyond the photograph it starts to actuality, will catch the essential feature of some natural truth. We shall nowhere lack for material. The plays are full of references to plants and flowers of every sort. England in Shakespeare's day, as now, was a land of bloom, and the poet but reflects the loveliness of beauty and color spread about him. But he does something more. He is not content with flashes of color and breathings of odor, he goes into detail and gives us the individual plant unmistakably. In his description he shows an exactitude, a discriminating perception that, had it been turned to Nature's problems seriously at all, must at once have transformed the science of his age. But Shakespeare was not a man of science; he was a poet. In his views of Nature he resembles the great poets of the world, notably Goethe; and, like Goethe, he not infrequently outruns the science of his time, uses his imagination, divining things invisible. Moreover, Shakespeare's plants are living things; they form a garden, not a herbarium. They stand before us in multitudes, so that it is difficult for the present purpose to know what to select. We must be content with a few specimen forms brought out in quotations no more extensive than seems necessary to the argument. Of course, there are many plants to-day discussed of which Shakespeare never heard. He does not speak of many sorts of fungi, of slime molds, microbes; he knew nothing about these. The microscope had hardly been invented, and the unseen world was as yet largely personified. And yet Shakespeare has not failed to note the visible signs of some of our microscopic forms. Critics have wasted their time and the patience of mankind in an effort to identify Hebona, the "leperous distilment" poured into the porches of the royal ear. Almost profitless are such discussions. Yet we may note that we have here to do with an effect; the means of producing it need not be too closely questioned. Before the rush of action, the weird setting, the voice of an apparition, the excited audience cares not what the mysterious vial may contain--ebony, henbane, yew, or whether it were entirely empty. What is called for is a speedy and mysterious taking off. Had the scene been laid in Italy, the effect had been reached by the fateful prick of a jeweled pin, some ring upon a Borgian finger whose pressure was the paralysis of death. But the king died of no such curari. Note the symptoms (Hamlet, i, 5, 64-73): "The leperous distilment; whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine; And a most instant tetter barked about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, All my smooth body." These are the symptoms of blood-poisoning, vividly portrayed; of some contagion, communicable by infection. In foul old London Shakespeare had doubtless seen endemic, zymotic diseases of every description, and drew his picture from the life. Royal blood is notoriously unsound, royal habit leaves the porches of royal ears especially exposed. On our supposition the vial need not have contained very much, not even ebony. The dramatist had plenty of mystery ready to his hand, and the Hebona is perhaps intentionally ambiguous. Bacterial diseases were of old called plagues; they fell from heaven. Listen to King Lear: "Now, all the plagues that in the pendulous air Hang fated o'er men's faults, light on my daughters!" Or Caliban: "All the infections that the sun sucks up From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him By inch-meal a disease!" Or they were attributed, as already intimated, to unseen personal agencies: "This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the hare-lip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth." I quote this latter rather also to show the accuracy and compass of Shakespeare's vision. How many people, not farmers, have seen wheat whitened by the blight! And that is exactly the description, white not "to the harvest," but whiter still to sterility and death. But leaving aside all microscopic forms which may or may not be incidentally touched upon everywhere, we may turn our attention next to cryptogamic plants which are positively defined. The sudden springing of mushrooms, for instance, especially at night, so unreal and yet realities withal, made their creation a suitable trick for Prospero: "You demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew." The "green sour ringlets on the fields whereof the ewe not bites" are "fairy rings." The same thing appears in the speech of Dame Quickly: "And nightly, meadow-fairies, look you sing, Like to the Garter's compass, in a ring; The expressure that it bears, green let it be, More fertile-fresh than all the field to see." Fungi, toadstools, mushrooms, and so forth, are fructifications only; the vegetative part of the plants permeates the soil, feeds on its organic matter, and spreads almost equally, we may assume, in all directions from the point of starting. When now this vegetative growth has accumulated energy to form fruit, the sporocarps or mushrooms rise all around at the limits of activity; hence, in a circle. The fungi cut a small figure in Shakespeare--i. e., considering their numbers and almost omnipresence. But we must remember that they were at that time studied by few, their significance and interest little suspected. They formed part of the realm of the world unseen; they came and went at the instance of powers unknown, mostly personified, imaginary, a misty population, the thought of which kept for long ages the childhood of our race in terror. Shakespeare saw the forms of unstudied plants, everything visible to the naked eye, and really omitted very little. He speaks of mosses--the lichens were included with them--chiefly as indicative of age in the object in which they rest: "Under an oak, whose boughs were mossed with age And high top bald with dry antiquity." Then again he simply touches them, but in such a way as to reveal his full appreciation of their beauty, as in Cymbeline, iv, 2. For the decoration of Imogen's grave the ruddock would bring flowers-- "... bring thee all this; Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none, To winter-ground thy corse." The "furred moss" to "winter-ground thy corse" is exquisite. Ferns, though so much larger, so handsome, and in our day so all-attractive, failed generally to impress our fathers. Butler, writing in 1670, has this to say: "They spring like fern, that infant weed, Equivocally without a seed, And have no possible foundation But merely in th' imagination." Now, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, ferns answered his purpose without seed just as well as with such visible means of perpetuity. His only reference is I Henry, iv, where Gadshill says: "We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible"; and Chamberlain replies: "Nay, by my faith, I think you are more belonging to the Night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible." In this connection Ellacombe suggests the doctrine of signatures. The God of Nature had written for us his human children prescriptions all over the leafy world. The remedy indicated by its form its own application. Thus a heart-shaped leaf was good medicine for cardiac troubles, a lung-like leaf was good for consumption, a lungwort in fact, and so a liverwort, a spleenwort, and the like. Gerarde, and, in fact, all the old medical writers throughout the centuries, are full of this. Now, what more natural than that a plant which could thus perpetuate itself age after age by means invisible should be able to confer the much-sought gift of invisibility, the power to disappear and reappear at pleasure? Many people so believed. Shakespeare appears to have been skeptical. Turn we now to the flowering plants: the amount of material at our disposal, as already indicated, is immense. Shakespeare was evidently a great lover of flowers simply as such. His pages from first to last are ornate with color, almost redolent of roses, lilies, eglantine, with every conceivable metaphor and trope--"the bud of love," the "nettle of danger," the "flower of safety." Their lovely shapes are ever before him; he is spellbound with their beauty. "England itself is a sea-walled garden." Grammatical forms may vanish, if only the flower may live. Compare Cymbeline, ii, 3: "Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, And Phoebus 'gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that _lies_." The image of the morning flowers, the fiery steeds that drink them dry, shall fascinate us so that we forget the grammar. It will not do to say lie; the word must rhyme with "arise," and further on with "eyes": "And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes: With everything that pretty is, My lady sweet arise." For the Queen of the Fairies he spreads this sort of a couch: "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine: There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight," etc. Such cases reveal the impress, the healthy, happy impress which Nature could exercise on this the foremost man of all the world, the harmony between Nature and Nature's child. All the plants in the last quotation are wild flowers, except the musk-roses, and these are so common in England as to be almost wild. The eglantine was the sweetbrier, said to be wild in all the southern part of the island and popular in the literature of all recorded centuries. Gerarde describes as follows: "The leaves are glittering, of beautiful green color, of smell most pleasant.... The fruit when it is ripe maketh most pleasant meats, and banqueting dishes, as tarts and such like, the making whereof I commit to the cunning cook, and teeth to eat them in the rich man's mouth." The sweetness of the leaf of the eglantine is referred to by Shakespeare in another passage which I venture to quote now for another purpose, to show the accuracy of his description as applied to simple flowers. The lines are from the scene quoted before. Arviragus and Guiderius would bury the swooning Imogen. They think her dead (Cymbeline, iv, 2): "I'll sweeten thy sad grave: thou shalt not lack The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor The azured harebell, like thy veins; no, nor The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander, Out-sweetened not thy breath." Primroses when pale are the palest of all withering plants. The flowers change color with maturity, especially after fertilization. The paleness of the primrose is the pallor of decay. But the azure harebell--behold it waving on its slender stipe beneath the shade of some great rock--who can look into its delicate cerulean cup again and not bethink him of the blue-veined eyelid sleep that falls upon our human flowers! The same accuracy of detail is evinced in many other places. Take, for instance, Shakespeare's description of the violet all the way through. It moves him chiefly by its odor (King John, iv, 2): "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, to add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess." Nevertheless, we have violets dim, and violets blue, and purple violets, and more particularly "blue-veined" violets, as if the poet looked with a lens into the very throat of the flower which Frenchmen call a thought. "And there is pansies--that's for thoughts." His description of the elm is equally exact (Midsummer-Night's Dream, iv, 1, 47-49): "So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle Gently entwist; the female ivy so Enrings the barky fingers of the elm." There is nothing better than that, as you may prove by examining the twigs of even some of our American species; the cork elm, for instance. The hawthorn, the cedar, and the pine and the oak especially, are most naturally treated. These are Shakespeare's familiar trees. The cedar of Shakespeare is the cedar of Lebanon, commonly planted throughout Europe since the time of the Crusades. Shakespeare had probably seen specimens in England. He uses it as the type of all that is great and fine. One author thinks he copies Ezekiel, chapter xxxi. The pine was beside him all the while. He knew the secret of the pine knot, and well describes it (Troilus and Cressida, i, 3): "... checks and disasters Grow in the veins of actions highest reared, As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap, Deflect the sound pine and divert his grain Tortive and errant from his course of growth." Any one who has ever examined the case, or even one who has handled knotty lumber, has seen the wood fiber run around the persistent base of some dead limb, and can appreciate these lines. All these quotations show that Shakespeare used his own eyes and used them well. He saw the real distinctions of things, the hoariness on the willow leaf. He found character in the oak as in the king, and beauty in both. In many of his notices of natural objects, however, the poet is not the original observer. He often uses current opinions, fancies, dreams, for these also were the realities in his day, quite as much sometimes as oaks and forests. There is concerning plants a sort of orthodox mythology, and thousands of years have sometimes contributed to the reputation born by a single species. A curious illustration is found in what Shakespeare has to say about the mandrake (Antony and Cleopatra, i, 5): "Give me to drink mandragora. Why, madam? That I might sleep out this great gap of time." Othello, iii, 3: "Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou owedst yesterday." Juliet, reflecting on her proposed entombment in the dark grave of the Capulets, exclaims (Romeo and Juliet, iv, 3): "Alack, alack! is it not like that I, So early waking, what with loathsome smells, And shrieks like mandrake's torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad: Or, if I wake, shall I not be distraught, Environèd with all these hideous fears?" The mandrake _Atropa officinalis_ belongs to the _Solanaceæ_, and, like others of the family, has narcotic properties. This was doubtless known to Shakespeare, as in the passage cited he compares the mandrake with the poppy. The groaning and shrieking are, of course, the purest superstition. The root of the mandrake was supposed to resemble the human form. The favorite habitat assigned to the plant was the foot of the gallows, and men believed that in some way the bodies of criminals were reproduced in the growing plant; their very pains and cries renewed, especially for him who profanely dared to pull the mandrake from the earth. The curious may consult Gerarde. These ideas, it is needless to say, are very old; Pliny refers to them, and, if I recollect well, Vergil has his hero pull up some plant amid the strangest of sights and sounds. With these old myths are tied up, perchance, the mandrakes of King James's version. Nay, the superstition still survives; look at the woodcut in Webster's Unabridged, and you will discover that the artist who set out to illustrate the word mandrake for that somewhat venerable authority was by no means able to free himself from the ancient spell. Credulity is evermore a factor in the compound called human nature. Men love to be fooled, or to find some support for belief in manifest absurdity. There is nothing so silly but has its advocates among men who ought to know better. A year or two since, a man brought from Ohio to the University of Iowa an innocent five-parted, digitate, black fungus. It was treasured in alcohol. Why? Because of its origin. An honest mechanic meeting with accident lost his fingers under the surgeon's knife. The amputated members were neglected, but presently discovered and duly buried in the garden. The following spring from the "identical spot" uprose a swarthy hand, black without, white within. The hand was a perfect _main-de-gloire_ for that sensation-loving community. The matter was discussed in newspapers. A long and careful account of the wonder was prepared, put in print and circulated among the friends of the deceased--fingers! "What fools we mortals be!" For sheer superstition and crass stupidity who may say that the nineteenth century may not yet discount the days of the virgin Queen? But I said at the outset that Shakespeare had in some instances anticipated modern scientific teaching. To illustrate this in its most striking instance, I am compelled to offer a somewhat long quotation (Winter's Tale, iv, 4, 76-106): "POLIXENES. Shepherdess, A fair one are you, well you fit our ages With flowers of winter. PERDITA. Sir, the year growing ancient, Not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o' the season Are our carnation and streaked gillyvors, Which some call nature's bastards: of that kind Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not To get slips of them. POLIXENES. Wherefore, gentle maiden, Do you neglect them? PERDITA. For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature. POLIXENES. Say there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: so, over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race: this is an art Which does mend nature, change it rather, but The art itself is nature. PERDITA. So it is. POLIXENES. Then make your garden rich in gillyvors, And do not call them bastards." Here we have brought out very distinctly the effect of cross-fertilization in flowers, the result of grafting and the development of varieties. Better than that, we have here the recognition of that tendency in organisms to vary that lies at the very root of the development of species. Natural selection, survival of the fittest, were impossible were it not true that "Nature is made better by no mean but Nature makes that mean"; or, as it is more broadly stated a few lines further on, "This is an art which does mend Nature, change it rather, but the art itself is Nature." I consider these very remarkable statements when we reflect on the time in which they were written. Darwin, in 1860, does but unfold the thought. The selection which Shakespeare notes as practiced by gardeners, and a similar selection seen in the world of domestic animals, gave Darwin his cue of natural selection. The beauty of Darwin's thesis lies in the fact that the process is natural, and such is Shakespeare's dictum. Later on, lines 112-128, Perdita brings out another remarkable observation that has only lately been confirmed by the conclusions of science: "... Now my fairest friend, I would I had some flowers o' the spring that might Become your time of day; and yours; and yours; That wear upon your virgin branches yet Your maidenheads growing: O Proserpina, For the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st fall From Dis's wagon! daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength--a malady Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds; The flower-de-luce being one!" Primroses are dimorphic--i. e., on the same species we find flowers of different sorts. These are complete, but in any particular flower the essential organs fail of adaptation to each other--the style in one too long, in another too short, to receive pollen from the stamens of its own flower. For fertilization such flowers are absolutely dependent upon the assistance brought by insect visitors. Perdita's primrose is _Primula veris_, the early primrose, "that takes the winds of March with beauty," and dies ere it beholds "bright Phoebus in his strength," and it is precisely this species that forms the basis of one of Darwin's earliest and most fruitful studies in the cross-fertilization of flowers. The styles in one form of the early primrose are three times as long as in the other, the stigmas differ, and the coadaptation of the parts of the different flowers extends even to the grains of pollen. Such flowers in the absence of insects are entirely unproductive. Insects are rare so early in the year, and accordingly many of the primroses die, as Perdita says, "unmarried." Of course, it is not pretended that Shakespeare knew anything of this; but that he should have discovered the fact that the early primrose bears little or no seed, and that he should have been impressed by the truth that this is due to lack of fertilization, is wonderful. This circumstance might well lead to the suspicion that the poet was a gardener. We must not forget to notice, too, in this connection, that carnations--i. e., pinks--are remarkable for the great number of their varieties. We have, if I may so say, pinks of every color, from crimson to white, even brown it is said. This was true in Shakespeare's time, if one may trust Gerarde again; he says, "A great and large volume would not suffice to write of every one at large considering how infinite they are, and how every year the climate and country bringeth forth new sorts and such as have not heretofore been written of." Another passage in which the poet has instinctively hit upon a scientific truth is found in Sonnet IV, the last ten lines. The beauty of the passage as a whole is so remarkable that the delicate touches in particular lines are apt to be overlooked: "For never-resting time leads summer on To hideous winter and confounds him there; Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone, Beauty o'ersnowed and bareness everywhere: Then, were not summer's distillation left, A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass. Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft, Nor it nor remembrance what it was: But flowers distilled though they with winter meet, Lose but their show; their substance still lives sweet." No botanist can read the line "A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass" and not recognize the exact portrayal of the living vegetable cell. The living protoplasm is a liquid prisoner sure enough, hemmed in by walls transparent. There could be no more striking image. And when in herb and tree, in every living plant, the summer's work is ended and hideous winter falls, the new cells, summer's distillation left, do in all perennials actually survive, lest of the effect of beauty, beauty be bereft. There is no more marvelous picture in all the vegetal world than that of a great tree with all its myriad cells, in summer so filled with the rush of life's activity and change that we might hear its music, in autumn sinking to quiescence, and the winter's silent chill where liquid prisoners sleep 'neath walls of glass. The poet did not understand it; he simply prophesied better than he knew. He makes us think of Goethe, of Lucretius. These men made happy guesses. Lucretius especially surprises us by his views of the constitution of matter--unverified, so far as we can know. Goethe lived in the age of science and went on laboriously to verify his surmises. The only natural science which Shakespeare knew was gardening--if that may be called a science. His Sonnets are supposed to have been written about 1590, and the first scientific glimpse of the "prisoner pent in walls of glass" came about 1670, through the lenses of Nehemiah Grew, a Puritan physicist and botanist. I am aware that it is said by some that in a critique like this we are apt to read much into the writings of our author. The quotations I have submitted show, it seems to me, that this is unnecessary in the present case at least. The words are generally unequivocal. Of course, the language is poetical, metaphoric, but the metaphor has reference to something else; the description is not the metaphor. But, in fact, ought we to expect in Shakespeare very exact or complete description? His whole art lies in the power of suggestion. The deep impressions a man of genius makes upon our minds lie often, if not always, in what he does not say. A word or two and the vision rises, whether in Nature or in life, a passion or a landscape. Take the broken phrases of Ophelia depicting her broken heart, her "no more but so"; or the picture of the winter woods in Sonnet LXXIII: "That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves or none or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." Does any one pretend that we are reading into the lines when we appreciate the marvelous sorrow of the one picture or the exquisite truthfulness and splendor of the other? Shakespeare's natural eye was clear indeed, but none the less he seems to have seen everything with the eye of his mind. Faraday so saw the world of force, Newton of mathematical law, and Tyndall's scientific use of the imagination lies in the same direction. And so the man of science and the poet have much in common. Both use the natural world, and the imagination is for each an instrument of effort. The poet's generalization is a splendid vision in a world ideal, suggested, no doubt, by what is actual and liable here and there to coincide with truth; the generalization of the scientific man is likewise a vision, but it rests upon the actual, upon the ascertained fact at the greatest number of points possible, and disappoints us only that it is not everywhere coincident. The poet dreams of Atlantis, the lost continents, the islands of the blest, and builds us pictures that vanish with his song; the man of science too beholds the continents rise; scene after scene he likewise makes to pass across our startled vision; but his are history, his tapestries are wrought in the loom of time. The poet writes the book of Genesis, with the herbs bringing forth fruit after their kind; the man of science figures fossil leaves and cones and fruit. Only at the last do poetry and science possibly again agree: "The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself-- Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind!" And when the man of science gathers all his data, and collates fact with fact, and builds the superstructure of his vision, with him, too, all things fade and vanish in the infinity of the future. AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL EXPOSITIONS--THEIR PURPOSES AND BENEFITS. BY MARCUS BENJAMIN, PH. D. Industrial expositions are a natural development of the fairs of the middle ages. The latter are believed to have originated in the religious gatherings which afforded an opportunity for the sale of wares to large numbers of people. Such fairs still persist in northern Europe, and the best known of them is probably that held three times a year in Leipsic, to which, it is said, "some twenty-five or thirty thousand foreign merchants" are still attracted each year. In course of time international exhibitions at which specimens of the arts and industries of the great nations of the world were contrasted came into vogue. These began with the International Exhibition held in London in 1851, and of them three have been held in the United States, as follows: The first in New York, in 1853; the second in Philadelphia, in 1876; and the third in Chicago, in 1893. The great magnitude of such expositions has led in recent years to their specialization or subdivision into expositions at which only a specialty was presented. Notable among such have been the following, which were for the most part international: Of articles connected with the leather industry, held in Berlin, in 1877; of all kinds of paper and pasteboard, held in Berlin, in 1878; of fisheries, held in Berlin, in 1880; of electricity, held in Paris, in 1881; of geography, held in Venice, in 1881; of cotton, held in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1881; of early data in American history, held in Madrid, in 1881; of fisheries, held in London, in 1883; of historical matters pertaining to Columbus and the discovery of America, held in Madrid, in 1892; and of hygiene, including chemical, pharmaceutical, and sanitary objects, held in Naples, in 1894. Similarly there has been a development in the United States from local fairs, such as those of the various mechanics' institutes, typical of which is the one held annually since 1828 in New York city under the auspices of the American Institute, into interstate expositions. Of these, since 1880, the following have been held: Cincinnati Industrial Exposition, Cincinnati, Ohio, September 30 to October 4, 1883; Southern Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky, August 16 to October 25, 1883; World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana, December 16, 1883, to June 30, 1884; Central Exposition of the Ohio Valley and Central States, Cincinnati, Ohio, July 4 to October 7, 1888; California Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, California, January 1 to July 4, 1894; Cotton States and Industrial Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia, September 18 to December 31, 1895; Tennessee Centennial Exposition, Nashville, Tennessee, May 1 to October 31, 1897; and Trans-Mississippi International Exposition, Omaha, Nebraska, June 1 to November 1, 1898. Of the foregoing, the more important were those held in New Orleans, in 1884; in San Francisco, in 1894; in Atlanta, in 1895; in Nashville, in 1897, and in Omaha, in 1898; especially so from the fact that all of these received recognition by the Government; and, with the exception of that held in San Francisco, liberal appropriations were made for their support by Congress. Moreover, at each of them, excepting again that held in San Francisco, a special Government building was erected in which the national Government made exhibits of the workings of the several executive departments, together with the Smithsonian Institution and its dependencies and the Fish Commission. The first named, that of New Orleans, was held as a celebration of the centenary of the cotton industry in the United States. The first record of cotton as a factor in the foreign trade of this country appeared in the shipment in 1784 of six bags, amounting to about one bale, from Charleston, South Carolina. Audubon Park was the site on which the buildings were erected. The exposition held in San Francisco, in 1894, had for its purpose the affording of an opportunity to foreign exhibitors at the World's Fair to further display their goods in the United States, and in consequence a great number of exhibits were shipped direct from Chicago to the Pacific coast. The exposition was located in Golden Gate Park. The Atlanta Exposition had its inception in a belief that the agricultural, mineral, and manufacturing resources of the South were not adequately represented in Chicago in 1893. It was believed that a better exhibit of the products of the Southland would tend to foster greater trade relations between that section of our country and other parts of the United States, as well as with foreign countries, especially those to the south, such as Mexico. The Cotton States Exposition was held in Piedmont Park. The exposition in Nashville was designed primarily to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the admission of Tennessee into the Federal Union. Recognizing the commercial and educational advantages to be derived from such a demonstration, it was deemed wise to characterize the celebration as an exhibit of "the matchless resources of Tennessee, and at the same time to lead to their greater development." The old West Side Park was chosen as the site of the "Centennial City." The exposition held last year in Omaha had for its purposes to do for the Trans-Mississippi States what the more local exhibitions had done for Atlanta and Nashville. It was claimed that it would for the "first time fully illustrate the wealth-producing power and the extent of productive industries of the Greater West," and it did. The exposition grounds were included within what was called the Kountze tract and the old fair grounds. Each of these expositions has been projected for distinct commercial reasons. They have had for their immediate purposes the presentation of the products of the region in which they were located to their neighbors, to the nation, and to the world. In this sense they have been simply the offspring of the fairs of the middle ages, differing from them only in that the feature of sale has been largely eliminated. That they have been successful in accomplishing the results desired is beyond doubt; indeed, the expositions in Nashville and Omaha were even financial successes. But they have done more than this; they have accomplished a world of good in the way of education. Let us consider some of these benefits. Beginning with the grounds, these have been given over to the charge of some competent landscape architect under whose skillful supervision the desert has been made to blossom like a rose. The sand hills of San Francisco became the beautiful "Palm City," which since the close of the exposition has become one of the most attractive spots in the Golden Gate Park. At Nashville the landscape effects were claimed by many to excel in beauty those of the World's Fair in Chicago. "Evergreens, vines, and shrubs are everywhere, and three lakes break this vista of green," was the opinion of one visitor. Besides the general architectural effect of the buildings, which can not but impress those who are so fortunate as to visit these expositions, there is a special value in the reproductions of historical buildings. At Atlanta the Massachusetts Building was a representation of the Craigie House, the headquarters of Washington when in Cambridge at the beginning of the Revolution, and later the home of the poet Longfellow. It was a fortunate inspiration of the late Dr. G. Brown Goode that led to its presentation by the State of Massachusetts to the local Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The architectural feature of the Nashville Exposition was the replica of the Athenian Parthenon in all its artistic beauty. Every detail was true to the original in design and coloring. It was the chief glory of the centennial, and as it was a permanent structure it will long remain to the "Athens of the South" a memorial of its exposition. Of less conspicuous interest were the reproductions of the Rialto of Venice and the Alamo of San Antonio. The only architectural feature of historic character announced for Omaha was that "the Arkansas Building will be a reproduction of the mansion of General Albert Pike in 1843." The long oval waterway around which the buildings were grouped afforded, however, excellent opportunity for studying the architecture of the buildings, which, it was claimed with much justice, approached those of the never-to-be-forgotten "White City" in their beauty of design. From the exterior to the interior is a natural method of progression. Let us therefore pass to a brief consideration of the educational features that are to be derived from an examination, no matter how cursory, of the displays that are to be seen within the buildings. First of all, and indeed frequently the most important, is the exhibit made by the national Government. In the special building devoted to that purpose are shown the exhibits of the several executive departments, including also that of the Smithsonian Institution and its dependencies, and the Fish Commission. As a result of the years of accumulated experience there has been in each of the expositions previously mentioned, except that in San Francisco, a distinct improvement in the installation of the exhibits in the Government Building, until it was recognized in Atlanta that the display was superior to that in Chicago, and in Nashville "the best exhibit ever made" was the verdict of those who had seen the successive expositions previous to that in Omaha. Therefore the telling of a story by means of objects in the best manner possible is the result sought for and attained most perfectly by those who installed the Government exhibits. It is, of course, understood that the purpose of the Government exhibit is to familiarize the public with the methods of carrying on the functions of the different departments. Thus, in the post-office exhibit there is shown the entire sequence of postage stamps, both of the United States and foreign countries, the various kinds of mail bags, figures of the mail carriers in their different uniforms, and finally models or pictures of the methods of transportation. The Treasury Department shows the working of the mint by the striking of commemorative medals, while a full series of the existing medals and coins of the country are displayed in cases on the wall. The functions of the Department of the Interior are shown by exhibits of a series of models of some important invention, as, for instance, a sequence showing the development of the sewing machine. In this way--for of course the blanks and other documents are shown--the working of the Patent Office is demonstrated; while the Geological Survey, also of the Department of the Interior, presents a series of minerals, showing the economical wealth of the country, together with its maps and reports, results of work accomplished. Everything can not be shown, but a most excellent idea of what each department does can be had from a study of the exhibits of the Government. Next in importance to the Government Building is the one devoted to commerce, and here are usually to be found the weak points of our American expositions. In lieu of a series of exhibits showing the progress in a given industry or trade, we find too frequently a collection of nondescript articles without much if any relationship to each other. This is due primarily to a lack of proper organization in soliciting exhibits, and also because the awards or medals of the jurors are so often of no relative value. The second condition is an outcome of the first. To be more specific, in Nashville there were no exhibits from any one of the larger and well-known silver firms, and yet American silverware has a recognized status as one of the most successful of our American art industries. Cut glassware is another branch in which our artisans or art workmen have achieved splendid results, and still there were no exhibits from art glassmakers in Nashville. Certain varieties of art pottery and art glassware, such as the Rookwood pottery and the Tiffany glass, are seldom seen at these smaller expositions. In consequence the juror makes an award to the best article of its kind on exhibition, which may be but a third-rate article compared with others; still it is the best shown in the exposition, and therefore worthy of recognition. Another unfortunate feature must be mentioned at this point. It is the decorative feature. At the last World's Fair held in Paris there was a colossal figure of George Washington in chocolate exhibited by an American manufacturer of that article. While it might be considered as a laudable attempt to make known to the French nation the features of the "Father of his Country," and from that point of view worthy of recognition, still it was no evidence of the superiority of the chocolate, and therefore could not be considered in connection with the giving of an award. This condition of affairs prevails at every exposition, and too frequently an exhibit of a meritorious article is made in such a modest manner that its claims are overshadowed by the pretentious display of something quite inferior. Two conditions thus present themselves--namely, the lack of proper exhibits and the improper presentation of certain exhibits. The first condition may be overcome by a more perfect canvass of the industries of the country. In nearly every one of these there is a national organization, and it should be the duty of that body to consider the matter. By the appointment of committees and working among the representatives of the industry, either a good exhibit from the leading firms could be secured, or else a collective exhibit of the best from many firms could be obtained. Typical of the last named was the exhibit made by the potters of the country at the World's Fair in Chicago. By the adoption of such a method of displaying the products of manufacturers the possibility of the second condition would be entirely eliminated. After all, the value of these expositions is chiefly educational, and surely no more perfect way of educating the visitor or sightseer could be found than by placing before him a historical series of products, beginning with the one made first in point of time, continuing with better specimens, showing the improvements that have resulted from increased experience and knowledge, and culminating with the finest product now made. The contrast between the first and the last would be indeed most striking. It must not be thought from the foregoing remarks that these interstate expositions have been lacking in the presentation of the products of their own home industries. Far from it. In San Francisco, in Atlanta, in Nashville, and in Omaha the local manufacturers did themselves great credit by the admirable way in which their goods were shown, but it was just in this particular feature that the weak point indicated previously made itself most conspicuous. A local silversmith could hardly be expected to compete with the more famous manufacturers in the same line in larger cities, and yet in the absence of an exhibit by the better known firm an award would naturally be given to the smaller manufacturer, thus creating a false impression to the world at large. It must not be assumed that the educational value of the exhibits in the Commerce Building is without commendation. Next to making a thing, the seeing of it is most important, and surely no one can pass along the aisles of any exposition without noticing much that is new or unusual, no matter what his previous experience may have been. It is in this connection that the foreign section is frequently most instructive. Warm furs from Russia and the north, rich fabrics and strange metal ware from the Orient, rare porcelains from Copenhagen, and brilliant glassware from Bohemia and Hungary, tell the story with striking vividness of the special products of the Old-World nations. As has been shown, the finished products of manufacturers are those that are housed in the building devoted to commerce and manufacturing, but the raw materials require a building or two for themselves. That in which the products of the earth are exhibited is usually designated the "Minerals and Forestry Building." This requires but brief mention, and has its chief interest for the expert. Geological specimens, including paleontological and lithological exhibits, show the age and character of the soil, while the rocks further indicate the possibilities of the territory, for they show the geological horizon. In natural order are shown the minerals of the country. At Atlanta and Nashville the richness of the mineral wealth of the Southern States was fully demonstrated. Not only ores such as those of iron and manganese, but the combustible minerals, as coal, lignite, and petroleum, were exhibited. More striking, perhaps, are the great numbers of economic minerals that these expositions show. The materials--phosphate rock, sulphur, and nitrates--used in making artificial fertilizers; the marbles; the pigment-yielding minerals, including ochres, umber, and barite; the clays, with their products of earthenware and pottery, bricks, and tiles; and even mineral waters are among the different minerals to be seen. It is from such exhibits that something of an idea is obtained of the enormous wealth that is contained in the earth, waiting only to be excavated and fashioned into articles of beauty and utility. While such exhibits are frequently to be seen in museums, still the average mind is more impressed by the casual examination of these things in expositions, and one's pride of home increased by the rich stores of mineral wealth attractively installed. It is customary also to show models of the machinery used in mining, and even books, maps, and drawings are not uncommonly seen. A similar arrangement is followed in regard to the forest products. Logs and sections of trees, as well as samples of wood and timber of all kinds, are shown. Then come the finished products--boards, shingle, and moldings--and finally the manufactured articles, such as pails, tubs, and then furniture. Barks, as for tanning or dyeing, seeds and gums, and the wood pulp for paper are on exhibition. Among the miscellaneous products deserving mention are fibers, as used in basket-making or cane work. Forestry as a science is made the basis of a series of exhibits. These include timber culture, tools used, and methods employed in planting and caring for trees. And finally lumbering as a science finds a place in the scheme followed in this department. This includes the tools used in lumbering and the methods employed, as well as exhibits illustrating the tan-bark industry, the turpentine industry, and the charcoal industry. So it happens that there is much that can be learned by the student who will devote a little time to the analysis of the exhibits in the building devoted to the products of the mines and the forest. A visit to the Agricultural Building reveals to the interested observer those products of the soil that are for the most part the result of cultivation, and so we find exhibits of cereals--wheat, oats, barley, and the like--and then their immediate products: bread, pastes such as macaroni, and starches. The sugar-yielding plants, together with honey and the manufactured product, as candy and other confections, come next in order. The root crops, such as potatoes or beets, and the vegetables, are of much importance. Preserved meats and food preparations, dairy products, spices, tea, and tobacco are among the articles on exhibition. Then come the plants yielding fibers, as cotton and the like; but we hasten on to make mention of the exhibits of implements used in agriculture and its special subdivisions, such as horticulture, viticulture, floriculture, and arboriculture. Who will gainsay the fact that the farmer can not do otherwise than learn much from a visit to the home of the products of the soil? It it also customary to include a live-stock exhibition during some period of the exposition. Mention has been made of the building devoted to the finished products of manufactures and of the buildings in which the crude materials are displayed. Besides these there are usually several buildings devoted to the exhibition of the means by which the original substances, whether from the mine, forest, or farm, are made up into the commercial product for the merchant. One of these is called the "Transportation Building," and in it we find the various means by which the raw materials are conveyed to the factory. From the lower forms of transportation of which man is the motive power, such as the wheelbarrow, upward through the various forms of vehicles of which the power comes from horses and other animals, until as the topmost member of the series is shown the magnificently equipped train of railway cars, provided with all the conveniences that modern luxury can devise. If the visitor is not content with land locomotion, more than likely he can find an exhibit in which transportation on water is possible, as by means of a naphtha or steam launch. Machinery is the active means by which the immediate transposition of the crude material into the finished article is accomplished. And in a building where the ceaseless belt moves with the rapidly revolving pulley may be seen the many forms of machinery which the active brain of the ingenious mechanic has devised to cheapen labor and increase production. The change of the cotton fiber into cloth, or the passage of the silken thread into the finished handkerchief; the revolving cylinder on which the virgin sheet of white paper becomes the printed purveyor of news; or the many and varied appliances by which the piece of leather is fashioned into a covering for the foot; or again the means by which the strip of steel is made into a pin or needle, are among the interesting things that may be seen in Machinery Hall. Conspicuous among the many interesting wonders of science that were shown at the Centennial, in 1876, were the few, insignificant, blue, flickering, and unstable lights that ushered into existence a new era in the history of electricity. In Atlanta, in Nashville, and in Omaha a building was necessary to hold the appliances and products of the latest of our sciences. Telephones no longer impress us by their newness, and the appliances of electricity to heating and lighting are now household necessities. To those who treasured the memory of the beauty of the lighted Court of Honor at the White City in Chicago there was given a greater joy when the entire grounds of the beautiful Centennial City in Nashville were illuminated with more than seventeen thousand incandescent lamps. Daylight had faded into darkness only to emerge into an electric day of brilliancy unsurpassed. Thus was told the story of the progress of the science which as a result of the studies of Franklin, Henry, Morse, and Graham Bell may well be regarded as the American science. A parting word must be given to the amusement features. How the Streets of Cairo, now so hackneyed, linger in one's memory! The Enchanted Swing was one of the novel features of the Midwinter Fair in San Francisco, and of weird interest was the Night and Morning in Nashville. The Mexican and Japanese villages were excellent features in Atlanta, and so was the Chinese village in Nashville, although the "Old Plantation" was more popular. Panoramas such as that of the Battle of Gettysburg, or pyrotechnic spectacular shows such as The Storming of Wei-Hai-Wei, are of value. The musical features must not be forgotten, even if popular fancy leans toward Dixie, for the occasional "Gems from the Operas" help to leaven the mass. At Nashville the military drills by the national and State troops were of considerable interest, and much had been hoped for in Omaha in this respect, but the war prevented. In this analysis, incomplete, it is true, of these American interstate expositions something has been shown of their design and more of their benefits. They have had for their purpose the exhibition of the materials, processes, and products of manufacture, but their ultimate benefit has been that of education. To the thoughtful an opportunity has been afforded of following the crude material through the processes of manufacture until the finished product has been exhibited. The variety of crude materials was shown him, the different processes were contrasted, and finally the completed article was exhibited which possessed this merit or that advantage according to the process followed. For the mere pleasure-seeker there were the delights of attractive surroundings, the beauty of the exhibits, and the delights of music or other entertainments. Indeed, all the influences are for good. Let it then be the effort of every one, whether official, exhibitor, or visitor, to use his influence to improve and elevate these expositions so that only the most desirable localities shall be chosen in which to hold them, and let the selection of exhibits be made so as to include the most worthy; for then, and only then, will the visitor derive the greatest benefit. And so from time to time and in various places we shall have these interstate expositions, which will show to the world the advancement made in the development of the resources of our great country. BOOKWORMS IN FACT AND FANCY. BY WILLARD AUSTEN. "What is a bookworm? Tell me if you can; I merely mean the insect, not the man-- A reptile whom a wit like Hood might dub A grub that grubs in Grub Street for its grub." ROBERT ROCKLIFF. So much mystery has gathered around the term bookworm, so much imagery has been employed in depicting the appearance and devastations of this mythical creature, that many have been prepared to accept almost anything, no matter how fabulous, that might be said about this unknown enemy of literature. Reaction against these weird and fantastical accounts is indicated by the question, not infrequently asked, "Are there such things as bookworms?" Few are aware that in this creature we encounter another case of masquerading, that these "destroyers of the Muses" are common enough pests playing other rôles than those in which they are familiarly known. Some of them are met with daily in the house and elsewhere, and arouse no unusual interest, while the world goes on wondering what a bookworm is like. Insects injurious to books and bindings are not a new subject. The Greeks and Romans observed and wrote about them, but notwithstanding, their knowledge of zoölogy, comparatively speaking, was so meager, they do not seem to have felt any of the mystery or wonderment about these creatures which we have felt. The terms _blatta_, _tinea_, _silphe_, are frequently met with in the works of classical writers, and, while we can not be sure of the particular species they intended to allude to by these terms, we do in many instances know from the context that the creatures known to them had like characteristics with those known to us, and that they were given to literary depredations as are their descendants. The earliest allusion to a book-destroying worm which has come down to us from classical lore was rescued from oblivion by the lad Salmasius in 1606, when he discovered the manuscripts of the anthology of Cephalas in the library of the Counts Palatine at Heidelberg. Among the fragments in this collection is one attributed to Evenus, the sophist-poet of Paros, who wrote about 450 B. C., in which the "foul destroyer" is thus berated: "O worst enemy of the Muses, devourer of the pages of books, Foul destroyer that lurkest in a hole, ever feeding on what thou hadst stolen from learning, Tell me, black-colored bookworm, why dost thou lie in ambush to injure the sacred decrees while fashioning thy envious image?" Aristotle, in his History of Animals, mentioned the "little scorpionlike creature found in books"; a characterization which obtains to-day for the little creature which Leunis calls the "_Bücherscorpion_." Horace addresses his finished book, to which he imputes an unbecoming haste to be displayed on the booksellers' stalls, thus: "When thumbed by the hands of the vulgar, you begin to grow dirty, then you will in silence feed the groveling bookworm." Ovid, in his exile at Tomi, likens the "external remorse of its cares" which his heart feels to the gnawing of the _tinea_. Considering the fact that Pliny is said to have comprised in his Natural History all the knowledge of the natural sciences then known, it is a little surprising that he had not more to say regarding book insects. Here and there in his writings, however, he speaks of worms in connection with books and papers in the same casual way as other classical writers, causing you to feel that he was conversant with their destructive tendencies. The epigrammatist Martial in the first century, and Lucian in the second, both use the term bookworm; Martial, in much the same way as did Horace, warning his book of the fate awaiting it; Lucian, in his well-known dialogue, The Dream; or, The Cock, as a symbol of the condition to which miserly man may descend. Sufficient has been said to show the attitude of the ancients toward these little pests, that had no more regard for their precious thoughts than for the utterances of modern "statesmen," whose speeches are "read by title and ordered printed." Crossing the cloistered period of the ages called dark, when books were so few and so constantly used by the jolly monks that these little creatures must have had a difficult time getting a living unobserved, we come down to the sixteenth century, by which time books had begun to multiply and worms to propagate. In the last quarter of this century we find Pierre Petit, who is numbered among the celebrated pleiade of Latin verse writers along with Rapin, Commire, and others, addressing these "impudent creatures" in a thirty-four-line Latin poem titled In Blattam. A curious and interesting characterization of some species of book insects has come to us in the writings of Christian Mentzel, the German naturalist and philologist, who lived in the seventeenth century. When one reads that he heard the bookworm crow like a cock, and said, "I knew not whether some local fowl was clamoring or whether there was but a beating in my ears," one can not help wondering if there was not something defective in his ear drums; but further on he says, "I perceived, in the paper whereon I was writing, a little insect that ceased not to carol like very chanticleer, until taking a magnifying glass I assiduously observed him." From this one concludes that if the fault were not with his hearing, by which some well-known sounds made by book insects seemed to him like the crowing of a cock, an altogether different cock from the kind we know must have lived in his day. The earliest observations on the subject possessing any scientific value were made by Robert Hooke in his Micrographia, published in London in 1665. In many respects this work was a curious medley of facts and fancy. The registers of the Royal Society, of which he was a member, testify to the eagerness with which Hooke hurried from one inquiry to another with "brilliant but inconclusive results." Among the many objects which engaged his attention was an insect which he described in a chapter entitled Of the Small Silver-colour'd Bookworm. His description shows it to have been the "fishtail," by naturalists called _Lepisma_, well known as one of the pests that not infrequently is found in the library as well as other parts of the house. Many interesting instances of the discovery of bookworms are found in the literature on the subject, showing the keen interest felt in the search for specimens of the "destroyer," many of them revealing the fact that some unique and curious creature which stands alone in its taste for literary food was sought. Mr. Blades reported in 1858 that he found specimens in some black-letter fragments at the Bodleian Library, that were recognized by the librarian, Dr. Bandinel, who crushed them with his thumb, saying, as he wiped his thumb nail on his coat sleeve, "O yes, they have black heads sometimes." The librarian of Hereford Cathedral, the Rev. F. S. Havergal, contributes his observations, covering a period of eighteen years, during which time he reports that he found two distinct species. From his description, however, it appears that he failed to recognize that the two were the larva and imago of the same species. Many cases of the finding of bookworms reported in England and America are not accompanied with sufficient data to determine just what they were. These contribute to the general impression that many have sought but few have found what were thought to be "genuine bookworms," while on every hand are those creatures which under the right conditions become book destroyers. Research among the literature concerning library pests reveals the fact that no less than eleven different groups have members that are directly or indirectly accused of injuring books and bindings. The number of species in each group ranges from one to eleven, making a total of over thirty different species. In addition to these there are others against which the evidence is at best only circumstantial. It is not necessary to say that none of these bear any resemblance in any period of their existence to worms, and that the term bookworms is a misnomer. The word has become so firmly fixed in literature, both in its figurative and literal sense, that its misuse will no doubt continue. The larger number of these are included in the class _Hexapoda_, or insects. Two species belong to the class _Arachnida_, which embraces the scorpions, spiders, mites, etc. One of these, _Chelifer cancroides_, known as the "book scorpion," although not a true scorpion, belongs to the order _Pseudoscorpiones_, and is probably what Aristotle had in mind when speaking of the "little scorpionlike insects found in books." The other species is known as _Cheyletus eruditus_, of the order _Acarina_, or "cheese mites." These two are known to be carnivorous in their habits, and there is some question as to whether they haunt books for the purpose of feeding on them or on other creatures to be found there. Of those in the class _Hexapoda_, which comprises all the other known book pests, there can be no question as regards their destructiveness. Many are known about the house by the name of the article they are most frequently found in, and unless driven by a lack of those things more to their liking, they do not invade the literary sanctum. Some are so cosmopolitan in their tastes that they seem to take whatever is most convenient, whether it be books or boots, pepper or poison. As has been said, the earliest observation of value was made by Hooke on _Lepisma_, commonly known as "fish moth" or "silver fish," from its resemblance, in shape and coating, to a fish; also as "bristle tail," from its caudal appendages. They are found in closets, cupboards, and clothes baskets. Opinions have differed as to its destructiveness to books, but the weight of evidence is against the insect. It seeks the paste and sizing used about books, and this leads it to attack bindings and labels. There is a theory that paste made from pure starch is not to their liking, but this is not substantiated by observation. Termites or "white ants," another misnomer, since they are not true ants, are also well-known ravagers whose deeds of destruction assume a serious aspect, especially in the tropics. "Humboldt," according to Shimer, "informs us that in all equinoctial America, where the white ants abound, it is infinitely rare to find papers or books that go back fifty or sixty years." Their destruction to timber has been the cause of serious accidents, at one time so weakening the supports of a dwelling that a whole dinner party was precipitated from the third floor to the basement. These pests belong to the order _Isoptera_. The American species is known as _Termes flavipes_, and several well-authenticated cases of their having done serious injury to books and bindings in this country are recorded. As the chief sustenance of these insects seems to be dead wood, it may be that the increased use of wood in paper will make modern books, which bookworms are said to scorn, more tempting than ever to them. By opening quickly some old book which has lain long unused, one may see tiny pale creatures with knowing black eyes scurrying across the pages. These insects are known as "book lice," or by the Germans as "_Staublaus_" (dust louse). Entomologists have given them the high-sounding name _Atropos divinatoria_. They belong to the family _Psocidæ_, of the order _Corrodentia_. Some writers, beginning with William Derham, in 1701, are of the opinion that this delicate little creature makes a noise like unto that of the coleopterous insect called "death-watch." These little fellows are said to have stout jaws with which they do damage to books, dried plants, etc., "nibbling away the leaves and covers of the former." Of all the insects that injure books perhaps the best known are the cockroaches, scientifically called _Blattidæ_, of which there are five species whose bookish habits are unquestioned. Many instances of serious damage done by them to the bindings of books are on record, the most important, perhaps, being that of the Natural History Museum Reports, at Albany, where Mr. J. A. Lintner found a hundred volumes or more so badly damaged by roaches that they could not be moved without coming to pieces. The United States Senate Reports, bound in cloth and leather, some fresh and new, have been badly damaged at Washington, in the efforts of these pests to get at the paste with which the covers were fastened to the volumes. The species known to commit these depredations are the "Croton bug" (_Blatta germanica_), smaller than the others, but considered by some writers as the worst pests of the family; a little larger species, called _Periplaneta orientalis_; and a large species, known as _Periplaneta americana_, or _Kakerlac_. Against two other species, _Blatta australasiæ_ and _Blatta gigantea_, there is not so much evidence. Among the moths, or millers, order _Lepidoptera_, are found several species which injure books, the best known being the _Aglossa pinguinalis_, commonly called "grease moth." The larva of this species is at first a pale, flesh-colored grub, but as it matures it becomes quite black. It injures bindings by constructing long "silken tubes," in which it remains until full fed. Sometimes they spin a web between the volumes, "gnawing small portions of the paper with which to form their cocoons." This species belongs to the family _Pyralididæ_. Of the family _Oecophoridæ_ two species are known to injure books: _Acompsia pseudospretella_, and an undetermined species of _Depressaria_. Under the name _Oecophora_, William Blades describes the ravages of the former on two leaves of a "Caxton," and accompanies his remarks with a photographic illustration of the damaged leaves, from which it is at once seen how irregular is the gnawing of this species. The newspaper account of the finding of bookworms in the Lenox Library not long ago classed the larvæ found with this species. The largest number of book-destroying insects are found among the beetles, of the order _Coleoptera_. To this group belong the "book borers." The species thus far considered have been more or less dilettantes in literature. The beetles, however, seem possessed with a true spirit of investigation, and when they undertake a piece of work in a serious fashion they go to the bottom of it, sticking close to the line laid down. This characteristic distinguishes these insects from all others, and makes it comparatively easy to determine when they have been at work in a worm-eaten volume. No less than sixteen different species of this order have been either detected in this work, or such strong circumstantial evidence has been found against them, that there is little doubt as to their guilt. Some insects seem to destroy books for the sheer want of something better to do; some do so in seeking the paste and sizing used in and about the books; others because the leather bindings are desirable material in which to undergo transformation; and, again, others haunt book shelves and books in search of prey in the form of living creatures. But among the beetles are found tiny little grubs that seem to have a genuine intent to destroy; that set out deliberately to wreak vengeance on man's record of his thoughts, deeds, and discoveries, and, as if knowing the means which man uses to destroy, have sought to imitate him in the effects produced. As a result we find books filled with small, round, shotlike holes strongly suggesting the results which might follow from the use of the family Bible by the restless boy as a target for his first shotgun. The book-destroying beetles are all grouped under three families: _Dermestidæ_, _Scolytidæ_, and _Ptinidæ_. The _Dermestidæ_ include the "flower beetles" and the well-known "carpet bug." The species of which there can be no doubt as to its disposition to pierce book bindings is _Anthrenus varius_, which Glover says "is a very pretty insect when examined under a magnifying glass, being beautifully marbled or variegated with black and gray." Another member of this family, against which there is less evidence, is _Dermestes chinensis_, so named by Dr. L'Herminier, of Guadeloupe, who reported a loss of nearly four hundred volumes from its ravages. Erichson believes this to have been the well-known _Anobium paniceum_. _Dermestes lardarius_ and _Attagenus pellio_ are others of this family mentioned in the same category. The family _Ptinidæ_ includes two groups, _Anobium_ and _Ptinus_, the first being generally known as the "death-watch," from the peculiar sound, like the tick of a watch, which is produced by striking against a hard substance with their tiny jaws. Superstitious persons have long considered this noise an omen of death, hence the name. Instead of an ill omen, this noise proves itself to be a love-call between the sexes, and may be imitated accurately enough to elicit a response. One of the best known of these beetles is called _Sitodrepa panicea_, generally known in Europe as _Anobium paniceum_. It is a cosmopolitan feeder, having a reputation in several different fields of activity, commercial and scientific as well as literary. To druggists it is known as "the worm," and their stock of ginger, rhubarb, Cayenne pepper, nux vomica, and belladonna root all appear to be equally to its liking, tin foil being no formidable barrier to its persistent search. Leather dealers have suffered from the destruction wrought by this little fellow to such an extent that whole cases of boots and shoes, carriage trimmings, etc., have been ruined. To this species belongs the insect found a few years ago at work in a volume of Dante's Divine Comedy, which had been sent to Cornell University library from Florence. The larvæ are about three to four millimetres in length, of a dirty-white color, head tinged with brown, and black mouth parts, with the abdomen strongly curved. The adult is a small, cylindrical, brown beetle from two to three millimetres in length, with head bent down and wing covers marked with fine punctate striæ. Professor Poey made extensive observations of an insect in Cuba which had destroyed about four thousand volumes. He called it _Anobium bibliothecarum_, and Schwartz thinks the injury reported by Herminier from Guadeloupe should be attributed to the same species. _Anobium striatum_ and _pertinax_ have long been known to injure books by their "gnawing and burrowing," not only in and through the bindings, but also entirely through the volumes. _Nicobium hirtum_, a native of southern Europe, where its larvæ have been found doing like injury, is only locally abundant, and for this reason has never been considered a serious library pest. Schwartz says, "In one way or another the insect has found its way to North America, but has always been regarded as a great rarity with us." The _Ptinus_ group embraces _Ptinus fur_, _Ptinus mollis_, _Ptinus brunneus_, and _Ptilinus pectinicornis_, called by Leunis "_Bücherbohrer_." According to Butler, a peculiarity of this genius--that of dissimilarity of shape between the sexes--is well illustrated by the _P. fur_, the male being almost cylindrical, the female inflated or rounded at the sides; so much variation that they might be taken for two different insects. _Ptinus brunneus_, although similar to _P. fur_, is distinguished from it by being wholly of a light-brown color and destitute of whitish bands on the wing covers. Some writers speak of this species as the "book beetle," while _Sitodrepa_ is spoken of as the "spice beetle." Dr. Henry Shimer makes the following statement regarding their method of boring: "They usually operate in leather-bound or half-bound volumes by boring galleries along in the leather.... They usually bore along quite under the surface of the leather, cutting it almost through; occasionally a small round hole penetrates through the leather to the outer surface." One of the most famous cases on record of insects boring through books is that reported by M. Peignot, in which he states that twenty-seven folio volumes were pierced through in so straight a line that a cord might be passed through them and all the volumes raised by means of it. Different writers give the credit of this feat to different members of this group, so that the most that can be said is that it was the work of some member of the _Ptinidæ_. In the family _Scolytidæ_ only one species belongs to the book ravagers. It is known as _Hypothemus eruditus_, and was described by Westwood in 1836 as "pitchy black, the head of the same color, entirely concealed from above by the front thorax." It is very minute in size, being about one twentieth of an inch in length. So far as its depredations have been observed it confines its work to the bindings of books, making furrows in all directions much as it does in the sap wood of dead trees. The strong resemblance of its burrowing to the gouging done by an engraver's chisel has given to this family the name of "engraver beetles." A review of the different families of insects whose habits under favorable conditions lead them to infest books and bindings will show them to be more or less well defined according to their feeding habits. The book scorpions and mite, _Cheyletus eruditus_, which, as we have seen, do not come under the head of insects, are primarily carnivorous, and their presence in books may be due to the fact that they find there animal as well as vegetable food. This is certainly true of the book scorpion, which feeds on mites, book lice, and other small insects. The "fish moths" or "silver fish," the "book lice," and the "cockroaches" can have no other reason for infesting books than their liking for farinaceous substances such as are used in and about the bindings and labels of books. For this reason the damage done by them is largely confined to the exterior or interior of the bindings, and only so much of the book itself is injured as comes in their way in their search for food. The "white ants" feed principally on wood, and in and about books there is more or less wood fiber which would be to the liking of these voracious feeders. The moths and beetles are the burrowers and borers. They seek retired places in which to lay their eggs where the larvæ will be surrounded with food for their growth. The moths and some of the beetles are more given to burrowing in the bindings, keeping close to the outer surface for the purpose, it is thought, of making it easy for the imago to emerge after the change is completed; while others bore straight tunnels often from cover to cover. A natural conclusion for one who has gone over the literature of book-injuring pests to reach is that the many persons that have been industriously looking for the bookworm, as well as those that have reported the finding of isolated specimens, some dead, some alive, have had in mind the one creature which bored holes in books. The frequent use of the terms "genuine bookworm," "the real bookworm," etc., reveals the fact that the users of these phrases approached the subject with a preconceived idea of the kind of creature they should find to account for the ravages only too apparent on scores of volumes which pass through the hands of booksellers and book keepers. To many the boring beetles are the only creatures which are rightfully called bookworms, and in their search other book pests have not been taken into account. HYDROPHOBIA IN BAJA CALIFORNIA. BY DANE COOLIDGE. When, in 1884, Pasteur discovered the true nature and cure of hydrophobia, he dispelled the accumulated superstition of centuries regarding this mysterious and dreaded disease. But in some countries where hydrophobia exists his cure is not yet known, and the old superstitions remain. While collecting mammals near San José del Cabo, in the cape region of Lower California, two summers ago, I found the country people very fearful of wild animals, especially of skunks and coyotes. My Mexican boy, whom I had sent on an errand, remained perched half the afternoon in a thorny mesquite tree because he had seen a coyote and was afraid it was _rabioso_. But they fear the skunks most of all because of their habit of approaching men in the night while they sleep, and biting them on the toe or ear, or any exposed part. In defense, unusual precautions are taken to exclude them. The windows of the houses are barred with iron, and the doors are made in halves, horizontally, so that the lower part may be closed to keep out animals and snakes without interfering with free ventilation. The common people, who live in brush houses, blockade their doorways at night, and rely on their cur dogs to attack any animal which may come near. Notwithstanding all this evidence, and innumerable ghastly stories, I remained a month in the country, at the rancho of Francis Pazik, a very intelligent and well-educated Bohemian, without seeing any rabid animals. Then, one evening just at sundown, a crowd of men came up the path, leading one of Pazik's mules and dragging the carcass of a skunk. They said that it had come out into the open field where the mule was picketed and bitten it on the hind foot. All of them insisted that it was rabid, and cited its extreme emaciation as a proof. The young man who dragged it showed me his great toe, half burned off with blue vitriol, and told me that a skunk had bitten him there two months before, and the doctors had burned it. These native "doctors" are uneducated men who live on the superstition of the people. In the case of hydrophobia their methods are characteristic. There are in the cane fields little insect-eating animals called shrews which, in that country, give off a scent so like that of a skunk that Pazik has hunted them out with his dogs in the night by mistake. The "doctors" pay as much as two dollars apiece for shrews on urgent occasions, and, mixing their bodies with herbs and roots, form a concoction which they claim will ward off hydrophobia. Besides this, they also bleed the patient and cauterize the wound. According to the Mexicans, there are two kinds of rabies: that affecting the head and that affecting the stomach. When animals have _rabia_ in the head they become stupid and move about slowly, biting at everything they see or touch. They are not violent, and become very thin. But when they have rabies in the stomach it gives them great pain, and they bark and howl and race about frantically, chasing other animals and tearing them. Mr. Cipriano Fisher, of Santa Catarina, told me of his experience with a coyote which had rabies in the stomach. He was hunting deer at Cape San Lucas, and had killed two. Carrying the smaller one and his gun to camp, he returned unarmed, except for the knife which every one wears in that region, to bring in the other. As he went down a deep cañon he heard a coyote ahead, howling in the peculiar way which he knew to be characteristic of the _rabioso_. All the hunters claim they can recognize the howling of a rabid coyote, and they say that no other animal will answer it or go near it. The howling approached rapidly. Knowing that he could not escape by running back uphill, nor kill it with his knife without being bitten, he stepped quickly into the brush and cut a long green club. As he turned back into the open place he saw the coyote down the cañon, leaping up and snapping at the air. When the coyote saw him it broke into a furious run up the trail, and when, as he says, about thirty feet away, made a flying leap at his face. He jumped to one side, struck the rabid animal in the back of the head as it passed, and killed it with the one blow. Skunks are particularly dangerous to persons who sleep out at night. J. Ellis McLellan, a field collector of the United States Department of Agriculture, whom I met at San José del Cabo, told me of an unpleasant experience he had with a skunk while coming down from La Paz. On account of the heat he had ridden in the night as far as Agua Caliente, where he stopped near a ranch house to sleep till morning. Although the night was warm, he covered his head with a _serape_ for protection from insects and wandering animals. Early in the morning he was awakened by a twitching at his blanket and, raising the _serape_, saw a skunk biting and jerking at it. Realizing the gravity of the situation, he reached for his heavy knife, and then, suddenly throwing aside the _serape_, he leaned forward and put his whole force into one blow. As he ducked under the blanket again, for protection, the dogs from the house rushed out in a body and pounced upon the dying skunk, which they worried on top of McLellan until the ranch people beat them off. When skunks bite at men's toes and ears, or at blankets in this way, it is taken as an indication that they are rabid. Shortly after this I saw a young man at Miraflores who had just been seized with hydrophobia. Two months before he had been bitten on the great toe by a skunk as he lay asleep in his house at Agua Caliente, but had shown no symptoms of the disease until that day, when he suddenly began to bite at the door jamb in the store at Miraflores. They put him into the brick jail, where he soon became very violent. When I went down to the jail the next morning I found a group of Mexicans about the huge wooden door, which was chained fast and tied with _riatas_ in addition. From the inside there came a succession of thumps and blood-curdling groans and strangles. I peered in through the barred window, and saw the unfortunate man lying on his back in a corner, spasmodically kicking out his legs from his chest and rolling his dilated eyes. Suddenly he leaped to his feet and, grasping the iron bars, shook the great door violently, chained and tied as it was. Then he seemed to leap against the walls, and at last fell down, groaning. He soon became rational again, and began to talk through a crack in the door to an old man whom I took to be his father. He asked for water, but they would not give him any, and while he was pleading for a knife or pistol another spasm seized him. Presently the judge came over with two policemen. They said they were going to take the _rabioso_ out and tie him to a tree, because he was getting the jail too dirty, and might not die for a week. As soon as the spasm passed, and the man lay weak and moaning, the burly policemen loosed the _riatas_, and, stepping in quickly, seized him from behind. He protested pathetically against going into the hot sunshine, but they pushed him out and started toward the corral to tie him up. But when the fierce sun struck him he was racked by horrible convulsions. He kicked and struggled, bit at his shoulders, and blew spittle into the air when he threw his head back. The policemen breathed hard, and the old man, his father, hugged himself in agony as he walked behind. There was a desperate struggle, then, with a final paroxysm, the _rabioso_ suddenly collapsed and hung limp in their arms. At first they thought that he was dead, but when he showed signs of life they carried him to the corral and tied him to a tree before he became conscious. Two days later he died. Pasteur himself does not undertake to cure patients who have been seized with spasms; but the judge told me that, fifteen years before, an Italian doctor had come through their country making marvelous cures. When he arrived at Miraflores there was a _rabioso_ in the jail who was so badly afflicted and so long-lived that the judge had ordered him to be shot. When the Italian doctor heard this, however, he asked permission to try an experiment on the man. This being granted, he had the patient lassoed, dragged to the river, and held under water until he was apparently drowned. After the _rabioso_ was full of water, the doctor rolled him on a barrel and resuscitated him; then he gave him some medicine which cured him. Cipriano Fisher told me that he had cured a valuable bulldog of rabies by this same method, using the bitter juice of the _pitahaya_, a species of cactus, for medicine. This crude means of alleged cure is unique, and seems based on the theory that the antipathy of rabid animals to water, implied in the name hydrophobia, is the cause of their death, and partial drowning, therefore, a cure. Rabies is extremely prevalent at times in certain districts of the Cape region. McLellan says it does not occur north of the tropic of Cancer--that is, of La Paz and Todos Santos--and it is hardly known in the thickly populated district about San José del Cabo, but at Cape San Lucas, and especially also along the base of the mountains near Miraflores and Agua Caliente, where it is very hot and dry, rabid animals are greatly to be feared. While collecting in these mountains I passed several good ranches which had been deserted because, as my guide said, stock could not be raised there successfully on account of the _rabia_. This man had worked as a _ranchero_ or stock herder for two years on one of these ranches, and had been obliged at one time to kill eleven cattle and seven sheep and goats in two weeks on account of their having rabies. It was part of his duty to follow up rabid coyotes, foxes, skunks, and wild cats when he saw them or heard their peculiar cry, and shoot them before they bit the stock. But he assured me very gravely that he preferred to work in the valley for less wages rather than have charge of Chollalito rancho; and when we camped there for a night he slept on top of the pack boxes, with his bare feet wrapped in blankets and a _serape_ over his head, and reverently pulled out the blessed rag he wore around his neck, in order to more surely protect himself against the rabid skunks and coyotes. There is, however, very little danger in traveling through this interesting country. Cases of hydrophobia are comparatively rare, and some scientists who have collected in Baja California have even denied its existence there. But with the traveler, as with the native, there remains the vague, constant, but unrealized expectation of seeing some raging coyote come tearing through the cactus, or of having his toe bitten in the middle of the night as he sprawls in the heat and darkness. * * * * * PROFESSOR WELLDON, in the British Association, expressed his sense of the intellectual insolence of those who presume to say, notwithstanding our ignorance of animal characters, that because a characteristic seems to us minute and without importance, it is therefore without importance to the animal. Until we know the function of the animal throughout, and can picture its physiological processes thoroughly, we have no right to say, _a priori_, that this or that feature is of no use. THE SENSE OF COLOR. BY M. ANDRÉ BRACCHI. When the different rays of the solar spectrum strike the eye separately they each produce a particular characteristic and subjective impression, which is called color. Ingenious theories have been set forth by physiologists, like Young, Helmholtz, Hering, and others, to explain the perception of colors by our eye, but the problem still awaits solution, and is not likely to be explained from that side, because it is rather psychical. The laws regulating the perception of colors are not physiological; we perceive only relations. We know that the sense of color may be modified independently of that of light and of space. Two phases may be distinguished in its evolution. Every light, whether chromatic or not, produces a simple luminous impression on the retina--a simple excitation of the optic nerve, without being analyzed by it. In the second phase the brain, the psychic center of color, intervenes. There may obviously be considerable differences between persons in the interpretation of what we call colors, and we may judge that there is an education of this psychical center, and that it is an important matter. Different as the ways of interpreting a sensation of color may be, there are still some fundamental ideas in the matter which painters, for example, do not all observe. Some, like the impressionists, exaggerate them, and others neglect them. Which of these are wrong? and which right? are questions we are not concerned with, our purpose being to show that many of the phenomena of color, shade, sources of light, etc., escape a large proportion of persons unless they are attentive observers. If we visit the exhibitions of the impressionists we shall be entertained at the criticisms we hear over the canvases of such painters as Renoir and Monet; youths who have just come out of the drawing school declaring that their master never taught them to put blue on a face, and that in Nature all shadows are gray or black, and none red or violet; and we should astonish a great many people if we should say that a white robe should never be painted in a portrait picture with white lead alone. "All skies are blue, all trees are green, all pantaloons are red," said a celebrated painter who was trying to show how the habit of seeing a colored object in a certain way prevented one from perceiving the different colors that might be applied to it. We recollect the trouble of a brave youth who, having sat for his portrait to a celebrated painter, was distracted at perceiving green in the reflections of the hair of his likeness. Yet there are in Nature shadows that are blue and reflections that are green, and if we do not see them habitually it is because we do not give sufficient attention to them. A common division of the spectrum is into warm and cold colors. The warm colors are red, yellow, orange, and yellow-green; the cold colors are violet, blue, green, and blue-green. This is not an arbitrary division, but answers to a fact of experience which passes from our physical to our moral impressions, and may cause in us feelings of comfort or uneasiness, joy, sadness, or moral depression. Some persons are influenced by the gray-colored sky, others are gay when the day is bright. It is a current expression that the color of the southern landscape is warm. Goethe said that blue caused him to feel cold. The terms warm and cold are technical expressions in the arts. A color tone is cooled by putting blue in it, and warmed by adding red or yellow. "This practice is not arbitrary," says M. F. Bracquemond in his book on Design and Color; "it copies the colored aspects which natural light imposes on all imitation that seeks to realize the colored and factitious light of painting. To reach this, art observes the order according to which the natural lights distribute their various colored elements, and classes luminous aspects--a process which it has always observed--into the two categories of warm and cold. Hence, so far as examples come to us, this contrast is easy to verify; at the Louvre, for example, in works from Pompeii, and in those of all the masters." Preyer relies upon this division of colors into warm and cold for a comparison of chromatic sensations with thermic, and for supposing that the color sense is developed from the sense of temperature. Chromatic sensitiveness to this author is only a special case of thermic sensitiveness limited to the retina. Darwin's ideas were evidently the same; the whole human body was a sort of retina capable of improvement; we may, it is true, suppose with Lord Kelvin that "there is absolute continuity between the perception of heat by the retina of the eye and its perception by means of the tissues and nerves." A very elementary experiment will easily enable us to recognize these different qualities of colors. Set a lighted candle on a table near a window; there are then two sources of light--the daylight, blue and cold, and the light of the candle, orange-red and warm. Cast a shadow on the white paper by holding a pencil straight up. The shadows cast by the candle will be blue to a degree that no one can mistake it, a greenish blue. Placing the pencil between the window and the candle and looking at the shadows, we have, first, the blue shadow of the candle, and then the shadow projected by the cold daylight. The color of the last, though perhaps less evident than the other, is an orange-yellow, of rich, warm tone. From this little experiment we may conclude that a warm light provokes a cold shadow, a cold light a warm shadow, and that the color of the shadow is complementary to that of the light. In the experiment, daylight was the source of the cold light. Let us now take a third source of light, warmer than that of the candle, the flame produced by burning alcohol and salt--a very warm, deep orange light, which makes the light of the candle seem cold and its blue shadows appear yellow, while its own shadows are blue. We recently observed a very striking example of these warm and cold appearances of light; it was at the theater: a beam of red light shone brightly upon an actor, whose shadow was absolutely green. Some of the people around us were astonished at the phenomenon, which they could perceive very plainly. Phenomena of this kind are produced every instant in a nature illuminated by the sun; nearly all the shadows are colored in hues which we can distinguish with a little attention where the unpracticed eye sees nothing but gray. Thus in a mountainous country, exposed to the warm light of the sun, the mountains in the horizon appear blue through the haze; then, as evening draws on, the sun appears a deeper orange, more reddish, while the sky seems green by contrast, and the red rays of the sun falling on the mountains turn them violet, in those beautiful tints which give so much glory to those countries of large shadows and bright lights. However intense the light of day may be, it is therefore always colored, and gives those colored shadows which painters do not always observe. The painter, in fact, should make an analysis of the complex light around him, and should repeat the result in synthesis on his canvas. Upon hardly any other condition can he represent the transparency of the atmosphere, or the luminosity of a subject or a landscape. These colored shadows are not, therefore, false colors, as often seems to be believed, or optical illusions; they are really existent, but our eyes are hardly ever practiced enough to discern them; we are deficient in education of the color sense. This education is not hard to attain. There are persons who have special aptitudes and are consequently remarkable colorists, just as some persons have an admirably organized ear for music; but, besides these, it is possible for all persons endowed with the faculty of observing and capable of attention to acquire with considerable rapidity the faculty of discerning colors, where they at present hardly see anything but confused gray masses. (The epithet gray, we may observe, is used as applied to many things the color of which is not susceptible of exact determination.) Such attentive observation of colors is, however, attended with some danger to painters. Every person prefers some one color, is influenced by a particular shade. When we examine the works of the painters we see that there are many differences in the way of seeing. Some see blue, red, green; others see clear, others obscure. In the analysis of a complex color it happens that there is sometimes an auto-suggestion. Where there is a hardly defined violet, the painter will exaggerate it on his canvas, and will be obliged, in order to keep up the right tone, to increase the intensity of the colors next to it. Hence arises a common error with painters, who start with a true principle, but are not able to apply it properly, and give their picture a tonic violet, green, or yellow, beyond all reason.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique._ SKETCH OF THOMAS EGLESTON. BY PROF. DANIEL S. MARTIN. As a general rule, the work of the scientist is not of a kind to attract conspicuous notice from the public, especially in great cities, filled and thrilled with commercial and political activity; and so it comes to pass that men of rare attainments and untiring energy, in the highest walks of life and thought, may spend their whole life-time in such an environment, and be scarcely known outside of a limited circle of kindred minds. They may confer lasting benefits on the community, render important services to the whole country, and be widely known and honored in other lands, and yet receive but little general recognition in the place of their abode. Such a man, in such a community, is Prof. THOMAS EGLESTON, of the city of New York. He has been too busy and too modest to seek prominence in the public eye, and his scientific work has been of a kind that does not lend itself readily to popular lectures or startling announcements; but as a mineralogist, a metallurgist, and a mining engineer, and as the planner and founder of the great School of Mines of Columbia University, he has made a deep and permanent impress on the history of science in the United States. Professor Egleston is of New England stock, his ancestors having been among the first settlers of Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1635. Thence they came by a toilsome and perilous journey to Connecticut, and founded Windsor, which was thenceforward their home, and whence his father came to New York. The removal to Connecticut arose from a desire for greater freedom of life and worship than they found in Massachusetts; and Professor Egleston has been deeply interested in studying the little-known records of this movement, and the influence which it exerted, as an almost unwritten chapter in American history. He proposes to publish these researches, together with much other material relating to our colonial history, in which he is an enthusiastic student. He was born in New York, on December 9, 1832. As a boy he took considerable interest in certain aspects of science, and at the age of thirteen had gathered a collection of minerals and rocks. He attended Yale College, and in the later years of his course took special elective work in chemistry. After graduating there in 1854, he was for a time an assistant to Prof. Benjamin Silliman, Jr. Subsequently he went abroad, partly for his health, and was advised to spend some time in Paris. With no special professional purpose, but from a general desire to improve his time, he began attending lectures on geology and chemistry at the Jardin des Plantes, under D'Orbigny (a brother of the eminent writer) and Hilgard, and he worked with much energy in the laboratories of those departments at the Jardin. He thus attracted the attention of some of the faculty of the École des Mines, who offered him larger facilities in that institution, which he at once accepted. After much very interesting study in the paleontological laboratory there, he decided to go regularly through the entire course, and accomplished that purpose with notable success and honor, graduating in 1860. He had worked as an assistant in every laboratory of the school, and in the summers had traveled through much of France, becoming familiar with its geology, mineral resources, mining works and processes, and gaining a mastery at first hand of all branches of those subjects. Those years were to him full of interest and enjoyment; friendships were formed that have enriched his whole life; and in it all the man was being remarkably prepared for the work of developing those forms of science and of industrial progress in our own country. Professor Egleston has always retained a strong feeling of attachment toward the École des Mines, which has likewise been warmly reciprocated. He has shown his interest by two gifts to the institution, of five thousand dollars each. Returning hither in 1861, just as the war cloud was darkening over the land, he received almost immediately an appointment at Washington, to take charge of the mineralogical collections and laboratory of the Smithsonian Institution. After two years there he conceived the purpose that determined his whole career, and has so greatly influenced both American science and American mineral development--that of a school of mines at New York. At that time there were, indeed, in this country schools of science, well organized and well equipped--the Sheffield School at Yale, the Lawrence Foundation at Harvard, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, and others. But their scope was rather general in character, and there was no institution planned and arranged with distinct reference to mining and metallurgy as its main subjects. Mr. Egleston, as he was then known, saw and felt this lack, and planned to supply it. There is not space here to detail the circumstances under which he was led to prepare, in 1863, the Plan for a School of Mines in New York; but the modest little outline then drawn up and printed has been exceedingly rich in results. It was taken up with interest by certain leading trustees of Columbia College, as it was then called, especially by the late George T. Strong. The president, the late Dr. Charles King, and a majority of the board, favored the experiment, for so it was regarded, and arrangements were finally made to begin it in the autumn of the next year, in limited quarters in the old college building on Forty-ninth Street, and with provision for but a small number of students--not over twenty. Part of the instruction was to be given by members of the existing college faculty; and three new professors were appointed to special chairs for the school, to be compensated wholly by fees therefrom. These were, Professor Egleston, mineralogy and metallurgy; Prof. Francis Vinton, mining engineering; and Dr. C. F. Chandler, chemistry. Meanwhile, in June, 1864, President King was succeeded by the late Dr. Barnard, whose strong interest in science made him a warm supporter of the school. Already some prominent people were impressed with the value of such a movement, and disposed to aid it. A fine collection of minerals was purchased and presented by Mr. Strong, and another was given by Mr. Gouverneur Kemble. On the opening day, November 15, 1864, the number of applicants was far beyond expectation and provision; the school was found to respond to a need and a demand that had not been suspected; it was a success from the first. In a year or two it had become an institution of recognized importance; ample quarters were provided for it in a large building, formerly a manufactory, on the Fourth Avenue side of the college block, and important additions were made to its corps of instructors--particularly the eminent geologist, Dr. J. S. Newberry, of Cleveland, Ohio, whose noble geological collection was deposited and used in the School of Mines, and whose breadth and power and personal magnetism so profoundly influenced scientific interest and progress in the city of New York for more than twenty years. Such was the beginning of the school; its career has been one of unbroken growth and increasing influence. After some ten years it was found needful to take down the plain old transformed factory and erect a new building on its site, with larger space and improved facilities. Fifteen years later Columbia College was removed to its new site on the Morningside Heights, where now the School of Mines is installed in stately fireproof structures, wherein its great accumulated treasures of collections, apparatus, models, and varied appliances of instruction are safely and permanently housed. The influence of this school upon science in New York city has been incalculable. Only those who have lived in touch with the scientific life of the metropolis during the period since the close of the civil war can appreciate the change that has taken place in public feeling regarding science, or can recognize how largely that change is due to the existence of such an institution, and to the presence of such a body of strong and able professors, in constant and active co-operation in the interest of science. The school attracted notice from the first, abroad as well as throughout this country. In 1871, seven years from its opening, a writer in the North American Review characterized it as "already more scientific than Freiberg, more practical than Paris," and emphasized its influence both upon science and upon mining interests in the United States, pointing out that the literature pertaining to mines and their working had been very limited in the English language, and that the instruction in the school had to be chiefly given by lectures; but that these courses would gradually develop into a literature. These suggestions have been fully justified by the results of the last quarter century. The vast development of our mineral resources has been largely under the direction of graduates of this school. Hundreds of them are to-day in important positions of scientific trust, not only throughout our own country but in South and Central America, Australia, China, Japan, and even Europe itself. The lectures of the professors, and the articles constantly published in the School of Mines Quarterly, have indeed given us a literature of the subject in English. The local influence in the city has been great, upon scientific education in secondary schools, and upon general public sentiment; while in Columbia University the experiment has become one of its finest departments and an element of its greatest strength. Rarely is it given to a man to see in his life-time so great a result from the plans and the labors of his earlier years. Of the many forms of scientific activity which have engaged Professor Egleston during his busy life, only the briefest mention can be made. He was one of the founders of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, was thrice its vice-president, and was chosen president in 1886; and he has published over one hundred articles in its Transactions. He was one of the founders of the American Metrological Society, and of the societies of Mechanical Engineers and of Electrical Engineers, and a member of the society of Civil Engineers and of the Iron and Steel Institute of Great Britain. In the New York Academy of Sciences he was active for many years, and held the vice-presidency from 1869 to 1881. In 1866 Professor Egleston was associated with the Agricultural and Geological Survey of the Union Pacific Railroad; in 1868 was appointed a United States Commissioner to examine the fortifications of the coast; and in 1873 was one of the jurors for the International Exposition at Vienna. From Princeton and Trinity Colleges he received, in 1874, the degrees of Ph. D. and LL. D., respectively, and from the Government of France the rank of a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1890, and the exceptional rank of "Officier" in 1895. His papers, published either separately or in the proceedings of the several engineering societies above mentioned, the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, the School of Mines Quarterly, etc., cover a wide range of subjects connected with mineralogy, metallurgy, and mining operations. In mineralogy he was especially devoted to crystallography, and his noble private collection was gathered and arranged with relation to that department. Besides his strictly metallurgical articles and treatises, he has dealt with such topics as rails, in relation to accidents; furnaces and their construction; fire-brick and refractory substances; slags and their utilization, etc.; the decay of building stones, in connection with the Obelisk; technical education, manual training, and improvement in the conditions of workingmen in mining and metallurgical occupations. His chief published works are The Metallurgy of Gold, Silver, and Mercury in the United States, two large volumes, 1887 and 1890, and his Lectures on Mineralogy, to which may be added his Tables for the Determination of Minerals, Metallurgical Tables on Fuels, Iron, and Steel, diagrams and comparisons of crystals and crystal notation, tables of production of many of the metals, report on the Union Pacific Railroad survey of 1868, and many others. Within the past two years Professor Egleston has withdrawn from active work in the School of Mines, and bears now the title of Professor Emeritus; his health has been a good deal impaired, and his work has passed largely into the charge of younger men who have grown up under his direction as students and assistants. During the last winter he has presented to the school his entire scientific library and his private collection of minerals above referred to, some six thousand specimens. These, in addition to the great mineralogical treasures already possessed by the institution, all gathered and arranged under his supervision, will make the School of Mines collection certainly one of the finest in the country. Although devoted to his own special branches, Professor Egleston had given a striking example of broad interest in other departments of science in his labor of love in connection with the monument to the memory of the great ornithologist Audubon. The present writer was closely associated with him in this work, and can testify to his energy, enthusiasm, and perseverance therein. The later years of Audubon's life had been spent on Manhattan Island, in a modest but beautiful suburban home on the Hudson, above Harlem, known as Audubon Park. He died in 1851, and was buried in a family vault in Trinity Cemetery, then far out of town, now lying between One hundred and Fifty-third and One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Streets, Amsterdam Avenue, and the Hudson. The spot was remote and almost unknown, and with the death and removal of most of the family, it had fallen into neglect. When One Hundred and Fifty-third Street was to be opened through to the river, the vault, which was close to the street line, was in danger of injury; and then Professor Egleston took up the matter and proposed to the trustees of the cemetery that if they would grant another plot in a better location, he would endeavor to have a handsome monument erected by national subscription. The trustees responded warmly, and Professor Egleston undertook the work. Before going abroad in 1887 he broached the subject to the writer, and suggested that he present it during the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which was to be held during that summer in New York. The writer gladly responded to the plan, and in August of that year laid the facts before a general meeting of the association. Much interest was expressed, but no action was taken, as had been hoped. At the first regular meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences, in October, the writer again presented the subject, with better result; and a committee was appointed by the academy, consisting of Professor Egleston as chairman, Dr. N. L. Britton, and the writer. On the return of the former from Europe the work was taken up in earnest; and under the indefatigable efforts of the chairman and of the secretary, Dr. Britton, although with many delays and discouragements, it was carried to a triumphant success. Before the end of the year (1887) the committee had held numerous meetings, prepared and issued a circular, and engaged the co-operation of several other organizations with the Academy of Sciences, including the American Ornithologists' Union, the Agassiz Association, and the Audubon Society (for the protection of our native birds). A design was proposed by the academy's committee, and adopted by the joint committee of the several societies; this design originated with Professor Egleston, and was a striking combination of the religious, scientific, and artistic elements appropriate to the purpose. The scheme was that of a Runic cross, the only form of that Christian symbol which can properly bear ornamental devices, according to the canons of artists and architects, and this was to be covered with reliefs of the birds, quadrupeds, and flowers that Audubon so loved and studied, and that have given him his fame as the artist-naturalist of America. The general design being approved, the selection and arrangement of the animals and birds was given to a subcommittee of specialists, consisting of Dr. J. A. Allen, Mr. G. B. Sennett, and Dr. N. L. Britton, whose duty was to secure accurate representation and artistic grouping of the forms. In all these combined aspects this monument is doubtless unique. As it stands to-day over the grave of him whom it commemorates--graceful, dignified, and altogether peculiar--it is an honor to our city, as well as a fitting tribute to the memory of Audubon, the Nature-lover, the artist, and the Christian believer. For this beautiful thought, so nobly carried out, both American science and the city of New York are indebted to Thomas Egleston. The progress of the effort was slow; it was not until 1891 that sufficient subscriptions were secured, and not until the spring of 1893 that all was ready for the formal ceremonies. During all this time Professor Egleston and Dr. Britton were untiring in their endeavors and unfaltering in their purpose to succeed. On April 26, 1893, the monument was dedicated with suitable exercises, of great interest, at Trinity Cemetery, and a memorial address upon the life and work of Audubon was delivered by Mr. Daniel G. Elliott, F. R. S. E., of the Ornithologists' Union, at a public meeting at the American Museum of Natural History. Professor Egleston has also laid the citizens of New York under enduring obligation to him in another and even more important matter, the preservation of one of the most valuable of our smaller parks from the clutches of the speculator and spoiler. It is known to but few of the residents of the city that a series of determined attempts was made, some years ago, to destroy and obliterate Washington Square, in the same way in which the St. John's Park outrage was perpetrated ten years before. The method pursued in that case was by interested parties buying up property around the park and "colonizing" the houses with tenants who would either favor or consent to the vandal obliteration of that beautiful spot of rest and shade for the erection thereon of the Hudson River Railroad freight depot. St. John's Park, however, was the property partly of a corporation, partly of individuals, and the job was comparatively easy. Washington Square belonged to the city; but the same process was begun by a great real-estate magnate, and was going on toward a similar result, when the death of the arch-conspirator checked the scheme for a time. A little later, however, it was revived, under the notorious Tweed _régime_, and would have succeeded but for the keen insight and vigorous action of a few public-spirited citizens, led by Professor Egleston. Washington Square had been dug over and torn up, under the pretext of remodeling and "improvement," and the unsightly mounds and piles of earth were left for many months, not only to offend the eye, but to generate malaria. The ground had been originally a Potter's Field, and the opening and upturning of the soil, frequently unhealthy in its effect, was markedly so in that case. The south side of the square had been "worked" already, in the first attempt, and had largely lost its population of old residents; but the north side was still occupied by a select class of old New-Yorkers. Now, however, between the desolate aspect of the park and the malaria that began to be felt, an exodus of the owners on the north side was imminent. Then began to be hinted some schemes for which all this was preparatory. A great militia armory was to be erected on the western end, and other projects vaguely loomed up, involving the ruin of the park as such. A bill to legalize these schemes was quietly introduced at Albany, and had been brought nearly to its passage, by "influences" no less potent for their careful concealment. Professor Egleston and a few other gentlemen of the vicinity were anxious about these rumors, but could get no information. Inquiries from city officials were met with positive denial of any such intentions, and it was only within a few days of the time set for the passage of the bill that they succeeded in discovering its real meaning. At this late juncture the "Public Parks Protective Association" was quietly and quickly organized by a small body of public-spirited men, of whom the late John Jay was president and Professor Egleston secretary. This association set itself to work most earnestly to reveal the danger, to arouse public sentiment and public protest, and to make these felt in the Capitol at Albany. Circulars and petitions were prepared and widely disseminated, at the cost of great labor, within the brief time left ere the bill should come up for passage. The New York Academy of Sciences, speaking in the interest of public health, passed strong resolutions of remonstrance; and various other bodies took similar action, including the Academy of Medicine. The result was that legislators were aroused, some to the real character of measures that they had not fully understood, and others to the existence of a public sentiment upon which they had not counted, and the bill failed to pass. Nor was this all: a resolution was adopted, prepared by the association, guaranteeing the ground occupied by the square to be kept "forever" as a park for purposes of public health and recreation. That Washington Square remains to-day, an oasis of beauty in the desert of brick and stone, and a breathing place in that densely built portion of the great city, is due principally to the watchfulness and energy of Professor Egleston. He it was who saved that park to the people of New York, and a debt of lasting gratitude therefore is owing him from them. This is an unwritten episode in the history of our city, and the present writer, who knew something of the facts at the time, is gratified to be able to put them on record now. But let us not fail to note the lesson that they convey. "Eternal vigilance is the price" of all that is valuable in a community like ours, where the demands of business greed and the devices of political schemers and "bosses" may at any time unite again, as in the past, for acts of profitable vandalism, and dismiss as "sentimental" all considerations of beauty, health, or historical association. The sanitary importance of our smaller parks is now better understood; and the city is buying property for such purposes at heavy cost, in localities where fifty years ago parks could have been laid out at little expense, and maintained at a vast saving of human health and life. Such articles, also, as that of Dr. Stephen Smith, in the February number of this monthly, are educating the intelligent community as to the sanitary value of vegetation in cities. But nothing is safe or sacred where the evil trinity of the boss, the speculator, and the "soulless" corporation may combine their forces; and the call is for ceaseless watchfulness. Professor Egleston has been all his life in active association with the religious and benevolent work of the Episcopal Church. He became president of the Bible and Common Prayer-Book Society in 1871; was vice-president of the Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society from 1870 to 1897; a trustee of the General Theological Seminary, and a member of the corporation of Trinity Church from 1878. In connection with the last-named body some of his relations have an interest wider than his own denomination, and may fittingly be mentioned in a sketch relating chiefly to his scientific career. Two points may here be noted: the schools among the poorer classes maintained by the Trinity corporation; and the unique jeweled chalice in memory of his wife, presented by him to Trinity Church. Aided and controlled more or less by Trinity corporation, though in different parts of the city and in connection with different Episcopal churches, are now eight schools, with about one thousand pupils. In these are taught careful and scientific methods of training along modern lines, of eye and hand development, hygiene, economy, and thrift, to children and youth of the neediest classes. Already for years much interested in these schools, Professor Egleston has, since his withdrawal from professional activity, given much of his time to their advancement, and has found intense gratification in observing the results of this training among a class of children that, from their general environment, would grow up to be a burden or a menace to the city. The intelligent culture of hand and eye, the mental quickening and moral uplifting, the capacity and purpose of honorable self-support, and the protection from moral and social perils, that are imparted and secured through the agency of these schools, are to him a constant source of enthusiasm. The jeweled chalice above referred to is of scientific interest from the great variety and rarity of the gems with which it is set. During years of travel to and from many parts of Europe, Professor Egleston had remarkable opportunities, in his visits to mining regions and his intercourse with mineralogists, to obtain fine and choice specimens of gems; these he had mounted in elegant forms as presents to his wife, Mrs. Augusta McVickar Egleston. Her death, in 1895, was a very great blow to her husband, as their married life had been extremely happy; and the only satisfactory use to which this beautiful treasure of jewelry could be put seemed to him to be in the services of divine worship in the church. It is not possible in brief compass, without a figure, to describe the arrangement of these jewels on the base, stem, and cup of the golden chalice; but it must suffice to say that there are one hundred and eighty stones set in, with embossed work, on a cup and pedestal nine inches high and half that width. The species and varieties number fifteen, many of them in rare shades of color; among them are the ruby-colored Siriam garnets, green "demantoid" garnets of the Ural ("Uralian emerald"), Ceylonese moonstones, colored diamonds, sapphires, both yellow and green (Oriental topaz and emerald), rubellites, red zircon, moldavite (the rare green obsidian of Moravia), green tourmaline, chrysoberyl, the rich purple amethysts of the Urals, etc. Considered either mineralogically or as a work of art, this chalice is almost unique; while the conception and designing, which are wholly of Professor Egleston's own, reveal the same union of artistic and scientific qualities that was shown in the Audubon monument above mentioned, joined with a religious and a personal sentiment almost too sacred to dwell upon in a sketch like the present. In all these aspects of his life and work, as we said at the beginning, Professor Egleston has been little known to the general public; but among scientific and engineering circles he has been highly honored. In these pages he may become more widely known, and the people of the metropolis and of the country at large may learn something of the manner of man that has lived and labored so honorably among them, and has done so much for science and his fellow-men. Editor's Table. _SCIENCE AND THE IDEAL._ We have had frequent occasion in these columns to refer to the tirades against science indulged in by writers who, because they can not quite make ends meet in their philosophy of the universe, strangely allow themselves to think that _science_ must be at fault. At one moment it is M. Brunetière, at another Tolstoi, at another it is a Harvard professor or a Western school superintendent; but no very long time elapses before we find somebody in very unnecessary trouble, as it seems to us, over the shortcomings of science. The last sufferer to whom our attention has been drawn is Dr. John Beattie Crozier, the author of two able works--Civilization and Progress, and History of Intellectual Development--who has lately written a history of his own intellectual development under the title of My Inner Life. This writer describes the effect upon his mind of a study of Mr. Spencer's Principles of Psychology. "Then it was," he says, "that the ideal within me, struck to the heart, shriveled and collapsed." This sad result was due to the discovery, forced on him by a study of the work in question, that all our mental experiences have equally a material basis, and that from a material point of view or, as we may say, seen from below, one thought or feeling is as much justified as any other. Previously he had considered that "such higher faculties as veneration, benevolence, conscientiousness, and the like, were quite distinct in essential nature from low ones, like revenge, lust, vanity, cowardice, and deceit"; but now "all this was changed, and all the faculties alike, the high and the low, the noble and the base, the heroic and the self-indulgent, lay on a dead level of moral and spiritual equality ... all alike being but vibrations, vibrations, vibrations, nothing more." Consequently, "the dethroned Ideal fell prone and headlong like a false and usurping spirit; and my mind, bereaved of that which had been its life, settled into a deep and what, for a year or two, threatened to be a permanent intellectual gloom." It is a great pity that at this critical moment a very simple consideration did not occur to this troubled spirit. When we read the Sermon on the Mount we read "words, words, words"; when we read some horrible piece of profanity or indecency it is again "words, words, words"; when we read the demonstration of a proposition in Euclid it is "words, words, words"; and, again, when we take up Tennyson's In Memoriam we find that its whole tissue is "words, words, words." But would it tend in the least to lessen one's reverence for the Sermon on the Mount to be reminded that it was constructed out of the same verbal elements as the piece of profanity? or would it diminish our admiration for In Memoriam to be told that it was constructed of words just like the dullest piece of prose? If not, then why should one be so terribly disconcerted and depressed to find that all our mental life finds its basis in vibrations? Or why should the inference be drawn that, because the basis is one, all that reposes on it must also be one in character and meaning? Is our delight in the lily or the rose impaired by the reflection that it springs from the same soil that produces noisome weeds; or do we gaze on the humming bird with less admiration because it flies in the same atmosphere as the bat? Why should "vibrations" not be the condition of existence of one mental phenomenon as well as of another? Surely the very fact that Dr. Crozier classes all the feelings he mentions as mental affections should prepare him to believe that they have a common basis. But how feelings shall be classified and ranked _after they have taken form_ is a question precisely similar to the question how the various combinations of words should be classified and ranked. In the latter case words are the basis of them all, but we say: "This is an epic poem; this is a moral essay; this is an immoral novel; this is a silly joke; this is a market report." Are these distinctions illusory because words are the basis and substance of all these various forms of composition? Does the poem lose anything of its beauty, or the essay anything of its ethical value, because each was not composed of elements altogether peculiar to itself? The solid globe itself was once a diffused nebula, but we do not on that account find a less varied beauty in flower and tree, in hillside and running brook and grandly flowing river. In his sad condition of mental disarray our author betook himself, he says, to the counsels of Thomas Carlyle. That sage, when he heard that his visitor had been reading Spencer, made some uncomplimentary remarks about the latter which we hardly think the visitor was justified in repeating. Apart from this, Carlyle told him in effect that, as he was in the world, he had just to make the best of it, and that in time he would find work that he could do with benefit to himself and others. Finally, our author made what he calls a discovery and offers as a contribution to modern philosophy--namely, that in the mind of man there is a "scale," according to which thoughts and feelings are appraised. Some are high up on the scale and some are low down. He found that there is that _in_ the mind which is not _of_ the mind, and which sits in judgment on all the contents of the mind--something which smiles on every right action and frowns on every wrong one, and yet which he does not care to speak of as conscience. Here was the antidote he required to the "pure and undiluted materialism" which had so paralyzed his moral being in the Principles of Psychology; and, having obtained it, he has been living happily, as we gather, ever since. We have tried to do justice to the originality of Dr. Crozier's conception, but really with indifferent success. That there is a scale by which we are all accustomed to measure the varying values of our thoughts, feelings, and actions hardly needs to be stated; and that there is substantial agreement between men on the same plane of civilization as to the relative values of different mental products is also unquestionably true. What our author has not shown is how this conflicts with the strict scientific position taken in the Principles of Psychology. He does not tell us that he has repudiated the teachings of that work; indeed, he gives us distinctly to understand that, so far as it affirms the dependence of thought upon physical organization, he adheres to it still. If so, he has only built upon it a superstructure which it was always open to him to build; so, why he should find fault with the foundation it is not easy to see. Science goes as far as she can see her way to go in setting forth the relations between the mind of man and the environing universe. It studies also the human mind in its historical manifestations, and tries to unfold the laws of human conduct. It confines itself to facts which are believed to admit of verification and to inferences which have been tested by experience. This is the contribution of Science to the theory of human life. But because Science stops here she does not lay any veto on thought, desire, or hope. She lays a foundation; it is for us to build thereon "gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble," each of us according to our own impulse and upon our own responsibility. The fire of experience will "try every man's work of what sort it is." But not only may we build, we must build; no one can live upon another man's philosophy. We may adopt this creed or that, but it means nothing to us till we have worked it over in our own mind and made it our own--with modifications. There is nothing whatever in science that conflicts with the ideal. Strictly speaking, science brings us to the threshold of the ideal, and leaves us there. "These are the facts of life," it says; "such has been the course of human history. The human race has risen from humble origins to its present commanding position in the world; and to-day the standards of human conduct and the conditions of human happiness are very different from what they were in the distant past. Social ties have multiplied and strengthened. Domestic affections have grown in depth and tenderness, and individual happiness is now bound up to a very large extent in the happiness of other individuals. The cruel superstitions of the past have given way in many minds to a reverent regard for a power which is felt to rule in the universe. Of such a power Science can not render any exact account; but before all the ultimate questions of existence Science is dumb; nor can it attempt to reconcile the antinomies which assert themselves in all phenomena. It is for you, the individual, entering upon life, to make your choice of the course you shall hold and the principles by which you shall be governed. The senses are the guides to immediate pleasure, but the experience of the ages has settled with considerable approach to certainty the conditions on which enduring happiness is to be won. "'Choose well; your choice is Brief and yet endless.'" To the man who insists on being knocked down with a club before he will yield to persuasion there is nothing in such a mode of address that will be convincing. This is a case in which, as Pascal says, "there is enough light for those who desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who want a pretext for not seeing.... Perfect clearness might help the understanding, but it would injure the will." There is, therefore, room on the scientific foundation for the idealism of Dr. Crozier, and for many other forms of idealism. It is for each one of us to construct his own ideal, and, having constructed it, to live by it. "If any man's work abide he shall receive a reward." _RACIAL GEOGRAPHY._ The interesting papers contributed to this magazine by Prof. William Z. Ripley, which, we are glad to say, will soon be published in a more permanent form, indicate very clearly the remarkable progress that has been made of late years in the scientific study of human origins. Formerly legend and tradition were the only sources of light upon prehistoric times; and the sagacious Thucydides dismissed all speculation respecting those ages with the curt remark that he did not think the people who lived then amounted to much, any way. No doubt he was nearer right in this opinion than were those who peopled antiquity with demigods and heroes; still there was much of interest to be gleaned respecting the prehistoric past if only right methods of research had been used. This was too much to expect in his day; and, indeed, it is only in very recent times that the study of human origins has been placed upon anything like an adequate scientific basis. A reference to Mr. Ripley's work will show how numerous are the lines of investigation now pursued. Language, which at one time was considered an all-important test of origin, has fallen from its high position; and theories which, on the strength of linguistic evidence, were very widely entertained, have lost their authority. Particularly has this been the case with the so-called "Aryan" theory. It was simple and beautiful and interesting, but as observations accumulated it became more and more untenable, until finally it had to be discarded. The problems which the anthropologist and ethnologist attack are indeed of the highest degree of complexity. If our predecessors went astray therein, we ourselves are only feeling our way very cautiously and somewhat uncertainly. We have not yet reached an era of victorious generalizations. Professor Ripley well indicates the difficulties of the research. Things will go well for a considerable time along certain lines of observation until the facts come to be gleaned in some special field, and then the result will perhaps be just the opposite of what theory required. In a brachycephalic region, for example, where craniological and other tests call for a population of short stature, the stature will reveal itself as much above the average. In a region where, looking at race characteristics as elsewhere established, the tendency, say, to suicide should be particularly low, it is found by statistics to be particularly high. The ethnologist finds his path strewn with endless difficulties of this nature, and yet he is not discouraged. The truth lies somewhere, and he knows that a vigorous and courageous sifting of the facts will be sure to bring it to light, if not to-day, to-morrow. We gather from Professor Ripley's pages a strong impression of the confident patience with which the true man of science attacks his problems; he is sure that his _methods_ are right, and that in the end they must triumph. The interesting points of view which the study of racial geography presents are numberless. This is particularly shown in Professor Ripley's chapter on Modern Social Problems. In this chapter the writer acknowledges, as he does elsewhere, that theories of race and of heredity have sometimes been pushed too far. He demands a due recognition of the influence of environment, and cites cases where environment will explain divergences from what are recognized as race characteristics or tendencies. An example of this is afforded by the case of Brittany, in connection with separateness of home life. The population of Brittany belongs to a race that is particularly prone to such separateness, and yet in Brittany there is an unusual intermingling of families under one roof. We can not enter into the explanation here, but Professor Ripley shows how the physical geography of the country may account for the variation from type. In the same chapter the writer shows very interestingly how the Celtic parts of France manifest almost invariably conservative tendencies: how they shun divorce, afford a very low rate of suicide, and, in the matter of crime, tend rather to deeds of violence than to acts of dishonesty. The general impression which the intelligent reader will gather from the whole work is that "racial geography" has all the interest of a rapidly growing science; but that, while much has been accomplished, much more remains to be done. The lines of research are many, and we may reasonably hope that before long the combined labors of anthropologist, ethnologist, and sociologist will give us a coherent body of knowledge and theory which shall not only illuminate the past but be of the very highest value for the comprehension of the problems of our own day. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. In a study of what constitutes the foundations of zoölogy we know of no one better equipped to discuss the various problems than Professor Brooks.[V] As an original investigator in many groups of invertebrate zoölogy, as a student of animal life in temperate and tropical seas, as a special teacher of embryology and zoölogy for a quarter of a century, and, above all, as a profound student of the philosophical literature of the subject, his equipment is thorough and complete. A fair review of this work would be difficult without voluminous quotations from its pages. [Footnote V: The Foundations of Zoölogy. A Course of Lectures delivered at Columbia University on the Principles of Science as illustrated by Zoölogy. By William Keith Brooks, Ph. D., LL. D., Professor of Zoölogy at Johns Hopkins University. Pp. 339. The Macmillan Company.] The reader will find here the soundest, healthiest acceptance of the Darwinian theory of natural selection. He penetrates the mists and fogs of philosophical vagaries and follows the dictum of Tyndall, who, in presenting the essentials of a discussion, says, "Not with the vagueness belonging to the emotions, but with the definiteness belonging to the understanding" we are to study these matters. It is fact, fact, fact. The honest "I do not know" inspires the reader with a confidence that obscure points are not to be juggled with. He insists that the principles of science are physical, that a mechanical interpretation of Nature is reasonable and just. Referring to Huxley, he remarks that faith and hope are good things, no doubt, and (quoting from Huxley) "expectation is permissible when belief is not," but experience teaches that expectation or faith of a master is very apt to become belief in the mind of the student," and (again from Huxley) "Science warns us that the assertion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunder but a crime." In the chapter of Nature and Nurture he brings many potent facts and arguments against the idea of the transmission of acquired traits. Without copious extracts it is impossible to do justice to this masterly presentation of the subject. The chapter abounds in aphorisms, as indeed do other portions of the work; and these alone, if serially collated with their contexts, would make a valuable little handbook for the student of biology. His chapter on Lamarck is equally strong, and the fallacies of Lamarckianisms have never been so clearly shown. "The contrast between what we may call the solicitude of Nature to secure the production of new beings, and the ruthlessness with which they are sacrificed after they have come into existence, is a stumbling-block to the Lamarckian, and the crowning glory of natural selection in that it solves this great enigma of Nature by showing that it is itself an adaptation and a means to an end, for the sacrifice of individuals is the means for perfecting the adjustments of living things to the world around them and for thus increasing the sum of life." "Whole books have been written on the marvelous fitness of the structure, the instincts, and the habits of the worker of the honeybee for its life of active industry--a life in which the male has no share, and from which the female is cut off by her seclusion in the depths of the hive, and by her devotion to her own peculiar duties. While the queen and the drones are well fitted for their own parts in the social organization of the hive, these duties are quite simple, and very different from the duties of the workers; and as these latter do not normally have descendants, and as they never under any circumstances have female descendants, all the workers are the descendants of queens and not of workers. "Their wonderful and admirable fitness for their own most necessary part in the economy of the hive must, therefore, be inherited from parents who have never been exposed to those conditions to which the workers are adapted; and this adaptation can not be due to the inheritance of the effect of these conditions, nor can we believe that they are inherited from some remote time, when the workers were perfect females or when the queens were also workers; for the sterile workers of allied species differ among themselves, thus proving that they have undergone modification since they became sterile. "Here we have a most complicated and perfect adjustment of marvelous efficacy to external conditions which are of such a character as to prove that the inheritance of the effect of these conditions has had no part in the production of the adaptation." His views of bird migration, based on the matter of ovulation and not on food supply, are extremely interesting. He says: "As their eggs are very large and heavy, a high birth rate is incompatible with flight, and the preservation of each species imperatively demands that every egg shall be cared for with increasing solicitude; for while in other animals increased danger to eggs or young may be met and compensated by an increase in the birth rate, the birth rate of birds can not be much increased without a corresponding restriction of the power of flight. Every one knows how quickly birds may be exterminated by the destruction of their eggs or young, and the low birth rate of all birds of powerful flight is a sufficient reason for migration, for at the same time that their fitness for flight limits the birth rate, it permits them to seek nesting places beyond the reach of their enemies." His critical estimate of Huxley is tersely presented. He says: "His evolution is not a system of philosophy, but part of the system of science. It deals with history--with the phenomenal world--and not with the question what may or may not lie behind it. "The cultivation of natural science in this historical field and the discovery that the present order of living things, including conscious, thinking, ethical man, has followed after an older and simpler state of Nature, is not 'philosophy' but science. It involves no more belief in the teachings of any system of philosophy than does the knowledge that we are the children of our parents and the parents of our children; but it is what Huxley means by 'evolution.'" Dr. Brooks credits Galton with employing simple terms to express new and abstruse truths, and we trust those who are continually wrestling with the dead languages to pick out new and distracting words to express their conceptions will profit by Galton's method. The lecture on Natural Selection and the antiquity of life is replete with original and pregnant suggestions based upon the results of his own profound investigations on pelagic life. Here again only ample quotations from his pages would convey an adequate idea of their value and importance. In his chapter on Louis Agassiz and George Berkeley he gives this just tribute to Agassiz: "The writer was a man of transcendent genius for scientific discovery, with intense earnestness and enthusiasm for the pursuit of truth, and rare eloquence and literary skill. If any man was devoted to the cause of truth and determined to accept it, whatever it might prove to be, that man was Agassiz; for while his impulses were notably devout and reverential, he proved, on many occasions, that he was fearless and independent in the search for truth. It is no disparagement to Buckland and Bell and Chalmers and the other authors of the Bridgewater Treatises to assert that Agassiz far surpassed them all in acquaintance with the methods which lead to success in the interpretation of Nature, and in ability to treat the problems of natural theology from the standpoint of the zoölogist." He dedicates his book to Bishop Berkeley, and throughout the lectures his references indicate a thorough acquaintance with the writings of this eminent scholar. Paley's old watch comes in for renewed consideration, and one wonders if the mainspring of this device will ever be broken. His apt references to classical authors indicate wide and judicious reading. The book is overburdened with thought and clear, concise reasoning, and his final advice should be followed when he urges his readers to do double duty by reading the book again. * * * * * In the April number (1898) of this magazine we had occasion to review the first two volumes of this work.[W] A perusal of the third volume does not permit us to modify the expressions and criticisms there made. We then said the work is "a compact storehouse of facts, a veritable ethnological museum, and this feature alone renders the book indispensable to American students." The author "shows no evidence of ever having seen the magnificent series of volumes issued by the United States Bureau of Ethnology." "The author in several instances confounds Japan and China." "His treatment of the African races is by far the most exhaustive." These extracts will apply most particularly to the present volume. The negro races of the interior of Africa and those of West Africa, as well as the cultured races of that continent, are exhaustively treated. In that portion treating of the history of the civilization of eastern Asia the Japanese and Chinese are considered together and many mistakes in generalization follow as a result of this confounding. Long before we get to this portion of the work an illustration is given of Japanese agricultural instruments, in which only one plow of the many types in Japan is presented, and this is evidently taken from a model. Not only has he confounded the Japanese with the Chinese, but the southern Malays are brought in when he speaks of the Malay and Japanese love of the cockfight--a practice which is unknown in Japan. He refers to the Japanese latrine as being built over running water, whereas the record of this custom is found only in an ancient Japanese classic of the seventh century. He is in error in stating that the stage is essentially the same in China and Japan. His description of the music of Japan applies to China only. The statements that pearls play a large part in the ornaments of the Japanese, that the fireproof buildings are of stone, that the Japanese tobacco is moistened with opium, that the Japanese street dress is full of color, are all erroneous. His description of the sash worn by men is the description of the woman's sash. He says "the Japanese currency before the change to dollars and cents was like that of the Chinese." Had he consulted Snowden's description of ancient and modern coins, etc., he would have found this correct statement in regard to Japanese coins: "In their shape, composition, and relation to each other they present some striking features which set them apart from every other system of coinage in the world." [Footnote W: The History of Mankind. By Prof. Friedrich Ratzal. The Macmillan Company. Vol. III, pp. 599.] The illustrations are badly distributed. Through pages of description of the Japanese and Koreans, in which little is said about the Koreans, are scattered illustrations of the inhabitants of Yeso--the Ainu. The illustration of Japanese table furniture depicts only utensils for smoking and wine-drinking, and some of these are erroneously labeled, as are those of certain Chinese utensils. We trust that the Asiatic portion of this valuable work will be written over again, and in doing it the author will realize that he is dealing with four or five hundred million people widely separated in language, modes of writing, customs, and manners; that he will consider the Ainu, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thibetan, and Indo-Chinese with the same thoroughness that he has given to the separate groups of the African continent; that he will draw his information from modern sources and collections properly labeled and up to date. Even with the defects pointed out the work will prove of great value to the American student, as it brings before him the richness of the ethnological museums of Europe. GENERAL NOTICES. _The Development of English Thought_[X] is "an attempt to present a theory of history through concrete illustrations." The book does not deal with the facts of history--a knowledge of these is assumed--it throws into relief certain salient features of each epoch which were instrumental in forwarding the social consciousness. It may, indeed, be called a philosophy of economics. It has a theory to propound: Survival is determined and progress created by a struggle for the goods for which men strive, or the means by which they may avert evil. These goods change, together with the environment dependent on them. Hence arise new activities; the race is modified, new modes of thought come forward, and finally the characteristics of the civilization are reconstructed. These changes are subject to a definite law of evolution, repeated in each new environment. England has been chosen for this economic interpretation of history; because of its insular position, its development has been more normal and indigenous, less subject to foreign influences since the Reformation, than any continental country. An explanation of the psychological theory underlying the book serves as general introduction. The antecedents of English thought are found among the early Germans, and the Early Church. The fifteenth century, with its inventions and discoveries, revolutionized men's ways of living and thinking. Then the Calvinists and Puritans imposed their standards of good and evil. These are followed by the great English thinkers: Locke, who marks the beginning of Deism in England; Mandeville, Hume, and Smith, developing the economic side; Whitefield and Wesley leading the religious revival. Later on, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill formulated the Economic Philosophy, whereas Darwin, the first of the biologists, imposed biologic habits of thought on economic inquiry. The concluding chapter, while cautious in the discussion of current problems, attempts, assisted by the lessons of the past, to indicate the probable future movement of thought, springing out of present economic conditions. [Footnote X: The Development of English Thought. A Study in the Economic Interpretation of History. By Simon N. Patten, Ph. D. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1899. $3.] Mr. _Wilbur S. Jackman_ has sought in preparing his manual of _Nature Study for Grammar Grades_,[Y] to propose a few of such problems arising in a thoughtful study of Nature as are within the comprehension of grammar-school pupils, and to offer suggestions designed to lead to their solution. Directions may perhaps be given by the teacher--that is, by some teachers, but very few--but even if he knows how, it is hardly possible for him to make them as systematic to so large an extent as would be required by a school of inquiring pupils; and such a plan as the author offers may be accepted as a valuable help. Take, for instance, the first lesson on the mutual relations of plants and insects--as to plants. The student is told what equipment to take, what places to visit; is reminded of seven kinds of evidence in the shape of galls, stings, eaten leaves, etc., to be considered; and is given a list of queries to be recollected in studying the phenomena, in their general aspect, as to the benefit or injury received by the plant from insects, the attractions it offers, and the defenses it possesses, with "number work" relating to the extent of the depredations, and methods of representing the results of the study in picture. The book contains forty-five such lessons on different aspects of Nature. [Footnote Y: Nature Study for Grammar Grades. A Manual for the Guidance of Pupils below the High School in the Study of Nature. By Wilbur S. Jackman. Danville, Ill.: The Illinois Printing Company. Pp. 407.] In the preparation of his book on _Fertilizers_[Z] it has been the aim of Mr. _Voorhees_ to point out the underlying principles and to discuss, in the light of our present knowledge of the subject, some of the important problems connected with the use of fertilizing materials. While the author recognizes the lack of definite knowledge on many vital points, he considers it desirable, when the investigations of the experiment stations are becoming so important and they are so well prepared to study the fundamental principles of plant nutrition, for the practical man to have a clear understanding of what is now known. The book treats of the natural fertility of the soil and the sources of the loss of the elements of fertility, the functions of manure and fertilizers and the need of artificial ones, the different classes of fertilizers, the chemical analysis of them, and the methods of using them with their special application to various crops. [Footnote Z: Fertilizers. The Source, Character, and Composition of Natural, Home-made, and Manufactured Fertilizers; and Suggestions as to their Use for Different Crops and Conditions. By Edward B. Voorhees. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 335. Price, $1.] We have received, with only a short interval between them, the first volume of a third edition and the fourth or last volume of the second edition of _Alfred H. Allen's Commercial Organic Analysis_.[AA] The former volume is first to reach us. It is a high testimony to the value of the work in itself that the publication of a rival issue of the edition of 1885 had been begun by another house, although its age, as suggested by the date, would indicate that it had much need of revision. During the thirteen years since the publication of this edition later research has thrown new light on many features of the science and processes, and has corrected many of the old conceptions, and the author's views on some points have changed in the light of the more recent results, so that the preparation of a new edition had become necessary. Mr. Allen has found it now impossible for him to undertake the continuous labor which would be imposed by such a task, and the work of revision has been undertaken by Henry Leffmann, of Philadelphia. For this new edition Mr. Allen has furnished material on the subjects of the Kjeldahl process, proteids of wheat flour, vinegar, brewing sugars, malt substitutes, hop substitutes, and secondary constituents in spirits. Information has been added by the American reviser, partly from suggestions by Mr. Allen on the subjects of specific gravity, formaldehyde, vinegar, methyl, alcohol, acetone, fusel oil, argol, starch, glucose, invert sugar, lactose, and wine, and brief notes on other topics. Processes of the American Association of Official Agricultural Chemists have been reprinted. The revision of Vol. II is well in hand, and will be much more extensive than that of Vol I. [Footnote AA: Commercial Organic Analysis. A Treatise on the Properties, Proximate Analytical Examination, and Mode of Assaying the Various Organic Chemicals and Products employed in the Arts, Manufactures, and Medicine. By Alfred H. Allen. Third edition. Illustrated. With Revisions and Appendix by the author and Henry Leffmann. Vol. I. Introduction. Alcohols, Neutral Alcoholic Derivatives, Sugars, Starch and its Isomers, Vegetable Acids, etc. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Sons & Co. Pp. 557. Price, $4.50. The same work. Second edition. Revised and enlarged. Proteids and Albuminous Principles, Proteids or Albuminoids. Same publishers. Pp. 584. Price, $4.50.] On the other hand, the revision of the second edition has extended over fourteen years, and is only just completed with the fourth volume, which appears a few weeks later than the volume noticed above. The earlier volumes have been long out of print, and are destined, of course, to be supplanted by those of the new revision. The present fourth volume, being newer and of the present date, will serve as the latest till the last volume of the new revision is reached; and, besides, the author hopes to publish an appendix to each volume, containing the more important of the later results. The meaning of the term Commercial Analysis has been somewhat extended, and matter has been included that in closest strictness does not belong under it, it being thought better, the author says, to include all facts possessing an analytical or practical interest to him, in the belief that what he finds useful himself will be of value to others. In _The Porto Rico of To-day_[AB] a traveler's view of that interesting island and its people is presented by Mr. _A. G. Robinson_, who went there and remained during August, September, and October, 1898, as correspondent of the New York Evening Post. While the book can not be regarded, as it does not profess and is not intended to be, as a source of geographical or statistical information, it admirably fulfills the design of the author to present a picture of the people and of the country as he saw them; and it is a very living picture too. He looked with a sharp eye, and has recorded what he saw in graphic style. In the author's story of his early days of the island we are made acquainted with the various names it has had, of which Porto Rico, or Puerto Rico, is only the latest. The oldest of the European names appears to have been Buriquién, in some one of the dozen or more spellings it has had, one of them being Bo. It has also been called La Isla de Carib, San Juan Bautista, etc. After the account of the author's first general impressions and experiences he describes the city of Ponce, his visit to a coffee district, a number of typical towns and villages, the journey from Ponce to San Juan, the highways, railways--of which there are one hundred and forty-three miles in operation and one hundred and seventy-five miles under construction--and a fairly effective telegraph system, views of the industrial possibilities and commerce of the island, with some experiences of military campaigning. [Footnote AB: The Porto Rico of To-day. Pen Pictures of the People and the Country. By Albert Gardner Robinson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 240, with maps. Price, $1.50.] The publication of the revision which Mr. _Herbert Spencer_ is making of his Synthetic Philosophy in order to incorporate in it as far as may be the results of more recent advances begins with the first volume of _The Principles of Biology_.[AC] The advance during the last generation, Mr. Spencer thinks, has been more rapid in the direction of this science than any other, and though the hope of bringing a work on biology at large up to date could not be rationally entertained at the author's age and under the existing conditions of his physical strength, a similar service to a work on the principles of the science did not seem impossible. Numerous additions have been needful. What was originally said about vital changes of matter is supplemented by a chapter on Metabolism. A chapter is added on The Dynamic Element in Life. The insertion of some pages on Structure fills a gap in preceding editions. The revelations of the microscope on cell life and multiplication are set forth. A supplementary chapter on Genesis, Heredity, and Variation gives the results of further evidence and further thought in that line, qualifying and developing certain views enunciated in the first edition. Various modern ideas are considered under the title Recent Criticisms and Hypotheses. The chapter on The Arguments from Embryology has been largely rewritten. Smaller additions appear in the form of new sections incorporated in pre-existing chapters. The assistance needed in the work of revision has been given by Prof. W. H. Perkin in Organic Chemistry and its derived subjects; Prof. A. G. Tansley in Plant Morphology and Physiology; Prof. E. W. MacBride and Mr. J. T. Cunningham in Animal Morphology; and Mr. W. B. Hardy in Animal Physiology. In all sections not marked as new the author desires it to be understood that the essential ideas set forth are the same as they were in the original edition of 1864. [Footnote AC: The Principles of Biology. By Herbert Spencer. In Two Volumes. Vol. I. Revised and enlarged edition. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 706. Price, $2.] Prof. _Silas W. Holman_ attempts the presentation, in _Matter, Energy, Force, and Work_,[AD] of some of the fundamental ideas and definitions of physics in a plain and logical manner. His purpose is not to set forth the experimental side of the subject or to describe phenomena or laws. He rather assumes a slight knowledge of these, and proceeds to develop the concept and definitions. The author regards a clearer thinking on these subjects as of special importance to engineers and members of the other technical professions, because correct views upon them have become essential in those professions through the progress of the applications of science to the industrial arts. These applications are likewise of considerable interest to the untechnical members of the community. Professor Holman has composed his book with the principle of presenting the subject of physics in logical sequence, and has divided it into two parts, the first of which contains the matter immediately proper to the subject, with discussions of substance or matter, motion; energy and its forms; force; kinetic energy, force-measurements, work, potential energy, and matter again, as distinguished from substance. The second part comprises summaries of the chief theories of the nature of matter, force, and energy, including the kinetic theory of gases, Le Sage's theory of gravitation, the vortex-atom theory, and a discussion of the nature of energy and matter, with observations on chemical energy and the ether. [Footnote AD: Matter, Energy, Force, and Work. A Plain Presentation of Fundamental Physical Concepts, and of the Vortex-Atom and other Theories. By Silas W. Holman. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 257. Price, $2.50.] The _Short Course in Music_, prepared for use in schools where a complete course is not thought necessary, by _F. H. Ripley_ and _Thomas Tappen_, is embraced in two books, of which we notice the second (American Book Company). Familiar songs are made the basis of instruction, some of those which appear as melodies in Book One being repeated here in full score. All other material has been prepared especially for this book. The music and directions are adapted equally for unchanged and changed voices. Voice training and the elements of phrasing and expression are furnished in a group of _solfeggios_ at the close of the book. Theory is given in condensed form, but one that, it is claimed, embraces all the essential elements of vocal music. Mr. _J. E. Marr_ has prepared his exposition of _The Principles of Stratigraphical Geology_ (Cambridge University Press; The Macmillan Company, New York, $1.60), under the belief that an idea of the subject can be obtained most satisfactorily if a large number of the details connected with the study of the stratified rocks are omitted. He has accordingly given very brief accounts of the strata of the different systems, paying more attention to the bearings of the facts than to their enumeration. The history of the earth is presented as a connected one, in which one period is linked on to the next, every event that occurs introducing a new complication into the conditions, which are consequently never quite the same--the changes showing an advance from the simple to the more complex. The study proves that an enormous period elapsed subsequent to the formation of the earth and previous to the deposition of the stratified rocks, of which we have only the slightest, if any, knowledge. The stratigraphical geologist has to establish the order of succession of the strata for the chronology, and to ascertain as far as he can the conditions existing during the deposition of the several strata or groups of strata. After an account of the growth and progress of stratigraphical geology, the nature of the stratified rocks and the law of superposition are discussed; the test of included organisms and the methods of classification are explained, the evidences of conditions under which strata were formed, and other theoretical points are considered, and the several geological systems or periods are enumerated under the English nomenclature. Finally, the various estimates of geological time and the bases on which they are made are reviewed. The American Book Company publishes as a part of the Eclectic System of Industrial Drawing an excellent manual of the _Elements of Perspective_, by _Christine Gordon Sullivan_, of the Cincinnati public schools. It consists of explicit directions and rules on the general principles of the art, with applications in Isometric Projection and Oblique Perspective, given in concise form and simple, clear language, amply illustrated, and supplemented by problems, in solving which the rules are made practical. A convenient manual on _Gas and Petroleum Engines_ has been prepared by _A. G. Elliott_ from the French of _Henry de Graffigny_ for Whittaker's Electro-Mechanical Series, in recognition of the interest that has been awakened in the application of such engines to supply the place now occupied by horses in drawing vehicles. One chapter deals exclusively with the theory of the gas engines. Other topics treated of are the history of the gas engine, the description of existing gas engines, carbureted air engines, petroleum engines, gas-generating plants, engines for use with poor gases, and the maintenance of gas and oil engines. (The Macmillan Company, 75 cents.) _Laboratory Exercises in Anatomy and Physiology_ (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 60 cents) have been prepared by _James Edward Peabody_ for practical application. The precept is emphasized that the pupil should be led to see that most of the materials required for observation and experiment are furnished by the organs and tissues of his own body. Directions which have been found in the author's experience necessary to guide the pupil in his observations and experiments are given at the beginning of each topic. The questions following them contemplate the student's seeking the facts from the material itself, and he is expected to be trained to distinguish observed results from the inferences that may be drawn from them. Some home study is contemplated, the results to be afterward reported in class. The book consists almost entirely of directions for experiments, and is interlined with blank sheets for recording observations. _Geographical Nature Studies_ (American Book Company) is intended by the author, _Frank Owen Payne_, to assist the teacher, and by pointing out the relations, often unrecognized, between familiar phenomena and home geography to guide the study of the class to definite and practical ends. The lessons are intended to fit the comprehension of the youngest pupils, to promote the cultivation of habits of accurate observation, and to stimulate a desire for more knowledge and broader views of the world. They lead directly up to the point where the more formal study of geography from a text-book begins. The lessons may be used as reading exercises and for topical recitations, and exercises are introduced which may assist the cultivation of the power of correct verbal expression in the statement of facts. The exercises concern weather, animals, physical phenomena, and objects about us, and are very various. Impressions of Medusæ have been observed on the Jurassic lithographic limestones of Solenhofen, and some "problematic fossils" on the Lower Cambrian rocks of Sweden have been regarded as derived from Medusæ. Certain nodules, bearing what looked like flattened-out starfishes--"star-cobbles" they were called--have been found among the fossils of the Coosa Valley, Alabama. Director _Charles D. Walcott_, of the United States Geological Survey, concluded that these also represented Medusæ, and began an investigation of them which involved a comparison with the Swedish and Bavarian specimens, and was at last enlarged so as to embrace all fossil Medusæ. His work is now published as a separate memoir, _Fossil Medusæ_, as one of the Monographs of the United States Geological Survey (Vol. XXX). The Middle Cambrian Medusæ are first described, and then, in order, the Lower Cambrian of the United States and of Sweden and Bohemia and the Jurassic of Bavaria. The text is illustrated by forty-seven excellent plates. A new edition, revised and with additions, of the _Mechanics_ and _Heat_ of _Edward L. Nichols_ and _W. S. Francis_ is published by the Macmillan Company ($1.50). The book is the first volume of the Elements of Physics of the authors, which is complete in three volumes. We find in it no explanation of the nature and extent of the revisions and additions. The publication of such a book as _Catering for Two_--Comfort and Economy for small Households (G. P. Putnam's Sons, $1.25)--has been suggested to _Alice L. James_ by the difficulty of reducing the average rules of the cook-book to meet the wants of a family of two or three. The work embodies the results of sixteen years' experience in labor and study, and the author hopes that with it the way may be made easier for others whose bills of fare may be made for two. The directions are claimed to be throughout exact and reliable, and the dishes to be nourishing, appetizing, and inexpensive. The author's plan is to take a bill of fare with a comfortable variety of dishes, and direct explicitly how each is to be prepared. The manual on _Testing Milk and its Products_, prepared for dairy students, creamery and cheese factory operators, food chemists, and dairy farmers, by _E. H. Farrington_ and _F. W. Noll_, has reached a fourth edition, the first three editions having been exhausted in about a year. The present edition has been thoroughly revised, and such additions have been made to it as have been necessary to bring it up to date. It has been adopted as a text-book or reference-book in the dairy schools of twelve States of the Union and in a number of schools in Canada. (Published by the Mendota Book Company, Madison, Wis. $1.) _The Silver Cross, or the Carpenter of Nazareth_ (International Publishing Company, New York), is a short story selected and translated from The Mysteries of the People of Eugène Sue, and published for the sake of the illustrations it is supposed to afford of the tyranny of the ruling class and the oppression of the working people and the poor and their suffering thereby which prevailed in the grand days of the Roman Empire, as well as always before, and is assumed to have continued down to the present. It is the story of the life and sufferings of Jesus of Nazareth, told in the thrilling style of the great French novelist. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Delaware College; No. 44. Sorghum in 1898. By Charles L. Penny. Pp. 16.--Michigan State Agricultural College. Special, No. 11. Frozen Trees and their Treatment. Pp. 4; Nos. 166 and 167. Dairy Matters. By C. D. Smith and G. H. True. Pp. 30; No. 168. Michigan Fruit List. By L. H. Taft. Pp. 16; Michigan Bulletin of Vital Statistics, February and March, 1899. Pp. 20 each.--New Hampshire College: No. 58. The Cost of raising Calves. By Fred W. Morse. Pp. 12; No. 59. Tenth Annual Report. By Charles S. Murkland. Pp. 56; No. 60. Green Corn under Glass. By F. William Rane. Pp. 60; No. 61. The Inspection of Fertilizers in 1898. Pp. 12; No. 62. Forcing Pole Beans under Glass. By F. William Rane. Pp. 8.--New Jersey: Report of the Botanical Department for 1898. By Byron D. Halsted. Pp. 84; No. 135. The Poisonous Plants of New Jersey. By Byron D. Halsted. Pp. 28.--New York: No. 150. Two Small Fruit Pests. By F. H. Hall and V. H. Lowe. Pp. 5.--Ohio: No. 99. Sugar Beet Investigations in 1898. By A. D. Selby; United States Department of Agriculture. Some Insects Injurious to Garden and Orchard Crops. By F. H. Chittenden. Pp. 99; North Dakota Weather and Crop Service for December, 1898. By W. L. Moon and B. H. Bronson. Pp. 8. American Economic Association. The Federal Census. Critical Essays by Members of the Association. Pp. 516. Paper. $1. American Public Health Association. The Bertillon Classification of Causes of Death. Lansing, Mich. Pp. 40. Badenoch, L. N. True Tales of the Insects. London: Chapman & Hall. Pp. 255. Barber, Edwin Atlee. Anglo-American Pottery. (Old English China, with American Views.) Indianapolis, Ind.: Press of the Clay-worker. Pp. 170. $1.50. Bauer, L. A. The Physical Decomposition of the Earth's Magnetic Field, No. 1. Pp. 20. Is the Principal Source of the Secular Variation of the Earth's Magnetism within or without the Earth's Crust? Pp. 6. Bridges and Framed Structures. An Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Vol. I, No. 1. April, 1899. Chicago: The D. P. Rauck Publishing Company. Pp. 92. 30 cents. Campbell, W. W. The Elements of Practical Astronomy. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 264. $2. Fairchild, H. L. Glacial Waters in the Finger-Lake Region of New York. Pp. 36. Glacial Lakes, Newberry, Warren, and Dana, in Central New York. Pp. 14. Fiske, John. Through Nature to God. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 194. $1. Greinger, S., M. D. A Case of Abnormally High Temperature subsequent to Attack of Tertian Ague. Pp. 5. Hague, Arnold. Presidential Address to the Geological Society of Washington, 1898. Abstracts of Minutes, etc. Pp. 48. Hollick, Arthur. Notes on Block Island. Pp. 20, with plates. The Relations between Forestry and Geology in New Jersey. Parts I and II. Pp. 24. Additions to the Palæobotany of the Cretaceous Formation on Staten Island. No. II. Pp. 12, with plates. Hunter, S. J. Alfalfa, Grasshoppers, Bees: Their Relationship. University of Kansas. Pp. 152. Jackman, Wilbur S. Nature Study for Grammar Grades. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 407. $1. Jenks, Josephine, Translator. Friedrich Froebel's Education by Development. New York: D. Appleton and Company. International Education Series. Pp. 347. Kemp, James Furman. Preliminary Report of the Geology of Essex County, New York. Pp. 24. Geology of the Lake Placid Region. Pp. 20, with map. Marot, Helen. A Handbook of Labor Literature. Philadelphia: Free Library of Economics and Political Science. Pp. 96. $1. Mason, Otis Tufton. Aboriginal American Zoötechny. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 37. New England Anti-Vivisection Society Monthly. Vol. IV, No. 4. April, 1899. Pp. 20. Boston. 10 cents. $1 a year. Pennwitt, W. C. Memorial to the United States Senate concerning a National University. Pp. 16. Peck, F. W., Commissioner General. The United States at the Paris Exposition in 1900. Pp. 11. Internationale Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900. Regulations, Classification. Chicago. Pp. 110. Roosa, D. B. St. John, M. D. Defective Eyesight. The Principle of its Relief by Glasses. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 193. $1. Russell, Frank. Explorations in the Far North. University of Iowa. Pp. 190. Sargent, Frederick Leroy. Corn Plants. Their Uses and Ways of Life. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 106. Smith, D. T., M. D. The Philosophy of Money, and other Essays. Louisville, Ky.: John P. Morton & Co. Pp. 203. $1.25. Smith, Edgar F. (authorized translator). Victor von Richter's Organic Chemistry, or Chemistry of the Carbon Compounds. Edited by Prof. R. Anschütz. Third American from the eighth German edition. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston & Co. Vol. I. The Aliphatic Series. Pp. 625. $3. Smithsonian Institution (U. S. National Museum). Cook, O. F. The Diplopod Family Striariidæ. Pp. 8, with plates. African Diplopoda of the Family Gomphodesmidæ. Pp. 64, with plates. Swift, Morrison I. Anti-Imperialism. Los Angeles, Cal.: Public Ownership Review. Pp. 64. United States Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries. Report to June 30, 1898. Washington. Pp. 350. Woodman, J. Edmund. Studies in the Gold-bearing Slates of Nova Scotia. Boston Society of Natural History. Pp. 42, with 3 plates. Fragments of Science. =The New Zealand Experiment in Woman Suffrage.=--The right of suffrage was given to all the women of New Zealand in 1893 without any concerted action or aggressive demonstrations on their part by the free, almost unsolicited, vote of the men. The general election took place in November of the same year, and is described in the Saturday Review as having been a warm contest, with several questions on which public opinion was sharply divided; but "on the whole, the women took matters wonderfully coolly. They flocked in thousands to the public meetings, where, by common consent, the front seats were given up to them." Contrary to expectation, they displayed little emotion, and even had to be "coached" to make a pretense of enthusiasm. "Polling day was awaited with dread by the electioneering agents and returning officers, with doubt by veteran politicians, and with pleasurable excitement by the women." They all voted, and "what did it all lead to?" "It left things very much as they were.... Gradually but irresistibly the conviction forced itself upon the New Zealand mind that the women knowing little and caring as little about political details, had voted almost always with the men of their family and class. Sharing to the full the prejudices, hopes, and interests of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and lovers, they had cheerfully doubled the voting power of these. Where, as in the case of schoolmistresses and factory girls, they had some special bond of union other than domestic they had voted very much as schoolmasters and male trade-unionists had voted.... With one accord colonists ceased to be afraid of what the suffrage might do, and began instead to complain of it for not doing more. Only here and there careful observers note that groups of women are studying politics, and foresee that, as years go by, these will supply a new and intelligent force with distinct and logically reasoned aims of its own." =The Metric System= (a Letter to the London Times).--SIR: I see that on Wednesday next, the 22d inst., the President of the Board of Trade is to receive a deputation from the Decimal Associations and others to urge on the Government, not merely the adoption of the decimal system of notation, but the compulsory application within two years of the metric system of weights and measures in its entirety. I have been hoping to see a letter in the Times from some person of importance calling attention to this deputation. I fervently trusted I should notice one from your correspondent, Mr. Herbert Spencer, who, a year or so back, contributed a series of thoroughly well-thought-out and logical articles, exposing the fallacy of the metric system; but if any such letter has appeared I have, unfortunately, missed it. I believe this agitation to be largely due to scientific professors who have been brought up on foreign books, and have found it too much trouble to convert foreign measurements into English; further, due to the promptings of a number of foreign merchants, forming (happily, or unhappily) now so large a portion of our traders-men who, also, do not wish to take the trouble of converting foreign weights and measures into English. As regards the suggestion, made time after time, that the metric system is one giving the greatest simplicity to calculations, I say unhesitatingly, from very considerable experience, that it is one absolutely subversive of mental arithmetic, and I appeal to anybody who has ever had the misfortune to wait at the _guichet_ of a French railway station while the clerk inside has been calculating the total amount to be paid for two first-class and one second-class from "A" to "B" with a piece of chalk, or pencil and paper, to compare the speed and the certainty of this process with the answer that he would get at Euston, or at any such station in Great Britain, and say which system shows by results the advantages in point of time and in accuracy. The French themselves, as has been pointed out on more than one occasion, find the metric system too irksome, and they evade it. According to the metric system, one of its great merits is that you can state every required quantity by multiples or submultiples of ten--metre, 1; decimetre, 0.1; centimetre, 0.01; millimetre, 0.001. But no Frenchman thinks of expressing himself in this way. Instead of 0.01, he says cm. 1. For a millimetre, he says mm. 1. When he comes to large weights, does he not commonly abjure the 1,000 kilos and write one tonne? When he comes to domestic weights the kilogramme is found too large; the half of this, the practical equivalent of the pound, is wanted. He ought to write 500 grammes. He does not. He abjures his decimals, and writes one half kilo. But I feel I must not take up your space by multiplying instances, so well known to many who have studied the subject, of the unbearable burden of the decimal _plus_ metrical system compulsorily carried out. I well know the value of decimals, and the indispensable need of their use in many circumstances; but I object to being compelled to use them when they are not needed and are in the way. I find it easier to state seven eighths, and to deal with it mentally, than to put it into the form of .875. I do not wish to be restricted by law in the use of my tools. What would be thought of the law which compelled a shipwright on all occasions to use a chisel, and never to employ the adze. I, with, I believe, every upholder of English weights and measures, and of the use of fractions, am quite willing that the metric system should be made legal in its entirety throughout Great Britain; but we are not willing that the useful weights and measures which we can employ with so great facility and accuracy should be made illegal. Let the two exist together, and experience will prove which is the one preferred by the community. I am, sir, your obedient servant, FREDERICK BRAMWELL. 5 GREAT GEORGE STREET, WESTMINSTER, S. W., _March 18, 1899_. P. S.--Very probably the old stalking-horses will be trotted out on Wednesday, and the President of the Board of Trade will be told of the confusion created by the existence of mere local weights and measures. I believe that if those who cite these anomalies were asked to give instances at various dates it would be found that these local weights and measures were dying out. In any event they are illegal, and are not obligatory upon anybody. Every man can claim to deal according to the standards of length, of weights, and of capacity. Most certainly the introduction of the metric system would largely add to the use of illegal weights and measures, not only locally, but generally. If the inquiry were made in France, even no farther off than Boulogne, it would be found that, in the markets there, dealings are frequently carried out on a local system unconnected with the metric.--F. B. =Variations in African Religious Ideas.=--Miss Kingsley observes, in her West African Studies, that when you are traveling from district to district you can not fail to be struck by the difference in character of the native religions you are studying, and that no wandering student of the subject in western Africa can avoid recognizing the existence of at least four distinct forms of development of the fetich idea. They have every one of them the same underlying idea, and yet they differ. "And I believe," Miss Kingsley says, "much of the confusion which is supposed to exist in African religious ideas is a confusion only existing in the minds of cabinet ethnologists from a want of recognition of the fact of the existence of these schools. For example, suppose you take a few facts from Ellis and a few from Bastian and mix, and call the mixture West African religion. You do much the same sort of thing as if you took bits from Mr. Spurgeon's works and from those of some eminent Jesuit and of a sound Greek churchman and mixed them, and labeled it European religion. The bits would be all right by themselves, but the mixture would be a quaint affair." Of the four main schools of fetich predicated by Miss Kingsley, the Tshi and Ewe school (Ellis's school) is mainly concerned with the preservation of life; the Calabar school with attempting to enable the soul successfully to pass through death; the Mpongwe school with the attainment of material prosperity; and the school of Nkissi with the worship of the mystery of the power of evil. =A Natural History Society as a School.=--Among the agencies employed by the Boston Society of Natural History for making itself a vehicle of instruction to the public has been the employment of an educated man and teacher as guide to the museum, who should also give lectures there. The salary of this officer has heretofore been provided by the bounty of Miss Harriet E. Freeman, but she has been obliged to discontinue her contribution, and the curator is now seeking other means of maintaining a suitably qualified assistant. The "guide," Mr. A. W. Grabau, delivered a course of lectures in April and May, 1897, on "The Surface of the Earth: Its Rocks, Soil, and Scenery," in which special attention was given to the scenery in New England; and, whenever it was practicable, excursions were made to localities which could be used as illustrations. A similar course, delivered in 1896, resulted in the formation during the summer of the same year of a class of thirty persons, summer residents of Kennebunkport, Maine, who were under Mr. Grabau's daily instruction for two weeks. The awakening of interest in local scenery further led to his giving lectures in Belmont and Arlington, and he thereby became instrumental in a movement intended to preserve the local frontal bowlder moraine on Arlington Heights--a valuable geological movement. A course of lectures on the Animals of the Shores of New England was given by Mr. Grabau to a class of from forty to seventy-five persons, in the Teachers' School of Science, with excursions on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. In a similar fall course attention was given specially to the study of animals in their various habitats. A course by Mr. Grabau on the use of the microscope and the preparation of specimens was followed by ten days' laboratory work in Limekilns Bay, Maine. One of the results of a winter course on zoölogy, to a class of twenty teachers, was the formation of the Hale House Natural History Club, in connection with which field meetings are held, classes for children are formed, and papers upon elementary subjects are read and discussed. Other courses of lectures are mentioned in the report of the curator of the society--the field lessons in geology, by Professor Barton, with a winter course in historical geology; the course of Dr. R. W. Greenleaf, on the elementary structure and function of the parts of flowering plants; the course of the curator (Alpheus Hyatt), on elementary zoölogy; and the lectures on geography, by Prof. W. M. Davis. =Glacier Water.=--An analysis of two samples of water from the Illecilliwaet Glacier, in British Columbia, was recently made by F. T. Shutt and A. T. Charron. The water was collected a few feet from the glacier's irregular face, about a mile and a half from the glacier station on the Canadian Pacific Railway. The following is abstracted from an account in the Chemical News: ----------------------------------+-----------+----------- | No. 1. | No. 2. +-----------+----------- | Parts per million. ----------------------------------+-----------+----------- Free ammonia | 0.018 | 0.018 Albuminoid ammonia | 0.027 | 0.037 Nitrogen as nitrates and nitrites | 0.0246 | 0.0442 Oxygen absorbed in fifteen minutes| 0.0396 | 0.0672 Oxygen absorbed in four hours | 0.1056 | 0.1744 Chlorine | 0.10 | 0.10 Total solids at 105° C. | 30.8 | 12.0 Solids after ignition | 30.8 | 8.0 Loss on ignition | None. | 4.0 Phosphates | None. | None. ----------------------------------+-----------+----------- The authors go on to say: "From the above data we may unhesitatingly conclude that the glacier water is one of great organic purity. The samples are not identical, due no doubt to the fact that they were collected twelve days apart, and probably from different parts of the foot of the glacier. Both analyses, however, show that, judged by the standards used in the diagnosis of ordinary potable waters, it is a water possessing a high degree of purity, and one perfectly wholesome and eminently suited for drinking and household purposes. As received, both samples were quite murky, almost milky, in appearance. On allowing them to stand, perfect subsidence took place, leaving the supernatant water colorless and brilliant. A microscopic examination of the sediment showed it to consist of very fine rock matter, chiefly fragments of quartzite. =Protection of Plants and Birds in France and Italy.=--Organized efforts for the protection of native plants and birds from further destruction are multiplying in Europe. Botanical stations for Alpine plants have been established at several places in France and Switzerland, and now Italy has come into line with the association _Pro Mortibus_, which, founded in July, 1897, has already more than five hundred adherents. Italy is probably the country where work of this kind is most needed, for nowhere else is the destruction, particularly of birds, so systematically, persistently, and industriously carried on. _Pro Mortibus_ will also interest itself in the preservation and replantation of the forests. Among other efforts looking in a similar direction, M. J. Corcelli tells in _La Nature_ of the establishment of shelters in connection with the schools in Saxony where birds are fed in the winter, and of lessons given to the children inculcating regard for them. A great deal has been accomplished in France without much noise in rewooding the devastated slopes of the mountains and erecting efficient safeguards against ravage by torrents--largely by restraining the torrents at their sources; and the Alpine forests of the country, M. Corcelli says, "are again rising from their ashes." Reserves of Alpine plants have been established by the Belfort section of the French Alpine Club on the _Ballon_ of Alsace; the central section is creating an extensive botanical garden in the Vosges, to serve as a place of refuge and propagation and multiplication of species threatened with extinction. The city of Annecy, in Savoy, has recently voted the money required for establishing a similar garden on the verdant ridges of the Semnoz. Two local societies in Italy are engaged in a similar work, one of which has established the garden museum Chamousia on the slopes of the Saint Bernard, where plants from the Pyrenees and the Himalaya are also collected. Switzerland is not behind either of these countries in this work. =Tortoise Shell.=--The following interesting account of the tortoise-shell industry is taken from Nature: The tortoise shell of commerce is obtained from the horny superficial plates overlying the bony case of the great majority of tortoises and turtles. Turtles differ from tortoises in the heart-shaped form of the upper half of the shell, and the conversion of the limbs into paddles adapted for swimming. The upper part of the shell carries a median row of five large superficial horny plates, flanked on either side by a row of four or five still larger flat plates; these thirteen or fifteen large plates affording some of the most valuable commercial tortoise shell in the particular species whose shell is in most demand. On the front and hind edges of the upper bony shell and the portion connecting the latter with the plastron, or lower shell, are a series of smaller horny plates, generally twenty-four in number, which are sharply bent in the middle and are known in the trade as "hoof." The under surface of the shell of a turtle carries six pairs of large, more or less flat, horny plates, for which the trade term, derived from their uniform color, is "yellow belly." In value they sometimes exceed all but the very finest of the large upper plates, generally known simply as "shell." Of the host of land and fresh-water tortoises, most of which are of comparatively small size, the horny plates (which, by the way, are altogether wanting in the so-called soft tortoises of tropical rivers), on account of their thinness and opacity, are now of no commercial value, at least in England. Moreover, it is by no means all species of marine turtles which yield commercial tortoise shell. Of these marine turtles, exclusive of the great leathery turtle, there are three well-marked and perfectly distinct types, severally represented by the green or edible turtle, the hawksbill, and the loggerhead. The hawksbill furnishes the most valuable shell. The largest and best plates, which are in the middle of the back, are about a quarter of an inch thick in the center, and measure about thirteen by eight inches, their weight being from about half a pound each to as much as one pound. The length of the carapace (the upper shell) in the hawksbill is about forty-two inches. It is found in all tropical and subtropical seas. From a dead turtle the plates of tortoise shell can be readily detached by beating. The highest price realized during 1898 in the London market was about 112_s._ 6_d._ (about $28) a pound for the very best selected shell. It is stated that 76,760 pounds of hawksbill shell were sold in London in 1898. The shell is very readily workable, being made partially plastic by immersion in hot water. =Poison in Wild Cherry Leaves.=--Instances having been brought to the notice of the directory of the New Hampshire College Agricultural Experiment Station of cattle presumably fatally poisoned by prussic acid from eating wild cherry leaves, the subject has been investigated by Fred W. Morse and Charles D. Howard. Five species of wild cherry grow in New Hampshire, of which the red cherry and the horse plum are not regarded as dangerous, and the dwarf cherry has not been examined, but is strongly suspected. The wild black cherry is the most noxious species, and the chokecherry is not far behind it. The poisonous principle in these cherries is hydrocyanic or prussic acid, which, however, does not exist in the leaves as such, but is derived from the amygdalin they contain. The popular opinion that only the wilted leaves are specially dangerous is not borne out. The authors found both wilted and fresh leaves poisonous, and the dried leaves worthy to be regarded with suspicion. Vigorous, succulent leaves from young shoots, which are the ones most likely to be eaten by cattle, are far more poisonous than the leaves from a mature tree or stunted shrub. The largest amounts of prussic acid were derived from leaves wilted in bright sunlight to about seventy-five per cent their original weight, or till they began to appear slightly limp and lose their gloss. Leaves wilted in the dark were much less dangerous. =Dr. Brinton's Contributions to American Linguistics.=--At the suggestion of the late James Constantine Pilling, Dr. D. G. Brinton has prepared an analytical survey of his contributions in the field of American linguistics, which have now extended over forty years. The list includes seventy-one titles of books and papers, of which sixteen are classed as general articles and works. The first four of these are occupied with the inquiry whether the native American languages, as a group, have peculiar morphological traits that justify their classification as one of the great divisions of human speech. Dr. Brinton finds a feature--incorporation--which, under the form polysynthesis, is present in a marked degree in nearly all of them. Another paper shows that the various alleged affiliations between American and Asiatic tongues are wholly unfounded, and another pleads for more attention to American languages. A volume of nearly four hundred pages--The American Race--was the first attempt at a systematic classification of all the tribes of North, Central, and South America on the basis of language. It defines seventy-nine linguistic stocks in North America and sixty-one in South America, pertaining to nearly sixteen hundred tribes. Other volumes in the list include writings, preferably on secular subjects, by natives in their own languages. One contains a list of native American authors, and notices some of their works. Another vindicates the claim of native American poetry to recognition. These works were followed by the Library of Aboriginal American Literature, of which eight considerable volumes were published, each containing a work wholly of native inspiration, in a native tongue, with a translation, notes, etc. Fourteen other publications relate to North American languages north of Mexico, thirty-two to Mexican and Central American languages, and ten to South American and Antillean languages. Many of these articles were collected in 1890 and published in a volume entitled Essays of an Americanist. It was arranged in four parts, relating respectively to Ethnology and Archæology, Mythology and Folklore, Graphic Systems and Literature, and Linguistics. The value of Dr. Brinton's labors will be realized by all persons who know how rapidly things purely native American are passing away. =Metallic Alloys of Rich Colors.=--A remarkable alloy of gold seventy-eight parts and aluminum twenty-two parts, discovered by Messrs. Roberts-Austen and Hunt, has a characteristic purple color which can not be imitated; for if the designated proportions of the constituents are varied from, the base is entirely changed. The compound lacks somewhat in the qualities of resistance and malleability. The color is abnormal in that it partakes of none of the color features of its constituents, as is the case in most combinations of metals. Thus, the colors of copper alloyed with zinc or tin pass gradually from red to white, according to the proportions of the constituent metals. In the union of two metals of white or bluish-white color, like zinc, tin, silver, and aluminum, the color of the alloys is not perceptibly different from that of the components--that is, it continues white. The purple of the gold aluminum alloy is not, however, the only exception to this rule. Aluminum gives highly colored compounds with several other metals, even when the second metal is clearly white. In the experiments of Charles Marcot, of Geneva, in alloying aluminum with platinum, palladium, nickel, and cobalt, combination took place abruptly at red heat, with the development of an intense temperature and a partial combination of the aluminum; and when platinum is the second metal, an explosion is liable to occur. An alloy of seventy-two parts of platinum and twenty-eight of aluminum had a bright golden or yellow color, which varied under slight changes in the proportions of the elements to violet green or coppery red. The alloy is hard and brittle and of crystalline structure. The yellow form is stable, while the other forms decompose in a short time. An alloy of seventy-two parts palladium and twenty-eight aluminum is of fine coppery rose color, crystalline texture, hard and brittle, and suffers no change with time. An alloy of from seventy-five to eighty parts cobalt and twenty to twenty-five aluminum is straw-yellow, inclining to brown; when just formed it is externally hard and scratches glass, but is easily broken with a hammer, and falls to a powder in a few days. An alloy of eighty-two parts nickel and eighteen aluminum has a pronounced straw-yellow color, is as hard as tempered steel, and resists the blow of a hammer. The fracture, close-grained, is that of steel or bell metal. It is susceptible of a fine polish, is stable, and keeps its color. Though interesting on account of their colors, these alloys, except that of nickel, are not suitable for any use. =The Chemistry of Sausages.=--The _Lancet_ is authority for the following: "The composition of the sausage is not only complex, but it is often obscure. It is supposed to be a compound of minced beef and pork. Abroad, however, the sausage is compounded of a much wider range of substances. These include brains, liver, and horseflesh. Occasionally they do not contain meat at all, but only bread tinged with red oxide of iron and mixed with a varying proportion of fat. Horseflesh is rich in glycogen, and this fact enables its presence in sausage meat to be detected with some amount of certainty. The test, which depends on a color reaction, with iodine has recently been more carefully studied and with more satisfactory results, so that the presence of five per cent of horseflesh can be detected. At present there is no legal provision for a standard in regard to the composition of sausages, but clearly there ought to be. Limitations should be laid down as to the amount of bread used, as to the actual proportion of meat substances present, and as to the coloring matters added to give an attractive appearance of fresh meat. Sausages are extremely liable to undergo decomposition and become poisonous, owing to the elaboration of toxic substances during the putrefactive process. Bad or rancid fat is very liable to alter the character of a sausage for the worse. Thus in some instances the use of rancid lard has rendered the sausage after a time quite phosphorescent, an appearance which indicates, of course, an undesirable change. The smoked sausage is a much safer article of diet than the unsmoked, since the curing process preserves the meat substance against decomposition by reason of the empyreumatic bodies present in the wood smoke which is used for this purpose." =Photographing Papuan Children.=--Many savages dislike to have their pictures taken, some being restrained by motives of superstition; but in New Guinea Professor Semon found being photographed a great joke for all the boys and girls. He had much trouble in isolating a single individual, so as not to get thirty or forty persons into his picture instead of the one he wished to immortalize. "Wishing," he says, "to portray one young girl of uncommonly good looks, I separated her from the rest, gave her a favorable position, and adjusted the lens, surrounded all the while by a crowd of people behind and beside me, the children cheering, the women most ardently attentive, the men benevolently smiling. Evidently my subject was proud of the distinction she enjoyed and the attention vouchsafed her. Quite suddenly, however, this simple savage, untaught as she was and innocent of the laws of reticence and prudishness, became convulsed with shame, covered her eyes with her hands, and valiantly resisted every attempt to make her stand forward as before. At the same time I noticed that the hue of her features changed, the brown of her face becoming darker and deeper than before, a phenomenon easily explained by the fact of the blood rising into her head. Had she been a brown girl we would have said that she blushed. At all events, the physiological process was the same as that which forces us to blush." At another time, when the author had got two little girls into position to be photographed, their mothers came up and forbade his taking them that day, but promised to present them on the morrow. On the next day "both the little angels were solemnly brought to meet us nearly smothered in ornaments, their hair decorated with feathers and combs, their ears with tortoise-shell pieces, their little throats surrounded by plates of mother-of-pearl and chains of dingo teeth, legs and arms hung with rings and shells, teeth, and all sorts of network.... Here, again, one may see that mothers are made of the same stuff all over the world, Papuan mammas being equal to any of our peasant women or fine ladies in the point of vanity as far as concerns their children." =Meat Extracts.=--An interesting account of the history and preparation of meat extracts was recently given as a lecture before the Society of Arts (English) by Charles R. Valentine. The idea of concentrating the body of an ox into a thimbleful of elixir seems to have been a very old one. Until the work of Justus von Liebig, about fifty years ago, however, little progress of practical value was made toward this end. Liebig macerated finely divided beef in cold water, or in water not above 150° F. The water dissolved from sixteen to twenty-four per cent of the weight of the dry flesh. This infusion was heated, the albumen and red coloring matter of the blood coagulated, and was separated as a flocculent precipitate. The remaining solution has the aromatic taste and all the properties of soup made by boiling the flesh. The infusion was then evaporated at a gentle heat. The residue amounted to about twelve or thirteen per cent of the original (dry) flesh. This is in rough outline the process of meat-extract making. This extract is simply an evaporated beef tea, containing the extractive matters of beef, and in virtue of these possesses medicinal and dietetic properties of value. But it is in no sense a substitute for beef, as the latter's most important food constituent--albumen--it does not contain. MINOR PARAGRAPHS. It appears from tables of Some Statistics of Engineering Education, compiled by President M. E. Wadsworth, of the Michigan College of Mines, that such education has been, in the United States, on the whole a thing of comparatively recent date, the oldest school, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, having been established in 1824; the next, the Lawrence and Sheffield Schools, in 1846 and 1847; and the Columbia School in 1863. Civil engineering has led in this country, and has had various periods of advance, as in 1887-'88, and depression, as in 1896-'97. Mechanical engineering progressed till 1886-'87, when the number of students fell off, and the same happened with electrical engineering, "which further suffers a natural reaction from having been greatly overdone." As a rule, most of the schools in the United States seem to run to specialties, one or two of the courses being usually more conspicuous than the others. The importance of some arrangement by which vessels may be informed of each other's approach in fog and darkness has given rise to many devices; the only one, however, which has as yet proved practical is the fog-horn or siren, and this has many disadvantages. Several fatal collisions at sea during the past year have given rise to renewed interest in the subject, and a number of new methods have been suggested. M. Branley, a French physicist, in a note presented to the French Academy suggests that each vessel be provided with a number of extremely sensitive magnetic receivers, or coherers, and a powerful magnetic transmitter. Periodical signals being made with the transmitter, corresponding impressions would be made upon the receivers of approaching vessels. The principal difficulty with this scheme lies in the fact that the receivers of a vessel will be affected by its own transmitter. There are several methods by which this difficulty may be overcome, however. Different signals may be employed, or the interval between signals may be regularly varied. M. Branley calls attention to the influence of a metallic envelope surrounding a coherer, and shows that when the coherer is thus completely surrounded it is unaffected by the influence of a transmitter. By thus inclosing the receiver on a ship at the instant of the operation of the transmitter of the same vessel, the above difficulty might be avoided. While we can not collect roses from our gardens in January and maple blossoms from the woods in February, yet, as Prof. W. J. Beal shows in a bulletin of the Michigan Agricultural College Experiment Station, our trees and shrubs in their winter garb furnish excellent lessons for the profitable employment of pupils during many weeks at that season in true botanical study. "Let each member of a class be provided with a branch, a foot or two long, from a sugar maple, and then spend some ten to twenty minutes or more quietly looking at the buds and the bark, with its scars and specks, and then tell what he has discovered, venturing to explain the object or meaning of some of the things he has seen. In a similar manner let each look over a branch of beech and then point out the difference between the two kinds." Opening buds of trees may be obtained at any time during the winter by placing the lower end of the stem in water for a week or two while in the schoolroom. Eivind Astrup, in his book With Peary near the Pole, gives admiring pictures of the natural innocence of the uncontaminated Eskimos of northern Greenland, where are communities in which "money is unknown, and love of one's neighbor is a fundamental rule of action; where theft is not practiced." All things are held in common, and falsehoods are told only to spare the feelings of the listener. Among the instances of the native kindliness of these people is one where a dog had eaten up a reindeer coat, yet was only remonstrated with by its owner. When the author suggested that a hungry dog should be punished for stealing a piece of blubber, the owner said that it was himself who deserved the thrashing for not having obtained sufficient food for the dog. The operations of the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History during 1897 and 1898 were almost wholly connected with the work of the State Entomologist or with that of the Biological Station. The former work related to various insects injurious to crops. The operations of the Biological Station were carried on with more reference to completing a formal report upon the fishes of Illinois. The work is conducted with a view to the acquisition of correct ideas of the relative abundance and local distribution of species, their haunts, habits, regular migrations, and irregular movements, their building times and places, rate of growth, food, diseases, and enemies--and, in short, the whole economy of each kind represented at the station and of the whole assemblage taken together as a community group. Extensive studies of aquatic entomology were made, and a paper on ephemerids and dragon flies is nearly ready for the press. No part of the work of the station, however, attracts more attention among scientific men, or is likely to lead to more interesting and important results, than the plankton work, or the systematic study of the minute forms of plant and animal life suspended in the water. Water analyses have been extensively made in connection with these studies, which, combined with the continuous biological work, will, when generalized, furnish a substantial and authoritative body of knowledge of the conditions of the waters of the middle Illinois previous to the opening of the Chicago drainage canal, useful for comparison with the results of similar studies made after that event. A summer school was conducted, with fifteen pupils, in 1898, and publications were issued. NOTES. The Pasteur monument was dedicated at Lille, France, the city in which the subject of the memorial performed his earlier more important researches, April 9th. The ceremony was witnessed by a large assembly, which included many eminent scientific men of France and foreign countries, among whom men engaged in similar researches to Pasteur's were especially represented. The monument, the fruit of a public subscription, represents Pasteur standing on the summit of a column of Soignies stone, holding in his right hand an experimental flask. At the foot of the column a woman presents her child, which has been bitten by a mad dog, for treatment. To the left is a group representing inoculation--a woman, personifying science, injecting serum into a child she holds on her knees. Three bas-reliefs represent respectively Dr. Roux inoculating a sheep for anthrax, Pasteur studying fermentation, and the first antirabic inoculation of the young Joseph Meister, who is held by his mother, wearing the broad-flapped Alsatian bonnet. The statue is in light bronze, and with the gilded bas-reliefs harmonizes well with the gray of the stone. Addresses were made by M. Armand Gautier and M. Duclaux, who said that the improved laboratories now enjoyed by scientific institutions in Paris were largely due to Pasteur's efforts. The minor planet recently discovered by Witt, remarkable as having an orbit that comes within that of Mars, and provisionally known as DQ, has been named Eros. An examination by Professor Pickering and Mrs. Fleming of the Harvard photographs has revealed traces of this body on twelve plates taken in 1893 and 1894, and on four plates of 1896. By the aid of these plates it has been possible to determine its elements with greater accuracy than would otherwise be possible. Its mean distance from the sun is 1.45810, its shortest distance 1.13334, and its greatest distance 1.78286 that of the earth; the eccentricity of its orbit is 0.222729, and its period is 643.10 days. Its synodical period is such that it has three oppositions in seven years. The next opposition will be in the last months of 1900, and will be a moderately favorable one for observation. The courses in pure science of the New York University include undergraduate, graduate, and summer courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, and biology, with laboratory privileges and provision for special students and independent work in chemistry. The university last year was attended by 1,717 students in its three faculties and six schools, and 720 non-matriculant students and auditors. A new feature this year is the inauguration of the Charles F. Deems lectureship of philosophy, under an endowment of $15,000 by the American Institute of Christian Philosophy, with Prof. James Iverach, D. D., of the Free Church College, Aberdeen, Scotland, as the first lecturer. A feature of the university organization is the institution of a woman's advisory committee co-operating with the council. A woman's law class is supported by the Woman's Legal Education Society, the purpose of which is to make business women and women in private life acquainted with existing law. The new Science Building of the City Library, Springfield, Mass., recently completed, is being inaugurated by a Geographical and Geological Exhibition. It includes the best and latest maps, models, globes, charts, relief maps, and photographs, special attention being paid to the most effective modes of teaching. One of the most attractive features of the exhibition is the work from the Springfield public schools. An ingenious method for thawing out frozen water pipes has been used by Prof. R. W. Wood, of the University of Wisconsin. It consists simply of passing a current of electricity through the pipe. In one case it is said that one hundred and fifty feet of frozen pipe was thawed out in eighteen minutes. The ordinary street current was used, the voltage being reduced to about fifty. In a summary of inspectors' reports of the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company for 1898 it is stated that of 78,349 boilers, inspected both internally and externally, during the year, there were 11,727 dangerous defects discovered and 603 entire boilers were declared unsafe for further use. The recent death list of men known in science includes the names of Charles Naudin, an eminent French botanist, Dean of the Botanical Section of the Academy of Sciences and author of a book on Hybrids in the Vegetable Kingdom, at Antibes, France, March 19th, aged eighty-four years; Dr. G. W. Leitner, an eminent Orientalist and linguist, Lecturer on Oriental Language at King's College, London, Principal of Lahne College, and Registrar of Punjaub University, where he introduced the use of their own language and literature in teaching Indian students, founder of the Anglo-Indian Institute at Woking, England, and author of works in Education, the Races of Turkey, The Races and Languages of Dardistan, Græco-Buddhist Discoveries, and other Oriental subjects, at Bonn, March 24th, in his sixty-ninth year; Dr. Angelo Knorr, Docent in the Veterinary School of Munich, February 22d; Elizabeth Brown, astronomical observer and author of papers on solar phenomena, at Cirencester, England, March 6th; Dr. Wilhelm von Müller, Professor General Chemistry in the Institute of Technology, Munich; Dr. Friedrich von Lühmann, mathematician, at Straslund, Prussia; Dr. Charles Fortuun, mineralogist, in London; Alfred Feuilleaubois, author of researches on Fungi, at Fontainebleau, France; Dr. Heinrich Kiefert, a geographer and cartographer whose fame was world-wide, whose maps and atlases are everywhere recognized as authorities, at Berlin, April 21st, aged seventy years; and Prof. Sophus Lie, of the University of Christiania, an eminent mathematician, February 18th, in his fifty-seventh year. Transcriber's Notes: Words surrounded by _ are italicized. Words surrounded by = are bold. Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent spellings have been kept, including inconsistent use of hyphen (e.g. "tortoise-shell" and "tortoise shell"), and proper names (e.g. "Shakspere" and "Shakespeare"). Some illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text. 
46473	----	Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LVI NOVEMBER, 1899, TO APRIL, 1900 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1900 COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. [Illustration: EDWARD ORTON.] CONTENTS PAGE THE TRANSPLANTATION OF A RACE. 513 MODERN CITY ROADWAYS. 524 TYPICAL CRIMINALS. 539 A CENTURY OF GEOLOGY. 546 "SALAMANDERS" AND "SALAMANDER" CATS. 556 WHAT MAKES THE TROLLEY CAR GO. 564 A SURVIVAL OF MEDIÆVAL CREDULITY. 577 "RIBBON LIGHTNING." 587 CROSS-EDUCATION. 589 THE MORBID "SENSE OF INJURY." 596 EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN AIR FLIGHT. 603 SKETCH OF EDWARD ORTON. 607 EDITOR'S TABLE. 614 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 618 MINOR PARAGRAPHS. 622 PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. 624 APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. MARCH, 1900. THE TRANSPLANTATION OF A RACE. BY N. S. SHALER, DEAN OF THE SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY. The experiments which have been intentionally or accidentally made in transplanting organic species from the countries in which they have been developed to others of diverse soil, climate, and inhabitants are always of much interest to the naturalist--each of them affords indications of some value as to the relations of species to what we term "environment." In almost all instances we find that the transplanted forms undergo changes in consequence of the alteration of their circumstances. It is true that certain of our domesticated animals, such as the horse, the dog, and most cattle, follow men from the Arctic to the Antarctic Circle, and that sundry insect pests appear to demand nothing of Nature save the presence of man; yet, as a whole, the creatures we have turned to use, both plant and animal alike, have shown themselves incapable of accommodating themselves to conditions of temperature differing much from those in which they were developed. With hardly an exception, species or varieties which have been developed in the tropics perish when called on to withstand the winter of higher latitudes. Few, indeed, do well when taken to stations where the heat or the humidity differs greatly from that to which they are accustomed. The intolerance of organisms to climatal changes is nowhere more evident than in the varieties, or species, as we would term them, of mankind. It is a well-attested fact that none of the tropical races has ever of its own instance colonized in the temperate zones. It is also clear that none of the northern peoples have ever become fully acclimated within the tropical realm. The colonies which have been founded there by the Teutonic folk, including the English group therein, have been lamentable failures, the pure-blooded strains dying out in a few generations. The people of southern Europe have been a little more successful in the equatorial regions, probably because their blood has there to a great extent become mingled with that of tropical origin. These general conclusions concerning the climatal limitations of man would be unassailable were it not for the history of the negro in North America. In his case we have the one masterful exception to the rule, otherwise good, that creatures bred near the equator can not endure boreal conditions. The negroes who came to North America had to undergo as complete a transition as ever fell to the lot of man, without the least chance to undergo an acclimatizing process. They were brought from the hottest part of the earth to the region where the winter's cold is of almost arctic severity--from an exceedingly humid to a very dry air. They came to service under alien taskmasters, strange to them in speech and in purpose. They had to betake themselves to unaccustomed food and to clothing such as they had never worn before. Rarely could one of the creatures find about him a familiar face of friend, parent, or child, or an object that recalled his past life to him. It was an appalling change. Only those who know how the negro cleaves to all the dear, familiar things of life, how fond he is of warmth and friendliness, can conceive the physical and mental shock that this introduction to new conditions meant to them. To people of our own race it could have meant death. But these wonderful folk appear to have withstood the trials of their deportation in a marvelous way. They showed no peculiar liability to disease. Their longevity or period of usefulness was not diminished, or their fecundity obviously impaired. So far as I have been able to learn, nostalgia was not a source of mortality, as it would have been with any Aryan population. The price they brought in the market and the satisfaction of their purchasers with their qualities shows that they were from the first almost ideal laborers. If we compare the Algonkin Indian, in appearance a sturdy fellow, with these negroes, we see of what stuff the blacks are made. A touch of housework and of honest toil took the breath of the aborigines away, but these tropical exotics fell to their tasks and trials far better than the men of our own kind could have done. At their first coming, or soon afterward, the negroes were distributed along the coast of our country from the Carolinas to Nova Scotia. So far as I have been able to find, there appears to have been no distinct difference in their tolerance of the climate in any part of this varied district. There are still negroes in the maritime provinces who are said to be the descendants of those who came upon the ground certainly more than a century ago. They are good specimens of their stock. So, too, along the New England coast and in New York there is a sufficient number of the progeny of those once held as slaves to make it clear that the failure to become a considerable part of the population in that district is not due to any incapacity to withstand the climate. The failure of the negro to increase in this field can be accounted for in other ways--by the effects of race prejudice, nowhere stronger than in this part of the country, and by the vice and misery that overtake a despised lower class. It early became evident that slavery was to be of no permanent economic advantage to any part of the colonies within the glaciated district, say from central New Jersey northward. In that portion of the coastal belt the state of the surface and the character of the crops alike tended to make the ownership of slaves unprofitable. The farms were necessarily small. They became in a natural way establishments worked by the head of the house, with the help of his children. Such other help as was needed was, in the course of two generations, readily had from hired white men and women. It was otherwise in the tobacco-planting region to the southward. The cultivation of that plant, to meet the extraordinary demands that Europe made for it, gave slavery its chance to become established in this country. But for that industry the institution would most likely have taken but slight root, and the territory as far south as North Carolina would have been in social order not very different from Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England settlements. But, owing to some peculiar, as yet unrecognized, adjustments of climate and soil, tobacco for pipes has a quality when grown in the Virginia district such as it has nowhere else in the world, and the world turned to smoking it with a disregard for expense that made each laborer in the field worth some hundred dollars a year. Moreover, the production of good tobacco requires much care, which extends over about a year from the time the seed is planted. Some parts of the work demand a measure of judgment such as intelligent negroes readily acquire. They are indeed better fitted for the task than white men, for they are commonly more interested in their tasks than whites of the laboring class. The result was that before the period of the Revolution slavery was firmly established in the tobacco-planting colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. It was already the foundation of their only considerable industry. Although the production of tobacco had made slavery a great economical success in the limited field where the best product was to be had, it is doubtful if the institution would have attained to any widespread importance but for the development of another form of planting--that of cotton. Thus, in Kentucky, where the crops, with the exception of a coarse tobacco, are the same as in the other Northern States of the Union, the institution, despite the long-continued scarcity of labor, never attained any very great development. The slaves were generally used for household service, but to no great extent in the fields, and in such employment only in the districts where the soil was of such great fertility that large quantities of grain were raised for export. In one third of that Commonwealth negroes were, and remain to this day, quite unknown. The invention of the cotton gin ended all hope that slavery might be limited to a part of the seacoast region, for nearly all of the lowland regions of the South, as well as some of the upland country north to the southern border of Kentucky and Virginia, are admirably suited to that crop--producing, indeed, a better "staple" than that of any other country. This industry, even more than that of raising tobacco, called for abundant labor which could be absolutely commanded and severely tasked in the season of extreme heats. For this work the negro proved to be the only fit man, for while the whites can do this work they prefer other employment. Thus it came about that the power of slavery in this country became rooted in its soil. The facts show that, based on an ample foundation of experience, the judgment of the Southern people was to the effect that this creature of the tropics was a better laborer in their fields than the men of their own race. Much has been said about the dislike of the white man for work in association with negroes. The failure of the whites to have a larger share in the agriculture of the South has been attributed to this cause. This seems to me clearly an error. The dislike to the association of races in labor is, in the slaveholding States, less than in the North. There can be no question that if the Southern folk could have made white laborers profitable they would have preferred to employ them, for the reason that the plantations would have required less fixed capital for their operation. The fact was and is that the negro is there a better laboring man in the field than the white. Under the conditions he is more enduring, more contented, and more trustworthy than the men of our own race. The large development of the cotton industry in this country came after the importation of negroes from Africa had ceased to be as completely unrestricted as it was at first. The prohibition of the traffic came indeed before the needs of laborers in the more Southern and Western slave States had been met. For a while there was some surreptitious importation, which in a small way continued down to the middle of this century, but this smuggling was quite insufficient to supply the market of the new States with slaves. The result was that the border slaveholding States became to a considerable extent the breeding grounds for men and women who were to be at maturity exported to the great plantations of Alabama and Mississippi, there to be herded by overseers in gangs of hundreds, with no hope of ever returning to their kindred. With this interdiction of the foreign slave trade the evils of the former situation became magnified into horrors. The folk who were brought from Africa came from a state of savagery to one of relative comfort. When once adjusted to their new conditions, their lot was on the whole greatly bettered. But their descendants, who had become attached to the places where they were born with the peculiar affection the better of them had for their homes, being accustomed to masters who on the whole were gentle, were now to undergo a worse deportation than that which made them slaves. It is not too much to say that the deeper evils of the system to the slaves themselves, as well as to their masters, began with this miserable slave trade that went on within the limits of this country, and was about at its height when the civil war began. It can not be denied that even in the best stages of slaveholding there had been a good deal of commerce in slaves where the feelings of these chattels were in no wise regarded. Still, there was a prevailing sentiment among all the slaveholders of the gentler sort that it was in a way disgraceful to part families. I distinctly recall, when I was a lad, some years before the civil war, my maternal grandfather often charged me to remember that I came of a people who had never bought or sold a slave except to keep families together. I know that this was a common feeling among the better men of Kentucky and Virginia, and that the practice of rearing negroes for the Southern market filled them with sorrow and indignation. Yet the change was the inevitable result of the system and of the advancing commercialism which separated the plantation life more and more from that of the owner's household. At the time when the civil war began the institution of slavery was, from the commercial point of view, eminently successful. Notwithstanding the occasional appearance of the spendthrift slave owner in Northern pleasure resorts or in Europe, the great plantations were generally in charge of able business men, who won a large interest on their investments and who were developing the system of planting in a way which, though it appeared to those who were accustomed to close tillage as shiftless, was really well adjusted to the conditions. Not one fourth of the land of the Southern States that was well fitted for the work of slaves had been brought into use. The blacks who were carefully managed in all that regarded their health and in their morals, so far as might affect their breeding, were in admirable physical condition, and rapidly increasing in numbers. It is doubtful if ever a peasant class was so well cared for or so freed from avoidable diseases. The growing protest against the institution, so far as it operated in the South, was practically limited to the border States, mainly to Kentucky, where alone did a considerable number of well-born men set themselves against it. There is good reason to believe that if the civil war had not occurred the end of the nineteenth century would have seen a negro population in the South much more numerous than we now have there. Experience has shown that the American cotton crop is little affected by foreign competition, so that it would have maintained the success of the institution. Although the system of slavery was by a chance of Nature so firmly planted on the cotton fields as to give it entire dominance in the South, and something like control of the Federal Union, there was one geographic condition that menaced its future, and in the end did much to insure its downfall in the events of the civil war, and most likely would have brought about its end even if the Confederacy had been established. This was the form and extent of the Appalachian uplands between the Potomac and the Ohio on the north and Alabama and Georgia in the South. In this area of nearly one hundred and fifty thousand square miles in extent the surface lies at an average height of some fifteen hundred feet above the sea; the good arable land is found mostly in narrow valleys suited only for household farms, totally unfit for the systematic agriculture in which alone negroes could be profitably employed as slaves. Into this area drifted the class of small farmers who by one chance and another had never been able to enter or to maintain themselves in the aristocratic class of slaveholders. These mountaineers--they may better be termed the hill people of the South--were an eminently peculiar people. They are not to be compared with the "poor white trash"--i.e., the downfallen and dependent whites, who were broken men in spirit, scarce above the slaves in quality. These poor whites were often, if not generally, either the weaker strains of the militant families or the descendants of the people who had been imported into this country by the land companies or sent out as peons. Partly because of their separation from the slaveholding class and partly because of the circumstances of their origin, the people of the Southern highlands formed a curiously separated class. They retained the quality of their English stock, as they had brought it with them--an independence, a carelessness as to life, and a humor for quarreling with those who were set above them whenever their liberties or their license seemed to be threatened. Even their customs and utensils held with curious adhesion to the usages of earlier centuries. Thus, in 1878, I found, in a secluded valley of southwestern Virginia, men hunting squirrels and rabbits with the old English short bow. These were not the contrivances of boys or of to-day, but were made and strung and the arrows hefted in the ancient manner. The men, one of them old, were admirably skilled in their use; they assured me that, like their fathers before them, they had ever used the bow and arrow for small game, reserving the costly ammunition of the rifle for deer and bear. These hill folk were, in a passive but obdurate manner, opposed to slavery, and even more to negroes. There are still many counties in this district where a negro has never dwelt. In some parts of it I have had people gather from twenty miles away to stare at my black camp servants, as the folk of central Africa are said to do at a white man. At the outbreak of the civil war the Appalachian upland was still thinly peopled; it was, however, fitted to maintain a population of some millions. If the Confederacy had won its independence, its plantation districts, with a relatively small voting population, would soon have had to settle an account with the people of the hills. As it was, the existence of this folk in a great ridge of country extending from the Northern States to within two hundred miles of the Gulf of Mexico was an element of weakness which went far to give success to the Federal arms. It kept Kentucky from seceding, prevented the region of West Virginia from being of any value to the rebellion, and weakened its control in several other States. In all, somewhere near one hundred thousand recruits came to the Federal army from this part of the South. It is not improbable that to this folk we may attribute the failure of the great revolt. That they turned thus against the people of their own States to cast in their lot with those who were strangers to them shows their feelings toward the institution of slavery; it indicated where they would have stood if the Confederacy had been established. It is not easy to picture the condition of the negro population in 1860. There is a common notion that it was consciously and bitterly suffering from its subjugation--ready to rise in arms against its oppressors. This view was indeed shared by the Southern people, who lived in chronic fear of insurrections. The error of it arose from the fallacious notion that the people of another race must feel and act as we would under like circumstances. The facts showed that the negro mind does not work in the fashion of our own. He had, it is true, suffered from slavery, but not as men of our race would have suffered. Against its deprivations and such direct cruelty as he experienced, not often great, he could set the simple comforts and small pleasures which are so much to him. That he was on the whole fairly contented with his lot, that his relations with his masters were on the whole friendly, is shown by his remarkable conduct during and since the civil war. If the accepted account of the negro had been true, if he had been for generations groaning in servitude while he passionately longed for liberty, the South should have flamed in insurrection at the first touch of war. We should have seen a repetition of the horrors of many a servile insurrection. It is a most notable fact that, during the four years of the great contention, when the blacks had every opportunity to rise, there was no real mark of a disposition to turn upon their masters. On thousands of Southern farms the fighting men left their women and children in the keeping of their slaves, while they went forth for a cause whose success meant that those slaves could never be free. That the negroes desired to be free is plain enough. The fact that they fled in such numbers to our camps shows this. Their failure to revolt must be taken as an indication that their relations with their masters measured on their own instinctive standards were on the whole affectionate. They had the strength to have made an end of the war at a stroke. They were brave enough for such action. That they did not take it after the manner of their kindred of Santo Domingo is the best possible testimony as to the generally sympathetic relation which existed between master and slaves. Of this no better test can be imagined than that which the final stages of the institution afforded. In taking account of the history of the slave in this Union it is not amiss for me to bear testimony as to the spirit with which the body of our slave owners met the singular obligations of their positions. There were here and there base men who abused their trust as masters--some, indeed, who never perceived its existence. But of the very many slave owners whom I can remember I can recall but three who failed to recognize the burden that fate had put upon them and to deal with it much as they dealt with the other cares of their households--conscientiously and mercifully, though often in the rude whacking way in which parents of old dealt with their children; so far as slavery was a household affair, and even where the farm employed no more hands than could be gathered in a house "quarter," the people were commonly subject to an anxious scrutiny as regarded their moral and religious training. Here and there, especially when there were young white men about, the result was the deplorable mixture of the races. There is no question but that this was extensive, though the amount of it is exaggerated. Yet it was common enough to degrade the whites and to make of itself a sufficient reason for ending the institution, however profitable it might otherwise have been. Men of no race are safely to be trusted with such power. The social evil was the heaviest part of the load which the high-minded slave owners had to bear. It was shared in even larger measure by his wife and daughters. How heavy the cross was can only be known to those who remember the conditions of that unhappy time. The result of the hopeless effort to keep the slaves in decent ways and to prevent the pollution of their sons was to make nearly every right-minded slaveholder at heart an abolitionist. Although the men, and even the women, who suffered most would have been disposed to slay any one who suggested that they shared the opinions of the detested antislavery folk, nearly every one in his heart reprobated the institution and in his mind was revolving some scheme, generally fanciful, by which an end of it might be made. They were in the unhappy position where overwhelming self-interest fought with their moral sense. Now and then some one of them passed the critical point and entered into the fold of the accursed abolitionists; but others, after the manner of average men, paltered with the situation, waiting for fate to decide the matter. In the meantime, they strove as best they could to lift these people to a higher estate. In many ways the standard of care by which the conduct of a master in relation to his slaves was judged was high. He was expected to clothe them in a fit manner, keep them from the nocturnal wanderings, termed "running," so common a trait in these children of the tropics, to see that they were decently married, that they went to church in a dutiful way, and, above all, that they were not abused by other whites, particularly by other slaveholders. To strike or even to vilify the slaves of another was a very serious thing. The offended person knew well that it was his part to make his complaint to the servant's master. Where the negroes exceeded in number those needed for household and personal service--there were often a dozen or two thus employed in families of no great wealth--there was a division between the house people and the "hands." Those in the former group were selected folk, often belonging to families that had been associated with those of their masters for a century or more. Such servants had rights that none could dispute. Not uncommonly their elders were the actual rulers of the establishment. These family slaves often received some little schooling, even when the laws forbade that slaves should be taught to read and write. The children of the household servants were allowed freely to play with those of their masters until the young people were about twelve years old. The boys of both often had their rough-and-tumble games together until they were young men. The field laborers, where the class was separate, had less perfect connection with their masters. They usually came to the family storeroom for the daily issued rations, which they received from the hands of the mistress or the daughter of the house. They were visited when sick, and their complaints were heard. They were free to all of the many festivities of the holiday time. It is impossible to conceive of a more effective schooling for the African people than was given this adoption into the households, and often into the hearts, of high-minded masters. A like opportunity never before came and will never again come to so lowly a folk. The effect of this educative contact with the superior race is, as before noted, to be seen in the temper of the negroes during and after the civil war. Upon the high-minded master the effect of the institution was in many ways enlarging. A man is morally what his cares have made him, and of these the dutiful slaveholder has more than an average share. He grew in the power of command and in the habit of doing justice to many fellow-beings. He lived a large life. The qualities bred of his station have been of profit to his folk and time. All this is true of slavery of the domestic sort. It is not so in like manner of the great plantations which came with the development of the cotton and sugar industries. It was characteristic of the northern part of the South until it began to be the place of supply for the rapidly developing plantation district. So long as the negro could look forward to life in the place and with the people of his birth his simple, careless nature opened to him little to bring a sense of danger. He was to live on until he passed in to the Elysium of the hereafter, of which he had no doubt whatever. Gradually there came, in the overcrowding of the farms and the diminishing fertility of the wasted land, the need of reducing the number of slaves. Then each year came the dreaded visits of the "trader," who was like a visible angel of death, to lead one or more into the far unknown country. Before the plantation demand for slaves began there were, of course, sales of slaves, but they commonly went as families, and not to places to them inconceivably remote. These could hope for Christmas reunions and other exchanges, but when the negro was "sold South" the place and people that had known him would know him no more. My first impression of the iniquity of slavery came from the anxious questions of negroes as to the danger of their being sold to Alabama, that State being then the supposed destination of all those who were out of favor. They naturally strove to make interest with children whom they thought could successfully intercede for them. There were several very diverse consequences arising from the exportation of slaves from the border States to the far South. It shook the confidence of the negro as to his safety in all that was dearest to him, and thus did much to degrade the relation between him and his master. It served, cruel as it was, to elevate the relatively uncivilized blacks of the more Southern districts, where the newly imported laborers were mostly accumulated. It curiously operated to elevate the quality of the blacks in what was termed the slave-breeding States, those where the institution had longest been established. This was due to the selection of those of lower grade for the market. As it became necessary to part with slaves, a choice was naturally made of men and women who had least endeared themselves to the household. Save in rare cases, the trader sought rather the lusty youths for their brawn than the more delicate, refined house people. Moreover, where a fellow had shown a tendency to any vice, the choice fell on him. In this way for two or three generations a weeding process went on, with the result that the negroes who were left in the districts where the work was done acquired a quality noticeably better than those on the Southern plantations. The difference is almost that we would look for between two distinct races. The faces of the selected folk are more intelligent, the lines of their bodies finer, their moral and intellectual quality very much above those of their lower kindred. They are at their best, in very numerous instances, as gentle as the elect of our own race. Where, as in the Southern plantations, the institution of slavery was deliberately made the basis of large commercial interests, the motives were wholly different from whatever existed in the early and better days, when the slaves were appendages of a household. Even on the largest tobacco plantations the numbers were not such as to exclude a share of contact with friendly whites. But on the great properties of the South the negro was not to any extent subject to the influences which had in the earlier stage of his apprenticeship done so much for him. Worked in gangs that were counted by the hundreds, seeing no whites except the overseers, they tended to lose what little culture they had gained. Their peculiar but perfectly intelligible speech began a degradation into a puzzling jargon. African superstitions, little if any trace of which remained among their kindred in Virginia and Kentucky, regained their hold. Marriage and a respect therefor, which had been tolerably well affirmed, tended to disappear. All trace of good thus vanished from the system. Although the great plantation, of the Mississippi type, was a relatively novel feature in American slaveholding, it was evidently the only largely profitable method of using slave labor. In the household system the care of the children, the aged, and the infirm, the unbusinesslike management of the labor, and the tendency to slipshod methods which with negroes can only be corrected by strict discipline, made ordinary farming unremunerative. It is evident that the profit, other than that in mere money, which the institution in the earlier state had brought to master and slave was rapidly diminishing, and that any further maintenance of it would have been calamitous. Though we may regret that it was ended by the civil war, it is difficult to see any other way in which it could have been terminated, or any profit which could have been gained by postponing the crisis. MODERN CITY ROADWAYS. BY NELSON P. LEWIS, ENGINEER OF HIGHWAYS, BOROUGH OF BROOKLYN. One of the conspicuous results of cheapened transportation and the facility with which the products of field, forest, mine, and factory can be transferred to the consumer has been the rapid increase in population of all our cities. In 1890 over forty-five per cent of the population of New York State (nearly six millions) was concentrated in four cities, while it is estimated that the greater city of New York contains at present not less and probably more than fifty per cent of the State's population. Nor is this tendency characteristic only of American cities, though the general impression seems to be that it is more conspicuous with us. In fact, many European cities (notably those of Germany) have outstripped ours in growth. In 1870 Berlin had about 150,000 less people than New York; in 1890 it had over 73,000 more. In 1875 Hamburg exceeded Boston in population by but 6,000, while in 1890 the German city was more than 121,000 ahead. Meanwhile the rural population the world over has increased very slowly, or has positively decreased. The massing together of large numbers of people, without proper regard to sanitary conditions, has always resulted in great mortality, as witness the terrible plagues which have swept over the old cities of Europe, and the disastrous results during the summer of 1898 of concentrating large numbers of our volunteers in camps not subjected to rigid sanitary regulations. It has been amply demonstrated, however, that our cities can be made at least as healthful as the country districts, and an increasingly large number of engineers are engaged in such city building. One branch of this municipal work will be considered in this paper--that of street improvement. The first impression gained by a stranger entering a city is undoubtedly that produced by the appearance of its streets. If they are poorly paved, irregular, dirty, and generally unkempt, he will consult his time table to see how soon he can get away. If they are broad, smooth, clean, well shaded and lighted, he will stay as long as possible. [Illustration: SECTIONS OF ROMAN ROADS] In spite of the pride of the American people in the development of our cities, and notwithstanding the fact that their wealth enables them to have only the best, they have been slow to appreciate the value of thoroughly well-paved streets. As stated by Mr. Albert Shaw, European cities have been ahead of us in accepting the doctrine that "smooth and clean highways are a wise investment from every point of view, and that so long as the work is done in a thorough and scientific manner the result is worth having, regardless of cost. No city should think itself rich enough to prosper without them, and no city is so poor that it can not afford them if it has any reason whatever for continued existence. Good roadways are cheap at any cost, and bad ones are so disastrously expensive that only a very rich country, like the United States, can afford them." Space will not permit even a brief history of street paving, or an attempt to sketch its development, but reference will be made to the different kinds in general use, and the kind most in favor in various cities. Probably no one has introduced the subject of pavements without reference to the Roman roads. While Carthage was probably the first city to boast of paved streets, the Romans soon followed its example, and all over Europe, Asia, and Africa, as far as the domain of their emperors extended, they built with the greatest care and at enormous expense that magnificent system of roads which were often supposed, in the middle ages, to be of supernatural origin, and remain the wonder of our modern civilization. These roads were generally from four to six metres in width, and were constructed in this way: The roadbed was excavated; in it was placed a layer of stones, which were sometimes united with mortar. These stones were such as were most available, sometimes rounded stones similar to the cobblestones with which we are familiar, and in some cases in the Alps the foundation was a compact mass of angular stones, two feet or more in their longest dimension, carefully fitted together. [Illustration: A STREET IN POMPEII, SHOWING OLD ROMAN PAVEMENT.] On this foundation was placed a layer of plaster made of stone or brick pounded with mortar; then a course of sand and lime or sand and clay, leveled and pounded until very hard. The top or wearing surface was made of irregular flat stones, fitted together with nicety and united with cement. The total depth of these roads, or pavements, as they can properly be called, was from three to (in some cases) seven feet. It is said that in the province of Hispania alone (Spain and Portugal) twenty thousand miles of roads were built. The first stone pavements to be laid in modern city streets were those formed of stones in their natural condition, variously known as bowlders, pebbles, or cobblestones. The first attempt at a street pavement in this country was doubtless that referred to by Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, in the _Goede Vrouw of Mana-na-ta_, where she says, in speaking of what was once called Brower Street, because it passed by the great brewery built by one of the first of the Van Cortlandts: "This street lies between Whitehall and Broad, and was one of the first lanes laid out by the settlers, and was commonly known as 'The Road.' In 1657 it was paved with small round cobblestones, and the circumstance created such a sensation that the country people visited it as a curiosity, and it was one of the sights of the little dorp. The burghers laughingly nicknamed it Stone Street, which name it still retains. The improvement was effected by Madame Van Cortlandt, as she could not endure the dust that filled her tidy house, caused by the heavy brewers' wains that were constantly passing her door." [Illustration: A STREET IN NAPLES, SHOWING LARGE PAVING STONES.] This cobblestone pavement, laid on Stone Street nearly two centuries and a half ago, has been a persistent type, and, on account of their availability and cheapness, such stones continued to be used in many cities until within a very few years. When they were well shaped and uniform in size they made quite a durable pavement, and, though rough and noisy, were capable, when well laid, of sustaining a considerable traffic. Fortunately, the better class of these stones are now so scarce and the poorer ones are so execrable that this type of pavement is becoming obsolete, though there are many miles for which more civilized pavements are yet to be substituted, two hundred and thirty-eight miles of which are unfortunately in the Borough of Brooklyn. The next step in advance was the use of stone shaped to uniform size, or approximately so, and with a more or less smooth surface. This is the pavement in most general use to-day, and for permanency and, consequently, cheapness can not be surpassed. When first used, these blocks were quite large, and the size has been decreased until the best stone pavements laid at the present time in Great Britain are six-inch cubes, or still smaller, with a surface four inches square and a depth of seven inches. [Illustration: COBBLESTONE PAVEMENT ON SARATOGA AVENUE, BROOKLYN.] But stone pavement when most carefully laid and maintained is noisy and unpleasant to ride over, and in these days we can never reconcile such a pavement with a handsome residence street. The writer experienced a distinct shock when on riding over Euclid Avenue, in Cleveland, last year, he found it still paved with Medina sandstone blocks, and it seemed that this famous street was still living on the reputation which Bayard Taylor gave it years ago as the handsomest street in the world. In looking about for something more quiet and smooth than stone, the first material tried was wood. In London the first wood pavement was laid in the Old Bailey in 1839, and was soon followed by many others. None of these pavements lasted more than seven years, and, as they cost more than granite and were so short-lived, a prejudice arose against them, and as they wore out they were mostly replaced with granite. Since that time wood pavement has become popular again, and a large area is now covered with it. The material most generally in use is Baltic fir, though there is quite a large amount of Australian hard wood which is more durable. The people of London seem willing to bear the greater expense and submit to the annoyance of more frequent renewals for the sake of the quiet, and wood is certainly the least noisy of all known pavements. Paris had at the close of 1893 more wood than asphalt, the areas of pavements of different kinds being as follows: Stone 7,541,258 sq. yds., 71.5 per cent. Wood 886,236 " 8.4 " Asphalt 402,394 " 3.8 " Gravel or macadam 1,724,632 " 16.3 " Berlin also has some wood pavements, but asphalt seems more popular, though by far the greatest area is still of stone pavements. [Illustration: GRANITE PAVEMENT ON ROADWAY OF BROOKLYN BRIDGE AFTER CONSTANT USE WITH VERY HEAVY TRAFFIC FOR SIXTEEN YEARS.] The most durable wood pavements are those made of the hard woods of Australia, which are especially adapted to this purpose. They are mostly of the eucalyptus family, the red gum, blue gum, black butt, tallow-wood, and mahogany. Mr. George W. Bell, in a pamphlet published in 1895, gives some remarkable statistics as to the durability of these pavements. He cites the case of George Street, in Sydney, which sustains a very heavy traffic, and on which a wooden-block pavement had been in constant use for over ten years, without repair of any kind. The only piece of wood pavement of this class which has been laid in this country, to the writer's knowledge, is on Twentieth Street, between Broadway and Fifth Avenue, in the Borough of Manhattan, where, in 1896, the Australian "kari" wood was laid. The work was done with the greatest care, and the resulting pavement has proved quite satisfactory. When Fifth Avenue was lately repaved the use of this material was considered, but, on account of the popular prejudice against all wood pavements and the delay which would be involved in obtaining the blocks, the idea was abandoned. [Illustration: LOOKING NORTH FROM BEVERLY ROAD AND EAST FIFTEENTH STREET, BROOKLYN, IN MARCH, 1899.] [Illustration: LOOKING NORTH FROM BEVERLY ROAD AND EAST FIFTEENTH STREET, BROOKLYN, IN OCTOBER, 1899.] When wood pavements are spoken of in most of our cities, the taxpayer pictures to himself the round cedar block so generally in use in Western cities. These are used on account of their cheapness. They are usually laid on one or two courses of plank. The blocks are round, from four to eight inches in diameter and six inches in depth, are set as closely as possible to each other, and the joints are filled with gravel, after which they are usually poured full of pitch. Such a pavement, when new, is quite agreeable to ride over. It soon, however, becomes uneven; the defective blocks quickly decay; the surface not being impervious to water, the wet foundation under a pavement with so little rigidity becomes soft, and the mud or slime works its way up between the blocks, and the process of decomposition is expedited. We hear sometimes of the floating pavements of Chicago. These are such cedar-block pavements which are said to rise with the floods of water filling the roadways after heavy rainfalls, and from specimens of the pavement which may be seen in that city considerable sections must have floated away. The round block has nothing to recommend it but its cheapness, and this usually proves to be expensive economy. In Galveston, Texas, creosoted yellow pine blocks have been laid for some years with general satisfaction. They are laid directly on the fine sand, which is water-rammed so as to be very compact. The surface is formed with great care by a template to the exact grade and crown, and the joints are filled with similar fine sand. In Indianapolis creosoted blocks have been laid for several years, sixty thousand square yards having been put down during the past season. They are laid as closely as possible on a concrete foundation, with a sand cushion of one inch, and the joints filled with paving cement, composed of ten per cent of refined Trinidad asphalt and ninety per cent of coal-tar distillate, after which the surface is covered with half an inch of clean coarse sand or granite screenings. [Illustration: A NEW CEDAR BLOCK PAVEMENT IN TORONTO.] Improved wood pavements are a luxury. They have many points of superiority over asphalt. They are so considered in London, where their use is continued, although they require renewal oftener than asphalt, and much more often than granite. They will undoubtedly be used more frequently in this country when the people are willing to pay the additional cost for the quiet and freedom from dust and from the somewhat disagreeable glare of asphalt. For a dozen years or more brick has been used for street pavements in the cities of the middle West. The use of this material is by no means new. It began in Holland in the thirteenth century, and in the seventeenth century the highway from The Hague to Scheveningen was paved with brick. In Amsterdam such pavements are said to last from ten to twenty years, or an average of fourteen years. After about ten years they are commonly turned over and relaid, after which they will last about four years more. The size in common use is about the same as that made in this country. A good paving brick should be tough enough to withstand the wear to which a street surface is subjected without chipping or cracking, and should not absorb more than from two to four per cent of its weight of water after submersion for forty-eight hours. It has not the wearing qualities of granite, although there is one block on Ninth Avenue, in the Borough of Manhattan, which has been subjected to very heavy traffic for eight years, has had no repairs to speak of, and its condition to-day compares very favorably with almost any street pavement of equal age which has been subjected to similar traffic. [Illustration: AN OLD CEDAR BLOCK PAVEMENT.] Another kind of street improvement which must be considered is macadam. In small towns, and some quite large cities, most of the streets are improved in this way. When well maintained and kept smooth, but not too hard, it forms a most agreeable surface for driving. It should not, in the writer's judgment, be classed as a pavement at all, certainly not as a permanent one, and its use should be restricted to park drives and boulevards (for maintaining which liberal appropriations can be secured), and to suburban roads, where sewers and subsurface pipes have not yet been laid, and where temporary roads are required to furnish convenient communication between centers of population, and to assist in developing these districts. Macadam has no place in a city street, nor is it wise to lay it on the entire width of a roadway. It best serves its purpose when laid in a comparatively narrow strip, leaving the sides of the road unimproved, except for the formation of earth gutters, so that the surface water can readily soak away where the soil is sufficiently porous. Macadam is the most expensive of all street surfaces to keep in thoroughly good condition, and in this country it is rarely, if ever, so maintained, except in some of our park roads. The pavement which is to-day, more generally than any other, superseding stone on all streets where the traffic is not excessive nor the grades extreme, is asphalt. It is scarcely necessary to attempt to give a history of the use of this material, how its adaptability to paving purposes was first discovered by the improved condition of the roads over which it was hauled from the French mines for use in reservoir and tank linings, etc. The drippings from the carts were observed to have been compacted by travel until a smooth, hard roadway resulted. The first street to be paved with it was Rue Bergera, in Paris, in 1854, and it was so successful that in 1858 Rue St. Honore was similarly treated. An asphalt pavement was laid in Threadneedle Street, London, in May, 1869, and in Cheapside and Poultry in the fall of 1870, while in Berlin its use began in 1873. [Illustration: EIGHTEENTH AVENUE, BROOKLYN; MACADAMIZED FULL WIDTH OF ROADWAY AND GUTTERS PAVED, WITH NO PROVISION FOR SURFACE DRAINAGE.] The laying of bituminous pavements in this country began in 1869, and they were first made of tar concrete, or Scrimshaw. Asphalt began to be used within the next year or two, and its popularity has been astonishing, as will be seen from the fact that on January 1, 1898, the area of this kind of pavement laid in the United States was, as nearly as could be ascertained, thirty million square yards. There is a notable difference between the European and American asphalts. The former may be called natural and the latter artificial pavements. In the former the material, as it comes from the mine, is ground to a powder, heated, placed upon the foundation prepared for it, and tamped into approximately the same condition as before it was disturbed, though usually the product of several mines is mixed in order to obtain the best percentage of bitumen, but nothing is added to or taken from the bituminous rock. In the pavement usually laid in America, on the other hand, only a small proportion of the material is brought from the asphalt deposits, the principal part of it (sand) being obtained near at hand. In the one case the cost of long ocean or rail transportation has to be paid on the entire mass forming the pavement, while in the other this expense attaches to but from twelve to fifteen per cent of the material. This, of course, is a great advantage, and at recent prices it is scarcely possible for the European rock asphalts to compete with the artificial ones. The making of a pavement from one of the standard asphalts may be briefly described as follows: The material as found in Nature has this composition: Bitumen 38.14 per cent. Organic matter, not bitumen 7.63 " Mineral matter 26.38 " Water 27.85 " ------ 100.00 This is cooked until the water has been driven off, and some of the mineral matter has settled. The above analysis is of Trinidad Pitch Lake asphalt, and is a particularly favorable result. This material is too hard for use in making a pavement, and it has to be softened or fluxed by the addition of something which will accomplish this purpose. In order to do this there is usually added to each one hundred pounds of refined asphalt about eighteen pounds of heavy petroleum oil. After this addition we have the asphaltic cement ready to combine with mineral matter, which is so selected that when asphaltic cement is added at the rate of about seventeen pounds of the cement to eighty-three pounds of the other all the particles will be coated, and more could not be added without making the pavement too soft. What is found to accomplish this best is fine stone dust and sand. The asphaltic cement and sand are heated separately to about 300° F. The stone dust is then added to and mixed with the hot sand in the proportion of from five to eighty in the case of fine, well-graduated sand, to fifteen to sixty-seven for coarse sands, having less variation in size. The asphaltic cement is then added, and the materials are mixed to a homogeneous mass, which is ready to be taken to the street. It should reach there at a temperature not less than 250°, and is spread with hot iron rakes so as to give usually a thickness of two inches after consolidation. After spreading, it is rolled with a hand roller, after which a small amount of hydraulic cement is swept over the surface, and it is thoroughly rolled with a steam roller of not less than ten tons, the rolling to be continued as long as the roller makes any impression on the surface. The foundation is usually of cement concrete about six inches thick, though asphalt pavements are often laid over old stone pavements. Between the foundation and the wearing surface there is generally laid what is called a binder course, one inch thick and formed of small broken stone, to which has been added asphaltic cement, the same as is used in making the wearing surface. Five or six pints of this cement are used to each cubic foot of stone. [Illustration: KING'S HIGHWAY, BROOKLYN; SIXTEEN FEET IN CENTER OF ROAD MACADAMIZED.] The pavement just described is made from Trinidad asphalt, the material from which nearly all the earlier artificial asphalt pavements in this country were made, and which was used almost exclusively until within the last half dozen years. Within that time, however, it has been discovered that there are a number of other deposits of asphalt well adapted to use for street pavements. A very large deposit containing a high percentage of bitumen and very little mineral matter is located near the coast in the State of Bermudez, in Venezuela. Large deposits have been found in several places in California, and in Utah, Kentucky, and Texas, and a number of other places. The Kentucky product is classed as a natural rock asphalt, as it is a sandstone impregnated with bitumen. It has been mixed with about an equal portion of German rock asphalt and used with very satisfactory results in Buffalo. These asphalts are quite different in their composition, and each requires somewhat different treatment. The Bermudez, being richer in bitumen and softer, requires the addition of very little flux. The California deposits furnish their own flux in a liquid asphalt or maltha, which is almost absolutely pure bitumen, and the use of petroleum residuum is thereby avoided altogether. [Illustration: ASPHALT PAVEMENT ON CLINTON AVENUE, BROOKLYN.] It has been recognized since 1836 that the bitumen which forms the greater part of natural asphalts can be separated into two substances, which have been commonly known as petrolene and asphaltene, the former of which possesses the cementitious qualities essential to the making of a successful pavement. Instead of the arbitrary names--petrolene and asphaltene--these substances are sometimes more aptly designated as active and inert bitumen. It has been found that of the bitumen extracted from asphalts which have given the most satisfactory results in making street pavements, sixty-nine per cent or more is soluble in petroleum naphtha having a specific gravity of 72° Beaumé. An asphalt pavement can not be economically kept in good condition unless every defect which may develop is immediately repaired. When the smooth, hard surface is once broken, disintegration proceeds very rapidly, and a large hole is soon formed. The more general distribution of smooth pavements, however, will tend to distribute the traffic more evenly, and the increasing use of rubber tires and rubber shoes for horses, to say nothing of the probably quite general use of motor vehicles, within the next decade will result in the elimination of the forces at present most destructive to pavements. Much regret is often expressed that asphalt pavements should be so frequently opened for the purpose of laying or obtaining access to subsurface pipes and conduits, and thereby mutilated. As a matter of fact, there is no pavement at present in use which can be so effectively and satisfactorily restored as asphalt. When skillfully done, almost no trace of such an opening can be found. The first question to arise, when it has been determined to pave a street, will be the selection of material, or the kind of pavement to be laid. In determining this, the governing considerations will be the traffic to be sustained, its density and character, the rate of grade, and the presence or absence of railroad tracks. If the traffic be very heavy and the street given up wholly to business, ease of traction, durability, and economy of maintenance are of first importance, while quiet, comfortable riding, and beauty can be sacrificed to them. Many efforts have been made to determine the relative force required to draw a load over different kinds of surface under similar conditions. The following is from a table compiled by Mr. Rudolph Hering, from different authorities, the force being that necessary to move one ton on a level grade at a speed of three miles an hour: KIND OF ROAD. Pounds. Ordinary dirt road 224 Ordinary cobblestone 140 Good cobblestone 75 Common macadam 64 Very hard, smooth macadam 46 Good stone block 45 Best stone block (London) 36 Asphalt 17 Granite tramway 12½ to 13½ Iron railway 8 to 11½ The question of durability occurs next, and the different kinds of pavement which may be considered for city streets may be rated as follows, it being assumed that the traffic is not excessively heavy: KIND OF PAVEMENT. Life in years. Best granite block on concrete 30 Granite block laid on sand 20 Belgian trap 20 Cobblestone 18 Asphalt 15 Best wood--rectangular block 10 Vitrified brick 12 Macadam 8 Cedar block--round--on sand 5 No class of municipal work comes so near to the daily life of an urban population--both the business and the home life--as the surface improvement of city streets, and no expenditure is too great (provided the work is skillfully and honestly done) to make them smooth, clean, sanitary, and beautiful. TYPICAL CRIMINALS. BY SAMUEL G. SMITH, LL. D. If the question of a criminal type, defined by certain marks of a physical nature and emphasized by accompanying mental and moral characteristics, were confined to the technical speculations of a special craft of scientists, the public would have little interest in the spread of the doctrines of Cesare Lombroso and his _confrères_ in this country. When it is believed, however, that certain men and women are committed to prison or condemned to death not on account of crimes in any ethical sense, but because of spontaneous actions from vicious impulses beyond their control, the subject affects the administration of law, the theory of punishment, and the safety of society. Lombroso and the Italian school say that they have discovered a type of man who is born a criminal, and who may be recognized by a Mongolian face, abnormal features, ill-shaped ears, unsymmetrical skull, and various psychical peculiarities, which are the result of bad organization. This doctrine is illustrated by descriptions of criminals who have the abnormalities, and in the hands of skillful writers the case is made very plausible. The theory is in harmony with so much popular modern thought, which loosely interprets the doctrine of evolution by a crass materialism, that it has infected American prison literature, while it has never misled those men to whom practical experience has given the most right to have an opinion on the subject. The sense of personal responsibility is still the foundation of social order, and if in truth there is no such thing, the world is awake at last from its dream of morality; righteousness is resolved into heredity, structure, and habit; living is a mere puppet show, and the wreck of things impends. If Lombroso is right, modern scientific methods are sure to prove him so, and we shall have at last sound theories; but we shall have no world in which they can be used, for the dissolution predicted by Herbert Spencer will have come. [Illustration: Group 1, No. 1.] [Illustration: Group 1, No. 2.] [Illustration: Group 1, No. 3.] Exceptional opportunities for the study of the abnormal classes in the institutions of this country and Europe have given me a personal interest in the question of the criminal type. I have discovered that the criminal anthropologists do not choose for comparison with the prison population their normal men from the ranks where the criminal classes are recruited. Blackwell's Island has no more peculiar inmates than abound in sections of New York near the East River; the residents of the Whitechapel district of London may be compared with the inmates of Pentonville, to the distinct credit of the latter; and the man in Roquette is no worse off in body than scores whom I have seen in certain localities south of the Seine. The fact is, no human body exists which is not in some respects abnormal. The number of abnormalities and their extent depend upon a variety of circumstances, among which are food, climate, occupation, and the incidents of birth itself, as well as the various forms of infantile disease. I will undertake to find enough physical peculiarities, in any locality, or among the members of any profession, to establish any physical theory which may be propounded. [Illustration: Group 2, No. 1 (forger).] [Illustration: Group 2, No. 2.] [Illustration: Group 2, No. 3.] It occurred to me to try an experiment in a manner entirely different from the usual criminal researches. Having been very familiar with a certain prison for many years, I requested the warden, who is a very able man in his profession, to send me the photographs of ten or a dozen men whom he regarded as the most representative criminals in his population of some five hundred persons. The warden was not informed of the use I intended to make of the material, and supposed it was for illustration in university class work. Later, he gave me the Bertillon measurements of the men, with an epitome of their history. A number of these men I have known for years. So far from this selection supporting the modern theory of a criminal type, it confutes it in a conspicuous manner. The abnormalities are slight, and there is as great a diversity among the men as could be asked. It must be remembered that these cases were selected by a shrewd and competent official, solely upon their criminal record, and not in the interests of any theory whatever. Of course, the men do not look well, but neither would any ordinary company of citizens if their heads were shaved and they were put in prison dress. I am always shocked by the changed appearance of the men after the prison transformation. Young embezzlers of elegant figure, who have moved in good society without a question, easily look the rascal behind prison walls. The first group are murderers. No. 1 murdered his daughter because she insisted upon going to a party against his wishes. He has the head of a philosopher. It was his first crime. It may be noted that tattooing is supposed to be common among criminals. This man is tattooed, but committed no crime until fifty years of age, and was a deputy sheriff for some years. No. 2 did not kill his victim, but the assault was murderous, and the escape from death was accidental. It is difficult to discuss the negro in crime without entering into racial and social questions beyond the present limits. No. 3 has a very good head, an excellent ear, and, barring the expression, a pleasing face. He has a life sentence for murder. He is the worst man in the prison. I have for years believed him to be insane. His family is criminal. His father murdered his mother in a brutal manner before the child's eyes, when No. 3 was only eight years old. He himself has committed several desperate assaults, growing out of his persistent mania of persecution. No. 3 is not morally responsible, and there are usually two or three such prisoners out of a thousand subjects. The second group are very diverse in structure and temperament, but have committed the same kind of crime. No. 1 is a confidence man and a forger. He is a crafty and an habitual criminal, has served terms in various prisons, is keen of intellect, well educated, has traveled in many countries, and is a citizen of the world. No. 2 is a confirmed forger, and has served several terms in prison for the same offense. He is a skillful bookkeeper, has an attractive manner, and as soon as he is out in the world secures employment and plans his next crime. No. 3 is a counterfeiter. His head is small, but of excellent shape, and he has rather a refined physical organization. His criminal record is bad, and he has served at least one term before for the same offense. His imagination, temperament, and vices would select him as a person who would be guilty of a very different and more fleshly kind of crime. The group is formed by the correlation of crime; they have nothing in common in physical organization. [Illustration: Group 3, No. 1.] [Illustration: Group 3, No. 2.] [Illustration: Group 3, No. 3.] The third group are thieves. No. 1 is a confirmed criminal, and has served several terms in prison. He is the tallest man in the list. His head is "long" and well formed, and his features are regular. His expression indicates power of sustained thought, and his peculiar appearance is not due to his kind of crime, but to his habit of mind. He is a pessimist of the first rank, and hates the world, his fellow-men, and perhaps himself most of all. He will not work when at liberty, thinks that society is totally depraved, and that war upon it is the only proper mission in life. He is pre-eminently the antisocial man. No. 2 is really a pleasing fellow. He is tender, sympathetic, and pious. Under proper circumstances he might have made an admirable Sunday-school superintendent. He is plausible, insinuating, and winning. In temperament, feeling, and social habit he is the complete antithesis to No. 1. He is a most dangerous criminal, and has a black and varied record. No. 3 is a man of lower grade of organization and habit, but he is a criminal by profession. He is an idle and worthless vagabond, but he is an accomplished thief. He makes an excellent prisoner, obedient to the rules, industrious, and seemingly anxious to improve. In fact, the prison furnishes his best environment, for it is only there that he is at peace with himself and his world. [Illustration: Contrasts, No. 1.] [Illustration: Contrasts, No. 2.] The last two men presented are contrasts. No. 1 is an accidental criminal. His previous history and character give strong grounds for the belief that, under pressure of want for the necessaries of life, he was led astray by a man older and stronger than himself. It is not likely that he would repeat his fault. No. 2, on the other hand, is a sexual pervert of the worst kind, whose case seems so hopeless that perpetual imprisonment is indicated as the only relief for him, and the only safety for society. Apart from the expression of his eyes, caused by an irregular focus, there is nothing marked about the face. The head is of a pronounced "broad" type, but, on the other hand, he comes from a province of Germany where that type is dominant. To complete the experiment, I submitted these portraits to a number of gentlemen, and to no two of them at the same time, for their opinions of the cases. The informal committee represented the different professions which might be expected to fit men for observation, for there was a lawyer, a physician, a railway president, a criminal judge, and a college professor. Each of them is eminent in his special field. The committee was manifestly handicapped by the shorn head, the prison dress, and the lack of the accessories of masculine ornamentation, such as collars and cravats. The committee was asked to name the crimes, and to group the men according to their criminal record. Each opinion differed from the other, and all were wide of the mark. The shrewd lawyer thought the accidental criminal "might be guilty of anything." It was only the college professor, the last man of the company from whom anything might properly be expected, who was able to select the worst two cases with the remark, "These men are degenerates." But while the committee was at work on the photographs the writer was at work on the committee, and actually discovered more anomalies of organization in these distinguished citizens than are apparent in the criminals. After this remark it is necessary to withhold their names, though some of them are men of national reputation. It is time to reassert with increasing emphasis the personal responsibility of the individual, and to insist upon the enthronement and guidance of conscience. There are certainly social and economic reasons for crime, some of which the writer has pointed out elsewhere, but the chief fact in human life is the power of self-determination. The chief causes of crime, outside of personal and moral degradation, are psychical and not physical. The reader of history can not fail to have noted that relation of prevalent ideas to conduct which is so conspicuous in human affairs. The scenes of blood and desolation characteristic of the French Revolution are directly traceable to the doctrines which prepared the way for anarchy, but not for rational freedom. We have had our attention directed to the contagion of suicide which has marked the last half decade. But Lecky tells us that suicide was made practically unknown in the civilized world by the spread of Christianity and its beliefs in the dignity and sanctity of man. The present contagion will disappear not as the result of food, or raiment, or houses, or any other material good, but by a revival of practical faith in the human soul and its capacity, in human righteousness and its obligation. A CENTURY OF GEOLOGY. BY PROF. JOSEPH LE CONTE. [_Concluded._] THE AGE OF THE EARTH. Until almost the beginning of the present century the general belief in all Christian countries was that not only the earth and man, but the whole cosmos, began to exist about six thousand to seven thousand years ago; furthermore, that all was made at once without natural process, and have remained substantially unchanged ever since. This is the old doctrine of the supernatural origin and substantial permanency of the earth and its features. Among intelligent and especially scientific men this doctrine, even in the eighteenth century, began to be questioned, although not publicly; for in 1751 Buffon was compelled by the Sorbonne to retract certain views concerning the age of the earth, published in his Natural History in 1749.[1] Remnants of the old belief lingered even into the early part of the present century, and may even yet be found hiding away in some of the remote corners of civilized countries. But with the birth of geology, and especially through the work of Hutton in Scotland, Cuvier in France, and William Smith in England, the much greater--the inconceivably great--antiquity of the earth and the origin of its present forms, by gradual changes which are still going on, was generally acknowledged. Indeed, as already said, this is the fundamental idea of geology, without which it could not exist as a science. Geology has its own measures of time--in eras, periods, epochs, ages, etc.--but it is natural and right that we should desire more accurate estimates by familiar standards. How old, then, is the earth, especially the inhabited earth, in years? Geologists have attempted to answer this question by estimates based on the rates of sedimentation and erosion, or else on the rate of changes of organic forms by struggle for life and survival of the fittest. Physicists have attempted to answer the same question by calculations based on known laws of dissipation of energy in a cooling body, such as the sun or the earth. The results of the two methods differ widely. The estimates of the geologists are enormous, and growing ever greater as the conditions of the problem are better understood. Nothing less than several hundred million years will serve his purpose. The estimates of the physicists are much more moderate, and apparently growing less with each revision. The latest results of King and Kelvin give only twenty to thirty millions.[2] This the geologist declares is absurdly inadequate. He can not work freely in so narrow a space--he has not elbow room. The subject is still discussed very earnestly, but with little hope of definite conclusion. One thing, however, must be remarked. Both parties assume--the geologist tacitly, the physicist avowedly--the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, and therefore the early incandescent _fluid_ condition of the earth as the basis of all his reasonings. Now, while this is probably the most reasonable view, it is not so certain that it can be made the basis of complex mathematical calculation. There is a possible alternative theory--viz., the meteoric theory--which is coming more and more into favor. According to this view, the planets may have been formed by aggregation of meteoric swarms, and the heat of the earth produced by the collision of the meteors in the act of aggregation. According to the one view (the nebular), the heat is all primal, and the earth has been only losing heat all the time. According to the other, the aggregation and the heating are both gradual, and may have continued even since the earth was inhabited. According to the one, the spendthrift earth wasted nearly all its energy before it became habitable or even a crust was formed, and therefore the habitable period must be comparatively short. According to the other, the cooling and the heating, the expenditure and the income, were going on at the same time, and therefore the process may have lasted much longer. The subject is much too complex to be discussed here. Suffice it to say that on this latter view not only the age of the earth, but many other fundamental problems of dynamical geology, would have to be recalculated. The solution of these great questions must also be left to the next century. In the meantime we simply draw attention to two very recent papers on the subject--viz., that of Lord Kelvin,[3] and criticism of the same by Chamberlin.[4] ANTIQUITY AND ORIGIN OF MAN. Even after the great antiquity of the earth and its origin and development by a natural process were generally accepted, still man was believed, even by the most competent geologists, to have appeared only a few thousand years ago. The change from this old view took place in the last half of the present century--viz., about 1859--and, coming almost simultaneously with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, prepared the scientific mind for entertaining, at least, the idea of man's origin by a natural process of evolution. Evidences of the work of man--flint implements, associated with the bones of extinct animals and therefore showing much greater age than usually accepted--had been reported from time to time, notably those found in the river Somme by Boucher de Perthes. But the prejudice against such antiquity was so strong that geologists with one accord, and without examination, pooh-poohed all such evidence as incredible. It was Sir Joseph Prestwich who, in 1859, first examined them carefully, and published the proofs that convinced the geological world that early man was indeed contemporaneous with the extinct animals of the Quaternary period, and that the time must have been many times greater than usually allowed.[5] Since that time confirmatory evidence has accumulated, and the earliest appearance of man has been pushed back first to the late glacial, then to the middle glacial, and finally, in Mr. Prestwich's Plateau Gravels, to the early glacial or possibly preglacial times. Still, however, in every case earliest man was unmistakably man. No links connecting him with other anthropoids had been found. Very recently, however, have been found, by Du Bois, in Java, the skull, teeth, and thigh bone of what seems to be a veritable _missing_ link, named by the discoverer _Pithecanthropus erectus_. The only question that seems to remain is whether it should be regarded as an ape more manlike than any known ape, or a man more apelike than any yet discovered. The age of this creature was either latest Pliocene or earliest Quaternary. BREAKS IN THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE. From the earliest times of geologic study there have been observed unconformities of the strata and corresponding changes in the fossil contents. Some of these unconformities are local and the changes of organic forms inconsiderable, but sometimes they are of wider extent and the changes of life system greater. In some cases the unconformity is universal or nearly so, and in such cases we find a complete and apparently sudden change in the fossil contents. It was these universal breaks that gave rise to the belief in the occurrence of violent catastrophes and corresponding wholesale exterminations and re-creations of faunas and floras. It is evident, however, on a little reflection, that every such unconformity indicates a land period at the place observed, and therefore a time unrecorded in strata and fossils at that place--i. e., a lost interval--certain leaves missing from the book of time. And if the unconformity be widespread, the lost interval is correspondingly great. It is therefore probable that change of species went on slowly and uniformly all the time, although not recorded at that place. Intermediate strata may be and often are found elsewhere, and the supposed lost interval filled. The record was continuous and the changes uniform, but the record is not all found in one place. The leaves of the book of Time are scattered here and there, and it is the duty of the geologist to gather and arrange them in proper order, so that the record may read continuously. This is the uniformitarian view, and is undoubtedly far truer than the catastrophic. But the objection to it is that in the case of very widespread unconformities, such as occurred several times in the history of the earth, the changes of organisms are so great that if the rate of change was uniform the lost interval must have been equal to all the rest of the history put together. Therefore we are compelled to admit that in the history of the earth there have been periods of comparative quiet (not fixedness) during which evolutionary changes were slow and regular, and periods of revolution during which the changes were much more rapid, but not catastrophic. This is exactly what we ought to expect on the idea of gradual evolution of earth forms by secular cooling, for in the gradual contraction of the earth there must come times of general readjustment of the crust to the shrinking nucleus. These readjustments would cause great changes in physical geography and climate, and corresponding rapid changes in organic forms. In addition to this, the changes in physical geography and climate would cause extensive migrations of species, and therefore minglings of faunas and floras, severer struggles of competing forms, and more rapid advance in the steps of evolution. Among these changes of organic forms there would arise and have arisen _new dominant types_, and these, in their turn, would compel new adjustment of relations and still further hasten the steps of evolution. Such changes, whether geographic, or climatic, or organic, would _not_ be simultaneous all over the earth, but propagated from place to place, until quiet was re-established and a new period of comparative stability and prosperity commenced. This view is a complete reconciliation of catastrophism and uniformitarianism, and is far more rational than either extreme. _Critical Periods in the History of the Earth._--Such periods of rapid change may well be called _critical periods or revolutions_. They are marked by several characteristics: (1) By widespread oscillations of the earth's crust, and therefore by almost universal unconformities. (2) By widespread changes of physical geography, and therefore by great changes in climate. (3) By great and widespread changes in organic forms, produced partly by the physical changes and partly by the extensive migrations. (4) By the evolution of new dominant types, which are also the cause of extensive changes in species. (5) Among the physical changes occurring at these times is the formation of great mountain ranges. The names of these critical periods or revolutions are often taken from the mountain range which form their most conspicuous features. There have been at least four of these critical periods, or periods of greatest change: (1) The pre-Cambrian or Laurentide revolution; (2) the post-Paleozoic or Appalachian; (3) the post-Cretaceous or Rocky Mountain; (4) the post-Tertiary or glacial revolution. Now, as these critical periods separate the primary divisions of time--the eras--it follows that the _Present_--the Age of Man--is an era. It may be called the _Psychozoic Era_. These views have been mainly advocated by the writer of this sketch, but I believe that, with perhaps some modification in statement, they would be accepted by most geologists as a permanent acquisition of science.[6] GEOLOGICAL CLIMATES. Attention was first drawn to this subject by the apparently unique phenomena of the Glacial epoch. For nearly a century past Alpine glaciers, their structure, their mysterious motion, and their characteristic erosive effects, have excited the keenest interest of scientific men. But until about 1840 the interest was purely physical. It was Louis Agassiz who first recognized ice as a great _geological agent_. He had long been familiar with the characteristic marks of glacial action, and with the fact that Alpine glaciers were far more extensive formerly than now, and had, moreover, conceived the idea of a Glacial epoch--an ice age in the history of the earth. With this idea in his mind, in 1840 he visited England, and found the marks of glaciers all over the higher regions of England and Scotland. He boldly announced that the whole of northern Europe was once covered with a universal ice sheet. A few years later he came to the United States, and found the tracks of glaciers everywhere, and again astonished the world by asserting that the whole northern part of the North American continent was modeled by a moving ice sheet. This idea has been confirmed by all subsequent investigation, especially here in America. But it would be strange, indeed, if the cold of the Glacial epoch should be absolutely unique. Attention was soon called to similar marks in rocks of other geological periods, especially in the Permian of the southern hemisphere. This opened up the general question of _geological climates and their causes_. Perhaps no subject connected with the physics of the earth is more obscure and difficult than this. The facts, as far as we know them, are briefly as follows: (1) All the evidence we have point to a high, even an ultra-tropical, climate in early geological times; (2) all the evidence points to a uniform distribution of this early high temperature, so that the zonal arrangement of temperatures, such as characterizes present climates, did not then exist; (3) temperature zones were apparently first introduced in the late Mesozoic (Cretaceous) or early Tertiary times, and during the Tertiary the colder zones were successively added, until at the end there was formed a polar ice-cap as now. Thus far all might be explained by progressive cooling of the earth and progressive clearing of the atmosphere of its excess CO_[2] and aqueous vapor. But (4) from time to time (i. e., at critical periods) there occurred great oscillations of temperature, the last and probably the greatest of these being the Glacial period. The cause of these great oscillations of temperature, and especially the cause of the glacial climate, is one of the most interesting and yet one of the obscurest and therefore one of most hotly disputed points in geology. Indeed, the subject has entered into the region of almost profitless discussion. We must wait for further light and for another century. Only one remark seems called for here. It is in accordance with a true scientific method that we should exhaust terrestrial causes before we resort to cosmical. The most usual terrestrial cause invoked is the oscillation of the earth's crust. But recently Chamberlin, in a most suggestive paper,[7] has invoked oscillations in the composition of the atmosphere, especially in its proportion of CO_[2], as the _immediate_ cause, although this in turn is due to oscillations of the earth's crust. THE NEW GEOLOGY. Heretofore the geological history of the earth has been studied only in the record of stratified rocks and their contained fossils. But in every place there have been land-periods in which, of course, erosion took the place of sedimentation. This kind of record is very imperfect, because there are no fossils. Until recently no account was taken of these erosion-periods except as breaks of indefinite length in the record--as lost intervals. But now, and mainly through the work of American geologists, interpretation of these erosion-periods has fairly commenced, and so important has this new departure in the study of geology seemed to some that it has been hailed as a new era in geology, connecting it more closely with geography. Heretofore _former_ land periods were recognized by unconformities and the amount of time by the degree of change in the fossils, but now the amount of time is estimated in _existing_ land surfaces by topographic _forms_ alone. This idea was introduced into geology by Major J. W. Powell, and has been applied with success by William Morris Davis, W. J. McGee, and others. The principle is this: Land surface subject to erosion and standing still is finally cut down to gently sweeping curves, with low, rounded divides and broad, shallow troughs. Such a surface is called by Davis a Peneplain. Such a peneplain is characteristic of old topography. If such a surface be again lifted to higher level, the rivers again dissect it by ravines, which are deep and narrow in proportion to the amount and rate of the uplift. If the land again remains steady, the sharply dissected surface is again slowly smoothed out to the gentle curves of a peneplain. If, on the contrary, the surface be depressed, the rivers fill up the channels with sediment which, on re-elevation, is again dissected. Thus the whole _ontogeny_ of land surfaces have been studied out, so that their age may be recognized at sight. Thus, while heretofore the more recent movements of the crust were supposed to be readable only on coast lines and by means of the old sea strands, now we read with equal ease the movements of the interior by means of the physiognomy of the topography, and especially the structure of the river channels. Moreover, while heretofore the history of the earth was supposed to be recorded only in stratified rock and their contained fossils, now we find that recent history is recorded and may be read also in the general topography of the land surfaces. Geography is studied no longer as mere description of earth forms, but also as to the causes of these forms, no longer as to present forms, but also as to the history of their becoming. Thus geography, by its alliance with geology, has become a truly scientific study, and as such is now introduced into the colleges and universities. It is this alliance with geology which has caused the dry bones of geographic facts to live. It is this which has created a soul under the dry "_ribs of this death_." This mode of study of the history of the earth has just commenced. How much will come of it is yet to be shown in the next century. In this connection it is interesting to trace the effect of environment on geological reasonings in different countries. Heretofore, especially in England, what we have called peneplains were usually attributed to marine denudation--i. e., to cutting back of a coast line by constant action of the waves, leaving behind a level submarine plateau, which is afterward raised above sea level and dissected by rivers. American geologists, on the contrary, are apt to regard such level surfaces as the final result of aërial degradation or a base level of rain and river erosion. The same difference is seen in the interpretation of glacial phenomena. Until recently, English geologists were inclined to attribute more to iceberg, Americans more to land ice. Again, in England coast scenery is apt to be attributed mainly to the ravages of the sea, while in America we attribute more to land erosion combined with subsidence of the coast line. In a word, in the tight little sea-girt island of Great Britain, where the ravages of the sea are yearly making such serious inroads upon the area of the land, it is natural that the power of the sea should strongly affect the imagination and impress itself on geological theories, and tend perhaps to exaggeration of sea agencies, while the broad features of the American continent and the evidences of prodigious erosion in comparatively recent geological time tend to the exaggeration of erosive agency of rain and rivers. These two must be duly weighed and each given its right proportion in the work of earth sculpture. PALEONTOLOGY. Paleontology at first attracted attention mainly by the new and strange life forms which it revealed. It is the interest of a zoölogical garden. This interest is of course perennial, but can hardly be called scientific. Geology at first was a kind of wonder book. Next fossils, especially marine shells, were studied as characteristic forms denoting strata of a particular age. They were coins by which we identify certain periods of history. They were "medals of creation." It was in this way chiefly that William Smith, the founder of English stratigraphic geology, used them. It was in this way that Lyell and all the older geologists, until the advent of evolution, were chiefly interested in them. It was Cuvier, the great zoölogist and comparative anatomist, who, in the beginning of the present century, first studied fossils, especially mammalian fossils, from the _zoölogical_ point of view--i. e., as to their affinities with existing animals. Cuvier's studies of the vertebrates of the Paris basin may be said to have laid the foundation of scientific paleontology from this point of view. Thenceforward two views of paleontology and two modes of study gradually differentiated from one another, the one zoölogical, the other geological. In the one case we study fossils in _taxonomic_ groups--i. e., as species, genera, families, orders, etc.--and trace the gradual evolution of each of these from generalized forms to their specialized outcomes, completing as far as possible the genetic chain through all time. In the other we study fossils in _faunal groups_, as successive geological faunas, and the geographic diversity in each geological period--i. e., the evolution of geologic faunas and the causes of geographic diversity in each. In a word, we study the laws of distribution of faunas in time geologically and in space geographically, and the causes of these laws in each case. The first is strictly a branch of zoölogy and botany, and we leave it to these specialists. The second alone belongs properly to geology. In this purely geologic paleontology, as seen from its scope given above, there are many questions of widest philosophical interest which are only now attracting the attention they deserve. I only touch lightly two which have been brought forward in these very last years of the century. I. GENERAL LAWS OF FAUNAL EVOLUTION.--The evolution of the organic kingdom from this strictly geological point of view may be briefly formulated as follows: 1. Throughout all geological time there has been a general movement upward and onward, as it were abreast, everywhere. If this were all, there would be only geological progress, but no geographical diversity. Geological history would be the same everywhere. A time horizon would be easily determined by identity of fossil species. This we know is not true. Therefore there are other elements besides this. 2. In different countries, isolated from one another and under different conditions, evolution takes different _directions_ and different _rates_, producing geographical diversity in each geological period. This diversity increases with time as long as the isolation continues. If this were all, the geographical diversity by continued divergence would have become so great that it would be impossible even approximately to determine any geological horizon. The history of each country must be studied for itself. A general history of the earth would be impossible. But this also is not true. There is therefore still another element. 3. From time to time, at long intervals--i. e., _critical periods_--there are widespread readjustments of the crust to internal strain, determining changes of physical geography and of climate, and therefore wide migrations of species with mingling and conflict of faunas. This would produce more rapid movement of evolution, but at the same time more or less complete obliteration of geographical diversity. 4. After these periods of migrations and minglings there would be re-isolations in new localities, and the process of diversification would recommence and increase as long as the isolation continues. The last of these critical periods of migrations and minglings and struggles for life among competing species was the _Glacial epoch_ or ice age. Therefore the present geographical distribution of species was largely determined by the extensive migrations of that time. II. COSMOPOLITAN AND PROVINCIAL FAUNAS.--There are apparently in the history of the earth periods of widespread or cosmopolitan faunas, alternating with localized or provincial faunas. The cosmopolitan periods are usually times of prevalence of limestones or organic sediments, and the fossils are very abundant. The provincial periods are usually characterized by sandstones and shales or mechanical sediments, and are comparatively poor in fossils. Moreover, it is believed that the cosmopolitan limestone periods are oceanic periods--i. e., periods of wide oceans and lower and smaller continents and little erosive activity, while the sandstone periods, characterized by provincial faunas, are periods of higher and larger continents, and therefore of great erosion and abundant mechanical sedimentation. Now, according to Chamberlin, these remarkable alternations are due to oscillations of the crust, in which the continents are alternately lifted and depressed. It must be remembered that abyssal faunas are almost unknown among fossils. This is the necessary result of substantial permanency of oceanic basins. The whole geological record is in shallow-water faunas. These shallow waters are along continental shore lines and in interior continental seas. According to Chamberlin again, during a period of continental depression all the flat continental margins are submerged, forming broad submarine platforms, and the lower interior portions of the continents are also submerged, forming wide and shallow interior seas. Under these conditions continental waste, and therefore sand and clay sediments, are reduced to a minimum. Life, animal and vegetal, abounds, and therefore much limestone is formed. The oceans are widely connected with one another, and therefore the faunas are widespread or cosmopolitan. During the period of elevation, on the contrary, the continents are extended to the margin of the deep oceanic basins, the broad, shallow submarine platforms are abolished, the interior seas are also abolished, the shallow-water areas are reduced to isolated bays, and their faunas are peculiar or provincial. Also, elevated and enlarged continents give rise to maximum erosion, and therefore abundant sediments of sandstone and clay, and comparative poverty of life and therefore of limestone. Chamberlin also gives reasons why the oceanic periods should be warm, humid, equable in temperature, and the atmosphere highly charged with CO_[2], and therefore highly favorable to abundant life, both vegetal and animal, while land periods would be drier and cooler, the atmosphere deficient in CO_[2], and therefore cold from that cause and in many ways unfavorable to abundant life. These extremely interesting views, however, must be regarded as still on trial, as a provisional hypothesis to be sifted, confirmed, or rejected, or in any case modified, in the next century. Lastly, it is interesting to note the ever-increasing part taken by American geologists in the advance of this science. There has been through the century a gradual movement of what might be called the center of gravity of geological research westward, until now, at its end, the most productive activity is here in America. This is not due to any superiority of American geologists, but to the superiority of their opportunities. Dana has well said that _America is the type continent of the world_. All geological problems are expressed here with a clearness and a simplicity not found elsewhere. We must add to this the comparative recency of geological study in this rich field. In Europe the simpler and broader problems are already worked out, and all that remain are difficult problems requiring much time. In America, on the contrary, not only are all problems expressed in simpler terms, but many great and broad problems are still awaiting solution. For these reasons the greatest activity in research, and the most rapid advance during the next century, will probably be here in America. "SALAMANDERS" AND "SALAMANDER" CATS. BY NORMAN ROBINSON. In many places in the extreme Southern States, especially in what is locally known as the "piney woods," one of the most notable features is the constantly recurring mounds of yellow sand which everywhere dot and, it must be confessed, disfigure the monotonous landscape. These piles of earth are usually nearly circular in form, fairly symmetrical in contour, from six inches to two feet in diameter, and, save where they have been beaten down by rain or winds or the trampling of cattle, about half as high as they are broad. Often these sand heaps are pretty evenly distributed, sometimes so thickly as to cover at least one fourth of the soil surface. If you ask a native the cause of this singular phenomenon, which you will perhaps at first be disposed to consider a kind of arenaceous eruption which has somehow broken out on the face of Nature, your informant will sententiously reply, "Salamanders!" All this disfigurement is indeed the work of a curious little rodent popularly so named and about the size and color of an ordinary rat. He is never seen above ground if he can possibly help it. He digs innumerable branching underground tunnels at depths varying from one to six feet, and these mounds of sand are simply the "dump heaps" which, in his engineering operations, he finds it necessary to make. [Illustration: "SNAP-SHOT" VIEW OF A LIVE "SALAMANDER."] After carrying the excavated earth to the surface this cautious little miner takes the greatest pains to cover up his tracks. No opening into his burrow is left. How he manages to so carefully smooth over his little sand mound and then literally "pull the hole in after him" is as yet unexplained. The work is mostly done at night, when observation is especially difficult. Sometimes, when he is a little belated and the early morning twilight admonishes him that it is "quitting time," he gets in a hurry and slights his work. Then a little depression at the top of the mound tells where he has made a hasty exit. Ordinarily the rounding out of the sand pile is as deftly done as though it had all been managed from above. Indeed, the feat actually accomplished by this little underground builder appears more puzzling the more it is considered. The most skilled human engineer would confess his inability to thus pile up a mound of loose sand, go down through it, leave the top perfectly smoothed over, and, with no supports save the sand itself, to so fill up the passageway above him as he went down that not the slightest mark should be left to indicate his pathway of retreat. Even if you dig into and under one of these sand mounds you will find very little to betray the builder's whereabouts. It is seemingly all solid earth, and unless you know exactly when and where and how to dig you will probably give up the search in disgust, with your labor and your backache but no "salamander" hole for your pains. Indeed, the cunning of this little rodent in hiding his burrow is quite as conspicuous as his skill in digging it. "Strategy" is his strong point. If by any chance you come upon his burrow it is probably an old abandoned one that is closed up and leads nowhere. The chances are ten to one that his real burrow is rods if not furlongs away. Provided you can find the last mound he has built and not more than four or five hours have elapsed since its completion, by digging diagonally to the right or left, at the distance of a foot or so, you will have a fair chance of encountering his burrow. He is probably near by, resting from the severe labors of the previous night. If you give him time to get his nap out and finish his job, your wiser plan will be to stop hunting and digging a little before you begin. Why this little underground dweller should be called "salamander" is one of those mysteries of popular nomenclature which is seemingly inexplicable. There is certainly nothing in the habits or appearance of the animal to suggest the fabled fireproof batrachian. Like some other lovers of darkness, he has quite a number of _aliases_ by which in various portions of the South and West he is known. "Gopher," "pouched rat," "hamster," and "muelos" are some of the titles by which he is locally known. "Salamander" appears to be the most generally accepted one. This enterprising little rodent belongs to an ancient if not honorable family. By naturalists he is generally known as "pocket gopher," and is classed among the _Geomyidæ_. Some fifteen known species have been recognized, with possibly more to hear from, and with a habitat extending quite across the continent. The Florida species is probably _Geomys tuza_ (Ord.), and though not as large as one or two others, is quite the peer of any of his cousins in enterprise and ability to look out for himself. The illustration given is from what is probably the only photograph of a living "salamander" ever taken. Mr. Geomys is not a model "sitter." No unwilling candidate for the "rogues' gallery" has more decided views on the subject of having his picture taken. In a general way, it may be said that he doesn't pose for anybody. Precisely how this prejudice was finally overcome it is needless to state. Perseverance and "snap shots" were too much for our recalcitrant rodent. In the matter of "looking pleasant" it must be conceded that Mr. Geomys was a little intractable. [Illustration: "DUMP HEAPS" OF THE "SALAMANDER."] The fore legs and feet of the "salamander" are worth studying. They remind one somewhat of those of the mole, but are more stoutly built, with much longer claws, and are evidently designed for harder tasks. They are controlled by powerful brachial and pectoral muscles, and, as we shall see, are not only special tools adapted to special and difficult work, but work which requires an enormous expenditure of physical force. The engineering problems which this little troglodyte has to solve are far and away ahead of any that the New York Rapid-Transit Commission has to deal with. It is very much as though a single miner were placed over in Hoboken, a hundred feet below the surface, with instructions to tunnel under the Hudson River with no tools except his hands, without a chance of seeing daylight until he reached it on the New York side, and with the added conditions that all the excavated earth should be carried out at the eastern opening of the tunnel, and finally that he should obliterate all marks of his work and, as he retreated into his tunnel, pack the exit shaft above him so tightly and so deftly that it is impossible to trace its course! How our little fur-coated engineer solves all these problems is as yet a mystery. We only know that he does it. He has a steam engine in his shoulders and shovels for hands, but his exact methods of using them is as yet largely a matter of conjecture. Only two plans of operation would seem to be possible. One would be for the "salamander" to first carry the excavated earth all to the rear into some portion of his already finished tunnel, and finally, when the outward exit is completed, to carry it back again and deposit it on the surface. This, of course, involves a double transfer of all the earth removed. It is more likely that the "salamander" first forces a narrow passageway along the line of his future tunnel in a way similar to that pursued by the mole. The latter animal has the advantage of working near the surface, and the earth always yields along the line of least resistance, which of course is upward. Four or five feet down there is no such line, and the amount of force required to push the ground aside must be something enormous. When the "salamander" comes to the upper air the work of excavation and enlargement begins. He then piles upon the surface all the earth that he can not use in obliterating his upward passageway. As the writer has frequently observed fresh sand mounds hundreds of feet from any others, he is inclined to believe that this is the real method pursued. The exceeding care which the "salamander" takes to leave no opening into his subterranean home arises, no doubt, from his horror of snakes. In this respect no woman can surpass him. His antipathies to reptiles are probably the accumulated embodiment of hundreds of centuries of ancestral experience. He is aware that these hereditary enemies of his race are of a very investigating turn of mind, and put in a good deal of spare time when awake in crawling into and exploring any tempting hole they may discover. And so Mr. Geomys, like the sensible fellow that he is, not only takes good care to shut and lock his front gate every time he is compelled to go through it, but he blocks up the whole passageway and does his best to convince trespassers that it is all a mistake to suppose that there ever has been any roadway leading to his underground home. Indeed, it is by taking advantage of this morbid antipathy to intruders and daylight that our little underground dweller is usually caught. If by skillful digging a recently formed burrow is reached, one may be reasonably certain that in from five to ten minutes Mr. "Salamander" will be on hand to see what has happened and to repair damages. A shotgun kept steadily aimed at the opening, and with a quick pull on the trigger the instant the slightest movement in the sand is seen, "fetches" him every time. Another very successful method is to place a strong trap right at the opening into his burrow. In making repairs our "salamander" is in too big a hurry to look very carefully where he steps, and so is quite likely to blunder into the trap. He is always caught, however, by one of his legs, and if left any length of time is quite apt to gnaw off the captive limb and thus make his escape. Spartan bravery or love of freedom surpassing this would be hard to find. The food of _Geomys bursarius_ appears to be exclusively vegetable. Native roots and root stocks, cones and bulbs, together with the root bark of various trees, are eaten by him, and sometimes in a very annoying way. Orange trees are peculiarly liable to his attacks. He gnaws through and around the tap root as near to the surface as he can without disturbing it or in any way calling attention to his work, and not infrequently he continues his depredations until every root of any size is eaten off. This, of course, means the death of the tree. From the "salamander" point of view, however, the greatest food "bonanza" of all is a sweet-potato patch. "A 'possum up a 'simmon tree" or a "pig in clover" is not more alive to the delights and advantages of the situation. He not only eats all he can stuff, but invites his relatives and friends. Nor is this all. He has learned that in autumn sweet potatoes are liable to suddenly disappear, so he "takes time"--and the potatoes--"by the forelock," and packs them away in liberal measure in his burrow for winter use. So well understood are the ways and weaknesses of this underground marauder that any suspicious mound of earth in a sweet-potato field is the signal for an active campaign of extermination, which ends only in the intruder's flight or death. The "side pockets" of the "salamander" have already been referred to. They are undoubtedly a great convenience to their owner in carrying food and possibly other things. The capacity of these cheek pouches is about sufficient to give room for a pigeon's egg. They are, however, quite extensile, and can readily be made to hold three or four times this amount. Indeed, the skin and underlying connective tissue are so elastic that these pockets can readily be turned inside out. It is claimed that the "salamander" employs his handlike fore feet to fill and empty these receptacles, using the right foot for the left pouch, and _vice versa_. A gentleman in Florida recently assured me that by a lucky thrust of a spade he once killed one of these mischievous rodents as he was in the very act of cutting off the roots of an orange tree. The cheek pouches of the culprit were filled with fragments of bark which he had gnawed off, doubtless to be stowed away in his burrow. Why, in a climate where there is almost no winter, where there is very little interruption to vegetable growth and the food supply is practically unlimited, provisions should thus be stored away is somewhat difficult to explain. It is not impossible that it is simply the survival of an ancestral habit acquired during the Glacial period. Or it may be that, like the dog, the "salamander" finds the flavor of old and well-seasoned food more to his taste. All that can be positively affirmed is that this wise little rodent does, occasionally at least, thus _caché_ his food supplies. One of the most curious results of the existence and habits of this elusive little burrowing rodent is the development of a new and peculiar breed of _Felis domestica_, called "salamander" cats. Ordinary tabbys do not understand or admire the ways of _Geomys bursarius_, or, for some other good and sufficient feline reason, do not include him in their game list. The variety of cats in question, which, so far as the author knows, is confined to Florida, appears to have been developed spontaneously and with very little if any human agency, and is noted for its special skill in catching "salamanders," as well as a decided liking for the sport. Any Mrs. Tabby of this breed, especially if she has a family to provide for, is up betimes in the morning. The particular object of her pursuit is a remarkably early riser, and finishes his day's work before most people have begun theirs. So if there is a convenient fence around the grounds she proposes to hunt she mounts it with the first peep of day, and, with a sharp eye to landward, starts on her tour of observation. Any fresh pile of sand is closely scrutinized. The slightest movement there brings her to the mound with a spring, and she is at once crouching behind it; so when Mr. Geomys comes up in a big hurry with his next load of sand he finds somebody to meet him that is in a bigger hurry still, and so the unsuspecting victim is borne off in triumph. An estimable lady of the writer's acquaintance who owned one of these "salamander" cats, with a single juvenile pussy to provide for, kept an accurate account of the number of these rodents which she saw this industrious mother cat bring to her offspring in a single month. The number was thirty, and as the month happened to be February this gave, of course, two more than a "salamander" a day. One other curious observed feature of this new variety of cats is their want of fecundity. The mother tabby seldom has more than one kitten at a birth. The writer once owned a fine female of this breed that scrupulously adhered to the traditional habits of her race. This particular pussy, like the rest of us, had her family troubles. Her one kitten--probably from its mixed parentage--was always inclined to rebel at the "salamander" diet. There was something amusing to a degree and suggestively human in the old cat's methods of discipline. When she had succeeded in catching a salamander she would always first bring it and lay it down before her mistress, to make sure of the praise and the petting. Then, with a motherly "_meow_," she would call her kitten. That frisky little youngster was always quite ready for his breakfast, but showed a decided preference for the "maternal font." Then the old cat would give him a "cuff" that would send him spinning. Then she would take up the "salamander" and put it down before her hopeful offspring with an air that said as plainly as words could do: "There, now! Eat that or go hungry!" Then her mother love would get the better of her and she would go to licking and petting her disobedient baby, and it would usually end in the kitten's having its own way and satisfying its hunger with milk from the "original package." By persistence and the force of example the old cat finally succeeded in accustoming her offspring to what she evidently thought the orthodox diet of her race. The writer is quite well aware of the intrinsic difficulties involved in the spontaneous development of any new variety of cats. Still, such branching of types has occurred in the past, and of course is possible now. When his attention was first called to the matter he was inclined to consider it merely an instance of animal education. A fact that came under his personal observation seems, however, hard to reconcile with this or any theory that does not concede the hereditary transmission of acquired habits and tastes. A kitten of the breed of cats in question was taken when very young and reared nearly a mile away from its mother. When grown it developed the same skill in hunting "salamanders," and the same love for the sport as that for which its mother was celebrated. Dogs, of course, have long been noted for the readiness with which acquired knowledge, habits, and tastes manifest and perpetuate themselves in hereditary forms. The setter, pointer, collie, St. Bernard, and other well-known breeds will occur to everyone as illustrating this psychic plasticity. Doubtless the cat brain is somewhat less impressible, but there would seem to be good reasons for including it among the educably variable types. WHAT MAKES THE TROLLEY CAR GO. BY WILLIAM BAXTER, JR., C. E. III. NOTE.--Figs. 28 and 32 are reproductions of photographs kindly furnished by the General Electric Company, while for the view of car, Fig. 30, we are indebted to Colonel N. H. Heft, chief electrical engineer of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. Although the electric railway has been introduced throughout the civilized world with the most remarkable rapidity, replacing cable as well as horse roads, there has always been a strong opposition to the use of the overhead trolley, and in some places, as, for instance, the city of New York, this opposition has been so strong as to prevent the introduction of the system until some other means of conveying the current to the moving cars was devised. Many attempts have been made to solve this problem, and the patents taken out on such devices can be numbered by the hundred and possibly by the thousand. Inventors in this field, however, have not met with all the encouragement they could desire, owing to the fact that, notwithstanding opposition, the overhead trolley has been permitted in all but about three or four of the larger cities of this country, and the greater portion of those of other countries. The principal well-founded objection that can be raised against the trolley is that it is unsightly and destroys the appearance of the street, but those who are opposed to it also claim that it is dangerous, and that underground or surface systems would not be. As a matter of fact it is not dangerous, and there is nothing on record to show that it is. Many persons have been run over by trolley cars, but this is no fault of the overhead trolley; it is due to the fact that street railroads are permitted to run cars through crowded streets at a speed that is too great for safety. Underground conduit cars running at the same speed would run over just as many people. In accusing the trolley of being dangerous it is sought to prove that the current flowing in the wire can do harm; but the history of the numerous roads in existence shows that, so far as human beings are concerned, the trolley current is not fatal, although it can give a decidedly unpleasant shock, such as one would not care to experience the second time. There is just as great, if not greater, liability of obtaining shocks from underground systems as from the trolley, therefore the only real gain that can be made by their use is in the artistic sense. From a financial point of view no underground system so far devised can compare with the overhead trolley; but if any one should devise anything hereafter that can be constructed at the same expense and will not cost more for maintenance it will undoubtedly find an extensive application. Until such a perfect solution of the problem makes its appearance the field for these devices will be confined to cities like New York and Washington, where the overhead trolley is not permitted. Every system of conductors that dispenses with the overhead wire is called by the layman an underground trolley, but, properly speaking, these systems may be divided into surface and subsurface conductors. Both of these may again be divided into exposed and inclosed conductors, and also into continuous and sectional conductors. Finally, we may designate the various modifications as mechanical, electrical, and magnetic, the mechanical being those that accomplish the result by purely mechanical means, the electrical being those that employ electrical devices, and the magnetic those that depend for their action upon the attraction of magnets. The principal difficulties that the inventors in this field have to contend with are the cost of construction and the effective insulation of conductors. With the overhead trolley the current flows out from the power house to the cars through wires carried on poles, and the poles are themselves good insulators; but to make the work doubly sure the conductors are secured to glass insulators, which are practically perfect. The current returns to the power house through the ground and the track rails. As it is easier for the current to circulate in a short path than in a long one, there is a continual tendency for it to jump from the overhead wire through the insulation to the ground, but this is effectually prevented by the very perfect character of the insulation. When the outgoing and incoming wires are both placed upon or underground the strain upon the insulation is very much increased, for then instead of the two lines being separated by fifteen or twenty feet of pole, which is a very fair insulator, they are separated by only a few inches of earth or perhaps metal, the first of which is a fairly good conductor, while the last is a nearly perfect one. It is evident, therefore, that the insulation proper in an underground or surface system must be of the highest order. If the conduits in which the wires are located could be kept perfectly dry, there would be no difficulty in obtaining insulation that would withstand the strain it is subjected to; but rain in summer and snow in winter will at times cover the tracks and fill the conduits, hence the securing of perfect insulation presents great difficulties. The manner in which inventors have sought to surmount the obstacles can be made clear by the aid of a few illustrations of typical designs. [Illustration: FIG. 25.--UNDERGROUND CONDUIT WITH PROTECTING SHIELD FOR THE CONDUCTOR.] Fig. 25 shows one of the forms of a class of underground conduits belonging to the inclosed conductor type. The track rails are supported upon the outer ends of large castings, _F F_, commonly called yokes. These are made of such size that the portion below the opening which incloses the conduit may be of sufficient depth to afford the requisite strength to properly support the track. The conductor that carries the current is located at _f_ and is insulated from the casing _j_, which forms the lower half of the conduit, by the stands _g_. From the car a bar, _P_, which is called a plow, projects downward through the slot between the rails, _k k_, and on its end is spread out into a fork, _d_, which carries a pulley, _e_. When this pulley is in contact with the conductor _f_ the current passes through the plow _P_ to the motors upon the car, and thence to the track rails and back to the power house. As the yokes _F F_ and the conduit casing _j_ are made of iron and are in metallic connection with the track rails, it is evident that if the conduits should fill with water to the depth of the wire _f_ the current would pass directly to the rails, and thus would avoid the longer path through the motors. To prevent this occurrence, the sides of the conduit are inclosed with the sheet-iron covers _c c_, which nominally are in the position shown by the dotted lines _i i_. The plow is also provided with the arms _b b_, upon the ends of which are mounted small wheels _a a_, and these run upon tracks attached to the covers _c c_. As is shown in the figure, the wheels _a a_, running upon the tracks attached to the covers _c c_, cause the latter to spread out to the position in which they are shown. This spreading, as can be readily understood, only takes place for a short distance ahead and behind the plow, but at all other parts of the conduit the sides assume the position _i i_, and thus close the conduit and exclude the water. It can be easily seen that some difficulty would be encountered in making a tight joint at _h h_, and also that the opening and closing of the sides might not operate as perfectly in practice as upon paper, but it does not follow from these facts that the design is not practical; it simply illustrates that there are many minor difficulties to be overcome in order that complete success may be attained. Many designs operating upon this principle have been patented, and in some of them a great amount of ingenuity is displayed. [Illustration: FIG. 26.--UNDERGROUND CONDUIT WITH INCLOSED CONDUCTOR.] Fig. 26 illustrates another type of inclosed conductor which at a first glance appears to be far superior to that just described, but upon closer investigation it is found to be not wholly free from objections that are difficult to overcome. The yoke _F F_, as in the design just described, is made wide enough to support upon its outer ends the track rails _R R_, and is cut away in the middle to an outline conforming with the shape of the conduit. The conductor that carries the current is located at _d_, being supported by the stands _e_. An elastic tube _f_ is provided, which is water-tight and thus excludes moisture from its interior, within which the conductor _d_ is located. On the top of tube _f_ a flexible rail _b_ is secured, and this connects with studs _c_, which are within the tube, as clearly shown in the drawing, and so situated that they may be forced down into contact with _d_. Normally these studs are separated from _d_, but when the car comes along, the wheel _a_, mounted upon the end of plow _P_, flattens the tube _f_ and thus forces one or more of the studs _c_ into contact with _d_. The distance between the studs _c_ is such that at least two will always be in contact with _d_, thus insuring a continuous electrical connection with the motors so long as the plow is depressed. The first impression upon looking at this design would be that it is entirely free from objections; for if we assume that the tube _f_ is made of rubber, we can see it in our mind's eye springing up after the plow passes by and thus separating the contacts _c_ from _d_, and at the same time yielding freely to the pressure of the wheel _a_. All of this is true, but rubber is not very durable when under such exposed conditions, and to maintain a length of several miles of it in a perfect state for even two or three years could not reasonably be expected; and if it became necessary to renew the tube oftener than this the cost of maintenance would be entirely too great. There is another objection, however, which is more serious, and that is that the conduit will gradually fill up with dirt, and this pressing against the rubber tube would force it out of shape, and thus cause the contacts _c_ to bear permanently upon _d_, or else to become so far displaced that they would not touch it when depressed by the plow. As the rubber tube can not be depended upon, inventors have sought to improve the construction by using sheet steel and making the tube flatter and much wider, so that a section of it would present an outline much resembling an elliptic carriage spring. Such a construction will meet the requirements as to strength and the retention of the contacts _c_ in their proper position; but steel expands when warm and contracts when cooled, therefore a long tube would be stretched so much in winter that it might pull apart, while in summer it would be compressed and tend to buckle up and thus be forced out of place. These difficulties can be overcome by providing expansion joints at suitable intervals, so that they are not necessarily proof of the impracticability of devices based upon the principles involved in this design; they simply serve to forcibly bring to mind the fact that the path of the inventor of underground systems is not strewn with roses, no matter in what direction he may turn to find a solution of the problem. [Illustration: FIG. 27.--UNDERGROUND CONDUIT WITH EXPOSED CONDUCTORS.] The object in the designs Figs. 25 and 26 is to shield the conductor so that it will remain dry should the conduit be filled or partially filled with water. If water could be excluded from the conduit, the casing _j c c_, in the first figure, and the tube _f_, in the second one, would not be required, for there is no difficulty in providing an insulating support that will hold the conductor firmly in place and at the same time prevent the escape of the current; but as soon as moisture collects upon the surfaces of the insulating supports it acts as a conductor, and thus renders the insulation of little value. If water runs into the conduit in such quantities as to come in contact with the conductor, then the effect of the insulation is entirely destroyed; the aim of the inventors, therefore, is to provide means for preventing the accumulation of water or moisture around the conducting wire. It can be readily seen that the shorter the conductor the easier it is to protect it, and this fact has given rise to the development of a great number of designs classified as sectional conductors. In these, two conductors are used, one of which is continuous and so situated and insulated that it can not under any conditions be reached by either moisture or water. The other conductor is made in lengths that vary all the way from fifteen to two or three hundred feet. Normally, these short sections are not connected with the circuit--they are dead, as it is called--but when the car comes along, the plow, by acting upon suitable mechanism, establishes a connection between the continuous conductor and the portion of the sectional conductor that is directly under it, and in this way the current passes to the car. As soon as the car passes beyond a section of the sectional conductor, the connection between it and the continuous wire is broken automatically. Some of these arrangements depend upon mechanical devices, such as levers that are struck by the plow and thereby move a switch that closes a connection between the section and the continuous conductor, but in most instances the switch is operated by a magnet, which may be carried by the car or may be arranged so as to be energized as the car approaches it. Designs of this last type come under the head of electrically operated sectional conductor systems. There are other arrangements in which a magnet carried by the car attracts iron levers suitably disposed along the conduit, and these levers close switches that connect the section of conductor under the car with the continuous one. As the levers are actuated by the magnet, they only hold the switch closed while the latter passes over them; thus the electrical connection is made and broken as the car moves along. [Illustration: FIG. 28.--VIEW OF STREET RAILWAY LINES IN WASHINGTON OPERATED BY UNDERGROUND CONDUCTOR OF TYPE SHOWN IN FIG. 27.] Most of the designs in which sectional conductors are used can be placed much nearer to the surface of the street than the types illustrated in Figs. 25 and 26, and this is a decided advantage, as it greatly reduces the cost of construction. Any system that requires an underground conduit, with the yokes _F F_ to support the track, can only be used by roads upon which the traffic is very great, for the cost of construction would be such as to prohibit its use under any other conditions, no matter how successful its operation might be. For small roads with moderate traffic the question of first cost is of paramount importance, and the only system that can offer a satisfactory solution of the problem for these is one that does not require an underground conduit. [Illustration: FIG. 29.--CROSS-SECTION OF RAILWAY TRACK PROVIDED WITH THIRD-RAIL CONDUCTOR.] Although many patents have been taken out for systems similar to those described in the foregoing, nothing has been done practically with any of them except in an experimental way. Some are in operation on small roads in out-of-the-way places, being intended principally to illustrate the practicability of the system and thus assist in promoting its introduction elsewhere, but the system that has been adopted in a commercial way is one in which no attempt is made to shield the conductor from moisture and water, and for its successful operation dependence is placed entirely upon the proper drainage of the conduit. This system is well illustrated in Fig. 27. The plow _P_ carries upon its end two brushes, _b b_, which are insulated from each other. These brushes rub against the conductors _a a_, which are made of bars of channel iron and are well insulated from the yokes _F F_ and the conduit casing to which they are attached by means of the supports _c c_. In the construction shown in the figure the current comes from the generator through one of the _a_ bars and returns through the other, but both bars can be used to conduct the current from the generator, in which case the return can be effected through the track rails, just as in the designs already considered. If both the bars _a a_ are used to convey the current from the power house the insulation between the brushes _b b_ is not required. To avoid the accumulation of water in the conduit the drain _G_ is provided with outlets _d_, located at suitable points. Although this system is the simplest that can be devised for use in streets or public highways its construction is very costly, so much so that it can only be used in cities where the traffic is so great as to require the running of cars on short headway; and, furthermore, it can not be operated with any degree of success except in municipalities where there is a good sewage system. During the summer months it is liable to be more or less impaired by heavy showers, but the trouble in such cases is only temporary. In winter time snowstorms are liable to affect it in the same way, especially if, after a heavy fall, a warm wave comes along and produces a rapid thaw. From the fact that no attempt whatever is made to protect the conductors, one would naturally suppose that every time there is a rain the road would be compelled to shut down; for, as the slot through which the plow travels is open, water can enter the conduit with the greatest freedom, and, in trickling down the sides, would be caught to some extent upon the brackets _c c_, and thus make its way over to the channel bars _a a_, and thereby destroy the insulation. Practice, however, shows that this action does not take place, at least not so often as to produce any serious trouble. The roads that are operated by electricity in New York, and also the lines of the Capital Traction Company, of Washington, D. C., employ this system, and they have been in operation a sufficient length of time to fully demonstrate that the difficulties actually developed by the action of the elements are not of a formidable character. On one occasion the Sixth Avenue road, in New York, was compelled to stop its cars for a short time just after a severe snowstorm, but the failure was not due to impairment of the insulation, according to the statements of the officials of the company, but to the fact that the melted snow froze upon the track and caused the wheels to slip around without sending the car ahead. The fact that other roads in New York, belonging to the same company, are being equipped with the system, is proof that, upon the whole, its practical operation is regarded as satisfactory; but it is very evident that it is not the final solution of the problem. A system to be a decided success must cost very little more than the ordinary overhead trolley, and its construction must be such that it will not easily get out of order. If it is not inexpensive it will not come into use except in places where the authorities will not permit the overhead wires. A surface or underground system ought to be more durable than the overhead, as the wires are not liable to be injured by high winds or the accumulation of ice and snow; and, furthermore, as the conductors are below the ground the danger of burning out motors and generators by lightning would be eliminated, and this is a serious matter with all trolley roads, especially in cities. Country roads do not suffer so much from lightning, because when there is a heavy thunderstorm the generators are stopped and the trolley poles are pulled away from the wire, the cars remaining stalled on the track until the storm passes over. This course can not be pursued by city roads, for the passengers feel that, lightning or no lightning, they must reach their destination, therefore the cars must continue to run and take their chances. Lightning, however, does not strike trolley lines as often in cities as in the open country, owing to the fact that there are so many iron buildings and roofs to attract it in other directions. [Illustration: FIG. 30.--VIEW OF A SECTION OF THE NEW YORK, NEW HAVEN AND HARTFORD RAILROAD, EQUIPPED WITH THE THIRD-RAIL SYSTEM.] Fig. 28 shows the appearance of the street surface when an underground system such as is illustrated in Fig. 27 is used. This figure is a photograph of the Capital Traction Company's lines in Washington. After looking at this picture one can not deny that the appearance of the streets of a city is greatly improved when the overhead wires are removed, but underground systems which require a plow to run in a groove are not without objection, for the groove forms a dangerous trap into which the narrow-tired wheels of light wagons can readily drop, and the toes and heels of horseshoes can be caught. Thus, unless the slot can be dispensed with the greater beauty overhead is obtained at the expense of increased danger on the street surface. There are quite a number of underground conductor systems in which the slot is not used, the current being conveyed to the car by contact made with plates set at suitable intervals between or along the sides of the tracks, and on a level with the street surface. Many of these arrangements appear to be quite practical, but none of them can attract the attention of railroad managers unless it can be constructed at a reasonable cost. [Illustration: FIG. 31.--CROSS-SECTION OF RAILWAY TRACK, SHOWING A MODIFICATION OF THE THIRD-RAIL SYSTEM.] About two years ago the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad published a report of the performance of a branch line that was equipped with electric motors, the current being conveyed to them by means of a third rail. Some of the sensational dailies at once took the matter up and heralded the third rail to the public as something entirely new and sure to supersede the trolley. Now, as a matter of fact, the third rail is one of the oldest arrangements that have been used, and was in daily operation in Baltimore in 1886. It is a very cheap system and well adapted to roads owning the right of way or running upon elevated tracks, but could not be used on public highways or streets. The third-rail system in its simplest form is shown in Fig. 29, which represents a section through the roadbed. The log _A_ represents a tie or sleeper, and _c c_ are the track rails, while _b_ is the third rail through which the current passes to the motors. Between the rail _b_ and the tie _A_ is placed a piece of insulating material, _a_, of such dimensions as may be necessary. If the track is high above the surrounding ground, so as to not be submerged when there is a heavy fall of rain, _a_ may be thin, but otherwise it must be of sufficient thickness to raise the rail above the high-water mark. The car is provided with a wheel or brush to bear upon the rail _b_. This is the construction used upon the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, as can be seen from Fig. 30, which is a photograph of a section of the road. The third rail, it will be seen, is raised but slightly from the ties, just about as shown in Fig. 29. One objection to this construction is that persons and animals can receive shocks by touching the center rail and one of the side ones at the same time, as, for example, by standing with one foot on each. Such shocks would not prove fatal to men, as the currents used for railway work are not of a sufficiently high electro-motive force to produce death, but the shock is nevertheless very severe. Horses and cattle would be killed outright, as these animals are not able to withstand as strong a shock as human beings. To render the third-rail system safer, and also to improve the insulation of the conducting rail, the construction illustrated in Fig. 31 has been devised. The only difference between it and Fig. 29 is that the rail _b_, instead of resting upon the ties between the tracks, is carried upon a side support _c c_ and is housed in with boards _a a_. To take the current from it a wheel is mounted upon a shaft projecting from the side of the car truck. [Illustration: FIG. 32--ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE ON THE BUFFALO AND LOCKPORT RAILWAY.] From the foregoing brief description of the essential features of the several systems devised for conveying current to the moving car by means of conductors placed underground or upon the surface, it can be seen that while the result can be accomplished in many ways, and is actually accomplished in a number of instances, nothing has been brought forward so far that is as free from objection as the simple trolley, if we disregard the unsightliness of the latter. It is this unsightliness that has created a demand for something else, but the substitutes, while capable of doing the work, are far more costly and can not be said to be as reliable under all conditions of weather. The sphere of action of the electric-railway motor is not confined to street railways or suburban transit, but extends to the legitimate domain of the steam locomotive. In many places electric locomotives are used to move freight trains made up of cars of the largest capacity, this same work having been done formerly by steam locomotives. In the city of Baltimore, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad uses electric locomotives, of greater capacity than any steam locomotives so far made, to draw trains through the tunnel that passes under the city. The general appearance of an electric locomotive can be judged from Fig. 32, which shows an engine of average size at the head of a long freight train. MM. Bertaux and G. Yver are quoted, in _La Nature_, as relating in their travels in Italy that between Benevento and Foggia, where the railway passes through a tract of wheat fields, a falcon was observed closely accompanying the train. He would graze the windows, fly over the roofs of the cars and turn, and keep constantly dashing down to the ground by the side of the track. A habitual traveler on the road remarked that he had observed this habit of the bird several times a week. The crafty hawk had observed that the eddy made by the train as it rushed through the air overcame the small birds and made them an easy prey, and it had learned to take advantage of the fact. It was also remarked that this particular train, which was the "fast train," was the only one the bird thus pursued. A SURVIVAL OF MEDIÆVAL CREDULITY. BY PROFESSOR E. P. EVANS. One of the crassest and most impudent and yet most successful frauds of modern times is that recently practiced by Leo Taxil and his associates on the papal hierarchy in their pretended exposures of the Freemasons and the Satanic rites performed by this secret fraternity. On April 20, 1884, Leo XIII issued an encyclical letter in which he divides the human race "into two diverse and adverse classes" (_in partes duas diversas adversasque_): "the kingdom of God on earth--namely, the true Church of Jesus Christ"--and "the realm of Satan." All who are not members of the former belong to the latter, so that there is no alternative between being a good Catholic or a worshiper of the devil. His Holiness then proceeds to show that the headquarters of Satanism are the lodges of the Freemasons, a fact, he adds, fully recognized by his predecessors, who have never ceased to expose and denounce the diabolical character and flagitious aims of these archenemies of the Christian faith. The detailed description of the organization of this order, its devilish purposes, and the horrible crimes committed in order to accomplish them are very queer reading in an official document emanating from an infallible ecclesiastical authority at the close of the nineteenth century. On August 20, 1894, Leo XIII published a decree of the Inquisition putting under ban "Odd Fellows, Sons of Temperance, and Knights of Pythias" as "synagogues of Satan," and excluding them from the sacraments of the Church. It is no wonder that such an exhibition of credulity, which excited the astonishment of many a Romanist and made all intelligent and unprejudiced persons smile and shrug their shoulders, should have suggested to an arrant wag and incorrigible player of practical jokes like Leo Taxil (pseudonym of Gabriel Jogand) the idea of appealing to this peculiar passion on a grand scale and seeing to what extent the "mother Church" could be led into fraud, as Milton says, like "Eve, our credulous mother." In tracing the development of this audacious plot through all its stages and perceiving by what silly tales and transparent deceptions the Holy Father permitted himself to be duped, one can hardly refrain from exclaiming, in the words of Ben Jonson: "Had you no quirk To avoid gullage, sir, by such a creature?" Leo Taxil was born at Marseilles on March 21, 1854, and was therefore thirty years of age when he entered upon this career of intrigue and mystification. From his childhood he had been educated in strictly Roman Catholic schools, and everything was done by his pious parents and teachers to render him sound in the faith. Long before arriving at man's estate he had thrown off these influences and cast in his lot with unbelievers, although he continued to go to mass, confession, and communion. While a pupil in the Catholic College of St. Louis, at Marseilles, he was strongly attracted to the political views of the radical party as set forth in Rochefort's _Lanterne_, and soon began to write for the press; in 1871 he joined the editorial staff of _Egalité_, and published for two years a humoristic journal--_La Marotte_ (Fool's Bauble). It is not necessary to give a detailed sketch of this man's life. Suffice it to say that he was violently anticlerical, and was repeatedly fined and imprisoned for articles insulting to the Church and to ecclesiastical dignitaries. On December 29, 1881, at Montpellier, he was condemned to pay a fine of sixty-five thousand francs for publishing a book entitled The Secret Amours of Pius IX. He appealed from this decision, and, after repeated efforts, succeeded in having the indictment quashed. A new edition appeared in 1885, and was announced by large placards, in the center of which was a medallion of the Pope's head, encircled with the heads of a bevy of beautiful women, forming, according to the author, a fitting halo for his Holiness. We may add that the sensational revelations contained in this book, as well as in the Scandalous History of the Orléans and similar works, are for the most part mere figments of the imagination recorded as facts, for the purpose of mystifying a credulous public. In 1880 he founded a "Society of Freethinkers," which, with its numerous branches, numbered in a few years about seventeen thousand members. The remarkable success of this movement was due in a great measure to the energy with which he advocated it in the columns of the _République Anti-Clericale_, of which he was the editor. Perhaps the most comical episode in his strange career is his pretended repentance, resulting in the return of this black sheep to the fold of the Catholic Church. In his Confessions the arrant renegade relates how, on April 3, 1885 (April 1st would have been a more appropriate date), while engaged in writing a book on Joan of Arc designed to excite animosity against the clergy, his fell purpose was suddenly shaken by strong compunctions, and soon a fearful agitation convulsed his whole being. His description of his contrition and self-reproaches is quite sensational and thrilling, and shows rare talent as an actor, if we only bear in mind that the whole thing was a farce. "I burst into sobs. 'Pardon me, O God!' I cried out in a voice choked with tears. 'Pardon my many blasphemies! Pardon all the evil I have wrought!' I passed the night in prayer, and resolved on the next day to seek absolution for my sins." He retired from the editorship of the _République Anti-Clericale_, and handed in his resignation at a meeting of the "Anti-Clerical League," of which he was the founder and hitherto the most active member, when he had the satisfaction of being denounced by the presiding officer as a comedian and scoundrel. No one of his former colleagues believed in his sincerity, and yet every one was puzzled to understand the strategic purpose of this retrograde movement. The general impression was that he had been bribed. "You can't fool us by your abjuration!" they exclaimed. "The fact is, you have received a large sum of money from the Vatican." He does not seem to have attempted to refute these charges, nor did he permit them to divert him from the execution of his deep-laid plot. With hypocritical humility, he made full confession to the papal nuncio in Paris, Monsignore Di Rende, who, after subjecting him to several days' penance, embraced him with joy and released him from all excommunications and ecclesiastical censures. Taxil now began to issue his Complete Revelations concerning Freemasonry, in four volumes, the ostensible object of which was to expose the secret and sacrilegious rites of this order as an organized system of devil-worship, thus confirming by the testimony of an eyewitness the assertions of the Popes, and proving that their decrees and decisions on this point had been bulls in the ecclesiastical and not in the Irish sense of the term. This work, although a mere tissue of fabrications, was greeted by the Catholic press and priesthood with exultation, as an authentic narration containing positive and irrefutable proofs of the diabolic character of the Masonic mysteries. The members of this fraternity, says Taxil, regard the God of the Catholics as an evil principle--a crafty, jealous, and cruel genius, a supernal tyrant, and archenemy of human happiness. Opposed to him is Lucifer, the good genius, the perennial source of virtue and wisdom, the spirit of freedom, and the friend of mankind. For this reason, in the high-grade lodges Lucifer, the reputed father of Cain, Canaan, and Hiram, is adored, under different names indicative of the Supreme Being, as the God of Nature, and the great architect of the universe. In short, while modern freethinking is atheistic and begets a skepticism which, even when not denying God, does not care for him, Freemasonry is essentially a Satanic cult. These words give the sum and substance of the supposititious disclosures which excited such intense joy in the clerical camp. In 1887, when Taxil was received in solemn audience by Leo XIII, "My son," asked the Pope, "what dost thou desire?" "Holy Father, to die this moment at thy feet were for me the highest bliss," replied the kneeling penitent. "Not so," was the benignant response of the successor of St. Peter; "thy life is still very useful in combats for the faith." His Holiness then pointed to Taxil's writings on the shelves of his library, declaring that he had read them all through with extreme satisfaction, and encouraged him to continue his exposures of these satellites of Satan and their abominations. Taxil left the Vatican with the papal benediction and with the firm conviction that he could devise no better means of currying favor with the Apostolic See than by inventing tales about the homage paid by the Freemasons to the devil, and determined to work this rich vein to its utmost capacity. He also came to the conclusion that he could imagine nothing so absurd that it would not be received in Catholic circles as authentic and indorsed by infallible authority. His work had an immense pecuniary success, and thus attained the chief object which he had in view. More than one hundred thousand copies of the original French edition were sold, and it was translated into English, German, Italian, and Spanish. This result is not so surprising, if we remember that nearly all the bishops and other clergy of the Catholic Church acted as voluntary and extremely zealous agents for the diffusion of these Revelations, which they seemed to regard as a new apocalypse designed to unveil the mysteries of Babylon and disclose the present doings of Satan and dominion of antichrist. Of the utterly apocryphal character of the Revelations they do not appear to have entertained the slightest suspicion, although the hoax was clearly perceptible to every unprejudiced mind. The German translation by the Jesuit Father Gruber, which appeared at Freiburg, in Switzerland, and at Paderborn, in Westphalia, omitted the volume entitled The Masonic Sisters, on account of the indecency of its contents, although accepted as true and deemed especially damaging to the Masonic fraternity. However desirable it might be to tear away the mask of philanthropy from the face of Freemasonry and let the world see its devilish features, it was thought best not to outrage the moral sense of the community by uncovering "the filthiness of the hellish crew." In 1892 Taxil's coadjutor, Dr. Bataille (a pseudonym of Dr. Karl Hacks, a German from the Rhineland), began to issue a serial publication, entitled The Devil in the Nineteenth Century, purporting to embody the results of his observations as ship's surgeon during his travels in various countries, and especially in the Orient, where he had opportunities of studying Satanism in its diverse manifestations. He begins by referring to the encyclical letter _Humanum genus_, already cited, in which Leo XIII divides the human race into worshipers of God and worshipers of Satan, and then proceeds to adduce facts proving the correctness of this classification. It is, in reality, a bold burlesque of the papal circular, as, indeed, it was intended to be, and would doubtless have been laughed at for a time as a clever persiflage, if the dignitaries of the Church had not taken it seriously, as they were expected to do. Dr. Hacks confessed to an "interviewer," in 1897, that no sooner had he read the pontifical circular in question than he saw in it "a rare opportunity to coin money out of the crass credulity and boundless stupidity of the Catholics. It needed only a Jules Verne to clothe these extravagant fancies in an attractive garb. I resolved to play the part of this Jules Verne. Strangely enough, the same idea occurred to others. I therefore joined forces with Leo Taxil and a few friends, and began to publish The Devil in the Nineteenth Century, the success of which is well known.... I had traversed many lands and got up marvelous stories, the scenes of which were laid in remote regions, which I was sure no one would visit in order to test the truth of my assertions." Besides, he counted on the silliness of the persons with whom he had to deal, and felt certain that if he should tell them he had been fooling them they would not believe him, but would remain convinced that all his inventions were strictly true. He could not conceive of a body of ecclesiastics as ready to discard a belief which served their turn, however evident its absurdity might be to other minds. "Sometimes I fabricated the most incredible stories, as, for example, that of the serpent inditing prophecies with its tail on the back of Sophia Walder, or that of the demon, who, in order to marry a Freemason, transformed himself into a young lady, and played the piano evenings in the form of a crocodile. My colleagues were aghast, and exclaimed, 'You'll spoil the whole joke with your nonsense.' 'Bah!' I replied. 'Let me be, and you will see!'" And they did see how eagerly such gross falsehoods were accepted as positive facts. Protestants without exception are denounced as godless apostates. Every Lutheran is a Luciferian in disguise. Singapore, he says, like every British colony, is settled by knaves, footpads, and all sorts of criminals. The Protestant Englishman is, at the bottom, an embodiment of scoundrelism coupled with Satanism. There is a strangely infernal element in the social life at Singapore. "The British matrons and even the maidens are incarnations of vice and godlessness. The young English woman dedicates all her charms and intelligence to the service of Satan, whose apostle and agent she is; cursed by God, she is the dearly beloved paramour of Lucifer; a woman only in name, she is in fact absolutely infernal--an actual deviless." Hacks asserts that in a Presbyterian church at Singapore he discovered a secret tabernacle for the worship of Satan. The pastor opened the door, and there was a Baphomet, with all the Palladistic (Satanic) apparatus--goblet, host, and dagger--standing before his eyes. Albert Pike, Grand Master of the Freemasons in Charleston, S. C., is called the "Satanic Pope," and is said to have a telephone invented and operated by devils, whereby instantaneous communication is possible between the seven principal directorates at Charleston, Rome, Berlin, Washington, Montevideo, Naples, and Calcutta. He has also a magic bracelet, by means of which he can summon Lucifer at any moment. "One day Satan took Pike gently in his arms and made a trip with him to Sirius, traversing the whole distance in a few minutes. After exploring the fixed star, he was brought back safe and sound to his room in Washington." Whether he found the star as hot and scorching as its name implies is not stated. Hacks discovered, under the cliffs of Gibraltar, mysterious caverns with laboratories in which devils prepared microbes for generating and diffusing epidemics. He was politely received by Tubal-Cain, the director of the establishment, who addressed him in pure Parisian French, from which we may infer that this is the language of the lower regions. On his departure Hacks was presented with a small vial, the contents of which would suffice to produce a fearful epidemic of cholera. No less an authority than Professor Bautz, of the Prussian Academy at Münster, tells us that the volcanoes are the flues of hell, and it was probably this contribution to the topography of Tartarus that led Hacks to look for the devil's workshop in the cavities of mountains, which, however, being used for infernal purposes, would hardly be what Milton calls "umbrageous grots and caves of cool recess."[8] The following may be cited as a specimen of the manner in which historical events were perverted by Hacks to subserve his purpose: Before the capture of Rome by the Italian troops in 1870, a secret meeting of Freemasons was held in Milan, at which Riboli, Cucchi, and General Cadorna were present, and the revolutionary deliberations were rendered piquant by dreadful blasphemies. Thus General Cadorna, a renegade priest, parodied the consecration of the host with a piece of bread, which he finally threw into the fire with the words, "In honor of Lucifer!" Thereupon Lucifer rose up in person through the floor, gazed benignantly for a moment on his faithful followers, and said, "The moment is come for firing the third salvo of cannon." A month later General Cadorna entered Rome through the breach of the Porta Via. In Luciferian lingo, the first salvo was the Reformation and the second the French Revolution, while the third victory of Satan was the overthrow of the Pope's temporal power. Hacks relates that in Freiburg, Switzerland, there was a Masonic temple of Satan hewn in a rock and provided with altars and all the paraphernalia of this cult. There men and women assembled in the costume worn by our first parents before the fall. Attached to the lodge was a brothel, the scene of the most disgusting debaucheries. One altar, in the form of a triangle with an image of the demon Baphomet, was used for stabbing the body of Christ, in the form of consecrated wafers, with a dagger. At this altar, too, was said the so-called "black mass," an invention of the Grand Master Holebrook and Albert Pike, of Charleston. During this service hymns were sung to Satan. The consecrated wafers were procured by Miss Lucia Claraz, of Freiburg, who stole them while pretending to partake of the communion, and passed the night before committing the theft in the wildest orgies. This incredibly foolish story was published in the _Moniteur de Rome_, against which Miss Claraz, a lady "piously inclined and morally irreproachable," according to the testimony of the Bishop of Freiburg, brought suit for defamation. The court sentenced the editor, Monsignore Vöglin, to a fine of twenty-five thousand lire and four years' imprisonment. These examples suffice to show the wretched stuff which Hacks hashed up for the edification of the clerical and the entertainment of the carnal-minded public. Even the silly statement that he saw a gigantic tree bow down before Sophia Walder, the predestined great-grandmother of antichrist, and present her with a bouquet, did not shake the faith of the true believers. The editor of the _Revue Mensuelle_ declared, in 1894, that Dr. Bataille had really made all these discoveries on his travels, and that his honesty and sincerity were beyond question. This was the attitude of the whole clerical press almost without exception, as well as of abbots, bishops, cardinals, and the highest dignitaries of the Church. Even as late as July, 1897, when the imposture had been exposed and confessed, a Parisian Catholic journal continued to regard "the mystification as more apparent than actual, and the documents adduced as chiefly authentic"; so difficult is it for minds thus constituted, with the rational faculties dwarfed and stunted by being constantly kept in the leading strings of credulity, to recognize the falsity of what they wish or are told to believe. Another of Taxil's confederates was Domenico Margiotta, according to his own account a native of Palmi, in southern Italy, and professor of literature and philosophy. His principal work, Adriano Lemmi, Supreme Head of the Freemasons, published in French in 1894, gives a long list of his titles, designed to impress the public by indicating his high position in the Masonic order. Hacks calls him a "Member of the Sovereign Sanctuary of the Oriental Rite of Memphis and Mizraim," a purely fictitious designation. This cunning device was also crowned with complete success, and caused the fabricated disclosures to be hailed with enthusiasm. Here, exclaimed the clerical journals, we have "not an apprentice or novice like Taxil, but one of the highest dignitaries of universal Freemasonry and Luciferianism, who is initiated and instructed in all its mysteries and occult observances," being apparently ignorant of the fact that Taxil was in the main the real author of the book. One of the most common accusations brought against the Freemasons is that of desecrating the host by stabbing it with a dagger. A German Catholic journal, The Pelican,[9] affirms that not only Masonic devil worshipers, but also Jews, infidels, and heretics in general commit this sacrilege in order to show their deadly hatred of Christianity. In proof of this charge, the following "historical fact" is published in the number for July, 1897: Several consecrated wafers were once stolen by Jews from a church at Langenses, in Silesia, and, after being pierced through with knives, were hidden in the forest. They were discovered by a Polish nobleman, whose four horses, as he was driving by, suddenly kneeled down and refused to go on, although he beat them with his whip. He then descended from the carriage, and soon found the wafers covered with blood. They were carried back with solemn ceremony to the church, which became a place of pilgrimage with a wonder-working pyx. What a hardened and hopeless skeptic a man must be, who is not convinced by conclusive evidence of this kind, when even horses bear witness to the truth by their genuflections! Still more sensational was the part played in this spicy comedy by Miss Diana Vaughan, whom Taxil introduced to the public as a descendant of the Rosicrucian alchemist and Oxford professor Thomas Vaughan, and who was said to have in her possession a copy of the written pact with Satan, signed by her ancestor on March 25, 1645. The young lady claimed to have been born in Paris on February 29, 1874. The fact that there was no February 29th in the year 1874 would make this date an impossible natal day for ordinary mortals, but a person with Luciferian blood in her veins would naturally take no note of the divisions of time as recorded in human calendars; for, according to Taxil, her forbear was the goddess Astarte, who appeared to Thomas Vaughan on a summer night in 1646, while he was sojourning among the American Indians, in all her marvelous beauty, bringing with her a bed surrounded with flames and attended by little demons bearing flowers. She approached Vaughan and put a wedding ring on his finger, and eleven days later gave birth to a daughter named Diana, from whom the Miss Diana Vaughan in question traced her descent. Several instances of similar commerce with incarnate demons are said to have occurred in the history of her family, so that she inherited a strong Satanic taint; even her own mother was guilty of the same criminal conduct. Her inherited qualities were carefully fostered by education, inasmuch as she was brought up by her father and uncle on strictly Luciferian principles. One day, when her instructors were praising Cain and Judas as ideals of excellence, she expressed some doubt of the superior worthiness of the fratricide and venal traitor. This dangerous unbelief was attributed to angelical possession, and it was soon ascertained that the archangel Raphael was the cause of the lapse from Luciferianism. Recourse was had to exorcism, the whole process of which, as described by Taxil, is a clever travesty of the ceremonial prescribed by the Romish Church for the expulsion of evil spirits. The dance performed by the father and uncle on this occasion consisted of the same saltatory movements that are executed by the "procession of jumpers" every year at the grave of St. Willibord, in Echternach, Luxemburg.[10] Devil's ointment took the place of holy oil, and the exorcism ended with the sacrifice of a black hen; thereupon "Raphael" went out of her, and simultaneously with his exit all the panes of glass in the house were broken into fragments and fell to the ground with a tremendous crash. The marvel is that bishops and priests accepted this ridiculous story as an authentic and edifying narration, instead of rejecting it with horror and disgust as a palpable burlesque of their own approved methods of casting out demons, and particularly of the _Exorcismus in Satanam et Angelos Apostatas_, composed by Leo XIII and issued by him November 19, 1890. It is evident that Taxil had this document in his eye, and intended to hold it up to derision; to calm the fears of the simple-minded, who were puzzled and perplexed by the striking resemblance of diabolic orgies to divine ordinances, he explained it on the general principle that "Satan is the ape of God." After being freed from the influence of Raphael, Diana was placed under the tutelage of Asmodeus, who, as her guardian devil, watched over her, shielding her from bodily harm and helping her to resist the wiles of angels. One day when she was wandering in the woods she was attacked by negroes, but Asmodeus came to her rescue, and bore her safely to her home through the air. Another time he caught her mettlesome courser by the bridle as he was running away, and when the chief of Garibaldi's staff, Bordone, insulted her, Asmodeus twisted his neck so that his face looked backward. For three weeks he was obliged to take a retrospective view of life and of his own conduct, when Diana, in the kindness of her heart, set his head right again. On these occasions the tutelar demon usually appeared in the form of a fine young gentleman, and emitted an aroma of balsam, which seems to have been as inseparable from him as is the scent of musk from a modern dude or modish dame. He spoke of her as his bride, and often took her on pleasure trips to paradise, purgatory, and other remote regions; once when she was greatly depressed, because her Luciferian rival, Sophia Walder, had got the better of her, he consoled her by making an excursion with her to Mars, where they rode on Schiaparelli's canals, sailed on the Sea of the Sirens, and strolled like pygmies among the gigantic inhabitants of that planet. [_To be concluded._] Contrary to the common supposition that the astronomy of the ancients was based exclusively on the geocentric hypothesis, Mr. G. H. Bryan says in Nature: "Schiaparelli has shown that Heraclitus Ponticus, a disciple of Plato, had already accepted the theory that the sun is the center of the orbit of the planets, while the earth is the center of the universe and of the lunar and solar rotations--a theory substantially that of Tycho." "RIBBON LIGHTNING." BY ORANGE COOK. In the summer of 1898, W. H. Osborne, of Chardon, Ohio, an amateur photographer of some experience, secured the accompanying photograph of a lightning flash which seemed to us to show certain peculiarities that entitle it to a public notice and a permanent record. The picture shows three flashes, of which the distant and faint one at the right and the bright one at the left were simultaneous, while the center one occurred a few seconds earlier. Nothing about the thunder that followed the last and bright flash suggested that it was specially near, but an examination of the picture when developed and a comparison with the features of the landscape showed that it had come to earth about fifteen rods from the place where Mr. Osborne stood with his camera. Mr. Osborne and myself carefully searched the locality indicated, but failed to find even the slightest mark caused by the discharge upon any object or in the earth. [Illustration] Measurements at this place give the width of the ribbon of light, if it stood at right angles with the line of sight, about eight feet. This ribbon of light is seen to consist of six lines, approximately parallel, of unequal brightness, a pair being at each edge and a pair near the center. The space between these pairs is crossed by many nearly horizontal lines and a few oblique ones, while that between the right-hand pair is crossed by oblique lines only. The horizontal lines at the right of the center become curved downward, which, with the increased brightness of the whole toward that side, suggests to us that the ribbon of light did not lie in a plane, but was concave toward a point at the observer's left. That the ribbon did not stand at right angles with the line of sight, but was nearer the observer at the right-hand edge, is also shown by the inequality of the lower termination of the six vertical lines referred to above. The ones at the left either rest upon or are hidden behind a rise of ground, whose crest can be traced for a little distance each side of the flash, while those at the right come lower, falling between the observer and the ground at that point. Probably, when measured upon this diagonal and curved line, the width of the flash was fifteen or twenty feet. Mention has already been made of the fact that the accompanying thunder was comparatively light, and not at all like that ordinarily heard when lightning occurs within so short a distance. Possibly this, as well as the absence of marks at the point where it reached the earth, might have been because the discharge was of very low tension. * * * * * [A very similar lightning flash was described and pictured in the issue of the Electrical World and Engineer for October 28, 1899, by A. E. Kennelly, who suggested the following explanation: A lightning flash passed through the air on the left-hand side of the ribbon of lightning (the wind was blowing from right to left) and broke a hole in the air along that line. This discharge may have been oscillatory, and may have lasted in all any time up to about 1/100 of a second. The discharge then ceased for lack of electricity, but a fresh charge from the cloud being gathered immediately afterward, or in about 1/30 of a second from the first rupture, a new discharge passed through the same hole in the air, which had not had time to seal up. There might thus be fourteen successive flashes (this was the number of distinct flashes making up the ribbon in the photograph), each averaging about 1/25 of a second apart, through the same hole, owing to the imperfect conducting qualities of the clouds overhead, meanwhile the hole having been carried from left to right in the picture, across the line of sight (by the wind), and thus producing the appearance of a broad ribbonlike flash. Professor Trowbridge, of Cambridge, has suggested the possibility that many of these apparently curious electrical phenomena may be of purely optical or physiological origin--that is, may arise through the abnormal behavior of the eye or the camera lens toward intense lines of light, such as lightning flashes.--ED.] CROSS-EDUCATION. BY E. W. SCRIPTURE, DIRECTOR OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY, YALE UNIVERSITY. Some years ago I made the following simple experiment: I arranged a rubber bulb, like that used for releasing a photographer's shutter, to connect with a bottle, from which rose a long, vertical glass tube. The bottle contained mercury, and the long tube reached nearly to the bottom. Every part was air-tight, so that when anybody squeezed the bulb the mercury was forced up the vertical tube. It was what is known as a mercury-dynamometer. During experiments with this dynamometer, what was more natural than to think of trying what would happen if one hand were practiced daily in squeezing the bulb? So one of our graduate students, Miss E. M. Brown, was set to work in the following manner: On the first day she squeezed the bulb as hard as possible with the left hand, while an assistant noted the height of the mercury; this was repeated ten times, and the results were averaged. Immediately thereafter she took ten records with the right hand. Then, on the following days, with some intermissions, she practiced the right hand by squeezing ten times on each occasion. On the last day she again tested the left hand, which had not been practiced in the meantime. The records ran as follows: ----------+--------------------------------------------------------------- | DAY. +------+------+------+------+------+------+-------+------+------ |First |Second|Third |Fourth|Fifth |Sixth |Seventh|Eighth|Ninth ----------+------+------+------+------+------+------+-------+------+------ |Inches|Inches|Inches|Inches|Inches|Inches|Inches |Inches|Inches Right hand| 28.8 | 33.7 | 35.6 | 36.6 | 40.9 | 44.7 | 47.0 | 48.8 | 48.6 Left hand | 29.6 | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | 42.3 ----------+------+------+------+------+------+------+-------+------+------ Thus the left hand had gained about fifty per cent in strength through practice of the right hand. This peculiar phenomenon of transference of the effects of practice from one side to the other I have ventured to call "cross-education." The phenomenon was curious enough to suggest other experiments. Another student, Miss T. L. Smith, was set to trying to insert the point of a needle at the end of a rod into a small hole in a drill-gauge without touching the sides. The first experiment consisted of twenty trials with the left hand, with a success of fifty per cent. Immediately thereafter twenty trials were made with the right hand, with a success of sixty per cent. On the following day and on each succeeding day two hundred experiments were made with the right hand, with successes of 61, 64, 65, 75, 74, 75, 82, 79, 78, and 88 per cent. On the last day the left hand, which had not been practiced in the meantime, was again tried, with a success of seventy-six per cent. These last experiments remind us of certain familiar phenomena. It has frequently been noticed that persons taught to write with the right hand become able to write backward, but not forward, with the left hand. This is the so-called "mirror writing," which appears correct if seen in a mirror. The first published observation of this fact exists in a letter from H. F. Weber to Fechner, the founder of experimental psychology. Fechner, moreover, noticed that with the left hand he could make the figure 9 backward better than in the regular way. Curiously enough, the principle of cross-education has been put to practical use. A letter (with permission to publish) has been received from Oscar Raif, Professor of Music in the Berlin Hochschule: "In the spring of 1898 I made an experiment with twenty of my pupils. I began by taking the average speed of each hand with the metronome. The average of the right hand was [quarter note symbol] = 116 (= four times 116 in the minute) [464 beats], and for the left hand 112 [448 beats]. I gave them exercises for the right hand only (finger exercises, scales, and broken accords) to develop rapidity. After one week the average of the right hand was 120 [480]; after two weeks, 126 [504]; three weeks, 132 [528], etc. After two months the right hand yielded 176 [604]. Then I had them try the left hand, which averaged 152 [608], whereas in November the average was only 112 [448]. In two months' time, absolutely without practice, the left hand had risen from 112 [448] to 152 [608]. A few of my pupils had some difficulty in playing the scales in parallel motion, but were able to play them in contrary motion. "The tenor of my work is that in piano playing the chief requirement is _not_ that each single finger should move rapidly, but that each movement should come at exactly the right time, and we do not work only to get limber fingers, but, more than that, to get perfect control over each finger. The source of what in German is called _Fingerfertigkeit_ is the center of our nervous system--the brain." These facts, however, require further investigation, for it is evident that we must begin with the fact of cross-education and proceed to more complicated cases. Indeed, cross-education has shown itself to be one step of a ladder up which we must climb even if there were no other motive except that of curiosity as to what we could find at the top. If practice of one hand educates the other hand, will it not also educate the foot? Again, if practice of one hand in squeezing a dynamometer develops the strength of the other members of the body, will it not also develop their dexterity or their advance? Again, if the development of voluntary power--let us say, frankly, "will power"--in one direction brings about a development in other directions, why should we limit the transference to muscular activity? Why can we not expect, that the development should be extended to the higher forms of will power that go to make up character? The outlook begins to be stirring on account of its vastness. If the last principle be admitted, there seems no argument against the claim that some forms of manual training, such as lathe work and forge work, are just the things to develop moral character. By the same reasoning we would be obliged to admit the often-made argument that training in Latin, Greek, and mathematics furnishes a means of general mental development. If we admit the principle, we find ourselves at once involved in important educational controversies. However we may think in respect to these questions, it is plain that it is worth while to climb a ladder which has such an outlook at the top. Let us begin. In the first place, the fact of cross-education is established. Let us ask in what this education consists. On this point some curious observations have been made by Prof. W. W. Davis,[11] now of Iowa College. The subject of the experiment began by raising a five-pound dumb-bell by flexing the arm at the elbow; this called into play chiefly the biceps muscle for lifting and the forearm muscles for grasping. This was done as many times as possible with the right arm, and then, after a rest, with the left arm. The subject then entered upon a practice extending from two to four weeks; this consisted in lifting the weight with the right arm only. At the end both arms were tested as at the start. The results were strange enough. The unpracticed left arm gained in power as we expected, but it also gained in size. Careful measurements were made by Dr. J. W. Seaver, of the Yale Gymnasium, on the girths of both upper arm and forearm. Let us compare the gains in girth with the gains in power: ----------+------------------------------+------------------------------ | GAINS IN GIRTH. | GAINS IN POWER. SUBJECT. +------+--------------+--------------+--------------- | Right biceps. | Left biceps. | Right arm. | Left arm. ----------+---------------+--------------+--------------+--------------- G | 5 mm. | -5 mm. | 820 flexions.| 200 flexions. J | 2 " | 0 " | 400 " | 225 " K | 4 " | 2 " | 724 " | 514 " H | 13 " | 6 " | 950 " | 30 " B | 6 " | 11 " | 900 " | 75 " I | 8 " | 3 " | 750 " | 75 " ----------+---------------+--------------+--------------+--------------- All subjects had gained power in the unpracticed left arm, three of them largely and three slightly. All but one had gained in the size of the unpracticed left biceps. Strangely enough, those who had gained most in power had gained least in size. The case was quite similar in regard to the girth of the forearm. The gains in power were unquestionably mostly central--that is, in the nerve centers--and not in the muscles. Yet there was also a strange but unquestionable gain in the size of the muscles at the same time. [Illustration: FIG. 1.] We have arrived at the second step of the ladder, which is: The gain by practice which shows itself in cross-education consists in a development of higher nerve centers connected with the two sides of the body. We must next ask: Is this effect of practice confined to the symmetrical organ, or does it extend to other organs? This question was answered by a peculiar experiment. The experiment consisted in testing the effect of educating one of the feet to tap as rapidly as possible on a telegraph key. The apparatus is shown in Fig. 1. The clocklike instrument is really a piece of clockwork actuated by a magnet, so that it counts up one point every time the electric circuit is closed. The electric circuit is comprised of a battery and two keys. Any form of battery will do; the one in the figure is a "lamp battery"--that is, an arrangement of lamps in series and in shunt, such that the ordinary high-voltage city current is conveniently transformed into a low-voltage current. The key to the left is the experimenter's key, and that to the right the subject's key. When the subject is set to tapping on the latter key the counter will register whenever the experimenter keeps his key closed. For the actual experiments by Professor Davis the subject's key was removed to a distant room. Here there were three keys of this kind, any one of which would register. One key each was arranged for tapping with the big toes; the third key could be tapped by either right or left index finger. On the first day all four digits--right and left index fingers and right and left large toes--were carefully tested in tapping as rapidly as possible. Thereafter the right large toe was practiced daily in tapping for several weeks, the other digits being left unpracticed. At the end all four digits were again tested. Four of the six persons experimented upon showed a gain for the right large toe--that is, for the digit practiced; the other two showed a slight loss, due unquestionably to "over-practice," or "over-training." All of those who gained for the right large toe gained for the other digits also. Their average gains were: Right foot, thirty-three per cent; left foot, thirty-one per cent; right hand, twenty-one per cent; left hand, thirty-one per cent. Even both of the "over-trained" men gained for the left foot and one of them gained for the left hand. Thus we have reached the third step--the effects of practice are extended to various parts of the body. Beyond the third step the experimental investigations have not yet advanced, but I believe that sooner or later we shall be able to establish the fact that development of those forms of the will involved in simple muscular activities does also develop the more complicated forms that express themselves in acts of a mental nature. It has long been claimed that sports, games, and manual occupations are among the best developers of character. Football develops solidarity of feeling and action; running rapids or cross-country hunting develop coolness in danger and promptness and firmness of judgment; wood-turning requires boldness and foresight; forge work requires regulation and reserve of power, and so on. This is no place for an account of the psychology of sports and occupations, but if the reader has ever tried any of these things and failed he will easily recognize the lacking mental quality. Yet there has never been but one attempt, as far as I can learn, to organize a system of manual occupations on the basis of this principle. The success of the attempt furnishes, I believe, the still-lacking laboratory proof of the principle itself. I refer to the remarkable experiment of Mr. Z. R. Brockway, Superintendent of the Elmira Reformatory. Most of the young felons sent to the Elmira Reformatory are set to learning trades, by which they can support themselves on leaving. Those, however, who are too stupid to even learn the simplest trade are put into a manual-training school, in the hope that their brains can be sufficiently developed to enable them to keep out of the prison or the asylum. Those who are so stupid that they have difficulty in learning the alphabet or in counting their fingers are put into a kindergarten, where they practice on letter blocks and sticks and straws. Those who are too stupid to learn a trade are the ones of interest here. Three main lines of defect are recognized in Superintendent Brockway's classification of them. Those who are intellectually weak, but of fair power of self-control, are classed as Group I; those who are reasonably bright, but are unable to get along because they can not control their impulses, are classed as Group II; those who fail on both sides are classed as Group III. Group II is composed of those who are for the most part devoid of moral sense--those who fight, swear, assault officers, are licentious, and generally unresponsive to the usual reformatory measures. To this class belong some of the most intellectual inmates of the reformatory, but this intellectuality runs riot on account of weakness of character. How are their characters to be built up? They are required to devote most of their waking hours to athletics and calisthenics, wood-turning, making wooden patterns for castings, mechanical drawing, sloyd, clay modeling, and chipping and filing metal. These exercises have been selected on account of their character-building qualities. The work is a great success. Nearly all inmates subjected to this building-up process finally graduate with sufficient self-control from the manual-training department into the trades school. A concrete example will give an idea of the change produced in the pupil. The record of No. 6,361 is instructive. The account is taken from a report by the manual-training instructor, R. C. Bates: "The pupil, previous to his assignment to manual training, had earned for himself the sobriquet of 'dangerous man' among the officers and inmates. His offenses have been mostly threatening language, lying, contraband articles, talking, fooling, assaulting officers, and institutional crimes of that nature. "We begin his record in September, 1895, when he was reduced to the second grade for fighting. October and November he lost three marks each for lying and threatening language, and, by the influence of September markings, caused his reduction to the third grade, or incorrigibles, a closely defined group. He was in the third grade two months and three days, when he was placed in the foundry, where, amid blinding smoke, stifling air, and the task system, it was thought he would tone down, upon the theory that the muscular demands of such a place on a 124-pound body would vitiate sufficiently to weaken the will and curb the disposition to riotous acts. "From January 15th to February 15th he was on modified treatment. On February 18th he was unconditionally restored to the second grade. February and March he did fairly well, losing one mark each month, but in April his period of passably well-doing was checked by his committing an assault, along with assumption of authority, and on the 27th of April he was returned to the third grade for the second time, remaining in the same two months and three days, when he was again placed on modified treatment, and did well for three months, when he fell again, this time for fighting, losing six marks in October. In November he made a perfect month, securing promotion to second grade. "On December 15, 1896, he was assigned to manual training, Group II; object, development of self-control, with subjects as follows: Athletics, drawing, sloyd, woodwork, chipping and filing, molding. Each subject one hour and a half per day, five days per week. The influence of the new environment sustained the effort made in November to improve, and, by securing a perfect month in December, all his past was blotted out and he was restored to the lower first grade again, through 'amnesty,' on December 25, 1896. "Thus, on December 25, 1896, he was where he was institutionally classed at the time of his admittance two years and three months ago--viz., lower first grade, from which all who are committed begin the reformatory course of treatment, additionally thereto in the manual-training department. His development now begins. In January, 1897, he lost two marks as a result of school failures, but in February he secured a perfect demeanor record; in March he lost two marks; April and May were perfect months in all respects, and he was graduated from manual training in May, returned to institutional life, and assigned to the exercise squad in the morning and stone masonry in the afternoon. Later his daily assignment was changed, placing him in the molding class of the technological department to complete trade. His development was complete and permanent. He was returned to the manual training as _assistant instructor_ in the molding class, and is now doing well in all departments, having been promoted to the upper first grade in August and ranking as sergeant in 'I' company." This record is only one example of many. When manual-training schools organize their courses on the principle of adapting the exercise to the ability to be developed, we shall have abundance of similar proof. When these facts have been incontestably established, there will be a means of satisfying the complaints of those who are constantly attacking our schools because they develop intellect and ruin character. "What is the use," say they, "of teaching children to read and think if you do not make them honest and truthful? How is it better for the community to educate liars and thieves merely that they may lie and steal successfully in business and politics, where they can not be caught, rather than to leave them in the slums, where the police can get them?" The accusation is bitterly unjust in many ways, but its force can be met by introducing a system of character building based on a careful study of the means of developing truthfulness, honesty, carefulness, persistence, bravery, courage under defeat, and the other qualities that go to make up a true man. The foundation of this system is to be found, I believe, in the _principle of character-building by motor activity_. The ladder of cross-education will be slowly climbed by psychological investigators; if they find at the top a principle of such value and wide application, surely the climb will have been worth the time and trouble. THE MORBID "SENSE OF INJURY." BY W. F. BECKER, M. D. As a fog about a ship removes it from exact relations to surroundings, so, from the standpoint of morbid psychology, we may fancy the mind peering through a more or less misty envelope to the true adjustment to things--the "glass" through which we see "darkly." Were all action and reaction of the mind to surroundings perfectly adapted, there could be such a thing as _absolute_ sanity. So long, however, as evolution with continuous readaptation and the processes of dissolution with attempted adaptations continue, so long can there be but groping, imperfect relations to surroundings, so long must there be defective or morbid mental action, and sanity and insanity therefore but relative terms. Thus many symptoms of the insane appear to be but varying degrees of the morbid mental manifestations of health, and we may assume _a priori_ that they have a common genesis and can be identified for study. If we take, for example, one of the commonest of these--viz., the idea of persecution among the insane--we may safely identify it with the "sense of injury" equally common among the sane. By this "sense of injury" is meant that vague sense which afflicts many of us at times of being the object of hostile feelings on the part of others. No doubt we often _are_, for, in the stress of necessary rivalry and conflict upon which progress depends, we give and take injuries. But there remains a large excess of this "injured" feeling which can not be so explained, or which is disproportionate to its cause or entirely gratuitous, and is thus shifted into the field of morbid psychology. This only is here treated--the _morbid_ sense of injury. It seems to find an easy entrance to the mind from a mere feeling of being ill used or stinted in sympathy to the entertainment of serious grievances or persecutory ideas. In certain temperaments it is marked. On so-called "blue" days we are constantly moved to a "sense of injury" from fancied aloofness of our friends. Madam Lofty slights us, and our jaundiced imagination has it that she has heard something detrimental and dislikes us. But lo! to-day, when the liver is released, madam smiles sweetly, and never heard a thing. So in suspicious people. They entertain a chronic state of mind, by which the acts of others are given an invidious construction. They anticipate ill will, carrying the _chip_ on the shoulder. Of two constructions of a given situation, they leap to the more offending. Some take on the vindictive attitude as a result, approaching that type of insanity known as _paranoia_, of which Guiteau and Prendergast were conspicuous examples; others are humiliated, as a consequence approaching the _melancholia_ type of insanity, each illustrating again how the sane and insane states are paralleled. Many come to bear the outward marks--the stigmata of this mental attitude, approaching sometimes the "asylum" face, like that of the insanely suspicious Rousseau. We all know such faces, with their hard, set expressions, as if forever sealed against any tender of good will. By a curious fact, those who invite ill will seem often to get it. Society, based on a reciprocity of faith, seems to have no smiles to bestow upon the misanthrope. It bids him, "Laugh, and the world laughs with you." It so comes to pass that many of them acquire some real ground for their "sense of injury," and in the long run that real quarrels are precipitated from this atmosphere of suspiciousness. Indeed, this is the psychology of most quarrels. The _effect_ of imaginary grievances comes in turn to be the _cause_ of real ones. Thus into an incident between two persons, one of them mistakenly reads an affront to himself. He retaliates, and the other person, unconscious of having done anything to evoke any hostility, finds _himself_ affronted, and in _his_ turn retaliates. By this time real grievances have come, and the quarrel is on. Balzac, that master analyst, in alluding to friendship, in one of his stories, says: "It died" (the friendship) "like other great passions--by a misunderstanding. Both sides imagine treachery, pride prevents an understanding, and the rupture comes." Just as the malevolent feelings may arise _de novo_, so it is with the benevolent ones. Nordau shows how the nondescript state of being "in love" often arises. Some incident between John and Mary leads one of them--we will say John--to think mistakenly that Mary has been attracted to him. Pleased with the fact, he reciprocates. Mary, altogether unconscious of the reciprocal nature of John's attention, finds pleasure in it, and in _her_ turn reciprocates. Mutual reciprocity then follows. In irritable persons we find the morbid sense of injury coupled with resentment. Quickly interpreting anything disagreeable to them as an affront by another, their first impulse is to resent it, which they do more or less violently, according to circumstances, their second thought often recognizing the irrational nature of the outbreak. This suggests the feral instinct. Examples are common in the lower animals, while in pain attacking those about them as if they were the cause of it. No doubt this resentment is a survival from evolutionary ancestry. It has probably served a necessary purpose in the conservation of animal life by causing the animal to attack what may, in the jealousy of self-preservation and its feeble discrimination, even be suspected of being inimical to its welfare. Blind and unjust, perhaps, but Nature hesitates at no apparent injustice to accomplish this. When we go higher, to the tribal relation of man, we find the same blind resentment. The Australian aborigines have no conception of death, except as vaguely associated with homicidal causes, and when a member of a tribe dies a most natural death a member of a hostile tribe is killed to avenge the supposed murder. The Africans, too, read homicidal forces into natural deaths. In civilized social relations it appears again in the very popular and usually irrational demand for a scapegoat when matters go wrong. The idea of religious sacrifice, too, is a practice by which the anthropomorphic God is credited with being aggrieved by human conduct and of wishing to be appeased therefor. Though the exercise of this indiscriminate resentment was probably greater and more necessary in the pre-social stage of human evolution, there is still ground for its activity to-day in the struggle for existence which has but changed its arena. Under a veneer of amity, laudable enough, there are till the suspicion and resentment of the tribal relation, as we may often see unveiled in a posse of boys, and that this resentment is yet of the blind kind, we still have proof if we have seen an enlightened man deliberately kick a harmless chair because he stumbled on it in the dark. Phylogenetically, then, we see this morbid "sense of injury" to be reversional. This is in harmony with the atavic theory of insanity. In the individual it is a delusion, and, like other delusions, an attempt by the reason to explain a disordered feeling; in this case a _painful_ feeling, having its origin broadly in some imperfect adaptation of the organism. This attempt to explain a feeling or sensation seems a human necessity. However wide of the truth such explanations usually are, we seem forced to attempt them. In the case of this _painful_ feeling, with which we are here concerned, we are either unwilling or unable to explain it in its true way, and are prone to attribute it to malevolent agencies, often personal--perhaps the "bogy-man" remnant of the child and race. Such explanation is often an easy escape from truths unwelcome to our ego--truths which, if recognized, would wound pride or conscience beyond easy endurance. It requires a man of rare courage and mental clarity to recognize his particular pain from failure in adaptation as autogenetic, and to lay it to natural and unflattering causes. We prefer, of the two, to accuse the environment rather than the organism, especially when the organism happens to be our own. We take refuge in a grievance rather than impugn the supremacy of our ego. Indeed, it seems to be necessary for healthy subjective activity, so to speak, that a sort of _imperialism_ of the ego, however circumscribed, be maintained. It is the condition _sine qua non_ of the necessary measure of well-being of the individual. It is most reluctantly relinquished, and we constantly see the plainest truths immolated that it be retained. Only in the great self-effacement of melancholia and in those rare characters who recognize and bear complacently naked truths--the _Weltschmerz_ of Goethe--is this well-being renounced. Even those who are willing to father their own wounded ego still seek the necessary approbation by reducing its future pretensions or claims so that they may not be again pained by their failure to achieve them. They _unhitch_ their wagon from the star. Professor James has illustrated this by a fraction showing that our approbation is determined by our _success_ divided by our _pretensions_. Thus, success/pretensions = approbation (self-esteem). The quotient may be increased by diminishing the _pretensions_ or by increasing the _success_. James's fraction is as applicable to the moral conduct as to the intellectual side. When we look for the physical equivalent of the mental state which evokes the "sense of injury" we find it in dynamic and toxic states of the nervous system and their correlation. Certain conditions of the individual or environment bring these into special relief. Old age is one. The querulousness, the sense of abuse or persecution which afflict the aged and often lead them to take refuge in the martyr-spirit, are sad examples. The state of fatigue or exhaustion is another, and "neurasthenic" insanity is only an expression in greater degree of the morbid mental action found in fatigue and exhausted states. The primary and secondary effects of alcohol or other narcotic indulgence is another soil in which the "sense of injury" easily grows. The _habitué_ is notoriously suspicious and irritable, and full of fictitious grievances and unwarranted persecutory ideas. His attitude toward them is that of the paranoiac, vindictive, rather than that of the melancholiac, humiliated. They swell the army of so-called "borderland" cases of insanity, fretting their friends and puzzling the doctor with conduct alternately interpreted as "cussed" or "crazy." Where there is bodily disease, acute or chronic, the morbid "sense of injury" is much in play. An intelligent patient, on recovery from a stomach disorder, admitted that whenever her stomach had ached she was taken with a violent hatred of her companion with whom she was in affectionate relation. An ignorant Southern colored woman, who had rheumatism in her ankle, believed that she had been "hoodooed," and explained the pain in her ankle by the presence of a snake, which she believed had been put there by a "hoodoo." She was not insane, the idea being consistent with her degree of intelligence, training, and early environment. Another patient, a sensible, cultivated woman, while suffering from a non-nervous illness, in which she had received all the consideration that love and money could furnish, believed herself to have been constantly and deliberately abused. After her recovery, now some years, she still maintains the belief. Instances could be multiplied, for doctors continually meet this atmosphere in the sick-room, from ugly little grievances to delusions of persecution. They are not surprised when a patient tells them in mingled confidence and complaint that he is hungry and neglected, that "they" will give him nothing to eat, etc., to find that his wife has been most attentive, has been pressing him to eat, and has stocked the pantry in anticipation. Dr. Johnson had plenty of ground for saying that a sick man is a rascal, though the modern doctor has reversed the formula. Persons who suffer from actual trouble or ill treatment easily develop a morbid sense of injury, just as under similar conditions they may become insane. Unable to estimate the precise amount of their real grievance, there is an easy mental overflow into the fictitious ones. It is for this reason that the narrative of a real trouble or quarrel is so fraught with calumnious arraignment of others that it is unreliable until we have heard the "other side of the story," and that when disputants meet and explanations follow they often find that they have no _casus belli_. In the examination of the alleged insane for commitment we have constantly to separate the real from the imaginary troubles. Mr. F---- was the subject of such examination. He was suffering from heart disease, and thereby compelled to remain at home idle. His wife was supporting the family by keeping boarders, and he began to develop a morbid jealousy of her. He annoyed her by a constant surveillance and suspicion of her every act, which amounted at times to the delusion that she was unfaithful to him, and which culminated one night in an outbreak in which the police figured. It was difficult to separate his real from his imaginary grievances, for his wife had ceased to have any affection for him, though his delusion in regard to her unfaithfulness was unfounded and had been grafted upon his real trouble. Sent to a general hospital, he improved, and was reported "not insane." Circumstances requiring a hard struggle for existence, disappointment without apparent cause, coupled with a certain sentimental cast of mind, often prevent the correct estimation of the wrongs suffered and the proper relation of undoubted misfortunes. In the insane the sense of injury or its analogue--delusions of persecution--appears in numerous shapes. Thus patients are defrauded, or conspired against, or acted upon by witchcraft, magnetism, electricity, or poisoned, or preached against, or subjected to disagreeable odors. Sometimes the delusions are but ill-defined and vague. Often it is possible to trace them to their underlying disordered sense impression or the particular environment or to vestiges of outgrown beliefs. They appear in depressed states of melancholia as well as in the exalted states of mania and paranoia. In melancholia they accompany a feeling of worthlessness which is the patient's explanation of his persecution--i. e., he is unworthy of better treatment. In paranoia the patient believes the persecution to be prompted by fear or envy of him, and there is consequently a feeling of self-importance--a morbid egotism which is in direct proportion to the magnitude or complexity of the ideas of persecution. Indeed, it is probable that these ideas of persecution, acting on a potentially melancholic or a potentially paranoiac mind, whatever these may be, determine the type that these mental diseases take. The difference between the "injured" sense in the sane and insane states we must from our view point, without essaying to bridge all the _terra incognita_ which lies between sanity and insanity, regard as largely but one of degree. And so with the underlying mental and physical states. We find the morbid ideas more fixed in the sane than in the insane, frequent repetitions of the morbid impression tending to its final organization, so to speak. We also find that the morbid idea is usually more elaborated in the insane than in the sane state, although instances of the greatest elaboration are sometimes met with, especially where the element of some external foundation is large. It is probable, however, that the elements of fixity and elaboration of the persecutory idea are after all dependent upon and in proportion to the intensity of the underlying brain and mind states. In other words, that to increase a given intensity of these states is to increase the fixity and elaborateness of the "sense of injury," is to prevent the correction of the morbid idea, until finally exploited in conduct, which is the _début_ of the insanity. Thus the relativity of insanity which has all along been maintained is clear on the line here pursued. It would be equally so in following other lines of morbid psychology. It has, though, received but little general recognition, and writers still treat insanity as an entity apart from its bearings on the average mind and its evolutionary history. The word "insanity," or "lunatic," is no doubt largely responsible for this, suggesting popularly, as it does, a distinct class of persons--a type of being as unlike ourselves as a Martian might be fancied to be. Nature or science, however, has set no line between the morbid mental manifestations which constitute sanity and those which constitute insanity, that being an arbitrary, however practical, distinction which science has had rather to descend to meet. Nothing so stands in the way of the best welfare of the insane than this abysmal ignorance which still prevails in regard to them--an ignorance which still clings to the mediæval idea of insanity, the classical portraiture, as in the pictures of Hogarth, or on the stage, or in fiction; an ignorance which is ever hearkening for the maniac's shriek or the clanking of his fetters, which recognizes nothing short of "furious madness" as sufficient ground for committing a brain-sick man to the tender therapy of the hospital ward. But those who know best tell us that the insane are very much like other people, that there is wonderfully little difference between them and ourselves; and sometimes but a slight circumstance, a mere accident of environment, determines which side of the hospital wall we shall be on. EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN AIR FLIGHT. BY M. BANET RIVET. Man has sought in all times and at all places to find means of leaving the earth's surface, in imitation of the birds, and rising into the air. Ancient legendary lore furnishes many stories, like those of Dædalus and his son Icarus, of attempts of this sort. In the fourth century B. C., Archytas of Tarentum, a learned Pythagorean, who has been credited with the invention of the screw, the pulley, and the kite, according to Aulus Gellius, constructed a wooden dove which could rise and sustain itself in the air by some mechanism the arrangement of which is not known. Credible accounts exist of an English Benedictine monk, Oliver of Malmesbury, in the eleventh century, having tried to fly by precipitating himself from the height of a tower, with the assistance of wings attached to his arms and his feet. It is said that, after having gone along a little way, he fell and broke his legs. He attributed his accident to failure to provide his apparatus with a tail, which would have helped preserve his equilibrium and made the descent a gentler one. In the sixteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci first demonstrated that a bird, which is heavier than the air, sustains itself, advances in the air, "by rendering the fluid denser where it passes than where it does not pass." In order to fly it has to fix its point of support on the air; its wing in the descending stroke exerts a pressure from above down, the reaction of which from below up forces the center of gravity of its body to ascend at each instant to the height at which the bird wishes to maintain it. Some sketches that have come down to us prove that Leonardo occupied himself, like Oliver of Malmesbury, with giving man power to fly by the aid of wings suitably fixed to his body. We owe to Leonardo also the invention of the parachute, which he described in the following terms: "If a man had a pavilion, each side of which was fifteen braces wide and twelve braces high, he might cast himself from any height whatever, without fear of danger." It may be said, too, of Leonardo da Vinci, that he was the first to suggest the idea of the screw propeller. "If," he said, "this instrument in the form of a screw is properly made--that is, made of linen cloth, the interstices of which have been filled with starch--and if we turn it rapidly, such a screw will make a bearing nut for itself through the air and rise. This can be proved by moving a broad, thin rule rapidly through the air, when it will be found that the arm is forced to follow in the direction of the edge of the board. The frame for the cloth of which I have been speaking should be made of long, stout reeds. A model of it might be made in paper, with, for its axis, a thin strip of iron which we twist forcibly. When the strip is left free it will turn the screw." In 1680 Borelli published some studies of a remarkably correct character on the flight of birds. According to his view, the wing acts upon the air in the phase of beating down, in the manner of an inclined plane, so as, by virtue of the resistance opposed by the air, to push the body of the animal upward at first and then onward. The action of the ascending wing was compared to that of a kite, and it would consequently continue to sustain the body of the bird while waiting the following stroke. But Borelli never thought of turning his observations to advantage, so as to supply man with the means of flying. Attention was much engaged in 1742 with the attempt of the Marquis de Bacqueville, substantially repeating that of Oliver of Malmesbury, which was terminated by a similar accident. Mention should also be made of Paucton, who in 1768 drafted a plan for a screw machine. In 1784 Launoy and Bienvenu exhibited and operated, before the Academy of Sciences in Paris, a screw which was moved by a strong spring. Before this, however, Joseph and Stephen Montgolfier had filled the world with the noise of their discovery of the air balloon, and the ingenious machine of these aëronauts failed to receive the attention it deserved. It has been known since the days of Archimedes that every body partly or wholly submerged in a liquid in equilibrium suffers a vertical push upward from the fluid equal to the weight of liquid it displaces. Let us consider the case of a body entirely plunged in a liquid--water, for example. If its weight exceeds the thrust it suffers it will fall to the bottom of the water under the action of a descensional force equal, at each instant, to the difference between the weight of the body, which is invariable, and the thrust, which is invariable also, and thus constant in direction and also in amount. If the weight of the body is less than the thrust, the latter overcomes it, and, contrary to the usual laws of weight, the body will rise under the action of an ascensional force, which will evidently be likewise constant in amount as well as in direction. A cork held down at the bottom of a vessel of water and then left to itself will supply an example of this ascensional movement. A third case may be presented--that in which the weight of the body is equal to the thrust of the water. Weight and thrust are then in mutual equilibrium. No force invites the body either to descend or to rise, and it remains balanced in the midst of the liquid, wherever it happens to have been placed. This state of indifferent equilibrium is, however, possible only if the weight of the body remains rigorously constant. The slightest augmentation of the weight immediately causes the body to descend, while the slightest diminution sends it up. From this source arise the difficulties that are met in the construction of submarine boats, when their ascent or descent is obtained by means of air chambers, which are filled with water or emptied of it according to the requirements. The equilibrium of these engines is always precarious, and this explains why none of them, from that of Van Drebbel in 1620 to the experiments of Goubet in 1895, have given really practical results in the matter of stability of immersion. When Galileo, following Aristotle, had demonstrated the ponderability of the air, and Torricelli had proved that atmospheric pressure was a result of that property, it was immediately thought that the principle discovered by Archimedes might be extended to the air, and Otto von Guericke gave an experimental demonstration of it by the invention of the baroscope. From this period it seems, then, that the discovery of aëronautics was possible. If the weight of the volume of air displaced is greater than that of the body, the latter should take an ascensional movement in the atmosphere, as a cork does when plunged into water; and it is evident that for a body to satisfy such conditions we have only to fill a very light envelope with a gas less dense than the ambient air. But the study of gases was still in its infancy in the seventeenth century, and it required the labors of Mortrel d'Élement and Hales, at the beginning of the following century, to teach physicists how to collect and retain them. The history of the progress of the human mind shows, further, that the pure and simple acceptance of a scientific discovery is not enough to make it produce all the consequences we have a right to expect from it. It must, further, impregnating the mind with itself, pass, we might say, into the condition of an innate idea. Chemistry, in this very matter of the discovery of the weight of the air and of the gases, presents a striking example of the accuracy of our proposition. The ponderability of the air had been accepted by physicists for a long time, while chemists continued to take no account of it, although, as Mendeleef has remarked, no exact idea could be conceived, under such conditions, concerning most chemical phenomena. It is to the glory of Lavoisier that he first took account of this ponderability and of that of all the gases as well. When we reflect that it was not till about 1775, or a hundred and fifty years after Galileo, that this illustrious Frenchman began to set forth those ideas, it is not any wonder that the discovery of aërostats was not made till toward the end of the eighteenth century. Lalande was therefore much in the wrong when he said "it was so simple! why was it not done before?" It would not be just, however, to refer the discovery of aërostats solely to the efforts of the Montgolfiers. Like all inventors, like Lavoisier himself, these brothers, as Figuier has remarked, had the benefit of a long series of isolated labors, carried on often without special purpose, by which the elements of their invention had been gathered up. Père Lana, of Brescia, conceived a plan in 1670 for constructing a ship which should sustain itself in the air and move by the aid of sails. Four copper globes, in which a vacuum had been produced in order to render them lighter than the volume of air displaced, were to support the ship while the sails propelled it. The scientific conception of the empty globes was correct, but Père Lana did not think of the enormous collapsing force which the atmospheric pressure would exercise upon them. The idea of a sail which would give his aërial boat a resemblance to a vessel driven by the winds was wholly erroneous. Sixty-five years later, in 1735, Père Galien, of Avignon, gave a fairly clear expression to the theory of aërostats. Resting on the principle of Archimedes, he maintained that if he could fill a globe made of light cloth with a sufficiently rarefied air the globe would necessarily possess an ascensional force, which would permit it to lift itself up in the air with a ship and all its cargo. He proposed to draw this rarefied air from out of the upper regions of the atmosphere, down from the summits of high mountains, forgetting that the air, when brought down to the level of the ground, would contract in volume and assume the density of the ambient atmosphere. In the condition of ignorance of the properties of gases that existed in that age, it did not occur, and could not have occurred, to Père Galien to use other gases than air; no more could he have thought of employing heat to rarefy the air, for the first not very precise notions on the decrease in densities of gases by heat only date from Priestley. But when Cavendish, in 1765, had fully studied hydrogen gas, and shown that as it was prepared then it was seven times lighter than air, Black was enabled to suggest that by filling a light bag with hydrogen the bag would be able to raise a certain weight in the air. The labors of Cavendish, Black, and the discoveries of oxygen, nitrogen, and other gases by Priestley, were described by Priestley a few years afterward in the celebrated book on The Different Kinds of Air--a book which Stephen and Joseph Montgolfier had in their possession. The two brothers evidently found the germ of their invention in it. It is fair to say that the Montgolfiers, who were already known in the learned world by their discoveries in the mechanical sciences, had thought, before they knew of Priestley's book, of a way of imitating Nature by inclosing vapor of water, a gas lighter than air, in a paper bag, which would be lifted up, the vapor contained in the bag being sustained in the air like a cloud. But the vapor condensed, and the weighted balloon shortly fell to the ground. The smoke produced by burning wood inclosed in a bag gave no better results. After seeing Priestley's book, they substituted hydrogen for vapor and for smoke, but the gas passed through the paper bag, and they gave up this attempt. They then fancied that electricity was one of the causes of the rise of clouds, and sought for a gas that had electrical properties. They thought they could obtain it by burning wet straw and wool together. A box made of silk was filled with this gas, and they had the great satisfaction of seeing it rise to the ceiling of their room, and, in a second experiment, into the air. This was in November, 1782. Five months previously, Tiberius Cavallo, in England, had repeated Black's experiment of filling a paper sack with hydrogen; but, as the Montgolfiers had found, the hydrogen leaked through the paper. Cavallo had better success with soap bubbles, which held the gas. His experiments stopped here, while the Montgolfiers carried theirs on to practical success.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique._ SKETCH OF EDWARD ORTON, LATE STATE GEOLOGIST OF OHIO; LATE PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. All persons interested in American science were surprised and shocked at learning of the death, from heart trouble, on October 16, 1899, of Prof. Edward Orton, of the Ohio State University. The event occurred only little less than two months after Professor Orton had presided, with a simplicity of manner that did not hide but rather heightened the traits of vigor in his character, over the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at his home in Columbus, Ohio. The services he rendered to geology, his long and honorable career as an educator, and his continual and consistent insistence upon the faithful use of the scientific method well entitle him to be remembered as one of the most meritorious of American scientific workers. EDWARD ORTON was born in Deposit, Delaware County, N. Y., March 9, 1829. He was descended from Thomas Orton, who, born in England in 1613, was one of the fifty-three original settlers and owners of Farmington, Conn., was of the stock from which most of the Ortons in the United States are derived, and represented his town in the General Court in 1784. Another ancestor, a grandson of Thomas Orton, was one of the original purchasers and settlers of Litchfield, Conn., where he owned a square mile of land known as Orton Hill, on the south side of Bantam Lake. Two of the maternal ancestors of the subject of this sketch fought in the colonial wars, and ten Ortons were soldiers in the Revolution. Young Edward Orton was taught by his father, the Rev. Samuel G. Orton, D. D., and received further training preparatory for college in the academies of Westfield and Fredonia, N. Y. He entered Hamilton College, whence his father had been graduated in 1822, in 1845 as a sophomore, and was graduated in 1848 in a class among the other members of which were the Rev. Dr. Thomas S. Hastings, President of Union Theological Seminary, New York, and the Hon. F. J. Van Alstyne, afterward Mayor of Albany, N. Y., and member of Congress. After his graduation he taught for a number of years in academies at Erie, Pa., Franklin, N. Y., and Chester, N. Y., and became, in 1856, Professor of Natural Science in the State Normal School at Albany, N. Y. He pursued post-graduate studies in chemistry, botany, and other subjects at the Lawrence Scientific School, with Professors Horsford, Cooke, and Gray as his teachers, and studied theology for a time under Dr. Lyman Beecher, at Lane, and Dr. Edwards A. Park, at Andover Seminaries. While teaching at Chester, N. Y., he was called to Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he took charge of the preparatory department in 1865; was made Professor of Natural History shortly afterward, and was made president of the college in 1872, but retained the office for only one year, at the end of which he went to occupy a similar position in the State University at Columbus. When the second Geological Survey of Ohio was undertaken in 1869 under the charge of Prof. J. S. Newberry, Professor Orton was appointed an assistant by Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, and was continued by reappointment by Governor E. F. Noyes. When Professor Newberry withdrew from the survey in 1881, Professor Orton was appointed State Geologist by Governor Charles Foster, and he was afterward reappointed to the position successively by Governors Hoadley, Foraker, Campbell, and Bushnell. He retained the title of State Geologist till his death, although he had not been engaged in any active public work on the survey for a considerable time. The Ohio State University having been established on the basis of the grants of land made to the States for colleges under the Morrill Land-Grant Act, Professor Orton was appointed its president and Professor of Geology. He discharged the duties of this office for eight years, or till 1881. But the executive work of the president's office was irksome to him, since it grew constantly heavier as the young college expanded, and therefore left him less and less time for teaching and research in geology. Being in a measure compelled to make a choice between the two fields of activity, he chose the less ambitious position, resigning the presidency, and assuming the position of Professor of Geology, which he retained for the remainder of his life. The geological building of the university is named after him--Orton Hall. Besides his work on the Geological Survey of Ohio and his participation in the composition of its reports, Professor Orton prepared, for the Eighth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, a paper on the New Oil and Gas Fields of Ohio and Indiana, and another, only recently published in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the United States Survey, on the Rock Waters of Ohio; a volume for the Geological Survey of Kentucky on the Petroliferous Production of the Western Part of the State, published in 1891; and a report on petroliferous productions which is in process of publication by the Geological Survey of New York. In the paper on the Oil and Gas Fields of Ohio and Indiana the discovery of the supply of those materials, the great value of which was only realized in 1884 and afterward, is spoken of as being more surprising and anomalous than any similar discovery that had preceded it, and as a development which experts were hardly more prepared for than others. The oil and gas derived from the Trenton limestone in certain parts of these States were found to differ from the oil and gas in the Pennsylvania wells in chemical composition and physical properties, in the horizons from which they were obtained, in the structural features of the rocks associated with their production, and, most of all, in the kind of rock that produced them. "No facts more unexpected have ever been brought to light in connection with the geology of this country than those with which we are now becoming acquainted." Professor Orton's paper, which fills one hundred and eighty of the large pages of the report of the Geological Survey, includes a sketch of the history of the discovery to July, 1887, when it was prepared; a designation of what was known in regard to the geological scale and geological structure of the regions within which the new fields are embraced, and the tracing of the chief factors that influence or control the productiveness of the oil rock, with the description of the special features and boundaries of the several fields and the setting forth of the leading facts and present development of these lately found sources of power. Two principal conditions under which the new oil rock had proved petroliferous on a large scale were found to be porosity, connected with and apparently dependent on the chemical transformation of the upper portion of the limestone, for a number of feet in thickness, into a highly crystalline dolomite; and a relief resulting from slight warping of the strata, whereby the common contents of the porous portions of the Trenton limestone had been differentiated by gravity, the gas and oil seeking the highest levels, and the salt water maintaining a lower but definite elevation in every field. Professor Orton found nothing in the new experience to make it safe to count the Trenton limestone an oil rock or a gas rock in any locality, unless it could be shown to have undergone the dolomitic replacement by which its porosity was assured; and even in case it had suffered this transformation it would not be found a reservoir of gas or oil in an important sense unless some parts of it had acquired the relief essential to the due separation of its liquid and gaseous contents. The report on the Rock Waters of Ohio concerns, first, those waters, chiefly in the northwestern and western part of the State, that are obtained from a considerable depth as compared with ordinary wells, the knowledge of which was almost wholly derived from wells drilled in the search for oil and gas, and was necessarily fragmentary and incomplete; because water was not included among the objects of search, but was considered a hindrance and obstruction to be got out of the way as well as possible; and, second, flowing wells, including only those having considerable head of pressure and those occurring in considerable areas, all of which belong entirely to the drift. Further, a brief review is given of some facts of unusual interest that were developed in the deep drillings concerning the preglacial drainage system of the part of the State in question. Indications of old river channels, one of which seems to have been extensive, were found at several points. Among the curious results of these studies was the conclusion, "seeming to be already established," "that the Ohio River, as we now know the stream, is of recent origin, and that the main volume of water gathered in it at the present time originally flowed across the State to the northward at least as far as Auglaize and Mercer Counties, where it turned to the westward toward the present lines of Wabash drainage in Indiana." Professor Orton seems to have placed considerable emphasis on the value of a study of the rocky floor of the State, concerning which all we know at present is derived from the revelations of deep drillings at haphazard; and he thought it would be a good work for the State to make use of all accessible data of this kind at once in constructing a model of the rocky floor of the region under review. The care and fidelity with which he studied the underground geology are exemplified in a map attached to the paper on the oil and gas fields, in which the horizons of the Trenton limestone are indicated and approximately bounded as they occur by gradations ranging from fifty to two hundred and fifty feet, from elevations above the ocean level to one thousand and more feet below. Another contribution of Professor Orton's which may appropriately be given special notice is his part of the article on Ohio in the Encyclopædia Britannica, in which a succinct, clear, and comprehensive account of the geology of the whole State is given, with its salient features delineated so sharply that one may almost conceive from it a definite geological picture of the region. Of all his scientific work, however, Professor Orton regarded the fixing of the order of the coal measures of Ohio as the most important; and he considered the determination of the order of the subcarboniferous strata, and particularly of the Berea Grit, as constituting a large permanent service to the study of the geology of the State. At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Professor Orton contributed a special paper on the local geology of Columbus, the place of the meeting, in which he dwelt largely on the origin of the drift that marks the superficial geology of the vicinity. Of the work he has done for the increase and advancement of knowledge, the extent of a part of which we have only faintly indicated by the mention of a few particular researches, Professor Orton put the highest value on his labors as a teacher, a calling to which he was devoted for more than half a century. He found peculiar pleasure in instructing the children of the old pupils whom he had taught in his younger days. He was actively concerned in the promotion and extension of sanitary science, his addresses in that field having been one of the factors that led to the establishment of the Ohio State Board of Health. He was also greatly interested in the advancement of agriculture. A theme on which Professor Orton was fond of dwelling in his public addresses was the amount and value of what has been accomplished within a comparatively short time in the world's history by the use of the methods of science. In an address delivered before the alumni of Hamilton College in 1888 he maintained that we were living in a revolutionary period, which is marked by a great advance in knowledge and a vastly larger control of the forces of Nature; by a large increase in freedom of thought and action; by a sudden and remarkable addition to the mobility of man, accompanied by an unexampled growth of great cities; and by an incalculable addition to the wealth of the world. Accompanying these great changes in the material and intellectual world were certain moral transformations appearing to grow out of them. All these advances were ascribed to a movement--a new method of investigating Nature--that began, so far as its particular and continuous development is concerned, about three hundred years ago, but to which no date or founder's name could be attached. This new philosophy thoroughly respected Nature, was humble, patient in the accumulation of facts and the trial of its theories, comprehensive, progressive, and hopeful. It has given us the marvelous increase of knowledge which especially marks the nineteenth century; it has impressed its influence upon all branches of study, and has wrought great improvements in methods and results; and has rendered an immense and inestimable service to Christian theology, and done much to broaden and rationalize it and thus to perpetuate and strengthen its hold on the world. Finally, the method of science was pronounced "the best gift that God has given to the mind of man." A similar train of thought as to the material aspects is apparent, though in a somewhat different form, in an address on The Stored (or Fossil) Power of the World, delivered in 1894. A considerable part of Professor Orton's presidential address at the last meeting of the American Association was devoted to a summary of the conclusions derived from Alfred Russell Wallace's book, The Wonderful Century, that the progress accomplished in the present century far outweighs the entire progress of the human race from the beginning up to 1800. In this address, also, the author felicitously spoke of the scope of the American Association as possibly including the whole continent, and its object as the advancement of science, the discovery of new truth. "It is possible that we could make ourselves more interesting to the general public if we occasionally forswore our loyalty to our name and spent a portion of our time in restating established truths." But the discoveries recorded, though often fragmentary and devoid of special interest to the outside world, all had a place in the great temple of knowledge; and the speaker hoped that although no great discoveries should be reported this time, the meeting might still be a memorable one through the inspiration it would give to the multitude of workers in the several fields of science. Professor Orton was a member of several learned societies; was President of the Sanitary Association of Ohio in 1884 and 1885; received the degree of Ph. D. from Hamilton College in 1876, and that of LL. D. from the Ohio State University in 1881; was elected President of the Geological Society of America in 1896; and was designated at the Boston meeting of the American Association, 1898, as president for the Columbus meeting, 1899. In addition to his interests in science and theology, Professor Orton was keenly alive to everything that bore on the history of man on this planet. He was long a member of the Ohio State Archæological and Historical Society, and had recently been made a member of its board of trustees. He was a prominent member of the Old Northwest Genealogical Society, and was the author of a volume, published in 1896, on the Genealogy of the Orton Family in America. The absolute freedom of his character from any desire for display or self-aggrandizement is well shown by the fact that in this volume, compiled, with enormous labor, in the spare minutes of a busy life, he cuts himself off with one paragraph of a hundred words, while devoting pages to contemporaneous members of the family of whom the world has never elsewhere heard. He was stricken with hemiplegia in December, 1891, but was able to do a considerable amount of work in his profession afterward. A few days before his death he said, in a note, that he felt that he had lived out his allotted time, and that his work was done. He never met his classes again, though he continued able to be up and about his home till the hour of his death. He seemed to feel that the solemn event was drawing close, during the last two days of his life, and his mind was always busy with the great question, "If a man die, shall he live again?" He had formed an affirmative answer apparently, as he read Browning's Prospice repeatedly in his last hours, and seemed to find in it the greatest pleasure and solace. His death was a quiet and painless one--a fitting end to a beautiful life. Statistics of cremation, presented by M. Bourneville at the recent annual meeting of the society in Paris, show that the number of incinerations at the Père Lachaise crematory has almost steadily increased since 1889, and that the whole number last year was 4,513, making 37,068 from the beginning. A fair proportion of the number were women. There are now in Europe and America seventy crematories, twenty-seven of which are in Italy and twenty in the United States. Cremation is making good progress in England, where four crematories are reported from, and two are in course of erection. Germany has six, where 423 incinerations took place in 1898; Switzerland and Sweden have two each, Denmark one, and one has been authorized in Norway. Editor's Table. _A COMMISSION IN DIFFICULTIES._ The synopsis which has been given to the press of the Thirteenth Annual Report of the Interstate Commerce Commission is not encouraging reading for those who like to believe in legislation as an infallible panacea for all public and social ills. The tone of the document indeed is very far from being one of triumph. The note struck in the very first paragraph is the need for more legislation to save the copious legislation already passed from proving ineffectual and abortive. Whether it is that Congress does not wish to make the work of the commission successful, or whether it has begun to have a wise distrust of its own powers, we can not say; but the commissioners complain bitterly of its inaction. We can not do better than quote their own words: "The reasons for the failure of the law to accomplish the purposes for which it was enacted have been so frequently and fully set forth that repetition can not add to their force or make them better understood. It is sufficient to say that the existing situation and the developments of the past year render more imperative than ever before the necessity for speedy and suitable legislation. We therefore renew the recommendations heretofore made, and earnestly urge their early consideration and adoption." As the document proceeds, we see the good commissioners at war with the wicked railways, and it is impossible to resist the conclusion that, on the whole, the wicked railways have the best of it. The commissioners admit that certain cases which have come before the courts have been decided against them, and in favor of the railways; but they are far from disclosing the full extent of the discouragement, not to say mortification, they receive. The business of the commission is to interfere between the railways and their customers--the public--in the interest of the latter. The railways naturally consider this a rather one-sided function, and are not extremely zealous to aid in its performance. They have their own troubles with the public, and have no commission to come to their assistance. Everybody is after cheap railway rates, just as everybody is after cheap goods; and the means sometimes resorted to to get reductions would at least hold their own for astuteness with any that could be concocted in a traffic office for the raising of rates. We give the commissioners full credit for doing their best to protect the interests of the public, but we can not help doubting whether, on the whole, the public has derived much benefit from their efforts. In fact, we are strongly inclined to the opinion that the whole idea of the commission is simply a legislative blunder. The railways undoubtedly possess great powers which theoretically there is nothing to prevent their abusing to almost any extent. But what is theoretically possible is not always practically possible. The President of the United States possesses great powers, which theoretically he might abuse to any extent; so does the Queen of England; so do many other potentates. But of all the evil that is theoretically possible, how much is carried out in practice? All kinds of things _might_ happen if people were fools enough to do all the harm that it is in their power to do. The great saving fact is that it is not possible to go very far in doing harm to others without doing it to yourself. It is this fact which the insatiable legislation-monger ignores. He has an infinite faith in the mischief that will happen if things are left alone. He can not bear to think that somebody is not looking after everybody. He has no faith whatever in natural law or natural actions and reactions, and would hoot the idea of what the poet Wordsworth calls a "wise passiveness." Such people have little conception of the mischief they do, and of the good that fails of realization through their pestilent activity. The readers of Dickens will perhaps remember Mrs. Pardiggle and the admirable system of education she applied to her numerous family of children. The unhappy youngsters were under orders every hour of the day; they were marched round the country with their mother when she went on visits of charity, and compelled to contribute out of their own (nominal) pocket money to all kinds of religious and benevolent schemes. How they kicked and rebelled, and what distressing passions were roused in their youthful breasts, the great novelist has told us; and we think we may take his word for it. The fussy legislator is a Pardiggle. If he would leave things alone, opposing interests would find a _modus vivendi_, and practical justice would more and more assert itself. The more interference there is between parties who in the last resort are dependent on one another's good will, the less likely they are to recognize their substantial identity of interest. If the interference is wholly in the interest of one of the parties, the other is sure to be forced into an undesirable attitude; while the one whose protection is the object in view will not unnaturally take all the protection he can get, and look for something more. What is wanted to put the relations between the railways and the public upon the most satisfactory footing possible is, in the first place, less legislative interference; and, in the second, a higher tone of business morality throughout the community. We place this second not as underrating its importance, but because we believe it would to some extent flow from the first. It is when the public transfers its right of eminent domain to a railway corporation that it should take adequate measures to protect its own interests; but how can this be done when legislation is sold--when charters are given or withheld, according to the amount of money available for purposes of persuasion? With honest legislators and honest courts there would be very little trouble between the railways and the public, and such as arose could be easily remedied. Commerce commissions are a testimony to the existence of low standards of business morality; and, unfortunately, they tend to keep them low, if not to make them lower. The sooner we make up our minds to trust more to moral influences freely acting in the intercourse of man with man and of interest with interest, and less to legal compulsion, the better it will be for us in every department of our national life. The Thirteenth Annual Report of the Interstate Commerce Commission is a virtual confession of the failure of legislation to accomplish a purpose which was supposed to be easily within its field of action. The confession is coupled with a demand for more legislation, but, were the demand conceded, who can guarantee that more still would not be wanted? The railways are not at the end of their resources, and new laws would, we fear, be only too likely to suggest new means of evasion. No; the remedy lies elsewhere, and if Congress is wise it will give that remedy a trial by allowing the railways and the public a chance to arrange terms between them, with public opinion as the principal court of appeal. _THE FUNCTION OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY._ A paper that was read by Mr. Lindsay Swift, of the Boston Public Library, at a meeting of the Massachusetts Library Club, on the subject of Paternalism in Public Libraries, and which we find in the Library Journal for November last, is one which, in our opinion, deserves to be separately printed and widely circulated. It abounds in good sense, and preaches a doctrine of self-help and self-reliance which is much needed in these days. A question which the author of the paper does not discuss, but which, it seems to us, lies at the threshold of the whole subject, is whether the very existence of a public library--if we understand by the term a library supported by public taxes--is not in itself an exemplification of paternalism. Mr. Swift strikes us as a benevolent bureaucrat who wants to give the people at large a wider liberty in the matter of reading than the ruling influences of time and place are disposed to allow. He sees that liberty is good, that leading strings belong to infancy, and he raises his protest against a paternalism in the management of public libraries which, under the plea of providing only the most approved reading for all classes, would tend to the repression of individuality in the reader and the establishment of the supremacy of commonplace. But what if commonplace insists on being supreme and shutting out whatever is not of one complexion with itself? How are we to resist its demand in the administration of a State-supported, and therefore majority-ruled, institution? "You offer us," say its representatives, "a liberty we do not want for ourselves, and are not prepared to concede to others, as we are sure it can not be for their good. We are not going to consult the tastes of cranks, criminals, intellectual aristocrats, or social mugwumps of any kind. For all practical purposes we are the public, and we mean to run this public library." To the objection that a portion, at least, of the taxes is paid by those whose views and tastes are not going to be consulted, the answer would be ready: "It is for the majority to say how taxes shall be applied." We recognize the excellence of Mr. Swift's intentions and sympathize with his way of looking at things, but we feel that his objections to "paternalism" in connection with public libraries are delivered from a somewhat shaky platform. We observe that a periodical quoted in the Library Journal--the Overland Monthly--makes the remark that "there is nothing to be said for free books that could not be urged in favor of free beefsteaks and free overcoats." Some of the points, however, that are made by Mr. Swift are deserving of attention. The several professions--law, medicine, theology, etc.--would more or less like to have only such books placed upon the shelves of a public library as represent what may be called their respective orthodoxies. But, as Mr. Swift observes, "libraries are as much the depositories of the folly as of the wisdom of the ages." A library, therefore, should tell us what men have thought and attempted in the past, and what they are thinking and attempting now. It is for schools and colleges, for newspapers and reviews, to afford guidance in the wilderness of opinions, not for the library to make a point of putting out of people's reach everything that is not in line with the scientific, literary, or other orthodoxy of the hour. "A subtle form of paternalism is the deliberate inculcation of the patriotic spirit, especially in children." Mr. Swift is a brave man to attempt to stem this particular torrent. He thinks there are times when one who loves his country would feel shame for it rather than pride, and that the motto "My country right or wrong" is not the most wholesome sentiment that can be impressed on the mind of youth. "To fill a child with the consummate virtues of Washington, Jefferson, and other of our immortals, and to leave him ignorant of the greatness of Cromwell and of William the Silent, is a serious injustice to the child and to the cause of education." Not only is this done, but, in the domain of literature as well, it seems as if the only names with which public-school pupils obtain any acquaintance are those of national authors. So far as poetry is concerned, Mr. Swift says that almost the only name he hears from the lips of children frequenting the Public Library is "Longfellow." He can not remember ever having had a call from a child for Tennyson, while Wordsworth in the school region is equally unknown. Apart from the studied inculcation of a narrow patriotism, the author of the paper we are considering thinks that there is altogether too much paternalism shown in the choice of children's reading. He has only a limited and feeble faith in "children's rooms" in public libraries. They are very much, he thinks, like Sunday schools--convenient places for parents to unload their offspring. The aim of the censorship is to eliminate everything that is not in accord with the most approved canons of juvenile life and thought, leaving only what is ready for immediate acceptance and assimilation. Such a policy, Mr. Swift holds, is not favorable either to individuality or to intellectual growth. "We must," he says, "take books, like life, as we find them, and learn to distinguish good and bad; learn, as we ought, that the good is not so good as we have been told it is, and that the bad contains a strong infusion of good. No wrecks are so fearful as those which come to the young who have up to a point led 'sheltered lives.'" It is not, however, children only who get the benefit of a benevolent protective policy. Selecting committees are quite prepared to look after grown-up people as well, and keep out of their way books which might prove too exciting, which might reveal depths of passion such as persons leading decorous lives are not supposed to know anything about, or otherwise agitate the tranquil mill pond of their existence. It does not occur to them that thus the salt and savor of human life are expelled, and that, instead of the free play of vital forces, there supervenes a dreary mechanic round of semi-automatic activities unvisited by enthusiasm, untouched by strong desire, without dream or vision or any quickening of the heart or the imagination. Some good people are excessively particular not only as to what may threaten moral disturbance, but as to anything that may encourage departures from conventional modes of speech and deportment. They do not like to admit books that they regard as vulgar, and a great mark of vulgarity in their opinion is the use of slang. Yet so accomplished a _littérateur_ as Mr. William Archer told us lately that he pleads guilty to "an unholy relish" for the talk of "Chimmie Fadden" and his Chicago contemporary "Artie." To him, as to Mr. Swift, the books in which these worthies disport themselves _mean something_, and something deserving of attention. That being the case, the vulgarity, which is part of the picture, becomes in proportion to its truth an element of value. Mr. Swift, very bold and like the ancient prophet, says plainly: "Harmless books in general are mediocre books; if a new note in morals or society is struck, the suggestion of a possible injuriousness at once arises." Taken as a whole, Mr. Swift's paper is a strong plea for individualism and liberty. As such we have felt it a duty to call attention to it, and we trust that it will in some way obtain a more general circulation than can be afforded by the useful, but somewhat technical, columns of the Library Journal. Fragments of Science. =Longevity of Whales.=--Some light was thrown, a few years ago, upon the subject of the vitality of whales by finding one of these animals in Bering Sea, in 1890, with a "toggle" harpoon head in its body bearing the mark of the American whaler Montezuma. That vessel was engaged in whaling in Bering Sea about ten years, but not later than 1854. She was afterward sold to the Government, and was sunk in Charleston Harbor during the civil war to serve as an obstruction. Hence, it is estimated, the whale must have carried the harpoon not less than thirty-six years. In connection with this fact, Mr. William H. Dall gives an account, in the National Geographic Magazine, of a discussion with Captain E. P. Herendeen, of the United States National Museum, of cases of whales that have been supposed to have made their way from Greenland waters to Bering Strait, and to have been identified by the harpoons they carried. While it is very likely that the whale really makes the passage, an uncertainty must always be allowed, for ships were often changing ownership and their tools were sold and put on board of other vessels, and harpoon irons were sometimes given or traded to Eskimos. It therefore becomes possible that the animal was struck with a second-hand iron. =Solidification of Hydrogen.=--As soon as he was able to obtain liquid hydrogen in manageable quantities, in the fall of 1898, Mr. James Dewar began experiments for its solidification. The apparatus he used was like that employed in other solidification experiments, consisting of a small vacuum test-tube, containing the hydrogen, placed in a larger vessel of the same kind, with excess of the hydrogen partly filling the circular space between the two tubes. No solidification was produced, and the effort was suspended for a time, while the author attacked other problems. The experiments were renewed in 1899, with the advantage of more knowledge concerning reductions of temperature brought about by reduction of pressure. A slight leak of air in the apparatus was observed, which was frozen into an air snow when it met the cold vapor of hydrogen coming off, and this leak at a particular point of pressure caused a sudden solidification of the liquid hydrogen into a mass like frozen foam. An apparatus was then arranged that could be overturned, so that if any of the hydrogen was still liquid it would run out. None ran out, but by the aid of a strong light on the side of the apparatus opposite the eye the hydrogen was seen as a solid ice in the lower part, while the surface looked frothy. The melting point of hydrogen ice was determined at about 16° or 17° absolute (-257° or -256° C.). The solid seemed to possess the properties of the non-metallic elements rather than of the metals, among which it has been usual to class hydrogen. =The Gegenschein.=--Much interest prevails among astronomers at present concerning the question of the nature of the _Gegenschein_. This German word, which means "opposite shine," is applied to designate a small, somewhat oblong, bright spot which is sometimes seen in the sky at night, nearly opposite the point which is at the time occupied by the sun on the opposite side of the globe. It is near the ecliptic, but appears two or three degrees away from exact opposition to the sun. It seems agreed that the _Gegenschein_ is not atmospheric, but rather meteoric, being a reflection from some collection of meteors. The problem set before astronomers is to identify the meteors. A theory that they are connected with the asteroidal zone, or mass of meteors of which the known and numbered asteroids are conspicuous examples, has, according to Professor Barnard, "much in its favor, but there are objections to the theory which can not easily be reconciled with the observed facts." Mr. J. Evershed, of Kenley, England, assumes the _Gegenschein_ to be a tail to the earth, produced by the escape of molecules of hydrogen and helium away from the globe in a direction opposite to the sun--much as a comet's tail is formed. Other observers suppose it to be connected with the zodiacal light or band, which is regarded as a body of meteors connected with the earth and accompanying it, and is plainly visible in the western sky after sunset in the spring, rising from the place of the sun toward the zenith; and Mr. William Anderson, of Madeira, publishes a figure with a demonstration, in The Observatory, to show how its place and appearance may be accounted for on this supposition. The _Gegenschein_ has been compared in a homely way to the radiance which may be seen around the shadows of our heads cast by the sun upon the dewy grass early on a bright summer morning. =Literature for Children.=--Mr. Richard le Gallienne, in an article published in the Boston Transcript, laments the flood of rubbish that is poured out under the guise of children's books. The subject of literature for children is discussed in the Studies of the Colorado Scientific Society by Prof. E. S. Parsons, who remarks that three of the greatest classics of childhood were not written for children at all. "Pilgrim's Progress was a new type of sermon written by the tinker preacher in his prison cell at Bedford; Robinson Crusoe was a pseudo-history from the pen of one of the first great English realists; Gulliver's Travels was a political satire by the greatest of English satirists. The same thing is true of the stories of the Bible, of the Arabian Nights, of the folklore which strikes a sympathetic chord at once in the child's nature.... Child study, then, reveals the fact that the child nature is the counterpart of what is best in books--that children can appreciate literature." A friend of Professor Parsons wrote him of her daughter, nine years old, being very fond of her father's library, and "simply devoted" to the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare. Harriet Martineau, when a child, "devoured all of Shakespeare," sitting on a footstool and reading by firelight, and making shirts, with Goldsmith or Thomson or Milton where she could glance at them occasionally. Another of Professor Parsons's friends read "all of Goethe's Faust with his little thirteen-year-old girl, to her great enjoyment," and the little girl afterward read alone all of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. "Many teachers have found young children delighted with Dante." These incidents and others point to the inference that it is not necessary to go outside of the world's great literature for fit material for a child's imaginative and emotional nature. One of Mr. Le Gallienne's main conclusions is that it is very hard to guess beforehand what the child will like. =Geography and Exploration in 1899.=--No great geographical discoveries were recorded during 1899, but much good work was done in exploration. Considerable interest has been taken in preparing expeditions of antarctic research, of which a Belgian expedition has returned with some important results, and Mr. Borchgrevink has begun work at Cape Adar, on the antarctic mainland. The search for Andrée has helped increase our knowledge of parts of the arctic coast. In Asia, Captain Deasy has laid down the whole of the before unknown course of the Yarkand River, and has furnished other information concerning little-known regions; and other surveys and explorations have been diligently prosecuted. About as much may be said of Africa, where "the want of adequate exploration of the mountainous regions on the borders of Cape Colony and Natal has been only too forcibly brought home" to the English. Expeditions sent out by Canadian surveys are constantly opening up new countries and producing maps of great geographical and industrial value. Mr. A. P. Low finds Labrador not quite so bleak and hopeless a country as had been generally believed. Sir Martin Conway has done some very creditable exploration in the Andes and in Tierra del Fuego, the scientific results of which are of considerable value. In Chile, Dr. Staffer and his colleagues have been exploring the wonderful fiords of the coast and the rivers that come down to them from the Andean range. Dr. Moreno has described the results of twenty-five years' exploration of the great Patagonian plains, and of the lakes and glaciers and mountains on the eastern face of the Andes. One of the most important scientific enterprises during the year, the London Times says, was the German oceanographical expedition in the Valdivia, under Professor Chum, which went south through the Atlantic to the edge of the antarctic ice, and north through the Indian Ocean to Sumatra, and home through the Red Sea. =Royal Society Medalists.=--The Copley medal was conferred, at the recent anniversary meeting of the Royal Society, upon Lord Rayleigh for his splendid service to physics, his investigations, the president said in presenting the award, having increased our knowledge in almost every department of physical science, covering the experimental as well as the mathematical parts of the subject. "His researches, from the range of subjects they cover, their abundance, and their importance, have rarely been paralleled in the history of physical science." A summary account of the principal ones was given in the sketch of him published in the twenty-fifth volume of the Popular Science Monthly (October, 1884). At the same meeting of the Royal Society the Royal medals were conferred upon Prof. G. F. Fitzgerald, for his brilliant contributions to physics, and Prof. William C. McIntosh, for his very important labors as a zoölogist. Professor Fitzgerald's investigations have been in the field of radiation and electrical theory, and in a manner complementary to those of J. Clerke Maxwell. Among his works is a memoir presenting a dynamic formulation of the electric theory of light on the basis of the principle of least action, which concludes with a remark upon the advantage of "emancipating our minds from the thraldom of a material ether." Professor McIntosh was spoken of as "one of a distinguished succession of monographers of the British fauna, who, beginning with Edward Forbes, have, during the last fifty years, done work highly creditable to British zoölogy." He is author of a great monograph of the British Annelids, which is still in progress of publication by the Royal Society, and of an important contribution to the Challenger reports, and was the founder of the first marine biological station in Great Britain--the Gatty Marine Laboratory at St. Andrews. The Davy medal was bestowed upon Edward Schunck for researches of very high importance in organic chemistry. These works include a remarkable series of contributions to the chemistry of the organic coloring matters, particularly those relating to the indigo plant and to the madder plant. Of late years he has studied, with distinguished success, the chemistry of chlorophyll. =Anglo-Saxon Superiority.=--The question of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race is at present interesting economists of other stocks, especially of the supposed Latin races. The fact of superiority seems to be conceded. The problem is to account for it. A French writer, M. Dumoulins, attributes it to the superiority of Anglo-Saxon educational institutions. Signor G. Sergi, the distinguished Italian anthropologist, thinks it is a result of the mixture of ethnic elements of which the English people are made up, and he goes over the history of the colonizations which have overtaken Britain, to show how upon the first neolithic settlers of the Mediterranean stocks came a small emigration of the Asiatic Aryan or Indo-European peoples. Cæsar's conquest brought in a Roman infusion with some African elements, which did not last long, but left their mark. Next the Anglo-Saxon tribes of northern Germany made the principal contribution to the formation of the English people. A portion of Scandinavian blood was added to the composition, and on top of all came the Normans. These elements, none of which were extremely discordant with the others, became thoroughly mixed in the course of time, and matured into the English people as it is. The English resemble the Romans in their methods of colonization, political tact, practical sense, persistence, religious tolerance, the magnitude of their works and the boldness of their undertakings, and in their egotism working together with the principle of social solidarity. Both readily established themselves in new colonies, carrying there the civilization of the mother country and their systems of administration. The great roads and wonderful bridges constructed by the Romans are paralleled by the great Anglo-Saxon railway systems. As the Latin language became almost universal, so the English language is diffusing itself everywhere. But Signor Sergi fails to show why, if the English have taken so much from the Romans, the Italians, their direct descendants, have lost so much of what they once had. He reserves that question, after raising it, for future consideration. =Carbonic Acid and Climate.=--The great importance of the carbonic acid in the atmosphere as a factor in determining the climate of the earth has been confirmed by the researches of a considerable number of investigators. Its work appears to be that of an absorbent of the sun's radiant heat, retaining it and preventing its passing by us and leaving us in the cold temperature of space. Tyndall computes that it has in this capacity a power eighty times that of oxygen or nitrogen, while it is excelled by water vapor with ninety-two times that of those gases. Lecher and Pretner, on the other hand, believe that carbonic acid is the only agent concerned in the service. Mr. Cyrus F. Talman, Jr., in view of the fact that carbonic acid is an important factor among geological agencies, has published, in the Journal of Geology, a study of the conditions of the content of that gas in the ocean, a study that leads to the consideration of the chemistry of the ocean. It seems to be clear that with falling temperature the ocean will dissolve carbonic acid from the air. Dr. T. C. Chamberlin has shown that the amount of carbonic acid in the atmosphere at any one time, and therefore the climate of the earth at that time, depends upon the value of the ratio of the supply of the gas to its depletion. Besides the continuous supply that the atmosphere receives from the interior of the earth and from planetary space and the continuous depletion due to the formation of carbonates in place of the igneous alkali earth silicates, there are variations in the ratio of supply to depletion dependent upon the attitude of the land and the water. A large exposure of land surface is correlated with a rapid solution of calcium and magnesium carbonates, which, becoming bicarbonates, represent a loss of carbonic acid to the atmosphere. On the other hand, the formation of the normal carbonate by lime-secreting animals causes a direct liberation of the second equivalent of the bicarbonate. Therefore extensive oceans and abundant marine life are correlated with warm climate. After a somewhat more minute discussion of the action, Mr. Talman concludes that the ocean very greatly intensifies the secular variation of the earth's temperature, although acting as a moderating agent in the minor cycles. =Pearl Mussels.=--In his report to the United States Fish Commission on the Pearly Fresh-Water Mussels of the United States, Mr. Charles T. Simpson speaks of the great variety of conditions under which they live. They show great capacity for adaptation. Most of them are found in shallow water, but certain forms live at considerable depths. Some bury themselves among the fibrous roots of trees, some in the muddy, sandy banks just below the surface of the water, and some, as in Lake Tiberias (Palestine) and Lake Tanganyika (Africa), under six hundred or more feet of water. Ordinarily they die in a very short time if taken out of the water--in from twenty-four to forty-eight hours, as a rule--and they generally die in a few hours when exposed to the sun. But many species, thus tender in the open air, will lie buried in dried mud for a long time. In June, 1850, a living pond mussel was sent to London, from Australia, which had been out of water for more than a year. Along a small stream near Braidentown, Fla., which runs only during about three months in summer and is dry the rest of the year, thousands of a large colony of _Unio obesus_ may be found just buried in the sandy banks or among the flags and rushes of the bottom, where there is very little moisture, all in healthy condition. Mr. Simpson has laid these mussels in the sun for months without killing them. The specimens which live in perennial water seem to die soon if removed from it, while those which inhabit streams or ponds that often dry up will live a long time out of water. Some species in rocky streams live in the crevices of the rocks. In the Big Vermilion River, in La Salle County, Illinois, a swift, rocky stream, the author has found living mussels that had been so washed about that nearly all the epidermis was destroyed. The shells in such streams are usually heavier than those in more quiet water. MINOR PARAGRAPHS. Prof. Frederick Starr, of the University of Chicago, has made two excursions to Mexico for the purpose of establishing the physical types of the aborigines by means of measurements, photographs, and casts. He studied twelve tribes, half of which were almost unknown to science, and made measurements of more than eleven hundred and fifty men and three hundred women. On his last trip he rode one thousand miles among the mountains on horseback. In a recent paper in the Open Court he takes notice of frequent and curious survivals of pagan belief to be remarked among these peoples, although they are all supposed to be devout Christians. In one instance, which is specially described, an idol bearing some resemblance to those found among the ruins of the ancient cities occupied a station in the church by the side of the crucifix, sharing the honors with the statue of the Virgin on the other side. Grief and consternation prevailed among the Indians when the idol was taken away by the ecclesiastical authorities. * * * * * The question of the increase of insanity in England during the last few years is regarded as assuming a serious aspect, and the report of the Commissioners of Lunacy for 1898, showing the largest annual increase yet recorded, the Lancet says, reveals the gravity of the situation. Other collateral facts given in the report "add to the seriousness of the outlook." The increase in the number of inmates in institutions for lunatics is attended with a falling off in the recovery rate, which is lower for 1898 than that of the previous year, and even than the average of the last ten years. A steady diminution in the recovery rate has appeared also during each period of five years since 1873. The attempt to account for the increase of lunatics in public and private asylums by supposing that it is made up by removals thither from workhouses or from the care of relatives fails, for it is shown that this class of insane is increasing too, though slowly. The subject is regarded as of so much importance that it was considered and discussed in the Psychological Section of the British Association at its Bristol meeting in 1899. * * * * * A process by which calcium carbide can be continuously produced more cheaply than by the process at present in use is reported, in Industries and Iron, to have been discovered by Professor Freeman, of Chicago. In the new process a huge arc lamp inclosed in brickwork in the interior of a furnace is employed. The upper electrode of the lamp is hollow, and through it is fed a powder composed of common lime and coke. This powder, being carried through the upper carbon directly into the electric flame, is melted by the intense heat, and molten calcium carbide runs away from the furnace. It is estimated that the carbide is produced at a cost of half a cent per pound. NOTES. A new method of securing more perfect combustion, described by Mr. Paul J. Schlicht before the Franklin Institute, is based on the fact, described by the inventor, that if a current of air is properly introduced into a chimney flue through which hot products of combustion are escaping, it will flow in a direction contrary to theirs, and, becoming heated in contact with them, will reach the center of the fire in a condition highly favorable to the most complete union of oxygen with the combustible elements of the fuel. Suggestions are made in Mr. Schlicht's paper for the construction and regulation of furnaces, so as to secure the condition described. * * * * * Mr. Edward Orton, Jr., has been appointed State Geologist of Ohio, to succeed his father, the late Dr. Edward Orton. He has been connected, as an assistant, with the survey, in which he studied the distribution of the coal measures, and has also prepared reports on the clay and clay industries of the State. * * * * * "From a moral if not from a scientific and industrial point of view, incontestably superior to that of the European peoples," is the characterization a book reviewer in the _Revue Scientifique_ gives to Chinese civilization. * * * * * Sir William Turner is the president-elect for the Bradford meeting of the British Association, 1900. He is head of the great medical school at Edinburgh, and President of the General Medical Council, and was pronounced by Lord Lister, in nominating him, the foremost human anatomist in the British Islands, and also a great anthropologist. * * * * * A gold medal is offered by the Society of Agricultural Industry and Commerce of Milan to the inventor of the best apparatus or the person who will make known the best method for protecting working electricians against the accidents of their profession. The competition is open to all nations. * * * * * The statue of Lavoisier, called by the French "the founder of chemistry," is to be erected, during the Universal Exposition in Paris, on the square of the Madeleine, at the intersection of the Rue Tronchet. The work is in charge of the sculptor Barrias. The sum of ninety-eight thousand francs, or nineteen thousand six hundred dollars, has been subscribed to pay for it. * * * * * The death list of the last few weeks of men known in science includes a considerable proportion of important names. Among the number are John B. Stallo, formerly of Cincinnati, author of General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Science, and numerous contributions to scientific publications, recently United States minister to Italy, in Florence, December 30th, in his seventy-fifth year; Sir James Paget, for many years the leading surgeon in England, and author of books relating to surgery, in London, December 30th, in his eighty-sixth year; Dr. Thomas C. Egleston, Emeritus Professor of Mineralogy and Metallurgy in Columbia University, in New York, January 15th; Prof. Henry Allen Hazen, one of the chief forecasters of the United States Weather Bureau, and author of improvements in the methods employed there, in Washington, from the results of a bicycle collision, January 22d, in his fifty-first year; Dr. Wilhelm Zenker, a distinguished physicist, at Berlin, October 21st, aged seventy years; Augustus Doerflinger, an engineer who was engaged in the work of the removal of Hell Gate in New York Harbor, at Brooklyn, November 24th, in his fifty-eighth year; Johann Carl Wilhelm Ferdinand Tiemann, Professor of Chemistry in the University of Berlin and late editor of the Reports of the German Chemical Society, at Meran, Tyrol, November 17th, in his fifty-second year; he was distinguished for his researches upon the constitution of odoriferous principles, including works on vanillin, the aroma of the violet, terpenes, and camphor, and the synthesis of amido-acids; Dr. Birch-Hirschfeld, Professor of Pathology in the University of Berlin, aged fifty-seven years; Sir Richard Thorne Thorne, principal medical officer to the Local Government Board, in London, December 18th, aged fifty-eight years; author of many official reports relating to the public health, of works on the progress of preventive medicine during the Victorian era, and of lectures on diphtheria and the administrative control of tuberculosis; Dr. John Frederick Hodges, Professor of Agriculture and lecturer on medical jurisprudence in Queen's College, Belfast, Ireland, and author of two elementary books on chemistry, The Structure and Physiology of the Animals of the Farm, and of several papers published in the Proceedings of Scientific Societies; E. C. C. Stanford, a practical chemist, distinguished for the introduction of several original methods of manufacture, and for the preparation of several new substances, such as algin and thyroglandin; he was the author of the monograph on the iodine industry in Thorpe's Dictionary of Chemistry; and John Ruskin, who, though not a man of science in the strict sense of the term, did his full share for the advancement of knowledge and comfort among men, at Coniston Lake, England, January 20th, in his eighty-first year. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Summary of Feeding-Stuffs Law in Force in New York after December 1, 1899. P. 1. Bulletin No. 159. A Pest of Woodland and Grove. (The Forest Tent Caterpillar). By F. H. Hall and V. H. Lowe. Pp. 5; No. 160. Report of Analyses of Commercial Fertilizers for the Fall of 1899. By L. S. Van Slyke. Pp. 102; No. 161. Popular Edition. Gooseberry Mildew held in Check. By F. H. Hall and C. P. Close. Pp. 4; Newspaper Summaries of these Three Bulletins. P. 1. Carter, Oscar C. S. Coastal Topography of the United States. Pp. 30. Connecticut, State of. Fifteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the Year ending September 30, 1899. Pp. 266. Densmore, Emmet, M. D. Consumption and Kindred Diseases. (Open-air Treatment.) Brooklyn, N. Y.: The Stillmann Publishing Company. Pp. 138. Douglas, James, New York City. American Transcontinental Lines. Pp. 56. Fry, the Right Hon. Sir Edward, and Agnes. The Mycetozoa and some Questions which they Suggest. London: "Knowledge" Office. Pp. 82. 1 shilling. Gay, Albert, and Yeaman, C. H. An Introduction to the Study of Central Station Electricity Supply. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 167. $3. Johnston, Charles. The Memory of Past Births. New York: The Metaphysical Publishing Company. Pp. 50. 25 cents. King, F. H. Irrigation and Drainage. Principles and Practice of their Cultural Phases. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 502. $1.50. Kunz, George F. The Production of Precious Stones in 1898. United States Geological Survey. Pp. 48, with plate. Marine Biological Laboratory, at Woods Holl, Mass. Announcement for the Thirteenth Season. July 5 to August 16, 1900. Pp. 12. McKay, A. H., Halifax, Nova Scotia. Phenological Observations, Canada, 1898. Pp. 20. McKim, W. Duncan. Heredity and Human Progress. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 283. $1.50. Michigan. Thirty-seventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the State Board of Agriculture, and Eleventh Annual Report of the Agricultural College Experiment Station. July 1, 1897, to June 30, 1898. Pp. 740. New York State Library Bulletin. (Legislation No. 11, January, 1900.) Albany. Pp. 395. 25 cents. Parker, T. Jaffrey, and Haswell, William A. A Manual of Zoölogy. Revised and adapted for the use of American Schools and Colleges. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 163. $1.60. Peet, Stephen Denison. The Cliff-Dwellers and the Pueblos. Chicago: Office of the American Antiquarian. Pp. 398. Smithsonian Institution. List of Publications available for Distribution. December, 1899. Pp. 35. Sound Currency. October, 1899. Deposit Currency; the Effective Currency of Commercial Communities. Pp. 12. November, 1899. The Farmer's Interest in the Banking Question. Pp. 8. Both by L. Carroll Root. Spencer, Frank Clarence. Education of the Pueblo Child. A Study in Arrested Development. (Columbia University Contributions to Philosophy, Psychology, and Education. Vol. VII, No. 1.) New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 97. 75 cents. United States Commissioner of Education. Report for the Year 1897-'98. Vol. II. Containing Parts II and III. Pp. 2640. United States Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries. The Preservation of Fishery Products for Food. By Charles H. Stevenson. Pp. 570. United States Department of Labor. Bulletin No. 25. November, 1899. Foreign Labor Laws. Pp. 80. FOOTNOTES: [1] Lyell's Principles of Geology, eighth edition, p. 41. [2] Clarence King, American Journal of Science, pp. 45-51, 1893; Kelvin, Science, vol. ix, p. 665, 1899. [3] Science, vol. ix, p. 665, 1899. [4] Ibid., p. 889, and vols. x and xi, 1899. [5] Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Prestwich, pp. 124 _et seq._ [6] Critical Periods, etc., American Journal of Science, vol. xiv, p. 99, 1877; Bulletin of the Geological Department of the University of California, vol. i, No. 11, 1895. [7] Journal of Geology, vol. vi, p. 597, 1898, and vol. vii, p. 545, 1899. [8] Views similar to those of Professor Bautz have been advocated by a French Jesuit, Père F. H. Schouppe, in a work entitled The Doctrine of Purgatory elucidated by Facts and Private Revelations. The "facts" consist of the visions of saints, and the "private revelations" prove to be apparitions of souls in purgatory to hysterical women and other persons "blasted with ecstasy." The book has been translated into German by a Tyrolese priest, G. Pletl, and just published at Brixen, "with the approbation of the Prince Bishop." An Austrian journal, the Ostdeutsche Rundschau, printed extracts from the volume with appropriate comments, and was confiscated by the Government in Vienna for "offense to religion." [9] The manner in which The Pelican makes piety profitable is most extraordinary and should win the admiration and excite the envy of the "yellow press." The editor informs the public that he entered into a compact with St. Joseph, promising to distribute fifty books in which this holy person is glorified, provided the journal receives two thousand subscribers. In less than a year the number of subscribers was twenty-five hundred. A promise to distribute one hundred books of this kind, if St. Joseph would procure eight thousand subscribers, raised the list of subscribers to twelve thousand; and this barter went on until The Pelican could boast of ninety thousand subscribers. The editor also announces that he has engaged two hundred and eighty priests to say masses for the readers of his paper and to pray for and bless their children, and concludes this astounding piece of puffery as follows: "Experience teaches us that the benediction of a single priest is effective. What, then, can not be obtained if two hundred and eighty priests unite in blessing us!" [10] _Cf._ Popular Science Monthly, November, 1895, p. 83. [11] Studies from the Yale Psychological Laboratory, vol. vi. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: -Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected. -A Table of Contents was not in the original work; one has been produced and added by Transcriber. -Subscripted numbers are rendered with an underscore (e.g. CO_[2] means that "2" is subscripted). 
45269	----	generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 45269-h.htm or 45269-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45269/45269-h/45269-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45269/45269-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/inventionsofgrea00bondrich [Illustration: Oil-tempering the lining of a Big Gun (See page 76)] INVENTIONS OF THE GREAT WAR by A. RUSSELL BOND Managing Editor of "Scientific American," Author of "On the Battle-Front of Engineering," etc. With Many Illustrations [Illustration] New York The Century Co. 1919 Copyright, 1918, 1919, by The Century Co. Published, June, 1919 PREFACE The great World War was more than two-thirds over when America entered the struggle, and yet in a sense this country was in the war from its very beginning. Three great inventions controlled the character of the fighting and made it different from any other the world has ever seen. These three inventions were American. The submarine was our invention; it carried the war into the sea. The airplane was an American invention; it carried the war into the sky. We invented the machine-gun; it drove the war into the ground. It is not my purpose to boast of American genius but, rather, to show that we entered the war with heavy responsibilities. The inventions we had given to the world had been developed marvelously in other lands. Furthermore they were in the hands of a determined and unscrupulous foe, and we found before us the task of overcoming the very machines that we had created. Yankee ingenuity was faced with a real test. The only way of overcoming the airplane was to build more and better machines than the enemy possessed. This we tried to do, but first we had to be taught by our allies the latest refinements of this machine, and the war was over before we had more than started our aërial program. The machine-gun and its accessory, barbed wire (also an American invention), were overcome by the tank; and we may find what little comfort we can in the fact that its invention was inspired by the sight of an American farm tractor. But the tank was a British creation and was undoubtedly the most important invention of the war. On the sea we were faced with a most baffling problem. The U-boat could not be coped with by the building of swarms of submarines. The essential here was a means of locating the enemy and destroying him even while he lurked under the surface. Two American inventions, the hydrophone and the depth bomb, made the lot of the U-boat decidedly unenviable and they hastened if they did not actually end German frightfulness on the sea. But these were by no means the only inventions of the war. Great Britain showed wonderful ingenuity and resourcefulness in many directions; France did marvels with the airplane and showed great cleverness in her development of the tank and there was a host of minor inventions to her credit; while Italy showed marked skill in the creation of large airplanes and small seacraft. The Central Powers, on the other hand, were less originative but showed marked resourcefulness in developing the inventions of others. Forts were made valueless by the large portable Austrian guns. The long range gun that shelled Paris was a sensational achievement, but it cannot be called a great invention because it was of little military value. The great German Zeppelins were far from a success because they depended for their buoyancy on a highly inflammable gas. It is interesting to note that while the Germans were acknowledging the failure of their dirigibles the British were launching an airship program, and here in America we had found an economical way of producing a non-inflammable balloon gas which promises a great future for aërial navigation. The most important German contribution to the war--it cannot be classed as an invention--was poison gas, and it was not long ere they regretted this infraction of the rules of civilized warfare adopted at the Hague Conference; for the Allies soon gave them a big dose of their own medicine and before the war was over, fairly deluged them with lethal gases of every variety. Many inventions of our own and of our allies were not fully developed when the war ended, and there were some which, although primarily intended for purposes of war, will be most serviceable in time of peace. For this war was not one of mere destruction. It set men to thinking as they had never thought before. It intensified their inventive faculties, and as a result, the world is richer in many ways. Lessons of thrift and economy have been taught us. Manufacturers have learned the value of standardization. The business man has gained an appreciation of scientific research. The whole story is too big to be contained within the covers of a single book, but I have selected the more important and interesting inventions and have endeavored to describe them in simple language for the benefit of the reader who is not technically trained. A. RUSSELL BOND New York, May, 1919 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I THE WAR IN AND UNDER THE GROUND 3 II HAND-GRENADES AND TRENCH MORTARS 20 III GUNS THAT FIRE THEMSELVES 41 IV GUNS AND SUPER-GUNS 62 V THE BATTLE OF THE CHEMISTS 85 VI TANKS 107 VII THE WAR IN THE AIR 123 VIII SHIPS THAT SAIL THE SKIES 148 IX GETTING THE RANGE 169 X TALKING IN THE SKY 184 XI WARRIORS OF THE PAINT-BRUSH 209 XII SUBMARINES 232 XIII GETTING THE BEST OF THE U-BOAT 253 XIV "DEVIL'S EGGS" 276 XV SURFACE BOATS 298 XVI RECLAIMING THE VICTIMS OF THE SUBMARINES 310 INDEX 339 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Oil-tempering the lining of a big gun _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE Lines of zig-zag trenches as viewed from an aëroplane 8 French sappers using stethoscopes to detect the mining operations of the enemy 9 A 3-inch Stokes mortar and two of its shells 36 Dropping a shell into a 6-inch trench mortar 36 The Maxim machine-gun operated by the energy of the recoil 37 Colt machine-gun partly broken away to show the operating mechanism 37 The Lewis gun which produces its own cooling current 44 The Benèt-Mercié gun operated by gas 44 Browning machine-gun, weighing 34-1/2 pounds 45 Browning machine-rifle, weight only 15 pounds 45 Lewis machine-guns in action at the front 52 An elaborate German machine-gun fort 53 Comparative diagram of the path of a projectile from the German super-gun 60 One of our 16-inch coast defence guns on a disappearing mount 61 Height of gun as compared with the New York City Hall 61 The 121-mile gun designed by American ordnance officer 68 American 16-inch rifle on a railway mount 69 A long-distance sub-calibered French gun on a railway mount 76 Inside of a shrapnel shell and details of the fuse cap 77 Search-light shell and one of its candles 77 Putting on the gas-masks to meet a gas cloud attack 84 Even the horses had to be masked 85 Portable flame-throwing apparatus 85 Liquid fire streaming from fixed flame-throwing apparatus 92 Cleaning up a dugout with the "fire-broom" 93 British tank climbing out of a trench at Cambrai 112 Even trees were no barrier to the British tank 113 The German tank was very heavy and cumbersome 113 The speedy British "Whippet" tank that can travel at a speed of twelve miles per hour 120 The French high-speed "baby" tank 120 Section through our Mark VIII tank showing the layout of the interior 121 A Handley-Page bombing plane with one of its wings folded back 128 How an object dropped from the Woolworth Building would increase its speed in falling 129 Machine-gun mounted to fire over the blades of the propeller 136 Mechanism for firing between the blades of the propeller 136 It would take a hundred horses to supply the power for a small airplane 137 The flying-tank 144 An N-C (Navy-Curtiss) seaplane of the type that made the first flight across the Atlantic 145 A big German Zeppelin that was forced to come down on French soil 148 Observation car lowered from a Zeppelin sailing above the clouds 149 Giant British dirigible built along the lines of a Zeppelin 156 One of the engine cars or "power eggs" of a British dirigible 156 Crew of the C-5 (American coastal dirigible) starting for Newfoundland to make a transatlantic flight 157 The curious tail of a kite balloon 160 Observers in the basket of an observation balloon 160 Enormous range-finders mounted on a gun turret of an American warship 161 British anti-aircraft section getting the range of an enemy aviator 176 A British aviator making observations over the German lines 177 Radio headgear of an airman 192 Carrying on conversation by radio with an aviator miles away 192 Long distance radio apparatus at the Arlington (Va.) station 193 A giant gun concealed among trees behind the French lines 212 Observing the enemy from a papier-mâché replica of a dead horse 213 Camouflaged headquarters of the American 26th Division in France 220 A camouflaged ship in the Hudson River on Victory Day 221 Complex mass of wheels and dials inside a German submarine 240 Surrendered German submarines, showing the net cutters at the bow 241 Forward end of a U-boat 256 A depth bomb mortar and a set of "ash cans" at the stern of an American destroyer 257 A depth bomb mortar in action and a depth bomb snapped as it is being hurled through the air 260 Airplane stunning a U-boat with a depth bomb 261 The false hatch of a mystery ship 268 The same hatch opened to disclose the 3-inch gun and crew 268 A French hydrophone installation with which the presence of submarines was detected 269 Section of a captured mine-laying U-boat 272 A paravane hauled up with a shark caught in its jaws 273 A Dutch mine-sweeper engaged in clearing the North Sea of German mines 288 Hooking up enemy anchored mines 289 An Italian "sea tank" climbing over a harbor boom 300 Deck of a British aircraft mothership or "hush ship" 301 Electrically propelled boat or surface torpedo, attacking a warship 304 Hauling a seaplane up on a barge so that it may be towed 305 Climbing into an armored diving suit 320 Lowering an armored diver into the water 320 A diver's sea sled ready to be towed along the bed of the sea 321 The sea sled on land showing the forward horizontal and after vertical rudders 321 The diving sphere built for deep sea salvage operations 324 The pneumatic breakwater 325 INVENTIONS OF THE GREAT WAR CHAPTER I THE WAR IN AND UNDER THE GROUND For years the Germans had been preparing for war. The whole world knew this, but it had no idea how elaborate were their preparations, and how these were carried out to the very minutest detail. When the call to arms was sounded, it was a matter of only a few hours before a vast army had been assembled--fully armed, completely equipped, ready to swarm over the frontiers into Belgium and thence into France. It took much longer for the French to raise their armies of defense, and still longer for the British to furnish France with any adequate help. Despite the heroic resistance of Belgium, the Entente Allies were unprepared to stem the tide of German soldiers who poured into the northern part of France. So easy did the march to Paris seem, that the Germans grew careless in their advance and then suddenly they met with a reverse that sent them back in full retreat. However, the military authorities of Germany had studied not only how to attack but also how to retreat and how to stand on the defensive. In this, as in every other phase of the conflict, they were far in advance of the rest of the world, and after their defeat in the First Battle of the Marne, they retired to a strong position and hastily prepared to stand on the defensive. When the Allies tried to drive them farther back, they found that the German army had simply sunk into the ground. The war of manoeuver had given way to trench warfare, which lasted through long, tedious months nearly to the end of the great conflict. The Germans found it necessary to make the stand because the Russians were putting up such a strong fight on Germany's eastern frontier. Men had to be withdrawn from the western front to stem the Russian tide, which meant that the western armies of the kaiser had to cease their offensive activities for the time being. The delay was fatal to the Germans, for they had opposed to them not only brave men but intelligent men who were quick to learn. And when the Germans were ready to resume operations in the West, they found that the Allies also had sunk into the ground and had learned all their tricks of trench warfare, adding a number of new ones of their own. The whole character of the war was changed. The opposing forces were dead-locked and neither could break through the other's lines. The idea of digging into the ground did not originate with this war, but never before had it been carried out on so extensive a scale. The inventive faculties of both sides were vainly exercised to find some way of breaking the dead-lock. Hundreds of new inventions were developed. The history of war from the days of the ancient Romans up to the present time was searched for some means of breaking down the opposing lines. However, the dead-lock was not broken until a special machine had been invented, a traveling fort. But the story of that machine is told in another chapter. At the outset the Allies dug very shallow ditches, such as had been used in previous wars. When it was found that these burrows would have to be occupied for weeks and months, the French and British imitated the Germans and dug their trenches so deep that men could walk through them freely, without danger of exposing their heads above ground; and as the ditches grew deeper, they had to be provided with a firing-step on which the riflemen could stand to fire over the top of the trenches. The trenches were zig-zagged so that they could not be flanked, otherwise they would have made dangerous traps for the defenders; for had the enemy gained one end of the trench, he could have fired down the full length of it, killing or wounding every man it contained. But zig-zagging made it necessary to capture each turn separately. There were lines upon lines of these trenches. Ordinarily there were but three lines, several hundred feet apart, with communicating trenches connecting them, and then several kilometers[1] farther back were reserve trenches, also connected by communicating trenches with the front lines. [1] A kilometer is, roughly, six tenths of a mile; or six miles would equal ten kilometers. Men did not dare to show themselves out in the open near the battle-front for a mile or more behind the front-line trenches, for the enemy's sharp-shooters were always on the watch for a target. The men had to stay in the trenches day and night for two or more weeks at a time, and sleeping-accommodations of a very rough sort were provided for them in dugouts which opened into the trenches. The dugouts of the Allies were comparatively crude affairs, but the Germans spent a great deal of time upon their burrows. UNDERGROUND VILLAGES When the French first swept the Germans back out of their trenches along the Aisne, they were astonished to find how elaborate were these underground dwellings. They found that the ground was literally honeycombed with rooms and passageways. Often the dugouts were two stories in depth and extended as much as sixty feet below the level of the ground. In fact, all along this part of the front, the Germans had a continuous underground village in which thousands of men were maintained. The officers' quarters were particularly well fitted up, and every attention was given to the comfort of their occupants. There were steel door-mats at the entrances of the quarters. The walls were boarded and even papered. The bedrooms were fitted with spring beds, chiffoniers, and wash-stands, and all the rooms were lighted with electric lamps. There were spacious quarters for the men, with regular underground mess halls and elaborate kitchens. There were power-plants to furnish steam for the operation of pumps and for the lighting-plants and for other purposes. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood Lines of Zig-Zag Trenches as viewed from an Airplane] There was a chalk formation here in which were many large natural caves. One enormous cave was said to have held thirty thousand soldiers, and in this section the Germans kept large reserve forces. By digging far into the ground, the German troops secured protection from shell-fire; in fact, the horrible noise of battle was heard only as a murmur, down in these depths. With characteristic thoroughness, the Germans built their trench system for a long stay; while the Allies, on the other hand, looked upon _their_ trenches as merely temporary quarters, which would hold the enemy at bay until they could build up armies large enough to drive the invaders out of the country. The construction of the trenches along some parts of the battle-line was particularly difficult, because of the problem of drainage. This was especially true in Flanders, where the trenches in many cases were below water-level, and elaborate pumping-systems had to be installed to keep them dry. Some of them were concrete-lined to make them waterproof. In the early stages of the war, before the trenches were drained, the men had to stand in water for a good part of the time, and the only way they could get about at all in the miry trenches was by having "duck-boards" in them. Duck-boards are sections of wooden sidewalk such as we find in small villages in this country, consisting of a couple of rails on which crosspieces of wood are nailed. These duck-boards fairly floated in the mud. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" French Sappers using Stethoscopes to detect the Mining Operations of the Enemy] Some of the trenches were provided with barbed wire barriers or gates calculated to halt a raiding-party if it succeeded in getting into the trench. These gates were swung up out of the way, but when lowered they were kept closed with a rather complicated system of bolts which the enemy would be unable to unfasten without some delay; and while he was struggling to get through the gate, he would be a target for the bullets of the defenders. HIDING RAILROADS IN DITCHES Because of the elaborate system of trenches, and the distance from the front line to that part of the country where it was safe to operate in the open, it was necessary to build railways which would travel through tunnels and communicating trenches to the front lines. These were narrow-gage railroads and a special standard form of track section was designed, which was entirely of metal, something like the track sections of toy railroads. The tracks were very quickly laid and taken up at need. The locomotives had to be silent and smokeless and so a special form of gasolene locomotive was invented to haul the little cars along these miniature railroads to the front lines. Usually the trench railroads did not come to the very front of the battle-line, but their principal use was to carry shell to the guns which were located in concealed positions. Railroad or tramway trenches could not be sharply zig-zagged but had to have easy curves, which were apt to be recognized by enemy airplanes, and so they were often concealed under a covering of wire strewn with leaves. PERISCOPES AND "SNIPERSCOPES" But while the armies were buried underground, it was necessary for them to keep their eyes upon each other so that each might be ready for any sudden onslaught of the other. Snipers were always ready to fire at any head that showed itself above the parapet of the trench and so the soldiers had to steal an idea from the submarines and build them periscopes with which they could look over the top of their trenches without exposing themselves. A trench periscope was a very simple affair, consisting of a tube with two mirrors, one at the top and one at the bottom, set at such an angle that a person looking into the side of the tube at the bottom could see out of the opposite side of the tube at the top. Observation posts were established wherever there was a slight rise in the ground. Sometimes these posts were placed far in advance of the trenches and sometimes even behind the trenches where it was possible to obtain a good view of the opposing lines. Sometimes a tunnel would be dug forward, leading to an outlet close to the enemy's lines, and here an observer would take his position at night to spy with his ears upon the activities of the enemy. Observers who watched the enemy by day would often not dare to use periscopes, which might be seen by the enemy and draw a concentrated fire of rifles and even shell. So that every manner of concealment was employed to make the observation posts invisible and to have them blend with their surroundings. Observers even wore veils so that the white of their skin would not betray them. [Illustration: Redrawn from Military Map Reading by permission of E. C. McKay FIG. 1. A "sniperscope" with which a sharpshooter could take aim without showing his head above the parapet] Snipers were equally ingenious in concealing themselves. They frequently used rifles which were connected with a dummy butt and had a periscope sighting-attachment. This attachment was called a "sniperscope." The rifle-barrel could be pushed through a loophole in the parapet and the sniper standing safely below the parapet could hold the dummy butt to his shoulder and aim his rifle with perfect accuracy by means of the periscope. It was next to impossible to locate a sniper hidden in this way. One method of doing it was to examine rubbish, tin cans, or any object that had been penetrated by a bullet and note the direction taken by the bullet. This would give a line leading toward the source of the shot, and when a number of such lines were traced, they would cross at a spot where the sniper or his gun was stationed, and a few shell would put the man out of business. Dummy heads of papier mâché were sometimes stuck above the parapet to draw the fire of enemy snipers and the bullet-holes which quickly appeared in them were studied to discover the location of the snipers. [Illustration: Redrawn from Military Map Reading by permission of E. C. McKay FIG. 2. A fixed rifle stand arranged to be fired after dark] Sometimes fixed rifles were used. These were set on stands so that they could be very accurately trained upon some important enemy post. Then they could be fired in the dark, without aiming, to disturb night operations of the enemy. Often a brace of rifles, as many as six, would be coupled up to be fired simultaneously, and by operating a single lever each gun would throw out the empty cartridge shell and bring a fresh one into position. STEEL BRIER PATCHES The most important defense of a trench system consisted in the barbed wire entanglements placed before it. Barbed wire, by the way, is an American invention, but it was originally intended for the very peaceful purpose for keeping cattle within bounds. Long ago it was used in war, but never to the extent to which it was employed in this world struggle. The entanglements were usually set up at night and were merely fences consisting of stout posts driven into the ground and strung with barbed wire running in all directions, so as to make an impenetrable tangle. Where it was possible to prepare the entanglements without disturbance and the position was an important one, the mass of barbed wire often extended for a hundred yards or more in depth. Just beyond the entanglements trip-wires were sometimes used. A trip-wire was a slack wire which was laid on the ground. Before being laid, the wire was tightly coiled so that it would not lie flat, but would catch the feet of raiders and trip them up. Each side had "gates" in the line through which this wire could quickly be removed to let its own raiding-parties through. Sometimes raiders used tunnels, with outlets beyond the barbed wire, but they had to cut their way through the metal brier patches of their opponents. Early in the war, various schemes were devised for destroying the entanglements. There were bombs in the form of a rod about twelve feet long, which could be pushed under the wire and upon exploding would tear it apart. Another scheme was to fire a projectile formed like a grapnel. The projectile was attached to the end of a cable and was fired from a small gun in the same way that life-lines are thrown out to wrecks near shore. Then the cable would be wound up on a winch and the grapnel hooks would tear the wire from its fastenings. Such schemes, however, did not prove very practicable, and it was eventually found that a much better way of destroying barbed wire was to bombard it with high-explosive shell, which would literally blow the wire apart. But it required a great deal of shelling to destroy these entanglements, and it was really not until the tank was invented that such obstructions could be flattened out so that they formed no bar to the passage of the soldiers. The Germans not only used fixed entanglements, but they had large standard sections of barbed wire arranged in the form of big cylindrical frames which would be carried easily by a couple of men and could be placed in position at a moment's notice to close a gap in the line or even to build up new lines of wire obstruction. MINES AND COUNTER-MINES In the earlier stages of the war it proved so impossible to capture a trench when it was well defended by machine-guns that efforts were made to blow up the enemy by means of mines. Tunnels were dug reaching out under the enemy's lines and large quantities of explosives were stored in them. At the moment when it was intended to make an assault, there would be a heavy cannonading to disconcert the enemy, and then the mine would be touched off. In the demoralizing confusion that resulted, the storming-party would sweep over the enemy. Such mines were tried on both sides, and the only protection against them was to out-guess the other side and build counter-mines. If it were suspected, from the importance of a certain position and the nature of the ground, that the enemy would probably try to undermine it, the defenders would dig tunnels of their own toward the enemy at a safe distance beyond their own lines and establish listeners there to see if they could hear the mining-operations of their opponents. Very delicate microphones were used, which the listeners would place on the ground or against the walls of their tunnel. Then they would listen for the faintest sound of digging, just as a doctor listens through a stethoscope to the beating of a patient's heart or the rush of air through his lungs. When these listening-instruments picked up the noise of digging, the general direction of the digging could be followed out by placing the instrument at different positions and noting where the noise was loudest. Then a counter-mine would be extended in that direction, far enough down to pass under the enemy's tunnel, and at the right moment, a charge of TNT (trinitrotoluol) would be exploded, which would destroy the enemy's sappers and put an end to their ambitious plans. A very interesting case of mining was furnished by the British when they blew up the important post of Messines Ridge. This was strongly held by the Germans and the only way of dislodging the enemy was to blow off the top of the ridge. Before work was started, geologists were called upon to determine whether or not the ground were suitable for mining-operations. They picked out a spot where the digging was good from the British side, but where, if counter-mines were attempted from the German side, quicksands would be encountered and tunneling of any sort would be difficult. The British sappers could, therefore, proceed with comparative safety. The Germans suspected that something of the sort was being undertaken, but they found it very difficult to dig counter-mines. However, one day their suspicions were confirmed, when the whole top of the hill was blown off, with a big loss of German lives. In the assault that followed the British captured the position and it was annexed to the British lines. CHAPTER II HAND-GRENADES AND TRENCH MORTARS In primitive times battles were fought hand-to-hand. The first implements of war were clubs and spears and battle-axes, all intended for fighting at close quarters. The bow and arrow enabled men to fight at a distance, but shields and armor were so effective a defense that it was only by hand-to-hand fighting that a brave enemy could be defeated. Even the invention of gunpowder did not separate the combatants permanently, for although it was possible to hurl missiles at a great distance, cannon were so slow in their action that the enemy could rush them between shots. Shoulder firearms also were comparatively slow in the early days, and liable to miss fire, and it was not until the automatic rifle of recent years was fully developed that soldiers learned to keep their distance. When the great European war started, military authorities had come to look upon war at close quarters as something relegated to bygone days. Even the bayonet was beginning to be thought of little use. Rifles could be charged and fired so rapidly and machine-guns could play such a rapid tattoo of bullets, that it seemed impossible for men to come near enough for hand-to-hand fighting, except at a fearful cost of life. In developing the rifle, every effort was made to increase its range so that it could be used with accuracy at a distance of a thousand yards and more. But when the Germans, after their retreat in the First Battle of the Marne, dug themselves in behind the Aisne, and the French and British too found it necessary to seek shelter from machine-gun and rifle fire by burrowing into the ground, it became apparent that while rifles and machine-guns could drive the fighting into the ground, they were of little value in continuing the fight after the opposing sides had buried themselves. The trenches were carried close to one another, in some instances being so close that the soldiers could actually hear the conversation of their opponents across the intervening gap. Under such conditions long-distance firearms were of very little practical value. What was needed was a short-distance gun which would get down into the enemy trenches. To be sure, the trenches could be shelled, but the shelling had to be conducted from a considerable distance, where the artillery would be immune to attack, and it was impossible to give a trench the particular and individual attention which it would receive at the hands of men attacking it at close quarters. Before we go any farther we must learn the meaning of the word "trajectory." No bullet or shell travels in a straight line. As soon as it leaves the muzzle of the gun, it begins to fall, and its course through the air is a vertical curve that brings it eventually down to the ground. This curve is called the "trajectory." No gun is pointed directly at a target, but above it, so as to allow for the pull of gravity. The faster the bullet travels, the flatter is this curve or trajectory, because there is less time for it to fall before it reaches its target. Modern rifles fire their missiles at so high a speed that the bullets have a very flat trajectory. But in trench warfare a flat trajectory was not desired. What was the use of a missile that traveled in a nearly straight line, when the object to be hit was hiding in the ground? Trench fighting called for a missile that had a very high trajectory, so that it would drop right into the enemy trench. HAND-ARTILLERY Trench warfare is really a close-quarters fight of fort against fort, and the soldiers who manned the forts had to revert to the ancient methods of fighting an enemy intrenched behind fortifications. Centuries ago, not long after the first use of gunpowder in war, small explosive missiles were invented which could be thrown by hand. These were originally known as "flying mortars." The missile was about the size of an orange or a pomegranate, and it was filled with powder and slugs. A small fuse, which was ignited just before the device was thrown, was timed to explode the missile when it reached the enemy. Because of its size and shape, and because the slugs it contained corresponded, in a manner, to the pulp-covered seeds with which a pomegranate is filled, the missile was called a "grenade." Grenades had fallen out of use in modern warfare, although they had been revived to a small extent in the Russo-Japanese war, and had been used with some success by the Bulgarians and the Turks in the Balkan wars. And yet they had not been taken very seriously by the military powers of Europe, except Germany. Germany was always on the lookout for any device that might prove useful in war, and when the Germans dug themselves in after the First Battle of the Marne, they had large quantities of hand-grenades for their men to toss over into the trenches of the Allies. These missiles proved very destructive indeed. They took the place of artillery, and were virtually hand-thrown shrapnel. The French and British were entirely unprepared for this kind of fighting, and they had hastily to improvise offensive and defensive weapons for trench warfare. Their hand-grenades were at first merely tin cans filled with bits of iron and a high explosive in which a fuse-cord was inserted. The cord was lighted by means of a cigarette and then the can with its spluttering fuse was thrown into the enemy lines. As time went on and the art of grenade fighting was learned, the first crude missiles were greatly improved upon and grenades were made in many forms for special service. There was a difference between grenades hurled from sheltered positions and those used in open fighting. When the throwers were sheltered behind their own breastworks, it mattered not how powerful was the explosion of the grenade. We must remember that in "hand-artillery" the shell is far more powerful in proportion to the distance it is thrown than the shell fired from a gun, and many grenades were so heavily charged with explosives that they would scatter death and destruction farther than they could be thrown by hand. The grenadier who cast one of these grenades had to duck under cover or hide under the walls of his trench, else the fragments scattered by the exploding missile might fly back and injure him. Some grenades would spread destruction to a distance of over three hundred feet from the point of explosion. For close work, grenades of smaller radius were used. These were employed to fight off a raiding-party after it had invaded a trench, and the destructive range of these grenades was usually about twenty-five feet. Hand-grenades came to be used in all the different ways that artillery was used. There were grenades which were filled with gas, not only of the suffocating and tear-producing types, but also of the deadly poisonous variety. There were incendiary grenades which would set fire to enemy stores, and smoke grenades which would produce a dense black screen behind which operations could be concealed from the enemy. Grenades were used in the same way that shrapnel was used to produce a barrage or curtain of fire, through which the enemy could not pass without facing almost certain death. Curtains of fire were used not only for defensive purposes when the enemy was attacking, but also to cut off a part of the enemy so that it could not receive assistance and would be obliged to surrender. In attacks upon the enemy lines, grenades were used to throw a barrage in advance of the attacking soldiers so as to sweep the ground ahead clear of the enemy. The French paid particular attention to the training of grenadiers. A man had to be a good, cool-headed pitcher before he could be classed as a grenadier. He must be able to throw his grenade with perfect accuracy up to a distance of seventy yards, and to maintain an effective barrage. The grenadier carried his grenades in large pockets attached to his belt, and he was attended by a carrier who brought up grenades to him in baskets, so that he was served with a continuous supply. LONG-DISTANCE GRENADE-THROWING All this relates to short-distance fighting, but grenades were also used for ranges beyond the reach of the pitcher's arm. Even back in the sixteenth century, the range of the human arm was not great enough to satisfy the combatants and grenadiers used a throwing-implement, something like a shovel, with which the grenade was slung to a greater distance, in much the same way as a lacrosse ball is thrown. Later, grenades were fitted with light, flexible wooden handles and were thrown, handle and all, at the enemy. By this means they could be slung to a considerable distance. Such grenades were used in the recent war, particularly by the Germans. The handle was provided with streamers so as to keep the grenade head-on to the enemy, and it was usually exploded by percussion on striking its target. These long-handled grenades, however, were clumsy and bulky, and the grenadier required a good deal of elbow-room when throwing them. [Illustration: FIG. 3. A rifle grenade fitted to the muzzle of a rifle] A much better plan was to hurl them with the aid of a gun. A rifle made an excellent short-distance mortar. With it grenades could be thrown from three to four hundred yards. The grenade was fastened on a rod which was inserted in the barrel of the rifle and then it was fired out of the gun by the explosion of a blank cartridge. The butt of the rifle was rested on the ground and the rifle was tilted so as to throw the grenade up into the air in the way that a mortar projects its shell. STRIKING A LIGHT The lighting of the grenade fuses with a cigarette did very well for the early tin-can grenades, but the cigarettes were not always handy, particularly in the heat of battle, and something better had to be devised. One scheme was to use a safety-match composition on the end of a fuse. This was covered with waxed paper to protect it from the weather. The grenadier wore an armlet covered with a friction composition such as is used on a safety-match box. Before the grenade was thrown, the waxed paper was stripped off and the fuse was lighted by being scratched on the armlet. In another type the fuse was lighted by the twisting of a cap which scratched a match composition on a friction surface. A safety-pin kept the cap from turning until the grenadier was ready to throw the grenade. The Mills hand-grenade, which proved to be the most popular type used by the British Army, was provided with a lever which was normally strapped down and held by means of a safety-pin. Fig. 4 shows a sectional view of this grenade. Just before the missile was thrown, it was seized in the hand so that the lever was held down. Then the safety-pin was removed and when the grenade was thrown, the lever would spring up under pull of the spring _A_. This would cause the pin _B_ to strike the percussion cap _C_, which would light the fuse _D_. The burning fuse would eventually carry the fire to the detonator _E_, which would touch off the main explosive, shattering the shell of the grenade and scattering its fragments in all directions. The shell of the grenade was indented so that it would break easily into a great many small pieces. [Illustration: FIG. 4. Details of the Mills hand grenade] There were some advantages in using grenades lighted by fuse instead of percussion, and also there were many disadvantages. If too long a time-fuse were used, the enemy might catch the grenade, as you would a baseball and hurl it back before it exploded. This was a hazardous game, but it was often done. [Illustration: FIG. 5. A German parachute grenade] Among the different types of grenades which the Germans used was one provided with a parachute as shown in Fig. 5. The object of the parachute was to keep the head of the grenade toward the enemy, so that when it exploded it would expend its energies forward and would not cast fragments back toward the man who had thrown it. This was a very sensitive grenade, arranged to be fired by percussion, but it was so easily exploded that the firing-mechanism was not released until after the grenade had been thrown. In the handle of this grenade there was a bit of cord about twenty feet long. One end of this was attached to a safety-needle, _A_, while the other end, formed into a loop, was held by the grenadier when he threw the grenade. Not until the missile had reached a height of twelve or thirteen feet would the pull of the string withdraw the needle _A_. This would permit a safety-hook, _B_, to drop out of a ring, _C_, on the end of a striker pellet, _D_. When the grenade struck, the pellet _D_ would move forward and a pin, _E_, would strike a cap on the detonator _F_, exploding the missile. This form of safety-device was used on a number of German grenades. [Illustration: FIG. 6. British rifle grenade with a safety-device which is unlocked by the rush of air against a set of inclined vanes, _D_, when the missile is in flight] The British had another scheme for locking the mechanism until after the grenade had traveled some distance through the air. Details of this grenade, which was of the type adopted to be fired from a rifle, are shown in Fig. 6. The striker _A_ is retained by a couple of bolts, _B_, which in turn are held in place by a sleeve, _C_. On the sleeve is a set of wind-vanes, _D_. As the grenade travels through the air, the wind-vanes cause the sleeve _C_ to revolve, screwing it down clear of the bolts _B_, which then drop out, permitting the pin _A_ to strike the detonator _E_ upon impact of the grenade with its target. [Illustration: FIG. 7. Front, side, and sectional views of a disk-shaped German grenade] [Illustration: FIG. 8. A curious German hand grenade shaped like a hair brush] The Germans had one peculiar type which was in the shape of a disk. In the disk were six tubes, four of which carried percussion caps so that the grenade was sure to explode no matter on which tube it fell. The disk was thrown with the edge up, and it would roll through the air. Another type of grenade was known as the hair-brush grenade because it had a rectangular body of tin about six inches long and two and three quarter inches wide and deep, which was nailed to a wooden handle. MINIATURE ARTILLERY Hand-artillery was very effective as far as it went, but it had its limitations. Grenades could not be made heavier than two pounds in weight if they were to be thrown by hand; in fact, most of them were much lighter than that. If they were fired from a rifle, the range was increased but the missile could not be made very much heavier. TNT is a very powerful explosive, but there is not room for much of it in a grenade the size of a large lemon. Trench fighting was a duel between forts, and while the hand-artillery provided a means of attacking the defenders of a fort, it made no impression on the walls of the fort. It corresponded to shrapnel fire on a miniature scale, and something corresponding to high-explosive fire on a small scale was necessary if the opposing fortifications were to be destroyed. To meet this problem, men cast their thoughts back to the primitive artillery of the Romans, who used to hurl great rocks at the enemy with catapults. And the trench fighters actually rigged up catapults with which they hurled heavy bombs at the enemy lines. All sorts of ingenious catapults were built, some modeled after the old Roman machines. In some of these stout timbers were used as springs, in others there were powerful coil springs. It was not necessary to cast the bombs far. For distant work the regular artillery could be used. What was needed was a short-distance gun for heavy missiles and that is what the catapult was. [Illustration: Press Illustrating Service A 3-inch Stokes mortar and two of its shells] [Illustration: Press Illustrating Service Dropping a shell into a 6-inch trench mortar] But the work of the catapult was not really satisfactory. The machine was clumsy; it occupied too much space, and it could not be aimed very accurately. It soon gave way to a more modern apparatus, fashioned after the old smooth-bore mortars. This was a miniature mortar, short and wide-mouthed. A rifled barrel was not required, because, since the missile was not to be hurled far, it was not necessary to set it spinning by means of rifling so as to hold it head-on to the wind. GIANT PEA-SHOOTERS Better aim was secured when a longer-barreled trench mortar came to be used. In the trench, weight was an important item. There was no room in which to handle heavy guns, and the mortar had to be portable so that it could be carried forward by the infantry in a charge. As the walls of a light barrel might be burst by the shock of exploding powder, compressed air was used instead. The shell was virtually blown out of the gun in the same way that a boy blows missiles out of a pea-shooter. That the shell might be kept from tumbling, it was fitted with vanes at the rear. These acted like the feathers of an arrow to hold the missile head-on to its course. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" The Maxim Machine-gun Operated by the Energy of the Recoil] [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" Colt Machine-gun partly broken away to show the Operating Mechanism Gas from port _A_ pushes down piston _B_, rocking lever _C_, which compresses coil-spring _D_. The cartridge fed into the gun by wheel _E_, is extracted by _F_, raised by _G_ to breech _H_, and rammed in by bolt _I_. _J_, piston firing-hammer.] The French in particular used this type of mortar and the air-pump was used to compress the air that propelled the shell or aërial torpedo, or else the propelling charge was taken from a compressed-air tank. Carbon-dioxide, the gas used in soda-water, is commonly stored in tanks under high pressure and this gas was sometimes used in place of compressed air. When the gas in the tank was exhausted the latter could be recharged with air by using a hand-pump. Two or three hundred strokes of the pump would give a pressure of one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds per inch, and would supply enough air to discharge a number of shell. The air was let into the barrel of the mortar in a single puff sufficient to launch the shell; then the tank was cut off at once, so that the air it contained would not escape and go to waste. THE STOKES MORTAR However, the most useful trench mortar developed during the war was invented by Wilfred Stokes, a British inventor. In this a comparatively slow-acting powder was used to propel the missile, and so a thin-walled barrel could be used. The light Stokes mortar can easily be carried over the shoulder by one man. It has two legs and the barrel itself serves as a third leg, and the mortar stands like a tripod. The two legs are adjustable, so that the barrel can be inclined to any desired angle. It took but a moment to set up the mortar for action in a trench or shell-hole. [Illustration: FIG. 9. Sectional view of a 3-inch Stokes mortar showing a shell at the instant of striking the anvil] [Illustration: FIG. 10. A 6-inch trench mortar shell fitted with tail-vanes] Curiously enough, there is no breech-block, trigger or fire-hole in this mortar. It is fired merely by the dropping of the missile into the mouth of the barrel. The shell carries its own propelling charge, as shown in Fig. 9. This is in the form of rings, _A_, which are fitted on a stem, _B_. At the end of the stem are a detonating cap and a cartridge, to ignite the propellant, _A_. At the bottom of the mortar barrel, there is a steel point, _E_, known as the "anvil." When the shell is dropped into the mortar, the cap strikes the anvil, exploding the cartridge and touching off the propelling charge, _A_. The gases formed by the burning charge hurl the shell out of the barrel to a distance of several hundred yards. The first Stokes mortar was made to fire a 3-inch shell, but the mortar grew in size until it could hurl shell of 6-inch and even 8-1/2-inch size. Of course, the larger mortars had to have a very substantial base. They were not so readily portable as the smaller ones and they could not be carried by one man; but compared with ordinary artillery of the same bore they were immeasurably lighter and could be brought to advanced positions and set up in a very short time. The larger shell have tail-vanes, as shown in Fig. 10, to keep them from tumbling when in flight. CHAPTER III GUNS THAT FIRE THEMSELVES Many years ago a boy tried his hand at firing a United States Army service rifle. It was a heavy rifle of the Civil War period, and the lad did not know just how to hold it. He let the butt of the gun rest uncertainly against him, instead of pressing it firmly to his shoulder, and, in consequence, when the gun went off he received a powerful kick. That kick made a deep impression on the lad, not only on his flesh but on his mind as well. It gave him a good conception of the power of a rifle cartridge. Years afterward, when he had moved to England, the memory of that kick was still with him. It was a useless prank of the gun, he thought, a waste of good energy. Why could not the energy be put to use? And so he set himself the task of harnessing the kick of the gun. A very busy program he worked out for that kick to perform. He planned to have the gun use up its exuberant energy in loading and firing itself. So he arranged the cartridges on a belt and fed the belt into the gun. When the gun was fired, the recoil would unlock the breech, take out the empty case of the cartridge just fired, select a fresh cartridge from the belt, and cock the main spring; then the mechanism would return, throwing the empty cartridge-case out of the gun, pushing the new cartridge into the barrel, closing the breech, and finally pulling the trigger. All this was to be done by the energy of a single kick, in about one tenth of a second, and the gun would keep on repeating the operation as long as the supply of cartridges was fed to it. The new gun proved so successful that the inventor was knighted, and became Sir Hiram Maxim. A DOCTOR'S TEN-BARRELED GUN But Maxim's was by no means the first machine-gun. During the Civil War a Chicago physician brought out a very ingenious ten-barreled gun, the barrels of which were fired one after the other by the turning of a hand-crank. Although Dr. Gatling was a graduate of a medical school, he was far more fond of tinkering with machinery than of doling out pills. He invented a number of clever mechanisms, but the one that made him really famous was that machine-gun. At first our government did not take the invention seriously. The gun was tried out in the war, but whenever it went into battle it was fired not by soldiers but by a representative of Dr. Gatling's company, who went into the army to demonstrate the worth of the invention. Not until long after was the Gatling gun officially adopted by our army. Then it was taken up by many of the European armies as well. Although many other machine-guns were invented, the Gatling was easily the best and most serviceable, until the Maxim invention made its appearance, and even then it held its own for many years; but eventually it had to succumb. The Maxim did not have to be cranked: it fired itself, which was a distinct advantage; and then, instead of being a bundle of guns all bound up into a single machine, Maxim's was a single-barreled gun and hence was much lighter and could be handled much more easily. A GUN AS A GAS-ENGINE Another big advance was made by a third American, Mr. John M. Browning, who is responsible for the Colt gun. It was not a kick that set Browning to thinking. He looked upon a gun as an engine of the same order as an automobile engine, and really the resemblance is very close. The barrel of the gun is the cylinder of the engine; the bullet is the piston; and for fuel gunpowder is used in place of gasolene. As in the automobile engine, the charge is fired by a spark; but in the case of the gun the spark is produced by a blow of the trigger upon a bit of fulminate of mercury in the end of the cartridge. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" The Lewis Gun which produces its own cooling current] [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" The Benèt-Mercié Gun operated by gas] Explosion is the same thing as burning. The only way that the explosion of gunpowder differs from the burning of a stick of wood is that the latter is very slow, while the former goes like a flash. In both cases the fuel turns into great volumes of gas. In the case of the gun the gas is formed almost instantly and in such quantity that it has to drive the bullet out of the barrel to make room for itself. In the cartridge that our army uses, only about a tenth of an ounce of smokeless powder is used, but this builds up so heavy a pressure of gas that the bullet is sent speeding out of the gun at a rate of half a mile a second. It travels so fast that it will plow through four feet of solid wood before coming to a stop. [Illustration: (C) Committee on Public Information Browning Machine Rifle, weight only 15 pounds] [Illustration: (C) Committee on Public Information Browning Machine-Gun, weighing 34-1/2 pounds] Now it occurred to Browning that it wouldn't really be stealing to take a little of that gas-power and use it to work the mechanism of his machine-gun. It was ever so little he wanted, and the bullet would never miss it. The danger was not that he might take too much. His problem was to take any power at all without getting more than his mechanism could stand. What he did was to bore a hole through the side of the gun-barrel. When the gun was fired, nothing happened until the bullet passed this hole; then some of the gas that was pushing the bullet before it would blow out through the hole. But this would be a very small amount indeed, for the instant that the bullet passed out of the barrel the gases would rush out after it, the pressure in the gun would drop, and the gas would stop blowing through the hole. With the bullet traveling at the rate of about half a mile in a second, imagine how short a space of time elapses after it passes the hole before it emerges from the muzzle, and what a small amount of gas can pass through the hole in that brief interval! The gas that Browning got in this way he led into a second cylinder, fitted with a piston. This piston was given a shove, and that gave a lever a kick which set going the mechanism that extracted the empty cartridge-case, inserted a fresh cartridge, and fired it. GETTING RID OF HEAT The resemblance of a machine-gun to a gasolene-engine can be demonstrated still further. One of the most important parts of an automobile engine is the cooling-system. The gasolene burning in the cylinders would soon make them red-hot, were not some means provided to carry off the heat. The same is true of a machine-gun. In fact, the heat is one of the biggest problems that has to be dealt with. In a gasolene-engine the heat is carried off in one of three ways: (1) by passing water around the cylinders; (2) by building flanges around the cylinders to carry the heat off into the air; and (3) by using a fan to blow cool air against the cylinders. All of these schemes are used in the machine-gun. In Dr. Gatling's gun the cooling-problem was very simple. As there were ten barrels, one barrel could be cooling while the rest were taking their turn in the firing. In other words, each barrel received only a tenth of the heat that the whole gun was producing; and yet Gatling found it advisable to surround the barrels for about half their length with a water-jacket. In the Maxim gun a water-jacket is used that extends the full length of the barrel, and into this water-jacket seven and a half pints of water are poured. Yet in a minute and a half of steady firing at a moderate rate, or before six hundred rounds are discharged, the water will be boiling. After that, with every thousand rounds of continuous fire a pint and a half of water will be evaporated. Now the water and the water-jacket add a great deal of weight to the gun, and this Browning decided to do away with in his machine-gun. Instead of water he used air to carry off the heat. The more surface the air touches, the more heat will it carry away; and so the Colt gun was at first made with a very thick-walled barrel. But later the Colt was formed with flanges, like the flanges on a motor-cycle engine, so as to increase the surface of the barrel. Of course, air-cooling is not so effective as water-cooling, but it is claimed for this gun, and for other machine-guns of the same class, that the barrel is sufficiently cooled for ordinary service. Although a machine-gun may be capable of firing many hundred shots per minute, it is seldom that such a rate is kept up very long in battle. Usually, only a few rounds are fired at a time and then there is a pause, and there is plenty of time for the barrel to cool. Once in a while, however, the gun has to be fired continuously for several minutes, and then the barrel grows exceedingly hot. EFFECT OF OVERHEATING But what if the gun-barrel does become hot? The real trouble is not that the cartridge will explode prematurely, but that the barrel will expand as it grows hot, so that the bullet will fit too loosely in the bore. Inside the barrel the bore is rifled; that is, there are spiral grooves in it which give a twist to the bullet as it passes through, setting it spinning like a top. The spin of the bullet keeps its nose pointing forward. If it were not for the rifling, the bullet would tumble over and over, every which way, and it could not go very far through the air, to say nothing of penetrating steel armor. To gain the spinning-motion the bullet must fit into the barrel snugly enough to squeeze into the spiral grooves. Now there is another American machine-gun known as the Hotchkiss, which was used to a considerable extent by the French Army. It is a gas-operated gun, something like the Colt, and it is air-cooled. It was found in tests of the Hotchkiss gun that in from three to four minutes of firing the barrel was expanded so much that the shots began to be a little uncertain. In seven minutes of continuous firing the barrel had grown so large that the rifling failed to grip the bullet at all. The gun was no better than an old-fashioned smooth-bore. The bullets would not travel more than three hundred yards. It is because of this danger of overheating that the Colt and the Hotchkiss guns are always furnished with a spare barrel. As soon as a barrel gets hot it is uncoupled and the spare one is inserted in its place. Our men are trained to change the barrel of a colt in the dark in a quarter of a minute. But a gun that has to have a spare barrel and that has to have its barrel changed in the midst of a hot engagement is not an ideal weapon, by any means. And this brings us to still another invention--that, too, by an American. Colonel I. N. Lewis, of the United States Army, conceived of a machine-gun that would be cooled not by still air but by air in motion. This would do away with all the bother of water-jackets. It would keep the gun light so that it could be operated by one man, and yet it would not have to be supplied with a spare barrel. Like the Colt and the Hotchkiss, the Lewis gun takes its power from the gas that comes through a small port in the barrel, near the muzzle. In the plate facing page 44 the port may be seen leading into a cylinder that lies under the barrel. It takes about one ten-thousandth part of a second for a bullet to pass out of the barrel after clearing the port, but in that brief interval there is a puff of gas in the cylinder which drives back a piston. This piston has teeth on it which engage a small gear connected with a main-spring. When the piston moves back, it winds the spring, and it is this spring that operates the mechanism of the gun. The cartridges, instead of being taken from a belt or a clip, are taken from a magazine that is round and flat. There are forty-seven cartridges in the magazine and they are arranged like the spokes of a wheel, but in two layers. As soon as forty-seven rounds have been fired, the shooting must stop while a new magazine is inserted. But to insert it takes only a couple of seconds. USING THE BULLET TO FAN THE GUN The most ingenious part of the Lewis gun is the cooling-system. On the barrel of the gun are sixteen flanges or fins. These, instead of running around the gun, run lengthwise of the barrel. They are very light fins, being made of aluminum, and are surrounded by a casing of the same metal. The casing is open at each end so that the air can flow through it, but it extends beyond the muzzle of the barrel, and there it is narrowed down. At the end of the barrel there is a mouthpiece so shaped that the bullet, as it flies through, sucks a lot of air in its wake, making a strong current flow through the sixteen channels formed between the fins inside the casing. This air flows at the rate of about seventy miles per hour, which is enough to carry off all the heat that is generated by the firing of the cartridges. The gun may be regulated to fire between 350 and 750 rounds per minute, and its total weight is only 25-1/2 pounds. [Illustration: Lewis Machine-guns in action at the front] America can justly claim the honor of inventing and developing the machine-gun, although Hiram Maxim did give up his American citizenship and become a British subject. By the way, he is not to be confused with his younger brother, Hudson Maxim, the inventor of high explosives, who has always been an American to the core. Of course we must not get the impression that only Americans have invented machine-guns. There have been inventors of such weapons in various countries of Europe, and even in Japan. Our own army for a while used a gun known as the Benèt-Mercié, which is something like the Hotchkiss. This was invented by L. V. Benèt, an American, and H. A. Mercié, a Frenchman, both living in St. Denis, France. THE BROWNING MACHINE-GUN When we entered the war, it was expected that we would immediately equip our forces with the Lewis gun, because the British and the Belgians had found it an excellent weapon and also because it was invented by an American officer, who very patriotically offered it to our government without charging patent royalties. But the army officials would not accept it, although many Lewis guns were bought by the navy. This raised a storm of protest throughout the country until finally it was learned that there was another gun for which the army was waiting, which it was said would be the very best yet. The public was skeptical and finally a test was arranged in Washington at which the worth of the new gun was demonstrated. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" An elaborate German Machine-Gun Fort] It was a new Browning model; or, rather, there were two distinct models. One of them, known as the heavy model, weighed only 34-1/2 pounds, this with its water-jacket filled; for it was a water-cooled gun. Without its charge of water the machine weighed but 22-1/2 pounds and could be rated as a very light machine-gun. However, it was classed as a heavy gun and was operated from a tripod. The new machine used recoil to operate its mechanism. The construction was simple, there were few parts, and the gun could very quickly be taken apart in case of breakage or disarrangement of the mechanism. But the greatest care was exercised to prevent jamming of cartridges, which was one of the principal defects in the other types of machine-guns. In the test this new weapon fired twenty thousand shots at the rate of six hundred per minute, with interruptions of only four and a half seconds, due partly to defective cartridges. There was no doubt that the new Browning was a remarkable weapon. But if that could be said of the heavy gun, the light gun was a marvel. It weighed only fifteen pounds and was light enough to be fired from the shoulder or from the hip, while the operator was walking or running. In fact, it was really a machine-rifle. The regular .30-caliber service cartridges were used, and these were stored in a clip holding twenty cartridges. The cartridges could be fired one at a time, or the entire clip could be fired in two and a half seconds. It took but a second to drop an empty clip out of the gun and replace it with a fresh one. The rifle was gas-operated and air-cooled, but no special cooling-device was supplied because it would seldom be necessary to fire a shoulder rifle fast enough and long enough for the barrel to become overheated. After the Browning machine-rifle was demonstrated it was realized that the army had been perfectly justified in waiting for the new weapon. Like the heavy Browning, the new rifle was a very simple mechanism, with few parts which needed no special tools to take them apart or reassemble them; a single small wrench served this purpose. Both the heavy and the light gun were proof against mud, sand, and dust of the battle-field. But best of all, a man did not have to have highly specialized training before he could use the Browning rifle. It did not require a crew to operate one of these guns. Each soldier could have his own machine-gun and carry it in a charge as he would a rifle. The advantage of the machine-rifle was that the operator could fire as he ran, watching where the bullets struck the ground by noting the dust they kicked up and in that way correcting his aim until he was on the target. Very accurate shooting was thus made possible, and the machine-rifle proved invaluable in the closing months of the war. Browning is unquestionably the foremost inventor of firearms in the world. He was born of Mormon parents, in Ogden, Utah, in 1854, and his father had a gun shop. As a boy Browning became familiar with the use of firearms and when he was but fourteen years of age he invented an improved breech mechanism which was later used in the Winchester repeater. Curiously enough, it was a Browning pistol that was used by the assassin at Serajevo who killed the Archduke of Austria and precipitated the great European war, and it was with the Browning machine-gun and rifle that our boys swept the Germans back through the Argonne Forest and helped to bring the war to a successful end. THE MACHINE-GUN IN SERVICE Although the machine-gun has been used ever since the Civil War, it was not a vital factor in warfare until the recent great conflict. Army officials were very slow to take it up, because they did not understand it. They used to think of it as an inferior piece of light artillery, instead of a superior rifle. The Gatling was so heavy that it had to be mounted on wheels, and naturally it was thought of as a cannon. In the Franco-Prussian War the French had a machine-gun by which they set great store. It was called a _mitrailleuse_, or a gun for firing grape-shot. It was something like the Gatling. The French counted on this machine to surprise and overwhelm the Germans. But they made the mistake of considering it a piece of artillery and fired it from long range, so that it did not have a chance to show its worth. Only on one or two occasions was it used at close range, and then it did frightful execution. However, it was a very unsatisfactory machine, and kept getting out of order. It earned the contempt of the Germans, and later when the Maxim gun was offered to the German Army they would have none of it. They did not want to bother with "a toy cannon." It really was not until the war between Russia and Japan that military men began to realize the value of the machine-gun. As the war went on, both the Russians and the Japanese bought up all the machine-guns they could secure. They learned what could be done with the aid of barbed wire to retard the enemy while the machine-guns mowed them down as they were trying to get through. A man with a machine-gun is worth a hundred men with rifles; such is the military estimate of the weapon. The gun fires so fast that after hitting a man it will hit him again ten times while he is falling to the ground. And so it does not pay to fire the gun continuously in one direction, unless there is a dense mass of troops charging upon it. Usually the machine-gun is swept from side to side so as to cover as wide a range as possible. It is played upon the enemy as you would play the hose upon the lawn, scattering a shower of lead among the advancing hosts. MACHINE-GUN FORTS It used to be thought that the Belgian forts of armored steel and concrete, almost completely buried in the ground, would hold out against any artillery. But when the Germans brought up their great howitzers and hurled undreamed-of quantities of high explosives on these forts, they broke and crumbled to pieces. Then it was predicted that the day of the fort was over. But the machine-gun developed a new type of warfare. Instead of great forts, mounting huge guns, little machine-gun forts were built, and, they were far more troublesome than the big fellows. To the Germans belongs the credit for the new type of fort, which consisted of a small concrete structure, hidden from view as far as possible, but commanding some important part of the front. "Pill-boxes," the British call them, because the first ones they ran across were round in shape and something like a pill-box in appearance. These pill-boxes were just large enough to house a few men and a couple of machine-guns. Concealment was of the utmost importance; safety depended upon it. Airplanes were particularly feared, because a machine-gun emplacement was recognized to be so important that a whole battery of artillery would be turned upon a suspected pill-box. Some of the German machine-gun forts were very elaborate, consisting of spacious underground chambers where a large garrison of gunners could live. These forts were known as _Mebus_, a word made from the initials of "_Maschinengewehr Eisen-Bettungs Unterstand_," meaning a machine-gun iron-bedded foundation. It was the machine-gun that was responsible for the enormous expenditure of ammunition in the war. Before a body of troops dared to make a charge, the ground had to be thoroughly searched by the big guns for any machine-gun nests. Unless these were found and destroyed by shell-fire, the only way that remained to get the best of them was to crush them down with tanks. It was really the machine-gun that drove the armies into trenches and under the ground. [Illustration: Comparative diagram of the path of a projectile from the German Super-gun] But a machine-gun did not have to be housed in a fort, particularly a light gun of the Lewis type. To be sure, the Lewis gun is a little heavy to be used as a rifle, but it could easily be managed with a rest for the muzzle in the crotch of a tree, and a strong man could actually fire the piece from the shoulder. The light machine-gun could go right along with a charging body of troops and do very efficient service, particularly in fighting in a town or village, but it had to be kept moving or it would be a target for the artillery. In a certain village fight a machine-gunner kept changing his position. He would fire for a few minutes from one building and then shift over to some other. He did this no less than six times, never staying more than five minutes at a time in the same spot. But each one of the houses was shelled within fifteen minutes of the time he opened fire from it, which shows the importance that the Germans attached to machine-gun fire. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" One of our 16-inch Coast Defence Guns on a disappearing mount] [Illustration: Height of gun as compared with the New York City Hall] CHAPTER IV GUNS AND SUPER-GUNS When the news came that big shells were dropping into Paris from a gun which must be at least seventy miles away, the world at first refused to believe; then it imagined that some brand-new form of gun or shell or powder had been invented by the Germans. However, while the public marveled, ordnance experts were interested but not astonished. They knew that it was perfectly feasible to build a gun that would hurl a shell fifty, or seventy-five, or even a hundred miles, without involving anything new in the science of gunnery. SHOOTING AROUND THE EDGE OF THE EARTH But if such ranges were known to be possible, why was no such long-distance gun built before? Simply because none but the Germans would ever think of shooting around the edge of the earth at a target so far away that it would have to be as big as a whole city to be hit at all. In a distance of seventy miles, the curve of the earth is considerable. Paris is far below the horizon of a man standing at St. Gobain, where the big German gun was located. And if a hole were bored from St. Gobain straight to Paris, so that you could see the city from the gun, it would pass, midway of its course, three thousand, seven hundred and fifty feet below the surface of the earth. With the target so far off, it was impossible to aim at any particular fort, ammunition depot, or other point of military importance. There is always some uncertainty as to just where a shell will fall, due to slight differences in quality and quantity of the powder used, in the density of the air, the direction of the wind, etc. This variation is bad enough when a shell is to be fired ten miles, but when the missile has to travel seventy miles, it is out of the question to try to hit a target that is not miles in extent. Twenty years before the war our Ordnance Department had designed a fifty-mile gun, but it was not built, because we could see no possible use for it. Our big guns were built for fighting naval battles or for the defense of our coasts from naval attacks, and there is certainly no use in firing at a ship that is so far below the horizon that we cannot even see the tips of its masts; and so our big guns, though they were capable of firing a shell twenty-seven miles, if aimed high enough, were usually mounted in carriages that would not let them shoot more than twelve or fifteen miles. The distance to which a shell can be hurled depends to a large extent upon the angle of the gun. If the gun is tilted up to an angle of 15 degrees, the shell will go only about half as far as if it were tilted up to 43-1/2 degrees, which is the angle that will carry a shell to its greatest distance. If the long-range German gun was fired at that angle, the shell must have risen to a height of about twenty-four miles. BEYOND THE EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE Most of the air that surrounds our globe lies within four miles of the surface. Few airplanes can rise to a greater height than this, because the air is so thin that it gives no support to the wings of the machine. The greatest height to which a man has ever ascended is seven miles. A balloon once carried two men to such a height. One of them lost consciousness, and the other, who was nearly paralyzed, succeeded in pulling the safety-valve rope, with his teeth. That brought the balloon down, and their instruments showed that they had gone up thirty-six thousand feet. What the ocean of air contains above that elevation, we do not know, but judging by the way the atmosphere thins out as we rise from the surface of the earth, we reckon that nine tenths of the air lies within ten miles of the surface of the earth. At twenty-four miles, or the top of the curve described by the shell of the German long-range guns, there must be an almost complete vacuum. If only we could accompany a shell on its course, we should find a strange condition of affairs. The higher we rose, the darker would the heavens become, until the sun would shine like a fiery ball in a black sky. All around, the stars would twinkle, and below would be the glare of light reflected from the earth's surface and its atmosphere, while the cold would be far more intense than anything suffered on earth. Up at that height, there would be nothing to indicate that the shell was moving--no rush of air against the ears. We should seem detached from earth and out in the endless reaches of space. It seems absurd to think that a shell weighing close to a quarter of a ton could be retarded appreciably by mere air. But when we realize that the shell left the gun at the rate of over half a mile a second--traveling about thirty times faster than an express-train--we know that the air-pressure mounts up to a respectable figure. The pressure is the same whether a shell is moving through the air or the air is blowing against the shell. When the wind blows at the rate of 100 to 120 miles per hour, it is strong enough to lift houses off their foundations, to wrench trees out of the ground, to pick up cattle and carry them sailing through the air. Imagine what it would do if its velocity were increased to 1,800 miles per hour. That is what the shell of a big gun has to contend with. As most of the air lies near the earth, the shell of long-range guns meet with less and less resistance the higher they rise, until they get up into such thin air that there is virtually no obstruction. The main trouble is to pierce the blanket of heavy air that lies near the earth. WAYS OF INCREASING THE RANGE The big 16-inch guns that protect our coasts fire a shell that weighs 2,400 pounds. Nine hundred pounds of smokeless powder is used to propel the shell, which leaves the muzzle of the gun with a speed of 2,600 feet per second. Now, the larger the diameter of the shell, the greater will be its speed at the muzzle of the gun, because there will be a greater surface for the powder gases to press against. On the other hand, the larger the shell, the more will it be retarded by the air, because there will be a larger surface for the air to press against. It has been proposed by some ordnance experts that a shell might be provided with a disk at each end, which would make it fit a gun of larger caliber. A 10-inch shell, for instance, could then be fired from a 16-inch gun. Being lighter than the 16-inch shell, it would leave the muzzle of the gun at a higher speed. The disks could be so arranged that as soon as the shell left the gun they would be thrown off, and then the 10-inch shell, although starting with a higher velocity than a 16-inch shell, would offer less resistance to the air. In that way it could be made to cover a much greater range. By the way, the shell of the German long-range gun was of but 8.2-inch caliber. Another way of increasing the range is to lengthen the gun. Right here we must become acquainted with the word "caliber." Caliber means the diameter of the shell. A 16-inch gun, for instance, fires a shell of 16-inch caliber; but when we read that the gun is a 40-or 50-caliber gun, it means that the length of the gun is forty or fifty times the diameter of the shell. Our biggest coast-defense guns are 50-caliber 16-inch guns, which means that they are fifty times 16 inches long, or 66-2/3 feet in length. When a gun is as long as that, care has to be taken to prevent it from sagging at the muzzle of its own weight. These guns actually do sag a little, and when the shell is fired through the long barrel it straightens up the gun, making the muzzle "whip" upward, just as a drooping garden hose does when the water shoots through it. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" The 121-Mile Gun designed by American Ordnance Officers] Now the longer the caliber length of a gun, the farther it will send a shell, because the powder gases will have a longer time to push the shell. But we cannot lengthen our big guns much more without using some special support for the muzzle end of the gun, to keep it from "whipping" too much. It is likely that the long-range German gun was provided with a substantial support at the muzzle to keep it from sagging. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood American 16-Inch Rifle on a Railway Mount] Every once in a while a man comes forth with a "new idea" for increasing the range. One plan is to increase the powder-pressure. We have powders that will produce far more pressure than an ordinary gun can stand. But we have to use powders that will burn comparatively slowly. We do not want too sudden a shock to start with, but we wish the powder to give off an enormous quantity of gas which will keep on pushing and speeding up the shell until the latter emerges from the muzzle. The fifty-mile gun that was proposed twenty years ago was designed to stand a much higher pressure than is commonly used, and it would have fired a 10-inch shell weighing 600 pounds with a velocity of 4,000 feet per second at the muzzle. The Allies built no "super-guns," because they knew that they could drop a far greater quantity of explosives with much greater accuracy from airplanes, and at a much lower cost. The German gun at St. Gobain was spectacular and it did some damage, but it had no military value and it did not intimidate the French as the Germans had hoped it would. A GUN WITH A RANGE OF A HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES But although we built no such gun, after the Germans began shelling Paris our Ordnance Department designed a gun that would fire a shell to a distance of over 120 miles! There was no intention of constructing the gun, but the design was worked out just as if it were actually to be built. It was to fire a shell of 10-inch caliber, weighing 400 pounds. Now, an Elswick standard 10-inch gun is 42 feet long and its shell weighs 500 pounds. Two hundred pounds of powder are used to propel the shell, which leaves the muzzle with a velocity of 3,000 feet per second. If the gun is elevated to the proper angle, it will send the shell 25 miles, and it will take the shell a minute and thirty-seven seconds to cover that distance. But the long-range gun our ordnance experts designed would have to be charged with 1,440 pounds of powder and the shell would leave the muzzle of the gun with a velocity of 8,500 feet per second. It would be in the air four minutes and nine seconds and would travel 121.3 miles. Were the gun fired from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, near Baltimore, Maryland, its shell would travel across three states and fall into New York Bay at Perth Amboy. At the top of its trajectory it would rise 46 miles above the earth. But the most astonishing part of the design was the length of the gun, which worked out to 225 feet. An enormous powder-chamber would have to be used, so that the powder gases would keep speeding up the shell until it reached the required velocity at the muzzle. The weight of the barrel alone was estimated at 325 tons. It would have to be built up in four sections screwed together and because of its great length and weight it would have to be supported on a steel truss. The gun would be mounted like a roller lift-bridge with a heavy counter-weight at its lower end so that it could be elevated or depressed at will and a powerful hydraulic jack would be required to raise it. The recoil of a big gun is always a most important matter. Unless a gun can recoil, it will be smashed by the shock of the powder explosion. Usually, heavy springs are used to take up the shock, or cylinders filled with oil in which pistons slide. The pistons have small holes in them through which the oil is forced as the piston moves and this retards the gun in its recoil. But this "super-gun" was designed to be mounted on a carriage running on a set of tracks laid in a long concrete pit. On the recoil the gun would run back along the tracks, and its motion would be retarded by friction blocks between the carriage and the tracks and also by a steel cable attached to the forward end of the carriage and running over a pulley on the front wall of the pit, to a friction drum. The engraving facing page 68 gives some idea of the enormous size of the gun. Note the man at the breech of the gun. The hydraulic jack is collapsible, so that the gun may be brought to the horizontal position for loading, as shown by the dotted lines. The cost of building this gun is estimated at two and a half million dollars and its 400-pound shell would land only about sixty pounds of high explosives on the target. A bombing-plane costing but thirty thousand dollars could land twenty-five times as big a charge of high explosives with far greater accuracy. Aside from this, the gun lining would soon wear out because of the tremendous erosion of the powder gases. THE THREE-SECOND LIFE OF A GUN Powder gases are very hot indeed--hot enough to melt steel. The greater the pressure in the gun, the hotter they are. It is only because they pass through the gun so quickly, that they do not melt it. As a matter of fact, they do wear it out rapidly because of their heat and velocity. They say that the life of a big gun is only three seconds. Of course, a shell passes through the gun in a very minute part of a second, but if we add up these tiny periods until we have a total of three seconds, during which the gun may have fired two hundred rounds, we shall find that the lining of the barrel is so badly eroded that the gun is unfit for accurate shooting, and it must go back to the shops for a new inner tube. ELASTIC GUNS We had better go back with it and learn something about the manufacture of a big gun. Guns used to be cast as a solid chunk of metal. Now they are built up in layers. To understand why this is necessary, we must realize that steel is not a dead mass, but is highly elastic--far more elastic than rubber, although, of course, it does not stretch nor compress so far. When a charge of powder is exploded in the barrel of a gun, it expands in all directions. Of course, the projectile yields to the pressure of the powder gases and is sent kiting out of the muzzle of the gun. But for an instant before the shell starts to move, an enormous force is exerted against the walls of the bore of the gun, and, because steel is elastic, the barrel is expanded by this pressure, and the bore is actually made larger for a moment, only to spring back in the next instant. You can picture this action if you imagine a gun made of rubber; as soon as the powder was fired, the rubber gun would bulge out around the powder-chamber, only to collapse to its normal size when the pressure was relieved by the discharge of the bullet. Now, every elastic body has what is called its elastic limit. If you take a coil spring, you can pull it out or you can compress it, and it will always return to its original shape, unless you pull it out or compress it beyond a certain point; that point is its elastic limit. The same is true of a piece of steel: if you stretch it beyond a certain point, it will not return to its original shape. When the charge of powder in a cannon exceeds a certain amount, it stretches the steel beyond its elastic limit, so that the bore becomes permanently larger. Making the walls of the gun heavier would not prevent this, because steel is so elastic that the inside of the walls expands beyond its elastic limit before the outside is affected at all. Years ago an American inventor named Treadwell worked out a scheme for allowing the bore to expand more without exceeding its elastic limit. He built up his gun in layers, and shrunk the outer layers upon the inner layers, just as a blacksmith shrinks a tire on a wheel, so that the inner tube of the gun would be squeezed, or compressed. When the powder was fired, this inner layer could expand farther without danger, because it was compressed to start with. The built-up gun was also independently invented by a British inventor. All modern big guns are built up. HOW BIG GUNS ARE MADE The inside tube, known as the lining, is cast roughly to shape, then it is bored out, after which it is forged by the blows of a powerful steam-hammer. Of course, while under the hammer, the tube is mounted on a mandrel, or bar, that just fits the bore. The metal is then softened in an annealing furnace, after which it is turned down to the proper diameter and re-bored to the exact caliber. The diameter of the lining is made three ten-thousandths of an inch larger than the inside of the hoop or sleeve that fits over it. This sleeve, which is formed in the same way, is heated up to 800 degrees, or until its inside diameter is eight tenths of an inch larger than the outside diameter of the lining. The lining is stood up on end and the sleeve is fitted over it. Then it is cooled by means of water, so that it grips the lining and compresses it. In this way, layer after layer is added until the gun is built up to the proper size. [Illustration: Photograph from Underwood & Underwood A Long-distance Sub-calibered French Gun on a Railway Mount] Instead of having a lining that is compressed by means of sleeves or jackets, many big guns are wound with wire which is pulled so tight as to compress the lining. The gun-tube is placed in a lathe, and is turned so as to wind up the wire upon it. A heavy brake on the wire keeps it drawn very tight. This wire, also, is put on in layers, so that each layer can expand considerably without exceeding its elastic limit. Our big 16-inch coast-defense guns are wound with wire that is one tenth of an inch square. The length of wire on one gun is sufficient to reach all the way from New York to Boston with fifty or sixty miles of wire left over. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" Inside of a Shrapnel Shell and Details of the Fuse Cap Search-light Shell and one of its Candles] GUNS THAT PLAY HIDE-AND-SEEK A very ingenious invention is the disappearing-mount which is used on our coast fortifications. By means of this a gun is hidden beyond its breastworks so that it is absolutely invisible to the enemy. In this sheltered position it is loaded and aimed. It is not necessary to sight the gun on the target as you would sight a rifle. The aiming is done mathematically. Off at some convenient observation post, an observer gets the range of the target and telephones this range to the plotting-room, where a rapid calculation is made as to how much the gun should be elevated and swung to the right or the left. This calculation is then sent on to the gunners, who adjust the gun accordingly. When all is ready, the gun is raised by hydraulic pressure, and just as it rises above the parapet it is automatically fired. The recoil throws the gun back to its crouching position behind the breastworks. All that the enemy sees, if anything, is the flash of the discharge. Now that airplanes have been invented, the disappearing-mount has lost much of its usefulness. Big guns have to be hidden from above. They are usually located behind a hill, five or six miles back of the trenches, where the enemy cannot see them from the ground, and they are carefully hidden under trees or a canopy of foliage or are disguised with paint. The huge guns recently built to defend our coasts are intended to fire a shell that will pierce the heavy armor of a modern dreadnought. The shell is arranged to explode after it has penetrated the armor, and the penetrating-power is a very important matter. About thirty years ago the British built three battle-ships, each fitted with two guns of 16-1/4-inch caliber and 30-caliber length. In order to test the penetrating-power of this gun a target was built, consisting first of twenty inches of steel armor and eight inches of wrought-iron; this was backed by twenty feet of oak, five feet of granite, eleven feet of concrete, and six feet of brick. When the shell struck this target it passed through the steel, the iron, the oak, the granite, and the concrete, and did not stop until it had penetrated three feet of the brick. We have not subjected our 16-inch gun to such a test, but we know that it would go through two such targets and still have plenty of energy left. Incidentally, it costs us $1,680 each time the big gun is fired. THE FAMOUS FORTY-TWO-CENTIMETER GUN One of the early surprises of the war was the huge gun used by the Germans to destroy the powerful Belgian forts. Properly speaking, this was not a gun, but a howitzer; and right here we must learn the difference between mortars, howitzers, and guns. What we usually mean by "gun" is a piece of long caliber which is designed to hurl its shell with a flat trajectory. But long ago it was found advantageous to throw a projectile not at but upon a fortification, and for this purpose short pieces of large bore were built. These would fire at a high angle, so that the projectile would fall almost vertically on the target. As we have said, the bore of a gun is rifled; that is, it is provided with spiral grooves that will set the shell spinning, so as to keep its nose pointing in the direction of its flight. Mortars, on the other hand, were originally intended for short-range firing, and their bore was not rifled. In recent years, however, mortars have been made longer and with rifled bores, so as to increase their range, and such long mortars are called "howitzers." The German 42-centimeter howitzer fired a shell that was 2,108 pounds in weight and was about 1-1/2 yards long. The diameter of the shell was 42 centimeters, which is about 16-1/2 inches. It carried an enormous amount of high explosive, which was designed to go off after the shell had penetrated its target. The marvel of this howitzer was not that it could fire so big a shell but that so large a piece of artillery could be transported over the highroads and be set for use in battle. But although the 42-centimeter gun was widely advertised, the real work of smashing the Belgian forts was done by the Austrian "Skoda" howitzers, which fired a shell of 30.5-centimeter (12-inch) caliber, and not by the 42-centimeter gun. The Skoda howitzer could be taken apart and transported by three motor-cars of 100 horse-power each. The cars traveled at a rate of about twelve miles per hour. It is claimed the gun could be put together in twenty-four minutes, and would fire at the rate of one shot per minute. FIELD-GUNS So far, we have talked only of the big guns, but in a modern battle the field-gun plays a very important part. This fires a shell that weighs between fourteen and eighteen pounds and is about three inches in diameter. The shell and the powder that fires it are contained in a cartridge that is just like the cartridge of a shoulder rifle. These field-pieces are built to be fired rapidly. The French 75-millimeter gun, which is considered one of the best, will fire at the rate of twenty shots per minute, and its effective range is considerably over three miles. The French supplied us with all 75-millimeter guns we needed in the war, while we concentrated our efforts on the manufacture of ammunition. GUNS THAT FIRE GUNS During the War of the Revolution, cannon were fired at short range, and it was the custom to load them with grape-shot, or small iron balls, when firing against a charging enemy, because the grape would scatter like the shot of a shot-gun and tear a bigger gap in the ranks of the enemy than would a single solid cannon-ball. In modern warfare, guns are fired from a greater distance, so that there will be little danger of their capture. It is impossible for them to fire grape, because the ranges are far too great; besides, it would be impossible to aim a charge of grape-shot over any considerable distance, because the shot would start spreading as soon as they left the muzzle of the gun and would scatter too far and wide to be of much service. But this difficulty has been overcome by the making of a shell which is really a gun in itself. Within this shell is the grape-shot, which consists of two hundred and fifty half-inch balls of lead. The shell is fired over the lines of the enemy, and just at the right moment it explodes and scatters a hail of leaden balls over a fairly wide area. It is not a simple matter to time a shrapnel shell so that it will explode at just the right moment. Spring-driven clockwork has been tried, which would explode a cap after the lapse of a certain amount of time; but this way of timing shells has not proved satisfactory. Nowadays a train of gunpowder is used. When the shell is fired, the shock makes a cap (see drawing facing page 77) strike a pin, _E_, which ignites the train of powder, _A_. The head of the shell is made of two parts, in each of which there is a powder-fuse. There is a vent, or short cut, leading from one fuse to the other, and, by the turning of one part of the fuse-head with respect to the other, this short cut is made to carry the train of fire from the upper to the lower fuse sooner or later, according to the adjustment. The fire burns along one powder-train _A_, and then jumps through the short cut _B_ to the other, or movable train, as it is called, until it finally reaches, through hole _C_, the main charge _F_, in the shell. The movable part of the fuse-head is graduated so that the fuse may be set to explode the shell at any desired distance. In the fuse-head there is also a detonating-pin _K_, which will strike the primer _L_ and explode the shell when the latter strikes the ground, if the time-fuse has failed to act. When attacking airplanes, it is important to be able to follow the flight of the shell, so some shrapnel shell are provided with a smoke-producing mixture, which is set on fire when the shell is discharged, so as to produce a trail of smoke. [Illustration: (C) Committee on Public Information Putting on the Gas Masks to Meet a Gas Cloud Attack] In meeting the attack of any enemy at night, search-light shell are sometimes used. On exploding they discharge a number of "candles," each provided with a tiny parachute that lets the candle drop slowly to the ground. Their brilliant light lasts fifteen or twenty minutes. Obviously, ordinary search-lights could not be used on the battle-field, because the lamp would at once be a target for enemy batteries, but with search-light shell the gun that fires them can remain hidden and one's own lines be shrouded in darkness while the enemy lines are brilliantly illuminated. CHAPTER V THE BATTLE OF THE CHEMISTS Some years ago the nations of the world gathered at the city of The Hague, in Holland, to see what could be done to put an end to war. They did not accomplish much in that direction, but they did draw up certain rules of warfare which they agreed to abide by. There were some practices which were considered too horrible for any civilized nation to indulge in. Among these was the use of poisonous gases, and Germany was one of the nations that took a solemn pledge not to use gas in war. [Illustration: (C) Kadel & Herbert Even the Horses had to be Masked] [Illustration: Photograph by Kadel & Herbert Portable Flame-throwing Apparatus] Eighteen years later the German Army had dug itself into a line of trenches reaching from the English Channel to Switzerland, and facing them in another line of trenches were the armies of France and England, determined to hold back the invaders. Neither side could make an advance without frightful loss of life. But a German scientist came forth with a scheme for breaking the dead-lock. This was Professor Nernst, the inventor of a well-known electric lamp and a man who had always violently hated the British. His plan was to drown out the British with a flood of poisonous gas. To be sure, there was the pledge taken at The Hague Conference, but why should that stand in Germany's way? What cared the Germans for promises now? Already they had broken a pledge in their violation of Belgium. Already they had rained explosives from the sky on unfortified British cities (thus violating another pledge of The Hague Conference); already they had determined to war on defenseless merchantmen. To them promises meant nothing, if such promises interfered with the success of German arms. They led the world in the field of chemistry; why, they reasoned, shouldn't they make use of this advantage? POURING GAS LIKE WATER It was really a new mode of warfare that the Germans were about to launch and it called for much study. In the first place, they had to decide what sort of gas to use. It must be a gas that could be obtained in large quantities. It must be a very poisonous gas, that would act quickly on the enemy; it must be easily compressed and liquefied so that it could be carried in containers that were not too bulky; it must vaporize when the pressure was released; and it must be heavier than air, so that it would not be diluted by the atmosphere but would hug the ground. You can pour gas just as you pour water, if it is heavier than air. A heavy gas will stay in the bottom of an unstoppered bottle and can be poured from one bottle into another like water. If the gas is colored, you can see it flowing just as if it were a liquid. On the other hand, a gas which is much lighter than air can also be kept in unstoppered bottles if the bottles are turned upside down, and the gas can be poured from one bottle into another; but it flows up instead of down. Chlorine gas was selected because it seemed to meet all requirements. For the gas attack a point was chosen where the ground sloped gently toward the opposing lines, so that the gas would actually flow down hill into them. Preparations were carried out with the utmost secrecy. Just under the parapet of the trenches deep pits were dug, about a yard apart on a front of fifteen miles, or over twenty-five thousand pits. In these pits were placed the chlorine tanks, each weighing about ninety pounds. Each pit was then closed with a plank and this was covered with a quilt filled with peat moss soaked in potash, so that in case of any leakage the chlorine would be taken up by the potash and rendered harmless. Over the quilts sandbags were piled to a considerable height, to protect the tanks from shell-fragments. Liquid chlorine will boil even in a temperature of 28 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but in tanks it cannot boil because there is no room for it to turn into a gas. Upon release of the pressure at ordinary temperatures, the liquid boils violently and big clouds of gas are produced. If the gas were tapped off from the top of the cylinder, it would freeze on pouring out, because any liquid that turns into a gas has to draw heat from its surroundings. The greater the expansion, the more heat the gas absorbs, and in the case of the chlorine tanks, had the nozzles been set in the top of the tank they would very quickly have been crusted with frost and choked, stopping the flow. But the Germans had anticipated this difficulty, and instead of drawing off the gas from the top of the tank, they drew off the liquid from the bottom in small leaden tubes which passed up through the liquid in the tank and were kept as warm as the surrounding liquid. In fact, it was not gas from the top of the tank, but liquid from the bottom, that was streamed out and this did not turn into gas until it had left the nozzle. WAITING FOR THE WIND Everything was ready for the attack on the British in April, 1915. A point had been chosen where the British lines made a juncture with the French. The Germans reckoned that a joint of this sort in the opponent's lines would be a spot of weakness. Also, they had very craftily picked out this particular spot because the French portion of the line was manned by Turcos, or Algerians, who would be likely to think there was something supernatural about a death-dealing cloud. On the left of the Africans was a division of Canadians, but the main brunt of the gas was designed to fall upon the Turcos. Several times the attack was about to be made, but was abandoned because the wind was not just right. The Germans wished to pick out a time when the breeze was blowing steadily--not so fast as to scatter the gas, but yet so fast that it would overtake men who attempted to run away from it. It was not until April 22 that conditions were ideal, and then the new mode of warfare was launched. Just as had been expected, the Turcos were awe-struck when they saw, coming out of the German trenches, volumes of greenish-yellow gas, which rolled toward them, pouring down into shell-holes and flowing over into the trenches as if it were a liquid. They were seized with superstitious fear, particularly when the gas overcame numbers of them, stifling them and leaving them gasping for breath. Immediately there was a panic and they raced back, striving to out-speed the pursuing cloud. For a stretch of fifteen miles the Allied trenches were emptied, and the Germans, who followed in the wake of the gas, met with no opposition except in the sector held by the Canadians. Here, on the fringe of the gas cloud, so determined a fight was put up that the Germans faltered, and the brave Canadians held them until reinforcements arrived and the gap in the line was closed. The Germans themselves were new at the game or they could have made a complete success of this surprise attack. Had they made the attack on a broader front, nothing could have kept them from breaking through to Calais. The valiant Canadians who struggled and fought without protection in the stifling clouds of chlorine, were almost wiped out. But many of them who were on the fringe of the cloud escaped by wetting handkerchiefs, socks, or other pieces of cloth, and wrapping them around their mouths and noses. The world was horrified when it read of this German gas attack, but there was no time to be lost. Immediately orders went out for gas-masks, and in all parts of England, and of France as well, women were busy sewing the masks. These were very simple affairs--merely a pad of cotton soaked in washing-soda and arranged to be tied over the mouth and nose. But when the next attack came, not long after the first, the men were prepared in some measure for it, and again it failed to bring the Germans the success they had counted upon. One thing that the Germans had not counted upon was the fact that the prevailing winds in Flanders blow from west to east. During the entire summer and autumn of 1915, the winds refused to favor them, and no gas attacks were staged from June to December. This gave the British a long respite and enabled them not only to prepare better gas-masks, but also to make plans to give the Hun a dose of his own medicine. [Illustration: (C) Kadel & Herbert Liquid Fire Streaming from Fixed Flame-throwing Apparatus] WHEN THE WIND PLAYED A TRICK ON THE GERMANS There were many disadvantages in the use of gas clouds, which developed as the Germans gathered experience. The gas started from their own lines in a very dense cloud, but the cloud grew thinner and thinner as it traveled toward the enemy, and lost a great deal of its strength. If the wind were higher than fifteen miles an hour, it would swirl the gas around and dissipate it before it did much harm to the opposing fighters. If the wind were light, there were other dangers. On one occasion in 1916 a cloud of gas was released upon an Irish regiment. The wind was rather fickle. It carried the gas toward the British trenches, but before reaching them the cloud hesitated, the wind veered around, and soon the gas began to pour back upon the German lines. The Germans were entirely unprepared for this boomerang attack. Many of the Huns had no gas-masks on, and those who had, found that the masks were not in proper working-order. As a result of this whim of the winds, eleven thousand Germans were killed. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" Cleaning Up a Dugout with the "Fire Broom"] While chlorine was the first gas used, it was evident that it was not the only one that could be employed. British chemists had suspected that the Germans would use phosgene, which was a much more deadly gas, and in the long interval between June and December, 1915, masks were constructed which would keep out not only the fumes of chlorine but also the more poisonous phosgene. In one of their sorties the British succeeded in capturing some valuable notes on gas attacks, belonging to a German general, which showed that the Germans were actually preparing to use phosgene. This deadly gas is more insidious in its action than chlorine. The man who inhales phosgene may not know that he is gassed. He may experience no ill effects, but hours afterward, particularly if he has exercised in the meantime, he may suddenly fall dead, owing to its paralyzing action on the heart. FREEING THE BRITISH TRENCHES OF RATS Phosgene was not used alone, but had to be mixed with chlorine, and the deadly combination of the two destroyed all life for miles behind the trenches. However, the British were ready for it. They had been drilled to put on their masks in a few seconds' time, on the first warning of a gas attack. When the clouds of chlorine and phosgene came over No Man's Land, they were prepared, and, except for casualties among men whose masks proved defective, the soldiers in the trenches came through with very few losses. All animal life, however, was destroyed. This was a blessing to the British Tommy, whose trenches had been overrun with rats. The British had tried every known method to get rid of these pests, and now, thanks to the Germans, their quarters were most effectively fumigated with phosgene and every rat was killed. If only the "cooties" could have been destroyed in the same way, the Germans might have been forgiven many of their offenses. The disadvantages in the use of gas clouds became increasingly apparent. What was wanted was some method of placing the gas among the opponents in concentrated form, without wasting any of it on its way across from one line to the other. This led to the use of shell filled with materials which would produce gas. There were many advantages in these shell. They could be thrown exactly where it was desired that they should fall, without the help of the fickle winds. When the shell landed and burst, the full effect of its contents was expended upon the enemy. A gas cloud would rise over a wood, but with shell the wood could be filled with gas, which, once there, would lurk among the trees for days. Chemicals could be used in shell which could not be used in a cloud attack. The shell could be filled with a liquid, or even with a solid, because when it burst the filling would be minutely pulverized. And so German chemists were set to work devising all sorts of fiendish schemes for poisoning, choking, or merely annoying their opponents. GAS THAT MADE ONE WEEP One of the novel shell the Germans used was known as the "tear-gas" shell. This was filled with a liquid, the vapor of which was very irritating to the eyes. The liquid vaporized very slowly and so its effect would last a long time. However, the vapor did not permanently injure the eyes; it merely filled them with tears to such an extent that a soldier was unable to see and consequently was confused and retarded in his work. The "tear-gas" shell were marked with a "T" by the Germans and were known as "T-shell." Another type of shell, known as the "K-shell," contained a very poisonous liquid, the object of which was to destroy the enemy quickly. The effect of this shell was felt at once, but it left no slow vapors on the ground, and so it could be followed up almost immediately by an attack. Later on, the Germans developed three types of gas shell--one known as the "Green Cross," another as the "Yellow Cross," and the third as the "Blue Cross." The Green Cross shell was filled with diphosgene, or a particularly dangerous combination of phosgene in liquid form, which would remain in pools on the ground or soak into the ground and would vaporize when it became warm. Its vapors were deadly. One had always to be on his guard against them. In the morning, when the sun warmed the earth and vapors were seen to rise from the damp soil, tests were made of the vapors to see whether it was mere water vapor or diphosgene, before men were allowed to walk through it. These vapors were heavier than air and would flow down into a trench, filling every nook and cranny. If phosgene entered a trench by a direct hit, the liquid would remain there for days, rendering that part of the trench uninhabitable except by men in gas-masks. The infected part of the trench, however, was cut off from the rest of the trench by means of gas-locks. In other words, blankets were used to keep the gas out, and usually two blankets were hung so that a man in passing from one part of the trench to another could lift up the first blanket, pass under it, and close it carefully behind him before opening the second blanket which led into the portion of the trench that was not infected. The Germans had all sorts of fiendish schemes for increasing the discomfort of the Allies. For instance, to some of their diphosgene shell they added a gas which caused intense vomiting. The Yellow Cross shell was another fiendish invention of the Huns. It was popularly known as "mustard gas" and was intended not to kill but merely to discomfort the enemy. The gas had a peculiar penetrating smell, something like garlic, and its fumes would burn the flesh wherever it was exposed to them, producing great blisters and sores that were most distressing. The material in the shell was a liquid which was very hard to get rid of because it would vaporize so slowly. On account of the persistence of this vapor, lasting as it did for days, these gas shell were usually not fired by the Germans on lines that they expected to attack immediately. THE SNEEZING-SHELL The Blue Cross shell was comparatively harmless, although very annoying. It contained a solid which was atomized by the explosion of the shell, and which, after it got into the nostrils, caused a violent sneezing. The material, however, was not poisonous and did not produce any casualties to speak of, although it was most unpleasant. A storm of Blue Cross shell could be followed almost immediately by an attack, because the effect of the shell would have been dissipated before the attackers reached the enemy who were still suffering from the irritation of their nostrils. GAS-MASKS As the different kinds of gas shell were developed, the gas-masks were improved to meet them. In every attack there were "duds" or unexploded shell, which the chemists of the Allies analyzed. Also, they were constantly experimenting with new gases, themselves, and often could anticipate the Germans. The Allies were better able to protect themselves against gas attacks than the Germans, because there was a scarcity of rubber in Germany for the manufacture of masks. When it was found that phosgene was going to be used, the simple cotton-wad masks had to give way to more elaborate affairs with chemicals that would neutralize this deadly gas. And later when the mustard gas was used which attacked the eyes, and the sneezing-gas that attacked the nose, it was found necessary to cover the face completely, particularly the eyes; and so helmets of rubber were constructed which were tightly fitted around the neck under the coat collar. The inhaled air was purified by passage through a box or can filled with chemicals and charcoal made of various materials, such as cocoanut shells, peach pits, horse-chestnuts, and the like. Because the Germans had no rubber to spare, they were obliged to use leather, which made their masks stiff and heavy. GLASS THAT WILL NOT SHATTER One of the greatest difficulties that had to be contended with was the covering of the eyes. There was danger in the use of glass, because it was liable to be cracked or broken, letting in the deadly fumes and gassing the wearer. Experiments were made with celluloid and similar materials, but the finest gas-masks produced in the war were those made for our own soldiers, in which the goggles were of glass, built up in layers, with a celluloid-like material between, which makes a tough composition that will stand up against a very hard blow. Even if it cracks, this glass will not shatter. The glasses were apt to become coated on the inside with moisture coming from the perspiration of the face, and some means had to be provided for wiping them off. The French hit upon a clever scheme of having the inhaled air strike the glasses in a jet which would dry off the moisture and keep the glasses clear. Before this was done, the masks were provided with little sponges on the end of a finger-piece, with which the glasses could be wiped dry without taking the masks off. But all this time, the Allies were not merely standing on the defensive. No sooner had the Germans launched their first attack than the British and French chemists began to pay back the Hun in kind. More attention was paid to the shell than the cloud attack, and soon gas shell began to rain upon the Germans. Not only were the German shell copied, but new gases were tried. Gas shell were manufactured in immense quantities. Then America took a hand in the war and our chemists added their help, while our factories turned out steady streams of shell. If Germany wanted gas warfare, the Allies were determined that she should have it. Our chemists were not afraid to be pitted against the German chemists and the factories of the Allies were more than a match for those of the Central Powers. When the Germans first started the use of gas, apparently they counted only their own success, which they thought would be immediate and overwhelming. They soon learned that they must take what they gave. The Allies set them a pace that they could not keep up with. When the armistice brought the war to a sudden stop, the United States alone was making each day two tons of gas for every mile of the western front. If the war had continued, the Germans would have been simply deluged. As it was, they were getting far more gas than they could possibly produce in their own factories and they had plenty of reason to regret their rash disregard of their contract at The Hague Conference. One gas we were making was of the same order as mustard gas but far more volatile, and had we had a chance to use it against the Germans they would have found it very difficult to protect themselves against its penetrating fumes. BATTLING WITH LIQUID FIRE Somewhat associated with gas warfare was another form of offensive which was introduced with the purpose of breaking up the dead-lock of trench warfare. A man could protect himself against gas by using a suitable mask and clothing, but what could he do against fire? It looked as if trench defenders would have to give up if attacked with fire, and so, early in the war, the Germans devised apparatus for shooting forth streams of liquid fire, and the Allies were not slow to copy the idea. The apparatus was either fixed or portable, but it was not often that the fixed apparatus could be used to advantage, because at best the range of the flame-thrower was limited and in few places were the trenches near enough for flaming oil to be thrown across the intervening gap. For this reason portable apparatus was chiefly used, with which a man could send out a stream for from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet. On his back he carried the oil-tank, in the upper part of which there was a charge of compressed air. A pipe led from the tank to a nozzle which the man held in his hand, using it to direct the spray. There was some danger to the operator in handling a highly inflammable oil. The blaze might flare back and burn him, particularly when he was lighting the stream, and so a special way of setting fire to the spray had to be devised. Of course, the value of the apparatus lay in its power to shoot the stream as far as possible. The compressed air would send the stream to a good distance, but after lighting, the oil might be consumed before it reached the desired range. Some way had to be found of igniting the oil stream far from the nozzle or as near the limit of its range as possible. And so two nozzles were used, one with a small opening so that it would send out a fine jet of long range, while the main stream of oil issued from the second nozzle. The first nozzle was movable with respect to the second and the two streams could be regulated to come together at any desired distance from the operator within the range of the apparatus. The fine stream was ignited and carried the flame out to the main stream, setting fire to it near the limit of its range. In this way a flare-back was avoided and the oil blazed where the flame was needed. The same sort of double nozzle was used on the stationary apparatus and because weight was not a consideration, heavier apparatus was used which shot the stream to a greater distance. But flame-throwing apparatus had its drawbacks: there was always the danger that the tank of highly inflammable oil might be burst open by a shell or hand-grenade and its contents set on fire. The fixed apparatus was buried under bags of sand, but the man who carried flame-throwing apparatus on his back had to take his chances, not knowing at what instant the oil he carried might be set ablaze, turning him into a living, writhing, human torch. Because of this hazard, liquid fire did not play a very important part in trench warfare; to set fire to the spray at its source with a well directed hand-grenade was too easy. THE "FIRE BROOM" There were certain situations, however, in which liquid fire played a very important part. After a line of trenches had been captured it was difficult to clear out the enemy who lurked in dugouts and underground passages. They would not surrender, and from their hidden recesses they could pour out a deadly machine-gun fire. The only way of dislodging them was to use the "fire broom." In other words, a stream of liquid fire was poured into the dugout, burning out the men trapped in it. If there were a second exit, they would come tumbling out in a hurry. If not, they would be burned to death. After the first sweep of the "broom," if there were any survivors, there would not be any fight left in them, and they would be quick to surrender before being subjected to a second dose of fire. CHAPTER VI TANKS There is no race-horse that can keep up with an automobile, no deer that can out-run a locomotive. A bicyclist can soon tire out the hardiest of hounds. Why? Because animals run on legs, while machines run on wheels. As wheels are so much more speedy than legs, it seems odd that we do not find this form of locomotion in nature. There are many animals that owe their very existence to the fact that they can run fast. Why hasn't nature put them on wheels so that when their enemy appears they can roll away, sedately, instead of having to jerk their legs frantically back and forth at the rate of a hundred strokes a minute? But one thing we must not overlook. Our wheeled machines must have a special road prepared for them, either a macadam highway or a steel track. They are absolutely helpless when they are obliged to travel over rough country. No wheeled vehicle can run through fields broken by ditches and swampy spots, or over ground obstructed with boulders and tree-stumps. But it is not always possible or practicable to build a road for the machines to travel upon, and it is necessary to have some sort of self-propelled vehicle that can travel over all kinds of ground. Some time ago a British inventor developed a machine with large wheels on which were mounted the equivalent of feet. As the wheels revolved, these feet would be planted firmly on the ground, one after the other, and the machine would proceed step by step. It could travel over comparatively rough ground, and could actually walk up a flight of stairs. We have a very curious walking-machine in this country. It is a big dredge provided with two broad feet and a "swivel chair." The machine makes progress by alternately planting its feet on the ground, lifting itself up, chair and all, pushing itself forward, and sitting down again. Although many other types of walking-machines have been patented, none of them has amounted to very much. Clearly, nature hopelessly outclasses us in this form of propulsion. Years ago it occured to one ingenious man that if wheeled machines must have tracks or roads for their wheels to run on, they might be allowed to lay their own tracks. And so he arranged his track in the form of an endless chain of plates that ran around the wheels of his machine. The wheels merely rolled on this chain, and as they progressed, new links of the track were laid down before them and the links they had passed over were picked up behind them. A number of inventors worked on this idea, but one man in particular, Benjamin Holt, of Peoria, Illinois, brought the invention to a high state of perfection. He arranged a series of wheels along the chain track, each carrying a share of the load of the machine, and each mounted on springs so that it would yield to any unevenness of the ground, just as a caterpillar conforms itself to the hills and dales of the surface it creeps over. In fact, the machine was called a "caterpillar" tractor because of its crawling locomotion. But it was no worm of a machine. In power it was a very elephant. It could haul loads that would tax the strength of scores of horses. Stumps and boulders were no obstacles in its path. Even ditches could not bar its progress. The machine would waddle down one bank and up the other without the slightest difficulty. It was easily steered; in fact, it could turn around in its own length by traveling forward on one of its chains, or traction-belts, and backward on the other. The machine was particularly adapted to travel on soft or plowed ground, because the broad traction-belts gave it a very wide bearing and spread its weight over a large surface. It was set to work on large farms, hauling gangs of plows and cultivators. Little did Mr. Holt think, as he watched his powerful mechanical elephants at work on the vast Western wheat-fields, that they, or rather their offspring, would some day play a leading role in a war that would rack the whole world. * * * * * But we are getting ahead of our story. To start at the very beginning, we must go back to the time when the first savage warrior used a plank of wood to protect himself from the rocks hurled by his enemy. This was the start of the never-ending competition between arms and armor. As the weapons of offense developed from stone to spear, to arrow, to arquebus, the wooden plank developed into a shield of brass and then of steel; and then, since a separate shield became too bothersome to carry, it was converted into armor that the warrior could wear and so have both hands free for battle. For every improvement in arms there was a corresponding improvement in armor. After gunpowder was invented, the idea of armor for men began to wane, because no armor could be built strong enough to ward off the rifle-bullet and at the same time light enough for a man to wear. The struggle between arms and armor was then confined to the big guns and the steel protection of forts and war-ships. But not so long ago the machine-gun was invented, and this introduced a new phase of warfare. Not more than one rifle-bullet in a thousand finds its mark on the battle-field. The Boers in the battle of Colenso established a record with one hit in six hundred shots. In the excitement of battle men are too nervous to take careful aim and they are apt to fire either too high or too low, so that the mortality is not nearly so great as some would expect. But with the machine-gun there is not this waste of ammunition, because it fires a stream of bullets, the effect of which can readily be determined by the man who operates the volley. The difference between the machine-gun fire and rifle fire is something like the difference between hitting a tin can with a stone or with a stream of water. It is no easy matter to score a hit with the stone; but any one can train a garden hose on the can, because he can see where the water is striking and move his hose accordingly until he covers the desired spot. In the same way, with the machine-gun, it is much easier to train the stream of bullets upon the mark, and, having once found the mark, to hold the aim. That is one reason why the destruction of a machine-gun is so tremendous; another, of course, being that it will discharge so many more shots per minute than the common rifle. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood British Tank Climbing out of a Trench at Cambrai] In the Russo-Japanese War, the Russians played havoc with the attacking Japanese at Port Arthur by using carefully concealed machine-guns, and the German military attachés were quick to note the value of the machine-gun. Secretely they manufactured large numbers of machine-guns and established a special branch of service to handle the guns, and they developed the science of using them with telling effect. And so, when the recent great war suddenly broke out, they surprised the world with the countless number of machine-guns they possessed and the efficient use to which they put them. Thousands of British soldiers in the early days of the war fell victims to these death-dealing machines. Two or three men with a machine-gun could defy several companies of soldiers, especially when the attackers had to cut their way through barbed wire entanglements. It was clearly evident that something must be done to defend the men against the machine-gun; for to charge against it meant, simply, wholesale slaughter. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood Even Trees were no Barrier to the British Tank] [Illustration: Press Illustrating Service The German Tank was very heavy and cumbersome] At first the only means of combating the machine-guns seemed to be to destroy them with shell-fire; but they were carefully concealed, and it was difficult to search them out. Only by long-continued bombardment was it possible to destroy them and tear away the barbed wire sufficiently to permit of a charge. Before an enemy position was stormed it was subjected to the fire of thousands of guns of all calibers for hours and even days. But this resulted in notifying the enemy that a charge was ere long to be attempted at a certain place, and he could assemble his reserves for a counter-attack. Furthermore, the Germans learned to conceal their machine-guns in dugouts twenty or thirty feet underground, where they were safe from the fire of the big guns, and then, when the fire let up, the weapons would be dragged up to the surface in time to mow down the approaching infantry. It was very clear that something would have to be done to combat the machine-gun. If the necessary armor was too heavy for the men to carry, it must carry itself. Armored automobiles were of no service at all, because they could not possibly travel over the shell-pitted ground of No Man's Land. The Russians tried a big steel shield mounted on wheels, which a squad of soldiers would push ahead of them, but their plan failed because the wheels would get stuck in shell-holes. A one-man shield on wheels was tried by the British. Under its shelter a man could steal up to the barbed wire and cut it and even crawl up to a machine-gun emplacement and destroy it with a hand-grenade. But this did not prove very successful, either, because the wheels did not take kindly to the rough ground of the battle-field. * * * * * And here is where we come back to Mr. Holt's mechanical elephants. Just before the great war broke out, Belgium--poor unsuspecting Belgium--was holding an agricultural exhibit. An American tractor was on exhibition. It was the one developed by Mr. Holt, and its remarkable performances gained for it a reputation that spread far and wide. Colonel E. D. Swinton of the British Army heard of the peculiar machine, and immediately realized the advantages of an armored tractor for battle over torn ground. But in the first few months of the war that ensued, this idea was forgotten, until the effectiveness of the machine-gun and the necessity for overcoming it recalled the matter to his mind. At his suggestion a caterpillar tractor was procured, and the military engineers set themselves to the task of designing an armored body to ride on the caterpillar-tractor belts. Of course the machine had to be entirely re-designed. The tractor was built for hauling loads, and not to climb out of deep shell-holes; but by running the traction-belts over the entire body of the car, and running the forward part of the tractor up at a sharp angle the engineers overcame that difficulty. In war, absolute secrecy is essential to the success of any invention, and the British engineers were determined to let no inkling of the new armored automobiles reach the enemy. Different parts of the machines were made in different factories, so that no one would have an idea of what the whole would look like. At first the new machine was known as a "land-cruiser" or "land-ship"; but it was feared that this very name would give a clue to spies, and so any descriptive name was forbidden. Many of the parts consisted of rolled steel plates which might readily be used in building up vessels to hold water or gasolene; and to give the impression that such vessels were being constructed the name "tank" was adopted. The necessity of guarding even the name of the machines was shown later, when rumors leaked out that the tanks were being built to carry water over the desert regions of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Another curious rumor was that the machines were snow-plows for use in Russia. To give some semblance of truth to this story, the parts were carefully labeled, "For Petrograd." Probably never was a military secret so well guarded as this one, and when, on September 15, 1916, the waddling steel tractors loomed up out of the morning mists, the German fighters were taken completely by surprise. Two days before, their airmen had noticed some peculiar machines which they supposed were armored automobiles. They had no idea, however, that such formidable monsters were about to descend upon them. The tanks proceeded leisurely over the shell-torn regions of No Man's Land, wallowing down into shell-holes and clambering up out of them with perfect ease. They straddled the trenches and paused to pour down them streams of machine-gun bullets. Wire entanglements were nothing to them; under their weight steel wire snapped like thread. The big brutes marched up and down the lines of wire, treading them down into the ground and clearing the way for the infantry. Even trees were no barrier to these tanks. Of course they did not attack large ones, but the smallish trees were simply broken down before their onslaughts. As for concrete emplacements for machine-guns, the tanks merely rode over them and crushed them. Those who attempted to defend themselves in the ruins of buildings found that the tanks could plow right through walls and bring them down in a shower of bricks and stone. There was no stopping these monsters, and the Germans fled in consternation before them. There were two sizes of tanks. The larger ones aimed to destroy the machine-gun emplacements, and they were fitted up with guns for firing a shell. The smaller tanks, armed with machine-guns, devoted themselves to fighting the infantry. British soldiers following in the wake of the bullet-proof tank were protected from the shots of the enemy and were ready to attack him with bayonets when the time was ripe. But the tanks also furnished an indirect protection for the troops. It was not necessary for the men to conceal themselves behind the big tractors. Naturally, every Hun who stood his ground and fought, directed all his fire upon the tanks, leaving the British infantry free to charge virtually unmolested. The success of the tank was most pronounced. In the meantime the French had been informed of the plans of their allies, and they set to work on a different design of tractor. It was not until six months later that their machines saw service. The French design differed from the British mainly in having the tractor belt confined to the wheels instead of running over the entire body of the tank. It was more blunt than the British and was provided at the forward end with a steel cutting-edge, which adapted it to break its way through wire entanglements. At each end there are two upward-turning skids which helped the tank to lift itself out of a hole. The larger machines carried a regular 75-millimeter (3-inch) field-gun, which is a very formidable weapon. They carried a crew of one officer and seven men. Life in a tank is far from pleasant. The heat and the noise of machinery and guns are terrific. Naturally, ventilation is poor and the fumes and gases that accumulate are most annoying, to say the least. Sometimes the men were overcome by them. But war is war, and such discomforts had to be endured. But the tank possessed one serious defect which the Germans were not slow to discover. Its armor was proof against machine-gun fire, but it could not ward off the shells of field-guns, and it was such a slow traveler that the enemy did not find it a very difficult task to hit it with a rapid-fire gun if the gunner could see his target. And so the Germans ordered up their guns to the front lines, where they could score direct hits. Only light guns were used for this purpose, especially those whose rifling was worn down by long service, because long range was not necessary for tank fighting. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood The Speedy British "Whippet" Tank that can travel at a speed of twelve miles per hour] [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood The French High-Speed "Baby" Tank] When the Germans began their final great drive, it was rumored that they had built some monster tanks that were far more formidable than anything the Allies had produced. Unlike the British, they used the tanks not to lead the army but to follow and destroy small nests of French and British that were left behind. When the French finally did capture one of the German tanks, which had fallen into a quarry, it proved to be a poor imitation. It was an ugly-looking affair, very heavy and cumbersome. Owing to the scarcity of materials for producing high-grade armor, it had to make up in thickness of plating what it lacked in quality of steel. The tank was intended to carry a crew of eighteen men and it fairly bristled with guns, but it could not manoeuver as well as the British tank; for when some weeks later a fleet of German tanks encountered a fleet of heavy British tanks, the Hun machines were completely routed. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Automotive Industries" Section through our Mark VIII Tank showing the layout of the interior with the locations of the most important parts in the fighting compartment in the engine room] It was then that the British sprang another surprise upon the Germans. After the big fellows had done their work, a lot of baby tanks appeared on the scene and chased the German infantry. These little tanks could travel at a speed of twelve miles an hour, which is about as fast as an ordinary man can run. "Whippets," the British called them, because they were like the speedy little dogs of that name. They carried but two men, one to guide the tank and the other to operate the machine-gun. The French, too, built a light "mosquito" tank, which was even smaller than the British tank, and fully as fast. It was with these machines, which could dart about quickly on the battle-field and dodge the shell of the field-guns, and which were immune to the fire of the machine-gun, that the Allies were able to make progress against the Germans. When the Germans retired, they left behind them nests of machine-guns to cover the withdrawal of their armies. These gunners were ordered to fight to the very end. They looked for no mercy and expected no help. Had it not been for the light tanks, it would have been well nigh impossible to overcome these determined bodies of men without frightful losses. Since America invented the machine-gun and also barbed wire, and since America furnished the inspiration for the tank with which to trample down the wire entanglements and stamp out the machine-guns, naturally people expected our army to come out with something better than anything produced by our allies. We did turn out a number of heavy machines patterned after the original British tank, with armor that could stand up against heavy fire, and we also produced a small and very speedy tank similar to the French "baby" tank, but before we could put these into service the war ended. The tanks we did use so effectively at St.-Mihiel and in the Argonne Forest were supplied by the French. CHAPTER VII THE WAR IN THE AIR We Americans are a peace-loving people, which is the very reason why we went into the war. We had to help down the power that was disturbing the peace of the world. We do not believe in conquests--at least of the type that Germany tried to force--and yet there are certain conquests that we do indulge in once in a while. Eleven years before Germany undertook to conquer Europe two young Americans made the greatest conquest that the world has ever seen. The Wright brothers sailed up into the heavens and gained the mastery of the air. They offered their conquest to the United States; but while we accepted their offering with enthusiasm at first, we did not know what to do with the new realm after we got it. There seemed to be no particular use in flying. It was just a bit too risky to be pleasant sport, and about all we could see in it was an exhibition for the circus or the county fair. Not so in Europe, however. Flying meant something over there--there where the frontiers have ever bristled with big guns and strong fortifications, and where huge military forces have slept on their arms, never knowing what dreadful war the morning would bring forth. The war-lovers hailed the airplane as a new instrument with which to terrorize their neighbors; the peace-lovers saw in it another menace to their homes; it gave them a new frontier to defend. And so the military powers of Europe took up the airplane seriously and earnestly and developed it. At first military authorities had rated the airplane chiefly as a flying scout. Some bomb-dropping experiments had been made with it, but it proved very difficult to land the bombs near the target, and, besides, machines of those days were not built to carry very heavy loads, so that it did not seem especially profitable to attack the enemy from the skies. As for actual battles up among the clouds, they were dreamed of only by the writers of fiction. But wild dreams became stern realities in the mighty struggle between the great powers of the world. EYES IN THE SKY As a scouting-machine the airplane did prove to be far superior to mounted patrols which used to perform scout-work. In fact, it changed completely the character of modern warfare. From his position high up in the heavens the flying scout had an unobstructed view of the country for miles and he could see just what the enemy was doing. He could see whether large forces of men were collecting for an attack. He could watch the course of supply-trains, and judge of their size. He could locate the artillery of the enemy and come back with information which in former times a scout posted in a tall tree or even in a captive balloon could not begin to acquire. Surprise attacks were impossible, with eyes in the sky. The aviator could help his own batteries by signaling to them where to send their shell, and when the firing began he would spot the shots as they landed and signal back to the battery how to correct its aim so as to drop the shell squarely on the target. The French sprang a surprise on the Germans by actually attacking the infantry from the sky. The idea of attack from overhead was so novel that armies did not realize the danger of exposing themselves behind the battle-front. Long convoys of trucks and masses of infantry moved freely over the roads behind the lines and they were taken by surprise when the French began dropping steel darts upon them. These were about the size of a pencil, with pointed end and fluted tail, so that they would travel through the air like an arrow. The darts were dropped by the hundred wherever the airmen saw a large group of the enemy, and they struck with sufficient velocity to pierce a man from head to foot. But steel darts were not used very long. The enemy took to cover and then the only way to attack him was to drop explosives which would blow up his shelter. At the outset, air scouts were more afraid of the enemy on the ground than in the sky. The Germans had anti-aircraft guns that were fired with accuracy and accounted for many Allied planes. In those days, airplanes flew at comparatively low altitudes and they were well within the reach of the enemy's guns. But it was not long before the airplanes began to fight one another. Each side was very much annoyed by the flying scouts of its opponents and after a number of pistol duels in the sky the French began to arm their planes with machine-guns. Two months after the war started the first airplane was sent crashing to earth after a battle in the sky. The fight took place five thousand feet above the earth, between a French and a German machine. The German pilot was killed and the plane fell behind the French lines, carrying with it a Prussian nobleman who died before he could be pulled out of the wreckage. The war had been carried into the skies. But if scouts were to fight one another, they could not pay much attention to scouting and spotting and it began to be realized that there were four distinct classes of work for the airplane to do--scouting, artillery-spotting, battling, and bombing. Each called for special training and its own type of machine. As air fighting grew more specialized these classes were further subdivided, but we need not go into such refinements. AIR SCOUTS AND THEIR DANGERS The scouting-airplane usually carried two men, one to drive the machine and the other to make observations. The observer had to carry a camera, to take photographs of what lay below, and he was usually equipped with a wireless outfit, with which he could send important information back to his own base. The camera was sometimes fitted with a stock like that of a gun, so that it could be aimed from the shoulder. Some small cameras were shaped so that they could be held in the hand like a pistol and aimed over the side of the fuselage, or body, of the airplane; but the best work was done with large cameras fitted with telescopic lenses, or "telephoto" lenses, as they are called. Some of these were built into the airplane, with the lens opening down through the bottom of the fuselage. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood A Handley-Page Bombing Plane with One of its Wings Folded Back] The scouting-airplane carried a machine-gun, not for attack, but for defense. It had to be a quick climber and a good dodger, so that it could escape from an attacking plane. Usually it did not have to go very far into the enemy country, and it was provided with a large wing-spread, so that if anything happened to the engine, it could _volplane_, or glide back, to its own lines. As the scouting-planes were large, they offered a big target to anti-aircraft guns, and so the work of the air scout was to swoop down upon the enemy, when, of course, the machine would be traveling at high velocity, because it would have all the speed of falling added to that which its own propeller gave it. [Illustration: How an object dropped from the Woolworth Building would increase its speed in falling] It was really a very difficult matter to hit a rapidly moving airplane; and even if it were hit, there were few spots in which it could be mortally wounded. Hundreds of shots could go through the wings of an airplane without impairing its flying in the least. The engine, too, could be pretty well peppered with ordinary bullets without being disabled. As for the men in the machine, they furnished small targets, and even they could be hit in many places without being put entirely out of business. And so the dangers of air scouting were not so great as might at first be supposed. One of the most vulnerable spots in the airplane was the gasolene-tank. If that were punctured so that the fuel would run out, the airplane would have to come to the ground. Worse still, the gasolene might take fire and there was nothing the aviator dreaded more than fire. There were occasions in which he had to choose between leaping to earth and burning to death, and the former was usually preferred as a quicker and less painful death. In some of the later machines the gasolene-tank could be pitched overboard if it took fire, by the throwing of a lever, and then the aviator could glide to earth in safety. THE SELF-HEALING GASOLENE-TANK One of the contributions which we made to military aëronautics was a gasolene-tank that was puncture-proof. It was made of soft rubber with a thin lining of copper. There are some very soft erasers on the market through which you can pass a lead pencil and never find the hole after it has passed through, because the rubber has closed in and healed the wound. Such was the rubber used in the gasolene-tank. It could be peppered with bullets and yet would not leak a drop of gasolene, unless the bullet chanced to plow along the edge of the tank and open a long gash. The Germans used four different kinds of cartridges in their aircraft guns. The first carried the ordinary bullet, a second type had for its bullet a shell of German silver filled with a phosphor compound. This was automatically ignited through a small opening in the base of the shell when it was fired from the gun and it left a trail of smoke by which the gunner could trace its course through the air and correct his aim. At night the bright spot of light made by the burning compound would serve the same purpose. Such a bullet, if it hit an ordinary gasolene-tank, would set fire to its contents. The bullet would plow through the tank and out at the opposite side and there, at its point of exit, is where the gasolene would be set on fire. Such incendiary bullets were repeatedly fired into or through the rubber tanks and the hole would close behind the bullet, preventing the contents from taking fire. The two other types of bullets referred to were an explosive bullet or tiny shell which would explode on striking the target and a perforating steel bullet which was intended to pierce armor or penetrate into vital parts of an airplane engine. Machines with which artillery-spotting was done were usually manned by a pilot and an observer, so that the latter could devote his entire attention to noting the fire of the guns and signaling ranges without being hampered by having to drive the machine. These machines were usually of the pusher type, so that the observer could have an unobstructed view. They did not have to be fast machines. It was really better for them to move slowly. Had it been possible for them to stop altogether and hover over the spot that was being shelled, it would have been a distinct advantage. That would have given the observer a chance to note with better accuracy the fall of the shell. Like the scout, the spotter had to be a fast climber, so that it could get out of the range of enemy guns and run away from attacking planes. GIANTS OF THE SKY The largest war-planes were the bomb-dropping machines. They had to be capable of carrying heavy loads of explosives. They were usually slow machines, speed being sacrificed in carrying-capacity. The Germans paid a great deal of attention to big bomb-dropping machines, particularly after their Zeppelins proved a failure. Their huge Gothas were built to make night raids on undefended cities. The Italians and the British retaliated with machines that were even larger. At first the French were inclined to let giant planes alone. They did not care to conduct long-distance bombing-raids on German cities because their own important cities were so near the battle-front that the Germans could have done those places more harm than the French could have inflicted. Later they built some giant machines, although not so large as those of the Italians and the British. The large triplane Capronis built by the Italians held a crew of three men. They were armed with three guns and carried 2750 pounds of explosives. That made a useful load of 4000 pounds. The machine was driven by three engines with a total of 900 horse-power. The big British plane was the Handley-Page, which had a wing-spread of 125 feet and could carry a useful load of three tons. These enormous machines conducted their raids at night because they were comparatively slow and could not defend themselves against speedy battle-planes. The big Italian machines used "search-light" bombs to help them locate important points on the ground beneath. These were brilliant magnesium torches suspended from parachutes so that they would fall slowly and give a broad illumination, while the airplane itself was shielded from the light by the parachute. But these giants were not the only bombing-machines. There were smaller machines that operated over the enemy's battle-line and dropped bombs on any suspicious object behind the enemy lines. These machines had to be convoyed by fast battle-planes which fought off hostile airmen. HOW FAST IS A HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES PER HOUR? In naval warfare the battle-ship is the biggest and heaviest ship of the fleet, but in the air the battle-planes are the lightest and the smallest of the lot. They are one-man machines, as a rule, little fellows, but enormously speedy. Speed is such an important factor in aërial warfare that there was a continuous struggle between the opposing forces to produce the faster machine. Airplanes were constantly growing speedier, until a speed of 150 miles per hour was not an uncommon rate of travel. It is hard to imagine such a speed as that, but we may gain some idea if we consider a falling object. The observation platform of the Woolworth Building, in New York, is about 750 feet above the ground. If you should drop an object from this platform you would start it on a journey that would grow increasingly speedy, particularly as it neared the ground. By the time it had dropped from the sixtieth story to the fifty-ninth it would have attained a speed of nearly 20 miles per hour. (We are not making any allowances for the resistance of the air and what it would do to check the speed.) As it passed the fiftieth story it would be traveling as fast as an express-train, or 60 miles per hour. It would finally reach the ground with a speed equal to that of a fast battle-plane--150 miles per hour. The battle-plane was usually fitted with a single machine-gun that was fixed to the airplane, so that it was brought to bear on the target by aiming the entire machine. In this the plane was something like a submarine, which must point its bow at its intended victim in order to aim its torpedo. The operator of the battle-plane simply drove his machine at the enemy and touched a button on his steering-lever to start his machine-gun going. SHOOTING THROUGH THE PROPELLER Now, the fleetest machines and the most easily manoeuvered are those of the tractor type, that is, the ones which have the propeller in front; but having the propeller in front is a handicap for a single-seater machine, for the gun has to be fired through the propeller and the bullets are sure to hit the propeller-blades. Nevertheless the French did fire right through the propeller, regardless of whether or not the blades were hit; but at the point where they came in line with the fire of the gun they were armored with steel, so that there was no danger of their being cut by the bullets. It was calculated that not more than one bullet in eighteen would strike the propeller-blade and be deflected from its course, which was a very trifling loss; nevertheless, it was a loss, and on this account a mechanism was devised which would time the operations of the machine-gun so that the shots would come only when the propeller-blades were clear of the line of fire. [Illustration: Machine-Gun mounted to Fire over the Blades of the Propeller] [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" Mechanism for Firing Between the Blades of the Propeller The cam _B_ on the propeller shaft lifts the rod _C_, rocking the angle lever _D_ which moves the rod _E_ and operates the firing-piece _F_. Firing may be stopped by means of lever _H_ and Bowden wire _G_. _I_ is the ejection-tube for empty cartridges.] [Illustration: It would take a Hundred Horses to Supply the Power for a Small Airplane] A cam placed on the propeller-shaft worked the trigger of the machine-gun. This did not slow up the fire of the machine-gun. Quite the contrary. We are apt to think of the fire of the machine-guns as very rapid, but they usually fire only about five hundred rounds per minute, while an airplane propeller will make something like twelve hundred revolutions per minute. And so the mechanism was arranged to pull the trigger only once for every two revolutions of the propeller. FIGHTING AMONG THE CLOUDS There was no service of the war that began to compare with that of the sky fighter. He had to climb to enormous heights. Air battles took place at elevations of twenty thousand feet. The higher the battle-plane could climb, the better, because the man above had a tremendous advantage. Clouds were both a haven and a menace to him. At any moment an enemy plane might burst out of the clouds upon him. He had to be ready to go through all the thrilling tricks of a circus performer so as to dodge the other fellow and get a commanding position. If he were getting the worst of it, he might feign death and let his machine go tumbling and fluttering down for a thousand feet or so, only to recover his equilibrium suddenly and dart away when the enemy was thrown off his guard. He might escape into some friendly cloud, but he dared not hide in it very long, lest he get lost. It is a peculiar sensation that comes over an aviator when he is flying through a thick mass of clouds. He is cut off from the rest of the world. He can hear nothing but the terrific roar of his own motor and the hurricane rush of the wind against his ears. He can see nothing but the bluish fog of the clouds. He begins to lose all sense of direction. His compass appears to swing violently to and fro, when really it is his machine that is zig-zagging under his unsteady guidance. The more he tries to steady it, the worse becomes the swing of the compass. As he turns he banks his machine automatically, just as a bicyclist does when rounding a corner. He does this unconsciously, and he may get to spinning round and round, with his machine standing on its side. In some cases aviators actually emerged from the clouds with their machines upside down. To be sure, this was not an alarming position for an experienced aviator; at the same time, it was not altogether a safe one. A machine was sometimes broken by its operator's effort to right it suddenly. And so while the clouds made handy shelters, they were not always safe harbors. To the battle-plane fell the task of clearing the air of the enemy. If the enemy's battle-planes were disposed of, his bombing-planes, his spotters, and his scouts could not operate, and he would be blind. And so each side tried to beat out the other with speedier, more powerful, and more numerous battle-planes. Fast double-seaters were built with guns mounted so that they could turn in any direction. THE FLYING TANK The Germans actually built an armored battle-plane known as the flying tank. It was a two-seater intended mainly for attacking infantry and was provided with two machine-guns that pointed down through the floor of the fuselage. A third gun mounted on a revolving wooden ring could be used to fight off hostile planes. The bottom and sides of the fuselage or body of the airplane from the gunner's cockpit forward were sheathed with plates of steel armor. The machine was a rather cumbersome craft and did not prove very successful. A flying tank was brought down within the American lines just before the signing of the armistice. AMERICA'S HELP Our own contribution to the war in the air was considerable, but we had hardly started before the armistice brought the fighting to an end. Before we entered the war we did not give the airplane any very serious consideration. To be sure, we built a large number of airplanes for the British, but they were not good enough to be sent to the front; they were used merely as practice planes in the British training-schools. We knew that we were hopelessly outclassed, but we did not care very much. Then we stepped into the conflict. "What can we do to help?" we asked our allies, and their answer gave us a shock. "Airplanes!" they cried. "Build us airplanes--thousands of them--so that we can drive the enemy out of the air and blind his armies!" It took us a while to recover from our surprise, and then we realized why we had been asked to build airplanes. The reputation of the United States as a manufacturer of machinery had spread throughout the world. We Americans love to take hold of a machine and turn it out in big quantities. Our allies were sure that we could turn out first-class airplanes, and many of them, if we tried. Congress made an appropriation of six hundred and forty million dollars for aëronautics, and then things began to hum. A BIRTHDAY PRESENT TO THE NATION The heart of an airplane is its engine. We know a great deal about gasolene-engines, especially automobile engines; but an airplane engine is a very different thing. It must be tremendously powerful, and at the same time extremely light. Every ounce of unnecessary weight must be shaved off. It must be built with the precision of a watch; its vital parts must be true to a ten-thousandth part of an inch. It takes a very powerful horse to develop one horse-power for a considerable length of time. It would take a hundred horses to supply the power for even a small airplane, and they would weigh a hundred and twenty thousand pounds. An airplane motor of the same power would weigh less than three hundred pounds, which is a quarter of the weight of a single horse. It was this powerful, yet most delicate, machine that we were called upon to turn out by the thousand. There was no time to waste; a motor must be designed that could be built in the American way, without any tinkering or fussy hand-work. Two of our best engineers met in a hotel in Washington on June 3, 1917, and worked for five days without once leaving their rooms. They had before them all the airplane knowledge of our allies. American engine-builders offered up their trade secrets. Everything was done to make this motor worthy of America's reputation. There was a race to have the motor finished by the Fourth of July. Sure enough, on Independence Day the finished motor was there in Washington--the "Liberty motor," a birthday present to the nation. Of course that did not mean that we were ready at once to turn out Liberty motors by the thousand. The engine had to undergo many tests and a large number of alterations before it was perfectly satisfactory and then special machinery had to be constructed before it could be manufactured in quantity. It was Thanksgiving Day before the first manufactured Liberty was turned out and even after that change upon change was made in this little detail and that. It was not until a year after we went to war that the engine began to be turned out in quantity. There was nothing startlingly new about the engine. It was a composite of a number of other engines, but it was designed to be turned out in enormous quantities, and it was remarkably efficient. It weighed only 825 pounds and it developed over 420 horse-power. Some machines went up as high as 485 horse-power. An airplane engine weighing less than 2 pounds per horse-power is wonderfully efficient. Of course the Liberty was too heavy for a light battle-plane (a heavy machine, no matter how powerful, cannot make sharp turns), but it was excellent for other types of airplanes and large orders for Liberty engines were made by our allies. Of course we made other engines as well, and the planes to carry them. We built large Caproni and Handley-Page machines, and we were developing some remarkably swift and powerful planes of our own when the Germans thought it about time to stop fighting. FLYING BOATS So far we have said nothing about the seaplanes which were used in large numbers to watch for submarines. These were big flying boats in which speed was not a very important matter. One of the really big machines we developed, but which was not finished until after the war, was a giant with a 110-foot span and a body or hull 50 feet long. During the war seaplanes carried wireless telephone apparatus with which they could call to destroyers and submarine-chasers when they spotted a submarine. They also carried bombs which they could drop on U-boats, and even heavy guns with which they could fire shell. A still later development are the giant planes of the N. C. type with a wing-spread of 126 feet and driven by four Liberty motors. They carry a useful load of four and a half tons. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood The Flying-tank--an Armored German Airplane designed for firing on troops on the march] Early in the war, large guns were mounted on airplanes, but the shock of the recoil proved too much for the airplane to stand. However, an American inventor produced a gun which had no recoil. This he accomplished by using a double-end gun, which was fired from the middle. The bullet or shell was shot out at the forward end of the gun and a dummy charge of sand was shot out at the rear end. The sand spread out and did no damage at a short distance from the gun, but care had to be taken not to come too close. These non-recoil guns were made in different sizes, to fire 1-1/2-inch to 3-inch shell. THE AUTOMATIC SEAPLANE Another interesting development was the target airplane used for the training of aërial gunners. This was a small seaplane with a span of only 18-1/2 feet, driven by a 12-horse-power motor, the whole machine weighing but 175 pounds. This was sent up without a pilot and it would fly at the rate of forty to fifty miles per hour until its supply of gasolene gave out, when it would drop down into the sea. It afforded a real target for gunners in practice machines. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood An N-C (Navy-Curtiss) Seaplane of the type that made the first flight across the Atlantic] Early in the war an American inventor proposed that seaplanes be provided with torpedoes which they could launch at an enemy ship. The seaplane would swoop down out of the sky to within a short distance of the ship, drop its projectile, and fly off again, and the torpedo would continue on its course until it blew up the vessel. It was urged that a fleet of such seaplanes protected by a convoy of fast battle-planes could invade the enemy harbors and destroys its powerful fleet. It seemed like a rather wild idea, but the British actually built such torpedo-planes and tested them. However, the German fleet surrendered before it was necessary to blow it up in such fashion. AIRPLANES AFTER THE WAR With the war ended, all the Allied powers have large numbers of airplanes on their hands and also large numbers of trained aviators. Undoubtedly airplanes will continue to fill the skies in Europe and we shall see more and more of them in this country. Even during the war they were used for other purposes than fighting. There were ambulances on wings--machines with the top of the fuselage removable so that a patient on a stretcher could be placed inside. A French machine was furnished with a complete hospital equipment for emergency treatment and even for performing an operation in case of necessity. The flying hospital could carry the patient back to the field or base hospital after treatment. Mail-carrying airplanes are already an old story. In Europe the big bombing-machines are being used for passenger service between cities. There is an air line between Paris and London. The airplanes carry from a dozen to as many as fifty passengers on a single trip. In some cities here, as well as abroad, the police are being trained to fly, so that they can police the heavens when the public takes to wings. Evidently the flying-era is here. CHAPTER VIII SHIPS THAT SAIL THE SKIES Shortly after the Civil War broke out, Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, an enthusiastic American aëronaut, conceived the idea of sending up scout balloons to reconnoiter the position of the enemy. These balloons were to be connected by telegraph wires with the ground, so that they could direct the artillery fire. The idea was so novel to the military authorities of that day that it was not received with favor. Balloons were looked upon as freak inventions, entirely impracticable for the stern realities of war; and as for telegraphing from a balloon, no one had ever done that before. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood A big German Zeppelin that was forced to come down on French soil] But this enthusiast was not to be daunted, and he made a direct appeal to President Lincoln, offering to prove the practicability of this means of scouting. So he took his balloon to Washington and made an ascent from the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution, while the President came out on the lawn south of the White House to watch the demonstration. In order to test him, Mr. Lincoln took off his hat, waved his handkerchief, and made other signals. Lowe observed each act through his field-glasses and reported it to the President by telegraph. Mr. Lincoln was so impressed by the demonstration that he ordered the army to use the observation balloon, and so with some reluctance the gas-bag was introduced into military service, Professor Lowe being made chief aëronautic engineer. Under Lowe's direction the observation balloons played an important part in the operations of the Union Army. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" Observation Car lowered from a Zeppelin sailing above the clouds] On one occasion a young German military attaché begged the privilege of making an ascent in the balloon. Permission was given and when the German officer returned to earth he was wildly enthusiastic in praise of this aërial observation post. He had had a splendid view of the enemy and could watch operations through his field-glasses which were of utmost importance. Realizing the military value of the aircraft, he returned to Germany and urged military authorities to provide themselves with captive balloons. This young officer was Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who was destined later to become the most famous aëronautic authority in the world and who lived to see Germany equipped with a fleet of balloons which were self-propelling and could travel over land and sea to spread German frightfulness into England. He also lived to see the virtual failure of this type of war-machine in the recent great conflict, and it was possibly because of his deep disappointment at having his huge expensive airships bested by cheap little airplanes that Count von Zeppelin died in March, 1917. However, he was spared the humiliation of seeing a fleet of Zeppelins lose their way in a fog and fall into France, one of them being captured before it could be destroyed, so that all its secrets of construction were learned by the French. THE WEIGHT OF HYDROGEN Before we describe the Zeppelin airships and the means by which they were eventually overcome, we must know something about the principles of balloons. Every one knows that balloons are kept up in the air by means of a very light gas, but somehow the general public fails to understand why the gas should hold it up. Some people have a notion that there is something mysterious about hydrogen gas which makes it resist the pull of gravity, and that the more hydrogen you crowd into the balloon the more weight it will lift. But hydrogen has weight and feels the pull of gravity just as air does, or water, or lead. The only reason the balloon rises is because it weighs less than the air it displaces. It is hard to think of air as having weight, but if we weigh air, hydrogen, coal-gas, or any other gas, in a vacuum, it will tip the scales just as a solid would. A thousand cubic feet of air weighs 80 pounds. In other words, the air in a room ten feet square with a ceiling ten feet high, weighs just about 80 pounds. The same amount of coal-gas weighed in a vacuum would register only 40 pounds; while an equal volume of hydrogen would weigh only 5-1/2 pounds. But when we speak of volumes of gas we must remember that gas, unlike a liquid or a solid, can be compressed or expanded to almost any dimensions. For instance, we could easily fill our room with a ton of air if the walls would stand the pressure; or we could pump out the air, until there were but a few ounces of air left. But in one case the air would be so highly compressed that it would exert a pressure of about 375 pounds on every square inch of the wall of the room, while in the other case its pressure would be almost infinitesimal. But 80 pounds of air in a room of a thousand cubic feet would exert the same pressure as the atmosphere, or 15 pounds on every square inch. And when we say that a thousand cubic feet of hydrogen weighs only a little over 5 pounds, we are talking about hydrogen at the same pressure as the atmosphere. Since the hydrogen is sixteen times lighter than air, naturally it will float in the air, just as a piece of wood will float in water because it is lighter than the same volume of water. If we surrounded the thousand cubic feet of hydrogen with a bag so that the gas will not diffuse into the air and mix with it, we shall have a balloon which would float in air provided the bag and the hydrogen it contains do not weigh more than eighty pounds. As we rise from the surface of the earth, the air becomes less and less dense, or, in other words, it becomes lighter, and the balloon will keep on rising through the atmosphere until it reaches a point at which its weight, gas-bag and all, is exactly the same as that of an equal volume of air. But there are many conditions that affect the height to which the balloon will ascend. The higher we rise, the colder it is apt to become, and cold has a tendency to compress the hydrogen, collapsing the balloon and making it relatively heavier. When the sun beats upon a balloon, it heats the hydrogen, expanding it and making it relatively lighter, and if there is no room for this expansion to take place in the bag, the bag will burst. For this reason, a big safety-valve must be provided and the ordinary round balloon is open at the bottom so that the hydrogen can escape when it expands too much and the balloonist carries ballast in the form of sand which he can throw over to lighten the balloon when the gas is contracted by a sudden draft of cold air. Although a round balloon carries no engine and no propeller, it can be guided through the air to some degree. When an aëronaut wishes to go in any particular direction, he sends up his balloon by throwing out ballast or lowers it by letting out a certain amount of gas, until he reaches a level at which he finds a breeze blowing in the desired direction. Such was the airship of Civil War times, but for military purposes it was not advisable to use free balloons, because of the difficulty of controlling them. They were too liable to fall into the hands of the enemy. All that was needed was a high observation post from which the enemy could be watched, and from which observations could be reported by telegraph. The balloon was not looked upon as a fighting-machine. ZEPPELIN'S FAILURES AND SUCCESSES But Count Zeppelin was a man of vision. He dreamed of a real ship of the air--a machine that would sail wherever the helmsman chose, regardless of wind and weather. Many years elapsed before he actually began to work out his dreams, and then he met with failure after failure. He believed in big machines and the loss of one of his airships meant the waste of a large sum of money, but he persisted, even though he spent all his fortune, and had to go heavily in debt. Every one thought him a crank until he built his third airship and proved its worth by making a trip of 270 miles. At once the German Government was interested and saw wonderful military possibilities in the new craft. The Zeppelin was purchased by the government and money was given the inventor to further his experiments. That was not the end of his failures. Before the war broke out, thirteen Zeppelins had been destroyed by one accident or another. Evidently the building of Zeppelin airships was not a paying undertaking, although they were used to carry passengers on short aërial voyages. But the government made up money losses and Zeppelin went on developing his airships. Of course, he was not the only one to build airships, nor even the first to build a dirigible. The French built some large dirigibles, but they failed to see any great military advantage in ships that could sail through the air, particularly after the airplane was invented, and so it happened that when the war started the French were devoting virtually all their energies to the construction of speedy, powerful airplanes. As for the British, they did not pay much attention to airships. The idea that their isles might be attacked from the sky seemed an exceedingly remote possibility. RIGID, SEMI-RIGID, AND FLEXIBLE BALLOONS Count Zeppelin always held that the dirigible balloons must be rigid, so that they could be driven through the air readily and would hold their shape despite variations in the pressure of the hydrogen. The French, on the other hand, used a semi-rigid airship; that is, one in which a flexible balloon is attached to a rigid keel or body. The British clung to the idea of an entirely flexible balloon and they suspended their car from the gas-bag without any rigid framework to hold the gas-bag in shape. In every case, the balloons were kept taut or distended by means of air-bags or ballonets. These air-bags were placed inside the gas-bags and as the hydrogen expanded it would force the air out through valves, but the hydrogen itself would not escape. When the hydrogen contracted, the air-bags were pumped full of air so as to maintain the balloon in its fully distended condition. Additional supplies of compressed hydrogen were kept in metal tanks. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood Giant British Dirigible built along the lines of a Zeppelin] [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood One of the engine cars or "power eggs" of a British Dirigible] In the Zeppelin balloon, however, the gas was contained in separate bags which were placed in a framework of aluminum covered over with fabric. Count Zeppelin did not believe in placing all his eggs in one basket. If one of these balloons burst or was injured in any way, there was enough buoyancy in the rest of the gas-bags to hold up the airship. As the Zeppelins were enormous structures, the framework had to be made strong and light, and it was built up of a latticework of aluminum alloy. Aluminum itself was not strong enough for the purpose, but a mixture of aluminum and zinc and later another alloy known as duralumin, consisting of aluminum with three per cent of copper and one per cent of nickel, provided a very rigid framework that was exceedingly light. Duralumin is four or five times as strong as aluminum and yet weighs but little more. [Illustration: Photograph by International Film Service Crew of the C-5 (American Coastal Dirigible) starting for Newfoundland to make a Transatlantic Flight] The body of the Zeppelin is not a perfect circle in section, but is made up in the form of a polygon with sixteen sides, and the largest of the Zeppelins used during the war contained sixteen compartments, in each of which was placed a large hydrogen gas-bag. A super-Zeppelin, as the latest type is called, was about seventy-five feet in diameter and seven hundred and sixty feet long, or almost as long as three New York street blocks. In its gas-bags it carried two million cubic feet of hydrogen and although the whole machine with its fuel, stores, and passengers weighed close to fifty tons, it was so much lighter than the air it displaced that it had a reserve buoyancy of over ten tons. KEEPING ENGINES CLEAR OF THE INFLAMMABLE HYDROGEN As hydrogen is a very inflammable gas, it is extremely dangerous to have an internal-combustion engine operating very near the gas-bags. In the super-Zeppelins the engines were placed in four cars suspended from the balloon. There was one of these cars forward, and one at the stern, while near the center were two cars side by side. In the rear car there were two engines, either of which could be used to drive the propeller. By means of large steering rudders and horizontal rudders, the machine could be forced to dive or rise or turn in either direction laterally. The pilot of the Zeppelin had an elaborate operating-compartment from which he could control the rudders, and he also had control of the valves in the ballonets so that by the touch of a button he could regulate the pressure of gas in any part of the dirigible. There were nineteen men in the crew of the Zeppelin--two in the operating-compartment, and two in each of the cars containing engines, except for the one at the stern in which there were three men. The other men were placed in what was known as the "cat walk" or passageway running inside the framework under the gas-bags. These men were given various tasks and were supposed to get as much sleep as they could, so as to be ready to replace the other men at need. The engine cars at each side of the balloon were known as power eggs because of their general egg shape. At the center of the Zeppelin the bombs were stored, and there were electro-magnetic releasing-devices operated from the pilot's room by which the pilot could drop the bombs whenever he chose. The Zeppelin also carried machine-guns to fight off airplanes. Gasolene was stored in tanks which were placed in various parts of the machine, any one of which could feed one or all of the engines, and they were so arranged that they could be thrown overboard when the gasolene was used up, so as to lighten the load of the Zeppelin. Water ballast was used instead of sand, and alcohol was mixed with the water to keep it from freezing. The machine which came down in French territory and was captured before it could be destroyed by the pilot, found itself unable to rise because in the intense cold of the upper air the water ballast had frozen, and it could not be let out to lighten the load of the Zeppelin. [Illustration: Photograph from Kadel & Herbert The Curious Tail of a Kite Balloon] [Illustration: British Official Photograph from Kadel & Herbert Observers in the Basket of an Observation-Balloon] THE ZEPPELIN'S TINY ANTAGONISTS The one thing above all others that the Zeppelin commander feared was the attack of airplanes. In the early stages of the war, it was considered unsafe for airplanes to fly by night because of the difficulty of making a landing in the dark. Later this difficulty was overcome by the use of search-lights at the landing-fields. The airplane would signal its desire to land and the search-lights would point out the proper landing-field for it. So that after the first few months of the war Zeppelins were subjected to the danger of airplane attack. Of course, on a dark night it was very difficult for an airplane to locate a Zeppelin, because the huge machine could not be seen and the throb of its engines was drowned out by the engines of the airplane itself. Nevertheless, Zeppelins were occasionally located and destroyed by airplanes. [Illustration: Photograph by Kadel & Herbert Enormous Range-finders mounted on a Gun Turret of an American Warship] The danger of the Zeppelin lay in the fact that it was supported by an enormous volume of very inflammable gas and the airplane needed but to set fire to this gas to cause the destruction of the giant of the air. And so the machine-guns carried by airplanes were provided with explosive, flaming bullets. A burst of flame within the gas-bag would not set the gas on fire, because there would be no air inside to feed the fire, but surrounding the gas-bag there was always a certain leakage of hydrogen which would mix with the air in the compartment and this would produce an explosive mixture which needed but the touch of fire to set it off. The Zeppelin was provided with a ventilating-system to carry off these explosive gases, but they could never be disposed of very effectively, and, as a consequence, a number of Zeppelins were destroyed by the tiny antagonists that were sent up by the British and the French. To fight off these assailants the Germans provided their Zeppelins with guns which would fire shrapnel shell. It is difficult for a Zeppelin to use machine-guns against an airplane because the latter would merely climb above the Zeppelin and would be shielded by the balloon itself. And so the Germans put a gun emplacement on top of the balloon both forward and aft. There was a deck extending along the top of the balloon which was reached by a ladder running up through the center of the airship. But it was impossible to ward off the fleet little antagonists, once the dirigible was discovered. True, a Zeppelin could make as much as seventy miles per hour, but the fastest airplanes could travel twice as fast as that. SUSPENDING AN OBSERVER BELOW THE ZEPPELIN One ingenious scheme that was tried was to suspend an observation car under the Zeppelin. The car was about fourteen feet long and five feet in diameter, fitted with a tail to keep it headed in the direction it was towed. It had glass windows forward and there was plenty of room in it for a man to lie at full length and make observations of things below. The car with its observer could be lowered a few thousand feet below the Zeppelin, so that the observer could watch proceedings below, while the airship remained hidden among the clouds. The observer was connected by telephone with the chart-room of the Zeppelin and could report his discoveries or even act as a pilot to direct the course of the ship. But despite everything that could be done, the Zeppelin eventually proved a failure as a war-vessel because it was so very costly to construct and operate and could so easily be destroyed, and the Germans began to build huge airplanes with which bombing-raids could be continued. Strange to say, however, although the Germans were ready to admit the failure of their big airship, when the war stopped the Allies were actually building machines patterned after the Zeppelin, but even larger, and expected to use them for bombing-excursions over Germany. This astonishing turn of the tables was due to the fact that America had made a contribution to aëronautics that solved the one chief drawback of the Zeppelin. A BALLOON GAS THAT WILL NOT BURN When we entered the war against Germany, our allies placed before us all their problems and among them was this one of the highly inflammable airship. Could we not furnish a substitute for hydrogen that would not burn? It was suggested to us that helium would do if we could produce that gas cheaply and in sufficient quantity. Now, helium has a history of its own that is exceedingly interesting. Every now and then the moon bobs its head into our light and we have a solar eclipse. But our satellite is not big enough to cut off all the light of the big luminary and the fiery atmosphere of the sun shows us a brilliant halo all around the black disk of the moon. Long ago, astronomers analyzed this flaming atmosphere with the spectroscope, and by the different bands of light that appeared they were able to determine what gases were present in the sun's atmosphere. But there was one band of bright yellow which they could not identify. Evidently this was produced by a gas unknown on earth, and they called it "helium" or "sun" gas. For a quarter of a century this sun gas remained a mystery; then one day, in 1895, Sir William Ramsay discovered the same band of light when studying the spectrum of the mineral cleveite. The fact that astronomers had been able to single out an element on the sun ninety million miles away before our chemists could find it right here on earth, produced a mild sensation, but the general public attached no special importance to the gas itself. It proved to be a very light substance, next to hydrogen the lightest of gases, and for years it resisted all attempts at liquefaction. Only when Onnes, the Dutch scientist, succeeded in getting it down to a temperature of 450 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, did the gas yield to the chill and condense into a liquid. The gas would not burn; it would not combine with any other elements, and apparently it had no use on earth, and it might have remained indefinitely a lazy member of the chemical fraternity had not the great world conflict stirred us into frenzied activity in all branches of science in our effort to beat the Hun. Because the gas had no commercial value, there was only a small amount of helium to be found in the whole world. Not a single laboratory in the United States had more than five cubic feet of it and its price ranged from $1,500 to $6,000 per cubic foot. At the lowest price it would cost $3,000,000,000 to provide gas enough for one airship of Zeppelin dimensions and it seemed absurd even to think of a helium airship. AMERICAN CHEMISTS TO THE RESCUE Just before the war it was discovered that there is a considerable amount of helium in the natural gas of Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, and Sir William Ramsey suggested that our chemists might study some method of getting helium from this source. The only way of separating it out was to liquefy the gases by subjecting them to extreme cold. All gases turn to liquid if they are cooled sufficiently, and then further cold will freeze them solid. But helium can stand more cold than any other and this fact gave the clue to its recovery from natural gas. The latter was frozen and one after another the different elements condensed into liquid, until finally only helium was left. This sounds simple, but it is a difficult matter to get such low temperature as that on a large scale and do it economically. To be of any real service in aëronautics helium would have to be reduced in cost from fifteen hundred dollars to less than ten cents per cubic foot. Several different kinds of refrigerating-machinery were tried and finally just before the war was brought to a close by the armistice we had succeeded in producing helium at the rate of eight cents per cubic foot, with the prospect of reducing its cost still further. A large plant for recovering helium was being built. The plant will have been completed before this book is published, and it will be turning out helium for peaceful instead of military airships. The reduction in the cost of helium is really one of the most important developments of this war. By removing the fire risk from airships we can safely use these craft for aërial cruises or for quick long-distance travel over land and sea. For, even in time of peace, sailing under millions of cubic feet of hydrogen is a serious matter. Although no incendiary bullets are to be feared, there is always the danger of setting fire to the gas within the exhaust of the engines. Engines have had to be hung in cars well below the balloon proper. But with helium in the gas-bags the engines can be placed inside the balloon envelop and the propellers can operate on the center line of the car. In the case of one Zeppelin, the hydrogen was set on fire by an electric spark produced by friction on the fabric of one of the gas-bags, and so even with the engine exhausts properly screened there is danger. The helium airship, however, would be perfectly safe from fire and passengers could smoke on deck or in their cabins within the balloon itself without any more fear of fire than they would have on shipboard. Wonderful possibilities have been opened by the production of helium on a large and economical scale, and the airship seems destined to play an important part in transportation very soon. As this book is going to press, we learn of enormous dirigibles about to be built in England for passenger service, which will have half again as great a lifting-power as the largest Zeppelins. The final chapter of the story of dirigibles is yet to be written, but in concluding this chapter it is interesting to note that the world's greatest aëronautic expert got his first inspiration from America and finally that America has now furnished the one element which was lacking to make the dirigible balloon a real success. CHAPTER IX GETTING THE RANGE Every person with a good pair of eyes in his head is a range-finder. He may not know it, but he is, just the same, and the way to prove it is to try a little range-finding on a small scale. Use the top of a table for your field of operations, and pick out some spot within easy reach of your hand for the target whose range you wish to find. The target may be a penny or a small circle drawn on a piece of white paper. Take a pencil in your hand and imagine it is a shell which you are going to land on the target. It is not quite fair to have a bird's-eye view of the field, so get down on your knees and bring your eyes within a few inches of the top of the table. Now close one eye and making your hand describe an arc through the air, like the arc that a shell would describe, see how nearly you can bring the pencil-point down on the center of the target. Do it slowly, so that your eye may guide the hand throughout its course. You will be surprised to find out how far you come short, or overreach the mark. You will have actually to grope for the target. If by any chance you should score a hit on the first try, you may be sure that it is an accident. Have a friend move the target around to a different position, and try again. Evidently, with one eye you are not a good range-finder; but now use two eyes and you will score a hit every time. Not only can you land the pencil on the penny, but you will be able to bring it down on the very center of the target. The explanation of this is that when you bring your eyes to bear upon any object that is near by, they have to be turned in slightly, so that both of them shall be aimed directly at that object. The nearer the object, the more they are turned in, and the farther the object, the more nearly parallel are the eyes. Long experience has taught you to gage the distance of an object by the feel of the eyes--that is, by the effort your muscles have to make to pull the eyes to a focus--and in this way the eyes give you the range of an object. You do not know what the distance is in feet or inches, but you can tell when the pencil-point has moved out until it is at the same focus as the target. The experiment can be tried on a larger scale with the end of a fishing-rod, but here you will probably have to use a larger target. However, there is a limit to which you can gage the range. At a distance of, say, fifteen or twenty feet, a variation of a few inches beyond or this side of the target makes scarcely any change in the focus of the eyes. That is because the eyes are so close together. If they were farther apart, they could tell the range at much greater distances. SPREADING THE EYES FAR APART Now the ordinary range-finder, used in the army and in the navy, is an arrangement for spreading the eyes apart to a considerable distance. Of course the eyes are not actually spread, but their vision is. The range-finder is really a double telescope. The barrel is not pointed at an object, but it is held at right angles to it. You look into the instrument at the middle of the barrel and out of it at the two ends. A system of mirrors or prisms makes this possible. The range-finder may be a yard or more in length, which is equivalent to spreading your eyes a yard or more apart. Now, the prisms or object-glasses at the ends of the tube are adjustable, so that they will turn in until they focus directly on the target whose range you wish to find, and the angle through which these glasses are turned gives a measure of the distance of the target. The whole thing is calculated out so that the distance in feet, yards, or meters, or whatever the measure may be, is registered on a scale in the range-finder. Ordinarily only one eye is used to look through the range-finder, because the system of mirrors is set to divide the sight of that one eye and make it serve the purposes of two. That leaves the other eye free to read the scale, which comes automatically into view as the range-finder is adjusted for the different ranges. On the battle-ships enormous range-finders are used. Some of them are twenty feet long. With the eyes spread as far apart as that and with a microscope to read the scale, you can imagine how accurately the range can be found, even when the target is miles away. But on land such big range-finders cannot conveniently be used; they are too bulky. When it is necessary to get the range of a very distant object, two observers are used who are stationed several hundred yards apart. These observers have telescopes which they bear upon the object, and the angle through which they have to turn the telescope is reported by telephone to the battery, where, by a rapid calculation, it is possible to estimate the exact position of the target. Then the gun is moved up or down, to the right or to the left, according to the calculation. The observers have to creep as near to the enemy as possible and they must be up high enough to command a good view of the target. Sometimes they are placed on top of telegraph poles or hidden up a tall tree, or in a church steeple. GETTING THE OBSERVER OFF THE GROUND This was the method of getting the range in previous wars and it was used to a considerable extent in the war we have just been through. But the great European conflict brought out wonderful improvements in all branches of fighting; and range-finding was absolutely revolutionized, because shelling was done at greater ranges than ever before, but chiefly because the war was carried up into the sky. A bird's-eye observation is much more accurate than any that can be obtained from the ground. Even before this war, some observations were taken by sending a man up in a kite, particularly a kite towed from a ship, and even as far back as the Civil War captive balloons were used to raise an observer to a good height above the ground. They were the ordinary round balloons, but the observation balloon of to-day is a very different-looking object. It is a sausage-shaped gas-bag that is held on a slant to the wind like a kite, so that the wind helps to hold it up. To keep it head-on to the wind, there is a big air-bag that curls around the lower end of the sausage. This acts like a rudder, and steadies the balloon. Some balloons have a tail consisting of a series of cone-shaped cups strung on a cable. A kite balloon will ride steadily in a wind that would dash a common round balloon in all directions. Observers in these kite balloons are provided with telephone instruments by which they can communicate instantly with the battery whose fire they are directing. But a kite balloon is a helpless object; it cannot fight the enemy. The hydrogen gas that holds it up will burn furiously if set on fire. In the war an enemy airplane had merely to drop a bomb upon it or fire an incendiary bullet into it, and the balloon would go up in smoke. Nothing could save it, once it took fire, and all the observers could do was to jump for their lives as soon as they saw the enemy close by. They always had parachutes strapped to them, so they could leap without an instant's delay in case of sudden danger. At the very first approach of an enemy airplane, the kite balloon had to be hauled down or it would surely be destroyed, and so kite balloons were not very dependable observation stations for the side which did not control the air. As stated in the preceding chapter, just before the fighting came to an end, our army was preparing to use balloons that were not afraid of flaming bullets, because they were to be filled with a gas that would not burn. MAKING MAPS WITH A CAMERA Because airplanes filled the sky with eyes, everything that the army did near the front had to be carefully hidden from the winged scouts. Batteries were concealed in the woods, or under canopies where the woods were shot to pieces, or they were placed in dugouts so that they could not be located. Such targets could seldom be found with a kite balloon. It was the task of airplane observers to search out these hidden batteries. The eye alone was not depended upon to find them. Large cameras were used with telescopic lenses which would bring the surface of the earth near while the airplane flew at a safe height. These were often motion-picture cameras which would automatically make an exposure every second, or every few seconds. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood British Anti-aircraft Section getting the Range of an Enemy Aviator] When the machine returned from a photographing-expedition, the films were developed and printed, and then pieced together to form a photographic map. The map was scrutinized very carefully for any evidence of a hidden battery or for any suspicious enemy object. As the enemy was always careful to disguise its work, the camera had to be fitted with color-screens which would enable it to pick out details that would not be evident to the eye. As new photographic maps were made from day to day, they were carefully compared one with the other so that it might be seen if there was the slightest change in them which would indicate some enemy activity. As soon as a suspicious spot was discovered, its position was noted on a large-scale military map and the guns were trained upon it. [Illustration: (C) Kadel & Herbert A British Aviator making Observations over the German Lines] CORRECTING THE AIM It is one thing to know where the target is and another to get the shell to drop upon it. In the firing of a shell a distance of ten or twenty miles, the slightest variation in the gun will make a difference of many yards in the point where the shell lands. Not only that, but the direction of the wind and the density of the air have a part to play in the journey of the shell. If the shell traveled through a vacuum, it would be a much simpler matter to score a hit by the map alone. But even then there would be some differences, because a gun has to be "warmed up" before it will fire according to calculation. That is why it is necessary to have observers, or "spotters" as they are called, to see where the shell actually do land and tell the gun-pointers whether to elevate or depress the gun, and how much to "traverse" it--that is, move it sideways. This would not be a very difficult matter if there were only one gun firing, but when a large number of guns are being used, as was almost invariably the case in the war, the spotter had to know which shell belonged to the gun he was directing. One of the most important inventions of the war was the wireless telephone, which airplanes used and which were brought to such perfection that the pilot of an airplane could talk to a station on the earth without any difficulty, from a distance of ten miles; and in some cases he could reach a range of fifty miles. With the wireless telephone, the observer could communicate instantly with the gun-pointer, and tell him when to fire. Usually thirty seconds were allowed after the signal sent by the observer before the gun was fired, and on the instant of firing, a signal was sent to the man in the airplane to be on the lookout for the shell. Knowing the position of the target, the gun-pointer would know how long it would take the shell to travel through the air, and he would keep the man in the airplane posted, warning him at ten seconds, five seconds, and so forth, before the shell was due to land. In order to keep the eyes fresh for observation and not to have them distracted by other sights, the observer usually gazed into space until just before the instant the shell was to land. Then he would look for the column of smoke produced by the explosion of the shell and report back to the battery how far wide of the mark the shell had landed. A number of shell would be fired at regular intervals, say four or five per minute, so that the observer would know which shell belonged to the gun in question. There are different kinds of shell. Some will explode on the instant of contact with the earth. These are meant to spread destruction over the surface. There are other shell which will explode a little more slowly and these penetrate the ground to some extent before going off; while a third type has a delayed action and is intended to be buried deep in the ground before exploding, so as to destroy dugouts and underground positions. The bursts of smoke from the delayed-action shell and the semi-delayed-action shell rise in a slender vertical column and are not so easily seen from the sky. The instantaneous shell, however, produces a broad burst of smoke which can be spotted much more readily, and this enables the man in the airplane to determine the position of the shell with greater accuracy. For this reason, instantaneous shell were usually used for spotting-purposes, and after the gun had found its target, other shell were used suited to the character of the work that was to be done. MINIATURE BATTLE-FIELDS Observation of shell-fire from an airplane called for a great deal of experience, and our spotters were given training on a miniature scale before they undertook to do spotting from the air. A scaffolding was erected in the training-quarters over a large picture of a typical bit of enemy territory. Men were posted at the top of this scaffolding so that they could get a bird's-eye view of the territory represented on the map, and they were connected by telephone or telegraph with men below who represented the batteries. The instructor would flash a little electric light here and there on the miniature battle-field, and the observers had to locate these flashes and tell instantly how far they were from certain targets. This taught them to be keen and quick and to judge distance accurately. Airplane observing was difficult and dangerous, and often impossible. On cloudy days the observer might be unable to fly at a safe height without being lost in the clouds. Then dependence had to be placed upon observers stationed at vantage-points near the enemy, or in kite balloons. SPOTTING BY SOUND When there is no way of seeing the work of a gun, it is still possible to correct the aim, because the shell can be made to do its own spotting. Every time a shell lands, it immediately announces the fact with a loud report. That report is really a message which the shell sends out in all directions with a speed of nearly 800 miles per hour--1,142 feet per second, to be exact. This sound-message is picked up by a recorder at several different receiving-stations. Of course it reaches the nearest station a fraction of a second before it arrives at the next nearest one. The distance of each station from the target is known by careful measurement on the map, and the time it takes for sound to travel from the target to each station is accurately worked out. If the sound arrives at each station on schedule time, the shell has scored a hit; but if it reaches one station a trifle ahead of time and lags behind at another, that is evidence that the shell has missed the target and a careful measure of the distance in time shows how far and in what direction it is wide of the mark. In this way it was possible to come within fifty or even twenty-five yards of the target. This sound-method was also used to locate an enemy battery. It was often well nigh impossible to locate a battery in any other way. With the use of smokeless powder, there is nothing to betray the position of the gun, except the flash at the instant of discharge, and even the flash was hidden by screens from the view of an airplane. Aside from this, when an airplane came near enough actually to see one of these guns, the gun would stop firing until the airplane had been driven off. But a big gun has a big voice, and it is impossible to silence it. Often a gun whose position has remained a secret for a long time was discovered because the gun itself "peached." The main trouble with sound-spotting was that there were usually so many shell and guns going off at the same time that it was difficult if not impossible to distinguish one from another. Sometimes the voice of a hidden gun was purposely drowned by the noise of a lot of other guns. After all, the main responsibility for good shooting had to fall on observers who could actually see the target, and when we think of the splendid work of our soldiers in the war, we must not forget to give full credit to the tireless men whose duty it was to watch, to the men on wings who dared the fierce battle-planes of the enemy, to the men afloat high in the sky who must leap at a moment's notice from under a blazing mass of hydrogen, and finally to the men who crept out to perilous vantage-points at risk of instant death, in order to make the fire of their batteries tell. CHAPTER X TALKING IN THE SKY In one field of war invention the United States held almost a monopoly and the progress Americans achieved was epoch-making. Before the war, an aviator when on the wing was both deaf and dumb. He could communicate with other airplanes or with the ground only by signal or, for short distances, by radiotelegraphy, but he could not even carry on conversation with a fellow passenger in the machine without a speaking-tube fitted to mouth and ears so as to cut out the terrific roar of his own engine. Now the range of his voice has been so extended that he can chat with fellow aviators miles away. This remarkable achievement and many others in the field of radio-communication hinge upon a delicate electrical device invented by Deforest in 1906 and known as the "audion." For years this instrument was used by radiotelegraphers without a real appreciation of its marvelous possibilities, and, as a matter of fact, in its earlier crude form it was not capable of performing the wonders it has achieved since it was taken over and developed by the engineers of the Bell Telephone System. THE AUDION Although the audion is familiar to all amateur radio-operators, we shall have to give a brief outline of its construction and operation for the benefit of those who have not had the opportunity to dabble in wireless telegraphy. The audion is a small glass bulb from which the air is exhausted to a high degree of vacuum. The bulb contains three elements. One is a tiny filament which is heated to incandescence by a battery, so that it emits negatively charged electrons. The filament is at one side of the bulb and at the opposite side there is a metal plate. When the plate and the filament are connected with opposite poles of a battery, there is a flow of current between them, but because only negative electrons are emitted by the filament, the current will flow only in one direction--that is, from the plate to the filament. If the audion be placed in the circuit of an alternating-current generator, it will let through only the current running in one direction. Thus it will "rectify" the current or convert alternating current into direct current. But the most important part of the audion, the part for which Deforest is responsible, is the third element, which is a grid or flat coil of platinum wire placed between the filament and the plate. This grid furnishes a very delicate control of the strength of the electric current between plate and filament. The slightest change in electric power in the grid will produce large changes of power in the current flowing through the audion. This makes it possible to magnify or amplify very feeble electric waves, and the extent to which the amplifying can be carried is virtually limitless, because a series of audions can be used, the current passing through the first being connected with the grid of the next, and so on. TALKING FROM NEW YORK TO SAN FRANCISCO There is a limit to which telephone conversations can be carried on over a wire, unless there is some way of adding fresh energy along the line. For years all sorts of experiments were tried with mechanical devices which would receive a telephone message and send it on with a fresh relay of current. But these devices distorted the message so that it was unintelligible. The range of wire telephony was greatly increased by the use of certain coils invented by Pupin, which were placed in the line at intervals; but still there was a limit to which conversation could be carried on by wire and it looked as if it would never be possible to telephone from one end of this big country of ours to the other. But the audion supplied a wonderfully efficient relay and one day we awoke to hear San Francisco calling, "Hello," to New York. Used as a relay, the improved audion made it possible to pick up very faint wireless-telegraph messages and in that way increased the range of radio outfits. Messages could be received from great distances without any extensive or elaborate aërials, and the audion could be used at the sending-station to magnify the signals transmitted and send them forth with far greater power. Having improved the audion and used it successfully for long-distance telephone conversation over wires, the telephone company began to experiment with wireless telephony. They believed that it might be possible to use radiotelephony in places where wires could not be laid. For instance, it might be possible to talk across the Atlantic. But before we go farther, just a word of explanation concerning radiotelegraphy and radiotelephony for the benefit of those who have not even an elementary knowledge of the subject. SIMPLE EXPLANATION OF RADIOTELEGRAPHY Suppose we should set up two stakes in a pond of water, at some distance from each other, and around each we set a ring-shaped cork float. If we should move one of these floats up and down on its stake, it would produce ripples in the water which would spread out in all directions and finally would reach the opposite stake and cause the float there to bob up and down in exactly the same way as did the float moved by hand. In wireless telegraphy the two stakes are represented by antennæ or aërials and the cork floats are electric charges which are sent oscillating up and down the antennæ. The oscillations produced at one aërial will set up electro-magnetic waves which will spread out in all directions in the ether until they reach a receiving-aërial, and there they will produce electric oscillations similar to the ones at the transmitting-antenna. Telegraph signals are sent by the breaking up of the oscillations at the transmitting-station into long and short trains of oscillations corresponding to the dots and dashes of ordinary wire telegraphy. In other words, while the sending-key is held down for a dash, there will be a long series of oscillations in the antenna, and for the dot a short series, and these short and long trains of waves will spread out to the receiving-aërial where they will reproduce the same series of oscillations. But only a small part of the energy will act on the receiving-aërial because the waves like those on the pond spread in all directions and grow rapidly weaker. Hence the advantage of an extremely delicate instrument like the audion to amplify the signals received. The oscillations used in wireless telegraphy these days are very rapid, usually entirely too rapid, to affect an ordinary telephone receiver, and if they did they would produce a note of such high pitch that it could not be heard. So it is customary to interrupt the oscillations, breaking them up into short trains of waves, and these successive trains produce a note of low enough pitch to be heard in the telephone receiver. Of course the interruptions are of such high frequency that in the sending of a dot-and-dash message each dot is made up of a great many of the short trains of waves. Now in radiotelephony it is not necessary to break up the oscillations, but they are allowed to run continuously at very high speed and act as carriers for other waves produced by speaking into the transmitter; that is, a single speech-wave would be made up of a large number of smaller waves. To make wireless telephony a success it was necessary to find some way of making perfectly uniform carrier-waves, and then of loading on them waves of speech. Of course, the latter are not sound-waves, because they are not waves of air, but they are electro-magnetic waves corresponding exactly to the sound-waves of air and at the receiving-end they affect the telephone receiver in the same way that it is affected by the electric waves which are sent over telephone wires. The telephone engineers found that the audion could be used to regulate the carrier-waves and also to superpose the speech-waves upon them, and at the receiving-station the audion was used to pick up these waves, no matter how feeble they might be, and amplify them so that they could be heard in a telephone receiver. TALKING WITHOUT WIRES Attempts at long-distance talking without wires were made from Montauk Point, on the tip of Long Island, to Wilmington, Delaware, and they were successful. This was in 1915. The apparatus was still further improved and then the experiment was tried of talking from the big Arlington station near Washington to Darien, on the Isthmus of Panama. This was a distance of twenty-one hundred miles, and speech was actually transmitted through space over that great distance. That having proved successful, the next attempt was to talk from Arlington to Mare Island and San Diego, on the Pacific Coast, a distance of over twenty-five hundred miles. This proved a success, too, and it was found possible even to talk as far as Honolulu. [Illustration: (C) G. V. Buck Radio Head-gear of an Airman] [Illustration: (C) G. V. Buck Carrying on Conversation by Radio with an Aviator Miles Away] The engineers now felt confident that they could talk across the Atlantic to Europe, and so in October of 1915 arrangements were made to conduct experiments between Arlington and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Although the war was at its height, and the French were straining every effort to hold back the Germans at that time, and although there were constant demands for the use of radiotelegraphy, the French showed such an appreciation of science that they were willing to lend their aid to these experiments. The Eiffel Tower could be used only for short periods of time, and there was much interference from other high-powered stations. Nevertheless, the experiment proved perfectly successful, and conversation was carried on between our capital and that of France, a distance of thirty-six hundred miles. At the same time, an operator in Honolulu, forty-five hundred miles away, heard the messages, and so the voice at Arlington carried virtually one third of the way around the globe. After that achievement, there was a lull in the wireless-telephone experiments because of the war. But there soon came an opportunity to make very practical use of all the experimental work. As soon as there seemed to be a possibility that we might be drawn into the war, the Secretary of the Navy asked for the design of apparatus that would make it possible for ships to converse with one another and with shore stations. Of course all vessels are equipped with wireless-telegraph apparatus, but there is a decided advantage in having the captain of one ship talk directly with the captain of another ship, or take his orders from headquarters, with an ordinary telephone receiver and transmitter. A special equipment was designed for battle-ships and on test it was found that ships could easily converse with one another over a distance of thirty-five miles and to shore stations from a distance of a hundred and seventy-five miles. The apparatus was so improved that nine conversations could be carried on at the same time without any interference of one by the others. [Illustration: (C) American Institute of Electrical Engineers Long Distance Radio Apparatus at the Arlington (Va.) Station, with enlarged view of the Type of Vacuum Tube used] When it became certain that we should have to enter the war, there came a call for radiotelephone apparatus for submarine-chasers, and work was started on small, compact outfits for these little vessels. RADIOTELEPHONES FOR AIRPLANES Then there was a demand for radiotelephone apparatus to be used on airplanes. This was a much more complicated matter and called for a great deal of study. The way in which problem after problem arose and was solved makes an exceedingly interesting narrative. It seemed almost absurd to think that a delicate radiotelegraph apparatus could be made to work in the terrific noise and jarring of an airplane. The first task was to make the apparatus noise-proof. A special sound-proof room was constructed in which a noise was produced exactly imitating that of the engine exhaust of an airplane engine. In this room, various helmets were tried in order to see whether they would be proof against the noise, and finally a very suitable helmet was designed, in which the telephone receiver and transmitter were installed. By summer-time the work had proceeded so far that an airplane equipped with transmitting-apparatus could send spoken messages to an operator on the ground from a distance of two miles. The antenna of the airplane consisted of a wire with a weight on the lower end, which hung down about one hundred yards from the body of the machine. But a trailing antenna was a nuisance in airplane manoeuvers, and it was also found that the helmet which was so satisfactory in the laboratory was not just the thing for actual service in an airplane. It had to fit very tightly around the ears and the mouth, and as the airplane went to high altitudes where the air-pressure was much lower than at the ground level, painful pressures were produced in the ears which were most annoying. Aside from that, in actual warfare airplanes have to operate at extreme heights, where the air is so rare that oxygen must be supplied to the aviators, and it was difficult to provide this supply of oxygen with the radio helmet tightly strapped to the head of the operator. But after considerable experiment, this difficulty was overcome and also that of the varying pressures on the ears. Another great difficulty was to obtain a steady supply of power on the airplane to operate the transmitting-apparatus. It has been the practice to supply current on airplanes for wireless-telegraph apparatus by means of a small electric generator which is revolved by a little propeller. The propeller in turn is revolved by the rush of air as it is carried along by the plane. But the speed of the airplane varies considerably. At times, it may be traveling at only forty miles per hour, and at other times as high as one hundred and sixty miles per hour, so that the little generator is subjected to great variations of speed and consequent variations of voltage. This made it impossible to produce the steady oscillations that are required in wireless telephony. After considerable experiment, a generator was produced with two windings, one of which operated through a vacuum tube, somewhat like an audion, and to resist the increase of voltage produced by the other winding. Then another trouble developed. The sparks produced by the magneto in the airplane motor set up electro-magnetic waves which seriously affected the receiving-instrument. There was no way of getting rid of the magneto, but the wires leading from it to the engine were incased in metal tubes which were grounded at frequent intervals, and in that way the trouble was overcome to a large extent. The magnetos themselves were also incased in such a way that electro-magnetic waves would not be radiated from them. Instead of using trailing wires which were liable to become entangled in the propeller, the antenna was extended from the upper plane to the tail of the machine, and later it was found that by using two short trailing antennæ one from each tip of the wings, the very best results could be obtained. Still another development was to embed the antenna wires in the wings of the plane. It was considered necessary, if the apparatus was to be practicable, to be able to use it over a distance of two thousand yards, but in experiments conducted in October, 1917, a couple of airplanes were able to talk to each other when twenty-three miles apart, and conversations were carried on with the ground from a distance of forty-five miles. The conditions under which these distances were attained were unusual, and a distance of three miles was accepted as a standard for communication between airplanes. The apparatus weighed only fifty-eight pounds and it was connected with both the pilot and the observer so that they could carry on conversations with each other and could both hear the conversation with other airplanes or the ground. As a matter of fact, airplanes with standard apparatus are able to talk clearly to a distance of five miles and even to a distance of ten miles when conditions are favorable, and they can receive messages from the ground over almost any distance. A similar apparatus was constructed for submarine-chasers with a standard range of conversation of over five miles. Apparatus was manufactured in large quantities in this country and all our submarine-chasers were equipped with it, as well as a great many of our airplanes and seaplanes, and we furnished radio-apparatus sets to our allies which proved of immense value in the war. This was particularly so in the case of submarine detection, when it was possible for a seaplane or a balloon to report its findings at once to submarine-chasers and destroyers, and to guide them in pursuit of submarines. The improved audion holds out a wonderful future for radiotelephony. For receiving, at least, no elaborate aërial will be needed, and with a small loop of wire, an audion or two, and simple tuning-apparatus any one can hear the radio gossip of the whole world. TELEGRAPHING TWELVE HUNDRED WORDS PER MINUTE Some remarkable advances were made in telegraphy also. During the war and since, messages have been sent direct from Washington to all parts of the world. In the telegraph room operators are connected by wire with the different radio stations along the coast and they can control the radio transmitters, sending their messages without any repeating at the radio stations. Long messages are copied off on a machine something like a type-writer, which, however, does not make type impressions, but cuts perforations in a long sheet of paper. The paper is then run through a transmitter at a high speed and the message is sent out at a rate of as much as twelve hundred words a minute. At the receiving-station, the message is received photographically on a strip of paper. The receiving-instrument has a fine quartz thread in it, which carries a tiny mirror. A beam of light is reflected from the mirror upon the strip of sensitized paper. The radio waves twist the quartz thread ever so slightly, which makes the beam of light play back and forth, but of course the motion is greatly magnified. In this way a perfect record is made of the message in dots and dashes, which are translated into the corresponding letters of the alphabet. DETECTING RADIO SPIES There is another radio invention which we contributed during the war, that proved of utmost service in thwarting German spies and which is going to prove equally valuable in time of peace. Although a war invention, its peacetime service will be to save lives. It is a very simple matter to rig up a wireless-telegraph system that will send messages to a considerable distance, and simpler still to rig up a receiving-set. European governments have always discouraged amateur radiotelegraphy, but in this country restrictions used to be so slight that almost any one could set up and use a radio set, both for receiving and for transmitting. When we entered the war we were glad that amateurs had been encouraged to play with wireless, because we had hundreds of good radio operators ready to work the sets which the army and the navy needed. But this was a disadvantage, too. Many operators were either Germans or pro-Germans and were only too willing to use their radio experience in the interest of our enemies. It was a simple matter to obtain the necessary apparatus, because there was plenty of it to be had everywhere. They could send orders to fellow workers and receive messages from them, or they could listen to dispatches sent out by the government and glean information of great military and naval importance. The apparatus could easily be concealed: a wire hung inside a chimney, a water-pipe, even a brass bedstead could be used for the receiving-aërial. It was highly important that these concealed stations be located, but how were they to be discovered? THE WIRELESS COMPASS This problem was solved very nicely. The audion had made it possible to receive radio signals on a very small aërial. In place of the ordinary stationary aërial a frame five feet square was set up so that it could be turned to any point of the compass. A few turns of copper-bronze wire were wound round it. This was called the "wireless compass." It was set up on the roof of the radio station and concealed within a cupola. The shaft on which it was mounted extended down into the operating-room and carried a wheel by which it could be turned. On the shaft was a circular band of aluminum engraved with the 360 degrees of the circle, and a couple of fixed pointers indicated true north and south. Now when a signal was received by the aërial, if it struck the frame edgewise the radio waves would reach one side before they would the other. Taking a single wave, as shown by the drawing, Fig. 11, we see that while the crest of the wave is sweeping over one side of the frame, the trough of the wave is passing the other side. Two currents are set up in the radio compass, one in the wires at the near side of the compass, and another in the wires at the far side of the compass. As these currents are of the same direction, they oppose each other and tend to kill each other off, but one of the currents is stronger than the other because the crest of the wave is sweeping over that side, while the trough of the wave is passing over the other. The length of the wave may be anything, but always one side will be stronger than the other, and a current equal in strength to the difference between the two currents goes down into the operating-room and affects the receiver. Now when the compass is set at right angles to the oncoming wave, both sides are affected simultaneously and with the same strength, so that they kill each other off completely, and no current goes down to the receiver. Thus the strength of the signal received can be varied from a maximum, when the compass is parallel to the oncoming waves, to zero, when it is at right angles to them. [Illustration: Courtesy of the "Scientific American" FIG. 11. The radio compass turned parallel to an oncoming electro-magnetic wave] To find out where a sending-station is, the compass is turned until the loudest sound is heard in the receiver and then the compass dial shows from what direction the signals are coming. At the same time, another line on the signals will be found by a second station with another compass. These directions are traced on a map; and where they meet, the sending-station must be located. With this apparatus it was possible to locate the direction of the station within a degree. After the station had been located as closely as possible in this way, a motor-truck was sent out in which there was a concealed radio compass. The truck would patrol the region located by the fixed compasses, and with it the position of the concealed station could be determined with perfect accuracy. The building would be raided and its occupants jailed and the radio equipment confiscated. Even receiving-sets were discovered with the portable compass, but to find them was a far more difficult task. For the receiving of messages from distant points without a conspicuous aërial an audion would have to be used and this would set up feeble oscillations which could be picked up under favorable conditions by the portable compass. PILOTING SHIPS INTO PORT And now for the peace-time application of all this. If the compass could be used to find those who tried to hide, why could it not also be used to find those who wished to be found? Every now and then a ship runs upon the rocks because it has lost its bearings in the fog. But there will be no excuse for such accidents now. A number of radio-compass stations have been located around the entrance and approach to New York Harbor. Similar stations have been, or soon will be, established at other ports. As soon as a ship arrives within fifty or a hundred miles of port she is required to call for her bearings. The operator of the control station instructs the ship to send her call letters for thirty seconds, and at the same time notifies each compass station to get a bearing on the ship. This each does, reporting back to the control station. The bearings are plotted on a chart and inside of two minutes from the time the ship gives her call letters, her bearing is flashed to her by radio from the control station. [Illustration: Courtesy of the "Scientific American" FIG. 12. Approaches to New York Harbor showing location of three radio compass stations and how position of a ship sending signals from A may be determined] The chart on which the plotting is done is covered with a sheet of glass. Holes are pierced through the glass at the location of each compass station. See Fig. 12. On the chart, around each station, there is a dial marked off in the 360 degrees of the circle. A thread passes through the chart and the hole in the glass at each station. These threads are attached to weights under the chart. When a compass station reports a bearing, the thread of that station is pulled out and extended across the corresponding degree on the dial. The same is done as each station reports and where the threads cross, the ship must be located. Not only can the direction-finder be used to pilot a ship into a harbor, but it will also serve to prevent collisions at sea, because a ship equipped with a radio compass can tell whether another ship is coming directly toward her. And so as one of the happy outcomes of the dreadful war, we have an apparatus that will rob sea-fogs of their terrors to navigation. CHAPTER XI WARRIORS OF THE PAINT-BRUSH When the great European war broke out, it was very evident that the Entente Allies would have to exercise every resource to beat the foe which had been preparing for years to conquer the world. But who ever imagined that geologists would be called in to choose the best places for boring mines under the enemy: that meteorologists would be summoned to forecast the weather and determine the best time to launch an offensive; that psycologists would be employed to pick out the men with the best nerves to man the machine-guns and pilot the battle-planes? Certainly no one guessed that artists and the makers of stage scenery would play an important part in the conflict. But the airplane filled the sky with eyes that at first made it impossible for an army to conceal its plans from the enemy. And then there were eyes that swam in the sea--cruel eyes that belonged to deadly submarine monsters, eyes that could see without being seen, eyes that could pop up out of the water at unexpected moments, eyes that directed deadly missiles at inoffensive merchantmen. They were cowardly eyes, too, which gave the ship no opportunity to strike back at the unseen enemy. A vessel's only safety lay in the chance that out in the broad reaches of the ocean it might pass beyond the range of those lurking eyes. It was a game of hide-and-seek in which the pursuer and not the pursued was hidden. Something had to be done to conceal the pursued as well, but in the open sea there was nothing to hide behind. HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT There is such a thing as hiding in plain sight. You can look right at a tree-toad without seeing him, because his colors blend perfectly with the tree to which he is clinging. You can watch a green leaf curl up and shrivel without realizing that the curled edge is really a caterpillar, cunningly veined and colored to look just like a dying leaf; and out in the woods a speckled bird or striped animal will escape observation just because it matches the spotted light that comes through the underbrush. Nature is constantly protecting its helpless animals with colored coats that blend with the surroundings. Long ago clumsy attempts at concealment were made when war-vessels were given a coat of dark-gray paint which was supposed to make them invisible at a distance. Actually the paint made them more conspicuous; but, then, concealment did not count for very much before the present war. It was the eyes of the submarines that brought a hurry call for the artists, and up to them was put the problem of hiding ships in plain sight. A new name was coined for these warriors of the paint-brush: _camoufleurs_ they were called, and their work was known as _camouflage_. MATCHING THE SKY Of course, no paint will make a ship absolutely invisible at a short distance, but a large vessel may be made to disappear completely from view at a distance of six or seven miles if it is properly painted. To be invisible, a ship must reflect as much light and the same shade of light as do its surroundings. If it is seen against the background of the sea, it must be of a bluish or a greenish tint, but a submarine lies so low in the water that any object seen at a distance is silhouetted against the sky, and so the ship must have a coat of paint that will reflect the same colors as does the sky. Now, the sky may be of almost any color of the rainbow, depending upon the position of the sun and the amount of vapor or dust in the air. Fortunately in the North Sea and the waters about the British Isles, where most of the submarine attacks took place, the weather is hazy most of the time, and the ship had to be painted of such a color that it would reflect the same light as that reflected by a hazy sky. With a background of haze and more or less haze between the ship and the periscope of the U-boat, it was not a very difficult matter to paint a ship so that it would be invisible six or seven miles away. One shade of gray was used to conceal a ship in the North Sea and an entirely different shade was used for the brighter skies of the Mediterranean. [Illustration: (C) International Film A Giant Gun Concealed Among Trees Behind the French Lines] In this way, the artists made it possible for ships to sail in safety much nearer the pursuer who was trying to find them, and by just so much they reduced his powers of destruction. But still the odds were too heavy against the merchantman. Something must be done for him when he found himself within the seven-mile danger-zone. Here again the artists came to the rescue. [Illustration: (C) Committee on Public Information Observing the Enemy from a Papier-Mâché Replica of a Dead Horse] Before merchant ships were armed, a submarine would not waste a torpedo on them, but would pound them into submission with shell. Even after ships were provided with guns, submarines mounted heavier guns and unless a ship was speedy enough to show a clean pair of heels, the pursuing U-boat would stand off out of range of the ship's guns and pour a deadly fire into it. But the ships, too, mounted larger guns and the submarines had to fall back upon their torpedoes. GETTING THE RANGE FOR THE TORPEDO In order to fire its torpedo with any certainty, the U-boat had to get within a thousand yards of its victim. A torpedo travels at from thirty to forty miles per hour. It takes time for it to reach its target and a target which is moving at, say, fifteen knots, will travel five hundred yards while a thirty-knot torpedo is making one hundred yards. And so before the U-boat commander could discharge his torpedo, he had to know how fast the ship was traveling and how far away it was from him. He could not come to the surface and make deliberate observations, but had to stay under cover, not daring even to keep his eye out of water, for fear that the long wake of foam trailing behind the periscope would give him away. All he could do, then, was to throw his periscope up for a momentary glimpse and make his calculations very quickly; then he could move to the position he figured that he should occupy and shoot up his periscope for another glimpse to check up his calculations. On the glass of this periscope, there were a number of graduations running vertically and horizontally. If he knew his victim and happened to know the height of its smoke-stacks or the length of the boat, he noted how many graduations they covered, and then by a set formula he could tell how far he was from the boat. At the same time he had to work out its rate of travel and note carefully the course it was holding before he could figure where his torpedo must be aimed. There was always more or less uncertainty about such observations, because they had to be taken hastily, and the camoufleurs were not slow to take advantage of this weakness. They increased the enemy's confusion by painting high bow-waves which made the ship look as if it were traveling at high speed. They painted the bow to look like the stern, and the stern to look like the bow, and the stacks were painted so that they appeared to slant in the opposite direction, so that it would look as if the vessel were headed the other way. U-boats came to have a very wholesome respect for destroyers and would seldom attack a ship if one of these fast fighting-craft was about, and so destroyers were painted on the sides of ships as scarecrows to frighten off the enemy. MAKING STRAIGHT LINES LOOK CROOKED We say that "seeing is believing," but it is not very hard to deceive the eye. The lines in Fig. 13 look absolutely parallel, and they are; but cross-hatch the spaces between them, with the hatching reversed in alternate spaces, as in Fig. 14, and they no longer look straight. Take the letters on the left, Fig. 15. They look all higgledy-piggledy, but they are really straight and parallel, as one can prove by laying a straight-edge against them, or by drawing a straight line through each letter, as shown at the right, Fig. 16. Such illusions were used on ships. Stripes were painted on the hull that tapered slightly, from bow to stern, so that the vessel appeared to be headed off at an angle, when it was really broadside to the watcher at the other end of the periscope. [Illustration: FIG. 13. Parallel lines that look straight] [Illustration: FIG. 14. Parallel lines that do not look straight] [Illustration: Courtesy of the Submarine Defense Association FIG. 15. Letters that look all higgledy-piggledy, but are really straight] There are color illusions, too, that were tried. If you draw a red chalk-mark and a blue one on a perfectly clean blackboard, the red line will seem to stand out and the blue one to sink into the black surface of the board, because your eye has to focus differently for the two colors, and a very dazzling effect can be had with alternating squares of blue and red. Other colors give even more dazzling effects, and some of them, when viewed at a distance, will blend into the very shade of gray that will make a boat invisible at six miles. When U-boat commanders took observations on a ship painted with a "dazzle" camouflage, they saw a shimmering image which it was hard for them to measure on the fine graduations of their periscopes. Some ships were painted with heavy blotches of black and white, and the enemy making a hasty observation would be apt to focus his attention on the dark masses and overlook the white parts. So he was likely to make a mistake in estimating the height of the smoke-stack or in measuring the apparent length of a vessel. A JOKE ON THE PHOTOGRAPHER Early in the submarine campaign one of our boats was given a coat of camouflage, and when the vessel sailed from its pier in the North River, New York, the owners sent a photographer two or three piers down the river to photograph the ship as she went by. He took the picture, but when the negative was developed, much to his astonishment he found that the boat was not all on the plate. In the finder of his camera, he had mistaken a heavy band of black paint for the stern of the ship, quite overlooking the real stern, which was painted a grayish white. The artist had fooled the photographer and at a distance of not more than two or three hundred yards! SEEING BEYOND THE HORIZON The periscope of a submarine that is running awash can be raised about fifteen feet above the water, which means that the horizon as viewed from that elevation is about six miles away, and if you draw a circle with a six-mile radius on the map of the Atlantic, you will find that it is a mere speck in the ocean; but a U-boat commander could see objects that lay far beyond his horizon because he was searching for objects which towered many feet above the water. The smoke-stacks of some vessels rise a hundred feet above the water-line, and the masts reach up to much greater altitudes. Aside from this, in the early days of the war steamers burned soft coal and their funnels belched forth huge columns of smoke which was visible from twenty to thirty miles away. When this was realized, efforts were made to cut down the superstructure of a ship as much as possible. Some vessels had their stacks cut down almost to the deck-line, and air-pumps were installed to furnish the draft necessary to keep their furnaces going. They had no masts except for slender iron pipes which could be folded down against the deck and could be erected at a moment's notice, to carry the aërials of the wireless system. Over the ship from stem to stern was stretched, a cable, familiarly known as a "clothes-line," upon which were laid strips of canvas that completely covered the superstructure of the ship. These boats lay so low that they could not be seen at any great distance, and it was difficult for the U-boats to find them. They were slow boats; too slow to run away from a modern submarine, but because of their lowly structure, they managed to elude the German U-boats. When they were seen, the U-boat commanders were afraid of them. They were suspicious of anything that looked out of the ordinary, and preferred to let the "clothes-line ships" go. [Illustration: (C) Committee on Public Information From Western Newspaper Union Camouflaged Headquarters of the American 26th Division in France] THE BRITISH MYSTERY SHIPS The Germans had some very unhealthy experiences with the "Q-boats" or "mystery ships" of the British. These were vessels rigged up much like ordinary tramp steamers, but they were loaded with wood, so that they would not sink, and their hatches were arranged to fall open at the touch of a button, exposing powerful guns. They also were equipped with torpedo-tubes, so that they could give the U-boat a dose of its own medicine. These ships would travel along the lanes frequented by submarines, and invite attack. They would limp along as if they had been injured by a storm or a U-boat attack, and looked like easy prey. When a submarine did attack them, they would send out frantic calls for help, and they had so-called "panic" parties which took to the boats. Meantime, a picked crew remained aboard, carefully concealed from view, and the captain kept his eye upon the enemy through a periscope disguised as a small ventilator, waiting for the U-boat to come within range of certain destruction. Sometimes the panic party would lure the submarine into a favorable position by rowing under the stern as if to hide around the other side of the ship. At the proper moment, up would go the white ensign--the British man-of-war flag--the batteries would be unmasked, and a hail of shell would break loose over the Hun. Many a German submarine was accounted for by such traps. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood A Camouflaged Ship in the Hudson River on Victory Day] Submarines themselves used all sorts of camouflage. They were frequently equipped with sails which they would raise to disguise themselves as peaceful sloops, and in this way they were able to steal up on a victim without discovery. Sometimes they would seize a ship and hide behind it in order to get near their prey. CAMOUFLAGE ON LAND But the call for the wielders of the paintbrush came not only from the sea. Their services were needed fully as much on land, and the making of land camouflage was far more interesting because it was more varied and more successful. Besides, it called for more than mere paint; all sorts of tricks with canvas, grass, and branches were used. Of course, the soldiers were garbed in dust-colored clothing and shiny armor was discarded. The helmets they wore were covered with a material that cast no gleam of light. In every respect, they tried to make themselves of the same shade as their surroundings. Like the Indians, they painted their faces. This was done when they made their raids at night. They painted their faces black so that they would not show the faintest reflection of light. A PAPER HORSE The most interesting camouflage work was done for the benefit of snipers or for observers at listening-posts close to the enemy trenches. It was very important to spy on the enemy and discover his plans, and so men were sent out as near his lines as possible, to listen to the conversation and to note any signs of unusual activity which would be likely to precede a raid. These men were supplied with telephone wires which they dragged over No Man's Land, and by which they could communicate their discoveries to headquarters. Some very ingenious listening-posts were established. In one case a papier-mâché duplicate of a dead horse was made, which was an exact facsimile of an animal that had been shot and lay between the two lines. One night, the carcass of the horse was removed and the papier-mâché replica took its place. In the latter a man was stationed with telephone connection back to his own lines. Here he had an excellent chance to watch the enemy. On another occasion a standing tree, whose branches had been shot away, was carefully photographed and an exact copy of it made, but with a chamber inside in which an observer could be concealed. One night while the noise of the workmen was drowned by heavy cannonading, this tree was removed and its facsimile was set up instead, and it remained for many a day before the enemy discovered that it was a fake tree-trunk. It provided a tall observation post from which an observer could direct the fire of his own artillery. FOOLING THE WATCHERS IN THE SKY In the early stages of the war, it seemed impossible to hide anything from the Germans. They had eyes everywhere and were able to anticipate everything the Allies did. But the spies that infested the sky were the worst handicap. Even when the Allies gained control of the air, the control was more or less nominal because every now and then an enemy observer would slip over or under the patrolling aëroplanes and make photographs of the Allies' lines. The photographs were carefully compared with others previously taken, that the slightest change in detail might be discovered. Airplane observers not only would be ready to drop bombs on any suspicious object or upon masses of troops moving along the roads, but would telephone back to their artillery to direct its fire upon these targets. Of course, the enemy knew where the roads were located and a careful watch was kept of them. The French did not try to hide the roads, but they concealed the traffic on the roads by hanging rows of curtains over them. As these curtains hung vertically and were spaced apart, one would suppose that they would furnish little concealment, but they prevented an observer in an aëroplane from looking down the length of a road. All the road he could see was that which lay directly under his machine, because there he could look between the curtains; if he looked obliquely at the road, the curtains would appear to overlap one another and would conceal operations going on under them. In one case, the Germans completely covered a sunken road with canvas painted to represent a road surface. Under this canvas canopy, troops were moved to an important strategic point without the slightest indication of such a movement. HIDING BIG GUNS Nature's tricks of camouflage were freely used in the hiding of the implements of war on land. Our big guns were concealed by being painted with leopard spots and tiger stripes, the color and nature of the camouflage depending upon the station they were to occupy. In many cases, they were covered with branches of trees or with rope netting overspread with leaves. So careful was the observation of the air scouts that even the grass scorched by the fire of the gun had to be covered with green canvas to prevent betrayal of the position of the gun. ROADS THAT LED NOWHERE In the making of an emplacement for a gun it was of the utmost importance that no fresh upturned earth be disclosed to the aërial observers. Even foot-paths leading to it had to be concealed. Plans were carefully made to cover up all traces of the work before the work was begun. Where it was impossible to conceal the paths, they were purposely made to lead well beyond the point where the emplacement was building, and, still further to deceive the enemy, a show of work was sometimes undertaken at the end of the path. Wherever the sod had to be upturned, it was covered over with green canvas. The earth that was removed had to be concealed somewhere and the best place of concealment was found to be some old shell-hole which would hold a great deal of earth without any evidence that would be apparent to an observer in an aëroplane. If no shell-hole were handy, the excavated material had to be hauled for miles before a safe dumping-ground could be found. As far as possible everything was sunk below the earth level. Big pits were dug in which the mortars were placed, or if a shell-hole were empty, this was used instead. SHADOWLESS BUILDINGS Any projection above the ground was apt to cast a shadow which would show up on the observer's photographs. This was a difficulty that was experienced in building the hangars for airplanes. The roofs of these sheds were painted green so as to match the sod around them, but as they projected above their surroundings, they cast shadows which made them clearly evident to the enemy. This was overcome by the building of shadowless hangars; that is, hangars with roofs that extended all the way to the ground at such an angle that they would cause no shadow except when the sun was low. In some cases, aëroplanes were housed in underground hangars, the approach to which was concealed by a canvas covering. As for the machines themselves, they scorned the use of camouflage. Paint was little protection to them. Some attempt was made to use transparent wings of _cellon_, a material similar to celluloid, but this did not prove a success. THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EYE Although camoufleurs made perfect imitations of natural objects and surroundings, they were greatly concerned to find that the flying observers could see through their disguises. To the naked eye the landscape would not show the slightest trace of any suspicions object, but by the use of a color-screen to cut out certain rays of light, a big difference would be shown between the real colors of nature and the artist's copies of them. For instance, if a roof painted to look like green grass were viewed through a red color-screen, it would look brown; while the real grass, which apparently was of exactly the same shade as the roof, would look red. It had not been realized by the artists who had never studied the composition of light, that there is a great deal of red in the green light reflected by grass, and that if they were to duplicate this shade of green, they must put a certain amount of red paint in their imitation grass roofs. Air scouts did not depend upon their eyes alone, but used cameras so that they could study their photographs at their leisure and by fitting the cameras with different color-screens, they could analyze the camouflage and undo the patient work of the artist. A CALL FOR THE PHYSICIST To meet this situation, another man was summoned to help--the physicist, who looks upon color merely as waves of ether; who can pick a ray of light to pieces just as a chemist can analyze a lump of sugar. Under his expert guidance, colors of nature were imitated so that they would defy detection. Aside from this, the physicist helped to solve the tricks of the enemy's camoufleurs. But the physicist had barely rolled up his sleeves and got into the fray when the armistice was signed which put an end to the shams as well as to the realities of the great war. While the work of camouflage was not completed, we owe an inestimable debt to the men who knew how to fake scenery and to their learned associates who count the wave lengths of light, and although their trade was a trade of deception and shams, there was no sham about the service they rendered. MAKING SHIPS VISIBLE While in war safety lies in invisibility, in peace the reverse is true. Now that the war is over, it may seem that the work of the camoufleurs can find no useful application; but it was impossible to learn how to make objects invisible without also learning how to make them conspicuously visible. As a consequence, we know now how to paint a ship so that it will show up more clearly in foggy weather, thereby reducing the danger of collision. We know, too, how to paint light-ships, buoys, etc., so that they will be much more conspicuous and better guides to mariners, and how to color railroad signals and road signs so that they will be more easily seen by locomotive engineers and automobile drivers. CHAPTER XII SUBMARINES It was an American invention that dragged America into the war--an American invention in the hands of barbarians and put to unspeakably barbarous use. After seeing how the Huns used the submarine we are not so sure that we can take much pride in its invention. But if any blame attaches to us for developing the submarine, we made amends by the way in which we fought the German U-boat and put an end to German frightfulness on the sea. Of course, the credit for Germany's defeat is not for a moment claimed by Americans alone, but it must be admitted that we played an important part in overcoming the menace of the U-boat. There is no question that the submarine was an American invention. To be sure, we can look into ancient books and find suggestions for navigating under the surface of the sea, but the first man who did actually build a successful submarine was David Bushnell, back in the Revolutionary War. After him came Robert Fulton, who carried the invention farther. He built and operated a submarine for the French Government, and, in more recent years, the submarine became a practical vessel of war in the hands of John P. Holland and Simon Lake, both Americans. However, we are not interested, just now, in the history of the submarine, but rather in the development of this craft during the recent war. With Great Britain as an enemy, Germany knew that she was hopelessly outclassed on the sea; but while "Britannia ruled the waves," she did not rule the depths of the sea, and so Germany decided to claim this realm for her own. Little attention did she pay to surface vessels. Except in the Dogger Bank engagement and the Battle of Jutland, the German first-class vessels did not venture out upon the open sea, and even the lighter craft merely made occasional raids under cover of fog or darkness, only to cut and run as soon as the British vessels appeared. The submarine boat, or _unterseeboot_ as the Germans called it, was virtually the only boat that dared go out into the high seas; consequently, the Germans specialized upon that type of craft and under their close attention it grew into a highly perfected war-vessel. But the Germans were not the only ones to develop the submarine, as we shall see. CONSTRUCTION OF THE U-BOATS When the great war broke out, the German U-boat was a comparatively small craft, less than 150 feet long, with its main hull only 12 feet in diameter. It could make a speed of 12 knots on the surface and only 9 when submerged. But as the war progressed, it grew larger and larger, until it attained a length of over 300 feet and its speed was increased to 12 knots when submerged and 18 knots on the surface. Figs. 16 to 18 show the construction of one of the early U-boats. The later boats were built after the same general plan, but on a bigger scale. [Illustration: Courtesy of the "Scientific American" FIG. 16. Sectional view of one of the earlier German U-Boats] [Illustration: Courtesy of the "Scientific American" FIG. 17. Sectional plan view of a German U-Boat of the type used at the beginning of the war] It is not always safe to judge a thing by its name; to do so is apt to lead to sad mistakes. One would naturally suppose, from its name, that a submarine is a boat that lives under water, like a fish. But it is not a fish; it is an air-breathing animal that prefers to stay on the surface, only occasionally diving under to hide from danger or to steal upon its prey. During the war, the German U-boats did not average three hours per day under the surface! Because they were intended to run on the surface they had to be built in the form of a surface vessel, so as to throw off the waves and keep from rolling and pitching too much in a seaway. But they also had to be built to withstand the crushing weight of deep water, and as a cylinder is much stronger than a structure of ordinary boat shape, the main hull was made circular in section and of heavy plating, strongly framed, while around this was an outer hull of boat shape, as shown in Fig. 18. PUTTING HOLES IN A TANK TO KEEP IT FULL The space between the inner and outer hulls was used for water ballast and for reservoirs of oil to drive the engines; and, strange as it may seem, the oil-tanks were always kept full by means of holes in the bottom of them. As the oil was consumed by the engines, water would flow into the reservoir to take its place, and the oil, being lighter than water, would float on top. The false hull was of light metal, because as it was open to the sea, the pressure on the inside was always the same as that on the outside. The reservoirs of oil and the water-ballast tanks protected the inner hull of the vessel from accidental damage and from hostile shell and bombs. There were water-ballast tanks inside the inner hull as well, as shown in the cross-sectional view, Fig. 18. The water in the ballast-tanks was blown out by compressed air to lighten the U-boat and the boat was kept on an even keel by the blowing out or the letting in of water in the forward and after tanks. [Illustration: Courtesy of the "Scientific American" FIG. 18. Transverse section through conning-tower, showing the interior (circular) pressure-resisting hull and the lighter exterior hull, which is open to the sea] A heavy lead keel was attached to the bottom of the boat, to keep it from rolling too much. In case of accident, if there were no other way of bringing the boat to the surface, this keel could be cast loose. At the forward end, where the torpedo-tubes were located, there was a torpedo-trimming tank. Torpedoes are heavy missiles and every time one was discharged the boat was lightened, and the balance of the submarine was upset. To make up for the loss of weight, water had to be let into the torpedo-trimming tank. A submarine cannot float under-water without swimming; in other words, it must keep its propellers going to avoid either sinking to the bottom of the sea or bobbing up to the surface. To be sure, it can make itself heavier or lighter by letting water into or blowing water out of its ballast-tanks, but it is impossible to regulate the water ballast so delicately that the submarine will float submerged; and should the boat sink to a depth of two hundred feet or so, the weight of water above it would be sufficient to crush the hull, so it is a case of sink or swim. Usually enough ballast is taken on to make the submarine only a little lighter than the water it displaces; and then to remain under, the vessel must keep moving, with its horizontal rudders tilted to hold it down. The horizontal rudders or hydroplanes of the U-boat are shown in Fig. 17, both at the bow and at the stern. The main hull of the vessel was literally filled with machinery. In the after part of the boat were the Diesel oil-engines with which the U-boat was propelled when on the surface. There were two engines, each driving a propeller-shaft. It was impossible to use the engines when the vessel was submerged, not because of the gases they produced--these could easily have been carried out of the boat--but because every internal-combustion engine consumes enormous quantities of air. In a few minutes the engines would devour all the air in the hull of the submarine and would then die of suffocation. And so the engines were used only when the submarine was running awash or on the surface, and then the air consumed by them would rush down the hatchway like a hurricane to supply their mighty lungs. ENGINES THAT BURN HEAVY OIL The oil-engines were strictly a German invention. In the earlier days of the submarine gasolene-engines were used, but despite every precaution, gasolene vapors occasionally would leak out of the reservoirs and accumulate in pockets or along the floors of the hull, and it needed but a spark to produce an explosion that would blow up the submarine. But Rudolph Diesel, a German, invented an engine which would burn heavy oils. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood Complex Mass of Wheels and Dials inside a German Submarine] In the Diesel engine there are no spark-plugs and no magneto: the engine fires itself without electrical help. Air is let into the cylinder at ordinary atmospheric pressure, or fifteen pounds per square inch. But it is compressed by the upward stroke of the piston to about five hundred pounds per square inch. When air is compressed it develops heat and the sudden high compression to over thirty times its normal pressure raises the temperature to something like 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Just as this temperature is reached, a jet of oil is blown into the cylinder by air under still higher pressure. Immediately the spray of oil bursts into flame and the hot gases of combustion drive the piston down. Because of the intense heat almost any oil, from light gasolene to heavy, almost tarlike oils, can be used. As heavy oils do not throw off any explosive vapors unless they are heated, they make a very safe fuel for submarines. [Illustration: Photograph by International Film Service Surrendered German Submarines, showing the Net Cutters at the Bow] To drive the U-boat when no air was to be had for the engines, electric motors were used. There was one on each propeller-shaft and the shafts could be disconnected from the oil-engines when the motors were driving. The motors got their power from storage batteries in the stern of the submarine and under the floors forward. The motors when coupled to and driven by the engines generated current which was stored in the storage batteries. The submarine could not run on indefinitely underwater. When its batteries were exhausted it would have to come to the surface and run its engines to store up a fresh charge of electricity. The electric motors gave the boat a speed of about nine knots. In addition to the main engines and motors, there was a mass of auxiliary machinery. There were pumps for compressing air to blow the ballast-tanks and to discharge the torpedoes. There was a special mechanism for operating the rudder and hydroplanes, and all sorts of valves, indicators, speaking-tubes, signal lines, etc. The tiny hull was simply crammed with mechanism of all kinds and particularly in the early boats there was little room for the accommodation of the officers and crew. The officers' quarters were located amidships, and forward there were the folding berths of the crews. In the later boats more space was given the men. The large U-boats carried a crew of forty and as the hazards of submarine warfare increased, more attention had to be paid to the men. FAT MEN NOT WANTED Oddly enough, small, slender men were preferred for submarine duty, not because of lack of space, but because it was apt to be very cold in a submarine, particularly in the winter-time. The water cooled off the boat when the submarine was traveling submerged, and the motors gave off little heat; while when the vessel was running on the surface the rush of wind to supply the engines kept the thermometer low. This meant that the men had to pile on much clothing to keep warm, which made them very bulky. The hatchway was none too large and a fat man, were he bundled up with enough clothing to keep him warm, would have a hard time squeezing through. In the center of the vessel was the main hatchway, leading up to the conning-tower, which was large enough to hold from three to five men. This was the navigating-room when the vessel was running submerged, and above it was the navigating-bridge, used when the submarine was on the surface. In the conning-tower there was a gyroscopic compass; a magnetic compass would not work at all inside the steel hull of the U-boat. And here were the periscopes or eyes of the submarine, rising from fifteen to twenty feet above the roof of the conning-tower. There were usually two periscopes. They could be turned around to give the man at the wheel a view in any direction and they were used sometimes even when the vessel was running on the surface, to give a longer range of vision. THE BLINDNESS OF THE SUBMARINE Now, a submarine cannot see anything underwater. The commander cannot even see the bow of his boat from the conning-tower, and until he gets near enough to the surface to poke his periscope out of water he is absolutely blind and must feel his way about with compass and depth-gage. It was always an anxious moment for the U-boat commander, when he was coming up, until his periscope broke out of the water and he could get his bearings; and even that was attended with danger, for his periscope might be seen. Of course a periscope is a very insignificant object on the broad sea, but when a submarine is moving its periscope is followed by a wake which is very conspicuous, and so the U-boat ran a chance of being discovered and destroyed before it could dive again to a safe depth. Later, telescoping periscopes were used, which could be raised by means of a hand-lever. The submarine would run along just under the surface and every now and then it would suddenly raise its periscope for an observation and drop it down again under cover if there was danger nigh. This was much simpler and quicker than having a six-or eight-hundred-ton boat come up to the surface and dive to safety. He might even collide with a vessel floating on the surface, but to lessen this danger submarines were furnished with ears or big microphone diaphragms at each side of the hull by which a ship could be located by the noise of its propellers. In the bow were the torpedo-tubes and the magazine of torpedoes. At first there were only two torpedo-tubes, but later the number was increased to four. These were kept constantly loaded, so that the projectiles could be launched in rapid succession, if necessary, without a pause for the insertion of a fresh torpedo. In some submarines tubes were provided in the stern also so that the boat could discharge a torpedo at its enemy while running away from him. Each tube was closed at the outer end by a cap and at the inside end by a breech-block. The tube was blown clear of water by means of compressed air, and of course the outer cap was closed when the breech was open to let in a torpedo. Then the breech was closed, the cap opened, and the torpedo was discharged from the tube by a blast of air. THE TORPEDO A torpedo is really a motor-boat, a wonderfully constructed boat, fitted with an engine of its own that is driven by compressed air and which drives the torpedo through the water at about forty miles per hour. The motor-boat is shaped like a cigar and that used by the Germans was about fifteen feet long and fourteen inches in diameter. We used much larger torpedoes, some of them being twenty-two feet long. Ours have a large compressed-air reservoir and will travel for miles; but the Germans used their torpedoes at short ranges of a thousand yards and under, cutting down the air-reservoir as much as possible and loading the torpedo with an extra large explosive charge. We found in the Diesel engine that when air is highly compressed it becomes very hot. When compressed air is expanded, the reverse takes place, the air becomes very cold. The air that drives the motor of the torpedo grows so cold that were no precautions taken it would freeze any moisture that might be present and would choke up the engine with the frost. And so an alcohol flame is used to heat the air. The air-motor is started automatically by release of a trigger as the torpedo is blown out of the torpedo-tube. By means of gearing, the motor drives two propellers. These run in opposite directions, so as to balance each other and prevent any tendency for the torpedo to swerve from its course. The torpedo is steered by a rudder which is controlled by a gyroscope, and it is kept at the proper depth under water by diving-rudders which are controlled by a very sensitive valve worked by the weight of the water above it. The deeper the water, the greater the weight or pressure; and the valve is so arranged that, should the torpedo run too far under, the pressure will cause the diving-rudders to tilt until the torpedo comes up again; then if the torpedo rises too high, the valve will feel the reduction of pressure and turn the rudders in the other direction. The business end of a torpedo is a "war-head" packed with about four hundred pounds of TNT. At the nose of the torpedo is a firing-pin, with which the war-head is exploded. Ordinarily, the firing-pin does not project from the torpedo, but there is a little propeller at the forward end which is turned by the rush of water as the torpedo is driven on its course. This draws out the firing-pin and gets everything ready for the TNT to explode as soon as the firing-pin is struck. But the firing-pin is not the only means of exploding the torpedo. Inside there is a very delicate mechanism that will set off the charge at the least provocation. In one type of torpedo a steel ball is provided which rests in a shallow depression and the slightest shock, the sudden stopping or even a sudden swerve of the torpedo, would dislodge the ball and set off the charge. Hence various schemes, proposed by inventors, for deflecting a torpedo without touching the firing-pin, would have been of no value at all. GUNS ON SUBMARINES As torpedoes are expensive things, the U-boats were supplied with other means of destroying their victims. The Germans sprang a surprise by mounting guns on the decks of their submarines. At first these were arranged to be lowered into a hatch when the boat was running submerged, but later they were permanently mounted on the decks so that they would be ready for instant use. They were heavily coated with grease and the bore was swabbed out immediately when the boat came to the surface, so that there was no danger of serious rust and corrosion. The 3-inch gun of the early months of the war soon gave way to heavier pieces and the latest U-boats were supplied with guns of almost 6-inch caliber and there was a gun on the after deck as well as forward. The U-boats depended upon radiotelegraphy to get their orders and although they did not have a very wide sending-range, they could receive messages from the powerful German station near Berlin. The masts which carried the radio aërials could be folded down into pockets in the deck. From stem to stern over the entire boat a cable was stretched which was intended to permit the U-boat to slide under nets protecting harbor entrances, and in later boats there were keen-toothed knives at the bow which would cut through a steel net. During the war German and Austrian U-boats occupied so much attention that the public did not realize the part that the Entente Allies were playing under the sea. America, Great Britain, France, and Italy made good use of submarines, operating them against enemy vessels, blockading enemy ports, and actually fighting enemy submarines. A STEAM-DRIVEN SUBMARINE The British in particular did splendid work with the submarine and developed boats that were superior to anything turned out by the Germans. For instance, they developed a submarine which is virtually a submersible destroyer. It is 340 feet long and it can make a speed of 24 knots on the surface. The most remarkable part of this boat is that its engines are driven by steam. Its boilers are fired with oil fuel. There are two smoke-stacks which fold down when it submerges. Of course when running under-water the vessel is driven by electricity and it makes a speed of 10 knots. It carries three 4-inch guns, two forward and one aft, and its displacement submerged is 2700 tons as against 800 tons for the largest German submarines. A SUBMARINE THAT MOUNTS A TWELVE-INCH GUN Still more remarkable is the big "super-submarine" designed by the British to bombard the forts of the Dardanelles, but unfortunately it was built too late to be used there. This submarine carries a gun big enough for a battle-ship. It is of 12-inch caliber and weighs 50 tons. Of course a big gun like that could not be fired athwart the submarine. It might bowl the little vessel over, even though it was a 1700-ton submarine. The gun is mounted to fire fore and aft, with a deviation of only a few degrees to one side or the other, so that the shock of the recoil is taken by the length instead of the beam of the submarine. It fires a shell weighing 620 pounds and a full charge is not used, so that the extreme range is only about 15,000 yards. This submarine monitor would have been a very difficult target for the Turkish gunners to hit. When the war came to an end and the German submarines surrendered to the Entente Allies at Harwich, there was considerable public curiosity as to whether or not an examination of the U-boats would disclose any wonderful secrets. But they contained nothing that the Allies did not already know, and one British officer stated that the plans of the German submarines had often fallen into their hands long before a U-boat of the same type was captured! CHAPTER XIII GETTING THE BEST OF THE U-BOAT The U-boat commander who sallied forth from the harbor of Wilhelmshaven in the early days of the war had nothing to fear. He was out to murder, not to fight. His prey was always out in the open, while he could kill without exposing more than his eye above water. Not even a sporting chance was allowed his victims, particularly when he chose unarmed merchantmen for his targets. He could come up boldly to the surface and shell a ship into submission. This was cheaper than torpedoing the vessel, because torpedoes are expensive. If the ship were speedy it might run away; or if the U-boat came up too close to its intended prey, the latter might run it down. That happened occasionally and it was the only danger that the _Herr Kommandant_ had to fear. If a destroyer suddenly appeared, the U-boat could dive into the shelter of the sea. If the water were not too deep, it could lie on the bottom for two or more days if need be. There was plenty of air in the hull to sustain life for many hours, and then the compressed air used for blowing the ballast-tanks could be drawn upon. In the U-boat there were potash cartridges to take up the carbon-dioxide, and tanks of pure oxygen to revitalize the air. If the submarine were damaged, it was not necessary for it to come to the surface to effect repairs. There were air-locks through which a diver could be let out of the boat. He was fitted with oxygen and potash cartridges, so that he did not need to be connected by an air-hose with the boat, but could walk around it freely to mend injured rudders or to clear the propeller of entanglements. Even the small submarines of those early days were capable of taking long voyages. Setting his course at a comfortable pace of 10 knots, the U-boat commander could count on enough fuel to carry him 1600 miles, and if need be he could slow down to 8 knots and by using certain of his water-ballast tanks for additional oil-reservoirs, extend his cruising-radius to nearly 3000 miles. The big 800-ton U-boats that were built later had a radius of 5000 miles at an 8-knot speed. And so when the British closed the English Channel with nets and mines, _Herr Kommandant_ was not at all perturbed; he could sail around the British Isles if he chose and make war upon transatlantic shipping. When harbors were walled off with nets, he could remain outside and sink vessels that were leaving or entering them. SUBMARINE-CHASERS A real menace came when the U-boat commander popped his periscope out of the sea and saw several little motor-boats bearing down upon him. They seemed harmless enough, but a moment's inspection showed them to be armed with guns fully as powerful as those he carried. It was useless to discharge a torpedo at so speedy and small a foe. A torpedo has to have a fairly deep covering of water, else its course will be disturbed by surface waves; and the submarine-chasers drew so little water that a torpedo would pass harmlessly under them. It was useless for the U-boat commander to come up and fight them with his guns. They would have been upon him before he could do that, and their speed and diminutive size made them very difficult targets to hit. Besides, he dared not risk a duel of shell, for he knew that if the precious inner hull of his boat were punctured, he could not seek refuge under water; and if he could not hide, he was lost. The little armed mosquito craft swarmed about the harbor entrances, ready to dash at any submarine that showed itself. They could travel twice as fast as the submarine when it was submerged and half again as fast as when it was running on the surface. Submarines had to take to cover when these chasers were about. _Herr Kommandant_ did not even dare to take a look around through his periscope, because the streak of foam that trailed in its wake would betray him and immediately the speedy motor-boats would take up the chase; and they had a disagreeable way of dropping bombs which, even if they did not sink the submarine, might produce such a concussion as to spring its seams. His foes had discovered one of his most serious defects. He was blind under-water and they were making the most of this handicap. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood Forward End of a U-boat. Note the Four Torpedo Tubes Behind the Officer] Groping along under-water by dead-reckoning was not any too safe a procedure near land, because he was liable at any moment to crash into an uncharted rock or maybe into the wreck of some submarine victim. He could not correct his bearings without coming to the surface, and, in the black depths of the sea, a slight miscalculation might send him to his doom. As was explained in the previous chapter, he had to keep moving, because he could not remain suspended under water. [Illustration: (C) Press Illustrating Service A Depth-bomb Mortar and a Set of "Ash Cans" at the Stern of an American Destroyer] He was more helpless than a ship sailing in the densest of fogs. A ship can stop and listen to sound-signals, or even to the beating of the surf on the shore, or it can take soundings to locate its position; and yet it is no uncommon occurrence for a ship to run ashore in a fog. How much easier it is for a submarine to lose its bearings when obliged to travel by dead-reckoning, particularly in the disconcerting excitement of the chase! To avoid the danger of collision with surface vessels, the commander chose to run at a depth of sixty-five feet. That was the upper limit of his safety-zone. A depth of over two hundred feet was his lower limit, because, as stated before, the water-pressure at that depth would crush in his hull or at least start its seams. If the bottom were smooth and sandy, and not too deep, he could settle gently upon it and wait for darkness, to make his escape. But while he lay on a sandy bottom, he was still in danger. Trawlers were sweeping the bottom with nets. He might be discovered; and then if he did not come up and surrender, a bomb would let in the sea upon him. A HINT FROM NATURE While he could not see under water, his adversaries could. They had taken a hint from nature. The fish-hawk has no difficulty in spying his submarine prey. Flying high above the water, he can see his victims at a considerable depth, and wait his chance to pounce upon an unwary fish that comes too near the surface. It is said that the British trained sea-gulls to hunt submarines. Sea-gulls will follow a ship far out to sea for the sake of feeding on refuse that is thrown overboard. British submarines encouraged the birds to follow them, by throwing out bait whenever they came to the surface. Of course the birds could see the submarine even when it was submerged, and if they pursued it, they were always rewarded with plenty of food. The gulls drew no fine distinction between Hun and Briton, and so it came that _Herr Kommandant_ often groped his way along in the dark sea, totally oblivious of the fact that he was attended by an escort of feathered folk who kept the British chasers informed of his presence. In this connection it is interesting to note that the British trained sea lions to hunt submarines. The animals were taught at first to swim to a friendly submarine, locating it by the sound of its propellers. They were always rewarded with fish. These sea lions were muzzled so that they could not go fishing on their own account. Then they learned to locate enemy submarines and pointed them out by swimming directly toward them and diving down to them. But there were human eyes, as well, that spied upon the U-boat. Fast seaplanes patrolled the waters, searching constantly for any trace of submarine. Its form could be vaguely outlined to a depth of from fifty to seventy-five feet, unless the sea were choppy, and once it was discovered, chasers or trawlers were signaled to destroy it with bombs or to entangle it in nets. Often a submarine would be discovered by a leak in its oil-tank which would leave a tell-tale trail. Sometimes when the U-boat itself could not be discerned, there would be slight shimmer, such as may be seen above a hot stove, caused by refraction of light in its wake. This was easily recognized by trained observers. [Illustration: (C) Press Illustrating Service A Depth-bomb Mortar in Action and a Depth-bomb snapped as it is being hurled through the air] Even better aërial patrols were the small dirigibles known as Blimps. They are a cross between a balloon and an airplane, for they have the body and the power-plant of an airplane, but the planes are replaced by a gas-bag. Blimps could cruise leisurely and search the sea thoroughly. They could stop and hover directly over a submarine and drop explosives upon it with great accuracy. And so _Herr Kommandant_ could take no comfort in hiding under a blanket of waves unless the blanket were so thick as to conceal his form completely from the eyes overhead. This made it imperative to leave the shallower waters near shore and push out into the deep sea, where the small chasers could not pursue him. But he could not shake off his pursuers. Stream-trawlers are built to ride the heaviest gales and they took up the chase out into the ocean. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" Airplane Stunning a U-boat with a Depth-bomb] There was a decided advantage for the U-boat in moving out to sea. It had a wider field of activity and could more easily escape from its pursuers. But on the other hand, its prey also had an advantage. Out in the open ocean they were not obliged to follow the usual ship lanes and it was more difficult for a submarine to intercept them. There it took more U-boats to blockade a given area. A GAME OF HIDE-AND-SEEK Then, it ceased to be quite so one-sided a game when merchantmen began to carry guns. That made it necessary for the submarine commander to creep up on his victims stealthily, and depend upon his torpedoes. He had to get within a thousand yards of the ship and preferably within five hundred yards, in order to be sure of hitting it. If the ship could travel faster than he could, he had to do this without betraying his presence. But ship-captains soon learned that their safety lay in zig-zagging. When _Herr Kommandant_ reached the point from which he had planned to attack, he would raise his telescopic periscope out of the water, expecting to see his victim within good torpedo range, only to find it sailing safely on another tack. Again, he would have to take observations and make another try, probably with no better luck. It was a game of hide-and-seek in which the merchant ship had a good chance of making its escape, particularly when blotches of camouflage paint made it difficult for him to get the range, as described in Chapter XI. [Illustration: Courtesy of the Submarine Defense Association FIG. 19. How a ship hid behind smoke produced on its own stern, with different directions of wind] Slower ships could be attacked without all this manoeuvering, provided the submarine's guns outranged those of the ship. And so U-boats were provided with larger and larger guns, which made it possible for them to stand off and pound the merchantmen while out of reach of the vessel's guns. But ships found a way of hiding on the surface of the sea. A vessel would spout forth volumes of dense black smoke which would obliterate it from view. (See Fig. 19.) If the wind was quartering, the ship would change its course and dodge behind the sheltering pall of smoke. Not only was the smoke produced on the vessel itself, but smoke-boxes were cast overboard to form a screen behind the vessel. These smoke-boxes contained a mixture of coal-tar and phosphorus and other chemicals which would produce incomplete combustion. They were ignited by the rubbing of a phosphorus compound on a priming-composition, and then cast adrift to pour out dense volumes of heavy smoke. (See Fig. 20.) Behind this screen, the ship could dodge and zig-zag and if her speed were greater than that of the submarine, her chances of escape were very good. [Illustration: Courtesy of the Submarine Defense Association FIG. 20. How a ship hid behind a screen of smoke produced by throwing smoke-boxes overboard] Another annoyance that _Herr Kommandant_ experienced was, when he lifted his periscopic eye above water, to find it so smeared with a sticky substance that he could not see. His foes had strewn the water with tar-oil that had spread in a thin film over a surface miles in extent. This blinded him at first, but before long he was equipped with a jet for washing off the periscope glass and that little annoyance was overcome. But the craft most dreaded by the U-boat commander were the destroyers. These light, high-powered, heavily armed vessels could travel twice as fast as he could on the surface and three times as fast as he could submerged. Shells were invented which would not ricochet from the surface of the sea, but would plow right through the water, where they struck and hit the submarine below water-level. DEATH-DEALING "ASH CANS" However, it was not shell-fire that he dreaded, but the big "ash cans" loaded with TNT which were timed to explode far under water, and which would crush his boat or start its seams. It was not necessary for these bombs to hit the U-boat. When they went off they would send out a wave of pressure that would crush the boat or start its seams even if it were a hundred feet and more from the point of the explosion. Within limits, the deeper the explosion the wider would its destructive area be. The timing-mechanism of some depth bombs consisted merely of a float on the end of a cord. When the bomb was thrown overboard this float remained on the surface until the cord was pulled out to its full length, when there would be a yank on the firing-trigger and the charge would explode. In other depth bombs there was a valve operated by the pressure of the water. When the bomb sank to the depth for which the valve was set, the pressure of the water would force the valve in, exploding a cartridge which set off the charge. So powerful were these depth bombs that the destroyer had to travel at high speed to get out of range of the explosion. Depth bombs were rolled off the stern of the destroyer and also thrown out from the sides of the vessel by means of mortars. Some of the mortars were Y-shaped and held a depth bomb in each arm of the Y. When a blank 3-inch shell was exploded at the base of the gun, both bombs would be hurled from the ship, one to port and the other to starboard. In this way the destroyer could drop the bombs in a "pattern" of wide area. _Herr Kommandant_ gained a wholesome respect for these terriers of the sea. It was suicide to show himself anywhere near a destroyer. In a moment the speedy boat would be upon him, sowing depth bombs along his course. His chances of escaping through this hail of high explosives were remote indeed. The ships that he was most eager to destroy were either too speedy for him to catch, unless they happened to come his way, or else they were herded in large convoys protected by these dreaded destroyers. The convoy proved a most baffling problem for _Herr Kommandant_. He dared not attack the convoy by daylight. In a fog he might take a chance at picking off one of the ships, but even that was very risky. He could trail the convoy until dusk and then under cover of darkness draw near enough to discharge a torpedo, but in the daytime he must keep his distance because there were eyes in the sky watching for him. At the van and rear of the convoy there were kite balloons high in the sky, with observers constantly watching for periscopes, and for U-boats that might be lurking under the surface. As the destroyers gained in experience, the difficulties of the U-boat attack grew greater and its work grew more and more perilous. The crew grumbled and grew mutinous. The morale of the men was shaken. We can imagine the horror of plunging hurriedly into the depths of the sea, and rushing along blindly under the surface, dodging this way and that, while terrific explosions of depth bombs stagger the submarine and threaten to crush it, and there is the constant expectation that the next explosion will tear the thin shell of the U-boat and let in the black hungry water. The tables were turned. Now, if never before, _Herr Kommandant_, the hunter, knew what it felt like to be hunted. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood The False Hatch of a Mystery Ship and--] [Illustration: The same Hatch opened to disclose the 3-Inch Gun and Crew] It takes an exceptional man to go through such a harrowing experience with unshattered nerves. On at least one occasion, a submarine that was being depth-bombed came suddenly to the surface. The hatch flew open and the crew rushed out, holding up their hands and crying, "_Kamerad_." The U-boat was uninjured, but the shock of a depth bomb explosion had put the electric-lighting system out of commission, and the crew, unnerved by the explosion and terrified by the darkness, had overpowered their officers and brought the boat to the surface. [Illustration: A French Hydrophone Installation with which the presence of Submarines was detected] EYES IN THE SEA There were other craft that _Herr Kommandant_ had to look out for. His were not the only submarines in the sea. His foes also were possessed of submarines. They could not see under water any better than he could, but they could fight on the surface as well as he, and they could creep up on him even as he crept up on his prey. As a French submarine commander puts it: "The U-boats used to enjoy the advantage of remaining themselves invisible while all the surface and aërial craft which were sent in pursuit of them were boldly outlined against the sky and visible to them. This is one of the reasons we used submarines to ambush U-boats." Submarines were also used to accompany the convoys, so that the U-boat commander had to watch not only for the eyes of the ship's lookouts and the eyes in the kite balloons, but also for the periscope eyes that swam in the sea. TRAILING U-BOATS BY SOUND The troubles of the submarine-commander were multiplying. All over the world inventors were plotting his destruction. As long as we depended upon our eyes to ferret him out, the sea was a safe refuge, provided he dived deep enough, but when we began to use our ears as well, he found himself in a very serious predicament. Although light is badly broken up in its passage through water, sound-waves will travel through water much better than in air. The first listening-devices used were crude affairs and did not amount to much, particularly when the U-boats muffled their motors and engines so that they were virtually noiseless. But the French invented a very sensitive sound-detector. It consisted of a lot of tiny diaphragms set in a big hemisphere. There were two of these hemispheres, one at each side of the boat. When sound-waves struck these hemispheres, the diaphragms would respond. At the focus of each hemisphere there was a megaphone receiver; one of these carried the sound to the operator's right ear and the other to his left. He would turn a megaphone around until he found the diaphragm that produced the loudest sound. This gave him the direction of the sound-wave. Then the boat would be steered in that direction. He knew that it was aimed properly when the sound coming to his right ear was just as loud as that which came into his left ear. A still better hydrophone was developed by a group of American inventors. The details of this cannot yet be disclosed, but we know that it was adopted at once by our allies. A very sensitive receiver was used which could detect a U-boat miles away and determine its direction accurately. Under ideal conditions the range of the device was from fifteen to twenty-five miles, but the average was from three to eight miles. If two or more boats fitted with sound-detectors were used, they could determine the position of the U-boat perfectly. One drawback was that the vessel would have to stop so that the noise of its own engines would not disturb the listener, but this was largely overcome by trailing the detector a hundred feet or more from the stem of the ship. The sounds were then brought in by an electric cable to the listener in the ship. These sound-detectors were placed on Allied submarines as well as surface vessels and they were actually tried out on balloons and dirigibles, so that they could follow a U-boat after it had submerged too deeply to be followed by sight. [Illustration: Courtesy of the "Scientific American" FIG. 21. Chart of an actual pursuit of a U-boat which ended in the destruction of the submarine] [Illustration: Section of a captured Mine-laying U-boat, showing how the mines were laid] Many U-boats were chased to their doom by the aid of the American hydrophone. Fig. 21 illustrates a very dramatic chase. The full line shows the course of the U-boat as plotted out by hydrophones and the broken line the course of the submarine-chasers. The dots represent patterns of depth bombs dropped upon the U-boat. Try as he would, the _Herr Kommandant_ could not shake off his pursuers. At one time, as the listeners stopped to take observations, they heard hammering in the U-boat as if repairs were being made. The motors of the submarine would start and stop, showing clearly that it was disabled. More depth bombs were dropped and then there was perfect silence, which was soon broken by twenty-five revolver-shots. Evidently the crew, unable to come to the surface, had given up in despair and committed suicide. [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood A Paravane hauled up with a Shark caught in its jaws] The Adriatic Sea was an ideal place for the use of the hydrophone. The water there is so deep that submarines dared not rest on the bottom, but had to keep moving, and so they could easily be followed. Across the sea, at the heel of the boot of Italy, a barrage of boats was established. U-boats would come down to this barrage at night and, when within two or three miles of the boats, dive and pass under them. But when hydrophones were used that game proved very hazardous. Our listeners would hear them coming when they were miles away. Then they would hear them shift from oil-to electric-drive and plunge under the surface. Darkness was no protection to the U-boats. The sound-detector worked just as well at night as in the daytime and a group of three boats would drop a pattern of bombs that would send the U-boat to the bottom. On one occasion after an attack it was evident that the submarine had been seriously injured. Its motors were operating, but something must have gone wrong with its steering-gear, or its ballast-chambers may have been flooded, because it kept going down and soon the listeners heard a crunching noise as it was crushed by the tremendous pressure of the water. And so U-boat warfare grew more and more terrible for _Herr Kommandant_. The depths of the sea were growing even more dangerous than the surface. On every hand he was losing out. He had tried to master the sea without mastering the surface of the sea. But he can never really master who dares not fight out in the open. For a time, the German did prevail, but his adversaries were quick to see his deficiencies and, by playing upon these, to rob the terror of the sea of his powers. And as _Herr Kommandant_ looks back at the time when he stepped into the lime-light as the most brutal destroyer the world has ever seen, he cannot take much satisfaction in reflecting that the sum total of his efforts was to spread hatred of Germany throughout the world, to summon into the conflict a great nation whose armies turned the tide of victory against his soldiers, and finally to subject his navy, second only to that of Great Britain, to the most humiliating surrender the world has ever seen. CHAPTER XIV "DEVIL'S EGGS" In modern warfare a duel between fixed forts and floating forts is almost certain to end in a draw. Because the former are fixed they make good targets, while the war-ship, being able to move about, can dodge the shell that are fired against it. On the other hand, a fort on land can stand a great deal of pounding and each of its guns must be put out of action individually, before it is subdued, while the fort that is afloat runs the risk of being sunk with a few well-directed shots. But fortifications alone will not protect a harbor from a determined enemy. They cannot prevent hostile ships from creeping by them under cover of darkness or a heavy fog. To prevent this, the harbor must be mined, and this must be done in such a way that friendly shipping can be piloted through the mine-field, while hostile craft will be sure to strike the mines and be destroyed. The mines may be arranged to be fired by electricity from shore stations, in which case they are anchored at such a depth that ships can sail over them without touching them. If a hostile vessel tried to dash into the harbor, the touch of a button on shore would sink it when it passed over one of the mines. But the success of electrically fired mines would depend upon the "seeing." In a heavy fog they would prove no protection. Another way of using electric mines is to have telltale devices which a ship would strike and which would indicate to the operator on shore that a vessel was riding over the mines and would also let him know over which particular mines it was at the moment passing. No friendly vessel would undertake to enter the harbor in a fog or after dark and the operator would not hesitate to blow up the invader even if he could not see him. However, the ordinary method of mining a harbor is to lay fields of anchored mines across the channels and entrances to the harbor--sensitive mines that will blow up at the slightest touch of a ship's hull--and leave tortuous passages through the fields for friendly shipping. Of course pilots have to guide the ships through the passages and lest enemy spies learn just where the openings are the mine-fields must be shifted now and then. The mines are, therefore, made so that they can be taken up by friendly mine-sweepers who know just how to handle them, and planted elsewhere. These are defensive mines, but there are other mines that are not intended to be moved. They are planted in front of enemy harbors to block enemy shipping and they are made so sensitive or of such design that they will surely explode if tampered with. THE MINE THAT DOES ITS OWN SOUNDING A favorite type of mine used during the war was one which automatically adjusted itself to sink to the desired depth. Submerged mines are more dangerous to the enemy because they cannot be seen and avoided. They should float far enough under the surface to remain hidden and yet not so deep that a shallow-draft ship can pass over them without hitting them. As the sea bottom may be very irregular, it is impossible to tell how long the anchor cable should be without sounding the depth of the water at every point at which a mine is planted. But the automatic anchor takes care of this. Very ingeniously it does its own sounding and holds the mine down to the depth for which it is set. The mine cable is wound up on a reel in the anchor and the mine is held fast to the anchor by a latch. The anchor is of box-shape or cylindrical form, with perforations in it. At first it sinks comparatively slowly, but as it fills with water it goes down faster. Attached to the anchor is a plummet or weight, connected by a cord to the latch. The length of this cord determines the depth at which the mine will float. [Illustration: Courtesy of the "Scientific American" FIG. 22. How the mine automatically adjusts itself to various depths of water] The operation of the mine is shown in Fig. 22. When it is thrown overboard (1) it immediately turns over so that the buoyant mine _A_ floats on the surface (2). While the anchor is slowly filling and sinking, the plummet _B_ runs out (3). If the mines are to float at a depth of, say, ten feet, this cord must be ten feet long. As soon as it runs out to its full length (4) it springs a latch, _C_, releasing the mine _A_. Then the mine cable _D_ pays out, as the anchor _E_ sinks, until the plummet _B_ strikes bottom (5). As soon as the plummet cord slackens a spring-pressed pawl is released and locks the mine-cable reel, so that as the anchor continues to sink it draws the mine down with it, until it touches bottom (6), and as the anchor was ten feet from the bottom when the plummet touched bottom and locked the reel, the mine must necessarily be dragged down to a depth of ten feet below the surface. The mine itself, or the "devil's egg" as it is called, is usually a big buoyant sphere of metal filled with TNT or some other powerful explosive; and projecting from it are a number of very fragile prongs which if broken or even cracked will set off the mine. There is a safety-lever or pin that makes the mine harmless when it is being handled, and this must be withdrawn just before the mine is to be launched. In some mines the prongs are little plungers that are withdrawn into the mine-shell and held by a cement which softens after the mine is submerged and lets the plungers spring out. When the plungers are broken, water enters and, coming in contact with certain chemicals, produces enough heat to set off a cartridge which fires the mine. PICKING INFERNAL MACHINES OUT OF THE SEA The enemy mine-fields were often located by seaplanes and then mine-sweepers had to undertake the extremely hazardous task of raising the mines or destroying them. If they were of the offensive type, it was much better to destroy them. But occasionally, when conditions permitted, mine-sweepers undertook to raise the mines and reclaim them for future use against the enemy. The work of seizing a mine and making it fast to the hoisting-cable of the mine-sweeper was usually done from a small rowboat. Raising the first mine was always the most perilous undertaking, because no one knew just what type of mine it was and how to handle it with safety, or whether there was any way in which it _could_ be made harmless. There were some mines, for instance, that contained within them a small vial partly filled with sulphuric acid. The mine carried no prongs, but if it were tilted more than twenty degrees the acid would spill out and blow up the mine. Such a mine would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible to handle from a boat that was rocked about by the waves. After the first mine of the field was raised and its safety-mechanism studied, the task of raising the rest was not so dangerous. A water telescope was used to locate the mine and to aid in hooking the hoisting-cable into the shackle on the mine. The hook was screwed to the end of a pole and after the mine was hooked, the pole was unscrewed and the cable hauled in, bringing up the "devil's egg" bristling with death. Care had to be taken to keep the bobbing boat from touching the delicate prongs until the safety-device could be set. However, this painstaking and careful method of raising mines was not often employed. Shallow-draft mine-sweepers would run over the mine-field, dragging a cable between them. The cable would be kept down by means of hydrovanes or "water kites" deep enough to foul the anchor cables of the mines. The "water kites" were V-shaped structures that were connected to the cable in such a way that they would nose down as they were dragged through the water and carry the cable under. The action is just the reverse of a kite, which is set to nose up into the wind and carry the kite up when it is dragged through the air. By means of the cable the anchor chain of the mine was caught and then the mine with its anchor was dragged up. If the mine broke loose from its anchor it could be exploded with a rifle-shot if it did not automatically explode on fouling the cable. FLOATING MINES When England entered the war she mined her harbors because, although she had the mastery of the sea, she had to guard against raids of enemy ships carried out in foggy and dark weather. But the mines were no protection against submarines. They would creep along the bottom under the mines. Then cable nets were stretched across the harbor channels to bar the submarines, but the U-boats were fitted with cutters which would tear through the nets, and it became necessary to use mines set at lower depths so that the submarines could not pass under them; and nets were furnished with bombs which would explode when fouled by submarines. In fact, mines were set adrift with nets stretched between them, to trap submarines. Floating mines were also used by the Germans for the destruction of surface vessels and these were usually set adrift in pairs, with a long cable connecting them, so that if a vessel ran into the cable the mines would be dragged in against its hull and blow it up. The laws of war require that floating mines be of such a design that they will become inoperative in a few hours; otherwise they might drift about for weeks or months or years and be a constant menace to shipping. Sometimes anchored mines break away from their moorings and are carried around by ocean currents or are blown about by the winds. A year after the Russo-Japanese War a ship was blown up by striking a mine that had been torn from its anchorage and had drifted far from the field in which it was planted. No doubt there are hundreds of mines afloat in the Atlantic Ocean which for many years to come will hold out the threat of sudden destruction to ocean vessels; for the Germans knew no laws of war and had no scruples against setting adrift mines that would remain alive until they were eaten up with rust. [Illustration: Courtesy of the "Scientific American" FIG. 23. Ocean currents of the North Atlantic showing the probable path of drifting mines] The chart on the next page shows the course of ocean currents in the North Atlantic as plotted out by the Prince of Monaco, from which it may be seen that German mines will probably make a complete circuit of the North Atlantic, drifting down the western coast of Europe, across the Atlantic, around the Azores, and into the Gulf Stream, which will carry them back to the North Sea, only to start all over. (See Fig. 23.) Some of them will run up into the Arctic Ocean, where they will be blown up by striking icebergs and many will be trapped in the mass of floating seaweed in the Sargasso Sea. But many years will pass before all danger of mines will be removed. In the meantime, the war has left a tremendous amount of work to be done in raising anchored mines and destroying them. EGG-LAYING SUBMARINES Early in the war the British were astonished to find enemy mine-fields in their own waters, far from any German ports. They could not have been planted by surface mine-layers, unless these had managed to creep up disguised as peaceful trawlers. This seemed hardly likely, because these fields appeared in places that were well guarded. Then it was discovered that German U-boats were doing this work. Special mine-laying U-boats had been built and one of them was captured with its cargo of "devil's eggs." A sectional view of the mine-laying U-boat is shown opposite page 272. In the after part of the boat were mine-chutes in each of which three mines were stored. A mine-laying submarine would carry about a score of mines. These could be released one at a time. The mine with its anchor would drop to the bottom. As soon as it struck, anchor-arms would be tripped and spread out to catch in the sand or mud, while the mine cable would be released and the mine would rise as far as the cable would allow it. The U-boat commander would have to know the depth of water in which the mines were to be laid and adjust the cables to this depth in advance. This could not be done while the U-boat was submerged. With the mines all set for the depth at a certain spot, the U-boat commander had to find that very spot to lay his "eggs," otherwise they would either lie too deep to do any harm to shipping, or else they would reach up to the surface, where they might be discovered by the Allied patrols. As he had to do his navigating blindly, by dead-reckoning, it was very difficult for him to locate his mine-fields properly. But the Germans did not have a monopoly on submarine mine-laying. The British also laid mines by submarine within German harbors and channels, right under the guns of Heligoland, and many a U-boat was destroyed by such mines within its home waters. [Illustration: (C) Press Illustrating Service A Dutch Mine-sweeper engaged in clearing the North Sea of German Mines] PARAVANES On the other hand, the Allies had a way of sailing right through fields of enemy mines with little danger. Our ships were equipped with "paravanes" which are something like the "water kites" used by mine-sweepers, and they are still used in the waters of the war zone. Paravanes are steel floats with torpedo-shaped bodies and a horizontal plane near the forward end. At the tail of the paravane, there are horizontal and vertical rudders which can be set to make the device run out from the side of the vessel that is towing it, and at the desired depth below the surface. Two paravanes are used, one at each side of the ship, and the towing-cables lead from the bow of the vessel. Thus there are two taut cables that run out from the ship in the form of a V and at such a depth that they will foul the mooring-cable of any mine that might be encountered. The mine cable slides along the paravane cable and in this way is carried clear of the ship's hull. When it reaches the paravane it is caught in a sharp-toothed jaw which cuts the mine cable and lets the mine bob up to the surface. The mine is then exploded by rifle or machine-gun fire. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" Hooking Up Enemy Anchored Mines] In some forms of paravane there is a hinged jaw which is operated from the ship to shear the cable. The jaw is repeatedly opened and closed by a line that runs to a winch on the ship. This winch winds up the line until it is taut and then the line is permitted to slip, letting the jaw open, only to close again as the winch keeps on turning and winding up the line. Guarded by steel sharks on each side, their jaws constantly working, a ship can plow right through a field of anchored mines with little danger. To be sure, the bow might chance to hit a mine, when, of course, there would be an explosion; but the ship could stand damage here better than anywhere else and unless the bow actually hit the mine, one or other of the paravanes would take care of it and keep it from being dragged in against the hull of the vessel. PENNING IN THE U-BOATS According to German testimony, mines were responsible for the failure of the U-boat. However, it was not merely the scattered mine-fields sown in German waters that brought the U-boat to terms, but an enormous mine-field stretching across the North Sea from the Orkney Islands to the coast of Norway. Early in the war, U-boats had been prevented from entering the English Channel by nets and mines stretched across the Straits of Dover. As the submarine menace grew, it was urged that a similar net be stretched across the North Sea to pen the U-boats in. But it seemed like a stupendous task. The distance across at the narrowest point is nearly two hundred and fifty miles. It would not have been necessary to have the net come to the surface. It could just as well have been anchored so that its upper edge would be covered with thirty feet of water. Surface vessels could then have sailed over it without trouble and submarines could not have passed over it without showing themselves to patrolling destroyers. It would not have been necessary to carry the net to the bottom of the sea. A belt of netting a hundred and fifty feet wide would have made an effective bar to the passage of U-boats. As U-boats might cut their way through the net, it was proposed to mount bombs or mines on them which would explode on contact and destroy any submarine that tried to pass. However, laying a net two hundred feet long even when it is laid in sections, is no small job, but when the net is loaded with contact mines, the difficulty of the work may be well imagined. And yet had it been thought that the net would be a success it would have been laid anyhow, but it was argued that seaweed would clog the meshes of the net and ocean currents would tear gaps in it. Even if it had not been torn away, the tidal currents would have swept it down and borne it under so far that U-boats could have passed over it in safety without coming to the surface. A WALL OF MINES When America entered the war, we were very insistent that something must be done to block the North Sea, and we proposed that a barrage of anchored mines be stretched across the sea and that these mines be set at different levels so as to make a "wall" that submarines could not dive under. This would do away with all the drawbacks of a net. Ocean currents and masses of seaweed could not affect individual mines as they would a net. Furthermore, an American inventor had devised a new type of mine which was peculiarly adapted to the proposed mine barrage. It had a firing-mechanism that was very sensitive and the mine had twice the reach of any other. At length the British mine-laying forces were prevailed upon to join with us in laying this enormous mine. It was one of the biggest and most successful undertakings of the war. It was to be two hundred and thirty miles long and twelve miles wide on the average, reaching from the rocky shores of the Orkney Islands to Norway. There was plenty of deep water close to the coast of Norway and it was against international law to lay mines within three miles of the shores of a neutral nation, so that the U-boats might have had a clear passage around the end of the barrage. But as it was also against the law for the U-boats to sail through neutral waters, Norway laid a mine-field off its coast to enforce neutrality, and this was to join with that which the British and we were to lay. Most of the mine-laying was to be done by the United States and we were to furnish the mines. The order to proceed with the work was given in October, 1917, and it was a big order. A hundred thousand mines were to be made and to preserve secrecy, as well as to hurry the work as much as possible, it was divided among five hundred contractors and subcontractors. The parts were put together in one plant and then sent to another, where each mine was filled with three hundred pounds of molten TNT. To carry them across the ocean small steamers were used, so that if one should be blown up by a submarine the loss of mines would not be very great. There were twenty-four of these steamers, each carrying from twelve hundred to eighteen hundred mines and only one of them was destroyed by a submarine. The steamers delivered their loads on the west coast of Scotland and the mines were taken across to the east coast by rail and motor canal-boats. Here the mines were finally assembled, ready for planting. Seventy thousand mines were planted, four fifths of them by American mine-layers and the rest by the British. MINE RAILROADS ON SHIPS To handle the mines the ships were specially fitted with miniature railroads for transporting the mines to the launching-point, so that they could be dropped at regular intervals without interruption. Each anchor mine was provided with flanged wheels that ran on rails. The mines were carried on three decks and each deck was covered with a network of rails, switches, and turn-tables, while elevators were provided to carry the mines from one deck to another. The mines, like miniature railroad cars, were coupled up in trains of thirty or forty and as each mine weighed fourteen hundred pounds, steam winches had to be used to haul them. At the launching-point the tracks ran out over the stern of the boat and here a trap was provided which would hold only one mine at a time. By the pulling of a lever the jaws of the trap would open and the mine would slide off the rails and plunge into the sea. The mines were dropped every three hundred feet in lines five hundred feet apart, as it was unsafe for the mine-layers to steam any closer to one another than that. The mines were of the type shown in Fig. 22 and automatically adjusted themselves to various depths. The depth of the water ran down to twelve hundred feet near the Norwegian coast. Never before had mines been planted at anywhere near that depth. It was dangerous work, because the enemy knew where the mines were being planted, as neutral shipping had to be warned months in advance. The mine-layers were in constant danger of submarine attack, although they were convoyed by destroyers to take care of the U-boats. There was even danger of a surface attack and so battle-cruisers were assigned the job of guarding the mine-layers. The mine-layers steamed in line abreast, and had one of them been blown up, the shock would probably have been enough to blow up the others as well. Enemy mines were sown in the path of the mine-layers, so the latter had to be preceded by mine-sweepers. Navigation buoys had to be planted at the ends of the lines of mines and the enemy had a habit of planting mines near the buoys or of moving the buoys whenever he had a chance. But despite all risks the work was carried through. The barrier was not an impassable one. With the mines three hundred feet apart, a submarine might get through, even though the field was twenty-five miles broad, but the hazards were serious. Before the first lines of mines had been extended half-way across, its value was demonstrated by the destruction of several U-boats, and as the safety-lane was narrowed down the losses increased. It is said that altogether twenty-three German submarines met their doom in the great mine barrage. U-boat commanders balked at running through it, and U-boat warfare virtually came to a standstill. According to Captain Bartenbach, commander of submarine bases in Flanders, three U-boats were sunk by anchored mines for every one that was destroyed by a depth bomb. CHAPTER XV SURFACE BOATS The war on the submarine was fought mainly from the surface of the sea and from the air above the sea, and naturally it resulted in many interesting naval developments. As described in Chapter XIII, the first offensive measure against the U-boat was the building of swarms of speedy motor-boats which drove the invaders away from harbors and into the open sea. To follow the U-boats out into rough water larger submarine-chasers were built, but even they could not cope with the enemy far from the harbors. MOTOR TORPEDO-BOATS The Italians made excellent use of speedy motor-boats in the protected waters of the Adriatic Sea. One type of motor-boat was equipped with two torpedo-tubes in the bow. Small 14-inch torpedoes were used, but as each torpedo carried two hundred pounds of high explosive, the motor-boat was a formidable vessel if it crept in close enough to discharge one of these missiles at its foe. On one occasion, a patrol of these little boats sighted a couple of Austrian dreadnoughts headed down the coast, surrounded by a screen of ten destroyers. Favored by the mist, two of the motor-boats crept through the screen of destroyers, and torpedoed the battle-ships. Then they made good their escape. A destroyer that pursued one of the boats decided that the game was not worth while when it was suddenly shaken up by the explosion of a depth bomb dropped from the motor-boat. THE SEA TANK The Italians showed a great deal of naval initiative. They were forever trying to trap the Austrian fleet or to invade its harbors. Like all other naval powers, the Austrians protected their harbors with nets and mines. It was impossible for submarines to make an entrance and the ports were too well fortified to permit an open attack on the surface. Nevertheless, the Italians did break through the harbor defenses on one or two occasions and sank Austrian war-vessels. Again it was with a small boat that they did the trick. The nets which the Austrians stretched across their harbor entrance were supported on wooden booms or logs which served as floats. These booms offered an effective bar to small boats which might attempt to enter the harbor under cover of darkness. But the Italians found a way to overcome this obstruction. They built a flat-bottomed motor-boat which drew very little water. Running under the boat were two endless chains, like the treads of a tank. In fact, the boat came to be known as a "sea tank." The chains were motor-driven and had spiked sprockets, so that when a boom was encountered they would bite into the wood and pull the boat up over the log, or maybe they would drag the log down under the boat. At any rate, with this arrangement it was not very difficult to pass the boom and enter the harbor. At the rear the chains were carried back far enough to prevent the propeller from striking when the boat had passed over the log. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" An Italian "Sea-tank" climbing over a Harbor Boom] [Illustration: (C) Underwood & Underwood Deck of a British Aircraft Mothership or "Hush ship"] THE AWKWARD "EAGLES" A curious boat that we undertook to furnish during the war was a cross between a destroyer and a submarine-chaser. After the submarine had been driven out to sea its greatest foe was undoubtedly the destroyer, and frantic efforts were made to turn out as many destroyers as possible. But it takes time to build destroyers and so a new type of boat was designed, to be turned out quickly in large numbers. A hundred and ten "Eagles" (as these boats are called) were ordered, but the armistice was signed before any of them were put into service; and it is just as well that such was the case, for in their construction everything was sacrificed to speed of production. As a consequence they are very ugly boats, with none of the fine lines of a destroyer, and they roll badly, even when the sea is comparatively peaceful. They are five-hundred-ton boats designed to make eighteen knots, which would not have been fast enough to cope with U-boats, because the latter could make as high a speed as that themselves, when traveling on the surface, and the two 4-inch guns of the Eagles would have been far outranged by the 5.9-inch guns of the larger U-boats. SEAPLANE TOWING-BARGES When the war on the U-boat was carried up into the sky, many new naval problems cropped up, particularly when German submarines chose to work far out at sea. Big seaplanes were used, but they consumed a great deal of fuel in flying out and back, cutting down by just so much their flying-radius at the scene of activities. A special towing-barge was used. These barges had trimming-tanks aft, which could be flooded so that the stern of the barge would submerge. A cradle was mounted to run on a pair of rails on the barge. The body of the seaplane was lashed to this cradle and then drawn up on the barge by means of a windlass. This done, the water was blown out of the trimming-tanks by means of compressed air and the barge was brought up to an even keel. The barge with its load was now ready to be towed by a destroyer or other fast boat to the scene of operations. There water was again let into the trimming-tanks and the seaplane was let back into the water. From the water the seaplane arose into the air in the usual way. Unfortunately, when the sea is at all rough it is exceedingly difficult for a seaplane to take wing, particularly a large seaplane. A better starting-platform than the sea had to be furnished. At first some seaplanes were furnished with wheels, so that they could be launched from platforms on large ships; and then, to increase the flying-radius, seaplanes were discarded in favor of airplanes. Once these machines were launched, there was no way for them to get back to the ship. They had to get back to land before their fuel was exhausted. On the large war-vessels a starting-platform was built on a pair of long guns. Then the war-ship would head into the wind and the combined travel of the ship and of the airplane along the platform gave speed enough to raise the plane off the platform before it had run the full length of the guns. But as long as aviators had no haven until they got back to land, there were many casualties. Eager to continue their patrol as long as possible, they would sometimes linger too long before heading for home and then they would not have enough fuel left to reach land. Many an aviator was lost in this way, and finally mother-ships for airplanes had to be built. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" Electrically Propelled Boat or Surface Torpedo, Attacking a Warship, under Guidance of an Airplane Scout] THE "HUSH SHIPS" The British Navy had constructed a number of very fast cruisers to deal with any raiders the Germans might send out. These cruisers were light vessels capable of such high speeds that they could even overtake a destroyer. They were 840 feet long and their turbines developed 90,000 horse-power. The construction of these vessels was for a long time kept a profound secret and it was not until the German fleet surrendered that photographs of them were allowed to be published. Because of this secrecy the boats were popularly known as "hush ships." They were not armored; it was not necessary to load them down with armor plate, because their protection lay in speed and they were designed to fight at very long range. In fact, they were to carry guns that would outrange those of the most powerful dreadnoughts. Our largest naval guns are of 16-inch caliber, but the "hush ships" were each to carry two _18-inch guns_. The guns were monsters weighing 150 tons each and they fired a shell 18 inches in diameter and 7 feet long to a distance of 30 miles when elevated to an angle of 45 degrees. The weight of the shell was 3600 pounds and it carried 500 pounds of high explosive or more than is carried in the largest torpedoes. At the 32-mile range the shell would pass through 12 inches of face-hardened armor and at half that range it would pass through armor 18 inches thick, and there is no armor afloat any heavier than this. [Illustration: Courtesy of "Scientific American" Hauling a Seaplane up on a Barge so that it may be Towed at High Speed by a Destroyer] MOTHER-BOATS FOR AIRPLANES Armed with such powerful guns as these, the "hush ships" would have been very formidable indeed; but when the guns were mounted on one of the cruisers, the _Furious_, they were found too powerful for the vessel. It was evident that the monsters would very seriously rack their own ship. So the guns were taken off the cruiser and it was turned into a mother-ship for airplanes. A broad, unobstructed deck was built on the ship which provided a runway from which airplanes could be launched, and this runway was actually broad enough to permit airplanes to land upon it. Under the runway were the hangars in which the airplanes were housed. Other "hush ships" were also converted into airplane mother-boats and there were special boats built for this very purpose, although they were not able to make the speed of the "hush ships." One of these special boats had funnels that turned horizontally to carry off the furnace smoke over the stern and leave a perfectly clear flying-deck, 330 feet long. TORPEDO-PROOF MONSTERS As for the 18-inch guns, they were put to another use. Early in the war the British had need for powerful shallow-draft vessels which could operate off the Flanders coast and attack the coast fortifications that were being built by the Germans. The ships that were built to meet this demand were known as monitors, because like the famous "monitor" of our Civil War they carried a single turret. These monitors were very broad for their length and were very slow. At best they could make only seven knots and in heavy weather they could not make more than two or three knots. To be made proof against torpedoes these boats were formed with "blisters" or hollow rounded swells in the hull at each side which extended out to a distance of twelve to fifteen feet. The blisters were subdivided into compartments, so that if a torpedo struck the ship it would explode against a blister at a considerable distance from the real hull of the ship and the force of the explosion would be expended in the compartments. The blisters were the salvation of the monitors. Often were the boats struck by torpedoes without being sunk. Unfortunately, this form of protection could not be applied to ordinary vessels, because it would have interfered seriously with navigation. The blisters made the monitors very difficult to steer and hampered the progress of a ship, particularly in a seaway. With ships such as these the British bombarded Zeebrugge from a distance of twenty to twenty-five miles. Of course, the range had to be plotted out mathematically, as the target was far beyond the horizon of the ship, and the firing had to be directed by spotters in airplanes. At first guns from antiquated battle-ships were used in the monitors; then larger guns were used, until finally two of the monitors inherited the 18-inch guns of the _Furious_. A single gun was mounted on the after deck of each vessel and the gun was arranged to fire only on the starboard side. No heavily armored turret was provided, but merely a light housing to shelter the gun. AN ELECTRICALLY STEERED MOTOR-BOAT The British war-vessels that operated in the shallow waters off the coast of Flanders were a constant source of annoyance to the Germans. Because of the shallow water it was seldom possible for a submarine to creep up on them. A U-boat required at least thirty-five feet of water for complete submergence and it did not dare to attack in the open. This led the Germans to launch a motor-boat loaded with high explosive, which was steered from shore. The motor-boat carried a reel of wire which connected it with an operator on shore. There was no pilot in the boat, but the helm was controlled electrically by the man at the shore station. As it was difficult for the helmsman to see just what his boat was doing, or just how to steer it when it was several miles off, an airplane flew high above it and directed the helmsman, by radiotelegraphy, how to steer his boat. Of course, radiotelegraphy might have been used to operate the steering-mechanism of the boat, but there was the danger that the radio operators of the British might send out disturbing waves that would upset the control of the motor-boat, and so direct wire transmission was used instead. Fortunately, when the Germans tried this form of attack, an alert British lookout discovered the tiny motor-boat. The alarm was given and a lucky shot blew up the boat with its charge before it came near the British vessel. CHAPTER XVI RECLAIMING THE VICTIMS OF THE SUBMARINE Nearly fifteen million tons of shipping lie at the bottom of the sea, sunk by German U-boats, and the value of these ships with their cargo is estimated at over seven billion dollars. In one year, 1917, the loss was nearly a million dollars a day. Of course these wrecks would not be worth anything like that now, if they were raised and floated. Much of the cargo would be so damaged by its long immersion in salt water that it would be absolutely valueless, but there are many kinds of merchandise that are not injured in the least by water. Every ship carries a certain amount of gold and silver; and then the ship's hull itself is well worth salving, provided it was not too badly damaged by the torpedo that sank it. Altogether, there is plenty of rich treasure in the sea awaiting the salvor who is bold enough to go after it. To be sure, not all of the U-boat's victims were sunk in deep water. Many torpedoed vessels were beached or succeeded in reaching shallow water before they foundered. Some were sunk in harbors while they lay at anchor, before the precaution was taken of protecting the harbors with nets. The Allies did not wait for the war to end before trying to refloat these vessels. In fact, during the war several hundred ships were raised and put back into service. A special form of patch was invented to close holes torn by torpedoes. Electric pumps were built which would work under water and these were lowered into the holds of ships to pump them out. The salvors were provided with special gas-masks to protect them from poisonous fumes of decayed matter in the wrecks. Our own navy has played an important part in salvage. Shortly after we entered the war, all the wrecking-equipment in this country was commandeered by the government and we sent over to the other side experienced American salvors, provided with complete equipment of apparatus and machinery. The majority of wrecks, however, are found in the open sea, where it would have been foolish to attempt any salvage-operations because of the menace of submarine attack. On at least one occasion a salvage vessel, while attempting to raise the victims of a submarine, fell, itself, a prey to a Hun torpedo. Now that this menace has been removed, such vessels as lie in comparatively shallow water, and in positions not subject to sudden tempests, can be raised by the ordinary methods; or if it is impracticable to raise them, much of their cargo can be reclaimed. However, most of the torpedoed ships lie at such depths that their salvage would ordinarily be despaired of. IN THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA It will be interesting to look into conditions that exist in deep water. Somehow the notion has gone forth that a ship will not surely sink to the very bottom of the deep sea, but on reaching a certain level will find the water so dense that even solid iron will float, as if in a sea of mercury, and that here the ship will be maintained in suspension, to be carried hither and yon by every chance current. Indeed, it makes a rather fantastic picture to think of these lost ships drifting in endless procession, far down beneath the cold green waves, and destined to roam forever like doomed spirits in a circle of Dante's Inferno. But the laws of physics shatter any such illusion and bid us paint a very different picture. Liquids are almost incompressible. The difference in density between the water at the surface of the sea and that at a depth of a mile is almost insignificant. As a matter of fact, at that depth the water would support only about half a pound more per cubic foot than at the surface. The pressure, however, would be enormous. Take the _Titanic_, for instance, which lies on the bed of the ocean in water two miles deep. It must endure a pressure of about two long tons on every square inch of its surface. Long before the vessel reached the bottom her hull must have been crushed in. Every stick of wood, every compressible part of her structure and of her cargo, must have been staved in or flattened. As a ship sinks it is not the water but the ship that grows progressively denser. The _Titanic_ must have actually gained in weight as she went down, and so she must have gathered speed as she sank. We may be certain, therefore, that every victim of Germany's ruthless U-boats that sank in deep water lies prone upon the floor of the sea. It matters not how or where it was sunk, whether it was staggered by the unexpected blow of the torpedo and then plunged headlong into the depths of the sea, or whether it lingered, mortally wounded, on the surface, quietly settling down until the waves closed over it. Theoretically, of course, a perfect balance might be reached which would keep a submerged vessel in suspension, but practically such a condition is next to impossible. Once a ship has started down, she will keep on until she reaches the very bottom, whether it be ten fathoms or ten hundred. A SUBMARINE GRAVEYARD Instead of the line of wandering specters, then, we must conjure up a different picture, equally weird--an under-world shrouded in darkness; for little light penetrates the deep sea. Here in the cold blackness, on the bed of the ocean, the wrecks of vessels that once sailed proudly overhead lie still and deathly silent--some keeled over on their sides, some turned turtle, and most of them probably on even keel. Here and there may be one with its nose buried deep in the mud; and in the shallower waters we may come across one pinned down by the stern, but with its head buoyed by a pocket of air, straining upward and swaying slightly with every gentle movement of the sea, as if still alive. This submarine graveyard offers wonderful opportunities for the engineer, because the raising of wrecked vessels is really a branch of engineering. It is a very special branch, to be sure, and one that has not begun to receive the highly concentrated study that have such other branches as tunneling, bridge-construction, etc. Nevertheless it is engineering, and it has been said of the engineer that his abilities are limited only by the funds at his disposal. Now he has a chance to show what he can do, for there are hundreds of vessels to be salved where before there was but one. The vast number of wrecks in deep water will make it pay to do the work on a larger and grander scale than has been possible heretofore. Special apparatus that could not be built economically for a single wreck may be constructed with profit if a number of vessels demanding similar treatment are to be salved. The principal fields of German activities were the Mediterranean Sea and the waters surrounding the British Isles. Although the submarine zone covered some very deep water, where the sounding-lead runs down two miles without touching bottom, obviously more havoc could be wrought near ports where vessels were obliged to follow a prescribed course, and so most of the U-boat victims were stricken when almost in sight of land. In fact, as was pointed out in a previous chapter, it was not until efficient patrol measures made it uncomfortable for the submarines that they pushed out into the open ocean to pursue their nefarious work. The _Lusitania_ went down only eight miles from Old Head of Kinsale, in fifty fathoms of water. If we draw a line from Fastnet Rock to the Scilly Islands and from there to the westernmost extremity of France, we enclose an area in which the German submarines were particularly active. The soundings here run up to about sixty fathoms in some places, but the prevailing depth is less than fifty fathoms. In the North Sea, too, except for a comparatively narrow lane along the Norwegian coast--which, by the way, marked the safety lane of the German blockade zone--the chart shows fifty fathoms or under. If our salvors could reach down as far as that, most of the submarine victims could be reclaimed. But fifty fathoms means 300 feet, which is a formidable depth for salvage work. Only one vessel has ever been brought up from such a depth and that was a small craft, one of our submarines, the _F-4_, which sank off the coast of Hawaii four years ago. DIFFERENT WAYS OF SALVING A WRECK There are four well-known methods of raising a vessel that is completely submerged. Of course, if the ship is not completely submerged, the holes in her hull may be patched up, and then when her hull is pumped out, the sea itself will raise the ship, unless it be deeply embedded in sand or mud. If the vessel is completely submerged, the same process may be resorted to, but first the sides of the hull must be extended to the surface to keep the water from flowing in as fast as it is pumped out. It is not usual to build up the entire length of the ship. If the deck is in good condition, it may suffice to construct coffer-dams or walls around several of the hatches. But building up the sides of a ship, or constructing coffer-dams on the ship's deck is a difficult task, at best, because it must be done under water by divers. A record for this type of salvage work was established by the Japanese when they raised the battle-ship _Mikasa_ that lay in some eighty feet of water. Her decks were submerged to a depth of forty feet. It is doubtful that this salvage work could be duplicated by any other people of the world. The wonderful patriotism and loyalty of the Japanese race were called forth. It is no small task to build a large coffer-dam strong enough to withstand the weight of forty feet of water, or a pressure of a ton and a quarter per square foot, even when the work is done on the surface. Perfect discipline and organized effort of the highest sort were required. Labor is cheap in Japan and there was no dearth of men for the work. Over one hundred divers were employed. In addition to the coffer-dam construction much repair work was necessary. Marvelous acts of devotion and heroism were performed. It is rumored that in some places it was necessary for divers to close themselves in, cut their air supply-pipes and seal themselves off from the slightest chance of escape; and that there were men who actually volunteered to sacrifice their lives in this way for their beloved country and its young navy. Where, indeed, outside of the Land of the Rising Sun could we find such patriotic devotion! A second salvage method consists in building a coffer-dam not on the ship but around it, and then pumping this out so as to expose the ship as in a dry-dock. Such was the plan followed out in recovering the _Maine_. Obviously, it is a very expensive method and is used only in exceptional cases, such as this, in which it was necessary to make a post-mortem examination to determine what caused the destruction of the vessel. Neither of these methods of salvage will serve for raising a ship sunk in deep water. RAISING A SHIP ON AIR A salvage system that has come into prominence within recent years consists in pumping air into the vessel to drive the water out, thus making the boat light enough to float. This scheme can be used only when the deck and bulkheads of the boat are strongly built and able to stand the strain of lifting the wreck, and when the hole that sank the vessel is in or near the bottom, so as to allow enough airspace above it to lift the boat. The work of the diver in this case consists of closing hatches and bulkhead doors, repairing holes in the upper part of the hull, and generally strengthening the deck. It must be remembered that a deck is built to take the strain of heavy weights bearing down upon it. It is not built to be pushed up from beneath, so that frequently this method of salving is rendered impracticable because the deck itself cannot stand the strain. [Illustration: Climbing into an Armored Diving Suit] [Illustration: Lowering an Armored Diver into the Water] A more common salvage method consists in passing cables or chains under the wreck and attaching them to large floats or pontoons. The slack in the chains is taken up when the tide is low, so that on the turn of the tide the wreck will be lifted off the bottom. The partially raised wreck is then towed into shallower water, until it grounds. At the next low tide, the slack of the chains is again taken in, and at flood-tide the wreck is towed nearer land. The work proceeds step by step, until the vessel is moved inshore far enough to bring its decks awash; when it may be patched up and pumped out. Where the rise of the tide is not sufficient to be of much assistance, hydraulic jacks or other lifting-apparatus are used. [Illustration: A Diver's Sea Sled ready to be towed along the bed of the sea] [Illustration: The Sea Sled on Land showing the forward horizontal and after vertical rudders] SALVING THE U. S. SUBMARINE F-4 If the salvor could always be assured of clear weather, his troubles would be reduced a hundredfold, but at best it takes a long time to perform any work dependent upon divers, and the chances are very good when they are operating in an unsheltered spot, that a storm may come up at any time and undo the result of weeks and months of labor. This is what happened when the submarine _F-4_ was salved. After a month of trying effort the submarine was caught in slings hung from barges, lifted two hundred and twenty-five feet, and dragged within a short distance of the channel entrance of the harbor, where the water was but fifty feet deep. But just then a violent storm arose, which made the barges surge back and forth and plunge so violently that the forward sling cut into the plating of the submarine and crushed it. The wreck had to be lowered to the bottom and the barges cut free to save them from being smashed. At the next attempt to raise the _F-4_ pontoons were again used, but instead of being arranged to float on the surface, they were hauled down to the wreck and made fast directly to the hull of the submarine. Then when the water was forced out of the pontoons with compressed air, they came up to the surface, bringing the submarine with them. In this way all danger of damage due to sudden storms was avoided because water under the surface is not disturbed by storms overhead; and when the wreck was floated, the pontoons and submarine formed a compact unit. While this method of salvage seems like a very logical one for work in the open sea, one is apt to forget how large the pontoons must be to lift a vessel of any appreciable size. Not only must they support their own dead weight, together with that of the sunken vessel, but some allowance must usually be made for dragging the wreck out of the clutches of a sandy or muddy bottom. Imagine the work of building pontoons large enough to raise the _Lusitania_. They would have to have a combined displacement greater than that of the vessel itself, and they would have to be so large that they would be very unwieldy things to handle in a seaway. It is for this reason that submarine pontoons are not often used to take the entire weight of the vessel. So far they have been employed mainly to salve small ships and then only to take a portion of the weight, the principal work being done by large wrecking-cranes. Instead of horizontal pontoons it has been suggested that vertical pontoons be employed, so as to provide a greater lifting-power without involving the use of enormous unwieldy units. Ships are not built so that they can be picked up by the ends. Such treatment would be liable to break their backs in the middle. Were they built more like a bridge truss, the salvor's difficulties would be materially lessened. It would be a much simpler matter to raise a vessel with pontoons were it so constructed that the chains of the pontoon could be attached to each end of the hull. But because a ship is built to be supported by the water uniformly throughout its length, the salvor must use a large number of chains, properly spaced along the hull, so as to distribute the load uniformly and see that too much weight does not fall on this or that pontoon. The main problem, however, is to get hold of the wreck and this requires the services of divers, so that if there were no other limiting factor, the depth to which a diver may penetrate and perform his duties sets the mark beyond which salvage as now conducted is impossible. [Illustration: (C) International Film Service The Diving Sphere built for Deep Sea Salvage Operations] A common diver's suit does not protect the diver from hydraulic pressure. Only a flexible suit and a thin layer of air separates him from the surrounding water. This air must necessarily be of the same pressure as the surrounding water. The air that is pumped down to the diver not only serves to supply his lungs, but by entering his blood transmits its pressure to every part of his anatomy. As long as the external pressure is equalized by a corresponding pressure within him, the diver experiences no serious discomfort. In fact, when the pressure is not excessively high he finds it rather exhilarating to work under such conditions; for, with every breath, he takes in an abnormal amount of oxygen. When he returns to the surface he realizes that he has been working under forced draft. He is very much exhausted and he is very hungry. It takes a comparatively short time to build up the high internal pressure, which the diver must have in order to withstand the pressure of the water outside, but it is the decompression when he returns to the surface that is attended with great discomfort and positive danger. If the decompression is not properly effected, the diver will suffer agonies and even death from the so-called "Caisson Disease." [Illustration: The Pneumatic Breakwater--Submerged Air Tubes protecting a California Pier from Ocean Storms] A HUMAN SODA-WATER BOTTLE We know now a great deal more than we used to know about the effect of compressed air on the human system, and because of this knowledge divers have recently descended to depths undreamed of a few years ago. When a diver breathes compressed air, the oxygen is largely consumed and exhaled from the lungs in the form of carbon-dioxide, but much of the nitrogen is dissolved in the blood and does not escape. However, like a bottle of soda-water, the blood shows no sign of the presence of the gas as long as the pressure is maintained. But on a sudden removal of the pressure, the blood turns into a froth of nitrogen bubbles, just as the soda-water froths when the stopper of the bottle is removed. This froth interrupts the circulation. The release of pressure is felt first in the arteries and large veins. It takes some time to reach all the tiny veins, and serious differences of pressure are apt to occur that often result in the rupture of blood-vessels. The griping pains that accompany the "Caisson Disease" are excruciating. The only cure is to restore the blood to its original pressure by placing the patient in a hospital lock, or boiler-like affair, where compressed air may be admitted; and then to decompress the air very slowly. It is possible to relieve the pressure in a bottle of soda-water so gradually that the gas will pass off without the formation of visible bubbles, and that is what is sought in decompressing a diver. After careful research it has been found that the pressure may be cut down very quickly to half or even less of the original amount, but then the diver must wait for the decompression to extend to the innermost recesses of his being and to all the tiny capillaries of his venous system. In the salvage of the _F-4_ a diver went down 306 feet, and remained on the bottom half an hour. The pressure upon him was 135 pounds per square inch, or about 145 tons on the surface of his entire body. Some idea of what this means may be gained if we consider that the tallest office building in the world does not bear on its foundations with a greater weight than 215 pounds to the square inch or only about 50 per cent more than the crushing pressure this diver had to endure. It took the diver a very short time to go down. On coming up he proceeded comparatively rapidly until he reached a depth of 100 feet. There he found the bottom rung of a rope ladder. On it he was obliged to rest for several minutes before proceeding to the next rung. The rungs of this ladder were 10 feet apart, and on each rung the diver had to rest a certain length of time, according to a schedule that had been carefully worked out. At the top rung, for instance, only 10 feet from the surface, he was obliged to wait forty minutes. In all, it took him an hour and forty-five minutes to come up to the surface. The decompression was complete and he suffered no symptoms of the "Caisson Disease." But he was so exhausted from his efforts that he was unfit for work for several days. Yet the operations that he performed at the depth of 300 feet would not have taken more than a few minutes on the surface. A SUBMARINE REST-CHAMBER The Germans have paid a great deal of attention to deep-diving operations, and no doubt while their U-boats were sinking merchant ships German salvors were anticipating rich harvests after hostilities ended. One scheme they developed was a submarine rest-chamber which could be permanently located on the bottom of the sea close to the point where the salvage operations were to take place. This chamber consists of a large steel box which is supplied with air from the surface and in which divers may make themselves comfortable when they need a rest after arduous work. Entrance to the chamber is effected through a door in the floor. The pressure of the air inside prevents the water from rising into the chamber and flooding it. From this submarine base the divers may go out to the wreck, either equipped with the ordinary air-tube helmets or with self-regenerating apparatus which makes them independent of an air-supply for a considerable period of time. When the diver has worked for an hour or two, or when he is tired, he may return to this chamber, remove his helmet, eat a hearty meal, take a nap if he needs it, and then return to the salvage work without going through the exhausting operation of decompressing. CUTTING METAL UNDER WATER WITH A TORCH The work of the diver usually consists of far more than merely passing lines under a sunken hull. It is constantly necessary for him to cut away obstructing parts. He must sometimes use blasting-power. Pneumatic cutting-tools frequently come into play, but the Germans have lately devised an oxy-hydrogen torch for underwater use, with which the diver can cut metal by burning through it. This is accomplished by using a cup-shaped nozzle through which a blast of air is projected under such pressure that it blows away the water over the part to be cut. The oxygen and hydrogen jets are then ignited electrically, and the work of cutting the metal proceeds in the hole in the water made by the air-blast. A similar submarine torch has recently been developed by an American salvage company. It was employed successfully in cutting drainage-holes in the bulkheads of the _St. Paul_, which was raised in New York Harbor in the summer of 1918. EXPLORING THE SEA BOTTOM IN A DIVER'S SLED The diver's sled is still another interesting German invention. It is a sled provided with vertical and horizontal rudders, which is towed by means of a motor-boat at the surface. The diver, seated on the sled, and provided with a self-contained diving-suit, can direct the motor-boat by telephone and steer his sled up and down and wherever he chooses. And so without any physical exertion, he can explore the bottom of the sea and hunt for wrecks. ARMORED DIVING-SUITS From time to time attempts have been made to construct a diver's suit that will not yield to the pressure of the sea, so that the diver will not be subjected to the weight of the water about him, but can breathe air at ordinary atmospheric pressure. Curious armor of steel has been devised, with articulated arms and legs, in which the diver is completely encased. With the ordinary rubber suit, the diver usually has his hands bare, because he is almost as dependent upon the sense of touch as a blind man. But where the pressure mounts up to such a high degree that a metal suit must be used, no part of the body may be exposed. If a bare hand were extended out of the protecting armor it would immediately be mashed into a pulp and forced back through the opening in the arms of the suit. The best that can be done, then, is to furnish the arms of the suit with hooks or tongs or other mechanical substitutes for hands which will enable the diver to make fast to the wreck or various parts of it. But if a diver feels helpless in the bag of a suit now commonly worn, what would he do when encased in a steel boiler; for that is virtually what the armored suit is! A common mistake that inventors of armor units have made is to fail to consider the effects of the enormous hydraulic pressure on the joints of the suit. In order to make them perfectly tight, packings must be employed, and these are liable to be so jammed by the hydraulic pressure that it is well nigh impossible to articulate the limbs. Again, the construction of the suit should be such that when a limb is flexed it would not displace any more water than when in an extended position, and vice versa. A diver may find that he cannot bend his arm, because in doing so he would expand the cubical content of his armor by a few cubic inches, and to make room for this increment of volume it would be necessary for him to lift several hundred pounds of water. The hydraulic pressure will reduce the steel suit to its smallest possible dimensions, which may result either in doubling up the members or extending them rigidly. But these difficulties are not insuperable. There is no reason why a steel manikin cannot be constructed with a man inside to direct its movements. THE SALVOR'S SUBMARINE Other schemes have been devised to relieve the diver of abnormally high air-pressure. One plan is to construct a large spherical working-chamber strong enough to withstand any hydraulic pressure that might be encountered. This working-chamber is equipped with heavy glass ports through which the workers can observe their surroundings in the light of an electric search-light controlled from within the chamber. The sphere is to be lowered to the wreck from a barge, with which it will be in telephonic communication and from which it will be supplied with electric current to operate various electrically driven mechanisms. By means of electromagnets this sphere may be made fast to the steel hull of the vessel and thereupon an electric drill is operated to bore a hole in the ship and insert the hook of a hoisting-chain. This done, the sphere would be moved to another position, as directed by telephone and another chain made fast. The hoisting-chains are secured to sunken pontoons and after enough of the chains have been attached to the wreck the pontoons are pumped out and the wreck is raised. It is a pity that ship-builders have not had the forethought to provide substantial shackles at frequent intervals firmly secured to the framing. A sunken vessel is really a very difficult object to make fast to and the Patent Office has recorded many very fantastic schemes for getting hold of a ship's hull without the use of divers. One man proposes the use of a gigantic pair of ice-tongs; and there have been no end of suggestions that lifting-magnets be employed, but no one who has any idea of how large and how heavy such magnets must be would give these suggestions any serious consideration. But, after all, the chief obstacle to salvage in the open sea is the danger of storms; months of preparation and thousands of dollars' worth of equipment may be wiped out in a moment. FIGHTING THE WAVES WITH AIR However, there has been another recent development which may have a very important bearing on this problem of deep-sea salvage work. It has often been observed that a submerged reef, twenty or thirty feet below the surface, may act as a breakwater to stop the storming waves. An inventor who studied this phenomenon arrived at the theory that the reefs set up eddies in the water which break up the rhythm of the waves and convert them into a smother of foam just above the reef. Thereupon he conceived the idea of performing the same work by means of compressed air. He laid a pipe on the sea bottom, forty or fifty feet below the surface, and pumped air through it. Just as he had expected, the line of air bubbles produced exactly the same effect as the submerged reef. They set up a vertical current of water which broke up the waves as soon as they struck this barrier of air. The "pneumatic breakwater," as it is called, has been tried out on an exposed part of the California coast, to protect a long pier used by an oil company. It has proved so satisfactory that the same company has now constructed a second breakwater about another pier near by. There is no reason why a breakwater of this sort should not be made about a wreck to protect the workers from storms. Where the water is very deep, it would not be necessary to lay the compressed-air pipe on the bottom, but it could be carried by buoys at a convenient depth. Summing up the situation, then, there are two serious bars to the successful salvage of ships sunk in the open sea--the wild fury of the waves on the surface; and the silent, remorseless pressure of the deep. The former is the more to be feared; and if the waves really can be calmed, considerably more than half the problem is solved. As for the pressure of the sea, it can be overcome, as we have seen, either by the use of special submarine mechanisms, or of man-operated manikins or even of unarmored divers. We have reached a very interesting stage in the science of salvage, with the promise of important developments. Fifty fathoms no longer seems a hopeless depth. Even in times of peace the sea exacts a dreadful toll of lives and property. Before the war the annual loss by shipwreck around the British Isles alone was estimated at forty-five million dollars. But the war, although it was frightfully destructive to shipping, may in the long run save more vessels than it sank; for it has given us sound-detectors which should remove the danger of collisions in foggy weather, and the wireless compass, which should keep ships from running off the course and on the rocks. And now, if salvage engineering develops as it should, the sea will be made to give up not only much of the wealth it swallowed during the war, but also many of the rich cargoes of gold and silver it has been hoarding since the days of the Spanish galleon. INDEX Air, fighting waves, 334 raising ship, on, 319 war in, 123 Airplane, ambulance, 146 armored, 139 artillery-spotting, 131 camera, 173 cartridges, 131 classes of work, 127 fighting among clouds, 137 flying boats, 144 gasolene tank, 130 giant, 132 hospital, 146 launching from ship, 303 Liberty motor, 142 scouting, 125 scouts, 128 speed of, 134 spotting, 177 training spotters, 180 wireless telephone, 194 See also Seaplane Ambulance airplane, 146 Armored diving-suit, 330 Arms and armor, 111 Artillery, hand, 23 Atmosphere, shooting beyond, 64 Audion, 185 Balloon, Blimp, 260 helium, 164 historical, 148 hydrogen, 150 Balloon, kite, 174 principles, 150 record flight, 65 Barbed wire, 15 cylinders, 17 gate, trench, 9 gates through, 15 shelling, 16 Barge for towing seaplanes, 302 Barrage, grenade, 27 mine, 292 Battle-fields, miniature, 180 Blimp, 260 Blisters on ships, 307 Boats, electric, 308 Eagle, 301 flying, 144 surface, 298 Bombs to destroy barbed wire, 16 Breakwater, pneumatic, 335 Browning, John M., 56 Buildings, shadowless, 227 Caisson disease, 325 Caliber, 68 Camera, airplane, 173 Camouflage and camoufleurs, 211 buildings, 227 grass, 229 horse, 223 land, 222 roads, 225 Camouflage, ships, 211 Cartridges, aircraft guns, 131 Catapults, 36 Caterpillar tractor, 109 Caves, 8 Coffer-dam, salvage, 318 Color, analyzing, 229 screens, 229 Compass, wireless, 201 Convoy, 267 Countermines, 17 Deep sea, conditions in, 312 Deep water diving, 327 Depth bombs, 265 Devil's eggs, 276 Diesel engine, 240 Direction-finder, 205 Dirigible, see Balloon Disease, caisson, 325 Diver, armored suit, 330 caisson disease, 325 rest chamber, 328 sled, 330 submarine torch, 329 suit, 324 Diving, deep, 324 record depth, 327 Duck-boards, 9 Dugouts, 7 Dummy heads of papier mâché, 13 Eagle boats, 301 Egg-laying submarines, 287 Eggs, Devil's, 276 Electric motor-boat, 308 Engine, Diesel, 240 Field-guns, 81 Fire broom, 105 liquid, 103 Forts, machine-gun, 58 Fuse, grenade, 28 Gas, 85 American, 102 Gas attack, boomerang, 92 first, 89 Gas, chlorine, 87 diphosgene, 96 exterminating rats, 94 grenades, 26 helium, 164 hydrogen, 150 lock, 97 masks, 99 mustard, 98 phosgene, 93 pouring like water, 86 shell, 95 sneezing, 98 tear, 95 vomiting, 98 Gasolene-tank, airplane, 130 Gate, barbed wire, trench, 9 Gates through barbed wire, 15 Gatling gun, 43 Geologists, Messines Ridge, 19 Glass, non-shattering, 100 Grapnel shell, 16 Graveyard, submarine, 314 Grenade, disk-shaped, 33 fuse, 28 gas, 26 hair brush, 34 history of, 23 Mills, 29 parachute, 31 range of, 25 rifle, 28 throwing implement, 27 Grenade, wind-vane safety device, 32 Gun, aircraft, 131 American, 50-mile, 63 big, hiding, 226 caliber, 68 disappearing, 77 double-end, 145 18-inch, monitors, 306 elastic, 73 field, 81 42-centimeter, 79 how made, 76 120-mile, 70 long range, German, 62 non-recoil, 145 on submarine, 249 16-inch, coast defense, 78 Skoda, 81 spotting by sound, 181 three-second life, 73 12-inch, submarine, 251 ways of increasing range, 67 wire-wound, 76 Hand-grenade, see Grenade Helium, 164 Hospital, airplane, 147 Horizon, seeing beyond, 219 Howitzer, 79 Hush ships, 304 Hydroaëroplanes, see Seaplanes Hydrogen, weight of, 150 Hydrophone, 270 Illusions, optical, 215 Kilometer, length in miles, 6 Kite balloons, 174 Kite, water, 283 Liberty motor, 142 Liquid-fire, 103 Locomotives, gasolene, 10 _Lusitania_, 316 Machine-gun, 112 airplane, 127 Benèt-Mercié, 52 Browning, 53 Colt, 44 forts, 58 Gatling, 43 history, 41 Hotchkiss, 49 Lewis, 50 Maxim, 42 water-jacket, 47 worth in rifles, 58 Machine-rifle, 55 Magnets, lifting, salvage, 334 Maps, making with camera, 175 Marne, first battle of, 4 Messines Ridge, mine, 19 Metal-cutting under water, 329 Microphone detectors, mines, 18 Mine-field, North Sea, 290 Mine laying, North Sea, 292 Mine-laying submarine, 287 Mine railroad, 294 Mine-sweeping, 281 Mines, 276 anchored, 278 and counter-mines, 17 automatic sounding, 278 drift of, 285 electric, 277 floating, 284 Messines Ridge, 19 Mines, paravanes, 288 Monitors, 306 Mortars, 79 depth bomb, 266 flying, 23 Mortars, See also Trench mortars Mother-ships for airplanes, 305 Motor-boat, electric, 308 sea Tank, 299 Motor torpedo-boats, 298 Mystery ships, 220 Net, North Sea, 290 Ocean currents, 285 Optical illusions, 215 Oxy-hydrogen torch, submarine, 329 Paint in war, 209 Papier mâché heads, 13 Papier mâché horse, 223 Parachute, 175 grenade, 31 search-light shell, 84 Paravanes, 288 Periscope, submarine, 244 trench, 11 Pill-boxes, 59 Pneumatic breakwater, 335 Pontoons, salvage, 320 Propeller, shooting through, 136 Radio, see Wireless Railroad, mine, 294 Railways, trench, 10 Range-finder, 170 Range, getting the, 169 Range of guns, increasing, 67 Range, torpedo, 213 Rats, freeing trenches of, 94 Rifle grenade, 28 safety device, 32 Rifle, machine, 55 Rifle stand, fixed, 14 Roads, camouflage, 225 Salvage, 310 diving, 324 ice-tongs, 334 lifting-magnets, 334 methods, 317 pneumatic, 319 pontoons, 320 shackles on ships, 333 submarine F-4, 321 submarine sphere, 332 Scouts, airplane, 128 Sea, deep, conditions, 312 Sea gulls finding submarines, 258 Sea lions locating submarines, 259 Sea tank, 299 Seaplane, 143 automatic, 145 submarine patrol, 259 torpedo, 145 towing-barges, 302 Search-light shell, 84 Shackles, salvage, 333 Shadowless buildings, 227 Shell, gas, 95 grapnel, 16 search-light, 84 shrapnel, 83 Stokes mortar, 39 Shield on wheels, 114 Ships, airplane, 304 Ships, blisters, 307 camouflage, 211 "clothes-line," 220 convoy, 267 hush, 304 making visible, 230 monitors, 306 mystery, 220 railroads on, 294 sunk by submarines, 310 Ships, see also Salvage Shrapnel shell, 83 Sled, submarine, 330 Smoke screen, 262 Sniper, locating, 13 Sniperscopes, 12 Sound, detecting submarines, 269 Sound detectors, mines, 18 Sound, spotting by, 181 Sphere, salvor's submarine, 332 Spotting by sound, 181 Spotting gun-fire, 177 Submarine, blindness, 244 chasers, 255 construction, 234 depth bombs, 265 egg-laying, 287 engines, 246 F-4, salving, 321 getting best of, 253 graveyard, 314 guns on, 249 history, 232 hydrophone, 270 mine-field, 290 mine-laying, 287 net, 290 oil-tank, 236 periscope, 244 reclaiming victims of, 310 rest chamber, 328 salvage vessel, 332 sea-gulls, 258 sea-lions, 259 seaplanes, 259 ships sunk, 310 sled, 330 steam-driven, 250 torch, 329 torpedo, 246 12-inch gun, 251 vs. submarine, 269 Super-guns, 62 Tank, 107 American, 122 flying, 139 French, 119 German, 120 one-man, 114 sea, 299 small, 121 Telegraphy, rapid, 199 Telephone, New York to San Francisco, 186 wireless, 178 _Titanic_, 314 TNT (trinitrotoluol), 18 Torch, submarine, 329 Torpedo, 299 boats, motor, 298 electrically steered, 308 construction, 246 getting range, 213 proof ships, 306 seaplane, 145 Towing-barge, seaplane, 302 Trajectory, 22 Trench, gas-lock, 97 Trench mortar, 36 pneumatic, 37 Stokes, 38 Trench railways, 10 Trench warfare, 4 Trenches, 21 barbed wire gates, 9 duck-boards, 9 Tunnels, mines, 17 to observation posts, 12 U-boats, see Submarines Villages, underground, 7 Walking-machine, 108 War, paint, 209 Water kites, 283 Waves, fighting with air, 334 Wireless compass, 201 spy detector, 200 Wireless telegraph, rapid, 199 Wireless telegraphy explained, 188 Wireless telephone, 178 airplane, 184 Wireless telephony across Atlantic, 192 Woolworth Building, falling from, 135 Wrecks, see Salvage Zeppelin and Lowe's balloon, 149 Zeppelin balloon, construction, 156 Zeppelin, suspended observer, 162 Zeppelin's failures and successes, 154 * * * * * * Transcribers' note: Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained. Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained. Some illustrations have been slightly repositioned to improve their appearance in eBooks. Page 76: "eight tenths of an inch" may be a misprint for "eight ten-thousandths of an inch". Page 100: "inhaled air" was misprinted as "inhaled aid". Page 104: "would send the stream" was misprinted as "sent". Page 113: "Secretely" was printed that way. Page 209: "psycologists" was printed that way. 
60462	----	CONSERVATION BY CHARLES L. FONTENAY _The people of Earth had every means of power at their command, yet they used none of it. Was it due to lack of knowledge and technique; or was there a more subtle, dangerous reason?_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, April 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The yellow sands of the spaceport stretched, glaring and empty, in every direction. There was no sign of life from the little group of buildings a mile away. In the control room of the tall, round-nosed starship, technicians labored and officers conferred while the red needles that showed rocket tube temperatures sank slowly toward zero on their dials. "Maybe Earth's depopulated, Tom," suggested John Gray, the executive officer. He ran his fingers through close-cropped red hair and peered through the port with thoughtful gray eyes. "Hardly, John," replied Commander Tom Wallace, frowning. "The scout rockets showed some good-sized cities, with smoke." "I was off duty then and haven't had time to read the log," apologized John. "What gets me is that they should have a robot-controlled space relay station orbiting outside the atmosphere, and a deserted spaceport. It just doesn't jibe." "That's why we have to be just as careful as though we were landing on an alien planet," said the commander. "We don't know what the conditions on Earth are now. How long has it been, John?" "Two hundred and fifty-eight years," answered John. "Ten years, our time." "Pick three for briefing, John. This is going to be a disappointing homecoming for the crew, but we'll have to send out an exploration party." The landing ramp slid out from just above the rocket tubes, and the armored car clanked down to the sand. John steered it across the wide expanse of the spaceport toward the group of buildings. Above and behind him, a woman swept the terrain with binoculars from the car's observation turret. In the body of the car, another woman and a man stood by the guns. The buildings were just as lifeless when they drew near, but there was an ominous atmosphere about them. They were windowless, of heavy concrete. Through slits in their domed roofs, the noses of a dozen cannon angled toward the ship. "John, there's someone there," said the girl in the turret, tensely. "You can't see it through the windshield, but there are some smaller guns poking out near the ground and they're following us." John stopped the car and switched on the loudspeaker. "Hello, the spaceport!" His amplified voice boomed out across the sand and reverberated against the buildings. "Is anybody there? We come in peace." There was no reply. The big guns still angled toward the starship, the little ones focussed on the car. "They may be robot-controlled," suggested Phil Maxwell, the gunner on the side of the car toward the forts. "Any sign of an entrance, Ann?" "Nothing but the gunports," replied the girl in the turret. "Don't fool with them, John," said Commander Wallace, who was tuned in from the ship on the car's communications system. "If they're robot-controlled, they'll be booby-trapped. Move out of range and continue with your exploration." * * * * * Two days later, the car emerged from the desert into comparatively fertile country. The four explorers found a broken concrete highway and followed it between rolling, treeless grasslands. Near dusk, they saw smoke on the horizon--and ran into a roadblock. A segment of the highway had been thrown up into a ten-foot wall, barring their progress. Over the edge of the wall, the muzzles of heat-guns pointed at them as they brought the car to a halt some distance away. John got the commander on the car radio. "We could swing around it, but we don't know whether they have vehicles that could outrun us," he reported. "And my conception of our mission is to establish contact." "That's right," agreed Tom. "But stay in the car until you get a friendly reaction. Then you're on your own--and I'm afraid you're expendable, John." John switched on the loudspeaker and made overtures to the roadblock. After a moment, a lone figure stepped around the edge of the mound of earth and concrete and approached the car slowly. The man was dressed in the drab, baggy uniform of a professional soldier. "If you come in peace, leave your vehicle and identify yourself," called the soldier. "You will not be harmed." "Take over, Phil," ordered John. He slipped from the driver's seat and climbed through the turret. Jumping to the ground, he approached the soldier, his arms swinging freely at his sides. "John Gray, executive officer of the starship Discovery, returned from a colonizing mission to Deneb III," said John, holding out his hand. The soldier ignored the out-stretched hand, saluting formally instead. "Arrive in peace," he said. "If you will leave your vehicle here, you will be escorted as deevs to Third Sarge Elfor, commander of the town of Pebbro." John returned to the car and held a brief consultation with his companions. Although he was in command of the exploration party, planetary operations of the starship's personnel were conducted on a somewhat democratic basis. The commander listened in, but left them to their own judgment. "Communications blackout for a while then, commander," said John. "I see no reason to let them know about the personal radios right now." The quartet emerged from the car wearing small packs of emergency rations and equipment. Behind the roadblock, the sight that met their eyes was unexpected. The robot-controlled space relay station, the heavily armed pillboxes at the spaceport and the heat-guns poked across the roadblock at them, all had made it logical to anticipate a powerfully equipped task force. Instead, they found a troop of 19th century cavalrymen, armed for the most part with 13th century weapons. There were no more than a dozen heat-guns in evidence, and their bearers also carried short swords and long-bows with quivers of arrows. The four from the starship were given mounts and, with no outward indications of hostility, were escorted to the town whose smoke they had seen. The town was another surprise. They had expected either a fortress or an outpost of brick and log buildings. It was neither. The buildings were tremendous cubes and domes of steel and concrete, sleek and modern, windowed with heavy glass bricks. Skeins of cables, coils and loops of aerials bespoke the power that must be at their command. But the people walked. Not a car or a truck was to be seen. Men and women in the gray military uniforms walked or trotted up and down the broad paved streets. Occasionally a horse-drawn wagon passed, hauling a load of vegetables or manure. It was as though a cavalry post of the old West carried on its slow-moving duties in a super-modern setting. * * * * * Third Sarge Elfor was a middle-aged man of military bearing, with a sandy handle-bar mustache. He sat behind a huge desk in one of the town's biggest buildings. There were elevators, open and deserted, in the lobby, but they had to climb ten flights of stairs to reach his gleaming office. "The Topkick sends you greetings from Kansity, capital of the Earth," he said. "We have watched your ship since it approached the outer atmosphere. We have listened to your communications since you left your ship, and have been interested in the indications that you are of Earth but unfamiliar with it. We are interested also in your use of a vehicle that can travel for three days without refueling. But we do not find a record of any ship named Discovery, and we do not know what you mean by Deneb III." "The Discovery left Earth 258 years ago," replied John. "We established a colony on Deneb III, the third planet of the star Deneb, before returning to Earth." "You are the descendents of the ship's original crew, then?" "No," said John. He explained as well as he could the extension of subjective time at near-light speeds. "Mmm. And you have left a colony on a planet of another star." They could not tell from the Third Sarge's tone what he thought. After a moment's meditation, he said: "We shall talk again tomorrow. Tonight you are our guests and will be accorded all courtesy as deevs. Are you husbands and wives, or shall we billet men and women separately?" "However it suits your convenience," answered John. "You may billet us all together if you prefer." Third Sarge Elfor took them at their word. They were conducted to a single room, evidently in the heart of officers' quarters. Here again they ran into the same anomaly that had impressed them since they landed. There were gleaming electric fixtures, but orderlies brought them tallow candles as dusk fell. There was plumbing of the most advanced order, but when they turned the taps no water came. The orderlies brought buckets full of hot water for their baths in the bright-tiled tub. "I don't understand this at all, Ann," said John. He was towelling himself vigorously, while she brushed the quartet's clothing clean of the dust of the road. Phil lolled in luxurious undress on one of the four beds, reading a book from the well-stocked bookcase. Fran, preparing for her bath, was binding up her hair before a full-length mirror. "Even the cold water doesn't run a drop." "Plumbing gets out of order in the best of families, John," Ann reminded him with a smile. He glanced affectionately at her. Blue-eyed, black-haired Ann had been John's companion in the six-months exploration of Deneb III, and their seven-year-old son now was learning to read in the starship's school. John and Ann clashed like flint and steel in the crowded confines of the starship and consequently maintained no association while aspace. But they were a happy team in the free, challenging atmosphere of a planet. "Electricity, too, at the same time?" he asked. "And it's not just that. The whole place reeks of latent power and high science, but they use an absolute minimum of it." "I've got a partial solution to the garrison state of affairs and the military set-up, anyhow," said Phil from the bed. "They've had a war since we've been gone." "That's no surprise," commented Fran. Chubby, blonde Fran and dark, stocky Phil had been companions for a year aboard the Discovery. They had volunteered jointly for the exploration mission. "They should have had several of them in 250 years." "This was an interplanetary war," retorted Phil mildly. "Or rather, it wasn't war, but occupation of the Earth by the enemy. The Jovians were smart enough not to attack Earth directly, but threw their strength at the crucial moment behind the weaker side in the war between Eurasia and the American Alliance. Then they moved in to take over the war-weakened victors." "The classic role of the strong neutral," commented John drily. "What were the Jovians like?" "Evidently everybody on Earth knew from first-hand experience when this book was written a century ago. There are no descriptions and no illustrations. There are some hints, though: methane-breathing, cold-loving. They had domed, refrigerated cities." "What are you reading--a history book?" asked Ann curiously. "Yes, it's the newest book of the whole lot, and the only one that isn't brittle and dog-eared. At that, it's the worst-made book of them all. It looks like it was printed on a hand-press and bound by hand." "Pioneers, oh pioneers!" trilled Fran softly. "But what are they doing in the midst of all this technology?" * * * * * Supper in the officers' mess was a glittering affair in the military tradition. Their conversation developed some new revelations. Third Sarge Elfor was commander of the whole area that surrounded Pebbro for hundreds of miles, including the abandoned spaceport. The Topkick was ruler of the nation, and the nation was the top echelon in a co-operating hierarchy of countries of the world. For some reason, the simplified terms for enlisted men's grades had replaced higher ranks in Earth's military systems: such titles as "sarge" and "topkick." Inquiry developed that none of the officers was familiar with such designations as "captain" and "commander." "But why is the spaceport deserted?" asked Phil. "Is space travel at such a low ebb on Earth now?" "You are mistaken in thinking the port deserted," replied Elfor. "The big guns in the pillboxes are zeroed on your ship. If it tries to blast off, it will be destroyed." There was no enmity in his tone, no threat. It was a simple statement of fact. He didn't elaborate, and the four from the starship discreetly asked no more about it. After the meal, they retired with Elfor and several members of his staff to a quiet lounge. Like every other place they had seen in the building, it was lit with candelabra. They relaxed in comfortable, leather-covered chairs and the men enjoyed the long-forgotten luxury of good cigars. White-aproned servitors brought them wine in fragile, long-stemmed glasses. "You asked about space travel from Earth," said Elfor. "Yes, you might call it at a low ebb. Yours is the first ship to blast down in fifty years, except the scout ships in the Jupiter sector. "It is such an unusual occurrence that the Topkick is being informed daily of developments. When the men of your starship have been assured of our peaceful intentions, it will be hangared underground and the personnel quartered here until further orders from the Topkick. Meanwhile, you are the deevs of the hour and we shall drink to your return to Earth." He stood and raised his glass. They all arose. The glasses clinked together. "Conserve!" shouted the Third Sarge and gulped his wine. It was a warm moment. For the first time, John felt the genuine glow, the thrill of homecoming, as he and Phil drained their glasses and performed the ancient rite of the spacemen when he sets foot on Earth once more. As in one motion, they hurled the empty glasses through the open door, to smash to pieces against the farther wall of the adjoining corridor. There was a second crashing tinkle on the heels of the first as the glasses of the women followed them closely. It was only when he turned back to Elfor, his face alight, that John realized something was wrong. The Third Sarge stood with his mouth open in astonishment. There was something of horror on the faces of the other Earthmen. Dead silence hung in the room. "Sleep in peace," said Elfor at last, in a strained voice. He turned on his heel and left the room. The staff members followed, coldly. "Well, what do you make of that?" asked John, turning to the others with outspread hands. "Do you suppose those glasses were valuable heirlooms or something?" "They looked like ordinary wine-glasses to me," said Fran. "I don't get it, but it looks like we slipped up somewhere." The orderly who escorted them to their room cast an occasional side-long glance, full of awe, at them. Their heat-guns had been taken from their room. "I don't know what we're in for, Tom," John said gravely into his pocket transmitter when he had tuned in to the ship. "This place is the biggest mess of contradictions I ever ran into. You'd think from the way they live that it's a decadent society living on the ruins of a former civilization. "The perplexing thing is that they obviously have power and know how to use it, but don't." "Your job is to find the motivation, John," replied the commander. "Remember, we couldn't understand the underground living habits of the Deneb IV natives until we lost half a search party in one of their semi-annual meteor showers. Do you have any recommendations for the ship?" "I'd advise you blasting off and taking an orbit," answered John, "but every gun at the spaceport is trained on the ship. I wouldn't take any chances that they don't have atomic weapons. Despite these swords and spears, we've seen several regulation heat-guns around here." "It might interest you to know that they're keeping us awake aboard with a battery of spotlights on us all night," said Tom drily. "Spotlights." John swore softly. "And all we have to see by are candles!" They didn't sleep well that night. They had the distinct impression that armed guards clanked by occasionally outside in the corridor. * * * * * There was no indication that they were prisoners the next day, however. Third Sarge Elfor and the other officers were cordial at breakfast and lunch, although they caught some quizzical glances directed at them from time to time. Their movements were not hampered. They were given the run of the town. After noon their armored car was brought in, hauled by four teams of horses. Flanked by a troop of soldiers, it was pulled around a corner and vanished from their sight. "If they're so curious about how it runs, why aren't they quizzing us instead of letting us go on a sight-seeing tour?" wondered Ann, staring after the disappearing vehicle. "I've built up a theory on these Earthmen...." began Phil. But he was interrupted as an officer and a squad of soldiers approached them. The officer saluted smartly. "Deev John Gray, Third Sarge Elfor sends greetings and desires that you confer with him. The others will be free to continue their inspection of the military city of Pebbro." "Very well," agreed John. "Ann, you'd better come along with me to take notes on the conference. We'll see you two tonight, if not sooner." He motioned to the officer to lead the way, and the group went up the street, leaving Phil and Fran standing in the shadow of a towering building. "What's your theory, Phil?" asked Fran. "Simple," he answered. "The Jovian war wiped out civilization. They've just climbed back up part of the way, but they still don't know how to operate the machinery and use the power they have available." "I don't know about that," said Fran doubtfully. "They seem to know how to handle those cannon and searchlights at the spaceport all right." "Automatic control, probably, or--" Phil paused. He was peering through a barred window at street level. "Say, Fran, look here! Unless I miss my guess, this is a central power station!" Fran stooped to look. "I think you're right," she said. "But it's deserted." "Proof of my theory," he said triumphantly. "Now, if we can just find a door somewhere...." * * * * * John and Ann had been back from a very routine conference with Elfor for more than an hour, and were enjoying the informality of the officers' cocktail lounge in their building. They were aroused by a commotion in the street outside and, along with several off-duty officers in the lounge, ran to the window to see what was up. Phil and Fran, seated in a military jeep, were surrounded by excited soldiers. Some sort of argument was in progress, and John and Ann heard the word "credentials" mentioned. Just as several of the soldiers, with drawn swords, dragged the couple from the jeep, one of the officers from the lounge hurried to the scene. The soldiers stood aside and saluted. There was a heated discussion, with much gesticulating, then Phil and Fran were released and headed for the lounge. The officer got into the jeep and shifted gears. All the soldiers whipped out their swords and stood rigid, presenting arms, as he drove it to the curb at the opposite side of the street. Then he turned off the engine and got out. A guard was posted around it, and a little later a team of horses arrived to pull it away. "How did you people get into such a predicament?" asked John when the show was over and the four of them were enjoying drinks. "Oh, I don't think it was as serious as it looked," said Phil lightly. "We ran across a whole garage full of jeeps. We drove that one all over town before this gang stopped us and wanted to see our written authority for driving it. Everybody else saluted us. That's the military mind for you." "Didn't it occur to you that their objections might be something other than mere military regulations?" asked John in some asperity. "Phil has a theory--" began Fran, but Phil silenced her with a shake of the head. "My theory can wait until I have proof for it, and I expect that in short order," said Phil, winking at Fran. "We've made good use of our time while you and Ann were in conference." Phil and Fran were eager to know what John and Ann had learned from their conference with Elfor. "Not much," he confessed. "Elfor is pretty close-mouthed. He's more anxious to learn about us than to give us information about their set-up. "We did find out, though, that they've located the records of the Discovery's departure in the archives of Kansity. There seems to be something irregular about it, but I couldn't get Elfor to go into detail." The first hint John and Ann had of Phil's method of proving his theory was when he quietly stripped and went into the bathroom as they were preparing for supper that evening. Ann was about to remind him he had forgotten to get the orderly to bring his bath water, when they heard the sound of a shower roaring. All three crowded to the door, to find Phil luxuriating under a steaming downpour. "What goes on here?" demanded John. "Phil, how did you know they'd started the water pumps?" Phil smiled triumphantly. "Try the lights," he suggested. The others trooped back into the bedroom and Ann flicked the switches. White light blazed in the room, overpowering the feeble gleam of the candles. "What is this, Fran?" asked John. "You were with Phil." "We found proof of Phil's theory that these people just don't know how to operate their own machinery," replied Fran happily. "We found their main pumping station. It was in good shape, and it didn't take us long to get the engines started and the main switches thrown." The electric lights suddenly faded and died, leaving them in candle-light again. At the same time, the sound of the shower gurgled to a stop in the bathroom. Phil appeared at the door with a towel, dripping. "Don't tell me their machinery's given out so soon," he growled. "Phil, this is no time to talk about discipline," snapped John angrily, "but you and Fran probably have pulled something a lot worse than the jeep this time. Neither of you is qualified in social psychology, but even so you should have been able to read the signs that they do know how to operate their machines. For some reason, they just don't operate them." In less than five minutes, Third Sarge Elfor appeared at their door with a squad of armed men. All of these soldiers carried heat-guns. "Two of you were observed in the vicinity of the power station today," said Elfor. "You are warned that you are suspected of having activated the power supply of the military city of Pebbro." "We don't deny that," admitted John carefully. "We are ignorant of your customs, and hope no harm has been done." "Your claim to ignorance will be determined at a formal hearing," retorted Elfor sternly. "We have given you the benefit of every doubt and treated you as honored deevs. I regret that this makes it necessary that all of you be placed under arrest. Your meal will be served to you in your quarters." As soon as Elfor had gone, leaving armed guards outside their door, John tuned in the starship on his pocket transmitter. "I would have advised against Phil's action, in view of our lack of understanding of the situation," he reported to Commander Wallace. "But I confess I wouldn't have anticipated that the result would be so extreme. "I can't fathom their reactions, Tom. In a crazy sort of way, I suppose they fit in with all the other contradictions of their social set-up. Have you had any luck with the ship's calculator?" "Not enough data," answered Tom. "Maybe this new stuff will help, and you might scrape for everything else you can transmit. I'd hate to try a rescue operation, because that might force us to head back for Deneb III. But if they don't decide to blast the ship in the next hour or so, there's a chance we can pull out of this trap at our end." John did not ask for details, for he knew their conversation probably was monitored. * * * * * The four of them sat up half the night poring over the books in their room. They gleaned nothing except from the "history" Phil had been reading the night before. Unfortunately, it was not a general history, but the flowery story of a high military family. The sort of references they found were, "after the Jovian invaders had been driven from Earth" and "Second Sarge Vesix participated in the bombardment that destroyed the Jovian tyrants." No details. What did emerge from their study was a picture of the rise of a military aristocracy on the ashes of an earlier civilization which had been ground to pieces under the heels of alien rulers. There was good news from the starship at dawn. "We're orbiting," said Commander Wallace with quiet pride. "Shortly after I talked with you last night, they called on us to surrender or be blasted. I asked time for a conference of officers and promised to fire a rocket from the nose if we decided to surrender. "I fired the rocket all right, but it was an instantaneous smoke screen rocket. I still don't know whether their guns are manned or robot-controlled, but I gambled that their firing was keyed to the sight of the ship blasting off instead of to vibration. We were half a mile up before they could swing into action, and we didn't get a scratch." A rescue mission with one of the scout rockets was too risky against the strong forces of the Earthmen. Tom mentioned that fast planes had followed them into the stratosphere. But one thing was done for the imprisoned four. Soon after breakfast, they were taken under guard to a Spartan courtroom, presided over by Third Sarge Elfor. "We have received a warning from your colleagues," Elfor said grimly. "They broadcast to us a short time ago that if harm came to you, this city and others will be destroyed before they leave the solar system. In case you knew of this and it has in any way raised your hopes, I wish to remind you that Earth's cities have been destroyed before. This threat will not affect our decision to mete strict justice to you. "You are charged with being enemies of the people of Earth, and with having landed on Earth under false colors with the intent of sabotage and espionage. Your prosecutor will be Fifth Tech Jatoo, representing the nations of Earth. You will be permitted to speak in your own defense." Jatoo was a slender, thin-faced man with the air of an experienced attorney. "The governments of Earth make these charges against the joint defendants," he began matter-of-factly: "That they are members of a rebellious and traitorous group who are allied with the Jovians and maintain an illegal, secret base on some planet or moon of the solar system; that they came here under the guise of strangers, with the specific intent of espionage and sabotage of Earth's defense against the Jovian enemy; and that they actually began such operations. "We shall present the following major evidence in support of these charges: "First, that the defendants did travel from the Numex spaceport to the military town of Pebbro in a vehicle, the motive power of which is still unknown but which obviously must utilize fuel, in violation of the conservation laws; "Second, that the defendants' colleagues did not approach the peoples of Earth in peace, but remained enfortressed in an armed space vessel; "Third, that the defendants Phil Alcorn and Fran Golden did throw the switches activating the electrical system and powered water system of the military town of Pebbro, that the above-named two defendants did utilize a military power vehicle for pleasure purposes and that all the defendants did unnecessarily destroy glass drinking vessels, all in violation of the conservation laws; "And, fourth, that the starship Discovery, listed in ancient records as having departed on a colonizing mission to the third planet of the star Deneb, was not scheduled to return to Earth for another seventy-five years and therefore could not be the ship in which the defendants arrived, as claimed." Elfor inclined his head toward the quartet from the starship, who sat behind a long table on the side of the room opposite Jatoo. "You may state what your defense will be," he said. "Our defense to the first three items of evidence," answered John, who had been taking notes, "is that we have been absent from Earth for more than 250 Earth-years and that we were, and are, ignorant of your laws and customs. Thus, we are innocent of intent to violate them. Our defense to the fourth item of evidence is that certain improvements were made in the engines of the starship Discovery while colonization of Deneb III was in progress, making it possible for us to return to Earth ahead of schedule. Our defense to all three charges made against us is that they are false." It was a monotonous trial, with a parade of witnesses brought to the stand by Jatoo, all of whom testified to seeing the defendants perform one or more acts of "unconservation." "In the courts of Earth, a case can be decided only on the evidence presented," said Third Sarge Elfor when John had offered his brief defense for the quartet. "The defendants have presented no evidence, only argument. The fact that the defendants' clothing corresponds to that in use two and a half centuries ago cannot be considered competent, as it could be copied easily. "For the safety of Earth, the defendants are found guilty and remanded for immediate execution. In view of the existence of doubt as to their treasonable intent and their previous status as deevs, they are accorded the honor of death by power weapons. Conserve!" * * * * * Shocked and silent, the four were led to a courtyard outside. As they walked, John switched on his pocket transmitter with a casual, almost unnoticeable gesture, and murmured a report to the ship. "I'm sorry, John," said the commander, his voice tense with emotion. "There's no possibility of rescue, and I know it's small satisfaction to you that your deaths will be avenged." The quartet's hands were bound behind them and they were lined up against a wall. The Third Sarge, attended by a good-sized retinue, stood at ease nearby, smoking a cigar, to direct the execution personally. "'Power weapons' to them apparently mean regulation heat-guns," remarked Phil, almost jocularly. "That's what the fellow has." A soldier was standing square in the center of the courtyard, a pistol dangling from his grip. At a signal from Elfor, he lifted it. "Looks like I'm first," said John, bracing himself. "Be seeing you, somewhere." He gritted his teeth for the wave of unbearable heat that was sure to come. Instead, there was a silent explosion in the midst of the courtyard and the soldier who had held the gun writhed on the ground, incinerated. "John! The gun exploded!" cried Phil in amazement. "I've only seen that happen once before!--Remember that crewman who wouldn't take the trouble to keep his gun clean?" John was thinking fast. "I remember," he said in a low voice. His heart was still racing from the reaction of his near brush with death. "There's a pattern here. If I could only get a chance to talk over things sensibly with this Third Sarge...." There was great excitement among the soldiery. Several of the men were crowded around the corpse of the marksman. Elfor stood nervously, his hand on his own holstered gun. "They're concealing weapons," he barked to his aides. "Search them!" A squad of guards swarmed over the four prisoners. There was an excited twitter when they discovered the pocket transmitters. They removed the little packets, snapping the aerial wires, and carried them to Elfor. He glanced at them, took one in his hand, and ordered: "Execute them!" Another guard with a heat-gun took his position in the center of the courtyard. He handled the weapon somewhat gingerly, but checked its mechanism and prepared to follow orders. He waited for the command from Elfor. But the Third Sarge now was staring hard at the little transmitter in his hand. Instead of ordering the guard to fire, he strode across the courtyard and thrust the tiny radio before John's face. "Is this true?" he demanded. He pointed at the well-known symbol stamped on the packet, the red diagram of an atom that warned against opening the lead-shielded mechanism without precaution. "You mean, is it atomic-powered?" asked John. "Yes it is." "It is a weapon?" "No, it's a radio transmitter." "But it operates?" "Certainly it operates. Why in thunder do you think I'd be carrying a useless transmitter?" "It has been many years since this sign was seen on a working mechanism on Earth," said Elfor soberly. "You are familiar, then, with atomic power?" "I'm not an atomic technician," answered John carefully, "but there are several on the Discovery who can build anything from one of these little transmitters to the engines of a spaceship, with the proper equipment." The Third Sarge stood in silent thought for several minutes. He was high in the councils of his country, or he would not have been commander of the zone that guarded Numex spaceport. He knew the reason for the basic slogan "Conserve!" and he knew, as 99 per cent of his subordinates did not, what circumstances would make that slogan meaningless. "Guard!" he growled. "Unbind the deevs! John Gray, come with me in peace." "You'd better give me back that transmitter, first," suggested John drily. "I'd hate to escape execution just to get H-bombed by my own ship." * * * * * It was the next afternoon that the four were escorted by a trim-uniformed guard of honor across the flat spaceport to the Discovery. "The Jovians wanted to reduce Earth to colonial status, to be exploited for its natural resources," John explained to his companions as they walked. "All atomic installations were destroyed, all technicians and scientists exterminated systematically and all scientific books burned. They were very thorough about it. "The successful revolt was accomplished with a concealed stock-pile of atomic weapons. Since that time, they've been garrisoned against the return of the Jovians. But atomic power was gone and so were the scientists who could bring it back and the books from which new scientists could learn. "It's because they can't replace even so small a thing as an electric light bulb that destruction or unnecessary use of any sort of equipment is the rankest sort of treason. They've been saving all their technological capital for a last-ditch stand against the expected invasion. "And it was their faulty, groping sort of maintenance that saved our lives, because even a heat-gun deteriorates in 150 years. That gun hadn't been fired since the Revolt!" "Then we can be their salvation?" suggested Phil. "Yes. The scientists who built the Deneb colony can rebuild the technology of our own Earth. It will take a long time ... there'll have to be schools and we'll all have to work hard ... but maybe some of us will be able to go back, in 30 or 40 years, say, when the Discovery can return to Deneb." They were nearing the ship, and John saw the officers crowding the main port, watching them come. "It's sort of inconsequential, I know," said Ann then. "But several times the Third Sarge referred to us as 'deevs.' Did he mention to you what a deev is?" John smiled. "It's an ancient military slang term, just like 'sarge' and 'topkick,'" he replied. "'Deev' is just plain old D.V. Distinguished Visitor. And I suppose we are, at that." 
46383	----	Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LV MAY TO OCTOBER, 1899 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. [Illustration: EDUARD OSCAR SCHMIDT.] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. SEPTEMBER, 1899. ARE WE IN DANGER FROM THE PLAGUE? BY VICTOR C. VAUGHAN, PROFESSOR OF HYGIENE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. In an article on the plague in this journal, in May, 1897, the writer answered this question as follows: "Yes, there is danger; but this, being foreseen, may be easily avoided. Thorough inspection of persons and disinfection of things from infected districts will keep the disease out of Europe and America. Only by the most gross carelessness could the plague be permitted to enter either of these continents." It will be of interest to take up this subject again, and study it in the light of the history of the plague since the article referred to was written. The plague first appeared in western India, at Bombay, where it still prevails. We are without any exact information concerning its introduction into that city. Before the outbreak of the disease at Bombay the mortality had increased so markedly that it was a subject of discussion for three meetings of the Grant Medical Society. The increase was attributed to the filthy condition of the streets. This society made an investigation of the increased mortality, and presented a report on the same to the municipal authorities. Instead of heeding the warning, the authorities jeered at the society, and refused to allow the report to be read. Dr. Viegas appears to have been the first physician to recognize the existence of the plague in the city. In a paper read before the Grant Medical Society on November 24, 1896, he discussed the possible and probable avenues by which the disease had found its way into the town. He stated that sugar and dates had been mentioned as means by which the plague was imported, but, if this had been the case, he thought it strange that the infection had not been conveyed from Bagdad and Bassorah, inasmuch as these articles come almost exclusively from those places. Again, it was thought possible that the clothes of the sick or of the dead from the plague in China might have been brought over to Bombay, but Dr. Viegas was unable to find any evidence in support of this theory. It had also been claimed that rats sick with the plague had come by ship from Hong Kong, and had infected the rats about the docks in Bombay. This theory, Dr. Viegas held, was not supported by any facts. In short, Dr. Viegas found some objection to every theory that had been proposed, and leaves us in doubt as to his own views concerning the avenue by which the plague reached Bombay. He is quite confident, however, that the filthiness of the city is to blame for the rapidity with which the disease spread. In a report by Lieutenant-Colonel Weir on the plague in Bombay a statement is made that the disease was imported from Suez. Early in September, 1896, four very suspicious deaths were reported, but, as none of these had been attended by medical men, no definite conclusion could be reached concerning them. The first case was reported by Dr. Viegas late in September, 1896. The patient was a native who had not been out of the city for months. The first case reported among Europeans occurred on November 12, 1896. During the winter of 1896 and 1897 the disease prevailed most alarmingly, and reached its highest mortality during the week ending February 9, 1897, when the deaths from all causes in Bombay numbered 1,891. During the summer of 1897 the disease declined, and led to the belief that the measures that had been put in operation would prove successful. This hope, however, was not realized, and during the winter of 1897 and 1898 there was a recrudescence of the disease. During the summer of 1898 the disease again abated, to appear with renewed strength during the winter of 1898 and 1899. During the last week in March, 1899, the total number of deaths from all causes in Bombay reached 2,408, and the deaths from plague alone numbered more than 250 a day. It will be seen from these figures that the plague still rages with undiminished virulence in the capital of western British India. The abatement of the disease during the summer months and its increased severity during the colder season are not directly due to the effects of temperature. In the warm season many of the natives sleep out of doors, while during the colder weather they crowd into small, unventilated, filthy rooms. It is the opinion of practically all observers at Bombay that the recrudescence of the disease during the winter is due to this overcrowding. Since the plague has prevailed at Bombay for nearly three years, it may be well to inquire concerning its probable continuance at that place. In making this inquiry we may learn something of the sanitary condition of the city and the habits of its inhabitants. Bombay is the metropolis of western India, and is situated on a long, narrow island running almost north and south. The city is located near the southern end of this island, with its harbor to the east and its sewage outfall to the west. Its population of about nine hundred thousand is a very mixed one, consisting of Hindoos of different castes, of Mohammedans, of Eurasians, and of Europeans. Differences in race, in religion, and in caste make it exceedingly difficult to carry out sanitary measures and to look after the sick. The mean temperature is about 79° F., and the relative humidity seventy-seven per cent. A considerable portion of the island is below high-water level, and consequently the sewage must be removed by means of pumps. The mean maximum temperature of the ground eleven feet below the surface is 84.9° F., and the mean minimum temperature is 80.9° F. It will be seen from these figures that organic matter must undergo rapid decomposition both on the surface and in the sewers. The water supply, which is said to be excellent, is so carelessly drawn upon by the natives that, although sufficiently abundant if used properly, it sometimes becomes scant. It not infrequently happens that the sewers will not carry the volume of water turned into them. For this reason, together with the tropical rains, the soil often becomes water-logged. Indeed, the surface in some sections of the city may be, not inappropriately, compared with a fermenting muck-heap. Besides the fixed population, there is a constant current of people flowing to and fro between the island and the mainland. When there is any opportunity for the employment of a large number of unskilled laborers, hundreds and thousands from the surrounding country pour into the city. These people know nothing of sanitary appliances, they lodge in the most densely crowded parts of the city, and often a dozen of them will hire a single room, not more than ten feet square, in which they eat and sleep. It is said that seventy per cent of the inhabitants of Bombay live in "chawls." These are tenement buildings of from five to seven stories high, built on the "flat" system. A narrow hall, at the end of which is a latrine, runs through each story, and from this doors open into rooms eight by twelve feet in area. In one of these houses from five hundred to eight hundred people live. These buildings are crowded together, with only narrow, dark alleys between. Into these alleys the inhabitants of the houses on both sides throw all kinds of refuse. In many parts of the city fecal matter is deposited in boxes or baskets, and these, when filled, are carried on the heads of scavengers to certain designated places and the contents dumped into the sewers. It may be of interest to note, in passing, that these scavengers seem to be largely immune to the plague and all other infectious diseases. This is a brief description of the sanitary condition of the city into which the bubonic plague found its way nearly three years ago. How long is it likely to remain? Before attempting to answer this question we might ask what means have been employed to eradicate the disease. On October 6, 1896, the municipal health commissioner issued an order to the effect that all cases of the plague were to be segregated, their houses disinfected, by force if necessary, and their sick to be taken to the hospital. Health inspectors visited all parts of the city, and carefully went through the great tenement houses looking for those sick with the plague. When such were found they were immediately sent to a hospital. Later, four camps were prepared, with facilities for accommodating about twenty thousand people. An attempt was made to transfer all the residents from a certain section of the city to these camps, and detain them there while their residences were being disinfected. After this had been done these people were allowed to return to their homes, and another twenty thousand were taken to the camps. This attempt, however, was never fully carried out. A high-caste Hindoo prefers death at any time to association with one of inferior caste. Every attempt at segregation of the sick led to more or less disturbance; and finally, in March, 1898, serious riots resulted. These were begun by Mohammedans, who followed a medical officer to the hospital and burned the building and hospital supplies. A plague inspector and three English soldiers were stoned to death. Since the riots attempts at segregation of the sick have been practically abandoned. Numerous hospitals have been provided, in order that those differing in religion or in caste might be cared for at different places. Under certain restrictions those sick with the plague are allowed to remain in their homes. It will be seen from these statements that it is not probable that the plague will be driven by human agency out of Bombay. The Hindoos believe that when the plague finds its way into a city it will remain for six years. The probabilities are that this belief will be strengthened by the history of the present epidemic in Bombay. Nothing short of an extensive conflagration, destroying a large part of the city, can thoroughly disinfect this place, in which the plague has already dwelt for nearly three years. I think, therefore, that we must conclude that it is quite certain that for several years yet Bombay will remain an infected city. When the plague was first announced at Bombay a large number of its inhabitants, estimated at about three hundred thousand, left the city. There can be but little doubt that with these the germs of the plague were carried into the surrounding country. From Bombay the disease has spread out in every direction, until it has found its way into nearly every part of India. To-day the three large commercial cities of British India--Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras--are all infected. The manner of the introduction of the disease into Calcutta is somewhat uncertain, several different accounts being given as authentic. Dr. Cantlie says on this point: "The first case dealt with and reported upon in Calcutta gives an interesting history. The patient, a lad seventeen years old, came from Bombay, where evidently he had been exposed to infection, as his sister, who accompanied him, had seen several cases of plague in Bombay. Fifteen days before leaving Bombay he had noticed swelling first in one groin and then in the other, but never felt ill until his arrival in Calcutta, on September 24th. He was seen and carefully examined in Calcutta by honest observers, and a diplobacterium identical with the Kitasato bacillus was found in his blood. Not only so, but the clinical symptoms of plague were most manifest." Another authority would have it that the plague was brought to Calcutta from Hong Kong by a British regiment which had been engaged in cleansing infected houses at Hong Kong. On this point Dr. Simpson makes the following statement: "In January, 1895, the regiment went to Calcutta, and this disease was first diagnosed as syphilis, then as malarial fever with bubo, and finally the cause was declared to be unknown. In June, 1896, one of the medical officers of the regiment was attacked with fever, and the glands of the neck, axilla, and groin were all enlarged. A goodly number of similar cases were met with in the town; moreover, the rats became sick, and the grain stores swarmed with diseased and dead rats. In spite of opposite evidence, it was well-nigh certain that plague in a sporadic form had been in Calcutta since 1895 or 1896." The bacillus of the plague has undoubtedly found Calcutta quite as well prepared for its reception as Bombay. In discussing a medical report on the sanitary condition of Calcutta, the Pioneer Mail makes the following statement: "London, with its population of over 4,000,000, has about 36,000 people to the square mile. In the thirteen wards of Calcutta there are only four below this figure; the remainder have from 46,000 to 144,000 per square mile, three wards containing actually over 100,000. Colootolah is most densely populated; the houses are literally crammed with people. One case is quoted where 250 persons were living in a space that should accommodate only 50. In a hut seven feet in length, breadth, and height five men were found, and several instances are given where similar conditions obtained. In our barracks 600 cubic feet per man is the minimum space allowed. In these _bastis_ the space runs from 157 to 49 cubic feet. This would be bad enough if everything were clean and sweet in and about the huts, but, as the medical board puts the case, 'here we find an allowance per head going as low as practically one thirtieth of that given in barracks, and no ventilation, with filth _ad libitum_ both in the room and in its surroundings, to say nothing of the filthy persons of its occupants, the sewage in the adjacent drains, and the accumulated filth in the neighboring latrines; and to this may be added the fact that the subsoil on which the huts are built is soaked through and through with sewage matters and littered with garbage and filth of all kinds.' The narrow gullies which give access to these huts are in keeping with the general character of the _bastis_, and we may well wonder that epidemic disease is not always present." The probabilities are that the plague will continue in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras until it dies out from want of susceptible material. It is not at all likely, with the conditions in these cities, such as have already been described, that sanitary measures sufficiently energetic to destroy the bacillus will be resorted to. For some years to come these cities are likely to harbor the infection, and will remain, as they are now, nurseries for the disease. The plague has not confined itself to the large cities of India, but has spread all over that country. It has extended into the northwestern provinces, has crossed the frontier, and passed into Baluchistan and Afghanistan. In many of the interior cities it has proved quite as fatal, in proportion to the population, as at Bombay and Calcutta. At Poonah the mortality has during some weeks been as high as eighty per cent of the cases, and four hundred deaths a week have been reported. At Sholapore, in the Punjab, far to the northwest of Bombay, the disease has prevailed in epidemic form. With the plague widely diffused over the Indian empire, what measures have been taken to prevent its spread to other parts of the world? There are two routes by means of which the disease may pass from India to Europe. One of these is by ship through the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean; the other is overland from the northwestern provinces of India through Afghanistan into southeastern Europe. In fact, there are three overland routes from northwestern India into Europe. One of these leads from Lahore, the capital of the Punjab, through Afghanistan into the Transcaspian Province of Russia. The Transcaspian Railway extends from Samarkand, a place of about thirty-five thousand inhabitants, through the desert to the Caspian Sea at Ouzoun Ada. The latter place is connected by steamer with Baku and the Russian railroad system. The second overland route starts from the northwestern provinces, or Afghanistan, or Baluchistan, passes through Persia, extending on up between the Caspian and Black Seas, and crosses the Caucasus Mountains in the neighborhood of Tiflis. Both of these routes are quite extensively traveled and pass through cities of considerable commercial importance. Samarkand has extensive manufactures of cotton and silk, and carries on considerable trade by means of the Transcaspian Railway with European Russia. The second route passes through Teheran, the capital of Persia, with a population of about two hundred and twenty-five thousand. This route is also largely employed by commercial travelers, especially from Russia. The third overland route passes through Persia and Turkey in Asia up to Constantinople. This route can not be called a commercial highway, but it is used to a considerable extent, especially by pilgrims, and since at no point do travelers along this route come in contact with European guards against the plague, it is most likely that the pest will find its way into Constantinople by this avenue, if at all. The first two overland routes are guarded by Russian medical inspectors. Russia has not been slow to protect itself against the introduction of this epidemic. In December, 1896, the following lines of action were determined upon, and have apparently since that time been carried out quite thoroughly: First, Russian medical men were sent to the larger cities of Persia, such as Teheran and Meshed, for the purpose of watching the approach of the plague. All Russian consular officers in Persia were requested to inform these medical men of every rumor of the epidemic. Second, points of embarkation on the Persian shore of the Caspian Sea have been watched, in order to detect suspicious cases that might pass to Russia along this route. Third, observation stations have been established along the frontiers of the Transcaspian Province. Inspection officers stationed at these places have been notified to close the frontier, with the exception of certain points where inspection stations have been established. Fourth, inspectors have also been placed to guard the region of Tiflis against the introduction of the plague from both Persia and Turkey. For the reasons above mentioned, it seems to me probable that if the plague reaches Europe, it will likely do so by way of Turkey in Asia, across the Bosporus into Constantinople. The large number of pilgrims passing along this route, with the Turk's well-known fatalistic belief, render it quite probable that infection gathered anywhere along the route may be carried into Europe. Since several places in Hedjaz, along the eastern shore of the Red Sea, have already become infected with the plague, it is by no means improbable that the disease may find its way into the Balkan Peninsula. There are also several centers of infection along the shores of the Persian Gulf. It will be seen from these statements that Mohammedan pilgrims are exposed to the infection. Indeed, already the disease has been detected among these pilgrims on steamships in the Red Sea. Certain international measures for the restriction of the plague were formulated at the Sanitary Convention of Venice in 1897. Nearly all civilized nations sent representatives to this conference, and certain general rules were adopted. Recognizing the fact that Mohammedan pilgrims from infected districts in India, coming to Mecca and other places along the eastern shore of the Red Sea, would mingle with those of like faith from Turkey and northern Africa, special rules concerning pilgrims were adopted at this conference. It should be understood, however, that these rules are likely to prove efficient safeguards only among those pilgrims who travel by sea. In the first place, the conference made certain regulations concerning the construction and sanitary arrangements of pilgrim ships. The upper deck must be kept clear for these people, and on the main covered deck every pilgrim has to have at least sixteen square feet of surface. Every one embarking on a pilgrim vessel must pass a medical inspection. No sick person or one suspected of having an infectious disease is allowed to go on board. The number which the vessel is allowed to carry is determined beforehand, and the names of all passengers and their home residences are recorded. The ship must supply wholesome water and make provision for food, proper in quality and sufficient in quantity. Every vessel carrying pilgrims must have on board a medical officer and a disinfecting stove. Details are given concerning the sanitary regulations during the voyage. All pilgrims are landed on the island of Camaran, in the Red Sea, before being allowed to disembark on the last stage of their journey. The period of detention from healthy ships at this place extends through only three days. If no disease appears during this time, the pilgrims are allowed to embark again, and go directly to Jeddah. If disease appears either before or after landing at Camaran, the pilgrims are detained at least ten days from the date of the last case. Arriving at Jeddah, they are no longer under international sanitary regulations, and any control exercised over them at that time must be administered by Turkish authorities. Just here, in my opinion, lies the greatest danger so far as pilgrims are concerned. It is true that the conference made certain recommendations and formulated certain rules concerning the return of those pilgrims going to the north or into Egypt, but the fact must not be overlooked that these restrictions are applicable only to those who go by sea. No restrictions are placed upon Mohammedan pilgrims returning from Mecca to India. India is already so generally infected that such restrictions have been deemed unnecessary. The following is a general statement of the rules applicable to vessels coming to European ports from India through the Suez Canal: All vessels that have been ten days or longer at sea after departure from an infected port are allowed to pass through the canal without question and without precaution. Suspected vessels or those which have been at sea less than ten days since departure from an infected port, and which are provided with a medical officer and a properly equipped disinfecting plant, are allowed to pass through the canal in quarantine. This means that while passing through the canal there shall be no communication between those on board the vessel and those on the land. Other suspected vessels are compelled to proceed to the Wells of Moses for disinfection. Here the passengers and crew are disembarked, isolated for twenty-four hours, and their effects disinfected. At the same time the contents of the ship undergo disinfection. If the plague be found on board, all passengers, as well as the crew, are detained for a period not exceeding ten days. All clothing, the cargo, and the ship itself are disinfected. When a vessel passes through the Suez Canal in quarantine, notice of that fact is telegraphed to the country to which the vessel is going, and it is not allowed to land elsewhere. Should the plague appear in any European country, the following rules were formulated to prevent its spread: (1) Whenever a case of the plague appears in any country the sanitary authorities of that country must give immediate notice to all other countries represented in the conference. This notice may pass through diplomatic or consular agencies, or it may be sent directly by telegraph. After this the sanitary authorities of the country in which the plague has appeared shall inform other countries at least once a week concerning the progress of the disease and the measures resorted to to prevent its spread. (2) When an infected person enters a country by rail or other conveyance overland, disinfection of his person and personal effects is made obligatory. Land quarantine is condemned, and it is recommended that modern disinfection be practiced in its stead. Each country, however, may reserve the right to close its frontier against any other country in which the disease exists. It is recommended that medical inspection along the frontier be established in connection with custom-house examinations, in order to prevent unnecessary delay in travel. Passenger trains and postal cars are not to be detained at any frontier, but if a car be found to contain a real or a suspected case of the plague, this car shall be detached from the train at the frontier or at the nearest station thereto and its contents disinfected. (3) Travelers coming from infected countries may be, at the discretion of the sanitary authorities, detained under observation for a period not exceeding eight days. Individual governments are allowed to take any special measures that may be deemed wise against the importation of the disease by means of gypsies, vagrants, and immigrants. In formulating the above-mentioned rules to prevent the importation of the plague into Europe the members of the Venice Congress seem to have been thoroughly convinced that the longest period of incubation possible in this disease is ten days. It seems to have been assumed that if a vessel had been for ten days or longer at sea after departure from an infected port, and no cases of the plague had developed up to that time, there could be no danger of this vessel carrying the infection. It appears to me that a safer course would have been to require inspection of all persons and things going on board a vessel leaving an infected port, and the thorough disinfection of certain things, at least, on such vessels arriving at uninfected ports. The disinfection of a ship and its cargo by means of steam is not at present a very costly procedure. Since the plague, if it reaches America at all, must come to us by sea, it may be of special interest to inquire concerning outbreaks of this disease on board ship. In making this inquiry we will confine ourselves to such cases as have occurred within the past two years. In March, 1897 (I have been unable to ascertain the exact date), the transport Dilwara left Bombay, bound for Southampton, with a regiment of English soldiers, together with their wives and children. On March 18th, while the vessel was in the Red Sea, a child died of the plague and was buried at sea. On arriving at Suez the persons who had been in immediate contact with the child were transferred to the Wells of Moses and properly disinfected. After this had been done, the vessel was allowed to pass through the Suez Canal in quarantine. No fresh case occurred, and the vessel arrived at Southampton April 6th. Here all articles which might possibly contain infection were disinfected, the passengers were allowed to go to their homes, and the troops were placed in barracks. No other cases resulted. On July 6, 1897, one of the crew of the Carthage, of the Peninsular and Oriental Company's line, was attacked with the plague. The ship was then in the Arabian Sea. Two days later the sick man, with two other members of the crew detailed to attend him, was landed at Aden. Six days later a second member of the crew was attacked with slight symptoms of the plague. This fact was reported when the vessel passed Malta. The Carthage had intended to stop at Marseilles, but, on account of the plague on board, continued its course to England. Both of these patients were isolated by being placed in a large boat hung at a height at the side of the vessel so as to avoid communication with others on the ship. When the vessel arrived at Plymouth the passengers were allowed to depart to their respective homes. The only precaution that was taken consisted in ascertaining the destination of each person, and informing the health authorities of the places to which these people were going. The Carthage had on board a steam disinfector, and everything that had been exposed to the infection was thoroughly disinfected. On arrival at the port of London the second patient was isolated until he recovered. No cases developed in England. On December 7, 1897, the Caledonia arrived at Plymouth, England, from Bombay, without touching at any Mediterranean port. While in the Red Sea two lascars developed symptoms of the plague. They were landed at Suez, and no further outbreak occurred. When the ship reached Plymouth one hundred and sixty passengers were landed, and their names and addresses forwarded to the local authorities of their respective destinations. After proper disinfection, the ship proceeded to London. In December, 1898, a case of plague developed on the Golconda while at Marseilles, on her way from Bombay to London. The ship proceeded immediately, the patient was landed at Plymouth, proper disinfection was carried out, and no other cases developed. This is a proof that the assumption that a vessel is safe from infection after ten days have passed since leaving an infected port is fallacious, as this time was exceeded between Bombay and Marseilles. The report that the Nippu Maru recently arrived at San Francisco with the plague on board has proved to be erroneous. In September, 1896, a Portuguese-Indian steward died at the Seamen's Hospital, at Greenwich, England, very suddenly. This man was in the hospital for only forty-eight hours, and no one suspected the plague at that time. On the last day of October of the same year another patient in the same hospital was taken ill and died with symptoms of the plague. Bacteriological examinations of the glands of the body of the second man were made, and a bacillus which presented the well-known characters of the plague bacillus was found. The vessel on which the Portuguese steward came to England left Bombay about the end of August, 1896. There was at that time no official knowledge of the existence of the plague in Bombay, but it probably existed there. This is another evidence of the fallacy of the belief in the ten days' period of incubation. It seems quite evident to me that the English authorities lay too much stress upon the period of incubation. A man leaving Bombay or any other infected port may carry the bacillus under his finger nails, elsewhere on his person, or in his clothing, and may not become infected until many days after leaving the infected place. Careful inspection and thorough disinfection of all vessels coming from infected ports should be insisted upon. It has been abundantly demonstrated by the history of the plague, as well as that of other infectious diseases, that the old plan of detention in quarantine is a relic of bygone times. Detention is cruel, dangerous, and inefficient; inspection and disinfection are rational and efficacious. The modes of infection with the bacillus of the plague are as follows: (1) By inoculation. The history of the present epidemic in Asia recounts several instances of inoculation with the plague bacillus. On June 22 or 23, 1896, while making a post-mortem examination, Professor Ayoama, of Tokio, one of the Japanese commissioners sent to Hong Kong to study the plague, scratched the third finger on his left hand; on June 27th he again scratched himself on the end of the right thumb; on the evening of June 28th he felt ill, and had a temperature of 101.6° F.; he slept well during that night, but during the afternoon of June 29th he had a temperature of 105° F. At that time a bubo was found in the left axilla, and there was well-marked lymphangitis of the right arm. Professor Ayoama has described his own case as follows: "On June 28th, after having finished a dissection, I took my meal about half past two and did not enjoy it. After the meal I went upstairs, when at certain movements of the arm I felt a slight pain in the left armpit, and on feeling with my finger I found some slightly enlarged glands present. In the evening I felt very ill, depressed, and languid, burning hot along the whole of the back, while the thermometer showed normal temperature. As Mr. Kitasato and I had invited guests that evening, I was present at supper. I had no appetite, and felt so languid that I often wished to withdraw. At half past eleven I hurried to my room, when I found my temperature was 39° C. I took one gramme of quinine, and slept well. Next morning I awoke and noticed, on the under side of the left ring finger, a small, whitish-yellow blister, and then, along the back of the hand, a red line. From this time I remembered nothing for more than two weeks." Dr. Ishigami, another of the Japanese commission in Hong Kong, also inoculated himself with the plague while making a post-mortem examination. A patient, while delirious with the pneumonic form of the plague, expectorated into the face of an English nurse caring for him. Within a few hours the eye on that side of the face became inflamed; later the parotid and cervical glands became involved, and the nurse died. Other illustrations of inoculation with the bacillus of the plague might be given. Dr. Wyssokowitch and Dr. Jobobat believe that the bacillus can penetrate the unbroken skin. In support of this belief they report some experiments made by them upon macaque monkeys. They found that when a needle was dipped in the culture of the plague bacillus and drawn across the palm of the hand of one of these monkeys, without making any visible scratch, the animal speedily developed the disease. However, this does not prove that the bacillus will penetrate the unbroken skin of man. (2) By inhalation. That the pneumonic form of the plague results from inhalation of the bacillus can not be doubted. Monkeys caused to inhale the bacillus develop this form of the disease. (3) By deglutition. That the disease may be acquired by taking the bacillus into the alimentary canal has been demonstrated by experiments upon animals of various kinds. The sputum of patients suffering from the pneumonic form of the disease is filled with the bacilli. The germs are also found, sometimes at least, in the discharges from the bowels and kidneys. That the infection may be transported in clothing and rags has been long known. The following extract from a memoir by Sir John Hay, then minister from England to Morocco, indicates that the plague was introduced into Morocco in 1826 by means of infected articles of clothing: "The danger from plague by contagion can not, however, to my mind be called in question. That dire disease was introduced into Morocco about the year 1826 by an English frigate, which our Government had dispatched to Alexandria, where the plague was then raging, to convey from that port to Tangier two sons of the Sultan, returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca. No case of plague or other illness had occurred on board the frigate during the voyage, and the Sultan's sons and other passengers were allowed to land at Tangier. "The customs officers, being suspicious that, in the numerous boxes brought by the pilgrims who had been permitted to embark with the Moorish princes, contraband goods were being smuggled, caused some of the cases to be opened. One contained Egyptian wearing apparel, which the owner said he had bought second hand, and subsequently confessed had belonged to a person who had died of the plague in Alexandria. The two Moorish officials who opened the boxes were attacked with the plague that night and died in a few hours. The disease spread rapidly throughout Morocco, carrying off eighty per cent of those who were attacked." I mention these facts in order to emphasize the desirability of disinfecting all articles liable to carry the infection coming from infected places. Professor Haffkine's preventive inoculation against the plague is still being largely employed in India. This consists in injecting hypodermically sterilized cultures of the bacillus. No curative action is claimed for this treatment, but it is believed to be protective against the disease. It is stated that more than eighty thousand people in India have undergone this form of vaccination, and that the death rate among these has been exceedingly low. However, it is well to be careful in accepting statistical statements on a matter of this nature. In the first place, it is probable that only the more intelligent will submit to vaccination, and these will also employ other means of protecting themselves against the disease. In the second place, there are many thousands of people exposed to the infection, or at least live in infected districts, who have never been vaccinated and who do not acquire the disease. Three kinds of serum have been used as curative agents in the plague. In 1896 M. Yersin began the use of a specially prepared serum in China. The first cases treated with this preparation did unusually well, and it was hoped that most valuable results would follow from its more extended use. This serum is prepared after the manner of the antitoxine used in the treatment of diphtheria. That used most largely in India is made at the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg. Numerous physicians in India have reported upon the action of this serum, and none of them favorably. Very recently Dr. Clemow treated fifty cases with this serum, and compared them with fifty other cases treated without the serum. Every other case was selected for the serum treatment. The mortality was exactly the same in each group, forty patients out of fifty dying. The second serum is that prepared by M. Roux, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. This is practically the same as the preparation made by M. Yersin, and the results obtained are equally unsatisfactory. In 1897 the writer had the privilege of observing, both at Paris and at St. Petersburg, the preparation of these agents, from which at that time great results were expected. A third preparation is made by Professor Lustig, of Florence. I have been unable, so far, to find any detailed account of the method followed by Professor Lustig in preparing his serum. From all that I can learn, however, it is not a serum, but a sterilized bacterial culture; at any rate, Lustig's preparation has proved probably least valuable of all. At present (July, 1899) the plague prevails throughout India, and has appeared at various places in Baluchistan and Afghanistan, at Samarkand in the Transcaspian Province of Russia; in Persia, at Bassorah and other points along the Persian Gulf; at several places along the western shore of the Red Sea; at Suez and Alexandria; at Tamatave, in Madagascar; at Port Lewis, Mauritius; at Penang, in the Straits Settlements; at Amoy and Hong Kong, China; and at numerous places in Formosa. For reasons already given, it will not be at all surprising should the recent report that the plague had appeared in Constantinople prove to be true. If it once reaches that place, it is more than likely that it will become scattered throughout the Balkan Peninsula. The sad death of Professor Müller and his laboratory servant, at Vienna, from the plague bacillus which Professor Müller brought from Bombay, shows the necessity for caution in handling the germ of this disease. Are we in America in danger of the plague? I will have to answer this question very much as I did two years ago: "Yes, we are in danger; but this danger, being foreseen, may be easily avoided." In my opinion, our most vulnerable point is along the Pacific coast. With the plague at Hong Kong, it is possible that it may be transferred to Manila, and the transports bringing soldiers to this country may also bring the infection. However, I think the chances of this happening are small. The length of time required to make the voyage from Manila to San Francisco is so great that, with the infection on board, it would be almost certain to manifest itself before reaching our shores, and, knowing its presence on board a ship reaching San Francisco or any other point on the western coast, thorough inspection and disinfection will keep the disease out of this country. The probabilities are that for several years to come the larger cities of India, at least, will remain infected, and our sanitary authorities must be vigilant. The fact that, if the plague reaches us at all, it must come by sea, that a long voyage must be made before it can reach us, and that the disease will most probably appear on board ship before arrival at any American port--all these conditions are in our favor. The General Government should take upon itself the control of all measures to prevent the introduction of infectious diseases from without. Quarantine detention is a relic of ignorance of the true nature of infectious diseases. All transports and other vessels between Manila and this country should be provided with proper disinfecting apparatus. The Government should supply the Marine-Hospital Service with every needed equipment, and if this be done the plague can enter America only through incompetency in that service. There is another source of danger on our Western coast that must not be overlooked. The plague is now widely distributed in Formosa, which is under the control of Japan, and our intercourse with the last-mentioned country should be most carefully watched. TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE AND ITS PRESIDENT. BY M. B. THRASHER. Tuskegee is a county town in the State of Alabama, not far from Montgomery. It is near the center of that part of the South commonly spoken of as the "black belt," because the negro inhabitants there greatly outnumber the whites. The town is one of the oldest in the South. It is said, in fact, that when De Soto made his famous journey across that part of the newly discovered continent he found an Indian village of the same name on the site of the present town. Tuskegee is five miles from the main line of the Southern Railroad, with which it is connected at Chehaw by means of a narrow-gauge road. [Illustration: THE FACULTY OF THE TUSKEGEE NORMAL AND INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE.] Tuskegee, as the word is oftenest used now, means the Normal and Industrial Institute, situated a mile out from the town and forming a little settlement in itself. This is the great school for young negro men and women which Booker T. Washington has built up, and of which he is the principal. The pupils who attend number a thousand each year. It is the largest school for colored people, managed by colored people, in the United States. There is no one connected with the school, except some of the members of the board of trustees, who is not of the race which the institute is designed to help. Tuskegee Institute is so entirely the result of Booker T. Washington's labors, and his life has been so interwoven with the development of the school, that a brief account of his boyhood and youth is almost indispensable to a complete description of the institute, particularly as the conditions with which he struggled were so generally those which confronted all of the negroes at that time. [Illustration: PRESIDENT BOOKER T. WASHINGTON.] Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia, not long before the breaking out of the war. It seems strange that a man who is so widely known to-day and is so universally respected as Mr. Washington, when asked how old he is should be obliged to reply that he does not know, yet such is the case. The birth of one more black babies on a large plantation at that time was a matter of too little moment to have sufficient notice taken of it to accurately fix the date. He was a boy old enough during the war, though, to know something of the struggle going on around him, for, speaking in public of Lincoln once, I heard him say: "My first acquaintance with our hero was this: Night after night, before the dawn of day, on an old slave plantation in Virginia, I recall the form of my sainted mother bending over the bundle of rags that enveloped my body, on a dirt floor, breathing a fervent prayer to Heaven that 'Massa Lincoln' might succeed, and that some day she and I might be free." [Illustration: MRS. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON.] Another incident of those days I have heard him tell of in these words: "Word was sent over the plantation for all 'the hands' to come up to the 'big house.' We went, and to us men, women, and children gathered in the yard some one standing on the veranda read a paper. I was too young to understand why the men and women around me should have begun to shout, 'Hallelujah! Praise de Lawd!' when the reading was finished, but my mother, bending down to where I was clinging to her dress, whispered to me that we were free." Not long after the close of the war the Washingtons left the plantation and went to West Virginia, where, in the coal mines, work could be had which would pay money wages. At first Booker worked in the mines with his brothers, but he soon became dissatisfied with the chance for improvement which that work afforded. "The first thing that led me to study," he has said, "was seeing a young colored man slowly reading a newspaper to a group of colored people who surrounded him with open mouths and gaping eyes. He was almost a god to them." The chance to study was soon found. An energetic woman of kindly nature hired the young colored boy to work about her house as a general chore-boy. Finding that he was anxious to learn, she offered to teach him to read in the spare minutes of his work, and did so. One day he overheard a man talking about Hampton, where General Armstrong had already begun his noble work. This, the man said, was a place where black boys could go to school, and at the same time work to pay their way. "As soon as I heard that," Mr. Washington has said, "I made up my mind that Hampton was just the place for me, and that I would go there. I started, although I had no money and did not even know where Hampton was. I felt sure I could inquire the way as I went, and work my passage. I walked a good share of the way, begged some rides, and when I had earned any money which I could spare, paid my fare to ride on the trains. I reached Richmond, Virginia, one night too late to get any work, and I was entirely out of money. While I was walking about wondering where I would get a lodging, I happened to see a nice dry place under a stretch of plank sidewalk. Watching my chance when no one was looking, I crawled in and curled up to sleep. The next day I was so fortunate as to get work helping to unload a vessel, and, as the job lasted several days, I came back each night to my lodging under the sidewalk, thus saving all my wages except the little required for food. In this way I was able to get money enough to carry me the rest of the way to Hampton, and leave me fifty cents when I got there." In these days of entrance examinations to various institutions of learning, it is interesting to read of the examination which young Washington was required to pass before he could enter Hampton. He tells us of it thus: "Of course," says he, "they knew nothing of me, and, after my long tramp, days of hard labor and nights of sleeping in barns and under sidewalks, I suppose I could not have presented a very prepossessing appearance. After looking me over in a not very encouraging manner, they gave me a broom and took me into a room, which they told me to sweep. I suppose I swept that room over three or four times before I was satisfied to call it done, when a teacher came in and took her handkerchief and wiped the walls to see if she could find any dust on them. After that they said I could come to the school. So you see I passed my examination. "At Hampton I found the opportunity, in the way of buildings, teachers, and industries provided by the generous, to get training in the class room, and by practical touch with industrial life to learn thrift, economy, and push. I was surrounded by an atmosphere of business, Christian influence, and a spirit of self-help that seemed to have awakened every faculty within me, and caused me for the first time to realize what it meant to be a man instead of a piece of property. "While there I resolved that, when I had finished my course of training, I would go into the far South, into the 'black belt' of the South, and give my life to providing the same kind of opportunity for self-reliance and self-awakening that I had found provided for me at Hampton. My work began at Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881, in a small shanty and church, with one teacher and thirty students, without a dollar's worth of property. The spirit of work and of industrial thrift, with aid from the State and generosity from the North, has enabled us to develop an institution of a thousand students, gathered from twenty-six States, with eighty-one instructors and thirty-eight buildings. "I am sometimes asked what is the object of all this outlay of energy and money. To that I would answer that the needs of the ten million colored people in the South may be roughly said to be food, clothing, shelter, education, proper habits, and a settlement of race relations. These ten million people can not be reached by any direct agency, but they can be reached by sending out among them strong selected young men and women, with the proper training of the head and hand and heart, who will live among these masses and show them how to lift themselves up. The problem that Tuskegee Institute keeps before itself is how to prepare these leaders." The first time I went to Tuskegee I happened to ride for half a day through the State of Georgia in the same seat in the car with a man whose conversation showed him to be one of the class to whom the designation "unreconstructed" has sometimes been applied. An officer in the Confederate army, he had accepted the situation at the close of the war, but now, after thirty years, although he spoke of existing conditions without bitterness, he spoke of them with little or no sympathy. I had some doubt how he would comment on my errand, when I told him that I was on my way to attend the Negro Conference at Tuskegee. Imagine my surprise when he exclaimed: "Going to Tuskegee, are you, to see Booker Washington? Just let me tell you there's a man that's got the right idea of things. He's teaching the negroes to work. I wish the South had a thousand Booker Washingtons." This man, I learned afterward, when I was in Atlanta, was one of the most prominent and successful business men of that city. The second day of my stay at Tuskegee, as I came out of the rude buildings where the conference had been held, a young colored man waiting at the door accosted me. "Is not this Mr. ----," he said, "and at the World's Fair were you not in charge of such an exhibit?" naming one of the educational exhibits. I said I was the man. "Don't you remember me?" he added, telling me where he had been working at the time. I did remember him perfectly, and asked how he happened to be so far removed from Chicago. "It was like this," he said. "Next year I went to the Atlanta Exposition. While there I heard Mr. Washington speak, and learned about his school where negro boys could learn a trade. I had always been at a disadvantage because I did not know how to do any kind of work really well. So I came here and began to learn carpentering. I have the trade nearly learned now, and when I graduate from here I shall know how to really work." Soon after beginning my long car ride from Tuskegee back to the North I stepped into the mail car on the train to post some letters. The envelopes I had used bore the imprint of Tuskegee Institute in the corner. As I handed them to the postal clerk, he glanced at the printing in the corner and exclaimed: "I say, that Booker Washington is a wonderful man, isn't he? I never saw him, but he's teaching those people there to work." Then he went on to tell me about a young colored man whom he had known who had gone to Tuskegee and learned harness-making, and then come home to set up business for himself. This man told me later that he had never been farther north than Louisville. It seemed to me as if here was an interesting coincidence of unsought testimony, and all tending to show how consistently Tuskegee teaches a gospel of work. Industrial training goes hand in hand there, with mental and moral teaching, in earnest effort to help the thousand young negro men and women there and make their lives count for the most possible for themselves and their race. [Illustration: A CLASS IN MENTAL PHILOSOPHY.] Any one who has heard Mr. Washington speak at any length to audiences of his own race knows how earnestly he advocates industrial education for the negro. As might be expected, then, we find at Tuskegee practical hand training. The advantage is twofold. The students not only learn to work, but in doing so many are enabled to work out all or a part of the expenses which otherwise in many cases would have prevented them from remaining at the school. [Illustration: ARMSTRONG HALL. One of the oldest buildings at Tuskegee.] Of the thirty-eight buildings at Tuskegee, all but the first three, and these are among the smallest ones, have been built by the students. Several of the largest of these buildings are of brick, and the educational process begins in the institute's own brickyard, where a class of muscular young men are making bricks under the direction of a capable instructor, and in making them learn the trade which they expect to follow in after life. This yard not only makes all the bricks the institute uses, but many thousand more to be sold each year for use in the surrounding country. [Illustration: ALABAMA HALL. One of the first buildings erected by the students.] I heard Mr. Washington tell to an audience of fifteen hundred negroes, in Charleston, South Carolina, a characteristic story of the beginning of this brickyard. "After I had been teaching a while at Tuskegee," he said, "I began to feel that I was partly throwing away my time teaching the students only books, without getting hold of them in their home life and without teaching them how to care for their bodies and how to work. I looked about for some land, and found a farm near Tuskegee which could be bought. I had no money, but a good friend had confidence enough in our prospects to loan me five hundred dollars to pay down toward the land so as to secure it. After that it was not long before I had the school moved. Then I would teach the boys for a part of the day, and then for the rest of the time take them out of doors with me to help clear up the land. In that way we did all the work we possibly could. When it came to making bricks for a building, though, we were stuck. We could make the bricks, and did, but none of us knew how to burn them. For that it was necessary to have a skilled man, who must be paid. I was out of money by that time, but I owned a gold watch. This I took to a pawnshop and raised all I could on it. The money I got was enough to pay a man to burn the bricks and teach us so that we could do the next ones ourselves. That watch is in pawn yet, but we have got thirty-eight buildings." [Illustration: STUDENTS AT WORK ON NEW TRADES-SCHOOL BUILDING.] Another class of young men are learning bricklaying. They take the bricks as they come from the yard and put up the walls of the buildings, while the carpenters do the woodwork. The classes in woodworking are among the most important at the school. The institute now owns a large tract of valuable timber land, while among the industrial buildings on the grounds is a good sawmill, equipped with the necessary machinery. Whatever lumber is needed in the erection of the buildings is cut on the timber lot, drawn to the mill, and sawed. In this way one class learns to saw and handle lumber. Besides the regular carpentry classes, joiner work and carriage-making are carried on. A large part of the furniture in the buildings, including the beds, tables, and chairs in the dormitories and dining rooms, was built in this way. All the carts, wagons, and carriages which are used about the place were built in the carriage shop, and the hickory lumber wagons turned out there have so good a reputation that all not needed on the place are sold readily to be used on the near-by farms. The carriages are painted, ironed, and trimmed by the young men, and no better proof of the workmanship can be asked than some of the rides I have had in them about Tuskegee. [Illustration: ONE END OF THE DINING HALL AT TUSKEGEE.] The management at Tuskegee tries to have a building always in course of construction for the benefit of the building classes. This year they are erecting a trades-school building. Last year they built a handsome brick church, which will seat two thousand persons. The building of this church shows well what the school's building classes can do. The designs were drawn by Mr. R. R. Taylor, the young colored man who is the instructor in mechanical and architectural drawing. One of his pupils designed the cornices with which the building is finished, and another designed the pews which furnish it. These pews were built in the school's joiner shop. The bricks were all made in the school's brickyard, and laid by the students. Men learning slating and tinsmithing covered the roof, and the steam-heating and electrical apparatus were also put in by the students, although this is one of the first of the buildings where the students have been sufficiently advanced in those trades to do the last-named work. As it was determined to employ only negroes as instructors at Tuskegee, it was at first difficult to find enough men and women of that race skilled in the arts and trades which it was wished to have taught there, and teachers were brought to the institute from all over the country. Now, however, as each year sees the industrial classes better under way, the tide is setting out, and Tuskegee yearly turns out teachers of trades, both men and women, who are eagerly sought by other institutions which are coming to see the value of industrial training. In many cases these teachers go to such positions at lower wages than they might hope to earn if they went to work at their trades, but they do this because they feel they have a duty to the institute and to the friends who have sustained it, to help extend its influence as widely as lies within their power. The question is often asked if a negro having learned a trade can find work at it. I do not think that the Tuskegee students who have thoroughly fitted themselves feel any anxiety about this. I remember speaking on this subject to the teacher in the harness-making and saddlery department, a good workman and a superb physical specimen of a man. He told me that during the long summer vacations he had left Tuskegee, and had never had any trouble in getting work and keeping it in shops in Montgomery and other towns of the State. [Illustration: A CLASS OF TAILORS.] Among the buildings at Tuskegee is a foundry and machine shop, which is always full of work, especially in the way of repairs upon agricultural machinery for the farmers about Tuskegee, because there is no other shop of the kind within thirty miles at least which has facilities for doing such heavy work as this. Printing, tailoring, blacksmithing, and painting are taught. Since a large proportion of the students at Tuskegee are young women, arrangements are made to furnish opportunities for them also to learn to work. They do all the work of taking care of the dormitories and dining rooms, learn plain and fancy cooking, candy-making, millinery, dressmaking, and all the most modern methods of laundry work. One class learns nursing, under the direction of a capable trained nurse. [Illustration: "BUILDING A HAT"; MILLINERY DEPARTMENT.] In speaking of the trades taught at Tuskegee, it should be remembered that agriculture is reckoned among them, and one of the most important. A very large percentage of the negroes of the South must continue to live upon the plantations and gain a living by tilling the soil. As a general thing their knowledge of how to best do this is lamentably deficient, and they labor under great disadvantages. They do not own their land, but rent it at ruinous rates. They mortgage their crops and eat them up before they are harvested. They plant nothing but cotton, because that is about the only crop that can be mortgaged, and are therefore obliged to buy food at any exorbitant prices which the dealers may demand. Tuskegee tries to remedy these evils by teaching the young men who come there the best methods of modern farming. If the farmers' sons can remain only a short time they carry back to the home plantations some new ideas to put in practice there; if they can remain for the full term of three or four years, they are fitted to take full charge of the work on any large plantation. The institute has a farm on which are raised the crops best adapted to the soil and climate of that part of the South. The men who have charge of this work are among the most able in the entire force of instructors. Mr. C. W. Green, the farm superintendent, has no superior in the South as a practical farmer. Mr. George W. Carver, the head of the agricultural department, is a graduate of the Iowa State College. To my mind, no more valuable text-book for Southern scholars could be furnished than a little pamphlet which this man has recently issued, telling how he raised between two hundred and three hundred bushels of sweet potatoes from an acre of ground, whereas the average yield of that crop in the same part of the country is less than fifty bushels to the acre. [Illustration: AN INSTITUTE CABBAGE FIELD.] Tuskegee has a large herd of cows and a good dairy and creamery, in which a class of men receive instruction in dairy work. An incident which occurred in connection with this dairy furnishes a story which Mr. Washington likes to tell, because it illustrates a point which he constantly impresses upon his colored audiences. One of the surest ways to abolish the color line, he tells his hearers, is to learn to do some kind of work so well that your services will be really needed. [Illustration: THE START FROM THE BARN. "FARM STUDENTS."] "There came to my knowledge," says Mr. Washington, "the fact that the owners of a certain creamery were in search of an able superintendent. We had just graduated a man who was thoroughly capable in every way, but he was just about as black as it is possible for a man to be. Nevertheless, I sent him on to apply for the place. When he made his errand known to the owners they looked at him and said: "'A colored man? Oh, that would never do, you know.' [Illustration: DAIRYING DIVISION; MAKING BUTTER.] "The applicant for work said very politely that he had not come there to talk about his color, but about the making of butter. Still, they said he would not do. "Finally, however, something the man said attracted the attention of the owners of the creamery, and they told him he might stay two weeks on trial, although they still assured him that there was no possibility whatever of their hiring a colored man. He went to work, and when the report for the first week's shipment of butter came back--would you believe it?--that butter had sold for two cents a pound more than any butter ever before made at that creamery! The owners of the establishment said to each other, 'Why, now, this is very singular!' and waited for the second week. When the returns for that week came back--a cent a pound more than for the week previous, three cents a pound more than the creamery's best record before our man had taken charge of it--they didn't say anything. They just pocketed the extra dividend, as welcome as it was unexpected, and hired the man for a term of years. That extra three cents a pound on the price of the butter he could make had knocked every bit of black out of the color of his skin so far as they were concerned." [Illustration: DELEGATES TO THE TUSKEGEE NEGRO CONFERENCE.] Out of the desire of Mr. Washington to help the struggling negro farmers has grown one of Tuskegee's greatest institutions--the annual Negro Conference which assembles there each year. About ten years ago Mr. Washington invited a few of the negro farmers who lived near Tuskegee to meet at the institute on a stated day "to talk over things." Perhaps twenty men accepted the invitation. These men, gathered in one of the smaller rooms of the institute, under Mr. Washington's leadership discussed the problems with which they had to contend, and different ones among them told how they had succeeded or failed. The meeting was felt to be so helpful that another was planned for the next year. From that small beginning has developed a conference which now brings to Tuskegee, in February of each year, two thousand persons, from a dozen States, and representing many occupations besides that of farming. These men and women are the parents of the generation which is at school at Tuskegee and similar institutions. These fathers and mothers lived "too soon" to be able to profit by such advantages. Few of them can read or write, and nearly all of them know by experience what slavery was. They see their children learning so much which was unattainable for them that they ask, "Is there no chance for us?" The conference is Tuskegee's attempt to answer that cry. As one grizzled old negro preacher, whom I heard make the opening prayer one year, said, "O Lawd, we wants ter tank de for dis, our one day ob schoolin' in de whole year." [Illustration: NEGRO CONFERENCE IN SESSION IN TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE CHURCH.] Beginning with this year the conferences will be held in the new church, which will comfortably seat all the delegates. Until this church was completed, though, there was no audience room at the institute which would begin to accommodate all who came, and the sessions were held in a rude temporary building, which was also utilized for chapel and graduation exercises. Convenient as the new church is in every way, I shall always miss the unique gathering in that old pavilion. Imagine a broad, low building of unplaned boards, its floor the earth, and its seats backless benches made by spiking planks on to posts driven into the ground. From its rafters hang masses of Spanish moss, amid which streamers of red, white, and blue bunting are woven. On the walls are many American flags, looped back with the spiked leaves of the palmetto tree. Booker Washington stands on a low platform at one end of the room, and all around him, packed just as closely as they can be, are the people, while hundreds of late comers cluster around the doors and open windows like bees around the opening of a hive. No matter if the benches are backless and hard. No opera audience in five-dollar chairs ever sat half so interested for an hour as do these men and women through all the day, which, long as it is, proves far too short for what they have to say. This is the one day of the year for them, and not a minute must be wasted. The speakers are the men and women themselves. Mr. Washington simply starts the discussions and steers them so as to make all the time count. He is a genius as a presiding officer, and gets more out of the limited time than any one else could do. The subjects which they discuss are the practical ones which concern them most vitally. Some I have mentioned--non-ownership of land, crop-mortgaging, and the evil of raising only cotton. Others are the need of a longer school year and how to get it, the foolish extravagances of buying showy clocks, sewing machines, and organs before a house is owned to put them in, and similar subjects. The time is never long enough for all there is to be said. The effort is to make this a center from which some helpful thought will be carried out to take root during the year. [Illustration: "PLAIN-SEWING" ROOM.] I saw a striking example of the influence which the conference may exert at one of the sessions. A tall young mulatto woman had finally succeeded in getting a chance to speak, for there are always twice as many to talk as can find time. "Last year brother Washington told us," said she, "that three acres of land, properly carried on, would support a person, and told us how, and said that a woman as well as a man could carry on the land. I made up my mind I'd try it. I did, and it's so. I hired three acres of land and had it plowed. I had it plowed deep, too. No lazy nigger half done the job, for I sat on the ground myself to see it done." She then went on to tell what her seed and fertilizer had cost, what she planted and raised, and what her profits were, showing them to be quite enough, as she had said, to support her for a year. Loud applause greeted this report, and cries of "Dat's good!" and "Go ahead, sister!" but through it all the woman was seen to be still standing where she had spoken, waiting for a chance to go on, and with no sign of satisfaction in her face at the approval shown her. Raising one yellow hand high above her head, as soon as she could be heard, she cried in a strangely thrilling voice, which echoed through the dusky room: "How can you waste the one day of the year for us in such foolishness, when the life of a race is in jeopardy? Get to work! We must learn first to help ourselves, if we want God to help us!" Hardly had this woman finished speaking when it was seen that another woman had risen and was waiting for a chance to make herself heard. I think I never saw a more pitiful figure. Very black, old, with a gaunt form on which a shabby dress hung loosely, her face was that of a person for whom life had been so hard that hope was for her a word unknown. Two or three men in the audience said, "Oh, sit down!" as if they wondered what such a person could have to say which would not be a waste of the meeting's time, but she would not sit down. Standing there until the noise had hushed, she began: "I wants ter tank Gawd I'se come here ter day an' heard what dat sister had ter say. I don' know what made me come. I'se nebber been here before, but I'se so glad I come ter-day! I'se been de mother ob sixteen chillen. I hain't nebber had a home nor a mule nor eben a dress dat wa'n't morgiged. My chillen's gone an' lef' me as soon as dey's growed up, an' now my ole man is gone too. I tought dere wasn't nuffin lef' for me ter do but jes' die, but now I'se goin' home an' get some lan' an' do for myself an' my littles' chillens what nobody has ebber done for me. I kin do it, an' I tank Gawd I'se been here ter git de word." It seems to me as if this was missionary work of the best kind, and it is such work as this that Tuskegee is doing constantly. RECENT LEGISLATION AGAINST THE DRINK EVIL. BY APPLETON MORGAN. [_Concluded._] X. QUALITY INSPECTION.--In my paper in these pages, in 1894, I remarked, "If there is any such thing as a salutary liquor law, not derived from excise or police jurisdiction, it would be, perhaps, a statute insuring the purity of liquor; reviving that old English functionary, the 'ale-taster,' with his care over all drinkables exposed for sale." And surely this would be a legitimate and a constitutional law, as providing for the public safety (which is, after all is said, the origin and summit of all law). To kill a rattlesnake the rattlesnake must first be recognized as alive, and the old cry of the Podsnap that nothing improper exists is fast disappearing. It seems to me that at present, and in view of the fact that Mr. Reed's plan would involve a social and economical plant which could only be accumulated by long and deliberate legislative action, and admitting that the drink evil not only calls for legislative action but has received it for sixty-two years, and so accustomed our communities to expect it; admitting also Mr. Bellamy's and Mr. Reed's basic proposition that there is no reason why any human being should starve, and that it is not public policy that any creature of the State (even if a criminal confined for crime in a State penitentiary) should starve--admitting all these, it seems as if this plan really might be the best and most immediately practicable plan yet. Every State, without any criticism or clamor of constitutionalists against paternal government, appoints its official tester of illuminating fluids, that conflagration may not ensue and the public safety be imperiled by the destruction of the citizens' homes. Why not a State "tester" of the stimulant which may inflame the vital forces of the citizen himself, and so imperil the public peace, which, by all laws, is the public safety? Municipal corporations appoint inspectors of meat, of milk, of fruits, of confectionery, precisely under this constitutional duty of preserving the public health, upon which, most largely of all, the public safety depends. Why not, then, inspectors of the potables which the public drink? By having liquors examined, and only pure liquors sold, and condemned liquors destroyed, precisely as in the case of unclean or impure meats, milk, fruit, and confectionery; much could be practicably, and in a minimum lapse of time, accomplished to the decrease of the liquor evil. The prohibitionists themselves, by placing and replacing and abolishing and experimenting with all sorts of statutes upon the statute-book, have accustomed us to State regulation of the sale of intoxicants, and, least of all, can complain of yet one more experiment toward the decrease of drunkenness. Let the national or State government have liquors examined, and those not up to the standard emptied into the sewers, precisely as in the case of milk found filthy, dangerous, or questionable. The Government might also supervise the distilleries and forbid the manufacture of what are called "quick-aging" goods, or "continuous distillation," precisely as it controls the manufacture of oleomargarine. It is not improbable that a commission appointed to this good work might, by just, equitable, and easily-to-be-borne statutes, prescribe a time limit or period after which no spirituous liquors should be sold less than, say, five years old (the age of liquor being said to regulate its irritant and insanitary and to conserve its really salutary and sanitary qualities). I believe (not without consultation and a deliberate exchange of opinion with experts) that the good effects of such legislation would be almost instant; I believe that from pure motives of self-interest alone the distillers and rectifiers of liquors, instead of fighting such a law, would be eager to compete to furnish pure brands of liquor for the State censors, in the certainty that the State must adopt the best and the purest. To-day the public is served with precisely what the publican finds it most to his profit to sell. It may be only dirty water which he sells at a price at which he could (to his own immense profit) sell pure liquor. In every drinking place in the land, to which the public resorts, there are two prices--one price for what you order, and the other for the same "good." I believe that one of these days the world will remember, as curiously as it now remembers the days of the stagecoach or the tallow-dip, a time when a man desiring a dram of liquor was obliged to drink whatever the dram-seller found it profitable to sell him. We have tried about everything else. Why not try this? We have conceded to our legislators the right and the jurisdiction. Since we can not adopt Mr. Reed's proposition to feed everybody, why not enter the wedge right here and do the next best or a next best thing--see that the people not only eat proper meats and fruits, but that they drink, if drink they will, pure liquors? And it need be added (however it may appear to be a sop to Cerberus) that it would not antagonize that most powerful class, whose organized and capitalized opposition every other liquor-regulating law which has ever been suggested has at once antagonized, and been obliged in the end to if not conciliate, at least to recognize in the adjustment of equities. Fortunately, we have not to begin our experiments out of whole cloth. Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington have led the way, and made the adulteration of liquor a misdemeanor. (New York, however, has probably negatived the best results of the prohibition by adding that the prohibited adulteration must only be "with any deleterious drug, substance, or liquor which is poisonous or injurious to the health," which is shutting one door and opening another, and relegating to the lawyers and their experts a tedious inquisition as to what the word "poisonous" or the term "injurious to health" may mean, in the course of which the offender would walk free.) The question as to whether it would conserve the public peace as well as the public safety by decreasing drunkenness can only be favorably conjectured. Experience of such a law only can show. To begin with, it would increase the cost of a dram. A glass of true whisky, for example, might be twenty cents instead of ten, and (the law forbidding adulteration) this would probably in itself lessen dram-drinking. In England, many years ago, a similar law was found to eventuate in compelling that only the highest grades of ale should be sold at a certain price. This led to the offering of a second, and then of a third grade, and finally of what was claimed to be a blending of all three grades or an "entire" (which was the origin of the term ENTIRE, that later began to be the name of an alehouse--a legend still seen on English alehouse signs). But the law we now suggest, by preventing the blending of three grades of spirits, might, while lessening the sales, increase the excise revenues, and perhaps accomplish whatever may be left to be accomplished in conserving at once the health, the peace, and the income of the State. That a system by which only pure liquors can be exposed for sale as beverages is feasible, seems already assured, the States of Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Washington having already long since adopted a partial statutory policy of the sort, and the State of New York, in 1896, having followed. In order to demonstrate what these have accomplished, and what improvements can be suggested, there were addressed to the proper officers of each of these States the following questions, viz.: 1. In your State what officer is charged with enforcement of the provisions of its liquor statutes, forbidding adulteration of liquors exposed for sale as beverages? And must such officer be examined as to his experience or as to his competency only? 2. Is his standard of unadulterated liquors established by law, and if so, what is it? Or is the officer's judgment as to what liquor may or may not be sold discretionary according to the circumstances of each case? 3. Is the examination to be conducted by taste or tasting (sampling), the old English method, or by chemical analysis? 4. Is adulteration so defined as to include the mixing of liquor with water, or only with substances or liquids in themselves toxicants? 5. Is the effect of this clause thought to be beneficial? Has it, for example, decreased drunkenness? To the first question Mr. Samuel P. Sharpless, State Assayer of Massachusetts, reports as follows: "An assayer of liquor is appointed under our public statutes, who is charged with performing such duties as are referred to him. No particular examination prior to appointment is laid down. The presumption is that an analytical chemist will receive the appointment, as in the twenty years in which the law has existed only analytical chemists have received the same." As to Ohio, Mr. Joseph E. Blackburn, Dairy and Food Commissioner, says: "The office of Dairy and Food Commissioner is charged with the enforcement of all laws governing the sale of food, drink, and drugs. He is not required to stand any examination, and his experience and qualifications are not considered except as to his eligibility as a candidate. It is distinctly a political position, and all the parties nominate candidates for the place." As to Michigan, Mr. Elliot O. Grosvenor, Dairy and Food Commissioner, says, "The Dairy and Food Commissioner of the State is charged with enforcement of the law relating to adulteration of liquors." As to Illinois, Hon. E. C. Akin, Attorney-General, writes: "It is the duty of the several State's attorneys to prosecute for violations of this section, on complaint of any one, or by indictment. There is no officer charged with the duty of making examinations or tests of liquors." As to New York, Hon. Henry H. Lyman, Commissioner of Excise, replies: "The district attorneys of the several counties in this State have direct and exclusive control of all criminal prosecutions against violators of the liquor-tax law, but indirectly the matter of enforcing this section devolves upon the State Board of Health. By the provisions of section 42, chapter 661, laws of 1893, the State Board of Health shall take cognizance of the interests of the public health as affected by the sale or use of foods and adulterations thereof, and make all necessary inquiries and investigations relating thereto. It shall appoint such public analysts, chemists, and inspectors as it may deem necessary for that purpose, etc. Upon discovering any violations of the provisions of the act relating to the adulteration of foods or drugs, the State Board of Health shall immediately communicate the facts to the district attorney of the county where the violation occurred, who shall thereupon forthwith commence proceedings for the indictment of the persons charged with such violations." To the second question, as to what is held to be adulteration, in Massachusetts the only standard fixed by law is that of the United States Pharmacopoeia. Chapter 272, Acts of 1896, undertakes to provide certain standards. But so far not a single case has been brought under this act, since it has not been made the duty of any one in particular to enforce it. The assayer and inspector can only examine such liquors as are brought to him by the proper officers. He has no authority to institute proceedings even if he finds the liquor to be badly adulterated. Such action must be taken by the officers making the seizure. But Mr. Sharpless writes that, in his opinion, the law (section 31 of chapter 100 of the public statutes) providing for taking samples of liquors for analysis contains in its last sentence a clause which renders it inoperative: it requires such samples to be paid for if they are found to be of good quality. Mr. Sharpless adds: "Under this section I have received perhaps on an average twenty samples a year for the past fifteen years. These samples have generally been whisky, gin, brandy, and rum. The Legislature has been repeatedly requested to give the assayer authority to take samples in the same manner as they are taken by the milk inspector, but has as uniformly refused to give him that power." Ohio reports that the legal standard for liquors is the requirements of the United States Pharmacopoeia. In Michigan the law does not define any standard for adulteration or unadulteration. Nor is it left to the mere judgment of any officer. "In case of prosecution the fact of adulteration would have to be proved to the satisfaction of the jury by any competent evidence." This is the language of Mr. Samuel A. Kennedy, Deputy Secretary of State. Mr. Elliot O. Grosvenor, the Dairy and Food Commissioner, indicates the nature of the evidence, however, as follows: "If the word 'standard' can be used in connection with the word 'adulteration,' our law does regulate this standard. We send you under another cover a copy of the law concerning liquors, so far as within the jurisdiction of this department, from which you will see we have little or no discretion in the matter." The clause marked by Mr. Grosvenor is as follows: "The law relating to liquors seems to be meant only to prohibit the sale of spirituous or fermented or malt liquors containing drugs or poisons or substances or ingredients deleterious or unhealthful; and provides that each barrel, cask, keg, bottle, or other vessel containing the same shall be branded or labeled with the words 'Pure and without drugs or poison,' together with the name of the person or firm preparing the package. This applies to every package of whatever size--it matters not whether they are put up for immediate delivery or for stock purpose. This includes all bottled ale, beer, rum, wine, or other malt or spirituous liquors, also the bottles used for dispensing over the bar. The State has no standard of proof, but liquors in packages where proof is indicated must test to that proof. Compounds containing nothing deleterious or unhealthful may be sold as cordials. The blending of liquors will be permitted, if spirits or other ingredients are not added. Dealers purchasing and receiving goods not properly branded or labeled are not relieved from any responsibility, if they sell the same without branding or labeling." In Illinois the standard is not mentioned, but the articles forbidden are plainly set forth by the criminal code of the State, which provides that "whoever adulterates, for the purpose of sale, any liquor used for drink, with cocculus indicus, vitriol, grains of paradise, opium, alum, capsicum, copperas, laurel water, logwood, Brazilwood, cochineal, sugar of lead, or any other substance which is poisonous or injurious to health; and whoever sells or offers, or keeps for sale any such liquor so adulterated, shall be confined in the county jail not exceeding one year, or fined not exceeding one thousand dollars, or both." In New York there is a standard fixed for wines, and sections 46, 47, and 48 of the laws of 1893 are devoted to the definition of pure wine, half wine, made wine, and the adulteration of wines generally. But there is no standard of purity enacted for spirituous or malt liquors, and it is left to the discretion of the inspecting officers whether any liquors inspected and analyzed by them contain any deleterious substances. As to question third, all the States seem to agree that chemical analysis is the safer, but adulteration seems to be considered by them all as a fact, to be proved by any competent process, even the taster not being barred, as he certainly is not by the clause as to inspection in the State of New York. Mr. Grosvenor, Food Commissioner of Michigan, however, says that the only test recognized by his department would be that made in its own laboratory by its own two chemists. As to whether the adulteration could be by water only, all our courteous informants refer us to their answer to the question as to standards but Ohio, whose Food Commissioner (Blackburn) replies, "Yes, if the proofage is reduced to less than one hundred degrees." In Massachusetts, Mr. Sharpless says, "In a case brought a number of years ago the court refused to consider water as an adulteration; no recent case has been brought." As to the fifth and vital question, whether the clause against adulteration tends to decrease drunkenness, Mr. Sharpless adds the following valuable record of his experiences as State assayer in a State which, in thirty years, has experimented with about every known form of liquor statute: "So far as I have observed, the quality of the liquor has but little to do with the question of drunkenness. In some localities where prohibition has been strictly enforced we find that the class who will have liquor is obtaining it in other than the well-known commercial forms. Frequently we find that large quantities of extract of ginger are being consumed. A number of cases have been brought against the venders of this article, as an alcoholic beverage containing more than one per cent of alcohol. These cases have generally proved successful in stopping its sale. Essence of peppermint and of checkerberry, for example, are favorite tipples. During the past summer a case was found in which 'So-and-so's Drops,' a nostrum, a mixture of ether and alcohol, was being used as an intoxicant. The so-called 'native wines' have given us some trouble. These are essentially a fermented solution of sugar and water, with sufficient juice of some fruit for flavoring and color. When made without the addition of spirits they contain about fourteen per cent of alcohol. They are generally pretty poor stuff. About two years ago we had an epidemic of so-called 'malt extracts.' These, with very few exceptions, were found to be essentially porter. The alcohol in them averaged about six per cent, and they were quite palatable beverages. They contained about seven or eight per cent of solid extract. "It has been several times proposed here that no liquors should be sold unless their purity was certified to by the State assayer. This I have uniformly opposed, for the reason that, while the State may well prohibit the sale of adulterated liquors, it is no part of its business to certify to the purity of any man's goods; and, unless the State becomes the sole vender of liquors, it has no means of keeping track of them. "It has been my practice during my term of office never to give a certificate in regard to a liquor to any one but the officers authorized to ask such a certificate. In other words, the only way a private person can get an analysis of liquor made by the State assayer is to take it to the chief of police of his town or city and make a complaint in regard to it; as the assayer is paid by the State for his work, it would obviously be wrong for him to do work which he might, have to revise in his official capacity.... I may perhaps be allowed to add a few words as to what is defined in this State as an intoxicating liquor. When the State assayer of liquors was first appointed he soon became convinced that some limit must be fixed to the allowable amount of alcohol contained in a liquor. After consultation this amount was fixed at three per cent by volume at 60° F. This law remained in force several years. Soon after it was found that a large amount of beer was being made which contained about 3.5 per cent of alcohol. This was a palatable beer, and the venders gave the officers much trouble. The regular trade, who were selling lager beer and ale, and paying for the privilege, were also much opposed to its sale, and the Legislature was asked to reduce the limit to one per cent by volume. This at one stroke destroyed a large amount of illegitimate trade. The Massachusetts law, as it now stands, is that ale, porter, strong beer, lager beer, cider, all wines, and any beverage containing more than one per cent of alcohol, by volume, at 60° F., as well as distilled spirits, shall be deemed to be intoxicating liquor, within the meaning of the license provisions, and this section of the law has been decided by the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth to be constitutional.[A] The question is never raised now in the court as to whether a liquor is actually intoxicating; the only question being, Does it contain more than one per cent of alcohol? If it does (and as a matter of fact cases are very rarely brought in which the sample does not contain at least two per cent of alcohol), the court has no power except to convict, if it be proved that the article was kept for sale. The result of this law has been that the sale of beer, with the idea that it is possible to convince the court that it is not intoxicating, has entirely stopped. Some few attempts are made to produce a beverage that shall contain less than one per cent of alcohol. And several brands are on the market which, when cold, taste very well, but which contain only about 0.85 per cent of alcohol. Generally the only test made in regard to liquors is as to the amount of alcohol that they contain; or, rather, whether the amount of alcohol exceeds one per cent, that being the maximum amount that can be sold without a license. Such examination is generally made by distilling the liquor and determining the alcohol in the distillate. [Footnote A: _Vide_ Commonwealth _vs._ Brelsford, 161 Mass., 61.] "The whiskies examined have in Massachusetts, as a rule, been free from any substance more injurious than the alcohol they contain. They have generally (as well as the other distilled liquors examined) been of standard strength--that is, they have contained about fifty per cent of alcohol, and as a rule have not given much over the amount of residue allowed by the Pharmacopoeia. As you will see by the foregoing remarks, the provisions of the Massachusetts liquor law, so far as adulteration is concerned, are practically a dead letter. I have been repeatedly before the Legislature asking for such modifications of the law as would enable me to make an intelligent study of the subject; but it seems satisfied to allow the matter to stand as it now is. Several difficulties arise in regard to any enforcement of the law. One of these--that samples must be paid for, and there is no appropriation to pay for them--I have already pointed out. In the second place, the State Board of Health (which has full power to inspect liquors under the food act) has discovered that the chief adulteration is water in distilled liquors, and that this, together with a little burned sugar and sirup, is practically the only adulteration. Large amounts of rectified spirits are used in the preparation of whiskies for the market, where the whisky is used only as a flavoring material. But such manufactured whiskies meet the requirements of the Pharmacopoeia better than the genuine article, being more free from the higher alcohols and ethers than a pure whisky. The only point in which they do not agree is that they are not three years old. But the only method for determining the age of a liquor that I am acquainted with, is the brand on the barrel. It certainly can not be determined by any chemical means." But, with the exception of Massachusetts, where Mr. Sharpless points out clearly the reason why the law against adulteration is a dead letter, all the reports speak encouragingly. Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio believe that the operation of the provision will do genuine good. Says Food Commissioner Blackburn, of Michigan, "It is my opinion that this law has and will decrease drunkenness, for the reason that pure liquor will not create the unnatural appetite that compounded, adulterated, or artificially prepared liquors do." The State of Washington sends no report. There is a provision in the South Carolina law providing that liquors shall be "pure"; but, as the State is the dispenser of liquors, the operation of this clause has not been considered exemplary for the purposes of this article. Mr. Lyman, in New York, thinks that sufficient time has not elapsed to fully pronounce as to the benefits of the law. XI and XII. HIGH LICENSE AND LOCAL OPTION.--Certainly the examination of these statutes and reports of their results in forty-nine States and Territories leaves it beyond question that so far the very best results have accompanied the combination of these two provisions. Perhaps the best example is in the largest of the communities to be affected--viz., in the State and city of New York. Here, by separating the plebiscitum or referendum into four local options--viz., (1) selling liquor to be drunk upon the premises where sold, (2) selling liquor not to be drunk upon the premises where sold, (3) selling liquor by apothecaries only on physician's prescription, (4) selling liquor by license granted to "hotel keepers" only--the result obtained has been, I think, precisely what I contended for in the paper of five years age, namely, the value of liquor has been recognized, and its sale provided for without denying its dangers as a temptation, or the disastrous effects of drunkenness. To use the exact words of the commissioner's report: "The tendency is to recognize the propriety of the sale of liquors by hotels and pharmacists in many communities where they will not, by their votes, approve the sale by saloons and groceries; and while there are now twenty less absolutely 'no-license' towns than when the law took effect, there are very many less saloons and groceries where liquors are dispensed." And this while not in any way compromising or dallying with the proposition which the prohibitionists and temperance societies insist upon (and which is all they have as a basis for their claims), viz., the consequences of intoxication and the public policy of its prevention. To show that, as a fact, an equivalent result has been reached in every State in the Union where high license and local option are united, would unduly tax these pages. But one or two prominent examples are of the paradoxical results--as gratifying as they are paradoxical--that the fewer the places where liquor is sold the larger the revenue to the State, and the less the drunkenness, may be cited. In the State of New York in two years of high license the reduction in selling places was 5,484; the increase of revenue to the State was $9,094,646.01; the decrease in the number of arrests was 22,689. In the city of New York alone the reduction in places was 1,204; the increase of revenue was $3,549,851.90; the decrease in the arrests for drunkenness was 3,044. Similar results are reported invariably as the fruit of high license elsewhere in the United States. In the city of Chicago, under an exceedingly high license, the reduction in one year was 200 in the number of saloons, while the increase of revenue was $1,250,000; and yet the decrease in the number of arrests was 1,217. Contrast this result with the condition of affairs in the triple-steel-barred prohibition State of Maine! Says an ex-Mayor of Portland: "I went into office perfectly free; I think I enforced the law impartially with all the vigor I could control.... I looked it all over to see what I had accomplished; I found that I had driven out of the business one set of men, and another had come in worse than the first. I found that the young men were establishing club rooms. Not only did they become drinking places, but they brought in gambling and other vice. While I was driving liquor out of the ordinary shops I was driving it into houses and kitchens, where even children dealt in it.... I am sorry to say it, but the law makes perjury alarmingly common; it opens up ... an avenue for bribes.[B] [Footnote B: Annual Report of the New York State Commissioner of Excise, 1897-1898, p. 716, Id.] "The local authorities could not be trusted to enforce the law. The price of liquors has been lessened and the quality is worse.... To those who shunned the open bars the apothecary shops supplied liquor by the bottle as often as desired.... Then arose pocket peddlers, young men who loiter about the street supplying customers from the bottle with a drink known as splits--a concoction of the cheapest alcohol mixed with a dash of rum and coloring matter, which produces a dangerous form of intoxication.... At the city agency the question 'Medicine?' and the answer 'Yes,' was quite sufficient, and throngs of people were constantly waiting with flasks to be filled.... 'Bars,' 'Eating Houses' (so called because protected by the police), 'Kitchen Bars,' 'Pocket Peddlers,' 'Hotel Bars,' 'Apothecary Shops,' 'Bottling Houses,' 'Express Companies,' 'Clubs,' and the 'City Agency.'" But all these, under the very eye of the late Hon. Neal Dow, were powerless to convince the Hon. Neal Dow that his policy was not a massive and monumental success, and to the end of his days the good old man delivered glowing eulogiums upon its exalted benefits to a suffering and liquor-ridden world! Among the novel devices among the statutes of States classed as licensing sales of liquor (or which have rejected prohibition) may be mentioned the following: Apothecaries may sell without a license if they keep records of sales. Purchasers of liquor must make affidavit of the purpose for which they require the liquor. Physicians prescribing liquors must make affidavit that they are required by the case they are attending. Public officers who tolerate or refuse to prosecute are fined. Name of owner of premises where liquors are sold must be painted in large letters on outside window with the word "owner" added. A provision that any one may sell liquor, but that the Legislature may provide in any way it sees fit against "the evils resulting therefrom." No barmaids, or dancing, gambling, or oil paintings on premises where liquor is sold. The provisions that eatables must or must not be sold where liquor is retailed are about numerically even. (It will be remembered that the New York ["Raines"] law at first abolished free lunches, but insisted that while one must not have food with his liquor on week days, he could not on Sundays have it without--the last provision still being enforced). Similarly, in some States, liquor dealers must not keep lodging houses, while in others they must. West Virginia says that a tavern or hotel must not be used as a liquor-selling establishment only, and that a refusal to give diet or lodging to any one demanding it will forfeit its license to sell liquor. One State (Colorado) recognizes the so-called "gold-cure," and authorizes "the person most interested," or the county, to send habitual drunkards at county expense to "any respectable gold-cure institute." In Illinois a drunkard is by law a vagrant, and drunkenness is a cause for divorce. In Louisiana the excise man who makes an erroneous estimate of the amount of business done (Louisiana regulates the liquor business according to sales only, disclaiming any preventive or reformatory object) is removable from office. In Tennessee applicants for license must state the amount of business they intend to do. Kentucky regulates the price of liquors sold, being the only American State so doing (except that South Carolina says that the price of a potion shall not be "more than fifty per cent above," or if used as a medicine "more than ten per cent above," the cost thereof to the seller--rather a difficult matter to approximate). Arkansas prohibits sales within three miles of a church, schoolhouse, or academy. The sales of liquor to Indians is prohibited, and the exclusive right of army officers to purchase it is conserved, at the proper frontiers. Texas inserts in her statutes a fine for keeping a "blind tiger" (defined to be a place "where intoxicating liquors are sold by any device whereby the party selling or delivering the same is concealed from the person buying or to whom the same is delivered"). And, in Kansas, twenty-five reputable women must unite with twenty-five reputable men in applying for a license to sell liquor. No State or Territory mentions the size or quantity of liquor to be sold at any price, as is the European custom. It would seem, therefore, that, with the exception of the State of Maine alone, all the American Commonwealths are gradually harking back to the standpoint of the earliest liquor laws. Moderation (temperance) in drinking was the public policy. Leaving out the act of the British Parliament, in the year 1735 (which gave Governor Oglethorpe the right to prohibit the importation of ardent spirits into Georgia, which was not a measure to prevent intoxication, but to give a monopoly to Governor Oglethorpe), the first temperance association was that founded by Dr. Rush; and it is related that the venerable president, upon being elected, rose with a glass of brandy in his hand and gave the toast: "Gentlemen, fill your glasses. Let us show the world that we know how to drink in moderation." To sum it all up. Why, since we can not set out with a club or a headsman's axe to reform mankind; since there are substantial rights to adjust and innocent parties to protect, why is not the proposition to prevent by law the exposure of adulterated liquors for sale as beverages the best so far suggested? Is there another which at the same time is constitutional, equitable, peaceable, and so conservative of the public safety, which creates no law-breaking class out of honest citizens, sheds no blood (as blood was shed in South Carolina in 1875 because men of Anglo-Saxon breed could not be readily made to concede that a man's house was not his castle), and which imports no new doctrine into American policy? I, for one, believe that, with it, the solution of the drink problem would be in sight. High license and personal damage laws are two thirds of it. If a man desires to sell liquor let him pay one or two thousand dollars, or other substantial sum of money, to the school or the police or the poor fund of his neighborhood. Let him be liable in damages, as are common carriers or any others who deal in conveniences or commodities in which there is possible risk to the community, for what is injured by his operations. As to the remaining third of the remedy: the sole objections to local option (viz., that it may be abused at the polls, where the total-abstinence interest might be as capable of a wrong use of money or of other undue influence as the liquor interest, or that it might be inconvenient to the public) are fully met by making adulteration impossible and providing for a compulsory, rigid, and universal inspection of liquors exposed for sale as beverages. And then, besides, it will be unnecessary to burn down our village to roast our pig. * * * * * A curious experiment, at Carnot, in the Congo, is described in the journal _Le Chasseur Français_ in the shape of the collection and raising of the animals which the natives bring in from the bush. Large numbers have been taken in. Some of the animals die, some escape. Among those that have stayed are two wild hogs, which roam at liberty, eat from the hand, and follow like dogs. There are a jackal, mangoustes, small rodents, a company of monkeys, and a young tiger cat, "which is the lawgiver to the others." None of the animals is confined, except that the jackal is tied, though he follows; but it has been necessary to separate the guinea-pigs from the rest. A large monkey has assumed the office of shepherd's dog, and takes care of the sheep. There are also dogs--"good company, but not of much value"--eight horses, with a colt that will eat at the table if allowed to; forty horned cattle, which are multiplying; and asses, which are also increasing. HAWK LURES. BY W. E. CRAM. It is a pretty well known fact among hunters and students of Nature generally that most flesh-eating animals, whether in fur or feathers, can be more readily called by imitating the squeaking of mice than in any other way, and proves conclusively enough that these creatures depend largely on the sense of hearing in their struggle for a livelihood. My first practical illustration of this fact occurred so long ago that it seems almost like ancient history. For some reason or other one summer's vacation began some six hours earlier than was expected, and although apparently insignificant enough when compared with the entire three months that were to follow, that extra half holiday was probably valued out of all due proportion by the pupils, owing to its unexpectedness, and for that reason, perhaps, more than any other, is still recalled by one at least as distinctly as ever. One of the boys had a contrivance known as a bird-call--a simple instrument of wood and some soft metal--that, on being turned, produced noises that bore not the slightest resemblance to the cries of any bird, but were not entirely unlike the squeaking of a mouse in distress. Some of us were more or less skeptical as to its powers of attracting birds, and decided to put it to the test. So we loafed about under the apple trees working the thing for all it was worth, but no birds came about us, and the bird-call was in danger of being thrown away in disgrace, when a small brown beast appeared from under a pile of boards and came running toward us, till suddenly scenting danger it disappeared. There was some discussion at the time whether it was a rat, chipmunk, or red squirrel; none had seen it very clearly or could give any very definite description of it, but in all probability it was a weasel attracted by what it supposed to be the voice of its accustomed prey. About halfway between that time and the present a young long-eared owl became an important member of our family, a most original and amusing bird, without the slightest fear of any of us. He was christened Mephistopheles. [Illustration: MEPHISTOPHELES.] As he was learning to fly, it seemed advisable that he should be taught to come at our call to be fed; and accordingly one day, by way of experiment, I held out a piece of meat to him and squeaked like a mouse. There was a rush of downy pinions, and his talons were neatly arranged about my lips. He was evidently a good deal excited, but was careful not to hurt me any more than was absolutely necessary in order to secure the mouse which he fancied he had cornered in my mouth. I was just reckless enough to try it again on the following day as he perched on the low branch of an apple tree. His power of detecting the direction whence the sound came proved fully equal to the occasion, and the result was the same as in the first instance. The end of Mephisto was tragic in the extreme. He was sometimes fastened by a linen cord six or eight feet long and as large as a lead pencil, which when not in use was hung across the perch where he slept. Evidently he felt that the food furnished him was too effeminate, for the powerful stomachs of all birds of prey require a certain amount of such indigestible matter as hair, feathers, or bone to keep them in good condition. So one ill-fated night, in looking about for something that would answer that purpose, he unfortunately hit upon the cord as a substitute, and proceeded to swallow one end of it. The first few feet must have fully satisfied his cravings, but there was the rest to be disposed of, and the most feasible method that presented itself naturally was to go on swallowing. The thing must have grown extremely dry and distasteful as inch after inch disappeared, still there was nothing for it but to go on, which he did. In the morning he was strangely silent and gloomy, with hardly a foot of cord protruding from his beak. Any attempt on our part to remove the cord proved not only fruitless but painful, so it was cut off close to his beak, whereupon he swallowed what remained in his mouth and looked relieved. His meal proved too much for him, however, and he only lived a few days after it. The different species of hawks vary greatly as regards the readiness with which they may be called--most of them, in fact, absolutely refusing to be lured in any way. As might be expected from its habits, the marsh hawk is the most susceptible, and in still weather may be brought from a distance of one hundred yards or more. At the first squeak he wheels about in the air and comes directly toward you with most unexpected impetuosity and swiftness. His discomposure on discovering the fraud is usually most amusing, as he stops short in mid air, with wings and legs asprawl, and turning his back on you, hurries off in feverish haste. The red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks are also easily attracted in this manner, but the rough-legged hawks, although they live almost entirely on mice, are not so readily deceived, though this is undoubtedly owing more to their extreme wariness than to any dullness of hearing on their part. None of the falcons or short-winged hawks pay the slightest attention to the most lifelike squeaking, so that evidently when they do deign to attack such ignoble quarry as a field mouse they depend more on their eyesight than on the sense of hearing. One still October day the red-tailed hawks were soaring and screaming above the pines beneath which I was hidden; by mimicking their cries I enticed one of them nearer and nearer, till at last he closed his wings and alighted bolt upright on a dead stump not fifty feet away. Changing my tactics, I endeavored to convince the hawk that a family quarrel was in progress among the mice in the thick clump of pines below him, and was rewarded by seeing him turn first one keen eye and then the other on my place of concealment; then he leaned forward and crouched catlike on his perch, half opening his broad wings and shifting his feet about in his impatience. But he evidently desired more positive evidence than his ears could give him before making the final dash for his breakfast. There was a slender dead branch beside me, and cautiously taking this, I shoved it slowly along under the carpet of pine needles out into the opening, as one sometimes amuses a kitten with a pencil beneath the tablecloth. The instant the hawk's eye caught the movement of the pine needles he descended with a whir almost to the point of seizing the stick in his claws; then, catching sight for the first time of the author of his disappointment, he rose flapping into the air, shrieking out his anger to the skies. If we had been more evenly matched in weight, I fear I should have suffered the most extreme punishment for my deceit. The northern shrike is generally given the credit of living to a certain extent on mice, but the only evidence pointing in that direction that I have ever seen is that, like the mouse-eating hawks and owls, he comes quickly enough to the call; nor is there any need of concealment when dealing with this bird. He will come fearlessly within a few yards of you, hopping and flying from twig to twig, with his long tail continually moving up and down in his excitement, apparently impelled more by motives of curiosity than hunger. [Illustration: NORTHERN SHRIKE.] But when it comes to calling up to you such shy creatures as the mink or fox the utmost caution is necessary, for although lacking the keenness of eyesight possessed by birds, the acuteness of their sense of smell and hearing is something marvelous; yet when conditions are favorable they may sometimes be brought quite close and studied to advantage. Standing one day beside an old tumble-down rail fence that ran along between the woods and salt marshes, half hidden in the brambles and tall grass, I caught the merest glimpse of a mink slipping along between the bottom rails. As he was evidently unaware of my presence, I determined to see more of him, and squeaked in as mouselike a manner as possible, and quickly had the satisfaction of seeing him make his appearance on a projecting stake much nearer than when I had first seen him. Stretching himself along the stake, he appeared to listen and look in my direction, but although I was standing in plain sight on the edge of the marsh hardly a rod away, the fact that he was obliged to look directly into the sun made it quite impossible for him to clearly distinguish what he saw. At the end of a few moments he dropped into the grass and started in my direction, the trembling grass blades clearly indicating his progress as he approached nearer and nearer, until almost at my feet he vanished, and, in spite of the most patient waiting on my part, absolutely refused to show himself again. The last instance of the kind that has come under my notice happened on a clear moonlight night as I was wheeling along a lonely road between old apple orchards. Some part of the machine squeaked at intervals in a way that might possibly have been mistaken for a mouse. At all events, an owl appeared to have been deceived thereby, for he came flapping out of the orchard and flew alongside, at times coming quite close and again swinging off into the shadow, till at last, convinced that his supper lay not in that direction, he put on fresh speed and left me far behind. Perhaps he would have done as he did if the bicycle had not squeaked, but, judging from his behavior, I am inclined to think otherwise. THE MILK SUPPLY OF CITIES. BY PROF. H. W. CONN. The ever-growing needs of civilized communities constantly demand new methods. At the time when the streets of Boston may have been the actual cow paths which we are sometimes told they represent, the milk problem did not exist. Every farmer owned his cows, and if some of the people in the small communities did not happen to own a cow there were plenty of these animals in their neighborhood to furnish them with milk. But as our cities have grown the farmer has been pushed back farther and farther into the country, while the demand for milk in the cities has been constantly increasing. The man of the city can no longer call upon his neighbor for milk, but must depend upon some unknown farmer living perhaps many miles away. In England the farmer still lives somewhat close to the city, and as soon as one passes the city limits he begins to find the fields and meadows covered with cows. London and Berlin draw their immense milk supply chiefly from a radius of seventy-five miles. In the United States, however, the farmer does not live so close to the cities, and the demand for milk is even greater than in Europe. Our cities must therefore depend upon a wider range of territory. New York draws its milk from a radius of some three hundred miles. It is easy to see that with such conditions many new problems have arisen. These problems, so far as they concern the obtaining of a sufficient quantity and the transportation and preservation of the milk, have, from a business standpoint, been pretty satisfactorily solved. The milk-supply companies succeed in obtaining a sufficient supply at all seasons of the year, and get it into the city in such a manner that when delivered to the consumer, even though it be forty-eight hours old, it is in tolerably good condition. But it is beginning to appear that the problem, as concerns the consumer, is a somewhat serious one, and that this problem has not yet been solved, nor is it likely to be solved unless the consumer himself takes a direct interest in it. The problem of the milk supply in the smaller cities is quite different from that of our larger cities. In the smaller cities, even those with populations of one hundred thousand, there may be commonly found a number of milkmen who bring into the city the milk from their own farms and personally distribute it. Such a business is a small one, and the dealer and the producer may be held directly responsible for the quality of the milk. In large cities, however, the business is very different. The individual milk dealer who brings in milk from his own farm has almost disappeared, and his place is supplied by the milk-supply companies that control the product from hundreds of farms and regulate the large part of the milk which the city consumes. These companies send milk trains into the country in all directions, and collect milk from thousands of farms. The milk is brought into the city in cars in which it is cooled by ice. It may be already many hours old when it reaches the city. It is taken from the cars, and the milk from many different sources is mixed in large mixers to insure greater uniformity. It is again packed in ice, and remains thus until the individual dealer is ready to put it into his cart and distribute it through the city to the customer. As a result of this the customer no longer knows whence his milk comes. If he is a citizen of New York, he may receive milk from his own State, or Connecticut, or Pennsylvania, or New Jersey. It may come from a thrifty farmer, or from a slovenly, filthy farm, or, for all that the consumer knows, it may come in part from a farm where there is a contagious epidemic. There is no method of tracing responsibility, no method of even knowing the source of any lot of milk. One morning we may receive milk from northern New York, and the next from New Jersey. One morning, for all he knows, it may come from a model dairy farm, and the next from the most unhygienic surroundings imaginable. But this is to a certain extent true of other foods. We can not tell where our flour or meat comes from, or our apples or sugar. Why should we be more disturbed over milk than other foods? Indeed, until recently we have had no especial interest in the milk problem, and have taken milk as it has been offered without question, except as to its being pure milk unadulterated with water. But the rapid discoveries of bacteriology, which have shown milk to be such a good locality for bacterial growth, have been raising some very significant questions. We have been told of the countless millions of bacteria which we have been drinking daily. This has somewhat disturbed us, and no sooner have we become reconciled to this idea than we are told of the great amount of filth that finds its way into milk--two hundred pounds of cow dung being the daily ration of New York city, some one tells us. The matter appears more serious still when we are told by the public press that there are more bacteria in city milk than in city sewage, and are informed of the epidemics of typhoid which are distributed by milk, or of the prevalence of tubercle bacteria in this food product. We become suspicious of the milk supply and hesitate to use this food product or to give it to our children. Naturally, the people in small communities feel somewhat more at ease in the matter since they know their milk producer and can hold him responsible. But it is questionable whether the milk supply of the large city is not more reliable. The milk supply in the city is handled by organizations, and these, on the whole, are rather more likely to exercise care in the treatment of the milk than are the small dealers. The advantage of handling the matter through companies is well shown in many European cities. In the large cities of England and the continent the milk business is commonly handled by concerns that distribute great quantities daily. Now, many of these companies deal with the subject in a very intelligent manner. They exercise a very considerable control over the individual dairy farms. Some of them keep inspectors traveling constantly among the farms, spending $10,000 to $15,000 yearly in such inspections. They will receive no milk from a farm until after an inspector has visited it and looked into the hygienic conditions of the dairy, even sometimes going so far as to make an analysis of the water used in the dairy. Only after such inspection has been declared favorable is the milk received in the city. These inspections are repeated monthly. The appearance of a contagious disease on the farm is noted at once and the milk no longer received, although still paid for. These companies employ chemists and bacteriologists to study the character of the milk received. They educate their men into their business, and consequently employ more intelligent help than small concerns can. They can furnish a more uniform product than can be expected of smaller dealers. They soon acquire a reputation for their milk, which they are very careful to preserve. Such firms can exercise a much more satisfactory control over the individual farmer than can even public statute, since, with their systems of inspection, it is possible to have an accurate knowledge of the actual conditions under which the milk is produced. It is plainly within the power of firms dealing in large quantities to control the character of its milk more accurately than can small dealers. Results, too, appear on the whole in favor of the large dealers. In the cities where there is a system of rigid milk inspection it is comparatively seldom that the milk furnished by such companies is found below the standard. This milk is kept up to the standard, and the companies having a chemical laboratory and having milk from many sources can keep the quality of the milk much more uniform than can a dealer whose supply comes from a single farm. The milk inspectors usually find that it is the small dealers that fail to meet the standard. Moreover, it is a fact that where epidemics have been traced to milk it has always been in communities where individual milkmen bring in milk from one or two dairies and distribute it personally. All the epidemics of typhoid that have been definitely traced to milk have been in small communities, and none traced to the milk of large dealers. It is true that it would be difficult or impossible to trace to the milk a typhoid epidemic which might occur in a large city. No one is likely to receive the milk from the same source for two days in succession, and the mixing which the milk receives in the receiving station entirely obliterates the individual source. If there should be some milk brought to the city which contained typhoid bacteria it would be impossible to determine the fact, for such milk, after mixing, would be thoroughly scattered beyond any possibility of following it. We may, then, question somewhat the significance of the fact, but it certainly is true that while serious epidemics have been caused by milk in smaller cities no such instance has occurred in the large cities, or been traced to the milk furnished by companies that handle it in considerable amounts. It would seem that if milk has ever been the cause of such diseases in large cities there ought to have been some evidence of the fact obtained. It is probable, therefore, that the small community can hardly feel itself any better off in regard to the milk supply than the larger city. It is, of course, easier to trace responsibility for bad milk if we know where it comes from, but it is less likely to be very bad if it comes from a large number of sources and is thoroughly mixed. The milk in the large city is perhaps forty-eight hours old when it is received by the consumer. But it has been kept on ice, has perhaps been filtered, and many of its bacteria may have been killed by the long-continued cold temperature. So far as concerns the bacteria question, our milk which is thus two days old, appears to be actually superior to milk delivered in European cities, which is only a few hours old. The free use of ice in our milk car produces a more favorable result than the more rapid handling which the milk receives in Europe. The milk company controlling a large territory, with great resources at its command, can put into practice rules which even public statute can not enforce, and which the individual farmer will rarely do by himself. One who is acquainted with the methods of handling milk in our cities finds that the companies are each year improving their methods, and that the milk is in most places becoming more reliable. The proper solution of the milk supply for our communities is in the formation of large companies, provided they are managed partly for the benefit of the public and not wholly for money-making. There is little question that the public has become somewhat suspicious of milk, and that many hesitate to drink it as freely as in earlier years. This suspicion is more pronounced in Europe than in the United States. Upon the continent of Europe the amount of milk which is used raw is really very small, and apparently its use in this condition is destined to cease. The younger generation of physicians are now being taught that raw milk is a dangerous food, and in some countries even the children in the schools are being taught that it is not safe to drink raw milk. Such teaching can have only one result, and that is the reduction in the amount of milk consumed. Much less milk is used in Europe than in this country. It is used for tea or coffee or for cooking, and of course for infant feeding, but for any one to drink milk as we do in this country is certainly a rarity. The suspicion under which milk has been placed has decreased its use. The dangers which are feared in milk are of course connected with the distribution of disease. Most persons who thus hesitate to use milk have simply a vague fear, without knowing just what is to be feared. When we put together all the facts in our possession we find that there is good reason for believing that milk is sometimes concerned in the distribution of the following well-known diseases and some obscure ones: The first is _tuberculosis_, which is a disease attacking the cow, and, if located in the mammary gland, may infect the milk with tubercle bacilli, and may subsequently produce the disease in the person who drinks the milk. It should be stated, however, that there is good reason for believing that the danger from this source has been overrated. Second, we have _diphtheria_, which apparently may also attack the cow. The diphtheria germs may get into the milk from the cow, and they certainly do get into the milk occasionally from secondary sources. _Scarlet fever_ apparently is distributed by milk, though whether this disease may come from the cow or only by secondary contamination of the milk is not yet positively settled. _Typhoid fever_ has in a large number of cases been traced to the milk supply. This disease, however, does not occur in the cow, and the germs always get into the milk from a secondary source, such as water or contact with a person who has the disease. _Cholera_ may be distributed by milk, but this is of course of little importance. Of these disease bacteria, the tubercle bacillus probably never grows in milk, while the typhoid and diphtheria germs do. The most common of all troubles attributed to milk are those somewhat obscure _intestinal diseases_ which attack people especially in the summer months, and are particularly common among children. Prominent among these stands _cholera infantum_. These latter troubles, according to our present knowledge, are not produced by distinct species of bacteria finding entrance into the body and growing there, as are the other diseases mentioned. They appear to be produced by bacterial poisons which are in the milk. The bacteria--probably several different varieties--grow in the milk and there give rise to certain poisonous products, and these, when taken into the stomach, produce the diarrhoeal diseases referred to. The question of more importance is, however, as to the extent of the danger from such causes. This question is much like the famous one of how large is a piece of chalk. There is danger in everything, even in drinking water and breathing air. Is the danger from milk so great as to suggest that we should give up our habit of drinking milk as they have largely done in Europe, or is this danger so slight that we can well afford to neglect it? We can not avoid all sources of disease even if we would. To do this we should need to shut ourselves up in a box, breathe nothing but sterilized air, drink nothing but sterilized water, and come in contact with no other person, to say nothing of wearing sterilized clothes. Such a method will produce physical weakness rather than vigor. We have learned in the last few years that the proper way of avoiding disease is rather by preparing ourselves to resist it rather than try to avoid all contact with possible disease germs. The question is significant, then, whether the danger from milk is so great that we should use every means of avoiding it; or is it one of the slight dangers which we may best class with the everyday incidents against which our proper guard should be simply vigorous health? It is impossible to say how great is the liability of contracting disease from milk. Sometimes the subject looms up before us in gigantic proportions. When our papers are describing the occurrence of hundreds of cases of typhoid fever in a city, all traced to a milk supply, the seriousness of the problem is very apparent, and very likely we stop drinking milk for a season. But when, on the other hand, we remember the millions of people that are drinking milk daily without injury, and remember that our forefathers have done the same, we grow graver and begin again our old custom. No one can, indeed, pretend to say how great the danger is. That it is greater than that from drinking water is pretty clear. That it is less than that of riding in the cars is probably equally true. That it is greater in a small community than a large one seems probable, and that there is a greater likelihood of its being serious where the milk comes from a single source than where it passes through the hands of a milk-supply company appears to the author to be quite sure. In his relation to this problem each person must decide for himself. We do not cease to ride in the cars because there is danger here, nor do the innumerable accidents from bicycling deter us from this pleasure. Ought we to give up milk because of an occasional instance of disease? It might be possible to give advice to use milk freely, looking upon the danger as a slight one and one of the unavoidable dangers of living, but if such advice is given some one will instantly declare it bad advice. It might be possible to advise boiling all milk before drinking, and again some authority would say that this is unnecessary and bad. Personally, the author, though living in a small community, uses raw milk with perfect freedom, but would regard it as unwise to allow young children, especially infants, to use it in this way. As already stated, the agitation over the milk supply is greater in Europe than in this country. While in England milk is used much as in this country, on the continent really little milk is drunk raw, and there is a growing demand for some means which shall deprive milk of the suspicions attached to it. This demand has been rapidly growing in recent years, and has resulted in the appearance of two new industries. These are the preparation of _sterilized_ and _Pasteurized_ milk. Neither of these industries has as yet developed much in the United States, although in our larger cities beginnings are being made along similar lines. _Sterilized_ milk has been used for many years. Long ago our doctors learned to recommend, for invalids, that milk should be boiled before drinking. This was done before the matter of its relation to bacteria was understood, and when physicians simply conceived that the boiling rendered the milk more digestible. From being used by invalids it came to be suggested in feeding infants, and then, after the relation of milk to possible disease germs had been understood, the general sterilization of milk was widely recommended. The process of sterilization of milk has not taken much of a hold upon the people of this country as yet, nor has it in England. In continental Europe, especially in northern countries, where the amount of tuberculosis is very large, it has made rapid headway, and now in most of the cities sterilized milk can be bought on the streets just as easily as ordinary milk. In sterilizing milk as it is done in Europe the destruction of the disease germs is not the only purpose. An object of perhaps equal weight is to produce a milk that will keep. There are many circumstances where it is desirable to carry milk for long distances, and to lay in a supply to last many days or even weeks. Under these circumstances sterilization is resorted to, since it preserves the milk. There are various methods of sterilizing milk. The simplest, and doubtless the most common, is simply the boiling of the milk. This can easily be done by any one at home, and is, beyond question, very widely resorted to. But where the sterilization is to be performed by a public-supply company, boiling is not satisfactory, since the milk, although it will keep some time, is not indefinitely preserved. The common method used is heating with superheated steam. The milk is placed in bottles of special device, holding about a pint or a quart, and are placed, hundreds at a time, in a large chamber which can be hermetically sealed and then filled with steam under pressure. Here the temperature rises to 102° to 106° C. (216° to 220° F.), and is retained here for some little time. This high heat is supposed to kill all the living bacteria that may be in the milk, even the resisting spores being commonly destroyed. While the milk is still in this apparatus, and before the chamber is opened, the bottles are sealed by a mechanical contrivance and then allowed to cool. After this they are taken out of the sterilizer, and are ready for distribution. The milk thus treated is sometimes pure white, although frequently it has acquired a brownish color, which is not enticing to one accustomed to ordinary milk. Moreover, it has a taste of cooked milk, which is to some people very unpleasant. But when the method is successful the milk contains no living bacteria, and may now be kept indefinitely without further change. It may be shipped to all parts of the world, and whenever opened it will be found still sweet. The process is evidently equivalent to the canning of fruit or meat, only more difficult because the milk commonly contains many resisting spores. Such sterilized milk can be bought almost anywhere in Europe, and there is undoubtedly a growing demand for it. Where this or other sterilized milk is used it is claimed that very favorable results follow. Careful statistics have been collected as to the number of deaths among infants from diarrhoeal diseases, and it is found that in some cities the deaths from infants fed upon raw milk are nearly three times as great as among those fed upon sterilized milk. Of course, no typhoid epidemics can ever be traced to such milk, and in general its use seems to meet with decided favor. There are, however, some serious objections to this method of treating milk, which have been and probably will continue to be sufficient to prevent its wide extension. The first is that such milk appears to be slightly less digestible than raw milk. Over this matter, however, there has been and still is a great diversity of opinion, and many claim that there is really no difference in the digestibility. It is a matter of comparatively little importance, however, at least for adults and healthy children, for the sterilized milk can be digested, and the slight difference in ease of digestion probably has little significance unless it be for weakly individuals. Secondly, the taste of the sterilized milk is that of boiled milk, and this is rather unpleasant to most people. Probably a majority of our people, if called upon to drink sterilized milk or none at all, would prefer to give it up entirely. This is really an almost insurmountable obstacle to the wide extension of the use of sterilized milk, at least for the present generation. Those who have accustomed themselves to the taste of raw milk will not drink sterilized milk, and, if they do not dare to drink it raw, will not drink it at all. If infants are brought up on sterilized milk the next generation may look upon the matter differently, since the taste can be cultivated. The third objection to sterilized milk is its cost, which pretty effectually prevents its wide use. Here is probably the real reason why the sterilized-milk industry has not extended more rapidly than it has. The cost of the milk that has been subjected to the treatment above described is considerably above that of ordinary milk, and the size of the pocketbook is commonly a matter outweighing, with most people, even matters of health. When raw milk can be purchased at half the price of sterilized milk, or even for a cent or two less, it will be purchased almost uniformly by the bulk of people, rather than the more expensive sterilized milk. Thus it happens that, in spite of the fact that sterilized milk can be purchased easily in most European cities, the business is not a large one. Probably not one quart of sterilized milk is sold to a hundred quarts of raw milk, even in cities where the business is best developed. There are some who think that this method of treating milk is soon to be recognized as a necessity, and that it will be shortly regarded as improper to drink raw milk as it is to eat raw pork. But the business has grown rather slowly. Most people prefer to purchase their milk raw at a cheaper price and then boil it themselves, if they do not forget it. There is, moreover, one rather serious criticism that is made against this sterilized milk. Even with the high temperature that is used, it is impossible to be sure that all bacteria spores are destroyed. In most cases they are killed, but occasionally, and indeed not infrequently, a lot of milk will contain resisting spores that the heat does not destroy. These few spores that are left may become serious, far more so than the bacteria in raw milk. After sterilization they begin to grow, and, since this milk is very commonly kept for many days before it is used, these germs have a chance to become very abundant in the milk and to produce profound chemical changes therein, in some cases actually developing poisons. The changes that thus occur may be such as to escape notice with the eye, since they do not curdle the milk, and they may even fail to affect the taste of the milk. Such milk is to all appearances good, and would be given to infants without hesitation. If it did contain the injurious products thus referred to the results would be serious. Some bacteriologists are convinced that not a few cases of serious sickness have been produced in this way. When the milk is used shortly after the sterilization this matter is of no importance, since the bacteria spores grow slowly. But sterilized milk is supposed to keep indefinitely, and is therefore likely to be preserved some time before using, giving abundant opportunity for these spores to grow. For these several reasons there is developing a different method of dealing with the problem. It is the well-known process of _Pasteurization_. But although the process has been known for several years, its application to the milk business on a large scale is quite new. Pasteurization consists in heating the milk to a temperature of only about 68° to 85° C. (165° to 185° F.), leaving it at this temperature for a short time, and then rapidly cooling. The length of time required depends upon the temperature used, being, of course, shortest for the higher temperature, but it varies from some two minutes to half an hour. This moderate heat does not necessarily produce the cooked taste nor, as we shall see, does it involve an expense which need raise the price. The temperature, however, is not sufficient to destroy all bacteria, and for this reason is looked upon with disfavor by those who feel that what is needed is an absolute destruction of all bacteria. The Germans, who like to do things thoroughly, do not take readily to Pasteurization, and there are others besides Germans who insist that this treatment does not make the milk safe. But if one is looking for practical possibilities rather than theoretical success, there is perhaps at present more to be said in favor of Pasteurization than sterilization. Pasteurization is found to be sufficient to destroy all the strictly pathogenic bacteria that are likely to be in milk. The germs of diphtheria and typhoid are killed, and even the tubercle bacillus is rendered innocuous by a few moments at a temperature of 75° C. The resisting spores above mentioned are of course not destroyed, and many other bacteria are left uninjured. But the bacteria which escape the heat are not strictly pathogenic, and do not grow in the body. If they produce any injury to the drinker it is because they grow in the milk and produce injurious chemical products there. They are only dangerous, therefore, after they have had an opportunity to grow in the milk for some time. This opportunity they do have, as we have seen, in sterilized milk, but they do not have the opportunity in Pasteurized milk. Pasteurized milk is not designed for keeping, and those who use it know that while the strictly pathogenic bacteria are killed the milk will not keep. It will remain sweet a little longer than raw milk, but it must be used at once. It must be treated just like fresh milk. Under these conditions the bacteria do not commonly have an opportunity of growing sufficiently to produce their poisonous products before the milk is consumed. Practically, then, these bacteria that resist the moderate heat of Pasteurization are of no serious importance in connection with the healthfulness of milk. Pasteurized milk has been deprived of all its strictly pathogenic bacteria, and the germs still left will commonly have no opportunity to grow very much before the milk is consumed. It is therefore the confident belief of many that Pasteurization is actually a safer method of treating milk than sterilization. Moreover, the results appear to be equally favorable, for Pasteurization is claimed to produce an effect upon diarrhoeal diseases equal to that of sterilization. But the most important argument for Pasteurization seems to be that it is really practical, and can be introduced upon a scale vastly more extended than can sterilized milk. The practice of Pasteurizing milk has doubtless been followed not a little by private families, but from the very outset it has appeared that the proper method of dealing with the matter is to treat the milk at a general distributing center, rather than to depend upon the consumer to do it. Not a few devices have been suggested for accomplishing the purpose satisfactorily and rapidly. The machines invented are planned upon two different principles. In one plan the milk is placed in some large vessel holding many gallons and is here heated, commonly by steam coils. It is allowed to remain here at the desired temperature for twenty minutes to half an hour, and is then cooled. This method is necessarily slow--so slow, indeed, that it is impractical for use where large amounts of milk must be treated rapidly for general distribution. It probably could not be used for the milk supply of a city. The other method is called that of continuous flow. Here the milk is allowed to flow continuously over a heated surface, which brings it quickly to the desired temperature. It is kept hot for only a short time, however, and it then flows over a cooled surface, where the temperature is brought down again and the milk is finally delivered from the machine in a continuous stream of cooled milk. Great objections have been urged against this process, from the fact that it is not thorough. The milk is retained at the high temperature for such a short time that many of the bacteria are not killed. The Pasteurization is decidedly less thorough than by the other method. But here, again, before condemning the process it is necessary to consider its purpose. If it is to destroy all the bacteria, or as large a number of them as is possible, it is of course unsatisfactory. If, however, the purpose is to treat the milk cheaply and rapidly in such a manner as to remove the danger of disease distribution through, the milk supply, it would appear that such a method is perhaps satisfactory. So far as can be determined, this method is efficient in destroying pathogenic bacteria. Its efficiency is of course dependent upon the length of time that the milk is retained at the high temperature, and this can be regulated by the rate of the flow of the milk through the machine. All evidence we have seems to point to the conclusion that a temperature of 75° C., continued for a few minutes only, so far destroys or weakens the pathogenic bacteria which are liable to be found in milk that they need not subsequently be feared as producing disease. Of course, there are pathogenic bacteria that are not destroyed by this temperature, but they are not likely to occur in milk. The germs of typhoid, diphtheria, and tuberculosis are probably rendered harmless by such treatment, and these are the chief pathogenic bacteria of milk. Moreover, the other bacteria are very greatly decreased in numbers, so that the dangers of intestinal troubles are at least much reduced. In hospitals where Pasteurization has been adopted the results are as favorable as with sterilization. The great value of this plan is, however, that it is practical on a large scale. In Copenhagen it has been in practice for some three years very extensively. In Denmark the amount of tuberculosis among cows is very great, somewhat more than half the animals suffering from this disease. As a result the public milk supply is regarded with more suspicion than in countries where the disease is less. It is everywhere recommended that the milk be always boiled before using, but the bother of treating the milk thus daily makes people unwilling to do it, and it is doubtful whether the practice is as common as the physicians think necessary. Some three years ago a company was organized to meet the public demand for safe milk, and it has adopted plans by which it furnishes Pasteurized milk on a scale as extensive as that of the ordinary milk-supply companies. The company has devised and manufactured two large machines which receive the milk, Pasteurize it, and cool it in a constant stream, and are capable of treating two thousand quarts an hour. The milk received by the company is tested chemically and filtered, and then allowed to pass through one of these large machines. After this it is placed in glass bottles and sealed with the company's seal. The heating is done by steam, and the cooling by brine cooled by an ammonia cooling machine. The greatest care is taken in cleaning and sterilizing the bottles, an enormous chamber some twenty feet long and six feet in diameter being used for a sterilizer. Into this the washed bottles are placed, the chamber hermetically closed, and then superheated steam is turned in upon them. Everything connected with the establishment is conducted with the greatest attention to cleanliness, and upon a very large scale. The bottled milk is subsequently distributed in ordinary milk carts. A bacteriologist is constantly testing the efficiency of the machines by bacteriological examinations of the Pasteurized milk. The most important feature in this undertaking is that the company furnishes the city with milk at the same price as that furnished by the other companies without Pasteurization. It seems strange that this can be done, for the Pasteurization of course costs something. But the explanation is essentially that heat is cheaper than cold. Because of the subsequent Pasteurization this company does not feel it necessary to demand that the milk should reach them in as cool a condition as is required by the other companies. While their business rivals insist that they shall receive milk not warmer than 4° C., this Pasteurizing company receives it as warm as 10° C., and this saving in the cooling largely pays for the Pasteurization. The mechanical bottling enables them to employ a cheaper grade of help than is necessary when the milk is peddled in carts. The results of this endeavor to furnish safe milk are in quite decided contrast to those connected with sterilized milk. Sterilized milk has now been on the market for quite a number of years, but, in spite of the fact that it can be readily bought in most cities, the actual business is small. The largest milk-supply company in Europe has a demand for only a few hundred quarts per day. This company in Copenhagen offers to the public a milk which has the taste of fresh milk and which has been so treated as to have all pathogenic bacteria within it destroyed, and at the same time the other bacteria greatly reduced in number. This milk it sells at the same price as ordinary milk. As a result its business has rapidly grown, and instead of supplying a few hundred quarts it sells some thirty thousand daily, and the amount of milk handled is increasing with great rapidity. It probably sells more Pasteurized milk than all the sterilized milk sold in Europe. It would thus seem that we have here actually a practical method of dealing with the new problem of the milk supply. That it is practical is manifest from the actual results in this institution in Copenhagen. Whether it is regarded as satisfactory will of course depend upon our standpoint. Those that insist that the milk must be freed from all danger, and hence deprived of all bacteria, will not regard this method as satisfactory. But probably every one will recognize that milk thus treated is very much safer than raw milk, and that dangers from typhoid epidemics and tuberculosis are removed, even if they do not admit that intestinal troubles are thus avoided. There can be little doubt that the method would be successful in our own cities, but its success would depend upon the price at which the milk is sold. If the Pasteurized milk is sold for a price much higher than ordinary milk it will not be a commercial success, for the vast majority of people prefer to save the one or two cents per quart, and run the rather slight risk of trouble from the milk. If it can be sold in our cities, as in Copenhagen, for the same price or a price only slightly higher than that of ordinary milk, it is hardly doubtful that it would soon come into favor, for who would not prefer milk that is safe from disease germs if the price is the same? Already there are a few attempts in this direction in some of our cities, but as yet they are only in the beginning stage. Whether they will develop to a wide extent depends probably almost wholly upon the price at which the milk can be sold. It would appear, then, that this method of Pasteurization by a central company offers the most hopeful solution of this feature of the problem which is growing with the growth of cities. The milk companies could probably arrange, without great expense, such a plan of Pasteurizing large amounts of milk. This only emphasizes the conclusion, already reached, that the most hopeful method of dealing with the problem in our cities is through properly organized companies that can handle milk on a large scale, and will do it conscientiously, and not wholly from the standpoint of money-making. TEACHERS' SCHOOL OF SCIENCE. BY FRANCES ZIRNGIEBEL. [_Concluded._] Parallel in time with the course in historical geology or paleontology was that in botany, under the leadership of Dr. Robert W. Greenleaf, a Boston physician, who in his student days had assisted Dr. Goodale and was at the time of giving these lessons Professor of Botany and Materia Medica at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. A growing interest in the study of botany in the schools, and Dr. Greenleaf's exceptional ability as a teacher, made the attendance at this class very large. After an hour's lecture the instructor and two assistants directed the observation of the specimens by the students, who were required to make sketches of the objects studied. The first set of lessons was similar to that given in the school by Dr. Goodale several years before, and was of a preparatory nature, including morphological, structural, and physiological botany. [Illustration: ROBERT W. GREENLEAF.] The introductory lesson dealt with the relation of botany to its various subdivisions and to other studies. The meaning of morphology was illustrated by comparing the four plant members--root, stem, leaf, and plant hair--with the different plant organs, and a practical exercise, with specimens whose parts were sketched and labeled, was given to show that the position and mode of development of a part determine its rank as a member or structural division, while its function may give it quite a different rank as an organ. A preliminary view of vegetable histology, considering the shape, wall, markings in the wall, and contents of cells, was next given. This was followed by lessons on vegetable physiology, in which the absorption of liquids and gases for the making of food, assimilation, transfer and storage of food, the growth of cells and tissues, the excretion of waste products, special kinds of work, as climbing, catching of insects, etc., reproduction, and the process of metabolism as illustrated in cells, were treated of first in a general way and then elaborated upon in the succeeding lessons. Much time was devoted to the anatomy, histology, and germination of seeds and to the structure and function of root, stem, and leaf. The morphology of fruits and their anatomical classification (profusely illustrated from the fruits of the market and neighboring fields), with a discussion of the contrivances for dissemination of fruits and seeds, furnished subject-matter for both a profitable and interesting lesson. The last lessons of this set were devoted to the study of the flower and its parts, particularly stamens and pistils, and ended with an explanation of the processes of pollination and fertilization. The work of making vertical and horizontal plans of the flower served as an introduction for the second year's course on Systematic Botany, wherein the relations between the common families of flowering plants were shown. This course was illustrated by numerous hothouse flowers and also by dried specimens, of which one hundred kinds were given to each teacher. This course was given to teachers, many of whom could by means of a key analyze any common flower, but who knew nothing of the principles of plant relationship. The theories of special creation and of evolution were explained, and the theory of descent with variation was taken as a hypothesis. Starting with this theory of evolution as a basis, the structure of certain families was studied and they were taken as types with which other related families were compared. After a classification of all known flowering plants into gymnosperms and angiosperms, and subdividing the latter into monocotyledons and dicotyledons, the lily family was considered as typical of monocotyledons. It and its related families afforded a simple means of demonstrating the problems under consideration. Members of this family were found to be characterized by having an endogenous stem, usually parallel veined leaves, six-parted perianth free from a three-celled superior ovary, and six stamens. The allied families were shown to agree with the type in the internal or fundamental characters, such as the number of carpels and cells of the ovary, but were found to differ in the more external or environmental characters, such as the arrangement of the parts of the perianth. After studying the relations between the various groups of endogens, the trees and weeds of the apetalous division of exogens were next considered, and through _Ranunculaceæ_ connected with polypetalous dicotyledons. These latter were classified according to whether the parts of the flower were hypogenous, perigynous, or epigynous. These terms signify, respectively, under the pistil, around the pistil, and on the pistil. In this group the rose family presented several modifications of the pistil, according to which it was divided into tribes. When the group of _Gamopetalæ_ was studied, _Solanaceæ_, the nightshade family, with its regular flower, and _Labiatæ_, or mint family, with irregular flower, were taken as types with superior ovaries. Various modifications from these types were found in several families. _Ericaceæ_, the heath family, presented, in its suborders of _Ericineæ_, _Pyroleæ_, and _Monotropeæ_, which had superior ovaries, and _Vacciniæ_, which had inferior ovaries, an intermediate order between the preceding _superæ_ and following _inferæ_, of which latter group _Campanulaceæ_ was considered a type. The relations between many families were traced, and the _Compositæ_ were lastly considered, this family showing the greatest differentiation with its coalescence of circles, adnation of different circles, reduction in parts, and number of individuals brought together. The greatest deviation from a simple flower and a complexity of structure were here presented. Through the co-operation of parts these flowers were of high physiological efficiency. Throughout the course, families of medicinal or other economic value, or such as presented evidences of adaptation for cross-fertilization, dissemination of seed, life in desert regions, or contained examples of parasiticism or many poisonous genera, were incidentally considered. Carefully made illustrated notebooks, collections of dried specimens, and other evidences of interest in the course were shown by the teachers, who gained great facility in placing an unknown flower in its proper family without the use of a key or botany. The next set of lessons in the botanical series consisted of the usual number (fifteen) on cryptogamic botany. This was perhaps the course which was the most difficult of presentation; but, notwithstanding, much dried and fresh material, representing chiefly the higher cryptogams, was distributed among the pupils and examined by them. The fourth and last year of the series was spent on paleobotany. This was a somewhat novel and valuable course, which was particularly appreciated by those who had studied geology and paleontology in other classes of the school. A large amount of laboratory material was provided from the museum. The duplicate fossil specimens of the society were used by the class, and ninety determined species were figured by many members. Since the close of these lessons persons who have shown throughout the four years a satisfactory knowledge of botany and have passed the examinations, in the most exhaustive course ever given in the subject for teachers, have received certificates stating their qualifications. [Illustration: GEORGE H. BARTON.] In the spring of 1887, owing to a suggestion made by Professor W. O. Crosby and to assistance furnished by him, a private course of instruction was arranged by Prof. G. H. Barton, of the Institute of Technology, for a series of lessons in field geology. Twenty-one persons, nearly all of whom had attended Professor Crosby's course in The Teachers' School of Science, took these lessons with great enthusiasm. The series of lessons was continued in the autumn, with the addition of twelve new members to the class. From this beginning has grown the systematic course of field instruction in geology now carried on as one of the regular courses. As at present conducted, it consists of a series of lessons in the autumn and spring of each year, so arranged as to give detailed instruction in methods of observation covering a range through all portions of the subject, embracing mineralogy, lithology, structural geology, historical geology, and physiography. [Illustration: TEACHERS' SCHOOL OF SCIENCE. FIELD CLASS IN GEOLOGY. PROF. GEORGE H. BARTON, INSTRUCTOR.] The method pursued is as follows: The class is taken to a typical place for illustrating the subject in hand. The area to be studied is pointed out, and then for a half hour or so the class is asked to make observations unassisted by the instructor and with as little communication among themselves as possible. Then they are called together and questions are asked to draw out the results of their observations, free discussion being invited at this time, and questions from the class answered by the instructor. Then the instructor explains the phenomena studied, and finally gives a general lecture upon the particular subject involved. Notes, taken in the field, are carried home and rewritten and then handed in at the next lesson, to be corrected and returned later. A printed synopsis is furnished each member of the class at every lesson, for which payment is made sufficient to cover the cost of the printing. Each member is also required to be provided with a hammer, chisel, and compass. The course of instruction begins with a discussion of the general principles of erosion, and one lesson each is given at places illustrating an excess of chemical and mechanical action. At Medford a very broad dike of coarsely crystalline diabase, penetrated by numerous cracks, furnishes an exceptionally good opportunity for the observation of rapid chemical decomposition, an almost complete gradual transition being shown from the fresh unaltered rock through all degrees of decomposition to the formation of soil. The cause of the decomposition is explained, with the resulting products, and the history of the latter is traced till they form parts or the whole of a new rock. A drumlin is seen, at Great Head, Winthrop, being undermined and worn away by the waves. By comparison with other drumlins in the neighborhood, the original form of Great Head can be easily restored mentally and the effect of waves and currents upon a coast can be readily appreciated. In an excursion to North Adams and rides over the Hoosac Mountains and to the summit of Greylock, rivers are seen in their various stages of action, the cutting backward by the cascade action, the cutting downward of torrent action, and the more quiet transportation and final deposition of the streams passing through the lower levels and approaching the sea. From the sides of Hoosac and Greylock the surface of the Massachusetts plateau is seen, with its dissection by the Berkshire and Deerfield Valleys, illustrating the broad effects of erosion over the surface of the continent. Passing next to a discussion of the disposition of the material that is derived by erosion from the land, a lecture upon the sorting action of water is given, and the resultant beds of gravel, sand, and clay are studied in a section cut by the Fitchburg Railroad through the sand plateau at Lake Walden, in Concord. The next step is to study these products of deposition in their consolidated forms. At Parker Hill, Roxbury, a large quarry furnishes opportunity for the study of conglomerate, special attention being paid to the means of determination of stratification in a nearly homogeneous, coarse material. Here also is a large section in a drumlin left in a nearly vertical face by excavation about twenty years ago, and now illustrating finely the action of rain during the years. This forms an instructive contrast with the marine erosion of Great Head, Winthrop. Any one of the numerous slate quarries at Somerville serves the purpose of studying stratification in a fine, homogeneous material. In each of these three last-named places the various phenomena of stratified rocks are studied, such as unconformity, cross-bedding, ripple-marks, strike, and dip, but attention is confined more especially to the original structures, subsequent structures being left for later lessons. Eruptive rocks are then taken up and studied in respect to their origin and original structures. The quarries near Winter Hill, in Somerville, furnish an admirable opportunity to study dikes. Here a small hill of slate is intersected by three series of dikes of different character and intersecting each other at various angles, enabling a determination of their relative ages. An intrusive bed, now separated from its parent dike by erosion, affords the means of comparing the characteristics of the two forms and of tracing out the relation between them. The inclined positions of the dike and bed and the numerous quarries furnish several sections in varying relations to the two. The various dikes and the inclined position of the inclosing slate give an excellent chance for the first instruction in the making of geological maps and sections. Notes are taken for this purpose, and both maps and sections are constructed and handed in at a later date. At Marblehead Neck various other eruptive structures, such as flow structure, ancient ash-beds, etc., are seen in the felsite, of which many varieties occur there. Attention is especially called to the liability of mistaking flow structure for stratification, the similarities and differences being explained. At Marblehead Neck, also, a careful study is made of the formation of pebbles, all stages being shown from the dislodging of fragments from the cliffs by frost action, the dropping into reach of the waves, the first rounding of the sharp angles to the subangular outline, and finally the rounding of the fragment into a complete pebble form. At Newton Centre a study of contemporaneous beds is made, including their relations to the inclosing rocks and a comparison of their characteristics with those of intrusive beds. Eruptive masses, metamorphic rocks, and vein phenomena are all well shown at Fitchburg, where Rollstone Hill is an eruptive mass of granite cutting through the metamorphic mica schists and gneisses, and the granite in turn is cut by very numerous veins of pegmatite, abundantly rich in tourmaline crystals and occasionally having beryl. Glacial structures are next taken up. At Newtonville is studied the esker and sand plateau, rendered famous by the work of Prof. W. M. Davis and others; at Clinton an exceptionally fine set of terraces, and the best example of _roches moutonnées_ near Boston, where a class can be taught in a very few minutes to recognize that the movement of the ice sheet must have been from the north toward the south; and at Stow and Haverhill are studied drumlins. After this, special attention is devoted to the subsequent structures of rocks, such as folds, faults, cleavage, joints, etc. Typical places, as before, are selected for each, and the work carried on in the same manner. When this course has been entirely accomplished, then places of greater complexity and where the problems are not quite so plain are visited, and opportunity is given to exercise the skill or knowledge already gained. Following this, a series of lessons is devoted to the study of typical places illustrating the various historical strata occurring in Massachusetts; among others, Nahant and Braintree for the Cambrian, Attleboro for the Carboniferous, Mount Holyoke for the Triassic, Gay Head for the Cretaceous and Tertiary, Rockport, Martha's Vineyard, and claypits of Cambridge for the Glacial Champlain. The work in this course has been marked by enthusiasm, and the attendance has been very large, reaching a maximum of two hundred and ten, with an average attendance of seventy-one in the autumn of 1896. As a direct outcome of this work, and connected with it, several excursions to distant points have been made by parties under the charge of Professor Barton during the summer vacations. The most important of these were the following: A five-days' trip through western Massachusetts; a seven-weeks' trip to the Pacific coast, including visits to the Lake Superior copper regions, the Yellowstone Park, Butte, Montana, Great Shoshone Falls in Idaho, Columbia River, Mount Hood, Frazer Cañon in British Columbia, the Great Glacier of the Selkirks, and the Hot Springs at Banff; and two trips through Nova Scotia, one in 1894 and another in 1898. In each of the latter trips special attention has been paid to the various kinds of mining coal, iron, and gold, to the famous mineral localities like Cape Blomidon, and to the general geology. Also, connected with this work, a special course of lessons has been given by Professor Barton each spring to a class from the Boston Normal School, and many occasional lectures and field lessons to the classes of the State Normal School at Framingham, and at other schools, teachers' clubs, etc. During the Boston exhibition of the cyclorama of the volcano of Kilauea, Hawaii, over three hundred teachers and a large number of schools visited that exhibition and listened to personal lectures by Professor Barton in direct connection with the work of The Teachers' School of Science. Owing to the request of members of the field class, a private class was organized in the winter for a course of twelve lessons in mineralogy. This proving successful, and a demand for laboratory work being shown, this work was incorporated as a distinct course in the school. It was during the early part of this work that Professor Barton introduced for the first time in The Teachers' School of Science the system of daily and final examinations--a system since followed as the general practice of the school and now considered as one of its most fundamental features. This course, after various experiments, has finally developed into a definite four-years' course of instruction, at the end of which those members who have met all the requirements receive the diploma of the school. The full four-years' course is designed to give a thorough training in the fundamental principles of geological science. Each year is given a series of fifteen lessons of two hours each, partly laboratory, partly lecture, and fully illustrated with specimens and diagrams. The first year's work is devoted to mineralogy. One introductory lecture is given on the principles of chemistry as the basis of understanding the composition of minerals, and the four following lessons are devoted to a study of the physical properties, mainly crystallography. During the remaining lessons, about one hundred and fifty of the commonest mineral species are studied, the class being required to learn to recognize each species and be able to tell its composition. The second year's work with lithology is carried on largely in the same way as with mineralogy. At first a brief review is made of the most important rock-forming minerals. Then all the commoner species of rocks are taken up and studied, so as to learn to recognize each species at sight and to tell its composition. Besides this, lectures are given upon the origin of the rocks and the derivation of their component materials, involving a large amount of dynamical geology. During the third and fourth years are taken up, respectively, structural and historical geology. Both these subjects are taught largely by lectures, illustrated by charts and diagrams, a select set of specimens for the table, and a few such specimens as can be passed around the room. In the historical geology special care is taken to furnish for class use as many specimens as possible of the typical rocks and fossils of the various ages. It is nearly impossible to provide so abundantly, however, as for mineralogy and lithology. As regards examinations, the methods used are as follows: The first half hour of each exercise is taken up with answering questions or identifying specimens, the examinations in all cases being written. The ground covered by each examination includes all that has been gone over during that year previous to the examination. After the examination is finished, the instructor briefly answers and explains the questions. The papers so handed in are marked by the instructor and returned the following week. All of this serves to enable the class to keep a comprehensive grasp of the subject constantly in hand. At the end of each year's work a final examination of three hours in length is given, covering the complete subject. The final rank given each member is made up equally from an average of the term's work and the final examination. This course has proved decidedly popular. The instruction was originally given in the Geological Department of the Institute of Technology, in a room adapted to seating thirty-six persons. This was gradually crowded to accommodate fifty-six persons. At the beginning of the last four-years' course the number of the applications was so large that each applicant was required to sign a printed statement promising to be present at all exercises for the four years, except for good and sufficient reasons. One hundred and seventeen persons gave the required promise. In order to meet this demand, two divisions were formed, and on each Saturday afternoon the same lesson was repeated. In order to defray the additional expense of the second division the members of the class voluntarily contributed three dollars each. The labor of repeating the lessons on the same afternoon proving too great, provision was made the second year to transfer the instruction to the large lecture hall of the Natural History building, where accommodations were made for one hundred and twelve students. The work has since been carried on there, and a complete new set of specimens, diagrams, etc., is gradually being obtained. The membership of the class is, of course, principally made up from Boston and the towns immediately surrounding, but a few come from places as far distant as towns in Connecticut and Rhode Island, from Bridgewater, Scituate, Framingham, Fitchburg, Lowell, Lawrence, and Beverly. One member of the class has made an exhaustive study of the granites of eastern Massachusetts, and others are teaching geology in secondary schools outside of Boston. An important and influential outcome of the first lessons of Mr. Barton was the formation, in the fall of 1888, of the Barton Chapter of the Agassiz Association, by seven ladies who had been fellow-students in mineralogy. Later, men and other ladies who had attended Mr. Barton's field lessons were invited to join. For ten years this club has flourished, and held weekly evening meetings for nine months of the year, at which the members have done much systematic work in the study of geology, mineralogy, chemistry, botany, entomology, and zoölogy. At some of the sessions the individual members have taken their share of the work by the preparing of exhaustive papers which have been read to and discussed by the class, and sometimes a series of lessons has been given by specialists in the several departments. Many of the first scientists of Boston have aided this association by the giving of lectures and advice regarding courses of lessons and opportunities for study, while the club has in return been a great benefactor to many who sought its instruction and the association of those with like tastes. In arranging regular Saturday outings for the study of field geology and botany, this club was the pioneer in this vicinity of the kind of study which happily now seems to be fast becoming popular. A number of persons who were members of this association in their younger years are now holding positions in the United States Geological Survey or other departments of the Government, or in the capacity of curator or instructor are connected with large museums, colleges, or schools in different parts of the country, thereby having opportunities to continue their favorite lines of work, to spread a knowledge of the things about them, and to induce in others tastes such as were fostered in them while connected with the Barton Chapter of the Agassiz Association. [Illustration: FIELD CLASS IN ZOÖLOGY. LOOKING FOR SHORE LIFE AMONG THE BOWLDERS AT WOODS HOLE.] Since closing the four-years' course in botany Dr. Greenleaf has repeated the lessons on vegetable morphology and physiology and those on systematic botany. Finding the class not so well prepared as in former years, instead of continuing the third course of the series, he has given a set of fifteen lessons on the elementary structure and function of flowering plants, as he believed that course to be a necessary foundation for further botanical study. Another feature of The Teachers' School of Science should not remain unnoticed. It consists of effective work in zoölogy and geology by Mr. A. W. Grabau, the official guide in the museum and a graduate student of geology. A course of lessons on The Shore Animals of New England was begun by him in April, 1897. Directly connected with these field lessons was held a class in laboratory work, which was attended by about twenty persons. The next year Mr. Grabau endeavored to give his audience a comprehensive view of the action of cold and heat, of winds and waves, rain and rivers, and of the chemical effect of the atmosphere in the production of the natural features of the earth's surface, by giving eight lectures on The Surface of the Earth, its Rocks, Soils, and Scenery. Special attention was given to the scenery of New England, and this awakened an interest in local scenery, which interest led to Mr. Grabau giving several lectures in surrounding towns, under local auspices. One of these lectures called the attention of the people of Arlington, Massachusetts, to the fact that they had in their midst a valuable geological monument, and led them to start a movement for the preservation of a terminal bowlder moraine on Arlington Heights, which is the only good accessible example of such moraine near Boston. Under the same instruction ten lessons were given on the use of the microscope and the preparation of specimens of hydroids. The work begun at the winter lectures was continued during the spring by excursions to the seashore. The beaches of Revere, Swampscott, Marblehead; the cliffs and tide pools of Nahant, Marblehead Neck, and Nantasket, and the mud flats and piles of Beverly, were explored. One excursion was made to the outer shore of Cape Cod and Buzzards Bay. The party spent four days on this excursion. During the early part of the summer an outing was made to Bayville, Maine, where a laboratory was furnished, with microscopes and other accessories, and fourteen persons (mostly teachers) devoted ten days to the study of marine fauna, special attention being given to hydroids. Some geology was studied during this excursion, and a small island mapped. Those who attended this expedition were delighted with an experience new to most of them, as many of them had not before studied zoölogy and knew not what a field could be opened by the study of natural history. One of the party afterward remarked, "I feel as if I had been born into a new world, so different are these things in their homes from their representations in books." In the autumn and following spring field lessons were given on marine zoölogy, the object being to study animals in their natural habitats. Another excursion was made to Woods Hole, Buzzards Bay, and a summer laboratory established for ten days at Goldsborough, Maine, where work similar to that done the previous summer was here carried out. Among the field lessons of the spring of 1899 was an excursion of four days' duration to Cuttyhunk, one of the Elizabeth Islands, where there was an opportunity to study a marine fauna southern in character and different from that found on the Maine coast. On the afternoon of Agassiz's birthday a sail was taken to another of this group of islands--Penikese, the site of the famous summer school. In the evening the class of seventeen persons listened to the reading of selections from the life of Agassiz, poems regarding him, and magazine articles describing events connected with the great meeting in the summer of 1873. The next day an excursion was made to Gay Head, Martha's Vineyard, where the afternoon was spent in studying the wonderfully colored clay cliffs and in searching for fossils. As an outcome of Mr. Grabau's field lessons the Hale House Natural History Club was formed. This club consists of teachers and other persons who have banded together for the study of natural history. Meetings are held twice a month, and similar classes have been formed for children of the neighborhood. The Teachers' School of Science has been of great assistance to the Boston Normal School by furnishing certain of its pupils with instruction in geology and zoölogy. In 1893 The Teachers' School of Science took part in the exhibition of elementary science teaching made by certain teachers of the schools of the eastern part of Massachusetts. The school was enabled to take part in this public exhibit through the generosity of Mr. T. A. Watson, a pupil in the school, who paid the necessary expenses. * * * * * A collection of articles obtained by the Baron de Baye in a scientific expedition last year to Siberia and the Russian Caucasus contains specimens from very ancient times down. Among them are mammoth bones and chipped flints, like those of the Mousterian period in France, from the Yenisei; arrowheads, like the European and American, from the same region; bronze weapons from the Caucasus; iron arrowheads like those of the Congo; skulls, weapons and ornaments, necklaces of hard, polished, pierced stones, from the Kurgans of the steppes, dating from antiquity down to the beginning of the middle ages; Caucasian jewels, and ceramic ware ancient and modern. A very curious object is one of the statues, called Kamenaia Baba, of a kind supposed to have been set up by the Scythians and always held in veneration, of which the present specimen is the only one yet allowed to go out of Russia. INFLUENCE OF THE WEATHER UPON CRIME. BY EDWIN G. DEXTER. The relation between general climatic conditions and the prevalence of suicide has been somewhat exhaustively studied by students of criminology, the result being a considerable accumulation of data and the formulation of a number of more or less tenable theories. From these studies we may safely conclude that the homicidal tendency, as shown by self-destruction (suicide) and the destruction of others (murder), is stronger in the temperate climatic zones than in the torrid or frigid, and that in the late spring and early summer months more of these offenses have been recorded than for any other period of the year. To these few facts the seeming effects of cosmical forces upon such tendencies has apparently been limited. In fact, it was the oft-repeated statement that nothing was known of the exact relations of the more definite meteorological conditions with the prevalence of suicide--a statement to be found in most treatises upon the subject--that has given rise to this paper. Realizing that the science of climatology must include, and in fact be based upon, a study of the meteorological conditions prevalent, and that the study of these definite conditions for the exact times when suicides or murders occurred might throw some light upon the question, this problem was undertaken. In the preparation of the accompanying charts, from the study of which the conclusions herein stated were deduced, the record of crime for Denver, Colorado, for the fourteen years ending with June, 1897, was made use of. Superintendent Howe, chief of the city detective service, has kept such a record with the greatest care, and we wish here to acknowledge the many courtesies of his office. No attempt has been made in this paper to compare the conditions for Denver, either meteorological or social--and each is somewhat unique--with such conditions elsewhere. In fact, such a comparative study is at present impossible since data are wanting. In the actual preparation of the charts each murder, suicide, or attempt at suicide--which, for our purpose, is equally important--was set down chronologically in the left-hand columns of large sheets of paper ruled for the purpose. These sheets were then taken to the office of the United States Weather Bureau, F. H. Brandenburg, director, where were recorded in the proper columns the maximum and minimum barometer readings, maximum and minimum temperature, maximum and minimum humidity, maximum velocity of the wind, precipitation, and character of the day for each day during the fourteen years on which a crime of either class occurred. When several took place upon the same day the fact was taken into consideration. From the sheets thus filled out, the curves on the accompanying charts were plotted by computing the per cent of crimes of each class committed under the definite meteorological condition indicated. The curves marked "normal" were constructed by tabulating in a similar manner the conditions for every day in a sufficient number of days to secure a fair average. Five years were so tabulated for Figs. 2, 3, 4, and 5, and the records for nineteen years used in Figs. 1 and 6. The whole number of suicides recorded is two hundred and sixty; murders, one hundred and eighty. It may be noted that this number of suicides, for a city averaging hardly one hundred thousand inhabitants for the fourteen years, is largely in excess of the rate recorded for American cities, but it must be remembered that some of these were unsuccessful attempts, and also that the social conditions of Denver tend to swell the number--containing, as it does, so many disappointed in the last struggle for health. [Illustration: FIG. 1.] Fig. 1 shows the occurrence, in per cent, of crimes of both the classes considered for each month of the year, together with the monthly meteorological means, computed from the records for nineteen years. The expectancy curve in the occurrence table is based upon the supposition that the months of the year are all of the same length, and that the numerical expectancy would be one twelfth, or eight and a third per cent for each. It will be seen that the crime curves are for the most part below the expectancy for the winter months, and above it for the summer (except for April, and suicides for June), showing the maximum for the latter class in May and for murders in March. Morselli shows[C] that for most European countries suicides are at the maximum in June, though a considerable number show that condition for the later spring months. A study of the general meteorological means, shown upon the same plate as the occurrence table, fails to indicate any good reason for irregularity of the crime curves. The "month" columns read from the top to the bottom of the chart, and by following that for May, for instance, which month shows the maximum for suicide, we find that the meteorological condition for each class of data is about halfway between the extremes for that class for the year, while for January (minimum suicides) each class is by far more divergent. Yet a mean, like those considered in this table, is but the average of the extremes, and those months which show great per cents of crime also present great extremes of condition, which fact, interpreted in the light of those disclosed by the charts yet to be considered, make the occurrence curve more explicable. [Footnote C: Suicide, International Science Series.] [Illustration: FIG. 2.] WIND.--An explanation of the various curves in Fig. 2 may serve for the series following, so I give it somewhat in detail. The vertical distances from the base line indicate per cents, and the distances from left to right, divided into columns, the maximum velocity of the wind per hour for the days tabulated. In the "normal" curve every day for five years was considered, and it was found that seven per cent of the days for that period showed a maximum velocity of between one and ten miles (first column), forty-eight per cent a maximum velocity of between ten and twenty miles (second column), nineteen per cent a maximum velocity of between twenty and thirty miles, and so on, as indicated by the curve. Now, it can readily be seen that this normal curve may also be considered the expectancy curve--_if the wind has no effect_. That is, if forty-eight per cent of the days of the year show a maximum velocity of the wind, between ten and twenty miles an hour, the law of probability would give us the same per cent of the crime for the year on such days if this meteorological condition were not effective. What we do find, however, is indicated by the other curves, and any increase of crime over expectancy may in this case be ascribed to the wind. We notice that for slight velocities (one to twenty miles an hour) the crime curves are below that of expectancy, but we can see that if the sum of all the per cents for any one curve is one hundred, and one is forced above the other at any part, there must be a corresponding deficiency at some other part. So we may, perhaps, with justice suppose that these mild velocities do not exert a positively quieting effect emotionally, but simply a less stimulating effect than the higher ones. For velocities of between twenty and thirty miles a marked effect is noticeable, and under those conditions the proportion of suicides to that expected is 37:29; velocities of from thirty to forty miles, 14:11; of forty to fifty miles, 7:2; of fifty to sixty miles, 0.4:2.6; of fifty to sixty miles, 0.2:2. The curve for murders shows the increase to be slightly less than for suicides, but the same general relation is preserved throughout. The value of such curves is, of course, somewhat proportional to the number of observations made and recorded, and we must confess that two hundred and sixty (suicides) and one hundred and eighty (murders) is a hardly sufficient number from which to deduce a definite law, but we can hardly doubt, even considering this somewhat limited number, that the wind is, in our problem, a factor of no mean importance. [Illustration: FIG. 3.] TEMPERATURE.--Fig. 3 is intended to show, in a similar manner, the relation between expectancy curves, based upon conditions of temperature, and the actual occurrence of the crimes in question. With this class of data, as well as that for the barometric readings and humidity (Figs. 4 and 5), both the maximum and minimum readings are considered. This was done instead of taking the mean of both for the day, since in many cases the latter might be quite normal, while one or possibly both the former might exhibit marked peculiarities. All the curves were constructed precisely as in the chart just considered, and those marked "normal" are again the expectancy curves. An inspection of the chart shows no marked discrepancies till we reach the higher temperatures. For the lower the coincidence for all the maximum and all the minimum curves is not exact, but somewhat similar. When, however, we reach for the minimum curves, temperatures of from 40° to 50° and from 50° to 60°, which means that for the per cent of days indicated, the temperature did not go below those points, the per cent of crime exceeds that expected under the conditions in the proportions of 22:16.5 and 24:18 (suicides), and 21:16.5 and 29:18 (murders). The same general relation exists between the maximum curves, where it is shown that for temperatures between 80° and 100° the actual crime is about thirty-three per cent in excess of the expected. These facts have their bearing upon the already noted statement that the summer months show a preponderance of homicide. [Illustration: FIG. 4.] BAROMETER.--Fig. 4, disassociated from the others, shows but little. Naturally we should not look for very marked effects from variations of an inch or less in the barometric readings, when in the course of a journey from the sea level to Denver a change of six inches is brought about, and in going from the same point to the summit of Pike's Peak one of nearly twelve inches without producing any marked emotional abnormities, but we must take into consideration the fact that sudden barometric variations generally accompany or more frequently precede other important meteorological changes. In the latter case, though they might be the primary cause of factors considered in this study, they themselves would fail to show upon the tables. [Illustration: FIG. 5.] HUMIDITY.--This figure (Fig. 5) indicates in a very decisive manner that states of low relative humidity, as shown by both maximum and minimum readings, are conducive to excesses in both the classes of crimes studied. For instance, for maximum humidities between ten and twenty the proportion of actual crime to that expected is 1:0.1; between twenty and thirty (suicide), 11:1; between thirty and forty, 9.5:4.5; between forty and fifty, 15:8. The maximum curves show somewhat the same general relation though not with quite so marked divergences. To one who has experienced the general low humidities of our Colorado altitudes (Denver is one mile above the sea level) this result is not surprising. There is no doubt that a nervous tension much in excess of that common in the lower altitudes exists, due in part, perhaps, to the deficiency in barometric pressure and a consequent effect upon the respiratory processes, but probably, as shown by these curves, more largely to the dryness of the atmosphere, as indicated by low humidity. I hope at some future time to verify or disprove this supposition by a comparative study made at some lower altitude. [Illustration: FIG. 6.] CHARACTER OF THE DAY.[D]--Fig. 6 shows the relation between the expectancy of crime, based upon the actual per cents of cloudy, partly cloudy, and clear days (records of nineteen years), and its actual occurrence. The disagreements are very slight, although a slight excess of murders is shown for cloudy days. [Footnote D: By the United States Weather Bureau days are characterized as "cloudy" when for 0.8 or more of the possible hours of sunshine the sun is obscured; "partly cloudy" when from 0.4 to 0.7 inclusive is obscured; and "clear" when 0.3 or less.] SUMMARY.--Fig. 1 shows at a glance no generally prevailing meteorological conditions to which can be ascribed, with any degree of certainty, the monthly variations of crime. Fig. 2 shows that high velocities of wind seem to increase to a marked extent the tendency to crime. For the highest velocities increasing the probability twenty times (two thousand per cent). Fig. 3 shows that high temperatures seem to have the same effect, that of between 90° and 100° increasing the probability one hundred per cent. Fig. 4 fails to show that barometric changes are accompanied by any marked excesses in crime. Fig. 5 shows that low conditions of relative humidity are attended with very marked excesses, those below thirty increasing the probability of suicides eleven times (eleven hundred per cent). Fig. 6 fails to show that the character of the day has any considerable effect. Considering briefly, in conclusion, the results of the foregoing study, and comparing them with a somewhat similar one for children,[E] we may safely conclude that the tendency to homicide varies with those meteorological conditions which bring about an emotional state necessitating a considerable discharge of motor stimulus. The same conditions which bring about irritability and unruliness on the part of the child accompany suicidal tendencies. [Footnote E: See The Child and the Weather, Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1898.] This supposition is upheld by the fact that suicide is less common in the colder climates, where the metabolic processes are slow, and in the torrid zone, where the heat produces a general depletion of energy for motor discharge, than in the temperate regions, where the climate is exhilarating. The study, from the social standpoint, too, leads us to the same conclusion. The excess of crime in the social whirlpools of our great cities is convincing, and especially the careful study made by Morselli of the prevalence of suicide in the different countries of Europe, interpreted in the light of what we know of their social conditions. Yet, in considering the facts disclosed by the present paper, we must not dogmatically assert that each is of the importance that the figures indicate. In fact, it seems evident from a careful study of the sheets, which show all the conditions together for the same day--a thing impossible with the charts illustrating this paper--that the various conditions for the day mutually react and interact upon one another, certain combinations seemingly resulting in a re-enforcement of the tendency to crime, while certain others inhibit it. Space forbids any full discussion of this phase of the problem in the present paper, but it very probably will be made the subject of some future study. AUTHOR'S NOTE.--The above paper was written more than a year ago. Since that time the work of comparing the prevalence of crime with the meteorological conditions has been carried on upon a much larger scale in the city of New York. An immensely greater number of data have served to corroborate the earlier conclusions arrived at in this Denver study, only in minor points--and those directly traceable to the very different climates--proving at all in opposition to them.--NEW YORK, _July, 1899_. THE SURVIVAL OF AFRICAN MUSIC IN AMERICA. BY JEANNETTE ROBINSON MURPHY. Fifty years from now, when every vestige of slavery has disappeared, and even its existence has become a fading memory, America, and probably Europe, will suddenly awake to the sad fact that we have irrevocably lost a veritable mine of wealth through our failure to appreciate and study from a musician's standpoint the beautiful African music, whose rich stores will then have gone forever from our grasp. During my childhood my observations were centered upon a few very old negroes who came directly from Africa, and upon many others whose parents were African born, and I early came to the conclusion, based upon negro authority, that the greater part of their music, their methods, their scale, their type of thought, their dancing, their patting of feet, their clapping of hands, their grimaces and pantomime, and their gross superstitions came straight from Africa. Some of their later songs, it is true, we must technically call "modified African," but how far the original African song elements have been altered (and usually not for the better) by contact with American life is a question of fact, and can only be settled by a careful comparison of the songs as sung among the natives of Africa and the changed forms in which their modified ones are found today in the South. It must be determined in each case, and can not be settled by any general theory or formula. This question of the classification of African music has given rise to more or less discussion. It seems hardly just to call the genuine negro songs "the folk songs of America." We are a conglomerate people, and no one race can claim a monopoly in this matter. English, Scotch, German, French, Italians, and others have brought their own music and their own folklore, and in each case it must be considered distinctly belonging to the nationality that imported it. Why should not the same be true of the genuine negro music? The stock is African, the ideas are African, the patting and dancing are all African. The veneer of civilization and religious fervor and Bible truth is entirely superficial. The African is under it all, and those who study him and his weird music at short range have no difficulty in recalling the savage conditions that gave it birth. Were I to begin now the study of all the intonations and tortuous quavers of this beautiful music, I fear I should be able to do little toward imitating it; for it was only possible to catch the spirit of it and the reason of it all while my voice had the flexibility of childhood, and the influences of slavery were still potent factors in the daily life of the negroes. I followed these old ex-slaves, who have passed away, in their tasks, listened to their crooning in their cabins, in the fields, and especially in their meeting houses, and again and again they assured me the tunes they sang came from Africa. Possibly I have an unusual predilection for this imported African music, but to me some of the strange, weird, untamable, barbaric melodies have a rude beauty and a charm beside which, as Cowper says-- "Italian trills are tame." It is indeed hard to account for the strange misconceptions which prevail as to what really constitutes genuine African music. The "coon songs" which are so generally sung are base imitations. The white man does not live who can write a genuine negro song. At home there used to be a rare old singer, an old Kentucky mammy, whom everybody loved. She once said: "Us ole heads use ter make 'em up on de spurn of de moment, arter we wrassle wid de Sperit and come thoo. But the tunes was brung from Africa by our granddaddies. Dey was jis 'miliar songs. Dese days dey calls 'em ballots, but in de ole days dey call 'em spirituals, case de Holy Spirit done revealed 'em to 'em. Some say Moss Jesus taught 'em, and I's seed 'em start in meetin'. We'd all be at the 'prayer house' de Lord's Day, and de white preacher he'd splain de word and read whar Ezekial done say-- "'Dry bones gwine ter lib ergin.' And, honey, de Lord would come a-shinin' thoo dem pages and revive dis ole nigger's heart, and I'd jump up dar and den and holler and shout and sing and pat, and dey would all cotch de words and I'd sing it to some ole shout song I'd heard 'em sing from Africa, and dey'd all take it up and keep at it, and keep a-addin' to it, and den it would be a spiritual. Dese spirituals am de best moanin' music in de world, case dey is de whole Bible sung out and out. Notes is good enough for you people, but us likes a mixtery. Dese young heads ain't wuth killin', fur dey don't keer bout de Bible nor de ole hymns. Dey's completely spiled wid too much white blood in 'em, and de big organ and de eddication has done took all de Holy Spirit out en 'em, till dey ain't no better wid der dances and cuttin' up dan de white folks." The negro usually sang religious music at his work. He was often turned out of church for crossing his feet or singing a "fiddle sing," which is a secular song, but he could steal all the chickens he wanted and never fall from grace. One of the most persistent fancies that the old slaves cherished was that they were the oppressed Israelites, that the Southerners were the cruel Egyptians, and that Canaan was freedom. Bondage was of course their slavery. They believed that some day the Red Sea would come in a sea of blood, which was verified in the civil war. In many of their songs they appropriate Bible prophecies and ideas to themselves. The song given on the opposite page is a characteristic one, illustrating many peculiarities; and if it did not come from Africa, where did it come from? It is often asserted at the North that, as a rule, the negro was punished if he prayed or received religious instruction. On the contrary, many fine plantations had their "prayer houses," where a white minister was employed to hold services and to instruct them in the Bible. In nearly every section they were permitted and encouraged to hold their own meetings. That this is true is attested by these same thousands of "spirituals," all of which are filled with Bible texts. Some of the most devout Christians were, and are yet, the old "mammies" and "uncles" who lived all the closer to the heavenly Father because of their simplicity and lack of learning. The deeply religious and better class of old negroes maintain that the reason that this music is so fascinating to whites and blacks is because it is God's own music inspired by the Holy Spirit. [Music: DONE FOUND DAT NEW HIDIN' PLACE. 1. Who dat ... yon- der dressed in white? ... Must be de 2. Who dat ... yon- der dressed in black? ... Must be de 3. Jes on-ly could see lee-tle ba - by to-day-- ... An - gel done 4. When I was down in E - gypt's land, ...Heard a mighty chil-lun ob de Is - rael - ite ... Done found dat new hid-in' place! nig - gers a - turn - in' back! Done found dat new hid-in' place! drug her thoo de twelve pearly gates! Done found dat new hid-in' place! talkin' 'bout de promised land-- Done found dat new hid-in' place! Who dat ... yon- der dressed in red? ... Must be de God don't talk like a nat-er-al man--... Talk so a Pur- ti- est ting what eb-ber I done ... Was to And when we get on Ca - naan's shore.... We'll chil-lun dat a Mos-es led! .. Done found dat new hid-in' place! sin-ner can a - un-der-stand-- Done found dat new hid-in' place! git religion when I was young-- Done found dat new hid-in' place! shout and sing for-eb-ber more-- Done found dat new hid-in' place! REFRAIN. Come a-long--Done found dat new hid-in' place! Ise so gla-ad 'm Done found dat new hid-in' place!] There is indeed a wonderful power in some of these songs, and the charm undoubtedly lies in the fact that they are founded on Bible texts. No one questions the remarkable hold the genuine negro music has upon the Anglo-Saxon race, as is evidenced by the success of the Jubilee singers years ago and of the Hampton students now. The negroes have simply used the weird African melodies as a fascinating vehicle for Bible truths. Most students of English hymnology have observed a similar fact in their own religious poetry. One of the most powerful devotional hymns in the language--How Firm a Foundation, ye Saints of the Lord--is largely indebted for its perpetuity to the fact that almost every line is taken directly from the Bible. To illustrate the power of this music upon the colored people themselves, I may be permitted to give this little bit of personal experience: A few nights ago I went to pay a visit to an old "mammy" from Charleston. All her family sat round the room when they found I was from the South. The eldest daughter said: "Bress de Lord! I'm glad to see you! The Norf am no place for people what's been used to eberyting. Nuffin but wuk, wuk, wuk; all's jes money. No fun, nor lub, nor Jesus Christ nowhar! Why, dey'll jes meet you and pass de time ob day, and dey'll let you go away widout eber stoppin' to ax yer ef you's prepared to die, and how's your soul. Why, I neber seed no stranger in Charleston 'thout axin' 'em how's der soul comin' on? De niggers heah ain't got no Holy Spirit and dey is singing no 'count songs--dese white songs from books." At this juncture I quietly began to sing, "I don't want to be buried in de Storm." Suddenly they all began to sing and pat with me, and quickly adapted their different versions to mine. They lost no time in getting happy. They all jumped up and down in a perfect ecstasy of delight, and shouted, "I feel like de Holy Spirit is right on my hade!" Another one exclaimed: "People! dem songs makes de har rise up. Mine a-risin' now." We all had a good time, and I felt greatly complimented when the head of the house explained enthusiastically: "You does shore sing 'em good; and for a white lady you is got a good deal ob de Holy Spirit in you, honey"; and before I left the house they had tried to convince me that God has surely blessed this music by taking a hand in forming it himself. We find many of the genuine negro melodies in Jubilee and Hampton Song Books, but for the uninitiated student of the future there is little or no instruction given, and the white singer in attempting to learn them will make poor work at their mastery; for how is he, poor fellow, to know that it is bad form not to break every law of musical phrasing and notation? What is there to show him that he must make his voice exceedingly nasal and undulating; that around every prominent note he must place a variety of small notes, called "trimmings," and he must sing tones not found in our scale; that he must on no account leave one note until he has the next one well under control? He might be tempted, in the _ignorance_ of his twentieth-century education, to take breath whenever he came to the end of a line or verse! But this he should never do. By some mysterious power, to be learned only from the negro, he should carry over his breath from line to line and from verse to verse, even at the risk of bursting a blood-vessel. He must often drop from a high note to a very low one; he must be very careful to divide many of his monosyllabic words in two syllables, placing a forcible accent on the last one, so that "dead" will be "da--_ade_," "back" becomes "ba--_ack_," "chain" becomes "cha--_ain_." [Music: 1. Ma- ry and Marthy had a cha-_ain_--Walk Jerus'lem jis like Job! An' a 2. I tell you bredderin, fur a fac'-- Walk Jerus'lem jis like Job! If you 3.Some says Pe-ter and some says Paul-- Walk Jerus'lem jis like Job! But dey eb'-ry link was a Je - sus Na-_ame_! Walk Jeru-s'lem jis like Job! ebber leabs de debbil you musn't turn back! Walk Jeru-s'lem jis like Job! ain't but one God saves us all-- Walk Jeru-s'lem jis like Job! REFRAIN. When I comes ter die ... I want ter be ... read-y; When I comes ter die, ... Gwine ter walk Jeru-s'lem jis like Job!] He must also intersperse his singing with peculiar humming sounds--"hum-m-m-m." He will have to learn that the negro never neglects his family relations in his songs, and seldom considers his "spirityul" finished until he has mentioned his father and mother and sister and brother, and his preacher. A beautiful custom prevails among them of sending messages by the dying to friends gone before into heaven. When a woman dies some friend or relative will kneel down and sing to the soul as it takes its flight. This song contains endless verses, conveying love and kisses to Aunt Fannie and Uncle Cæsar and "Moss Jesus." With omissions it is used upon other occasions with fine effect. [Music: RIDE ON, JESUS. CHORUS. Ride on, Je-sus, Ride on, Je-sus, Ride on, Conq'ring King; I want to go to Heaven in de morn-in'. 1. See my mud-der, Oh, yes! Tell her for me, Oh yes! Ride my hoss in de bat-tle ob de field, I want to go to Heaven in de morn-in'!] Old Mary, who sang this, was a nurse in our family. She, like most negroes, had no idea how old she really was. She never worried, though the heavens should fall, and this ignorance as to when their birthdays rolled round may account for their longer lives here and in Africa, and for their not showing their age. She found great difficulty in arranging her religion to suit her morals, and once, in my childish innocence, I remonstrated with her for getting "baptisted" so many times, and she exclaimed indignantly: "I's a Methodist wid a Baptist faith. I gits baptisted ebery summer when de water am rale warm, and I gits turned out ebery winter fur dancin' and stealin', and you would too, child, ef you was a nigger." A few days ago I asked one of the most scholarly and noted ministers of the colored race, who was visiting in New York, about the negro music. He is very black, and his parents were pure Africans. He said that undoubtedly the tunes came directly from Africa, that his father said he had sung them at home in Africa, and that the tunes were almost supernatural in their hold upon the people. He continued: "Upon condition that you will never tell my name, I'll give you an incident which will prove to you that many of our race are still under the influences of voodooism, and that although I am, as you see, a professed Christian, all the African practices hold a powerful charm for me which I can't shake off." Knowing well his reputation and position, I was startled. He went on and said: "And this may serve you some time, as it is a true story of my own weakness. Once the bishop ordered me to the city of ----, where I was to have charge of a run-down church. The first prayer-meeting night the members locked me out, and came with shotguns to the church steps and said they were tired of ministers, that they had had four, and would not have a fifth minister. By dint of eloquence and superior education I obtained their consent to enter the church. Well, I tried faithfully to attract them. I never had more than a handful, and for six months all seemed dead set against me. I could not draw. Completely discouraged, I was in my study praying when the door opened and a little conjure man came in and said softly: 'You don't understand de people. You must get you a hand as a friend to draw 'em. Ef you will let me fix you a luck charm you'll git 'em.' In my desperation, I told him to fix it. He brought the charm back in a few days, and said, 'Now, you must feed it wid alcohol, whisky, or spirits, and never let it git dry, and always wear it nex' your heart when you enters or leaves de church.' "It was only an ugly piece of red flannel, and I hate to confess it, but I obeyed his instructions. I always felt for it before I went down on my knees to pray. The next Sunday the church was full of people. The following Sabbath there was not standing room. For four years the aisles were crowded every Sunday. I knew it was not the gospel's power, but that wretched 'luck ball.' When the bishop sent me to another church he wrote and said: 'When you came they tried to drive you away with shotguns; here, now, twenty men write me begging to have you stay. Now you draw beyond any minister in the city! How is this?' I was ashamed to tell him. I opened the charm, and found these things in it. It was a large piece of red flannel, with a horseshoe magnet fastened flat to it. In the center of the space in the magnet was a bright silver dime. On one side were sewed two needles, on the other side of the money one needle. Below it were two more needles. The whole was covered with what looked and tasted like gunpowder. I tore it up and threw it away, and have never been able to draw an audience since.--You want one? Well, I'll try to get one for you." "Indeed I want one! What lecturer would not?" I give this as an instance of the peculiar persistency of African ideas even in enlightened, civilized, Christian minds. There is a Mrs. R---- in a side street in a Northern town whom I lately visited. She was the most prominent member in the Baptist colored church. She was the leading singer. Another singer got jealous of her power to holler the loudest; besides, she wanted to get her washing away from her as well as her husband, and, worst of all, _conjured_ her. At last the first singer fell sick, and the doctor could do nothing to relieve her. A conjure woman called, and for twenty-five dollars undertook the case. She came in and moaned a few incantations in an unknown tongue. She carried a satchel, and took from it a glass, poured some gin into it and drank a little, and then, holding her hand over it, said: "Mrs. R----, look inside yourself and tell me what you see." Mrs. R---- was hypnotized, I suppose, and said, "I see pizen, and snakes a-crawlin'." "That's right! It's the lady across the way has put the spell on you, and she has cut your shape out in red flannel and stuck it full of pins and needles and biled it. She's trickin' you, and killin' you. But I'll throw it back on her--scatter your spell to the four winds. She has killed a snake and taken the blood and mixed it with wine, and in twenty-four hours it turned into snakes and you drank it and you were going crazy, and your home would have been gone." It is needless to say the sick woman recovered. She showed the caul she was born with tied up in a bundle in her stocking. The neighbors were always trying to touch the lump so they could put spells on people and be healed from diseases. The conjure woman also makes luck balls for sale. She tells her customers they must always wear them next their skin on the right side, and keep them wet with "feedin' medicine." I was so fortunate as to discover the contents of one of her balls. Corn, twine, pepper, a piece of hair from under a black cat's foot, a piece of rabbit's right foot, and whisky--all put into a red flannel bag. This was all inclosed in a buckeye biscuit. She puts loadstones in some of them to draw away a lover from a girl. She also takes roots of several different herbs and flowers and makes them into love powders, and gives them to a darkey lassie to throw upon her truant lover to bring him back to her waiting heart. It is not to be disputed that Africa has touched in many ways and in divers places the highest civilization of the Old World. I am fully persuaded that in the near future scientific researches will discover among native African tribes traditions which disclose the real parentage of many of the weird stories concerning the Creation and the Flood which are now current among their descendants in this country. The same may be said of "Brer Rabbit" and the "Tar baby," "Brer Fox," "Brer Dog," "Brer Wolf," and all that other wonderful fraternization with animal nature which simple savage life and unbridled childish imagination suggest. In many instances they will be found absolutely identical with those that are now told in the wilds of Africa. To show the existence of this belief among the negroes themselves, I will quote from an old negress, whom I know well, named "Aunt Lucinda": "Dis is an ole tale. Hit done come down since de Flood. Why, chile, de Bible didn't git eberyting by a good deal--cose it didn't! Us niggers done tole dis in Africk, and Moss John done say de Bible say ef it got all de words Jesus say hit couldn't holt 'em. And dere's lots of tales de Bible didn't git. Dis one now be 'bout de hammer and de ark: "One time God done tole Moss Nora to build him a ark, case de people fo de Flood was a singin' and a cuttin' up and a givin' entertainments, and God wanted to raise up a better people to a sarve him, and so Moss Nora had to build de ark tight, so de few people wouldn't drown. God tole him to take a he and a she of every kind and fix de jistes tight so de ark wouldn't leak water when de Flood came. De people sat around on de benches a-pokin' fun at him, and dey say, 'Moss Nora, what you doin'?' "He say, 'I's a-hammerin' de jistes tight.' "And de people say, 'What dat you doin'?' "And Moss Nora say, 'I got this ark to build, and I gwine to build it.' "And de people kep' a-pokin' fun. Dey say, 'Moss Nora, what dat hammer say?' "And he say, 'What it sound to you like it say, humph?' "And de people laugh and say it soun' like it say nuffin but 'Tim--tam! tim--tam!' "And Moss Nora say: 'Dot's whar you fotch up wrong. I got ter build this ark so tight de water won't leak thoo, and de people won't fall out, and dat hammer don't say "Tim--tam," no sich ting. Hit say ebery time I hits de jistes, "Repent! repent!"' "Dere's a spiritual what goes long wid it too, honey, 'bout de hammer an' de nails, but I don't know it. Hit's a ole, ole story dat we been singin' since de Flood--jes come down from mouf to mouf. Hist de Window is a ole tune, but not ole like dis one. Hit done come jis like I tole you." In regard to one song, at least, I have irrefragable proof of its African origin. Mrs. Jefferson Davis tells me her old nurse was a full-blooded African named Aunt Dinah. She would lovingly put her little charge to sleep with this doggerel: [Music: FADDING, GIDDING. Fad-ding, gid-ding, fad-ding go; San-té mo-lé, san-té mo-lé; Fad-ding, gid-ding, fad-ding go; Eb-er sence I born ma' han' 'tan so.] Aunt Dinah would also sing it pleadingly when begging for a present. She would begin the supplication with hands clinched tight, and open them quickly at the last line. She declared that she always sang it in this exact manner in her old African home whenever she was asking a favor, but she was never able to tell the meaning of any part of it except the last line, the African of which she had forgotten, but which meant that all black races are born with wide-open palms ready and waiting for other peoples to pour rich gifts into them. This she translated in her apt, crude way: "Eber sence I born, my hand stand so!" She had a relative named Moses, I think, who had three deep gashes radiating from each eye. Of these he was very proud, as he said they indicated that he was of the king's blood. Ten days have elapsed since the above was written. I feel like crying, "Eureka!" I have found my proof! After a diligent search for a real live African, I have found an educated convert to Christianity, who has been absent only two years from the wilds of the west coast of Africa. In broken English he sang for me several songs sung by the savages of the native Mendi tribe. The tunes sounded much like songs I know, but I could not take them down during this interview. All the songs I sang he said seemed very familiar--in certain portions especially so. I was especially interested in the description he gave of a peculiar ceremony common among the wildest Bushmen and the Yolloff tribe. My informant grew up and played with them a great deal when a child. He says the death of a young boy they consider an affront to the living--an affront which they never forgive. It is singular that among some of our Indian tribes a similar notion prevails. The friends meet around the corpse and exclaim, while they chant and sing and dance, in a high-pitched voice: "Why did you die? Were you too proud to stay with us? You thought yourself too good to stay with us. To whom do you leave all your things? We don't want them! Take them with you if you are so stuck up; we'll bury them with you!" They work themselves into a perfect fury, and one gets a whip and flogs the corpse until it is horribly mutilated. Then the few who have really been friends to the child in their crude way draw near and begin to sing: "Anasa yi. Anasa papa," which this native African assured me meant, as nearly as he could translate it-- "Find out how mother is. Find out how papa is." The curious identity of the name for father in this African dialect and our own he could not explain. Even while the relatives were thus speaking kindly to the departed child, others would come up with whips, and with blows spitefully exclaim: "Tell my father's sister I am happy. Speak to her for me." This they said, mocking the relatives for sending messages. What better proof is required of the origin of the peculiar custom of the negroes in our own Southland of sending communications by the dead? He also gave me new stories of Brother Conch, and a tale of a rabbit and a pitch-man. He says he has heard a savage tribe often sing to the beat of a peculiar drum, as they started to pillage and destroy a neighboring tribe, these words, which he could not translate: "Zo, whine, whine, Zo, bottom balleh. Zo, whine, whine, Zo, bottom balleh." Some of the tribes are followers of Mohammed. After they have broken their fast, they sing this hymn to their God: "Li li, e li li, Moo moo dooroo, soo moo li." I then sang for him a part of "Gawd bless dem Yankees, dey'll set me free," [Music: Gawd bless dem Yankees, dey'll set me free! 'Most done toil-in' heah! Leetle chiler-den, 'm ... 'm ... 'Most done toil-in' ... heah!] and when I came to the humming, which we all know is the marked peculiarity of the negro singing, he stopped me and said, "Whenever you hum that way it means 'Hush!' and among the tribes I have known it always comes in baby songs." He then sang this one, which a heathen woman used to sing to his little sister "Amber": "Amber in a wa, Keen yah feenyah ma, Amber in a bamboo carri, Amber eeka walloo. Um, um, um." A rough translation of this means: "Amber, be quiet and I'll give you something. I'm not going to flog you. You are quiet, so I thank you. Hush, hush, hush!" REMEDIES FOR THE DEPOPULATION OF FRANCE. BY M. JACQUES BERTILLON. France is on the way to become a country of the third rank. It is perishing for lack of births. Its population remains stationary, while that of all the other great countries has largely increased since the beginning of the century. This points ultimately to a certain growing inferiority in military strength, economical prosperity, literary prestige, and scientific repute; and finally to a progressive diminution of French influence upon the march of civilization. This depreciation of France comes partly from political causes and partly from its low birth rate. In the examination of the remedies which have been proposed to antagonize this evil, we shall begin with a rapid review of those which appear to be least efficacious. Then we shall present those which figure on the programme of the _Alliance Nationale pour l'accroissement de la population française_, a society which should include all French people who care for the future of their country. The reforms for which the depopulation of France has served as the vaulting board may be divided, notwithstanding the great variety of them, into four categories: (1) Various social reforms; (2) increase in the number of marriages; (3) diminution of involuntary sterility; and (4) reduction of mortality. We have a word to say with respect to each of these: I. SOCIAL REFORMS PROPOSED FOR THE HYPOTHETICAL PURPOSE OF INCREASING NATALITY.--Nobody has ever shown that the emancipation of woman, selection in paternity, the suppression of divorce, or, the contrary, laws facilitating divorce, would augment natality. Nobody has ever given a proof, or the beginning of a proof, in support of these fancies. Would socialistic reforms leading to a diminution of the share of capital, and a corresponding increase of the share of labor, have any effect upon natality? I can not pronounce upon this question, because I have not sufficient data; nevertheless, the remuneration of capital has not ceased to diminish since the beginning of the century--we may even estimate that it has diminished nearly one half, for the nominal interest on money has fallen from five to three per cent. This has not prevented natality from decreasing in our country. Would it be augmented if capital should come to have no remuneration at all? I have not examined this difficult and very hypothetical question, for, if such a thing should happen, it could be only in an extremely remote future. But the supreme struggle of which our country has always to think will have taken place long before that. The revival of religious ideas, if it should come about, might have some effect on natality. Demographic studies have shown how great an influence religion has on habits and on phenomena of moral pathology (on the frequency of suicides, for example), and prove that men put the prescriptions of their religion into practice more than one would believe. All religions direct man, more or less imperatively, to have as numerous a posterity as possible. There may therefore exist a relation between natality and the degree of sincerity of religious convictions. But it is manifest that, whatever we may do, we can not change our age nor prevent its growing more and more incredulous. II. SUMMARY EXAMINATION OF MEASURES HAVING IN VIEW THE INCREASE OF THE NUMBER OF MARRIAGES.--Nuptiality is nearly the same in France as it has been. It has, however, diminished during the last twenty years, falling gradually from eight marriages to seven marriages a year per thousand inhabitants. For seven years past it has gained a little, and is now 7.6--a fairly satisfactory rate. It is not here that the saddle galls us. It has been proposed, as a measure for increasing the number of marriages, to simplify the required formulas. I believe that these formulas are indeed too long, too many, and too expensive. The countries which have been so foolish as to copy our civil code have taken pains to strike out this chapter, and they have done well. But he is greatly mistaken who believes that the number of marriages could be perceptibly increased by suppressing unpleasant formulas. When one wants to marry, he generally does so in spite of the obstacles which maladroit legislation may have piled up. In case of need, the matter is settled by an irregular affiance, and natality loses little. The violent suppression of convents has also been proposed as a measure for promoting the increase of marriages. A person who has reflected much could not speak of such a thing. To what extent does any one suppose that might augment natality? The convents at this time contain about sixty thousand women. Suppose they were all as ready as other women to marry--which is not the case, for the fact that they have retired to a cloister proves that family life has few attractions for them--a simple calculation shows that they would afford forty-five hundred births a year. So France needs six hundred thousand infants every year, and a plan is advanced to give it four or five thousand at most--and that by means of a violent measure, unworthy of an age of freedom! Next are the _measures proposed for diminishing involuntary sterility_. Is involuntary sterility as frequent as it is supposed to be? Our respected master, Jules Rochard, was surprised to find two million sterile families recorded in the census reports. But the number does not appear excessive. We can not compare it with similar returns abroad, for France is the only country, except in the case of a few cities abroad, in which items of this kind are inquired into by the census takers. But, according to different gynæcologists--chiefly German--cited in the Academy of Medicine, the number of sterile families should be sixteen per cent. Now, this is the exact proportion found in France in the enumeration of 1896. The really surprising thing about the matter is not the number of sterile families, but the limited fecundity of the fertile families. There are other figures to show that absolute sterility is not the cause of the low rate of French natality. An inquiry respecting sterile families was made in 1856, at a time when French natality was a little higher than it is now, a comparison of the results of which with those of the enumeration of 1886 shows that the number of fruitful families had not diminished (83.6 per cent of the families having one or more children then, to 83.3 in 1886). The factor that has diminished is the fertility of the families. It is only necessary to cite the measures that have been suggested to counteract this supposed excessive sterility to make their inanity apparent. Among them are reform of the abuse of tobacco and alcohol and war upon syphilis. Do not these scourges exist among other nations than us? Nothing could be more salutary than to war upon them, but to connect their existence with the depopulation of France is a singular exaggeration of their importance. More than this, the physician of a benevolent institution in Paris has told me that the large families who resort to his dispensary nearly all have a drunkard at their head. The families that issue from such parents are not necessarily degenerate. This curious observation ought not certainly to make us partisans of drunkenness, but it demonstrates to us that the suppression of alcoholism is not what will restore French natality. Rather the contrary. III. EXAMINATION OF MEASURES PROPOSED FOR DIMINISHING MORTALITY.--As the question of the population of France has been more especially discussed by the doctors, it has done great service as a vaulting board for medical theories. Doctors are very ready to reason as if they could dispose of human life at their will. It is very hard to keep a man from dying. The most skillful doctors have not reached that point; but it is very easy to have a man born, and is within the reach of the latest-made young practitioner. It is very doubtful whether the proposed measures will be efficacious or practical. See how much trouble we have had, after a century of experiments, in realizing the benefit of vaccination, the only nearly infallible remedy we have against disease. Surely a country ought to guard itself as much as possible against sickness and death, and should do everything that will conduce to that end, as we do all that is possible to cure a man ill with pneumonia or any other disease. But we should not delude ourselves with illusions, and we have to confess that the efficacy of the measures which we take to satisfy our conscience is very doubtful. The failures of hygiene are almost as numerous as those of medicine. Mortality has not increased in France. It is rather less there than in other countries in the same latitude, and even less than that of some of the countries situated farther north. So we can hardly hope to diminish it very much. The effect of mortality on the whole is, moreover, not to diminish natality, but rather to favor it. The death of an adult leaves some position vacant, and makes room for the institution of a new household and the birth of other children. So when a rich old man dies, the money he leaves helps set up his children in life; and when a poor old man dies, a burden is taken away from his descendants, who had to support him and who can now marry and have children. Some of the parallelisms in the movements of population which statisticians have observed may be explained thus. We might compare a human society to a tank so arranged as to be always full of water. It has a supply pipe (natality and immigration) which opens and operates only when the discharge pipe (mortality and emigration) is also open; or to a forest of definite extent, in which, when a clearing is opened, a new growth appears in the cleared space, unless some cause exists to prevent it, which cause it will be the forester's business to find and remove. He would not think, however, of stopping the cutting of the old trees, for that would be to prevent the essential condition of the new growth's getting a headway. The law of all living societies, in forests and in nations, is the perpetual renewal of the stock. IV. OF MEASURES THAT WILL BE EFFECTIVE.--The evil must be fought in its causes. These causes are detestable family customs, dictated by pecuniary considerations. These being the things to be reformed, and money being the cause of them, the beginning should be made with money. We have a right to demand energetic measures, severe if necessary, against the evil that is eating France. Those which we shall ask for here are only equitable. They shall fully respect individual liberty, and in some cases augment it. Their purpose is to teach the French people who do not know it the immense wrong which their mistaken selfishness is inflicting upon the country. They aim especially to modify customs, and to invoke for reasonably numerous families the profound respect and protection that are due them. And they seek to harmonize general with particular interests, a thing to which the present laws have precisely the contrary effect. _It is just as much every man's duty to contribute to the perpetuity of his country as it is to defend it._ This is a moral truth which the French have forgotten, and it will have to be inculcated in them. The case is beyond the reach of the most eloquent sermons, and will have to be met, if the mass of men are to be convinced, by palpable facts that will touch all personally. This leads to the principle, which seems, moreover, self-evident, that the fact of bringing up a child should be considered a form of tax payment. The payment of a tax is, in fact, the imposition of a pecuniary sacrifice for the profit of the whole nation. This is what the father accepts who rears a child. _A family, to be acquitted of the tax, should rear at least three children._ It takes two children to fill the place of the parents, and there should be a third in addition, for one in three families, on an average, will have no children. Hence the family which does not rear three children will fail of imposing sufficient sacrifices upon itself for the future of the nation. It is free to do this, but should pay damages for it. He, on the other hand, who rears more than three children imposes supplementary burdens upon himself, for which he should be recompensed every time occasion offers. The principle of a reduction of taxes proportioned to the number of children was applied in June, 1898, at the instance of the _Alliance Nationale_, by the city of Lyons. It has been adopted, very timidly at first, and then a little more broadly, by the Minister of Finance.[F] But it would be easy, and even necessary, to go considerably further in this direction. [Footnote F: France is not the first country that has started on this course. The spirit of justice has suggested similar reforms in countries which have no questions of depopulation to deal with. Reductions of taxes proportioned to the number of children have been granted in Prussia, Saxony, most of the secondary states of Germany, Servia, Norway, Sweden, several Swiss cantons, and Austria.] To accomplish this reduction without the treasury losing anything, it is only necessary to charge the less prolific families with one fifth additional tax. The demographic condition of France is, in fact, so deplorable that families of more than three children form only one sixth part of the whole number, or are 2,122,210 out of 12,127,023; hence, in order to clear fully from liability for taxes these two million families, it is enough to charge the other ten million families with supplementary taxes of twenty per cent--a thing that is entirely practicable. It may, however, seem more expedient to scale the supplementary impost, so that it shall fall in inverse proportion to the number of children. Thus, let bachelors more than thirty years old pay fifty per cent; households without children, forty per cent; families with one child, thirty per cent; families with two children, ten per cent; families with three children, the present tax without addition; while families with more than three children should be wholly exempt. A simple calculation will show that the treasury would gain by such an adjustment. It would lose 2,122,210 contributors of taxes, and would gain, against these, 2,456,112. Furthermore, families with more than four children are usually poor and hardly able to pay even light assessments, while those we propose to tax supplementarily are mostly wealthy, whence the tax against them would be generally productive. These scalings and exemptions might be applied to all the various kinds of direct taxes, so that the state should say, in effect, to the infertile families: "You have done a wrong to your country. We have no thought of punishing you for it, but it is not right that you profit by it. You must pay damages for it." The plan actually followed by the state, instead of making lighter the meritorious burden which the head of a numerous family assumes, does everything to make it harder. All the direct and indirect taxes seem to fall higher upon families having many children. It would not be exact to say that the law is indifferent to natality. It would be more just to say that it does all it can to discourage it, and that every Frenchman is officially invited, in his own interest and that of his posterity, to limit it as much as possible. The contrary is what should be done. There are wealthy families which are in a position to contribute most liberally to the perpetuity of the nation, and yet, strangely, they are the most abstemious. It would not be fair to tax them according to the number of servants they have, for this must increase as children multiply; but the tax might be adjusted to the excess of servants over children. As an objection to our plan, it may be asked if we really believe that those "neo-Malthusian" families who have only one or two children will decide to have four in order to save themselves from some taxes? We do not cherish this illusion; but the sordidness of the family customs of the country should not be exaggerated. Most of the families sin through selfishness, while they do not realize that their selfishness is culpable, harmful, and ignoble. This must be made clear to them, and no method of publishing the fact is as imposing and effective as the tax-collector's schedule. The reform in direct taxes which we propose will therefore have an educational influence. The same principle might be applied in the military service by expediting the discharge of soldiers who are married. A bill to this effect has been introduced in the French Senate, and an amendment has been proposed extending the favor to the eldest son of a family of five children. The inheritance tax is a particularly fitting form of impost in which insufficiently fruitful families might pay the indemnity which they justly owe the state on account of their sterility; for the prime object of the neo-Malthusians is to forestall the necessity of dividing their fortunes among too many children. The laws of succession are so framed now that _only_ sons pay less than others; not only are the expenses of notarial acts less for them than for families with several children, but the latter are liable to pay the tax several times, for when one of the heirs dies his brothers and sisters will have to pay new succession taxes. In all cases of this order the treasury burdens numerous families, and spares neo-Malthusian ones. The institution of heritage stimulates industry, and is one of the chief reasons for it. A great many men, we are sure, would work less and would certainly save less except for the prospect of leaving the fruit of their labor and economy to their children--or, too often, to their only child. But as the institution of heritage becomes under these conditions one of the prime factors of depopulation, it will have to be modified. The state is as much interested in the fecundity of families as it is in their industry and thrift. To stimulate the latter virtues it guarantees them the right of inheritance. It might withdraw it or diminish it to its own profit, if their fertility was not judged sufficient for it. For such a measure to be effective its application should be severe enough to touch sensibly the fortunes of families which have given the country only one or two children. The state, for instance, might reserve to itself the disposable part of the inheritance--half, for instance, in the case of families having only one child; a third, of families where there are two children; and waiver of the extra tax where there are three children. The principle might be approximately expressed as that of treating single children as to their inheritance portions as if they had brothers. But as a proposition so worded would have but little chance of immediate adoption, we should have to be satisfied with a less radical reform. If it is objected that such measures would be too revolutionary and too much opposed to existing ideas and habits, the answer is that anodynes would be without effect upon so profound and inveterate an evil. French families must cease to have an evident interest in limiting the number of their children, and something more than half measures will be needed to achieve such a result. Our principle is equality of burdens. We say to the French: "You have three chief duties toward your country: to contribute to its perpetuity, to its defense, and to its pecuniary burdens. We affirm that you have failed in the first of these duties. This being true, you must accept the other two with a supplement. With this principle severely applied, and with some other reforms, we hope to bring back to the country the idea of the respect that is due to numerous families and of aversion against the detestable habits that are destroying France." The sums derived from the increased succession taxes which we have proposed to assess upon families that have given the country only one or two children might be reserved for the education of poor children or for the realization of some such plan as has been proposed by M. Raoul de la Grasserie for the pensioning of a retreat in old age for the parents of large families. Another means of encouraging parentage may be found in instituting special honors and marks of esteem for the fathers and mothers of numerous children. Thus the General Council of the Drôme gives a gold medal on the 14th of July to each of the two women in the department who excel in this respect. A fund has been created at Nantes for providing rewards to those who have the most children under fifteen years of age. A system of rewards also exists at Meaux for those who have contributed most to the population. The French law requiring the equal division of estates among all the children operates as a deterrent to parentage. A father who has built up a large business or accumulated a handsome domain is exceedingly averse to the prospect of having it cut up and dispersed, and is therefore careful to have but one child, so that it may descend unimpaired to him. The coincidence that France is the only country where this system prevails, and is, at the same time, the only one where the population is decreasing, is striking enough to suggest a connection between the two phenomena. The law works mischievously in this respect, and requires modification in the direction of giving the parent larger privileges of testamentary disposition. Thus, the state should in every way and in every department of law and administration manifest its profound respect for large families; it should set the example on this point, for it is the party most largely interested.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique._ WEST INDIAN POISONOUS FISHES. BY JAMES MACDONALD ROGERS, F. R. C. S., STAFF SURGEON, R. N. At a time when so much attention is being paid to the West Indian Islands as regards their politics, social condition, and natural history it may not be out of place to briefly consider the subject of the poisonous fishes to be found in the neighboring seas. Considering the number of unwholesome fish abounding in these waters and the numerous cases of illness caused by them, I was surprised on investigation to find that so little appeared to be known or written on the subject. During my three-years' cruise in the West Indies the study of those fishes reputed to be poisonous was forced upon me by reason of the numerous cases of illness among the sailors of my own ship. When it is asserted that there are no less than sixty varieties of noxious fishes to be found in Cuban waters alone, it seems desirable that those who are about to settle in these parts should have some general idea as to what fish to choose and what to avoid. Colored fishermen are not too particular about hawking unwholesome fish in the streets, even when its sale is forbidden in the market, and numerous cases have come under my notice where the unwary purchaser has paid the penalty by a sharp and painful illness. One of the great delights of our sailors is to land on some sandy beach, provided with a large seining net, in order to catch fish, the consumption of which varies the monotony of salt beef and pork. On examining the hauls they made I invariably found some unwholesome specimens, which I advised them to reject, and by so doing every time they went seining had no more cases of fish poisoning on board. In tropical seas some fish are found to be always poisonous wherever and whenever caught, but there are numerous instances where wholesome fish become noxious when found in certain localities, especially on coral reefs and shoals. Fish when feeding on decomposing coral polyps, medusæ, and poisonous mollusks found on these reefs often become noxious, as the following instance will prove: Midway between Cuba, Hayti, and Jamaica lie the extensive reefs and shoals of the Formigas, which are several miles in extent and covered by a small depth of water. These shoals present a concentration of all the incidents to be found in West Indian fringing shore reefs. Arborescent corals and spreading millepores stretch on walls and ledges, interspersed with huge meandrinas and brainstones, among which lodge a profusion of _Holothurias_, starfishes, and a variety of sponges. This great mass of reefs, called from their clustering swarm the Ants' Nest, or the Formigas, abound with all sorts of fishes. As you approach the great submarine plateau, the odor of the slime and of the spermatic substances that find a resting place in the crevices and shallow pools spread through it is very remarkable--the pleasant blandness of the sea breeze suddenly changing to the nauseating smell of a fish market. Those who have waded on tropical shore reefs know not only the strong scent given out by the polyps that build there, but feel how sensibly the hands are affected, and how the skin of the thighs is susceptible of a stinging irritation from the slightest contact with the slime of corals. It has been found by invariable experience that all the fishes taken on the Formigas are pernicious; that the barracudas especially are always poisonous. Similar stretches of shoals among the Bahamas produce fishes deleterious as food. The low-spreading ledges and banks of the Virgin Islands, called the Anegadas, or the Drowned Islands, afford a similar unfavorable ground for fishing. In this way we may account for the remark of Dr. Grainger that fishes are poisonous at one end of St. Christopher while they are harmless at another. We get over, by these several incidents of those fishing grounds, the adventitious occurrence of poisonous among wholesome fishes, which become deleterious from the food on which they subsist at certain seasons on certain banks and coasts. Again, in the tropics wholesome fish soon become virulently poisonous if kept too long, as the fierce heat favors rapid decomposition. In this short article I have only space for a description of the most common and injurious fishes met with in the West Indies. One of the commonest fish in these seas is the barracuda (_Sphyræna barracuda_), which can be easily recognized by its elongated body, covered with cycloid scales. The color is dark olive-green on the back, fading to a lighter green on the sides, while its under surface is silvery white. The mouth is wide and curved, with long and sharp teeth. These fishes are large and voracious, often attaining the length of six feet; and as they are usually found close inshore, amid the heaviest surf, they are as much feared by fishermen and bathers as the shark. Indeed, they are more to be feared, for the shark as a rule is timid, and unless extremely hungry is cautious in its voracity. The barracuda, on the contrary, is very bold. The shark flees from a splashing in the water, but the barracuda goes there to see what he may find, as he is only attracted by live bait. The wounds inflicted by the barracuda are exceedingly severe and sometimes fatal. When young this fish is generally used as food, but having attained a certain size the flesh becomes exceedingly noxious, at least at certain seasons of the year. This change is said to be due to the poisonous fish on which they feed. When caught on certain banks, as the Formigas, their flesh is always extremely unwholesome, and, as Kingsley says, they have this advantage, that while they can always eat you, you can not often eat them with impunity. The Cubans, as a rule, will not touch this fish, and at Santa Cruz it is the custom never to eat it till the next day, and then not till after salting it; but that is apparently no safeguard, as four persons living in Kingston, Jamaica, suffered severely after eating "corned barracuda." It is stated that when unwholesome, its teeth will be found of a blackened color at the base, and on inserting a silver coin into its flesh this will also turn black. The poisonous symptoms caused by this fish are peculiar, and were strongly marked in the case of a friend of mine who was a solicitor living in Barbados. He and several others who had partaken of the same fish suffered from severe gastro-intestinal disorder, with intense nausea and vomiting. His face swelled up and became tubercular like a leper; afterward, general muscular tremblings and acute pain about the body, particularly in the joints of his hands and arms, came on. The nails of his feet and hands became black and fell off without any pain, and his hair also fell out. For years after he suffered from debility and tubercular skin eruptions. Death sometimes follows, but those who do not die suffer for a long time from its effects, which in some cases last for twenty-five years. The "yellow-tailed sprat" (_Clupea thrissa_) is common in the West Indies, and may be recognized by having its last dorsal ray prolonged into a filament. A black spot behind the gill cover is said to distinguish it from a somewhat similar fish, the "red-eared pilchard," which has a yellow spot behind its gill cover. Schomburgk gives testimony to the poisonous properties of the "yellow-tailed sprat" when found at certain periods of the year among the Leeward and Virgin Islands. The eating of this poisonous "sprat" is said to be followed by most violent symptoms and rapid death. The common saying in the West Indies--that if you begin at the head you never have time to finish the tail--is almost literally true. The eating of the roe of this "sprat" caused in Japan, in the year 1884, twenty-three deaths. The victims suffered from severe inflammation of the mouth and throat, strong abdominal pain, formication in the arms and legs, disorders of vision, paralysis, convulsions, and loss of consciousness. Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhoea often occurred. Death followed in some cases in a quarter of an hour, but mostly in from two to three hours. Lacroix describes a case of poisoning through eating the "sprat" which occurred on board a French man-of-war. Out of a crew of fifty men, thirty were dangerously ill and five died. The men experienced strong muscular cramps in the arms and legs, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhoea. Afterward congestion of the brain, delirium, and coma supervened. Most of the cases of fish poisoning which I have met with in the West Indies have been due to eating various kinds of "snappers," especially the "gray snapper." The tropical species are very numerous and difficult to differentiate, owing to their frequent change of color according to age and surroundings. In 1897, at St. Georges, Grenada, twelve persons who partook of a large gray snapper were attacked with severe symptoms of fish poisoning. A few hours after the meal all these were suffering from pain and fullness in the stomach, followed by persistent vomiting, severe cramps, watery evacuations, weak, thready pulse, and labored respirations. One of the victims was examined by me four months afterward, and he stated that, owing to intense weakness, he had been forced to keep his bed for several months, during which period he suffered from various nervous disorders. He had shooting pains and tingling of the limbs, dimness of vision, and quick, thready pulse. In 1893 seventeen persons living in Bridgetown, Barbados, were attacked by similar symptoms to those mentioned above. All these had eaten of a fish which had been hawked about by a fisherman, and which was subsequently identified as a "gray snapper," though sold under a more innocent name. A Spanish naval surgeon, Don Anton Jurado, while serving on board the gunboat Magallanes had an opportunity of proving Poey's statement that the fishes caught on the coast of Cuba are often very poisonous. No less than twenty-seven of the officers and men were taken ill, most of them with gastro-intestinal disturbance of a more or less severe nature; the others suffered from nervous symptoms. The horse mackerel, green cavalla, and the jack are often found most unwholesome when caught in West Indian waters. In Barbados a whole family were seized with symptoms simulating cholera from eating "green cavalla." The editor of The Barbadian writes: "We think it right to caution people against the fish called 'green cavalla' from being purchased by their cooks. Some years ago we know that several individuals were extremely ill from eating this fish, which is frequently very poisonous. The night before last a whole family in Bridgetown, except the master, who fortunately had dined out, were seized with violent cholera after having partaken of cavalla." The "jack" (_Caran plumieri_) is found to be poisonous in some seasons of the year, and it is said that at such times two small red lumps appear in its gills. When they are suspected of being in a poisonous condition an experiment is tried upon a duck by giving her one of them to swallow, and if at that season it is poisonous the duck dies in about two hours. The "rock hind," or "smoky hind," after attaining a certain size becomes most unwholesome, and often infested with parasites. Numerous instances of severe symptoms attacking persons after eating this fish are recorded. Toadfish, or _Tetrodons_, are occasionally met with, and are to be avoided as being extremely poisonous, especially if the roe or liver be eaten. A family of coolies in Trinidad, in spite of being warned, ate one of these fishes, with a fatal result. The symptoms were blunted sensibility, trembling, general muscular weakness, difficulty of breathing, vomiting of blood, convulsions, and death. The _Diodonts_, "trunkfishes," are not nearly so poisonous as the _Tetrodonts_, but they are found to be very noxious at certain times or in certain localities, more especially if the gall bladder, liver, and intestines are not removed before cooking. It is reported that those persons who had eaten them suffered from loss of sensibility, cold sweat over the whole body, and stiffened limbs. Death followed in some cases. The "prickly bottle fish" (_Diodon orbicularis_), met with in the Gulf of Mexico, is said to be injurious when eaten. The _Ostracion triqueter_, called in the West Indies "fair maid," "plate fish," "trunkfish," is often eaten with no ill effects by the negroes, who, after cleaning it, bake it in its hard shell-like covering. There is, however, a gelatinous matter near the tail which is called "the jelly," and a similar substance is found near the head. When only part of this jelly has been eaten its effects are a peculiar vertigo, nausea, vomiting, pains all over the body, more especially in the limbs. The feeling of vertigo is similar to that of intoxication, hence the fish has been called "drunken fish." The "filefishes," or "trigger fishes," when found in the tropics, where they feed on coral polypi, have the reputation of being most unwholesome. In the West Indies "sea eels," or murenas, are only eaten by the negroes. The blood of eels is said by Mosso to contain a poison like that of vipers. It is related that a man drank some eel's blood mixed with wine, and was in consequence seized with severe diarrhoea, disturbance of vision, foaming at the mouth, and stertorous breathing. He ultimately recovered after vigorous treatment. Dr. Gordon, of Montego Bay, Jamaica, records a case of death from eating the flesh and liver of a species of coast conger (_Gymnothorax restratus_). In spite of treatment, the man died after a lingering illness. Space will not permit me to dwell in this article on the remaining noxious fishes, but it is to be hoped that enough has been written to teach people to be cautious in their selection of fish when in the West Indies. THE COLORS OF NORTHERN FLOWERS. BY JOHN H. LOVELL. For profusion of bloom and brilliancy of coloring, the land of the tropics, with all its luxuriance of vegetation, can offer nothing to compare with a New England meadow in June. Along the great rivers of the South or in the islands of the East strange and beautiful flowers occur individually or in small groups, but the traveler looks in vain for myriads of blossoms giving a distinctive coloring to the landscape itself. It was long the popular notion that the colors of flowers were of no importance except as they gave human pleasure. This idea has been made familiar by a well-known line of Gray's Elegy. It was a German pastor, Christian Conrad Sprengel, at the close of the last century, who first pointed out their true significance. So enthusiastically did he pursue his botanical studies that he neglected the duties of his office, and finally even omitted the Sunday sermon. The natural result followed, that he was deprived of his parish. In straitened circumstances he then sought unsuccessfully to maintain himself at Berlin by giving lessons in botany and Sunday excursions in search of plants. His book, now a botanical classic, attracted but little attention; his publisher did not even send him a copy of it, and in disgust he turned from the study of plants to that of languages. The title of the work, The Secret of Nature in the Form and Fertilization of Flowers Discovered, affords us the pleasure of knowing that he rightly estimated the importance of his observations. Sprengel clearly states that the bright hues of flowers, as is now well established, serve as signals to attract the attention of nectar-loving insects flying near by. He was led to this conclusion very fitly by the study of _Myosotis_, the "forget-me-not." He has not been forgotten. His name and theory were rescued from obscurity by Darwin; his book a few years ago was reprinted at Leipsic, and is now universally recognized, says H. Müller, as having "struck out a new path in botanical science." A day's stroll through the fields and woodlands is sufficient to show that yellow and white blossoms are in Nature more common than red or blue. From an examination of 741 New England and Eastern species belonging to 48 families (see table) it appears that 164 are yellow, 283 white, 71 red, 136 blue and purple, and 87 green. Greenish flowers occur in 25 families, yellow in 29, white in 32, red in 16, purple and blue in 22. _The Predominant Colors of the Flowers of Ranunculaceæ to Cornaceæ in the Northern States._ --------------+---------+--------+--------+--------+---------+-------- | Yellow. | White. | Red. | Blue. | Green. | Total. --------------+---------+--------+--------+--------+---------+-------- Ranunculaceæ | 19 | 19 | 2 | 14 | 6 | 60 Magnoliaceæ | 1 | 4 | .. | .. | 1 | 6 Anonaceæ | .. | .. | .. | 1 | .. | 1 Menispermaceæ | .. | 2 | .. | .. | 1 | 3 Berberaceæ | 2 | 3 | .. | .. | 1 | 6 Nymphæaceæ | 3 | 2 | .. | 1 | .. | 6 Sarraceniaceæ | 1 | .. | .. | 1 | .. | 2 Papaveraceæ | 4 | 2 | 2 | .. | .. | 8 Fumariaceæ | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | .. | 8 Cruciferæ | 17 | 37 | 2 | 5 | 4 | 65 Capparidaceæ | .. | 1 | .. | .. | .. | 1 Resedaceæ | 1 | .. | .. | .. | .. | 1 Violaceæ | 4 | 6 | .. | 8 | .. | 18 Cistaceæ | 4 | .. | .. | .. | 4 | 8 Droseraceæ | .. | 3 | 1 | .. | .. | 4 Hyperaceæ | 18 | .. | 2 | .. | .. | 20 Elatinaceæ | .. | .. | .. | .. | 1 | 1 Caryophyllaceæ| .. | 32 | 15 | .. | 6 | 53 Portulaceæ | 1 | .. | 3 | 1 | .. | 5 Malvaceæ | 5 | 4 | 10 | 3 | .. | 22 Tiliaceæ | .. | 2 | .. | .. | .. | 2 Camilliaceæ | .. | 2 | .. | .. | .. | 2 Linaceæ | 3 | .. | .. | 1 | .. | 4 Geraniaceæ | 3 | 2 | 2 | 6 | .. | 13 Rutaceæ | .. | 2 | .. | .. | 1 | 3 Anarcardiaceæ | 1 | .. | .. | .. | 5 | 6 Vitaceæ | .. | .. | .. | .. | 7 | 7 Rhamnaceæ | .. | 3 | .. | .. | 4 | 7 Celastraceæ | .. | .. | .. | 2 | 1 | 3 Sapindaceæ | 2 | 2 | 2 | .. | 5 | 11 Polygalaceæ | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | .. | 14 Leguminosæ | 19 | 28 | 6 | 61 | 2 | 116 Rosaceæ | 19 | 44 | 13 | 2 | 2 | 80 Calycanthaceæ | .. | .. | .. | 3 | .. | 3 Saxifragaceæ | 2 | 20 | .. | 1 | 13 | 36 Crassulaceæ | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 9 Hammelaceæ | 1 | 1 | .. | .. | 1 | 3 Halorageæ | .. | .. | .. | .. | 9 | 9 Onagraceæ | 15 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 30 Melastomaceæ | .. | .. | .. | 3 | .. | 3 Lythraceæ | .. | 1 | .. | 8 | .. | 9 Loasaceæ | 1 | .. | .. | .. | .. | 1 Cactaceæ | 3 | 1 | .. | .. | .. | 2 Cucurbitaceæ | .. | 2 | .. | .. | 1 | 3 Umbelliferæ | 8 | 33 | .. | 2 | 2 | 45 Araliaceæ | .. | 3 | .. | .. | 3 | 6 Cornaceæ | .. | 11 | .. | .. | 2 | 13 |---------+--------+--------+--------+---------+-------- Total | 164 | 283 | 71 | 136 | 87 | 741 --------------+---------+--------+--------+--------+---------+-------- Yellow appears to have been the first color developed, and flowers with this coloration are usually simple and regular in structure, as the buttercups and five-fingers. But why, it will be asked, should yellow have been the primitive color? The spores and spore-cases of the club mosses, and the pollen of all cone-bearing trees, and, in fact, of most plants, are yellow, and the yellow coloration of the first petals is doubtless correlated with this fact. Flowers of this tint are peculiarly attractive to yellow-banded flies, and when dull are avoided by beetles. Yellow flowers vary greatly in size, but pale yellow flowers are usually small, and bright or orange-yellow are large. _Ranunculus abortivus_ and _R. sceleratus_, which grow in wet places, are small and pale, while _R. bulbosus_ and _R. acris_, the familiar buttercups of our meadows, are an inch broad. An apparent exception to the above rule is offered by the globe-flower (_Trollius laxus_), found in dense swamps, which has solitary, very large, pale greenish-yellow flowers. As the cultivated European and Asiatic species have bright yellow flowers, the coloring of the sepals of _T. laxus_, for the petals are wanting, has probably retrograded from growing in dense shade. Yellow flowers in their natural state exhibit but little variation of color. They change most readily to white, and less often to red or blue. Under cultivation sudden variations from yellow to white have been observed. A double yellow hollyhock, according to Darwin, suddenly turned one year into a single white kind, and a chrysanthemum has been seen to bear both yellow and white flowers. It will be observed in the accompanying table that in all families in which yellow flowers are common, white are also common, except in the _Hyperaceæ_, which contain no white-flowered species. Some species of mustard regularly fade to white, while many white flowers show that they are descended from ancestral yellow forms by retaining vestiges of this color on the base of the petals, as in the water-crowfoot. The pale yellow flowers of _Oenothera laciniata_, of the cultivated _Ribes aureum_, and of _Diervilla trifida_ in fading change to rose or red, exhibiting a tendency to develop red coloration. _Aquilegia canadensis_ produces scarlet flowers, which are yellow inside and rarely all over. There are two other species in the Northern flora which exhibit similar coloring, _Lonicera sempervirens_ and _Spigelia marylandica_, and the former is sometimes yellow throughout. _Myosotis_ is at first pale yellow, and changes to sky-blue. But the best illustration of the transition from yellow to blue is exhibited by the violet family; the smallest and simplest species is yellow, the most highly specialized is blue, and all the intermediate stages are presented by _Viola tricolor_. Honey-guides are exceedingly rare among yellow flowers. _Cassia chamæcrista_, which has nearly regular, showy yellow flowers, has two or three petals with a purple spot at base, while four of the anthers are yellow and six purple. It is interesting to compare with this flower the change of color presented by _Arnebia_. When the flower opens, each lobe of the yellow corolla is marked by a dark purple spot, which soon begins to fade, and by the next day has entirely disappeared. _Saxifraga aizoides_ has golden flowers spotted with orange, and attracts a large number of insect visitors, and the yellow violets have their petals marked with dark-brown lines leading to the honey glands. Sulphur-yellow flowers are visited chiefly by bumblebees, and their coloration seems to have been developed by their selective influence from red or purple-flowered ancestors. Müller observed that the sulphur-yellow flowers of _Sempervivum Wulfenii_, which are unlike the primitive yellow of the _Crassulaceæ_, are purple at base. This purple coloring he believed to be a remnant inherited from an earlier purple-flowered form. _Hibiscus trionum_, which is sulphur-yellow with a blackish eye, has perhaps been derived from a red-flowered ancestor, for the three other species of the genus are rose or flesh colored. White flowers, in the opinion of the writer, are due to retrogression, and are derived from yellow, red, or blue, and in some instances from the primitive green, as in the involucre of _Cornus_. As a whole they present no advance in specialization over yellow flowers, and are often smaller and less conspicuous. When the petals of blossoms containing yellow, red, or blue pigments are placed in concentrated alcohol they turn to white. To produce these pigments is evidently more or less a tax upon the energies of the plant, which, whenever possible, is avoided. They are not present in the embryonic buds, and may not develop until they are well advanced in size. In _Gentiana crinita_ the yellowish-white bud is nearly an inch long before the purple coloring appears, and the corolla always remains white at base. A stimulus to the growth of the plant makes itself apparent in the increased brilliancy of the flowers, as when they are exposed to clear sunlight or are treated with nitrate of soda, and may also be observed in the flushing of tulips, by which they lose their variegated colors when treated with strong manure. On the other hand, a check in nutrition and growth will cause a diminution of the perianth in size, accompanied by retrogression in color. When double red poppies are transplanted the whole plant is dwarfed, while the flowers are much smaller and pure white. This view of the origin of white flowers explains why they are the commonest in Nature, accounts for their being most numerous in families in which yellow flowers are likewise numerous, and why they are most true to name under cultivation. Many white flowers also exhibit other evidences of degeneration in their structure. Numerous species of _Cruciferæ_ and _Caryophyllaceæ_ have small white flowers, which regularly fertilize themselves; and in _Lepidium_, _Stellaria_, and _Sagina_ the petals are sometimes present and in other instances are wanting. White flowers often develop red or blue coloration. It is interesting to note that the red and white varieties of the hyacinth were derived from the wild blue form earlier than the yellow. Darwin gives an instance of a white and red rose produced on the same root, also of white and pink flowers on a single plant of _Antirrhinum majus_. _Cratægus oxyacantha_, a dark pink hawthorn, has been known to throw out a tuft of pure white blossoms. Every stage of the transition from white to red is placed before us by the rose family. The thorns are white, rarely tinged with rose; in the pear and apple the flowers are white, regularly shaded with red; and one of the _Spiræas_ is rose, rarely white, while in the roses proper the six species are rose-colored, but the prairie rose changes to white. Under cultivation the wild geranium has been seen to produce upon the same plant both white and blue flowers. Good examples of the transition from white to blue and from blue to white may be met with in the _Ranunculaceæ_ and _Leguminosæ_. _Delphinium tricorne_ is bright blue, sometimes white, _Viola canadensis_ has the petals white inside but the upper ones tinged with violet beneath, _Astragalus_ has a part of the species white and a part purple, while it is common to find blue and white varieties of _Hepatica_ growing on the same grassy bank. White flowers pass more readily into red, blue, or yellow than any one of these colors can be converted into any other, since it is easier to develop a new pigment than to transform one already existing. This is confirmed by the experience of florists, who always seek to obtain a white variety from which to develop the desired hue. Red flowers are much rarer than blue, and both are seldom common in the same family. For instance, in the pink family red and white blossoms prevail, and there are no blue shades. The pinks are crimson and scarlet, often with elegant markings and a strong aromatic odor. The honey is deeply concealed, and they are visited almost exclusively by butterflies and millers. Twenty-eight species of diurnal _Lepidoptera_ have been collected upon a single variety of _Saponaria_. Of the eighty species of _Rosaceæ_, thirteen are red and two purple, but the forty-four white flowers are very generally tinged or tipped with red. The two purplish-flowered species, _Geum rivale_ and _Potentilla palustris_, belong to genera in which yellow predominates, and this primitive color is still evident in both their calyx and corolla. There are no blue or violet flowers. This family exhibits a marked tendency both in stem, leaf, bud, flower, and fruit to develop reddish coloration, a tendency which is probably due to the chemical constitution of the sap. There are no flowers in this family adapted to _Lepidoptera_, but they are visited by a mixed company of flies, beetles, and _Hymenoptera_. The smaller and less specialized _Rosaceæ_ are yellow and white and are visited by a variety of short-lipped insects. With the increase of the flower in size and conspicuousness the number of insect visitors greatly increases, and the enlargement of the flower is attended by red coloration. Owing to the chemical constitution of the nutritive fluid, probably to its acidity (for when the petals of a rose are treated with ammonia they become blue), there has been no opportunity for the development of blue coloration by insects. With the enlargement of the perianth and the increased flow of sap, red tints have tended to appear by process of oxidation. The correlation of red coloring with an increased flow of sap is well illustrated by the galls of the wild-rose tree, which are often "as rosy as the rosiest apple." An abnormal flow of sap is caused to the part stung by the insect, and red coloration is due to the action of light, for it is of no service to the plant. Again, when the flowers of _Cratægus coccinea_ are stung by the gall-fly the different organs all become bright red, and the change in coloring is accompanied by an increase in size. In some instances red colors, according to Darwin, indicate greater vigor on the part of the plant, and I have also observed that the dwarfing of red flowers under cultivation may cause them to revert to white. It was long, indeed, believed that the same species could not produce yellow, red, and blue flowers. But this doctrine, to use the words of Dr. Lindley, "must now be laid up in the limbo of pleasant dreams." This supposed law is contradicted by the hyacinth, pansy, _Delphinium cardinale_, and many other plants. Though red and blue coloring never occurs among the roses, a hyacinth has been seen to produce a perfectly pink and a perfectly blue blossom on the same truss, and the _Borraginaceæ_ afford examples of flowers turning from red to blue in even a short space of time. Blue is the highest color of the floral world, and is preferred by bees. Blue flowers are, as a rule, highly specialized both in form and color, and often possess marvelous mechanisms which aid in disseminating the pollen. This coloring is very common in the mint and pulse families, and in this district there are in the former forty-nine and in the latter sixty-one species of blue flowers. Their structure is such that few insects besides the long-tongued bees can gain access to the honey, and in some instances a single species of flower is visited by a single kind of bee, as one of the larkspurs by one of the bumblebees. While this high specialization of the flower may insure intercrossing, it is yet open to many objections, such as scarcity of proper guests, mechanical imperfections, perforation of the flowers by bees, and development of the perianth at the expense of the essential organs. It is noteworthy that when genera occur containing three or more species they are seldom all blue or purple; one species at least, and frequently more than one, is yellow, white, or red. In _Trifolium_, _T. pratense_ is rose-purple, _T. repens_ white, and _T. agrarium_ yellow. In the genus _Astragalus_ a part of the species are violet or blue and a part white, and the same is true of _Lespedeza_ and _Vicia_; in _Lathyrus_ three species are blue-purple, one yellow, and one yellowish white. It is probably more advantageous in these genera for a part of the species to be of one color and a part of another than for all to be blue. When species are closely allied bees tend to visit them indiscriminately, as has been observed to be true of the buttercups, _Spiræas_, and golden-rods. During an afternoon the writer carefully collected the insect visitors to _Solidago bicolor_, our only cream-colored golden-rod. Both the number of species and of individuals taken was much larger than upon the yellow-flowered and more abundant varieties of this genus growing near by. There could be no doubt that the whitish coloration was beneficial in enabling insects to distinguish it more readily. Many purplish flowers are regular, often showing indications of degeneration, are devoid of honey, and are self-fertilized or adapted to _Diptera_, or, as in _Hepatica_, which is visited by bees for the pollen, open to a wide circle of visitors. In the sea purslane (_Sesuvium maritimum_), a prostrate maritime herb, there are no petals, but the five-parted calyx is purplish inside. The genus _Ammannia_ of the _Lythraceæ_ has the petals small, purplish, and in one species they are wanting; the axillary flowers of _Bracenia purpurea_ are small and dull purple; in the common papaw the lurid purple flowers are large and adapted to _Diptera_, as are probably the lurid purple flowers of _Calycanthus_. Blue flowers may revert to red, white, or yellow. The fringed _Polygala_ of Britain is usually bright blue, but often reverts to pink and white; there is a pure white variety of the blue-eyed grass; _Mertensia virginica_ is purple-blue, rarely white; the larkspur is bright blue, sometimes white, and a white variety of the purple _Trillium_ frequently occurs; there is, indeed, no improbability of a white-flowered form of every species being discovered. _Viola calcarata_ is normally blue, but sometimes changes to the ancestral yellow. The possession of a strong scent may, however, in many instances more than compensate for the absence of color. This is well illustrated in _Lepidium sativum_. The flowers are small and inconspicuous and in rainy weather do not fully open, yet, as it is odoriferous, Müller found it more abundantly visited by insects than any other crucifer. It is their strong odor, rather than their color, that renders so many umbellifers so attractive to a great variety of insects. Nocturnal flowers, which are visited by moths, are usually white and sweet-scented, though the evening primrose is yellow and _Saponaria officinalis_ is rose-colored. Kohler and Schübeler have shown that a larger proportion of white flowers are fragrant than of any other color. Of 1,193 white flowers examined by them, 187 were odoriferous; of 951 yellow, 75; of 923 red, 85; of 594 blue, 31. But neither color nor odor will long alone serve to insure the visits of insects. The common elderberry exhibits the disadvantages which may attend the want of honey when there is but a limited supply of pollen. There are great masses of odoriferous flowers which convert the shrub into a huge bouquet, but it blooms at midsummer, when it must contend with many nectar-yielding plants. As a result, it is almost wholly deserted by insects. Only four species of flies have been taken upon it, and repeatedly the blossoms were examined without discovering a single visitor, and yet upon the jewel-weed and the red-osier cornel, a few yards away, scores were at work. * * * * * Among the more recent applications of electricity is one for the desiccation of wood, by the Nadon Bretonneau method, by which wood is made as fit for use for certain exact processes in as many months as it has formerly taken years. It is also proposed by Mr. Shaw, an English mining engineer, to substitute water and steam for gunpowder in mine blasts, a cartridge of water being placed instead of the powder cartridge, and vaporized by passing the electrical current through it. SKETCH OF OSCAR SCHMIDT. Oscar Schmidt was characterized by Ludwig von Graff, his successor at Grätz, as a real naturalist who, keeping up with the advances of science and philosophy all his life, as a zoölogist spanned the whole domain of that science, giving equal interest to every part and branch of it. The animal as a whole, as a living being in the series of organisms, was the object of his concern, and all the parts of the animal and all the processes that go on within it were alike interesting and important to him; and the ultimate purpose of his study of that object was to gain from the facts disclosed a philosophic view of Nature. EDUARD OSCAR SCHMIDT was born at Torgau, Prussia, February 24, 1823, the son of a military chaplain who was descended from an old family of clergymen--"a man of fine Saxon culture, with no very great taste for theology, and open-minded to a ripe old age," and who died in 1875. His mother was of French and German (Hamburg) descent, and counted the great Aristotelian Petrus Ramus among her ancestors. The father was a gentle instructor to the son; and the latter, attending in the intervals of study to duties of the household and the farm and making good use of his opportunities for relaxation, enjoyed a young life that was invigorating to mind and body. He thus acquired tastes that led him frequently in his later life to leave the city and his study and go into the country to build and plant, whereby he endeared himself to the Badenese farmers. On rainy days and winter evenings, as he gleefully told of himself in 1858, the boy of eleven or twelve years of age entertained himself and had his fancy stimulated by reading Campe's old accounts of his travels. He thus became interested in geography, and acquired a thirst for travel that was never quenched. Having finished his elementary schooling at Weissenfels, on the Saale, where his grandfather had served as superintendent, he went in 1836 to the celebrated Royal School at Pforta, of which his father was an alumnus, and whither he himself took his son thirty years later. He was much impressed by the teaching of Koberstein, the historian of literature, who unlocked for him the world of Goethe and of romance; and he went out from Pforta into life with a full conviction that the soundness of our culture depends upon its humanistic foundation. He went to Halle in the fall of 1842 to fulfill his military obligations and study mathematics and natural science, and became interested in other branches. At the Berlin Hochschule, whither he went next, he further broadened the scope of his culture, pursued philosophical studies, and finally settled upon the organic sciences. His interest was gradually diverted from mathematics, and he took up zoölogy with enthusiasm. Johann Müller--whose portrait, his son Erich Schmidt says, in the memorial address from which we draw most of the facts of his life, always adorned his room--permitted him, in 1845, after a summer term in comparative anatomy at Heligoland, to take part in a research upon sea animals, and impressed a stamp on the young investigator's view of Nature that lasted till the Darwinian revolution. Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg interested him in the investigation of the minute life of the infusoria, and, besides being his teacher, had a fatherly affection for him. In 1846 Schmidt obtained a promotion to Doctor of Philosophy at Halle, the subject of his still unprinted dissertation being the sacred _Scarabæus_. He passed the higher teachers' examination in Berlin, and thereby avoided a year of probation at a realgymnasium. In August, 1847, he habilitated himself at Jena. He presented, on the occasion, a paper entitled Morphological Fragments, in which, while the name of Oken was mentioned appreciatively in the introduction, the gap between his philosophy and the current zoölogy was insisted upon. He became Professor Extraordinary of Natural History in this university in 1849, and Director of the Grand Ducal Zoölogical Museum in 1854. While at Jena he published the Handbook of Comparative Anatomy (1849), the Hand Atlas of Comparative Anatomy (1852), and a historical study on the Development of Comparative Anatomy (1855). Some results of a journey to the North in the course of his studies of the _Turbellaria_ were embodied in a lecture on the Faroe Islands (1848), and Pictures from the North, collected during a Journey to the North Cape (1854), a versatile work, in which his sharp powers of observation were well illustrated. A work of somewhat different character was a lecture on Goethe's Relation to the Organic Natural Sciences, which was delivered in the Berlin Singakademie and was printed in 1853. Having occupied the professorship at Jena for seven years on a salary never exceeding one hundred thalers, and after declining an invitation to Prague, Schmidt in 1855 accepted the appointment of Professor of Zoölogy in the University of Cracow. The conditions at this institution were quite different from those which had surrounded him at Jena. He received more liberal allowances than had been granted him there; but political affairs were disturbed, and he withdrew in 1857 to become Professor of Zoölogy and Comparative Anatomy, and eventually rector, at Grätz. Here he spent the fifteen most enjoyable and most fruitful years of his life, of which his son, Erich Schmidt, has given, in his memorial address, a most pleasant picture. "In the magnificent scenery," he says, "among which he often wandered with his growing children, with warm-hearted men around him, sure of the increasing affection and capacity of his students, he reached his culmination as a naturalist and as a man. He was active in every direction. The university was in a very promising period of its career. A medical faculty was required, and that magnified his function. He also represented his department in the Johanneum, and presided over the museum. He went every year to Dalmatia while he was composing his monograph on the sponges, and made experiments in their artificial cultivation, being given one year a small war steamer at his disposal. These journeys were doubly enjoyed when Franz Unger went with him to Lesina or to the Ionian Islands. He and the great botanist had a close community of interests, and it was an inestimable privilege, during the great scientific crisis, to stand shoulder to shoulder with an older man, who to power of following philosophical intricacies united the habit of the most exact research with finely trained effort and suggestive intuition. Together the two devoted themselves to the study of Darwinism, at first opposed to it, as is shown by one of Schmidt's printed essays, but soon becoming impressed with the conviction that all scientific progress was connected with that revolution, and finally Schmidt gave all his energy to the advancement of it. As Rector Magnificus--the first Protestant to wear the golden chain at an Austrian university--he declared himself, in his inaugural address, for Darwinism with a resoluteness peculiar to him, and neither the silly demonstrations of the theological students nor the wrath of Cardinal Rauscher could intimidate him from the vindication of free investigation.... The rectoral year 1865-'66 was also the year of the Austro-Prussian War, and he now proved that the rashly progressive man to whom the whole clash of opinions was a bath of steel also possessed a considerable measure of self-control. He bore himself correctly in every sense in his difficult position, and, without turning his back upon his native Prussia, he so completely devoted himself to the care of the wounded as to receive a note of thanks from the General Archduke Albrecht. Having been chosen a deputy to the Landtag, his voice was always heard in favor of the Liberal side. He served indefatigably in the communal council and the school board. The Protestant communes depended upon him as one of their most effective champions, even to the end of the partisan contest. Besides all this many-sided scientific and public-spirited activity, Schmidt had time to describe the lower animals for Brehm's _Thierleben_, and to write a number of popular treatises. A lively social disposition bound him to numerous colleagues, and on the whole he felt so much at home in Grätz, especially after he had a new institute and a share in the direction of a zoölogical station at Trieste in prospect, that he had no thought of a change. He declined invitations to Marburg and Dorpat. He was always favored by the Government, and kept the marks of its consideration faithfully in memory." Ludwig von Graff describes three plainly marked periods in Schmidt's scientific career. The first, the beginning of which coincided with his entrance into his scientific professorship, was characterized by his labors on the _Turbellaria_, from which he was only occasionally diverted during his residence at Jena and Cracow. "The observations on infusoria, radiates, and tapeworms, the structure of the annelids and the development of the mollusks, the descriptions of new amphibia, and the important discovery of the crustacean nature of the peltogasters, were, we might say, only rests in the uninterrupted course of the _Turbellaria_ studies; and that Schmidt was constantly returning to them was not merely because particular interest had been devoted to them in Germany at that time only by M. Schultze and R. Leuckart, for other animal groups had fared no better among the then small number of scientifically working zoölogists, but Schmidt had won his earliest scientific fame with his little book on the fresh-water _Rhabdocoelas_ (1848), and had by means of it entered the circle of recognized investigators. He gave in this book the first connected presentation of the whole organization of a group of animals, the diversity and great abundance of which in fresh water were hardly suspected, and the anatomy of which consisted of few and imperfectly understood isolated data; described new systems of organs in them, and based an improved classification on their remarkably complicated and variously graded structure, with new families, genera, and species. The little book was therefore received with much interest. A journey to the Faroe Islands in 1848, and his first excursion to Lesina in 1852, followed in 1856 by a journey from Cracow to Nice and Naples, enabled him to increase the number of new species, and permitted an insight into the great diversity of forms, without, however, giving him time for accurate anatomical investigations, for the nature of the objects promised a considerable advance in this direction only at the cost of tenacious patience and untiring industry. His subsequent labors on the _Rhabdocoelas_ of the vicinity of Cracow, the _Dendrocoelas_ of the vicinity of Grätz, and his researches on the _Turbellaria_ of Corfu and Cephalonia, which (in 1861) closed this period of his career as worthily as it had begun, proved that Schmidt possessed both these requirements. These labors, if he had accomplished no more, would have been sufficient to give him an honorable position in science for all time. "The second period begins in Grätz. Some contributions to the knowledge of the prehistoric vertebrate fauna of Steiermarck resulted from Schmidt's keen observations of Nature during an excursion in the Alps. But the Adriatic, so near, enticed him into new paths, and offered an inexhaustible field for work in the sponges. Aside from his contributions to the theory of the _Bathybius_ and to the systematics of the _Gephyrea_, the sea sponges constituted the object of his studies during the whole period of his residence in Grätz, and were the occasion of yearly journeys to the Adriatic coasts. The results reached by Schmidt in this field placed him in the foremost rank of contemporary investigators, while his occupation with the sponges marked the completion of a revolution in his view of Nature by converting him to Darwinism. After his work the characteristic fluid form of the sponges became a classic subject in the study of the transmutation theory. "At the time of the appearance of Schmidt's first work on the sponges of the Adriatic (in 1862), just enough of their anatomy and physiology had been made known through individual labors, especially those of Lieberkühn, to prove their animal nature; and then, also, the sponges first found a place in the fifth edition of Schmidt's Handbook of Comparative Anatomy. But any one who undertook either in the Adriatic or the Mediterranean to make his way through the immense wealth of the forms would have found himself without help of any kind. It was therefore Schmidt's purpose to lay the basis, through exact description and definition of the forms, for continued investigation through which the study might be further advanced. He carried out this purpose, recognizing in the skeleton parts what survived amid the changes, clearly defining the species and genera, nineteen of which were new, and brilliantly demonstrating his talent in systematization. While in the first supplement, in 1864, which brought up the histology of the sponges, he still acknowledged himself an adherent of the old school, he expressed the hope in the second supplement that science might some time come upon the track of the genealogical relations of species; and, in the memorable rector's address of November 15, 1865, he openly signalized his passage to the new theory, and proclaimed it, with all the youthful enthusiasm and carelessness as to consequences characteristic of his nature, as the gospel of the research of the future. "The idea of utilizing the great reproductiveness of the sponges for artificial cultivation was suggested to Schmidt during his studies of the Dalmatian fauna, and his experiments in this direction made his name well known in the Austrian coast land and far beyond. After the publication of an article on the subject in the _Wiener Zeitung_ he was requested, by the Imperial-Royal Ministry of Trade and National Economy, to make a special presentation of his views respecting the possibility and methods of cultivating sponges artificially in Dalmatia. He first asked for means for experimenting, as furnishing the prime and most essential method of determining where and how a sponge culture could be instituted with the best prospect of success. The request was not granted, but Schmidt was requested to furnish data respecting the provisions and measures within reach which might be employed with advantage till further information could be obtained concerning the adaptability of sponges to propagation from such local experiments as might be carried on through the industrial and commercial chambers of Dalmatia. The Notes on Sponges in the Adriatic Sea and an article of similar import in the _Triester Zeitung_ of March 12, 1862, were the answer to this request, and they were followed by Schmidt's having placed at his disposal, by the exchanges of Trieste, in the next season, money and the control of the war steamer Hentzis for use in scientific and practical investigations on the Dalmatian coast. With the assistance of his brother, Eugen, he carried his experiments to a successful issue at Sebenico, Zlarin Valle Socolizza on Lesina, Curzola, Lagosta, Meleda, and Ragusa, but especially in the more favored stations of Zlarin and Lesina, and demonstrated the possibility of artificial propagation. In order to test the practical value of the experiments, propagating stations were established on the island of Lesina and visited by Schmidt every spring. The results of the experiments were presented in a report to the Imperial-Royal Ministry of Commerce and National Economy, in which the possibility of artificial propagation was emphatically affirmed." Unfortunately, the Dalmatines have not been quick enough to take advantage of the opportunity thus offered to them to establish a new industry on their not very busy coast. Bucchich continued Schmidt's experiments till 1872, but no capitalists have been found to establish the cultivation of sponges on an extensive and permanent scale. Another enterprise, however--the Zoölogical Station at Trieste, to which Schmidt for a time devoted all his energy--has had a more fortunate realization. The plan of it was developed by Carl Vogt, but it would never have been erected if Schmidt's practical sense had not adapted the plan to the actual needs of the case and the financial conditions imposed by the state, and if he had not given the weight of his personality to the accomplishment of it. The erection of a German Empire at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War was an occasion of proud and exultant joy to Schmidt; and when, in the spring of 1872, he was elected, at the instance of his friend Haeckel, a professor in the newly instituted university at Strasburg, he deemed it a patriotic duty to accept. With his removal to Strasburg, what both Erich Schmidt and Professor von Graff call the third period of Schmidt's scientific career began. It was a period of undisturbed ease in his home life, and was devoted chiefly to the continuation of the studies of the sponges, with a few special researches, the results of which appeared in books, on the theory of descent, fossil animals, on Hartman's theories, and on social democracy. His systematic and anatomical labors on the sponges--the provisional conclusions of which, in 1870, constituted the _Grundzüge einer Spongienfauna des Atlantischen Gebietes_ (Outlines of a Sponge Fauna of the Atlantic Region)--were carried on, Professor von Graff says, from the point of view of the development theory. Besides several smaller contributions to the building up of the theory of descent, the most important of all his works of this time is his book on the Theory of Descent and Darwinism (Appletons' International Scientific Series)--"one of the best presentations of all the questions pertaining to that subject, and distinguished from other similar works both by the philosophical spirit with which the whole discussion is carried on, and by the even consideration it gives to all the various fundamental points of the principle of descent. The prominent features of Schmidt's presentation appear most especially in the final chapter, the subject of which is the Application of the Theory of Descent to Man, which he had also previously discussed in a public address. Shortly after this he reduced to absurdity, in a very forcible attack on Hartman's Philosophy of the Unconscious, the idea of the Social Democrats that they could use Darwinism to the advantage of their Utopia, and treated the subject of the Mammalia in their Relation to Primeval Times (Appletons' International Scientific Series) most vigorously from the point of view of the development theory." He also found time for special researches on the Structure and Development of Loxosema, the Eyes of Arthropods, and, still keeping up his studies of the sponges, closed his more than twenty years' labors on this group with his Sponges of the Gulf of Mexico, and his last scientific work--Derivation of New Species through the Decay and Atrophy of Older Characteristics. The preface to the former work, Professor von Graff says, shows plainly how Schmidt, in contrast to so many fellow-laborers in the field of the theory of descent, was always circumspect in a high degree, and never suffered himself to be carried so far in his zeal as to leave the ground of facts. Although a champion of monophyletic derivation, he did not overlook the facts that might be brought to bear in favor of a polyphiletic origin. During the later years of his life Schmidt visited Heligoland, and enjoyed the sea air, which seemed to have become necessary to him, during two winters at Dohrn's Institute at Naples, in southern France, and at Grado, and attended the meetings of naturalists at Leipsic, Wiesbaden, Salzburg, Baden-Baden, Munich, Cassel, and Freiburg, where he was a welcome guest and a prominent speaker. In September, 1885, as president of the Zoölogical Section he entertained his fellow-specialists at his house. A slight stroke of apoplexy, which he suffered in the summer of 1882, passed away without seeming to leave any trace. He spent the Easter season of 1885 with his son's family in Vienna and with Graff in Grätz. He intended to speak on Easter of 1886 in Weimar and to visit Jena, "whither he expected to return in his sixty-fifth year so as to attach a good end to a good beginning." But on the morning of January 9, 1886, after he had spent the previous evening in pleasant social intercourse, there came another stroke. He never recovered consciousness, but died on January 16th. Professor von Graff describes Schmidt's method of teaching as one encouraging the students to pursue their own ways of thinking. He did not expect formal theses from them, but, having indicated the theme, left them to work it out according to their own logical processes, and as often let them choose their own subjects. Having found a pupil's bent, he sought to turn him into a corresponding course, "and never tried to make a poor naturalist out of one who might become a good doctor or teacher." In his lectures he was earnest and enthusiastic, not as good a speaker as writer, and sometimes betraying his trouble to find the right word; "but he knew how to win the love of his pupils for his subject, and, while trying to make the comprehension of the matter not too difficult, to keep interest alive by occasional glances at the theoretical significance of the facts. It was very far from his purpose to make pastime for his hearers, and, when he was polemical, every one had to be made sensible of the purely technical bearing." Professor Schmidt's literary work covered a field of extraordinary breadth. Besides numerous works and text-books in systematic and anatomical zoölogy and life histories, he published popular lectures and essays in many different periodicals, recensions, reviews of books, translations, and even political articles. It would be impossible to give a complete bibliography of his works, because he left no notes respecting them. A list of his publications in zoölogy, by Professor von Graff, includes ninety-nine titles. Correspondence. SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE BIBLE. _Editor Popular Science Monthly_: SIR: I have read with great interest an article in the July number of your Monthly entitled Scientific Method and its Application to the Bible. So far as I am able to understand the writer's views, I must certainly decline to accept some of his conclusions. The vital teaching of his paper appears to me to be this: it is proper to apply scientific methods to the study of the Bible so far as to inquire into its structure, the date of its composition, its composite authorship and the sources from which it was compiled, and the names of its authors; but certain truths are distinctly taught in it of a supernatural character which must be accepted because they are a revelation of God's will, and not because they are found to be true by intellectual apprehension and logical reasoning. Indeed, to think of understanding them by intellectual processes is "unscientific beyond hope of pardon." It is conceded that "the stifling of thought and of investigation into what might lead men away from the truth and the faith once delivered to the saints" was instrumental in causing the barrenness in scientific work for twelve hundred years of the middle ages, between Hipparchus and Copernicus, and that "the same causes are more or less at work at all times to hinder the growth of science and the extension of scientific method." He still, however, insists that there is limitation to human inquiry and ecclesiastical bounds beyond which thought must not go. There are still revelations of truths which the intellect can not perceive, and which can only be understood by "an exercise of faith." It is no longer the Mosaic line which scientists are forbidden to cross, but the "spiritual verities" must not be questioned. There are some revelations which, in the language of Huxley, "they are to hold for the certainest of truths, to be doubted only at the peril of their salvation." Was it not Martin Luther who called Copernicus a "fool" for trying "to reverse the entire science of astronomy" in the face of revealed truths? "To accept the truth as revealed by God and to acquiesce in it is the part of a good mind," said Melanchthon in condemning Copernicus. "Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?" said Calvin. Verily, his unpardonable sin was "investigating the truths which are distinctly taught in the Bible," which required an "exercise of faith" and were not to be "apprehended intellectually." The question seems a reasonable one to ask, To what authority shall we look for knowledge and interpretation of these spiritual truths which are not accessible by scientific study? How shall we know that they are truths at all? I am aware that here the testimony of Christian conscientiousness is sometimes held to be the court of last resort, which I interpret to mean that if one intuitively reaches the conclusion that something is true it is true, the most positive evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Certainly, no other fact is better established in all human history than the truth of witchcraft, if we admit the potency of this authority. If we reject this, must we not then fall back upon ecclesiastical infallibility as the final interpreter of truth? And this the essayist, in his paper, declines to argue. Now, can there be any such thing as scientific investigation within such prescribed limitations? Or scientific study of the Bible itself which excludes from its province the so-called spiritual revelations which it contains? One might naturally think that the primary purpose of all the critical study of the books, authors, and structure of the Bible was to learn just what these distinct truths it teaches are. But what bearing can this study have upon the question, being but an intellectual process with which the essential truths are disconnected, which only come by revelation? Higher criticism can not hold permanently such an untenable position. It must either go backward to an infallible book, or an infallible interpretation of it by authority, or it must go forward to the consideration of the Bible as a collection of books of ancient literature, to be examined without restrictions. The truths which it contains are to be ascertained by "apprehending intellectually" and "reasoning logically," in the same manner as with other books written by religious leaders in ancient times. Any halting between these two positions is only for temporary rest. No permanent foothold can ever be gained on such a foundation of quicksand. An impassable dead line in biblical study is indicative of the theological and not the scientific method. LEWIS DAYTON BURDICK. MCDONOUGH, N. Y. A CORRECTION. _Editor Popular Science Monthly_: SIR: A correspondent, Mr. C. Wood Davis, of Peotone, Kansas, appears to think it his duty to prove that we can not produce wheat enough in this country to meet our own future demands, and apparently regards it as a personal matter when any one contests this position. He also thinks he has found a small error in long division in the last article which you printed from me on this question which I can not find, but which if found and corrected would have no influence on the general argument. He also rebukes me in a most earnest manner for the alleged misuse of the chemical term "phosphate of potash," which crept into my article in connection with the right use of the term "phosphate of lime," when I referred to the mineral phosphates of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Florida. Technically he is apparently right. There is no permanent form or no natural mineral form of phosphate of potash which can be removed from place to place. Yet my article was revised by an experienced geologist, thoroughly familiar with the chemistry of the soil, before I sent it to you, and he failed to correct this technical error. My own knowledge of chemistry is very limited. It might be inferred, as my irascible correspondent points out, from the manner in which I have called attention to the deposits of mineral phosphates in Kentucky and Tennessee, that I thought these deposits would yield phosphates of lime and phosphates of potash each in a separate movable form, which could not be a fact. Yet my critic will doubtless admit that the soils of many parts of this country are stocked with potash sufficient for a very long period. Many years ago, when I began the study of the cotton plant and its growth, under the leadership of the late Prof. William B. Rogers, I made reference to the existence of the vast supplies of phosphate of lime and potash, which are necessary to the growth of the cotton plant, in the Southern soils. I derived my conception of their origin in the lowlands and plateaus in marine formations from Professor Rogers, and also from the works of Professor Shaler. One may also impute the large amount of potash that is found in the valleys and mountain lands to the disintegration of the gneiss and other rocks of the Appalachian chain, which have never been washed out by glacial action or by glacial streams. If any one has been misled by this slight misuse of chemical terms it may be well to state that phosphate of potash does not exist, and I am told that it can not exist, in a separate removable form. We have not as yet discovered any large deposit or mine like that of Stassfurt, in Prussia, yielding potash in a commercial form in which it can be widely distributed. We import annually thousands of tons of potash from Stassfurt. This deposit was discovered, as I am informed, by accident, and it may be hoped that a similar accident may occur in this country. These mines were originally opened for the production of salt. In boring for salt the product of a stratum above or below the salt, I know not which, was brought up, which was thrown aside as worthless until an inquisitive visiting chemist examined it and thus discovered this great source of potash. We possess enormous beds of salt, of soda, and of alkalies, scattered throughout the area of this country, in connection with which it may be hoped that we may hereafter discover a deposit of mineral potash, or of the mineral from which potash may be derived cheaply and in large quantities. These two exceptions which have been taken to my article have no real connection with the substance of the argument, which stands independently either of the undiscoverable error in long division or of the technical fault in the use of the term "phosphate of potash." Yours very truly, EDWARD ATKINSON. BOSTON, _June 7, 1899_. Editor's Table. _AN OLD-FASHIONED MORAL._ Voltaire's Candide is not a book that can be recommended for general reading; yet it contains perhaps as good a moral as could easily be found in a wide range of books aiming more distinctly at edification. The hero, after many vicissitudes and copious experience of the deceitfulness of riches and the miseries of an ill-regulated life, made the blessed discovery that peace and health and independence were to be obtained by the industrious cultivation of a small piece of ground. He had a friend called Martin who associated himself with him in his agricultural labors, but who had rather a fine talent for discussing abstract questions. Candide would listen to him for a while, but never allowed him to get very far without breaking in with the observation, "Mais surtout il faut cultiver notre jardin" ("But above everything else we must cultivate our garden"). Here was safety, here was balm for painful recollections, here was about the best that the world had it in its power to give; and Candide, chastised by misfortune, wanted to stick to that. This is an age of copious and unending discussion of social and political problems. Discussion is well in its way; but perhaps the problems would not be so acute if there was less discussion and more cultivating of gardens. It may indeed be said, with no small degree of plausibility, that the greed to be rich, the unwillingness, so to speak, to cultivate a garden which only promises a moderate reward, is at the bottom of a large part of our troubles. Wisdom cries aloud and tells the world that happiness is not to be found in riches; but the cry is little heeded. The whole lesson of higher education is that happiness springs from within and not from without; but thousands take what they can of the higher education while declining the lesson. Science unlocks a world of beauty and wonder, and offers to the mind a constant succession of interesting subjects of contemplation; but thousands again ask nothing of science except to show them the way to wealth. Precisely similar in a multitude of cases is the demand made of art and literature. It is well-nigh a century since Wordsworth lamented the decay of "plain living and high thinking." Have the succeeding years brought any improvement in this respect? It is much to be feared they have not. Wealth is, if possible, more than ever the ideal of society, and plain living is terribly at a discount. We believe, however, that in the deliberate choice of plain living by an influential portion of society there lies a greater potency of social reform than in all the schemes of socialistic reconstruction. The most hurtful thing in the world to-day is the false glamour of wealth. It is against this evil influence that we want an insurrection, not against capital as such. Weaken the fascination of wealth, and, in the same degree that you do so, you increase the moral responsibility of those who are its possessors. The luxury of the present age has run to a dangerous extreme. Advice in such a matter may seem idle, but the discovery that Candide made is one that the world at large must make some day. True happiness is the natural accompaniment of honest industry and moderate living. Such conditions make high thinking possible, and give a savor to all enjoyments. There have been times when men, to save their souls, would go forth into the wilderness or the desert. Such sacrifices are not needed in the present day; there is a very respectable measure of salvation to be won in cultivating a garden. _THE TROUBLES OF ORTHODOXY._ The thought of the age has now reached a point of development at which it has become almost impossible for any man of trained intellect to say that he receives on authority pure and simple any statement which admits or should admit of direct verification--for example, any statement dealing with matters of a historical or scientific character. This, if we mistake not, is the true secret of the troubles over doctrinal questions which have lately broken out in more than one division of the Christian Church. It is not so much that there has been a revolt against doctrines as such, as that a need is felt by thinking and cultivated men to seek for higher grounds of belief than those hitherto deemed sufficient. This has led to a certain generalization of belief, if we may so call it, which to less cultivated minds looks almost like an abandonment of the most essential doctrines of the Christian faith. Such a view of the matter, however, we hold to be entirely erroneous. The men we are thinking of--and Dr. Briggs and Bishop Potter may be taken as conspicuous examples--have the interests of religion and of their fellow-men at heart. They do not wish to force upon others a mode of looking at religious questions for which they are not prepared; but, for their own part, they find it necessary to restate the articles of their religious faith in terms which do not absolutely conflict with the principles of reason. This rectification of terms is imposed in part by the conditions of thought in the modern world, but to an equal extent at least by what may be called an inward expansion of the doctrines themselves. Who that holds any truth, scientific or other, does not feel impelled to seek for it continually a wider interpretation and application? Not otherwise is it, we hold, with religious doctrines; they have their own law of growth and development, and he who would arrest the process condemns them to atrophy and decay. It is charged against both the scholars we have mentioned that they speak of the Bible as literature, and say that in determining its meaning we must keep in view the same class of considerations which would guide us in dealing with other literary monuments. There is nothing in this which need alarm any thoughtful person. It would be doing less than justice to the Bible to deny that many parts of it are literature of a very high order; and it would be doing less than justice to our own intellects to deny that the conception of the Bible as literature is a great help to its correct interpretation. Religion, in the view of such men as we have mentioned, does not depend upon the meaning given to a text or the acceptance or rejection of any specific statement of fact. There is nothing specially "religious" in believing that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by St. Paul, or that the adventures of Jonah were precisely as described in the book that bears his name. Grant that the organ of religious apprehension is faith, yet each age must settle for itself the question as to what is the proper scope of faith and what of reason. In the present day reason can deal with many things which at one time were thought to be entirely within the domain of faith, and it would be rash to say that the frontier has even yet received its final rectification. If we rightly understand the position of Dr. Briggs and Bishop Potter, they hold that religion is essentially an attitude of mind and heart, a seeing of the invisible, an instinctive recognition of a supreme moral authority, a sense that every human being is called to nothing less than holiness of life. They reverence the Scriptures because in them, as in no other body of writings in the world, the realities of religion are both expressed and implied. They do not demand of the Bible perfect agreement with either scientific or historic truth; they are content if they find in it the spiritual basis of human life, a scheme of thought that links the individual human being with an infinite origin and an infinite destiny. From their standpoint the value of the Bible for the highest moral purposes would in no way be increased if every word in it which touches on scientific or historical questions had the seal of all the academies in the Old World and the New. It is not a difficult thing, nor does it require much wisdom, to harry a man whose independent thinking and moral earnestness have forced him to take a different attitude toward some great question from that which is adopted by the multitude. It is easy to present his views in an invidious light, but a more useful task would be to show that all that is essential and precious in religious belief can exist as well in a philosophical as in a popular form. With such a thesis it may not be quite so easy to "score," but it is a pity when the standards of the reporters' room invade the desk of the literary or theological editor. It is upon such men as we have mentioned, men of competent scholarship and earnest spirit, that the task is laid of purifying and liberating the religious consciousness of the age; and we do not hesitate to say that when, from the vantage height of modern knowledge, they affirm with deep conviction the indestructibleness of the religious sentiment and the everlasting reality of its object, they render a service which, from a religious point of view, can not be overestimated. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. In a stout volume[G] of nearly a thousand pages Mr. _Jackson_, the leader of the Jackson-Harmsworth Polar Expedition of 1894-'97, puts into permanent form the record of three years' observations made in Franz-Josef Land, a region beyond the eightieth parallel of latitude, which was accidentally made known to the world twenty years before by the drift of the Tegethoff, the ill-fated vessel of the Austrian expedition of Payer and Weyprecht. As such it is a substantial contribution to arctic literature, and from it much important detail will be obtained by those seeking further adventure in the quest for the pole, and a mass of material, geographic and otherwise, pertaining to the region which forms the subject of the work before us. The meteorological data, covering as they do a longer continuous period of observation in the extreme North than has heretofore been possible, and fittingly supplementing those recorded by Nansen for an almost equal period, will be specially prized by the scientist, even if the facts of the air are not considered to be the main object of arctic research. It is interesting to note, from the observations on temperature, that the lowest record was only -46° F., the extreme rigor, consequently, being only that of Dakota or Manitoba, and marking nearly fifty degrees above what has been observed a thousand miles farther to the south at Verkhoyansk, in Siberia. Nothing approaching the extreme cold (-72°) noted by Kane and by the Nares British Expedition of 1875-'76 has thus been recorded by Nansen, Peary, or Jackson. [Footnote G: A Thousand Days in the Arctic. By Frederick G. Jackson, Knight, First Class, of the Royal Order of St. Olaf, etc. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1899.] Mr. Jackson's claims to discovery lie mainly in the field of geography; for, while the observations on zoölogy, botany, and geology are by no means meager or lacking in originality, the results obtained have been largely anticipated by other investigators--notably Payer, Leigh Smith, and Nansen. In the domain of geography, however, there is a distinct contribution, and the author has missed no opportunity to add to the catalogue of geographical names by "rounding up," as it were, the numerous points which appeared new to him or were thought worthy of designation. This diligence in applying names, at times to points or places which are wholly insignificant and which could be followed with equal advantage or disadvantage on most of the known coast lines of either Europe or North America, can hardly be said to detract from the value of the discoveries actually made, although their publication, from advance letters received by Mr. Harmsworth's representative in London, has caused hostile comment and bitter controversy, even on the part of British geographers and scientists. Much of Mr. Jackson's work, it was contended, was directed to demolishing the work of Lieutenant Payer in the same region, and toward substituting names for those given, whether with a correct placing or not, by the Austrian commander--in itself a legitimate undertaking, but heralded out, it was claimed, to mask Mr. Jackson's own failure to accomplish the real task of his expedition--the finding of the north pole. Mr. Jackson has certainly very largely remodeled Payer's map of the archipelago, but the new map in no way discredits the attainments of his predecessor, even though showing up many and even glaring inaccuracies in the cartographical details published by him, for allowance must be made for the limitations under which the Austrian commander made his work. The vital points which have to be eliminated from the geography of Payer are: That Franz-Josef Land is a congeries of no very large islands, without continental extent northward, and that much that has been represented to be land is, in fact, water or ice, the appearance of land in the frozen North being frequently suggested by the vast gray and ill-defined ice masses which loom up in fog and mist, both as flat sheets and mountain buttresses. It was the failure to find a northward continental extension to Franz-Josef Land, such as had been thought to possibly exist by Payer, which led Jackson to abandon all effort to advance upon the pole--a condition which appears, at this time, the more surprising seeing that two expeditions, those of Walter Wellmann and the Duke of Abruzzi, with all of Mr. Jackson's facts before them, have elected this same route as the one most calculated to bring about a successful issue, and certainly much can be said in favor of it. While the Franz-Josef Land route may not commend itself as the one best to be followed--and surely the open highway which from time to time appears north of Spitzbergen offers marked advantages for one without a land following--it still has its advantages in the point of high northern departure, and arctic authorities will fail to be impressed by the negative conditions which were obtained from it by the Harmsworth Expedition. Manifestly, Mr. Jackson had prepared himself for one form of journey only--that of following the land, a singularly blind limitation, considered in the light of the little that was positively known of such land extension as the expedition had counted upon, and one that is disagreeably emphasized by the lavish expenditure of money that had been put to the expedition, and the personal confidence that had in some quarters been expressed in its success. Without wishing in any way to disparage or minimize the importance of Mr. Jackson's work, or to underestimate the hardships of any form of arctic exploration, one can not but feel surprised and in a measure disappointed that an expedition designed primarily for an advance upon the pole, which passed the better part of three years beyond the eightieth parallel of latitude, and whose members during this time did not know a single day of sickness--an almost unprecedented performance in arctic methods--should have found itself in a condition unable even to make an effort upon the "open." The recollection of Parry's performance in the frozen sea north of Spitzbergen in 1827, of Markham's advance in 1876, and of Peary's "treck" across the north of Greenland in 1892, emphasizes only more deeply this feeling of disappointment. Mr. Jackson has made a very careful study of Franz-Josef Land, and has brought that region into a condition of knowledge similar to that which the different Peary expeditions have brought to the north of Greenland. His narrative is simple and direct, virtually a transcript of notebook and diary, without embellishment of any kind, and with a statement of facts and conditions such as they appeared almost at the instant of time of their occurrence. While indisputably impressing a truthfulness and reality, it can not be said that this method adds to the readableness of the book, which is overburdened with repetitions, frequently in identical words and sentences, to a useless and, one is tempted to say, most distressing extent. It is to be regretted that an explorer of the marked energy, routine, and persistence which are Mr. Jackson's qualities should have faltered in what by some travelers has been considered the most arduous part of their task--the proper preparation of a report--for surely it can not be conceived that a good purpose was subserved, either in a popular or scientific aspect, in the publication of wholly unimportant matter, over and over repeated, merely because it formed part of an official diary. The work is abundantly illustrated throughout with half-tone reproductions from photographs, taken by Jackson and his companions, that give a vivid reality to the journey which no amount of word-painting, even when so skillfully handled as by the present author, could prove a substitute for. Scientists will be gratified to know that supplemental reports, prepared by specialists in different departments, may be expected before long to fill out the full scientific aspects of the exploration. On one point in connection with Mr. Jackson's discoveries the geographer, not less than the lay public, has the right to break straws with the author--that is, the method of naming the new points of land, water, and ice. Zoölogists and botanists have long been guilty of an absurd levity in the discharge of their obligations as namers of new species, and have burdened the vocabulary of animal and vegetable names with thousands of _personalia_ which in no way called for perpetuation, and many of which were suggested only by way of ridicule or jest. So long, however, as these were dressed in Latin or Greek form and remained merely the possession of the scientific world there was little to complain of, and even the objections of the extreme sentimentalists might have been met by an appeal to the difficulty of obtaining or coining judicious or otherwise appropriate names. The case is different with the naming of places on the earth's surface, which at this day can be done with direct reference to euphony, to a certain appropriateness of dedication or appeal, and the intelligence of the student. A map of the world is intended for everybody, and not for a class of specialists, and its symbols are devised for readers of all classes. Maps of America have particularly suffered from irrelevant and commonplace designations, and only during recent years has the money value of names suggested radical changes, as in the case of many of the seaside resorts of the middle Atlantic coast. But, with all our indifferences and extravagances of even a half century ago--the period of Hog Hollows and Yuba Dams--a no cruder infraction of the logic of nomenclature can be found than in the coining of such names as "Cape Mary Harmsworth," "Cape Cecil Harmsworth," "Alfred Harmsworth Island," "Harold Harmsworth Straits," "Cape William Bruce," "Bruce Island," "Mabel [Bruce] Islands," "Mabel Bruce Fjord," "Albert Armitage Island," "Cape Alice Armitage," "Ceceil Rhodes Straits," "H. M. S. Worcester Glacier," etc. These have not even the advantage of an old-time arctic "ring" about them. Courting popularity by the bestowal of all manner of personal names, irrespective of direct relation to the expedition or to geographical exploration, is hardly commendable, and is only less objectionable than the plan suggested a few years ago by an American would-be arctic explorer to "sell" the names of places to be discovered to the highest bidder--i. e., according to a graded schedule of contributions to the expedition funds. GENERAL NOTICES. _On the South African Frontier_[H] is a narrative of the experiences and observations of the author, Mr. _William Harvey Brown_, partly as naturalist of the United States Government Eclipse-observing Expedition of 1889 to the west coast of Africa, and partly as a resident in various occupations for seven years in Rhodesia. The principal object in composing it was to give American readers a clearer idea of English operations in conquest and colonization on the South African frontier than it is possible to glean from current fragmentary accounts. The author served his apprenticeship at natural history collecting under Prof. L. L. Dyche, of the University of Kansas, and Mr. W. T. Hornady, of the New York Zoölogical Gardens, and was recommended by Mr. Hornady to the Government for the Eclipse Expedition. He sailed first to Freetown, then to St. Paul de Loanda, where he spent a few weeks collecting, establishing his headquarters at Bishop Taylor's American Methodist Self-supporting Mission. Thence, after a short attack of African fever, he proceeded to Cape Town, where he was attacked by the other sort of African fever--"an irresistible longing to penetrate the Dark Continent for purposes of exploration and of observing both man and Nature." He made the journey overland to Mafeting and to the Mashona country, in the region of which he spent seven years as "game-hunter, gold-seeker, landowner, citizen, and soldier," observing and participating in the settlement and early development of the new state of Rhodesia. The larger part of the book is devoted to his adventures and observations, "travel, collecting, hunting, prospecting, farming, scouting, fighting," and seeing pioneer life. Two chapters are devoted to ethnology. The race problems which arise during the stage of transition from barbarism, the agricultural and mineral resources of Rhodesia, and its prospects and possibilities, are discussed. [Footnote H: On the South African Frontier. The Adventures and Observations of an American in Mashonaland and Matabeleland. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 430, with map. Price, $3.] A very handsome book, in what to many are the most graceful and interesting forms of vegetable life, is Mrs. _Parsons's How to Know the Ferns_.[I] The name of the author is new, but the author herself is a familiar friend to all lovers of American field and wild-wood life, for she is none other than Mrs. William Starr Dana, who had already given us How to Know the Wild Flowers and According to Season. In this book she does as she did with regard to the wild flowers--takes her readers to the haunts of the ferns and into their company, introduces us to them, and before she is done makes us well acquainted with them. "It seems strange," she says, "that the abundance of ferns everywhere has not aroused more curiosity as to their names, haunts, and habits." Possibly it is because they are so common that we are not at pains to seek greater intimacy with them. Then, they depend on the beauty of graceful proportion, which is less obvious to careless eyes than that of color. First, Mrs. Parsons discourses of Ferns as a Hobby, and the pleasure we may derive from them; then she tells when and where to find them, defines the terms used in speaking of them, explains their fertilization, development, and fructification, gives a list of notable fern families and descriptions of the American ferns classified into eight groups according to the arrangement of their spores, and completes the work with indexes of Latin and of English names and of technical terms. [Footnote I: How to Know the Ferns. A Guide to the Names, Haunts, and Habits of our Common Ferns. By Prances Theodora Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 215. Price, $1.50.] _The Microscopy of Drinking Water_[J] is intended by Mr. _Whipple_ primarily to serve as a guide to the water analyst and the water-works engineer by describing the methods of microscopic examination, assisting in the identification of the common microscopic organisms found in drinking water, and interpreting the results in the light of environmental studies. A second purpose is to stimulate a greater interest in the study of microscopic aquatic life and general limnology (the lessons of lakes and ponds) from the practical and economic point of view. The work is elementary in character. Principles are stated and illustrated, but the last ten years' accumulations of data are not otherwise attacked. The illustrations have been largely drawn from Massachusetts cases, from which there may be differences elsewhere, but not very great as to microscopic organisms. The latter half of the book is devoted to descriptions of a limited number of organisms, chosen for the most part from those commonest to the water supplies of New England, and those that have best illustrated the more important groups of microscopic animals and plants. Most of the illustrations have been drawn from living specimens or photomicrographs of such, but some are reproduced from other sources. [Footnote J: The Microscopy of Drinking Water. By George Chandler Whipple. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 300, with nineteen plates.] It is evidence of appreciation of Dr. _Wetterstrand's Hypnotism and its Application to Medicine_[K] that, written in Swedish, it has been translated into German and Russian, and now into English. The German work, from which the present translation is made, was enlarged from the original, and embodied the results of additional experience. The author disavows the intention of writing a manual or text-book, and modestly assumes only to have given "unpretentious notes by a physician who, under the pressure of a fatiguing and engrossing practice, has not been able to develop his rich material into a more complete form." The book is characterized by the translator as more practical than theoretical, and as offering the results of conscientious and able observation. Hypnosis is defined by Dr. Wetterstrand as embracing a number of various conditions of the nervous system, which can be produced in different ways. "We recognize phases of the greatest variety, from a slight heaviness in the limbs, the most superficial somnolence enabling the hypnotized subject to hear and perceive the least noise, to the deepest sleep, from which the greatest disturbance can not awake him, and wherein every sensation disappears and permits the most serious surgical operation without pain." The author believes that the majority of people can be brought into any of these conditions, but the methods and degrees of difficulty of the process are various. "Liébeault distinguishes five degrees in hypnotic sleep, Bernheim nine; but Wetterstrand thinks they may all be grouped under three. Suggestive therapeutics is regarded as by no means a panacea, but it succeeds in cases where other methods have failed," and, as Bernheim says, "often it produces miracles." After an outline of the general principles of the subject the author passes on to describe some diseases and morbid conditions in which he has employed hypnotism with the greatest results, culling from his notes, as impartially as possible, both successful attempts and failures. The cases include insomnia, the list of nervous diseases, drug diseases, consumption, rheumatic, heart, and other organic diseases, and functional affections; with the use of suggestive therapeutics in operations, obstetrics, and on some other occasions. Dr. Petersen's medical letters on hypno-suggestion, etc., added to Dr. Wetterstrand's work, are intended to give a succinct idea of the present status of practical psychic therapeutics, as based on the observation of clinical facts. They relate to suggestive treatment in reform work, post-hypnotic responsibility, and music in hospitals. [Footnote K: Hypnotism and its Application to Medicine. By Otto Georg Wetterstrand, M. D. Authorized translation (from the German edition), by Henrik G. Petersen, M. D. Together with Medical Letters on Hypno-Suggestion, etc. By Henrik G. Petersen, M. D. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 166.] The original object of Mr. _Henry Rutgers Marshall's_ essay on _Instinct and Reason_[L] was to present a conception of religion. In attempting to make his argument convincing he found it necessary to deal with questions which did not at first appear to relate to this subject, whereby the study of religion, though still the most important and interesting matter considered, is made to appear subsidiary to the treatment of instinct and reason. Believing that activities so universal in man as those which express his religious life must be significant in relation to his biological development, the author has attempted to outline a theory that will account for their existence and explain their biological import. In order to present this clearly he has made a special study of instinct and the relation of its activities with religious activities in general. This has naturally led to the study of impulse, and thus to a consideration of moral standards. The study of reason, too, has been found appropriate in connection with the consideration of the nature of religion. The genesis of religious customs and beliefs is touched upon only so far as seems necessary for the elucidation of other parts of the treatise. Concerning the relation of religion and morals, the author finds that religion teaches us to listen to the past, and gives enthusiasm to do the work commended by the "voice" of that past; it gives us the basis for the perfection of our moral code, but it does not give us this perfect moral code itself. When reason and the religious instinct are opposed we should, after reverent and full consideration, act in accord with reason, but should be cautious in guiding others that way, for the chances are decidedly that we are wrong, and "the rule of action which will best satisfy conscience, which will produce the closest correspondence between our action as viewed in retrospect and our most permanently efficient impulse series, is one which is based upon the religious instinct, and which involves the presence in mind of the sense of duty." [Footnote L: Instinct and Reason. An Essay concerning the Relation of Instinct to Reason, with some Special Study of the Nature of Religion. By Henry Rutgers Marshall. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 574. Price, $3.50.] Mr. _Arthur Berry_ has undertaken, in his _Short History of Astronomy_,[M] to give an outline of the history of the science from the earliest times in a form intelligible to readers who have no special knowledge of astronomy or mathematics. Some compression having been necessary, it has been found possible to omit a considerable number of details which might receive treatment, and indeed would often require it in a treatise on the science. The author has deliberately abstained from giving any connected account of the astronomy of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Chinese, and other peoples who are usually supposed to have had a share in the early development of star-lore. Accounts of scientific instruments, except in a few simple and important cases, are omitted. But little is said of scientific discoveries that have to be described in technical mathematical language, and of speculative theories that have not been established or refuted. On the other hand, whatever pertains to the real history of astronomy has been given with sufficient fullness to make it plain; the principles which are illustrated by enormous masses of observations that there is no room to record; short biographical sketches of leading astronomers other than living ones; a considerable number of dates, such as those of the births and deaths of astronomers; and even descriptions of such obsolete theories as appear to form an integral part of astronomical progress. Among the illustrations are portraits of a few of the eminent astronomers of the past. [Footnote M: A Short History of Astronomy. By Arthur Berry. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. (The University Series.) Pp. 440. Price, $1.50.] The special articles in the _Bulletin of the Department of Labor_, Nos. 18 and 19, are Wages in the United States and Europe, 1870 to 1898, in the September number, and Mr. Dunham's paper on The Alaskan Gold Fields and the Opportunities they offer for Capital and Labor, and Mutual Relief and Benefit Associations in the Printing Trade, by W. S. Wandly, in the number for November. The Rev. Dr. _Adam Miller_ is a retired minister who has devoted his leisure hours to the study of sunshine, in which he has included all that properly belongs to the sun. He has read the standard works on astronomy, and some, but apparently not all, the later results for comparison, it seems, rather than information, and he has performed some original and ingenious experiments with the sunlight. His views, therefore, as expressed in _The Sun an Electric Light_ (Chicago), are his own. He has come to the conclusion that the material theories of the origin of the sun's light and heat do not account for the facts, and are therefore insufficient if not wrong; postulates a theory that the phenomena are matters of electric action made perceptible to us by refraction through the atmosphere, and makes an unnecessary and inconsequent attack on the theory of the conservation of forces. When Dr. Miller assumes that his views of the insufficiency of present theories and of the electrical nature of the sun's action are new, he shows that he is not fully read up in the current literature on the subject. The insufficiency of present views is confessed, and the discussions of the subject with the various suppositions which he criticises are efforts to find better explanations. The causal identity of electricity, heat, and certain other forces is accepted. But, given that electrical action is the basis of it all, what then? Philosophers know of no way of maintaining electric action except through material processes, and the way they are replenished to keep it up is as hard to find out as would be the way fuel is supplied to keep up a solar fire. A pamphlet entitled _The Story of the Rise of the Oral Method in America_ (of Instructing the Deaf and Dumb) _as told in the Writings of the late Hon. Gardner G. Hubbard_, compiled by Mrs. _M. Gardner Bell_, reveals a seeming indolence in the early instructors of the old method that is hardly creditable to their energy in investigation. When deaf-mute instruction was first projected here, a teacher was sent over to Europe to learn the best methods. Denied access to schools in London and Edinburgh, where articulation systems were taught, he went to Paris, found the Abbé de l'Epée's sign language there and brought it over. This and the finger language held sway in our schools for many years, while the possibility of teaching articulation to the deaf was denied. It required long-persistent effort on the part of a few men who refused to have their deaf children taught these systems and consequently isolated from their fellow-men to secure a recognized place for oral schools. The story of the struggle is told in Mrs. Bell's pamphlet. The widespread ignorance and superstition with which even to-day the practicing physician has to contend are hardly conceivable by an outsider. The conditions under which a doctor knows his patients are just those calculated to bring out the weak spots in their mental organization, and the absurd notions which still have a foothold in many minds are a constant source of wonder to the speculative doctor. These superstitions are so widespread and so frequently dangerous to the whole community, as well as the individual himself, that anything which is calculated to improve matters, however so little, should be welcomed with open arms. _Dr. Therne_, by _H. Rider Haggard_, is aimed at the antivaccinators, and by means of a not uninteresting story points out the serious consequences which a general belief in this absurd crusade brought to an English city. The author labels his story as an attempt to forecast the "almost certain issue of the recent surrender of the English Government leaders to the clamor of the antivaccinationists." The annual number of the _Cumulative Index_ for 1898, constituting the third annual volume, is a book of seven hundred and ninety-two pages, and includes one hundred periodicals. It indexes--by authors, titles, and subjects, including reviews and portraits--what is important in the monthly and part of that in the weekly publications of the year. Special attention is given to portraits, reviews, and necrology. The Index is a very useful publication to writers and students of every sort, recording the articles as they appear month by month in a form that makes the knowledge of them easily accessible to one who seeks it. The numbers succeeding the first number of the volume include, besides their own fresh matter, that which has appeared in two or three previous numbers, saving the necessity of hunting up scattered editions. The annual volume contains all for the year. The Index is edited in the Public Library of Cleveland, Ohio, and is published by the Holman-Taylor Company in the same city. Two papers bearing upon instruction of the deaf, published by the Volta Bureau, Washington, are statistics, by Alexander G. Bell, of the relative use in the United States of the several methods, and a collection of _International Reports of Schools for the Deaf_. The latter paper contains reports from sixteen countries. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Armour Institute of Technology. Year-Book, 1898-'99. Pp. 89. Association of American Anatomists. Report of the Majority of the Committee on Anatomical Nomenclature. Pp. 10. Baillairge, Charles. Biographie. By E. La Selve. With Addenda by Léon Sortie. Pp. 15, and papers.--In French: On Communism. Pp. 45; Report on Engineering Works In Quebec. Pp. 90; Etymological Utility of Greek and Latin. Pp. 48; The Club of Twenty-one in 1879, Biography for Twenty Years. Pp. 12; Life, Evolution, and Materialism. Pp. 37; Antiquity of the Earth and Man. Pp. 23; Bibliography. Pp. xv.--In English: Technical Education of the People In Untechnical Language. Pp. 42; Educational Word Lessons. Pp. 19; How best to Learn or Teach a Language. Pp. 9; Address. P. 1. Baker, Major-General, Royal (Bombay) Engineers. Visions of Antichrist and his Times. St.-Leonards-on-Sea, England. Pp. 28. Binet, Alfred, Beaunis, H., and Ribot, Th. L'Année Psychologique. (The Psychological Year.) Fifth year. Paris, France. Libraire C. Reinwald. Schleicher Frères. Pp. 902. 15 francs. Bulletins, Reports, Transactions, etc. American Microscopical Society: Twenty-first Annual Meeting, Syracuse, N. Y., August 31 and September 1, 1899. Transactions. Pp. 370.--Astronomical Observatory of Harvard University: Vol. XXIII, Part II. Discussion of Observations made with the Meridian Photometer during the Years 1882-'88. By E. C. Pickering and O. C. Wendell. Pp. 100.--Johns Hopkins University: Circulars. July, 1899. Pp. 10. 10 cents.--Michigan Monthly Bulletin of Vital Statistics. April, 1899. Pp. 20.--Michigan Ornithological Club: Bulletin. April, 1899. Pp. 12.--Minnesota: Fourth Annual Report of the Chief Fire Warden. Pp. 148.--New York State Commission in Lunacy: Rules and Suggestions as to Plumbing Work, Drainage, etc. Pp. 93.--United States Department of Labor. July, 1899. Pp. 124.--United States Coast and Geodetic Survey: Notice to Mariners. No. 246. Pp. 14.--University of Tennessee: Record. Announcements for 1899, 1900. Pp. 96. Clayton, The, Air Compressors. Clayton Air-Compressor Works. New York. Pp. 70. Coulter, John M. Plant Relations. A First Book of Botany. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 264. $1.10. Crook, James K. The Mineral Waters of the United States and their Therapeutic Uses. New York and Philadelphia: Lea Brothers & Co. Pp. 588. $3.50. Dalton, Captain Davis. How to Swim. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 133. $1. Gerhard, W. P. Sanitary Engineering of Buildings. Vol. I. New York: W. P. Comstock. Pp. 454. $5.--A Half Century of Sanitation, 1850-'99. Pp. 30. Gildemeister, E., and Hoffmann, Fr. Die Aetherischen Oele. (The Etherial Oils.) Prepared in behalf of the firm of Schimmel & Co. Leipzig and Berlin: Julius Springer. Pp. 919. Gould, the late Benjamin Apthorp. Cordoba Photographs. Photographic Observations of Star Clusters. Lynn, Mass.: the Nichols Press. Pp. 533, with 37 plates. Text in Spanish and English. Iowa Geological Survey. Annual Report. 1898, with accompanying Papers. Samuel Calvin, State Geologist; H. F. Bain, Assistant State Geologist. Pp. 572, with maps. Kellerman, W. A. The Fourth State Catalogue of Ohio Plants. Systematic Check-list of the Pteridophytes and Spermatophytes. Columbus, Ohio. Pp. 65. 20 cents. Leonard, John W. Who's Who in America. A Biographical Dictionary of Living Men and Women in the United States, 1899, 1900. Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Co. Pp. 822. Long Island Hospital. Polhemus Memorial Clinic and Hoagland Laboratory. Forty-first Annual Announcement, 1899. Meunier, Stanislas. La Géologie Expérimentale. (Experimental Geology.) Paris: Félix Alcan. Pp. 311. Reprints. Adler, Cyrus. The International Catalogue of Scientific Literature. Second Conference. Pp. 43.--Chamberlin, T. C. A Systematic Source of Evolution of Provincial Faunas, and the Influence of Great Epochs of Limestone Formation upon the Constitution of the Atmosphere. Pp. 24; The Ulterior Basis of Time Divisions and the Classifications of Geologic History. Pp. 161; Lord Kelvin's Address on the Age of the Earth as an Abode fitted for Life. Pp. 20.--Croke, W. J. Architecture, Painting, and Printing at Subiaco. Pp. 21.--Daly, Reginald A. Three Days in the Caucasus. Pp. 15.--Harkness, H. W. Californian Hypogæous Fungi. Pp. 56, with plates.--Hobbs, W. H. The Diamond Fields of the Great Lakes. Pp. 16.--Lucas, Frederick A. The Fossil Bison of North America. Pp. 12, with plates.--Manson, Marsden. Observations on the Denudation of Vegetation. Pp. 18, with plates.--Mason, Otis T. The Latimer Collection of Antiquities from Puerto Rico, and the Guerde Collection of Antiquities from Pointe à Pitre, Guadeloupe. Pp. 837.--Pammel, Louis H. Anatomical Characters of Seeds of Leguminosæ. Pp. 262, with tables and plates.--Ravenel, Mazyck P. The Resistance of Bacteria to Cold. Pp. 5.--Veeder, M. A. Questions in regard to the Diphtheria Bacillus. Pp. 6.--West, Max. The Public Domain of the United States. Pp. 32.--Wilder, Burt C. Some Misapprehensions as to the Simplified Nomenclature of Anatomy. Pp. 24. Ripley, William Z. The Races of Europe. Accompanied by a Supplementary Bibliography of the Anthropology and Ethnology of Europe. Published by the Public Library of the City of Boston. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 624, with plates and Supplement, Pp. 160. $6. Stearns, Frederick, and Pilsby, Henry A. Catalogue of the Marine Mollusks of Japan. Detroit: Frederick Stearns. Pp. 196, with plates. Tilden, William A. A Short History of the Progress of Scientific Chemistry within our own Times. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 276. United States Department of Agriculture: Bulletin No. 19. The Structure of the Caryopsis of Grasses with Reference to their Morphology and Classification. By P. B. Kennedy. Pp. 44, with plates.--No. 26. Lightning and the Electricity of the Air. By A. G. McAdie and A. J. Henry. Pp. 74, with plates.--No. 56. History and Present Status of Instruction in Cooking in the Public Schools of New York City. By Mrs. L. E. Hogan. Pp. 70. Vincenti, Giuseppi. La Fonografia Universale Michela, o La Fono-Telegrafia Universale Vincenti. (The Michela Universal Phonography, or the Vincenti Universal Phono-Telegraphy.) In Italian, French, and English. Pp. 40, with plates.--Short Course in Michela's Universal Hand-Phonographic System. (In Italian.) Pp. 24; New and Partial Applications of Michela's Phonographic Table for the Use of the Universal Alphabet. Pp. 6. (All published at Ivrea, Italy.) Warder, George W. The New Cosmogony. New York: J. S. Ogilvie Publishing Company. Pp. 293. Warman, Cy. Snow on the Headlight. A Story of the Great Burlington Strike. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 249. $1.25. Weber, Adna F. The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century. A Study in Statistics. (Columbia University Studies.) New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 495. $3.50. Yale University, Observatory of. Report for 1898-'99. Pp. 21. Fragments of Science. =Death of Dr. Brinton.=--By the death of Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, at Atlantic City, N. J., July 31st, America loses one of the most industrious and intelligent students of its ethnology, languages, and antiquities. We think we may safely say of him that he did as much as any other single man among us to organize and systematize these studies and put them on a stable foundation and a broad basis. To them he devoted his time, his heart, and his fortune. Dr. Brinton was born in West Chester, Pa., in 1837; was a graduate of Yale College and of Jefferson Medical College; served in medical departments in the United States Volunteer Army during the civil war; was for several years editor of the Medical and Surgical Reporter and of the Quarterly Compendium of Medical Science; and was finally drawn predominantly to the study of American ethnology and languages, to which he contributed a long list of books, special articles, and paragraphs, a large proportion of them fruits of his own investigations. For his work in this department he received, in 1866, the medal of the Société Américaine de France. He was Professor of Ethnology and Archæology in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and of American Linguistics and Archæology in the University of Pennsylvania, and was President of the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society of Philadelphia. He was President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1894. He established a library and publishing house of aboriginal American literature, and one of his most noteworthy works was the publication in this library of a series of original texts in the languages of North and South American tribes, with commentaries and translations, in the preparation of which he called in other Americanists to assist him. In this way he contributed much to save a literature and a history that were fast disappearing. A few months ago, as was mentioned in the Monthly at the time, he presented his entire collection of books, pamphlets, and manuscripts, many original and some unique, relating to the aboriginal languages of North and South America, to the University of Pennsylvania. =Nebraska as a Home for Birds.=--Mr. Lawrence Bruner introduces his Notes on Nebraska Birds with the expression of a belief, founded on his own observations for twenty-five years, together with those of about fifty other persons to whose notes he has had access, that Nebraska, although a prairie State, has an unusually large bird fauna. The notes show 415 species and subspecies as visiting the State, while there are records of 227 species breeding within its borders, and of more than 700 winter residents. "When we learn that only about 780 species are recorded for the whole of North America north of the Mexican boundary, it certainly seems astonishing that from among them we should receive so large a percentage. If, however, we take into consideration the variations in altitude above sea level, the differences in surface configuration, climate, etc., that pertain to our State, its location, and the relation which it bears to the country at large, perhaps the wonderment will become less." The southeastern corner of Nebraska is only eight hundred feet, the western border almost six thousand feet, above tide water. The State is divided into timber, prairie, and plain regions. It lies in the middle of the United States, with a high mountain chain to the west and a giant water way along its eastern boundary. In fact, eastern, western, northern, and southern fauna meet in Nebraska, and it also has a fauna of its own. Forms are found there that belong to low and high altitudes, to wet and dry climates, to prairie and timbered countries, and to semi-desert and alkali regions. =The Power of the Imagination.=--The following interesting experiment is described in the Psychological Review for July by E. E. Slosson, of the University of Wyoming: "I had prepared a bottle, filled with distilled water, carefully wrapped in cotton and packed in a box. After some other experiments in the course of a popular lecture I stated that I wished to see how rapidly an odor would be diffused through the air, and requested that as soon as any one perceived the odor he should raise his hand. I then unpacked the bottle in the front of the hall, poured the water over the cotton, holding my head away during the operation, and started a stop-watch while awaiting results. I explained that I was quite sure no one in the audience had ever smelled the chemical compound which I had poured out, and expressed the hope that while they might find the odor strong and peculiar it would not be disagreeable to any one. In fifteen seconds most of those in the front row had raised their hands, and in forty seconds the 'odor' had spread to the back of the hall, keeping a pretty regular 'wave front' as it passed on. About three quarters of the audience claimed to perceive the smell, the obstinate minority including more men than the average of the whole. More would probably have succumbed to the suggestion, but at the end of a minute I was obliged to stop the experiment, for some on the front seats were being unpleasantly affected, and were about to leave the room." =Government Scientific Work.=--Mr. Charles W. Dabney, Jr., of Knoxville, Tenn., while having a very high opinion of the scientific work of the Government, finds it greatly scattered and confused, and often multiplied, among the departments. There are three distinct and separate agencies for measuring the land of the country, four hydrographic offices in as many departments, and five separate and distinct Government chemical laboratories. The Coast Survey, the Naval Observatory, and the Weather Bureau are all engaged in studying the magnetism of the earth. Three distinct branches of the Interior Department are engaged in irrigation work, and the census has published a report on the subject, while the report of a board appointed to examine into the matter shows that eight bureaus of the Interior and Agriculture Departments must co-operate in order to accomplish any thorough work on the great problem of irrigation. The statistics of the natural resources and the products of the country, of exports and imports, of populations, schools, etc., are collected and compiled by eight or ten different agencies in five or six different departments. Mr. Dabney's remedy for this condition is the consolidation of all the scientific work under a single department, to constitute a National Department of Science. This seems hardly necessary. The scientific work of the departments has grown under the pressure of their necessities, relating chiefly to the examination of an unsettled and unexplored country. So long and so far as such work is essential to the legitimate work of the department it will have to be done within it. All work beyond this can be left to the Smithsonian Institution, the universities and scientific academies, and individual effort. The Government of the United States is not a scientific body. =American Indians and Mongolians.=--In answer to Major Powell's theory, recently expressed anew, that while there may be a unity of species in the ancient physical man, the civilization, arts, industries, institutions, languages, and opinions of the American tribes were autochthonous, and owed nothing to Old-World influences; Mr. James Wickersham, of Tacoma, Washington, maintains that our Indians are connected in blood with the Mongolian stock of East Asia and none other, and that their arts, etc., were derived thence in comparatively recent times. In the comparison he makes, for argument, between the two races he finds a considerable number of features that were common and peculiar to both. Of both, the Chino-Japanese and the Americans, he says: "The most civilized tribes spoke a monosyllabic language, others spoke an agglutinative tongue; their writing was ideographic and written from right to left, from top to bottom; their systems of numeration were based upon the digital count, and their old numerals up to nineteen were practically identical; their calendar systems were alike in principle, and nearly so in details; both divided time into cycles and quarters thereof; the solar year in both regions began at the winter solstice, and the solstices were celebrated in both lands on the same day by the same national festivals; both prepared almanacs on paper of national manufacture; the good or evil power of every day was fixed by the priest-astronomer, and each almanac also contained medical receipts and astrological formulæ and a table of religious festivals; the same elements, colors, viscera, birds, seasons, and planets were assigned in the same general scheme to the cardinal points." Like similarities are traced in constitutions, laws, ecclesiastical institutions, monastic orders, and physical aspects. =The Teaching of Bows and Arrows.=--What the study of so simple a subject as bows and arrows may reveal is illustrated by Mr. Herman Meyer's paper in the Smithsonian Report for 1896 on Bows and Arrows in Central Brazil; an introduction giving a general outline of a contemplated larger work which intended to set forth for the circumscribed region of the Matto-Grosso, how, through the harmonizing of different tribal groups, ethnographic types arise; what share the several associated tribes have had in this creation of groups; and, on the other hand, what ethnographic development within the group each tribe has undergone. While the South American Indian tribes have different special methods of capturing wild animals, they all have as the chief weapon the bow and arrow, which even the gun can not supplant. The tribes that are now sedentary, which practice hunting along with agriculture only for amusement, exercise still the greatest care upon the preparation of this weapon, and know how to use it with skill. In their sagas the bow and arrow still play an important part. They are regarded almost as sacred, and are frequently used as cult objects. When bows and arrows are exchanged for other weapons the children keep up the old reminiscences, and hold on to the bow and arrow as playthings. The South American Indian is accustomed to recognize the tribe by its arrow. A grouping by these weapons, a separation of forms according to specific marks of structure, is possible for the study of the tribes. The feathering, which seems to be capable of unlimited variation, is of great importance. A great deal of care may be bestowed on the fastening of the feather, on the wrapping of the shaft with thread, or upon the manner of fitting the feather. The wrapping of the feathered end or shaftment offers excellent opportunity to preserve certain textile patterns, perhaps the one remaining survival of the old tribal peculiarity. The fastening of the point to the shaft or to the foreshaft also affords a safe datum for discriminating, and the shape of the point furnishes a guide for differentiations. =An Aztec Pictorial Record.=--The forty-four paintings of the _Mapa de Cuauhtlantzinco_ were executed in oil colors on European paper by an artist named Tepozetecatl, and are of high importance in the history of the conquest of Mexico. The Pueblo of San Juan de Cuauhtlantzinco, to which they belong, is situated between the cities of Pueblo and Cholula, and is inhabited by about fifteen hundred people, who still speak the Aztec language. The pictures, each about sixteen by twelve inches in size, were discovered about thirty years ago by Padre D. José Vicente Campos, who, to save them from decay, had them pasted on cotton sheeting and mounted in two frames. They contain scenes from the conquest--not badly executed--and portraits of aborigines. Each bears a text in Nahuatl, which Padre Campos translated into Spanish and appended the translation to the original. Another series of ancient paintings somewhat like these was preserved for a long time at Tlaxcala, but, according to Prof. Frederick Starr, they were less personal and less local. They are called the _Lienzo de Tlaxcala_, and picture all the important events of conquest from the time when Cortes came into contact with the Tlascalans till the city of Mexico was captured. The Mapa de Cuauhtlantzinco deals with but little space; perhaps Texculco and Chalco and Quimistlan describe its limits. The pictures and the texts in Spanish and English have been copied by Professor Starr, who publishes them for their ethnological interest, in that they illustrate a practice, common at the time of the conquest, of painting representations of important matters; that they in many cases present successful portraits; that they are, in conception and execution, truly native works of art; that they give considerable information relative to daily life and customs; and that they are psychically interesting in showing the feelings of the natives shortly after the conquest toward their conquerors and toward the newly introduced religion. The town of Cuauhtlantzinco appears to have been settled between 1519 and 1528 by refugees from Cholula, who were driven away because they had gone to Tlaxcala to visit Cortes and invite him to come to their pueblo. =Permanence of the Fish Supply.=--A Scottish fish commission has been for fifteen years conducting an experimental research on the capacity of the sea to bear the drain upon its resources made by the growing industry of trawl fishing along shore. Some first-class fishing grounds along the coast were closed for several years, in the anticipation that the fish, freed from molestation, would breed and multiply in them. The conclusion reached from examination of the results has been that fishing or no fishing makes no difference whatever. "On the preserved grounds there are no more fish, and no less, than when the trawls were daily dragged across the bottoms of the bays. For the rest of the areas frequented by trawlers beyond the three-mile limit the happy conclusion is that there are as many fish in the sea as ever, and that the supply does not diminish, in spite of the increased and increasing number of ships engaged in the fisheries and their fine equipment." The equipment of steam trawlers for the North Sea and the open ocean has become an immense industry in the east of England. Never have so much capital and labor been spent in harrying the fish since the fishing began. "Yet the take steadily increases as the boats increase. 'The great labor and expenditure of the last ten years prove that the balance of Nature in the neighboring seas is steadily maintained, and that there is no need for anxiety concerning the continuance of every species of good fish.' ... It is now clear that life in the sea is not dependent on what takes place near the shore. In other words, it is difficult to destroy marine life, so far as fish are concerned, by mischief done near the coast. Their area of propagation and reproduction is too large for land creatures like us, who can only invade the sea in boats, seriously to injure it." Yet the experiments and experience of the United States Fish Commission show that we are able to increase the supply immensely. =Relative Power of Fungicides.=--Mr. F. L. Stevens has published, in the Botanical Gazette, an account of experiments made for the purpose of establishing with some degree of accuracy the strengths of various solutions which are necessary to prevent the growth of fungous spores. The bearing of this question upon the relation of a fungicide to its efficiency is apparent. As among the general results the author finds that mercuric chloride is the strongest chemical used in its toxic effect upon the fungi, while potassium cyanide is remarkably weak considering its great toxic action on animals. Alcohol and sodium chloride have a stimulating effect. Various fungi offer different resistance to poisons, and the limits of resistance will vary in the same species. The spores of fungi are less susceptible than the roots of seedlings. A chemical may be twice as powerful as another against one fungus, while in acting upon another fungus an entirely different ratio may be sustained. An occasional spore may germinate and grow quite normally in a solution that prevents hundreds of normal spores around it from germinating. Penicillium as a nutrient medium offered greater resistance to poisons than did any of the other fungi worked upon. Uromyces did not diminish in vigor of growth with the increased strength of the poison, but the percentage of spores that germinated was diminished. In general, the results of the action of the chemicals were in accord with the theory of hydrolytic association. Incidentally new evidence bearing upon the theory of the hydrolytic dissociation of the molecule was adduced, together with facts that may throw some light upon the structure of the cell wall. =National Forest Reserves.=--The report of the Secretary of the Interior for the year ending June 30, 1898, mentions thirty forest reservations (exclusive of the Afognac Forest and Fish-Culture Reserve in Alaska) as existing by presidential proclamation under the act of March 3, 1891, embracing an estimated area of 40,719,474 acres. The patrolling of the reserves has shown that fire is the paramount danger to which they are exposed. Next to fire, sheep-raising is the most serious difficulty to be considered in administering the reserves. Yet, as it is not considered expedient to prohibit so important an industry throughout the reserves, special efforts have been directed toward ascertaining the particular regions in which the conditions demand the exclusion of sheep, and toward learning what restrictions may be necessary in other regions. The institution of a national system of timber cutting to be economical in all directions is under consideration, but it is acknowledged that the work will require a certain degree of experience and training on the part of forest officers. A forest system inaugurated by the department in August, 1898, in which the reserves are placed under the control of a graded force of officers, has already shown good results; the reports received from the forest officers indicate that the patrolling has limited both the number and extent of fires. During the eighteen months previous to the preparation of the report in November, 1898, a great advance was made toward a comprehensive administration of the public forests. A marked change in public sentiment toward forest policy is noticed, with a subsidence of the opposition to the reserves and a tendency among the people in the localities directly interested to take a deep and approving interest in the matter. =Sloyd as an Educational Factor.=--Mr. Gustaf Larsson, of the Sloyd Training School, Boston, represents, in his Bulletin, that Sloyd is steadily gaining ground, and has been introduced, during the past year, into city schools, colleges, and charitable institutions, and that many clubs and social organizations are becoming interested in it as an educational factor. The Sloyd principles seem to meet a cordial welcome wherever they are adequately presented. Mr. Larsson insists that in Sloyd instruction the teacher should enter into the child's point of view, and must never forget, he says, that it is the real work which appeals to him, and not the particular exercise or the typical use of the tool. As Dr. Henderson says, it is not necessary to be forever suggesting to him that he is being educated. "We must see, feel, and think with the worker, and so introduce our disciplinary exercises that he practices them correctly while still carrying out his own dearest desire. In this way only can he get the greatest benefit from any exercise. We must constantly bear in mind that we are aiming at a well-developed producer rather than a perfect product.... Whenever a piece of work, however poor in itself, stands for a child's best effort, it is a highly satisfactory production from the true teacher's point of view. He must remember also to keep constantly before us the fact that independence and self-reliance are to be cultivated from the outset." Sloyd claims to be peculiar in aiming at ethical rather than technical results, and at general organic development rather than special skill; in employing only pedagogically trained teachers; in using rationally progressive courses of exercises applied on objects of good form which are also of special use to the worker; in striving after gymnastically correct working positions in encouraging the use of both the left and right sides of the body; and in giving to each individual opportunity to progress according to his peculiar ability. These points have been emphasized in Sloyd from its beginning in Sweden more than twenty-five years ago. =Hawaiian Reptiles.=--It is shown, in a paper on the subject by Dr. Leonhard Stejneger, published by the United States National Museum, that there are no true land reptiles in the Hawaiian archipelago other than a few species of lizards, all belonging to the cosmopolitan families--the geckoes (four species) and the skinks (three species). All of these, except one of the geckoes, belong to species widely distributed over the Indo-Polynesian island world, while the gecko excepted has close relatives in New Caledonia, Java, Sumatra, and Ceylon. This distribution is regarded by the author as not sustaining the theory of a once continuous land connection between the various island groups, but rather, by the limited number of species, as indicating that at the time of the immigration of the lizards the islands were separated from other lands. Yet these land creatures could not have been distributed over thousands of miles of ocean by ordinary means, and the agency of man has to be invoked. From various considerations it is permissible to conclude that they came to the islands with the ancestors of the Hawaiians. No records are known of any of the marine snakes having been taken at the Sandwich Islands. Marine turtles live in the seas surrounding the archipelago and breed upon some of its outlying islands, but little is known of them. There are no indigenous batrachians in the group, but frogs and toads are said to have been brought, intentionally, from China, Japan, and America to assist in the fight against mosquitoes. MINOR PARAGRAPHS. Miss Kingsley defines one of the fundamental doctrines of African fetich as being that the connection of a certain spirit with a certain mass of matter, a material object, is not permanent. "The African will point out to you a lightning-stricken tree and tell you that its spirit has been killed; he will tell you when the cooking pot has gone to bits that it has lost its spirit; if his weapon fails, it is because some one has stolen or made sick its spirit by means of witchcraft. In every action of his daily life he shows you how he lives with a great, powerful spirit world around him. You will see him, before starting out to hunt or fight, rubbing medicine into his weapons to strengthen the spirit within them, talking the while, telling them what care he has taken of them, reminding them of the gifts he has given them, though those gifts were hard to give, and begging them in the hour of his dire necessity not to fail him. You will see him bending over the face of a river, talking to its spirit with proper incantations, asking it when it meets a man who is an enemy of his to upset his canoe or drown him, or asking it to carry down with it some curse to the village below which has angered him, and in a thousand other ways he shows you what he believes if you will watch him patiently. It is a very important point in the study of pure fetich to gain a clear conception of this arrangement of things in grades. As far as I have gone I think I may say fourteen classes of spirits exist in fetich. Dr. Nassau, of Gaboon, thinks that the spirits affecting human affairs can be classified completely into six classes." At a recent meeting of the Institute of Mining Engineers (England), reported by Industries and Iron, Mr. J. A. Longden, who delivered the opening address, discussed the problem presented by the rapid exhaustion of the English coal fields. During the last twenty-five years, he said, the output of coal had increased from 120,000,000 to 200,000,000 tons, the ratio of increase being two and a half per cent per annum. Assuming that the increase for the next twenty-five years will only be one and a half per cent, the coal output in 1925 would reach 280,000,000 tons. At such an increasing annual output the commercially workable coal would be practically used up. Mr. Longden suggested the propriety of putting an export duty of sixpence per ton on all coal exported, and finally said: The evidence before them all pointed to one thing--namely, that in fifty years they would practically be dependent on the United States of America for cheap coal, iron, and steel, and when this came about "we or our sons will find out that an alliance with the United States for coaling our navy was imperative." In conclusion, he insisted upon the necessity of taking measures to avoid waste in the coal industry. The following note is from Nature of May 11th: "At the last meeting of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland Dr. Elliot Smith settled a point in the comparative morphology of the brain which at one time was the subject of a heated controversy between Huxley and Owen. In 1861, it may be remembered, Owen maintained that the _calcar avis_ and the calcarine fissure which causes it were characters peculiar to the brain of man, a statement which Huxley showed to be untrue, the formation being well marked in all primate brains. Dr. Elliot Smith has reached the further generalization that the _calcar avis_ is a character shown by all mammalian brains, with the possible exception of the prototherian. He identifies--and the reasons for this identification do not seem capable of refutation--the calcarine fissure of the primate brain with the splenial fissure of the brain of other mammals. This generalization will materially assist in homologizing the primate and unguiculate _pallium_." The influence of wind on the speed of steamers is of considerably more importance than is generally believed. In the _Annalen der Hydrographie_ for January, 1899, L. E. Dinklage describes some observations recently made on two of the North German Lloyd steamers of about five thousand tons and fifteen or sixteen knots. The results show that when the wind was favorable no difference whatever could be detected in the speed of the vessels during a light breeze or a heavy gale. But with a beam (cross-wind) or head wind a reduction of from three to five knots and a half was produced. The obvious conclusion is that the wind when favorable never helps a fast steamer, but always hinders it when unfavorable. Probably with vessels steaming ten knots or less a favoring gale might increase the speed. NOTES. The burden of the president's address of J. B. Johnson before the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education is the necessity for our future material prosperity for a specific scientific training for the directors of each and every kind of manufacturing and commercial activity. Germany "has worked out this problem to a most fruitful issue," but its imperial and paternal method can not be imitated here, or probably anywhere else. The problem is a very difficult one with us, and it will be of no use to look to municipalities or Legislatures for its solution. There exist a few special high-grade industrial, commercial, mechanical, electrical, and mining schools, but they are entirely inadequate to answer the demands of the occasion. The author looks to organized commercial bodies like the one he is addressing as furnishing the best means for establishing the schools desired. Prof. F. L. Washburn, of the University of Oregon, describes in the American Naturalist a curious specimen of the toad (_Bufo columbiensis_), which has an extra arm projecting from the left side just in front of the normal left arm. The extra arm has seven digits, and is without an elbow joint, but is slightly movable at the proximal joint next to the body. Its radius and ulna are separate bones, not fused as they are normally. The dissection shows other peculiarities of structure, such as might be expected from a consideration of the exterior. The species, normal, is common in parts of Oregon. It is related of Charcot, the distinguished alienist, late of the Salpêtrière, Paris, that he had marked artistic ability, and when he was seventeen years old his family had some hesitation whether to make him a doctor or a painter. He chose the medical profession. He was fond of drawing sketches of his patients, and of landscapes he saw in his travels, and was not above making an occasional caricature. Several albums are filled with designs of this kind. A study of his work as an artist was prepared by Dr. Henri Meige in connection with the erection of his monument, and is deposited in the Salpêtrière. The Russian decree nullifying the constitutional privileges of Finland, notwithstanding treaty guarantees, is producing an effect that was probably not intended or anticipated. Realizing the futility of resistance and holding the people true to their reputation of being the most peaceable, enlightened, and orderly of the Czar's subjects, the representatives of the Finns are said to be quietly making inquiries about the prospects of settlement in the Canadian Northwest and other free regions. Despite the growing use of motor traction, the raising of horses gives no sign of diminishing. Against 212,827 horses in 1888, the Argentine Republic has, by the census of 1895, 4,234,032. That country now ranks third in horse-rearing nations, being excelled only by Russia and the United States. M. André Broca has found, concerning the use of India-rubber supports for isolating physical apparatus from earth tremors, that when apparatus having movable parts are supported in this way the vibrations, instead of being reduced, may in some cases be increased tenfold. But when the apparatus consists entirely of rigid material there is no better way of insuring steadiness than by resting it on India rubber. The Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis works for the single end of educating the community in a knowledge of the true nature of consumption and of the means of controlling or conquering it. For this it diffuses literature, seeks the aid of persons in influential positions, and strives to obtain the requisite conditions for restoring those early afflicted and for preventing the communication of infection to others from those far advanced. Its main effort is directed toward the establishment of a municipal hospital for tuberculous patients, and for a sanatorium in the high regions of the State. For the last purpose it is offered a most desirable location in Luzerne County. The list of recent deaths among men known in science includes the names of W. W. Norman, Professor of Biology in the University of Texas; John Whitehead, who died while on a scientific mission to the island of Hainan, for which he left England in the autumn of 1898; Naval Lieutenant Charles William Baillie, Marine Superintendent of the English Meteorological Office, inventor of the hydra sounding machine, late Director of Nautical Studies at the Imperial Naval College, Tokio, and author of important meteorological investigations, at Broadstairs, June 2th, aged fifty-five years; Henry Wollaston Blake, an original member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and of the British Association, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, eighty-four years of age; Edward Jannetaz, a French mineralogist, an assistant in the Museum of Paris, and Lecturer on Mineralogy for forty years, Master of Conferences in the Faculty of Sciences, author of _Les Roches_ and other books, aged sixty-seven years; Dr. Eugen Ritter von Lommell, of the University of Munich, distinguished in mathematics, physics, and optics, and author of several books on those subjects, including The Nature of Light in the International Scientific Series, June 19th, in his sixty-third year; Sir Alexander Armstrong, arctic navigator and discoverer of the Northwest passage, late Director-General of the Medical Department of the British Museum, and author of a narrative of his great discovery and of a work on Naval Hygiene; Dr. Hugo Weidel, Professor of Chemistry in the University of Vienna; Sir William Henry Flower, late Director of the British Museum of Natural History, Past President of the British Association, at the time of his death President of the Zoölogical Society of London, and author of several excellent books on zoölogy, natural history, museums, and kindred subjects, aged sixty-eight years; and Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, the distinguished American ethnologist and linguist, of whom we give a fuller notice elsewhere. Transcriber's Notes: Words surrounded by _ are italicized. Words surrounded by = are bold. Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent spellings have been kept. Some illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text. 
61055	----	THE VALLEY OF THE MASTERS By CHARLES MINOR BLACKFORD His sin was curiosity--his crime was witchcraft--but Henry's real offense against his strange world was that it was dying--and he wanted it to live! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Henry stopped and squatted in the underbrush, well hidden from the path but close enough to see the coming group. Within a minute they became visible. There were twenty-five to thirty boys, girls and youths walking slowly in ragged groups, talking and laughing. The youngest were ahead, a group just entering their teens, dressed like the rest in jackets and shorts, with sandals of plast on their feet. The dark, synthetic cloth made them a uniformed body. Henry's nose wrinkled in distaste. Again his hideaway would be invaded and he would have to move on. But where to? They were opposite him now, a bare twenty feet away. Most of them looked as alike as brothers and sisters, logically enough; there was not one who wasn't a cousin in some degree to the others. Plump, round-faced and dull-eyed, they lived from cradle to grave according to custom. It was the custom, when they were old enough to feel the urge, to join a group like this. Together they tramped the valley from spring to fall, gathering fruit and nuts as they came in season. When a couple felt like settling down they awaited a vacant Mastership--a plot of orchard and the house that went with it--and moved in. They took over the responsibilities of the place and bred or adopted the three children necessary to hold it. They remained there until they became Elders. Then they moved into Town, where they worked in the factories, idled and gossiped until death overtook them. They were ignorant, superstitious, living out their dull routine as generations before them had. Only a few questioned it. Almost none made any active challenge. The youngsters sighted the tavern and made for it at a dead run, wanting to claim favorable bunks before the others arrived. Henry was impatient. Ants were crawling over his foot, but it would never do for him to be seen, especially in the woods. One didn't go into them. They were inhabited by goblins, ghosts and fearsome animals. Finally they were past. He straightened, started to step into the path, then squatted again quickly. Coming alone, behind the others, was the girl. Her slimness and pale hair made her stand out from the rest. His thoughts had been upon her since that day when his group passed the house of her father, an avocado Master, down in the lower valley. She had called to them to wait, had run inside to come back with her two pouches, one for her personal belongings, the other for food. Living on a fruit diet as they did, they ate most of their awakened hours. "I'm Theta!" she called out happily as she joined them. "Mama says I'm old enough to go with you." She recognized a cousin and ran over to join her, her hair a spot of brightness among the dark. He wanted her from that moment, but she was far too young. He would have to wait. * * * * * Coming towards Theta from the opposite direction was the slap of flat feet. In a moment Henry recognized Ole. He was considerably older than the others; his only object in life was enjoying all the young girls who joined the group. He was a bulky dullard and a bully, his eyes small and mean. It was evident that he was looking for the girl. A pleased expression spread over his face when he saw her. She stopped abruptly, looking about for a way to flee, but the path was enclosed by woods and Ole was on her. "Leave me alone!" she cried in anger as his hand closed about her wrist. Henry could see disgust for him in her eyes. Why didn't she let him have what he wanted and be done with him? That was the way most of the girls responded. "Won't have anything to do with me, eh?" gloated Ole. "Think you are too good for us! I been watching you, asking about you. None of the boys have had you ... but you won't get by me!" Henry felt a surge of sympathy for her, fed by his dislike for the other. He slipped into the path. He was almost up to them before he was seen. Ole swung about, still holding the girl. Henry stopped six feet off. "Why don't you let her alone if she doesn't want you?" he asked with deceiving mildness, apparently relaxed. There was startled fright in Ole's eyes. Henry had appeared so suddenly, from nowhere. Worse, he was proscribed. He was accused of learning witchery. Henry was taller than Ole, but thin and almost weak looking. This would be something to boast about: capturing the witch singlehanded, bringing him in for punishment! "Make me let her alone, then!" he challenged. It was usual to boast and strut before fighting. Henry took the advantage of immediate attack. He sprang at the other, catching him before he unhanded the girl, with a right to the jaw, a left to the belly. Theta ran about fifty feet down the path, then turned to watch. Ole, head down, was closing in to grip his opponent, but Henry stepped to one side, coming up with a blow to Ole's right eye. Ole raised his guard and Henry sank both fists into the other's stomach. Ole doubled up. There was no fight in him. He plunged past Henry, down the path towards the tavern. Henry faced the girl. She came towards him without hesitation. "Thank you," she said. "I shouldn't have left the others. I didn't think he had noticed." She walked slowly towards the tavern, Henry beside her. The past year had made her taller, filled her out. Yet the sweetness of her expression was the same, and the vitality in her face and eyes. "He's been after you then?" She nodded. "Him and a couple of others." It was just a turn in the path to sight of the tavern. Henry halted. "You seem to forget I'm proscribed," he reminded her. "I don't care! I like you--always have." Her voice became tragic, "Why did you go into that awful learning house?" "I got tired of wondering--wondering what kept the food in the bins fresh, how it got from the hoppers in the fields to the bins. What made the light and heat. Where the water came from." "But the Old Ones did it all by magic!" "What kind of magic?" His face had a slightly mocking expression. "If that was so why are things beginning to break down? Magic should go on forever." * * * * * From the direction of the tavern came sounds of shouting. He smiled at her. "You'd better go on before they think I've turned you into a bat." "Henry--" she began, but she had lingered too long. The whole group rounded the turn, trotting, their faces twisted in superstitious fury. They raised their arms when they sighted the two. Each hand had a stone in it. "She's one of them too!" screamed fat, malicious Hecla, seeing a chance to vent her envy. "They're planning something! Throw! Throw!" Her voice was a hysterical shriek. Henry saw the stones in the air. Grasping the girl's wrist he drew her into the brush beside the path. He stopped his flight under an ancient tree and let go her wrist. "See," he said, "even to speak to me is dangerous." She tossed her head and brushed the hair from her brow, her eyes scornful. "I don't care. I'm sick of them." "You can go back. Give them some fancy tale about my hexing you, but say that you crossed two sticks or something and got away." She looked him squarely in the face, her own composed and determined. "I'd rather stay with you." He dropped to a jutting rock and scraped at the dead leaves with the heel of his sandal. "It's not nice," he began, "the life I live. Hiding in the woods by day, sneaking into deserted houses or taverns at night for food and warmth. I've been doing it all summer now, and that's bad enough. In a month the Masters of these upper levels will be closing their houses and the taverns, moving to town for the winter. Everything on the lower levels will be taken up. They expect me to be starved into surrender." Theta dropped to her knees beside him. "I'd rather be with you. I've wanted to be with you ever since I first saw you. But you never seemed to notice me." "I noticed you." He placed a hand over hers. "But you were so young looking, so sweet. I was waiting for you to grow up a little more. Then, when I found an open Mastership, I was going to ask you to share it with me." Theta felt a tingling happiness. Her face flushed, her eyes brightened. "Henry!" she cried. "I've always wanted you! That's why I never...." He put an arm about her and pulled her close. They sat that way for minutes. "I'll give you a Mastership!" he cried out. "I'll give you the whole valley!" He pushed her shoulders around until she was facing him. "What is your first wish, Mistress of the Valley?" "Something to eat," she said promptly. Henry made a rueful face. "My dear, that is something you will have to become used to: being hungry. But fortunately I know of a ruined and deserted house where the bins are still operating." The forest they were in filled a steep-sided ravine. He followed it for some distance, then started abruptly up the left-hand slope to a low-crowned crest planted with apple trees. A hundred yards away was the house. One corner of it was crushed by a fallen tree. The low sun made shafts of light through the trees as Henry approached it cautiously, Theta behind him. He entered through the broken wall into what was once a bedroom, then through a door into the remainder of the house. It was a typical living room they entered, with the regular ration of furnishings. The visiphone and visiscreen were set into the inner wall; a calendar clock was over the front door, its dial marked with symbols for planting, pruning, cutting and picking. The hand was approaching the latter symbol, Henry went through into the kitchen, leaving her to watch through the window. He returned with a basket of mixed fruit. She reached for an avocado, plucking her knife from its sheath with the other hand. "Hey! Wait a minute!" Henry cried. "You are a sinner now, remember?" He pushed the basket towards her. "Fill your pouch first, eat later." They ate, keeping an eye on the path towards the house until dark. No one moved at night except on extreme emergency, and then only with lanterns and noise. Without lights on other than the normal glow of the walls they retired to one of the undamaged bedrooms. "See?" she said, with a rippling, contented laugh. "I waited for you." II It was still dark when they filled their pouches to capacity and slipped from the house. "What will we do now?" Theta asked. Henry looked down. "I don't know. I had something planned, but...." "What was it?" "I was going to climb up the mountain, past the top defrost towers and the force fence, to the top of the ridge." She stared at him, her eyes round. "Why, that's the edge of the world! You might fall off!" "Not if I'm careful." Only a few in the valley could boast of going beyond the top row of defrosters, fewer yet of even going within looking distance of the force fence. Beyond it, tradition said, lived great beasts that could eat a man with one bite. While the ridges that bounded the valley on three sides, to the east, west and north, were the edges of the world, from which one dropped off into bottomless space. To the south, where forest enclosed the mouth of the valley, tradition was vague, but the edge must be off there somewhere. It had taken Henry all summer to build up his determination. But now, up was the only direction it was safe to go. "If you're not afraid, I'm not either," Theta said. "Let's go." Carrying the basket with its remaining supply of fruit between them, they started up the slope. It was only a short distance to the top defrosters. These only went into action at blossom time for the apples and other highland fruits. From there to the force fence was a steep climb through rocks and brush. Their pace grew slower as they approached the fence. Their eyes scanned the rocks and scant brush for signs of the great beasts, but they saw none. Higher yet, about a quarter of a mile, was the top of the ridge. The edge of the earth. Theta pressed against him. "I'm scared," she murmured. Henry's face became set. "We said we were going," he said curtly. "You can stay if you wish." He selected rocks for both hands. The force fence only gave them a strong tingling sensation. The plast sandals insulated them somewhat. The slope became steeper, but there was no indication of any great beasts. Too excited to stop and rest, although they were breathing heavily, they pressed onward. Would it be night down there, over the edge of the world? Stars shining? Would it be daylight and clouds? The top of the ridge was a hundred feet away ... ten. Henry flung himself on the ground so if he became dizzy he would not lose his balance and fall. Theta did the same. Side by side, they crept the remaining distance. What they saw made them stare in open-mouthed amazement. * * * * * Before them was another ridge running out from the northern range. It was pretty much like the one they were on. Between it and them was another valley. Defrost towers rose from among the trees. Over the top of the opposite ridge, they could see still another. The northern mountains were lost in the blue distance. The shock to both was unnerving. Steeled to look out into Limbo, they found a valley much like their own. Together they turned and looked back into what could be seen of their own valley. Even in shape the two were roughly similar. They could see the tall, slim defrost towers, an occasional house and the geometrical designs of the groves and orchards with their orderly rows of trees. There was Town at the lower end of the valley. And there, at the upper end, was something they never knew existed; a large, ivy-clad building that stretched from cliffside to cliffside. And yet above that was a still, blue lake. Henry looked ahead again. There _was_ a difference in the other valley. There were no orderly rows of fruit trees, only thick forest like that which grew only in their ravines or beyond the foot of the valley. The defrost towers looked down on multicolored autumn foliage, even in the bottom of the valley where everything should be green. Why weren't there fruit trees for the defrosters to protect? What kind of a crop did this valley grow? Henry scrambled to his feet. Theta looked up at him. "What...?" "I'm going down there." "What for?" "To see what they grow. What kind of people they are." "They might...." He smiled down at her. "I've become an expert at not being seen," he assured her. "I've had them pass five feet away." Theta got up. "I'm coming, too." They reached the force fence, but there was no irritation. The forest started immediately and it was fairly clear of underbrush. There were no paths to be seen, no sounds of harvesters, no unfamiliar trees. Even on the floor of the valley there were no signs of life, although they had seen and avoided several houses. Henry stopped suddenly, staring ahead. "What's the matter?" Theta asked. Wordlessly Henry pointed to the bole of a dead and rotting tree. Its straight trunk had branches coming out of it in orderly rings, its top cut off to make the branches spread at ladder distance above the ground. It leaned drunkenly against a supporting tree. "Avocado," he said. "This was once a grove." The normal fear of the unfamiliar swept over Theta. "I want to get out of here. It scares me," she quavered. Henry glanced up at the sun. "Too late to cross over now," he said. "We'll find a house." He turned and looked about. There should be one close, on the slope of the ridge so as not to take up useable land. He sighted one and made for it. From the outside it looked no different from those in their own valley. Beside it was an old apple tree with some emaciated fruit on it. At least they wouldn't starve. As the house was obviously empty he went around to the back, got a picking ladder off the rack and plucked enough fruit to fill their pouches, although it was unflavorable. Not until then did they venture to the front door and push it open. * * * * * As far as they could see it was like the houses in their valley, only it was cold, with a chill dampness. Light gray dust covered everything; cobwebs festooned the walls. That it had not been lived in for years, perhaps generations, was evident. Theta clung to his arm, shivering and afraid. Henry shook her off. He strode to the kitchen and pulled open a bin. In the bottom was dust, smelling faintly of peaches. "We'll clean out a bedroom for the night," he said, re-entering the living room. In the bedroom the westerly sun poured light through a dust-covered window, putting the bed somewhat in shadow. It, too, was covered with dust, turning the everlasting blankets into a color uniform with the room. Their movements stirred up dust that danced as motes in the streaming sunlight as if to bar their way across the room. They walked into it. Their eyes could now see clearly what was beyond. Theta screamed and sprang back. Protruding beyond the upper edges of the blankets were two skulls! They were outside, breathing heavily, before they realized they had moved. Henry stared at the still open door, at the black hole through the white wall. It was the first time they had seen the aftermath of death. For their people, there were places into which bodies were placed. From them they vanished like all other refuse. Shaken by the horror of it, they plunged into the forest in panic. The sun dropped behind the ridge; the air chilled. Bones or no bones they had to find shelter for the night. Fire, naked flame, they never had seen or knew existed. Heat came from the walls of houses, with warm clothing and blankets. Henry's lips firmed. Dead ones or no dead ones, they had to find something to keep them warm during the night. Another house appeared. With fast beating hearts they entered. It was now warmer inside, but still chilly. They would still need coverings. "Stay here," Henry said. He strode into the nearest bedroom. Without stopping to look around, he stepped to the bed. Closing his eyes, he snatched off the bedding and fled into the livingroom. Together, crouched in a corner, the bedding around them, they spent the night. Sleep did not come immediately. Henry stared into the darkness, reviewing the day, putting together what he had discovered. "It all fits," he said aloud. "What does?" Theta asked. "The forest, the dead trees, dead people. Something happened to everything, perhaps all at once. To the defrosters, the heaters, the bins. It must have been in winter. They crept into bed to keep warm, then starved to death. All of them." "No, no!" Theta cried. "But it did. And it's beginning to happen to us. Each year something stops working. The time may come when nothing works." "We can't do anything...." "Yes, we can." "What?" "Find out why--and try to stop it!" III At dawn, stiff and shivering, they stumbled outside and by unspoken consent started directly up the slope. By full daylight they found themselves in a chestnut grove. They stopped to fill their pouches. The last mile was made in the hot warmth of the sun. At the top of the ridge they stopped to rest. As they did, they feasted their eyes on the orderly groves below them. But Henry's eyes were seeking out the squares of brown among the green of the lower valley. He counted twenty. Far more than he realized. The defrosters had gone dead at intervals, years apart. His eyes crept up the valley to the structure at its head, with the captive lake behind it. It must be the House of the Old Ones the old stories told about but no one had ever seen. From it they had worked the magic that made the valley what it was. There, they said, they could be seen and heard to speak. If he could get to see the Old Ones, ask them questions, perhaps they would tell him what should be done. "Where are we going now?" Theta asked. "To the House of the Old Ones. Up there," he said, pointing. "Perhaps they can tell us something." She clutched his arm. "You can't!" she cried. "They'll ... they'll...." "They'll what?" "I don't know! Something awful!" "That's what they said about the learning house, but there was nothing in it but dust. I found, from the size of the chairs, that you had to start learning almost from the time you walked. I didn't even know how to start!" "Then you didn't learn anything?" "Nothing." He came to his feet. "You don't have to go if you don't want to." "I go where you go," she said with stubborn determination. They had to dip down below the force fence to find water, then keep to the harvested portions where the Masters had gone to Town for the winter. They were lucky in finding houses where the keys had been lost, and thus had been left unlocked. It was noon the next day when they forced themselves through the brush to find themselves within feet of their destination. With Henry leading they skirted it, looking for an entrance. Close to the center they found a deep indentation with a pair of doors at its inner end. Cautiously, over the accumulated leaves and rubble, they moved toward them, wondering how to get inside. The moment Henry came within three feet of them they flew open, inwards. Theta screamed and sprang back. Henry stopped, startled. "It's nothing to be scared of," he reassured her. "They say that the doors of Hall in Town used to open this way until someone broke a glass button on the wall. Come on." There was another pair of glass doors that opened the same way as they approached. They led to a large reception room with a desk and chair opposite the door, chairs in a row along the wall. The floor was red tile, with a white line, about six inches wide, circling around to a door to the left. Behind the desk was another door. * * * * * "Sightseers," said a voice from out of nowhere that made Theta scream, "will follow the white line through the door to the left. Those with business in the offices will consult the receptionist. Please proceed." Almost in a state of trance, Henry led the way along the white line. The door opened and admitted them, then a second door. Here everything was spotless, dustless, though no one had been there for years. "You are now in the generating room," the voice began again. "The humidity is zero. All dirt and dust has been removed. What you bring in with you will be gone in five minutes." They were on a balcony, looking down into a large space. On the floor below them seemed to be a huge cylinder, suspended between two metal-covered blocks. Only by the glimmering reflections from its polished surface could one tell that it was revolving. "Before you is the main generator," the voice began again. "If you look closely you will note that the armature shaft does not touch its supporting bearings. It is held in suspension by polarized barumal obtained from Mars, so there is no friction and no wear. It is powered by water reduced to hydrogen and oxygen. The excess gases are used in the hoppers and storage bins to force out the air and preserve the foods on their way to their destinations. Some gas is piped to the disposal plants, in which all organic matter is converted into fertilizer." Henry felt let down, cheated. It was just an empty building containing soundless machinery and a recorded lecture. No Old Ones. Nothing he wanted. "Now behind you," the voice began again, "you can see into the Control Room. From there every machine, store or house can have its power cut on or off. And if anything goes wrong with its circuit a button on the board flashes red until it is repaired. The glowing red button close to the window is the master switch that will shut off everything in case of an emergency, such as an earthquake." Theta pressed her nose to the glass window. "Just think," she breathed, "push that and everything stops!" Perhaps that's what happened in the other valley, thought Henry. Someone pushed the red button ... then couldn't get things going again. "Now follow the line to the next room and be seated. There you will be shown how the complex of the valley was constructed and how it operates." On entering the hall they found several rows of seats facing a large screen. Soft music began as they entered. The hall darkened and the screen lit up, showing the valley as it was before the work began. Forest mainly, a few farms scattered along the narrow bottoms. What startled Henry was that they were _above_ the valley, looking down as they seemed to drift through the air. So the old tales were right! The Old Ones could fly through the air! Here was proof of it. He sat on the edge of his seat, breathing hard, waiting to see the Old Ones, giant of stature, who could tear a tree out of the ground or shovel away a mountain. But the first humans he saw were men like himself and those in the valley. Men who pointed at places while others squinted in that direction through strange instruments. He wished he could follow the talk, but the men pronounced words differently and used many he had never heard. He had to use his eyes instead of his ears. * * * * * They started to work right where he was--he recognized the outlines of the ridges about them--but it was done by no giant extending his hand and showering magic. Big machines dug away the ground. Other things with no visible means of locomotion brought building materials up a broad road where there was not even a path now. A little man, graying and wrinkled, answered questions of their invisible guide, and, as he did, he gave directions to others. Was he one of the Old Ones, not as large as himself, no older than his father? Behind him on the screen the building Henry was in was going up. And men were making it, ordinary men, not magic. Were the Old Ones just ordinary men, their magic not strange words and motions but machines they manipulated with their hands and feet? They were not gods, just men who had begun to learn sitting in the little chairs in the learning house. He watched them dig the trenches from the groves-to-be to the hidden storage bins, put in the pipes lined with gravity-repellent barumal, lay the snakelike cables that he had seen occasionally where erosion had exposed them. He saw the building of Town, the Master's houses and the final planting of the groves. The record ended. Henry remained staring at the blank screen until Theta nudged him and brought him back to the present. The white line led on, past large offices on one side, on the other windows looking down into a vast storeroom that contained parts for repairing everything in the valley. The Old Ones knew that, some day, things would start breaking down and had prepared for it. They had not prepared for life dropping into routine, interest in progress being lost. What need was there to spend years in school when everything was already done for you? The picture had shown some buildings close to the cliffs on one side that looked like the apartment houses in Town. They broke through the brush and found one. Other than for dust it was in good condition. The food bins were filled, but the contents had dried to the hardness of stone. As soon as they were emptied they began to refill; but it was two days of constant emptying before eatable fruit began to appear. By the end of a week they had the rooms they needed cleaned and some of the brush about the place cut clear. It left Henry free to roam the plant. He sat again and again through the record of construction, understanding a little more each time. He noted, for instance, where what was now forest at the entrance to the valley was once farmland, laid out in squarish, varicolored fields. He found his way into the control room, discovered how to trace the lines from the board to their end on the large map on the wall across from the board. One day, while it was snowing heavily above the permanent defrosters, he heard a buzzer sound and saw a light turn from green to red. He traced it down. It was the damaged house where they had first taken refuge. There was plenty of time to ponder. Each time it ended in the same question and the same conclusion. Something had to be begun before it was too late. The valley had to be stirred out of its antipathy. But how? One morning, before dawn, he sat up in bed. Theta asked what was wrong. "I'm going to the meeting in Town at Peach Blossom Time," he announced. "Something has to be done." Theta clutched his arm. "You can't! They'll kill you!" "I have to! Do you want our children, or our children's children, to die like those people on the other side of the ridge?" "No, but...." "I have to go--have to make them listen." IV The Peach Blossom Time Meeting was always the best in the year. Those not already in Town were on the nearby bottom groves. After it, the Masters would return to the upper orchards, and the youth work parties would start their rounds. During the three-day meeting there would be dances and parties, an exchange of news while the assembled Elders would judge disputes, pass on the qualifications of Masters, deposing the lazy and unfit, selecting couples to take their places. It was the one time of the year when Henry could get the ear of everyone. They traveled down unseen, slipping into unlocked houses for food and the night. They entered Town at the beginning of the first meeting. They made it unrecognized to the Hall. It was not crowded. The day was bland; most preferred to stay outside and watch the proceedings on the visiscreen. Henry and Theta slipped into a section to one side and awaited the clearance of the immediate business of the Elders. There was none, of importance. Within an hour all that was pending was cleared up. The Senior Elder, emaciated and with shaking hands, faced the audience. "Any further business?" he quavered. Henry stood up. "Yes," he called out. "Something very important." Theta fully intended to follow him, but she found she could not move. It was as if she was tied to the chair. The more practical of the two, she knew that the men he was facing would refuse to face the facts. All he was doing was placing himself in their hands. And that meant death! The elders peered in his direction as he gained the aisle. Ole twisted about in his seat and was the first one to recognize him. For a moment he stared open-mouthed. "It's Henry Callis!" he cried out. "He's proscribed for learning witchery! Grab him!" Henry stopped before him. Ole's words became a gurgle and dried up. "If I'm a witch," Henry said loudly, "I'm a good person to keep away from. Whether I am or not, I have something important to tell you. And all of you had better listen!" He started again for the platform, those along the aisle shrinking back as he passed. The Elders, from fat to withered, with the same uneasy expressions on their faces, watched silently as he climbed to the stage and faced them. He could feel their chill hostility. He knew now that he had done wrong but it was too late to undo it. He stopped a short distance from their table, half turned so the audience could hear him. * * * * * "I have been living in the houses of the Old Ones at the head of the valley, beyond the defrosters and the forest above them. And I also have been up to the top of the East Range, expecting to look over the edge of the world. But what I saw was another valley just like this one. It had a force fence, defrosters, hoppers, houses. Everything this valley has, except for one thing: living inhabitants. There were people in the houses. Dead people. Reduced to bones, the bones of people who had died from hunger and cold when everything in their valley suddenly ceased to work. "That is what sent me to the House of the Old Ones, to see if I could find out what had happened. I found out there that the Old Ones were not giants who did things with magic, but people like ourselves who used machinery to make things. Just as we make clothing with machinery here in Town. They had machines that could fly through the air. They could go the length of the valley in an hour in a road machine. With machines they built these buildings, dug the trenches for the hoppers, did everything. They were just men. Men who had studied in the learning houses from the time they were tiny children. And I found out more...." He stopped to take a quick look about the still hall. He felt the hostility. "And I found out more," he repeated. "I found that, in this valley, twenty banks of defrosters have already failed. Eleven houses cannot be used, plus two taverns and one factory here in town. It shows that our own system is breaking down. Some day--perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not until the time of our grandchildren--everything will stop as it did in the next valley. If we want to keep living, we must start to learn how to keep these machines running. At the House of the Old Ones there is a vast store of parts and visigraph records showing how it should be done. I ask you all to come up and see the record they have there of building the things in the valley! See the machine that keeps everything running. Then let me have a band of youths to start studying the records until we find out how to keep things running." There was silence after he finished. The Elders eyed him, uneasy, suspicious. From the seats of the hall came Ole's voice. "Don't believe him!" he shouted. "He wants to get us up there so he can bewitch us--like he did Theta! Take him out and stone him!" Someone on the other side of the hall echoed the cry. In a moment it seemed that everyone was roaring it, rising in their seats, shaking fists. The Senior Elder motioned to the Hallmaster. He stepped forward with two husky assistants who grabbed Henry. "Put him in the strong room," quavered the Senior Elder. "Keep him there until the day for punishment." Roughly Henry was pushed around, led out a rear door to the stage. The day of punishment! Three nights and two days to live! * * * * * He awoke the morning of the third night feeling cold. He opened his eyes to find himself in total darkness. For a moment he thought himself free, hiding out in some deserted building, that all that had happened lately was a dream. But from outside he heard a panicky voice crying that the lights in his apartment were out and it was getting cold. It had happened! Far sooner than he expected, it had happened! But what would Theta do? She had gotten away, he was sure, as no one mentioned her. Theta, that was it! She had gone to the plant, pushed the button, condemning herself and all the others to death! But that was not like Theta. She was too clever.... That was it! Why hadn't he thought of it! It was a message, a challenge, a tool which he could use to free himself--get them to help him! More relaxed, he lay back. Dawn was already showing up over the ridge. More people would be getting up, more people rushing out into the streets in panic. They would remember him, come to his cell imploring him to do something. He would demand what he wanted. They could comply--or face disaster. What should he demand? Someone came down the street shouting for the Senior Elder. The volume of excited voices increased with each minute: voices demanding to know why there was no light, no heat, no water. Asking each other if they had them. Hysteria mounting each minute. Perhaps it would be a time before they thought of him, but they would be before him before the day was over. "It's that witch in the strong room!" bellowed Ole's voice outside. "He did it by magic! Kill him before he strikes us all dead!" The cry was taken up, "The witch, kill the witch! He did it! He is right in there, kill him!" Cold terror seized Henry. Theta's scheme was backfiring! There would be no reasoning with a superstitious, hysterical mob! Well, at least it hurried things up by a few hours. More composed, he came to his feet as they burst through the back door of the Hall and stampeded towards the door to the cell. He even smiled slightly. If they thought him a witch.... The key was in the lock. They had no difficulty getting in. He stood in the center of the room, the slight smile still on his lips. He raised his forearm to a horizontal position, pointed his index finger in their direction. "Who wants to die first?" he cried above the noise they made. The onrush into the cell stopped abruptly, those in front pushing back against those behind them. They followed his finger with fascinated eyes as he fanned it across the group of them. He stopped, his finger pointing to a fat, applecheeked grovemaster. The man shrieked, turned about and began fighting his way back into the corridor. One man was tripped up and fell. There was a wild shriek of terror. Men shouted that he was killing the leaders by magic. To Henry it seemed only an instant before the passageway was back in its usual silence. He stepped out of his cell. He could see a mass of people about the street door surrounding the panicked men. The passage in the other direction seemed empty. He turned that way, passed onto the rear of the stage, felt his way across it in the darkness to the steps and down into the aisle. Calmly and without haste he passed through the front doors into the next street and walked, unrecognized in the half light and excitement, out of town. * * * * * It was dark when he arrived in the upper valley. Theta was sitting at a table. She sprang up and rushed into his arms with a glad cry. "It worked! They let you go?" He looked about. "You turned the power back on?" "No. The plant and these buildings have a separate power source of their own. I wasn't going to touch it until I knew you were safe." He drew an apple from a bin and munched it. "We'd better turn things on again before the fruit spoils. Come on...." The button, Henry knew, turned on as well as off. Henry pressed down the button, stepped back to watch the large battery of lights flash on, but nothing happened. Had Theta somehow wrecked--ah! The red buttons all began to glow again. Then, a minute later, a bank of lights switched to green, then another and another. But Henry noted that an occasional light did not change. Within the hour the board was lighted up completely. Henry could barely stumble back to his quarters as the reaction set in compounded with disappointment. He flung himself on his bed. "I have failed," he kept muttering. "I have failed in everything. They won't listen. No one will!" Theta wisely kept silent and covered him up. On the second day they heard the sound of a group breaking their way through the forest. They slipped into the brush, ready to retire to a hiding place they had ready. But the dozen people who appeared in the clearing did not have the look of a vengeful mob. Several were almost elderly, some were boys, two were young women. Henry stepped into the open, but not too close to them. "What do you want?" he demanded. They looked at each other, waiting for the other to speak first. "What do you want?" Henry directed his question to an elderly grovemaster. "I want to know what's happening," he began. "My hopper has stopped working, my defrosters were dimming. They blame me...." A young man, strong, with alert eyes, stepped forward. "You are right about that other valley," he said. "I have been in it myself. I don't want that to happen here. I want to learn." "I do too!" shrilled one of the teenagers. "I sneaked into a learning house, too, but I couldn't understand." The others gave their reasons, all varied, but with the same intent: they wanted to learn. Sometimes how to repair an individual object, others longed for general knowledge. But they were willing to face the rest of the valley with him to get it. Henry took a deep, happy breath. There would be others. Slowly but surely the group would grow. "Come in," he said. "Rest and eat. Then we'll start making plans." 
46710	----	Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LV MAY TO OCTOBER, 1899 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. [Illustration: WILLIAM PEPPER.] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. OCTOBER, 1899. THE HELP THAT HARMS. BY THE RIGHT REVEREND HENRY C. POTTER. The analogies between the life of an individual and that other organism which we call civilized society are as interesting as for any other reason because of their inexhaustible and ever-fresh variety. The wants, the blunders, the growth, the perils of the individual are matched at every step by those other wants and dangers and developments which rise in complexity and in variety as the individual and the social organism rise in intelligence, in numbers, and in wealth. It ought to interest us, if it never has, to consider from how much that is mischievous and dangerous we should be delivered if we could revert from the civilized to the savage state; and it is undoubtedly true that serious minds have sometimes been tempted to question whether civilization is quite worth all that it has cost us in its manifold departures from a simple and more primitive condition. Such a question may, at any rate, not unnaturally arise when we ask ourselves the question, What, on the whole, is the influence upon manhood--by which I mean, here and for my present purpose, the qualities that make courage, self-reliance, self-respect, industry, initiative--in fact, those independent and aggressive characteristics by which great races, like great men, have climbed up out of earlier obscurity and inferiority into power, leadership, and distinction; what is the influence upon these of conditions which tend, apparently by an inevitable law, to beget or to encourage indolence, inertia, parasitic dependence? One can not but be moved to such a question by either of two papers which have recently appeared in these pages: I mean that entitled Abuse of Public Charity, by Comptroller Bird S. Coler; and that by Prof. Franklin H. Giddings, of Columbia University, on Public Charity and Private Vigilance. The community whose capable and efficient servant he is has reason to be thankful that, in the person of a public official intrusted with such large responsibilities, it has a thoughtful and far-seeing student of problems whose grave importance he has so opportunely pointed out. It needs the courage and the knowledge of such a one to affirm that "it is easier for an industrious and shrewd professional beggar to live in luxury in New York than to exist in any other city in the world," which, if any social reformer or minister of religion or mere critic of the social order had said it, would probably have been denounced as an atrabilious and unwarranted exaggeration. Concerning the comptroller's indictments of certain charitable societies and organizations as expensive mechanisms for the consumption of appropriations or contributions largely spent upon their salaried officials, I am quite willing to recognize the force of Professor Giddings's demurrer to the effect that a so-called charitable society may now and then rightly exist, and expend its income largely, if not wholly, upon the persons whom it employs as its agents, since these agents are the vigilant committees whose office it is to detect, discourage, and expose unworthy objects, whether of public or private charity. But that, besides such agencies, there are constantly called into being wholly spurious organizations, which profess to exist for the relief of certain classes of sufferers or of needy people; that these succeed, sooner or later, in fastening themselves upon the treasury of the city and of the State; and that they are, in a great many cases, monuments of the most impudent and unscrupulous fraud, there can be no smallest doubt. Well, it may be asked, What are you going to do about it? Will you accept the inevitable evils that march in the rear of all public or private charity, or will you sweep all the various agencies, which have relieved such manifold varieties of human want and alleviated to such an incalculable degree human misery, out of existence? Will you care to contemplate what a great city like New York or London would be if to-morrow you closed the doors of all the hospitals, _crèches_, homes of the aged, asylums for the crippled, the blind, the insane, and the like, and turned their inmates one and all into the street? That is certainly a very dramatic alternative to present; but suppose that we look at it a little more closely. And, in order that we may, I shall ask my reader to go back with me, not to that primitive or barbaric era to which I began by referring, but only to a somewhat earlier stage in our own social history, with which many persons now living are abundantly familiar. One of the interesting and startling contrasts which might be presented to one anxious to impress a stranger with our American progress would be to take only our present century, and group together, out of its statistics, the growth and development, in its manifold varieties, during that period in any city, great or small, of institutional charity. But if such a one were just he would have, first of all, to put upon his canvas some delineation of that situation which, under so many varying conditions and amid such widely dissimilar degrees of privilege or of opportunity, preceded it. I listened the other day to the story of a charming woman, of marked culture and refinement, as she depicted, with unconscious grace and art, the life of a gentlewoman of her own age and class--she was young and fair and keenly sympathetic--on a Southern plantation before the civil war. One got such a new impression of those whom, under other skies and in large ignorance of their personal ministries or sacrifices, we had been wont to picture as indolent, exclusive, indifferent to the sorrow and disease and ignorance that, on a great rice or cotton or sugar plantation in the old days, were all about them; and one learned, with a new sense of reverence for all that is best in womanhood, how, in days that are now gone forever, there were under such conditions the most skillful beneficence and the most untiring sympathies. But, in the times of which I speak, the service on the plantation for the sick slave (which, an ungracious criticism might have suggested, since a slave was ordinarily a valuable piece of property, had something of a sordid element in it) was matched in communities and under conditions where no such suspicion was possible. No one who knows anything of life in our smaller communities at the beginning of the century can be ignorant of what I mean. There was no village or smallest aggregation of families that had not its Abigail, its "Aunt Hannah," its "Uncle Ben," who, when there was sickness or want or sorrow in a neighbor's house, was always on hand to sympathize and to succor. I do not forget that it is said that, even under our greatly changed conditions, in modern cities this is still true of the very poor and of their kindness and mutual help to one another; and I thank God that I have abundant reason, from personal observation, to know that it is. But, happily, neither great cities nor small are largely made up of the very poor, and the considerations that I am aiming to present to those who will follow me through these pages are not concerned with these. What I am now aiming to get before my readers is that there was a time, and that it was not so very long ago, when that vast institutional charity which exists among us to-day, and which I believe to be in so many aspects of it so grave a menace to our highest welfare, did not exist, because it had no need to exist. The ordinary American community, East or West, had, as distinguishing it, however small its numbers and narrow its means, two characteristics which our modern systems of institutional charity are widely conspiring to extinguish and destroy. One of these was that resolute endurance of straitness and poverty of which there is so fine and true a portraiture in Miss Wilkins's remarkable story Jerome. I venture to say that the charm of that rare book, to a great many of the most intelligent and appreciative of its readers, lay in the fact that they could match it, or something like it, in their own experience; that they had known silent and proud women, and brave and proud boys, to whom, whatever the hard pinch of want that they knew, to accept a dole was like accepting a blow, and who covered their poverty alike from the eye of inquisitive stranger or kin with a robe of secrecy that was at once impenetrable and all-concealing. Life to them was a battle, and they could lose it, as heroes have lost it on the tented field, without a murmur; but to sue for bread to some other, even if that other were of the same blood, would have smitten them as with the stain of personal dishonor. And over against such, in the days and among the communities of which I speak, were those whose gift and ministry it was--without an intrusive curiosity, without a vulgar ostentation, without a word or look that implied that they guessed the sore need to which they reached out--yet somehow to discover it, to succor it, and then to help, finest and rarest of all, to hide it. Now, then, behind such a condition of things there was a sure and wise discernment, even if it was only instinctive, of a profound moral truth, which was this: that you can not help me, nor I you, without risk. For the most sacred thing in either of us is our manhood or womanhood--that thing which differentiates us from any mere mechanism, that thing in us which says, _I can, I ought, I will_. Take that out of human nature and what is left is not worth considering, save as one might consider any other clever mechanism. But the power to choose, the power to act, and the consciousness that choice and action are to be dominated by something that answers to the instinct of loyalty to God, to self-respect, to the ideals of honor and righteousness--that is what makes life worth living, and any conceivable thing worth seeking or doing. Now, the moment that the question of our mutual relations enters we have to be concerned with the way in which they will act on this power, quality, characteristic--call it what you will--that makes manhood. It is not enough, for example, that my impulse to give you a pint of gin is a benevolent impulse, if certain tendencies in you make it antecedently probable that a pint of gin will presently convert you from the condition of a rational being into that of a beast. And so of any impulse of mine in the direction of beneficence which, in its gratification, threatens manhood--that is, self-reliance, self-respect, independence, the right and faithful use of powers in me. And here we come to the problem which lies at the basis of the whole question of charitable relief, for whatever class and in whatever form. The wholesome elements in that earlier situation, to which I have just referred, were threefold, and in our modern situation each one of them is sorely attenuated, if not wholly absent: 1. In the first place, there was a relative uniformity of condition. In other words, at the beginning of the present century in almost all communities, whether industrial or agricultural, the disparities of estate were inconsiderable. There was perhaps the rich man of the village or town, or two or three or half a dozen of them; but they were rich only relatively, and they were marked exceptions. The great majority of the people were of comparatively similar employments and circumstances. Among these there were indeed considerable varieties of task work, but work and wage were not far apart; and, what was of most consequence, a certain large identity of condition brought into it a certain breadth of sympathy and mutual help, out of which came the outstretched hand and the open door for the man who was out of work and was looking for it. 2. Yes, _who was looking for it_. For here again was a distinguishing note of those earlier days of which I am speaking. Idleness was a distinct discredit, if not dishonor. In communities where everybody had to work, an idler or a loafer was an intolerable impertinence, and was usually made to feel it. 3. And yet, again, there was the vast difference in those days from ours that the industries of the world had not taken on their immensely organized and _mechanized_ characteristics. A mechanic--e. g., out of a job--then could turn his hand to anything that ordinary tools and muscle and intelligence could do. But an ordinary mechanic now must be a skilled mechanician in a highly specialized department, and when he is out of a job there, he is ordinarily out of it all along the line. I might, as my reader will have anticipated me in recognizing, go on almost indefinitely in this direction; but I have said enough, I trust, to prepare him for the point which I want to make in connection with our modern charities and their mischief. Our modern social order, in a word, has become more complex, more segregated, more specialized. A whole class of people in cities--those, I mean, of considerable wealth--with a few noble exceptions (which, however, in our greater cities, thank God, are becoming daily less rare), live in profound ignorance of the condition of their fellow-citizens. Now and then, by some sharp reverse in the financial world or some national recurrence of "bad times," they are made aware that large numbers of their neighbors are out of work and starving. And, at all times, they are no less reminded that there is a considerable class--how appallingly large it is growing to be in New York Mr. Coler has told us--who need help, or think they do, and who, at any rate, more or less noisily demand it in the street, at the door, by begging letter, or in a dozen other ways that make the rich man understand why the prayer of Agur was, "Give me neither poverty nor riches."[1] [Footnote 1: Proverbs xxx, 8.] Well, something must be done, they agree. What shall it be? Shall the State do it, or the Church, or the individual? If only they could, as to that, agree! But it has been one of the most pathetic notes of our heedless and superficial treatment of a great problem that, here, there has not been from the beginning even the smallest pretense of a common purpose or any moderately rational course of action. Undoubtedly it is true that there is no imaginable mechanism that could relieve any one of these agencies from responsibility in the matter of relief to the unfortunate, nor is it desirable that there should be. Sometimes it has been the Church that has undertaken the relief of the poor and sick, sometimes it has been largely left to the individual, and sometimes it has been as largely left to the State. But, in any case, the result has been almost as often as otherwise mischievous, or corrupt and corrupting. For, in fact, the ideal mode of dealing with the problems of sickness, destitution, and disablement should be one in which the common endeavor of the State, the Church, and the individual should be somehow unified and co-ordinated. But, incredible as it ought to be, the history of the best endeavors toward such co-ordination has been a history of large inadequacy and of meager results. As an illustration of this it is enough to point to the history of the Charity Organization Society in New York, which, I presume, is not greatly different from that of similar societies elsewhere. Antecedently it would have seemed probable that such a society, which aims simply to discourage fraud, to relieve genuine want, and to protect the community from being preyed upon by the idle and the vicious, would have the sympathy of that great institution, some of whose teachings are, "If any man will not work, neither shall he eat"; "Stand upright on thy feet"; "Provide things honest in the sight of all men"; "Not slothful in business"; and the like. But, as a matter of fact, such societies have had no more bitter antagonists than the churches, and no more vehement opponents than ministers of religion. In a meeting composed of such persons I have heard one of their number denounce with the most impassioned oratory any agency which undertook, by any mechanism, to intrude into the question of the circumstances, resources, or worthiness of those who were the objects of ecclesiastical almsgiving. Who, he demanded, could know so well as the clergy all the facts needed to enable them wisely and judiciously to assist those worthy and needy brethren who were of their own household of faith? Nothing could sound more plausible or probable; but in a little while it happened that a woman who had for years been a beneficiary of this very pastor died, leaving behind her, among her effects, sundry savings-bank books which showed her to be possessed of some thousands of dollars, which she bequeathed to relatives in a distant land. Still more recently a case of a similar character has occurred in which a still larger amount having been paid over in small sums through a long series of years by a church, the whole, with interest, has been found to have been hoarded, the recipient having been a person entirely capable of self-support, and, as a matter of fact, during the whole period self-supporting, and the large accumulations are at present the subject of a suit in which the church is endeavoring to recover what it not unnaturally regards as its own misappropriated money. And yet, as any one knows who knows anything of the delicacy, vigilancy, and thoroughness with which a well-organized society conducts its work, any such grotesque and deplorable result would, with a little wise co-operation between the Church and such a society, have been rendered impossible. I know how impatient many good people are of the services of any such association, and we have all heard _ad nauseam_ of their protests against a "spy system which invades the sacred privacy of decent poverty," and the rest; but, in fact, such persons never seem to realize that, in one aspect of it, the Church stands, or, as a matter of common honesty, as the administrator of trust funds, ought to stand, on the same equitable basis, at least, as a life-insurance company. Now, when I seek the benefits of a life-insurance company I am asked certain questions which affect not only my physical resources but my diseases, my ancestry and their diseases, my personal habits, infirmities, and the like. If the company has the right, in the just interests of its other clients, to ask these questions, as administering a large trust, has not the Church, which is also the administrator of a trust no less in the interest of other clients? But, indeed, this is the lowest aspect of such a question, and I freely admit it. The title of this paper points to that gravest aspect of it, with which I am now concerned. The largest mischief of indiscriminate almsgiving is not its wanton waste--it is its inevitable and invariable degradation of its objects. I have spoken of the grave antagonism of the Church to wisely organized charity, but it is but the echo of the hostility of the individual, and often of the best and wisest men and women. Elsewhere (but not, I think, in print) I have related an incident in this connection of which one is almost tempted to say _ex uno disce omnes_. Approaching one day, when I was a pastor in a great city, the door of one of my clerical brethren, I observed a woman leaving it who, though she hastily turned her back upon me, I recognized as a member of my own congregation. On entering my friend's study I said to him: "I beg your pardon, but was not that Mrs. ---- whom I saw leaving your door a moment ago?" "Yes." "What was she after, may I ask?" My friend--now, alas! no longer living--was a man distinguished by singular delicacy and chivalry of character and bearing, and he turned upon me with some surprise and _hauteur_ and said: "Well, yes, you may ask; but I do not know that, in the matter of the sad and painful circumstances of one of my own parishioners, I am called upon to answer." "Precisely," I replied; "but, as it happens, she isn't your parishioner." "What do you mean, sir?" he exclaimed, with some heat. "Do you suppose that I don't know the members of my own flock?" "On the contrary," I said, "I have no doubt that you know not only them but the members of a great many other flocks, as in the instance of the person who has just left your door, who, as it happens, has been a member of the church of which I am rector for some fifteen years." The remark and the abundant evidence with which I was able to re-enforce it at last persuaded my friend to institute further inquiries, which resulted in the discovery that the subject of those inquiries maintained similar relations with some seven parishes, from every one of which she was receiving, as a poor widow, a monthly allowance! And yet my reverend brother was one of the most strenuous opponents of any system or society, any challenge or interrogation which, as he said, came between him and _his_ poor. Alas! though in one sense they were his poor, in another they were as remote from him as if they and he had been living in different hemispheres. With every sympathy for their distresses, he had not come to recognize that, under those complex conditions of our modern life, to which I have already referred, a real knowledge of the classes upon whom need and misfortune and the temptations to vice and idleness press most heavily has become almost a science, in which training, experience, most surely a large faith, but no less surely a large wisdom, are indispensable. In this work there is undoubtedly a place for institutional charity, and also for that other which is individual. The former affords a sphere for a wise economy, for prompt and immediate treatment or relief, and for the utilization of that higher scientific knowledge and those better scientific methods which the home, and especially the tenement house, can not command. But over against these advantages we are bound always to recognize those inevitable dangers which they bring with them. The existence of an institution, whether hospital, almshouse, or orphanage, to the care of which one may easily dismiss a sick member of the household, or to which one may turn for gratuitous care and treatment, must inevitably act as strong temptations to those who are willing to evade personal obligations that honestly belong to them. In connection with an institution for the treatment of the eye and ear, with which I happen to be officially connected, it was found, not long ago, that the number of patients who sought it for gratuitous treatment was considerably increased by persons who came to the hospital in their own carriages, which they prudently left around the corner, and whose circumstances abundantly justified the belief that they were quite able to pay for the treatment, which, nevertheless, their self-respect did not prevent them from accepting as a dole. Such incidents are symptomatic of a tendency which must inevitably degrade those who yield to it, and which is at once vicious and deteriorating. How widespread it is must be evident to any one who has had the smallest knowledge of the unblushing readiness with which institutional beneficence is utilized in every direction. A young married man in the West, I have been told, wrote to his kindred in the East: "We have had here a glorious revival of religion. Mary and I have been hopefully converted. Father has got very old and helpless, and so we have sent him to the county house." One finds himself speculating with some curiosity _what_ religion it was to which this filial scion was converted. Certainly it could not have been that which is commonly called Christian! And at the other end of the social scale the situation is often little better. In our greater cities homes have been provided for the aged, and especially for that most deserving class of gentlewomen who, having been reared in affluence, come to old age, after having struggled to maintain themselves by teaching, needlework, and the like, with broken powers and empty purses. But it has, I am informed, been often impossible to find places for them in institutions especially created for their care, because its lady managers have filled their places with their own worn-out servants, who, having spent their years and strength in their employer's service, are turned over in their old age, with a shrewd frugality which one can not but admire, to be maintained at the cost of other people. It is impossible to confront such instances, and they might be multiplied indefinitely, without recognizing how enormous are the possibilities of mischief even in connection with the most useful institutional charity. And yet these are not so great as those which no less surely follow, as it is oftenest administered, in the train of individual beneficence. In an unwritten address, not long ago, I mentioned an illustration of this which I have been asked to repeat here. While a rector in a large city parish, I was called upon by a stranger who asked for money, and who, as evidence of his claims upon my consideration, produced a letter from my father, written some twenty-five years before, when he was Bishop of Pennsylvania. The writer had, when this letter was placed in my hands, been dead for some twenty years, but, in a community in which he had been greatly loved and respected, his words had not, even in that lapse of time, lost their power. The letter was a general letter, addressed to no one, and therein lay its mischief. When read, it had in each instance been returned to its bearer, and he soon discovered that he had in it a talisman that would open almost any pocket. He was originally a mechanic who had been temporarily disabled by a fit of sickness; when I saw him, however, he was obviously, and doubtless for years had been, in robust health. But he had discovered that if he were willing to beg he need not work, and he had long before made his choice on the side of ease and indolence. After reading the letter which he produced, and looking at its date and soiled condition, both revealing the long service that it had performed, I said to him, "No, I will not give you anything, but I will pay you ten dollars if you will let me have that letter." It would not be easy to describe the leer of cunning and contempt with which he promptly took it out of my hand, folded it, placed it in his pocketbook, and left the room. He was not so innocent as to surrender his whole capital in trade! Now, here was a man to whom a well-meaning but inconsiderate act of kindness had been the cause of permanent degradation. The highest qualities in such a one--manhood, self-respect, frugal and industrious independence--had been practically destroyed, and an act of charity had made of one who was doubtless originally an honest and hard-working young man, a mendicant, a loafer, and a fraud. And yet for a sincere and self-sacrificing purpose to help our less fortunate fellow-men there were never so many inspiring and encouraging opportunities. Along with the undeniably increasing complexity of our modern life there have arisen those attractive instrumentalities for a genuine beneficence which find their most impressive illustrations in the improvements of the homes of the poor in college settlements, in young men's and young girls' clubs in connection with our mission churches, in the kindergartens and in the cooking schools founded by these and other beneficent agencies, in juvenile societies for teaching handicrafts and encouraging savings, and, best of all, in that resolute purpose to know how the other half live, of which the noble service of Edward Denison in England; of college graduates in England and in America, who have made the college and university settlements their post-graduate courses; of such women here and in Chicago as Miss Jane Addams, and the charming group of gentlewomen living in the House in Henry Street, New York, maintained with such modest munificence by Mr. Jacob Schiff; of such laborious and discerning scrutiny and sympathy as have been shown in the studies and writings of my friend Mr. Jacob Riis--are such noble and enkindling examples. These and such as these are indicating to us the lines along which our best work for the relief of ignorance and suffering and want may to-day be done, and the more closely they are studied, and the more intimately the classes with which they are concerned are known, the more abundantly they will vindicate themselves. For these latter have in them, far more commonly than we are wont to recognize, those higher instincts of self-respect and of manly and womanly independence that, in serving our fellow-men, we must mainly count upon. There are doubtless instinctive idlers and mendicants among the poor, as, let us not forget, there are chronic idlers, borrowers, "sponges," among the classes at the other end of the social scale. But the same divine image is in our brother man everywhere, and the better, more truly, more closely we know him, the more profoundly we shall realize it. During some six weeks spent, a few years ago, in the most crowded ward in the world, among thousands of people who lived in the narrowest quarter and upon the most scanty wage, I gave six hours every day to receiving anybody and everybody who came to me. During that time I had visits from dilapidated gentlemen from Albany and Jersey City and Philadelphia and the like, who supposed that I was a credulous fool whose money and himself would be soon parted, and who gave me what they considered many excellent reasons for presenting them with five dollars apiece. But, during that whole period, not one of the many thousands who lived in the crowded tenements all around me, and to hundreds of whom I preached three times a week, asked me for a penny. Not one! They came to me by day and by night, men and women, boys and girls, for counsel, courage, sympathy, admonition, reproof, guidance, and such light as I could give them--but never, one of them, for money. They are my friends to-day, and they know that I am theirs; and, little as that last may mean to the weakest and the worst of them, I believe that, in the case of any man or woman who tries to understand and hearten his fellow, it counts for a thousandfold more than doles, or bread, or institutional relief. THE HOPI INDIANS OF ARIZONA. BY GEORGE A. DORSEY. As one approaches the center of Arizona, along the line of the Santa Fé Railroad, whether he come from the east or from the west, his attention is sure to be arrested by several tall, spire-like hills which are silhouetted against the sky to the far north. These peaks are the Moki Buttes, and to the north of them lies the province of Tusayan, the land of the Mokis, or the Hopis, as they prefer to be called. That country to-day contains more of interest to the student of the history of mankind than any other similar-sized area on the American continent. But very few of the great throng that roll by on the Santa Fé trains every year in quest of pleasure, of recreation, of new scenes and strange, stop off at Holbrook or Winslow to take the journey to the Hopis, and very few even know of the existence of these curiously quaint pueblos of this community, which to-day lives pretty much as it did before Columbus set out on his long voyage to the unknown West. The term _pueblo_, a Spanish word meaning town, is by long and continued use now almost confined to the clusters of stone and adobe houses which to-day shelter the sedentary Indians of New Mexico and Arizona. Not only are these Indian towns called "pueblos," but we speak of the Indians themselves as the Pueblo Indians, and of the culture of the people--for they all have much in common--as the pueblo culture. This similarity of culture is not due to unity of race or of language, but is the resultant of a peculiar environment. In recent times, the limits of the pueblo-culture area have contracted to meet the demands of the white man; we know also that before the advent of the Spaniard many once populous districts had been abandoned, and as a result there came to be fewer but larger villages. We know also, both from tradition and from archæological evidence, that in former days the pueblo people inhabited many of the villages of southern Colorado and Utah, and that the Hopis and their kin were numerous in many parts of Arizona. The silent houses of the cliffs, the ruins of central Arizona, and the great crumbling masses of adobe of the Salt and Gila River valleys and in northern Chihuahua are all former habitations of the Pueblo Indian. To-day there are no representatives of these people in Utah or Colorado, while the seven Hopi towns of Tusayan alone remain in Arizona. But there are still many pueblos scattered along the Rio Grande, Jemez, and San Juan Rivers in New Mexico. Alike in culture, we may divide the existing pueblos into four linguistic groups--namely, the Hopis of Arizona, the Zuñis of New Mexico, the Tehuas east of the Rio Grande, and the Queres to the west of the Rio Grande. Of the earlier home of the last three stocks we know but little. The ancestors of the Hopis we know came from different directions--some from the cliff dwellings of the north, others from central Arizona. To-day, however, they form a congeries of clans united and welded into a unit by similarity of purpose and by the more powerful influence of a peculiar environment. The opinion was held until within a very few years that the Hopis represented a small branch of the Shoshonean division of the Uto-Aztecan stock, but Dr. Fewkes, our greatest authority on the Hopi, has questioned the accuracy of this classification, and it can be stated that the true affinities of the Hopi have not yet been discovered. The province of Tusayan, or the Moqui Reservation, as it is officially known to-day, contains about four thousand square miles and about two thousand Indians. It is in the northeastern part of Arizona, and its towns are about eighty miles by trail from the railroad. The present inhabitants are grouped in seven pueblos, located on three parallel _mesas_, or table-lands, which extend southward like stony fingers toward the valley of the Little Colorado River. The first or east mesa contains the pueblos of Walpi, Sitcomovi, and Hano; on the second or middle mesa are Miconinovi, Cipaulovi, and Cuñopavi; and on the third or west mesa stands Oraibi, largest and most ancient of all Hopi pueblos, and in many respects the best preserved and most interesting community in the world. A community without a church, separated by a broad, deep valley from its nearest neighbor, with but a single white man within twenty miles, removed nearly thirty-five miles from a trading post, isolated, proud, spurning the advances of the Government, Oraibi could maintain its independence if every other community on the earth were blotted out of existence. The journey from Winslow to Oraibi is not without great interest. The beautiful snow-capped peaks of the San Francisco Mountain are always in sight far away to the west, and when the eye tires of the rigid and immovable desert their graceful outlines check the often rising feeling of utter helplessness. Then there is a sweep and barrenness of the plain which is impressive and often awe-inspiring, and which at times produces a feeling similar to that created by the sea. Save for the stunted cottonwoods along the Little Colorado River, there is scant vegetation to relieve the bright reds, yellows, and blues of the painted desert over which the sun's heat quivers and dances, revealing here and there mirages of lakes and forests of wonderfully deceptive vividness. Arising out of the plain here and there are brief expanses of table-lands, with the soft under strata crumbled away and the higher strata having fallen down the sides, producing often the appearance of a ruined castle. At the foot of the mesas are clumps of sagebrush and grease wood, while the plain is dotted here and there with patches of cactus and bright-colored flowers. Foxes and wolves are common enough, and we are rarely out of sight or sound of the coyote, bands of which make night hideous with their shrill, weird cry. Although the Navajo country proper is to the north and east of Tusayan, their _hogans_, or thatched-roofed dugouts, are met with here and there along the valley of the river. The Navajos are the Bedouins of America. We often see the women in front of the hogans weaving, or the men along the trail tending their flocks of sheep and goats, for they are great herders and produce large quantities of wool, part of which they exchange to the traders; the remainder the women weave into blankets, which are in general use throughout the Southwest and which find their way through the trade to all parts of the relic-loving world. They raise, in addition, great quantities of beans, which they also send out to the railroad. They are better supplied with ponies than the Hopi, and with them make long journeys, for the Navajos do not live a communal life as do the pueblo people, but are scattered over an extensive territory, each family living alone and being independent of its neighbors. After a long and tiresome journey of four days we arrive at the foot of the mesa and begin the long, upward climb, for Oraibi is eight hundred feet above the surrounding plain and seven thousand feet above the level of the sea. Just before the crest is reached the trail for fifty or more feet is simply a path along and up the base of a rocky precipice, its steps worn deep by the never-ending line of Indians passing to and fro. Once upon the summit we have an unobstructed view over the dry, arid, sun-parched valleys for many miles--a view which, in spite of its desolation, is extremely fascinating. [Illustration: STREET SCENE, ORAIBI.] We often speak of this or of that town as the oldest on the continent. But here we are in the streets of a town which antedates all other cities of the United States--a pueblo which occupied this very spot when, in 1540, Coronado halted in Cibola and sent Don Pedro de Tobar on to the west to explore the then unknown desert. Imagine seven rather irregularly parallel streets about two hundred yards long, with here and there a more open spot or plaza, lined on each side with mud-plastered, rough-laid stone houses, and you have Oraibi. The houses rise in the form of terraces to a height of two or three stories. As a rule there is no opening to the ground-floor dwellings save through a small, square hatch in the roof. Leading up to this roof are rude ladders, which in a few rare instances are simply steps cut in a solid log, differing in nowise from those found leading into the chambers of the old cliff ruins of southern Colorado. The roof of the first row or terrace of houses forms a kind of balcony or porch for the second terrace, and so the roof of the second-story houses serves a similar useful purpose for the third-story houses. [Illustration: TERRACE SCENE, STREETS OF ORAIBI.] Two things impress one on entering a Hopi home for the first time--the small size of the rooms, with their low ceilings, and the cleanness of the floors. Both floors and walls are kept fresh and bright by oft-renewed coats of thin plaster, which is always done by the woman, for she owns the house and all within it; she builds it and keeps it in repair. The ceiling is of thatch held up by poles, which in turn rest on larger rafters. Apart from the mealing bins and the _piki_ stones, to be described later, there is no furniture--no table, no chairs, no stools, simply a shelf or two with trays of meal or bread, and near the wall a long pole for clothing, suspended by buckskin thongs from the rafters. Their bed is a sheepskin rug and one or two Navajo blankets spread on the floor wherever there may be a vacant space. In one corner may be a pile of corn stacked up like cordwood, and in another corner melons or squashes and a few sacks of dried peaches or beans. Between the thatch and rafters you will find bows and arrows, spindles, hairpins, digging-sticks, and boomerangs, and from the wall may hang a doll or two, children's playthings. Such is an Oraibi home; but it always seems a happy home, and the traveler is always welcome. [Illustration: STREET SCENE, ORAIBI.] A prominent feature of almost every pueblo plaza is a squarish, boxlike elevation which extends about two feet above the level of the earth and measures about six feet in length, with a two-foot hole in the center, from which projects to a considerable height the posts of a ladder. If you descend this ladder you will find yourself in a subterranean chamber, rectangular in shape, and measuring about twenty-five feet in length by about fifteen feet in breadth, with a height from the floor to the ceiling of about ten feet. This underground room is the _kiva_, or the _estufa_ of the Spaniards. Here are held all the secret rites of religious ceremonies, and here the men resort to smoke, to gossip, to spin, and weave. The floor, to an extent of two thirds of the entire length, except for a foot-wide space extending around this portion, is excavated still farther to a depth of a foot and a half. The remaining elevated portion is for the spectators, while the banquette around the excavation is used by the less active participants in the ceremonies. Just under the hatchway and in front of the spectators' floor is a depression which is used as a fire hearth. The walls are neatly coated with plaster, and the entire floor is paved with irregularly shaped flat stones fitted together in a rough manner. There is sometimes inserted in the floor, at the end removed from the spectators, a plank with a circular hole about an inch and a half in diameter; this hole is called the _sipapu_, and symbolizes the opening in the earth through which the ancestors of the Hopi made their entrance into this world. The roof of the kiva is supported by great, heavy beams, which are brought from the San Francisco Mountain with infinite trouble and labor. In Oraibi there are thirteen kivas, each probably in the possession of some society, one of which belongs to women, who there erect their altar in the _mamzrouti_ ceremony. Oraibi has the largest number of kivas of any of the Hopi pueblos; in a single plaza there are no less than four kivas. This plaza is on the west side of the village, and one of the kivas is of special interest, for in it are held the secret rites of the weird snake ceremony. A little to the west of this plaza is a small bit of the mesa, standing apart and separated from the main mesa by a depression. This is known as "Oraibi rock," whence the pueblo takes its name. The etymology of this name "Oraibi" is lost in a misty past, but the rock is still held in great veneration. On it stands a rude shrine, where one may always find sacrificial offerings of prayer-sticks, pipes, sacred meal, cakes, etc. [Illustration: ORAIBI ROCK, UPON WHICH STANDS KATCIN KIKU, THE PRINCIPAL ORAIBI SHRINE.] The roof of a Hopi house is always of interest. Here we may see corn drying in the sun or loads of fagots ready for use, women dressing their hair or fondling their babies, or groups of children playing or roasting melon seeds in an old broken earthenware vessel which rests on stones over a fire. From the projecting rafters are ears of corn hung up to dry, or pieces of meat placed there to be out of reach of the dogs, or bunches of yarn just out of the dye pot. When a ceremony is being performed in some one of the plazas the roofs near by present a scene which is animated in the extreme, every square foot of space being occupied by a merry, good-natured throng of young and old. As one looks from one group to another it is impossible not to notice the stunted and dwarfed appearance of the women, which is in marked contrast to that of the men, who are beautifully formed, of medium height, and of well-knit frames. There is not, however, the same powerful ruggedness or splendid development among these pueblo dwellers which we find among the plains Indians, for the days of the Hopi women are spent in carrying water and grinding corn, while the men in summer till their fields and in winter spin and weave. In considering the routine life of the Hopi it is hard to draw a sharp line between what we may call his regular daily occupations and his religious life, for they are closely interwoven. He is by nature a religionist, and he never forgets his allegiance and obligations to the unseen forces which control and command him. [Illustration: AN ORAIBI MOTHER AND CHILDREN.] In nothing is the primitiveness or the absence from contamination of the Hopi better revealed than in the children, for here, as elsewhere, is it shown that they are the best conservators of the habits and customs of ancestral life. What utter savages the little fellows are! Stark naked generally, whether it be summer or winter, dirty from head to foot, their long black hair disheveled and tangled and standing out in every direction, their head often resembling a thick matted bunch of sagebrush. They are never idle; now back of the village behind tiny stone ramparts eagerly watching their horsehair bird snares, or engaged in a sham battle with slings and corncobs, or grouped in threes or fours about a watermelon, eagerly and with much noise gorging themselves to absolute fullness, or down on the side of the mesa playing in the clay pits. A not uncommon sight is that of two or three little fellows trudging off in pursuit of imaginary game, armed with miniature bows and arrows or with boomerangs and digging-sticks. In their disposition toward white visitors they are extremely shy and reticent, but they are also very inquisitive and curious, and, furthermore, they have a sweet tooth, and one only need display a stick of candy to have half the infantile population of the pueblo at his heels for an hour at a time. If perchance one of the little fellows should die, he is not buried in the common cemetery at the foot of the mesa, but he is laid away among the rocks in some one of the innumerable crevices which are to be found on all sides near the top of the mesa, for the Hopis, in common with many other native tribes of America, believe that the souls of departed children do not journey to the spirit land, but are born again. [Illustration: GRAVE OF CHILD IN ROCK CREVICE.] As the girls reach the age of ten or twelve they distinguish themselves by dressing their hair in a manner which is both striking and absolutely unique on the face of the earth. The hair is gathered into two rolls on each side of the head, and then, at a distance of from one to two inches, is wound over a large U-shaped piece of wood into two semicircles, both uniting in appearance to form a single large disk, the diameter of which is sometimes as much as eight inches. After marriage the hair is parted in the middle over the entire head, and is gathered into two queues, one on each side, which are then wound innumerable times by a long hair string beginning a few inches from the head and extending about four inches. The ends of the queues are loose. Hopi maidens are, as a rule, possessed of fine, regular features, slender, lithe, and graceful bodies, and are often beautiful. But with the early marriage comes a daily round of drudgery, which prevents full development and stunts and dwarfs the body. But to old age she is generally patient, cheerful, nor does she often complain. Lines produced by toil and labor may show in her face, but rarely those of worry or discontent. Even long before marriage she has not only learned to help her mother in the care of her younger brothers and sisters, but she has already trained her back to meet the requirements of the low-placed corn mills. From her tenth year to her last it has been estimated that every Hopi woman spends on an average three hours out of every twenty-four on her knees stooping over a _metate_, or corn-grinder, for corn forms about ninety per cent of the vegetable food of the Hopis. In every house you will find, in a corner, a row of two, three, or four square boxlike compartments or bins of thin slabs of sandstone set on edge. Each bin contains a metate set at an angle with its lower edge slightly below the level of the floor. There is a clear space around each stone to permit of a better disposition of the corn and meal. The texture of the metates is graduated from the first to the last, the final one being capable of grinding the finest meal. Accompanying the metate is a crushing or grinding stone about a foot in length and from three to four inches wide. Its under surface is flat, while its upper surface is convex to a slight extent, so as to permit of its being grasped firmly by the thumb and fingers of both hands. The corn is ground between these two stones, the upper one being worked up and down the metate by a motion of the operator not unlike that of a woman washing clothes on a washboard. The favorite position assumed by the woman while working is to sit on her knees, her toes resting against the wall of the house behind her. Of the many colors of corn used by the Hopis, blue is the most common, and corn of this color is ordinarily employed in the making of bread; other colors, however, are used for the piki consumed in ceremonial feasts. The stone used by the Oraibians for making piki is from a sandstone quarry near Burro Springs. It is about twenty inches long by fourteen broad, and is three inches thick. The upper surface is first dressed by means of stone picks, and is polished by a hard rubbing-stone, and then finally treated with pitch and other ingredients until its surface is as smooth as glass. It is mounted on its two long edges by upright slabs, so that it stands about ten inches from the level of the floor, the floor itself being usually excavated to a depth of two or three inches beneath the stone. At a height of about four feet above this primitive griddle is a large rectangular hood which is extended above the roof in the form of a chimney made of bottomless pots, one resting on the other. Kneeling in front of the stone and supporting her body with her left arm, the woman coats the stone with the thin batter of corn and water with the fingers of her right hand. After a few seconds' time she lifts the waferlike sheet from the stone and transfers it to a mat which is made for this special purpose. For some time the piki remains soft and pliable, and while in this condition she rolls or folds the sheets according to her custom--some folding, others rolling it. It is a curious sight on the feast days of certain ceremonies to see women gathering from all quarters of the village at an appointed house, each carrying a tray heaped high with rolls of this paper bread. [Illustration: WOMAN OF ORAIBI MAKING COILED POTTERY.] The Hopis are among the foremost potters in North America, when we take into consideration the fineness of the clays used and the character of the decoration. But in many respects, especially in form, their ware is much inferior to that of the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians. They make pottery to-day as they did hundreds of years ago, but the quality of the work has greatly deteriorated and the earthenware now produced is not to be compared with that found in near-by Hopi ruins. It should be kept in mind, however, that the specimens found in the ancient graves are to a certain extent ceremonial, and consequently better made and more ornate in their decoration than those which were made simply for household purposes. Still, there are a fineness of texture and a delicacy of coloring in the ancient ware which can not now be produced. It is to be noted, also, that the Hopi woman of to-day can not decipher the designs on the earlier pottery, although she often copies them. The demand for earthenware vessels, however, is nearly as great at present as it was in prehistoric days, for you may search the homes of Oraibi for a long time without finding a tin pan or an iron pot. Thus it is that every Hopi woman must be a worker in clay, and one of the occasional sights is that of a woman on her "front porch" surrounded by vessels of all sizes and in varying degrees of completeness. The process of pottery-making is somewhat as follows: After the clay has been worked into a plastic mass she draws out from it a round strip the size of one's finger and about five inches in length. This is coiled flat in the bottom of the tray, and forms the base of the vessel. Other clay strips are kneaded out of the mass, and these are coiled in a gradually increasing spiral, the desired shape and proportion being acquired at the same time, until the vessel has reached its proper height. The sides of the vessel are then thinned down, and both inside and outside are made smooth by means of small bits of gourds and polishing-stones. The vessel is then ready for a coat of wash, after which it is painted and fired. This method of making pottery is not peculiar to the pueblos, but is found among some of the tribes of South America. The art of basketry was never brought to a high state among the Hopis, for they confine themselves chiefly to the manufacture of large shallow trays and rough baskets made of the long, pliable leaves of the yucca or of some other fiber. These answer all ordinary domestic requirements. From the reddish-brown branches of a willowlike bush which grows near, the Hopi mother interweaves a cradle board for her children. This cradle is peculiar in its shape, and especially so in its construction, and differs greatly from that in use among the plains Indians. Another singular point to be noted is the fact that this cradle board is not often strapped to the back, but is usually in the arms, or, more often still, is placed on the floor by the side of the mother as she works. The Oraibi mesa, like other table-lands of Tusayan, is destitute of water. The nearest spring is in the valley at the foot of the mesa nearly a mile away. From before sunrise to ten o'clock of every day there is an almost unbroken line of water carriers going and coming from the spring, bending under the weight of a large jar which they carry on their back by means of a blanket, the ends of which are tied in a knot on their forehead. No wonder these women grow prematurely old. Winter for them, however, has its advantages, for they have an ingenious way of utilizing the snow to save them from the necessity of going down the mesa for water. One of the most extraordinary sights I saw was that of a Hopi woman and her little girl trudging along, each bent almost to the ground under the weight of an immense snowball. These they were carrying home on their backs, enveloped in a blanket. About half a mile from the pueblo, back on the mesa, reservoirs have been scooped out in the soft sandstone, which are often partially filled by the spring rains, but the water soon becomes brackish and is not potable, but is used for washing clothes. The costume of the woman consists ordinarily of four pieces--a blanket, dress, belt, and moccasins. The blanket is of wool, and is about four feet square. It is blue in color, with a black border on two sides. These two edges are usually bound with a heavy green or yellow woolen thread. To make the dress, this blanket is once folded and is sewn together with red yarn at the long side, except for a space sufficiently large to accommodate one arm. The folded upper border is also sewn for a short space, which rests on one of the shoulders. The other shoulder and both arms are bare, except as they may be partially covered by the blanket. The belt or sash is of black and green stripes, with a red center, ornamented with geometric designs in black; it is about four inches wide, and is long enough to permit of being wound around the waist two or three times. The moccasins are of unpainted buckskin, one side of the top of which terminates in a long, broad strip, which is wound round the leg several times and extends up to the knee, thus forming a thick legging. More than half the time the Hopi woman is barefooted. The girls wear silver earrings, or suspend from the lobe of the ear small rectangular bits of wood, one side of which is covered with a mosaic of turquoise. This custom is of some antiquity, as ear pendants exactly similar to these have been found in the Hopi ruins of Homolobi, on the Little Colorado River. In addition to this regulation costume, worn on all ordinary occasions, each Hopi woman is supposed to own a bridal costume and two special blankets, which are worn only in ceremonies, and hence need not here be described. The bridal costume consists of a pair of moccasins, two pure white cotton blankets, one large and the other small, both having large tassels of yellow and the black yarn at each corner, and a long, broad, white sash, each end of which terminates in a fringe of balls and long thread. All three garments, before being used, are covered with a thick coat of kaolin, so that they are quite stiff. With these garments belongs a reed mat sufficiently large to envelop the small blanket and the sash. So far as I am able to learn, the three pieces of this remarkable costume are never worn except on a single occasion, and at only one other time does the bride formally appear in any of them. About a month after the marriage ceremony has been performed, during which time she has been living with the family of her husband, she completes the marriage ceremony by returning to the house of her mother. This is termed "going home," and this will be her place of abode until she and her husband own a dwelling of their own. For this ceremony she puts on the larger of the two blankets, which reaches almost to the ground and comes up high on the back of the head, covering her ears. The smaller blanket and the sash are rolled up in the mat, and with this in front of her on her two arms she begins her journey "home." This white cotton costume is probably a survival from times which antedate the introduction of wool into the Southwest. Who makes all these garments, blankets, etc.? Not the women, as you might expect, but the men. A Hopi woman doesn't even make her own moccasins. If you will descend into one of the kivas on almost any day of the year, except when the secret rites of ceremonies are being held, you will behold an industrious and an interesting scene. You will find a group of men, naked except for a loin cloth, all busy either with the carding combs, the spindle, or the loom; and to me the most interesting of these three operations is that of the spinning of wool. The spindle itself is long and heavy, and the whorl, in the older examples, is a large disk cut from a mountain goat's horn. There is no attempt at decoration, nor do the spindles compare with those found in Peru and other parts of America for neatness and beauty. An unusual feature of the method employed by the Hopi spinner is the manner in which the spindle is held under one foot while he straightens out the thread preparatory to winding it. For weaving, two kinds of looms are used. One is a frame holding in place a fifteen-inch row of parallel reeds, each about six inches long and perforated in the center. This apparatus is used solely for making belts, sashes, and hair and knee bands. These are not commonly woven in the kiva, but in the open air on the terrace, one end of the warp being fastened to some projecting rafter. The other loom is much larger, and is used for blankets, dresses, and all large garments. It differs in no essential particular from other well-known looms in use by the majority of the aborigines of this continent. The method of suspending the loom is perhaps worth a moment's notice, as in nearly every house and in all kivas special provision is made for its erection. From the wall near the ceiling project two wooden beams, on which, parallel to the floor, is a long wooden pole, and to this is fastened, by buckskin thongs, the upper part of the loom. Immediately under this pole is a plank, flush with the floor, in which at short intervals are partially covered U-shaped cavities in the wood, through which are passed buckskin thongs which are fastened to the lower pole of the loom. The sets of thongs are long enough to permit of the loom being lowered or raised to a convenient height. While at work the weaver generally squats on the floor in front of his loom, or he occasionally sits on a low, boxlike stool. It is no uncommon sight to see, at certain times of the year, as many as six or eight looms in operation at one time in a single kiva. The men also do all the sewing and embroidering. Practically all the yarn consumed by the Hopis is home-dyed, but the colors now used are almost entirely from aniline dyes and indigo. Cotton is no longer used except in the manufacture of certain ceremonial garments, all others being made of wool. They own their own sheep, which find a scant living in the valleys; for the better protection of the sheep from wolves they also keep large numbers of goats. Although the men do all the weaving, they do but little of it for themselves. For the greater part of the year their only garment is the loin cloth--a bit of store calico. In addition, they all own a shirt of cheap black or colored calico, which is generally more or less in rags, and a pair of loose, shapeless pantaloons, made often from some old flour sack or bit of white cotton sheeting. It is a rather incongruous sight to see some old Hopi, his thin legs incased in a dirty, ragged pair of flour-sack trousers, on which can still be traced "XXX Flour, Purest and Best." Neither sex scarifies, tattoos, or paints any part of the body except in ceremonies, when colored paints are used as each ceremony requires. The men often wear large silver earrings, and suspend from their neck as many strands of shell and turquoise beads as their wealth will allow. Some of the younger men wear, in addition, a belt of large silver disks and a shirt and pantaloons of velvet. Most of their silver ornaments, it should be noted, however, have been secured in trade from the Navajos, who are the most expert silversmiths of the Southwest. When the Hopi isn't spinning or weaving, he is in his kiva praying for rain, or he is in the field keeping the crows from his corn. I was once asked if the Hopis plow with oxen or horses. They use neither; they do not plow. When they plant corn they dig a deep hole in the earth with a long, sharp stick until they reach the moist soil. When the corn is sprouted and has reached a height of a few inches there is always the possibility of its being blown flat by the wind or overwhelmed in a sand storm. To provide against this the Hopi incloses the exposed parts of his little field with wind-breakers, made by planting in the earth thick rows of stout branches of brush. These hedges even are often overwhelmed by the sand and completely covered up. And the crows, and the stray horses, and the cattle! Surely the poor Indian must fight very hard for his corn. For nearly two months he never leaves it unguarded, and that he may be comfortable he makes a shelter behind which he can escape the burning rays of the July and August sun. The shelters are occasionally rather pretentious affairs, at times consisting of a thick brush roof, supported by stout rafters which rest on upright posts. More often, however, they simply consist of a row of cottonwood poles, five or six feet high, set upright at a slight angle in the earth. Although corn is by far the most important vegetable food, the rich though sun-parched soil yields large crops of beans and melons of all kinds. [Illustration: VALLEY SCENE; FIELDS AND PEACH TREES. ORAIBI ON MESA TO THE RIGHT.] Peach orchards also thrive in the sheltered valleys near the mesa, and in the fall great patches of peaches may be seen spread out to dry on the rocks of the mesa to the north of the village. Of both beans and peaches the Hopis generally have large quantities for the outside market, which they take over to the railroad on the backs of burros or ponies. Before leaving the subject of the daily life of the male portion of Oraibi I have still to mention a curious weapon of which they make occasional use. This is the throwing-stick, or so-called boomerang, which differs only slightly from that used by the aborigines of Australia; the Hopi stick, however is better made, and is ornamented by short red and black lines. This is the weapon of the young men, and with it they work havoc with the rabbits which infest the valleys. But although they have good control over it, as can often be seen on their return from a hunt, they are not able to cause its return as can the Australians. At first thought it seems rather strange that the boomerang should have been evolved by two groups of mankind dwelling in parts of the world so remote, but we must look for the explanation of this phenomenon in the fact that the natural conditions of the two countries have much in common--a generally level, sandy country, with here and there patches of brush, a peculiar condition which would readily yield itself to the development of an equally peculiar and specialized weapon. [Illustration: ORAIBI MAN TRANSPORTING FIREWOOD WITH BURROS.] For fire the Hopi depends almost entirely on the rank growth of brush which is found along the ravines. This suffices to supply heat to the piki stone and the boiling pot, and enough to keep a fire on the hearth in the kiva. But now and then he must make a distant journey to that part of the mesa where the supply of stunted and scrubby pines and piñons has not already been exhausted; for by custom four kinds of fuel are prescribed for the kivas, and to keep the hearth replenished with these often necessitates long journeys. As the woman bends under her water jar, so the man staggers along under his load of fagots, often carried from a distance of several miles. REFORM OF PUBLIC CHARITY. BY BIRD S. COLER, COMPTROLLER OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK. Abuse of municipal charity in New York city has reached a stage where immediate and radical reform is necessary in order to prevent the application of public funds to the payment of subsidies to societies and institutions where professional pauperism is indirectly encouraged and sustained. More than fifty years ago the city began to pay money to private institutions for the support of public charges. The system has grown without check until to-day New York contributes more than three times as much public money to private or semiprivate charities as all the other large cities in the United States combined. The amounts so appropriated in 1898 by some of the chief cities were: Chicago, $2,796; Philadelphia, $151,020; St. Louis, $22,579; Boston, nothing; Baltimore, $227,350; Cincinnati, nothing; New Orleans, $30,110; Pittsburg, nothing; Washington, $194,500; Detroit, $8,081; Milwaukee, nothing; New York city, $3,131,580.51. No serious attempt has heretofore been made to reform this system of using public funds for the subsidizing of private charities. One reason for this has doubtless been the fact that until recently the local authorities were powerless to avoid or modify the effects of mandatory legislation which has disposed of city moneys without regard to the opinions entertained by the representatives of the local taxpayers. It has always been easier to pass a bill at Albany than to persuade the Board of Estimate and Apportionment of the propriety of bestowing public funds on private charities, and the managers of private charities seeking public assistance have therefore generally proceeded along the line of least resistance. The effect of this system was to make beneficiaries the judges of their own deserts, for the bills presented by them to the Legislature were usually passed without amendment or modification, and gross inequalities in disbursing public funds have arisen, different institutions receiving different rates of payment for the same class of work. In 1890 the city paid for the support of prisoners and paupers in city institutions the sum of $1,949,100, and for paupers in private institutions the sum of $1,845,872. In 1898 these figures had increased to $2,334,456 for prisoners and public paupers, and $3,131,580 for paupers in private institutions. Private charity, so called, has prospered at the expense of the city until in some cases it has become a matter of business for profit rather than relief of the needy. The returns made by institutions receiving appropriations in bulk from the city treasury show that many of them are using the public funds for purposes not authorized by the Constitution. The Constitution authorizes payments to be made for "care, support, and maintenance." The reports of a large number of institutions show the money annually obtained from the city carried forward wholly or in part as a surplus. Different uses are made of this surplus, none of them, however, authorized by law or warranted by a proper regard for the interests of the taxpayers. In some cases this surplus is used to pay off mortgage indebtedness, in others for permanent additions to buildings, or for increase of investments and endowment. In one case the manager of an institution frankly explained a remarkable falling off in disbursements (so great that its charitable activities were almost suspended) by stating that it was proposed, by exercising great economy for a number of years, to let the city's annual appropriations accumulate into a respectable building fund. The flagrant nature of this abuse is so apparent that comment is unnecessary. Appropriations for dependent children have reached enormous proportions. Out of a total of $3,249,623.81 appropriated for private charities in 1899, no less than $2,216,773, or sixty-nine per cent, is for the care and support of children. In no city in the United States will the number of children supported at the public expense compare, in proportion to the population, with the number so cared for in the city of New York. This may be partly accounted for by the extremes of poverty to be met with in the metropolis, especially among the foreign-born population, where the struggle for existence is so severe as to weaken the family ties; partly by the rivalry and competition which have existed between the several institutions devoted to this kind of work; partly by reason of the fact that the rate paid by the city for the care of these children is such as to enable the larger institutions, in all probability, to make a small profit; but, to a considerable extent, also from an insufficient inspection by public officers for the purpose of ascertaining whether children are the proper subjects of commitment and detention. In the city of New York 50,638 children in private institutions are cared for at the public expense. This is one to every sixty-eight of the estimated population of the city. So much for the abuse and extent of public charity. Now for the reforming of the system that was fast approaching the condition of a grave scandal. The last Legislature passed a bill placing in the hands of the local Board of Estimate absolute power over all appropriations for charitable purposes, and for the first time in many years reform is possible. The discretion conferred by this act upon the Board of Estimate and Apportionment carries with it a large responsibility. If hereafter the city, in its relation to private charitable institutions, should either, on the one hand, be wasteful of public funds, or, on the other hand, should fail to perform the duties owed by the community to the dependent classes, the blame can not be shifted to the Legislature, but will rest squarely upon the shoulders of the local authorities. In treating a condition which has been allowed to exist for many years almost without challenge from the local authorities, and which has grown upon the passive or indifferent attitude of the public, sweeping and immediate reforms can be instituted only at the cost of serious temporary injury to certain charitable work of a necessary character. I believe that the best results will be obtained if the city authorities first decide clearly the relations to be established between the city treasury and private charitable institutions, and then move toward that end by gradually conforming the appropriations in the budget to that idea, in such a manner that progress shall be made as rapidly as may be consistent with the desire to avoid crippling excellent charities which have been led to depend for many years upon public assistance. By this, of course, I do not mean to suggest that we should approach the subject with excessive timidity, for the evils that exist have assumed such proportions that a more or less severe use of the pruning knife must be made in dealing with appropriations, else the effect will be scarcely perceptible. I am convinced that ultimately the cause of charity will benefit rather than suffer from this course, for it is a serious objection to the whole subsidy system that it tends to dry up the sources of private benevolence. In making up the budget for 1900 I shall urge my associates in the Board of Estimate to agree with me to limit the appropriations for charity to actual relief work accomplished. The giving of public money in lump sums to private societies and institutions for miscellaneous charitable work, of which there is no public or official inspection, should be discontinued at once. It has been the practice for some years past, both in Brooklyn and New York, to donate annually lump sums of money to such organizations. In New York these amounts have been for the most part comparatively small, and principally derived from the Theatrical and Concert-License Fund. In Brooklyn the amounts have been larger, and were obtained originally from the Excise Fund, and later directly from the budget. This practice should be wholly discontinued. The charter itself contains stringent prohibitions against the distribution of outdoor relief by the Department of Public Charities, and the spirit of these provisions would certainly seem to disfavor accomplishing the same result in an indirect manner. Many of these recipients of public funds devote themselves exclusively to outdoor relief, and an examination of the purposes of some of these organizations shows that, however proper these may be as the result of private benevolence, they are extremely improper objects of the public bounty. The immediate and permanent discontinuance of appropriations to all such societies and institutions will correct one of the gravest abuses of the present system. If the persons conducting these miscellaneous charities are really sincere, and believe that they are doing good, they can readily obtain from private sources the funds necessary to carry on the work. I shall urge that all appropriations to institutions of every kind not controlled by the city be limited to per-capita payment for the support of public charges, and that a system of thorough inspection be at once established to ascertain if present and future inmates are really persons entitled to maintenance at public expense. In addition to this precaution, the comptroller should have full power to withhold payments to any institution after an appropriation has been made if in his judgment, after examination, the money has not been earned. The payment of city money to dispensaries should be discontinued, except in special cases where the work done is clearly a proper charge against the public treasury. No money should be paid for the treatment of dependent persons in any private hospital while there is unoccupied room in the city hospitals. The city maintains its own hospitals, while at the same time subsidizing private institutions which compete with them. During the last few years great improvements have been made in the city hospitals, but their condition is still capable of considerable further improvement. While sometimes overcrowded, it frequently happens that the city hospitals are not filled to the limits of their capacity, and it would seem as though the city should not deal with private hospitals except as subsidiary aids or adjuncts to the public institutions. It stands to reason that so long as there are vacant beds in the city hospitals and the city is at the same time subsidizing private hospitals at a cost greater than the expense of caring for patients in its own institutions, a wrong is being done to the taxpayers. If private hospitals are to receive public assistance at all, payments should be made only at some uniform rate, approximately the same as the cost per capita of maintenance in the public institutions. The gravest problem of public charity is the support and training of dependent children, because that has to do with the making of future citizens of the republic as well as the relief of immediate suffering. This work is entirely in the hands of private societies and institutions. The rearing of large numbers of children in either private or public institutions is in itself an evil--a necessary evil--and likely to continue as long as there is extreme poverty, but still an evil, and not to be fostered by subventions of public money in unnecessary cases, when parents are really able to provide for their support. To build, equip, and maintain public buildings for the care of dependent children seems to me entirely impracticable. Regardless of the matter of expense, which would be enormous, all the disadvantages of the "institutional system" would continue, and it is not likely that public employees could be obtained who would rear children as economically, as efficaciously, or with the same devotion and self-denial as is the case with the religious orders and associations now performing this work--in many respects so successfully. The care of these children by direct governmental agencies being therefore practically impossible, in the city of New York at least, and it being recognized that the present system is likely to continue for many years, if not permanently, the most should be made of it. With the religious training of children the city has nothing to do. Their moral training may also be left safely to those now responsible therefor. On the other hand, the State is vitally concerned with their mental and physical development, and visitation and control for the purpose of maintaining a proper standard in these respects is essential. This form of public charity, like many others, has been abused, and many children are now supported in institutions who probably should not be there. For the rearing of a child into a possible useful man or woman a poor home is better than a good institution, and it is the duty of the city authorities to extend the work of inspection and investigation of such cases until they make it impossible for fraud in the commitment and retention of children to escape detection. The reduction and regulation of appropriations as outlined can not be classed as a radical reform, and will work no hardship upon any dependent person who is a proper charge upon the city. The saving to the taxpayers, if the plan I have suggested is adopted, will approximate one million dollars in 1900, and a steady reduction of expenditures for charitable work should continue for several years to come. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE FROM A PHYSICIAN'S POINT OF VIEW. BY JOHN B. HUBER, A. M., M. D. Christian science is stated to be a religious system which was "discovered," in 1866, by Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, a lady now living in the vicinity of Boston, Mass., who has passed her eightieth year, and who is called by her followers the "Mother of the Christian Science Church," or "Mother Mary." Mrs. Eddy has formulated Christian Science in a book entitled Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, in which book are to be found the principles upon which this system rests. We are told that to him who studies this book reverently and conscientiously there will be revealed "the Truth," for which man has been searching without avail since the beginning of his existence; that the faithful student will find in Christian Science an infallible guide for the conduct of life in all its phases; and that the Christian Scientist has the power to heal without any therapeutic means, other than that of the influence of mind upon mind, all imaginable ills, surgical or medical, which afflict mankind and the lower animals. Mrs. Eddy tells us that she and her followers have had this power transmitted to them from Jesus Christ, and that they are able to heal the sick and to perform miracles as He is said to have done. In Science and Health all religious systems other than "Christian Science" are held to have been erroneous and pernicious in their influence upon mankind, and the practice of medicine, as it is taught in the medical colleges, is considered to be hurtful rather than helpful to humanity, and to have increased disease rather than ameliorated human suffering. It is said that in 1898 there were in the Greater City of New York three thousand Christian Scientists and seven Christian Science churches. The whole number of Christian Scientists is declared to be one million, of whom one hundred thousand, it is said, are engaged in the business of "healing," and are called "healers." The movement has been and is spreading day by day. In religious matters Christian Science has divided many homes, and has destroyed not a few through the mischief produced by its propaganda. It is claimed that Christian Science has cured many who have not been benefited by the efforts of regular practitioners of medicine. On the other hand, many have died during the exclusive ministrations of Christian Scientists. Moreover, Christian Science considers itself entitled to disregard such sanitary laws, including those concerning infectious diseases, as have been found effectual to preserve intact the general health of communities and peoples. Christian Science, then, is a cult unusually powerful and far reaching in its influence, and it is therefore entitled to and should invite correspondingly careful investigation of all its various aspects. I have been interested in Christian Science from the view-point of the medical man, and I have felt quite unaffected, for the reason which I shall presently give, by Mrs. Eddy's stricture that "a person's ignorance of Christian Science is a sufficient reason for his silence on the subject." The system of medicine, as it is taught in the great medical colleges of to-day, is an epitome of the accumulated study and experience of mankind from the time human beings first became ill up to the present day. All systems of cure, or of alleged cure, have been examined by men who have made it the work of their lives to treat the sick. Whatever has been found curative has been retained, and unsubstantiated claims to cure have been discarded; so that the regular degree of doctor of medicine states that its recipient has acquired a knowledge of the system of treating disease which is a crystallization of the world's best medical thought, study, and experience. As the possessor of such a degree, I have been engaged during several months in an investigation of the cures which Christian-Science healers are said to have accomplished. Before beginning this work I reflected that mental suggestion, or the influence of the mind of the physician upon that of the patient, is a potent factor in the treatment of such diseases as are not characterized by permanent pathological changes in the tissues, and I remembered that when judiciously influenced by the physician's mind, the mind of the patient can affect his body favorably both in functional disorders and in disorders which may result from nervous aberration--such as hysteria in all its protean forms, the purely subjective, as headache and hyperæsthesia, and also those exhibiting objective manifestations, as hysterical dislocations and paralyses. I knew that medical men, in their own unadvertised work, employ mental suggestion as a therapeutic means, rely upon it as a part of their armamentarium, and use it in appropriate cases, either alone or combined with other means of cure, as electricity, hydrotherapy, and drugs--which last, despite Mrs. Eddy's foolish denunciation, are quite as much entitled to be considered divinely appointed therapeutic agents as is mental suggestion. What I did want especially to discover was whether the Christian Scientist could cure such diseases as are considered by the medical man to be incurable--as cancer, locomotor ataxia, or advanced phthisis--and also what were the results of their treatment of typhoid fever, pneumonia, diphtheria, malaria, etc. And I wanted also to investigate the claims of Christian Science concerning the alleged cure of surgical conditions, such as necrosis or hæmorrhage from severed arteries, by no other means than the sole exercise of thought. If the Christian Scientist could have healed in such cases, I for my part would have declared him a worker of miracles. Therefore I searched diligently for such cases. In the beginning I had the honor to meet Mrs. Stetson, the "pastor," or the "first reader," of the "First Church of Christ, Scientist," at 143 West Forty-eighth Street, New York city. I had prepared a number of questions concerning Christian Science which I wished to ask Mrs. Stetson. She preferred, however, not to answer them herself, but told me that she would be pleased to forward them to Mrs. Eddy. I then wrote out these questions and put them, together with a letter to Mrs. Eddy, very respectfully requesting her consideration of them, in Mrs. Stetson's hands. Mrs. Stetson then very kindly forwarded them to Mrs. Eddy. Among the questions which I asked were the following: Is the treatment of the sick a part of Christian Science? Upon what principles is the Christian Scientist's method of treatment founded? How do you define health? How do you define disease? When a patient presents himself to you, do you inquire concerning the causes of his illness? Do you investigate symptoms? (Symptoms, I stated, are the signs of disease.) Do you make diagnoses? (A diagnosis, I stated, is a consideration of symptoms by which one disease is distinguished from another or others.) In what does your treatment consist? In treating a patient, do you administer any material substance, and require that it be taken into the body as one would food? Do you consider cleanliness, good order, and the attainment of æsthetic effects in a patient's environment a part of treatment? Do you take any steps to isolate the patient sick of an infectious disease, or to protect those about the patient from the disease? Do you treat structural diseases, as cancer or locomotor ataxia? Do you consider you have cured such diseases? If so, how do you know you were treating a structural disease, such as cancer or locomotor ataxia? Would you treat cases of fracture of bones or violent injury? If so, what would you do in such cases? Will you give me the names of patients whom you have treated, with permission to inquire concerning their illnesses, your treatment of them, and the effects of your treatment upon them--upon the distinct understanding that their names are not to be published? Do you deny the existence of matter? In Science and Health it is stated that "all is mind, there is no matter." How is it possible, in treating disease, for you to separate mind from matter? Animals sometimes become sick; could they be cured by Christian-Science methods? From Mrs. Eddy I received no answer nor any communication whatever. But, some time afterward, Mrs. Stetson informed me that the matter had been turned over to Judge Septimus J. Hanna, Mrs. Eddy's "counsel." Just here I reflected how Jesus Christ, whose representative Mrs. Eddy declares herself to be, would have acted under those circumstances, and I wondered how he would have appeared in this odd atmosphere hedged about by "counsel" and other legal paraphernalia. Presently thereafter I had the honor to receive a note from Mrs. Stetson, appointing a time for me to call. When I did this, Mrs. Stetson gave me a letter which had been sent her by Judge Hanna, and which she permitted me to use as I should see fit. This is the letter: "BOSTON, MASS., _November 18, 1898._ "_Editorial Office of The Christian Science Journal, Mrs. A. E. Stetson, New York City_: "DEAR SISTER: Mr. Metcalf handed me the questions submitted by Dr. Huber. I have also received and carefully read your letters. As I think Mr. Metcalf has informed you, this matter was referred to me from Concord. I have been so very busy that I have not had time to give this matter the thorough attention it needs until now. "I have carefully read and considered the entire paper. My conclusion is that it will be wholly impractical--indeed, I may say impossible--to answer these questions in such a manner as to make an entire paper fit for publication in a medical journal, or in any other magazine or periodical. The questions submitted touch the entire subject of Christian Science, both in its theology and therapeutics. These questions can be answered only in one way so that they can be understood, and that is by just such study of the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as the earnest, sincere Christian Scientists are giving them every day of their lives, and have been for years. When we think of the helps provided by our leader, the Rev. Mary Baker Eddy, for her own students in arriving at a correct interpretation and putting in practice the teachings of these text-books, such as the publications established by her, the Bible Lessons made up of selections from the Bible and our text-book, constituting the sermons for our service in all the Christian-Science churches; the many auxiliaries she has published and is publishing in further illucidation of the text-books--when we stop to consider that even those of her students who may be considered the most advanced are as yet infants in the understanding and ability to demonstrate the truth contained in these text-books, can we not easily see, and will not your friend the doctor at a glance see, the utter futility of attempting to answer his questions so as to make the answers intelligible to the medical profession and their readers? I admire greatly the kindly spirit manifested by the doctor and those for whom he is acting,[2] and the entire fairness, from their standpoint, of the questions submitted, but this does not relieve the difficulty of the situation. I therefore return the doctor's questions, with many thanks in behalf of our leader and the cause for the impartial spirit manifested. "Yours in Truth, "S. J. HANNA." [Footnote 2: I had arranged with the editor of the New York Medical News for the publication in that journal of a paper on Christian Science, and had so informed Mrs. Stetson.] I wrote Judge Hanna a note of thanks, and in reply received a letter in which he stated: "I should have been very glad if I could have seen my way clear to answer your questions in such a way as could have been intelligible and satisfactory. But it was impossible for me to do so." Now, all this seems to me much worse than preposterous. I fail utterly to see why he who asks the question, "Do you isolate a patient suffering from an infectious disease?" would have to spend months or years in Nirvana-like abstraction before he would be able to appreciate an answer to it. No doubt Judge Hanna, who is evidently a lawyer, could, if he chose, tell the reason why. To all who had been "healed in Christian Science" whom I met I stated plainly my object--to investigate how they had been "healed." I stated that my findings would be published, but that no names would be printed. The cases were to be numbered. I stated that I did not wish to examine nervous manifestations of a hysterical sort or purely functional disorders. I wished to see cases of disease in which the structure of the organs was likely to be or to have been involved, such as Bright's disease or cancer. Having, to begin with, explained this fully, I took the subject's history and ascertained whenever possible the name of any physician who may have treated the patient before he or she went "into Christian Science." Almost all these physicians who live in New York I visited; to the others residing in New York and to those living out of town I wrote, the form of the letter being generally as follows: "DEAR DOCTOR: I am investigating Christian Science from the physician's view-point, and am examining a number of people, in the hope of presenting some twenty histories. These histories would, I think, be valuable only in so far as they are scientifically accurate. Therefore, whenever possible, I request a medical account from any physician who may formerly have been in attendance. I have now under observation the case of Mr. X----, who believes himself to have been cured 'in Christian Science.' I would thank you very kindly if you would send me whatever medical information you can concerning this case, with records of examinations if possible. The cases will be numbered, not named." In each case, having set down the subject's statements and the physician's statement, I recorded my own observations of the subject's condition. I examined in succession _and without exception_ the case of every willing Christian Scientist up to the number of twenty.[3] All these cases were of their own choosing; no doubt, then, they would be considered to be among their "good" cases. Their "failures" I had no opportunity to examine. There were many others who refused to testify, no doubt justifiably. Others refused for reasons not easily comprehended, considering the fact that these people hold weekly "experience meetings," in which they "rejoice to testify to the power of Christian Science." It is difficult to see, therefore, why such cases should not invite scientific investigation. [Footnote 3: These medical histories are a part of my serial paper in the New York Medical News of January 28, 1899, _et seq._] I could find in all these twenty cases no "cure" that would have occasioned the medical man the slightest surprise. What did surprise me was the vast disproportion between the results they exhibited and the claims made by Christian-Science healers. One of these cases may be cited as an example of the loose generalization upon which many of the claims of these healers rest. A lady stated that she had had pneumonia. I asked how she knew she had had pneumonia. She declared she knew, because her nurse "could tell at a glance she had pneumonia." No medical examination had been made. I asked what symptoms she had had--how she had suffered. She told me she had purposely forgotten--she had tried to dismiss from her mind all recollection of this distressing illness. Well, this is no doubt commendable enough; but how do we know, then, if she really had pneumonia, or anything more than an ordinary cold? I heard during my investigation of cases of yellow fever, phthisis, cancer, and locomotor ataxia which had been "healed in Christian Science." But truth compels the statement that my efforts to examine these cases were defeated by the cheapest sort of subterfuge and elusion. To be explicit: On November 2, 1898, a man arose in an "experience meeting" which I attended and stated that he had been one of a party of twelve who, while in Central America, contracted yellow fever, he having suffered with the rest. All took medicine but himself; instead, he read Science and Health. Among his companions seven died; he recovered completely. Several days later I called at the church and asked for the name and address of this gentleman, and twice, on this and a subsequent visit, the clerk promised to send me his address. Not having received it, I called a third time, on November 21st. The clerk told me he could not find this eel-like specimen, and could not get his address. This man was, however, a member of that church, and had, on the evening I was present, a number of acquaintances in the congregation. Again, I had been told that a young lady living out of town had been "healed" of consumption. I wrote her mother, who sent me a kind note, inviting me to call several evenings later, and inclosing a time-table. She stated, "I shall be happy to give you any information in my power, as Christian Science has been a great blessing in my family." Before the appointed evening I received a note, breaking the engagement. Again, at an "experience meeting" a man arose and declared he had cured a case of locomotor ataxia, "so that the patient's two former physicians had been lost in amazement at the change." I learned also that his wife, another "healer," had cured a case of cancer of the tongue. I wrote this gentleman, and he sent me an answer, kindly inviting me to call at his house. He lived out of town. I went to his house, and spent the greater part of an evening trying to prevail upon these two people to show me or to introduce me to these subjects of locomotor ataxia and cancer of the tongue. They utterly refused to do so. Their line of argument was quite of the same sort as that contained in the letter of their better-known "brother in the church," which appears earlier in this paper. I was not investigating in the right way. What I ought to do was to study Science and Health and the other elucidatory works--above all with an obedient spirit, and "the truth" would come to me in time. Or it may be this pair of "healers" had in mind this reasoning, not new in my observation of this odd cult: In the mind of the Christian Scientist the locomotor-ataxia patient was healed, but he was withheld from inspection by the deceptive senses of those outside the Christian-Science pale, to which senses the patient might appear to stagger about and be as ill or more ill than ever before. Following is this "healer's" letter to me: "MY DEAR DR. HUBER: I received your letter with Joy, and name next Monday eveng as a time to give you for your enquiry into the workings of Truth as it has come under my notice. Our field is a broad one coverig several towns, and we have not lately had an eveng free for discussin the subject coverig this sublime and stately Science That leads into all Truth even to the solving of the problem of Being. The healing of the sick is only the primary steps this step however is an important one as its demonstration with proof attests its divine origen even God--Good, its principle source and ultimates in Eternal Life. For the Life is in his Son and Divine Science reveals this son Even our own Christ our spiritual Individuality God being our Father and mother, "Yrs. in Truth "----." The writer of this letter is the leader of that Christian-Science church in New Jersey a member of which was a woman who died, in June of this year, of consumption,[4] and this woman's "healer" was the writer's wife. The woman who died left the Episcopalian Church and became a Christian Scientist in January, 1899. In April she contracted a heavy cold, to which she gave no attention. Her husband remonstrated with her, and wished her to consult a physician, but she would not do so. She declared she could not be ill, but that she was well and happy. The services of her "healer" were the only ministrations she received. In the beginning of June her condition was so bad that her husband prevailed upon her to see a physician, who examined her and found her hopelessly ill with consumption. Another physician examined her and reached the same conclusion. She then turned "longingly and earnestly to the religion in which she had been brought up." Two weeks after, she died, "asking the prayers of her co-religionists in behalf of herself, her husband, and her children." [Footnote 4: New York Times, June 24, 1899.] Mrs. Eddy declares that she "healed consumption in its last stages, the lungs being mostly consumed"; that she "healed carious bones which could be dented with the finger"; and that she "healed in one visit a cancer that had so eaten the flesh of the neck as to expose the jugular vein so that it stood out like a cord." Judge Hanna has published statements to the effect that "cancer, malignant tumors, consumption, broken bones, and broken tissues have been healed in Christian Science, without the assistance of any material means whatever." Mr. Carol Norton, a Christian-Science lecturer, has publicly announced that Christian Science has healed "locomotor ataxia, softening of the brain, paresis, tumor, Bright's disease, cancer," etc. And many other Christian Scientists have made like claims. Very well, then. Who are these people that have thus been cured? What are their names? Where do they live? How can they be found? Will Mrs. Eddy and her followers submit these cases for scientific examination? I and other investigators are asking, and have for years been asking, these questions, and we are all of us still waiting for answers. The importance of all this is no doubt manifest. The healing of disease is, we are told, the outward and visible evidence upon which Christian Science expects to be judged and accepted. Therefore the cult must stand or fall upon the results of an investigation of the healer's claims. "By their fruits ye shall know them." There are Christian Scientists who will say that these statements of Mrs. Eddy and her associates must be taken upon faith and as _ipse dixit_ utterances. This is in the last degree silly. With such statements faith has absolutely nothing to do. They are solely matters for scientific inquiry. Every Christian Scientist may be a healer. A little child may be a healer in Christian Science. The treatment is said to consist in thinking, speaking, and writing. It is declared that no material substances are used. The following oddity in mental processes is here to be noted: A healer told her patient to take a certain drug during her illness, and that she would then demonstrate the power of Christian Science _over this drug_. The healer does not need to see his patient. He may, if he will, treat "absently," by a species of thought transference. He would consider his treatment effectual if he were in New York and his patient were in Hong Kong. I have rheumatism, let us say, and at midnight my swollen and inflamed joint gives me pain. I send for a Christian-Science healer. In all probability my messenger will call upon a person who has had no preliminary medical education whatever. He is likely to find some one who is quite illiterate, as witness the letter last presented. He may, as I have, come upon some one who has been engaged in the occupation of amusing the _habitués_ of beer saloons by playing upon the zither before he took up the more remunerative business of Christian-Science healing. Or he may, as I have, come upon some one who is engaged simultaneously both in the business of selling drugs and in the practice of healing by mental therapeutics alone. Having been found, the healer, first requiring a fee from my messenger, treats me "absently," while lying abed in his own home. His treatment consists in sending me word that I only imagine I am ill, that my joint is really not swollen, that it is really not inflamed, and that it really does not pain me, but that, on the contrary, I am really very well and very happy indeed. Some diseases are in Christian Science considered to take longer to heal than others; I have not understood why. If "all is mind, and there is no matter,"[5] as the Christian Scientist holds, and if, therefore, the varying densities of tissues need not be considered, why should not cancer or locomotor ataxia be healed as easily and as rapidly as a headache or a hysterical manifestation? Christian Science despises bodily cleanliness, the use of baths, and the most ordinary sanitary regulations. "To bow down to a flesh-brush, bath, diet, exercise, and air is a form of idolatry."[6] We learn, finally, that "the heart, the lungs, the brain, have nothing to do with life."[7] [Footnote 5: Science and Health.] [Footnote 6: Ibid.] [Footnote 7: Ibid.] Christian Science has stood by the bedside of an infant sick with diphtheria, has prevented interference with its incantations, and has seen this infant choke, grow livid, gasp, and expire, without so much as putting a drop of water to its lips. Most Christian Scientists are well to do. Their tenet is that "no one has any business to be poor." In New York their churches are in the neighborhood of the wealthy, and there are no missions by means of which the professed blessings of Christian Science may be disseminated among the poor. Christian Science is demonstrably a powerful organization for the accumulation of wealth, and by easy calculation one may see that her propaganda has made Mrs. Eddy, who is said to have been at one time very poor, conspicuously rich even in these days of enormous fortunes. When we consider that this woman claims to be actuated by the spirit of the poor Nazarene, has hypocrisy ever gone to greater length? Mrs. Eddy despises all metaphysical systems, yet her writings display her inability to think logically through half a dozen consecutive lines. Mrs. Eddy declares that "no human being or agency taught me the truths of Christian Science, and no human agency can overthrow it."[8] But there are published statements,[9] of the truth of which the writer offers to give legal proof, in which it is shown, by means of the "deadly parallel," that the essential ideas underlying her system are all plagiarized from the writings of an irregular practitioner to whom, many years ago, she went for treatment. Published accounts of her illness at that time present a picture of hysteria pure and simple. [Footnote 8: Science and Health.] [Footnote 9: The Arena, May, 1898.] Mrs. Eddy claims to possess healing powers nothing short of miraculous, yet the writer just mentioned declares that she has probably not been a well woman these forty years past. Certain it is she almost never appears in public, and only a few of her followers have ever seen her face except in copyrighted photographs. The medical profession is most stupidly reprobated by Mrs. Eddy and her associates, especially for its "mercenary motives." A specific statement may here be not malapropos. In the year 1895 there were 1,800,000 inhabitants in the lesser city of New York, and on the rolls of its hospitals and dispensaries were more than 793,000 names of people for the treatment of whom New York's medical men received practically no pecuniary reward whatever. It is declared that Christian Science is a religious system, that the treatment of the sick is a part of this system, and that, as the Constitution forbids interference by the States with religion, no laws can be enacted which could compel the healer to desist from his work. But there is a sharp distinction between religious liberty and license to commit, in the name of religion, unlawful acts. A man would not be justified in killing his child in obedience to a fanatical belief, as Abraham was about to do; but Christian Science has sacrificed the lives of little children upon the altar of its pseudo-religion. Had not these children rights which ought to have been safeguarded? If the Christian Scientist's position be admitted, a thug might, upon the same principles, be justified in committing murder, on the ground that murder is a practice required by his religion; and a Mormon might, on the same basis, practice polygamy. When a healer treats for hire a sufferer from typhoid fever, is he acting in a religious capacity? The observer will find in Christian Science much charlatanry (by which many honest fanatics are deceived), much to surprise reason and common sense, to offend good taste and the proprieties, to outrage justice and the law, and to mortify the pious. And in the last degree reprehensible will appear this cult's ghastly masquerade in the garb of Him that prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, "the pale, staggering Jew, with the crown of thorns upon his bleeding head," the tenderest, the divinest, the most mankind-loving personality the world has ever known. THE WHEAT LANDS OF CANADA. BY SYDNEY C. D. ROPER. When Sir W. Crookes, in his inaugural address as President of the British Association, startled a large number of people by stating that, unless some radical change was made in the present system of wheat cultivation, there would be a bread famine in 1931, because the world's supply of land capable of producing wheat would have been exhausted, there was undoubtedly a considerable feeling of uneasiness engendered, and more attention was paid to the address than is usual even to so valuable a contribution as the inaugural address of the President of that Association must always be. It was, therefore, with a feeling of relief that we found one person after another, well qualified to speak, coming, as it were, to the rescue, and pointing out that Sir W. Crookes's conclusions were not warranted; and in the minds of the majority, no doubt, the last feeling of uneasiness was dispelled by the able letter in The Times, in December last, in which Sir John Lawes and Sir Henry Gilbert, who are _facile principes_ as scientific agriculturists, and whose opinions carry greater weight than even those of the President of the British Association, gave most satisfactory reasons for being unable to believe in Sir W. Crookes's predictions. It is true that, in a subsequent letter, Sir W. Crookes stated that his remarks were intended more as a serious warning than as a prophecy; but, seeing that his conclusions were based on definite statements of definite facts and figures, it is difficult to treat them as other than prophetic. In order, however, to establish the probability of a wheat famine in the near future it became necessary for Sir W. Crookes to seriously misrepresent and underestimate the wheat resources of some of the principal countries most interested in producing that cereal, and it is to a large extent by exposing the magnitude of these misrepresentations that the validity of his conclusions is called in question and disproved. The two countries which, with perhaps the exception of Russia, are most concerned in the wheat production of the future, and therefore in the correction of these misstatements, are Canada and the United States. Mr. Atkinson, the well-known writer on economic subjects, took up the cudgels for the United States, and their case could hardly have been in better hands; but so far no champion has appeared on behalf of Canada; and while Sir W. Crookes may not have been alone in his views about the possible exhaustion of the wheat area in the United States, he certainly stood quite alone when he committed himself to the remarkable statements that are to be found in the address, in order to decry the capabilities of the Canadian wheat fields. I did not immediately reply to them myself, thinking that some one better qualified would do so, but this has not been done, and as I feel that they can not be allowed any longer to remain unanswered, I propose to deal with them in the present article. Mr. Atkinson's defense has been criticised, in the March number of The Forum, by Mr. C. Wood Davis, who naturally upholds Sir W. Crookes's views, seeing that they appear to have been largely induced by his own figures and agree with his own ideas, but his argument in that article is more one of fault finding with the statements of others than an attempt to justify his own position. As a specimen of his style of criticism, Mr. Davis takes Mr. Atkinson to task for saying that "the present necessities of the world are computed by Sir W. Crookes at 2,324,000,000 bushels," and says that in no part of his address was an estimate of the whole world's requirements so much as mentioned; and yet, on turning to the address, we find that Sir W. Crookes said: "The bread eaters of the whole world share the perilous prospect.... The bread eaters of the world at the present time number 516,500,000.... To supply 516,500,000 bread eaters will require a total of 2,324,000,000 bushels for seed and food." The requirements of the whole world are distinctly stated here, for bread is required only for the bread-eating population, and therefore the requirements of that population are, as far as bread is concerned, the requirements of the whole world. Mr. Atkinson, however, is well able to take care of himself, and he and Mr. Davis can fight out for themselves the question as to when, or if ever, the United States will cease to export wheat; but it is amusing to find Mr. Atkinson charged by Mr. Davis, of all men, with dealing in "purely speculative computations," for if there is any one who has freely indulged in these same purely speculative computations it is Mr. Davis himself, as we shall presently see. The value of the various calculations that statisticians indulge in is largely discounted by the fact that allowance is rarely made for changing conditions. Such has been the ratio, such is the ratio, and therefore in so many years' time such will be the ratio, is the burden of their calculations, so that while their figures for the past and present may be both correct and instructive, their calculations for the future are frequently of little practical utility; and it is this failure to allow for any variation in conditions that renders Mr. Davis's figures of so little value, and Sir W. Crookes's conclusions, which are based on them, of no greater importance. It is surprising to find how much value Sir W. Crookes attaches to Mr. Davis's figures, and it leads one to the conclusion that he has either not examined them very closely, or shares with Mr. Davis a fondness for "purely speculative computations"; and while it is not seemly to accuse, as has been done, a man of Sir W. Crookes's standing and reputation of resorting to "bucket-shop" methods to support his conclusions, it is difficult to avoid thinking that the anxiety to establish those conclusions has not only led him to accept Mr. Davis's calculations without proper examination, but has also influenced the preparation of some of his antecedent data and led him to subordinate facts as a means to a required end. Since Sir W. Crookes thinks so highly of Mr. Davis's figures and upon them has based some of the most important conclusions of his address, and as Mr. Davis himself is so ready to find fault with the calculations of others, it might be well just here to see how some of Mr. Davis's own calculations have been verified and what amount of dependence should be placed upon his figures or on deductions from them. In An Epitome of the Agricultural Situation, published by Mr. Davis in 1890, he predicted an annually increasing deficit in the world's wheat supply and the almost immediate inability of the United States to do more than grow enough wheat for home consumption, and, as a consequence, that "After 1895 we (United States) must either import breadstuffs, cease to export cotton, or lower the standard of living," this latter prophecy being emphasized by being printed in capital letters. These predictions were made ten years ago--ample time, surely, for at least some evidence of their fulfillment to be apparent. But what are the facts? The Chief of the Bureau of Statistics, in his report on the foreign commerce of the United States for 1898, says: "The total exportation of meats and dairy products amounted in the last fiscal year (1898) to $167,340,960, against $145,270,643 in the highest year prior to that date (1894), while the value of animals exported in 1898 was greater than that of any preceding year; of wheat the exports of the year were the largest in value, save the exceptional years of 1880, 1881, and 1892. Of cotton the exports of the year were the largest in quantity in the history of the country.... Thus, in the great agricultural products--breadstuffs, provisions, and cotton--the exports have been phenomenally large, while the total of products of agriculture exceed by $54,000,000 the exports of agricultural produce in any preceding year of our history." So much for exports; now for the imports of breadstuffs. The total value of breadstuffs, both dutiable and free, entered for consumption in 1898 was $957,455, of which $628,775 were for imports of macaroni, vermicelli, etc., articles not in any case manufactured in the country. I have not seen any explanation by Mr. Davis of the failure of his predictions, but it is probable that he had them in mind when he wrote in The Forum (March, 1899), "Had not the herds of hay- and maize-eating animals shrunk greatly since 1892, thus rendering vast areas of hay and maize lands available for wheat production, we should probably have reduced the wheat area, instead of adding ten million acres to it since 1895." This, however, is a purely arbitrary assumption, unsupported by anything more substantial than Mr. Davis's personal opinion. In the same article he says: "But herds being insufficient for present needs must be added to in the measure of the existing deficit, as well as in that of the animal products and services required by all future additions to the population. This will necessitate and force a restoration to other staples of acres recently diverted to wheat." But, in the face of the figures quoted above, the evidence is clear that herds are not only ample for present needs, but afford a larger margin than ever of exportable surplus. If herds were insufficient, there would have been a curtailment of exports and an increase in the consumption of breadstuffs, but neither have happened; neither has there been any reduction in the standard of living. Is not the inference irresistible that the country was carrying a larger number of animals than conditions absolutely required, since farm animals have declined from 169,000,000 in 1892 to 138,000,000 in 1898, without in any way disturbing the conditions of food supply or reducing the exports of provisions? In 1890, Mr. Davis assumed that 44,800,000 acres of hay would be required in 1895 and 49,200,000 acres in 1900, yet in 1898, 42,800,000 acres were found to be ample for the needs of the country. Do not the foregoing figures clearly indicate that it is not safe to assume that the area employed in the cultivation of certain staples at any given time, or the average of that area for any given period, must necessarily be the proportion always to be required for the cultivation of those articles, and that any calculations or predictions made on that assumption are liable to be completely upset by events unforeseen and unprovided for? Does it not seem probable that if Sir W. Crookes had examined Mr. Davis's figures more closely than apparently he did, he would have found that "average acre yields for long periods" are not "essential factors"; that "unit requirements for each of the primary food staples of the temperate zones" can not be so easily determined; that "the ratio existing during recent periods between the consuming element and acres employed in the production of each of such primary food staples" are not necessarily indicative of the ratio that will require to exist in the years to come; and that Mr. Davis's "scientific method" does not "enable him to ascertain the acreage requirements of the separate national populations and of the bread-eating world as a whole"? In order to insure a famine in 1931 it was necessary for Sir W. Crookes to assume a given increase of population during the intervening period and no change in the existing conditions of wheat cultivation and consumption, and also to limit by hard-and-fast lines the sources of supply. It is to the manner in which Sir W. Crookes has limited and underestimated the wheat resources of Canada that we now propose to take exception; and it is difficult to understand how, with ample means of information available, he could have committed himself to the statements he has made. What does he say about Manitoba? "In the year 1897 there were 2,371,441 acres under cultivation in Manitoba, out of a total of 13,051,375 acres. The total area includes water courses, lakes, forests, towns and farms, land unsuitable for wheat growing, and land required for other crops." Now, the facts are that the total area of Manitoba is 73,956 square miles, and if from that area 9,890 square miles of water surface are deducted there remain 64,066 square miles, or 41,002,240 acres of land, so that even after making due allowance for forests, towns, etc., there are nearly three times the number of acres available than are given by Sir W. Crookes. Attempts have been made in vain to find out whence these figures were obtained, but there is apparently no clew; and while it is not to be supposed for a moment that the figures were purposely misstated, surely the important conclusions drawn from them deserved that some attempt at least should have been made to ascertain their accuracy. Sir W. Crookes claims to be indebted to the official publications of the Government of Canada, but it is certain that none of them ever contained the figures used by him. "The most trustworthy estimates," says Sir W. Crookes, "give Canada a wheat area of not more than six millions of acres in the next twelve years, increasing to a maximum of twelve millions of acres in twenty-five years." Who prepared these estimates, and upon what are they based? Were they prepared by the same authority that supplied Sir W. Crookes with the figures of the area of Manitoba? If so, we may well dismiss them at once; but supposing that these estimates are, as far as the rate of increase is concerned, perfectly correct, and that the wheat area of Canada will be only twelve million acres in twenty-five years, there would still remain at least twelve million acres in Manitoba alone available for wheat. It is no exaggerated estimate to say that from sixty to seventy per cent of the land available for cultivation in Manitoba is well adapted for the production of wheat. Sir W. Crookes says that his area of Manitoba of 13,051,375 acres includes water courses, lakes, forests, towns, etc. Now, the water area alone of Manitoba is 6,329,600 acres, so that after deducting this area and the 1,630,000 acres already under wheat and making due allowance for the other conditions mentioned, he would have us believe that wheat-growing in Manitoba has already nearly reached its limit, which all who know anything about the province will unite in saying is absurd. Now let us turn to the Northwest Territories, where, according to Sir W. Crookes, there is practically no amount of land of any consequence available for wheat, and let us remember that the same authority limits the wheat area of Canada to a maximum of twelve million acres. The area of the three provisional districts, with which alone we will deal, is as follows, viz.: Assiniboia, 57,177,600 acres; Saskatchewan, 69,120,000 acres; and Alberta, 63,523,200 acres (these figures being exclusive of water surface), making a total of 189,820,000 acres. Some of this large area is possibly not particularly well adapted for agricultural purposes, but a careful examination of all available data on the subject justifies one in saying that fully one half is suitable for successful wheat cultivation, while in eastern and southern Assiniboia there are some 20,000,000 acres, in the valley of the Saskatchewan 14,000,000 acres, and in northern Alberta 15,000,000 acres that are especially adapted for the production of wheat as a staple crop. The area is so large and settlement at present so sparse, that it is impossible to do more than give its capabilities in general terms, founded on the opinions of experienced men who have traveled over it. Professor Saunders, Director of the Experimental Farm at Ottawa, than whom there is no better authority on the subject in the Dominion, told me that, from what he saw of the country in driving over it, he became more and more impressed every year with the vast area of good land in the Northwest, and no practical man has ever traveled through those regions but has been amazed at the prospect of their capabilities. But we have not yet reckoned with the rich and fertile province of Ontario. This province has a land area of 140,576,000 acres, of which 11,888,853 acres were under cultivation in 1898, and of this latter quantity 1,437,387 acres, or twelve per cent, were in wheat, being an increase of 163,860 acres over the wheat area of 1897, and of 62,573 acres over the average of 1882-'98. According to the census of 1881 there were nearly 2,000,000 acres in wheat in 1880, but, under the influence of an unremunerative market, the area declined year by year until in 1895 there were but 967,156 acres so employed; since then, however, stimulated by a more profitable price, the area has increased by 470,471 acres, and an increase of twenty per cent upward is reported in the area for 1899. Fall wheat in this province is a very successful crop, having averaged in the last two years twenty-five bushels and twenty-four bushels per acre respectively, while the average for the period 1882-'98 has been 20.5 bushels per acre, so that nothing but a continuance of good prices is needed to largely increase the production of wheat in Ontario. In no part of the province, where agriculture is possible, has wheat failed to grow, but the area is so large that it would be unwise to put into figures the extent available for wheat cultivation, it being sufficient to show that a very large portion, if not indeed the whole, of the twelve million acres to which Sir W. Crookes has limited Canada could, other conditions being favorable, be supplied by Ontario alone. The "trustworthy estimates" quoted by Sir W. Crookes limit, as has been stated, the wheat area of Canada to a maximum of twelve million acres under cultivation in twenty-five years; whence the estimates were derived or on what grounds they are entitled to be considered trustworthy there is no information; but is it of any consequence? Let them come from whatever source they may, are they not perfectly useless? The progress of wheat cultivation during the next twenty-five years does not depend upon any mathematical ratio of progression, but on the course of certain events absolutely unknown at the present time. The point is that Sir W. Crookes adopts these estimates and gives out to the world a statement, on the strength of them, that, in addition to the 3,500,000 acres at present in use, there are not more than 8,500,000 acres in Canada available for wheat cultivation--a statement calculated, if believed, to seriously damage Canada's prospects of settlement, and a statement that is as much at variance with the actual facts as it is possible for such things to be. Is it fair to the country for a man of such high standing and reputation to make such unfounded assertions? Five minutes' real consideration of the question would have convinced him that there are more than that number of acres in the province of Manitoba alone. The figures already given, which have been prepared from the most reliable available information, go to show that there are upward of seventy-five million acres of land in Canada especially adapted for the production of wheat, and this estimate is confined to those portions of the country which may be considered as essentially wheat-producing areas; and no account has been taken of the vast extent of land, not only in the provinces of Ontario and Manitoba and in the Northwest Territories, but also in the otherwise unnoticed provinces of Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and British Columbia, that is not only suitable for the production of wheat, but on which a large quantity of wheat will undoubtedly be grown, which, entering into home consumption, will increase the exportable surplus. I am well aware that there are a number of people who will say that my figures underestimate the resources of the country, but I would rather that it were so than indulge in figures that seem too extravagant to be realized; and if, in the future, it appears that the wheat area is larger than I have stated, then so much the better for Canada. I do not mind how much evidence can be brought to increase my figures, as long as I am satisfied that they can not be truthfully reduced. It is not intended to accuse Sir W. Crookes of deliberately misrepresenting Canada, but rather of almost criminal carelessness in the preparation of his case; but it is intended to accuse Mr. C. Wood Davis of the former offense and of intentionally garbling extracts from an official handbook issued by the Canadian Minister of the Interior in order to decry that country's wheat-bearing capabilities. By taking a line here and there which seems to serve his ends, and by leaving out everything that would have a contrary tendency, Mr. Davis, in his article in The Forum, makes it to appear that, according to the Minister of the Interior, the greater part of the Canadian Northwest is not only incapable of producing wheat, but is actually unfit for settlement, and summarizes his extracts by saying, "Available data do not show that any part of the Canadian districts named, except southern Manitoba and the eastern half of Assiniboia, is adapted to wheat culture, while they do show that over the greater part of these vast regions neither summer heats nor rainfalls are sufficient." This statement is false in every particular. The official handbook from which Mr. Davis professes to quote says of Manitoba that there are thirty-seven million acres available for active farm cultivation, giving therefore no warrant for the limiting of the wheat area to the southern part of the province. Mr. Davis quotes a line here and there about southern Alberta in order to convey the impression that that part of the country is good for nothing, whereas, while it is essentially a ranching and dairying country, producing a most luxurious and nutritious growth of native grasses, with a bountiful supply of water for irrigation purposes, by which means most satisfactory crops of grain and fodder are produced, it has never been contended that it is particularly well adapted for wheat-growing; but, on the other hand, Mr. Davis carefully omits all mention of northern Alberta, and has no room for the following remarks about it which appear on the same page of the handbook: "Northern Alberta is essentially an agricultural district; ... the principal advantages of the district will insure settlement by immigrants who desire to engage in grain farming.... The rainfall in northern Alberta during the summer months is sufficient to insure good crops." Concerning the district of Saskatchewan, Mr. Davis quotes a remark about some of the wooded portion being unsuited to the immediate requirements of settlement, as if it applied to the whole district, and deliberately omits the following: "The southern half of the district" (Saskatchewan) "is traversed from east to west by the Saskatchewan River, and the valley of this important stream, with the country immediately adjacent thereto, has long been famed as a desirable field for immigration." With reference to precipitation, Mr. Davis has so garbled his extracts as to convey the impression that the handbook states that over the greater part of the Northwest the rainfall is not sufficient for the pursuit of agriculture, whereas what the book really says is, "So far as the Canadian Northwest is concerned, out of about two hundred million acres of land between the Red River of the North to the Rocky Mountains, available for agricultural and pastoral purposes, not more than about one fourth, or fifty million acres in all, require the artificial application of water." Mr. Davis's attempts to prejudice the interests of the Northwest by remarks on the severity of the climate do not need serious attention; the experience of the inhabitants and the annual production of the country speak for themselves, and it is well understood that mere thermometer readings afford little indication in themselves of the nature of a climate, and that temperatures unendurable in some countries are enjoyable, salubrious, and advantageous in others. It seems difficult to believe that Mr. Davis ever wrote the following sentence, but having written it, it would be well if he would take it to heart: "Truly 'honesty is the best policy' in the employment of statistics, whether by scientists, by plain people, or by professional statisticians; while the ability to eschew bucket-shop methods, to read correctly, to state facts and to state them clearly, and to criticise with intelligence and entire fairness, is especially desirable." Sir W. Crookes is not content with reducing Canada's wheat resources to an insignificant minimum, but he must also retard as much as possible the development even of the small area that he admits to exist, for he says: "The development of this promising area necessarily must be slow, since prairie land can not be laid under wheat in advance of a population sufficient to supply the needful labor at seed time and harvest. As population increases so do home demands for wheat." To say that prairie land can not be laid under wheat in advance of population, and that as population increases so do home demands for wheat, are mere truisms, but it is incorrect to say that therefore the development must be slow. The rate of development depends entirely upon the rate of increase of population, and that increase depends upon the price of wheat, and the area of production will increase concurrently with the demand. According to Mr. Davis--and we will assume that his figures are in this case correct--the population in the United States in fourteen years from 1871 increased forty-four per cent and the cultivated area one hundred and twelve per cent, and, if that was the case, no estimates, however trustworthy, could have provided for such results. It has been perfectly true, as Sir W. Crookes says, that as the wheat area of Manitoba and the Northwest increased, the wheat area of Ontario and the eastern provinces decreased, but this was in consequence of the continued low price of wheat, which led the farmers of Ontario to turn their attention more and more to dairy and mixed farming, substituting hay and root crops for wheat and barley, until the province became a dairying rather than a cereal-producing country; but that this was a movement to suit the times, and that the area available for wheat is no less in consequence, is evidenced by the rapid increase in the wheat acreage in the last two years. The farmer produces what pays him best, and it is certain that before Sir W. Crookes's failure of the wheat supply comes to pass prices will have been such that every acre of land suitable for wheat and that can be spared from other uses will have been taken advantage of; and if this is not the case, then some other staple for food will have been substituted, which will necessarily change the whole economic situation as viewed at present. It is also true that "thus far performance has lagged behind promise," but the reasons for this are the same, and in the low values we find a ready explanation of the apparent lack of progress. What inducement has the immigrant had of late years to take up land for, or the farmer to grow, wheat that he could hardly sell for the actual cost of production? And yet Sir W. Crookes would argue that because the land has not been utilized for this particular purpose the land can not be there, and that land upon which wheat once was grown, but which is now employed for other purposes, can never again be included in the wheat-bearing area. Progress may appear to have been slow, but it has kept pace with the demand, and in any case has been considerably more rapid than Sir W. Crookes allows. He says, "The wheat-bearing area of all Canada has increased less than 500,000 acres since 1884," whereas the actual increase since 1880 has been over 1,100,000 acres, and since 1890 upward of 760,000 acres. The area under wheat in Canada in 1898 was 3,508,540 acres, so that Sir W. Crookes only allows for an increase of 2,500,000 acres in the next twelve years. Perhaps it will not be as much, but if it is not, it will only be putting the predicted day of famine still farther away, and will prove nothing more than the fact that the state of the market has not warranted any more extended cultivation. The statements made by Sir W. Crookes about the wheat acreage in the States are as incorrect as those about Canada, for he says, in his letter to The Times of December 8, 1898, that "the whole wheat acreage in the United States is less than it was fifteen years ago," whereas the official figures for 1897 and 1898, which were before him at the time, told him that the wheat acreage in 1897 was 3,000,000 acres in excess of the average of the preceding fifteen years, and in 1898 was in the neighborhood of 5,000,000 acres in excess of any year in the history of that country. Do not the fluctuations in the wheat acreage of the United States in recent years prove conclusively that they were solely the result of the movement of prices, and had no bearing whatever on the question of exhaustion of land? Under the depressing influence of an unprofitable market, the wheat area fell from 39,900,000 acres in 1891 to 34,000,000 acres in 1895, but, under the stimulus of a substantial appreciation, increased again, in three years, to 44,000,000 acres. If, in spite of a rising and remunerative market, the area had remained stationary or shown signs of decrease, it would have been in order to call attention to the fact as indicating exhaustion; but when, in immediate response to a rising market, the area increases by leaps and bounds, the question of exhaustion becomes less and less one of actual probability, and more and more one of theoretical possibility. A precisely similar line of reasoning is applicable to the fluctuations in the province of Ontario, and goes to show just as clearly that the decrease in area has had absolutely no bearing on the wheat-producing capabilities of the province. "A permanently high price for wheat is, I fear, a calamity that ere long must be faced," says Sir W. Crookes; but, with due deference to so great an authority, I believe that the day of a permanent high price for wheat is yet far distant. There will be appreciations undoubtedly, but the sources of supply as yet undrawn upon are so great that it will be long before those appreciations are of any prolonged duration; but in the meantime they mean periods of great prosperity to the farmer and therefore to the world. Is a higher price for wheat such an unmixed calamity, after all? Has the average consumer of wheat benefited by the low price of wheat of late years in proportion to the hardships endured by the producer? I think not. Let those who are qualified by literary and scientific knowledge point out if they will the possibility, or even perhaps the probability, of at some period in the future the time coming when there may be, if present conditions continue to exist, a scarcity in the wheat supply, and urge as strongly as they like the advisability of taking steps in good time to prevent such a calamity; but nothing is to be gained by frightening the world with predictions of evil based only on a series of unfounded assertions, mathematical calculations, and "purely speculative computations." When, if ever, the day of scarcity will come is unknown. That it is yet far off appears to be tolerably certain; but it is sufficient for the purposes of this article that it should be understood that Sir W. Crookes's statements concerning the wheat area of Canada are absolutely unreliable and incorrect, and that there are millions of acres of good wheat land waiting for occupation by the surplus population of the world, which, when under cultivation, will assist in deferring for many years the threatened day of famine. * * * * * Dr. Sven Hedin, in his account of travel through Asia, mentions as the most remarkable feature in the central region of internal drainage (in which the rivers drain into inland lakes) "the process of leveling which goes on unceasingly. The detritus which results from the disintegrating action of the weather, and the more or less mechanical agency of the wind and water and gravity, is constantly being carried down from the mountains all round its borders toward the lower parts of its depressions, and being deposited there. In this way the natural inequalities in the configuration of the ground are being gradually smoothed away." Mr. Curzon refers to the same phenomenon in the central districts of the Pamirs--the process being the exact reverse to that where the streams hew out deep ravines in their course to the sea-going river. BEST METHODS OF TAXATION. BY THE LATE HON. DAVID A. WELLS. PART III (_concluded_). The universal and admitted failure of the general property tax to attain good results and the great difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of reducing it to a form in which it can operate with efficiency and an approach to justice, must lead to its abolition and the gradual substitution of other and more simple taxes. However well adapted to a community in which the taxable property was in evidence and easily assessed for purposes of taxation, it becomes antiquated, unequal, and inquisitorial in a people where credit and credit investments have been highly developed, and where the greater social activities, whether in commerce or industry, transportation or production, are conducted by corporations issuing various kinds of securities, none of which can easily be reached by a taxing authority away from the center of incorporation. To undertake to include these securities, evidences of debt, or obligations in a general property tax is to invite evasion, put a heavy inducement on concealment, and, whenever effective, to give rise to shocking inequalities of burden. The widow and orphan, whose property is in the hands of a trustee, pay the full tax; in any other direction the holder of stocks or bonds, money or notes, escapes according to the elasticity of his conscience. The very exemptions recognized by law give an opportunity for new evasions, based upon analogy or upon some technicality under which the business is conducted. Bonds of the United States, the legal-tender notes, or money are beyond the reach of State authorities for the purpose of taxation. In the same category come also all imported goods in original packages, in the possession of the importers, and all property in transit. These exemptions alone amount to thousands of millions of dollars, and the tendency has been to increase the number of items exempted. But every such exception under the law adds to the burdens of the honest taxpayer, and every evasion of taxation also renders his charge the greater. Here is not distributive justice, but concentrated injustice. Another large proportion of the personal property owned by the citizens of the State is of the most intangible character, and in great part invisible and incorporeal, such, for instance, as negotiable instruments in the form of bills of exchange, State, municipal, and corporate bonds, and, if actually situated in other States, exempt from taxation where they are held; acknowledgments of individual indebtedness, and a number of similar matters. All property of this character is, through a great variety of circumstances, constantly fluctuating in value; is offset by indebtedness which may never be the same one hour with another; is easy to transfer, and by simple delivery is, in fact, transferred continually from one locality to another, and from the protection and laws of one State to the sovereignty and jurisdiction of some other. It is not to be wondered, therefore, that all attempts to value and assess this description of property have proved exceedingly unsatisfactory, and that nearly every civilized community, with the exception of the States of the Federal Union, have long ago abandoned the project as something wholly inexpedient and impracticable. The differences among the States in the interpretation of residence, of the _situs_ of the property taxed, are also an objection to this system and an obstacle to its application. The want of uniformity can not be abolished by enactments of law, because absolute uniformity of laws would not insure as uniform interpretation of their provisions. The rules for assessment are uniform for the officers of a State, but the returns made involve such differences in the application of the rules that one is forced to the conclusion that a misunderstanding of the spirit of the law exists, coloring differently the view of each returning officer. Discrimination against the county or municipality and discrimination against the individual are to be met at every turn. No wording of the law can eliminate this personal judgment of each assessing authority, and the supervision of the returns by State boards of equalization has introduced an even greater departure from justice, as a majority, based upon selfish interests, may be had, and its decision may readily be defended as based upon good and sufficient reasons. An appeal to the last resort, the higher courts, may produce redress against unjust assessments, but each case must be decided upon its merits, and only under very exceptional circumstances--as in the recent case at Tarrytown, New York, where striking and general, even personal, spite had been shown in the tax levy--can a number of taxpayers find it their interest to combine and carry the question into the courts for adjudication. Imperfect in theory, the machinery of the general property tax is imperfect. With at present fully two thirds of the personal property of the State exempted from taxation by law or by circumstances growing out of its condition, or the natural depravity and selfishness of the average taxpayer, and with a large part of the other third exempted by competing nations or neighboring States, what becomes of the theory so generally accepted in the United States that in order to tax equitably it is necessary to tax everything? A very slight examination leads to the conclusion that it is the most imperfect system of taxation that ever existed; that, with the exception of moneyed corporations, it is a mere voluntary assessment, which may be diminished at any time by an offset of indebtedness which the law invites the taxpayers to increase _ad infinitum_, borrowing on pledge of corporate stocks, United States bonds, legal-tender notes, etc., all exempt from taxation; that its administration in respect to justice and equity is a farce and more uncertain and hazardous than the chances of the gaming table; and that its continuance is more provocative of immorality and more obstructive of material development than any one agency that can possibly be mentioned. A stringent enforcement only leads to greater perversions and a wider evasion. A lax enforcement does not reduce its inequalities and general want of application to actual conditions.[10] [Footnote 10: The commissioners "have no confidence in any system of inquisition or system which requires assessors to be clairvoyants; to ascertain things impossible to be ascertained by the agencies provided in the law; to ascertain the indebtedness of the taxpayer; to ascertain or know who is the owner of property at a given time that can be and is transferred hourly from owner to owner by telegraph or lightning, and that may be transported into or out of the jurisdiction of the assessor with the rapidity of steam, or that requires assessors or taxpayers to make assessments on evidence not admissible in any court, civil or criminal, in any civilized country where witches are not tried and condemned by caprice or malice on village or neighborhood gossip."] The problem, then, is what taxes to introduce in place of this confessed failure of the general property tax. There can be little doubt that the desire for greater simplicity in taxation is generally felt, and in part put into practice. The mass of various kinds of imposts, added without any system or real connection or relation one to another, has often resulted in so large a number of charges on Government account as to defeat itself. The French taxes at the end of the last century, with their added fault of inequality and injustice in distribution, led naturally to the theory of a single tax--the _impôt unique_ of the physiocrats--which did not become a fact, yet registered the protest against the multiplicity and crying oppressiveness of the remains of feudal dues and fiscal experiments undertaken under the stress of an empty treasury. So it has been noted at the present time that where an opportunity has offered there is a tendency in European countries to simplify their taxes, and, as in the case of Switzerland, prepare the way for income and property taxes. It is a greater dependence on such direct taxes in place of indirect taxes that has distinguished the great fiscal changes in recent years. Germany may have wished to establish a brandy monopoly, and Russia may resort to a monopoly of the manufacture and sale of distilled spirits. But England increases her death duties, France and the United States seek to frame acceptable taxes on income, and Switzerland succeeds in modifying her system in the line of direct taxes. There is an earnest movement in favor of a single tax on the value of land, exclusive of other real property connected with it. As involving a question of abstract justice the proposition has much in its favor, but it can not be denied that practical obstacles oppose its adoption. The recent commission on taxation in Massachusetts thus treats of it: "It proposes virtually a radical change in the ownership of land, and therefore a revolution in the entire social body. In this form of taxation all revenue from land alone is to be appropriated--that is, the beneficial ownership of land is to cease. Whether or not this system, if it had been adopted at the outset and had since been maintained, would have been to the public advantage may be an open question, but it would certainly seem to be too late now to turn to it in the manner proposed. In any event, it involves properly not questions of taxation, but questions as to the advantage or disadvantage of private property in land."[11] [Footnote 11: Report of the Massachusetts Commission, 1897, p. 74.] If securities are to be taxed, the methods adopted should avoid a double taxation, and an attempt to reach capital outside of the State. It is evident that a State, like Massachusetts, which taxes the foreign holder of shares in its corporations as well as the shares of foreign corporations held by its own citizens, is inviting a dangerous reprisal from other States. "Wherever the owner may be, if the corporation is chartered within the State the Commonwealth collects the tax on the shares. Wherever the corporation may be, if the owner is within the State the Commonwealth also collects the tax (in theory of law at least)." If this be the best possible system, and it is supposed Massachusetts assumes it to be, general double taxation would follow its adoption by the other States. The effort to carry this rule into practice proves its injustice as well as futility. The most searching and inquisitorial methods of seeking such property will not avail to reach a good part of it, and this results in adding inequality of burden to its other difficulties. Evasion is too simple a process to be unused, and the heavier the rate of tax the greater will be the resort to evasion and even to perjury, express or implied. The fundamental cause of the failure lies in this, "the endeavor to tax securities, which are no more than evidences of ownership or interest in property, and which offer the easiest means of concealment and evasion, by the same methods and at the same rate as tangible property situated on the spot." This inherent difficulty can be cured only by abandoning the attempt to tax directly securities or evidences of debt, representing ownership or interest in property beyond the limits of the taxing authority. In the case of the securities of home companies they may be readily taxed at the source, but in the case of foreign corporations it is only by methods almost revolting in their injustice and treatment of the taxpayer that even a partial success can be secured. The dependence upon the sworn statement or declaration of the taxpayer is known to be extremely faulty and to offer a premium on untruthfulness. So long as this dependence is retained in whole or in part in a system for taxing personal property, the results must be unsatisfactory. The most judicious, even if it seems the most radical, remedy is to abandon the taxation of securities. Certainly it would be well to put an end to the Massachusetts plan of taxing securities representing property outside of the State, for that involves double taxation wherever it has been possible to impose the tax. What can be reached only by methods at all times trying and difficult, and sometimes very demoralizing, should not be permitted to remain a permanent feature of the revenue system of a State. The New York commission of 1870 proposed to limit the State taxes to a very few number of objects. That they be "levied on a comparatively broad basis--like real estate--with certainty, proportionality, and uniformity on a few items of property, like the franchises of all moneyed corporations enjoying the same privileges within the State, and on fixed and unvarying signs of property, like rental values of buildings"--such was the scheme proposed. The leading object to be attained was equality of burdens, and a second object of quite as great importance, was simplicity in assessment and collection. Granting that real estate, lands, and buildings were taxed on a full and fair market valuation, and that corporations contributed their share toward the expenses of the State, it remained to devise a tax that should reach all other forms of property that could be properly and easily assessed. This tax was to be known as the "building-occupancy" tax, and was to be levied on an additional assessment of a sum equal to three times the annual rent or rental value of all the buildings on the land.[12] Nearly thirty years later the Massachusetts commission proposed a modified form of this tax. An annual rental value of four hundred dollars was to be exempt from taxation, but ten per cent was to be levied on all rental values in excess of that amount. [Footnote 12: The New York commission of 1870 submitted two propositions on this point: 1. Tax the house or building as real estate separately, at the same rate of valuation as the land--that is, fifty per cent--and then assuming that the value of the house or building, irrespective of its contents, be such contents furniture, machinery, or any other chattels whatsoever, is the sign or index which the owner or occupier puts out of his personal property, tax the house or building on a valuation of fifty per cent additional to its real estate valuation, as the representative value of such personal property; or, in other words, tax the land separately on fifty per cent of its fair marketable valuation, and tax the building apart from the land, as representing the owner's personal property, on a _full_ valuation, as indicated by the rent actually paid for it or its estimated rental value. Or-- 2. Tax buildings conjointly with land as real estate at a uniform valuation; and then as the equivalent for all taxation on personal property, tax the occupier, be he owner or tenant of any building or portion of any building used as a dwelling, or for any other purpose, on a valuation of three times the rental or rental value of the premises occupied. Tenement houses occupied by more than one family, or tenement houses having a rental value not in excess of a fixed sum, to be taxed to the owner as occupier.--_Report_, p. 107.] "The advantages of a tax on house rentals," said the commission, "can be easily stated. It is clear, almost impossible of evasion, easy of administration, well fitted to yield a revenue for local uses, and certain to yield such a revenue. It is clear, because the rental value of a house is comparatively easy to ascertain. The tax is based on a part of a man's affairs which he publishes to all the world. It requires no inquisition and no inquiry into private matters; it uses simply the evidence of a man's means which he already offers."[13] If this tax were to be given it would be possible to wipe out all the tax on incomes from "profession, trade, or employment," to abolish the existing assessments on personal property. The effects would be far-reaching. If loans of money are free from taxation, the purchasing power of money in the same degree must diminish, which simply means that the purchasing power of farms and products of farms for money must to the same extent increase; hence, the borrower on bond and mortgage will not be subject to double taxation--first, in the form of increased rate of interest, and then in taxation of his real estate--and hence the farmer or landowner who is not in the habit of either lending or borrowing money will find his ability to meet additional taxation on his land increased in additional value of land and products of land in proportion as the tax is removed from money at interest. Also, the exemption of the products of farms and things consumed on farms from taxation will give a corresponding increased value to compensate for the "building-occupancy" tax. Tenants controlled by all-pervading natural laws can and will give increased rents, if their personal property is exempt primarily from taxation. The average profits of money at interest or of dealings in visible personal property free from taxation can not exceed, for any considerable length of time, the average profits of real estate, risk of investment and skill in management taken into consideration; and therefore the real pressure of taxation under the proposed system will finally be, like atmospheric pressure or pressure of water, on all sides, and by a natural uniform law executed upon all property in every form used and consumed in the State. Persons must occupy buildings and business must be done in buildings, and through these visible instrumentalities capital can be reached by a rule of fractional uniformity, and by a simple, plain, and economical method of assessment and collection. [Footnote 13: Massachusetts Report, p. 106.] This building-occupancy tax, or tax on rental value, does not preclude a supplementary tax on corporations. Much has been said of the onerous burdens of taxation endured by individuals compared with those of corporations, and especially corporations enjoying certain rights or franchises in public streets and highways or corporations of a more or less public character. The phenomenal growth of municipalities has been one of the notable social movements of the last twenty-five years. The drift of population from the country districts to cities has increased with each year, and finds an explanation in many causes. The opportunities offered in a city for advancement are greater and more numerous; the monotony of the farm life does not keep the young at home, but drives them for excitement and profit to the great centers of population. The economic changes of a half century also have their influence. The competition of new regions, better adapted for certain cultures on a commercial scale, has reduced the profitableness of older and more settled localities, where comparatively costly methods must be resorted to if the fertility of the land is to be maintained. The wheat fields of the West narrowed the margin of profit in New England farming, while the sheep and cattle ranges of the West made it impossible for the same quality of live stock to be raised for profit in the East. Farms were abandoned, and the younger blood went West to grow up with the country, or into the cities to struggle for a living. Further, the advances in agriculture, the application of more productive methods, and the introduction of machinery have reduced the demand for labor in the rural districts, and this has led to a migration to the cities. The result of this has been an immense development of city life, and with it an ever-increasing field for investment in corporate activities. The supply of water is usually in the city's control, but the manufacture and sale of gas, the production and distribution of electricity, the street railways, telegraph, and telephone interests are private corporations formed for profit and using more or less the public highways in the conduct of their various enterprises. A grant of a street or highway for a railway or electric-wire subway generally involves a monopoly of that use, and the privilege or franchise may become more valuable with the mere growth in the population of the cities. Assured against an immediate competition, there is a steady increment in the value of the franchise, and in the case of a true monopoly there seems to be no limits to its possible growth. An instance of this nature is so striking in its relations and so pertinent to the present discussion that attention is asked to it. In the reign of James I water was supplied by two or three conduits in the principal streets of London, and the river and suburban springs were the sources of supply. Large buildings were furnished with water by tapping these conduits with leaden pipes, but other buildings and houses were supplied by "tankard bearers," who brought water daily. A jeweler of the city, Hugh Myddleton by name, believed something better could be done, and he proposed to bring water from Hertfordshire by a "new river." He embarked in the undertaking, sank his fortune in its conduct, and appealed to the king for assistance. James granted this aid, taking one half of the shares of the company--thirty-six out of the seventy-two shares into which it was divided. The shares that remained received the name of "adventurer's moiety." The work was completed in 1613, and water was then let into the city. So little was the measure appreciated that its first years were troublous ones for the shareholders. The squires objected to the river, believing it would overflow their lands or reduce them to swamps and destroy the roads. The city residents adopted the use of the water slowly. The shares were nominally worth £100 apiece, but for nearly twenty years the income was only 12_s._, or $3, per share. In 1736 a share was valued at £115 10_s._, and by 1800 it had risen to £431 8_s._ With the first years of this century the company prospered, and its benefits were widely applied, reflecting this change in the value of its capital. In 1820 a share was worth £11,500 and in 1878 the fraction of a share was sold at a rate which made a full share worth £91,000. In 1888 the dividend distributed to each share was £2,610. Eleven years later, in July, 1889, a single share was sold for £122,800, or nearly $600,000. The nominal capital of the company in 1884 was £3,369,000, and besides its water franchise it holds large estates and valuable properties. While the actual real estate controlled by the corporation accounts for some of this remarkable rise in the value of the shares, a greater and more lasting cause was the possession of an almost exclusive privilege or franchise which assured a handsome and ever-increasing return on the investment. Had all the other property been deducted from the statement of the company's assets, there would have remained this intangible and immeasurable right created and conceded by its charter and long usance. A definition of a franchise has been given by the Supreme Court in terms of sufficient general accuracy to be adopted: "A franchise is a right, privilege, or power of public concern which ought not to be exercised by private individuals at their mere will and pleasure, but which should be reserved for public control and administration, either by the Government directly or by public agents acting under such conditions and regulations as the Government may impose in the public interest and for the public security."[14] A necessary condition, then, is a public interest in the occupation or privileges to be followed. The good will of a person or individual trader is not a franchise in this sense, though a franchise may be enjoyed by an individual as well as by a corporation, and good will may rest upon the privilege implied in the franchise. [Footnote 14: California vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, 127 U. S., 40.] The recognition of franchises, a species of property "as invisible and intangible as the soul in a man's body," as a proper object for taxation is now beyond any dispute. It is peculiarly appropriate as a source of revenue for the exclusive use of the State, inasmuch as the grant of franchises emanates from the State in its sovereign capacity. In the case of Morgan _vs._ the State of Louisiana, Justice Field, of the Supreme Court of the United States, said: "The franchises of a railroad corporation are rights or privileges which are essential to the operation of the corporation and without which its roads and works would be of little value, such as the franchise to run cars, to take tolls, to appropriate earth and gravel for the bed of its road, or water for its engines, and the like. They are positive rights or privileges, without the possession of which the road or company could not be successfully worked. Immunity from taxation is not one of them."[15] Further, the extent to which this taxation of franchises may be carried rests entirely in the discretion of the taxing power, subject only to constitutional restrictions. [Footnote 15: 93 U. S. Reports, pp. 217, 224.] The great difficulty in applying such a tax lies in the methods of reaching an understanding on the value of the franchise. How can this indefinite something be made visible on the tax books? In many instances the franchise may be regarded as inseparable from the real property of the corporation. The rails of a tramway, the poles and wires of a telegraph company, the pipes and conduits of a gas company, are real and tangible things, necessary to a proper conduct to the respective functions of the corporations. But the right to lay tracks in the public streets, to sink pipes under the streets, or to string wires overhead is as necessary a possession and as essential to the performance of what the corporation was created to accomplish. Whether this permits the franchise to be regarded as "real estate" and so offers it for taxation is a question of some theoretical interest, but of little practical importance.[16] Unless the franchise is regarded in this way, as belonging to real estate, or as forming a taxable entity apart from other property, it would be simpler to reach it through a corporation tax in one of the many ways open for applying that tax. [Footnote 16: A recent law of New York is very full on this point: "The terms 'land,' 'real estate,' and 'real property,' as used in this chapter, include the land itself above and under the water, all buildings and other articles and structures, substructures, and superstructures, erected upon, under, or above, or affixed to the same; all wharves and piers, including the value of the right to collect wharfage, cranage, or dockage thereon; all bridges, all telegraph lines, wires, poles, and appurtenances; all supports and inclosures for electrical conductors and other appurtenances upon, above, and underground; all surface, underground, or elevated railroads, including the value of all franchises, rights or permission to construct, maintain, or operate the same in, under, above, on, or through streets, highways, or public places; all railroad structures, substructures, and superstructures, tracks, and the iron thereon, branches, switches, and other fixtures permitted or authorized to be made, laid, or placed on, upon, above, or under any public or private road, street, or grounds; all mains, pipes, and tanks laid or placed in, upon, above, or under any public or private street or place for conducting steam, heat, water, oil, electricity, or any property, substance, or product capable of transportation or conveyance therein, or that is protected thereby, including the value of all franchises, rights, authority, or permission to construct, maintain, or operate in, under, above, upon, or through any streets, highways, or public places, any mains, pipes, tanks, conduits, or wires, with their appurtenances, for conducting water, steam, heat, light, power, gas, oil, or other substance, or electricity for telegraphic, telephonic, or other purposes; all trees and underwood growing upon land, and all mines, minerals, quarries, and fossils in and under the same, except mines belonging to the State. A franchise, right, authority, or permission, specified in this subdivision, shall for the purposes of taxation be known as a 'special franchise.' A special franchise shall be deemed to include the value of the tangible property of a person, copartnership, association, or corporation, situated in, upon, under, or above any street, highway, public place, or public waters, in connection with the special franchise. The tangible property so included shall be taxed as a part of the special franchise." The reason for classing franchises as real estate was that under the existing laws of New York a franchise could not be assessed as personal property, as the bonded debt could then be deducted, leaving little or nothing to be taxed.] Enough has been said to demonstrate the extremely faulty condition of tax methods in the United States. Uniformity is highly desirable, but equality of burden is even more to be desired. The advances in this direction have been few, and accomplished only partially in a few States. The machinery for making assessments is only a part of the problem, as the intention of the law, the spirit of the act, is of even higher importance in securing justice and moderation. If these essays, incomplete as they must of necessity be, have led to a better comprehension of the chaotic condition existing now and of the difficulties to be overcome, their object will have been attained. The remedy may be left for time to effect. * * * * * In connection with the celebration of the centenary of the death of the naturalist Lazaro Spallanzani, at Reggio, Italy, in February last, a booklet has been published containing articles on various aspects of the life and work of Spallanzani and matters associated with him. Among the authors represented are Mantegazza, Ferrari, and others well known in Italian science. BACON'S IDOLS: A COMMENTARY. BY WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY. In the first book of the _Novum Organon_ the great leader of the new philosophy undertook to set forth the dangers and difficulties which stand always in the way of clear and fruitful thought. Conscious that he was breaking entirely with the schools of the past, and ambitious of laying the firm foundations on which all future inquirers would have to build, it was natural that Bacon should pause on the threshold of his vast enterprise to take stock of the mental weaknesses which had rendered futile the labors of earlier thinkers, and which, if not carefully guarded against, would jeopardize the efforts of times to come. That the understanding may direct itself effectively to the search for truth it is necessary, he insisted, that it should have a full apprehension of the lapses to which it is ever liable, the obstacles with which it will constantly have to contend. A vague sense of peril is not enough. As a first condition of healthy intellectual activity we must learn to know our frailties for what they really are, estimate their consequences, and probe the secrets of their power. Bacon's statement of the sources of error and vain philosophizing is regarded by him as merely the _pars destruens_ or negative portion of his work--as it were, "the clearing of the threshing floor." But his aphorisms are packed close with solid and substantial thought, and well deserve the attention of all who would seriously devote themselves to the intellectual life. "True philosophy," as he conceived it, "is that which is the faithful echo of the voice of the world, which is written in some sort under the direction of things, which adds nothing of itself, which is only the rebound, the reflection of reality." To reach for ourselves, as nearly as we may, a philosophy which shall meet the terms of this exigent definition is, or should be, one chief purpose of our study and our thought. We may very well ask, then, what help so great and suggestive a thinker may give us on our way. With his characteristic fondness for fanciful phraseology, Bacon describes the causes which distort our mental vision as _Idola_--idols or phantoms of the mind.[17] Of such he distinguishes four classes, which he calls, respectively: Idols of the Tribe (_Idola Tribus_); Idols of the Cave (_Idola Specus_); Idols of the Market Place (_Idola Fori_); and Idols of the Theater (_Idola Theatri_). It is not to be claimed for Bacon's analysis that it is exhaustive or always scientifically exact. In many places, too, it opens up difficult philosophic questions, which for the present must be disregarded. But, as Professor Fowler has said, there is something about his diction, "his quaintness of expression, and his power of illustration which lays hold of the mind and lodges itself in the memory in a way which we can hardly find paralleled in any other writer, except it be Shakespeare."[18] Moreover, though he often deals with matters of merely technical and temporary interest, his leading thoughts are of permanent and universal applicability. Let us see, then, what suggestions we can gather from a brief consideration of his Idols, one by one. [Footnote 17: _Idola_ ([Greek: eidôla]), though commonly rendered idols, would here undoubtedly be more correctly translated phantoms or specters. With this explanation, however, I shall usually employ the more familiar word.] [Footnote 18: Novum Organon, edited by Thomas Fowler, introduction, p. 132.] Idols of the Tribe are so called because they "have their foundation in human nature itself"; in other words, they are the prepossessions and proclivities which belong to men as men, and as such are common to the whole race or tribe. "Let men please themselves as they will," says Bacon, "in admiring and almost adoring the human mind, this is certain: that as an uneven mirror distorts the rays of objects according to its own figure and section, so the mind, when it receives impressions of objects through the sense, can not be trusted to report them truly, but in forming its notions mixes up its own nature with the nature of things." In many lines of thought there is no more pregnant source of fallacy and confusion than the tendency, innate in all and seldom properly checked, to accept man as the measure of all things, and to translate the entire universe into terms of our own lives. Theology, though it is slowly outgrowing its cruder anthropomorphism, still talks about the "will" of God, an "intelligent" First Cause, the "moral governor," and "lawgiver"; and outside theology we have ample evidence of the persistency with which we humanize and personify Nature by endowing it with attributes belonging to ourselves. Darwin confessed that he found it difficult to avoid this tendency.[19] It is a pitfall into which men constantly stumble in their attempts to interpret the processes at work about them. [Footnote 19: Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. i, p. 6.] One important result of our habit of thus forcing the universe to become "the bond-slave of human thought" is to be found, as Bacon notes, in our proneness to "suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world" than is actually to be discovered there. While we read design and purpose into the phenomena of Nature because we are conscious of design and purpose in our own activities, thus allowing ourselves to drift into the metaphysical doctrine of Final Causes, we also do our best to bring Nature's multitudinous operations into such definite formulas as will satisfy our love of plan and symmetry. We are not content till we can systematize and digest, whence our continual recourse to loose analogies and fanciful resemblances. We start from an imagined necessity of order, or from some conception of things attractive because of its apparent simplicity, and then reason out from this into the facts of Nature. Mill furnishes some telling examples. "As late as the Copernican controversy it was urged, as an argument in favor of the true theory of the solar system, that it placed the fire, the noblest element, in the center of the universe. This was a remnant of the notion that the order of the universe must be perfect, and that perfection consisted in conformity to rules of procedure, either real or conventional. Again, reverting to numbers, certain numbers were _perfect_, therefore these numbers must obtain in the great phenomena of Nature. Six was a perfect number--that is, equal to the sum of all its factors--an additional reason why there must be exactly six planets. The Pythagoreans, on the other hand, attributed perfection to the number ten, but agreed in thinking that the perfect numbers must be somehow realized in the heavens; and knowing only of nine heavenly bodies to make up the enumeration, they asserted 'that there was an _antichthon_, or counter-earth, on the other side of the sun, invisible to us.' Even Huygens was persuaded that when the number of heavenly bodies had reached twelve it could not admit of any further increase. Creative power could not go beyond that sacred number."[20] Do these concrete illustrations of perverse reasoning strike us as ludicrous? It is because they are taken from an order of ideas long since outgrown. The tendencies they exemplify have not been outgrown. We have only to keep a vigilant eye on our own mental conduct to be convinced that we are very apt to begin with some general notion of "the fitness of things," or what "ought to be," and to argue thence to conclusions not a whit less absurd essentially than those just referred to. [Footnote 20: Logic, ninth edition, Book V, chapter v, § 6.] While these universal mental habits are conspicuous enough in the higher regions of thought and begin to play tricks with us the moment we undertake on our own accounts any serious speculation, there are other Idols of the Tribe whose influence is perhaps more commonly fatal. We all jump at conclusions, the mind feigning and supposing "all other things to be somehow, though it can not see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded"; we all allow ourselves to be unduly "moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination." Hasty judgments are thus daily and hourly passed on men and things, and rash generalizations permitted to circulate untested. Even more disastrous, perhaps, in the long run, is the power of prepossessions. When once, says Bacon, the human understanding has "adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion, or as being agreeable to itself)" it straightway "draws all things else to support and agree with it." Illustrations may be found in every direction. Note, for instance, the vitality, even in the teeth of positive disproof, of many long-accepted and often-challenged ideas--belief in dreams, omens, prophecies, in providential visitations and interpositions, in the significance of coincidences, in popular saws about natural phenomena, in quacks and quackery, in old wives' tales, vulgar and pseudo-scientific. The story of witchcraft is only another example of the same kind, though written large in the chronicles of the world in letters of fire and blood; the human understanding had "adopted" a belief in witches, and drew "all things else to support and agree with it." In all such cases of prepossession the mind obstinately dwells on every detail that favors its accepted conclusions, while disregarding or depreciating everything that tells against them; it is always, in Bacon's phrase, "more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives." Thus, we hear much of the one dream that is fulfilled, and of the ninety and nine that are unfulfilled--nothing. Bacon illustrates this perversity by the well-known anecdote of the ancient cynic, which may be left to convey its own moral: "And therefore it was a good answer that was made by one who, when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods--'Ay,' asked he again, 'but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?'" Finally, among these Idols of the Tribe we must include the disturbance caused by the play of feeling upon the mind. "The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections, whence proceed sciences which may be called 'sciences as one would.'" We all know, to our cost, how passion will warp judgment; how difficult it is to see clearly when the emotions are thoroughly aroused; how tenaciously men cling to opinions they are familiar with, or would fain have to be true; how fiercely they contest ideas that are unfamiliar or repugnant. Had it been contrary to the interest of authority, observed shrewd old Hobbes, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, the fact would have been, if not disputed, yet suppressed.[21] Similarly, if the passions of men had been called into play over the most clearly demonstrable of abstract mathematical truths, we may be sure that furious controversy would have attended the issue, and some way found to overthrow the demonstration. That two and two make four would have been denied had any strong emotion been excited against the proposition. "Men," said Whateley, "are much more anxious to have truth on their side than to be on the side of truth." And the danger is greater because we are frequently not aware of the bias given by feeling. There are cases in plenty where men more or less consciously and deliberately espouse "sciences as one would," but there are many others in which the emotional interference is insidious and obscure. "Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the feelings color and infect the understanding." [Footnote 21: Leviathan, Part I, chapter xi.] These Idols of the Tribe are of course inherent in our intellectual constitution, and are ineradicable. The simple consideration that all knowledge is relative--that by no effort and under no circumstances can we escape beyond the conditions and limitations of our own minds--suffices to show that intelligence must ever mix up its own nature with the nature of things, though this fact need not make us doubt the validity of knowledge as is sometimes hastily inferred. For the rest, clear recognition of these common obstacles to thought should put us in the way of anticipating and withstanding their more serious effects. In practice it must be our object to maintain watchfulness and a careful skepticism; to test evidence and check passion; to cultivate candor, flexibility, and alertness of mind; to avoid loose generalizations; and to be ever ready to accept, revise, reject. Above all must we steadily resist the seductions of what is called common sense, and overcome that mental inertness which too often leads us to drift unthinking along the current of popular opinion.[22] [Footnote 22: It is well to remember that if common sense had said the last word about the matter, the Ptolemaic theory of the universe would still stand unshaken.] But, in addition to errors arising from the common intellectual nature of men, there are others, the sources of which are to be found in the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind. These Bacon calls Idols of the Cave;[23] for every one, he says, "has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of Nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to his reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed, or in a mind indifferent and settled; and the like." This summary is comprehensive enough to indicate the character and point to some of the causes of individual aberrations of judgment; that it does no more than this is due to the simple fact that the personal bias is as varied as humanity itself, and that the deflecting impulses in any given case are to be referred to a complex of factors almost eluding analysis. To follow this part of the subject into detail would, therefore, manifestly be impossible. But certain of the larger and more widely influential of these disturbing forces may be roughly marked out by way of illustration. [Footnote 23: The metaphor is taken from the opening of the seventh book of Plato's Republic.] In the first place, there is what we may call the professional bias. Exclusive devotion to separate lines of activity, study, or thought inevitably gives the mind a particular set or twist. Bacon complains that Aristotle, primarily a logician, made his natural philosophy the slave of his logic. Few specialists can escape the insulation consequent upon living too continuously in a confined area of problems and ideas. Their intellectual outlook is necessarily circumscribed, facts are seen by them out of proper perspective, and one-sidedness of training and discipline renders their judgment of things partial and incomplete. The lawyer carries his legal, the theologian his theological, the scientist his scientific bent of mind into every inquiry; with what grotesque results is only too frequently apparent. Accustomed to move in a single narrow groove, and wholly absorbed in the contemplation of certain isolated classes of phenomena, they unconsciously allow their particular interests to dominate their thought, and impose disastrous restrictions upon their view of whatever lies outside their own chosen field. Secondly, we have the bias of nation, rank, party, sect. Here the mental disturbances are too numerous to permit and too obvious to require special exemplification. Intellectual provincialism of any kind is fatal to large and fertile thought, alike by limiting the range of our knowledge and sympathies and by inducing mental habits and implanting prejudices which prevent us from seeing things in wide relations and under a clear light. So long as our point of view is simply that of our country, our class, our party, or our church, so long, it is evident, our minds will lack the breadth and flexibility necessary for free inquiry, fruitful comparisons, sane and balanced judgments.[24] [Footnote 24: _Cf._ Spencer's Introduction to the Study of Sociology, chapters viii-xii.] Finally, among the Idols of the Cave "which have most effect in disturbing the clearness of the understanding," mention must be made of the temperamental bias. Every man, it has been said, is born Platonist or Aristotelian; it is certain that the great divisions in thought--religious, philosophical, political--answer roughly to fundamental differences in human nature, and that every one not checked or turned aside by extraneous influences will spontaneously gravitate in one or another direction. Bacon is only recording a fact of the commonest experience when he says that "there are found some minds given to an extreme admiration of antiquity, others to an extreme love and appetite for novelty, but few so duly tempered that they can hold the mean, neither carping at what has been well laid down by the ancients nor despising what is well introduced by the moderns." Many instinctively brace themselves against authority and tradition; by others again, whatever is handed down to us by authority and tradition is for this reason alone treated with contempt. That the crowd believes a thing is enough to convince this man of its truth, and that of its falsehood. "The vulgar thus through imitation err; As oft the learned by being singular." These and similar congenital differences in men's intellectual constitutions might be illustrated indefinitely if it were necessary. A further remark of Bacon's must, however, be quoted, for it goes deeper in mental analysis and touches a less obvious point. "There is one principal and, as it were, radical distinction between different minds in respect of philosophy and the sciences, which is this: that some minds are stronger and apter to mark the differences of things, others to mark their resemblances. The steady and acute mind can fix its contemplations and dwell and fasten on the subtlest distinctions; the lofty and discursive mind recognizes and puts together the finest and most general resemblances." Men belonging to the former class we should call logical and critical; those belonging to the latter, imaginative and constructive. Each class tends to the excesses of its own predominant powers, and in each case excess interferes with calm reasoning and sound judgment. To correct the personal equation it is imperative that we should study ourselves conscientiously, consider dispassionately the natural tendencies of our birth, early surroundings, education, associations, and interests, and do our utmost to conquer, or at least to make allowance for, every individual peculiarity, temperamental or acquired, likely to turn the mind aside from the straight line of thought. Such self-discipline every one must strenuously undertake on his own account if he would wish to see things as they really are. Stated in more general terms, our aim must be to rise above all kinds of provincialism and personal prejudice, and to overcome our natural proneness to rest content in our own particular point of view. Bacon quotes with approval the words of Heraclitus: "Men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world." We must strive to escape from our own lesser world, and to make ourselves citizens of the greater, common world. For this we need the widest and most generous culture--the culture that is to be found in books, in travel, in intercourse with men of all classes and every shade of opinion. Left to ourselves we only too sedulously cultivate our own insularity; we mingle simply with the people who agree with us, belong to our own caste, and share our own prejudices; we read only the papers of our own party, the literature of our own sect; we allow our own special interests in life to absorb our energies, color all our thoughts, and narrow our horizon. In this way the Phantoms of the Cave secure daily and yearly more despotic sway over our minds. Self-detachment, disinterestedness, the power of provisional sympathy with alien modes of thought and feeling, must be our ideal. "Let every student of Nature," says Bacon, "take this as a rule, that whatever his mind seizes and dwells on with particular satisfaction is to be held in suspicion, and that so much the more care is to be taken in dealing with such questions to keep the understanding even and clear." A hard saying, truly, yet one that must be laid well to heart. While the Idols of the Tribe, then, are common human frailties in thought, and the Idols of the Cave the perturbations resulting from individual idiosyncrasies, there are other Idols "formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other," which Bacon calls "Idols of the Market Place, on account of the commerce and consort of men there." By reason of its manifold and necessary imperfections--its looseness, variability, ambiguity, and inadequacy--the language we are forced to employ for the embodiment and interchange of ideas plays ceaseless havoc with our thought, not only introducing confusion and misconception into discussion, but often, "like the arrows from a Tartar bow," reacting seriously upon our minds. A large part of the vocabulary to which we must perforce have recourse, even when dealing with the most abstruse and delicate subjects, is made up of words taken over from vulgar usage and pressed into higher service; they carry with them long trains of vague connotations and suggestions; the superstitions of the past are often imbedded in them; no one can ever be absolutely certain of their intellectual values. While, therefore, they may do well enough for the rough needs of daily life, they prove sadly defective when required for careful and exact reasoning. And even with that small and comparatively insignificant portion of our language which is not inherited from popular use, but fabricated by philosophers themselves, the case is not much better. Every word, no matter how cautiously employed, inevitably takes something of the tone and color of the particular mind through which it passes, and when put into circulation fluctuates in significance, meaning now a little more and now a little less.[25] What wonder, then, that "the high and formal discussions of learned men" have so often begun and ended in pure logomachy, and that in discussions which are neither high nor formal and in which the disputants talk hotly and carelessly the random bandying of words is so apt to terminate in nothing beyond the darkening of counsel and the confusion of thought? [Footnote 25: The need of a language of rigid mathematical precision for the purposes of philosophic thought and discussion has long been the subject of remark. Hence Bishop Wilkins's Essay toward a real character and a philosophic language (1668), and the earlier Ars Signorum of George Dalgarno--boldly presented by its inventor as a "remedy for the confusion of tongues, as far as this evil is reparable by art." We may give these ingenious authors full credit for the excellent intentions with which they set out on impossible undertakings. A philosophic language may perhaps be attained in the millennium, but then probably it will be no longer needed. Meanwhile readers interested in the history of the mad scheme called Volapük may find some curious matter in these rare works.] Bacon notes two ways particularly in which words impose on the understanding--they are employed sometimes "for fantastic suppositions ... to which nothing in reality corresponds," and sometimes for actual entities, which, however, they do not sharply, correctly, and completely describe. The eighteenth century speculated at length on a state of Nature and the social contract, unaware that it was deluding itself with unrealities, and we have not yet done with such abstractions as the Rights of Man, Nature (personified), Laws of Nature (conceived as analogous to human laws), and the Vital Principle. The more common and serious danger of language, however, lies in the employment of words not clearly or firmly grasped by the speaker or writer--words which, in all probability, he has often heard and used, and which he therefore imagines to represent ideas to him, but which, closely analyzed, will be found to cover paucity of knowledge or ambiguity of thought. Cause, effect, matter, mind, force, essence, creation, occur at once as examples. Few among those who so glibly rattle them off the tongue have ever taken the trouble to inquire what they actually mean to them, or whether, indeed, they can translate them into thought at all. Among the Idols of the Market Place we must also class the evils arising from the tendency of words to acquire, through usage and association, a reach and emotional value not inherent in their original meanings. This is what Oliver Wendell Holmes happily described as the process of polarization. "When a given symbol which represents a thought," said the Professor at the Breakfast Table, "has lain for a certain length of time in the mind it undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron. It becomes magnetic in its relations--it is traversed by strange forces which did not belong to it. The word, and consequently the idea it represents, is _polarized_." The larger part of our religious and no small portion of our political vocabulary consist of such polarized words--words which, on account of their acquired magnetism, unduly attract and influence the mind. We can never hope to think calmly and clearly while the very symbols of our thoughts thus possess a kind of thaumaturgic power over us, which in turn readily transfers itself to our ideas. If, then, "words plainly force and overrule the understanding and throw all into confusion and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies," it behooves us to watch closely the interrelations of language and thought. To put it in the vernacular, we must at all times make sure that we know what we are talking about and say what we mean. To this end the study of language itself is useful, but the habits of precise thought and expression will never be acquired by linguistic exercise alone. To use no word without a distinct idea of what it means to us as we speak or write it; to check, when necessary, the process of thought by constant redefinition of terms; to depolarize all language that has become, or threatens to become, magnetic, thus translating familiar ideas into "new, clean, unmagnetic" phraseology, these may be set down as first among the rules to which we should tolerate no exception. We now come to the last group of Idols--those "which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration." These Bacon calls Idols of the Theater, "because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion." And perhaps this conceit carries further than Bacon himself intended, for it not only suggests the unsubstantial character of philosophic speculations, but also reminds us how, in the world's history, these airy fabrics have succeeded each other as on a stage, some to be hissed and some applauded, but all sooner or later to drop out of popular favor and be forgotten. Dealing with these Idols of the Theater, or of Systems (of which there are many, "and perhaps will be yet many more"), Bacon takes the opportunity of criticising, briefly but incisively, the methods and results of ancient and mediæval philosophers. His classification of false systems is threefold: The sophistical, in which words and the finespun subtilties of logic are substituted for "the inner truth of things"; the empirical, in which elaborate dogmas are built up out of a few hasty observations and ill-conducted experiments; and the superstitious, in which philosophy is corrupted by myth and tradition. Under the first head, Bacon again instances Aristotle, whom he accuses of "fashioning the world out of categories"; under the second he glances especially at the alchemists; and under the third he refers to Pythagoras and Plato. To follow Bacon into these historic issues does not belong to our present purpose. Suffice it to notice the continued vitality of these three classes of speculative error. Bacon's judgment of Aristotle--that "he did not consult experience as he should have done, in order to the framing of his decisions and axioms; but, having first determined the question according to his will, he then resorts to experience, and, bending her into conformity with his placets, leads her about like a captive in a procession"--is at least equally applicable to thinkers like Hegel and his followers. Empiricism has by no means been eliminated from the scientific or would-be scientific world. And as for the philosophy which is corrupted by myth and tradition, the countless attempts that are still made to "reconcile" the facts of science with the data and prepossessions of theology are enough to prove that, _mutato nomine_, the methods of Pythagoras and Plato and of those who in Bacon's day sought "to found a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, on the book of Job, and other parts of the sacred writings," are as yet far from obsolete. It is hardly necessary to call attention to the fact that there is a close similarity between systematic empiricism and some of the dangers brought out in connection with the Idols of the Tribe, for in each case stress must be laid on the tendency to generalize hastily, depend on scattered and inadequate data, and seek for light in the "narrowness and darkness" of insufficient knowledge. This matter is important only as showing how a common weakness may be caught up and dignified in a philosophic system and rendered more dangerous by the adventitious weight and influence which it gains thereby. Another point, not distinctly dealt with by Bacon, calls, however, for special remark. While the various Idols of the Theater, or of Systems, exercise their own peculiar and characteristic influences for evil, they all tend to the debasement of thought by reason of the authority which they gradually acquire. Associated with great names, promulgated by schools, officially expounded by disciples and commentators, they finally settle into a creed which is regarded as having oracular and dogmatic supremacy. The formula "Thus saith the Master" closes discussion. Not the fact itself, but what this or that teacher has said about the fact, comes at last to be the all-important question. In the condition of mind thus engendered there is no chance for intellectual freedom, self-reliance, growth. Lewes related an anecdote of a mediæval student "who, having detected spots in the sun, communicated his discovery to a worthy priest. 'My son,' replied the priest, 'I have read Aristotle many times, and I assure you that there is nothing of the kind mentioned by him. Go rest in peace, and be certain that the spots which you have seen are in your eyes, and not in the sun.'"[26] Such an incident forms an admirable commentary on the saying of the witty Fontenelle that Aristotle had never made a true philosopher, but he had spoiled a great many. The position assumed is simple enough: Aristotle _must_ be right, therefore whatever does not agree with the doctrines of the Stagirite must be wrong. Are your facts against him, then revise your facts. Come what may of it, you must quadrate knowledge with accepted system. Here is the theological method in a nutshell. And the theological method has only too often been the method also of the established philosophic schools. [Footnote 26: History of Philosophy, vol. ii, pp. 95, 96.] In our own relations with these Idols of the Theater the first and last thing to remember is that all systems are necessarily partial and provisional. "They have their day and cease to be," and at the best they only mark a gradual progress toward the truth. There can be no finality, no closing word authoritatively uttered. Our attitude toward the systems of the past and the present, toward long-accepted traditions, and dogmatically enunciated conclusions, must be an attitude of firm and steady--of respectful, it may be, but still firm and steady--independence. We must resist the tendency to passive acquiescence, and endeavor to combine with generous hospitality to all ideas the habit of not accepting anything merely because it is stated _ex cathedra_, or is backed by an influential name, or can "plead a course of long observance for its use." Perhaps to wean ourselves from this particular form of idolatry there is nothing so helpful as a wide and constant study of the history of thought. The pathway of intellectual development is strewn with outgrown dogmas and exploded systems. How fatuous, then, to accept, whole and untested, the doctrine of any master, new or old, believing that his word will give us complete and undiluted truth! * * * * * So much, then, we may say with Bacon "concerning the several classes of Idols and their equipage, all of which must be renounced and put away with a fixed and solemn determination, and the understanding thoroughly freed and cleansed; the entrance into the kingdom of man, founded on the sciences, being not much other than the kingdom of heaven, whereinto none may enter except as a little child." It may perhaps be urged that the result of such a survey as we have taken of the obstacles to clear thought is to leave the mind dazed and discouraged, partly because the suggestions made for the conquest of these obstacles, though easily formulated in theory are difficult and sometimes impossible in practice, and partly because the general if not expressed tendency of our analysis is (it may be said) in the direction of that Pyrrhonic skepticism which "doomed men to perpetual darkness." To the former objection I have only to reply that it is one to which all discussions of the principles and problems of conduct are necessarily open. "If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces."[27] None the less, to state as lucidly as we can what were good to do under certain circumstances is properly regarded as part of the business of ethics. The other point is touched upon by Bacon himself in words which it would be impertinent to seek to better: "It will also be thought that by forbidding men to pronounce and set down principles as established until they have duly arrived through the intermediate steps at the highest generalities, I maintain a sort of suspension of the judgment, and bring it to what the Greeks call _acatalepsia_--a denial of the capacity of the mind to comprehend truth. But in reality that which I meditate and propound is not _acatalepsia_, but _eucatalepsia_; not denial of the capacity to understand, but provision for understanding truly; for I do not take away authority from the senses, but supply them with helps; I do not slight the understanding, but govern it. And better surely it is that we should know all that we need to know, and yet think our knowledge imperfect, than that we should think our knowledge perfect, and yet not know anything we need to know." [Footnote 27: This quotation is _not_ from Bacon.] MATHEMATICS FOR CHILDREN. BY M. LAISANT. Except with persons having specially favorable surroundings, I believe that the vast majority of parents have a feeling of dread at the thought of putting their children to the study of mathematics. They know that the child must learn something about it in order to pass his examinations; but with this knowledge goes an apprehension of loading his mind with those ideas which are so complicated and hard to acquire, and we put off the dreaded moment of setting him to work as late as possible. While I believe it is wise to spare the child all useless overwork, I am persuaded also that the best way of sparing him is not to shrink from initiating him into hard work, if that can be done in a rational way. I regard all the sciences as, at least to a certain extent, experimental, and, notwithstanding the views of those who would regard the mathematical sciences as a series of operations in pure logic, resting upon strictly ideal conceptions, I believe that we may affirm that there does not exist a mathematical idea that can enter our brain without the previous contemplation of the outer world and the facts it offers to our observation. This affirmation, the discussion of which now would carry us too far, may help to a clear idea of the way we should try to convey the first mathematical ideas to the mind of the child. The outer world is the first thing the child should be taught to regard and concerning which he should be given as much information as possible--information which he will have no trouble in storing, we may well believe, and from this outer world the first mathematical notions should be borrowed; to these should succeed later an abstraction, which is less complicated than it seems. Our primary teaching of arithmetic now follows in the tracks of that of grammar, as we might as well say that the teaching of grammar follows in the tracks of that of arithmetic. That is, in either case we teach the child a number of abstract and confusing definitions which he can not comprehend, imposing on him a series of rules to follow under the pretext of giving him a good practical direction, and we force him to learn and memorize these rules whether they are good for anything or not. When the child has grown older he is given two or three short lessons a week in science, nine tenths of which, with his fleeting memory, he forgets before the next week's lessons come on. He can not relish anything that is taught him in that way, and it would be vastly better to give him no scientific ideas at all than to scatter them around in such a way, for all teachers agree that a fresh pupil is more easily dealt with and can be taught more satisfactorily and thoroughly than one who has been mistaught. When the student has passed through it all and has established himself in life he is apt to look back upon his experiences under such teachings in no very amiable mood, and to regard such matters in the light of barriers that were set up to prevent his getting his diploma with too little work; and even if his profession is one that calls for applications of mathematics he prepares himself with sets of formulas that enable him to dispense with the imperfect instruction he has received. When we think of giving a child a mathematical education we are apt to ask whether he has special aptitudes fitting him to receive it. Do we ask any such questions when we talk of teaching him to read and write? Oh, no! we all acknowledge that reading and writing are useful, practical, and indispensable arts, which every human being not infirm or defective should learn. Now, elementary mathematics, which represents a tolerably extended equipment, is no less useful and indispensable than the knowledge of reading and writing, and I assert further, what may seem paradoxical to many, that it can be assimilated with much less fatigue than the earliest knowledge of reading and writing, provided always that instead of proceeding in the usual way and giving lessons bristling with formulas and rules, appealing to the memory, imposing fatigue, and producing nothing but disgust, we adopt the philosophical method of conveying ideas to the child by means of objects within reach of his senses. The teaching should be wholly concrete and applied only to the contemplation of external objects and their interpretation, and the instruction should be given continually, especially during the primary period, under the form of play. Nothing is easier than this, then, in arithmetic; for instance, to use dice, beans, balls, sticks, etc., and by their aid give the child ideas of numbers. Do we do anything of this kind? When I was taught to read and write I knew how to write the figure 2 before I had any idea of the number two. Nothing is more radically contrary to the normal working of the brain than this. The notion of numbers--up to 10, for example--should be given to the child before accustoming him to trace a single character. That is the only way of impressing the idea of number independently of the symbol or the formula which is only too ready to take the place in the mind of the object represented by it. When a child has learned to count through the use of such objects as I have mentioned he may be taught what is called the addition table. This table can be learned by heart easily enough, but when we reach the multiplication table we come upon one of the tortures of childhood. Would it not be simpler and easier to make the children construct these tables, instead of making them learn them? [Illustration: FIG. 1.] Let us first take the addition table, and suppose that we trace ten columns on suitably ruled paper, at the top of which we write the first ten numbers, for example, and then write them again at the beginning of a certain number of horizontal lines (Fig. 1). Let us suppose, too, that we have a box divided into compartments arranged like the squares in our table, into which we put heaps of balls, beans, or dice corresponding to the numbers indicated in the table. The child will take, for example, two balls from one compartment and three from another, will put them together and place his five balls in the case corresponding with the point where the lines of two and three will meet, and will thus gradually accustom himself to the idea that two added to three are equal to five, four and two to six, etc., before he knows how to write the corresponding figures. As soon as he has learned how to write them he can himself make the table with figures (Fig. 2), showing that one and one make two, one and three four, etc. [Illustration: FIG. 2.] This will be all the easier for him because he will only have to write the figures in their order in the lines and the columns. This furnishes an excellent writing exercise after the children have begun to write figures, and affords besides a certain method of teaching them the addition table up to nineteen at least. I insist that all this can be done even before the child knows how to write the figures by means of an arrangement like a printer's case, and that it will be as a play, rather than a study, to the child. Hardly anything more will be required than to bring the toy to the child's notice and leave him to himself after he has been started with it, and he will get along the faster the less he is bothered. A similar process may be adopted with the multiplication table. With a case like the other, it is only necessary to tell the child that if he wants to know how much are three times four he has only to make heaps of four things each, take three of them and put them in the box at the intersection of the line three and the column four. If he can write the figures he will write 12, instead of gathering up the twelve objects that represent the product. When he has played at this for some time he may become acquainted with all the products up to ten times ten or beyond without having to make any abnormal effort of memory. The idea of numeration, which is usually put off till a later period, should also be given at the beginning. Children soon understand the decimal numeration and learn to write 10 for ten, and other numbers composed of one of the nine ciphers and zero. But the fact which, however, though quite essential to know, receives very little attention is that there is nothing particular about this number ten, and that systems of numeration can be devised resting on any basis that may be taken; that the principle of every system of numeration consists in taking a certain number of units and grouping them. Take, for example, a system having five as its basis. All the numbers of such a system can be represented with the figures 1, 2, 3, and 4, the symbol 10 standing in this case for five. To construct a number we have only to group the units by fives and observe the result. To learn decimal numeration by this process we put tens of objects into little boxes, tens of little boxes into larger ones, and so on. The child can in this way acquire an exact idea of the units of successive order in any system that may be desired. This method of teaching was developed in a remarkable way about thirty years ago by Jean Macé in a little book entitled _L'Arithmétique du Grand-Papa_--Grandpa's Arithmetic--which made some impression when it appeared, but has been substantially forgotten. In this method I attach much importance to giving these exercises a form of play. I believe that nothing in primary instruction should savor of obligation and fatigue. It would, on the other hand, be better to try to induce the child to desire himself to go on, and it would always be well to try to give him the illusion, in all stages of instruction, that he is the discoverer of the facts we wish to impress upon his mind. We need not stop with arithmetic, but may go on and give the child a little geometry. To accomplish this we should give him the idea of geometrical objects, and to some extent their nomenclature, and this can be done without causing fatigue. To accomplish this he should be taught to draw, however rudely. He can begin with straight lines, of which he soon learns the properties; then, when he has drawn several lines side by side, he will learn that they are parallels and will never meet. He will learn, too, after he has drawn three intersecting lines, that the figure within them is called a triangle, that the figure formed by two parallel lines meeting two other parallels is a parallelogram, and he can go on to make and learn about polygons, etc (Fig. 3). All this nomenclature will get into his head without giving abstract definitions, but in such a way that when he sees a geometrical object of definite form he will recognize it at once and give it the name that belongs to it. [Illustration: FIG. 3.] In the practical matter of the measurement of areas we convey immediate comprehension as to many figures without special effort, provided we do not present the demonstration in professional style, limiting ourselves to making the pupil comprehend or feel things so clearly and definitely that it shall be equivalent, as to the satisfaction of his mind, to an absolutely rigorous demonstration. At any rate, he will be better provided for the future than by rigorous demonstrations that he does not understand. Taking the parallelogram, for example, let us suppose a figure made like Fig. 4, and we saw through it along the lines _A A'_ and _B C_. It does not need a very great effort of attention to recognize, experimentally if need be, that the two triangles _A A' D_ and _B B' C_ may be placed one upon the other and are identical. If, from the figure thus formed, we take away the right-hand triangle the parallelogram will remain; if we take away the other triangle a rectangle will be left, or a peculiar parallelogram, of which also we give the idea to the child as a figure in which the angles are formed by straight lines perpendicular to one another. Here, then, the child gains the notion of the equivalence of a parallelogram and a rectangle of the same base and height; and this notion, obtained by cutting up a piece of board or pasteboard, he will carry so seriously and firmly in his head that he will never lose it. By cutting the same parallelogram in two, along a diagonal _A C_, it may be easily shown that the two triangles can be placed exactly one upon the other, and that, consequently, they have equal areas. These lessons constitute a series of classical theorems in geometry which the child can try with his fingers and learn without even giving them the form of theorems. I might show the same as to the area of the trapeze and with many other theorems, but my purpose is only to present as many examples as will make my idea understood, without going into details. [Illustration: FIG. 4] Yet I can not leave this subject without showing how we can make a very child understand some of the geometrical theorems that have acquired a bad reputation in the world of candidates for degrees, including even such as the _pons asinorum_ of Pythagoras; the demonstration, that is, that if we construct the triangles _B_ and _C_ on the sides of a right-angled triangle, their sum will be equal to the square _A_ constructed on the hypotenuse. The usual demonstration of this theorem is not very complicated, but there is something tiresome, artificial, and hard in it. The demonstration I propose is almost intuitive, and the reasoning of it is both simple and rigorous. Suppose we take two equal squares, and, making equal lengths on the four sides of one of them, join the points so obtained as indicated in the first of the two figures (Figs. 5 and 6) so as to form four right-angled triangles, and then place four other squares in the corners of the original square. These right-angled triangles are of such sort that the sum of their sides is equal to the side of the square. This can be demonstrated, but it strikes the eyes without that. We see, too, that the interior figure is a square, and that it is constructed on the hypotenuse of the triangles in question. [Illustration: FIG. 5.] [Illustration: FIG. 6.] It is easy to see in the other figure, which is formed after the same measures as its alternate, that the triangles 1, 2, 3, 4 can be arranged so as to occupy the positions 1', 2', 3', 4' in such way as to leave in the main square two smaller squares constructed on the sides of one of the right-angled triangles. It follows that the square A is equivalent to the sum of the squares _B_ and _C_. The theorem thus becomes a kind of intuition, a thing evidently indisputable. It is a curious fact that the origin of this demonstration is lost in the obscurity of the past; it probably goes back to thirty or forty centuries, at least, before the Christian era, and apparently to India. Bhascara, in his _Bija Ganita_, after tracing a figure, a simple combination of these two, says, "There you see it." I remark that such a demonstration, even if dressed with geometrical terms, assuming a character that conforms to existing ways of teaching, would be vastly superior, even in secondary schools, to the demonstrations of Legendre and others, which are much harder. The return to what was done very long ago in this case constitutes a great advance upon what we are doing now. Having given our little one an initiation into the mysteries of arithmetic and geometry, we introduce him to algebra, a branch which passes in the majority of families as the hardest, most complicated, and most abstruse that can be imagined. I do not pretend that algebraic theories enter easily into the child's delicate brain; rather the contrary; but I declare that some ideas in algebra can be made comprehensible to children without fatigue. We can, for instance, make them understand, in the way of amusement and without great difficulty, the formula that gives the sum of the first numbers. We take a sheet of paper ruled in squares and shade the first square of the first line, then the first two squares of the second line, the first three of the third, etc. (Fig. 7). The whole number of squares shaded in this manner represents visibly the sum of the first whole numbers up to any one we may choose--to 7 in the figure. If we give this paper to the child and ask him to return it, he will very easily perceive that the figures formed by the white and the black squares are alike. The number sought for will therefore be equal to half the sum of the squares--that is, in the present example 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 = (7 X 8) : 2 = 28, we can prove by reasoning that if n be taken to represent the last number we shall have for the sum n (n + 1) S = ---------- 2 [Illustration: FIG. 7.] I introduce this formula to define my thought better, but one can make the child perceive the numbers that are wanted without writing down a single character. Somewhat similar is the method of finding the sum of the odd numbers. For this it will be enough to take our square-ruled sheet of paper and shade the first square on the left, then the three squares around it, which will form with it a square (1 + 3 = 4); continuing thus we obtain, as the figure readily shows (Fig. 8), a square formed of a series of shaded zones, representing the series of odd numbers, the examination of which will illustrate the property to the child. [Illustration: FIG. 8.] In another direction it is possible to give the child algebraic ideas much beyond anything we would imagine. Suppose, for example, we want to give him a conception of addition. He easily realizes that objects--material bars, for example--can be selected so as to represent numbers by their length. He can be readily made to understand that if he has one bar three and another five inches long he can obtain the sum of these lengths, in what we might call a material way, by placing them lengthwise, one at the end of the other--an essentially practical notion and easily carried into effect. If we take a line and mark a starting point on it, calling it zero, then measure off segments on it representing the bars we have been talking about one after another, we can get the sum represented by the length of the two segments. If, instead of measuring three plus five inches I measure three plus two I reach another point. If, instead of adding two and three, I wish to take one of the bars or numbers away (3-2), or subtract, the operation will be easily performed by measuring the two in the opposite direction. The difference will be represented by the length that is left. If we try to form the quantity 3-5 in arithmetic we can not do it; but in proceeding in this method and measuring back on the bar we get to a point back of the original starting point which represents this difference--say two inches behind where we began. Here we have in the germ the whole theory of negative quantities, concerning which thousands and thousands of pages have been written. Yet we find that by carefully graduating our lines we can make it intuitive and accessible to a child who has learned that the common operations of addition and subtraction can be represented with material objects. The generation of negative and positive quantities follows quite naturally. These examples, I think, are sufficient to show that we might considerably enlarge the field of the investigations within reach of the child. For this purpose a small amount of very simple material, which we can vary as we please, is needful. The first element of this material is paper ruled in squares, a wonderful instrument, which everybody dealing with mathematics or with science generally should have. It is of special pedagogic use in giving children their first ideas of form, size, and position, without which their early instruction is only a delusion. Add to this paper dice, buttons, beans, and match-sticks--things always easy to get--and we have all the material we need. There is no amusement, however puerile it may appear, not even a play of words, that can not be utilized in teaching of this sort. For instance, when your child has learned his addition table, if you put him to a demonstration, assuming to prove to his comrades that six and three make eight, his curiosity will be excited, and you may be very sure that, once his attention has been given to this amusement, he will never forget that six and three make nine and not eight. To make the demonstration, we have only to group the nine match-sticks as in the figure (Fig. 9) below. We might demonstrate in a like way that half of twelve is seven by cutting the Roman numeral XII in two, leaving the upper part visible. Such pleasantries have a pedagogical value, because the paradox is precisely of a kind to attract the attention of the child, and he will always afterward be sure not to fall into the trap. [Illustration: FIG. 9.] The side of this kind of instruction on which I insist most is that, given under the form of play, it is free from every sort of dogmatic character. No truth should be imposed on the child; on the contrary, he should be allowed to discover it as a fruit of his own activity. He will be thoroughly impressed with the truths which he has thus found out himself. They had better be few at first; the important thing is for him to know them completely. The instruction should also be essentially objective and free from all abstraction. The absence of abstraction should, however, be rather apparent than real. Abstraction is indeed one of the elements that contribute most to give mathematical science a fearful air to outsiders, and yet it is most usually a simplification of matters--quite the contrary of what is generally supposed. It is, in fact, such a simplification and so necessary that we all make it as if by instinct, and the child makes it, not in mathematics only, but in all the considerations of life. Thus, when I want to give the child his first idea of the number two I put two beans in his hand and let him contemplate them. He gets a perfect notion of the collection two. Yet, if you look at them a little closer and he himself looks at them closer he will find that the two beans, whatever else they may be, are not identical, for there exist no two objects in Nature that are not different. So when the child introduces this idea of collection into his mind in a wholly instinctive way, by identifying the things he sees, he begins to perform abstraction. This abstraction delivers him from all the complications and all the annoyances that come to him from the contemplation of real objects. By the philosophic process of abstraction it has been possible to construct all the sciences, and especially the science of magnitudes. The ideas I have been setting forth in outline are not mine, and are, unfortunately, not recent. They may be found in somewhat different form, but substantially the same in principle, in _l'Essai d'education nationale_, published by Le Chalotais in 1763. The paper furnishes a programme of studies and education which, if put into execution, would, I believe, constitute a long advance over the present conditions. At a later period Condorcet was occupied with the subject. At the close of the nineteenth century the name of Jean Macé, which I have already cited, should be held among those of men who have tried to infuse sound and just views concerning the pedagogy of mathematics. Another man, from whom I have borrowed a considerable part of the examples I have cited, is Edouard Lucas, who, in his _Récréations mathématiques_, of which one volume was published during his lifetime and two others after his death, and in his lectures before the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, strove to develop views concerning the primary mathematical education of childhood--views which did not differ, except in form, from those which I have presented.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique._ PRESENT POSITION OF SOCIOLOGY. BY F. SPENCER BALDWIN. The present condition of sociological thought is confused, if not chaotic. It needs only a brief examination of the writings of professed sociologists to discover the want of agreement among them. There is no consensus of opinion regarding either the scope and method of the new science, so called, or its fundamental laws and principles. The name sociology stands for no definite body of systematic knowledge. It is applied to an inchoate mass of speculation, often vague and conflicting, which represents the thought of various thinkers about social phenomena. A few years ago a student of sociology in Chicago wrote to "all the teachers of sociology in the United States, and to others known to be deeply interested in the subject and entitled to express an opinion," asking them to answer a number of pertinent questions regarding the nature and function of the "science."[28] About forty replied; of these, three discreetly pleaded knowledge insufficient to entitle them to an opinion. Comparison of the views expressed in the remaining twenty-seven replies led the investigator to conclude that the science is in a more or less undefined and tentative position. So little progress toward unanimity of opinion has been made by sociologists since the date of this census that its results may be taken as typical of present conditions. Among the questions asked were these: "Do you think the study is entitled to be called a science?" "In what department does it belong?" "What is its relation to political economy, history, political science, ethics?" [Footnote 28: Present Condition of Sociology in the United States. Ira W. Howarth. Annals of the American Academy, September, 1894.] The question whether sociology is entitled to be called a science is answered by "fully three fourths" of the correspondents in the affirmative. Some hedge, by affirming that it is "becoming a science." Prof. John Bascom, of Williams College, appears to have entered into the humor of the situation; he writes, "It will do no harm to call it a science if we do not abate our effort to make it one." The opinions regarding the department in which sociology belongs are entertainingly diverse. Prof. John Dewey, of the University of Chicago, is frank enough to admit that he doesn't "feel at all sure" where it belongs. "It would seem well," he adds, "to have it a separate branch, in order to make sure that it received proper attention." This feeling of uneasiness lest the claims of sociology be slightingly treated appears to be general among the representatives of the new study. Most of the teachers of sociology are of the opinion that it ought to form a department by itself. Some would place it in the department of the social sciences, along with politics, economics, jurisprudence, and the like. Others would change the order, making all the social sciences divisions of sociology. On the other hand, Professor Giddings, of Columbia University, says: "General sociology can not be divided into special social sciences, such as economics, law, and politics, without losing its distinctive character. It should be looked on as the foundation or groundwork of these sciences, rather than as their sum or as their collective name." Scattering replies place it under psychology, moral and political science, political economy, and anthropology. One teacher thinks it belongs under the "humanities"; while two say it has no natural boundaries, and is therefore not included in any one department. Altogether the impression left by the replies to this question is that the teachers of sociology are quite at a loss to know where to put the study in the university curriculum. They appear to realize confusedly that they have on their hands a pedagogical white elephant, which defies classification. The opinions concerning the relation of sociology to political economy, history, political science, and ethics are almost delphic in their vagueness. Says one, "History is its material, ethics its guide, political economy its interpreter, and a rational system of political science its proposed end." Says another, "Sociology is political economy in practice, history in the making, political science as an art, and ethics applied." After worrying over these oracular epigrams it is refreshing to be told by another teacher that "the relation of sociology to political economy, history, etc., is _close_." It would be superfluous to cite further illustrations of the unsettled state of sociological thought. The quotations that have been made show conclusively that the accredited representatives of the new "science" are at loggerheads upon fundamental questions. This fact the sociologists themselves readily admit. The author of a recent treatise on sociology speaks of the "confusion and perplexity among its teachers, and declares that its forms are as yet varied, and perhaps would suggest a series of pseudo-sciences instead if one genuine science."[29] Even Professor Giddings confesses in the preface of his Principles of Sociology that "much sociology is as yet nothing more than careful and suggestive guesswork." Professor Small, of the University of Chicago, in his Introduction to the Study of Society, speaks of sociology as an "inchoate science," and remarks that "only ignoramuses, incompetent to employ the method of any science, could claim for sociology the merit of a completed system." [Footnote 29: Fairbanks. Introduction to Sociology, p. 1.] Sociologists themselves, then, confess that differences of opinion exist among them. Let us look more carefully at the nature of these differences. They relate to the scope, the method, the object, and the ground-principles of the "science." The province of sociology is defined by some very broadly, to include the whole range of the phenomena of human association. By others the scope of the study is limited to a narrower range of social phenomena. Among the latter, again, there are some who would identify sociology with the study of social origins, or the genesis of social institutions. Others would restrict sociology to a study of the history and function of the family. Still others understand by sociology merely the pathology of society, devoting themselves to the diagnosis of social diseases, as crime and pauperism. Professor Giddings has called attention to the natural tendency on the part of each social philosopher to create a sociology in the image of his professional specialty. "To the economist," he says, "sociology is a penumbral political economy--a scientific outer darkness--for inconvenient problems and obstinate facts that will not live peaceably with well-bred formulas. To the alienist and the criminal anthropologist it is a social pathology. To the ethnologist it is that subdivision of his own science which supplements the account of racial traits by a description of social organization. To the comparative mythologist and the student of folklore it is an account of the evolution of culture." The narrower conceptions of sociology, however, have been discarded by the best-known sociologists of the present time. There is a general tendency to adopt a broad definition of the province of sociology, to include in the field of investigation all the phenomena of social structure and growth. But what is the relation of this general social science to the special social sciences--that is, the sciences dealing with special groups of social phenomena, as economics, politics, and jurisprudence? Is sociology anything more than a convenient collective name for the sum of all these? Touching this point opinions differ.[30] [Footnote 30: See for the following: H. H. Powers. Terminology and the Sociological Conference, in Annals of the American Academy, March, 1895.] At least three different conceptions of the relation of sociology to the various special social sciences may be distinguished. Sociology has been defined as (1) the "inclusive," as (2) the "co-ordinating," and as (3) the "fundamental" science of society. 1. The first conception is that of Spencer and De Greef. Spencer defines sociology as "the science of society," and defends his adoption of the term on the ground that "no other name sufficiently comprehensive existed." This implies that he conceives of sociology as an inclusive science. De Greef, the Belgian sociologist, makes the science all comprehensive; his scheme of classification "includes everything, from the husbanding of corn and wine to electioneering contests in the Institute of France."[31] 2. The second conception is that of Professor Small, of Chicago. He defines sociology as "the synthesis of all the particular social sciences." It does not include, it coordinates these sciences. It concerns itself with the relations which the various special groups of social phenomena hold to each other and to society as a whole, leaving to special social sciences the study of each group in minute detail. The conclusions won by these special sciences are taken by sociology and worked over into a body of correlated social principles. Sociology is, therefore, subsequent to the particular social sciences and dependent upon them. 3. The third conception is that of Professor Giddings, of Columbia University. He defines sociology as "the science of social elements and first principles." It is "not merely the sum of the social sciences; it is rather their common basis." It undertakes to analyze the general characteristics of social phenomena and to formulate the laws of social organization and evolution. Sociology furnishes a body of fundamental principles which make a common basis for the special social sciences. The latter rest on sociology, which is the antecedent and fundamental social science. [Footnote 31: See Giddings. Principles of Sociology, p. 29.] Now a little reflection will show that these three conceptions of sociology do not conflict, but harmonize. There is no real opposition between them, rightly understood. Each emphasizes correctly one phase of the relation between sociology and the special social sciences. Sociology is both an inclusive, a co-ordinating, and a fundamental science. In the first place, sociology is a general science, having as its subject-matter social phenomena of all kinds. Therefore it comprehends all the sciences dealing with special kinds of social phenomena. These particular sciences are, in the nature of things, closely related to each other. They must possess in common certain laws and principles. These it is the task of sociology to formulate; for as the inclusive social science it should exhibit the mutual relations of the included social sciences. Thus sociology becomes a co-ordinating as well as an inclusive science. Furthermore, the laws and principles of the special social sciences, which sociology, as the co-ordinating science, undertakes to formulate, are necessarily fundamental. And in this respect sociology may be regarded as the fundamental social science. The three rival conceptions of sociology must be combined in the correct view. As Mr. Arthur Fairbanks remarks in his admirable Introduction to Sociology: "Sociology may embrace all the sciences dealing with society, but it does not destroy the partial independence of any of these branches. It includes economics, politics, and the like, but, instead of supplanting them, its sphere is to lay the foundation of these particular social sciences." It appears, then, that the disagreement among the leaders of sociological thought regarding the scope of their "science" is more apparent than real. The same may be said regarding the contention about method. The debate here is over the question whether deduction or induction is the proper method of investigation in the social sciences. One party holds that the only legitimate method is the abstract-deductive, the investigator arriving at his conclusions by reasoning _a priori_ from certain fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of man in general. What these thinkers aim at is a subjective interpretation of social phenomena in terms of human motives, principles, and ideals. Another party maintains that the only fruitful method is the concrete-inductive, the investigator reaching his conclusions by observing the facts of social life and reasoning from them to general laws and principles. The aim here is to give an objective interpretation of society in terms of race, environment, and historical conditions. The controversy has been especially violent among the economists. The English classical school of political economy made exclusive use of the deductive method; economic laws were deduced from the fundamental postulate of human selfishness. The German historical school employed the inductive method; economic laws were inferred from a study of the concrete facts of industrial life. This academic discussion over method is tiresome and futile. Neither method will ever drive the other from the field. The exclusive employment of either deduction or induction will yield only half results in the social sciences. The two methods effectually supplement each other and should be used together. They are not rivals, but allies. Induction without deduction is blind; deduction without induction untrustworthy. This fact is recognized by recent writers on sociology. So Professor Giddings remarks that "history without deductive illumination is chaos. Deduction without verification is undoubtedly the very light that never was on sea or land!" The principal method in the social sciences must undoubtedly be the inductive. The nature of the subject-matter determines this. The social sciences deal with the facts of social structure and growth. The task of the investigator is the explanation of these facts. He has first, then, to observe and compare the facts. But his observation must be guided and his conclusions verified by deduction. Concerning the purpose of sociology, as touching its method, there are two conflicting opinions. But here again the seeming disagreement is not absolutely irreconcilable. It is held by some that the purpose of the sociologist should be merely the acquisition of knowledge, without further thought of the practical use to which the results of his researches might be put. He should aim to discover and formulate the laws of social forces, not to propose ideals of social reform. Sociology is a pure science and has no utilitarian end. By others it is held that the purpose of the sociologist should be the regulation of social forces in the interest of human progress. The object of sociology is the betterment of society, the acceleration of social evolution. It is an applied science and has a practical end. Both these views are tenable. In fact, sociology, like all sciences, has a double purpose. The primary purpose is to acquire knowledge; the secondary purpose is to apply that knowledge to the attainment of practical ends. This duality of purpose is clearly set forth by Mr. Lester F. Ward in a recent essay.[32] "Sociology," he says, "has both a pure and an applied stage." It "should be studied first for the sake of information relating to the laws of human association and co-operative action, and finally for the purpose of determining in what ways and to what extent social phenomena may, with a knowledge of their laws, be modified and directed toward social ideals." [Footnote 32: Lester F. Ward. Purpose of Sociology. American Journal of Sociology, November, 1896.] Modern society is a complex of difficult problems. And this fact furnishes a background of motive for the studies of the sociologist. Not even the veriest stickler for pure science can deny the imperative need of established knowledge of the laws of social activity. The people perish for lack of wisdom. To enlighten the public mind on vital social questions and thus to promote an intelligent direction of social conduct toward rational ends is the high function of sociology. This practical purpose, however, should be kept always secondary to the pursuit of knowledge. "The knowledge is the important thing. The action will then take care of itself."[33] The discussion of the what-ought-to-be must wait on the investigation of the what-is. The neglect of this caution has been responsible for much false doctrine and foolish counsel. Sociologists have allowed their enthusiasm for ideals to blind the eye and bias the judgment. Panacea hawkers of all sorts have attempted to prescribe for social diseases, without making any study of social structure and function. Communistic quackery has masqueraded as sociological wisdom. The wild-cat sociology of the present day is a result of the over-addiction to social reform which besets students of society. It can not be too strongly emphasized that the primary object of the sociologist is the impartial investigation of facts. The man who forgets this becomes dangerous. He is liable to run amuck. [Footnote 33: Ward. Ibidem.] The differences of opinion as to the scope, method, and purpose of sociology have been found upon examination to be less serious than they at first sight appeared. But in regard to the fundamental principles of sociology, the confusion is hopeless. The student will search in vain in the systematic treatises on sociology for any definite body of established doctrine which he can accept as the ground-principles of the science. He finds only an unmanageable mass of conflicting theories and opinions. Each treatise contains an exposition of what the author is pleased to label the Principles of Sociology. But the "principles" are not the same in any two treatises; and by no process of analysis and synthesis can they be brought into harmony. They are fundamentally contradictory. It is impossible, I believe, to discover a single alleged ground-principle of sociology that has commanded general assent. Some of the recent writers on sociology have devoted themselves particularly to the task of establishing one basal principle which may be applied to the interpretation of all social phenomena. At least half a dozen claims to the discovery of such a principle have been put forward. Prof. Ludwig Gumplowicz finds the elementary social fact to be conflict; Prof. Guillaume De Greef finds it to be contract; M. Gabriel Tarde contends that the fundamental principle of society is imitation; Prof. Emile Durkheim argues that it is "the coercion of the individual mind by modes of action, thought, and feeling external to itself." Professor Giddings criticises all these explanations of society, as either too special or too general, and undertakes to prove that "the original and elementary fact in society is the consciousness of kind." This is the determining principle to which all social phenomena are to be referred.[34] But Professor Giddings's sociological postulate has been promptly rejected by his American colleagues, Prof. Albion W. Small and Mr. Lester F. Ward. The former speaks contemptuously of the consciousness of kind as a remote metaphysical category, and declares that the whole system of sociology based on the principle is "an impossible combination of contradictions."[35] This opinion is approved by Ward, who riddles Giddings's book with criticism, and complains of the author's inability to handle principles correctly.[36] [Footnote 34: See Giddings. Principles of Sociology, chap. i.] [Footnote 35: In American Journal of Sociology, September, 1896.] [Footnote 36: In Annals of the American Academy, July, 1896.] It is hardly necessary to penetrate further into this debate over first principles. The most exhaustive examination of the writings of the leaders in sociological thought would fail to discover any fundamental unity of opinion. The so-called principles of the science are multiform. They represent merely the unsupported conclusions of individual thinkers. If we except the barest commonplaces, no truths have been established; no scientific laws have been agreed upon. The content of the science of sociology, as expounded in treatises bearing this name, varies with the particular bias of the writer. In fine, there are systems of sociology galore, but there is hardly a sociology. Of the various systems of sociology that have been developed since the new "science" was first outlined by Auguste Comte, that of Herbert Spencer is undoubtedly the most coherent and self-consistent. But even the genius of Mr. Spencer has been unequal to the task of working out a body of firmly grounded principles which should furnish a basis for the convergence of opinion on social questions. He has not succeeded in giving permanent form and content to sociology. His work is disparagingly criticised by other living sociologists. Small declares that "Spencer's sociology ends precisely where sociology proper should begin," and quotes approvingly De Greef's assertion that "Mr. Spencer not only fails to show that there is a place for sociology, but his own reasoning proves more than anything else that there is no social science superior to biology."[37] Ward, while commending the logical consistency of Mr. Spencer's work, pronounces him "unsystematic, nonconstructive, and nonprogressive."[38] [Footnote 37: See Giddings. Principles of Sociology, chap. i.] [Footnote 38: Small and Vincent. Introduction to the Study of Society, p. 46]. There is much justice in these criticisms of Mr. Spencer's system. His sociology is almost entirely descriptive; and his description of social phenomena has taken the form of an elaborate analogy between society and the animal organism. The utility of this biological analogy has rightly been called in question. The particular resemblances traced by Mr. Spencer between a society and a living body are these: both grow and increase in size; while they increase in size they increase in structure; increase in structure is accompanied by progressive differentiation of functions; and differentiation of functions leads to mutual interdependence of the parts. Furthermore, in the case both of a society and of a living body the lives of the units continue for some time if the life of the aggregate is suddenly arrested; while if the aggregate is not suddenly destroyed by violence its life greatly exceeds in duration the lives of its units. Since, therefore, the permanent relations among the parts of a society are analogous to the permanent relations among the parts of an organism, society is to be regarded as an organism. Now the trouble with this clever analogy is that it breaks down completely when the comparison is carried beyond a certain point. Mr. Spencer himself notices some differences between the social body and the animal body, but declares that they are not of such fundamental character as to weaken the force of his analogy. One of these differences, however, can not be so lightly dismissed. If we compare a high type of animal organism with a high type of society, this striking unlikeness is discovered. In the former there is but one center of consciousness; in the latter there are many. "In the one," to quote Mr. Spencer's own words, "consciousness is concentrated in a small part of the aggregate. In the other it is diffused throughout the aggregate." The animal body has one brain, one center of thought, feeling, and life; the social body has numberless such centers. When we go back and compare the course of development in the two cases the difference noted comes into even greater prominence. The evolution of animal life is characterized by progressive centralization, the evolution of social life by progressive decentralization. In the lowest form of animal, the amoeba, there is no single center of life. The life is in all the parts; reproduction takes place simply by division. But with each successive advance above this lowest form there is developed more and more definitely a single center of consciousness. One part becomes distinctly differentiated as the sole seat of life. If that part is destroyed, the organism dies. Thus, "animal development has meant a concentration of the more important nervous elements and a merging of their separate activity in the common activity of a single consciousness."[39] [Footnote 39: Fairbanks. Introduction to Sociology, p. 44.] The law of progress is quite the reverse in social development. At a primitive stage there is a marked subjection of the individual elements of society to a central authority, whether that of the patriarch, the tribal head, or the tribal assembly. The individual has no economic, legal, or moral independence. But as society develops, the control which the whole exerts over the parts through authority and custom is gradually diminished. The individuality of the members of the social body becomes more and more marked. Individual freedom and responsibility are definitely recognized. Thus, the development of society has meant "the development of individuality in each of its members." It is a development of persons; the "social consciousness exists only in the discrete social elements which have become individual."[40] [Footnote 40: Fairbanks. Ibidem.] In a word, social evolution is accompanied by a growing individualization of the component elements of society, whereas animal development leads to ever-stronger concentration of the life of the organism in a single part. This difference between the physical organism and society is fundamental and essential. It is far more striking than the superficial likenesses ingeniously adduced by Mr. Spencer. His analogy tends to obscure the real nature of social relations. Unless used with cautious qualifications it "suggests false and one-sided views" and thus hinders the progress of sociology. The biological analogy has, it may be conceded, a certain value as a convenient way of describing some of the aspects of social structure and growth. It may aid the student to comprehend certain facts, but, if followed blindly, it will lead him to overlook other facts of even greater importance. The biological analogy has been carried to absurd lengths by some writers. There is wearisome enumeration of social aggregates and organs, and exhaustive description of the social nervous system. We learn that the individual may be either a communicating cell or a terminal cell, otherwise known as an end organ. The girl in the central telephone office acts as a communicating cell when she telephones to Mr. Smith a message from Mr. Brown. "But when, Mr. Smith having asked her the exact time by the chronometer in the exchange, she looks at the dial and reports her observation to him, she is primarily a terminal cell or end organ."[41] The lookout man at sea, on the other hand, is invariably an end organ. This is far-fetched and fanciful. To clothe mere commonplaces in the borrowed rags and tags of biological terminology is not social science, nor does it aid one to get a correct conception of social reality. [Footnote 41: Small and Vincent. Introduction to the Study of Society, p. 218.] The unsettled state of sociological thought which has been here set forth is a natural result of the peculiar difficulties that stand in the way of the social sciences. These have been described by Mr. Spencer with great fullness of illustration.[42] They arise from three sources--namely, (1) from the intrinsic nature of the facts dealt with; (2) from the natures of the observers of these facts; and (3) from the peculiar relation in which the observers stand toward the facts observed. [Footnote 42: Herbert Spencer. Study of Sociology, chaps. iv to xii.] 1. In the first place the peculiar nature of social phenomena is such as to render scientific observation difficult. They are not of a directly perceptible kind like the phenomena which form the subject-matter of the natural sciences. Quantitative measurement and experiment are not possible. Social facts "have to be established by putting together many details, no one of which is simple, and which are dispersed, both in space and time, in ways that make them difficult of access." 2. Again, to these objective difficulties are added the subjective difficulties resulting from the intellectual and the emotional limitations of the investigators. There is, very generally, a lack of intellectual faculty sufficiently complex and plastic to comprehend the involved and changing phenomena of society. The scientific judgment is disturbed by a variety of emotional prejudices, which Mr. Spencer classifies as the educational bias, the bias of patriotism, the class bias, the political bias, and the theological bias. 3. And, finally, the peculiar position which the sociological observer occupies with reference to the phenomena puts further obstacles in the way of trustworthy observation. The sociologist has to study an aggregate in which he is himself included. He is a member of society and can not wholly free himself from the beliefs and sentiments generated by this connection. These peculiar difficulties which beset sociology have naturally impeded the development of the department compared with other branches of knowledge. They furnish adequate explanation of the unsettled condition of sociological thought which has been described in this paper. In conclusion, it is hardly necessary to state that in the writer's opinion sociology is not, at present, entitled to be called a science. In order to establish the right of a body of knowledge to the title of science, the claimants must be able to show that they have a definitely bounded field of investigation, that they employ recognized scientific methods, and that they have established certain truths of unquestioned value. Sociology in its present state fails to meet these conditions. Its province is not yet agreed upon, its methods have been often unscientific, and its first principles are yet to be formulated. It is not, therefore, a science. "Sociology," says one of its critics, "no more demonstrates its claim to existence as a science than astronomy would if we found some astronomers insisting that the sun went around the earth and others contending that the earth went around the sun."[43] [Footnote 43: The Nation, vol. lx, p. 351. Review of Small and Vincent's Introduction to the Study of Society.] After all, the question whether sociology deserves to be called a science or not is one of merely academic interest. It has received far more attention than it really deserves. Nor will any amount of discussion upon this point help to make sociology a science. "It is safe to say," remarks the critic from whom we have just quoted, "that no great scientific work was ever done by a man who was fretting over the question whether he was a scientist or not. The work is the thing and not what it is called. On the other hand, no name can dignify a work which is petty and futile." It is not by talking about it, but by working over it, that a body of knowledge is developed into a science. And sociologists would do well to heed the advice of Tarde, the French writer: "Instead of discoursing upon the merits of this infant--sociology--which men have had the art to baptize before its birth, let us succeed, if possible, in bringing it forth."[44] [Footnote 44: Quoted by Vincent in American Journal of Sociology, January, 1896, p. 487.] A FEATHERED PARASITE. BY LEANDER S. KEYSER. Nothing could more clearly prove that a common law runs through the whole domain of Nature than the fact that in every division of her realm there seems to be a class of parasites. In the vegetable world, as is well known, there are various plants that depend wholly upon other plants for the supply of their vital forces. And in the human sphere there are parasites in a very real and literal sense--men and women who rely upon the toil and thrift of others to sustain them in worthless idleness. In view of the almost universal character of this law it would be strange if these peculiar forms of dependence did not appear in the avian community. We do find such developments in that department of creation. Across the waters there is one bird which has won an unenviable reputation as a parasite, and that is the European cuckoo, which relies almost wholly on the efforts of its more thrifty neighbors to hatch and rear its young, and thereby perpetuate the species. Strangely enough, our American cuckoos are not given to such slovenly habits, but build their own nests and faithfully perform the duties of nidification, as all respectable feathered folk should. However, this parasitical habit breaks out, quite unexpectedly it must be conceded, in another American family of birds which is entirely distinct from the cuckoo group. In America the cowbird, often called the cow bunting, is the only member of the avian household that spirits its eggs into the nests of other birds. The theory of evolution can do little toward accounting for the anomaly, and even if it should venture upon some suggestions it would still be just as difficult to explain the cause of the evolution in this special group, while all other avian groups follow the law of thrift and self-reliance. The cowbird belongs to the family of birds scientifically known as _Icteridæ_, which includes such familiar species as the bobolinks, orioles, meadow larks, and the various kinds of blackbirds, none of which, I am glad to say, are parasites. The name _Molothrus_ has been given to the genus that includes the cowbirds. They are confined to the American continent, having no analogues in the lands across the seas. The same may be said, indeed, of the whole _Icteridæ_ family. It may be a matter of surprise to many persons that there are twelve species and subspecies of cowbirds in North and South America, for most of us are familiar only with the common cowbird (_Molothrus ater_) of our temperate regions. Of these twelve species only three are to be found within the limits of the United States, one is a resident of western Mexico and certain parts of Central America, while the rest find habitat exclusively in South America. A fresh field of investigation is open to some enterprising and ambitious naturalist who wishes to study several of these species, as comparatively little is known of their habits, and indeed much still remains to be learned of the whole genus, familiar as one or two of the species are. Their sly, surreptitious manners render them exceedingly difficult to study at close range and with anything like detail. Are all of them parasites? It is probable they are--at least to a greater or less degree--except one, the bay-winged cowbird of South America, which I shall reserve for notice later on in this article. We might assert that our common cowbird is the parasite _par excellence_ of the family, for, so far as I can learn from reading and observation, they never build their own nests or rear their own young, but shift all the duties of maternity, save the laying of the eggs, upon the shoulders of other innocent birds. These avian "spongers" have a wide geographical range, inhabiting the greater part of the United States and southern Canada, except the extensive forest regions and some portions of the Southern States. The center of their abundance is the States bordering on the upper Mississippi River and its numerous tributaries. They occur only as stragglers on the Pacific coast west of the Cascade and Sierra Nevada Mountains. The most northern point at which they have been known to breed is the neighborhood of Little Slave Lake in southern Athabasca. In the autumn the majority of these birds migrate to southern Mexico, although a considerable number remain in our Southern States, and a few occasionally tarry for the winter even as far north as New England and southern Michigan. The male cowbird looks like a well-dressed gentleman--and may have even a slightly clerical air--in his closely fitting suit of glossy black, with its greenish and purplish iridescence, and his cloak of rich metallic brown covering his head, neck, and chest. He makes a poor shift as a musician, but his failure is not due to lack of effort, for during courtship days he does his level best to sing a variety of tunes, expanding and distorting his throat, fluffing up his feathers, spreading out his wings and tail, his purpose evidently being to make himself as fascinating as possible in the eyes of his lady love. One of his calls sounds like the word "spreele," piped in so piercing a key that it seems almost to perforate your brain. One observer maintains that the cowbirds are not only parasitical in their habits, but are also absolutely devoid of conjugal affection, practicing polyandry, and seldom even mating. This is a serious charge, but it is doubtless true, for even during the season of courtship and breeding these birds live in flocks of six to twelve, the males almost always outnumbering the females. However, if their sexual relations are somewhat irregular, no one can accuse them of engaging in family brawls, as so many other birds do, for both males and females seem to be on the most cordial terms with one another, and are, to all appearances, entirely free from jealousy. Who has ever seen two cowbirds fighting a duel like the orioles, meadow larks, and robins? Their domestic relations seem to be readily adjusted, perhaps all the more so on account of their lax standards of sexual virtue. In obtruding her eggs into the nests of other birds Madame Cowbird is sly and stealthy. She does not drive the rightful owners from their nests, but simply watches her opportunity to drop her eggs into them when they are unguarded. No doubt she has been on the alert while her industrious neighbors have been constructing their domiciles, and knows where every nest in the vicinity is hidden. Says Major Charles Bendire: "In rare instances only will a fresh cowbird's egg be found among incubated ones of the rightful owners. I have observed this only on a single occasion." From one to seven eggs of the parasite are found in the nests of the dupes. In most cases the number is two, but in the case of ground builders the cowbird seems to have little fear of overdoing her imposition. Major Bendire says that he once found the nest of an ovenbird which contained seven cowbird's eggs and only one of the little owner's. If parasitism were the only crime of the cowbird one would not feel so much disposed to put her into the avian Newgate Calendar; but she not only inflicts her own eggs upon her innocent victims, but often actually tosses their eggs out of the nests in order to make room for her own. Nor is that all; she will sometimes puncture the eggs of the owners to prevent their hatching, and thus increase the chances of her own offspring. Whether this is done with her beak or her claws is still an open question, Major Bendire inclining to the belief that it is done with the claws. Her finesse is still further to be seen in the fact that she usually selects some bird for a victim that is smaller than herself, so that when her young hopefuls begin to grow they will be able to crowd or starve out the true heirs of the family. In this way it is thought that many a brood comes to an untimely end, the foster parents having no means of replacing their own little ones when they have been ejected from the nest. However, I am disposed to think that the cowbird's impositions are not usually so destructive as some observers are inclined to believe. I once found a bush sparrow's nest containing one cowbird and four little sparrows, all of which were in a thriving condition. The sparrows were so well fed and active that as soon as I touched the nest they sprang, with loud chirping, over the rim of their cottage and scuttled away through the grass. They were certainly strong and healthy, in spite of the presence of their big foster brother. Before they flitted away I had time to notice how the little family were disposed. The cowbird was squatted in the center of the nest, while his little brothers and sisters were ranged around him, partly covering him and no doubt keeping him snug and warm. They were further advanced than he, for while they scrambled from the nest, he could do nothing but snuggle close to the bottom of the cup, where he was at my mercy. A wood thrush's nest that I found contained two young thrushes and two buntings. All of them were about half fledged. Being of nearly the same size, the queerly assorted bantlings lived in apparent peace in their narrow quarters. I watched them at frequent intervals, but saw no attempts on the part of the foundlings to crowd out their fellow-nestlings. The cowbirds were the first to leave the roof-tree. Thus it appears that the intrusion of the cowbird's eggs does not always mean disaster to the real offspring of the brooding family, but of course it always prevents the laying of the full complement of eggs by the builders themselves. Even after the youngsters have left the nest the mother cowbird does not assume the care of them, but still leaves them in charge of the foster parents. It is laughable, almost pathetic, to see a tiny ovenbird or redstart feeding a strapping young cowbird which is several times as large as herself. She looks like a pygmy feeding a giant. In order to thrust a tidbit into his mouth she must often stand on her tiptoes. Why the diminutive caterer does not see through the fraud I can not say. She really seems to be attached to the hulking youngster. By and by, however, when he grows large enough to shift for himself, he deserts his little parents and nurses and seeks companionship among his own blood kindred, who will doubtless bring him up in the way all cowbirds should walk. It is surprising how many species are imposed on successfully by the cowbird. The number, so far as has been observed, is ninety, with probably more to be added. Among the birds most frequently victimized are the phoebes, the song sparrows, the indigo birds, the bush sparrows, and the yellow-breasted chats. Even the nests of the red-headed woodpecker and the rock wrens are not exempt. Some species, notably the summer warblers, detect the imposture and set about defeating the purposes of the interloper. This they do by building another story to their little cottage, leaving the obtruded eggs in the cellar, where they do not receive enough warmth to develop the embryo. While it is surprising that acute birds should allow themselves to be imposed on in this way, perhaps, after all, they look upon the cowbird as a kind of blessing in disguise; at least, he may not be an unmixed evil. They may act on the principle of reciprocity--that "one good turn deserves another." What I mean is this: In my rambles I have often found the cowbirds the first to give warning of the approach of a supposed danger. Having no domestic duties of their own, they can well secrete themselves in a tall tree overlooking the entire premises, and thus play the useful rôle of sentinel. This, I am disposed to believe, is one of the compensating uses of this parasite, and may furnish the reason for his being tolerated in birdland. And he _is_ tolerated. Has any one ever seen other birds driving the cowbird away from their breeding precincts, or charging him with desperate courage as they do the blue jays, the hawks, the owls, and other predatory species? He evidently subserves some useful purpose in the avian community, or he would not be treated with so much consideration. A young cowbird that I purloined from the nest and reared by hand did not prove a very pleasant pet. He was placed in a large cage with several other kinds of young birds. At first he was quite docile, taking his food from my hand and even allowing some of his feathered companions to feed him; but in a few weeks he grew so wild and manifested such a fierce desire for the outdoor world that I was glad to carry him out to the woods and give him his freedom. A young red-winged blackbird and a pair of meadow larks developed a different disposition. The dwarf cowbird (_Molothrus ater obscurus_) is similar to his relative just described, except that he is smaller and his geographical range is more restricted. He is a resident of Mexico, southern Texas, southwestern Arizona, and southern California. His habits resemble those of the common cowbird. Another bunting, having almost the same range, although a little more southerly, is the red-eyed cowbird, which is larger and darker than our common cowbird and has the same parasitical habits. In South America three species have been studied by Mr. W. H. Hudson, who, in collaboration with Mr. P. L. Sclater, has published a most valuable work on Argentine ornithology. One of these is called the Argentine cowbird (_Molothrus bonariensis_). It is a _bona fide_, blue-blooded parasite, and has been seen striking its beak into the eggs of other birds and flying away with them. The males, it is said, show little discrimination in pecking the eggs, for they are just as likely to puncture the cowbird eggs as those of other birds. Every egg in a nest is frequently perforated in this way. These buntings lay a large number of eggs, often dropping them on the ground, laying them in abandoned nests, or depositing them in nests in which incubation has already begun, in which cases all of them are lost. However, in spite of this wastefulness the birds thrive, thousands of them being seen in flocks during the season of migration. And, by the way, a description of their habits by Mr. Hudson has thrown an interesting light on the subject of migration in the southern hemisphere. South of the equator the recurrence of the seasons is the exact reverse of their recurrence north of the equator, and therefore the breeding season of the birds is in the autumn instead of the spring; the flight from winter cold occurs in the spring instead of in the autumn, and is toward the north instead of toward the south. Thus, in February and March the Argentine cowbirds are seen flying in vast battalions in the direction of the equatorial regions--that is, northward--in whose salubrious clime they spend the winter. As our northern autumn draws near and the southern summer approaches these winged migrants take the air line for their breeding haunts in the Argentine Republic and Patagonia. At the same time the migrants of the northern hemisphere are pressing southward before the blustering mien of old Boreas. It all seems wonderful and solemn, this world-wide processional of the seasons and the birds. Naturally, one would expect to find some other eccentricities in this aberrant family besides that of parasitism, and in this expectation one is not disappointed. There are two other species of cowbirds in the Argentine country--the screaming cowbird (_Molothrus rufoaxillaris_) and the bay-winged cowbird (_Molothrus badius_). The latter is only partly a trencher on the rights of other birds--that is, it is only half a parasite. Indeed, it sometimes builds its own nest, which is quite a respectable affair; but, as if to prove that it still has some remnants of cowbird depravity in its nature, it frequently drives other birds from their rightful possessions, appropriates the quarters thus acquired, lays its eggs into them, and proceeds to the performance of its domestic duties like its respectable neighbors. Its virtue is that it never imposes the work of incubation and brood rearing on any of its feathered associates, even though it does sometimes eject them from their premises. But what is to be said of the screaming cowbird? Instead of inflicting its eggs on its more distant avian relatives it watches its chance and slyly drops them into the domicile of its bay-winged cousins, and actually makes them hatch and rear its offspring! This seems to be carrying imposture to the extreme of refinement, or possibly developing it into a fine art, and reminds one of those human good-for-naughts who "sponge" off their relatives rather than go among strangers. One can scarcely refrain from wondering whether grave questions of pauperism and shiftlessness ever enter into the discussion of "the social problem" in the bird community. THE COLUMBUS MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION. BY PROF. D. S. MARTIN. The Columbus meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was looked forward to with considerable interest as the first in the new half century of that body. Would the impression and stimulus of the great semicentennial gathering at Boston last year be found to continue, or be followed by a reaction? The meetings west of the Alleghanies are always smaller than the eastern ones, and the brilliancy of the Boston meeting could not be looked for in any interior city. The general expectation was for an "off-year" gathering. But only in point of attendance was this impression verified. The register of those present showed three hundred and fifty-three names--a good number for an interior meeting, very few of the Western gatherings having exceeded it. In all other respects the general feeling of the members indicates that the meeting was notably successful and enjoyable, and the remarks made by the writer a year ago as to the real value of the smaller and less conspicuous meetings he feels to have been well exemplified. It was a scientific working meeting, with enough of social intercourse and attentions to be delightful, but not distracting. In these aspects the "golden mean" was markedly preserved. The arrangements of the local committee for the convenience of the members and the success of the meeting in general were remarkable in their completeness. Nothing seems to have been overlooked, and some advances were made upon any previous year. The daily programmes were well printed and on hand early every morning--a most important point, not always heretofore attained. A complete telephone service between the section rooms and the central hall was a feature of special advantage, each section reporting to headquarters every paper as it was taken up. This was then posted on a bulletin, so that any one could know at any time what was going on in each section. A great amount of delay and disappointment, that has often been felt by members anxious to hear certain papers in different sections, was thus entirely obviated. Columbus has set an example in this feature that must be followed in the arrangements for all future meetings. The entire service on these telephones was rendered not by professional operators, but by young lady students of the university, and it was well and gracefully done. It is fitting also that recognition should be given to some who have been less prominent in the local arrangements, but have had a large share in their preparation. While the public resolutions of thanks have made well-deserved mention of the local committee and its officers, especially Prof. B. F. Thomas, the indefatigable secretary, it is known in Columbus that much of the planning and arranging was the work of Prof. Edward Orton, Jr., the son of the president of the meeting, and that very much is owing to his laborious activity in the perfection of the local adjustments. The place of meeting was eminently pleasant and suitable--the wide campus and fine buildings of the Ohio State University. To members from the East it was a matter of great interest to see this noble institution, one of the best examples of the great educational enterprises of the central States. In his address of welcome at the opening of the association the president of the university, Dr. William O. Thompson, outlined the history of public education in the West as dating back to provisions in the "Ordinance of 1787," looking to educational advantages for the great "Northwest Territory." The State University of Ohio is one of the youngest of its kind, but now one of the most important, among the States formed from that great region, although Ohio was the first to be organized into Statehood. Among the numerous fine structures scattered over the broad area of the campus, one of the most interesting is Orton Hall, containing the collections in geology and archæology, which are very extensive, as well as the laboratories, workrooms, and classrooms of the geological department, and at present the University Library. Here the meetings of Section E (Geology and Geography) were held. In the adjacent Botanical Hall, with its greenhouses, etc., Section G held its meetings. But most of the sections met in Townshend Hall, where the telephone service above described connected all the rooms. The Ohio State University not only welcomed and accommodated the association, but had a strong representation among the officers of the meeting. The venerable president, Dr. Orton, has long been professor of geology in the university, and his collections are displayed in the hall that so appropriately bears his name. Section C (Chemistry) and Section G (Botany) both had secretaries from the university faculty--Professors Weber and Kellerman, respectively--while the arrangements for the meeting have been already spoken of as largely due to Professor Thomas and Professor Orton, Jr. The ladies' reception committee did everything for the comfort and convenience of the visiting ladies. Their musicale and garden party in the grounds were described as extremely enjoyable, and the provision of private carriages to convey ladies and aged members across the broad spaces of the campus to and from the entrances was a very delicate and highly esteemed convenience, especially on warm days. The association was favored in the weather, which, though somewhat hot out of doors, was not severe, and the rooms were pleasant and airy. The excursions given to the members were all of them scientific; they were not merely pleasure trips. This point was a marked feature of the Columbus meeting, and one well worthy of future imitation as far as may be. Not every place, however, has such marked facilities in this respect. On Saturday, August 26th, three free excursions were provided to points of geological or archæological interest. They were about equally shared by the members, together with representatives of the local committee. One party left on Friday evening, passing the night at Sandusky, and going by boat thence to the celebrated islands of Lake Erie, there to see the wonderful glacial furrows in the corniferous limestone on Kelley's Island and the recently opened strontia cave on Put-in-Bay Island. These islands are also favorite pleasure resorts for the whole neighborhood, and the trip was one of great interest and enjoyment. Another party, on Saturday morning, went to points of special importance in the coal region of the Hocking Valley, under the direction of Mr. R. M. Haseltine, chief mine inspector of Ohio. At Corning the party went down into Mine No. 8, owned by the Sunday Creek Coal Company, which has recently been equipped with electric power generated by utilizing the waste gas from neighboring gas-wells. This is said to be the first mine in Ohio to improve this natural source of power. At a depth of sixty-five feet the visiting party were taken by mine cars to a point where a remarkably fine exposure has been made of a carboniferous "forest," with upright trunks of _Sigillaria_ and associated forms of coal vegetation finely displayed. At a point somewhat nearer the entrance, but at a lower level, lunch was served by the company, in a chamber lighted by electricity, two hundred feet underground and a mile from daylight! Another mine was visited later, and the machinery and appliances examined; this was No. 16, at Hollister, owned by the Courtright Coal Company. The third party went to Fort Ancient to examine the great aboriginal earthworks at that place, owned by the State, and in charge of the Ohio Archæological Society. Here, on a hill widely overlooking the Little Miami Valley, are some of the most extensive prehistoric works in the country. The State has purchased two hundred and eighty-seven acres, and of these about one hundred acres are included within the walls. These ramparts, overgrown with large trees, follow closely the contour of the hills, and show that, whatever their age, there has been no change and little erosion since they were built. Their form is very irregular, consisting of two main areas--a northern one, called the "new fort," rudely square, and a southern one, called the "old fort," rudely triangular--connected by a narrow portion, called the "isthmus," with crescent-shaped transverse walls crossing it, and high conical mounds at the entrance to the "old fort." From the main gateway of the "new fort," starting from two mounds, two parallel walls can be traced, exactly eastward, for half a mile or more. Irregular as these works are, from the contour of the hills and the course of the ravines that bound them, yet there is also seen at times in their shaping a singular exactness of orientation that is striking and suggestive. Their use is problematical, but they must have been defensive, although an enormous force would be required to hold them, as their entire circumference is three miles and a half. At one point within the "old fort," in front of the gateway to the "isthmus," was found a burial place where a number of skeletons lay as though thrown together, not carefully and separately buried. The suggestion is strongly made that this spot marks an unsuccessful attack by enemies, who were roughly buried where they fell. At other points graves have been found, some containing copper implements and overlaid with plates of mica. Great regret was felt that Mr. W. K. Moorehead, who has explored so extensively here and in the vicinity and has published such interesting accounts of Fort Ancient and similar remains, was unable to be at the meeting on account of severe illness. The public spirit that has secured this spot for the State, and the work of the Ohio Archæological Society in caring for it properly, are matters for pride and congratulation, and evidences of the highest type of civilization. The society is clearing away the dense undergrowth so as to display the works and the trees upon them; is guarding and repairing the walls at points where injury has occurred by "washing"; has sunk a well in the "old fort," with fine water; and built a pavilion for visitors. Here lunch was served to the party, and addresses given by archæologists present and officers of the Archæological Society. On Thursday a large number of the geologists spent most of the day in examining moraines and glacial phenomena near Lancaster, and in the evening nearly the entire association was taken by special train to see the gas-wells in the same neighborhood, at Sugar Grove, which were lighted and "blown off" for their benefit. The city of Columbus itself is to a considerable extent supplied with natural gas. Turning to the proceedings of the meeting, there may be noted in the character of the papers certain tendencies which are independent of the association and belong to the general line of thought of the present, and doubtless yet more of the future. The papers presented may be roughly grouped into two classes: those relating to technical details, and those involving or seeking practical results and applications. Of course, there is no conflict between these two lines of thought and work--the latter, to be really attained being dependent upon the former--but there is this tendency distinctly shown, to consider scientific questions in their bearing on the welfare or the needs of humanity. Naturally, this aspect appeared more clearly in some of the sections than in others, but no one who looks over the titles in the daily programmes can fail to note it. The whole work of Section I (Social and Economic Science) is of this character, and it is marked in Sections G (Botany), D (Mechanics and Engineering), and H (Anthropology). It would be impossible to mention all the papers bearing upon such relations; a very few only can here be noted, even of those that were important. In Section I no more suggestive title has ever been presented to such a body than that of Miss Cora A. Benneson, of Cambridge, Mass., on Federal Guarantees for Maintaining Republican Government in the States. Miss Benneson is a graduate in law, and has already achieved distinction in her profession in subjects relating to questions of government. In Section G, Prof. H. A. Weber, the secretary, read a paper on Testing Soils for the Application of Commercial Fertilizers--the outcome of twelve years' intercourse with farmers' institutes and many more years of experimentation--aiming to avoid unwise and unprofitable use of fertilizers on soils to which they are not adapted, and to provide ready and accurate methods of determination as to the needs and the capacities of soils. Sections D and I united to hear a paper before the former, by Principal Morrison, of the Manual Training High School, of Kansas City, Mo., on Thermal Determinations in Heating and Ventilating Buildings, with special reference to schools. These are merely given as instances. Agriculture, electrical appliances, educational methods, and social conditions, all received important attention. Another paper of great practical moment was read before Section C by Prof. H. W. Wiley, chemist to the United States Department of Agriculture, and Mr. H. W. Krug, on New Products from Maize Stalks. Careful analyses of the pith and stalks of corn, and important suggestions as to their great utility in various ways, were presented. Some of these were very surprising, not only pointing out the value of these substances as fodder, when properly prepared and used, but in the realm of war as well as in peace, for protecting the sides of naval vessels as a light and most effective armor, and in the manufacture of smokeless powder of a superior quality. Professor Wiley claimed that from these hitherto almost waste products of American farms immense results may be obtained. Very naturally, the recent war and questions connected with it called forth some striking contributions. Prof. William S. Aldrich, of the University of Illinois, addressed Section D and a large proportion of members from other sections on Engineering Experiences with Spanish Wrecks, and the story of the Maria Teresa. Professor Aldrich was connected with the United States repair-ship Vulcan, and described the remarkable character of that vessel--an entire novelty in naval warfare--with her complete outfit of engineering tools and machinery, even to brass and iron furnaces of large capacity. Never before, he said, had such castings been made on board ship, or a foundry operated on the ocean. The effects of the American rapid-fire guns on Admiral Cervera's ships were fully described and illustrated, and the paper closed with a vivid and detailed account of the floating of the Maria Teresa, her repairing by the crew of the Vulcan through five weeks of most difficult work, and the unsuccessful attempt to bring her to Norfolk, ending in her abandonment and loss. The public lecture of Wednesday evening was by Prof. C. E. Monroe, of Washington, D. C., on the Application of Modern Explosives, very fully illustrated. Detailed accounts were given of the manufacture of gun cotton and various recent forms of high explosives and smokeless powders. In regard to the use of the latter, Professor Monroe emphasized the fact that France and Germany had adopted smokeless powders in 1887, and Italy and England a year or two later, and characterized as "unpardonable" the fact that our own service was unprovided with any such material when we began the war with Spain. He further discussed recent and very important experiments in the matter of throwing from ordinary guns shells charged with high explosives, especially that known as Joveite, with which tremendous effects have been produced in penetrating the heaviest plating. Very different in character was the interesting and pleasing programme carried out by the Section of Botany in memory of two eminent workers in bryology who were long identified with Columbus--Dr. William S. Sullivant and his colaborer, Prof. Leo Lesquereaux, who was eminent also in fossil botany. Wednesday was set apart as "Sullivant day," and was marked by an extensive display of portraits, books, and specimens, and a series of memorial addresses, with notes on the progress of bryology. Twelve North American species of mosses have been named for Dr. Sullivant, and specimens of all these, with drawings made by him, were loaned for this occasion from his collection, now at the museum of Harvard University. Sets of duplicates of these species, from the herbarium of Columbia University, were prepared and presented as souvenirs to the botanists in attendance. Some members of Dr. Sullivant's family were present, and naturally felt a very deep sense of gratification at such a tribute to his name and fame. The address of the retiring president, Prof. F. W. Putnam, had a special interest in that it was the last official appearance of one who has been for so many years closely and prominently identified with the association as its permanent secretary, and whose presence and personality have seemed an essential element in every meeting. Professor Putnam, in opening, paid an especial tribute to the late Dr. D. G. Brinton, of Philadelphia, a former president and leading member of the association, devoted to the same branch of research with himself--North American ethnology--although holding different theories therein. Professor Putnam dealt with the prehistoric peoples of this continent, and argued for distinct racial types as expressed in the remains that they have left, and for resemblances as due to intercourse and mingling of tribes, and not to autochthonous development of arts and customs as the result of corresponding stages of evolution without contact or outside influence--the view maintained by Dr. Brinton. There is not space here to dwell further upon many valuable papers and discussions. The Section of Geology had a full and interesting session, in which glacial phenomena, especially as displayed in Ohio, bore a considerable part. One of the papers had a very wide and painful interest for all Americans--that of Mr. E. H. Barbour, on the Rapid Decline of Geyser Activity in the Yellowstone Basin. Careful and extended comparison of the present state of the geysers and hot springs with that to be seen a few years ago shows that these wonderful and impressive phenomena have greatly decreased in both the amount and the frequency of their manifestations, and Mr. Barbour warned all who desire to witness anything of their grandeur to visit the region without delay, as the indications point to their speedy cessation as probable if not inevitable. In reference to the future of the association, it is gratifying to observe that the various special societies, whose relations to the association were considered in the article by the present writer a year ago, have not only continued to hold their summer sessions in connection with that of the association, but have shown a very cordial spirit of co-operation, and that some others are proposing to affiliate in a similar way. This is as it should be; but there is in it also the suggestion of a broader and more definite relationship of all these special societies to each other through the medium of the association. The tendency is apparently toward affiliation and co-operation among them, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science could have no more fitting or useful function than as a sort of federative or representative body for all the others. The next meeting is to be held in New York, two months earlier than usual--at the end of June. Both the place and the time were determined by the Paris Exposition. It was thought best to arrange the meeting so that it might easily be attended by the large number of scientists from all over the country who will be going abroad next summer. This plan is doubtless wise, although it is much to be regretted that the time--the last week in June--will cut off from attendance almost all the members who are teachers in public schools, who will be just then in the pressure of their closing days and examinations. The peculiar circumstances of the year, however, justify what would otherwise be a most unfortunate time. New York will do her best, and give the association a welcome worthy of the great metropolis of America. SKETCH OF DR. WILLIAM PEPPER. BY LEWIS R. HARLEY. Philadelphia has long been regarded as the home of medical science in America. Here was founded the first medical school in the United States, among whose alumni are numbered some of the most brilliant names in the profession. The spirit of scientific research has always been most active in Philadelphia. Here Franklin made his experiments in electricity, and Rittenhouse observed the transit of Venus; while Rush, Morgan, Williamson, and Physick gave the city a name abroad as a great medical center. Each generation has contributed something to her fame as the abode of scientific culture. In recent times no name has been so closely associated with the intellectual progress of the city as that of the subject of this sketch. Dr. William Pepper was reared in a scientific atmosphere. His father, William Pepper, the elder, was born in Philadelphia, January 21, 1810. He graduated with first honors at Princeton in 1829. He afterward studied medicine for a time with Dr. Thomas T. Hewson, and in 1832 graduated in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He then spent two years in study in Paris, and in 1834 he entered upon his profession in Philadelphia, where he rose rapidly in reputation. He was physician to the Pennsylvania Hospital for twenty-six years. In 1860 he was elected Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania. He held this position until the time of his death, October 15, 1864. Dr. Pepper had two sons, who became distinguished in the medical profession. The eldest son, George, was born April 1, 1841, and died September 14, 1872. He graduated from the college department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1862, and completed the course in the Medical School in 1865. He served with distinction in the civil war, and died at the beginning of a successful professional career. Another son, Dr. WILLIAM PEPPER, the subject of this sketch, was born in Philadelphia, August 21, 1843. Dr. Pepper received his educational training solely in the city of his birth, having graduated from the college department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1862, in the same class with Provost Charles C. Harrison, Thomas McKean, Dr. Persifor Fraser, and many other men prominent in university circles. He graduated from the Medical School in 1864, and at once began the practice of medicine. His connection with the University of Pennsylvania began in 1868, when he was appointed lecturer on morbid anatomy. From 1870 to 1876 he was lecturer on clinical medicine. In 1876 Dr. Pepper was given a full professorship of clinical medicine, in which he continued until 1887, when he succeeded Dr. Alfred Stillé in the chair of the Theory and Practice of Medicine. During this early period of his career Dr. Pepper labored with untiring zeal in the practice of his profession, and he also became eminently successful as a teacher. In 1877 he set forth his views on higher medical education in an address at the opening of the one hundred and twelfth course of lectures in the University Medical School.[45] At that time a very low standard existed in the medical schools of our country, and Dr. Pepper, in his address, urged the following reforms: 1. The establishment of a preparatory examination. 2. The lengthening of the course to at least three full years. 3. The careful grading of the course. 4. The introduction of ample practical instruction of each student both at the bedside and in laboratories. 5. The establishment of fixed salaries for the professors, so that they may no longer have any pecuniary interest in the size of their classes. [Footnote 45: Higher Medical Education. The True Interest of the Public and of the Profession. By William Pepper, M. D., LL. D. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1894.] It was a source of gratification to Dr. Pepper that he lived to see all these reforms in medical education adopted. On the extension of the medical course to four years he subscribed $50,000 toward a permanent endowment of $250,000. As early as 1871 he began to urge the establishment of a university hospital, the subject being first discussed in a conversation with Dr. H. C. Wood and Dr. William F. Norris. An appeal was made to the public, and Dr. Pepper was made chairman of a finance committee. By May, 1872, a splendid site and $350,000 for building and endowment had been secured. Dr. Pepper was selected as chairman of the building committee, and work on the hospital was pushed so rapidly that it was ready for patients on July 15, 1874. When Dr. Charles J. Stillé resigned the provostship of the university in 1881, Dr. Pepper was elected as his successor. The executive abilities which he had displayed in connection with the founding of the new hospital made him the natural choice of the trustees. Although his private practice had increased to immense proportions, besides being occupied with his duties as a clinical professor, Dr. Pepper accepted the provostship. To the duties of this office he devoted the best years of his life. The extent of his practice and the demands made upon his time by the university would have appalled an ordinary man, but his capacity for labor appeared to be without limit, his working day often exceeding eighteen hours. His administration was characterized by the unification of the various schools of the university, besides the founding and equipment of several new departments. In one of his annual reports Dr. Pepper defined the broad policy of the university in the following appropriate language: "The university is truly the voluntary association of all persons and of all agencies who wish to unite in work for the elevation of society by the pursuit and diffusion of truth."[46] In other words, Dr. Pepper regarded the functions of the university as not simply an institution of instruction, but also of research. To this end every effort was made to open up new fields of investigation and to widen the scope of the university. During his provostship thirteen new buildings were erected, and the following departments, or schools, were organized: 1. The Department of Finance and Economy. 2. The Department of Philosophy. 3. The Department of Veterinary Medicine. 4. The Department of Biology. 5. The Department of Physical Education. 6. The Department of Archæology and Paleontology. 7. The Department of Hygiene. 8. The Graduate Department for Women. 9. The School of Architecture. 10. The School for Nurses in the University Hospital. 11. The Veterinary Hospital. 12. The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology. [Footnote 46: Report of the Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, from October, 1892, to June, 1894. Philadelphia, 1894.] Dr. Pepper took particular interest in the Department of Archæology and Paleontology connected with the university. For a number of years he was president of its board of trustees, while it was largely through his efforts that the Babylonian Exploration Fund was formed.[47] It was Dr. Pepper's ambition to have at the university well-equipped laboratories that would offer an opportunity for original investigation in medical science. The establishment of the Laboratory of Hygiene, in 1892, was the first step in this direction, soon to be followed by Dr. Pepper's gift of the Laboratory of Clinical Medicine. This laboratory was founded in memory of his father, the late Dr. William Pepper. The gift is unique in that it is made for the purpose of promoting and stimulating original research, and improving the methods of diagnosing and treating the diseases of human beings. Another field of work in the laboratory is that of giving advanced and special instruction to men who have already obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine. At the opening of the laboratory in 1895 Dr. William H. Welch, of Johns Hopkins University, said, "To the small number of existing clinical laboratories the William Pepper Laboratory of Clinical Medicine is a most notable addition, being the first laboratory of the kind in this country, and it is not surpassed by any in foreign countries."[48] [Footnote 47: See the article on Science at the University of Pennsylvania, in Popular Science Monthly for August, 1896.] [Footnote 48: Proceedings at the Opening of the William Pepper Laboratory of Clinical Medicine, December 4, 1895. Philadelphia, 1895.] Dr. Pepper realized more and more every year that the vast extent of the university interests demanded the undivided activity of its head. In 1894 he resigned the office of provost, stating at the time that, as it became necessary for him to choose between administration work and medical science, his devotion to the latter determined his choice. His administration was an eventful one, during which the university evolved from a group of disconnected schools to a great academic body. In 1881 its property in land amounted to fifteen acres, while in 1894 it controlled fifty-two acres in a continuous tract. In 1881 the university property was valued at $1,600,000; in 1894 it exceeded $5,000,000. The teaching force in 1881 numbered 88 and the students in all departments 981; in 1894 the former were 268, and the attendance had reached 2,180, representing every State in the Union, as well as thirty-eight foreign countries. Dr. Pepper became well known as an author on medical subjects. He founded the Philadelphia Medical Times, and was its editor for two years. In 1885 he edited a System of Medicine by American Authors, a work that has been considered a leading authority on medical subjects. He also edited a book of medical practice by American authors, and, with Dr. J. F. Meigs, issued a work on Diseases of Children. He was Medical Director of the Centennial Exposition in 1876, and for his services he received from the King of Sweden the decoration of Knight Commander of the Order of St. Olaf. Dr. Pepper showed an unbounded interest in behalf of any movement that would benefit the community in general. He was one of the first to realize the advantage that would accrue to Philadelphia should she become a museum center. The Philadelphia Commercial Museum was established in October, 1893, with Dr. Pepper as president of the board of trustees. The old offices of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company were leased, and exhibits were secured from the Latin-American countries, Africa, Australia, Japan, and India, forming the largest permanent collection of raw products in existence. Referring to the great value of the museum, Dr. Pepper spoke as follows in his address of welcome at the first annual meeting of the advisory board: "It would seem clear, however, that no method of studying industries and commerce can be scientific and complete which does not include the museum idea as now comprehended. The museum aims to teach by object lesson the story of the world, past and present. The Biological Museum presents the objects of human and comparative anatomy, arranged scientifically and labeled so fully as to constitute the best text-book for the study of those subjects. The Museum of Natural History does the same in its field. The Museum of Archæology shows the progress of the race from the most archaic times, the different types of human beings, their mode of living, their forms of worship, their games, their weapons, their implements, the natural products which they used for subsistence, in their industries, and in their arts, the objects of manufacture or of art which they produced, and the manner in which they disposed of their dead. "The natural products and manufactured articles, which constitute the material of commerce, come necessarily into such a scheme, and the long-looked-for opportunity of establishing a commercial museum upon a truly scientific basis presented itself when, at the close of the Columbian Exposition at Chicago, it was possible, through the enlightened liberality of the municipal authorities of Philadelphia and the invaluable services of Prof. W. P. Wilson, to secure vast collections of commercial material, which was so liberally donated to the Philadelphia museums by nearly all the foreign countries of the globe." It was Dr. Pepper's idea to have the University Museum and the Commercial Museum situated near each other, on the plan of the South Kensington Museum. To this end the City Councils, in 1896, passed an ordinance giving over to the trustees of the Commercial Museum sixteen acres of land for the erection of suitable buildings. When all the plans are carried out the city will have unrivaled facilities for the study of civilization, past and present. One of the most enduring monuments to Dr. Pepper's zeal and generosity is the Free Library of Philadelphia. In 1889 his uncle, George S. Pepper, bequeathed the sum of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars "to the trustees of such Free Library which may be established in the city of Philadelphia." From the beginning Dr. Pepper took a warm interest in the Free Library movement. It was under his leadership that the library was organized, and he was made the first president of its board of trustees. Speaking of his activity in this direction, the librarian, Mr. John Thomson, said: "No detail was too small for his personal attention. No plan for its future growth was too large for his ambitious hope of both public and private support. The remarkable and rapid increase in the circulation of the Free Library, the multiplication of its branches, the organization of all its departments on a broad and generous plan, his success in enlisting a large number of able fellow-workers, his clear, plain statements to Councils and the city authorities, his activity in securing needed legislation at Harrisburg, were some of the results of that intelligent energy which enabled him to do so much and to do it so well." The bequest of the Pepper family has been supplemented by ample appropriations by the City Councils, and the Free Library is now one of the most important institutions in Philadelphia. The library at present has twelve flourishing branches, while the combined circulation of the system for the year 1898 was 1,738,950 volumes. Dr. Pepper was also connected with many scientific bodies. He was Vice-President of the American Philosophical Society, and President of the first Pan-American Medical Congress in 1893. He was a Fellow of the College of Physicians; President of the Philadelphia Pathological Society from 1873 to 1876; Director of the Biological Section, Academy of Natural Sciences; President, in 1886, of the American Climatological Association; President of the Foulke and Long Institute for Orphan Girls; President of the First Sanitary Convention of Pennsylvania; and in 1882 he was a member of the Assay Commission of the United States Mint. He received the degree of LL. D. from Lafayette College in 1881, and from the University of Pennsylvania in 1893. In 1873 Dr. Pepper married Miss Frances Sargeant Perry, a lineal descendant of Benjamin Franklin, and a granddaughter of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. Four sons were born, of whom three survive--Dr. William Pepper, Jr., Benjamin Franklin Pepper, and Oliver Hazard Perry Pepper. Failing in health, Dr. Pepper went to California early in the summer of 1898, where he died of heart disease on July 28th of that year. His body reached Philadelphia on August 6th. Funeral services were held in St. James's Protestant Episcopal Church, after which the body was cremated, and the ashes interred in Laurel Hill Cemetery. The American Anthropometric Society received, by the conditions of his will, Dr. Pepper's brain. Among the members of this society were Dr. Joseph Leidy, Phillips Brooks, and Prof. E. D. Cope. The articles of membership of the Anthropometric Society require that each member contribute his brain in the interests of science. Dr. Pepper's death was followed by many expressions of sorrow from learned societies in various parts of the world. One of the most beautiful tributes was the memorial meeting held in the city of Mexico on September 12th. The leading medical and scientific societies of Mexico assembled in the hall of Congress to do honor to the work and character of Dr. Pepper. President Diaz occupied the chair, and about him were gathered the leading citizens, officials, and scientists of Mexico. Representatives of the National Medical School and the Board of Health eulogized Dr. Pepper, while Hon. Matias Romero spoke of him not as a physician, but as an "altruist who had consecrated himself to doing good for his fellow-men." In Philadelphia, steps have been taken to erect a substantial memorial to Dr. Pepper. At a memorial meeting, held on March 6th last, a proposition was made to place a statue of the deceased scientist on the City Hall plaza, after the style of the Girard Monument. A committee was appointed with power to raise funds for the proposed statue, the cost not to exceed ten thousand dollars. * * * * * One of the letters of William Pengelly, geologist, of Torquay, England, printed in the memoir published by his daughter, gives this sketch of Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the calculating machine: "I then called on Babbage, and could not get away until after one. He is a splendid talker. He seemed much pleased to see me, and complimented me very much on my lecture (at the Royal Institution), in which he was evidently much interested. He is the most marvelous worker I ever met with. I never saw anything like the evidence of multifarious and vast labor which his 'workshop' presents; he sticks at nothing. One drawer full of riddles, another of epigrams, one of squared words, etc.... It is appalling! And then the downright fun of the fellow; it is almost intoxicating to be with him!" Correspondence. "DO ANIMALS REASON?" DR. EDWARD THORNDIKE'S interesting account, in our August number, of his investigations touching the reasoning power of animals has brought us a large number of letters questioning some of the main conclusions set forth in the article, and criticising the method of the inquiry. Not having room for all these communications, we print one of them, and add extracts from two others. These represent the principal objections urged by the various writers against the conclusions drawn by the author of the article from his experiments. _Editor Popular Science Monthly:_ SIR: The first reading of Dr. Thorndike's article Do Animals Reason? in the August Popular Science Monthly, gave the impression, which has been deepened by subsequent perusal, that his experiments were not only inadequate to solve the question, but unfairly chosen. A dog or a cat, utterly hungry, is placed in a box, from which it can escape "by performing some simple (?) action, such as pulling a wire loop, stepping on a platform or lever, clawing down a string, or turning a wooden button." In the first place, what tends to destroy the reasoning power more than utter hunger? This intense physical craving begets frenzy rather than reason. The more intense this primeval desire, the greater the demand upon primitive instinct for its satisfaction. In the open the cat will jump at a bird, the dog at a bone. If the bird be up a tree, the cat will climb; if the bone be buried, the dog will burrow. Climbing and burrowing are deep-rooted developments of the feline and the canine nature. Put a dog or a cat, utterly hungry, in a box and hang a piece of meat outside. Instinct prompts a jump through the bars of the box at the meat, and the greater the number of unsuccessful attempts the less the likelihood of the animal with a gnawing stomach sitting down to scrutinize the mechanical construction of the box to the point of perceiving that by stepping on a lever it will open a door. How many millions of years did it take two-legged man to arrive at the perception of the use of the lever? Did the shaggy biped arrive at that perception by sitting down when utterly hungry and looking at a lever; or did he, through countless generations, by some such chance as lifting a stone with a stick, come to the knowledge of weight and fulcrum? Put an anthropoid ape, some several degrees nearer man in intelligence than a cat, in a modern office elevator that moves by the push of an electric button, suspend the elevator between two stories, and what do you suppose that anthropoid ape will do? Put a schoolgirl fresh from belles-lettres and matinées in the cab of a locomotive and tell her to run it to the next station. She can not but know that steam will make the wheels go round, but what will she do in the maze of throttles, handles, disks, and rods that confronts her? What will she do if utterly hungry? Take a laborer from his pick and shovel on the railway embankment and put him at the desk of the general manager. He can read and write. Let the messenger boys and clerks shower him with the letters and telegrams that bombard that desk every day, and let him try to settle the questions to which they give rise. Now, why can not the schoolgirl run the locomotive, the laborer the railroad? Because the relations of things necessary to the tasks have never been imprinted upon their registering cells; because, in the latter case at least, of the lack of power of co-ordination--that is, the lack of the power of abstract reasoning that the task involves. Why can not anybody do anything as well as anybody else? Because certain relations have been more deeply impressed upon certain brains than upon others; because of the greater power of certain brains to co-ordinate certain relations, their greater ability to give concrete manifestation of the result of such co-ordination through the efferent nerves. Otherwise any one of us could design a bridge, compose a symphony, or organize a trust. The oftener relations are impressed upon the registering cells, the more readily are those relations co-ordinated, provided the brain structure be of the requisite caliber. Reiterated impression through the ages of the relations between their needs and surrounding things, together with the development of structural capacity, has led the beaver to build his dam, the bee the honeycomb, the ant its village, the bird its nest. In each case the registered impressions have led to action made possible by long-continued contact between structure and environment; the actions are the result of development that has proceeded mite by mite through unknown time. The brain of neither bird nor beast nor man will immediately co-ordinate radically new impressions received in a radically new environment into coherent action that leads to definite result. Here is an example within the writer's immediate knowledge: At the age of seventeen a boy entered the service of one of the large railway systems as a clerk in the passenger department. Through eleven years of enthusiastic and concentrated endeavor to master the details of the service he rose to the head of the clerical force--that is, the reiterated impression upon his brain cells of the functions of the passenger service led to that co-ordination which resulted in efficient action. Then he became employed in the office of a large coal-mining company. For several days it was with the utmost difficulty that he could bring his attention to bear upon the new tasks. While seated at the desk in the coal office the old railway problems would chase through his mind; when he began to write the initials of the Pittsburg Consolidated Coal Company, he would find that he had written the initials of the Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway Company; instead of the initials of the Pittsburg, Fairport and Northwestern Dock Company, the initials of the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway Company. The latter initials in each case would appear upon the paper before he knew it, actually without his knowing that he had written them. The entirely unfamiliar routine entailed by the custody of bank accounts, coal leases, deeds and contracts, reports of coal shipments, and the handling of vouchers, became adjusted in his brain bit by bit through many weeks, and it was months before he could co-ordinate the new impressions into broad and well-defined reasoning. If he had been utterly hungry through all the period of the new service, it might have taken years. Now, what can be expected of a dog or a cat, whose mental processes have been adjusted by inheritance and experience to life in the fields and jungles, when placed in a box, utterly hungry, to study mechanical contrivances? It is manifest that if the brain of a dog or a cat would become adjusted to the radically unfamiliar steps necessary to release it from such a radically unfamiliar environment, that adjustment could only come by extremely slow degrees. Voluntary perception is almost beyond the limits of expectation, and the leading of the animal through the necessary steps would have to be repeated time after time before the impressions upon its brain would reach any degree of permanence, especially as its brain would be lacking in attention, and the repeated handling be an annoyance to it. But that by such tutelage the animals, or a proportion of them, arrived at a knowledge of the means necessary to escape from the box is shown by Dr. Thorndike himself. "If one repeats the process, keeps putting the cat back into the box after each success, the amount of useless action gradually decreases, the right movement is made sooner and sooner, until finally it is done as soon as the cat is put in." But he says: "This sort of a history is not the history of a reasoning animal. It is the history of an animal who meets a certain situation with a lot of instinctive acts.... Little by little the one act becomes more and more likely to be done in that situation, while the others slowly vanish. This history represents the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness." Wherein, however, does this differ from the manner in which hundreds of clerks in offices finally learn routine work and mechanically go through the motions necessary to its performance? Do not the actions of thousands of laborers in field and factory seem to proceed from a wearing smooth of a path in the brain, rather than from rational consciousness? Yet they can not be said to be devoid of reason. Is not a great proportion of the daily actions of any one of us gone through from force of habit, almost by instinct? The word reason does not apply alone to the mental processes of a Helmholtz, but to the co-ordination, however slight, of relations that result in definite action even of a humble organism. Herbert Spencer has clearly shown that instinct and reason differ in degree and not in kind. Dr. Thorndike lays stress upon the fact that a "cat which, when first put in, took sixty seconds to get out, in the second trial eighty, in the third fifty, in the fourth sixty, in the fifth fifty, in the sixth forty," etc., and remarks: "Suppose the cat had, after the third accidental success, been able to reason? She would then have, the next time and all succeeding times, performed the act as soon as put in." Not long ago the writer and a man whose high intelligence can not be questioned, in moments of relaxation were trying to do one of the familiar ring puzzles--endeavoring to separate a ring from two others of peculiar shape and then to join the three. After repeated trials, one would loosen it, but could not replace it; the other finally succeeded in replacing it, but could not loosen it. Then the one could replace it, but not loosen it; the other loosen, but not replace it, and each was closely watching the other all the time. It was half an hour or more before either could both loosen and replace the ring, occasional successful attempts not being repeated until after several succeeding failures. Contrast the relation of the brain of the dazed and indifferent and peculiarly bedeviled cat to the puzzle presented to it by the inside of the box with the earnest effort of the two men to solve the ring puzzle. Who has not found a task more difficult the fifth or sixth time than the second or third, and has only performed it with ease after repeated attempts of varying degrees of success and failure? In conclusion, the writer begs leave to relate an incident, which has not before appeared in print, that profoundly impressed him with the belief that at least in one instance one particular animal displayed reason. One Sunday morning, a dozen years or more ago, he was standing on the bank of the Ohio River at the Sewickley Ferry. A family group, accompanied by a large Newfoundland dog, hailed the ferryman and got in his boat, leaving the dog, which persuasively barked and wagged his tail, on the bank. As the boat pulled out into the stream the dog whined, and then made ready to leap in after it. Then he stopped at the water's edge, and, with head down, gazed intently at the river for several seconds--it seemed a minute or more. Then he ran up the bank more than a hundred feet, stopped, looked at the receding boat, plunged into the stream, and swam vigorously. The current, bearing him down, made his course diagonal to the bank. A boy standing by my side said: "Isn't that a smart dog? If he'd been a crazy dog he'd have jumped in where he was, but he ran up the bank so the current wouldn't wash him down away from the boat." But the dog, swimming with all his vigor, was borne past the boat when within twenty feet or so of it; he endeavored to straighten his course without success, and then, in a long semicircle, swam around to the near bank, landing two or three hundred feet below the place whence the ferryboat had started. What this dog would have done if placed, utterly hungry, in a box from which he could only liberate himself by stepping on a platform or turning a wooden button, I do not know. LOGAN G. MCPHERSON. PITTSBURGH, _August 3, 1899._ MR. FREDERIC D. BOND, of 413 South Forty-fourth Street, Philadelphia, writes: Of the accuracy of Dr. Thorndike's experiments I have no doubt, but certain facts connected with them seem to deprive the observations of much of their relevance. Dr. Thorndike states that he arranged his experiments to give reasoning every chance to display itself, if it existed, and to observe those in which the acts required and the thinking involved were not far removed from the acts and feelings of ordinary animal life. Of these experiments one of the chief was to determine whether and in what way a cat would escape from a box opening by turning a button. Now, I submit that in this and the succeeding experiments the conditions Dr. Thorndike fancied to exist by no means did so. Simple as the release of a door by a button seems to us, the apparent simplicity arises merely from our empirical knowledge of what does happen in such a situation. Actually to think out the rationale of the matter, as an animal having no experience either personally or from heredity would have to do, involves very complex mental processes. The environment of a human being is vastly different from an animal's, though of this fact we constantly lose sight in reasoning; of mechanical appliances and principles, for example, an animal knows nothing, and yet we are too apt to suppose it regarding the world with a store of ancestral and individual experiences utterly foreign to it; and then, on its failing to do what, in the light of such experience, seems to us easy, we proceed to call into question its possession of reason.... That the cats did finally learn to escape shows, according to Dr. Thorndike, "the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness." May I ask Dr. Thorndike what possible reason could a cat have to suppose that what happened once must needs happen again? Does Dr. Thorndike fancy his own knowledge of a million like matters was acquired by reason, and not empirically elaborated by processes of exactly the same sort as the cats went through? Let this experiment be tried on a healthy infant of two years, and I am of the opinion that the results would be the same as with the cat; yet the infant undoubtedly carries on "thinking processes similar, at least in kind, to our own," which Dr. Thorndike implicitly denies to his cats. The chief cause of the inability of students to reach concordant results in this matter of animal intelligence appears to lie in a certain uncritical assumption often made. That all consciousnesses have a certain field of presentations, that to this field they attain, that because of it they feel and will, are fundamental facts; but the belief that attention or feeling or will differs per se in different consciousnesses, other than as the field to which they are at the moment related, differs--this is an utterly unwarranted assumption. According to the action of its environment, each conscious being must know the world just so far as is needed to conform its existence thereto, or else it must perish; but whether such knowledge, which is acquired by experience only, be quite small, as with animals, or somewhat larger, as with man, there is no reason to suppose that the attention, feeling, or will of the animal differs in itself from the same psychological state in man. MR. ANDREW VAN BIBBER, of Cincinnati, Ohio, says: Animals, and especially wild ones, have no bank account or reserve, and have to face new conditions daily, and yet they make a living where man would starve. When I was out in Colorado and Utah, years ago, I used to know of animals removing the bait nicely from dangerous traps without springing the trap. I knew of a dog who went over a mile to call his owner to the aid of a boy who had broken his leg, and who would not be refused till understood. This is brutish "instinct," is it?--something that Dr. Thorndike can't define. Will "instinct" teach a tired, half-starved horse to eat oats if you set them before him? Dr. Thorndike would say "Yes," but Dr. Thorndike would be wrong unless that horse knew from personal past experience what oats were. What animals learn (like the human animal) they learn chiefly by experience. They accumulate facts in their minds and use them. I served in the cavalry of the Armies of the Tennessee and the Cumberland, and I know that instinct will not cause a hungry horse to touch oats unless he knows from his own experience what oats are. We used to capture horses in Mississippi which had never seen oats. It is all corn down there. We would bring them into camp tired out and hungry, and would pour out our oats for them. Not one of them would touch the oats. You could leave the hungry horses hitched for twenty-four hours before oats, and not one grain would they touch. They would stand there and starve. We had to throw up their heads and fill their mouths full of oats. If we stopped there, they would spit them out. We had to grab their jaws and work them sideways until they had a good taste. Then they understood, and ate oats right along. Plenty of such horses in Mississippi to-day.... If Dr. Thorndike tried his intelligent "Experiment No. 11" with a two-year-old cat, why didn't he try it with a two-year-old human? I guess he would have found an equal amount of ignorance of the mechanism of door fastenings, which comes only with teaching, and would have produced only struggles and screaming. THE TREND OF POPULATION IN MAINE. _Editor Popular Science Monthly:_ SIR: In the article contributed to your magazine for the month of August on Recent Legislation against the Drink Evil, I notice what appears to me to be a misstatement of fact. The writer speaks of the results of prohibition in the State of Maine, and says, "In sixty-three years Maine has seen her commerce disappear and her population dwindle." I have not investigated the matter of Maine's commerce, but I find that her population has not dwindled in any possible sense of the term during the period indicated above. It is, perhaps, a common impression that Maine has had such an exodus of her people to other States of the Union that she has suffered a loss in population. What are the real facts of the case? The census taken by the Government in 1840 gave the State 501,000 people, and that taken in 1890, 661,000, which shows, during the interval between 1840 and 1890, an increase of 160,000. The increase in population even during the decade 1880-'90 was 13,000. Whether there has been a decrease since 1890 nobody at present knows, and will not know until the decennial census is taken next year. In view of these facts, I feel justified in challenging the correctness of the gentleman's statement, quoted above. There can be no room for doubt that Maine has sustained considerable losses in population from farm desertion, but no statistics can be presented to show that the State has, during the time stated above, been dwindling in the number of people living within her borders. J. EARLE BROWN. WOONSOCKET, R. I., _August 17, 1899._ Editor's Table. _EDUCATION AND CHARACTER-BUILDING._ It is many years ago now since Mr. Spencer, in his Study of Sociology, remarked upon the exaggerated hopes commonly built upon education. With the courage that is characteristic of him, he went counter to a current of opinion which was then running with perhaps its maximum force. He said that the belief in the efficacy of education to remold society had taken so strong a hold of the modern world that nothing but disappointment would avail to modify it. This was in the year 1872; since then the disappointment has in a measure come, and many are prepared to accept his views to-day, who, twenty-seven years ago, thought they proceeded from a mind fundamentally out of sympathy with modern progress. Facts indeed are accumulating from year to year to prove the soundness of the philosopher's contention that "cognition does not produce action," and that a great variety of knowledge may be introduced into the mind without in the least inclining the individual to higher modes of conduct. We are reminded of Mr. Spencer's line of argument by an article lately published in the London Spectator, entitled Influence on the Young. The writer sees clearly that enthusiastic educationists undertake far more than they can perform. "The character forms itself," he says, "assimilating nutriment or detriment, as it were, from the air, which the parents or teachers, for all their pains, can in no way change." There seems indeed to be in the young, he remarks, a distinct tendency to resist influence. Father and son will be opposed in politics; very pious people too often find, to their sorrow, their children growing up far otherwise than they could wish. The man who is very settled in his habits is as like as not to have a boy who can not be persuaded to take a serious view of life. The most unexceptionable home lessons seem to be of no avail against the attractive power of light companions. Evidently, Nature is at work in ways that men can not control. If there is a law of "recoil," as the writer in the Spectator hints, we may be pretty sure it serves some good purpose. It introduces, we can see at once, a diversity which makes for the progress, and perhaps also for the stability, of society. Two practical questions, however, suggest themselves: (1) What can we reasonably hope from education? and (2) What can we do to make a wholesome _milieu_ for the rising generation? With regard to education, it is evident that we can not know the best it can do until it has been reduced to a science--until, that is to say, as a result of the joint labors of practical educators and psychologists, we can claim to possess a reasonable degree of certainty as to the best arrangement and sequence of studies and the best methods of stimulating the mind and imparting knowledge. Upon these important questions there is still considerable diversity of opinion. Some educators think we should be very sparing of abstractions in the instruction of younger pupils. Others are of a contrary opinion. Professor Baldwin, for example, in his little work on The Mind, says that "grammar is one of the very best of primary-school subjects." He also recommends mathematics. These are questions which, it seems to us, admit of being finally settled. Allowance must of course be made for the varying capacities of individual children, but this need not stand in the way of the establishment of some general doctrine as to the law of development of the human mind. We shall then further require a true theory of method in education, so that we may know by what means the best results in the imparting of knowledge and the development of the capacities of the individual mind may be obtained. Assuming that these vantage points have been gained, education should be for every mind an eminently healthful and invigorating process, which is more than can be said for the forms of education that have prevailed in the past. These, while developing certain faculties, have, to a great extent, stunted others--have indeed, in too many cases, fatally impaired the natural powers of the mind. A notable paper, which appeared in the first number of this magazine, was one by the late Dr. Carpenter on The Artificial Cultivation of Stupidity in Schools. Professor Baldwin, in the work already cited, seems to be of the opinion that the process of cultivating stupidity, or at least mental shiftlessness, is in full blast to-day in many of our secondary schools owing to the prominence given to language studies. The science of education must at least put an end to this, and insure that the youths who are committed to the public schools shall not be subjected to any mind-destroying exercises. We can hope, however, that it will do much more. The mind, like the body, grows by what it feeds upon; and it is hard to conceive that suitable kinds of knowledge could be imparted in a natural manner, so as to awaken interest and develop the perceptive and reasoning powers, without at least preparing the mind for the reception of right sentiments. So much the science of education, when it is fairly established, may reasonably be expected to do. It will deal with the mind upon true hygienic principles. There remains the more serious question how such a moral atmosphere can be created as will incline the young to take a right view of knowledge and its uses. Knowledge, it is hardly necessary to say, is power, just as money is power; and it is quite as needful that the idea of social service should be associated with the one as with the other. The best social service which, perhaps, any man can render is to give to the world the example of high disinterestedness and general nobility of character; and knowledge should be valued not as conferring individual distinction, but according as it expands and liberalizes the mind. The poet Coleridge has said with some truth that "Fancy is the power That first unsensualizes the dark mind, Giving it new delights; and bids it swell With wild activity; and peopling air, By obscure fears of beings invisible, Emancipates it from the grosser thrall Of the present impulse, teaching self-control, Till Superstition with unconscious hand Seat Reason on her throne." The mind having been "unsensualized," the next step is to moralize and humanize it, otherwise Reason on her throne may act not much more wisely than other monarchs have done. The classic example of the worship of reason is not reassuring as to the infallibility of the goddess. The question, then, as to how intellectual education and the education of the moral sentiments may go hand in hand is one that comes home to every member of the community. We all help to make the moral atmosphere and create the moral ideals of our time; and there is no use in looking for high standards in our colleges and other institutions of learning if we have low standards in our homes. The youth who hears nothing talked of at home but money is not likely to take much interest in instruction that does not bear directly on the question of making money. The youth who hears money spoken of in the home circle simply as a means of personal enjoyment and glorification will need something more than a few lectures on political or social economy to make him take a different view of it. We may employ excellent men and women as teachers, but their success from a moral point of view will always be limited by the general tone of the community. It is evident, then, that no very special directions can be given for solving the problem with which we are concerned. Still, the posing of the problem and the indication of the conditions on which its solution depends may awaken in a few minds a new sense of their responsibility in the matter, and it is a gain for even one to go over to the right side. It would be quite as easy for _the whole_ of society to live on a somewhat higher plane as it is for it to live on its present plane. It would simply mean that the average man would treat the average man a little better than he does now: whatever one gave he would thus get in return, and the burdens which are always associated with mutual distrust would be proportionately lightened. The philosopher whom we began by quoting has indicated ways in which the craze for legislative shortcuts is working against the moral improvement of society. He holds that parental responsibility has been seriously impaired by legislative encroachments in the matter of education and otherwise. Book learning has become to the modern world a kind of fetich; and minds that ought to be in contact with the facts of life are stupefied, and so far prevented from getting their normal moral growth by being drilled in studies that bring no real profit. We can not bear the idea that one of our human brethren should not be able to read and write; but, provided he possesses these accomplishments, we ask no questions as to what use he makes of them. We have before us a police description of a criminal who graduated at one of the most celebrated universities on the Continent, who studied afterward for the Church, who was for several years an elder, and who possesses--so we are distinctly informed--fine literary tastes. The gentleman with all these advantages is a fugitive from justice. With all his knowledge and accomplishments he got no hold of the principles of right conduct, and--there are not a few like him. We need not only a science of education, but a science of government, the most valuable part of which will probably be that which shows us with demonstrative force what things government ought to leave alone. It is quite possible we should find the moral atmosphere materially improving if only the natural reactions between the individual and his environment were not interfered with. The course of Nature, we may feel assured, provides not less for moral than for mental growth, and if either process is defectively carried on we may safely attribute it to some ill-advised attempt we are making to improve on natural institutions. Science has done much for the world in the past, but it has yet to do much more. It will yet give us a light to our feet in matters educational and political, and will liberate us from many of the yokes and trammels we have foolishly imposed upon ourselves. Mankind will then look into the face of Nature and see in it a new beneficence and brighter promises for the future of the race. _THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION AT COLUMBUS._ A fairly good attendance, with an unusually large proportion of men prominent in science, and most cordial welcome and painstaking care of the members by the Ohio State University and the citizens of Columbus, combined to make the forty-eighth annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science a most enjoyable and instructive one. The two features of the meeting which seem to deserve the most attention are: First, the tendency which was shown in every section to direct the papers and discussions to practical subjects, so that all could participate in the proceedings and each member feel justified in having a word to say in them; and, secondly, the perfect cordiality with which the association was received and the assiduous attention with which it was taken care of by the local committee. The smaller and apparently less important details, but at the same time those which so largely determine one's comfort in a strange community, were thoughtfully arranged, and to this alone much of the success of the meeting was due. The numerous excursions were not only exceedingly enjoyable, but were arranged in every case primarily for their instructive and scientific features, and an Easterner, at any rate, could not take any of them without learning something. Another feature of the meeting that was especially satisfactory was the possibility it afforded for the younger workers in science to meet their elders, who had hitherto led the way--who were present, as we have already said, in larger proportion than usual. The importance of this feature, as President Orton pointed out in these pages a few months ago, can not be overestimated. The instruction and encouragement which a new worker in the scientific field gains from a personal acquaintance with the older men who have already achieved success and reputation in his branch of science are obvious enough. With the increasing specialization which modern research is making absolutely unavoidable, the social feature of the annual gathering of such a company of scientists is coming to be its most important function. A slight extension of it might very readily lead to the adoption of a specific policy by the several sections of devoting at least a part of their time to such a general statement of what has been accomplished in their department or to some especially important work of general interest that some of the members have been engaged in as would be most instructive to the members of the other sections. In the earlier meetings of the association the sectional chairmen often made such presentations in their stated addresses, but as times and men have changed, the idea has been departed from and this feature has become an exceptional one. If it could be restored, in a modified if not an identical form, and made a regular part of the programme of at least one of the sections at each meeting, the interest would be greatly enhanced, and in this way the chemist, the geologist, the botanist, and the others could be given regularly an authoritative account of what is being done in the other branches of science, and an important step would be taken toward doing away with the unfortunate narrowing influence which special scientific work is too apt to exercise. The fixing of the last week in June as the time for holding the next meeting of the association, which is to be in New York, is a departure from recent practice as to date, but, aside from the special reason for it in this particular case--the probability that many of the members will be at the Paris Exposition during the following August--the experiment seems a desirable one because of the almost invariably excessive heat to which August meetings are exposed. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. Evidences are apparent in many quarters of a reaction against the headlong rush toward aggression and territorial aggrandizement in which the American people have allowed themselves to be carried away. For a time the lovers of the Constitution of the United States as the fathers of the republic left it and Lincoln glorified it were bewildered, stunned by the revolution suddenly precipitated upon us from Washington, while the people at large seemed to be wild with enthusiasm for they knew not what, and men suffered themselves to be led--they knew not whither. Very slowly the true patriots recovered their voices, and signs appear that the people are at last getting into a mood to listen to reason. President _David Starr Jordan's Imperial Democracy_[49] comes very opportunely, therefore, to call to the minds of those who can be induced to think some of the forgotten principles of American policy, and to depict, in the terse, incisive style of which the author is master, the true nature and bearing of those iniquitous proceedings to which the American people, betrayed by treacherous leaders, have allowed themselves to become a party. President Jordan was one of the first who dared, in this matter, to make a public protest against this scheme of aggression. His first address on the subject--Lest we Forget--delivered to the graduating class of Leland Stanford University, May 25, 1898, was separated only a few days in time from Prof. Charles Eliot Norton's exposure of the reversal of all our most cherished traditions and habits which the precipitation of the war with Spain had brought about. The two men must share the honor of leadership in the awakening movement. In this address President Jordan gives a true definition of patriotism as "the will to serve one's country; to make one's country better worth saving"--not the shrilling of the mob, or trampling on the Spanish flag, or twisting the lion's tail. Even so early he foresaw the darkness of the future we were bringing upon ourselves, and said: "The crisis comes when the war is over. What then? Our question is not what we shall do with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. It is what these prizes will do to us." This, with the wickedness of the whole business, is the burden of most of the other papers in the volume. In the paper on Imperial Expansion we are told of three "world crises" in our history when we were confronted with momentous questions. The first was after the Revolution. The second came through the growth of slavery. The third is upon us now. "It is not the conquest of Spain, not the disposition of the spoils of victory which first concerns us. It is the spirit that lies behind it. Shall our armies go where our institutions can not? Shall territorial expansion take the place of democratic freedom? Shall our invasion of the Orient be merely an incident, an accident of a war of knight-errantry, temporary and exceptional? Or is it to mark a new policy--the reversion from America to Europe, from democracy to imperialism?" President Jordan has an answer to the question, What are we to do in the shape affairs have assumed? The right thing would be "to recognize the independence of the Philippines, under American protection, and to lend them our army and navy and our wisest counselors; not our politicians, but our jurists, our teachers, with foresters, electricians, manufacturers, mining engineers, and experts in the various industries.... The only sensible thing to do would be to pull out some dark night and escape from the great problem of the Orient as suddenly and as dramatically as we got into it." Yet President Jordan recognizes that some great changes in our system are inevitable, and belong to the course of natural progress. They must not be shirked, but should be met manfully, soberly, with open eyes. A paper on Colonial Lessons of Alaska presents as an object lesson the muss we have made with colonial government in that Territory. [Footnote 49: Imperial Democracy. A Study of the Relation of Government by the People, Equality before the Law, and other Tenets of Democracy, to the Demands of a Vigorous Foreign Policy, and other Demands of Imperial Dominion. By David Starr Jordan. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 293. Price, $1.50.] * * * * * Mr. _A. H. Keane's Man Past and Present_[50] is a part fulfillment of a promise held out in his Ethnology, the first volume of the Cambridge Geographical Series, that it might be followed by another dealing more systematically with the primary divisions of mankind. In it the "four varietal divisions" of man over the globe are treated more in detail, with the primary view of establishing their independent specialization in their several geographical zones, and of elucidating the difficult questions associated with the origins and interrelations of the chief subgroups. The work consequently deals to a large extent with the prehistoric period, when the peoples had already been fully constituted in their primeval homes and had begun their subsequent developments and migratory movements. The author has further sought to elucidate those general principles which are concerned with the psychic unity, the social institutions, and religious ideas of primitive and later peoples. The two principles, already insisted upon in the Ethnology, of the specific unity of all existing varieties of the human family and the dispersion of their generalized precursors over the whole world in Pleistocene times are borne in view throughout. Subsequent to this dispersion, the four primary divisions of man have each had its Pleistocene ancestor, from whom each has sprung independently and divergently by continuous adaptation to their several environments. Great light is believed to have been thrown on the character of the earliest men by the discovery of the _Pithecanthropus erectus_, and this is supplemented as to the earliest acquirements by Dr. Noetling's discovery, in 1894, of the works of Pliocene man in upper Burmah. The deductions made from these discoveries strengthen the view Mr. Keane has always advocated, that man began to spread over the globe after he had acquired the erect posture, but while in other physical and in mental respects he still did not greatly differ from his nearest of kin. As to the age when this development was taking place, agreement is expressed with Major Powell's remark that the natural history of early man becomes more and more a geological and not merely an anthropological problem. The human varieties are shown to be, like other species, the outcome of their environments, and all sudden changes of those environments are disastrous. In both hemispheres the isocultural bands follow the isothermal lines in all their deflections--temperate regions being favorable, and tropical and severe ones unfavorable, to development. Of the metal ages, the existence of a true copper age has been placed beyond reasonable doubt. The passage from one metal to another was slow and progressive. In art the earliest drawings were natural and vital. The apparent inferiority of the drawings of the metal period to those of the cave dwellers and of the present Bushmen is due to the later art having been reduced to conventions. The development of alphabetical writing from pictographs is briefly sketched. Thus light is sought from all quarters in dealing with the questions of the book, and due weight is given to all available data--physical and mental characters, usages, religion, speech, cultural features, history, and geographical range. The general discussion of these leading principles is brief but clear and comprehensive. The bulk of the volume, following them, is occupied with the detailed and minute studies of the four main groups of mankind--the Negro, Mongol, American Indian, and Caucasic--and their subgroups, the discussion of each being preceded by a conspectus showing its Primeval Home, Present Range, Physical Characters, Mental Characters (Temperament, Speech, Religion, and Culture), and Main Divisions. The text is full, clear, good reading, instructive and suggestive, and in it the author has sought to make the volume a trustworthy book of reference on the multifarious subjects dealt with. [Footnote 50: Man Past and Present. By A. H. Keane, F. R. G. S. (Cambridge Geographical Series). Cambridge, England: At the University Press. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 584. Price, $3.] GENERAL NOTICES. The fact that Mr. _Charles A. Dana_ stood in close personal relations with Secretary Stanton and was officially associated with him during a considerable period of the war for the Union, and was also incidentally brought near Mr. Lincoln, gives whatever he may relate concerning the events of that period somewhat the air of a revelation from the inside. Accordingly, we naturally expect to find things narrated in his _Recollections of the Civil War_[51] that could not be told as well by any one else. The account given in the book relates to events in which the author was personally concerned. Mr. Dana had been associated with Horace Greeley in the editorial management of the New York Tribune for fifteen years, when, in April, 1862, Mr. Greeley invited him to resign. No reason was given or asked for the separation, and no explicit statement of a reason was needed. Mr. Greeley, having expressed in the beginning his willingness to let the secessionist "wayward-sister" States go in peace, was in favor of peace; Mr. Dana was for vigorous war. A correspondence was opened between him and Mr. Stanton in reference to public matters shortly after Mr. Stanton went into the War Department. Then Mr. Dana was intrusted with special commissions that carried him to the front and brought him in contact with the leaders of the army; and finally, in 1863, was appointed Assistant Secretary of War, an office he filled till the end of the contest. His narrative deals as the story of one having knowledge with questions of policy, with the critical phases of the hard conflict, with the perplexities and anxieties of the men charged with responsibilities, with stirring scenes in the councils at the Capitol and in battle at the front, and with personal incidents of the men whose names the nation loves and delights to honor. All is related in the straightforward, fluent style, touching only the facts, of a writer who has a story to tell and makes it his business to tell it. The result of the reading of the book is to arouse a new appreciation of the abilities and virtues of those great men in their various walks of civil, political, and military life, who took our country through its supreme trial. [Footnote 51: Recollections of the Civil War. With the Leaders at Washington and in the Field in the Sixties. By Charles A. Dana. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 296. Price, $2.] Mrs. _Arabella B. Buckley's Fairy-Land of Science_ has stood the test of about thirty years' publication as one of the simplest, clearest, and best popular introductions to physical science. Originating in a course of lectures delivered to children and their friends, the thought of publishing the book was suggested by the interest taken in the lectures by all the hearers. It was a happy thought, and the carrying of it out is fully justified by the result. But thirty years is a long time in so rapidly advancing a pursuit as the study of science, and makes changes necessary in all books treating of it. The publishers of this work,[52] therefore, with the assistance of the author, have considerably extended the original volume, adding to it notices of the latest scientific discoveries in the departments treated, and amplifying with fuller detail such parts as have grown in importance and interest. A few changes have been made in the interest of American readers, such as the substitution, where it seemed proper, of words familiar here for terms almost exclusively used in England, and the introduction of American instead of English examples to illustrate great scientific truths. The book has also been largely reillustrated. [Footnote 52: The Fairy-Land of Science. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 252.] Some of the essays in Miss _Badenoch's True Tales of the Insects_[53] have already appeared in serials--two of them in the Popular Science Monthly. The essays are not intended to present a view of entomology or of any department of it, but to describe, in an attractive and at the same time an accurate manner, a few special features of insect life and some of what we might call its remarkable curiosities. The author is well qualified for her undertaking, for, while being an entomologist of recognized position, she has those qualities of enthusiasm in her pursuit and literary training that enable her to present her subject in its most attractive aspect. From the great variety of insect forms she has selected only a few for this special presentation, including some of eccentric shape and some of genuine universal interest. She begins with the strange-looking creatures of the family of the _Mantidæ_, or praying insects, or, as the Brazilians call the _Mantis_, more fitly, the author thinks, the devil's riding horse, which is characterized as "the tiger, not the saint, of the insect world." The walking-stick and walking-leaf insects, of equally strange appearance, but peaceful, naturally follow these. Then come the locusts, and grasshoppers, which are more familiar, and the butterflies and moths, which attract the most attention and present such remarkable forms as the case-moths and the hawk and death's-head moths. The insects made subjects of treatment are described with fullness of detail, and the record of their life histories. The book is published in an attractive outer style, on thick paper, with thirty-four illustrations by Margaret J. D. Badenoch. [Footnote 53: True Tales of the Insects. By L. N. Badenoch. London: Chapman & Hall. Pp. 253.] Prof. _Charles C. James_, now Deputy Minister of Agriculture for Ontario, defines the purpose of his book, _Practical Agriculture_[54] to be to aid the reader and student in acquiring a knowledge of the science as distinguished from the art of agriculture--"that is, a knowledge of the 'why,' rather than a knowledge of the 'how.'" The author believes, from his experience of several years' teaching at the Ontario Agricultural College, that the rational teaching of agriculture in public and high schools is possible and would be exceedingly profitable, and that an intelligent knowledge of the science underlying the art would add much interest to the work and greatly increase the pleasure in it. The science of agriculture is understood by him to consist of a mingling of chemistry, geology, botany, entomology, physiology, bacteriology, and other sciences in so far as they have any bearing upon agriculture. He has aimed in this book to include only the first principles of these various sciences, and to show their application to the art of agriculture. The subject is treated as it relates, consecutively, to the plant, the soil, the crops of the field; the garden, orchard, and vineyard; live stock and dairying; and, under the heading of "other subjects," bees and birds, forestry, roads, and the rural home. The appendix contains lists of trees and of weeds, and an article on spraying mixtures. Questions to be answered by the reader are attached to most of the chapters. The illustrations are well chosen and good. [Footnote 54: Practical Agriculture. By Charles C. James. American edition edited by John Craig. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 203. Price, 80 cents.] Considerable information about the Philippine Islands and their inhabitants is given by Dr. _D. G. Brinton_ in a pamphlet entitled _The Peoples of the Philippines_. Dr. Brinton's point of view is the anthropologist's, and accordingly, after a few paragraphs about the geography, geology, and history of the islands, he takes up their ethnology and describes their various peoples as they have been studied by the masters of the science and by travelers. Much valuable as well as interesting information is given respecting their manners and customs, languages, and literature, for the Tagals have had a written language from the earliest known times, and though their old literature does not amount to much they are to-day exceedingly facile versifiers. The Open Court Publishing Company (Chicago) publishes _The Lectures on Elementary Mathematics_ (_Leçons élémentaires sur les mathématiques_) of _Joseph Louis Lagrange_, "the greatest of modern analysts," in a translation from the new edition of the author's collected works by Thomas J. McCormack. These lectures, which were delivered in 1765 at the École Normale, have never before been published in separate form, except in the first printing in the Journal of the Polytechnic School and in the German. "The originality, elegance, and symmetrical character of these lectures have been pointed out by De Morgan, and notably by Dühring, who places them in the front rank of elementary expositions as an example of their kind. They possess, we might say, a unique character as a reading book in mathematics, and are interwoven with helpful historical and philosophical remarks." They present with great clearness the subjects of arithmetic and its operations, algebra, equations of the third and fourth degrees, the evolution of numerical equations, and the employment of curves in the solution of problems. The translator has prefixed a short biographical sketch of Lapouge, and an excellent portrait is given. A book of _Observation Blanks for Beginners in Mineralogy_ has been prepared by _Herbert E. Austin_, as an aid to the laboratory course, and is published by D. C. Heath & Co. (Boston, 30 cents). The laboratory course is intended to make the pupil familiar with the characteristics of minerals and the terms used in describing them by directing him to observe typical specimens and describe what he sees, and to develop his faculties of observation, conception, reasoning, judgment, comparison, and memory. A description is given of apparatus that may be home-made. The blanks follow, containing spaces for the insertion of notes under the heads of Experiment, Observation, Statement, and Conclusion. In Volume No. XXX of the International Education Series--Pedagogics of the Kindergarten--a number of Froebel's essays relating more especially to the plays and games were printed from the collection made by Wichard Lange. A new volume of the series, _Friedrich Froebel's Education by Development_, includes another selection from Lange's publication, in which the gifts are more thoroughly discussed. "Again and again, in the various essays," the editor of the series says, "Froebel goes over his theory of the meaning of the ball, the sphere, the cube, and its various subdivisions. The student of Froebel has great advantage, therefore, in reading this volume, inasmuch as Froebel has cast new light on his thought in each separate exposition that he has made.... The essays on the training school for kindergartners and the method of introducing children's gardens into the kindergarten are very suggestive and useful. In fact, there is no other kindergarten literature that is quite equal in value to the contents of this volume." The few essays in Lange's volume that still remain untranslated are characterized as being mostly of an ephemeral character. With the publication of the present volume, of which, as of the Pedagogics, Miss Josephine Jarvis is the translator, a complete list of the original works of Froebel in English translations has been provided in the International Education Series of Messrs. D. Appleton and Company. A useful manual for students in chemistry is the _Chemical Experiments_ of Prof. _John F. Woodhull_ and _M. B. Van Arsdale_ (Henry Holt & Co., New York). It embraces directions for making seventy-five experiments with different substances and chemical properties, including oxygen and the air, hydrogen and water, chlorine and the chlorine family, acids, bases, salts, sulphur, nitrogen, carbon, carbon dioxide and the carbonates, fermentation, potash, and problems to illustrate the law of definite proportions. A title is given to each experiment, suggesting what is to be proved by it; the details of the process are given, and the pupil is left to do the rest, entering his particular observations and conclusions on the blank page opposite the text. Questions are appended, of a nature further to develop the thinking powers of the pupils, and tables or lists are added of the elements concerned in the experiments, weights and measures, apparatus, and chemicals. The book _Defective Eyesight: the Principles of its Relief by Glasses_, of Dr. _D. B. St. John Roosa_, is the result of an attempt to revise The Determination of the Necessity for Wearing Glasses, published by the same author in 1888. It was found, on undertaking the work of revision, that the advance in our knowledge of the proper prescription of glasses, especially in the matter of simplicity in method, had been so great as to require a complete rewriting. In doing this the book has been very much enlarged, and illustrations have been introduced. The author hopes his manual may prove a reliable guide to the student and practitioner in ophthalmology, and may also be of interest to persons who wish to know the principles on which the prescription of glasses is based. The special subjects treated of are the measurement of visual power, presbyopia, myopia or short-sightedness, hypermetropia, corneal astigmatism, asthenopia, and the qualities of lenses. (Published by the Macmillan Company. Price, $1.) PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. North Carolina State Agricultural Society: Second Annual Report (1896) of the Experimental Farm at Southern Pines. Pp. 90.--Ohio: Press Bulletin No. 195. Stomach Worms in Sheep. Pp. 2; No. 196. Comparison of Varieties of Wheat. Pp. 2; No. 197. Successful Treatment of Stomach Worms in Sheep. Pp. 2; No. 198. Varieties of Wheat and Home-mixed Fertilizers. Pp. 2.--United States Department of Agriculture: Monthly List of Publications (July, 1899). Pp. 4; Report on North American Fauna. No. 14. Natural History of the Tres Marias Islands, Mexico. Pp. 96; No. 15. Revision of the Jumping Mice of the Genus _Zaphus_. By Edward A. Preble. Pp. 34, with one plate; Report of the Puerto Rico Section of the Weather and Crop Service of the Weather Bureau, for May, 1899. Pp. 8. Baker, M. N. Potable Water and Methods of Detecting Impurities. New York: The Van Nostrand Company. (Van Nostrand Science Series.) Pp. 97. 50 cents. Beman, W. W., and Smith, D. E. New Plane and Solid Geometry. Boston: Ginn & Co. Pp. 382. Bulletins, Proceedings, Reports, etc. Boston Society of Natural History: Vol. XXIX. No. 2. Variation and Sexual Selection in Man. By E. T. Brewster. Pp. 16; No. 3. Notes on the Reptiles and Amphibians of Intervale, New Hampshire. By Glover M. Allen. Pp. 16; No. 4. Studies in Diptera Cyclorhapha. By G. & N. Hough. Pp. 8; No. 5. Contributions from the Gray Herbarium of Harvard University. New Series: No. 17. By B. L. Robinson and J. M. Greenman. Pp. 12.--Dominion of Canada: Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonization. Improvements In Crop Growing. By Prof. James W. Robertson. Pp. 39.--International Correspondence Schools, Scranton, Pa.: General Circular. Pp. 32.--Liberal University, Silverton, Oregon: Announcements. Pp. 18.--Society of American Authors: Bulletin for July, 1899. Pp. 22.--University of Michigan, Department of Medicine and Surgery: Annual Announcement for 1899-1900. Pp. 91.--United States Artillery Journal: Index to Vol. X, 1898. Pp. 12. Carpenter, George H. Insects, their Structure and Life. A Primer of Entomology. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 404. $1.75. Daniels, Winthrop Moore. The Elements of Public Finance, including the Monetary System of the United States. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 383. $1.50. Grotius, Hugo. Proceedings at the Laying of a wreath on the Tomb of, July 4, 1899, by the Commission of the United States to the International Peace Conference. Pp. 48. Howard, John R., editor. Educational Nuggets. New York: Ford, Howard & Hulbert. Pp. 215. 50 cents. McIlvaine, Charles, and Macadam, R. K. Toadstools, Mushrooms, and Fungi, Edible and Poisonous. (Specimen pages.) Indianapolis. Ind.: The Bowen-Merrill Company. (Author's Edition.) $10. Massee, George. A Text-Book of Plant Diseases caused by Cryptogamic Parasites. New York. The Macmillan Company. Pp. 458. $1.60. Mellen, George E. New Pointers for Amateurs (Photography). Published by the author. Times Building, Chicago. Pp. 46, with blanks. 15 cents. Miller, Prof. Kelly. The Primary Needs of the Negro Race. Washington: Howard University. Pp. 18. Oregon Short Line Railroad. Where Gush the Geysers. (Guide to Yellowstone National Park.) Pelley, W. H., Knoxville, Ill. Christian Government. Pp. 44. 10 cents. Pfungst, Dr. Arthur. Ein Deutscher Buddhist. (A German Buddhist.) Theodor Schultze. Stuttgart. Pp. 51. Rector, L. E., Translator and Editor. Montaigne on the Education of Children. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (International Education Series.) Pp. 191. Reprints: Billings, S. A., and Englehardt, H. A. Observations on a New Coal-Tar Product. Pp. 7.--Goldmann, J. A. Prophylactic Treatment of the Uric-acid Diathesis. Pp. 8.--Kingsley, Carl. Methods of Determining the Frequency of Alternating Currents. Pp. 11.--Kunz, George F. The Production of Precious Stones in 1897. Pp. 22.--Shimer, P. W. Carbon Combustions in a Platinum Crucible. Pp. 12. Sumner, William G. The Conquest of the United States by Spain. Boston: Dana, Estes & Co. Smithsonian Institution: Doan, Martha. Index to the Literature of Thallium. Pp. 26; Proceedings of the United States National Museum. Index to Vol. XXI. United States Commission of Labor: Thirteenth Annual Report. Hand and Machine Labor. Two volumes. Pp. 1604. United States Geological Survey: Nineteenth Annual Report. Part I. Director's Report, including Triangulations and Spirit Levelings. Pp. 422, with map; Part IV. Hydrography. Pp. 814; Part VI. Mineral Resources of the United States. By David T. Day. Two volumes. Pp. 651 and 706.--Monographs: Vol. XXIX. Geology of Old Hampshire County, Massachusetts. By B. K. Emerson. Pp. 790, with maps; Vol. XXXI. Geology of the Aspen Mining District, Colorado. By J. E. Spurr. Pp. 260, with an Atlas of thirty sheets; Vol. XXXV. The Later Extinct Floras of North America. By J. S. Newberry. A posthumous work, edited by Arthur Hollick. Pp. 295, with 68 plates.--Maps and Descriptions of Routes of Exploration in Alaska in 1898. Pp. 138, with envelope containing ten maps. Young Men's Christian Association, Educational Department: Annual Report for 1899. Pp. 70; Prospectus for 1899 (July 1, 1899 to July 1, 1900). Pp. 112; Fourth International and other Exhibits. Awards of Merit. Pp. 24; The Present Status of Our Educational Work. By Frederic B. Pratt. Pp. 5. Fragments of Science. =Officers of the American Association for 1900.=--The American Association, at Columbus, Ohio, elected as president for the next meeting, which is to be held in New York city, June 25 to 30, 1900, Prof. R. S. Woodward, of Columbia University. The vice-presidents-elect are: Section A (Mathematics and Astronomy), Asaph Hall, Jr., of Ann Arbor, Mich.; Section B (Physics), Ernest Merritt, of Ithaca, N. Y.; Section C (Chemistry), James Lewis Howe, of Lexington, Va.; Section D (Mechanical Science and Engineering), J. A. Brashear, of Pittsburg, Pa.; Section E (Geology and Geography), J. F. Kemp, of New York city; Section F (Zoölogy), C. B. Davenport, of Cambridge, Mass.; Section G (Botany), William Trelease, of St. Louis, Mo.; Section H (Anthropology), A. W. Butler, of Indianapolis, Ind.; Section I (Economic Science and Statistics), C. M. Woodward, of St. Louis. The permanent secretary is L. O. Howard, United States Entomologist, Washington, D. C.; General Secretary, Charles Baskerville, of Chapel Hill, N. C.; Secretary of the Council, William H. Hallock, of New York city. The sectional secretaries are: Section A, W. M. Strong, of New Haven, Conn.; Section B, R. A. Fessenden, of Allegheny, Pa.; Section C, A. A. Noyes, of Boston, Mass.; Section D, W. T. Magruder, of Columbus, Ohio; Section E, J. A. Holmes, of Chapel Hill, N. C.; Section F, C. H. Eigenmann, of Bloomington, Ind.; Section G, D. T. McDougal, of New York Botanical Garden; Section H, Frank Russell, of Cambridge, Mass.; Section I, H. T. Newcombe, of Washington, D. C. Treasurer, R. S. Woodward, of New York city. =Graphite.=--An interesting account of the history and manufacture of graphite is given by E. G. Acheson in the June issue of the Journal of the Franklin Institute. In the year 1779 Karl Wilhelm Scheele, a young apothecary in the town of Köping, Sweden, discovered that graphite was an individual compound. It had up to this time been confounded with molybdenum sulphide. In 1800 Mackenzie definitely added graphite to the carbon group by showing that, on burning, it yielded the same amount of carbon dioxide as an equal amount of charcoal and diamond. Graphite in a more or less pure state is quite freely distributed over the earth, but only in a few places is it found under conditions of purity, quantity, ease of mining, refining, and transportation to market that permit of a profitable business being made of it. Statistics for the last six years (1890-'95) show an average yearly production of 56,994 short tons. The countries contributing to the supply were Austria, Ceylon, Germany, Italy, United States, Canada, Japan, India, Russia, Great Britain, and Spain. Great differences exist in the structure and purity of the graphites furnished from the various mines. There are two general forms--the crystalline and the amorphous. The product of the Ceylon mines is crystalline of great purity, analyzing in some cases over ninety-nine per cent carbon, while that of the Barrowdale mines is amorphous and also very pure. The chief impurity in graphite is iron. It is probable that the first use made of graphite was as a writing substance. The first account we have of its employment for this purpose is contained in the writings of Conrad Gessner on Fossils, published in 1565. Its present uses include the manufacture of pencils, crucibles, stove-polish, foundry-facing, paint, motor and dynamo brushes, anti-friction compounds, electrodes for electro-metallurgical work, conducting surfaces in electrotyping, and covering the surfaces of powder grains. For most of these purposes it is used in the natural impure state. The mining and manufacture of graphite into articles of commerce give employment to thousands of people. The mines of Ceylon alone, when working to their full capacity, employ about twenty-four thousand men, women, and children. The rapid increase in the use of graphite has led to considerable discussion in recent years regarding the possibility of its commercial manufacture. It has been made in a number of different ways in the laboratory, all, however, depending on the same fundamental principle--viz., the liberation of the carbon from some one of its chemical compounds, under conditions which prevent its reassociation with the same or other elements. Mr. Acheson, who has been working for several years in an endeavor to devise a commercially successful process of manufacture, found, somewhere back in 1893, that graphite was formed in the carborundum (electric) furnaces of the Carborundum Company of Niagara Falls. Since then he has been following up this clew, and now believes that "the only commercial way to make graphite is by breaking up a carbide by the action of heat." A building for its manufacture in this way, by the use of the electric furnace, is now in course of erection at Niagara Falls. =Commercial Education in England.=[55]--It is only of comparatively late years that the Government has had anything to do with the education of the people. For some centuries back all English education was practically controlled by our two ancient universities--Oxford and Cambridge. They decided what subjects were to be taught, and how they were to be taught. The control they exercised over our English schools was an indirect one, but it was none the less effectual. The schools themselves were, like the universities, independent of Government, or, indeed, of any control. The principal of these are known as "public schools," though the term "public" has of late years also been applied to the public elementary schools. These are nearly all developments of ancient foundations. Winchester, founded in the fourteenth century, and Westminster, in the sixteenth, grew up under the shadows of great religious houses; Eton was established in the fifteenth century by the monarch, close to his own palace at Windsor; Harrow, which dates from the sixteenth century, is the most important example of the most numerous class of all privately founded local schools--grammar schools, as they were generally entitled--which have developed beyond their original founders' intention, and have eventually come to attract boys from all parts of the kingdom. The best boys from all of them went to the universities, and the course of study which was most successful at the university was naturally the course of study which was preferred at the school. The _literæ humaniores_, which were the sum total of university education, included only Greek and Latin language and literature, mathematics, and logic. Science--I have now in my mind the education of but a single generation back--was ignored. The teaching of modern languages was perfunctory in the extreme; the same may be said of history and geography, while even English language and literature were almost entirely neglected. Now an education modeled on these lines was not ill suited for professional men--men who went from the university into law, the Church, or medicine. But it was by no means suited, especially when cut short in its early stages, for boys whose future destination was the counting-house or the shop. We are not met to consider the training of scholars, but the sort of education best adapted to the requirements of the ordinary man of business, and given under the limitations inevitable in the conditions of the case--that is to say, in a very limited period and during the early years of life--intended also not only to train the mind but to provide a means of earning a living. Commercial education must in fact be a compromise between real education and business training. The more it inclines to the former the better. With the growth of modern industry and commerce the necessity for a training better suited for the requirements of modern life became more and more evident, and the place was supplied, or partially supplied, by private-adventure schools, which undertook to provide the essentials of a commercial education. Of late years also some important middle-class schools have been founded by institutions like the Boys' Public Day Schools Company, and the Girls' Public Day Schools Company, the teaching in which is of a modern if not of a commercial character. The growth also of science had its natural and obvious effects on educational methods. Scientific teaching was introduced at the universities--it had been practically ignored at Oxford, and recognized at Cambridge only as a department of mathematics. The more important of our public schools introduced what was known as a "modern side," that is to say, an alternative course which a boy might take, and in which science, modern languages, and mathematics took the place, to a greater or less extent, of the classical languages. Other schools modified their whole curriculum in a like direction; others again almost abandoned the ancient knowledge in favor of the modern. Such, in briefest and baldest summary, is the condition at which our system of secondary education has now arrived. In the meantime, elementary education in England had been organized and systematized. At the beginning of the century elementary education was imparted to the children of the peasants and agricultural laborers in village schools, most of which were sadly inefficient. In the towns there were various charitable institutions for educating the children of those who were unable to provide education for themselves, and there were also what were known as ragged and parochial schools, which were more or less of the same character as the elementary schools of to-day. Early in the century several important societies were established--they were mostly of a religious character--for the improvement of elementary education. By their assistance schools were founded throughout the country. These were maintained by voluntary effort, and so gained their name of voluntary schools, though they received aid from the Government, an annual grant being allotted for the purpose. In 1839 a committee of the Privy Council was created to regulate the administration of Government grants for education, and this committee still remains the governing body of our education department. The Elementary Education Act of 1870, with later acts of 1876 and 1880, laid down the principle that sufficient elementary education should be provided for all children of school age, and established a system of school boards, which boards were to be and were formed in all districts where such sufficient provision for education did not exist. By a later act of 1891 education was made gratuitous as well as compulsory. We have, therefore, now two great classes of elementary schools--school-board schools, in which education is free, and voluntary schools, in which a fee may be charged. Both alike receive Government aid under certain conditions. As a rule the voluntary schools are connected with the Church of England or with one or other of the nonconformist bodies. The boards which control the board schools are elected bodies, and the teaching is undenominational. [Footnote 55: From a paper read by Sir H. T. Wood, at the International Congress, on Technical Education, at Venice, May, 1899.] =Genius and Habit.=--W. L. Bryan and N. Harter are the authors of an interesting monograph in the Psychological Review for July, from which the following paragraphs are taken: "There is scarcely any difference between one man and another of greater practical importance than that of effective speed. In war, business, scientific work, manual labor, and what not, we have at the one extreme the man who defeats all ordinary calculations by the vast quantity of work he gets done, and at the other extreme the man who no less defeats ordinary calculations by the little all his busyness achieves. The former is always arriving with an unexpected victory, the latter with an unanswerable excuse for failure. It has seemed to many psychologists strongly probable that the swift man should be distinguishable from the slow by reaction time tests. For (_a_), granting that the performances demanded in practical affairs are far more complicated than those required in the laboratory tests, it seems likely that one who is tuned for a rapid rate in the latter will be tuned for a rapid rate in the former, when he has mastered them. Moreover (_b_), a rapid rate in elementary processes is favorable to their fusion into higher unitary processes, each including several of the lower. Finally (_c_), a rapid rate in elementary processes is favorable to prompt voluntary combinations in presence of new emergencies. In face of these _a priori_ probabilities, eleven years' experience in this laboratory (the first three being spent mainly on reaction times) has brought the conviction that no reaction time test will surely show whether a given individual has or has not effective speed in his work. Very slow rates, especially in complicated reactions, are strongly indicative of a mind slow and ineffective at all things. But experience proves that rapid rates by no means show that the subject has effective speed in the ordinary, let alone extraordinary, tasks of life. How is this to be explained? The following answer is proposed: The rate at which one makes practical headway depends partly upon the rate of the mental and nervous processes involved; but far more upon how much is included in each process. If A, B, and C add the same columns of figures, one using readily the method of the lightning adder, another the ordinary addition table, while the third makes each addition by counting on his fingers, the three are presently out of sight of one another, whatever the rates at which the processes involved are performed. The lightning adder may proceed more leisurely than either of the others. He steps a league while they are bustling over furlongs or inches. Now, the ability to take league steps in receiving telegraphic messages, in reading, in addition, in mathematical reasoning, and in many other fields, plainly depends upon the acquisition of league-stepping habits. No possible proficiency and rapidity in elementary processes will serve. The learner must come to do with one stroke of attention what now requires half a dozen, and presently, in one still more inclusive stroke, what now requires thirty-six. He must systematize the work to be done, and must acquire a system of automatic habits corresponding to the system of tasks. When he has done this he is master of the situation in his field. He can, if he chooses, deal accurately with minute details. He can swiftly overlook great areas with an accurate sense of what the details involved amount to--indeed, with far greater justice to details than is possible for one who knows nothing else. Finally, his whole array of habits is swiftly obedient to serve in the solution of new problems. Automatism is not genius, but it is the hands and feet of genius." "=A vague Impression of Beauty.="--The following sentences occur in an article on The Real purpose of Universities in a recent issue of the London Spectator. They give so strange a picture of the ideals of the two leading English universities as to seem worthy of reproduction: "However, Dr. Hill made one statement for which we owe him a sincere gratitude. 'The excellence of the classics,' said he, 'lay chiefly in their complete uselessness.' ... In this simple statement is expressed the true value of our old universities. They should be practically useless. They should not teach you to be a good carpenter or a skillful diplomatist. You can not march out of Oxford or Cambridge into any career which will return you an immediate and efficient income.... The other universities of Europe are prepared to cut you to a certain measure, or to render you technically competent. But our English universities have hitherto declined to discharge this humble function, save in rare lapses, from a noble ideal. They at least profess to accomplish a far greater task. There is a strange period dividing the man from the boy, which clamors aloud for intelligent discipline, and this discipline Oxford and Cambridge are anxious to supply. The undergraduate is too young to specialize, and not too old to receive instruction. When his period of training is finished he is asked to assume the heavy burdens of life, to discharge tasks which may be dull, and which are rarely concerned with what were once called the humanities. As he passes through the university he may not have the time nor the wit to become a sound scholar nor a profound mathematician. But he may, if he understand his privilege aright, linger for a while in the groves of 'practically useless' knowledge. He may learn what literature meant in an age when it was concerned only with the essentials of simplicity; he may read the lessons of history when history was still separate from political intrigue. And though he forgets his Greek grammar, though in middle life he can not construe a page of Virgil, yet he carries away from this irrational interlude a vague impression of beauty which no other course of education will ever give him." Even for the schoolmen "a vague impression of beauty," whatever that may mean, seems rather unpractical as an educational _ultima Thule_. =The Purple of Cassius.=--There are few substances in the field of inorganic chemistry on which so much speculation and actual work has been expended as the so-called purple of Cassius. A recent article by Mr. C. L. Reese, in the Chemical News, contains some interesting information regarding this curious compound. Up to the present time there have, it seems, been two views held as to its chemical nature--one that it is a mixture of stannic acid and metallic gold; the other, that of Berzelius, that it is substantially a chemical compound of purple gold oxide with the oxides of tin possibly mixed with an excess of stannic acid. It has seemed very likely that the substance is a chemical compound of acid character, and that the solubility in ammonia is due to the formation of a salt, but it has been found that by oxidation of stannous chloride and by allowing very dilute solutions of stannic chloride to stand, the "hydrogel" of stannic acid separated out, which, on the addition of a few drops of ammonia, liquefied and so became soluble in water, just as the purple of Cassius does. There can therefore be no salt formation here. Some comparatively recent work by Richard Zsigmondy, however, seems to have finally cleared up the chemical nature of this curious substance. Its formation is explained by assuming that when stannous chloride is added to a sufficiently dilute solution of gold chloride the latter is immediately reduced to metallic gold while stannic chloride is formed. Generally after a few seconds the liquid becomes red, but the purple is not precipitated for several days, unless it is heated. The gold is not precipitated as a black powder because the stannic chloride formed is immediately hydrolized into hydrochloric acid and the hydrate of stannic acid. The latter prevents the aggregation of the gold particles, and the stannic acid remains in solution as a colloid, which on standing gradually changes under the influence of the dilute hydrochloric acid to an insoluble form, the "hydrogel" of stannic acid. By heating, this change takes place immediately. The properties of the purple of Cassius depend on the properties and character of the stannic acid present, and the great variety in the properties of the stannic acids, the ortho, the meta, and the colloidal mixtures of the two explain the many contradictions in the literature with reference to the properties of the purple of Cassius. Zsigmondy says, "I look upon the knowledge that a mixture of colloid bodies can behave, under some conditions, as a chemical compound, and that the properties of one body in such mixtures can be hidden by those in another as the most important conclusion to be drawn from this work." =The Abuse of Unskilled Labor.=--The number of diseases directly or indirectly due to continued long standing is especially numerous among women. The London Lancet, which nearly twenty years ago attempted to improve matters in this respect in the case of shopgirls, has again taken up the subject, and recently published an editorial urging customers of the shops to boycott those establishments where no sitting accommodations are provided for the clerks. It says: "We, as medical men, maintain that sitting accommodations are absolutely necessary for shopgirls. The only argument having even the semblance of legitimacy which we have heard put forward in defense of the nonprovision of seats is that sitting is conducive to idleness, but in this connection such a premise can not be permitted, for an employee would be bound to come forward when an intending purchaser entered the shop.... The very fact that in many shops she is not allowed to sit down is conducive to idleness--idleness of the worst kind, the idleness of pretending to do something while in reality nothing is being done. Can nothing be done to stop this--as we once called it without the least exaggeration or sensationalism--'cruelty to women'? To the true woman--the woman with feelings for her sisters, the woman of love and sympathy, the true woman in every sense of the word--we appeal for help in this matter. If such women would abstain from purchasing at shops where they see that the employees are compelled to work from morning till night without permission to rest from their labors even when opportunity occurs, we should soon see the end of a practice which ruins the health and shortens the lives of many of our shopgirls." That there is a certain amount of danger for women from long-continued standing, to the point of exhaustion, there is no doubt, and much can be done toward improving the present conditions in this respect and in other hygienic ways in the shops. The large influx of women during recent years into the counting-room and the salesroom gives such questions an increasing importance, especially in the less skilled positions where labor combinations for mutual protection are not possible. There has already been considerable agitation of the question in this country, and there still remains much to be done. But, as Lord Salisbury pointed out in causing the rejection of a bill for remedying present shop conditions in England, it is a question not suitable for legislation, and can only be settled through the indirect action of public opinion on the shopkeeper himself. =The Occurrence of Gold Ores.=--The following paragraphs are from an article by H. M. Chance in the Engineering Magazine for July, entitled The Increasing Production of Gold: "Another reason for anticipating further increase in the production of gold is found in our better knowledge of gold ores, and of the conditions under which gold occurs in Nature. Until the discovery of the Cripple Creek district the occurrence of gold as tellurid in deposits of large extent and value was practically unknown. Gold was, of course, known to occur, sparingly in some ores, partially as a tellurid associated with other minerals; but such a mineralized belt as that at Cripple Creek was entirely unknown, and such deposits were not looked for by the prospector. Similarly, we now know of another class of gold ores in which the gold occurs apparently in some form chemically combined in a siliceous matrix, often approaching a true jasper or hornstone, and showing by analysis possibly ninety-five per cent of silica. Such ores show no trace of 'free' or metallic gold, and the presence of gold can be determined only by assay or analysis. A few such discoveries have recently been made, accidentally, by inexperienced persons, who had rock assayed from curiosity. Similarly again, in the last few years gold has been found in most unpromising-looking porphyry dikes--the very rocks prospectors the world over have regarded as necessarily barren because they almost invariably fail to show any 'free' or metallic gold by the miner's quick 'horn' or 'pan' test. But mining engineers and prospectors are learning that in a mineralized region gold may occur in any rock, and hundreds of prospectors are assaying all sorts of most unpromising-looking rock, satisfied that by assay alone can they determine whether a certain rock is gold-bearing or not. This persistent and more or less systematic work now going on in every mining district must result in the discovery of many valuable deposits in unexpected localities, and ultimately promises to add largely to the annual output of gold." MINOR PARAGRAPHS. The investigations of F. E. L. Beal of the Food of Cuckoos and S. D. Judd of the Food of Shrikes in their relation to agriculture are published in a single bulletin by the Department of Agriculture. Mr. Beal finds that the food of cuckoos consists almost wholly of insects, of which he has found sixty-five species in their stomachs, and concludes that from an economical point of view they rank among our most useful birds; and, in view of the caterpillars they eat, it seems hardly possible to overestimate the value of their work. Mr. Judd finds, from a very extensive examination, that the food of butcher birds and loggerhead shrikes consists of invertebrates (mainly grasshoppers), birds, and mice. During the colder half of the year the butcher bird eats birds and mice to the extent of sixty per cent, and ekes out the rest of its food with insects. In the loggerhead's food, birds and mice amount to only twenty-four per cent. Its beneficial qualities "outweigh four to one its injurious ones. Instead of being persecuted, it should receive protection." The Engineering Magazine is authority for the following: "The wrecking of the steamship Paris on the coast of Cornwall and the difficulties encountered in attempting to save her while a number of her compartments forward are filled with water, lead Mr. Richards, in the American Machinist, to suggest the applicability of compressed air. 'There is a means of expelling the water from the filled compartments so obvious, and so certainly effective, that it seems unaccountable that some engineer has not suggested it before this. Close the hatches of the flooded compartments and drive the water out by forcing air in. It would not make the slightest difference how big the holes might be in the bottom, as the water would be expelled and kept out on the same principle as in the old-fashioned diving bell.' This suggestion carries with it a much larger and more important one--namely, the use of air pumps instead of water pumps to save a leaking ship while afloat. As Mr. Richards well remarks, the work of trying to pump out a leaky ship is not only enormously wasted while it is going on, but it is never finished. If, however, the water leaking into a compartment of a ship be expelled by pumping air into the space, the work is done so soon as the compartment is filled with air down to the level of the leak. After that point is reached the ship is safe, no matter how large the hole, and no further pumping is necessary." Chlorate of potash has always been regarded by manufacturers and chemists as a nonexplosive, and hence there has been little care taken in handling and storing it. A recent explosion, however, at a large chemical works at St. Helens, in England, seems to disprove this view. A storehouse containing about one hundred and fifty tons of chlorate in the form of both powder and crystals took fire, and almost immediately after the falling in of the roof an explosion of terrible violence occurred, the shock being felt over a distance of twenty miles. The chlorate works were entirely demolished. A large gas holder of the city gas works, containing two hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet of gas, was burst and the gas ignited. Eight hundred tons of vitriol was poured into the streets of the town by the wrecking of ten vitriol chambers in a neighboring alkali works. Houses were unroofed, and in the main streets of the town, a quarter of a mile away, nearly every plate-glass window was demolished. A theory accounting for the explosion, advanced by Mr. J. B. C. Kershaw, in the Engineering and Mining Journal, is that it was due to the sudden and practically simultaneous liberation of all the oxygen from such a mass of chlorate, combined with the restraining influence of the kegs (the chlorate was packed in kegs of one hundredweight each), and possibly also helped by the presence of much charred wood and the dense volume of smoke. Whatever is the true theory, however, it is evident that our belief in the nonexplosiveness of potassium chlorate must be modified. NOTES. A piece of experimental glass pavement was laid in Lyons, in the Rue de la République, last fall, and it is reported to have worn very well thus far. The silicate of which the pavement is composed is called by the manufacturers ceramo-crystal or devitrified glass. It may be finished in various colors and with a rough or smooth surface. The blocks are made by heating broken glass to a temperature of 1,250° C. and then compressing it by hydraulic power. The resulting compound is said to have all the qualities of glass except its transparency. The New York Agricultural Experiment Station reports of its analyses of sugar beets in 1898 that the average percentage of sugar in the samples analyzed is 14.2, with a coefficient of purity of 85. In general the yield of beets was between nine tons and twenty tons per acre. An altitude of 12,440 feet, or 366 feet greater than any attained before, was reached in the kite-flying experiments at Blue Hill Observatory, Massachusetts, on February 21st. The flight was begun at twenty minutes to four in the afternoon, with a temperature of 40° and a wind velocity of seventeen miles an hour at the surface. At the highest point reached by the kite the temperature was 12° and the wind velocity fifty miles an hour. Four improved Hargreave kites with curved surfaces, like soaring birds' wings, were used tandem, and the flying line was a steel wire. The first to be unveiled of a series of tablets to be fixed by the Municipal Council of Bath, England, to mark historical houses is on the house where William Herschel lived in 1780, and was officially unveiled by Sir Robert Ball, April 22d. In a little workshop at the end of the back garden of this house Herschel made his Newtonian reflector, and here he discovered Uranus. Attention is called by Dr. Martin Ficker to the fact, brought out in his experiments, that cultures of microbes are affected by the glass of the tubes in which they are made. By virtue of differences in composition, different sorts of glass give varying degrees of alkalinity to water in contact with them, and the activity of the bacteria they contain is correspondingly affected. We have to add to our obituary list of persons in whom science is interested the names of Professor Socin, late of the University of Leipsic, Orientalist, and author of Baedeker's Palestine and Syria and many special works on the Arabic language and dialects; M. N. Rieggenbach, correspondent of the Paris Academy of Sciences, Section of Mathematics, at Olten, Switzerland; Elizabeth Thompson, donor of liberal gifts for scientific purposes, at Stamford, Conn.; she contributed toward the telescope for Vassar College, was a patron of the American Association, and endowed the Elizabeth Thompson Scientific Fund; George Averoff, who died at Alexandria, Egypt, July 27th, leaving, among other bequests, £20,000 to create an agricultural school in Thessaly, and £50,000 to the polytechnic schools at Athens; Charles J. Stillé, ex-Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, under whose administration the institution took a great stride in its development; Mrs. Arvilla J. Ellis, an assiduous student of the fungi, who assisted her husband, J. B. Ellis, in preparing and mounting the five thousand specimens for the North American Fungi and the Fungi Columbiani, and more than two hundred thousand other specimens which were distributed to the botanists of the world, at Newfield, N. J., July 18th; M. Balbiani, Professor of Embryology at the Collége de France; Prof. Pasquale Freda, Director of the Station for Agricultural Chemistry at Rome; Dr. S. T. Jak[vc]i[vc], Professor of Botany and Director of the Botanic Gardens, at Belgrade; Dr. Carl Kuschel, formerly Professor of Physics in the Polytechnic Institute at Dresden; M. A. de Marbaix, Professor of Zoölogy and Anatomy in the Agricultural Institute at Louvain; Dr. N. Grote, Professor of Psychology and Philosophy in the University of Moscow and editor of a journal devoted to those subjects; Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, the eminent German chemist, of whom a fuller notice will be given; and Sir Edward Frankland, another eminent chemist (English), one of Bunsen's pupils, a member of the Royal Commissions on Water Supply and River Pollution, and author of researches on the luminosity of flame and the effect of the density of a medium on the rate of combustion, died in Norway, aged seventy-four years. INDEX. ARTICLES MARKED WITH AN ASTERISK ARE ILLUSTRATED. Abbott, C. C. The Antiquity of Man in North America*, 326 Abuse of Unskilled Labor. (Frag.), 862 Acetylene, The Use of.* E. Renouf, 335 A Correction. (Corr.), 702 African Music in America, Survival of. J. R. Murphy*, 660 " Religious Ideas, Variations in. (Frag.), 281 Agriculture, Fungicides, Relative Power of. (Frag.), 717 Alleghanies, Folklore of the. F. A. Doughty, 390 Alloys, Metallic, of Rich Colors. (Frag.), 284 American Association for the Advancement of Science, Proper Objects of. E. Orton, 466 " " Columbus Meeting of, 822 " " Meeting of. (Table), 850 " " Meeting, The. (Frag.), 568 " " Officers of, for 1900. (Frag.), 857 " Indians and Mongolians. (Frag.), 715 Andrews, E. A. Sketch of W. K. Brooks. (Portrait), 400 Animals Reason? Do. E. Thorndike*, 480 " " " (Corr.), 843 An Old-fashioned Moral. (Table), 703 Anthropology: American Indians and Mongolians. (Frag.), 715 " Antiquity of Man in North America. C. C. Abbott*, 326 " Aztec Pictorial Record, An. (Frag.), 716 " Bows and Arrows, The Teaching of. (Frag.), 715 " Brinton, D. G., Death of. (Frag.), 713 " European Culture, Origin of. W. Z. Ripley*, 16 " Folklore of the Alleghanies. F. A. Doughty, 390 " Gypsies and their Folk-Tales. (Frag.), 424 " Hopi Indians of Arizona. George A. Dorsey*, 732 " Jews? Are Jews. J. Jacobs, 502 " Origin of Ancient Hindu Astronomy. Count G. D'Alviella, 396 " Primitive Man. (Table), 410 " Race Questions in the Philippine Islands. F. Blumentritte, 472 Antiquity of Man in North America. C. C. Abbott*, 326 Astronomy, Origin of Ancient Hindu. Count G. D'Alviella, 396 Austen, W. Bookworms in Fact and Fancy, 240 Aztec Pictorial Record, An. (Frag.), 716 Bacon's Idols. W. H. Hudson, 788 Baker, Smith. Causes and Prevention of Insanity, 102 Baldwin, F. S. Present Position of Sociology, 811 Beautifying the Home Grounds. (Frag.), 430 Benjamin, M. American Industrial Expositions, 231 Bering Sea Controversy again. T. C. Mendenhall, 99 Bertillon, M. J. Remedies for the Depopulation of France, 672 Bible, Scientific Method and the. (Corr.), 701 " The Scientific method and its Application to the. Rev. D. Sprague, 289 Bicknell, E. From Serfdom to Freedom, 84 Birds as Pest Destroyers. (Frag.), 571 Block Island, Geology of. (Frag.), 570 Blumentritte, F. Race Questions in the Philippine Islands, 472 Books Noticed, 126, 270, 415, 557, 705, 853 African Frontier, On the South. W. H. Brown, 708. -- Studies, West. M. H. Kingsley, 418. Agriculture. Fertilizers. E. B. Voorhees, 274. -- Practical. C. C. James, 854. -- The Principles and Practice of. L. H. Bailey, 421. Algebra. Text-Book of. G. E. Fischer and I. J. Schwatt, 420. Allen, A. H. Commercial Organic Analysis, 274. American Indians. F. Starr, 421. Amryc, C. Pantheism: the Light and Hope of Modern Reason, 421 Anatomy and Physiology, Laboratory Exercises in. J. E. Peabody, 277. Anglo-Saxon (Monthly), 562. Animated Pictures. C. F. Jenkins, 132. Anthropology. Australian Bush, In the. R. Semon, 417. -- Australia, The Native Tribes of Central. B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, 417. -- History of Mankind. F. Ratzel, 272. -- Man, Past and Present. A. H. Keane, 852. -- Philippines, People of the. D. G. Brinton, 855. Arctic, A Thousand Days in the. F. G. Jackson, 705. Arithmetic, Primary. A. R. Hornbrook, 420. -- The American Elementary. M. A. Bailey, 422. Armageddon. Stanley Waterloo, 133. Aston, W. G. History of Japanese Literature, 131. Astronomy, A Short History of. A. Berry, 710. Atkinson, G. F. Elementary Botany, 131. Austin, H. E. Observation Blanks for Beginners in Mineralogy, 855. Australian Bush, In the. R. Semon, 417. Australia, The Native Tribes of Central. G. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, 417. Badenoch, L. N. True Tales of the Insects, 854. Bailey, L. H. The Principles of Agriculture, 421. -- M. A. The American Elementary Arithmetic, 422. Bardeen, C. W. Commissioner Hume, 562. Bates, F. G. Rhode Island and the Formation of the Union, 421. Bauer, L. A., and French, Thomas, Jr. Terrestrial Magnetism. (Quarterly), 132. Beddard, F. E. Structure and Classification of Birds, 128. Bell, M. G. Story of the Rise of the Oral Method in America, 711. Berry, A. A Short History of Astronomy, 710. Bickerton, A. W. New Story of the Stars, 134. Biology, Principles of. H. Spencer, 275. Birds, Structure and Classification of. F. E. Beddard, 128. Botany, Elementary. G. F. Atkinson, 131. -- Elementary Text-Book of. S. H. Vines, 131. -- Evolution of Plants, Lectures on the. D. H. Campbell, 561. -- Ferns, How to Know the, 708. Bradford, Gamaliel. The Lesson of Popular Government, 415. Brinton, D. G. Peoples of the Philippines, 855. Brooks, W. K. Foundations of Zoölogy, 270. Brown, W. H. On the South African Frontier, 708. Bryant, W. M. Life, Death, and Immortality, 130. Buckley, A. B. The Fairy-Land of Science, 854. Bush Fruits. F. W. Card, 129. Call, R. E. Ichthyologia Ohioensis. (C. E. Rafinesque), 560. Cajori, Florian. History of Elementary Physics, 419. Campbell, D. H. Lectures on the Evolution of Plants, 561. Card, F. W. Bush Fruits, 129. Carpenter, F. G. Geographical Reader for North America, 561. -- of Nazareth, The, or the Silver Cross, 278. Catering for Two. A. L. James, 278. Cave Regions of the Black Hills. L. A. Owen, 562. Census, The Federal, 558. Chemical Experiments. Woodhull and Van Arsdale, 856. Cole, J. R. Miscellany, 134. Commercial Organic Analysis. A. H. Allen, 274. Cuba, Industrial. R. P. Porter, 560. Cumulative Index for 1898, 712. Dall, C. H. Memorial of W. W. Turner and Sisters, 563. Dana, C. A. Recollections of the Civil War, 853. Deaf and Dumb. Comparison of Methods of Instruction. Volta Bureau, 712. -- Oral Method of Instructing, Rise of, in America. M. G. Bell, 711. De Morgan, A. On the Study and Difficulty of Mathematics, 561. Drinking Water, The Microscopy of. G. C. Whipple, 709. Dr. Therne. H. R. Haggard, 711. Dyers and Colorists, Year-Book of. H. Huntington, 563. Economics. Census, The Federal, 558. -- Strikes and Lockouts, Sympathetic, 563. Education. Commissioner Hume. C. W. Bardeen, 562. -- Froebel's, by Development, 855. -- Ideals and Programmes. J. L. Gourdy, 421. -- Nature Study In Elementary Schools. L. S. W. Wilson, 422. -- Report of the Commissioner of, for 1896-'97, 562. Elliott, A. G., and Graffigny, H. de. Gas and Petroleum Engines, 277. Ethnology. American Indians. F. Starr, 421. Evolution, Footnotes to. D. S. Jordan, 559. Evolution of Plants, Lectures on the. D. H. Campbell, 561 -- The Last Link. E. Haeckel, 126. Eyesight, Defective: Its Relief by Glasses. D. B. St. John Roosa, 856. Faraday, Michael, His Life Work. S. P. Thompson, 421. Farrington and Noll, E. H. and F. W. Testing Milk and its Products, 278. Ferns, How to Know the. F. T. Parsons, 708. Fertilizers. E. B. Voorhees, 274. Fischer, G. E., and Schwatt, I. J. Text-Book of Algebra, with Exercises for Secondary Schools, 420. Fitz, G. W. Revised Edition of H. N. Martin's The Human Body, 422. Force, General M. F. General Sherman, 419. Fossil Medusæ. C. D. Walcott, 278. Froebel's Education by Development, 855. Gas and Petroleum Engines. A. G. Elliott, 277. Geographical Nature Studies. F. O. Payne, 277. -- Reader for North America. F. G. Carpenter, 561. Geology. Cave Regions of the Black Hills. L. A. Owen, 562. -- Rivers of North America. I. C. Russell, 127. -- Stratigraphical, Principles of. J. E. Marr, 276. Gourdy, J. L. Ideals and Programmes, 421. Graffigny, H. de. (See Elliott, A. G.), 277. Guerber, H. A. Story of the English, 133. Haeckel, Ernst. The Last Link, 126. Haggard, H. R. Dr. Therne, 711. Hall, F. S. Sympathetic Strikes and Lockouts, 563. Histology, An Epitome of Human. A. W. Weysse, 130. History of Mankind. F. Ratzel, 272. -- Civil War, Recollections of. C. A. Dana, 853. -- of the World. E. Sanderson, 129. -- Story of the English. H. A. Guerber, 133. Holman, S. W. Matter, Energy, Force, and Work, 276. Hornbrook, A. R. Primary Arithmetic, 420. Horticulture. Bush Fruits. F. W. Card, 129. Human Body, The. H. N. Martin. Revised edition by G. W. Fitz, 422. Huntington, H. The Year-Book of Colorists and Dyers, 563. Hygiene. Drinking Water, The Microscopy of. G. C. Whipple, 709. Hypnotism: its Application to Medicine. O. G. Wetterstrand, 709. Imperial Democracy. D. S. Jordan, 851. Insects, True Tales of the. L. N. Badenoch, 854. Instinct and Reason. H. R. Marshall, 710. Jackman, W. S. Nature Study for Grammar Grades, 274. Jackson, P. G. A Thousand Days in the Arctic, 705. James, A. L. Catering for Two, 278. -- C. C. Practical Agriculture, 854. Japan-American Commercial Journal. (Monthly), 561. Japanese Literature, History of. W. G. Aston, 131. Jenkins, C. F. Animated Pictures, 132. Jordan, D. S. Footnotes to Evolution, 559. -- D. S. Imperial Democracy, 851. Keane, A. H. Man, Past and Present, 852. Kingsley, Mary H. West African Studies, 418. Klondike, In the. F. Palmer, 418. Labor, Bulletins Department of: Wages in the United States and Europe. The Alaskan Gold Fields, and The Mutual Relief Associations in the Printing Trade, 711. -- Twelfth Annual Report of Commissioner of, 134. Lagrange, J. L. Lectures on Elementary Mathematics, 855. Lange, W. Froebel's Education by Development, 855. Language Lessons. J. G. Park, 422. Life, Death, and Immortality. W. M. Bryant, 130. Loomis, Ernest. Occult Science Library, 562. Marr, J. E. Principles of Stratigraphical Geology, 276. Marshall, H. R. Instinct and Reason, 710. Mathematics. Algebra, Introduction to Graphical. F. E. Nipher, 133. -- Elementary, Lectures on. J. L. Lagrange, 855. -- On the Study and Difficulty of. A. De Morgan, 561. Mechanics and Heat. Nichols and Francis, 278. Merriman, M. Elements of Sanitary Engineering, 130. Metric System of Weights and Measures. A. D. Risteen, 132. Microscopy of Drinking Water, The. G. C. Whipple, 709. Milk and its Products, The Testing of. Farrington and Noll, 278. Miller, A. The Sun an Electric Light, 711. Mineralogy, Observation Blanks for Beginners in. H. E. Austin, 855. Music, Short Course in. Ripley and Tappen, 276. Natural History. Outdoor Studies. J. G. Needham, 562. -- Rafinesque. Ichthyologia Ohioensis (by R E. Call), 560. Nature Study for Grammar Grades. W. S. Jackman, 274. -- in Elementary Schools. L. S. W. Wilson, 422. Needham, J. G. Outdoor Studies, 562. New Man, The. E. P. Oberholzer, 133. New Story of the Stars. A. W. Bickerton, 134. New York Academy of Sciences. Publications, 134. Nichols and Francis, E. L. and W. S. Mechanics and Heat, 278. Nipher, F. E. Introduction to Graphical Algebra, 133. Ober, F. A. Puerto Rico and its Resources, 559. Oberholzer, E. P. The New Man, 133. Occult Science Library. E. Loomis, 562. Owen, L. A. Cave Regions of the Black Hills, 562. Palmer, F. In the Klondike, 418. Pantheism: the Light and Hope of Modern Reason. C. Amryc, 421. Park, J. G. Language Lessons, 422. Parsons, F. T. How to Know the Ferns, 708. Patten, S. N. The Development of English Thought, 273. Payne, F. O. Geographical Nature Studies, 277. Peabody, J. E. Laboratory Exercises in Anatomy and Physiology, 277. Perspective, Elements of. C. G. Sullivan, 277. Philosophy. Development of English Thought. S. N. Patten, 273. -- Life, Death, and Immortality. W. M. Bryant, 130. Physics, History of, in its Elementary Branches. F. Cajori, 419. -- Matter, Energy, Force, and Work. S. W. Holman, 276. -- Philip's Experiments. J. Trowbridge, 132. Popular Government, The Lessons of. G. Bradford, 415. Porter, R. P. Industrial Cuba, 560. Porto Rico of To-day. A. G. Robinson, 275. Psychology. Reason and Instinct. H. R. Marshall, 710. Puerto Rico and Its Resources. F. A. Ober, 559. Rafinesque, C. S. Ichthyologia Ohioensis (by R. E. Call), 560. Ratzal, F. History of Mankind, 272. Rhode Island and the Formation of the Union. F. G. Bates, 420. Ripley and Tappen, F. H. and T. Short Course in Music, 276. Risteen, A. D. Metric System of Weights and Measures, 132. Rivers of North America. I. C. Russell, 127. Robinson, A. G. Porto Rico of To-day, 275. Roosa, D. B. St. John. Defective Eyesight: Its Relief by Glasses, 856. Russell, I. C. Rivers of North America, 127. Sanderson, E. History of the World, 129. Sanitation. Elements of Sanitary Engineering. M. Merriman, 130. Schimmel & Co. Semiannual Report, 423. Science, The Fairy-Land of. A. B. Buckley, 854. Semon, Richard. In the Australian Bush, 417. Sherman, General. General M. F. Force, 419. Socialist Almanac and Treasury of Facts, 563. Sociology. Imperial Democracy. D. S. Jordan, 851. -- Leisure Class, The Theory of the, 557. -- Popular Government, The Lessons of. G. Bradford, 415. Spencer, B., and Gillen, F. J. The Native Tribes of Central Australia, 417. -- H. Principles of Biology, 275. Starr, F. American Indians, 421. St. John Roosa, D. B. Defective Eyesight: Its Relief by Glasses, 856. Sullivan, C. G. Elements of Perspective, 277. Sun, The, an Electric Light. A. Miller, 711. Terrestrial Magnetism. Bauer and French. (Quarterly), 132. Thompson, S. P. Michael Faraday, His Life Work, 421. Travel. African Studies, West. M. H. Kingsley, 418. -- Arctic, A Thousand Days In the. F. G. Jackson, 705. -- Klondike, In the. F. Palmer, 418. -- On the South African Frontier. W. H. Brown, 708. Trowbridge, John. Philip's Experiments, 132. Turner, W. W., Memorial of, and Sisters. By C. H. Dall, 563. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class, 557. Vines, S. H. Elementary Text-Book of Botany, 131. Voorhees, E. B. Fertilizers, 274. Walcott, C. D. Fossil Medusæ, 278. Waterloo, Stanley. Armageddon, 133. Wetterstrand, O. G. Hypnotism and Its Application to Medicine, 709. Weysse, A. W. An Epitome of Human Histology, 130. What is This? 564. Whipple, G. C. The Microscopy of Drinking Water, 709. Wilson, Lucy S. W. Nature Study in Elementary Schools, 422. Woodhull and Van Arsdale. Chemical Experiments, 856. Zoölogy. Australian Bush, In the. R. Semon, 417. -- Birds, The Structure and Classification of. F. E. Beddard, 128. -- Foundations of. W. K. Brooks, 270. Bookworms in Fact and Fancy. W. Austen, 240 Boston Public Library and Science. (Table), 412 Botany: Colors of Northern Flowers. J. H. Lovell, 685 " Forms, Unusual, in Plants. B. D. Halsted*, 371 " of Shakespeare. T. H. MacBride, 219 " Poisonous Plants, Somewhat. (Frag.), 572 Bounties and Free Trade. (Frag.), 569 Bows and Arrows, The Teaching of. (Frag.), 715 Bracchi, M. A. The Sense of Color, 253 Brinton, D. G., Death of. (Frag.), 713 Brinton's Contributions to American Linguistics. (Frag.), 284 Brooks, William Keith. Sketch of. (With Portrait), 400 " William K. Thoughts about Universities, 348 Canada, Wheat Lands of. S. C. D. Roper, 766 Catskills, Forest and Animal Life in the. (Frag.), 569 Charity, Public and Private Vigilance. F. H. Giddings, 433 Chemistry Teaching in Grammar and High Schools. (Frag.), 574 Cherry Leaves, Poison in Wild. (Frag.), 283 Christian Science from a Physician's Point of View. J. B. Huber, 755 Climate and Acclimatization. (Frag.), 565 Climate, Is Freedom limited by. (Table), 124 Coler, B. S. Abuse of Public Charity, 155 " " " Reform of Public Charity, 750 Colonial Expansion and Foreign Trade. J. Schoenhof, 62 Colors of Flowers, The. Henri Coupin, 386 " " Northern Flowers. J. H. Lovell, 685 Color, The Sense of. M. A. Bracchi, 253 Commercial Education in England. (Frag.), 858 Conn, H. W. The Milk Supply of Cities, 627 Coolidge, D. Hydrophobia in Baja California, 249 Country Checks, The Charges on, an Economic Mistake. (Frag.), 567 Coupin, Henri. The Colors of Flowers, 386 Cram, W. E. Hawk Lures*, 623 Crime, Influence of the Weather upon. E. G. Dexter, 653 Criminology: Desire for Notoriety a Cause of Crime. (Frag.), 568 " Luccheni, Study of Luigi. C. Lombroso*, 199 Curry, J. L. M. The Negro Question, 177 D'Alviella, G. Origin of Ancient Hindu Astronomy, 396 Deaf and Dumb, Instruction of the. (Frag.), 573 Degeneration. (Frag.), 571 Desire for Notoriety a Cause of Crime. (Frag.), 568 Dexter, E. G. Influence of the Weather upon Crime, 653 Dorsey, George A. Hopi Indians of Arizona*, 732 Doughty, F. A. Folklore of the Alleghanies, 390 Economics: Colonial Expansion and Foreign Trade. J. Schoenhof, 62 " Country Checks, The Charges on, An Economic Mistake. (Frag.), 667 " Free Trade and Bounties. (Frag.), 569 " Philippine Islands and American Capital. J. R. Smith, 186 " Unskilled Labor, The Abuse of. (Frag.), 862 " Wheat Lands of Canada. S. C. D. Roper, 766 Edgar, P. Tendencies in French Literature, 207 Education and Character Building. (Table), 847 Education: "A Vague Impression of Beauty." (Frag.), 860 " Chemistry Teaching in Grammar and High Schools. (Frag.), 574 " Commercial, in England. (Frag.), 858 " Deaf and Dumb, Instruction of the. (Frag.), 573 " High School, The Claims of. (Frag.), 570 " Kindergartenized Children (Table), 122 " Putting Life in the School. (Frag.), 429 " Sloyd in. (Frag.), 717 " Teaching the Teachers. (Frag.), 138 " Universities, Thoughts about. W. K. Brooks, 348 Educational Work of an Experiment Station. (Frag.), 425 Egleston, T., Sketch of.* D. S. Martin, 256 Enchanted Ravine, An. (Frag.), 428 European Culture, Origin of.* W. Z. Ripley, 16 Field Columbian Museum, The Work of the. (Frag.), 428 Firecrackers, Manufacture of, in China. (Frag.), 427 Fish Supply, Permanence of. (Frag.), 716 Fittest to Survive, Which is the. (Frag.), 137 Flies as Bearers of Disease. (Frag.), 425 Ford, R. C. Malay Literature, 379 Forest and Animal Life in the Catskills. (Frag.), 569 " Reserves, National. (Frag.), 717 France, Remedies for the Depopulation of. M. J. Bertillon, 672 Freedom limited by Climate. (Table), 124 French Literature, Tendencies in. P. Edgar, 207 Fungicides, Relative Power of. (Frag.), 717 Genius and Habit. (Frag.), 860 Geology: Niagara, New Method of Estimating the Age of. G. F. Wright*, 145 " of Block Island. (Frag.), 570 Giddings, F. H. Public Charity and Private Vigilance, 433 Glacier Water. (Frag.), 282 Gold Ores, The Occurrence of. (Frag.), 862 Government Scientific Work. (Frag.), 714 Graphite. (Frag.), 857 Gypsies and their Folk Tales. (Frag.), 424 Halsted, B. D. Unusual Forms in Plants*, 371 Harley, L. R. Sketch of William Pepper. (With Portrait), 836 Harvard Observatory, A Year at. (Frag.), 429 Hawaiian Reptiles. (Frag.), 718 Hawk Lures. W. E. Cram*, 623 Heilprin, A. Alaska and the Klondike*, 1, 163, 300 Help that Harms, The. H. C. Potter, 721 High School, The Claims of the. (Frag.), 570 Hopi Indians of Arizona. George A. Dorsey*, 732 Huber, J. B. Christian Science from a Physician's Point of View, 755 Hudson, W. H. Bacon's Idols, 788 Hydrophobia in Baja California. D. Coolidge, 249 Hygiene: Milk Supply of Cities. H. W. Conn, 627 " Plague, Are We in Danger from the. V. C. Vaughan, 577 Hypnotism, The Dangers of. (Frag.), 572 Imagination, Power of the. (Frag.), 714 Indian Peoples and the Missionaries. (Frag.), 138 Industrial Expositions, American. M. Benjamin, 231 Insane Characters in Fiction and the Drama. C. Lombroso, 53 Insanity, Causes and Prevention of. S. Baker, 102 Interpretation of Nature. E. Noble, 72 Jacobs, Joseph. Are Jews Jews?, 502 Jews? Are Jews. J. Jacobs, 502 Jordan, D. S. In the Little Brook, 355 Keyser, L. S. A Feathered Parasite, 822 Kindergartenized Children. (Table), 122 Klondike, Alaska and the. A Heilprin*, 1, 163, 300 Laisant, M. Mathematics for Children*, 800 Lamps, Evolution in. (Frag.), 140 La Nature's Second Scientific Excursion. (Frag.), 568 Lead Poisoning and Pottery Making. (Frag.), 426 Life in the School, Putting. (Frag.), 429 Linguistics, Brinton's Contributions to American. (Frag.), 284 Liquid Air. I. Remsen*, 35 Locusts, Seventeen- and Thirteen-Year. (Frag.), 141 Lombroso, C. Insane Characters in Fiction and the Drama, 53 " " Study of Luigi Luccheni*, 199 Longevity of Animals, The. (Frag.), 426 Lovell, J. H. Colors of Northern Flowers, 685 Luccheni, Study of Luigi. C. Lombroso*, 199 MacBride, T. H. Botany of Shakespeare, 219 Malay Literature. R. C. Ford, 379 Marcy, Death of Prof. Oliver. (Frag.), 137 Marsh, Death of Professor. (Frag.), 136 Martin, D. S. Columbus Meeting of the American Association, 828 " " " Sketch of Thomas Egleston*, 256 Mathematics for Children. M. Laisant*, 800 Mather, Fred. White Whales in Confinement, 362 Meat Extracts. (Frag.), 286 Medicine: Flies as Bearers of Disease. (Frag.), 425 Mendenhall, T. C. The Bering Sea Controversy again, 99 Mental Fatigue. M. V. O'Shea, 511 Metric System, The. (Frag.), 280 Milk Supply of Cities, The. H. W. Conn, 627 Morgan, Appleton. Recent Legislation against the Drink Evil, 438, 610 Murphy, J. R. Survival of African Music in America*, 660 National Museum, The United States. C. D. Walcott, 411 Natural History: A Feathered Parasite. L. S. Keyser, 822 " " Hawk Lures. W. E. Cram*, 623 " " In the Little Brook. D. S. Jordan, 355 " " Longevity of Animals. (Frag.), 426 " " Poisonous Fishes of the West Indies. J. M. Rogers, 680 " " Reptiles of Hawaii. (Frag.), 718 " " Society as a School, A. (Frag.), 281 " " White Whales in Confinement. Fred Mather, 362 Nature Study, Experiments in. (Frag.), 573 Nebraska as a Home for Birds. (Frag.), 714 Negro Problem in the United States, The. B. T. Washington, 317 " Question, The. J. L. M. Curry, 177 New Zealand Experiment in Woman Suffrage. (Frag.), 279 Niagara, New Method of Estimating the Age of. G. F. Wright*, 145 Noble, E. The Interpretation of Nature, 72 Ornithology: Nebraska as a Home for Birds, 714 Orthodoxy, The Troubles of. (Table), 704 Orton, E. Proper Objects of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 466 O'Shea, M. V. Mental Fatigue, 511 Oswald, F. L. Physical Geography of West Indies* (_continued_), 47, 193 Papuan Children, Photographing. (Frag.), 285 Pengelly, William. Sketch of (Portrait), 113 Pepper, William. Sketch. (With Portrait.) L. R. Harley, 836 Philippine Islands and American Capital. J. R. Smith, 186 " " Race Questions in. F. Blumentritte, 472 Philosophy: An Old-fashioned Moral. (Table), 703 Philozoists, Inconsistent. (Frag.), 140 Physics: Liquid Air. I. Remsen*, 35 Physiology: Color, The Sense of. M. A. Bracchi, 253 Picture Telegraphy. (Frag.), 566 Plague, Are We in Danger from the. V. C. Vaughan, 577 Poison in Wild Cherry Leaves. (Frag.), 283 Poisonous Fishes of the West Indies. J. M. Rogers, 680 " Plants, Somewhat. (Frag.), 572 Popular Co-operation in Health Work. (Frag.), 136 Population in Maine, The Trend of. (Corr.), 846 Potter, H. C. The Help that Harms, 721 Pottery Making and Lead Poisoning. (Frag.), 426 Practical Philanthropy. H. A. Townsend, 534 Primitive Man. (Table), 410 Protection of Plants and Birds in France and Italy. (Frag.), 282 Psychology: Animals Reason? Do. E. Thorndike*, 480 " Crime, Influence of the Weather upon. E. G. Dexter, 653 " Habit and Genius. (Frag.), 860 " Imagination, Power of the. (Frag.), 714 " Insane Characters in Fiction and the Drama. C. Lombroso, 53 " Mental Fatigue. M. Y. O'Shea, 511 Public Charity, Abuse of. B. S. Coler, 155 " " Reform of. B. S. Coler, 750 Purple of Cassius, The. (Frag.), 861 Race Troubles, Our. (Table), 414 Racial Geography. (Table), 268 Recent Legislation against the Drink Evil. Appleton Morgan, 438, 610 Remsen, I. Liquid Air*, 35 Renouf, E. The Use of Acetylene*, 335 Ripley, W. Z. Origin of European Culture*, 16 Rogers, J. M. West Indian Poisonous Fishes, 680 Roper, S. C. D. Wheat Lands of Canada, 766 Sausages, Chemistry of. (Frag.), 285 Schmidt, Oscar. Sketch. (With Portrait), 693 Schoenhof, J. Colonial Expansion and Foreign Trade, 62 Science and the Boston Public Library. (Table), 412 " and the Ideal. (Table), 266 " Teachers' School of. F. Zirngiebel*, 451, 640 Scientific Method and its Application to the Bible. Rev. D. Sprague, 289 " " and the Bible. (Corr.), 701 Serfdom to Freedom. E. Bicknell, 84 Shakespeare, Botany of. T. H. MacBride, 219 Sloyd as an Educational Factor. (Frag.), 717 Smith, J. R. Philippine Islands and American Capital, 186 Sociology: Charity, Abuse of Public, 155 " Depopulation of France, Remedies for the, 672 " Drink Evil, Recent Legislation against. A. Morgan, 438, 610 " Help that Harms, The. H. C. Potter, 721 " Negro Question, The. J. L. M. Curry, 177 " Philanthropy, Practical. H. A. Townsend, 534 " Present Position of. F. S. Baldwin, 811 " Public Charity and Private Vigilance. F. H. Giddings, 433 " Race Problem in the United States. B. Washington, 317 " Race Troubles, Our. (Table), 414 " Reform of Public Charity. B. S. Coler, 750 Spencer, Herbert, at Seventy-nine. (Portrait), 542 Sprague, Rev. D. Scientific Method and its Application to the Bible, 289 Taxation, Best Methods of. Part II. D. A. Wells 524, 778 Teachers' School of Science. F. Zirngiebel*, 451, 640 Teaching the Teachers. (Frag.), 138 Theology: Troubles of Orthodoxy. (Table), 704 Thorndike, E. Do Animals Reason?*, 480 Thrasher, M. B. Tuskegee Institute and its President*, 592 Tortoise Shell. (Frag.), 283 Townsend, H. A. Practical Philanthropy, 534 Travel: Klondike, Alaska and the. A Heilprin*, 1, 163, 300 Tuskegee Institute and its President. M. B. Thrasher*, 592 Universities, Thoughts about. W. K. Brooks, 348 "Vague Impression of Beauty, A." (Frag.), 860 Vaughan, V. C. Are we in Danger from the Plague?, 577 Walcott, C. D. The United States National Museum, 491 Washington, B. T. The Race Problem in the United States, 317 Weather, Influence of the, on Crime. E. G. Dexter, 653 Weeds under Cultivation. (Frag.), 139 Wells, D. A. Best Methods of Taxation. Part II, 524, 778 West Indies, Physical Geography of. F. L. Oswald* (_continued_), 47, 193 Wheat Lands of Canada. S. C. D. Roper, 766 " Question. A Correction. (Corr.), 702 White Whales in Confinement. Fred Mather, 362 Woman Suffrage, New Zealand Experiments in. (Frag.), 279 Woodchucks, Operations against. (Frag.), 139 Wright, G. F. New Method of Estimating the Age of Niagara*, 145 Xkichmook, Yucatan, Ruins of. (Frag.), 141 Yang-tse-Kiang, The. (Frag.), 571 Zirngiebel, Frances. The Teachers' School of Science*, 451, 640 THE END. Transcriber's Notes: Words surrounded by _ are italicized. Words surrounded by = are bold. Diacritical mark caron (v-shaped symbol) is represented as [vx] in this e-text (x being the letter with the symbol caron above it). Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent spellings have been kept, including inconsistent use of hyphen (e.g. "far reaching" and "far-reaching"). Illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text. Pg. 816, word "of" added to sentence "...acceleration of social evolution." Entries in Index refer to all five issues of Popular Science Monthly Vol. LV: - May (pp. 1-136) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44880 - June (pp. 137-288) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45115 - July (pp. 289-432) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45361 - August (pp. 433-576) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45938 - September (pp. 577-720) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46383 
6139	----	MARVELS OF MODERN SCIENCE By PAUL SEVERING Edited by THEODORE WATERS 1910 CONTENTS CHAPTER I FLYING MACHINES Early attempts at flight. The Dirigible. Prof. Langley's experiments. The Wright Brothers. Count Zeppelin. Recent aeroplane records. CHAPTER II WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY Primitive signalling. Principles of wireless telegraphy. Ether vibrations. Wireless apparatus. The Marconi system. CHAPTER III RADIUM Experiments of Becquerel. Work of the Curies. Discovery of Radium. Enormous energy. Various uses. CHAPTER IV MOVING PICTURES Photographing motion. Edison's Kinetoscope. Lumiere's Cinematographe. Before the camera. The mission of the moving picture. Edison's latest triumph. CHAPTER V SKY-SCRAPERS AND HOW THEY ARE BUILT Evolution of the sky-scraper. Construction. New York's giant buildings. Dimensions. CHAPTER VI OCEAN PALACES Ocean greyhounds. Present day floating palaces. Regal appointments. Passenger accommodation. Food consumption. The one thousand foot boat. CHAPTER VII WONDERFUL CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE Mating Plants. Experiments of Burbank. What he has accomplished. CHAPTER VIII LATEST DISCOVERIES IN ARCHAEOLOGY Prehistoric time. Earliest records. Discoveries in Bible lands. American explorations. CHAPTER IX GREAT TUNNELS OF THE WORLD Primitive Tunnelling. Hoosac Tunnel. Croton aqueduct. Great Alpine tunnels. New York subway. McAdoo tunnels. How tunnels are built. CHAPTER X ELECTRICITY IN THE HOUSEHOLD Electrically equipped houses. Cooking by electricity. Comforts and conveniences. CHAPTER XI HARNESSING THE WATER-FALL Electric energy. High pressure. Transformers. Development of water-power. CHAPTER XII WONDERFUL WAR SHIPS Dimensions, displacements, cost and description of battleships. Capacity and speed. Preparing for the future. CHAPTER XIII A TALK ON BIG GUNS The first projectiles. Introduction of cannon High pressure guns. Machine guns. Dimensions and cost of big guns. CHAPTER XIV MYSTERY OF THE STARS Wonders of the universe. Star Photography. The infinity of space. CHAPTER XV CAN WE COMMUNICATE WITH OTHER WORLDS? Vastness of Nature. Star distances. Problem of communicating with Mars. The Great Beyond. Introduction The purpose of this little book is to give a general idea of a few of the great achievements of our time. Within such a limited space it was impossible to even mention thousands more of the great inventions and triumphs which mark the rushing progress of the world in the present century; therefore, only those subjects have been treated which appeal with more than passing interest to all. For instance, the flying machine is engaging the attention of the old, the young and the middle-aged, and soon the whole world will be on the wing. Radium, "the revealer," is opening the door to possibilities almost beyond human conception. Wireless Telegraphy is crossing thousands of miles of space with invisible feet and making the nations of the earth as one. 'Tis the same with the other subjects,--one and all are of vital, human interest, and are extremely attractive on account of their importance in the civilization of today. Mighty, sublime, wonderful, as have been the achievements of past science, as yet we are but on the verge of the continents of discovery. Where is the wizard who can tell what lies in the womb of time? Just as our conceptions of many things have been revolutionized in the past, those which we hold to-day of the cosmic processes may have to be remodeled in the future. The men of fifty years hence may laugh at the circumscribed knowledge of the present and shake their wise heads in contemplation of what they will term our crudities, and which we now call _progress_. Science is ever on the march and what is new to-day will be old to-morrow. We cannot go back, we must go forward, and although we can never reach finality in aught, we can improve on the _past_ to enrich the _future_. If this volume creates an interest and arouses an enthusiasm in the ordinary men and women into whose hands it may come, and stimulates them to a study of the great events making for the enlightenment, progress and elevation of the race, it shall have fulfilled its mission and serve the purpose for which it was written. CHAPTER I FLYING MACHINES Early Attempts at Flight--The Dirigible--Professor Langley's Experiment--The Wright Brothers--Count Zeppelin--Recent Aeroplane Records. It is hard to determine when men first essayed the attempt to fly. In myth, legend and tradition we find allusions to aerial flight and from the very dawn of authentic history, philosophers, poets, and writers have made allusion to the subject, showing that the idea must have early taken root in the restless human heart. Aeschylus exclaims: "Oh, might I sit, sublime in air Where watery clouds the freezing snows prepare!" Ariosto in his "Orlando Furioso" makes an English knight, whom he names Astolpho, fly to the banks of the Nile; nowadays the authors are trying to make their heroes fly to the North Pole. Some will have it that the ancient world had a civilization much higher than the modern and was more advanced in knowledge. It is claimed that steam engines and electricity were common in Egypt thousands of years ago and that literature, science, art, and architecture flourished as never since. Certain it is that the Pyramids were for a long time the most solid "Skyscrapers" in the world. Perhaps, after all, our boasted progress is but a case of going back to first principles, of history, or rather tradition repeating itself. The flying machine may not be as new as we think it is. At any rate the conception of it is old enough. In the thirteenth century Roger Bacon, often called the "Father of Philosophy," maintained that the air could be navigated. He suggested a hollow globe of copper to be filled with "ethereal air or liquid fire," but he never tried to put his suggestion into practice. Father Vasson, a missionary at Canton, in a letter dated September 5, 1694, mentions a balloon that ascended on the occasion of the coronation of the Empress Fo-Kien in 1306, but he does not state where he got the information. The balloon is the earliest form of air machine of which we have record. In 1767 a Dr. Black of Edinburgh suggested that a thin bladder could be made to ascend if filled with inflammable air, the name then given to hydrogen gas. In 1782 Cavallo succeeded in sending up a soap bubble filled with such gas. It was in the same year that the Montgolfier brothers of Annonay, near Lyons in France, conceived the idea of using hot air for lifting things into the air. They got this idea from watching the smoke curling up the chimney from the heat of the fire beneath. In 1783 they constructed the first successful balloon of which we have any description. It was in the form of a round ball, 110 feet in circumference and, with the frame weighed 300 pounds. It was filled with 22,000 cubic feet of vapor. It rose to a height of 6,000 feet and proceeded almost 7,000 feet, when it gently descended. France went wild over the exhibition. The first to risk their lives in the air were M. Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis de Arlandes, who ascended over Paris in a hot-air balloon in November, 1783. They rose five hundred feet and traveled a distance of five miles in twenty-five minutes. In the following December Messrs. Charles and Robert, also Frenchmen, ascended ten thousand feet and traveled twenty-seven miles in two hours. The first balloon ascension in Great Britain was made by an experimenter named Tytler in 1784. A few months later Lunardi sailed over London. In 1836 three Englishmen, Green, Mason and Holland, went from London to Germany, five hundred miles, in eighteen hours. The greatest balloon exhibition up to then, indeed the greatest ever, as it has never been surpassed, was given by Glaisher and Coxwell, two Englishmen, near Wolverhampton, on September 5, 1862. They ascended to such an elevation that both lost the power of their limbs, and had not Coxwell opened the descending valve with his teeth, they would have ascended higher and probably lost their lives in the rarefied atmosphere, for there was no compressed oxygen then as now to inhale into their lungs. The last reckoning of which they were capable before Glaisher lost consciousness showed an elevation of twenty-nine thousand feet, but it is supposed that they ascended eight thousand feet higher before Coxwell was able to open the descending valve. In 1901 in the city of Berlin two Germans rose to a height of thirty-five thousand feet, but the two Englishmen of almost fifty years ago are still given credit for the highest ascent. The largest balloon ever sent aloft was the "Giant" of M. Nadar, a Frenchman, which had a capacity of 215,000 cubic feet and required for a covering 22,000 yards of silk. It ascended from the Champ de Mars, Paris, in 1853, with fifteen passengers, all of whom came back safely. The longest flight made in a balloon was that by Count de La Vaulx, 1193 miles in 1905. A mammoth balloon was built in London by A. E. Gaudron. In 1908 with three other aeronauts Gaudron crossed from the Crystal Palace to the Belgian Coast at Ostend and then drifted over Northern Germany and was finally driven down by a snow storm at Mateki Derevni in Russia, having traveled 1,117 miles in 31-1/2 hours. The first attempt at constructing a dirigible balloon or airship was made by M. Giffard, a Frenchman, in 1852. The bag was spindle-shaped and 144 feet from point to point. Though it could be steered without drifting the motor was too weak to propel it. Giffard had many imitations in the spindle-shaped envelope construction, but it was a long time before any good results were obtained. It was not until 1884 that M. Gaston Tissandier constructed a dirigible in any way worthy of the name. It was operated by a motor driven by a bichromate of soda battery. The motor weighed 121 lbs. The cells held liquid enough to work for 2-1/2 hours, generating 1-1/3 horse power. The screw had two arms and was over nine feet in circumference. Tissandier made some successful flights. The first dirigible balloon to return whence it started was that known as _La France_. This airship was also constructed in 1884. The designer was Commander Renard of the French Marine Corps assisted by Captain Krebs of the same service. The length of the envelope was 179 feet, its diameter 27-1/2 feet. The screw was in front instead of behind as in all others previously constructed. The motor which weighed 220-1/2 lbs. was driven by electricity and developed 8-1/2 horse power. The propeller was 24 feet in diameter and only made 46 revolutions to the minute. This was the first time electricity was used as a motor force, and mighty possibilities were conceived. In 1901 a young Brazilian, Santos-Dumont, made a spectacular flight. M. Deutch, a Parisian millionaire, offered a prize of $20,000 for the first dirigible that would fly from the Parc d'Aerostat, encircle the Eiffel Tower and return to the starting point within thirty minutes, the distance of such flight being about nine miles. Dumont won the prize though he was some forty seconds over time. The length of his dirigible on this occasion was 108 feet, the diameter 19-1/2 feet. It had a 4-cylinder petroleum motor weighing 216 lbs., which generated 20 horse power. The screw was 13 feet in diameter and made three hundred revolutions to the minute. From this time onward great progress was made in the constructing of airships. Government officials and many others turned their attention to the work. Factories were put in operation in several countries of Europe and by the year 1905 the dirigible had been fairly well established. Zeppelin, Parseval, Lebaudy, Baidwin and Gross were crowding one another for honors. All had given good results, Zeppelin especially had performed some remarkable feats with his machines. In the construction of the dirigible balloon great care must be taken to build a strong, as well as light framework and to suspend the car from it so that the weight will be equally distributed, and above all, so to contrive the gas contained that under no circumstances can it become tilted. There is great danger in the event of tilting that some of the stays suspending the car may snap and the construction fall to pieces in the air. In deciding upon the shape of a dirigible balloon the chief consideration is to secure an end surface which presents the least possible resistance to the air and also to secure stability and equilibrium. Of course the motor, fuel and propellers are other considerations of vital importance. The first experimenter on the size of wing surface necessary to sustain a man in the air, calculated from the proportion of weight and wing surface in birds, was Karl Meerwein of Baden. He calculated that a man weighing 200 lbs. would require 128 square feet. In 1781 he made a spindle-shaped apparatus presenting such a surface to the resistance of the air. It was collapsible on the middle and here the operator was fastened and lay horizontally with his face towards the earth working the collapsible wings by means of a transverse rod. It was not a success. During the first half of the 19th Century there were many experiments with wing surfaces, none of which gave any promise. In fact it was not until 1865 that any advance was made, when Francis Wenham showed that the lifting power of a plane of great superficial area could be obtained by dividing the large plane into several parts arranged on tiers. This may be regarded as the germ of the modern aeroplane, the first glimmer of hope to filter through the darkness of experimentation until then. When Wenham's apparatus went against a strong wind it was only lifted up and thrown back. However, the idea gave thought to many others years afterwards. In 1885 the brothers Lilienthal in Germany discovered the possibility of driving curved aeroplanes against the wind. Otto Lilienthal held that it was necessary to begin with "sailing" flight and first of all that the art of balancing in the air must be learned by practical experiments. He made several flights of the kind now known as _gliding_. From a height of 100 feet he glided a distance of 700 feet and found he could deflect his flight from left to right by moving his legs which were hanging freely from the seat. He attached a light motor weighing only 96 lbs. and generating 2-1/2 horse power. To sustain the weight he had to increase the size of his planes. Unfortunately this pioneer in modern aviation was killed in an experiment, but he left much data behind which has helped others. His was the first actual flyer which demonstrated the elementary laws governing real flight and blazed the way for the successful experiments of the present time. His example made the gliding machine a continuous performance until real practical aerial flight was achieved. As far back as 1894 Maxim built a giant aeroplane but it was too cumbersome to be operated. In America the wonderful work of Professor Langley of the Smithsonian Institution with his aerodromes attracted worldwide attention. Langley was the great originator of the science of aerodynamics on this side of the water. Langley studied from artificial birds which he had constructed and kept almost constantly before him. To Langley, Chanute, Herring and Manly, America owes much in the way of aeronautics before the Wrights entered the field. The Wrights have given the greatest impetus to modern aviation. They entered the field in 1900 and immediately achieved greater results than any of their predecessors. They followed the idea of Lilienthal to a certain extent. They made gliders in which the aviator had a horizontal position and they used twice as great a lifting surface as that hitherto employed. The flights of their first motor machine was made December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, N.C. In 1904 with a new machine they resumed experiments at their home near Dayton, O. In September of that year they succeeded in changing the course from one dead against the wind to a curved path where cross currents must be encountered, and made many circular flights. During 1906 they rested for a while from practical flight, perfecting plans for the future. In the beginning of September, 1908, Orville Wright made an aeroplane flight of one hour, and a few days later stayed up one hour and fourteen minutes. Wilbur Wright went to France and began a series of remarkable flights taking up passengers. On December 31, of that year, he startled the world by making the record flight of two hours and nineteen minutes. It was on Sept. 13, 1906, that Santos-Dumont made the first officially recorded European aeroplane flight, leaving the ground for a distance of 12 yards. On November 12, of same year, he remained in the air for 21 seconds and traveled a distance of 230 yards. These feats caused a great sensation at the time. While the Wrights were achieving fame for America, Henri Farman was busy in England. On October 26, 1907, he flew 820 yards in 52-1/2 seconds. On July 6, 1908, he remained in the air for 20-1/2 minutes. On October 31, same year, in France, he flew from Chalons to Rheims, a distance of sixteen miles, in twenty minutes. The year 1909 witnessed mighty strides in the field of aviation. Thousands of flights were made, many of which exceeded the most sanguine anticipations. On July 13, Bleriot flew from Etampes to Chevilly, 26 miles, in 44 minutes and 30 seconds, and on July 25 he made the first flight across the British Channel, 32 miles, in 37 minutes. Orville Wright made several sensational flights in his biplane around Berlin, while his brother Wilbur delighted New Yorkers by circling the Statue of Liberty and flying up the Hudson from Governor's Island to Grant's Tomb and return, a distance of 21 miles, in 33 minutes and 33 seconds during the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. On November 20 Louis Paulhan, in a biplane, flew from Mourmelon to Chalons, France, and return, 37 miles in 55 minutes, rising to a height of 1000 feet. The dirigible airship was also much in evidence during 1909, Zeppelin, especially, performing some remarkable feats. The Zeppelin V., subsequently re-numbered No. 1, of the rigid type, 446 feet long, diameter 42-1/2 feet and capacity 536,000 cubic feet, on March 29, rose to a height of 3,280, and on April 1, started with a crew of nine passengers from Frederickshafen to Munich. In a 35 mile gale it was carried beyond Munich, but Zeppelin succeeded in coming to anchor. Other Zeppelin balloons made remarkable voyages during the year. But the latest achievements (1910) of the old German aeronaut have put all previous records into the shade and electrified the whole world. His new passenger airship, the _Deutschland_, on June 22, made a 300 mile trip from Frederickshafen to Dusseldorf in 9 hours, carrying 20 passengers. This was at the rate of 33.33 miles per hour. During one hour of the journey a speed of 43-1/2 miles was averaged. The passengers were carried in a mahogany finished cabin and had all the comforts of a Pullman car, but most significant fact of all, the trip was made on schedule and with all regularity of an express train. Two days later Zeppelin eclipsed his own record air voyage when his vessel carried 32 passengers, ten of whom were women, in a 100 mile trip from Dusseldorf to Essen, Dortmund and Bochum and back. At one time on this occasion while traveling with the wind the airship made a speed of 56-1/2 miles. It passed through a heavy shower and forced its way against a strong headwind without difficulty. The passengers were all delighted with the new mode of travel, which was very comfortable. This last dirigible masterpiece of Zeppelin may be styled the leviathan of the air. It is 485 feet long with a total lifting power of 44,000 lbs. It has three motors which total 330 horse power and it drives at an average speed of about 33 miles an hour. A regular passenger service has been established and tickets are selling at $50. The present year can also boast some great aeroplane records, notably by Curtiss and Hamilton in America and Farman and Paulhan in Europe. Curtiss flew from Albany to New York, a distance of 137 miles, at an average speed of 55 miles an hour and Hamilton flew from New York to Philadelphia and return. The first night flight of a dirigible over New York City was made by Charles Goodale on July 19. He flew from Palisades Park on the Hudson and return. From a scientific toy the Flying Machine has been developed and perfected into a practical means of locomotion. It bids fair at no distant date to revolutionize the transit of the world. No other art has ever made such progress in its early stages and every day witnesses an improvement. The air, though invisible to the eye, has mass and therefore offers resistance to all moving bodies. Therefore air-mass and air resistance are the first principles to be taken into consideration in the construction of an aeroplane. It must be built so that the air-mass will sustain it and the motor, and the motor must be of sufficient power to overcome the air resistance. A ship ploughing through the waves presents the line of least resistance to the water and so is shaped somewhat like a fish, the natural denizen of that element. It is different with the aeroplane. In the intangible domain it essays to overcome, there must be a sufficient surface to compress a certain volume of air to sustain the weight of the machinery. The surfaces in regard to size, shape, curvature, bracing and material, are all important. A great deal depends upon the curve of the surfaces. Two machines may have the same extent of surface and develop the same rate of speed, yet one may have a much greater lifting power than the other, provided it has a more efficient curve to its surface. Many people have a fallacious idea that the surfaces of an aeroplane are planes and this doubt less arises from the word itself. However, the last syllable in _aeroplane_ has nothing whatever to do with a flat surface. It is derived from the Greek _planos_, wandering, therefore the entire word signifies an air wanderer. The surfaces are really aero curves arched in the rear of the front edge, thus allowing the supporting surface of the aeroplane in passing forward with its backward side set at an angle to the direction of its motion, to act upon the air in such a way as to tend to compress it on the under side. After the surfaces come the rudders in importance. It is of vital consequence that the machine be balanced by the operator. In the present method of balancing an aeroplane the idea in mind is to raise the lower side of the machine and make the higher side lower in order that it can be quickly righted when it tips to one side from a gust of wind, or when making angle at a sudden turn. To accomplish this, two methods can be employed. 1. Changing the form of the wing. 2. Using separate surfaces. One side can be made to lift more than the other by giving it a greater curve or extending the extremity. In balancing by means of separate surfaces, which can be turned up or down on each side of the machine, the horizontal balancing rudders are so connected that they will work in an opposite direction--while one is turned to lift one side, the other will act to lower the other side so as to strike an even balance. The motors and propellers next claim attention. It is the motor that makes aviation possible. It was owing in a very large measure to the introduction of the petrol motor that progress became rapid. Hitherto many had laid the blame of everything on the motor. They had said,--"give us a light and powerful engine and we will show you how to fly." The first very light engine to be available was the _Antoinette_, built by Leon Levavasseur in France. It enabled Santos-Dumont to make his first public successful flights. Nearly all aeroplanes follow the same general principles of construction. Of course a good deal depends upon the form of aeroplane--whether a monoplane or a biplane. As these two forms are the chief ones, as yet, of heavier than-air machines, it would be well to understand them. The monoplane has single large surfaces like the wings of a bird, the biplane has two large surfaces braced together one over the other. At the present writing a triplane has been introduced into the domain of American aviation by an English aeronaut. Doubtless as the science progresses many other variations will appear in the field. Most machines, though fashioned on similar lines, possess universal features. For instance, the Wright biplane is characterized by warping wing tips and seams of heavy construction, while the surfaces of the Herring-Curtiss machine, are slight and it looks very light and buoyant as if well suited to its element. The Voisin biplane is fashioned after the manner of a box kite and therefore presents vertical surfaces to the air. Farman's machine has no vertical surfaces, but there are hinged wing tips to the outer rear-edges of its surfaces, for use in turning and balancing. He also has a combination of wheels and skids or runners for starting and landing. The position to be occupied by the operator also influences the construction. Some sit on top of the machine, others underneath. In the _Antoinette_, Latham sits up in a sort of cockpit on the top. Bleriot sits far beneath his machine. In the latest construction of Santos-Dumont, the _Demoiselle_, the aviator sits on the top. Aeroplanes have been constructed for the most part in Europe, especially in France. There may be said to be only one factory in America, that of Herring-Curtiss, at Hammondsport, N.Y., as the Wright place at Dayton is very small and only turns out motors and experimenting machines, and cannot be called a regular factory. The Wright machines are now manufactured by a French syndicate. It is said that the Wrights will have an American factory at work in a short time. The French-made aeroplanes have given good satisfaction. These machines cost from $4,000 to $5,000, and generally have three cylinder motors developing from 25 to 35 horse power. The latest model of Bleriot known as No. 12 has beaten the time record of Glenn Curtiss' biplane with its 60 horse power motor. The Farman machine or the model in which he made the world's duration record in his three hour and sixteen minutes flight at Rheims, is one of the best as well as the cheapest of the French makes. Without the motor it cost but $1,200. It has a surface twenty-five meters square, is eight meters long and seven-and-a-half meters wide, weighs 140 kilos, and has a motor which develops from 25 to 50 horse power. The Wright machines cost $6,000. They have four cylinder motors of 30 horse power, are 12-1/2 meters long, 9 meters wide and have a surface of 30 square meters. They weigh 400 kilos. In this country they cost $7,500 exclusive of the duty on foreign manufacture. The impetus being given to aviation at the present time by the prizes offered is spurring the men-birds to their best efforts. It is prophesied that the aeroplane will yet attain a speed of 300 miles an hour. The quickest travel yet attained by man has been at the rate of 127 miles an hour. That was accomplished by Marriott in a racing automobile at Ormond Beach in 1906, when he went one mile in 28 1-5 seconds. It is doubtful, however, were it possible to achieve a rate of 300 miles an hour, that any human being could resist the air pressure at such a velocity. At any rate there can be no question as to the aeroplane attaining a much greater speed than at present. That it will be useful there can be little doubt. It is no longer a scientific toy in the hands of amateurs, but a practical machine which is bound to contribute much to the progress of the world. Of course, as a mode of transportation it is not in the same class with the dirigible, but it can be made to serve many other purposes. As an agent in time of war it would be more important than fort or warship. The experiments of Curtiss, made a short time ago over Lake Keuka at Hammondsport, N.Y., prove what a mighty factor would have to be reckoned with in the martial aeroplane. Curtiss without any practice at all hit a mimic battle ship fifteen times out of twenty-two shots. His experiment has convinced the military and naval authorities of this country that the aeroplane and the aerial torpedo constitute a new danger against which there is no existing protection. Aerial offensive and defensive strategy is now a problem which demands the attention of nations. CHAPTER II WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY Primitive Signalling--Principles of Wireless Telegraphy--Ether Vibrations--Wireless Apparatus--The Marconi System. At a very early stage in the world's history, man found it necessary to be able to communicate with places at a distance by means of signals. Fire was the first agent employed for the purpose. On hill-tops or other eminences, what were known as beacon fires were kindled and owing to their elevation these could be seen for a considerable distance throughout the surrounding country. These primitive signals could be passed on from one point to another, until a large region could be covered and many people brought into communication with one another. These fires expressed a language of their own, which the observers could readily interpret. For a long time they were the only method used for signalling. Indeed in many backward localities and in some of the outlying islands and among savage tribes the custom still prevails. The bushmen of Australia at night time build fires outside their huts or kraals to attract the attention of their followers. Even in enlightened Ireland the kindling of beacon fires is still observed among the people of backward districts especially on May Eve and the festival of mid-summer. On these occasions bonfires are lit on almost every hillside throughout that country. This custom has been handed down from the days of the Druids. For a long time fires continued to be the mode of signalling, but as this way could only be used in the night, it was found necessary to adopt some method that would answer the purpose in daytime; hence signal towers were erected from which flags were waved and various devices displayed. Flags answered the purposes so very well that they came into general use. In course of time they were adopted by the army, navy and merchant marine and a regular code established, as at the present time. The railroad introduced the semaphore as a signal, and field tactics the heliograph or reflecting mirror which, however, is only of service when there is a strong sunlight. Then came the electric telegraph which not only revolutionized all forms of signalling but almost annihilated distance. Messages and all sorts of communications could be flashed over the wires in a few minutes and when a cable was laid under the ocean, continent could converse with continent as if they were next door neighbors. The men who first enabled us to talk over a wire certainly deserve our gratitude, all succeeding generations are their debtors. To the man who enabled us to talk to long distances without a wire at all it would seem we owe a still greater debt. But who is this man around whose brow we should twine the laurel wreath, to the altar of whose genius we should carry frankincense and myrrh? This is a question which does not admit of an answer, for to no one man alone do we owe wireless telegraphy, though Hertz was the first to discover the waves which make it possible. However, it is to the men whose indefatigable labors and genius made the electric telegraph a reality, that we also owe wireless telegraphy as we have it at present, for the latter may be considered in many respects the resultant of the former, though both are different in medium. Radio or wireless telegraphy in principle is as old as mankind. Adam delivered the first wireless when on awakening in the Garden of Eden he discovered Eve and addressed her in the vernacular of Paradise in that famous sentence which translated in English reads both ways the same,--"Madam, I'm Adam." The oral words issuing from his lips created a sound wave which the medium of the air conveyed to the tympanum of the partner of his joys and the cause of his sorrows. When one person speaks to another the speaker causes certain vibrations in the air and these so stimulate the hearing apparatus that a series of nerve impulses are conveyed to the sensorium where the meaning of these signals is unconsciously interpreted. In wireless telegraphy the sender causes vibrations not in the air but in that all-pervading impalpable substance which fills all space and which we call the ether. These vibrations can reach out to a great distance and are capable of so affecting a receiving apparatus that signals are made, the movements of which can be interpreted into a distinct meaning and consequently into the messages of language. Let us briefly consider the underlying principles at work. When we cast a stone into a pool of water we observe that it produces a series of ripples which grow fainter and fainter the farther they recede from the centre, the initial point of the disturbance, until they fade altogether in the surrounding expanse of water. The succession of these ripples is what is known as _wave_ motion. When the clapper strikes the lip of a bell it produces a sound and sends a tremor out upon the air. The vibrations thus made are air waves. In the first of these cases the medium communicating the ripple or wavelet is the water. In the second case the medium which sustains the tremor and communicates the vibrations is the air. Let us now take the case of a third medium, the substance of which puzzled the philosophers of ancient time and still continues to puzzle the scientists of the present. This is the ether, that attenuated fluid which fills all inter-stellar space and all space in masses and between molecules and atoms not otherwise occupied by gross matter. When a lamp is lit the light radiates from it in all directions in a wave motion. That which transmits the light, the medium, is ether. By this means energy is conveyed from the sun to the earth, and scientists have calculated the speed of the ether vibrations called light at 186,400 miles per second. Thus a beam of light can travel from the sun to the earth, a distance of between 92,000,000 and 95,000,000 miles (according to season), in a little over eight minutes. The fire messages sent by the ancients from hill to hill were ether vibrations. The greater the fires, the greater were the vibrations and consequently they carried farther to the receiver, which was the eye. If a signal is to be sent a great distance by light the source of that light must be correspondingly powerful in order to disturb the ether sufficiently. The same principle holds good in wireless telegraphy. If we wish to communicate to a great distance the ether must be disturbed in proportion to the distance. The vibrations that produce light are not sufficient in intensity to affect the ether in such a way that signals can be carried to a distance. Other disturbances, however, can be made in the ether, stronger than those which create light. If we charge a wire with an electric current and place a magnetic needle near it we find it moves the needle from one position to another. This effect is called an electro-magnetic disturbance in the ether. Again when we charge an insulated body with electricity we find that it attracts any light substance indicating a material disturbance in the ether. This is described as an electro-static disturbance or effect and it is upon this that wireless telegraphy depends for its operations. The late German physicist, Dr. Heinrich Hertz, Ph.D., was the first to detect electrical waves in the ether. He set up the waves in the ether by means of an electrical discharge from an induction coil. To do this he employed a very simple means. He procured a short length of wire with a brass knob at either end and bent around so as to form an almost complete circle leaving only a small air gap between the knobs. Each time there was a spark discharge from the induction coil, the experimenter found that a small electric spark also generated between the knobs of the wire loop, thus showing that electric waves were projected through the ether. This discovery suggested to scientists that such electric waves might be used as a means of transmitting signals to a distance through the medium of the ether without connecting wires. When Hertz discovered that electric waves crossed space he unconsciously became the father of the modern system of radio-telegraphy, and though he did not live to put or see any practical results from his wonderful discovery, to him in a large measure should be accorded the honor of blazoning the way for many of the intellectual giants who came after him. Of course those who went before him, who discovered the principles of the electric telegraph made it possible for the Hertzian waves to be utilized in wireless. It is easy to understand the wonders of wireless telegraphy when we consider that electric waves transverse space in exactly the same manner as light waves. When energy is transmitted with finite velocity we can think of its transference only in two ways: first by the actual transference of matter as when a stone is hurled from one place to another; second, by the propagation of energy from point to point through a medium which fills the space between two bodies. The body sending out energy disturbs the medium contiguous to it, which disturbance is communicated to adjacent parts of the medium and so the movement is propagated outward from the sending body through the medium until some other body is affected. A vibrating body sets up vibrations in another body, as for instance, when one tuning fork responds to the vibrations of another when both have the same note or are in tune. The transmission of messages by wireless telegraphy is effected in a similar way. The apparatus at the sending station sends out waves of a certain period through the ether and these waves are detected at the receiving station, by apparatus attuned to this wave length or period. The term electric radiation was first employed by Hertz to designate waves emitted by a Leyden jar or oscillator system of an induction coil, but since that time these radiations have been known as Hertzian waves. These waves are the underlying principles in wireless telegraphy. It was found that certain metal filings offered great resistance to the passage of an electric current through them but that this resistance was very materially reduced when electric waves fell upon the filings and remained so until the filings were shaken, thus giving time for the fact to be observed in an ordinary telegraphic instrument. The tube of filings through which the electric current is made to pass in wireless telegraphy is called a coherer signifying that the filings cohere or cling together under the influence of the electric waves. Almost any metal will do for the filings but it is found that a combination of ninety per cent. nickel and ten per cent. silver answers the purpose best. The tube of the coherer is generally of glass but any insulating substance will do; a wire enters at each end and is attached to little blocks of metal which are separated by a very small space. It is into this space the filings are loosely filled. Another form of coherer consists of a glass tube with small carbon blocks or plugs attached to the ends of the wires and instead of the metal filings there is a globule of mercury between the plugs. When electric waves fall upon this coherer, the mercury coheres to the carbon blocks, and thus forms a bridge for the battery current. Marconi and several others have from time to time invented many other kinds of detectors for the electrical waves. Nearly all have to serve the same purpose, viz., to close a local battery circuit when the electric waves fall upon the detector. There are other inventions on which the action is the reverse. These are called anti-coherers. One of the best known of these is a tube arranged in a somewhat similar manner to the filings tube but with two small blocks of tin, between which is placed a paste made up of alcohol, tin filings and lead oxide. In its normal state the paste allows the battery current to get across from one block to another, but when electric waves touch it a chemical action is produced which immediately breaks down the bridge and stops the electric waves, the paste resumes its normal condition and allows the battery current to pass again. Therefore by this arrangement the signals are made by a sudden breaking and making of the battery circuit. Then there is the magnetic detector. This is not so easy of explanation. When we take a piece of soft iron and continuously revolve it in front of a permanent magnet, the magnetic poles of the soft iron piece will keep changing their position at each half revolution. It requires a little time to effect this magnetic change which makes it appear as if a certain amount of resistance was being made against it. (If electric waves are allowed to fall upon the iron, resistance is completely eliminated, and the magnetic poles can change places instantly as it revolves.) From this we see that if we have a quickly changing magnetic field it will induce or set up an electric current in a neighboring coil of wire. In this way we can detect the changes in the magnetic field, for we can place a telephone receiver in connection with the coil of wire. In a modern wireless receiver of this kind it is found more convenient to replace the revolving iron piece by an endless band of soft iron wire. This band is kept passing in front of a permanent magnet, the magnetism of the wire tending to change as it passes from one pole to the other. This change takes place suddenly when the electric waves form the transmitting station, fall upon the receiving aerial conductor and are conducted round the moving wire, and as the band is passing through a coil of insulated wire attached to a telephone receiver, this sudden change in the magnetic field induces an electric current in the surrounding coil and the operator hears a sound in the telephone at his ear. The Morse code may thus be signalled from the distant transmitter. There are various systems of wireless telegraphy for the most part called after the scientists who developed or perfected them. Probably the foremost as well as the best known is that which bears the name of Marconi. A popular fallacy makes Marconi the discoverer of the wireless method. Marconi was the first to put the system on a commercial footing or business basis and to lead the way for its coming to the front as a mighty factor in modern progress. Of course, also, the honor of several useful inventions and additions to wireless apparatus must be given him. He started experimenting as far back as 1895 when but a mere boy. In the beginning he employed the induction coil, Morse telegraph key, batteries, and vertical wire for the transmission of signals, and for their reception the usual filings coherer of nickel with a very small percentage of silver, a telegraph relay, batteries and a vertical wire. In the Marconi system of the present time there are many forms of coherers, also the magnetic detector and other variations of the original apparatus. Other systems more or less prominent are the Lodge-Muirhead of England, Braun-Siemens of Germany and those of DeForest and Fessenden of America. The electrolytic detector with the paste between the tin blocks belongs to the system of DeForest. Besides these the names of Popoff, Jackson, Armstrong, Orling, Lepel, and Poulsen stand high in the wireless world. A serious drawback to the operations of wireless lies in the fact that the stations are liable to get mixed up and some one intercept the messages intended for another, but this is being overcome by the adoption of a special system of wave lengths for the different wireless stations and by the use of improved apparatus. In the early days it was quite a common occurrence for the receivers of one system to reply to the transmitters of a rival system. There was an all-round mix-up and consequently the efficiency of wireless for practical purposes was for a good while looked upon with more or less suspicion. But as knowledge of wave motions developed and the laws of governing them were better understood, the receiver was "tuned" to respond to the transmitter, that is, the transmitter was made to set up a definite rate of vibrations in the ether and the receiver made to respond to this rate, just like two tuning forks sounding the same note. In order to set up as energetic electric waves as possible many methods have been devised at the transmitting stations. In some methods a wire is attached to one of the two metal spheres between which the electric charge takes place and is carried up into the air for a great height, while to the second sphere another wire is connected and which leads into the earth. Another method is to support a regular network of wires from strong steel towers built to a height of two hundred feet or more. Long distance transmission by wireless was only made possible by grounding one of the conductors in the transmitter. The Hertzian waves were provided without any earth connection and radiated into space in all directions, rapidly losing force like the disappearing ripples on a pond, whereas those set up by a grounded transmitter with the receiving instrument similarly connected to earth, keep within the immediate neighborhood of the earth. For instance up to about two hundred miles a storage battery and induction coil are sufficient to produce the necessary ether disturbance, but when a greater distance is to be spanned an engine and a dynamo are necessary to supply energy for the electric waves. In the most recent Marconi transmitter the current produced is no longer in the form of intermittent sparks, but is a true alternating current, which in general continues uniformly as long as the key is pressed down. There is no longer any question that wireless telegraphy is here to stay. It has passed the juvenile stage and is fast approaching a lusty adolescence which promises to be a source of great strength to the commerce of the world. Already it has accomplished much for its age. It has saved so many lives at sea that its installation is no longer regarded as a scientific luxury but a practical necessity on every passenger vessel. Practically every steamer in American waters is equipped with a wireless station. Even freight boats and tugs are up-to-date in this respect. Every ship in the American navy, including colliers and revenue cutters, carries wireless operators. So important indeed is it considered in the Navy department that a line of shore stations have been constructed from Maine on the Atlantic to Alaska on the Pacific. In a remarkably short interval wireless has come to exercise an important function in the marine service. Through the shore stations of the commercial companies, press despatches, storm warnings, weather reports and other items of interest are regularly transmitted to ships at sea. Captains keep in touch with one another and with the home office; wrecks, derelicts and storms are reported. Every operator sends out regular reports daily, so that the home office can tell the exact position of the vessel. If she is too far from land on the one side to be reached by wireless she is near enough on the other to come within the sphere of its operations. Weather has no effect on wireless, therefore the question of meteorology does not come into consideration. Fogs, rains, torrents, tempests, snowstorms, winds, thunder, lightning or any aerial disturbance whatsoever cannot militate against the sending or receiving of wireless messages as the ether permeates them all. Submarine and land telegraphy used to look on wireless, the youngest sister, as the Cinderella of their name, but she has surpassed both and captured the honors of the family. It was in 1898 that Marconi made his first remarkable success in sending messages from England to France. The English station was at South Foreland and the French near Boulogne. The distance was thirty-two miles across the British channel. This telegraphic communication without wires was considered a wonderful feat at the time and excited much interest. During the following year Marconi had so much improved his first apparatus that he was able to send out waves detected by receivers up to the one hundred mile limit. In 1900 communication was established between the Isle of Wight and the Lizard in Cornwall, a distance of two hundred miles. Up to this time the only appliances employed were induction coils giving a ten or twenty inch spark. Marconi and others perceived the necessity of employing greater force to penetrate the ether in order to generate stronger electrical waves. Oil and steam engines and other appliances were called into use to create high frequency currents and those necessitated the erection of large power stations. Several were erected at advantageous points and the wireless system was fairly established as a new agent of communication. In December, 1901, at St. John's, Newfoundland, Marconi by means of kites and balloons set up a temporary aerial wire in the hope of being able to receive a signal from the English station in Cornwall. He had made an arrangement with Poldhu station that on a certain date and at a fixed hour they should attempt the signal. The letter S, which in the Morse code consists of three successive dots, was chosen. Marconi feverishly awaited results. True enough on the day and at the time agreed upon the three dots were clicked off, the first signal from Europe to the American continent. Marconi with much difficulty set up other aerial wires and indubitably established the fact that it was possible to send electric waves across the Atlantic. He found, however, that waves in order to traverse three thousand miles and retain sufficient energy on their arrival to affect a telephonic wave-detecting device must be generated by no inordinate power. These experiments proved that if stations were erected of sufficient power transatlantic wireless could be successfully carried on. They gave an impetus to the erection of such stations. On December 21, 1902, from a station at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Marconi sent the first message by wireless to England announcing success to his colleagues. The following January from Wellsfleet, Cape Cod, President Roosevelt sent a congratulatory message to King Edward. The electric waves conveying this message traveled 3,000 miles over the Atlantic following round an arc of forty-five degrees of the earth on a great circle, and were received telephonically, by the Marconi magnetic receiver at Poldhu. Most ships are provided with syntonic receivers which are tuned to long distance transmitters, and are capable of receiving messages up to distances of 3,000 miles or more. Wireless communication between Europe and America is no longer a possibility but an accomplishment, though as yet the system has not been put on a general business basis. [Footnote: As we go to press a new record has been established in wireless transmission. Marconi, in the Argentine Republic, near Buenos Ayres, has received messages from the station at Clifden, County Galway, Ireland, a distance of 5,600 miles. The best previous record was made when the United States battleship _Tennessee_ in 1909 picked up a message from San Francisco when 4,580 miles distant.] CHAPTER III RADIUM Experiments of Becquerel--Work of the Curies--Discovery of Radium--Enormous Energy--Various Uses. Early in 1896 just a few months after Roentgen had startled the scientific world by the announcement of the discovery of the X-rays, Professor Henri Becquerel of the Natural History Museum in Paris announced another discovery which, if not as mysterious, was more puzzling and still continues a puzzle to a great degree to the present time. Studying the action of the salts of a rare and very heavy mineral called uranium Becquerel observed that their substances give off an invisible radiation which, like the Roentgen rays, traverse metals and other bodies opaque to light, as well as glass and other transparent substances. Like most of the great discoveries it was the result of accident. Becquerel had no idea of such radiations, had never thought of their possibility. In the early days of the Roentgen rays there were many facts which suggested that phosphorescence had something to do with the production of these rays It then occurred to several French physicists that X-rays might be produced if phosphorescent substances were exposed to sunlight. Becquerel began to experiment with a view to testing this supposition. He placed uranium on a photographic plate which had first been wrapped in black paper in order to screen it from the light. After this plate had remained in the bright sunlight for several hours it was removed from the paper covering and developed. A slight trace of photographic action was found at those parts of the plate directly beneath the uranium just as Becquerel had expected. From this it appeared evident that rays of some kind were being produced that were capable of passing through black paper. Since the X-rays were then the only ones known to possess the power to penetrate opaque substances it seemed as though the problem of producing X-rays by sunlight was solved. Then came the fortunate accident. After several plates had been prepared for exposure to sunlight a severe storm arose and the experiments had to be abandoned for the time being. At the end of several days work was again resumed, but the plates had been lying so long in the darkroom that they were deemed almost valueless and it was thought that there would not be much use in trying to use them. Becquerel was about to throw them away, but on second consideration thinking that some action might have possibly taken place in the dark, he resolved to try them. He developed them and the result was that he obtained better pictures than ever before. The exposure to sunlight which had been regarded as essential to the success of the former experiments had really nothing at all to do with the matter, the essential thing was the presence of uranium and the photographic effects were not due to X-rays but to the rays or emanations which Becquerel had thus discovered and which bear his name. There were many tedious and difficult steps to take before even our present knowledge, incomplete as it is, could be reached. However, Becquerel's fortunate accident of the plate developing was the beginning of the long series of experiments which led to the discovery of radium which already has revolutionized some of the most fundamental conceptions of physics and chemistry. It is remarkable that we owe the discovery of this wonderful element to a woman, Mme. Sklodowska Curie, the wife of a French professor and physicist. Mme. Curie began her work in 1897 with a systematic study of several minerals containing uranium and thorium and soon discovered the remarkable fact that there was some agent present more strongly radio-active than the metal uranium itself. She set herself the task of finding out this agent and in conjunction with her husband, Professor Pierre Curie, made many tests and experiments. Finally in the ore of pitchblende they found not only one but three substances highly radio-active. Pitchblende or uraninite is an intensely black mineral of a specific gravity of 9.5 and is found in commercial quantities in Bohemia, Cornwall in England and some other localities. It contains lead sulphide, lime silica, and other bodies. To the radio-active substance which accompanied the bismuth extracted from pitchblende the Curies gave the name _Polonium_. To that which accompanied barium taken from the same ore they called _Radium_ and to the substance which was found among the rare earths of the pitchblende Debierne gave the name _Actinium_. None of these elements have been isolated, that is to say, separated in a pure state from the accompanying ore. Therefore, _pure radium_ is a misnomer, though we often hear the term used. [Footnote: Since the above was written Madame Curie has announced to the Paris Academy of Sciences that she has succeeded in obtaining pure radium. In conjunction with Professor Debierne she treated a decegramme of bromide of radium by electrolytic process, getting an amalgam from which was extracted the metallic radium by distillation.] All that has been obtained is some one of its simpler salts or compounds and until recently even these had not been prepared in pure form. The commonest form of the element, which in itself is very far from common, is what is known to chemistry as chloride of radium which is a combination of chlorin and radium. This is a grayish white powder, somewhat like ordinary coarse table salt. To get enough to weigh a single grain requires the treatment of 1,200 pounds of pitchblende. The second form of radium is as a bromide. In this form it costs $5,000 a grain and could a pound be obtained its value would be three-and-a-half million dollars. Radium, as we understand it in any of its compounds, can communicate its property of radio-activity to other bodies. Any material when placed near radium becomes radio-active and retains such activity for a considerable time after being removed. Even the human body takes on this excited activity and this sometimes leads to annoyances as in delicate experiments the results may be nullified by the element acting upon the experimenter's person. Despite the enormous amount of energy given off by radium it seems not to change in itself, there is no appreciable loss in weight nor apparently any microscopic or chemical change in the original body. Professor Becquerel has stated that if a square centimeter of surface was covered by chemically pure radium it would lose but one thousandth of a milligram in weight in a million years' time. Radium is a body which gives out energy continuously and spontaneously. This liberation of energy is manifested in the different effects of its radiation and emanation, and especially in the development of heat. Now, according to the most fundamental principles of modern science, the universe contains a certain definite provision of energy which can appear under various forms, but which cannot be increased. According to Sir Oliver Lodge every cubic millimeter of ether contains as much energy as would be developed by a million horse power station working continuously far forty thousand years. This assertion is probably based on the fact that every corpuscle in the ether vibrates with the speed of light or about 186,000 miles a second. It was formerly believed that the atom was the smallest sub-division in nature. Scientists held to the atomic theory for a long time, but at last it has been exploded, and instead of the atom being primary and indivisible we find it a very complex affair, a kind of miniature solar system, the centre of a varied attraction of molecules, corpuscles and electrons. Had we held to the atomic theory and denied smaller sub-divisions of matter there would be no accounting for the emissions of radium, for as science now believes these emissions are merely the expulsion of millions of electrons. Radium gives off three distinct types of rays named after the first three letters of the Greek alphabet--Alpha, Beta, Gamma--besides a gas emanation as does thorium which is a powerfully radio-active substance. The Alpha rays constitute ninety-nine per cent, of all the rays and consist of positively electrified particles. Under the influence of magnetism they can be deflected. They have little penetrative power and are readily absorbed in passing through a sheet of paper or through a few inches of air. The Beta rays consist of negatively charged particles or corpuscles approximately one thousandth the size of those constituting the Alpha rays. They resemble cathode rays produced by an electrical discharge inside of a highly exhausted vacuum tube but work at a much higher velocity; they can be readily deflected by a magnet, they discharge electrified bodies, affect photographic plates, stimulate strongly phosphorescent bodies and are of high penetrative power. The radiations are a million times more powerful than those of uranium. They have many curious properties. If a photographic plate is placed in the vicinity of radium it is almost instantly affected if no screen intercepts the rays; with a screen the action is slower, but it still takes place even through thick folds, therefore, radiographs can be taken and in this way it is being utilized by surgery to view the anatomy, the internal organs, and locate bullets and other foreign substances in the system. A glass vessel containing radium spontaneously charges itself with electricity. If the glass has a weak spot, a scratch say, an electric spark is produced at that point and the vessel crumbles, just like a Leyden jar when overcharged. Radium liberates heat spontaneously and continuously. A solid salt of radium develops such an amount of heat that to every single gram there is an emission of one hundred calories per hour, in other words, radium can melt its weight in ice in the time of one hour. As a result of its emission of heat radium has always a temperature higher by several degrees than its surroundings. When a solution of a radium salt is placed in a closed vessel the radio-activity in part leaves the solution and distributes itself through the vessel, the sides of which become radio-active and luminous. Radium acts upon the chemical constituents of glass, porcelain and paper, giving them a violet tinge, changes white phosphorous into yellow, oxygen into ozone and produces many other curious chemical changes. We have said that it can serve the surgeon in physical examinations of the body after the manner of X-rays. It has not, however, been much employed in this direction owing to its scarcity and prohibitive price. It has given excellent results in the treatment of certain skin diseases, in cancer, etc. However it can have very baneful effects on animal organisms. It has produced paralysis and death in dogs, cats, rabbits, rats, guinea-pigs and other animals, and undoubtedly it might affect human beings in a similar way. Professor Curie said that a single gram of chemically pure radium would be sufficient to destroy the life of every man, woman and child in Paris providing they were separately and properly exposed to its influence. Radium destroys the germinative power of seeds and retards the growth of certain forms of life, such as larvae, so that they do not pass into the chrysalis and insect stages of development, but remain in the state of larvae. At a certain distance it causes the hair of mice to fall out, but on the contrary at the same distance it increases the hair or fur on rabbits. It often produces severe burns on the hands and other portions of the body too long exposed to its activity. It can penetrate through gases, liquids and all ordinary solids, even through many inches of the hardest steel. On a comparatively short exposure it has been known to partially paralyze an electric charged bar. Heat nor cold do not affect its radioactivity in the least. It gives off but little light, its luminosity being largely due to the stimulation of the impurities in the radium by the powerful but invisible radium rays. Radium stimulates powerfully various mineral and chemical substances near which it is placed. It is an infallible test of the genuineness of the diamond. The genuine diamond phosphoresces strongly when brought into juxtaposition, but the paste or imitation one glows not at all. It is seen that the study of the properties of radium is of great interest. This is true also of the two other elements found in the ores of uranium and thorium, viz., polonium and actinium. Polonium, so-called, in honor of the native land of Mme. Curie, is just as active as radium when first extracted from the pitchblende but its energy soon lessens and finally it becomes inert, hence there has been little experimenting or investigation. The same may be said of actinium. The process of obtaining radium from pitchblende is most tedious and laborious and requires much patience. The residue of the pitchblende from which uranium has been extracted by fusion with sodium carbonate and solution in dilute sulphuric acid, contains the radium along with other metals, and is boiled with concentrated sodium carbonate solution, and the solution of the residue in hydrochloric acid precipitated with sulphuric acid. The insoluble barium and radium sulphates, after being converted into chlorides or bromides, are separated by repeated fractional crystallization. One kilogram of impure radium bromide is obtained from a ton of pitchblende residue after processes continued for about three months during which time, five tons of chemicals and fifty tons of rinsing water are used. As has been said the element has never been isolated or separated in its metallic or pure state and most of the compounds are impure. Radium banks have been established in London, Paris and New York. Whenever radium is employed in surgery for an operation about fifty milligrams are required at least and the banks let out the amount for about $200 a day. If purchased the price for this amount would be $4,000. CHAPTER IV MOVING PICTURES Photographing Motion--Edison's Kinetoscope--Lumiere's Cinematographe--Before the Camera--The Mission of the Moving Picture. Few can realize the extent of the field covered by moving pictures. In the dual capacity of entertainment and instruction there is not a rival in sight. As an instructor, science is daily widening the sphere of the motion picture for the purpose of illustration. Films are rapidly superseding text books in many branches. Every department capable of photographic demonstration is being covered by moving pictures. Negatives are now being made of the most intricate surgical operations and these are teaching the students better than the witnessing of the real operations, for at the critical moment of the operation the picture machine can be stopped to let the student view over again the way it is accomplished, whereas at the operating table the surgeon must go on with his work to try to save life and cannot explain every step in the process of the operation. There is no doubt that the moving picture machine will perform a very important part in the future teaching of surgery. In the naturalist's domain of science it is already playing a very important part. A device for micro-photography has now been perfected in connection with motion machines whereby things are magnified to a great degree. By this means the analysis of a substance can be better illustrated than any way else. For instance a drop of water looks like a veritable Zoo with terrible looking creatures wiggling and wriggling through it, and makes one feel as if he never wanted to drink water again. The moving picture in its general phase is entertainment and instruction rolled into one and as such it has superseded the theatre. It is estimated that at the present time in America there are upwards of 20,000 moving picture shows patronized daily by almost ten million people. It is doubtful if the theatre attendance at the best day of the winter season reaches five millions. The moving picture in importance is far beyond the puny functions of comedy and tragedy. The grotesque farce of vaudeville and the tawdry show which only appeals to sentiment at highest and often to the base passions at lowest. Despite prurient opposition it is making rapid headway. It is entering very largely into the instructive and the entertaining departments of the world's curriculum. Millions of dollars are annually expended in the production of films. Companies of trained and practiced actors are brought together to enact pantomimes which will concentrate within the space of a few minutes the most entertaining and instructive incidents of history and the leading happenings of the world. At all great events, no matter where transpiring, the different moving picture companies have trained men at the front ready with their cameras to "catch" every incident, every movement even to the wink of an eyelash, so that the "stay-at-homes" can see the _show_ as well, and with a great deal more comfort than if they had traveled hundreds, or even thousands, of miles to be present in _propria persona_. How did moving pictures originate? What and when were the beginning? It is popularly believed that animated pictures had their inception with Edison who projected the biograph in 1887, having based it on that wonderful and ingenious toy, the Zoetrope. Long before 1887, however, several men of inventive faculties had turned their attention to a means of giving apparent animation to pictures. The first that met with any degree of success was Edward Muybridge, a photographer of San Francisco. This was in 1878. A revolution had been brought about in photography by the introduction of the instantaneous process. By the use of sensitive films of gelatine bromide of silver emulsion the time required for the action of ordinary daylight in producing a photograph had been reduced to a very small fraction of a second. Muybridge utilized these films for the photographic analysis of animal motion. Beside a race-track he placed a battery of cameras, each camera being provided with a spring shutter which was controlled by a thread stretched across the track. A running horse broke each thread the moment he passed in front of the camera and thus twenty or thirty pictures of him were taken in close succession within one or two seconds of time. From the negatives secured in this way a series of positives were obtained in proper order on a strip of sensitized paper. The strip when examined by means of the Zoetrope furnished a reproduction of the horse's movements. The Zoetrope was a toy familiar to children; it was sometimes called the wheel of life. It was a contrivance consisting of a cylinder some ten inches wide, open at the top, around the lower and interior rim of which a series of related pictures were placed. The cylinder was then rapidly rotated and the spectator looking through the vertical narrow slits on its outer surface, could fancy that the pictures inside were moving. Muybridge devised an instrument which he called a Zoopraxiscope for the optical projection of his zoetrope photographs. The succession of positives was arranged in proper order upon a glass disk about 18 inches in diameter near its circumference. This disk was mounted conveniently for rapid revolution so that each picture would pass in front of the condenser of an optical lantern. The difficulties involved in the preparation of the disk pictures and in the manipulation of the zoopraxiscope prevented the instrument from attracting much attention. However, artistically speaking, it was the forerunner of the numerous "graphs" and "scopes" and moving picture machines of the present day. It was in 1887 that Edison conceived an idea of associating with his phonograph, which had then achieved a marked success, an instrument which would reproduce to the eye the effect of motion by means of a swift and graded succession of pictures, so that the reproduction of articulate sounds as in the phonograph, would be accompanied by the reproduction of the motion naturally associated with them. The principle of the instrument was suggested to Edison by the zoetrope, and of course, he well knew what Muybridge had accomplished in the line of motion pictures of animals almost ten years previously. Edison, however, did not employ a battery of cameras as Muybridge had done, but devised a special form of camera in which a long strip of sensitized film was moved rapidly behind a lens provided with a shutter, and so arranged as to alternately admit and cut off the light from the moving object. He adjusted the mechanism so that there were 46 exposures a second, the film remaining stationary during the momentary time of exposure, after which it was carried forward far enough to bring a new surface into the proper position. The time of the shifting was about one-tenth of that allowed for exposure, so that the actual time of exposure was about the one-fiftieth of a second. The film moved, reckoning shiftings and stoppages for exposures, at an average speed of a little more than a foot per second, so that a length of film of about fifty feet received between 700 and 800 impressions in a circuit of 40 seconds. Edison named his first instrument the kinetoscope. It came out in 1893. It was hailed with delight at the time and for a short period was much in demand, but soon new devices came into the field and the kinetoscope was superseded by other machines bearing similar names with a like signification. A variety of cameras was invented. One consisted of a film-feeding mechanism which moves the film step by step in the focus of a single lens, the duration of exposure being from twenty to twenty-five times as great as that necessary to move an unexposed portion of the film into position. No shutter was employed. As time passed many other improvements were made. An ingenious Frenchman named Lumiere, came forward with his Cinematographe which for a few years gave good satisfaction, producing very creditable results. Success, however, was due more to the picture ribbons than to the mechanism employed to feed them. Of other moving pictures machines we have had the vitascope, vitagraph, magniscope, mutoscope, panoramagraph, theatograph and scores of others all derived from the two Greek roots _grapho_ I write and _scopeo_ I view. The vitascope is the principal name now in use for moving picture machines. In all these instruments in order that the film projection may be visible to an audience it is necessary to have a very intense light. A source of such light is found in the electric focusing lamp. At or near the focal point of the projecting lantern condenser the film is made to travel across the field as in the kinetoscope. A water cell in front of the condenser absorbs most of the heat and transmits most of the light from the arc lamp, and the small picture thus highly illuminated is protected from injury. A projecting lens of rather short focus throws a large image of each picture on the screen, and the rapid succession of these completes the illusion of life-like motion. Hundreds of patents have been made on cameras, projecting lenses and machines from the days of the kinetoscope to the present time when clear-cut moving pictures portray life so closely and so well as almost to deceive the eye. In fact in many cases the counterfeit is taken for the reality and audiences as much aroused as if they were looking upon a scene of actual life. We can well believe the story of the Irishman, who on seeing the stage villain abduct the young lady, made a rush at the canvas yelling out,--"Let me at the blackguard and I'll murder him." Though but fifteen years old the moving picture industry has sent out its branches into all civilized lands and is giving employment to an army of thousands. It would be hard to tell how many mimic actors and actresses make a living by posing for the camera; their name is legion. Among them are many professionals who receive as good a salary as on the stage. Some of the large concerns both in Europe and America at times employ from one hundred to two hundred hands and even more to illustrate some of the productions. They send their photographers and actors all over the world for settings. Most of the business, however, is done near home. With trapping and other paraphernalia a stage setting can be effected to simulate almost any scene. Almost anything under the sun can be enacted in a moving picture studio, from the drowning of a cat to the hanging of a man; a horse race or fire alarm is not outside the possible and the aviator has been depicted "flying" high in the heavens. The places where the pictures are prepared must be adapted for the purpose. They are called studios and have glass roofs and in most of them a good section of the walls are also glass. The floor space is divided into sections for the setting or staging of different productions, therefore several representations can take place at the same time before the eyes of the cameras. There are "properties" of all kinds from the ragged garments of the beggar to kingly ermine and queenly silks. Paste diamonds sparkle in necklaces, crowns and tiaras, seeming to rival the scintillations of the Kohinoor. At the first, objections were made to moving pictures on the ground that in many cases they had a tendency to cater to the lower instincts, that subjects were illustrated which were repugnant to the finer feelings and appealed to the gross and the sensual. Burglaries, murders and wild western scenes in which the villain-heroes triumphed were often shown and no doubt these had somewhat of a pernicious influence on susceptible youth. But all such pictures have for the most part been eliminated and there is a strict taboo on anything with a degrading influence or partaking of the brutal. Prize fights are often barred. In many large cities there is a board of censorship to which the different manufacturing firms must submit duplicates. This board has to pass on all the films before they are released and if the pictures are in any way contrary to morals or decency or are in any respect unfit to be displayed before the public, they cannot be put in circulation. Thus are the people protected and especially the youth who should be permitted to see nothing that is not elevating or not of a nature to inspire them with high and noble thoughts and with ambitions to make the world better and brighter. Let us hope that the future mission of the moving picture will be along educational and moral lines tending to uplift and ennoble our boys and girls so that they may develop into a manhood and womanhood worthy the history and best traditions of our country. * * * * * * The Wizard of Menlo Park has just succeeded after two years of hard application to the experiment in giving us the talking picture, a real genuine talking picture, wholly independent of the old device of having the actors talk behind the screen when the films were projected. By a combination of the phonograph and the moving picture machine working in perfect synchronism the result is obtained. Wires are attached to the mechanism of both the machines, the one behind the screen and the one in front, in such a way that the two are operated simultaneously so that when a film is projected a corresponding record on the phonograph acts in perfect unison supplying the voice suitable to the moving action. Men and women pass along the canvas, act, talk, laugh, cry and "have their being" just as in real life. Of course, they are immaterial, merely the reflection of films, but the one hundred thousandth of an inch thick, yet they give forth oral sounds as creatures of flesh and blood. In fact every sound is produced harmoniously with the action on the screen. An iron ball is dropped and you hear its thud upon the floor, a plate is cracked and you can hear the cracking just the same as if the material plate were broken in your presence. An immaterial piano appears upon the screen and a fleshless performer discourses airs as real as those heard on Broadway. Melba and Tettrazini and Caruso and Bonci appear before you and warble their nightingale notes, as if behind the footlights with a galaxy of beauty, wealth and fashion before them for an audience. True it is not even their astral bodies you are looking at, only their pictured representations, but the magic of their voices is there all the same and there is such an atmosphere of realism about the representations that you can scarcely believe the actors are not present in _propriae personae_. Mr. Edison had much study and labor of experiment in bringing his device to a successful issue. The greatest obstacle he had to overcome was in getting a phonograph that could "hear" far enough. At the beginning of the experiments the actor had to talk directly into the horn, which made the right kind of pictures impossible to get. Bit by bit, however, a machine was perfected which could "hear" so well that the actor could move at his pleasure within a radius of twenty feet. That is the machine that is being used now. This new combination of the moving picture machine and the phonograph Edison has named the _kinetophone_. By it he has made possible the bringing of grand opera into the hamlets of the West, and through it also our leading statesmen may address audiences on the mining camps and the wilds of the prairies where their feet have never trodden. CHAPTER V SKY-SCRAPERS AND HOW THEY ARE BUILT Evolution of the Sky-scraper--Construction--New York's Giant Buildings--Dimensions. The sky-scraper is an architectural triumph, but at the same time it is very much of a commercial enterprise, and it is indigenous, native-born to American soil. It had its inception here, particularly in New York and Chicago. The tallest buildings in the world are in New York. The most notable of these, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building with fifty stories towering up to a height of seven hundred feet and three inches, has been the crowning achievement of architectural art, the highest building yet erected by man. How is it possible to erect such building--how is it possible to erect a sky-scraper at all? A partial answer may be given in one word--_steel_. Generally speaking the method of building all these huge structures is much the same. Massive piers or pillars are erected, inside which are usually strong steel columns; crosswise from column to column great girders are placed forming a base for the floor, and then upon the first pillars are raised other steel columns slightly decreased in size, upon which girders are again fixed for the next floor; and so on this process is continued floor after floor. There seems no reason why buildings should not be reared like this for even a hundred stories, provided the foundations are laid deep enough and broad enough. The walls are not really the support of the buildings. The essential elements are the columns and girders of steel forming the skeleton framework of the whole. The masonry may assist, but the piers and girders carry the principal weight. If, therefore, everything depends upon these piers, which are often of steel and masonry combined, the immense importance will be seen of basing them upon adequate foundations. And thus it comes about that to build high we must dig deep, which fact may be construed as an aphorism to fit more subjects than the building of sky-scrapers. To attempt to build a sky-scraper without a suitable foundation would be tantamount to endeavoring to build a house on a marsh without draining the marsh,--it would count failure at the very beginning. The formation depends on the height, the calculated weight the frame work will carry, the amount of air pressure, the vibrations from the running of internal machines and several other details of less importance than those mentioned, but of deep consequence in the aggregate. Instead of being carried on thick walls spread over a considerable area of ground, the sky-scrapers are carried wholly on steel columns. This concentrates many hundred tons of load and develops pressure which would crush the masonry and cause the structures to penetrate soft earth almost as a stone sinks in water. In the first place the weight of the proposed building and contents is estimated, then the character of the soil determined to a depth of one hundred feet if necessary. In New York the soil is treacherous and difficult, there are underground rivers in places and large deposits of sand so that to get down to rock bottom or pan is often a very hard undertaking. Generally speaking the excavations are made to about a depth of thirty feet. A layer of concrete a foot or two thick is spread over the bottom of the pit and on it are bedded rows of steel beams set close together. Across the middle of these beams deep steel girders are placed on which the columns are erected. The heavy weight is thus spread out by the beams, girders and concrete so as to cause a reduced uniform pressure on the soil. Cement is filled in between the beams and girders and packed around them to seal them thoroughly against moisture; then clean earth or sand is rammed in up to the column bases and covered with the concrete of the cellar floor. In some cases the foundation loads are so numerous that nothing short of masonry piers on solid rock will safely sustain them. To accomplish this very strong airtight steel or wooden boxes with flat tops and no bottoms are set on the pier sites at ground water level and pumped full of compressed air while men enter them and excavating the soil, undermine them, so they sink, until they land on the rock and are filled solid with concrete to form the bases of the foundation piers. On the average the formation should have a resisting power of two tons to the square foot, dead load. By dead load is meant the weight of the steelwork, floors and walls, as distinguished from the office furniture and occupants which come under the head of living load. Some engineers take into consideration the pressure of both dead and live loads gauging the strength of the foundation, but the dead load pressure of 2 tons to the square foot will do for the reckoning, for as a live load only exerts a pressure of 60 lbs. to the square foot it may be included in the former. The columns carry the entire weights including dead and live loads and the wind pressure, into the footings, these again distributing the loads on the soil. The aim is to have an equal pressure per square foot of soil at the same time, for all footings, thus insuring an even settlement. The skeleton construction now almost wholly consists of wrought steel. At first cast-iron and wrought-iron were used but it was found they corroded too quickly. There are two classes of steel construction, the cage and the skeleton. In the cage construction the frame is strengthened for wind stresses and the walls act as curtains. In the skeleton, the frame carries only the vertical loads and depends upon the walls for its wind bracing. It has been found that the wind pressure is about 30 lbs. for every square foot of exposed surface. The steel columns reach from the foundation to the top, riveted together by plates and may be extended to an indefinite height. In fact there is no engineering limit to the height. The outside walls of the sky-scraper vary in thickness with the height of the building and also vary in accordance with the particular kind of construction, whether cage or skeleton. If of the cage variety, the walls, as has been said, act as curtains and consequently they are thinner than in the skeleton type of construction. In the latter case the walls have to resist the wind pressure unsupported by the steel frame and therefore they must be of a sufficient width. Brick and terra-cotta blocks are used for construction generally. Terra-cotta blocks are also much used in the flooring, and for this purpose have several advantages over other materials; they are absolutely fire-proof, they weigh less per cubic foot than any other kind of fire-proof flooring and they are almost sound-proof. They do equally well for flat and arched floors. It is of the utmost importance that the sky-scraper be absolutely fire-proof from bottom to top. These great buzzing hives of industry house at one time several thousand human beings and a panic would entail a fearful calamity, and, moreover, their height places the upper stories beyond reach of a water-tower and the pumping engines of the street. The sky-scrapers of to-day are as fireproof as human ingenuity and skill can make them, and this is saying much; in fact, it means that they cannot burn. Of course fires can break out in rooms and apartments in the manufacturing of chemicals or testing experiments, etc., but these are easily confined to narrow limits and readily extinguished with the apparatus at hand. Steel columns will not burn, but if exposed to heat of sufficient degree they will warp and bend and probably collapse, therefore they should be protected by heat resisting agents. Nothing can be better than terra-cotta and concrete for this purpose. When terra-cotta blocks are used they should be at least 2 inches thick with an air space running through them. Columns are also fire-proofed by wrapping expanded metal or other metal lathing around them and plastering. Then a furring system is put on and another layer of metal, lathing and plastering. This if well done is probably safer than the layer of hollow tile. The floor beams should be entirely covered with terra-cotta blocks or concrete, so that no part of them is left exposed. As most office trimmings are of wood care should be taken that all electric wires are well insulated. Faulty installation of dynamos, motors and other apparatus is frequently the cause of office fires. The lighting of a sky-scraper is a most elaborate arrangement. Some of them use as many lights as would well supply a good sized town. The Singer Building in New York has 15,000 incandescent lamps and it is safe to say the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building has more than twice this number as the floor area of the latter is 2-1/2 times as great. The engines and dynamos are in the basement and so fixed that their vibrations do not affect the building. As space is always limited in the basements of sky-scrapers direct connected engines and dynamos are generally installed instead of belt connected and the boilers operated under a high steam pressure. Besides delivering steam to the engines the boilers also supply it to a variety of auxiliary pumps, as boiler-feed, fire-pump, blow-off, tank-pump and pump for forcing water through the building. The heating arrangement of such a vast area as is covered by the floor space of a sky-scraper has been a very difficult problem but it has been solved so that the occupant of the twentieth story can receive an equal degree of heat with the one on the ground floor. Both hot water and steam are utilized. Hot water heating, however, is preferable to steam, as it gives a much steadier heat. The radiators arc proportioned to give an average temperature of 65 degrees F. in each room during the winter months. There are automatic regulating devices attached to the radiators, so if the temperature rises above or falls below a certain point the steam or hot water is automatically turned on or off. Some buildings are heated by the exhaust steam from the engines but most have boilers solely for the purpose. The sanitary system is another important feature. The supplying of water for wash-stands, the dispositions of wastes and the flushing of lavatories tax all the skill of the mechanical engineer. Several of these mighty buildings call for upwards of a thousand lavatories. In considering the sky-scraper we should not forget the role played by the electric elevator. Without it these buildings would be practically useless, as far as the upper stories are concerned. The labor of stair climbing would leave them untenanted. No one would be willing to climb ten, twenty or thirty flights and tackle a day's work after the exertion of doing so. To climb to the fiftieth story in such a manner would be well-nigh impossible or only possible by relays, and after one would arrive at the top he would be so physically exhausted that both mental and manual endeavor would be out of the question. Therefore the elevator is as necessary to the skyscraper as are doors and windows. Indeed were it not for the introduction of the elevator the business sections of our large cities would still consist of the five and six story structures of our father's time instead of the towering edifices which now lift their heads among the clouds. Regarded less than half a century ago as an unnecessary luxury the elevator to-day is an imperative necessity. Sky-scrapers are equipped with both express and local elevators. The express elevators do not stop until about the tenth floor is reached. They run at a speed of about ten feet per second. There are two types of elevators in general use, one lifting the car by cables from the top, and the other with a hydraulic plunger acting directly upon the bottom of the car. The former are operated either by electric motors or hydraulic cylinders and the latter by hydraulic rams, the cylinders extending the full height of the building into the ground. America is pre-eminently the land of the sky-scraper, but England and France to a degree are following along the same lines, though nothing as yet has been erected on the other side of the water to equal the towering triumphs of architectural art on this side. In no country in the world is space at such a premium as in New York City, therefore, New York _per se_ may be regarded as the true home of the tall building, although Chicago is not very much behind the Metropolis in this respect. As figures are more eloquent than words in description the following data of the two giant structures of the Western World may be interesting. The Singer Building at the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street, New York City, has a total height from the basement floor to the top of the flagstaff of 742 feet; the height from street to roof is 612 feet, 1 inch. There are 41 stories. The weight of the steel in the entire building is 9,200 tons. It has 16 elevators, 5 steam engines, 5 dynamos, 5 boilers and 28 steam pumps. The length of the steam and water piping is 5 miles. The cubical contents of the building comprise 66,950,000 cubic feet, there are 411,000 square feet of floor area or about 9-1/2 acres. The weight of the tower is 18,300 tons. Little danger from a collapse will be apprehended when it is learned that the columns are securely bolted and caissons which have been sunk to rock-bed 80 feet below the curb. The other campanile which has excited the wonder and admiration of the world is the colossal pile known as the Metropolitan Building. This occupies the entire square or block as we call it from 23rd St. to 24th St. and from Madison to Fourth Avenue. It is 700 feet and 3 inches above the sidewalk and has 50 stories. The main building which has a frontage of 200 feet by 425 feet is ten stories in height. It is built in the early Italian renaissance style the materials being steel and marble. The Campanile is carried up in the same style and is also of marble. It stands on a base measuring 75 by 83 feet and the architectural treatment is chaste, though severe, but eminently agreeable to the stupendous proportions of the structure. The tower is quite different from that of the Singer Building. It has twelve wall and eight interior columns connected at every fourth floor by diagonal braces; these columns carry 1,800 pounds to the linear foot. The wind pressure calculated at the rate of 30 lbs. to the square foot is enormous and is provided for by deep wall girders and knee braces which transfer the strain to the columns and to the foundation. The average cross section of the tower is 75 by 85 feet, the floor space of the entire building is 1,080,000 square feet or about 25 acres. The tower of this surpassing cloud-piercing structure can be seen for many miles from the surrounding country and from the bay it looks like a giant sentinel in white watching the mighty city at its feet and proclaiming the ceaseless activity and progress of the Western World. CHAPTER VI OCEAN PALACES Ocean Greyhounds--Present Day Floating Palaces--Regal Appointments--Passenger Accommodation--Food Consumption--The One Thousand Foot Boat. The strides of naval architecture and marine engineering have been marvelous within the present generation. To-day huge leviathans glide over the waves with a swiftness and safety deemed absolutely impossible fifty years ago. In view of the luxurious accommodations and princely surroundings to be found on the modern ocean palaces, it is interesting to look back now almost a hundred years to the time when the _Savannah_ was the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. True the voyage of this pioneer of steam from Savannah to Liverpool was not much of a success, but she managed to crawl across the sails very materially aiding the engines, and heralded the dawn of a new day in transatlantic travel. No other steamboat attempted the trip for almost twenty years after, until in 1838 the _Great Western_ made the run in fifteen days. This revolutionized water travel and set the whole world talking. It was the beginning of the passing of the sailing ship and was an event for rejoicing. In the old wooden hulks with their lazily flapping wings, waiting for a breeze to stir them, men and women and children huddled together like so many animals in a pen, had to spend weeks and months on the voyage between Europe and America. There was little or no room for sanitation, the space was crowded, deadly germs lurked in every cranny and crevice, and consequently hundreds died. To many indeed the sailing ship became a floating hearse. In those times, and they are not so remote, a voyage was dreaded as a calamity. Only necessity compelled the undertaking. It was not travel for pleasure, for pleasure under such circumstances and amid such surroundings was impossible. The poor emigrants who were compelled through stress and poverty to leave their homes for a foreign country feared not toil in a new land, but they feared the long voyage with its attending horrors and dangers. Dangerous it was, for most of the sailing vessels were unseaworthy and when a storm swept the waters, they were as children's toys, at the mercy of wind and wave. When the passenger stepped on board he always had the dread of a watery grave before him. How different to-day. Danger has been eliminated almost to the vanishing point and the mighty monsters of steel and oak now cut through the waves in storms and hurricanes with as much ease as a duck swims through a pond. From the time the _Great Western_ was launched, steamships sailing between American and English ports became an established institution. Soon after the _Great Western's_ first voyage a sturdy New England Quaker from Nova Scotia named Samuel Cunard went over to London to try and interest the British government in a plan to establish a line of steamships between the two countries. He succeeded in raising 270,000 pounds, and built the _Britannia_, the first Cunard vessel to cross the Atlantic. This was in 1840. As ships go now she was a small craft indeed. Her gross tonnage was 1,154 and her horse power 750. She carried only first-class passengers and these only to the limit of one hundred. There was not much in the way of accommodation as the quarters were cramped, the staterooms small and the sanitation and ventilation defective. It was on the _Britannia_ that Charles Dickens crossed over to America in 1842 and he has given us in his usual style a pen picture of his impressions aboard. He stated that the saloon reminded him of nothing so much as of a hearse, in which a number of half-starved stewards attempted to warm themselves by a glimmering stove, and that the staterooms so-called were boxes in which the bunks were shelves spread with patches of filthy bed-clothing, somewhat after the style of a mustard plaster. This criticism must be taken with a little reservation. Dickens was a pessimist and always censorious and as he had been feted and feasted with the fat of the land, he expected that he should have been entertained in kingly quarters on shipboard. But because things did not come up to his expectations he dipped his pen in vitriol and began to criticise. At any rate the _Britannia_ in her day was looked upon as the _ne plus ultra_ in naval architecture, the very acme of marine engineering. The highest speed she developed was eight and one-half knots or about nine and three-quarters miles an hour. She covered the passage from Liverpool to Boston in fourteen and one-half days, which was then regarded as a marvellous feat and one which was proclaimed throughout England with triumph. For a long time the _Britannia_ remained Queen of the Seas for speed, but in 1852 the Atlantic record was reduced to nine and a half days by the _Arctic_. In 1876 the _City of Paris_ cut down the time to eight days and four hours. Twelve years later in 1879 the _Arizona_ still further reduced it to seven days and eight hours. In 1881 the _Alaska_, the first vessel to receive the title of "_Ocean Greyhound_," made the trip in six days and twenty-one hours; in 1885 the _Umbria_ bounded over in six days and two hours, in 1890 the _Teutonic_ of the White Star line came across in five days, eighteen hours and twenty-eight minutes, which was considered the limit for many years to come. It was not long however, until the Cunard lowered the colors of the White Star, when the _Lucania_ in 1893 brought the record down to five days and twelve hours. For a dozen years or so the limit of speed hovered round the five-and-a-half day mark, the laurels being shared alternately by the vessels of the Cunard and White Star Companies. Then the Germans entered the field of competition with steamers of from 14,500 to 20,000 tons register and from 28,000 to 40,000 horse power. The _Deutschland_ soon began setting the pace for the ocean greyhounds, while other vessels of the North German Lloyd line that won transatlantic honors were the _Kaiser Wilhelm II., Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, Kronprinz Wilhelm and Kronprinzessin Cecilie_, all remarkably fast boats with every modern luxury aboard that science could devise. These vessels are equipped with wireless telegraphy, submarine signalling systems, water-tight compartments and every other safety appliance known to marine skill. The _Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse_ raised the standard of German supremacy in 1902 by making the passage from Cherbourg to Sandy Hook lightship in five days and fifteen hours. In 1909, however, the sister steamships _Mauretania_ and _Lusitania_ of the Cunard line lowered all previous ocean records, by making the trip in a little over four and a half days. They have been keeping up this speed to the present time, and are universally regarded as the fastest and best equipped steamships in the world,--the very last word in ocean travel. On her last mid-September voyage the _Mauretania_ has broken all ocean records by making the passage from Queenstown to New York in 4 days 10 hours and 47 minutes. But they are closely pursued by the White Star greyhounds such as the _Oceanic_, the _Celtic_ and the _Cedric_, steamships of world wide fame for service, appointments, and equipment. Yet at the present writing the Cunard Company has another vessel on the stocks, to be named the _Falconia_ which in measurements will eclipse the other two and which they are confident will make the Atlantic trip inside four days. The White Star Company is also building two immense boats to be named the _Olympic_ and _Titanic_. They will be 840 feet in length and will be the largest ships afloat. However, it is said that freight and passenger-room is being more considered in the construction than speed and that they will aim to lower no records. Each will be able to accommodate 5,000 passengers besides a crew of 600. All the great liners of the present day may justly be styled ocean palaces, as far as luxuries and general appointments are concerned, but as the _Mauretania_ and _Lusitania_ are best known, a description of either of these will convey an idea to stay-at-homes of the regal magnificence and splendors of the floating hotels which modern science places at the disposal of the traveling public. Though sister ships and modeled on similar lines, the _Mauretania_ and _Lusitania_ differ somewhat in construction. Of the two the _Mauretania_ is the more typical ship as well as the more popular. This modern triumph of the naval architect and marine engineer was built by the firm of Swan, Hunter & Co. at Wellsend on the Tyne in 1907. The following are her dimensions: Length over all 790 feet. Length between perpendiculars 760 feet. Breadth 88 feet. Depth, moulded 60.5 feet. Gross tonnage 32,000. Draught 33.5 feet. Displacement 38,000 tons. She has accommodation space for 563 first cabin, 500 second cabin, and 1,300 third class passengers. She carries a crew of 390 engineers, 70 sailors, 350 stewards, a couple of score of stewardesses, 50 cooks, the officers and captain, besides a maritime band, a dozen or so telephone and wireless telegraph operators, editor and printers for the wireless bulletin published on board and two attendants for the elevator. The type of engine is what is known as the Parsons Turbine. There are 23 double ended and 2 single ended boilers. The engines develop 68,000 horse power; they are fed by 192 furnaces; the heating surface is 159,000 square feet; the grate surface is 4,060 square feet; the steam pressure is 195 lbs. to the square inch. The highest speed attained has been almost 26 knots or 30 miles an hour. At this rate the number of revolutions is 180 to the minute. The coal daily consumed by the fiery maw of the furnaces is enormous. On one trip between Liverpool and New York more than 7,000 tons is required which is a consumption of over 1,500 tons daily. There are nine decks, seven of which are above the water line. Corticine has been largely used for deck covering, instead of wood as it is much lighter. On the boat deck which extends over the greater part of the centre of the ship are located several of the beautiful _en suite_ cabins. Abaft these at the forward end are the grand Entrance Hall, the Library, the Music-Room and the Lounging-Room and Smoking-Room for the first cabin passengers. There is splendid promenading space on the boat deck where passengers can exercise to their hearts' content and also indulge in games and sports with all the freedom of field life. Many life boats swing on davits and instead of being a hindrance or obstacle, act as shades from the sunshine and as breaks from the wind. In the space for first-class passengers are arranged a large number of cabins. What are known as the regal suites are on both port and starboard, and along each side of the main deck are more _en suite_ rooms. On the shelter deck there are no first-class cabin quarters. At the forward end of this deck are the very powerful Napier engines for working the anchor gear. Abaft this on the starboard side is the general lounging room for third-class passengers, while on the port-side is their smoking room with a companion way leading to the third-class dining saloon below and to the third-class cabins on the main and lower decks. The third-class galleys are accommodated on the main deck house and close by is a set of the refrigerating machinery used in connection with the rooms for the storage of supplies for the kitchen department. The side of the ship for a considerable distance aft of this is plated up to the promenade deck level so that the third-class passengers have not only convenient rooms but a protected promenade. Abaft this promenade is another open one. Indeed the accommodations for the third class are as good as what the first-class were accustomed to on most of the liners some dozen years ago. To the left of the grand staircase on the deck house is a children's dining saloon and nursery. On the top deck are dining saloons for all three classes of passengers, that for the third being forward, for the first amidships and for the second near the stern; 470 first-class passengers can be seated at a time, 250 second class and more than 500 of the third class. The main deck is given up entirely to staterooms. The whole of the lower deck forward is also arranged for third-class staterooms. The firemen and other engine room and stokehold workers are located in rooms above the machinery with separate entrances and exits to and from their work. Promenade and exercise space is provided for them on the shelter deck which is fenced off from the space of the second and third class passenger. Amidships is a coal bunker with a compartment under the engines for the storage of supplies. The coal trimmers are accommodated alongside the engine casing and abaft this are the mailrooms with accommodation for the stewards and other helpers. The "orlop" or eighth deck is devoted entirely to machinery with coal bunkers on each side of the boilers to provide against the effect of collisions. The general scheme of color throughout the ship is pleasing and harmonious. The wood for the most part is oak and mahogany. There are over 50,000 square feet of oak in parquet flooring. All the carving and tracing is done in the wood, no superpositions or stucco work whatever being used to show reliefs. The grand stairway shows the Italian renaissance style of the 16th century; the panels are of French walnut; the carving of columns and pilasters is of various designs but the aggregate is pleasing in effect. The Library extends across the deck house, 33 by 56 feet; the walls of the deck house are bowed out to form bay windows. When you first enter the Library the effect is as though you were looking at shimmering marble, this is owing to the lightness of the panels which are sycamore stained in light gray. The mantelpiece is of white statuary marble. The great swing doors which admit you, have bevelled glass panels set in bronze casings. The chairs have mahogany frames done in light plush. The first class lounging room is probably the most artistic as well as the most sumptuous apartment in the ship. The panels are of beautiful ingrained mahogany dully polished a rich brown. The white ceiling is of simple design with boldly carved mouldings and is supported by columns embossed in gold of exquisite workmanship. Some of the panels are of curiously woven tapestries, the fruit of oriental looms. Chandeliers of beautiful design in rich bronze and crystal depend from the ceiling. The curtains, hanging with their soft folds against the dull gold of the carved curtainboxes, are of a charming cream silk and with their flower borders lend a tone both sumptuous and refined. The carpet is of a slender trellis design with bluish pink roses trailing over a pearl grey ground and forms a perfect foil to the splendid furniture. The chairs are of polished beech covered with 18th century brocade. The smoking-room of the first-class is done in rich oak carving with an inlaid border around the panels. An unusual feature in the main part of the room is a jube passageway extending the whole length and divided into recesses with divans and card tables. Writing tables may be found in secluded nooks free from interruption. The windows of unusual size, are semicircular and give a home-like appearance to the room. The dining saloon is in light oak with all carvings worked in the wood. A children's nursery off the main stairway in the deck house is done in mahogany. Enameled white panels depict the old favorite of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds baked in a Pie. An air of delicate refinement and rich luxury hangs about the regal rooms. A suite consists of drawing-room, dining-room, two bedrooms, bathroom and a private corridor. The drawing- and dining-rooms of these suites are paneled in East India satin-wood, probably the hardest and most durable of all timber. The bedrooms are in Georgian style finished in white with satin hangings. The special staterooms are also finished in rich woods on white and gold and have damask and silk hangings and draperies. An idea of the richness and magnificence of the interior decorations may be obtained when it is learned that the cost of these decorations exceeded three million dollars. The galleys, pantries, bakery, confectionery and utensil cleaning rooms extend the full length of the ship. Electricity plays an important part in the culinary department. Electric motors mix dough, run grills and roasters, clean knives and manipulate plate racks and other articles of the kitchen. The main cooking range for the saloon is 24 by 8 feet, heated by coal. There are four steam boilers and 12 steam ovens. There are extensive cold storage compartments and refrigerating chambers. In connection with the commissariat department it is interesting to note the food supply carried for a trip of this floating caravansary. Here is a list of the leading supplies needed for a trip, but there are hundreds of others too numerous to mention: Forty thousand pounds of fresh beef, 1,000 lbs. of corned beef, 8,000 lbs. of mutton, 800 lbs. of lamb, 600 lbs. of veal, 500 lbs. of pork, 4,000 lbs. of fish, 2,000 fowls, 100 geese, 150 turkeys, 350 ducks, 400 pigeons, 250 partridges, 250 grouse, 200 pheasants, 800 quail, 200 snipe, 35 tons of potatoes, 75 hampers of vegetables, 500 quarts ice ream, 3,500 quarts of milk, 30,000 eggs and in addition many thousand bottles of mineral water and spirituous liquors. The health of the passengers is carefully guarded during the voyage. The science of thermodynamics has been brought to as great perfection as possible. Not alone is the heating thoroughly up to modern science requirements but the ventilation as well, by means of thermo tanks, suction valves and exhaust fans. All foul air is expelled and fresh currents sent through all parts of the ship. There is an electric generating station abaft the main engine room containing four turbo-generators each of 375 kilowatts capacity. There are more than 5,000 electric lights and every room is connected by an electric push-bell. There is a telephone exchange through which one can be connected with any department of the vessel. When in harbor, either at Liverpool or New York, the wires are connected to the City Central exchange so that the ships can be communicated with either by local or long distance telephone. By means of wireless telegraphy voyagers can communicate with friends during almost the entire trip and learn the news of the world the same as if they were on land. A bulletin is published daily on board giving news of the leading happenings of the world. There is a perfect fire alarm system on board with fire mains on each side of the ship from which connections are taken to every separate department. There are boxes with hydrant and valve in each room and a system of break glass fire alarms with a drop indicator box in the chartroom and also one in the engine-room to notify in case of any outbreak. The sanitation is all that could be desired. There are flush lavatories on all decks in marble and onyx and with all the sanitary contrivances in apparatus of the best design. The vessel is propelled by four screws, rotated by turbine engines and the power developed is equal to that of 68,000 horses. Now 68,000 horses placed head to tail in a single line would reach a distance of 90 miles or as far as from New York to Philadelphia; and if the steeds were harnessed twenty abreast there would be no fewer than 3,400 rows of powerful horses. Such is the steamship of to-day but there is no doubt that the thousand foot boat is coming, which probably will cross the Atlantic ocean in less than four days if not in three. But the question is, where shall we put her, that is, where shall we dock her? To build a thousand foot pier to accommodate her, appears like a good answer to this question, but the great difficulty is that there are United States Government regulations restricting the length of piers to 800 feet. Docking space along the shore of New York harbor is too valuable to permit the ship being berthed parallel to the shore, therefore vessels must dock at right angles to the shore. Some provisions must soon be made and the regulations as to dock lengths revised. The thousand footer may be here in a couple of years or so. In the meantime the two 840 footers are already on the stocks at Belfast and are expected to arrive early in 1911. Before they come changes and improvements must be made in the docking and harbor facilities of the port of New York. If higher speed is demanded, increased size is essential, since with even the best result every 100 horse-power added involves an addition to machinery weight of approximately 14 tons and to the area occupied of about 40 square feet. To accomplish this the ship must be as much larger in proportion. The ship designer has to work within circumscribed limits. If he could make his vessel of any depth he might build much larger and there would be theoretically no limit to his speed: 40 knots an hour might be obtained as easily as the present maximum of 26, but in designing his ship he must remember that in the harbors of New York or Liverpool the channels are not much beyond 30 feet in depth. High speed necessitates powerful engines, but if the engines be too large there will not be space enough for coal to feed the furnaces. If the breadth of the ship is increased the speed is diminished, while on the other hand, if too powerful engines are put in a narrow vessel she will break her back. The proper proportions must be carefully studied as regards length, breadth, depth and weight so that the vessel will derive the greatest speed from her engines. CHAPTER VII WONDERFUL CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE Mating Plants--Experiments of Burbank--What he has Accomplished. In California lives a wonderful man. He has succeeded in doing more than making two blades of grass grow where grew but one. Yearly, daily in fact, this wizard of plant life is playing tricks on old Mother Nature, transforming her vegetable children into different shapes and making them no longer recognizable in their original forms. Like the fairies in Irish mythology, this man steals away the plant babies, but instead of leaving sickly elves in their places, he brings into the world exceedingly healthy or lusty youngsters which grow up into a full maturity, and develop traits of character superior to the ones they supplant. For instance he took away the ugly, thorny insipid cactus and replaced it by a beautiful smooth juicy one which is now making the western deserts blossom as the rose. The name of this man is Luther Burbank whose fame as a creator of new plants has become world wide. The basic principle of Burbank's plant magic comes under two heads, viz.: breeding and selection. He mates two different species in such a way that they will propagate a type partaking of the natures of both but superior to either in their qualities. In order to effect the best results from mating, he is choice in his selection of species--the best is taken and the worst rejected. It is a universal law that the bad can never produce the good; consequently when good is desired, as is universally the case, bad must be eliminated. In his method, Burbank gives the good a chance to assert itself and at the same time takes away all opportunity from the bad. So that the latter cannot thrive but must decay and pass out of being. He takes two plants--they may be of the same species, but as a general rule he prefers to experiment with those of different species; he perceives that neither one in its present surroundings is putting forth what is naturally expected from it, that each is either retrograding in the scale of life or standing still for lack of encouragement to go forward. He knows that back of these plants is a long history of evolutions from primitive beginnings to their present stage just as in the case of man himself. 'Tis a far cry from the cliff-dweller wielding his stone-axe and roaming nude through the fields and forests after his prey--the wild beast--to the lordly creature of to-day--the product of long ages of civilization and culture, yet high as the state is to which man has been brought, in many cases he is hemmed in and surrounded by circumstances which preclude him from putting forth the best that is in him and showing his full possibilities to the world. The philosopher is often hidden in the ploughman and many a poor laborer toiling in corduroys and fustian at the docks, in the mills, or sweeping the streets may have as good a brain as Edison, but has not the opportunity to develop it and show its capabilities. The same analogy is applicable to plant life. Under adverse conditions a plant or vegetable cannot put forth its best efforts. In a scrawny, impoverished soil, and exhausted atmosphere, lacking the constituents of nurture, the plant will become dwarfed and unproductive, whereas on good ground and in good air, which have the succulent properties to nourish it the best results may be expected. The soil and the air, therefore, from which are derived the constituents of plant life, are indispensably necessary, but they are not the primal principles upon which that life depends for its being. The basis, the foundation, the origin of the life is the seed which germinates in the soil and evolves itself into the plant. A dead seed will not germinate, a contaminated seed may, but the plant it produces will not be a healthy one and it will only be after a long series of transplantings, with patience and care, that at length a really sound plant will be obtained. The same principle holds good in regard to the human plant. It is hard to offset an evil ancestry. The contamination goes on from generation to generation, just as in the case of the notorious Juke family which cost New York State hundreds of thousands of dollars in consequence of criminality and idiocy. It requires almost a miracle to divert an individual sprung from a corrupt stem into a healthy, moral course of living. There must be some powerful force brought to bear to make him break the ligatures which bind him to ancestral nature and enable him to come forth on a plane where he will be susceptible to the influence of what is good and noble. Such can be done and has been accomplished. Burbank is accomplishing such miracles in the vegetable kingdom, in fact he is recreating species as it were and developing them to a full fruition. Of course as in the case of the conversion of a sinner from his evil instincts, much opposition is met and the progress at first is slow, but finally the plant becomes fixed in its new ways and starts forward on its new course in life. It requires patience to await the development Burbank is a man of infinite patience. He has been five, ten, fifteen, twenty years in producing a desired blossom, but he considers himself well rewarded when his object has been obtained. Thousands of experiments are going on at the same time, but in each case years are required to achieve results, so slow is the work of selection, the rejecting of the seemingly worthless and the eternal choosing of the best specimens to continue the experiments. When two plants are united to produce a third, no human intelligence can predict just what will be the result of the union. There may be no result at all; hence it is that Burbank does not depend on one experiment at a time. If he did the labors of a life-time would have little to show for their work. In breeding lilies he has used as high as five hundred thousand plants in a single test. Such an immense quantity gave him a great variety of selection. He culled and rejected, and culled and rejected until he made his final selection for the last test. Sometimes he is very much disappointed in his anticipations. For instance, he marks out a certain life for a flower and breeds and selects to that end. For a time all may go according to his plans, but suddenly some new trait develops which knocks those plans all out of gear. The new flower may have a longer stem and narrower leaves than either parent, while a shorter stem and broader leaves are the desideratum. The experimenter is disappointed, but not disheartened; he casts the flower aside and makes another selection from the same species and again goes ahead, until his object is attained. It may be asked how two plants are united to procure a third. The act is based on the procreative law of nature. Plant-breeding is simply accomplished by sifting the pollen of one plant upon the stigma of another, this act--pollenation--resulting in fertilization, Nature in her own mysterious ways bringing forth the new plant. In order to get an idea of the Burbank method, let us consider some of his most famous experiments, for instance, that in which by uniting the potato with the tomato he has produced a new variety which has been very aptly named the pomato. Mr. Burbank, from the beginning of his wonderful career, has experimented much with the potato. It was this vegetable which first brought the plant wizard into worldwide prominence. The Burbank potato is known in all lands where the tuber forms an article of food. It has been introduced into Ireland and promises to be the salvation of that distressed island of which the potato constitutes the staple diet. The Burbank potato is the hardiest of all varieties and in this respect is well suited for the colder climates of the Temperate Zone. Apart from this potato which bears his name, Mr. Burbank has produced many other varieties. He has blended wild varieties with tame ones, getting very satisfactory results. Mr. Burbank believes that a little wild blood, so to speak, is often necessary to give tone and vigor to the tame element which has been long running in the same channels. Probably it was Emerson, his favorite author, who gave him the cue for this idea. Emerson pointed out that the city is recruited from the country. "The city would have died out, rotted and exploded long ago," wrote the New England sage, "but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is only country that came to town day before yesterday, that is city and court to-day." In Burbank's greenhouses are mated all kinds of wild and tame varieties of potatoes, producing crosses and combinations truly wonderful as regards shape, size, and color. One of the most palatable potatoes he has produced is a magenta color approaching crimson, so distributed throughout that when the tuber is cut, no matter from what angle, it presents concentric geometric figures, some having a resemblance to human and animal faces. Before entering on any experiment to produce a new creation, Burbank always takes into consideration the practical end of the experiment, that is, what the value of the result will be as a practical factor in commerce, how much it will benefit the race. He does not experiment for a pastime or a novelty, but for a purpose. His object in regard to the potato is to make it a richer, better vegetable for a food supply and also to make it more important for other purposes in the commerce of the nations. The average potato consists of seventy-five per cent. water and twenty-five per cent. dry matter, almost all of which is starch. Now starch is a very important article from a manufacturing standpoint, but only one-fourth of the potato is available for manufacturing, the other three-fourths, being water, is practically waste matter. Now if the water could be driven out to a great extent and starchy matter increased it is easy to understand that the potato would be much increased in value as an article of manufacture. Burbank has not overlooked this fact in his potato experiments. He has demonstrated that it is as easy to breed potatoes for a larger amount of starch, and he has really developed tubers which contain at least twenty-five per cent. more starch than the normal varieties; in other words, he has produced potatoes which yield fifty per cent. of starch instead of twenty-five per cent. The United States uses about $12,000,000 worth of starch every year, chiefly obtained from Indian corn and potatoes. When the potato is made to yield double the amount of starch, as Burbank has proved it can yield and more, it will be understood what a large part it can be made to play in this important manufacture. Also for the production of alcohol the potato is gaining a prominent place. The potato starch is converted into maltose by the diastase of malt, the maltose being easily acted upon by ferment for the actual production of the alcohol. Therefore an increase in the starch of the potato for this purpose alone is much to be desired. Of course the chief prominence of the potato will still consist in its adaptability as an article of food. Burbank does not overlook this. He has produced and is producing potatoes with better flavor, of larger and uniform size and which give a much greater yield to the area. Palatability in the end decides the permanence of a food, and the Burbank productions possess this quality in a high degree. Burbank labored long and studied every characteristic of the potato before attempting any experiments with the tomato. Though closely related by family ties, the potato and the tomato seemed to have no affinity for each other whatever. In many other instances it has also been found that two varieties which from a certain relation might naturally be expected to amalgamate easily have been repellant to each other and refused to unite. In his first experiment in trying to cross the potato and tomato, Burbank produced tomatoes from the seeds of plants pollenated from potato pollen only. He next produced what he called "aerial potatoes" of very peculiar twisted shapes from a potato vine grafted on a Ponderosa or large tomato plant. Then reversing this operation he grafted the same kind of tomato plant upon the same kind of potato plant and produced underground a strange-looking potato with marked tomato characteristics. He saw he was on the right road to the production of a new variety of vegetable, but before experimenting further along this line he crossed two distinct species of tomatoes and obtained a most ornamental plant, different from the parent stems, about twelve inches high and fifteen inches across with large unusual leaves and producing clusters of uniform globular fruit, the whole giving a most pleasing and unique appearance. The fruit were more palatable than the ordinary tomatoes, had better nutritive qualities and were more suitable for preserving and canning. Very pleased with this result he went back to his experiments with the potato-tomato, and succeeded in producing the most wonderful and unique fruit in the world, one which by a happy combination of the two names, he has aptly called the pomato. It may be considered as the evolution of a potato seed-ball. It first appears as a tiny green ball on the potato top and as the season progresses it gradually enlarges and finally develops into a fruit about the size and shape of the ordinary tomato. The flesh is white and the marrow, which contains but a few tiny white seeds, is exceedingly pleasant to the taste, possessing a combination of several different fruit flavors, though it cannot be identified with any one. It may be eaten either raw or cooked after the manner of the common tomato. In either case it is most palatable, but especially so when cooked. It is exceptionally well adapted to preserving purposes. The production of such a fruit from a vegetable is one of the crowning triumphs of the California wizard. Probably it is the most novel of all the wonderful crosses and combinations he has given to the world. It would be impossible here to go into detail in regard to some of the other wonders accomplished in the plant world by this modern magician. There is only space to merely mention a few more of his successful achievements. He has given the improved thornless and spiculess cactus, food for man and beast, converting it into a beautifier and reclaimer of desert wastes; the plum-cot which is an amalgamation of the plum and the apricot with a flavor superior to both; many kinds of plums, some without pits, others having the taste of Bartlett pears, and still others giving out a fragrance as sweet as the rose; several varieties of walnuts, one with a shell as thin as paper and which was so easily broken by the birds that Burbank had to reverse his experiment somewhat in order to get a thicker shell; another walnut has no tannin in the meat, which is the cause of the disagreeable flavor of the ordinary fruit; the world-famed Shasta daisy, which is a combination of the Japanese daisy, the English daisy and the common field daisy, and which has a blossom seven inches in diameter; a dahlia deprived of its unpleasant odor and the scent of the magnolia blossom substituted; a gladiolus which blooms around the entire stem like a hyacinth instead of the old way on one side only; many kinds of lilies with chalices and petals different from the ordinary, and exhaling perfumes as varied as those of Oriental gardens; a poppy of such dimension that it is from ten to twelve inches across its brilliant bloom; an amaryllis bred up from a couple of inches to over a foot in diameter; several kinds of fruit trees which withstand frost in bud and in flower; a chestnut tree which bears nuts in eighteen months from the time of seed-planting; a white blackberry (paradoxical as it may appear), a rare and beautiful fruit and as palatable as it is beautiful; the primusberry, a union of the raspberry and the blackberry; another wonderful and delicious berry produced from the California dewberry and the Cuthbert-raspberry; pieplants four feet in diameter, bearing every day in the year; prunes, three, four, and five times as large as the ordinary and enriched in flavor; blackberries without their prickly thorns and hundreds of other combinations and crosses of fruits and flowers too numerous to mention. He has improved plums, pears, apples, apricots, quinces, peaches, cherries, grapes, in short, all kinds of fruit which grow in our latitude and many even that have been introduced. He has developed hundreds of varieties of flowers, improving them in color, hardiness and yield. Thus he has not only added to the food and manufacturing products of the world, but he has enriched the aesthetic side in his beautiful flower creations. CHAPTER VIII LATEST DISCOVERIES IN ARCHAEOLOGY Prehistoric Time--Earliest Records--Discoveries in Bible Lands-- American Explorations. For the earliest civilization and culture we must go to that part of the world, which according to the general belief, is the cradle of the human race. The civilization of the Mesopotamian plain is not only the oldest but the first where man settled in great city communities, under an orderly government, with a developed religion, practicing agriculture, erecting dwellings and using a syllabified writing. All modern civilization had its source there. For 6,000 years the cuneiform or wedge-shaped writing of the Assyrians was the literary script of the whole civilized ancient world, from the shores of the Mediterranean to India and even to China, for Chinese civilization, old as it is, is based upon that which obtained in Mesopotamia. In Egypt, too, at an early date was a high form of neolithic civilization. Six thousand years before Christ, a white-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed race dwelt there, built towns, carried on commerce, made woven linen cloth, tanned leather, formed beautiful pottery without the wheel, cut stone with the lathe and designed ornaments from ivory and metals. These were succeeded by another great race which probably migrated into Egypt from Arabia. Among them were warriors and administrators, fine mechanics, artisans, artists and sculptors. They left us the Pyramids and other magnificent monumental tombs and great masses of architecture and sculptured columns. Of course, they declined and passed away, as all things human must; but they left behind them evidences to tell of their prestige and power. The scientists and geologists of our day are busy unearthing the remains of the ancient peoples of the Eastern world, who started the waves of civilization both to the Orient and the Occident. Vast stores of knowledge are being accumulated and almost every day sees some ancient treasure trove brought to light. Especially in Biblical lands is the explorer busy unearthing the relics of the mighty past and throwing a flood of light upon incidents and scenes long covered by the dust of centuries. Babylon, the mightiest city of ancient times, celebrated in the Bible and in the earliest human records as the greatest centre of sensual splendor and sinful luxury the world has ever seen, is at last being explored in the most thorough manner by the German Oriental Society, of which the Kaiser is patron. Babylon rose to its greatest glory under Nebuchadnezzar, the most famous monarch of the Babylonian Empire. At that period it was the great centre of arts, learning and science, astronomy and astrology being patronized by the Babylonian kings. The city finally came to a terrible end under Belshazzar, as related in the Bible. The palace of the impious king has been uncovered and its great piles of masonry laid bare. The great hall, where the young prophet Daniel read the handwriting on the wall, can now be seen. The palace stood on elevated ground and was of majestic dimensions. A winding chariot road led up to it. The lower part was of stone and the upper of burned bricks. All around on the outside ran artistic sculptures of men hunting animals. The doors were massive and of bronze and swung inward, between colossal figures of winged bulls. From the hall a stairway led to the throne room of the King, which was decorated with gold and precious stones and finished in many colors. The hall in which the infamous banquet was held was 140 feet by 40 feet. For a ceiling it was spanned by the cedars of Lebanon which exhaled a sweet perfume. At night a myriad lights lent brilliancy to the scene. There were over 200 rooms all gorgeously furnished, most of them devoted to the inmates of the king's harem. The ruins as seen to-day impress the visitor and excite wonder and admiration. The Germans have also uncovered the great gate of Ishtar at Babylon, which Nebuchadnezzar erected in honor of the goddess of love and war, the most renowned of all the mythical deities of the Babylonian Pantheon. It is a double gateway with interior chambers, flanked by massive towers and was erected at the end of the Sacred Road at the northeast corner of the palace. Its most unique feature consists in the scheme of decoration on its walls, which are covered with row upon row of bulls and dragons represented in the brilliant enamelled bricks. Some of these creatures are flat and others raised in relief. Those in relief are being taken apart to be sent to Berlin, where they will be again put together for exhibition. The friezes on this gate of Ishtar are among the finest examples of enamelled brickwork that have been uncovered and take their place beside "the Lion Frieze" from Sargon's palace at Khorsabad and the still more famous "Frieze of Arches of King Darius" in the Paris Louvre. The German party have already established the claim of Herodotus as to the thickness of the walls of the city. Herodotus estimated them at two hundred royal cubits (348 feet) high and fifty royal cubits (86-1/2 feet) thick. At places they have been found even thicker. So wide were they that on the top a four-horse chariot could easily turn. The hanging gardens of Babylon, said to have been built to please Amytis the consort of Nebuchadnezzar, were classed as among the Seven Wonders of the World. Terraces were constructed 450 feet square, of huge stones which cost millions in that stoneless country. These were supported by countless columns, the tallest of which were 160 feet high. On top of the stones were layers of brick, cemented and covered with pitch, over which was poured a layer of lead to make all absolutely water-tight. Finally, on the top of this, earth was spread to such a depth that the largest trees had room for their roots. The trees were planted in rows forming squares and between them were flower gardens. In fact, these gardens constituted an Eden in the air, which has never since been duplicated. New discoveries have been recently made concerning the Tower of Babel, the construction of which, as described in the Book of Genesis, is one of the most remarkable occurrences of the first stage of the world's history. It has been found that the tower was square and not round, as represented by all Bible illustrators, including Dore. The ruins cover a space of about 50,000 square feet and are about ten miles from the site of Babylon. The ruins of the celebrated synagogue of Capernaum, believed to be the very one in which the Saviour preached, have been unearthed and many other Biblical sites around the ancient city have been identified. Capernaum was the home of Jesus during nearly the whole of his Galilean ministry and the scene of many of his most wonderful miracles. The site of Capernaum is now known as Tell Hum. There are ruins scattered about over a radius of a mile. The excavating which revealed the ruins of the synagogue was done under supervision of a German archaeologist named Kohl. This synagogue was composed of white limestone blocks brought from a distance and in this respect different from the others which were built of the local black volcanic rock. The carvings unearthed in the ruins are very beautiful and most of them in high relief work, representing trailing vines, stately palms, clusters of dates, roses and acanthus. Various animal designs are also shown and one of the famous seven-branched candlesticks which accompanied the Ark of the Covenant. Most of the incidents at Capernaum mentioned in the Bible were connected with the synagogue, the ruins of which have just been uncovered. The centurion who came to plead with Jesus about the servant was the man who built the synagogue (Luke VII:1-10). In the synagogue, Jesus healed the man with the unclean spirit (Mark I:21-27). In this synagogue, the man with the withered hand received health on the Sabbath Day (Matthew XII:10-13). Jairus, whose daughter was raised from the dead, was a ruler of the synagogue (Luke VIII:3) and it was in this same synagogue of Capernaum that Jesus preached the discourse on the bread of life (John VI:26-59). The hill near Capernaum where Jesus fed the multitude with five loaves and two fishes is also identified. The stoning of St. Stephen and the conversion of St. Paul are two great events of the New Testament which lend additional interest to the explorations now being carried on at the ancient City of Damascus. Damascus lays claim to being the most ancient city in the world and its appearance sustains the claim. Unlike Jerusalem and many other ancient cities, it has never been completely destroyed by a conqueror. The Assyrian monarch, Tiglath Pileser, swept down on it, 2,700 years ago, but he did not succeed in wiping it out. Other cities came into being long after Damascus, they flourished, faded and passed away; but Damascus still remains much the same as in the early time. Among the famous places which have been identified in this ancient city is the house of Ananias the priest and the place in the wall where Paul was let down by a basket is pointed out. The scene of the conversion of St. Paul is shown and also the "Street called Straight" referred to in Acts IX:II. Jerusalem, birthplace and cradle of Christianity, offers a vast and interesting field to the archaeologist. One of the most remarkable of recent discoveries relates to the building known as David's castle. Major Conder, a British engineer in charge of the Palestine survey, has proved that this building is actually a part of the palace of King Herod who ordered the Massacre of the Innocents in order to encompass the destruction of the Infant Saviour. The tomb of Hiram is another relic discovered at the village of Hunaneh on the road from Safed to Tyre; it recalls the days of David. Hiram was King of Tyre in the time of David. The tomb is a limestone structure of extraordinary massiveness Unfortunately the Mosque of Omar stands on the site of Solomon's Temple and there is no hope of digging there. As for the palace of Solomon, it should be easy to find the foundations, for Jerusalem has been rebuilt several times upon the ruins of earlier periods and vast ancient remains must be still buried there. The work is being pushed vigorously at present and the future should bring to light many interesting relics. At last the real site of the Crucifixion may be found with many mementoes of the Saviour, and the Apostles. Professor Flinders Petrie, the famous English archaeologist, has recently explored the Sinaitic peninsula and has found many relics of the Hebrews' passage through the country during the Exodus and also many of a still earlier period. He found a remarkable number of altars and tombs belonging to a very early form of religion. On the Mount where Moses received the tables of the law is a monastery erected by the Emperor Justinian 523 A.D. Although the conquering wave of Islam has swept over the peninsula, leaving it bare and desolate, this monastery still survives, the only Christian landmark, not only in Sinai but in all Arabia. The original tables of stone on which the Commandments were written, were placed in the Ark of the Covenant and taken all through the Wilderness to Palestine and finally placed in the Temple of Solomon. What became of it when the Temple was plundered and destroyed by the Babylonians is not known. Clay tablets have been found at Nineveh of the Creation and the Flood as known to the Assyrians. These tablets formed part of a great epic poem of which Nimrod, the mighty hunter, was the hero. Explorers are now looking for the palace of Nimrod, also that of Sennacherib, the Assyrian monarch who besieged Jerusalem. The latter despoiled the Temple of many of its treasures and it is believed that his palace, when found, may reveal the Tables of the Law, the Ark of the Covenant, the Seven-branched candlestick, and many of the golden vessels used in Israelitish worship. Ur of the Chaldees, birthplace of Abraham, father and founder of the Hebrew race, is a rich field for the archaeologist to plough. Some tablets have already been discovered, but they are only a mere suggestion as to future possibilities. It is believed by some eminent investigators that we owe to Abraham the early part of the Book of Genesis describing the Creation, the Tower of Babel and the Flood, and the quest of archaeologists is to find, if not the original tablets, at least some valuable records which may be buried in this neighborhood. Excavators connected with the American School at Jerusalem are busy at Samaria and they believe they have uncovered portions of the great temple of Baal, which King Ahab erected in honor of the wicked deity 890 B.C. When the remains of this temple are fully uncovered it will be learned just how far the Israelites forsook the worship of the true God for that of Baal. The Germans have begun work on the site of Jericho, once the royal capital of Canaan, and historic chiefly from the fact that Joshua led the Israelites up to its walls, reported to be impregnable, but which "fell down at the blast of the trumpet." Great piles have been unearthed here which it is thought formed a part of the original masonry. One excavator believes he has unearthed the ruins of the house of Rahab, the woman who sheltered Joshua's spies. Another thinks he has discovered the site of the translation of Elijah, the Prophet, from whence he was carried up to heaven in a fiery chariot. Every Christian will be interested in learning what is to be found in Nazareth where Jesus spent his boyhood. Archaeologists have located the "Fount of the Virgin," and the rock from which the infuriated inhabitants attempted to hurl Christ. In the "Land of Goshen" where the Israelites in a state of servitude worked for the oppressing Pharaoh (Rameses II), excavators have found bricks made without straw as mentioned in Scripture, undoubtedly the work of Hebrew slaves, also glazed bead necklaces. They are looking for the House of Amran, the father of Moses, where the great leader was born. The site of Arbela, where Alexander the Great won his mightiest victory over Darius, has been discovered. It is a series of mounds on the Western bank of the Tigris river between Nineveh and Bagdad. All the treasures of Darius were taken and Alexander erected a great palace. Bronze swords, cups and pieces of sculpture have been unearthed and it is supposed there are vast stores of other remains awaiting the tool and patience of the excavator. The famous Sultan Saladin took up his residence here in 1184 and doubtless many relics of his royal time will be discovered. The remains of the city of Pumbaditha have been identified with the immense mound of Abnar some twenty miles from Babylon, on the banks of the Euphrates. This was the centre of Jewish scholarship during the Babylonian exile. One of the great schools in which the Talmud was composed was located here. The great psalm, "By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept." was also composed on this spot, and here, too, Jeremiah and Isaiah thundered their impassioned eloquence. Broken tombs and a few inscribed bowls have been brought to light. Probably the original scrolls of the Talmud will be found here. Several curiously wrought vases and ruins have been also unearthed. Several monuments bearing inscriptions which are sorely puzzling the archaeologists have recently been unearthed at the site of Boghaz-Keni which was the ancient, if not original capital, of the mysterious people called the Hittites who have been for so long a worry to Bible students. Archaeology has now revealed the secret of this people. There is no doubt they were of Mongolian origin, as the monuments just discovered represent them with slant eyes and pigtails. No one as yet has been able to read the inscriptions. They were great warriors, great builders and influenced the fate of many of the ancient nations. In many other places throughout these lands, deep students of Biblical lore are pushing on the work of excavation and daily adding to our knowledge concerning the peoples and nations in whom posterity must ever take a vital interest. A short time ago, Professor Doerpfeld announced to the world that he had discovered on the island of Ithaca, off the west coast of Greece, the ruins of the palace of Ulysses, Homer's half-mythical hero of the _Odyssey_. The German archaeologist has traced the different rooms of the palace and is convinced that here is the very place to which the hero returned after his wanderings. Near it several graves were found from which were exhumed silver amulets, curiously wrought necklaces, bronze swords and metal ornaments bearing date 2,000 B.C., which is the date at which investigators lay the Siege of Troy. If the ruins be really those of the palace of Ulysses, some interesting things may be found to throw a light on the Homeric epic. As the schoolboys know, when Ulysses set sail from Troy for home, adverse winds wafted him to the coast of Africa and he beat around in the adjacent seas and visited islands and spent a considerable time meeting many kinds of curious and weird adventures, dallying at one time with the lotus-eaters, at another braving the Cyclops, the one-eyed monsters, until he arrived at Ithaca where "he bent his bow and slew the suitors of Penelope, his harassed wife." In North America are mounds, earthworks, burial sites, shell heaps, buildings of stone and adobe, pictographs sculptured in rocks, stone implements, objects made of bone, pottery and other remains which arouse the enthusiasm of the archaeologist. As the dead were usually buried in America, investigators try to locate the ancient cemeteries because, besides skeletons, they usually contain implements, pottery and ornaments which were buried with the corpses. The most characteristic implement of early man in America was the grooved axe, which is not found in any other country. Stone implements are plentiful everywhere. Knives, arrow-points and perforators of chipped stone are found in all parts of the continent. Beads and shells and pottery are also found in almost every State. The antiquity of man in Europe has been determined in a large measure by archaeological remains found in caves occupied by him in different ages, but the exploration of caves in North America has so far failed to reveal traces of different degrees of civilization. CHAPTER IX GREAT TUNNELS OF THE WORLD Primitive Tunneling--Hoosac Tunnel--Croton Aqueduct--Great Alpine Tunnels--New York Subway--McAdoo Tunnels--How Tunnels are Built. The art of tunnel construction ranks among the very oldest in the world, if not the oldest, for almost from the beginning of his advent on the earth man has been tunneling and boring and making holes in the ground. Even in pre-historic time, the ages of which we have neither record nor tradition, primitive man scooped out for himself hollows in the sides of hills, and mountains, as is evidenced by geological formations and by the fossils that have been unearthed. The forming of these hollows and holes was no indication of a superior intelligence but merely manifested the instincts of nature in seeking protection from the fury of the elements and safety from hostile forces such as the onslaughts of the wild and terrible beasts that then existed on the earth. The Cave Dwellers were real tunnelers, inasmuch as in construction of their rude dwellings they divided them into several compartments and in most cases chose the base of hills for their operations, boring right through from side to side as recent discoveries have verified. The ancient Egyptians built extensive tunnels for the tombs of their dead as well as for the temples of the living. When a king of Thebes ascended the throne he immediately gave orders for his tomb to be cut out of the solid rock. A separate passage or gallery led to the tomb along which he was to be borne in death to the final resting place. Some of the tunnels leading to the mausoleums of the ancient Egyptian kings were upwards of a thousand feet in length, hewn out of the hard solid rock. A similar custom prevailed in Assyria, Mesopotamia, Persia and India. The early Assyrians built a tunnel under the Euphrates river which was 12 feet wide by 15 high. The course of the river was diverted until the tunnel was built, then the waters were turned into their former channel, therefore it was not really a subaqueous tunnel. The sinking of tunnels under water was to be one of the triumphs of modern science. Unquestionably the Romans were the greatest engineers of ancient times. Much of their masonry work has withstood the disintegrating hand of time and is as solid and strong to-day as when first erected. The "Fire-setting" method of tunneling was originated by them, and they also developed the familiar principle of prosecuting the work at several points at the same time by means of vertical shafts. They heated the rock to be excavated by great fires built against the face of it. When a very high temperature was reached they turned streams of cold water on the heated stone with the result that great portions were disintegrated and fell off under the action of the water. The Romans being good chemists knew the effect of vinegar on lime, therefore when they encountered calcareous rock instead of water they used vinegar which very readily split up and disintegrated this kind of obstruction. The work of tunneling was very severe on the laborers, but the Romans did not care, for nearly all the workmen were slaves and regarded in no better light than so many cattle. One of the most notable tunnels constructed by the old Romans was that between Naples and Pozzuoli through the Posilipo Hills. It was excavated through volcanic tufa and was 3,000 feet long, 25 feet wide, and of the pointed arch style. The longest of the Roman tunnels, 3-1/2 miles, was built to drain Lake Fucino. It was driven through calcareous rock and is said to have cost the labor of 30,000 men for 11 years. Only hand labor was employed by the ancient people in their tunnel work. In soft ground the tools used were picks, shovels and scoops, but for rock work they had a greater variety. The ancient Egyptians besides the hammer, chisel and wedges had tube drills and saws provided with cutting edges of corundum or other hard gritty material. For centuries there was no progress in the art of tunneling. On the contrary there was a decline from the earlier construction until late in the 17th century when gunpowder came into use as an explosive in blasting rock. The first application of gunpowder was probably at Malpas, France, 1679-1681, in the construction of the tunnel on the line of the Languedoc Canal 510 feet long, 22 feet wide and 29 feet high. It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the art of tunnel construction, through sand, wet ground or under rivers was undertaken so as to come rightly under the head of practical engineering. In 1803 a tunnel was built through very soft soil for the San Quentin Canal in France. Timbering or strutting was employed to support the walls and roof of the excavation as fast as the earth was removed and the masonry lining was built closely following it. From the experience gained in this tunnel were developed the various systems of soft ground subterranean tunneling in practice at the present day. The first tunnel of any extent built in the United States was that known as the Auburn Tunnel near Auburn, Pa., for the water transportation of coal. It was several hundred feet long, 22 feet wide and 15 feet high. The first railroad tunnel in America was also in Pennsylvania on the Allegheny-Portage Railroad, built in 1818-1821. It was 901 feet long, 25 feet wide and 21 feet high. What may be called the epoch making tunnel, the construction of which first introduced high explosives and power drills in this country, was the Hoosac in Massachusetts commenced in 1854 and after many interruptions brought to completion in 1876. It is a double-track tunnel nearly 5 miles in length. It was quickly followed by the commencement of the Erie tunnel through Bergen Hill near Hoboken, N.J. This tunnel was commenced in 1855 and finished in 1861. It is 4,400 feet long, 28 feet wide and 21 feet high. Other remarkable engineering feats of this kind in America are the Croton Aqueduct Tunnel, the Hudson River Tunnel, and the New York Subway. The great rock tunnels of Europe are the four Alpine cuts known as Mont Cenis, St. Gothard, the Arlberg and the Simplon. The Mont Cenis is probably the most famous because at the time of its construction it was regarded as the greatest engineering achievement of the modern world, yet it is only a simple tunnel 8 miles long, while the Simplon is a double tunnel, each bore of which is 12-1/4 miles. The chief engineer of the Mont Cenis tunnel was M. Sommeiler, the man who devised the first power drill ever used in such work. In addition to the power drill the building of this tunnel induced the invention of apparatus to suck up foul air, the air compressor, the turbine and several other contrivances and appliances in use at the present time. Great strides in modern tunneling developed the "shield" and brought metal lining into service. The shield was invented and first used by Sir M. I. Brunel, a London engineer, in excavating the tunnel under the River Thames, begun in 1825 and finished in 1841. In 1869 another English engineer, Peter Barlow, used an iron lining in connection with a shield in driving the second tunnel under the Thames at London. From a use of the shield and metal lining has grown the present system of tunneling which is now universally known as the shield system. Great advancement has been made in the past few years in the nature and composition of explosives as well as in the form of motive power employed in blasting. Powerful chemical compositions, such as nitroglycerine and its compounds, such as dynamite, etc., have supplanted gunpowder, and electricity, is now almost invariably the firing agent. It also serves many other purposes in the work, illumination, supplying power for hoisting and excavating machinery, driving rock drills, and operating ventilating fans, etc. In this field, in fact, as everywhere else in the mechanical arts, the electric current is playing a leading part. To the English engineer, Peter Barlow, above mentioned, must be given the credit of bringing into use the first really serviceable circular shield for soft ground tunneling. In 1863 he took out a patent for such a shield with a cylindrical cast iron lining for the completed tunnel. Of course James Henry Greathead very materially improved the shield, so much so indeed that the present system of tunneling by means of circular shields is called the Greathead not the Barlow system. Greathead and Barlow entered into a partnership in 1869. They constructed the tunnel under the Tower of London 1,350 feet in length and seven feet in diameter which penetrated compact clay and was completed within a period of eleven months. This was a remarkable record in tunnel building for the time and won for these eminent engineers a world wide fame. From thenceforth their system came into vogue in all soft soil and subaqueous tunneling. Except for the development in steel apparatus and the introduction of electricity as a motive agent, there has not been such a great improvement on the Greathead shield as one would naturally expect in thirty years. The method of excavating a tunnel depends altogether on the nature of the obstruction to be removed for the passage. In the case of solid rock the work is slow but simple; dry, hard, firm earth is much the same as rock. The difficulties of tunneling lie in the soft ground, subaqueous mud, silt, quicksand, or any treacherous soil of a shifting, unsteady composition. When the rock is to be removed it is customary to begin the work in sections of which there may be seven or eight. First one section is excavated, then another and so on to completion. The order of the sections depends upon the kind of rock and upon the time allotted for the job and several other circumstances known to the engineer. If the first section attacked be at the top immediately beneath the arch of the proposed tunnel, next to the overlying matter, it is called a heading, but if the first cutting takes place at the bottom of the rock to form the base of the tunnel it is called a drift. Driving a heading is the most difficult operation of rock tunneling. Sometimes a heading is driven a couple of thousand feet ahead of the other sections. In soft rock it is often necessary to use timber props as the work proceeds and follow up the excavating by lining roof and sides with brick, stone or concrete. The rock is dislodged by blasting, the holes being drilled with compressed air, water force or electricity, and, as has been said, powerful explosives are used, nitroglycerine or some nitro-compound being the most common. Many charges can be electrically fired at the same time. If the tunnel is to be long, shafts are sunk at intervals in order to attack the work at several places at once. Sometimes these shafts are lined and left open when the tunnel is completed for purposes of ventilation. In soft ground and subaqueous soil the "shield" is the chief apparatus used in tunneling. The most up-to-date appliance of this kind was that used in constructing the tunnels connecting New York City with New Jersey under the Hudson River. It consisted of a cylindrical shell of steel of the diameter of the excavation to be made. This was provided with a cutting edge of cast steel made up of assembled segments. Within the shell was arranged a vertical bulkhead provided with a number of doors to permit the passage of workmen, tools and explosives. The shell extended to the rear of the bulkhead forming what was known as the "tail." The lining was erected within this tail and consisted of steel plates lined with masonry. The whole arrangement was in effect a gigantic circular biscuit cutter which was forced through the earth. The tail thus continually enveloped the last constructed portion of this permanent lining. The actual excavation took place in advance of the cutting edge. The method of accomplishing this, varied with conditions. At times the material would be rock for a few feet from the bottom, overlaid with soft earth. In such case the latter would be first excavated and then the roof would be supported by temporary timbers, after which the rock portion would be attacked. When the workmen had excavated the material in front of the shield it was passed through the heavy steel plate diaphragm in center of the shell out to the rear and the shield was then moved forward so as to bring its front again up to the face of the excavation. As the shell was very unwieldy, weighing about eighty tons, and, moreover, as the friction or pressure of the surrounding material on its side had to be overcome it was a very difficult matter to move it forward and a great force had to be expended to do so. This force was exerted by means of hydraulic jacks so devised and placed around the circumference of the diaphragm as to push against the completed steel plate lining of the tunnel. There were sixteen of these jacks employed with cylinders eight inches in diameter and they exerted a pressure of from one thousand to four thousand pounds per square inch. By such means the shield was pushed ahead as soon as room was made in front for another move. The purpose of the shield is to prevent the inrush of water and soft material while excavating is going on; the diaphragm of the shields acts as a bulkhead and the openings in it are so devised as to be quickly closed if necessary. The extension of the shield in front of the diaphragm is designed to prevent the falling or flowing in of the exposed face of the new excavation. The extension of the shell back from the diaphragm is for the purpose of affording opportunity to put in place the finished tunnel lining whatever it may be, masonry, cast-iron, cast-iron and masonry, or steel plates and masonry. Where the material is saturated with water as is the case in all subaqueous tunneling it is necessary to use compressed air in connection with the shield. The intensity of air pressure is determined by the depth of the tunnel below the surface of the water above it. The tunnelers work in what are called caissons to which they have access through an air lock. In many cases quick transition from the compressed air in the caisson to the open air at the surface results fatally to the workers. The caisson disease is popularly called "the bends" a kind of paralysis which is more or less baffling to medical science. Some men are able to bear a greater pressure than others. It depends on the natural stamina of the worker and his state of health. The further down the greater the pressure. The normal atmospheric pressure at the surface is about fourteen pounds to the square inch. Men in normal health should be able to stand a pressure of seventy-six pounds to the square inch and this would call for a depth of 178 feet under water surface, which far exceeds any depth worked under compressed air. For a long time one hundred feet were regarded as a maximum depth and at that depth men were not permitted to work more than an hour in one shift. The ordinary subaqueous tunnel pressure is about forty-five pounds and this corresponds to a head of 104 feet. In working in the Hudson Tunnels the pressure was scarcely ever above thirty-three pounds, yet many suffered from the "bends." What is called a freezing method is now proposed to overcome the water in soft earth tunneling. Its chief feature is the excavating first of a small central tunnel to be used as a refrigerating chamber or ice box in freezing the surrounding material solid so that it can be dug out or blasted out in chunks the same as rock. It is very doubtful however, if such a plan is feasible. The greatest partly subaqueous tunnels in the world are now to be found in the vicinity of New York. The first to be opened to the public is known as the Subway and extends from the northern limits of the City in Westchester County to Brooklyn. The oldest, however, of the New York tunnels counting from its origin is the "McAdoo" tunnel from Christopher Street, in Manhattan Borough, under the Hudson to Hoboken. This was begun in 1880 and continued at intervals as funds could be obtained until 1890, when the work was abandoned after about two thousand feet had been constructed. For a number of years the tunnel remained full of water until it was finally acquired by the Hudson Companies who completed and opened it to the public in 1908. Another tunnel to the foot of Cortlandt Street was constructed by the same concern and opened in 1909. Both tunnels consist of parallel but separate tubes. The railway tunnels to carry the Pennsylvania R. R. under the Hudson into New York and thence under the East River to Long Island have been finished and are great triumphs of engineering skill besides making New York the most perfectly equipped city in the world as far as transit is concerned. The greatest proposed subaqueous tunnel is that intended to connect England with France under the English Channel a distance of twenty-one miles. Time and again the British Parliament has rejected proposals through fear that such a tunnel would afford a ready means of invasion from a foreign enemy. However, it is almost sure to be built. Another projected British tunnel is one which will link Ireland and Scotland under the Irish Sea. If this is carried out then indeed the Emerald Isle will be one with Britain in spite of her unwillingness for such a close association. England already possesses a famous subaqueous tunnel in that known as the Severn tunnel under the river of that name. It is four and a half miles long, although it was built largely through rock. Water gave much trouble in its construction which occupied thirteen years from 1873 to 1886. Pumps were employed to raise the water through a side heading connecting with a shaft twenty-nine feet in diameter. The greatest amount of water raised concurrently was twenty-seven million gallons in twenty-four hours but the pumps had a capacity of sixty-six million gallons for the same time. The greatest tunnel in Europe is the Simplon which connects Switzerland with Italy under the Simplon Pass in the Alps. It has two bores twelve and one-fourth miles each and at places it is one and one-half miles below the surface. The St. Gothard also connecting Switzerland and Italy under the lofty peak of the Col de St. Gothard is nine and one-fourth miles in length. The third great Alpine tunnel, the Arlberg, which is six and one-half miles long, forms a part of the Austrian railway between Innsbruck and Bluedenz in the Tyrol and connects westward with the Swiss railroads and southward with those of Italy. Two great tunnels at the present time are being constructed in the United States, one of these which is piercing the backbone of the Rockies is on the Atlantic and Pacific railway. It begins near Georgetown, will pass under Gray's peak and come out near Decatur, Colorado, in all a length of twelve miles. The other American undertaking is a tunnel under the famous Pike's Peak in Colorado which when completed will be twenty miles long. It can clearly be seen that in the way of tunnel engineering Uncle Sam is not a whit behind his European competitors. CHAPTER X ELECTRICITY IN THE HOUSEHOLD Electrically Equipped Houses--Cooking by Electricity--Comforts and Conveniences. Science has now pressed the invisible wizard of electricity into doing almost every household duty from cleaning the windows to cooking the dinner. There are many houses now so thoroughly equipped with electricity from top to bottom that one servant is able to do what formerly required the service of several, and in some houses servants seem to be needed hardly at all, the mistresses doing their own cooking, ironing, and washing by means of electricity. In respect to taking advantage of electricity to perform the duties of the household our friends in Europe were ahead of us, though America is pre-eminently the land of electricity--the natal home of the science. We are waking up, however, to the domestic utility of this agent and throughout the country at present there are numbers of homes in which electricity is employed to perform almost every task automatically from feeding the baby to the crimping of my lady's hair in her scented boudoir. There is now no longer any use for chimneys on electrically equipped houses, for the fires have been eliminated and all heat and light drawn from the electric street mains. A description of one of these houses is most interesting as showing what really can be accomplished by this wonderful source of power. Before the visitor to such a house reaches the gate or front door his approach is made known by an annunciator in the hall, which is connected with a hidden plate in the entrance path, which when pressed by the feet of the visitor charges the wire of the annunciator. A voice comes through the horn of a phonograph asking him what he wishes and telling him to reply through the telephone which hangs at the side of the door. When he has made his wants known, if he is welcome or desired, there is a click and the door opens. As he enters an electrically operated door mat cleans his shoes and if he is aware of the equipments of the house, he can have his clothes brushed by an automatic brush attached to the hat-rack in the hall. An escalator or endless stairway brings him to the first floor where he is met by the host who conducts him to the den sacred to himself. If he wishes a preprandial cigar, the host touches a segment of the wall, apparently no different in appearance from the surrounding surface, and a complete cigar outfit shoots out to within reach of the guest. When the gong announces dinner he is conducted to the dining hall where probably the uses to which electricity can be put are better exemplified than in any other part of the house. Between this room and the kitchen there is a perfect electric understanding. The apartments are so arranged that electric dumbwaiter service is operated between the centre of the dining table itself and the serving table in the kitchen. The latter is equipped with an electric range provided with electrically heated ovens, broilers, vegetable cookers, saucepans, dishes, etc., sufficient for the preparation of the most elaborate house banquet. The chef or cook in charge of the kitchen prepares each dish in its proper oven and has it ready waiting on the electric elevator at the appointed time when the host and his guest or guests, or family, as the case may be, are seated at the dining table. The host or whoever presides at the head of the table merely touches a button concealed on the side of the mahogany and the elevator instantly appears through a trap-door in the table, which is ordinarily closed by two silver covers which look like a tray. In this way the dish seemingly miraculously appears right on top of the table. When each guest is served it returns to the kitchen by the way it came and a second course is brought on the table in a similar manner and so on until the dinner is fully served. Fruits and flowers tastefully arranged adorn the centre of the dining table and minute electric incandescent lamps of various colors are concealed in the roses and petals and these give a very pretty effect, especially at night. Beneath the table nothing is to be seen but two nickel-plated bars which serve to guide the elevators. Down in the kitchen the cooking is carried on almost mechanically by means of an electric clock controlling the heating circuits to the various utensils. The cook, knowing just how long each dish will require to be cooked, turns on the current at the proper time and then sets the clock to automatically disconnect that utensil when sufficient time, so many minutes to the pound, has elapsed. When this occurs a little electric bell rings, calling attention to the fact, that the heat has been shut off. Another kitchen accessory is a rotating table on which are mounted various household machines such as meat choppers, cream whippers, egg beaters and other apparatus all electrically operated. There is also an electric dishwasher and dryer and plate rack manipulator which places the dishes in position when clean and dried. The advantages of cooking by electricity are apparent to all who have tested them. Food cooked in an electric baking oven is much superior than when cooked by any other method because of the better heat regulation and the utter cleanliness, there being absolutely no dust whatever as in the case when coal is used. The electric oven does not increase the temperature nor does it exhaust the pure air in the room by burning up the oxygen. The time required for cooking is about the same as with coal. The perfect cleanliness of an electric plate warmer is sufficient to warrant its use. It keeps dishes at a uniform temperature and the food does not get scorched and become tough. Steaks prepared on electric gridirons and broilers are really delicious as they are evenly done throughout and retain all the natural juices of the meat; there is no odor of gas or of the fire and portions done to a crisp while others are raw on the inside. In toasting there is no danger of the bread burning on one side more than on the other, or of its burning on either side and a couple of dozen slices can be done together on an ordinary instrument at the same time. The electric diskstove, flat on the top, like a ball cut in two, can be also utilized as a toaster or for heating any kettles or pots or vessels with flat bottoms. Very appetizing waffles are made with electric waffle irons, because the bottom and top irons are uniformly heated, so that the irons cook the waffles from both sides at the same time. Electric potato peeling machines consist of a stationary cylinder opened at the top for the reception of the potatoes and having a revolving disk at the bottom. The cylinder has a rough surface or is coated with diamond flint, so that when the disk revolves the potatoes are thrown against the sides of the cylinder and the skin is scraped off. There is no deep cutting as when peeled by a knife, therefore, much waste is avoided. While the potatoes are being scraped, a stream of water plays upon them taking away the skins and thoroughly cleansing the tubers. Among other electric labor savers connected with the culinary department may be mentioned floor-scrubbers, dish-washers, coffee-grinders, meat choppers, dough-mixers and cutlery-polishers, all of which give complete satisfaction at a paltry cost and save much time and labor. A small motor can drive any of these instruments or several can be attached and run by the same motor. The operation of an ordinary snap switch will supply energy to electric water-heaters attached to the kitchen boiler or to the faucet. The instantaneous water heater also purifies the water by killing the bacteria contained in it. The electric tea kettle makes a brew to charm the heart of a connossieur. In fact all cooking done by electricity whether it is the frying of an egg or the roasting of a steak is superior in every way to the old methods and what accentuates its use is the cleanliness with which it can be performed. And it should be taken into consideration that in electric cooking there is no bending over hot stoves and ranges or a stuffy evil smelling smoky atmosphere, but on the contrary, fresh air, cleanliness and coolness which make cooking not the drudgery it has ever been, but a real pleasure. Let us take a glance at the laundry in the electrically equipped house. There is a large tub with a wringer attached to it and a simple mechanism by which a small motor can either be connected with the tub or the wringer as required. The washing is performed entirely by the motor and in a way prevents the wear and tear associated with the old method of scrubbing and rubbing done at the expense of much "elbow grease." The motor turns the tub back and forth and in this way the soapy water penetrates the clothes, thus removing the dirt without injuring or tearing the fabric. In the old way, the clothes were moved up and down in the water and torn and worn in the process. By the new way it is the water which moves while the clothes remain stationary. When the clothes are thoroughly washed, the motor is attached to the wringer and they are passed through it; they are completely dried by a specially constructed electric fan. Whatever garments are to be ironed are separated and fed to a steel roll mangle operated by a motor which gives them a beautiful finish. The electric flat iron plays also an important part in the laundry as it is clean and never gets too hot nor too cold and there is no rushing back to replenish the heaters. One is not obliged to remain in the room with a hot stove, and suffer the inconveniences. No heat is felt at all from the iron as it is all concentrated on the bottom surface. It is a regular blessing to the laundress especially in hot weather. There is a growing demand in all parts of the country for these electric flat-irons. Electricity plays an important role in the parlor and drawing-room. The electric fireplace throws out a ruddy glow, a perfect imitation of the wide-open old-fashioned fireplaces of the days of our grandmothers. There are small grooves at certain sections in the flooring over which chairs and couches can be brought to a desired position. When the master drops into his favorite chair by the fireplace if he wishes a tune to soothe his jangled nerves, there is an electric attachment to the piano and he can adjust it to get the air of his choice without having to ask any one to play for him. In the drawing-room an electric fountain may be playing, its jets reflecting the prismatic colors of the rainbow as the waters fall in iridescent sparkle among the lights. Such a fountain is composed of a small electric motor and a centrifugal pump, the latter being placed in the interior of a basin and connected directly to the motor shaft. The pump receives the water from the basin and conveys it through pipes and a number of small nozzles thus producing cascades. The water falling upon an art glass dome, beneath which are small incandescent lamps, returns to the basin and thence again to the pump. There is no necessity of filling the fountain until the water gets low through evaporation. When the lights are not in colored glass, the water may be colored and this gives the same effect. To produce the play of the fountain and its effects, it is only necessary to connect it to any circuit and turn on the switch. The dome revolves by means of a jet of water driven against flanges on the under side of the rim of the dome and in this way beautiful and prismatic effects are produced. The motor is noiseless in operation. In addition to the pretty effect the fountain serves to cool and moisten the air of the room. The sleeping chambers are thoroughly equipped. Not only the rooms may be heated by electricity but the beds themselves. An electric pad consisting of a flexible resistance covered with soft felt is connected by a conductor cord to a plug and is used for heating beds or if the occupant is suffering from rheumatism or indigestion or any intestinal pain this pad can be used in the place of the hot water bottle and gives greater satisfaction. There is a heat controlling device and the circuit can be turned on or off at will. There are many more curious devices in the electrically equipped house which could they have been exhibited a generation or so ago, would have condemned the owner as a sorcerer and necromancer of the dark ages, but which now only place him in the category of the smart ones who are up to date and take advantage of the science and progress of the time. CHAPTER XI HARNESSING THE WATER-FALL Electric Energy--High Pressure--Transformers--Development of Water-power. The electrical transmission of power is exemplified in everything which is based on the generation of electricity. The ordinary electric light is power coming from a generator in the building or a public street-dynamo. However, when we talk in general terms of electric transmission we mean the transmission of energy on a large scale by means of overhead or underground conductors to a considerable distance and the transformation of this energy into light and heat and chemical or mechanical power to carry on the processes of work and industry. When the power or energy is conveyed a long distance from the generator, say over 30 miles or more, we usually speak of the system of supply as long distance transmission of electric energy. In many cases power is conveyed over distances of 200 miles and more. When water power is available as at Niagara, the distance to which electric energy can be transmitted is considerably increased. The distance to a great extent depends on the cost of coal required for generation at the distributing point and on the amount of energy demanded at the receiving point. Of course the farther the distance the higher must be the voltage pressure. Electrical engineers say that under proper conditions electric energy may be transmitted in large quantity to a distance of 500 miles and more at a pressure of about 170,000 volts. If such right conditions be established then New York, Chicago and several other of our large cities can get their power from Niagara. In our cities and towns where the current has only to go a short distance from the power house, the conductors are generally placed in cables underground and the maximum electro-motive force scarcely ever exceeds 11,000 volts. This pressure is generated by a steam-driven alternating-current generator and is transmitted over the conductors to sub-stations, where by means of step-down transformers, the pressure is dropped to, say, 600 volts alternating current which by rotary converters is turned into direct current for the street mains, for feeders of railways and for charging storage batteries which in turn give out direct current at times of heavy demand. That electric transmission of energy to long distances may be successfully carried out transformers are necessary for raising the pressure on the transmission line and for reducing it at the points of distribution. The transformer consists of a magnetic circuit of laminated iron or mild steel interlinked with two electric circuits, one, the primary, receiving electrical energy and the other the secondary, delivering it to the consumer. The effect of the iron is to make as many as possible of the lines of force set up by the primary current, cut the secondary winding and there set up an electromotive force of the same frequency but different voltage. The transformer has made long distance the actual achievement that it is. It is this apparatus that brought the mountain to Mohammed. Without it high pressure would be impossible and it is on high pressure that success of long distance transmission depends. To convey electricity to distant centres at a low pressure would require thousands of dollars in copper cables alone as conductors. To illustrate the service of the transformer in electricity it is only necessary to consider water power at a low pressure. In such a case the water can only be transmitted at slow speed and through great openings, like dams or large canals, and withal the force is weak and of little practical efficiency, whereas under high pressure a small quantity can be forced through a small pipe and create an energy beyond comparison to that developed when under low pressure. The transformer raises the voltage and sends the electrical current under high pressure over a small wire and so great is this pressure that thousands of horse-power can be sent to great distances over small wires with very little loss. Water power is now changed to electrical power and transmitted over slender copper wires to the great manufacturing centres of our country to turn the wheels of industry and give employment to thousands. Nearly one hundred cities in the United States alone are today using electricity supplied by transmitted water-power. Ten years ago Niagara Falls were regarded only as a great natural curiosity of interest only to the sightseer, today those Falls distribute over 100,000 horse-power to Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Toronto and several smaller cities and towns. Wild Niagara has at last indeed been harnessed to the servitude of man. Spier Falls north of Saratoga, practically unheard of before, is now supplying electricity to the industrial communities of Schenectady, Troy, Amsterdam, Albany and half a dozen or so smaller towns. Rivers and dams, lakes and falls in all parts of the country are being utilized to supply energy, though at the present time only about one-fortieth of the horse-power available through this agent is being made productive. The water conditions of the United States are so favorable that 200,000,000 horse-power could be easily developed, but as it is we have barely enough harnessed to supply 5 million horse-power. Eighty per cent. of the power used at the present time is produced from fuel. This percentage is sure to decrease in the future for fuel will become scarcer and the high cost will drive fuel power altogether out of the market. New York State has the largest water power development in the Union, the total being 885,862 horsepower; this fact is chiefly owing to the energy developed by Niagara. The second State in water-power development is California, the total development being 466,774 horsepower over 1,070 wheels or a unit installation of about 436 H.P. The third State is Maine with 343,096 horse-power, over 2,707 wheels or an average of about 123 horse-power per wheel. Lack of space makes it impossible to enter upon a detailed description of the structural and mechanical features of the various plants and how they were operated for the purpose of turning water into an electric current. The best that can be done is to outline the most noteworthy features which typify the various situations under which power plants are developed and operated. The water power available under any condition depends principally upon two factors: First, the amount of fall or hydrostatic head on the wheels; second, the amount of water that can be turned over the wheels. The conditions vary according to place, there are all kinds of fall and flow. To develop a high power it is necessary to discharge a large volume of water upon properly designed wheels. In many of the western plants where only a small amount of water is available there is a great fall to make up for the larger volume in force coming down upon the wheels. So far as actual energy is concerned it makes no difference whether we develop a certain amount of power by allowing twenty cubic feet of water per second to fall a distance of one foot or allow one cubic foot of water per second to fall a distance of twenty feet. In one place we may have a plant developing say 10,000 horse-power with a fall of anywhere from twenty to forty feet and in another place a plant of the same capacity with a fall of 1,000, 1,500 or 2,000 feet. In the former case the short fall is compensated by a great volume of water to produce such a horse-power, while in the latter converse conditions prevail. In many cases the power house is located some distance from the source of supply and from the point where the water is diverted from its course by artificial means. The Shawinigan Falls of St. Maurice river in Canada occur at two points a short distance apart, the fall at one point being about 50 and at the other 100 feet high. A canal 1,000 feet long takes water from the river above the upper of these falls and delivers it near to the electric power house on the river bank below the lower falls. In this way a hydrostatic head of 125 feet is obtained at the power house. The canal in this case ends on high ground 130 feet from the power house and the water passes down to the wheels through steel penstocks 9 feet in diameter. In a great many cases in level country the water power can only be developed by means of such canals or pipe lines and the generating stations must be situated away from the points where the water is diverted from its course. In mountainous country where rivers are comparatively small and their courses are marked by numerous falls and rapids, it is generally necessary to utilize the fall of a stream through some miles of its length in order to get a satisfactory development of power. To reach this result rather long canals, flumes, or pipe lines must be laid to convey the water to the power stations and deliver it at high pressure. California offers numerous examples of electric power development with the water that has been carried several miles through artificial channels. An illustration of this class of work exists at the electric power house on the bank of the Mokelumne river in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Water is supplied to the wheels in this station under a head of 1,450 feet through pipes 3,600 feet long leading to the top of a near-by hill. To reach this hill the water after its diversion from the Mokelumne river at the dam, flows twenty miles through a canal or ditch and then through 3,000 feet of wooden stave pipe. Although California ranks second in water-power development it is easily the first in the number of its stations, and also be it said, California was the first to realize the possibilities of long distance electrical energy. The line from the 15,000 horsepower plant at Colgate in this State to San Francisco by way of Mission San Jose, where it is supplied with additional power, has a length of 232 miles and is the longest transmission of electrical energy in the world. The power house at Colgate has a capacity of 11,250 kilowatts in generators, but it is uncertain what part of the output is transmitted to San Francisco, as there are more than 100 substations on the 1,375 miles of circuit in this system. Another system, even greater than the foregoing which has just been completed is that of the Stanislaus plant in Tuolumme County, California, from which a transmission line on steel towers has been run in Tuolumme, Calaveras, San Joaquin, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties for the delivery of power to mines and to the towns lying about San Francisco Bay. The rushing riotous waters of the Stanislaus wasted for so many centuries have been saved by the steel paddles of gigantic turbine water wheels and converted into electricity which carries with the swiftness of thought thousands of horse power energy to the far away cities and towns to be transformed into light and heat and power to run street cars and trains and set in motion the mechanism of mills and factories and make the looms of industry hum with the bustle and activity of life. It is said that the greatest long distance transmission yet attempted will shortly be undertaken in South Africa where it is proposed to draw power from the famous Victoria Falls. The line from the Falls will run to Johannesburg and through the Rand, a length of 700 miles. It is claimed the Falls are capable of developing 300,000 electric horse power at all times. Should this undertaking be accomplished it will be a crowning achievement in electrical science. CHAPTER XII WONDERFUL WARSHIPS Dimensions, Displacements, Cost and Description of Battleships-- Capacity and Speed--Preparing for the Future. All modern battleships are of steel construction. The basis of all protection on these vessels is the protective deck, which is also common to the armored cruiser and many varieties of gunboats. This deck is of heavy steel covering the whole of the vessel a little above the water-line in the centre; it slopes down from the centre until it meets the sides of the vessel about three feet below the water; it extends the entire length of the ship and is firmly secured at the ends to the heavy stem and stern posts. Underneath this deck are the essentials of the vessel, the boilers and machinery, the magazines and shell rooms, the ammunition cells and all the explosive paraphernalia which must be vigilantly safe-guarded against the attacks of the enemy. Every precaution is taken to insure safety. All openings in the protective deck above are covered with heavy steel gratings to prevent fragments of shell or other combustible substances from getting through to the magazine or powder cells. The heaviest armor is usually placed at the water line because it is this part of the ship which is the most vulnerable and open to attack and where a shell or projectile would do the most harm. If a hole were torn in the side at this place the vessel would quickly take in water and sink. On this account the armor is made thick and is known as the water-line belt. At the point where the protective deck and the ship's side meet, there is a projection or ledge on which this armor belt rests. Thus it goes down about three feet below the water and it extends to the same distance above. The barbettes, that is, the parapets supporting the gun turrets, are one forward and one aft. They rest upon the protective deck at the bottom and extend up about four feet above the upper deck. At the top of the barbettes, revolving on rollers, are the turrets, sometimes called the hoods, containing the guns and the leading mechanism and all of the machinery in connection with the same. The turret ammunition hoists lead up from the magazine below, delivering the charges and projectiles for the guns at the very breach so that they can be loaded immediately. An athwartship line of armor runs from the water line to the barbettes, resting upon the protective deck. In fact, the space between the protective and upper deck is so closed in with armor, with a barbette at each end, that it is like a citadel or fort or some redoubt well-guarded from the enemy. Resting upon the water-belt and the athwartship or diagonal armor, and following the same direction is a layer of armor usually somewhat thinner which is called the lower case-mate armor; it extends up to the lower edge of the broadside gun ports, and resting upon it in turn is the upper case-mate armor, following the same direction, and forming the protection for the broadside battery. The explosive effect of the modern shell is so tremendous that were one to get through the upper case-mate and explode immediately after entering, it would undoubtedly disable several guns and kill their entire crews; it is, therefore, usual to isolate each broadside gun from its neighbors by light nickel steel bulkheads a couple of inches or so thick, and to prevent the same disastrous result among the guns on the opposite side, a fore-and-aft bulkhead of about the same thickness is placed on the centre line of the ship. Each gun of the broadside battery is thus mounted in a space by itself somewhat similar to a stall. Abaft the forward turret there is a vertical armored tube resting on the protective deck and at its upper end is the conning tower, from which the ship is worked when in action and which is well safe-guarded. The tube protects all the mechanical signalling gear running into the conning tower from which communication can be had instantly with any part of the vessel. To build a battleship that will be practically unsinkable by the gun fire of an enemy it is only necessary to make the water belt armor thick enough to resist the shells, missiles and projectiles aimed at it. There is another essential that is equally important, and that is the protection of the batteries. The experience of modern battles has made it manifest, that it is impossible for the crew to do their work when exposed to a hail of shot and shell from a modern battery of rapid fire and automatic guns. And so in all more recently built battleships and armored cruisers and gunboats, the protection of broadside batteries and exposed positions has been increased even at the expense of the water-line belt. Armor plate has been much improved in recent years. During the Civil War the armor on our monitors was only an inch thick. Through such an armor the projectiles of our time would penetrate as easily as a bullet through a pine board. It was the development of gun power and projectiles that called forth the thick armor, but it was soon found that it was impossible for the armor to keep pace with the deadliness of the guns as it was utterly impossible to carry the weight necessary to resist the force of impact. Then came the use of special plates, the compound armor where a hard face to break up the projectile was welded to a softer back to give the necessary strength. This was followed by the steel armor treated by the Harvey process; it was like the compound armor in having a hard face and a soft back, but the plates were made from a single ingot without any welding. The Harvey process enabled an enormously greater resistance to be obtained with a given weight of armor, but even it has been surpassed by the Krupp process which enables twelve inches of thickness to give the same resistance as fifteen of Harveyized plates. The armament or battery of warships is divided into two classes, viz., the main and the second batteries. The main battery comprises the heaviest guns on the ship, those firing large shell and armor-piercing projectiles, while the second battery consists of small rapid fire and machine guns for use against torpedo boats or to attack the unprotected or lightly protected gun positions of an enemy. The main battery of our modern battleships consists usually of ten twelve-inch guns, mounted in pairs on turrets in the centre of the ship. In addition to these heavy guns it is usual to mount a number of smaller ones of from five to eight inches diameter of bore on each broadside, although sometimes they are mounted on turrets like the larger guns. A twelve-inch breech-loading gun, fifty calibers long and weighing eighty-three tons, will propel a shell weighing eight hundred and eighty pounds, by a powder charge of six hundred and twenty-four pounds, at a velocity of over two thousand six hundred and twenty feet per second, giving an energy at the muzzle of over forty thousand foot-tons and is capable of penetrating at the muzzle, forty-five inches of iron. During the last few years, very large increases have been made in the dimensions, displacements and costs of battleships and armored cruisers as compared with vessels of similar classes previously constructed. Both England and the United States have constructed enormous war vessels within the past decade. The British _Dreadnought_ built in nineteen hundred and five has a draft of thirty-one feet six inches and a displacement of twenty-two thousand and two hundred tons. Later, vessels of the _Dreadnought_ type have a normal draft of twenty-seven feet and a naval displacement of eighteen thousand and six hundred tons. Armored cruisers of the British _Invincible_ class have a draft of twenty-six feet and a displacement of seventeen thousand two hundred and fifty tons with a thousand tons of coal on board. These cruisers have engines developing forty-one thousand horse-power. Within the past two years the United States has turned out a few formidable battleships, which it is claimed surpass the best of those of any other navy in the world. The _Delaware_ and _North Dakota_ each have a draft of twenty-six feet, eleven inches and a displacement of twenty thousand tons. Great interest attached to the trials of these vessels because they were sister ships fitted with different machinery and it was a matter of much speculation which would develop the greater speed. In addition to the consideration of the battleship as a fighting machine at close quarters, Uncle Sam is trying to have her as fleet as an ocean greyhound should an enemy heave in sight so that the latter would not have much opportunity to show his heels to a broadside. The _Delaware_, which has reciprocating engines, exceeded her contract speed of twenty-one knots on her runs over a measured mile course in Penobscot Bay on October 22 and 23, 1909. Three runs were made at the rate of nineteen knots, three at 20.50 knots, and five at 21.98 knots. The _North Dakota_ is furnished with Curtis turbine engines. Here is a comparison of the two ships: North Delaware Dakota Fastest run over measured mile......... 21.98 22.25 Average of five high runs.............. 21.44 21.83 Full power trial speed................. 21.56 21.64 Full power trial horsepower............ 28,600. 31,400. Full power trial, coal consumption, tons per day............ 578. 583. Nineteen-knot trial coal consumption, tons per day....... 315. 295. Twelve-knot trial coal consumption, tons per day.............111. 105. The _Florida_, a 21,825 ton boat, was launched from the Brooklyn Navy Yard last May 12. Her sister ship, the _Utah_, took water the previous December at Camden. Here is a comparison of the _North Dakota_ of 1908 and the _Florida_ of 1910: N. Dakota Florida Length 518 ft. 9 in. 521 ft. 6 in. Beam 85 ft. 2-1/2 in. 88 ft. 2-1/2 in. Draft, Mean 26 ft. 11 in. 28 ft. 6 in. Displacement 20,000 tons 21,825 tons Coal Supply 2,500 tons 2,500 tons Oil 400 tons 400 tons Belt Armor 12 in. to 8 in. 12 in. to 8 in. Turret Armor 12 inches 12 inches Battery armor 6 in. 6-1/2 in. Smoke stack protection 6 inches 9-1/2 inches l2-inch guns Ten Ten 5-inch guns Fourteen Sixteen Speed 21 knots 20.75 knots The _Florida_ has Parsons turbines working on four shafts and generates 28,000 horse-power. The United States Navy has planned to lay down next year (1911) two ships of 32,000 tons armed with l4-inch guns, each to cost eighteen million dollars as compared with the $11,000,000 ships of 1910. The following are to be some of the features of the projected ships, which are to be named the _Arkansas_ and _Wyoming_. 554 ft. long, 93 ft. 3 in. beam, 28 ft. 6 in. draft, 26,000 tons displacement, 28,000 horse-power, 30 1/2 knots speed, 1,650 to 2,500 tons coal supply, armament of twelve l2-inch guns, twenty-one 5-inch, four 3-pounders and two torpedo tubes. Fittings in recent United States battleships are for 21-inch torpedoes. The armor is to be 11 inch on belt and barbettes and on sides 8 inches, and each ship is to carry a complement of 1,115 officers and men. Two of the turrets will be set forward on the forecastle deck, which will have 28 feet, freeboard, the guns in the first turret being 34 feet above the water and those of the second about 40 feet. Aft of the second turret will be the conning tower, and then will come the fore fire-control tower or lattice mast, with searchlight towers carried on it. Next will come the forward funnel, on each side of which will be two small open rod towers with strong searchlights. Then will come the main fire-control tower and the after funnel and another open tower with searchlight. The two lattice steel towers are to be 120 feet high and 40 feet apart. The four remaining turrets will be abaft the main funnel, the third turret having its guns 32 feet above water; those in the other turrets about 25 feet above the water. The guns will be the new 50-calibre type. All twelve will have broadside fire over a wide arc and four can be fired right ahead and four right astern. CHAPTER XIII A TALK ON BIG GUNS The First Projectiles--Introduction of Cannon--High Pressure Guns--Machine Guns--Dimensions and Cost of Big Guns. The first arms and machines employing gunpowder as the propelling agency, came into use in the fourteenth century. Prior to this time there were machines and instruments which threw stones and catapults and large arrows by means of the reaction of a tightly twisted rope made up of hemp, catgut or hair. Slings were also much employed for hurling missiles. The first cannons were used by the English against the Scots in 1327. They were short and thick and wide in the bore and resembled bowls or mortars; in fact this name is still applied to this kind of ordnance. By the end of the fifteenth century a great advancement was shown in the make of these implements of warfare. Bronze and brass as materials came into general use and cannon were turned out with twenty to twenty-five inch bore weighing twenty tons and capable of hurling to a considerable distance projectiles weighing from two hundred pounds to one thousand pounds with powder as the propelling force. In a short time these large guns were mounted and carriages were introduced to facilitate transportation with troops. Meantime stone projectiles were replaced by cast iron shot, which, owing to its greater density, necessitated a reduction in calibre, that is a narrowing of the bore, consequently lighter and smaller guns came into the field, but with a greater propelling force. When the cast iron balls first came into use as projectiles, they weighed about twelve pounds, hence the cannons shooting them were known as twelve-pounders. It was soon found, however, that twelve pounds was too great a weight for long distances, so a reduction took place until the missiles were cut down to four pounds and the cannon discharging these, four pounders as they were called, weighed about one-quarter of a ton. They were very effective and handy for light field work. The eighteenth century witnessed rapid progress in gun and ammunition manufacture. "Grape" and "canister" were introduced and the names still cling to the present day. Grape consisted of a number of tarred lead balls, held together in a net. Canister consisted of a number of small shot in a tin can, the shots being dispersed by the breaking of the can on discharge. Grape now consists of cast iron balls arranged in three tiers by means of circular plates, the whole secured by a pin which passes through the centre. The number of shot in each tier varies from three to five. Grape is very destructive up to three hundred yards and effective up to six hundred yards. Canister shot as we know it at present, is made up of a number of iron balls, placed in a tin cylinder with a wooden bottom, the size of the piece of ordnance for which it is intended. Towards the close of the eighteenth century, short cast-iron guns called "carronades" were introduced by Gascoigne of the Cannon Iron Works, Scotland. They threw heavy shots at low velocity with great battery effect. They were for a long time in use in the British navy. The sailors called them "smashers." The entire battery of the Victory, Nelson's famous flag-ship at the battle of Trafalgar, amounting to a total of 102 guns, was composed of "carronades" varying in size from thirty-two to sixty-eight pounders. They were mounted on wooden truck carriages and were given elevation by handspikes applied under the breech, a quoin or a wedge shaped piece of wood being pushed in to hold the breech up in position. They were trained by handspikes with the aid of side-tackle and their recoil was limited by a stout rope, called the breeching, the ends of which were secured to the sides of the ship. The slow match was used for firing, the flint lock not being applied to naval guns until 1780. About the middle of the nineteenth century, the design of guns began to receive much scientific thought and consideration. The question of high velocities and flat trajectories without lightening the weight of the projectile was the desideratum; the minimum of weight in the cannon itself with the maximum in the projectile and the force with which it could be propelled were the ends to be attained. In 1856 Admiral Dahlgren of the United States Navy designed the _Dahlgren_ gun with shape proportioned to the "curve of pressure," which is to say that the gun was heavy at the breech and light at the muzzle. This gun was well adapted to naval use at the time. From this, onward, guns of high pressure were manufactured until the pressure grew to such proportions that it exceeded the resisting power, represented by the tensile strength of cast iron. When cast, the gun cooled from the outside inwardly, thus placing the inside metal in a state of tension and the outside in a state of compression. General Rodman, Chief of Ordnance of the United States Army, came forward with a remedy for this. He suggested the casting of guns hollow and the cooling of them from the inside outwardly by circulating a stream of cold water in the bore while the outside surface was kept at a high temperature. This method placed the metal inside in a state of compression and that on the outside in a state of tension, the right condition to withstand successfully the pressure of the powder gas, which tended to expand the inner portions beyond the normal diameter and throw the strain of the supporting outer layers. This system was universally employed and gave the best results obtainable from cast iron for many years and was only superseded by that of "built up" guns, when iron and steel were made available by improved processes of production. The great strides made in the manufacture and forging of steel during the past quarter of a century, the improved tempering and annealing processes have resulted in the turning out of big guns solely composed of steel. The various forms of modern ordnance are classified and named according to size and weight, kind of projectiles used and their velocities; angle of elevation at which they are fired; use; and mode of operation. The guns known as breechloading rifles are from three inches to fourteen inches in calibre, that is, across the bore, and in length from twelve to over sixty feet. They weigh from one ton to fifty tons. They fire solid shot or shells weighing up to eleven hundred pounds at high velocities, from twenty-three to twenty-five hundred feet per second. They can penetrate steel armor to a depth of fifteen to twenty inches at 2,000 yards distance. Rapid fire guns are those in which the operation of opening and closing the breech is performed by a single motion of a lever actuated by the hand, and in which the explosive used is closed in a metallic case. These guns are made in various forms and are operated by several different systems of breech mechanism generally named after their respective inventors. The Vickers-Maxim and the Nordenfeldt are the best known in America. A new type of the Vickers-Maxim was introduced in 1897 in which a quick working breech mechanism automatically ejects the primer and draws up the loading tray into position as the breech is opened. This type was quickly adopted by the United States Navy and materially increased the speed of fire in all calibres. What are known as machine guns are rapid fire guns in which the speed of firing is such that it is practically continuous. The best known make is the famous Gatling gun invented by Dr. R. J. Gatling of Indianapolis in 1860. This gun consists of ten parallel barrels grouped around and secured firmly to a main central shaft to which is also attached the grooved cartridge carrier and the lock cylinder. Each barrel is provided with its own lock or firing mechanism, independent of the other, but all of them revolve simultaneously with the barrels, carrier and inner breech when the gun is in operation. In firing, one end of the feed case containing the cartridges is placed in the hopper on top and the operating crank is turned. The cartridges drop one by one into the grooves of the carrier and are loaded and fired by the forward motion of the locks, which also closes the breech while the backward motion extracts and expels the empty shells. In its present state of efficiency the Gatling gun fires at the rate of 1,200 shots per minute, a speed, by separate discharges, not equaled by any other gun. Much larger guns were constructed in times past than are being built now. In 1880 the English made guns weighing from 100 to 120 tons, from 18 to 20 inches bore and which fired projectiles weighing over 2,000 pounds at a velocity of almost 1,700 feet per second. At the same time the United States fashioned a monster rifle of 127 tons which had a bore of sixteen inches and fired a projectile of 2,400 pounds with a velocity of 2,300 feet per second. The largest guns ever placed on board ship were the Armstrong one- hundred-and-ten-ton guns of the English battleships, _Sanspareil_, _Benbow_ and _Victoria_. They were sixteen and one-fourth inch calibre. The newest battleships of England, the _Dreadnought_ and the _Temeraire_, are equipped with fourteen-inch guns, but they are not one- half so heavy as the old guns. Many experts in naval ordnance think it a mistake to have guns over twelve inch bore, basing their belief on the experience of the past which showed that guns of a less calibre carrying smaller shells did more effective work than the big bore guns with larger projectiles. The two titanic war-vessels now in course of construction for the United States Navy will each carry a battery of ten fourteen-inch rifles, which will be the most powerful weapons ever constructed and will greatly exceed in range and hitting power the twelve-inch guns of the _Delaware_ or _North Dakota_. Each of the new rifles will weigh over sixty-three tons, the projectiles will each weigh 1,400 pounds and the powder charge will be 450 pounds. At the moment of discharge each of these guns will exert a muzzle energy of 65,600 foot tons, which simply means that the energy will be so great that it could raise 65,600 tons a foot from the ground. The fourteen-hundred-pound projectiles shall be propelled through the air at the rate of half a mile a second. It will be plainly seen that the metal of the guns must be of enormous resistance to withstand such a force. The designers have taken this into full consideration and will see to it that the powder chamber in which the explosion takes place as well as the breech lock on which the shock is exerted is of steel so wrought and tempered as to withstand the terrific strain. At the moment of detonation the shock will be about equal to that of a heavy engine and a train of Pullman coaches running at seventy miles an hour, smashing into a stone wall. On leaving the muzzle of the gun the shell will have an energy equivalent to that of a train of cars weighing 580 tons and running at sixty miles an hour. Such energy will be sufficient to send the projectile through twenty-two and a half inches of the hardest of steel armour at the muzzle, while at a range of 3,000 yards, the projectile moving at the rate of 2,235 feet per second will pierce eighteen and a half inches of steel armor at normal impact. The velocity of the projectile leaving the gun will be 2,600 feet per second, a speed which if maintained would carry it around the world in less than fifteen hours. Each of the mammoth guns will be a trifle over fifty-three feet in length and the estimated cost of each will be $85,000. Judging from the performance of the twelve-inch guns it is figured that these greater weapons should be able to deliver three shots a minute. If all ten guns of either of the projected _Dreadnoughts_ should be brought into action at one time and maintain the three shot rapidity for one hour, the cost of the ammunition expended in that hour would reach the enormous sum of $2,520,000. Very few, however, of the big guns are called upon for the three shots a minute rate, for the metal would not stand the heating strain. The big guns are expensive and even when only moderately used their "life" is short, therefore, care is taken not to put them to too great a strain. With the smaller guns it is different. Some of six-inch bore fire as high as eight aimed shots a minute, but this is only under ideal conditions. Great care is being taken now to prolong the "life" of the big guns by using non-corrosive material for the charges. The United States has adopted a pure gun-cotton smokeless powder in which the temperature of combustion is not only lower than that of nitro-glycerine, but even lower than that of ordinary gunpowder. With the use of this there has been a very material decrease in the corrosion of the big guns. The former smokeless powder, containing a large percentage of nitro-glycerine such as "cordite," produced such an effect that the guns were used up and practically worthless, after firing fifty to sixty rounds. Now it is possible for a gun to be as good after two or even three hundred rounds as at the beginning, but certainly not if a three minute rate is maintained. At such a rate the "life" of the best gun made would be short indeed. CHAPTER XV MYSTERY OF THE STARS Wonders of the Universe--Star Photography--The Infinity of Space. In another chapter we have lightly touched upon the greatness of the Universe, in the cosmos of which our earth is but an infinitesimal speck. Even our sun, round which a system of worlds revolve and which appears so mighty and majestic to us, is but an atom, a very small one, in the infinitude of matter and as a cog, would not be missed in the ratchet wheel which fits into the grand machinery of Nature. If our entire solar system were wiped out of being, there would be left no noticeable void among the countless systems of worlds and suns and stars; in the immensity of space the sun with all his revolving planets is not even as a drop to the ocean or a grain of sand to the composition of the earth. There are millions of other suns of larger dimensions with larger attendants wheeling around them in the illimitable fields of space. Those stars which we erroneously call "fixed" stars are the centers of other systems vastly greater, vastly grander than the one of which our earth forms so insignificant a part. Of course to us numbers of them appear, even when viewed through the most powerful telescopes, only as mere luminous points, but that is owing to the immensity of distance between them and ourselves. But the number that is visible to us even with instrumental assistance can have no comparison with the number that we cannot see; there is no limit to that number; away in what to us may be called the background of space are millions, billions, uncountable myriads of invisible suns regulating and illuminating countless systems of invisible worlds. And beyond those invisible suns and worlds is a region which thought cannot measure and numbers cannot span. The finite mind of man becomes dazed, dumbfounded in contemplation of magnitude so great and distance so amazing. We stand not bewildered but lost before the problem of interstellar space. Its length, breadth, height and circumference are illimitable, boundless; the great eternal cosmos without beginning and without end. In order to get some idea of the vastness of interstellar space we may consider a few distances within the limits of human conception. We know that light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, yet it requires light over four years to reach us from the nearest of the fixed stars, travelling at this almost inconceivable rate, and so far away are some that their light travelling at the same rate from the dawn of creation has never reached us yet or never will until our little globule of matter disintegrates and its particles, its molecules and corpuscles, float away in the boundless ether to amalgamate with the matter of other flying worlds and suns and stars. The nearest to us of all the stars is that known as _Alpha Centauri_. Its distance is computed at 25,000,000,000,000 miles, which in our notation reads twenty-five trillion miles. It takes light over four years to traverse this distance. It would take the "Empire State Express," never stopping night or day and going at the rate of a mile a minute, almost 50,000,000 years to travel from the earth to this star. The next of the fixed stars and the brightest in all the heavens is that which we call _Sirius_ or the Dog Star. It is double the distance of Alpha Centauri, that is, it is eight "light years" away. The distances of about seventy other stars have been ascertained ranging up to seventy or eighty "light years" away, but of the others visible to the naked eye they are too far distant to come within the range of trigonometrical calculation. They are out of reach of the mathematical eye in the depth of space. But we know for certain that the distance of none of these visible stars, without a measurable parallax, is less than four million times the distance of our sun from the earth. It would be useless to express this in figures as it would be altogether incomprehensible. What then can be said of the telescopic stars, not to speak at all of those beyond the power of instruments to determine. If a railroad could be constructed to the nearest star and the fare made one cent a mile, a single passage would cost $250,000,000,000, that is two hundred and fifty billion dollars, which would make a 94-foot cube of pure gold. All of the coined gold in the world amounts to but $4,000,000,000 (four billion dollars), equal to a gold cube of 24 feet. Therefore it would take sixty times the world's stock of gold to pay the fare of one passenger, at a cent a mile from the earth to Alpha Centauri. The light from numbers, probably countless numbers, of stars is so long in coming to us that they could be blotted out of existence and we would remain unconscious of the fact for years, for hundreds of years, for thousands of years, nay to infinity. Thus if _Sirius_ were to collide with some other space traveler and be knocked into smithereens as an Irishman would say, we would not know about it for eight years. In fact if all the stars were blotted out and only the sun left we should still behold their light in the heavens and be unconscious of the extinction of even some of the naked-eye stars for sixty or seventy years. It is vain to pursue farther the unthinkable vastness of the visible Universe; as for the invisible it is equally useless for even imagination to try to grapple with its never-ending immensity, to endeavor to penetrate its awful clouded mystery forever veiled from human view. In all there are about 3,000 stars visible to the naked eye in each hemisphere. A three-inch pocket telescope brings about one million into view. The grand and scientifically perfected instruments of our great observatories show incalculable multitudes. Every improvement in light-grasping power brings millions of new stars into the range of instrumental vision and shows the "background" of the sky blazing with the light of eye-invisible suns too far away to be separately distinguished. Great strides are daily being made in stellar photography. Plates are now being attached to the telescopic apparatus whereby luminous heavenly bodies are able to impress their own pictures. Groups of stars are being photographed on one plate. Complete sets of these star photographs are being taken every year, embracing every nook and corner of the celestial sphere and these are carefully compared with one another to find out what changes are going on in the heavens. It will not be long before every star photographically visible to the most powerful telescope will have its present position accurately defined on these photographic charts. When, the sensitized plate is exposed for a considerable time even invisible stars photograph themselves, and in this way a great number of stars have been discovered which no telescope, however powerful, can bring within the range of vision. Tens of thousands of stars have registered themselves thus on a single plate, and on one occasion an impression was obtained on one plate of more than 400,000. Astronomers are of the opinion that for every star visible to the naked eye there are more than 50,000 visible to the camera of the telescope. If this is so, then the number of visible stars exceeds 300,000,000 (three hundred millions). But the picture taking power of the finest photographic lens has a limit; no matter how long the exposure, it cannot penetrate beyond a certain boundary into the vastness of space, and beyond its limits as George Sterling, the Californian poet, says are-- "fires of unrecorded suns That light a heaven not our own." What is the limit? Answer philosopher, answer sage, answer astronomer, and we have the solution of "the riddle of the Universe." As yet the riddle still remains, the veil still hangs between the knowable and the unknowable, between the finite and the infinite. Science stands baffled like a wailing creature outside the walls of knowledge importuning for admission. There is little, in truth no hope at all, that she will ever be allowed to enter, survey all the fields of space and set a limit to their boundaries. Although the riddle of the universe still remains unsolved because unsolvable, no one can deny that Astronomy has made mighty strides forward during the past few years. What has been termed the "Old Astronomy," which concerns itself with the determination of the positions and motions of the heavenly bodies, has been rejuvenated and an immense amount of work has been accomplished by concerted effort, as well as by individual exertions. The greatest achievements have been the accurate determination of the positions of the fixed stars visible to the eye. Their situation is now estimated with as unerring precision as is that of the planets of our own system. Millions upon millions of stars have been photographed and these photographs will be invaluable in determining the future changes and motions of these giant suns of interstellar space. Of our own system we now know definitely the laws governing it. Fifty years ago much of our solar machinery was misunderstood and many things were enveloped in mystery which since has been made very plain. The spectroscope has had a wonderful part in astronomical research. It first revealed the nature of the gases existing in the sun. It next enabled us to study the prominences on any clear day. Then by using it in the spectro-heliograph we have been enabled to photograph the entire visible surface of the sun, together with the prominences at one time. Through the spectro-heliograph we know much more about what the central body of our system is doing than our theories can explain. Fresh observations are continually bringing to light new facts which must soon be accounted for by laws at present unknown. Spectroscopic observations are by no means confined to the sun. By them we now study the composition of the atmospheres of the other planets; through them the presence of chemical elements known on the earth is detected in vagrant comets, far-distant stars and dimly-shining nebulae. The spectroscope also makes it possible to measure the velocities of objects which are approaching or receding from us. For instance we know positively that the bright star called Aldebaran near the constellation of the Pleiades is retreating from us at a rate of almost two thousand miles a minute. The greatest telescopes in the world are now being trained on stars that are rushing away towards the "furthermost" of space and in this way astronomers are trying to get definite knowledge as to the actual velocity with which the celestial bodies are speeding. It is only within the past few years that photography has been applied to astronomical development. In this connection, more accurate results are obtained by measuring the photographs of stellar spectra than by measuring the spectra themselves. Photography with modern rapid plates gives us, with a given telescope, pictures of objects so faint that no visual telescope of the same size will reveal them. It is in this way that many of the invisible stars have impressed themselves upon exposed plates and given us a vague idea of the immensity in number of those stars which we cannot view with eye or instrument. Though we have made great advancement, there are many problems yet even in regard to our own little system of sun worlds which clamor loudly for solution. The sun himself represents a crowd of pending problems. His peculiar mode of rotation; the level of sunspots; the constitution of the photospheric cloud-shell, its relation to faculae which rise from it, and to the surmounting vaporous strata; the nature of the prominences; the alternations of coronal types; the affinities of the zodiacal light--all await investigation. A great telescope has recently shown that one star in eighteen on the average is a visual double--is composed of two suns in slow revolution around their common center of mass. The spectroscope using the photographic plate, has established within the last decade that one star in every five or six on the average is attended by a companion so near to it as to remain invisible in the most powerful telescopes, and so massive as to swing the visible star around in an elliptic orbit. The photography of comets, nebulae and solar coronas has made the study of these phenomena incomparably more effective than the old visual methods. There is no longer any necessity to make "drawings" of them. The old dread of comets has been relegated into the shade of ignorance. The long switching tails regarded so ominously and from which were anticipated such dire calamities as the destruction of worlds into chaos have been proven to be composed of gaseous vapors of no more solidity than the "airy nothingness of dreams." The earth in the circle of its orbit passed through the tail of Halley's comet in May, 1910, and we hadn't even a pyrotechnical display of fire rockets to celebrate the occasion. In fact there was not a single celestial indication of the passage and we would not have known only for the calculations of the astronomer. The passing of a comet now, as far as fear is concerned, means no more, in fact not as much, as the passing of an automobile. Science no doubt has made wonderful strides in our time, but far as it has gone, it has but opened for us the first few pages of the book of the heavens--the last pages of which no man shall ever read. For aeons upon aeons of time, worlds and suns, and systems of worlds and suns, revolved through the infinity of space, before man made his appearance on the tiny molecule of matter we call the earth, and for aeons upon aeons, for eternity upon eternity, worlds and suns shall continue to roll and revolve after the last vestige of man shall have disappeared, nay after the atoms of earth and sun and all his attending planets of our system shall have amalgamated themselves with other systems in the boundlessness of space; destroyed, obliterated, annihilated, they shall never be, for matter is indestructible. When it passes from one form it enters another; the dead animal that is cast into the earth lives again in the trees and shrubs and flowers and grasses that grow in the earth above where its body was cast. Our earth shall die in course of time, that is, its particles will pass into other compositions and it will be so of the other planets, of the suns, of the stars themselves, for as soon as the old ones die there will ever be new forms to which to attach themselves and thus the process of world development shall go on forever. The nebulae which astronomers discover throughout the stellar space are extended masses of glowing gases of different forms and are worlds in process of formation. Such was the earth once. These gases solidify and contract and cool off until finally an inhabited world, inhabited by some kind of creatures, takes its place in the whirling galaxy of systems. The stars which appear to us in a yellow or whitish yellow light are in the heyday of their existence, while those that present a red haze are almost burnt out and will soon become blackened, dead things disintegrating and crumbling and spreading their particles throughout space. It is supposed this little earth of ours has a few more million years to live, so we need not fear for our personal safety while in mortal form. To us ordinary mortals the mystery as well as the majesty of the heavens have the same wonderful attraction as they had for the first of our race. Thousands of years ago the black-bearded shepherds of Eastern lands gazed nightly into the vaulted dome and were struck with awe as well as wonder in the contemplation of the glittering specks which appeared no larger than the pebbles beneath their feet. We in our time as we gaze with unaided eye up at the mighty disk of the so called Milky Way, no longer regard the scintillating points glittering like diamonds in a jeweler's show-case, with feelings of awe, but the wonder is still upon us, wonder at the immensity of the works of Him who built the earth and sky, who, "throned in height sublime, sits amid the cherubim," King of the Universe, King of kings and Lord of lords. With a deep faith we look up and adore, then reverently exclaim,--"Lord, God! wonderful are the works of Thy Hands." CHAPTER XVI CAN WE COMMUNICATE WITH OTHER WORLDS? Vastness of Nature--Star Distances--Problem of Communicating with Mars--The Great Beyond. A story is told of a young lady who had just graduated from boarding school with high honors. Coming home in great glee, she cast her books aside as she announced to her friends;--"Thank goodness it is all over, I have nothing more to learn. I know Latin and Greek, French and German, Spanish and Italian; I have gone through Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Conic Sections and the Calculus; I can interpret Beethoven and Wagner, and--but why enumerate?--in short, '_I know everything_.'" As she was thus proclaiming her knowledge her hoary-headed grandfather, a man whom the Universities of the world had honored by affixing a score of alphabetical letters to his name, was experimenting in his laboratory. The lines of long and deep study had corrugated his brow and furrowed his face. Wearily he bent over his retorts and test tubes. At length he turned away with a heavy sigh, threw up his hands and despairingly exclaimed,--"Alas, alas! after fifty years of study and investigation, I find _I know nothing_." There is a moral in this story that he who runs may read. Most of us are like the young lady,--in the pride of our ignorance, we fancy we know almost everything. We boast of the progress of our time, of what has been accomplished in our modern world, we proclaim our triumphs from the hilltops,--"Ha!" we shout, "we have annihilated time and distance; we have conquered the forces of nature and made them subservient to our will; we have chained the lightning and imprisoned the thunder; we have wandered through the fields of space and measured the dimensions and revolutions of stars and suns and planets and systems. We have opened the eternal gates of knowledge for all to enter and crowned man king of the universe." Vain boasting! The gates of knowledge have been opened, but we have merely got a peep at what lies within. And man, so far from being king of the universe, is but as a speck on the fly-wheel that controls the mighty machinery of creation. What we know is infinitesimal to what we do not know. We have delved in the fields of science, but as yet our ploughshares have merely scratched the tiniest portion of the surface,--the furrow that lies in the distance is unending. In the infinite book of knowledge we have just turned over a few of the first pages; but as it is infinite, alas! we can never hope to reach the final page, for there is no final page. What we have accomplished is but as a mere drop in the ocean, whose waves wash the continents of eternity. No scholar, no scientist can bound those continents, can tell the limits to which they stretch, inasmuch as they are illimitable. Ask the most learned _savant_ if he can fix the boundaries of space, and he will answer,--No! Ask him if he can define _mind_ and _matter_, and you will receive the same answer. "What is mind? It is no matter." "What is matter? Never mind." The atom formerly thought to be indivisible and the smallest particle of matter has been reduced to molecules, corpuscles, ions, and electrons; but the nature, the primal cause of these, the greatest scientists on earth are unable to determine. Learning is as helpless as ignorance when brought up against this stone-wall of mystery. _The effect_ is seen, but the _cause_ remains indeterminable. The scientist, gray-haired in experience and experiment, knows no more in this regard than the prattling child at its mother's knee. The child asks,--"Who made the world?" and the mother answers, "God made the world." The infant mind, suggestive of the future craving for knowledge, immediately asks,--"Who is God?" Question of questions to which the philosopher and the peasant must give the same answer,--"God is the infinite, the eternal, the source of all things, the _alpha_ and _omega_ of creation, from Him all came, to Him all must return." He is the beginning of Science, the foundation on which our edifice of knowledge rests. We hear of the conflict between Science and Religion. There is no conflict, can be none, for all Science must be based on faith,--faith in Him who holds worlds and suns "in the hollow of His hand." All our great scientists have been deeply religious men, acknowledging their own insignificance before Him who fills the universe with His presence. What is the universe and what place do we hold in it? The mind of man becomes appalled in consideration of the question. The orb we know as the sun is centre of a system of worlds of which our earth is almost the most insignificant; yet great as is the sun when compared to the little bit of matter on which we dwell and have our being, it is itself but a mote, as it were, in the beam of the Universe. Formerly this sun was thought to be fixed and immovable, but the progress of science demonstrated that while the earth moves around this luminary, the latter is moving with mighty velocity in an orbit of its own. Tis the same with all the other bodies which we erroneously call "fixed stars." These stars are the suns of other systems of worlds, countless systems, all rushing through the immensity of space, for there is nothing fixed or stationary in creation,--all is movement, constant, unvarying. Suns and stars and systems perform their revolutions with unerring precision, each unit-world true to its own course, thus proving to the soul of reason and the consciousness of faith that there must needs be an omnipotent hand at the lever of this grand machinery of the universe, the hand that fashioned it, that of God. Addison beautifully expresses the idea in referring to the revolutions of the stars: "In reason's ear they all rejoice, And utter forth one glorious voice, Forever singing as they shine- 'The Hand that made us is Divine.'" Our sun, the centre of the small system of worlds of which the earth is one, is distant from us about ninety-three million miles. In winter it is nearer; in summer farther off. Light travels this distance in about eight minutes, to be exact, the rate is 186,400 miles per second. To get an idea of the immensity of the distance of the so-called fixed stars, let us take this as a base of comparison. The nearest fixed star to us is _Alpha Centauri_, which is one of the brightest as seen in the southern heavens. It requires four and one-quarter years for a beam of light to travel from this star to earth at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, thus showing that Alpha Centauri is about two hundred and seventy-five thousand times as far from us as is the sun, in other words, more than 25,575,000,000,000 miles, which, expressed in our notation, reads twenty-five trillion, five hundred and seventy- five billion miles, a number which the mind of man is incapable of grasping. To use the old familiar illustration of the express train, it would take the "Twentieth Century Limited," which does the thousand mile trip between New York and Chicago in less than twenty-four hours, some one million two hundred and fifty thousand years at the same speed to travel from the earth to _Alpha Centauri_. _Sirius_, the Dog-Star, is twice as far away, something like eight or nine "light" years from our solar system; the Pole-Star is forty-eight "light" years removed from us, and so on with the rest, to an infinity of numbers. From the dawn of creation in the eternal cosmos of matter, light has been travelling from some stars in the infinitude of space at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, but so remote are they from our system that it has not reached us as yet. The contemplation is bewildering; the mind sinks into nothingness in consideration of a magnitude so great and distance so confusing. What lies beyond?--a region which numbers cannot measure and thought cannot span, and beyond that?--the eternal answer,--GOD. In face of the contemplation of the vastness of creation, of its boundlessness the question ever obtrudes itself,--What place have we mortals in the universal cosmos? What place have we finite creatures, who inhabit this speck of matter we call the earth, in this mighty scheme of suns and systems and never-ending space. Does the Creator of all think us the most important of his works, that we should be the particular objects of revelation, that for us especially heaven was built, and a God-man, the Son of the Eternal, came down to take flesh of our flesh and live among us, to show us the way, and finally to offer himself as a victim to the Father to expiate our transgressions. Mystery of mysteries before which we stand appalled and lost in wonder. Self-styled rationalists love to point out the irrationality and absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all the unimaginable vastness of suns and systems, filling for all we know endless space, should take any special interest in so mean and pitiful a creature as man, inhabiting such an infinitesimal speck of matter as the earth, which depends for its very life and light upon a second or third-rate or hundred-rate Sun. From the earliest times of our era, the sneers and taunts of atheism and agnosticism have been directed at the humble believer, who bows down in submission and questions not. The fathers of the Church, such as Augustine and Chrysostom and Thomas of Aquinas and, at a later time, Luther, and Calvin, and Knox, and Newman, despite the war of creeds, have attacked the citadel of the scoffers; but still the latter hurl their javelins from the ramparts, battlements and parapets and refuse to be repulsed. If there are myriads of other worlds, thousands, millions of them in point of magnitude greater than ours, what concern say they has the Creator with our little atom of matter? Are other worlds inhabited besides our own. This is the question that will not down--that is always begging for an answer. The most learned savants of modern time, scholars, sages, philosophers and scientists have given it their attention, but as yet no one has been able to conclusively decide whether a race of intelligent beings exists in any sphere other than our own. All efforts to determine the matter result in mere surmise, conjecture and guesswork. The best of scientists can only put forward an opinion. Professor Simon Newcomb, one of the most brilliant minds our country has produced, says: "It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that beings, not only animated but endowed with reason, inhabit countless worlds in space." Professor Mitchell of the Cincinnati Observatory, in his work, "Popular Astronomy," says,--"It is most incredible to assert, as so many do, that our planet, so small and insignificant in its proportions when compared with the planets with which it is allied, is the only world in the whole universe filled with sentient, rational, and intelligent beings capable of comprehending the grand mysteries of the physical universe." Camille Flammarion, in referring to the utter insignificance of the earth in the immensity of space, puts forward his view thus: "If advancing with the velocity of light we could traverse from century to century the unlimited number of suns and spheres without ever meeting any limit to the prodigious immensity where God brings forth his worlds, and looking behind, knowing not in what part of the infinite was the little grain of dust called the earth, we would be compelled to unite our voices with that universal nature and exclaim--'Almighty God, how senseless were we to believe that there was nothing beyond the earth and that our abode alone possessed the privilege of reflecting Thy greatness and honor.'" The most distinguished astronomers and scientists of a past time, as well as many of the most famous divines, supported the contention of world life beyond the earth. Among these may be mentioned Kepler and Tycho, Giordano Bruno and Cardinal Cusa, Sir William and Sir John Herschel, Dr. Bentley and Dr. Chalmers, and even Newton himself subscribed in great measure to the belief that the planets and stars are inhabited by intelligent beings. Those who deny the possibility of other worlds being inhabited, endeavor to show that our position in the universe is unique, that our solar system is quite different from all others, and, to crown the argument, they assert that our little world has just the right amount of water, air, and gravitational force to enable it to be the abode of intelligent life, whereas elsewhere, such conditions do not prevail, and that on no other sphere can such physical habitudes be found as will enable life to originate or to exist. It can be easily shown that such reasoning is based on untenable foundations. Other worlds have to go through processes of evolution, and there can be no doubt that many are in a state similar to our own. It required hundreds of thousands, perhaps hundreds of millions of years, before this earth was fit to sustain human life. The same transitions which took place on earth are taking place in other planets of our system, and other systems, and it is but reasonable to assume that in other systems there are much older worlds than the earth, and that these have arrived at a more developed state of existence, and therefore have a life much higher than our own. As far as physical conditions are concerned, there are suns similar to our own, as revealed by the spectroscope, and which have the same eruptive energy. Astronomical Science has incontrovertibly demonstrated, and evidence is continually increasing to show that dark, opaque worlds like ours exist and revolve around their primaries. Why should not these worlds be inhabited by a race equal or even superior in intelligence to ourselves, according to their place in the cosmos of creation? Leaving out of the question the outlying worlds of space, let us come to a consideration of the nearest celestial neighbor we have in our own system, the planet Mars: Is there rational life on Mars and if so can we communicate with the inhabitants? Though little more than half the earth's size, Mars has a significance in the public eye which places it first in importance among the planets. It is our nearest neighbor on the outer side of the earth's path around the Sun and, viewed through a telescope of good magnifying power, shows surface markings, suggestive of continents, mountains, valleys, oceans, seas and rivers, and all the varying phenomena which the mind associates with a world like unto our own. Indeed, it possesses so many features in common with the earth, that it is impossible to resist the conception of its being inhabitated. This, however, is not tantamount to saying that if there is a race of beings on Mars they are the same as we on Earth. By no means. Whatever atmosphere exists on Mars must be much thinner than ours and far too rare to sustain the life of a people with our limited lung capacity. A race with immense chests could live under such conditions, and folk with gills like fish could pass a comfortable existence in the rarefied air. Besides the tenuity of the atmosphere, there are other conditions which would cause life to be much different on Mars. Attraction and gravitation are altogether different. The force with which a substance is attracted to the surface of Mars is only a little more than one-third as strong as on the earth. For instance one hundred pounds on Earth would weigh only about thirty-eight pounds on Mars. A man who could jump five feet here could clear fifteen feet on Mars. Paradoxical as it may seem, the smaller a planet, in comparison with ours and consequently the less the pull of gravity at its centre, the greater is the probability that its inhabitants, if any, are giants when compared with us. Professor Lowell has pointed out that to place the Martians (if there are such beings) under the same conditions as those in which we exist, the average inhabitant must be considered to be three times as large and three times as heavy as the average human being; and the strength of the Martians must exceed ours to even a greater extent than the bulk and weight; for their muscles would be twenty-seven times more effective. In fact, one Martian could do the work of fifty or sixty men. It is idle, however, to speculate as to what the forms of life are like on Mars, for if there are any such forms our ideas and conceptions of them must be imaginary, as we cannot see them on Mars we do not know. There is yet no possibility of seeing anything on the planet less than thirty miles across, and even a city of that size, viewed through the most powerful telescope, would only be visible as a minute speck. Great as is the perfection to which our optical instruments have been brought, they have revealed nothing on the planet save the so-called canals, to indicate the presence of sentient rational beings. The canals discovered by Schiaparelli of the Milan Observatory in 1877 are so regular, outlined with such remarkable geometrical precision, that it is claimed they must be artificial and the work of a high order of intelligence. "The evidence of such work," says Professor Lowell, "points to a highly intelligent mind behind it." Can this intelligence in any way reach us, or can we express ourselves to it? Can the chasm of space which lies between the Earth and Mars be bridged--a chasm which, at the shortest, is more than thirty-five million miles across or one hundred and fifty times greater than the distance between the earth and the moon? Can the inhabitants of the Earth and Mars exchange signals? To answer the question, let us institute some comparisons. Suppose the fabled "Man in the Moon" were a real personage, we would require a telescope 800 times more powerful than the finest instrument we now have to see him, for the space penetrating power of the best telescope is not more than 300 miles and the moon is 240,000 miles distant. An object to be visible on the moon would require to be as large as the Metropolitan Insurance Building in New York, which is over 700 feet high. To see, therefore, an object on Mars by means of the telescope the object would need to have dimensions one hundred and fifty times as great as the object on the moon; in other words, before we could see a building on Mars, it would have to be one hundred and fifty times the size of the Metropolitan Building. Even if there are inhabitants there, it is not likely they have such large buildings. Assuming that there _are_ Martians, and that they are desirous of communicating with the earth by waving a flag, such a flag in order to be seen through the most powerful telescopes and when Mars is nearest, would have to be 300 miles long and 200 miles wide and be flung from a flagpole 500 miles high. The consideration of such a signal only belongs to the domain of the imagination. As an illustration, it should conclusively settle the question of the possibility or rather impossibility of signalling between the two planets. Let us suppose that the signalling power of wireless telegraphy had been advanced to such perfection that it was possible to transmit a signal across a distance of 8,000 miles, equal to the diameter of the earth, or 1-30 the distance to the moon. Now, in order to be appreciable at the moon it would require the intensity of the 8,000 mile ether waves to be raised not merely 30 times, but 30 times 30, for to use the ordinary expression, the intensity of an effect spreading in all directions like the ether waves, decreases inversely as the square of the distance. If the whole earth were brought within the domain of wireless telegraphy, the system would still have to be improved 900 times as much again before the moon could be brought within the sphere of its influence. A wireless telegraphic signal, transmitted across a distance equal to the diameter of the earth, would be reduced to a mere sixteen-millionth part if it had to travel over the distance to Mars; in other words, if wireless telegraphy attained the utmost excellence now hoped for it--that is, of being able to girdle the earth--it would have to be increased a thousandfold and then a thousandfold again, and finally multiplied by 16, before an appreciable _signal_ could be transmitted to Mars. This seems like drawing the long bow, but it is a scientific truth. There is no doubt that ether waves can and do traverse the distance between the Earth and Mars, for the fact that sunlight reaches Mars and is reflected back to us proves this; but the source of waves adequate to accomplish such a feat must be on such a scale as to be hopelessly beyond the power of man to initiate or control. Electrical signalling to Mars is much more out of the question than wireless. Even though electrical phenomena produced in any one place were sufficiently intense to be appreciable by suitable instruments all over the earth, that intensity would have to be enhanced another sixteen million-fold before they would be appreciable on the planet Mars. It is absolutely hopeless to try to span the bridge that lies between us and Mars by any methods known to present day science. Yet men styling themselves scientists say it can be done and will be done. This is a prophecy, however, which must lie in the future. As has been pointed out, we have as yet but scratched the outer surface in the fields of knowledge. What visions may not be opened to the eyes of men, as they go down deeper and deeper into the soil. Secrets will be exhumed undreamt of now, mysteries will be laid bare to the light of day, and perhaps the psychic riddle of life itself may be solved. Then indeed, Mars may come to be looked on as a next-door neighbor, with whose life and actions we are as well acquainted as with our own. The thirty-five million miles that separate him from us may be regarded as a mere step in space and the most distant planets of our system as but a little journey afield. Distant Uranus may be looked upon as no farther away than is, say, Australia from America at the present time. It is vain, however, to indulge in these premises. The veil of mystery still hangs between us and suns and stars and systems. One fact lies before us of which there is no uncertainty--_we die_ and pass away from our present state into some other. We are not annihilated into nothingness. Suns and worlds also die, after performing their allotted revolutions in the cycle of the universe. Suns glow for a time, and planets bear their fruitage of plants and animals and men, then turn for aeons into a dreary, icy listlessness and finally crumble to dust, their atoms joining other worlds in the indestructibility of matter. After all, there really is no death, simply change--change from one state to another. When we say we die, we simply mean that we change our state. There is a life beyond the grave. As Longfellow beautifully expresses it: "Life is real, life is earnest, And the grave is not its goal, Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul." But whither do we go when we pass on? Where is the soul when it leaves the earthly tenement called the body? We, Christians, in the light of revelation and of faith, believe in a heaven for the good; but it is not a material place, only a state of being. Where and under what conditions is that state? This leads us to the consideration of another question which is engrossing the minds of many thinkers and reasoners of the present day. Can we communicate with the Spirit world? Despite the tenets and beliefs and experiences of learned and sincere investigators, we are constrained, thus far, to answer in the negative. Yet, though we cannot communicate with it, we know there is a spirit world; the inner consciousness of our being apprises us of that fact, we know our loved ones who have passed on are not dead but gone before, just a little space, and that soon we shall follow them into a higher existence. As Talmage said, the tombstone is not the terminus, but the starting post, the door to the higher life, the entrance to the state of endless labor, grand possibilities, and eternal progression. THE END 
45361	----	Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LV MAY TO OCTOBER, 1899 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. [Illustration: WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS.] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. JULY, 1899. SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND ITS APPLICATION TO THE BIBLE. BY THE REV. DAVID SPRAGUE, B. D. "Trained and organized common sense" is Professor Huxley's definition of science. There is probably no better. The popular mind persists in thinking that there is a wide difference between science and knowledge in general. Yes, there is a wide difference, but it is just the difference that there is between a trained and organized _body_ of men for the accomplishing of some great work, and a _crowd_ of men unorganized and undisciplined. What unscientific knowledge has accomplished may be roughly seen in the condition of savage races to-day; while the changes wrought by knowledge trained and organized, in enlarging the sum of knowledge, in extending men's power of perception, and in increasing the facilities not merely for living, but for living well, are changes in comparison with which all others recorded in history are trifling. It will be profitable for us, in order to get a clearer idea of scientific method, to trace as briefly as possible the history of science and the development of the scientific idea. The very beginning of science is beyond our ken. We can form no idea of just what stage in the intellectual development of the race witnessed the rise of training and order in men's knowledge. Long before the dawn of history there must have been some degree of orderliness in men's knowledge--some grouping of facts, and reasoning from one thing to another. Rude classification would be made, e. g., among animals, as some were found to be good for food and others not; so among herbs, as to size, form, color, use for food and medicine, poisonous qualities, etc.; so among woods, as some were better adapted than others to use as instruments of war and of the chase. Men must also, very early in their development, have noticed the changes that took place in the heavens: the sun by day, the moon and the stars by night; have grouped the stars into little clusters here and there as they seemed rudely to resemble forms of things which they knew, and as some were brighter than the rest; have begun to reckon periods of time according as position of sun and moon varied. In their observation of the heavens no other phenomenon would have attracted as much attention as an eclipse, and for a long time men would have ascribed this occasional phenomenon to the intervention of some supernatural power. In process of time, however, as their observations were made with more care and recorded, some regularity would be noticed in these, as in other phenomena of the skies; and the period of their recurrence being at last approximately known by those more learned than the rest, predictions of eclipses would be made and verified by what would seem to the multitude direct supernatural aid. Hence the earliest scientific records that have come down to us are of eclipses observed, and in time regularly predicted, by the Chaldeans; hence also the reputation that was always given to the Chaldeans of having magical power. Coming down now to the time when men first seemed to have a genuine spirit of scientific inquiry, we find it among the Greeks some five hundred years B. C. Whatever of rudely scientific work had been done before, seems to have been for practical or religious purposes. About that time, however, men began to investigate and speculate in order to find out the truth, and soon we see a class of men, known as philosophers, whose one aim was to find out, because they loved, the truth. "What they saw excited them to meditate, to conjecture, and to reason; they endeavored to account for natural events, to trace their causes, to reduce them to principles" (Whewell). They set about this, too, in no small, narrow way. They wanted to go right to the bottom of things, of everything at once, and to know the great principles, as they called them, of Nature and of life. That was the reason why the actual scientific results of Greek thought, with all its splendid powers, were so meager. Two things are the necessary conditions of science--facts, and the human power of reasoning. Two processes must be carried out in order to yield any scientific result: facts must be patiently accumulated, and the mind must set its reasoning powers to work on them. It was in the first of these that the Greeks were wanting. They did not realize the need of endless patience in learning the details of Nature's way of working. They wished to take in all of Nature with one tremendous sweep of thought. They did a little investigating and a great deal of reasoning. Occasionally, however, we find an instance of inquiry into the cause of more definite and limited phenomena, which seems much more to suggest the true spirit of physical inquiry. We have one recorded by Herodotus, which is the more remarkable from being so nearly alone. It is in reference to the fact which he had observed about the flooding of the Nile--that it was flooded for one hundred days, beginning with the summer solstice; and that from that time it diminished, and was during the winter months very low. He tells us that he made pressing inquiries about the cause of it from many of the Egyptians, but that he found no satisfaction, and apparently little interest in the matter. Three different theories on the subject that had been propounded by the Greeks he examines in detail and confutes; and finally he states a theory of his own. And yet even in this instance of scientific inquiry he commits the usual fault of the Greeks--he does not pursue far enough the investigation of the facts of the case, and the absence of the facts he tries to make up for by exhaustive arguments on words used in describing the phenomena. Strange as it may seem at a first glance, it is a very similar trouble that we find with the reasoning of Aristotle. It seems strange, I say, because we are accustomed to associate with Aristotle just those things which would seem to indicate a scientific temper, and to give promise of great results: 1. Extensive accumulation of facts. Many of those works of Aristotle which remain to us are vast treasuries of facts collected from almost every field of Nature, and we have reason for thinking that he made other wonderful collections of facts which have not come down to us. His work has been a standing marvel to all time. 2. Extraordinary powers of reasoning. 3. The fact that he asserted in the strongest terms the need of building up the whole superstructure of knowledge on _experience_. And yet throughout his works, side by side with the evidences of profound knowledge and profound speculation, there are repeated instances of reasonings which are not only unsound, but altogether puerile--e. g., in the beginning of his treatise on the heavens he proves the world to be perfect by reasoning of the following kind: "The bodies of which the world is composed are solids, and therefore have three dimensions. Now, three is the most perfect number; it is the first of numbers, for of one we do not speak as a number; of two we say both; but three is the first number of which we say all; moreover, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end." That is a fair instance of his scientific incompetency. He has the facts, he is able to reason, but he does not reason _according to_ the facts; he loses sight of them and builds up great arguments on words and names. To give one more example: "He is endeavoring to explain the fact that when the sun's light passes through a hole, whatever be the form of the hole, the bright image, if formed at any considerable distance from the hole, is circular. This, of course, is easily seen to be a necessary consequence of the circular figure of the sun, if we conceive light to be diffused from the luminary by means of straight rays proceeding from every point. But Aristotle attempts to explain the fact by saying that the sun's light has a circular nature which it always tends to manifest. He employs the vague and loose conception of a circular _quality_ instead of the distinct conception of rays" (Whewell). It is a kind of reasoning which may be applied with great show of success to everything, but which really proves nothing. And so, as a matter of fact, Aristotle did not leave one single scientific generalization of value to succeeding ages. Did not the Greeks then do anything in the way of physical science that was to stand? Yes, there was a little work that was exact, and therefore lasting. Archimedes established the fundamental principle on the one hand of the lever, on the other of pressure in fluids--that is to say, laid the stable foundation of the sciences of statics and hydrostatics. Euclid developed, if he did not discover, the law of the reflection of light. Pythagoras discovered, and his followers developed, some of the fundamental principles of harmonics. Greater than any of the others in genuine scientific work was Hipparchus, who, with many erroneous theories, yet really laid the permanent foundation of the science of astronomy. Only one more name need be mentioned among the ancients--that of Ptolemy, who seemed possessed of a genuinely scientific spirit. He accomplished little original work, made no broad generalization (what is known as the Ptolemaic system was in reality the system of Hipparchus), but more than any other of the ancients he is the type of the true scientist in these respects--the accuracy of his observations, the thoroughness of his work at every point, and the really great additions that he made to science in the way of verifying, correcting, and extending the theory he received. He lived in the early part of the second century A. D. And the next name to attract our notice is that of Copernicus, more than twelve hundred years later. What is the meaning of that lapse of time? After such noble foundations had been laid, was there no great scientific work built thereon in all those centuries? Absolutely none. It will be well for us to think for a moment of what were the reasons for that barrenness, for the same causes are more or less at work at all times to hinder the growth of science and the extension of scientific method. 1. And what strikes us most forcibly at the outset is a lack of the sense of the importance of physical science. Through most of that period Christianity dominated the best thought of Europe, and the tremendous practical problems that confronted the Church for a long time threw everything else into the shade; for a long time, I said, during the early part of this period in especial, when the Church in general seemed to realize its responsibility to win the whole world to its Master, and every individual coming into the Church was made to feel that the Church's work was above everything else in the world. The importance of an exhaustive knowledge of the facts of Nature seemed trifling when compared with questions of character and future life, and making the world feel the power of Christ. Eusebius only expressed the thought of much of his age when he said, speaking of those who pursued the study of physical science, "It is not through ignorance of the things admired by them, but through contempt of their useless labor, that we think little of these matters, turning our souls to the exercise of better things." And with that deliberate turning away from such subjects there would come of necessity that indistinctness of ideas about natural things which is fatal to all scientific investigation. Witness these words of Lactantius: "To search for the causes of natural things; to inquire whether the sun be as large as he seems; whether the moon is convex or concave; whether the stars are fixed in the sky or float freely in the air; of what size and of what material are the heavens, whether they be at rest or in motion; what is the magnitude of the earth, on what foundations it is suspended and balanced--to dispute and conjecture on such matters is just as if we chose to discuss what we think of a city in a remote country, of which we never heard but the name." As Whewell, from whom these last two quotations are taken, says, "It is impossible to express more forcibly that absence of any definite notions on physical subjects which led to this tone of thought." 2. Contributing, without doubt, largely to that indistinctness of ideas, and to the low value put upon physical science, was the mysticism common to the early and the mediæval Church, and to the world at large for many hundred years--the mysticism, that is to say, the habit of assigning supernatural agencies to the various phenomena of Nature, and of regarding them as subject to the vicissitudes of arbitrary will rather than as following out the workings of a consistent orderly plan. There is no need of any attempt to show how fatal such a spirit is to science, nor how that spirit seemed for a long while to dominate the world. "It changed physical science to magic; astronomy to astrology; the study of the composition of bodies to alchemy; and even mathematics was changed till it became the contemplation of the spiritual relations of number and figure." That the Church was not, as has been often charged, responsible for this spiritualizing temper of the age is apparent to any one familiar with the development of Greek philosophy and with the history of the superstitions of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, it is also true that that temper has been increased in the past and is fostered to-day by the undue emphasis which the Church has placed upon the miraculous character of early Christianity. 3. We notice in the history of the thought of this period, both in the Church and in the world at large, a disposition rather to examine, criticise, and comment upon the work of others, than to do investigating and thinking of one's own. That such a spirit should be found in the Church is not to be wondered at, for the authority of Christ and his apostles would seem to leave no room for originality of thinking on religious subjects, and the sacred Scriptures would give abundant scope for the exercise of the highest learning and of intellectual penetration in interpreting. But the same tendency is noticed outside of the Church, as the great schools of interpreters of Aristotle and of Plato, and the large volumes of abstracts and compilations from preceding writers, bear witness. But when vast learning and ability are expended, rather on such labors than on investigation into the secrets of Nature, science does not thrive. 4. And once again we observe the gradually increasing dogmatic tendency of the Church, the claim to be the repository of all knowledge, the stifling of thought, and of investigation into what might lead men away from the truth and the "faith once delivered to the saints." It seemed best to give in detail these four evident reasons for the barrenness of science during those centuries, because, as I said, the same things to-day, though with decreasing force, interfere with the progress of science and the extension of scientific method. I shall refer to them again a little further on. The great revival of four centuries ago in art, in learning, in religion, reached also to science. At last the spell of ignorance, of unreasoning prejudice, of offensive dogmatism, and of vague mysticism, that had held the world for so long, was broken. The new life of science was feeble at first, and remained long in its swaddling clothes. It was about the middle of the sixteenth century that Copernicus gave his great work to the world; then no great work again for nearly one hundred years, when Kepler, Galileo, and Stevinus arise. But the century has not been an idle one. Everywhere men have been awakening to the new light, have begun to think freely and fearlessly; are no longer deterred by the cry of magic or the prohibition of church dignitaries from investigating into Nature for themselves. And so, when in the seventeenth century those mighty ones appeared, thoughtful people in great numbers were found to welcome the new truths; and at almost the same time Descartes by his essay on Scientific Method, and Bacon by the Novum Organum, were able to give an impetus to scientific investigation such as the world had never felt before. The history of the progress of science from that time to this is too complex to receive any treatment in a paper of this character. How it has been throughout a record of successive triumphs; how gradually one department after another of Nature's workings has been mastered and reduced to orderly system; how all systems have been themselves reduced to one, harmonious and complete, in the magnificent generalization of evolution; how all the time not only has the sum of knowledge been steadily augmented, but the power of acquiring knowledge marvelously enlarged--all of that we know. That which has accomplished such results is science, and the process employed has been scientific method. We are in a position now to have a fairly intelligent idea of it. Look at it and see. "Scientific method" is not, of course, a technical expression, as are induction, deduction, etc. Yet it means something very definite. It is that method of dealing with phenomena which reason declares and experience has shown to insure the greatest accuracy in results. There are in the complete process four necessary steps: 1. Observation of facts. 2. Comparison and classification, or generalization. 3. Deduction. 4. Verification. We can see these steps alike in the simplest scientific attempt of our remote ancestors, and in the work of a Newton or a Darwin. To use an illustration of the former suggested by the book of Leviticus. In very early times it was noticed that animals that had both the characteristics of being cloven-hoofed and of chewing the cud were good for food. A new animal is discovered having those characteristics. It is argued from the general principle laid down that this new animal is good for food, and the matter is verified by experiment. There are the four distinct steps: observation of the facts, drawing a principle from the comparison of the facts, deducing as to the particular case, verifying. The result is, of course, not only a classifying of the particular case, but also the extension of the principle. So with the generalization of the law of gravitation. Numberless facts were observed with the greatest care; from them the principle was generalized; from that again deductions were made as to particular cases; and the results were verified. But though the steps of the process are the same in both instances, yet what a vast difference between them! Take the first step, the observation of facts. All that the thought of the earlier age could do was to note a few striking resemblances and differences among the animals that roamed the neighboring forests. What could be done in the later age, ay, what the scientific temper of the age demanded, was the most rigidly careful examination of multitudes of facts; examination by a trained mind and with all the improved appliances which science and art had given to the world, and then submitted to the searching scrutiny of other trained minds, with like appliances. Or take the last step, verification. In one case it meant finding the effect upon the taste and upon the health. In the other, what it meant may be judged from the account we have of one of Newton's investigations. In applying his hypothesis of gravitation (it was only a hypothesis then) to the motion of the moon, there was a very slight divergence, about two feet a minute, between the time of the revolution of the moon in its orbit, as he calculated it and as he observed it. He was not satisfied until, _eighteen years after_, on account of an improvement made in the method of taking observations, he was able to obtain what he regarded as a verification. And so what we learn from the history of science is the gradual _development_ of scientific method. Scientific method in the work of Hipparchus meant a very different thing from the scientific method of the Chaldeans. Very different still is the scientific method of studying the heavens to-day. So to an even greater degree is there a difference between the scientific method of studying the earth to-day and as our fathers studied it. It is not merely the multitude of facts that we have learned, nor the marvelous instruments that we have made to aid us in our observations; it is also, and by no means least, this--that men all these centuries have been _learning_ to observe, to reason, and to verify. We may say that science and scientific method have grown and developed together: the development of one has invariably advanced the development of the other, and, on the other hand, where one has remained stationary, or has retrograded, so has the other. History has enabled us to see this other fact also: that the conditions which interfered with the growth of science in the past not only interfere with it always, wherever they exist, but to very much the same degree interfere with the free application of scientific method. What those conditions were during one long period of history we saw--a failure to realize its importance as compared with questions of conduct; a tendency to comment rather than investigate; a tendency to ascribe everything to spiritual agency rather than to natural causes; and lastly, dogmatism. We very well know how, as a matter of fact, those very conditions do interfere with the application of scientific method to-day. How far is scientific method applicable to the investigation of the Bible? Is there any department of human knowledge to which scientific method of investigation is not applicable? If scientific method is what we defined it to be, that method of dealing with phenomena which reason declares and experience has shown to insure the greatest accuracy in results, then there is obviously no department of knowledge to which that method is not applicable, for it means simply the method which will bring us nearest to the truth. When we are dealing with the highest spiritual verities we use that method which will bring us nearest to the truth; we are bound to use it in the interest of truth! That does not mean that we are to look for material causes for spiritual phenomena; nor does it mean that those things which in their nature appeal to the sensibilities, or have to do with conduct, or require an exercise of faith, must, in order for us to find out the truth, be removed from the domain of sensibility, conduct, faith. That would be a most unscientific method of investigation. The very first canon of scientific method is that it be appropriate to the matter in hand. And so in investigating the truths which are distinctly taught in the Bible--truths which are of the nature of a revelation of God's will and which are designed to reach and affect the whole nature of man--to take no account of other faculties in a man besides his power of apprehending intellectually, and of reasoning logically, would be unscientific beyond hope of pardon. But what I wish especially to consider is a different kind of investigation of the Bible--one not concerned with the truths taught in the Bible, but with the Bible itself, as a collection of writings that has come down to us from the past. What is the nature of these writings? Who are their authors? Are there any of them which have more than one author? Are there any which are compilations from several different sources? What is the age in which these works were written or compiled? All of those, and similar questions, are not only the appropriate but the necessary inquiries of a truth-loving mind. They will continue to be asked until they are satisfactorily answered. With reference to other writings, the persistence of such inquiries will depend, except in cases of pure curiosity, upon the importance of such writings to the world. On that principle there will be no cessation of inquiries concerning the Bible until they are, as I said, satisfactorily answered, for no other writings are to be compared, in their importance to the world, with the writings of the Bible. How can such answers be given? Where does competency to give answer lie? Does it lie in the authority of the Church? Not to lay any stress upon the fact, one way or the other, that the Church, except in certain localities, has never declared on the canon of the Bible, much less on the questions proposed above, there is no such authority residing in the Church, unless we grant the claim sometimes made for her, to infallibility. With those making such a claim we must, within the limits of this paper, decline to argue. But if not the Church, what other authority can give us the answers we seek? The authority of primitive tradition, or of the opinions of great commentators, or of the great mass of Christian people of modern times? Authority which is so shadowy in other things that might be mentioned would surely count for nothing in a matter as grave as this. Or can particular expressions of the Bible itself be taken to settle the matter once for all? But as to most of those very questions the Bible itself is silent; and if it had spoken, yet the question of competent authority would only be put one step further back. Or, once again, can the answer come from "the spirit which is in man," guided by God's Spirit? But in this, as in the instance mentioned above, that which has been shown to be incompetent in so many other things can not be called competent in this. There is, there can be, according to the requirement of our minds, only one answer which will satisfy; it is that which is determined by purely scientific method--that is to say, according to the nature of the subject, that method of investigating literary works which reason declares and experience has shown to insure the greatest accuracy in results. That method is known by the name of the "Higher Criticism." What is the history of the higher criticism? One would imagine, from the language often used by the opponents of its application to the Bible, that it was an arbitrary method of criticism, invented in these rationalizing times expressly for the purpose of doing away with the divine character of the Bible. But higher criticism has been in use in examining the classics and other (nonscriptural) writings of former ages for fully two hundred years. The first one to state its fundamental principles was Du Pin, in his New History of Ecclesiastical Writers, published in 1694. In 1699 Bentley published his famous examination of the epistles of Phalaris, according to the methods and principles of the higher criticism. There is no better instance of scientific investigation as to authenticity. These epistles had been commonly accepted by scholars as the work of Phalaris, and accounted of great value. Bentley, by his searching examination of them, proved them to be the forgery of a sophist, so conclusively that no scholar worthy of the name has ventured to question the result since. That, I say, was in 1699. The first work in the way of higher criticism of the Bible, Eichhorn's Introduction to the Old Testament, was not published till nearly one hundred years later. But that very modernness of the work brings it with some into disfavor. "If that is the true way of investigating the biblical writings," they say, "why are we so long in finding it out? Why did not the fathers of the Church--mighty, indeed, as many of them were, with keenness of insight into the Bible, with profound knowledge of its characteristics, with substantially the same evidence before them as we have now--why did not they give us the principles of the higher criticism, if those principles are true?" For the very same reason as science in general has not until very lately begun to do its true work. How meager is all the scientific work done in the ages of the past in comparison with that done during the last three hundred years! Men were not up to it; they were only learning the scientific method. So, the scientific method of examining literature, men have not learned till within the past two hundred years. Having all the facts before them which we have now would avail nothing without the knowledge of _how_ to observe, to classify, to deduce, to verify, any more in the field of letters than in the field of Nature; any more in the Bible than in other literary works. Among the immense benefits which science has conferred upon the world, surely this should not be accounted the least, that it has taught us a method by which we may find out with ever-growing certainty the truth concerning the Bible itself. What, then, should be the attitude of lovers of truth toward the higher criticism of the Bible? It can be only one--openness of mind to the ready acceptance of its work. Not that all its present results are to be accepted as final, for its work is still confessedly incomplete. Moreover, we can not fail to see that all investigations into the sacred Scriptures have not been prompted by a genuine love of truth, nor carried on with that judicial mind that should characterize every one working in the name of science. So that not all that has been done in the name of the higher criticism has been according to scientific method. Nevertheless, there are results already obtained, bearing the stamp of truth--such as the composite character of the Hexateuch; the double authorship of Isaiah; the post-exilic date of many of the Psalms--results which to a scientific mind have the practical certainty of a demonstration, but which the great majority of Christian ministers, who are supposed to look at such things intelligently, are not ready to accept. Are not the ministry in general more zealous to do as St. Paul says, "Hold fast that which is good," than either to do, as he also says, "Prove all things," or to make sure that what they hold fast is the best? Well, undoubtedly that is the better way to do, if they are to do only one--to "hold fast that which is good." And yet it is a blessed thought that every brave, fearless effort which men make toward finding out the truth, with every help that they can get from reason and a knowledge of the past, is an effort after God. GEOLOGY OF THE KLONDIKE GOLD FIELDS.[1] [Footnote 1: From Alaska and the Klondike. With thirty-five full-page illustrations and three maps. By Prof. Angelo Heilprin. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 326. Price, $1.75.] BY ANGELO HEILPRIN, LATE PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AT THE ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES OF PHILADELPHIA, FELLOW OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. The gold fields of the Klondike or Troandik district, as officially designated, lie along or immediately about the waters, whether direct or tributary, of the Klondike, an eastern affluent of the Yukon, which discharges into the "father of northern waters" at the site of Dawson. The Klondike itself, whose upper waters are as yet only imperfectly known, seemingly carries but little gold, the main quantity of the precious metal and that which has made the region famous being contributed by one of its southern arms, the Bonanza, and by a tributary of this, the Eldorado. Hunker Creek, draining a mountainous district several miles to the eastward of the Bonanza, and like it a southern affluent of the Klondike, finds promise of a wealth but little if at all inferior to that of the Bonanza. In a broader or more popular sense, the Klondike region not only embraces the special district so designated in the books of the Gold Commissioner, but also the entire tract which heads up to the sources of the streams that have before been mentioned, and thereby, with Quartz, Sulphur, and Dominion Creeks as tributaries of Indian River, takes in the greater portion of the Indian River mining district, and with Baker, Reindeer, and other creeks on the west, the official districts indicated by these names as well. With this limitation the region roughly defines an area about forty miles square, whose northern boundary lies somewhat to the north of the sixty-fourth parallel of latitude, and on the west reaches to within about thirty-five miles of the international boundary, the one hundred and forty-first meridian of west longitude. This area of approximately fifteen hundred square miles, which but little exceeds that of Rhode Island or of the county of Cornwall in England, may be broadly characterized as being gently mountainous, with elevations of five hundred to fifteen hundred feet, and in the highest parts of about twenty-two hundred feet. Its lowest depression is the valley of the Yukon, which, in itself occupying a position about fourteen hundred feet above the sea, gives to these points absolute elevations of three and nearly four thousand feet. Dome Mountain, or, as it is frequently designated, simply "The Dome," and less often "Solomon's Dome," "King Dome," and "Mount Ophir," appears to be the culminating point of the entire region; and its prominent position at the water parting of Bonanza, Hunker, Sulphur, and Dominion Creeks makes it a noble figure in the landscape, and the most interesting single feature to the prospector and miner. No absolute determinations for altitude have as yet been made for it, but when crossing the summit it seemed to me that it could not be much under four thousand feet, and I believe that Mr. Ogilvie gives to it about thirty-five hundred feet. The landscape which this mountain dominates is surpassingly beautiful, and I know of no finer view from similarly low mountains than that which this one commands. The sharply incised wooded valleys of the different streams that head up to it tear the mountain into projecting buttresses, and in the ridge that leads off from it southwestward contracts it to the extent of forming for half a mile or more a narrow backbone or saddle. In this respect it reminded me much of Mount Katahdin, in Maine. On a clear day the distant main mass of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains is sharply outlined against the northeastern sky, a most impressive setting to the verdant slopes that trend off toward it, only to disappear in the belt of plain that separates the two mountain systems. I was unfortunate in not getting the full benefit of this view, as at the time of my first crossing the atmosphere was very cloudy, and on the second it was so surcharged with smoke from forest fires in the valleys of Gold Bottom, Quartz, and Sulphur Creeks that hardly more than the foreground was visible. [Illustration: A BIT OF NORWAY IN ALASKA.--CASCADE NEAR SKAGUAY.] A succession of five or six knobs runs out from the ridge to which reference has been made and which trends off in the direction of the head waters of Eldorado, and these, together with the main Dome, are sometimes spoken of as the "Seven Domes," but they have no particular significance in the orographic detail and can not even be said to be clearly defined to the eye. Dome Mountain is held in a respect bordering almost on veneration by the Klondikers, inasmuch as it is generally thought to be the mainspring of the gold supply which is contained in the streams that fall off from it, and this means nearly all the good and the promising streams of the entire region. And, in truth, there is for the moment no way of absolutely disposing of the miner's suppositions, nor can the circumstance that little or no gold has yet been found in place either on or in the mountain be given much value in the discussion of the probable origin of the gold, inasmuch as the same negative condition confronts us in a study of the rocks of all other parts of the same and adjoining regions. Assuming that alluvial gold is in the main a derivative from reef gold, it is certainly strange that streams flowing in well-nigh opposite directions, and yet rising within very short distances of one another, should be so largely charged with gold, unless they have obtained it from a common source; nor can the fact, as received and reported by most miners, but of the full import of which I have not yet fully made up my mind, that the different streams carry different classes of gold, be argued away as having no significance in this connection. Claim holders profess at most times to be able to distinguish between Eldorado gold and that of Bonanza, between the gold of Bonanza and that of Hunker or Dominion, and so on; and there is no question that marked differences in color and in the contours of the coarse flakes and nuggets do present themselves, and even in narrower limits than has here been outlined. Thus, the gold from French Hill, abreast of Claim 17 on Eldorado, has a distinctiveness that is largely its own, and hardly follows the gold of the rest of the Eldorado tract; and the same is true of the gold of Skookum Hill in its relations to that of Bonanza, and also of that of Victoria Gulch. Moreover, the recent assays that have been made by the Bank of British North America and the Canadian Bank of Commerce, in Dawson, of the gold of the different creeks and gulches show plainly that marked differences as to fineness are distinctive qualities--at least they appear to be such at the present time. Thus, while Eldorado and Bonanza gold generally assays but about $15.50 or $15.80 to the ounce, Dominion gold shows as high as $17.80, and Hunker close to $18.50; the gold of Bear Creek, a minor tributary of the Klondike, is reported to actually give $19.20 to the ounce, falling only behind the almost pure specimens that have been reported from American Creek and Mynook, and to which a valuation of nearly $20 has been given. If these assumed facts continue to be proved true, then they must argue in favor of a distribution of gold from largely localized spots or areas, a conclusion that is also pointed to by a number of other circumstances. On the other hand, there are some facts which point in quite the opposite direction, and some of these will be referred to later on. [Illustration: THE VALE OF ELDORADO.] None of the mountains of the region even approximates the snow line, which would here probably occupy a position not much below six thousand feet, and on the northern face perhaps even rise to seven thousand feet. Not a vestige of snow was seen by me when crossing the Dome, not even in the most sheltered hollows, a condition that at first strikes one as strange, considering that in so many parts of our own mountains of equal or less elevation snow may be found lingering through a long period of the summer months. But here the greatly protracted hours of summer daylight and heat, together with the correspondingly diminished period of night, when a regelation might take place or melting at least could be arrested, have a marked influence in dissipating the winter's snows and ice when these are not particularly heavy. I did not find the August heat quite so intense on the mountain tops as I had been led to suppose that it would be, but there was quite enough of it to satisfy an ample vegetation and to make heavy garments in walking more than a luxury. Unfortunately, my thermometer was away from me at this time, and as sensation in this dry northern climate is so difficult to gauge by the standard of the mercurial index, I shall not hazard a guess as to the actual reading. Taking the mountains in their entirety, it is difficult from single points of view to determine for them any definite relation. There are so many valleys in close proximity to one another, some very ancient and others relatively modern, and with trends so opposed in all directions, that in the absence of a dominant ridge or mass this relation becomes very confused; and I was not in a position, with the limited time at my command and the deficiency of rock outcrops, to positively define any main line or axis of uplifts. Yet I suspect that there is one such, with a generally east and west bearing, whose trend might correspond with that of the ridge already referred to, which, with a southwesterly deflection, unites Dome Mountain with the mass that separates the upper Eldorado from Chief Gulch. What strikes one as particularly interesting in the conformation of some of these mountains when seen from an elevation is their hummocky appearance. This is particularly noticeable in the mountains which close in the Eldorado and Bonanza Valleys. With considerable actual elevations, they convey the impression of being merely swells or undulations of an open surface, very much like magnified morainic knolls in a glaciated country. This depressed type of mountain structure, with the evidence of its expanded valleys and gently flowing contours, carries with it the proof of long-continued degradation, and of a history whose pages read far back into geological chronology. With the evidences of antiquity before us, there are yet indications, amounting, it seems to me, almost to proof, that many of the more pronounced features of the region date their origin from only a comparatively recent period. Such is the case with a number of valleys that are tributary to the main ones, and even the latter appear to have been modified by late stream displacements. Taking the Eldorado or Bonanza, with their open U-shaped troughs and in most parts gently sloping banks, as types of the older valleys, it is surprising to note how many of their tributaries have the deeply incised and narrow contours; and I am led almost to conclude that some of these are really of very late construction. The stream displacements, which, by reason of the indices they give to the finding of new placers, are now beginning to be so attentively studied by the miner and prospector, are emphatic in their testimony in this direction.[2] One has but to note the triangular area that is included between French Gulch (tributary to Eldorado abreast of Claims 17 and 18) and Adams Creek (tributary to Bonanza at Claim 6 below Discovery) to be convinced of the actuality of recent transformations. Most of the miners regard the high-level gravels of this tract--of French Hill, Gold Hill (opposite to Grand Forks Village), Skookum Hill, and Adams Hill--so rich in gold as to make the claims fairly the rivals of the creek claims, as representing the ancient high-level flow of the Eldorado and Bonanza, but I am convinced that this is not the case (although it is certain that both streams mentioned did at one time flow at as high, and even considerably higher, levels). The materials that so largely distinguish these bench or hillside gravels (placers) are in greater part rounded bowlders or cobbles of white quartz, with a marked deficiency of the fragmented schists and slates which make pay dirt and bed rock in the course of the streams below. [Footnote 2: Prof. Israel Russell has made the interesting observation that orographic movement may now be taking place in the region of the middle Yukon, about the Lower Ramparts, with the uplifting of a mountain range athwart the river; on this supposition he seeks an explanation for the detail of the Yukon lowlands.] _Per contra_, the creek claims of Eldorado and Bonanza contain, as a rule, only an insignificant quantity of the rounded quartz bowlders, while almost everywhere where excavations have been made the body and substance of the output are the flattened and discoid parts of the mother-rock of most of the region--quartzitic, micaceous, hornblendic, and chloritic schists, and with them a less quantity of gneissic and dioritic rock. The high quartz-capped knob to which reference has already been made as marking the water parting of French, Nine Mile, and Adams Creeks, has large quartz masses entering into its composition, whether as bosses, dikes, or veins, and to them, or rather their wasted parts, must we look for the source which has so generously supplied the materials of the French-Adams Hills benches. There has been a bad break-up in this quarter, and the materials resulting from it have been swept into the confluence (delta) of the two streams which define the main valleys. Furthermore, the descending arcuate contour lines which are so well marked by terrace slopes on that face of French Hill which is turned to the corner of Eldorado and French Gulch, show plainly the receding course, in the direction of south, of French Creek (Gulch). On the hill slopes south of the position which it now occupies there is none of that deposit which lies to the north of it; the riches of French Hill are delimited by French Gulch, and even in the gulch itself there is nothing that can be compared with what is found on the heights. Again, on the side of Eldorado opposite to French and Gold Hills there is the same deficiency as regards the characteristic bench deposits, and this also holds true with the Bonanza opposite Skookum and Adams Hills. If these high-level deposits were in fact the ancient waste of the Eldorado and Bonanza, we should naturally expect to find at least "outliers" on the less favored bank of the streams, and surely in the case of the Eldorado former evidence of this deposition ought to be had on the hillsides, similarly contoured to those of the north, which lie south of and immediately adjoining French Gulch. [Illustration: GRAND FORKS VILLAGE.--VALLEY OF THE BONANZA.] Through virtually the entire Klondike tract and far beyond it on all sides there are evidences of high water flows. No more perfect presentation of high-level terraces can be had than that which defines the first line of heights, of perhaps one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet, which so beautifully impress the landscape of the Yukon about Dawson. The observer, from a still loftier elevation, notes these flat-topped banks, having the regularity of railroad constructions, following the course of the river as far as the eye can reach, here perhaps interrupted by a too steeply washed buttress, elsewhere washed to low level by some stream which has taken a transverse direction. A somewhat higher line of benches curves around the still higher points of eminence, and defines the course of water across country--such, at least, it is to-day. And all the way to the top, scattered evidences of the recent presence of water can still be found. I met with rolled or water-worn pebbles so near to the top (the actual summit and not the position of the signal flag) of the high peak overlooking Dawson that it may safely be assumed that they also occur on the very apex (about eleven hundred feet above the present level of the Yukon), a conclusion which is more than strengthened by the finding of pebbles at even a greater elevation on the French-Adams Creek knob. While thus presenting the evidence of high water levels, I am far from convinced that this evidence points exclusively to river flows. Much more does it appear that, in one part of its history at least, we are dealing with the evidences of the past existence of large lakelike bodies of water, perhaps even of a vast inland sea. The contours of the country in a sort of ill-defined way suggest this interpretation--an interpretation that is not, however, without evidence to support it, and which seems also to have been entertained before me by McConnell and by Israel Russell. The latter investigator has, indeed, given the name of Lake Yukon to a former extensive body of water, of which the existing Lakes Lebarge, Marsh, Tagish, and Bennett, with the connecting Yukon, are only dissociated parts. This lake is assumed to have been about one hundred and fifty miles in length, with a surface elevated between twenty-five hundred and twenty-seven hundred feet above the sea. First in the line of evidence may perhaps be taken the universality of wash gravel and of terrace _débris_ and the great heights which they occupy. While I have not myself observed such evidences of water action on the very summit of the Dome, there is reason to believe that they do or at least did exist. Most of this summit, in its narrowed form and rapidly descending slopes, has been, if one may use the expression, more than washed off, and could hardly be expected to retain for any great length of time accumulations of loose fragmental material. But at least its far-off continuation near the source (right fork) of Eldorado Creek bears some of it on its shoulder, and I have also seen it in an excavation on the loftily located Claim 71 of that stream. Nearly abreast of the international boundary, the one hundred and forty-first meridian of west longitude (Greenwich), McConnell and Russell noted the terrace line of the Yukon River as high up as seven hundred and thirty feet, which is still about four hundred feet below the point where I obtained wash gravel on the peak back of Dawson; but Dr. George Dawson found the terraces on Dease Lake to rise to thirty-six hundred and sixty feet, and elsewhere he calls attention to having come across water-rolled gravel at an elevation of forty-three hundred feet, which would probably exceed by about six hundred feet the culminating point of Dome Mountain. Such high water could, with the existing configuration of the land surface, hardly define any other feature than that of a large interior sea or of a series of lake basins; and while it may be argued that there has been sufficient degradation of the land surface since the period of the height of water to permit us to reconstruct a contour that would be in harmony with altered and reduced river courses, and relieve us from the necessity of invoking the assistance of lacustrine bodies in a solution of the problem, it does not seem to me likely that this has been the case. The physiognomy of the upper Yukon Valley supports this contention, and even to-day the river has not yet fully escaped from a lacustrine condition which is merely fragmental of a previous state. On one point bearing upon the succession of events in the upper Yukon Valley, and which has its connection with the history of the Klondike region, my conclusions differ somewhat from those that have been expressed by Dawson. This pertains to the deposit of volcanic ash which is so marked a feature of the accumulations of the river's banks. For nearly three hundred miles by the course of the river a stratum of pumiceous ash, ordinarily not more than four or six inches in thickness, constitutes almost without break the top layer but one of the banks on either side, and that which is above it is generally only the insignificant soil or subsoil which immediately supports the vegetation. So persistent is this ash layer, and so uniformly does it hold to an even thickness and to its exact position beneath the surface, that without further examination one would be tempted to believe from a little distance that it was merely the ordinary subsoil layer from which the color had been leached out by vegetable growths. Here and there, where there have been local disturbances or water washings have produced concentration, it may have acquired a development of a few feet, and occasionally it has accommodated itself to flexures or saggings of the deposits which it normally caps as a horizontal zone. Dr. Dawson, in commenting upon its occurrence, correctly assumes that it represents one continuous volcanic eruption, the date of which might fall well within a period of a few hundred years, and he speculates as to its being possibly associated with an outbreak from Mount Wrangel or some active cone which is represented by the Indians to exist in the region of the upper White River. Beyond this, from the normality of its position, and the assumed fact that no fluviatile or aqueous deposits have been found overlying it, the same observer argues that the outbreak must have taken place subsequent to the formation of the present river courses and their valleys, a conclusion in which I do not see my way to concur. The only satisfactory interpretation of this vast uniformly placed and uniformly layered deposit of ash is to me that which assumes a deposition in a widely extended lake basin, or in shallow lagoon waters which already in part occupied the present valley surfaces. In such waters precipitation from long-continued suspension would proceed gradually and evenly, to the end of shaping a deposit of nearly uniform development and of vast extent. Such depositions we find in the valleys lying north of the City of Mexico (Zumpango, Tequixquiac) and in the lacustrine area of Anahuac, also in the famous fossiliferous basin of Florissant, in Colorado. With the subsequent formation or reformation of the river's course we should have this deposit cut through, with the result of presenting the even layer which is so persistent in its following. This method would also account for the anomalous position in which we find the ash deposits; while still holding the same relation to the top surface, it occasionally rises far above what might be assumed to be its normal height or level above the water's surface--from four to ten feet--a condition that would hardly be in consonance with the assumption that the ash was deposited after the actual river channels had been cut. But other and more direct proof of aqueous occupation after the laying of the ash is had in the fact that in one place at least, and doubtless many more such will be found on closer investigation, lacustrine or fluviatile shells (subfossils) occur in the layer overlying the ash. A locality of this kind is found on the right bank not many miles above the Five Finger Rapids. Here, at a height of not more than four feet above the river, I had the pleasure of determining species of _Limnea_ and _Physa_, associated singularly enough with _Helix_, in the layers immediately above and below the ash bed, and in both horizons the species were identical. This isolated fact speaks volumes for itself. Had this been the region of Helena, Ark., I should have been prompted to class the bed with a portion of the Mississippi loess. What interested me further in this connection was the fact that up to this time I had failed to bring to light one solitary mollusk from the upper Yukon, and to all inquiries regarding the existence of shellfish in this northern water invariably a negative reply was received. Only on that day did I again obtain success in my malacological effort, the almost icy waters rewarding my search with a single specimen--unfortunately subsequently lost--of a _Bythinella_, or some closely related type, so that even to-day my knowledge does not permit me to state if the subfossil species of the banks have their living representatives, either specific or generic, in the almost wholly noncalcareous waters of the existing river. The question from more points than one is interesting, and deserves more than passing attention. It may be remarked in this place that the only other fluviatile invertebrate which I found in these waters was a white siliceous coating sponge, whose statoblasts were well visible to the naked eye. Unfortunately, the loss of my specimens has prevented determination, a circumstance the more to be deplored as these fresh-water sponges are the most northern in habit known to the zoölogist.[3] [Footnote 3: Professor Russell, in discussing the flood-plain deposits of the Yukon about the mouth of the Porcupine River, says that "fresh-water shells were frequently observed in the finer deposits." Unfortunately, no statement is made of the types which they represent.] There is evidence of another kind pointing to a comparative newness of much of the present course of the Yukon. The feature has been noticed alike by nongeographers and geographers, and by geologists as well, that the arm which carries the greatest volume of water does not everywhere occupy the main orographic valley. Thus, as Dawson has well pointed out, in coming up the stream the valley of the Big Salmon appears to be more nearly the continuation of the main valley below than that which still (and properly) continues to be designated the Lewes (Yukon) above; and this is still more markedly the case with the Hootalinqua (Teslin-too or Newberry River) at the confluence with the Thirty Mile. Even the valley of the Pelly at its junction with the Yukon, near Fort Selkirk, would perhaps to most persons suggest itself as the main channel of erosion. There is no hardship to geological facts in invoking the aid of great displacements to account for a condition which to my mind is well impressed upon the landscape; for, even without the proper or fully satisfactory evidence in hand to support the view, I fully believe that the greater part of the upper Yukon tract only recently emerged from a lacustrine condition. Nor is it to me by any means certain that this emergence or final reconstruction of the land surface into valley tracts need be more than a few hundred years old, or necessarily older than the deposition of the volcanic ash, which is hypothetically carried back to Dawson to a possible five hundred years or so. If it should be objected that we know of no such rapid change in the configuration of a land surface brought about by aqueous agencies, it might be answered that the mechanics of erosion in a pre-eminently drift-covered region, under subarctic conditions and with the influence of a most powerful and energetic stream near by, have neither been studied nor observed. [Illustration: SLUICING ON THE BONANZA.] Let us examine the possibilities of the case. As an initiatory premise it might be assumed, without much chance of either affirmation or denial, that the degradation of the land surface in the immediate valleys of the main streams is or has been in the past taking place at the rate of half a line per day; so far as the eye and ordinary instruments of measurement are concerned this is a quite inappreciable amount, and I see no reason why it may not be assumed as the working power of the Yukon. With this rate of erosion a valley trough or contour of about a foot and a third might be formed in the period of a single year, or of nearly seven hundred feet in five hundred years; and if we lessen the daily erosion to one quarter of the amount stated--i. e., to an eighth of a line--we should still have in this same period of five hundred years, speaking broadly, a trough of about one hundred and seventy-five feet depth, quite sufficient to have brought about most marked changes in the aspect of a drift-covered lagoon region, and perhaps ample to account for those physiognomic peculiarities which have been discovered. I am fully impressed with the magnitude of the distance which separates the amount of erosion which I have assumed--an eighth of a line daily--from the "one foot in six thousand years," which has been preached categorically from lecturn and text-book for the better part of a quarter of a century and threatens to make dogma for still another period of equal length; but the conditions here are entirely different from those of average continental denudation--in fact, have as nearly nothing in common as they can have. My observations in the tropics and subtropics have most impressively taught me the lesson of rapid changes, and with the conditions that are and have been associated with the Yukon, I am prepared for the lesson of equal change in the north. But, as a matter of fact, are we not taught of a removal in the west central United States of some twelve thousand feet of rock strata in a period not impossibly considerably less than two hundred thousand years? The one foot in sixteen years has here likewise nothing in common with the "prevailing" rate of continental destruction. While stalled on a bar on the Yukon River, about two miles above Fort Selkirk, I was much impressed with the mechanical work of the stream. The gravel and pebbles were being hurried along rapidly under the lash of a five to six mile current, and their groans were audible frequently when they themselves were invisible. Every few minutes our steamer would swerve from her seemingly fixed position by the undercutting of the bar, and perhaps it would be not far from the truth in saying that we should be to-day in very nearly the same position that we were in then had it not been for this undermining action of the stream. Let it be remembered that the Yukon has a current ranging up to seven miles, or to eight, as some of the navigators say, and that in certain months it is swiftly ice-bound both on top and at the bottom, and heavily charged with bowlders, and one may well realize the work of which it is capable. That with which I have debited it is purely hypothetical or conjectural, but it may serve a purpose in the elucidation of the main problem. In its more distinctively geological relations the Klondike region may be broadly defined as one composed in the main of schists and schistose rocks, defining an area of considerable disturbance. Owing to the limited number of outcrops, by far the greater part of the surface being still buried beneath vegetation of one kind or another, the variety of rocks included within the region can best be told from an examination of creek bowlders or the different dumps that mark hundreds of diggings and prospect holes along the various valleys and gulches. Some of this output, in which may be found fragments of quartz and quartzitic schist, of mica, hornblende, and chloritic schists and slates, of granitic gneiss and gneissose granite, porphyry, diabase, diorite, and quartz (quartzite), is probably extra-territorial, having been washed in at a time when a more extensive foreign water had access to the region; but there is enough of outcrop to show that most, and perhaps all, of the types here indicated are really a part of the tract. The schists and schistose rocks, whose age from direct evidence in the field I was unable to determine, but which are almost certainly the equivalents in greater part of the Birch Creek series, as described by Spurr from the American side (Birch Creek and Forty Mile districts), constitute the kernel of the region. Observation is as yet too limited to permit of a positive classification of these schists according to their natural relations, and the reasons that have prompted some to consider them as being in part of pre-Paleozoic age are not quite clear to me, although they may easily be such. Of granite and true gneiss in position I saw practically nothing, and the limestones and marble were not sufficient in quantity to permit me to identify the heavy beds which are considered to be the distinguishing element of the Forty Mile series. The beds where exposed show in most parts steep dips--in places standing almost vertically--but in how far these dips are uniform or the reverse, or in any way define a line of strike with anticlinals and synclinals, must be left for future close examination to ascertain. [Illustration: APPROXIMATE MAP OF THE KLONDIKE REGION] Great lumps of white or pinkish quartz, some of them _in situ_, others washed or rolled down the open slopes, occur at many points of some of the mountain elevations, indicating the presence of dikes and gash veins, and in part of interstratified beds containing this material. I found much of it at several "horizons" of the slope back of French Hill, and also as a cap overlying the badly cleaved and fragmented schists of the summit (three thousand feet?) of the prominent knob which dominates this region. The same type of "kidney" quartz appears at repeated intervals on the slope leading up to the Dome, almost immediately after leaving the junction of Carmack's Fork with the Bonanza, and also on the saddle ridge which might properly be considered to be a part of the summit of Dome Mountain. Prospectors have in nearly all cases staked these assumed outcrops of quartz, recognizing them as ledges, and in a number of them have claimed the discovery of the "mother lode." So far as visible gold is concerned, I have in nearly all cases found them to be absolutely barren, and I do not think at this time that there is much chance of finding anything materially valuable in them, although events might prove the reverse. Most of the quartz that has so far been discovered in direct association with the gold--that is to say, wrapped up with or within itself, as in the case of the quartz-gold nuggets of French Hill--is of a gray-blue or pinkish tint and of a granular and nonspathic type, therefore differing materially in aspect and structure from the quartz of the hillsides and from the greater number of the quartz bowlders that are contained in the dumps or have been removed from bed rock. Some of the bowlders or rolled pebbles containing coarse gold are of the same character of quartz as the quartz of the hillsides. Notably one such was shown to me as coming from a high-bench claim (Millett's) on Adams Hill (left "limit" [bank] of Bonanza, between Little Skookum and Adams Creek), and other similar fragments taken from the rock _in situ_ were observed on Gay Gulch and the ridge which separates the head waters of this stream from those of Eldorado. In a dump at the mouth of Gay Gulch (a right-hand tributary of Eldorado abreast of Claim 37) I found fragments of rotted quartz which were well sprinkled with fine gold. It does not by any means appear so conclusive to me as seemingly it does to Professor Spurr that because in some gulches the gold heads up in increasing quantities the nearer we approach the beginnings (heads) of these gulches, and that with this approach the coarseness of the grains and nuggets likewise increases, we are necessarily forced to assume that the travel of the gold at large has been confined within the boundaries of the gulches in which it is at present contained, or that its source is to be sought near by. A number of the most "solid" streams of the Klondike region, such as the Bonanza and Eldorado, if we are permitted to judge from the evidence of outputs and of prospects up to the present time, hardly sustain the conditions of the American creeks. The richest claims on the Eldorado are, starting from its mouth--the junction of the Bonanza--4, 5, 12, 13, 29, 30, 31, 36, with other claims abundantly rich between these. Number 30 is, I believe, generally considered to be the banner claim, and it is situated about three miles up--far enough, perhaps, to sustain in a superficial way Professor Spurr's generalization as to location--and above it 36 is not unlikely to show up as well as any of the other creek claims below. But the valley of Eldorado, whether constricted or open, continues for miles beyond either of its two head forks--that which is known as Eldorado proper, and the one, Chief, or Chief Isaac Gulch, which is geographically the continuation. So little has been found above 36 or 37 that the stream in that part is ordinarily spoken of as being barren. Again, so far as the tributaries on either side of Eldorado are concerned, and the possibility that they are responsible for the gold that is contained in the main stream between 37 and 1 rather than the Eldorado itself--a condition in no way impossible or improbable--it can only be said for them that up to this time they have, with the possible exception of Oro Grande (tributary to Eldorado abreast of Claim 31), yielded very little gold themselves, and have hardly given indication of containing much of a supply. I have used the words "up to this time" advisedly, because I am aware upon how little the evil reputation of a gulch rests, and how prospectors deceive themselves by the character of their defective prospect holes. Hence, while my argument is drawn from existing evidence, it can not be assumed that this evidence is by any means sufficient to warrant a conclusion. It is by no means unlikely that some of the lateral gulches will really be found to be largely gold-bearing, and of such Gay Gulch and the left-fork ascending of Eldorado (Eldorado proper above 47) appear to me the most promising.[4] [Footnote 4: Since writing the above intelligence has been received of the location of a rich pay streak on Gay Gulch.] The condition of the Bonanza is very similar to that of the Eldorado. Its greatest wealth, as so far determined, is concentrated in its middle course, beginning about five miles above its mouth and terminating some six miles below its source. But very little gold, if the information given to me is correct, has been taken out from or determined to exist in the tract lying above Claim 42 above Discovery, or the mouth of Victoria Gulch (left-hand tributary, whose source is found on a ridge from the opposite side of which Gay Gulch descends to the Eldorado), and yet the valley continues open and without material change for at least two miles, and with a certain contraction for four miles more. Barring the Eldorado and the streams coming in from the same side nearest to it--Big Skookum, Little Skookum, and Adams--few if any of the side gulches of the Bonanza are known to be really rich in gold, and for the moment, at least, they can hardly be looked upon as having furnished the main supply to the main stream. THE RACE PROBLEM IN THE UNITED STATES. BY BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, PRINCIPAL OF THE TUSKEGEE NORMAL INSTITUTE. I have been asked a number of times during the last few months the cause of and the cure for the riots that have taken place recently in North Carolina and South Carolina. I am not at all sure that what I shall say will answer these questions in a satisfactory way, nor shall I attempt to narrow my expressions to a mere recital of what has taken place in these two States. I prefer to discuss the problem in a broader manner. In the first place, in politics I am a Republican, but have always refrained from activity in party measures, and expect to pursue this policy in the future; so in this article I shall refrain, as I always have done, from entering upon any discussion of mere party politics, in the narrow and usual sense. What I shall say of politics will bear upon the race problem and the civilization of the South in the larger sense. In no case would I permit my political relations to stand in the way of my speaking and acting in the manner that I believe is going to be for the permanent interest of my race and the whole South, regardless of mere party name and organization. In 1873 the negro in the South had reached the point of greatest activity and influence in public life, so far as the mere holding of elective office was concerned. From this date those who have kept up with the history of the South have noticed that the negro has steadily lost in the number of elective offices held. In saying this I do not mean that the negro has gone backward in the real and more fundamental things of life. On the contrary, he has gone forward faster than has been true of any other race in history, under anything like similar circumstances. If we can answer the question as to why the negro has lost ground in the matter of holding elective office in the South, perhaps we shall find that our reply will prove to be our answer also as to the cause of the recent riots in North Carolina and South Carolina. Before beginning a discussion of the question I have asked, I wish to say that this change in the political influence of the negro has continued from year to year, notwithstanding the fact that for a long time he was protected politically, by force of Federal arms and the most rigid Federal laws, and still more effectively, perhaps, by the voice and influence in the halls of legislation of such advocates of the rights of the negro race as Charles Sumner, Benjamin F. Butler, James A. Garfield, Oliver P. Morton, Carl Schurz, and Roscoe Conkling; and on the stump and through the public press by those great and powerful negroes, Frederick Douglass, John M. Langston, Blanche K. Bruce, John R. Lynch, P. B. S. Pinchback, Robert Browne Elliot, and many others; but the negro has continued for twenty years to have fewer representatives in the State and national legislatures. The reduction has continued until now it is to the point where, with few exceptions, he is without representatives in the lawmaking bodies of the State and of the nation. Now, let us find, if we can, a cause for this. The negro is fond of saying that his present condition is due to the fact that the State and Federal courts have not sustained the laws passed for the protection of the rights of his people, but I think we shall have to go deeper than this, because I believe that all agree that court decisions, as a rule, represent the public opinion of the community or nation creating and sustaining the court. At the beginning of his freedom, it was unfortunate that those of the white race who won the political confidence of the negro were not, with few exceptions, men of such high character as would lead them to assist him in laying a firm foundation for his development. Their main purpose appears to have been, for selfish ends in too many instances, merely to control his vote. The history of the reconstruction era will show that this was unfortunate for all the parties in interest. It would have been better, from any point of view, if the native Southern white man had taken the negro, at the beginning of his freedom, into his political confidence, and exercised an influence and control over him before his political affections were alienated. In the light of present experience, I think all will now agree that the ballot would have meant more to the negro and would have been more lasting in its results, would have caused less opposition, if it had been given to him gradually, as he came into possession of education. The average Southern white man has the idea to-day that if the negro were permitted to get any political power all the mistakes of the reconstruction period would be repeated. He forgets or ignores the fact that thirty years of acquiring education and property and character have produced a higher type of black man than existed thirty years ago. But to be more specific for all practical purposes, there are two political parties in the South--a black man's party and a white man's party. In saying this, I do not mean that all white men are Democrats, for there are some white men in the South of the highest character who are Republicans, and there are a few negroes in the South of the highest character who are Democrats. It is the general understanding that all white men are Democrats, or the equivalent, and that all black men are Republicans. So long as the color line is the dividing line in politics, so long will there be trouble. The white man feels that he owns most of the property, furnishes the negro most of his employment, that he pays most of the taxes, and, besides, has had years of experience in government. There is no mistaking the fact that the feeling which, in some way, has heretofore taken possession of the negro--that to be manly and stand by his race he must oppose the Southern white man with his vote--has had much to do with intensifying the opposition to him. The Southern white man says that it is unreasonable for the negro to come to him, in a large measure, for his clothes, board, shelter, and education, and for his politics to go to men a thousand miles away. The Southern white man argues that when the negro votes he should in a larger measure try to consult the interests of his employer, just as the Pennsylvania employee tries to vote for the interests of his employer. The Southern white man argues, further, that much of the education which has been given the negro has been defective in not preparing him to love labor and to earn his living at some special industry, and has, in too many cases, resulted in tempting him to live by his wits as a political creature, or by trusting to his "influence" as a political timeserver. Then there is no mistaking the fact that much opposition to the negro in politics is due to the circumstance that the Southern white man has not got accustomed to seeing the negro exercise political power, either as a voter or as an officeholder. Again, we want to bear it in mind that the South has not yet reached the point where there is that strict regard for the enforcement of the law against either black or white men that there is in many of our Northern and Western States. This laxity in the enforcement of the laws in general, and especially of criminal laws, makes such outbreaks as those in North Carolina and South Carolina of easy occurrence. Then there is one other consideration which must not be overlooked: it is the common opinion of almost every black man and almost every white man that nearly everybody who has had anything to do with the making of laws bearing upon the protection of the negro's vote has proceeded on the theory that all the black men for all time are going to vote the Republican ticket, and that all the white men in the South are going to vote the Democratic ticket; in a word, all seemed to have taken it for granted that the two races are always going to oppose each other in their voting. In all the foregoing statements I have not attempted to define my own views or position, but simply to describe conditions as I have observed them, that might throw light upon the cause of our political troubles. As to my own position in all these matters I do not favor the negro's giving up anything which is fundamental and which has been guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States. It is not best for him to relinquish any of his rights; nor would his doing so be best for the Southern white man. Every law placed in the Constitution of the United States was placed there to encourage and stimulate the highest citizenship. If the negro is not stimulated and encouraged by just State and national laws to become the highest type of citizen, the result will be worse for the Southern white man than for the negro. Take the State of South Carolina, for example, where nearly two thirds of the population are negroes. Unless these negroes are encouraged by just election laws to become taxpayers and intelligent producers, the white people of South Carolina will have an eternal millstone about their necks. In addressing the Southern white people at the opening of the Atlanta Exposition, in 1895, I said: "There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable: "'The laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed; And close as sin and suffering joined We march to fate abreast.' "Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one third of its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one third to the business and industrial property of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic." Subsequently, in an open letter to the State Constitutional Convention of Louisiana, I wrote: "I am no politician; on the other hand, I have always advised my race to give attention to acquiring property, intelligence, and character, as the necessary basis of good citizenship, rather than to mere political agitation. But the question upon which I write is out of the region of ordinary politics: it affects the civilization of two races, not for to-day alone, but for a very long time to come; it is up in the region of duty of man to man, of Christian to Christian. "Since the war no State has had such an opportunity to settle for all time the race question, so far as it concerns politics, as is now given to Louisiana. Will your convention set an example to the world in this respect? Will Louisiana take such high and just grounds in respect to the negro that no one can doubt that the South is as good a friend to the negro as he possesses elsewhere? In all this, gentlemen of the convention, I am not pleading for the negro alone, but for the morals, the higher life of the white man as well; for the more I study this question, the more I am convinced that it is not so much a question as to what the white man will do with the negro as to what the negro will do with the white man's civilization. "The negro agrees with you that it is necessary to the salvation of the South that restriction be put upon the ballot. I know that you have two serious problems before you: ignorant and corrupt government on the one hand, and on the other a way to restrict the ballot, so that control will be in the hands of the intelligent, without regard to race. With the sincerest sympathy with you in your efforts to find a good way out of the difficulty, I want to suggest that no State in the South can make a law that will provide an opportunity or temptation for an ignorant white man to vote and withhold the opportunity or temptation for an ignorant colored man without injuring both men. No State can make a law that can thus be executed without dwarfing for all time the morals of the white man in the South. Any law controlling the ballot that is not absolutely just and fair to both races will work more permanent injury to the whites than to the blacks. "The negro does not object to an educational and property test, but let the law be so clear that no one clothed with State authority will be tempted to perjure and degrade himself by putting one interpretation upon it for the white man and another for the black man. Study the history of the South, and you will find that where there has been the most dishonesty in the matter of voting, there you will find to-day the lowest moral condition of both races. First, there was the temptation to act wrongly with the negro's ballot. From this it was an easy step to act dishonestly with the white man's ballot, to the carrying of concealed weapons, to the murder of a negro, and then to the murder of a white man, and then to lynching. I entreat you not to pass a law that will prove an eternal millstone about the necks of your children. "No man can have respect for the Government and officers of the law when he knows, deep down in his heart, that the exercise of the franchise is tainted with fraud. "The road that the South has been compelled to travel during the last thirty years has been strewn with thorns and thistles. It has been as one groping through the long darkness into the light. The time is not far distant when the world will begin to appreciate the real character of the burden that was imposed upon the South when four million ex-slaves, ignorant and impoverished, were given the franchise. No people has ever been given such a problem to solve. History has blazed no path through the wilderness that could be followed. For thirty years we have wandered in the wilderness. We are now beginning to get out. But there is only one road out, and all makeshifts, expedients, profit-and-loss calculations, but lead into swamps, quicksands, quagmires, and jungles. There is a highway that will lead both races out into the pure, beautiful sunshine, where there will be nothing to hide and nothing to explain, where both races can grow strong and true and useful in every fiber of their being. I believe that your convention will find this highway; that it will enact a fundamental law that will be absolutely just and fair to white and black alike. "I beg of you, further, that in the degree that you close the ballot box against the ignorant you open the schoolhouse. More than one half of the population of your State are negroes. No State can long prosper when a large part of its citizenship is in ignorance and poverty, and has no interest in government. I beg of you that you do not treat us as an alien people. We are not aliens. You know us; you know that we have cleared your forests, tilled your fields, nursed your children, and protected your families. There is an attachment between us that few understand. While I do not presume to be able to advise you, yet it is in my heart to say that if your convention would do something that would prevent for all time strained relations between the two races, and would permanently settle the matter of political relations in one Southern State, at least, let the very best educational opportunities be provided for both races; and add to this an election law that shall be incapable of unjust discrimination, at the same time providing that in proportion as the ignorant secure education, property, and character, they will be given the right of citizenship. Any other course will take from one half your citizens interest in the State, and hope and ambition to become intelligent producers and taxpayers, to become useful and virtuous citizens. Any other course will tie the white citizens of Louisiana to a body of death. "The negroes are not unmindful of the fact that the white people of your State pay the greater portion of the school taxes, and that the poverty of the State prevents it from doing all that it desires for public education; yet I believe that you will agree with me that ignorance is more costly to the State than education; that it will cost Louisiana more not to educate the negroes than it will to educate them. In connection with a generous provision for public schools, I believe that nothing will so help my own people in your State as provision at some institution for the highest academic and normal training in connection with thorough training in agriculture, mechanics, and domestic economy. The fact is that ninety per cent of our people depend upon the common occupations for their living, and outside of the cities eighty-five per cent rely upon agriculture for support. Notwithstanding this, our people have been educated for the most part since the war in everything else but the very thing most of them live by. First-class training in agriculture, horticulture, dairying, stock raising, the mechanical arts, and domestic economy would make us intelligent producers, and not only help us to contribute our proportion as taxpayers, but would result in retaining much money in the State that now goes outside for that which can be as well produced at home. An institution which will give this training of the hand, along with the highest mental culture, would soon convince our people that their salvation is largely in the ownership of property and in industrial and business development, rather than in mere political agitation. "The highest test of the civilization of any race is in its willingness to extend a helping hand to the less fortunate. A race, like an individual, lifts itself up by lifting others up. Surely no people ever had a greater chance to exhibit the highest Christian fortitude and magnanimity than is now presented to the people of Louisiana. It requires little wisdom or statesmanship to repress, to crush out, to retard the hopes and aspirations of a people, but the highest and most profound statesmanship is shown in guiding and stimulating a people, so that every fiber in the body and soul shall be made to contribute in the highest degree to the usefulness and ability of the State. It is along this line that I pray God the thoughts and activities of your convention be guided." As to the cure for such outbreaks as have recently hurt North Carolina and South Carolina, I would say that the remedy will not come by the Southern white man's being merely cursed by the Northern white man or by the negro. Again, it will not come by the Southern white man merely depriving the negro of his rights and privileges. Both of these methods are but superficial, irritating, and must in the nature of things be short-lived. The statesman, to cure an evil, resorts to enlightenment, to stimulation; the politician to repression. I have just remarked that I favor the giving up of nothing that is guaranteed to us by the Constitution of the United States, or that is fundamental to our citizenship. While I hold to these views as strongly as any one, I differ with some as to the method of securing the permanent and peaceful enjoyment of all the privileges guaranteed to us by our fundamental law. In finding a remedy, we must recognize the world-wide fact that the negro must be led to see and feel that he must make every effort possible in every way possible to secure the friendship, the confidence, the co-operation of his white neighbor in the South. To do this, it is not necessary for the negro to become a truckler or a trimmer. The Southern white man has no respect for a negro who does not act from principle. In some way the Southern white man must be led to see that it is to his interest to turn his attention more and more to the making of laws that will in the truest sense elevate the negro. At the present moment, in many cases, when one attempts to get the negro to co-operate with the Southern white man, he asks the question, "Can the people who force me to ride in a Jim Crow car, and pay first-class fare, be my best friends?" In answering such questions, the Southern white man as well as the negro has a duty to perform. In the exercise of his political rights I should advise the negro to be temperate and modest, and more and more to do his own thinking, rather than to be led or driven by a political "boss" or by political demagogues. I believe the permanent cure for our present evils will come though a property and educational test for voting that shall apply honestly and fairly to both races. This will cut off the large mass of ignorant voters of both races that is now proving so demoralizing a factor in the politics of the Southern States. But most of all it will come through industrial development of the negro! It is for this reason that I have believed in General Armstrong's theory of industrial education. In the first place, industrial education makes an intelligent producer of the negro, who becomes of immediate value to the community rather than one who yields to the temptation to live merely by politics or other parasitical employments. In the next place, industrial development will make the negro soon become a property-holder, and when a citizen becomes a holder of property he becomes a conservative and thoughtful voter. He is going to think about the measures and individuals to be voted for. In proportion as the negro increases his property interests he becomes important as a taxpayer. When the negro becomes a large taxpayer, he will see that it is to his interest to consult with his white neighbor about the measures to be voted for. There is little trouble between the negro and the white man as to matters of education, and when it comes to the negro's business development the black man has implicit faith in the advice of the Southern white man. When the negro gets into trouble in the courts, which require a bond to be given, in nine cases out of ten he goes to a Southern white man for advice and assistance. Every one who has lived in the South knows that in many of the church troubles among the colored people the ministers and other church officers apply to the nearest white minister for assistance and instruction. As soon as we have grown to the point where we shall consult the Southern white man about our politics as we now consult him about our business, legal, and religious matters, there will be a change for the better in the situation. The object lesson of a thousand negroes in every county in the South owning neat and comfortable homes, possessing skill, industry, and thrift, with money in the bank, who are large taxpayers and co-operate with the white men in the South in every manly way for the development of their own communities and counties, will go a long way in a few years toward changing the present status of the negro as a citizen as well as the attitude of the whites toward the blacks. In proportion as the negro grows along industrial and business lines he will divide in his politics on economic issues, just as the white man in other parts of the country now divides his vote. In proportion as the South grows in business prosperity the whole South will divide its vote on economic issues, just as other portions of the country divide their vote. When we can enact laws that result in honestly cutting off the large ignorant and nontaxpaying vote, and when we can bring both races to the point where they will co-operate with each other in politics in matters of business, religion, and education, the problem will be in a large measure solved, and political outbreaks will cease. * * * * * COLONEL GEORGE EARL CHURCH, speaking of the Indians of the country of the Amazons, relates of the chief of a horde of Yocaré savages whom he met among the falls of the Madeira, a young fellow twenty-five years old, that "he appeared to know everything that was going on around him. He seemed to have eyes in the back of his head, so acute were his senses. His hearing appeared to indicate, and his mind to define, the thousand things which were occurring in the tropical forest around us. Instinctively, he classified and estimated them at their true value as if they were under close and accurate analysis. As he sat dining with me at my camp table, in the simplicity of his nature and modesty of his nakedness, I could not help thinking that, in the evolution of man, many magnificent qualities have been sacrificed upon the altar of civilization." THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN NORTH AMERICA. BY DR. CHARLES C. ABBOTT. The claim of satisfactory evidence of the extreme antiquity of man in the valley of the Delaware River has been soberly discussed and intemperately ridiculed until the public, both scientific and general, have become tired of hearing the subject mentioned; but this is no valid reason why the truth should not be ascertained. If man in a paleolithic stage of culture did exist on the Atlantic seaboard of North America, then we have a basis upon which to build--a tangible starting point from which to date a history of human activities on this continent. As it is, we have but an immense array of facts, largely unrelated, and the greater portion sadly distorted and misleading because of the reckless theories set forth with them by their discoverers, and undoubtedly there never has been, in the whole range of scientific agitation of a simple question, as great a volume of reckless assertion, illogical deduction, and disregard of exact statement. The main question was often wholly lost sight of, and the author's sole purpose that of demonstrating some one else in error. Predetermination on the part of many has been fatal to the value of their field work. Convinced on theoretical grounds, such are necessarily blinded when on the spot where positive evidence occurs. He who does not desire the object searched for seldom finds it; and, later in the day, pride declines to accede to the just demands of candor--the admission of having reached a wrong conclusion. There probably would not have been as much attention paid to the subject of man's growth in culture on this continent had not the proposition of a sequence from paleolithic to Indian, with an intervening period, seemed to necessitate a dating back to the Glacial epoch, which naturally brought geological erudition to bear upon the question, and since then, most surprisingly, there has been confusion worse confounded, rather than a flood of light. Much has been written, but we can not yet be confident which author is most nearly correct; and the latest report, showing sad evidences of haste, is vitiated by evident determination to modernize every trace of man, whether the facts warranted such procedure or not. What is held, primarily, to be an evidence of paleolithic man is a wrought stone implement, that in Europe was characteristic of his handiwork. Here, in the valley of the Delaware, this same form of implement has been confidently asserted to be a rejected piece of stone--usually argillite--that failed to lend itself to reduction to a finished blade or spear point. If this could be established as of invariable application, however the supposed "reject" occurred, then the whole matter would be brought to a quick conclusion. But the "reject" theory has utterly failed of establishment. The typical paleolithic implement is not characteristic of the refuse of an arrow-maker's workshop site, and the familiar arrow points of small size, nor even the long, thin blades of several times their length, were reduced from masses greatly larger than the desired form. The refuse of many a chipping site shows this conclusively; and, as hundreds of failures demonstrate, many an arrowhead was made from a pebble but a trifle larger than the finished object. But admit, for argument's sake, the identity in shape of a "reject" and a "paleolithic" implement; this does not prove their identity in age and origin, and it is not an unwarranted or illogical suggestion to draw a distinction between the two, where the conditions under which they occur suggest a possibility of diverse history. Rather than demonstrating that all rudely chipped stones are "failures," it should be shown that paleolithic man, as we know of him in Europe, could not possibly have existed here. This has not only never been attempted, but the conditions during and immediately subsequent to the glaciation of the river valley have been asserted, time and again, to have been favorable for man's existence. Furthermore, it has not been shown that a typical paleolithic implement could not have been available on this continent, as it undoubtedly was in Europe, as an effective weapon, and it must be remembered that the fauna of the Delaware Valley was, in glacial times, very like that of parts of Europe in what we may call the reindeer period. Like conditions may not have produced like results in the case of early man, but what was practicable in Europe was certainly so in America, and the question resolves itself into that of determining if any trace of man that has been discovered in the valley of the Delaware can be dated back to a time preceding the Indian as he was when first he came in contact with the European. Did, in other words, the Indian bring his art with him from Europe or Asia, or did he experience a growth in culture from paleolithic simplicity to neolithic complexity? The whole subject hinges on the distribution of these traces of man. If from the first day of his occupancy until the European replaced the Indian the immediate valley of the river had undergone no change, then the imperishable relics of the first and last savage would remain associated, and position alone would tell nothing concerning any particular object's age or origin, but, at the present day, except the contents of graves, not a stone implement of the Delaware Indians rests where chance or the intention of its one-time owner placed it. Indeed, save a few bowlders of the largest size, few natural objects on the immediate shores of the river are as first seen by William Penn and his associates. This fact has not been duly considered, and unwarranted conclusions have been published as established truths--all, of course, eliminating antiquity from the Indian history of the region. The fact that a so-called paleolithic implement was found lying on the surface of the river's shore has resulted in a pen picture of a modern Indian attempting to fashion a blade and tossing the pebble aside in disgust. Why, indeed, could not an Indian walk on exposed gravel and pick up a pebble as well as we can to-day? There are two considerations to which we must give heed when this question is asked. We are, in the first place, tacitly informed that the Indian was given to chipping stone in this haphazard way to supply a sudden need upon the spot, all of which is not only not a reasonable assumption, but absolutely incorrect, as argillite bowlders and pebbles, which are not abundant in the gravels, were not habitually used, but, instead, the mineral was systematically mined and selected with skill, so that failures were reduced to a minimum. Then, again, if the object as found has been lying undisturbed on the river shore for centuries--two centuries at least--why is it that the chips are not there also? These are never found under such circumstances. In fact, they are very rarely found at all in the gravel where the implement itself occurs, and in numbers they exceed the "reject" or finished object at least as ten to one. Furthermore, we are asked to believe that the river shore where we find rude implements is the same to-day as when the Indian wandered along it centuries ago. Fig. 1 shows clearly how the never-resting tidal flow wears away the shore, carrying sand and fine gravels from one point and spreading it elsewhere to form a sand bar, it may be, and turning the channel from one side of the stream to the other, and so exposing long reaches of the shore to wasting, that for many a year had been fixed and apparently secure. Often the mud is entirely removed from the underlying gravel, and abundant traces of Indian occupation are brought to light, and, less frequently, so strong a current attacks a given point that even the gravel is moved and deep holes are formed, to be filled in time with the wasting shore from a point perhaps a mile away. This is the story of the river of to-day, and so it has been for centuries; and yet we are asked to believe that we can fill the moccasin prints of the Indian by walking now along the water's edge. I submit that it is asking a great deal too much. [Illustration: FIG. 1.--WASTING RIVER SHORE DUE TO TIDAL FLOW.] It has been suggested that rudely chipped implements, when found on the gravelly shore of the river, have fallen out from the bank and rolled down from where they had long been lying. This is not at all improbable; but how does this modernize the object, when the gravel extends quite to the surface? The pebbles and bowlders at the top of the bank are clearly as much a part of the deposit as are those at its base, and while the surface may be--is, in fact--less ancient than the deeper gravels, still they can not be dissociated; and it is a significant fact that we find, on the gravel at the foot of the bluff or other exposure, only the rude argillite objects at the water's edge or on the flat laid bare at low tide, and not a general assortment of the Indian's handiwork, including pottery; and we must not overlook the fact that the "gravel-bed" implements bear evidence of all the conditions to which the gravel itself has been subjected--this one stained by manganese, that incrusted with limonite; this fresh as the day it was chipped, because lost in sand and water and not subsequently exposed to the atmosphere; that buried and unearthed, rolled, scratched, and water-worn until much of its artificiality has disappeared. The history of almost every specimen is written upon it, and not one tells such a story as has been told about it by the advocates of the "Indian-reject" theory. Much has been written on the natural history of the gravel that is so marked a feature of the river valley, particularly at the head of tide water, and almost every essay differs in more or less degree from its fellows in the matter of the gravel's age as a well-defined deposit. Its origin no one can question, nor the agencies by which it was brought to where we now find it. Ice and water did the work, nor have they ceased entirely to add to the bulk transported in strictly glacial times--perhaps it were better to say in superlatively glacial time, as the river even now can be positively glacial upon occasion, as Fig. 2 demonstrates. The main channel has often been completely blocked with ice and the water forced into new directions and spread over the lowlands or flats, which it denudes of its surface soil, and once within recent years the stream found an old channel, deepened it, and for a time threatened to leave a flourishing riverside town an inland one. Ice accumulated in this way year after year must necessarily affect the river's banks, and yet the extent of "damage" is trifling usually, in comparison with that of the water, particularly when agitated by passing steamboats or violent winds; and now, too, the ice of our present winters does not transport coarse pebbles to any significant extent. I am convinced of this since the examination I gave acres of ice, when the river was gorged with it, some years ago. It was possible to walk for miles over the ice, as shown in Fig. 2, and to see it under exceedingly favorable circumstances, and a most careful search failed to reveal a stone larger than a pigeon's egg incased in this ice, which was all gently floated from far up the stream and stranded here; and where piled up upon the shores it usually remains until melted, and really acts as armor plate, protecting the ground from abrasion when the floods incident to the "break-up" prevail. Such are the present-day considerations, and they have a direct bearing upon the question of man's antiquity here because, first, the river valley has not varied for hundreds of years, except in becoming wider, the low shores receding, and the stream becoming broader and more shallow. In earliest Indian times the river was subject to freshets and ice gorges as now, but never did the water become so dammed up as to overflow the broad plateaus, areas of glacial gravel, that at the close of the Glacial period were within the boundary of the river. The Delaware was a very different stream then--_crescendo_ for thousands of years, and _diminuendo_ for thousands since--until now it barely hints at what once was. But not even in the height of its glacial activity was the climate so severe that the waters contained no fish, nor the forests of the high surrounding hills harbored no game. Never was it as bleak as the arctic region of to-day, and as man maintains a footing there, why should he not have done so here, where life was ever more easily sustained? True; but did he live here in glacial time? [Illustration: FIG. 2.--ICE-GORGED RIVER. Reproducing on a small scale the conditions of the Glacial epoch.] It has been stated in the most positive manner, which only positive evidence could warrant, that so-called paleolithic implements have not been found _in situ_ in gravel deposits at a distance from the river, and such, _if there were such_, as appeared to be in the gravel, were recent intrusions. This statement, in its several parts and its entirety, is absolutely incorrect, and no excuse can be offered for its publication. It is to be explained, however, because avowedly predetermined. Wherever the glacial gravel of the Delaware tide-water region is found, there paleolithic implements occur, as they also do on and in the surface of areas beyond the gravel boundary. We accept, notwithstanding the unscientific source of the suggestion, the statement that post-glacial floods inhumed all traces of man found beneath the superficial soils, and find that, if these traces are considered in that light, some mysterious power was behind the senseless flood, and always buried argillite paleolithic implements far down in the gravel, and then selected argillite artifacts of more specialized forms for the overlying sands and reserved the pottery and jasper arrow points for the vegetation-sustaining soil. This, as stated, is absurd, but such is the order of occurrence of the traces of early man in the upland fields, and these are to be considered carefully before a final conclusion can be reached. The broad, elevated plateau extending eastward from the present bank of the river offers facilities for studying the evidences of man's occupancy in this region such as are to be found in few localities. The principal reason for this is that almost no local disturbance has occurred since the original deposition of the sand that overlies the gravel and underlies the soil. The natural history of these underlying sands has recently received a good deal of attention, because, unlike the deeper gravels, there is perfect accord as to the occurrences therein of artificially chipped objects; and the suggestion that they are of intrusive origin being set aside as untenable, the geologists are now divided on the question whether the sand is wind-blown, a modified dune, and so not necessarily old even in years, or the result of intermitting overflow of water, usually carrying a considerable amount of sand and often heavy with washings from some distant clay bank. The objections to the "eolian" theory are that pebbles and bowlders, even of considerable weight, are scattered at all elevations through the sand, and these pebbles, as a rule, do not present any evidence of exposure to eroding sands, but are smooth and glassy, or the typical water-worn pebbles of a brook or the river bed, and more significant is the fact that the sands themselves are of different degrees of fineness, layer upon layer, and are nowhere clean or free from clay; and finally the thin layers of clay are clearly continuous over such extensive areas that in no sense can they be called segregations of that material. On the other hand, a carefully instituted comparison of the sand from the surface of the field to its junction with the gravel proper shows its identity with a deposit made by water in comparatively recent times. No difference whatever could be detected. The sand dune, modified by rains and finally leveled to a plain, presents, in section, no such appearance as the sands that overlie the gravels of glacial origin. Without a scintilla of reason, however, many geologists declare that no deposit of sand can be of any geological significance _if it contains traces of man not clearly intrusive_. The latter fact necessitates the former claim, all of which, I submit, is nonsense. Fig. 3 illustrates how artificially chipped pebbles occur in this underlying sand. The upper portion shows the superficial soil removed to its point of contact with the sand. This is determined by the change of color from dark brown to light yellowish brown, and it is generally so very abrupt a change that no doubt arises as to where the soil ends and the sand begins. The sand proper is shown by the position of the object--the measuring rule and trowel. It will be noticed that the implement is lying flat, as such an object would almost necessarily be if transported by water, and not perpendicular, as would be the case if it had fallen down some root-hole, animal's or insect's burrow, or opening in the earth from any cause, and now obliterated. [Illustration: FIG. 3.--OCCURRENCE OF AN ARGILLITE IMPLEMENT IN GLACIAL STRATIFIED SAND.] The presence of these artificial flakes, blades, and other forms of simple implements can only be explained by considering them as a constituent part of the containing bed, having been brought hither by the same agency that brought the sand, pebbles, and clay. When standing before a newly made section of this implement-bearing deposit it is easy to picture the slow progress of its accumulation. The broad plain has been subjected to overflow, now of water bearing only sand, and then of muddy water; now with current strong enough to roll small pebbles from some distant point, and then periods when the sun shone on the new deposit, dried it, and the loose sand was rippled by the wind. Floods of greater volume occasionally swept across the plain, and ice-incased pebbles were dropped upon its surface, and with this building up of the plateau to a higher level there were also brought to it traces of man's handiwork. Of this, I think, there can be no doubt now. Years ago I endeavored to show from the distribution of rude argillite implements of specialized forms, as arrow points and small blades, trimmed flakes and scrapers, that these objects were older, as a class, than jasper and quartz implements and weapons, and that pottery was made only in the rudest way before "flint" chipping--jasper and quartz--was established. The more exhaustively this subject was followed up, the proposition became more evidently true, and to-day it is unqualifiedly confirmed by the results obtained from systematically digging deeply over wide areas of country. The fact that argillite continued in use until the very last does not affect this conclusion. As the high land, now forty or more feet above the river and beyond the reach of its floods of greatest magnitude, was once continually overflowed and gradually built up by the materials the water spread upon it, it is evident that the conditions were materially different when such things happened from what now obtains, and the whole configuration of the country to-day points to but the one conclusion: that these plateau-building floods occurred so long ago as when the river flowed at a higher level and possessed a greater transporting power than at present. This, it is true, was long after the coarse gravel and huge bowlders were transported from the hillsides of the upper valley, but it was before the river was confined to its present channel, and more significantly before what may be called the soil-making period, itself of long duration and the time of the Indian as such. Not an argillite chip from the sands beneath the soil but speaks of the distant day when this plateau was an almost barren plain, and man saw it, roamed over it, and perhaps dwelt upon it, when but the scantiest vegetation dotted its surface, and only upon the hills beyond its boundary were there trees and herbage. Even if we consider the agency of the streams that now are but insignificant inflowing brooks in spreading, during their freshet stages, sand over level areas, we must still go back to a time when they were streams of infinitely greater magnitude than they have been for many centuries, and before, too, the Indian was a skilled chipper of jasper and a potter of taste, else why the absence of these products of his skill in the deeper sands? It matters not how we look at it, whether as geologists or archæologists, or whether it is all post-glacial, or the starting point is still so distant as ice-age activities, the sequence of events is unaffected. We still have paleolithicity in the gravel, argillite and the discovery of pottery synchronous with the deposition of the gravel-capping sand, and, lastly, the Indian. The record is not a difficult one to read, and never has been, and the manifold attempts to modernize all traces of man on the eastern coast of North America can safely be relegated to the limbo of misdirected energy. Studied in the proper spirit and after the needful preliminary study of archæology as a whole, the student will find himself, when in the field--ever a more desirable place than the museum--face to face with evidences of an antiquity that is to be measured by centuries rather than by years. THE USE OF ACETYLENE. BY EDWARD RENOUF, COLLEGIATE PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. It is now five years since the use of acetylene as an illuminant was suggested to the public, and it may be of interest to give a sketch of what has been done during this time, especially as it seems that with the year 1899 the tentative period which must characterize every new industry is in some respects passed, and a period of solid and well-directed industrial effort, backed by ample capital, has begun. The knowledge gained during this tentative period by the laboratory experiments of scientific men, and by the practical work of inventors and promoters, has made it possible for the industry to enter on its new phase. To understand its present and to foresee its future importance it is necessary briefly to review the work of the last years. In May, 1892, Mr. Thomas Willson, a Canadian electrician, tried to make the metal calcium in an electric furnace in his works at Spray, North Carolina, by heating a mixture of lime and coal dust. He thought that the lime (calcium oxide) would act on the coal (carbon) to form calcium and carbon monoxide. He did not succeed in getting calcium, but found in the furnace a brown, crystalline mass, which was decomposed by pouring water on it, yielding an inflammable gas. Willson is not a chemist, and he therefore sent specimens of the material to several men of science to determine its nature. It was shown to be calcium carbide, a compound of calcium and carbon, formed by the action of the carbon on the calcium oxide. The reaction expressed in chemical symbols is CaO + 3C = CaC_{2} + CO. The gas formed by the action of water was acetylene, a compound of carbon and hydrogen. The reaction is CaC_{2} + H_{2}O = C_{2}H_{2} + CaO; calcium carbide and water form acetylene and lime. If water enough is added, the lime is slaked, and slaked lime, or calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH_{2}), is formed. Neither calcium carbide nor acetylene was a new discovery; acetylene was discovered by Edmund Davy in 1836, and its properties were studied by Berthelot in 1862. Impure calcium carbide was first made in 1862 by Wöhler, who described its decomposition by water into acetylene and lime. What was there new, then, in Willson's discovery? Two important facts: (1) He was the first to make carbide by a method applicable commercially; (2) he was the first to make crystalline carbide. Wöhler's carbide was impure and amorphous; Willson's, nearly pure and crystalline, so that he succeeded in obtaining United States patents for crystalline carbide, and, as all carbide made by commercial processes is crystalline, its manufacture is covered by Willson's patents. In the same year, 1892, Prof. Henri Moissan, of Paris, announced the discovery of crystalline calcium carbide. Moissan's discovery, too, was an accidental one. He was reducing refractory metallic oxides in an electric furnace made of lime. At the close of the article in which he reports his work to the French Academy of Sciences (_Comptes Rendus de l'Académie Française_, vol. cxii, page 6, December 12, 1892) he refers in two lines to the formation of an ill-defined carbide of calcium by the action of the carbon electrodes on the lime of which his furnace was made. As is common with most important inventions, there is a dispute as to the priority of making carbide by an electric furnace; and the wonder is, not that there is a dispute, but that there are so few claimants. A few words of explanation of the electric furnace will show why. The enormous heat of the electric furnace (2000° to 3000° C.) is caused by an electric arc, formed by currents playing between carbon electrodes; carbon is often used in the furnace processes; here we have one constituent of calcium carbide. Lime, the material for the other constituent, withstands heat better than any other common substance excepting magnesia; naturally, inventors would use it, as Moissan did, as a refractory lining to the furnace. Electric furnaces were not new. The conditions then were such that the discovery of the carbide was fairly forced on experimenters, and, as we have seen, the discoveries of Willson and Moissan were both accidental. American priority was claimed by Willson, French priority by the friends of Moissan, German priority by Professor Borchers, of Aix-la-Chapelle. Fortunately for Willson, among those to whom he had sent specimens of carbide was Lord Kelvin, the famous English physicist, whose reply to Willson, stating that the substance received was calcium carbide, was dated October 3, 1892, two months before Moissan's first publication. Borchers's claims are too vague to waste space on. Willson's priority is now generally recognized excepting in France. The German Government has acknowledged it, and has annulled the German patent granted to Bullier. Commercial carbide is essentially an American discovery, and it was developed industrially by Willson's associates before industrial action began abroad. Messrs. Dickerson and Suckert, of New York, were the first to undertake the industrial liquefaction of acetylene. Dr. G. de Chalmot, chemist, and Mr. J. M. Morehead, electrician, worked up the details of the furnace process in the early days at Spray, North Carolina, and the purity and the yield from a given weight of material of their carbide have never been excelled, though cheaper working furnaces are now in use. Carbides of other metals can be made in the electric furnace, but, owing to the cheapness of the new material, calcium carbide is the only one of these which has industrial value as a source of acetylene. One pound of pure carbide yields 5.89 cubic feet of acetylene. Thus far carbide has been found industrially valuable for two other purposes. The one is for carbonizing steel; experiments in Germany show that iron or soft steel takes up carbon more readily when it is heated with carbide than when it is heated with coal dust or charcoal. Some steel works are now using carbide for this purpose. The other use of carbide is more important. It is found to be a valuable germicide. It is said to be the most effectual preventive of black rot, and to destroy the _Phylloxera_, the two worst enemies of the grape. The action of the carbide as a germicide depends on its decomposition by the moisture of the soil, forming acetylene, which kills the _Phylloxera_. If the use of carbide on a large scale substantiates the claims made for it, this is a discovery of vast importance. The ravages caused by the _Phylloxera_ in the vineyards of southern Europe, of Africa, and Australia must be ranked as great national calamities. A temperature ranging from 2000° to 2500° C. (3600° to 4500° Fahrenheit) is required to make carbide. It is probable that this temperature can be economically attained only by the electric furnace using water power as the source of the electric current, and this is the only method used for making carbide, with the exception of the Walther process, which does not use electricity but depends on the intense heat generated by burning acetylene under pressure. In electric furnaces the formation of carbide depends simply on the heat of the arc, which fuses the mixture of lime and coke. The latest improvements on the first very simple forms of furnace have secured continuity of work and economy of electric energy. In the United States carbide is made exclusively in the Horry furnace. This furnace consists of a huge short cylinder or hollow wheel, mounted to revolve slowly on a horizontal shaft. The periphery of the cylinder is closed by removable cast-iron slats. As the cylinder is partly revolved on its axis from time to time, the slats are taken off from one side and replaced on the other, thus leaving the top always open. The cylinder is filled on one side with the powdered mixture of coke and lime. Into the mixture two vertical carbon electrodes project downward through the open top of the cylinder. As the carbide is formed, the cylinder is revolved, lowering the mass from the electrodes. The fused carbide cools, hardens, and is broken off and removed as it rises on the other side of the slowly revolving cylinder; new material is constantly fed in to maintain the level around the electrodes. The process in the Horry furnace is continuous; the furnace can be run without arresting the current until repairs are necessary. It is said to combine the different theoretical improvements referred to, and to reduce the cost of production. The Horry furnace is in use at Niagara Falls and at Sault Ste. Marie. At St. Catherine's, Canada, Willson is using his own furnace. Abroad, the older types of furnace, the Willson, Bullier, and Héroult, are those chiefly in use. The actual ingot of good commercial carbide is nearly pure--ninety-six to ninety-nine per cent--but the ingot is surrounded by a crust of carbide mixed with unchanged material, containing forty to seventy per cent of carbide. Foreign makers break and blend ingot and crust to standard size, the best makers guaranteeing their carbide ninety per cent pure, giving five cubic feet of acetylene per pound (pure carbide gives 5.89 cubic feet). Eight to nine pounds of carbide per horse power in twenty-four hours, averaging five cubic feet of acetylene, is considered satisfactory work. The Union Carbide Company, which controls the sale of carbide in the United States, is selling graded carbides under guarantee, the first grade being the nearly pure ingot, the lower grade the crust. [Illustration: HORRY FURNACE, SHOWING ELECTRODES.[5]] [Illustration: HORRY FURNACE, SHOWING GEARING.[5]] [Illustration: HORRY FURNACE, SHOWING CARBIDE JUST REMOVED.[5]] [Footnote 5: NOTE.--We are indebted to the courtesy of the Electrical World and Engineer for cuts showing the Horry furnace.] As the moisture of the air decomposes the carbide, it must be broken up as soon as made, and packed in air-tight tin cans, varying in size from one to four hundred pounds. The present price of carbide abroad averages $96.80 in large lots, and $7.26 per hundredweight in small lots, packing included; in the United States, $70 per ton in large lots, and $4.50 per hundredweight in small lots, packing included. In 1898, 4,650 tons are said to have been made in the United States and Canada, and a much larger amount abroad. The output for 1899 is estimated at 12,000 tons for the United States, with a capacity in the new works in erection at Sault Ste. Marie and at Niagara Falls of 41,000 tons. The new works building in Europe, to be finished in 1899-1900, have a capacity for making 80,000 metric tons. These figures will justify the statement made at the beginning of this article, that the new industry has found ample capital. The statement is still current that acetylene attacks copper and brass, forming an explosive compound. This is not true. Exhaustive experiments by Moissan and by Gerdes, keeping these and other metals in contact with acetylene for months at a time, have shown that the metals were not affected. The conditions under which the explosive copper acetylide is made in laboratories can not well occur in generators or gas holders. It has been said that acetylene is very poisonous; the experiments of many observers, and especially those of Gréhant, do not confirm this statement. Gréhant experimented on dogs, causing them to breathe mixtures of acetylene, air, and oxygen, which always contained 20.8 per cent of oxygen, this being the percentage of oxygen in pure air. By this device he was able to discriminate between the poisoning caused by acetylene and suffocation caused by insufficient oxygen. A mixture containing twenty per cent acetylene inhaled for thirty-five minutes did not seem to trouble the animal. A sample of the dog's arterial blood contained ten per cent of acetylene. A dog which inhaled a mixture containing forty per cent of acetylene died suddenly after fifty-one minutes, having inhaled one hundred and twelve litres of the mixture; the arterial blood contained twenty per cent acetylene. Gréhant proved that acetylene simply dissolves in the blood plasma, while carbon monoxide forms a compound with the hæmoglobin of the blood. A dog breathing a similar mixture of air, oxygen, and illuminating gas containing only one per cent of carbon monoxide quickly showed convulsive movements, and died after ten minutes; its blood contained twenty-four per cent of carbon monoxide. Thus acetylene, while slightly poisonous, is less poisonous than coal gas, and vastly less than water gas, which contains a high percentage of carbon monoxide. A pressure of thirty-nine atmospheres and three quarters at 20° C. converts acetylene into a liquid weighing one third as much as the same volume of water, while one cubic foot of the liquid when released from pressure gives five hundred cubic feet of gas. Hitherto acetylene is used only as a source of heat or as a source of light; yet with very cheap carbide it would prove useful in many ways in chemical industry, and its use would have the most wide-spread effect on industry and agriculture. For instance, a method of making alcohol from acetylene is patented abroad, and by another patented process it is proposed to make sugar from acetylene. With the present prices of alcohol, sugar, and carbide, these processes have no commercial value. Acetylene may be made from the carbide in gas works and delivered to the consumer through mains like ordinary illuminating gas; or it may be liquefied at a gas works and delivered to the consumer in the liquid form under pressure; or the consumer may purchase carbide and generate acetylene for his own consumption. All three of these methods are in use. To understand the attitude of insurance companies and of consumers toward liquid acetylene it will be well to examine its record for the last few years. Those interested in methods for liquefying acetylene, and for reducing the pressure of the liquid at the place of consumption so that the consumer actually uses it as a gas under a water pressure of six inches or less, may find processes described in detail in the Progressive Age, and in other technical journals. Suffice it to say that the methods in use in this country and abroad are simple and effective. The purified acetylene is delivered in strong steel cylinders, which may be placed in a special building or case and need not be handled by the consumer. It has been proved by the exhaustive experiments of the eminent French chemist Berthelot that liquefied acetylene in cylinders can not be exploded by blows or shocks to the closed cylinder. If it is exploded, however, by causing a spark within the cylinder, the explosive force is very great, being about equal to that of gun cotton. The use of the liquefied acetylene is so simple and clean that the attention of inventors was first turned to this mode of supply. It may in future come again into prominence despite the present strong feeling against it, its use in many cities being prohibited. This feeling was caused by a number of explosions, accompanied by loss of life. Three of these explosions occurred in factories for liquefying acetylene; one in a factory where liquid acetylene regulators were made; several in buildings of consumers. In October, 1896, Pictet's works in Paris were wrecked by the explosion of a cylinder filled with liquid acetylene; evidence proved that the cylinder was held in a vise, and that the two workmen killed were at the ends of a wrench, closing or opening the valve, supposing the cylinder to be empty. The explosion was caused either by a spark from friction in turning the screw, or by the too sudden opening of the valve and releasing the pressure, causing a shock sufficient to decompose the liquid. In December, 1896, the works of G. Isaac, in Berlin, were destroyed by an explosion in the condenser where the cooled acetylene was liquefied by pressure; Isaac and three workmen were killed. Evidence showed that through carelessness warm water instead of cold water was in contact with the condenser, thus warming the liquid and increasing the pressure to a point which burst the condenser. In December, 1897, the works of the Dickerson & Suckert Acetylene Gas Liquefying and Distributing Company in Jersey City were destroyed by fire caused by the explosion of a cylinder filled through carelessness of workmen with a mixture of air and liquid acetylene--i. e., with an explosive mixture--killing the superintendent and a workman. In the explosion at the regulator factory at New Haven, January, 1895, the valve of the cylinder, on which one of two workmen killed was working, broke; a large volume of acetylene escaped and ignited from a lighted candle. In all four cases the explosions were caused by ignorance or carelessness incident to the beginnings of a new industry, and could be avoided by experience and skill. It should be stated that in the explosion at Paris all of the full acetylene cylinders were dug out of the ruins unhurt. The same was true at Berlin, where five full cylinders were blown against the wall of the building by the explosion of the condenser, but did not explode. At Jersey City sixty filled cylinders were exposed to the heat of the fire following the explosion; they were fitted with safety diaphragms of fusible metal; forty-eight remained intact, the acetylene burning off quietly as it escaped through the fused diaphragm, and twelve exploded, either on account of imperfection of the diaphragms or stoppage of the air passage leading from the diaphragm. The explosions of liquid acetylene in buildings of consumers have been due in every case to gross carelessness and ignorance on the part of the consumer. Although one of the chief points in favor of the liquid acetylene is its portability, yet it can be shown that it is still easier to carry carbide to the consumer. One cubic metre of acetylene is compressed to two litres in liquid form; two litres of carbide weigh 4.44 kilogrammes, which will produce a cubic metre and a third of acetylene, reckoning three hundred litres to the kilogramme, which is the average guaranteed yield of carbide. The light tin carbide cans occupy less space and weigh less than the heavy steel cylinders, while the generation of the gas is simple and, with proper generators, perfectly safe. On the other hand, the generators must be cared for, must often be filled with fresh carbide, and from time to time must be cleaned. With the generator system acetylene is as safe as or safer than illuminating gas. Berthelot has shown that at pressures below two atmospheres a vessel filled with acetylene can not be exploded by the explosion of a cap of fulminating mercury within the vessel, nor by heating a wire which extends into the vessel to a white heat by an electric current. The reason is that the acetylene can not explode unless it is decomposed into its elements, carbon and hydrogen; to decompose it requires a certain amount of energy. While the energy of the glowing wire or of the exploding cap causes a local decomposition at the point of contact, it is not sufficient to spread the decomposition further. Acetylene forms an explosive mixture with air; so does illuminating gas. The odor of acetylene is unpleasant; so is the odor of the water gas used generally in the United States, and the acetylene can be cheaply deodorized. As the generator system, then, is the general one, the most important question to the consumer is what generator to buy, and it is a perplexing question. The carbide manufacture is so organized that it is everywhere under the control of powerful and responsible companies which sell a guaranteed product. The burners now in use are nearly all good. With generators it is different; the market is flooded with them at all prices, ranging in value from worse than useless to very good, as regards safety, economy, and quality of light. As the generator question is by far the most important and the least understood in the whole acetylene industry, it will be well to give a full account of the results of the experiments which have been made within the last two years on this question. The most exhaustive experiments are those of the English expert, Professor Lewes, and his results agree with those of other observers. Lewes first determined the amount of heat developed by the decomposition of carbide by water, and the conditions which tend to lessen or increase the intensity of the reaction. The average result of the experiments as to the amount of heat was 446.6 calories for pure carbide, and a little less for commercial carbide (to state this differently, one pound of carbide, when decomposed by water, gives off heat enough to raise the temperature of 446.6 pounds of water 1° C., or to raise the temperature of one pound of water 446.6° C.). As the intensity of the heat developed determines the highest temperature attained during the decomposition, and is a function of the time needed to complete the action, and as the decomposition of carbide in contact with water is extremely rapid, it is evident that the temperature developed may be so high as to cause disaster. All the generators at present before the public may be classified under three heads: 1. Those in which water is allowed to drip or flow slowly on a mass of carbide, the evolution of the gas being regulated by the stopping of the water. 2. Those in which water in considerable volume is allowed to rise in contact with carbide, the evolution of the gas being regulated by the driving back of the water by the increase of pressure in the generating chamber. 3. Those in which the carbide is dropped or plunged into an excess of water. The conclusions deduced from a large number of experiments were that when, as in type 1, water is allowed to drip or flow in a fine stream upon a mass of carbide, the temperature rapidly rises until after eighteen to twenty-five minutes the maximum is reached, which varies from 400° to 700° C. (720° to 1120° Fahrenheit), and it is probable that in some of the mass the higher limit is always reached, as traces of tar are usually found in the residual lime, in some cases in sufficient quantity to make the lime yellow and pasty, while vapors of benzene and other polymerization products pass off with the gas. Leaving the question of temperature in this type of generator, another important question is the length of time during which the generation of gas continues after the water supply is automatically cut off. It is found that gas is evolved with increasing slowness sometimes for an hour and three quarters after the water supply has ceased, the total volume of gas so evolved being large. The experiments showed that in any automatic generator of this type the cut-off should be so arranged that one quarter of the total capacity of the gas holder is still available to store the slowly generating gas. The second class of generators bring about contact either by water rising from below to the carbide suspended in the cage (II, _A_), or by a cage of carbide suspended in a movable bell which, as it falls, dips the carbide into water, withdrawing the carbide from the water as the excessive generation of gas lifts the bell (II, _B_). Lewes found that under certain conditions generators of the type II, _B_ were far worse than those of type I. The trials were made with a movable glass bell, with counterweights, containing a half-pound of carbide. The maximum temperatures reached in four trials were 703°, 734°, 754°, and 807° C. Excessive heating took place in every case; in the last mentioned the temperature was far above the point at which acetylene is decomposed into carbon and hydrogen, a thin black smoke being formed immediately around the carbide while tar vapor poured out. On removing the residue after cooling it was found to be coated with soot and loaded with tar. On several occasions the charge was removed from the generator just after the maximum temperature was reached, and was found to be at a bright red heat. These experiments are of the greatest practical importance. At 600° acetylene begins to polymerize--i. e., to form more complex hydrocarbons, which are liquid, or solid, at ordinary temperatures. Probably in the generator acetylene is first given off so rapidly that the heat does not act on it, but as decomposition advances into the center of the mass of carbide, the acetylene generated has to pass through the external layers, which, as shown, may be at high temperatures, above that at which acetylene decomposes; thus a considerable amount of gas is lost, and the tar formed may distill into the generator and tubes, clogging the tubes. A more serious evil is the deterioration in the illuminating quality of the gas. Samples of the gas were taken as the maximum temperature was approached, and analyzed with this average result: Acetylene, seventy per cent; other hydrocarbons, eleven per cent; hydrogen, nineteen per cent. This reduces the illuminating value from two hundred and forty to one hundred and twenty-six candles. The hydrocarbons consist largely of benzene, which requires three times as much air for complete combustion as acetylene does. The best possible acetylene burner smokes when the acetylene contains benzene. [Illustration: Type I. TYPE OF GENERATOR.[6]] [Illustration: Type II, _A_. Type II, _B_. Type III. TYPES OF GENERATORS.[6]] [Footnote 6: NOTE.--We are indebted to the courtesy of the Progressive Age for cuts showing types of generators.] At first sight these experiments would seem absolutely to condemn generators of class II, yet the fact remains that some excellent generators are of this type. Under certain conditions excessive overheating may be avoided. The rising bell shown in II, _B_ should be discarded. Generators in which the water rises from below, and slowly attacks the carbide, can be made safe if the water is never driven back from the carbide, and the carbide is in separated layers as in II, _A_. Under these conditions the water is always in excess at the point where it attacks the carbide, so that the evaporation, by rendering heat latent, keeps the temperature down, the temperature of the melting point of tin, 228° C., being rarely reached in good generators where these conditions are met. Undoubtedly the best generators, and the only ones which from a scientific point of view should be employed, are those of class III, in which carbide falls into an excess of water. In such generators it is impossible to get a temperature higher than the boiling point of water, 100° C., while with a properly arranged tank the temperature never exceeds that of the air by more than a few degrees. Under these conditions the absence of polymerization and the washing of the nascent and finely divided bubbles of gas by the limewater in the generator yield acetylene of a degree of purity unapproached by any other form of generator. When acetylene is burned in air under such conditions that the flame does not smoke, it has been proved by Gréhant that there is no carbon monoxide among the combustion products; the acetylene combines with the oxygen of the air to form carbon dioxide and water (C_{2}H_{2} + 5O = 2CO_{2} + H_{2}O). One cubic foot of acetylene requires two and a half cubic feet of oxygen. Supposing a room to have an illumination equal to sixty-four standard candles; this amount of light from candles would use up 38.5 cubic feet of oxygen from the air, and would give off forty-three cubic feet of carbon dioxide; petroleum requires, in cubic feet, twenty-five of oxygen, and gives off forty of carbon dioxide; gas burned with a flat flame requires about twenty-five oxygen and gives nineteen carbon dioxide--with an Argand flame a little less, while with the Welsbach burner gas requires only three oxygen, and gives off 1.8 carbon dioxide; acetylene requires five oxygen and yields four carbon dioxide. So that, light for light, acetylene fouls the air less than any ordinary illuminant excepting the Welsbach gas burner. (With incandescent electric light there is no combustion and no fouling of the air.) Under the best conditions five cubic feet of acetylene give a light of two hundred and forty candles for one hour, or we may speak of acetylene as a two-hundred-and-forty-candle gas. Yet this statement, though strictly true, may be misleading. When ordinary illuminating gas is tested with the photometer, it is burned from a standard flat-flame burner, burning five cubic feet per hour. Now the amount of light given by such a gas flame is no greater than is pleasant to the eye; it is true that if we burn five cubic feet of acetylene from a suitable flat-flame burner, a light of two hundred and forty candles is given, but it is unfair to take this ratio as representing the actual relative illuminating value of the two lights, because we neither need a light of two hundred and forty candles, nor is such an amount of light issuing from one burner endurable to the eye. One-foot or one-half foot acetylene burners are used for domestic lighting; light from the best one-foot burners averages thirty-two to thirty-five candles per cubic foot. With acetylene, as with every other illuminating gas, the smaller the burner and consumption, the less light per cubic foot of gas is obtained. Another important point is that while these figures represent the best practical illumination obtained from acetylene by the burners hitherto in use, the standard flat-flame burner does not give the best gaslight; with a good Welsbach burner a cubic foot of illuminating gas will give a seventeen-candle light as an average. The comparison, to be fair, should be between acetylene and the Welsbach light. The reader will ask whether it is not possible to burn acetylene with other forms of burner, or to use it with Welsbach mantles. Successful acetylene burners of the Argand or of the regenerative type have not yet been introduced; but in Germany a new acetylene burner with Welsbach mantle promises good results. Experiments in England with an acetylene Bunsen burner and Welsbach mantle gave a light of ninety candles per cubic foot of acetylene used. It remains to be seen whether it is necessary to modify the composition of the mantles because of the intense heat of the acetylene Bunsen flame, which gives a temperature of 2100° to 2400° C. (3812° to 4397° Fahrenheit). It would extend this article to undue length to speak of the various uses of acetylene as an enricher of other gases, but a mixture of acetylene and Pintsch oil gas now in use on all the Prussian state railways deserves mention, as it is a success, and ten thousand tons of carbide will be used this year for lighting cars by this system. Lewes's new invention of a very cheap methane water gas which is enriched by acetylene, carried to the consumer through mains, and burned in ordinary burners, is also promising. Insurance and police regulations vary for every country. As a rule, restrictions are put on the use of liquid acetylene, and on the amount of carbide to be kept in storage. Generators must stand in separate buildings, which, in towns, must be fireproof. The Willson patents cover the manufacture of crystalline carbide in the United States, Canada, and the South American states; and, as all carbide made by the electric furnace is crystalline, no carbide can be made independently of these patents in these countries. In conclusion, it may be predicted that within the next few years acetylene will prove a factor in giving us an improved and cheaper light. Whether this will be an acetylene-Welsbach light or whether the acetylene will be chiefly used as an enricher of cheaper gases the future will show. THOUGHTS ABOUT UNIVERSITIES. BY WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS, PROFESSOR OF ZOÖLOGY IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. You are aware that the pedagogue is no longer treated with that deference and respect which he feels to be due to his love of learning. Past is all his fame. Past is the day when the village all declared how much he knew. Nowadays he is accustomed to be told by the rustics, who once gazed and wondered, that he is old-fashioned and out of place in our modern world; that he does not represent the nation; that the love he bears to learning is at fault; and that the university the people want must be universal like an omnibus, with a place for all, either for a single square or to the end. He is also used to hearing from those successful people of whom all must speak with reverence--those who have demonstrated their superiority by laying their hands on everything they think worth the getting--that he is a mere "bookish theorist," and that they are much more able to show him the path to success than he to tell them anything to their advantage. Unless he can minister to their comfort or entertainment, or make smooth the royal road to learning, or at the very least help to maintain the patent office, he is told to be content with such treatment as they think good enough for him, and to keep himself to his work of teaching the lower classes to be lowly and reverent to all their betters. I have been much interested of late by two books on certain aspects of modern society. One treats of the dangers which threaten liberal culture and constitutional government, and all the best products of civilization, through the increasing prevalence of the belief that our institutions have been _devised_ by a few for their own selfish ends. So long as men differ in natural endowments the ignorant and the incapable and the unsuccessful must outnumber those whose industry and energy and foresight insure success. As those who have little have always outnumbered those who have much of the desired fruits of civilization, this writer says that one of the great questions of the day is whether, in last resort, the world shall be governed by its ignorance or by its intelligence. He is alarmed by the diffusion of belief that our established institutions do not represent the people, and that they are hostile to the best interest of mankind, and by the prevalence of the opinion that the true way to reform the world and to secure rational progress is to intrust the organization and administration of government and of education and of all matters of public interest and importance to the majority. The danger so clearly pointed out is real, beyond question; but I can not agree with the author that it is exclusively or distinctively modern. If some in our day interpret the belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God, as conviction that the loudest voice is most divine; if they assert that the man with pure and lofty ideals of education and duty and loyalty is a public enemy; we must remember that so wise a man as Aristotle taught, in the day of Athenian democracy, that the man who is virtuous in undue measure is a moral monster, as justly repugnant to his neighbors as one pre-eminent in vice. If the first book calls Aristotle to mind, one must often think of Jeremiah while reading the second, for its author is a dismal prophet, who holds that, formidable as unbridled democracy seems, it is helpless in the struggle with organized plutocracy, and that its efforts to shake off the restraints and limitations of social existence can end in nothing but a more crushing despotism, while submission may bring such rewards of merit for good behavior in the past and such prizes for good conduct in the future as seem to the givers to be good investments. Both writers draw many of their illustrations from the history of our own country, and they hold that our great political contests are struggles between those who wish to maintain our institutions for the sake of what they can themselves make out of them, and those who seek to wreck the ship of state for very similar reasons. Some hold that, these things being true, they can show the learned professor how he may win back, through the struggle between these two great classes of mankind, some of that confidence in his wisdom which his predecessors enjoyed. They tell him he may make his learning represent the people if he will extend his university until it becomes as universal as the kindergarten, and that he may at the same time increase his popularity with the select if he will devote more of his time and more of his energy to that branch of learning which was in olden times pursued in that secluded cloister called the campus, although it is better known to the polite society of our day through the banjo club, the football team, and the mask and wig club. If he will cultivate these two fields, and, refraining from the theoretical pursuit of empty generalities, will enter upon a three months' campaign of education at some time when men's minds are stimulated by the heat of faction to welcome calm discussion of the principles of common honesty and good citizenship, he can not fail to win the respect and confidence of all. When I wrote this last sentence I thought that it was all out of my own head, and I was proud of it; but as I laid down my pen in my satisfaction for a moment's rest, my eye fell upon this passage in the prospectus of a new university--one which is said, in the prospectus, to be not only universal, but cosmopolitan: "When a question arises which divides scholars, like the tariff, the causes and course of the Reformation, money, etc., the student will be referred to the ablest exponents of the opposing sides." No professor can plead ignorance of the way to enter this new career of usefulness. One can scarcely pick up a college catalogue or a magazine or a newspaper without learning how to make the university universal. One of the simplest plans, with which all are familiar, is to send to men with a reputation for learning a ruled form and a request that each will write, in the proper columns, the price, publisher, and title of the best book on his own subject--mathematics, astronomy, moral science, or whatever it may be--or, if he knows of no such book, that he will write one. An accompanying circular tells how these lists are to be scattered through the innumerable homes of our land, and how diplomas are to be distributed as prizes to those who, after purchasing the books, prepare and submit the most exhaustive permutations of their tables of contents. Learned men who do not approve this plan are offered a choice from many others: six-week courses in law, medicine, and theology; summer schools for the promotion of science and the liberal arts; questions and answers in the educational column of some journal for the home; or a national university so universal that it shall supply lunches and learning for all out of the public chest, with no doorkeeper to examine passports. The way to extend the university in this direction is so well understood that I will turn now to another part of our subject, for some may be less familiar with our opportunity to construct a royal road to learning for those who are entitled to use it. A recent writer on education, who says American universities impose "upon young men in the nineteenth century a curriculum devised by dead-and-gone priests for the young men of the twelfth," calls upon the teachers of America to reconstruct their curriculum on psychological principles. I myself am no psychologist, and while I fail to see how this fact concerns the public, it has recently been pointed out in print, although no one has ever charged me with lack of reverence for the psychologist. In truth, he is to me what the good old family doctor is to many, for I am convinced that it would be hard to name one among all the educational ills that flesh is heir to that he would not be able to throw on the spot, with a good collar-and-elbow hold. I have a prodigious respect for those fine big words _curriculum_ and _psychological principles_, and I welcome the plan for reconstructing the curriculum on psychological principles the more eagerly because it is extremely simple and not hard to understand, like some psychological utterances. In fact, it is so very simple and easy that it is sure of enthusiastic indorsement by innumerable children, for this reformer's plan is neither more nor less than the abolition of the pedagogue. "If," he says, "I was director general of education for all America" (which at the present moment he is not), "I would abolish colleges, but send American youths to travel for two years in Europe. In my opinion," he says, "a father who has sons and daughters of a proper age to go to college will do better by his children if he sends them for two years to travel in Europe than if he sends them for three years to an American or English university." Admirable and simple as is this plan for ascending Parnassus in vestibuled trains of drawing-room cars, personally conducted by Grant Allen, this psychologist seems to me to err in thinking it new, for it was in high favor in England during the reign of that merry monarch who was always so furious at the sight of books that his queen, who loved reading, had to practice it in secret in her closet. Euphranor having asked, in the reign of George II, "Who are these learned men that of late years have demolished the whole fabric which lawgivers, philosophers, and divines have been erecting for so many ages? Lysicles, hearing these words, smiled and said he believed Euphranor had figured to himself philosophers in square caps and long gowns; but, thanks to these happy times, the reign of pedantry was over. Our philosophers, said he, are of a different kind from those awkward students. They are the best-bred men of the age, men of the world, men of pleasure, men of fashion, and fine gentlemen. I will undertake a lad of fourteen bred in the modern way shall make a better figure and be more considered in any drawing-room or assembly of polite people than one at four-and-twenty who hath lain by a long time at school and college. He will say better things in a better manner, and be more liked by good judges. I say, when a man observes and considers all this, he will be apt to ascribe it to the force of truth and the merits of our cause, which, had it been supported by the revenues and establishments of the Church and universities, you may guess what a figure it would make by the figure it makes without them. People begin to open their eyes. It is not impossible but the revenues that in ignorant times were applied to a wrong use may hereafter, in a more enlightened age, be applied to a better." "The money that went to found the Leland Stanford or the Johns Hopkins University," says the modern reformer, "would have been immeasurably better spent in bringing St. Marks at Venice and the Uffizi at Florence into the lives of innumerable young Americans. Here, then, is the opportunity for a wiser Cornell." A few years ago an acquaintance of my own, himself an accomplished psychologist, brought with him to Washington a young man, a native of north Greenland, that he might take into his life the best substitute for St. Marks at Venice that this country affords. While limited in range, the results were as definite as one could wish, for two of the most refined delights of our wonderful civilization--rum and horses--were at once taken into the life of Eskimo Joe with all the fresh enthusiasm of youth. In his boyish impetuosity he could not see why a hired horse should not have the fleetness of Santa Claus's reindeer and the endurance of wild dogs; and as few horses survived the first lesson, the psychologist soon reconstructed the curriculum, for Joe's progress in rum and oysters was most gratifying. You who have attended my lectures in anthropology will remember that Nature has bestowed on the Eskimos two endowments which are not elsewhere found united, although they are exhibited separately in high perfection by the anaconda and the camel. Joe was able to load himself with food and drink like a pirate ship victualed for a long cruise, and he became so proficient in three months that a two-year course seemed unnecessary, so he was shipped off to Labrador at the first opportunity, and was left there to carry St. Marks at Venice into the homes of Greenland as best he might. It is clear that our psychological reformer's plan is not new, but he says our curriculum is some thousand years behind the times, and he asks, "Will somebody one day have the wisdom to perceive that the education which sufficed for the mediæval England of the Plantagenets is not absolutely adapted to the America of the nineteenth century?" I myself know so little of the curriculum of that day that this charge may, for all I know, be well founded, and if so it were a grievous fault. For all I know the dead-and-gone priests of the twelfth century may have read Homer in the original Greek, and carried on their studies in trigonometry and navigation with the aid of logarithms and the nautical almanac, although it has come in my way to know something of their method of teaching zoölogy, for my studies have led me to examine a text-book on this subject, which was written early in the twelfth century for the education of the young Queen Adelaide, who was married to Henry I of England in 1121. The dedication is as follows: "Philippi de Thann into the French language has translated the Bestiary, a book of science, for the honor of a jewel, who is a very handsome woman, Aliz is she named, a queen is she crowned, Queen she is of England, may her soul never have trouble! In Hebrew in truth Aliz means praise of God. I will compose a book, may God be with the commencement!" As a sample of the zoölogical curriculum of the twelfth century take this chapter: "Onager by right is named the wild ass; of it the Physiologus says, in his speech, when March in his course has completed twenty-five days, then that day of the month he brays twelve times, and also in the night for this reason, that that season is the equinox, that is that night and day are of equal length; by the twelve times that it makes its braying and its crying, it shows that night and day have twelve hours in their circuit. The ass is grieved when he makes his cry, that the night and day have equal length; he likes better the length of the night than of the day. Now hear without doubt the signification of this. Onager signifies the devil in this life; and by March we understand all the time that we have; by the day we understand good people, by right, who will go in light; and by night we understand those who were Neros; and by hours we understand the number of people. And when the devil perceives that his people decrease, as do the hours which are in the night, after the vernal equinox which we have in March, then he begins to cry, to deplore greatly, as the ass does which brays and crys." One need not go back to the middle ages for a measure of progress, for all who remember the American college of thirty years ago know there has been notable improvement in this short time, and they also know that every change has not been an improvement. All who are concerned with education see many defects, and wish to do what they can to remedy them, and to increase the efficiency and usefulness of our whole educational system in all its branches from the lowest to the highest, although I believe they still find much wisdom in the advice of the prophet of old, "that we make a stand upon the ancient way, and then look about us and discover what is the straight and right way, and so walk in it." Many who are now before the public as reformers seem to me to fall into error through belief that our educational system has been _devised_ by some one, either in the twelfth century or at some other time, and that they may therefore hope to devise a better. All who know that it is a highly complex and delicate organism which has grown up imperceptibly and naturally in accordance with many needs, fulfilling many different purposes and acting in many diversified and far-reaching ways, know also that while reform always has been and always will be needed, organic change is quite another matter. They know, too, that a disposition to pull it to pieces in the interest of some theory or speculation must inevitably end in disaster, for they must agree with Bacon that "it were good, therefore, that men in their innovations would follow the example of time itself, which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be perceived." The complaint that learning is no longer treated with due deference is not exclusively modern, for it was enumerated long ago among the things that are not new under the sun; and he who for his own pleasure or distinction devotes himself to work in fields that yield nothing but the interest of the exploration should look to his own pleasure for his reward, since learning is no more exalted by turning it into an aristocratic and exclusive pleasure ground than by making it a shop for profit. While no weak and foolish brother of the laboratory should be permitted to think that he belongs to a favored class or has any claims to support or respect except for service rendered, it is the duty of our graduates to teach the world, by the example of their lives, what the work of the university is. Lyceum lectures and summer schools and systematic courses of reading are good things, and the common school and the home are the foundation of all education. Travel is a most valuable adjunct, but those who are to profit by it must first know what they go out to see, "for else shall young men go hooded and look abroad little." No school or college can improve its work by calling itself a university, although the prevalence of belief that its work is the work of a university may bring harm incalculable; for that university is universal, in the best sense of the word, where students are inspired with enthusiasm for truth by the example of those whose minds are "as a mirror or glass capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof as the eye joyeth to receive light." What nobler task can our graduate undertake than to teach the world that while the benefits which learning confers are its only claim to consideration, these benefits will cease so soon as they are made an end or aim? All men prize the fruit; but who else is there to tell them that the tree will soon be barren if they visit it only at the harvest, that they must dig about it and nourish it and cherish the flowers and green leaves? What better service can he render than to point out that the gifts of learning are like health, which comes to him who does not seek it, but flies farther and farther from him who would lure it back by physic or indulgence? The two authors I referred to at the beginning can not both be right, and both may be partly wrong, for it is possible that neither plutocracy nor a democratic majority makes a state. No university need humble itself to seek the favor of either plutocracy or democracy if its graduates can convince mankind, by their own lives, that its aim is not to gain deference or success or distinction or reward of any sort, but solely to propagate and diffuse among mankind "that enthusiasm for truth, that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much learning, a nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge." IN THE LITTLE BROOK. BY DAVID STARR JORDAN. Long ago, in the old Devonian times, when life was very leisurely, all the beasts and people that there were lived in the sea together. The air was dull and murky on the land. It was so light that it gave no support to the body, and so those that ventured about in it had to lie prone on the ground all the time wherever they went. So they preferred to stay in the water, where motion is much easier. Then, too, water is so much better to breathe than air, if one has gills fitted for it! He has only to open his mouth and the water rushes in. Then he has only to shut his mouth and the water rushes out backward, bathing his gills on the way. Thus, the air dissolved in the water purifies all the little drops of blood that run up and back through the slender tubes of which the gills are made. But in those days, besides the gills, some of the beasts of the sea had also a sac in the throat above the stomach in which they could stow away air which they took from the atmosphere itself. This served them in good stead when they were in crowded places, in which the air dissolved in the water would fail them. And those which were so provided used to venture farther and farther out of the water, pushing their way heavily on the ground. And those which could put forth most effort survived, until at last their descendants were able to maintain themselves on the land altogether. These gave rise to the races of reptiles and birds and mammals, the ancestors of all the land beasts that you know, as well as men and women and all the monkey people. But it was very long ago when this happened, and because these ancestors came finally out of the water they have no part in the story I am trying to tell to-day. Those that remained in the water grew more and more contented with their condition. Because the medium in which they lived was as heavy as their bodies, they swam without much effort, and effort not being needed, it was not put forth. As there was food enough in the water, they did not need to go on land. As they did not go on land, they did not use their lungs for breathing, the air sac gradually shrank away, or was used for some other purpose, and all the parts of the body became adjusted for life in water, as those of their cousins who left the sea became fitted for the life in air. Being now fishes for good, all the progress since then has made them with each succeeding century more and more decidedly fishy. And because they are fishes they are contented to live in little brooks, which would not satisfy you and me at all. But our ancestors in the early days were more ambitious, and by struggle and effort won what seems to us a larger heritage. So it happened one spring when the ice melted out from some little brook that flows down from somebody's hills somewhere toward some river that sets toward the Mississippi, the little fishes began to run. And first of all came the lampreys, but they hardly count as fishes, for they have yet to learn the first principles of fishiness. A fish is a creature whose arms and legs are developed as fins, having cartilaginous rays spreading out fanlike to form an oar for swimming. But the lamprey has no trace of arm or leg, not even a bone or cartilage hidden under the skin. And its ancestors never had any limbs at all, for the earliest lamprey embryo shows no traces of them. If the ancestors ever had limbs, the descendants would never quite forget it. Some little trace would be kept by the clinging force of heredity, and at some time or another this rudiment would appear. And the lower jaw they lack too, for that is really another pair of limbs joined together in front--as it were, a pair of short hands clasped together and never unlocked. But though the lampreys have no limbs and no jaws and are not fishes anyhow, they do not know the difference, and come up the brook in the spring, rushing up the rapids, swirling about in the eddies, just as if they were real fishes and owned the brook themselves. They are long, slender, and slippery, shaped like eels, without any scales and with only a little fin, and that along the back and tail, an outgrowth from the vertebral column. The vertebral column itself is limp and soft, the vertebræ only imperfectly formed and made of soft cartilage. In front the lamprey seems to be cut off short, but if we look carefully we see that the body ends in a round disk of a mouth, and that this disk is beset by rows of sharp teeth. A row of the sharpest of these is placed on the tongue, and two of these are above the gullet, for the tongue to scrape against them. And the rest are all blunt and are scattered over the surface of the mouth, which has no lips nor jaws, but is surrounded by a belt of fringes. When the lamprey is hungry he puts his mouth against the side of some fish, exhausts the water between, and then the pressure of the outside water holds him there tightly. When this is done, the fish swims away and the lamprey rides with it, giving no thought to where he is going, but all the while scraping away the flesh with his rasplike teeth. When he has filed off enough fish flesh to satisfy his hunger he lets go, and goes off about his business. The fish, who does not know what hurt him, goes off to get well if he can. Usually he can not, for the water of the brook is full of the germs of little toadstool-like plants, and these fasten themselves on the fish's wounds and make them bigger and bigger, until at last the cavity of the abdomen is pierced and little creatures of many kinds, plant and animal, go in there and plunder all this fish's internal organs, to carry them away for their own purposes. But when the lampreys come up the April brook it is not to feed on fishes, nor is it to feed at all. Nature is insistent that the race should be kept up, and every animal is compelled to attend to the needs of the species, even though it be at the sacrifice of all else. If she were not so, the earth and the seas would be depopulated, and this is a contingency toward which Nature has never looked. The lampreys come up the stream to spawn, and while on this errand they fasten their round mouths to stones or clods of earth, that the current may not sweep them away. When so fastened they look like some strange dark plant clinging to the bottom of the brook. When the spawning season is over some of them still remain there, forgotten by Nature, who is now busied with other things, and they wear their lives away still clinging--a strange, weird piece of brook-bottom scenery which touched the fancy of Thoreau. When the young are hatched they are transparent as jelly, blind and toothless, with a mouth that seems only a slit down the front end of the body. These little creatures slip down the brook unobserved, and hide themselves in the grass and lily pads till their teeth are grown and they go about rasping the bodies of their betters, grieving the fishes who do not know how to protect themselves. The lamprey is not a fish at all, only a wicked imitation of one which can deceive nobody. But there are fishes which are unquestionably fish--fish from gills to tail, from head to fin, and of these the little sunfish may stand first. He comes up the brook in the spring, fresh as "coin just from the mint," finny arms and legs wide spread, his gills moving, his mouth opening and shutting rhythmically, his tail wide spread, and ready for any sudden motion for which his erratic little brain may give the order. The scales of the sunfish shine with all sorts of scarlet, blue, green, purple, and golden colors. There is a black spot on his head which looks like an ear, and sometimes grows out in a long black flap, which makes the imitation still closer. There are many species of the sunfish, and there may be a half dozen of them in the same brook, but that makes no difference; for our purposes they are all as one. They lie poised in the water, with all fins spread, strutting like turkey-cocks, snapping at worms and little crustaceans and insects whose only business in the brook is that the fishes may eat them. When the time comes, the sunfish makes its nest in the fine gravel, building it with some care--for a fish. When the female has laid her eggs the male stands guard till the eggs are hatched. His sharp teeth and snappish ways, and the bigness of his appearance when the fins are all displayed, keep the little fishes away. Sometimes, in his zeal, he snaps at a hook baited with a worm. He then makes a fierce fight, and the boy who holds the rod is sure that he has a real fish this time. But when the sunfish is out of the water, strung on a willow rod, and dried in the sun, the boy sees that a very little fish can make a good deal of a fuss. When the sunfish goes, then the catfish will follow--"a reckless, bullying set of rangers, with ever a lance at rest." The catfish belongs to an ancient type not yet fully made into a fish, and hence those whose paired fins are all properly fastened to the head, as his are not, hold him in well-merited scorn. He has no scales and no bright colors. His fins are small, and his head and mouth are large. Around his mouth are eight long "smellers," fleshy feelers, that he pushes out as he crawls along the bottom in search of anything that he may eat. As he may eat anything, he always finds it. His appetite is as impartial as that of a goat. Anything from a dead lamprey or a bunch of sunfish eggs to a piece of tomato can is grateful to him. In each of the fins which represent his arms is a long, sharp bone with a slimy surface and a serrated edge. These are fastened by a ball-and-socket joint, and whenever the fish is alarmed the bone is whirled over and set in place; then it sticks out stiffly on each side. There is another such bone in the fin on the back, and when all of these are set there is no fish that can swallow him. When he takes the hook, which he surely will do if there is any hook to be taken, he will swallow it greedily. As he is drawn out of the water he sets his three spines, and laughs to himself as the boy pricks his fingers trying to get the hook from his stomach. This the boy is sure to do, and because the boy of the Mississippi Valley is always fishing for catfish is the reason why his fingers are always sore. The catfish is careless of the present, and sure of the future. After he is strung on a birch branch and dried in the sun and sprinkled with dust and has had his stomach dug out to recover the hook, if he falls into the brook he will swim away. He holds no malice, and is ready to bite again at the first thing in sight. The catfish uses his lungs as an organ of hearing. The needless lung becomes a closed sac filled with air, and commonly known as the swim bladder. In the catfish (as in the suckers, chubs, and most brook fishes) the air bladder is large, and is connected by a slender tube, the remains of the trachea, to the oesophagus. At its front it fits closely to the vertebral column. The anterior vertebræ are much enlarged, twisted together, and through them passes a chain of bones which connect with the hidden cavity of the air. The air bladder therefore assists the ear of the catfish as the tympanum and its bones assist the ear of the higher animals. An ear of this sort can carry little range of variety in sound. It probably gives only the impression of jars or disturbances in the water. The catfish lays her eggs on the bottom of the brook, without much care as to their location. She is not, however, indifferent to their fate, for when the little fishes are hatched she swims with them into shallow waters, brooding over them and watching them much as a hen does with her chickens. In shallow ponds the young catfishes make a black cloud along the shores, and the other fishes let them alone, for their spines are sharp as needles. Up the brooks in the spring come the suckers, large and small--coarse, harmless, stupid fishes, who have only two instincts, the one to press to the head of the stream to lay their eggs, the other to nose over the bottom of the stream wherever they go, sucking into their puckered, toothless mouths every organic thing, from water moss to carrion, which they may happen to find. They have no other habits to speak of, and when they have laid their eggs in a sandy ripple they care no more for them, but let go of life's activity and drop down the current to the river whence they came. There are black suckers and white suckers, yellow ones, brown ones, and mottled, and there is more than one kind in every little brook, but one and all they are harmless dolts, the prey of all larger fishes, and so full of bones that even the small boy spits them out after he has cooked them. Then come the minnows, of all forms and sizes, the female dull colored and practical, laying her eggs automatically when she finds quiet water, and thinking no more of them afterward. The male, feeble of muscle, but resplendent in color, with head and fins painted scarlet or purple, or silver white, or inky black, as may be most pleasing to his spouse. His mouth is small and without teeth, for he feeds on creatures smaller than fishes, and his head in the spring is covered with coarse warts, nuptial ornaments, which fall off as soon as the eggs are properly disposed of. In the little brook which comes to my mind as I write two kinds of minnows come up the stream together before the others realize that it is verily spring. The one is small, dainty, translucent, and active, swimming free in the water near the surface and able to take care of itself when pursued by a sunfish or bass. Along the side of its body are two black stripes not quite parallel, and between and below them the silvery scales are flushed with fiery scarlet. The fins are all yellow, with scarlet at base, and as the male passes and repasses before the female all these colors, which she has not, grow brighter than ever. The next is a larger fish, clumsy in form, hugging the bottom as he swims. The whole body of the male is covered with coarse white warts, and across each fin is a bar of black, white, and orange. This minnow feeds on mud, or rather on the little plants which grow in mud, and his intestines are lengthened out proportionally. In fact, they are so long that, to find room for them, they are wound spool-fashion about the air bladder in a way which happens to no other animal. Of the other minnows, the one attracts his female by a big, jet-black head; another by the painted fins, which shine like white satin; another by his deep-blue sheen, which is washed all over with crimson. In fact, every conceivable arrangement of bright colors can be found, if we go the country over, as the adornment of some minnow when he mates in the spring. The only exception is green, for to the fishes, as to the birds, green is not a color. It only serves to cover one, while the purpose of real color is to be seen. And there are fishes whose colors are so placed that they are hidden from above or below, but seen of their own kind which looks on them from the side. The brightest fishes in the world, the "Johnny darters," are in our little brook. But if you look at them from above you will hardly see them, for they are dull olive on the back, with dark spots and dashes like the weeds under which they lie. The male is only a little fellow, not so long as your finger and slim for his size. He lies flat on the bottom, half hidden by a stone, around which his tail is twisted. He will stay there for hours, unseen by other fishes, except by his own kinsmen. But if you reach down to touch him with your finger he is no longer there. The tail straightens out, there is a flash of blue and scarlet, and a foot or two away he is resting quietly as before. On the bottom is his place, and he seems always at peace, but when he moves his actions are instantaneous and as swift as possible to a creature who lives in the water. On the bottom, among the stones, the female casts her spawn. Neither she nor the male pays any further attention to it, but in the breeding season the male is painted in colors as beautiful as those of the wood warblers. When you go to the brook in the spring you will find him there, and if you catch him and turn him over on his side you will see the colors that he shows to his mate, and which her choice through ages has tended to develop in him. But do not hurt him. He can only breathe for a moment out of water. Put him back in the brook and let him paint its bottom the colors of a rainbow, a sunset, or a garden of roses. All that can be done with blue, crimson, and green pigments in fish ornamentation you will find in some brook in which the darters live. It is in the limestone brooks that flow into the Tennessee and Cumberland where they are found at their brightest, but the Ozark region comes in for a close second. There will be sticklebacks in your brook, but the other fishes do not like them, for they are tough and dry of flesh, and their sharp spines make them hard to swallow and harder still to digest. They hide beneath the overhanging tufts of grass, and dart out swiftly at whatever passes by. They tear the fins of the minnows, rob the nests of the sunfish, drag out the eggs of the suckers, and are busy from morn to night at whatever mischief is possible in the brook. The male dresses in jet-black when the breeding season is on, sometimes with a further ornament of copper-red or of scarlet. The sticklebacks build nests in which to hide their eggs, and over these the male stands guard, defending them with courage which would be dauntless in any animal more than two inches long. Very often he has to repel the attacks of the female herself, who, being relieved of all responsibility for her offspring, is prone to turn cannibal. Even the little dwellers of the brook have their own troubles and adversities and perversities. Last of all comes the blob, or miller's thumb, who hides in darkness and picks up all that there is left. He is scaleless and slippery, large of head, plump of body, and with no end of appetite. He lurks under stones when the water is cold. He is gray and greenish, like the bottom in color. He robs the buried nests of eggs, swallows the young fishes, devours the dead ones, and checks the undue increase of all, not forgetting his own kind. When he has done his work and the fall has come and gone, and the winter and the spring return, the brook once more fills with fishes, and there are the same kinds, with the same actions, the same ways, and the same numbers, and one might think from year to year, as the sun is said to do, that these were the selfsame waters and the selfsame fishes mating over and over again and feeding on the selfsame food. But this is not so. The old stage remains, or seems to remain, but every year come new actors, and the lines which they repeat were "written for them centuries before they were born." But each generation which passes changes their lives just a little, just as the brook and the meadow itself is changing. WHITE WHALES IN CONFINEMENT. BY FRED MATHER. The dolphin family (_Delphinidæ_) contains nine genera, with only one species in each, but the most interesting one is the white whale (_Delphinapterus leucas_ of Pallas, or _D. catodon_ [Linn.] of Gill), because it is the only one that can be kept in confinement and its habits observed under semi-domestication. It has fallen to my lot to care for several of these animals in confinement, and to have a chance to note their peculiarities. "The Great New York Aquarium," at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, New York city, was built by Messrs. Coup and Reiche, and opened in 1876. Mr. Butler was the superintendent. I supervised fish culture, and when not otherwise engaged made collections of fishes and invertebrates in Bermuda and in other parts. In 1877 I had charge of their branch aquarium at Coney Island. At both places we had many white whales at different times, for the management would keep whales penned up on the St. Lawrence River to replace those which died, and would never show more than two at a time, claiming that they were rare animals and only to be had at "enormous" expense. The aquarium was a private concern; admission fifty cents; and as the owners were W. C. Coup, a former circus proprietor and once the business manager of Barnum's Circus, and Henry Reiche, an animal dealer, who would sell you giraffes, elephants, or white mice, the attractions were duly exaggerated by the press agent, no matter what the facts might be. This is why we kept a reserve stock of white whales. It would never do to have the public know that they were common during the summer in the St. Lawrence, and when one was getting weak another would be sent down, and the public supposed that the same pair was on exhibition all the time. This species is common in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. According to the late Prof. G. Brown Goode, "stragglers have been seen in the Frith of Forth, latitude 56°, while on the American coast several have been taken within the past decade [1880] on the north shore of Cape Cod. They are slightly abundant in New England waters, but in the St. Lawrence River and on the coast of Labrador are plentiful, and the object of a profitable fishery. They abound in the Bering and Okhotsk Seas, and ascend the Yukon River, Alaska, to a distance of seven hundred miles. The names in use are beluga and whitefish among whalers, porpoise, dauphin blanc, marsouin or marsoon in Canada, and keela luak with the Greenland Eskimos" (Fisheries Industries). The white whale grows to be sixteen feet long; we never had one over ten feet in length, but they were billed, showman fashion, to be much longer. An adult will yield from eighty to one hundred gallons of good whale oil, besides several gallons of more valuable oil from the head which is used on clocks and watches under the trade name of "porpoise-jaw oil," which is sent in a crude state to manufacturers on Cape Cod, who refine it and free it from all tendency to gum. The skins make a leather that is waterproof and stands more hard service than any other known leather. Large quantities of it are sent to England and made into "porpoise-hide boots" for sportsmen, and in Canada the hides are converted into mail bags. The flesh is eaten to some extent by the fishermen, fresh, salted, and smoked. Zach. Coup said: "I have eaten the fresh steaks several times, and found the meat a fair substitute for beef when the choice was between fish and bacon as a continuous diet, down on the islands where these three things were the only possible variation in the line of animal food, and a very limited choice in the vegetable line, comprising dried beans and rice, for when I was with them there was a scarcity of potatoes for seed, and canned goods had not attained their present popularity, even if these poor fishermen had been able to buy them." The fat, oily blubber is an overcoat, a nonconductor of heat, and is between the muscle and the skin, as is largely the case with the hog, and, like the latter animal, there is savory muscle which may be cut into succulent steaks below it. At first the white whales were not in my care, but, being strange animals, were watched with curiosity. The whale tank was as nearly circular as a twenty-sided tank could be whose glass plates were four feet wide with iron standards between, making a pool of about thirty feet in diameter. The pool was of cement and tapered down to an outlet about three feet below the floor, for drainage, and on the floor the cement basin arose two and a half feet, while the panes of one-inch glass were six feet high, with the water line two feet below the top of the glass. This gave the spectators a view of the animals below water, and of their backs as they came up to blow. The white whale and the harbor porpoise (_Phocæna brachycion_), known as the herring-hog, etc., do not make as much of a "spout" as the larger whales do; they roll up and exhale either less strongly or with less water over the blow-hole than their larger relatives. They merely send a mist into the air which can not be seen at a distance of a thousand yards, while the "blowing" of the larger whales may be seen for miles. Half a century ago we boys were taught by the text-books that the whale--there was only one mentioned--drew in water through its mouth, strained out the jellyfishes and other life, and then ejected the water, after the manner of a fire engine, through the top of its head. That this nostril, equipped with the best water-tight valve ever invented, enabled an air-breathing mammal to exhale and inhale, without getting much water into its lungs, we never suspected. If we thought about it at all we looked at the whale as a fish, having gills somewhere, and let it go at that. As our laws speak of "whale fisheries" and "seal fisheries" in connection with these great aquatic mammals, it would be just as correct to speak of all animals which frequent the water as "fishes," and legislate on the "muskrat fisheries," "mink fisheries," etc.; there is really no difference. I have seen newspaper reports that about thirty years ago a white whale, brought there by a Mr. Cutting, lived in captivity in Boston for two years. Beyond the fact that one was brought there by a Mr. Cutting, and was on exhibition about that time, is all that I have been able to learn, and it is doubtful if it lived one year (see Fisheries Industries, section 1, page 19). One was exhibited at Barnum's old museum, at Broadway and Ann Street, New York, that is said to have lived nine months and was then burned up when that building burned, in March, 1868. As these animals only come into the St. Lawrence, where all live ones have been captured, in May and June, there is no reason to doubt that it did live in confinement for nine months, but none that have been exhibited since that time have survived more than half as long, and I have had personal knowledge of every one since Barnum's. Coup's Broadway Aquarium opened on October 11, 1876--too late to get a white whale that year. But early next spring Mr. Coup sent his brother to the St. Lawrence River for specimens. This brother, "Zach.," had never seen a whale, but he had full instructions concerning their care from Professor Butler, who had charge of the one at Barnum's Museum. There was an air of mystery about the expedition, and in May "Zach." brought a solitary specimen and at once went for more. The town was billed, the daily press was worked in true circus fashion, the crowd came and expressed various opinions. Standing by the tank, I heard strange comments: "Do you call that little thing a whale?" This to an attendant. "Yes, sir, it's a white whale from the northern coast of Labrador, the only one ever captured or ever seen by the oldest whaleman. It was reported to have been seen near the entrance to Hudson Bay, and Mr. Coup fitted out an expedition and captured it at an expense of over one hundred thousand dollars." He had evidently been reading what the press agent had stuffed into the newspapers. The visitor took another look and remarked: "The papers said it was twenty feet long; I should think it might be six feet, but no more." "Well," answered the attendant, "water is mitey deceivin', an' that whale is more'n three times as long as it looks. The fact is, the papers did report it to be longer than it is, for when we drew off the water to clean the tank yesterday we put a steel tape over the whale and it measured just nineteen feet eleven inches and a half." Then a rural couple came, and she remarked: "Oh, I'm so glad we came here, and can tell the folks that we've seen a real live whale!" "Lucy," said he, "this city is full of all kinds of cheats, an' I don't believe that thing is alive more'n Methuselah is; it's some indy-rubber contraption with clockwork in it that makes it go round and puff in that way." After the season for hatching trout and salmon was over, in April, I was detailed to build a branch aquarium at Coney Island, with instructions to construct a whale tank the first thing, in order to be ready for the next arrivals. I employed a maker of beer vats, and he brought three-inch planks for the bottom, staves eight feet high, and iron for hoops. The tank was to be twenty-five feet in diameter, with a "chime" nine inches below the bottom, making the tank seven feet deep inside. It was to set with its top eighteen inches above the soil, which was to be the water line, giving the whales five feet and a half of water--little enough when we realize that a ten-foot animal has a diameter of nearly three feet. Heavy timbers were laid under the bottom of the tank, carefully leveled, for no weight can be borne by the staves in a tank of that size. All this was planned, as well as the engine and pumps, and was well under way, when I received an order from Mr. Coup to go to Quebec and bring down two whales while Zach. went for more. Then I learned the secrets of the live white whale trade. The first whale had been kept back until it could be delivered at night, and its transportation was a mystery intended to arouse the curiosity of the public. At the railroad station at Quebec two boxes were turned over to me. They were about fifteen feet long, four feet wide, and four feet deep. They were upholstered with "bladder wrack," a most soft cushion, and in each box a white whale lay on these pneumatic cushions. A plug in the bottom of each box had let the water out while the boxes were being lifted by the rope handles on the sides, but when on the cars the plugs were replaced and water to the depth of a foot was poured in; this served to keep the under parts moist, while frequent sponging or the use of a dipper served to keep the skin from drying. The nostril, or "blow-hole," needed the most attention, for it has a valve which must not be allowed to get even partially dry, and a saturated sponge was kept suspended over this all the time during the journey by rail to New York. The white whale is a very timid animal, and comes up the St. Lawrence in May and June, when the young are brought forth; it is believed that they then go to the river to avoid their enemies, among which is the "killer" or orca whale. Their food, according to Professor Goode, is "bottom fish, like flounders and halibut, cod, haddock, salmon, squids, and prawns." From my knowledge of this whale in confinement I am surprised at the above list, for those under my observation not only preferred live eels, but could not swallow one whose diameter was over one inch, and it was difficult to get quantities of eels as small as three quarters of an inch in diameter, especially when an adult whale would consume about twenty pounds in a day. When larger eels were placed in the tank they would be taken out dead in a day or two with their sides scratched and torn by the small teeth of the whale which had failed to swallow it. We tried other food, for eels are quite expensive in New York city, costing fifteen and eighteen cents per pound, but the whales refused small flatfish, flounders, etc., and the only other food they ate was small tomcods. They refused dead herrings and all fish that were cut in pieces. The animals are captured at the small French fishing village of Rivière l'Ouelle, on Isle aux Coudres, seventy miles below Quebec, where life is as primitive as it was two hundred years ago in this, one of the oldest of Canadian settlements. Luke Tilden, one of our aquarium men, who went up with Zach. Coup, told of the capture of the whales, and the following is from notes taken by me as Luke told it: The men all fish and the women do a little gardening, but their harvest is the marsouin, a name common to the white whale and to the black porpoise. A fair white whale will weight eight hundred pounds and yield nearly one hundred gallons of oil worth fifty cents per gallon, so that when they trap twenty in a season it means prosperity to the colony; in 1874 they took one hundred, but the catch has fallen off since. "When we reached the island," said Luke, "we went straight to Father Alixe Pelletier and donated ten dollars to the Church for prayers for our success, and it was well invested. The good old man is the head of that colony and keeps everything straight. In 1863 there was an epidemic of indifference to the Church, and the men went to the bad, got drunk, fought, fished on Sundays, and reviled the priest, withholding all dues to him. Then he said, 'God is angry with you, and to punish you will send no more marsouin until you repent.' They laughed at him, and for three years no marsouin came to them, and they were very poor. They went to the father on a Christmas day and implored him to intercede for them, and he did. The next spring there was a great catch of marsouin, and the men have remained faithful since. "The tides here rise and fall some twenty feet, and the whales are trapped in an inclosure made of poles, the entrance to which is closed when a school enters. The pound is about a mile square, and is made of slim poles put two feet apart, space enough to let a whale through, but they will not attempt it. The tide falls and leaves them on the mud, quaking with fear. When we want live ones the boxes are made, padded with seaweed, shoved out over the mud, tipped on one side, and the whale rolled into it, where its struggles soon put it on an even keel, and then it gives up and does nothing but breathe as the boxes are taken on board a schooner for Quebec." I was fortunate in getting the above story from Luke Tilden, for a few weeks afterward he died in the aquarium; and Zach. Coup would tell nothing that could be relied on, not even to the locality where the whales were caught. The white whale is the only one of its tribe that can be captured in the manner related, because of its cowardly timidity. The harbor porpoise, or "herring-hog," would jump nets and break barricades or die. It would not bear the confinement of an aquarium, for it would leap out of the tanks or dash its brains out in trying to do so; but, once placed in a tank of either salt or fresh water, the white whale starts to circle it, always to the left, with the sun, and contentedly blows at intervals of from five to fifteen minutes, and seems as contented as a canary bird in its cage. The whale does not always swim in circles to the left when free, and why it does so in confinement is a question. I merely assert the fact. Perhaps wiser men know why perfectly still water in a washbowl will rotate to the left with an accelerated motion when the plug is withdrawn, but I do not. As the motion to the left is invariable there must be a rule for it, but, granting that this motion has some relation to the motion of the earth, the question of how this affects the voluntary movements of an animal remains to be answered. I have watched over a dozen white whales in captivity, dumped into tanks from the most convenient side without regard to the direction of their heads, and every one turned and circled to the left. The question arises, Why do they do this? At the new aquarium now at Battery Park, New York city, the big sturgeon always circles to the left except when feeding. The two whales at Coney Island were good-sized ones, nearly ten feet long, and they raced around, side by side, and played for nearly two hours before they began to take the eels which had been in the tank several days, although the large mammals had been without food for at least seven days. On the way down I had noticed a difference in the sound of their breathing, that of the female being sharp and clear, while her mate seemed to have a hoarseness, and occasionally gave something like a cough. I called attention to this and told Mr. Coup that the animal had some lung trouble. He consulted a man who professed to know about these animals, and then reported his opinion that the cough was nothing to fear, "merely a little water in the blow-hole." "This may be true," I replied; "I'm not a medical man, but I've heard many consumptives cough, and that whale imitates them. I doubt if it lives a month." It lived just twenty-six days after its arrival at Coney Island. The last five days of its life it took no food, and its labored breathing was annoying to all who knew the cause of it. Then came a touching display of affection. The female slackened her pace day by day to accommodate it to that of her constantly weakening companion, and as the end neared she put her broad transverse tail under his and propelled him along. He stopped breathing at 10 A. M., but his mate kept up her efforts, occasionally making a swift run around the tank, as if to say, "Come, follow me," and then slowing up at his side, resumed the work of sculling him along, as before. Rude men expressed pity for the living one, and after my men had rigged a derrick and hoisted her mate from the pool she would rise higher out of water when she came up to blow, remembering that he had gone out over the top of the tank. An autopsy by local physicians, whose names have been forgotten, assisted by a medical student then in my employ, now Dr. J. R. Latham, 126 West Eleventh Street, New York city, disclosed the fact that the whale died of pneumonia. A white whale which reached the Broadway aquarium about July 1st, after mine came, lived seven months, dying January 28, 1878. My whale was either diseased when captured or took a cold at Isle aux Coudres. The New York one was sound all summer, and I told Mr. Coup that it might live for years, but the artificial heat of the aquarium in winter was not what a subarctic animal could endure, and it succumbed as most of Peary's Eskimos did in New York last winter. The autopsy on this whale was performed by Dr. F. D. Weisse, professor of practical and surgical anatomy of the medical department of the University of the City of New York, assisted by Prof. J. W. I. Arnold, of the same university, and Dr. Liautard, superintendent of the Veterinary College. They agreed that pneumonia was the cause of death, induced by a change of temperature of the water in which the animal had been kept. The official measurements of this female specimen, whose organs were kept in the two institutions named, were: nine feet six inches from snout to tail tips; three feet between tips of caudal fins, with a body breadth of twenty inches and a head breadth of thirteen inches. The lungs, weighing twenty-two pounds, presented on dissection the appearance of having been affected with chronic catarrhal pneumonia. The liver weighed nineteen pounds. The four stomachs were all free from any trace of previous disease. In looking up the life history of the white whale when opportunity offered, during the last twenty years I have consulted many old whalemen, and they all say that whales of all kinds take their babies on their flukes and scull them along as my female sculled her dying and dead partner. This must be a fact, for the little one could never swim with its parent. But another question arises: Is this purely a female instinct to provide for its young, which was, in the case of my pair, developed into a desire to preserve a companion? or, in other words, would a male have done this, or would a female have done it if she were free and had other companions? Was it love for her mate, or a feeling of selfishness at her lonely position? My female was afterward sent to England in the old transportation box, and was nine days without food, for they will not swallow food in transit, and it lived four days in London, clearing more than enough to pay for the animal and all expenses. When the free aquarium at Battery Park, New York city, was opened, December 10, 1896, there was talk of getting white whales the next spring, but there was no way to employ men to go for them at a stated salary, as they would have to pass a civil-service examination and become regularly appointed employees of the city. In this emergency Mr. Eugene G. Blackford came forward and advanced the money for the expedition, and it started early in May. On June 4th Professor Butler delivered a pair of them to the superintendent, Dr. Bean. I was aware of their coming, and was at the aquarium, and so was Dr. Latham. The male was lead-colored, was said to be a year and a half old, and was nine feet long. The female was of the usual cream-color, ten feet and a half long, and was said to be a year older than her mate. It is known that young and immature specimens are darker than adults, but I am skeptical about the ages, especially as there is a half year credited to each at the exact time the young are brought forth, and do not know on what the ages are based further than that the young are darker in color for a time. "How does the breathing of the big one sound to you?" the doctor asked. "Like ours at Coney Island that died from lung trouble," I replied, "and I would not have brought that animal down unless it was the only one to be had during the season." "I think I'll give her about ten days to live," replied the doctor. As these were not my whales, I declined to talk of their prospects of life to several reporters who knew me, and the whale in question died of pneumonia on June 11th, just a week after its arrival in New York, and several days before the trained ear of Dr. Latham had allotted its span of life. The male came to its death by an accident at 9 P. M. on June 24th, just twenty days after arrival. An eel got into its blow-hole and it drowned. According to an account published in the New York Sun of Monday, July 26, 1897, said to be obtained from Dr. Tarleton H. Bean, director of the aquarium, the whale "was as healthy a one as ever spouted until late on Friday afternoon, the 24th, when one of the keepers noticed that something was wrong. His attention was attracted by the loud wheezing that accompanied each blow that the whale made when he came up for air. The wheezing could be heard all over the aquarium. Dr. Bean was sent for. He was certain that the whale's lungs were all right. He cited a fact, known to the custodian and to all the keepers, that the mammal for the past month had remained under water a little longer after he came to the surface to blow. This convinced Dr. Bean that the whale's lungs were sound and that some other cause of illness must be found." Then the whale coughed out a piece of an eel that it had bit in two, and as it came up to blow again there was another piece hanging from the blow-hole which could not shut, and so let water into the lungs. Dr. Bean ordered the water drawn off the tank in order to get at the animal, but a former superintendent, who had planned the tanks, had put in such small drainage pipes that by the time the water was drawn down so that the men could get at the whale it was dead. I do not believe that a white whale lived two years in Boston, because this subarctic animal could not endure the extremes of Boston's temperatures without contracting lung disease in some form. Think of such an animal living through climatic conditions that an Eskimo can not stand, and in a public institution where thousands of people are vitiating the air! Animals which live wholly in water are more susceptible to changes of temperature than those which live on land. The white whale can be kept the year round in New York city if it can have a refrigerating plant to give it the temperature which it needs, and proper food. We bring polar bears to New York which suffer in summer, if not in our comparatively mild winters, and tropical animals which barely survive, but these land mammals are not so susceptible to climatic influences as are the fishes and the purely aquatic mammals, like the whales. These can never be kept long by the crude means which have been employed. From the purest air they have been changed to the more or less vitiated air where thousands of human beings are crowded and in a temperature which is unnatural. If we would keep them we must give them better chances for living than in open tanks in the summer temperature of New York. UNUSUAL FORMS IN PLANTS. BY BYRON D. HALSTED. The unexpected is apt to occur. Along with the regularity in living things, which we call "uniformity of Nature," there is so strong a tendency to vary that one almost expects to find a turn in the avenues of life sooner or later, and that gradual or sudden, as the case may be. We will not stop to discuss the open question of whether we are possessed by an inherent quality of variation, or as creatures of circumstances, subject to the controlling forces of our environment. Yesterday while looking at a row of seedling peaches, all from the same lot of pits, one of the miniature trees was found to be bronze or copper colored throughout. This set me to thinking. Here was a "sport," as it is termed, and if I take good care of the abnormity, bud it into common stock, etc., the landscape architects and ornamental gardeners may thank me for the novelty that will please their wealthy patrons. Leaving aside the abnormal as met with in the animal world, for much of it is more painful than otherwise to contemplate, let us glance at some of the unusual things occurring among plants. One first thinks of some strange forms in leaf, and if the eyes are opened to them they may be met with upon every hand. The "four-leaf" clover is lucky perhaps only because the finder is sharper-eyed than others, and stands a brighter chance of seeing success as it crouches almost invisible in the wild grass, the tilled field, or wherever the eyes may be set to find it. The child who brings me the oddities of vegetable forms is knowing in the normals of his class of curiosities, or else he would not see the novelties from the finding and exhibiting of which he gains so much pleasure. The person who is familiar with the striking beauty of the cardinal flower (_Lobelia cardinalis_) is the one who rejoices at the variations that may occur in the tints of the bright corolla. His delight would reach a high pitch should the conspicuous spikes be found upon dry ground, and not by the bank of some stream half hidden by the overhanging grass. But should the wandering plant display white flowers, then an albino of a most interesting kind has been met with, and some reason for it is sought in the unusual locality. Only a few days ago a white variation of the _Lobelia syphilitica_, cousin to the cardinal, was seen by the writer treasured in the Botanical Garden at Cambridge, Mass., and it called to mind the rage for pink water lilies, that twenty years ago were only met with wild in ponds at Plymouth, Mass. I asked an expert recently if there was any call for the pink or "Plymouth" lilies, and he informed me that the fad had died out with the transplanting and widespread culture of the pink "sports" of the nymphæa ponds. Abnormal colors in flowers are among the most common freaks in wild plants, and none are more frequent than the albinos. One could fill a page with instances of this sort. Some of our most common weeds, as the moth mullein (_Verbascum blattaria_), have a large percentage of the plants with white blossoms, and the patches of the white interspersed with the normal yellow-flowered plants in poorly kept meadows and neglected land has led the writer to gather seed of each to test the truth of the opinion that the white strain may be transmitted to the offspring, but the proof is not yet at hand. The writer knows where there is a patch of the hound's tongue (_Echinospermum_) with a good sprinkling of plants producing white corollas instead of the normal deep maroon. The two colors make a good subject for students who are gaining an elementary knowledge of the stability of species, and the range of striking variations that must be allowed for them. Next to the albinos the instances where the floral parts approach leaves in size and color are the most common. A few weeks ago while passing through a field once devoted to corn, but now overgrown with weeds, and therefore of special interest to a botanist, my eyes fell upon a daisy plant all the heads of which were with olive-green ray flowers instead of the ordinary pure white ones. These rays were smaller than the normal and quite inclined to roll, as shown in Fig. 1, and form quills, as seen in some of the fancy chrysanthemums. By the way, our common field daisy is a genuine chrysanthemum, and that which is produced in one species under the guiding, fostering hand of the skilled gardener was here shadowed forth in the field of waste land. [Illustration: FIG. 1.--GREEN AND NORMAL OXEYE DAISY HEADS.] A week or so later, while going through a similar field in an adjoining county to the one where the daisy freak was found, I came upon nearly the same thing as seen in the heads of the "black-eyed Susan," or cone flower (_Rudbeckia hirta_ L.). Here were the two leading weedy daisies, the white and the yellow, the former coming to our fields from the East and across the sea, while the latter, as a native of our Western prairies, journeys to make a home here and help to compensate by its pestiferous presence for the vile weeds that have gone West with the advance of civilization. Both of these daisies revealed that tendency in them to vary in their floral structures that if made use of by the floriculturist might result in forms and colors as attractive and profitable as met with in their cousins the chrysanthemums of the Orient. Perhaps the season which we have had, with its excess of moisture and superheat, has made the abnormal forms more abundant than usual. The even current of life has been met by counter streams, so to say, and the channels were broken down. In walking through a meadow in early June it was a common thing to find the spikes of the narrow-leaved plantain (_Plantago lanceolata_ L.) branched and compounded into curious shapes. Some of the normal and malformed spikes are shown in Fig. 2. [Illustration: FIG. 2.--MALFORMED HEADS OF PLANTAGO LANCEOLATA.] As a tailpiece to this portion of the subject it is a pleasure to introduce a freak among the native orchards, as shown in Fig. 3. A word of explanation is needed of the normal form of the lady's slipper here shown. As found in the moist woods, the plant above ground consists of two leaves and a single pink and strange-looking blossom terminating the stalk. This is the rule, and it has been strictly adhered to, so far as the writer knows, for centuries with a single exception, and that exception is the one here presented. It is as remarkable as a double-headed dog, and as difficult of explanation as the twin thumb. Perhaps the best way is to make no attempt to account for the freak, and leave the subject open for those who have a gift of insight into the secrets of the abnormal and the unexpected. Other species of cypripediums regularly bear more than one flower; this one may have done so in former ages, and here is the link that binds our pretty unifloral species to its remote and possibly extinct ancestor. On the other hand, a double-flowered form is possibly in embryo, and before the next century closes the _Cypripedium acaule_ Ait. may need to have its description changed so as to embrace two flowers. The influence of moisture, heat, and light is very great upon vegetation, and one only needs to observe the same species of plant as grown in a moist, shady place, as compared with the ones that are located in the full sun where the soil is dry. Size and shape of parts, and even their color and the surface, are different, and this all leads us up to the cultivated plants where variation is the rule and constancy the exception. Among wild plants where similar surroundings obtain for all members of the species the albino is noted, and any replacement of stamens by petals, as in the wild buttercup, is the rare exception. But the cultivated plants have led a charmed life, and we scarcely wonder that the plants in the bed of sweet peas or gladiolus, canna or dahlia, are as diverse in form and color as the pieces in a crazy-bedquilt. Man, with all his ingenuity and skill, has been at work molding the plant clay made plastic by generations of special culture. In one sense the greenhouse, the garden, orchard, and even the cultivated field are all dealing with monstrosities. The well-filled horticultural hall at a State or county fair is a vast collection of unnatural curiosities--that is, they do not occur in Nature, but are truly the creations of the mind of man as worked out along lines of vegetable physiology and stimulated plant production. For dinner this very day the writer ate a slice of a modern watermelon. What a triumph of horticultural art was exhibited in that giant fruit, each seed of which was filled with the accumulated tendencies of a generation of high breeding! There was represented the influence of soil and selection, of crossing and of culture, until the wild melon, which none of us sees or cares to see, is gone and a special creation takes its place, with its great demands upon any one who would attempt to grow it to perfection. [Illustration: FIG. 3.--A TWIN-FLOWERED CYPRIPEDIUM ACAULE (AIT.).] The art of breeding might possibly have deprived it of seeds had there been some other convenient method for propagation, as is true of many of our tree fruits, the navel orange being a striking example. Along with the absence of seeds and the presence of fine flavor there is truly a monstrous form, in that one orange is within and at the "navel" end of the other. Should we glance at some of our garden vegetables, as, for example, the cabbages in their various races, every one will be struck with the strangeness, to say the least, of the forms produced. In contrast with the head of the true cabbage, where leaf is folded upon leaf until a mass of metamorphosed foliage as large as a half bushel is produced, there is the cauliflower, with the edible substance stored in a fleshy inflorescence that has lost its normal function and become truly monstrous. Were it not so tender and delicate a food we might be disposed to smile at the absurdity of the whole thing, or at the kohl-rabi, with its turniplike bulb in the stem just above the surface of the ground. It is certainly a plastic species that will give such diverse and fantastic forms--so far from the wild state, and for that reason so useful to man. In the same manner a comparison of our orchard fruits with the forms from which they came would lead to the thought that man has made them to his liking, and not for service to the plant species. They are abnormal, judged by all standards in Nature; monstrous in size and in many cases have lost their essential structure as seed-producing organs. Coming to the ornamental grounds, the disguises are largely swept away, and there is but little hope of judging what the original plants may have been from which have descended the favorites of the flower bed and the conservatory. Species have been split into a thousand and one varieties, each with its peculiarities and each with the potency for greater deviation. Where shall we cast the line and land an example? The rose show of June is only surpassed by the chrysanthemum exhibition in autumn. There must be the new sorts brought out each year, whether the fancy be for a special shade or color or a striking new shape of bud or form of bloom. Would you realize what a novelty means to those in the craft who watch a group of carnation growers as they hang over the exhibit of a "new" rival, and consider all the merits and defects of the candidate for a certificate? All the beauties of the flower garden are so familiar to us that it is not expected that they will be considered unnatural. If the hydrangea makes a panicle larger than it can bear, man helps it out with a string or stake, for by overdoing it is not undone any more than is the coddled peach tree held up at fruiting time by a dozen poles, or the forced lily with a weak back supported upright by an artificial green stem at church on Easter morning. But even here there are monstrosities in the true sense. The asparagus or sweet potato stem occasionally broadens out into a ribbon, and it passes as an abnormity. The same thing takes place in the flower cluster of cockscomb (_Celosia cristata_), and if it failed to produce a strange fan-shaped and highly colored and crested top the owner would complain that her seed had given her only an inferior pigweed, and therefore not come true to name. The attractiveness of the cockscomb resides in the strange habit the plant has of broadening the upper end of the flower stalk out into a form that is truly monstrous. And this brings me to speak of a form that attracted my attention during the present season, samples of which are shown in Fig. 4. [Illustration: FIG. 4.--MONSTROUS BLOSSOMS OF FOXGLOVE.] The striking feature of the specimens of foxglove (_Digitalis purpurea_) under consideration is the production of an enormous somewhat bell-shaped flower at the extremity of the long racemose inflorescence, and at a time when only a few of the lowermost blossoms upon the stem have opened. The normal digitalis flower has a large pendant purple corolla much spotted upon the middle lobe of the larger and lower lip. On the other hand, the truly monstrous flowers, two to three inches across, are borne terminally and are quite uniformly bell-shaped, with the lobes from twelve to fourteen and spotted evenly over all the surface. The four stamens of the normal flower have increased to twelve in three examined and to thirteen in another. These stamens are normal in size and situated upon the corolla tube, except that there is no indication of their being in long and short pairs. The single pistil is many times enlarged in the monstrous blossom--in one instance two thirds of an inch in diameter for the ovary. Within the outer ovarian wall there was a circle of five petaloid pistils, some showing the placentæ and ovules intermixed with the pink and purplish petaloid expansions. Within the circle above mentioned there was a second pistil, tipped like the original with petal-like lobes instead of a stigma. The column was found so closely built up that the parts would not separate, and a cross-section was made through it, which showed that the pistil had a greenish central stalk around which the ovarian cavities were scattered quite irregularly, all bearing numerous ovules. In the flowers with twelve stamens there were four tips to the stigma, and the eight cavities were to be distinguished in the ovary, although they were not arranged in any regular order and not uniform in size. In short, the transections of these resembled the seed cavities seen in a slice of a large tomato of the "trophy" or "ponderosa" type. The florists' catalogues advertise in a few instances this "_Digitalis monstrosa_," and it is presumed that the specimens from which the engraving was made were from a packet of this "strain" of seed. As but a small percentage of the plants in the bed examined were monstrous, letters were addressed to some German growers of the seed, with questions as to this commercial monstrosity. One reply contained the statement that the form known as "monstrosa" had been in the market about ten years, and that about fifty per cent of the plants produce the strange terminal flowers. Another correspondent recalls the form in question as having been catalogued for more than forty years, and that it is described in a work upon gardening published in 1859, in which it states that the seed of this variety must only be gathered from the capsules of the monstrous flowers in order to preserve the abnormity. Concerning this last my correspondent said that it is all the same whether the seed is taken from the capsules of monstrous flowers or from the whole spike. Seed taken in this way will give from twenty-five to thirty-five per cent of the monstrous flowers, but the ratio varies from year to year. There are some advantages to the floriculturist in the monstrous form as the first bloom in it is uppermost and very conspicuous, while in the normal form the blooms appear from below upward, and the drooping tip of the spike is the last to produce flowers. The case in hand is a remarkable deviation from the type in many ways, but most interesting of all is the fact that floriculturists have by selection developed a variety that, in a packet of a hundred seeds, is quite certain to give some plants of the type "monstrosa," which it bears as its trade name. MALAY LITERATURE. BY R. CLYDE FORD. The Malay has a literature peculiarly his own, and in it comes to light all that subtle appreciation of Nature which marks him as a _Naturmensch_, but not a savage. This lore of his race he carries mostly in his memory, for to reduce it to writing has been, until recently, a task at once laborious and scholarly, and the ordinary Malay, living in the ease of perpetual summer, is neither. Still, there are dog-eared old manuscripts which circulate from one village or _campong_ to another, and these are often read aloud in the evenings to eager companies. And it makes a scene never to be forgotten, to see a dozen people seated in the shadows around some old man and to listen to the mellow cadences of his voice as he reads to them a tale of the olden time, of the great days of his race, before the foreigner's ships had scared the fish from the bays or turned them into noisy harbors; the sparkling stars peep through the ragged, whispering fronds of the palm trees, the yellow light of the _damar_ torch shines on eager faces, crickets chirp in the grass, and from afar comes the booming of the sea borne on the soft breath of the night wind. Malay literature, like most literatures, has had an ancient and a modern period. In the former we behold a primitive people dominated by Sanskrit life and civilization, and naturally enough the literature of this time is mostly translations of Sanskrit poems and romances, or at least productions inspired by such, and full of allusions to Hindu mythology. Probably to this early time may be traced such works as _Sri Rama_, a free translation of the _Ramayana_; the _Hikayat Pancha Tantra_, an adaptation of the _Hitaspodêsa_; _Radin Mantri_, a history of the love affairs of a Javan royal prince; the _Shaïr Bidasari_, an epic; and several other such epics and romances. One must not think that the language of these works is old-fashioned or obsolete, as Beowulf and Chaucer are to us, or the Niebelungen Lied in German. On the contrary, they are full of Arabic words and many other marks of recent composition; but it is the matter, the conditions of life described, the evident antiquity of the very feeling of the productions, that lead one to refer them to the early period. There are also some works that are genuinely Malay in origin and inspiration, and probably of a date that would put them between the ancient and modern periods. Of such is _Hong Tuah_, a story of a prince of Malacca who was a kind of King Arthur of his day. This work exists in several manuscripts, some of which are in England, one in Leyden, and one or two in the East Indies, and the date of the oldest is not before 1172 of the Hegira. Considering the fact that the year 1317 of the Mohammedan era does not commence till May 12, 1899, we thus see that many of the manuscripts of Malay literature are of no great antiquity. Another of these intermediate works is the _Sejarat Malayu_, or Malay Annals, which narrates the history of the Malays of Malacca, and their heroic defense against the Portuguese in the year 1511. It is divided into chapters, and is about the only notable historical composition in the language. The modern period is that period which marks the domination of Islam in the far East, the period in which the Malay mind has adjusted itself to a new faith and a new education. It is hard to tell when Mohammedanism first obtained a real foothold among the Malays, but probably not much before the fourteenth century. However, the conquest when once effected was complete, and to-day the people of Tanah Malayu are among the strictest followers of the Prophet. In a certain sense this period of the literature has been fruitful, but not so fruitful as the former one. Originality has been checked and imagination deadened, and the result is seen in a loss of sprightliness and vivacity. Works of morals and philosophy and compilations of Mohammedan law, have flourished. Still, we find some prose works of this period which are commendable; they even have some of the spirit of the earlier writings by which, no doubt, they were inspired; among these may be mentioned the _Tadju Elsalathin_, or Crown of Kings, by a mendicant monk, and the _Hikayat Sultan Ibrahim_, a religious romance of some beauty and pathos. Within the last seventy-five years the prose literature has received some notable additions through the writings of Abdulla bin Abdulkadir, a famous _moonshi_ of Singapore, who attained to some distinction under the Straits Government, being sent once or twice on missions to native states. He was born in Malacca toward the close of the last century, of Arab-Malay parentage, and received the ordinary education of a Malay lad of good family. After Singapore was founded, in 1819, he moved thither, where he thenceforth spent most of his life. His most important works are the _Hikayat Abdulla_, an autobiography, the _Pelayaran Abdulla_, an account of his trip for the government to Kelantan, and a narrative of his pilgrimage to Mecca made in the year 1854. Without a doubt Abdulla was the most cultured Malay who ever wrote. In his capacity as teacher he was often called upon to help missionaries with their translations of the Bible into Malay; though a devout Mohammedan, he was more than ordinarily liberal in belief, and quite willing to see the contest between Christianity and Islam go on fairly and on its merits. He once assisted a Mr. Thompsen, of Malacca, in translating portions of the Scriptures, but it was a thankless task, for the missionary was obstinate, and thought he knew more about the language than the _moonshi_ himself. As a result, such wretched Malay got into the work that Abdulla felt called upon in his autobiography to set himself right before the world. This is what he says: "... But let it be known to all gentlemen who read my autobiography that where there are wrong expressions or absurd Malay phrases in Mr. Thompsen's translation they must consider well the restraint put upon me, wherein I could neither add nor subtract a word without the concurrence of Mr. Thompsen. Now, because of all the circumstances mentioned here, let no gentleman rail at my character, for I was merely Mr. Thompsen's _moonshi_ or instructor. I acknowledge I am not destitute of faults, but truly by God's grace I am able to distinguish between right and wrong in all that relates to the idiom of the Malay language, for I have made it my study. I did not attain it by hearing, nor by the way, nor in the bustle of the crowd." But it is in poetry that we must look for whatever of originality and beauty there is in Malay literature, a fact not to be wondered at if we consider the softness and mellifluence of the language, which lends itself easily to the requirements of rhyme and rhythm. Two chief forms of poetry are recognized--the _pantun_ and the _shaïr_. THE PANTUN.--The _pantun_ in Malay literature corresponds to the lyric verse of Western lands. It consists of one or many quatrains, as the case may be, the lines usually from ten to twelve syllables in length. However, if worse comes to worst, the Malay poet with true poetic license suits himself in preference to others, and frequently employs as few as six or as many as thirteen syllables in a line. The length of a syllable is determined by tonic accent, but penult syllables not ending in a consonant are long, those ending in silent _i_ are short. But here, too, the Malay often departs from theory, and his rhymes, instead of being always exact, are constructed for the eye and not for the ear; and as for the short lines, they have to be drawled out into a legitimate scansion. The lines are not written one below another as with us, but the second opposite the first, the third under the second and opposite the fourth, and so on. The _pantun_ is much employed in improvisation, the stanzas being recited alternately by the two taking part. To the Malayan mind the beauty of this kind of verse lies in the artistic perfection of each quatrain by which it is made to veil some charming metaphor, which in turn serves in the last two lines to point a moral or express some sentiment of love or friendship, depending on the allegory of the preceding. To illustrate: _Tinggih tinggih pokok lamburi Sayang puchok-nia meniapa awan Habis teloh puwas kuchari Bagei punei menchari kawan._ _Bulan trang bintang berchaya Burong gagah bermakan padi Teka tuan tiada perchaya Bela dada, melihat hati._ The lamburi tree is tall, tall, Its branches sweep the sky; My search is vain, and o'er is all, Like a mate-lorn dove am I. Clear is the moon, with stars agleam, The raven wastes in the padi field; O my beloved, when false I seem, Open my breast, my heart is revealed. * * * * * The waves are white on the Kataun shore, And day and night they beat; The garden has white blossoms o'er, But only one do I think sweet. Deeper yet the water grows, Nor the mountain rain is stilled; My heart more longing knows, And its hope is unfulfilled. In poetry of more pretentious style, and in improvisations also, each stanza contains a key-word or line which becomes the text, so to speak, of the next. As artificial and unnatural as this may seem, it is, nevertheless, an ingenious way of keeping the thread of one's discourse when other inspiration fails. The best results of Malay verse come from it. A beautiful example may be cited from the Asiatic Journal of 1825: Cold is the wind, the rain falls fast; I linger, though the hour is past. Why come you not? Whence this delay? Have I offended, say? My heart is sad and sinking too; O break it not--it loves but you! Come, then, and end this long delay; Why keep you thus away? The wind is cold, fast falls the rain, Yet weeping, chiding, I remain. You come not still, you still delay-- O wherefore can you stay? Adelbert von Chamisso, the German poet, who has another claim to fame, however--his scientific career was charmingly described in the Popular Science Monthly for December, 1890--includes in his published poems three songs, In Malay Form, for which he doubtless obtained inspiration during his voyage to the far East in 1815 to 1818. They are so faithful in spirit and style to their source that we can not forbear quoting one in translation. It is called The Basketmaker, and is in the form of a dialogue, each stanza having the usual "key" line: The shower's gone by, the sun shines bright, The weather vanes now gayly swing; We maidens here in merry plight Quick beg of you a song to sing. The weather vanes now gayly swing, Through fire-red clouds the sun shines fair; Right gay and quick to you I'll sing A song that's full of dread despair. Through fire-red clouds the sun shines fair, A bird sings sweet and lures the bride; Pray what concerns your dread despair To maidens fair and dear beside? A bird sings sweet and lures the bride, A net for fishes there is spread; A maiden fair and dear beside, A sprightly maiden would I wed. A net for fishes there is spread, The moth's wings burn in bright flame hot; A sprightly maiden wouldst thou wed, But thee the maiden chooseth not. THE SHAÏR.--The _shaïr_ is very different from the _pantun_; the latter is lyric, the former epic in its nature; the _shaïr_ may be heroic or romantic, the _pantun_ never. However, it employs the same measure as the _pantun_, but all the lines of each stanza rhyme, instead of by pairs, as in the quatrains of the lyric verse. It is to the _shaïr_ that we must look for the really great works of Malay poetry, where some are bold enough to declare we may find passages of Homeric beauty. The most famous works of this nature are _Radin Mantri_, _Kin Tambouhan_, and _Bidasari_. The first two of these tell the story of the love of a prince of the royal house of Nigara for a maiden of his mother's court. It is a beautiful tale, abounding in parts of striking eloquence and pathos, and the characters are strong and well portrayed. The _Bidasari_ is the longest poem in the language, and typically Malayan. Its author is unknown, likewise the time and place of its composition. The only hint as to the writer is in the opening lines: "... Listen to this story of the history of a king in a province of Kambayat. A fakir has turned the narrative into a poem." And again at the conclusion, where it says: "This poem is weak and faulty because my knowledge is imperfect. My heart was troubled--for that reason have I written it. I have not made it long, because I was sad; but I have finished it and thereby obtained many blessings." Internal evidence, however, indicates that the poem is old, of a time long before the Europeans first came to the East, possibly before the Mohammedan conquest. It shows plainly the influence of Hindu theology, yet in the customs and scenes described, and the mode of life and the manner of thinking, it is essentially Malay, and so worthy, perhaps, of a somewhat extended notice. "There was once a king, a sultan, handsome, learned, perfect; he was of the race of noble kings; he caused the land of merchants and strangers to be swallowed up. From what people of his time say of him he was a valorous prince who had never yet been thwarted. But to-morrow and the day after to-morrow are uncertain." Such is the beginning of Canto I, as given in the French translation by Louis de Backer. The king marries, but just as joy and happiness are to be his, a griffinlike _garuda_ sweeps down upon his land and ravages it. Terrified, the monarch deserts his throne, takes his royal consort and flees for his life. On the flight the queen gives birth to a child, which, however, must be deserted, much to the mother's grief. In Canto II a rich merchant is introduced--a man whose goods and treasures are immense, whose slaves numerous, prosperity constant, but who, alas! is childless. One morning as he and his wife are walking by the side of a stream they discover a boat drifting near them, and in it a child of such radiant beauty that they are moved to adopt it. The lord of the region is Sultan Mengindra, whose queen is beautiful, but unhappy, through constant looking forward to the day when she shall be displaced by some woman more beautiful than she. At last she has a costly fan made, and sends out spies to offer it for sale in every village and town, but not to tell its price. If they discover a woman of rare beauty they are to return and notify her. In course of time the spies come to the old merchant's home, and see Bidasari, the handsome adopted child. After some delay she is brought to court, where she has to undergo much studied ill treatment from the jealous queen. By a subterfuge the girl escapes and is then removed by the merchant to a secret place in the desert. Canto III tells how Sultan Mengindra goes to hunt in the desert, and there finds a sleeping beauty whom he awakens and consoles with the music of a _pantun_. In Canto IV the story returns to the King of Kambayat. He and his queen have succeeded in reaching a distant part of their kingdom, but the fate of the young princess whom they so shamefully deserted oppresses them. Finally, the king's son, stirred by his mother's tears, sets out to search for this sister whom he has never seen. In his search he meets with Bidasari's adopted brother, who detects the resemblance between the young prince and his sister. Together they go to obtain audience of the sultan and Bidasari, who is now queen. Canto V. Convinced that the story of the prince is true, Sultan Mengindra dissuades him from returning, but bids his minister write a missive in letters of gold and dispatch it at once, with presents and jewels, to the King of Kambayat. In Canto VI we have the last chapter. The King of Kambayat receives the letter, which, however, makes no mention of Bidasari, and at once accompanies the messengers to Sultan Mengindra's court. He makes his entry into the strange capital with becoming splendor, and is received with great honor. The queen now makes herself known to her father, who is moved to tears. Banquets and great tournaments follow, and happiness pervades the court. The king returns after a time to his own land, but continues as long as he lives to send gifts and goods to his daughter and her royal lord. THE COLORS OF FLOWERS. BY HENRI COUPIN. Much might be said, from an artistic and poetic point of view, concerning the colors of flowers. It is in the corolla that they reveal themselves in their most minute delicacy. The tints so widely diffused among animals, even those of butterflies, are coarse as compared with them, and the painter's palette is powerless to reproduce them. They run through the whole gamut of the solar spectrum, even to its most minute details. Some naturalists have striven to establish a classification of them, and it will be convenient to be acquainted with their efforts, though they are not decisive and are somewhat artificial, like all classifications. We give one of the most ingenious of them: GREEN. { Greenish-blue. | Yellow-green. } { Blue. | Yellow. } Cyanic series. { Blue-violet. | Yellow-orange. } Xanthic series. { Violet. | Orange. } { Violet-red. | Orange-red. } RED. The type of the cyanic series is blue, and that of the xanthic series yellow. The first is sometimes denominated the deoxidized series, and the second the oxidized, but these designations have hardly solid enough foundations to be preserved. De Candolle, who publishes the table in his Vegetable Physiology, appends some interesting remarks to it. It will be noticed by the inspection of the table that nearly all the flowers susceptible of changes of color, as a rule, simply go up or down the scale of shades of the series to which they belong. Thus, in the xanthic series the flowers of the _Nyctago jalapa_ may be yellow, yellow-orange, or red; those of _Rosa eglantina_ yellow-orange or orange-red; those of nasturtium from yellow to orange; the flowers of _Ranunculus asiaticus_ present all the colors of red up to green; those of the _Hieracium staticefolium_, and of some other yellow _Chicoraceæ_ and of some _Leguminosæ_ like the lotus, become greenish-yellow when dried, etc. In the cyanic series the flowers of many _Boraginaceæ_, especially of _Lithospermum purpureo-cæruleum_, vary from blue to violet-red; those of hortensia from rose to blue; the ligulate flowers of the asters from blue to red or violet; those of the hyacinths from blue to red, etc. There are, however, a few apparent exceptions to this rule. Thus, although the hyacinths usually vary only in the blues, reds, or white, yellowish varieties, indicating an approach to the xanthic series, are sometimes found in gardens. The auricula, which is originally yellow, passes to reddish-brown, to green, and to a sort of violet, but never reaches pure blue; and single petals occasionally give suggestions of both series in distinct parts of their surfaces. Some surprise may be felt that white does not figure in De Candolle's table. This is because an absolutely white color does not seem to exist in any flower. The fact may be shown by placing some flowers supposed to be of the purest white, like the lily, the white campanula, or the wood anemone, on a leaf of clear white paper. It will be found that the white of the corolla is really washed with yellow, blue, or orange, according to what flower is taken. If the tint does not appear distinct, infusions of the corollas in alcohol will present tones unmistakably yellow or red, etc. White flowers are therefore flowers with tints appertaining to one of De Candolle's series, but albinized, as if they were etiolated. A small number of flowers begin white, and are subsequently colored under the action of light. The _Cheiranthus chameleo_ passes from white to citron-yellow and a slightly violet-red; the _Ænothera tetraptera_, at first white, becomes rose and then almost red; the petals of the Indian tamarind are white the first day and yellow the second; and the corolla of the _Cobea scandens_ comes out greenish-white and turns to violet the second day. The most remarkable plant in this respect is _Hibiscus mutabilis_, which Rumph calls the hourly flower, because it starts white, turns flesh-color toward noon, and becomes red at sunset. In his recent work on Plants and their Cosmic Media, M. Costantin has some remarks concerning the precocity of various races and the tint of their flowers. Hoffmann made observations on this point for several years. He remarked, as the result of eight years' observation, that the common lilac with white flowers blooms on an average six days earlier than the normal form with purple flowers. This might be a curious anomaly with no bearing, but the more we advance in the study of Nature the more we perceive that all phenomena, even the most insignificant, deserve to be examined. Similar results have been observed in varieties of radish (_Raphanus raphanistrum_) and of saffron (_Crocus vernus_); in the former the white flowers expand on an average of sixteen days earlier than the yellow ones (twelve years of observation), and in the latter plant the difference is four days. These changes of tint sometimes appear to depend on the temperature. Thus, the white lilac was obtained by horticulturists under the influence of a temperature of between 30° and 35° C. We can not, however, affirm that spontaneous races with white flowers originated in the same way as the white lilac. It will be enough to point out a few facts that may contribute to the guidance of persons who are seeking to learn the origin of these colored varieties. The _Papava alpinum_ has a very stable variety with yellow flowers, which, according to Focke, has been observed in the polar regions, while the white varieties have been seen in Switzerland. The cultivation of the same species at Giessen, Germany, has made it possible to obtain specimens with white flowers by metamorphosis from specimens with yellow flowers, but it is impossible to say whether or not heat is the agent that produces the changes in these cases. The experiments of MM. Schübela and Bonnier have shown that flowers become darker without changing their color in high regions and in those near the pole; but this phenomenon is one of light and not of color. Be their origin what it may, these white and colored forms have remarkable fixedness. It will be observed that black does not figure in the table of the classification of colors given above. Absolute black, in fact, does not exist in any flower. If some parts appear black, it is only because their tint is excessively dark. The black of the petals of _Pelargonium triste_ and of the bean is yellow, and that of the _Orchis nigra_ is a brown. Apparent blacks are, moreover, extremely rare. The gamut of the reds is much more varied than that of other colors. The reds of the xanthic series are generally more lively-hued, carnation or flame-colored; those of the cyanic series present tints more nearly approaching violet. These two reds may furthermore give rose-colors, but a little skill will divine their origin. The rose of the hydrangea inclines to blue, while that of the rose tends rather toward yellow. Blue colors are the most variable, and readily pass to violet and red, but most frequently to white. The most tenacious hues are those of yellow, and we might affirm that the bright and glistening yellow of the buttercup may be said never to change. The paler yellows change more easily, but rarely pass to anything but white. Green flowers, not being readily distinguished from the foliage around them, need not be specially mentioned. They are believed to be much rarer than they really are. Horticulturists are able, by cultivation, selection, and hybridization, to cause the colors of flowers to vary in considerable proportions. Not much is known of the laws of these variations, chiefly because gardeners who might tell botanists of them if they would have not the scientific spirit. We cite here what MM. Decaisne and Naudin[7] say respecting the variations of the color of flowers: [Footnote 7: Manuel de l'amateur des jardins.] "Change in this respect is effected in two ways: sometimes there is a simple discoloration, drawing the red, yellow, or blue tints of the corolla toward a more or less pure white; sometimes there is a radical substitution of one color for another. Flowers in which red or blue are the dominant tints are most subject to turn white, but the change may also be observed on some flowers that are naturally yellow, such as the disk of the daisy, the dahlia, and the chrysanthemum when those flowers suffer ligular transformation. Nothing, on the other hand, is more common in our gardens than white varieties of pink or of red roses, lilac, scarlet runners, larkspur, purple digitalis, Canterbury bells, etc.--in fact, nearly all plants with lilac, rose, red, purple, blue, or violet flowers. There are some flowers, however, in these categories the coloration of which is very persistent, and rarely fades perceptibly--as may be seen in the purple petunias, the hue of which does not lose its vivacity even when it is crossed with the white variety. "The radical substitution of one color for another, whether over the whole corolla or only on some of its parts, in the form of spots, stripes, or variegations, is also of frequent occurrence, and is one of the sorts of modifications which horticulturists have used with great advantage. A considerable number of 'fancy' plants derive almost all their importance from the facility with which the liveliest colors replace one another, blend, and intermix in a thousand ways and in relative proportions of which nothing is fixed, so that we can not find in these collections, when they are well chosen, two plants out of a hundred that are exactly alike in the tone and distribution of their colors. These multicolored varieties, all the offspring of cultivation, are generally perpetuated true by cuttings, while the seedlings compensate for the uncertainty of what they will produce by the certainty that they will give rise to new combinations of colors. This is not the case with single-colored varieties, which, unless they are crossed with others, tend to perpetuate themselves through their seedlings. The yellow, white, and purple varieties of the four-o'clock, for example, when they are pure, reproduce themselves constantly; when crossed with one another they give rise to intermediately colored flowers, and more frequently to variegated ones." Mr. Hughes Gibb observed, in the mild winter of 1897-'98, that flowers blooming out of season were liable not to have the same color as regularly blooming ones. The cactus dahlia, usually red, has put out flowers almost orange and with exterior florets sometimes nearly yellow. On the other hand, these dahlias have often shown a marked tendency to return to the simpler form. A species of nasturtium, habitually of a bright scarlet-red, has given in the cold frame late flowers of a bright yellow, a red band near the center of the petals remaining the only vestige of the normal color. In both cases the change of color began on the edges of the petals. The flower of the myosotis, normally bright blue, has become almost clear rose, without the slightest trace of blue; and a pure blue phlox has shown a tendency toward greenish-yellow.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from La Nature._ FOLKLORE OF THE ALLEGHANIES. BY FRANCES ALBERT DOUGHTY. The West Virginia mountaineer lives very close to Nature, and viewed from many standpoints the relation is characterized by pleasing amenities: juicy berries refresh him along the road; nuts drop into his path; "sang" (ginseng), which makes one of his sources of revenue, reveals itself to his eye as he follows the cows to pasture; a cool brook springs up to quench his thirst when weary of following the plow; pine knots are always within reach to make light as well as warmth; mud and stones easily combine in his hand to shape a daub chimney; and a trough dug out of an old tree furnishes a receptacle that is as good for dough at one end as for a baby at the other. Often, however, this close relation to Nature assumes a war attitude, fierce and uncompromising. If hungry wolves no longer howl furiously at the back fence after nightfall, or gnaw at the log pens which secure the stock, and if panthers are seldom bold enough to spring at a horse's flanks as a man rides along in the daytime, bears are still numerous enough to devour a large number of sheep every year in spite of precautions, and they have a pronounced taste for sweet young corn. The living wrested from the soil in the short and changeable summer months must cover the winter's need as well; it is generally so scant and uncertain that the mountaineer feels a chronic discouragement toward agriculture as a pursuit and resource. He must depend on it, and yet as far back as he or his father can remember there has always been some reason why "a good crop" could not be made that year. The West Virginian lives in a large and thinly settled game preserve, but the fleet deer usually contrives to escape the hunter's chill wait in the autumnal dawn, the coy wild turkey is overshy of his lure, and the wary trout requires a very patient rod. In the long winter deep snows cover the fences, groups or "bunches" of cows and sheep often perish in the drifts, and the human prisoners in their cabins, huddling around the wood fires, are nearly always, as they express it, "short of" some article which would be considered a necessity in the average city home. The varying, defiant, and incalculable moods and phases of Nature bring so many chances into the humble lot of the mountaineer that it is not surprising he should interpret her phenomena as having a distinctly personal import. Anciently, around Olympus the talk was of "omens," "auguries," and "fate"; dwellers along the chain of the Alleghanies to-day talk of "signs," "spells," and "luck," and these words held their significance for hundreds of years in the ancestral stock of the first settlers in the region, most of the folklore being directly traceable to a Scotch-Irish strain of blood. The mountain pattern taken far from cities probably differs little either mentally or physically from that of the colonial mountaineers. Even with the railroad traversing a limited area, and the influx of summer visitors during three months of the year, the only perceptible change wrought in the natives is a little sharpening of their wits from the barter of fruit and furs at the hotels in the extensive mineral-spring section. The Alleghany mountaineer, ignorant, narrow-minded, honest, brave, and hospitable, remains what he was when the eagle soared from the inaccessible eyrie above his head to be chosen as the tutelary genius of the unconquerable young republic. The chief distinction in the temperament of the sexes is that the men are frank and talkative, the women shy and uncommunicative. Beings approaching the legendary fauns and satyrs, clad in the skins of wild animals, are sometimes discovered by the solitary horseman in the wild mountain fastnesses; they gaze at him as an apparition from a strange world, never having seen a village or heard a railroad whistle. There is a curious and persistent survival of the belief in witchcraft through this mineral-spring belt in West Virginia. To draw out the natives on this mysterious subject they must be approached sympathetically; if twitted with their credulity they will shut up like clams, for with all the simplicity of the unlettered their intuition often arrives at a correct understanding of the estimate placed upon them by more fortunate persons. When satisfied that he is not expected to pose as a "freak," but is met on the equal plane of human intercourse, the mountain story-teller seems to enjoy recounting the traditions and beliefs of his people and their forefathers. Leaving himself a loophole of escape, he is very likely to finish his yarn with-- "'Tain't that I believe them things myself. I know they ain't nawthin' but superstition; but I kin qualify that right round here, not many miles away, there's people that believes in witches." In a little cottage on a much-traveled thoroughfare one woman admitted to me with bated breath, as though not quite sure her tormentor was dead, that she had been bewitched. Her account was given in these words: "I kep' seein' an old woman with a cow's hoof in her hand; sometimes she was by my side an' sometimes she was there on the wall. At last she come up close to me, an' she was goin' to clap the cow's hoof over my mouth, but I slapped at her right hard an' she went away. She ain't never come again. Yes, I _know_ I was bewitched." A cow's hoof is a frequent accessory, and animals that are brought into the magic circle are always of a domestic character, completely subservient to the power of the witch. It is noticeable that the exercise of witchcraft is generally ascribed to women; and that of witch mastery, the superior attribute, to men. The form of a judicial process found favor with the Puritan temperament in old Salem, although by a grim mockery the verdict was decided in advance. The independent mountaineer likes to take the law in his own hands, as the following story illustrates: "A farmer believed a woman was bewitching his stock. He drew a picture of her and set it up as a target; then he sunk a piece of silver in his bullet with an awl, _that being the charm for shooting a witch_. He aimed to shoot the picture through the heart, but fired a little too low. On that very day the woman herself fell flat on the ground, and a deep, awful hole was found in her side. From that minute she suffered extreme agony, and died in a week." The narrator had heard this grewsome tale from his grandmother, who said that she had seen the hole. One of the oldest inhabitants of Monroe County is responsible for the ensuing chronicle; he dates it in the "forties" of the present century: "'Tain't so very long ago there was a woman livin' near the Sweet Springs who used to be always seen with a cap and bonnet on; nobody ever saw her without the cap. She was a hard, grim-lookin' monster. If anybody was watchin' to see her ontie her cap strings, somehow they never could see any more until the clean cap was on--now that's _so_, there ain't any mistake about that! When she come over here from Botetourt County the report followed her that she lived pretty close to a man whose chillun went to school, an' a calf had been in the habit of attackin' 'em an' bitin' em. The father concealed himself one day and was watchin' to catch the calf. On that occasion it come out an' attacked the chillun on a bridge across a little stream o' water. He ran and caught the calf and cut off his ears with a knife. They always believed that _the old witch had turned herself into that calf_, and so when she turned back into a woman she wore the cap to hide that she didn't have any ears. There was three sisters of 'em; it was reported they was all witches, possessed of some uncommon art. John and Harriet had two little pet pullets they thought a good deal of. The cap-woman wanted 'em; they just fluttered an' fluttered till they died. Her name was Nancy L----. Well, she wanted the carpenter to make her a piece of furniture out of an old dirty plank she had, an' he wouldn't do it. He said it was gritty and it would ruin his tools. Then she got mad and said, 'I'll make you suffer in the flesh for that!' One day soon after that he was at his hog pen feedin' the hogs, when suddenly he was struck down perfectly helpless, so he couldn't speak. He thought it was paralytic or rheumatism. In those days there was an old doctor in Staunton, Augusta County, who had a kind o' process to steam people and boil 'em in a big kettle, for rheumatism. He put sump'n fireproof, a paste or ointment, all over 'em, like the fireproof you put on buildings, an' boiled 'em an hour or two hours, as the case might be. The carpenter went to consult him, an' he put him in a kettle that was big enough for him either to stand or sit down in it; a collar was fitted tight round his neck so the hot water couldn't get into his face and eyes. The boilin' didn't seem to do him any good. When he got home he halted about for twelve months or more. First he felt a pain in his hip, and then he felt a pain by the side of his knee as if it was gradually workin' down; then one day there was sump'n jaggin' in the calf of his leg. He put his leg up on a bench and an old gentleman seen sump'n stickin' out. He took a pair of nippers an' ketched holt an' pulled out a big shirtin' needle. Hugh kept the needle as long as he lived, and he believed Nancy the old witch shot him with it. He halted on that leg the balance of his days. _I've seen the needle_; it's God's truth!" A spice of profanity seems to have the virtue of embalming a witch story in the mountain memory. A rustic maiden who lives with her family on one of the loneliest hilltops in the Alleghanies, only to be reached on foot or horseback, makes this contribution to the folklore of the region: "An old lady not far off had three daughters, and she was going to learn 'em to be witches. They had to sit on the hearth by the fire and take off their shoes and grease their heels so as to go up the chimney, and they were not allowed to speak. The mother was to go first and the girls were to follow. The old lady and the two foremost ones had all got up safe, but the last girl, when she was in a narrow place in the chimney, said, 'This is a d--d tight squeeze!' With that she fell back and was burned up." The value of silence and self-control appears to be the only touch of morality in the witch logic. Manifestations of the black art frequently take place by or over running water. These characteristics are observed in another story from the same maid of the mountain: "Two witches were going to rob a store in the night, and they took a young man with them as a partner. They put the greased witch cap on his head so he could go through the keyhole. They all started out, and presently they came to a river. They saw some calves in a field, and caught three of 'em; they mounted the two that were heifers and the boy got on the steer calf. They charged him of all things not to speak on the journey. The witches jumped the river on their calves without makin' a sound, but just as he was jumping across he cried out, 'That was a d--d good jump for a steer calf!' Well, they all went on, and when they got to the store they passed through the keyhole one after another, the young man too. They took all the money they wanted, but when the time came to leave he couldn't get out of the keyhole, because he had spoken, and the spell was broken. He was found in the store the next morning, and had to take all the punishment." It is interesting to note as an offset to all these diabolic attributes and potencies that a firm faith exists in a beneficent Power back of them which under given conditions will prevail over evil. "God is always stronger than the devil" is the mountain way of expressing this dependence, and there are charlatans who take advantage of it by going about as "witch masters." One of these died a few years ago, and another farther back, an Irishman named "Mosey," is quoted yet for his successes as "master of all the witches and all the devils." When the cows had been eating mushrooms and their milk became too bitter to make good butter, Mosey was sent for at once to "cure the witchcraft" and "take off the spell." He took his regular beat through his part of the mountain country once in a while. An old man who oscillates between the "White" and the "Sweet," selling canes, remembers him well. He tells of one woman's experience who "filed a complaint" that her cow wouldn't give much milk, and that the milk wouldn't "gether" for butter. "'Woman,' says Mosey, 'your cow's bewitched, and badly bewitched!' "'Can you do anything for her, Mosey, and what will you charge?' "'Yes, I can cure her if you'll pay me five dollars and give me five pounds of butter to take home with me to burn in the fire to cap the climax and burn out the spell.' "Then he want through his enchantments over the cow, and took the money and the butter home with him. One day when he had been drinking a little I asked him if he really burned all that butter. 'Divil a grain of it did I burn; I ate it with my pertaties.' It was on that same trip when Mosey was curin' the cow that a man who lived near by sent for him. 'I feel mighty quare, Mosey,' says he, 'an' I can't describe exactly how I do feel!' 'You're bewitched, sir,' says he, 'and badly bewitched!' (he always used those words). 'Faith, an' I'll try and cure ye! Have ye got any blue yarn about the house?' The man's wife went to look for some, and she came back with a hank of blue yarn. Mosey wound off enough of it to make a cord about the size of his finger; they twisted it together, he pretending to put some enchantments on it, and then he told the sick man to fasten it round his waist next to his skin. 'Don't you lose it on peril of your life,' says he, 'or you're a dead man!' 'Peggy, get a needle and sew it on me!' he says to his wife, an' she done it. He gradually got well--may be he'd a got well anyway. I can't vouch for that." When asked if such things were still happening, the cane-seller replied: "Not three weeks ago a woman thought her cow was bewitched because her butter wouldn't gather, and she het an old horseshoe hot and dropped it in the churn of milk. When she churned again the butter on that occasion gathered, and _it was the same milk_ that was in the churn to burn the witch. You can put that down for June, '93." The Potts Creek neighborhood is said to be a center for the witch superstition. It is also a favorite place for "bush meetings," to which the natives come from a distance in their wagons with picnic dinners of salt-risen corn pone and sliced bacon, and there they listen approvingly to fervid exhortations that are based on orthodox Baptist and Methodist doctrines. The West Virginia mountaineer is profoundly religious in temperament, and considers that he has scriptural ground for a belief in witchcraft. * * * * * PROF. H. E. ARMSTRONG has described how, by taking incidents from suitable story books, children aged respectively seven and a half, ten, and twelve and a half years were set to work to test the physical facts mentioned, and how, by the systematic use of the balance, measuring instruments, and simple apparatus, or even household utensils, a true spirit of scientific research was engendered. Evidence of the good effect was exhibited in the notebooks made by the children, which demonstrate clearly how well the juvenile investigators have mastered the scientific method of observation. ORIGIN OF ANCIENT HINDU ASTRONOMY. BY THE COUNT GOBLET D'ALVIELLA. It is manifest that India is indebted for some of its astronomy to the Greeks. Not that it had not astronomy and astronomers from an epoch anterior to the invasion of Alexander. It had, in fact, been necessary to make observations of the heavens in order to fix a calendar that would enable the sacrifices of the Vedic ritual in connection with the return of the seasons and the revolutions of the stars to be celebrated at the right dates. Further, the belief in astrology, or the influence exercised by the movements of the planets on physical phenomena and all the events of human life, would lead, in India as elsewhere, to the observation and anticipation of everything relating to the conjunction and opposition of the heavenly bodies. The Rig-Veda has allusions to the phases and stations of the moon. The stations (_nakshatras_) consisted, according to a tradition preserved by the Brahmans, of twenty-seven constellations (afterward twenty-eight) which the moon was supposed to traverse successively in the course of its sidereal revolution. A lunar zodiac and a primary division of time into months were thus obtained. The moon, moreover, bears in the Veda the name of month-maker (_mâsakrit_). Each station was assigned a uniform length of 13° 20' on the ecliptic, and a denomination, generally derived from mythology. The month, in turn, took its name from the constellation that had the honor of harboring the moon. Manon and the Djyotisha (a special treatise included among the Védângas, or commentaries on the Vedas) tell us that the year was composed of twelve months, the month of thirty days, the day of thirty hours, the hour of forty-eight minutes, all strictly sexagesimal subdivisions, like our own measures of time. The Djyotisha also teaches the art of constructing a clepsydra, or water-clock. The adjustment of the solar year to correspond with the lunar year and of the two with the civil year dates from this period. The month was still composed of thirty days, but the solar years were grouped into quinquennial periods, in the middle and at the end of which the lunar month was doubled. Combining these quinquennial periods with the revolutions of the planet _Brihaspati_ (Jupiter), which was calculated as occupying about twelve years, the Indian astronomers computed an astronomical cycle of sixty solar years. As the same cycle is found with the Chaldeans, where, according to Berosus, it was called the _Sossos_, we have to inquire how far Brahmanic astronomy was influenced by the systems which were originally formed in ancient Chaldea. The presumption of such an influence furnishes a simpler and more probable hypothesis than the effort to trace the earliest astronomical ideas of the Hindus, as M. W. Brennand has recently suggested, to a period when the ancestors of the Aryans, the Semites, and the Chinese were wandering together over the plateaus of central Asia! We know now, from the cuneiform inscriptions, that the Chaldeans had, at a period far anterior to the entrance of the Aryans into India, invented a double calendar, solar and lunar, with intercalary periods; discovered the proper motion of the planets; calculated the return of eclipses; and constituted a double metrical system, decimal and sexagesimal; and, as was done, too, in India, had divided the circumference into three hundred and sixty degrees of sixty minutes each. It is impossible to draw the lines exactly between the astronomical discoveries which the Hindus borrowed from abroad and those which they drew from their own resources prior to the invasion of the Greeks, but we need in no case go farther than Mesopotamia for the source of the borrowed data. The ancient literature of India contains observations of the positions or conjunctions of some of the stars that carry us back to positive dates in the history of the sky. The astronomers Bailly, Colebrooke, and Bentley, and, more recently, M. Brennand, have found notes relative to astronomical phenomena that took place in the twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and even the twenty-first centuries B. C. Max Müller, however, advises prudence and reserve in accepting these calculations, some of which may have been afterthoughts, and others offer only apparent agreements. In any case, the advent of Buddhism, by depreciating the religious practices and astrological speculations of the Brahmans, contributed to bringing on a decline of astronomy at the very time it was taking its most vigorous stand among the Greeks. We learn from a passage in Strabo that the Pramnai regarded the Brahmans as boasters and mad because they were interested in physiology and astronomy. Now, there really exists an ancient Buddhist treatise in which the predictions by the Brahmans of eclipses of the sun and of the conjunctions and oppositions of the planets, and their discussions of the appearance of comets and meteors, are treated as despicable arts and lies. It was just at this age that Hellenic culture was developed in northwest India. It held astronomy, and astrology too, in great esteem. The Milinda Panda mentions the royal astrologer as one of the principal functionaries of Menander. No doubt there were, among the Gavanas (Ionians) of Taxila and Euthydêmia, minds versed in the knowledge of the principal cosmological systems formulated among the Greeks from Thales to Aristotle, and also acquainted with all the progress in the physical and mathematical sciences that had been achieved by the Alexandrian astronomers in the last centuries before Christ. To comprehend the extent of the influence of Hellenic science, we have only to inquire what Hindu astronomy had become again at the time of the restoration of the Brahmans in the sixth century A. D. Aryabhatta teaches the rotation of the earth around its axis; maintains that the moon, naturally dark, owes its light to the rays of the sun; formulates the true theory of eclipses; assigns an elliptical form to the planetary epicycles; and demonstrates the displacement of the equinoctial and solstitial points. Varâha-Mihira devotes himself especially to astrological labors, but also has the merit of having condensed into a vast encyclopædia the _Pantcha Siddhântikâ_, the principal astronomical treatises that were current in India. And Brahmazoupta is especially famous for his revision of an older treatise, the _Brahma Siddhânta_. In the opinion of the most competent critics, these works, which are chiefly empirical methods of determining the positions of the stars, are inferior to those which the Alexandrians have left us. Yet, in matters relating to the measurement of arcs and to spherical trigonometry, they reveal a more advanced state of the science. It is impossible to determine at what period this new astronomical science was constituted in India. Some of its theories squarely betray their indebtedness to Greek science, as, for instance, that of the displacement of the equinoctial and solstitial points by a periodical vibration or tremor. We can also say as much of the solar zodiac, the names of the constellations of which strikingly resemble the Greek names in form as well as in significance, and the same of the names of the chief planets. Other expressions are found, notably in the works of Varâha-Mihira, which indicate, if not a borrowing, a contact, at least, with the works of the Greek astronomy, of which Mr. Burgess gives a fairly complete list in his Notes on Hindu Astronomy and the History of our Knowledge of it, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Among these terms, some are Greek words which have been utilized in naming constellations or astronomical measures; others have retained the special significations which they had in the works of the Alexandrian astronomers. It would certainly be an exaggeration to insist that the adoption of a foreign term of necessity implies the borrowing of the idea which it expresses. It is, nevertheless, probable that the Sanskrit writers would not have made use of so many of these exotic denominations if the ideas they represent had already found their expression in the languages of India. Further, among the fine Siddântas which Varâha-Mihira collected and condensed as including all the astronomical science of his time, there are two, the _Romaka_ and the _Pauliça_, the names of which suggest directly--the first the scientific culture of the Roman world, and the other Paulus, a celebrated Alexandrian astronomer of the third century A. D.[8] [Footnote 8: The Romaka Siddânta employs, as a measure of time, the _Guga_ of 2,850 years or 1,040,953 days, giving a tropical year of 365 days, 5 hours, 55 minutes, and 12 seconds, which is exactly the figure proposed by Ptolemy and Hipparchus.--_Burgess, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society._] We apparently find, likewise, the names of Manetho (fourth century A. D.) in _Manittha_ or _Manimda_; of Spensippus in _Sporedjivadja_; and of Ptolemy in _Asoura Maya_, whom the _Sounya Siddhânta_ designates as the founder of astronomy, and who another treatise says was born at Romakapouri, "the city of the Romans." In this order of ideas the natives of India have never tried to deny their sources. The Gavanas, we read in the _Gargí Samhitâ_, are barbarians; but this science (astrology) has been constituted by them, and they must be revered as saints. M. Weber affirms that a treatise on astrology bearing their name, the _Gavana Çastra_, was reputed to have been written in the land of the Gavanas by the god Sourya in person, when, expelled from heaven by the resentment of his divine rivals, he came down and was born again in the city of the Romans.[9] [Footnote 9: The term Romakapouri does not necessarily imply the city of Rome; the name was probably extended to Alexandria and perhaps also to Byzantium. In other writings we find the name Gavanapouri, the city of the Greeks (or Ionians), applied to Alexandria.] We find, further, that the Greek calendar appears to have survived Hellenic domination in northern India. General Cunningham, in 1862, read in the inscriptions of the Indo-Scythians the names of the Macedonian months Artemisios and Appellaios. Since then the names of two other months of that calendar--Panemos and Daisios--have been found in inscriptions in the Kharosthis character. Another era of Grecian origin, that of the Seleucidæ, seems likewise to have furnished the Hindus their first historical computation.[10] It should be observed, in fact, that their most ancient era, that of the Mauryas, dates from the year 312 B. C., or the beginning of the era of the Seleucidæ. This had been adopted by the Grecian sovereigns of India, as is attested by a coin of Plato, struck in the year 166 B. C. [Footnote 10: Till then, the Hindus hardly seem to have sought for a common measure of time except for astronomical or mythological purposes.] Beginning with the Indo-Scythians, India generally adopted the era of the Cakas, which began, not, as had been long supposed, with the expulsion of the Scythians, but with the coronation of their principal sovereign, Kanichka.[11] Nevertheless, the inscriptions offer still other historical computations, as, for instance, that of the Gouptas era, which began in the year 240 of the Çaka era, and that of Vikramâditya, which was made to begin retrospectively fifty-six years B. C. Hence arise complications of a nature to make the task of paleography and history no lighter.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from Ciel et Terre (from the author's essays on Classical Influences on the Scientific and Literary Culture of India)._ [Footnote 11: M. Sylvain Levi has, however, lately reopened the question of the initial date of this era.] SKETCH OF WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS. The old problem of Nature _versus_ nurture that meets us in studying the life history of any organism becomes especially interesting in dealing with the biography of men of eminence. Are their achievements the inevitable expression of the natural forces innate in them at birth, or the product of environmental influences, or some resultant of these two factors? And how much may we in each case assign to one factor or to the other? These difficult questions naturally suggest themselves in glancing at the life of the subject of this sketch. Like so many men who have won prominence in comparatively new countries, he seemed, in an environment that had no apparent relation to his future, to grow from innate tendencies toward something not suggested by the circumstances about him, even to grow in opposition to the molding influences of these, and to conquer them. Later, however, we find him surrounded by influences that made a particular mode of self-expression easy, if they may not be said to have forced such expression. It was then that the casual observer might say that the circumstances made the man; yet, looking backward, we can trace the initiative in the man that led him into the congenial environment. A selection of proper environment to express Nature has been rightly claimed as a potent factor in all organic life; nurture, then, comes as a secondary power to mold, or rather to translate, the inherent power. WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS, the second son of Oliver Allen Brooks and Eleanora Bradbury, daughter of the Rev. Phineas Kingsley, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1848. In 1877 he married Amelia Katherine, daughter of Edward T. Schultz and Susan Rebecca, daughter of David L. Martin. He has two children. Brooks grew up amid the stimulating influences of a relatively new country, where freedom of development was not so sharply restricted but that all paths of life seemed equally open to one who would work. As a boy he was not one of those precocious naturalists of the common sort whose collecting instincts find expression in the hoarding of dead animals or plants rather than the neater postage stamp; names and authorities, classes and species, neatly arranged mummies, were not his delight. At first there seemed no sign that zoölogy would claim him as a most ardent admirer. Yet he was fond of live things and their ways, and introduced into his home that most delightful microcosm, the fresh-water aquarium (so much neglected in this country), in which he could observe at ease the habits and slow changes of living things when their native haunts were not accessible. Such early interest in the essential wonders of livingness rather than in man's artificial classification of phenomena was thus prophetic of much of his later originality of thought and view. He has never forgotten how much he owes to the instruction of the earnest and broad-minded teachers in the public schools of Cleveland. His college life began at Hobart, where two years left a deep impression from an acquaintance with Berkeley's thought, gained in browsing in the library, and long treasured up to produce fruit in philosophic views of maturer years. Then at Williams College, where the notable Natural History Society was sending out its expedition across South America, his love of Nature matured and specialized for two years longer, until he received the A. B. degree in 1870. It was Williams also that later, in 1893, bestowed upon him the LL. D. degree. For him the completion of college life was truly the "commencement" and not the finish of his intellectual training. His strong trend toward pure science and abstract mental life forced him onward into post-graduate work. But this required funds, and America was not Germany; the struggle for existence was not here so intense that one might not win bread in many walks of life without special training, and parents did not need to extend the larval period of support for offspring beyond the completion of college life to gain for them a place in any rank, social or intellectual. Now, a rapidly increasing need for the Ph. D. degree as entrance to professional life, necessitating several years of post-graduate study, often forces parents to take up their share in the increased burden. Then, however, few were agreed as to the advisability of prolonging an unpractical life devoted to study beyond what seemed the maximum limit of unproductive preparation for life--the day of graduation at college. Beyond that the young man must make his own way as best he might. The subject of this sketch chose to work his way by his own unaided efforts into the fullest measure of academic training. That was before the day of competition between universities, and there was no temptation to go here rather than there in order to live a semi-parasitic existence as scholar or fellowship holder. First in his father's counting house, and then at a boy's school near Niagara, young Brooks bravely gained the means to pursue higher branches of natural history, and to devote himself to research. In the former position he realized how futile for him would be a life given to money-getting, and he palliated the uncongenial nature of that life by such abstract thought as seemed useful, one immediate result of which was the invention of a mechanical device for computing interest and discounts in sterling money, that had considerable circulation. This, though it scarcely indicated a stronger bias for mathematics than for Nature study, showed a latent possibility that was not to be developed. In the latter position, which brought him in close contact with the wonders of time action, so plainly read in one of Nature's books for the blind--Niagara Falls--he found food for thought, as well as a deep interest in the action of young minds. Here was much material for philosophical study of wood life too, as well as for growth of conceptions of the way to learn and to teach. Free, after serving three years, to follow his genius, Agassiz's romantic venture at Pennikese drew this young naturalist, as it did so many of that epoch; and henceforth marine life, with its revelation of fundamental problems, fascinated him. Working on at Agassiz's museum, learning its collections by heart, absorbing from this center of American natural history and from its founder both stimulus and method, influenced deeply also by the unobtrusive teachings of McCrady and others who helped to make Cambridge the Mecca of naturalists, he was already an active contributor to the discussion of problems in the embryology of animals when he won his Ph. D. degree in 1875. Quiet, diffident, slow to speak, leaving hasty action, too, for those of other constitution, with thoughtful brow and keen eye to look outward, as well as to regard inner thought, this young man with flowing beard was a noticeable person. At this time he was to be seen always accompanied by his faithful "Tige"; for, wiser than Ulysses, he shared all the hardships and joys of life with this loved companion. Now he sought his true environment, and found it in the new university starting in 1876--the Johns Hopkins University. There he was appointed Fellow, an honor subsequently won by many who are well known to biological science, as W. T. Sedgwick, E. B. Wilson, K. Mitsukuri, A. F. W. Schimper, H. H. Donaldson, H. L. Osborn, J. McKeen Cattell, H. H. Howell, A. T. Bruce, E. S. Lee, H. E. Nachtrieb, W. Noyes, J. Jastrow, E. B. Mall, H. V. Wilson, C. E. Hodge, S. Watase, and T. H. Morgan. Like C. O. Whitman, in 1879, he did not enter upon the privileges of that position, but as instructor and associate became at once a guiding element in the new growth. In the freedom from old traditions, from fixed conventions and routines offered by this new university, this peculiar original mind found its best environment, and while the opportunity doubtless did much for the man, the man certainly reacted most favorably for the welfare of the highest ideals of his new home. We find him at once outspoken in emphasis of the philosophical aspect of animal morphology, contributing thoughts upon "inductive reasoning in morphological problems," upon "the relation between embryology and phylogeny," upon "the causes of serial and bilateral symmetry," and upon the "rhythmic nature" of the cleavage of an egg. Yet this period was also, and pre-eminently, one of acquisition of hard-earned and detailed facts. The development of Pulmonates and Lamellibranchs, of Crustacea and of Medusæ, as well as of the marvels of Salpa's life history, became absorbing studies. This great field of the morphology of nonvertebrates could be properly worked only with access to the marine fauna, and at that date there were few facilities for seaside study in America. A true disciple of Louis Agassiz, Professor Brooks saw the need of a marine laboratory, and devoted himself, as Dohrn did at Naples, to the accomplishment of an end so necessary for the advance of natural science. Encouraged by the aid of a few citizens of Baltimore, in 1878 there was started an experiment--"The Chesapeake Zoölogical Laboratory," at Fort Wool, Va., with Professor Brooks as director. With the absolute devotion of its director to research as example, and with the liberal aid of the trustees of the Johns Hopkins University, this laboratory became a most important adjunct to the university and a virile center of zoölogical study. So great was its success as a factor in the advance of zoölogical knowledge that the trustees bravely continued to support it whenever financial disaster did not rob them of the last penny. For eight years in the Chesapeake, or in the remoter waters of North Carolina, the station flourished; then, in 1886, we find the director, with a few enthusiastic students, venturing in a small schooner to the but little known Bahama Island, Green Turtle Cay, there to enlarge their experiences with such delightful realization of naturalists' dreams of the tropics as Haeckel experienced in his Journey to Ceylon. Subsequent annual expeditions to Nassau, the Bemini Islands, and to various parts of Jamaica served as marked eras in the lives of many young naturalists who will not soon forget the contact with life thus obtained. From these sources and from his connection with the United States Fish Commission, as director of the Marine Station at Woods Holl, Mass., in 1888, Professor Brooks drew inspiration and fact for the work and thought by which he is so well known to the working naturalist. There are few great divisions of the animal kingdom that have not excited his special interest and claimed his long-sustained labor upon the problems they express. Like McCrady, deeply fascinated by the _Hydromedusæ_ and their wonderful changes, many smaller papers, as well as the Memoir of the Boston Society of Natural History, entitled The Life History of the _Hydromedusæ_ and the Origin of Alternation of Generations, testify to his success in unraveling plots that thickened with new discoveries. An early interest in the mollusca, shown by his doctor's dissertation upon the embryology of the fresh-water mussels, printed in part in the Proceedings of the American Association, 1875, continued to be expressed in his contributions to many problems in the embryology of the fresh-water Pulmonates, of Gasteropods, of Lamellibranchs, and of the Squid. The Crustacea also rightly claimed a large share of the attention of a philosophic naturalist, bringing him face to face with the rigid formulations of law which these creatures present. The discovery of the very exceptional method of cleavage in the egg of the decapod Lucifer, and the demonstration of the existence of a free Nauplius stage there (published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1882), marked a most important advance in the morphological interpretation of all Crustacea, and brought its author to the first rank as an authority upon this much-studied group. Studying and capturing at Beaufort those phantom-like sand burrowers, the Squilla, gained him an insight into and an interest in this strange division of Crustacea that enabled him to undertake that difficult task, the description of Stomatopods collected by the Challenger Expedition--a task completed in 1886. The report, published in such a magnificent series as only the British Government could have consummated, is noticeable for the author's clear, free illustration of the creatures described and classified. In it we find a classification of the numerous, weird, glassy larvæ, agreeing with the classification of the adults and marking the success of the solution of the problem--the reference of chance collections of various stages of many species to their proper places in the life history of each species. When the fever for ancestral trees had spread among naturalists in a much more virulent form than that endemic in Wales, and when the Ascidians were brought into line as ancestral vertebrates, it was no wonder to find Professor Brooks laboring upon these interesting creatures, but his work in this group started from a different point of view. As early as 1875, when studying in the laboratory of Alexander Agassiz, he contributed to the Boston Society of Natural History a description involving a most novel interpretation of the embryology of a remarkable Ascidian, Salpa. This form is known to many not naturalists as that beautiful animal chain which is sometimes so common in the clear waters of Newport Harbor as to be dipped up in every bucket of water, but more often not there at all. The female buds forth male branches and gives each an egg (which is fertilized to form a second generation of females). There is thus no alteration of sexual and non-sexual generations at all; and, with characteristic appreciation of a paradox, Professor Brooks subsequently emphasized the fact that the poet naturalist Chamisso, in discovering, in 1814, "Alternation of Generations" in Salpa, had discovered a phenomenon where it did not exist, though subsequently found common enough in many other animals. With the continuity of interest so marked in him, the life history of Salpa, as thus revealed, continued to be one of the living thoughts in Professor Brooks's mind for a long period of years, and, with the accumulation of material and results of researches afforded by his summer work, culminated in the monograph Salpa--a quarto of nearly four hundred pages and fifty odd plates--published in 1893, or after nearly twenty years of sustained interest in this complex problem. In this volume we find first a coherent view of the intricate life history of this animal illuminated by such metaphors as make the necessary technicalities both readable and thinkable. For instance, "A chain of Salpa may be compared to two chains of cars on two parallel tracks, placed so that the middle of each car on one track is opposite the ends of two cars of the other track, and each joined by two couplings to the car in front of it on its own track, and in the same way to the one behind it, and also to those diagonally in front of it and behind it on the other track." Again, in speaking of that startling process of egg development that makes the embryology of Salpa one of the apparently insoluble problems of this branch of inquiry, he says: "Stated in a word, the most remarkable peculiarity of the Salpa embryology is this: It is blocked out in follicular cells, which form layers and undergo foldings and other changes which result in an outline or model of all the general features in the organization of the embryo. While these processes are going on the development of the blastomeres is retarded, so that they are carried into their final position in the embryo while still in a rudimentary condition. Finally, when they reach the places they are to occupy, they undergo rapid multiplication and growth and build up the tissues of the body, while the scaffolding of follicle cells is torn down and used up as food for the true embryonic cells. An imaginary illustration may help to make the subject clear. Suppose that while carpenters are building a house of wood the brick-makers pile clay on the boards as they are carried past, and shape the lumps of clay into bricks as they find them scattered through the building where they have been carried with the boards. Now, as the house of wood approaches completion, imagine the bricklayers build a brick house over the wooden framework and not from the bottom upward, but here and there wherever the bricks are to be found, and that as fast as parts of the brick house are finished the wooden one is torn down. To make the analogy complete we must imagine that all the structure which is removed is assimilated by the bricks, and is thus turned into the substance of new bricks to carry on the construction." Following that descriptive portion of the work comes a most interesting interweaving of facts gathered in wide experience with a scientific imagination possible only to one who had lived and thought in close sympathetic contact with tropical marine life. It is an account of the present conditions of life along tropical shores and the probable steps that led to the evolution of the innumerable sedentary and creeping things from the ancestral forms that floated on the surface of the ocean before there were shores. Charming reading for the layman, and for the specialist a broadening poetic insight into life as it is and as it was when the world was young and the pelagic forbears of the vertebrates competed with their simpler associates in the annexation of the bottom as a vantage ground for the "benevolent assimilation" of later immigrants. The third portion of the work follows a most commendable plan: "Scientific controversy is so unprofitable that I shall try to make it as subordinate as possible, that the reader may devote all his attention to the life history of Salpa, without interruption at every point where my own observations confirm or contradict the statements of others." This section deals with the refutation of criticism of the author's interpretations, and endeavors to harmonize the discords that in this, as in all complex morphological research, make progress slow though surer. The above brief references to the research work of the subject of this sketch would be too incomplete did we omit mention of his papers upon that very interesting and extremely ancient inhabitant of the Chesapeake, the Lingula, or of the beautifully illustrated memoir of the National Academy of Sciences, describing the crania of the Lucayan Indians, an unfortunate race of gentle beings discovered by the Spaniards and treated as part of the live stock of the New World and soon annihilated, leaving but a few bones, and, as Professor Brooks tells us, our familiar and pleasant word "hammocks," as evidences of their having been. Coming to maturity in the period of general acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis of organic evolution, Professor Brooks was naturally deeply influenced, and no one who has read his works can doubt his allegiance to natural selection as a powerful factor in the formation of the present order of living things. In the American Naturalist for 1877 he published the first outlines of a provisional hypothesis of pangenesis that sought to "combine the hypotheses of Owen, Spencer, and Darwin in such a way as to escape the objections to which each is in itself liable, and at the same time to retain all that renders them valuable." In 1883 the same hypothesis--that variations are perpetuated chiefly through the male line by special gemmules, and that the female is essentially conservative--was elaborated in book form under the title of The Law of Heredity. Thenceforth, in intervals of research work, Professor Brooks has contributed to various periodicals, notably the Popular Science Monthly, such essays upon kindred topics as spontaneously arose in his mind in connection with current work here and abroad. Some of these of a general philosophical interest have been incorporated with lectures, originally given to students in Baltimore, as The Foundations of Zoölogy, brought out this year by the Macmillan Company as Volume V of the Columbia University Biological Series. This, it will be noted, is dedicated "To Hobart College, where I learned to study, and, I hope, to profit by, but not blindly to follow, the writings of that great thinker on the principles of science, George Berkeley," and its keynote might be said to be difficult to hold, expressing the standpoint of one who says "The proof that there is no necessary antagonism between mechanical explanations of human life and belief in volition and duty and moral responsibility seems to me to be very simple and easy to understand." Though thus active in pushing forward the limit of fact and theory in the domain of pure science, Professor Brooks has not shirked the duty that falls to every member of society, but has labored earnestly to build a sound basis for immediate practical application of zoölogical research. In 1876 he organized a summer zoölogical laboratory for teachers and others in Cleveland, with the co-operation of two other young Clevelanders--A. H. Tuttle, now Professor of Biology in the University of Virginia, and I. B. Comstock, Professor of Geology in the University of Arizona. Identifying himself with the interests of the community in which he had cast his lot, he interested himself in the establishment of such educational influences as that of a public aquarium, and it was through no fault of the sower that the seed laboriously sown fell upon stony ground. In the winter of 1880 he gave a course of lectures and of laboratory work for teachers in the schools of Baltimore. Again, his early studies of the development of the oyster (for which he was awarded the medal of the Société d'Acclimatisation of Paris in 1883), his discovery that the American oyster could be reared like fish from artificially fertilized eggs, since he found it to have a different life history from its European fellow, led him to realize the greater possibilities that awaited our oyster industries when they should be based upon scientific fact. Living amid a population dependent to no small extent upon these industries, Professor Brooks threw himself with enthusiasm into the problem of warding off the ruin that comes to every enterprise expanding faster than its capital is replenished, and eagerly sought the means to magnify without deterioration so important a factor in the existence of the Commonwealth. As chairman of the Oyster Commission appointed by the General Assembly of Maryland in 1882, he drew up the long, detailed, and well-illustrated report, issued in 1884, which set forth the condition of the oyster beds in the Chesapeake Bay and their deterioration from overwork, and suggested a legislative remedy in the form of a bill designed to remove this industry from that primitive, barbaric stage in which our communal ownership of migrant birds and fish still remains, and to place it upon the secure basis of personal ownership underlying other live-stock business. But it is difficult to change the customs of centuries' standing, and prophets rarely see the fulfillment of their predictions. Many lectures and the issue of a popular book--The Oyster, 1891--were necessary labors assumed by Professor Brooks before the public mind was educated to some appreciation of the nature of the problem, and the fruits of his labors are yet to be matured and gathered. But it is not so much by discovery of new facts or by aid to the community in which one may chance to live that a man exerts his best influence upon mankind; rather by his success in inspiring others to see whatever of good there may be in his point of view and method of attack upon old problems, that his followers may keep alive and enlarge what he stands for in the growth of civilization. As a teacher Professor Brooks has exerted a powerful influence by the stimulus of example in his whole-hearted devotion to research, by originality of suggestion, and by his clear intuition of the essential factors in morphological problems. Convinced that naturalists, like poets, are born and not made--or, if so, then self-made--his teaching has been free from that too easily acquired hallucination that the forcible introduction of facts, and frequent extraction of words by means of examination, are a possible means to the making of zoölogists, or what you will to order, to be ticketed and branded as such after a fixed term of the above process. Those who are strong enough to grow in the open have found in him a genial sunshine, but those needing hothouse forcing have sometimes missed, perhaps, the care necessary to bring them to a marketable state. Many who have followed his lectures will recall the clearness and simplicity with which complex and puzzling questions were presented to their minds; the skull of the bony fish soon lost its terrors, while the homologies of the limb bones were brought to the mind in a graphic way, sure to leave a deep impression. Directness and lucidity, with freedom from investment of unessentials, are characteristics of his teaching and prominent features in his too little known Handbook of Marine Zoölogy, which, despite technical faults, was so original and honest, so free from closet natural history, that it marked an era in the advance of biological instruction. It was a direct appeal to the concrete study of living animals at a time when zoölogy for students was still the learning of text-books, and text-books were too often in spirit but modernizations of Pliny or of Aldrovandus. It is this removal of the impeding paraphernalia of custom-bound authority, and a direct, childlike communion with Nature in search of truth by one's unaided labor, that this man has to offer to those who come under his sway as teacher; with what success will be evident from the work of those who recently united to honor his fiftieth birthday with a portrait that might recall him to them as he taught them, and from the work of those who, in coming years, will enjoy the privilege of contact with his genius and be led to "seek admission to the temple of natural knowledge naked and not ashamed, like little children." * * * * * FORESTRY, Professor Fernow said in his paper at the American Association, is not, as it seems to be popularly believed, "Woodman, spare that tree," but "Woodman, cut those trees judiciously." The handling of a slowly maturing crop like forest trees requires especial consideration of a problem quite unlike any other that presents itself to the business man. The trees ripen slowly, a full century often being necessary to the complete development of growth. Obviously it would be inadvisable to cut down the product and then wait a hundred years for further income from the land; another system is necessary, where merely the interest is taken, in trees which are in a condition to cut, while the principal, the forest itself, remains always practically intact. Editor's Table. _PRIMITIVE MAN._ Two articles contributed to the April and May numbers of the Fortnightly Review by Mr. J. G. Frazer, the learned author of The Golden Bough, and more recently of a monumental edition of Pausanias, are worthy of the close attention of all who are interested in the early history of mankind. The articles are entitled The Origin of Totemism, and the object of the writer is to show that on this obscure subject a flood of light has been shed by the lately published researches of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen into the beliefs and practices of the native tribes of central Australia, those tribes being perhaps the best representatives now anywhere surviving of the most primitive condition of the human race. Mr. Baldwin Spencer, formerly a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, is at present Professor of Biology in the University of Melbourne, while Mr. Gillen is a special magistrate in South Australia, charged with the protection of the aborigines. In their work, Mr. Frazer observes, "We possess for the first time a full and authentic account of thoroughly primitive savages living in the totem stage and practically unaffected by European influence. Its importance," he adds, "as a document of human history can, therefore, hardly be overestimated." Evolution, it has often been remarked, and is again remarked by the writer of these articles, is an outcome of the struggle for life, and is rapid and vigorous or slow and feeble, according to the intensity of the struggle and the number and variety of the competing elements. Among the great land masses of our planet Australia is the smallest; and, owing to this circumstance, and also to its physical conformation, which renders large areas unfit for the maintenance of life, population has been much restricted and competition has been at a minimum. Hence the extremely backward and undeveloped condition of its native tribes, a condition which enables us, as Mr. Frazer observes, to detect humanity in the chrysalis stage, and mark the first blind gropings of our race after liberty and light. The account given of these tribes contains indeed some very remarkable details. For example, "though they suffer much from cold at night under the frosty stars of the clear Australian heaven, the idea of using as garments the warm furs of the wild animals they kill and eat has never entered into their minds." They attribute the propagation of the human race wholly to the action of spirits, to whom they attribute a fecundating power, treating as wholly irrelevant to the matter any contact of the sexes. The idea of natural causation seems to be one which they have no power to grasp. They believe that various results are dependent on special antecedent conditions, but it is a pure matter of accident what they shall conceive the conditions in any case to be. Here we come to the origin of totemism. Heretofore totemism has been considered, broadly speaking, as the identification of themselves by some group of savages with a particular plant or animal or other manifestation of the powers of Nature, accompanied by a complete or partial _taboo_, so far as the group in question is concerned, of the animal or other object adopted as totem, and also by a rule prohibiting marriage within the group. What Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have succeeded in doing has been to observe and detect the significance of certain practices of the Australian tribes which have never been observed, or at least never understood, before. At a certain time of the year, it appears, each totemistic tribe goes through elaborate ceremonies of a purely magical character for the purpose of promoting the growth and multiplication of the particular animal or plant, if it be one useful for food, with which the tribe is identified, or of antagonizing its evil effects if it be of a hurtful character. As "there is scarcely an object, animate or inanimate, to be found in the country occupied by the natives which does not give its name to some totemic group of individuals," the general scheme of things is pretty well looked after in the various ceremonies that are practiced by the different groups. Attention is here drawn to the essential difference between religion and magic, religion being an attempt to propitiate or conciliate the higher powers, while magic undertakes to coerce them. "To the magician," as Mr. Frazer observes, "it is a matter of indifference whether the cosmic powers are conscious or unconscious, spiritual or material; for in either case he imagines that he can force them by his enchantments to do his bidding." The ceremonies of the native Australians, as we have said, are wholly magical. They have the same kind of faith in their incantations and other strange performances that the modern man of science has in the preparations he makes for a physical experiment. The difference is that imagination or the crudest kind of symbolism has suggested the methods of the savage, while a careful scrutiny and comparison of facts has dictated those of the man of science. The _proprium_ of the savage mind is an utter insensibility to evidence, or rather a lack of all power of conceiving what evidence is, and therefore a total incapacity for feeling any need of it. The scientific man, on the other hand, feels that he needs it every hour and every moment. It may be interesting to quote the description given by Mr. Frazer, after Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, of the ceremonies performed by the men whose totem is the "witchetty grub," a creature much prized as an article of diet by the natives. "The men of the witchetty-grub totem repair to a shallow cave in a ravine where lies a large block of quartzite, surrounded by some small rounded stones. The large block represents the full-grown grub; the small stones stand for the eggs. On reaching the cave the head man of the totem group begins to sing, while he taps the large block with a wooden trough, such as is used for scooping the earth out of burrows. All the other men at the same time tap it with twigs of a particular gum tree, chanting the while. The burden of their song is an invitation to the insect to go and lay eggs. Next, the leader takes up one of the smaller stones, representing an egg, and strikes each man in the stomach with it, saying, 'You have eaten much food,' after which he butts at the man's stomach with his forehead.... Ceremonies of the same sort are performed at ten different places. When the round has been completed the party returns home. Here, at some distance from the camp, a long structure of boughs has been got ready; it is designed to represent the chrysalis from which the full-grown insect emerges. Into this structure the men, each with the sacred design of the totem painted in red ochre and pipe clay on his body, enter and sing of the grub in the various stages of its development. After chanting thus for a while they shuffle out of the mock chrysalis one by one, with a gliding motion, singing all the time about the emergence of the real insect out of the real chrysalis, of which their own performance is clearly an imitation." The Emu men have their own ceremonies, equally elaborate and quite as well adapted to promote the multiplication of emus as those of the witchetty-grub men to produce an abundance of witchetty grubs. The earnestness which is thrown into these ceremonies is beyond all question; and it seems to be clear that each totemic group in turn takes up its own burden of social responsibility: each has its duty to the tribe as a whole, and performs it to the best of its ability. Through their united efforts, as they firmly believe, the various processes of Nature are maintained in satisfactory activity; the succulent grub comes forth in due season and in reasonable quantity; the emu, the kangaroo, the bandicoot, and other useful animals keep up their numbers and continue to furnish food for the community; the hakea flower and the manna of the mulga tree grow in normal abundance; the winds blow; the streams flow; the clouds yield rain and the sun goes on shining by day and the stars by night, with, on the whole, an admirable regularity. A more satisfactory system it would really be difficult to conceive. How absurd, not to say profane, it would be for any one to suggest that ceremonies which were so abundantly justified by results might without danger be omitted! Skepticism is indeed very much out of place in certain stages of human development. The interesting feature, however, as Mr. Frazer holds, in the descriptions given by the two Australian writers we have named is the proof they afford that totemism, instead of being an irrational, unexplainable aberration of the nascent intellect of man, was really a scheme for securing the greatest possible multiplicity of benefits for the savage community. The whole tribe was divided into groups, and each group undertook to look after some function of Nature and keep it up to the mark. Here was a notable step in the direction of division of labor. How it came about that the particular animal or plant which was the totem of a group became wholly or partially _taboo_ to the group is not very easily explained; but it seems not impossible that some sense of tribal duty, gradually developed, kept those who were credited with providing any particular food element from being themselves greedy consumers of it. So far as that article was concerned they may have felt themselves as sustaining somewhat the character of hosts or entertainers of the tribe, and it may thus have become the custom that they should either not partake at all of that special thing, or partake of it only sparingly. If so, we find the foundations already laid both of politeness and of morality. It is an interesting question how far the notions which have been described have died out of modern civilized society. That they are wholly extinct it would be rash to affirm. There are many traces, indeed, of the surviving influence of symbolism, and here and there lingering tendencies toward a belief in magic are easily discoverable. Perhaps the wisest of us may learn to understand ourselves a little better by studying the operations of the human mind in its very earliest stages, before reason had yet shaken itself free from the random suggestions of sense. _THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY AND SCIENCE._ Apropos of the recent notable issue, by the Boston Public Library, of a comprehensive Bibliography of the Anthropology and Ethnology of Europe, to accompany Professor Ripley's Races of Europe, the twofold and diversely opposed interests of a great institution of this sort are called to mind. On the one hand are its manifold obligations to the great mass of the public, to the average reader, to the ubiquitous novel and fiction consumer, to private clubs, and to school children. A field of activity and value in popular education is involved, scarcely secondary to that of the public schools, appealing to the general reader, the taxpayer, and, above all, to the well-wisher for democratic political institutions and representative government in the future. In stimulating work of this character in Boston, in bringing the Public Library into deserved prominence among the educational institutions of the community, Mr. Herbert Putnam achieved great and deserved success during his administration, winning commendation upon all sides. The second aspect of public library duty is revealed by the recent undertaking at Boston above mentioned. It concerns the relations of great libraries to science, to original research, not to the average reader, but to the specialist. Instead of the purchase of twenty copies of David Harum, or perhaps of A Bloodthirsty and Self-laudatory History of the Recent Spanish War, by One who killed fifty men with his own hand, to meet a sudden demand on the part of readers, the expenditure of perhaps an equal sum of money for some rare and costly work in a foreign language, intelligible to but half a hundred men in the entire city, is involved. Such obligations do not of course rest upon libraries of secondary size and importance. Their path of duty is clearly marked out for them in the interests of the public, both on the score of financial ability and of demand as well. With the leading libraries of the country the case is different. Our universities are fast taking rank with the very best in Europe. Specialists in science and technology, the peers of those abroad, are plentiful on every hand. Oftentimes their private means are as limited as their appreciation and ambition are great. Without these rare books--the tools of their trade--they are powerless. In former days they were denied the opportunity for research, or else were obliged to spend months of study in Europe. We have the men and the minds here in America now; there is every indication that the books and apparatus are speedily becoming available as well. This Bibliography of the Boston Public Library is a case in point. A collection of works relating to the physical history, the origins, migrations, and languages of the peoples of Europe is indicated upon its shelves, in all probability, we venture to predict, superior to any single one existing in Europe. This startling statement is based upon several considerations familiar to any specialist. Scientific book materials are of two classes. The first are the expensive and compendious volumes, generally to be found in great libraries, although oftentimes the paucity of their scientific collections is very surprising, especially in all that concerns the newer sciences of biology, anthropology, and the like. The second order of publications, often rarer and scientifically more valuable than the first, are the scattered monographs or pamphlets published in all manner of forms and by societies, oftentimes ephemeral and of all degrees of eminence. This second class of materials is generally richly represented in the collections of the various scientific societies, especially in the form of reprints presented by the authors. But the great and expensive tomes are seldom thus presented, and the societies can seldom afford to purchase them. Thus it comes about that these two classes of raw materials have to be separately hunted down, being rarely found together. For example, the library of the Société d'Anthropologie at Paris, judging by its printed catalogues, while abounding in scattered monographs and reprints, contains very few of the expensive volumes. One must seek these, and if they be in English or German, very likely in vain, in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The Public Library of the city of Boston has apparently tried an experiment in this direction, and is certainly to be congratulated upon the result. To a very rich collection of standard works has been added, by co-operation with a special investigator, a large part of the _flotsam_ and _jetsam_ which is of such extreme value to the student of original sources. The library has set a worthy example of encouragement to research; it has offered definite proof of the ability of our American institutions to rival their European contemporaries. And a peculiarly appropriate rounding-out to the successful career in the distinctively popular phases of administration of the institution of the late librarian, Mr. Herbert Putnam, is afforded in this work, the last at Boston officially, perhaps, to bear his signature and the stamp of his approval. _OUR RACE TROUBLES._ The article which we publish in the present number of the Monthly, under the title of The Race Problem in the United States, is a sequel to one which appeared in the May number entitled The Negro Question. Both writers have a special acquaintance with the subject, and are widely known as active workers for the elevation of the negro race--Mr. Booker T. Washington, the writer of the second article, being himself one of its most distinguished representatives. While both manifest abundant sympathy with the negro, and a deep sense of the pressing nature of the problems to which the presence of a large negro element in the population of certain of our States gives rise, they virtually acknowledge that it is extremely difficult in discussing the subject to do more than present a few broad general views. That there is a very bad condition of things in some of our Southern States no one will dispute. The crimes which have been committed by white men, in avenging real or supposed crimes committed by black men, stamp a character of utter savagery on the communities in which they have occurred, and in which they have remained unpunished. At the same time there is no doubt that the existence of so large a negro element in the South constitutes a serious obstacle to the moral and intellectual as well as to the economic development of that part of the country, and tends to keep alive a dangerous condition of public feeling. Our contributor, Dr. Curry, states significantly that he could give very impressive details on this point, were it not that it would furnish altogether too unpleasant reading. What are we going to do about it? No doubt we have before us an illustration of the old adage, "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." The South had its "peculiar institution" for some generations, and held to it with extraordinary tenacity--went to war rather than give it up. Now, by the simple force of events, the old patriarchal and slaveholding system is broken up, and there the former slaves and their descendants are--emancipated citizens who have their rights under the Constitution, and who therefore have to be reckoned with. They can not be deported against their will; they have the same right to live in the country that any white man has. Manifestly there is but one honorable way of dealing with the blacks, and that is to treat them with absolute justice. Upon this point we are in entire agreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. If a black man is excluded from the suffrage on account of his ignorance, let the equally ignorant white man be equally excluded. We have great faith in the educative effect of justice, and a firm administration of law. It would at once raise the self-respect of the negro to know that what was law for the white man was law for him, and _vice versa_; and self-respect is a sure ground for further advance. In the matter of education, we hold that education for the colored race should be almost wholly of a practical kind. We go further, and say that the education given to white children everywhere might with great advantage be much more practical than it is. The proper education for any individual is that which will tend to make him more efficient, successful, and self-sufficing in the position which he is called to occupy. This principle, far from implying a stationary condition of the individual, is precisely the one which provides best for his advancement. It is the man who is thoroughly competent for the work he has at any given moment to do who passes beyond that work to something better. The misery of existing systems of education is that to so large extent they educate for a hypothetical position beyond that for which an immediate preparation is necessary. The result is that the schools unload upon the community year by year a levy of adventurous youths who at once begin to live by their wits in no very creditable sense, and who constitute a distinct menace to the stability of society. We would therefore urge most earnestly upon all who take an interest in the education of the colored race to keep in view above all things the importance and necessity of fitting the negro to take an active part in the practical industries of the country, and above all in agriculture. An education directed mainly to this end would do far more to develop his intelligence than one of a more abstract and ambitious character and would furnish a far better foundation for success in life. Far from tying the negro down to manual occupations, it would prepare the way for his eventual participation in all occupations. But occupation for occupation, where is there one that can reasonably be rated higher than the intelligent and successful cultivation of the soil? If the negro problem can not be solved by common sense and common honesty it can not be solved at all. Before giving it up as insoluble we should make full proof of these homely specifics. We have long been proclaiming that the negro is a man and a brother; let us therefore treat him as such, and if we find out anything that is particularly good for his moral and intellectual improvement, let us try a little of it ourselves. It surely will not do us any harm. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. _The Lesson of Popular Government_[12] is a fruit of thirty years' study, by Mr. _Bradford_, of certain peculiarities in the political workings of our institutions. The book is not for those who consider it patriotic to shut their eyes to whatever is going wrong, but for those whose regard for the Federal Constitution and the organization of our governments is only increased by the consciousness of the strain to which they are exposed, and who feel strongly that while the principles of the Government and the character of the people "are still sound and reliable, some modifications and readjustments of the machinery must take place, unless we are to drift through practical anarchy and increasing corruption to military despotism." For the sake of putting the subject in a clearer light, the three more prominent approaches to democratic government in modern times--those of England, France, and the United States--are studied comparatively in the former part of the work. The carrying on of governments in accordance with the expressed wish of the people is spoken of in the beginning as the appearance of a new force which has changed the whole face of society, and points to still greater changes in the future. How it has worked in the three countries in which it has been in operation for a little more than a century, and what it has done, are the questions which the author undertakes to answer. In England, popular government has taken the form, with a powerless hereditary sovereign commanding universal loyalty, of a ministry responsible to a Parliament, which is directly responsible to the people. In France, the executive is controlled by a legislative body chosen by universal suffrage, the majority of which is held together by party discipline. The virtue of this government is undergoing a supreme test in the Dreyfus case, the right issue of which would show a greater proportional advance in true liberty and the justification of popular government than has taken place in any other nation. In the United States, power is passing more and more into Congress, a body chosen separately from the President, whose members are actuated by personal, local, and partisan motives, and rarely rise to the conception of broad national views or look further than to the immediate present, while the nation at large and the Executive are without representation such as insures the co-operation of the ministry and Parliament in England. In all other respects than appointments to office, which must be made "in strict subordination to the demands of members of his party in both Houses of Congress," the recognized power of the Executive is confined within very narrow limits. In matters of legislation he has no voice whatever beyond general recommendations, such as are open to any citizen, and to which Congress pays little or no attention. In fact, that body resents anything like an expression of opinion from the President. The system is not encouraging to the filling of the office by men of the first rank, and men of that rank seldom reach it. The House of Representatives, meeting every two years a new body, suffers from its entire want of coherency and the absence of a qualified leader, and falls an easy prey to the lobbyist and the boss. So, while "there are still many, perhaps the majority, of men of good character in public life, the tendency is steadily downward." It has been customary in some quarters to charge the evils we suffer upon universal suffrage, but Mr. Bradford maintains that it is this which to-day is keeping up the character of the Government, and that but for the restraints imposed by it our political condition would be a great deal worse than it is. Further light is sought upon the situation, and further pictures are given of the conditions existing in comprehensive reviews of the State and municipal governments of the country. In considering proposed remedies the referendum is dismissed as tending to destroy personality and diffuse responsibility even more than is done now--the reverse of the concentration of executive power as the only really indispensable part of the Government, which should be sought. The enforcement of this principle of executive supremacy with immediate responsibility is the purpose of the book. Mr. Bradford would obtain this by giving the representatives of the administrative departments seats in the House, with power to suggest legislation, make explanations, and participate in debate. His final argument is that it can not be charged that democracy is a failure; but, "with a wholly new force introduced into the world, the proper machinery for its application has not yet been employed. In its nature it is reasonable, sound, and, on the whole, beneficent." Using the words of an English writer, "the failures of government in the United States are not the result of democracy, but of the craftiest combination of schemes to defeat the will of democracy ever devised in the world." [Footnote 12: The Lesson of Popular Government. By Gamaliel Bradford. New York: The Macmillan Company. Two volumes. Pp. 520 and 590. Price, $4.] We have already published a fairly comprehensive review of _Richard Semon's In the Australian Bush_,[13] based upon the German original, by Prof. E. P. Evans, in the fifty-second volume of the Monthly (November, 1897). But little needs to be added to what Professor Evans has said of the book besides announcing the appearance of the English edition, the translation for which was written under the author's own superintendence, and the contents of which do not differ in any important particular from the German impression. Professor Semon went to Australia on a special zoölogical mission, and spent two years there. His purpose was the study of the wonderful Australian fauna, the oviparous mammals, marsupials, and ceratodus (lungfish). These animals represent forms which, with a few notable exceptions, have long since become extinct in other countries, where they have to be studied in such parts of their bony forms as happen to have been preserved in the rocks, while here they can be examined alive and in the flesh--"living fossils," as the author fittingly calls them, links between the present age and one of the geological periods of the past. His observations on these subjects are in course of publication in a special scientific work, not quite half of which has appeared. The present volume consists in the notes of travel and adventure, the dealing with men, the anthropological studies, and what we might call the _obiter_ observations of the expedition. Almost simultaneously with Professor Semon's narrative we have from the same publishers another book, on _The Native Tribes of Central Australia_,[14] which deals more fully, exclusively, and perhaps more expertly with the anthropology of a part of the Australian continent. Of the authors, Mr. _Gillen_ has spent the greater part of the past twenty years in the center of the continent, and as sub-protector of the aborigines has had exceptional opportunities of coming in contact with the Arunta tribe; and both of them have been made fully initiated members of that tribe. Though both about Australia, the two books do not cover the same ground. Australia is very large, and its physical conditions are such that the groups of tribes inhabiting the various regions have for a long period of time been isolated from one another and have followed different lines in development. Professor Semon's observations were made in the Burnett district of northeastern Queensland, while those recorded in the work of Spencer and Gillen were made in the very center of South Australia and of the continent. Consequently, in reading them we read really about different things. In addition to the investigation of various customs, such as those connected with initiation and magic, special attention has been paid by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen to the totemic system and to matters connected with the social organization of the tribes; and here again the authors insist upon the differences between the groups of tribes, and that the customs of no one tribe or group can be taken as typical of Australia generally in any other sense than as broad outline. Both works deal with considerable fullness with the institution of marriage among the Australians, and the customs by which too close intermarriage is prevented. Among other subjects treated with especial fullness by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen are the totems, the bull-roarers, the Intichuma ceremonies (associated with the totems), the initiation ceremonies, customs relative to the knocking out of teeth, traditions, burial and mourning, spirit individuals, medicine men and magic, methods of obtaining wives, myths, clothing, weapons, implements, decorative art, and names. Professor Semon formed a moderate opinion of the capacity of the Australians. Though coarse and heavy, their faces are not bad looking and have expression. They are "no link between monkeys and men, but human creatures through and through," though of one of the lowest types. They have no pottery, no agriculture, no abstract ideas of any kind, can not count very far, but are clever in learning to write, read, and draw, are experts in signaling, and have their intellect and senses "brilliantly developed in all directions bearing on the hunt," with great dexterity in the use of weapons. [Footnote 13: In the Australian Bush, and on the Coast of the Coral Sea. Being the Experiences and Observations of a Naturalist in Australia, New Guinea, and the Moluccas. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 552. Price, $6.50.] [Footnote 14: The Native Tribes of Central Australia. By Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 671, with maps and plates. Price, $6.50.] GENERAL NOTICES. Miss _Mary H. Kingsley_ has given in her _West African Studies_[15] a book marked by pungent wit and striking originality in its sketches of adventure and observation, and containing in the chapters devoted to ethnology results of her personal studies. She was already known by a record of her adventures of a young Englishwoman traveling alone through some of the worst regions of West Africa, embodied in her book Travels in West Africa, which was published in the latter part of 1898. The present book may be regarded, as its name implies, as the result and the embodiment of the afterthoughts of that hazardous journey. It includes, after descriptions in which the unconventional directness of expression is much to be remarked, an account of African characteristics and a description of fishing in West Africa, chapters of a soberer sort on fetich, schools of fetich, witchcraft, African medicine and the witch doctor, and historical and economical chapters on Early Trade, French Discovery, Commerce, the Crown Colony System and some of its incidents, The Clash of Cultures, and African Property. Miss Kingsley's criticisms of the present system of administration being regarded as rather destructive, she endeavors to set forth, in a chapter entitled An Alternative Plan, "some other way wherein the African colonies could be managed." Special attention is invited by the author to two articles in the appendix to the volume by M. le Comte C. N. de Cardi and Mr. John Harford. We are pleased to note the high appreciation which Miss Kingsley expresses of the anthropological work concerning west-coast tribes of our former contributor, Colonel A. B. Ellis--Sir A. B. Ellis when he died. [Footnote 15: West African Studies. By Mary H. Kingsley. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 633, with Map. Price, $5.] Mr. _Frederick Palmer's In the Klondyke_[16] is an unpretentious book and free from the appearance of sensationalism, but gives a clear and graphic account of the region and its ways and of the getting there at the breaking up of winter. The author was at Dyea late in February, having intended to go with a Government relief expedition which had found no occasion to proceed farther. Being thus left out, he undertook, with dogs and sledges and two companions who proved congenial, the "untried journey" of six hundred miles over the ice fields of the Lewes Lakes and the ice packs of the Yukon River, which had been the contemplated route of the expedition. The start was made about the 18th of March, with little time to spare, because the Yukon was expected to become impassable by the 20th of April. The Chilkoot Pass was achieved in a day, and the rest of the journey was made "downhill with the current of the river at the rate of eight inches to the mile," in weather that became very variable, with now hard freezing and now slush in the middle of the day. The difficulties of the journey must have been formidable, with considerable suffering, besides a week in a hut with the measles, but no complaint further than the mention of the incidents appears in the author's story. On some of the days the thermometer ranged from 10° to 20° below zero at two o'clock in the morning, to 80° above at night, and the author "had one ear blistered by the frost and the other by the sun in the same day." The party arrived at Dawson just four days before the final break-up of the ice in the river. Accounts corresponding in temper and vividness with that of the journey are given of Dawson, the miners and mining, the history of the Klondyke mining enterprise, Klondyke types of character and adventure, the toils and trials and profit and losses of the "Pilgrims," the workings of the Government, and the return home to civilization--which does not appear, after all, to have offered transcendentally superior attractions to those who had experienced the pleasure of adventure. [Footnote 16: In the Klondyke, including an Account of a Winter's Journey to Dawson. By Frederick Palmer. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 218, with plates. Price, $1.50.] The _History of Physics in its Elementary Branches_[17] has been prepared by Professor _Cajori_ in the belief that some attention to the history of a science helps to make it attractive, and that the general view of the development of the human intellect gained in reading a history on the subject is in itself stimulating and liberalizing. The author has had in mind Professor Ostwald's characterization of the absence of the historical sense and the want of knowledge of the great researches upon which the edifice of science rests as a defect in the present method of teaching. The subject is treated by periods. In ancient times the Greeks, while displaying wonderful creative genius in metaphysics, literature, and art, being ignorant of the method of experimentation, achieved relatively little in natural science. The Roman scientific writers were contented to collect the researches of Greek professors. Except in a few instances the Arabs did not distinguish themselves in original research. Writers in the middle ages were only commentators, and knew nothing of personal investigation. The physicist of the renascence abandoned scholastic speculation and began to study Nature in the language of experiment. The seventeenth century was a period of great experimental as well as theoretical activity. In the eighteenth century speculation was less effectively restrained and guided by experiments. The nineteenth century "has overthrown the leading theories of the previous one hundred years, and has largely built anew on the older foundations laid during the seventeenth century." The evolution of physical laboratories, first for teachers and then for students, is the subject of the last chapter. [Footnote 17: A History of Physics in its Elementary Branches, including the Evolution of Physical Laboratories. By Florian Cajori. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 322. Price, $1.60.] "The Great Commanders Series" of D. Appleton and Company is enriched by a biography of _General Sherman_,[18] whom the author, General _Manning F. Force_, styles "the most picturesque figure in our civil war." He was more than this; he was its scholar and statesman--a man distinguished by the possession of high military combined with the best civil qualities. Further, as General Force well says, "his character was absolutely pure and spotless." In his dealings with the Vigilance Committee in San Francisco he assumed a position which it required courage of a much higher order than a soldier's to maintain. While comfortably situated as an honored professor in the State Military Academy of Louisiana when the Legislature passed the Ordinance of Secession, he had no hesitation in deciding what to do. He at once gave in his resignation in a letter that is a model of manliness, declaring his preference "to maintain allegiance to the Constitution of the United States as long as a fragment of it survives." His career as a general in the civil war is described at length. Through it all his foresight, seeking always to accomplish the most with the least expenditure and ultimate suffering, to which his strategy was adapted, is conspicuous. At this time and afterward his supreme thought appears to have been as to what would best conduce to the permanent good of the republic. To his military ability and self-effacing patriotism he added a far-seeing wisdom in council that could always be relied upon. "In his most unguarded words his principle was always clear, noble, and intensely patriotic, and his careless colloquial expressions often covered a practical wisdom and insight of a most striking kind." [Footnote 18: General Sherman. By General Manning F. Force. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 353.] In preparing their _Text-Book of Algebra_[19] the authors, assuming that mental discipline is of the first importance to every student of mathematics, have endeavored to present the elements of the science in a clear and logical form, while yet keeping the needs of beginners constantly in mind. Special attention is given to making clear the reason for every step taken; each principle is first illustrated by particular examples, and then rules and suggestions for performing the operation are laid down. The authors have endeavored to avoid apparent conciseness at the expense of clearness and accuracy, and have thereby made their volume somewhat larger than ordinary text-books. Features to which attention is called are the development of the fundamental operations with algebraic numbers and the concrete illustrations of these operations; the use of type forms in multiplication and division and in factoring; the application of factoring to the solution of equations; the solutions of equations based upon equivalent equations and equivalent systems of equations; the treatment of irrational equations; the discussions of general problems and the interpretation of positive, negative, zero, intermediate, and infinite solutions of problems; the treatment of inequalities and their applications; the outline of a discussion of irrational numbers; a brief introduction to imaginary and complex numbers; and the great number of graded examples and problems. [Footnote 19: Text-Book of Algebra, with Exercises for Secondary Schools and Colleges. By George Egbert Fisher and Isaac J. Schwatt. Part I. Philadelphia: Fisher & Schwatt. Pp. 683. Price, $1.25.] The material of the _Primary Arithmetic_, Number Studies for the Second, Third, and Fourth Grades, of _A. R. Hornbrook_ (American Book Company), has been chosen with careful reference to the development of the number sense of little children, as noticed by the author and as reported by many other observers. A distinctive feature of the work is the use of diagrams called "number tables," as a concrete basis for the child's thinking while he is getting his first ideas of the facts of the addition and multiplication tables. In them the numbers up to one hundred are presented in columns of tens, and so handled as to exhibit to the child's conception the relations of the several digits. By their use he first learns the properties of ten, then of two, and so on of the others--not presented in regular order, but with a view of exhibiting special properties--and their relations to one another. The method is ingenious and appears useful. The study on _Rhode Island and the Formation of the Union_, of the Columbia University Series in History, Economics, and Public Law (The Macmillan Company, New York), was undertaken by Mr. _Frank Greene Bates_ in order to ascertain why Rhode Island so long delayed its ratification of the Federal Constitution. The delay seems to have been largely a matter of the assertion of State rights, in which Rhode Island appears at that time to have been but little, if any, behind South Carolina. Liberty "was the presiding genius of the spiritual life of the colony, and the principle of freedom of conscience was never lost sight of; and this could not otherwise than heighten the other characteristics of the colony--individualism." The course pursued was the natural outcome of the conditions of the times, the "outcropping of the undying love of the people of the State for democracy and liberty, and their jealousy of all authority outside their own boundaries." "No book up to recent date," says the author of _Pantheism, the Light and Hope of Modern Reason_, who signs his name _C. Amryc_, and gives no publisher's name, "has treated pantheism as consistently as it deserves to be treated"; and he adds that "it is no creed; it is a logic; it makes absolutely no demand upon 'belief'; what is not logical is rejected, what is logical to-day is accepted, no matter whether it was unlogical a thousand years ago or will be illogical a thousand years hence; we are only responsible for our times." As pantheism, if it is a true logic, must be applicable to all races, the author has not chosen his examples from one nation or tribe; and he believes that the views he expresses are also those of nine tenths of what is called modern science. Many topics are treated of, some of which would not at first thought be associated with an exposition of pantheism. The matter and manner of the book are various. Parts of it are fairly good reading; other parts strike us as different. A book on _The Principles of Agriculture_, prepared by Prof. _L. H. Bailey_ as a text-book for schools and rural societies, is published as a number of the Rural Science Series of the Macmillan Company ($1.25). In it agriculture is treated as a business, not a science, but as a business which is aided at every point by a knowledge of science. "It is on the science side that the experimenter is able to help the farmer. On the business side the farmer must rely upon himself, for the person who is not a good business man can not be a good farmer, however much he may know of science." The principle of the intelligent application of knowledge is illustrated in a remark of the author's about the treating of drainage. The learner is apt to begin at the wrong end of his problem. In the usual method the pupil or reader is first instructed in methods of laying drains. "But drainage is not the unit. The real unit is texture and moisture of soils--plowing, draining, green cropping, are methods of producing a given or desired result. The real subject-matter for first consideration, therefore, is amelioration of soil, rather than laying of drains." Professor Bailey aims throughout this book to get at "the real subject-matter for first consideration" in matters relating to soils, the plant and crops, and the animals and stock. _Ideals and Programmes_ (C. W. Bardeen, Syracuse, N. Y., 75 cents) is a collection of thoughtful and suggestive essays, by _Jean L. Gourdy_, on the practical side of school life and the teaching of children. The author's ideal seems to be that the teacher should have a plan for her work, preparing for it so as to have the whole course marked out on general lines for the entire school year. Thus, her occupation should be to qualify herself for doing the work right. These statements of general principles are followed by essays on reading and plans for teaching, correlation as "the headstone of the corner of successful teaching, geography, sand modeling, field lessons, kindergarten training, and discipline." The burden of the whole is by skillful adaptation to get the best possible out of every lesson, in which a liberal use of field work assists greatly, and above all to avoid the stiff, formal, juiceless lessons of the old style of teaching. There have been several biographies of Faraday, most of them now out of print; but the life, work, methods, character, and aims of the man--who was "beyond all question the greatest scientific expositor of his time"--can not be kept too constantly or too long before the minds of students. Welcome, therefore, is the easily accessible and convenient volume _Michael Faraday: His Life and Work_, which has been prepared by Prof. _Sylvanus P. Thompson_, and is published by the Macmillan Company in their Century Science Series ($1.25). The work by which Faraday contributed so much to the advancement of knowledge is made prominent, and is illustrated largely, due regard being had to the limitations of the size of the book, with citations from his own journal and copies of his drawings. In _American Indians_, a book second in order but first in date of publication of a series of "Ethno-Geographic Readers" (D. C. Heath & Co., Boston), Prof. _Frederick Starr_ has succeeded in conveying a large amount of information about our aborigines in a very small space, and has done it in a clear style and a very satisfactory manner. The book is intended as a reading book for boys and girls in school, to whose tastes and capacity it seems well adapted; but the author will be pleased if it also interests older readers, and hopes it may enlarge their sympathy with our native Americans. Besides the accounts of the tribal divisions, general customs, manner of life, houses, and institutions--which when they are counted up are found to be quite numerous--it has articles on the sign language, medicine men and secret societies, the mounds and their builders, George Catlin and his work, the cliff-dwellings and ruins of the Southwest, the tribes of the Northwest coast, matters of religious and mythological significance, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the ruined cities of Yucatan and Central America. The revision, for the fifth edition, of _H. Newell Martin's The Human Body_ (Henry Holt & Co., New York, $1.20) was undertaken by Prof. _George Wills Fitz_ with the idea of bringing the book into accord with the late developments of physiology, of simplifying the treatment of some parts while expanding that of others, and of giving additional illustrations. Every effort has been made to avoid injuring those features of the author's work which have contributed to making the book so favorably known. The changes in the first nine chapters are largely verbal; but considerable alterations and additions have been made in some of the succeeding chapters. The directions for demonstrations and experiments have been greatly enlarged and collected into an appendix. They include the new requirements in anatomy, physiology, and hygiene for admission to Harvard College and the Lawrence Scientific School. We have already noticed some of _Lucy S. W. Wilson's_ excellent Manuals on Nature Study, particularly the one intended for the guidance of teachers. We now have in the same line the _First Reader_ of a series on _Nature Study in Elementary Schools_ (New York: The Macmillan Company, 35 cents), a book composed of original matter and selections which has been prepared "with the desire of putting into the hands of little children literature which shall have for their minds the same interest and value that really good books have for grown-up people." But the author does not expect to accomplish this by merely giving the book to the child and leaving the reading to work out its own effect. Each of the lessons is intended to be preceded by a Nature lesson. During or after the reading a lesson should be given in the new words introduced, and afterward the lessons should be grasped for the sake of thought. The lessons, which have appropriate illustrations from Nature, present some novel features. Among them is an apparent intention in the original compositions to follow the child's method of thought. _The American Elementary Arithmetic_ (American Book Company) is intended by the author, Prof. _M. A. Bailey_, to cover the first five years' work (beginning apparently very young) in the study, and is the first of a two-book series. It is divided into two parts--for the primary and for the three succeeding grades. It contemplates the use of apparatus, consisting of paper, pasteboard, toy money, blocks, and splints. The attempt is made to give every subject twice: first in pictures, and second in the particular form of printed words. Mathematical conceptions are presented in the first chapter in the order in which they are supposed to arise in the child's consciousness--first, once or more, indefinitely; next, how many, by holding up fingers, laying down sticks, etc.; and then by words, and so on--all introductory work designed to develop step by step a mathematical vocabulary, and to form a habit of clear mathematical thinking. The laboratory plan is followed in the succeeding chapters. In the _Language Lessons_ of _J. G. Park_ (American Book Company) an arrangement of the matter is aimed at which will draw upon the student for such effort as may be expected at a given stage of advancement, which will cause him to think first and then to express his thought with clearness and precision. In the succeeding parts are given exercises on language work, with special drills upon capitalization and punctuation, inductive lessons in grammar, and, finally, lessons so graded that a student may advance very readily from them into the higher work of grammar. The study is facilitated by the use of striking illustrations as the basis of lessons. The _Semi-annual Report of Schimmel and Company_ (Leipsic and New York), though primarily a business document, furnishes much information about the industries in essential oils and fine chemicals, and concerning progress in the departments of chemical science relating to these. The report for October, 1898, speaks of much research and many valuable studies as having been carried on during the preceding six months in the domain of the essential oils and their constitution, and of ample material for scientific reports as having been gathered. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Connecticut: No. 128. Commercial Feeding Stuffs. Pp. 12; No. 129. Inspection and Care of Nursery Stock. By W. E. Britton. Pp. 10. Twenty-second Annual Report, Part II, Food Products. Pp. 120.--Cornell University: No. 165. Ropiness in Milk and Cream. By A. R. Ward. Pp. 16; No. 166. Sugar-Beet Investigations for 1898. Pp. 50; No. 167. The Construction of the Stave Silo. By L. A. Clinton. Pp. 16.--Hatch Station, Massachusetts Agricultural College: No. 61. Asparagus Rust. By G. E. Stone and R. E. Smith. Pp. 20.--Iowa Agricultural College: No. 40. Relation of Acid Fermentation to Butter Flavor and Aroma. Pp. 12; No. 41. New Orchard Fruits and Shrubs. Pp. 64; No. 42. Weeds and Potato Scab. Pp. 12.--New Hampshire Agricultural College: No. 63. Third Potato Report. By F. William Ranes. Pp. 32; No. 64. The Forest Tent Caterpillar. By Clarence M. Weed. Pp. 24.--New Jersey: No. 136. Field Experiments with Nitrogenous Fertilizers. By E. B. Voorhees. Pp. 32.--New York: No. 149 (popular edition). Will Poultry thrive on Grain Alone? By F. H. Hall and W. P. Wheeler. Pp. 7; No. 151 (popular edition). How Ringing affects Grapes. By F. H. Hall and Wendell Paddock. Pp. 4; No. 152 (popular edition). Two Apple Pests and how to check them. By F. H. Hall and V. H. Lane. Pp. 8; No. 153. Director's Report for 1898. By W. H. Jordan. Pp. 36; No. 154 (popular edition). Profitable Potato Fertilizing. By F. H. Hall and W. H. Jordan. Pp. 2; No. 155 (popular edition). Sugar-Beet Success for the Season. By F. H. Hull and L. L. Van Slyke. Pp. 8.--Ohio: No. 100. The Home Mixing of Fertilizers. By C. R. Thorne. Pp. 40; No 101. Oats. By J. F. Hickman. Pp. 24; No. 102. Treatment for Insect Pests and Plant Diseases, etc. By W. J. Green and others. Sheet; No. 103. The San José Scale Problem. By F. M. Webster. Pp. 24. Newspaper Bulletin No. 192. Bovine Tuberculosis. Pp. 2.--Purdue University: No. 75. The Sugar Beet. By H. A. Husten and A. H. Bryan. Pp. 20; No. 76. Skim Milk for Young Chickens. By W. B. Anderson. Pp. 8; No. 77. Field Experiments with Corn. By W. C. Latta and W. B. Anderson. Pp. 160.--University of Illinois. Eleventh Annual Report. Pp. 16; No. 84. Spraying Apple Trees. By J. C. Blair. Pp. 36.--United States Department of Agriculture. Natural History of the Marias Islands, Mexico. By E. W. Nelson. Pp. 96.--West Virginia. Nursery Hints. By L. C. Corbett. Pp. 24. Barber, Edwin Atlee. Anglo-American Pottery, Old English China with American Views. Indianapolis, Ind.: Press of the Clay Worker. Pp. 175. Barrett, John. The Philippine Islands and America's Interests in the Far East. Hong-Kong. Pp. 65. Binet, Alfred. The Psychology of Reasoning. Based on Experimental Researches In Hypnotism. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. Pp. 191. 75 cents. Bridges and Framed Structures. Monthly. Vol. 1, No. 2. May, 1899. Chicago: The D. H. Ranck Publishing Company. Pp. 92, with plates. 30 cents. Brooks, William Keith. The Foundations of Zoölogy. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 339. $2.50. Bullen, Frank T. Idylls of the Sea. With an Introduction by J. St. Loe Strachey. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 286. $1.25. Bulletins, Reports, Transactions, etc. American Society of Civil Engineers: Proceedings. Vol. XXV. No. 4. Pp. 150.--British Columbia, Province of: Annual Report of the Minister of Mines to December 31, 1898. Pp. 280, with maps.--Chicago Manual Training School (University of Chicago): Catalogue, 1898-'99. Pp. 20.--City of Seattle, County of King, State of Washington: Report of the Chamber of Commerce. Pp. 33.--City Library Association, Springfield, Mass.: Bibliography of Geographical Instruction. By W. S. Monroe. Pp. 8.--Geographical Society of Washington: Presidential Address of Arnold Hague, Minutes for 1897 and 1898, etc. Pp. 48.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Annual Report of the President and Treasurer for 1898. Pp. 96, with plates; Annual Catalogue, 1898-'99. Pp. 347.--Michigan College of Mines: Catalogue, 1896 to 1898. Pp. 192.--New York Academy of Natural Sciences: Annals. Vol. XI, Part III. December 1, 1898. Pp. 230.--Ohio State University, Department of Zoölogy and Entomology, No. 1: The Odonata of Ohio. By David S. Kellicott. Pp. 116.--United States Department of Labor: No. 21. Pp. 188.--United States Life-Saving Service: Annual Report of Operations to June 30, 1898. Pp. 448.--Utah, State of: Second Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, to June 30, 1898. Pp. 317, with tables.--War Department of the United States: Customs Tariff and Regulations for the Philippine Islands. Pp. 40. Burgess, O. O. A Question of Consciousness. San Francisco. Pp. 40. Cumulative Index to a Selected List of Periodicals. Third Annual Volume, 1898. Cleveland, Ohio: The Helman-Taylor Company. Pp. 792. Coming Age, The. A Magazine of Constructive Thought. B. O. Flower and Mrs. C. K. Reifsnider, Editors. Boston and St. Louis. Vol. I, No. 3. March, 1899. Pp. 112. 20 cents. Eidlitz, Leopold. On Light. An Analysis of the Emersions of Jupiter's Satellite I. New York: The Knickerbocker Press. Pp. 12. Elrod, M. J. The College, Past and Present. Bloomington, Ill.: The University Press. Pp. 26. Fay, Edward Allen. Marriages of the Deaf in America. Washington, D. C.: The Volta Bureau. Pp. 527. Gardiner, Charles A. Our Right to acquire and to hold Foreign Territory. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 56. International Express Company, New York. Chart of Express Routes over the World. Sheet. Interstate Commerce Commission. Statistics of Railways in the United States to June 30, 1897. Pp. 687. Jacoby, Johann. The Object of the Labor Movement. Translated by Florence Kelley. New York: International Publishing Company (International Monthly Library). Pp. 36. 5 cents. Jackson, Frederick G. A Thousand Days in the Arctic. With Preface by Admiral S. F. Leopold McClintock. New York: Harper & Brothers. Pp. 940. Jordan, David Starr, with Official Associates and Special Contributors. The Fur Seals and Fur-Seal Islands of the North Pacific Ocean. In Two Parts. Washington: Government Printing Office. Pp. 606, with plates. Krüger, F. C. Theo. A Step Forward, A Treatise on Possible Social Reform. New York: Isaac H. Blanchard & Co. Pp. 30. Lucas, Fred Alexander. The Hermit Naturalist. Trenton, N. J.: William Hibbert. Pp. 121. McLaughin, Andrew C. A History of the American Nation. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 587. $1.40. Marsh, O. C. The Dinosaurs of North America. United States Geological Survey. Pp. 112, with 84 plates. Marshall, Percival. Small Accumulators, How Made and Used. New York: Spon and Chamberlain. Pp. 78. 50 cents. Michigan Ornithological Club, The. Bulletin of, Monthly. Vol. III, No. 1. January, 1899. Grand Rapids, Mich. 50 cents a year. Moon, Clarence B. Certain Aboriginal Mounds on the Coast of South Carolina. (Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.) Pp. 40, with plates. Moses, Alfred J. The Characters of Crystals. An Introduction to Practical Crystallography. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company. Pp. 211. $2. Munro, John. The Story of the British Race. (Library of Useful Stories.) New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 228. 40 cents. Palmer, Frederick. In the Klondyke. Including an Account of a Winter's Journey to Dawson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 218. $1.50. Porter, Robert P. Industrial Cuba, Being a Study of Present Commercial and Industrial Conditions, etc. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 428. $3.50. Reprints. Bolin, Jacob. On Group Contests. Pp. 14.--Coulter, John M. Notes on the Fertilization and Embryology of Conifers. Pp. 4, with plates.--Grabau, Amadeus W. Moniloperidæ, A New Family of Palæozoic Corals. Pp. 16, with 4 plates.--Hunter, S. J. The Coccidæ of Kansas. II. Pp. 12, with 6 plates.--Oliver, Charles A. The Value of Repeated and Differently Placed Exposures to the Roentgen Rays in determining the Location of Foreign Bodies in and about the Eyeball. Pp. 4.--Tyson, James, M. D., Philadelphia. The Uric-Acid Diathesis from a Clinical Standpoint. Pp. 15.--Washburn, F. L. Hermaphroditism in Ostrea Lurida. Pp. 3. The Sanitary Home. A Magazine devoted to Foods, Hygiene, and University Extension Work. Monthly. Fargo, North Dakota. Pp. 24. 10 cents. $1 a year. Schimmel & Co., Leipsic and New York. Semi-annual Report (Essential Oils, etc.). April, 1899. Pp. 68. Smith, D. T. Philosophy of Memory, and other Essays. Louisville, Ky.: John P. Morton & Co. Pp. 203. Smithsonian Institution. Crookes, William. Diamonds. Pp. 16.--Nutting, J. C. Hydroida from Alaska and Puget Sound. Pp. 12, with plates. Todd, David P. Stars and Telescopes. A Handy Book of Astronomy. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Pp. 419. $2. Wetterstrand, Otto Georg. Hypnotism and its Application to Practical Medicine. Authorized Translation. By Henrik G. Petersen. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 166. Wilkensen, H. E., Acting Secretary, and French, H. A., Acting Secretary. An Earnest Word to Our Friends. Portland, Oregon. (Home Making there.) Woodhull, John F., and Van Arsdale, M. B. Chemical Experiments. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 136. Fragments of Science. =The Gypsies and their Folk Tales.=--In the introduction to his collection of Gypsy Folk Tales Mr. Francis H. Groome describes the wide dispersion of the gypsy race as extending, in Europe, from Finland to Sicily, and from the shores of the Bosporus to the Atlantic seaboard; in Asia, from Siberia to India, and from Asia Minor (possibly) to China; in Africa, from Egypt and Algeria to Darfúr and Kordofan; and in America, from Pictou in Canada to Rio Janeiro. Believing that the gypsies, originating in India, left that region at an unknown date very long ago, he traces their migrations in the past and shows that a part of the race is still very migratory, passing, among other routes, between Scotland and North America, and between Spain and Louisiana. Another migration not mentioned in his book is the annual oscillation between north and south of the North American gypsy colony, which is growing healthily. The author finds it at present quite impossible to fix the arrival of the gypsies in southeastern Europe at a thousand years before Christ or a thousand years after. If the Komodromoi of the Byzantine writers were gypsies, then these people must have been a recognized and familiar element of the Balkan population about as early as the latter date. Gypsies pass for a very cunning people, and such they are to outsiders, so that Romany or gypsy guile is a very common expression. Centuries of suspicion and repression have taught them to arm themselves proof against confidence in strangers; but to those who become acquainted with them, as Mr. Groome professes to have done and George Borrow did, they present a character of simplicity and frankness. There is, as a gypsy woman once said to a writer in The Athenæum, "somethin' in the mind of a Gorgio that shuts the Romany's mouth and opens his eyes and ears." Gypsies are active transmitters of folklore, and have rich funds of stories; and many believe that the folklore stories of Europe are traceable to Indian sources, whence they may have been transmitted to Europe. Mr. Groome suggests how some of these stories may have originated by telling of a gypsy girl he knew who dashed off "what was almost a folk tale impromptu." She had been to a picnic in a four-in-hand with "a lot of real tiptop gentry," and "Reia," she said to me afterward, "I'll tell you the comicallest thing as ever was. We'd pulled up to put the brake on, and there was a _puro hotchiwitchi_ (old hedgehog) come and looked at us through the hedge, looked at me hard. I could see he'd his eye upon me. And home he'd go, that old hedgehog, to his wife, and 'Missus,' he'd say, 'what d'ye think? I seen a little gypsy gal just now in a coach and four horses,' and 'Dabla,' she'd say, 'bless us, every one now keeps a carriage.'" =Educational Work of an Experiment Station.=--The survey of the year's work of Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station in its efforts to "help the farmer" by dealing with present-day problems includes mention of its investigations, related in bulletins published or to be published in reference to fruits, their insect and fungoid enemies, vegetables, flowers, sugar beets, potatoes, fertilizers, beans, the dairy, veterinary science, horticulture, and plant disease. Much of the work of the station can not be published, consisting as it does of correspondence, personal advice, attending meetings, making records, or the performance of special illustrative experiments at farmers' homes or in neighborhoods as object lessons. "It is a pity," the report says, "that every farmer in the State can not be personally touched at least once in his life by the methods and the inspiration of a good teacher." The itinerant schools which were held in the early days of the extension work are regarded as being most beneficial when the community has been awakened by simpler and more elementary means, while the larger part of the work can be done more economically than by them. Yet in particular places and cases they are of greatest value, and they are still held when suitable conditions prevail. Special dairy schools, largely of the nature of practical demonstrations, were held at various places. The report lays much stress on the importance of beginning the educational work with the children and upon the value of Nature study. More than sixteen thousand school children have requested and been supplied with information on the making of gardens. =Flies as Bearers of Disease.=--In estimating the relative importance of flies and water supply in spreading disease, Dr. M. A. Veeder distinguishes between intestinal and malarial disorders. In the former the infection is a bacillus of some sort, the presence of which can be traced to contamination by excretions from a diseased bowel. In the latter the source of infection is peculiar to marshy or stagnant water, and independent of contamination from human sources. It is the author's belief that, with relatively unimportant exceptions, intestinal diseases are spread almost exclusively by flies and malarial diseases by water, and he supports it by citations from recent army experiences. Likewise, during the recent British campaign in Fashoda, which was most carefully planned and took place in a climate that is exceptionally dry and hygienic, there was no abatement of typhoid fever. In the case of an outbreak of malignant dysentery described by the author in a previous paper, taken at its height, not a new case occurred after measures were adopted that made conveyance by flies impossible, although there had been fresh ones every day for some time previously. Another more recent "lively epidemic" of typhoid mentioned by the author was ended in a day by measures directed against conveyance by water. "When flies are responsible, there are little neighborhood epidemics, extending in short leaps from house to house, without reference to water supply or anything else in common. But when water is at fault the disease follows its use wherever it may go.... Epidemics spread by flies tend to follow the direction of prevailing warm winds, as though the fly, wandering outdoors after contact with the source of infection, had drifted with the wind, but nothing of the sort is perceptible in the case of water-borne disease." =Pottery Making and Lead Poisoning.=--The report of Professors Thorpe and Oliver on the subject of the employment of compounds of lead in the manufacture of pottery, especially in its relation to the health of the work people, has just been issued as an English blue book. It appears that of the total male workers in the year 1898, 4.9 per cent became "leaded," while of the female workers the proportion was 12.4 per cent. It is stated that in the last six months many successful attempts have been made by the manufacturers to substitute a leadless glaze, and there seems no doubt that glazes of sufficient brilliancy, covering power, and durability are now within the reach of the manufacturer. The exclusion of women from certain parts of the work, except where leadless glazes are used, is advocated, and also various expedients for preventing the absorption of the lead by the skin, such as rubber gloves or "dipping" tongs. Their general conclusions are as follows: "That by far the greater amount of earthenware of the class already specified can be glazed without the use of lead in any form. It has been demonstrated, without the slightest doubt, that the ware so made is in no respects inferior to that coated with lead glaze. There seems no reason, therefore, why in the manufacture of this class of goods the operatives should still continue to be exposed to the evils which the use of lead glaze entails. There are, however, certain branches of the pottery industry in which it would be more difficult to dispense with the use of lead compounds. But there is no reason why, in these cases, the lead so employed should not be in the form of a fritted double silicate. Such a compound, if properly made, is but slightly attacked by even strong hydrochloric, acetic, or lactic acid. There can be little doubt that, if lead must be used, the employment of such a compound silicate--if its use could be insured--would greatly diminish the evil of lead poisoning. The use of raw lead as an ingredient of glazing material, or as an ingredient of colors which have to be subsequently fired, should be absolutely prohibited. As it would be very difficult to insure that an innocuous lead glaze shall be employed, we are of opinion that young persons and women should be excluded from employment as dippers, dippers' assistants, ware cleaners after dippers, and glost placers in factories where lead glaze is used, and that the adult male dippers, dippers' assistants, ware cleaners, and glost placers should be subjected to systematic medical inspection. In the 1893 report the medical members of the committee expressed the opinion that 'many old factories are wholly, or in part, unfit in a sanitary point of view for occupation,' and they suggested that 'there should be some authority to close them, or whatever part of them is condemned, on the same principle as dwellings are declared uninhabitable.' We share this opinion and we concur in the suggestion. Certain of the factories we have inspected are in the last stages of dilapidation, and it appears to us to be well-nigh impossible to introduce into them such rearrangements or additions as are required by the amended special rules." =The Longevity of Animals.=--The following interesting table, showing the periods of maturity and the full term of life of various animals, was prepared by E. D. Bell and appeared in Nature for March 23d. The table was made for the purpose of demonstrating a constant relation (in length) between these two periods of life, which the author expresses in the following formula, in which f. t. l. = full term of life, and p. m. the time required to arrive at maturity: f. t. l. = 10.5(p. m.) / [3root](p. m.), or 10.5 × (p. m.)^{2/3} and which seems to be fairly well borne out by the table: ----------+-----------------------------------+---------- | OBSERVATIONS. | f. t. l. ANIMAL. |-----------------+---------+-------| by | Authority. | p. m. | f.t.l | formula. ----------+-----------------+---------+-------+---------- | |Mos. Yr. | Yrs. | Years. Dormouse | Ainslie Hollis. | 3 .25 | 4-5 | 4.167 Guinea-pig| Flourens. | 7 .583 | 6-7 | 7.33 Loprabbit:| | | | Buck | R. O. Edwards, | | | | p. m. | 9 .75 | 8 | 8.67 Doe | R. O. Edwards, | | | | p. m. | 8 .667 | 8 | 8.013 | | Years. | | Cat | St. G. Mivart. | 1 | 12 | 10.5 Cat | J. Jennings. | 2 | 15 | 16.67 Goat | Pegler. | 1.25 | 12 | 12.18 Fox | St. G. Mivart. | 1.5 | 13-14 | 13.76 Cattle | Ainslie Hollis. | 2 | 18 | 16.67 Large dogs| Dalziel, p. m. | 2 | 15-20 | 16.67 Eng. thor-| | | | oughbred | | | | horse | Ainslie Hollis. | 4.5 | 30 | 28.62 Hog | James Long. | 5 | 30 | 30.7 Hippopot- | | | | amus | Chambers's | | | | Encyclopædia. | 5 | 30 | 30.7 Lion | St. G. Mivart. | 6 | 30-40 | 34.67 Eng. horse| | | | --hunter | Blaine. | 6.25 | 35 | 35.63 Arab horse| Ainslie Hollis. | 8 | 40 | 42.00 Camel | Flourens. | 8 | 40 | 42.00 Man | Buffon, f. t. l.| 25 | 90-100| 89.77 Elephant | Darwin. | 30 | 100 |101.4 Elephant | C. F. Holder | | | | and Indian | | | | hunters. | 35 | 120 |112.35 ----------+-----------------+---------+-------+---------- =The Manufacture of Firecrackers in China.=--There were exported from China during the year ending June 30, 1897, 26,705,733 pounds of firecrackers, all from the province of Kwantung. The exports, however, represent only a small portion of the number manufactured, as the use of the cracker is universal all over China. They are used at weddings, births, funerals, at festivals, religious and civil, and in fact on all occasions out of the ordinary routine. The United States consul general at Shanghai gives the following account of the industry: There are no large factories; the crackers are made in small houses and in the shops where they are sold. In making them only the cheapest kind of straw paper is used for the body of the cracker. A little finer paper is used for the wrapper. A piece of straw paper, nine by thirty inches, will make twenty-one crackers an inch and a half long and a quarter inch in diameter. The powder is also of the cheapest grade, and is made in the locality where used. It costs about six cents per pound. For the fuse a paper (called "leather" in Shanghai) is used, which is imported from Japan, and is made from the inner lining of the bamboo. In other places a fine rice paper is used, generally stiffened slightly with buckwheat-flour paste, which the Chinese say adds to its inflammability. A strip of this paper one third of an inch wide by fourteen inches (a Chinese foot) long is laid on a table, and a very little powder put down the middle of it with a hollow bamboo stick. A quick twist of the paper makes the fuse ready for use. The straw paper is first rolled by hand around an iron rod, which varies in size according to the size of cracker to be made. To complete the rolling a rude machine is used. This consists of two uprights supporting an axis from which is suspended, by two arms, a heavy piece of wood, slightly convex on the lower side. There is just room between this swinging block and top of the table to place the cracker. As each layer of paper is put on by hand, the cracker is placed on the table and the suspended weight is drawn over the roll, thus tightening it until no more can be passed under the weight. For the smallest "whip" crackers, the workman uses for compression, instead of this machine, a heavy piece of wood fitted with a handle like that of a carpenter's plane. In filling crackers, two hundred to three hundred are tightly tied together in a bunch; red clay is spread over the end of the bunch, and forced into the end of each cracker with a punch. While the clay is being treated a little water is sprayed on it, which makes it pack closer. The powder is poured in at the other end of the cracker. With the aid of an awl the edge of the paper is turned in at the upper end of the cracker, and the fuse is inserted through this. The long ends of the fuses are braided together in such a way that the crackers lie in two parallel rows. The braid is doubled on itself, and a large, quick-firing fuse inserted, and the whole is bound with a fine thread. The bundle is wrapped in paper and in this shape is sent to the seacoast. A variety of cracker which is very popular in China is the "twice-sounding" cracker; it has two chambers, separated by a plug of clay, through which runs a connecting fuse. There is also a fuse extending from the powder in the lower chamber through the side of the cracker. When the cracker is to be fired, it is set on end and fire applied to the fuse. The powder exploding in the chamber throws the cracker high in the air, where the second charge is exploded by fire from the fuse extending through the plug between the two chambers. In the manufacture of these the clay is first packed in with a punch to form the separating plug. The lower chamber is then loaded with powder and closed by turning over the paper at the end. The upper chamber is loaded and closed with clay. A hole is punched in the side of the lower chamber with an awl, and the fuse inserted through this opening. =An Enchanted Ravine.=--During his archæological researches in the Uloa Valley, Honduras (Memoirs of Peabody Museum), Mr. George Byron Gordon made an excursion to the wonderful enchanted ravine, _Quebrada Encantada_, which was famous through all the country for its weather wisdom. It was situated in a deep valley, and, Mr. Gordon says, "sends forth a loud melodious sound which may be heard many miles away, and is regarded by the people of the region as an infallible sign of rain. In fact, it is a regular weather bureau, with this peculiarity, that it is always reliable; for the sound is so modulated as to indicate by its pitch whether the coming storm is to be heavy or light. The amount of promised rain is in exact proportion to the volume of the sound, and thus it proclaims to the accustomed ear with unerring precision the approach of a passing shower or heralds the terrific thunderstorm of the tropics; and this is no fiction, but a fact, which any one may demonstrate for himself by going and listening to it." Tradition says the ravine was the abode of a golden dragon, and that in former times "it was lined with golden pebbles and the sands at its margin were grains of gold, and it was the custom of the golden dragon to rise occasionally to the margin of the pool and receive the offerings that were made to him by the people. If they wanted rain, they would bring their offerings and lay them on the golden sand behind the pool or cast them on the water; then, while all the people chanted a prayer, the dragon would rise from the cave where he dwelt in the depths of the pool, and take the good things that were offered him, and there was never a drought or a famine in the land. Then, when the Spaniards came and the people were driven from their homes, the golden pebbles and grains of gold disappeared, and the golden dragon, retiring into the uttermost corner of his watery cavern, withdrew forever from the upper world. There he still lives, and, as formerly, controls the clouds and the winds that bring the rain. The spirits of the Indians, too, still hold their meetings of an occasional evening by their accustomed pool, now lost in the solitude of the forest, and it is the sound of their chanting that makes the voice of the ravine." The pool is formed by a cataract tumbling down the side of the mountain and making a final fall of fifty feet, and the sound of the tumbling of the waters forms the basis of the pretty legend. =The Work of the Field Columbian Museum.=--Making only a selection from the numerous items of general interest in the Annual Report of the Director of the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, for 1897-'98, we find mentioned the fall and spring courses of nine lectures each, as having been more largely attended than ever before, hundreds of persons having been turned away from some of them, and in one case nearly a thousand. The library contains 9,003 books and 9,630 pamphlets, and has had some valuable additions, particularly in the department of Americana. The additions to the collections include specimens from Egypt, Italy (ancient Etruscan and renaissance Venetian), Portuguese South Africa, Pacific islands, and Alaska, the department representing which now numbers more than ten thousand objects. Valuable contributions have been received from the expedition of the curator of the anthropological (physical) department to Arizona. The herbarium of the late Mr. M. S. Bebb, added to the botanical department, represents much of the flora of the Western States, and "about all" that of Illinois. Numerous other botanical collections and additions to the geological and zoölogical departments are mentioned. Field work was prosecuted by Mr. G. A. Dorsey among the Hopi Indians in Arizona, C. F. Millspaugh in the collection of North American forest trees, and O. C. Farrington in the Tertiary geology of South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Other excursions were made among the zinc-lead deposits of southeast Missouri, to the Olympian Mountains of the Northwest, to "a point beyond which nothing unless provided with wings could go," etc., all resulting in collections of one kind or another. The museum was visited by 3,963 more persons than in the year before. =A Year at Harvard Observatory.=--The director of Harvard College Observatory reports the addition to the resources of the institution of twenty thousand dollars bequeathed by Charlotte Maria Haven, and twenty-five thousand dollars by Eliza Appleton Haven, without further restriction in the application of the income than that it shall be for direct purposes connected with astronomical science. In these bequests the legators fulfilled the wishes of their brother, Horace Appleton Haven, as expressed half a century ago. By the peculiar organization of the force of the observatory, with a single director to oversee all and a large force of assistants, each having a special work and many of them skillful only in that, an increased amount of work can be done for a given expenditure, and great advantages for co-operation are secured, but too much depends upon a single person--the director. In the examination of the spectra of stars photographed in the Draper, Bruce, and Bache telescopes by Mrs. Fleming, twelve new variable stars were discovered by means of their bright hydrogen lines, and the spectra of a considerable number of other stars were determined. Valuable results, obtained by other examiners, are mentioned. An instrument has been constructed by which prismatic spectra can be converted into normal spectra or any other desired change of scale can be effected. By photographs obtained of stars in the vicinity of the north pole material is believed to be furnished for an accurate determination of the constants of aberration, nutation, and precession. Sixteen circulars were issued during 1897-'98. When fifty of these circulars have been issued, a title-page and index are to be published for binding. =Putting Life in the School.=--The discussion of the hygiene of instruction, said Dr. G. W. Fitz, in addresses which are published in the American Physical Education Review, brings us at once face to face with one of the gravest problems of our educational system--the depressing effect of school routine. In the search for a remedy "the school programme has been pronounced poor, and efforts have been made to enrich it. The work has been pronounced abstract and object lessons have been introduced; uninteresting and bright colors, varied shapes, pictures innumerable, have been rushed upon the child until he has been bewildered by the multiplicity of detail, and further exhausted by the demand for more discriminating attention. The fundamental difficulty has been that too much has been required of the child in the beginning, and the attempt at enrichment and greater variety has but increased the burden." Children begin learning to read before they have acquired experience and ideas to match the text; and "experience has shown over and over again that the child who begins to read at eight or even ten years of age is in no wise handicapped in his later intellectual progress. He has the inestimable advantage of intense interest, roused by his growing ability to unlock the secrets of books and papers after the fashion of his elders." Writing is taught before the child has acquired the art of fine co-ordination, and the effort demanded in the use of the pen "leads to a degree of nervous exhaustion unapproached by any other school work." In arithmetic the children "are unable to grasp the numerical relations involved, and the drill, which makes it a pure exercise of memory, is necessary. Much of the aversion to arithmetical problems found later is undoubtedly due to this disheartening primary work. Here again the child who begins arithmetic at eight or ten years of age finds himself able to take it up quickly and has the liking for it that easy mastery always gives." Nature work, on the other hand, "offers wonderfully interesting and valuable material for awakening the intellectual activities of childhood, and while its material for study and description is unlimited, its demand upon the child may be perfectly adapted to his power of observation. We must remember that physical activity is the supreme factor in the development of the child." This means spontaneous play under favorable conditions, not "that nervously exhausting and deadening drill known as the Swedish gymnastics, which ... adds fatigue to fatigue, by taking the initiative away from the child and forcing him to pay constant attention to the orders of the teacher." As to discipline, "the child is self-disciplined when he is held to his work by the reflex attention of interest. This can always be secured when the work is adapted to his grasp, when he has the sense of power which comes with easy conquest, when he is not exhausted by the imposition of a sequence logical to the adult mind but meaningless to him, when his attention is not dulled by a demand for attention continued beyond a physiological limit." =Beautifying the Home Grounds.=--The Horticultural Division of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station has been making efforts during the past few years, under the auspices of the agricultural extension work, to improve the surroundings of rural houses, a part of which consists in the publication of bulletins giving hints as to how improved conditions and simple adornments may be obtained without great expense. One of these indicates as one of the means of making the home attractive and "keeping the boy on the farm" the brightening of the place with flowers. Assuming that the main planting of any place should be of trees and shrubs, the flowers are then used as decorations. They may be thrown in freely about the borders of the place, but not in beds in the center of the lawn. They show off better when seen against a background, which may be foliage, a building, a rock, or a fence. "Where to plant flowers is really more important than what to plant. In front of bushes, in the corner by the steps, against the foundation of the residence or outhouse, along a fence or walk--these are places for flowers. A single petunia plant against a background of foliage is worth a dozen similar plants in the center of the lawn.... The open-centered yard may be a picture; the promiscuously planted yard may be a nursery or a forest. A little color scattered in here and there puts a finish to the picture. A dash of color gives spirit and character to the brook or pond, to the ledge of rocks, to the old stump, or to the pile of rubbish." The flower garden, if there is one, should be at one side of the residence or at the rear, "for it is not allowable to spoil a good lawn even with flowers." MINOR PARAGRAPHS. Of the twelve genera and fifty species of known North American frogs and toads, Mr. William L. Sherwood says, in his paper in the Proceedings of the Linnæan Society, New York, that five genera and fifty species are found in the vicinity of New York city. Some of these are less secretive in habit than salamanders, and therefore much better known. As ponds and ditches have been drained, the aquatic forms have removed to greater distances from human dwellings, and only the more terrestrial toad and arboreal tree frogs have remained. All of our species have been described, but the author believes that the first mention of the cricket frog being found in this region is in a paper on salamanders, read by him in 1895. The breeding habits of these animals vary, but all lay their eggs in water or moist places. The purely amphibious and really aquatic species are three. Of the other eight species, one is burrowing, five tend to be terrestrial, inhabiting the woods and fields, and two are arboreal. The eggs are laid in gelatinous envelopes, which swell after leaving the adult. At the time of hatching the young tadpole has three pairs of external gills, but no mouth or anal opening. Two small suckers, just back of where the mouth is to appear, enable it to cling to aquatic plants and prevent its dropping to the bottom of the pond and getting smothered in the mud. It soon develops into a tadpole, and proceeds to its development; but if prevented from coming to the surface of the water no metamorphosis takes place, and the changes are delayed by cold and dark. At a meeting recently held in Berlin in behalf of a German antarctic exploration, Dr. von Drygalski, speaking of the scientific, practical, and national importance of the enterprise, said that from a geographical point of view the fundamental problem attached to the south polar region--the verification or disproof of a polar continent--is still unsolved. No less important questions likewise await solution with respect to the geological structure and character of the southern lands--so important in connection with a knowledge of volcanic action and the supposed former connection of South America and Australia--and with respect to the conditions of inland ice. Even the study of the floating ice broken away from the main mass may lead to important conclusions as to its mode of origin and the nature of the land from which it comes. Other problems to be investigated are the origin of the cold ocean currents that take their rise in the south, the conditions of the atmospheric pressure and temperature in that region, and the questions relating to terrestrial magnetism, which have a very important bearing on the practice of navigation. The present seems to be a particularly favorable period for the resumption of south polar research by reason of the unusual amount of drift ice which has within the last few years broken away from the main mass, and because, according to Supan, we are passing through a warmer temperature period. Over and above the statistics and the bare record of facts the annual reports of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind afford a continuous and growing interest to friends of suffering mankind in their stories of the development of mental life and illumination. Pupils come there blind and deaf, and apparently without any avenues of intelligent communication with the outer world, and are there brought to full consciousness and keenness of intellect that would be remarked even in many persons possessed of all their senses perfect from birth. The record began with Laura Bridgman, was continued with Helen Keller, and has been occupied for five or six years past with the wonderful mental growth of Elizabeth Robin, Edith M. Thomas, and Tommy Stringer. Before Dr. Howe began with Laura Bridgman, such things would have been deemed impossible and not to be thought of. NOTES. The Swiss Association for the Protection of Plants, which was formed in Geneva in 1883, has more than 900 members, and publishes 1,500 copies of its bulletin, which is sent, besides the members of the association, to the libraries of foreign Alpine clubs, the press, botanists, _curés_, and municipalities in countries harboring plants that require protection. Under its care, or the influence of its work, gardens have been created in various places and devoted especially to the cultivation of such plants as are most threatened with extinction. Of these are the Linnea Garden in the Valais, 5,500 feet above the sea; the Chanousia, founded five years ago by R. P. Chanoux, rector of the Hospice of St. Bernard, 6,800 feet; and the Rambertia, at the foot of the Rochers de Naye, 6,500 feet above the Lake of Geneva. Lectures are given under the auspices of the association, and no occasion for informing the public is lost. A neat chromo-poster calling attention to the association and its purpose has been prepared to be put up in railroad stations and hotels, to which is appended a motto emphasizing the importance of caring for rare plants. The report of Heinrich Ries on the Kaolins and Fire Clays of Europe, published in the reports of the Geological Survey, is based largely on notes collected by the author during visits in 1897 to most of the important kaolin and clay deposits. To these such facts of importance concerning the clays as have already been published have been added. Some manufacturers have claimed that the foreign kaolins are superior to the American, but the evidence, Mr. Ries says, does not seem to bear out the statements. Notes are added respecting the clays and clay-working industries in the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, New York, and North Carolina. According to the report of the _Commission Internationale des Glaciers_ for 1897, thirty-nine out of fifty-six glaciers observed in Switzerland are retreating, five are at a standstill, and twelve are growing. Of the Italian glaciers, those of the Disgrazia and Bernina groups and the glaciers of Mont Canin in the Julian Alps show a marked retreat. Retreat seems to be almost universal in the Scandinavian glaciers. The report includes also information from the Caucasus, Altai, and Turkestan, and notes on a few glaciers in the United States and Mexico, concerning which we have not the particulars. In a book on social types among the French people, M. Edmond Demolins tries to show that varieties of types are the products of constant causes which it is possible to analyze exactly, and the most fundamental principle of which is the nature of the place and of the occupation. Thus there is a social type derived from the pastoral occupation; another from the cultivation of fruit trees, among which the several classes determine as many modalities of the type; one is derived from petty gardening, and another from large farming; another from manufacturing, and another from transportation and commerce. Close analysis permits the detection of still more delicate shades of types of varieties in each of the categories named, whereby notable modifications are produced in the same region and the same work. The brewing industry in Germany is credited with the following output of beer for the year 1897-'98: Germany proper, 8,055 breweries, exclusive of Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden, and Alsace-Lorraine, 916,000,000 gallons; Bavaria, 6,364 breweries, 351,000,000 gallons; Würtemberg, 6,285 breweries, 90,000,000 gallons; Baden, 946 breweries, 60,000,000 gallons; Alsace-Lorraine, 127 breweries, 21,230,000 gallons--a grand total of 1,438,230,000 gallons, from the taxation of which the Government received a revenue of $22,305,150. Speaking in his society of the Relation of Britain to Folklore, retiring President Alfred Nutt urged that it was the privilege of that country to enshrine in its literature the ancient customary wisdom of many races, as the English system of law was itself largely derived from custom. The accidents of the geographical position and historical circumstances of Britain had made it the preserver of a great body of archaic tradition, which it was the function of the Folklore Society to study and interpret. We have to record the deaths of Dr. William Hankel, Professor of Physics in the University of Leipsic; Prof. F. K. C. L. Büchner, author of the famous book, Force and Matter, at Darmstadt, Germany, May 1st; Dr. Francis W. MacNamara, State Examiner of Medical Stores at the India Office, London, formerly Professor of Chemistry in Calcutta Medical College, and later Chemical Examiner to the Government of India, March 5th, aged sixty-seven years; he was author of a number of books and papers on hygiene and medical chemistry; Jeremiah Head, engineer, President of the Mechanical Science Section of the British Association in 1893, and President of the British Institute of Mechanical Engineers in 1885-'86, March 10th, aged sixty-four years; who was instrumental in introducing into England important American improvements in the manufacture of iron and steel; Franz Ritter von Hanse, Austrian geologist, Intendant of the National Museum in Vienna, Director of the Imperial Geological Survey in 1866, and author of the Geological Map of Austria, Bosnia, and Montenegro, and of geological books, March 20th, aged seventy-seven years; Surveyor Major G. C. Wallich, March 31st, in his eighty-fourth year, and Count Abbé F. Castracan, of Rome, the two oldest Fellows of the Royal Microscopical Society; Dr. P. L. Ryke, of the University of Leyden, aged eighty-six years; Joseph Stevens, honorary curator of the museum at Reading, England, author of archæological and geological papers; Dr. C. Brogniart, entomologist, and author of a memoir On Fossil Insects of the Primary Period, at Paris; Charles L. Prince, author of papers on meteorology and astronomy, at Tunbridge Wells, England, April 22d; Dr. Wilhelm Jordan, Professor of Geometry and Geodesy at the Technical Institution, Hanover, April 17th, aged fifty-seven years; Sir William Roberts, of the Royal College of Physicians, author of lectures and papers on digestion, diet, uric acid, the opium habit in India, etc.; Prof. Karl Scheibler, chemist, at Berlin, aged seventy-two years; Dr. Josef Wastler, docent in geodesy at the Technical Institute in Graz; Dr. H. A. Wahlforso, Professor of Chemistry at Helsingfors, aged sixty years; and Philip Thomas Main, Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, England, author of a treatise on astronomy. Transcriber's Notes: Words surrounded by _ are italicized. Words surrounded by = are bold. Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent spellings have been kept, including inconsistent use of hyphen (e.g. "widespread" and "wide-spread"), and proper names (e.g. "Siddânta" and "Siddhânta"). Some illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text. 
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8951	----	[Illustration] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL INFORMATION, ART, SCIENCE, MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY, AND MANUFACTURES. NEW YORK, DECEMBER 28, 1867. Vol. XVII.--No. 26. [NEW SERIES.] $3 per Annum [IN ADVANCE.] * * * * * Contents: (Illustrated articles are marked with an asterisk.) *Improvement in Hulling and Cleansing Hominy Nitro Glycerin *Hisert's Adjustable Cultivator Tooth Remedy for Cold Feet in City Cars Getting Your Money Back Patent Claims Pending Applications for Reissues The Last Number of Volume XVII Commencement of a New Volume A Change at the Patent Office Obituary How to Make Intelligent Workmen--Go and Do Likewise The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN as a Medium of Business *Hunt's Improved Steam Packing Piston The Iron Clads at Sea *Improvement in Hand Drills *Improved Method of Securing Cutters on Boring Bars Tides and Their Causes The Great Hoosac Tunnel Horse-hair Snakes--Wonderful Transformation Man Proposes, but God Disposes Extraordinary Effects of an Earthquake Recent American and Foreign Patents Answers to Correspondents Business and Personal Manufacturing, Mining, and Railroad Items Patent Office Decision * * * * * Improvement in Hulling and Cleansing Hominy. Many of our readers well remember when "hulled corn" was a standing winter dish. This was corn or maize the kernels of which were denuded of their "hulls" by the chemical action of alkalies, which, however, impaired the sweetness of the food. Hominy is corn deprived of the hulls by mechanical means leaving the corn with all its original flavor unimpaired. Hominy is a favorite dish throughout the country, but is not always entirely free from particles of the outer skin of the kernels. The mill shown in perspective in the engraving is intended to obviate this objection. [Illustration: DONALDSON'S PATENT HOMINY MILL.] The corn is placed in the hopper, A, from which it is fed to the hulling cylinder contained in the case, B. The hulling machinery is driven by a belt on the pulley, C, the other end of the shaft of which carries a pinion which gives motion to the gear wheel, D. This, by means of a pinion on the shaft of the blower, E, drives the fans of the blower. On the other, or front end of the shaft which carries the gear, D, is a bevel gear by which another bevel gear and worm is turned. The worm rotates the worm gear, F, in two opposite arms of which are slots that carry pins projecting inwards, which may be moved toward or away from the center. This gear wheel turns free on the shaft that carries the pulley, C, and is intended for opening, by means of the pins in the arms and levers, a cover in the bottom of the hopper and a valve in the bottom of the hulling cylinder. Coiled or bent springs return these levers or valves to place when the pin which moves them has passed. A wrist-pin on the gear, D, forms a crank which is connected to a bar at the rear end of the sieves, G, pivoted to an arm at H, by which the sieves have a shaking or reciprocating motion as the machine operates. The blower drives out the hulls and the motion of the sieves with their inclined position insure access of the air to every portion of the hominy. It will be noticed that the connection of all the parts is absolute. The motion of the sieves, the speed of the blower, and the action of the inlet hopper valve and the delivery hulling valve are always exactly proportioned to the speed of the hulling cylinder, whether fast or slow. The upper or feed valve opens upward and has a downward projecting lip that shuts into a recess in its seat which insures security against leakage from the hopper to the hulling cylinder during the intervals of its being raised; a great advantage in hominy making, as no grain ought to get into the batch until that in the cylinder is done. Patented Oct. 15, 1867, by John Donaldson, who may be addressed for further information at Rockford, Ill. * * * * * Nitro-Glycerin. Professor Doremus of this city was called as a witness at the inquest upon the bodies of the unfortunate persons killed by the recent explosion at Bergen, N.J. The Professor having previously analyzed some of the explosive mixture, testified as follows:--"I have subjected it to chemical analysis, and find it to correspond to the formula C_{6}, H_{3}, O_{3}, and NO_{5}; it is well made nitro-glycerin; the substance freezes at about 46; it is made to decompose in a very peculiar way; on moistening paper with it it burns with rapidity; it does not explode when red-hot copper is placed in it; we tried it with the most intense heat--we can produce with a galvanic battery with two hundred cells holding a gallon and a half each; some nitro-glycerin was placed in a cup and connected with one of the poles of the battery; through a pencil of gas carbon the other poles of the battery were connected with the glycerin, no explosion ensued; but when the point touched the britannia vessel the nitro-glycerin took fire, a portion burning and the rest scattering about; this is as severe a test as we can submit it to in the way of heat under the pressure of the air; we therefore would conclude that nitro-glycerin carried about exposed cannot explode, even if you drop a coal of fire into it; if the liquid is confined, or is under pressure, then an explosion will ensue; if paper be moistened with it and put on an anvil and a smart blow given with a hammer, a sharp detonation ensues; if gunpowder or the fulminates of mercury, silver or gun-cotton be ignited in a vacuum by a galvanic battery, none of them will explode; if any gas be introduced so as to produce a gentle pressure during the decomposition, then a rapid evolution of gases will result; the results of decomposition in a vacuum differ from those under atmospheric pressure or when they are burnt in a pistol, musket, a cannon, or in a mine; where we have little or no pressure it is difficult to get these substances to burn rapidly; nitro-glycerin is more difficult to explode than powder; in many respects it resembles gun-cotton which is made in a similar way; if gun-cotton be immersed in the proto-chloride of iron it turns into common cotton; the same experiment was tried with nitro-glycerin by mixing it with proto-chloride of iron, and it reverted into common glycerin; there are four well known varieties of gun-cotton made by employing acids of different strengths; they differ in chemical composition and properties, as well as in their explosive qualities; the late Minister of War in Austria in 1862 stated to me that he had ordered four hundred cannon for gun-cotton, and six months after he stated that he had ordered all the cannon to be changed and adapted to powder, in consequence of spontaneous combustions; much less is known of nitro-glycerin than of gun-cotton, and probably several varieties of this article may be formed as of gun cotton; this would explain cases of spontaneous explosion; if the nitro-glycerin is not carefully washed to get rid of the acid, a gradual decomposition will ensue, producing gases, which, if the vessel be closed, will explode; my opinion is that nitro-glycerin should be used in the most careful hands; do not think I would put it in the hands of a common laborer for blasting purposes; it is less dangerous in a frozen than a liquid state; I think concussion would explode frozen nitro-glycerin. * * * * * HISERT'S ADJUSTABLE CULTIVATOR TOOTH. The object of the device exhibited in the engraving is to allow the teeth of a cultivator to turn slightly and avoid obstructions, while they will follow at all times the line of draft, so that in turning the cultivator there is no risk of breaking the teeth or their shanks, or of overturning the implement. The cultivator blade, A, may be of any desired form, and it is secured to the curved shank, B, which is pivoted by a bolt to the beam, C. On the under or lower side of the beam is an iron plate, D, having a projecting socket, E, which is the stud or pin on which the eye of the shank turns. A bolt passing through the socket and beam holds the shank in place. Farmers will readily perceive the advantages of this device. It may be applied to any or all of the different cultivators now in use. Patented Sept 3, 1867, by B.F. Hisert who may be addressed for rights to make or sell at Norton Hill, Green Co., N.Y., or address G.W. King, Scoharie, N.Y. [Illustration] * * * * * Remedy for Cold Feet in City Cars. "Riding down town these cold mornings in the horse cars, the unpleasant sensation of chilled feet reminds us of the plan adopted in France and other parts of Europe to keep the feet of car passengers warm. This is accomplished by inserting a flattened iron tube along the bottom of the car lengthwise in the center, between the rows of seats. This tube is raised a little above the floor level of the car to afford a rest for the feet, yet, not enough to make a stumbling block. When the car leaves the depot this tube is filled with hot water from a boiler kept heated for the purpose, and this water retains its heat and gives a pleasant warmth to the feet of the passengers and the car generally, for about two hours, after which the tube is refilled at a convenient station on the road. In the case of our city cars this might easily be done, and be a cheap and exceedingly comfortable improvement."--_Evening Post_. It should be understood that the French cars are arranged with small compartments like stage coaches, and the passengers sit face to face, with the warming tube above described under their feet. One tube for every six persons. We should be glad, indeed, to see this plan introduced here. But it is not to be expected that our city railroad companies will do anything for the comfort of their passsengers, while without such trouble they continue to reap rich harvests. Very likely the idea of loading a lot of hot water upon their cars, for passengers to stand upon, would strike them as a good joke. Their poor, broken down, spavined horses, could not stand any additional load. * * * * * Getting Your Money Back. The French are a curious people and one of the novelties of Parisian enterprises is a large warehouse, in which are sold, at retail, all manner of goods, from a diamond necklace to a shoe brush. The purchaser, having paid the price, receives not only the goods, but a bond for the whole amount of his purchase money, payable, after thirty years, and guaranteed by the Credit Foncier and other moneyed corporations. The prices charged are said to be no greater than in any other retail shops. This is really eating your cake in order to keep it; the more you spend the richer you will be; indeed it sets at defiance the whole of Franklin's code of proverbs, and proves "Poor Richard" a silly fellow. Imagine Jones lecturing his wife on her economy, and reproaching her for a spirit of saving, "My dear, if you had bought this camel's hair shawl thirty years ago, it would now be a source of income to us; if you had not been so close we should now be wealthy." Smith acquires an independence by giving his children an expensive education, and sees in every new dress or costly jewel which his growing daughters wear, a new mine of wealth for himself. If he can only persuade them to spend money enough he is sure of a support in his old age. * * * * * A GIGANTIC BRIDGE.--A suspension bridge is to be erected by M. Oudry, engineer, over the Straits of Messina, Sicily, from Point Pezzo, on the Calabrian Coast. It is to consist of four spans of 3,281 feet each, elevated about 150 feet above high-water level, so that the largest ships may pass under. The proposed Roebling bridge over the East River, between New York and Brooklyn, is to have a single span of 1,600 feet. * * * * * The through mails to the West now go in iron-bound boxes instead of leathern bags. Each box, tightly packed, contains about eight hundred letters. * * * * * The first steam vessel used in Great Britain was called the _Comet_, and built by Henry Bell in 1812. It was thirty tuns burden. * * * * * OFFICIAL REPORT OF PATENTS AND CLAIMS Issued by the United States Patent Office, FOR THE WEEK ENDING DECEMBER 10, 1867. _Reported Officially for the Scientific American_ PATENTS ARE GRANTED FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS the following being a schedule of fees:-- On filing each Caveat $10 On filing each application for a Patent, except for a design $15 On issuing each original Patent $20 On appeal to Commissioner of Patents $20 On application for Reissue $30 On application for Extension of Patent $50 On granting the Extension $50 On filing a Disclaimer $10 On filing application for Design (three and a half years) $10 On filing application for Design (seven years) $15 On filing application for Design (fourteen years) $30 In addition to which there are some small revenue-stamp taxes. Residents of Canada and Nova Scotia pay $500 on application. _Pamphlets containing the Patent Laws and full particulars of the mode of applying for Letters Patent, specifying size of model required, and much other information useful to Inventors, may be had gratis by addressing MUNN & CO., Publishers of the Scientific American, New York._ * * * * * 71,836.--MACHINE FOR NOTCHING KNITTING NEEDLES.--W. Aiken, Franklin, N.H. I claim 1st, The improved machine, substantially as described, for effecting the several operations of notching, slotting, boring, and burring a knitting machine needle blank, in the order and manner as explained. 2d, Also, the combination of one or more vibratory clamps, Y, the cam, E, and the two burrs or cutters, q r, for forming the notches in the needle blank such clamp or clamps, cam and cutters being provided with mechanism for operating them, substantially as described. 3d, Also the combination of one or more vibratory clamps Y, the cam, E, the two burrs or cutter wheels, q r, and the slotting burr or cutters, s, provided with mechanism for operating them substantially as explained, 4th, Also, the combination of one or more rotary clamps, Y, the cam, E, the burrs or cutter wheels, q r s, and the drill, u, provided with mechanism for operating them, substantially as set forth. 5th, Also, the combination of one or more vibrating clamps, the burring cutter, t, the drill, u, and the slotting cutter, s, arranged and provided with mechanism for operating, substantially as explained. 71,837.--TEA AND COFFEE POT.--Alfred Arnold, Tenafly, N.J. I claim 1st, In a tea or coffee boiler, the base, D, so constructed and adapted, relatively to the other parts, that an oscillating motion will be imparted to the vessel by process of ebullition, substantially as shown and described. 2d, In combination with the base or heating-surface, D, the chambers, b b', and diaphragm, E, or their equivalents, substantially as arranged and described, and for the purposes shown. 71,838.--TOOL FOR SIZING LAMP CHIMNEYS.--Lewis J. Atwood, (assignor to himself and Holmes, Booth and Haydens), Waterbury, Conn. I claim the adjustable sizing and shaping-jaws employed, substantially as specified, in the manufacture of glass lamp chimneys and similar articles. 71,839.--MODE OF PREVENTING THE UNTWISTING OF THE ENDS OF WIRE ROPE BANDS.--Arthur Barbarin, New Orleans, La. I claim a wire rope band, in which the ends of the several wires composing the same are soldered together, substantially as herein described and shown in the accompanying drawings, and for the purposes set forth. 71,840.--SPRING-BED BOTTOM.--Alonzo B. Baty, Binghamton, N.Y. I claim the construction and application of the bracket, B, in combination with the bail or pendant, C, the springs, D D, transverse pieces, F F, and slats, A A, all being constructed substantially as herein described and represented, for the purpose set forth. 71,841.--HORSE-RAKE.--H.L. Beach, Montrose, Pa., assignor to Beach Wheel Horse-Rake Manufacturing Company, N.Y. I claim 1st, The teeth heads, N, constructed and operating substantially as described. 2d, In combination with the teeth heads, N, the teeth, Q, substantially as described. 3d, The arms, K, and teeth heads, N, combined and operating substantially as set forth. 4th, The cleaners, M, teeth heads, N, and teeth, Q, when combined for the purposes indicated. 5th, The blocks, f, pins, c, sliding bar, E, and lever, G, when combined for the purposes set forth. 6th, The hooks, i i, and pins, j, secured in the axle for the purpose shown. 7th, The washers, P, combined with the teeth and teeth heads, substantially as and for the purpose described. 71,842.--APPARATUS FOR LIGHTING STREET GAS-LAMPS.--J. W. Beard, St. Johns, New Brunswick. I claim the combination of the hook, F, and the perforated cap, E, with the lamp, D', to be affixed on a pole or staff, as set forth. Also, the combination of the curved or hooked arms, c c, with the key, k, of the cock of the burner, and their arrangement with respect, to the opening in the bottom of the lantern, as explained. Also, the combination of the socket tube, e, with the lamp, D', its hook, F, and perforated cap, E. Also the combination of the receiving tube, f, and bayonet connection, g, with the socket tube, e, the lamp, D', its hook and perforated cap, as described. 71,843.--CALIPER AND T-SQUARE.--Joseph Bennor, Philadelphia, Pa. I claim the rule, a, stand, c, slide, m, legs, p and q, marker, u, cutter, w, with their several described appendages, all combined in the manner and for the purpose substantially as shown and described. 71,844.--REFRIGERATOR.--Ferdinand Borchard, Detroit, Mich. I claim 1st, A refrigerator which is provided with movable racks, H, within cooling chambers which are arranged beneath an ice chamber, B, constructed with inclined walls, a a a, a drip pan, D, and an ice-supporting rack, c, substantially as and for the purposes described. 2d, Providing the movable racks, with sliding brackets, I, which are so applied as to serve as supports for the outer ends of the racks when drawn partially out of their respective apartments, substantially as described. 71,845.--CONSTRUCTION OF METAL SALVERS.--George Brabrook, (assignor to Reed and Barton), Taunton, Mass. I claim the arrangement and combination of the metallic ring and cap molding together, and with the waiter or salver, in manner substantially as and for the purpose specified. Also, as a new or improved manufacture, a waiter or salver of britannia metal, having a metallic strengthening-ring and cap molding combined and arranged with its body in manner as specified. 71,846.--MANUFACTURE OF SHOES, ETC.--M.L. Brett, Warren, Ohio. I claim the construction of a seamless shoe, etc., by felting, in the manner set forth, as a new article of manufacture. 71,847.--CONSTRUCTION OF SCOOPS.--Theo. C. Bromley, Fort Howard, Wis. I claim the cone-shaped back and the circular raised brace. 71,848.--WATER-RESERVOIR FOR EXTENSION-TOP STOVE.--Chas. H. Buck, St Louis, Mo. I claim 1st, the boiler, D, constructed with a depression in its rear side, in combination with a stove made with the extended top, A, and with a stovepipe, C, which is entirely independent of the boiler, but still is partly enclosed by the boiler, in the manner and for the purpose described. 2d, The boiler, D. with its depression in its rear side made wholly independent of the pipe, C, but capable of enclosing a portion of said pipe, and of being removed without disturbing the pipe, as herein described and shown. 71,849.--JOURNAL-BOX.--T.F. Burgess, Lowell, Mass. I claim the drips, e e, and conducting holes, d d, in combination with the recesses, b b, when arranged to operate substantially as described and for the purposes fully set forth. 71,850.--HAY ELEVATOR.--E.H. Carpenter, Dexter, Mich. I claim 1st, In combination with a cable, A, frame, F, wheels, G, sheave, E, and rope, C, the disengaging device, consisting of a collar, M, stop, L, and vertical catch, K, enclosing the cable, A, and rope, C, and operated substantially as described. 2d, The combination of the frame, F, rope, C, collar, M, stop, L, catch, K, and valves, H, cams, I, and lever, l', said parts being constructed and the whole arranged substantially as set forth. 71,831.--STEAM GENERATOR.--C.E. Case, Xenia, Ohio. I claim the metal cup, G, constructed and arranged substantially upon the principle and in the manner herein set forth. 71,852.--LOOM FOR WEAVING PALM-LEAF, ETC.--Geo. W. Chandler, (assignor to himself and Lysander F. Thompson), Fitchburg, Mass. I claim 1st, The hinged holder, G, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 2d, The combination of the hinged fingers, c c, with the ribs, b b b, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 3d, The combination of the adjustable weight, G', with the bottom of the holder, for the purposes set forth. 4th, The combination with the hinged fingers, c c, of the hinged holding-piece, G", substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 5th, The fingered stop or guard piece, h', with the holder, G substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 6th, The combination, with the stand or plate, h, of the grooved hinged flap, i, for supporting the guard or stop piece, h'. 7th, The combination with the ribbed holder, G, of the guide piece, s, as and for the purposes set forth. The combination of the feed arm, m, with the slide-piece, n, and lever, 26, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 9th, the combination with lever, 26, of the adjustable ears, 27 27, for the purposes stated. 10, The combination with slide piece, n, and table, L, of the connecting piece, 21, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 11th, The combination with the slotted slide piece, M", and connecting piece, 21, of the double shouldered bolts, 18 18, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 12th, The combination with the curved lever, M, and the slide piece, M", of the bent levers, M' M', substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 13th, The combination with the arm, 70, and notched bar, w, of the sping-pawl, t, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 14th, Mechanism for separating the pieces of material to be fed, constructed and combined for operation substantially as described, and as shown in fig. 7, of the accompanying drawings. 15th, The combination with a loom for weaving palm-leaf and other cloth, of a push-finger, 41, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 16th, The combination with the stem of the push finger, 41, of the catch-piece, 42, lever, 44, and operating springs, 43 and 46, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 17th, The combination with the slide, n, of the projection or dog, 47, for releasing lever, 46, from the catch-piece, 42, as set forth. 18th, The combination with the hinged table, L, of the mechanism for separating and feeding the material, substantially as set forth. 19th, The combination with the stationary bed, L", and stand, 72, of the hinged table, L, and catch, o, substantially as set forth. 20th, The combination and relative arrangement with the table, L, bed, L", and holder, G, of the evener knives, 12 and 14, as shown and set forth. 21st, The combination with the bridge piece, 50, of the hinged dog, 52, and bell-spring, 53, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 22d, The combination and relative arrangement of mechanism, substantially such as is shown and described for communicating the proper motions to the feed arms, S, from lever, K. 23d, The combination with a loom for weaving palm-leaf of mechanism substantially such as shown and described for stopping the loom, as set forth. 71,853.--PITMAN COUPLING.--G. W. Clark, Manchester, Ind. I claim the arrangement of forked pitman, A G G', bolt, H, screw shanked hook, D, and nuts, F F', or their equivalents, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 71,854.--MACHINE FOR MAKING LEVEES.--Ernest Comeaux, Bayou Goula, La. I claim 1st, The endless apron in combination with the hinged adjustable frame, K, operating as described for elevating the earth used in making levees, in the manner and for the purpose set forth. 2d, The combination of the endless apron, F, chains, H, slats, J, and adjustable supporting-frame, K, and standards, L, as herein described for the purpose set forth. 3d, The above in combination with the spur-wheels, C and B, and the endless chain, D, as herein described for the purpose set forth. 72,855.--CONSTRUCTION OF ROOF.--M. De K. Cutts, Richmond, Va. I claim 1st, A tobacco drying house which is provided with a sectional hinged roof in combination with frames, A, which support the tobacco leaves while being dried and cured substantially as described, 2d, The supporting posts, G, in combination with hinged sections, B B', elevating devices, and supporting frames, constructed and arranged in such manner that the leaves of tobacco upon said frames can be exposed to the action of the sun and air at pleasure substantially as described. 71,856.--CAR BRAKE.--Shadrach Davis, Dartmouth, Mass. I claim a car brake, consisting of the broad connecting bar, C1, which rests on pivots, F1, working in slots, and has the brake-shoes movable fixed to it, the whole combined as described, operated by the bar, I2, and screw rod, H2, and by contact with the wheels as and for the purposes set forth. 71,857.--FEEDER FOR GRAIN MILL.--Michael Decamp, South Bend, Ind. I claim 1st, The combination of the device, D, bridge ring-bearing, a b, feeder, c, and collar, e, substantially as described, 2d, The toothed eccentric, J, in combination with lever, G, and collar, e, substantially as described. 71,858.--PAINTER'S EASEL.--Paul Deschause, New York city. I claim 1st, The extensible legs, consisting of the hinged legs, a, and their extension sliding parts, b, made and arranged substantially as described. 2d, Also the combination of the legs with the toggle-brace, c c, substantially as described. 3d, Also, the extensible rest, composed of the fixed part, e, and the sliding part, d, in combination with the fixed and movable clamps, f g, substantially as described. 71,859.--GUIDE FOR SAW IN SAW MILLS.--Hiram P. Dillingham, Norwalk, Ohio. I claim the plates, A and A', guides, B B', and C and C', the whole constructed substantially as described, and operating as and for the purposes set forth. 71,860.--PRODUCING CALCIUM MAGNESIUM LIGHT.--Chas. A. Dresser, New York city. George A. Dresser, Trustee; I claim the preparation of dolomite, native or artificial substantially as and for the purpose described. 71,861.--CALENDAR ATTACHMENT TO INKSTAND.--Sam'l. R. Dummer, New York city. I claim 1st, An inkstand, etc., constructed with a series of shoulders or rests, B, whether one or more and one above another, in combination with the rings, C, and plate or frame, D, or their respective equivalents substantially as and for the purpose described. 2d, In combination with the above, the two tubes, H M, and plunger, O, as herein set forth for the purpose specified. 71,862.--PLANING MACHINE FOR WOOD.--G. B. Durkee and W. H. Murray, (assignor to themselves and I. T. Safford), Chicago, Ill. We claim 1st, The employment of two separately adjustable cutter heads in a single machine, so that the axis of one cutter may be at the angle of the other at a different angle, and both cutters operating at the same time upon the same board, substantially as specified. 2d, The crossheads, C, cutter-heads, E, screws, D and G, in combination with the standards, B, constructed and operating substantially as specified. 71,863.--SELF-ADJUSTING RELAY MAGNET.--J. M. Fairchild, (assignor to himself, J. K. Bundy, and J. M. Townsend), New Haven, Ct. I claim the arrangement of the head, C, combined with the magnet so as to be self-adjusting in relation to the armature, substantially as herein set forth. 71,864.--CORN CAKE CUTTER.--Leonard Felker, Tewksbury, Mass. I claim the rotating cylinder i, with its cutters, i'i', in combination with the rotating cylinder, f, with the stationary knives, f'f', and adjustable finishers, g g, when arranged to operate substantially as described and set 2d, The pressure rotating cylinder, f, with stationary knives, f'f', and adjustable finishers, g g, substantially as described and set forth. 3d, The clearer, m, in combination with the rotating cutters, i'i', as described. 4th, The adjustable stands, d d, and lever, p, in combination with the table, b', and weight, o, when arranged to operate substantially as described. 71,865.--MEASURING FAUCET.--Elisha Fitzgerald, N. Y. city. I claim the combination of a four way cock with a receptacle having a movable partition operated by the water, substantially as described, for the purpose of limiting and determining the amount of water to be discharged, as specified. Also, in combination with the above, the dial and pointer, to indicate the amount of water discharged, as described. 71,866.--TWEER.--Charles C. Forncrook, Hermitage, N. Y. I claim the combination of the valve, d, adjustable bridge, g, chamber, B, and tweer, A, arranged and operating substantially in the manner and for the purpose set forth. 71,867.--COTTON TIE.--John H. Fraley, New Orleans, La. I claim the combination of the buckles, A and B, when they are constructed and united as described, with the ends of hoop iron, when bent into the form of hooks, as and for the purpose set forth. 71,868.--BRIDGE.--John Glass, George P. Schneider, and William B. Rezner, Cleveland. Ohio. We claim, 1st, The tubular flanged sections, A B, as arranged in combination with the diaphragm, C, for the purpose and in the manner substantially as set forth. 2d, The tubular arch, as constructed, with sections, A B C, in combination with the foot block, I, provided with a flange or boss, K, when arranged in the manner as and for the purpose set forth. 71,869.--OIL CUP.--John H. Gomer, New York city. I claim the combination of the cap, B, with its screw flange, b, and case, A, provided with suitable tube, C, in the manner and for the purpose herein specified. 71,870.--PEAT MACHINE.--George D. Goodrich, Chicago, Ill. I claim, 1st, The adjustable bearing for the shaft, B, composed of two or more segments, r, constructed and operating substantially as described. 2d, The separate troughs, I, located below the tempering mill, when more than one expelling screw is employed, so as to give each screw a separate and independent action, substantially as specified. 3d, The cutter or knife, F, for cutting the material into suitable lengths in a peat machine having a continuous discharge from the expelling mill, substantially as specified. 4th, Closing the mouth of the die by an adjustable intermittent stop or knife, when so arranged that the movements can be varied with respect to the movements of the other operating parts of the machine, substantially as specified. 5th, The double slotted plate or wheel, K, provided with the sockets, h, and pins, i, for the purpose of adjusting the movements of the cutter stop or knife, F, substantially as described. 6th, The combination of the separate troughs, I, expelling screws, H, and cutter stop, F, with a tempering mill, substantially as specified. 71,871.--RATCHET BED KEY.--William M. Gray, Brooklyn, N. Y. I claim the bed key constructed and arranged as above described, as a new article of manufacture. 71,872.--MODE OF PREVENTING THE EXPLOSION OF LAMPS.--Cyrus P. Grosvenor, McGrawville, N.Y. I claim the application to lamps or heaters, using coal oils, alcohol, or other explosive substances, of such a burner as will supply the vacuum made in the reservoir by the combustion with nitrogen gas, the burner being constructed as herein described, or in any other form substantially the same, and which will produce the intended effect. 71,873.--CAR-AXLE BOX.--Joseph Harris, Dorchester, Mass. I claim, 1st, The roller guides, i, with detached radial joints, substantially as described. 2d, In combination with the system of rollers and box, g, the construction of the axle, with its extension, e, and shoulder, d, as and for the purpose set forth. 71,874.--WASHING MACHINE.--Job H. Haskell (assignor to himself and Horace Taplin), Lowell, Mass. I claim the general construction and combination of all the parts, consisting of the cylinder, G, series of yielding rollers, a, roller stands, k, spring bars, f, levers or arms, m, spring bar, D, transverse bar, R, rod, O, and the box, the whole arranged to operate substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 71,875.--HORSE RAKE.--John V. Hawkey (assignor to himself and Israel T. Sheffler), Greensburg, Pa. I claim, 1st, A rake shaft or head, arranged outside of the periphery of the wheels, projecting laterally beyond them, and so jointed that its sections can be folded vertically upon the carrying frame without detaching any of the parts of the rake, substantially as described. 2d, An axially turning rake-shaft, so jointed that its outer sections can be folded inwards without detaching any of its parts. 3d, The combination of the inner fixed section of the rake shaft with the outer vertically folding sections, projecting beyond the wheels, substantially as and for the purpose described. 4th, The combination, substantially as described, with a jointed rake shaft, of hinges allowing the sections to fold vertically, and a locking device to hold them rigidly when unfolded. 5th, The arrangement as described, of the top pins, m, on the folding sections, to secure them in position when folded up. 6th, The combination in a horse rake, of an axially turning folding rake shaft, with a rock shaft controlled by a handle on the driver's platform to raise and lower the teeth. 7th, The arrangement, in a horse rake, of an axially turning jointed rake shaft, mounted on the rear end of the thills, and supported on two wheels mounted on independent axles. 71,876.--APPARATUS FOR DRAINING SUGAR.--James B. Hill, Allegheny City, Pa. I claim the combination and arrangement of the hopper, C, provided with valve, d, case, B, screen, R, distributing drum, P, distributor, f, provided with valve, i, scraper, S, chute h, and pipe, t, the whole being constructed, arranged, and operating substantially in the manner herein described, and for the purpose set forth. 71,877.--CENTRIFUGAL MACHINE FOR DRAINING SUGAR.--James B. Hill, Allegheny City, Pa. I claim the use of a fan when used in combination with the shield, m, distributor, f, screen, R, case, B, hopper, C, and scraper, S, constructed, arranged, and operating, substantially in the manner herein described, and for the purpose set forth. 71,878.--CARD HOLDER.--Samuel L. Hill, Brooklyn, N.Y. I claim, in combination with a back or support, the use or employment of any number of strips when the same shall be constructed and combined substantially as shown for the purpose specified. 71,879.--FISHING LINE SWIVEL.--Martin Hiltz, Gloucester, Mass. I claim the improved swivel, as made with the screw bolt, D, and the nut chamber, e, arranged and combined, as explained, with the parts, A B C, constructed and applied together as specified. 61,880.--IMPLEMENT FOR LIGHTING GAS.--Thomas W. Houchin, Morrisania, N.Y. I claim, 1st, Placing a receiver, A, at the lower end of a tube, B, for the purposes fully described. 2d, The combination of a receiver, A, tubes, B, and wick chamber, C, when the same shall be constructed substantially as described, for the purposes set forth. 71,881.--CORN-POPPER.--J. W. Howe, and J. K. Barton, Worcester, Mass. We claim, 1st, The combination of the twisted wires, a a a' a', with the handle, B, and receptacle, A, substantially as and for the purposes described. 2d, The combination of the wires, a' a', with handle, B, receptacle, A, and cover of the same, as and for the purposes described. 3d, The combination of the wires, a a a' a', with each other, receptacle, A, and cover of same, as shown and described. 71,882.--COPY BOOK.--Benj. G. Howes, Worcester, Mass. I claim the copy book, constructed substantially as described. 71,883.--PETROLEUM GAS BURNER.--G. A. Hyver, New Orleans, La. I claim, 1st, The combination of the pipe, D, when filled with finely broken charcoal, with the concentric or annular chamber, F, the latter being provided with pipes, b, extending upwardly into the cup furnace or heat retort, H, as and for the purpose substantially as set forth. 2d, The combination of the pipe, D, when filled with finely broken charcoal, the concentric or annular chamber, F, pipes, b, and pipe, d, with the gas pipe, c, when the latter is provided with the valve, J, for regulating the flow of gas, as and for the purpose described. 3d, The gas pipe, c, when constructed and arranged with relation to the chamber, F, and one of the pipes, b, as described, in combination with the valve, J, for the purpose set forth. 4th, The combination of the concentric or annular chamber, F, and pipes, b, with the cup furnace or heat retort, H, when the latter is constructed as described, and shown upon the drawings, and occupies the relation to the former herein set forth, for the purpose set forth. 5th, The pipe, d, in combination with one of the pipes, b, for the purpose of affording a light for illuminating purposes, as herein described. 71,884.--SHAFT COUPLING.--John Keesey, Chester, Pa. I claim the combination of the box, hub, or shell, B, reverse wedge-shaped blocks, C C', and bolts, D D', with their nuts, E E', or the equivalents of these devices, arranged for operation together, substantially as and for the purposes herein set forth. 71,885.--CLAMP SCREW.--Charles L Kingsley (assignor to Charles Parker), Meriden, Conn. I claim the nut, E, formed with the seats, F, and the lever, G, formed with the trunnions, I, so as to be combined and operate in the manner and for the purpose described. 71,886.--MACHINE FOR BENDING WOOD.--Joseph Klahr, Bernville, assignor to himself, W.R. Weand, C.H. Zink, and James J. Wagenhorst, Philadelphia, Pa. I claim, 1st, The formers, F F', with their arms, p p', levers, k k', and catches, q, or their equivalents, in combination with the clamps, G, the whole being constructed and operating substantially as and for the purpose described. 2d, The combination of the above, the weighted levers, D D', and the links, l. 3d, The adjustable plates, B B', with their shoulders, c, operating in combination with the formers, and their projections, q, substantially as and for the purpose described. 71,887.--OIL CAN.--George Alvan Knowlton, Natick, Mass. I claim, 1st, The stoppers, D and I, retracted from their respective orifices by a single trigger, H h', and provided with two springs, G J, to insure the effective closure of both said orifices, substantially as described. 2d, In a valved oil can, constructed as above specified, the arrangement of the trigger, H h', obliquely on the upper side of the handle, A', as and for the purpose set forth. 71,888.--FENCE.--Ira Lackey, Lebanon, Ohio. I claim the combination of the sills, A, braces, C, and hooks or loops, i j, with the grooved posts, a c, of the panels, when the parts are constructed and arranged to form a detachable and portable fence, in the manner and for the purpose specified. 71,889.--BUTTER DISH.--Nathan Lawrence (assignor to Reed and Barton), Taunton, Mass. I claim the arrangement and combination of the friction spring with the cover and vase, the journal and the bearing to extend entirely around the said journal, as specified. 71,890.--HARVESTER RAKE.--Edward J. Leyburn, Lexington, Va. I claim, 1st, Connecting the rake arm, E', to a loose collar, c, on reel shaft, B, by means of a pivot, d', carrying an arm, f, in combination with the jointed connecting rod, h, substantially as described. 2d, The arresting plate, G2, in combination with the rake pivot, d', arm, f, and collar, c, and connecting rod, h, substantially as described. 3d, The cam plate, G G1, in combination with the rake pivot, d', loose collar, c, and connecting rod, h, substantially as described. 4th, The anti-friction roller, i, applied to the arm, f, of the rake pivot, in combination with the arresting plate, G2, substantially as described. 5th, Connecting the arm, f, which is in the rake pivot, d, to the reel shaft or reel arm thereof, by means of a rod, h, and universal joint, h', substantially as described. 6th, The application of a weight, g, to an arm, f, of the rake pivot, when said arm is upon a loose collar, c, and arranged to operate substantially as described. 71,891.--WASHING MACHINE.--Reuben Lighthall, Brooklyn, N.Y. I claim the detachable holder, A, with the set screw, B, in combination with the slotted lever, D, and the rollers, F F', and the cam, H, as and for the purpose set forth. 71,892.--PROCESS FOR RENDERING PAPER, CLOTH, AND THE LIKE, FIRE AND WATER PROOF.--Robert O. Lowrey, Salem, N.Y. I claim the process, substantially as herein described, of treating fibrous and other materials for rendering them fire and water proof. 71,893.--COMPOSITION OF MATTER FOR THE MANUFACTURE OF WATER PROOF PAPER AND OTHER ARTICLES.--Robert O. Lowrey, Salem, N.Y. I claim, 1st, The new compound or composition of matter, produced by the treatment of vegetable fiber, substantially as described. 2d, The process herein described of treating vegetable fiber for producing a new compound, substantially as set forth. 71,894.--STREET SWEEPER.--Robert Y. McConnell and Geo. Pringle, Rochester, N.Y. We claim, 1st, The pinions, a, of the counter shaft, s, combined with carrier wheels, W, of street sweepers, by suitable sliding clutches, c, all arranged substantially as shown and described, and for the purpose of equalizing the strength and efficiency of those portions of the machine. 2d, The broom shaft, b, and the counter shaft, s, arranged substantially as shown, being held by means of the adjustable rigid straps, y, for the purposes set forth. 3d, The spring clutches, c, governed by means of the hand lever, D, connecting rod, f, lever, k, and the counter inclined planes, m, all arranged and operating substantially in the manner and for the purposes set forth. 71,895.--UTERINE SUPPORTER.--Frederick Meriwether, Tamola, Miss. I claim the combination, as described, of the spring, E, composed of copper or other soft metal, with the pessary, for the purposes set forth. Also, the combination, substantially as described, of the pelvic spring, the vertically adjustable bar and set screw, the soft metal spring, E, the pessary pillar, F, and the pessary, for the purposes specified. 71,896.--RAILROAD SIGNAL.--Abraham S. Miller (assignor to himself, J.P. James, and Charles Folsom), Zanesfield, Ohio. I claim, 1st, The combination of the trigger, E, and rock shaft, F f, with a railroad signal and suitable intermediate connections, so arranged that the contact of the train with said trigger shall throw the signal into its conspicuous position, substantially as described. 2d, The arrangement of the trigger, E, rock shaft, F f, arm, H, link, I, lever, G, wire, J, eccentric lever, L, catch, M, and shaft, B, signal, A, and weight, B', or its equivalent (P P1 P2 Q), substantially as and for the purpose specified. 3d, The arrangement of the trigger, E', rock shaft, F' f', arm, H', and rod or other suitable connection, N, all arranged and operating substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 4th, The combination, with the disk or signal, A, of the reflecting plate, a substantially as and for the object stated. 71,897.--SPINNING WHEEL.--Henry Miller, Ronald Township, Mich. I claim the arrangement of the adjustable and hinged rods and levers, constructed as herein described, for connecting the rocking treadle with the hinged spindle arm, so that the operator, by the foot, may move the spindle arm out or in at pleasure, as set forth and represented. 71,898.--BOOTS AND SHOES.--Charles Mole, Pembroke Terrace, Regent's Park, London, England. I claim the manufacture of a movable boot heel in two parts, to be adjusted in different positions by means of a single central projection taking into a single slot hole or countersunk part, and secured in position by means of a central screw or pin, whether such projection and hole or countersunk part be square or many sided, and no matter what the shape of these sides, so that the shape of the projection and that of the hole which is to receive it be identical, the whole substantially as hereinbefore described and illustrated on the annexed sheet of drawing. 71,899.--WATER COOLER AND REFRIGERTOR.--Alfred Murden and Henry L. Cooper (assignors to themselves and Fiancis Warner), New Haven, Conn. We claim the arrangement of the cylinder, A, and outer cylinder, C, so as to form a water space, D, and combined with covers, E and G, so as to form a chamber, F, above the water space, D and ice cylinder, A, so that the cover, E, forms the bottom of and the cover, G, the top of the said chamber, in the manner and for the purpose herein set forth. 71,900.--CONSTRUCTION OF STAMPED SHEET METAL KETTLES.--Frederic G. Niedringhaus and William F. Niedringhaus, St. Louis, Mo. We claim the spout of a kettle when formed by pressure from the bottom and top plate of the kettle, when constructed substantially as shown and specified. 71,901.--BREAST STRAP SLIDE.--O.B. North (assignor to O.B. North & Co.), New Haven, Conn. I claim, 1st, The arrangement of the hinged tongue, E, upon the plate, A, so as to cover the ring, substantially in the manner herein set forth. 2d, Constructing the hook or projection, D, upon the inside of the plate, by forming an opening, d, through the plate, substantially as and for the purpose herein set forth. 71,902.--SNOW PLOW.--Abel Nutting, Quincy, Mass I claim the rotary plow, arranged to operate substantially as set forth. Also, in combination with such a plow, inclines, or shares, fixed, with respect to the frame by which they are supported, substantially as described. 71,903.--STEAM GENERATOR.--Isaac R. Oakford, Philadelphia. Pa. I claim a steam generator, composed of a series of cylindrical boilers, of round ends, provided with openings for steam and water, and arranged in a vertical and inclined position, in the manner and for the purpose above set forth and described. 71,904.--CASTER FOR FURNITURE.--P.B. O'Brien and Wm. E. Sparks, New Haven, Conn., assignors to P.B. O'Brien. We claim the arrangement of the spring, a, in the spindle, B, and combined with the socket, C, so as to operate in the manner substantially as described. 71,905.--RAILWAY FROG.--Staats N. Park, Bloomsbury, N.J. I claim, 1st, So constructing the frogs of railways that the frog plate and the rail or track sections, guard rails, and frog point are separate from each other, and so that the rail sections and guard rails and frog point can be inserted in or attached to and detached from the frog plate, for the uses and purposes set forth. 2d, So constructing the frogs of railways or the frog plate, that the track rails of any railway can be extended upon and combined with such frog plate to form the track or rail section of the frog, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 71,906.--HARVESTER.--Henry W. Pell, Rome, N.Y. I claim. 1st, The carriage, C, supported at both ends on wheels or rollers, cc, running on a guide way, S, substantially as and for the purposes specified. 2d, The rib or groove joint between the friction rollers and guideway, to sustain the lateral pressure, as set forth. 3d, The clevis pin or whiffletree bolt, B, attached to the center of the carriage, C. 4th, The independent attachment of the draught clevis to the whiffletree bolt to permit the independent oscillation of the whiffletree without affecting the clevis. 71,907.--MEDICAL COMPOUND.--M. Perl, New Orleans, La. I claim the medical compound herein described, when made by the process and composed of the ingredients herein specified, in the proportions stated, for the purpose set forth. 71,908.--MACHINERY FOR SHAVING AND SLOTTING SCREWS.--Elijah S. Pierce, Hartford, Conn. I claim, 1st, The combination of the cam, M, the sliding frame, Y, the spindle, A, the pulley, P, the clamp, C, the spring, S, and the rest, R, or their equivalents, with a shaving tool, and one or more nicking saws, substantially as herein specified. 2d, The combination of the sliding frame, Y, the spindle, A, and the clamping device, C, with a shaving tool and one or more saws, substantially as described, for the purpose of shaving, nicking, and turning screw blanks or other similar articles, while held in the same jaws. 71,909.--DOUBLE SCREW.--Elijah S. Pierce, Hartford, Ct. I claim the double screw herein described and shown, as a new article of manufacture. 71,910.--APPARATUS FOR PRESERVING MEATS, FISH, POULTRY, AND OTHER PERISHABLE ARTICLES.--Charles F. Pike, Piovidence, R.I. I claim, 1st, Constructing a tubular ice box, with holes or openings in the tubes or pipes, at or near the bottom, to let the air out into the chamber, F, and slots or openings into the ice receptacle, reservoir, or depository, near the top, and so get the combined and double purpose of radiation, conduction, and internal circulation of the air in the chamber, F, substantially as and for the purposes set forth and described in the drawing and specification hereunto annexed, without confining myself to any particular form, size, or shape of the pipes or tubes, whether they be vertical or horizontal, round, square, oval, oblong, or in any other form, neither do I confine myself to any particular form of ice receptacle, reservoir, or depository. 2d, The perforating or making slots, holes, or openings in the tubes or pipes, near the bottom, for the purposes set forth and described, howsoever the same may be made, whether used in connection with the ice receptacle, reservoir, or depository, as described, or without the openings in the ice receptacle, reservoir, or depository, for the purpose of the rotating of the air. 3d, The ice receptacle, reservoir, or depository, with its openings to let the air into and on to the ice in this ice receptacle, reservoir, or depository, for the purpose of taking off the moisture in the preserving room, at or near its top, whether the tubes connected to the bottom of this ice receptacle, reservoir, or depository, are perforated or not, or whether the ice receptacle reservoir, or depository, is removed altogether, and the tops or collars of the tubes or pipes are perforated. 4th, The ice box, receptacle, reservoir, or depository, A, as described, pipes or tubes, B C D L, pan, E H, room, F, substantially as described and set forth, with their appendages. 71,911.--MULTIPLYING REFLECTORS FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC CAMERA.--D.W.S. Rawson, Peru, Ill. I claim, 1st, The reflector box, A, the doors and shade wings, B B, the bars, C C, the non-reflecting division, D D, surrounding and between the several mirrors, the base board, F, and the slide board, G, and the double pivot, H, when used for the purposes herein described. 2d, The use of the lever for the purpose of adjusting the reflectors. 3d, The moving of the reflectors with the slide, G. to produce more than one set of impressions on the same plate, or an equivalent movement. 71,912.--CAR SPRING.--Wm. F. Ray, Fort Wayne, Ind. I claim a series of reflexed springs, so constructed that the bows slide into each other, the whole being adjustable so as to regulate the amount of elasticity, as described. 71,913.--LAMP BURNER.--Henry Read, Providence, R I. I claim the skeleton bottom, B, in combination with the perforated cylinder, C, and cone, D, when constructed and arranged substantially as described and for the purpose specified. 71,914.--APPARATUS FOR TAMING WILD ANIMALS.--Peter R. Sanderson, Caledonia, N Y. I claim the construction and use of a circingle strap, as described, with the sheaves, A A A A, and their attachments to said circingle, and the slipping straps, B B B B, and rope, C, when arranged substantially as described for the purpose specified. Also, the combination of the above parts, A A, etc., B B, etc, and C, with any harness, arranged substantially as described for the purpose designed. 71,915.--JOURNAL BOX.--Wm. Sherburne, Charlestown, Mass. I claim, 1st, The bolt, E, constructed as and for the purposes above described. 2d, The bolt, E, in combination with the jaw, m, and oil box, B, substantially and for the purpose above specified. 71,916.--HORSE AND CATTLE POKE.--Nelson Sylvester, Weymouth, Ohio. I claim, 1st, The head, B, cross bar, E, in combination with the springs, F, and spikes, a, for the purpose and in the manner substantially as set forth. 2d, The cross bar, E, as arranged in relation to the yoke, C, and in combination with the poke, A, in the manner as and for the purpose specified. 71,917.--CORN PLANTER.--Frank J. Smiley, Marshall, Mich. I claim, 1st, In combination with a wheeled machine for planting corn or other seed at regular intervals, a "perambulator," substantially as described, when hung concentrically to a revolving seed cylinder, C, and operated in connection therewith, substantially in the manner and for the purpose herein in specified. 2d, When operated in connectin with a revolving seed cylinder, the arrangement and combination of the dropping tubes, t, and their attachments with the tappet pins, T, and receiving basins, K, for dropping and conveying the seed to the furrowers, substantially as set forth. 3d, The pendant gage-bars, h, in combination with the gage plates, g, substantially as and for the purpose described. 71,918.--WHIP RACK.--Charles A. Smith, Philadelphia, Pa. I claim a whip rack composed of metal or other inelastic material, and furnished with a series of divisions or apartments, with a hinged tongue or flap in each, and suitable openings in each apartment for the insertion and retention of a whip, substantially as described. 71,919.--METHOD OF HARDENING AND BLEACHING ARTICLES MADE OF SOAPSTONE, TALC, ETC.--Henry Julius Smith, Boston, Mass., assignor to Joseph C. Wightman, Newtonville, N. Y. I claim, 1st, The heating in a closed vessel, and in contact with carbon, the above described substances, or articles formed therefrom, for the purpose of hardening and toughening the same, substantially as above described. 2d, The removal, either before or after the hardening process, of impurities producing discoloration, by the action of a bath of melted chloride or sodium, or other chemical compound operating in like manner. 71,920.--HANDLE FOR TEA AND COFFEE POTS.--Enos E. Stow, Plantsville, Ct. I claim a handle, as made hollow or tubular, and provided with openings in or through it, that when applied to a pot or vessel, warm or heated air may be caused to pass into and through and out of such handle, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 71,921.--AERIAL CARRIAGE AND WAY.--Daniel Towse, Pittsburg, Pa. I claim the combination of the endless wire rope or ropes, A A, pulleys, T T T' T", and piers, B B B' B", with the suspended carriages, H H H H, arranged and operating as specified. 71,922.--AERIAL CARRIAGE AND WAY.--Daniel Towse, Pittsburg, Pa. I claim the combination of the wire ropes, A A, piers, B B B B, reel, F, and rope, P, with the carriage, H, arranged and operating in the manner set forth. 71,923.--AERIAL CARRIAGE AND WAY.--Daniel Towse, Pittsburg. Pa. I claim the combination of the two aerial ways, A A' A" A'", the drum, C, with the carriages, H H, and ropes, f f, constructed and operating as specified. 71,924.--ATTACHMENT TO THE REGULATORS QF WATCHES--Wm. B. Tucker, Hillsboro, Ohio. I claim the combination of the screw-arbor, c, and the toothed segment, e, with the regulating lever, d, and the scale base plate, a b, substantially in the manner and for the purpose herein set forth. 71,925.--BILLIARD CUE TIP.--Joseph A. Veazie, Boston, Mass. I claim the new or improved composition, substantially as described, in which ground leather is an important constituent. Also, the combination of a layer of such composition and one or more layers or strata of leather or caoutchouc, or both, such being for the formation of cue tips, as explained. 71,926.--CAR SPRING.--Richard Vose, New York city. I claim a volute spring, formed or constructed of a coiled metallic bar, whose thickness is greater transversely upon one edge thereof than at any other point therein, substantially as and for the purpose herein set forth. 71,927.--APPARATUS FOR TURNING ON GAS.--W.P. Wage [assignor to himself and M. Clarke], Barre Centre, N.Y. I claim, 1st, The cylinder, E, and the piston, F, in combination with the lever, D, or their equivalent, operated by the means and in the manner and for the purpose specified. 2d, Lighting gas by electricity, in combination with the apparatus above described for turning on gas, as shown and described. 71,928.--HORSE HAY FORK.--George H. Waldo, Prattsburg, N.Y. I claim the tines, b b, bail, f f, curved holding tine, I, spring, J, pulley, l, rope, k, all constructed and operated substantially as herein set forth. 91,929.--MACHINE FOR ROLLING LEATHER.--J.H. Walker, Worcester, Mass. I claim, 1st, The combination of the horizontal way, G, slide, H, and roll, b, with tables, K and M, and treadle operating device, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 2d, The combination, with the pieces, C C, of the truss rods, E E, bridge, F, way, G, and slide, H, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 71,930.--FERTILIZER AND CORN PLANTER COMBINED.--Samuel H. Wallize, Washingtonville, Pa. I claim the arrangement of the devices, slide, G, and roller, D, as connected and operating together, with the crank, F, so as to drop the guano and corn through a single spout, to prevent choking, as herein described. 71,931.--WASHING MACHINE.--D.T. Ward, Cardington, O. I claim, 1st, The segmental or convex washboard, E, actuated by levers, D, in combination with the reciprocating washboard, F, and connecting arms, H, substantially in the manner and for the purpose set forth. 2d, In combination therewith, the spring, j, rod, k, and slots, I, arranged and operating substantially as described. 3d, The gate, p, in combination with the horizontal reciprocating washboard, F, and tub, A, arranged and operating substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 71,932.--CORN PLANTER.--John R. Weber, Bourbon, Ind. I claim, 1st, The springs, m, on the shaft, e, in combination with the dropping cylinders, k, as and for the purpose described. 2d, The combination of the foot board, c', forked lever, d" m", connecting rods, e", and cross piece, h", arranged and operating as explained. 3d, The combination of the frame, B, elbow levers, m', connecting rods, n' s', arms, o' t', and shafts, r' u', as and for the purpose set forth. 4th, The combination of the transverse shaft, v, sliding bar, s, hook, r, pins, o, block, n, and dropping cylinders, k, substantially as described. 5th, The combination of the crank, w, arm, x a', spring, b, and sliding bar, s, arranged and operating as set forth. 6th, The combination of the lever, a", shaft, v, pinion, e', and spring, e"', when used independently, or in connection with the frame, B, substantially as and for the purpose described. 71,933.--BED BOTTOM.--David S. Williams, Coldwater, Mich. I claim the combination of the loop, A, rods, B, spring band, C, rods, D, webbing, E, slats, F, wires or equivalent, G, in the manner described. 71,934.--INSTRUMENT FOR ADMINISTRATION OF AN�STHETICS.--Osborn Wilson, Aurora, Ill. I claim, 1st, The construction of an instrument with inhaling and exhaling tubes, provided with valves, working automatically and alternately in opening and closing the tubes by the respiration of the patient, substantially in the manner and for the purposes as herein specified. 2d, Providing the instrument with a spring valve and air tube for regulating the administration of nitrous oxide and other anæsthetics, substantially in the manner and for the purposes as herein specified. 3d, The construction and arrangement of stock, A, mouth piece, B, inhaling and exhaling tubes, C' C, plate, D, air tube, E', valve, E, spiral spring, b, valves, c c, rods, d d, fulcra, e e, arm, f, and rod, g, substantially in the manner and for the purposes as herein specified. 71,935.--CIDER MILL AND PRESS.--Martin Winger, Ephrata, Pa. I claim, 1st, A series of press boxes, D, with perforated sides and an external cogged flange, d, all connected in the form of a wheel revolving horizontally, with its cross-arms, N, secured centrally to a vertical shaft, L, in combination with the bearing, M, and step, O, sustained on a framework, A B B', all arranged substantially in the manner and for the purpose specified. 2d, With the revolving press boxes, D, the press block and central upright, K, E, pulley, G, guides, F, arms, e, in combination with the inclined planes, H and R, all arranged and operating substantially in the manner and for the purpose specified. 3d, In combination with the revolving box wheel, D D N N, and pressing arrangement, the hinged drop bottom, Q, in combination with a series of rollers or pulleys, P, or their equivalents, for the purpose and in the manner shown and described. 4th. In combination with my horizontal box wheel, the arrangement of the gearing and mill hopper, X, and crushers, W V, pinions, Y S, on shaft, all combined substantially m the manner specified. 5th, In combination with an apple mill, a cider press, with a series of presses in a horizontal revolving wheel, substantially as and for the purposes specified. 71,936.--CURB FOR WATER WHEEL.--Albert Winton, Chambersburg, Pa. I claim, 1st, The serpentine or double curved chute gates, O O, when formed with surfaces tapering or sloping from their centers towards their ends, and so arranged, relative to intermediately situated diaphragms or plates, r r, that one of the tapering ends of said chute gates, O O, shall project beyond the circumferences of the rims, a a c e, and extend so as to enter slots, or between the prongs of fork-like arms, K L K L, to be operated in the manner and for the purpose substantially as described. 2d, The annular adjustable rim, or ring, i i, provided with the fork-like arms, K L K L, and with the moving lever or crank, m, and the fulcrum pin, h, all arranged to operate the chute gates, O O, substantially as shown and described. 71,937.--HARVESTER.--James Winters and Charles C. Gapen, Lacon, Ill. We claim the skeleton frame, A, or its equivalent, provided with an adjustable clevis, and attached to the end of the tongue, or reaping and mowing machines, substantially in the manner and for the purpose herein described and represented. 71,938.--SASH TOP.--Orson E. Woodbury, Madison, Wis. I claim, 1st, The cam, slotted at H D I, forming bearings at either extremity for the screw or other support, when the cam is operating against the catch, C, at the points, F or O, all as described and for the purpose specified. 2d, The catch, C, with the spikes, G G, constructed and used as and for the purposes hereinbefore named. 71,939.--PEAT AND BRICK MACHINE.--Charles D. Wrightington, Fairhaven, and Benjamin P. Rider, Boston, Mass. We claim, 1st, In combination with the mold wheel having the series or sets of molds in it, a series of plungers revolving with said wheel and operated in succession by the eccentric journal and frame, Q, substantially as and for the purpose described. 2d, Also in combination with a mold wheel having a series of cogs interposed by a series of concave stops, blanks or abutments upon its periphery, a drive wheel having cogs and a blank surface on its perimeter so that the mold wheel may be moved, stopped and locked by said drive wheel which has a continuous movement, substantially as and for the purpose described. 3d, Also the location and arrangement of the cam over and around the blank on the perimeter of the drive wheel so that while the mold wheel is stopped and locked by said drive wheel which continues its movement said drive wheel shall operate the pushers to discharge the pressed bricks or blocks from the molds, substantially as described. 71,940.--.TOY.--Derrick Adams, Lansingburg, N.Y. I claim an automatic toy having the legs of the horse and the head and arm of the driver actuated by mechanical devices, in manner substantially as herein described and for the purposes as set forth. 71,941.--EAVES TROUGH FASTENING.--Philip Ahn, Brandon Vt. I claim the bolt, c, combined with the elastic strap, e, substantially as and for the purpose described. 71,942.--INFLATING RUBBER BALLS.--Henry A. Alden, Fishkill, N.Y., assignor to the New York Rubber Company. I claim the application to rubber balls or other hollow articles requiring to be distended by inflation of the combined bulb and tube, substantially in the manner and for the purposes herein shown and set forth. 71,943.--REAMER.--Charles Allardice, Cohoes, N.Y. I claim, 1st, A shank, A, formed substantially as described in combination with the cutters, B, and nut or screw ring, O, the whole operating as set forth. 2d, In combination with the shank, A, cutters, B, and nut, C, the nut, e, bolt, g, and washer, g', formed as described and employed for the purposes specified. 71,944.--BOLT ATTACHMENT TO DOOR LOCK.--William H. Andrews [assignor to Burton Mallory], New Haven, Conn. I claim the bolt, E, constructed arranged within the lock case in combination with the follower, F, constructed with a cam, I, and spring, H, so as to hold the bolt securely in both its locked and unlocked position, substantially in the manner herein set forth. 71,945.--MECHANISM FOR PRESENTING PALM LEAF TO LOOMS.--Isaac Angell, Malden, Mass. I claim for employment in connection with a loom for weaving with palm leaf or similar weft a mechanism substantially as set forth which automatically presents in succession the entering ends of single pieces of weft in such position with relation to the cross sectional form of each that each piece will be carried into the shed or web flatwise. Also the mechanism for effecting the elevation and release of the weft, substantially as described. Also the plate, d, with its rectangular perforations and the gate or slide for clamping a single piece of weft projecting through the plate, substantially as shown and described. Also a mechanism substantially as set forth for "knocking off" the weft raising mechanism when a piece of weft is presented. 71,946.--BLACKBOARD FOR SCHOOLS.--William Arroquuier, Worcester, Mass. I claim covering the plaster, B, with a coating, C, composed of the ingredients named and applied in the manner above described whereby the proper color and roughness are obtained as set forth. 71,947.--MODE OF OPERATING SWELL IN MELODEONS.--C.E. Bacon [assignor to himself. George A Prince and Calvin F.S. Thomas], Buffalo, N.Y. I claim the arrangement of the swell pedals side by side with the bellows pedals and contiguous to and parallel therewith, for the purpose and substantially as described. 71,948.--MATERIALS FOR TRANSMITTING HEAT.--William C. Baker, New York city. I claim the employment of salted water, glycerin, or their equivalents, to prevent freezing in transmitting and diffusing heat through ordinary pipes, tubes or radiators for the purpose of warming and ventilating railroad cars, public vehicles and buildings, substantially as herein described. 71,949.--LAMP BURNER.--George E. Baldwin (assignor to E. Miller & Co.), West Meriden, Conn. I claim the arrangement of the auxiliary or ventilating tube, E, with the wick tube, B, combined with a solid partition, F, in the base of the burner so as to form a close chamber around the tubes and wick adjuster, substantially in the manner and for the purpose herein set forth. 71,950.--AUTOMATIC TOOTH PLUGGER.--Burr Bannister and George F. Green, Kalamazoo, Mich. We claim, 1st, The combination of an engine operated by means of compressed air with a tooth plugger for the purpose set forth and described. 2d, The lock, F, in connection with spring, 1, operated by cross head of piston rod, in the manner and for the purpose specified. 71,951.--CAR COUPLING.--William F. Barlow (assignor to himself, James Bower and W.A. Jackson), Monmouth, Ill. I claim, 1st, The catch, C, slotted draw head, A, and weight, X, combined as described and for the purpose set forth. 2d, The rods, M N and H, and elbow, K, combined as described and operating in combination with the elements of the first claim arranged substantially as described and for the purpose set forth. 3d, The weight, X, arranged as described for the purpose set forth. 71,952.--HARVESTER RAKE.--John Barnes, Rockford, Ill. I claim 1st, The inclined serrations, h h h, on the face of the rake head for the purpose of compacting the gavel. 2d, A compressor or supplementary rake pivoted to the rake handle and moving parallel to the rake head, substantially as described. 3d, The combination substantially as described of an automatic rake, a compresser and an interposed spring for the purpose set forth. 4th The combination substantially as described of a reel revolving continuously on a horizontal shaft a rake mounted on the same shaft [on trunnions arranged diagonally to the shaft], and a shipping device by which the rake may be thrown into gear between any two of the beaters of the reel and by which it may automatically be thrown out of gear at the end of its stroke. 5th, The combination substantially as described of the inclined rake handle with the trunnions or pivots revolving on the reel shaft, and arranged diagonally thereto. 6th, The combination substantially as described of the rake handle pivoted on trunnions diagonal to the reel shaft and the friction roller with a guide vertical below the axis of the rake and deflected both horizontally and laterally above that axis, as and for the purpose set forth. 7th, The combination substantially as described of the rake handle and shipping lever whereby the rake throws itself out of gear after discharging the gavel. 8th, The combination substantially as described of a rake mounted on trunnions revolving on a horizontal axis in a fixed relation to the guide which controls the movements of the rake with a revolving reel having an endwise movement on the same axis whereby the rake can be thrown out of gear by moving the reel endwise without stopping the reel. 71,953.--TRY SQUARE AND BEVEL.--Samuel N. Batchelder, Prairie du Chien, Wis. I claim, 1st, The blade B, pivoted within the stock, A, and provided with a hooked projection, e, by means of which and the hook slide, D, the blade, B, may be set and held at any desired angle, substantially as described and for the purpose specified. 2d, The hook slide, D, with the thumb screw, E, arranged and operating substantially as shown and described for the purposes set forth. 3d, The spiral spring, F, in combination with a combined try square and bevel, substantially as described. 71,954.--PLATE LIFTER.--David B Beaty, Aurora, Ind., assignor to himself and James Lamb. I claim the curved wires, B B B, having hooks at their lower ends and connected to a handle, A, said handle being provided with a wire loop formed into a spring which connects to the wires, B, so that by pressing upon this spring, C, the wires, B, are caused to separate and release the plate, all constructed as specified. 71,955.--SUSPENSION BRIDGE.--Charles Bender, N.Y. city. I claim, 1st, The construction and arrangement of one or more yielding joints connecting the beams or trusses of stiffened suspension bridges, substantially as herein described. 2d, The attachment of the ends of the cables or chains at or near the first or shore piers to the longitudinal beams or trusses of stiffened suspension bridges, substantially as set forth. 3d The means and method by which the ends of the beams or trusses of stiffened suspension bridges are secured to the shore piers by vertical anchorage and the arrangement of suitable joints, v, in said anchors, substantially for the purpose described. 4th, The means and method employed to reduce the side motion by attaching the longitudinal beams or trusses of stiffened suspension bridges to the central piers sidewise said attachment being on one pier perfectly immovable in any horizontal direction while at the other piers allowance is made for the variations of the length of the beams substantially as set forth and described. 71,956.--FOLDING TRUNK.--O.K. Bernbaum, Brooklyn, N.Y. I claim the folding ends in combination with the hinged sectional back and front for the purposes herein fully described. 71,957.--SOFA BEDSTEAD.--Charles H. Berry, East Somerville, Mass. I claim the combination of the lower position, a, the seat, b, and head, d, and the hinged or movable panel, e, in a sofa or lounge, substantially as and for the purpose described. 71,958.--CHURN.--Thomas Bisbing, Buckstown, Pa. I claim the combination of the removable frame, B, sliding frame, C, ratchet bar, G, and pinion wheel, H, with each other, with the body, A, of the churn, and with the dasher shaft, I, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 71,959.--HAT-FELTING MACHINE.--Job W. Blackham, Brooklyn, N.Y. I claim, 1st, The duplicate series of rolls, b and bN', and rubbers, C and CN' or their equivalent, with their water pans, N N', and jets of hot water or steam, as represented, arranged to operate together in the manner and for the purpose herein specified. 2d, Mounting the reciprocating rubber over the bed of rolls so as to allow of its ascent and descent by means of springs, substantially as and for the purpose herein specified. 71,960.--BUILDERS' SCAFFOLD.--John E Bliss, Oxford, Ind. I claim the combination of the right angled pivoted frame, A, and adjustable sliding bars, B and D, with each other, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 71,961.--SUBSTITUTE FOR MILK FOR CATTLE.--Rufus K. Blodgett, near Fulton, Ill. I claim, 1st The use of white or blue clay, when used for the purpose above specified. 2d, The combination of flour, catechu and clay, when mixed and used for the purposes above set forth. 71,962.--FIRE LADDER.--Johan Blomgren, Galesburg, Ill. I claim, 1st, The stuffing coil, O, inserted into the lower port of the tube H H', and forced up or down in the tube by the cog wheel, M, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 2d, The basket, R, in combination with a fire escape having the hinged side, T, and the adjusting rod, S, substantially as and for the purpose described. 3d, The construction of the stuffig coil, O, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 71,963.--SAFETY GUN LOCK.--Charles Bowlen, Milwaukee, Wis. I claim tumbler, F, with its pin, G, in combination with dog, H, with its slot, I, substantially as and for the purpose described. 71,964.--VENTILATOR FOR BUILDINGS.--Thomas Boyd, Cambridgeport, Mass. I claim, 1st, The combination of the chamber, A, with or without the lenses, B, cone, C, and rods, D, constructed and arranged to operate substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 2d, The combination of the oscillating cap, K, and elastic pads, I, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 3d, The arrangement of the chamber, A, cone, C, pipes E and H, and cones, G and K, substantially as set forth. 71,965.--DOOR LATCH.--Purmort Bradford (assignor to Sargent & Co.), New Haven, Conn. I claim the construction of the latch bolt with the pivot bearings, a and b, upon opposite sides combined with a single central pivot upon the plate so as to be adjustable for a right or left-hand door and the said plate constructed with a slot through which the latch is operated, in the manner herein set forth. 71,966.--PLOW.--Harvey Briggs, Smithland, Ky. I claim, 1st, Forming the land side, mold board frame and upper and lower strengthening floors, b1 and b2, solid in one piece B, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 2d, The combination of the conical rollers, D, and their boxing frame, H, with the mold board frame, B, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 3d, Forming the boxing frame, H, in two parts, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 4th, forming an oil trench or channel, J, in the boxing frame, II substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 5th, The combination of the elastic washers or packing, I, with the journals and bearings of the rollers and wheels, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 6th, The combination of the adjustable friction wheel, F, and stationary friction wheel, E, with the solid hand side and mold board frame, B, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 7th, The combination of the vertical flanged friction roller, G, with the land side of the plow, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 71,967.--PIANO STOOL.--Josua Briggs, Peterboro, N.H. I claim, in combination with the pillar and feet, the socket block, m, having recesses formed with side lips or flanges, o, to fit into groves, q, in the feet and bottom seats, p, between which and the shoulder on the pillar the feet are securely continued, substantially as described. Also the center piece, w', fitting upon and covering the screw bolt and nut which confine the pillar to the base, substantially as shown and described. Also constructing the socket block, m, with a center socket, t, into which the tail piece of the pillar fits and is confined, substantially as described. Also making the screw spindle removable from the seat, substantially as set forth. 71,968.--PLOW.--T.E.C. Brinly, Louisville, Ky. I claim, 1st, The mode of attaching the beam, D, to the plows by a socket, C, connected with the land side by braces, B B, substantially as set forth. 2d, The combination of the socket, C, constructed with diagonal flanges, C', the handles, and the beam, substantially as set forth. 71,969.--COMBINED SHOVEL AND SIFTER.--Stephen P. Brooks (assignor to himself and Benjamin Woodward), Somerville, Mass. I claim the within-described combined shovel and sifter, constructed and operating substantially as set forth. 71,970.--SEAT AND DESK.--A.H. Brown, May's Landing, N.J. I claim the hinged brace, J, passing through the guides, M, upon the inside of the ends, B, of the seat and hinged to the outer edge of the folding desk, H, all arranged as described whereby the gravity of the brace, J, as the desk is raised causes the L-shaped notch, L, to fit and catch in the guide, M, to hold the said desk raised, for the purpose specified. 71,971.--GRAIN FORK.--E G. Bullis, Manchester, Iowa, assignor to Charles J. Riggs, same place, and said Riggs assignor to D E. Lyon, Dubuque, Iowa. I claim, 1st, The combination of a band-cutting device with a pitching fork, substantially as and for the purposes described. 2d, The combination of the rearwardly-extended parts of the tines, C, the cross head, B, grooved bars, E, sliding cutter, F, and springs, L, with each other, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 3d, The combination of the pivoted or jointed bars, G H I, with the sliding cutter, F, shank, J, of the fork head and handle, A, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 71,972.--SEED PLANTER.--Matthew S. Burdick. Milton, Wis., assignor for himself and John M. May. I claim, 1st, Thumb screw, I, in combination with part, H, and seed cup bar, D, when constructed, connected together and used substantially as and for the purposes described. 3d, Seed-cup bar, E, or its equivalent, when combined with seed-cup bar, D, in the same planting machine so that corn and pumpkin seed and other flat seeds, as squash and melon seeds, may be planted at one operation, substantially as described. 3d, Spring, O, or its equivalent, attached to and combined with seed-cup bar, E, substantially as and for the purposes described. 4th, Jaws or points, F and G, provided with partitions, h and h, for the purpose of dividing the seed, when used in combination with parts, A and A' B and E and N, substantially as described. 5th, A general arrangement and combination of legs or bars, A and A', hoppers, B and C, seed-cup bars, D and E, covering, N, and jaws, F and G, when constructed, connected together and used substantially as and for the purposes described. 71,973.--PULLEY BLOCK.--John A. Burnap, Albany, N. Y. I claim the arrangement of the frame, E, and pulley, F, through the eye of which is inserted the frame, A, having a series of rollers, a a, the whole constructed and used substantially as specified. 71,974.--SADIRON.--Jesse S. Butterfield and Joseph A. Reed, Philadelphia, Pa. We claim, 1st, The steadying, pin, d", in combination with the sectors, d"' d"', on the guard-plate, d', the said parts being constructed and arranged to operate in connection with the planes, a"' a"', on the projection, a', substantially as and for the purpose described. 2d, The projection, a', on the base, A B, with its two opposite sectors or inclined planes, a" a", constructed and arranged to receive and hold down the inward ends, c" c", of the feet of the handle, C D, substantially as described and set forth. 3d, The projecting ends, c" c", of the handle, C D, constructed and arranged to operate in combination with the spaces, b' b', and planes, a" a", substantially as and for the purpose described. 71,975.--PRUNING SHEAR.--Seth P. Carpenter, Milford, Mass. I claim the new or improved manufacture of pruning shears, as hereinbefore described, that is, as composed of the blades, a b, the lever, C, the long shank, B, the lever, D, the open handles, C C', the arm, f, and the rod, g, arranged and combined in manner, and for the purpose, and to operate substantially as specified. 71,976.--WASHSTAND AND CLOTHES DRYER.--Frances H. Carrier, Bridgeport, Conn. I claim, 1st, The combination of the clothes drying apparatus with the washbasin, when they are constructed, arranged, and fitted for use substantially as herein described and set forth. 2d, The combination of the cups, b c d, or their equivalents, with the wash basin, when they are constructed, arranged, and fitted for use as a toilet apparatus, substantially as herein described and set forth. 71,977.--SPICE CASE.--John T. Carter and John Park. Lowell Mass. We claim, 1st, The cups or boxes, c c, when arranged to operate substantially as described, and for the purposes fully set forth. 2d, The springs, k k, in combination with the cups or boxes, c c, for the purpose described and set forth. 3d, The combination and arrangement of the case, a, with its feet, d d d, handle, e, loop, f, and shelves, b b b b, cups or boxes, c c, and spring, k k, all for the purposes substantially as described and set forth. 71,978.--APPARATUS FOR PAINTING OR GRAINING PAILS, ETC.--Jonathan Carter, Winchendon, Mass. I claim, 1st, The combination of the flexible painting or die printing roll with the supplying roller, for painting, graining, ornamenting pails, or other tapering articles. 2d, The mechanism for holding and revolving the pail, when mounted on a bench or table, in combination with the movable printing or die roll, operating substantially in the manner as and for the purposes set forth. 3d, Casting graining or other ornamental configurations on conical rolls so as to form a continuous body, for the purposes herein described. 4th, Making die or printing conical rolls in sections, and securing them to the staves so as to change their position for making a greater variety of ornamental designs for graining and ornamenting hollow ware, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 5th, Applying a smooth coat or body of paint or varnish with a flexible roller to pails, tubs, or other articles of hollow ware, substantially in the manner herein set forth. 71,979.--SAWYERS' RULE.--Thos. Carter, Louisville, Ky. I claim, 1st, A scale so constructed and adjusted that any two of the three quantities of the thickness of the planks, the diameter of the log, and the number of the planks cut or to be cut from the log being given, the third of said quantities is read off from the scale in the manner substantially as above set forth and described. 2d, A scale exhibiting the number of turns to be given to the screws of the log carriage for cutting plank or boards of any desired thickness. 71,980.--CAST METAL CASE FOR SPRING BALANCE.--John Chatillon, New York city. I claim a cast metal case for spring balances, when provided with a perforated or slotted upper head for the reception to the pin, b, and when made substantially as and for the purpose herein shown and described. 71,981.--VACUUM GRAIN DRYER.--Geo. Clark, Buffalo, N.Y. I claim, 1st, the three essential features or parts: the air tight grain chamber, the radiations heating pipes or floors, and the vacuum-producing apparatus, combined and operating substantially as herein set forth. 2d, the arrangement of the steam heating pipes within the grain chamber, substantially as set forth. 3d, The graduated gage vessel, H, arranged as and for the purpose set forth. 71,982.--DOOH LATCH.--Francis Clymer, Galion, Ohio. I claim the mode of attaching a combined latch and hasp, B, and staple, F, to doors, by means of slots, I and H, so as to permit the adjustment of the same substantially as set forth. 71,983.--CLAMP.--Geo. H. Coo and Geo. H. Snow, New Haven, Conn. We claim the herein described clamp, consisting of the head, C, upon one arm of the body, [Transcribers note: illegible letter], the opposite arm, provided with a corresponding foot, and the said head having arranged therein levers, D, and combined with a screw, B, so as to operate to clamp between the screw and the foot, substantially as set forth. 71,984.--BOAT DETACHING TACKLE.--David L. Cohen, Pensacola. Fla. I claim the combination of the notched bars, a a, with the grooved blocks, B B, the sliding blocks, C, pitman, D D', and lever, F, substantially as and for the purpose described. 71,985.--APPARATUS FOR ELEVATING WATER.--J.R. Cole, Keaton Station, Tenn. I claim, 1st, The combination of the chamber, F, provided with the short pipes, p p', and the pipes, p", with the pumps, G H, and the chambers, C D E, substantially as and for the purposes described. 2d, The combination and arrangement, for the purpose described, of the chambers, C D E F, pipes, p p' p", P P' P", and pumps, G H, the latter working alternately, so as to maintain a constant pressure upon the water in the chambers, substantially in the manner specified. 71,986.--TACK HAMMER.--Thomas A. Conklin, New Britain. Conn. I claim, as a new article of manufacture, a tack hammer, constructed in the manner and With the characteristics herein specified, for the purposes set forth. 71,987.--FLOOR CLAMP.--Wm. Conner and C. W. Mitchell, Wilmington, Del. We claim the combination of the frame, a, with the screws, b and d d, with the wedge blocks, e e, wedges, f f, and plates i i, constructed and arranged, as herein described, to operate as a clamp for clamping ship timber, flooring, and other carpenters' work. 71,988.--BUTTON.--Geo. Cooke, Winchester, Mass. I claim a button or stud, its shank attached by means of a disk formed concave, and subsequently compressed, substantially as described. 71,989.--HARVESTER.--Francis C. Coppage, Terre Haute, Ind. I claim 1st, The combination of the double or alternate step wheel, E, having the inclined steps, e e e, with the two stepping-dogs, D D', and the springs, x x, when the said parts are constructed and arrange substantially in the manner and for the purposes described. 2d, The combination and arrangement of the adjusting rod, n o", with the cylindrical sleeve, O', the sleeve or slide, O"', the post, P, and the reel, O"', in such a manner that while the post P, supports the reel, the elevation of the latter is adjusted by the compound rod, n o", substantially as and for the purposes specified. 3d, The rod, H, having the crank, h, and the worm, h', in combination with the worm segment, i, the shaft, I, the winding arm or segment, i', and the chain, K, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 71,990.--MACHINE FOR STRETCHING CLOTH.--A.C. Corpe, Stafford, Conn. I claim, 1st, The two gear clamps, B B, composed each of two wheels, a a', one placed above the other, and the upper wheels arranged so as to be capable of adjustment, both vertically and laterally, substantially as shown and described. 2d, The arrangement of gearing, as shown, in connection with the gear clamps, B B, and roller, C, whereby an equal movement of the clamps is insured, substantially as shown and described. 3d, The supplemental frame, E, provided with the roller, D, upon which the cloth is wound, in connection with the gearing, k u, clutch, o, driving pulley, m, and shaft, l, all arranged substantially as shown and described. 71,991.--ROLLER FOR DRESSING.--Benjamin R. Cotton, Lewiston, Me. I claim as an improved dresser roll, a stone roll covered with the surfacing metal, or metal composition, substantially as set forth. Also, the method of surfacing a roll by placing around or over a central roll a metal frame as a base upon which to cement the surface metal, and the surfacing such frame, substantially as set forth. 71,992.--WAGON LOCK.--James A. Counts, Indianapolis, Iowa. I claim the catch, g, the bands, h h, the spring, the bar, e, lever, k, for the purposes set forth and described. 71,993.--HAME TUG.--Jas. C. Covert, Townsendville, N. Y. I claim, 1st, The metallic hames tug, A, provided with the V-shaped openings, C, having inclined sides, and the tongues, D, adapted to receive the V-shaped block, O, formed upon the block, N, of the trace strap and block, O, held in place by means of the pin upon the spring lever stop, Q, fitting in the groove, P, in the end of tongue, D, of the hame tug, as herein described for the purpose specified. 2d, The hame clip, fastened by bolts to the hame tug, substantially as herein described and for the purpose specified. 3d, The block, N, upon the trace strap, when provided with the V-shaped block, C, and the spring lever, Q, as herein described for the purpose specified. 71,994.--HARVESTER RAKE.--James. S. Crump, Williamsburg, Mo. I claim, 1st, The curved eccentric arm, I, applied to the rock shaft, E, and operated in the manner and for the purpose described. 2d, The swinging lever, M, or its equivalent, in combination with the curved eccentric arm for operating the platform, as described. 3d, The arrangement of one or more springs in combination with the curved eccentric arm, I, for the purpose set forth. 4th, The manner of adjusting the hight of the swinging platform upon the supporting arms and uprights, as described. 5th, The adjustable cant or deflecting boards, C, in combination with the swinging platform, as described. 71,995.--WASHING MACHINE.--S.W. Curtiss, Sugar Grove, Pa. I claim an improved washing machine, consisting box, A, provided with blocks, H, and roller, E, the hinged frame, B, having rollers, C D, and handle, G, all constructed, arranged and operating as and for the purpose set forth. 71,998.--MACHINE FOR FORMING HAT BODIES.--Francis Degen, Newark. N.J. I claim, 1st, A hat body formed partly of common and partly of fine stock, by first blowing on the cone a belt of fine stock, then over the whole cone a quantity of common stock, and finally a quantity of fine stock, substantially as set forth. 2d, The close fitting cap, B, in combination with the perforated cone, A, of a machine for forming hat bodies, substantially as and for the purpose described. 3d, The slide, D, in combination with the trunk, C, cap, B, and perforated cone, A, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 71,997.--MAIL-BAG FASTENER.--S. Denison, Portlandville, N.Y. I claim the hooks, C, constructed substantially as herein shown and described, in combination with the straps, D and F, with the bag, B, and staples, A, as and for the purpose set forth. 71,998.--SAWBUCK.--Henry J. Dill, Cummington, Mass. I claim the clamps, D, the treadle, E', the arms, E, springs, F', and rods, F, constructed, arranged, and operating, in combination with the stationary part, A, substantially as shown and described for the purpose set forth. 71,999.--CARRIAGE FOR ROCK DRILL.--Thomas Doane, Boston, Mass. I claim the arrangement of the round bars, E F G and H, of a rock drill carriage into a frame, for the reception of rock drilling machines which shall be able to reach therefrom any point where it is desirable to bore a hole, substantially as and for the purpose described. 2d, The position of the horizontal round bars, E and F, under an acute (more or less) angle, d, to the side frame of a rock drill carriage, or to the alignment of the tunnel, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 3d, The construction of a rock drill carriage for driving a tunnel or mine so as to swing in a vertical direction on the forward wheels and axle, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 72,000.--RAILWAY CHAIR.--John H. Downing, Salem, Mass. I claim the single-headed chair, A, in combination with a sectional railroad rail, arranged as and for the purpose shown and described. 72,001.--ROTARY PUMP.--John Doyle, Hoboken, N. J., and Timothy A. Martin, New York city. We claim the two drums, A C, placed concentrically one within the other, the chamber, D, air passages, E E', valves, F G, and tubular journals, B B', all arranged and combined to operate in connection with water or other liquid placed in the space or spaces between the two drums, A C, substantially in the manner as and for the purpose specified. 72,002.--GRINDING MILL.--James F. Drummond, New York city. I claim the tubular inlet-journal, b, having its interior contracted around the feed pipe at one point, and thence flaring toward the cylinder and the blast pipe, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 72,003.--PIVOT GEARING.--Joseph J. Duchesne, Lacon, Ill. I claim the circular bed plate, A, in combination with the pinion plate, B, and coupling plate, C, secured by the set screw, S, the whole arranged and operating substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 72,004.--CULTIVATOR.--William Duffner, Petersburg, Ind. I claim the cultivator composed of the elements, A B B' C D E F H I J N, and the device for regulating the depth of the shovels, composed of the elements, G K L M P, constructed and arranged as set forth. 72,005.--WOVEN FABRIC.--J. Renshaw, East Greenwhich, R.I. I claim the fabric, herein described, as a new article of manufacture. 72,006.--HORSE RAKE.--Edward A. Field, Sidney, Me. I claim, 1st, The application of each tooth, E, to its arm, D, by means of a round tenon arranged at an obtuse angle with the axis of the tooth, and going into the arm, the same being substantially as and for the purpose described. 2d, Also, the combination as well as the arrangement of the adjustable brace d, and the staple or clasping wire, f, with the arm and the tooth, when applid by means substantially as specified, viz., a cylindrical tenon arranged at an obtuse angle with the axis of the tooth, and going into a corresponding hole made in the arm. 3d, Also, the combination of the damping screw, h, with the arm, and the tooth applied to such arm by a tenon arranged at an obtuse angle with the axis of the tooth as specified. 4th, Also, the arrangement of the rope, or its equivalent, with the several arms and their teeth, and the braces thereof, the said rope being to operate as and for the purpose specified. 72,007.--PUNCH FOR FORMING CLASP.--Charles D. Flesche, New York city. I claim the sliding punch, B, in combination with the plates, A A', cutters, b b, an spring, e, substantially as and for the purpose herein shown and described. 72,008.--SELF-FASTENING SPRING FOR WEBBING.--John Flinn, Philadelphia, Pa., assignor to Archer Steel, same place. I claim a spiral spring, for webbing, having the wire at one end of the spiral coils, A A, bent in the manner described and shown by B C D E, for the purpose specified. 72,009.--CARVING KNIFE AND FORK HOLDER.--Alden T. Foster, Albany, N.Y. I claim, as an article of manufacture, the dish or stand, A, constructed substantially as described, with notches, a a and c c, as and for the purpose set forth. 72,010.--LAMP CHIMNEY.--Sam'l W. Fowler, Brooklyn, N.Y. I claim the construction of the glass chimney, with its concave and convex deflectors, J and E, on each side, and collar, B, beneath, with its projections, C C, as herein described and for the purposes set forth. 72,011.--CARTRIDGE BOX.--William Freeborn, Tivoli, N.Y. I claim the square box, A, made of leather or any suitable material, when constructed with a series of round, fluted, or ruffled holders, B, on the inside, made of any firm or flexible material, a series of holders, B, being attached to each flap, C, in front, and the flaps buttoning to the sides of the box, A, as herein described and for the purpose set forth. 72,012.--DEVICE FOR HITCHING HORSES.--Samuel Galbraith, New Orleans, La. I claim the device above described, consisting of the rings, A and B, and the pivoted curved jaws, C C, meeting at one extremity at e' e', and connected at the other by means of the rods, r r, and springs, s, working in the tube, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 72,013.--CAPPING SCREWS.--J. Gardner, New Haven, Conn. I claim, 1st, Cutting away or depressing the cap at the point where it meets the nick in the screw head, substantially as described, so that such cut away or depressed portion, while connected with and forming part of the cap shall lie within outline the nick in the screw head, as set forth. 2d, A capped screw in which the slot or depression in the cap corresponding to the nick in the screw head is forced, substantially in the manner and for the purposes herein shown and described. 72,014.--TIGHT AND LOOSE PULLEY.--Joseph P. Gates, Lincoln, Ill. I claim the construction of the pulley, e, in two sections, with the arrangement and combination of the ram spring, F, the rebound guard, G, the stop flange, I, the case dog, J, and spring, K, the case dog ram, L, the shuttle key, P, and stands, Z, and arm, b, with cam, a, when constructed, arranged, and operated as herein described and for the purposes set forth. 72,015.--BRICK MACHINE.--Samuel Gissinger, Allegheny City, Pa. I claim, 1st, The device for moving the mold on to the roller way, G, consisting of the arm, l, held by a spring, m', lever, m, pin, n, on the gear wheel, o, and block, j, moving in the slot, h, substantially as described. 2d, The device for moving the molds under the hopper, consisting of the gear wheel, p, operated by the gear wheel, c, arm, k', and block, k, moving the slot, l, substantially as described. 3d, In combination with the above, the gear wheel, o, shaft, B, grinding knives, C, stationary knives, D, and fillers, F, in the hopper, A, substantially as and for the purposes described. 4th, The roller way, O, provided with openings and rollers, g and g', substantially as and for the purposes described. 72,016.--HARVESTER RAKE.--James H. Glass and Albert J Glass, McGregor, Iowa. We claim, 1st, The combination of the wheel, L, with the rake wheel, A and arms, C, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 2d, The combination of the cam, O, and bent or crooked lever, M, with the shaft N, of the gear wheel, L, and with the arm, I, rigidly connected with the switch, F, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 72,017.--METHOD OF MOLDING PLASTIC MATERIAL.--Wm. B, Gleason, Boston, Mass. I claim the process substantially as and for the purposes specified. 72,018.--HAND CULTIVATOR.--Wm. C. Goodwin, Hampden, Conn. I claim, 1st, The combination of the frame, C, with frame, G, and the set screws, x and y, and binding screw, f, when they are constructed, arranged, and fitted for adjusting the blades, substantially as herein described and set, forth. 2d, The combination of the blade with the foot and shank, when the foot is made with a keel, like v, to guide the blade and strengthen the shank, substantially as herein described and set forth. 3d, The combination of the handle, D, with the frame, G, when the handle is made adjustable by means of the tongue, h, and set screw, j, and the whole is constructed, combined, and fitted for use substantially as herein described and set forth. 72,019.--APPARATUS FOR MAKING DIPPED CANDLES.--Peter R. Gottstein, Houghton, Mich. I claim, 1st, The combination and arrangement, substantially as described, of the weighted cistern, B, car, A, and straps, C, for the purpose set forth. 2d, The combination of the cistern, B, car, A, and track, I, substantially as and for the purpose described. 3d, The combination and arrangement of the slab or board, J, with the weighted cistern, B, substantially as and for the purpose described. 4th, The new process of producing dipped candles by raising the molten tallow or other liquid to the wicks, substantially as described. 72,020.--CORN SHELLER.--Joseph Gould, Grinnell, Iowa. I claim the roller, C, having its teeth placed upon its face in the manner herein described, and placed within the box between the stationary board, b, and adjustable board, F, by means of its curved springs or oblong slot, when used in combination with metallic inclined plane, E, and hopper, B, with false bottom, as herein set forth. 72,021.--KNIFE CLEANER.--Lewis Goulding, Medfield, assignor to himself and James E. Carpenter, Foxborough, Mass. I claim, 1st, The combination in an implement for scouring knives, of the bar, B, with its adjustable pad, g, arranged for operation as and for the purposes herein shown and described. 2d, Also in combination with the board or tablet, A, the bar, B, provided with the scouring pad, g, and pivoted to such board, and operating with its upper surface, or upon an inclined bed formed thereon, essentially as herein set forth and explained. 3d, Also the combination with the bar, B, and its pad, of the knife bed and the enclosure for holding and receiving the scouring material, arranged relatively to each other and to the bar, B, as herein shown and set forth. 72,022.--FENCE POST.--David M. Graham, Evansville, Ind. I claim, 1st, The construction of double portable fence posts, attached by metallic bevel clasps, with flanges, slots, and tongues, and secured by keys, substantially in the manner and for the purposes as herein described and shown. 2d, The adjustable anchors or braces attached by metallic eyes and key, and the combination of the feet of the posts and base, substantially in the manner and for the purposes as herein described. 72,023.--STEAM GAGE.--Albert S. Greene (assignor to John F. Olmsted), Washington, D.C. I claim, 1st, The construction of a steam gage with two columns of mercury, A and F, communicating with each other at their lower extremities by means of the flexible diaphragms, c and d. and the solid double-headed lifter C, substantially in the manner and for the purpose as herein set forth. 2d, The solid double headed lifter, C, in combination with the flexible diaphragms, c and d, and the primary and secondary reservoirs, substantially in the manner and for the purpose as herein set forth. 3d, The transmission of the pressure of steam from one column to the other by means of a solid double headed lifter, in combination with the flexible diaphragms, c and d, substantially in the manner and for the purpose as herein set forth. 4th, Providing the primary reservoir, I, with the screw plunger, H, substantially in the manner and for the purpose as herein set forth. 72,024.--MACHINE FOR WALL BUILDING AND STUMP EXTRACTING.--Thomas S. Greenman, Mystic Bridge, assignor to George W. Packer, Jr., Mystic River, Conn. I claim, 1st, The within described novel construction of a truss for a wall building machine, the same consisting in the pyramidal framing, A B B, the horizontal timbers, D D, uprights. E F, holding-down bolts G J, and inclined braces, I H, combined and arranged substantially as and for the purpose herein set forth. 2d, Also in such truss firmly securing the timbers, D D, to the pyramidal framing, A B B, by enlarging and bolting, or equivalent fastenings, at the points of contact, in addition to the truss work before described, substantially as and for the purpose herein specified. 3d, Also the diagonal arrangement of the holding-down bolts, G, at the front of my truss, the same being arranged relatively to the timbers, D, triangular frame, A B B, and their several connections, substantially in the manner and for the purpose herein set forth. 72,025.--WINDOW SCREEN.--A.W. Griffith, Roxbury, Mass. I claim the roller cover, E, in combination with the removable screen, D, spring roller, C, sash, A, and window frame, as herein described for the purpose specified. 72,026.--FERTILIZER.--Wm.C. Grimes, Ladiesburg, Md. I claim forming a fertilizer in the manner herein described, of the ingredients and proportions substantially as specified. 72,027.--CULTIVATOR.--John Gross and John C. Tunison, Decatur, Ill. We claim, 1st, the arrangement and combined action of the two frames, so that when any permanent obstruction comes against any of the plows the frames will disconnect, and the back frame ride or move up on the front one and thus avoid breakage, substantially as described. 2d, Also a frictional spring hook upon the tongue or tongue frame, for catching or holding upon a cross bar of the rear frame so that the two frames will not disconnect until the pressure upon the plow or plows exceeds that for which the hook has been adjusted, substantially as described. 72,028.--HOSE SHIELD.--John A. Hasse, Philadelphia, Pa. I claim the combination of the floor or footway, C, with the side pieces, b b, of a sectional hose bridge, constructed substantially as described. 72,029.--SKY ROCKET.--John W. Hadfield, Newtown, N.Y. I claim the application of detachable wings to a sky rocket, through the medium of a collar or band, arranged so that the wings may be detached from the collar or band, or the latter detached from the rocket, substantially as shown and described. 72,030.--SKY ROCKET.--John W. Hadfield, East Williamsburg, N.Y. I claim the attachment to a sky rocket of three or more sticks, at equal distances apart, substantially in the manner and for the purpose set forth. 72,031.--MACHINE FOR REFITTING CONICAL VALVE.--Chas. F. Hall, Brooklyn, N.Y. I claim, last, A milling tool with one or more cutters attached to one or more arms or longitudinal sections of a cone, whether straight or oblique, whereby conical valves of different sizes may refitted, constructed substantially as shown and described. 2d, In combination therewith, the yielding center, C, substantially as described. 72,032.--COLLECTING OXIDE OF ZINC.--Geo.C. Hall, Brooklyn, N.Y. I claim, 1st, A building, structure, or compartment, A, provided with openings, a, covered by screens, B, substantially as and for the purpose set forth, 2d, A screen for separating the oxide of zinc from the fumes and gases of burning zinc ore, composed of ground cork, hair, wool, sponge, or other suitable or similar material, confined within a suitable chamber, substantially as set forth. 72,033.--REGISTER FOR ODOMETERS.--Henry F. Hart, New York City. I claim the arrangement in an inclined position of the counting wheels, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, upon shafts of equal lengths, in combination with the notched and perforated lid, B, as herein shown and described. 72,034.--NECKTIE.--Wm.H. Hart, Jr., Philadelphia, Pa. I claim a bow or tie, A, having an elastic loop or cord, B, arranged horizontally at its rear, with both of its ends free, for the purpose substantially as described. 72,035.--ELLIPTIC CARRIAGE SPRING.--Horace R. Hawkins, Akron. Ohio. I claim an elliptical carriage spring composed of a single piece, F, or two separate pieces, E E, of steel, united by means of blocks and bolts, substantially as herein shown and specified. 72,038.--HATCH-LINING DRAWINGS.--E.K. Haynes, Hanover, N.H. I claim a straight-edge or scale having a mechanism for effecting an intermittent movement of the same, substantially as described. Also in combination therewith the tongue, q, tor angular lining, substantially as described. Also in combination with the feed mechanism, a mechanism for presenting the straight edge in positions radiating from a center, substantially as set forth. 72,037.--PLATFORM SCALE.--D. Hazzard, Milton, Del. I claim the Hollow stand, A, the spindle, C, the springs, D, the elastic rod, G, and the graduated plate, H, in combination and arranged substantially as shown and described tor the purposes set forth. 72,038.--PIANO LOCK.--Adam Helmstaedter, Newark, N.J. I claim the pin, a, secured in the oscillating hook, C, and catching in a slot in the hook, C', substantially as and tor the purpose described. 72,039.--TWEER.--John B. Himberg, Frederick City, Md. I claim a tweer consisting of the box, A, annular cover, C, with a convex under side, and of the removable ring, E, from which the concave plate, F, is suspended, all made and operating substantially as herein shown and described. 72,040.--LAMP FOR BURNING PETROLEUM.--James Hinks and Joseph Hinks, Birmingham, England. We claim, 1st, Constructing the burners of the said lamps substantially in the manner hereinbefore described and illustrated in figs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, of the accompanying drawings, that is to say, the combination in the same burner, of two or more flat or curved wick cases or holders, in which two or more flat wicks are placed, so as to produce thereby two or more flat flames or elliptical of nearly circular flames. 2d, Constructing and arranging the shade holders or galleries of the said lamps for the purpose of admitting air to the flames, substantially in the manner hereinbefore described, and illustrated in figs. 7, 11, 12 13 and 14, of the accompanying drawings. 3d, Supporting the shade holders or galleries in a vase, or cup on the top of the pillar of the lamp, and supplying air to the lamp through the said pillar or vase, or supporting them in a cup or vase without a pillar, the air in this case being supplied through the vase, substantially in the manner hereinbefore described, and illustrated in fig. 7 of the accompanying drawings. 4th, The improvement described and illustrated in figs. 11, 12, 13, and 14, of the accompanying drawings, for isolating the shade from the shade holder or gallery. 5th, The arrangement or combination of the parts of punkah-protectors or wind protectors, substantially in the manner hereinbefore described, and illustrated in figs. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, and 16, of the accompanying drawings. 72,041.--DEVICE FOR LASHING AND BINDING.--John M. Hirlinger, Red Rock, Pa. I claim the cord, A, provided with the links, B and C, hooked lever, D, and slide, E, with its ring, a, arranged and used as and for the purpose set forth. 72,042.--TOOL FOR OPENING FRUIT CANS.--Horace Holt, New York city. I claim, 1st, A tool for opening sheet metal cans, composed of a hand lever, B, carrying a tooth, c, and connected to tongs, A, or other equivalent means, capable of clamping said tooth-carrying lever to the can, as set forth. 2d, Placing the tooth, c, in an oblique direction, when the same is used in combination with the hand lever, B, and clamping device A, substantially as and for the purpose described. 3d, The raised bearing, d, in combination with the lever, B, and clamping device, A, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 72,043.--MOP WRINGER.--Zadok Howe, Lowell, Mich. I claim the treadle, G, and spring bail, E, in combination with the rollers, B and C, the same being used as and for the purpose specified. 72,044.--MACHINE FOR MAKING EYELETS.--David K. Hoxsie, Providence, R.I. I claim the combination of the eyelet forming punch, C, the eyelet forming die, e, and the punch, G, arranged and operating substantially as herein described, for the purpose set forth. Also, in combination with the eyelet forming punch, J, and cutting punch, H, as described, the spring or snapper, g, arranged and operating substantially as described, for the purpose specified. 72,045.--RAILWAY SLEEPING CAR.--George W. Hunt, Hopkinton, Mass. I claim the construction and arrangement of the backs of car seats, by which the whole of some of the backs, and parts of others, are formed into berths, in connection with adjacent seats, substantially as described. Also, the combination of the leaves, n, p, and q, hinged as shown, and to fold together, for a day car, or to be extended and made into a berth for a night car, substantially as described. 72,046.--HARVESTER.--George M. Jackson, North Hector, N.Y. I claim the arrangement and combination of the toothed wheels, S and T, crank, U, box, W, of the hinged frame, V, adjustable finger bar, J, hoisting rope or chain, Y, and lever, Z, when constructed and operated as herein described and for the purposes set forth. 72,047.--REVERSIBLE SADIRON.--S.M. Johnson, Lockport, N.Y. I claim, 1st, The combination, with a reversible sadiron, A, of the hollow handle, C, forming a reservoir, i, the pipe, D, leg, l, and set screw, H, or equivalent, arrranged and operating substantially in the manner and for the purpose set forth. 2d, Also, in combination therewith, the pipe, E, provided with burner, e, cone, G, and stop-cock, F, arranged and operating substantially as specified. 72,048.--BOOT AND SHOE.--William Keats, and John Keats, Street, England. We claim the construction of coverings for the feet, substantially hereinbefore set forth, that is so say, with the sole cut at the edge, and sewed to the edge of the upper while turned outward, substantially as described. 72,049.--MUFF.--M.A. King, New York city. I claim a muff provided with the skeleton spring frame B, made in sections, for the purpose of sustaining its cylindrical form, and adapting it for use as a reticule or pocket, substantially as shown and described. 72,050.--HORSE HAY FORK.--Alfred Knapp, North Fairfield, Ohio. I claim the hinged chisel, c, in combination with the main piece, A, rod, B, brace piece, G, and holder, D, constructed substantially as described, and for the purposes set forth. 72,051.--FIFTH WHEEL FOR CARRIAGES.--Joshua Lawrence, Palmyra, N.Y. I claim the combination of the housings, a a, inclosing the rollers, b b, with the bows, G H, the whole conducted and arranged as described, and operating in the manner and for the purpose set forth. 72,052.--WASHING-MACHINE.--J.Q. Leffingwell, Nevada, Iowa. I claim the combination of the semi-cylindrical box, D, segment, W, pinion P, parts, m m', lever, H, and ribs, r, as herein described, for the purpose specified. 72,053.--DOOR-FASTENER.--Francis C. Levaliey, Warnerville, N.Y. I claim the sliding wedge bolt, F, in combination with the sliding spring catch, K, and cases, E J, as herein described, for the purpose specified. 72,054.--CONDENSING ENGINE.--William A. Lighthall, New York city. I claim the arrangement of the ordinary jet condenser, B, air pump, D, and hot well, E, with the surface condenser, F, and the valves, H K, and L, as shown and described, so that the change from the use of the jet condenser can be made at will, and _vice versa_, 73,055.--MACHINE FOR FORMING AND TEMPERING ELLIPTIC SPRINGS.--Geo. S. Long, Bridgeport, Ct. I claim, 1st, A steel spring former, substantially as shown and described, and for the purposes set forth. 2d, The vibrating rod, B, and shoe, f', and any former, F, in combination with the slotted wheel, W, and roller, W', substantially as shown and described, and for the purpose set forth. 3d, The hollow shaft, s', and roller, W, in combination with the binder or presser, D, substantially as shown and described, and for the purposes set forth. 4th, The sliding crank pin, p, in combination with the slotted wheel, W, and slotted vibrating rod, B, substantially as shown and described, and for the purposes set forth. 72,056.--FURNACE FOR HOT AIR BLAST.--Richard Long, Chillicothe, Ohio. I claim, 1st, Constructing the air pipe of a furnace-blast heater of fire clay, substantially as described. 2d, Constructing the air pipe of an oval or other equivalent form, and uniting the sections of which it is composed by socket joints, with clumps and keys, substantially as shown and described. 3d, Forming the supporting walls, B, of firebrick, with iron plates between the courses, substantially as shown and described, 4th, Placing an open or a solid plate beneath the air pipe, substantially as and for the purposes herein described. 72,057.--CLOTHES RACK.--Eugene F. Lyman, Indianapolis, Ind. I claim the combination and arrangement of the semi-circular racks G and H, the arms, f and c, the sockets and staples for the arms, and the box, A B C D, all operating substantially as and for the purpose specified. 72,058.--CENTER BOARD FOR VESSELS.--E. J. McFarlin, San Francisco, Cal. I claim the location of the center boards, or other equivalent devices for the same specific purpose, in the extreme bow and stern of vessels, that is to say, the placing of the said boards forward of the foremast or aft of the mainmast, in two masted vessels, and forward of the foremast and aft of the mizzen mast in three masted vessels, substantially as shown and described, and for the objects and purposes specified. 72,059.--REGISTER POINTS FOR PRINTING PRESS.--E. W. McGowan, New York city. I claim, 1st, The pivoted or jointed pointer, B, having a spring or equivalent weight attached, and arranged to operate in the manner substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 2d, The tube, A, provided with the slotted cap plate, b, and the nut, C, when used in connection with the pointer, for the purpose specified. 72,060.--ROOFING.--Orville Manly, Garrettsville, Ohio. I claim, 1st, a roof composed of tiles, a and b, having spaces, S, between them for a water tight cement, substantially as shown and described, and for the purposes set forth. 2d, The saturated tiles, a, and the saturated tiles, b, substantially as shown and described, and for the purposes set forth. 3d, The lower or outer row of tiles, b, when laid together, forming an eaves trough, substantially as shown and described, and for the purpose set forth. 72,061.--REFINING CAST IRON AND CONVERTING IT INTO STEEL.--Emile Martin and Pierre E. Martin, Paris, France. We claim the method and means for refining and converting cast iron into cast steel and other metals, substantially as herein shown and described. 72,062.--STRAW CUTTER.--John W. Mauzy, Richmond, and James Hughes, Cambridge, Ind., assignor to James Hughes. We claim, 1st, The combination of the side pieces, D D, constructed as described, containing the bearings for the cutting mechanism, the shearing bar, B, with square faces, and the spirally bladed knife, C, arranged substantially as described. 2d, The combination of the perforated rollers, E, ratchet wheels, F, pawls, H1, i add R, adjustable oscillating arm, G1, eccentric rod, L, and eccentric, M, respectively, constructed and arranged substantially as set forth. 3d, The arrangement of the cap, G, rollers, E E, covers, Q, sides pieces, D D, knife, C, and the driving and the feed mechanism, constructed and combined substantially as set forth. 4th, The feed rollers E, when constructed from sheet metal, and punched from the inside, forming projections as shown, for feeding the straw to the knife. 5th, The metallic side pieces, D D, constructed as described, in combination with the bar, B, knife, C, feed rollers, E E, arranged substantially as set forth. 6th, The combination of the eccentric, M, on the knife shaft, eccentric rod, L, and oscillating arm, G1, when the latter are so arranged as to regulate the cut by adjusting the point of attachment, substantially in the manner set forth. 72,063.--CONVERTIBLE SHOT GUN AND RIFLE.--Samuel McCulloch, Yellow Springs, Ohio. I claim, 1st, The removable barrel, C, constructed with external collars, c, and secured within a shot gun barrel, A, by a screw, D, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 2d, Also the plug, F, for the purposes set forth. 72,064.--DERRICK.--D. J. McDonald, Gold Hill, Nevada. I claim, 1st, The derrick standard, L, and frame, K, fitted in the derrick frame, J, and arranged as shown, for the ready adjustment of the standard, L. 2d, The fitting of the derrick frame, J, on the wagon frame, as shown, to wit by means of the circular plate, D, frame, F, and circular plate, G, with the wheel, E, and pinion, Y, to admit of the ready turning of the derrick, as set forth. 3d, The supports, D, provided with screws, a, and attached to the frame, B as shown, in connection with the levels, b, in platform, C, for the purpose of levelling the device, substantially as described. 4th, The angular platform, C, applied to the wagon, A, when used in combination with a revolving derrick frame, J, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 72,065.--AUGERS.--John A. McGee (assignor to Theodore Mace), New York city. I claim the boring instrument formed with a cutting edge extending outwardly from the base of the tapering screw, and curved backwards and downwards until it intersects the periphery of the tool, as and for the purposes set forth. 72,066.--DRY DOCK.--Israel J. Merritt, New York city. I claim, 1st, The arrangement and combination with a floating section or dock, A, of one or more wells, through which a lifting chain or chains are passed down to the vessel or object to be raised, substantially as described. 2d, The arrangement and combination of the lever, J, with the floating dock or section, A, and chain or chains, C, substantially as described. 3d, The shape of the well, B, the same being made flaring from its top downwards, so as to allow the chains to go or be conducted from the mouth of the well directly towards the vessel or object to be raised, substantially as shown. 72,067.--KNIFE AND FORK CLEANER.--John Merritt, New York city. I claim, 1st, The combination of the circular disks, D, leather or equivalent rubbers, K, shaft, A, holding plates, E E', adjusting nut, G, and adjusting screw, I, with each other and with the box, B, substantially as herein shown and described, and for the purpose set forth. 2d, The combination of the friction wheel, O, brush, N, and shaft, L, with each other, and with the disk, D, and box, B, substantially as herein shown and described, and for the purpose set forth. 3d, The combination of the lever, M, spring, P, and hook, R, with the brush shaft, L, and box, B, substantially as herein shown and described, and for the purpose set forth. 72,068.--MANUFACTURE OF LAMP BLACK.--A. Millochan, New York city, assignor to R.N. Perlee, Jersey City, N.J. I claim the method herein specified of manufacturing lamp black by condensing the carbonaceous vapors upon a surface directly over the flame, that is constantly kept sufficiently cool by artificial means. 72,069.--CAR BRAKE.--James Mitchell, La Porte, Ind. I claim, 1st, The combination of the lever, A, rod, B, lever, C, pawls, D and D1, spring, D2, and ratchet wheel, E, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 2d, The combination of the shaft, E3, collar, R, arm, R', collar, S, and shaft, I, substantially as set forth. 3d, The combination of the shaft, I, spiral collar, U, lever, T, and arm, R, for disengaging the brakes, substantially as set forth. 4th, The combination of the ratchet bar, P, with the inclined face, P1, and catch lever, G, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 5th, The combination of the ratchet bar, P, with its shoulder, P2, and the lever, T, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 72,070.--AUTOMATIC TABLE FOR TEACHING.--Hannah Munson, Rockford, Ill., administratrix of the estate of Wm. C. Munson, deceased. I claim the combination of the frame, A, with its pivoted pointers, C C, and hooks, e e, and movable bars, B B, with pointers and charts, D, as constructed, the whole being arranged and used substantially as and for the purpose specified. 72,071.--HYDRANT.--John G. Murdock, Cincinnati, Ohio. I claim, 1st, The hollow plunger, E, having the interior valve, I, and sleeve packing, F, which respectively close and encircle the supply and waste pipe, B, as and for the purpose set forth. 2d, In combination with the supply and waste pipe, B, and valve, I, the vertically adjustable hollow plunger, E, for the object stated. 3d, The adjustable shoulder or lock nut, J, in combination and arrangement with the elements, B, D, I and E. 4th, The arrangement of internally packed plunger, E, which surrounds and packs a vertical supply pipe, B, having one or more waste ways, D, and being enclosed within and guided by a cup, C, substantially as described. 72,072.--CLEANER FOR LAMP CHIMNEYS.--R.B. Musson, Champaign, Ill. I claim a cleaner for lamp chimneys, bottles, and other articles of a similar character, consisting of strips of rubber, or other soft elastic substance, secure to a holder, and arranged in manner and for the purposes substantially above set forth and described. 72,073.--BOOT AND SHOE HEEL.--Erastus Newhall, Lynn, assignor to himself and John R. Moffitt, Chelsea, Mass. I claim a heel made with a circular thread and a corresponding seat, when one or both of the two parts are made of elastic material, and are united substantially as described. 72,074.--PORTABLE HOT AIR CONDUCTOR.--John B. Oldershaw, Baltimore, Md. I claim a portable hot air receiver and conductor, constructed, arranged and operating in connection with a stove, for the purpose of heating apartments above it, substantially as described. 72,075.--VINE HOLDER.--Garret J. Olendorf and Albert O. Parshall, Middlefield, N.Y. We claim, 1st, The frame, A, constructed as described and set forth, for the purpose specified. 2d. The cord, B, combined with and supported by frame, A, as described and set forth, for the purpose specified. 72,076.--BREECH-LOADING FIRE-ARMS.--Henry O. Peabody (assignor to the Providence Tool Company), Providence, R.I. I claim combining the breech block, A, hinged at its posterior extremity, and operating as described, with the hammer, D, by means of the protuberant inclined plane, C, or its equivalent, substantially as described for the purposes specified. 72,077.--RAILWAY CROSSINGS.--Stanhope Perkins, Fairfield, England. I claim forming the points or V-parts of crossings, without splice, by bending the rail, prepared as above described, back upon itself, and securing the abutting parts in the manner and for the purpose above set forth. 72,078.--MANUFACTURE OF LAMP BLACK.--R.N. Perlee, Jersey City, N.J. I claim the method herein specified of manufacturing lamp black, by introducing atmospheric air to the flame, by artificial means, for the purposes set forth. 72,079.--AXLE BOX.--Henry B. Pitner, La Porte, Ind. I claim, 1st, An axle box, substantially as shown and described, and for the purpose set forth. 2d, The sleeve or thimble, A, in combination with the end pieces, B, substantially as shown and described, and for the purposes set forth. 3d, The shoulder, a1, and the shoulder, a2, in combination with the sleeve A, and end pieces, B, substantially as shown and described, and for the purposes set forth. 72,080.--RAILWAY CHAIR.--Leander Pollock, (assignor to himself and John P. Schenck, Jr.), Matteawan, N.Y. I claim 1st, A railroad-chair which is divided by an inclined line drawn through the base, into two parts, A and B, each part carrying one of the cheeks, and all made and operating substantially as herein shown and described. 2d, Interposing an elastic plate, g, between the edge of the upper base, d, and the stationary cheek, a, substantially as and for the purpose herein shown and described. 72,081.--VENTILATING HAY-MOWS.--Geo. Race, Norwich, N.Y. I claim making vertical perforated pipes, having lateral branches extending out from the main pipe for the purpose of ventilating hay-mows, and stacks of hay or grain, substantially as herein set forth. 72,082.--PNEUMATIC CAR.--Louis Ransom, Lansingburg, N.Y. I claim in combination with a pneumatic car, a series of metal cylinders for containing compressed air, the said cylinders being connected by pipes, so as to form one common reservoir substantially as described. 2d, I also claim the combination, with a stove for warming the car, or other heating apparatus, a conducting pipe, for the compressed air, so located with reference to the stove or other heating apparatus that the compressed air in passing through it will become heated, and have its expansive power increased thereby, substantially as described. 3d, I also claim the compound flexible pipe, constructed substantially as described. 4th, I also claim the muffler, D, for the purpose of deadening the sound of the escaping air as described. 72,083.--MACHINE FOR SHARPENING SAWS.--E.B. Rich, (assignor to himself and Andre Cashing), Boston, Mass. I claim the sliding holder, B. and adjustable rail, C, in combination with the grinding wheel, D, constructed and arranged to operate as herein described, for the purpose specified. 72.084.--AUTOMATIC REGISTER.--J.T. Buckley, Ottawa, Ill. administrator of the estate of Stephen Rigler, deceased. I claim 1st, Operating a register slide so as to regulate the temperature of apartments, by means of a column of mercury within a tube, which is arranged within the register itself and acts upon said slide through the means substantially as described. 2d, The combination of an index hand, B, with a register arranged and operated by a column of mercury within a tube, which is arranged within the register itself, substantially as described. 3d, The combination with a circular turning register slide, B, of mercury pipe, G', piston rod, g1, cross head, g, toothed lever, F, spur wheel, d, and shaft, b, arranged, constructed and operating substantially as described. 72,085.--SHOVEL PLOW, CULTIVATOR, ETC.--P.A. Ross, Harveys, Pa. I claim 1st, The combination of the notched rack, E, and removable pin, F, with the pivoted or rocking cross-bar, C, and slotted standard, B, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 2d, Connecting the forward ends of the handles, D, to the beam, A, by means of the hook or eye-bolt, G, and pivoted bar or plate, H, when used in connection with the pivoted or rocking cross bar, C, and pin, F, substantially as herein shown and described and for the purpose set forth. 72,086.--FENCE POST.--Robert Ramsey, New Wilmington, Pa. I claim the fence-post, P P' P", having dove-tail gains at its lower end, in combination with the parallel slits, A A', and the keys, e e e e, substantially in the manner and for the purpose set forth. 72,087.--CHURN.--J.A. Rowley, Vanceburg, Ky. I claim the arrangement substantially as described of the driving wheel, C, shafts, c c', spring, D, notched bracket, E e. and friction pulley, F G, for the purpose of imparting a rotary motion to the dasher shaft, f, in the manner herein described and set forth. 72,088.--STEAM TRAP.--David Saunders, Brooklyn, N.Y. assignor to Jos. Nason & Co., New York city. I claim 1st, The arrangement of the central part, C, of the cover and main cover, B, substantially as herein set forth. 2d, The arrangement of the stop-joint between the floating part and the fixed part of the apparatus, whereby to avoid the clogging by accumulations of dirt as specified. 3d, The arrangement of the tubes E and H, the tube, H, being mounted upon the floating part, substantially as herein specified. 72,089.--DOOR SPRING.--Rudolph Schrader, Indianapolis, Ind. I claim 1st, The door-spring, constructed as described, consisting of the hollow socket, F, placed over the square shank of the door arm: and provided with the right angular arm, J, sleeve, E, to which the inner end of the coiled spring, D, is securely fastened, fitting at or alternating upon the socket, F, and provided with the right angular arm, I, resting against the post, H, in the case, A, the free end, G, of the spring resting against the opposite side of said post, all operating as described for the purpose specified. 2d, The spring, D, operated by means of the right angular arm, J, of the hollow shank, F, engaging with the outer end, G, of the spring when the door moves in one direction, and when moving in the opposite direction engaging with the arm, I, of the sleeve, E, to which the inner end of the spring is secured substantially as described for the purpose specified. 3d, The combination and arrangement within the case, A, of the spring, D, hollow socket, F, having arm, J, sleeve, E, having arm, I, post, H, and hook, G, operating as described for the purpose specified. 72,090.--POLE COUPLING FOR VEHICLES.--Anson Searls, N.Y. city. I claim the circular joints, B B, and the arrangement of the ratchet teeth, K K, springs, D D, and bolts, E E, in combination with the arm, A, substantially as described and for the purposes set forth. 72,091.--CARRIAGE.--Anson Searls, San Francisco, Cal. I claim, 1st, The axle composed of the steel bars, d and g, attached, as herein described. 2d, The clip b, passing around under the axle, with its ends fastened to the plate a, on the rocker, both before and behind the axle, substantially as described. 72,092.--STEAM ENGINE.--George Shale, Taunton, Mass. I claim, 1st, The steam-chest, B, constructed with the chambers, gh, and partition, p, in combination with the steam and exhaust pipes, and cylinder, a, substantially as described. 2d, The valve-rods, i i', provided with the recesses or chambers, k k, in combination with the partition, p, constructed as described, and operated by the lever, l, as and for the purpose set forth. 72,093.--FERRULE.--Archibald Shaw, Philadelphia, Pa. I claim a ferrule, provided internally, or at its inner side, with oblique spurs or projections, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 72,094.--FENCE POST.--Warren H. Shay, Sylvania, Ohio. I claim the plank standards, B B, joined by the pins, a a, the braces, A A, and the cross-piece, C, combined and secured by the dove-tail tenons, o b, the gib and key, c d, and the keys, g g, substantially as and for the purpose herein shown and described. 72,095.--TABULAR HEATER.--C.J.Shepard, Brooklyn, N.Y. I claim, 1st, The combination of the grate, E, ash-pit, D, and combustion-chamber, C, with the slide-valve, I, for the purposes indicated. 2d, The slide-valve at the junction of the upper and under front flue, for the purposes described. 3d, The upper front flue covered externally with a non-conducting lining as a portion of the combustion-chamber. 4th, The corrugated tubular externally-flanged chamber, provided with an incombustible termination, constructed and operating substantially as shown for the purposes pointed out. 5th, A semi-cylindrical reverberating chamber of combustion, when combined with a flue and a series of tubes, for the purposes specified. 6th, A feeding-chamber in combination with an arched chamber of combustion and the abutments for properly distributing the fuel upon the grate. 7th, Constructing the bed-plate or grate-plate in such a manner that the same shall form a support for the grate and brick-work of the chamber of combustion, as well as the bed of the front flue. 8th, The division-plate, in combination with a series of tubes, for the purposes fully described. 72,096.--WINDOW-SASH SUPPORTER.--J.W.Simpson, Newark, N.J. I claim the lever, d, and wedge, b, constructed, combined, and operated substantially in the manner and for the purpose hereinabove set forth. Also, the socket, m, with its ratch, n, and the catch, i, on the lever, d, in combination with the lever and wedge, in the manner and for the purpose specified. 72,097.--STAKE-HOLDER FOR RAILROAD CARS.--Thomas A. Slack, Peoria county, Ill. I claim the combination of revolving staple, stakes, and divisional "coal sides." as described and for the purpose set forth. 72,098.--EXCAVATOR.--Benjamin Slusser, Sidney, Ohio, assignor to himself and Elias M. Gluck, same place. I claim, 1st, The method of elevating or adjusting the plough of an excavator by the rotary motion of the forward axle, derived from the forward wheels by means of the clutches, a' a', substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 2d, In combination with the above, the plough, P, racks, r r, and pinion, a, when the latter is fixed to the axle, and operates to raise the plough by power derived from the axle, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 3d, The combination of the rocking cart, C, gear, e e'e", apron, B, and plough, P, when the parts are so constructed and arranged that by the raising or depressing of the plough, the wheels, e e', shall be thrown into or out of gear, and the apron put in motion or stopped, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 4th. The combination of the looped rods, w w w, with the arms, v v v, doors, m m' m", and lever, 1", substantially as and for the purpose specified. 5th, The lips or projections, o o, of the doors, m m' m", substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 6th. The combination of the rod, u, lever, l', spring, s, trigger, n, doors, m m' m", having the lips, o o o, rod, y', and hook, y, substantially as and for the purposes specified. 72,099.--AUGER HANDLE.--Daniel Y. Smith, Joliet, Ill. I claim the combination of the ferrule, a, with the annular nut, e, and flat spring, c, when constructed and arranged as and for the purposes set forth. 72,100.--MACHINE FOR SHARPENING SAWS.--J.B.Smith, Milwaukee, Wis. I claim cutter, B, gauge, E, and adjustable cone-mandrel, D, in combination, substantially as and for the purpose described. 72,101.--RAISING OILS AND BURNING-FLUIDS BY PNEUMATIC PRESSURE.--John Henry Smith, Allegheny city, Pa. I claim raising, by pneumatic pressure, oils or burning-fluids from an oil or fluid compartment of a ship or other vessel, and mixing with said oil and fluid the gas generated therefrom, as herein described and set forth. Also, the combination and arrangement of the pipes, A B C f and f', when used in connection with the oil or fluid compartment, R, of a ship or other vessel, the whole being constructed, arranged, and operating substantially in the manner hereon described and set forth. Also, in connection with the above, ejecting fine jets of water into the flame, caused by the burning of the oil or fluid and other matter mixed therewith, as herein described and set forth. 72,102.--SHIP FOR TRANSPORTING PETROLEUM.--John H. Smith, Allegheny city, Pa. I claim, providing the hulls of ships and other vessels with a compartment for oils and burning fluids, said compartment being protected with water, and furnished with supply and discharge pipes, substantially as herein described and for the purpose set forth. 72,103.--DEVICE FOR SHEARING AND CLIPPING WOOL.--R.T.Smith and J.K.Priest, Nashua, N.H. I claim, 1st, The revolving spring cutter or cutters, O, in connection with a cutter-plate. 2d, The open cutter-plate, P. 3d, The shield, N, in connection with the cylinder, C, covering shaft, M, and extending into groove, g, substantially in the manner and for the purpose herein described. 72,104.--CORN PLOUGH.--John Snyder, Williamsfield, Ohio. I claim the combination of the tongue, H, strap, L, and upright, K, with the forward end of the central beam, A, substantially as herein shown and described, and for the purpose set forth. 72,105.--BOOT-HEEL POLISHER.--V.K.Spear, Lynn, Mass. I claim, 1st, The reciprocating polisher, moving in the line of an arc of a circle, by means of mechanism substantially as herein described, and having an elastic bearing, as and for the purpose set forth. 2d, In combination with a reciprocating polisher, substantially as described, I claim the pivoted sliding frame to support the boot or shoe constructed, arranged, and operating substantially as set forth. 72,106.--MEANS FOR PROPELLING VESSELS.--Robt.R. Spedden and Daniel F. Stafford, Astoria, Oregon. We claim, 1st, The combination of the rack-frame, K, racks, I and J, and ratchet wheel, H, with each other and with a shaft, D, for the purpose of applying power to said shaft, substantially as herein shown and described. 2d, The combination of the stationary post, O, pitman, N, rocking-post, M, and adjusting slide, L, with each other, with the rack frame, K, and with the hinged parts of a vessel or other structure, one or both of said hinged parts floating in the water, so as to be acted upon by the motion of the waves, substantially as herein shown and described. 72,107.--CULTIVATOR.--C.E.Steller, Chicago, Ill. I claim, 1st, The hinged runners, J W, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 2d, The slotted sides, A A and B B, in combination with the shanks, C D E, arranged to be set at different angles, and fastened by set-screws, Z Z, as described. 3d, The combination of the guide-bar, E, arranged to be raised and lowered, with rear standards, H H, and sides, A A B B, as described. 4th, The combination of standards, G G, hinged runners, J W, and sides, A A B B, as set forth. 5th, The shanks, U, of shovel, T, arranged to fit in a socket, V, and bar, S, in combination with standards, G G, and cross-bar, I, as and for the purpose set forth. 6th, The double evener, L, arranged substantially as set forth. 7th, The double evener, L, in combination with braces, O O and P P, with or without braces, Y, substantially as set forth. 72,108.--EYE CUP.--Benj. F. Stephens, Brooklyn, N.Y. I claim a pair of bowls, united by tubes or necks to an exhaustion-bag or ball, as and for the purposes set forth. 72,109.--HARVESTER RAKE.--Edward Stewart, Fort Madison, Iowa. I claim the arrangement of the shafts, D E and G, with their respective wheels, crank, I, and pitman, J, with its dividing end, J', connecting the arms, e e, upon the box, K', at the end of shaft, K, the whole constructed and operating substantially as and for the purposes specified. 72,110.--STREET PAVEMENT.--H. M. Stow, San Francisco, Cal. I claim, 1st, A wooden pavement, composed of alternate tiers of square-ended and wedge-shaped blocks, the wedge-shaped ends of the latter being driven down into a foundation-bed of sand or earth, substantially as and for the purpose described. 2d, A wooden pavement, composed of blocks with lower ends wedge-formed, and all driven down into a foundation-bed of sand or earth, substantially as shown and described. 72,111.--STREET PAVEMENT.--H. M. Stow, San Francisco, Cal. I claim, 1st, The cast iron plates, with projecting wedge-shaped flanges to be driven into the sand or earth, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 2d, Also, a pavement composed of alternate tiers of cast iron plates, with projecting wedge-shaped flanges and wedge-shaped wooden blocks, driven into the sand and earth, substantially as described. 72,112.--WASHING MACHINE.--John D Swartz, Milton, Pa I claim, 1st, The slotted aims, g, bearing the shaft, D, and rubber, C, when such arms are connected at their lower ends by the slotted bar, E, through which the spring, G, passes as herein described for the purpose specified. 2d, The combination of the semi-circular rubber, C, slotted arms, g, shaft, D, slotted cross-bar, E, spirally grooved rollers, d, in the curved frames, B, the spring, G, and rack, H, as herein described for the purpose specified. 72,113.--PORTABLE FENCE.--G. D. Sweigert, Martic township, Pa., assignor to himself, John Sweigert and Felix W. Sweigert. I claim a portable fence, combined of round wrought-iron posts, C, bed-plate, A, rails, B, scarfed, and applied with intervening ferrules, D, head and bottom washers, F, all arranged in the manner and for the purpose specified. 72,114.--VARIABLE CRANK FOR BORING MACHINE.--G. C. Taft, Worcester, Mass., assignor to Theodore Mace, Sing Sing, N.Y. I claim the two variable cranks, constructed as specified, and applied in the manner shown, to the shaft or axis of the boring machine, as and for the purposes set forth. 72,115.--ROTARY TAKE-UP FOR KNITTING MACHINE.--James Teachout, Waterford, N.Y. I claim, 1st, The stationary scroll plate, C, placed over the center of motion of take-up of knitting machines, for the purpose described. 2d, Also, in combination with the scroll plate, C, the toothed gear, D, for the purpose herein set forth. 3d, Also, the toothed wheel, D, or its equivalent, either separately, or combined with the described appendages e i g i K, arranged as shown and described as operating substantially in the manner and for the purpose specified. 4th, Also, in combination with the above, the adjustable gear, s, and concentric gears, s', for the purpose described. 72,116.--KNITTING MACHINE.--James Teachout, Waterford, N.Y. I claim 1st, Forming the "jacks" or loop-lifters, B, with a projecting are, f, and depressed arc, g, for the purposes set forth. 2d, n combination with the arc, f, and arch, g, the rounded end, as shown and described. 3d, In combination with the described knitting jacks, a retaining hub or device, constructed and arranged as shown and described. 72117,--KNITTING MACHINE--James Teachout, Waterford, N.Y. I claim, 1st, The vertically adjustable collars or rings, G and H, for the purposes described. 2d, In combination with the collars, G and H, the partitions or wings, k, and groove, l, as set forth. 3d, In combination with the adjustable collars, G and H, wings, k, and groove, l, the "jacks" or lifters, M, formed as shown and described, for the purpose specified. 72,118.--MANUFACTURING ILLUMINATING GAS.--J. B. Terry, Hartford, Conn. I claim, 1st, The method herein described of heating air charged with hydrocarbon vapor, so as to render it non-condensable previous to its delivery as an illuminating gas, for the purposes set forth. 2d, The employment of a retort or other heating medium interposed between the carbureter and gas holder or other gas-delivering or gas-burning device, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 3d, The employment of one or more burners under the retort or vessel, for the purpose of heating the same under the arrangement herein shown and described. 4th, The combination, with the carbureting vessel and intermediate heater, of a jacket under or around the sand carbureter, and a flue connecting the jacket with said heater, substantially in the manner and for the purposes set forth. 72,119.--LOOMS.--S. T. Thomas and J. H. Dolley, Guildford, N.H. We claim, in combination with the lever, g, arranged to operate as set forth, the incline, n, or its equivalent, for relieving the picker from the action of the spring, i, to permit free movement of the shuttle boxes, substantially as set forth. 72,120.--GATE.--John W. Thompson, Greenfield, Mass. I claim a gate, made of metallic tubing and connections, substantially as herein set forth and described. 72,121.--TAIL-PIECE FOR VIOLINS.--James Thoms, South Boston, Mass. I claim applying a winch to the tail-piece of a violin, substantially as and for the purpose herein shown and described. 72,122.--FOLDING BEDSTEAD AND CRIB.--R. S. Titcomb, Gloversville, N.Y. I claim, 1st, A folding bedstead or crib, substantially as shown and described, and for the purpose set forth. 2d, a rotating bedding-box, A, in combination with the head and foot-boards of a bedstead or crib, substantially as shown and described, and for the purpose set forth. 3d, Folding head and foot-boards, composed of the parts, F and C, substantially as shown and described, and for the purposes set forth. 4th, The swinging sides, A', in combination with the box, A, and the head and foot-boards, F C, substantially as shown and described, and for the purposes set forth. 72,123.--STEAM ENGINE.--J. F. Troxel, Bloomsville, Ohio. I claim, 1st, The construction of the oscillating valve, T, and arrangement of the openings, S P P', and R, substantially as shown and described. 2d, Also the arrangement of the piston rods, K and L, operating in one and the same end of the cylinder, substantially as shown and described. 72,124.--WARDROBE.--Nathan Turner, West Lynn, Mass. I claim a convertible wardrobe, closet, or bookcase, with swinging or folding sides, C, and swinging or folding top, A, and bottom, B, substantially as described and for the purpose set forth. 72,125.--APPARATUS FOR DISTILLING OILS.--Herbert W.C. Tweddle, Pittsburg, Pa I claim, 1st, A trough or troughs, having perforations for the passage of the oil in small quantities and furnished with points near to such perforations, so as to cause the oil to pass therefrom in drops, or fine streams, or thin films or layers, over heated pipes or tubes placed thereunder, when used within a vacuum still, for the purposes substantially as described. 2d, In a vacuum still for distilling oil, the use of a series or coil of steam pipe, placed horizontally, one under another, as a series of evaporating surfaces, substantially as and for the purposes above set forth. 3d, In a vacuum still for distilling oil, a series or coil of steam jet pipes, e, in combination with a series or coil of evaporating pipes, a, substantially as and for the purposes above set forth. 4th, Combining together a series of apparatus, such as hereinbefore described, for the purpose of procuring a continuous distillation of petroleum, each member of a series consisting of a vacuum still containing a coil of steam pipe as evaporating surfaces, and troughs for the gradual distillation of the oil, in combination with suitable condensing apparatus, substantially as and and for the purposes hereinbefore set forth. 5th, A vacuum residnum receiver D, connected to and in combination with a vacuum still, or a battery of such stills, substantially in the manner and for the purposes above set forth. 72,126.--DISTILLING HYDROCARBON OILS.--Herbert W. C. Tweddle, Pittsburg, Pa. I claim, 1st, In distilling hydrocarbon oils, vaporizing the oil by causing it to flow in a thin film or layer over the surfaces of a series of heated pipes in a vacuum still, with or without the application of superheated steam, substantially as above described. 2d, The application of the process of distillation, hereinbefore described, to the re-distillation of fire-distilled oils, for the purpose of producing an oil similar to the refined oil of commerce, substantially as above set forth. 3d, Securing a continuous and complete distillation of hydrocarbon oils by causing the oil to flow over the surfaces of a succession of heated pipes in different vacuum stills, the temperature of such pipes increasing in each successive still, so as to drive off at first more volatile ingredients, and then those less so, and so on till only the residuum remains, substantially as hereinbefore described. 72,127.--GRAIN DRILL.--Joseph G. Yale, Cumberland Co, Pa. I claim the quarti-elliptical shovel, B, with its base, E E', coming to a point at E, the rod, C, the rod, H, with thereon the balls, D and D', together with the funnel, A, all constructed and operating in the manner and for the purpose described. 72,128.--WINDOW-SASH STOP.--George R. Vanderbilt (assigner to himself, J. J. Lindstrom, and D. W. Stidolph), Mount Vernon, N.Y. I claim, 1st, The two clamping plates, and the tightening bolt, combined and operated substantially as and for the purpose specified. 2d, The springs, arranged in relation to the plates, c d, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 72,129.--MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.--George W. van Dusen, Williamsburg, N.Y. I claim the combination and arrangement of lever, V, with finger piece, Y, at one end and stud, b, at the other valve, G, and air passage, E, closed by a flexible diaphragm, K, substantially as herein described, and for the purpose of producing, by means of air, an action upon any suitable sound-producing mechanism through the movement of a sheet or strip perforated, or in any other eqivalent manner prepared. 72,130.--WATER INDICATOR FOR BOILERS.--Andreas Vang, Chicago, Ill. I claim the arrangement of the globe, a, arm, b, cylinder, c, indicator, f, and whistle, g, substantially as herein set forth. 72,131.--HORSE HAY FORK.--Oliver Vanorman, Ripon, Wis. I claim the arrangement of the fork heads, B B', in the frame, A, and with the arms, C C', rollers, e e, and cords, D D, as and for the purpose set forth. 72,132.--WASHING MACHINE.--Lewis Vaughan, Rapids, O. I claim the adjustable bottom, B, and spring lever, I, as arranged in combination with the roller, C, in the manner substantially as described. 72,133.--HAY RAKER AND LOADER.--Albert Vose, Pittsfield, assignor to himself and Ambros S. Vose, Randolph, Vt. I claim, 1st, the fork arm, b, hinged or pivoted to the frame in line with the axle, and operated by means of friction blocks, as described. 2d, The friction blocks, d, in combination with fork arm, b, and eccentric levers, e, arranged as described. 3d, The fork arms, b, in combination with the freely-swiveling fork bar, o, operated as described. 4th, The forks, q, pivoted in swiveling bar, o, and operated by means of levers, v, and rods, cords, or chains, substantially as described. 5th, The levers, v, mounted on fork bars or arms, b, in combination with the fork, q, substantially as described. 6th, The combination of forks, q, spring, t, chains, w, and levers, v, with the fork arm, b, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 7th, The means for opening and closing the lifting forks in combination with a means for operating the friction blocks, or their equivalent, whereby they are operated simultaneously, as described. 8th, The lever, e, for closing the forks and applying the friction blocks, as described, in combition with the arms, g, for releasing the same as described. 9th, The extension, x, of the pivoted fork bars, b, in combination with cords or chains, 5, operating as described. 10th, The curved or semicircular rake head, or its equivalent, arranged in rear of and operated in connection with the lifting fork, substantially as described. 72,134.--WASHING MACHINE.--George E. Wade, Jefferson City, Mo. I claim the lever, M, the spiral metal plate, F, the wash boards, A and B, corrugated as shown, and the springs, c c' c". In combination with a common wash tub, when constructed, arranged, and operating substantially as shown and specified. 72,135.--BOLT AND RIVET MACHINE.--John Wakefield, Birmingham, England, assignor to Isaac Smith and William Fothergill Bartho. I claim, 1st, the arrangement or combination, substantially as hereinbefore described, and illustrated in the accompanying drawings, of the vertical dies, b b, for cutting off and carrying the cut-off length of rod, and for shaping the head of the rivet or bolt, with the horizontal punch or die, m, for shaping the shank of the rivet or bolt, and upsetting the end of the rivet or bolt into a head in the vertical dies. 2d, The arrangement or combination of parts hereinbefore described, and illustrated in the accompanying drawings, for giving motion to the said vertical dies, b b, and horizontal punch or die, m. 3d, The arrangement or combination of parts hereinbefore described and illustrated in the accompanying drawings, for removing the finished rivet or bolt from the horizontal punch or die. 72,136.--EGG BEATER.--Dudley Webster, Washington, D. C. I claim as a new article of manufacture an egg-beater spoon, constructed as described, viz., with its circumference and the edges of an inner central opening serrated as and for the purpose described. 72,137.--BRICK MACHINE.--P.V.Westfall, Kalamazoo, Mich. I claim, 1st, the combination of the two molding cylinders, C C, when the molding recesses, I I, in said cylinders, and their intermediate followers, J J, are so proportioned with each other that the faces of the said followers cannot be brought in contact with each other, and when the said follower pieces have substantially the degree of curvature herein represented and described. 2d, In connection with the molding cylinders, C C, I also claim the central shaft, b, and its operating levers, L L, in combination with the jointed rods, n n, and the crank arms, m m, on the respective cam shafts, for operating all the cams simultaneously, substantially in the manner herein set forth. 3d, Also the vibrating spring scraper, i, in combination with the wire cloth belt, w, when arranged with the molding cylinders, C C, and operated substantially in the manner and for the purpose herein set forth. 72,138.--APPARATUS FOR ENAMELING PHOTOGRAPHIC PICTURES.--Nathaniel Weston, San Francisco, Cal. I claim the rest, A, for the glass, or its equivalent, the use of the glasses, B B, the weight G, the fastenings, H, the clamps, E E, or their equivalents, in combination, for the purposes, herein set forth. 72,139.--VALVE GEAR FOR STEAM ENGINES.--Norman W. Wheeler, Brooklyn, N.Y. I claim, 1st, Opening the ports, as i' i" so as to suspend the operation of the moving force upon the valve or valves at the period when the steam is cut off, and before the exhaust is opened, substantially as and for the purpose herein set forth. 2d, Also the closure of certain ports, as i' i" and k' k", so as to cause the valve or valves to resume the movement toward its or their full throw at the proper period, substantially as and for the purposes herein set forth. 3d, Also opening the proper ports, as h' h, so as to suspend the moving force operating upon the valve or valves, when they or it have reached the proper limit of throw, substantially as and for the purposes herein set forth. 4th, Also regulating the times of closing passages, so as to induce the cutting-off movement of the valve or valves, at variable periods, substantially in the manner and for the purposes herein set forth. 5th, Also changing a continuous reciprocating motion derived from an eccentric, or equivalent moving part of the engine, to an intermittent reciprocating motion, by means of a hydraulic apparatus as hereinbefore described, substantially in the manner and for the purpose herein set forth. 72,140.--DITCHING MACHINE.--A.H.Whitacre and T.S.Whitacre, Morrow, Ohio. We claim, 1st, The combination of the sled, A, and the frame, B, connected by the racks and pinions, c a, at the corners, arranged and operating substantially as and for the purpose described. 2d, The pulleys, D and E, carrying the endles chain, g, with the scoops, h h, in combination, with the drum, C, the plungers, n n, operating by the double incline, p, around the wheel, K, and the sweep, F, constructed and operating substantially as and for the purpose herein described. 72,141.--FARM FENCE.--Samuel P. Williams, Sheridan, N.Y. I claim the application and use of the triangular brace posts, B B, and tie-rod, C, in the construction of farm fences, in the manner substantially as described. 72,142.--VENTILATING TUNNEL.--Hugh B. Wilson, N.Y. city. I claim, 1st, The method of applying street lamp posts, and awning and other useful or ornamental posts, pillars, or structures, to the purposes of ventilating underground railway tunnels, substantially as within described. 2d. Also the combination of street lamp posts, and awning and other posts, pillars, or structures, whether for ornament or use, with the connecting tubes of such railway tunnels, substantially in manner set forth. 72,143.--MEDICAL COMPOUND.--J.T. Wilson, Brooklyn, N.Y. I claim the combination of the above-named ingredients in the manner as and for the purpose described. 72,144.--SHOE LIFTER.--Wm.H. Winans, Newark, N.J. I claim, 1st, The combination of the lever plate, A, griping plate, B, spring, b, and holding level, C, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 2d, The teeth or studs, a', provided upon the inner surface of the griping plate B, and arranged in relation with the back of the plate, A, substantially as and for the purpose specified. 72,145.--STOVE.--T.W.Wisner, Howell, Mich. I claim the portable hop-drying stove, constructed as described, of the corrugated side and end plates, A, supported upon the ash pan, B, extending the entire length of the stove, and mounted upon wheels, the adjustable grate placed at b, in the center of the stove, and the boiler, all arranged as described for the purpose specified. 72,146.--PAPER FILE.--John Wolfe, Washington, D. C. I claim the paper file or holder constructed and operated as herein recited. 72,147.--LATHE BOX AND JOURNAL.--Aurin Wood, Worcester, Mass. I claim, 1st, The combination and relative arrangement of the oil box, B, and grove, a, and inclined oil passage, e, formed in the bottom part, A, of the journal box, substantially in the manner and for the purpose herein shown and specified. The combination of the journal, C, having the peculiarly shaped grooves, d d, cut in its surface, with the journal box, D, provided in its lower part with the oil box, inclined oil passage, and groove, a, under the arrangement substantially as herein shown and set forth. 72,148.--LATHE FOR TURNING SHAFTING.--Aurin Wood, Worcester, Mass. I claim, 1st, The combination with the bed of the lathe, provided with a reservoir or receptacle, as described, of the sliding tool carriage and the pump, attached to and moving with said carriage, substantially as and for the purposes shown and set forth. 2d, The combination with the sliding tool carriage and pump, mounted upon said carriage, of the cup, C, and tube connecting said cup with the pump, substantially in the manner and for the purposes herein shown and described. 3d, The method of operating the pump by connecting the piston rod of the same with a friction wheel, actuated by the rotation of the shaft which is being turned in the machine, in the manner herein shown and specified. 72,149.--FINGER BAR FOR HARVESTER.--Walter A. Wood, Hoosick Falls, N.Y. I claim, bevelling off the front upper corner of the finger bar, to afford a seat for the sickle or scythe bar, to vibrate upon, in combination with beveling off the lower side of the finger bar, for the reception of the guard finger. 72,150.--CURTAIN FIXTURE.--William H. Woods, Philadelphia, Pa. I claim the lever dog, e, with the cross foot, e, engaging and disengaging the teeth of the rack, b b, in combination with the swivelled knob, d, having a cross bar, g, and working in the slot, a a, of the racket case, A, substantially as and for the purpose herein described. 72,151.--CHIMNEY.--Ebenezer S. Phelps, Jr., Wyanet, Ill. I claim the device above described, consisting of the iron box, A, and drawer, B, constructed and arranged as shown, when used in combination with the chimney, D, substantially in the manner and for the purposes specified. * * * * * REISSUES. 62,057.--BRICK MACHINE.--Philip H. Kells, Adrian, Mich. Dated March 19,1867. Reissue 2,810. I claim, 1st, The combination of the annular mold bed, B, and the central hub or support, C, substantially as described and represented. 2d, The adjustable wedge-shaped cut off, d, arranged and employed in the manner and for the purpose explained. 3d, Ihe arrangement upon the mold wheel of the two pug mills on opposite portions, substantially as described. 4th, An annular mold wheel, provided with cogs or gear teeth upon its periphery, and mounted upon a central hub or support, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. * * * * * DESIGNS. 2,846.--MASONIC BADGE--Virgil Price, New York city. 2,847.--COOK'S STOVE.--Russell Wheeler, Utica, N.Y. * * * * * PENDING APPLICATIONS FOR REISSUES. _Application has been made to the Commissioner of Patents for the Reissue of the following Patents, with new claims as subjoined. Parties who desire to oppose the grant of any of these reissues should immediately address MUNN & Co., 37 Park Row, N.Y._ * * * * * 40,571.--ROTARY ENGINE.--Metropolitan Rotary Engine Co. (assignees by mesne assignments of Adolph Mulochan), New York city. Dated Nov. 10, 1863. Application for reissue received and filed Sept. 27, 1867. 1st, The combination with the outer stationary case, d, and its concentric inner cylinder or flanges, x, of the eccentric wheel, ring or rim, c, fast to the rotating shaft and carrying radial slides or pistons for simultaneous action and exposure to the steam or fluid in chambers, y and z, on opposite sides or peripheries of the ring, c, essentially as herein set forth. 2d, The pipes, i l n o, and valves or cocks k k' m' and m', in combination--with the ring c and pistons acting in the steam spaces, y and z, substantially as specified. 2,821 (whole No. 33,825).--LAMP.--Charles W. Cahoon, Portland Me Dated Dec. 3, 1861. Application for reissue received and filed Nov 23 1867. 1st, A lever with chimney fastenings having that part of it on which the chimney rests extended so as to form a deflector substantially as described. 2d, The deflector board or flat shaped or nearly so when made not only as a deflector but partly as a chimney holder substantially as described. 3d, The combination of the said deflector with the conical foraminous piece of metal and the cylindrical tubular air screen for the purpose of forming the air chamber, A, protecting the flame and admitting the air from below the same, substantially as described. 4th, The combination with the lever for raising the chimney of the deflector air screen and foraminous piece of metal, substantially as and for the purposes specified. 5th, The ring surrounding the wiek tube a little above the top of the same with the standards, s s, substantially as and for the purposes specified. 6th, A chimney holder having a projection for manipulating the same, chimney fastenings, a deflector and a joint substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 7th, The combination of the ring, f, supports, s s, and air screen, c, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 8th, The combination of the glass body of a lamp with a metallic handle, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 61,956.--COOKING STOVE.--J.J. Savage Troy, N.Y. Dated Feb. 12, 1867 Application for reissue received and filed Dec. 4, 1867. 1st, I claim constructing a heating stove with its fuel door way or aperture, B, below, and forward of its flame or combustion chamber and contiguous to or adjoining its fire box, A, in manner substantially as and for the purposes herein set forth. 2d, I claim the combination of the fuel door way or aperture, B, and the firebox, A, extended contiguously thereunder as applied to heating stoves, in manner substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 3d, I claim in combination with a heating stove having its fuel door way in the position as herein described, the employment therewith of a lifting lever, F, substantially in manner as and for the purposes herein set forth. 4th, I claim, in a heating stove, in combination with a fire box, back lining plates and its fuel door way or aperture, B, the arrangement of a front lining plate, E, in position between the flame chamber, C, and the said fuel aperture in manner substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 5th, In combination with a lever lifter, F, applied to heating stoves in manner as herein described, I claim the employment of a holding hook, b, and catch ridge, e, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 6th, I claim so constructing a heating stove in manner substantially as described herein that fresh fuel may be cast directly into its fire box below and between ignited fuel or coke therein, in manner substantially as herein set forth for the purposes specified. 16,944.--GUN POWDER KEG.--Henry E. Irenee L. and Eugene Du Pont (assignees of James Wilson and William Wilson, J. and Charles Green for themselves) Wilmington, Del. Dated March 31, 1857. Application for reissue received and filed Nov. 30, 1867. 1st, As a new article of manufacture a keg or can with a series of corrugations representing hoops which give combined strength and finish. 2d, Casting the female screw for the stopper on a tap or mandrel, as set forth. 3d, The extra ring or boss, D, and head, C, as set forth. 62,693.--MACHINE FOR CUTTING THREADS ON BOLTS.--Schweitzer Patent Bolt Co. (assignees of Franzis Schweizer), New York city. Dated March 5, 1867. Application for reissue received and filed Nov. 30, 1867. 1st, The sliding or movable heads, N O, in combination with the lever, P, and cutter or dies, a b, substantially as and for the purpose described. 2d, The adjustable lever, P, provided with arms, d e, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 3d, The elastic rest, g, constructed and operating substantially as and for the purpose shown and described. 53,169.--MARKING WHEEL.--Horace Holt, New York city. Dated Jan. 23, 1866. Application for reissue received and filed Nov. 30, 1867. 1st, The combination of the type wheel, A, inking roller, C, and handle, B, substantially as and for the purpose described. 2d, The ink reservoir, e, in combination with the roller, C, type wheel, A, and handle, B, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 3d, The projecting flanges, b, on the type wheel, A, constructed and operating substantially as and for the purpose described. 4th, The stop, h, in combination with the type wheel, A, and handle, B, substantially as and for the purpose set forth. 5th, Ihe spring, g, in combination with the stop, h, type wheel, A, and handle, B, substantially as and for the purpose described. 18,872.--BORING MACHINE.--A. Wyckoff (assignee by mesne assignments of La Fayette Stevens), Elmira, N.Y. Dated Dec. 15, 1857. Application for reissue received and filed Nov. 29, 1867. 1st, Ihe hollow cylindrical stock of an annular auger in combination with a spiral flange with such a pitch as will remove the cuttings horizontally as made and deliver them from the opening of the annular kerf, substantially as set forth. 2d, The combination of a hollow annular bit having their cutting lips projecting in the direction of the rotation of the bit, a hollow cylindrical stock and a spiral flange substantially as described. 3d, An annular bit formed in one piece and used in combination with a hollow cylindrical stock for cutting an annular kerf in a stick of timber, substantially as set forth. 4th, Ihe loose independent collar, f, provided with knife edges, g g, to keep it from turning for the purpose of furnishing a bearing for the head of the auger while in operation. 5th, The sharp annular spur, c, for the purpose of centering and guiding the auger and at the same time leaving a core of the material bored in the center of the auger, in the manner specified. 6th, The oblique traversing rests, O O, in combination with the screws, t t, and dogs, Q, for the purpose of adjusting the timber to the auger as described and holding it firmly while under the operation of the auger. 66,608.--DREDGING MACHINE.--James H. McLean, St Louis, Mo. Dated July 9, 1867. Application for reissue received and filed Nov. 8, 1867. 1st, The adjustable dredging frame, C, when such adjustment is produced by a derrick, i i, and fall, when constructed and operated substantially as shown and specified, 2d, The scoops, d, of a dredging machine having circular vertical cutting edges in advance of the usual lateral cutting edge, W, Fig. 1, when constructed and operating substantially as shown and specified. 3d, In combination with the dredging vessel the pins, L, for the purpose of moving the same, substantially as described. 4th, The dredger, the receiving and discharging apron and the derrick of a dredging machine all in combination, when constructed and operated substantially as shown and specified. 49,992.--SLEEPING CAR.--George M. Pullman, Chicago Ill., assignee of Ben. Field, Albion, N.Y., and George M. Pullman, Chicago, Ill. Dated Sept. 19 1865. Application for reissue received and filed Nov. 26, 1867. 1st, The berth, A, permanently connected with the side of the car by hinges, B, in combination with the recess to receive the same when turned up, substantially as described. 2d, The employment in combination with the berth, A, as described of jointed suspenders to support the inner side of the berth that will fold together to permit the berth to be turned up, substantially as described. 3d, The employment in combination with the berth, A, as described of the sliding partition, I, substantially as described. 4th, The employment in combination with the berth, A, as described, of the movable head board, J, substantially as described. 5th, The employment in combination with the berth, A, as described of a counterpoise to facilitate the handling of the same substantially as described. 6th, Constructing a car seat with the back and seat cushions hinged together and disconnected from the seat frame so that the back cushion may be placed on the seat frame and the seat cushion extended to meet the seat cushion of the opposite chair, substantially as described. 48,555.--DOOR BOLT.--The Stanley Works (assignees of William H. Hart), New Britain, Conn. Dated July 4, 1865. Application for reissue received and filed Oct 29 1867. 1st, Making the barrel of a door or shutter bolt of sheet metal, substantially as shown and described. 2d, The bolt catch or keeper with the base plate formed with a flanch at right angles, substantially as described, that it may be secured by screws parallel with the axis of the bolt, substantially as described. 29,430.--INDEX DOOR PLATE.--E.M. Montague, Boston, Mass., assignee of Nathan Ames, Saugus Center, Mass. Dated July 31, 1860. Application for reissue received and filed Oct. 15, 1866. 1st, In use in a door plate of a tablet or slate and an adjustable plate or disk having figures or readable signs or characters for the purposes specified and set forth. 2d, In combination with the above door plate a rotating disk, C, marked with the hours and parts of an hour, as shown in Fig. 2, said disk being confined in the center to a spindle, D, which passes through the door, substantially as and for the purpose described. 3d, The spring, S, arranged, combined and operating substantially as described. 65,018.--STEAM GENERATOR GAGE LOCK.--Thomas Shaw, Philadelphia, Pa. Dated May 21, 1867. Application for reissue received and filed Oct. ll, 1867. The construction and arrangement of whistle with gage valve whereby to indicate the sound produced by steam or steam and water commingled or water unmingled with steam, substantially as set foath. 49,847.--STEAM GENERATOR.--John R. Eckman, Green Post office Pa., assignee of John D. Beers, Philadelphia, Pa. Dated Sept. 12, 1865. Application for reissue received and filed Sept. 30, 1867. 1st. Broadly the circular plate or ring, b, as shown and described. 2d, The plate, H, encircling the fire box, substantially as shown and described. 3d, Forming a water space between the inner surface of the boiler shell, A, and the plate or ring, b, as shown and described. 9,286.--MACHIHFRY FOR CUTTING LATHS PROM A REVOLVING LOG.--Jonathan C. Brown, Brooklyn, N.Y., assignee of Henry C. Smith, Cleveland, Ohio. Dated Sept. 28, 1852. Application for reissue received and filed Dec, 5, 1867. 1st, Turning the log to be cut by driving the mandrels at each end thereof by gearing them directly with the driving shaft, substantially as and for the purposes set forth. 2d, The dog, a, and its appurtenances for connecting the log with the mandrels and disconnecting it therefrom, as specified. 3d, The combination of the cylinder cutter, K, and the stripping knife moved up simultaneously and automatically, all substantially as and for the purposes set forth. * * * * * NOTE--_The above claims for Reissue are now pending before the Patent Office and will not be officially passed upon until the expiration of 30 days from the date of filing the application. All persons who desire to oppose the grant of any of these claims should make immediate application. MUNN & CO., Solicitors of Patents, 37 Park Row, N.Y._ * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MUNN & COMPANY, Editors and Proprietors. PUBLISHED WEEKLY AT NO. 37 PARK ROW (PARK BUILDING), NEW YORK. O.D. MUNN. S.H. WALES. A.E. BEACH. * * * * * "The American News Company," Agents, 121 Nassau street, New York "The New York News Company," 8 Spruce street Messrs. Sampson Low, Son & Co, Booksellers, 47 Ludgate Hill, London, England, are the Agents to receive European subscriptions or advertisements for the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Orders sent to them will be promptly attended to. * * * * * VOL. XVII., No. 26....[NEW SERIES.]...._Twenty-first Year_. NEW YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28, 1867. * * * * * THE LAST NUMBER OF VOLUME XVII. We give in this number a full index of the volume of which this is the last issue. No doubt this will be more satisfactory to our readers--those at least who preserve their numbers for binding, and probably most do--than publishing the index in a separate sheet. The list of claims in this number will be found to be unusually full, a gratifying evidence that dullness of business does not cripple the resources nor abate the industry of our inventors. With a parting word of good will to our present subscribers and a welcome to those who begin with our new volume, we wish for all a HAPPY NEW YEAR. * * * * * COMMENCEMENT OF A NEW VOLUME. With the next number the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN enters upon its twenty-third year. Probably no publication extent will furnish a more complete and exhaustive exhibit of the progress of science and the arts in this country for the past twenty-two years than a complete file of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. It is a curious and interesting pastime to compare the condition of the mechanic arts as presented in some of our first volumes with that shown in our more recent ones. During all this time, nearly a quarter of a century, our journal has endeavored to represent the actual condition of our scientific and mechanical progress and to record the discoveries and improvements in these departments wherever made. The result is a compendium of valuable information unattainable through any other means. But the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN has aimed not only to gratify a laudable curiosity by collecting and presenting such information, but to give practical knowledge which could be applied to valuable uses. We labor for the producers--the mechanics, farmers, laborers--those who build up a country and make the wilderness to blossom like the rose. We believe that the workers are the power, especially in this country; and while we do not wish to detract from the value of the products of merely intellectual speculators, we still think that the world needs specially the laborer. We use the term "laborer" in this connection in its widest sense, comprehending he who uses brain as well as he who employs muscle; scientific investigation and discovery should be followed by and united to practical application. The improvement exhibited in our past volumes will be no less noticeable hereafter. Keeping pace with the "march of mind" we shall endeavor always to lead rather than to follow. The different departments of our paper are managed by those who are practically acquainted with the subjects they profess to elucidate. "To err is human," but we shall spare no pains nor expense to make the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN as reliable in its statements as it is interesting in the variety and matter of its subjects. There are none of our people, from the student or professional man to the day laborer, but will find something in every number, of present or future value to him in his business. * * * * * A CHANGE AT THE PATENT OFFICE. T.C. Theaker has resigned as Commissioner of Patents. A number of gentlemen are mentioned as candidates for the succession, prominent among whom are B. T. James and Charles Mason. Mr. James has acted in the capacity of primary Examiner in the Engineering Class for a number of years, and has filled his position acceptably. Judge Mason held the Commissionership from 1853 to 1857, and his whole administration was marked with reform and ability. Judge Mason was educated at West Point, and he is a man of sterling integrity, a sound jurist, experienced in patent law, and a splendid executive officer. One thing may be relied upon, if Judge Mason should receive and accept the appointment of Commissioner, inventors will not have to complain long of delay in the examination of their cases The Judge is as industrious by nature as he is stern and systematic by education and he will have no drones about him. The work of the office under his administration would be brought up and kept up. A good day for inventors and all persons having business with the Patent Office will dawn when Judge Mason takes the Commissioner's chair again, and we hope the proper influences may be brought to bear to secure his acceptance. * * * * * OBITUARY. Ebenezer Winship, died at his home in this city Dec. 6, 1867, at the age of 67. A long and eminently useful although unobtrusive life entitles his memory to respect. He commenced his career as a mechanic in the steam engine establishment of James P. Allaire, soon after the application of steam for the propulsion of boats and long before its application to ships for the purposes of commerce or war. For fifty-two years, with the exception of one or two brief intervals, he was connected with the Allaire works in this city, and for more than forty years he was the master mechanic and general superintendent of the works. Probably no man now living has had a more intimate connection with the construction of the marine steam engine in all its remarkable changes and improvements, or been so long employed at one engine establishment. James P. Allaire, the founder of the Allaire Works, died May 20,1858, at the age of 73. He was an intimate acquaintance of Fulton and from the engine of Fulton's first boat, the _Clermont_, took drawings which he used in the construction of his first marine engines. He built the engines for the _Chancellor Livingston_ which ran between New York and Albany. He built also the first marine engines ever constructed in this country, which were put into the steamship _Savannah_, the first steamer that crossed the Atlantic, and also those for the _Pacific_ and _Baltic_ of the Collins line, which ships surpassed in speed any before constructed. Under such tutelage and with such advantages Mr. Winship rose successively through the grades of apprentice, journeyman, boss, and foreman, to the position of master mechanic and superintendent. Connected intimately with the progress of marine engineering for over half a century, he was the teacher of a large number of our engineers who now reflect credit upon their instructor. Mr. Winship's professional skill was unsurpassed; his ability in directing and managing others and thorough acquaintance with the minutest details made him invaluable in the position he so long honorably filled. His personal characteristics were faithfulness, industry, earnestness, kindness of heart, and unvarying punctuality and promptness. As master mechanic it was his invariable rule to be at the works an hour before the time for beginning labor to lay out the work for the hands, getting his breakfast in winter by gas light and returning from dinner in time to see the condition of the work before the men arrived. In short, he made his employers' business his own and neglected nothing which might contribute to their success. He was a connecting link between the present generation of mechanics and that which saw the beginnings of that great power, steam, which has revolutionized the world. His funeral on the 8th of December was attended by all the employés of the Allaire Works, by many from other mechanical establishments, and a large number of citizens. * * * * * How to Make Intelligent Workmen--Go and Do Likewise. Mr. H. O. Osborn, of Castleton, Vt., in a letter covering an order for a club of subscribers, says:--"It may not be uninteresting to you to learn that the last six names are those of young men in my employ. I have myself been your subscriber for the past four years, and knowing as I did the value of your paper, I felt it a duty I owed to my men to recommend the paper to their notice, and the result is as above. I am proud to think that I have so many in my mill who can appreciate its worth. I hope at no remote date to send you another list of names from among my own men, and I am certain that if every manufacturer would consult his own best interest he would do all he could to place your paper in the hands of his workmen, for I feel it to be a valuable acquisition to all in any way connected with machines." We believe that employers who wish to improve the condition of their employés can render them no better service than to make each of them a Christmas present of a year's subscription to this paper. Send in the names early, so that we may know how large an edition to print to supply the demand. We close this Volume with over 30,000--nearly 35,000--subscribers, and we wish to commence the new with at least 50,000. Send in your names. * * * * * The Iron-Clads at Sea. In his last annual report to Congress, the Secretary of the Navy thus refers to the cruise of the _Miantonomah_ to Europe and her return and of the _Monadnock_ to San Francisco, voyages the most remarkable ever undertaken by turreted iron-clad vessels. These vessels encountered every variety of weather, and under all circumstances proved themselves to be staunch, reliable sea-going ships. The monitor type of vessel has been constructed primarily for harbor defence, and it was not contemplated that they would do more than move from port to port on our own coast. These voyages demonstrate their ability to go to any part of the world, and it is believed by experienced naval officers that with slight modifications above the water line, in no way interfering with their efficiency in action, they will safely make the longest and most difficult voyages without convoy. Steam, turreted iron-clads and fifteen-inch guns have revolutionized naval warfare, and foreign governments, becoming sensible of this great change, are slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that turreted vessels and heavy ordnance are essential parts of an efficient fighting navy. * * * * * THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN AS A MEDIUM OF BUSINESS. We seldom publish the favorable opinions expressed by our correspondents when in their letters they allude to this journal. If we chose we could fill columns with notices similar to those which follow. R. S. Miller of Logansport, Ind., under date of Dec. 2d, says:-- I have a club of 10 or 12 engaged, and will send names and money about the 20th inst. I have been reading the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN for several years and frequently I find items in it of more value than the year's subscription. In No. 9, present volume, you illustrated a plan for setting steam boilers. I was much pleased with it and showed it to a friend of mine who was about re-setting a 60-horse power boiler in his machine shop. He adopted the plan. Four week's use of the improved furnace proves all you claimed for it. My friend will be one of your new subscribers. I shall, in a few days, re-set my 15-horse power boiler according to the plan. Every live mechanic should take your valuable journal. The Lamb Knitting Machine Manufacturing Co, Chicopee Falls, Mass., say:-- In payment of your bill please find inclosed draft, etc. Please insert our advertisement every other week hereafter. We are compelled to this being overrun with orders. Unless they hold up we shall be obliged to withdraw it entirely. So much for the advantages of your medium for advertising. C.W. Le Count, Manufacturer of lathe dogs and steam engine governors, South Norwalk, Conn., writes concerning his advertisement in these columns: What business I have I can trace three-quarters of it directly to your journal. An agent of the Hinkley Knitting Machine Co., whose invention was illustrated in these columns some weeks ago, writes: It is now but ten days since its publication, yet without a single advertisement in any paper I have been obliged to engage extra assistance to simply inclose my circulars to parties, who are writing and even _telegraphing_ for agencies and machines, while many have traveled long distances to personally engage agencies. The Superintendent of the Company makes similar _complaints_. * * * * * HUNT'S IMPROVED STEAM PACKING PISTON. Engineers are aware that there are more or less objections to the use of the ordinary spring pistons, owing to the changing tension of the springs, the necessity of frequent adjustment, and the impossibility of the packing rings adapting themselves to the varying pressures of the steam on the piston. A number of attempts have been made to produce a self packing or steam expanding piston, which will act always with the pressure of the steam and the velocity of the engine. The advantages of such a piston will be readily appreciated by practical engineers, especially drivers of locomotives, working, as they nearly all do, at a very high pressure of steam. The general complaint against the several packings in use on our railroads is, that they "pack too tight," and rapidly wear out the rings, while the only remedy has been, the extremely uncertain one of contracting the openings by which steam is admitted under the ring, or rings, to expand them. The obvious objection to such an arrangement is, that it allows the steam to act on the rings with its full force during slow motion, as when a train is starting, while if effective under any circumstances, it will be so only at comparatively high piston speed. The efficacy of such a remedy, if it possesses any, is in fact inversely as the piston speed. [Illustration: Fig.1] Fig. 1 is a perspective of the piston itself, or the "spider," with its follower and its rings removed, which are shown in Fig. 2. Fig. 3 is a cross section of another form of the piston, to be presently described, but which will serve to explain that shown in Figs. 1 and 2. Next to the core of the spider are two narrow internal rings, A, in Figs. 1 and 3; surrounding these two outer rings, B, the cross section of which is of L-form, as seen in Fig. 3. The lips of these outer rings extend to the whole thickness of the piston. The flange head of the piston, and also the follower, are turned beveling on their edges to admit the steam around the annular space thus formed under the rings, B. These spaces are plainly exhibited at C, in Figs. 2 and 3. Both inner and outer rings are adjusted to the bore of the cylinder by means of the gibs, D, and set screws seen in Fig. 1. [Illustration: Fig.2] The section, Fig. 3, represents a modification intended for use in vertical cylinders, if considered necessary. The additional center ring, E, is intended to prevent leakage through the cut in the expanded ring and over the face of the unexpanded one, which might occur when the rings and cylinder should become so worn that the rings, when not expanded, should collapse and leave the surface of the cylinder. The rivets, F, shown by the dotted lines, are placed near the cuts in the L-rings, and are intended to hold the outside and inside rings together at that point, and prevent any tendency on the part of the latter to collapse and let steam under that part of the L-rings. Probably, however, if the packing is properly constructed and adjusted in the first instance, these devices will be unnecessary. In horizontal cylinders the weight of the piston, if properly supported on the set screws and gibs, will accomplish these objects, if the cuts in the L-rings are placed near the bottom side of the cylinder. The steam enters the annular space between the beveled edges of the spider flange and follower and the inner periphery of the overhanging part of the L-rings, and acts only on that part. [Illustration: Fig.3] Patented by Nathan Hunt, Sept. 17, 1867. For further information address the patentee, or Sharps, Davis & Bonsall, Salem, Ohio, who will furnish piston heads to order on receipt of size of cylinder and piston rod. * * * * * Improvement in Hand Drills. There are frequent occasions in a machine shop where light drilling is required on work it is inconvenient to bring to the lathe. For this the Scotch or ratchet drill, if the job is heavy, is employed, and if light, the breast drill. The placing and working of the former consumes considerable time, and the labor of drilling with the breast drill is excessive and exhausting. It is difficult also to hold the instrument so steady as not to cramp and break the drill. The combination of the drill with tongs and a pivoted bed piece, as seen in the engraving, obviates these objections. [Illustration: NEVERGOLD & STACKHOUSE'S TONGS DRILL.] To the lower jaw, A, of a pair of tongs is pivoted a platen or bed, B, having a hole through its center, which is continued through the jaw for the passage of the drillings. The upper jaw is formed with a circular flange on which is mounted the circular or disk-like base, C, of the drill frame, D. This, with the frame, is secured on the jaw of the tongs by means of two screw bolts--one seen in the engraving--passing through the jaw and screwing into the base of the drill. These bolts pass through semi-circular or segmental slots, by which the drill frame can be swung around at different angles to the tongs, to adapt itself to the convenience of the workman and the requirements of the work. If desired, the crank by which the drill is driven may be used on the upright spindle, E. It will be seen that the pivoted base or bed, B, will allow the work to adapt itself always to the line of the drill. In operation, the work being placed between the drill and platen, the left hand presses the handles of the tongs together, while the right turns the crank; the feed is thus graduated wholly by the pressure of the hand. No further description is required for understanding the construction or operation of this tool. Patented by F. Nevergold and George Stackhouse, June 19, 1866. Applications for the whole right, or for territorial rights, should be addressed to the latter at Pittsburgh, Pa. * * * * * COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE.--The Senate on Friday, the 29th ult., confirmed the nomination of the Hon. Horace Capron as Commissioner of Agriculture to fill the position made vacant by the death of Isaac Newton, the former head of the Department. * * * * * It is estimated that 10,000,000 feet of sawed lumber is frozen up in the docks at Bangor, Maine, three fourths of which is sold and waiting shipment. * * * * * Correspondence _The Editors are not responsible for the opinions expressed by their correspondents._ Improved Method of Securing Cutters on Boring Bars. MESSRS. EDITORS:--Thinking it may be of use to some of the readers of your invaluable paper, I have taken the liberty of sending you a sketch of a new mode of securing the cutter in a boring bar or pin drill. Where the cutters are secured, as usual, by a key, all mechanics know that it is very difficult to set a cutter twice alike; and the notch, which is filed in the cutter, to prevent it from moving endways, is a great source of weakness, often causing the cutters to crack in hardening, as well as after they are put to work. The inclosed sketch will explain itself: [Illustration] A is a cutter, and B a collar, screwed upon the cutter bar, C. The edge of this collar fits into a notch on either end of the cutter, as shown at D, thus leaving the cutter as strong as possible at the center, and giving it a solid support at the point where support is needed, and at the same time insuring its always coming alike. Brooklyn, N.Y. THEODORE L. WEBSTER. [The device seems to be eminently well calculated for the support of the cutter on a boring bar, and is applicable, with but slight modification, to a pin or "teat" drill. Machinists will readily perceive its operation and excellencies.--EDS. * * * * * Tides and Their Causes. The phenomenon of the daily tides of our seacoasts and tidal rivers is attributed to the attraction of the moon upon the earth--that the moon draws the earth towards it, and that in drawing the earth towards it, it bulges up the water of the ocean on the side presented towards the moon, and drawing the earth and water thus on that side, also draws the earth _away_ from the water on the opposite side of it, and thus leaves the water bulged up on _that_ side, and in doing all this the effect comes after the cause some three hours, which is termed "the tide lagging behind." Now if we knew, _per se_, what attraction of gravitation was, and that it produced this anomaly of force, there would be nothing to question in the matter. But as we only know by attraction that it means _drawing to_, it is impossible to reconcile the theory of the tides as they run to the attraction of the moon. If the moon is so potent in drawing up, why does it not draw a bulge on the inland seas--our great lakes? I will not discuss the question of the moon's Apogee and Perigee--its different velocities in different parts[1] of its orbit, as laid down by the law of Kepler, or whether it turns once on its axis in a month, or not, as either theory will answer for its phases, as well as for the face of the "Man in the Moon," but I will endeavor to give a more rational theory for the phenomenon of the daily tides. [Transcribers note 1: typo fixed, changed from 'pasts' to 'parts'] The earth revolves on its axis and makes a revolution every twenty-four hours, and this moves its equatorial surface nearly a thousand miles per hour. Now the water on its surface, covering about three-fourths of it, and being more mobile than the solid earth, is, by centrifugal force, made to roll around the earth, the same as the water is made to move around the grindstone when in motion, a thing familiar to every body that uses that instrument. In the Southern Ocean this motion of the water is so well known to mariners who double Cape Horn in sailing from San Francisco to New York, that they now run considerably lower down in order to ride this tide eastward, than they did in former times. Here then we have one fact of water tide more comprehensive, at least, than the tractive theory of the moon. We have also the fact of two great promontories in Capes Horn and Good Hope, where this great tidal wave must strike against, and they produce constant oscillations of the water to and fro, and produce gurgitation and regurgitation in all the gulfs and rivers that line the coasts of the Northern, or more properly, the Land Hemisphere. These gurgitations swell the water highest in the places where the seas become the narrowest, as the more northern latitudes. In addition to these daily oscillations of the water, there are constant eddy currents, denominated "Gulf Streams," all agreeing in their courses and motion to this theory of the ocean tides. When our present received tide theory of moon attraction was first laid down, the fact of the water of the great Southern ocean rolling round faster than the solid parts of our planets was not known. Smith in his Physical Geography, says, "The tidal wave flows from east to west, owing to the earth's daily rotation in a contrary direction." Here he is unintentionally correct, because the water striking these promontories of the two great capes, is hurled back, and not, as he assumes, that the great ocean wave is moving from east to west. The United States government sailing charts lay down the fact of this great ocean wave moving from west to east, south of the capes, and the ships coming from the Pacific to the Atlantic ocean take advantage of this and ride the sea at the rate of over twenty knots per hour, by following the routes laid down in Maury's charts. The old philosophy of the crystalline spheres was not more at variance with the correct motion of the stars and planets, than the moon theory of the tides. In their dilemma to account for the retrograde motions of the planets, they denominated them wanderers, stragglers, because they would not march with the "music of the spheres." In the moon theory of the tides the lunar satellite is made to pull and push at one and the same time, which is entirely at variance with the philosophy of force. There is nothing in the heavens, nor in the earth, that proves to us positively that the sun holds the planets, and the planets their satellites, by attraction, as we are taught that the moon attracts the water of our world. We see that all terrestrial bodies tend toward the center of the earth, and we call this gravitation; but we cannot see how a body moves around the earth without falling on it, by this law. We say in dynamic philosophy, that bodies move in the direction of least resistance, and _that_ we can positively understand; but what force _per se_ is, we do not know. It is always better for us to explain phenomena by positive known laws and motions, than by any that rest merely upon conjecture. Lancaster, Pa. JNO. WISE. * * * * * The Great Hoosac Tunnel. Messrs. Editors:--In No. 23, Vol. XVII., of your paper, is an article upon the Hoosac Tunnel, but made up from data nearly a year old, and consequently not correctly representing the tunnel as it is at the present time. Your conclusions of course were based upon the same data; but during the past year, and especially during the past five months, much greater progress has been made than ever before upon the work, and a knowledge of what has been done since the last report was issued will, I think, give you a different impression of the time required for its final completion. Referring to the profile in that number of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, the following are the distances to the various points where the work is being prosecuted: Distance from east end to central shaft 12,837.294 feet " " central shaft to west shaft 9,747.072 " " " west shaft to new shaft 265.000 " " " new shaft to well No. 4 659.150 " " " well No. 4 to pier[1] 1,522.825 " ---------- " " east end to pier[1] 25,031.341 " [Footnote 1: The instrument pier is 4 feet west of the present west end of the tunnel.] The following are the lengths of the headings at the various points of the work, Dec. 2, 1867: Length of east end heading 4,608.000 feet " " west shaft, east heading 1,262.000 " " " " " west heading 611.000 " " " west end heading 617.000 " ---------- Total length of headings 7,098.000 " Leaving 17,933.341 " or 3,396 miles of heading yet to be made, of which 1,218.975 feet are between the west end and the west shaft, and 16,714.366 feet between the west shaft and east end of the tunnel. The central shaft is down 583 feet, and well No. 4 is down 150 feet. The progress for the month of November, 1867, was as follows: East end heading 126.00 feet West shaft, east heading 33.00 " " " west heading 5.00 " West end 20.00 " -------- Total for the month of November 184.00 " Thirty feet of brick arch were completed during the month at the west end, making a total of 516 feet of brick arch completed to date. The progress for the last six months has been as follows: East end 711.00 feet West shaft, east heading 216.00 " " " west " 288.00 " West end 180.00 " --------- Total, from June 1, to Dec. 2 1,395.00 " " for the previous six months 632.00 " --------- " " year ending Dec. 2, 1867 2,027.00 " The new shaft has been sunk, and at its foot are the pumps which, together with those at the west shaft, are now throwing out between 900 and 1,000 gallons of water per minute. During the last month great quantities of water were struck at both headings of the west shaft (70 gallons per minute at the east heading in one day), and the work was stopped in consequence, which accounts for the small progress at this point. A new pump of 1,000 gallons per minute capacity will be at work, in addition to the above, in a few days, and the work can then go forward with increased rapidity. Well No. 4 is an artesian well, which is now being carried down as a shaft to afford two more faces to work from. Its depth will be, when finished, 215 feet, its dimensions 8 by 8 feet. At the rate of progress for the past year it will require but eight years and ten months to pierce through the mountain and at the rate for the past six months it will require but six years and five months. But when the central shaft and well No. 4 are sunk to grade the number of faces to work from will be doubled, and the time of completion thereby greatly diminished. At present drilling machines are employed only at the east end, but in a few weeks they will be used at the west shaft, and also at the central shaft as soon as the buildings and machinery are again in place, and this again will hasten the completion of the work. At the west shaft buildings are already erected for the manufacture of nitro-glycerin, and the use of this powerful explosive will be adopted during the present month. In fine, every means that will hasten the work will be employed, and ere the present generation passes away, and even within from four to seven years, trains loaded with freights and passengers will pass and repass through the great heart of the Hoosac Mountain as an hourly occurrence. A. BEARDSLEY, C. E., Asst. Engineer. North Adams, Mass. * * * * * Horse-hair Snakes--Wonderful Transformation. Messrs. Editors:--In No. 21, current volume, you referred H. K., of Wis., who had described the horse-hair snake, to page 280, No. 18 current volume, for a reply, which you considered "sufficient." With your kind permission I would like to speak a few words about the "snakes" in question. When I resided in Pennsylvania, I, in company with many other lads, used to tie a bundle of horse hairs into a hard knot and then immerse them in the brook, when the water began to get warm, and in due time we would have just as many animals, with the power of locomotion and appearance of snakes, as there were hairs in the bundle. I have raised them one-eighth of an inch in diameter, with perceptible eyes and mouth on the butt end or root part of the hair. Take such a snake and dip it in an alkaline solution, and the flesh or mucus that formed about the hair will dissolve, and the veritable horse hair is left. They will not generate in limestone water, only in freestone or salt water. Covington, Ky. T.W.B. * * * * * Man Proposes, but God Disposes. It may not be generally known that but for one of those accidents which seem to be almost a direct interposition of Providence, Prof. Morse, the originator of the magnetic telegraph, might have been now an artist instead of the inventor of the telegraph, and that agent of civilization be either unknown or just discovered. We publish from Tuckerman's "Book of the Artists" just from the press of G. P. Putnam & Son, the following reminiscence of Prof. Morse: "A striking evidence of the waywardness of destiny is afforded by the experience of this artist, if we pass at once from this early and hopeful moment to a more recent incident. He then aimed at renown through devotion to the beautiful; but it would seem as if the genius of his country, in spite of himself, led him to this object, by the less flowery path of utility. He desired to identify his name with art, but it has become far more widely associated with science. A series of bitter disappointments obliged him to "coin his mind for bread", for a long period, of exclusive attention to portrait painting, although, at rare intervals, he accomplished something more satisfactory. More than thirty years since, on a voyage from Europe, in a conversation with his fellow passengers, the theme of discourse happened to be the electromagnet; and one gentleman present related some experiments he had lately witnessed at Paris, which proved the almost incalculable rapidity of movement with which electricity was disseminated. The idea suggested itself to the active mind of the artist, that this wonderful and but partially explored agent might be rendered subservient to that system of intercommunication which had become so important a principle of modern civilization. He brooded over the subject as he walked the deck, or lay wakeful in his berth, and by the time he arrived at New York, had so far matured his invention as to have decided upon a telegraph of signs, which is essentially that now in use. After having sufficiently demonstrated his discovery to the scientific, a long period of toil, anxiety, and suspense intervened before he obtained the requisite facilities for the establishment of the magnetic telegraph. It is now in daily operation in the United States, and its superiority over all similar inventions abroad was confirmed by the testimony of Arago and the appropriation made for its erection by the French Government. "By one of those coincidences which would be thought appropriate for romance, but which are more common, in fact, than the unobservant are disposed to confess, these two most brilliant events in the painter's life--his first successful work of art and the triumph of his scientific discovery--were brought together, as it were, in a manner singularly fitted to impress the imagination. Six copies of his "Dying Hercules" had been made in London, and the mold was then destroyed. Four of these were distributed by the artist to academies, one he retained, and the last was given to Mr. Bulfinch, the architect of the Capitol--who was engaged at the time upon that building. After the lapse of many years, an accident ruined Morse's own copy, and a similar fate had overtaken the others, at least in America. After vain endeavors to regain one of these trophies of his youthful career, he at length despaired of seeing again what could not fail to be endeared to his memory by the most interesting associations. One day he was superintending the preparations for the first establishment of his telegraph in the room assigned at the Capitol. His perseverence and self-denying labor had at length met its just reward, and he was taking the first active step to obtain a substantial benefit from his invention. It became necessary in locating the wires, to descend into a vault beneath the apartment, which had not been opened for a long period. A man preceded the artist with a lamp. As they passed along the subterranean chamber the latter's attention was excited by something white glimmering through the darkness. In approaching the object, what was his surprise to find himself gazing upon his long-lost Hercules, which he had not seen for twenty years. A little reflection explained the apparent miracle. This was undoubtedly the copy given to his deceased friend, the architect, and temporarily deposited in the vault for safety, and undiscovered after his death." * * * * * Extraordinary Effects of an Earthquake--An American Man-of-War Carried Over the Tops of Warehouses and Stranded. [OFFICIAL REPORT.] UNITED STATES STEAMSHIP "MONONGAHELA," ST. CROIX, Nov. 21, 1867. Sir:--I have to state, with deep regret, that the United States steamship _Monongahela_, under my command, is now lying on the beach in front of the town of Frederickstadt, St. Croix, where she was thrown by the most fearful earthquake ever known here. The shock occurred at 3 o'clock, P. M., of the 18th inst. Up to that moment the weather was serene, and no indication of a change showed by the barometer, which stood at 30 degrees 15 minutes. The first indication we had of the earthquake was a violent trembling of the ship, resembling the blowing off of steam. This lasted some 30 seconds, and immediately afterward the water was observed to be receding rapidly from the beach. In a moment the current was changed, and bore the ship toward the beach, carrying out the entire cable and drawing the bolts from the kelson, without the slightest effect in checking her terrific speed toward the beach. Another anchor was ordered to be let go, but in a few seconds she was in too shoal water for this to avail. When within a few yards of the beach, the reflux of the water checked her speed for a moment, and a light breeze from the land gave me a momentary hope that the jib and foretopmost staysail might pay her head off shore, so that in the reflux of the wave she might reach waters sufficiently deep to float her, and then be brought up by the other anchor. These sails were immediately set, and she payed off so as to bring her broadside to the beach. When the sea returned, in the form of a wall of water 25 or 30 feet high, it carried us over the warehouses into the first street of the town. This wave in receding took her back toward the beach, and left her nearly perpendicular on the edge of a coral reef, where she has now keeled over to an angle of 15 degrees. All this was the work of a few moments only, and soon after the waters of the bay subsided into their naturally tranquil state, leaving us high and dry upon the beach. During her progress toward the beach she struck heavily two or three times; the first lurch carried the rifle gun on the forecastle overboard. Had the ship been carried 10 or 15 feet further out, she must inevitably have been forced over on her beam ends, resulting, I fear, in her total destruction, and in the loss of many lives. Providentially only four men were lost; these were in the boats at the time the shock commenced. The boats that were down were all swamped except my gig, which was crushed under the keel, killing my coxswain, a most valuable man. During this terrific scene the officers and men behaved with coolness and subordination. It affords me great pleasure to state, that, after a careful examination of the position and condition of the ship, I am enabled to report that she has sustained no irreparable damage to her hull. The sternpost is bent, and some 20 feet of her keel partially gone; propeller and shaft uninjured. The lower pintle of the rudder is gone, but no other damage is sustained by it. No damage is done to her hull more serious than the loss of several sheets of copper, torn from her starboard bilge and from her keel. She now lies on the edge of a coral reef, which forms a solid foundation, on which ways may be laid. She can thus be launched in 10 feet of water at 100 feet from the beach. Gentlemen looking at the ship from shore declare that the bottom of the bay was visible where there was before, and is now, 40 fathoms of water. To extricate the ship from her position I respectfully suggest that Mr. I. Hanscom be sent down with suitable material for ways, ready for laying down, and india-rubber camels to buoy her up. I think there is no insuperable obstacle to her being put afloat, providing a gang of ten or twelve good ship carpenters be sent down with the Naval Constructor, as her boilers and engines appear to have sustained no injury. A valuable ship may thus be saved to the navy, with all her stores and equipments. S. B. BISSELL, Commodore Commanding. Rear-Admiral J. S. Palmer, commanding H. A. Squadron, St. Thomas. * * * * * The survey of another trans-continental railway route, which shall follow mainly the 35th parallel of latitude, is nearly completed. Its projectors claim this as the most feasible one across the continent, and even if the northern and southern roads are constructed, this would still be the favorite popular thoroughfare, and the easiest and cheapest built. * * * * * The Chilian gun now being built at Pittsburgh, is 22¼ feet in length, being two feet longer than the famous Rodman gun at Fort Hamilton, this harbor, but of exactly the same bore, twenty inches. Its greatest diameter is 5 feet 4 inches, its least diameter, 2 feet 9 inches. The gun is designed for garrison or naval service. * * * * * From lack of economy, in reduction of ores, it is estimated that the aggregate loss on the production of bullion in this country for the present year will reach the sum of $25,000,000. * * * * * Recent American and foreign Patents. _Under this heading we shall publish weekly notes of some of the more prominent home and foreign patents._ * * * * * WARDROBE.--Nathan Turner, West Lynn, Mass.--This invention consists in a movable or swinging arrangement of the sides and top and bottom, whereby they are folded upon each other, with grooves or strips in or upon the sides to support shelves when used as a closet or book case, and which shelves may be removed when used as a wardrobe. AXLE BOX.--Henry B. Pitner, La Porte, Ind.--This invention consists of an iron thimble or slieve provided on each end in the inside with a screw thread into which are fitted ends of brass or composition, or other metal softer than iron, in such a way that said metallic ends will not turn in the box, and so that the axle bears only upon the softer metal. SPRING FORMER.--George S. Long, Bridgeport, Conn.--This invention consists of a vibrating anvil or former, upon which the steel to be worked is placed, said former vibrating under a roller, said roller being hollow, and provided with holes or orifices through which water received in the shaft of said roller is distributed upon the heated steel. DOOR-FASTENER.--Francis C. Levalley, Warrenville, N. Y.--The present invention relates to a fastener for doors more particularly which, in the construction and arrangement of its parts, is simple, and most effective, and secure, when fastened. ROOFING.--Orville Manly, Garrettsville, Ohio.--This invention consists of tiles saturated with raw coal tar, made in the same way as ordinary brick, having all the edges bevelled, being thicker at one end, and laid upon the roof with the thicker end towards the eaves, and the spaces between the tiles formed by the bevelled sides of the same filled with a cement made of raw coal and clay. FOLDING BEDSTEAD OR CRIB.--R. S. Titcomb, Gloversville, N. Y.--This invention consists of the parts being attached to each other by pivots and hinges, whereby the same may be folded in upon the bed and clothing, and upon each other. CAST METAL CASES FOR SPRING BALANCES.--John Chattillon, New York city.--This invention relates to a new manner of arranging the cast metal cases for spring balances, so that they can be made less expensive and simpler than they are now made, and consists in fitting the iron, to which the upper end of the spring is secured, directly through the upper head of the case, instead of using an additional head in the case for that purpose. TWEERS.--John B. Himberg, Frederick City, Md.--This invention relates to a new tweers, which is so arranged that the center part or ring can be easily taken out, whenever desired, but not accidentally, by a hook or stirrer, and that it can be easily cleaned and taken apart whenever desired, and that it may conduct a strong blast of air to the fire. PUNCH.--C. D. Flesche, New York city.--This invention consists in arranging a punch in such a manner that it consists of two parts, which are firmly connected together for cutting the metal, while for bending the same, an inner sliding punch will be moved out of the stationary cutting punch, thus making both operations by one instrument, and avoiding the removal of the article from the cutting to the bonding punch, which was heretofore necessary. RAILROAD CHAIR.--Leander Pollock, Matteawan, N.Y.--This invention consists in making the chair of two pieces, each piece consisting of one cheek and of a portion of the case. When the two pieces are connected, the base of one rests upon the base of the other, the line of division between the two bases being inclined so that as the rail presses upon the upper base, it, will tend to force the same downward on the incline, whereby the two cheeks will be brought together. FIRE LADDER.--Johan Blomgren, Galesburg, Ill.--The main feature in this invention is a telescopic tube, expanded or closed by a coil fitting within it, and worked by a toothed wheel. HARVESTER.--Francis C. Coppage, Terre Haute, Ind.--The object of my invention is to render more simple and effective the machinery for operating and adjusting the cutter bar and the reel of harvesters. BOAT-DETACHING APPARATUS.--David L. Cohen, Pensacola, Fla.--The object of this invention is to furnish a device by which a ship's boat can be readily shipped or launched at sea, without danger of capsizing or fouling. DEVICE FOR HITHING HORSES.--Samuel Galbraith, New Orleans, La.--This invention is a neat, cheap, and durable device, designed to be attached to halters used in hitching horses, mules, etc., to prevent their being thrown, hung, or injured. HYDROSTATIC MACHINE.--Dr. J. R. Cole, Kenton Station, Tenn.--The object of this invention is to construct a machine which, by the application of but little power, will raise a stream of water to any desired hight, to furnish motive power for machinery or for other purposes. FENCE POST.--Robert Ramsay, New Wilmington, Pa.--In this invention the bottom of the post is supported between two parallel sills a short distance from the ground, the post being dovetailed and held by keys passing across the sills, and being adjusted high or low, or at any inclination, by making the keys larger or smaller, or of different sizes. SELF-LOADING EXCAVATOR.--Benj. Slusser, Sidney, Ohio.--In this invention a pinion, attached to the forward axle is made to elevate the plow, when desired, and at the same instant to ungear and stop the endless apron carrier that conveys the dirt from the plow to the cart. A new method of instantly unloading the cart, and setting it again to receive another load, is shown. WASHING MACHINE.--J. Q. Leffingwell, Nevada, Iowa.--This invention relates to an improvement in washing machines, and consists of a vibrating semi-cylindrical box operated by a means of a lever handle and gearing. SCAFFOLD FOR BUILDERS, ETC.--John E. Bliss, Oxford, Ind.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved scaffold for the use of carpenters, masons, painters, etc., which shall be simple in construction, strong, durable and easily adjusted to any desired hight. PLOW.--Harvey Briggs, Smithland, Ky.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved plow for breaking up sod or prairie land, which shall be strong and durable in construction and effective m operation. CORN PLOW.--John Snyder, Williamsfield, Ohio.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved plow for plowing and hoeing corn, which shall be simple and strong in construction and will do its work well. SELF-RAKING ATTACHMENT FOR REAPERS.--James H. Glass and Albert J Glass, McGregor, Iowa.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved attachment for reapers of that class in which the rakes act as beaters, in the place of a reel, and are made to descend occasionally to sweep the bundle from the platform, so that the third, fourth, sixth, or any other desired rake may sweep the platform and deliver the bundle. SKY ROCKET.--John W. Hadfield, Newtown, N. Y.--This invention relates to a modification of an improvement in sky rockets for which letters patent were granted to this inventor bearing date Nov. 28, 1865. The original improvement consisted in a novel application of wings to the body or "carcass" of the rocket, whereby the use of the ordinary guide stick was rendered unnecessary and the rockets rendered capable of being packed for transportation much more compactly than when provided with sticks. The present invention also consists in a novel manner of attaching the wings to the body or "carcass" of the rocket, whereby the same advantage is obtained as hitherto, at a less cost of manufacture. TAIL PIECE FOR VIOLINS.--James Thoms, South Boston, Mass.--This invention relates to a new and improved manner of attaching the E-string to the tail piece of a violin, whereby a comparatively small portion of said string is wasted in case of breakage. HAME TUG.--James E. Covert, Townsendville, N. Y.--This hame tug, according to the present invention, is made of a strip of malleable iron or other suitable material, perforated or provided with V-Shaped holes or slots having a center tongue piece, for the reception of a V-Shaped block fixed at one end of the trace, by means of which block the trace is engaged with the hame tug, where through a suitably arranged spring slot that strikes against the end of the tongue to the said V-slots, the block is held firmly in place, and consequently the trace fastened to the hame tug. CENTER BOARD.--F. J. McFarland, San Francisco, Cal.--This invention relates to the location of the center boards of boats and sailing craft of all kinds, but is designed more particularly for freight carrying vessels. It consists simply in employing two center boards and locating the same at the extreme ends of the hull. MUSICAL INSTRUMENT.--George W. Van Dusen, Williamsburgh, N.Y.--This invention consists in a novel connection and arrangement of levers and valves between the plane of movement of the perforated surface or surfaces, and an airchest or chests, and the keys or levers for opening the valves to the reeds or for operating any other mechanism suitable for producing tones, whereby through such perforated surface or surfaces the mechanism forming the connection between it and the sounding mechanism will be operated through the perforations to produce the sound or note or notes desired, of whatever length such notes or sounds are to be. COMBINED SEAT AND DESK.--Rev Allen H. Burn, May's Landing, N. J.--The present invention relates to the combination of a desk or lid with a seat or bench, such lid or desk being hinged to the back of the seat in such a manner as to be raised or lowered at pleasure, and when raised, supported in position by means of supporting bars properly applied thereto. MACHINE FOR REFITTING CONICAL VALVES.--Charles F. Hall, Brooklyn. N. Y.--This invention relates to a device by which the conical stop valves of gas, steam, and water works may be refitted or repaired when from any cause they are rendered leaky and unfit for use. GRAIN-BAND CUTTER AND FORK.--E. G. Bullis, Manchester, Iowa.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved instrument by means of which the bands of the grain bundles may be cut at the same time that the bundles are pitched to the person who feeds them to the threshing machine, and by the same operation. PROPELLING VESSELS, ETC.--Robert R. Spedden and Daniel F. Stafford, Astoria, Oregon.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved means by which the motion of the waves may be used for propelling vessels or working pumps or other machinery. MAILBAG FASTENER.--S. Denison, Portlandville, N.Y.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved mailbag fastening by the use of which the mouth of the bag will be closed securely, and which may be operated, in closing and opening the bag, in less time and with less labor, than the fastenings now in use. KNIFE AND FORK CLEANER.--John Merritt, New York city.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved machine by means of which knives and forks may be quickly and thoroughly cleaned. CHURN.--Thomas Bisbing, Buckstown, Penn.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved churn conveniently and easily operated, and which will do its work quickly and thoroughly. SAW BUCK.--Henry J. Dill, Cummington, Mass.--This invention relates to the manner in which a stick of fire wood, or cord wood, is held fast or secured in the saw buck for the purpose of sawing it into suitable lengths, and it consists in arranging adjustable toothed clamps for holding the stick, which clamps are brought in contact with it by bearing upon a treddle with the foot. PLATFORM SCALES.--D. Hazzard, Milton, Del.--This invention relates to a new and improved method of constructing scales of the platform kind, and it consists in attaching a spiral spring to a spindle, to the top end of which spindle the platform is secured, and to the bottom end of which a rod and index finger is attached so that when an article, to be weighed, is placed on the platform, the weight of the article will act upon the spring and be indicated by the finger. WASHING MACHINE.--S. W. Curtiss, Sugar Grove, Pa.--This invention relates to a new and improved method of constructing washing machines, and consists in the arrangement of three fluted revolving rollers in a suitable washing box or vessel. COMBINED TRY SQUARE AND BEVEL.--Samuel N. Batchelder, Prairie du Chien, Wis.--This invention consists in attaching the blade of a try square to the stock in such a manner that it can be set and fastened at any desired angle by operating a hook slide and set screws. STEAM ENGINE.--J. F. Troxel, Bloomsville, Ohio.--This invention relates to a new and improved method of constructing steam engines, whereby the same are greatly increased in power and effectiveness, and consists in operating a number of pistons in one cylinder. STOVE.--T. W. Wisner, Howell, Mich.--This invention relates to a new and improved method of constructing those stoves which are used for drying purposes or for heating water, or steaming vegetables and for all other purposes of a similar nature, and the invention consists in rendering the stove portable by providing for supporting the same on truck wheels which allows of its being transported from place to place, as may be required. FURNACE HOT AIR BLAST.--Richard Long, Chillicothe, Ohio.--This invention relates to a new and improved method of constructing and arranging the air pipes for heating the air blast for furnaces for smelting and reducing the ores in the manufacture of iron, having particular reference to the materials of which the air pipe is formed, the method of its construction, and also to the materials and method of construction of the supporting walls. PRINTING POINTERS.--R. W. Macgowan, New York city.--This invention relates to a new and improved application of pointers to printing presses for registering the sheets of paper as they are fed to the press. Hitherto these pointers have been operated automatically, from the running parts of the press allowed to remain in an elevated or nearly upright position, and through the sheet until the fingers or nippers of the cylinder arrive in proper position to grasp the sheet, at which time the pointers are drawn down and the sheet released, so that it may be connected with the cylinder, and related with the same in order to receive the impression. This improvement consists in applying a spring or an equivalent weight to the pointers, the latter being pivoted at their lower ends, or attached to axes and all constructed and arranged in such a manner that the pointers will hold the sheets properly in position on the feed board, and the nippers of the cylinder allowed to draw the sheet off from the points on account of the latter yielding or being allowed to be drawn down under the slight pull of the sheet, the springs or weights throwing the points back to their original position as soon as the sheet is withdrawn. CLEANER FOR LAMP CHIMNEYS, ETC.--R. B. Musson, Champaign, Ill.--This invention relates to an improved cleaner for lamp chimneys, bottles, and other hollow ware. SAWYER'S RULE.--Thomas Carter, Louisville, Ky.--This invention relates to an improved sawyer's rule, and consists of a rule on which is a scale showing at a glance the number of boards or planks, of any desired thickness, which can be sawn from a log of any given diameter. WINDOW SCREEN.--A. W. Griffith, Roxbury, Mass.--This invention relates to an improvement in window screens, and consists in a screen wound round a spring roller at foot of a window, and attached to the bottom of the lower sash so that on opening the window the screen opens with it, admitting the air but excluding insects, and on closing the sash the screen winds up itself. SHOVEL PLOW, CULTIVATOR, ETC.--P. Atkinson Ross, Harveys, Pa.--This invention has for its object to improve the construction of single and double-shovel plows, cultivators, etc., to enable them to be readily adjusted for use upon sidehills or level ground, so that the handles may be secured in nearly a level position, while the plow is held in the best position for doing the work properly. SKY ROCKETS.--John W. Hadfield, East Williamsburgh, N. Y.--This invention consists in dispensing with the long stick or guide which is now attached to sky rockets in order to insure a straight upward flight of the same in the air, and using instead a plurality of short guides, whereby several important advantages are obtained, to wit: the packing of the rockets in a small space, so as to economise in transportation, the forming of a stand or support for the rocket, so that no fixture of any kind will be required when they are to be fired or "set off," and lastly, the obtaining of an efficient guide to insure the straight flight of the rockets upward in the air. CATCHING THE OXYDE OF ZINC.--G. C. Hall, Brooklyn, N. Y.--This invention relates to an improved means for catching the oxyde of zinc, as it escapes with the fumes and gases from roasting zinc, or zinc ore. Hitherto the oxyde of zinc has been caught and retained by forcing the fumes and gases from the roasting ore into a large bag or receptacle composed of cotton cloth or other porous material, which will admit of the gases and air passing it, but not the oxyde, the latter being retained within the bag, and, by its superior gravity, falling to the bottom thereof and settling in teats or pendent receptacles at the bottom of the bag, from which it is removed from time to time. This invention has for its object the dispensing with the large bag, which is very expensive--the gases from the ore affecting the same so that it rots in a very short time, and soon becomes ruptured under the blows which are given it to cause the oxyde which adheres to the sides of the bag to drop into the teats or receptacles made to receive it. The invention consists in having the fumes and gases from the roasting zinc or zinc ore forced into a close building, provided with openings or apertures, over which screens are placed, constructed in such a manner and of such materials as to admit of the air and gases passing through them, but not the oxyde. FERRULE.--Archibald Shaw, Philadelphia, Pa.--This invention relates to a new and improved ferrule for the handles of tools and other implements, and it consists in providing the interior of the ferrule with oblique spurs or projections, disposed or arranged in such a manner as to admit of the ferrule being driven on the handle and at the same time prevent it from casually slipping off therefrom. The object of the invention is to obviate the necessity of tacks or screws being used to secure the ferrule on the handle, as well as the pinching of the same externally to form a burr to sink into the handle to effect the same end. SUCTION OF VACUUM PUMP AND BLOWER.--John Doyle and Timothy A. Martin, New York City.--This invention consists in arranging valves and air passages with a hollow cylinder or drum having an oscillating movement, and provided with a chamber or chambers to receive water, mercury or other fluid, whereby an exceedingly simple and compact pump or blower is obtained, one not liable to get out of repair or become deranged by use. MACHINE FOR REGSTERING NUMBERS FOR ODOMETERS.--Henry F. Hart, New York city.--This invention relates to an improved machine or apparatus for registering numbers applicable to odometers or measurements of quantities of all kinds, such as the numbers of barrels of flour, bushels of grain or any other commodity that requires a tally or record of the quantity packed, stored, weighed, or handled in any manner. DITCHING MACHINE.--A. H. and P. S. Whitacre, Morrow, Ohio.--This invention relates to an improvement in the construction of a machine for cutting ditches suitable for laying tile for draining lands, or pipe of any kind, and consists in a sled worked by tackle and supporting a frame carrying the machinery, in such manner that the frame can be raised and lowered to cut the ditch to any required depth. WINDOW SHADE RACK AND PULLEY FASTENING.--Wm. H. Woods, Philadelphia, Pa.--This invention relates to an improvement in constructing a fastening for window shades and consists in a metal rack to be attached vertically as usual to the side of the window frame for holding the cord connected with the shade by means of a lever dog that works in a longitudinal slot in the rack and is engaged and disengaged with the teeth thereof by moving the lever in and out of the slot to be secured in places when engaged by a swivelknob on which is a pulley that covers the cord of the shade. FENCE POST.--Warren H. Shay, Sylvania, Ohio.--This invention relates to an improved method of constructing fence posts and consists in forming them of plank uprights supported by braces and held together by cross ties and keys. CLOTHES-WASHING MACHINE.--John D. Swartz, Milton, Pa.--This invention relates to a new and improved clothes-washing machine of that class which are provided with an oscillating rubber and a concave of rollers. RAILROAD RAILS AND CHAIRS.--John H. Downing, Salem, Mass.--This invention relates to an improvement in railroad rails and chairs, and consists in forming the rails in two parts, to lie side by side, with lap joints combined with narrow chairs, having single heads placed on each side of the rail to clamp the two parts together at the joints, and fasten them to the ties. MACHINE FOR STRETCHING CLOTH.--A. C. Corpe, Stafford, Conn.--This invention relates to a new and improved machine for stretching cloth, with a view of tendering the same smooth and enfolding such portion of the selvedges which may have been rolled over in the manipulations to which it was subjected after being taken from the loom. MACHINE FOR SHARPENING SAWS.--E. B. Rich, South Boston, Mass.--This invention relates to a machine for the sharpening of saw blades, whether straight or circular, and consists in the combination of a revolving or rotating grinding wheel made of any suitable material, and a holder for the saw blade, so arranged together that as the grinding wheel revolves the saw will be presented to the same, or the wheel to the saw-blade, in such a manner as to produce the desired sharpening of the teeth, in regular order and succession. DOOR SPRING.--Rudolph Schrader, Indianapolis, Ind.--The present invention relates to a spring for doors, that being properly connected with the door will operate to close, whether when opened it swings inside or outside through the casing to the door, the spring being especially applicable to doors hung to swing through their casing, or inside and outside. PORTABLE DERRICK.--D. J. McDonald, Gold Hill, Nevada.--This invention relates to a new and improved derrick, and it consists in a novel construction and arrangement of parts, whereby the device may be readily drawn from place to place, the crane or derrick frame adjusted in any desired position within the scope of its movement, friction avoided, and the whole apparatus manipulated with the greatest facility. * * * * * Answers to Correspondents. _Correspondents who expect to receive answers to their letters must, in all cases, sign their names. We have a right to know those who seek information from us; besides, as sometimes happens, we may prefer to address the correspondent by mail. Special Note.--This column is designed for the general interest and instruction of our readers, not for gratuitous replies to questions of a purely business or personal nature. We will publish such inquiries, however, when paid for as advertisements, at 50 cents a line, under the head of "Business and Personal" All reference to back numbers should be by volume and page._ * * * * * J. F. McK., of Md.--"What kind of silk is used for balloons, what is the varnish which covers them, and what amount of common illuminating gas will support one pound weight?" Silk for large balloons is now rarely used, stout cotton cloth being substituted. Ordinary boiled linseed oil makes a good varnish. Any elastic varnish will do, however. The specific gravity of ordinary illuminating gas ranges from 0.540 to 0.700, air being 1.000. Its weight may be called one-thirty-second of a pound to the cubic foot and atmospheric air about three-fourths of a pound. R. B. C., of Pa., says: "Here is a proposition in geometry which I would like to see demonstrated theoretically by one of your correspondents. The side of a regular heptagon is equal to half the side of an equilateral triangle inscribed in the same circle. The mechanical construction is very simple and will be found useful. I discovered it some years ago and am not aware of its ever having been in print." F. H., of Mich., asks "if sal-soda will scale a boiler?" H. N. Winans, 11 Wall street, N. Y. replies that in some waters it is partially effective but at the expense of the boiler, with a certainty of foaming and corrosion. The most reliable and positively uninjurious remedy for incrustations is his anti-incrustation powder--in successful use for 12 years past. T., of R. I., speaks of the famous mechanical horse shown at the Paris Exposition which is said to have accomplished with its rider a little over an English mile in fifty seconds, and asks what is the motive power. As it is said that the French Government took possession of the machine and preserves its mechanical construction a secret, we know no more about it than about the much vaunted Napoleon cannon. S.S., of N. Y.--"Please give the ingredients of the composition used for tipping matches." Different manufacturers employ different materials and in varying proportions; the mixture of phosphorus melted and stirred up with thin glue is sufficient, although some add a quantity of powdered glass, niter, chlorate of potash, sulphur, etc. The phosphorus, however is the light-producing material. R.S.B., of N.Y., alluding to the inquiry of S.W.P., in No. 23, for a waterproof paste. "Calico printers when they wish to leave white figures on a dark ground use what they term a 'resist paste' to cover such places as are designed to be unaffected by the dye. If the ingredients of this paste were known it might be what S.W.P., desires." This "resist paste" is 1 lb. of binacetate of copper (distilled verdigris), 3 lbs. sulphate of copper dissolved in 1 gal. water. This solution to be thickened with 2 lbs. gum senegal, 1 lb. British gum and 4 lbs. pipe clay; adding afterward, 2 oz. nitrate of copper as a deliquescent. M.A.H, of Vt.--"I have a surplus of water power and desire to know the probable cost of the apparatus for producing the electric light, with a view of employing my surplus power in that direction." A serviceable magneto-electrical machine for giving light is quite expensive. * * * * * Business and Personal. _The charge for insertion under this head is 50 cents a line_. * * * * * Parties in want of Fine Tools or Machinists' Supplies send for price list to Goodnow & Wightman, 23 Cornhill, Boston, Mass. Pattern Letters and Figures for inventors, etc., to put on patterns for castings, are made by Knight Brothers, Seneca Falls, N.Y. Allen & Needles, 41 South Water street, Philadelphia, Manufacturers of Allen's Patent Anti-Lamina, for removing and preventing Scale in steam boilers. All Parties having any article to sell through an agent, address, with circular, etc., Box 499 Oil City, Pa. Manufacturers of Tag Holders will please send address to Box 1019, St. Paul, Minn. Manufacturers of Presses for making Castor Oil, address or send circular to F.M. Peck, P.O. Box 190, Montgomery, Ala. Manufacturers of Cotton-Spinning and Knitting Machinery send circular and price list to W.L. Jones, Holly Springs, Miss. Dr. W. Spillman, Marion Station, Miss., wishes to correspond with manufacturers of buckshot or bullets, either conical or spherical. Toy Makers--One-half of Patent Right of Toy Wind Wheel given away! Address Dr. W.H. Benson, Norfolk, Va. Milton Darling, East Macdonough, Chenango Co., N.Y., wishes the address of those that want broom handles for the year 1868. A.B. Woodbury, Winchester, N.H., wants to sell two valuable patents--Jack-Spinning Improvements. E.C. Tainter, Worcester, Mass., wants to sell a good set of Sash and Door Machinery, used only six months. Parties desiring any of their new ideas put into practical form, or wanting any new apparatus invented for manufacturing purposes, etc., address, with confidence, A.E.W., Inventor and Draftsman, 114 Fulton street, N.Y. References given. * * * * * MANUFACTURING, MINING, AND RAILROAD ITEMS. For the benefit of the Union Pacific railroad, the base of the Rocky Mountains has been fixed at the base of the Black Hills, a distance of 6.637 miles west of Cheyenne, and, according to the railway surveys 525.078 miles from Omaha. The Pittsburg, Fort Wayne and Chicago railway have just rebuilt in the most permanent manner an iron bridge over the Alleghany river, to replace the old wooden Howe truss bridge, which had become inadequate to the increasing traffic. The new bridge opens like a fan towards the freight yard at Pittsburg being at the narrowest part, next to the main span 55 feet wide. The river is crossed with spans averaging 153½ feet in the clear, with a bearing of five feet on each pier. The principle of the construction is known as the lattice girder plan, with vertical stiffening. The work was executed under the superintendence of its designer, the engineer and architect of the company Felician Stataper. The production of precious metals in the United States from 1849 to 1867 inclusive, has amounted in value to $1,174,000,000. The president of one of the New Jersey railroads proposes a plan to avoid the danger to life and limb from the series of trains that run into and out of Jersey city. The new project is to elevate the present tracks fifteen feet above the streets, and by safe machinery to lower at once an entire train in the depot at the river. A mining company at Newton, Nev., are making preparations to work their claims by means of a steam engine which will be used to throw a stream of water instead of the ordinary hydraulic pressure They estimate that with a ten or twelve horse power engine, then can throw 100 inches of water with a force equal to at least 150 feet fall. The result of this experiment is looked upon with a good deal of interest, as there is a vast amount of good hydraulic ground in the adjoining countries, which, as in this case, cannot be worked by the ordinary process for want of water fall, but which, if the expedient in this case proves successful, will soon be worked by steam engines. By an oversight in the article on the trans-continental railroad, published in our last issue, the Western or California section of the road was styled the Union Pacific, instead of the Central railroad. In the race to reach Salt Lake the California company have 400 miles more to build, while the Union company have only 328 miles. But the country to be traversed by the former is comparatively level, and favorable for winter work, while that on the other side crosses four distinct mountain ranges, and winter storms must interrupt work for several months in the year. * * * * * PATENT OFFICE DECISIONS ON APPEAL. USEFUL COMPOUNDS ARE PATENTABLE--THE APPLICANT NOT REQUIRED TO PROVE THE FUNCTION OF EACH INGREDIENT. S.H. HODGES for the Board of Examiners-in Chief. _Application of Rew for a Patent for Preventing and Curing Swine Cholera_.--The applicant's specific is composed of a number of medical articles, the nature of which is not important upon the present occasion, and it is unnecessary to enumerate them. But it is objected that "a medical prescription" "should contain some recognition of the medicinal properties of the several ingredients" "and the part they perform in the compound:" or, as it is elsewhere expressed, such a mixture should not receive the sanction of this department "unless perhaps a satisfactory rationale should be given for the use of each of the ingredients in the proportions named." If the medical faculty were always satisfied themselves as to the operation of the various remedies they employ, there might be more reason in the objection. But it is well known that different schools disagree widely on this subject, and there are remedies employed with success the effect of which the most intelligent are unable to account for. So long as there is a single one of this character to be found, and while the operations of the vital functions are so concealed from us that we are unable fully to comprehend the process by which any specific operates, so long it is impossible to prescribe as a conditon of patentability, a full explanation of the mode in which any one acts that is brought forward. It would be still less justifiable to require such an explanation as would content any particular class of medical men. Every year new therapeutics are introduced into practice, and not unfrequently some whose beneficial results are not understood. And as long as one such may be found, it is not just to make it a condition of its being protected by a patent, that the discoverer should bring the scientific world to agree with him in his theory respecting it, nor even that he should have one. The man who stumbles upon a new and useful article is just as much entitled to the exclusive use of it as if he had elaborated it by the most profound and painful study. It is true that there is danger upon this principle of countenancing mere nostrums, and giving them undue prestige This can only be guarded against by the exercise of great caution and requiring convincing proof of utility. Such his been furnished in this case, in abundance. The application cannot be rejected except upon such grounds as would insure the rejection of nearly all medicines whatever. Nor is the Office responsible for the false importance which the public may attach to its proceedings, so long is they are confined to its legitimate province. Its duties certainly must not be neglected, and meritorious petitions refused, in order to obviate such misapprehensions. The decision of the Primary Examiner is reversed. [Transcribers note: full index of volume XVII. left out] 
8952	----	[Illustration] SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL INFORMATION, ART, SCIENCE, MECHANICS, CHEMISTRY, AND MANUFACTURES. NEW YORK, JANUARY 1, 1870. Vol. XXII.--No. 1. [NEW SERIES.] $3 per Annum [IN ADVANCE.] * * * * * Contents: (Illustrated articles are marked with an asterisk.) *Engines of the Spanish Gunboats The Torpedo Problem Sugar Making in Louisiana Sticking, or Court Plaster *An Improved Hoisting Pulley Wanted *Ferdinand De Lesseps--Chief Promoter of the Suez Canal *An Ingenious Vent Peg *A New English Patent Pulley Block Plants in Sleeping Booms *Improved Treadle Motion *Improved Method of Catching Curculios Remains of a Megatherium in Ohio Artificial Ivory American and English Kailway Practice Contrasted Boiler Covering Attachment of Saws to Swing Frames Patent Decision Inventions Patented in England by Americans *Russ Improved Wood Molding Machine A Lost Civilisation *Girards "Palier Glissant" A Happv New Year The Suez Canal not yet a Failure Tubular Boilers and Boiler Explosions Professor Fiske's Lecture at Harvard The Brighter Side The American Institute Prizes Awarded to Steam Engines A Protest against the Canadian Patent Law American Railway Management Scientific Lecture before the American Institute The Battle Fields of Sceence How French Bank Notes are Made What the Newspapers Say Chinese Method of Preserving Eggs Steam Boiler Explosion Editorial Summary The Steven Breech Loading Rifle * A Novel Improved Hand Vise The Mound Builders of Colorado *The Woven-Wire Mattress Flouring Mill Hazards Fire-Proof Building The Decline of American Shipping Aerial Navigation-A Suggestion Putty Floors of Jewelers Shops and otherwise Western Demand for Agricultural Implements Economical Steam Engine Friction and Percussion Oiling a Preservative of Brownstone Interesting Correspondence from China Commumcation Between Deaf and Blind Mutes Cheap Cotton Press Wanted A Singular Freak of a Magnet Preservation of Iron The Bananas and Plantains of the Tropics Putting Up Stoves The Magic Lantern The Largest well in the World--Capacity 1,000,000 gallons of water per Day Paper for Building *Improved Muzzle-Pivoting Gun Stock Feeding by Clock Work Milk and What Comes of It *Improved Hay Elevator *Improvement in Lamp Wicks Great Transformation Answers to Correspondents Recent American and Foreign Patents New Books and Publications List of Patents * * * * * Engines of the Spanish Gunboats. In our description of these boats in No. 25, Vol. XXI., special mention was made of the compactness of the engines. It has frequently been urged as an objection against the twin screw system that the double set of engines, four steam cylinders with duplicates of all the working parts called for on this system, render the whole too complicated and heavy for small vessels, preventing, at the same time, the application of surface condensation. In the engines of the Spanish gunboats, of which we annex an illustration from _Engineering_, the designer, Captain Ericsson, has overcome these objections by introducing a surface condenser, which, while it performs the function of condensing the steam to be returned to the boiler in the form of fresh water, serves as the principal support of the engines, dispensing entirely with the usual framework. Besides this expedient, each pair of cylinders have their slide frames for guiding the movements of the piston rods cast in one piece. Altogether the combination, is such that the total weight and space occupied by these novel twin screw engines do not exceed the ordinary single screw engines of equal power. Several improvements connected with the working gear have been introduced. [Illustration: ENGINES OF THE TWIN SCREW SPANISH GUNBOATS] The outer bearings of the propeller shafts, always difficult to regulate and keep in order on the twin screw system, are selfadjusting and accommodate themselves to every change of the direction of the shafts. This is effected by their being spherical externally, and resting in corresponding cavities in the stern braces or hangers. The spring bearings for supporting the middle of the shafts are also arranged on a similar self-adjusting principle. The thrust bearing is of peculiar construction, the arrangement being such that the bearing surfaces remain in perfect contact however much the shaft may be out of line. The reversing gear likewise is quite peculiar, insuring complete control over the movement of the two propellers under all circumstances. It is claimed that these engines are the lightest and most compact yet constructed for twin screw vessels. * * * * * The Torpedo Boat Problem. The _Army and Navy Journal_ thinks the problem of a torpedo boat capable of firing rapidly and with certainty, has at length reached a satisfactory solution. It says: "A boat has been completed which is proved by experiment to be faultless in machinery and arrangement. On the 2d of December, Secretary Robeson, Vice-Admiral Porter, and Commodore Case, Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, went to the Navy Yard at Washington, to witness the experiment with this new engine of destruction. After examining the workings of the machinery, and the manner of firing, one of the destructives was put in the frame and the party proceeded to the shore to witness the result. A torpedo of only thirty-six pounds was first run out with rapidity and fired; but the result showed that this small amount of powder, even, would have been sufficient to destroy any ship, by lifting her out of the water and breaking her back, even if her bottom was not knocked out altogether. Mud and water were thrown up together, and the concussion was felt far up in the Navy Yard, the ground being shaken by the shock of the powder against the bed of the river. The concussion felt on board the torpedo-boat was not more than that caused by a wave striking a vessel at sea. "Several torpedoes were fired from the vessel, the explosion of which the party witnessed on board, as they desired to ascertain for themselves the effect of the shock. The result seemed satisfactory, as no change whatever is contemplated in the machinery, which is very simple, and 'works to a charm.' The torpedo vessel is the _Nina_, a very strong iron boat of three hundred and fifty tuns burden, capable of crossing the ocean, and having a speed of seventeen knots an hour. She is not impervious to heavy shot, but can be made so, and is capable of resisting any ordinary projectile that could be brought to bear on her from the decks of a ship of war. Her decks will be made torpedo and shot-proof, and several arrangements will be applied, now that it is known that the torpedo system is a success. Such a vessel as the _Nina_, attacking an enemy's squadron on our coast some dark night, or entering an enemy's port, could destroy half the vessels in the harbor, and easily escape as few vessels could overtake her. Such a vessel could, for instance, enter the harbor of Havana, and destroy every vessel of war in the port, under cover of darkness. A squadron supplied with such boats to be used to attack, after the fight began, and the ships were enveloped in smoke, would have a most decided advantage against an enemy not thus armed for torpedo warfare. It is reported that our torpedo navy will consist of twenty vessels, none of which will have a less speed than twelve knots, and the fastest of them will go seventeen knots." * * * * * SUGAR MAKING IN LOUISIANA. The New Orleans _Times_ contains, in a late number, an account of the manufacture of sugar as conducted on the Poychas estate, from which we extract portions containing the essential particulars of cane sugar making as conducted in the southern portions of the United States. "Reaching the Cane shed, the crop, dumped into piles, is received by a crowd of feeders, who place it (eight or ten stalks at a time) on the cane carrier. This is an elevator, on an endless band of wood and iron, which carries them to the second story, where the stalks drop between the rollers. An immense iron tank below, called a juice box, receives the liquid portion, and another elevator bears the bruised and broken fragments to the opposite side of the building, where they are dropped into the bagasse burner. "This invention, at its introduction, caused more scientific inquiry and dispute, probably, than any other of the age, and settled beyond question the possibility of combustion, without the use of atmospheric air. The process consists in dropping the wet, spongy mass into a fire of wood or coal, and closing the furnace doors. The steam arising from the drying matter passes to a chamber in the rear, where, by the intense heat, it is decomposed. Oxygen and hydrogen (both strong combustibles) unite with the carbon, reaching there in the form of smoke, and a white heat is the result. "Cane juice, as it escapes from the mill, could scarcely be considered inviting to either palate or vision. The sweet, slimy mass of fluid, covered with foam, and filled with sticks, has more the appearance of the water in a brewer's vat than anything which now suggests itself. A small furnace, containing a quantity of burning sulphur, sends through a tube a volume of its stifling fumes, and these, caught by jets of steam, thoroughly impregnate the contents of the juice box. Having received its first lesson in cleanliness, the liquid now rises through a tube to the series of clarifiers on the second floor. They are heated by a chain of steam pipes running along the bottom, and being filled, the juice slowly simmers Much of the foreign substance rises in a scum to the surface and is skimmed off by the sugar maker. It is further purified by the addition of Thomaston or what is called sugar lime. At one half a peck is considered sufficient for seven hundred and fifty gallons of juice, but much depends upon the quantity of saccharine matter it contains. Another set of pipes now permit the liquor to run into the evaporators, in the boiling room below. These are also heated by circles of steam pipes, and the liquid is first gently simmered, to enable any additional foreign substance to rise to the surface and be skimmed off. "After that the steam is turned on fully, and the juice boils until it reaches the solidity of twenty-five degrees, as measured by the saccharometer. This point attained, more pipes conduct it to a series of square iron tanks called filterers. Each is provided with a false bottom, covered with thick woolen blankets, and through these the juice slowly drips into an immense iron vessel called a sirup tank. "The process of cleaning has now been completed, and the sirup is pumped into the covered vessel previously alluded to, called the vacuum pan. "This is also heated by layers of steam pipes, and here the liquor boils until the process of crystallization is completed. This end achieved, another conductor permits the substance to slowly descend to a large square iron tank, called a strike-pan. The process of emptying the vacuum pan is technically called a "strike." We now find a reddish brown substance, having somewhat the appearance of soft mortar. "Men are at hand with square wooden boxes, and while the sugar is still warm, it is placed in rotary cylinders, protected on the inside by wire guards, called centrifugals. "Placed on a horizontal, they revolve with a velocity which frequently reaches 1200 a minute. The damp, dingy looking pile instantly spreads, a broad circle of yellow is first visible on the inner rim of the machine, and this slowly whitening finally becomes a shining ring of snowy sugar. To effect this result requires the aid of nine steam boilers, three steam engines, a vacuum pan, three large evaporators, five clarifiers, five filters, an immense sirup tank, the juice box, mill, bagasse furnace, and fifteen coolers. "With the engineers, sugar makers, firemen, and laborers, thirty-eight persons are constantly on duty in this sugar-house. "Doubling this number, to give each the necessary rest, swells the gathering to seventy-six souls, who, during the grinding season, find employment at the sugar-house alone. This of course does not include the laborers employed in gathering and bringing in the crop, and the great number occupied in odd jobs and the extensive repairs which are constantly going on." * * * * * Sticking, or Court Plaster. This plaster is well known from its general use and its healing properties. It is merely a kind of varnished silk, and its manufacture is very easy. Bruise a sufficient quantity of isinglass, and let it soak in a little warm water for four-and-twenty hours; expose it to heat over the fire till the greater part of the water is dissipated, and supply its place by proof spirits of wine, which will combine with the isinglass. Strain the whole through a piece of open linen, taking care that the consistence of the mixture shall be such that, when cool, it may form a trembling jelly. Extend the piece of black silk, of which you propose making your plaster, on a wooden frame, and fix it in that position by means of tacks or pack-thread. Then apply the isinglass (after it has been rendered liquid by a gentle heat) to the silk with a brush of fine hair (badgers' is the best). As soon as this first coating is dried, which will not be long, apply a second; and afterwards, if you wish the article to be very superior, a third. When the whole is dry, cover it with two or three coatings of the balsam of Peru. This is the genuine court plaster. It is pliable, and never breaks, which is far from being the case with many of the spurious articles which are sold under that name. Indeed, this commodity is very frequently adulterated. A kind of plaster, with a very thick and brittle covering, is often sold for it. The manufacturers of this, instead of isinglass, use common glue, which is much cheaper; and cover the whole with spirit varnish, instead of balsam of Peru. This plaster cracks, and has none of the balsamic smell by which the genuine court plaster is distinguished. Another method of detecting the adulteration is to moisten it with your tongue _on the side opposite to that which is varnished_; and, if the plaster be genuine, it will adhere exceedingly well. The adulterated plaster is too hard for this; it will not stick, unless you moisten it on the varnished side.--_The Painter, Gilder, and Varnisher's Companion_. * * * * * AN IMPROVED HOISTING PULLEY WANTED. A gentleman of this city has sent us the accompanying diagram of an improved hoisting pulley, for which he say she would be willing to pay any reasonable price provided he knew where to obtain it--the wheel, not the price. It is a pulley within a pulley, the friction of the outer one upon the inner one--the latter being held by a ratchet and pawl-acting as a brake in lowering weights, while both would turn together in elevating weights. The idea is rather an ingenious one, but we are confident our inventors can attain a like object by simpler means. [Illustration] * * * * * THE VACUUM METHOD OF MAKING ICE.--An ice and cold producing machine has been invented by Herr Franz Windhausen, Brunswick. The action of the machine is based on the principle of producing cold by the expansion of atmospheric air, which is accomplished by means of mechanical power. The machines require no chemicals, nothing being used in them but water and atmospheric air. They may be wrought by steam, water, or wind, and they produce from 100 to 1,000 lbs. of ice per hour, according to size, at a cost of from 2d. to 5d. per 100 lbs., this difference resulting from the varying prices of fuel and the mode of working chosen. One of their uses is to cool rooms, cellars, theaters, hospitals, compartments of ships, etc.--_Builder_. * * * * * FERDINAND DE LESSEPS--CHIEF PROMOTER OF THE SUEZ CANAL. [From the Phrenological Journal.] The scheme of re-opening the canal of the Pharaohs between the Mediterranean and Red seas, and thus connecting by a short cut across the Isthmus of Suez the commerce of Europe and Asia, though long entertained by the first Napoleon, may fairly be claimed for M. de Lesseps. His attention was doubtless first drawn to it by reading the memorable report of M. la Pére, who was employed by Bonaparte to make a survey in 1798. The credit of designing and executing the great work belongs alike to him. With the general plan, progress, and purpose of the Canal, the American reader has, during the past few months, been made tolerably familiar. He is the son of Jean Baptiste Barthelemi, Baron de Lesseps, who was born at Cette, a French port on the Mediterranean, in 1765. Jean Baptiste was for five years French Vice-Consul at St. Petersburg. In 1785 he accompanied La Perouse on a voyage to Kamtchatka, whence he brought by land the papers containing a description of the expedition. In 1788 he was Consul at Kronstadt and St. Petersburg. From St. Petersburg he was called, in 1812, by the Emperor Napoleon, to Moscow, as _intendant_. From the latter city, in 1814, he proceeded to Lisbon, and was stationed there as Consul until 1823. He died at Paris, May 6, 1834. Ferdinand, the subject of this sketch, was born at Versailles in 1805, and is consequently in his sixty-fourth year, though his appearance is that of a man little past the meridian of life. Early in life he evinced peculiar aptitude for the diplomatic career in which he has since distinguished himself--a career as varied and romantic as it is brilliant. In 1825 he was appointed _attaché_ to the French Consulate at Lisbon. Two years later found him engaged in the Commercial Department of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. During the latter part of 1828 he was _attaché_ to the Consul-General at Tunis; and in 1831 he was dispatched by his Government as Consul to Alexandria. Hard work and rapid promotion for _le jeune diplomat!_ But the most eventful period of his long and wonderfully active career lay yet before him. Seven years subsequent to his appointment at Alexandria, and consequently when he was in his thirty-fifth year, he was sent as Consul to Rotterdam. From Rotterdam he proceeded to Malaga in 1839, to negotiate in behalf of French commerce with the Spanish Government. In the latter part of the same year he was transferred to the Consulate at Barcelona, where during the two subsequent years he was especially active, and signally distinguished himself against the reign of Espartero. In 1844 we again find him in Alexandria, whither he was sent to take the place of Lavalette. But the time for the development of his great project had not yet come. He did not long remain in the Egyptian capital. Returning to his former position in Barcelona he was witness to some of the scenes of the revolution of February. In 1848 he was appointed French Minister at the court of Madrid. Remaining in the Spanish capital about a year, he returned to Paris immediately after the revolution of '48, and in May of the following year was dispatched as Envoy of the French Republic to the Republican Government of Mazzini at Rome, where he took a leading part in the abortive negotiations which preceded the restoration of the Pope by a French army. [Illustration] In 1854 he received a commission from the _Sociéte d'études du Canal de Suez_ at Paris to negotiate with Säid Pacha for the construction of the canal projected in 1816. Accordingly, toward the close of that year, we again find him on the Isthmus, preparing for his great work. This time he came to conquer. His mission was crowned with success, and the necessary concession made in November of that year. A palace and a retinue of servants were assigned to his use, and he was treated, as a guest of the Viceroy, with the utmost respect. Great opposition followed, especially from England; and it was not till January, 1856, that the second and fuller concession was granted by Säid Pacha, and a _Compagnie International_ fully organized. In 1858 M. Lesseps succeeded in raising two hundred millions of francs in France, and in 1859 he proceeded to Egypt and planted the Egyptian flag in the harbor of the ancient Pelusium, the great sea-port of Egypt thirty centuries ago, where Port Säid now stands. He laid, at the same time, the foundation of a lighthouse, and proudly proclaimed the work commenced. Fresh difficulties--chiefly of a political nature--interposed, but the indefatigable Lesseps never despaired. In 1859 he had the satisfaction of seeing his company and work placed upon a firm footing, though the final decision of the French Emperor was not given till July, 1864. From that time to the present hour the Canal has steadily progressed toward completion. The personal appearance of M. de Lesseps is very striking. Though long past middle age, he has a fresh and even youthful appearance. Both face and figure are well preserved; his slightly curling gray hair sets off in pleasing contrast his bronzed yet clear complexion, his bright eye, and genial smile. He is somewhat over the medium stature, possessed of a compact and well-knit frame, carries his head erect, and moves about with a buoyancy and animation perfectly marvelous in one of his years and experience. His address is that of the well-bred, well-educated French gentleman that he is. His manner is winning, his voice clear and under most excellent control, as all those who have listened to his admirable lectures on the Canal at the late Paris Exposition cannot fail to remember. What is perhaps most remarkable in a man so bred and constituted, is that with great gentleness of speech and suavity of manner he combines a strength of will and fixity of purpose worthy of Napoleon or Caesar himself. Beneath that calm exterior lay a power which needed but the stimulus of a great idea to develop. Though beset by difficulties, laughed at, and maligned, he has never for a moment swerved from his purpose or relaxed his efforts to accomplish it. Neither the sneers of Stevenson and his associate engineers, the heavy broadside of the "Thunderer," or the squibs of _Punch_, ever made any visible impression on the purpose or action of Lesseps.--"My purpose from the commencement was to have confidence," said he. How bravely he has maintained his principle and redeemed his pledge let the ceremonies which marked the completion and inauguration of his great work tell--when sea sent greeting to sea; and let the keels of richly laden argosies from Cathay and from Ind, which plow the waters of the Canal, declare. * * * * * AN INGENIOUS VENT PEG. The engraving illustrates an English invention of value in that it provides a means of giving vent to casks from which liquids are to be drawn, at the same time excluding the air when the drawing is discontinued, and thus preventing deterioration in the liquid by undue exposure to air. [Illustration] The principle on which it operates is that of admitting just so much air as may be required to fill the vacant space produced by the withdrawal of the liquor from time to time, and affording this air no egress, thus hermetically sealing the barrel. This is effected by means of a valve opening inward, at the upper portion of the peg, so long as the density of the exterior air is in excess of that within. This action takes place at the very instant of the flow of the liquid, and ceases with it; for at that instant all further supply is shut off, there being no further pressure. * * * * * THE LARGE TREES OF TEXAS.--The large court-house of Navarro county is said to have been covered with shingles made from a single cedar tree. The oaks, pecans, and cedars of that section of the country attain an immense size. A pecan tree in Navarro county, on the banks of the Trinity, measured twenty-three feet in circumference. The cedars are often more than 100 feet high. * * * * * ELECTRIC MESSAGES.--Although it may require an hour, or two or three hours, to transmit a telegraphic message to a distant city, yet it is the mechanical adjustment by the sender and receiver which really absorbs this time; the actual transit is practically instantaneous, and so it would be from here to China, so far as the current itself is concerned. * * * * * A New English Patent Pulley Block. The following description of a new pulley block, which we take from the _Ironmonger_, does not give as clear an idea of the invention as could be desired, but it shows that invention in this field has not yet exhausted itself: [Illustration] "The block is made on the differential principle. The lifting chain is passed over two sheaves, each of which is geared internally, the one having one or more teeth in excess of the other. Revolving around these internal teeth is a pinion, actuated by an eccentric, which is keyed on to a shaft passing through the center of the block, with a bearing at each end in the outside frame of the block. At one end of this shaft is a wheel with an endless hand chain passing over it; this gives the motion to the eccentric shaft. The teeth of the internal pinion are broad enough to gear into the teeth of both the sheaves, but as there is more teeth in one than in the other, they (the teeth) are not exactly opposite each other, and therefore will not admit the teeth of the revolving pinion without moving; but the tooth of the pinion, acting as a wedge, and entering with great power, pushes the one tooth forward and the other tooth back; and this continually occurring, a continual rotary motion is given to the sheaves, in opposite directions, with a power which is proportioned to the number of the teeth, the throw of eccentric, and the leverage gained by the diameter of the hand wheel. The lifting chain is passed over the one sheave, then down, and up over the other, the two ends being attached to a powerful cross bar, to which is connected the lifting hook. By this means the weight is distributed over the two sheaves and the two parts of the chain, increasing the safety and diminishing the friction of the block. "The blocks are very simple in construction, and are not at all liable to get out of order; the construction being such that the weight cannot run down, though the men lifting let go the chain. They hang quite plumb when in action, and the men are able to stand clear away from under the load, as the hand-wheel chain can be worked at any angle." * * * * * Plants In Sleeping Rooms. The following from the able pen of Dr. J.C. Draper, in the January number of the _Galaxy_, will answer some inquiries lately received on the subject, and is a brief, but clear exposition of the injurious effects of plants in sleeping apartments: "Though the air is dependent for the renewal of its oxygen on the action of the green leaves of plants, it must not be forgotten that it is only in the presence and under the stimulus of light that these organisms decompose carbonic acid. All plants, irrespective of their kind or nature, absorb oxygen and exhale carbonic acid in the dark. The quantity of noxious gas thus eliminated is, however, exceedingly small when compared with the oxygen thrown out during the day. When they are flowering, plants exhale carbonic acid in considerable quantity, and at the same time evolve heat. In this condition, therefore, they resemble animals as regards their relation to the air; and a number of plants placed in a room would, under these circumstances, tend to vitiate the air. "While the phanerogamia, or flowering plants, depend on the air almost entirely for their supply of carbon, and are busy during the day in restoring to it the oxygen that has been removed by animals, many of the inferior cryptogamia, as the fungi and parasitic plants, obtain their nourishment from material that has already been organized. They do not absorb carbonic acid, but, on the contrary, they act like animals, absorbing oxygen and exhaling carbonic acid at all times. It is, therefore, evident that their presence in a room cannot be productive of good results. "Aside from the highly deleterious action that plants may exert on the atmosphere of a sleeping room, by increasing the proportion of carbonic acid during the night, there is another and more important objection to be urged against their presence in such apartments. Like animals, they exhale peculiar volatile organic principles, which in many instances render the air unfit for the purposes of respiration. Even in the days of Andronicus this fact was recognized, for he says, in speaking of Arabia Felix, that 'by reason of myrrh, frankincense, and hot spices there growing, the air was so obnoxious to their brains, that the very inhabitants at some times cannot avoid its influence.' What the influence on the brains of the inhabitants may have been does not at present interest us: we have only quoted the statement to show that long ago the emanations from plants were regarded as having an influence on the condition of the air; and, in view of our present ignorance, it would be wise to banish them from our sleeping apartments, at least until we are better informed regarding their true properties." * * * * * PATENT OFFICE ILLUSTRATIONS.--We are indebted to Messrs. Jewett & Chandler, of Buffalo, N.Y., for advance sheets of the illustrations designed to accompany the Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the year 1868. We have frequently had occasion to commend the skill and fidelity of these illustrations. They are most admirably done, and the value of our Patent Office Reports is much enhanced thereby. In fact without these illustrations the reports would be of little value. * * * * * Improved Treadle Motion. It is well known that the ordinary means employed to propel light machinery by the foot are fatiguing in the extreme and although the best of these is the rock shaft with foot pieces, employed almost universally in modern sewing machines, this requires the operator to sit bolt upright, a position very trying to the back, and one which has been shown to be productive of weakness and even permanent disease. The device shown in the engraving employs only the swinging motion of the leg to generate the required power. [Illustration: GOODES' IMPROVED TREADLE MOTION.] A pendulum, A, is pivoted to the underside of the table and carries a heavy disk, B. To the central pivot of B is attached a foot piece, C. The bottom of B is slotted, and through the slot passes a stationary rod, D, which holds the bottom of the disk from vibrating while it causes the upper part to reciprocate with the swinging of A. To the upper part of B is pivoted a pitman which actuates the crank as shown. In operation the foot is placed upon the foot piece, and a swinging motion is imparted by it to the pendulum, which is ultimately converted into rotary motion by the crank as described. The heavy disk, B, gives steadiness to the motion, and acts in concert with the fly wheel on the crank shaft for this purpose; but it is not essential that this part of the device should be a disk; any equivalent may be substituted for the same purpose. Patented, through the Scientific American Patent Agency, Oct, 26, 1869, by E. A. Goodes For further information address Philadelphia Patent and Novelty Co., 717 Spring Garden street, Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * Improved Method of Catching Curculios. This is a novel and curious invention, made by Dr. Hull, of Alton, Ill., for the purpose of jarring off and catching the curculio from trees infested by this destructive insect. It is a barrow, with arms and braces covered with cloth, and having on one side a slot, which admits the stem of the tree. The curculio catcher, or machine, is run against the tree three or four times, with sufficient force to impart a jarring motion to all its parts. The operator then backs far enough to bring the machine to the center of the space between the rows, turns round, and in like manner butts the tree in the opposite row. In this way a man may operate on three hundred trees per hour. A bag and a broom are carried by the operator by which the insects are swept from the cloth and consigned to destruction. [Illustration: CURCULIO CATCHER.] * * * * * Remains of a Megatherium in Ohio. The Columbus _State Journal_, of Dec. 6, says "there is now on exhibition at the rooms of the State Board of Agriculture, or headquarters of the Geological Corps, a section of the femur or thigh bone of an animal of the mastodon species, the fossilized remains of which were recently discovered in Union county. These remains were found in a drift formation about three feet below the surface, and are similar to the remains of the Megatherium found in other parts of the State. Arrangements were made by Mr. Klippart, of the Geological Corps, to have the skeleton or the parts thereof removed with proper care. Before excavations had proceeded far bad weather set in, and work has been abandoned. The section of the femur, upper part, with socket ball, is about twenty inches in length, or about half the length of the thigh bone. This would make the aggregate length of the bones of the leg about ten feet. The ball is twenty-two inches in circumference, and the bone lower down, of course, much larger. From the part of the skeleton secured, it is estimated that the hight of the animal was twelve and a half feet, and the skeleton entire much larger than the specimen now in the British Museum. As this particular species, or remains thereof, have been found only in Ohio, this specimen has been named the _Megatharium Ohioensis_. The animals lived, it is supposed, in the period immediately preceding the human period, and were after the elephant type." Exhuming operations will be resumed in the spring, and if the skeleton is removed in good shape or a good state of preservation, it will be set up in the Echo room at the Capitol, where the fossils collected by the Geological Corps are now being arranged and stored. * * * * * Artificial Ivory. A process for producing artificial ivory has been published in a German journal. The inventor makes a solution of india-rubber in chloroform and passes chlorine gas through it. After this, he heats the solution to drive off any excess of chlorine, and also the solvent, whereupon he has left behind a pasty mass with which it is only necessary to incorporate sufficient precipitated carbonate of lime or sulphate of lead, or, indeed, any other dense white powder, to obtain a material which may be pressed into molds to form whatever articles may be desired. The details of this process are obviously incomplete, and the success of it may be doubted. Only good and well masticated rubber could be employed, and even then a dilute solution must be made, and any earthy impurities allowed to deposit. In the next place, we are doubtful of the bleaching action of chlorine on rubber, and, moreover, chloroform is, under some circumstances, decomposed by chlorine. Lastly, it is clear that, to obtain a hard material at all resembling ivory, it would be necessary to make a "hard cure," for which a considerable proportion of sulphur would be required. The simple purification of india-rubber by means of chloroform, would, however, furnish a mass of a very fair color. * * * * * An iron car made of cylindrical form is now used on the Bengal Railway, for the carriage of cotton and other produce. It is much lighter and safer than the ordinary car. We believe in iron cars. * * * * * ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND.--At the rate old subscribers are renewing, and new ones coming in, there is a prospect that our ambition to increase the circulation of this paper to one hundred thousand will be gratified. * * * * * AMERICAN AND ENGLISH RAILWAY PRACTICE CONTRASTED. A paper on "American Locomotives and Rolling Stock," read before the Institution of Civil Engineers, in England, with an abstract on the discussion thereon, has been forwarded to us by the publishers, William Clowes and Sons, Stamford street and Charing Cross, London. We have seldom met with a pamphlet of greater interest and value. The whole subject of American as contrasted with English railroad practice is reviewed, and the differences which exist, with the necessities for such differences ably discussed. Mr. Colburn shows these differences to be external rather than fundamental, and traces many of the peculiarities of American construction to the "initiative of English engineers." The cause for the adoption and retention of these peculiarities he attributes to "the necessities of a new country and the comparative scarcity of capital," and thinks that but for these causes" American railways and their rolling stock would have doubtless been constructed, as in other countries, upon English models, and worked, in most respects, upon English principles of management. He reviews the origin and introduction of American features of railway practice, and points out as the distinguishing feature of American locomotives and rolling stock the bogie, or swiveling truck. "Keeping in mind the distinguishing merits of the bogie, the other differences between English and American locomotives are differences more of costume and of toilet than of vital principles of construction." The author attributes the origin of the greater subdivision of rolling weight and consequent coupling of wheels on American roads to the comparatively weak and imperfect permanent way, estimating the maximum weight per wheel as being for many years four English tuns, while three tuns he considers, as more than the average for each coupled wheel of American locomotives. To follow the author through the whole of his able paper, and the discussion which it elicited, would occupy more of our space than we can spare for the purpose. We will, however, give in the author's own language, an account of an experiment conducted by him in 1855 on the Erie Railroad. "In the autumn of 1855, the author, at the request of Mr. (now General) M'Callum, the manager of the Erie Railroad, took charge of an experimental train, which he ran over the whole length of the line and back, a total distance of nearly 900 miles. The same engine was employed throughout the run, occupying in all nearly three weeks, making an average for each week day of about 50 miles. The line is divided into four divisions, varying considerably in respect of gradients, and the utmost load the engine could draw was taken in both directions over each division. The maximum inclinations were 1 in 88. The results of the experiments were so voluminous, that it will be sufficient to detail the particulars of what may be termed crucial tests of adhesion and resistance to traction. "The engine had four coupled wheels and a bogie, the total weight in working trim being 29½ tuns, of which 17-7/8 tuns rested on the coupled wheels available for adhesion. The coupled wheels were 5 feet in diameter; the outside cylinders were 17 inches in diameter, and the stroke 24 inches. The safety valves were set to blow off at 130 lbs., and the steam, as observed by a Bourdon gage, was seldom allowed to exceed that limit. No indicator diagrams were taken, nor was any measure taken of the wood burnt, all that could be consumed by the engine, in maintaining the requisite steam, being supplied. The tender, loaded, weighed 181 tuns. The train drawn consisted of eight-wheel wagons fully loaded with deals. The average weight of each wagon was 5 tuns 8 cwt. 3 qrs., and of each wagon with its load 15 tuns 5 cwt. 3 qrs. nearly. The wagons had cast-iron chilled wheels, each 2 feet 6 inches in diameter, with inside journals 3 7/8 inches in diameter, and 8 inches long. All the wagons had been put in complete order, and the journals, fitted with oil-tight boxes, were kept well oiled. The gage of the line was 6 feet. The weather was most favorable, clear and dry, with the exception of a single day of heavy rain. "Upon about one hundred miles of the line, forming a portion of the Susquehanna division, a train of one hundred wagons, weighing, with engine and tender, 1,572 tuns was taken. The train was a few feet more than half a mile in length. "At one point it was stopped where the line commenced an ascent of 24 feet in four miles, averaging 1 in 880 up for the whole distance. There were also long and easy curves upon this portion. The train was taken up and purposely stopped on the second mile, to be sure of starting again with no aid from momentum. The average speed was 5 miles an hour, and neither was the pressure of steam increased nor sand used except in starting from the stops purposely made. The engine, even were its full boiler pressure of 130 lbs. maintained as effective pressure upon the pistons throughout the whole length of their stroke, could not have exerted a tractive force greater than (17 x 17 x 130 lbs. x 2 ft.)/ 5 ft = 15,028 lbs.; nor is it at all probable that the effective cylinder pressure could have approached this limit by from 10 lbs. to 15 lbs. per square inch. Supposing, however, for the sake of a reductio ad absurdum, that the full boiler pressure had been maintained upon the pistons for the whole length of their strokes, the adhesion of the coupled driving wheels, not deducting the internal resistances of the engine, would have been 15028/40050 3/8 of the weight upon them. In any case there was a resistance of 4,011 lbs. due to gravity, and if even 120 lbs. mean effective cylinder pressure be assumed, corresponding to a total tractive force of 13,872 lbs., the quotient representing the rolling and other resistances, exclusive of gravity, would be but 6.27 lbs. per tun of the entire train; a resistance including all the internal resistances of the engine, the resistance of the curves, easy although they were, and the loss in accelerating and retarding the train in starting and stopping. This estimate of resistance would correspond, at the observed speed of 5 miles an hour (upwards of ¾ of an hour having been consumed on the 4 miles), to 185 indicated H.P., which, with the driving wheels, making but 28 revolutions per minute, would be the utmost that an engine with but 1,038 square feet of heating surface could be expected to exert. This was the highest result observed during the three weeks' trial, but one or two others are worthy of mention. On the Delaware division of the same line, the train, of 1,572 tuns' weight, was run over 5 consecutive miles of absolutely level line, at a mean rate of 9.23 miles an hour, and during the same day, over 5 other consecutive miles of level at a mean rate of 9.7 miles per hour. On both levels there were 14½ chain curves of good length, and the speed, from 9 to 12 miles an hour, at which the train entered the respective levels, was not quite regularly maintained throughout the half hour expended in running over them. But if even 7 lbs. per tun of the total weight be taken as the resistance at these speeds, the tractive force will be 11,004 lbs., which is more than one fourth the adhesion weight of 40,050 lbs. On the next day, the same engine drew 30 wagons weighing 466½ tuns, or, including engine and tender, 514 tuns nearly, up a gradient of 1 in 117½, three miles long, at a mean speed of 10¼ miles an hour. The resistance due to gravity was 9,814 lbs., and supposing the other resistance to traction to amount to no more than 7 lbs. per tun, the total resistance would be 13,412 lbs., corresponding to a mean effective cylinder pressure of 117 lbs. per square inch, and to a co-efficient of adhesion of almost exactly one third. "It is needless to repeat instances of much the same kind, as occurring during the experiment referred to. The author is bound to say that they were, no doubt, influenced by the favorable circumstances of weather, and something is to be allowed also for the great length of train drawn, very long trains having a less tractive resistance per tun on a level than short ones, and something, possibly more than is commonly supposed, may have been due to the use of oil-tight axle boxes, the saponaceous compound known as 'railway grease' being nowhere in use on railways in the States. It could not possibly be used, except in a congealed form, in the severe American winters; and Messrs. Guebhard and Dieudonné's experiments (_vide_ "De la résistance des trains et de la puissance des machines." 8vo. Paris, 1868, p. 36) made in 1867, on the Eastern Railway of France, showed a very considerable diminution in the resistance of oil-boxed rolling stock as compared with that fitted with grease boxes. But, weighed upon the other hand, are the facts, first, that the line was of 6-feet gage, and, _pro tanto_, so much the worse for traction; secondly, that the wheels were comparatively small, and the inside journals of comparatively large diameter, the ratio of the former to the latter being as 7¾ to 1, instead of 12 to 1 as on English lines. It is difficult to believe that the length and steadiness of the double bogie goods wagons, scarcely liable as they are to lateral vibrations, had not something to do with the result, which is in some respects unique in the history of railway traction. The result, although not absolutely showing the real resistance to traction, nor the real adhesion of the engine, presents this alternative; namely, that the resistance must have been unusually small, or the adhesion unusually large." In the discussion which followed some doubts were expressed as to the accuracy of Mr. Colburn's conclusions, drawn from the experiments described; but it was conceded by some who took part in the discussion that some of the features of our practice might be advantageously copied in England. For the most part, however, the opinion prevailed that the features of our system, which are here regarded as almost indispensable, could not be introduced into English practice with advantage. * * * * * BOILER COVERING. BY C.M. O'HARA, C.E. At the regular weekly meeting of the Polytechnic Association of the American Institute, held on Thursday evening, the 25th ult., the subject of boiler clothing was discussed at some length, but without any decisive conclusion being arrived at respecting the most serviceable and economical material for that purpose. It appeared from the testimony adduced, that though there is a variety of substances in use, even those which are practically acknowledged as being the most efficient are far from coming up to the required standard of utility, and are characterized by defects which are at once forced upon us by a little close examination. Felt is an admirable non-conductor of heat, but owing to its combustible nature it is quite unreliable when subject to the heat of a high pressure of steam. A large fragment of this material which had been taken off the boiler of a North River steamboat was exhibited at the meeting, scorched and charred as if it had been exposed to the direct action of fire. For these reasons felt covering is, generally speaking, confined to boilers in which a comparatively low pressure of steam is maintained. But even under the most favorable circumstances of actual wear its durability is limited to a short period. Powdered charcoal possesses the elements of efficiency as a non-conductor in an eminent degree; but its susceptibility of taking fire militates strongly against its adoption as a boiler covering. Besides the materials above mentioned, there are some which come under the denomination of cements; but the use of such is somewhat at variance with what a dull world would call "facts." Employing them as a clothing for a vessel in which it is necessary to retain heat is certainly the wrong way of doing a light thing, if the evidence of distinguished experimenters be worth anything. The researches of most well-informed physical philosophers go to prove that the conducting properties of bodies are augmented by cohesion, and that heat is conveyed profusely and energetically through all solid and ponderable substances. Thus gold, silver, and others of the most solid metals are the best conductors. Next to the pure metals in conducting powers are rocks, flints, porcelain, earthenware, and the denser liquids as the solutions of the acids and alkalies. As a further evidence to prove that the passage of heat through all substances is increased by cohesion, even some of those which are known to be among the best conductors are deprived of this property by a division or disintegration of their particles. Pure silica in the state of hard, rock crystal is a better conductor than bismuth or lead; but if the rock crystal be pulverized, the diffusion of heat through its powder is very slow and feeble. Heat is conducted swiftly and copiously through transparent rock salt, but pulverization converts the solid mass into a good non-conductor. Caloric has for the same reason a stronger affinity for pure metals than for their oxides. Again, wood is known to be a better non-conductor when reduced to shavings or sawdust than when in the solid state. It is probably on this account that trees are protected by bark, which is not nearly so dense and hard a body as the wood. Wool, silk, and cotton are much diminished in conducting qualities when spun and woven, for the reason that their fibers are brought closer together. Count Rumford discovered that hot water, at a given temperature, when placed in a vessel jacketed with a clothing of twisted silk, and plunged into a freezing mixture, cooled down to 185° Fah. in 917 seconds. But when the same vessel was clothed with an equal thickness of raw silk, water at the same heat and under the same process required 1,264 seconds before it reached the same decrease of temperature. It was also found by Sir Humphry Davy that even metals became non-conductors when their cohesion was destroyed by reducing them to the gaseous state. It is now generally admitted that, heat being motion, anything, which, by the cohesion of particles, preserves the continuity of the molecular chain along which the motion is conveyed, must augment calorific transmission. On the other hand, when there is a division or disintegration of atoms, such as exists in sawdust, powdered charcoal, furs, and felt, the particles composing such bodies are separated from each other by spaces of air, which the instructed among us well know are good non-conductors of heat. The motion has, therefore, to pass from each particle of matter to the air, and again from the air to the particle adjacent to it. Hence, it will be readily seen, that in substances composed of separate or divided particles, the thermal bridge, so to speak, is broken, and the passage of heat is obstructed by innumerable barriers of confined air. The correctness of these assumptions has been so abundantly proved by experimental demonstrations, that every mind that is tolerably informed on the subject must be relieved of every shade of doubt respecting the greatly superior non-conducting powers which bodies consisting of separate atoms possess over those of a solid concrete nature. The next matter of interest connected with the subject under notice is its relation to the philosophy of radiation. It has long been known that the emission of heat from a polished metallic surface is very slight, but from a surface of porcelain, paper, or charcoal, heat is discharged profusely. Even many of the best non-conductors are powerful radiators, and throw off heat with a repellent energy difficult to conceive. "If two equal balls of thin, bright silver," says Sir John Leslie, "one of them entirely uncovered and the other sheathed in a case of cambric, be filled with water slightly warmed and then suspended in a close room, the former will lose only eleven parts in the same time that the latter will dissipate twenty parts." The superior heat-retaining capacity which a clean tin kettle possesses over one that has been allowed to collect smoke and soot, lies within the compass of the most ordinary observation. The experiments of the eminent philosopher just mentioned furnish a variety of suggestions on the radiation from heated surfaces. He found that, while the radiating power of clean lead was only 19, it rose to 45 when tarnished by oxidation, that the radiating power of plumbago was 75, and that of red lead 80. He also discovered that, while the radiating power of gold, silver, and polished tin was only 12, that of paper was 98, and lamp black no less than 100. He further says: "A silver pot will emit scarcely half as much heat as one of porcelain. The addition of a flannel, though indeed a slow conductor, far from checking the dissipation of heat, has directly a contrary tendency, for it presents to the atmosphere a surface of much greater propulsive energy, which would require a thickness of no less than three folds to counterbalance." It is safe to infer from this analogy that the felt covering of boilers should not only be of considerable thickness, but should be protected by an external jacketing of some sort; for, though felt is a good non-conductor, it is a powerful absorber and radiator, more especially when it has been allowed to contract soot and dust. Various experiments have lead to the general conclusion that the power of absorption is always in the same proportion as the power of radiation. It must be so. Were any substance a powerful radiator and at the same time a bad absorber, it would necessarily radiate faster than it would absorb, and its reduction of temperature would continue without limit. It has, furthermore, been proved that the absorptive property of substances increases as their reflecting qualities diminish. Hence, the radiating power of a surface is inversely as its reflecting power. It is for this reason that the polished metallic sheathing on the cylinders of locomotive engines, and on the boilers of steam fire engines, is not only ornamental but essentially useful. Decisive tests have also established the fact that radiation is effected more or less by color. "A black porcelain tea pot," observes Dr. Lardner, "is the worst conceivable material for that vessel, for both its material and color are good radiators of heat, and the liquid contained in it cools with the greatest possible rapidity; a polished silver or brass tea urn is much better adapted to retain the heat of the water than one of a dull brown, such as is most commonly used." A few facts like those above stated afford more decisive information regarding the nature of heat than columns of theory or speculation. Yet it is rather strange that when so many learned and reliable men have, experimented so much and commented with such persuasiveness upon the subtile agency of heat and the vast amount of waste that must accrue by injudicious management, comparatively few have availed themselves of the united labors of these indefatigable pyrologists; manufacturing owners and corporations still persisting in having their steam boilers painted black or dull red and leaving them exposed to the atmosphere. Some persons, who pass themselves off very satisfactorily as clever engineers, affect a contempt for the higher branches of science, and assert, in a very positive and self-sufficient manner that experiments made in a study or laboratory are on too trifling and small a scale to be practically relied upon; that a tin kettle or a saucepan is a very different thing to the boiler of a steam engine. This may be so in one sense, but the same chemical forces which operate upon the one will be just as active in a proportionate degree in their action upon the other. It was said by Aristotle that the laws of the universe are best observed in the most insignificant objects; for the same physical causes which hold together the stupendous frame of the universe may be recognized even in a drop of rain. The same observation may be applied to the laws of heat in all their ramifications; for, after all, our experiments are, in many instances but defective copies of what is continually going on in the great workshop of nature. It would be needless to insist on the wasteful and destructive effects produced by the exposure of boiler surfaces to the open atmosphere. Such a practice can be neither supported by experience nor justified by analogy; and it is to be hoped that it may before long be consigned to the limbo of antiquated absurdities and be satisfactorily forgotten. Seeing that it cannot with any show of reason be affirmed that the boiler covering materials in present use possess the requirements necessary to recommend them; the question arises as to what is the best means of achieving the object required. This is an inquiry which it is the office of time alone to answer. As the problem is obviously one of primary importance, and well worthy of the attention of inventors, it is hazarding nothing to predict its satisfactory solution at no distant date. The plain truth is, boilers have of late become gigantic foes to human life. Explosions have increased, are increasing, and should be diminished; and they are, in many instances, caused by boilers being strained and weakened by sudden contraction from having their surfaces exposed when the fire has been withdrawn from them. Boilers are also materially injured by the excessive furnace heat which it is necessary to maintain to compensate for the large amount of caloric which is dissipated from their surfaces, not only by radiation but from absorption by the surrounding atmosphere. As the views here laid down are drawn exclusively from the region of fact and experiment, it is to be hoped that an enlightened sense of self-interest may prompt those whom the subject may concern, to give it that special attention which its importance demands. * * * * * Attachment of Saws to Swing-Frames. To insure the efficiency of mill-saws, it is highly important to have them firmly secured in the frames by which they are reciprocated. Swing-frames for carrying saws are ordinarily of wrought iron or steel, and made up of several pieces mortised and tenoned together in the form of a rectangular frame or parallelogram, of which the longest sides are termed verticals and the shortest crossheads or crossrails. In the case of deal frames, the swing frame differs somewhat from that of a timber frame, in having two extra verticals, which separate it into two equal divisions. These are necessary in order that two deals may be operated upon simultaneously, each division being devoted to a separate deal, and likewise to enable the connecting-rod which works the frame to pass up the center and oscillate on a pin near the top, thereby avoiding the deep excavations and costly foundations required where the rod is engaged with the pin at the bottom. The rack that advances the deals to the saws passes through a "bow" in the connecting-rod and the middle of the frame, the deals are placed on either side of it, on rollers purposely provided. In sawing hard deals, the saws require to be sharpened about every tenth run or journey, and every twentieth for soft. Fifty runs, or one hundred deals, are reckoned an average day's work; this is inclusive of the time required for changing the saws, returning the rack for another run, and other exigencies. For attachment to swing-frames the saws have buckles riveted to them; these are by various modes connected to the crossheads. Each top buckle is passed through the crosshead and is pierced with a mortise for the reception of a thin steel wedge or key, by whose agency the blade is strained and tightened. The edge of the crosshead upon which the keys bed is steeled to lessen the wear invariably ensuing from frequently driving up the keys. The distances between the blades are adjusted by interposing strips of wood, or packing pieces, as they are termed, of equal thickness with the required boards or leaves; the whole is then pressed together and held in position by packing screws. The saws themselves are subsequently tightened by forcing home the keys until a certain amount of tension has been attained, this is ascertained only by the peculiar sound which emanates from the blade on being drawn considerably tight and tense. Great experience is required to accustom the ear to the correct intonation, as in general the tensile strain on the saws approximates so closely to the breaking point that one or two extra taps on the keys are quite sufficient to rupture them. Mr. Brunel, in the government saw-mills at Woolwich, adopted a method of hanging saws by means of a weighted lever, like a Roman steelyard. A cross-shaft affixed above the saws to the cornice of the main frame carried a lever, weighted at one end and provided with a hook or shackle at the other for engagement with the saw buckle. In using this apparatus the blades were strained one at a time by linking the lever to the buckle and then adjusting the movable weight until the desired tension was acquired, after which the key was inserted into the mortise and the lever released. This arrangement is not now in common use on account of the trouble attending its employment, and at present the saws are merely strained by hammering up the keys. The saw blades had usually a tensile strain of upwards of one tun per inch of breadth of blade. It is to be further observed that the cutting edges of the saws are not quite perpendicular, but have a little lead, or their upper ends overhang the lower about three eighths of an inch or one half of an inch, according to the nature of the material to be sawn. The object of this is that the saws may be withdrawn from the cuts in the ascending or back stroke, and allow the sawdust free escape. The eccentric actuating the mechanism for advancing the timber to the saws is generally set in such a manner that the feed commences just at the moment when the frame has attained half its ascending stroke, and continues until the entire stroke has been completed. By this regulation the saws are not liable to be suddenly choked, but come smoothly and softly into their work.--_Worssam's Mechanical Saws_. * * * * * PATENT DECISION. _In the matter of the application of William N. Bartholomew, assignor to J. Reckendorfer, for letters patent for a design for Rubber Eraser_--Letters patent for designs have increased in importance within the past few years. Formerly but few were granted, now many are issued. To this day they have made so little figure in litigation that but three reported cases are known in which design patents have come into controversy. With their increase, questions have arisen concerning their scope and character, which have given rise to dispute and to inquiry as to the correctness of the current practice of the office in this branch of invention. While on the one hand, it is insisted that the practice has always been uniform, and is therefore now fixed and definite; on the other, it is asserted, that there has never been, and is not now, any well-defined or uniform practice, either in the granting or refusal of design patents. The act of 1836 made no provision for the patenting of designs. The earliest legislation upon this subject is found in the act of August 29, 1842, section 3; and the only legislation upon the subject is found in this section and in section 11, of the act of March 2, 1861. The definition of the subject matter, or, in other words, of a "design," is the same in both acts. It is is follows: "That any citizen, etc., who, by his, her, or their own industry, genius, efforts, and expense, may have invented or produced any new and original design for a manufacture, whether of metal or other material or materials, any original design for a bust, statue, bas-relief, or composition in alto or basso-relievo, or any new and original impression being formed in marble or other material, or any new and useful pattern, or print, or picture, to be either worked into or worked on, or printed, or painted, or cast, or otherwise fixed on any article of manufacture, or any new and original shape or configuration of any article of manufacture not known or used by others, etc." This definition embraces five particulars. 1. A new and original design for a manufacture. 2. An original design for a bust, statue, etc. 3. A new and original impression or ornament to be placed on any article of manufacture. 4. A new and useful pattern, print, or picture to be worked into or worked on, or printed, or painted, or cast, or otherwise fixed on any article of manufacture. 5. A new and original shape or configuration of any article of manufacture. The first three of these classes would seem to refer to ornament only; the fourth to ornament, combined with utility, as in the case of trade marks; and the fifth to new shapes or forms of manufactured articles, which, for some reason, were preferable to those previously adopted. The disputed questions which have thus far arisen under these definitions are: 1. What variations may be claimed or covered by the patent consistently with unity of design. 2. Is a new shape of an article of manufacture, whereby utility is secured, a subject of protection under this act; and 3. Is mechanical function of any kind covered by it. As to the first of these questions, it seems to have been assumed that the design spoken of in all parts of the sections referred to covered a fixed, unchangeable figure, that the protection of letters patent did not extend to any variation, however slight, but that such variation constituted a new design, might be covered by a new patent, and might safely be used without infringement of the first. This, it is said, is the correct theory of the law, and has been the uniform adjudication of the Office. Neither of these statements is absolutely correct. The law by no means defines a design with such strictness. The language is, "new and original design for a manufacture," "new and original impression or ornament," "new and original shape or configuration." It would seem to be too plain for argument, that the new design, or impression, or shape, might be so generic in its character as to admit of many variations, which should embody the substantial characteristics and be entirely consistent with a substantial identity of form. Thus, if the invention were of a design for an ornamental button, the face of which was grooved with radial rays, it would seem that the first designer of such a button might properly describe a button of five rays, and, having stated that a greater number of rays might be used, might claim a design consisting generally of radial rays, or of "five or more" rays, and, that it could not be necessary for him to take out a patent for each additional ray that could be cut upon his button. So, if the design were the ornamentation of long combs by a chain of pearls, it would seem that a claim for such a design might be maintained against one who arranged the pearls, either in curved or straight lines, or who used half pearls only, and that such modifications if they had occurred to the designer, might properly have been enumerated in his specification as possible and equivalent variations. In short, I can see no reason, under the law, why designs may not be generic, why what are called "broad claims," may not be made to them, and why the doctrine of artistic or aesthetic equivalents may not be applied to them. This has been recognized to a greater or less extent in the adjudications of the courts and in the practice of the Office. One of the reported cases is that of Booth _vs_. Garelly 1, Blatch 247. The design is described as consisting of "radially formed ornaments on the face of the molds or blocks of which the button is formed, combined with the mode of winding the covering on the same, substantially as set forth, whether the covering be of one or more colors." The specification, in "substantially" setting forth the design, contained this language: "It will be obvious from the foregoing that the figures can be changed at pleasure by giving the desired form to the face of the mold by depressions and elevations which radiate from a point, whether in the center of the mold or eccentric thereto." In the consideration of the case by the Court no objection was made to this statement or claim. In the case of Root _vs_. Ball, 4 McLean 180, the learned judge instructed the jury that "if they should find that the defendants had infringed the plaintiff's patent by using substantially the same device as ornamental on the same part of the stove they would, of course, find the defendant guilty. To infringe a patent right it is not necessary that the thing patented should be adopted in every particular; but if, as in the present case, the design and figures were substantially adopted by the defendants, they have infringed the plaintiff's right. If they adopt the same principle the defendants are guilty. The principle of a machine is that combination of mechanical powers which produce a certain result. And in a case like the present, where ornaments are used for a stove, it is an infringement to adopt the design so as to produce substantially the same appearance." It has been the constant practice to grant patents for designs for fonts of type, for sets of silver plate, for a series of printers' flourishes, and the like. This class of cases has always passed without objection. Two other cases which have arisen within the Office deserve notive. The first was for a series of miniature shoulder straps, with emblems denoting rank, provided with a pin, to be worn under an officer's coat, upon his vest, or as a lady's breastpin. The drawing shows eight of these pins with emblems of rank, varying from that of second lieutenant to major-general, specification describing the brooch for a second lieutenant goes on to say: "I propose to introduce, on some of them, the different ornaments showing the respective ranks of the army, from a major-generalship to a second lieutenancy. See Figs. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8." The second case was that of an application for a monogram visiting card, on which the name was to be inscribed or printed in the form of a monogram. The applicant filed a drawing, showing a card upon which was a monogram of his own name. In his specification he gives certain rules for forming such monograms, and then says: "It is manifest that the form of the letters as well as the letters themselves can be changed as required by circumstances or the taste of the individual for whom the monogram is designed; and that the general form and outline of the monogram may be varied; and indeed, must vary to be adapted to the particular name it is required to represent." The claim was for "a monogram, visiting card, or visiting card upon which the name is inscribed or printed in the form of a monogram, substantially as herein specified." This application was rejected by the Examiner and Board of Examiners-in-Chief, but was allowed by the Commissioner upon appeal. It is true that, before and since this patent was issued, many patents have been refused for what I have called generic designs. One man having designed a tack head, ornamented with radial lines, was compelled to take out one patent for his tack with six radial lines, and another for the same tack with eight. There are other instances of like character, but they only serve to show that the practice of the Office has not been uniform, and that the true practice is still to be adopted and followed. I have no hesitation in saying, in view of the premises, that a valid patent may be granted for a new genus or class of ornaments as well as for specific ornaments, though I do not doubt that, under the statute, every species, variety, and individual having distinct characteristics under such a genus might also be patented, the patent being subordinate and tributary to that which covered the class. From the nature of this subject-matter there must always be more latitude in the issue of patents for trifling changes, or form, or outline, since it is only necessary that such changes should constitute a new "design" to entitle them to a patent of this class. The second question relates to the elements of utility in patents for designs. Upon this point, it is said by my predecessor, in Jason Crane _ex parte_ Commissioners, December-May, 1869, p. 1, that the construction which has been given to the act of 1842, by the Office, ever since its passage, is that it relates to designs for ornament merely; something of an artistic character as contradistinguished to those of convenience or utility. The Board of Examiners-in-Chief, in the present case, say "The practice of the Office has been uniform from the beginning, and has always excluded cases like the present from the benefit of the laws relating to designs." And, again, "The general understanding has always been that the acts of 1842 and 1861 were intended to cover articles making pretensions to artistic excellence exclusively." In thus denying that a new "shape or configuration" of an article, whereby utility or convenience is promoted, is the proper subject of a patent under the acts referred to, the Office would seem to have involved itself in the absurdity that if a design is useless it may be patented; whereas, if it be useful, it is entitled to no protection. Fortunately no such "uniform practice" has existed, and the Office is relieved from so grievous an imputation. The practice seems to have been taken for granted by the appellate tribunals, and, so far from being as stated, is, as nearly as possible, the reverse of it. Articles have been, and are being, constantly patented as designs which possess no element of the artistic or ornamental, but are valuable solely because, by a new shape or configuration, they possess more utility than the prior forms of like articles Of this character are designs for ax heads, for reflectors, for lamp shades, for the soles of boots and shoes, which have been heretofore patented as designs, and to this class might be added, with great propriety, that class of so-called "mechanical" patents, granted for mere changes of form, such as plowshares, fan blowers, propeller blades, and others of like character. When, therefore, my learned predecessor in Crane's case added to this number a box so designed as to hold with convenience a set of furs, he did but confirm and not alter the practice of the Office, so far as it can be gleaned from the patented cases. I am of opinion that the class of cases named in the act as arising from "new shape or configuration" includes within it all those mere changes of form which involve increase of utility. This I take to be the spirit of the decision in Wooster _vs_. Crane, 2 Fisher 583. The design was of a reel in the shape of a rhombus. The learned Judge says "In this case, the reel itself, as an article of manufacture, is conceded to be old and not the subject of a patent. The shape applied to it by the complainant is also an old, well-known mathematical figure. Now although it does not appear that any person ever before applied this particular shape to this particular article, I cannot think that the act quoted above was intended to secure to the complainant an exclusive right to use this well known figure in the manufacture of reels. The act, although it does not require utility in order to secure the benefit of its provisions, does require that the shape produced shall be the result of industry, effort genius, or expense, and must also, I think, be held to require that the shape or configuration sought to be secured shall, at least, be new and original as applied to articles of manufacture. But here the shape is a common one in many articles of manufacture, and its application to a reel cannot fairly be said to be the result of industry, genius, effort, and expense. No advantage whatever is pretended to be derived from the adoption of the form selected by the complainant, except the incidental one of using it as a trademark. Its selection can hardly be said to be the result of effort even; it was simply an arbitrary chance selection of one of many well-known shapes, all equally well adapted to the purpose. To hold that such an application of a common form can be secured by letters patent, would be giving the act of 1861 a construction broader than I am willing to give it" It would seem from this language that if there had been "advantage," that is, utility in the adoption of the form of the rhombus, that it would have found more favor in the eyes of the Court. This subject has been well discussed in the opinion of Commissioner Foote in Crane _ex parte_. I concur in that opinion, except as to the recital of the former practice of the Office, which a careful examination has shown to be erroneous. The third question may be readily disposed of. Modes of operation or construction, principles of action, combinations to secure novelty or utility of movement, or compositions of matter, can hardly be said to be "shapes, configurations, or designs," but where the sole utility of the new device arises from its new shape or configuration, I think it may fairly be included among the subjects which the act of 1842 was designed to protect. The present case may, in view of the foregoing consideration, be disposed of without difficulty. Letters patent are asked, by applicant, for a new design for a rubber eraser, which consists in giving to the eraser a cylindrical body, with ends beveled to an edge. The claim is for the "cylindrical rubber eraser provided with a wrapper or case, as herein shown and described" In the body of the specification the applicant describes the mode of making the eraser, and he also enumerates its advantages over erasers of the ordinary forms. The Examiner does not object to the application because of the utility of the eraser, although the Board of Examiners in Chief seem to base their decision upon that point alone, but he pronounces the form already old in its application to artists' stumps, and he insists that the mode of composition or construction can form no element, for the claim for a design patent. In the latter statement he is undoubtedly right. These patents are granted solely for new shapes or forms, and the form being new it is immaterial by what process that form is attained. The composition of matter or the mode of construction is neither "design," "shape," nor "configuration," and must be protected, if at all, under a patent of another kind. I cannot say that the presence of such matter in the specification would be objectionable if description merely, but it could in no way be allowed to enter into, or to modify the claim. As to the first ground of rejection, I think the Examiner is in error. This purports to be a new form or shape of a distinct article of manufacture, to wit: rubber erasers. If it be new, as thus applied, it is immaterial whether pencils, or stumps, or pen holders, or anything else may or may not have been made cylindrical. If they are not substantially the same article of manufacture as erasers, the old form applied to this new article is unquestionably entitled to protection. The applicant has not defined his invention with entire accuracy. He should strike from his claim the words "provided with a wrapper or case," as those relate to construction and not configuration, and he should insert the words "having the ends beveled to an edge" in lieu of the phrase erased, or he should adopt the usual form of claim for designs, viz: "The design for a rubber eraser, as shown and described." As the claim stands, it ought not to be allowed, and the decision must be affirmed, but the applicant will be allowed to amend as suggested. (Signed) S.S. FISHER. Commissioner of Patents * * * * * Inventions Patented In England by Americans. [Compiled from the "Journal of the Commissioners of Patents."] PROVISIONAL PROTECTION FOR SIX MONTHS. 3,201.--SEWING MACHINE.--H.A. House, Bridgeport, Conn. November 4, 1869. 3,211.--BORING TOOL.--Alexander Allen, New York city. November 5 1869. 3,215.--MODE OF AND DEVICES FOE SECURING STAIR RODS.--H. Uhry, New York city. November 6, 1869. 3,229.--TRANSPORTATION OF LETTERS, PARCELS, AND OTHER FREIGHT BY ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE, AND IN APPARATUS CONNECTED THEREWITH.--A. E. Beach, Stratford, Conn. November 9, 1869. 3,303.--RELOADING CARTRIDGE SHELL.--R.J. Gatling, Indianapolis, Ind. November 16, 1869. 3,342.--WOODEN PAVEMENT.--I. Hayward and J.F. Paul, Boston, Mass. November 20, 1869. 3,358.--MACHINERY FOR DISTRIBUTING TYPE.--O.L. Brown, Boston, Mass. November 20,1869. 3,219.--WEIGHING MACHINE.--M. Kennedy, New York city. November 10, 1869. 3,260.--BRAN DUSTER.--W. Huntley and A. Babcock, Silver Creek, N.Y. November 12, 1869. 3,339.--RAILWAY CARRIAGE.--E. Robbins, Cincinnati, Ohio. November 19, 1869. 3,341.--REVOLVING BATTERY GUN.--R.J. Gatling, Indianapolis, Ind. Nov. 19, 1869. 3,360.--SASH FASTENER.--S.L. Loomis, South Byron, N.Y. November 20, 1869. 3,363.--MAGNETIC MACHINES AND MAGNETS.--J. Burroughs, Jr., Newark N.J. November 20, 1869. * * * * * Russ' Improved Wood Molding Machine. A comprehensive description of this excellent machine was given upon page 230, Vol. XVIII., of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. We now present our readers with an engraving of it and a summary of its important features, which doubtless render it equal if not superior to any machine of the kind in market. The frame in which the feed rollers are arranged is so hung to the frame-work of the molding machine, that it can be raised or lowered at pleasure, in order to properly adjust the feed rollers for action upon the "stuff," and it is also so constructed as to permit the feed rollers to yield in case of variations in the thickness of the "stuff" passing under them. The spindle of the side cutter-heads is hung in a vertical frame arranged to be moved up and down, and laterally, to adjust the cutter-head for action, and is provided at its upper end with a box or bearing, whereby the bearing of the box is always kept upon the spindle instead of at different points of the same as in other machines, and this without interfering with the adjustability of the side cutter-head. Thus uneven wear is avoided. [Illustration: RUSS' MONITOR MOLDING MACHINE.] The bed of the machine is formed with a series of slots or openings provided with bridge bars so that the cutters may act upon the edges of the stuff without danger of injury from striking the bed. The presser shoe is also made adjustable for different thicknesses of the "stuff" and self-yielding to variations in thickness, by a peculiar method of hanging the bar, which carries the presser shoe, to the framework of the machine. The clamp which holds the press block which acts upon the "stuff" after it has passed through the cutter, is of novel construction, and the spindle of the side cutter-heads is so arranged in connection with a loose pulley and the pulley-drums, that both cutter-heads are driven by one belt and in the same direction. The bed plate is provided with springs through which the side cutter-heads are arranged, to move laterally or transversely with a bridge-plate or plates, susceptible of adjustment independent of the cutter-heads, whereby an adjustable support to the "stuff" is given as it passes over the line of the openings in the bed. Most machines have weighted pressure feed, but this having steel springs adjustable by a screw and hand wheel, a heavy or light pressure can be applied according to the work done or size of molding. The cutter-heads are square and slotted so that any style of molding can be stuck by putting cutters on all sides of the head, thus equalizing the cost and lessening the power. The pressure shoe is arranged to hold the "stuff" at the very point of contact with the cutters, and, as we have shown, is readily adjusted to a long or short cutter, so that a small molding can be made as smooth as a large one, and so as not to require any finishing with sandpaper or a hand tool. The machine has also a bevel track very useful for picture frame molding, and a patent cap of great value for the cutters, and readily applied to any slotted head or common head. The wrenches that go with the machine, and the common malleable iron caps for the top cylinder, are shown in detail. These machines are now running in Worcester, Boston, and Fitchburg, Mass.; Chicago, Ill.: Philadelphia, Pa.; Brattleboro, Vt.; Whitesboro, N. Y.; Charleston, S. C., and other places, and, it is claimed, are capable of doing better work and more of it than any machine now in use. This machine is covered by several patents taken through the Scientific American Patent Agency. It is manufactured by R. Ball & Co., of Worcester, Mass, to whom write for further information. * * * * * A Lost Civilization. At the last regular meeting of the American Geographical and Statistical Society at its rooms in the Cooper Institute, Professor Newberry, of Columbia College, delivered an address on the subject of his explorations in Utah and Arizona Territories. The speaker commenced by giving a short history of the circumstances under which the two government expeditions to which he was attached were organized. He then confined his remarks to the subject of the latter expedition, no account of which has yet been published. Its aim was principally to explore the region embraced by what is known as the old Spanish trail from Santa Fe to California. After giving an interesting account of the topography of the region traversed, he proceeded to speak of the traces which were found on every hand of a former occupancy by a numerous population now extinct. These were most numerous near the course of the San Juan river. There were found ruins of immense structures, a view of one of which he exhibited, built regularly of bricks, a foot in thickness, and about eighteen inches in length, with the joints properly broken, and as regularly laid and as smooth as any in a Fifth Avenue mansion. This structure he said was as large as the Croton reservoir. Inside were rooms nicely plastered as the walls of a modern house. There were also traces of extensive canals, which had been constructed to bring water to these towns, which were received into large cisterns. The lecturer also exhibited pieces of pottery which he said abounded everywhere, showing that in a former age all this vast region had been inhabited. He gave it as his opinion that the depopulation of this region was attributable to the fact that both to the north and the south were warlike hordes, and from the incursions of one and the other of these, the peaceable Aztecs, who had been the former denizens of the country, had been gradually wiped out. The only people left here now were the Mokies, who lived in towns inclosed within high, thick walls, and who were almost inaccessible. These people were visited, and the explorers were received by them with great hospitality. The speaker concluded by giving a short account of the manners of the people and their customs, as far as an opportunity was had to observe them. * * * * * GIRARD'S "PALIER GLISSANT." The term "_palier glissant_," which does not admit of being very happily translated into an English term of equal brevity, is the name given by the inventor, Mr. Girard, to a frictionless support, or socket, designed to sustain the axes of heavy wheels in machinery. Since it is a contrivance deriving its efficacy from hydraulic pressure, it may, without impropriety, be considered here. The friction of axles in their supports is the occasion of a considerable loss of power in every machine. [Illustration] The loss of power itself, though a real disadvantage, is nevertheless a matter of secondary consequence compared with the attendant elevation of temperature, which, were not means carefully provided for reducing friction to the lowest point possible, might soon be so great as to arrest the operation of the machine itself. It was stated in a public lecture delivered in May, 1867, before the Scientific Association of France, that, in a certain instance within the lecturer's knowledge, the screw shaft of a French naval propeller became absolutely welded to its support, though surrounded by the water of the sea, in consequence of the great heat developed by its revolution. The ordinary means of reducing friction is to apply oil, or some other unctuous substance, to the parts which move upon each other. Some disadvantages attend this expedient, but till a better is suggested they have to be endured. The cost of the oil expended in maintaining in proper condition the axles of the machinery in a foundery, or of the rolling stock of a railroad, amounts to a large sum annually; while the want of neatness which its use makes, to a certain extent, inevitable, and the labor which must be constantly employed to prevent this want of neatness from becoming much greater than it is, are serious items to be set off against its positive usefulness. The object of Mr. Girard is to get rid of all these drawbacks by the simple expedient of substituting water for oil. It would not avail to apply water precisely as oil is applied. Though any one's experience may tell him that two smooth pieces of metal will slide more smoothly on each other when they are wet than when they are dry, yet every one knows also that oil facilitates the movement much more perceptibly than water; and also, that in the case of oil there is no difficulty in maintaining the lubricating film, whereas water easily evaporates, and in case of the accident of even a moderate elevation of temperature, it would be expelled from the joint entirely. Mr. Girard proposes, therefore, to employ the water to act, first, by its pressure, to lift the Journal to be lubricated; and secondly, by its fluidity, to form a liquid bed or cushion between the journal and its box, on which the journal may rest in its revolution, without touching the metal of the box at all. The construction will be understood by referring to the figure. One of the journals is represented as removed, and in the cylindrical surface of the socket are seen grooves occupying a considerable part of the area exposed. These grooves communicate, by an aperture in the middle, with a tube which is represented externally, and which sends a branch to the other journal, through which water under a heavy pressure is introduced into the box beneath the journal. The effect of the hydraulic pressure is to lift the axle, opening a passage for the escape of the compressed water, which at the same time, because of its release from compression, loses the power to sustain the weight. If, therefore, by the first impulse, the axle is thrown upward to any sensible distance, it will immediately fall back again, once more confining more or less completely the water. After one or two oscillations, therefore, the axle will settle itself at length in a position in which, while the water will escape, it will escape but as a film of inappreciable thickness. In this condition the journal turns upon a liquid bed, and the resistance to its revolution is so excessively small that a slow rotation given by hand to a wheel sustained by it will be maintained for many minutes without perceptible retardation. In fact, the most striking illustration which can be given of the immense superiority of the _palier glissant_ over a support lubricated in in any other way, is furnished by placing two precisely similar wheels or disks side by side, weighing five or six pounds each, with a diameter of seven or eight inches, and journals of half an inch in diameter; one of them furnished with _paliers glissants_, and the other with boxes lubricated with fine oil. Give each of them a velocity of rotation of about one revolution in a second; the one lubricated with oil will come to rest before the other begins to give evidence of any sensible retardation; but if at any moment the stop-cock which supplies the water to the second be turned, this one will also stop, and its stopping will be instantaneous. It might be supposed that a journal supported in the manner above described would be unsteady and liable to injurious vibrations. This is not the case, and it is easy to see why not. When the journal is truly in the middle of the socket, that is to say when there is an equal distance between it and the wall of the socket on either side, it will be equally pressed from both sides. But if it is in the least displaced laterally, the pressure on the side toward which it moves will instantly increase, while that on the other side will correspondingly diminish: both causes transpiring to resist the displacement, and to maintain the journal in the position of true equilibrium. The water pressure by which these "slippery supports" are supplied must be created by a force pump worked by the machine itself. The reservoir need not be large as the expenditure of water is very minute in volume. To the objection which may naturally be made, that the working of the pump must be a tax on the motive power without return, a reply at once simple and satisfactory is found in the experience of Mr. Girard, that the working of the pump does not consume so much as half, and sometimes not more than one one quarter, of the power which is lost in friction when the ordinary modes of lubrication are employed; so that by the adoption of this expedient the available power of the machine is very sensibly increased after deducting all that is expended in the performance of this additional work. * * * * * BEES BENEFICIAL TO FRUIT.--Dr. A. Packard, editor of the _American Naturalist_, replies to a query in regard to the effects produced upon fruit by the agency of honey bees, that all the evidence given by botanists and zoologists who have specially studied the subject, shows that bees improve the quality and tend to increase the quantity of fruit. They aid in the fertilization of flowers, thus preventing the occurrence of sterile flowers, and, by more thoroughly fertilizing flowers already perfect, render the production of sound and well developed fruit more sure. Many botanists think if it were not for bees, and other insects, many plants would not bear fruit at all. * * * * * Steamboats on the American plan are to be introduced on Lake Geneva, Switzerland. This will add very greatly to the comfort and pleasure of tourists on that beautiful lake. * * * * * SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MUNN & COMPANY, Editors and Proprietors. PUBLISHED WEEKLY AT NO. 37 PARK ROW (PARK BUILDING), NEW YORK. O.D. MUNN. S.H. WALES. A.E. BEACH. * * * * * "The American News Company," Agents, 121 Nassau street, New York "The New York News Company," 8 Spruce street * * * * * VOL. XVII., No. 1....[NEW SERIES.]...._Twenty-fifth Year_. NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JANUARY, 1, 1870. * * * * * A HAPPY NEW YEAR! Is the heartfelt wish conveyed in this beautiful and unusually large number, to each and all of our friends and readers This holiday number is worthy of note not only on account of its size, its rich table of contents, and profuse illustrations, but because we publish this week the largest edition ever sent out from this office. Our readers may be surprised at our publishing the title page of the volume again this week but they will please observe it is the title page of Vol XXII, which we are now commencing The title pages will hereafter be published with the first instead of the last number of each volume, so as to bring it in its proper place for binding. Subscriptions are pouring in from all parts of the country in the most encouraging manner. Many have already secured the prize engraving, by sending in the requisite number of names-but we feel obliged to confess that there is now a considerable want of vitality in the competition for the cash prizes. We expect however, that as soon as the new year's greetings are fairly exchanged, that this opportunity to receive some purse money will attract the attention of our enterprising readers The times may be a little close just now, but we are confident that the spring will open joyously, and we are quite sure that the people will still want to know what is going on in the GREAT WORLD OF INDUSTRY, which, it will be our duty to chronicle. All lists intended to compete for the cash premium must be marked "Cash prize list." Once more we say a "Happy New Year" to all. * * * * * THE SUEZ CANAL NOT YET A FAILURE. The daily press is giving currency to a great many facts in regard to the present incomplete condition of the Suez Canal, and some journals are arguing therefrom that it is a failure. As yet, ships of heavy draft are unable to get through it. Some disasters to shipping have occurred in the Red Sea after the canal has been passed, and it is not at all improbable that more troubles will arise before everything goes smoothly. The Red Sea is comparatively unknown to navigators. It contains hidden rocks which must be charted and buoyed before its navigation can be rendered safe. Surely this ought not to take the world by surprise. As to the canal itself, we are only surprised that it has reached its present state of perfection and we advise those who now make haste to prophesy ignominious defeat for one of the greatest enterprises of the century, to suspend judgment for a time. New York journalists might certainly call to mind with profit, the annual troubles attending the opening of the canals in this State. Frosts heave and rats undermine, and banks annually give way, yet these things are not regarded as surprising. But upon the opening of a work, to which all the minor canals in the world are like the rods of the magicians to Aaron's rod which swallowed them up, it is expected that everything shall move without difficulty, and that no oversight will have been committed. Truly this would be to attribute a power of prevision to M. Lesseps beyond what is human. The world can afford to wait a little till this huge machine gets oiled. Great enterprises move slow at the outset. We have yet unshaken faith in the ultimate success of the Suez Canal. * * * * * TUBULAR BOILERS AND BOILER EXPLOSIONS. In our description of the novel steam boiler, published on page 209, last volume, we made a quotation from several eminent writers and experimenters on the subjects of heat and steam, to the effect that the tubular system in steam boilers was wrong in theory and unsafe in practice, and although this system has hitherto been extensively used on account of some advantages which it secures, it has long been a serious question with thinking men whether these advantages were not obtained at too dear a rate. While not prepared to admit all the force of the objections made to the tubular system, there are arguments against it that it will not do to treat lightly and which seem to us more and more forcible the more we candidly reflect upon the subject. One of the most forcible of these which occurs to us is, that in the tubular system the disruptive force of unequal expansion is far more likely to become a cause of danger than in the plain cylinder boiler. In such boilers the tension of expanded tubes is transmitted to the shell, which are greatly strained without doubt, often nearly to the verge of rupture. When this occurs it is evident an unusual strain, caused by sudden generation of steam, would act in concert with the expansion of the tubes, and we have no doubt these causes combined have given rise to many an explosion when the steam, acting singly, could never have produced rupture. But while we give due weight to this argument, there is one often referred to by our correspondents, and which we often see stated in newspapers, as ridiculous as the one we have noticed is forcible. It is that when, in such boilers, water, by carelessness or otherwise, is allowed to fall below any of the tubes, the steam which surrounds them is decomposed, and becomes an explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gases, ready to explode with terrible violence whenever the temperature of the tubes shall have reached the proper point. This argument is ridiculous, because it rests on no experimental basis. It is a flimsy theory, entirely unsupported by any facts. Never has it been proved that hot iron, at any temperature likely to be obtained in steam boiler tubes, decomposes steam except by itself appropriating the oxygen of the steam, and leaving the hydrogen, by itself no more explosive than any other heated gas. The sole object of the tubular boiler is to increase the heating surface, without corresponding increase in other particulars. That it is not the only means whereby this object can be secured has already been demonstrated and we believe will hereafter be shown in divers ways. We have no more doubt that the next fifty years will witness the total abandonment of the tubular system, than we have that the world will last that length of time. * * * * * AMERICAN RAILWAY MANAGEMENT. There seems a growing opinion among railway managers that the sole end and purpose of a railroad is to line the 6 pockets of, if not its stockholders, at least its directors. In fact we not long since saw a statement in a widely-circulated journal, that, as the sole purpose of railroads is that the companies who own them should make money, it is absurd to suppose they would be content to manage them in any way whereby such a result would not be most likely to accrue. The journal referred to, in making this statement a basis for an argument in favor of railway consolidation, entirely ignored the rights of the public from which railway corporations have obtained their charters. In these charters certain privileges were granted, not out of pure generosity, but with the understanding that certain benefits were to accrue to the public. Its safety and convenience were to be considered as well as the profits to the owners. Every charter granted to these roads involves a contract on their part to do the public a certain service, and in a large majority of cases these contracts are to-day unfulfilled. Day after day sees the power to control more and more centered in a few unscrupulous wily managers, and the comfort and safety of passengers more and more disregarded; yet still the people submit. But they do not submit without complaint. Now and then a newspaper correspondent grumbles, and the news of smashes that may be almost daily seen in the papers gives a text for an occasional editorial blast, as little heeded by the delinquent companies, as a zephyr is felt by an oak. Thus the New York _Times_, on the occasion of a recent railway disaster, gives vent to a little mild denunciation. It says: "The general rule in this country (to which there are indeed exceptions) in regard to the purchase of railway materials is simply this: buy the cheapest. First cost is the controlling and often the only question entertained. The nature of the materials and processes to be used in the manufacture of rails, for instance, are not mentioned. The buyers for some of our roads, especially new roads, never make the slightest allusion to quality, and never specify tests and inspections, but simply go about among the mills, comparing and beating down prices, and accepting the very lowest. More than one of our rail makers are to-day rolling, under protest, rails upon which they decline to put their trade-mark--rails made from the very cheapest materials, in the very meanest manner--for all that is required is that they shall stick together till they are laid. And if American makers will not roll them, Welsh makers will. The late report of the State Engineer of New York says: 'American railway managers, instead of offering anything like a reasonable price for good iron rails, have made themselves notorious by establishing as standard, a brand of rails known all over the world as "American rails," which are confessedly bought and sold as the weakest, most impure, least worked, least durable, and cheapest rails that can be produced.' The State Engineer refers, in confirmation of this opinion, to the statement of Mr. A.S. Hewitt, United States Commissioner to the Paris Exposition, a statement not yet controverted; and to a statement of Mr. Sandberg, an English engineer of note, in the London _Times_. A leading American railway president and reformer has publicly said: 'There is a fear on my part that railway companies will themselves tempt steel makers to send a poor article by buying the cheapest--first cost only considered--_as they did with the ironmasters_.'" This certainly is a blessed state of affairs. We have given privileges to giant corporations, which they have improved so profitably, that they now can defeat, in our Legislatures, any attempt to revoke them, and can laugh at any demand for better management. Disguise it how we may, the railroads have got the upper hand of the people, and they seem likely to keep it, unless, indeed, their rapacity shall react against themselves. At the moment of this writing accounts reach us of the officers of a prominent railway line intrenching themselves against the officers of the law, and employing force to resist the service of precepts calling them to account for alleged frauds upon the stockholders. That the Legislature of this State has the power to put a stop to these disgraceful proceedings, is certain; what it will do remains to be demonstrated. * * * * * THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE PRIZES AWARDED TO STEAM ENGINES. If there is anybody satisfied with the action of the managers of the American Institute, in the matter of awarding prizes to the competing engines exhibited at the recent fair, we have yet to meet that complacent individual. Neither the exhibitors nor the general public could be expected to accept with equanimity such a report as the managers have made, because it is inadequate to give any real idea of the relative merits of the engines tested. The exhibitors, at a large expense, took their engines to the hall of exhibition, placed them in position, and with them drove the machinery exhibited there; and now, when in return they had a right to expect a decided, manly course on the part of the managers, the oyster is swallowed and the contestants are each politely handed a shell. The conditions on which the general test was to be made contained, among other specifications, these: that "the water supplied to and evaporated in the boiler will be measured by means of a meter, and the coal burned may also be weighed." Only one of the conditions quoted was properly complied with. The coal was weighed, but though a meter was used to measure the water, tests made, we are informed, _after the trial of the engines_, showed that the meter was so inaccurate as to completely invalidate any calculation based upon its record of the water supplied. Nevertheless this has, we are credibly informed, been made the basis of calculation; and the amount of coal consumed during each trial has been rejected either as a basis of calculation or a check on the inaccuracy of the meter. Other prescribed regulations were observed with great care. The engines were indicated in a masterly manner by a gentleman of great experience, as the cards--tracings of which we have seen--bear ample testimony. The temperature of the feedwater was 47 degrees; it should, in our opinion, have been heated, but we waive this point. The state of the barometer and temperatures of engine room and fire-room were observed; but we respectfully submit, that with coal consumption left out of the calculation, and the water consumption an unascertained quantity, the question of relative economy, the vital point to be settled, is as uncertain today as it was before the test. In the _Tribune_ of December 20, appeared a statement of the test to ascertain the accuracy of the meter used, which showed that in an aggregate of twelve tests it varied nearly three per cent in its record from the actual quantity delivered, while at times it was so erratic that it varied in one instance over _ten per cent_. Truly, considered in connection with this fundamental error, temperatures of engine and boiler rooms, and states of barometer, will not count for much with engineers. An oversight like this would, however, never have been laid at the door of the managers, however it might invalidate the test; but when the utterly absurd decision announced in the papers, after a tedious delay had led the public to expect an exhaustive statement, gave rise to general disappointment and excited the utmost dissatisfaction, it became manifest that a manly, straightforward course on their part was not to be hoped for, and that any protest against the consummation of the farce would be vain. It is not for us to decide on the merits of the engines submitted to test. It was for the judges to do this. We maintain that nothing that the public will accept as a decision has been reached, and on behalf of the public we protest that the managers have not only placed themselves in a very unenviable position by their action in the premises, but have done a lasting injury to the American Institute, the results of which will be disastrously felt in future exhibitions. The studied ambiguity of the report which awards two first prizes to the competing engines, is no less apparent than the desire to shun responsibility. * * * * * A PROTEST AGAINST THE CANADIAN PATENT LAW. In July, 1869, the New Dominion Patent Law went into operation, but it has not yet been approved by the Queen, and if rejected the Canadian Parliament will perhaps try its hand again. Although Canadians may freely go to all parts of the world and take out patents for their inventions, they have always manifested a mean spirit and adopted a narrow policy, in reference to inventors of other nations. Their present patent laws are so framed as practically to debar all persons except Canadians from taking patents; and the result is that American and English inventions are pirated and patented in the Dominion, without so much as a "thank you, sir," to the _bona fide_ originators. A protest has been presented to her Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies, asking that the new law may be rejected, on the ground that it deprives the subjects of the Crown of their equal rights throughout the empire. There is force in this objection, and Lord Granville has promised that it shall be duly considered before the Queen is advised to sign the law. The probable result will be a revision of the Dominion patent code so as to let in Englishmen but exclude the Yankees, from whom the Canadians derive whatever of improvement, progress, and energy they possess. * * * * * THE BRIGHTER SIDE. Ingratitude seldom enters into the composition of a true inventor, and nothing in our business career has afforded us more pleasure than the frequent letters addressed to us by those who have, during more than twenty years, employed the Scientific American Patent Agency. We cannot find room for all the pleasant missives that come to us from our extensive list of clients, but we may give a few as samples of the many. Mr. Daniel J. Gale, of Sheboygan, Wis., has recently secured through our Agency Letters Patent for a "Perpetual and Lunar Calendar Clock." In the fullness of his satisfaction he thus writes: "The fact is, I shall never be able to thank you sufficiently for what you have done for me. I sent you a copy of the paper printed here, which favorably notices my improvement and your great Agency. The fees charged me for my patent have been low enough. Already, by one of my own townsmen, I have been offered $4,000 for my interest in the patent. But I must not take up too much of your I time. Please allow me to add that I regularly receive your valuable paper, the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, and that you may number me as one of its stanch friends." Mr. Edwin Norton, of Brooklyn, N.Y., in a recent note, says: "Allow me to express my thanks for the promptness and efficiency with which the business of obtaining a patent for my 'Cinder and Dust Arrester' has been conducted through your Agency--and not only in this case but in several previous ones. This is the _fourth_ patent obtained by me through four Agency within nine months. It gives me pleasure to add my testimony to that of many others, with respect to the very satisfactory manner in which your Patent Agency is conducted." Mr. E. J. Marstens says, in reference to his improved "Field Press"--"I find everything correct. You certainly accomplished more than I expected after the first examination by the Primary Examiner. I hope soon to be able to give you another case." Mr. S. P. Williams, an old client, writes as follows: "I received the patent on my 'Trace Lock for Whiffletrees,' and I am truly pleased with the prompt manner in which you have done the business. It is only a few weeks since I made the application, and I expected that it would be as many months before the patent could be granted." * * * * * PROFESSOR FISKE'S LECTURES AT HARVARD. It certainly argues well for the intellectual character of the readers of the New York _World_ that during the prevalent taste for sensational journalism, it has found the publication of a series of philosophical lectures acceptable. We thank our neighbor for thus making these lectures available to the general public. Their ability is unquestionable; and the calmness and candor which Professor Fiske brings to the treatment of the subject is such as to add greatly to the force of his logic. The "positive philosophy" has been shown by Professor Fiske to be much misunderstood, misapprehension not being confined solely to the ranks of its opponents. His exposition of some of the misconceptions on which Professor Huxley has based some criticisms upon the writings of Comte, strikes us as especially forcible; and the whole course of lectures proves Professor Fiske to be one of the clearest and most able of American thinkers. These lectures are followed as they appear, with great interest, and their publication in the World we regard as a real and permanent benefit to the public. * * * * * SCIENTIFIC LECTURES BEFORE THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. The announcement of these lectures came to hand too late for our last issue, and the first has already been delivered. The course is as follows: Friday, Dec. 17, The Battle Fields of Science, by Andrew D. White, President of the Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Friday, Dec. 24, How Animals Move, by Professor E. S. Morse, of the Peabody Academy of Science, Salem, Mass. Friday, Dec. 31, The Correlation of Vital and Physical Forces, by Professor G. F. Barker, of Yale College, New Haven. Friday, Jan. 7, The Air and Respiration, by Professor J. C. Draper, of the College of the City of New York. Friday, Jan. 14, The Connection of Natural Science and Mental Philosophy, by Professor J. Bascom, of Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. Friday, Jan. 21, The Constitution of the Sun, by Dr. B. A. Gould, of Cambridge, Mass. Friday, Jan. 28, The Colorado Plateau, its Canons and Ruined Cities, by Professor J. S. Newberry, of Columbia College, New York. The course is a good one, and ought to be, and doubtless will be, well attended. Abstracts of the lectures will appear as delivered, in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. * * * * * THE BATTLE FIELDS OF SCIENCE. LECTURE BY PROFESSOR WHITE, BEFORE THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. This lecture did not disappoint the expectations of those familiar with the subject of the discourse, which, considering the difficulty of restating familiar historical facts in such a manner as to clothe them in a garb of originality, is high praise. Many, however, found great difficulty in hearing the speaker at the back part of the hall, and some left the room on that account. This was unfortunate, as the lecture will scarcely be exceeded in interest by any subsequent one of the course. The speaker said that "In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion--no matter how conscientious such interference may have been--has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and science, and _invariably_. And on the other hand all untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed, temporarily, to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good of religion and science. I say _invariably_--I mean exactly that. It is a rule to which history shows not one exception. It would seem, logically, that this statement could not be gainsaid. God's truth must agree, whether discovered by looking within upon the soul or without upon the world. A truth written upon the human heart to-day in its full play of emotions or passions, cannot be at any real variance even with a truth written upon a fossil whose poor life was gone millions of years ago. And this being so, it would also seem a truth irrefragable; that the search for each of these kind of truths must be followed out in its own lines, by its own methods, to its own results, without any interference from investigators along other lines by other methods. And it would also seem logically that we might work on in absolute confidence that whatever, at any moment, might seem to be the relative positions of the two different bands of workers, they must at last come together, for truth is one. But logic is not history. History is full of interferences which have cost the earth dear. Strangest of all, some of the most direful of them have been made by the best of men, actuated by the purest motives, seeking the noblest results. These interferences and the struggle against them make up the warfare of science. One statement more to clear the ground. You will not understand me at all to say that religion has done nothing for science. It has done much for it. The work of Christianity has been mighty indeed. Through these 2,000 years it has undermined servitude, mitigated tyranny, given hope to the hopeless, comfort to the afflicted, light to the blind, bread to the starving, life to the dying, and all this work continues. And its work for science, too, has been great. It has fostered science often and developed it. It has given great minds to it, and but for the fears of the timid its record in this respect would have been as great as in the other. Unfortunately, religious men started centuries ago with the idea that purely scientific investigation is unsafe--that theology must intervene. So began this great modern war." Professor White next reviewed the battle between science and theology on the subjects of the "earth's shape, surface, and relations," "the position of the earth among the heavenly bodies," in which Copernicus and Galileo struggled so bravely and successfully for truth. The lecturer said: "The principal weapons in the combat are worth examining. They are very easily examined; you may pick them up on any of the battle-fields of science; but on that field they were used with more effect than on almost any other. These weapons were two epithets--the epithets 'Infidel' and 'Atheist.' These can hardly be classed with civilized weapons; they are burning arrows; they set fire to great masses of popular prejudices. Smoke rises to obscure the real questions. Fire bursts out at times to destroy the attacked party. They are poisoned weapons. They go to the heart of loving women; they alienate dear children; they injure the man after life is ended, for they leave poisoned wounds in the hearts of those who loved him best--fears for his eternal happiness, dread of the Divine displeasure. The battle-fields of science are thickly strewn with these. They have been used against almost every man who has ever done anything for his fellow-men. The list of those who have been denounced as Infidel and Atheist includes almost all great men of science--general scholars, inventors, philanthropists. The deepest Christian life, the most noble Christian character has not availed to shield combatants. Christians like Isaac Newton and Pascal, and John Locke and John Howard, have had these weapons hurled against them. Nay, in these very times we have seen a noted champion hurl these weapons against John Milton, and with it another missile which often appears on these battle-fields--the epithets of 'blasphemer' and 'hater of the Lord.' Of course, in these days these weapons though often effective in disturbing the ease of good men and though often powerful in scaring women, are somewhat blunted. Indeed, they do not infrequently injure assailants more than assailed. So it was not in the days of Galileo. These weapons were then in all their sharpness and venom. The first champion who appears against him is Bellarmine, one of the greatest of theologians and one of the poorest of scientists. He was earnest, sincere, learned, but made the fearful mistake for the world of applying direct literal interpretation of Scripture to science. The consequences were sad, indeed. Could he with his vast powers have taken a different course, humanity would have been spared the long and fearful war which ensued, and religion would have saved to herself thousands on thousands of the best and brightest men in after ages. The weapons, which men of Bellarmine's stamp used, were theological. They held up before the world the dreadful consequences which must result to Christian theology were the doctrine to prevail that the heavenly bodies revolve about the sun, and not about the earth. "The next great series of battles were fought on those great fields occupied by such sciences as _Chemistry and Natural Philosophy_. Even before these sciences were out of their childhood--while yet they were tottering mainly towards, childish objects and by childish steps--the champions of that same old mistaken conception of rigid Scriptural interpretation began the war. The catalogue of chemists and physicists persecuted or thwarted would fill volumes." After alluding to many other battle-fields of science which might not for want of time be dwelt upon at length the lecturer reviewed the battle grounds of medicine and anatomy on which some of the severest warfare has been waged. The speaker here remarked that "perhaps the most unfortunate thing that has ever been done for Christianity is the tying it to forms of science and systems of education, which are doomed and gradually sinking. Just as in the time of Roger Bacon excellent but mistaken men devoted all their energies to binding Christianity to Aristotle. Just as in the time of Reuchlin and Erasmus they insisted on binding Christianity to Thomas Aquinas, so in the time of Vesalius such men gave all efforts to linking Christianity to Galen. The cry has been the same in all ages. It is the same which we hear in this age against scientific studies--the cry for what is called '_sound learning_.' Whether standing for Aristotle against Bacon, or Aquinas against Erasmus, or Galen against Vesalius, or making mechanical Greek verses at Eton, instead of studying the handiwork of the Almighty, or reading Euripides with translations instead of Leasing and Goethe in the original, the cry always is for 'sound learning.' The idea always is that these studies are _safe_." The speaker next proceeded to show that not alone in Catholic countries, has such warfare been waged, and that even now in Protestant America the fight is going on. One of the fields on which the severest warfare had raged in Protestant countries was that of Geology. "From the first lispings of investigators in this science there was war. The early sound doctrine was that fossil remains were _lusus naturae_--freaks of nature--and in 1517 Fracastor was violently attacked because he thought them something more. No less a man than Bernard Palissy followed up the contest, on the right side, in France, but it required 150 years to carry the day fairly against this single preposterous theory. The champion who dealt it the deadly blow was Scilla, and his weapons were facts obtained by examination of the fossils of Calabria, (1670). But the advocates of tampering with scientific reasoning soon retired to a now position. It was strong, for it was apparently based upon Scripture--though, as the whole world now knows, an utterly exploded interpretation of Scripture. The new position was that the fossils were produced by the deluge of Noah. In vain had it been shown by such devoted Christians as Bernard Palissy that this theory was utterly untenable; in vain did good men protest against the injury sure to result to religion by tying it to a scientific theory sure to be exploded--the doctrine that the fossils were remains of animals drowned at the flood continued to be upheld by the great majority as '_sound_' doctrine. It took 120 year for the searchers of God's truth, as revealed in nature--such men as Buffon, Linnaeus, Woodward, and Whitehurst--to run under these mighty fabrics of error, and by statements which could not be resisted, to explode them. "Strange as it may at first seem, the war on geology was waged more fiercely in Protestant countries than Catholic, and of all countries England furnished the most bitter opponents. You have noted already that there are generally two sorts of attacks on a new science. First, there is the attack by pitting against science some great doctrine in theology. You saw this in astronomy, when Bellarmine and others insisted that the doctrine of the earth's revolving about the sun is contrary to the doctrine of the Incarnation. So now against geology it was urged that the scientific doctrine that the fossils represented animals which died before Adam was contrary to the doctrine of Adam's fall, and that death entered the world by sin. Then there is the attack by the literal interpretation of texts, which serves a better purpose generally in arousing prejudice. It is difficult to realize it now, but within the memory of the majority of those before me, the battle was raging most fiercely in England, and both these kinds of artillery were in full play and filling the civilized world with their roar. Less than thirty years ago, the Rev. J. Mellor Brown was hurling at all geologists alike, and especially at such Christian divines as Dr. Burkland, Dean Conybeare, and Pye Smith, and such religious scholars as Professor Sedgwick, the epithets of 'Infidel,' 'Impugner of the Sacred Record,' and 'Assailant of the Volume of God.' His favorite weapon was the charge that these men were 'attacking the Truth of God,' forgetting that they were simply opposing the mistaken interpretations of J. Mellor Brown. He declared geology 'not a subject of lawful inquiry;' he speaks of it as 'a dark art,' as 'dangerous and disreputable,' as a 'forbidden province.' This attempt to scare men from science having failed, various other means were taken. "To say nothing about England, it is humiliating to human nature to remember the trials to which the pettiest and narrowest of men subjected such Christian scholars in our country as Benjamin Silliman and Edward Hitchcock. But it is a duty and a pleasure to state here that one great Christian scholar did honor to religion and to himself by standing up for the claims of science despite all these clamors. That man was Nicholas Wiseman, better known afterward as Cardinal Wiseman. The conduct of this pillar of the Roman Catholic Church contrasts nobly with that of timid Protestants who were filling England with shrieks and denunciations. Perhaps the most singular attempt against geology was that made by a fine specimen of the English Don, Dean Cockburn of York, to _abuse_ its champions out of the field. Without apparently the simplest elementary knowledge of geology, he opened a battery of abuse. He gives it to the world at large by pulpit and press; he even inflicts it upon leading statesmen by private letters. But these weapons did not succeed. They were like Chinese gongs and dragon lanterns against rifled cannon. Buckland, Pye Smith, Lyell, Silliman, Hitchcock, Murchison, Agassiz, Dana, and a host of of noble champions besides, pressed on the battle for truth was won. And was it won merely for men of science? The whole civilized world declares that it was won for religion; that thereby has infinitely increased the knowledge of the power and goodness of God." The lecturer classed the present opposition of the Catholics to the Free School system in this country among the long list of battles between science and theology and concluded his lecture as follows: "But, my friends, I will not weary you with so recent a chapter in the history of the great warfare extending through the centuries. There are cheering omens. The greatest and best men in the churches--the men standing at centers of thought--are insisting with power, more and more, that religion shall no longer be tied to so injurious a policy--that searchers for truth, whether in Theology or Natural Science, shall work on as friends, sure that, no matter how much at variance they may at times seem to be, the truths they reach shall finally be fused into each other. No one need fear the result. No matter whether science shall complete her demonstration that man has been on the earth six thousand years or six hundred thousand. No matter whether she reveal new ideas of the Creator or startling relations between his creatures--the result, when fully thought out, will serve and strengthen religion not less than science. The very finger of the Almighty has written on history that science must be studied by means proper to itself, and in no other way. That history is before us all. No one can gainsay it. It is decisive, for it is this: There has never been a scientific theory framed for the use of Scriptural texts, which has been made to stand. This fact alone shows that our wonderful volume of sacred literature was not given for any such purpose as that to which so many earnest men have endeavored to wrest it. The power of that volume has been mighty indeed. It has inspired the best deeds our world has known. Despite the crusts which men have formed about it--despite the fetters which they have placed upon it--Christianity has blessed age after age of the past, and will go on as a blessing through age after age of the future. Let the Warfare of Science, then, be changed. Let it be a warfare in which religion and science shall stand together as allies, not against each other as enemies. Let the fight be for truth of every kind against falsehood of every kind--for justice against injustice--for right against wrong--for beauty against deformity--for goodness against vice--and the great warfare which has brought so many sufferings, shall bring to the earth God's richest blessings." * * * * * HOW FRENCH BANK NOTES ARE MADE. When a new batch of French notes is to be printed, an equivalent number of the choicely prepared and preserved sheets of paper is handed over to the superintendent of the printing office. This office is among the inner buildings of the Bank of France, and is governed by very rigorous rules in all things. The operatives are all picked men, skillful, active, and silent. The sheets, the ink, and the matrixes of the plates are kept securely under lock and key until actually wanted. The printing is effected by steam-worked presses. The ink is blue, and its composition known only to a few of the authorities. An inspector goes his rounds during the continuance of the operations, watching every press, every workman, every process. A beautiful machine, distinct from the press, is employed to print the variable numbers on the note; fed with sheets of paper, it will number a thousand of them in succession, changing the digits each time, and scarcely requiring to be touched meanwhile; even the removal of one note and the placing of another are effected by automatic agency. At every successive stage the note is examined. So complete is the registration of everything that a record is always at hand of the number of sheets rejected ever since the Bank of France was established, be its defects in the paper, the printing, or the numbering. When the master-printer has delivered up his packets of printed and numbered sheets, each note is stamped with the signature of the Secretary-General and the Comptroller. This completes the _creation_ of notes. The notes so created are kept in a strong box, of which the Secretary-General and the Comptroller have keys, and are retained until the day of _issue_. The chief cashier tells the Governor that he wants a new supply of a particular denomination of notes, the Governor tells the council, the council tell the secretary-general and the comptroller, and these two functionaries open their strong box, and hand over the notes demanded. The notes at this time are not really money; they do not become so until the chief cashier has put his signature to each, and registered its number in a book. The life of a French bank note is said to average two or three years, and does not terminate until the condition is very shaky indeed--crimpled, pierced with pinholes, corner creases torn, soft, tarnished, decrepit while yet young. Some have been half-burned; one has been found half-digested in the stomach of a goat, and one boiled in a waistcoat-pocket by a laundress. No matter; the cashier at the bank will do his best to decipher it; he will indeed take an infinity of trouble to put together the ashes of a burned note, and will give the owner a new note or the value in coin, if satisfied of the integrity of the old one. The bank authorities preserve specimens of this kind as curiosities, minute fragments gummed in their proper position on a sheet of paper. Very few of the notes are actually and irrevocably lost. During the last sixty-seven years 24,000 bank notes of 1,000 francs each have been issued, and of this number 23,958 had been returned to the bank by the month of January 1869, leaving only 42 unaccounted for. Whether these 42 are still in existence, or have seen burned into uncollected ashes, or are at the bottom of the sea, or elsewhere, is not known. Of 500-franc notes, 24,935 have been returned out of 25,000. The bank holds itself morally and financially responsible for the small number of notes unreturned, ready to cash them if at any time presented. The bank sends the old notes again and again into circulation, if verified and usable; but they are examined first, and any that are found too defective are canceled by stamping a hole in them. These canceled notes pass from one official to another, and are grouped in classified bundles; the book that records the birth of each note now receives a notification of its civil death, and after three years incarceration in a great oak chest, a grand conflagration takes place. A huge fire is kindled in an open court; the defunct notes are thrown into a sort of revolving wire-cage over the fire; the cage is kept rotating; and the minute fragments of ash, whirled out of the cage through the meshes, take their flight into infinite space--no one knows whither. The Bank of France prints a certain number of notes per day, and destroys a smaller number, so as to have always in reserve a sufficient supply of new notes to meet any emergency; but the actual burning, the grand flare-up takes place only about once a month, when perhaps 150,000 will be burned at once. The French go down to lower denominations than the Rank of England, having notes of 100 francs and 50 francs, equivalent to £4 and £2. There must be a great deal of printing always going on in the Bank of France, seeing that in 1868 they issued 2,711 000 notes, of an aggregate value of 904,750,000 francs (averaging about £13 each), and burned 1,927,192, value 768,854,900 francs. It _sounds_ a very dreadful thing for 30,000,000 sterling in bank notes to be willfully burned in one year. But there is always a phoenix to rise from its ashes; the bank can regenerate as fast as it kills. The Bank of France, in 1846, put in circulation a beautiful crimson printed note for 5,000 francs; but the French people did not like notes of so high a denomination, and all but a very few of this kind have been returned and canceled. On one occasion, a superb individual, wishing to pay a dowry in handsome style, obtained twelve notes of 5,000 francs each for the purpose; but they were returned the very next day by the banker, who much preferred smaller notes for his general purposes. The notes now regularly kept in circulation in France are those of 1,000, 500, 100, and 50 francs. * * * * * WHAT THE NEWSPAPERS SAY. A VALUABLE PAPER.--Of all the journals published in the United States, for the mechanic and scientific man, there is nothing that will in any way compare with the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, published by Munn & Co., of 37 Park Row, New York. Whether as a work of reference, a record of current scientific development, or as an organ and exponent of our inventors, it stands alone for the general ability of its conduct, the voluminousness and variety of its contents, the exactitude and extent of its knowledge, and the correctness of its information. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is a credit at once to the press and our country, and the small price of a yearly subscription ($3), purchases, it is quite safe to say, the largest amount of solid value to be procured for a like expenditure in the world. With our more intelligent mechanics it has long been a great favorite, while to the inventor it is absolutely indispensable. It has had many imitators and competitors in its day, but they have nearly all died the natural death of a feeble inferiority.--_Argus_ (Brooklyn, N. Y.) * * * * * THE GREAT JOURNAL OF ARTS AND SCIENCE.--There is a place in the periodical literature of America which is occupied by only one journal; namely, the well-known SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. It is almost indispensable to a well-balanced intelligence, that a certain proportion of its reading should be devoted to the industrial arts and sciences, those natural manifestations of the high mental development of the age. Every number of the journal has sixteen imperial pages, embellished with engravings, as illustrations, which are gems of art in themselves. It is most ably edited, and its usefulness is not impaired by technical terms nor dry details.--_Milwaukee Sentinel._ * * * * * THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN.--This paper is the oldest in its peculiar province in the United States, and was, for many years, the only one. More recently others have arisen, and are following in its footsteps; but the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN still maintains its position as the best American journal of the inventive arts. Its Patent Office department alone is invaluable to inventors, while its editorial articles, illustrations, etc., give not only information, but a constant stimulus to the productive faculty.--_Mobile Register_. * * * * * Among the papers which we could not very well do without is the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, issued from the well-known office of Munn & Co., 37 Park Row, New York. Carefully edited, nicely printed, well illustrated, it is not only a complete record of the progress of useful inventions, but a trustworthy guide to many of the scientific topics that enlist attention at the present day. No one can be a reader of this most valuable journal, without being kept well informed as to current matters of scientific discovery.--_Congregationalist_ (Boston). * * * * * THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN.--In another column we publish the prospectus of this great paper, and would direct our readers to it. It should be on the work bench of every mechanic, and particularly the young men of our country, upon whose intelligence and mechanical skill depends the future dignity of labor and prosperity of American arts and sciences.--_Monitor_ (Huntington, Pa.) * * * * * We could fill our pages with similar notices, but will close with the following from our cotemporary _De Hope_, published at Holland, Mich., which we doubt not will be read with interest: Wij plaatsen in dit Nummer het prospectus van den SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Het is een zeer schoon blad, dat vooral behoort gelezen te worden door Handwerkslieden. Nieuwe uitvindingen, verbeteringen op het terrein van werktuigkunde, enz, worden daar steeds in vermeld en beschreven. De prijs is zeer matig voor zulk cen blad; drie dollars per jaar. Dat belangstellenden de advertentie lezen. * * * * * CHINESE METHODS OF PRESERVING EGGS. As much has been said of late about the mode of preserving eggs, it may not be uninteresting to say a few words about the Chinese methods, as related by a French chemist, M. Paul Champion, who has lately visited that country, and published a very interesting book on the ancient and modern industries of that curious people. A very common method is to place the eggs in a mixture of clay and water; the clay hardens around the eggs, and is said to preserve them good for a considerable time. But another and much more elaborate method is also commonly practiced. An infusion of three pounds of tea is made in boiling water, and to this are added three pounds of quicklime (or seven pounds when the operation is performed in winter), nine pounds of sea-salt, and seven pounds of ashes of burnt oak finely powdered. This is all well mixed together into a smooth paste by means of a wooden spatula, and then each egg is covered with it by hand, gloves being worn to prevent the corrosive action of the lime on the hands. When the eggs are all covered with the mixture, they are rolled in a mass of straw ashes, and then placed in baskets with balls of rice--boiled, we presume--to keep the eggs from touching each other. About 100 to 150 eggs are placed in one basket. In about three months the whole becomes hardened into a crust, and then the eggs are sent to market; the retail price of such eggs is generally less than a penny each. These eggs are highly esteemed in China, and always served in good houses; but they have undergone a strange transformation, which certainly would not recommend them to English palates; the yolk has assumed a decidedly green tinge, and the white is set. When broken, they emit that unpleasant sulphurous smell which would certainly cause their instant banishment from our breakfast-tables. However, the Chinese are admitted, even by Frenchmen, to be great _gourmets_; and we can only say, therefore, that in questions of eating there is certainly no disputing about tastes. * * * * * STEAM BOILER INSPECTION. Mr. Alfred Guthrie, U.S. Inspector, informs us that the following resolution was recently adopted by the Board of Supervising Inspectors: Resolved, That a special committee be appointed, to whom shall be referred the subject-matter of steam boiler explosions, who shall be requested to take up the subject in all its varied complications, and present the result of their inquiries, with their opinions of the real causes of such explosions, accompanied by such information as may be of practical benefit and general interest, to be reported at the next annual meeting of the board for its consideration. Mr. Guthrie, whose address will be at Washington, D.C. until January 10, desires to receive suggestions from practical engineers upon the subject of boiler explosions. * * * * * EDITORIAL SUMMARY. Darkness of complexion has been attributed to the sun's power from the age of Solomon to this day. "Look not upon me because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me." And there cannot be a doubt that, to a certain degree, the opinion is well founded--the invisible rays in the solar beams, which change vegetable color, and have been employed with such remarkable effect on the daguerreotype, act upon every substance on which they fall, producing mysterious and wonderful changes in their molecular state, man not excepted. * * * * * The three companies under whose protection Chinese are brought into California, keep an accurate account of the condition and employment of the persons they import. From these books it appears that 138,000 Chinese have been brought into California. Of these, 10,426 have died, 57,323 have returned to China, and about 91,000 still remain on the Pacific coast. But only 41,000 live in California. Of these 41,000, 9,300 are women, children, old and decrepit, or criminals confined in the jails. The California authorities have at length decided to admit Chinese testimony in the courts. * * * * * One of our subscribers residing in Maine has read our article "How to Spend the Winter Evenings," and writes to us that up in his section they have no trouble on that score. As soon as the day's work is over the inhabitants commence the job of trying to get their rooms warm, and as soon as a comfortable temperature is reached it is time to go to bed. * * * * * DESIGN PATENT DECISION.--We publish elsewhere a recent elaborate decision of Commissioner Fisher, in which he reviews the laws and former practice of the office in regard to applications for patents for designs, with the view to the establishment of a uniformity of practice in regard to design patents. The decision is one of much interest to inventors and agents, and fully warrants its publication. * * * * * OIL PAPER HANGINGS.--A kind of oil paper hangings called "Oleo Charta" is now made in England, which, it is asserted, is impervious to wet, may be placed on new or damp walls without risk of damage or discoloration, may be washed with soap and water as often as required, and will last twenty years. The process of manufacture is not explained. * * * * * THE STEVENS BREECH-LOADING RIFLE. This new arm, a patent on which, was obtained through the Scientific American Patent Agency, June 11, 1867, is destined, in our opinion, to become a formidable rival to the breech-loading rifles which have already attained popularity. It is one of the most simple and effective guns we have yet seen. Only three motions are required to load, discharge the piece, and throw out the shell of the cartridge. The breech-block is side-hinged, and it is opened and the shell is thrown out by simply bringing the gun to half cock. The gun may, however, be cocked without opening the breech by pressing the trigger while cocking. The gun, when held in position, may be fired at the rate of forty shots per minute. All the movements of the parts are directly backward and forward; in our opinion the best that can be employed for this purpose, and the least liable to get out of order. In short, the gun possesses all the essentials of a first class rifle, and has advantages which we think are not ordinarily met with in arms of this character. * * * * * A NOVEL FRENCH HAND VISE. In using ordinary hand vises several inconveniences are met with. For instance, if it is desired to work a piece of metal of a certain length, it must necessarily be presented obliquely on the side of the jaw of the vise, because of its screw, which is horizontal and forms a knob in the axis of the vise. The consequences are, first, that on tightening the nut of the horizontal screw vise the pressure is only exerted on the side, and greatly tries the vise itself while obtaining an irregular pressure; secondly, that as the piece to be worked is held obliquely, however skilled the workman may be, he always finds himself cramped in the execution of his work, particularly if of a delicate nature. To avoid these inconveniences a Parisian mechanic has designed and lately patented in England the neat form of hand vise of which we annex illustrations, Fig. 1 being an elevation and Fig. 2 a longitudinal section. In these views, A, is a wooden or metal handle pierced throughout its length; this handle of metal may be made in one piece, with the nut, and the conical ferrule. B is the ring or ferrule of the handle; and C are the jaws of the vise worked by the adjusting screw, D, and the springs, r r. E is a conical ferrule or shoulder, fixed or movable, and serving to open or close the jaws of the vise accordingly as the handle is turned right or left; this conical shoulder is protected from wear by a tempered steel washer, v. G is a nut with collar carrying the conical ferrule or shoulder, E, and the steel washer, v, while H H are the joints of the jaws of the vise held by a screw, I, which serves as a support to the adjusting screw. [Illustration: FIG. 1. FIG. 2.] This hand vise may be applied to a number of uses, and among others it may be readily converted into a haft or handle for any kind of tailed or shanked tool, such as files, wrenches, olive bits, chisels, or screwdrivers, and may also serve as pincers or nippers. It is of very simple construction. * * * * * THE MOUND-BUILDERS IN COLORADO. New evidence of the existence of the Mound-Builders in the mountain ranges of Colorado, similar to those in Montana, Utah, and Nevada, have recently been discovered by Mr. C.A. Deane, of Denver. He found upon the extreme summit of the snow-range structures of stone, evidently of ancient origin, and hitherto unknown or unmolested. Opposite to and almost north of the South Boulder Creek, and the summit of the range, Dr. Deane observed large numbers of granite rocks, and many of them as large as two men could lift, in a position that could not have been the result of chance. They had evidently been placed upright in a line conforming to a general contour of the dividing ridge, and frequently extending in an unbroken line for one or two hundred yards. The walls and the mounds are situated three thousand feet above the timber line. It is, therefore, hardly supposable that they were built for altars of sacrifice. They were not large enough for shelter or defense. The more probable supposition is that, like the large mounds in Montana and elsewhere, they were places of sepulture. * * * * * THE WOVEN-WIRE MATTRESS. Most of our readers who attended the last Fair of the American Institute, will recall an article in the furniture department, which attracted much attention on account of its novelty and utility. We refer to the wire mattress, or bed, manufactured by the Woven Wire Mattress Company, of Hartford, Conn. To the ordinary mind a new invention is interesting or not, in proportion to the probability of its coming into every-day use, and many a good housewife lingers in admiration over an improved sewing machine or cooking stove, to whom a new steam engine has no attraction. For this reason it was that the wire mattress was sat on and lain on by the numerous visitors at the Fair. [Illustration] The engraving presented herewith will give the reader, who has not seen the article, a good idea of its appearance. It consists of a fabric represented below, half an inch thick, composed of fine wire springs, each one the length of the bed; all the three hundred spirals, being so woven and braided together, in a double "weave," by machinery, that a sort of wire cloth is produced. It differs from any other material hitherto made, in that it has great strength and elasticity. There is, in fact, no other device, except the air or water bed, which can compare with it in its elastic properties. [Illustration] We are informed that nine hundred pounds of dead weight of wire were placed on it for nearly five days, without injurious effects. This fabric is stretched on a frame, as seen in the first engraving, the proper tension is secured to suit the fancy, and the mattress is ready for use. It is then set into the bedstead, like the ordinary spring bed, except that only two slats are used to support it. Thus, with a slight covering in summer, and a thin hair mattress for warmth in winter, a most perfect sleeping arrangement is secured. The first adaptation of the wire mattresses was for private houses, but they have been found to have special advantages for hospital use. They have been largely introduced into the Hartford Hospital, the Bellevue Hospital, New York, and the Marine Hospital, Brooklyn, and have proved to be, after months of the severest use, with all classes of patients, a very great success for such purposes. The elastic flexible mattresses yield to every motion and part of the body, much to the relief of the suffering patient. Another very great advantage is, that when carefully painted they are always clean. Pillows of the same materials are made soft and pliable by using a fine wire and small coil. They are always cool, and afford the opportunity of placing bags of ice under the head in case of sickness. One of these mattresses and a bedstead and pillows complete--all of which the Company make--furnish, with the addition of a folded blanket or comfortable, a perfect outfit for hospital use. They are particularly useful for ships' berths, as they dispense with the ordinary bottom, and the sacking and thick mattress. Shippers know this. We are assured that a coating of paint, carefully applied to the well-tinned wires will protect them from rust. There can be no question but that these beds, with a light covering--scarcely more than a sheet--are especially adapted for hot climates. The Company have already orders for them for the Brazilian market, and they have been introduced into many of the Southern States. This wire fabric is adapted to other articles of furniture, and is used in place of the ordinary springs in chairs, sofas, etc. For out-door settees, lounges, car seats, and other like purposes, it is well adapted. Three patents have been issued to the Company on the wire mattress, through the Scientific American Patent Agency. [See advertisement of the Woven Wire Mattress Company on another page.] * * * * * Flouring Mill Hazards. A correspondent, in discussing the causes of fires in flour mills, gives the following facts and queries: "F. Bertchey's mill, at Milwaukee, burned in September last. The fire originated from a candle held near a bran or feed spout, reaching from the upper to a lower floor. The ignition was instant, and attained different points of the building at about the same moment. "On November 20, 1868, Schmidt & Co's mill, at St. Louis, burned in a similar manner, the light in this case being in a globe lamp, but the conflagration was, nevertheless, quite as sudden and general as in the first case cited. Other instances of like character have occurred quite recently. And now the query is, What caused the disaster? Whence the combustion? "It has been conjectured that the bran-dust, or fine and dry powder, passing down or up these conductors, may be the kindling cause of the fire in these cases; but bran is not over combustible in itself, nor do we know why it should become so when thus reduced to an impalpable powder. "Another theory is that a gas arises from the transmuting grain, which, excluded from surrounding atmosphere in these close conduits, becomes inflammable, and hence the results, as recited above, whenever a lighted flame is brought in contact therewith. "Be the cause gas or dust, the disaster is the same: and is it not a phenomenon worth studying and remedying, so far as within the province and control of those most interested?" Some similar instances came under our personal observation while adjuster for the Aetna at its western branch. The Star Mills at Mascoutah, Ill., burned about the year 1864. They were grinding middlings. About three o'clock in the morning the miller in charge went up to the chamber (a large box extending through several stories), as he had often done before, to jar the middlings down, they having clogged. He carried a small, open oil lamp, which he placed on a beam, just behind and above his head. He then opened a slide and thrust in a shovel, which started the middlings down with a thump, raising a great dust. As this dust issued in a thin cloud from the slide, it approached and touched the lamp, when instantly, as if it had been coal gas, it flashed, burning the miller's hair and beard, and filling the middlings box with a sheet of flame, which spread with great rapidity and destroyed the mill. A mill at Dover, Ky., had accumulated a large quantity of middlings in an upper story, when the weight caused some sagging, and a man was sent up with a shovel to "even" the bin. His pressure was the "last straw," and the floor under the man broke through, pouring out a cascade of middlings, which flowed down from story to story, filling the mill with its dust. In a very few minutes it reached the boiler room, and the instant it touched the fire it ignited with a flash, and the mills was in flames instantly. It was totally destroyed. In this last named case the gas theory will not apply. The dust was not confined in a spout, but was floating free in the air throughout the mill. The phenomenon was like the others mentioned, and seems to indicate that the fine dust itself, when floating in the air, is the fatal incendiary. The subject is worthy of a scientific analysis, such as we have never seen bestowed upon it. The facts are well authenticated, but the philosophy of such ignition is not generally understood.--_Insurance Monitor_. * * * * * Fire-Proof Buildings. "It has long been a vexed problem with architects and builders, how to make a building completely fire-proof without the enormous expense of iron beams and girders, and even this has sometimes failed to prove a complete protection. In the building of the National State Bank, the architect estimated that it could not be made fire-proof in the ordinary style for less than $6,000, and while hesitating as to the expense and seeking to provide some remedy against the dampness incident to iron beams, Mr. Fowler learned from the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN that Edwin May, of Indianapolis, the well-known architect of our county jail, had taken letters patent on a fire-proof lath for ceilings and inside partition walls, together with a concrete floor for the protection of the upper edge of the joist which by actual test had been demonstrated to be fire-proof. After a critical examination of the invention upon its merits, it was adopted, and the workmen are now engaged in putting it in. Our citizens engaged in, or contemplating building, will be interested in an examination of the work while in progress." [We copy the above from the _Lafayette_ (Indiana) _Courier_, and in this connection we make the following extract from a letter just received by us from Mr. May, the inventor: "You will see by the above notice one result of my advertisement in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. This is only a _mite_. I have more than I can do, and I would say to inventors who are not realizing what they expected from their patents, that one _illustrated advertisement_ in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will effect more than a notice in all the newspapers in the United States. This is saying a good deal but such is my belief."] * * * * * The Decline of American Shipping. At a meeting of the New York Chamber of Commerce, held December 16, to consider means for reviving American commerce, the following resolutions were adopted: Resolved, That this Chamber recommend to the Congress of the United States, about to assemble, the modification of existing laws, so that I. Foreign-built steamers may be imported free of duty, and privileged to carry the American flag, provided they are American owned and not to be employed in our coastwise trade. II. That iron plates and such other material for the construction of steamers as may be deemed advisable, be admitted free of duty. III. That on all ship stores procurable in bond, drawback be returned, as upon goods shipped for sale to foreign lands; and Finally, That ample subsidies be granted to lines of steamers built in American yards, to the end that competition with powerful foreign organizations may be successfully inaugurated and sustained. The Chamber ordered the resolutions engrossed, accompanied by a memorial forwarded to Congress. These resolutions, in our opinion, embody the solution of the question under consideration, and we trust they may be speedily and favorably acted upon by Congress. * * * * * Young men out of employment can easily obtain enough subscribers for the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN to receive a cash prize of sufficient magnitude to insure them a good salary for six weeks' work. Send for prospectus and circulars. * * * * * CORRESPONDENCE. _The Editors are not responsible for the Opinions expressed by their Correspondents_. * * * * * Aerial Navigation--A Suggestion. Messrs. Editors:--As a constant reader of your invaluable paper, many subjects of deep interest come under my observation, and doubtless no journal throughout the land contains more instructive reading--that which tends to accelerate the progress of scientific investigation, and promote the general interest of the people--than the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. The series of articles under the head of "Aerial Navigation," commenced on page 309, volume XXI., has, perhaps, been read with as much pleasure and interest as anything published in your valuable journal. I say with pleasure--because it is really gratifying to mark the advancing steps which inventors are making in this branch of science; and with interest--because every new idea set forth, calculated to further the success of aerial navigation, should be, and no doubt will be, regarded as of great importance by every one. And, as the more suggestions placed before the minds of those working for the improvement of any invention, the greater number will they have from which to choose or experiment upon, I would like to make one suggestion here, which may be of some importance in the construction and operation of the "Aeroport," under the supervision of Mr. Porter, of your city, a description of which is given on pages 346-7, volume XXI., of your paper. I suggest that the propelling wheels be placed in some other position than that given in the said description. From what little knowledge I possess of aerial navigation, I am persuaded that it would take less power to propel the "Aeroport" at a given speed, if the wheels were placed at the rear or front portion of the flying ship. My reason for being thus persuaded is, that as the forward and aft halves of the float are cone-shaped--the center being the base, and the front and rear ends being the vertexes--there must be an increased velocity of the atmosphere from front to aft as the aeroport advances. Consequently the driving wheels being placed under the center or largest diameter of the float, they must evidently revolve with greater rapidity in the current of air passing between the float and the saloon, going in opposite direction to that in which the aeroport is flying at a given speed, than they would were they placed in front or behind where the atmosphere is comparatively at rest. I take this view from the fact that steamboats and other vessels proceed with greater speed, with a given power, _down_ stream than they do _up_ stream, mostly on account of the paddles striking against the current flowing in the same direction in which the vessel is rowing. The propelling wheels placed either at the front or rear may have the axle extended through the end of the float to the center, and the cog-wheel, for the chain, placed on the inner end of the axle, and the chain descending through the bottom of the float, and connected to the engine in the same manner as given in your paper. The chain should be inclosed from the float to the saloon below, with a pipe of the same material as the float, and sufficiently large to insure the free action of the chain, and the axle of the propellers should be made tight with suitable packing to prevent the escape of gas. However there may be different arrangements employed for connecting the engine to the wheels. A shaft extending directly under the float, and reaching from the center to the axle supporting the propellers, and connected therewith by means of side cog-wheels, might be used; and as the shaft would necessarily diverge from a straight line with the said axle, the shaft having the chain-wheel on the end directly over the engine and connected therewith in the manner proposed by Mr. Porter, I would suggest further that it would, perhaps, be preferable to place the wheels at the front end, that the rudder might remain in its original position, and the aeroport could swing behind the propellers on encountering side currents of air, and could thus be more easily guided. I firmly believe that Mr. Porter has taken "the right step in the right direction" to accomplish that which has been so long sought, and which evidently will be accomplished at some future time. The air will yet be navigated by numerous flying ships, going from one city to another like those that now cover the broad bosom of our oceans. HIRAM VAN METER. Macomb, Ill. * * * * * Puttying Floors of Jewelers Shops and Otherwise. Messrs. Editors:--I am a reader of your valuable paper and find in it much to interest, and many practical hints that are useful in my vocation; I would not be without it for any consideration and I think every mechanic in the land should take it, read it, and profit by the reading. I notice, in Vol. XXI, page 371, a communication headed, "Watch Repairers' Shop," in which directions are given to fill the chinks in the floor around the work-bench with soft pine and putty, etc., etc.; this is all well enough, but will not prevent the breaking of pivots should a balance wheel be dropped, neither will it prevent the wheel being stepped upon and so rendered useless, as often happens. I am a watch-maker and jeweler, and I never drop a wheel or part of a watch on the floor. I have an apron about one yard wide, and in the corners of it are eyelet-holes, so that I can pin it to the bench when I am working; I have strings to it, but do not generally tie them around me, but let it be loose in my lap as I have to jump up, to attend to customers in the shop. In the shop where I learned my trade (in London, England), every workman was _compelled_ to wear an apron, and so much waste of property and valuable time was saved; the saving of _time_ in _one week_ will more than pay the cost of the aprons. Sidney Plains, N. Y, GEO. C.L. KENT. * * * * * Western Demand for Agricultural Implements. Messrs. Editors:--I often think, on perusing your very valuable journal of science, and the numerous mechanical and scientific problems it unfolds, that the tendency of the age is to supersede all manual labor by machinery. Whether such a thing is possible is not the question for me to consider; I only know that the tendency of universal human genius seems directed to that end. I make the above observation casually, in order to introduce a few ideas on the subject of improvement in agricultural implements--the great _desideratum_ of the West at this moment. Here nature has opened her stores so munificently, that all the husbandman has to do is to plow, sow, and garner the fruits of his labor. But two great improvements are needed to enable the western farmer to keep pace with improvements in the mechanic arts and other kindred employment. Indeed, we at the West, particularly, need a good, cheap, steam plow that can be made practicable for at least the better grade of farmers. The English plan of moldboards, that overcome all possible traction and necessitate the duplex stationary engines, with the cumbrous "artillery of attachments," may do for sluggish people but will never meet the wants of the Yankee nation. The steam plow suited to the genius of our people, must, to use a vulgarism, "get up and go." It must possess sufficient power of propulsion and traction to pulverize the ground better, deeper, and more rapidly than the "old way." Such is the want of the great West in reference to preparing the soil for crops. I do not know of such a machine in use, nor do I believe in the theory of Dr. Brainard, that the moldboard is the only plan for properly pulverizing the soil; for I am satisfied that such plan is wholly inadmissible in steam plowing in this country, for want of sufficient traction for self-propulsion, and observation has taught me that a self-propelling plow is the only steam plow our people will tolerate. I have lately examined the drawings of a steam plow invented by a gentleman of this city (which I am not at liberty to explain in detail) that seems to meet the great want I have spoken of. The invention consists in a very simple device, by which the whole force of pulverizing the ground is applied to propel the machine, and if this be not sufficient, an independent force may be applied, so arranged as to govern the speed of the machine at the will of the operator. You will, no doubt, in due time hear more of this machine, which seems to me to meet the great want so long experienced in Western cultivation. The next great want of the West is a practical grain binder, that shall securely bind the grain as cut. The scarcity and high price of labor renders such a machine an absolute necessity. The efforts to supply this great want have been numerous, but with no flattering success so far as I am able to learn, except the machine invented by a citizen of this place, which has already made its mark by demonstrating that automatic machinery can and does bind the grain as fast as cut. The machine I speak of is yet in a chrysalis state, so to speak, but it has been worked two years in the field, the last season without missing a bundle, though not without the usual difficulties of all new machines in respect to the workings of some parts--too weak, etc. It is believed that the coming harvest will witness its triumphant success. If so, the production of our staple cereal will be greatly cheapened. I shall be glad to renew "old acquaintance," by a more detailed statement hereafter. I send enclosed the pay for another year of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, which I can no more do without than my accustomed dinner. C. Madison, Wis. * * * * * Economical Steam Engine. Messrs. Editors:--Permit me now to make a few remarks in regard to an article on page 844, last volume of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, entitled "Which is the Most Economical Steam Engine?" The principles laid down in that article, I think are correct. I run a saw-mill with an engine which fills those conditions nearer than I ever saw, and I would like to give your readers a brief description of it. The cylinder is 10-inch bore, and 14-inch stroke; steam chest extends enough beyond the ends of the cylinder so that the steam travels only 2½ inches, the shortest distance possible, after leaving the valve before it reaches the piston-head, and the space between the piston-head and cylinder-head is only one-fourth of an inch, the bolt heads being counter-sunk until even. Other things about this engine are in proportion. With this engine attached to a direct acting circular mill, I can saw 2,000 feet of hard-wood inch boards in one hour. If any of your readers can beat this, I would like to hear from them. JOHN CARNES. * * * * * Friction and Percussion. Messrs. Editors:--In reply to "Spectrum," page 358, of last volume, I will be brief. In his third paragraph he claims that he has merely _suggested_ that friction and percussion may often be one and the same thing; and immediately claims that in the case of the polished button rubbing a planed pine board, the force which overcomes and levels the undulations of the wood, is percussion, and that percussion is also the cause of the heat; the microscopic hills and hollows on the shining brass button skipping and jumping along the pine, produces little infinitesimal bumpings, and so pound out the heat. This _little_ theory should be known to the homeopaths--they could illustrate infinitesimal quantities by it! "Spectrum" treats my hammered horsenail illustration shabbily. After indirectly acknowledging that there is a point where hammering will no longer produce heat, he puts it on the grindstone, subjects it to friction, and when it burns his fingers, throws his hat in the air and shouts "Hurrah for _percussion!_" We agree perfectly, except that he calls hammering, _condensation_; calls friction, _percussion_; and drops friction from the mechanical dictionary altogether. A railway car axle often heats and sets fire to the packing, when the journal is smooth as polished glass; but I never heard of those parts of the car which are constantly undergoing percussion, even getting uncomfortably warm. The natives of the South Pacific produce fire by rubbing pieces of dry wood together, but I never heard of their rapping sticks for the same purpose. I have seen a new, sharp knife made hot enough to raise a blister, whittling a clean dry stick of pine, and I would like to have "Spectrum" tell us, if in all the above cases percussion is the cause of the evolution of of heat, and what is friction doing in the mean time. New Albany, Ind. C.C.H. * * * * * Oiling a Preservative of Brown Stone. Messrs. Editors:--I have read the article entitled, "What is to Become of our Brown Stone Fronts," and have waited to see what others have to say. But with so much at stake, no body seems to know what to do or say. Being a practical painter, it has been my lot to oil some of the best fronts in New York, namely corner of 23d Street and 5th Avenue, No. 2, West 23rd Street, also No. 1, West 30th Street; also the residence of E.S. Higgins, the carpet manufacturer, done by other journeymen. They were very dark in color for a few weeks, but now after two years, they are bleached almost as light as they were at first. These fronts were cleaned whenever necessary, and then oiled with fresh raw linseed oil from the press, put on pretty much as carefully as in ordinary varnish work. No second coat or lapping over of the oil. All was put on at once that it would take without running down in streams. The result: the oil penetrates into good dry stone probably 1½ inches, making the stone hard and flinty, as any stone cutter will soon find out if he tries to trim it. It keeps the damp and therefore the frost out of the stone, as will be seen any foggy day, the damp running down in streams on the oiled stone, and the unoiled stone absorbing the dampness. It is therefore necessary to oil during dry weather. The oil is especially beneficial to balustrades and carvings, as they are generally got out of soft stone. It is also beneficial underneath balconies and porches, as the sun never has a chance to dry the stone in such situations before the frost flakes it. This I send in part payment for the great deal I have learned from your paper. T.H. Rilley New York City. * * * * * Interesting Correspondence from China. Messrs. Editors:--Your paper seems to increase in interest. I brought the back volumes from Madras to Pekin, and am glad to refer to them here where I must depend upon myself. I have been building and repairing premises since I came here last year. I find the carpenters and masons are very much delighted with our tools, especially our saws, planes, borers, vise, and hammers. Our lathe is a wonder. They use only the ancient spindle turned backwards and forwards by a treadle or by the left hand while the right guides the chisel or turning-tool, which cuts only half the time. They use only the turning saw, which often fails them because it cannot be used in splitting wide boards in the middle, and in many other places. They are great sawyers, however. They stand heavy pine spars on end, if rather short, say 8 feet, the common length of many intended for making coffins, and cut them up into three-eighths or half-inch stuff with great patience. A longer one they will lean over and prop up, raising it towards the perpendicular as they advance. They must have some hard jobs. I have just measured a poplar plank in front of a coffin manufactory, which I found to be 5 ft. 3 in. at the butt, 3 ft. 10 in. at the top, 8 feet long, and about 8 inches thick. For a crosscut saw they rig one like our wood-saw. I am sure it would deeply interest you to make a visit to Pekin and see how this ancient, patient, and industrious people do their work. It is truly painful to see how much time they spend in making the simplest tool for want of at least a few labor-saving appliances. Doubtless you have their tools on show in New York. They are to me an interesting study, though I have been long familiar with the rude tools of the Hindoos. It is constantly suggested to me that we must have got many hints from the Chinese, or else indeed they have taken hints from the West; or again, which is perhaps the true solution, implements like words have a common origin. I should think from what I have observed in a short time, that the Chinese resemble the Europeans in their tools more than the Hindoos--a thing I did not at all anticipate. A clever man could write you an interesting chapter on the ways of the Pekinese, the Chinese Manchus, Mongols, and the rest mixed together, though the Chinese are confessedly the workers in wood, iron, and everything else. The Manchus are mostly hangers on of the government, living mainly upon a miserable monthly stipend. The reading of your unequaled journal makes me interested in you as if you were personal friends, and so I have run away with these pointless remarks. I am sure you will excuse me, and not wonder that one wishes to breathe now and then. I was an old subscriber in Madras, and hope to be till I can read no longer. My son, who perished at Andersonville, was a subscriber to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN till the day of his capture by Mosby. Pekin, China. P.R. Hunt. * * * * * Communication Between Deaf and Blind Mutes. Messrs. Editors:--In a recent number of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN I notice an ingenious method of teaching deaf and dumb persons to converse in the dark, which is also applicable to blind mutes, and it brings to my recollection a method which was in use among the "telegraph boys" some years ago when I was one of them. Sometimes when we were visiting and asked to communicate to a "brother chip," anything that it was not advisable for the persons around us to know, a slight tap-tapping on the table or chair would draw the attention of the party we asked to talk to, and then by his watching the forefinger of the writer, if across the room, or if near enough, by placing the hand of the writer carelessly on the shoulder of the party we desired to communicate with, the communication was written out in the telegraph alphabet or by taking hold of his hand and writing upon the finger. I think this method will be found much less complicated, if not quite as rapid, as the method with both hands, and much more convenient, as it is only necessary to have hold of one hand of the person communicated with, and is more rapid than writing with a pen. For the benefit of those not acquainted with the telegraph alphabet, I give it: A B C D E F G H I .- -... ... -.. . .-. --. .... .. J K L M N O P Q -.-. -.- --- -- -. . . ..... ..-. R S T U V W X Y . .. ... - ..- ...- .-- ..-. .. .. Z ... . The uninitiated will observe that O differs from I in the distance between the dots, made thus: I by two quick strokes of the forefinger; O by one quick stroke, slight pause, and another quick stroke; the dashes are made by holding the finger down for a short space: thus SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN would be written: S C I E N T I F I C ... .. . .. . -. - .. .-. .. .. . A M E R I C A N .- -- . . .. .. .. . .- -. In a very short time any one can learn to read by the sight or by the touch. Anything which can add to the pleasure or comfort of these unfortunates is of importance. MAGNET [Nothing can compensate for want of rapidity in a language designed for colloquy. Although our correspondent found the Morse telegraph alphabet a resource on occasion, he would scarcely be content to use it, and it only for life, even if emancipation from it involved months of labor. The motions required to spell SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN by the telegraph alphabet are thirty-nine, but as the short dashes occupy the time of two dots for each dash, and there are eight of these, eight more ought to be counted in a comparison of it with an alphabet composed wholly of dots, this would make forty-seven. To spell the same words in full by the mute alphabet referred to would require only twenty-three motions. A still greater disparity in rate would, we think, be found in an entire colloquial sentence. Thus the sentence "Hand me an apple" would require, by the mute alphabet, the time of fourteen dots, while with the telegraph alphabet it would require the time of thirty-nine.--Eds.] * * * * * Cheap Cotton Press Wanted. Messrs. Munn & Co.:--Please give us any information of cheap cotton-presses, such as small neighborhoods, or single planters, in the South could own. In particular, a press that will put 40 pounds cotton into each cubic foot. We want cotton better handled, and to that end may want small bales, say 150 pounds each. But these must be put into three or four cubic feet, or they will cost too much for covering, ties, etc. Perhaps you can furnish us with a wood-cut of some, or several, presses worked by hand, or by horse-power, that will do good service, not cost too much, be simple in operation, not require too much power, and be effective as above. It may be for the interest of some of your clients or correspondents to give us the facts, as we shall put them into a report for circulation amongst the entire cotton interest of the country. Yours very truly, WALTER WELLS, _Sec'y_. National Association of Cotton Manufacturers and Planters, No. 11, Pemberton Square, Boston, Mass. * * * * * A Singular Freak of a Magnet. Messrs. Editors:--In my library hangs a powerful horseshoe magnet which has a keeper and a weight attached of about three ounces. This weight is sustained firmly by the attracting power of the magnet, and is not easily shaken off by any oscillating motion, yet through some (to me) unknown cause during each of the last ten nights the magnet has lost its power, and the keeper and weight lie in the morning on the bottom of the case where the magnet has hung for many years without a like occurrence, except once on the occasion of a severe shock of an earthquake which took place December 17, 1867. There is no possible way for this magnet to be disturbed except by the electric current; then why should its power thus return without the aid of a battery or keeper? Will some one explain? FLOYD HAMBLIN. Madrid Springs, N.Y. * * * * * Speaking makes the ready man, writing the correct man, and reading the full man. * * * * * PRESERVATION OF IRON. BY PROF. HENRY E. COLTON. "What is wanted is something equally applicable to large or small pieces of iron, and which will answer to ward off the attacks not only of the common atmospheric oxygen, but also remain unaffected by acids or salt waters." The above from a late number of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN states not only the writer's ideas but also one of the greatest wants of the age. Iron is daily being put to more and more varied uses. On land the great question is what will prevent rust; on water, what will prevent rust and fouling of bottoms of iron vessels. We will briefly summarize the many patents granted for this purpose. Eight are for sheathing of various kinds put on in varied modes. The most practicable of these is a system prepared by Daft. Most iron vessels are now constructed by every other plate lapping the edges of the one between. He proposes, instead of having the plates all the same width, to have one wide and one very narrow plate. This would leave a trough between the two wide plates of the depth of the thickness of the plates. He proposes to force into this trough very tightly pieces of teak, and to the teak, thus embedded, he nails a sheathing of zinc. The zinc is kept clean by slowly wearing away of its surface from action by contact with the iron and salt water. There are four patents, in which various, so-called, non-conducting coats are put on the iron, and copper pigment in some form put on over them. These have been specially condemned in England, as no matter how good the non-conducting substance--and many are so only in name--it will become rubbed off at some points, and there the bottom will be eaten both by salt water and action of copper. Coal tar and asphaltum are the subjects of patents in various forms. One patent claims rubber or gutta-percha dissolved in linseed oil as a vehicle in which to grind the pigment; another the same dissolved in naphtha or bisulphide of carbon as a pigment; another hard rubber, ground. Enameling with different materials is proposed by some, while one proposes to glaze the bottoms so that barnacles and grass would find a slippery foothold. Combinations of tallow, resin, and tar--mineral and pine--are patented mostly to use over other paints. Coal tar, sulphur, lime, and tallow, are the subject of one patent; guano, red lead, and oil of another; while sulphur and silica are claimed by a third. Paints containing mercury, arsenic, and even strychnine, are the subjects of several patents. A mixture of coal tar and mercurial ointment of one. Galvanism is proposed to be used in various ways--strips of copper and zinc, or by galvanizing the plates before use. Black lead finds a place in many compositions. One patent, by a complicated process, effects a union of metallic zinc and iron; this, granulated and ground fine, then mixed with red lead and oil, makes the paint. It is said to be the best of all the patented stuffs. It is astonishing how many use oils derived from coal, peat, or resin, and tars of the same. There are about fifty patents for this object and with all of them before their eyes, the British Society for the Advancement of Art still hold the $5,000 reward for a pigment or covering which will perfectly protect from rust and fouling. However they may puff their products for selling, no one has the temerity to claim that they deserve the reward. We think it would be difficult to find so many expedients ever before adopted for the accomplishment of any one object. These are all English patents, England having necessarily been obliged to use iron for vessels from its cheapness as well as its consequent first introduction there. In the United States no patents worth mentioning have been granted. The first requisites for a pigment or coating for iron are, that it should not contain any copper--the corrosive action of that metal on iron being intense. Then if for work exposed to air it should form such a coating as to be impervious to that gaseous fluid, and be so constituted chemically as not to be oxidizable by it; if under water--especially sea water--to be impermeable to moisture, so elastic as not to crack, so insoluble as not to chloridize; to form a perfect, apparently hard, coating: and yet wear just enough to keep off incrustation, barnacles, or growth of grass. In fact, this slow wearing away is the only preventive of fouling in iron vessels. Wooden bottoms may be poisoned by solutions of copper--and that metal has no superior for such uses, especially when it is combined in mixture with mineral or resinous tars and spirits--these compounds, however, are not only useless on iron bottoms, but also injurious. What then is _the_ substance: 1st. One of the oxides of lead (red lead). 2d. The purest oxide of iron to be found. If properly made these articles can be carried to no higher state of oxidation, and respectively, as to order named, they have no superiors for body and durability. By preference, 1st, red lead, either out of or under water; 2d, Prince's oxide of iron only, out of water. The color of these paints--the first red, the latter brown, may be hidden by a coat of white or tinted color. If there were to be had in combination as a white paint, an oxide of lead and an oxide of zinc, it would be immensely superior to either, but that such has not been produced is rather the fault of carelessness than of possibility. Zinc protects iron with great effect, but it is too rapidly worn in the effort to be of lasting value. Hence the great desideratum, the yet to be, the coming pigment is a white oxide of lead or a combined white oxide of lead and white oxide of zinc, without sulphates or chlorides. Those materials answer very well for work exposed to atmospheric air, and perhaps nothing will ever be found better; but a different need is that for salt water. No mere protector of the iron from rust can be found superior to pure red lead and linseed oil. We have seen a natural combination of zinc, lead, and iron, which, in our experience, ranks next; but the zinc is acted on by the chloride of sodium, and wears away too much of the material. Red lead, however, while covering the iron perfectly and effectually preventing rust, and also having but little disposition to chloridize, when it does, will foul both with grass and barnacles. Hence, the first desideratum being obtained, how shall we accomplish the other. The prevention of fouling may be accomplished in two ways: First, cover the vessel's bottom with two or even three coats of red lead, and give each time to dry hard. Then melt in an iron pot a mixture of two parts beeswax, two parts tallow, and one part pine resin; mix thoroughly, and apply hot one or two coats. This mixture may be tinted with vermilion or chrome green. It is not necessary to use any poisonous substance, as it is only by its softness and gradual wear that it is kept clean. Second, mix red lead and granular metallic zinc, ground fine, or such a mineral as we have mentioned--crystalline and granular in its character. Put on two or three coats, and allow each to set--they will never dry hard. The zinc will slowly wear off, keeping the whole surface clean, while there will be left enough coating of the lead to preserve the iron from rust. The oil I would urge for these pigments is linseed--as little boiled as possible, to be thinned with spirits of turpentine. There seems to have been a mania for mixtures of tar and resins, their spirits and oils; my experience fails to show me any advantage for them on an iron bottom. They have neither elasticity nor durability, while linseed oil has both in a pre-eminent degree, and is no more likely to foul than they, when in a combination that does not dry hard. Besides they are difficult to grind, inconvenient to transport, and offensive to use. Perhaps we have not, in the opinion of some, answered the want expressed in the first paragraph. No pigment with the requisites of durability and cheapness will resist the attacks of strong acids on iron. The first we have mentioned will--all such as may float in our air from factories or chemical works. Chemically it is converted by nitric acid and chlorine into an insoluble substance--plumbic acid or the cyanide of lead. An experience of more than three years, with almost unlimited means at our command for experiment, demonstrates to us that we have indicated the means of filling the other requisites asked for. It may be that something new will be discovered, but we doubt it. Let any one tread the road we have trod, investigate and experiment where and as much as we have, and, if that place is, where we have not, and their experience will be the same as ours. * * * * * THE BANANAS AND PLANTAINS OF THE TROPICS. [For the Scientific American.] Poets have celebrated the banana plant for its beauty, its luxuriance, the majesty of its leaves, and the delicacy of its fruit; but never have they sufficiently praised the utility of this tropical product. Those who have never lived in southern countries are unable to fully appreciate its value. Some look even with indifference upon the gigantic clusters of this fruit, as they are unloaded from the steamers and sailing vessels; and yet they deserve special attention and admiration, for they are to the inhabitants of the torrid zone, what bread and potatoes are to those of the north temperate zone. The banana tree is one of the most striking illustrations of tropical fertility and exuberance. A plant, which in a northern climate, would require many years to gain strength and size, is there the production of ten or twelve months. The native of the South plants a few grains, taken from an old tree, in a moist and sandy soil, along some river or lake; they develop with the greatest rapidity, and at the end of ten months the first crop may be gathered, though the cluster and bananas are yet small; but the following year one cluster alone will weigh some sixty or more pounds. Even in the South they are always cut down when green, as they lose much of their flavor when left to ripen or soften on the tree. The trunk of the tree, if it may be so called, and which grows to a hight of some fifteen feet, is formed only by the fleshy part of the large leaves, some of which attain a length of eighteen feet, and are two and a half feet in width. While from an upper sprout you perceive the large yellow flowers, or already formed fruits, you see underneath a cluster, which is bending the tree by its weight. The plantain tree is much the same as the banana, with the difference, however, that its fruit cannot be eaten raw, like the banana's, and that it is much larger in size. Almost every portion of the banana tree is useful. First of all, the nutritious fruit. The plantains when green and hard, are boiled in water or with meat like our potatoes, or they are cut in slices and fried in fat, when they are soft and ripe. There is a singularity about the boiled plaintain, worthy of being mentioned. Pork especially, and other meats are so exceedingly fat in the tropics that they would be most disgusting or even impossible to eat with either bread or potatoes, but the plaintain seems to neutralize or absorb all the greasy substance, and the fattest meat is thus eaten by natives and foreigners without the least inconvenience. Ripe bananas are mashed into a paste, of which the natives bake a sort of bread, which is very nourishing, though somewhat heavy. This paste, which contains much starch, can be dried, and thus kept for a length of time, which is often of great service to mariners. The young sprouts are used and prepared like vegetables, and the fibrous parts of the stalks of the majestic leaves are used like manilla for ropes and coarse cloth. The utility of the leaves is a theme rich enough to fill a volume; they are used to cover the huts, for table-cloths and napkins, or wrapping paper. The dough of bread, instead of being put in a pan, into the oven, is spread on a piece of plantain leaf; it will neither crisp nor adhere to the bread when taken out. The Indians of America carry all their products, such as maize, sugar, coffee, etc., in bags made of this leaf, which they know how to arrange so well, that they transport an "arroba," or twenty-five pounds any distance without a single grain escaping, and without any appliance other than a liana or creeper to tie it up with. As to the medicinal qualities of the leaves, they are numerous. Indeed, a book has been written upon them. I speak, however, from my own experience. The young, yet unrolled leaves are superior to any salve or ointment. If applied to an inflamed part of the body, the effect is soothing and cooling, or if applied to a wound or ulcer, they excite a proper healthy action, and afterwards completely heal the wound. Decoctions made of the leaves are used among the natives for various diseases. Since the beginning of the world this plant has ranked among the first in the Flora of Asia. The Christians of the orient look upon it as the tree of Paradise which bore the forbidden fruit, and they think its leaves furnished the first covering to our original parents. According to other historians, the Adam's fig was the plant, which the messengers brought from the promised land to Moses, who had sent them out to reconnoitre. "It is under the shade of the _musa sapientium_, that," as recorded by Pliny, "the learned Indians seated themselves to meditate over the vicissitudes of life, and to talk over different philosophic subjects, and the fruit of this tree was their only food." The Oriental Christians, up to the present date, regard the banana almost with reverence; their active fancy beholds in its center, if a cut is made transverse, the image of the cross, and they consider it a crime to use a knife in cutting the fruit. In the holy language of the Hindoo, the Sanscrit, the Adam's fig is called "modsha," whence doubtless, the word "musa" is derived. It is generally believed that the plant came from India to Egypt in the seventh century; it still forms a most important article of commerce in the markets of Cairo and Alexandria. In the year 1516, the banana was brought to the West Indian Islands by a monk, since which time it has rapidly spread over the tropics of America, and is found to the twenty-fifth degree north and south of the equator. It is equally indispensable and is appreciated by the immigrant and by the native as a beautifier of the landscape; affording shelter from the sun and rain, and giving bread to the children; for if every other crop should fail, the hungry native looks up to the banana tree, like a merchant to his well-filled storehouse. * * * * * PUTTING UP STOVES. BY MARK TWAIN. We do not remember the exact date of the invention of stoves, but it was some years ago. Since then mankind have been tormented once a year, by the difficulties that beset the task of putting them up, and getting the pipes fixed. With all our Yankee ingenuity no American has ever invented any method by which the labor of putting up stoves can be lessened. The job is as severe and vexatious as humanity can possibly endure, and gets more so every year. Men always put their stoves up on a rainy day. Why, we know not; but we never heard of any exception to this rule. The first step to be taken is to put on a very old and ragged coat, under the impression that when he gets his mouth full of plaster it will keep the shirt bosom clean. Next, the operator gets his hand inside the place where the pipe ought to go, and blacks his fingers, and then he carefully makes a black mark down the side of his nose. It is impossible to make any headway, in doing this work, until this mark is made down the side of the nose. Having got his face properly marked, the victim is ready to begin the ceremony. The head of the family--who is the big goose of the sacrifice--grasps one side of the bottom of the stove, and his wife and the hired girl take hold of the other side. In this way the load is started from the woodshed toward the parlor. Going through the door, the head of the family will carefully swing his side of the stove around and jam his thumb nail against the door post. This part of the ceremony is never omitted. Having got the family comfort in place, the next thing is to find the legs. Two of these are left inside the stove since the spring before. The other two must be hunted after, for twenty-five minutes. They are usually found under the coal. Then the head of the family holds up one side of the stove while his wife puts two of the legs in place, and next he holds up the other while the other two are fixed, and one of the first two falls out. By the time the stove is on its legs he gets reckless, and takes off his old coat, regardless of his linen. Then he goes for the pipe and gets two cinders in his eye. It don't make any difference how well the pipe was put up last year it will always be found a little too short or a little too long. The head of the family jams his hat over his eyes and taking a pipe under each arm goes to the tin shop to have it fixed. When he gets back, he steps upon one of the best parlor chairs to see if the pipe fits, and his wife makes him get down for fear he will scratch the varnish off from the chairs with the nails in his boot heel. In getting down he will surely step on the cat, and may thank his stars that it is not the baby. Then he gets an old chair and climbs up to the chimney again, to find that in cutting the pipe off, the end has been left too big for the hole in the chimney. So he goes to the woodshed and splits one side of the end of the pipe with an old axe, and squeezes it in his hands to make it smaller. Finally he gets the pipe in shape, and finds the stove does not stand true. Then himself and wife and the hired girl move the stove to the left, and the legs fall out again. Next it is to move to the right. More difficulty now with the legs. Move to the front a little. Elbow not even with the hole in the chimney, and the head of the family goes again to the woodshed after some little blocks. While putting the blocks under the legs, the pipe comes out of the chimney. That remedied, the elbow keeps tipping over, to the great alarm of the wife. Head of the family gets the dinner table out, puts the old chair on it, gets his wife to hold the chair, and balances himself on it to drive some nails into the ceiling. Drops the hammer on wife's head. At last he gets the nails driven, takes a wire swing to hold the pipe, hammers a little here, pulls a little there, takes a long breath, and announces the ceremony concluded. Job never put up any stoves. It would have ruined his reputation if he had. The above programme, with unimportant variations, will be carried out in many respectable families during the next six weeks. * * * * * THE MAGIC LANTERN. The invention of the magic lantern dates back to 1650, and is attributed to Professor Kircher, a German philosopher of rare talents and extensive reputation. The instrument is simple and familiar. It is a form of the microscope. The shadows cast by the object are, by means of lenses, focussed upon something capable of reflection, such as a wall or screen. No essential changes in the principles of construction have been made since the time of Kircher; but the modern improvements in lenses, lights, and pictures, have raised the character of the instrument from that of a mere toy to an apparatus of the highest utility. By its employment the most wonderful forms of creation, invisible, perhaps, to the eye, are not only revealed but reproduced in gigantic proportions, with all the marvelous truth of nature itself. The success of some of the most celebrated demonstrations of Faraday, Tyndall, Doremus, Morton, and others, was due to the skillful use of the magic lantern. As an educator, the employment of this instrument is rapidly extending. No school apparatus is complete without it; and now that transparencies are so readily multiplied by photography upon glass, and upon mica, or gelatin, by the printing press or the pen, it is destined to find a place in every household; for in it are combined the attractive qualities of beauty, amusement, and instruction. The electric light affords, probably, the strongest and best illumination for the magic lantern; then comes the magnesium light; but their use is a little troublesome and rather expensive; next to these in illuminating power is the oxy-hydrogen or Drummond light. The preparation of the gases and the use of the calcium points involve considerable skill. Need has long been felt for some form of the magic lantern, having a strong light, but more easily produced than any of those just mentioned; and this has at last been accomplished, after several years' study and experiment, by Prof. L.J. Marcy, 632 Arch St., Philadelphia, Pa. The "Sciopticon," is the name of his new instrument, and from actual trial we find that it possesses many superior qualities. Its lenses are excellent, and in illuminating power its light ranks next to the oxy-hydrogen. The sciopticon light is produced from ordinary coal oil by an ingenious arrangement of double flames, intensifying the heat and resulting in a pencil of strong white light. Prof. Marcy's instrument is the perfection of convenience, simplicity, and safety. Any one may successfully work it and produce the most brilliant pictures upon the screen. It is peculiarly adapted for school purposes and home entertainment. Those who wish to do a good thing for young people should provide one of these instruments. Photographic transparencies of remarkable places, persons, and objects, may now be purchased at small cost; while there is no end to the variety of pictures which may be drawn by hand at home upon mica, glass or gelatin, and then reproduced upon the screen by the sciopticon. * * * * * The Largest Well in the World--Capacity 1,000,000 Gallons of Water per Day. One of the grand necessities of the Prospect Park, Brooklyn, N.Y., that of providing for a continual supply of water for all the purposes of the Park developed itself, as the Commissioners progressed with their stupendous undertaking. Mr. Stranahan, the President of the Board, after carefully weighing the cost, the practicability, and importance of having an independent water supply for the Park, advised the Commissioners of the plan which had suggested itself, and the calculations which had been made by the engineers relative to the project, and the work was commenced, the first idea being to secure at least a partial supply of water by means of a well constructed in the Park. The subject was thus treated in the last annual report of Mr. C.C. Martin, the engineer in charge: "This well has been located on the south side of Lookout Hill, near the lake, and work was commenced upon it late in the season. After a careful consideration of various methods for sinking the well, it was decided to build the wall and then to excavate the material from within, trusting to the weight of the wall to force it down. Sixteen feet of the wall were laid securely bolted together, before the excavation was commenced. A derrick with a boom fifty-five feet in length was set up near the wall, so that the sweep of the boom commanded the interior of it. Iron buckets containing fourteen cubic feet each were obtained, and a six-horse power hoisting engine purchased. With these appliances the excavation was commenced, and carried on with slight interruption until the work was suspended on account of the frost." The well is now completed, and is one of the most important features of the Park. It is worthy to rank as a feat of engineering skill with, any of the great works of modern times. The Commissioners decided to put its powers to the test yesterday afternoon, but owing to the unpropitious weather of the forenoon the trial was postponed. Nevertheless, Commissioners Stranahan, Fiske, and Haynes, with Mr. Martin, engineer in charge, and Mr. John Y. Culyer, his assistant, were at the well. During the last summer some difficulties were encountered in the sinking of the wall, which were set down by superficial observers as the utter failure of the enterprise. Mr. Stranahan received but little encouragement from his fellow Commissioners, some of whom had never seen greater works of engineering than the construction of street sewers. He assumed the responsibility of seeing the work through, feeling that the whole thing depended entirely upon the ability of the engineers, in which he had abundant faith. All obstacles were surmounted; the work proceeded and the well is now finished, and so far as is known, is understood to be the largest one in the world. The outer wall is fifty feet in diameter, two feet thick, and fifty-four feet high. The inner curb, or wall, is thirty-five feet in diameter and two feet thick, having a depth of ten feet. The masonry, as seen from the top of the structure, is a marvel of neatness and solidity. The water surface in the well is thirteen feet above high-tide level, and the depth of water in the well is fourteen feet. The pump foundations are entirely independent of the walls. This plan was adopted so as to obviate any possible difficulty which might arise from displacement. The pump is the Worthington patent, and, with a pressure of forty pounds, is capable of raising one million gallons of water every twenty-four hours a height of 176 feet, and is competent to a lift of 180 feet. The boiler house is a neat, pressed-brick structure trimmed with Ohio stone, standing on the surface near the mouth of the well. The interior of the well is reached by a spiral stairway built in the wall, and commencing in the boiler house. In this way the engineer is able to reach the pump. It is a fact worthy of notice in connection with the construction of the wall, or rather the sinking of it, that the outer wall rests upon four feet of wooden cribwork, two feet thick, and having an iron shield. The inner wall is built upon a similar crib only two feet deep, also shielded with iron. The Commissioners were led to the construction of this well in presence of the danger at any time of some accident taking place in connection with the Brooklyn Water Works which would render it necessary for the Water Board to cut off the Park supply so as to secure the citizens from suffering. This well has more than the necessary capacity to supply the Park abundantly with water, yielding most when most is needed. This is established by the discovery that the time of drought from which the well is, or may be, likely to suffer, occurs in the Fall. Besides these facts, it further appears that in order to furnish the supply of water to the Park the Water Board would have to go through the process of pumping their water twice to convey it to the required elevation, equal to 225 feet from its original level. The work of the well will be to supply the pools at an elevation of 133 feet. From the pools the water is conducted to the lake. Besides this, there is an independent connection with the lake by which, as necessity may suggest, the water can be directed to the lake, a lift of only seventy feet. The lake, when completed, will occupy an area of fifty acres, which will be kept continually supplied with fresh water, the arrangements being such, or to be such, as will insure a permanent change of water, and prevent any of the evils that may arise from stagnancy. The well is fed from the earth, consisting of a circuit of two miles, with a fall of five feet to the mile. For this reason it does not appear easy to exhaust the supply, as when the water is pumped out to four or five feet from the surface of the well it is replaced at a rate equal to the demand. Every allowance has been made for evaporation from the lake and pools, and the supply is regarded as inexhaustible. Another important fact here suggests itself; that is, that sufficient rain falls during the season in the area of two miles around the well to make the supply perennial. The Prospect Park well is a credit to Brooklyn.--_New York Times_. * * * * * PAPER FOR BUILDING. Our readers will find in another column an advertisement of this new building material which is now attracting much attention in the West, and of which we have received very favorable reports. It has been recently tested in Chicago with the result we are informed of fully establishing its utility. It is said that a house twenty-two feet long, sixteen wide, and fourteen high, can be covered on the outside for less than $9; and a house thirty-six feet by twenty-two, and twenty feet high, for $20. The building can be done at any season, and can be finished with great speed, and there are said to be numerous other advantages connected with the use of the paper. It differs from ordinary paper in consistency, compactness and solidity. In the manufacture it is subjected to a pressure of hundreds of tuns, which squeezes out the liquid matter, leaving a substance of the right thickness. It is said to be proof against damp and gnawing of vermin, and it being an excellent non-conductor of heat, must make a warm dwelling in winter and a cool one in summer. It is used in the place of plastering for inside walls. * * * * * The Prussian Government has military maps of every foot of its territory so complete that every hill, ravine, brooklet, field, and forest is delineated with perfect accuracy. It is a common boast of Prussian military men, that within the space of eight days 848,000 men can be concentrated to the defense of any single point within the kingdom, and every man of them will be a trained and well-equipped soldier. * * * * * Improved Muzzle-Pivoting Gun. We are indebted for the following able description and criticism of this Prussian gun to our able contemporary, _The Engineer_. Viewed as a piece of mechanism, nothing can well be more beautiful in mutual adaptation of parts to the fulfillment of given and rather recondite movements, and in point of execution, than this muzzle-pivoting arrangement of Herr Gruson's; but having said this we are compelled to add, as impartial engineering critics, that it is nothing more. [Illustration: GRUSON'S SYSTEM OF MUZZLE-PIVOTING APPLIED TO MONITORS.] A very few words of description, aided by the very clear engraving annexed, will suffice to make the arrangement plain to every mechanical reader. The entire structure is metallic, chiefly of cast iron or of steel. Upon the platform of the casemate, or deck of the ship, or turret, is laid the heavy bed or traverse plate, cast hollow in iron, holding the vertical pivot at its forward end, on which the gun slide traverses in azimuth, and at its rear end the segment plate, bolted down and separately adjustable as to position upon the bedplate. The slide is also a ponderous hollow casting, the upper surfaces of which, on which the gun carriage runs forward or recoils, are curvilinear in a vertical plane, so that the inclination to the horizon is greatest at the rear end. At the rear end of the slide it traverses upon two heavy cast-iron turned conical rollers, which are geared together and actuated by the winch handle and spur gear, seen in our engraving; by these the slide is practically held fast in any position on the bedplate. The gun itself--in the model, a steel breech-loader, on the Prussian regulation system, very slightly modified--is sustained between two high and ponderous cheek plates of cast iron, which constitute the sides of the carriage, and which are connected together strongly at the lower edges by a heavy base or bottom plate, and at the top by two light cross distance bolts. The muzzle and breech extremities of the piece project well beyond those cheeks. Along the bottom of the trough of the carriage, directly under the gun, lies a nearly horizontal hydraulic press cylinder, the pump and handle actuating which are seen in the figures to the proper left of the gun, and the supply of water for which is contained in the hollow bottom of the carriage. On each side cheek of the carriage is formed, by curved planing, a circular segmental race, opening inward or toward each other, rectangular in cross section and into each of which is fitted a segmental block just filling it up, and occupying a portion of its length so as to slide easily up or downward through the whole range of the arc or segment. The center point of the length of each of those blocks carries one side of the gun, which is connected also with the two heavy radius bars seen outside the cheeks, and pivoted close to the segment races on the outside, and with a system of link work between the gun itself and the crosshead of the ram of the hydraulic cylinder, which gives motion to the gun in elevation or depression, through a vertical arc, the imaginary center of which, and of the segments of the side cheeks, is situated in the horizontal diameter across the muzzle of the gun. This is in brief the muzzle-pivoting part of the arrangement, of which, were it worth while to go into its details, we should need some further diagrams to make it quite clear. Nor is it worth while to go into the description of various minor points of refinement about the gun mounting, such as the very exposed long tangent scale seen in the figure, by which the elevation or depression is read off, nor the still more exposed and rather ricketty arrangement by which the rear sight is arranged to rise and fall with the gun, and allowance for dispart avoided. The recoil of the gun is resisted through and by the segment blocks in the side cheeks, and by the heavy radius bars, etc., and thus transferred to the carriage itself. This moves upon four eccentro-concentric rollers, in all respects identical with those brought before the Ordnance Select Committee of Woolwich by Mr. Mallet, in 1858--then rejected, after some time adopted, and brought into use in our own service, where they are now universal, and from which they have been adopted into every artillery in the world, and, we understand, without the slightest recognition of the inventor's rights. On the axle of each of these rollers is keyed a circular eccentric cam plate, those at the same side being connected together by a linking bar so as to move in concert. Adjustable tripping plates attached to the sides of the slide, are so arranged that when the loaded gun has been run forward its carriage base rests hard down, with its full weight upon the top faces of the slide, and thus the recoil is made under the full resistance due to the friction of the entire load. Arrived at the highest point, it rests there until loaded. The cam plates being then given a slight motion of rotation by the help of socket levers--the rectangular projections to be received by which are seen on the top edges of the cam plates in the figure--the carriage, by its own commenced descent, gets again upon its rollers, and runs forward upon these at once into firing position. The two elevated horns which are seen standing up at the rear part of the slide above the roller frame are designed to receive the thump of the two short buffer-blocks--seen at the rear part of each carriage cheek--in the event of the recoil not being wholly expended in raising the weight of gun and carriage, etc., along the curved racers of the slide. These buffer-blocks bear against plugs of vulcanized india-rubber secured in the bottoms of the buffer cylinders. We have thus, though very briefly, described the whole of this mounting. As a carefully thought out and elaborated piece of elegant mechanical complication Herr Gruson's muzzle-pivoting carriage attracted much attention at Paris, in 1867, and its merits were regarded as great by those whose thoughts went little further perhaps. We should have been glad had it been in our power to have joined in its praise. We are, however, obliged honestly to say that, however highly creditable to its designer as an ingenious and capable mechanism, it shows that he has never realized to himself as a practical artillerist the primary, most absolute, and indispensable conditions of construction for a serviceable muzzle-pivoting gun for either land or sea service. As to the general merits, or general conditions, of muzzle-pivoting, however, once in doubt at first, these are admitted now by all; and the latter resolve themselves almost into this--that system of muzzle-pivoting must be best which, while preserving the essential point of leaving the muzzle of the gun free of any direct attachment, i.e., with an imaginary, not an actual, pivot of vertical arc motion, shall be _the simplest possible_ in its parts, have the least details, the fewest parts capable of being struck by splinters or shot, and all its parts of such materials and character as to receive the smallest amount of injury if so struck. In every one of these aspects Herr Gruson's mounting is at fault. With parts and movements far more ingeniously adapted than those of the crude and unskillfully designed muzzle-pivoting carriages of Captain Heathorn, also exhibited at Paris, and much exhibited and exposed since, the Gruson mounting is even more complicated, expensive, and liable to injury of every sort to which a gun carriage can be conceived liable. We may even venture to affirm that ponderous as was the mass of cast iron, etc., in the Paris model carrying only a 12-pounder gun, were it all enlarged in such ratio as might appear to suit for a 10-inch 25-tun rifled gun of the British type, the almost proverbial relations, between weight, velocity of impulse, and brittleness of cast iron, would show themselves, in the whole machine going to pieces within a very few rounds. * * * * * Stock Feeding by Clock Work. Mr. F. B. Robinson, of North Haven, Conn., has invented a very neat arrangement, whereby horses or stock can be fed at any time required with certainty and without personal attention at the time of feeding. His invention consists of a hopper with a drop bottom in which the provender is placed. A latch secures the drop bottom, the latch engaging with a spring catch. A simple arrangement of clock work on the principle of the alarm clock, may be set to release the spring at any hour or minute desired, when the drop falls and the provender falls through a chute into the feeding trough. This invention may be adapted to feeding any number of horses or cattle, only one clock being required. We regard the invention as one of much value. By its use much neglect of careless attendants may be obviated, and a farmer without help, might leave home for an evening's entertainment, or absent himself on business, without fear that his stock would suffer. Besides being so convenient the cost of the apparatus is a mere bagatelle. * * * * * Milk, and What Comes of It. Orange County has long been a laud flowing with milk and--butter. Three or four of these most beautiful autumn days were spent by us, says a writer in _Harper's Weekly_, among the farmers which are supposed to butter our New York city bread, and qualify our tea and coffee. Recent mechanical improvements have taken away much of the traditional romance of the farm, but, on the whole, the loss is more than made up by the gain of perfect system and wonderful adaptation. Instead of four or five cows, known by such names as Brindle, Bess, and Sukey, milked by rosy-cheeked maidens, we have now droves of fifty or a hundred, milked by men, who know them only as "good" or "poor milkers." In some fine farms a large and luxuriant pasture, with running brooks and border of woodlands, affords, with the herd feeding in it, a beautiful picture; and the substantial barns constructed to keep the cattle comfortably cool in summer and warm in winter, with ample drinking troughs and stalls for fastening up at night, are indicative of the good shelter at hand when winter storms drive the cows indoors. To the farmyards the cows are brought night and morning, in summer, to be milked. The strained milk is put into large cans holding forty quarts, such as the milkmen use in distributing it through the city. These cans are then put into tanks made in some cool running stream, where the water comes nearly to the top of the can. Frequent stirring is necessary until the animal heat is quite gone. The milk is then fit to be sent to the cars. This process can never safely be omitted for, paradoxical though it may seem, milk is "fresher" and sweeter when it reaches the consumer if it is delayed at the farm for at least twelve hours. Even in hot weather, it is more certain to keep sweet when twenty-four or thirty-six hours elapse between the milking and the using in the city. There has been much discussion as to the best means of cooling milk for market, and patent pails have been tried in which the milk passes directly from the cow through small, coiled tubes surrounded by ice. But this rapid cooling does not work well, and practical experience indicates that the old simple process is the best. Every well-appointed farm must have, therefore, a cool and unfailing stream of water. There are two such streams in one of the farms we visited. One passes through the barn, furnishing drinking troughs for the cattle, and a tank for cooling milk in winter. The other, running through the pasture, supplies a trout-breeding pond, and furnishes a tank for summer use. In a little hut under the trees, the milk cans are kept in a stream, which even the severe drought of last summer did not dry, nor the heat raise to a temperature of 60°. We are assured most positively that none of the spring water finds its way over the mouth of the can into the milk. Its dilution, of which there is so much just complaint, must be done, if at all, in the city, for the wholesale buyer is said to have such means of testing the milk as effectually protects him against the farmer. May the man be busy at work who is to give each family such a protection. We have heard it said that one end of a small piece of common tape placed in a pan of milk will carry from it all the water into another vessel in which the other end of the tape should be placed; but we have never found this a safe test. Strange to say, no butter is made on these large milk farms. The supply for the family is obtained from market, or, more rarely, from a neighbor who churns all his milk for the accommodation of those who send all theirs to the city. Our notions of the way to make butter were decidedly overturned on going to such a dairy. No setting of the milk in shallow pans for cream to rise; no skimming and putting away in jars until "churning day," when the thick cream was agitated by a strong arm until the butter came, then worked and salted. Instead, there is a daily pouring of the unskimmed soured milk into a common churn, perhaps somewhat larger than ordinary. The dasher is fastened to a shaft, which is moved by a crank. The crank is turned by means of a nearly horizontal wheel some eight or ten feet in diameter, which is kept in motion by a dog, sheep, or calf standing on it, something after the manner of the old tread-mill. When taken from the churn, the butter is worked by hand as of old. The farmer with whom we have talked said he was about determined to send his milk to the creamery, since butter-making made it so hard for the women. Surely woman is less a drudge than she used to be. If, after being relieved from the labor of churning, the remaining working of the butter is considered too hard for the farmer's wife, the day of a woman's redemption must be near at hand. Only one butter farm, have we been able to find, and not enough is made there to supply the immediate neighborhood. Where, then, does all the Orange county butter come from? Mostly from the West. Farmers buy from the vicinity of the Alleghenies, and even further west, large quantities, which they sell in the original packages or repack in pails. Since railroads have become so numerous, New York drinks up all the milk in Orange county, and must butter her bread elsewhere. The largest institution for the disposition of milk is the Creamery, which is, in other words, a cheese factory. Here is brought the milk which the farmers themselves are unable properly to prepare for market, for want of cool springs or sufficient help. Received here, it is placed in deep but narrow tin pails holding twelve or fourteen quartz. These are floated in large tanks of water. From these pails the cream is carefully taken and sent to market. The skimmed milk is then placed in a large vat and heated, by means of steam pipes to about 80°. Then the rennet is put in. From twenty to thirty minutes suffices for curdling, and the mass is then stirred to separate the curd from the whey. After which it is heated still more; and then the whey, passing off through a strainer, goes to feed hogs, while the curd remains in the vat, to be salted and worked before putting into the presses. In two or three hours the curds become hard enough for the canvas to be put upon them ready for the shelves. Very carefully they must then be watched, lest the fly lying in wait for them makes in them a snug house for her family. Greasing and turning must be a daily labor, and some weeks must pass before they are sufficiently cured for market. For the benefit of city consumers, who are paying ten and twelve cents a quart for milk, from a tenth to a quarter of which is not infrequently pure Croton, we may add that the highest price the farmer ever gets for his milk is seven cents a quart; and he sometimes sells it for as low as two cents and a half. Our friends, the milkmen, have, therefore, it will be seen, a pretty good margin for freight and profit. * * * * * Improved Hay Elevator. The method most generally used for elevating hay is evidently not the most economical application of the power of horses for the accomplishment of the purpose desired. The tackle involves a great deal of friction, and as the quantity which can be thus raised at once is, probably, on the average, not more than from 150 to 200 lbs, much more time is employed in re-adjusting the fork, than would be the case if a larger quantity were elevated. The invention under consideration supplies a means whereby it is claimed hay may be unloaded with far greater facility than heretofore, with less labor to the team and with fewer hands than are at present employed. A primary gear wheel is propelled horizontally by a lever worked by a horse. The primary gear impels a pinion keyed to the shaft of a windlass, upon which is wound the elevating rope, whenever the clutch, A, is made to operate through the cord and lever, B. This cord runs over a pulley on the under side the wood framework at C, and its further end may be held in the hand of the workman on the hay load, who, when he has properly adjusted the fork, pulls the cord which operates the clutch, and the "fork-full" of hay is at once elevated. The cylinder of the windlass, not being keyed to the shaft, only operates when the clutch is closed by the cord. The horse, or horses which furnish power to the machine, may, therefore, keep on traveling in the same direction, and no time is lost in stopping and backing, as in the method in general use. [Illustration: DERR'S CAPSTSTAN FOR ELEVATING HAY FORKS.] There is no doubt but that this is a cheap, durable, and desirable machine, and one that can be used to great advantage, not only for the elevation of hay, but for many other purposes. We think it would be found a decided improvement in discharging cargoes of coal from barges, and for handling coal in storage yards. The inventor claims that twice as much hay can be raised in a given time by its use, as can be done by the old method; and it dispenses with one hand at the barn or stack. A coupling at D, enables attachments to be made, which extend the usefulness of the machine very much. It may be used as a power for driving wood saws, cutting fuel, thrashing, and other work where a simple horse power is desirable. Address for further information, Wm. Derr, Tiffin, Ohio. * * * * * COMPETITORS FOR PRIZES.--The interest that our friends have taken in obtaining additional names to send with their own subscriptions to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN for the coming year, is without a parallel. The clubs sent by competitors for the cash prizes are not so many or so large as we expected, but the number of applicants for the steel plate engraving exceeds our expectation. * * * * * The Emperor of France is said to be interested in the art of flying and to have given money to fledge some inventions. * * * * * IMPROVEMENT IN LAMP WICKS. Our engravings show a novel substitute for the cotton lamp wick. The wick, two forms of which are shown in Figs. 1 and 2, are made of glass, and are filled preferably with pulverized gypsum, although any finely-ground stone, mineral, or metal may be employed. The bottom of the glass tube is closed by wire gauze, or other suitable strainer, through which the fluid flows; and is carried by the capillary attraction of the pounded material to the top of the wick. Thus a permanent wick is obtained, which may be employed with any form of lamp, and will last for an indefinite time. It may also be used in connection with an open cup, which the inventor terms a poor man's lamp. A perforated card is laid upon the top of the cup or tumbler as a support to the wick. [Illustration] It may be used either with or without a chimney, and it is claimed that with good kerosene oil it is perfectly safe, and consumes less of it, while it may be also used as a candle. Patented through the Scientific American Patent Agency, September 14, 1869, by Edward D. Boyd, of Helena, Ark. Address for rights, etc., the patentee, as above, or Jos. P. Branch, 277 Fulton street, Brooklyn, N.Y. * * * * * Great Transformation. Seven years ago, says the Port Said correspondence of the London _News_, there was nothing to distinguish Ismailla or the smiling lake before you from the rest of the desert, and all was sand. It is the canal which has raised up the numerous handsome villas and fine gardens. Fresh water is all that is needed to turn the arid desert into a fruitful soil; and the supply of this is provided by the subsidary canal which the company has formed side by side with that broad salt one which now unites two worlds. Wonderful stories are told of the productiveness of the gardens, and a walk through any of those belonging to the leading officials stationed at Ismailla is to verify them all. Vines with large bunches of grapes pendent from their branches; orange trees with green fruit just showing a golden tint; ivy, roses, geraniums from England, and an endless variety of rich tropical plants are all flourishing. In the centre of the town is a square with trees and a building clothed with rich creepers in its midst. Everything here looks French. A handsome boulevard runs down to the point of embarkation, the streets and squares are on the true Parisian model, and there are _cafes_, billiard rooms, and _cafe chantants_ which might easily belong to Nantes or Lyons. There are of course huge gaps where the houses and shops will be; the roads are, many of them, still of sand; camels draw carts, and generally pervade the place in long strings; but with all this you are kept in a state of wonder during your stay at Ismailla at the marvelous conversion which has taken, place under your eyes. * * * * * American agricultural implements are highly praised in newspaper reports of the Metropolitan Cattle Show, held recently in London. * * * * * Moore's Rural New Yorker For Dec. 25 contains a splendid full page Engraving of the PRIZE FOWLS at the recent State Poultry Show--the Best Poultry Picture ever given in an American newspaper.--Also, a magnificent CHRISTMAS PICTURE, and other fine Illustrations. For sale by all Newsdealers; price 8 cents. See advertisement of RURAL in this paper. * * * * * BUSINESS AND PERSONAL. _The Charge for Insertion under this head is One Dollar a Line. If the Notices exceed Four Lines, One Dollar and a Half per line will be charged._ * * * * * To ascertain where there will be a demand for new machinery or manufacturers' supplies read Boston Commercial Bulletin's manufacturing news of the United States. Terms, $4.00 a year. Ties, timber, and lumber seasoned by steam, without a building. Costs $2, worth $20 per M. Stops eramacausis. H.G. Bulkley, N.Y. Wanted--Light Machinery or Articles to Manufacture. Work done in a neat, prompt manner. Address W.E. Bradner & Co., 13 Mulberry st., Newark, N.J. Pyrites wanted--Containing Gold, Silver, or Copper. Address A.G. Hunter, Jackson, Mich. Those wishing articles of metal or light machinery manufactured, will find it for their interest to address J.B. Heald, Milford, N.H. One horizontal stationary steam engine, with variable cut-off, 60-H.P.; one plain do., 25-H.P.; one do., 20-H.P.; one Portable 12-H.P., on hand and for sale low. Albertson & Douglass Machine Co., New London, Conn. For sale cheap--Good 2d-hand plate iron. 50 plates 3-8 thick, 42 inches wide, 120 inches long. Been used 3 months for a floor. Price 3 cents per lb. Address box 1352, Norwich, Conn. The head draftsman of a locomotive works, just closed, desires another engagement. Familiar with stationary, marine, or locomotive machinery. Unexceptionable references. Watkins, 13 Dutch st., N.Y. Wanted--Iron Planer about 4 ft., describe same and price, Geo. S. Grier, Milford, Del. Wanted--Best Water Filter for Household purposes. Frank Alexander, Box 3769, New York. A Brick Machine wanted. Address A. Hansen, Sumter, S.C. For Sale for want of use--A 3-Horse portable steam engine and boiler, in perfect running order. Address B.S. Nichols & Co., Burlington, Vt. Patent Rights bought and sold by R.T. Bradley & Co., 131 Fourth st., Cincinnati, Ohio. Peck's patent drop press. For circulars, address the sole manufacturers, Milo Peck & Co, New Haven, Ct. Every wheelwright and blacksmith should have one of Dinsmore's Tire Shrinkers. Send for circular to R.H. Allen & Co., Postoffice Box 376, New York. For Small Engine Lathes, with foot-power, Hand Lathes, Bolt or Terret Cutters, Planers, etc., address W.E. Bradner & Co., Newark, N.J Aneroid Barometers made to order, repaired, rated, for sale and exchange, by C. Grieshaber, 107 Clinton St., New York. Foundery and Machine Business.--Experience with some capital, wants an engagement. South or West preferred. Address Box E.E., Catskill, N.Y. Foreman in a Machine Shop--A person having ten years experience in that capacity is desirous of forming a new engagement. Address, with particulars, Postoffice Box 119, La Crosse, Wis. Makers of Pipe Cutting and Tapping and Screwing Machines send circulars, without delay, to Forest City Pipe works, Cleveland, O. For Best Spring-bed Bottoms address S.C. Jennings, Wautoma, Wis. Parties having patents or patent goods to sell, send for The National, Buffalo, N.Y., $1 per year, 10c. single copy. Back Nos., Vols., and Sets of Scientific American for sale. Address Theo. Tusch, No. 37 Park Row, New York. Mineral Collections--50 selected specimens, including gold and silver ores, $15. Orders executed on receipt of the amount. L. & J Feuchtwanger, Chemists, 55 Cedar st., New York. The Babcock & Wilcox Steam Engine received the First Premium for the Most Perfect Automatic Expansion Valve Gear, at the late Exhibition of the American Institute. Babcock, Wilcox & Co., 44 Cortlandt st., New York. For best quality Gray Iron Small Castings, plain and fancy Apply to the Whitneyville Foundery, near New Haven, Conn. Keuffel & Esser, 71 Nassau st., N.Y., the best place to get 1st-class Drawing Materials, Swiss Instruments, and Rubber Triangles and Curves. Foot Lathes--E.P. Ryder's improved--220 Center st., N.Y. Those wanting latest improved Hub and Spoke Machinery, address Kettenring, Strong & Lauster, Defiance, Ohio. For tinmans' tools, presses, etc., apply to Mays & Bliss, Brooklyn, N.Y. Mill-stone dressing diamond machine, simple, effective, durable. Also, Glazier's diamonds. John Dickinson, 64 Nassau st., New York. Send 3-cent stamp for a circular on the uses of Soluble Glass, or Silicates of Soda and Potash. Manufactured by L. & J.W. Feuchtwanger, Chemists and Drug Importers, 55 Cedar st., New York. Glynn's Anti-Incrustator for Steam Boiler--The only reliable preventative. No foaming, and does not attack metals of boiler. Liberal terms to Agents. C.D. Fredricks, 587 Broadway, New York. Cold Rolled--Shafting, piston rods, pump rods, Collins pat. double compression couplings, manufactured by Jones & Laughlins, Pittsburgh, Pa. For solid wrought-iron beams, etc., see advertisement. Address Union Iron Mille, Pittsburgh, Pa., for lithograph, etc. Machinists, boiler makers, tinners, and workers of sheet metals read advertisement of the Parker Power Presses. Diamond carbon, formed into wedge or other shapes for pointing and edging tools or cutters for drilling and working stone, etc. Send stamp for circular. John Dickinson, 64 Nassau st., New York. The paper that meets the eye of manufacturers throughout the United States--Boston Bulletin, $4.00 a year. Advertisements 17c. a line. Winans' boiler powder, 11 Wall st., N.Y., removes Incrustations without injury or foaming; 12 years in use. Beware of Imitations. * * * * * ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS. _Correspondents who expect to receive answers to their letters must, in all cases, sign their names. We have a right to know those who seek information from us; besides, as sometimes happens we may prefer to address correspondents by mail. SPECIAL NOTE.--This column is designed for the general interest and instruction of our readers, not for gratuitous replies to questions of a purely business or personal nature. We will publish such inquiries, however, when paid for as advertisemets at $1.00 a line, under the head of "Business and Personal." All reference to back numbers should be by volume and page._ * * * * * C.H.G., of N.Y.--To make pure nitrate of silver, dissolve pure silver in pure nitric acid, evaporate the solution to dryness, or, if crystals are preferred, evaporate until the solution is sufficiently concentrated to form crystals. If you can not get pure silver, you may purify it by dissolving coin in nitric acid, filtering the solution and precipitating the silver in the form of a chloride by hydrochloric acid. Next wash the precipitate with hot water until the washings cease to redden litmus paper. Next mix the pure chloride of silver while yet moist with its own weight of pure crystallized carbonate of soda, place the mixture in a covered porcelain crucible and heat very gradually until the fusing point of silver is reached. The reduced silver will be pure and may be removed by breaking the crucible. Wash the button thoroughly with hot water to remove the flux. In dissolving the pure silver thus obtained in nitric acid, it is better to use an excess of acid; the excess will be driven off by heat in evaporation. G.B., of Iowa.--Nominal horse power is merely a conventional expression for diameter of cylinder and length of stroke, and does not apply to the actual power of the engine. It is found by multiplying the cube root of the stroke in feet by the square of the diameter in inches and dividing the product by 47. This rule is based upon the postulate established by Watt, that the speed of a piston with two feet stroke is 160 feet per minute, and that for longer strokes the speed varies as the cube roots of the length of the stroke. It is needless to say this rule is not observed in modern practice, yet the expression, nominal horse power, is like many other relics of past time still retained. The above rule does not apply to high pressure engines. For such engines Bourne has given the following rule: Multiply the square of the diameter of the cylinder in inches by the cube root of the stroke in feet, and divide by 15.6. The real power of an engine is estimated from the mean effective pressure in the cylinder--not the boiler--and the speed of the piston. Your data are insufficient to determine the horse power of your boiler. The horse power of boilers is estimated from the extent of heating surface when the grate and all other things are correctly proportioned, but with them as with engines, only actual test will positively determine it. The pipe you mention ought to be enlarged as proposed. W.H.R., of Mass.--Pressure acts independently of the mode of application. A tun laid upon the head of a wedge would produce the same effect as though it were applied through toggles. When, however, a weight is dropped its effect increases as the square of its velocity. J.B., of N.Y.--We recommend you to get "Appleton's Dictionary of Mechanics." Also send for descriptive catalogue to Henry Carey Baird, Philadelphia, from which you will be able to judge for yourself what works are suited to your requirements. T.D.H., of Mass.--Ammonia, in a weak solution, may be used to cleanse the scalp, but is not recommended for the purpose. Borax in solution is better. The supposed preservation of the color of the hair by its use is a mistake. F.B.H., of Ill.--So far as we know, nothing better than the flax seed bag has been discovered for packing the lower end of tubes in artesian wells. We have never heard of any trouble arising from the method and think you will have none. L.G. of Mass.--Express the decimal ratio of the diameter of a circle to the circumference to which you refer, as a mixed vulgar fraction, and you will have what you ask for, if we understand your query. A.H.S., of Sandwich Islands.--We know of no substance that in our opinion, could be used advantageously to paint the interior of sheet-iron evaporating pans for concentrating cane juice. L.B., of Wis.--We would be glad to assist you but the data you furnish are not sufficient. The accurate solution of such a problem involves the higher mathematics. A.H.M.--All animal and mineral oils are destructive to rubber. Linseed oil will not dissolve it. Oils should not be allowed to get on rubber belting. T.W.J., of Pa.--For your rollers try some emery mixed in a solution of gum shellac in good alcohol. E.B., of Mass.--The patent can be corrected by reissue. J.M.T., of Ind.--To find the proper area for a safety valve port, when the evaporating surface is properly proportioned to the engine power, multiply the square of the diameter of the piston in inches by the speed in feet of the piston per minute, and divide the product by 375 times the pressure on the boiler per square inch. Having decided upon the length of the lever, the distance of the valve stem from the fulcrum, and the point from which the weight will be suspended, the weight necessary will be found by multiplying the area of the valve port in inches into the pressure per square inch in the boiler in pounds, and this product into the distance of the center of the valve stem from the fulcrum in inches, and dividing the product thus obtained by the distance from the fulcrum to the point of suspension of the weight in inches. The quotient will give the weight in pounds. A.K.S., of Ohio.--The inclination of the poles of a planet to the plane of its orbit, determines its zones and also its seasons. The inclination of the earth's axis is twenty-three and one half degrees. This places the tropics the same distance each side of the equator, and the polar circles the same distance from the poles. The torrid zone is therefore forty-seven degrees wide, and the temperate zones each forty-three degrees wide. As the planets vary in their inclination of their axis to the planes of their orbits, it follows that their zones and seasons differ from those of the earth. W.H.C., of Texas.--The teeth of a circular wood saw to be driven by foot-power, should be not larger than those of the ordinary hand crosscut. The fly-wheel ought to have a rim weighing from eighty to one hundred pounds, and it should be, for a 12-inch saw, not less than a foot in diameter. It should be placed on the saw arbor. The belt should not run on the fly-wheel, but on a special pulley, and the treadle and crank motion should be so adjusted that the foot will move through an arc of from 10 to 12 inches. A.H.B., of Pa.--We advise you to use a battery in coating the small gray castings, of which you write, with copper. It will be all the more satisfactory in the end. The best polishing material to put in with them in the tumbler we think would be leather cuttings and sweepings. They will not need returning to the tumbler after being coppered. We recommend you to get "Byrne's Practical Metalworkers Assistant," published by Henry Carey Baird, Philadelphia. J.H.G., of Tenn.--Don't put oil in your boiler to prevent incrustation. It will not probably do any good, and it will cause much foaming, while besides that it is a waste of heat, it is injurious to engines. S.S.R., of Tenn.--No ammoniacal engines are, so far as we are aware, running in this country. C.E.C., of Ohio.--The varnish for patterns is common shellac varnish. It is sometimes made black by lampblack. * * * * * RECENT AMERICAN AND FOREIGN PATENTS. _Under this heading we shall publish weekly notes of some of the more prominent home and foreign patents_. * * * * * MOP.--Philip Cook, Jr., Sioux City, Iowa.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in mops, whereby they are so arranged that they may be wrung or freed from water when in use by moving the slides connected with the handle and head of the mop. VENTILATING HORSE COVER.--Charles P. Eager, Boston., Mass.--This invention relates to a new horse cover, which is so arranged that it will be entirely waterproof, and nevertheless permit a free escape of air from the body of the animal. CAR COUPLING.--S.O. Campbell, Tipton, Mo.--This invention relates to a new car coupling, which is so arranged that it will be self-coupling and retain the coupling pin ready to lock as long as the link is not inserted. GAS STOVE.--Wm. J. Hays, New York city.--This invention has for its object to construct a gas stove, with an extender radiating surface, and with proper air channels, so that with a comparatively small amount of heat, the air in an ordinary-sized room can be properly warmed. SCRIBE HOOK FOR WEATHER BOARDING.--John Nester, Portland, Oregon.--This invention relates to a new scribe hook for weather-boards, which will be generally useful and adaptable to the purposes for which it is intended and to provide an adjustable spur and marker. RAILROAD SMOKE CONVEYER.--Lemuel Powell, Milford, Conn.--The object of this invention is to prevent the smoke and ashes, issuing from the smoke stack of a locomotive, from entering the cars of the train and from thereby preventing the proper ventilation of the cars. DRILL FOR BORING POLYGONAL HOLES.--J.C. Broadley, Franklin, N.J.--This invention relates to a new implement for boring polygonal, oval, star-shaped, or holes of other suitable form, in metal, wood, or other material. The invention consists chiefly in arranging the pattern, which regulates the shape of the hole to be bored, on the upper part of the drill shank, and in having the bit shanks, which are pivoted to the lower part of the drill shank, held by means of springs against the inner edges of the inverted cup-shaped pattern. ROOFING.--H.G. Noble, Selma, Ala.--This invention relates to improvements in roofing, and consists in covering roofs with sheet metal, laid on the rafters and nailed down at the edges, so as to be considerably concaved between them, the joints on the rafters being covered by inverted caps or troughs. The concave form of the sheet is designed to prevent the sheet metal from cracking, to which it is subject by expansion and contraction when laid on flat. WASHING MACHINE.--John J. Kimball Naperville, Ill.--This invention relates to improvements in washing machines, and consists in an improved arrangement of operating mechanism for revolving a vertically suspended shaft with a crank at the top, and carrying within the tub a corrugated or roughened rubber, for action on the clothes. The invention also comprises an improved arrangement of the rubber, whereby it is made capable of sliding up or down on the shaft, according to the amount of clothes to be acted on. BOLT CUTTER.--O.E. Butler and S.P. Dunham Marshalltown, Iowa.--This invention relates to improvements in hand instruments for cutting bolts, and consists in the combination with the handles of an instrument, such as patented to the inventors, January 19, 1869, as an improved instrument for sharpening horseshoes, of a cutting pin of peculiar construction, whereby the said tool is adapted, when this cutter is applied in substitution of the cutter and jaw, is used for sharpening horseshoes, to cut off the ends of bolts with great facility. SHAFT TUG LUGS FOR HARNESS.--T.J. Magruder, Marion, Ohio.--This invention relates to improvements in the construction and application of shaft tug lugs for harness, and consists in forming the said lugs with broad and long plates, properly curved to suit the curve of the pad, and connecting the latter to the under sides of the skirts and to the pads in a way to stiffen the skirt and to hold the stud securely from breaking loose, the said lugs being made solid with a screw nut at the end to confine the bearing straps, or hollow, with female screw threads near the base, and bolts screwing into the said female threads to secure the bearing straps and to admit of readily applying or removing the straps so that the harness may be adapted for use either as single or double harness. HARNESS BUCKLE.--J.W. Burch, Fayette, Miss.--The object of this invention is to provide buckles for harness and other uses, with tongues constructed in the form of leather punches, whereby they may be used at any time required for punching holes. HUMMING-WHEEL TOY.--A.F. Able, New Orleans, La.--This invention relates to improvements in humming wheel toys, having for its object to provide an improved holding apparatus for supporting and maintaining the proper tension on the cords, and designed to support the cords of two or more wheels at the same time. COMBINED CLOTHES IRONING TABLE AND CLOTHES DRYER.--William P. Adams, Brooklyn, N.Y.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in an article for the laundry, and consists in an adjustable ironing table, and in combination therewith a clothes dryer. SEED AND GRAIN STRIPPER.--J.F. King and H.A. Rice, Louisiana, Mo.--The object of this invention is to provide a seed and grain stripper, with light and strong fingers, capable of adjustment as to hight, and arranged in a way to vary the spaces between the teeth at the point of stripping the heads for straw of different sizes. CLOTHES WRINGER.--M.M. Follett, Lake City, Minn.--This invention relates to a new apparatus for applying pressure to the rollers of a wringer with an object of obtaining equal and adjustable power without any danger to the rubber of the rollers or to the articles to be dried. AUGER HANDLE.--James Swan, Seymour, Conn.--The object of this invention is to provide a cheap, simple, and durable handle for augurs for boring in wood, one which shall require no fitting except to make the augur enter the socket, and which shall be of such size and shape that the shanks of ordinary augurs shall enter without any fitting at all. CANDLESTICK.--H. Zahn, San Francisco, Cal.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in candlesticks, and consists in the use of a thumb screw in combination with the candlestick tube, whereby the candle is kept steady, and in a perpendicular position in the stick, and firmly held without the use of springs or other attachment. WASHING MACHINE.--J.S. Merchant, Hopedale, Ohio.--This invention relates to new and useful improvements in machines for washing clothes. PACKING CASES FOR OIL CANS.--John McLeod Murphy, New York city.--This invention consists of an arrangement especially adapted for use with cans provided with an improved cut off nozzle, which is the subject of an application for a patent, made by the same inventor and bearing even date herewith, which said improvement comprises the application to the ordinary vertical nozzles of a lateral spout connected to the side, and arranged to open an escape passage for the contents when the said spout is turned with the right position, which position is that best adapted for pouring from the can into another vessel, and in which the said spout projects through a slot in the side of the packing case in closing it, the said case being provided with an opening and a door for closing the same adapted for it. WASHING MACHINE.--Edward Heim, Pittsburgh, Pa.--This invention relates to a new machine for washing clothes, and consists in the introduction of several improvements whereby the machine is adapted to thoroughly clean coarse as well as fine articles without injury to the same, and in a comparatively short time. PADLOCK--John S. Rankin, Ann Arbor, Mich.--The object of this invention is to provide a simple, cheap, and efficient construction and arrangement of the locking and operating parts of padlocks. The invention consists in an improved and simple compound tumbler bolt and relative arrangement thereof with the bow and bow spring. GRAIN DRILL.--Jacob F. Gibson, Chestnut Level, Pa.--This invention relates to a seed tube pivoted in its drag bars, in such manner that it may yield to an immovable obstruction. PROPELLING MACHINERY OF COTTON GINS.--Wm. L. May, Linwood, Ala.--This invention has for its object to effect such arrangement of machinery as will enable a cotton gin to be run at a materially reduced expense. SNOW PLOW.--Thomas L. Shaw, Omaha, Nebraska.--This invention relates to a snow plow, for a locomotive engine, which takes up a load of snow, is then borne back out of the cut by the engine, and dumps its load when arrived at a clear space. BEEHIVE.--W.T. Kirkpatrick, Tamarva, Ill.--This invention relates to improvements in beehives, and consists in the combination with beehives in a peculiar way, of a moth box, and moth passage thereto, calculated to entice the moths away from the bee passage and prevent them from entering thereat. SEEDING MACHINE.--M.F. Lowth and T.J. Howe, Owatonna, Minn.--This invention relates to that class of seeders which employ a revolving cylinder, having pockets in its periphery, and placed at the bottom of the hopper which contains the seed, the function of the pockets being to receive seed, when right side up, and drop it when inverted. UPRIGHT PIANO.--Geo. C. Manner, New York city.--This invention consists in placing the strings of an upright piano in an inclined position in the frame instead of a perpendicular one, as heretofore, for the purpose of enabling the hammer handle to be pivoted so near the strings that when the hammer head is driven up against them, it shall necessarily fall back again by its own weight. CARPET CLEANER.--Alexander Stevenson, New York city.--This invention relates to new and useful improvements in carpet cleaning devices, having for its object to provide a simple and efficient apparatus consisting of a yielding bed, brushing rollers, moving rollers, and a beating apparatus, whereby the carpet, being bound upon a roller, or rollers, may be moved along, from time to time, over the said yielding bed and brushing rollers, and be beaten and brushed. COTTON CULTIVATOR.--I.W. Burch, Fayette, Miss.--This invention comprises a pair of plows suspended from the frame of a truck so as to work on both sides of the row, for "barring off" or scraping the weeds and earth away from the row, also, a pair of rotary cutters having oblique blades for throwing away from the plants, and designed, also, to work on both sides of the rows, and closer to the plants than the plows, both sets of devices having vertical vibration. WATER WHEEL--Geo. W. Cressman and Burt Pfleger, Barren Hill, Pa., and Nice Keely Roxborough, Pa.--This invention relates to improvements in turbine wheels designed to produce an arrangement of the gates within the bucket rim (the water being secured from below, and the wheel being made hollow, for the reception of the water, and to provide space for the said gate), in a manner calculated to relieve the wheel of pressure from the water, either in an upward or downward direction. ATTACHING FLY AND MOSQUITO BARS TO WINDOWS, DOORS, ETC.--James Hebron, Buffalo, N.Y.--This invention relates to improvements in attaching fly and mosquito bars to window sashes or frames, doors, or other light frames to be used in combination with window frames or doors, and consists in attaching one edge of the cloth to a round or other shaped bar or rod of wood or metal, by binding thereon and sewing, passing the thread spirally around the bar or rod, and then securing the rod to the sill or frame, either on the surface thereof, or in a groove formed therein, then stretching the cloth across the window and securing it by clamping another rod down upon it by staples, either in a groove or not, and, in some cases, securing the ends in a similar way. It is also proposed to stretch the cloth over or under these rods. ADJUSTABLE STOVEPIPE THIMBLE.--H.N. Bill, Willimantic, Conn.--This invention relates to improvements in thimbles for the passage of stovepipes through the walls into flues, and consists in providing a vertically-sliding thimble plate in a metallic frame, having a long opening, and adapted for insertion in an opening through the wall, so as to support the thin plate at or about the line of the face of the flue wall, so that the plate may be drawn up or down to vary the hight of the thimble for pipes of different vertical lengths. The invention, also, comprises an improved mode of attaching the thimbles to this plate by means of radial studs at the rim, separated from the main part of the rim and bent inward so as to pass through slots in the thimble plate around the hole, to engage behind the edge of the plate by turning the thimbles on their axes a short distance after being passed through the slots, while the main part of the rims of the said thimbles bear against the front face of the thimble plate and cover the slots when so turned. COMBINED HAY RAKE AND TEDDER.--John C. Mills, Palmyra, N.Y.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in combining two important agricultural machines in one (or combining a tedder with a hay rake), and it consists in the construction of the tedder and the arrangement of the same in combination with the rake. Patented Dec. 7, 1869. POST-HOLE AUGER.--Geo. Seeger and Chas H. Shaffer, Clark's Hill, Ind.--This invention relates to a post hole boring apparatus, mounted upon a wheelbarrow, and the invention consists in providing the barrow with legs that may be either turned up out of the way or adjusted at any required angle so as to keep the barrow level when on uneven ground. SELF-DROPPER FOR REAPERS.--T.F. Lippencott, Conemaugh, Pa.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved self-dropper for reapers, which shall be so constructed as to operate automatically, to fall and deposit the grain and to rise to receive another supply, making the gavels all of about the same size. PLOWING MACHINE.--Albert Bondeli, Philadelphia, Mo.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved machine for preparing the ground to receive seed, and which shall be so constructed and arranged as to prepare the ground more thoroughly and put it in better condition to receive seed, and which shall be so constructed and arranged as to prepare the ground more thoroughly and put it in better condition to receive the seed than when the ordinary plows are used. EXPANDING TRIPLE SHOVEL PLOWS.--Edward Wiard, Louisville, Ky.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved triple shovel plow, which shall be so constructed and arranged that the shovels may be conveniently expanded and contracted, or set at any desired pitch, and, at the same time, in such a way as to be securely held in any desired position. SEWING MACHINE.--L.W. Lathrop, Nyack, N.Y.--This invention relates to improvements in sewing machines, and consists in certain improvements in mechanism for forming the loop, and for conveying the binding thread through the same, in a manner to prevent the contact of the binding thread spool, or its carrier, with the thread of the needle, and thereby to avoid wearing the same, and to produce more easily operating parts; also, a secure, permanent, and reliable arrangement of apparatus, and calculated also to be more certain to form the stitch. POETABLE DERRICK.--J.R. Hammond, Sedalia, Mo.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved derrick, simple in construction, effective in operation, and easily moved from place to place, designed especially for use in connection with the improved rake, thrasher, loader, and stacker, patented by the same inventor Nov. 30, 1869, but equally applicable for other uses. WAGON SEAT FASTENER.--Charles Collins, Vernon Centre, N.Y.--This invention relates to improvements in means for holding detachable wagon or sleigh seats to the boxes, and consists in the application to the seat risers of hooks with spring stops, adapted for engaging staples in the boxes below the said hooks, and for being held in such engagement by the spring stops, until disengaged by the operator for removing the seats. VELOCIPEDE.--William Volk, Buffalo, N.Y.--This invention relates to a new three-wheeled velocipede, which is so arranged that the driving wheels, although mounted on separate axles, will make equal numbers of revolutions, as long as the machine is to be kept in a straight direction, while they can be disconnected when the device is to be turned in a circle. COFFIN HANDLES.--Clark Strong, Winsted, Conn.--This invention relates to new and useful improvements in coffin handles, and consists in the construction, arrangement, and combination of parts. LOOM.--Lyman Stone, Nelson, N.H.--This invention relates to improvements in power looms, and has for its principal object to provide an arrangement and construction of the same, calculated to furnish looms of equal or greater efficiency than those now in use, but occupying very much less space, so as to economize materially in room, where large numbers are used on a floor, as is the case in factories; not only in respect of the space occupied by the loom itself, but also in respect of the space required for the passages or aisles between the rows of looms. The invention also comprises improved let-off and take-up mechanisms, also, an improvement in cloth beams; also, an improved picker motion, inducing a novel adjusting arrangement for the picker operating cams, also, an improved construction of treadle cams, whereby an equal capacity of throw is obtained with less size and friction, and with less power, and whereby they are guarded to prevent accidents to the attendant while cleaning when the loom is in operation. PAPER FILE.--C.W. West, Shiloh, N.J.--This invention relates to a new paper file, which is a compound of two bars that can be tied together so that the paper will be securely clasped between them; the strings for tying them being arranged in a peculiar manner to draw them firmly together. ROLLING BLOTTER.--C.A. Gale, Demopolis, Ala.--This invention has for its object to provide an improved rolling blotter, which shall be so constructed and arranged that the blotting pads maybe conveniently removed when required, and replaced with new ones. DUMP WAGON.--Daniel Willson, Ishpeming, Mich.--This invention has for its object to furnish a simple, strong, and convenient dump wagon, which shall be so constructed and arranged that it maybe dumped when required, by backing the team. SEWING MACHINE SOAP HOLDER.--Mary Dewey, New Albany, Ind.--This invention relates to a new device for soaping the cloth that is fed under the needle of a sewing machine, and consists in the attachment of a tubular soap holder to the presser foot of a sewing machine. MONKEY WRENCH.--Samuel Zarley, Niantic, Ill.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved monkey wrench, which shall be simple in construction, strong, durable, and easily and quickly adjusted to the nut to be unscrewed. ANIMAL TRAP.--Adam Brown, Bridgeport, Oregon.--This invention relates to improvements in traps for rats, squirrels, and other animals, and consists in the application through an opening in the side of a box, of a detachable chute extending some distance into the box, forming a passage thereinto the walls of which are armed with spring points arranged in the usual way to permit ingress and prevent egress; the floor of the passage is elevated to form a chamber below for inclosing the bait, so that it cannot all be readily devoured. The invention also comprises in connection with the above, the application to the side walls of the box, which is open at the top, of projecting sheets of metal to prevent the animals from climbing out; also the application to the top of tilting shelves for discharging any animals that may climb up the outside of the box, and on to the same. SHINGLE PACKER.--Robert Taylor, West Pensaukie, Wis.--This invention relates to improvements in apparatus for pressing and holding the bunches of shingles for binding them, and consists of the arrangement on a suitable bench, having end walls for gaging the piling of the shingles at the thick ends, of a pair of vertically sliding bars, a transverse passing bar, and a set of gear wheels, shaft, and hand lever, the said wheels gearing with the vertically sliding bars which are toothed for the purpose in such a way that the hand lever may be used to force the transverse bar, which is connected to the upper end of the sliding bar down upon the bundle of shingles across the center, pressing and holding the bundle till fastened. REGISTERING APPARATUS FOR VEHICLES.--Thomas Ollis, Netherfield road, South Liverpool, England.--This invention consists in the application of apparatus similar to that used for stamping or indorsing purposes for registering or indicating the number of passengers that have traveled by an omnibus or other vehicle. STEAM AND CALORIC ENGINES.--Alexander Hendry, Victoria, British Columbia.--This invention consists in an improved arrangement of jacketed cylinders, and jacketed furnace, constituting a water space, for generating steam by the radiating heat of the furnace, and arranged to envelope the cylinders with water to prevent injury by the gases and heat; also an improved arrangement of chambered pistons, for keeping the same filled with water to counteract the action of the heat upon the same, also, certain improvements in chambered valves, and valve operating devices, the said chambered valves and rods being supplied with water, also to prevent injury by the heat and the gases, and the invention also comprises an arrangement of the furnace calculated to separate and distribute the gases and effect the most perfect combustion. COTTON BASKETS.--R.S. Myers, Washington, N.C.--This invention relates to improvements in baskets for carrying cotton, especially when ginned and consists in providing the cotton baskets of the ordinary form and construction with large holes through the center of the bottom, whereby in emptying the said baskets the operator may insert his hand and push the cotton out by one effort in a mass, whereas, by the present arrangement it must be pulled out from the mouth, which takes much more time, as in this way it only comes out in small quantities. NOTE CASE.--Alphonzo Button, Dunkirk, N.Y.--This invention relates to improvements in note or paper cases or files for inclosing notes, papers, bills, etc., in a simple, cheap, and convenient portable package for the use of bankers and other business men. It consists of a cylindrical case of leather or other light suitable material having an opening from end to end covered by a flap, a central revolving spool, and a web of flexible substance connected to and wound on the spool so as to be drawn out through the opening and wound up again, on which web any suitable arrangement of narrow flaps folding over from the edges and connected by elastic bands, in a way to secure papers, notes, etc., in different and separate sections, may be arranged as now arranged in pocket books. PUMP.--A.C. Judson, Grand Rapids, Ohio.--This invention consists in the arrangement of two dish shaped metal disks with a diaphragm of leather between them, and another leather diaphragm above, adapted for the better support of the water in lifting; it also consists of an arrangement for operating the pump rod without lateral vibration, so that it may be packed tightly in the tube to prevent foul matter and vermin from getting in. PANELING, MOLDING, AND CARVING MACHINE.--A.S. Gear, New Haven, Conn.--This machine performs all of the work of the well known Variety Molding Machine, and in addition molds and carves any desired pattern of panel work, and simultaneously dovetails both mortise and tenon. The wood to be carved is fastened firmly to the bed of the machine by movable clamps adjustable to suit any required size of wood, and the cutters are fastened to a spindle moved by a universal joint in any direction upon the bed of the machine. The cutter is guided by hand, the guide resting against the pattern. The carving can be gaged to any required depth, and made to conform to any required pattern. A fan blows away chips as fast as they are produced, leaving the work constantly in view of the operator. The same tool which cuts the mortise also cuts the tenon, the two pieces of work to be dovetailed being clamped together to the end of the table. Every kind of finish hitherto made upon the edges of lumber, and which has heretofore been mitered and glued upon the face to create a finish, is planed, beaded, and molded upon the piece itself by this machine. WASHING BOILERS.--John P. Sherwood, Fort Edward, N.Y.--This invention has for its object to improve the construction of that class of washing boilers in which the clothes are washed by the water as it boils being projected down upon the clothes to percolate through them, and thus remove the dirt. And it consists in the construction and combination of the various parts. TOY VELOCIPEDE.--H.C. Alexander, New York city.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved toy velocipede. BRICK MACHINE.--Thomas Smurfit, Davisville, Mich.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved brick machine, which shall be strong, durable, simple in construction, and effective in operation, making the bricks rapidly and well. TRUNKS, ETC.--Thomas B. Peddie, Newark, N.J.--This invention has for its object to improve the construction of trunks, valises, portmanteaus, pellesiers, traveling bags, etc., so as to adapt them to receive and carry a portfolio in such a way that while carrying it safely, it may be conveniently removed when required for use. SEED PLANTER.--David C. Woods, Waxahatchie, Texas.--This invention has for its object the construction of a seed planter, which will deposit the seeds in the requisite quantities and the proper distances apart, and which will cover and mark the hills, so that a plowman will not be at a loss where to start at the commencement of a new row, and after having passed around tree stumps or other obstructions, as he can always see the marks on the preceding rows. WASHING MACHINE.--Joseph Balsley, Bedford, Ind.--This invention has for its object to improve the construction of the machine known as the "Egyptian Washing Machine," so as to make it more convenient in use and more effective in operation. DENTAL IMPRESSION CUP FOR LOWER JAW.--Robert V. Jenks, Paterson, N.J.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved impression cup for use in taking a cast of the lower jaw, to form a model of said jaw to fit the plate upon, which shall be so constructed as to enable the dentist to take a more perfect cast than is possible with impression cups constructed in the ordinary manner. SHOW CARD SUSPENSION RING.--H.S. Griffiths, New York city.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved suspension ring for suspending show cards, which shall be simple in construction and easily attached to the cards, and which shall, at the same time, be so formed as to take a firm hold upon the card, and not be liable to tear out. REFRIGERATOR.--Samuel Ayres, Danville, Ky.--This invention relates to improvements in refrigerators, and consists in certain improvements in the construction and arrangement for excluding the external atmosphere, distributing the cold by means of the ice, and also the water resulting therefrom; for economizing space, and for providing convenient access to all the different parts. CINDER AND DUST ARRESTER FOR CAR WINDOWS.--Edwin Norton, Brooklyn, N.Y.--This invention relates to improvements in apparatus for preventing the cinders and dust from being blown into the cars, when in motion, through the open windows, and consists in the application to the cars at the sides of the windows, on the exterior, by hinging thereto or by other equivalent connection, small guard plates of wood or other substance to project outwardly in a right or other suitable or preferred angle, at the side of the window, to arrest the cinder and dust moving rearward alongside of the car, and conduct it below the windows, the said guard plates being arranged so that those on the side of the windows in the direction of the movement of the train may be adjusted to the operating position while the others are folded back against the side of the car. HOSE COUPLING.--William J. Osbourne, New York city.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in couplings for hose pipe, whereby the parts of a hose are united in a more perfect manner than by the ordinary hose coupling. SAW GUIDE.--John Trunick, Muscatine, Iowa.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in means for guiding circular saws and keeping them to the true saw line. SQUARE, GAGE, AND LEVEL.--Josiah Potts, Milwaukee, Wis.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in a tool for mechanics' use and consists in combining with a try square, a spirit level and a surface gage. EXTENSION MUFF BLOCK.--C.F. Butterworth, Troy, N.Y.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in blocks for forming and stretching muffs in the process of manufacturing that article. HAY AND GRAIN ELEVATOR.--John Dennis, Oswego, N.Y.--This invention has for its object to furnish an improved device, to be used in connection with the improved hay and grain elevator, patented by the same inventor, September 21, 1869, and numbered 95,006, for the purpose of moving the whole load of hay or grain when elevated to any desired part of the barn before unloading it. MILLER TRAP FOR BEEHIVES.--T.L. Gray, Thomasville, Tenn.--This invention relates to a device for catching millers, or other insects, in their attempts to gain entrance into beehives. VALVE GEAR.--Thomas E. Evans, William R. Thomas, and Joshua Hunt, Catasauqua, Pa.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in the mode of operating valves of steam engines, more especially designed for pumping engines, but applicable to other purposes or to valves of steam and water engines generally. WATER WHEEL.--Henry W. McAuley, De Soto, Wis.--This invention consists in certain improvements in the form and arrangements of the buckets and in chutes for delivering the water thereto. SELF-LOADING HAY WAGON.--James Capen, Charlton, Mass.--This invention relates to improvements in hay loaders, and consists in the application to the rear end of a hay wagon of an endless elevator case and rake, the latter having spring teeth, and arranged for adjustment by means of a hand lever at the front and suitable connecting devices; and the elevator is connected with one or both of the hind wheels of the wagon by machine chains or belts for operation. ELEVATOR.--Francis Stein and Henry Haering, New York city.--This invention consists in the application to a pair of vertical ports or ways with toothed racks, of a carriage or platform having a shaft provided with a gear wheel at or near each end, and gearing into the toothed rack; also, having in suitable cases sliding on the posts a set of hoisting gears, gearing with the toothed racks and operated by hand cranks, and provided with ratchet wheels, holding pawls, and friction apparatus, arranged in a peculiar way for elevating the platform, holding it in any desired position or governing its descent. FOLDING AND EXTENSION TABLE.--C. Mayer, Sullivan, Ill.--This invention relates to improvements in tables, and consists in arranging the side rails of the top of the frame, which are enlarged at the center and hinged to the posts for folding against the cross rails, when the top, which is detachably connected, is removed, for economy of space and convenience, in packing for transportation or storage; also in arranging the legs for folding up against the under edge of the cross rails; also in an improved arrangement of the side rails for extension. MANUFACTURE OF SCOOPS.--S. Geo. Knapp, Woodhaven, N.Y.--This invention relates to an improved mode of manufacturing sheet-metal flour, grain, and other scoops, and consists in forming the bowls in one piece of metal, without seams or joints, by stamping up sheets of metal into the form of a trough, with a flange around the top, and cutting the same transversely in the center, with blanks for the bowls of two scoops, to be finished by trimming or shaping the cut ends, turning down the flange at the top, for stiffening either over wire or not and attaching the handle; the object being to produce scoops with bowls formed in one piece, and shaped at the base or in the part where the handles are connected, and to smoothly effect an economy of labor by stamping two blanks at one blow of the drop press, and also to control the metal under the action of the drop better in shaping the deep curved part of the base so as to upset and stiffen the blanks thereat. BORING MACHINE.--E.C. Barton, Bloomsburg, Pa.--This invention relates to improvements in wood-boring machines, whereby it is designed to provide a simple and efficient arrangement of frame operating devices and feeding table for boring light articles to be presented to the machine by hand. HASP LOCK.--E.R. Culver, New London, Conn.--This invention relates to improvements in that class of locks where the locking devices are incased within a hasp, and a hook is used in connection with the hasp for locking, or independently for fastening the door without locking. WATER WHEELS.--W.J. Thompson, Springfield, Mo.--This invention relates to improvements in that class of horizontally running wheels, which receive the water from above or below on curved buckets taking the water at one side and discharging it at the other, and it consists of an improved arrangement of vertically oscillating gates, which, when open, form chutes for the water; it also consists of an improved means for working the gates. PIPE COUPLING.--J.D. Ware, Savannah, Ga.--This invention relates to improvements in pipe couplings, and consists in forming a dovetailed groove across the end of one part, with an annular recess in the bottom around the bore for a packing ring, and fitting on the other part a dovetailed projection for engaging in the groove, and in arranging on one of the parts an eccentric ring to work against the head of the projection and force it tightly into the groove. FIRE GRATES.--G.W. Everhart, Louisville, Ky.--This invention relates to improvements in that class of fire grates used for heating rooms, and consists in so arranging them as to provide a clear air space between the basket and the walls of the fire-place, both at the back and ends, for the admission of air more directly at these parts, for the better combustion of the coal and the gases arising therefrom; it also consists in providing a recess in the hearth or bottom of the fire-place under the grate, for the reception of ash pans of greater capacity than can be contained on the top of the hearth, whereby a much larger quantity of cinders and ashes may be received and retained, so that less frequent removals of the same will be required. APPARATUS FOR SEWING SADDLERY AND OTHER LEATHER, OR STRONG MATERIALS.--Auguste Jacques Hurtu and Victor Joseph Hautin, Paris France.--This invention relates to apparatus more especially applicable for sewing leather, saddlery, harness, and other similar work with waxed thread, and consists first, in the improved apparatus of this invention, two needles are employed, the one sewing as an awl, and the other carrying the thread; the two needles have at the same time a vertical movement and also an adjustable horizontal movement. The needles are operated alternately, so that the needle may pass the thread through the hole made just previously by the awl, before the leather has been moved forward. By this means the sewing may be carried on with great regularity, and the material be turned in any direction in order to execute small designs. Secondly, the invention relates to improvements in the arrangement of the shuttle, whereby it is caused to pass through the loops formed by the waxed thread without touching it. PACKING AND ATOMIZING CAN.--F.L. Palmer, Sr., New York city.--This invention relates to improvements in cans for packing insect powder and other like finely powdered substances which, in use, require to be delivered in atomic jets for penetrating crevices where insects secrete themselves, and it consists in providing such cans with stoppers having nozzles, through which stoppers or nozzles the passages are temporarily closed in a way to be readily opened for use; also, in providing the cans with nozzles at or near the bottom temporarily plugged in which tubes may be connected so that the powder may, when required for use, be readily blown out in atomic jets, whereby the said cans are made to subserve the uses of packing cans and discharging atomizing cans, with but trifling additional expense, whereas, at the present time, users of such powders are compelled to buy expensive atomizing cans, to which the powder must be transferred from the packing cans, before it can be properly used, or in the absence of such cans the powder is scattered in an ineffectual and wasteful way in or about the resorts of the insects. REMEDY TOR RHEUMATISM.--H.H. Munroe, Louisville, Ky.--This invention relates to a new and useful improvement in a remedy for rheumatism. * * * * * NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS. ELOCUTION AND ORATORY. Giving a Thorough Treatise on the Art of Speaking and Reading. With numerous Selections of Didactic, Humorous, and Dramatic Styles. The author of this valuable treatise is Prof. Charles A. Wiley, of Fort Plain, N.Y. The instructions are valuable and the selections admirable; and we can very cordially recommend it to all who would improve either in speaking or reading. Such a book is worthy a place in every family. SPECIMENS OF FANCY TURNING EXECUTED ON THE HAND OR FOOT LATHE. With Geometric, Oval, and Eccentric Chucks, and Elliptical Cutting Frame. By an Amateur. Illustrated by Thirty exquisite Photographs. Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, Industrial Publisher, 406 Walnut Street. The beauty of these photographs is indescribable; they must be seen to be appreciated. The designs from which they were taken were executed by a gentleman well known to us, and who is undoubtedly one of the most expert turners on this continent. The price of the work by mail, free of postage, is $3.00. THE NATIONAL WAGES TABLES, Showing at a glance the Amount of Wages, from Half an Hour to Sixty Hours at $1 to $37 per Week, also from One Quarter of a Day to Four Weeks, at $1 to $37 per Week. By Nelson Row, Publisher, No 149 Fulton street, New York. This little work, which our readers will find advertised in another column, must prove an almost indispensable help in the counting rooms of establishments employing large numbers of workmen at varying rates of wages. It is one of the best things of the kind we have ever seen, and we give it earnest commendation. DIRECTIONS FOR COOKING. By Miss Leslie. Price, by mail, $1.50. Henry Carey Baird, of Philadelphia, has just published a new edition of Miss Leslie's "Old Standard and Renowned Cookery," being the sixtieth edition of a book which has stood the test of time and practice, and is a valuable aid in every household. BENNY. S.R. Wells, of this city, has published in pretty form "Benny," a Christmas ballad, by Annie Chambers Ketchum, a poem which has already appeared in the _Phrenological Journal_. The prospectus of EVERY SATURDAY, for 1870, by Fields, Osgood & Co. of Boston, promises to give us that excellent journal in a new and enlarged form, with the additional attraction of illustrations, engraved from designs by leading European artists. This publication will therefore hereafter present weekly, not only the cream of European literature, but the cream of European art. The high character of the publishers of this journal is an ample guarantee that this promise will be fulfilled in the most satisfactory manner. LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE, for January, also presents a varied and select bill of fare, containing among other things, Part XIII. of Robert Dale Owen's novel "Beyond the Breakers," "The Fairy and the Ghost," a Christmas tale, with six amusing illustrations; a curious and interesting article on "Literary Lunatics," by Wirt Sikes, "Our Capital," by William R. Hooper, and very much more excellent matter in the way of stories poems, and essays. The "Mobile Weekly Register," the oldest Democratic paper in the South, is said to have reached a larger circulation than was ever attained by any journal South of Mason and Dixon's line. It is full of interesting varied matter, having an able agricultural department, presided over by the veteran editor and successful agriculturist, Hon. C.C. Langdon. Its general literature, poetry, stories, etc., make it highly acceptable to the ladies. The year will open with a new continued story, of deep interest, by one of the most distinguished writers of the day. The price was recently reduced to $3.00 per year, which, for so large a paper (12 pages), is extremely cheap. We have received the January number of "Demorest's Mirror of Fashions," a work that interests the ladies. Also "Demorest's Young America," a fine magazine for boys and girls. Both these serials are well published by Mr. and Madame Demorest of this city. * * * * * U.S. Patent Office How to Obtain Letters Patent for New Inventions. Information about Caveats, Extensions, Interferences Designs, Trade Marks; also, Foreign Patents. For a period of nearly twenty-five years, MUNN & CO. have occupied the position of leading Solicitors of American and European Patents, and during this extended experience of nearly a quarter of a century, they have examined not less than fifty thousand alleged new inventions, and have prosecuted upward of thirty thousand applications for patents, and, in addition to this, they have made, at the Patent Office, over twenty thousand preliminary examinations into the novelty of inventions, with a careful report on the same. The important advantages of MUNN & CO.'S Agency are, that their practice has been ten-fold greater than that of any other Agency in existence, with the additional advantage of having the assistance of the best professional skill in every department, and a Branch Office at Washington, which watches and supervises, when necessary, cases as they pass through official examination. CONSULTATIONS AND OPINIONS FREE. Those who have made inventions and desire a consultation are cordially invited to advise with MUNN & CO. who will be happy to see them in person at the office, or to advise them by letter. In all cases, they may expect an HONEST OPINION. For such consultations, opinion, and advice, NO CHARGE is made. A pen-and-ink sketch and a description of the invention should be sent. TO APPLY FOR A PATENT, a model must be furnished, not over a foot in any dimension. Send model to MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York, by express, charges paid, also, a description of the improvement, and remit $16 to cover first Government fee, and revenue and postage stamps. The model should be neatly made, of any suitable materials, strongly fastened, without glue, and neatly painted. The name of the inventor should be engraved or painted upon it. When the invention consists of an improvement upon some other machine, a full working model of the whole machine will not be necessary. But the model must be sufficiently perfect to show with clearness the nature and operation of the improvement. PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION is made into the patentability of an invention by personal search at the Patent Office, among the models of the patents pertaining to the class to which the improvement relates. For this special search, and a report in writing, a fee of $5 is charged. This search is made by a corps of examiner of long experience. Inventors who employ us are not required to incur the cost of a preliminary examination. But it is advised in doubtful cases. COST OF APPLICATIONS. When the model is received, and first Government fee paid, the drawings and specification are carefully prepared and forwarded to the applicant for his signature and oath, at which time the agency fee is called for. This fee is generally not over $25. The cases are exceptionally complex if a higher fee than $25 is called for, and, upon the return of the papers, they are filed at the Patent Office to await Official examination. If the case should be rejected for any cause, or objections made to a claim, the reasons are inquired into and communicated to the applicant, with sketches and explanations of the references; and should it appear that the reasons given are insufficient, the claims are prosecuted immediately, and the rejection set aside, and usually WITHOUT EXTRA CHARGE TO THE APPLICANT. MUNN & CO. are determined to place within the reach of those who confide to them their business, the best facilities and the highest professional skill and experience. The only cases of this character, in which MUNN & CO. expect an extra fee, are those wherein appeals are taken from the decision of the Examiner after a second rejection; and MUNN & CO. wish to state very distinctly, that they have but few cases which can not be settled without the necessity of an appeal; and before an appeal is taken, in any case, the applicant is fully advised of all facts and charges, and no proceedings are had without his sanction; so that all inventors who employ MUNN & CO. know in advance what their applications and patents are to cost. MUNN & CO. make no charge for prosecuting the rejected claims of their own clients before the Examiners and when their patents are granted, the invention is noticed editorially in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. REJECTED CASES. MUNN & CO. give very special attention to the examination and prosecution of rejected cases filed by inventors and other attorneys. In such cases a fee of $5 is required for special examination and report, and in case of probable success by further prosecution, and the papers are found tolerably well prepared, MUNN & Co. will take up the case and endeavor to get it through for a reasonable fee, to be agreed upon in advance of prosecution. CAVEATS Are desirable if an inventor is not fully prepared to apply for a Patent. A Caveat affords protection, for one year, against the issue of a patent to another for the same invention. Caveat papers should be carefully prepared. The Government fee on filing a Caveat is $10, and MUNN & Co.'s charges for preparing the necessary papers are usually from $10 to $12. REISSUES. A patent when discovered to be defective, may be reissued by the surrender of the original patent, and the filing of amended papers. This proceeding should be taken with great care. DESIGNS, TRADE MARKS, AND COMPOSITIONS can be patented for a term of years, also, new medicines or medical compounds, and useful mixtures of all kinds. When the invention consists of a medicine or compound, or a new article of manufacture, or a new composition, samples of the article must be furnished, neatly put up. Also, send a full statement of the ingredients, proportions, mode of preparation, uses, and merits. PATENTS CAN BE EXTENDED. All patents issued prior to 1861, and now in force, may be extended for a period of seven years upon the presentation of proper testimony. The extended term of a patent is frequently of much greater value than the first term; but an application for an extension, to be successful, must be carefully prepared. MUNN & Co. have had a large experience in obtaining extensions, and are prepared to give reliable advice. INTERFERENCES Between pending applications before the Commissioners are managed and testimony taken; also, Assignments, Agreements, and Licenses prepared. In fact, there is no branch of the Patent Business which MUNN & Co. are not fully prepared to undertake and manage with fidelity and dispatch. FOREIGN PATENTS. American inventors should bear in mind that five Patents--American, English, French, Belgian, and Prussian--will secure an inventor exclusive monopoly to his discovery among ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY MILLIONS of the most intelligent people in the world. The facilities of business and steam communication are such, that patents can be obtained abroad by our citizens almost as easily as at home. MUNN & Co. have prepared and taken a larger number of European Patents than any other American Agency. They have Agents of great experience in London, Paris, Berlin, and other Capitals. A Pamphlet, containing a synopsis of the Foreign Patent Laws, sent free. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York. * * * * * Official List of Patents. Issued by the United States Patent Office FOR THE WEEK ENDING DEC. 14, 1869. _Reported Officially for the Scientific American_ SCHEDULE OF PATENT OFFICE FEES: On each caveat $10 On filing each application for a Patent (seventeen years) $15 On issuing each original Patent $20 On appeal to Commissioner of Patents $20 On application for Reissue $30 On application for Extension of Patent $50 On granting the Extension $50 On filing a Disclaimer $10 On an application for Design (three and a half years) $10 On an application for Design (seven years) $15 On an application for Design (fourteen years) $30 In addition to which there are some small revenue-stamp taxes. Residents of Canada and Nova Scotia pay $500 on application. _For copy of Claim of any Patent issued within 30 years_ $1 _A sketch from the model or drawing, relating to such portion of a machine as the Claim covers, from_ $1 _upward, but usually at the price above-named_. _The full Specification of any patent issued since Nov. 20,1866, at which time the Patent Office commenced printing them_ $1.25 _Official Copies of Drawings of any patent issued since 1836, we can supply at a reasonable cost, the price depending upon the amount of labor involved and the number of views. Full information, as to price of drawings, in each case, may be had by addressing_ MUNN & CO., Patent Solicitors, No. 37 Park Row, New York. * * * * * 97,751.--FLUTING MACHINE.--Henry B. Adams, New York city. 97,752.--ELASTIC WASHER FOR CARRIAGES, ETC.--George W. Billings, Chicago, Ill. Antedated December 4, 1869. 97,753.--ADJUSTABLE WAGON BOTTOM AND CHUTE.--Abraham Bitner, Jr., Lancaster, Pa. 97,754.--MODE OF TREATING CONGLOMERATES OF CAST IRON.--Thomas Schoenberger Blair, Pittsburgh, Pa. 97,755.--ANIMAL TRAP.--John Blume, Mount Pleasant, Md. 97,756.--ELECTRO-MAGNETIC ADVERTISING FRAME.--Joshua Brooks, (assignor to himself and Benjamin E. Corlew), Boston, Mass., Antedated December 1, 1869. 97,757.--LAMP EXTINGUISHER.--Wm.I.Bunker, Yankton, Dakota Territory. 97,758.--MACHINE FOR POLISHING THE EDGES OF BOOT AND SHOE SOLES.--Robert F. Burns, Albany, N.Y. 97,759.--BEEHIVE.--Peter Campbell, Carrolltown, Pa. 97,760.--RAILWAY GATE.--Peter Campbell, Carrolltown, Pa. 97,761.--REDUCING ORES.--Thomas J. Chubb, Williamsburg, N.Y. Antedated June 14, 1869. 97,762.--MACHINE FOR BENDING AND FOLDING SHEET METAL.--James B. Clark and Lucas C. Clark, Plantsville, Conn. 97,763.--SAW SWAGE.--Joseph S. Clark, New York city. 97,764.--SASH HOLDER.--Nelson C. Cole (assignor to himself and Leverett H. Marvin), Beaver Dam, Wis. 97,765.--MACHINE FOR CRIMPING AND FORMING THE FRONT OF BOOTS.--Christopher Day, Mineral Point, Wis. Antedated November 30, 1869. 97,766.--WATER HEATER FOR CULINARY PURPOSES.--Royal E. Deane, Brooklyn, N.Y. 97,767.--PUMP.--Joseph W. Douglas, Middletown, Conn., assignor to W.& B. Douglas. 97,768.--DEPURATOR.--S. C. Frink and L. D. Harlan, Indianapolis, Ind. 97,769.--SHUTTER FASTENER.--Charles B. Goodrich, Jr., Boston, Mass. 97,770.--Suspended. 97,771.--MANUFACTURE OF GLUE.--George Guenther, Chicago, Ill., assignor to himself and E. H. Heymann, New York city. 97,772.--SHADE RINGS FOR LAMP BURNERS.--Hiram W. Hayden (assignor to Holmes, Booth & Haydens), Waterbury, Conn. 97,773.--LAMP.--Hiram W. Hayden (assignor to Holmes, Booth & Haydens), Waterbury, Conn. 97,774.--FLUTING MACHINE.--Frederick Hewitt, Bloomfield, N.J. 97,775.--WAGON BRAKE.--Abram C. Jaques, Levenworth, Kansas. 97,776.--WICK-TRIMMER FOR LAMPS.--E.C.Jenkins, Jr., Worcester, Mass. Antedated December 11, 1869. 97,777.--LUMBER DRYER.--Jesse.B. Johnson and Thomas E. Johnson, Indianapolis, Ind. 97,778.--TURBINE WATER WHEEL.--Julius H. Jones, Charlton, Mass. 97,779.--HYDRAULIC ENGINE.--Henry J. King and Benton L. Beebe, Middletown, N. Y. 97,780.--BREECH-LOADING REVOLVING FIREARMS.--Francois Alexandre Le Mat, New Orleans, La., assignor to Charles Pietroni, London, England. 97,781.--COMPOSITION FOR COVERING STEAM BOILERS AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES.--Ferdinand Leroy (Ferdinand Leroy, administrator), of Commercial Road, London, England, assignor to himself and P. A. Victor Le Luoez, England. 97,782.--WINE AND CIDER MILL.--Edward C. Lewis, Benton Harbor, Mich. 97,783.--EXCAVATOR.--John R. Lewis, Piper City, Ill. 97,784.--BAND TIGHTENER.--Francis M. Lottridge, Portland, Ind., assignor to himself, James M. Templer, and James C. Jay. Antedated December 14, 1869. 97,785.--CLOD FENDER.--Francis M. Lowden and John D. Lowden, Lawrence, Ind. 97,786.--SHAFT TUG LUG FOR HARNESS.--T.J.Magruder, Marion, Ohio. 97,787.--SHIPS OR VESSELS FOR CARRYING LIQUID CARGO.--John W. Marshall, Gilman Joslin, and Nelson Curtis, Boston, and Oliver Edwards, Brookline, Mass. 97,788.--FASTENING FOR CORSETS.--Frank W. Marston, Boston, Mass. Antedated November 30, 1869. 97,789.--CART SADDLE.--W.B.McClure, Alexandria, Va. 97,790.--POTATO DIGGER.--Philip C. McManus, Troy, N.Y. Antedated December 7, 1869. 97,791.--WASHING MACHINE.--J.S.Merchant, Hopedale, Ohio. 97,792.--RAILWAY RAIL.--James Montgomery, Croton Landing, N.Y. 97,793.--WASHING MACHINE.--Wm. Morgan, Middlebrook, Va. 97,794.--COMPOUND FOR TREATING RHEUMATISM.--H.H.Munroe, Louisville, Ky. 97,795.--SCRIBE HOOK.--John Nester, Portland, Oregon. 97,796.--ROOFING.--H.G.Noble, Selma, Ala. 97,797.--DEVICE FOR FASTENING PISTONS TO PISTON RODS.--Anthony T. Norgan, Palo Alto, Pa. Antedated December 7, 1869. 97,798.--ATTACHABLE AND REMOVABLE CALKS FOR HORSESHOES.--G.S. Norris, Baltimore, Md. 97,799.--HARNESS FOR HORSES.--John Palen, Lockport, assignor to Nathan T. Healy, Medina, N.Y. 97,800.--RAILWAY CAR BRAKE.--Thomas Payne, Detroit, Mich. 97,801.--SAW MILL.--A. Perin, Paris, France. 97,802.--SPOKE SHAVE.--Joseph A. Perley (assignor to himself and Wm. H. Perley), Lynn. Mass. 97,803.--ORGAN BELLOWS.--J.R.Perry, Wilkesbarre, Pa. 97,804.--APPARATUS FOR SETTING CATS IN METALLIC CARTRIDGES.--William C. Pickersgill (assignor to Providence Tool Company), Providence, R.I. 97,805.--CAP-EXTRACTOR FOR CARTRIDGES.--William C. Pickersgill (assignor to Providence Tool Company), Providence, R.I. 97,806.--APPARATUS FOR SETTING BULLETS IN CARTRIDGES.--William C. Pickersgill (assignor to Providence Tool Company), Providence, R.I. 97,807.--SMOKE AND SPARK CONVEYER FOR RAILROAD TRAINS.--Lemuel Powell, Milford, Conn. 97,808.--CONVERTIBLE END-BOARD AND PLATFORM FOR WAGONS.--Thomas T. Powell and John F. Burroughs, Lawn Ridge, Ill. 97,809.--MACHINE FOR MAKING FLY NETS.--A. Prutzmann, Canton, Ohio. 97,810.--BURGLAR PROOF SAFE.--George W. Putnam, Boston, Mass. Antedated November 27, 1869. 97,811.--HORSESHOE BEVELER.--Ephraim Quinby, Comstock, Mich. Antedated Dec. 1, 1869. 97,812.--PADLOCK.--J.S.Rankin, Ann Arbor, Mich. 97,813.--SHIP WINDLASS.--Elisha R. Ritch, South Boston, Mass. 97,814.--REIN-GUIDE FOR HARNESS.--Lemuel Richmond, Derby, Vt. 97,815.--CHURN.--Stacy Risler, Locktown, N. J. 97,816.--PAPER-CUTTING MACHINE.--T. C. Robinson, Boston, Mass., assignor to G. H. Sandborn, New York city. 97,817.--STONE-POLISHING MACHINE.--Henry Schofield (assignor to himself and C. D. Clarke). Philadelphia. 97,818.--TWIST DRILL.--Socrates Scholfield, Providence, R. I. 97,819.--SMOKE-CONSUMING FIRE BOXES.--G. H. Smith, Galesburg, Ill. 97,820.--CHURN.--Samuel Smith, Yohogany, Pa. 97,821.--REPEATING FIRE-ARM.--William Sidney Smoot, Washington, D.C. 97,822.--PNEUMATIC ENGINE.--Robert Spear, New Haven, Conn. 97,823.--MACHINE FOR POLISHING WOOD.--W. F. Spear, Worcester, Mass. 97,824.--CARPET BEATER AND CLEANER.--Alexander Stevenson, New York City. 97,825.--MODE OF FORMING "BURNER CONES" OF LAMPS.--C. St. John and C. E. Marston, Charlestown, Mass. 97,826.--LOOM.--Lyman Stone, Nelson, N. H. 97,827.--COFFIN HANDLE.--Clark Strong, Winsted, Conn. 97,828.--PLOW.--Z. W. Sturtevant, Dunstable, Mass. 97,829.--SAFE.--T. J. Sullivan, Albany, N. Y. 97,830.--AUGER HANDLE.--James Swan, Seymour, Conn. 97,831.--STOVE SHELF.--Gr. L. Swett, Leominster, Mass. 97,832.--RAILWAY RAIL.--J. F. Tallant, Burlington, Iowa. 97,833.--TOOL FOR CABINET MAKERS.--R. W. Tanner (assignor to himself and Samuel J. Davenport), Albany, N. Y. Antedated Dec. 11,1869. 97,834.--TICKET BOX FOR RAILROAD PASSENGER TRAINS.--Asahel Todd, Jr., Pultneyville, N. Y. 97,835.--HYDRANT.--T. Van Kannel, Cincinnati, Ohio. 97,836.--RETICULE WICKER BASKET.--Joseph Venet, New York city. 97,837.--VELOCIPEDE.--Wm. Volk, Buffalo, N. Y. 97,838.--SILVERING GLASS, AND PROTECTING THE SAME.--H. B. Walker, New York city. 97,839.--STEELYARD.--P. H. Walker (assignor to himself and J. L. Trowbridge), Boston, Mass. 97,840.--BARREL.--D. H. Waters, Grand Rapids, Mich. 97,841.--BARREL.--D. H. Waters, Grand Rapids, Mich. 97,842.--CAR SPRING.--Cyrenus Wheeler, Jr., Auburn, N. Y. 97,843.--METALLIC CARTRIDGE.--Rollin White, Lowell, Mass. 97,844.--APPARATUS FOR PURIFYING IRON.--S. M. Wickersham, Allegheny, Pa. 97,845.--MAKING PIANO LEGS.--Henry Willoghs, New York city. 97,846.--DUMPING WAGON.--Daniel Willson, Ishpeming, Mich. 97,847.--HARVESTER KNIFE GRINDER.--Edwin L. Yancey, Batavia, N. Y. 97,848.--CANDLESTICK.--H. Zahn, San Francisco, Cal. 97,849.--MONKEY WRENCH.--Samuel Zarley, Niantic, Ill. 97,850.--HUMMING-WHEEL TOY.--A. F. Able, New Orleans, La., assignor to himself and A. D. Finley. 97,851.--IRONING TABLE AND CLOTHES DRYER.--W. P. Adams, Brooklyn, N. Y. 97,852.--SAWSET.--Daniel Agnew, Vincennes, Ind. 97,853.--MODE OF PROTECTING THE ENDS OF VULCANIZED RUBBER HOSE.--H. A. Alden, Matteawan, N. Y. 97,854.--LAMP BURNER.--Joseph Bell Alexander, Washington, D.C. 97,855.--GATE FOR SWINGING BRIDGES.--Lauritz Anderson, Chicago, Ill. 97,856.--BUTTONHOLING ATTACHMENT FOR SEWING MACHINES.--S. J. Baird, Staunton, Va. 97,857.--OIL BLACKING FOR LEATHER.--J. L. Baumer, Columbus, Ohio. 97,858.--HEAD BLOCK FOR SAW MILLS.--C. B. Beall, Hamilton, Ohio. 97,859.--CHURN DASHER.--A. Belt, Newton, Iowa. 97,860.--COMBINED SHOVEL AND SIFTER.--F. S. Bidwell, Mystic Bridge, Conn. 97,861.--STOVEPIPE THIMBLE.--Horatio N. Bill, Willimantic, Conn. 97,862.--DIVING BELL.--H. C. Billings, Brooklyn, N. Y. 97,863.--HOE.--Lewis Billings, Gallipolis, Ohio. 97,864.--STEAM GENERATOR.--Edward Bourne, Pittsburgh, Pa. 97,865.--STEAM GENERATOR.--Edward Bourne, Pittsburgh, Pa. 97,866.--RIVETS AND WASHERS.--Edward Bourne, Pittsburgh, Pa. 97,867.--WAGON BRAKE.--William H. Bradt, New Scotland, N.Y. 97,868.--DRILL FOR BORING POLYGONAL HOLES.--J.C. Broadley (assignor to himself and Jas. Stout), Franklin, N. J. 97,869.--WATER WHEEL.--J. D. Bryson and J. H. Hartsuff, Newcastle, Pa. 97,870.--COTTON CULTIVATOR.--I. W. Burch, Fayette, Miss. 97,871.--BUCKLE.--I. W. Burch, Fayette, Miss. 97,872.--CLAMP.--Mathias Burkhardt, Cincinnati, Ohio. 97,873.--DINNER PAIL.--N. C. Burnap, Argusville, N. Y. 97,874.--BOLT CUTTER.--O. E. Butler and S. P. Dunham, Marshalltown, Iowa. 97,875.--PADLOCK.--S. G. Cabell (assignor to F. B. Cabell), Quincy, Ill. 97,876.--RAILWAY CAR COUPLING.--S. 0. Campbell, Tipton, Mo. 97,877.--WRENCH AND SAW SET COMBINED.--G. J. Capewell, West Cheshire, Conn. 97,878.--MACHINE FOR DRESSING MILLSTONES.--J. S. Carr, Alliance, Ohio. 97,879.--CAR TANK COVER.--L. C. Cattell, Cleveland, Ohio. 97,880.--MANUFACTURE OF RUBBER SPONGE.--Edwin Chesterman, Tremont, N. Y. Antedated Nov. 17, 1869. 97,881.--VALVE FOR WATER ENGINES.--Abraham Coates (assignor for one half, to James Martin Hunt), Watertown, N. Y. 97,882.--SHUTTLE FOR LOOMS.--John H. Coburn, Lowell, Mass. 97,883.--WAGON SEAT FASTENING.--Charles Collins, Vernon Centre, N. Y. 97,884.--HARVESTER.--Robert Conarroe (assignor to himself, H. Young, and A. C. Stauffer), Camden, Ohio. 97,885.--MOP.--Philip Cook, Jr., Sioux City, Iowa. Antedated Dec. 10, 1869. 97,888.--RAILWAY SWITCH.--J. B. Cox, James O'Connor, and Michael Cahalan, Columbus, Ga. 97,887.--SLIDE VALVE.--Isaac Craft (assignor to himself, T. J. Williams, and C. M. Greve), Cincinnati, Ohio. 97,888.--WATER WHEEL.--G.W. Cressman, and Bert Pfleger, Barren Hill, and Nice Keely, Roxborough, Pa. 97,889.--TREATING WHISKY AND OTHER ALCOHOLIC SPIRITS.--J. C. Crossman and Obadiah Marland, Boston, Mass., assignors t themselves and A. E. Tilton, New York city. 97,890.--DISINTEGRATING MILL.--G. B. Davids (assignor to himself and Talbot Denmead), Baltimore, Md, 97,891.--MACHINE FOR COMPOSING AND DISTRIBUTING TYPE.--Isidore Delcambre, Paris, France. 97,892.--SOAP-HOLDING ATTACHMENT FOR SEWING MACHINES. Mary Dewey, New Albany, Ind. Antedated Dec. 10, 1869. 97,893.--CONCRETE FOR PAVING AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES.--J. E. Dotch, Washington, D. C. Antedated Oct. 14, 1869 97,894.--APPARATUS FOR EXTINGUISHING FIRES BY MEANS OF CHEMICAL AGENTS.--J. W. Douglas (assignor to W. Douglas and B. Douglas), Middletown, Conn. 97,895.--LOOM TEMPLE.--Warren W. Dutcher (assignor to Dutcher Temple Co.), Hopedale, Mass. 97,896.--VENTILATING HORSE COVER.--C. P. Eager (assignor to P. B. Eager), Boston, Mass. 97,897.--MANUFACTURE OF IRON AND STEEL.--Wm. Ennis, Philadelphia, Pa. 97,898.--SEEDING MACHINE.--James Finlayson, Albany, Oregon. 97,899.--CLOTHES WRINGER.--M. M. Follett, Lake City, Minn. 97,900.--BLOTTING PAD.--C. A. Gale, Demopolis, Ala. 97,901.--MANUFACTURE OF NUTS.--J. W. Gaskill and Jas. Christie, Phillipsburg, N. J. 97,902.--FIRE PLACE.--E. H. Gibbs, New York city. 97,903.--GRAIN DRILL.--Jacob F. Gibson, Chestnut Level, Pa. 97,904.--CARTRIDGE MACHINE.--Jabez H. Gill, Philadelphia, Pa. 97,905.--FIELD ROLLER.--Robert Glover, Tonawanda, N. Y. 97,905.--CORN PLANTER.--Henry Gortner, Nashport, Ohio. 97,907.--HINGE.--D. R. Gould (assignor to himself and O. H. Green), Chestertown, N. Y. 97,908.--RADIAL DRILLING MACHINE.--G. A. Gray, Jr., Cincinnati, Ohio. 97,909.--BUCKLE.--F. F. Greenwood, Horsney, England. Patented in England, Sept. 16, 1868. 97,910.--TOOL FOR CARVING WOOD.--L. L. Gunther, Chicago, Ill. 97,911.--PORTABLE DERRICK.--James R. Hammond, Sedalia, Mo. 97,912.--COAL STOVE.--B. R. Hawlev, Normal, Ill. 97,913.--GAS STOVE.--W. J. Hays, New York city. 97,914.--CONDENSING COLUMN FOR STILLS.--A. Hazzard, St. Louis, Mo. 97,915.--STOVEPIPE DRUM.--W. Hearle, Beamsville, Canada, assignor to C. L. Spencer, trustee, assignor to Wm. Hearle and A. B. Johnson. 97,916.--MEANS FOR ATTACHING MUSQUITO BARS TO WINDOW BLINDS, DOORS, ETC.--James Hebron, Buffalo, N. Y. 97,917.--WASHING MACHINE.--Edward Heim, Pittsburgh, Pa. 97,918.--RAILWAY CAR COUPLING.--Noah Hill, Leavenworth City, Kansas. 97,919.--FIFTH WHEEL FOR CARRIAGES.--Richard Hoadly, Toulon, Ill. 97,920.--FRUIT JAR.--D. I. Holcomb, Henry county, Iowa. 97,921.--CORN CULTIVATOR.--J. C. Holmes, Wyoming, Pa. 97,922.--FRUIT JAR.--Thos. Houghton and H. H. Houghton, Philadelphia, Pa. 97,923.--CONDENSER.--John Houpt, Springtown, Pa. 97,924.--PROPELLING APPARATUS.--Robert Hunter, New York city. 97,925.--HEDGE TRIMMER.--A. H. Hussey, Mount Pleasant, Ohio. 97,926.--FENCE.--Daniel Johnson, Cranberry, Ohio. 97,927.--SAW SET.--J. M. Jones, Commerce, Mo. 97,928.--RUBBER SPRING FOR USE IN SHIPS, CARS, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES.--J. A. Joyner, New York city. 97,929.--CARPET STRETCHER AND TACK HOLDER.--F. W. Judd, New Britain, assignor to himself and E. M. Judd, New Haven, Conn. Antedated Dec. 9,1889. 97,930.--PUBLIC URINAL.--William M. Kepler, Cincinnati, Ohio. 97,931.--WASHING MACHINE.--John J. Kimball, Naperville, Ill. 97,932.--GRAIN STRIPPER.--J. O. King and Hiram A. Rice, Louisiana, Mo. 97,933.--BEEHIVE.--W. T. Kirkpatrick, Tamarva, Ill. 97,934.--LATCH.--G. W. Large, Yellow Springs, Ohio. 97,935.--SEWING MACHINE.--L. W. Lathrop, Nyack, N. Y. 97,936.--MANUFACTURE OF DRY WHITE LEAD.--G. T. Lewis, Philadelphia, and E. O. Bartlett, Birmingham, Pa. 77,937.--CHURN.--F. A. Lindal, Stockton, N. Y. 97,938.--SEEDING MACHINE.--M. F. Lowth and T. J. Howe, Owatonna, Minn. 97,939.--FERTILIZER OR GUANO.--Orazio Lugo, Baltimore, Md. 97.940.--FURNACE FOR THE MANUFACTURE OF ULTRAMARINE.--H. A. Ludwig. New York city. 97,941.--MANUFACTURE OF ULTRAMARINE.--H. A. Ludwig, New York city. 97,942.--WARDROBE.--A. G. Mack (assignor to himself and George Shelton), Rochester, N. Y. 97,943.--UPRIGHT PIANO.--G. C. Manner, New York city. 97,944.--BOOT CRIMPER.--F. P. Marcy, Keokuk, Iowa. Antedated Dec. 4, 1869. 97,945.--MECHANISM FOR DRIVING COTTON GINS.--Wm. L. May, Linwood, Ala., assignor to W. J. May. 97,946.--MEAT CHOPPER.--Arthur McCarter, Salem, Ohio. 97,947.--GATE.--F. H. McGeorge, Corning, N. Y. 97,948.--CONSTRUCTION OF BUILDINGS.--Alexander McPherson, Santa Cruz, Cal. 97,949.--GALVANIC BATTERY.--J. R. McPherson, Beloit, Wis. 97,950.--GAGE FOR CIRCULAR SAW TABLE.--R. N. Meriam, Worcester, Mass. 97,951.--SEWING MACHINE FOR SEWING BOOTS AND SHOES.--Daniel Mills, New York city, assignor to Charles Goodyear, Jr., Ne Rochelle, N. Y. 97,952.--PROPELLER.--S. B. Morey, San Francisco, Cal. 97,953.--CAST-STEEL TUBE OR INGOT.--C. B. Morse, Rhinebeck, N. Y. Antedated Dec. 8,1869. 97,954.--PACKING CASE FOR OIL CANS.--J. McLeod Murphy (assignor to J. L. Graham), New York city. 97,955.--TIGHTENING AND GUIDING BELT.--C. K. Myers (assignor, for one half, to Peter Weybrich), Pekin, Ill. 97,956.--FIRE-PLACE FUEL MAGAZINE STOVE.--J. J. Myers, (assignor to B. C. Bibb), Baltimore, Md. 97,957.--CORN PLANTER.--J. B. Parker, Knob Noster, Mo. 97,958.--SAWING MACHINE.--Archibald Perry (assignor to himself and Jacob Fisher), Richland, Ind. Antedated Dec. 3,1869. 97,959.--MECHANICAL MOVEMENT.--Osgood Plummer, Worcester, Mass. 97,960.--TEACHERS' REGISTER.--W. S. Poulson and W. N. Poulson, Cadiz, Ohio. 97,961.--SIDE-SADDLE TREE.--J. H. Preston, Jefferson City, Mo. 97,962.--PROCESS OF PREPARING PLANTS TO BE USED IN CIGAKS, SNUFF, ETC.--P. V. Ramel, Paris, France. 97,963.--PIPE COUPLING.--L. W. Reed, East Cambridge, Mass. 97,964.--FRUIT JAR.--S. B. Rowley, Philadelphia, Pa. 97,965.--CLOTHES WRINGER.--E. P. Russell, Manlius, N. Y. 97,966.--COAL STOVE.--Watson Sanford, New York city. Antedated Sept. 3, 1869. 97,967.--BASE BURNING STOVE.--Watson Sanford, New York city. Antedated Sept. 15, 1869. 97,968.--JOURNAL BOX.--A. H. Sassaman, Scranton, Pa. 97,969.--HOOK AND LADDER TRUCK.--Jacob Schmidlapp, New York city. 97,970.--Suspended. 97,971.--SNOW PLOW FOR RAILWAYS.--T. L. Shaw, Omaha, Nebraska. 97,972.--COMPOSITION METAL FOR TUBING, PIPES, AND SHEETING.--W. A. Shaw (assignor to Peter Naylor), New York city. 97,973.--PRUNING SHEARS.--J. H. Shehan, Lima, Ind., assignor to himself, G. W. Edgecomb, and T. J. Bull. 97,974.--PRICE-CALCULATING DEVICE.--Albert Sinclair, West Waterville, Me. 97,975.--CONSTRUCTION OF BRIDGES.--C. S. Smith, C. H. Latrobe, and F. H. Smith, Baltimore, Md. 97,976.--CHURN.--Simon Smith, Clarksburg, N. Y. 97,977.--COTTON BALE TIES.--W. M. Smith, Augnsta, Ga. 97,978.--GRAIN MEASURING ATTACHMENT TO THRASHING MACHINES.--W. A. Workman, Fairfleld, Iowa. 97,979.--SCAFFOLD FOR GATHERING FRUIT, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES.--A. J. Wright, Cleveland, Ohio. 97,980.--REVOLVING CUPBOARD.--Wendell Wright, Bloomfield, N. J. 97,981.--BARRACK OR HOSPITAL BEDSTEAD.--Chas. S. Snead, Louisville, Ky. 97,982.--PIANO FORTE.--C. F. Th. Steinway, New York city. 97,983.--WATER-PROOFING FABRICS.--John Stenhouse, 17 Rodney street, Pentonville, London, England, assignor to Arthur Cheney and Alonzo Milliken, Boston, Mass. Patented in England, Jan. 8, 1862. 97,984.--RAILS FOR ORNAMENTAL FENCE.--Elizabeth Mary Stigale, Philadelphia, Pa. 97,985.--LATCH FOR DOUBLE DOORS.--J. W. Still, San Francisco, Cal. 97,986.--LATHE FASTENING.--J. G. Stowe, Providence, R. I. 97,987.--VINEGAR APPARATUS.--A. D. Strong, Ashtabula Ohio. 97,988.--WRENCH.--G.C.Taft, Worcester, Mass. 97,989.--BARK MILL.--William Tansley, Salisbury Centre, assignor to "Starbuck Brothers," Troy, N.Y. 97,990.--CLEVIS FOR PLOWS.--J.H. Tarpley, Greensborough, N.C. 97,991.--HANDLE FOR KNIVES.--A.L. Taylor, Springfield, Vt. 97,992.--MAKING BRICKS, TILES, ETC.--Daniel Thackara, Woodbury, N.J. 97,993.--FOOT AND KNEELING STOOL FOR CHURCHES.--J.P. Tibbits, New York city. 97,994.--RAILWAY CARRIAGE WHEEL AND AXLE.--C.D. Tisdale (assignor to himself and J.H. Clapp), Boston, Mass. 97,995.--SUSPENDERS.--C. Van Hoesen, Catskill, assignor to himself, J.H. Burtis, Brooklyn, and M.W. Staples, Catskill, N.Y. 97,996--BUTTONHOLE CUTTER.--F.H. Walker, Boston, Mass. 97,997.--BED BOTTOM.--C.E. Walkes, Elyria, Ohio. 97,998.--STILL FOR OIL, ETC.--John Warner, Flushing, N.Y. 97,999.--PAPER FILE.--C.W. West, Shiloh, assignor to himself and O.A. Douglas, Bridgeton, N.J. 98,000.--HOISTING APPARATUS.--T.A. Weston, Ridgewood, N.J., assignor to William Sellers and John Sellers, Jr., Philadelphia, Pa. Patented in England, Aug. 28, 1868. 98,001.--COKE WAGON.--Corydon Wheat and Alfred Catchpole, Geneva, N.Y. 98,002.--MACHINE FOR MAKING CARRIAGE CLIPS.--Darius Wilcox and R. McChesney (assignors to D.M. Basset and Darius Wilcox), Derby, Conn. 98,003.--DOOR FOR FIRE-PLACE STOVE.--W.E. Wood, Baltimore, Md. 98,004.--INTERCHANGEABLE BOOT AND SHOE HEEL.--J.C. Woodhead, Pittsburgh, Pa. 98,005.--CAMEL FOR RAISING VESSELS.--Samuel Woolston, Vincentown, N.J. * * * * * REISSUES. 60,192.--STEAM ENGINE GOVERNOR.--Dated Dec. 4,1866; reissue 3,759.--R.K. Huntoon,for himself and J.A. Lynch, assignee, by mesne assignments, of R.K. Huntoon. Boston, Mass. 72,114.--VARIABLE CRANK FOR BORING MACHINES.--Dated Dec. 10,1867; reissue 3,760.--Theodore Mace, New York city, assignee of G.C. Taft. 68,782.--SLIDE FOR EXTENSION TABLE.--Dated Sept. 10,1867; reissue 3,761.--H. Olds, Syracuse, N.Y. 89,167.--NOZZLE FOR CANS.--Dated April 20,1869; reissue 3,762.--Charles Pratt, New York city. 84,766.--HORSE POWER.--Dated Dec. 8, 1868; reissue 3,763.--Cyrus Roberts and J.A. Throp, Three Rivers, Mich. 44,117.--COMPOSITION FOR CONCRETE PAVEMENTS.--Dated Sept. 6,1864; reissue 3,764.--Edward Seeley, Scranton, Pa. 49,207.--CARPET BAG LOCK.--Dated Aug. 1, 1865; reissue 3,765.--Bernard Steinmetz, Paris, France. 91,800.--STEAM GENERATOR FURNACES.--Dated June 22, 1866; reissue 3,766.--A.J. Warren and D.W. Wilson, assignors to themselves and Noah Shaw, West Eau Claire, Wis., and U.M. Stone, Augusta, Wis. * * * * * DESIGNS. 3,784.--STOVE.--D.P. Beckwith, Dowagiac, Mich. 3,785.--PLOW CLEVIS.--Geo. Johnson, administrator of the estate of G.P. Darrow, deceased, (assignor to J.L. Haven & Co.), Cincinnati, Ohio. 3,786.--STOVE.--S.S. Jewett and F.H. Root, Buffalo, N.Y. 3,787.--MASONIC ORNAMENT.--Daniel Keefer, Attica, Ind. 3,788.--PAPER COLLAR.--W.F. Mosely, Brooklyn, N.Y. 3,789.--FLOWER STAND.--C.H. Waters, Groton, Mass. * * * * * EXTENSIONS. CLOTH-STRETCHING ROLLERS.--Seth Simmons, of Providence, R.I., administrator of Nathan Simmons, deceased.--Letters Patent No. 13,888; dated Dec. 4, 1855. BUCKLE.--S.E. Booth, of Orange, Conn., administrator of S.S. Hartshorn, deceased.--Letters Patent No. 13,907; dated Dec. 11, 1855 * * * * * PATENTS ISSUED FOR THE WEEK ENDING DEC. 21, 1869. 98,006.--MANUFACTURE OF THE METALLIC PARTS OF FIRE ARMS.--Isaac Adams, Jr.. Boston, Mass, assignor to United Nicke Company. 98,007.--TOY VELOCIPEDE.--H.C. Alexander, New York city. 98,008.--MACHINE FOR MAKING WROUGHT NAILS.--Daniel Armstrong, Chicago, Ill. 98,009.--WASH BOILER.--James Armstrong, Bucyrus, Ohio. 98,010.--REFRIGERATOR.--Samuel Ayers, Danville, Ky. 98,011.--HYDRANT.--G.C. Bailey, Pittsburgh, Pa. 98,012.--WASHING MACHINE.--Joseph Balsley, Bedford, Ind. 98,013.--SAW MILL.--A.P. Barlow, Kalamazoo, Mich. 98,014.--BORING MACHINE.--E.C. Barton, Bloomsburg, Pa. 98,015.--PADLOCK.--Thomas Bernhard, Hartford, Conn. 98,016.--FENCE.--Inmon Blackaby, Civer, Ill. 98,017.--PLOWING MACHINE.--Albert Bondeli, Philadelphia, Mo. 98,018.--CARRIAGE BRAKE.--A.S. Boyer, Bernville, Pa. 98,019.--LOW-WATER INDICATOR.--William A. Bradford, Cincinnati, Ohio, assignor to C.G. Pease, trustee for Malone Safety-Valve Company. 98,020.--MACHINE FOR MAKING FERRULES.--Robert Briggs, Philadelphia, Pa. 98,021.--STEAM GENERATOR.--M.S. Bringier, Ascension parish, La. 98,022.--FIRE AND WATER-PROOF PAINT.--Theodor Brinkmann, Greeneville, Tenn. 98,023.--ANIMAL TRAP.--Adam Brown, Bridgeport, Oregon. 98,024.--HAIR-SPRING ADJUSTMENT FOR WATCHES.--Augustus Brown, Dryden, N.Y. 98,025.--EXPANDING MUFF BLOCK.--C.F. Butterworth, Troy, N.Y. 98,026.--SAP SPOUT.--G.L. Cady, Lowell, Mass. 98,027.--HAY LOADER.--James Capen, Charlton, Mass. 98,028.--GRINDING MACHINE.--George T. Chattaway, Brooklyn, E.D., and John Dickinson, New York city, assignors to G.S. Chattaway. 98,029.--COOPERS' TOOL.--John Christy, Clyde, Ohio. 98,030.--NAIL AND PEG DRIVER.--F.0. Claflin, New York city. Antedated Dec. 18,1869. 98,031.--SELF-CANCELING POSTAL AND REVENUE STAMP.--S.M. Clark, Washington, D.C. 98,032.--CAPSTAN WINDLASS.--D.N.B. Coffin, Jr., Newton, assignor to himself and I.D. Spaulding:, Boston, Mass. 98,033.--METAL-CLAD ARTIFICIAL STONE.--François Coignet, Paris, France. 98,034.--MAKING ARTIFICIAL STONE AND CONCRETE.--François Coignet, Paris, France. 98,035.--MALAXATOR FOR THE PREPARATION OF PLASTIC MATERIALS FOR ARTIFICIAL STONE, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES.--François Coignet, Paris, France. 93,036.--HASP LOCK.--E.R. Colver, New London, Conn. 98,037.--DEVICE FOR CONVEYING SAWDUST FROM SAWS.--W.S. Colwell, Pittsburg, Pa. 98,038.--COMBINATION OF PIANOFORTE AND CABINET.--Edward Cotter, Boston, Mass. 98,039.--CURTAIN FIXTURE.--J.P. Crawford, Carmichaels, Pa. 98,040.--VISE.--Edwin Crawley and T.L. Baylies, Richmond, Ind. 98,041.--CLOD FENDER.--W.L. Dearth and G.P. Rondebush, Jefferson, Ind. 98,042.--HAY AND GRAIN ELEVATOR.--John Dennis. Oswego, N.Y. 98,043.--DYNAMOMETER.--J. Emerson, Lowell, Mass. 98,044.--DUMPING WAGON.--John Esch, Milwaukee, Wis. 98,045.--FIREPLACE GRATE.--George W. Everhart, Louisville, Ky. 98,046.--VAPORIZING PETROLEUM, ETC.--H.R. Foote, Boston, Mass. 98,047.--TOY GUN.--C.T. Ford and E. Trask, Salem, Mass. Antedated Dec. 7, 1869. 98,048.--SHIFTING RAIL FOR BUGGY.--Harlow French and Robert Meyer, Buffalo, N.Y. 98,049.--RAILWAY-CAR TRUCK.--Perry G. Gardiner, New York city. 98,050.--CAR SPRING.--P.G. Gardiner, New York city. 98,051.--RAILWAY SWITCH.--M. J. Gaskill, Wm. Yost, and John Ferris, Pleasant Plain, Ohio. 98,052.--MILLER TRAP FOR BEEHIVES.--T. L. Gray, Thomasville, Tenn. 98,053.--STUFFING Box.--Chas. Green, Philadelphia, Pa. 98,054.--SUSPENSION CLIP.--H. S. Griffiths and J. C. Gary, New York city. 98,055.--TOY SAFE OR BANK.--John Hall, Watertown, Mass. Antedated Dec. 7,1869. 98,056.--LOUNGE AND BEDSTEAD.--A. R. Harper and C. B. Dake, Hobart, Ind. 98,057.--MACHINE FOR UPSETTING TIRE.--A. S. Hart, San Francisco, Cal. 98,058.--RAILWAY CAR COUPLING.--A. S. Hart, San Francisco, Cal. 98,059.--STOVE GRATE.--David Hathaway, Troy, N. Y. 98,060.--HOLDING DEVICE FOR LAMP CHIMNEYS.--John F Hechtle, Waterbury, Conn. 98,061.--STEAM AND CALORIC ENGINE.--Alexander Hendry, Victoria, British Columbia. 98,062.--REIN HOLDER.--Davis Kurd, Lockport, N. Y. 98,063.--SPRING SEAT FOR WAGONS.--A. L. Hurtt, Monticello, Ind. 98,063.--SEWING MACHINE.--A. J. Hurtu and V. J. Hautin, Paris, France. 98,065.--ROOFING COMPOUND.--C. B. Hutchins, Ann Arbor, Mich. 98,066.--DENTAL IMPRESSION CUP.--R. V. Jenks, Paterson. N. J. 98,067.--PUMP.--A. C. Judson (assignor to himself and E. O. Judson), Grand Rapids, Mich. 98,068.--LEATHER-SPLITTING MACHINE.--Charles Keniston, Somerville, Mass. 98,069.--SPRING BED BOTTOM.--E. S. Kimball, Springfield, Mass. 98,070.--WHIP SOCKET.--C. P. Kimball, Portland, Me. 98,071.--FLOOD GATE.--A. L. King, Farmersville, Ohio. 98,072.--MANUFACTURE OF SCOOPS.--J. Geo. Knapp, Woodhaven, N.Y., assignor to the Lalance & Grosjean Manufacturing Co., New York city. 98,073.--DRIVE WELL TUBES.--D. R. Knight, Akron, Ohio. 98,074.--DEVICE FOR PREVENTING LEAKAGE ABOUT CHIMNEYS.--Abraham Lang, Buffalo, N. Y. 98,075.--HARVESTER DROPPER.--T. F. Lippencott, Conemaugh, Pa. 98,076.--CAR COUPLING.--Joseph Long, Mechanicsburg, Pa. 98,077.--HEAD REST.--C. B. Loveless, Syracuse, N. Y. 98,078.--BURGLAR ALARM.--Moses Lunt, Cambridgeport, Mass. 98,079.--FOLDING AND EXTENSION TABLE.--G. Mayer, Sullivan, Ill. 98,080.--LANTERN.--I. C. Mayo, Gloucester, Mass. 98,081.--WATER WHEEL.--H. W. McAuley, De Soto, Wis. 98,082.--LET-OFF MECHANISM FOR LOOMS.--Ephriam McDaniel, Lowell, Mass. 98,083.--LAMP.--J. K. Mentzer, New Holland, Pa. 98,084.--SURVEYOR'S MARK.--C. C. P. Meyer, Yankton, Dakota Territory. 98,085.--TAILOR'S CRAYON SHARPENER--R. R. Miles, Wabash, Ind. 98,086.--COOKING STOVE.--J. H. Mitchell and T. S. Mitchell, Pittsburgh, Pa. 98,087.--PRINTING PRESS.--Charles Montague (assignor to C. C. Child), Boston, Mass. 98,088.--PRINTING PRESS.--Chas. Montague (assignor to C. C. Child), Boston, Mass. 98,089.--STEAM GENERATOR.--Jas. Montgomery, Sing Sing, N. Y. Antedated Dec. 17,1869. 98,090.--HARVESTER DROPPER.--Ephraim Myers, Creagerstown, Md. Antedated Dec. 4,1869. 98,091.--COTTON BASKET.--R. L. Myers, Washington, N.C. 98,092.--VELOCIPEDE.--Robert Neale, Brooklyn, N. Y. Antedated Dec. 4,1869. 98,093.--STOVEPIPE THIMBLE.--Thomas Newell, Oskaloosa, Iowa. 98,094.--CURTAIN AND SHAWL STRETCHER.--James Nicklin, Cleveland, Ohio. 98,095.--RAILROAD CAR VENTILATOR.--E. Norton, Brooklyn, N. Y. 98,096.--ILLUMINATING STOVE.--Benjamin Nott. Albany, N. Y. 98,097.--HAY ELEVATOR,--J. W. Odaniel, Cloverdale, Ind. 98,098.--PASSENGER REGISTER FOR VEHICLES.--Thos. Ollis, Netherfleld Road South, Liverpool, England. Patented in England, March 31,1868. 98,099.--RAILWAY CAR WHEEL.--J. T. Owen, Philadelphia, Pa. 98,100.--HARROW.--George Paddington, Springville, Iowa. 98,101.--PACKING AND ATOMIZING CAN FOR INSECT POWDER.--F.L. Palmer, Sr., New York city. 98,102.--COMBINED OYSTER KNIFE AND ICE PICK.--Wm. Pattberger, Philadelphia, Pa. 98,103.--Suspended. 98,104.--TRUNK.--T. B. Peddie, Newark, N. J. 98,105.--BOLT CLAMP.--Charles E. Phillips, South Deerfield, Mass. 98,106.--COMBINED SQUARE AND CALIPER.--Josiah Potts, Milwaukee, Wis. 98,107.--METAL ALLOY FOR HARNESS TRIMMINGS, ETC.--A.A. Randall, South Braintree, assignor to himself and C. F. Whitcomb, Boston, Mass. 98,108.--CARPENTER'S PLOW.--Royal B. Rice, Williamsburgh, Mass. 98,109.--CUT-NAIL MACHINE.--Levi Richards (assignor, by mesne assignments, to himself, O. A. Washburn, G. S. Perkins, and F. S Roscoe), Providence, R. I. 98,110.--ELECTRO-PLATING WITH BRASS AND OTHER ALLOYS.--Samuel Rust, Jr., Cincinnati, Ohio. 98,111.--INDICATOR FOR SAW MILL HEAD BLOCKS.--George Selden, Erie, Pa. 98,112.--CULTIVATOR.--J. B. Skinner, Rockford, Ill. 98,113.--HARVESTER.--A. L. Smith, Bristol Centre, N. Y. 98,114.--ELECTRO-MAGNETIC LOCK.--J. C. Smith, Brooklyn, N. Y. 98,115.--BRICK MACHINE.--Thomas Smurfit, Davisville, Mich. 98,116.--FLOOR CLAMP.--Joseph B. Spencer, Norwich, Conn. Antedated Dec. 17,1869. 98,117.--CHURN DASHER.--Aurelius Sperry, Tremont, Ill. 98,118.--GAS GENERATOR AND CARBURETER.--Amos Stevens (assignor to E. A. Whitney), Fitchburg, Mass. 98,119.--ROCKING AND EASY CHAIR.--A. W. Stewart, Boston, Mass. 98,120.--PLOW.--R. E. Strait, Galesburg, Mich. 98,121.--MACHINE FOR SCOURING, SETTING-CUT, AND FINISHING HIDES OK SKINS.--John Taggart, Melrose, assignor to himself and W. N. Brink, Boston, Mass. 98,122.--VARIABLE CUT-OFF FOR STEAM ENGINES.--M. C Taylor, Grass Valley, Cal. Antedated Dec. 17,1869. 98,123.--SHINGLE PACKER.--R. B. Taylor, Pensaukie, Wis. 98,124.--CUTTER-HEAD.--Hiram Thompson (assignor to R. Ball & Co.), Worcester, Mass. 98,125.--WATER-WHEEL.--W. J. Thompson, Springfield, Mo. 98,126.--WHEEL FOR STEAM CARRIAGE--R. W. Thomson, Edinburgh, Great Britain. Patented in England, April 21, 1868. 98,127.--CIRCULAR SAW MILL.--John Trunick, Muscatine, Iowa 98,128.--CLOD FENDER.--J. W. Tull, Zionsville, Ind. 98,129.--NECKTIE AND COLLAR COMBINED.--James Varley, Hudson, assignor to himself and D. M. Smyth, Orange, N. J. 98,130.--EYE FOR RAILWAY CAR BELL-ROPE.--W. M. Walton (assignor to J. J. Walton), Newark, N. J. 98,131.--PIPE COUPLING.--J. D. Ware, Savannah, Ga. 98,132.--GAGE COCKS.--G. L. Watson, Nesquehoning, Pa. 98,133.--LUBRICATOR FOR THE BOLSTERS OF VERTICAL SHAFTS.--J.W.Watties, Canton, Mass. 98,134.--BRICK KILN, ETC.--E.V. Wingard, Williamsport, Pa. 98,135.--MACHINE FOR SPINNING AND CURLING HAIR.--Philip Wisdom, Brooklyn, N. Y., assignor to John Sickles, trustee, and John Sickles, trustee, assignor to John Wisdom and J. H. Wilcox, New York city. 98,136.--SEED PLANTER.--D.C. Woods, Waxahatchie, Texas 98,137.--HARROW.--George Workman, Rochester, N. Y. 98,138.--RAILROAD SWITCH.--Edmund Yardley, Pittsburgh, Pa. 98,139.--APPARATUS FOR THE MANUFACTURE OF IRON AND STEEL.--Charles Adams (assignor to himself and Charles Sharpe), Philadelphia, Pa. 98,140.--RAILWAY CAR SPRING.--William Barry and George Franklin, Philadelphia, Pa. 98,141.--FOLDING CHAIR.--Burroughs Beach, Meriden, assignor to himself and E.I. Pyle, Bridgeport, Conn. 98,142.--HAIR RESTORATIVE.--Ann K. Benson, Allegheny City, Pa. 98,143.--MACHINE FOR LAYING OUT SASH.--Alpheus Bigony, Winchester, Ohio. 98,144.--DEVICE FOR SECURING PULLEYS TO SHAFTS.--J. H. Buckman (assignor to himself and P. W. Reinshagen), Cincinnati, Ohio. 98,145.--POCKET BOOK.--Alphonzo Button, Dunkirk, N. Y., assignor to M. O. Wilber for one half of said patent. 98,146.--SPRING BED BOTTOM.--J. P. Chamberlin, Abington, Mass. 98,147.--SAFETY HARNESS BUCKLE.--John Chestnut, Jr., Hustontown, Pa. 98,148.--WASHING MACHINE.--A. P. Cindel and Martin Vogel, Jacksonville, Ill. 98,149.--OPERATING DEVICE FOR WATER CLOSETS.--B. R. Cole, Buffalo, N. Y. 98,150.--TURBINE WATER-WHEEL.--E. F. Cooper, Mount Gilead, Ohio. 98,151.--SEWING MACHINE FOR SEWING BOOTS AND SHOES.--C. O. Crosby. New Haven, Conn. 98,152.--CHURN DASHER.--Theophilus Crutcher, Edgefield, Tenn. 98,153.--WATER CLOSET VALVE.--J. N. Deck (assignor to himself, B. R. Cole, and G. F. Deck), Buffalo, N. Y. 98,154.--CARD HOLDER.--C. R. Doane, Brooklyn, E. D., N. Y. 98,155.--PROCESS OF TREATING WINES, BEER, AND LIQUORS.--J. O. Donner, Jersey City, N. J. 98,156.--VALVE GEAR.--T. E. Evans, W. R. Thomas, and Joshua Hunt, Catasauqua, Pa. 98,157.--CORN PLANTER.--D. Fitzpatrick and John Knull, St. Paris, Ohio. 98,158.--PAINT BRUSH.--F. P. Furnald, Jr., R. W. Champion, and I. N. Davies, New York city. 98,159.--GRUB HOOK.--J. W. Goodall, Eldred, Pa. 98,160.--WASH BOARD.--B. F. Gott, Brooklyn, E. D., N. Y. 98,161.--CHURN.--G. H. Gregory, North Wilton, Conn. 98,162.--HYDRO-PNEUMATIC GOVERNOR.--Andrew Harris, Philadelphia, Pa. 98,163--MUSICAL INSTRUMENT.--C. F. Hill, New York city. 98,164.--SECURING THE LASH IN FLY-NETS.--J. S. Huston, Mechanicsburg, Pa. 98,165.--PROCESS OF PURIFYING AND DECOLORING ALBUMEN FROM BLOOD.--Pierre Jacques, Paris, France. 98,166.--WIRE HANDLE FORMER.--W. C. Jones, Quincy, Ill. 98,167.--MECHANISM FOR RAISING AND LOWERING BOARDS.--Cheney Kilburn and Artemas Kilburn (assignors to Hale, Goodman, & Co.), Philadelphia, Pa. 98,168.--EGG BEATER.--Linn Laurie, Washington, D. C. 98,169.--WIRE BALE FASTENING.--E. S. Lennox, New Brighton, N. Y. 98,170.--INSOLE FOR BOOTS AND SHOES.--Calvin A. Leonard, Rochester, N. Y. 98,171.--GLOBE VALVE.--Hippolite Levasseur, Brooklyn, N. Y. 98,172.--LUBRICATING SLEEVE.--G.A. Lloyd, San Francisco, Cal., assignor to himself and Anthony Rosenfield. 98,173.--COMPOSITION FOR PREVENTING INCRUSTATION IN STEAM BOILERS.--G.W. Lord, Philadelphia, Pa. 98,174.--GAS GENERATOR AND BURNER.--C.B. Loveless, Syracuse, N.Y. 98,175.--EXTINGUISHING FIRE IN BUILDINGS.--Orozi Lugo, Baltimore, Md. 98,176.--APPARATUS FOR DISPENSING SODA-WATER SIRUPS.--John Matthews, Jr., New York city. 98,177.--SIRUP-DISPENSING APPARATUS.--John Matthews, Jr., New York city. 98,178.--SIRUP RESERVOIR FOR SODA-FOUNTAINS.--John Matthews, Jr., New York city. 98,179.--SOAP.--C.P. McGimsey, Memphis, Tenn. 98,180.--METHOD OF HEADING SCREWS.--Daniel T. Munger (assignor to himself and Rufus E. Hitchcock), Waterbury, Conn. 98,181.--BRICK MOLD.--Matthew Newlove (assignor to himself and Samuel Gilbert) Burlington, Iowa. 98,182.--HARVESTER CUTTER.--Theodore Neys, Menomonee, Wis., assignor to himself and Alexis I. Brunell. 98,183.--COTTON SEED PLANTER.--A. E. Nixon, Memphis, Tenn. 98,184.--HOSE COUPLING.--William J. Osbourne (assignor to himself, Gideon B. Massey, and William F. Shaffer), New York city. 98,185.--FARM GATE.--Christopher Ostrander, Lodi, Wis. 98,186.--RAILWAY RAIL CHAIR.--S.N. Park, Bloomsbury, N.J. 98,187.--NUT LOCK.--Morgan Payne, Cardington, Ohio. 98,188.--SHUTTLE-CHECK FOR LOOMS.--David Pickman (assignor to himself and Stuart Bishop), Lowell, Mass. 98,189.--SAW GUIDE.--C. Purdy, Bedford, Ohio. 98,190.--GRAIN BIN.--Fitch Raymond and August Miller, Cleveland, Ohio. 98,191.--BOOKBINDING.--Ira Reynolds (assignor to "Reynolds & Reynolds"), Dayton, Ohio. 98,192.--VAPOR BURNER.--Wm.H. Rudolph, St. Louis, Mo. 98,193.--CORN PLANTER.--C.B. Ruth, Doylestown, Pa. Antedated December 11, 1869. 98,194.--GATE.--Charles Saxton, Fredonia, Ohio. 98,195.--FARM GATE.--Samuel Scott, Yane, Ohio. 98,196.--POST AUGER.--George Seeger and Charles H. Shaffer, Clark's Hill, Ind. Antedated December 11,1869. 98,197.--PAYING BLOCK.--Reuben Shaler, Madison, Conn. 98,198.--CARTRIDGE FEEDER FOR GUN HAMMER.--Thomas Shaw, Philadelphia, Pa. 98,199.--WASH BOILER.--John P. Sherwood (assignor to himself and Benjamin S. Burnham), Fort Edward, N. Y. 98,200.--BOOKBINDING.--David Shive, Philadelphia, Pa. 98,201.--RAILROAD CAR VENTILATOR.--Oliver Slagle, London, assignor to himself and Thomas H. Foulds, Cincinnati, Ohio. 98,202.--CULTIVATOR.--S.T. Spaulding, North Cohocton, N.Y. 98,203.--ELEVATOR.--Francis Stein and Henry Haering--New York city. 98,204.--TIRE COOLER.--Edward Stodtmeister, Cape Girardeau, Mo. 98,205.--DYNAMOMETERS.--John W. Sutton, Portland, Oregon. 98,206.--MACHINE FOR SAWING AND SPLITTING WOOD--John A. Taplin, Carthage Landing, Fishkill, N.Y. 98,207.--CARRIAGE SPRING.--George W. Tew, Kansas City, Mo. 98,208.--SELF--VENTILATING SAFETY CANS FOR FILLING AND DISCHARGING HYDROCARBON APPARATUS.--Lovias D. Towsley Newark, N. J. 98,209.--CORD-TIGHTENER FOR CURTAIN FIXTURES.--Elisha Turner, Wolcottville, Conn. 98,210.--MANUFACTURE OF PAPER PULP FROM WOOD.--George Vining, Pittsfield, Mass. 98,211.--COMPOUND FOR MIXING PAINT.--Peter M. Wallower, Smith's Ferry, Pa. 98,212.--HASP LOCK.--Cornelius Walsh, James F. Connelly, and Alfred Bratt, Newark, N. J., assignors to Cornelius Walsh. 98,213.--SEED DRILL.--Orrin A. Wheeler, Doniphan, Kansas. 98,214.--EXPANDING TRIPLE SHOVEL PLOW.--Edward Wiard (assignor to B. F. Avery), Louisville, Ky. 98,215.--HEAD-BLOCK OF SAW MILLS.--Franklin J. Staley (assignor to himself, George W. Joseph, Isaac S. Long, and George H. Carter), Indianapolis, Ind. * * * * * REISSUES. 97,293.--MACHINE FOR CLIPPING HORSES' HAIR.--Dated June 30, 1868; patented in England, April 24, 1867; reissue 3,767.--Patrick Adie, of the Stand, London, England. 23,033.--HOSE COUPLING.--Dated February 22,1859; reissue 3,768.--William H. Bliss, Newport, R. I., assignee of himself and Robert B. Lawton. 52,135.--SEEDING MACHINE.--Dated January 23, 1866; reissue 3,769.--Henry Bundel, Dayton, Ohio. 26,475.--BREECH-LOADING FIREARM.--Dated December 20, 1859; reissue 3,770.--Bethel Burton, Brooklyn, N. Y., and Wm. C. Ward, New York city, assignees of Bethel Burton. 94,486.--EXTENSION SLIDE FOR TABLES.--Dated September 7, 1869; reissue 3,771.--S. J. Genung. Waterloo, N. Y. 71,624.--ELECTRIC CLOCK.--Dated December 3, 1867; reissue 3,772.--The Kennedy Electric Clock Company, New York city, assignees of Samuel A. Kennedy, S. W. Holt, and Joseph Gerlach. 82,705.--SCRUBBING BRUSH.--Dated October 6, 1868; reissue 3,773.--B.F. Koller, Shrewsbury, Pa., assignee of Samuel Gibson. 42,617.--PUMP.--Dated May 3, 1864; reissue 3,774.--Henry R. Sensenig and Moses W. Martin. Earl township, Pa., assignees, by mesne assignments, of Martin W. Zimmerman and John Zimmerman. 88,208.--MANUFACTURE OF IRON AND STEEL.--Dated March 23, 1869; reissue 3,775.--John Ralston, Abraham L. Thomas, and William Parkinson, for themselves, and William A. Shoemaker, Schuylkill county, and George E. Buckley, Philadelphia, Pa., assignees of said Ralston, Thomas, and Parkinson. * * * * * DESIGNS. 3,790 and 3,791.--TACK HEAD.--Orrin L. Bassett (assignor to the Taunton Tack Company), Taunton, Mass. Two patents. 3,792.--COFFEE OR TEA FILTER.--George M. Bull, New Baltimore, N.Y. 3,793.--CARPET PATTERN.--Robert R. Campbell (assignor to Lowell Manufacturing Company), Lowell, Mass. 3,794.--CAR VENTILATOR.--Robert Hitchcock, Springfield, Mass. 3,795 to 3,797.--WARDROBE HOOK.--Morton Judd, New Haven, Conn. Three patents. 3,798 to 3,802.--CARPET PATTERN.--Elemir J. Ney, Dracut, assignors to Lowell Manufacturing Company, Lowell, Mass. Five patents. 3,803.--TRADE MARK.--Charles Perkes, Philadelphia, Pa. 3,804 and 3,805.--WATCH PLATE.--George P. Reed, Boston, Mass. Two patents. 3,806.--FRUIT JAR COYER.--Henry E. Shaffer, Rochester, N.Y. * * * * * SUBSCRIBERS--who wish to have their volumes bound, can send them to this office. The charge for binding is $1.50 per volume. The amount should be remitted in advance, and the volumes will be sent as soon as they are bound. * * * * * ADVERTISEMENTS _The value of the_ SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN _as an advertising medium cannot be over-estimated. Its circulation is ten times greater than that of any similar journal now published. It goes into all the States and Territories, and is read in all the principal libraries and reading-rooms of the world. We invite the attention of those who wish to make their business known to the annexed rates. A business man wants something more than to see his advertisement in a printed newspaper. He wants circulation. If it is worth 25 cents per line to advertise in a paper of three thousand circulation, it is worth $2.50 per line to advertise in one of thirty thousand._ RATES OF ADVERTISING. Back Page $1.00 a line. Inside Page 75 cents a line. _Engravings may head advertisements at the same rate per line, by measurement, as the letter-press_. * * * * * FOR SALE--A 9-ft. Planer, 4 Lathes, 2 Shapers, Gear Cutter, Drill Press, Fanblower, Anvils, Vises, etc., at L. DUVINAGE'S, 209 Center st., New York. * * * * * TOSELLI'S Ice Machines, Simple in operation, makking transparent ice without steam power. Address G. B. NEWMAN,33 Maiden Lane, New York. * * * * * GALVANO PLASTIC IRON--For Bank Note Printing, Books, Engravings, etc. Patent Rights for sale by C. M. CLAY & CO., No. 45 Liberty st. Box 4950. * * * * * CANCERS, SCROFULA, and all CUTANEOUS DISEASES cured by using the SHELDON SPRING WATER. Book of thirty pages, with certificates, sent free. Addres J. W. BEALS, Treasurer, Boston, Mass. * * * * * AGENTS WANTED IN EVERY COUNTY of the four following States:--Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Wisconsin, to sell B. F. Alexander's Patent Horse Hay Fork. For particulars address HOMER DUBREE, Glen Hope, Clearfleld Co., Pa. * * * * * _IRON & WOODWORKING_ Machinery Depot. New and Second-hand. GEORGE L. CUMMTNGS, 140 Center st., New York. * * * * * FOR SALE _AT A BARGAIN_, A BABCOCK & WILCOX ENGINE, 16-in. cylinder, 42 in. stroke, NEARLY NEW. This Engine is to be taken out by Wm. A. Harris, and replaced by a Corliss Engine, built by him. Address WILLIAM A. HARRIS, Providence, R.I., or 49 Murray st., New York. * * * * * HUNTER'S GUIDE--Revised, Enlarged, New Secrets Added. 24,000 already sold. Twenty-seventh edition of 5,000 copies Now Ready, enlarged, twenty new tanning secrets added (three cost $5 each). THE HUNTER'S GUIDE AND TRAPPER'S COMPANION tells how to hunt and trap all animals, from mink to bear, to make traps, boats, etc. How to tan and dress all hides, etc., etc., to color furs and skins. New secrets just added. The secret recipes in this book would cost $30 anywhere else. Tells how to hunt, fish, has hunting narratives, etc., etc. A New Book, well printed and bound, 64 pp. Price (not $1) but 25c.; six for $1; mailed free. Beware of "Recipes," "10-cent papers," and swindlers. Sold by all dealers. All wholesale news dealers sell it. Send for one. Worth $10 to any farmer, hunter, or boy. Only a "QUARTER." Address HUNTER & CO., Publishers, Hinsdale, N.H. * * * * * COLLEGIATE & Commercial Institute (Gen. Russell's School), New Haven, Conn. Winter term begins Jan.11 * * * * * FOR SALE--A splendid set of Sub-marine Diving Apparatus, but little used, cheap. Address Box 1582, Norwich, Conn. * * * * * We rarely open a more readable magazine than "The Galaxy." There is not a dull page between its covers.--_N.Y. Times_. Well sustains its reputation for vigorous and racy writing.--_N. Y. Tribune_. A model periodical; a credit to American periodical literature.--_Press, Philadelphia_. THE GALAXY FOR 1870. GREAT ATTRACTIONS. ARTICLES SECURED FROM CHARLES READE, MRS. EDWARDS, RICHARD GRANT WHITE, ANTHONY TROLLOPE, JUSTIN McCARTHY, PARK GODWIN, DR. J. C. DALTON, DR. DRAPER. AND ALL THE LEADING WRITERS OF THE DAY. FIRST. PUT YOURSELF IN HIS PLACE.--Charles Reade's Great Story will continue to delight the readers of the Galaxy the greater part of the year 1870. Part First is is now ready in book form, and will be sent free with the Galaxy for 1870 on receipt of $4, the regular subscription price. SECOND. A NEW STORY BY MRS. EDWARDS, author of "Susan Fielding," "Steven Lawrence, Yeoman," etc. Mrs. Edwards is one of the very best female novelists now writing in the English language. THIRD. ANTHONY TROLLOPE will furnish a series of "Editors' Tales," in which he will work an entirely new vein. FOURTH. PARK GODWIN, one of the ablest American writers, will furnish a series of noteworthy articles on Historical subjects. FIFTH. RICHARD GRANT WHITE will continue his critical and social essays. SIXTH. JUSTIN MCCARTHY, whose skill as an efficient magazine writer is almost unequaled, has been engaged on the Editorial Staff, and will contribute regularly to the Galaxy. SEVENTH. TEN YEARS IN ROME, giving an inside view of the Roman Catholic Church, by a late Ecclesiastic, will be a noteworthy series of articles. EIGHTH. THE SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES will be prepared by Drs. Dalton and Draper, both eminent Physiologists. NINTH. THE EDITORIAL STAFF of the Galaxy is now very large, and has on it the best talent engaged on American periodical literature. We have arranged for very liberal clubbing terms with the other leading periodicals. A sample copy will be sent on receipt of 25 cents. Price, 35 cents per number; $4 per year. NOW IS THE TIME TO SUBSCRIBE. THE GALAXY IS THE BEST OF AMERICAN MAGAZINES. SHELDON & COMPANY, 498 & 500 Broadway, New York. * * * * * FOUND AT LAST.--Watches Superseded. The Dollar Time Keeper.--A Perfect Gem.--Elegantly cased in Oriode of Gold, Superior Compass attachment, Enameled Dial, Silver and Brass Works, glass crystal, size of Ladies' Watch. Will denote correct time, warranted five years, superb and showy case, entirely of metal. This is no wood Compass. Is entirely new, patented. 6500 sold in three weeks. Only $1 each, three for $2, in neat case, mailed free. Trade supplied. Address the sole manufacturers, MAGNETIC WATCH CO>, Hinsdale, N. H. * * * * * STOCKS, DIES, AND SCREW PLATES Horton's and other Chucks. JOHN ASHCKOFT, 50 John st., New York. 16 tf * * * * * THE NOVELTY IRON WORKS--Foot E. 12th st., and 77 and 83 Liberty st., New York Manufacture the most approved Stationary Steam Engine, with Variable Cut-off, now in use. * * * * * ROBERT McCALVEY, Manufacturer of HOISTING MACHINES AND DUMB WAITERS. 602 Cherry st., Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * STATEMENT. ORDINARY FURNACE, from 15th to 20th April, produced 23,195 lbs. of Muck Bar, and 295 lbs. Scrap Bar, worked double turn. Day turn started at 3 A.M., and was done by 1 P.M. Night turn went on at 2 P.M., and was done by 11 P.M., worked 5 heats to each turn. Consumed 350 bushels of coal. Furnace was lighted on Sunday out of coal. The Stevenson Furnace, from 15th to 20th April, produced 29,160 lbs. of Muck Bar, and 515 lbs. of Scrap Bar, worked double turn. Day turn started at 3 A.M., and was done by 10 A.M. Night turn started at 11 A.M., and was done by 6 P.M., worked 6 heats to each turn. Consumed 300 bushels of coal. Furnace was lighted on Sunday out of coal. The same weight of heats of Pig and Scrap were weighed to each Furnace. On Stevenson Furnace, 3,963 lbs. more Muck Bar, and 220 lbs. more Scrap Bar were made, with 50 bushels less coal than were used in other furnace. The saving in ore (fix) in former over latter during the week, was 450 lbs., by actual weight. A very important feature is the great saving accomplished in brick and brick-laying. The first Stevenson Furnace, put up three months, has not had any repair put upon it, and is, to-day, in good working order, while the ordinary furnaces are generally repaired about every two weeks. The cost, over ordinary furnace, is about seventy dollars. We cheerfully bear witness to the truth of the above statements of Mr. Stevenson. They are rather under than over the mark. The quality of iron made in his furnaces is the same as made by ordinary kind. We think it a valuable improvement, and intend to introduce it as fast as possible in our forge. J. PAINTER & SONS. WILLIAM STEVENSON, West Pittsburgh, Pa. * * * * * FOR SALE.--The entire State Rights (except Georgia and Texas), of the Self-supporting Gate. Every farmer wants it, and will give from three to ten dollars for the right to make it for his own use. Address JOHN R. DAVIS, Covington, Ca., stating what you will give. [Illustration] * * * * * LARGEST-BEST-CHEAPEST! MOORE'S RURAL NEW-YORKER. THE GREAT ILLUSTRATED Rural, Literary, and Family Weekly. MOORE'S RURAL Excels in CONTENTS, Size, Style, ILLUSTRATIONS, etc. Sixteen Double-Quarto Pages of Five Columns Each. Ably Edited, Beautifully Illustrated, Neatly Printed, and adapted to both Town and Country. The RURAL is Profusely and Splendidly Illustrated--the vol. just closed containing OVER EIGHT HUNDRED ENGRAVINGS! The Rural for 1870 Will be the Largest, Best, and Cheapest ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF ITS CLASS in the World! Only $3 a Year,--$2 50 in Clubs. All who form Clubs will get "GOOD PAY FOR DOING GOOD!" A choice of OVER ONE HUNDRED VALUABLE PREMIUMS! Specimens, Premium Lists, Posters, etc., sent free. D. D. T. MOOME, 41 Park Row, N. Y, * * * * * 2d-Hand Machinery. 22x48; 16x36; 10x24; 9x12; 8x24, Stationary; and 2 Portable Engines, in good order; Boilers of all sizes; Lathes; Wood and Iron Planers; Fay's Molding Machine; Machinery bought, sold, and exchanged. W. WILLARD, 47 Dey st., New York. * * * * * THE GEM NOVELTY Combines a Superior Battonhole Cutter, Yard Measure, Scissors Snarpener, Knife Sharpener, Pencil Sharpener, Emery Cushion, Seam Ripper, Spool Stand,Thread Cutter, Scale, and Rule. A standard, popular, and rich article for agents, very ornamental and useful. Rapid sales guaranteed. Price prepaid by mail $1. For sample and liberal terms. Address J. H. MARTIN, Hartford, N. Y. * * * * * AN Experienced Civil and Mechanical Engineer is open for engagement as Manager. Would undertake Contract Work. Address "Engineer," care of Philip S. Justice Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * McCHESNEY'S IMP'VD GIG OR SCROLL Saw.--First Medal and Diploma, Fair of the American Institute, N. Y., Sept. and Oct., 1869. Superior to any for either light or heavy work. For description and price address T.L. CORNELL, Birmingham, Conn. * * * * * NATIONAL WAGES TABLES-- Showing at a glance any wages from $1 to $37, by hour, day, or week, from half an hour to four weeks. Half bound, 50 cents; cloth, 75 cents; in Morocco, $1. Sent by mail on receipt of Price. Address NELSON ROW, Publisher, 149 Fulton st., New York. * * * * * BAIRD'S CATALOGUE OF PRACTICAL & SCIENTIFIC BOOKS. Sent free of postage to any one who will furnish his address to HENRY CAREY BAIRD, Industrial Publisher, 406 Walnut St., PHILADELPHIA. * * * * * NOW READY. Charles Reade's Great Story, PUT YOURSELF IN HIS PLACE. PART FIRST. One volume, octavo, elegantly illustrated. Price, $1. Containing all published in the "Galaxy" up to the January Number. This great story will be continued in the "Galaxy" most of the year 1870. PUT YOURSELF IN His PLACE will be sent with the "Galaxy," for 1870, on receipt of $4. which is the regular subscription price of the "Galaxy." THE GALAXY NOW STANDS AT THE HEAD OF AMERICAN MAGAZINES. RECENTLY PUBLISHED. SUSAN FIELDING. A NOVEL, BY MRS. EDWARDS. Author of "Archie Lovell" and "Steven Lawrence, Yeoman." One vol., octavo. Elegantly Illustrated. Cloth, $2. Paper, $1 25. Also, A New Edition of ARCHIE LOVELL. A NOVEL, BY MRS. EDWARDS. One volume, octavo. Illustrated. Cloth. $1 75. Paper, $1. STEVEN LAWRENCE, YEOMAK A NOVEL, BY MRS. EDWARDS. One volume, octavo. Illustrated. Cloth, $2; paper, $1 25 SHELDON & COMPANY, Publishers, NEW YORK. * * * * * "It Still Waves." The old favorite, the "STAR SPANGLED BANNER." The Jan. No. just out, Now is the Time to Subscribe Every No. contains 40 long columns, 8 pages, Ledger size 480 long columns of splendid reading during 1870. Four columns of "swindling exposures" in every No. In fact the whole paper is brimming with Wit, Humor, Fun Sense & Nonsense, Wit, Wisdom, & Wind, Fun, Fact, & Fancy. It is Rich, Rare, & Racy; Smart, Spicy, & Sparkling. It exposed 100 swindlers last year, and is bound to "show up" rascality without fear or favor. You Need it. There is nothing Like it. It will instruct, amuse, and will Save You Money. We give the superb steel plate, 1½x2 feet in size, entitled "Evangeline," mount it on roller, and send it Gratis, and the paper till 1871, all for only 75c. Engraving alone sells for $2. It is not a "sell." Has been published regular since 1863. Largest circulation in New Hampshire. If you try it one year you will come again. You have often thought of subscribing--Now is Just the Time. We will refund your money if you are not Perfectly Satisfied it Will Pay. You run no risk. Buy a copy of any newsman, or send six cents and receive one by mail. Remember you get the elegant parlor engraving, "Evangeline," (richly worth $2), and the paper a whole year; all for only 75c. Satisfaction Guaranteed, or will return your cash. Address "STAR SPANGLED BANNER," Hinsdale, N. H, * * * * * S. CRAIGE'S PATENT SPUR FOR SALE at the Philadelphia Riding School, Nos 3,334 to 42 Market st., Philadelphia. This spur possesses advantages over every other spur. Is easily put on, and solid when on. Will last a life-time. Suitable for Ladies or Gentlemen. Send size of heel. * * * * * PRACTICAL DRAFTSMAN'S BOOK OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AND MACHINISTS' & ENGINEERS' DRAWING COMPANION. Forming a Complete Course of Mechanical, Engineering, and Architectural Drawing. From the French of M. Armengaud the elder, Prof. of Design in Conservatoire of Arts and Industry, Paris, and MM. Armengaud the younger, and Amoroux, Civil Engineers. Rewritten and arranged with additional matter and plates, selections from and examples of the most useful and generally employed mechanism of the day. By WILLIAM JOHNSON, Assoc. Inst., C.E. Illustrated by fifty folio steel plates, and fifty wood cuts. A new edition, 4to.............$10 Among the contents are:--Linear Drawing, Definitions, and Problems. Sweeps, Sections, and Moldings, Elementary Gothic Forms and Rosettes. Ovals, Ellipses, Parabolas, and Volutes, Rules, and Practical Data. Study of Projections, Elementary Principles. Of Prisms and other Solids. Rules and Practical Data. On Coloring Sections, with applications--Conventional Colors, Composition or Mixture of Colors. Continuation of the Study of Projections--Use of Sections--details of machinery. Simple applications--spindles, shafts, couplings, wooden patterns. Method of constructing a wooden model or pattern of a coupling. Elementary applications. Rules and Practical Data. THE INTERSECTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF SURFACES WITH APPLICATIONS.--The Intersection of Cylinders and Cones. The Delineation and Development of Helices, Screws, and Serpentines. Application of the helix--the construction of a staircase. The Intersection of Surfaces--applications to stop cocks. Rules and Practical Data THE STUDY AND CONSTRUCTION OF TOOTHED GEAR.--Involute, cycloid, and epicyloid. Involute. Cycloid External epicycloid, described by a circle rolling about a fixed circle inside of it. Internal epicycloid. Delineation of a lack and pinion in gear. Gearing of a worm with a worm wheel. Cylindrical or Spur Gearing. Practical delineation of a couple of Spur wheels. The Delineation and Construction of Wooden Patterns for Toothed Wheels. Rules and Practical Data. CONTINUATION OF THE STUDY OF TOOTHED GEAR.--Design for a pair of bevel wheels in gear. Construction of wooden patterns for a pair of beveled wheels. Involute and Helical Teeth. Contrivances for obtaining differential Movements. Rules and Practical Data. ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OF SHADOWS.--Shadows of Prisms, Pyramids, and Cylinders. Principles of Shading. Continuation of the Study of Shadows. Tuscan Order. Rules and Practical Data. APPLICATION OF SHADOWS TO TOOTHED GEAR.--Application of Shadows to Screws. Application of Shadow to a Boiler and its Furnace. Shading in Black--Shading in Colors. THE CUTTING AND SHAPING OF MASONRY.--Rules and Practical Data. Remarks on Machine Tools. THE STUDY OF MACHINERY AND SKETCHING.--Various applications and combinations: The Sketching of Machinery. Drilling Machines; Motive Machines; Water-wheels. Construction and Setting up of water wheels, Delineation of water wheels, Design of a water wheel, Sketch of a water wheel; Overshot Water wheels, Water Pumps; Steam Motors; High-pressure expansive steam engine. Details of Construction; Movements of the Distribution and Expansion Valves; Rules and Practical Data. OBLIQUE PROJECTIONS. PARALLEL PERSPECTIVE. TRUE PERSPECTIVE.--Elementary principles. Applications--flour mill driven by belts. Description of the mill. Representation of the mill in perspective. EXAMPLES OF FINISHED DRAWINGS OF MACHINERY. The above or any of my Books sent by mail, free of postage, at the publication prices. My new revised and enlarged CATALOGUE OF PRACTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC BOOKS, 74 pp. 8vo, now ready, complete to Nov. 1. 1869, will be sent, free of postage, to any one who will favor me with his address. HENRY CAREY BAIRD Industrial Publisher, 406 Walnut st..Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * "A BLAZE OF BEAUTY." FOR 1870. THE JANUARY DOUBLE NUMBER OF THE PICTORIAL PHRENOLOGICAL JOURNAL appears in bright array. A new form, new types, numerous rich illustrations, with sound and sensible reading matter, render this the best ever issued. Among the contents are the following: Ferdinand De Lesseps, the chief promoter of the Suez Canal with a portrait and sketch of his life. Hon. S. S. Fisher, United States Commissioner of Patents, with portrait and biographical sketch, and a glimpse of the workings of the Patent Office. Carlos Manuel Cespedes, the President of the Cuban Republic. George Peabody, the successful merchant, banker, and philanthropist. Dr Tischendorff, the eminent Biblical discoverer and critic--his life, travels, and writings, with portrait. The Kaffir Race--Physically and mentally considered: with engravings, from life, of young and old natives. Northwestern Australians--Appearance, customs, and peculiarities, dress, ornaments, food, weapons, etc. The Progress of Science-Steam, electricity, invention, scientific discovery, anatomy, physiology, medicine, phrenology. Brain Waves--Progression of thought how thought and sentiment are transmitted. What Can I do Best?--Or, the requirements of the teacher. Who believes Phrenology?--Are there among its followers persons of eminence and influence? Faces We Meet--What they tell us and how they affect us. An Afternoon at "389"--A glimpse at the specimens in our cabinet. Small cautiousness--"Just for Fun," or trifling with death. Confessions of a Smoker; what he suffered in consequence of the habit; how he reformed and the happy results. The Wasp Waist--its metaphysics and physiology. Application--the necessity for its culture. Our Country's Agricultural Resources--A survey of our productions during the past fifty years with tables. Facts in Natural History--Will a horsehair become a snake? The Hedge hog--What it is, how it lives, and where it is found. Illustrated. The Sponge--Its origin, growth, and uses. Educational Matters-Cornell, Harvard, Yale, Michigan. Cathedral of Rheims-The Coronation place of the old French Kings; Joan of Arc. This favorite JOURNAL has now reached its fiftieth volume, and appears in the usual magazine form. We think it will prove even more popular than ever before. Terms, only $30 a year. Thirty cents a No. Newsmen have it. Now is the time to subscribe for 1870. Premium list sent on application. Address S.R. WELLS, 389 Broadway, N.Y. * * * * * R. BALL & CO., Worcester, Mass., Manufacturers of Woodworth's, Daniel's, and Dimension Planers; Molding, Matching, Tenoning, Mortising Shaping, and Boring Machines; Scroll Saws, Re-Sawing, Sand Boring, Wood turning Lathes and a variety of other Machines for Working Wood. Also, the best Patent Door, Hub, and Rail Car Mortising Machines in the world. Send for our Illustrated Catalogue. RICHARD BALL. E.P. HALSTED * * * * * DO NOT BE SWINDLED.--READ STARSPANGLED BANNER * * * * * VINEGAR.--How Made from Cider, Wine, Molasses, or Sorghum in 10 hours, without using jugs. For circulars, address F I. SAGE, Vinegar Maker, Cromwell Conn. * * * * * FOR SALE LOW--A No. 6 Taft's Pat. Power Shears. In use but a few days. H. McMURTRIE & CO, 80 Milk st., Boston, Mass. * * * * * ATTENTION INVENTORS! Having lately made several important negotiations, thereby leaving vacancies in our regular schedule, we are now prepared to receive applications from patentees who wish to contract with us for the sale of their inventions. Enough will be selected to fill our list, and negotiations for their sale immediately commenced. Comunications by mail promptly noticed. Commissions reasonable. E. E. ROBERTS & CO., Consulting Engineers, 15 Wall st., New York. * * * * * HINKLEY KNITTING MACHINE For Family Use--simple, cheap, reliable. Knits everything. AGENTS WANTED. Circular and sample stocking FREE. Address HINKLEY KNITTING MACHINE CO., Bath, Me., or 176 Broadway, N.Y. * * * * * CAST STEEL Name Punches, Letters, and Figures--all sizes and styles, and for all purposes, made by ROBERT ROGEKS, Letter Cutter, 26 Spruce st., S.E. cor. William st., New York. * * * * * PARKER POWER PRESSES. [Illustration] Are what are universally known as the "FOWLER PRESS," improved, and _are without a rival_ as regards strength and durability, combined with delicacy of adjustment of the Punch. NOTICE is hereby given that the STILES POWER PRESS is a direct INFRINGEMENT OF OUR PATENT dated April 17, 1855, and reissued Aug. 24, 1869, and ALL PARTIES are hereby CAUTIONED against BUYING OR USING said presses WITHOUT OUR PERMISSION. PARKER BROTHERS, West Meriden, Conn. New York office with CHAS. PARKER, 27 Beekman st. * * * * * THE BEST PUNCHING PRESSES ARE made by the Inventor and Patentee of the famous Eccentric Adjustment. Infringements upon said Patent will be severely dealt with. N.C. STILES, Middletown, Conn. * * * * * WROUGHT-Iron Pipe for Steam, Gas, and Water; Brass Globe Valves and Stop Cocks, Iron Fittings, etc. JOHN ASHCROFT, 50 John St., N.Y. * * * * * RICHARDSON, MERIAM & CO., Manufacturers of the latest improved Patent Daniels' and Woodworth Planing Machines, Matching, Sash and molding, Tenoning, Mortising, Boring, Shaping Vertical and Circular Re-sawing Machines, Saw Mills, Saw Arbors, Scroll Saws, Railway, Cut-off, and Rip-saw Machines, Spoke and Wood Turning Lathes, and various other kinds of Wood-working Machinery. Catalogues and price lists sent on application. Manufactory, Worcester, Mass. Warehouse, 107 Liberty st., New York. 17 * * * * * CINCINNATI BRASS WORKS.--Engineers' and Steam Fitters' Brass Work. Best Quality at very Low Prices. F. LUNKENHEIMER, Prop'r, Cincinnati, Ohio. * * * * * L.W. Pond's New Tools. NEW AND IMPROVED PATTERNS-- Lathes, Planers, Drills, Milling Machines, Boring Mills, Gear and Bolt Cutters Punches and Shears for iron. Dealer in IRON & WOOD WORKING MACHINERY Works at Worcester, Mass. Office, 98 Liberty st., N.Y. S.N. HARTWELL, General Agent. * * * * * S.S.B "SO SAID BILL." The STAR SPANGLED BANNER saved me from sending $10 to a swindler. * * * * * WANTED--Iron Planers, Engine Lathes, Boring and Shaping Machines, one set of Boiler Tools, Cupola, etc.; must be modern tools, and as good as new. Address, with catalogue and lowest cash prices, JOHN COOPER & CO., Mount Vernon, Ohio. * * * * * _Niagara Steam Pump_. CHAS. B. HARDICK, No. 9 Adams st., Brooklyn, N.Y. * * * * * OTIS' SAFETY HOISTING _Machinery._ OTIS BROTHERS & CO. NO. 309 BROADWAY, NEW YORK. * * * * * Do your own Printing WITH A NOVELTY JOB PRINTING PRESS The only Low-Priced Press ever invented, that will do good printing. Printing can be done as well and as rapidly on this press as on the best that printers use; and for printing offices where artificial power is not used, or for business men, apothecaries, grocers, country traders, and others who desire to do their own printing, it is entirely without a rival. The Best Holiday Gift for Boys. Price of Presses--$15, $30, $32, and $50. Send for full descriptive illustrated circulars, with testimonials from all parts of the country, and specimens of plain and color printing done on the press, & specimen sheets of types, borders, cuts, rules, etc., to BENJ. O. WOODS, Proprietor, 351 Federal st., Boston, Mass. [Illustration] * * * * * IRON STEAMERS, HULLS, & LIGHTERS. Estimates & Specifications furnished on application. HENRY J. DAVISON, 77 Liberty st., New York, Agent for Pusey, Jones & Co. 21 tf * * * * * HAIR, WOOL, AND COTTON DUCK FELT, for sale by the Square foot,or boilers covered by Contract. RUSSIAN FELT, of every description, a SPECIALTY, by HENRY J. DAVISON 77 Liberty st., N.Y. * * * * * WAGON AXLES, COMMON, CONCORD, IRON HUB, and SOLID COLLAR, of superior quality & finish. Also, Manufacturers of Machinery, Pat. Steam and Belt Forge Hammers, Power Shears, Car Axles, Windlass Necks Truss Shapes, Crowbars, Boiler Fronts, Cast Iron Jack Screws, Patent Swage Blocks, Tire Benders. Forgings & Castings. Address, for Price List, LYMAN KINSLEY & CO., Cambridgeport, Mass. * * * * * TO THE WORKING CLASS.--We are now prepared to furnish all classes with constant employment at home, the whole of the time or for the spare moments. Business new, light and profitable. Persons of either sex easily earn from 5oc. to $5 per evening, and a proportional sum by devoting their whole time to the business. Boys and girls earn nearly as much as men. That all who see this notice may send their address, and test the business, we make this unparalleled offer: To such as are not well satisfied, we will send $1 to pay for the trouble of writing. Full particulars, a valuable sample, which will do to commence work on, and a copy of _The People's Literary Companion_--one of the largest and best family newspapers published--all sent free by mail. Reader, if you want permanent, profitable work, address E.C. ALLEN & CO., Augusta, Maine. * * * * * INVENTORS, AGENTS, MERCHANTS, and all Dealers in Patents or Patented Goods, should subscribe for the PATENT STAR, devoted to their Interests. Terms 5oc. per year. Send stamp for sample to BENT, GOODNOW & CO., Boston, Mass. * * * * * WROUCHT IRON BEAMS & GIRDERS The Union Iron Mills, Pittsburgh, Pa. The attention of Engineers and Architects is called to our improved Wrought-iron Beams and Girders (patented), in which the compound welds between the stem and flanges, which have proved so objectionable in the old mode of manufacturing, are entirely avoided, we are prepared to furnish all sizes at terms as favorable as can be obtained elsewhere. For descriptive lithograph address the Union Iron Mills. Pittsburgh, Pa. * * * * * ASHCROFT'S LOW-WATER DETECTOR will insure your Boiler against explosion. JOHN ASHCROFT, 50 John st.. New York. 16 tf * * * * * POWER LOOMS. Impreved Drop Box. Spooling, Winding, Beaming, Dyeing, and Sizing Machines Self-Actmg, Wool-Scouring Machines, Hydra Extractors Also, Shafting, Pulleys, and Sen-Oiling Adjusable Han...ers [Transcribers note: word illegible], manuf'd by THOS. WOOD, 2106 Wood st., Philad'a. Pa * * * * * WOODBURY'S PATENT Planing and Matching and Molding Machmes, Gray & Wood's Planers, Self-oiling Saw Arbors, and other wood working machinery. S. A. WOODS, / 91 Liberty street, N. Y.; Send for Circulars. \ 67 Sudbury street, Boston. * * * * * BOILER FELTING SAVES TWENTY-FIVE PER CENT OF FUEL. JOHN ASHCROFT, 50 John st. New York. 16 tf * * * * * WATCH SWINDLES.--Humbug Music Boxes. Bogus Money. Four columns of "Ventilations" in the "STAR SPANGLED BANNER." * * * * * BUERK'S WATCHMAN'S TIME DETECTOR.--Important for all large Corporation and Manufacturing concerns--capable of controlling with the utmost accuracy the motion of a watchman or patrolman, as the same reaches different stations of his beat, Send for a Circular. J.E.BUEBK, P.O.Box 1,057, Boston, Mass. N.B.--This detector is covered by two U. S. patents. Parties using or selling these instruments without authority from me will be dealt with according to law. * * * * * LATHE CHUCKS--HORTON'S PATENT--from 4 to 36 inches. Also for car wheels. Address E. HORTON & SON, Windsor Locks, Conn. * * * * * CATALOGUES 10 CENTS EACH, SENT BY MAIL. _MATHEMATICAL INSTRUMENTS_, 112 pages. _OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS_, 72 pages. _MAGIC LANTERNS and STEREOPTICONS_, 100pp. _PHILOSOPHICAL INSTRUMENTS_, 84 pages. JAMES W. QUEEN & CO., 924 Chestnut st..Philadelphia Pa * * * * * COTTON AND WOOL SHODDY PICKERS Of the most approved English pattern, built by RICHABD KITSON Lowell, Mass. * * * * * Excelsior Lubricator For Cylinders of Engines. The most durable and best oil cup, manufactured by B. E. LEHMAN, Lehigh Valley Brass Works. Bethlehem, Pa. Send for desc'ive circular * * * * * MODELS, PATTERNS, EXPERIMENTAL, and other machinery. Models for the Patent Office built to order by HOLSKE MACHINE CO., Nos. 528, 530 and 532 Water st., near Jefferson. Refer to SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN office. 14 tf * * * * * MACHINERY FOR SALE-- Consisting of steam engines, boilers, machinists' tools, planers from two to five feet wide, lathes from 1½ to 7-ft. swing, and one boring, turning, and slotting mill, of 8-ft. swing, trip hammer, blacksmith's tools, fire proof safes, portable mills, fan blowers, water wheels, pulleys, shafting, belting, platform scales, etc., etc.; all at prices that will insure a rapid sale. Send for schedule. Engines, water wheels, and machinery made to order. GEOBGE T. McLAUTHLIN & CO., 120 Fulton st., Boston, Mass. * * * * * M. N. FORNEY, Mechanical Engineer, 64 B'dway (Room 48), N.Y. Designs, Plans, Estimates and Working Drawings of Machinery. etc., promptly and accurately made. Instruction given in Mechanical Drawing to a limited number of pupils. * * * * * NEW SCROLL SAW (Moyer's Pat.), with--out Post or Gate; uniform Tension; no jarring or noise; executes better and faster than any other. Send for a circular. HAMPSON & COPELAND, 42 Cortlandt st., New York. * * * * * PERFECTLY RELIABLE.--Established 1863. Satisfaction Guaranteed. "Star Spangled Banner." 75 cents a year. * * * * * THE WOODWARD STEAM-PUMP MANUFACTUBING COMPANY, Manufacturers of the Woodward Pat. Improved Safety Steam Pump and Fire Engine, Steam, Water, and Gas Fittings of all kinds. Also, Dealers in Wrought-iron Pipe, Boiler Tubes, etc. Hotels, Churches, Factories, & Public Buildings, Heated by Steam, Low Pressure. Woodward Building, 76 and 78 Center st., cor. of Worth st. (formerly of 77 Beekman st.), N.Y. All parties are hereby cautioned against infringing the Pat. Bight of the above Pump. G. M. WOODWABD, Pres't. * * * * * CAMDEN Tool and Tube Works, Camden, N. J. Manufacturers of Wrought Iron Tube. Brass Work and Fittings, and all the most improved TOOLS for Screwing, Cutting, and Fitting Pipe. Screwing Machines for Pipe, of five different sizes. Pipe Tongs, Common and Adjustable; Pipe Cutters, Pipe Vises, Taps, Bearners, Drills, Screwing Stocks, and Solid Dies. Peace's Patent Screwing Stocks, with dies. No. I Screws ¾, 3/8, ½, ¾, Pipe. Price complete, $10. No. 2 Screws, 1, 1¼, 1½, 2 Pipe, $20. No. 3 both screws and cuts off, 2½, 3, 3½, 4, $65. * * * * * TODD & RAFFERTY, Manufacturers and DEALERS IN MACHINERY. Works, Paterson, N. J.; Warerooms, 10 Barclay St., N. Y Boilers, Steam Pumps, Machinists' Tools. Also, Flax, Hemp, Rope, and Oakum Machinery, Snow's and Judson's Governors, Wright's pat. Variable Cut-off & other engines. * * * * * To Electro-Platers. BATTERIES, CHEMICALS, AND MATERIALS, in sets or single, with books of instruction, manufactured and sold by THOMAS HALL, Manufacturing Electrician, 19 Bromfleld st., Boston, Mass. Illustrated catalogue sent free on application. * * * * * PORTABLE STEAM ENGINES, combining the maximum of efficiency, durability and economy, with the minimum of weight and price. They are widely and favorably known, more than 750 being in use. All warranted satisfactory or no sale. Descriptive circulars sent on application. Address J C HOADLEY & CO Lawrence, Mass * * * * * BLIND-SLAT TENON MACHINE.--We have recently patented one of the above Machines, which we GUARANTEE SUPERIOR to any machine of the kind in use. Shall be pleased to furnish cuts and prices of this and any other Wood-working Machinery. Address STEPTOE, McFABLAN & CO., Cincinnati, Ohio. * * * * * FOR CUTS AND PRICES of Machinists' Tools, address STEPTOE, McFARLAN & CO., Cincinnati, Ohio, * * * * * STEAM AND WATER GAGES, STEAM Whistles, Gage Cocks, and Engineers' Supplies. 16 tf JOHN ASHCROFT, 50 John St., New York. * * * * * H. BOARDMAN, Lancaster, Pa.--Superior Patent Cork-cutting Machinery, Hard-laid Twine Cord, and Rope Machinery, with Pat. Stop & Condenser * * * * * WOODWORTH PLANERS a SPECIALTY--From new patterns of the most approved style and workmanship. Wood-working Machinery generally. Nos. 24 and 26 Central, corner Union street, Worcester, Mass. Warerooms. 42 Cortlandt street, New York. WITHERBY, RUGG & RICHARDSON. * * * * * SILICATE OF SODA, IN ITS VARIOUS forms, manufactured as a specialty, by Philadelphia Quartz Co., 783 South 2d St., Philadelpnia, Pa. * * * * * 11-2 by 2 FEET IS THE superb new plate "Evangeline," given free to all who send 75 cents for the "STAR SPANGLED BANNER," for 1870. * * * * * _Pevey's Cupola_, WARRANTED to Melt, with, one tun of Coal, 2000 lbs. of Iron MORE than any other Cupola now in use. ABIEL PEVEY, Patentee and Proprietor, Lowell, Mass. Van Tuyl & Co. No. 273 Cherry st,. New York, Agents. * * * * * MERRICK & SONS Southwark Foundery, 430 Washington Ave., Philadelphia, Pa., MANUFACTURE NASMYTH & DAVY STEAM HAMMERS, CORNISH PUMPING, BLAST, HORIZONTAL, VERTICAL, AND OSCILLATING ENGINES. Gas Machinery of all descriptions. Sugar Refineries fitted up complete, with all modern apparatus. New York office 62 Broadway. * * * * * LECOUNT'S PATENT HOLLOW LATHE DOGS AND CLAMPS.--A set of 8 Dogs from 3/8 to 2-in., inclusive, $8. A set of 12 from 3/8 to 4-in., $17.30. Five sizes Machinists' Clamps, from 2 to 6-in., inclusive, $11. Send for Circular. C.W. LECOUNT. South Norwalk, Conn. [Illustration] [Illustration] * * * * * MASON'S PAT'T FRICTION CLUTCHES are Manufactured by Volney W. Mason & Co., Providence, R.I. Agents, R. BROOKS & CO., 123 Ave. D, New York. TAPLIN RICE & CO. Akron, Ohio 16 tfeow * * * * * Molding Machinery. THE MOST VALUABLE MACHINE FOR Planing Irregular and Straight Work in all branches of Wood-Working, is the Combination Molding and Planing Machine Co.'s "Variety Molding and Planing Machine." Our improved guards make it safe to operate; our combination collars save one hundred per cent; and for planing, molding, and cutting irregular forms, our Machine is unsurpassed. The right to make and vend these Machines is owned solely by us, and we will defend Purchasers in case litigation is forced upon them by any parties pretending to own Patent on any part of our Variety Machine. COMBINATION MOLDING AND PLANING MACHINE CO., 424 East 23d st., or Postoffice Box 3230 New York City. Silas M. Hamilton, Baltimore Samuel Leggert, New York. 19 tfeow * * * * * Gear's Variety Moulding Machine, WARRANTED THE BEST in THE WORLD FOR Moulding and Cutting Irregular Forms, with Patent Improvements for Combination Cutters, and Patent Guard to protect operator and material. Secured by six Patents. Deeds of Right to use furnished with every Machine sold, to protect parties in using them. Before purchasing Combination Moulding and Planing Machine Co.'s or Grosvenor's Mongrel Infringing Machines, (which they and their agents, in behalf of the Singer Sewing Machine Co., and the Central Pacific R.R. Co., and others to whom they had sold Machines to be used out of the State of New York, have been made to pay us for using) or Ball's or Fay's infringing Machines, which users have had to pay us for right to use. Address for particulars and Machines, Sole Owners and Lawful Manufacturers for all the United States, except New York A.S.& J. GEAR & CO., NEW HAVEN, CONN., or 91 Liberty Street, New York. * * * * * MACHINERY.--S.C. HILLS, No.12 Platt st., New York, dealer in all kinds of Machinery and Machinists' supplies. 2 tf a * * * * * PLATINUM. H.M. RAYNOR 57 Bond st., N.Y. * * * * * AGENTS wanted everywhere. Brown's Pat. Double Cone Ventilating Damper gives the most heat with the least fuel. Send tor Circulars. O.R. BRIGGS & CO., 184 Washington st., N.Y * * * * * AMERICAN TINNED SHEET IRON. Coating uniformly over the entire sheet, by an entirely new and patented process. All sizes and gages on hand and made to order. H. W. BUTTERWORTH & SON, 29 and 31 Haydock st., Philadelphia, Pa. 25 eow tt * * * * * Independent Steam BOILER SUPPLY, OR _Feed Pump_. RELIABLE FOR HOT OR COLD WATER. [Illustration] Circulars sent free. COPE & CO., No. 118 East 2d st., Cincinnati, Ohio * * * * * BREECH-LOADING GUN.-- Probably superior to any in the market. Patent for sale. Address T.L., Box 728 Postoffice, Derby, Conn, * * * * * CIRCULAR SAW MILLS, PLANERS Matchers, etc. Prices Low. S. HEALD & SONS Barre, Mass., make the Largest and Best Planer to be found for the money. Send for circulars. * * * * * SHINGLE AND HEADING MACHINE--Trevor & Co.'s Improved. The Simplest and Best in use. Also, Shingle, Heading, and Stave Jointers, Stave Cutters, Equalizers. Heading Turners, Planers, etc. Address TREVOR & CO, Lockport, N. Y. * * * * * THE INVENTOR'S AND MECHANIC'S GUIDE.--A valuable book upon Mechanics, Patents, and New Inventions. Containing the U. S. Patent Laws, Rules and Directions for doing business at the Patent Office; 112 diagrams of the best mechanical movements, with descriptions; the Condensing Steam Engine, with engraving and description; How to Invent; How to Obtain Patents; Hints upon the Value of Patents; How to sell Patents; Forms for Assignments; Information upon the Rights of Inventors, Assignees and Joint Owners; Instructions as to Interferences, Reissues, Extensions Caveats, together with a great variety of useful information in regard to patents, new inventions, and scientific subjects, with scientific tables, and many illustrations 108 pages. This is a most valuable work. Price only 25 cents. Address MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, N.Y. * * * * * BALL, BLACK & CO. Nos. 565 and 567 BROADWAY, Offer an Unequaled Assortment of JURGENSEN, NARDINE, JACOT, SALTZMAH, NICOUD, GERARD, FRODSHAM, PEARDON, GORDING, RUGENSTEIN, HARRISON, TAYLOR. ALSO, A FULL LINE OF AMERICAN WATCHES, At the Lowest Price. * * * * * ROPER Carloric Engine Co., 49 Cortlandt st. New Style Upright Engines. Send for Circular. * * * * * Perpetual Brick Kiln. SAVES 2-3 IN FUEL. Address WEDEKIND & DUEBERG, 55 N. Calvert st., Baltimore, Md. * * * * * WANTED-To correspond with an extensive manufacturing firm of 1st-class reliability, to make and sell, on royalty, Dodge's 2-way cock or pump attachment. Exclusive control of territory given. 100,000 doz wanted in U.S. Address Hedden & Dodge, Lowville, N.Y. * * * * * WANTED.-- In an Extensive Agricultural Implement Works in Ohio, an Experienced and Capable Superintendent. None but a Through Machinist, who can give high reference as to Character, etc., need apply. Address Thrashing Machine Works, Drawer 5947, Chicago, Ill. * * * * * RIGGS' BELMONTYLE OIL PREVENTS Rust, Tarnish, etc. Send for circular to H.B. Riggs, 150 Front Street, Hew York. * * * * * The Mother's Journal. THE BEST HOME MAGAZINE IN THE WORLD. Beautifully illustrated; 600 double-column pages; $2 per year. Specimens sent free. Now is the time. Address MOTHERS' JOURNAL, Chicago, 111. * * * * * DECISION ON STEAM ENGINES.--Wm. A. HARRIS, builder of the Corliss Steam Engine, was awarded the 1st Premium at the National Fair of the American Institute, New York,1869, for its superiority in economy in fuel, regularity in speed, perfect construction, accessibility of all its parts. Send for a circular. One 80-H.P. Engine, ready for delivery; one 40-H.P. Engine, ready for delivery; three 30-H.P. Engines, ready for delivery. WM. A. HARRIS Providence R.I. New York Office 49 Murray st. Send for a circular. * * * * * Manufacturers' Depot. SPOKES, HUBS, WHEELS, And a general assortment of Carriage and Wagon Wood work. The above goods are of our own manufacture, which enables us to offer better inducements than any other House in the city. N.G. OLDS & SON, 51 Murray st., New York. * * * * * ROOT'S WROUGHT IRON SECTIONAL Safety Boiler. Composed of best Wrought Iron Tubes, tested to 500 pounds; no large sheet iron, shell or thin cast iron to explode. Absolutely safe, economical, durable, and efficient. Send for pamphlet. Also, Steam Engines, Steam Pumps, etc. ROOT STEAM ENGINE CO., 95 and 97 Liberty St., New York. * * * * * FOR SALE--A 60-H.P. Root's Sectional Safety Boiler, at Atlantic Sugar Refinery. Brooklyn. Apply to LABATT & CO., 111 Front st., New York. * * * * * POWER PLEDGED Equal to any overshot, with N.F. BURNHAM'S New Turbine Water Wheel. Illustrated Pamphlet, for 1870, "with Reduced Price List," sent free by N.F. BURNHAM, "Patentee," York, Pa., or S.N. Hartwell, "Ag't," 98 Liberty st., N.Y. [Illustration] * * * * * The Woven Wire Mattress Co. OF HARTFORD, CONN., Call attention to the fact, that they have established AN AGENCY in the City of NEW YORK, at 82 E. Ninth St., opposite the store of A. T. Stewart & Co., for the sale of the Woven Wire Mattress. All who are interested in the article in this No. of the Scientific American, all who admired its qualities at the American Institute Fair, and all who desire A PERFECT BED, are requested to call at the Agency and examine it. The Mattresses are for sale by many of the Furniture Dealers in the city, and also throughout New England. If your furniture dealer does NOT keep them, order one through him, at the Agency in New York, or directly from the Co. Send for circulars, rights, or any information desired, to GEO. C. PERKINS, Sup't, Hartford, Ct. * * * * * STEREOSCOPES WITH ENDLESS CHAIN--To hold from 3 to 50 doz. pictures, in great variety, at the Patentee's manufactory. ALX BECKER, 560 Broadway, N.Y. * * * * * TO INVENTORS AND MANUFACTURERS IN THE UNITED STATES-- Mr. George Wood, Wood's Museum and Menagerie, respectfully and earnestly invites the attention of Inventors and Manufacturers to the fact that, at a large expense, he has arranged a hall in the Museum Building, for the purpose of exhibiting to the public Models, Machines, and all the products of inventive genius in active working operation. The space allotted for this purpose embraces 6,000 square feet, supplied with Steam-power, Gas, and all the requirements of the Workshop, the Factory, and the Laboratory, which will be kept open every day and evening, and form a perpetual MECHANICS' FAIR, affording an opportunity to Inventors and Mechanics to place their products before thousands of daily visitors at a nominal tariff. Inventors and Mechanics are earnestly invited to co-operate in this laudable and advantageous enterprise, and are requested to call on or address MR. WALTER P. NEWHALL, Superintendent of Machinery and Models. GEO. WOOD, Proprietor. Office at Wood's Museum, corner Broadway and 30th st. * * * * * FRENCH BAND SAW MACHINES, SAWS, Taper Files, etc., Machines for Scroll, Re-sawing, and Log; Mongin & Co.'s Band Saw Blades, all Sizes, on hand and made to order. All Styles of Band Saw Machines in operation at Mahogany Mill, 10th st., E.R. GEORGE GUEUTAL, Sole Agent for the U.S., 39 West 4th st., N.Y. * * * * * _Horsford's Bread Preparation_. The only "baking powder" recommended by Scientific Men. Made under personal supervision of Prof. Horsford, of Harvard University. Restores to fine flour the Phosphates. Refer to S.H. Wales, Scientific American; Dr. Fordyce Barker; Dr. John H. Griscom; Dr. Wm.A. Hammorid (late Surgeon Gen. U.S. Army), Prof. R.O. Doremus, all of New York; Prof. J.C. Booth, Prof. S.H. Dickson, Philadelphia, etc. Liebig & Horsiord's Essay on Bread Making sent free. WILSON, LOCKWOOD, EVERETT & CO., 201 Fulton st., New York, General Agents. * * * * * STURDEVANT'S FAN BLOWERS, _Pressure Blowers_, THE BEST FOR ALL PURPOSES. _Judson's Governors_. THE ONLY RELIABLE. JAS.L. HAVEN & CO., Cincinnati, Ohio, Agents for the above standard, articles. * * * * * _Oak Leather Belting_. Manufactured Dy CHAS. A. SCHIEREN, 92 Gold st., N.Y. * * * * * SCHLENKER'S PATENT BOLT CUTTER NEW INVENTION. ADDRESS. HOWARD IRON WORKS. BUFFALO. N.Y. * * * * * [Illustration] Reynolds' Turbine Water Wheels. No Complex, Duplex, or Triplex complications. All such are costly, perishable, easily clogged, inaccessible. Mill Gearing, Shafting, and Pulleys. Send for Illustrated Pamphlet. GEORGE TALLCOT, 96 Liberty st., New York. * * * * * STEAM ENGINES & BOILERS From 4 to 500-H.P., including celebrated Corliss Patent Variable Cut-off Engines, Slide Valve Stationary Engines, Portable Engines, etc. Also, Circular Mulay, & Gang Saw Mills Sugar Cane Mills, Shafting, Pulleys, etc. Wheat and Corn Mills, Circular Saws, Belting, etc. Send for Circular and Price List. WOOD & MANN STEAM ENGINE CO., Utica, N.Y. * * * * * IRON PLANERS, ENGINE LATHES, Drills, and other Machinists' Tools, of Superior Quality, on hand and finishing. For sale Low. For Description and Price, address NEW HAVEN MANUFACTURING CO., New Haven, Conn. 5 tf os * * * * * Free.--Our New Catalogue of Improved STENCIL DIES. More than $200 A MONTH is being made with them S.M. SPENCER & CO., Brattleboro Vt. * * * * * [Illustration: EMERSON'S PATENT PERFORATED CIRCULAR & LONGSAWS REQUIRE NO GUMMING FOR DESCRIPTIVE PAMPHLET ADDRESS AMERICAN SAW CO. N.Y.] Factory, Trenton, N.J.... Office. No. 2 Jacob st., N.Y. Branch Office for Pacific Coast, No. 606 Front st. San Francisco, Cal. * * * * * HOWLAND'S PAT. KNIFE SHARPENER. [Illustration] The best and most durable thing of the kind ever invented. Agents wanted from all parts of the country. Sure sale. Every family wants one. Sample of Porcelain sent on receipt of 75c. F. TRAVER & CO., Agents, 14 Park Place, New York. * * * * * Pratt's "Astral" Oil. UNLIKE MANY OTHER ILLUMINATING OILS, the Astral Oil is perfectly pure and free from all adulterations of any kind. It emits no offensive smell while burning, gives a soft and brillant light, and can be used with as little danger as gas. Chemists pronounce it the best and safest Illuminating Oil ever offered to the public; and insurance companies indorse and urge upon consumers the use of the "Astral" Oil in preference to any other. Thousands are now burning it, and in no instance has any accident occurred from its use. A lamp filled with it upset and broken will not explode or take fire. To prevent adulteration, the Astral Oil is packed only in the Guaranty Patent Cans, of 1 gallon and 5 gallons each, and each can is sealed in a manner that cannot be counterfeited Every package, with uncut seal, we warrant. The universal testimony of consumers is that the "Astral" Oil is perfect; a single trial serves to establish it in the family. For sale by all dealers, and by wholesale and retail by the proprietors Oil House of CHARLES PRATT. P.O. Box, 3,050. 108 Fulton Street, New York. Send for Circulars with testimonials and price list. * * * * * Building Paper. This is a hard, compact paper, like an ordinary book cover, and is saturated with tar and used on the outside of frame buildings, under the clapboards, also under shingles and floors, to keep out damp and cold. It is also used on the inside, not saturated, _instead of Plastering_, and makes a warm and cheap wall. It costs only from $8 to $30 (according to size) to cover houses on the outside. Samples and descriptive circulars sent free. Address, ROCK RIVER PAPER CO., Chicago, Or B.E. HALE, 22 & 24 Frankfort Street, N.Y., Agent for the Eastern States. * * * * * CAUTION TO BRASS COOK MAKERS. PLUMBERS, STEAM AND GAS FITTERS, ARCHITECTS, BUILDERS, DEALERS IN BRASS GOODS, And _ALL OTHERS_ against _MAKING, BUYING, SELLING_, or _USING_ any INFRINGEMENT of our "PATENT RIGHT" for COMPRESSION BIBBS, FAUCET, COCKS, or on any thing to which our Patent is applied. We have already commenced LEGAL proceedings with the firm determination to prosecute all and every violation of our rights to the fullest extent of the law. MESSRS. HAYDEN, GERE, & CO., 84 Beekman st. NEW YORK, --AND-- DALTON & INGERSOLL, 19 Union st. BOSTON, Are our ONLY Authorized Selling Agents. _E. STEBBINS Manufacturing Co._, SPRINGFIELD, MASS. * * * * * _Ahearn's Patents_. PURCHASERS wanted for every State and County not yet sold. $1000 AND EXPENSES can be made monthly on every $200 invested. For particulars, address J. AHEARN, 5 P.O. Avenue, Baltimore, Md. * * * * * PATTERN LETTERS TO PUT ON PATTERNS FOR CASTINGS--.&.C. KNIGHT BROS. SENECA FALLS N.Y. * * * * * $20 A DAY TO MALE AND FEMALE Agents to introduce the BUCKEYE $20 SHUTTLE SEWING MACHINES. Stitch alike on both sides, and is the only _LICENSED SHUTTLE MACHINE_ sold in the United states for less than $40. All others are infringements, and the seller and user are liable to prosecution and imprisonment. Outfit free. Address _W.A. HENDERSON & CO., Cleveland, Ohio._ * * * * * 2d-Hand Machinery FOR SALE--viz:-- 50 Milling Machines, Index and Universal Milling Machines, Horizontal Milling and Drilling Machines, Drill Presses. Hand and Power Lathes, Edging Machines, Drops and Punch Presses, Screw Machines, etc., etc., 1000 feet of 1-3/16 Shafting, with Hangers and Pulleys, etc., etc., by O.F. WINCHESTER, New Haven, Conn. * * * * * SENT FREE! M. O'KEEFE, SON & CO.'S SEED CATALOGUE AND GUIDE TO THE FLOWER AND VEGETABLE GARDEN, FOR 1870. Published in January. Every lover of flowers wishing this new and valuable work, free of charge, should address immediately M. O'KEEFE, SON & CO., Ellwanger & Barry's Block, Rochester, N.Y. * * * * * London 48 Cannon street. H. KOHNSTAMM, Manufacturer of ULTRAMARINE, And Importer of English, French, and German Colors, Paints, and Artists' Materials, Bronzes, and Metals. No. 3 Tryon Row, New York, opposite City Hall * * * * * _WIRE HOPE_. Manufactured by JOHN A. ROEBLING'S SONS, Trenton N.J. FOR Inclined Planes, Standing Ship Rigging Bridges, Ferries, Stays or Guys on Derricks & Cranes Tiller Ropes, Sash Cords of Copper and Iron, Lightning Conductors of Copper. Special attention given to hoisting rope of all kinds for Mines and Elevators. Apply for circular, giving price and other information. Send for pamphlet on Transmission of Power by Wire Ropes. * * * * * THE _Tanite Emery Wheel_. Does not Glaze, Gum, Heat, or Smell. Address THE TANITE CO., Stroudsburg, Monroe Co., Pa. * * * * * GETTY'S PATENT PIPE CUTTER. No. 1 cuts from 1 inch to 1/8........................Price $8 No. 2 cuts from 2 inches to ½........................Price $10 GETTY'S PATENT PROVING PUMP AND GAGE. Pump and Gage.......................................Price $25 Gage alone..........................................Price $13 Address McNAB & HARLIN, MANUFACTURERS OF BRASS GOODS AND IRON FITTINGS, 86 John st., New York. * * * * * REPEATING FIRE-ARMS FOR SALE, viz:-- 5,000 Winchester Repeating Muskets. 5,000 " " Carbines. 5,000 " " Sporting Rifles. 2,000 Spencer " Muskets. 30,000 " " Carbines. 500 " " Sporting Rifles. 2,000 Joslyn Single Breech-loading Carbines. Metallic Cartridges of all sizes, by WINCHESTER REPEATING ARMS CO., New Haven, Conn. * * * * * PAT. SOLID EMERY WHEELS AND OIL STONES, for Brass and Iron Work, Saw Mills, and Edge Tools. Northampton Emery Wheel Co., Leeds. Mass. * * * * * KIDDER'S PASTILES--A Sure Relief for Asthma. STOWELL & CO., Charlestown, Mass. * * * * * WELBY & McCAULEY, PRACTICAL MECHANICS.--Mechanical Commission Depot No. 5, Harrison st., Baltimore, Md., Buy and Sell, on Commission, Improved Machinery, etc., etc. Negotiate Patent Rights, introduce New Inventions, practically. Agents for manufacturers generally. * * * * * _The American Builder_ AND JOURNAL OF ART.--Terms $3.00 a year. Sent four months to trial Subscribers on receipt of one dollar. Address CHARLES D. LAKEY Chicago, Ill. * * * * * _Cotton Seed Oil Mills_. Built by Contractor otherwise. For Estimates and Machinery apply to Oil Machinery Manufacturing Co. of N.Y. city, 96 Liberty st. P.O. Box 1183 * * * * * HARRISON SAFETY BOILER First-Class Medal World's Fair, London, 1862. First-Class Medal, American Institute Fair, New York, October, 1869, for safety, economy of space, and economy of fuel. 400-H.P. AT A.T. STEWART'S. 437-H.P. AT JERSEY CITY SUGAR REFINERY, and over 1,000 boilers in other places. Harrison Boiler Works, Philadelphia. _John A. Coleman, Ag't_, 49 Murray St., N. Y., and 36 Kilby St., Boston. * * * * * _30-H. Corliss Engine_. Also, Six Engines, from 15 to 30-Horse. Have been in use, but are in good order. Cheap for cash. Address CHAS. H. SMITH, 135 North 3d st., Philadelphia, Pa. * * * * * _Drawing Materials_. WHATMAN'S PAPERS.--White and Yellow Roll Drawing Paper, 40 and 54 inches wide Tracing Muslin, Tracing Paper. Muslin-backed Drawing Paper, 40 and 53 inches wide. Winsor & Newton's Colors India Ink. Faber's Drawing Pencils, etc., etc. Priced catalogues 10 cents each. JAS. W. QUEEN & CO., 924 Chestnut st. Philadelphia. * * * * * SAWS. EVERY DESCIPTION Guaranteed under a forfeiture of $1000, to cut the most lumber with the least expense. _Henry Disston & Son_, PHILADELPHIA. Special attention paid to our new style Circular, Belt, Cross-cut, Mill and Hack Saws. Orders received from England, Ireland, and the Continent. * * * * * THE Scientific American FOR 1870 Cash Prize and Premium List This Illustrated Weekly Journal of Practical Information, Art, Science, Mechanics, Invention, Chemistry, and Manufactures--Entered its Twenty-fifth Year on the 1st of January. The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN stands at the head of Industrial Journals of the world in point of Circulation and Influence. Every number has Sixteen Imperial pages, embellished with Engravings of New Inventions, Machinery, Tools for the Workshop, House, and Farm, also Public Buildings, Dwelling Houses, and Engineering Works. The Illustrated Department of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is a very striking feature, and has elicited the praise of the Press and all articles appearing in its columns are written in a popular and instructive style. To Inventors and Mechanics the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN has special value and interest, from the fact that it furnishes an Official List of Patents issued, with copious notes of the principal American and European Patents. The Publishers offer the following SCHEDULE OF CASH PRIZES. For the fifteen largest lists of names sent in before February 10, 1870, the following Cash Prizes will be given: $300 FOR THE FIRST LIST. 250 " SECOND LIST. 200 " THIRD LIST. 150 " FOURTH LIST. 100 " FIFTH LIST. 90 " SIXTH LIST. 80 " SEVENTH LIST 70 " EIGHTH LIST. 60 " NINTH LIST. 50 " TENTH LIST. 40 " ELEVENTH LIST. 35 " TWELFTH LIST. 30 " THIRTEENTH LIST. 25 " FOURTEENTH LIST. 20 " FIFTEENTH LIST. Competitors sending names should be particular to mark "Prize List" on their orders, and remit the amount of subscription, as per terms. All Clubs of 10 names and upward, will be taken at the rate of $2.50 per annum. To those who do not compete for the Cash Prizes the publishers offer the Splendid Steel Engraving, in size 22x36, entitled "MEN OF PROGRESS-AMERICAN INVENTORS." It contains the following group of illustrious inventors, namely: Prof. Morse, Prof. Henry Thomas Blanchard, Dr. Nott, Isaiah Jennings, Charles Goodyear, Jos. Saxton, Dr. W. T. Morton, Erastus Bigelow, Henry Burden, Capt. John Ericsson, Elias Howe, Jr., Col. Samuel Colt, Col. R. M. Hoe, Peter Cooper, Jordan L. Mott, C. H. McCormick, James Bogardus, and Frederick E. Sickles. The likenesses are all excellent, and Mr. Sartain, who stands at the head of our American Engravers on Steel, in a letter addressed to us, says "that it would cost $4,000 to engrave the plate now," which is a sufficient guarantee of the very high character of the Engraving as a work of art. Price of the Engraving, $10 for single copy. To enable all to possess this beautiful work of art, at, a very reduced rate, the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will be sent one year, together with a copy of the picture, on receipt of $10 Any one sending 10 Names for 1 year, and $30, will receive one picture 20 " " 50, " " " 30 " " 75, " two pictures 40 " " 100, " three " 50 " " 125, " four " Competitors for the above prizes can send in names at any time on or before February 10th, and from any postoffice. For full particulars and sample copies of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, address the Publishers. Terms of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: Single copy one year, $3.00; six months, $1.50; and one dollar four months. To Clubs of ten and upward, $2.50 each per annum. MUNN & CO., 37 Park Row, New York 
45938	----	Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LV MAY TO OCTOBER, 1899 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. [Illustration: Herbert Spencer] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. AUGUST, 1899. PUBLIC CHARITY AND PRIVATE VIGILANCE. BY FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS, PH. D., PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. The Comptroller of the City of New York deserves the thanks of all good citizens for his serious indictment of the abuses of public charity that have grown up in this city and State within the past ten years. Probably very few of the more intelligent men and women of the community were aware that three million dollars, raised by taxation, are annually appropriated to the assistance of private charitable institutions, over which the public has no real control and only the most shadowy authority through the inspection of the State Board of Charities. Of those who were informed of this fact, very few indeed were acquainted with the specific abuses which the comptroller's article exposes. To a few individuals, however, who have devoted time and money unselfishly to the defense of public interests and to the exposure of the evils of irresponsible relief, these facts have long been familiar. Such can not fail to take satisfaction in the clear presentation of the case by Mr. Coler. Especially to the men and women who have been connected with the work of the State Charities Aid Association and the Charity Organization Society will Mr. Coler's article be welcome, as a strong re-enforcement of arguments which they for years have been presenting to the people of New York, oftentimes, it has seemed, to but unwilling hearers. It is therefore in no spirit of fundamental disagreement, but rather in the desire to further the reform which the comptroller demands, that I venture to criticise in two particulars the statement as he has left it. It is an incomplete view of the enormously difficult problem of charity which fails to set forth some of the reasons that have led to the growth of an excessive faith in the excellence of private institutions and in the wisdom of a co-operation between them and the public, which is taken for granted when they receive appropriations of public money. Great as have been the abuses associated with private charity, they are small when compared with the abuses that have existed in the public administration of poor relief. As all familiar with the history of this subject know, the old English poor law was so administered in the rural parishes that paupers were in a more eligible position than industrious farm laborers; that women with bastard children were publicly rewarded for unchastity; and that, now and again, rent-paying farmers were willing to surrender their lands to the paupers to work them for what could be made, rather than to go on paying rates. The exposure of the evils of the system, which was made in the report of the famous Poor Law Commission appointed in 1832, and the attempt to abolish them by the provisions of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, ought to be studied by every citizen who desires to perform his full duty as a guardian of public interests, and especially by every individual whose sympathies lead him to undertake any practical effort for the amelioration of pauperism. In the United States, on account of the extremely decentralized character of our poor-relief system generally, we have no such impressive body of critical literature as that which was brought out in England during the first half of the present century. None the less, whenever special investigations of the management of town and city relief administration and of the management of almshouses have been made, deplorable abuses have almost invariably been exposed, and individuals acquainted with the facts have argued that any possible misdirection of either private or public funds through private agencies could not equal the corruption and the inhumanity for which officialism has been responsible. Let us look at one noteworthy example. In 1891 a special committee appointed to report on outdoor alms in the town of Hartford, Connecticut, discovered a state of affairs with which nothing revealed in Mr. Coler's statements can for a moment be compared. The general situation, the committee said, was found to be as follows: "In 1885 Hartford was paying $2.07 for each man, woman, and child of its population in poor relief. New Haven was paying $1.30; Bridgeport, $1.03; Waterbury, 81 cents; Norwich, $1.54; New Britain, $1.39, etc.; for twelve Connecticut cities an average of $1.22 per capita against our $2.07; and with Hartford far ahead of her nearest competitor. For outdoor relief the figures were similar. Hartford, 90 cents per capita; New Haven, 51 cents; Norwalk, 23 cents, etc.--an average for the twelve of 61 cents per capita, with only one higher, Hartford in the lead again by fifty per cent. Five Massachusetts cities, including Boston, Worcester, and Lowell, average $1.16 for all relief, against our $2.07; and 24 cents for outdoor relief against our 90 cents. Five other New England cities, including Providence and Bangor, average 33 cents for all relief, against our $2.07; and 12 cents for outdoor, against our 90 cents. Four New York cities--New York, Brooklyn, Buffalo, and Albany--average 63 cents, against our $2.07; and 43 cents, against our 90 cents. Five cities in Pennsylvania and Maryland, including Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Baltimore, average 38 cents against our $2.07; and 4 cents, against our 90 cents. Seven Western and Southern cities, including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Charleston, average 62 cents for all relief, against our $2.07; and 17 cents, against our 90 cents." A similar comparison extended by the committee to the principal cities of Europe, including Berlin, Dresden, and Stuttgart, showed that here again Hartford led them all. In short, it appeared to be proved that Hartford was spending on the poor more money per capita of population than any other city in the United States, and more than any other in the world, with certain exceptions in Italy, and the noteworthy exceptions of London, $3.75 per capita, and Paris, $3.66 per capita. Hartford, however, outranked even London in its percentage of pauper population, which was 6.2 in Hartford, against 2.46 in London. While in Hartford every sixteenth person was a recipient of municipal bounty, in London the proportion was only one in forty. Paris led all, with one in eight. Investigation of the causes of this deplorable state of affairs revealed an astonishing understanding between the paupers and the officials. Tramps were given residence and support for the sake of their votes on election day. Grocery stores were practically subsidized. Families whose individual members could be made useful politically were supported in outdoor relief. That the showing was so much better for New York and other great American cities was not a proof of greater honesty or wisdom of administration on the part of municipal officials. The difference was almost wholly due to the enormous extension of private as over against public charity outside of typical New England Commonwealths like Connecticut, where the town method of dealing with such matters still holds its own against other forms of philanthropic enterprise. Proof on this point would be overwhelming were we to take the necessary space to present it. One has only to go through the annual reports of the New York State Board of Charities and read the exposures that have repeatedly been made of the state of affairs on the islands of the East River and in the county almshouses of the State to satisfy himself that were the whole burden of supporting the pauper population of this Commonwealth, and especially of this city, thrown upon the public, private enterprise withdrawing from the competition, the appropriations mentioned by Mr. Coler would sink into ridiculous insignificance by comparison. The appropriation of public money to private institutions has become a scandalous abuse, but we shall never understand its strength until we frankly face the fact that the public has been experimenting with it, hoping thus to find a way of escape from the greater abuses that attend the administration of public relief by public agencies except when they are incessantly watched and held up to the broadest light of publicity by the disinterested efforts of private citizens. The omission of this side of the matter from Mr. Coler's discussion may perhaps be regarded as a mere failure to deal with the whole of a very large and difficult problem. But it is more than a mere omission; it is, I think, a positive error, and a serious one, into which the comptroller falls when he lays as much stress as he does upon the expenditure, for salaries and wages, of a large proportion of the sums appropriated by the city for private institutions. The real question here, as all sound experience has repeatedly demonstrated, is not whether the expenditure is for salaries in general rather than for relief. This Mr. Coler practically admits when he says that a great deal of money spent for relief is worse than wasted, because it fosters pauperism instead of repressing it, and when, at the close of his article, he says that he found it necessary to create in his department a bureau to investigate the character of institutions asking aid. This is a frank confession that the expenditure of money for salaries or for wages may be wiser than its expenditure in relief, provided the salaries or wages are earned in actual investigation, which results in exposing fraud and preventing expenditures on improper applicants. This is the very kernel of the whole matter, whether it is a private or a public administration of charity that we are considering. The use of money, public or private, for the payment of salaries that are mere sinecures is dishonesty pure and simple, and neither the comptroller nor any of those private organizations that make it their business to watch and criticise administration can have a more imperative duty than that of putting an end to such corruption. But, on the other hand, there could be no better index of positive progress in solving the practical problems of charity than a steady increase in the ratio of expenditures in salaries and wages on account of investigation and prevention to the amount spent in actual relief. That, in fact, would be an ideal administration of public and private charities in which the efficiency of investigators and the practical sagacity of relieving agents was so high that nearly the whole sum expended had to be charged to their salary account. This is precisely the principle which private organizations like the State Charities Aid Association and the Charity Organization Society have labored in season and out of season to make the public and the officials comprehend. Innumerable exposures of the impostures practiced upon a credulous public by the great class of professional mendicants, tramps, and place seekers have furnished all the evidence that sensible men need to satisfy themselves that large sums expended by the public and by private individuals of charitable proclivities have no other result than that of encouraging pauperism and misery. It is largely due to the tireless efforts of the State Charities Aid Association for many years past that the institutions receiving public moneys in this State have been watched with such vigilance that there is now a strict system of accounting in all of them, and that it has become the duty of the State Board of Charities not only to insist upon such accounting and to carry out a thorough inspection, but also to frame and enforce rules for their government. These criticisms I offer, however, only because, as I said at the outset, I desire to see the fundamental proposition of Mr. Coler's statement strengthened and made to bear practical fruit. It is indeed a very serious question whether the appropriation of public money to private institutions has not become so great an evil that it would be better to put a stop to it once for all. And yet I must confess to a doubt whether, upon a complete survey of all the facts, this would be the judgment of the most practical and far-seeing men. The granting of appropriations gives to the city and the State a reason and an excuse for a strict inspection of organizations that otherwise might do incalculable mischief by preying upon the credulity of a generous public while concealing their actual operations. I therefore am inclined to think that the path of practical wisdom lies through an attempt to perfect the existing co-operation between public and private agencies, and to bring it to a sounder business basis by developing inspection, publicity, and accountability. If private organizations are encouraged to do all in their own power under a system wherein the State grants them aid under strict conditions, lays down necessary rules for their government and guidance, and remorselessly exposes all their transactions, the actual result may be better in the long run than if State and private associations proceeded independently of one another, often duplicating each other's work, or, if not that, working at cross-purposes. RECENT LEGISLATION AGAINST THE DRINK EVIL. BY APPLETON MORGAN. Five years ago it was sought in these pages[1] to discover the cause or causes of the total failure in the United States of prohibitive legislation. [Footnote 1: The Popular Science Monthly for February, 1894.] Our conclusion, so far as a conclusion could be said to have been reached, was that the failure lay in the misapplication of ways to means, rather than of means to ends--namely, that an attempt to abolish the crime (or misdemeanor) of drunkenness by punishing, not the criminal, but the community in which he committed the crime, and to prevent law-breaking by legislating out of existence the neutral instrument which happened to form the particular temptation to the particular law-breaker (or with which he found it convenient to commit the crime), was quite too logical to be practicable; as, for instance, laws abolishing the use of spoons, as so many temptations to housebreakers; or of railways, because trespassers on railway tracks were often killed; or steamboats, because steamboat boilers sometimes burst, would be quite too logical for public convenience. Whence it followed that there was no demand for prohibitive liquor laws, and therefore only failure had resulted from attempting to enforce them. In the five years since that paper was printed almost every one of the United States (in fact, all, with but one exception) have recognized such failure and striven to so recast each its statutes as to plant the responsibility for breach of public order upon the real offender without hardship to the law-abiding classes. The results of these attempts have evolved many novel and unusual contrivances and much curious operation of statutory and statistical wisdom, and some remarkable propositions--so much so that it is believed that an effort to digest them (not by States, but by the principles, or rather by the remedies, attempted) will be interesting consideration for readers of the Popular Science Monthly. If the following summary shall develop two apparent paradoxes--first, that the fewer the places where liquor is sold the larger the consumption of liquor; and, second, that the larger the consumption of liquor the less drunkenness--the present writer can only submit that these paradoxes are not his own, but seem to arise from the official statistics submitted under the oaths of the authorities commissioned to collect them, as hereinafter will more fully appear: Of the forty-nine States and Territories in the United States, the solitary exception above noted is the State of Maine. With a heroism that is actual martyrdom of self-interest and convenience, the State of Maine has clung with imperious tenacity to her policy of absolute prohibition, and to the logic of the report of her citizen, who, sixty-three years ago, carried her first prohibition law through her Legislature. Said that report: "The objection will doubtless be made that had we such a law it could not be enforced. Now, admit the validity of this objection, and it proves the utter hopelessness of the case; for no one, we presume, will venture the supposition that you can accomplish, against law, that which you could not effect with it."[2] [Footnote 2: Report of General James Appleton to the Legislature of Maine, July 15, 1837.] Admitting, as all the world does admit, that the abolition of drunkenness is desirable, against such pitiless, such iron, logic as this, there is no appeal, and from it there is no escape even to-day. But the trouble was, and is, that it is placing an entire Commonwealth in time of peace under martial law. It was in the fitness of things that General Appleton, a soldier, who had seen intoxication in a form most likely to impress him with dangers to the public--i. e., in soldiers to whom the safety of the State in time of war was intrusted--should have brought in the first prohibition law on record;[3] and that, in the teeth of more than two generations of failure, the sovereign State of Maine should have adhered to his martial logic, with the loss of her commerce and the reduction of her census, is a tribute to both the logic of a soldier or the self-insistence of the State which must compel admiration! In sixty-three years Maine has seen her commerce disappear and her population dwindle. She has seen not only her contemporary sister States, but those admitted yesterday and the day before, pass her in affluence and prosperity. But the only remedy for her failure she will listen to the suggestion of is an increased severity of prohibition statutes and an increased crucifixion of her law-abiding citizens, lest one of her own or a single stranger within her gates should obtain a glass of alcoholic compound within her borders. [Footnote 3: General Appleton was commander of the First Brigade of the Second Division of Massachusetts infantry in the War of 1812-1815, his resignation dating 1828.] But, cling as the State of Maine may to the fierce logic of prohibition, it appears that her forty-eight sisters have found its unappealable rigor too rigid, and have modulated it in the diverse ways now to be considered. In these remaining forty-eight States and Territories of the Union the statistics regulating liquor seem to divide themselves, as to the remedies attempted, into ten heads, as follows: I. Abolish all liquor laws except those for revenue. II. Example. III. Education. IV. Government control of all warehousing and sales. V. Regulation of hours for retailing liquors. VI. Refusal of employment to drinkers. Change of pay-day. VII. Personal damage law. VIII. Encourage the use of light wines and beers; remove all duties or imposts on food products; quality inspection. IX. High revenue--national, interstate, or State. X. Local option. For No. I, pure and simple, we have but a single report, perhaps (as of a frontier State) not exemplary, or safe to guide the more interior States, but given exactly for what it may be worth. The Governor of Montana (a State which boasts the bad eminence of having proportionately more liquor-sellers paying license fees than any other State in the Union--having, in fact, one licensed liquor-seller to every fifty-five inhabitants) reports as follows: "Saloons are run wide open night and day; while there is a great deal of drinking there is very little drunkenness, and one in an intoxicated condition is promptly arrested and fined." One other State, however (Louisiana), has the continental idea that liquor laws are for "revenue only." Louisiana, therefore, has an elaborate excise, guiltless of any suggestion of reformative objects. So far as her statistics go, she is the most temperate State in the Union. II. EXAMPLE.--This may be called the apostolic cure--the one laid down by the apostle St. Paul (I Corinthians, viii, 13)--though we find a prominent English ecclesiastic, Dean Hole, on being asked if he was not aware that people ought to abstain for the sake of their example to others, replied: "I have never seen any one converted by example. I have often challenged teetotalers to produce Mr. Jones converted by the example of Mr. Brown, but I am waiting for him. I don't see why I should make a fool of myself because others do." I should not deal with the matter quite so summarily myself. Doubtless the example of a thrifty, wholesome, prosperous laborer, if left (without exhortation or impertinence of third parties) to work upon his dram-drinking, wretched neighbor, might have its laudable effect: such example not being deprived in advance of its value by the fetters of a written pledge which a man's personal pride might force him to ostentatiously observe--or if the exemplary person does not get his living by denouncing liquor--or by the coercion of a Ladies' Temperance Union! But as the person converted by the example would be certain not to parade the fact, no statistics could even then be attainable. The case or cases, if genuine, would be hidden in the consciences of the converts and beyond any marshaling in figures. All we can do is to hope and trust that our good examples may prevail, and that, like the apostle St. Paul (whom our British ecclesiastic begs to differ with), there may be some among us strong enough physically as well as spiritually to say, "If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no meat while the world standeth." These considerations have not, however, deterred certain States from ingrafting example upon the statute-book, as nearly as it could be made a subject of legislation, by enacting that there shall be held before the eye of the possible drinker the spectacle of his neighbors drinking rum: trusting, doubtless, to the rum itself to work a condition in the drinker to afford the example required, and so add to the unestimated but hoped-for good example to bad example at hand. Three States--i. e., Indiana, Michigan, and Utah--and the city of Atlanta, Georgia, by municipal ordinance, provide that the premises on which liquor is retailed by drinks shall have no screen or other obstruction before its windows, so that passers-by may see the drinking which goes on therein and its horrible accompanying circumstances. The reports from these States, however, are not such as to commend this policy of example to universal acceptance. III. EDUCATION.--Within the past four years several States--Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, Nevada--have enacted statutes providing that pupils in the public schools should be particularly instructed in so much at least of the science of toxicology as relates to the uses and abuses of alcohol, and of its effect upon the human system. Such instruction, if honestly imparted by capable teachers and by honest text-books, can not fail to be of the highest value. Capable teachers and honest text-books could not possibly teach, for example, that alcoholic liquors were an unmixed evil, could not deny their medicinal value, or their stimulative aid in fortifying against disease or exposure, or in supplying the waste of age; could not teach (as I gave instances of of fanatical teachings) that it were better to die for the need of a glass of whisky than to have one's life saved by the use of it, or that the use of liquor "destroys both body and soul" (in the teeth of the facts that only the most flagrant and protracted abuse of liquor ever, and that after a long term of years, destroyed a human body, and that statistics as to the soul are not attainable). Much is to be hoped for under this benign instruction. It is not possible that our youth will not miss to acquire much important information, such as that "wine is a good servant if well used"; that total abstinence is a regimen only to be pursued by advice of a physician; that the vast majority of human beings can and do partake moderately of alcoholic liquors, not only without injurious consequences, but with positive benefit; and that, as it is a source of much enjoyment, and much discomfort often springs from its discontinuance, it is difficult to say why such use should be discontinued under ordinary circumstances. Our youth will learn, too, that there are many nations that thrive without alcoholic drinks--nations, for example, professing the Mohammedan faith, to whom alcohol is forbidden by their religion; but that among them the use of stronger narcotics, such as opium and Indian hemp, is extremely common, and the exchange from alcohol to these narcotics can hardly be looked upon as a gain. The result of this State instruction may be confidently looked for, and can not possibly do harm. It is too early as yet to procure data for discussion of the amount of good accomplished by this legislation. We must wait until the adolescent pupil has grown to man's estate, to middle age, until his mortal change, and search his record, and the record of the family he leaves behind him, for the benefits of the paternal legislation. In short, it is exceedingly doubtful if data upon this subject, in the nineteenth century at least, will ever be collected at all. It is noticeable, however, that in the States' scheme of education the peripatetic temperance lecturer, with his lurid colored charts of the human stomach in the horrors of suffering from what he calls "the flowin' bowl," have no place, and no salary is provided for such "university extension" processes. A suggestion lately made in these pages that temperance lecturers as well as liquor dealers being obliged to take out licenses (at least as caterers to the public amusement) is conspicuous by its absence from the educational plan. IV. GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF TRAFFIC.--The idea of a government monopoly in liquor is from continental Europe, and, like most ideas from that source, is paternal and monarchical pure and simple. The idea reached perfection in what is known as the Gothenburg system, which, attracting considerable attention from students of the liquor problem, was introduced into the statutes of Georgia, where after a brief trial it was discarded. The State of South Carolina, however, adopted its principal features, calling it the "dispensary system," and is still maintaining it. The story of the Gothenburg system is as follows: Since the days of Gustavus Adolphus III there had existed in Sweden and Norway a policy making the distillation of a liquor called _bränxin_, or brandy, a right running with the ownership of land first, afterward with a tenancy of land, and ultimately a right secured to tavern-keepers. This brandy being distilled from grain or potatoes, and containing about fifty per cent of alcohol, was cheap, and in consequence of the poor food supply grew into universal use, until not only men and women but very young children drank it. Drunkenness became the rule, and pauperism and crime prevailed in startling proportions, outrunning the range of either charity or police to control them. In this state of affairs a Dr. Wisselgren, Dean of Gothenburg, a Swedish city, arose, and from his exertions grew the famous Gothenburg system. Stripped of detail, this system provides that stock companies called brandy companies shall receive from the crown a monopoly of liquor sales, on condition of maintaining eating houses, reading rooms, lodgings, and other conveniences for the community, and out of surplus profits contribute to the police, the poor, and the educational, funds of the community. The companies shall be under inspection of the royal governor, with no appeal from his discretion, and also under inspection of officers of the three funds entitled to the surplus profits. The companies must close their places of sale on Sundays, can sell only to persons over eighteen years of age, and in the rooms devoted to drinking alone there must be no chairs or settees. After drinking, the purchaser must depart. Such rooms must not be in communication directly with the eating and lodging rooms. In these latter cleanliness and cheapness must prevail, but the company may raise the price and dilute the strength of the brandy sold. With much amendment and revision, this system appears to be to-day substantially in effect, with what good results opinions differ. It was speedily rejected after brief trial in Georgia for a high-license system pure and simple. In South Carolina its introduction from Georgia provoked riot and even bloodshed on account of the right of search which it involved. The main feature is, of course, that the State becomes the real buyer, jobber, and retailer of all ardent spirits. Here it has been found difficult of complete administration, and, unless its success should be more distinguished than at present, it probably is but a short-lived expedient. V. REGULATION OF HOURS OF SALE.--All the liquor-licensing States and Territories regulate the hours of opening and closing drinking places. They all agree in closing them during the small hours (that is, from midnight or one o'clock A. M. until about sunrise or an hour after). It is difficult to all what effect for good or ill these statutes can have upon either the decrease of drunkenness or the increase of revenue. Doubtless they are convenient for the public force of cities or the constabulary of the smaller towns, so that they may know when to be prepared for possible breaking of the public peace. But in no State, so far as we can discover, are they applied to Sunday, the day when, in large cities especially, and in the heated season, the inconvenience of hermetically closed ale and beer houses is most exasperating to the wayfarer, and intolerable and even (from a sanitary standpoint) dangerous to the wage-earning and poorer classes, packed in torrid and fetid tenements on the figment of a danger of "disturbing a public worship" (I say "figment" because no instance of a disturbance of public worship by the sale of liquor can be found in the history of this planet). Why in torrid weather the worthy poor man and his family who can not afford ice-boxes can not quench a natural and normal thirst, and so avoid contracting disease by drinking stale and impure water in the superheated apartments of city tenement houses where an average of three families to a window pane has been said to be the rule, I for one have never been able to comprehend. A good Sunday law, as in London, not allowing but compelling the opening of beer houses on certain hours on Sundays, would be a most desirable thing, especially in our great cities. The fact, too, that at present the streets of our American cities are woefully lacking in other sanitary conveniences, which are only supplied meagerly by an occasional drinking place, would appear an additional reason why a Sunday-opening law would be quite as convenient and quite as welcome as a Sunday-closing law. Such a law would have the effect of at least meeting public convenience, and might well be substituted for the present ridiculous closing laws. Into what legislative intellect it ever first entered to conceive that the cause of temperance would be assisted by closing liquor saloons seven hours out of the twenty-four (and those seven the hours when all Nature, drunk or sober, is asleep) it passes imagination to conjecture. Most Legislatures have followed the first one, however, and enacted such provisions. VI. REFUSAL OF EMPLOYMENT TO PERSONS KNOWN TO BE HABITUAL USERS OF LIQUOR.--In two States--viz., New York and Ohio--clauses have been introduced forbidding the employment by railways and other common carriers of passengers, of persons known to be addicted to the use of intoxicants. In the latter State the common carrier must be notified that such person has been known to be intoxicated while in said carrier's "active" employment, in order to bind the carrier with knowledge. Such a provision as this may be criticised as the Czar of Russia's proposition for a universal disarmament is likely to be criticised--as admirable and millennial, but of no value if gradually adopted, and impossible of instant adoption. No public industry, not even the liquor industry, could cease and disappear in a day without throwing tens of thousands of wage-earners out of employment, and it would be hardship indeed if the family of the drinking man, the toiling wife, scheming to save a morsel of the weekly wages from the dram shop, should be forced to accept the alternative of no wages at all. The suggestion presents, again, a maze of presumption from which, once entered into, no practical exit would present itself. Supposing that no skilled laborer, no finisher, no engineer, no oiler, no fireman, etc., could be found who was a total abstainer for any one factory or railway service, let alone a hundred or a hundred thousand cases? Clearly this discussion could only be pursued as a curiosity (or, say, a fascinating speculation as to the effects of an industrial chaos). The first item in the recipe for making hare stew was to catch your hare. To run our commerce with totally abstaining employees we must find our totally abstaining employees. To pause to create them would bring commerce, and with it society, including the churches, the schools, and the Temperance Unions themselves, to a standstill like that of Joshua's moon in Ajalon! In connection with this employment question, however, a practical suggestion has been made. It is suggested that, as Saturday night is the workman's "night off" and the ensuing Sunday is his holiday, it might work well to make the weekly pay-day of a Monday instead of a Saturday. The experiment is worth a trial. The change could be made abruptly, and the bad half an hour to the workman would occur but once. Let him be handed his wages some Monday morning when the Saturday night's spree and the long Sunday's headache had been novel and conspicuous omissions. The necessity of good shape for Tuesday's stint would prevent a Monday night at the bar room, and the probability is that the wife and family might realize a substantial instead of a marginal proportion of the weekly wage. At any rate, compared with some of the suggestions made for remedying the drink evil, this is superbly sensible. Indeed, one who has not had occasion to examine these matters can have little idea of the absurdity to which otherwise perfectly sane persons will go in combating an evil with which they are very properly impressed, but to the consequences of an abrupt removal of which it has not occurred to them to pay any attention whatever; for example, the seriously proposed law against "treating"--that is, against inviting a friend to "take a drink" with him. Granted that the tippling habit is encouraged by the social instinct, and that the great peril of drunkenness comes (as an old New England farmer expressed it) "not from drinkin', but from drinkin' agin," a law to prevent treating, like a law forbidding a man from inviting his neighbor home to dinner, or his wife inviting the other man's wife over to luncheon, would be obliged to first find its lawgiver. But gentlemen who solve the liquor question are not apt to be particular to find a jurisdiction and a source for the laws they propose. It is interesting to note that in one State (Nevada) an anti-treating law was once actually passed, but repealed, "having proved impracticable" (at least, that is the official record of the reason for its repeal, no particulars being given). VII. THE PERSONAL DAMAGE LAW.--that is, the holding of a seller of liquor to a person known to be dangerous when in drink responsible for damage caused by his intoxication. This principle has now become ingrafted in the laws of seventeen of the United States, sometimes coupled with high license and local option and sometimes not. It is really only an application of the principle of the common law that a man must so use his own as not to injure his neighbor; that communities had the same right to hold a supplier of intoxicants to a violent drinker as a criminal as it had to punish the keeper of a dangerous beast (of a biting dog, for example, knowing it to be such--i. e., if the animal has once bitten a human being or killed a domestic animal kept for revenue, as a cow or a sheep). This civil damage law has been made statutory in many ways. In Ohio the seller is held indefinitely for the "expenses of any one who takes charge of the intoxicated person" after notice to the seller not to sell to that person. In Michigan the damages may be exemplary. In Vermont, if the drunkard is imprisoned the seller must pay two dollars per day to his wife or minor children in addition to suffering an imprisonment. In New Hampshire and Nebraska, and in several other States, a person arrested for drunkenness is given his liberty if he will disclose the name of the person who sold him the liquor on which he became intoxicated. In most of the other States (as in New York) the damages are not limited except by the facts of such case. In New York, too, the preliminary notice is insisted on. In other States (as Idaho) the seller's damage is the loss of his license, if notice not to sell has been properly served upon him. In Arkansas the liquor seller as a condition of his license must give a bond to pay all damages awarded. In Nebraska the seller must give a bond to support all widows and orphans, and pay all legal expenses of prosecution as well as all damage resulting from any intoxication induced by or traceable to his sales. VIII. ENCOURAGE THE USE OF LIGHT WINES AND BEERS.--The suggestion has often been made that this would undoubtedly solve at one swoop a respectable proportion of the problem. The practical difficulty would be to institute the reform in any but the cities and larger towns. Everybody has remarked that, to see the true and distinguished squalor of drunkenness, one must seek the villages, sparsely settled communities, the rural districts whence come the "come-ons," the willing victims of the green-goods men, anxious to cheat their Government (and so, one might say, at least a shade less estimable than the sharper who only proposes to cheat a fellow-citizen). It seems to me that the reason for this difference lies distinctly in the fact that the countryman, who will gratify his appetite for drink, has no choice but the concoction of ardent spirits, high wines, or whatever it is which the local publican sets before him. To him the word "wine" suggests a luxury beyond his venture or his purse. And so for the price at which, in a large city, he could obtain half a bottle, or even a bottle, of wholesome red wine, the consumption of which at a settling would do no possible harm, he throws into his stomach a glass of biting poison, and, horrible to relate, another and another; whereas the whole bottle, or at least the half bottle, probably shared with a neighbor, would have satisfied his craving without ruining his digestion or stealing away his brains. This clause of our discussion runs largely into our IX. But meanwhile here are some figures which may startle prohibitionists as completely as did the figures given in these pages four years ago, which went to prove that habitual drunkards lived longer than total abstainers. (These figures have been strenuously denied in declamation and denouncement. I have yet to learn that any attempt has been made by industry in collection of counter-figures to demonstrate their fallacy.[4]) But here are certain other figures: It appears by the official report of Dr. Nagle to the Health Department of the city of New York for the first thirty-one weeks of the year 1893 (the city then prior to the consolidation or to the present "Raines" law) that in the community (as it then was of 1,765,645 inhabitants) out of 29,080 deaths only twenty-nine were directly traceable to the use of liquor. And this in a community where 10,749 liquor saloons were in operation from sunrise to midnight daily, not to mention the use of wines and liquors in hundreds of hotels and clubs and of wines and malt liquors on tens of thousands of private tables. These figures are startling, and read quite as extravagantly as those quite to the reverse conclusion with which the prohibitionists are wont to appall us. But they are from the official sources, and, unlike the awful figures which show a larger mortality from the use of liquor alone than the mortality from all known causes (liquor included), can be verified by taking the trouble to consult the files of the (New York) City Record. As for the part which drinking wine has to do with this official summary, I may mention the difficulty of approximating to the sales of what may be properly called "light wines." But I have been able to ascertain (as some indication of it, perhaps) that in the fifty-two weeks of this same year (1893) there were consumed in the same city 265,414 cases of champagne! So it would appear that even champagne is a mitigant, rather than an aggravator, of at least the public horrors of drunkenness. [Footnote 4: Perhaps for convenience of reference the figures heretofore found so startling may be repeated. Of 4,234 deaths collected by the British Medical Association, divided for reference into five classes--namely: _a_, total abstainers; _b_, habitually temperate; _c_, careless drinkers; _d_, free drinkers; _e_, habitual drunkards--the ages of death of those in each class were registered, together with the causes of death; and the average of death for each class computed with the following result: Total abstainers lived on an average 51.22 years; Habitually temperate lived on an average 62.13 " Careless drinkers lived on an average 59.67 " Free drinkers lived on an average 57.59 " Habitual drunkards lived on an average 52.03 " To cancel such a statement as this, some industry is required on the other side; at least a collection of 4,234 other cases. Anybody can say that a laboriously tabulated statement is false. But it requires patience to demonstrate it.] I am not unconscious of the fluent answer to these figures. It will be of course urged by the prohibitionist that they only show deaths the "direct" cause of dram-drinking. But such answer is correspondingly unsafe. For, since death, albeit normal to us all comes from some cause (notably from old age, for example), a better formula would be that, since many deaths are caused by old age, and as old age is caused by living too long, we should be careful not to live too long. Hence, as life is prolonged by eating, as well as shortened by drinking (granting that contention), to abstain from the use of food is the only course of wisdom! This encouragement to the drinking of light wines has, so far, only positively found its way into the statute-books of the one essentially wine-growing State, California, though in other States it has made its limited appearance. Nor does there seem to be any reason why every State should not include in its laws such a provision, for example, as that of Oregon (certainly not known as _per se_ a "wine-growing State" at present), which provides that "owners of vineyards may sell their products without license"; or of Utah, which, however, adds to a similar provision that the sale must be in quantities not less than five gallons. Even Kansas provides that wine or cider, grown by the maker for his own use or to be sold for communion purposes, is not within the prohibitions. However, as in most of the States, the price of a license to sell only wines, or wines and beers, is less than the price of a license to sell ardent spirits, it may fairly be said that an encouragement to drinking wines in preference to distilled liquors has become parcel of the public policy in most communities. In Georgia the sellers of wines who are also manufacturers thereof are exempted from paying any license. The State of Michigan is justly proud of its Dairy and Food Commission, which provides for the examination and secures the purity not only of fruits, butter, milk, cheese, but of buckwheat flour, jellies, canned goods, lard, vinegar, coffee, sirups and molasses, chocolate, cocoanuts, baking powder, flavoring extracts, mustard, and other spices. And this same law (elsewhere considered as to adulteration of liquors) seems to encourage light wines by a distinct provision that "the blending of liquors will be permitted if spirits or other ingredients are not added." In Rhode Island, if manufactured from fruit or grain grown in the State, no license is required for the manufacture of cider, wine, or malt liquors; and (with a thrift not uncharacteristic) alcohol, while subject to a heavy license for home consumption, may be produced for exportation without any license at all. IX. REMOVE ALL DUTIES, TAXES, IMPOSTS, OR BURDENS OF ANY SORT ON FOOD PRODUCTS, SERIALS, OR MEATS, in order that the food supply may be unfailing everywhere. Ten years ago the Hon. Edwin Reed, of Boston, Massachusetts, published a pamphlet[5] in which he had the courage to say that, if a man were well fed, liquor could have no terrors for him. "Take care of the eating and the drinking will take care of itself." Repeal all laws that in any degree and on any pretext tend to enhance the market prices, was Mr. Reed's thesis, and he nailed it boldly to the Massachusetts State-House door! Mr. Reed proceeded with figures to remind us that the countries where drunkenness existed to the most alarming degrees were those countries where the masses of the people eat the least, see meat perhaps once or twice a year, and perhaps never; where the year's labor barely suffices to pay the year's taxes!--in Italy, Russia, or Sweden, and parts of Germany, for example, where life is a struggle for bread enough to keep life in the body. The figures Mr. Reed gives are too appalling for an Anglo-Saxon to read calmly. "If Russia," says Mr. Reed, "could reduce her infant mortality to that of Great Britain she would save annually a million of lives. Half the Russian mothers can not nurse their children. The whip and spur of poverty drives them to labor in the fields, where they follow the plow three days after confinement, and where the death rate is forty-eight per thousand.... In France many a factory hand lives on a slice of sour bread for a meal, over which he is fortunate if he can rub an onion to give it flavor.... In Italy, where taxes are imposed to twenty-five per cent of the laborer's income, the average length of life is twenty-seven years, and the whole kingdom is mortgaged to an average of seventeen per cent." In Würtemberg Mr. Reed assures us that "in this garden of Germany the peasant lives on black bread and potatoes with meat only once a year." And even in England Mr. Reed (quoting his authority) declares that the collier breakfasts on bread soaked in hot water and flavored with onion, dines on bread and hard cheese, with sour, thin cider, and sups on potatoes or cabbage greased with a bit of bacon rind. And precisely the identical testimony, varying only the staples of starvation, comes from Switzerland, Poland, and other countries. Now, all this requires something, and that something usually takes the form of something alcoholic. Poor Edgar Allan Poe produced his fascinating prose and marvelous poetry on dinners of herbs, and the well-fed, fat, greasy Honey-thunders and Podsnaps recognize the crime, not in the fact that such a man was left to eat such dinners, but that he took a glass of whisky to keep the life in his poor unnourished body while he wrote. Therefore Mr. Reed would make food as plentiful as Nature has enabled man to make it. In other words, a condition of unfedness requires the human system to crave alcoholic stimulants, and what the human system craves it must find, since the craving becomes functional, and impossible to disregard, _malgre_ laws, systems, or statutes whatsoever. Even the children in Switzerland, says Dr. Schuler (quoted by Mr. Reed), are fed whisky between meals in order to sustain their tiny lives, the low regimen of whose mothers has given them the frailest possible hold on life to live at all. Mr. Reed believes also that, on public grounds, other effort for amelioration should be made by the State, such as shorter hours of labor, two holidays a week, etc. But as to these we will not follow him here. He makes his point, however, and his pamphlet is worth the consideration of philanthropists. It can not be denied that, with the exception of the shorter hours for labor and the general tendency to increase the number of holidays ("Labor Day," Arbor Day, Memorial Day, Lincoln Day, etc.), much of Mr. Reed's theories have got into our statute-books. And the general tendency to ameliorate the condition of the laborer, which is everywhere apparent in the United States, may fairly be alluded to here as among statutory efforts to the universal betterment. [Footnote 5: A New View of the Temperance Question. By Edwin Reed, Boston, 1889.] [_To be concluded._] * * * * * Regarding changes in the language of science, as illustrated in the English Historical Dictionary, C. L. Barnes pointed out, in the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, England, that the words "astronomy" and "astrology" have interchanged meanings since they were first introduced, as is shown by Evelyn's speaking, in his Memoirs, of having dined with "Mr. Flamsteed, the learned astrologer and mathematician." Gaule, in 1652, spoke of chemistry as "a kind of præstigious, cheating, covetous magick"; and even as late as 1812 Bentham spoke of the "unexpressive appellation chemistry" as the single-worded synonym for "idioscopic or crypto-dynamic anthropurgics." Atom originally meant a small interval of time--the 22,564th part of an hour. The word gas was suggested to Van Helmont by the Greek chaos. "I called that vapor gas," he said, "an ancient mystery not long from chaos." Algebra was a branch of mathematics and also the art of bone-setting, and both meanings are still used in Spain. TEACHERS' SCHOOL OF SCIENCE. BY FRANCES ZIRNGIEBEL. "He who would most effectually improve school tuition must find out the most effectual way of improving the teachers. Hence he is the greatest educational benefactor who does most to raise the character and qualifications of the teachers," said John D. Philbrick, late superintendent of the public schools of the city of Boston, in his twenty-third semiannual report. By providing teachers with the best instruction on subjects the teaching of which was at the time of making this report, and is still, unsatisfactory, The Teachers' School of Science of the Boston Society of Natural History has for nearly three decades been a great educational benefactor. It stands unique as an institution which, while doing a great work for many years, has presented nothing of startling nature such as would attract the attention of the general public, and is therefore not so widely known as it deserves to be. During a conversation held at the council room of the Boston Society of Natural History, in 1870, between Prof. Alpheus Hyatt and the late Mr. John C. Cummings, a Boston merchant interested in natural history and curator of the plant collection of the society for twenty odd years, the latter expressed regret that the Lowell lectures for teachers had been discontinued. Professor Hyatt then suggested to him a plan for lectures for teachers exclusively. That afternoon Mr. Cummings gave five hundred dollars for the commencement of such a course, and soon after the matter was brought before a committee consisting of Mr. Cummings, Professor Hyatt, and Professor Niles. [Illustration: ALPHEUS HYATT.] [Illustration: JOHN CUMMINGS.] Under the direction of the committee the courses of lessons were given as follows: physical geography, by Prof. William H. Niles, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; mineralogy, by Mr. W. C. Greenough, of the Providence Normal School; zoölogy, by Prof. Alpheus Hyatt, then custodian of the Boston Society of Natural History; botany, by Dr. W. G. Farlow, of Cambridge--in all thirty-three lessons. These courses were wholly tentative and experimental, but attained success that was most encouraging. [Illustration: WILLIAM H. NILES.] Through the kindness of Professor Runkle, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Huntington Hall, in which so many great scientists have spoken, was opened for the first lesson in geography. Professor Niles here delivered six lectures. "He undertook to give the more general features of the earth's surface, and then to apply these general principles to the explanation of the physical characteristics of Massachusetts." The success of this course may be judged by the average attendance, which was about six hundred teachers of all grades, and by the fact that the teaching of geography in some of the public schools at once underwent a change in favor of the more natural method introduced by him. [Illustration: ON THE RIGHT, BUILDING OF THE BOSTON SOCIETY OF NATURAL HISTORY; ON THE LEFT, ROGERS'S BUILDING OF THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.] "On account of the necessity of actually handling and dissecting specimens, the tickets issued for the succeeding lessons were limited, and at the six lessons on mineralogy and eleven on zoölogy there was an average attendance of about fifty-five. The materials for the course in zoölogy were gathered in sufficient abundance through the extraordinary facilities for collecting marine animals afforded by Prof. S. F. Baird, United States Commissioner of Fisheries; those for the course in botany were furnished with equal readiness and generosity by Prof. Asa Gray from his botanical garden at Cambridge." The society's attempt to introduce natural history into the public schools met with favor at the hands of the superintendent, Mr. Philbrick, and a committee of school principals was appointed, with Mr. James A. Page as chairman, who canvassed the teachers regarding this matter. Accordingly, in October, 1871, a circular was sent to teachers which said that lessons were to be given by "professors familiar with the object methods of teaching and skillful in the use of chalk." Seven hundred teachers signed this circular, and so signified their pleasure at the prospect of receiving such instruction. While Mr. Cummings was generously providing these courses of lectures exclusively for the benefit of teachers, Mr. John A. Lowell, trustee of the Lowell Institute Fund, made liberal provision for free courses on different branches of natural science, to which teachers were specially invited and which were well adapted to their wants, although not intended exclusively for them. During the winter of 1872-'73, on account of the large fire in Boston and the absence of Professor Hyatt in Europe, the lessons in The Teachers' School of Science were necessarily suspended. In the autumn of 1874 they were resumed and supported by renewed donations from Mr. Cummings. Mr. L. S. Burbank gave thirty lessons on minerals, and distributed the specimens used at the lectures among the teachers. These minerals were then used in the schools for instruction. This was virtually the introduction of the teaching of natural science in the public schools of Boston. The following winter Mr. Burbank continued his teaching by giving fourteen lessons in lithology to a class averaging ninety in attendance. One hundred sets of seventy-five specimens each were distributed, and many of these sets placed in collections of the city schools. "A supplementary course of field lessons about Boston was voluntarily conducted by Mr. Burbank, who had in his class this year seventy-five per cent of the members of the class in mineralogy of the previous year. This class included a large number of the busiest teachers of Boston and vicinity, and each member of the class was provided with tools, consisting of a small hammer, magnet, file, streak stone of Arkansas quartzite, a bottle of dilute acid, a glass rod, and the scale of hardness previously used in the mineralogical course." In 1876 women were admitted to the Society of Natural History, and in that way further privileges were granted to teachers. As in previous years, through the liberality of Mr. Cummings, the lessons were continued, and a course of twenty-one lessons in morphological, physiological, and systematic botany was given by Prof. George L. Goodale, of Harvard University. Each lesson was illustrated by specimens which were distributed to the students. The analysis of the flowers and the determination of the peculiarities of floral structure were considered by Professor Goodale an important part of the course. For this purpose blank forms were distributed to the teachers, which enabled each one to pursue his examination of the flower in hand independently, and made it possible for the instructor to cover more ground than would have been practical by any other method. There was an unusually large attendance at these lessons, averaging one hundred. The following year Professor Goodale continued to teach in the school, giving twenty lectures on the principles of systematic botany. Printed synopses of the lectures were placed in the hands of the teachers, and nearly all the large orders of plants were illustrated by specimens or diagrams. The teachers were also provided with dried and named specimens of native plants suitable for private herbaria. About one hundred and fifty sets of these plants were distributed during the course, at which the attendance was even greater than that of the previous year. [Illustration: GEORGE L. GOODALE.] It was at this time that, through the efforts of Miss Lucretia Crocker, the study of zoölogy was introduced into the high schools of Boston, and the study of Nature in the public schools took a definite form. At this time The Teachers' School of Science attained an extraordinary size and importance, a development which was sudden and unexpected. The supervisor of Nature study, Miss Crocker, assured the directors of the school that their assistance would be of great benefit, and in fact essential, to the success of the introduction of this subject into the schools. It was therefore determined to institute appropriate courses upon elementary botany, zoölogy, and mineralogy, if the means of paying the expenses could be raised. Mrs. S. T. Hooper and Miss Crocker undertook a considerable amount of the necessary work, and fortunately their scheme met with substantial appreciation from Mrs. Augustus Hemmenway, who subscribed most liberally, and they were assured of further support and interest. Obstacles arose on account of the number of applicants and the necessity of providing identical specimens for all. The association and sympathy of Mrs. Elizabeth Agassiz with the undertaking was particularly gratifying, since Prof. Louis Agassiz was the first naturalist who ever taught the popular audiences in this country with the specimens in hand. Large sums of money were contributed by women, many members of the Natural History Society, and the teachers themselves joined in making up the necessary fund. The Institute of Technology generously gave the use of Huntington Hall upon the payment of a nominal sum for cleaning and heating. Count Pourtalés, Dr. Hermann Hagan, and Mr. E. C. Hamlin, of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy, which was under the direction of Mr. Alexander Agassiz, at various times assisted by donations from their respective departments. Further assistance in various ways, such as the drawing of zoölogical charts, preparations of models, and donations of specimens, was received from other persons. There were six hundred and sixteen applicants for this winter's course, and the number of specimens distributed did not fall short of one hundred thousand. After an introductory lecture, at which the Superintendent of Public Schools, the President of the Society of Natural History, and the custodian, delivered addresses appropriate to the occasion, Professor Goodale completed a course of six lessons on botany, in which he instructed the whole audience of five hundred. These lessons were followed the same year by twelve on zoölogy by Professor Hyatt, and five on mineralogy by Mr. Burbank, which ended with a geological excursion to Marblehead. These lessons were given to very large classes, and were supplemented by the issuing of pamphlets under the general title of Science Guides. Three numbers--About Pebbles, by Professor Hyatt; A Few Common Plants, by Dr. Goodale; and Commercial and Other Sponges, by Professor Hyatt and others--were published by Messrs. Ginn and Heath, who have since brought out many such helps. After a winter of intense activity there came a period of repose, and no lectures were given the next season. After lying quiet for a year the school once more came into active operation. Mrs. Quincy A. Shaw and Mrs. Augustus Hemmenway showed their sympathy with the efforts on behalf of education by most generously assuming the whole expense of the lessons given that year. Immediate measures were taken to carry out the plan which had been arranged several years before, which consisted in giving a series of lessons which would be a good preparation for a course in physiography. Accordingly, Professor Cross, of the Institute of Technology, was engaged to give eight lessons in physics, Professor Hyatt following with eight on the physical relations of animals to the earth; Professor Goodale gave four treating of plants in the same way, and Mr. W. O. Crosby concluded the course with four lectures on the relations of geological agencies to physiography. The applications for tickets to these lectures so far exceeded the expectations of the committee that they were forced to duplicate them, each speaker repeating his lesson on the same day before a different audience. [Illustration: WILLIAM O. CROSBY.] After this the work of The Teachers' School of Science was taken under the protection of the Lowell Fund, Mr. Augustus Lowell sending word that he would make an annual donation of fifteen hundred dollars. Mr. Lowell allowed the Natural History Society to make engagements and announce lectures one year beforehand, and also gave the use of Huntington Hall. Eighteen lectures were given that winter, under the title of the Lowell Free Lectures in The Teachers' School of Science. Eight of these lectures were on physics, by Professor Cross; five on geology, by Mr. Crosby; five on physiology, by Dr. H. P. Bowditch, of the Harvard Medical School, and all were very successful and well attended by the teachers. The Teachers' School of Science had another branch in active operation, which was courses of laboratory lessons paid for by the teachers themselves. [Illustration: LABORATORY OF THE BOSTON SOCIETY OF NATURAL HISTORY USED BY CLASSES OF THE TEACHERS' SCHOOL OF SCIENCE.] Through the liberality and co-operation of the Woman's Education Association the Society of Natural History was able to announce that a seaside laboratory, under the direction of Professor Hyatt and capable of accommodating a limited number of students, would be open at Annisquam, Massachusetts, from June 5th to September 15th inclusive. The purpose of this laboratory was to afford opportunities for study and observation to the development, anatomy, and habits of common types of marine animals under suitable direction and advice. It was believed that such a laboratory would meet the wants of many teachers who had attended practical lessons in The Teachers' School of Science. Twenty-two persons--ten women and twelve men (nearly double the number expected)--availed themselves of the privileges offered. The summer work, which was very successful, was due to the ability and energy of Mr. B. H. Van Vleck, who had the whole charge of the instruction and work done in the laboratory. The seaside laboratory continued to be used successfully in the same way during seven consecutive summers, and the work of the laboratory materially influenced the future science teaching in several colleges and in many public schools of this country. In 1886 Professor Hyatt called the attention of the Woman's Education Association and the society to the fact that the laboratory had reached a stage when it could claim the support of patrons of science and learning, and be placed on an independent and permanent foundation. The two associations accordingly called a meeting, made up largely of the representative teachers of biology, who decided to make an effort to establish a permanent biological laboratory and raise at least fifteen hundred dollars to carry it on for five years. The result was the foundation of the Marine Biological Laboratory, at Woods Holl, which now attracts to its general courses teachers and other students from all over the land, and also maintains a department for special research work. In 1882 agents were obtained, by correspondence and through the kindness of the Secretary of the State Board of Education, Mr. Dickinson, in forty-four towns, who distributed tickets and filled out blanks so that the benefits of The Teachers' School of Science were extended beyond the limits of Boston. In this year there were two courses, one of ten lessons, by Professor Niles, on physical geography, and five on physiology, by Dr. H. P. Bowditch. These courses began in November and continued throughout the whole year, with a decrease in attendance after the Christmas and April holidays. These lessons were followed by five on elementary chemistry, by Prof. L. M. Norton, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His subjects were as follows: First Principles of Chemistry; the next, Chemistry of Air, Chemistry of Water, Chemistry of Combustion, Chemistry of Metallic Elements. There were also five on Practical Examination, with Simple Apparatus of the Physics and Chemistry of Vegetable Physiology, by Professor Goodale, which were divided as follows: (1) Vegetable Assimilation, the mode in which plants prepare food for themselves and animals; (2) The Kinds of Food Stored in Vegetable Organs, illustrations of the starches, sugars, oils, and albuminoidal matters; (3) How Food is used by Plants and Animals in a Formation of New Parts, mechanics of growth; (4) How Food is Used in Work of all Kinds by Different Organisms; (5) Adaptations of Organisms to Extremes of Heat and Light, chiefly with respect to geographical distribution. This session was concluded with a series of five lessons on Chemical Principles illustrated by Common Minerals, by Professor Crosby. At the beginning of this season there was the usual large attendance, with teachers from thirty towns, but the number was slowly reduced. It was evident to the curator that the decline in attendance was not due to the subjects nor the mode in which they were treated, but from fatigue on the part of the teachers, and this state of affairs caused him to say in his annual report that "proper and wise forethought should long ago have given teachers a portion of every week besides the usual Saturday holiday for the pursuit of information needed for teaching new subjects." He believed that the efficiency of the individual teacher would be greatly increased by this expedient, and that the pupils would gain more than they lost by the shortening of the school hours. At the request of the Superintendent of Schools the curator gave the following year ten lessons, which were directed mainly to the subjects put down in the course of study under the title of Elementary Science Lessons. In his course in Elementary Mineralogy, Professor Crosby followed the plan indicated by Mrs. E. H. Richards in one of the science guides--First Lessons in Minerals. The curator, for his course on Structure and Habits of Worms, Insects, and Vertebrates, used many specimens which had been tanned by a process which was then in use. Over twenty-eight thousand zoölogical specimens were given away in two years. Professor Crosby, with a class of sixty, continued the course of the previous year, giving lessons in the mineralogical laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the specimens there studied were retained by the teachers. In the winter of 1888-'89 Professor Crosby, using for his auditorium Huntington Hall, gave a course of ten lessons on the geology of Boston and vicinity. "The object of the lessons was to acquaint the teachers of Boston and vicinity with natural opportunities by which they are surrounded, and specially to show them how to use these opportunities for their own culture and the benefit of their pupils. The subject was treated in accordance with the following scheme: (1) A general study of the physical features of the Boston basin and of the geological changes now in progress in this region; (2) a systematic study of the various minerals and rocks found in the Boston basin, together with the more characteristic kinds of structure which they exhibit; (3) a summary of the geological history of the district so far as that is plainly recorded in the rocks. The course was freely illustrated by maps and diagrams, also to a large extent by specimens, more than ten thousand of which were distributed. Special pains were taken at every step of the work to indicate the localities where phenomena such as were described in the lessons might be most advantageously studied. This comprehensive course formed suitable preparation for a second series of lessons, the principal object of which was to apply the principles taught by the first series to a thorough and detailed study of the physical history of the Boston basin. Each important locality in the section under consideration formed the subject of a separate lesson, in which its structural features and the more important events of its history were presented. Special attention was given to tracing the relations of the existing surface features of each district to its geological structure, thus connecting the physical geography and geology of the region. These lectures were based on a large amount of original investigation and results reached by Professor Crosby in his studies of the Boston basin." During the winter of 1886-'87 Prof. W. M. Davis delivered a course on Problems in Physical Geographic Classification, treated of in two lessons, and the Laws of the Evolution of the Principal Topographical Types occupied the remainder of the course. Professor Davis gave the class the benefit of the results of his investigations, which were original contributions of importance to the progress of physical geography. "The graphic manner of illustrating the lessons upon the Glacial period and the effects of the great glacier upon the area of the Great Lakes was very effective. This was shown by means of a relief model whose surface was composed of an ingenious arrangement of overlying and differently painted surfaces. By removing these in succession the lecturer traced the whole history of changes following upon the recession of a continental glacier and its effects upon the surface waters.... These lessons were so novel and useful to teachers that he was invited to give a course of ten lessons during the next winter upon the physical geography of the United States. New matter, new models, and more extended illustrations were used in this course. The objects of the course were: To illustrate the value of systematic classification in the study of physical geography in order that forms of similar origin might be grouped together; to advocate the importance of studying the evolution of geographic forms in time, so that forms similar in origin but dissimilar in age (and consequently in degree of development) might be regarded as their natural relations; to apply these principles to the physical geography of our own land; and, finally, to promote the use of models in geographic teaching. The different parts of the country were considered in this order: The mountains as constituting the framework of the continent, the plains and plateaus flanking the mountains, the rivers carrying the waste of the land into the ocean, the lakes temporarily interrupting the transportation of waste to the ocean and retarding the action of the rivers, the shore line where the land dips under the sea." Persons interested in the improvement of the teaching of geography in the public schools suggested to the trustee of the Lowell Institute the advisability of hearing again from Professor Davis, and the curator was requested to invite him to give a course of eight lectures on geography in the autumn and winter of 1897-'98. The subjects treated of in these lessons were selected from among those presented by Professor Davis in his course on geography in the Harvard Summer School, as they afforded material most directly applicable to the work of grammar-school teachers. At the end of each meeting opportunity was given for individual conference on questions suggested by the lectures. This course excited more interest among teachers than any which had been given since the beginning of the school, and it was consequently a serious disappointment to many teachers when it became known that Mr. Lowell did not feel able to re-engage Professor Davis and continue this kind of instruction. The same winter that Professor Davis gave his first course on physical geography Prof. F. W. Putnam, of Harvard University, Curator of Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Anthropology at Cambridge, and now President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, gave lessons on American archæology. The topics selected covered the whole range of the remains of prehistoric man and his life on this continent so far as these subjects could be presented in ten lessons. The original methods of research elaborated by Professor Putnam, which have placed his name among the first in his department of archæological work, rendered this course remarkably interesting and instructive. Specimens were studied and given away in sufficient numbers to illustrate the modes of making stone implements and some of the different kinds of pottery. Professor Putnam invited the teachers to visit the Peabody Museum, and there gave them an opportunity to inspect the larger objects which it had not been possible to bring into the city. The audience became so interested in the famous serpent mound in Ohio, which was then threatened with destruction, that a subscription was started which finally made it possible to purchase and preserve this ancient monument. [Illustration: F. W. PUTNAM.] The winter succeeding the lessons on archæology, Mr. B. H. Van Vleck, who had spent a considerable portion of the previous summer in preparing specimens for this work, gave fifteen lessons on zoölogy. The study of the general morphology of animals was made under advantages such as had never before been offered in this school, and enabled teachers to see and study structures not usually within their reach. The work was mainly directed to the observation and study of a limited number of types, but general points in physiology and anatomy were also taken up in a comparative way. The microscope was also used in this work. This special course was continued during the next two terms. Dr. J. Walter Fewkes gave a series of ten lessons, during the winter of 1890-'91, on Common Marine Animals from Massachusetts Bay. Special attention was given to the mode of life, differences in external forms, local distribution, habitats, methods and proper times to collect the eggs, young, and adults. The anatomy, embryology, and morphology of the species considered were dealt with incidentally. [Illustration: J. WALTER FEWKES.] "The relative abundance of species and individuals, local causes which influenced distribution, the rocky or sandy nature of the shores and their characteristic faunæ, and the influence of depth of water tides and temperature, were also considered." The relations and boundaries of the marine fauna of New England were treated of under the following heads: Comparison of the Fauna of Massachusetts Bay with that of Narragansett Bay and the Bay of Fundy, and Causes of the Differences Observed; Pelagic Animals; Littoral and Shallow-Water Genera; Introduced and Indigenous Marine Animals; and Marine Animals which inhabit both Brackish and Fresh Water. It having been found that for several years the audiences at the general courses had been decreasing, it became evident that the giving of general information had accomplished a mission, but that there was a demand for more specialized courses of study and that a change of policy was warranted. It was therefore determined to abandon the general courses and continue the special prolonged laboratory courses. Since 1891 all lessons have been given either in the form of laboratory lessons or field work, and the school was organized and conducted upon a new and more effective basis. The teachers have been required to keep notebooks and attend examinations in order to be candidates for the certificates which have been, and will continue to be, granted to those who have completed a series of lessons. In the fall of 1890 was begun a course of lessons on paleontology which had been planned for some time but had not been previously undertaken because the teachers lacked the knowledge of the elements of zoölogy and geology which was a necessary preparation for those taking up the study of the history of animals as found in the earth's crust. The members of this class, which now began to make systematic observations upon fossils, were found to be sufficiently prepared to study certain groups which illustrated the laws of evolution. The class was limited in number and was under the instruction of Professor Hyatt, who for five years conducted the most advanced course of lessons ever given in The Teachers' School of Science, and such as have not elsewhere been offered to teachers nor to many classes of college students. The lessons began with general instruction in the use of the microscope, the structure of cells and their union and differentiation into tissues, and then a study of simplest organisms--_Protozoa_. The work was continued through _Porifera_, _Hydrozoa_, and _Actinozoa_, and the types of fossils compared with their living representatives. The periods of occurrence of fossilized remains in the rocks were noted, and the characteristics of the different periods mentioned, but details of stratigraphic character were subordinated to the tracing out of the relations of the animals and the laws which governed the evolution of their forms. Special attention was given to those classes whose history is most complete and which furnish the best specimens for examination. _Echinodermata_, represented by a large number of both living and fossil forms, was made the subject of study the second winter. The common starfish was examined in detail, and with it were compared other members of its class--_Asteroidea_, living and fossil forms in _Ophiuridea_ and _Echinoidea_, the modern _Holothuroidea_, the ancient _Blastoids_ and _Cystoids_, and both extinct and modern _Crinoids_, the last of which were illustrated by alcohol specimens of _Comatula_. Professor Hyatt was assisted in giving these lessons by Miss J. M. Arms, who, in conjunction with him, had previously written the largest of the Science Guides--entitled Insecta--and by Dr. Robert T. Jackson, who has done much work on this group of fossils. One member of the class a few years ago, after receiving these lessons, looked over and prepared a large number of fossils, principally _Crinoids_, belonging to the Natural History Society, and discovered a form of paleozoic _Echinoderm_, which proved to be an interesting new species and was described by Dr. Jackson as _Lepidesthes Wortheni_. The third year of this series consisted of lessons on _Brachiopoda_ exclusively. Professor Hyatt was at that time in correspondence with Dr. C. E. Beecher, of Yale, the distinguished paleontologist, who has made remarkable discoveries and was then investigating _Brachiopoda_, and communications from him regarding this group were from time to time read to the class. "The sudden expansion or the quick evolution in the earlier periods of the earth's history and the slower evolution of the same types in their progressive history, after a period of sudden expansion had been passed through," were shown in several series. The ancestral form of this group, the phylembryo, has been found in _Paterina_, whose adult represents the youngest stage, the beak of the shell, of other _Brachiopods_. There was, therefore, unusual opportunity to here illustrate theories of evolution, particularly the theory of constitutional tendency involving a conception of the youth, maturity, and senescence of species. In order to make the instruction clearer, terms used for the different stages of development by Professor Hyatt in his writings on bioplastology were explained to and used by the class. The many specimens used in this study were carefully figured in the notebooks, and the teachers became so familiar with them that they were able to pass at the end of the term a severe examination. The final test of the season's work consisted of three parts: The passing in of lecture notebooks, the naming and classifying of a dozen fossils selected by the professor, and the answering of a set of difficult questions. On account of the amount of time required for this course, and because the lessons were such as were not directly applicable to work in the public schools, the attendance decreased. The number who continued, however, were those who felt that a broad scientific education is necessary to the best teaching of even elementary science. The fourth year was devoted to _Mollusca_, _Cephalopoda_ in particular, and the class was fortunate in having for its teacher one whose investigations in this latter group have given him world-wide fame. The evolution of the group from its straight radical form, now named and called _Diphragnoceros_, was traced through the bent, curved, and coiled forms of the _Nautiloids_, _Ammonoids_, and _Belamites_. The phylogeny of the _Ammonoids_ presented a complete cycle, late forms entirely uncoiling and presenting the straight characters of their ancestors. The study of _Cephalopods_ amply illustrated the neo-Lamarckian theory of evolution, including the inheritance of acquired characters which is now believed by most paleontologists. The fifth and last year of this course included the study of _Arthropoda_ and _Vertebrata_. The insects presented many illustrations for the theory of natural selection, which the neo-Lamarckians consider an aid, but a subordinate factor, in the origin of species. About this time Poulton gave a series of twelve lectures on animal coloration at the Lowell Institute, drawing his illustrations mainly from insects. Many of the students of The Teachers' School of Science in zoölogy and paleontology attended these lectures. After working on fishes, batrachians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, in which the structural development of some animals--man, for example--was found to be retrogressive and the physiological development progressive, the lessons closed with the study of man's structure as compared with the anthropoid apes and the few remains of prehistoric man, and finally with a discussion of the works of paleolithic man. The teachers who had attended this course throughout the five years and had passed satisfactory examinations have been presented with diplomas testifying to their proficiency. [_To be continued._] PROPER OBJECTS OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. BY EDWARD ORTON, PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY IN OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY; PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. The objects of the American Association for the Advancement of Science are clearly expressed in the opening paragraph of its constitution, which was adopted at its first meeting, held September 20, 1848, in Philadelphia. From that day to this the paragraph referred to has not been modified except by the replacement of three words, viz., "the United States" by a single and more comprehensive word--"America." As here defined, the objects of the association are "to promote intercourse between those who are cultivating science in different parts of America, to give a stronger and more general impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific research in our country, and to procure for the labors of scientific men increased facilities and a wider usefulness." Three distinct elements are included in this general statement, viz.: (1) The cultivation of personal intercourse or acquaintance among the workers in science in this country; (2) the encouragement, extension, and proper direction of scientific research; (3) the gaining of popular recognition and good will for the results of scientific work. These objects may be conveniently summarized as (1) _social_, (2) _scientific_, (3) _practical_. There is nothing in the original paragraph to indicate whether the elements of this threefold division were counted of equal value, or whether they were arranged in either an ascending or descending scale of importance, but from the fact that in the development and expansion of the association during the last fifty years nothing has been added to and nothing subtracted from this general statement, while in many other divisions of the constitution large and sometimes radical changes have been adopted, it seems safe to conclude that the present members of the association see its work and office in very much the same light as its founders did. But, while sailing under the old colors and apparently by the old charts, it is quite possible that the association is, insensibly to itself, undergoing modification more or less important. Such an experience is unavoidable in all human institutions, at least in those that retain their vitality in state, society, or church. The fifty years that cover the life of the association are unquestionably the most important, so far as the growth of science is concerned, in the history of the race. Within this period every science has been recast and rewritten, and divisions and subdivisions of the old units have gone forward and are still in progress. Of every one of these sciences the boundaries have been so enormously extended that even the _dream_ of universal knowledge on the part of any man has gone by, never to return. Leibnitz, it has been said, was the last of the intellectual giants of old who mastered all that was knowable in his day. Alexander von Humboldt could almost claim the same for the knowledge of Nature that was attainable in the first quarter of our century. But since the application of the compound microscope to the study of Nature and the subdivisions of the sciences that have resulted therefrom, and especially since the extension of the method of science to all the branches of anthropology, as language, history, institutions, the task of mastering all that is known is seen to be altogether too great for finite powers and span-long lives. It might well be, therefore, in view of the amazing changes that have taken place in the entire field covered by the association, that it should have outgrown the aims and ambitions of its early days. The fact that it continues to use the identical statement of its objects with which it began its work, while it does not definitely settle the question, affords at least presumptive evidence that no such change has taken place. How, then, do the objects originally recognized by the association as its _raison d'être_ correspond to the needs of our own time? 1. Is the _social_ feature of the association, to which the first place was assigned by the founders, whether by design or not, worthy of preservation by us? In other words, is it as important "to promote intercourse between those who are cultivating science in America" at the close of the nineteenth century as it was at the middle of the century--the need that was responded to by the formation of the American Association for the Advancement of Science? While revolutionary changes have taken place in the country at large during this period in modes of travel, facilities for acquiring education, and the diffusion of intelligence, it would be hard to show why the need in this field should be in any respect less urgent. There is a far larger number of people who are cultivating science, and there are many more branches of science to be cultivated. What particular service is to be expected from such intercourse as the association seeks to provide? The gathering of the workers in the diverse fields of science into a single organization has a tendency to _unify_ them. They find that a common spirit animates them, that they all make use of essentially the same method of research or inquiry, and that the results which they reach all have a common note of certainty, being herewith differentiated from other and older views on the same subjects, as knowledge differs from opinion. They are thus led to see more clearly than they could otherwise see the unity of the universe, that knowledge is one, and that each science is but a facet cut on the crystal sphere of natural truth, touching other facets at many points, and by no means independent, but supported by the integrity of the sphere. Such a gathering tends to an increase of mutual respect and confidence on the part of all engaged in scientific work. It tends to discourage the narrow conceit of the specialist, who, if left entirely to his own tastes, comes to think that his own facet is the only one that deserves to be regarded, and practically to ignore its relation to the sphere of which it constitutes an essential though a minor part. Such an association tends toward making specialists intelligible to each other. In other words, it puts a premium on the art of popularizing science, for when the specialist makes himself intelligible to his brethren in their widely separated fields he makes himself intelligible to all educated men, whether especially trained in science or not. The specialist is under a strong temptation to limit himself to a language of his own, which is an unknown tongue even to the rest of the scientific world. Technical terms, carried out to minute subdivisions, are indispensable in every branch of modern science, but the student of any science is in an evil state who can not present his results to the world without appealing to the technical jargon of the branch which he cultivates. There even seems a reluctance on the part of some to use plain language in stating scientific conclusions, as if the cheapening of science were feared by its being made intelligible. Such a fear is certainly unworthy. The masters have never felt it. In lucidity and directness of speech and in general intelligibility Tyndall, Huxley, and Darwin were not surpassed by any men of their generation. To whom are we as much indebted for the great advance of science in their day as to these very men? If the scientist neglects this popularizing of science, the sciolist is sure to take it up, and his work in this field always makes the judicious grieve. Is there not possible danger that this phase of scientific work and the function of the association corresponding thereto are losing consideration to some extent? But instead of its being true that the scientific work of the country has outgrown the need of the association, is it not rather true that we are in far more urgent need of its unifying agency than even the founders were fifty years ago? We have all the divisions of science that were then recognized, and half as many more. Physics and chemistry could then be classed in one section without offense, and zoölogy and botany were assigned without protest to a single heading. Now, not only does every science demand recognition by and of itself, but all are represented by separate societies as well--as the Mathematical Society, the Chemical Society, the Geological Society, etc. These societies hold meetings, publish bulletins, reports, and sometimes monthly journals, and, in short, aim to cover the entire field for the branches which they represent. They are generally affiliated with the association, and it is becoming usual for them to hold joint summer meetings of society and section. Their annual meetings are held in the winter, and, as their membership is more select than that of the association, standing as it does in all cases for published or recognized work already in evidence, these winter meetings are coming to be preferred for the presentation of technical papers. Those who read them feel sure of "fit audience, though few." These societies are all vigorous and successful. They obviously meet a "felt want" on the part of American science, but just what their effect will be upon the association remains to be determined. Certainly, with these centrifugal tendencies in growing activity, this is not the time for the attraction of our one centripetal force to be relaxed. More than ever do we need such a unifying agency as the association was designed to supply. Some _modus vivendi_ between section and society will doubtless be found. Perhaps the more abstract and technical papers will be reserved for the winter meetings, while those dealing with the larger phases, and especially those pertaining to the philosophy of the subjects discussed, will find their places in the joint meetings of the summer. It would be well if the association meetings of whatever character could be made memorable by the announcement of important discoveries made during the preceding year. The custom of holding back such announcements is said to obtain in the transatlantic national associations, and notably in the British Association, which is the mother of all the rest. Those who were present at the Boston meeting of the American Association will remember the enthusiasm created there by the announcement of the discovery of a new element--etherion. If later discussions have thrown doubt upon the discovery of a new element, the alternative explanation suggested of the facts proves scarcely less interesting or important than the original claim. Whether our eager American workers would be willing to hazard their claims to priority by holding back the announcements of their discoveries for months after they have been made is a question, but the foreign practice in this regard has certainly much to commend it. It would be a calamity of real magnitude to American science if the sectional meetings of the association were abandoned to men who have not done enough approved work to entitle them to places in the several societies already named. The old title--The American Association for the Advancement of Science--might still be retained, it is true, but what a humiliating misnomer it would be if none of the men who _have_ advanced science in the past by their labors and none of those who are prepared to advance it in the future by their training were now included! It would be the omission of the part of Hamlet from the play. The foremost men in all the societies, our leaders in the branches represented there, owe it to themselves, owe it much more to the great name of American science, to maintain and magnify their connection with, their service to, the American Association. At the second meeting of the association it was the illustrious Joseph Henry who called the attention of his brethren to the fact that the organization was, by its very name, consecrated to the _advancement_ of science--to the discovery of new truth. He reminded them that the association was not designed to furnish opportunity for the restatement of what was already known. Its purpose was rather to add to the existing body of knowledge in the world. Let not the hopes of the founders be brought to naught by allowing the organization from which they expected so much to be thus eviscerated! We see, then, that the _social feature_, with what it legitimately includes, deserves to hold as prominent a place among the objects of the association at the end of the century as was given to it by its founders when first established. Two other objects which were deemed worthy of being incorporated into the organic law of the association remain to be considered. To the treatment of each a few words will be devoted. Neither of them commands as high regard from us as they seem to have had at the beginning. 2. The second object of the association as declared by the founders was "to give a stronger and more general impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific research in our country." It is not easy for those who were born after the middle point of the century to think themselves back into the conditions under which the words above quoted were written. At that time there were but two or three schools of science in the United States, and not one west of the seaboard. The degrees of bachelor, master, and doctor of science were unknown. There was but one journal of science published in the country, and foreign scientific journals and reviews, comparatively weak and few at the best, seldom found their way to the New World. The men who cultivated science were widely separated, and for the most part rarely met their peers. As a natural consequence, there must have been more or less misdirected effort. Many a worker must have attacked problems already solved, or have attacked them by inadequate or obsolete methods. How great the changes that fifty years have wrought in this country, in the world indeed, in all these respects! Now there is not a State in the Union that has not at least one fairly equipped school of science, and in some of the older States such schools can be counted by the dozen or the score. These schools are manned by teachers trained at the foremost centers of science in this country and Europe, familiar with all the great problems and with all the most improved methods of research. Moreover, on the library table of every one of these schools are the latest periodicals and special reports of the two continents in which science is cultivated. The untrained and isolated investigator can no longer justify his existence. There is no occasion for the survival of such qualities as these terms imply. This wonderful transformation in educational scope and methods effects to a great degree just what the founders hoped to accomplish through the agency of the association. The ground has thus been cut from under the second of the objects of the association as avowed in its constitution. In other words, while the result aimed at deserved the prominence given to it fifty years ago, it no longer depends on the association for its accomplishment. 3. The third of the objects which the association was organized to accomplish was "to procure for the labors of scientific men increased facilities and a wider usefulness." This clause evidently refers to the endowment of science by founding and equipping institutions, professorships, laboratories, museums, and the like, and to a more cordial and general appreciation of the results of scientific work. In this direction, also, such immense progress has been made in the country at large that the need of special effort in this line no longer exists. Munificent gifts to science from private fortunes are now the order of the day. It is a poor year for science in America when such contributions do not exceed a million dollars. This work was begun in the large way under the elder Agassiz, and the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Cambridge is its first important monument. It has gone forward in the addition of scientific departments worthy of the name to the older institutions of learning, and in the establishment of new institutions wholly devoted to science. Such beneficent use of private wealth, the unparalleled increase of which during the last fifty years has become a matter of grave concern to the whole body politic, does more than anything else can do to reconcile the public to the conditions which make such accumulations possible. Still more significant is the policy which the General Government entered upon, forty years ago, of establishing, in conjunction with the several States, schools of general and applied science. The State colleges and universities thus founded have already become potent factors in American education, and science lies at the heart of them all. It would be hard to overrate their influence on the development of science for time to come. When the American Association was established, fifty years ago, a new day was breaking on the world. The men who were cultivating science then saw something of the conquests over Nature that the new method--the method of science--rendered possible. They were wise in demanding that all who use this method should recognize the common bond. The association was the outcome of that demand. At the end of the century we who have shared in the mighty advance and who have been taught by our experience to discard limitations in the possibilities of the future, feel the same and an even more urgent need of some unifying and interpreting agency for the ever-widening fields to which the method of science is now applied. RACE QUESTIONS IN THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. BY FERDINAND BLUMENTRITTE. When I published my article on the History of Separatism in the Spanish colonies, in the _Deutsche Rundschau_ for July, 1898, I said that the colored peoples of a colony would always be inclined to struggle for the independence of their native country, because the rule of the mother country of the colony makes their access to the highest positions in the state impossible. I declared, further, that in the Philippine Islands the contempt manifested toward the colored tribes by the Spanish press had contributed very much toward making the gulf between rulers and ruled progressively deeper and harder to bridge. The natural conceit and sensitiveness of the colored races in America could never weigh as heavy in the scale as those of the colored Filipinos do, because in America the creoles and their numerously represented crosses were the real upholders of separatist ideas, so that when the idea ripened into an act they held the leading of the movement in their hands. Indians and negroes have there never been more than the _plebs contribuens_, or the tributary class, and "food for cannon." Only in single exceptional cases have leading spirits ever risen from out of these lower castes; and where the separatist movement has been confined to these colored primitive races, as in Haiti, it has led not only to cutting loose from the mother country, but also to a more or less complete renunciation of European civilization. In saying this I cast no condemnation upon the negroes, for, whenever in our civilized states the proletariat and the populace have struck down or cast out all the cultivated and half-cultivated classes, the same sort of "nigger management," with only differences corresponding with the environments, has gained place among us as in the great islands of the Antilles. Very different are the conditions in the Philippine Islands; and, in view of the importance which the "skin question" plays in the conflict raged by the Americans, I think it proper to deal further with this fundamental question of Philippine politics, especially since the journals and the politicians, at least those of America, have given very little attention to the matter. The small number of creoles, of whom, besides, the principal part live in the city of Manila, which the Americans have in their power, would not alone explain why the war of independence and the formation of the Philippine republic must be spoken of as pre-eminently the work of Christian, civilized Malays and mestizos. For there are in America countries, like Paraguay, where the number of whites is even smaller than in the Philippine Islands, and yet the separatist movement and the foundation of the state were the exclusive work of the creoles. Why has it been thus? Because the Indians and the negroes do not possess that inclination toward civilization and that capacity for assimilation that are evident in the colored populations of the Philippine Islands. It is supposed that the Philippine Malays have Japanese blood in their veins; but, all the same, whether the supposition is founded or unfounded, it is certain that not only do they resemble the Japanese more or less in features, but that also many mental traits are common to them with these wide-awake Orientals, and they even excel them in a moral respect. The school statistics show them superior to their Spanish lords. The Filipinos have no larger percentage of illiterates than Spain of those who can not read and write. And, as a bishop exclaimed with astonishment, there are in those islands villages where it would be hard to find a person unable to read. The pressure of the colored people to the higher studies and the special schools far exceeds the percentage which one would anticipate from their proportion to the whole population. And if we add to these those who seek their education in Spain and other foreign countries we shall find Malays and mestizos in the first line, and the creoles in the last. It should be remarked on this point that many more natives would have gone to Europe for education if the Spaniards, and especially the monks, had not perceived conspirators in all Filipinos who studied away from home. The fear of persecution deterred many fathers from sending their sons over the sea. More than ten years ago a prominent monkish writer showed how the professions of medicine and the law were crowded with Malays and mestizos. But besides these two professions and that of the secular clergy the colored Filipinos turned also to engineering and art. With respect to art, I am not thinking of the skillful goldsmiths and silversmiths of Manila, although these artificers are among the best, but I refer to artists of divine gifts, among whom the mestizo F. Resureccion Hidalgo, resident in Paris, and Don Juan Luna, of the tribe of Ilokans of northwestern Luzon, brother of the Philippine minister Antonio Luna, are most conspicuous. Luna is not unknown to us Germans, for the Leipsic _Illustrirte Zeitung_ some time ago published a wood engraving of his great prize-crowned picture Spoliarum. The best testimony to his eminence is the fact that the Spanish Senate honored this artist, who was then living in Paris, with the commission to paint for its chamber a pendant to Padilla's famous picture Boabdil Surrendering the Keys of Granada to the Catholic Queen, and he painted The Battle of Lepanto. And among the Filipino poets the name of the great Tagal, Dr. Rizal, has become known to the whole world through his skill in tragedy. There is no need of mentioning any other names, for those we have given are enough to show that these Malays and mestizos are susceptible of cultivation, and, as Bismarck used to say, "carry a rocket-charge in their bodies."[6] [Footnote 6: Einen Raketensatz im Leibe führen.] As the Spaniards who came to the archipelago were for the most part only monks or officers, trade, so far as it was not in the hands of foreigners, was dependent on the participation of the colored population, particularly of the mestizos. And what of large land ownership the monkish orders had not absorbed likewise belonged for the most part to the colored races. None but foreigners and colored took part in all the great enterprises of the country. The Spaniards only ruled. This position of the colored population in the country was the more perilous to the Spaniards, because the Spanish press, particularly the monkish journals, systematically treated them with scorn, called them anthropoids, and denied their capacity to attain European civilization. The educated Filipinos foamed with rage when spoken to about these attacks upon their race. "Besides," they said, "it makes the color of our skin a stigma with the Spanish lords, and with all Europe too; why thus insult us and in so cowardly a way, when the censorship at Manila makes it impossible for us to defend ourselves?" But all these noisy revilings of their race could only outwardly, not inwardly, disturb the self-esteem of the Malays, because their leading spirits had by critical psychological studies of the white race confirmed the opinion of the simple Tagal peasants that the whites are made out of the same earth as the colored, and that the latter could, under equal conditions, have done as well as they. Only the whites have adopted that lordly code of morals which, like the flag with contraband goods, covers the grossest breaches of right and other outrages, which a white gentleman would not venture, indeed, to commit upon his peers, but which, in the treatment of colored men, belong, so to speak, to good tone, to "European smartness." The educated brown man generally feels in his intercourse with the European that uneasiness, that poorly concealed embarrassment, which the parvenue with us feels in the presence of one of the blue-blooded aristocracy. He feels every instant that the white man's critical eye is upon him, and knows that the criticism will be pitiless and harsh to injustice. He knows, further, that this criticism in every case does not apply only to him, the individual, but that conclusions are drawn at once from his errors, even though they may be only presumed, that are applied to his whole race or caste--conclusions which are never flattering, but always culminate, in agreement with the scorn of the superior, in a severe condemnation. This consciousness of running the gantlet before the eyes of Europeans often causes the brown man to commit mistakes in European society, which refuses to pass him among people whose favor he would be sure to enjoy. The opinion which Europeans living in the tropics form of the brown men is generally unfavorable and unjust to them. We Europeans, or rather our nations and states, already judge one another harshly and in a more than partisan manner, because we see first only the weaknesses, often even only the fancied weaknesses, of our neighbors. How, then, could we expect anything better when a European has to pass an opinion on a brown man? We should not forget that only those Europeans go to the tropics who display special energy and force of will--a kind of chosen lot among our race--while the natives there include all the levels of the people. If we add to this that all the Europeans believe in their own superiority and in the inferiority of the brown men, it will seem quite natural that when the Europeans begin to make comparisons between themselves and the natives the comparisons will always be flattering to those who make them. In the Philippine Islands, on the other hand, the reaction of the natives against this extreme self-conceit of the whites has been making itself felt for more than twenty years. This has come to pass since the philosophical heads among them have carefully studied the whites in the various countries of Europe, and have in consequence lost faith in the divine likeness of the Caucasians. Single examples of the studies of these men have been published, such as that of the war minister of the Philippine republic, Don Antonio Luna, a pure-blooded Malay like his brother the painter. Luna studied in Spain and in Paris (under Pasteur), and lived a little while in England, so that he had opportunities to become acquainted with three civilized nations at their home. His literary works are represented to us in the garb of novels and _feuilletons_, the sarcasm of which, while it certainly escapes the uninitiated European, will be all the more effective and precious upon those who are acquainted with the purpose of the brilliant author, which is to satirize the depreciatory accounts by European travelers of the land and people of the Philippine Islands. This he does by telling of his rummaging through the critics' home and finding all the weaknesses and faults which are accredited to the brown men as signs of their incapacity no less prevalent in Europe than in the Philippine archipelago; and arguing that therefore the whites and the browns differ only in the color of their skin, in build, and in language, but not in mind. If space allowed I should be glad to follow my inclination to repeat some of Luna's descriptions, which are given in a style that reminds one of Maupassant's. I shall only say that Luna has drawn within the circle of his observations the movements of all classes in the aristocratic saloon and in the workman's beerhouse, and remarks that everything that has been charged against the brown man appears likewise in the European. The first sketch is excellent. European travelers speak in their works of the "stupid staring" at their white-skinned, thoughtful faces by the "brown savages." Luna, whose pen-name is Taga-ilog,[7] parodies these stories by simply relating that on his arrival in Europe and during his earlier residence there the people on the streets stared at him, and some of the boys threw stones or stuck out their tongues at him. He did not, however, care for that, while he expected that the better circles would convince him of the superiority and the innate tact of the lordly race by their more refined behavior. But it did not turn out so. He saw the ladies in the saloons tittering behind their fans and making merry over "the queer man." And then at the table! How plain was the expression of astonishment among the gentlemen of the saloons that the brown man behaved in his eating just as the whites did! They had apparently anticipated that the "black" would act as if he were tearing live pigeons to pieces and swallowing them. The indolence of the Europeans is shown up no less amusingly. Luna finds it apparent in all conditions, prevailing in the highest and the lowest social strata. He asks what would become of the industry and activity of the European peoples if they were suddenly given the climate and the fruitfulness of his native land. These two examples are all we can give. Likewise interesting are the studies of my Tagalog friends Don Marcelo H. del Pilar and Don Mariano Ponce. The former, an advocate from the province of Bulakan, in the island of Luzon, and a descendant of King Lakandola, of Manila, was the leader of the Reformist party and the chief editor of the journal _La Solidaridad_, published in Madrid, which he directed with a remarkable skill that was recognized by his opponents. He died in Barcelona in the summer of 1896. His compeer, Ponce, is now living in Japan and is no less distinguished than Pilar for his keen wit and his zeal in research. [Footnote 7: From over the water; or it may be derived from Ilokos, or Tagal.] These two Malay jurists carefully examined the criminal records of Europe. Why? Because, whenever an extraordinary or especially heinous crime was committed in the Philippine Islands, the Spaniards were accustomed to use it to confirm their conclusions as to the innate inferiority of the Malay race. "That could occur only among a people of inferior intelligence," was their standing phrase. Del Pilar and Ponce gathered the accounts of trials from the European journals, and were able to reply to the Spaniards quietly: "No, that is not so. All these crimes occur among you Europeans, and relatively more frequently than with us. Your conclusion is therefore false, or else you too have a defective intelligence such as you ascribe to us." Del Pilar, from his studies of the colonial enterprises of all peoples, came to the conclusion that "the Europeans founded most of their colonies at a time when the holding in vassalage of men of their own race by whites and the slavery of negroes and Indians were not regarded as offenses. If, now, we look at colonies in which, as in the Philippine Islands, agricultural populations are living with a civilization of their own, the development of the native races will depend on their religion. In a colony where Islam or a dogmatized heathen religion prevails no assimilation between Europeans and natives can take place. It is otherwise in countries like the Philippines, where the natives accepted Christianity at a time when religion had more importance among Europeans than now; a common basis was formed for the co-operation of both parts, the whites and the colored. But the circumstance that rulers and ruled had the same religion and the same official language may have led directly to another evil--that the colors became marks of condition, the whites being the Spartans, the mestizos the perioikoi, and the colored men the helots or servile people. So long as no pressure toward higher ambitions occurred from among those of the perioikoi and the helot grades, and so long as the whites were able to keep their prestige freely recognized by their dependents, the view of the whites, that the colored were both socially and intellectually a lower caste, seemed to be justified. The case has been different in the present century, especially in the second half of it. People of our (Philippine) race attended the high schools, appropriated to themselves the civilization and the knowledge of the whites, and still the brand of inferiority stuck to them. And this happened, too, when the quality of the whites had deteriorated. They were no longer exclusively _señors_, but there came bankrupted Spaniards or those of the lowest classes into the country, among them persons who could not read and write, who should be rated as beneath our school-trained people. And yet these illiterates claimed, by virtue of their color, to be respected as lords of the land, an absurdity which left the idea of 'European prestige' without justification, for how could beggars, spongers, bummers, rowdies, and illiterates impress anybody? The decent Spaniards committed the mistake of avowing their solidarity with the sorry fellows of their caste, instead of rejecting them and holding aloof from them and sending them back to Spain. So the Spaniards have brought it to pass, through a mistaken policy, that the Filipinos on their side, too, throw the good elements of the Spanish population into the same pot with the foul. Another reason why a Spanish prestige can not be thought of among us is that, with the exception of the tobacco companies, all the great enterprises in our country are carried on by foreigners and Filipinos. We owe all that is called progress not to the Spaniards, but to our own force or to foreigners." When the painter Juan Luna attracted so much attention with his picture Spoliarum it was not known that the artist was a Malay, and the work was therefore regarded and criticised from a purely artistic point of view. But as soon as the race of the painter became known, European prejudice made itself manifest. It was said that the choice of a tragic subject could unquestionably be traced back to the descent of the artist from "savages." But when did artists of the white race ever shrink from such subjects? Luna has had cause enough to complain of European injustice. The natives are charged with not being independent in art. "They can only imitate," it is said. But how many European nations one would have to strike out of the list of the civilized if that title is to belong only to those which have an art of their own! It should not be forgotten that the Spaniards have, during their three hundred years' rule, impressed a Spanish mark on the native artistic tendencies. The ethnographer who is acquainted with the woven and carved designs of the heathen tribes which have remained free from the Spaniards and from Christian civilization will certainly not be able to deny that the Malays of the Philippine Islands have a great talent for ornamental art. But if the reproach is cast against the Filipinos that they have tried to Europeanize themselves in plastic art as well as in music, they have not done differently from the Europeans--that is, they denationalize themselves and come into the great international circle of civilization, a thing that can hardly be charged as a sin against them. It is very remarkable, they say, that Europeans condemn in the Filipinos, as a mark of inferiority that which they regard in themselves as a sign of progress. Rizal also has spoken of the injustice of the judgments which Europeans pass upon Philippine conditions. I have published his views on this subject in the tenth volume of the _Internationalen Archivs für Ethnographie_, and will therefore on the present occasion only give a sketch of them, with a few additional observations to complement them. Dr. Rizal says that most Europeans judge the natives from their servants, which would be as false as if anybody should form his conception of the German people from the complaints which German housewives are always ready to make concerning their domestics. At one time while he was visiting me we strolled out of town. He gathered some wild flowers and asked me their names. I had to confess respecting many of them that I knew neither their common nor their botanical names. He laughed and said: "Well, you are a cit; let us ask a countryman." We met a peasant, but he could not give us any information about any of the flowers. "Why," Rizal said, "is this the first time you ever saw the flowers?" The peasant replied that he knew the flowers very well, but did not know what they were called. When the countryman had gone, Rizal said to me: "How fortunate you Europeans are as compared with us poor Tagals! If such an experience as I have just gone through should happen to a European among us he would write in his notebook that 'the stupidity of these people shows itself in the fact that they do not know or have no names for many of the flowers which they see every day and tread upon with their clumsy feet. What can not be eaten or put to some immediate use has very little value or interest to these fellows, and such dull-witted folk as these want reform and autonomy!' And he would be only a modest traveler. Another one would write a whole chapter over the incident, as illustrating the inferiority of all our people." I might continue at greater length on this theme, but I believe that the reader will sufficiently apprehend from what I have said that the European and American whites have not made a good impression on the colored Filipinos, and that the Philippine creoles feel as one with their colored brethren; that there is no spirit of caste in the matter like that which existed in the old colonial times, but they all call themselves simply Filipinos, and that the rule of the American Anglo-Saxons, who regard even the creoles as a kind of "niggers," would be looked upon by educated Filipinos of all castes as a supreme loss of civic rights.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Deutsche Rundschau._ DO ANIMALS REASON? BY EDWARD THORNDIKE, PH. D. Probably every reader who owns a dog or cat has already answered the question which forms our title, and the chance is ten to one that he has answered, "Yes." In spite of the declarations of the psychologists from Descartes to Lloyd Morgan, the man who likes his dog and the woman who pets a cat persist in the belief that their pets carry on thinking processes similar, at least in kind, to our own. And if one has nothing more to say for the opposite view than the stock arguments of the psychologists, he will make few converts. A series of experiments carried on for two years have, I hope, given me some things more to say--some things which may interest the believer in reason in animals, even if they do not convert him. In trying to find out what sort of thinking animals were capable of I adopted a novel but very simple method. Dogs and cats were shut up, when hungry, in inclosures from which they could escape by performing some simple act, such as pulling a wire loop, stepping on a platform or lever, clawing down a string stretched across the inclosure, turning a wooden button, etc. In each case the act set in play some simple mechanism which opened the door. A piece of fish or meat outside the inclosure furnished the motive for their attempts to escape. The inclosures for the cats were wooden boxes, in shape and appearance like the one pictured in Fig. 1, and were about 20 � 15 � 12 inches in size. The boxes for the dogs (who were rather small, weighing on the average about thirty pounds) were about 40 � 22 � 22. By means of such experiments we put animals in situations seeming almost sure to call forth any reasoning powers they possess. On the days when the experiments were taking place they were practically utterly hungry, and so had the best reasons for making every effort to escape. As a fact, their conduct when shut up in these boxes showed the utmost eagerness to get out and get at the much-needed food. Moreover, the actions required and the thinking involved are such as the stories told about intelligent animals credit them with, and, on the other hand, are not far removed from the acts and feelings required in the ordinary course of animal life. It would be foolish to deny reason to an animal because he failed to do something (e. g., a mathematical computation) which in the nature of his life he would never be likely to think about, or which his bones and muscles were not fitted to perform, or which, even by those who credit him with reason, he is never supposed to do. So the experiments were arranged with a view of giving reasoning every chance to display itself if it existed. [Illustration: FIG. 1.] What, now, would we expect to observe if a _reasoning_ animal, who is surely eager to get out, is put, for example, into a box with a door arranged so as to fall open when a wooden button holding it at the top (on the inside) is turned from its vertical to a horizontal position? We should expect that he would first try to claw the whole box apart or to crawl out between the bars. He would soon realize the futility of this and stop to consider. He might then think of the button as being the vital point, or of having seen doors open when buttons were turned. He might then poke or claw it around. If after he had eaten the bit of fish outside he was immediately put in the box again he ought to remember what he had done before, and at once attack the button, and so ever after. It might very well be that he would not, when in the box for the first time, be able to reason out the way to escape. But suppose that, in clawing, biting, trying to crawl through holes, etc., he happened to turn the button and so escape. He ought, then, if at once put in again, this time to perform deliberately the act which he had in the first trial hit upon accidentally. This one would expect to see if the animal _did_ reason. What do we really see? To save time we may confine ourselves to a description of the twelve cats experimented with, adding now that the dogs presented no difference in behavior which would modify our conclusions. The behavior of all but No. 11 and No. 13 was practically the same. When put into the box the cat would show evident signs of discomfort and of an impulse to escape from confinement. It tries to squeeze through any opening; it claws and bites at the bars; it thrusts its paws out through any opening, and claws at everything it reaches; it continues its efforts when it strikes anything loose and shaky; it may claw at things in the box. The vigor with which it struggles is extraordinary. For eight or ten minutes it will claw and bite and squeeze incessantly. With No. 13, an old cat, and No. 11, an uncommonly sluggish cat, the behavior was different. They did not struggle vigorously or continually. (In the experiments it was found that these two would stay quietly in the box for hours, and I therefore let them out myself a few times, so that they might associate the fact of being outside with the fact of eating, and so desire to escape. When this was done, they tried to get out like the rest.) In all cases the instinctive struggle is likely to succeed in leading the cat accidentally to turn the button and so escape, for the cat claws and bites all over the box. These general clawings, bitings, and squeezings are of course instinctive, not premeditated. The cats will do the same if in a box with absolutely no chance for escape, or in a basket without even an opening--will do them, that is, when they are the foolishest things to do. The cats do these acts for just the same reason that they suck when young, propagate when older, or eat meat when they smell it. Each of the twelve cats was tried in a number of different boxes, and in no case did I see anything that even looked like thoughtful contemplation of the situation or deliberation over possible ways of winning freedom. Furthermore, in every case any cat who had thus accidentally hit upon the proper act was, after he had eaten the bit of fish outside, immediately put back into the box. Did he then think of how he had got out before, and at once or after a time of thinking repeat the act? By no means. He bursts out into the same instinctive activities as before, and may even fail this time to get out at all, or until a much _longer_ period of miscellaneous scrabbling at last happens to include the particular clawing or poking which works the mechanism. If one repeats the process, keeps putting the cat back into the box after each success, the amount of the useless action gradually decreases, the right movement is made sooner and sooner, until finally it is done as soon as the cat is put in. This sort of a history is not the history of a reasoning animal. It is the history of an animal who meets a certain situation with a lot of instinctive acts. Included without design among these acts is one which brings freedom and food. The pleasurable result of this one gradually stamps it in in connection with the situation "confinement in that box," while their failure to result in any pleasure gradually stamps out all the useless bitings, clawings, and squeezings. Thus, little by little, the one act becomes more and more likely to be done in that situation, while the others slowly vanish. This history represents the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness. [Illustration: FIG. 2.] [Illustration: FIG. 3.] We can express graphically the difference between the conduct of a reasoning animal and that of these dogs and cats by means of a time-curve. If, for instance, we let perpendiculars to a horizontal line represent each one trial in the box, and let their heights represent in each trial the time it took the animal to escape (each three millimetres equaling ten seconds), the accompanying figure (Fig. 2) will tell the story of a cat which, when first put in, took sixty seconds to get out; in the second trial, eighty; in the third, fifty; in the fourth, sixty; in the fifth, fifty; in the sixth, forty, etc. This figure represents what did actually happen with one cat in learning a very easy act. Suppose the cat had, after the third accidental success, been able to reason. She would then have the next time and in all succeeding times performed the act as soon as put in, and the figure would have been such as we see in Fig. 3. The thing is still clearer if, instead of drawing in the perpendiculars, we draw only a line joining their tops. Fig. 4 shows, then, the curve for the real history, and Fig. 5 shows the abrupt descent, due to a rational comprehension of the situation. I kept an accurate record of the time, in seconds, taken in every trial by every cat in every box, and in them all there appears no evidence for the presence of even the little reasoning that "what let me out of this box three seconds ago will let me out now." Surely, if an animal could reason he would, after ten or eleven accidental successes, think what he had been doing, and at the eleventh or twelfth trial would at once perform the act. But no! The slope of the curves, as one may see in the specimens shown in Fig. 6, is always gradual. So, in saying that the behavior of the animals throughout the experiments gave no sign of the presence of reasoning I am not giving a personal opinion, but the impartial evidence of an unprejudiced watch. The curves given in Fig. 6 are for cats learning to escape from the box already described, whose door was held by a wooden button on the inside. [Illustration: FIG. 4.] [Illustration: FIG. 5.] [Illustration: FIG. 6.] Some one may object that, true as all this may be, the intelligent acts reported of animals are in many cases such as could not have happened in this way by accident. These anecdotes of apparent comprehension and inference are really the only argument which the believers in reason have presented. Its whole substance vanishes if, as a matter of fact, animals can do these supposed intelligent acts in the course of instinctive struggling. They certainly can and do. I purposely chose, for experiments, two of the most intelligent performances described by Romanes in his Animal Intelligence--namely, the act of opening a door by depressing the thumb-piece of an ordinary thumb-latch and the opening of a window by turning a swivel (see pp. 420-422 and p. 425 of Animal Intelligence, by G. J. Romanes). Here I may quote from the detailed report of my experiments (Monograph Supplement to the Psychological Review, No. 8): "G was a box 29 � 20-1/2 � 22-1/2, with a door 29 � 12 hinged on the left side of the box (looking from within), and kept closed by an ordinary thumb-latch placed fifteen inches from the floor. The remainder of the front of the box was closed in by wooden bars. The door was a wooden frame covered with screening. It was _not_ arranged so as to open as soon as the latch was lifted, but required a force of four hundred grammes, even when applied to the best advantage. The bar of the thumb-latch, moreover, would fall back into place again unless the door were pushed out at least a little. Eight cats (Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 13) were, one at a time, left in this thumb-latch box. All exhibited the customary instinctive clawings and squeezings and bitings. Out of the eight, _all succeeded, in the course of their vigorous struggles, in pressing down the thumb-piece_, so that if the door had been free to swing open they could have escaped. Six succeeded in pushing both thumb-piece down and door out, so that the bar did not fall back into its place. Of these, _five succeeded in also later pushing the door open, so that they escaped and got the fish outside_. Of these, three, after about fifty trials, associated the complicated movements required with the sight of the interior of the box so firmly that they attacked the thumb-latch the moment they were put in." In the cases of No. 1 and No. 6 the combination of accidents required was enough to make their successes somewhat rare. Consequently weariness and failure offset the occasional pleasure of getting food, and after succeeding four and ten times respectively they never again succeeded, though given numerous opportunities. Their cases are almost a perfect proof of the claim that accident, not inference, makes animals open doors. For they hit upon the thing several times, but did not know enough to profit even by these experiences, and so failed to open the door the fifth and eleventh times. Accident is equally capable of helping a cat escape from an inclosure whose door is held by a swivel. "Out of six cats who were put in the box whose door opened by a button, _not one failed_, in the course of its impulsive activity, to push the button around. Sometimes it was clawed one side from below; sometimes vigorous pressure on the top turned it around; sometimes it was pushed up by the nose. No cat who was given repeated trials failed to form a perfect association between the sight of the interior of that box and the proper movements." If, then, three cats out of eight can escape from a small box by accidentally operating a thumb-latch, one cat in a hundred may easily escape from a room by accident. If one hundred per cent of all cats are sure to sooner or later turn a button around when in a small box, one cat in a thousand may well escape from a room by accidentally turning a swivel around. So far we have seen that when put in situations calculated to call forth any thinking powers which they possess, the animal's conduct still shows no signs of anything beyond the accidental formation of an association between the sight of the interior of the box and the impulse to a certain act, and the subsequent complete establishment of this association because of the power of pleasure to stamp in any process which leads to it. We have also seen that samples of the acts which have been supposed by advocates of the reason theory to require reasoning for their accomplishment turn out to be readily accomplished by the accidental success of instinctive impulses. The decision that animals do not possess the higher mental processes is re-enforced by several other lines of experiment--for example, by some experiments on imitation. The details of these experiments I will not take the time to describe. Suffice it to say that cats and dogs were given a chance to see one of their fellows free himself from confinement and gain food by performing some simple act. In each case they were where they could see him do this from fifty to one hundred and fifty times, and did actually watch his actions closely from ten to forty times. After every ten chances to learn from seeing him, they were put into the same inclosure and observed carefully, in order to see whether they would, from having so often seen the act done, know enough to do it themselves, or at least to try to do it. In this they signally failed. Those who had failed previously to hit upon the thing accidentally never learned it later from seeing it done. Those who were given a chance to imitate acts which accident would sooner or later have taught them learned the acts no more quickly than if they had never seen the other animal do it the score or more of times. The animals, that is, could not master the simple inference that if, in a certain situation, that fellow-cat of mine performs a certain act and gets fish, I, in the same situation, may get fish by performing that act. They did not think enough to profit by the observation of their fellows, no matter how many chances for such observation were given them. Equally corroborative of our first position are the results of still another set of experiments. Here the dogs and cats were put through the proper movement from twenty-five to one hundred times, being left in the box after every five or ten trials and watched to see if they would not be able at least to realize that the act which they had just been made to do and which had resulted in liberation and food was the proper act to be done. For instance, a dog would be put in a box the door of which would fall open when a loop of string hanging outside the box was clawed down an inch or so. Animals were taken who had, when left to themselves, failed to be led to this particular act by their general instinctive activities. After two minutes I would put in my arm, take the dog's paw, hold it out between the bars, and, inserting it in the loop, pull the loop down. The dog would of course then go out and eat the bit of meat. After repeating this ten times (in some cases five) I would put the dog in and leave him to his own devices. If, as was always the case, he failed in ten or twenty minutes to profit by my teaching I would take him out, but would not feed him. After a half hour or so I would recommence my attempts to show the dog what needed to be done. This would be kept up for two or three days, until he had shown his utter inability to get the notion of doing for himself what he had been made to do a hundred or more times. The mental process required here need not be so high a one as inference or reasoning, but surely any animal possessing those would, after seeing and feeling his paw pull a loop down a hundred times with such good results, have known enough to do it himself. None of my animals did know enough. Those who did not in ten or twelve trials hit upon an act by accident could never be taught that act by being put through it. And, as in the case of imitation, acts of such a sort as would be surely learned by virtue of accidental success were not learned a whit sooner or more easily when I thus showed them to the animal. An interesting supplement to these facts is found in the following answers to some questions which I sent to the trainer of one of the most remarkable trick-performing horses now exhibited on the stage. The counting tricks done by this horse had been quoted to me by a friend as impossible of explanation unless the horse could be educated by being put through the right number of movements in connection with the different signals. _Question 1._--If you wished to teach a horse to tap seven times with his hoof when you asked him "How many days are there in a week?" would you teach him by taking his leg and making him go through the motions? _Answer._--"No!" _Question 2._--Do you think you _could_ teach him that way, even if naturally you would take some other way? _Answer._--"I do not think I could." _Question 3._--How would you teach him? _Answer._--"You put figure 2 on the blackboard and _touch him, on the leg_ twice with a cane, and so on." The counting tricks of trained horses seem to us marvelous because we are not acquainted with the simple but important fact that a horse instinctively raises his hoof when one pricks or taps his leg in a certain place. Just as once given, the cat's instinct to claw, squeeze, etc., you can readily get a cat to open doors by working latches or turning buttons, so, once given this simple reflex of raising the hoof, you can, by ingenuity and patience, get a horse to do almost any number of counting tricks. Probably any one who still feels confident that animals reason will not be shaken by any further evidence. Still, it will pay any one who cares to make scientific his notions about animal consciousness to notice the results of two sets of experiments not yet mentioned. The first set was concerned with the way animals learn to perform a compound act. Boxes were arranged so that two or three different things had to be done before the door would fall open. For instance, in one case the cat or dog had to step on a platform, reach up between the bars over the top of the box and claw down a string running across them, and finally push its paw out beside the door to claw down a bar which held it. The animal's instinctive impulses do often lead it to accidentally perform these several acts one after another, and repeated accidental successes do in some of these cases cause the acts to be done at last in fairly quick succession. But we see clearly that the acts are not thought about or done with anything like a rational comprehension of the situation, for the time taken to learn the thing is much longer than all three elements would take if tackled separately; and even after the animal has reached a minimum time in doing the acts, he does not do the things in the same order, and often repeats one of the acts over and over again, though it has already attained its end. The second set comprised experiments on the so-called "memory" of animals. I will describe only one out of many which agree with it. A kitten had been trained to the habit of climbing the wire-netting front of its cage whenever I approached. I then trained her to climb up at the words "I must feed those cats." This was done by uttering them and then in ten seconds going up to the cage and holding a bit of fish to her at its top. After this had been done about forty times she reached a point where she would climb up at the signal about fifty per cent of the times. I then introduced a new element by sometimes saying, "I must feed those cats," as before, and feeding her, and at other times saying, "I will not feed them," and remaining still in my chair. At first the kitten felt no difference, and would climb up just as often at the wrong signal as at the right. But gradually (it took about four hundred and fifty trials) the failure to get any pleasure from the act of climbing up at the wrong signal stamped out the impulse to do so, while the pleasure sequent upon the act of climbing up at the other signal made that her invariable response to it. Here, as elsewhere, the absence of reason was shown by the cat's failure at any point in these hundreds of trials to think about the matter, and make the easy inference that one set of sounds meant food, while the other did not. But still better proof appears in what is to follow. After an interval of eighty days I tried her again to see how permanent the association between the signal and act was. It was permanent to the extent that what took three hundred and eighty trials before took only fifty this time, for after fifty trials with the "I will not feed them" signal, mixed up with a lot of the other, the cat once more attained perfect discrimination. But it was not permanent in the sense that the cat at the first or tenth or twentieth trial felt, as a remembering, reasoning consciousness surely ought to feel, "Why, that lot of sounds means that he won't come up with fish." For instead of at first forgetting and for a while climbing up at the _I will not feed them_, and then remembering its previous experience and at once stopping the performance it had before learned was useless, the cat simply went through the same gradual decreasing of the percentage of wrong responses until finally it always responded rightly. What has so far been said is true regardless of any prejudice or incompetence on my part, for the proof in all cases rests not on my observation, but on impartial time records or such matters of fact as the escape or nonescape, the climbing or not-climbing of the animals. I may add that in a life among these animals of six months for from four to eight hours a day I never saw any acts which even _seemed_ to show reasoning powers, and did see numerous acts unmentioned here which pointed clearly to their absence. All that is left for the fond owner of a supposedly rational animal to say is that though the average animal, the typical dog or cat, is by these experiments shown to be devoid of reasoning power, yet _his_ dog or _her_ cat is far above the average level, and is therefore to be judged by itself. He may claim that just because my average animals failed to infer, we have no right to deny inference to all, particularly to his. Is it not fair to ask such a one to repeat my experiments with his supposedly superior animal? Until he does and systematically tries to find out how its mind works and what it is capable of, has he any right to bear witness? It may also be said that of the number of people who witnessed the performances of my animals after they had fully learned a lot of these acts, but had not seen the method of acquisition, all unanimously wondered at their wonderful intellectual powers. "How _do_ you teach them?" "Where did you get such bright animals?" "I always thought animals could think," and such like were common expressions of my visitors. The fact was that the dogs and cats were picked up in the street at random, and that no one of them had thought out one jot or tittle of the things he had learned to do. The specious appearance of reasoning in a completely formed habit does not involve the presence or assistance of reasoning in the formation of the habit. Here, at the close of this account, I may signify my willingness to reply, so far as is possible, to any letters from readers of the Popular Science Monthly who may care to ask questions about any feature of animal intelligence. * * * * * In a discussion of the question "How Education fails," Dr. J. T. Searcy, of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, speaks of the tendency of too much education as being to make the pupil too machine-cut. "The successful, the progressive, the aggressive men, families, and races are not the manufactured ones, but the self-made ones." In the conditions and complexities of human society, the accumulating data of knowledge change so rapidly that educators can not anticipate the future in the elements and curricula of prescribed education. The advancing man, who is able to keep up in his day and generation, shows his excellence in his ability to readjust to his changing environment. The schools can not give this faculty, but rather have a tendency to weaken it; yet on it, more than anything else, rests the success of the man and the race. "Too much ought not to be demanded of the schools, nor ought they to assume too much to themselves." THE UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. BY HON. CHARLES D. WALCOTT, DIRECTOR OF THE UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY. A national museum should be the center of scientific activity in the country in which it is located. In England the British Museum is the Mecca of scientific men. In Paris, Copenhagen, Vienna, Berlin, and other capitals of Europe the national museum stands in similar relations to the scientific work of its own country. Such a relation our National Museum should hold to scientific men and affairs in America. It should receive and take care of all material that has been or may be valuable for investigation or for the illustration of the ethnology, natural history, geology, products, and resources of our own country, or for comparison with the material of other countries. It should furnish material for all kinds of scientific investigations which deal with specimens or types, and give aid to such researches and publish their results. It should present by illustration such of the results of the scientific investigations of its corps of officers as are susceptible of such representation. It should co-operate with all the higher educational institutions of learning in the country, and assist in the promotion and diffusion of knowledge in all lines of investigation carried on by it. It should provide library facilities, and aid all post-graduate students who may wish to take advantage of the provisions made by the Government for scientific research. HISTORY AND PRESENT ORGANIZATION.--Beginning in a small way in the Patent-Office building early in the century, the "Government" collections of "natural products" were transferred to the custody of the Smithsonian Institution in 1858, where they were installed along with the larger and more valuable collections of the institution. Twenty-three years later, in 1881, the present National Museum building was ready for the great mass of material that had accumulated in the Smithsonian building, and had been transferred from the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia. Out of these heterogeneous collections Dr. G. Brown Goode, under the direction of Secretary Baird, of the Smithsonian, organized a museum of broad scope, based on all that had proved best in museum experience to that time. Faithfully he carried forward the work until September, 1896, when his health broke under the strain of too many duties, and one of the best museum administrators the world has yet produced, if not the very best one, passed from us. In January, 1897, I was placed in temporary charge of the administration of the museum as an acting Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and remained in charge until July 1, 1898. On July 1, 1897, in order to meet changed conditions, a new plan of organization went into effect. The various divisions and sections of anthropology, biology, and geology, which had previously been conducted independently of one another, the curators and custodians reporting directly to the assistant secretary in charge of the museum, were united under three head curators--one of anthropology, another of biology, and a third of geology. This secured direct expert supervision, and correlated the work of each department. Before this such correlation had been impossible, owing to the large number of independent heads of sections and divisions in each department, who planned and executed the work more or less independently of one another. In the department of anthropology the system of installation inaugurated by Prof. W. H. Holmes is somewhat elaborate. The primary arrangement is founded, first, on the geographical or ethnographical assemblage, and, second, on the developmental or genetic assemblage. Other methods may be classed as special; they are the chronologic, the comparative, the individual, etc. The primary methods are adapted to the presentation of the general truths of anthropology, and the special methods are available for limited portions of the field. In many ways the department of biology, under the charge of Dr. F. W. True, was, at the date named, in much better condition than either of the other two departments. Many of the zoölogical divisions had been in existence since the reorganization of the museum in 1883, and several of them for a much longer period, and as the biological specimens had been in charge of curators and assistants who followed well-defined and long-established methods, the reorganization of the department was a relatively simple matter, no radical changes in the scientific methods or in the business administration being required. To the organization and administration of the department of geology, Dr. George P. Merrill brought the results of a recent study of various European museums. He found it necessary to make a systematic examination of the written and printed records of the various Government exploring expeditions and surveys, with a view to ascertaining what geological material had been collected which could properly be considered the property of the Government, and what disposition had been made of the same. The law[8] provides that collections made for the Government shall, when no longer needed for investigations in progress, be deposited in the National Museum. It was found that this law had not in all cases been strictly enforced, and that several important collections had not been transferred to the museum, although some of the earlier exploring expeditions had passed out of existence, and in several instances the individuals making the collections had likewise passed away. This investigation has resulted in the transfer to the museum of several car loads of specimens no longer needed elsewhere. [Footnote 8: "And all collections of rocks, minerals, soils, fossils, and objects of natural history, archæology, and ethnology, made by the Coast and Interior Survey, the Geological Survey, or by any other parties for the Government of the United States, when no longer needed for investigations in progress, shall be deposited in the National Museum...."--_Supplement to the Revised Statutes of the United States_, vol. i, second edition, 1874-1891, p. 252.] The National Museum is unique among permanent museums in having large sections of its collections almost constantly away from it. It made displays at London in 1883, at Louisville in 1884, at Minneapolis in 1887, at Cincinnati and Marietta in 1888, at Madrid in 1892, at Chicago in 1893, at Atlanta in 1895, at Nashville in 1896, and at Omaha in 1898. The injury to the museum resulting from the packing and transportation of specimens and from the interruption of systematic work and development has been keenly felt at times by the scientific staff. The advantages have consisted in showing to the people of many sections of the country what the museum is doing, in securing collections that otherwise would not have been obtained, and in extending the educational sphere of influence. RELATIONS TO THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION.--The museum is a child that has by its vigorous growth already overshadowed the parent institution in the extent of its buildings, its expenditures, and its direct influence upon the people of the United States. In the larger fields for which the Smithsonian Institution was organized, for the purpose of increasing and diffusing knowledge among men throughout the world, the museum is subordinate to the institution, and if the latter is administered in the future as it has been in the past, it will continue to hold a unique place among all institutions for the increase and diffusion of knowledge. In 1877 Prof. Asa Gray, as chairman of a special committee of the Regents of the Smithsonian, submitted a report which recommended that a distinction between the institution itself and the museum under its charge should be made as prominent as possible. The fear was expressed that if the museum was developed to its full extent and importance within the Smithsonian Institution it would absorb the working energies of the institution, and it was thought that such a differentiation would pave the way to entire separation of administration or to some other adjustment, as the Board of Regents might think best or be able to accomplish. Professor Baird, in 1878, in his report to the regents, called attention to the frequent mention in the reports of his predecessor of the relations existing between the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum, and remarked that "it is only necessary to mention briefly that the museum constitutes no organic part of the institution, and that, whenever Congress so directs, it may be transferred to any designated supervision without affecting the general plans and operations connected with the 'increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.'" During the administration of the museum by Dr. Goode, under the direction of Professor Baird, and later Professor Langley, no movement was made toward the separation of the museum from the Smithsonian. On the contrary, Dr. Goode was strongly opposed to any such action, and in this he was heartily supported by Secretary Langley. He felt that the result of placing the museum under the control of one of the great departments of the Government, or leaving it to be buffeted about in the sea of politics as an independent organization, would be the destruction of its scientific character. I have been intimately acquainted with the administration of the museum since 1886, and less so with the administration of other scientific bureaus of the Government, one of which, the Fish Commission, is independent of departmental control. After a careful reconsideration of the subject of the relations of the National Museum to the Smithsonian Institution, I have come to the conclusion that the present welfare and the future development of the museum will be best served by administrative connection with the Smithsonian Institution. Under the present organization there is no necessity for large demand upon the time and energies of the secretary by the affairs of the museum. If in the future it should become otherwise, relief could readily be secured by action of the Board of Regents, requiring the officer in charge of the museum to report to them through the secretary, much as the various bureaus of the departments report through their respective secretaries to Congress. It is not probable, however, that this will become necessary, for at any time an assistant secretary could be appointed to take sole charge of the museum, thus relieving the secretary of all but the most general administrative supervision. RELATIONS TO A NATIONAL UNIVERSITY.--A national museum should radiate an educational influence to the remotest portions of the country. It should set the standard for all other museums, whether in public school, academy, college, university, or the larger museums under municipal and State control. Its influence should be exercised largely through its publications and through those who come to study its collections and the methods of work of the investigators connected directly or indirectly with its scientific staff. In its library system the student should have access to the literature bearing upon the subjects with which the museum is concerned. In its exhibition halls each object should be labeled and arranged with the view of presenting, by graphic illustration and concise description, all that it is capable of teaching, either as a discrete object or as one of a series of objects telling the story of the evolution of the group to which it belongs. Such a museum is not a place where the uninformed student may obtain the elements of a university training; it is an institution where the post-graduate student can secure access to material for study and research in connection with men who are carrying forward scientific work of the highest type. Dr. D. C. Gilman would go further than this. He says:[9] [Footnote 9: Century Magazine, vol. lv, 1897, p. 156.] "Any person of either sex, from any place, of whatever age, without any question as to his previous academic degree, should be admissible; provided, however, that he demonstrate his fitness to the satisfaction of the leader in the subject of his predilection." Dr. Gilman thinks that such an organization "may be developed more readily around the Smithsonian Institution, with less friction, less expense, less peril, and with the prospect of more permanent and widespread advantages to the country, than by a dozen denominational seminaries or one colossal university of the United States. "To the special opportunities that the Smithsonian and its affiliations could offer, every university, at a distance or near by, might be glad to send its most promising students for a residence of weeks, months, or years, never losing control of them. Many other persons, disconnected with universities, but proficient to a considerable degree in one study or another, would also resort with pleasure and gratitude, and with prospect of great advantages, to the rare opportunities which Washington affords for study and investigation in history, political science, literature, ethnology, anthropology, medicine, agriculture, meteorology, geology, geodesy, and astronomy." I fully agree with him, but would make the National Museum the center of activity, rather than the Smithsonian Institution. It would then be under the control of the Board of Regents, through the secretary or the assistant secretary, who could have direct charge. It seems to me that the function of the Smithsonian Institution is to aid at the beginning of such a movement, and then place the administration in charge of one of its bureaus or transfer it to some other suitable organization. With the National Museum as a center or base, the student in Washington may avail himself of the Library of Congress and of the facilities offered for study and investigation by the various scientific bureaus of the Government, such as the Fish Commission, the Zoölogical Park, the Geological and Coast and Geodetic Surveys, the Naval Observatory, and the Weather, Botanical, Biological, and Entomological Bureaus of the Department of Agriculture, and systematic courses of lectures will place before him the most advanced ideas and conclusions of the largest body of scientific investigators in the world. A single well-trained man, with a few assistants, could render invaluable aid to hundreds of post-graduate and special students, whose only need is direction as to the best means of pursuing studies and investigations. Such an organization could be located in the administrative building that it has been proposed to erect as a nucleus of the National University. From this beginning a national university of the broadest type could be developed with as much rapidity as the educational interests of the country might demand. The National Museum can not at present give facilities to more than a score of students, but with the erection of a modern museum building, well equipped with laboratory space and a suitable staff to conduct the necessary work of installation and investigation, the scientific side of the National University would be established. It should be remembered that many of the officers of the scientific bureaus of the Government are directly connected with the museum staff as honorary curators and custodians, and that a number of them have laboratories within the museum building. NEED OF A NEW BUILDING.--The growth of the United States National Museum was rapid under the successful administration of Dr. Goode. When the character of the building and the funds available for the maintenance of the museum are considered, it compares favorably with any modern museum. It has received large collections from the scientific departments of the Government, by private contribution, by purchase, and by exchange, which have been accommodated as well as possible in the inadequate laboratories, storerooms, and exhibition spaces. During the fiscal year 1897-'98, accessions to the number of 1,441 were received, containing upward of 450,000 specimens--the largest number for any one year since the museum was opened. The total number of specimens recorded to July 1, 1898, exceeds four million. The galleries just completed have added sixteen thousand square feet of floor space, which is available for the spreading out and proper exhibition of material that has previously been crowded in the exhibition halls and courts on the floor; but, as an illustration of the present congested conditions, it may be stated that the anthropological collections now in the possession of the Government, illustrating the development and progress of man and his works, if properly placed on exhibition, would occupy the entire space in the present museum building. The great collections in biology, botany, economic geology, general geology, and paleontology should be placed in a building properly constructed for their study and exhibition. A considerable portion of the collections are still in the Smithsonian building, where the crowding is scarcely less than in the museum building. Moreover, in the present building there is great deficiency in laboratory facilities. Curators and assistants are hampered for want of room in which to lay out, arrange, classify, mount, and label specimens. There should also be rooms in which students could bring together and compare various series of objects, and have at hand books and scientific apparatus. The present museum building contains a few rooms suitable for the purposes mentioned, but the majority have to be used as storerooms, laboratories, and offices, and are therefore too much crowded to serve in any one of these capacities. Owing to the pressure for space, courts, halls, and galleries intended for exhibition purposes, both in the Smithsonian building and in the museum building, are unavoidably occupied to a considerable extent as laboratories and storerooms. There is also need of storage room, an increase of the scientific staff, and a purchasing and collecting fund. The American Museum of Natural History expends annually $60,000 for the increase of its collections; the National Museum has from $3,000 to $4,000 for the purpose. The immediate and greatest need, however, is a suitable museum building. The present building is 375 feet square. The space on the ground floor is 140,625 square feet, and that in the galleries 16,000 square feet; exhibition space, 96,000 square feet. The entire cost is $315,400. For comparison with the above figures, the following statistics relating to the American Museum of Natural History in New York are given: Total floor space, 294,000 square feet, divided as follows: Exhibition space, 196,000 square feet; laboratories, library, etc., 42,500 square feet; workrooms, storage, etc., 42,000 square feet; lecture hall, 13,500 square feet. These figures include the portions of the building now being completed. The total cost of the museum to date, including the completion of the new wings, is $3,559,470.15. The buildings, and the care of them, are provided for by the city of New York. The expenses of the scientific staff, increase of collections, etc. (the income for which for the present year is approximately $185,000), are defrayed from endowments, membership fees, and contributions. In the capitals of Europe, museum buildings are generously provided for. The National Museum building was erected with the view of covering the largest amount of space with the least outlay of money. In this respect it may be considered a success. It is, in fact, scarcely more than the shadow of such a massive, dignified, and well-finished building as should be the home of the great national collections. There is needed at once a spacious, absolutely fireproof building of several stories, constructed of durable materials, well lighted, modern in equipment, and on such a plan that it can be added to as occasion arises in the future. The site for such a building is already owned by the Government; only the building needs to be provided for. What the Capitol building is to the nation, the library building to the National Library, the Smithsonian building to the Smithsonian Institution, the new museum building should be to the National Museum. There should be available: Sq. ft. Department of biology 190,000 Department of geology 83,000 Special laboratories for students 5,000 Rough storage, workshops, etc. 20,000 Lecture hall 6,000 ------- Total 304,000 Present museum space to be devoted to the department of anthropology 96,000 ------- Grand total 400,000 FUTURE DEVELOPMENT.--With suitable buildings provided, the immediate development of the National Museum naturally lies in four directions: (1) The occupation of the present building by the anthropological collections; (2) the housing, developing, and installing of the large biological collections; (3) the development of a great museum of practical geology; and (4) the development of the scientific side of a National University. 1. The collections in anthropology, as they stand to-day, cover a wide field in a broken and disconnected way. It is difficult to use them effectively to illustrate the great features of this branch of science. They do not present a connected story of the peoples and cultures of the world. This arises from the gaps in the collections and the absence of suitable laboratory and exhibition space. This department should have adequate representations of the American peoples and their culture, not only of our own country, but of the whole American continent. Our nation is the only one in America that can reasonably be expected to do anything of importance toward the preservation of the materials necessary for the illustration of this vast field; and as the American race is a unit, of which the tribes in our own territory constitute a considerable part, it appears to be our duty to take up this work in a comprehensive way. Thus would be built up not only a National Museum, but an American Museum in the widest sense. This applies not only to anthropology, but to the other great departments of the museum. It will be impossible to carry on such a work without turning over to the Department of Anthropology the entire present building, with all its laboratory and exhibition space. 2. The Department of Biology now occupies a large exhibition space in the Smithsonian building and 55,000 square feet in the museum building. Large collections are stored in laboratories and inclosed spaces in the exhibition halls which would be placed on exhibition if space were available. As has already been explained, in a new building there should be available for the Department of Biology 190,000 square feet of exhibition, laboratory, and storage space. The present exhibit is more complete than that of the other departments of the museum. Of birds there is a large mounted series, one of the finest in existence, but it is so indifferently housed that it fails to make the impression it should. Of mammals there is a good North American series, and there are some excellent examples of exotic species. There is a good and rather large exhibit of the various groups of the lower forms of animals, including an especially fine series of corals and sponges. These are the only series at present exhibited which can be considered at all comprehensive. Of the great groups of fishes, reptiles, and amphibians there is room only for an outline representation. The wonderful variety of form among insects can be scarcely more than suggested in the space available. Of plants there has hitherto been no exhibit worthy of the name, and the space which it has now been possible to set aside is entirely out of proportion to the vast extent and importance of this great kingdom of Nature. Every natural-history museum of the first class should have at least two comprehensive exhibition series. The first, the _Systematic Series_, is a series representing the natural groups, among which all animals and plants, from the highest to the lowest, are divided. The second, the _Faunal and Floral Series_, is a series showing the animals and plants characteristic of each of the grand divisions of the earth's surface, which naturalists have established as a result of their study of these two kingdoms of Nature. These two great comprehensive exhibits should be supplemented by a number of _Special Series_, illustrating the more interesting phenomena and phases of life, such as the macroscopic and microscopic structure of animals and plants and their development from the germ to the fully adult individual, and special modifications of form and color by which animals are protected from their enemies; the adaptations for peculiar environments and modes of life; the characteristics of youth, maturity, and old age; the variation in form, size, and color among individuals of the same species; the domiciles and other works constructed by birds, mammals, insects, and the like. To these series should be added another of great importance, the _Economic Series_, representing the animals and plants as related to the activities and needs of man. Any one of these principal series in its full development would more than fill the entire space now available. 3. There should be developed a museum of practical geology in the broadest sense, which will be of service to every producer and consumer of American mineral products, and to all students of geology who are engaged in either economic or purely scientific investigations. In addition to the series of rocks and fossils illustrating the stratigraphy and succession of the sedimentary rocks and the systematic collection of minerals and ores, an exhibit showing how geologic work benefits the daily life of the people should be developed. An illustration of this would be a representation of the artesian-water supply of the semi-arid region, showing the stratification and structure of the sedimentary rocks, and how hydrographic and geologic investigations clearly indicate the regions in which artesian-water development may be carried on successfully. Mining and areal geology could also be illustrated in such manner as to place before the student and intelligent observer the import and value of such work. In most museums the principal effort has been to make a collection of useful mineral products. This is desirable, but, from the broad view of illustrating the practical in addition to the scientific side of geology, it should be secondary. The best basis for classification on the practical side of the museum exhibit appears to be the finished mineral product. For instance, if pig iron be taken as a key material in classification, the iron ores from which it has been obtained should be arranged so as to show the various kinds whose combination has resulted in the pig iron. In connection with this should be grouped the geologic phenomena, which should include any geologic conditions connected with the original deposition and the occurrence of iron ores. This might include the conditions which have led to the oxidation of pyrite and other sulphur compounds of iron, and to the development of hydrous oxides of iron; also an illustration of what has been demonstrated in regard to the solution of widely distributed minerals in certain rocks, and their subsequent concentration in ore bodies by metasomatic action. All the metals could be arranged under such a classification, as also the nonmetallic products. The preparation of such an exhibit would require many years of work, the details of which would be considered as each mineral product was taken in hand. 4. The fourth direction of development is toward the requirements of a National University, which has already been sufficiently dwelt upon in this connection. CHILDREN'S MUSEUM.--The children gain a fair amount of information from the general exhibit in any well-arranged museum, but it is desirable that their interest should be aroused by having certain exhibits made expressly for them. I would have a space set aside in each of the three departments in which nothing should be exhibited except for the children. It might be called a Museum Kindergarten. Some of the preceding suggestions have been adopted by the museum authorities and partially put into execution, and the carrying of them out is dependent upon enlarged facilities for laboratory work and exhibition space. During the administration of Dr. Goode the museum developed as far as possible under the conditions surrounding it. No one knew better than he that only by securing new buildings and expanding the museum could it take the place in America that the several national museums of Europe have taken in their respective countries. It is well recognized that a public museum is a necessity in every highly civilized community, and that, as has been so well stated by Dr. Goode, "the degree of civilization which any nation, city, or province has attained is best shown by the character of its public museums and the liberality with which they are maintained." At present New York city is, in this respect, in advance of all other American cities and of the national Government. Whether the latter will take its proper place by developing the National Museum as it has developed the National Library remains to be seen. The question whether they are willing to be represented by the museum as it is to-day is one that the American people should consider and decide at an early date; meantime, it is the duty of all interested in the advancement of science and education to aid by every means in their power the development of a National Museum that will be truly national and American. ARE JEWS JEWS? BY JOSEPH JACOBS, PRESIDENT OF THE JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY. In the December (1898) and January (1899) numbers of Appletons' Popular Science Monthly Prof. William Z. Ripley concludes the remarkable series of articles on the Racial Geography of Europe, originally delivered as Lowell Institute lectures, by a couple of articles on the Jews. Strictly speaking, the articles might seem to have no right in the particular series in which Professor Ripley has included them, since their main object is to show that the Jews are not a race but a people, and have therefore no claim to be considered in the racial geography of any continent. But one can not regret that a daring disregard for logic has caused Professor Ripley to conclude his interesting series with the somewhat startling paradox that Jews are not Jews, in the sense of the word in which both their friends and their enemies have hitherto taken it. As Professor Ripley has been good enough to refer to me as having written with some authority on the subject, and as I have not been convinced by his arguments against the comparative racial purity of the Jews, I am glad of an opportunity to discuss the question, which is of equal theoretic and practical interest. The theoretic interest, with which alone we need concern ourselves here, seems to me of two kinds. Professor Ripley, as a student of anthropology, declares, as the result of his inquiries, that there has been so large an admixture of round skulls with the (hypothetically assumed) original long skulls of the Hebrews that all signs of racial unity have disappeared. I, on the other hand, who have approached the subject as a student of history,[10] see no evidence of any such large admixture of alien elements in the race since its dispersion from Palestine, and have come, therefore, to the opposite conclusion--that the Jews now living are, to all intents and purposes, exclusively the direct descendants of the Diaspora. Here, then, anthropology and history--if Professor Ripley and I have respectively interpreted their verdicts aright--appear to speak in two opposite senses, and no conference at La Hague or elsewhere can appoint a court of appeal which can decide between contrary propositions by two different sciences. [Footnote 10: To prevent misunderstanding, I should perhaps add that I have not neglected the anthropological aspects of the question. My paper on The Racial Characteristics of Modern Jews, which appeared in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1885, contained, I believe Professor Ripley would allow, the fullest account of Jewish anthropometry collected up to that date.] But the point in discussion seems to me to raise also a problem of exceeding interest within the anthropological sphere itself. Professor Ripley assumes that round heads beget round heads, and long heads descend from long heads for all time unchanged. That appears to carry with it the assumption that no amount of brain activity can increase the mass of brain, that skull capacity has no relation to mental capacity, and that alone among the organs of the body the brain and skull are incapable of growth, change, or development. The _crux_ of Jewish anthropology raises this problem, as I shall proceed to show, and, if I have interpreted history aright, offers valuable material toward its solution. I might have met Professor Ripley's arguments on narrower grounds, which would have enabled me to evade this larger question. His main, I might say his solitary, argument is that contemporary Jews are predominantly brachycephalic, or round-headed, whereas contemporary Arabs, whom he takes as the type of the Semites, are as predominantly dolichocephalic, or long-headed. Accepting Professor Ripley's own criterion of purity of race, I might point to the almost universal round-headedness of the Jew as a proof of their racial unity. The fact that Arabs do not share that quality really does not affect the question. Linguistically and geographically the Hebrews of history were associated with the Aramæans and Assyrians of Asia Minor, and Professor Ripley himself allows that Asia Minor was mainly brachycephalic. Till Professor Ripley brings forward craniological evidence that the cephalic index of the ancient Hebrews was below 77.8, his reference to the contemporary Arab must be ruled out of court. But, quite apart from this, the Arabic evidence would be of little significance, since the chief characteristic of Moslem civilization has been the predominance of marriage by capture and descent from slave concubines. Every caravan that has entered Arabia for the last twelve hundred years has had its contingent of female slaves of alien race, mainly from dolichocephalic Africa. I must confess my surprise that Professor Ripley has based his main argument on the shifting sands of Arabic racial purity. The only attempt Professor Ripley makes toward a proof that the pure Hebrew is dolichocephalic is a half-hearted endeavor to claim that quality for the Sephardim, or Spanish and Portuguese Jews, descended in the main from Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal in 1492. As a matter of fact, the largest number of measurements of Sephardic heads has been made by Mr. Spielman and myself,[11] and of the fifty-one heads examined by us only eight were long-headed. Professor Ripley gives a portrait of a Tunisian Jew, with index 75, who is also probably of Sephardic origin, like most of the Jews of the Mediterranean littoral. But, curiously enough, there is far more evidence for the mixture of race among contemporary Sephardim than of any other branch of Jews. Even while they were living in Spain as avowed Jews they were persistently accused of intermarriage, chiefly with the Moors, while a large number of contemporary Sephardim are descended not from refugees of 1492, but from the so-called Marranos--Jews who remained in Spain, professing Christianity and marrying tolerably freely among the surrounding population. If one wished to be hypercritical, one could trace the long-headedness of a minority of Jews to this admixture of race from Spain. [Footnote 11: On the Comparative Anthropometry of English Jews, in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1889.] After all, I must insist that it is to history one must go to determine a question of this sort. Jews have shown such marked individuality throughout their career for the last two thousand years among the nations--they have been so much in the world's eye throughout that time--that any appreciable degree of intermarriage would not have escaped notice, both by themselves and by their enemies. Now there is practically no evidence of this kind during the Christian era. Religious antipathy has been so strong throughout that period as to form an almost insurmountable barrier to intermarriage and the consequent proselytism to Judaism which is necessary for a valid Jewish marriage. Sporadic cases doubtless occur, but their very infrequency drew attention to them, and all that historical research can discover is under one hundred cases throughout the middle ages, scattered through Europe. Jewish nomenclature has special formulæ to name the proselyte, and yet, though we have hundreds of the mediæval lists of Jewish communities and martyrologies, it is the rarest thing in the world to find one of these names referred to as "sons (or daughters) of Abraham our father." In earlier days, doctors of the Talmud, when discussing hypothetical cases, dismissed that of the proselyte as being so rare.[12] In my Memoir in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1885 I have taken the marriage statistics of modern Algeria as most nearly representing the most favorable conditions that one could imagine at any time during the middle ages, and have found that during nearly half a century (1830-'77) there were only thirty mixed marriages out of an average population of twenty-five thousand Jews--not one a year. The only instances of proselytism on a large scale are those of the Chozars in southern Russia, converted to Judaism in the eighth century, and the Falashas of Abyssinia, about the same time. Yet these are an indirect proof, by the method of difference, of the comparatively pure descent of the rest of the Jews, for neither the Karaites, who are the descendants of the Chozars, nor the Falashas show any of the characteristic Jewish features or expression. [Footnote 12: Babylonian Talmud, Gittin, 85a.] Those who contest the purity of the Jewish race lay great stress upon the Chozars as forming the nucleus of the Russian Polish Jews, who are, as is well known, a predominant majority among present-day Jews, probably ninety per cent of whom either dwell in the Russian dominions or are descended from former inhabitants of old Poland. Yet against this is the absence of any reference to Jews in Poland during the time the Chozars flourished (eighth to eleventh centuries), while the very speech of the Polish Jews--the so-called "Yiddish," really archaic German mixed with Hebrew--indicates their true source, the German kingdoms and principalities. Professor Ripley throws some doubt upon the possibility of such large numbers as those of the Polish Jews having been derived from Germany. Nowadays there are probably five millions of Jews in the regions once possessed by Poland, but the remarkable fertility of Jews is one of the most striking characteristics of their vital statistics, to which, indeed, Professor Ripley has called attention in his remarks upon their vitality. The development of a generation depends, as is well known, upon the relative number of deaths under five years of age, and it is just at this period that Jewish mortality presents so favorable an aspect, owing to the care of Jewish mothers and the absence of alcoholism among the fathers. I have estimated that the Jewish population of the world in 1730 (six generations ago) was only 1,300,000, whereas at the present moment it is at least nine times as much. If one could assume the same rate of progress to have existed through the middle ages the Jewish population in the fourteenth century would have been not much more than 25,000. Such a rate of progress is, however, extremely unlikely, considering the large losses by persecution, which in Poland alone, during the disastrous Cossack inroads between 1648 and 1656, is said to have removed no less than 180,000 Jews. But, making every allowance for this disturbance in the rate of progress, it would have been quite possible for 50,000 Jews who had migrated to Poland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to increase to over half a million at the beginning of the eighteenth. Americans, who have seen nearly half a million Russian Jews land upon their shores within the last twenty years after crossing nearly half the world, need not be incredulous as to the possibility of one tenth of that number passing over the borders between Germany and Poland in a couple of centuries during the middle ages, when, if means of transit were less numerous, intensity of persecution and motives for emigration were ten times as strong as even under the iron rule of the Russian Czar. History, then, as I read it, has nothing to say against the purity of descent of contemporary Jews from those of the Bible. What has anthropology, as interpreted by Professor Ripley, to produce against this negative evidence of history? Mainly, it would appear, the fact that Jews of the present day are predominantly brachycephalic. Of the fact there can be little doubt. The list given by Professor Ripley in the Popular Science Monthly (vol. liv, page 340), of over twenty-five hundred heads, would be sufficient to establish this. But the very uniformity of the index is almost sufficient by itself to refute the deduction Professor Ripley draws from it. If there had been any general amount of admixture, that would have tended rather to produce variety than uniformity. Surely Professor Ripley does not contend that the Jewish young men and maidens, who, on his theory, so freely welcomed outsiders into the family circle, have never fallen in love with long-headed persons of the opposite sex. His argument requires that the original Jews of the Diaspora were long-headed, and that they have uniformly intermarried with the broad-headed varieties of the genus _homo_. Now, he adduces no evidence whatever that Jews originally were dolichocephalic, and even if he succeeded in proving this he would have the further difficulty of finding a European race with skulls so broad as to raise the average index of the race considerably over 80. If we assume that the original index of the Jewish skull was 75, Professor Ripley would have to find some race with an average index of nearly 90 before the mixture would raise the contemporary Jewish skull to its present broad-headedness. Dr. Ammon has shown[13] that there are only two small regions in Europe where such abnormally broad skulls exist, neither of them centers of Jewish population. [Footnote 13: Die Natürliche Auslese beim Menschen, Jena, 1883.] But Dr. Ammon has shown more. By comparison with the skulls found in the long barrows in Germany, he shows that the index of German skulls has risen from 77 to no less than 83 during the last thousand years or so; and he further shows, by reasoning similar to that which I have just given, that this rise in index can not be due to any admixture of race. Now, to what is this rise in head index due? Dr. Ammon, who is a professed disciple of Weismann, does not go into the question of causation, but the simplest and most obvious explanation is that cranial capacity has followed brain development, and that, roughly speaking, brachycephalism implies intellectual development. A few instances may be given, confirming this impression of the superior intellectual capacity of the broad-headed. Prof. Karl Pearson, in his Chances of Death (vol. i, page 205), has given the following sexual ratios of the superiority of English, German, and French men over the opposite sex: ------------------+----------+---------+--------- | English. | German. | French. ------------------+----------+---------+--------- | | | Brain weight | 1.120 | 1.117 | 1.125 Skull capacity | 1.179 | 1.126 | 1.164 Stature | 1.081 | 1.078 | 1.069 ------------------+----------+---------+--------- In other words, men's skulls contain about eight per cent more and their brains weigh four per cent more than women's, even allowing for the difference in height. So, too, there is a uniform increase of cubic capacity from the skulls of the Australians (75 cubic centimetres) up to the Teutons (93.5 cubic centimetres).[14] The same authority gives the average weight of brain in a number of brachycephalic individuals as 1,314 grammes, as against 1,287 grammes for dolichocephalic cases.[15] Professor Pearson points out that the higher the caste in India the broader the skull, the Brahmans being highest, with an index of 78.86, according to the measurements of Risley. The same writer gives a long list (page 290) of the indexes of skulls of some thirty-seven races, ranging from Australians at the bottom of the list, with 70.34, and headed by mediæval Jews (only twelve skulls), with an index of 84.74. Every indication seems to point out that in races where progress depends upon brain rather than muscle the brain-box broadens out as a natural consequence. Little investigation has as yet been made as to the influence of brain development on the form of the skull, but what little has been done all points in the same direction. Dr. Giulio Chiarugi[16] has made some careful measurements of twenty-one brains, and has shown that in every instance there is much greater complexity of the cerebral convolutions in the brachycephalic as compared with the dolichocephalic skulls, in which the brains were contained. From the nature of the sutures of the skull it is tolerably obvious that if brain capacity produces an enlargement of brain, the consequent internal pressure on the skull will be lateral and tend to produce brachycephalism. The application of all this to the case of Jews seems obvious. If they had been forced by persecution to become mainly blacksmiths, one would not have been surprised to find their biceps larger than those of other folk; and similarly, as they have been forced to live by the exercise of their brains, one should not be surprised to find the cubic capacity of their skulls larger than that of their neighbors. When it is remembered that they are, owing to their persecutions, the shortest of all European folk, their relative superiority in brain comes out even more strikingly. [Footnote 14: Topinard, �léments d'Anthropologie, 1885, p. 612.] [Footnote 15: Ibid., p. 568.] [Footnote 16: La Forma del Cervello umano e le variazioni correlative del Cranio, Siena, 1886.] The conclusion I have thus drawn from anthropological data receives remarkable confirmation from the results of an inquiry I made on the Comparative Distribution of Jewish Ability, and contributed to the Anthropological Institute in 1886. Applying the methods of Galton, I compared the celebrities produced by the Jewish race during the last hundred years with those of Englishmen and Scotchmen, and came to the conclusion that the race, as a whole, took rank between Scotchmen and Englishmen in intellectual capacity, while if the comparison had been confined to western Jews, who alone have had an opportunity of displaying their talents, they would have come out superior to both. From the anthropological side we should expect that the brachycephalism of Jews would show itself in superior mental capacity, and this is confirmed by the number of distinguished persons of Jewish blood recorded in the European dictionaries of biography. The anthropological and sociological importance of this result, if confirmed by further inquiry, seems to me of very great significance for the science of anthropology, and for this reason I have insisted so much upon it. Skull capacity and cephalic index are not so much indications of race as of intellect. If it is found that, as a rule, each race, and even each people, tends to have a uniform cephalic index, that would merely imply that the sociological conditions of the said race or people were tolerably uniform as regards intellectual development. Australians, who have had no opportunity of pitting their wits against any other competing race, and have depended for their existence on the fleetness of their legs and the capacity of their stomachs to carry food from one orgy to another, have used their brains less than all other human races, and have the narrowest skulls of all. Teutons, who have had the largest sphere for intellectual rivalry with their neighbors, have the broadest skulls of all except the Jews, who have, so to speak, lived by their wits the last two thousand years. The evidence produced by Professor Ripley of long-headed Jews among the lower developed communities only shows that where the brain is not much exercised the skull is not broadened. So far, then, from history and anthropology giving contrary verdicts with regard to the racial purity of the Jews, the above considerations would seem to show that they rather confirm one another's interpretation of the facts. If brain capacity and skull index follow the intellectual struggle for existence, we should not be surprised to find the Jews mostly broad-headed. If there had been much intermixture with races who had less cause to exercise their brains in the struggle for existence, we might expect a greater admixture of dolichocephalism among them. To my mind a much stronger case could have been made out for the admixture of the Jews by the large number of blondes among them, ranging to about twenty per cent, but, as a rule, in Europe blond types are dolichocephalic, and the evidence of admixture that could be drawn from the admixture of blue eyes or brown hair among the Jews is counterbalanced by that very evidence of their uniform round-headedness, upon which Professor Ripley lays so much stress. In the memoir I have frequently quoted I have given reasons for believing that there was a blond as well as a brunette type among the ancient Jews, and till evidence is shown to the contrary the presence of the fair Jew is only an indication of descent from the earlier blond strain of the race. Professor Ripley has scarcely taken into account the more positive arguments I have adduced in my memoir for the comparative purity of Jewish descent. I have pointed out a definite class of Jews--the Cohens, or priestly descendants of Aaron--who can not, according to Jewish law, marry proselytes. These still constitute, I have calculated, some five per cent of Jews even at the present day. He appears to think that this is merely a matter of name, and asks how I would explain the existence of quasi-Jewish names, such as Davis, Harris, Phillips, and Hart, among Christian populations of the Anglo-Saxon world. As a matter of fact, it can be proved that, on the contrary, these names among the Jews have been adopted for "mimicry" reasons from the corresponding Christian names which are mostly derived from the Bible. But, at the best, Professor Ripley's argument would merely prove a certain amount of Jewish blood among the Christian populations of Europe and America, which nobody would deny. That Jews, under the pressure of persecution or for other reasons, have abjured their faith, married Christian wives, and become merged in the surrounding populations, is undoubtedly a fact, but does not in any way affect the relative purity of the "remnant" which has remained true to its faith. It certainly does not affect the very important fact that the ancestry of at least five per cent of Jews at the present day can not have married proselytes, owing to the rigid requirements of Jewish law. So far as I understand the latter part of Professor Ripley's second article, he appears to contend that the remarkable similarity of the Jewish physiognomy all over the world has no force in proving their racial unity. This is, of course, from the popular point of view, the strongest argument which Professor Ripley has to meet. Speaking generally, one can always tell a Jew or Jewess by the Jewish features and expression. So marked is this that Andrée mentions an instance where the negroes of the Gold Coast even distinguish between other whites and Jews by its means, saying not "Here are three whites coming," but "Here are two whites and a Jew." So marked a community of expression and appearance would be, to an ordinary mind, an absolute proof of unity of race, but Professor Ripley prefers to judge by the skull beneath, rather than by the expression and features on the surface. He hints at some obscure embryological process by which Jewish mothers can stamp on their offspring the Ghetto expression, whatever be the racial formation of skull. According to him, it would appear that noses are more plastic in this regard than skulls. I do not quite see how this would work out in detail. Are we to suppose that a pair of snub-nosed converts to Judaism would produce offspring with the characteristic Jewish nose because the lady convert had her imagination influenced by the hook-noses surrounding her? Are we to suppose that round heads can only beget round heads, but that snub noses can produce the hooked variety as a mere result of imagination? Mere expression one could understand could be produced by sociological causes, and it is certainly my impression that Jews who mix more with their fellow-citizens lose a good deal of the characteristic Jewish expression, but that Jewish features should be influenced in this way few people would be prepared to allow. Jewish "nostrility," as I have termed it, and the "Jew's eye," can not be affected by change of environment. They can be affected, I grant, by admixture with races snub-nosed or dull-eyed, but as they have persisted throughout the ages they are themselves a striking proof of the absence of such admixture. Altogether I remain unconvinced by Professor Ripley's arguments as to any large admixture of alien elements among contemporary Jews as unvouched for by history, and not necessarily postulated by anthropology. The broad skulls of the Jews, if they differ from those of earlier date (of which Professor Ripley has produced no evidence whatever), are due to the development of Jewish capacity, owing to their consistent attention to education and to the conditions under which they have pursued the struggle for existence. The persistence of Jewish features throughout the ages and the existence of an influential minority who are not allowed by Jewish law to marry outside their race is further proof of the position for which I have throughout contended. If there has been a tolerably large admixture of Jewish and alien blood throughout the Christian centuries it has been by conversions to Christianity or Islam, not by adoption of Judaism, and it is confirmed by history that the offspring have wandered away from the Jewish race and have not affected the more conservative remnant. The significance of this result for the science of anthropology can not be overrated. The great question of the science is that expressed by Dr. Galton as "the struggle between Nature and nurture"--the difference that social influences can produce on men of the same race. Jews afford the science almost the sole instance in which this problem can be studied in its least complex form. My own investigations have shown that social environment has a direct influence on such anthropometrical data as height and breathing capacity. The Jews of the West End of London, though of the same race as those of the East End, are superior in height and other external qualities, and this superiority can thus be shown to be due entirely to nurture. Similarly, if the argument I have previously adduced is correct, the brachycephalism of the Jew is a proof that intellectual development produces broad heads, and that, roughly speaking, the cephalic index is a key to intellectual capacity. I should rather reverse Professor Ripley's main contentions: breadth of skull is not a criterion of race, but of intellectual development; whereas features, which are not directly influenced by social or intellectual characteristics, are the true index to racial purity. SOME PRACTICAL PHASES OF MENTAL FATIGUE. BY PROF. M. V. O'SHEA. I. Modern studies in neurology have contributed much to our knowledge of the function of the nervous system as a whole and of its several parts, and also of the relation of psychical activity to cerebral conditions and processes. The architecture of the neural mechanism delineated by these investigations is not only interesting in itself on account of the marvelous unity of things apparently diverse, but it is at the same time suggestive respecting its office as the physical instrument through which mind must express itself in this world. Psychologists now quite generally conceive of a living being, human or otherwise, as a reacting organism, receiving impressions from its environment and responding to them in some characteristic manner. To be fitted for this office an individual must be provided with appliances alike for the reception of stimulations and for their transformation into incitements to muscular activity. In the human species Nature has ordained that action need not follow immediately and inevitably upon any sense stimulus; fortunately, it may be deferred, so that when it does finally occur it will be the resultant of any given present impression modified by others previously received and treasured up in memory, as we say. To accomplish this really great feat, Nature had to devise an elaborate contrivance, interposed between incoming messages and outgoing impulses, to act as a moderator or transformer of a very extraordinary and intricate character--the central nervous system, comprising the brain and spinal cord. That it may be able to meet the requirements of its office, this system must be equipped with two principal kinds of apparatus--cells, which will serve as storehouses of energy to be employed in keeping the machinery running, and association fibers or pathways, which will put any one cell into communication with others in the cerebral community. The item which will engage our attention principally here relates to the primary function of the nerve cell--to store up vital forces in the form of highly unstable chemical compounds,[17] which may upon slight disturbance be broken down, the static energy represented in their union thus becoming dynamic. Those who have given special attention to the matter seem to agree that all activity, physical as well as mental, involves the expenditure of a portion of this energy.[18] It may perhaps be mentioned in passing that when this conception was first being presented some persons hastily constructed the theory that what people had been calling mind was nothing more nor less than a certain mode of manifestation of this mysterious but yet physical force. While abundant evidence, gained from various sciences by recent research, leads one to the conviction that in some unknown manner psychical and neural processes are closely co-ordinated, yet not a single investigator of standing claims that they are identical. There is doubtless among some in our day too great a tendency, unconscious though it may be for the most part, to declare that a description of the physical correlates or antecedents of mental phenomena fully accounts for the latter in respect alike of their nature and their modes of manifestation; but those who find themselves coming to such conclusions might be both interested in and benefited by examining the opinions of great naturalists and psychologists who have reflected long and profoundly upon the world-old problem of the connections between body and mind--such men as Lotze,[19] Darwin,[20] Romanes,[21] Wallace,[22] Fiske,[23] Drummond,[24] Wundt,[25] and many others of equal scientific attainments. [Footnote 17: For chemical formulæ of some of the compounds, see Ladd, Outlines of Physiological Psychology, p. 13.] [Footnote 18: For the opinions of investigators, as Mosso, Lombard, Maggiora, Kraeplin, and others, see Pedagogical Seminary, vol. ii, No. 1, pp. 13-17; Scripture, The New Psychology, chapter xvi; and Educational Review, vol. xv, pp. 246 _et seq._] [Footnote 19: Microcosmus, p. 162.] [Footnote 20: Descent of Man, p. 66.] [Footnote 21: Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 218 _et seq._] [Footnote 22: Darwinism, p. 469.] [Footnote 23: Destiny of Man in the Light of his Origin.] [Footnote 24: Ascent of Man.] [Footnote 25: Human and Animal Psychology, pp. 5-7 and 440-445.] The architecture and chemical constitution of the neural elements indicate unmistakably, it seems, that they were so constructed that in their functioning they would be amenable to the law of the conservation of energy, and recent investigations have produced some experimental evidence in support of this view. Hodge,[26] who succeeded in making microscopical examinations of living nerve cells while under stimulation, demonstrated that the cell by this treatment was depleted of its contents, as revealed in the gradual reduction of its size. In corroboration of these results it was found that the cerebral cells in animals were larger in the morning than after a day's activities, indicating that depletion must have taken place during waking life, followed by recuperation in sleep. Some interesting data relating in a way to this matter are easily gained in the laboratories by the use of the plethysmograph, which is designed to record the degree of blood pressure in different parts of the body. This instrument may be put upon the wrists and head, for instance, and it may be observed, when a person is subjected to certain influences whether, there is any alteration in blood supply in either region. It may be noticed, as a matter of fact, that when one is required to think diligently upon any problem, or being asleep is awakened or even disturbed by a noise in his environment, the volume of blood decreases in the wrist and increases in the head.[27] This same phenomenon is shown by experiments with the scientific cradle.[28] The inference from these data seems reasonable, that mental activity causes an expenditure of nerve force, which Nature seeks to replenish by inciting an unusual flow of nutritive-bearing fluid to the cerebral cortex. It has been shown, in further illustration of this law, that thought increases the temperature of the head, indicating that heat is generated through molecular activity; and also that psychical action increases waste products in the system, which may be derived only from the degradation of substances in nerve cells.[29] So information obtained from various other sources points toward the conclusion that in all activity energy stored in nerve cells is dissipated. [Footnote 26: For a complete statement of methods and results, see Hodge, American Journal of Psychology, vol. ii, pp. 3 _et seq._; and vol. iii, pp. 530 _et seq._] [Footnote 27: See Pedagogical Seminary, vol. ii, pp. 12 _et seq._] [Footnote 28: Ibid., _op. cit._] [Footnote 29: Cowles, Neurasthenia and its Mental Symptoms, pp. 17 _et seq._] Recent experimental studies have given us reasons for believing that nerve cells in different individuals yield up their energy in response to stimulation with varying degrees of readiness.[30] Experience corroborates what Professor Bryan[31] has said: that some persons possess a leaky nervous system, wherefrom their vitalities flow away without issue in useful results. In such individuals activity will be likely to be in excess of that which the stimulus occasioning it should normally produce. Every one must have seen children, and adults as well, who when they hear a slight noise, for instance, which others do not mind, react with great vigor by jumping or screaming; or, when spoken to unexpectedly the face flushes, the lip quivers, and they become physically uncontrolled in a measure. In these instances the persons are unduly profligate in the expenditure of their means, and, in consequence, their capital is relatively soon exhausted.[32] [Footnote 30: Educational Review, _op. cit._] [Footnote 31: Addresses and Proceedings of the National Educational Association, 1897, p. 279.] [Footnote 32: _Cf._ Warner, The Study of Children, chapters viii and ix.] The writer last year conducted some experiments upon school children which yielded results that appear to confirm the view here set forth. Scripture's steadiness gauge was used in one test. This is designed to investigate stability of control by requiring a person to direct a light rod under guidance of the eye upon a point several feet distant, failure to accomplish this being announced by the ringing of an electric bell. The subject is usually required to make the trial fifteen times at a single test, and the number of successful attempts is taken to be in a way, although not always reliable, an index to his power of co-ordination. But more important than the success or failure in accomplishing the task is the index it affords of the nervous condition of the subject as revealed in the expressions of face and body. Tests were made in the morning, shortly following the opening of school, and again at half past eleven o'clock, or thereabouts, after the pupils had been working over their lessons for about two hours. One boy of eleven years, A. M., is a fair illustration of what might not inappropriately be called an exhaustive type, wherein nervous energy is readily depleted because of incessant waste. In the morning tests he was well controlled and accurate. A record of five tests made at half past eleven all show that after four or five attempts to place the rod upon the point the hand became very unsteady, the lips compressed, the region about the eyes showed unusual constraint, and the hand not being used was tightly clinched. Ten trials were usually sufficient to produce twitchings or _tics_ in the face and body, although nothing of this was ever noticed at other times. This boy invariably made hard work of the task, and all the physical accompaniments indicated excessive motor stimulation following, of course, upon an unduly excited condition of the cerebral cells. At the close of the experiments he generally seemed exhausted, and upon three occasions it was thought best not to permit him to make the entire fifteen trials. Another pupil, W. R., two years younger, illustrates a different type. In the morning trials he was no better than A. M., but he, too, was subjected to five different tests at half past eleven, with the result that he could in every instance complete the task without any apparent fatigue. There was no constraint apparent in the face or hands, no unusual effort to co-ordinate the muscles of the body, and no twitchings of any kind. Now, it seems probable that in the case of W. R. the brain was able to adjust effort in right degree to the needs of the occasion, while with A. M. there was such prodigality in the expenditure of energy in various irrelevant motor tensions and activities that it not only defeated its purpose, but it was soon largely spent. A. M. showed this tendency to nervous extravagance in all the work of the school. While an unusually bright boy, he yet became fatigued in the performance of duties that W. R. could discharge with no evidence of overstrain; indeed, the latter boy seemed never to reach a point beyond which he could not go with safety if he chose. Further illustrations of this principle of individual differences in the conservation of nervous energy were afforded by another simple experiment. The apparatus employed consisted of a plate of smoked glass set in a frame so that it could be moved horizontally. Just touching the glass, and adjusted to it by a delicate spring, was a fine metal point which could be maintained at any height by a silk thread to be held in the fingers of the subject to be experimented upon, who stood with closed eyes endeavoring to keep his hand perfectly quiet for one half minute. During the test the glass was moved slowly in the frame, the metal point thus tracing a line which was a faithful index to most of the movements, at any rate, of the subject's hand. Five sets of experiments were made upon a number of pupils in the morning soon after the opening of school, and again just before the noon recess. The accompanying tracings are reproductions of those gained at one of the tests, and are typical examples. The first two were secured from a girl, M. L. R., eleven years of age. The one made at half past eleven, after two and a quarter hours' work in school, shows a significant phenomenon which could be easily witnessed during the experiment. She had become so fatigued that all muscular expressions were unusually constrained. During the short period while the experiment continued one could observe the arm and fingers contracting, which accounts for the upward direction of the tracing. The body swayed almost to the point of falling, the fingers of the hand not employed were clinched, and all the expressions indicated great tension. The second set of tracings, gained from a girl, E. H., twelve years of age, shows evidences of marked fatigue after a few hours' work; but the effect upon the bodily activities is quite in contrast with that of the case just mentioned. Here there was relaxation of the muscles, a general letting go of the whole body, revealed in the tracings taking an abrupt downward direction. The third group of tracings was gained from W. R., whose characteristics have already been adverted to, and who indicated here, as in the other tests, that his morning's duties had had no serious effect upon his nervous energies. [Illustration: M. L. R.] [Illustration: E. H.] [Illustration: W. R.] It should be said in passing that the principle of healthful mental growth and activity seems to require that in education of any sort cerebral cells should be freely exercised up to the point of fatigue, but never beyond; for after this there is not only no progress, but what has been gained by previous training may even be lost. And, what is more serious, the undue depletion of the nerve cell renders its recovery extremely slow, and investigation has shown that school children when overtaxed return to their studies day after day in a fatigued condition, their energies not being fully restored until the long vacation brings the needed rest.[33] Those who train athletes realize that the fatigue limit must not be passed if possible, and this law is recognized as well in the training of racing horses,[34] One who has observed his experience in learning to ride the bicycle must have discovered that practice pursued when in a condition of exhaustion operates rather to retard than to promote facility. So in matters of the mind activity carried to excess, which point is further removed in some cases than in others, results in retardation of growth, even though no more serious consequences ensue. [Footnote 33: Educational Review, _op. cit._] [Footnote 34: Bryan, Addresses and Proceedings of the National Educational Association, 1897.] II. As might be readily inferred, even if we were lacking experimental evidence, fatigue interferes with the normal activities alike of body and mind. One of the earliest and most conspicuous effects may be observed by any one in the people about him--a decrease in the rapidity of physical action. The child depleted of nervous energy, for whatever reason, will usually be slower than his fellows in performing the various activities of home or school. If observed during gymnastic exercises it may be noticed that his execution of the various commands is delayed; in responding to signals he is behind his comrades whose nervous capital is not so largely spent. And what is here said of the child is, of course, equally true in principle of the adult; the effect of fatigue in his case will be revealed in less lively, vivacious, and vigorous conduct in the affairs of business or of society. Mosso,[35] Burgerstein,[36] Scripture,[37] Bryan,[38] and others have been able to confirm by scientific experiment what people have thus long been conscious of in a way--that cerebral fatigue renders one slower, more lethargic in his activities. It seems clear, to hazard an explanation, that when nerve cells become depleted up to the point of fatigue Nature designs that they should be released from service in order that repair may take place. This rhythm of action and repose seems to be common to all forms of life. The phenomenon of sleep is an expression of this principle, and is characterized by almost entire absence of activity. [Footnote 35: Pedagogical Seminary, vol. ii, pp. 20 _et seq._] [Footnote 36: Ibid., _op. cit._] [Footnote 37: The New Psychology, pp. 128-132.] [Footnote 38: The Development of Voluntary Motor Ability, p. 76.] Again, fatigue disturbs the power of accurate and sustained bodily co-ordinations, particularly of the peripheral muscles, or those engaged in the control of the more delicate movements of the body, as of the fingers. Every one must have had the experience that consequent upon a period of exacting labor (physical or mental), or worry, the hand becomes unsteady, as revealed in writing or other fine work, the voice is not so perfectly controlled as at other times, and perhaps involuntary twitchings or _tics_ make their appearance in the face or elsewhere. Ordinarily people regard these phenomena as evidences simply of "nervousness," but, as commonly used, this term does not take account of the neural conditions responsible for these abnormal manifestations. Warner[39] points out that nerve cells in a state of fatigue become impulsive or spasmodic in their action; there is not such perfect balance as usually exists between them when in a normal, rested condition, and this results in lessened power of inhibition. Scripture[40] and others have shown by experiments in the laboratory that fatigue renders co-ordination less sustained and accurate. If, now, one observes a group of people, young or old, in which some or all have passed the fatigue limit, he can see the cause of many of those occurrences which give the teacher in the school, for example, continual trouble. The children will doubtless be moving incessantly in their seats, books and pencils may be dropping upon the floor, and various signals are responded to slowly and in a disorderly manner. The restlessness is probably due for the most part to the effort of the pupils to relieve the tension of muscles induced by overstrain, while inability to accurately co-ordinate the muscles employed in holding pencils and books causes objects to slip out of the pupils' hands upon the floor. One has but to observe his own experience, and he will soon realize that when nervously exhausted he is not so certain of retaining securely small objects which he handles. This accounts for what is sometimes regarded as carelessness in school children as well as in adults, exhibited in slovenly writing, in breaking dishes, and in similar occurrences. Any task demanding delicate and sustained adjustment of the finer muscles on the part of one fatigued will be liable to be performed in a careless manner, as we are apt to feel. Often more than not the term carelessness probably denotes impaired neural conditions, as well as consequent mental dispersion, if one may so speak, leading to inaccurate and intermittent mental and physical adjustments to duties in hand. [Footnote 39: Mental Faculty, pp. 76, 77.] [Footnote 40: The New Psychology, pp. 236-248.] Cowles[41] observes that the first prominent and serious mental concomitant of nervous depletion is revealed in the inability to direct the attention continuously upon any given subject; and James has said that when one is fatigued the mind wanders in various directions, snatching at everything which promises relief from the object of immediate attention. Experiments in the laboratory upon the keenness of sense discrimination of data appealing to sight, hearing, touch, and the other senses, show that there is lessened ability in conditions of fatigue;[42] and this is accounted for probably by the waning power of attention. The mind can be held to one thing, excluding irrelevant matters. This phenomenon is further illustrated in the following simple experiment: The pupils in a large graded school in Buffalo, N. Y., were required upon three successive days, at half past nine o'clock and again at half past eleven in the morning, to trisect a line three inches long. The results, calculated for one hundred and fifty children, show that on the average they were several millimetres nearer correct in the morning trisections than in those just before the midday recess.[43] It seems that this test measured the degree of attention which pupils were able to exert at different hours during the day, and it confirmed what must in a way be known to every one--that a day's work in school reduces the energy of attention. Doubtless every instructor has remarked how much more difficult it is at half past eleven than at ten to hold the thoughts of students to the subject in hand, and if recitations in intricate studies occur late in the forenoon, progress will be slower and more errors will be made, simply because pupils are unable to attend so critically. [Footnote 41: _Op. cit._, p. 47.] [Footnote 42: See Educational Review, _op. cit._; Galton, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1888, pp. 153 _et seq._] [Footnote 43: Since this article was written extensive investigations on school-room fatigue have been made in the schools of Madison, Wis., under the writer's direction, and the general principles here mentioned have been corroborated.] The significance of this latter effect of fatigue must be apparent when it is realized that attention is at the basis of all the intellectual processes. If one can not attend vitally, he can not perceive readily or accurately; he will be unable to recall fully or speedily what has formerly been thoroughly mastered; and, most serious of all, he can not so well compare objects or ideas to discover their relationships--that is, he is not so ready or accurate in reason. In fatigue, then, one really becomes stupid. Suppose a fatigued pupil in school working over his spelling lesson, for instance; he will be liable to make errors both in copying from the board and in reproducing what he already knows. In recitations in history, memory will be halting; what has apparently been made secure some time before now seems to be out of reach. In those studies requiring reflection, as arithmetic, grammar, geography, and the like, the reasoner will be unable to hold his thoughts continuously to the matters under consideration, and so will be unable to detect relationships between them readily and accurately. When one considers, in view of what is here set forth, that many persons, adults as well as students, are for one cause or another in a constant state of fatigue, he can see the explanation of the stupid type of individual, in some instances at any rate. The effects upon the emotional activities, while not so easily detected by experimentation, may yet be readily observed in one's own experiences and in the conduct of persons in his environment. Cowles,[44] Beard,[45] and others assure us as physicians that neurasthenia gives rise to irritability, gloominess, despondency, and sets free a brood of fears and other kindred more or less abnormal feelings. Wey,[46] in his studies upon the physical condition of young criminals, has found that in the majority of instances there appears to be some neural defect or deficiency, mostly of the nature of depletion, which he believes contributes to alienate the moral feelings of the individual. There is little doubt that viciousness has a physiological basis. It is probable that in such a case the highest cerebral regions, through which are transmitted the spiritual activities last developed in the race, becoming incapacitated first by fatigue, are rendered incapable of inhibiting impulses from the lower regions, which manifest themselves in an antisocial way. [Footnote 44: _Op. cit._, pp. 47 _et seq._] [Footnote 45: _Op. cit._, pp. 36-117.] [Footnote 46: Papers in Penology, 1891, pp. 57-69; _cf._ Collin, also in same, pp. 27, 28; Wright, American Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry, vols. ii and iii, pp. 135 _et seq._] III. It follows from what has gone before that cerebral fatigue is a most important matter to be reckoned with in all the affairs of life, but especially in education, where the foundations for nervous vigor or weakness are being permanently established, and where relatively little can be accomplished in either intellectual or moral training unless the physical instrument of mind be kept in good repair. It needs no argument to beget the conviction that we should if possible ascertain what circumstances produce fatigue most frequently in the schoolroom, so that they may be ameliorated and their injurious consequences thus avoided. What, then, are the most important causes? It is well to appreciate at the outset that every individual has a certain amount of nervous capital which, when expended, leaves him a bankrupt, and it is of supreme import to him that something should always be kept on the credit side of his account. If we would deal most wisely with a pupil, then, whose activities we are able to direct, we should know just what demands we could make upon his energies without fatiguing him. But we can not hope at the present time and under present conditions to discover with accuracy the fatigue point of each individual, and even if we were able to do so, we would doubtless find it next to impossible to observe it at all times in our teaching, especially in our large graded schools. But we can at any rate adjust our requirements with some degree of accuracy to the average capacity of the whole. Regarding the number of hours of mental application per day which may be safely expected of a pupil in school, investigations have tended to show that there is a danger of requiring too many. When pupils return to school morning after morning without having recovered from the previous day's labors, it is evident that too heavy draughts are being made upon their nervous capital. It may be said in reply that many factors conspire to produce this depleted condition, as insufficient sleep, inadequate nutrition, and outside duties; but the answer is that under such unfavorable circumstances less work may be demanded. As the curriculum is planned in many places, alike in graded and ungraded schools, the pupil is expected to be employed in the school for five or six hours a day no matter what may be his age, and to this work should be added studies at home for the older students. Now, as Kraeplin[47] has justly observed, Nature ordains that a young child should not give six hours' daily concentrated attention in the schoolroom, but, rather, she has taken pains to implant deeply within him a profound instinct to preserve his mental health by refusing to attend to hard work for such a long period. Consequently, in such an educational _régime_, the mind of the pupil continually wanders from the duties in hand. The most serious aspect of this is apparent, that when attention is constantly demanded and not given, or when a pupil is pretending or attempting to keep his thoughts turned in a given direction, yet allows them to drift aimlessly because he is practically unable to control them, he is acquiring an unfortunate habit of mental dissipation. It seems certain that healthful and efficient mental activity requires that a child apply himself in a maximum degree for a relatively short period, the duration differing with the age of the individual and the balance of nervous energy to his credit; and then he should relax, attention being released for a time. [Footnote 47: A Measure of Mental Capacity, Popular Science Monthly, vol. xlix, p. 758.] Experiments conducted by Burgerstein[48] and at Leland Stanford Junior University[49] emphasize a particular phase of this principle--that too long continued mental application without relaxation induces fatigue more readily than when there are comparatively short periods of effort, followed by intermissions of rest. Thus when pupils (and the younger they are the more is this true) have a given amount of work to do requiring their attention say for an hour and a half they will accomplish most with least waste of energy by breaking up this long stretch into several parts, interspersing a few minutes of free play. With adults application may profitably continue for longer periods, but even here the rhythm of concentration and relaxation must be observed in order that effort may have the most fruitful issue. There would assuredly be less dullness, carelessness, and disorder in our schools, high and low, and in our homes, if this law were observed in the arrangement of the activities of daily life. The writer knows of a normal school where the work begins at half past eight in the morning and continues until one o'clock, with a pause of only ten minutes in the middle of the session. During the passage of classes from room to room at the close of recitations, monitors are placed in the halls to prevent any exhibition of freedom in communicating with one another or in the movements of the body. Here there is little if any relief to the attention, since pupils are under practically the same constraint as when reciting in Latin, Greek, or geometry. This enthronement of discipline, which we all seem natively to think necessary that we may prevent the reversionary tendencies of youth, is sure to breed in some measure the very maladies--stupidity and disorder--which various agencies in society are striving to cure by all sorts of formulæ. [Footnote 48: _Op. cit._] [Footnote 49: Pedagogical Seminary, vol. iii, pp. 213 _et seq._] In the normal, well-organized adult brain the various areas are closely knit together by association pathways or fibers,[50] which renders it possible to employ in particular direction the energies generated over large regions. But this development comes relatively late and is not fully completed under about thirty-three years of age, it is now believed. It is in a measure, then, impossible for the young child to utilize the energies produced in one part of the brain in activities involving remote sections. One who observes little children in their spontaneous activities can not fail to note evidences in plenty in illustration of this principle. It should be apparent, then, why a school programme so arranged that a lesson in writing is followed by one in written language, this by written number, and this in turn by written spelling, or possibly by a written reproduction of a lesson in Nature or literature, is admirably suited to exhaust the overused areas of pupils' brains, whereupon the mental and physical effects of fatigue make their appearance. In one of the large cities of our country the amount of time spent in writing was calculated for all the grades in the schools, and it was found that at least one hour was required of the children in every grade, and in the fourth and fifth grades they were engaged for two hundred minutes every day in writing in some form or other. [Footnote 50: Donaldson, The Growth of the Brain, chapters ix to xiii.] Doubtless every one has observed how readily he becomes fatigued when he is engaged in activities demanding very delicate muscular adjustments--threading a needle, for instance. Work of this character involves particularly the higher co-ordinating areas of the brain, those controlling the more precise and elaborate adjustments of the body, and this work makes large demands upon one's nervous energy. This seems to be pre-eminently true of the child, in whose brain the highest regions are yet comparatively undeveloped, so that much exercise of them leads quickly to exhaustion. Those activities, then, which compel a great amount of exact co-ordination of young children will easily fatigue them. The writer has for some time been observing the effect of various sorts of playthings upon the activities, particularly upon the emotions, of two young children. He has noticed that those plays requiring most accurate co-ordination, as stringing kindergarten beads with small openings or writing with a hard lead pencil, will quickly produce fatigue, shown in irritability, discontent, and lack of control; while those plays which employ the larger muscles, as working in sand or drawing a cart, are more enduring in their interest and are not attended by such disagreeable after effects. It is customary, however, in many homes and schools to require of the youngest children the finest work in the management of the smallest tools and materials, such, for instance, as writing on very narrow spaced paper, greater freedom being permitted in this respect as the pupil grows older--an inversion of the natural order. The mode of development of the nervous system indicates unmistakably that in all training the individual should proceed gradually from the acquirement of _strength_ and _force_ in large, coarse, and relatively inexact movements to the acquisition of _skill_ in precisely co-ordinated activities. Any reference to the remediable causes of mental fatigue would be incomplete without allusion to the harmful influence of certain personal characteristics in the people with whom we associate. By virtue of a great law of our being, that of suggestion, the importance of which we are appreciating more fully from day to day, we tend ever to reproduce within ourselves the activities of the things in our environment.[51] Now, when we are forced to remain in the presence of one fatigued, as pupils too frequently are in the school and children in the home, and this fatigue manifests itself in irritability, impatience, tension of voice, and constraint of face and body--in such an environment we become overstimulated ourselves and rapidly waste our energies. Especially true is this of children, who are more suggestible than adults; and, in view of this, one can appreciate the necessity of placing in our schoolrooms, and if we could in our homes, persons possessing an endowment of nervous energy adequate for the demands to be made upon it without inducing too readily fatigue with all its train of evils. [Footnote 51: _Cf._ Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion; and Vernon Lee and C. A. Thompson, Beauty and Ugliness, Contemporary Review, vol. lxxii, pp. 544-569 and 669-688.] BEST METHODS OF TAXATION. BY THE LATE HON. DAVID A. WELLS. PART II. In passing from the tariff, or duties on imports, to the internal or excise taxes imposed by the Federal Government, there is evidently a distinct change in purpose. However subject to abuse the tax on distilled spirits has proved, and however frequently its agency has been invoked to exaggerate the profits of interested parties, there has never been an open and avowed intention of turning it to private gain. The policy that has become almost inseparable from the customs tariff, and is by most people regarded as inherent in all customs legislation, has not been transferred to the internal revenue taxes save in one or two instances of recent application and secondary importance. The danger of permitting taxation to be employed by either State or Federal Government for a purpose other than that of raising necessary revenue has been dwelt upon. When a police power is exercised in conjunction with a tax framed for revenue, and is regarded as the more important function to be performed, the policy requires careful examination. If revenue is the real object, the method of imposing the tax and the determination of the rate which will give the highest return with the least interference in the production, distribution, and export of the commodity taxed remains to be defined. If restriction in manufacture, sale, or consumption is intended, the question is no longer one of taxation proper, but of police regulation. The Federal taxes on oleomargarine, filled cheese, and mixed flour are of the nature of police inspection, and the tax on the circulation of State banks, amounting, as it has, to prohibition, is a still more extreme exercise of the same power. The imposition and collection of these duties have a penal quality, an intention to restrict or prohibit the production or sale or use of some article. They are not properly taxes; they are not a proper application of tax principles, but have originated, in private interest, or in the deliberate intention to constitute a monopoly, State or other. The approach of war, or its actual presence, is made the excuse of an extension of taxes, and the Federal Government tacitly admits its inability to increase indirect taxes on consumption by its general resort to an extension of the internal taxes and excise. The instrumentalities of business offer a fair field for stamp taxes, and these, when not so burdensome as to invite evasion, are acceptable because of the ease with which they are assessed and collected. A specific duty on the more important acts of commerce and daily business may be evaded, it is true, but not when the paper or instrument taxed must become public evidence. Stamps of small denomination on bonds, debentures, or certificates of stock and of indebtedness; on a bill of sale or memorandum to sell; on bank checks, drafts, or certificates of deposit; bills of exchange, draft, or promissory note; money orders and bills of lading; on express and freight receipts, on telegraph messages, and a large number of legal and other instruments, such as leases, mortgages, charter party, insurance policies--these are simple duties, productive of large returns, and not unequal in their weight. The law of 1898 included such stamp taxes, as well as others on proprietary articles and wines. It was not simple to predict the incidence of these rates, and the distribution has been unequal. The charges of one cent on telegraph messages and express packages are paid by the sender in the larger number of cases, the companies merely adding a penny to their rates. This was not the intention of the law, and the courts have held that it was not so intended. The individual is powerless in a few transactions, and only the great concerns are able to avail themselves of this decision. The duties for seats or berths in a parlor car or for proprietary medicines, are paid by the company or manufacturer, though in certain preparations the price to the consumer was advanced on the passage of the act. With all their drawbacks, and they are not few in number, these stamp duties afford a ready means of obtaining a good revenue without increasing unduly the general burdens of taxation. The law of 1898 was modeled after that of 1863, and many of the rates and descriptions will undoubtedly be incorporated into the permanent internal revenue system of the country--a measure enforced by the remarkably unequal returns derived from the customs. The existing system of internal duties is even more defensible than the tariff as a source of revenue. Its inequalities, due to the haste in which the measure was prepared and the inexperience of those who framed the provisions and fixed upon the rates, are worn away in use, and where the rates are moderate and are not infected with a penal quality, the community adapts itself to them, accepting them as a necessary convenience. In the United States this spirit of acquiescence is most marked, not only because of a natural patience of tax burdens, but because of as natural a fear of other untried and more radical or oppressive measures. The situation of "business" when a general tariff bill is pending in Congress is one almost of panic, and the scramble to protect interests or to obtain some special advantage against rivals has become a scandalous feature of tariff revision. Except in the instances named, as oleomargarine and filled cheese, the internal revenue system presents less of a field for such an exhibition of greed and self-interest; but the spirit duties, and even the tobacco rates, may be used in such a way as to favor the large manufacturer against the small concerns, and are to that extent misused and applied for purposes antagonistic to those properly pertaining to taxation. In a time of tax revision the suggestions for new taxes and ideas for changing the old are freely offered, and do not stop short of absolute prohibition of an industry, of total destruction of interest. The vagaries of a legislative body under such suggestions have instilled into the public mind a wholesome fear of its possible acts and fully explain the timid and uneasy condition of "business" when a general tax measure is under discussion. Whether it be the manufacturer or producer seeking protective duties, or the Granger or Populist asking for taxes of confiscation against capital and accumulated property, the spirit is the same--a desire to turn taxation to improper purposes. The tendency of Federal taxation to turn to taxes on capital and the instruments of "business"--direct, rather than indirect taxes--found its most extreme illustration in the income tax of 1894, the principles of which have already been discussed. It finds a more moderate and restricted exercise in certain graduated duties under the act of 1898, and especially in the duties on legacies and distributive shares of personal property. It was no sentimental or even theoretical argument based upon the right of inheritance or the inequality of taxation that led to the adoption of these duties in 1898; it was only a blind following of the provisions of the earlier act, and the consciousness that revenue must be had at every cost, and no possible source of income should be overlooked. Yet the legacy tax is essentially a tax of democracy and defensible for much the same reasons as a tax, whether graduated or not, upon income might be. By the act approved June 13, 1898, entitled "An act to provide ways and means to meet war expenditures, and for other purposes," the national Government imposed a tax upon legacies and distributive shares of personal property. This tax has been one of the features of the tax law of 1862 (§§ 111-114), but in a much simpler form and in a form better calculated to produce a revenue. This earlier law imposed a duty on all legacies exceeding one thousand dollars in amount, but very properly made a distinction in the rate according to the degree of connection between the person from whom the property came and the receiver of the legacy. Thus, lineal issue or lineal ancestor, brother or sister, should pay at the rate of seventy-five cents for each and every hundred dollars of the clear value of the interest in the property. A descendant of a brother or sister of the decedent paid double this rate; an uncle or an aunt was taxed three dollars for every one hundred dollars passing; a great-uncle or a great-aunt, four dollars; and persons in any other degree of collateral consanguinity, or a stranger, or a body politic or corporate, five dollars. The only exemption made was in favor of a wife or husband. As only personal property was intended to be reached, all land and real estate escaped the duty. The law of 1898 made important modifications in these rates and manner of assessing. In the first place, the rates fell only on legacies in excess of $10,000, a limit ten times larger than that of the law of 1862. The degrees of relationship were the same, the rates were copied from those of the earlier act, and the same exemption of property passing between husband and wife was admitted. But the idea of a progressive tax was ingrafted into the law. Thus, the old rates applied only to legacies of more than $10,000 and not more than $25,000. When the property passing was valued between $25,000 and $100,000 the rates were multiplied by one and a half; between $100,000 and $500,000, they were multiplied by two; between $500,000 and $1,000,000, they were multiplied by two and a half; and by three when the property was in excess of $1,000,000. In restricting the tax to personal property passing by inheritance the measure aims at a crude means of making the burdens of personal more nearly approach those of real property. No such consideration controlled the views of those responsible for the act, and, after all, it offers only a question of theoretical interest. The inheritance tax collected in many of the States may have owed their adoption to such an idea, but the United States, in taking up these duties, merely saw a means of obtaining revenue without regarding the actual results of the tax on the estates paying it. "The inheritance tax in one form or another has come to stay, and new States are being added every year to the list of those which have adopted it. Five years ago it was found in only nine States of the Union--Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, New York, West Virginia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and New Jersey. During the first half of 1893 Ohio, Maine, California, and Michigan were added to the list, though the Michigan law was afterward annulled because of an unusual provision in the State Constitution which was not complied with. In 1894 Louisiana revived her former tax on foreign heirs; Minnesota adopted a constitutional amendment permitting a progressive inheritance tax which has not yet been given effect by the Legislature; and Ohio added to her collateral inheritance tax a progressive tax on direct successions. In 1895 progressive inheritance taxes were adopted in Illinois and Missouri, and an old proportional tax was revived in Virginia; and last year Iowa adopted in part the inheritance tax recommendation of her revenue commission."[52] [Footnote 52: Max West, in North American Review, May, 1897, p. 635.] The real problems are to be encountered in local taxation. The many different methods used in the different States, the want of uniformity in the local divisions of each State, and the extraordinary diversity in the interpretation or application of tax laws by the courts and executive authorities of the States have introduced a confusion, to end which, many would invoke the intervention of the Federal Government. The haphazard manner in which the laws have been framed and passed is only the least notable explanation of the variety of phrase and interpretation to be found. Even were the Federal Government to establish definitions, and frame rules of uniform assessment, there would still be room for difference. The customs tariff is known to be variously applied in the different ports of the country, and there is greater certainty in the tariff rate than could be found in a tax resting on the assessed valuation of land, for example. The difficulty encountered by France in its attempt to determine the net income from land for the purposes of taxation carries an important lesson. Failing to obtain uniformity of appraisement of this net income under the crude method first employed--of basing it on the character of soil and nature of cultivation, deducting the expenses of cultivation--a _cadastre_ was decreed.[53] In this _cadastre_ each particular piece of property was recorded, with its boundaries, its manner of cultivation, and its net rental. Begun in 1807, it was not completed until 1850, and proved of little value, as no provision had been made for recording the changes in cultivation, rentals, or other conditions, except those of ownership, buildings, and exemption from taxes. Instead of proving a successful means to a desired end, it "turned out to be a stupendous disillusionment." "The experience of both the western Prussian provinces and of France showed that the newly constructed _cadastre_ was of considerable service in equalizing the land tax within a relatively small area, but not as a basis for alterations in the contingents to be paid by large and widely separated regions. The officials in charge of the _cadastre_ on the Rhine, as well as those in France, themselves admitted that any computation of net income was uncertain; that the coincidence of the figures obtained by the cadastral computation with the actual net income could never be assured; that the figures afforded by the _cadastre_ were rather of the nature of a proportion, while uniformity of assessment was to be attained rather by observation of the business transacted than by depending on the figures obtained by computation."[54] This effort to discover and record the net income from land was a failure. [Footnote 53: The word _cadastre_ was derived from the Latin _capitastrum_, or register of _capita_, _griga_, or units of territorial taxation into which the Roman provinces were divided for the purposes of _capitatio terrena_, or land tax. It is of modern use and is locally found in Louisiana.] [Footnote 54: Cohn, Science of Finance, p. 477.] So thorough an experiment, carried through so long a time, and presenting an example to be avoided, was in fact imitated by Prussia under a law of 1865. In each division (_Kreis_) was appointed a commissioner, who was chairman of a committee, the size of which ranged from four to ten members, according to the size of the division. One half of this committee was appointed by the representatives of the division and one half by the central Government. A number of divisions formed a department, with its commissioner and committee of similar composition as in the division, and above all was a central committee, presided over by the Minister of Finance. The valuation was accomplished in less than four years. The method was applied only to land employed in agriculture or forests; a separate law provided for the taxation of buildings and gardens. In the end the results were no better than those obtained in France. In either case a plan too refined to work to advantage had been employed, and, apart from its simplest function, that of making a general survey of the land and the uses to which it was applied, it could not advance the theory of a proper land tax. No modification could make it a better instrument of taxation. The gross income from land as a taxing basis would involve heavy injustice, and further supervision by government officers could not do away with the mechanical difficulties of securing uniformity. The English plan of making rental value the foundation is more easily applied and gives better results. If land be difficult of assessment, personal property offers a very much more difficult problem. On this particular question this country has much to learn from the experience of other governments. In Great Britain a Royal Commission has been making a study of local taxation, and, in a preliminary report, concludes that an alteration in the law for the purpose of obtaining a uniform basis of valuation in England and Wales is a necessary preliminary to any revision of the existing system of local taxation. It has been already stated that the poor rate constituted the basis of valuation of property for local rates. In its development the system has become more complicated. Two valuations of the same property may be made for raising imperial taxes--namely, one for the income tax, and one for the land tax. Three valuations of the same property may be made for raising local rates--namely, one for the poor rate, one for the county rate, and one for the borough rate. Here, then, are five different valuations in activity. Of these the parish was the first and most important division, having been introduced in the sixteenth century, when the dissolution of the monasteries had raised the question of poor relief. It was adopted for convenience, as the contributions were at first entirely voluntary; but as the problem of the poor increased in importance, compulsion was applied, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century, by the acts of Elizabeth of 1597 and 1601, compulsion was fully established and the parish adopted as the area for levying rates for the relief of its poor. It now became necessary to define more specifically the persons liable for this rate, but the law framed no system by which assessments were to be made or rates collected. A distinction was made between the occupier of certain properties (such as lands, houses, coal mines, or salable underwoods) and an inhabitant of the parish. The occupier was to be taxed upon the basis of the annual benefit arising from the property situated in the parish; but the inhabitant was taxed not in respect to any specified subjects, implying an intention to tax them upon some other basis. This raised the question of "ability," and how that question was to be determined. The act said nothing that could point to personal property, "and it was only on the ground of his being an inhabitant that any owner of personal property could be rated for that property, because there was no word in that statute to include him, except the word inhabitant. Under that statute, therefore, there was necessarily a distinction between residents and nonresidents, because the resident would be ratable for his personalty within the place, the nonresident not. The distinction, however, under that statute applied only to those kinds of property which the statute did not specify, for the occupier of lands, houses, etc., and whatever the statute enumerated, was ratable whether he were resident or not."[55] And when the judge of assize was asked to give an opinion he decided that lands should be taxed equally and indifferently, but an additional tax could be laid on the "personal visible ability" of the parishioner. Further, "all things which are real, and a yearly revenue must be taxed to the poor." Yet there were limitations on this apparently wide interpretation, and as early as 1633 it was only visible properties, both real and personal, of the inhabitants within the parish, and only within the parish, that could be taxed. The property to be assessed must be local, visible, and productive; it must consist only of the surplus left after deducting debts; it must be rated according to the profit produced; and its nature must be distinctly specified. "Consequently, such subjects as wages, pensions, easements, profits derived from labor and talent, profits from money invested or lent elsewhere, and furniture, were exempt." [Footnote 55: Abbott (Chief Justice) in R. _vs._ The Hull Dock Company, 3 B and C, p. 525.] The absence of all attempts to tax or value property other than what was visible and tangible continued to the reign of Queen Anne, when a single decision of the court pointed to the taxation of the stock in trade of a tradesman, a decision that does not appear to have been acted upon. As late as 1775 Lord Mansfield said, "In general, I believe neither here nor in any other part of the kingdom is personal property taxed to the poor." At all events, it could not be taxed unless usage could support it. Toward the end of the century, when taxation for the Napoleonic wars was touching more intimately the concerns of the people, the idea of subjecting personal property to the poor rate was favored, but nearly half a century passed before it attracted attention. In their report for 1843 on local taxation the poor-law commissioners gave the following summary of the status of this question: "The practice of rating stock in trade never prevailed in the greater part of England and Wales. It was, with comparatively few exceptions, confined to the old clothing districts of the south and west of England. It gained ground just as the stock of the wool staplers and clothiers increased, so as to make it an object with the farmers and other rate payers, who still constituted a majority in their parishes, to bring so considerable a property within the rate. They succeeded by degrees, and there followed upon their success a more improvident practice in giving relief than had ever prevailed before in England.... When the practice of rating stock in trade was fully established in this district, the ancient staple trade rapidly declined there and withdrew itself still more rapidly into the northern clothing districts, where no such burden was ever cast upon the trade." A final determination of the question was imposed upon Parliament by the pressure of the manufacturing and commercial classes arising from a decision in the case of R. _vs._ Lumsdaine, in 1839, looking to the taxation of personal property. In consequence, an act was passed (3 and 4 Vict., c. 89), and has remained in force until the present time, exempting an inhabitant from any tax "in respect of his ability derived from the profits of stock in trade or any other property, for or toward the relief of the poor." Thus it is that the English local taxation has managed to keep clear from the bog of assessing personal property, and the annual value of immovable property, such as lands and houses, within the parish has come to be selected as the simplest and most practicable basis for assessments. The history is of high importance, because the basis of the poor rate was adopted as the basis for all other rates levied in local taxation. Whatever confusion has been introduced has arisen from other causes, such as the constituting poor-law unions containing more than one parish, the levying of county rates, a county having a boundary other than a parish or a union, and the assessing for rates by parish officers who acted independently of each other. Many efforts have been made to introduce a uniform system of assessment, but without success. One of the clearest thinkers on this subject was Sir George Cornewall Lewis. In appearing before a committee on taxation, in 1850, he said: "We have never recognized the principle of having one valuation for all the different rates. If that principle were once admitted, the inducement to have an accurate and complete valuation would be at its maximum, because then you would know that whatever charge might be imposed it would be imposed upon that valuation, whereas if there is one assessment for one rate and another assessment for another rate, and an amended assessment for a third rate, no one cares much about making any assessment perfect. This is one defect of the present system of valuation." The defect has persisted and become more aggravated each year. In 1870 a special commission came to the resolution that "the great variety of rates levied by different authorities, even in the same area, on different assessments, with different deductions and by different collectors, has produced great confusion and expense; and that in any change of the law as regards local taxation, uniformity and simplicity of assessment and collection, as well as of economy of management, ought to be secured as far as possible." When it is considered that for the five independent valuations for raising rates on property there are in England and Wales more than one thousand valuation authorities, the hopelessness of obtaining uniformity is apparent. With such a multiplicity of agents it is useless to look for good results. There is no fixed or necessary time for making the valuation lists; no uniform system of or scale for making deductions for arriving at the ratable values of certain classes of property; exemptions and allowances are said to be given unduly, through undue pressure on the assessing authorities; and the assessment committees have no statutory power to ascertain from owners or occupiers the rentals and other particulars needed to determine values. The reforms needed are a geographical redistribution of taxing limits and uniform rules of assessments. If so great confusion can occur where the property to be valued for taxation is visible and tangible property, and where the principles underlying the assessment are few and comparatively simple, what is to be expected when the attempt to reach invisible and intangible property is added? Constitutional provisions have not secured equality of valuation, and the statute laws are powerless to make effective the sounding phrases of the Constitutions. "Property shall be assessed for taxes," says the Constitution of New Jersey, "under general laws and by uniform rules, according to true value." The Assembly sought to embody this principle or rule in the laws of the State. "All real and personal estate within this State, whether owned by individuals or corporations, shall be liable to taxation at the full and actual value thereof, on the day in each year when by law the assessment is to commence."[56] Such assertions of the basis of taxation need no further explanation, for the intention of the framers of constitution and law is unmistakable--equal and uniform taxation, a common burden involving a common obligation to discharge it. The practice at once creates the necessity for recognizing the inaptitude of the instruments called upon to carry the law into execution. More than four hundred separate assessors and boards of assessors determine the taxable values upon no uniform system and in defiance of law and Constitution. "In practice they value real estate all the way from twenty-five to seventy-five per cent of its true value, depending on its location, income, etc., and their personal or political prejudices, and value different contiguous areas at different valuations, though of equal values really; and as to personal property, I regret to say, they appear to make no earnest or honest effort to reach it anywhere, except in the agricultural districts, and even there very imperfectly."[57] [Footnote 56: General Statutes of New Jersey, p. 3929, section 62.] [Footnote 57: James F. Rusling, in the New Jersey report of 1897.] Enough has been said in these articles to show that this defect of method is not peculiar to one State, but is to be found in all. The remedies proposed or adopted have proved ineffectual to produce a better result. It is asserted that the more careful selection of the assessors, a higher salary for service, and a more strict accountability for their acts would introduce a reform; but this could, even under the most favorable of conditions, be only a partial reform. A State assessor with power to remove the assessors has been recommended, but this officer could not become so conversant with conditions throughout the State as to be able to decide on the many questions of assessments coming before him. Certain descriptions of property could be dealt with by such an officer and with an approach to fair and equal treatment. The valuation of the "main stem" of the New Jersey roads was made by civil engineers, and it is believed to have met the constitutional provision as to "true value." In the valuation of a vast quantity of other property no such expert knowledge could be applied, and especially is this true as to "personal property." Real estate might be approximately valued and a _cadastre_ or record prepared, but after twelve months the most carefully compiled valuation would be out of date. Before personal property the assessor would still stand powerless. No multiplication of officers or no system of control over the many local assessors can solve this question in a manner satisfactory to justice to both State and taxpayer. It would seem, then, as if an abandonment of what has been regarded as almost essential features of the State tax systems alone offers relief. No such abandonment can be effected unless an adequate revenue from other sources be provided. The "general property tax," with its futile and laughable incompetency to reach the most profitable sources of revenue, should be modified, and even eliminated as far as is possible. The general principle underlying it, of taxing every form of property, was suited only to a time when the bulk of a man's estate consisted in visible and tangible objects--lands, houses, live stock, and furniture. With every creation of a credit instrument, with the immense development of corporations, the principle has become weaker, until it now stands confessedly inapplicable to at least four fifths of the personal property in existence, and this proportion grows larger each year. PHASES OF PRACTICAL PHILANTHROPY. BY HARRIET A. TOWNSEND. The annual reports of the "Conference of Charities and Corrections" indicate a growing interest in the study of scientific philanthropy. That there has been marvelous progress in methods of charitable work during the past decade no one will deny, but, gratifying as this is (or appears to be on the surface), we find a somewhat discouraging feature in the tendency of the present to multiply institutions, to inaugurate new and extravagant enterprises where theories may be proved, and which threaten to become burdensome to a generous public and to absorb energy in the financial struggle to maintain them which is sorely needed for the more vital issues of the work. The purpose of this article is to give information about simple and practical efforts which have met the test of usefulness and are worthy of imitation. They are being used in four different lines--namely, protection, education, domestic training, and employment. PROTECTION.--The first protective agency was organized in New York city in 1864; it is truly an American idea, and before that date no organization of its kind had been known in England or on the European continent. As a result of the civil war many women were thrown upon their own resources, with children to support, and much suffering was endured in the effort to obtain adequate compensation for labor performed. The objects of the parent protective association--"to secure justice for women and children, to give legal advice free of charge, and to extend moral support to the wronged and helpless"--appealed forcibly to practical philanthropists, and there now exist similar agencies in many other large cities in America, such as Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Buffalo, and San Francisco. The women's educational and industrial unions, which work "to increase fellowship among women in order to promote the best practical methods for securing their educational, industrial, and social advancement," have all adopted the protective work as an important branch of their endeavor. To give detailed statistics of all that has been accomplished in this line since 1864 would be impossible; indeed, so much of the work is of a private nature which can never be revealed that one must "read between the lines" of the annual reports; suffice it to say that by the protective department of one women's union during a period of fourteen years more than twelve thousand dollars unjustly withheld from working women (mostly in small sums) has been collected, police matrons appointed in three local stations, women given places on public boards, a law passed compelling the appointment of women physicians in all the State insane hospitals, and a law making the guardianship of the mother equal to that of the father (passed by the State Legislature without a single negative vote). All this has been done with little expenditure of money, but through the wise effort of courageous men and women whose service has been rendered not for charity alone, but in the cause of justice, "that each should have what he has justly earned is the first necessity of social life." One province of the protective work is to endeavor to make more clear the obligation of the employer and employee, and especially in the domain of household service to place the relation on a commercial basis. The problem of unskilled labor in the home is the principal difficulty in the way of such reform, and until the household economic and kindred associations shall bear more fruit it may prove an insurmountable barrier to complete success. During the last ten years the attention of the humanitarian has been frequently called to the injustice of our laws regulating the "age of consent." In some States the age has been raised to sixteen or eighteen years and penalties increased, but through widespread ignorance of the law it is often a dead letter in both small towns and large cities. A law so constantly broken and with impunity provides little protection for the young of both sexes, in whose interest it is framed, and it is a _dead_ letter because of the indifference of the public. To spread abroad a knowledge of and help to enforce these laws, which so intimately affect the purity of the home, is worthy the consecrated effort of the noblest and most cultivated women in our land. For this and other like ends the number of protective agencies should be largely increased. In every town, or at least in every county, such an association might be formed. There are only required a few women with brave hearts and clear heads, willing to give one afternoon or evening a week, the free services of one or more able lawyers (which will never be found lacking), a small room for a meeting place, and the work can begin. Let notice be given through the press or in the churches that a protective agency is formed and stands ready to offer sympathy and advice to all women in need. Methods of work are very simple: printed blanks are important to properly record the cases, and letterheads which shall give names of committee and those of the attorneys; when a claim for wages is presented, a courteous letter stating the fact that the wage-earner has asked the assistance of the protective agency, and requesting the defendant to answer personally or by letter and to state his side of the case, will generally receive response; great care must be observed to be just to both parties, and not to make hasty nor unwarrantable decisions. The laws affecting the rights and property of women of New York have been briefly compiled for the use of protective associations, and it is very easy to obtain in any State a copy of the laws regulating domestic service for reference in making decisions. The Legal Status of Women, compiled by Jessie J. Cassidy (a graduate of Cornell), will be found useful. If in the beginning the work of protection should be misunderstood and resented it matters not; in time it will win the respect and co-operation of the best elements in any community. What a moral force would an "endless chain" of such workers prove in the struggle for universal brotherhood! To give courage to the most humble beginning we have the word of our philosopher that "every reform was once a private opinion." DOMESTIC TRAINING.--Scientific domestic training or household science is becoming a subject of great interest to all who believe that a truer development of home life lies at the foundation of all social and moral progress. Three large institutions--Pratt, of Brooklyn; Drexel, of Philadelphia; and the College of Teachers, in New York city--present opportunities for the thorough training of teachers in this comparatively new branch of popular education. Clubs for the study of household economics are multiplying year by year; the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ has given earnest thought to the domestic problem, and as a result, and in spite of much prejudice, courses of cookery have been made a part of the public-school curriculum in a few of our large cities. The Board of Regents of New York State has recently adopted a syllabus for a course in home science to be used in the high schools. While the movement, as yet, may be said to be in the experimental stage, it is safe to assert that sentiment in favor of the new idea is increasing. The difficulties in the way of a rapid growth are formidable and make the outlook somewhat discouraging. To properly equip a school for scientific domestic training is in the beginning a considerable expense; the number of skilled teachers ready for the field is small, and their services too valuable to be given without adequate compensation. The cooking schools so far established have not proved self-sustaining, and until more sensible ideas as to the dignity of household labor shall prevail, limitations will continue. In all reforms we must "dig at the roots" if we would insure a steady and healthful growth. The kitchen-garden idea, originated by Miss Emily Huntington in 1887 for "the purpose of giving the little daughters of the poor attractive instruction in housework," has proved one of the best means of practical philanthropy ever discovered. The New York Kitchen-Garden Association was formed in 1880, and from that, as its crowning work, we have the New York Training School for Teachers. The kitchen-garden lessons are very simple; they include how to make beds and take care of sleeping rooms, set and wait on table, wash and iron clothes, care of a baby and the nursery, how to build fires, clean lamps, sweep and dust, instruction in house-cleaning, marketing, and the care of the person--all taught by miniature utensils to the accompaniment of songs and exercises, which give enthusiasm and variety to the work. The training of the kitchen-garden teacher is not difficult, and young women in any community, by a few lessons as to the methods and a study of kitchen-garden literature, may soon become efficient. Children of the ages of from five to eleven are eligible for the training, and both girls and boys enjoy the classes. After the various lessons have been mastered, the next step for girls is into the cooking class, and if on account of the expense or for any other reason the scientific teacher is _not_ available, the courses may be given by housekeepers. Very practical results were thus obtained by one organization of women. A class of fourteen young girls graduated from a kitchen garden were given instruction for twenty weeks on every Saturday morning; the lessons were divided into four short courses; five each were given in the preparation of breakfast, luncheon, dinner, and supper. Every fifth morning was devoted to a practice lesson, when the little cooks prepared and served a meal without assistance. While the number of kitchen gardens is increasing there are yet many localities where the good seed has not taken root; no better work in village or town could enlist the faithful service of King's Daughters or of societies for Christian Endeavor. An inexpensive outfit of kitchen-garden utensils can easily be procured and the work begun. When a class is ready to graduate from the kitchen garden the voluntary service of half a dozen notable housekeepers, who will give the simple lessons in cooking once a week, will yield a most satisfactory harvest. The unconscious tuition of the cultivated house mother is often of greater value than all else. A little girl of eleven years given such opportunities enthusiastically exclaimed, "I've taught my mother how to make bread!" The mother, a peasant woman from across the sea, had passed her childhood and youth in the fields, and, like many of her class, had received no training for the responsibilities of motherhood. To the large number of foreigners, who are constantly seeking homes in our free land, the privileges of the kitchen garden and the free cooking school would prove an inestimable blessing. When housework shall take its proper place among the professions, the chaos which now abounds in a majority of American homes will be forever banished. In home making, regarded as one of the noblest objects of every woman's life--in fact, _the_ object whenever possible--lies the hope of the future. To this end God speed the kitchen garden and the cooking school! EDUCATION.--The public school and kindergarten, free libraries, art galleries and museums, cheap literature, and compulsory education laws would seem, to the casual observer, to leave little need for the philanthropist in the field of education. A philosopher of to-day looks forward to the time when "the object of all free education shall be the emancipation of the individual," and to the time "when general education shall be supplemented by special schools for the special vocations of life." The trend of the present system of education may be in that direction and the prospect more or less hopeful, but that the schools and other opportunities mentioned do not now reach all who need instruction is demonstrated by the success of the various clubs, classes, and lectures which form so important a part of the humanitarian associations of to-day. Everywhere are found men and women of middle age who can not read or write, who were denied even a common-school education in youth; to reach such as these and make them not ashamed to accept and make use of the privileges for which they have secretly longed is practical philanthropy. Among the foreign-born population many children are early forced to help earn the necessities of life, and are taken from school as soon as the law will allow. The college settlements have already accomplished much for this class, but their work has been confined to thickly settled districts in large communities. The story of The Abandoned Farm in New England is familiar, and bears its own pertinent lesson. Because of the opportunities for education, entertainment, and varied employment which the large city offers, the young people desert the farm, home ties are broken, and many lives ruined. Of the low ideals which prevail in many country districts there are striking illustrations. A bright woman sojourning for a winter in a small town found that there were two hotels or taverns where liquor was sold, two churches where only occasional services were held, a single school-house kept open during the winter months, no hall except the ballrooms of the hotels (used only for dancing), no library, and no entertainments of a literary order. This woman organized a club or debating society, and after a few months of careful guidance she allowed the members to select their own topic for the last meeting of the season; to her great surprise, a debate was announced on the subject, "Whether it is better for a young man upon coming of age to have one thousand dollars or a good education." The majority decided that it would be better to have the money, because he could then speculate and gain a fortune! What better missionary work could be done in behalf of education than to establish a "thought center" in every farming region or small town? The system of traveling libraries, a recent and encouraging movement, makes it possible (in some States) to place the best books and current literature in the homes of the farmers and of the inhabitants of the smallest towns. The books can be obtained, made use of, and exchanged for others, so that the interest may be perpetuated; the conditions are not difficult, and the fact that a room or rooms must be provided for the safe keeping and the circulation of the library is important. A traveling library once secured, a "thought center" is established. Lectures, clubs, and classes will follow; they are a natural sequence. In addition to literary topics, talks on personal purity, physical culture (respect for the body as the temple of the soul), and on home ideals (plain living and high thinking) may be given. Good men and women, fitted to speak well on these subjects, will be ready to give their services. Where enthusiasm is once aroused, seed can be sown by such nonsectarian gatherings which fails to take root in the churches. We are taught that the highest authority within man is the conscience. Rosenkranz, in his Philosophy of Education, gives this fine definition of conscience: "Conscience is the criticism which the ideal self makes on the realized self." To discover and quicken the ideal self wherever possible is one of the noblest aims of practical philanthropy. EMPLOYMENT.--A recent report of the United States Labor Commissioner, Hon. Carroll D. Wright, states that the number of women laborers is increasing, but that women are more generally taking the places of children than of men; that the encroachment of women upon the occupations held by men is so far very slight, and only in conditions where women are better adapted for the particular work in which they are employed. "Women," he says, "are considered by many employers to be more reliable, more easily controlled, neater, more rapid, industrious, polite and careful, and less liable to strike than men. Wyoming and Utah are cited as the only States which have laws according to men and women equal wages for equal work. There is still much economic injustice as to compensation for women's work, although some progress has been made within the last few years." The agitation of the question of "equal pay for equal work," if it has not as yet accomplished much for the woman wage-earner, has at least revealed the fact that women as a class are not as well trained for the work they attempt as men. The number of unskilled women in all branches of trade presents a problem which may well engage the attention of the philanthropist. The necessity of earning to "keep the wolf from the door," the pleasure resulting from financial independence, and a desire to add to "pin money" have all tended to increase the number of girls and women who are seeking employment outside the home. The fever has extended to the smaller towns, and even to the farmers' wives and daughters, until the supply greatly exceeds the demand in many localities, and the women really in need are often crowded to the wall in this inadequate race. In the passing of old ideas as to the proper status of woman much good has been evolved; it is no longer considered degrading to earn one's living, and the woman worker in every field is winning her way to the respect and recognition which she deserves. What can be done to raise the standard of woman's work, to give more thorough training in vocations for which women are best fitted, to dignify important occupations which suffer from the lack of skilled service and which are not overcrowded because of mistaken ideas, and, above all, to make women ashamed to receive compensation which they do not fully earn? The employment bureaus connected with the various organizations of women are endeavoring to answer these questions. Their object, as outlined, is to advise and adopt such methods as shall best assist women in their chosen vocations; to also provide a bureau of registration where applications can be received and information given. A committee of practical women supervises the work and endeavors not only to secure temporary positions, but to confer permanent benefits on those who seek their aid. The applicants usually include stenographers, typewriters, copyists, clerks, governesses, matrons, nurses, housekeepers, seamstresses, laundresses, cooks, and housemaids. It is the rule, and not the exception, to find a girl or woman _specially_ fitted for the position she seeks. The majority are not fitted even to do _one_ thing well, and the ignorance and assumption shown are appalling. To discover latent ability, to stimulate the desire to excel, to explain the rights of the employer and employee, and the moral obligations of both, is a part of the privilege of the women who give time and thought to the employment problem. The Boston Women's Educational and Industrial Union has been able to render excellent service by the distribution of circulars cautioning women against advertisements which offer large returns for work done at home. Its list of fraudulent firms, obtained by thorough investigation, has been sent to other associations, and has already proved of inestimable value to many women who would otherwise have been tempted to send money, allured by the attractive advertisements. The list compiled gives the names of one hundred firms which are a "delusion and a snare," and which, on account of some trifling technicality, the law seems unable to touch. To exalt the home and raise the standard of domestic service is another important object--perhaps the most important of all. From the ordinary intelligence office to the employment bureau under the guidance of educated women is a long step for progress. In all humane effort, the more scientific the methods employed the better will be the results. According to Charles Kingsley, "scientific method needs no definition--it is simply the exercise of common sense." HERBERT SPENCER AT SEVENTY-NINE. The portrait of Herbert Spencer, which forms the frontispiece to this number of the Monthly, is from a photograph taken soon after he reached the age of seventy-eight. Though of late years his health has been unusually feeble, this is scarcely reflected in the face, which still retains in a marked degree the expression of intellectual strength that was so characteristic of his prime. About the time Mr. Spencer completed the Synthetic Philosophy, or, as it is better known, the Philosophy of Evolution, with the publication of the third volume of the Principles of Sociology, we gave an account of The Man and his Work, from the pen of Prof. William H. Hudson, who had for a number of years acted as his secretary, and was so familiar with his thought that he afterward published an Introduction to the Philosophy, which Mr. Spencer himself has cordially commended. It was naturally supposed by his many friends that having practically carried out his original plan as laid down in his prospectus thirty-six years before, Mr. Spencer would throw off the cares and vexations of authorship, to enjoy the rest and relaxation that his arduous and long-continued labors had earned. But this, it seems, he was not inclined to do. Apparently as active intellectually as ever, he has kept at work to the full extent of his physical ability, devoting himself mainly to such additions and modifications of his published writings as new knowledge and the advance of thought have made necessary. This persistent industry, unusual, to say the least, in one so far advanced in life, the presentation of his latest portrait, and the interest which the world takes in the doings of a man who has so profoundly influenced the thought of his time, make this a fitting opportunity to refer to some of the later incidents in his career. Though never inclined to plume himself on the importance or the grandeur of his great undertaking, wondering now that he ever had the "audacity" to begin it, and regarding its completion as more an "emancipation" than a triumph, Mr. Spencer is nevertheless entitled to the satisfaction which comes from the contemplation in the evening of a long life of the fulfillment of the purpose to which that life has been devoted. Although he speaks of the series of works comprising the Synthetic Philosophy as "complete yet incomplete," because more things might have been put into it, Mr. Spencer has the unquestionable right to look upon his "system" as finished in all the essentials of a symmetrical and self-sustaining structure; and more than this, he finds it generally accepted as a masterpiece, embodying, if not all the truth, yet a fundamental truth manifested in the growth and order of the universe of matter and mind. When we regard the comprehensiveness of Mr. Spencer's system, embracing everything there is, and the multitude of the details that had to be considered in the course of its preparation, we wonder at the magnitude of the aggregation that may be formed by the repetition of small daily tasks. The portions of time he was able to give to work were at most very brief, and would be regarded by the majority of workers as insufficient for any great accomplishment; and when the frequent and sometimes long interruptions that occurred are considered, seem absolutely insignificant. Yet in these small fragments of two or three hours a day with many lost days in the year, and several lost years, one of the greatest works in the history of the human mind was carried to its end. The old figure of the dropping of the water on the stone and the fable of the tortoise and the hare are newly illustrated. Outside of his work in the composition of the Philosophy, Mr. Spencer has always taken a vital interest in leading public questions, making them the subjects of frequent communications to the press, and seeking the co-operation of others when opportunity offered either in combating some needless innovation or aiding some important reform. True to the teaching of his philosophy, it will be observed that in any attempts of the kind his reliance has always been on the power of gradual development, rather than abrupt changes by acts of Parliament or otherwise, to bring about desired conditions. Before his visit to the United States, in 1882, he interested himself in forming an Anti-Aggression League, for the purpose of opposing schemes for extending the lines of British dominion in various parts of the world. Among his associates in this effort were Mr. John Morley, Mr. Frederic Harrison, and the Rev. Llewellyn Davis and Canon Fremantle, now Dean of Ripon, liberal-minded clergymen of the Church of England. The movement found little public sympathy, and no adequate support. Mr. Spencer, severely taxing his strength in promoting it, suffered another breakdown (from which he has never fully recovered), in consequence of which the next number of his Philosophy--Part VI of the Principles of Sociology: Ecclesiastical Institutions--did not appear till the close of 1855. It is worthy of remark in connection with this incident that it seems to have been left for non-Christians almost alone in a professedly Christian community to take the advance in inculcating and disseminating one of the central ideas of the Christian religion; as now, in the United States, with the orthodox church people almost unanimous in supporting war and the wildest schemes of aggression, it has been left for a few New England Unitarians first to dare to speak in protest against an iniquitous and perilous crusade for foreign dominion. Mr. Spencer has never neglected an opportunity to express in unmistakable terms his aversion to militancy, and has been at great pains to demonstrate, as in his Sociology, that the true road to all higher development of society is through encouraging the growth of its industrial factors. A disposition manifested among English legislators to favor the passage of acts embodying some of the ideas of the socialists led to the publication of a series of magazine articles showing the demoralizing tendencies of measures of paternalism and foreshadowing the disastrous ultimate results that would ensue from the unnecessary interference of the state. These were afterward collected and published under the title of The Man _versus_ the State, and are now bound up with the revised Social Statics. From the spring of 1886 till 1889, when conditions of health compelled entire suspension of the work on the Philosophy, and it was even doubtful whether it could ever be continued, Mr. Spencer dictated the larger part of his autobiography. This has since been completed and put in print, but will not be published during his lifetime. It will comprise two considerable volumes. Not finding life in a boarding house in all respects suited to his wishes, Mr. Spencer for many years entertained the idea of establishing himself in a home of his own in the suburbs of London, but had been deterred from so doing by the prospective troubles of housekeeping. In the summer of 1889, however, after making such arrangements as promised to relieve him in great measure of these cares, he finally carried out the idea by taking a house in the neighborhood of Regent's Park. But though for some years the bachelor household was a success, we understand it eventually ceased to be so, though it was continued until Mr. Spencer changed his residence to Brighton two years ago. There was wanting in those who had immediate charge of details that feeling of identity of interests and that disposition to co-operate which belong to the ordinary family, and as a consequence differences grew up that could not be permanently composed, and that on the whole did not conduce to domestic tranquillity. About the time his housekeeping experience was entered upon, Mr. Spencer found himself well enough to go on with the composition of his Philosophy. As he relates in the preface to the Data of Ethics and to Justice, he had already, ten years before, in the imminent doubt of ever being able to complete the work as it had been laid out, determined to devote his attention first to the end and ultimate object of the system--to that part of it to which all the rest was intended to lead up; the purpose, "lying behind all proximate purposes," of finding a scientific basis for the principles of right and wrong in conduct at large. When, now, the question arose again of what work to undertake first, completion of the Principles of Ethics was at once decided upon. As it was still doubtful whether he would be able to accomplish even this, he took up the part which seemed most important--Justice. This was published as Part IV of the Ethics in the summer of 1891. No further serious interruptions occurred in the execution of the work. Parts II and III, completing the first volume of the Ethics, were finished in the spring of 1892; and a year afterward Parts V and VI were added, forming, with Justice, the second volume. The ethical part of the Philosophy as contemplated by Mr. Spencer having been completed, only two divisions remained to be worked out--Professional Institutions and Industrial Institutions, parts of the Principles of Sociology--to fill out the whole plan. A subsidiary discussion of considerable importance for the integrity of the theory of evolution now intervened to be disposed of before these parts of the work could be proceeded with. Prof. August Weismann had published a book in which he denied the transmission of acquired characters; or, as Mr. Spencer would word it, the transmission of functionally-wrought modifications--a very vital point in all Mr. Spencer's philosophy. Mr. Spencer took the matter up at once, and published several incisive essays refuting Professor Weismann's positions. He opened his argument against the neo-Darwinian position with essays on the Inadequacy of Natural Selection, and on Professor Weismann's Theories, and followed them, at intervals of a few months, with the additional articles, A Rejoinder to Professor Weismann, and Weismannism Once More. Anxious that the question should be brought to the notice of every biologist, Mr. Spencer had reprints of these essays distributed among the teachers of the science all over Europe and America. The work on the final stage of Mr. Spencer's great undertaking was begun about the middle of 1894. The reading of an editorial in the Popular Science Monthly having suggested to him that it would be desirable to do so, he published the chapters on Professional Institutions--serially in this periodical and in the Contemporary Review. The chapters on Industrial Institutions did not appear till the third volume of the Sociology was issued in November, 1896--the volume which was the culmination of the work so persistently prosecuted in the face of the most formidable and even seemingly hopeless difficulties. In these departments of the system, the argument was pursued, consistent with that which prevails in all the other departments, that in the professions and the industries the principle of evolution operates just as surely and completely as in the derivation of an animal species from its ancestral form. Appreciation of the value of Mr. Spencer's work had been growing for many years, and its influence was gradually making itself felt in movements of various kinds in the active world. Whatever he wrote or said received attention at once, was discussed, or influenced action. The completion of his Philosophy was deemed worthy of formal notice and a proper subject for felicitation wherever science was known, and in England was regarded as a suitable object for a national memorial. An address of congratulation was prepared for presentation to him, and with it went a request that he would have his portrait painted to be presented to the nation. It has always been his principle to decline offers of testimonials, on the ground that the custom had become an abuse, and persons invited to participate in presentations were often put under a kind of moral obligation to comply, to which he would not be, even incidentally, a party. Consistently with this attitude and not realizing the real nature of the movement in favor of a testimonial and how really spontaneous it was, he wrote to its promoters repeating his objections and asking that it be not pressed. But when the address was presented and he saw the list of illustrious names attached to it, including those of men who had been his antagonists, he yielded to what was evidently a spontaneous feeling of the representative men among his countrymen, and sat for his portrait as soon as circumstances permitted, or about a year afterward, to Mr. Hubert Herkomer. The following is the letter of congratulation and the request for his portrait, with the names of the distinguished signers, and Mr. Spencer's reply: THE CAMP, SUNNINGDALE, _December 16, 1896_. DEAR SIR: We, the undersigned, offer you our cordial congratulations upon the completion of your System of Synthetic Philosophy. Not all of us agreeing in equal measure with its conclusions, we are all at one in our estimate of the great intellectual powers it exhibits and of the immense effect it has produced in the history of thought; nor are we less impressed by the high moral qualities which have enabled you to concentrate those powers for so many years upon a purpose worthy of them, and, in spite of all obstacles, to carry out so vast a design. To the many who, like us, have learned to honor the man while profiting by his writings, it would be a satisfaction to possess an authentic personal likeness of the author. It has therefore occurred to us that the occasion might be appropriately marked by requesting you to permit us to employ some eminent artist to take your portrait, with a view, to its being deposited in one of our national collections for the benefit of ourselves and of those who come after us. We hope that your health may be benefited by the leisure which you have earned so well, and that you may long continue to enjoy the consciousness of having completed your work. W. DE W. ABNEY, R. E., C. B., D. C. L., F. R. S., Pres. Physical Society. ROBERT ADAMSON, M. A., LL. D., Prof, of Logic, Glasgow University. GRANT ALLEN, B. A. ALEXANDER BAIN, M. A., LL. D., Professor of Logic, Aberdeen University. SIR GEORGE S. BADEN-POWELL, K. C. M. G., M. A., M. P. RIGHT HON. ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR, P. C., D. C. L., F. R. S., M. P. SIR ROBERT STAWELL BALL, LL. D., F. R. S., Lowndean Prof. Ast., Camb. H. CHARLTON BASTIAN, M. A., M. D., F. R. S., Prof. Medicine, Univ. Coll., London. FRANK E. BEDDARD, M. A., F. R. S., Prosector Zoölogical Society. JOHN BEDDOE, M. D., F. R. S. SIR WALTER BESANT, M. A. E. W. BRABROOK, Pres. Anthropological Institute. BERNARD BOSANQUET, M. A. C. V. BOYS, F. R. S., Assistant Prof. Physics R. C. S. T. LAUDER BRUNTON, M. D., D. Sc., F. R. S. EDWARD CLODD. F. HOWARD COLLINS. SIR J. CRICHTON-BROWNE, M. D., LL. D., F. R. S. W. H. DALLINGER, LL. D., D. Sc., F. R. S. FRANCIS DARWIN, M. A., M. B., F. R. S. GEORGE H. DARWIN, M. A., LL. D., F. R. S., Plumian Prof. Ast. and Exp. Physics, Cambridge. W. E. DARWIN, B. A. JAMES DONALDSON, M. A., LL. D., Principal University St. Andrews. RIGHT HON. SIR M. E. GRANT-DUFF, P. C., G. C. S. I., F. R. S. Earl of Dysart. SIR JOHN EVANS, K. C. B., D. C. L., LL. D., D. Sc., Treas. R. S. SIR JOSHUA FITCH, LL. D. MICHAEL FOSTER, M. A., M. D., LL. D., D. C. L., Sec. R. S., Prof. Physio., Cambridge. EDWARD FRANKLAND, M. D., D. C. L., LL. D., F. R. S. RIGHT HON. SIR EDWARD FRY, P. C., LL. D., D. C. L., F. R. S. SIR DOUGLAS GALTON, K. C. B., D. C. L., LL. D., F. R. S. FRANCIS GALTON, M. A., D. C. L., D. Sc., F. R. S. RICHARD GARNETT, LL. D. SIR GEORGE GROVE, C. B., D. C. L., LL. D. ALBERT C. L. G. G�NTHER, M. A., M. D., F. R. S., Pres. Linnean Society. FREDERIC HARRISON, M. A. JAMES EDMUND HARTING. RIGHT HON. LORD HOBHOUSE, P. C. HENRY HOBHOUSE, M. A., M. P. SHADWORTH HODGSON, late Pres. Aristotelian Society. SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER, K. C. S. I., C. B., M. D., D. C. L., LL. D., F. R. S. WILLIAM HUGGINS, D. C. L., LL. D., F. R. S. J. HUGHLINGS JACKSON, M. D., LL. D., F. R. S. WILLIAM KNIGHT, LL. D., Prof. Moral Philosophy, St. Andrews. ANDREW LANG. E. RAY LANKESTER, M. A., LL. D., F. R. S., Linacre Prof. Anatomy, Oxford. SIR TREVOR LAWRENCE, Pres. Royal Horticultural Society. W. E. H. LECKY, M. A., LL. D., D. C. L., M. P. J. NORMAN LOCKYER, C. B., F. R. S., Prof. Astr. Physics, R. C. S. RIGHT HON. SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, P. C., D. C. L., LL. D., F. R. S., M. P. VERNON LUSHINGTON, Q. C. P. A. MACMAHON, R. A., F. R. S., late Pres. Math. Society. JAMES MARTINEAU, D. D., LL. D., D. C. L. DAVID MASSON, M. A., LL. D., Emeritus Prof. Rhetoric, Edinburgh. RAPHAEL MELDOLA, F. R. S., Pres. Entomological Society. C. LLOYD MORGAN, Prin. University Coll., Bristol. RIGHT HON. JOHN MORLEY, P. C., M. A., LL. D., F. R. S., M. P. C. HUBERT H. PARRY, Prin. R. Coll. of Music. GENERAL PITT-RIVERS, D. C. L., F. R. S. EDWARD B. POULTON, M. A., F. R. S., Prof. Zoöl. Oxford University. SIR WILLIAM O. PRIESTLEY, M. D., LL. D., M. P. LORD REAY, G. C. S. I., G. C. I. E. LORD RAYLEIGH, M. A., D. C. L., LL. D., F. R. S., Prof. Nat. Philos. Royal Institution. DAVID G. RITCHIE, M. A., Professor of Logic St. Andrews University. SIR HENRY E. ROSCOE, LL. D., D. C. L., F. R. S. J. S. BURDON SANDERSON, LL. D., D. C. L., F. R. S., Reg. Prof. of Medicine Univ. Oxford. GEORGE H. SAVAGE, M. D., F. R. C. P. E. A. SCH�FER, F. R. S., Prof. Physio. Univ. Coll. London. D. H. SCOTT, M. A., Ph. D., F. R. S., Hon. Keeper Jodrell Laboratory, Kew. HENRY SIDGWICK, M. A., Litt. D., D. C. L., Prof. Moral Philos. Univ. Camb. W. R. SORLEY, Prof. Moral Philos. Univ. of Aberdeen. LESLIE STEPHEN, M. A., Litt. D., LL. D. G. F. STOUT. JAMES SULLY, M. A., LL. D. W. T. THISELTON-DYER, C. M. G., C. I. E., M. A., F. R. S. JOHN VENN, Sc. D., F. R. S. SYDNEY HOWARD VINES, M. A., D. Sc., F. R. S., Prof. Botany Univ. Oxford. SIR WILLOUGHBY WADE, M. D., F. R. C. P. ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, D. C. L., F. R. S. BEATRICE WEBB. LADY VICTORIA WELBY. SAMUEL WILKS, M. D., LL. D., F. R. S., Pres. R. College of Physicians. HAWARDEN, _November 30, 1896_. MY DEAR SIR: It has long been my rule to decline joining in groups of signatures, nor do I think myself entitled to bear a prominent part in the present case. But I beg that you will, if you think proper, set me down as an approver of the request to Mr. Spencer, whose signal abilities and, rarer still, whose manful and self-denying character, are so justly objects of admiration. I remain your very faithful, W. E. GLADSTONE. F. HOWARD COLLINS, Esq. 2, LEWES-CRESCENT, BRIGHTON, _December 19, 1896_. MY DEAR HOOKER: If, as may fitly be said, the value of congratulations increases in a geometrical progression with the eminence of those offering them, I may, indeed, be extremely gratified by the accumulation coming from men standing so high in various spheres. And an accompanying pleasure necessarily results from the good wishes expressed for my health and happiness during my remaining days. The further honor offered has caused in me some mental conflict. Eight years ago, to the inquiry whether I would sit for a subscription portrait to be painted by Millais, I replied negatively, assigning the reasons that the raising of funds to pay the costs of conferring marks of approbation had grown into an abuse; that the moral coercion under which contributions were in many cases obtained was repugnant to me; and that I objected to have my known and unknown friends asked to tax themselves to the required extent. These reasons survived, and, swayed by them, I recently sent a copy of the letter in which they had been stated to the gentleman with whom the proposal now made originated, thinking thereby to prevent further trouble. I was unaware to how large an extent the proposal had been adopted and how distinguished were the numerous gentlemen who had given it their support. I now find myself obliged either inconsistently to waive my objection or else rudely to slight the cordially-expressed feelings and wishes of so many whose positions and achievements command my great respect. Between the alternatives there seems to be practically no choice. I am compelled to yield to the request made in so sympathetic a manner by signatories so eminent, and at the same time must express to them through you my full sense of the honor done me. I am, my dear Hooker, sincerely yours, HERBERT SPENCER. Marks of honor offered to Mr. Spencer from time to time since 1871 have included doctor's degrees from the Universities of St. Andrews, Bologna, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Buda-Pesth; and elections as foreign member or correspondent of the Academies of Rome, Turin, Naples, Paris, Philadelphia, Copenhagen, Brussels, Vienna, Milan, and the Prussian order "_Pour le Mérite_." Mr. Spencer has been prompted year after year to decline these various honors by the conviction that instead of being, as commonly supposed, encouragements to literature and science, they are discouraging. He contends that they constitute a system of inverse handicapping. In physical competitions it is usual to give the younger a certain artificial advantage when they are set against the elder; but in these mental competitions between the rising men and the men who have risen the reverse practice is followed--the men who have risen have an artificial advantage, and the younger men, who of necessity have much to struggle against, have their difficulties artificially increased by the absence of titles which their competitors possess. Mr. Spencer is quite aware that the course he has persistently followed has cost him much, since a list of honors on the title-pages of his books would have greatly increased the attention paid to them by critics and others. Nevertheless, he has continued to make this practical protest. Since completing his Philosophy, Mr. Spencer has occupied his working hours with the revision of the Principles of Biology, making the modifications and incorporating the new facts which the progress of the science demands. He recognizes that the advance has been more rapid in this branch than in any other; and that while it might be almost hopeless for him at his time of life to bring a work on biology at large up to date, the case is different in an exposition of the Principles of Biology. The additions to the work include a chapter on Metabolism supplementing the discussion of vital changes of matter; a chapter on the Dynamic Element in Life, to render less inadequate the conception of life previously expressed; some pages on Structure; an account, under the head of Cell Life and Cell Multiplication, of the astonishing actions in cell nuclei which the microscope has revealed; a further chapter on Genesis, Heredity, and Variation, in which certain views enunciated in the first edition of the book are qualified and developed; a review of various modern ideas under the title of Recent Criticisms and Hypotheses; a rewriting of most of the chapter on The Argument from Embryology; and a number of changes incorporated as sections in pre-existing chapters. The articles on Weissmannism are incorporated in an appendix. In performing this work assistance was needed, and the author sought and received criticism and help from different persons, each taking a division falling within the range of his special studies: Prof. W. H. Perkin in organic chemistry and its derived subjects; Prof. A. G. Tansley in plant morphology and physiology; Prof. E. W. MacBride and Mr. J. T. Cunningham in animal morphology; and Mr. W. B. Hardy in animal physiology. The first volume of this work, recently published, has been received with favor by persons of all shades of opinion respecting the questions it touches. The London Times, in not the friendliest of criticisms, says that even persons who do not accept the author's Philosophy will rejoice that he has been able to complete it, and adds that as it stands it "is a marvel of erudition: every page exhibits the wealth and variety of illustration for which Mr. Spencer is justly famous." The latest notice of it that we have observed, a French one in the _Revue Scientifique_, says that in consulting it biologists "will not lose their time, and many will find valuable ideas in it, suggestions by which their experimental work can not fail to be greatly benefited. And, like us, they will be filled with admiration for a work so condensed, and at the same time so admirably co-ordinated, so replete with facts and ideas, of the philosopher who has exercised so great an influence on the science of his times, and who is one of the finest intellectual glories of his country and of the present epoch." Perhaps one of the most significant of recent testimonials of appreciation of the Synthetic Philosophy is the announcement of the publication of a complete translation of First Principles into Japanese by Mr. Fujii, who has devoted several years to the work. "Mr. Spencer's works," it is added, "have long had a great attraction for Japanese translators." Mr. Spencer is now engaged upon the second volume of the Biology. It was formerly Mr. Spencer's custom to spend about nine months of the year in London and the three summer months in the country, but for several years past he has found the fogs and other gloomy winter conditions of the metropolis too trying. The confinement enforced upon him by increasing feebleness has, moreover, precluded his enjoyment of the social privileges, particularly of the Athenæum Club, which were one of the attractions that made a town residence tolerable. He therefore, at the beginning of 1898, took up his residence in Brighton, where he has a house looking upon the sea, and giving him the benefit of the flood of light which that place enjoys. At present Mr. Spencer is able to give very little time to work, and being confined to the house most of the time, the routine of his daily life admits of little variety. His first business in the day is to hear the morning paper read; then he attends to his correspondence, and if well enough does a little work. If any matter is going through the press he will generally be seen with a proof close by. His afternoon is spent in such relaxation as is afforded by scanning the illustrated papers and magazines, listening to music, which must always be classical, or, if sufficiently well, a drive; and he retires at ten o'clock. * * * * * It is often asked, Miss Mary H. Kingsley says in her West African Studies, whether Christianity or Mohammedanism is to possess Africa--"as if the choice of Fate lay between these two religions alone. I do not think it is so, or at least it is not wise for a mere student to ignore the other thing in the affair, fetich, which is, as it were, a sea wherein all things suffer a sea change. For, remember, it is not Christianity alone that becomes tinged with fetich, or gets ingulfed and dominated by it. Islam, when it strikes the true heart of Africa, the great forest belt region, fares but little better, though it is more recent than Christianity, and though it is preached by men who know the make of the African mind." PRESIDENT CHARLES W. DABNY, Jr., of the University of Tennessee, once said in an address that when in school, where the work was all done "at the point of the hickory, so to speak," the best teacher he had "was the kindly old neighborhood loafer," who roamed the woods with him, told him of the times of the wild flowers and the habits of the birds, and taught him to shoot the long rifle. He followed the "natural method, and showed a pupil how to do a thing by doing it." Editor's Table. _SCIENCE AND THE STATE._ It is probably not too much to say that the true measure of the intelligence and efficiency of a government is the extent to which, in the various spheres of activity which it controls, it recognizes the authority and adopts the methods of science. There is one department of Government--the remark might be applied to nearly all civilized governments, and very pointedly to our own--in which science receives a large and serious recognition, and that is the Navy Department. We have lately had a striking exhibition, which the world at large has watched with great interest, of the high state of efficiency to which a navy can be brought in a comparatively short space of time. If the question is asked how it was done, there is but one answer: it was done by recognizing science and working on scientific lines. To work on scientific lines is simply to study carefully, in the light of the best available knowledge, the means for accomplishing a desired end, and having found the best means, to adopt them in practice. Our naval administration has fortunately been able to repel if not wholly, at least to a remarkable extent, the intrusion of "political" influence, and has consequently been able to apply itself without serious distraction to the accomplishment of its own special tasks. It has called science to its aid not only as regards purely physical questions, but as regards questions of organization; and the result is that it has succeeded in giving the nation not only ships and guns, but the men who are fitted by knowledge, by training, and by discipline to make the best possible use of the ships and guns. Next to the navy in the recognition accorded to science, but yet a long way off, comes the army. We are speaking now, of course, of our own army; and what the "long way off" meant in waste of money and of human life, in the suffering and misery of brave men, is a too familiar tale. Had science governed the operations of the land forces and presided over their whole organization to the same extent that it did over the operations and organization of the navy, a certain recent page of history would have borne a very different record, and would not have been so burdened as it is with shame and heartache to patriotic citizens. Killing and being killed are serious matters, and everybody understands that the business can not safely be trifled with. That is why science is allowed to have its own way almost entirely in the navy, and to exercise a large measure of control in the army, with the effect of rendering the first a nearly perfect machine, and giving to the latter a high degree of efficiency for its own purposes. But have we not here object lessons which ought to be applied to other departments of the Government? Is it only in the matter of killing that the aid of science is required? Can the public at large not rise to the conception that, if science can make splendid killing machines, it might also, if allowed fair play, make excellent administrative machines for peaceful purposes? We have departments which deal with such important matters as currency and finance, agriculture and statistics, the administration of justice, the control of railway traffic, the erection of public buildings and the improvement of waterways, the carrying out of geodetic and geological surveys, the representation of the country abroad, the protection of the public health, and, finally, the great question of public education. It must be obvious to every thoughtful person that, if science could have its say and its way in relation to these matters, it would put them all on the best footing which the existing condition of knowledge permits. It would ask, "What are the objects to be accomplished?" and would proceed to select the persons and adopt the means best fitted to realize those objects. The country would then have a civil service in which economy and efficiency would be equally conspicuous, and which would furnish examples for imitation in private enterprise of the best ways of doing things. It is needless to say how far removed the present condition of government business is from anything like scientific organization. If killing must be done scientifically, the injured feelings of the politician find relief in insisting that nearly everything else within the sphere of government action shall be done most unscientifically. In the filling of important positions the first thing considered is not the question of fitness for the work to be done, but the question of party advantage. It is not too much to say that a prejudice frequently exists against a man conspicuously qualified by knowledge, experience, and character for a given post. There is an uncomfortable feeling that such a man might not be sufficiently pliable afterward in the hands of those who had appointed him--that the preposterous idea might get into his head that, having obtained the office on his merits, he was at liberty, in the execution of his duties, to think only of the public interest. The preference of the politician, therefore, for "the boys" is easily understood; but "the boys" and science do not work hand in hand. Our universities are turning out year by year men possessing the highest scientific qualifications, men who have studied both in this country and in Europe, and who are prepared to take any positions in which scientific work is required. Some of these are absorbed by the teaching profession, but the great majority find employment in the various industries of the country. Unfortunately, the attainments of such men give them no special advantage as regards employment in the public service of the country; to qualify for that they must graduate in another school entirely, and get certificates from a very different class of professors. We are far from holding the opinion that men of high education should dissociate themselves from the political life of the country; but it is unhappily true that the kind of interest which an intelligent man who places the nation above party can take in politics is not likely to recommend him to those who have the dispensing of places. The fact should, however, be emphasized that if science does not receive due recognition in connection with the public services, it is not because of any lack of native-born citizens capable of representing it with credit and even with distinction. In this respect America has placed herself fully abreast with the most advanced nations of the modern world, and the Government has only to say what service it requires in order to have its choice of men possessing every qualification to render that service in the most competent and satisfactory manner. In the last resort, it must be admitted, the fault rests with the people. It is with reluctance that the average elector acknowledges--if he can be brought to acknowledge at all--that any public office requires special qualifications. Such an idea seems to be at war with true democratic doctrine, and to imply a serious abridgment of the powers of the people's representatives. It is readily conceded that private industries and enterprises of all kinds call for training and experience and special knowledge on the part of those who conduct them; but Government business is supposed to be so simple that a wayfaring man, though a pronounced fool, need not err therein. There is more or less hypocrisy, however, in the pretension. The real underlying thought is that, outside of the two great killing departments, no very serious harm can be done by official incompetence, and that the great thing is to provide for "the boys." No idea could be more false. The evil that can be done by unwise economic measures, for example, is incalculable. The army and navy are brought into action only when the dogs of war have been let loose; but the influence of the civil departments of the Government acts unceasingly, and touches the life of the people at a thousand points. In the matter of public education science has never had the recognition to which it is entitled; nor will it have until the people as a whole know better what science is--until they cease to think of it as a thing of mysteries and technicalities, and come to understand that it is simply the organization of knowledge and the rendering of it available for guidance in the business of life. Meantime, wherever circumstances are favorable, the education of the young, even of the youngest, should be given as far as possible a scientific character. We are strongly inclined to the opinion that, in a country whose fundamental industry is agriculture, an effort should be made in all schools to impart a few sound elementary ideas as to the principles of agriculture. What better starting point could there be for scientific instruction than the soil out of which we derive, mediately or immediately, all that goes to sustain life? It seems to us that no human being should be permitted to be wholly ignorant of the conditions upon which the successful cultivation of the soil depends, and we are persuaded that the subject might, by proper treatment, be made deeply interesting to the vast majority of school children. A prominent Englishman, Mr. Boyd-Kinnear, has lately been discussing this matter in a London paper. He points out that a knowledge of the scientific principles of agriculture is of fundamental importance, and that whatever else is taught in the national schools, the sciences on which farming rests--physics, chemistry, mechanics, and the physiology of plants and animals--should hold a principal place. He observes that in order to know agriculture it is necessary to understand, first of all, the elements and the action of the soil and the air. There is urgent need, he contends, for teaching what is known on these subjects and for pursuing research into the much larger field of the unknown. In these remarks we entirely concur, and we believe that it would be a happy thing for this country, and for every country, if education could be so administered that, instead of tending, as it so often does, to separate human beings from the soil, it should tend to establish in their minds a sense of their dependence on it and an intelligent, if possible a loving, interest in the operations by which the living of the world is won and the face of Nature is beautified. Here, as we conceive, is where scientific teaching should begin. Such a system of instruction would do much more than increase the intelligence of the farming community, though that would be a benefit of the first magnitude; it would so transform public opinion in general that the divorce we now see between science and the State would no longer be possible. The whole national life would be placed on a sounder basis; and it would probably be found that the result of doing other things scientifically was to diminish very greatly the importance of the arrangements for scientific killing. A nation governed by science would be a peace-loving and peace-maintaining nation. _AGRICULTURE AND NATIONAL LIFE._ Some very interesting points of view are presented in an article on the food supply of England which appeared a few months ago in The New Century Review of London. The writer, Mr. Richard Higgs, Jr., is very unwilling to admit the commonly accepted view that Great Britain must be dependent upon other countries for the food her people require. He holds that all that is required to make the production of grain profitable in England is the application of higher intelligence and more businesslike methods to the work of the farm. "Speaking generally," he says, "agriculture has been of late a despised industry; intellectual activity has not been brought to bear on it; the men of force and enterprise have failed to recognize that it offers an absolutely unrivaled sphere for the exercise of personal initiative, skill, and knowledge.... Agriculture has not been regarded as a means of assisting human development, but rather as a hindrance to progress. A low type of manhood and a slow, unprogressive condition of life are usually regarded as indispensable to agriculture, and consequently it has been neglected by reformers who desire to further the progress of the race." The writer proceeds to describe the various ways in which, as he believes, agriculture might be made more profitable, partly through lowering of the cost of production, and partly by improvement of the yield; and, finally, he sets forth the disagreeable and very serious conclusions which flow from the proposition--if it is to be accepted as established--that Great Britain can not feed herself by the remunerative production of wheat in the face of low prices. In the first place, the national policy must be one of "bluff and weakness toward other nations: bluff, because it will not answer our purpose to appear weak; and weakness, because, seeing that possible enemies are our largest feeders, we are not in a condition to deal with other nations on equal terms, but must ever face the galling necessity of being dependent upon the good will of a few powerful nations for our daily bread." A nation so situated must be "in the front rank of the nations which are engaging in the mad scramble after markets"; must give itself over "to all the orthodox requirements of diplomacy by engaging in bullying, cringing, lying, deceit, and massacre, in order to secure an outlet for its manufactured goods." Such a fact further implies "the eternal persistence on the face of the land of those hideous monstrosities--our manufacturing towns; those excrescences which, like the dragon of old, are daily vomiting fire and smoke, and by their foulness are blasting and cursing the lives of the people and causing the physical, mental, and moral deterioration of the race.... It banishes the poetry, the music, and the glories of an agricultural life, and condemns untold millions to the artificial and unhealthy moral atmosphere of our towns." It may be said that all this has not much application to the state of things in these happy United States. It has application to at least this extent, that our towns too are becoming bloated and our country places starved. We are fully at one with the writer in his estimate of the agricultural life, and believe that no greater service could be rendered to any country than to place its agriculture on the moral and intellectual, as well as on the economic, level which it has a just claim to occupy. It is the application of science to agriculture that will bring about this result. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. _The Theory of the Leisure Class_[58] of Mr. _Thorstein Veblen_ is primarily an inquiry into the place and value of the leisure class as an economic factor in modern life. Hardly less attention, however, is given to the origin and line of derivation of the institution, and to features of social life not commonly classed as economic, into the very heart of some of which the study goes. The institution of the leisure class, which is defined generally as that class whose occupation is not industrial, is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture, as in feudal Europe or feudal Japan. Whichever way we go from this point it is modified. Its origin appears at a very early stage in history, and appears in the germ in the savage division of the occupations of men and women. The women carried on the industries, and the men went to the hunt or to war--occupations with which the idea of prowess or exploit was associated, giving the stamp of aristocracy. In the highest development of this distinction, the nonindustrial upper-class occupations may be roughly comprised under the heads of government, warfare, religious observances, and sports. In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure class coincides with the beginning of ownership, ownership of women being one of the most conspicuous forms in earlier times, then ownership of property and its symbols. Among the signs of wealth are conspicuous leisure, which includes social distinction and functions and conspicuous consumption, or the possession of fine things not necessaries, and plenty of them. These lead to the setting up of a pecuniary standard of living and pecuniary canons of taste, and the adoption of dress as an expression of the pecuniary culture. In the chapter on Industrial Exemption and Conservatism we are introduced to the reason of conventionalism and of its power. "The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-do leisure class acquire the character of a prescriptive canon of conduct for the rest of society gives added weight and reach to the conservative influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all respectable people to follow their lead." Hence it exerts a retarding influence on social development, stiffening the resistance of all other classes against innovation. Further, the code of proprieties in vogue at any given time or in any society has the character of an organic whole, and any important infringement upon it is likely to derange it. This conservative quality goes so far as to tend toward spiritual survival and reversion. The idea of prowess survives in our barbaric admiration of military exploits, in the taste for sports, and in the gambling tendency, which is based on belief in luck and is enhanced by the desire to triumph at the expense of another. A connection is traced between the admiration of prowess and the cultivation of the devotional spirit which, joined with the fondness for display, leads all worshipers eventually to elaboration of rituals. A further development, classed as Survivals of the Non-Invidious Interest, is that of beneficences. The Higher Learning was primarily the exclusive privilege of the leisure class, and has still attached to it a mass of ritual in the shape of paraphernalia, ceremonies, degrees, and privileges which grow more elaborate as the college and the community become richer. Devotion to classical learning, which is practically useless, is a form of "conspicuous leisure" and "conspicuous expenditure," but now encounters a rival in athletics, which is equally useless and conspicuous and more costly. [Footnote 58: The Theory of the Leisure Class. An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. By Thorstein Veblen. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 400. Price, $2.] The American Economic Association, at its meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1897, authorized the appointment of a committee to inquire into the scope and method of the eleventh census, with a view of determining what ought to be attempted in the twelfth. In order to make an adequate review of the eleventh census this committee invited a certain number of critical articles on particular portions of the work; and further, in order to discover what might seem weak points in the work and what inquiries it might seem desirable to elaborate in the twelfth census, addressed a circular letter of questions to all the members of the association. Only about sixty replies were received to the questions, but a generous response was made to the invitations to contribute reviews, the result of which is a series of papers by independent authors upon specific topics which are regarded as constituting a very valuable commentary on the Federal census and on statistical methods in general. These criticisms are now embodied in a book[59] of more than five hundred pages, containing twenty essays by authors each of whom is specially interested in the particular topic of which he treats. These articles include a general review of the statistics of population, by Walter F. Wilcox, and special articles on the negro population, by W. Z. Ripley; the North American Indians, by Franz Boas; Age, Sex, Dwellings, and Families, and Urban Population, by George K. Holmes; Illiteracy and Educational Statistics, by Davis R. Dewey; Statistics of Occupation, by Richard Mayo-Smith; Various Aspects of the Vital and Social Statistics, by Cressy L. Wilbur, Irving Fisher, Roland P. Falkner, and Samuel M. Lindsay; of Agriculture and Farms, by N. I. Stone and David Kelley; Transportation, by Emery R. Johnson and Walter E. Weyl; Manufactures, by S. N. D. North, William M. Stewart, Worthington C. Ford, and Charles J. Bullock; Wealth, Debt, and Taxation, by Carl C. Plehn; Municipal Finance, by Henry B. Gardner; and the Scope and Method of the Twelfth Census, by William C. Hunt. A number of general conclusions are pointed out by the committee as deducible from the papers contributed by these writers. The criticism throughout touches not so much the accuracy of the census as the treatment of the data and the lack of continuity from census to census--both defects believed to be largely due to the insufficient time allowed by law for preparing plans and schedules. The work of the census is believed to be seriously impeded by the number and variety of the investigations ordered, in consequence of which fundamental inquiries can not receive attention. A number of subordinate inquiries might advantageously be transferred to established bureaus or departments under whose scope they would properly fall, and some of which already publish annual volumes of kindred statistics. Among classes of defects or weaknesses in method pointed out in the criticisms are a lack of comparability in data from census to census, lack of co-ordination, certain specified faults in method, and faults in the textual analysis of the figures. A summary of the answers received to the circular letter of questions is appended, particularly of the answers to the request to suggest what special information might be furnished by the twelfth census which is not in the eleventh. Many of the writers point to the desirability of a permanent census bureau. The committee has a right to congratulate itself, as it does, "upon this noteworthy collection of papers--the result of the scientific zeal and effort of so many men." [Footnote 59: The Federal Census. Critical Essays by Members of the American Economic Association, collected and edited by a Special Committee. Published for the American Economic Association by the Macmillan Company, New York. Pp. 516. Price, $1; cloth, $2.50.] GENERAL NOTICES. The qualification of Mr. _Frederick A. Ober_ to write a book about _Puerto Rico and its Resources_[60] is indicated by the facts that he visited every point of importance on the island in 1880, and revisited it as West Indian Commissioner for the Columbian Exposition. To the fruits of observations made during these two visits he has added information gathered from the books that have been written about Puerto Rico by Spanish and other officers. A plain, concise account of the island is presented, without sensational exaggerations and free from apparent padding. It begins with the consideration and estimation of the commercial and strategic value of the island. Next its coastal features, rivers--of which it seems to have a relatively good supply--and harbors are described. Then the climate, which is "hot and moist, yet in the main less injurious to the health of white people than that of adjacent islands"; seasons, which are not very variable; and hurricanes, which appear to be rather an important feature. As to products, they are of course tropical, and grow, as in Mexico, in three zones of climate and vegetation. Considering these more specially a chapter is given to Sugar, Tobacco, Coffee, and Cacao; another to Fruits, Spices, Cereals, and Food Plants; and a third to Dyes, Drugs, Woods, and Minerals. The chapter on Natural History includes accounts of game and insect pests. The topographic description begins with San Juan, the capital, and takes in the cities and towns of the coast and the inland towns and routes of travel. A few words are devoted to the government as it has been, and the general characteristics of the people are briefly sketched. Accounts of their foods, drinks, diversions, etc., are given, after which the author passes to the Indians of Puerto Rico. Two chapters relate to the general and the recent history of the island respectively. Considerable information of a statistical character is included in an appendix. [Footnote 60: Puerto Rico and its Resources. By Frederick A. Ober. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 282, with Map.] President _D. S. Jordan's Footnotes to Evolution_[61] is made up of popular essays or addresses on the general subject of organic evolution which were given originally as oral lectures before University Extension Societies. Three of them have been also published in this Monthly, and as many in another magazine. Besides the author's own twelve essays, he has inserted in this volume three other papers of special importance, setting forth the present state of knowledge concerning the methods of evolution and of heredity. These are on the Factors of Organic Evolution as displayed in the Process of Development, by Prof. E. G. Conklin; the Physical Basis of Heredity, by Prof. F. M. McFarland; on The Testimony from Paleontology, by Prof. J. P. Smith. President Jordan's own essays begin with a discussion of the kinship of life. This is followed by three articles on evolution, relating to its nature, elements, and factors from the point of view of embryology, and an application of the subject in the paper on The Heredity of Richard Roe, in which the rise of race types from the survival of the existing race with its best results modified and preserved by the survival of the fittest is illustrated. In the seventh essay certain facts of animal distribution as related to the origin of species are considered; in the eighth (Latitude and Vertebrata) the curious biological problem of the possession of more numerous vertebræ by northern than by tropical fishes is considered--a problem the solution of which on any other hypothesis than that of the derivation of species would be impossible. The evolution of mind is then taken up as the sum total of all psychic changes, actions, and reactions, and this development is extended to nations the laws of whose greatness "expand themselves from the laws which govern the growth of the single cell." In the essay on Degeneration a lesson is drawn in favor of individual initiative. Hereditary Inefficiency is discussed in view of the danger from pauperism. Some of the aspects of the woman question are considered in another of the essays. In the paper on The Stability of Truth some recent enunciations of Lord Salisbury, Mr. Balfour, and Haeckel respecting science are criticised. The last essay is on The Struggle for Realities, and concerns the relations of science and conservatism, the Church, etc. [Footnote 61: Footnotes to Evolution. By David Starr Jordan. With Supplementary Essays by Edwin Grant Conklin, Frank Mace McFarland, and James Perrin Smith. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 392. Price, $1.] Mr. _Robert P. Porter's_ volume on _Industrial Cuba_[62] deals with living questions of the island. It aims to give a description of Cuba as it appeared to the author when he visited it in the fall of 1898 as special commissioner of the United States to report on its industrial, commercial, and financial condition. It is the result of nearly seven months' inquiry and hard work, in which the island was visited three times, more than five hundred witnesses were examined, and "numerous statements" were studied and analyzed. Among the special subjects treated of are the political and economical condition of Cuba, the outlook for labor, the population, sanitary work, Colonel Waring's report, municipal problems in Havana, banks and currency, the revenue and tariffs, commerce, sugar, tobacco, mines and mining, agriculture and stock, timber and fruit, transportation, navigation, education and religion, and the outlook for the future. [Footnote 62: Industrial Cuba. Being a Study of Present Commercial and Industrial Conditions, with Suggestions as to the Opportunities presented in the Island for American Capital, Enterprise, and Labor. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 428. Price, $3.50.] Naturalists and bibliophiles have reason to be grateful to Mr. _Call_ for his verbatim reproduction of Rafinesque's _Ichthyologia Ohioensis_.[63] The book is of importance as constituting, in the language of the editor, the foundation of fresh-water ichthyology in America. No book dealing specifically with the Ohio Valley area as a region has since been published. The original description of many fish forms which are now recognized by ichthyologists as good species were first given in this book, and many have not since been reprinted. Further, the book contains the first and most complete description, to date, of the Ohio River from Pittsburg down, with notices of all its tributaries. Its value as a book about fishes is not limited to the Ohio River, for the species of that stream are found, to a greater or less extent, throughout the Mississippi Valley, so that it is in effect a necessity to all students of the fresh-water fishes of that territory. The editor regrets that Rafinesque did not preserve in some manner the types of his genera, instead of which, when the technical description was completed and some common form, if one was known, was referred to, the specimen was discarded or rejected. Hence his descriptions can not be compared conveniently with prepared specimens in cabinets or with descriptions made from them, but the student must go to the river and look up the living fish. The original papers of Rafinesque on fishes were published in The Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine, Lexington, Ky., in 1819, 1820, and 1821. The matter was then arranged in book form from the same type. Two different systems of pagination resulted. These have both been indicated in the present edition by the insertion of the numbers at their proper places. The reprint is an exact copy of the original, including even typographical errors, excepting only the style of type. Of the original edition only eight copies are known to exist, so that the republication was desirable to preserve the book, as well as for the facilitation of reference, and of this only two hundred and fifty numbered copies are printed for the market. [Footnote 63: Ichthyologia Ohioensis: or Natural History of the Fishes inhabiting the River Ohio and its Tributary Streams. By C. S. Rafinesque. A Verbatim and Literatim Reprint of the Original, with a Sketch of the Life, the Ichthyologic Work, and the Ichthyologic Bibliography of Rafinesque. By Richard Ellsworth Call. Cleveland: The Burrows Brothers Company. Pp. 175. Price, $4.] Mr. _Douglas Houghton Campbell_ has endeavored, in his _Lectures on the Evolution of Plants_,[64] to present in as untechnical a manner as seemed feasible the more striking facts bearing upon the evolution of plant forms, believing that it will fill an existing want among English text-books. The substance of the work was given originally in the form of lectures to classes in Leland Stanford Junior University. After an introduction, in which a few fundamental principles are presented, elementary structures are defined, and accepted classification is mentioned, the conditions of plant life are treated of as relating to food substances, water, life, division of labor, and movements, of which all plants exhibit more or less marked ones, that may be spontaneous. While in the simple unicellular plants all the functions are performed by a single cell, a gradual division of labor takes place as we go up, first in a separation of the vegetative and reproductive cells, and later a further specialization of both vegetative and reproductive functions, culminating in the seed plant. This course is described as exemplified in the simplest forms of life, algæ, fungi, mosses and liverworts, ferns, and seed plants of the different classes. The study of the geological relations, fragmentary as their teachings are, has yielded most important evidence for tracing the succession of plant forms. Observation of geographical distribution casts much light on the subject. The relations of animals and plants have an important bearing. The influence of the environment embraces many factors, and is often shown in conspicuous features of form and structure adapting plants to certain sorts of conditions and enabling them to resist others. Plants have thus succeeded in adapting themselves to almost every environment. [Footnote 64: Lectures on the Evolution of Plants. By Douglas Houghton Campbell. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 319. Price, $1.25.] Prof. _Augustus de Morgan's_ book _On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics_,[65] though originally published more than sixty years ago, is still fresh and suggestive and full of matter valuable alike to students and teachers, and possesses qualities of clearness of reasoning and intelligibility from which many mathematical treatises are unfortunately free. Its purpose is to notice particularly several important points in the principles of algebra and geometry which have not obtained their due importance in elementary works in those sciences. Metaphysical points are avoided, and the method of explaining by reference to some particular problem, with hints as to more general adaptation, is adopted. Among the points taken up and classified are the nature and objects of mathematics, arithmetical and algebraic notation, rules and principles, equations, the negative sign, roots and logarithms, geometrical subjects, and application of algebra to measurements. The editor of the present edition, Mr. Thomas J. McCormack, has corrected the errata of the old edition and incorporated such changes as the progress of time and mathematical literature have made seem proper. An excellent portrait of De Morgan is given. [Footnote 65: On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics. By Augustus De Morgan. New edition. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company. Pp. 288.] The purpose of _Carpenter's Geographical Reader, North America_ (American Book Company), is to give its readers a living knowledge of some of the wonders of the country and continent in which they live. They are taken by the author, Mr. _Frank G. Carpenter_, on a personally conducted tour through the most characteristic parts of the American continent, studying the most interesting features of life and work among the people, learning how they are governed, and how they make their living. Much information is also given concerning the natural resources and the physical features of the countries visited. The _Japan-American Commercial Journal_ is a monthly periodical started with the beginning of the year, with an especial view to the opening of the empire of Japan to unrestricted foreign trade and residence, for the advancement of the reciprocal interests of Japan and the United States. It is printed in English and Japanese, and is published at Tokio by the Japan-American Commercial and Industrial Association, for $2.50 a year. _The Anglo-Saxon_ is a monthly magazine, the first number of which is dated November, 1898, "devoted to the identity of the Anglo-Saxon race with the house of Israel." It is edited by _George E. Inglis_, and published by the Anglo-Saxon Publishing Company, Chicago. The title of the first paragraph--"Cui bono"--seems to us to suggest a very appropriate question. The argument seems to be that the house of Israel was appointed to universal dominion, and the Anglo-Saxon race, between England and the United States, with its late war "as nearly a Christian war as any war might be," is getting it. Among the general papers in the second volume, containing Parts II and III, of the _Report of the Commissioner of Education_ for 1896-'97 are those on Federal and State Aid to Higher Education, the First Common Schools of New England, the Learned Professions and Social Control, and the Beginnings of the Common-School System in the South. Statistics of foreign universities are given, with a paper on the Teaching of Geography in certain foreign countries, and consular reports on educational topics. Professor Boas's paper on the Growth of Toronto Children is included. Educational matters of interest in various States are reported upon. An Eskimo vocabulary is introduced. A special report on education in Alaska appears. Part III is devoted to statistical matter. The _Occult Science Library_ is a course of seven essays on the subject of practical occultism by _Ernest Loomis_. The author assumes that the rules based on the occult principles of Nature would, if fully applied, enable any person to invoke the assistance of occult forces in every practical rule of life, and that they may with like success be applied in matters of health, the acquisition of knowledge, the formation of plans, and the solution of religious and ethical enigmas. The publishers claim that the maxims of the book have proved their efficiency to the satisfaction of thousands who have read them. (Published by Ernest Loomis & Co., Chicago.) Mr. _James G. Needham_ has furnished, in _Outdoor Studies_ (American Book Company), one of the fullest and most systematic guides or "reading books," as he calls this one, for Nature study that we have seen. Recognizing that there is no lack, in numbers, of books offering object lessons, etc., for children of the earlier years intervening between the primary and the high school, he has prepared this book to supply for the later years of that period "a few lessons of greater continuity, calling for more persistence of observation and introducing a few of the simpler of our modern conceptions of Nature at large." The lessons presuppose some years of experience of life and some previous training in observation; they are given simply for the sake of the interest and educative value of the facts and phenomena of Nature which they set forth; and they have been written more for the boys and girls than for the teachers. The things described--birds, insects, plants, etc.--are such as can be seen anywhere. Mr. Needham tells how to study them and learn what they mean. In _Commissioner Hume, a Story of New York Schools_, a sequel to Roderick Hume, the Story of a New York Teacher, Mr. _C. W. Bardeen_ has undertaken to give a picture of rural New York schools, or rather of the administration of school affairs by commissioners as they were in 1875, and he declares it to be accurate. He represents, however, that the general tone of the commissioners has vastly changed in the period that has intervened since then, and the conditions described in the volume no longer prevail. The book is offered, therefore, as a contribution to educational history. (Published by C. W. Bardeen, Syracuse, N. Y.) The southern half of Missouri and the Black Hills of South Dakota offer exceptionally delightful regions for the study of caves, or speleology, as well as of geology and geography. Each of these regions has its peculiar geological history and its own scenery, and possesses a number of truly wonderful caves. Some of the more important of these caves and the scenery amid which they lie are described by Mrs. _Luella Agnes_ Owen in the book _Cave Regions of the Black Hills_ (Cincinnati: the Editor Publishing Company), and we have been much interested in reading the accounts. The descriptions are introduced by summaries of the methods of the formation of caves and of the results of the geological and topographical explorations of the regions in which they are situated, as presented in official reports and scientific memoirs. The descriptions are for the most part relations of the author's personal explorations of the caves. The most important of these caves are Marble Cave, "the finest yet explored in Missouri," and Wind Cave, in South Dakota, said to be the largest known after the Mammoth Cave. Others are Fairy, Powell, Stone County, Oregon County Caves and the Grand Gulf in Missouri, and the Onyx and Crystal Caves in South Dakota. Many illustrations are given. The author has fine descriptive powers, but her literary style needs discipline. She is the first American, and the only woman, so far, elected to membership in the Société de Speleologie of Paris. A valuable paper on _Sympathetic Strikes and Sympathetic Lockouts_ is published by Mr. _Fred S. Hall_ as the first number of the eleventh volume of the Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law. In it, the author having fixed the definition of sympathetic strikes and lockouts as distinguished from those not sympathetic, and having found the difference between a strike and a lockout, discusses the origin and development of the two sympathetic movements, analyzes them, and forecasts the future as it is indicated by the past. Illustrations are freely drawn from the important strikes and lockouts that have occurred in the United States and abroad for a number of years past. _The Year Book of Colorists and Dyers_, in the opinion of the author, Mr. _Harwood Huntington_, supplies a want, for, so far as he is aware, there are no other portable works in the English language to which the color-chemist can refer and find the information which he requires the oftenest. The object of the present publication is to meet the demand for a review of the advances made annually in the special field worked in by dyers and colorists--in the bleaching, dyeing, printing, and finishing of textiles--and it endeavors to do this with accuracy and brevity. (Published by the author, New York.) The first number of _The Socialist Almanac and Treasury of Facts_ has been issued in accordance with a decision of the National Convention of the Socialist Labor Party, held in New York in July, 1896. It has been prepared by _Lucien Sanial_, to whom the task was assigned by the National Executive Committee. A large proportion of it is historical, and consists mainly of monographs presenting views of the movements and condition of "militant socialism" in Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Belgium, from its beginning to the present day. Special attention is invited by the author to the monographs on Italy and Spain as tracing the struggle between socialism and anarchism to its beginning. The second part of the book contains statistical matter and comments on economical and social conditions, which, if the argument on "Who owns the Savings?" is a specimen of its quality, must be accepted with many reservations. Prof. William Wadden Turner, a native of England who came to this country at an early age, became an eminent scholar in Oriental literature, and in 1842 a professor of that subject in Union Theological Seminary. He was called thence to Washington in 1852 to organize the library of the Patent Office, where his work was of great value. Thence he was taken by Professor Baird to catalogue and arrange the library of the Smithsonian Institution. He associated his sister with him in this work and as recorder of scientific collections and exchanges in 1858. She continued there after his death the next year, and served the library faithfully and efficiently, going with it to the Congressional Library when it was removed there, till 1886, when she resigned on account of age. She died in 1896. A _Memorial_ of the two and of their elder sister Susan has been prepared by Mrs. _Caroline H. Dall_ and has been printed privately. The author of _What is This?_ after a brief discussion of the personality of Jesus and the present degenerate condition of Christianity, goes on to say: "We must have another revelation, therefore. It seems to be a necessity. But what troubles me is this: can it be possible that any part of this revelation can come through one as humble as myself? What have I seen and what have I heard?... I have often pondered the great questions of man's origin and future; never until now, never until I heard this voice, have I had any glimmer of a solution of this great puzzle. I know I am nothing, but can not the Supreme Being use a mere nothing to accomplish his purpose?" Notwithstanding the author's avowed unworthiness, he seems to have been selected, and we have from his pen a new and considerably detailed book of genesis. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Acetylene Gas Journal. Monthly. Vol. I, No. 1. June, 1899. Buffalo, N. Y. Pp. 12. 5 cents. 50 cents a year. Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Delaware College: No. 43. Veterinary Studies, Milk Legislation, and Basic Slag as a Fertilizer.--Michigan State Agricultural College. No. 169. Notes from the South Haven Sub-Station. By L. R. Taft and T. T. Lyon. Pp. 108; Nos. 170, 171. Vegetable Tests and Bush Fruits. Pp. 42; Nos. 172, 173. Combating Disease-producing Germs and Killing the Tubercle Bacillus in Milk. Four authors. Pp. 30.--Montana: No. 18. The Alkali Soils of Montana. Preliminary Bulletin. Pp. 30.--United States Department of Agriculture: No. 24. Proceedings of the Convention of Weather-Bureau Officials, held at Omaha, Neb., October 13 and 14, 1898. Pp. 184, with plate. Anglo-American Magazine. Monthly. May and June, 1899. Pp. 120 and 128. 25 cents. $2.50 a year. Blackman, William F. The Making of Hawaii. A Study in Social Evolution. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 266. $2. Breese, B. B. On Inhibition. (Monograph Supplement to the Psychological Review.) New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 65. Bulletins, Reports, Transactions, etc. Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1899. Part I. January, February, and March. Pp. 216, with plates.--American Society of Naturalists: Records. Vol. II, Part IV. Providence, R. I. Pp. 36.--New York Academy of Sciences: Annals. Vol. XII, Part I. Pp. 89.--New York State Reformatory, Elmira: Year-Book for 1898. Pp. 126.--Société Royale de Canada: Report of the Geographical Society of Quebec. Pp. 2.--United States Department of Labor: Bulletin No. 22. May, 1899. Pp. 42.--University of Tennessee: Record, Review of 1898. Knoxville, Tenn. Pp. 56.--Wyoming State Medical Society: Transactions. May and June, 1899, E. Stuver, Secretary. Pp. 75.--Zoölogical Society of Philadelphia: Twenty-seventh Annual Report of the Board of Directors. Pp. 25. Cragin, Belle S. Our Insect Friends and Foes. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 377. $1.75. Dana, Charles A. Recollections of the Civil War. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 296. $2. Davis, Lucius D. Ornamental Shrubs for Garden, Lawn, and Park Planting. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 338. $3.50. Dexter, E. G. Conduct and the Weather. (Monograph Supplement of the Psychological Review.) New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 101. $1. Erlingsson, Dr. Thorstein. Ruins of the Saga Time. (Travels and Explorations in Iceland.) London: David Nutt. Pp. 112, with map. Fergusen, James. A New System of Natural Philosophy. Book I. The Physical Universe. Published by the Author at Talmage, Neb. Pp. 240. Field Columbian Museum, Chicago. Publication No. 30. New Rodents from the Olympic Mountains. By D. G. Elliot. Pp. 4.--No. 31. Cold-Blooded Vertebrates from the Olympic Mountains. By S. E. Meek. Pp. 10.--No. 32. Catalogue of Mammals from the Olympic Mountains, Washington. By D. G. Elliot. Pp. 36, with plates.--No. 33. The Ores of Colombia. By H. W. Nichols. Pp. 56, with maps.--No. 34. The Mylagaulidæ. An Extinct Family of Sciuromorph Rodents. By E. S. Riggs. Pp. 8.--No. 35. A Fossil Egg from South Dakota. By A. C. Farrington. Pp. 8, with plates.--No. 36. Contributions to the Paleontology of the Upper Cretaceous Series. By W. N. Logan. Pp. 16, with plates.--No. 37. Mammals from Oklahoma Territory. By D. G. Elliot. Pp. 4.--No. 38. Mammals from the Indian Territory. By D. G. Elliot. Pp. 8. Heilprin, Angelo. Alaska and the Klondike. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 315. Hrdlicka, Dr. Ales. Anthropological Investigations of Children in the New York Juvenile Asylum. Pp. 86, with plates. Irish, Cyrus W. Qualitative Analysis for Secondary Schools. American Book Company. Pp. 100. James, Charles C. Practical Agriculture. American edition. Edited by John Craig. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 203. 80 cents. Jordan, David Starr. Imperial Democracy. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 293. $1.50. Jordan, David Starr, Leonhard Stejneger, and other Official Associates. The Fur Seals and Fur-Seal Islands of the North Pacific Ocean. Part IV. Washington: Government Printing Office. Pp. 384, with maps and plates. Kenne, A. H. Man Past and Present. Cambridge, England; New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 584. $3. Lavignac, Albert. Music and Musicians. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 504. $3. Miller, Olive Thorne. The First Book of Birds. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 149. Missouri Botanical Garden. Tenth Annual Report. William Trelease, Director. St. Louis. Pp. 209, with plates. Moon, J. Howard. Better-World Philosophy. Chicago: The Ward Waugh Company. Pp. 275. Reprints. Abbott, Samuel W. Infant Mortality in Massachusetts. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. Pp. 19.--Baillairgé, Charles. La Vie, L'Evolutlon, et le Materialism. (Life, Evolution, and Materialism.) Pp. 37.--Le Grec, le Latin: leur Utilité, etc. (Greek and Latin: their Utility, etc.) Pp. 48; L'Antiquité de la Terre et de l'Homme. (Antiquity of the Earth and of Man.) Pp. 23; Royal Society of Canada.--Burt, Stephen S. Recollections and Reflections of a Quarter of a Century. New York. Pp. 12.--Cathell, W. T. On the Reduction of Obesity. Pp. 12.--Goode, John P. The Piracy of the Yellowstone. University of Chicago. Pp. 12.--Halsted, Byron D., New Brunswick, N. J. Root Tubercles and Nitrogen Appropriation. Pp. 14.--MacBride, Thomas H. Botany, How Much and When? Iowa City. Pp. 11.--Marsh, Othniel Charles, Biographical Sketch by Charles E. Beecher. From the American Journal of Science. Pp. 28, with portrait.--Meyer, Max. Ueber Beurtheilung Zusammengesetzer Klänge. (On the Estimation of Composite Sounds.) Leipsic, Saxony. Pp. 33.--Poteat, W. L. Leidy's Genus Ouramoeba. Pp. 5.--Sexton, Pliny T. Reasons and Authorities for Favoring Education Unification under the Regents of the University. Pp. 56.--Von Schrenck, Herman. A Disease of Taxodium known as Peckiness, etc. St. Louis. Washington University. Pp. 54, with plates. Scudder, Samuel H. Everyday Butterflies. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 386. Sutro, Emil. Duality of Voice. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 224. $1. Sites, C. M. L. Centralized Administration of Liquor Laws in the American Commonwealths. (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law.) New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 162. Union Pacific Railroad Company, Passenger Department. Some of Wyoming's Vertebrate Fossils. Pp. 31. United States Geological Survey. Eighteenth Annual Report. Part I. Director's Report, Triangulation, and Spirit Leveling. Pp. 440.--Part II. Papers chiefly of a Theoretic Nature. Pp. 653, with maps.--Part III. Economic Geology. Pp. 861, with maps.--Part IV. Hydrography. Pp. 756, New York City and Vicinity Map. United States National Museum: Lord, E. C. E. Petrographic Notes on Rocks from the United States-Mexico Boundary. Pp. 10, with map.--Richardson. Harriet. Key to the Isopods of the Pacific Coast, etc. Pp. 56.--Stejneger, Leonhard. The Land Reptiles of the Hawaiian Islands. Pp. 32. Vita Nuova. (New Life.) A Fortnightly Illustrated Review of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. Clelia Bertini-Attilii, Director. Rome. Pp. 16. Walter, Robert, M. D. Vital Science based upon Life's Great Law, the Analogue of Gravitation. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company. Pp. 319. Watson, David K. History of American Coinage. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 278. $1.50. Fragments of Science. =Climate and Acclimatization.=--In view of the rapid growth of West Indian and South American commerce and the considerable emigration to Cuba and neighboring islands, which our present relations with them will probably bring about, the following extracts from an editorial in the London Lancet are of interest: "The American nation has entered upon a new and, in a sense, imperial policy, which may be regarded as forming an epoch in its history. This brings it face to face with the problem of colonization and acclimatization--a problem which we have had to confront long ago and toward the solution of which we have ever since been slowly fighting our way by following on the lines of the best practical measures of hygiene known to us. 'The white man's burden' has proved a tragical one in its drain on the life of the young manhood of this country, notwithstanding the very large measure of success which has attended our sanitary efforts in this direction. The Americans, having taken up their burden, will, no doubt, like the practical people they are, set about their task in a practical way. The four principal factors in the production of climate, according to Buchan, are distance from the equator, height above the sea, distance from the sea, and prevailing winds. The equatorial region has the most equable climate; tropical regions have much greater variations of temperature than those near the equator, and have a hot and cold or dry and rainy season. The isothermal lines of mean temperature do not supply a graduated measure of the effects of temperature on animal life. So far as climate is concerned, no single meteorological influence appears, however, to equal the effect of temperature upon health, and its range is of more importance than its mean. The European under a tropical climate suffers from anæmia, diseases of the digestive system, especially of the liver, from malaria, dysentery, typhoid fever, and yellow fever. It is not at all easy to say, however, how much of the excess of mortality of Europeans in tropical and subtropical countries is simply attributable to climatic heat _per se_, and is consequently inevitable and not the effect of malaria, or how much of it is the direct consequence of habits of life and of the neglect of sanitary laws and of personal hygiene. As Arnould rightly said, the _habitudes alimentaires_ of the Anglo-Saxon constitute one of the stumbling-blocks to health, but by far the most important is malaria, compared with which the rest are relatively insignificant. Mr. Chamberlain was right when he said the other day that 'the man who shall successfully grapple with this foe to humanity and shall find a cure for malarial fever and shall make the tropics livable for the white man, will do more for the world and more for the British Empire than the man who adds a new province to the wide dominions of the Queen.'" "=Picture Telegraphy.="--The following account of the new so-called picture telegraphy is from the New York Electrical World and Engineer: "The apparatus consists of a receiver and transmitter, similar in appearance and in mechanism. The picture to be transmitted is drawn on a heavy piece of metal foil, the lines of the drawing being made with an insulating ink. The foil is then secured on the circumference of a horizontal cylinder on the transmitter, the cylinder being of about the size of a typewriter rubber roller. There is a similar cylinder on the receiver, on whose surface is clamped the paper upon which the drawing is to be reproduced; over this is superposed carbon paper, which is covered in turn by a sheet of thin paper. A stylus actuated by an electro-magnet is adjusted close to the surface of the latter, and each time a current is passed through the electro-magnet the stylus is forcibly pressed against the moving surface of the cylinder, and a corresponding mark is made on the two sheets in contact with the carbon paper; the outer sheet serves merely to offer a smooth surface to the stylus and to enable the operator to see that the picture is being properly reproduced. The transmitting cylinder passes under a similar stylus, which latter closes the circuit between the receiving and transmitting ends when it rests upon the foil, and opens the circuit when it passes over the lines drawn with insulating ink, in the latter case actuating the stylus magnet at the receiving end, which leaves a mark on the paper of the receiving cylinder in the form of a line corresponding to the width of the insulation over which the transmitting stylus is passing. The stylus at each end of the line is simultaneously advanced at the end of each revolution of the cylinders by a screw of small pitch. From the description it will be seen that if the surface of the foil on the transmitting cylinder were entirely insulated the receiving stylus would merely draw a number of parallel lines on the paper corresponding to the turns of the screw, and separated a distance corresponding to the pitch of the screw and the angle through which it is turned at each operation. Four different rates of advance may be given to the stylus, corresponding to as many different angles of advance that may, by appropriate mechanism, be given to the screw. The two cylinders have synchronous motion, so that all the marks or lines on the receiving cylinder correspond to widths of insulating ink traced over on the transmitting cylinder. Synchronism is obtained as follows: Connected with both receiver and transmitter is an electric motor which, at the end of every revolution of the cylinder, raises a weight, which acts on a clock train when falling and thus gives motion to the cylinder. At the end of each revolution of the transmitting cylinder a contact is made which locks for an instant the receiving cylinder when it arrives in a position corresponding to a similar position of the transmitting cylinder. Thus it will be seen that each cylinder begins its revolution from identical positions and at the same instant, and as the clockwork of both receiver and transmitter are duplicates, approximate synchronism is maintained during a revolution. Owing to the use of carbon paper, the lines made by the receiver are of considerable width, with the consequence that the resulting picture does not have the appearance of being made up of parallel lines, as in the case of reproductions by the original Caselli picture telegraph, of which the system described is a modification. The Hummell apparatus appears to be entirely practicable, the simplicity of its synchronizing mechanism giving it a great advantage over former types of Caselli picture telegraphs. The apparatus has been worked duplex with success. In one instance, a few days ago, a picture was sent from New York to St. Louis while one was being received from the same place in New York, the latter picture in addition being received simultaneously at Boston." =The Charges on Country Checks: an Economic Mistake.=--An article in the May issue of the Yale Review, discussing the recent adoption by the New York banks of a rule imposing a "collection charge" on all country checks handled, takes the view that the new rule is a mistake. After reviewing the history and present position of the Bank of England; calling attention to the fact that although it is a private enterprise its position is used as a governor, so to speak, of English finance; the similarity to it in position and power for good or evil of the association of banks known as the New York Clearing House is pointed out; the review goes on to say: "In the associated banks of New York, as in the Bank of England, is kept a very large part of the reserve on which the great financial transactions of a whole country are based. The system of 'reserve cities' for holding large deposit accounts of country banks, in which New York is by far the most important center, is but the recognition in the national banking law of this great fact of a central reserve, and the power of utilizing such deposits, indirectly extended by the law which allows and encourages country banks to hold a large part of their legal reserve in the form of deposits in New York, probably constitutes a much more valuable privilege than the rights of note issue enjoyed by the Bank of England. In extraordinary emergencies the parallel is even closer. Just as the Bank of England is encouraged to expect a modification of the restrictions on its right of note issue, as a means of extending its effective currency reserve in times of panic, so the New York banks, by their system of clearing-house loan certificates, are encouraged and expected to evade those provisions of our national banking laws which restrict their power of issuing notes to meet an emergency.... The exercise of this function of holding a reserve for clearing the business of the country is attended with some expense, as well as with much profit. One of the most vexatious of these expenses has been the cost of collecting country checks.... Under these circumstances they have adopted a rule imposing such charges on country checks as to compel a large part of the remittances to be made in the form of bank drafts on New York city, rather than individual checks on country banks supposed to have accounts with some New York bank. This rule will save the New York banks something like two million dollars annually. It will not prevent any solvent man from making remittances, for if he has a deposit in his local bank and his local bank has a deposit in New York he can buy a draft to send as a remittance, which will pass through the New York Clearing House without question or expense. Yet, in spite of these plausible arguments, we believe the action of the New York banks to be a mistake of very serious magnitude, an inconvenience to the public, a probable loss to deposit banking in the long run, and, worst of all, a serious blow to the cause of sound currency throughout the country. It seems to us, in short, a case where narrower duties and economics have been allowed to crowd broader ones out of sight." The review then goes on to show how great an amount of inconvenience and loss of time in the aggregate the new rule is going to cause, and finally says: "In a popular government the greatest safeguard against soft money--we may fairly say the _only_ real safeguard--is to prevent the growth of a demand for soft money. And of all the means of prevention at our command the most effective is the encouragement of the habit of paying by checks. The habit of paying by check is very general in all large business centers, and has been rapidly extending into the smaller centers, and the most serious public danger in the action of the New York banks is that it seems likely to deal a severe blow to such progress." =La Nature's Second Scientific Excursion.=--A second scientific excursion to an interesting district of France is planned, by M. Henri de Parville, of _La Nature_, to start from Bayonne August 25th. It will spend about two weeks, following the chain of the Pyrenees from the ocean to the Mediterranean. Among objects of interest enumerated are the scenery at Biarritz, Pau, Cauterets, and Bigorre; fine architecture at Toulouse, Carcassonne, Elne, etc.; glacial phenomena and thermal waters along the whole mountain chain; manufactories, including iron works at Bouchain, woolen mills at Bigorre, cigarette factories at Perpignan, and the Arago Maritime Laboratory and the sanitarium at Banyuls. The excursion will be "personally conducted" by the eminent anthropologist and archæologist, M. E. Cartaillac. The excursion last year, to the Central Plateau and the Tarn, was an eminent success. The programme of the present one seems equally attractive. M. de Parville and his associates deserve great credit for their sagacity and enterprise in inaugurating these excursions, which now promise to become annual. We can conceive nothing more profitable and conducive to real pleasure in a vacation than the tour in the company of men having a common interest in the pursuit of knowledge of Nature and art, through such magnificent regions as that of the Pyrenees or through a country so full of natural wonders and novelties as that of last year's excursion. And it will be an incalculable advantage to be under the guidance of so eminent a student and one so familiar with the remarkable features and the antiquities of southern France as M. Cartaillac. =The American Association Meeting.=--The forty-eighth annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science will be held at Columbus, Ohio, August 19th to 26th. The association headquarters will be in University Hall, of the Ohio State University, and the headquarters of the council will be at the Chittenden Hotel. The president of the meeting will be Prof. Edward Orton, of the Ohio State University. The vice-presidents or chairmen of sections will be: Mathematics and astronomy, Alexander Macfarlane; physics, Elihu Thomson; chemistry, F. P. Venable; mechanics and engineering, Storm Bull; geology and geography, J. F. Whiteaves; zoölogy, S. H. Gage; botany, Charles R. Barnes; anthropology, Thomas Wilson; social and economic science, Marcus Benjamin. The Permanent Secretary is L. O. Howard, Cosmos Club, Washington; General Secretary, Frederick Bedell, Cornell University; Secretary of the Council, Charles Baskerville, Chapel Hill, N. C.; Treasurer, R. S. Woodward, Columbia University, New York. The address of retiring President Putnam will be delivered Monday evening, August 21st. Saturday, August 26th, will be devoted to excursions to Fort Ancient and elsewhere. Receptions and shorter excursions will be provided at hours that will not conflict with the appointments of the association. =The Desire for Notoriety a Cause of Crime.=--Under the title _Luccheni Redivivus_ the London Lancet gives some interesting psychological data which have been obtained since the imprisonment of Luccheni, the assassin of the Austrian Empress. Twice since his trial and conviction he has attempted suicide. Within the last few days (May 13th) his moral condition has undergone a change confirmatory in a significant degree of the diagnosis which found vanity or megalomania at the root of his crime. The cantonal juge d'instruction in an attempt to ascertain if possible his associates in the crime, visited him in his cell and approached the subject with what seemed to himself due dexterity and caution. At once the previously downcast and abject creature brightened up, his eyes sparkling with gratified self-importance. "_I giornali riparlano di me?_" (So the journals are talking of me again) he exclaimed interrogatively. The judge disclosed the object of his visit. Luccheni thereupon dallied with his interlocutor, smiling at his reminiscences of the crime, assuming airs of reticence, even indulging in self-contradiction to tease if not torment his judicial antagonist. It was learned, however, that in the preliminaries leading up to the assassination he really had accomplices; beyond this nothing new was elicited from him. The point of chief importance, however, to be observed in this account is the large part which vanity and a desire for the widespread public attention which such crimes bring about plays in reconciling the criminal to his fate, and even leading to the commission of the crime in cases where the mental balance is very unstable. Hence this class of criminals should always be tried and punished with as little publicity as possible, not only because this policy deprives the individual of a show, with himself as the center, but also because every such public trial is liable to lead to the commission of similar crimes by other mentally unsound degenerates, who are sure to attend such spectacles whenever it is possible. =Bounties and Free Trade.=--Much discussion is going on in England over the question of bounties and the propriety of putting a tariff on those imported articles which, owing to bounties or other form of government aid at their place of manufacture, can be sold "too cheaply." The following paragraphs are taken from an article in the London Spectator: "In our opinion there can be no question between the policy of free and open market and the policy of only allowing goods to be sold here 'at the natural price of the world's market.' We hold that the maintenance of an open and unhindered market is essential to our welfare; ... that is the real principle involved, and that is the ground on which this question of bounties must be fought out. It is not Cobdenism or free trade that is involved, but that which underlies them both--the great principle of the free and open market.... We attach such immense importance to the open market because we believe not only that our internal prosperity is essentially bound up with the right, not merely of consumers, but of producers, to buy as cheaply as they can and where and how they will, but that the empire itself rests upon the preservation of a free and open market. Mr. Morley never spoke a truer word than when he insisted that Cobden and Bright and the old free traders were empire builders. That they were so and that our empire could not possibly have grown up except with the help of free trade and a market always open must be clear to all whose eyes are not blinded by that evil and foolish spirit of commercial jealousy under which a man, in order to injure his neighbor, wounds himself. Free trade made our empire possible and created what the world before had never seen, overwhelming commercial power wielded without jealousy or narrowness and based on wide and liberal ideas. How long would our colonies have tolerated the connection with us had we been forever worrying them with tariffs and excluding this or that product because it was unnaturally cheap?... As it is, we bid all men welcome in our markets and none are aggrieved.... Foreign powers may hate us for our wealth and prosperity, but not one of them would care to spoil their best market. How would the commerce of France, or Germany, or Russia get on if England were ruined and the English market destroyed? The principle of maintaining a free and open market, coupled with our moral and physical energy, and our liberal aims and aspirations have given us a great and splendid empire. Are we to risk its destruction because the sugar refiners grumble, and because the words of Cobden on another subject may possibly be interpreted to show that he would not, were he alive, have voted against the imposition of countervailing duties?" =Forest and Animal Life of the Catskills.=--The interior region of the Catskill Mountains surrounding Kaaterskill Junction is assigned, by Dr. E. A. Means in a paper of the United States National Museum, to the Canadian faunal region, with a slight mixture of the Alleghanian in the farming lands on the banks of Schoharie Creek. A few mammals of the Upper Austral zones, however, such as the New England cottontail, the deer mouse, and the gray fox, appear to have extended their ranges into the locality by following up the clearings. Though the region is now again well wooded, only the barest tags and remnants yet remain of the splendid forests that once covered the area. All is second growth except in the rockiest gulches, whence the lumber can not be extracted, and about the rocky summits of a few mountains of the East Jewett ranges. While the original forests seem to have been of conifers, the woods are now very thoroughly mixed, and the succession of trees according to altitudes, with its strongly marked division lines, is no longer seen. Specimens of fifty-eight species of trees and shrubs have been collected and placed in the National Museum. Only ten species of mollusks, one crustacean (the common crawfish), probably a dozen fishes (the author identifies eight and mentions others), eight batrachians, two snakes, and a turtle have been found. Of mammals, thirty-five species are described as known to occur at the present time, and eight as of doubtful occurrence now. =Geology of Block Island.=--In a study of the geology and natural history of Block Island, of which Arthur Hollick gives a summary in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, the most important problem was whether the Amboy clay series was represented in the island. Of fifteen species of fossil leaves and fruit capable of identification, represented by about twenty-five specimens, at least nine were typical of the Amboy flora. Observations on dip and strike of strata tended to emphasize the fact of contortion of glacial action, the dip in all cases being toward the north, indicating that the strata had been pushed southward in a series of overthrust folds by the advancing ice front. The flora may be divided physiographically into that of the hills, the peat bogs and pond holes, the salt marshes, the sand dunes, and the salt water. Trees are rare, and such vegetation as is dependent on forestal conditions is absent. The bulk of the surface is that of a typical morainal region, with rounded hills and corresponding depressions, many of the depressions being occupied by swamps or ponds, often without any visible outlet. Running streams are few and insignificant, and permanent springs occur only in a limited number of localities. The soil is bowlder till and gravel, with sand in the dunes and beaches, and there are no outcrops of rock. The flora is morainal in its general character, except in the peat bogs and on the limited sand dunes and sea-beach areas, and has its nearest analogue in that of Montauk Point. "In fact, if we could imagine Montauk Point to be despoiled of its few remaining trees and converted into an island it would bear a striking resemblance, geologically and botanically, to Block Island." Considering the geological features of Long Island, Block Island, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket, and comparing their floras, we find that all except Block Island have some of the plain region remaining with them, on which a characteristic flora finds a home. Block Island has lost all its plain region and accompanying flora, and is now merely an isolated portion of the terminal moraine, with small areas of modern sand beach and dune formations, affording a home only for such species as can exist under such conditions. The island appears to have been extensively wooded before it was settled, and large stumps, together with roots and branches, are found in some of the peat bogs. The scarcity of animal life on the island is sure at once to attract the attention of the observer from the mainland. Tree-living birds are absent, but robins, bank swallows, red-winged blackbirds, and meadow larks occur with some frequency. Among mollusks, the periwinkle of the Old World, an importation or migration, is the most abundant. Frogs and spotted turtles are plentiful, and a few small striped snakes were seen by Mr. Hollick. The archæology of the island is being studied by persons specially interested in the subject. =The Claims of the High School.=--In considering the right of the public high school to be a just charge upon the public treasury, Mr. Frank A. Hill, of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, finds that less than one fifth of the school money raised in the State is expended on account of these schools, whereas if the number of pupils in each of the thirteen grades of school was equal and the money was evenly divided, the higher grades would be entitled to four thirteenths, or nearly one third of it. To an objection sometimes raised against the high-school system that the "toiling millions" will have no use for more than the teaching of the elementary grades, Mr. Hill asks, Who has a right to decide whether one child shall have a greater or less amount of instruction than another? "And so freedom of choice, when the question of what one's life work shall be comes up, is a basic thing in government by the people. Upon the wisdom of this choice turns the welfare of each unit in the State, and therefore of the State itself." Hence the State has no right to refuse to one any opportunity of preparing himself to exercise this freedom of choice which it accords to another. There has never been a time since 1647 when the laws of Massachusetts did not require certain towns to maintain grammar schools, of which the high schools are the modern equivalents, at public expense, and when the colony became a State a perpetual obligation was imposed upon the Legislature and magistrates "to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns." =Degeneration.=--Dr. William C. Krauss, in a paper on The Stigmata of Degeneration, describes degeneration as meaning, in pathology, the substitution of a tissue by some other regarded as less highly organized, less complex in structure, of inferior physiological rank, or less suited for the performance of the original function. The same definition may apply equally well, according to Dr. Krauss, in human ontogeny, "where we can regard a normal man as possessing a certain number of units of strength capable of supplying or exerting a certain number of units of work or force, varying of course according to the environment, education, and fixity of purpose of the individual. It would be obviously unfair to compare a professional man or a brain-worker, whose units of work are intuitively manifold more than a hand-worker, and declare the latter a degenerate because his force and energy, as measured by the world's standard, are not as productive as the former. The questions of money standard and time-worth are foreign to the laws of degeneracy, and are not to be regarded in any way. The degenerate must be considered solely and alone upon the physical, mental, and abnormal stigmata which brand him as an abnormal or atypical man, and prevent him from exerting himself to the highest limit commensurate with his skill and development." The author's paper treats in detail of the various aspects of degeneracy. =Birds as Pest Destroyers.=--The French journal, _Le Chasseur_, puts in a plea for the animals that should not be killed. "Why destroy spiders, except in rooms, while they check the increase of flies? Why tread on the cricket in the garden, which wars upon caterpillars, snails, and grubs? Why kill the inoffensive slowworm, which eats grasshoppers? Why slay the cuckoo, whose favorite food is the caterpillar, which we do not like to touch? Why destroy the nuthatch and de-nest the warbler, foes of wasps? Why make war on sparrows, which eat seeds only when they can not get insects, and which exterminate so many grain-eating insects? Why burn powder against starlings, which pass their lives in eating larvæ and picking vermin from the cattle in the fields? (But they eat grapes too.) Why destroy the ladybird, which feeds on aphides? Why lay snares for titmice, when each pair take on an average one hundred and twenty thousand worms and insects for their little ones? Why kill the toad, which eats snails, weevils, and ants? Why save the lives of thousands of gnats by destroying goat-suckers? Why kill the bat, which makes war on night moths and many bugs, as swallows do on flies? Why destroy the shrew mole, which lives on earthworms, as the mouse does on wheat? Why say the screech owl eats pigeons and chickens, when it is not true, and why destroy it when it takes the place of seven or eight cats by eating at least six thousand mice a year?" =The Yang-tse-Kiang.=--In a lecture before the London Foreign Press Association Mrs. Isabella Bishop describes the Yank-tse-Kiang as one of the largest rivers of the world, it draining an area of 650,000 square miles, within which dwell a population of 180,000,000. In the journey to the far East, the scenery at Szu-chuan changed from savage grandeur and endless surprises to the fairest scenes, with prosperity, peace, law, and order seeming to prevail everywhere. Erroneous ideas were often entertained about Chinese social life and surroundings. China had many trade associations, which were often strengthened by alliance with guilds. They were composed of men in any particular trade or employment, who bound themselves for common action in the interest of that trade. They might rightly be called trade unions, for through their elected officers they prescribed hours of labor and minimum wages and made trade rules, the breach of which was punishable by fine and expulsion. The Chinese people displayed much benevolence and social kindness one to another, and had societies for providing free coffins and seemly burial in free cemeteries for the poor, soup kitchens, foundling institutions, asylums, orphanages, and medical dispensaries. Throughout the whole of the Yang-tse basin the author was impressed with the completeness of Chinese social and commercial organization by the existence of patriotism or public spirit, by great prosperity, and by the absence of the decay often attributed to the nation. Of the prevailing "expansion" or territorial robbery fever Mrs. Bishop said that we were coming to think only of markets and territories, and to ignore human beings, and were breaking up, in the case of a fourth of the human race, the most ancient of the earth's existing civilizations without giving for our supposed advantage a fair equivalent. ="Somewhat" Poisonous Plants.=--In Prof. B. D. Halsted's paper in the State Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletins on The Poisonous Plants of New Jersey, besides the descriptions of plants recognized as poisonous internally and to the touch, a list is given of "many somewhat poisonous plants." Among these the catalpa and ailantus produce emanations that are disagreeable and sometimes poisonous, and catalpa flowers, when handled, will produce an irritation of the skin. The thorn of the Osage orange leaves a poisoned wound. The young leaves of the red cedar and the arbor vitæ are irritating to the skin and may produce blisters, and the pitch of the spruce causes itching. Balm of Gilead may cause blistering. The green bark of the club of Hercules is irritating to the skin. The herbage of oleander affects some persons like poison ivy, the bark of the daphne causes blisters, and the juice of the box produces an itching with many persons. To some the herbage of the wild clematis is acrid and unpleasant. Many of the wild herbs have acrid properties, among them skunk cabbage, Indian turnip, cow parsnip, several of the mustards, and the juice of red pepper and stonecrop. Garden rue and the short bristles of the borage are irritating. Some persons have had their skin inflamed by handling the garden nasturtium. Other plants not always pleasant to handle are meadow-saffron bulbs, garlic, juice of bloodwort and celandine, the smartweed, the herbage of the poke, monkshood, larkspur, bearberry, some of the buttercups, anemone, star cucumber, various burs, daisy flowers, hairy plants, the nettles, sneeze-weed, the corpse plant, and some of the toadstools. Flax spinners have a flax poison, jute workers a rash, hop pickers a disagreeable irritation of the hands, and the grinders of mandrake root find the powder irritating to the face. It is not unusual for persons who gather plants in field and forest to receive sensations akin to those produced by mosquitoes, which are often chargeable to the plants. Other animals than man are less susceptible to the effects of contact poisons. =The Dangers of Hypnotism.=--In a review of the medico-legal aspects of hypnotism Dr. Sydney Kuh inquires whether the hypnotized can be injured physically or mentally by hypnotization, and whether they can fall victims to crime. Summing up a number of cases cited as bearing on the former question, he finds that hypnotism is now generally conceded to be a pathological and not a physiological condition; that its use, when resorted to too frequently, is liable to bring on mental deterioration; that it may be the cause of chronic headache or of an outbreak of hysteria; that at times it has an undesirable effect upon pre-existing mental disease; and that in some cases it may even produce an outbreak of insanity. He has learned of a few cases on record in which hypnotism was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of the patient. On the other hand, "we all know that hypnotism is a useful therapeutic agent practically only in cases of functional disease which only very rarely endangers the patient's life." Seeking simpler, less dangerous methods of treating maladies for which hypnotism has been recommended, the author has experimented upon the use of suggestion in the waking state, with results that encourage him. A large series of cases convinced him that a hypodermic injection of _aqua destillata_, given under proper precautions and circumstances, so as to impress the patient deeply, will produce very nearly, if not quite, as many cures as hypnotization. As for the other question, laboratory experiments indicate that a hypnotized person may be induced to commit acts bearing the aspect of crime, but that when the case becomes a serious one something will most likely occur in the mind of the patient or the conditions to prevent the consummation. The result is too uncertain and difficult, and the risks are too many and various, even to permit the use of hypnotism as an instrument of crime to become common or really dangerous. And the author's conclusion is that the dangers of hypnotism lie much more in its use for experimental and therapeutical than for criminal purposes. =Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb.=--Of the two principal methods of instructing deaf-mutes in this country, as defined by Mr. J. C. Gordon, of the Illinois Institution, in the sign method, deaf-mutes are taught a peculiar language of motions of the arm and upper part of the body, to which they learn to attach signification through usage. For instance, to teach the word _cat_ to a deaf child a sign teacher would show the child a cat or a picture of a cat. He would next direct attention to the cat's whiskers, drawing the thumb and finger of each hand lightly over them. "A similar motion of the thumb and hand above the teacher's upper lip at once becomes a sign for cat." After the sign has become familiar the child is trained to write the word cat on a slate, blackboard, or sheet of paper, and by frequent repetition the pupil associates the written word with the sign for cat, so that the written word recalls the gestural sign, and the gestural sign serves to recall the concept cat. This language is acquired more readily than any other means of communication. The other method is the intuitive, direct, or English-language method, and, while it would require the use of the living cat or the recognition of the picture of a cat by the deaf child, would connect the written or spoken word directly with the object, without the intervention of any artificial finger-sign. Wherever this method prevails the English language in its written or spoken forms, or in its finger-spelled form, becomes the ordinary means of communication between teachers and pupils, so that every step in instruction requires the use of the English language, which is practically both the instrument and the immediate end of instruction. All the schools called oral use this method. It can be used in connection with finger-spelling, but not with the sign method. =Experiments in Nature Study.=--Some very interesting features of school children's Nature study--not the teaching of science, but the seeing and understanding of the common objects of the external world--are illustrated in a report of Cornell Agricultural Experiment Station, from incidents of school life in some of the New York schools. The children in the sixth grade of one of the schools of Saratoga Springs provided themselves with eggshells filled with earth and sown with wheat. "The botanical side was made a lesson well flavored with active interest. The pride of ownership and a plant coming from a spoonful of earth had the charm of a creation all the pupil's own, and it was much more real to study the thing itself than to read about it and make a recitation." Geographical applications were made by tracing the introduction and extension and transportation of the crop, and by means of the exchange of correspondence the wheat belt could be traced and plotted in every State of the Union. The children of Corning gathered seeds and divided them into classes as indicated by the means of travel with which they are provided. A small boy felt himself a profound investigator when he discovered the advantage some seeds have in being able to float and ride on the water. It required no hard drill to learn the names. The summer planting of flowers by the children of Jamestown resulted in a flower show in the fall. Many children took the tent caterpillar, reared it from the eggs, and learned all about its metamorphoses. "Nature study can be made elastic. In the kindergarten it can be idealized so as to approach a fairy story. It can be intensified so that in the high school it will have all the solidity of pure science." The best proof that the idea is bearing fruit is that teachers are asking for definite instruction on the subject, and a course has been provided for them. The study should be so informal as not to admit of systematic examination. =Chemistry Teaching in Grammar and High Schools.=--At the fourth meeting of the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers, held in Boston in January, 1899, preliminary reports were made on grammar-school and high-school courses in chemistry. The grammar-school course was defined as intended to give its pupils first-hand knowledge of the more obvious and important facts and principles of chemical changes, with emphasis placed on those facts which are illustrative of the changes that are going on all about the pupil in the home and in outdoor Nature. While the point of view should be that of Nature study rather than of science, the selection of material and method of study should be such as to make the course of greatest value to those who are to pursue the subject in higher institutions. For high-school study the report insists that, before everything else, the course be intelligible to the pupil. Whatever experiment or work is undertaken, it must be such that the pupil shall be able to understand its aim and the steps in its pursuit, and it must not be too intricate in demonstration or abstruse in application. It should require at least five hours a week, and, if possible, too, of these periods consecutive, and should come as late in the curriculum as possible, following physics. The general work may be divided into the heads of historical, informational (qualitative and quantitative), and theoretical, the second division having ordinarily the larger part of the time. The belief is expressed that only part of the demonstration work should be done by the teacher in the class, but most of it should be performed, as far as practicable, by each pupil in the laboratory. Lastly, the report recommends that the humanistic side of the science be made as prominent as possible. Whenever facts in chemistry can be related to human life or activity this should be done. MINOR PARAGRAPHS. In a recent report on the educational work of the Passaic (New Jersey) public schools, Superintendent F. E. Spaulding points out one of the worst faults of our present public-school system. "The true function of education is to foster and direct the growth of children, not to teach so many pages, rules, facts, or precepts of this subject or of that. And the one adequate rule of practice is constantly to meet the growing needs of this and that individual child, not to teach this class of children as a class. From this proposition there follows the corollary, which is amply substantiated in practice, that the time, order, method, and extent of presenting any subject can be rightly determined only by the interest and capacity of the child for whose benefit it is to be presented, not by the logic and practical importance of the subject itself." DR. SIR JAMES GRANT, of Ottawa, has been led, by his studies of the alimentary canal in its function of discharging the secretions of the various glands, to a high appreciation of the importance of its operation in connection with the elaborate and complex nervous system associated with it. It is reasonable, he believes, to suppose that the activity of these nerves is injuriously affected by noxious influences long before any evidence of organic disease appears, and that, hence, want of care in the digestive process can not and does not fail "to bring about results of a most telling character in the very process of sanguinification." Believing that irregularities of the digestive process in the alimentary canal are more frequent than is generally supposed, he holds that "the internal sewage of the system" can not be too critically examined with a view of preventing the ill effect of toxic accumulations upon the nerve centers. "That the recently discovered neurones," he adds, "play an important part in the vitalizing of nerve energy is a reasonable deduction. A path is now open in which life, under ordinary circumstances, _may be prolonged_, provided no organic disease is present." The courses in biology in the University of Pennsylvania have been arranged with reference to the needs of students who desire instruction in the biological sciences for general culture, as a preparation for teaching or original investigation, or as a foundation for the professional course in medicine. They include in the courses in arts and sciences the electives, the biology-chemistry group, and the botany-zoölogy group, each set including several classes; the four-year course in biology, which appeals particularly to students who wish to become teachers or to take up special work as investigators in biology, and the two-years' course in biology, which is designed especially for those who desire some systematic training in natural science before taking up the study of medicine. Both of these courses are open to men and women alike. An ample equipment is provided for the biological department in the shape of spacious class rooms and laboratories, a botanic garden, an herbarium, a vivarium, zoölogical and auxiliary collections, a marine laboratory at Sea Isle, New Jersey, tables at Woods Holl, library facilities, two serial publications, and clubs and societies. We learn from the London Lancet that besides the special ward of twelve beds at the Royal Southern Hospital of Liverpool, which was formally opened by Lord Lister on April 29th last, arrangements have been completed for a school for the study of tropical diseases at Liverpool. Lord Lister, on the occasion of the school's foundation, said: "The medical student in the ordinary hospital has rare opportunities of seeing these diseases, and for a man who is about to practice in the tropics it is essential that he have opportunities for studying them here before embarking on his tropical career. The possession of tropical colonies makes such institutions in the home country very necessary, not only for preparing the colonial doctors, but for the protection of the home population, which is sure to be brought into contact more or less with the infectious tropical diseases." An interesting paper by Mr. C. J. Coleman on The Electrical Protection of Safes and Vaults is described in the Electrical World and Engineer. He divided the methods into two systems, in one the alarm depending on the opening and the other on the closing of a circuit--the latter of the two being the one most in use. Among the curious devices mentioned are cementing narrow tin-foil strips on the inner surfaces of window glass, so that any breakage or fracture of the glass will open the circuit; the use of glass tubes filled with mercury and connected in circuit, or tubes filled with water or compressed air. In reply to questions as to the use of electricity in perforating safes it was stated that a five-ply chrome steel safe, seven inches and a half thick, was burned through by three hundred ampères in twenty-five minutes, and holes were burned through a solid block of vault steel twelve inches thick in twenty-six minutes with three hundred and fifty ampères, and in fifteen minutes with five hundred ampères. NOTES. The Royal Institution of Great Britain, on the occasion of its one hundredth anniversary, has elected as honorary members the following Americans: Prof. Samuel Pierpont Langley, astronomer, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.; Prof. Albert Abraham Michelson, physicist, of Chicago; Prof. Robert Henry Thurston, mechanical engineer, Director of the Sibley College of Cornell University; Prof. J. S. Ames, of Johns Hopkins University; George Frederick Barker, physicist, Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; and Prof. William Lyne Wilson, President of Washington and Lee University, ex-Congressman, and Postmaster-General. The foundation stone of an oceanographic museum, instituted by Prince Albert of Monaco, was laid in that city April 25th. The museum is designed, primarily, to receive the large and valuable collections obtained by the prince in the voyages of ocean exploration which he has conducted, and to become a general depository for oceanographic spoils. The principal address was made by the governor-general, who glorified the prince's meritorious scientific career. The German Emperor, who is named a patron of the museum, and the French President were represented on the occasion by deputies. The City Library Association of Springfield, Mass., has been holding, during April, May, and June, an elaborate and instructive exhibit of geographic appliances of special interest to teachers in the elementary schools. The exhibition included a number of sets of wall maps, relief maps and globes, models for use in structural geography, pictures, photographs, etc., of geographical features, aids in teaching, geographical texts, manuals and treatises, books of travel, and an exhibit of geographical work done in the elementary schools of Springfield and vicinity. The association has also published a brief Bibliography of Geographical Instruction, which was prepared by W. S. Monroe, of the State Normal School at Westfield, Mass. Dr. Daniel G. Brinton has presented to the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Professor of American Archæology and Linguistics, his entire collection of books and manuscripts relating to the aboriginal languages of North and South America. The collection represents the work of twenty-five years, and embraces about two thousand titles. Mr. Andrew Carnegie has offered to complete, with a contribution of £50,000, a fund which Mr. Joseph Chamberlain is trying to raise in order to make the scientific school the principal department of the University of Birmingham, England. A noteworthy experiment in bird protection has been made in a boys' school at Coupvray, France, by forming a society of the pupils for that purpose. The president, vice-president, and secretary of the society are selected from among the pupils of the first division, and all the other pupils are members. Meetings are held every Saturday afternoon in March, April, May, June, and July, under the presidency of the teacher, to hear the reports of members and record the nests protected and noxious animals destroyed in a notebook kept for the purpose. In 1898, 570 nests were protected by the school, and more than 400 mice, rats, weasels, and dormice were destroyed. Such societies cost nothing, and are capable of rendering great service. Ernest D. Bell, whose formula for determining animal longevity by the length of the period of maturity was published in a recent Monthly, has sent a later communication to Nature, changing his constant from 10.5 to 10.1, the latter figure giving much better results. The report of Mr. J. C. Hopkins on the Clays and Clay Industries of Western Pennsylvania is the second one of a series of economic reports on the natural resources of the State in course of publication by the Pennsylvania State College. The first report, published in 1897, was on the Brown Stones of Pennsylvania. The report represents that a capital of nearly $7,000,000 is invested in the clay industries about Pittsburg, of which more than $3,000,000 are in the fire-clay industry. The value of the annual output of material is nearly $4,000,000, more than fifty per cent of the capital invested. The 139 companies employ 4,403 men. Herr Hansemann, of the University of Berlin, who examined the skull of Helmholtz, reports in the _Zeitschrift für Psychologie_ that he found the head about the size of Bismarck's, and a little smaller than Wagner's. By metrical standards the brain weighed about 1,700 grammes with the coagulated blood, and about 1,440 grammes without it--about 100 grammes more than the average. The circumvolutions, which are now thought to have more relation to mental capacity than mere weight, were particularly deep and well marked. The skull was 55 centimetres in circumference, 15.5 centimetres broad, and 18.3 centimetres long, and the cephalic index was 85.25. Our obituary list for this month includes the names, among persons known in connection with science, of Miss Elizabeth M. Bardwell, Professor of Astronomy in Mount Holyoke College, who died May 28th, aged sixty-seven years; G. F. Lyster, long Engineer-in-Chief of the Mersey Docks and Harbor Board, and author of valuable improvements in the Liverpool docks, member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Institute of Civil Engineers, aged seventy-six years; Prof. Lars Fredrik Nilson, Director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Stockholm, Sweden, May 14th, aged fifty-nine years; M. Adolphe Lageal, a French geologist, killed by natives while making explorations in the French Soudan; Sir Frederick McCoy, Professor of Natural Science in the University of Melbourne, died in May, aged seventy-six years; he was a member of the Geological Survey of Victoria, founder of the Melbourne National Museum, and author of numerous papers on Victorian geology; before going to Australia he was Professor of Geology in Queen's College, Belfast, and had already attained a high reputation as a geologist by the work he had done as assistant to Sedgwick and by the publication of important memoirs in geology and paleontology; and Lawson Tait, an eminent English surgeon, author of numerous books of a high order relative to his profession, and an active worker in practical sanitary matters; he died at Llandudno, Wales, June 13th, aged fifty-four years. Transcriber's Notes: Words surrounded by _ are italicized. Words surrounded by = are bold. Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent spellings have been kept, including inconsistent use of hyphen (e.g. "long-continued" and "long continued") and proper noun (e.g. "Yang-tse-Kiang" and "Yank-tse-Kiang"). Some illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text. 
2481	----	The Civilization of Illiteracy, by Mihai Nadin (C) Mihai Nadin 1997 The book's cover succinctly depicts the subject To see the book cover, and to read more details about the book (reviews, opinions, forum, etc.) Go to http://www.nadin.ws/publications/books The author, who made this book available to you as a copyrighted Gutenberg Project Etext, would like readers to let him know at nadin@utdallas.edu that they read the book or parts of it. Foreward Introduction Literacy in a Changing World Thinking about alternatives Progressing towards illiteracy? Book One The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow Contrasting characters Choose a letter and click Keeping up with faster living Loaded literacy Man proposes, man disposes Beyond the commitment to literacy A moving target The wise fox "Between us the rift" Malthus revisited Captives to literacy The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy For the love of trade "The best of the useful and the best of the ornamental" The rear-view mirror syndrome Book Two From Signs to Language Semeion revisited The first record is a whip Scale and threshold Signs and tools From Orality to Writing Individual and collective memory Cultural memory Frames of existence The alienation of immediacy Orality and Writing Today: What Do People Understand When They Understand Language? A feedback called confirmation Primitive orality and incipient writing Assumptions Taking literacy for granted To understand understanding Words about images The Functioning of Language Expression, communication, signification The idea machine Writing and the expression of ideas Future and past Knowing and understanding Univocal, equivocal, ambiguous Making thoughts visible Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia Language and Logic Logics behind the logic A plurality of intellectual structures The logics of actions Sampling Memetic optimism Book Three Language as Mediating Mechanism The power of insertion Myth as mediating pre-text Differentiation and coordination Integration and coordination revisited Life after literacy Literacy, Language and Market Preliminaries Products 'R' Us The language of the market The language of products Transaction and literacy Whose market? Whose freedom? New markets, new languages Literacy and the transient Market, advertisement, literacy Language and Work Inside and outside the world We are what we do Literacy and the machine The disposable human being Scale of work, scale of language Innate heuristics The realm of alternatives Mediation of mediation Literacy and Education "Know the best" Ideal vs. real Relevance Temples of knowledge Coherence and connection Plenty of questions The equation of a compromise To be a child Who are we kidding? What about alternatives? Book Four Language and the Visual How many words in a look? The mechanical eye and the electronic eye Who is afraid of a locomotive? Being here and there at the same time Visualization Unbounded Sexuality Seeking good sex Beyond immediacy The land of sexual ubiquity The literate invention of the woman Ahead to the past Freud, modern homosexuality, AIDS Sex and creativity Equal access to erotic mediocrity Family: Discovering the Primitive Future Togetherness The quest for permanency What breaks down when family fails? The homosexual family To want a child Children in the illiterate family A new individuality Discontinuity How advanced the past. How primitive the future A God for Each of Us But who made God? The plurality of religious experiences The educated faithful-a contradiction in terms? Challenging permanency and universality Religion and efficiency Religiosity in the civilization of illiteracy Secular religion A Mouthful of Microwave Diet Food and expectations Fishing in a videolake Language and nourishment Sequence and configuration revisited On cooks, pots, and spoons The identity of food The language of expectations Coping with the right to affluence From self-nourishment to being fed Run and feed the hungry No truffles (yet) in the coop We are what we eat The Professional Winner Sport and self-constitution Language and physical performance The illiterate champion Gentlemen, place your bets! The message is the sneaker Science and Philosophy-More Questions Than Answers Rationality, reason, and the scale of things A lost balance Thinking about thinking Quo vadis science? Discovery and explanation Time and space: freed hostages Coherence and diversity Computational science Explaining ourselves away The efficiency of science Exploring the virtual Quo vadis philosophy? The language of wisdom In scientific disguise Who needs philosophy? And what for? Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes Making and perceiving Art and language Impatience and autarchy The copy is better than the original A nose by any other name Crying wolf started early Meta-literature Writing as co-writing The end of the great novel Libraries, Books, Readers Why don't people read books? Topos uranikos distributed The Sense of Design Drawing the future Breakaway Convergence and divergence The new designer Designing the virtual Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning The commercial democracy of permissiveness How did we get here? Political tongues Can literacy lead politics to failure? Crabs learned how to whistle A world of worlds Of tribal chiefs, kings, and presidents Rhetoric and politics Judging justice The programmed parliament A battle to be won "Theirs not to reason why" The first war of the civilization of illiteracy War as practical experience The institution of the military From the literate to the illiterate war The Nintendo war (a cliché revisited) The look that kills Book Five The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in the Age of the Web Transcending literacy Being in language The wall behind the Wall The message is the medium From democracy to media-ocracy Self-organization The solution is the problem. Or is the problem the solution? From possibilities to choices Coping with choice Trade-off Learning from the experience of interface A Sense of the Future Cognitive energy Literacy is not all it's made out to be Networks of cognitive energy The University of Doubt Interactive learning Footing the bill A wake-up call Consumption and interaction Unexpected opportunities Foreword No other time than ours has had more of the future and less of the past in it. The heat and beat of network interactions and the richness of multimedia and virtual reality reflect this time more than do the pages you are about to read. I wish I could put in your hands the new book, suggested on the cover, as the first page following all those that make up the huge library of our literate accumulation of knowledge. Let's us imagine that it exists. As I see it, the book would read your mind.as you pause on a thought and start formulating questions. It should enable you to come closer to the persons whose thoughts are mentioned here, either through further investigation of their ideas or by entering into a dialogue with them. We would be able to interact with many of the individuals making this fascinating present happen. The emergence of a new civilization, freed from constraints borne by its members during a time to which we must bid farewell-this is the subject of the book. Science and technology are themes of this intellectual expedition, but the subject is the ever-changing human being. The civilization we are entering is no promised land, make no mistake about that. But it is a realm of challenge. Tentative upon entering the territory of new possibilities, we have no choice but to go ahead. Some-the pioneers, inventors, entrepreneurs, even politicians of the so-called Third Wave-rush into it, unable to contain an optimism based on their own opportunistic enthusiasm (as real or fake as it might be). The young lead, unburdening themselves of the shackles of an education which made the least contribution to their innovative accomplishments. Others hesitate. They don't even notice the chains of a literate heritage, a heritage that buffers them, as it buffers us all at various times, from the often disquieting changes we experience at all levels of our existence. In the palace of books and eternity, we were promised love and beauty, prosperity, and above all permanence. Disinheriting ourselves from all that was, we are nostalgic for our lost sense of continuity and security. Still, we cannot help feeling that something very different from what we used to expect is ahead of us. We are excited, though at times apprehensive. It might be that the cutting-edge language and look of Wired, the magazine of the Netizens, is more appropriate to the subject than is the elaborate prose of this book. But this is not yet another product of the cottage industry of predictions, as we know them from Naisbitt, Gilder, or the Tofflers. To explain without explaining away the complexity of this time of change was more important to me than to ride the coattails of today's sound-byte stars. Solid arguments that suggest possibilities fundamentally different from what they are willing to accept, or even entertain, make for a more deeply founded optimism. If you get lost along the intellectual journey to which this book invites, it can be only my fault. If you agree with the argument only because it tired you out, it will be my loss. But if you can argue with me, and if your argument is free of prejudice, we can continue the journey together. Try reaching me, as my thoughts try to reach you through this book. Unfortunately, I am not yet able to hand you that ideal book that would directly connect us. Short of this, here is an address you can use: nadin@utdallas.edu. Let's keep on touch! Literacy in a Changing World Thinking about alternatives Preoccupation with language is, in fact, preoccupation with ourselves as individuals and as a species. While many concerns, such as terrorism, AIDS, poverty, racism, and massive migration of populations, haunt us as we hurry to achieve our portion of well-being, one at least seems easier to allay: illiteracy. This book proclaims the end of literacy, as it also accounts for the incredible forces at work in our restlessly shifting world. The end of literacy-a chasm between a not-so-distant yesterday and the exciting, though confusing, tomorrow-is probably more difficult to understand than to live with. Reluctance to acknowledge change only makes things worse. We notice that literate language use does not work as we assume or were told it should, and wonder what can be done to make things fit our expectations. Parents hope that better schools with better teachers will remedy the situation. Teachers expect more from the family and suggest that society should invest more in order to maintain literacy skills. Professors groan under the prospect of ill-prepared students entering college. Publishers redefine their strategies as new forms of expression and communication vie for public attention and dollars. Lawyers, journalists, the military, and politicians worry about the role and functions of language in society. Probably most concerned with their own roles in the social structure and with the legitimacy of their institutions, they would preserve those structures of human activity that justify literacy and thus their own positions of power and influence. The few who believe that literacy comprises not only skills, but also ideals and values, say that the destiny of our civilization is at stake, and that the decline in literacy has dreadful implications. Opportunity is not part of the discourse or argument. The major accomplishment of analyzing illiteracy so far has been the listing of symptoms: the decrease in functional literacy; a general degradation of writing skills and reading comprehension; an alarming increase of packaged language (clichés used in speeches, canned messages); and a general tendency to substitute visual media (especially television and video) for written language. Parallel to scholarship on the subject, a massive but unfocused public opinion campaign has resulted in all kinds of literacy enterprises. Frequently using stereotypes that in themselves affect language quality, such enterprises plead for teaching adults who cannot read or write, for improving language study in all grades, and for raising public awareness of illiteracy and its various implications. Still, we do not really understand the necessary character of the decline of literacy. Historic and systematic aspects of functional illiteracy, as well as language degradation, are minimally addressed. They are phenomena that affect not only the United States. Countries with a long cultural tradition, and which make the preservation and literate use of language a public institution, experience them as well. My interest in the subject of illiteracy was triggered by two factors: the personal experience of being uprooted from an East European culture that stubbornly defended and maintained rigid structures of literacy; and involvement in what are commonly described as new technologies. I ended up in the USA, a land of unstructured and flawed literacy, but also one of amazing dynamics. Here I joined those who experienced the consequences of the low quality of education, as well as the opening of new opportunities. The majority of these are disconnected from what is going on in schools and universities. This is how and why I started thinking, like many others, about alternatives. My Mayflower (if I may use the analogy to the Pilgrims) brought me to individuals who do many things-shop, work, play or watch sports, travel, go to church, even love-with an acute sense of immediacy. Worshippers of the instant, my new compatriots served as a contrast to those who, on the European continent I came from, conscientiously strive for permanency-of family, work, values, tools, homes, appliances, cars, buildings. In contrast, the USA is a place where everything is the present, the coming moment. Not only television programs and advertisements made me aware of this fact. Books are as permanent as their survival on bestseller lists. The market, with its increasingly breathtaking fluctuations, might today celebrate a company that tomorrow disappears for good. Commencement ceremonies, family life, business commitments, religious practice, succeeding fashions, songs, presidents, denture creams, car models, movies, and practically everything else embody the same obsession. Language and literacy could not escape this obsession with change. Because of my work as a university professor, I was in the trenches where battles of literacy are fought. That is where I came to realize that a better curriculum, multicultural or not, or better paid teachers, or cheaper and better books could make a difference, but would not change the outcome. The decline of literacy is an encompassing phenomenon impossible to reduce to the state of education, to a nation's economic rank, to the status of social, ethnic, religious, or racial groups, to a political system, or to cultural history. There was life before literacy and there will be life after it. In fact, it has already begun. Let us not forget that literacy is a relatively late acquisition in human culture. The time preceding writing is 99% of the entire story of the human being. My position in the discussion is one of questioning historic continuity as a premise for literacy. If we can understand what the end of literacy as we know it means in practical terms, we will avoid further lamentation and initiate a course of action from which all can benefit. Moreover, if we can get an idea of what to expect beyond the safe haven now fading on the horizon, then we will be able to come up with improved, more effective models of education. At the same time, we will comprehend what individuals need in order to successfully ascertain their manifold nature. Improved human interaction, for which new technologies are plentifully available, should be the concrete result of this understanding of the end of the civilization of literacy. The first irony of any publication on illiteracy is that it is inaccessible to those who are the very subject of the concern of literacy partisans. Indeed, the majority of the millions active on the Internet read at most a 3-sentence short paragraph. The attention span of students in high school and universities is not much shorter than that of their instructors: one typed page. Legislators, no less than bureaucrats, thrive on executive summaries. A 30-second TV spot is many times more influential than a 4-column in- depth article. But those who give life and dynamics to reality use means other than those whose continued predominance this book questions. The second irony is that this book also presents arguments which are, in their logical sequence, dependent on the conventions of reading and writing. As a medium for constituting and interpreting history, writing definitely influences how we think and what we think about. I wondered how my arguments would hold up in an interactive, non-linear medium of communication, in which we can question each other, and which also makes authorship, if not irrelevant, the last thing someone would worry about. Since I have used language to think through this book, I know that it would make less sense in a different medium. This leads me to state from the outset-almost as self-encouragement-that literacy, whose end I discuss, will not disappear. For some, Literacy Studies will become a new specialty, as Sanskrit or Ancient Greek has become for a handful of experts. For others, it will become a skill, as it is already for editors, proofreaders, and professional writers. For the majority, it will continue in literacies that facilitate the use and integration of new media and new forms of communication and interpretation. The utopian in me says that we will find ways to reinvent literacy, if not save it. It has played a major role in leading to the new civilization we are entering. The realist acknowledges that new times and challenges require new means to cope with their complexity. Reluctance to acknowledge change does not prevent it from coming about. It only prevents us from making the best of it. Probably my active practice of literacy has been matched by all those means, computer-based or not, for coping with complexity, to whose design and realization I contributed. This book is not an exercise in prophesying a brave new world of people happy to know less but all that they have to know when they need to. Neither is it about individuals who are superficial but who adapt more easily to change, mediocre but extremely competitive. Its subject is language and everything pertaining to it: family and sexuality, politics, the market, what and how we eat, how we dress, the wars we fight, love, sports, and more. It is a book about ourselves who give life to words whenever we speak, write, or read. We give life to images, sounds, textures, to multimedia and virtual reality involving ourselves in new interactions. Transcending boundaries of literacy in practical experiences for which literacy is no longer appropriate means, ultimately, to grow into a new civilization. Progressing towards illiteracy? Here is as good a place as any to explain my perspective. Language involves human beings in all their aspects: biology, sense of space and time, cognitive and manual skills, emotional resources, sensitivity, tendency to social interaction and political organization. But what best defines our relation to language is the pragmatics of our existence. Our continuous self-constitution through what we do, why we do, and how we do all we actually do-in short, human pragmatics-involves language, but is not reducible to it. The pragmatic perspective I assume originated with Charles Sanders Peirce. When I began teaching in the USA, my American colleagues and students did not know who he was. The semiotic implications of this text relate to his work. Questioning how knowledge is shared, Peirce noticed that, without talking about the bearers of our knowledge-all the sign carriers we constitute-we would not be able to figure out how results of our inquiries are integrated in our deeds, actions, and theories. Language and the formation and expression of ideas is unique to humans in that they define a part of the cognitive dimension of our pragmatic. We seem endowed with language, as we are with hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste. But behind the appearance is a process through which human self-constitution led to the possibility and necessity of language, as it led to the humanization of our senses. Furthermore, it led to the means by which we constitute ourselves as literate as the pragmatics of our existence requires under ever-changing circumstances. The appearance is that literacy is a useful tool, when in fact it results in the pragmatic context. We can use a hammer or a computer, but we are our language. The experience of language extends to the experience of the logic it embodies, as well as to that of the institutions that language and literacy made possible. These, in turn, influence what we are and how we think, what we do and why we do. So does every tool, appliance, and machine we use, and so do all the people with whom we interact. Our interactions with people, with nature, or with artifacts we ourselves generated further affect the pragmatic self-constitution of our identity. The literate experience of language enhanced our cognitive capabilities. Consequently, literacy became larger than life. Much is covered by the practice of literacy: tradition, culture, thoughts and feelings, human expression through literature, the constitution of political, scientific, and artistic programs, ethics, the practical experience of law. In this book, I use a broad definition of literacy that reflects the many facets it has acquired over time. Those readers who think I stretch the term literacy too far should keep in mind all that literacy comprises in our culture. In contrast, illiteracy, no matter what its cause or what other attributes an individual labeled illiterate has, is seen as something harmful and shameful, to be avoided at any price. Without an understanding that encompasses our values and ways of thinking, we cannot perceive how a civilization can progress to illiteracy. Many people are willing to be part of post- literate society, but by no means are they willing to be labeled members of a civilization qualified as illiterate. By civilization of illiteracy I mean one in which literate characteristics no longer constitute the underlying structure of effective practical experiences. Furthermore, I mean a civilization in which no one literacy dominates, as it did until around the turn of the century, and still does. This domination takes place through imposition of its rules, which prevent practical experiences of human self-constitution in domains where literacy has exhausted its potential or is impotent. In describing the post-literate, I know that any metaphor will do as long as it does not call undue attention to itself. What counts is not the provocativeness but that we lift our gaze, determined to see, not just to look for the comforting familiar. This civilization of illiteracy is one of many literacies, each with its own characteristics and rules of functioning. Some of such partial literacies are based on configurational modes of expression, as in the written languages of Japan, China, or Korea; on visual forms of communication; or on synesthetic communication involving a combination of our senses. Some are numerical and rely on a different notation system than that of literacy. The civilization of illiteracy comprises experiences of thinking and working above and beyond language, as mathematicians from different countries communicating perfectly through mathematical formulae demonstrate. Or as we experience in activities where the visual, digitally processed, supports a human pragmatics of increased efficiency. Even in its primitive, but extremely dynamic, deployment, the Internet embodies the directions and possibilities of such a civilization. This brings us back to literacy's reason for being: pragmatics expressed in methods for increasing efficiency, of ensuring a desired outcome, be this in regard to a list of merchandise, a deed, instructions on how to make something or to carry out an act, a description of a place, poetry and drama, philosophy, the recording and dissemination of history and abstract ideas, mythology, stories and novels, laws, and customs. Some of these products of literacy are simply no longer necessary. That new methods and technologies of a digital nature effectively constitute an alternative to literacy cannot be overemphasized. I started this book convinced that the price we pay for the human tendency to efficiency-that is, our striving for more and more at an ever cheaper price-is literacy and the values connected to it as represented by tradition, books, art, family, philosophy, ethics, among many others. We are confronted with the increased speed and shorter durations of human interactions. A growing number and a variety of mediating elements in human praxis challenge our understanding of what we do. Fragmentation and interconnectedness of the world, the new technology of synchronization, the dynamics of life forms or of artificial constructs elude the domain of literacy as they constitute a new pragmatic framework. This becomes apparent when we compare the fundamental characteristics of language to the characteristics of the many new sign systems complementing or replacing it. Language is sequential, centralized, linear, and corresponds to the stage of linear growth of humankind. Matched by the linear increase of the means of subsistence and production required for the survival and development of the species, this stage reached its implicit potential. The new stage corresponds to distributed, non-sequential forms of human activity, nonlinear dependencies. Reflecting the exponential growth of humankind (population, expectations, needs, and desires), this new stage is one of alternative resources, mainly cognitive in nature, compensating for what was perceived as limited natural means for supporting humankind. It is a system of a different scale, suggestively represented by our concerns with globality and higher levels of complexity. Therefore, humans can no longer develop within the limitations of an intrinsically centralized, linear, hierarchic, proportional model of contingencies that connect existence to production and consumption, and to the life-support system. Alternatives that affect the nature of life, work, and social interaction emerge through practical experiences of a fundamentally new condition. Literacy and the means of human self-constitution based on it reached their full potential decades ago. The new means, which are not as universal (i.e., as encompassing) as language, open possibilities for exponential growth, resulting from their connectivity and improved involvement of cognitive resources. As long as the world was composed of small units (tribes, communities, cities, counties), language, despite differences in structure and use, occupied a central place. It had a unifying character and exercised a homogenizing function within each viable political unit. The world has entered the phase of global interdependencies. Many local languages and their literacies of relative, restricted significance emerge as instruments of optimization. What takes precedence today is interconnectivity at many levels, a function for which literacy is ill prepared. Citizens become Netizens, an identity that relates them to the entire world, not only to where they happen to live and work. The encompassing system of culture broke into subsystems, not just into the "two cultures" of science and literacy that C.P. Snow discussed in 1959, hoping idealistically that a third culture could unite and harmonize them. Market mechanisms, representative of the competitive nature of human beings, are in the process of emancipating themselves from literacy. Where literate norms and regulations still in place prevent this emancipation-as is the case with government activity and bureaucracies, the military, and legal institutions-the price is expressed in lower efficiency and painful stagnation. Some European countries, more productive in impeding the work of the forces of renewal, pay dearly for their inability to understand the need for structural changes. United or not in a Europe of broader market opportunities, member countries will have to free themselves from the rigid constraints of a pragmatic framework that no longer supports their viability. Conflicts are not solved; solutions are a long time in coming. One more remark before ending this introduction. It seems that those who run the scholarly publishing industry are unable to accept that someone can have an idea that does not originate from a quotation. In keeping with literacy's reliance on authority, I have acknowledged in the references the works that have some bearing on the ideas presented in this book. Few, very few indeed, are mentioned in the body of the text. The line of argument deserves priority over the stereotypes of referencing. This does not prevent me from acknowledging here, in addition to Leibniz and Peirce, the influence of thinkers and writers such as Roberto Maturana, Terry Winograd, George Lakoff, Lotfi Zadeh, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, George Steiner, Marshall McLuhan, Ivan Illich, Yuri M. Lotman, and even Baudrillard, the essayist of the post-industrial. If I misunderstood any of them, it is not because I do not respect their contributions. Seduced by my own interest and line of reasoning, I integrated what I thought could become solid bricks into a building of arguments which was to be mine. I am willing to take blame for its design and construction, remaining thankful to all those whose fingerprints are, probably, still evident on some of the bricks I used. In the 14 years that have gone by since I started thinking and writing about the civilization of illiteracy, many of the directions I brought into discussion are making it into the public domain. But I should be the last to be surprised or unhappy that reality changed before I was able to finish this book, and before publishers could make up their minds about printing it. The Internet was not yet driving the stock market, neither had the writers of future shock had published their books churning prophecies, nor had companies made fortunes in multimedia when the ideas that go into this book were discussed with students, presented in public lectures, outlined to policy-makers (including administrators in higher education), and printed in scholarly journals. On starting this book, I wanted it to be not only a presentation of events and trends, but a program for practical action. This is why, after examination of what could be called the theoretical aspects, the focus shifts to the applied. The book ends with suggestions for practical measures to be considered as alternatives to the beaten path of the bandage method that only puts off radical treatment, even when its inevitability is acknowledged. Yes, I like to see my ideas tested and applied, even taken over and developed further (credit given or not!). I would rather put up with a negative outcome in discussions following publication of this book, than have it go unnoticed. Book one The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow Contrasting characters The information produced in our time, in one day, exceeds that of the last 300 years. What this means can be more easily understood by giving some life to this dry evaluation originating from people in the business of quantifying data processing. Zizi, the hairdresser, and her companions exemplify today's literate population. Portrayed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, she is contrasted to Pascal, who at the age of sixteen had already published his work on conic sections, to Hugo Grotius, who graduated from college at fifteen, and to Melanchton, who at the age of twelve was a student at the once famous Heidelberg University. Zizi knows how to get around. She is like a living address on the Internet at its current stage of development: more links than content, perennially under construction. She continuously starts on new avenues, never pursuing any to the end. Her well-being is supported by public money as she lives off all the social benefits society affords. Zizi's conversations are about her taxes, and characters she reads about in magazines, sees on television, or meets on vacation. As superficial as such conversations can be, they are full of catch phrases associated or not with the celebrations of the day. Her boyfriend, 34-year-old Bruno G., graduated with a degree in political economy, drives a taxi cab, and still wonders what he wants to do in life. He knows the name of every soccer team that has won the championship since 1936; he knows by heart the names of the players, which coach was fired when, and every game score. Melanchton studied reading, writing, Latin, Greek, and theology. He knew by heart many fragments from the classical writers and from the Bible. The world he lived in was small. To explain its workings, one did not need to master mathematics or physics, but philosophy. Since Melanchton can no longer be subjected to multiple choice or to IQ tests, we will never know if he could make it into college today. The question posed about all the characters introduced is a simple one: Who is more ignorant, Melanchton or Zizi? Enzensberger's examples are from Germany, but the phenomena he brings to his readers' attention transcend national boundaries. He himself-writer, poet, publisher-is far from being an Internet buff, although he might be as informed about it as his characters are. As opposed to many other writers on literacy and education, Enzensberger confirms that the efficiency reached in the civilization of illiteracy (he does not call it that) makes it possible to extend adolescence well into what used to be the more productive time in the life of past generations. Everyone goes to college-in some countries college education is a right. This means that over half of the young people enter some form of higher education. After graduating, they find out that they still don't know what they want. Or, worse yet, that what they know, or are certified as knowing, is of no consequence to what they are expected to do. They will live, like Zizi, from social benefits and will get extremely angry at anyone questioning society's ability to provide them. For them, efficiency of human practical experiences translate into the right to not worry whether they will ever contribute to this efficiency. While still students, they demand, and probably rightly so, that everything be to the point. The problem is that neither they nor their teachers can define what that means. What students get are more choices among less significant subjects. That, at least, is how it looks. They probably never finish a book from cover to cover. Assignments are given to them in small portions, and usually with photocopied pages, which they are expected to read. A question-and-answer sheet is conveniently attached, with the hope that the students will read the pages to find the answers, and not copy them from more dedicated classmates. That Zizi probably has a vocabulary as rich as that of a 16th-century scholar in the humanities can be assumed. That she likely uses fewer than 1,000 of these words only says that this is how much she needs in order to function efficiently. Melanchton used almost all the words he knew. His work required mastery of literacy so that he could express every new idea prompted by the few new practical experiences of human self-constitution he was involved in or aware of. He spoke and wrote in three languages, two of which are used today only in the specialties they are part of. Two or three sentences from a tourist guidebook or from a tape is all Zizi needs for her next vacation in Greece or Italy. For her, travel is a practical experience as vital as any other. She knows the names of rock groups, and lip-syncs the songs that express her concerns: sex, drugs, loneliness. Her memory of any stage performance or movie surpasses that of Melanchton, who probably knew by heart the entire liturgy of the Catholic Church. Like everyone else constituting their identities in the civilization of illiteracy, Zizi knows what it takes to minimize her tax burden and how to use coupons. The rhythm of her existence is defined more by commercial than natural cycles. And she keeps refreshing her base of practical information. Living in a time of change, this is her chance to beat the system and all the literate norms and constraints it imposes on her. Melanchton, despite his literacy, would have been lost between two consecutive tax laws of our time, and even more between consecutive changes in fashion or music trends, or between consecutive versions of computer software, not to say chips. He belonged to a system appropriate to a stable world of relatively unchanging expectations. What he studied would last him a lifetime. Zizi and Bruno, as well as their friend Helga-the third in Enzensberger's text-live in a world of unsettled, heterogeneous information, based on ad hoc methods delivered by magazines, or through the Internet, that one has only to scan or surf in order to find useful data. At this juncture, readers familiar with the World Wide Web, whether passionate about it or strongly against it, understand why I describe Zizi as a living Internet address. To derive some meaning from this description, and especially to avoid the appearance of drawing a caricature of the Internet, we need to focus on the pragmatic context in which Zizi constitutes herself and in which the Internet is constituted as a global experience. The picture one gets from contrasting the famous Melanchton to Zizi the hairdresser is not exactly fair, as it would be unfair to contrast the Library of Alexandria to the Internet. On the one hand, we have a tremendous collection representative of human knowledge (and the illusion of knowledge). On the other we have the embodiment of extremely effective methods for acquiring, testing, using, and discarding information required by human pragmatics. The world in which Melanchton worked was limited to Central Europe and Rome. News circulated mainly by word-of- mouth. Melanchton, like everyone who was raised with and worked amid books, was subjected to less information than we are today. He did not need an Intel inside computer or search engine to find what he wanted. He would not understand how anyone could replace the need for and pleasure of browsing by a machine called Browser. His was a world of associations, not matches, no matter how successful. Human minds, not machines, made up his cognitive world. Literacy opened access to knowledge as long as this knowledge was compatible with the pragmatic structures it embodied and supported. The ozone hole of over- information broke the protective bubble of literacy. In the new pragmatic context, the human being, thirsty for data, seems at the mercy of the informational environment that shapes work, entertainment, life-in short, everything. Access to study was far from being equal, or even close to some standard of fairness, in Melanchton's time of obsession with excellence. Information itself was very expensive. In order to become a hairdresser-were it possible and necessary 500 years ago-Zizi, as well as the millions who attend career training schools, would have had to pay much more for her training than she did in our age of unlimited equal access to mediocrity. Knowledge was acquired through channels as diverse as family, schools, churches, and disseminated in very few books, or orally, or through imitation. Individuals in Melanchton's time formed a set of expectations and pursued goals that changed minimally over their lifetime, since the pragmatic context remained the same. This ended with the dynamic practical experiences of self-constitution that led to the pragmatic context of our day. Ended also are the variety of forms of human cooperation and solidarity-as imperfect as they were-characteristic of a scale in which survival of the individual was essential for the survival and well-being of the community. They are replaced by a generalized sense of competition. Not infrequently, this takes the form of adversity, socially acceptable when performed by literate lawyers, for instance, yet undesirable when performed by illiterate terrorists. More suggestive than precise, this description, in which Zizi and Melanchton play the leading characters, exemplifies the chasm between yesterday and today. A further examination of what is going on in our world allows the observation that literate language no longer exclusively, or even dominantly, affects and regulates day-to-day activities. A great amount of language used in the daily routine of people living in economically advanced countries was simply wiped out or absorbed in machine transactions. Digital networks, connecting production lines, distribution channels, and points of sale spectacularly augment the volume and variety of such transactions. Practical experiences of shopping, transportation, banking, and stock market transactions require literacy less and less. Automation rationalized away the literate component of many activities. All over the world, regardless of the economic or technological level reached, communication-specific endeavors, such as advertisement, political campaigns, various forms of ceremonial (religious, military, athletic), make crystal clear that literate language use is subordinated to the function or purpose pursued. The developments under scrutiny affect surviving pre-literate societies-the nomadic, animistic population of Sudan, the tribes of the Brazilian Amazon forests, remote populations of Africa, Asia, Australia-as they affect the literate and post- literate. Without going into the details of the process, we should be aware that commodities coming from such societies, including the commodity of labor, no less than their needs and expectations, are traded on the global market. In the African Sahara, TV is watched-sets connected to car batteries-as much as in the high mountains of Peru populated by illiterate Incas. As virtual points of sale, the lands with pre-literate societies are traded in the futures markets as possible tourist resorts, or as a source of cheap labor. Experiences of practical self-constitution as nomadic, animistic, and tribal are no longer confined to the small scale of the respective community. In the effective world of a global pragmatics of high efficiency, their hunger and misery shows up in ledgers as potential aid and cooperation programs. Don't read here only greed and cynicism, rather the expression of reciprocal dependencies. AIDS on the African sub- continent and the Ebola epidemics only capture the image of shared dangers. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the plants of the disappearing Amazon rain forest, studied for their healing potential, capture an image of opportunity. In such situations and locations, the pragmatics of literacy and illiteracy meet and interact. Choose a letter and click Images substitute text; sounds add rhythm or nuance; visual representations other than written words become dominant; animation introduces dynamics where written words could only suggest it. In technologically advanced societies, interactive multimedia (or hypermedia) combine visual, aural, dynamic, and structural representations. Environments for personal exploration, organization, and manipulation of information proliferate in CD-ROM formats, interactive games, and tutorial networks. High fidelity sound, rich video resources, computer graphics, and a variety of devices for individualized human interaction provide the technological basis for what emerges as a ubiquitous computing environment. The entire process can be provisionally summarized as follows: Human cooperation and interaction corresponding to the complexity of the undertakings of our age is defined by expectations of high efficiency. Relatively stable and well structured literate communication among the people involved is less efficient than rather fast and fragmentary contact through means other than those facilitated by, or based on, literacy. Stereotyped, highly repetitive or well defined unique tasks, and the literate language associated with them, have been transferred to machines. Unique tasks require strategies of specialization. The smaller the task assigned to each participant, the more effective the ways to carry it out at the expense of variety of forms and extent of direct human interaction, as well as at the expense of literacy-based interactions. Accordingly, human self-constitution today involves means of expression and communication no longer based on or reducible to literacy. Characteristics immanent in literacy affect cognitive processes, forms of human interaction, and the nature of productive effort to a lesser extent. Nevertheless, the reshaping of human pragmatics does not take place by general agreement or without conflict, as will be pointed out more than once. While some fail to notice the decreased role of literacy and the deterioration of language in our life today, others surrender to illiteracy without even being aware of their surrender. We live in a world in which many people-especially those with more than undergraduate college education-complain about the low level of literacy while they simultaneously acquiesce to methods and necessities that make literacy less and less significant. Furthermore, when invoking literacy, people maintain a nostalgia for something that has already ceased to affect their lives. Their thinking, feeling, interpersonal relations, and expectations regarding family, religion, ethics, morals, art, dining, cultural and leisure activities already reflect the new illiterate condition. It is not a matter of personal choice, but a necessary development. The low level of literacy of those who receive an education from which society used to expect literate adults to graduate worries politicians, educators, and literacy professionals (writers, publishers, booksellers). They fear, probably for the wrong reasons, that people cannot live and prosper without knowing how to write or read at high levels of competence. What actually worries them is not that people write less well, or less correctly, or read less (some if at all), but that some succeed despite the odds. Self-styled champions of literacy, instead of focusing on change, spend money, energy, and intelligence, not in exploring how to optimally benefit from change, but on how to stop an inexorable process. The state of affairs characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy did not come about overnight. Norbert Wiener's prophetic warning that we will become slaves of intelligent contraptions that take over intellectual faculties deserves more than a parenthetic reminder. Some commentators point to the disruption of the sixties, which put the educational system all over the world in turmoil. The events of the sixties, as much as the new machines Wiener discussed, are yet another symptom of, but not a reason for, the decline of literacy. The major hypothesis of this book is that illiteracy, in its relative terms mentioned so far, results from the changed nature of human practical experiences; that is, from the pragmatics corresponding to a new stage of human civilization. (I prefer to use pragmatics in the sense the Greeks used it: pragma, for deeds, from prattein, to do.) Regardless of our vocations-working in a large corporation or heading one's own business, farming, creating art, teaching language or mathematics, programming, or even participating in a university's board of trustees- we accept, even if with some reluctance, the rationalization of language. Our lives take place increasingly in the impersonal world of stereotype discourse of forms, applications, passwords, and word processed letters. The Internet, as World Wide Web, e-mail medium, data exchange, or chat forum effectively overrides constraints and limitations resulting from the participation of language in human pragmatics. Our world is becoming more and more a world of efficiency and interconnected activities that take place at a speed and at a variety of levels for which literacy is not appropriate. Still, complex interdependencies are reflected in our relation to language in general, and in our use of it, in particular. It seems that language is a key-at least one among many-to the mind, the reason for which artificial intelligence is interested in language. It also seems to be a major social ingredient. Accordingly, no one should be surprised that once the status of language changes, there are also changes far beyond what we expect when we naively consider what a word is, or what is in a word or a rule of grammar, or what defines a text. A word on paper, one like the many on this page, is quite different from a word in the hypertext of a multimedia application or that of the Web. The letters serve a different function. Omit one from this page and you have a misspelling. Click on one and nothing happens. Click on a letter displayed on a Web page and you might be connected to other signs, images, sounds, and interactive multimedia presentations. These changes, among others, are the implicit themes of this book and define the context for understanding why illiteracy is not an accident, but a necessary development. Keeping up with faster living Ours is a world of efficiency. Although more obvious on the computer screen, and on the command buttons and touch-sensitive levers of the machines we rely quite heavily upon, efficiency expectations met in business and financial life insinuate themselves into the intimacy of our private lives as well. As a result of efficiency expectations, we have changed almost everything we inherited in our homes-kitchen, study, or bathroom-and redefined our respective social or family roles. We do almost everything others used to do for us. We cook (if warming up prefabricated dishes in a microwave oven still qualifies as cooking), do the laundry (if selecting dirty sheets or clothes by color and fabric and stuffing them into the machine qualifies as washing), type or desktop publish, transport (ourselves, our children). Machines replaced servants, and we became their servants in turn. We have to learn their language of instructions and to cope with the consequences their use entails: increased energy demand, pollution, waste, and most important, dependence. Ours is a world of brief encounters in which "How are you?" is not a question reflecting concern or expecting a real answer, but a formula. Once it meant what it expressed and prefaced dialogue. Now it is the end of interaction, or at best the introduction to a dialogue totally independent of the question. Where everyone living within the model of literacy expected the homogeneous background of shared language, we now find a very fragmented reality of sub-languages, images, sounds, body gestures, and new conventions. Despite the heavy investment society has made in literacy over hundreds of years, literacy is no longer adopted by all as a desired educational goal. Neither is it actively pursued for immediate practical or long-term reasons. People seem to acknowledge that they need not even that amount of literacy imposed upon them by obligatory education. For quite a few-speech writers, editors, perhaps novelists and educators-literacy is indeed a skill which they aptly use for making a living. They know and apply rules of correct language usage. Methods for augmenting the efficiency of the message they put in the mouths of politicians, soap-opera actors, businessmen, activists and many others in need of somebody to write (and sometimes even to think) for them are part of their trade. For others, these rules are a means of exploring the wealth of fiction, poetry, history, and philosophy. For a great majority, literacy is but another skill required in high school and college, but not necessarily an essential component of their current and, more important, future lives and work. This majority, estimated at ca. 75% of the population, believes that all one has to know is already stored for them and made available as an expected social service-mathematics in the cash register or pocket calculator, chemistry in the laundry detergent, physics in the toaster, language in the greeting cards available for all imaginable occasions, eventually incorporated, as spellers or writing routines, into the word processing programs they use or others use for them. Four groups seem to have formed: those for whom literacy is a skill; those using it as a means for studying values based on literacy; those functioning in a world of pre- packaged literacy artifacts; and those active beyond the limitations of literacy, stretching cognitive boundaries, defining new means and methods of communication and interaction, constituting themselves in practical activities of higher and higher efficiency. These four groups are the result of changes in the condition of the human being in what was broadly (in fact, too broadly) termed Post-Industrial Society. Whether specifically identified as such or assuming labels of convenience, the conflict characteristic of this time of fundamental change has its locus in literacy; and more specifically in the direction of change towards the civilization of illiteracy. At first glance, it is exceedingly difficult to say whether language, as an instrument of continuity and permanence, is failing because the rhythm of existence has accelerated increasingly since the Industrial Revolution, or the rhythm of existence has accelerated because human interaction is no longer at the mercy of language. We do not know whether this acceleration is due to, or nourished by, changes in language and the way people use it, or if changes in language reflect this acceleration. It is quite plausible that the use of images, moreover of interactive multimedia and network-based exchange of complex data are more appropriate to a faster paced society than texts requiring more time and concentration. But it is less clear whether we use images and synesthetic means of expression because we want to be faster, and thus more efficient, or we can be faster and improve efficiency if we use such means. Shorter terms of human interaction and, for example, the change in the status of the family have something in common. The new political condition of the individual in modern society also has something in common with the characteristics of human interaction and the means of this interaction. But again, we do not really know whether the new socio-economic dynamics resulted from our intention to accelerate interactions, or the acceleration in human interaction is only the background (or a marginal effect) of a more encompassing change of our condition under circumstances making this change necessary. My hypothesis is that a dramatic change in the scale of humankind and in the nature of the relation between humans and their natural and cultural environments might explain the new socio-economic dynamics. Loaded literacy Languages, or any other form of expression and communication, are meaningful only to the extent that they become part of our existence. When people do not know how to spell words that refer to their existence, we suspect that something related to the learning of spelling (usually the learner) does not function as we assumed it should. (Obviously, literacy is more than spelling.) School, family, new habits-such as extensive television viewing, comics reading, obsessive playing of computer games, Internet surfing, to name some of the apparent culprits-come under scrutiny. Culture, prejudice, or fear of the unknown prevents us from asking whether spelling is still a necessity. Cowardly conformity stops us short from suspecting that something might be wrong with language or with those literacy expectations deeply anchored in all known political programs thrown into our face when our vote is elicited. When spelling and phonetics are as inconsistent as they are in English especially, this suspicion led to the examination and creation of alternative alphabets and to alternative artificial languages, which we shall examine. But spelling fails even in languages with more consistent relations between pronunciation and writing. Because we inherited, along with our reverence for language, a passive attitude regarding what is logically permissible under the guise of literacy, we do not question implicit assumptions and expectations of literacy. For instance, the belief that command of language enhances cognitive skills, although we know that cognitive processes are not exactly reducible to language, is accepted without hesitation. It is ascertained that literate people from no matter what country can communicate better and learn foreign languages more easily. This is not always the case. In reality, languages are rather loaded systems of conventions in which national biases and other inclinations are extensively embodied and maintained, and even propagated, through speech, writing, and reading. This expectation leads to well intended, though disputable, statements such as: "You can never understand one language until you understand at least two" (signed by Searle). There is also the implication that literate people have better access to the arts and sciences. The reason for this is that language, as a universal means of communication, is consequently the only means that ultimately explains scientific theories. Works of art, proponents of language argue, can be reduced to verbal description, or at least be better accessed through the language used to index them through labels, classifications, categories. Another assumption (and prejudice) is that the level of performance in and outside language is in direct relation to competence acquired in literacy. This prejudice, from among all others, will come under closer scrutiny because, though literacy is declining, language use deviating from that normed by literacy takes astonishing forms. Man proposes, man disposes Knowledge of the connection between languages-taking the appearance of entities with lives of their own-and people constituting them-with the appearance of having unlimited control over their language-is essential for understanding the shift from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of multiple means of expression and communication. These means could be called languages if an appropriate definition of such languages (and the literacies associated with them) could be provided. In light of what has been already mentioned, the broader context of the changes in the status of literacy is the pragmatic framework of our existence. It is not only that the use of language has diminished or its quality decreased. Rather, it is the acknowledgment of a very complex reality, of a biologically and culturally modified human being facing apparent choices difficult, if not impossible, to harmonize. Life is faster paced, not because biological rhythms abruptly changed, but because a new pragmatic framework, of higher efficiency, came about. Human interaction extends in our days beyond the immediate circle of acquaintances, or what used to be the family circle. This interaction is, however, more superficial and more mediated by other people and by various devices. The universe of existence seems to open as wide as the space we can explore-practically the whole planet, as well as the heavens. At the same time, the pressure of the narrower reality, of exceedingly specialized work, through whose product individual and social identification, as well as valuation take place, is stronger than ever before. On a different level, the individual realizes that the traditional mapping from one to few (family, friends, community) changes drastically. In a context of globality, the mapping extends to the infinity of those partaking in it. Characteristic of the context of change in the status and function (communication, in particular) of literacy are fragmentation of everything we do or encounter and the need to coordinate. We become aware of the increased number and variety of stimuli and realize that previous explanations of their origin and possible impact are not satisfactory. Decentralization of many, if not all, aspects of existence, paralleled by strong integrative forces at work, is also characteristic of the dynamics of change. It is not communication alone, as some believe, that shapes society. More encompassing effective forces, relatively independent of words, images, sounds, textures, and odors continuously directed at society's members, from every direction and with every imaginable purpose, define social dynamics. They define goals and means of communication as well. The gap between the performance of communication technology and the effectiveness of communication is symptomatic of the contradictory condition of contemporary humans. It often seems that messages have lives of their own and that the more communication there is, the less it reaches its address. Less than two percent of all the information thrown into mass media communication reaches its audience. At this level of efficiency, no car would ever move, no plane could take off, babies could not even roll over in their cribs! The dependency of communication on literacy proved to be communication's strength. It delivered a potential audience. But it proved to be its weakness, too. The assumption that among literate people, communication not only takes place, but, based on the implied shared background, is always successful, was found to be wrong time and again. Experiences such as wars, conflicts among nations, communities, professional groups (academia, a highly literate social group, is infamous in this respect), families and generations continuously remind us that this assumption is a fallacy. Still we misinterpret these experiences. Case in point: the anxiety of the business community over the lack of communication skills in the young people it employs. That the most literate segment of business is rationalized away in the massive re-engineering of companies goes unnoticed. We want to believe that business is concerned with fundamental values when its representatives discuss the difficulties mid-level executives have in articulating goals and plans for achieving them in speech or writing. The new structural forms emerging in today's economy show that business-people, as much as politicians and many other people troubled by the current state of literacy today, speak out of both sides of their mouths. They would like to have it both ways: more efficiency, which does not require or stimulate a need for literacy since literacy is not adapted to the new socio-economic dynamics, and the benefits of literacy, without having to pay for them. The reality is that they are all concerned with economic cycles, productivity, efficiency, and profit in trying to figure out what a global economy requires from them. Re-engineering, which companies also called restructuring or downsizing, translates into efficiency expectations within an extremely competitive global economy. By all accounts, restructuring cut the literacy overhead of business. It replaced literate practical experiences of management and productive work with automated procedures for data processing and with computer-aided manufacturing. The process is far from over. It has just reached the usually placid working world of Japan, and it might motivate Europe's effort to regain competitiveness, despite all the social contracts in place that embody expectations of a past that will never return. In fact, all boils down to the recognition of a new status of language: that of becoming, to a greater extent than in its literate embodiment, a business tool, a means of production, a technology. The freeing of language from literacy, and the subsequent loss in quality, is only part of a broader process. The people opposing it should be aware that the civilization of illiteracy is also the expression of practical criticism in respect to a past pragmatic framework far from being as perfect as literacy advocates lead us to believe. The pragmatics of literacy established a frame of reference in respect to ownership, trade, national identity, and political power. Distribution of ownership might not be new, but its motivations are no longer rooted in inheritance, rather in creativity and a selfish sense of business allegiance. One much circulated observation sums it up: If you think that the thousands of not yet fully vested Microsoft programmers will miss their chance to join the club of millionaires to which their colleagues belong, think again! It is not for the sake of the owner of a business, or of a legendary entrepreneur, and certainly not for the sake of idealism. It is for their own sake that more and more young and less young people use their chance in this hierarchy-free, or freer, environment in which they constitute their identity. What motivates them are arguments of competitiveness, not national identity, political philosophy, or family pride. All these and many other structural aspects resulting from the acquired freedom from structural characteristics of a pragmatic context defined by literacy do not automatically make society better or fairer. But a distribution of wealth and power, and a redefinition of the goals and methods through which democracy is practiced is taking place. We know, too, that the coercion of writing was applied to what today we call minorities. Since writing is less natural than speaking and bears values specific to a culture, it has alienated individuality. Literacy implies the integration of minorities by appropriating their activity and culture, sometimes replacing their own with the dominant literacy in total disregard of their heritage. "If writing did not suffice to consolidate knowledge," observed Claude Lévi-Strauss, "it was perhaps indispensable in affirming domination. [...] the fight against illiteracy is thus identical with the reinforcement of the control of the citizen by authority." I shall not go so far as to state that the current attempt to celebrate multiplicity and to recognize contradiction brought about by irreducible differences among races, cultures, and practical experiences is not the result of literate necessities. But without a doubt, developments peculiar to the civilization of illiteracy, as this becomes the background for heterogeneous human experiences and conflicting value systems, brought multiplicity to the forefront. And, what is more important, illiteracy builds upon the potential of this multiplicity. Beyond the commitment to literacy What seems to be the issue of putting the past in the right perspective (with the appearance of historic revisionism) is actually the expression of pragmatic needs in regard to the present and the future. The subject, in view of its many implications, deserves a closer examination outside, but not in disregard of, the political controversy it has already stirred up. Writing is a form of commitment that extends from the Phoenician agreements and Egyptian records, religious and legal texts on clay and in stone, to the medieval oath and later to contracts. Written language encodes, at many levels (alphabet, sentence structure, semantics, etc.), the nature of the relation among those addressed in writing. A tablet that the Egyptians used for identifying locally traded commodities addressed very few readers. A reduced scale of existence, work, and trade was reflected in very direct notation. For the given context, the tablets supported the expected efficiency. In the framework of the Roman Empire, labeling of construction materials-roof tiles, drainage pipes-distributed within and outside the Empire, involved more elaborate elements. These materials were stamped during manufacture and helped builders select what matched their needs. More people were addressed. Their backgrounds were more diverse: they functioned in different languages and in different cultural contexts. Their practical experience as builders was more complex than that of Egyptian dealers in grain or other commodities who operated locally. Stamping construction materials signaled a commitment to fulfill building needs and expectations. Over time, such commitments became more elaborate and separated themselves from the product. With literacy, they became formalized contracts covering various pragmatic contexts. They bear all the characteristics of literacy. They also become representative of the conflict between means of a literate nature and means appropriate to the levels of efficiency expected in the civilization of illiteracy. A short look at contracts as we experience them today reveals that contracts are based on languages of their own, hard to decipher by even the average literate person. They quantify economic expectations, legal provisions, and tax consequences. Written in English, they are expected to address the entire world. In the European Community, each of the member countries expects a contract to be formulated in its own language. Consequently, delays and extra costs can make the transaction meaningless. Actually, the contract, not only the packaging and distribution labels, could be provided in the universal language of machine-readable bar codes. Ours is a pragmatic framework of illiteracy that results in the generation of languages corresponding to functions but pertinent to the fast-changing circumstances that make the activity possible in the first place. In a world of tremendous competition, fast exchange, and accelerated growth of new expectations, the contract itself and the mechanisms for executing it have to be efficient. Relations to power, property, and national identity expressed in language and stabilized through the means of literacy were also embodied in myths, religions, poetry and literature. Indeed, from the epic poems of ancient civilizations to the ballads of the troubadours and the songs of the minstrels, and to poetry and literature, references were made to property and feelings, to the living and the dead. Records of life were kept and commitments were reiterated. Today many literates despair at the thought that these are displaced by the dead poetry or prose of the computer-generated variety. It is unquestionable that information storage and access redefined the scope of commitments and historic records, and ultimately redefined memory. From whatever angle we look at language and literacy, we come back to the people who commit themselves in the practical experience of their self-constitution. While the relation of people to language is symptomatic of their general condition, to understand how and why this relation changes is to understand how and why human beings change. With the ideal of literacy, we inherited the illusion that to understand human beings is to understand human language. It is actually the other way around-if we understand language as a dynamic practical experience in its own right. There is a deeper level that we have to explore-that of the human activity through which we project our being into the reality of existence, and make it sensible and understandable to others. It is only in the act of expressing ourselves through work, contemplation, enjoyment, and wonder that we become what we are for ourselves and for others. Under pragmatic circumstances characteristic of the establishment of the species and its history up to our time, this required language and led to the need for literacy. As a matter of fact, literacy can be seen as a form of commitment, one among the successive commitments that individuals make and the human species enters. For over 2,500 years, these circumstances seemed to be eternal and dominated our existence. But as humankind outgrows the pragmatics based on the underlying structure of literacy, means different from language, that is, means different from those constituting the framework of literacy and of literacy-based commitments become necessary. A moving target The context of the subject of change comprises also the terminology developed around it. The variation of the meanings assigned to the words literacy and illiteracy is symptomatic of the various angles from which they are examined. Literacy, as someone said (I found this credited to both John Ashcroft, once governor of Missouri, and to Henry A. Miller) has been a moving target. It has reflected changes in criteria for evaluating writing and writing skills as the pragmatic framework of human activity changed through time. Writing is probably more than 5,000 years old. And while the emergence of writing and reading are the premise for literacy, a notion of generalized literacy can be construed only in connection to the invention of movable type (during the 11th century in China, and the early 16th century in Western Europe), and even more so with the advent of the 19th century high-speed rotary press. Within the mentioned time-frame, many changes in the understanding of what literacy connotes have come about. For those who see the world through the Book (Torah, Bible, Koran, Upanishads, Wu Ching), literacy means to be able to read and understand the book, and thus the world. All practical rules presented in the Book constitute a framework accessed either through literacy or oral tradition. In the Middle Ages, to be literate meant to know Latin, which was perceived as the language of divine revelation. Parallel to the religious, or religion-oriented, perspective of literacy, many others were acknowledged: social-how writing and reading constitute a framework for social interaction; economic-how writing and reading and other skills of comprehending maps, tables, and symbols affect people's ability to participate in economic life; educational-how literacy is disseminated; legal-how laws and social rules are encoded in order to ensure uniform social behavior. Scholars have looked at literacy from all these perspectives. In doing so, they have foisted upon the understanding of literacy interpretations so diverse and so contradictory that to follow them is to enter a maze from which there is no escape. One of Will Rogers' lines was paraphrased as: "We are all illiterate, only about different things." The formula deserves closer examination because it defines another characteristic of the context for understanding the relative illiteracy of our times. The degree of illiteracy is difficult to quantify, but the result is easy to notice. Everything carried into the self-constitution of the individual as warrior, lover, athlete, family member, educator or educated in literacy-based pragmatics is being replaced by illiterate means. Nobody expected that an individual who reads Tolstoy or Shakespeare will be a better cook, or devise better military plans, or even be a better lover. Nevertheless, the characteristics of literacy affected practically all pragmatic experiences, conferring upon them a unity and coherence we can only look back upon with nostalgia. Champions of sexual encounters, as much as innovators in new technologies and Olympic athletes are extremely efficient in their respective domains. Peak performance increases as the average falls in the range of mediocrity and sub- mediocrity. In this book I will examine many aspects of literacy pertinent to what is usually associated with it: the publications people write and read, communication at the individual and social levels, as well as many aspects of human activity that we do not necessarily consider in relation to literacy-military, sports, sex and family, eating-but which nevertheless were influenced by the pragmatic framework that made literacy possible and necessary. With the evident demise of philosophy as the science of sciences, began fragmentation of knowledge. Doubt that a common instrument of access to and dissemination of knowledge exists is replaced by certitude that it does not. A so-called third culture, in the opinion of the author who brought it to public attention, "consists of rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives" in ways different from those of literary intellectuals. This is not C.P. Snow's third culture of scientists capable of communicating with non-scientific intellectuals, but the illiterate scientific discourse that brings fascinating notions into the mainstream, via powerful metaphors and images (albeit in a trivialized manner). This is why the relation between science and literacy, as well as between philosophy and literacy, will be examined with the intention to characterize the philosophy and science of the civilization of illiteracy. But are we really equipped with the means of exploration and evaluation of this wide-ranging change? Aren't we captive to language and literacy, and thus to the philosophic and scientific explanations based on them? We know that the system in place in our culture is the result of the logocratic view adopted. The testing of skills rated by score is to a great extent a measure of comprehension characteristic of the civilization of literacy. The new pragmatic framework requires skills related not only to language and literacy, but also to images, sounds, textures, motion, and virtual space and time. Knowing this, we have to address the relation between a relatively static medium and dynamic media. We should look into how literacy relates to the visual, in general, and, in particular, to the controversial reality of television, of interactive multimedia, of artificial images, of networking and virtual reality. These are all tasks of high order, requiring a broad perspective and an unbiased viewpoint. Most important is the comprehension of the structural implications of literacy. An understanding of the framework that led to literacy, and of the consequences that the new pragmatic framework of existence has on all aspects of our lives will help us understand how literacy influenced them. I refer specifically to religion, family, state, and education. In a world giving up the notion of permanency, God disappears for quite a number of people. Still, there are many more churches, denominations, sects, and other religious factions (atheist and neo-pagan included) than at any other time. In the United States of America, people change life partners 2.8 times during their lifespan (if they ever constitute a family), and calculate the financial aspects of getting married and having children with the same precision that they use to calculate the expected return on an investment. The state has evolved into a corporation regulating the business of the nation, and is now judged on its economic achievements. Presidents of states act as super-peddlers of major industries on whose survival employment depends. These heads of state are not shy about giving up the ideals anchored in literate discourse (e.g., human rights). But they will raise a big fuss when it comes to copyright infringement, especially of software. The irony is that copyright is difficult to define in respect to digital originals. Through the literacy model, the state became a self- preserving bureaucratic machine rarely akin to the broad variety of options brought about by the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy. Many more people than previous records mention become (or remain) illiterates after finishing the required years of schooling-a minimum of ten years-and even after graduating from college. Some people know how to read; even how to write, but opt for scanning TV channels, playing games, attending sports events, or surfing the Internet. Aliteracy is also part of the broader change in the status of literacy. Decisions to forego reading and writing are decisions in favor of different means of expression and communication. The new generation is more proficient in video games than in orthography. This generation will be involved in high-efficiency practical experiences structurally similar to the interactive toy and far removed from the expectation of correct writing. The Internet shapes the choices of the new generation in terms of what they want to know, how, when, and for what purpose more than newspapers, books, and magazines, and even more than radio or television does. And even more than schools and colleges do. Through its vast and expanding means and offerings, the Internet connects the individual to the globe, instead of only talking about globality. Networking, at many levels and in many ways, is related to the characteristics of our pragmatic framework. As rudimentary as it still is, networking excludes everything that is not fast- paced and to the point. Can all these examples, part of the context of the discussion of literacy in our changing world, be interpreted as being in causal relation to the decline of literacy? That is, the less people are knowledgeable in reading and writing, or choose not to read or write, the less they believe in God or the more pagan they want to be? The more often they divorce, the less they marry or have children? The more they want or accept a bureaucratic machine to handle their problems, the more TV programs they watch and the more electronic games they play, the more they surf the infinite world of networks? No, not along this line of one-dimensional, linear, simplistic form of determinism. A multiplicity of factors, and a multiplicity of layers need to be considered. They are, however, rooted in the pragmatic framework of our continuous self- constitution. It is exhibited through the dynamics of shorter and faster interactions. It is embodied in the ever wider choices of ascertaining our identity. It takes the appearance of availabilities, fragmentation and global integration, of increased mediation. The dynamics described corresponds to the higher efficiency that a larger scale of human activity demands. To call attention to the multi-dimensionality of the process and to the many interdependencies, which we can finally uncover with the help of new technologies, is a first step. To evince their non-linearity, reflecting the meshing between what can be seen as deterministic and what is probably non-deterministic is another step in the argument of the book. Without basing our discussion on human pragmatics, it would be impossible to explain why, despite all the effort and money societies invest in education, and all the time allocated for education-sometimes over a quarter of a lifetime-despite research of cognitive processes pertinent to literacy, people wind up less literate, but, surprisingly, not at all less efficient. Some would argue-the late Alan Bloom, a crusader for culture and literacy, indeed a brilliant writer of the epilogue of human culture and nostalgia for it, already did-that without literacy, we are less effective as human beings. The debate over such arguments requires that we acknowledge changes in the status of human beings and of human societies, and that we understand what makes such changes unavoidable. The wise fox The world as it stands today, especially the industrialized world, is fundamentally different from the world of any yesteryear, the last decade and century, not to mention the past that seems more the time of story than of history. Alan Bloom's position, embraced by many intellectuals, is rooted in the belief that people cannot be effective unless they build on the foundation of historically confirmed values, in particular the great books. But we are at a point of divergences with no noticeably privileged direction, but with many, many options. This is not a time of crisis, although some want us to believe the contrary and are ready to offer their remedies: back to something (authority, books, some primitive stage of no-ego, or of the mushroom, i.e., psychedelic drugs, back to nature); or fast forward to the utopia of technocracy, the information age, the service society, even virtual reality or artificial life. Humans are heuristic animals. Our society is one of creativity and diversity, operating on a scale of human interaction to which we exponentially add new domains: outer space, whose dimensions can be measured only in light years, and whose period of observation extends over lifetimes; the microcosmos, mirroring the scale in the opposite direction of infinitesimal differentiations; the new continents of man-made materials, new forms of energy, genetically designed plants and animals, new genetic codes, and virtual realities to experience new spaces, new times, and new forms of mediation. Networking, which at its current stage barely suggests things to come, can only be compared to the time electricity became widely available. Cognitive energy exchanged through networks and focused on cooperative endeavors is part of what lies ahead as we experience exponential growth on digital networks and fast learning curves of efficient handling of their potential. The past corresponds to a pragmatic framework well adapted to the survival and development of humankind in the limited world of direct encounters or limited mediations. In terms pertinent to a civilization built around the notion of literacy, the current lower levels of literacy can be seen as symptomatic of a crisis, or even a breakdown. But what defines the new pragmatic context is the shift from a literacy- centered model to one of multiple, interconnected, and interconditioned, distributed literacies. It is well justified to repeat that some of the most enlightened minds overlook the pragmatics of bygone practice. Challenged, confused, even scared by the change, they call for a journey to the past: back to tradition, to discipline, to the ethics of our forefathers, to old-time religion and the education that grew out of it, to permanence, and hopefully to stability. Even those who wholeheartedly espouse evolutionary and revolutionary models seem to have a problem when it comes to literacy. All set to do away with authority, they have no qualms about celebrating the imperialism of the written word. Other minds confess to difficulties in coping with a present so promising and, at the same time, so confusing in its structural contradictions. What we experience, from the extreme of moral turpitude to a disquieting sense of mediocrity and meaninglessness, nourishes skeptical, if not fatalistic, visions. The warning is out (again): We will end up destroying humankind! Yet another part of the living present accepts the challenge without caring about the implications it entails. The people in this group give up their desire to understand what happens, as long as this makes life exciting and rewarding. Hollywood thrives on this. So do the industries of digital smoke- and-mirrors, always a step from fame, and not much farther from oblivion. Addresses on the Internet fade as quickly as they are set up. The most promising links of yesterday show up on the monitor as a "Sorry" message, as meaningful as their short- lived presence was. Arguing with success is a sure recipe for failure. Success deserves to be celebrated in its authentic forms that change the nature of human existence in our universe. The future suggested in the labels technocracy, information age, and service society might capture some characteristics of today's world, but it is limited and limiting. This future fails to accommodate the development of human activity at the new scale in terms of population, resources, adaptation, and growth it has reached. Within this model, its proponents preserve as the underlying structure the current set of dependencies among the many parts involved in human activity, and a stubborn deterministic view of simplistic inclination. Unreflected celebration of technocracy as the sole agent of change must be treated with the same suspicion as its demonization. The current participation of technology in human activity is indeed impressive. So are the extent of information processing and information mining, and the new relation between productive activities and services. To make sense of disparate data and from them form new productive endeavors is a formidable task. Science, in turn, made available enormously challenging theories and extremely refined models of the world. But after all is done and said, these are only particular aspects of a much more encompassing process. The result is a pragmatic framework of a new condition. Highly mediated work, distributed tasks, parallel modes, and generalized networking of rather loosely coordinated individual experiences define this condition. Within this framework, the connection between input (for instance, work) and output (what results) is of a different order of magnitude tfrom that between the force applied on a lever and the outcome; or that between the energy necessary to accomplish useful tasks through engines or electric, or pneumatic devices, no matter how efficient, and the result. In addition, even the distinction between input and output becomes fuzzy. The wearable computer provides interoperability and interconnectedness-an increase in a person's heart rate can be a result of an increase in physical exertion or cause for communicating with a doctor's office or for alerting the police station (if an accident takes place). It might be that the next interaction will involve our genetic code. The capacity for language and the ability to understand its various implications are only relatively interdependent, and thus only relatively open to scrutiny and understanding. This statement, as personal as it sounds, and as much as it expresses probably less resignation than uncertainty, is crucial to the integrity of this entire enterprise. Indeed, once within a language, one is bound to look at the world surrounding oneself from the perspective of that language as the medium for partial self-constitution and evaluation. Participating in its dynamics affects what I am able to see and describe. This affects also what I am no longer able to perceive, what escapes my perception, or even worse, filters it to the point that I see only my own thoughts. This dual identity-observer and integral part of the observed phenomena-raises ethical, axiological, and epistemological aspects almost impossible to reconcile. Since every language is a projection of ourselves-as participants in the human experience, yet as distinct instantiations of that experience-we do not see the world so much as ourselves in relation to it, ourselves in establishing our culture, and again ourselves in taming and appropriating the universe around us. The fox in Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince says it much better: "One only understands the things one tames." "Between us the rift" Huge industrial complexes where an immense number of workers participate in the production of goods, and densely populated urban centers gravitating around factories, make up the image characteristic of industrial society. This image is strikingly different from the new reality of interconnected, yet decentralized, individual activities going well beyond telecommuting. Various mediating elements contribute to increasingly efficient practical experiences of human self-constitution. The computer is one of the varied embodiments of these mediating elements, but by no means the only one. Through its functions, such as calculation, word, image, and information processing, and control of manufacturing, it introduces many layers between individuals and the object of their actions. The technology of interconnecting provides means for distributive task strategies. It also facilitates parallel modes of productive work. This is a world of progressive decentralization and interoperative possibilities. All kinds of machines can be an address in this interconnected world. Their operations can range from design tasks to computer-aided manufacturing. Distributed work and cognitive functions pertinent to it afford practical experiences qualitatively different from the mechanical sequencing of tasks as we know it from industrial modes of production. Obviously, large portions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as part of the European and North American continents, do not necessarily fit this description in detail. Industrial activities still constitute the dominant practical experience in the world. Although nomadic and jungle tribes are part of this integrated world, the Industrial Revolution has not yet reached them all. In some cases, the stages leading to agriculture have not yet been attained. In view of the global nature of human life and activity today, I submit that despite the deep disparity in the economic and social evolution of various regions of the world, it is plausible to assume that centralized modes of production peculiar to industrial economies are not a necessary development. Efficiency expectations corresponding to the global scale of human activity can be reached only by development strategies different from those embodied in the pragmatic framework of industrial activity. It is therefore probable that countries, and even subcontinents, not affected by the Industrial Revolution will not go through it. Planners with an ecological bent even argue that developing countries should not take the path that led industrial nations to augment their population's living standard to the detriment of the environment or by depleting natural resources (A German Manifest, 1992). Industrial production and the related social structures rely on literacy. Edmund Carpenter formulated this quite expressively: "Translated into gears and levers, the book became machine. Translated into people, it became army, chain of command, assembly line...." His description, made in broad strokes, is to the point. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, children and women became part of the labor market. For the very limited operation one had to perform, no literacy was necessary; and women and children were not literate. Still, the future development of the industrial society could not take place without the dissemination of literacy skills. For instance, industry made possible the invention, in 1830, of the steel pen indispensable to the compulsory elementary education that was later instituted. The production of steel needles seemed to extend domesticity, but actually created the basis for the sweat trades following what Louis Mumford called carboniferous capitalism. Gaslight and electricity expanded the time available for the dissemination of literacy skills. Housing improvements made possible the building of the individual library. George Steiner sees this as a turning point in the sense that a private context of the experience of the book was created. As far as national structures were concerned, phenomena characteristic of the Industrial Revolution cannot be understood outside the wider context of the formation and consolidation of nations. Affirmation of national identity is a process intimately connected to the values and functions of literacy. The production process of the industrial age of mechanical machinery and electric power required not brute force, but qualified force. Administrative and management functions required more literacy than work on the assembly line. But literacy projected its characteristics onto the entire activity, thus making a literate workforce desirable. The market it generated projected the condition of the industry in the structure of its transactions. The requirements for qualified work expanded to requirements for qualified market activities and resulted in the beginnings of marketing and advertising. That market was based on the recognition of national boundaries, i.e., boundaries of efficiency, self-sufficiency, and future growth offering markets of a size and complexity adequate to industrial output. Nations replaced the coarse fragmentation of the world. They were no longer, as Jean-Marie Guéhenno notices, a disguise of tribal structures, but a political space within which democracy could be established. Progression from competing individual life and temporary congregation in an environment of survival of the fittest to tribal, communal, local, confederate, and national life is paralleled by progression in the forms and methods of human integration. The global scale of human activity characteristic of our age is not an extension of the linear, deterministic relations between those constituting a valid human entity and the life-support system, called environment, that structurally define industrial society. Discontinuity in numbers (of people, resources, expectations, etc.), in the nature of the relations among people, in the forms of mediations that define human practical experiences is symptomatic of the depth and breadth of change. The end of nations, of democracy even, might be far off, but this end is definitory of the chasm before us. The United Nations, which does not yet comprise the entire world, is a collection of over 197 nations, and increasing. Some are only island communities, or newly proclaimed independent countries brought about by social and political movements. Of the over 240 distinct territories, countries, and protectorates, very few (if any) are truly autarchic entities. Despite never before experienced integration, our world is less the house of nations and discrete alliances among them, and more the civilization of a species in firm control (too firm, as some perceive) of other species. Within the world, we know that there are people still coming out of an age of natural economy based on hunting, foraging, fishing, and rudimentary agriculture. While barter and the minimal language of survival is the only market process in such places, in reality, the world is already involved in global transactions. Markets are traded in their entirety, more often than not without the knowledge of those comprising these markets. This only goes to show again the precarious nature of national structures. National independence, passionately fought for, is less a charter for the future than the expression of the memory of the past (authentic or fake). Selling or buying extends to the entire economy, which while still at a stage difficult to entirely explain, is bound to change in a rhythm difficult to cope with by those supposed to control it, but inescapable in the context of world-wide market. That literacy and national identity share in this condition should not surprise anyone. Malthus revisited The Malthusian principle (1798) related growth of populations (geometric) to food supply increases (arithmetic): "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio." The weakness of the principle is probably its failure to acknowledge that the equation of mankind has more than the two variables it considers: population and food supply. The experience of extensive use of natural resources, in particular through farming, is only one among an increasing number of experiences. Human beings constitute their own reality not only as one of biological needs, but also of cultural expectations, growing demands, and creativity. These eventually affect changes in what were believed to be primary needs and instincts. In many ways, a great deal of previously acknowledged sources of protein are exhausted. But in an ever more impressive proportion, the acceptable realm of sources of nutrition-proteins included-has been expanded so as to include the artificial. Hunting and gathering wild plants (not to mention scavenging, which seems to predate hunting) were appropriate when linear, sequential strategies of survival defined human behavior; so were herding and agriculture, a continuation of foraging under circumstances of changed subsistence strategies. Language was formed, and then stabilized, in connection to this linear form of praxis. Linearity simply reflects the fact that one person is less effective than two, but also that one's needs are smaller than those of several. The experience of self- constitution in language preserves linearity. This preservation of linearity extends as long as the scale of the community and its needs and wants allowed for proportional interaction among its individuals and the environment of their existence. Industrial society is probably the climax of this optimization effort. If the issue were only to feed mankind, the population census (over five billion people on record as of the moment these pages are being written, though less than four billion when I started) and the measure of resources would not yet indicate a new scale. But the issue is to accommodate geometrically growing populations and exponentially (i.e., non-linearly) diversifying expectations. Such expectations relate to a human being celebrating higher average ages, and an extended period of active life. We change anatomically, not necessarily for the better: we see and hear less well and have lower physical abilities. Our cognitive behavior and our patterns of social interaction change, too. These changes reflect, among other things, the transition from direct interaction and co-presence to indirect, mediated forms of the practical self-constitution of the human being. The sequential nature of language, in particular its embodiment in literacy, no longer suits human praxis as its universal measure. The strategies of linearization introduced through the experience of literacy were acceptable when the resulting efficiency accommodated lower and less differentiated expectations. They are now replaced by more efficient, intrinsically non-linear strategies made possible by literacies structurally different from those rooted in the practice of so-called natural language. Accordingly, literacy loses its primacy. New literacies emerge. Instead of a stable center and limited choice, a distributed and variable configuration of centers and wide choice connect and disconnect areas of common or disjoint interest. There are still national ambitions, huge factories to be built, cities to be erected and others to be expanded, highways to be widened in order to accommodate more intercity traffic, and airports to be constructed so that more airplanes can be used for national and international travel. The inertia of past pragmatics has not yet been annihilated by the dynamics of a fundamental change of direction. Still, an integrated, yet decentralized, universe of work and living has been taking shape and will continue to do so. Interconnection made possible by digital technology, first of all, opens a wide range of possibilities for reshaping social life, political institutions, and our ability to design and produce goods. Our own ability to mediate, to integrate parts and services resulting from specialized activities is supported by machines that enhance our cognitive characteristics. Captives to literacy Probably the most shocking discovery we sometimes make is that, in order to be able to undertake new experiences, we need to forget, to break the curse of literate memory, and to immerse ourselves in the structurally amnesiac systems of signs corresponding to and addressing our senses. Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Earth's Holocaust" was prophetic in this sense. In this parable, the people of a new world (obviously the United States of America) bring all the books they inherited from the old world to a great bonfire. Theirs is not an exercise in mindless book-burning. They conscientiously discard all the rules and ideas passed down through millennia that governed the world and the life they left behind. Old ideas, as well as new ones, would have to prove their validity in the new context before they would be accepted. Indeed, the awareness brought about by theories of the physical world, of the mind, of our own biogenetic condition made possible practical experiences of self-constitution that are not like anything experienced by humans before our time. The realization of relativity, of the speed of light, of micro- and macro-structures, of dynamic forces and non-linearity is already translated in new structures of interactions. Our systems of interconnection- through electric energy, telephone (wired and cellular), radio, television, communication, computer networks-function at speeds comparable to that of light. They integrate dynamic mechanisms inspired by genetics, physics, molecular biology, and our knowledge of the micro- and macro-structure. Our life cycle seems to accept two different synchronizing mechanisms: one corresponding to our natural condition (days, nights, seasons), the other corresponding to the perceived scale and to our striving towards efficiency. The two are less and less dependent, and efficiency seems to dominate nature. Discovery of the world in its expanded comprehensive geographic dimensions required ships and planes. It also required the biological effort to adapt and the intellectual effort to understand various kinds of differences. In outer space, this adaptation proves to be even more difficult. In a world in a continuous flux of newer and newer distinctions, people constitute, instead of one permanent and encompassing literacy, several literacies, none of which bears the status of (quasi)eternal. Differentiation of human experience is so far reaching that it is impossible to reduce the variety to one literate language. In the process of building rational, interpretive methods and establishing a body of knowledge that can be tested and practically applied, people often discard what did not fit in the theories they advanced, what did not obey the laws that these theories expressed. This was a necessary methodology that resulted in the progress we enjoy today. But it was also a deceptive method because what could not be explained was omitted. Where literacy was instilled, non-linguistic aspects-such as the irreducible world of magic, mystery, the esoteric (to name a few)-were done away with. Commenting upon The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Illich and Sanders pointed out that there is a whole world in Twain's novel that is inaccessible to the illiterate, but also a world of folklore and superstition that cannot be understood by those hostage to the beautiful kingdom of literacy. Folklore in many countries, and superstition, and mystery in all the varieties corresponding to human practical self-constitution are definitely areas from which we might gain better insight into life past, present, and future. They are part of the context and should not be left out, even though they may belong to the epoch before literacy. All in all, since language was and still is the most comprehensive testimony to (and participant in) our experience as human beings, we may want to see whether its crisis says something about our own permanence and our own prejudices concerning the species. After all, why, and based on what arguments, do we see ourselves as the only permanence in the universe and the highest possible achievement of evolution? Literacy freed us in many respects. But it also made us prisoners of a number of prejudices, not the least a projection of self-awareness in direct contradiction to our own experience of never-ending change in the world. The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy In the opinion of foe and friend alike, America (the name under which the United States of America, appropriating the identifier of the two continents comprising the New World) epitomizes many of the defining characteristics of today's world: market oriented, technologically driven, living on borrowed means (financial and natural resources), competitive to the extreme of promoting adversarial relations, and submitting, in the name of democracy and tolerance, to mediocrity, demagoguery, and opportunism. Americans are seen as boastful, boorish, unrealistic, naive, primitive, hypocritical, and obsessed with money. Even to some of its most patriotic citizens, the USA appears to be driven by political opportunism, corruption, and bigotry. As still others perceive the USA, it is captive to militarism and prey to the seductive moral poison of its self-proclaimed supremacy. At times it looks like the more it fails in some of its policies, the more it wants to hear declarations of gratitude and hymns of glory, as in John Adams' lines: "The eastern nations sink, their glory ends/ And empires rise where sun descends." To the peoples just awaking from the nightmare of communism, the American political slogans have a familiar, though frightening, self-delusive ring. On the other hand, Americans are credited with extraordinary accomplishments in technology, science, medicine, the arts, literature, sports, and entertainment. They are appreciated as friendly, open, and tolerant. Their willingness to engage in altruistic projects (programs for the poor and for children all over the world), indeed free from discrimination, makes for a good example to people of other nations. Patriotism does not prevent Americans from being critical of their own country. To the majority of the world, America represents a vivid model of liberal democracy in action within a federation of states united by a political system based on expectations of balance among local, state, and federal functions. Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber once made headlines writing about the American challenge (Le Défi Américain), more or less about the danger of seeing the world Americanized. Downtown Frankfurt (on the river Main) is called Mainhattan because its skyscrapers recall those of the island between the Hudson and East Rivers. The Disneyland near Paris, more of an import (the French government wanted it badly) than an export product, was called a "cultural Chernobyl." Tourists from all over the crumbled Soviet Empire are no longer taken to Lenin's Mausoleum but to Moscow's McDonald's. The Japanese, reluctant to import American-made cars and supercomputers, or to open their markets to agricultural goods (except marbled beef), will bend over backwards for baseball. Add to all this the symbolism of blue jeans, Madonna or Heavy Metal (as music or comic books), Coca-Cola, the television series Dallas, the incessant chomping on chewing gum and bubble-gum popping, Texan boots, and the world-wide sneaker craze, and you have an image of the visible threat of Americanization. But appearance is deceitful. Taken out of their context, these and many other Americanized aspects of daily life are only exotic phenomena, easy to counteract, and indeed subject to counteraction. Italians protested the culture of fast food near the Piazza d'Espagna in Rome (where one fast food establishment rented space) by giving out free spaghetti carbonara and pizza. (They were unaware of the irony in this: the biggest exporter of pizza restaurants is no longer Italy, but the USA.) The rightist Russian movement protested McDonald's by touting national dishes, the good old high-calorie menu of times when physical effort was much greater than in our days (even in that part of the world). The Germans push native Lederhosen and Dirndls over blue jeans. The German unions protest attempts to address structural problems in their economy through diminishing social benefits with a slogan that echoes like a hollow threat: American conditions will be met by a French response, by which they mean that strikes will paralyze the country. The Japanese resisted the Disney temptation by building their own lands of technological marvels. When an athlete born in America, naturalized as Japanese, won the traditional Sumo wrestling championship, the Japanese judges decided that this would be his last chance, since the sport requires, they stated, a spirituality (translated by demeanor) that a foreign-born sportsman cannot have. On closer examination, Americanization runs deeper than what any assortment of objects, attitudes, values, and imitated behavior tell us. It addresses the very core of human activity in today's global community. It is easy to understand why America appears to embody efficiency reached at the expense of many abandoned values: respect for authority, for environment, for resources, even human resources, and ultimately human values. The focus of the practical experience through which American identity is constituted is on limitless expectations regarding social existence, standard of living, political action, economic reward, even religious experience. Its encompassing obsession is freedom, or at least the appearance of freedom. Whatever the pragmatics affords becomes the new expectation and is projected as the next necessity. The right to affluence, as relative as affluence is in American society, is taken for granted, never shadowed by the thought that one's wealth and well-being might come at the expense of someone else's lack of opportunity. Competitive, actually adversarial, considerations prevail, such as those manifest in the morally dubious practices accepted by the legal and political systems. "To the victor go the spoils" is probably the most succinct description of what this means in real life. The American way of life has been a hope and promise for people all over the world. The mixed feelings they have towards America does not necessarily reflect this. The entire world is probably driven by the desire for efficiency that makes such a standard of living possible more than by the pressure to copy the American style (of products, living, politics, behavior, etc.). This desire corresponds to a pragmatics shaped by the global scale of humankind, and by the contemporary dynamics of human self-constitution. Each country faces the battle between efficiency and culture (some going back thousands of years), in contrast to the USA, whose culture is always in status nascendi. The American anxiety over the current state of literacy is laden with a nostalgia for a tradition never truly established and a fear of a future never thought through. It is, consequently, of more than documentary interest to understand how America epitomizes a civilization that has made literacy obsolete. For the love of trade As a country formed by unending waves of immigration, America can be seen, superficially though, as a civilization of many parallel literacies. Ethnic neighborhoods are still a fact of life. Here one finds stores where only the native language is spoken, with newspapers printed in Greek, Hungarian, German, Italian, Ukrainian, Farsi, Armenian, Hebrew, Romanian, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean. Cable TV caters to these groups, and so do many importers of products reminiscent of some country where "food tastes real" and goods "last forever." All of these carried-over literacies are, in final analysis, means of self-constitution, bridges between cultures that will be burned by the third generation. In practicing the literacy of origins, human beings constitute themselves as split personalities between two pragmatic contexts. One embodies expectations characteristic of the context that relied upon literacy- homogeneity, hierarchy, centralism, tradition. The other, of the adopted country, is focused upon needs that effect the transition to the civilization of illiteracy- heterogeneity, horizontality, decentralism, tradition as choice, but not way of life. Aspects of immigration (and in general of human migration) need to be addressed, not from the perspective of parallel literacies, but as variations within a unifying pragmatic framework. The de-culturization of people originating from many countries and belonging to many nations is probably a unique feature of America. It impacted all aspects of life, and continues to be a source of vitality, as well as tension. Immigrants arrive as literates (some more so than others) only to discover that their literacy is relatively useless. That things were not always like this is relatively well documented. Neil Postman reported that the 17th-century settlers were quite literate in terms characteristic of the time. Up to 95 percent of the men were able to read the Bible; among women the percentage reported is 62. They also read other publications, some imported from England, and at the beginning of the second half of the eighteenth century supported a printing industry soon to become very powerful. In importing their literacies, the English, as well as the French and Dutch, imported all the characteristics that literacy implies and which went into the foundation of the American government. Over time, in the successive waves of immigration, unskilled and skilled workers, intellectuals, and peasants arrived. They all had to adapt to a different culture, dominated by the British model but moving farther away from it as the country started to develop its own characteristics. Each national or ethnic group, shaped through practical experiences that did not have a common denominator, had to adapt to others. The country grew quite fast, as did its industry, transportation system, farming, banking, and the many services made possible and necessary by the overall economic development. To some extent, literacy was an integral part of these accomplishments. The young country soon established its own body of literature, reflecting its own experience, while remaining true to the literacy of the former mother country. I say to some extent because, as the history of each of these accomplishments shows, the characteristics inherent in literacy were opposed, under the banner of States' rights, democracy, individuality, or progress. With all this in mind, it is no wonder that Americans do not like to hear that they are a nation of illiterates, as people from much older cultures are sometimes inclined to call them (for right or wrong reasons). No wonder either that they are still committed to literacy; moreover, that they believe that it represents a panacea to the problems raised by fast technological cycles of change, by new modes of human interaction, and by circumstances of practical experiences to which they have to adapt. Educators and business-people are well aware, and worried, that literacy in the classical sense is declining. The sense of history they inherited makes them demand that effort and money be spent to turn the tide and bring America back to past greatness, or at least to some stability. Probably the nature of this greatness is misunderstood or misconstrued, since there is not much in the history of the accomplishments of the United States that could rank the country among the cultural giants of past and present civilizations. Throughout its history, America always represented, to some degree, a break with the values of the old world. The Europeans who came to the Dutch, French, and English colonies had at least one thing in common: they wanted to escape from the pragmatics of hierarchy, centralized political and religious domination, and fixed rules of social and cultural life representing a system of order that kept them in their place. Freedom of religion-one of the most sought after-is freedom from a dominant, unified church and its vision of the unconditionally submissive individual. Cultivating one's own land, another hope that animated the settlers, is freedom from practical serfdom imposed by the landowning nobility on those lower on the hierarchy. John Smith's maxim that those who didn't work didn't eat was perhaps the first blow to the European values that ranked language and culture along with social status and privilege. Most likely, the immigrants, highborn and low, did not come with the intention of overthrowing the sense and morals prevailing at the time. The phase of imitation of the old, characteristic of any development, extended from religious ceremonies to ways of working, enjoying, educating, dressing, and relating to outsiders (natives, slaves, religious sects). In this phase of imitation, a semi-aristocracy established itself in the South, emulating the English model. In protesting the taxes and punitive laws imposed by King George III, the upper-class colonials were demanding their rights as Englishmen, with all that this qualifier entailed. Jefferson's model for the free United States was that the agrarian state best embodied the classic ideals that animated him. Jefferson was himself the model of literacy-based practical experiences, a landed aristocrat who owned slaves, a man trained in the logic of Greece and Rome. His knowledge came from books. He was able to bring his various interests in architecture, politics, planning, and administration in focus through the pragmatic framework for which literacy was adequate. Although Jefferson, among others, rejected monarchy, which his fellow citizens would have set up, he did not hesitate to exercise the almost kingly powers that the executive branch of government entailed. His activity shows how monarchic centrality and hierarchy were translated in the new political forms of emerging democracies, within which elective office replaced inherited power. In the history of early America, we can see how literacy carries over the non-egalitarian model as it advanced equality in people's natural rights and before the law, the power of rules, and a sense of authority inspired by religion, practiced in political life, and connected to expectations of order. Just as new trees sprout from the trunk of an old tree, so new paradigms take root within an old one. People immigrated to America to escape the old models. Challenged by the need to provide a framework for their own self-identification, they ended up establishing an alternative context for the unfolding of the Industrial Revolution. In the process, they changed in more ways than they could foresee. Politically, they established conditions conducive to emancipation from the many constraints of the system they left. Even their patterns of living, speaking, behaving, and thinking changed. In 1842, Charles Dickens observed of Americans that "The love of trade is assigned as a reason for that comfortless custom...of married persons living in hotels, having no fireside of their own, and seldom meeting, from early morning until late at night, but at the hasty public meals. The love of trade is a reason why the literature of America is to remain forever unprotected: 'For we are a trading people, and don't care for poetry: though we do, by the way, profess to be very proud of our poets.'" Dickens came from a culture that considered literacy one of the highest achievements of England, so much so that, according to Jane Austen, Shakespeare could be particularly appreciated by the English alone (cf. Mansfield Park). She gave cultivation of the mind the highest priority. Literature was expected to assist in defining values and pointing out the proper moral and intellectual direction. France was in a very similar position in regard to its culture and literature; so were the German lands and Holland. Even Russia, otherwise opposed to acknowledging the new pragmatic context of industrial production, was affected by the European Enlightenment. De Toqueville, whose journey to America contributed to his fame, made his historic visit in the 1830's. By this time, America had time and opportunity to establish its peculiar character, so he was able to observe characteristics that would eventually define a new paradigm. The associated emerging values, based on a life relatively free of historic constraints, caught his attention: "The Americans can devote to general education only the early years of life. [...] At fifteen they enter upon their calling, and thus their education generally ends at the age when ours begins. If it is continued beyond that point, it aims only towards a particular specialized and profitable purpose; one studies science as one takes up a business; and one takes up only those applications whose immediate practicality is recognized. [...] There is no class, then, in America, in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. Accordingly, there is an equal want of the desire and power of application to these objects." Opinions, even those of scholars of de Toqueville's reputation, are inherently limited in scope. Sent by the French government to examine prisons and penitentiaries in the New World, he wound up writing a study of how a highly literate European understood America's social and political institutions. Many of the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy were emerging during the years of his visit. He highlighted the shortness of political cycles, the orality of public administration, the transience of commitments (the little there is of writing "is soon wafted away forever, like the leaves of the sibyl, by the smallest breeze"). Severance from the past, in particular, made this visitor predict that Americans would have to "recourse to the history of other nations in order to learn anything of the people who now inhabit them." What we read in de Toqueville is the expression of the surprise caused by discontinuity, by change, and by a dynamics that in other parts of the world was less obvious. The New World certainly provided new themes, addressed and interpreted differently by Americans and Europeans. The more European cities of the Northeast- Boston, New York, Philadelphia-maintained cultural ties to the Old World, as evidenced by universities, scholars, poets, essayists, and artists. Nevertheless, Washington Irving complained that one could not make a living as a writer in the United States as one could in Europe. Indeed, many writers earned a living as journalists (which is a way of being a writer) or as civil servants. The real America-the one Dickens so lamented-was taking form west of the Hudson River and beyond the Appalachian Mountains. This was truly a world where the past did not count. America finally did away with slavery (as a by-product of the Civil War). But at the same time, it started undoing some part of the underlying structure reflected in literacy. The depth and breadth of the process escaped the full understanding of those literate Founding Fathers who set the process in motion, and was only partially realized by others (de Toqueville included). It clearly affected the nature of human practical experiences of self-constitution as free citizens of a democracy whose chance to succeed lay in the efficiency, not in the expressive power, of ideas. America's industrial revolution took place against a background different from that of the rest of the world- a huge island indulging in relative autarchy for a short time. Forces corresponding to the pragmatics of the post-industrial age determined a course of opening itself and opening as much of the world as possible-regardless of how this was to be accomplished. The process still affects economic development, financial markets, cultural interdependencies, and education. "The best of the useful and the best of the ornamental" Some will protest that over 150 years have gone by and the American character has been shaped by more than the love of trade. They will point to the literary heritage of Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James. Indeed, 20th century American writers have been appreciated and imitated abroad. Faulkner and Hemingway are the best known examples. Today, American writers of lesser stature and talent are translated into the various European languages, for the same reasons that Disneyland was brought to France. Americans will point to theaters (which presented European plays) and opera houses, forgetting how late these acquisitions are, instituted when economic progress was on a sound track. Indeed, the response to these assertions is simple: the result of other influences is not a change of course, but a much faster movement in the direction America pursues. A good example is given by education. The American colleges and universities founded in the 18th and early 19th centuries attempted to follow the traditional model of learning for its own sake; that is, moral and intellectual improvement through study of the age-old classics. This lasted until various interest groups, in particular businessmen, questioned the validity of an educational program that had little or no pragmatic value. These schools were in the East-Harvard, Brown, Yale, Columbia, William and Mary- and the curricula reflected that of the Old World. In general, only the elite of America attended them. The newer universities, the so-called Land Grant colleges, later called state universities (such as Ohio State University, Texas A & M), established west of the Allegheny River during the last quarter of the 19th century, did indeed pursue more pragmatic programs-agriculture and mechanics-to serve the needs of the respective state, not the nation. In view of this demand for what is useful, it is easy to understand why American universities have become high (and sometimes not so high) level vocational schools, substituting for what high school rarely provided. Pragmatic requirements and anti-elitist political considerations collided with the literate model and a strange hybrid resulted. A look at how the course offerings changed over time brings clear evidence that logic, rhetoric, culture, appreciation of the word and of the rules of grammar and syntax-all the values associated with a dominant literacy-are relegated to specializations in philosophy, literature, or written communication, and to a vast, though confusing, repertory of elective classes, which reflect an obsession with free choice and a leveling notion of democracy. Literature, after being forced to give up its romantic claim to permanency, associates itself with transitory approaches that meet, with increasing opportunistic speed, whatever the current agenda might be: feminism, multiculturalism, anti-war rhetoric, economic upheaval. Human truth, as literary illusion or hope, is replaced by uncertainty. No wonder that in this context programs in linguistics and philology languish or disappear from the curriculum. Economics lost its philosophic backbone and became an exercise in statistics and mathematics. When faced with a list of courses that a university requires, most students ask, "Why do I need...?" In this category fall literature, mathematics, philosophy, and almost everything else definable within literacy as formative subject matter or discipline. Blame for this attitude, if any can be uttered, should not be put on the young people processed by the university system. The students conform, as difficult as it might be for them to understand their conformity, to what is expected of them: to get a driver's license and a college diploma, and to pay taxes. The expectation of a diploma does not result from requirements of qualification but from the American obsession with equality. America, which revolted against hierarchy and inequality, has never tolerated even the appearance of individual superiority. This led to a democracy that opposed superiority, leveling what was not equal-rights or aptitudes, opportunities or abilities-at any price. College education as privilege, which America inherited from the Europe it left behind, was considered an injustice. Over time, commercial democracy turned college into another shopping mall. Today, diplomas, from BA to Ph.D., are expected just for having attended college, a mere prerequisite to a career, not necessarily the result of rigorous mental application leading to quality results. Young adults go to college because they heard that one can get a better (read higher paying) job with a college education. The result of broadening the scope of university studies to include professions for which only training is required is that the value of a college diploma (but not the price paid for it) has decreased. Some say that soon one will need a college diploma just to be a street cleaner (sanitation engineer). Actually, a person will not need a diploma, but will just happen to have one. And the wage of a sanitation worker will be so high (inflation always keeps pace with demagogy) that a college graduate will feel more entitled to the job than a high school dropout. When Thomas Jefferson studied, he realized that none of his studies would help him run his plantation. Architecture and geometry were subordinate to a literacy-dominated standard. Nevertheless, education inspired him as a citizen, as it inspired all who joined him in signing the Declaration of Independence. A context was established for further emancipation. The depth and breadth of the process escaped the full understanding of those who set the process in motion, and was at best partially realized by very few others, de Tocqueville included. It clearly affected the nature of human practical experiences of self-constitution as free citizens of a democracy whose chance to succeed lay in the efficiency of ideas, not in their expressive power. Inventiveness was unleashed; labor-saving devices, machinery that did the work of tens and hundreds of men provided more and more immediate satisfaction than intellectual exercise did. Americans do not, if they ever did, live in an age of the idea for its own sake or for the sake of the spirit. Maintaining mental faculties or uplifting the spirit are imported services. In the early history of the USA, the Transcendentalist movement, of a priori intuitions, was a strong intellectual presence, but its adherents only transplanted the seed from Europe. Those and others-the schools of thought associated with Peirce, Dewey, James, and Royce-rarely took root, producing a flower more appreciated if it actually was imported. This is not a country that appreciates the pure idea. America has always prided itself in its products and practicality, not thinking and vision. "A plaine souldier that can use a pick-axe and a spade is better than five knights," according to Captain John Smith. His evaluation summarizes the American preference for useful over ornamental. Paradoxically though, business leaders argued for education and proclaimed their support for schools and colleges. At a closer look, their position appears somewhat duplicitous. American business needed its Cooper, Edison, and Bell, around whose inventions and discoveries industries were built. Once these were in place, it needed consumers with money to buy what industries produced. Business supported education as a right and took all the tax deductions it could in order to have this right serve the interests of industry and business. Consequently, in American society, ideas are validated only at the material level, in providing utility, convenience, comfort, and entertainment, as long as these maximize profit. "The sooner the better" is an expectation of efficiency, one that does not take into consideration the secondary effects of production or actions, as long as the first effect was profit. Not the educated citizen, but the person who succeeded in getting rich no matter how, was considered the "smart" fellow, as Dickens learned during his journey through America. Prompted by such a deeply rooted attitude, Sidney Lanier, of Georgia, deplored the "endless tale/ of gain by cunning and plus by sale." To value success regardless of the means applied is part of the American teleology (sometimes in complicity with American theology). Bertrand Russell observed of Machiavelli that no one has been more maligned for simply stating the truth. The observation applies to those who have taken upon themselves the task of writing about the brave citizens of the free land. Dickens was warned against publishing his American Notes. European writers and artists, and visitors from Russia, China, and Japan have irritated their American friends through their sincere remarks. Not many Americans refer to Thorston Veblen, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, or to Gore Vidal, but the evaluations these authors made of the American character have been criticized by the majority of their compatriots whose sentimental vision of America cannot cope with legitimate observations. Mark Twain felt that he'd rather be "damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than be obliged to read James's The Bostonians. The rear-view mirror syndrome So why do Americans look back to a time when people "knew how to read and write," a time when "each town had five newspapers?" Big businesses, consolidated well before the invention of newer means of communication and mediation, have large investments in literacy: newspapers, publishing houses, and especially universities. But the promise of a better material life through literacy today rings tragically hollow in the ears of graduates who cannot find jobs in their fields of study. The advertisement most telling of this state of affairs is for a cooking school: "College gave me a degree in English. Peter Kump's Cooking School gave me a career." Granted that literacy has never made anyone rich in the monetary sense, we can ask what the pragmatic framework set up in this part of the New World did accomplish that literacy could not. In the first place, escape from one dominant mode embodied in literate practical experiences facilitated the assertion of other modes of expression and communication. Peter Cooper, founder of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, made his fortune in railroads, glue, and gelatin desserts. He was truly illiterate: he could not read. Obviously he was not unintelligent. Many pioneers had a better command of their tools than of their pen. They read nature with more understanding than some university students read books. There are other cases of people who succeed, sometimes spectacularly, although they cannot read. The illiterate California businessman who taught high school social sciences and mathematics for eighteen years became known because television, for some reason, saw in him a good case for the literacy cause. People like him rely on a powerful memory or use an intelligence not based on literate conventions. Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (formerly known as aptitudes) seems to be ignored by educators who still insist that everyone learn to read and write-better said, conform to the conventions of literacy-as though these were the only ways to comprehend others and to function in life. There are few commentaries that contradict this attitude. William Burroughs thought that "Language is a virus from outer space." Probably it feels better to perceive language like this in view of the many abuses to which language is subjected, but also in view of the way people use it to deceive. A more direct criticism states: "The current high profile of literacy is symptomatic of a speedy, ruthless transition from an industrial to an information-based economy. [...] Literacy, to be sure, is a powerful, unique technology. Yet literacy remains a human invention contained by social contract, and the maintenance of that contract in education betrays our ideas of humanity as surely as our use of literacy enforces them" (cf. Elsbeth Stuckey) American experience shows that the imposition of a sole model of higher education, based on literacy, has economic, social, and cultural consequences. It is very costly. It levels instead of addressing and encouraging diversity. It introduces expectations of cultural homogeneity in a context that thrives on heterogeneity. The literate model of education with which the country flirted, and which still seems so attractive, negates one of America's sources of vitality-openness to alternatives, itself made possible by the stubborn refusal of centralism and hierarchy. Held in high esteem in the early part of American history, literacy came to students through schoolhouses in which Webster's Speller and McGuffey's Reader disbursed more patriotism (essential to a nation in search of an identity) and more awareness of what "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" should mean than quality writing or the possibility to select good books for reading. Literacy with a practical purpose, and the variety of literacies corresponding to the variety of human practical experiences, is a discovery made in America. Understanding pragmatic requirements as opposed to pursuing literacy for the sake of literacy, at the price of rejecting its rewards, is where the road forks. But here America follows Yogi Berra's advice: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." In their search for new values, or when faced with competing answers to tough questions, people tend to look back to a time when everything seemed all right. And they tend to pick and choose the characteristics that led to this perceived state of affairs. Things were all right, some want to believe, when kids, plodding along country roads, winter or summer, went to school and learned to read. Therefore, most people assume that the environment propitious to literacy will bring back the golden age. No one wants to see that America was never reducible to this romantic picture. In the South, education never seemed to be a mission. Slaves and poor whites remained outside the idealized stream. Females were not encouraged to study. A Protestant viewpoint dominated subject matter (recall the Puritan alphabet primer). Americans seem intent on ignoring accomplishments outside the domain of literacy and the dynamics of the non-literate United States. In admiration of real cultures, Americans do not want to hear or see that many of them, of proud and ancient ancestry, started questioning their own values and the education transmitting them. The practical sense and pragmatism ascertained in the formation of America were adopted as causes worth fighting for. In Europe, students protested an education that did not prepare them for work. Thanks to universal education-European governments by and large offer publicly supported higher education, at no cost to the student, through college and graduate school-more young people received an education (in the classical sense of the word) and their ranks flooded the market. They discovered that they were not prepared for the practical experiences characteristic of the new pragmatics, especially the new forms of mediations that characterize work and that are making headway around the world. In Europe, there is a clear distinction between university studies and vocational studies. This has prevented universities from becoming the high-class vocational schools that they are in America, and has maintained the meaning of the diploma as a proof of intellectual endeavor. On the other hand, they remain ivory towers, not preparing students for the practical experiences of the new pragmatics. Brotlose Kunst (breadless art) is what the Germans now call such fields of study as literature, philosophy, musicology, religion, and any other purely intellectual endeavor. Looking at a totally different culture, Americans tend to respond to Japan's economic success and criticism of our system by saying that our educational system must become more like that of America's leading competitor. They ignore the fact that Japan's high rate of productivity has less to do with the nation's high rate of literacy than does the indoctrination and character formation that Japanese schooling entails. Fundamental attitudes of conformity, team mentality, and a very strong sense of hierarchy, together with an almost sacred sense of tradition, are instilled through literate means. One does not have to be literate in any language in order to solder one circuit to another on an assembly line or to snap together modular components fabricated by advanced machines. What is necessary, indeed expected, is an ethic that calls for a sense of duty and pride in a job well done, a sense met by the social promise of permanency. All in all, the Japanese system allows for little variation from the consensus, and even less for the creation of new models. The only way Japan stepped out of the literate mode in the manufacturing world is in quality control. Ironically, this idea was developed by the American Edward Denning, but rejected by his compatriots, who literally stagnated in a hierarchic model originating from circumstances of literacy. This hierarchical model, now in obvious decline, gave to American businessmen the sense of power they could not achieve through education or culture. The Japanese, living in a system that preserved its identity while actively pursuing plans for economic expansion, formed strategies of self-containment (severely tested in times of economic downturn), as well as methods of relating to the rest of the world. This condition is manifest in their talent for spotting the most profitable from other countries, making it theirs, and pursuing avenues of competition in which what is specifically Japanese (skills, endurance, collusion) and the appropriated foreign component are successfully joined. Almost the entire foundation of today's television, in its analog embodiment, is Japanese. But if for some reason the programming component would cease to exist, all the marvelous equipment that makes TV possible would abruptly become useless. In some ways, Japan has almost no interest in a change of paradigm in television, such as the revolutionary digital TV, because an enormous industry, present in almost every home where television is used, would have to reinvent itself. The expectation of permanency that permeates literate Japan thus extends from literacy to a medium of illiteracy. In the American context, of almost no stable commitments, digital television, along with many other innovations in computation and other fields, is a challenge, not a threat to an entire infrastructure. This example was not chosen randomly. It illustrates the dynamics of the change from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of many competing literacies. These emerge in the context of change from self-sufficient, relatively small-scale, homogeneous communities to the global world of today, so powerfully interconnected through television and through digital media of all kinds. As illiterates, Americans lead other nations in breakthroughs in medicine, genetics, networking, interactive multimedia, virtual reality, and inventiveness in general. Obviously, it is easier to design a course of education assuming some permanency or maintaining it, regardless of pragmatic requirements. Diane Ravitch stated that it is hard to define what education will be needed for the future when we don't know what skills the jobs of the future will require. An optimal education, reflecting pragmatic needs of highly mediated practical experiences of distributed effort and networking, will have to facilitate the acquisition of new cognitive skills. Decentralized, non-sequential, non-deterministic experiences require cognitive skills different from those characteristic of literacy. Schools used to be able to prepare students to find their place in the workforce even before graduation. More schools than ever insist on churning out a strange version of the literate student who should go on to a college that is more (though still not enough) vocational school than university. The university, under the alibi of equal opportunity and more in consideration of its own agenda, has done more damage to education and literacy by forcing itself upon Americans as the only means to attain a better life. The result is crowded classes in which passive students are processed according to the industrial model of the assembly line, while the creative energy of faculty and students is redirected to a variety of ventures promising what a university cannot deliver. The very word university acknowledges one encompassing paradigm, prevalent in the Middle Ages, that the USA practically disposed of over a century ago. In an age of global reality and many paradigms, the university is in reality less universal and increasingly specialized. In these times of change, America, founded on innovation and self-reliance, seems to forget its own philosophy of decentralization and non-hierarchy. By no surprise, the newer computer technology-based companies took the lead in decentralizing and networking the workplace, in re-engineering each and every business. Most business-people, especially in established companies, are reluctant to address matrix management methods or to use distributed forms of organization and decentralized structures. Consequently, after waves of corporate restructuring and resizing, presidents and chairmen (not unlike university presidents and school principals) are kings, and the laborer, when not replaced by a machine, is often a virtual serf. Surprisingly, the decentralized spirit of homesteading and the distribution of tasks and responsibilities, through which much of efficiency is reached, makes slow headway. But things are changing! If there is an engine at work pulling the world from its literacy- based pragmatics to the future of higher efficiency required by the new scale of human activity, it has the initials USA written on it. And it is-make no mistake about it-digital. When not faithful to its own experience of pluralism and self-motivation, the USA faces the inherent limitations of literacy-based practical experience in a number of domains, the political included. America once had a number of political parties. Now it seems that it cannot effectively get beyond the literate dualistic model of two antagonistic parties, emulating the Tories and the Whigs of the empire to which it once belonged. European countries and several African and Asian states have multi-party systems that reflect sensitivity to differences and take advantage of the variety they allow for. Such systems enfranchise more of a country's citizenry than does the two- party system in the USA. Every four years, Americans demand greater choice in elections, but only one state, Alaska, considers it normal to have more than two parties, and, incidentally, a governor who is neither Republican nor Democrat. The USA has a complex about literacy to the extent that every subject is now qualified as literacy-cultural literacy, computer literacy, visual literacy, etc.-whether literacy is involved or not. Literacy has become its own specialty. In addition, new literacies, effectively disconnected from the ideals and expectations of classical literacy, have emerged from practical experiences of human self-constitution in realms where writing and reading are no longer required. This would not be so bad if it were not blinding people to the truth about a major characteristic of humankind. Diversity of expression and multiplicity of communication modes define new areas of human accomplishment and open avenues for further unfolding of people's creative and economic potential. The new condition of language, in particular the failure of literacy, is at the same time a symptom of a new stage in human progress. It in no way reflects a failure of national policy or will. As a matter of fact, the new stage we are entering is a reflection of the human spirit unfolding, refusing to be held captive to a dominant mode that has outlived its usefulness. It may well be that the coming of age of America is part of this new stage. After all, many believe that the crisis of language is the crisis of the white man (cf. Gottfried Benn), or at least of Western civilization. So, is the USA the epitome of the civilization of illiteracy? Yes, America is illiterate to the extent that it constituted itself as an alternative to the world based on the underlying structures of literacy. The new pragmatic framework that the USA embodies does not automatically free it from the seductive embrace of the civilization it negates, and the current angst over the state of literacy is a manifestation of this. As an embodiment of the civilization of illiteracy, America demonstrates how several literacies can work together by complementing each other. Such a pragmatics succeeds or fails on its own terms. Whenever the implicit founding principles of adaptation, openness, exploration and validation of new models, and pragmatically based institutions are pursued, the result is the expected efficiency. Sometimes, the price people seem to pay for it is very high-unemployment, dislocation, retrenchment, a loss of a sense of permanency that humans long for. The price includes the ability or willingness to consider all aspects involved in a situation-political, environmental, social, legal, religious. These aspects transcend the tangible and necessitate taking the broad view, which literate civilization allowed for, over the specialized, narrowly focused, short- sighted, parochial view. Other times, it looks as though there are no alternatives. But in the long run, no one would really want to go back to the way things were 200 years ago. Book two From Signs to Language Languages are very different. So are literacies. The differences go well beyond how words sound, how alphabets differ, how letters are put together, or how sentences are structured in the various languages used around the world. In some languages, fine distinctions of color, shape, gender, numbers, and aspects of nature are made while more general statements are difficult to articulate. Anthropologists noted that in some of the Eskimo languages many words could be identified for what we call (using one word) snow and for activities involving it; in Arabic, many names are given to camel; in Mexico, different names qualify ceramic pottery according to function, not form: jarro for drinking, jarra for pouring, olla for cooking beans, cazuela for cooking stews. The Japanese and Chinese distinguish among different kinds of rice: still in the paddy, long- grained, shucked, kernels. George Lakoff mentions the Dyirbal language of Australia where the category balan includes fire, dangerous things, women, birds, and animals such as platypus, bandicoot, and echidna. In other languages, the effort to categorize reveals associations surprising to individuals whose own life experiences are not reflected in the language they observe. The questioning attitude in the Talmud (a book of interpretations of the Hebrew Torah) is based on 20 terms qualifying different kinds of questions. Shuzan is calculation based on the use of the abacus. Hissan, hiding the Japanese word hitsu that stands for the brush used for writing, is calculation based on the use of Arabic numerals. To be in command of a language such as Chinese (to be literate in Chinese) is different from being literate in English, and even more different from being literate in various tribal languages. These examples suggest that the practical experience through which language is constituted belongs to the broad pragmatic context. There is no such thing as an abstract language. Among particular languages there are great differences in vocabulary, syntax, and grammar, as well as in the idiosyncratic aspects implicit in them, reflective of the experience of their constitution. Despite such differences-some very deep-language is the common denominator of the species Homo Sapiens, and an important constitutive element of the dynamics of the species. We are our language. Those who state that language follows life consider only one side of the coin. Life is also formed in practical experiences of language constitution. The influence goes both ways, but human existence is in the end dependent upon the pragmatic framework within which individuals project their own biological structure in the practical act through which they identify themselves Changes in the dynamics of language can be traced in what makes language necessary (biologically, socially, culturally), what causes different kinds of language use, and what brought about change. Necessity and agents of change are not the same, although sometimes it is quite difficult to distinguish between them. Changed working habits and new life styles are, as much as the appropriate language characterizing them, symptomatically connected to the pragmatic framework of our continuous self-constitution. We still have ten fingers-a structural reality of the human body projected into the decimal system-but the dominant number system today is probably binary. This observation regards the simplistic notion that words are coined when new instances make them desirable, and disappear when no longer required. In fact, many times words and other means of expression constitute new instances of life or work, and thus do not follow life, but define possible life paths. There are several sources from which knowledge about language constitution and its subsequent evolution can be derived: historic evidence, anthropological research, cognitive modeling, cultural evaluation, linguistics, and archaeology. Here is a quote from one of the better (though not uncontroversial) books on the subject: Language "enabled man to achieve a form of social organization whose range and complexity was different in kind from that of animals: whereas the social organization of animals was mainly instinctive and genetically transmitted, that of man was largely learned and transmitted verbally through the cultural heritage," (cf. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, The Consequence of Literacy). The general idea pertaining to the social implications of language is restrictive but acceptable. What is not at all explained here is how language comes into existence, and why instinctive and genetically transmitted organization (of animals) would not suffice, or even be tantamount to the verbally transmitted organization of human beings. As a matter of fact, language, as perceived in the text cited and elsewhere in literature, becomes merely a storing device, not a formative instrument, a working tool of sorts, even a tool for making other tools and for evaluating them. Languages have to be understood in a much broader perspective. Like humans, languages have an evolution in time. What came before language can be identified. What remains after a certain language disappears (and we know of some that have disappeared) are elements as important as the language itself for our better understanding of what makes language necessary. The disappearance of a language also helps us realize how the life of a language takes place through the life of those who made it initially possible, afterwards necessary, and finally replaced it with means more appropriate to their practical life and to their ever-changing condition. Research into pre-linguistic time (I refer to anthropological, archaeological, and genetic research) has focused on items people used in primitive forms of work. It convincingly suggests that before a relatively stable and repetitive structure was in place, people used sounds, gestures, and body expressions (face, hands, legs) pretty much the way infants do. The human lineage, in its constitutive phases, left behind a wealth of testimony to patterns of action and, later, to behavioral codes that result in some sense of cohesion. Distant forebears developed patterns in obtaining food and adapting to changes affecting the availability of food and shelter. Before words, tools probably embodied both potential action and communication. Many scholars believe that tools are not possible without, or before, words. They claim that cognitive processes leading to the manufacture of tools, and to the tool-making human being (Homo Faber), are based on language. In the opinion of these scholars, tools extend the arm, and thus embody a level of generality not accessible otherwise than through language. It might well be that nature-based "notation" (footprints, bite marks, and the stone chips that some researchers believe were the actual tools) preceded language. Such notation was more in extension of the biological reality of the human being, and corresponded to a cognitive state, as well as to a scale of existence, preparing for the emergence of language. Research on emerging writing systems (the work of Scribner and Cole, for instance, and moreover the work of Harald Haarmann, who considers the origins of writing in the notations found at Vinca, in the Balkans, near present-day Belgrade) has allowed us to understand how patterns of sounds and gestures became graphic representations; and how, once writing was established, new human experiences, at a larger scale of work, became possible. Finally, the lesson drawn from dying languages (Rosch's studies of Dyirbal, reported by Lakoff) is a lesson in the foundation of such languages and their demise. What we learn from these is less about grammar and phonetics and more about a type of human experience. We also acquire information regarding the supporting biological structure of those involved in it, the role of the scale of humankind, and how this scale changes due to a multitude of conjectures. The differentiation introduced above among pre-language notations, emerging languages, emerging systems of writing, and dying languages is simultaneously a differentiation of kinds and types of human expression, interaction, and interpretation of everything humans use to acknowledge their reality in the world they live in. Drawing attention to oneself or to others does not require language. Sounds suffice; gestures can add to the intended signal. In every sound and in every gesture, humans project themselves in some way. Individuality is preserved through a sound's pitch, timbre, volume, and duration; a gesture can be slow or rapid, timid or aggressive, or a mixture of these characteristics. Once the same sound, or the same gesture, or the same sequence of sounds and gestures is used to point to the same thing, this stabilized expression becomes what can be defined, in retrospect, as a sign. Semeion revisited Interest in various sign systems used by humans reaches well back to ancient times. But it was only after renewed interest in semiotics-the discipline dealing with signs (semeion is the Greek word for sign)-that researchers from various other disciplines started looking at signs and their use by humans. The reason for this is to be found in the fast growth of expression and communication based on means other than natural language. Interaction between humans and increasingly complex machines also prompted a great deal of this interest. Language-oral and written-is probably the most complex system of signs that researchers are aware of. Although the word language comprises experiences in other sign systems, it is by no means their synthesis. Before the practical experience of language, humans constituted themselves in experiences of simpler means of expression and communication: sounds, rhythms, gestures, drawings, ritualized movement, and all kinds of marks. The process can be seen as one of progressive projection of the individual onto the environment of existence. The sign I of one's own individuality-as distinct from other I's with whom interaction took place through competition, cooperation, or hostility-is most likely the first one can conjure. It must be simultaneous with the sign of the other, since I can be defined only in relation to something different, i.e., to the other. In the world of the different, some entities were dangerous or threatening, others accommodating, others cooperating. These qualifiers could not be simply translated into identifiers. They were actually projections of the subject as it perceived and understood, or misunderstood, the environment. To support my thesis about the pragmatic nature of language and literacy, a short account of the pre-verbal stage needs to be attempted here. Very many scholars have tried to discover the origin of language. It is a subject as fascinating as the origins of the universe and the origin of life itself. My interest is rather in the area of the nature of language, the origin being an implicit theme, and the circumstances of its origination. I have already referred to what are loosely called tools and to behavioral codes (sexual, or relating to shelter, food-gathering, etc.). There is historic evidence that can be considered for such an account, and there are quite a number of facts related to conditions of living (changes in climate, extinction of some animals and plants, etc.) that affect this stage. The remaining information is comprised of inferences based on how beings similar to what we believe human beings once were constituted their signs as an expression of their identity. These signs reflected the outside world, but moreover expressed awareness of the world made possible by the human's own biological condition. The very first sentence of the once famous Port-Royal Grammar unequivocally considers speaking as an explanation of our thoughts by signs invented for this particular purpose. The same text makes thinking independent of words or any kind of signs. I take the position that the transition from nature to culture, i.e., from reactions caused by natural stimuli to reflections and awareness, is marked by both continuity and discontinuity. The continuous aspect refers to the biological structure projected into the universe of interactions with similar or dissimilar entities. The discontinuity results from biological changes in brain size, vertical posture, functions of the hands. The pre- verbal (or pre-discursive) is immediate by its very nature. The discursive, which makes possible the manifest thought (one among many kinds) is mediated by the signs of language. Closeness to the natural environment is definitive of this stage. Although I am rather suspicious of claims made by contemporary advocates of the psychedelic, in particular McKenna, I can see how everything affecting the biological potential of the being (in this case psilocybin, influencing vision and group behavior) deserves at least consideration when we approach the subject of language. Signs, through which pre-verbal human beings projected their reality in the context of their existence, expressed through their energy and plasticity what humans were. Signs captured what was perceived as alike in others, objects or beings, and likeness became the shared part of signs. This was a time of direct interaction and immediateness, a time of action and reaction. Everything delayed or unexpected constituted the realm of the unknown, of mystery. The scale of life was reduced. All events were of limited steps and limited duration. Interacting individuals constituted themselves as signs of presence, that is, of a shared space and time. Signs could thus refer to here and now as immediate instantiations of duration, proximity, interval, etc., but long before the notions of space and time were formed. Once distinctions were projected in the experience of signs, the absent or the coming could be suggested, and the dynamics of repetitive events could be expressed. It was only after this self- expression took place that a representational function became possible: a high-pitched cry not just for pain, but also for danger that might cause pain; an arm raised not only as an indication of firm presence, but also of requested attention; a color applied on the skin not only as an expression of pleasure in using a fruit or a plant, but also of anticipated similar pleasures-an instruction to be mimetically followed, to be imitated. Being part of the expressed, the individuals projecting themselves in the expression also projected a certain experience related to the limited world they lived in. Signs standing for associations of events (clouds with rain, noise of hooves with animals, bubbles on a lake's surface with fish) were probably as much representations of those sequences as an expression of constituted experience shared with others living in the same environment. Sharing experience beyond the here and now, in other words, transition from direct and unreflected to indirect and reflected interaction, is the next cognitive step. It took place once shared signs were associated with shared common experiences and with rules of generating new signs that could report on new, similar, or dissimilar experiences. Each sign is a biological witness to the process in which it was constituted and of the scale of the experience. A whisper addresses one other person, maybe two, very close to each other. A shout corresponds to a different scale. Accordingly, each sign is its shorthand history and a bridge from the natural to the cultural. Sequences, such as successions of sounds or verbal utterances, or configurations of signs, such as drawings, testify to a higher cognitive level. Relations between sequences or configurations of signs and the practical experience in which they are constituted are less intuitive. To derive from the understanding of such sign relations some practical rules of significance to those sharing a sign system was an experience in human interaction. Later in time, the immediate experiential component is present only indirectly in language. The constitution of the language is the result of the change of focus from signs to relations among them. Grammar, in its most primitive condition, was not about how signs are put together (syntax), nor of how signs represent something (semantics), but of the circumstances determining new signs to be constituted in a manner preserving their experiential quality-the pragmatics. Consequently, language was constituted as an intermediary between stabilized experience (repetitive patterns of work and interaction) and future (patterns broken). Signs still preserved the concreteness of the event that triggered their constitution. In the use of language, the human being abandoned a great deal of individual projection. Language's degree of generality became far higher than that of its components (signs themselves), or of any other signs. But even at the level of language, the characteristic function of this sign system was the constitution of practical experiences, not the representation of means for sharing categories of experiences. In each sign, and more so in each language, the biological and the artificial collide. When the biological element dominates, sign experiences take place as reactions. When the cultural dominates, the sign or language experience becomes an interpretation, i.e., a continuation of the semiotic experience. Interpretation of any kind corresponds to the never-ending differentiation from the biological and is representative of the constitution of culture. Under the name culture as used above, we understand human nature and its objectification in products, organizations, ideas, attitudes, values, artifacts. The practical experience of sign constitution-from the use of branches, rocks, and fur to the most primitive etchings (on stone, bone, and wood), from the use of sounds and gestures to articulated language-contributed to successive changes in ongoing activity (hunting, seeking shelter, collaborative efforts), as well as to changes in humans themselves. In the universe of rich detail in which humans affirmed their identity through fighting for resources and creatively finding alternatives, information did not change, but the awareness of the practical implications of details increased. Each observation made in the appropriation of knowledge through its use in work triggered possible patterns of interaction. Once signs were constituted, sharing in the experience became possible. Genetic transmission of information was relatively slow. It dominated the initial phases during which the species introduced its own patterns within the patterns of the natural environment. Semiotic transmission of information, in particular through language, is much faster than genetic inheritance but cannot replace it. Human life is attested at roughly 2.5 million years ago, incipient language use roughly 200,000 years ago. Agriculture as a patterned experience emerged no more than 19,000 years ago, and writing less than 5,000 years ago (although some researchers estimate 10,000 years). The shorter and shorter cycles characteristic of self-constitution correspond to the involvement of means other than genetic in the process of change. What today we call mental skills are the result of a rather compressed process. Compare the time it took until motor skills involved in hunting, gathering, and foraging were perfected to the extent they were before they started to degenerate, relatively speaking, as we notice in our days. The first record is a whip Signs can be recorded-quite a few were recorded in and on various materials- and so can language, as we all know. But language did not start out as a written system. The African Ishango Bone predates a writing system by some thousands of years; the quipus of the Inca culture are a sui generis record of people, animals, and goods previous to writing. China and Japan, as well as India, have similar pre-writing forms of keeping records. The polygenetic emergence of writing is, in itself, significant in several ways. For one, it introduced another mediating element disassociated from a particular speaker. Second, it constituted a level of generality higher than that of the verbal expression that was independent of time and space, or of other forms of record keeping. Third, everything projected into signs, and from signs into articulated language, participated in the formation of meaning as the result of the understanding of language through its use. Only at that moment did language gain a semantic and syntactic dimension (as we call them in today's terminology). Formally, if the issue of literacy and the constitution of languages are connected, then this connection started with written languages. Nevertheless, events preceding written language give us the perspective of what made writing necessary, and why some cultures never developed a written language. Although referring to a different time-frame (thousands of years ago), this could help us comprehend why writing and reading need not dominate life and work today and in the future. Or at least it could help clarify the relation among human beings, their language, and their existence. After all, this is what we want to understand from the vantage point of today's world. We take the word for granted, wondering whether there was a stage of the wordless human being (about which we can only infer indirectly). But once the word was established, with the advent of the means for recording it, it affected not only the future, but also the perception of the past. Conquering the past, the word gives legitimacy to explanations that presume it. Thus it implies some carrying device, i.e., a system of notation as a built-in memory and as a mechanism for associations, permutations, and substitutions. But if such a system is accepted, the origins of writing and reading are pushed back so far in time that the disjunction of literate-illiterate becomes a structural characteristic of the species at one of the periods of its self-definition. Obviously expanded far in time and seen in such a broad perspective, this notation (comprising images, the Ishango Bone, quipus, the Vinca figurines, etc.) contradicts the logocratic model of language. Mono- and polysyllabic elements of speech, embodying audible sequences of sounds (and appropriate breathing patterns that insert pauses and maintain a mechanism for synchronization), together with natural mnemonic devices (such as pebbles, knots on branches, shapes of stones, etc.) are pre-word components of pre-languages. They all correspond to the stage of direct interaction. They pertain to such a small scale of human activity that time and space can be sequenced in extension of the patterns of nature (day-night, very close-less close, etc.). This juncture in the self-definition of the species occurred when the transition, from selected natural marks to marking, and later to stable patterns of sounds, eventually leading to words, took place. This was an impressive change that introduced a linear relation in a realm that was one of randomness or even chaos. If catastrophes occurred (as many anthropologists indicate), i.e., changes of scale outside the linear to which human beings were not adapted, they resulted in the disappearance of entire populations, or in massive displacements. Rooted in experiences belonging to what we would call natural phenomena, this change resulted in rudimentary elements of a language. New patterns of interaction were also developed: naming (by association, as in clans bearing names of animals), ordering and counting (at the beginning by pairing the counted objects, one by one, with other objects), recording regularities (of weather, sky configurations, biological cycles) as these affected the outcome of practical activities. Scale and threshold Already mentioned in previous pages, the concept of scale is an important parameter in human development. At this point, it is useful to elaborate on the notion since I consider scale to be critical in explaining major transitions in human pragmatics. The progression from pre-word to notation, and in our days from literacy to illiteracy is paralleled by the progression of scale. Numbers as such-how many people in a given area, how many people interacting in a particular practical experience, the longevity of people under given circumstances, the mortality rate, family size-are almost meaningless. Only when relations among numbers and circumstances can be established is some meaningful inference possible. Scale is the expression of relations. A crude scale of life and death is remote from underlying adaptive strategies as these are embodied in practical experiences of self-constitution. Knowledge regarding biological mechanisms, such as knowledge of health or disease, supports efforts to derive models for various circumstances of life, as humans project their biological reality into the reality of interactions with the outside world. We know, for instance, that when the scale of human activity progressed to include domesticated animals, some animal diseases affecting human life and work were transmitted to humans. Domestication of animals, a very early practical experience, brought humans closer to them for longer times, thus facilitating what is called a change of host for agents of such diseases. The common cold seems to have been acquired from horses, influenza from pigs, smallpox from cattle. We also know that over time, infectious diseases affect populations that are both relatively large and stationary. The examples usually given are yellow fever or malaria and measles (the latter probably also transported from swine, where the disease is caused by the larva of the tapeworm from which the word measles is derived). Sometimes the inference is made from information on groups that until recently were, or still are, involved in practical experiences similar to those of remote stages in human history, as are the tribes of the Amazon rain forest. Isolated hunter- gatherers and populations that still forage (the !Kung San, Hadza, Pygmies) replay adaptive strategies that otherwise would be beyond our understanding. Statistical data derived from observations help improve models based only on our knowledge about biological mechanisms. The notion of scale involves these considerations insofar as it tells us that life expectancy in different pragmatic frameworks varies drastically. The less than 30-year life expectancy (associated with high infant mortality, diseases, and dangers in the natural environment) explains the relatively stationary population of hunter-gatherers. Orders of magnitude of 20 years higher were achieved in what are called settled modes of life existing before the rise of cities (occurring at different times in Asia Minor, North Africa, the Far East, South America, and Europe). The praxis of agriculture resulted in diversified resources and is connected to the dynamics of a lower death rate, a higher birth rate, and changes in anatomy (e.g., increased height). The hypotheses advanced by modern researchers of ancestral language families concerning the relation between their diffusion over large territories and the expanding agricultural populations is of special interest here. The so-called Neolithic Revolution brought about food production in some communities of people as opposed to reliance on searching, finding, catching or trapping (as with foragers and hunters). As conditions favored an increase in population, the nature of the relations among individuals and groups of individuals changed due to force of number. Groups broke away from the main tribe in order to acquire a living environment with less competition for resources. Alternatively, pragmatic requirements led to situations in which the number of people in a given area increased. With this increase, the nature of their relations became more complex. What is of interest here is the direction of change and the interplay of the many variables involved in it. Definitely, one wants to know how scale and changes in practical experiences are related. Does a discovery or invention predate a change in scale, or is the new scale a result of it or of several related phenomena? Polygenetic explanations point to the many variables that affect developments as complex as those leading to discoveries of human practical experiences that result in increased populations and diversified pragmatic interactions. The major families of languages are associated, as archaeological and linguistic data prove, with places where the new pragmatic context of agriculture was established. One well documented example is that of two areas in China: the Yellow River Basin, where foxtail millet is documented, and the Yangtzi River Basin, where rice was domesticated. The Austronesian languages spread from these areas over thousands of miles beyond. We have here an interesting correlation, even if only summarily illustrated, between the nature of human experience, the scale that makes it possible, and the spread of language. Similar research bears evidence from the area called New Guinea, where cultivation of taro tubers is identified with speakers of the Papuan languages, covering large areas of territory as they searched for suitable land and encountered the opposition of foragers. Natural abilities (such as yelling, throwing, running, plucking, breaking, bending) dominated a humankind constituted in groups and communities of reduced scale. Abilities other than natural, such as planting, cooking, herding, singing, and using tools, emerge consciously, in knowledge of the cause, when the change of scale in population and effort required efficiency levels relative to the community, impossible to achieve at the natural level. Such abilities developed very quickly. They led to the diversified means generated in practical experiences involving elements of planning (as rudimentary as it was at its beginning), reductionist strategies of survival and well-being (break a bigger problem into smaller parts, what will become the divide-and-conquer strategy), and coalition building. These involved acts of substitution, insertion, and omission, and continued with combinations of these at progressively higher levels. At a certain scale of human activity, the experience of work and the cognitive experience of storing information pertinent to work differentiated. Do structural changes bring about a new scale, or does scale effect structural changes? The process is complex in the sense that the underlying structure of human activity is adapted to exigencies of survival fine tuned to the many factors influencing both individual and communal experiences. That scale and underlying structure are not independent results from the fact that possibilities as well as needs are reflected in scale. More individuals, with complementary skills, have a better chance to succeed in practical endeavors of increased complexity. Their needs increase, too, since these individuals bring into the experience not only their person, but also commitments outside the experience. The underlying structure embodies elements characteristic of the human endowment-itself bound to change as the individual is challenged by new circumstances of life-and elements characteristic of the nature of human relations, affecting and being affected by scale. Dynamic tensions between scale and the elements defining the underlying structure lead to changes in the pragmatic framework. Language development is just one example of such changes. Articulated speech emerged in the context of initial agricultural praxis as an extension of communication means used in hunting and food gathering. Notation and more advanced tools emerged at a later juncture. Crafts resulted from practical experiences made possible by such tools as work started to become specialized. Writing was made possible by the cognitive experiences of notation and reading (no matter how primitive the reading was). Writing emerged as practical human constitution extended to trade, to beyond the here-and-now and beyond co-presence. The underlying structure of literacy was well suited to the sequentiality characteristic of practical experiences, expression of dependencies, and deterministic processes. As already stated, successive forms of communication came about when the scale of interaction among humans expanded from one to several to many. Literacy corresponded to a qualitatively different moment. If language can be associated with the human scale characteristic of the transition from hunting and foraging for food to producing it by means of agriculture, literacy can be associated with the next level of human interconditioning-production of means of production. One can use here the metaphor of critical mass or threshold, not to overwrite scale, but to define a value, a level of complexity, or a new attractor (as this is called in chaos theory). Critical mass defines a lower threshold-until this value, interaction was still optimally carried out by means such as referential signs, representations based on likeness, or by speech. At the lower threshold, individuals and the groups they belong to can still identify themselves coherently. But a certain instability is noticeable: the same signs do not express similar or equivalent experiences. In this respect, critical mass refers to number or amount (of people, resources they share, interactions they are involved in, etc.) and to quality (differences in the result of the effort of self-constitution). Former means are rendered inadequate by practical experiences of a different nature. New strategies for dealing with inadequacies result from the experience itself, as the optimization of the sign systems involved (signals, speech, notation, writing) result from the same. Notation became necessary when the information to be stored (inventories, myths, genealogies) became more than what oral transmission could efficiently handle. Critical mass explains why some cultures never developed literacy, as well as why a dominant literacy proves inadequate in our days. Signs and tools Practical experiences involving nature led to the realization of differences: colors that change with seasons, flora and fauna in their variety, variations in sky and weather. Human need is externalized through hunting (maybe scavenging), fishing, finding shelter, and seeking one's own kind, either under sexual drive or for some collaborative effort. Thus, multiplicity of nature is met by multiplicity of elementary operations. What resulted was a language of actions, with elements relevant to the task at hand. There was no real dialogue. In nature, screeches and hoots, in finite sequences, signal danger. Otherwise, nature does not understand human signs, images, or sounds. For attracting and catching prey, or for avoiding danger, sounds, colors, and shapes can be involved. What qualifies them as signs is the infinity of variations and combinations required by the practical context. Against the background of differences, human practical experiences resulted also in the realization of similarities in appearance and actions. Awareness of similarities was embodied in means of interaction. They became signs once the experience stabilized in the constitution of a group coherently integrating the sign in its activity. Elementary forms of praxis maintained individuals near the object upon which they acted, or upon which needs and plans for their fulfillment were projected. Extraction of what was common to many tasks at hand translated into accumulation of experience. With experience, a certain distance between the individual, or group, and the task was introduced. The language of actions changed continuously. Evaluation started as a comparison. It evolved into inclinations, repetitive patterns, and selections until it translated into a rule to be followed. Interpretation of natural patterns connected to weather (what we call change of season, storm, drought, etc.), to observations concerning hunted animals, or digging for tubers, or to agriculture (as we define it in retrospect) resulted in the constitution of a repertory of observed characteristics and, over time, in a method of observation. Once observed, phenomena were tested for relevancy and thus became signs. They integrated the observer, who memorized and associated them with successful patterns of action. In a way, this meant that reading- i.e., observation of all kinds of patterns and associations to tasks at hand-was in anticipation of notation and writing, and probably one of the major reasons for their progressive appearance. This reading filtered the relevant, that characteristic-of an animal, plant, weather pattern-which affected the attainment of desired goals. Consequently, the language of actions gained in coherence, progressively involving more signs. Rituals are a form of sharing and collective memory, a sui generis calendar, characteristic of an implicit sense of time. They are a training device in both understanding the signs pertaining to work and the strategy of action to follow when circumstances changed. In rituals, the unity between what is natural and what is human is continuously reaffirmed. Tools are extensions of the physical reality of the human being. They are relevant as means for reaching a goal. Signs, however, are means of self-reflection, and thus by their nature means of communication. Tools, which can be interpreted as signs, too, are also an expression of the self-reflective nature of humans, but in a different way. What defines them is the function, not the meaning they might conjure in a communicational context. By their nature, tools require integration. In retrospect, tools appear to us as instances of self-constitution at a scale different from the natural scale of the physical world in which individuals created them. The difference is reflected in their efficiency in the first place, but also in the implicit correlations they embody. Some are tools for individual use; others require cooperation with other persons. Sign activity at such primitive stages of humankind marked the transcendence from accidental to systematic. The use of tools and the relative uniform structure of the tasks performed contributed to a sense of method. Tools testify to the close and homogenous character of the pragmatic framework of primitive humans. The syncretic nature of the signs of practical experiences were reflected in the syncretism of tools and signs. What we today call religion, art, science, philosophy, and ethics were represented, in nuce, in the sign in an undifferentiated, syncretic manner. Observations of repetitive patterns and awareness of possible deviations blended. Externalized in these complex signs, individuals strove towards making them understandable, unequivocal, and easy to preserve over time. Think about such categories as syncretism, understanding, repetitive patterns in practical terms. A sign can be a beat. It should be easily perceived even under adverse conditions (noise from thunder, the howl of animals). Humans should be able to associate it with the same consequences (Run! should not be confused with Halt!; Throw! should not be confused with Don't throw! or some other unrelated action). This univocal association must be maintained over time. As practical experiences diversified, so did the generation of signs. Rhythm, color, shape, body expression and movement, as experienced in daily life, were integrated in rituals. Things were shown as they are- animal heads, antlers and claws, tree branches and trunks, huge rocks split apart. Their transformation was performed through the use of fire, water, and stones shaped to cut, or to help in shaping other stones. It is quite difficult for us today to understand that for the primitive mind, likeness produced and explained likeness, that there was no connotation, that everything had immediate practical implications. What was shared, here and now, or between one short-lived generation and the next, was an experience so undifferentiated that sometimes even the distinction between action and object of action (such as hunting and prey, plowing and soil, collecting and the collected fruit, etc.) was difficult to make. The process of becoming a human being is one of constituting its own nature. Externalizing characteristics (predominantly biological, but progressively also spiritual) to be shared within the emergent human culture is part of the process We have come to understand that there is no such thing as the world on one side and a subject reflecting it on another. The appearance, which Descartes turned into the premise of the rational discourse adopted by Western civilization, makes us fall captive to representational explanations rather than to ontogenetic descriptions. Human beings identify themselves, and thus the species they belong to, by accounting for similarities and distinctions. These pertain to their existence, and sharing in the awareness of these similarities and distinctions is part of human interaction. As such, the world is constituted almost at the same time as it is discovered. This contradictory dynamics of identity and distinction makes it possible to see how language is something other than the "image of our thoughts," as Lamy once put it, obviously in the tradition of Descartes. Language is also something other than the act of using it. We make our language the way we continuously make ourselves. This making does not come about in a vacuum, but in the pragmatic framework of our interdependencies. The transition from directness and immediateness to indirectness and mediation, along with the notions of space and time appropriated in the process, is in many ways reflected in the process of language constitution. The emergence of signs, their functioning, the constitution of language, and the emergence of writing seem to point to both the self- definition and preservation of human nature, as these unfold in the practical act of the species' self-constitution. From Orality to Writing Tracing the origin of language to early nuclei of agriculture, as many authors do (Peter Bellwood, Paul K. Benedict, Colin Renfrew, Robert Blust, among them), is tantamount to acknowledging the pragmatic foundation of the practical experience of language of human beings. Language is not a passive witness to human dynamics. Diversity of practical experience is reflected in language and made possible through the practical experience of language. The origins of language, as much as the origins of writing, lie in the realm of the natural. This is why considerations regarding the biological condition of the individual interacting with the outside world are extremely important. Practical experiences of self-constitution in language are constitutive of culture. The act of writing, together with that of tool-making, is constitutive of a species increasingly defining its own nature. Considerations regarding culture are accordingly no less important than those concerning the biological identity of the human being. Let us point to some implications of the biological factor. We know that the number of sounds, for instance, that humans can produce when they push air through their mouths is very high. However, out of this practically infinite number of sounds, only slightly more than forty are identifiable in the Indo-European languages, as opposed to the number of sounds produced in the Chinese and Japanese languages. While it is impossible to show how the biological make-up of individuals and the structure of their experience are projected onto the system of language, it would be unwise not to account for this projection as it occurs at every moment of our existence. When humans speak, muscles, vocal chords, and other anatomical components are activated and used according to the characteristics of each. People's voices differ in many ways and so subtly that to identify people through voice alone is difficult. When we speak, our hearing is also involved. In writing, as well as in reading, this participation extends to sight. Other dynamic features such as eye movement, breathing, heartbeat, and perspiration come into play as well. What we are, do, say, write, or read are related. The experience behind language use and the biological characteristics of people living in a language differ to such an extent that almost never will similar events, even the simplest, be similarly accounted for in language (or in any other sign system, for that matter) by different persons. The first history, or the personal inquiry into the probable course of past events, rests upon orality, integrates myths, and ends up with the attempt to refer events to places, as well as to time. Logographers try to reconstruct genealogies of persons involved in real events (wars, founding of clans, tribes, or dynasties, for example) or in the dominant fiction of a period (e.g., the epics attributed to Homer, or the book of Genesis in the Bible). In the transition from remembrance (mnemai) to documented accounts (logoi), human beings acquired what we call today consciousness of time or of history. They became aware of differences in relating to the same events. The entire encoding of social experience, from very naive forms (concerning family, religion, illness) to very complex rules (of ceremony, power, military conduct) is the result of human practice diversified with the participation of language. The tension between orality and writing is, respectively, an expression of the tension between a more homogeneous way of life and the ever diversifying new forms that broke through boundaries accepted for a very long time. In the universe of the many Chinese languages, this is more evident than in Western languages. Chinese ideographic writing, which unifies the many dialects used in spoken Chinese, preserves concreteness, and as such preserves tradition as an established way of relating to the world. Within the broader Chinese culture, every effort was made to preserve characteristics of orality. The philosophy derived from such a language defends, through the fundamental principle of Tao in Confucianism, an established and shared mechanism of transmitting knowledge. Unlike spoken language, writing is fairly recent. Some scholars (especially Haarmann) consider that writing did not appear until 4,000 to 3,000 BCE; others extend the time span to 6,000 BCE and beyond. To repeat: It is not my intention to reconstitute the history of writing or literacy. It makes little sense to rekindle disputes over chronology, especially when new findings, or better interpretations of old findings, are not at hand or are not yet sufficiently convincing. The so-called boundaries between oral and post-oral cultures, as well as between non-literate, literate, and what are called post-literate, or illiterate, cultures are difficult to determine. It is highly unlikely that we shall ever be able to discover whether images (cave drawings or petroglyphs) antecede or come after spoken language. Probably languages involving notation, drawings, etchings, and rituals-with their vast repertory of articulated gestures-were relatively simultaneous. Some historians of writing ascertain that without the word, there could be no image. Others reject the logocratic model and suggest that images preceded the written and probably even the spoken. Many speculate on the emergence of rituals, placing them before or after drawing, before or after writing. I suggest that primitive human expression is syncretic and polymorphous, a direct consequence of a pragmatic framework of self-constitution that ascertains multiplicity. Individual and collective memory Anthropologists have tried to categorize the experience transmitted in order to understand how orality and, later, writing (primitive notation, in fact) refer to the particular categories. Researchers point to the material surroundings-resources, in the most general way-to successful action, and to words as pertaining to the more general framework (time, space, goals, etc.). Speculation goes as far as to suggest that these human beings became increasingly dependent on artifactual means of notation. As a consequence, they relied less on the functions of the brain's right hemisphere. In turn, this resulted in decreased acuteness of these functions. Some even go so far as to read here an incipient Weltanschauung, a perspective and horizon of the world. They are probably wrong because they apply an explanatory model already influenced by language (product of a civilization of literacy) on a very unsettled human condition. In order to achieve some stability and permanence, as dictated by the instinctive survival of the species, this human condition was projected in various sequences of signs still unsettled in a language. The very objects of direct experience were the signs. This experience eventually settled and became more uniform through the means and constraints of orality. Language is not a direct expression of experience, as the same anthropologists think. In fact, language is also less comprehensive than the signs leading to it. Before any conversation can take place, something else-experience within the species-is shared and constitutes the background for future sharing. Face to face encounter, scavenging, hunting, fishing, finding natural forms of shelter, etc., became themselves signs when they no longer were related only to survival, but embodied practical rules and the need to share. Sharing is the ultimate qualifier for a sign, especially for a language. Tools, cave paintings, primitive forms of notation, and rituals addressed collective memory, no matter how limited this collective was. Words addressed individual memory and became means of individual differentiation. Individual needs and motivations need to be understood in their relation to those of groups. Signs and tools are elements that were integrated in differentiation. To understand the interplay between them, we could probably benefit from modern cognitive research of distributed and centralized authority. Tools are of a distributed nature. They are endlessly changed and tested in individual or cooperative efforts. Signs, as they result from human interaction, seem to emanate from anything but the individual. As such, they are associated with incipient centralized authority. These remarks define a conceptual viewpoint rather than describe a reality to which none of us has or can have access. But in the absence of such a conceptual premise, inferences, mine or anybody else's, are meaningless. The distinctions introduced above point to the need to consider at least three stages before we can refer to language: 1. integration in the group of one's kind in direct forms of interaction: touching, passing objects from one to another, recognition through sounds, gestures, satisfying instinctual drives; 2. awareness of differences and similarities expressed in direct ways: comparison by juxtaposition, equalization by physical adjustment; 3. stabilization of expressions of sameness or difference, making them part of the practical act. From the time same and different were perceived in their degree of generality, directness and immediateness was progressively lost. Layers of understanding, together with rules for generating coherent expressions, were accumulated, checked against an infinity of concrete situations, related to signs still used (objects, sounds, gestures, colors, etc.), and freed from the demand of unequivocal or univocal meaning. All these means of expression were socialized in the process of production (the making of artifacts, hunting, fishing, plowing, etc.) and self-reproduction until they became language. Once they became language-talked about things and actions-this language removed itself from the objects and the making or doing. This removal made it appear more and more as a given, an entity in itself, a reality to fear or enjoy, to use or compare one's actions to the actions of others. The time it took for this process to unfold was very long-hundreds of thousands of years (if we can imagine this in our age of the instant). The process is probably simultaneous to the formation of larger brains and upright posture. It included biological changes connected to the self- constitution of the species and its survival within a framework different from the natural. It nevertheless acknowledged the natural as the object of action and even change. The functional need for distinctions explains morphological aspects; the pragmatic context suggests how the shift from the scale of one-to-one direct interaction to one-to-many by the intermediary of language takes place. Concreteness, i.e., closeness to the object, is also symptomatic of the limited shared universe. These languages are very localized because they result from localized experiences. They externalize a limited awareness, and make possible a very restricted development of both the experience and the language associated with it. As we shall see later on, a structurally similar situation can be identified in the world today, not on some island, as the reader might suspect, but on the islands of specialized work as we constitute them in our economies. Obsessed with (or driven by) efficiency, and oriented towards maximizing it, we use strategies of integration and coordination which were not possible in the ages of language constitution. But let us get back to the place of the spoken (before the emergence of notation and the written) and its cultural function in the lives of human communities. The memory before the word was the memory of repeated actions, the memory of gestures, sounds, odors, and artifacts. Structuring was imposed from outside-natural cycle (of day and night, of seasons, of aging), and natural environment (riverside, mountainside, valley, wooded region, grassy plains). The outside world gave the cues. Participants acted according to them and to the cues of previous experience as this was directly passed from one person to another. Long before astrology, it was geomancy (association of topographical features to people or outcomes of activity) that inhabited people's reading of the environment and resulted in various glyphs (petroglyphs, geoglyphs). Initially remembering referred to a place, later on to a sequence of events. Only with language did time come into the picture. Remembrance was dictated minimally by instinct and was only slightly genetic in nature. With the word, whose appearance implied means for recognizing and eventually recording words, a fundamental shift occurred. The word entered human experience as a relational sign. It associated object and action. Together with tools, it constituted culture as the unity between who we are (identity), what our world is (object of work, contemplation, and questioning), and what we do (to survive, reproduce, change). At this moment, culture and awareness of it affected practical experiences of human self-constitution. Simultaneously, an important split occurred: genetic memory remained in charge of the human being's biological reality, while social memory took over cultural reality. Nevertheless, they were not independent of each other. The nature of their interdependence is characteristic of each of the changes in the scale of humankind that interests us here. If we could describe what it takes for individuals to congregate, what they need to know or understand in order to hunt, to forage, to begin herding and agriculture, we would still not know how well they would have to perform. In retrospect, it seems that there was a predetermined path from the stage of primitive development to what we are today. Assuming the existence of such a path, we still do not know at what moment one type of activity no longer satisfied expectations of survival and other paths needed to be pursued. Once we involve the notion of scale in our cognitive modeling, we get some answers important for understanding not only orality and writing, but also the process leading to literacy and the post-literate. Cultural memory Memory, in its incipient stages (comparable to childhood, at the beginning of human culture), as well as in its new functions today, deserves our entire attention. For the time being, we can confidently assume that before cultural memory was established, genetic memory, from genetic code to the inner clock and homeostatic mechanisms, dominated the inheritance mechanisms related to survival, reproduction, and social interaction. The emphasis brought by words is from inheritance to transmission of experience. Rituals changed; they integrated verbal language and gained a new status-syncretic projections of the community. Language opened the possibility to describe efficient courses of action. It also described generic programs for such diverse activities as navigating, hunting, fire-making, producing tools, etc. Expressions in language were of a level of generality that direct action and the ritual could not reach. In images preceding words, thought and action followed a circular sequence: one was embedded in the other. A circular relation corresponded to the reduced scale of the incipient species: no growth, input and output in balance. Only when the circle was opened was a sense of progression ascertained. The circular framework can be easily defined as corresponding to the identity between the result of the effort and the effort. Obviously, chasing and catching prey required a major physical effort. The reward at this stage was nothing more nor less than satisfied hunger. Let us divide the result by the effort. The outcome of this division is a very intuitive representation of efficiency or usefulness. The circular stage maintained the two variables close to each other, and the ratio around the value of 1:1. The framework of linear relations started with awareness of how efforts could be reduced and usefulness increased. The linear sequence of activities was deterministically connected-the stronger the person, the more powerful in throwing, thrusting and hauling; the longer the legs, the faster the run, etc. Language was a product of the change from the circular framework, embodied in foraging, but also a factor affecting the dynamics and the direction followed, i.e., agriculture. In language the circle was opened in the sense that sequences were made possible and generality, once achieved, generated further levels of generality. From direct interaction coordinated by instinct, biological rhythm, etc., to interaction coordinated by melodic sound, movement, fire signals, to communication based on words, the human species ascertained its existence among other species. It also ascertained a sense of purpose and progression. The pragmatics of myths is one of progression. It extends well into our age, in forms that suit the scale of humankind-progression from tribal life to the polis, ancient cities-and its activities. In today's terminology, we can look at myths as algorithms of practical life. In the ritual, giving birth, selecting a mate, fruitful sexual relations-all related to reproduction and death-could be approached within the implicit circularity of action-reaction. In myths, the word of the language conveys a relatively depersonalized experience available to each and all. Since it was objectified in language, it took on the semblance of rules. In language, things are remembered; but also forgotten, or made forgotten, for reasons having to do with new circumstances of work and social life. Change in experience was reflected in the change of everything pertinent to the experience as it was preserved in language. Quite often, in the act of transmitting experience, details were changed, myths were transmuted. They became new programs for new goals and new circumstances of work. Generally speaking, the emergence and cultural acquisition of language and the change of status of the human being from Homo Faber (tool-using human) to Homo Sapiens (thinking human) were parallel processes within the pragmatic framework of linear relations between actions and results. The pre-language stage of relatively homogeneous activities, of directness and immediateness, of relative equality between the effort and the result progressively came to an end. The need to describe, categorize, store, and retrieve the content of diversified, indirect, mediated experience was projected into the reality of language, within the experience of human self- constitution. The relevance of experience to the task at hand was replaced by the anticipated relevancy of structuring future tasks in order to minimize effort and maximize outcome. Frames of existence The oral phase of language made it difficult, if not impossible, to account for past events. Testimony in communities researched while still in the oral phase (see Lévi- Strauss, among others) shows that they could not maintain the semantic integrity of the discourse. Words uttered in a never-ending now-the implicit notion of present-seem to automatically reinvent the past according to the exigencies of the immediate. The past, during the oral phase of language, was a form of present, and so was the future, since there are no instruments to project the word along the axis of time. Orality is associated with fixed frames of existence and practical life. The culture of the written word resulted from the introduction of a variable frame of existence, within which a new pragmatic framework, corresponding to a growing scale of human activity, required a stable outline of language. This outline of language-over short time intervals it appears as a fixed frame of reference-can be associated with more mobile, more dynamic frames of existence and practical experiences, whose output follows the dynamic of the linear relations it embodies. Work and social interaction-in short, the pragmatic dimension of human existence-made the recording of language necessary and impressed linearity upon it. A cuneiform notation, over 3,500 years old, testifies to a Sumerian who looked at the nightly skies and saw a lion, a bull, and a scorpion. More importantly, it demonstrates how a practical experience constitutes a cognitive filter: what people saw when they looked at something unknown and for which no name was constituted, and how disjoint worlds-the earthly environment and the sky-were put in relation at this phase of language constitution. This is even more important in view of the fact that as an isolated language, Sumerian survives only in writing, a product of that "budding flower" as A. and S. Sherrat described it, referring to the agricultural heartland of Southwest Asia where many language families originated. Writing, which takes place in many respects at a higher cognitive level than the production and utterance of the word, or than in pictographic notation, is a multi- relational device. It makes possible relations between different words, between different sentences, between images and language. From its incipient phase, it also related disjoint worlds, but at a level other than that achieved in Sumerian cuneiform notation. Writing facilitates and further necessitates the next level of a language, which is the text, an entity in which its parts lose their individual meaning while the whole constitutes the message or is conjured into meaning. The experience already gained in visual records, such as drawing, rock engravings, and wood carvings, was taken over in the experience of the written word. The pictorial was a highly complex notation with a vast number of components, some visible (the written), some invisible (the phonetics), and few rules of association. Within the pictorial, sequences are formed which narrate events or actions in their natural succession. What comes first in the sequence is also prior (in time) to everything else, or it has a more important place in a hierarchy. The male-female relation, or that between free individuals and slaves, between native and foreign was embedded here. Even the direction of writing (from left to right, right to left, top to bottom) encodes important information about the people constituting their identity in the practical experience of engraving letters on tablets or painting them on parchment. The very concrete nature of the pictograms prevents generalization. Expression was enormously rich, precision practically impossible to achieve. The detailed history of writing makes up many chapters in the history of languages. It is also a useful introduction to the history of knowledge, aesthetics, and most likely cognitive science. This history also details processes characteristic of the beginning of literacy. Probably more than 30,000 years passed between the time of cave paintings and rock engravings and the first acknowledged attempt at writing. From the perspective of literacy, this time span comprised the liberation of the human being from the pictorially concrete and the establishment of the realm of conventions, of purposeful encoding. Abstract thinking is not possible without the cognitive support of abstract representations and the sharing of conventions (some implicit) they embody. The wedge-shaped letters of Sumerian cuneiform, the sacred engraved notations of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Chinese ideograms, the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman alphabets-all have in common the need to overcome concreteness. They offer a system of abstract notation for increasingly more complex languages. Until writing, language was still close to its users and bore their mark. It was their voice, and their seeing, hearing, and touching. With writing, language was objectified, freed from the subject and the senses. The development towards written language, and from written language to initially limited and then generalized literacy, paralleled the evolution from satisfying immediate needs (the circular relation) to extending and increasing demand (the linear function) of a mediated nature. The difference between needs related to survival and needs that are no longer a matter of survival but of social status (power, ego, fear, pleasure, incipient forms of conviction, etc.) is represented through language, itself seen as part of the continuous self-constitution of the human being in a particular pragmatic framework. The alienation of immediacy The term alienation requires a short explanation. Generally, it is used to describe the estrangement, through work, of human beings from the object of their effort. Awareness of having one's life turned into products, which then appear to those who made them as entities in themselves, open to anybody to appropriate them in the market, is an expression of alienation. There are quite a number of other descriptions, but basically, alienation is a process of having something that is part of us (our bodies, thoughts, work, feelings, beliefs, etc.) revealed as foreign. Rooting the explanation of this very significant process of alienation (and of the concept representing it in language) in the establishment and use of signs, makes possible the understanding of its pragmatic implications. Awareness of signs is awareness of the difference between who we are and how we express our identity. In the case of signs representing some object (the drawing of the object or of the person, the name, social security number, passport, etc.), the difference between what is represented and the representation is as much an issue of appropriateness (why we call a table table or a certain woman Mary) as it is one of alienation. The conscious use of signs most probably results from the observation people make that their thoughts, feelings, or questions are almost always imperfectly expressed. Two things happen, probably at the same time: 1. No longer dealing directly with the object, or intended action, but with its representation, makes it more difficult to share with others experiences pertinent to the object. 2. The interpretation being no longer one of the direct object, or the intended action, but of its representation, it leads to new experiences, and thus associations-some confusing, and others quite stimulating. The image was still close to the object; the confusion regarded actions. Writing is remote from objects, though actions can be better described since differentiation of time is much easier. We know by now that moving images, or sequences of photographs of the action, are even better for this purpose. With the written word, even in the most primitive use of it, events become the object of record. Relations, as well as reciprocal commitments among community members, can also be put in the records. Norms can be established and imposed. A fundamental change, resulting from the increased productivity of the newly settled communities, is accounted for in writing. People no longer deal with work in order to live (in order to survive, actually), but with life dedicated to work. Writing, more than previously used signs (sounds, images, movements, colors), estranges human beings from the environment and from themselves. Some feelings (joy, sadness), some attitudes (anger, mistrust) become signs and, once expressed, can be written down (e.g., in letters, wills). In order to be shared, thoughts go through the same process, and so does everything else pertaining to life, activity, change, illness, love, and death. It was stated many times that writing and the settlement of human beings are related. So are writing and the exchange of goods, as well as what will become known as labor division. While the use of verbal language makes possible the differentiation of human praxis, the use of written language requires the division between physical and non-physical work. Writing requires skills, such as those needed for using a stylus to engrave in wax or clay, quill on parchment, later the art of calligraphy. It implies knowledge of language and of its rules of grammar and spelling. There is a great difference between writing skills and the skills needed for processing animal skins, meat, various agricultural products, and raw materials. The social status of scribes proves only that this difference was duly acknowledged. It should be added here that the few who mastered writing were also the few who mastered reading. Nevertheless, some historic reference points to the contrary: in the 13th century, non-reading subjects were used as scribes because the accuracy of their undisturbed copying was better than that of those who read. This reference is echoed today in the use of non-English speaking operators to key-in texts, i.e., to transfer accumulated records into digital databases. And while the number of readers increased continuously, the number of writers, lending their hands as scribes to real writers, remained small for many centuries. Literacy started as an elitist overhead expenditure in primitive economies, became an elitist occupation surrounded by prejudices and superstition, expanded after technological progress (however rudimentary) facilitated its dissemination, and was finally validated in the marketplace as a prerequisite for the higher efficiency of the industrial age. Primitive barter did not rely on and did not require the written word, although barter continued even after the place of written language became secure. In barter, people interact by exchanging whatever they produce in order to fulfill their immediate needs within a diversified production. The alienation peculiar to barter and the alienation characteristic of a market relying on the mediating function of written language are far from being one and the same. In short, exchanging is fundamentally different from selling and buying. Products to be exchanged still bear the mark of those who sweat to produce them. Products to be sold become impersonal; their only identity is the need they might satisfy or sometimes generate. Myth, as a set of practical programs for a limited number of local human experiences, no longer satisfied exigencies of a community diversifying its experience and interacting with communities living in different environments. This contrast of market forms characteristic of orality and of incipient writing is related to the contrast between myth transmitted orally and mythology, associated with the experience of writing. Language in its written form appeared as a sui generis social memory, as potential history. The obsession with genealogies (in China, India, Egypt, among the Hebrews, and in oral culture in general) was an obsession with human sequences stored in a memory with social dimensions. It was also an obsession with time, since each genealogical line is simultaneously a historic record-who did what, when and where; who followed; and how things changed. Most of these aspects are only implicit in genealogy. In oral culture, genealogies were turned into mnemonic devices, easily adjustable to new conditions of life, but still circular, and just as easily transformable from a record of the past into a command for the future. In its incipient phases as notation and record, genealogy still relied on images to a great extent (the family tree), but also on the spoken, maintaining a variability similar to that of the oral. Nevertheless, the possibility for more stabilized expression, for storing, for uniformity, and consistency was given in the very structure of writing. These were progressively reached in the first attempts to articulate ideas, concepts, and what would become the corpus of theoria- contemplation of things translated into language-on which the sciences and humanities of yesterday, and even some of today, are based. Theories are in some ways genealogies, with a root and branches representing hypotheses and various inferences. Written language extended the permanence of records (genealogies, ownership, theories, etc.) and facilitated access through relatively uniform codes. In the city-states of ancient Greece, writing alerted people working within the pragmatic constraints of orality to the dangers involved in a new mechanism of expression and communication. Writing seemed to introduce its own inaccuracies, either because of a deliberate attitude towards certain experiences, or as a result of systematic avoidance of inconsistency, which ended up affecting the records of facts. As we know, facts are not intrinsically consistent in their succession. Therefore, we still use all kinds of strategies to align them, even if they are obliquely random. In the oral mode, as opposed to procedures later introduced through writing, consistency was maintained by a succession of adaptations in the sequence of conversations through which records were transmitted. Within oral communication, there is a direct form of criticism, i.e., the self-adjusting function of dialogue. Completeness and consistency are different in conversation (open-ended) than in written text, and even more different in formal languages. Memory itself was also at issue. Reliance on the written might affect memory- which was the repository of a people's tradition and identity in the age of orality- because it provided an alternative medium for storage. The written has a different degree of expression and leaves a different impression than the oral. Writing, confined to those who read, could also affect constitution and sharing of knowledge. Writing was characterized as superficial, not reaching the soul (again, lacking expressiveness), interfering between the source of knowledge and the receiver of any lesson about knowledge. Spoken words are the words of the person speaking them. A written text seems to take on a life of its own and appears as external, alien. The written is given and does not account for differences among human beings; the spoken can be adapted or changed, its coherence dependent upon the circumstances of the dialogue. There are societies today (the Netsidik, the Nuer, the Bassari, to name a few) that still prefer the oral to the written. Within their pragmatic framework, the live expression of the human uttering the words in the presence of others conveys more information than the same words can in writing. The memory of a literate society becomes more and more a repository of the various mediations in social life and loses its relation to direct experience. Things said (what the Greeks called legomena) are different from things done (dromena). The written word connects to other words, not to things done. And so does the sentence, when it acquires its status as a relatively complete unit of language. But the real change is brought about by the written, whether on papyrus, clay, scroll or tablet, or in stone or lead. Such a page connects to other written pages and to writing in general. Thus, things done disappear in the body of history, which becomes the collection of writings, eventually stored on bookshelves. The meaning of history is expressed in the variability of the connections ascertained from one text to another. When the here and now of dromena are expurgated, we remain only with the consciousness of sequences. This is a gain, but also a loss: the holistic meaning of experience vanishes. How much of this kind of criticism, opposing the oral to the written, is relevant to the phenomena of our time cannot be evaluated in a simple statement. Language has changed so much that in order to understand texts originating at the time of this criticism, we have to translate and annotate them. Some are already reconstituted from writings of a later time (i.e., of a different pragmatic framework), or even from translations. There is no direct correspondence between the literacy of emergent writing and that of automated writing and reading. In some cases we have to define a contextual reference in the absence of which large parts of these recuperated texts make little sense, if any, to people constituted in literacy and in a pragmatic reality so different from that of thousands of years ago. Even written words are dependent on the context in which they are used. In other words, although it seems that written language is less alive than conversation, and less bound to change, it actually changes. We write today, using technologies for word processing, in ways different from any other practical experience of writing. The criticism voiced in Plato's time cannot be entirely dismissed. Writing became the medium through which some human experiences were reified. It allowed for extreme subjectivity: In the absence of dialogue and of the influence of criticism through dialogue, the past was continuously reinvented according to goals and values of the writer's present. In orality-dominated social life, opinion (which Greeks called doxa) was the product of language activity, and it had to be immediate. In writing, truth is sought and preserved. What made Socrates sound so fierce (at least in Plato's dialogues) in his attacks against writing was his intuition of progressive removal from the source of thinking, hence the danger of unfaithful interpretation. Socrates, as well as Plato, feared indirectness and wrote conclusively about memory and wisdom. Situated between Socrates and Aristotle, Plato could observe and express the consequences of writing: "I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence." As one of the first philosophers of writing, Plato could not yet observe that writing is not simply the transcription of thoughts (of the words through which and in which humans think), that ideas are formed differently in writing than in speech, that writing represents a qualitatively new sign system in which meanings are formed and communicated through a mechanism once more mediated in respect to practical reality. The subject of confidence in language became the central theme of the Sophists' exercise, of Medieval philosophy, of Romanticism, and of the literature of the absurd (symptomatically popular in the years following World War 2). Moving from the past to the present, we notice that memory is an issue of extreme importance today, too. Literacy challenges the reliability of memory across the board, even when memory is the repository of facts through which people establish themselves in the world of work. Professionals ranging from doctors, lawyers, and military commanders to teachers, nurses, and office personnel rely more on memory than do factory workers on an assembly line. The paradox is that the more educated a professional is, the less he or she needs to rely on literacy in the exercise of his or her profession, except in the initial learning process, which is made through books. With the advent of video and cassette tapes or disks, with digital storage and networks, literacy loses its supremacy as transmitter of knowledge. What makes language necessary is also what explains its history and its characteristics. Language came to life in a process through which humans projected themselves into the reality of their existence, identified themselves in respect to natural and social environments, and followed a path of linear growth. Orality testifies to limited, circular experiences but corresponds to an unsettled human being in search of well being and security. It relied on memory for the most part and was assimilated in ritual. The written appeared in the context of several fundamental changes: diversified human praxis, settlement, and a market that outgrew barter, each related and influencing the other. Its main result was the division between mental and physical labor. It made speaking, writing, and reading-characteristics of literacy, as we know it from the perspective of literate societies-logically possible. In fact, it represented only the possibility of literacy, not its beginning. Once we understand how language works and what were some of the functions of language that corresponded to the new stage made possible by writing, we shall also understand how writing contributed to the future ideal of literacy. Orality and Writing Today: What Do People Understand When They Understand Language? Sitting before your computer, you connect to the World Wide Web. What is of interest today? How about something in neurosurgery? Somewhere on this planet, a neurosurgeon is operating. You can see individual neurons triggering right on your monitor. Or you can view how the surgeon tests the patient's pattern recognition abilities, allowing the surgeon to draw a map of the brain's cognitive functioning, a map essential for the outcome of the operation. Every now and then the dialogue between surgeon and assistants is complemented by the display of data coming from different monitoring devices. Can you understand the language they are using? Could a written report of the operation substitute for the real-time event? For a student in neurosurgery, or for a researcher, the issue of understanding is very different from what it would be for a lay-person. Tired of science? A concert is taking place at another Internet address. Musical groups from all over the world are sending their live music to this address. As a multi- threaded performance, this concert enables its listeners to select from among the many simultaneously performing groups. They sing about love, hope, understanding...all the themes that each listener is familiar with. Still, understanding every word the musicians use, do you understand what is taking place? Moving away from the Internet, one could visit a factory, a stock exchange, a store. One could find oneself in subway in any city, witness a first-grade class in session, or pursue business in a government office. All these scenarios embody the various forms of self-constitution through practical activity. It seems that everyone involved is talking the same language, but who understands what? In seemingly simpler contexts, what do individuals understand today when they understand a written instruction or conversations, casual or official? The context is our day, which is different from that of any previous time, and, in particular, different from that of a literacy- dominated pragmatics. The answers to the questions posed above do not come easily. A foundation has to be provided for addressing such questions from a perspective broader than that afforded by the examples given. A feedback called confirmation Understanding language is a process that extends far beyond knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Where there is no sharing of experience beyond what a particular language sequence expresses, there is no understanding. This sounds like a difficult expectation. To be met, the non-expressed must be present in the listener, reader, or writer. Language must recreate the non-expressed, through the sequence heard, read, or written, and related to it, beyond the words recognized and the grammar used. Behind each word that people comprehend, there is either a common practical experience, or a shared pragmatic framework, or minimally some form of shared understanding, which constitute what is known as background knowledge. "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world," Wittgenstein promulgated. I would rephrase, in an attempt to connect knowledge and experience, "The limits of my experience are the limits of my world." Self-constitution in language is such an experience. The first level of the indirect relation established between someone expressing something in language and someone else trying to understand it is concentrated in a semantic assumption: "I know that you know." But is it a sufficient condition to continue a conversation, let's say about a hunted animal, fire, or a tool, as long as the listener knows what the hunted animal or fire is? Many who study semantics think that it is, and accordingly devise strategies for establishing a shared semantic background. These strategies range from making sure that students in a class understand the same things when they use the same words, to publishing comprehensive dictionaries of what they perceive as the necessary shared knowledge in order to maintain cultural coherence at the appropriate scale of the group or community in question. In the final analysis, these strategies correspond to a semantically based model of cultural education driven by the Chomskyan distinction between competence and performance. They identify the problem in the incongruence of our individual dictionaries (vocabulary), not in the diversity of human practical experiences. The assumption is that once people understand what is in language, they apply it (pragmatics as "uses and effects of signs within the behavior in which they occur," according to J. Lyons). We know by now that after a certain stage of unifying influences corresponding to industrial society, this congruence becomes impossible when the scale of human experience changes. The examples given at the beginning of this chapter are evidence of this fact. What I maintain throughout this book is that language is constituted in human experiences, not merely applied to them. Performance predates competence. Recognition, of an utterance, a written word, a sentence, is itself an experience through which individuals define each one of themselves. Within a limited scale of existence and experience, the homogeneity of the circumstance guaranteed the coherence of language use. As the number of people increases, and as they are involved in increasingly varied experiences, they no longer share a homogeneous pragmatic framework. Consequently, they can no longer assume the coherence of language. Progressively, ever diversifying practical experiences cause words, phrases, and sentences to mean more and different things at the same time. Instantiation of meaning is always in the experience through which individuals constitute their identity. Examination of the various elements affecting the status of literacy in the contemporary world of fragmented practical experiences opens a new perspective on language. Within this perspective, we acknowledge how and when similar experiences make the unifying framework of literacy possible and necessary. We also acknowledge from which point literacy is complemented by literacies and what, if anything, bridges among such literacies. Direct experience and mediated experience are the two stages to be considered. In particular, we are interested in language at the level where direct experience is affected by the insertion of gestures, sounds, and initial words. Indirectness implies awareness of a shared reference-the gesture, the sound, the word-that is simultaneously shared experience. At this level, there is no generality. Patterns of activity are patterns of self-constitution: in the act of hunting, the hunter projects physical abilities (running, seeing, ability to use the terrain, to grab stones, to target). In relation to other hunters, he projects abilities pertinent to coordination, planning, and reciprocal understanding. Within this pragmatic framework, a level of indirectness is constituted: confirmation, or what cybernetics identifies as feedback, in all biological processes. Along this line, the initial (unuttered and obviously unwritten) "I know that you know" becomes subsequently "I know that you know that I know." Coordination and hierarchy within the given task come into the picture. Indeed, if we consider the experience as the origin of meaning in language, the sequence of assumptions is even larger: "I know that you know that I know that you know." It corresponds to a cognitive level totally different from that of direct practical experiences. In a way, this threefold sequence shows how syntax is enveloped in semantics, and both in the pragmatics that determines them. Applied to the hunting scene, it says, "I know that you know that I am over here, opposite you, we are both closing in on a hunted animal, and I know that you are aware that you might throw your spear in my direction; but the fact that we share in the knowledge of who is placed where will help us get the animal and not kill each other by accident." At a very small scale of human experiences, the sequence was realized without language. Patterns of activity captured its essence. At a larger scale, words replaced signs used for coordination. Writing established frames of reference and a medium for planning more complex activities. The language of drawings, for what eventually became artifacts, confirmed the sequence in the built-in knowledge. The Internet browser, a graphic interface to an infinity of simultaneous experiences of sharing information, frees participants from saying to each other, "Hello. I am here." It facilitates a virtual community of individuals who constitute the experience of real-time neurosurgery, or the virtual concert mentioned at the beginning of this section. In similar ways, new patterns of work in the civilization of illiteracy constitute our work-place, school, or government, based on the same pragmatic assumptions. Between the primitive hunters and those who in our days identify their presence by all kinds of devices-a badge, a pager, a mobile phone, an access card, a password-there is a difference in the means and forms used to acknowledge the shared awareness that affects the outcome of the experience. Even the simple act of greeting someone we think we know implies the whole sequence of feedback (double confirmation, each participant's awareness, and shared awareness). This says, probably in too many words: 1. To understand language means to understand all the others with whom we share practical experiences of self-constitution. 2. All the others must realize this implicit expectation of communication. 3. Each new pragmatic context brings about new experiences and new forms of awareness. This understanding can go something along the line of, "I know that you know that I know that you know" what the hunted animal is, what fire is, which tool can be used and how; or in today's context, what surgery is, what a brain is, what a virtual concert is, what a certain activity in a production cycle affects, what the function of a particular government office is. Otherwise, the conversation would stop, or another means of expression (such as recreating fire, or demonstrating a tool) would have to be used, as happened in the past and as frequently happens today: "I know that you know how to drive a car (or use a computer), but let me show you how." Confirmation in language, gestures, and facial expression signals the understanding. Whenever this understanding fails, it fails on account of the missing confirmation. When this confirmation is no longer uniquely provided by means characteristic of literacy-let us recall modern warfare, technology controlling nuclear reactors, electronic transactions-the need for literacy is subject to doubt. Since the majority of instruction conveyed today is through images (drawings), or image and sound (videotapes), or some combination of media, it is not surprising that literacy is met with skepticism, if not by those who teach, at least by those who are taught. In the pragmatics of their existence they already live beyond the literate understanding. This applies not only to the Internet, but just as well to places of work, schools, government, and other instances of pragmatic activity. Primitive orality and incipient writing In addition to the general background of understanding, there are many levels, represented by the clues present in speech or writing, or in other forms of expression and communication. For example, a question is identified by some vocal expression accepted as interrogation. In writing, the question is denoted by a particular sign, depending on the particular language. But other clues, no less important, are more deeply seated. They refer to such things as intention, who is talking-man, woman, child, policeman, priest-the context of the talk, hierarchies-social, sexual, moral-and many other clues. Much extra-language background knowledge goes into human language and directs understanding from experience to language use. Dialogue is more than two persons throwing sentences at each other. It is a pragmatic situation requiring as much language as understanding of the context of the conversation because each partner in the dialogue constitutes himself or herself for the other. Dialogue is the elementary cell of communication experience. Within dialogue, language is transcended by the many other sign systems through which human self-constitution takes place. Dialogues make it clear that understanding language becomes a supra- (or para-) linguistic endeavor. It requires the discovery of the clues, in and outside language, and of their relationship. But more importantly, it requires the reconstruction of experience as it is embodied in background knowledge. By contrasting primitive orality to incipient writing, we can understand that the process of establishing conventions is motivated by the need to overrule concreteness and to access a new cognitive realm that a different pragmatic context necessitates. By understanding how experience affects their relation, we can consider orality and writing in successive moments of human pragmatics, i.e., within a concrete scale of humankind. Indeed, when writing emerged, elements of orality corresponding to a reduced scale of experience were reproduced in its structure because they were continued at the cognitive level. In our days, there is a far less pressing need to mimic orality in written signs. Some will argue that 4 Sale, 4-Runner, While-U-Wait, and Toys 'R' Us, among other such expressions, are examples to the contrary. These attempts to compress language represent ways of establishing visual icons, of achieving a synthetic level better adapted to fast exchange of information. We see many more examples in interactive multimedia, or in the heavy traffic of Internet-based communication. There is no literacy involved here, and no literacy is expected in decoding the message. There is a strong new orality, with characteristics reminiscent of previous orality. But the dominant element is the visual as it becomes a new icon. The international depiction of a valentine-shaped heart to represent the word love is one example in this sense; the icons used in Europe on clothing care labels are others. Time reference in texts today is made difficult by the nature of processes characteristic of our age: numerous simultaneous transactions, distributed activity, interconnection, rapid change of rules. These cannot be appropriately expressed in a written text. In the global world, Now means quite a different thing for individuals connected over many time zones. Sunrise experienced on the Web page of the city of Santa Monica can be immediately associated to poetic text through a link. But the implicit experience of time (and space) carried by language and made instrumental in literacy does not automatically refresh itself. It took thousands of years before humans became acquainted with the conventions of writing. It is possible that some of these conventions were assimilated in the hardware (brain) supporting cognitive activity and progressively projected in new forms of self-constitution. The practice of writing and the awareness of the avenues it opened led to new conventions. Practical endeavors, originating in the conventions of space and time, implicit in the written (and the subsequent reading), resulted in changed conventions. For instance, the discovery that time and space could be fragmented, a major realization probably not possible in the culture of orality, resulted in new practical experiences and new theories of space and time. Once writing became a practical experience and constituted a legitimate reality, at a level of generality characteristic of its difference from gestures, sounds, uttered words or sentences, associations became possible at several levels of the text. Some were so unexpected or unusual that understanding such associations turned into a real challenge for the reader. This challenge regarding understanding is obviously characteristic of new levels, such as the self-referential, omnipresent in the wired world of home pages. In some ways, language is becoming a medium for witnessing the relation between the conscious, unconscious, or subconscious, and language itself. The brain surgery mentioned some pages ago suppressed the patient's conscious recognition of objects or actions by inhibiting certain neurons. The unnatural, nonlinguistic use of language is studied by psychologists, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers in order to understand the relation between language and intelligence. This need to touch upon the biological aspects of the practical experiences of speaking, writing, or reading results from the premise pursued. Self-constitution of the human being takes place while the biological endowment is projected into the experience. Important work on what are called split- brain patients-persons who, in order to suppress epileptic attack, have had the connection between the two brain hemispheres severed-shows that even the neat distinction left-right (the left part of the brain is in charge of language) is problematic. Researchers learned that in each practical experience, our biological endowment is at work and at the same time subject to self-reflection. Projecting a word like laugh in the right field of vision results in the patients' laughing, although in principle they could not have processed the word. When asked, such patients explain their laughter through unrelated causes. If a text says "Scratch yourself," they actually scratch themselves, stating that it is because something itches. Virtual reality practical experiences take full advantage of these and other clinical observations. The absent in a virtual reality environment is very often as important as the present. On the back channels of virtual reality interactions, not only words but also data describing human reactions (turning one's head, closing the eyes, gesturing with the hand) can be transmitted. Once fed back, such data becomes part of the virtual world, adapted to the condition of the person experiencing it. This is why interest in cognitive characteristics of oral communication-of the primitive stages or of the present-remains important. Background information is more readily available in oral communication. In orality, things people refer to are closer to the words they use. Human co-presence in conversation results in the possibility to read and translate the word under the guise of a willingness by others to show what a particular word stands for. In orality, the experience pertinent to the word is shared in its entirety. This is possible because the appropriate world of experience (corresponding to the circular scale of human praxis) is so limited that the language is in a one-to-one relation with what it describes. In some ways, the parent-child relation is representative of this stage in the childhood of humankind. In the new orality of the civilization of illiteracy the same one-to-one relation is established through strategies of segmentation. The speaker and listener(s) share space and time-and hence past, present, and, to a certain degree, future. And even if the subject is not related to that particular space and moment, it already sets a reference mechanism in place by virtue of the fact that people in dialogue are people sharing a similar experience of self-constitution. Far is far from where they speak; a long time ago is a long time ago from the moment of the verbal exchange. The acquisition of far, long (or short) time ago is in itself the result of practical circumstances leading to a more evolved being. We now take these distinctions for granted, surprised when children ask for tighter qualifiers, or when computer programs fail because we input information with insufficient levels of distinction. The realization of the frame of time and space occurred quite late in the development of the species, within the scale of linear relationships, and only as a result of repeated practical experiences, of sequences constituting patterns. Once the reference mechanism for both time and space was acknowledged and integrated in new experiences, it became so powerful that it allowed people to simplify their language and to assume much more than what was actually said. In today's world, space and time are constituted in experiences affected by the experience of relativity. Accordingly, the orality of the civilization of illiteracy is not a return to primitive orality, but to a referential structure that helps us better cope with dynamism. The space and time of virtual experiences are an example of effective freedom from language, but not from the experiences through which we acquired our understanding of time and space. Computers able to perform in the space of human assumptions are not yet on the horizon of current technological possibilities. Assumptions Assumptions are a component of the functioning of sign systems. A mark left can make sense if it is noticed. The assumption of perception is the minimum at which expression is acknowledged. Assumptions of writing are different from those of orality. They entail the structural characteristics of the practical experiences in which the people writing constitute their identity. Literate assumptions, unlike any other assumptions in language, are extensions of linear, sequential experience in all its constitutive parts. They are evinced in vocabulary, but even more strongly in grammar. In many ways, the final test of any sign system is that of its built-in assumptions. Illiteracy is an experience outside the realm defined by the means and methods of literacy. The civilization of illiteracy challenges the need and justification of literate assumptions, especially in view of the way these affect human effectiveness. The very fine qualifiers of time and space that we take for granted today were acknowledged only slowly, and initially at a rather coarse level of distinction. Despite the tremendous progress made, even today our experience with time and space requires some of the repertory of the primitive human. Movements of hands, head, other body parts (body language), changes in facial expression and skin color (e.g., blushing), breathing rhythm, and voice variations (e.g., intonation, pause, lilt)-all account for the resurrection in dialogue of an experience much richer than language alone can convey. Such para-linguistic elements are no less meaningful in new practical experiences, such as interaction with and inside virtual environments. Para-linguistic elements consciously used in primitive communities, or unconsciously present, still escape our scrutiny. Their presence in communication among members of communities sharing a certain genetic endowment takes different forms. They are not reducible to language, although they are connected to its experience. Examples of this are the strong sense of rhythm among Blacks in America and Africa, the sense of holistic perception among Chinese and Japanese. We can only conjecture, from words reconstituted in the main language strand (proto-languages), or in the mother tongue of humankind (proto-world), that words were used in conjunction with non-linguistic entities. Whether a mother-tongue or a pre-Babel language existed is a different issue. The hypothesis mimics the notion of a common ancestor of the species and obviously looks for the language of this possible ancestor. More important, however, is the observation that the practical experience of language constitution does not eliminate everything that is not linguistic in nature. Moreover, the para-linguistic, even when language becomes as dominant as it does under the reign of literacy, remains significant for the effectiveness of human activity. The civilization of illiteracy does not necessarily dig for para-linguistic remnants of previous practical endeavors. It rather constitutes a framework for their participation in a more effective pragmatics, in the process involving technological means capable of processing all kinds of cues. In a given frame of time and space, para-linguistic signs acquire a strong conventional nature. The way the word for I evolved (quite differently than equivalents in different languages of the world: ich, je, yo, eu, én, ani, etc.), and the way words relating to two evolved (hands, legs, eyes, ears, parents), and so forth, gives useful leads. It seems, for instance, that the pair entered language as a modifier (i.e., a grammatical category), marked by non-linguistic signs (clasp, repetition, pointing). Some of the signs are still in use. The grammatical category and the distinction between one and two are related. The Aranda population (in Australia) combine the words for one and two in order to handle their arithmetic. Also, the distinction singular- plural begins with two. We take this for granted, but in some languages (e.g., Japanese), there is no distinction between singular and plural. In addition, it should be pointed out here that the same signs (e.g., use of a finger to point, hand signals) can be understood in different ways in different cultures. Bulgarians shake their head up and down to signal no, and side to side to signal yes. Within a given culture, each sign eventually becomes a very strong background component because it embodies the shared experience through which it was constituted. In direct speech, we either know each other, or shall know each other to a certain extent, represented by the cumulative degrees of "I know that you know that I know that you know," defining a vague notion of knowledge within a multivalued logic. This makes speaking and listening an experience in reciprocal understanding, if indeed the conversation takes place in a non-linear, vague context impossible to emulate in writing. Dialogues in the wired world, as well as in transactional situations of extreme speed (stock market transactions, space research, military actions), belong to such experiences, impossible to pursue within the limitations of literacy. Orality can be assertive (declarative), interrogative, and imperative (a great deal more so than writing). In the course of time, and due to very extended experience with language and its assumptions in oral form, humans acquired an intrinsic interactive quality. This resulted from a change in their condition: on the natural level there was the limited interactivity of action-reaction. In the human realm, the nucleus action-reaction led to subsequent sequences through which areas of common interest were defined. The progressive cognitive realization that speaking to someone involves their understanding of what we say, as well as the acknowledged responsibility to explain, whenever this understanding is incomplete or partial, is also a source of our interactive bent. Questions take over part of the role played by the more direct para-linguistic signs and add to the interactive quality of dialogue, so long as there is a common ground. This common ground is assumed by everyone who maintains the idea of literacy-how else to establish it?-as a necessity, but understood in many different ways: the common ground as embodied in vocabulary and grammar, in logic, spelling, phonetics, cultural heritage. Granted that a common language is a necessary condition for communication, such a common language is not simultaneously a sufficient condition, or at least not one of most efficient, for communication. Interactivity, as it evolved beyond the literate model, is based on the probability, and indeed necessity, to transcend the common language expectation and replace it with variable common codes, such as those we establish in the experience of multimedia or in networked interactions. Even the ability to interact with our own representation as an avatar in the Internet world becomes plausible beyond the constraining borders of literate identity. Taking literacy for granted In preceding paragraphs, we examined what is required, in addition to a common language, for a conversation to make sense. Scale is another factor. The scale that defines a dialogue is very different from the scale at which human self-constitution, language acquisition and use included, take place. Scale by itself is not enough to define either dialogue or the more encompassing language-oriented, or language- based, practical activity through which people ascertain their biological endowment and their human characteristics. There is sufficient proof that at the early stage of humankind, individuals could be involved only in homogeneous tasks. Within such a framework of quasi-homogeneous activity, dialogues were instances of cooperation and confirmation, or of conflict. Diversification made them progressively gain a heuristic dimension-choosing the useful from among many possibilities, sometimes against the logical odds of maintaining consistency or achieving completeness. A generalized language-supported practical activity involved not only heuristics ("If it seems useful, do it"), but also logic ("If it is right/If it makes sense"), through the intermediary of which truth and falsehood take occupancy of language experiences. Thus an integrative influence is exercised. This influence increases when orality is progressively superseded by the limited literacy of writing and reading. The quasi-generalized literacy of industrial society reflected the need for unified and centralized frameworks of practical experience, within a scale optimally served by the linearity of language. In our days, people constitute themselves and their language through experiences more diverse than ever. These experiences are shorter and relatively partial. They are only an instant in the more encompassing process they make possible. The result is social fragmentation, even within the assumed boundaries of a common language, which nations are supposed to be, and paradoxically survive their own predicted end. In reality, this common language ceases to exist, or at least to function as it used to. What exists are provisional commitments making up a framework for activities impossible to carry out as a practical experience defined by literacy. Within each of these fast-changing commitments, partial languages, of limited duration and scope, come into existence. Sub-literacies accompany their lives. Experience as such opens avenues to more orality, under post-literate conditions-in particular, conditions of increased efficiency made possible by technology that negates the pragmatics of literacy. The most favorable case for the functioning of language-direct verbal communication-becomes a test case for what it really means to speak the same language, and not what we assume a common language accomplishes when written or read by everyone. Instances of direct verbal communication today (in the family and community, when visiting foreign countries, at work, shopping, at church, at a football stadium, answering opinion polls or marketing inquiries, in social life) are also instances of taking for granted that others speak our own language. Many researchers have attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of communication in these contexts. Their observations are nevertheless not independent of the assumed premise of literacy as a necessity and as a shared pragmatic framework. Some recent research on the cognitive dimension of understanding language does not realize how deep the understanding goes. One example given is the terse instruction on a bottle of shampoo: "Lather. Rinse. Repeat." It is not a matter of an individual's ability to read the instructions in order to know how to proceed. One does not need to be literate, moreover, one does not even need to create language in order to use shampoo, if one is familiar with the purpose and use of shampoo (i.e., with the act). Indeed, for most individuals, the word shampoo on a bottle suffices for them to use it correctly with no written instructions at all. Icons or hieroglyphics can convey the instructions just as well, even better, than literacy can. These, by the way, are coming more into use in our global economy. It is even doubtful that most individuals read the instructions because they are familiar not just with the conventions that go into using shampoo, but, deeper still, the conventions behind the words of the instructions. Should an adult, even a literate adult, who was totally unfamiliar with the concept of washing his or her hair be presented with a bottle of shampoo, the entire experience of washing the hair with shampoo would have to be demonstrated and inculcated until it became part of that adult's self-constitutive repertory. Such analyses of language only scrape the surface of how humans constitute themselves in language. Literacy forces certain assumptions upon us: Literate parents educate literate children. A sense of community requires that its members share in the functionality of literacy. Literate people communicate better beyond the borders of their respective languages. Literacy maintains religious faith. People can participate in social life only if they are literate. Considering such assumptions, we should realize that the abstract concept of literacy, resulting from the assumption that a common language automatically means a common experience, only maintains false hope. Children of literate parents are not necessarily literate. Chances are that they are already integrated in the illiterate structures of work and life to the same degree children of illiterate parents are. This is not a matter of individual choice, or of parental authority. On the digital highway, on which a growing number of people define their coordinates, with the prevalent sign @ taking over any other identification, communities emerge independent of location. Participation in such communities is different in nature from literate congregations maintained by a set of reciprocal dependencies that involved spelling as much as it involved accepting authority or working according to industrial production cycles. In all of today's communication, not only is the literate component no longer dominant, it is undergoing the steepest percentile fall in comparison to any other form of communication. In this framework, states and bureaucracies are putting up a good fight for their own survival. But the methods and means of literacy on which their entire activity-regulation, control, self-preservation-is based have many times over proven inefficient. These statements do not remove the need to deal with how people understand writing, to which literacy is more closely connected than it is to speech. To discover what makes the task of understanding language more difficult as language frees itself from the constraints of literacy within the new pragmatic framework is yet another goal we pursue. To understand understanding Incipient writing was pictorial. This was an advantage in that it regarded the world directly, immediately perceived and shared, and a disadvantage in that it did not support more than a potential generality of expression. It maintained notation very close to things, not to speech. Image-dominated language came along with a simplified frame of space and time reference. Things were presented as close or far apart, as successive events or as distant, interrupted events. Anyone with a minimal visual culture can read Chinese or Japanese ideograms, i.e., see mountain, sky, or bird in the writing. But this is not reading the language; it is reading the natural world from which the notation was extracted, reconstituting the reference based on the iconic convention. Alphabetic writing annihilates this frame of experience based on resemblance. Unless time is specifically given, or coordinates in space intentionally expressed, time and space tend to be assimilated in the text, and more deeply in the grammar. It is a different communication, mediated by abstract entities whose relation to experience is, in turn, the result of numerous substitutions, the record of which is not at the disposal of the reader. Between tell in English and the root tal (or dal) in proto-language (with the literal meaning of tongue), there is a whole experiential sequence available only implicitly in the language. In the nostratic phylum (root of many languages, the Indo- European among them), luba stands for thirst; the English love and the German Liebe seem to derive from it, although when we think of love we do not associate it with the physical experience of thirst. Clues in written language are clues to language first of all, and only afterwards clues to human experience. Accordingly, reading a text requires an elaborate cognitive reconstruction of the experience expressed, and probably a never-ending questioning of the appropriateness of its understanding. When a text is read, there is nobody to be questioned, nobody to actively understand the understanding, to challenge it. The author exists in the text, as a projection, to the extent that the author exists in the manufactured objects we buy in order to use (glasses to drink water, chairs to sit on), or in whose production we participate in some way. After all, each text is a reality on paper, or on other means of storage and display. Clues can be derived from names of writers and from historic knowledge. What cannot be derived is the reciprocal exchange which goes on during conversation, the cooperative effort under circumstances of co- presence. Regardless of the degree of complexity, the interactive component of orality cannot be maintained in writing. This points to an intrinsic limitation relevant to our attempt to find out why literacy does not satisfy expectations characteristic of practical experiences requiring interactivity. The metaphoric use of interactivity, as it is practiced to express an animistic attitude according to which, for instance, the text is alive, and we interact with it in reading, interpreting, and understanding it, addresses a different issue. Difficulties in language understanding can be overcome, but not in the mechanical effort of improving language skills by learning 50 more words or studying a chapter in grammar. Rather, one has to build background knowledge through extending the experience (practical, emotional, theoretical, etc.) on which the knowledge to be shared relies. But once we proceed in this direction, we step out from the unifying framework of literacy, within which the diversity of experiences is reduced to the experience of writing, reading, and speaking. When this reduction is no longer possible-as we experience more and more under the new conditions of existence-understanding language becomes more and more difficult. At the same time, the result of understanding becomes less and less significant for our self-constitution in human experiences. If no other example comes to mind, the reader should reflect upon the many volumes that accompany the software you've bought in recent years. Their language is kept simple, but they are still difficult to comprehend. Once comprehended, the pay-off is slim. This is why the illiterate strategy of integrating on-line the instructions one needs to work with software is replacing literate documentation. These instructions can be reduced to graphic representations or simple animations. The framework is specialization, for instance, in providing instructions in a form adequate to the task. Within specialized experience, even writing and reading are subject to specialization. Literacy turns into yet another distinct form of human praxis instead of remaining its common denominator. Writing, in this context, makes it clear that language is not enough for understanding a text. Under our own scrutiny, writing becomes a form of praxis in itself, contributing to the general fragmentation of society, not to its unification. This happens insofar as specialized writing becomes part of the general trend towards specialization and generates specialized reading. Some explanation is necessary. Even when writers strive to adapt their language to a specific readership, the result is only partially successful, precisely because the experiences constituted in writing are disjoint. Indeed, the practical experience to be shared, and the subsequent practical experience of writing are different, pertinent to domains not reducible to each other. Sometimes the writer falls captive to the language (that very specialized subset of language adapted to a specific field of knowledge) and mimics natural discourse by observing grammar and rhetoric devices. Other times, the writer translates, or explains, as in popular magazines on physics, genetics, arts, psychology. Within this type of interpretive discourse either details are left out, or more details are added, with the intention of broadening the common base. Expressive devices, from simple comparisons (which should bridge different backgrounds) to metaphors, expose readers to a new level of experiences. Even if readers know what comparisons are and how metaphors work, they still cannot compensate for the unshared part of experience, with whose help a text makes sense. A legal brief, a military text, an investment analysis, the evaluation of a computer program are examples in this sense. The language they are written in looks like English. But they refer to experiences that a lawyer, or military officer, or broker, or computer programmer is likely to be familiar with. Writers, speakers, readers, and listeners are aware of the adjustments required to comprehend these and many other types of documents. While a direct conversation, for which time spent with others is required, can be a frame for adjustment, a printed page is definitely less so. The reader can, at best, transmit a reaction in writing, or write to request supplementary explanation, that is, to maintain the spirit of conversation. The experience of writing and reading is becoming less a general experience or cultural identifier, and more a specialized activity. Writing can be read by machines. In order to serve the blind, such machines read instructions, newspaper articles, and captions accompanying video images. The synthetic voice, as much as a synthetic eye or nose, a syntactic touch-sensitive device, or taste translator, operates in a realm devoid of the life that went into the text (image, odor, texture, taste) and which was supposed to be contributed by the reader (viewer, smeller, toucher, taster). Literacy, projected as a universal and permanent medium for expression, communication, and signification, nourished a certain romanticism or democracy of art, politics, and science. It embodied an axiomatic system: since everybody should speak, write, and read, everybody can and should speak, write, and read; everybody can and should appreciate poetry, participate in political life, understand science. This was indeed relatively true when poetry, politics, and science were, to a certain degree, direct forms of human praxis with levels of efficiency appropriate to the scale of human activity constituted in linear, homogeneous practical experiences. Now that the scale changed, dynamics accelerated, mediation increased, and non-linearity is accepted, we face a new situation. Paradoxically, the poet, the speech-writer, and the science-writer not only fail to address everybody, but they, as part and result of the mechanism of labor division, also contribute to the generation of partially literate human beings. In other words, they contribute to the fragmentation of society, although they are all devoted (some passionately) to the cause of its unity. In reaction to claims that literacy carried through time, a general deconstructionist attitude challenges the permanency of philosophical tractate, of scientific systems, of mathematics, political discourse and, probably more than anything else, of literature. The method applied is coherent: make evident the mechanisms used to create the illusion of permanence and truth. Texts thus appear as means to an end that does not directly count. What results is an account of the technology of expression, embraced by all who grew skeptical of the universality of science, politics and literature. When each sign (independent of the subject) becomes its own reference, and the experience it embodies is, strictly speaking, that of its making, the deconstructionist project reaches the climax. Nike's advertisement is not about sneakers, even less about the celebrities who wear them. It is a rather hermetic self-referential experience. Its understanding, however, is based on the fast-changing experience of revealing one's illiterate identity. Words about images The written, as we know, almost constantly appeared together with other referential systems, especially images. In this respect, a question regarding what we understand when we understand language is whether images can be used as an aid to understanding texts. Doubtless, pictures (at least some of them) are, by their cognitive attributes, better bearers of interpretation clues than are some words or writing devices. Images, more so than texts, can stand in for the absent writer. To the extent that they follow conventions of reality, pictures can help the individual reconstitute, at least partially, the frame of time and space, or one of the two. However, this represents only one side of the issue. The other side reveals that images are not always the best conveyors of information, and that what we gain by using them comes at a cost in understanding, clarity, or context dependence. First of all, what is gained through the abstraction of the words is almost entirely lost through the concreteness of the image. The very dense medium of writing stands in sharp contrast to the diluted medium of images. To download text on the network is quite different from displaying images. If this were the only reason, we would be alert to the differences between images and texts. When the complexity of the image reaches high levels, decoding the image becomes as tedious as decoding texts, and the result less precise. All this explains why people try to use a combination of images and words. It also helps in understanding strategies for their combination. As a strategy of relating text and image, redundancy helps in focusing interpretation. The strategy of complementing helps in broadening the interpretation. Other strategies, ranging from contrasting texts and images to paraphrasing texts through images, or substituting texts for images, or images for text, result in forceful ways of influencing interpretation by introducing explanatory contexts. A very large portion of today's culture-from the comic strip to picture novels and advertisements, to soap operas on the Internet-is embodied in works using such and similar strategies. What interests us here is whether images can replace the experience required to understand a text. If the answer is affirmative, such images would be almost like the partner in conversation. As products of human experience, images, just like language, embody that particular experience. This automatically makes the problem of understanding images more involved than just seeing them. But we knew this from written language. Seeing words or sentences or texts on paper (in script or in print) is only preliminary to understanding. The naturalness of images (especially those resembling the physical universe of our existence) makes access to them sometimes easier than access to written language. But this access is never automatic, and should never be taken for granted. In addition, while the written word does not invite to imitation, images play a more active role, triggering reactions different from those triggered by words. The code of language and visual codes are not reducible to each other; neither is their pragmatic function the same. Research reports are quasi-unanimous in emphasizing that the usefulness of pictures in increasing text comprehension seems not to depend on the mere presence of the image, but on the specific characteristics of the reader. These make clear the role played by what was defined as background knowledge, without which texts, images, and other forms of expression stabilized as languages make little sense, if any, to their readers, viewers, or listeners. In order to arrive at such conclusions, researchers went through real-time measurements of the so-called processing of texts, in comparison to picture-text processing. The paradigm employed uses eye movement recordings and comprehension measures to study picture-text interactions. Pictures helped what the researchers defined as poor readers. For skilled readers, pictures were neutral when the information was important. The presence of pictures interfered with reading when the information in the text was less important. Researchers also established that the type of text-expository or narrative-is not a factor and that pictures can help in recall of text details. This has been known for at least 300 years, if not longer. Actors in Shakespeare's time were prompted to recall their lines through visual cues embodied in the architecture of the theater. After all was measured and analyzed, the only dependable conclusion was that the effects of images on comprehension of written language are not easy to explain. Again, this should not come as a surprise as long as we use literacy-based quantifiers to understand the limits of literacy. Whether images are accidental or forced upon the reader, whether the text is quasi-linear or very sophisticated (i.e., results from practical experiences of high complexity), the relation does not seem to follow any pattern. Such experiments, along with many others based on a literacy premise, proved unsuitable for discovering the sources and nature of reading difficulties. Eye movement and comprehension measures used to study picture-text interactions only confirmed that today there are fewer commonalties, even among young students (not to mention among adults already absorbed in life and work) than at the time of the emergence of writing and reading. The diversification of forms of human experience, seen against the background of a relatively stable language adopted as a standard of culture, hints at the need to look at this relation as one of the possible explanations for the data, even for the questions that prompted the experiments in the first place. These questions have bearing on the general issue of literacy. Why reading, comprehension, and recall of written language have become more uncertain in recent years, despite efforts made by schools, parents, employers, and governments to improve instruction, remains unanswered. Regardless of how much we are willing to help the understanding of a text through the use of images, the necessity of the text, as an expression of a literate practical experience, is not enhanced. Conclusions like these are not easy to draw because we are still conditioned by literacy. Experiences outside the frame of literacy come much more naturally together because their necessity is beyond the conditioning of our rational discourse. This is how I can explain why on the Internet, the tenor of social and political dialogue is infinitely more free of prejudice than the information provided through books, newspapers, or TV. These observations should not be misconstrued as yet another form of technological determinism. The emphasis here, as elsewhere in the book, is on new pragmatic circumstances themselves, not on the means involved. The research reported above, as any research we hear about in our days, was carried out on a sample. A sample, as representative as it can be, is after all a scaled- down model of society. The issue critical to literacy being the scale of human practical existence, scaled-down models are simply not suited for our attempt to understand language changes when the complexity of our pragmatic self-constitution increases. We need to consider language, images, sounds, textures, odors, taste, motion, not to mention sub-verbal levels, where survival strategies are encoded, and beliefs and emotions are internalized, as they pertain to the pragmatic context of our existence. Literacy is not adequate for satisfactorily encoding the complexity and dynamics of practical experiences corresponding to the new scale that humankind has reached. The corresponding expectations of efficiency are also beyond the potential of literacy-based productivity. Ill-suited to address the mediated nature of human experience at this scale, literacy has to be integrated with other literacies. Its privileged status in our civilization can no longer be maintained. Korzybski was probably right in stating that language is a "map for charting what is happening both inside and outside of our skins." At the new stage that civilization has reached, it turns out that none of the maps previously drawn is accurate. If we really want details essential to the current and future development of our species, we have to recognize the change in metrics, i.e., in the scale of the charted entity, as well as in dynamics. The world is changing because we change, and as a result we introduce new dimensions in this world. Even when we notice similarities to some past moment-let us take orality as an example-they are only apparent and meaningless if not put in proper context. Technology made talking to each other at long distances (tele-communication) quite easy, because we found ways to overcome the constraints resulting from the limited speed of sound. The most people could do when living on two close hills was to visit, or to yell, or to signal with fire or lights. Now we can talk to somebody flying on an airplane, to people driving or walking, or climbing Mount Everest. Cellular telephony places us on the map of the world as precisely as the global positioning system (GPS) deployed on satellites. The telephone, in its generalized reality as a medium for orality, defies co- presence and can be accessed virtually from anywhere. Telephony as a practical experience in modern communication revived orality under circumstances of highly integrated, parallel, and distributed forms of human activity on a global scale. On the digital networks that increasingly represent the medium of self-constitution, we are goal and destination at the same time. In one click we are wherever we want to be, and to a great extent what we want to be or are able to do. With another click, we are only the instantiation of someone else's interest, acts, knowledge, or questioning. The use of images belongs to the same broad framework. So does television, omnipresent and, at times, seemingly omnipotent. We became connected to the world, but disconnected from ourselves. As bandwidth available for interacting through a variety of backchannels expands from copper wire to new fiberglass data highways, a structure is put in place that effectively resets our coordinates in the world of global activity. Defying the laws of physics, we can be in more than one place at the same time. And we can be more than one person at the same time. Understanding language under such circumstances becomes a totally new experience of self-constitution. Still, understanding language is understanding those who express themselves through language, regardless of the medium or the carrier. Literacy brought to culture the means for effectively understanding language in a civilization whose scale was well adapted to the linear nature of writing and reading, and to the logic of truth embodied in language. However, literacy lacks heuristic dimensions, is slow, and of limited interactivity. It rationalizes even the irrational, taking into bureaucratic custody all there is to our life. Common experience, in a limited framework characteristic of the beginning of language notation, is bound to facilitate interpretation and support conflicting choices. Divergent experiences, many driven by the search for the useful, the efficient, the mediating, experiences having less in common among themselves, make language less adapted to our self-constitution, and thus less easy to understand. In such a context, literacy can be perceived only as a phenomenon that makes all things it encomapsses uniform; therefore literacy is resisted. Far from being only a matter of skill, literacy is an issue of shared knowledge formed in work and social life. Changes in the pragmatic framework brought about the realization that literacy today might be better suited to bridging various fragmented bodies of knowledge or experiences, than to actually embodying them. Literacy might still affect the manner in which we use specialized languages as tools adapted to the various ways we see the world, the manner in which we try to change it and report on what happens as a result. But even under these charitable assumptions, it does not follow that literacy will, or should, continue to remain the panacea for all human expression, communication, and signification. The Functioning of Language To function is a verb derived from experiences involving machines. We expect from machines uniform performance within a defined domain. In adopting the metaphor of functioning to refer to language, we should be aware that it entails understandings originating from human interaction involving sign systems, in particular those eventually embodied in literacy. The argument we want to pursue is straightforward: identify language functions as they are defined through various pragmatic contexts; compare processes through which these functions are accomplished; and describe pragmatic circumstances in which a certain functioning mechanism no longer supports practical experiences at the efficiency level required by the scale of the pragmatic framework. Expression, communication, signification Traditionally, language functions either are associated with the workings of the brain or defined in the realm of human interaction. In the first case, comprehension, speech production, the ability to read, spell, write, and similar are investigated. Through non-invasive methods, neuropsychologists attempt to establish how memory and language functions relate to the brain. In the second case, the focus is on social and communicative functions, with an increasing interest in underlying aspects (often computationally modeled). My approach is different in that it bases language functions in the practical experience, i.e., pragmatics, of the species. Language functions are, in the final analysis, sign processes. Preceding language, signs functioned based on their ontogenetic condition. As marks left behind-footprints, blood from an open wound, teethmarks-signs facilitated associations only to the extent that individuals directly experienced their coming into being. Cognitive awareness of such marks led to associations of patterns, such as action and reaction, cause and effect. Biting that leaves behind teethmarks is an example. Pointers to objects-broken branches along a path, obsidian flakes where stones had been processed, ashes where a fire had burned-and, even more so, symptoms-strength or weakness-are less immediate, but still free of intentionality. Imitation brought the unintentional phase of sign experience to an end. In imitative signs, which are supposed to resemble whatever they stand for, the mark is not left, but produced with the express desire to share. The function best describing signs that are marks of the originator is expression. Communication is the function of bringing individuals together through shared experiences. Signification corresponds to an experience that has signs as its object and relies on the symbolic level. It is the function of endowing signs with the memory of their constitution in practical experiences. Signification expresses the self-reflective dimension of signs. Expression and communication, moreover signification, vary dramatically from one pragmatic framework to another. Expressions, as simili of individual characteristics and personal experience, can be seen as translations of these characteristics and of the experience through which they come into being. A very large footprint is a mark associated with a large foot, human or animal. It is important insofar as it defines, within a limited scale of experience, a possible outcome essential to the survival of those involved. Expressions in speech are marked by co-presence. The functioning of language within orality rested upon a shared experience of time and space, expressed through here and now. In writing, expression hides itself in the physical characteristics of the skill. This is how we come, for example, to graphology-an exercise in associating patterns of the marks somebody wrote on paper to psychological characteristics. Literacy is not concerned with this kind of expression, although literacy is conducive to it and eventually serves as a medium for graphology. Rather, literacy stipulates norms and expectations of correct writing. People adopting them know well that within the pragmatics based on literacy, the efficiency of practical experiences of self-constitution is enhanced by uniform performance. As we search in our days for the fingerprints of terrorists, we experience the function of expression in almost the reverse of previous pragmatic contexts. Their marks-identifiers of parts used to trigger explosions, or of manufacturers of explosives-are accidental. Terrorists would prefer to leave none. The analysis can be repeated for communication and signification. What they have in common is the progressive scale: expression for kin, expression for larger groups, collective expression, forceful expression as the scale of activity increases and individuals are gradually being negated in their characteristics. Communication makes the process even more evident. To bring together members of a family is different from achieving the togetherness of a tribe, community, city, province, nation, continent, or globe. But as available resources do not necessarily keep up with increased populations, and even less with the growth in need and expectations, it is critical to integrate cognitive resources in experiences of self-constitution. Communication, as a function performed through sign systems, reached through the means of literacy higher levels than during any previous pragmatic phase. Another increase in scale will bring even higher expectations of efficiency and, implicitly, the need for means to meet such expectations. Only as practical experiences become more complex and integrate additional cognitive resources do changes-such as from pre-verbal to verbal sign systems, from orality to writing, and from writing to literacy, or from literacy to post- literacy-take place. In other words, once the functioning of language no longer adequately supports human pragmatics in terms of achieving the efficiency that corresponds to the actual scale of that pragmatics, new forms of expression, communication, and signification become necessary. These remarks concern our subject, i.e., the transitional nature of any sign system, and in particular that of orality or that of literacy, in two ways: 1. They make us aware of fundamental functions (expression, communication, signification) and their dependence on pragmatic contexts. 2. They point to conditions under which new means and methods pertinent to effective functioning complement or override those of transcended pragmatic contexts. As we have seen, prior to language experiences, people constituted their identity in a phase of circular and self-referential reflection. This was followed by a pragmatics leading to sequential, linear practice of language and language notation. With writing, and especially with literacy, sequentiality, linearity, hierarchy, and centralism became characteristics of the entire practical experience. Writing was stamped by these characteristics at its inception, as were other practical activities. With its unfolding in literacy, it actively shaped further practical experiences. The potential of experiences sharing in these characteristics was reached in productive activities, in social life, in politics, in the arts, in commerce, in education and in leisure. The advent of higher-level languages and of means for visualization, expanding into animation, modeling, and simulation in our day, entails new changes. Their meaning, however, will forever escape us if we are not prepared to see what makes them necessary. Ultimately, this means to return to human beings and their dynamic unfolding within a broader genetic script. To make sense of any explanatory models advanced, here or elsewhere, we need to understand the relation between cultural structure-in which sign systems, literacy, and post-literate means are identified-and social structure, which comprises the interaction of the individuals constituting society. The premise of this enterprise is as follows: Since not even the originators of the behaviorist model believed that we are the source of our behavior (Skinner went on record with this in an interview shortly before his death), we can look at the individuals constituting a human community as the locus of human interactions. Language is only one agent of integration among many. The shift from the natural to the cultural-with its climax in literacy-was actually from immediacy, circularity, discreteness, and the physical realm to indirectness, sequentiality, linearity, and metaphysics. What we experience in our time is a change of course, to the civilization of illiteracy, characterized by msny mediating layers, configuration, non-linearity, distribution of tasks, and meta-language. In the process, the functioning of language is as much subject to change as the human beings constituted in succeeding practical experiences of a fundamentally new nature. The idea machine Functioning of language cannot be expressed in rotations per second (of a motor) or units of processed raw materials (of a processing machine). It cannot even be expressed in our new measurement of bits and bytes and all kinds of flops. Expressions, opportunities for exchange of information, and evaluations are the output of language (to keep to the machine model and terminology). But more important is another output, definitive of the cognitive aspect of human self-constitution: thoughts and ideas. We encounter language as we continuously externalize our biological and cultural identities in the act of living as human beings. Attempts within primitive practical experiences to capture language in some notation eventually freed language from the individual experience through sharing with the entire group practicing such notation. Even in the absence of the originator of whatever the notation conveyed, as long as the experience was shared, the notation remained viable. Constituted in human praxis, notation became a reality with an apparent life of its own. It affected interactions as well as a course of action, to the degree that notation could describe it. Notation predates writing, addressing small-scale groups involved in relatively homogenous practical experiences. As the scale grew and endeavors required different forms of interaction, the written evolved from various co-existing notations based on constitutive experiences with their own characteristics. Together with the experience of writing, an entire body of linear conventions was established. Circumstances that made possible the constitution of ideas and their understanding deserve attention because they relate to a form of activity that singles out the human being from the entire realm of known creatures. Ideas, no matter how complex, pertain to states of affairs in the world: physical, biological, or spatial reality embodied in an individual's self-constitution. They also pertain to the states of mind of those expressing them. Ideas are symptomatic of human self-constitution, and thus of the languages people have developed in their praxis. What we want to find out is whether there is an intrinsic relation between literacy and the formation and understanding of ideas. We want to know if ideas can be constituted and/or understood in forms of expression other than verbal language, such as in drawings, or in the more current multimedia. Humans not only express themselves to (enter into contact with) one another through their sign systems, but also listen to themselves, and look at themselves. They are at once originators (emitters, as the information theory model considers them) and receivers. In speech, signs succeed themselves in a series of self-controlled sequences. Synthesis, as the generation of new expression by assembling what is known in new ways appropriate to new practical experiences, is continuously controlled by self-analysis. Pre-verbal and sub-verbal unarticulated languages (at the signal level of smell, touch, taste, or language of kinesic or proxemic type) participate in defining sensations directly, as well as through rudimentary specification of context. The relationship of articulated language and unarticulated sub-verbal languages is demonstrated at the level of predominantly natural activities as well as at the level of predominantly socio- cultural activities. One example: Under the pragmatic conditions leading to language, olfaction played a role comparable to sight and hearing, effectively controlling taste. This changed as experience mediated through language replaced direct experience. Within the pragmatics of higher efficiency associated with literacy, the sense of smell, for example, ended up being done away with. The decrease of the weight of biological communication, in this case of chemo-physical nature, is paralleled by the increase of importance of the immaterial, not substance-bound, communication. Granted, there are no ideas, in the true definition of the word, that can be expressed in smell. But practical experiences involving the olfactory and the gustatory, as well as other senses, affect areas of human practical experiences beyond literacy. Identification of kin, awareness of reproduction cycles, and alarm can all be simulated in language, which slowly assumed or substituted some of the functions of natural languages. Writing and the expression of ideas When the sign of speech became a sign of language (alphabets, words, sentences), the process described above deepened. The concrete (written, stabilized) sign participated in capturing generality via the abstraction of lines, shapes, intersections, in wax, in clay, on parchment, or on another medium. The succession of individual signs (letters, words) was metamorphosed into the sign of the general. For centuries, writing was only a container for speech, not operational language. This observation does not contradict the still controversial Saphir-Whorf hypothesis that language influences thinking. Rather, the observation makes clearer the fact that active influence did not originate from language itself, but is a result of succeeding practical experiences. Had a recorder of spoken language, let us imagine, been invented before writing, a need or use for literacy would have taken very different forms. Humans did not dispose of a system of signs as a person disposes of a machine or of elements to be assembled. They were their own scripts, always re-constituting in notation an experience they had or might have had. In other words, the functioning of languages is essentially a record of the functioning of human beings. The Hebrew alphabet started as shorthand notation reduced to consonants by scribes who retained only the root of the word before recording its marks on parchment. Due to the small scale and shared pragmatics of readers, this shorthand sufficed. In Mayan hieroglyphics, and in Mesopotamian ideographs, as well as in other known forms of notation, the intention was the same: to give clues so that another person could give life to the language, could resuscitate it. Increased scale and consequently less homogenous practical experiences forced the Hebrew scribes to add diacritical marks indicating vowels. The written language of the Sumerians and Mesopotamians also changed as the pragmatic framework changed. That writing is an experience of self-constitution, reflected in the structure of ideas, might not sound convincing enough unless the biological component is at least brought up. Derrick de Kerkhove noticed that all languages written from right to left use only consonants. The cognitive reading mechanism involved in deciphering them differs from that of languages using vowels, too, and written from left to right. Once the Greeks took over the initially consonantal alphabet of the Phoenicians and Hebrews, they added vowels and changed the direction of writing-at the beginning using the Bustrophedon (how the oxen plow), i.e., both directions. Afterwards, the direction corresponding to a cognitive structure associated with sequentiality was adopted. Consequently, the functioning of the Greek language changed as well. Ideas resulting in the context of pre-Socratic and Socratic dialogue have a more pronounced deductive, speculative nuance than those expressed in the analytic discourse of written Greek philosophy. One can further this thought by noticing the so-called bias against the left-hand that is deeply rooted in many languages and the beliefs they express. It seems that the right (hand and direction) is favored in ways ranging from calling things right, or calling servants of justice Herr Richter (Master Right, the German form of address for a judge), or favoring things done with the right hand, on the right side, etc. The very idea of what is right, what is just, human rights, originates from this preference. The left hand is associated, in a pragmatic and cognitive mode dominated by the right, with weakness, incompetence, even sin. (In the New Testament, sinners are told to go to the left side of God after judgment.) While the implicit symbolism is worth more than this passing remark, it is worthwhile noticing that in our days, the domination of the right in writing and in literacy expectations is coming to an end. The efficiency of a right-biased praxis is not high enough to satisfy expectations peculiar to globality. The process is part of the broader experience through which literacy itself is replaced by the many partial literacies defining the civilization of illiteracy. Since ideas come into being in the experience of language, their dissemination and validation, critical to the efficiency of human effort at any given scale, depends on the portability of the medium in which they are expressed. Through writing, the portability of language was no longer reducible to the mobility of those speaking it. Ideas expressed in writing could be tested outside the context in which they originated. This associated the function of dissemination through language to the function of validation in the pragmatic context. A tablet, a papyrus scroll, a codex, a book, or a digital simile have in common their condition as a record resulting from practical experiences; but it is not what they have in common that explains their efficiency. Portability is telling of pragmatic requirements so different that nothing before the digital record could be as pervasive and globally present. Except for a password, we need nothing with us in order to access knowledge distributed today through networks. We are freeing ourselves from space and time coordinates. Literacy cannot function within such broad parameters. The domain of alternatives constitutes the civilization of illiteracy. Future and past Do we need to be literate in order to deal with the future? Reciprocally: Is history, as many believe, the offspring of writing? Moreover, is it a prerequisite for understanding the present? These are questions that resonate loudly in today's political discourse and in the beliefs of very many people. Let us start with the future, as the question raises the issue of what it takes to deal with it. Pre-sensing (premonition) is the natural form of diffuse perception of time. This perception can be immediate or less immediate. It is extended not from now to what was (stored in one's memory or not), but to what might be (a sign of danger in the natural environment, for instance). The indexical signs participating in these representations are footprints, feathers, bloodstains. Speech makes premonition and feeling explicit, but not wholly so. It transforms accumulated signs (past) into the language of the possible (future). In fact, in the practical experience of re-constituting the past we realize that each past was once a future. Still, as we want to establish some understanding of the unfolding of the present into the future, we come to realize that while possibilities expand, the future becomes less and less determined in its details. Try to tell this to the champions of technology who predicted the paperless office and who now predict the networked world. Alternatively, tell this to those who still constitute their identity in literacy-dependent practical experiences: politicians, bureaucrats and educators. Neither of the two categories mentioned seems to understand the relation between language and the future expressed in it, or in any sign system, as plans, prophecies, or anticipations. An idea is always representative of the practical experience and of the cognitive effort to transcend immediate affection. Monoarticulated speech (signaling), as well as ideographic writing, result from experiences involving the pragmatic-affective level of existence. One cries or shouts, one captures resemblance in an image when choices are made and feelings evoked. There are no ideas here, as there is very little that reaches beyond the immediate. Ideas extend from experiences involving the pragmatic- rational level. Speech can serve as the medium for making plans explicit. Drawings, diagrams, models, and simulations can be described through what we say. Indeed, before writing the future, human beings expressed it as speech, undoubtedly in conjunction with other signs: body movement, objects known to relate to danger and thus to fear, or successful actions associated with satisfaction. When finally set in clay tablets or papyrus, the language regarding the future acquired a different status-it no longer vanished, as the sounds or gestures used before. Writing accompanies action, and even lasts past the experience. This permanency gave the written word an aura that sounds, gestures, even artifacts, could not achieve. Even repetition, a major structural characteristic of rituals, could not project the same expectation of permanency as writing. Probably this is what prompted Gordon Childe to remark that "The immortalization of a word in writing must have seemed a supernatural process; it was surely magical that a man long vanished from the land of the living could still speak from a clay tablet or a papyrus roll." Within the context of religion, the aura shifts from the mytho-magical- transmitted clues for successful action-to the mystical-the source of the successful clues is a higher authority. Even social organization, which became necessary when the scale of humankind changed, was not very effective in the absence of documents with a prescriptive function. Recognized in ancient Chinese society, this practical need was expressed in its first documents, as it was in Hindu civilization, in the Hebrew and the Greek, and by the civilizations to follow, many taking an obvious cue from the Roman Empire. Language use for prescriptive purposes does not necessitate or even imply literacy. This holds true as much for the past as for the present. There was a time, corresponding to increased mobility of people, when only those foreign to a land were supposed to learn how to write and read. The requirement was pragmatic: in order to get used to the customs by which the native population lived, they had to gain access to their expression in language. Nevertheless, once promises are made-a promise relates structurally to the future-the record becomes more and more written, although quite often sealed by the oral, as we know from oath formulae and from oath gestures that survived even in our days. In all these, linear relations of cause-and-effect were preserved and projected as the measure, i.e. rationality, for the future. In contemporary society, the language characteristic of the past is used as a decorum. Global scale and social complexity are no longer efficiently served by linear relations. Subsequently, means for formulating ideas regarding the future make literacy not only one of the many languages of the time to come, but probably an obstacle in the attempt to more efficiently articulate ideas for the future. Keep in mind that almost all people dedicated to the study of the future work on computational models. The outcome of their effort is shorter and shorter on text, which is replaced with dynamic models, always global in nature. Linearity is effectively supplanted by non-linear descriptions of the many interlocking factors at work. Moreover, self-configuration, parallelism, and distributive strategies are brought to expression in simulations of the future. As far as history is concerned, it is, whether we like it or not, the offspring of writing. Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders state bluntly: "The historian's house is on the island of writing.... Where no words are left behind, the historian finds no foundations for his reconstructions." Indeed, history results from concern with records that are universally accessible, hence within the universe of those sharing in literacy. We never know whether a grammar is a summary of the history of a language, or its program for the future. Grammars appear in various contexts because people recognize the need to verify the voices within a language. Histories appear also, motivated by the same stimulus, not so much to do justice to some army, general, king or party, but to maintain coherent records, make them speak in one and only one voice, and probably link the records to recreate the continuum from which they emerge. While the future and the self-constitution of the human being in new pragmatic contexts are directly related, the past is connected to human practical experiences in indirect ways. The unifying element of the various perspectives of the future is in the new experience. In the absence of such a unifying perspective, writing history becomes an end in itself, notwithstanding the power exercised by examples. From the beginning of the Middle Ages, the written record and the analytic power of language sufficed for constituting history and shaping historic experience. But once the methods of historic research diversified, probably as much as the pragmatics of human existence did, new perspectives were introduced. Some of these have practical implications: What were the plants used in primitive societies? How was water supply handled? How were the dead disposed of? Other perspectives had ideological, political, or cultural ramifications. In each of these pragmatically determined instances, history started escaping the prison of literacy. Linguistic archaeology, anthropological and especially paleoanthropological history, computational history, are only some of the post-literate forms of practical experiences constituting a new domain of history. This domain is characterized by the use of non-traditional tools, such as genetics, electronic microscopy, computational simulation, artificial life modeling, and inferences supported by artificial intelligence. Memetics, or the life of ideas and awareness of them, pertains no less to the past than to the present and future. It sprang from genetics and bears the mark of an implicit Darwinian mechanism. Its focus on ideas made it the catch phrase of a generation feeling dangerously severed from its relation to history, and no less endangered by a future falling too fast upon this generation. Technological extensions of memetics (the so-called memetic engineering) testify to expectations of efficiency which history of the literate age never seemed to care about or even to acknowledge. Based on the awareness thus gained, we would have to agree that the relative dissolution of literacy and the associated ideals of universality, permanency, hierarchy, and determinism, as well as the emergence of literacies, with the resulting attitudes of parochialness, transitoriness, decentralization, and indeterminacy are paralleled by the dissolution of history and the emergence of specialized histories. Hypertext replaces sequential text, and thus a universe of connections is established. The new links among carefully defined fields in the historic record point to a reality that escapes the story (in history), but are relevant to the present. The specialized historian reports not so much about the past, but about particular aspects of human self-constitution from the past that are significant in the new frame of current experience. It sometimes seems that we reinvent the past in patches, only to accommodate the present pragmatics and to enforce awareness of the present. The immanent sequentiality and linearity of the pragmatic framework within which languages emerged and which made, at a later juncture, literacy and history necessary, is replaced by non-sequentiality and non-linear relations better adapted to the scale of humankind's existence today. They are also better adapted to the complexity of the practical process of humankind's continuous self-constitution. In addition, primitive, deterministic inferences are debunked, and a better image of complexity, as it pertains to the living subject, becomes available. As an entry in a database (huge by all means), the past sheds its romantic aura, only to align itself with the present and the future. The illiterate attitude, reflected, for instance, in the ignorance of the story of the past, results not from lack of writing and reading skills. It is not caused by bad history teachers or books, as some claim. Decisive is the fact that our pragmatic framework, i.e. our new practical experiences of self-constitution, is disconnected from the experiences of the past. Knowing and understanding Probably one of the most important aspects of current pragmatics is the connection between knowing and understanding. We are involved in many activities without really understanding how they take place. Our e-mail reaches us as it reaches those to whom we send messages, even though most people have no idea how. The postal system is easier to understand. We know what happens: letters are delivered to the post office, sorted, and sent to their destinations by bus, train, plane, or boat. Determining the paths of an e-mail message is trivial for a machine, but almost impossible for a human being. As the complexity of an endeavor increases, chances that individuals constituting themselves in the activity know how everything works and understand the various mechanisms involved decrease. Still, the efficiency of the experience is not diminished. Moreover, it seems that knowledge and understanding do not necessarily affect efficiency. This statement is valid for an increasing number of practical experiences in the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy-not for all of them. We can conceive of complex diagnostic machines; but there is something in the practical experience of medicine, for example, that makes one physician better than another. We can automate a great deal of other activities-accounting, tax preparation, design, architecture-but there is something implicit in the activity that will qualify a certain individual's performance as above and beyond our most advanced science and technology. There are managers who know close to nothing about what their company produces but who understand market mechanisms to such an extent that they end up winners regardless of whether they head a bank, a cracker-producing factory, or a giant computer company. These managers constitute themselves within the experience of language- the language of the market more than the language of the product. Therefore, it is useful to examine the evolution of knowledge and understanding within succeeding pragmatic frameworks, and the role language as a mediating element in each of these frameworks. The sign of language represents the contradictory unity of the phonetic and semantic units. Within a limited scale of experience, literacy meant to know what is behind the written word, to be able to resuscitate it, and to even give the word new life. As the scale increases, literacy means to take for granted what is behind the written word. This implies that dictionaries, including personal dictionaries, as they are formed in constituting our language, are congruent. Learning language is not reducible to the memorization of expressions. The only way to learn is to live the language. With knowledge acquired and expressed in language comes understanding. Humans are not born free of experience. Important parts of it are passed along in the biological endowment. Others are transmitted through ever new human interactions, including those of reciprocal understanding. Neither are humans born free of the evolutionary cycle of the species. The relative decline of the olfactory in humans was mentioned some pages ago. With the relative loss of sensory experience, knowledge corresponding to the respective sensorial perception diminishes. Linguistic performance is the result of living and practicing language, of existence as language. Relating oneself to the world in language experience is a condition for knowing and understanding it. The language of the natural surrounding world is not verbal, but it is articulated at the level of the elementary sensations (Merleau-Ponty's participative perception) that the world occasions, when human beings are engaged in the practical attempt to constitute themselves, or instance, by trying to change or to master their world. They perceive this world, after the experience, as stabilized meanings: clouds offer the hope of rain; thunder can produce fire; running deer are probably pursued by predators; eggs in a nest testify to birds. The complexity of the effort to master the world surrounding us increases over time. Tasks originating in the context leading to literacy are of a different degree of complexity than those faced in industrial society and than those we assume today. Between the senses and speech-hence between nonverbal and verbal languages-numerous influences play a role. Words obviously have a cognitive condition different from perceptions and are processed differently. Speech adds intellectual information to the sensorial information, mainly in the form of associations, capable of reflecting the present and the absent. Interestingly enough, we do not know everything that we understand; and we do not understand everything that we know. For instance, we might know that in non-Euclidean geometries, parallels meet. Or that water, a liquid, is made up of oxygen and hydrogen, two gases. Or that the use of drugs can lead to addiction. Nevertheless, we do not necessarily understand how and why and when. Within the civilization of literacy the expectation is that once we know how to write something, we automatically know and understand it. And if by some chance the knowledge is incomplete, inconsistent, or not maintained, if it loses its integrity through some corruption, it can be resuscitated through reading or can be made consistent by comparing it to knowledge accumulated by others, and eventually redeemed. As writing has failed us repeatedly within practical experiences that transcend its characteristics and necessity, we have learned that the relative stability of the written is a blessing in disguise. Compared to the variability of the speech, it is more stable. But this stability turns out to be a shortcoming, exactly because knowledge and understanding are context dependent. Within relatively stable contexts this shortcoming is noticed only at rare intervals. But with the expectation of higher efficiency, cycles of human activity get shorter. Increased intensity, the variability of structures of interaction, the distributed nature of practical involvement, all require variable frames of reference for knowledge and understanding. As a result of these pragmatic characteristics, we witnessed progressive use of language in equivocal and ambiguous ways. Acceptable, and even adequate, in the practical experience of poetry, drama and fiction, of disputable relevance in political and diplomatic usage, ambiguity affects the literate formulation of ideas and plans pertinent to moral values, political programs, or scientific and technological purposes. The same pragmatic characteristics mentioned above make necessary the integration of means other than language and its literate functioning in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. This addresses concerns raised in the opening lines of this section. Fast-changing knowledge can be acquired through means adapted to its dynamics. As these means, such as interactive multimedia, virtual reality programs, and genetic computation, change, the experience of accessing knowledge becomes, in addition, one of understanding the transitory means involved in storing and presenting it. Many practical experiences are based on knowledge that no other means, literacy- based means included, could effectively make available. From advanced brain surgery at neuronal levels to the deployment of vast networks, which support not only e-mail but also many other meaningful human interactions-from space exploration to memetic engineering-focused understanding and a whole new gamut of highly efficient practical experiences, involving knowledge never before available, make up the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy. Univocal, equivocal, ambiguous At least 700 artificial languages are on record. Behind each of these there is a practical experience in respect to which natural language functions in a less than desirable manner. There is a language on record that addresses left-hand/right-hand biases. There is one, authored by S. H. Elgin, in which gender biases are reversed (Láadan). And there is Inda, a language constructed like a work of art. There are exotic languages written for certain fictional worlds: J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish, or the language of the Klingons of Star Trek fame, or Anthony Burgess's Nadsat, the language of the yobbs in A Clockwork Orange. And there are scientifically oriented attempts to structure a language: James Cooke Brown invented Loglan to be a logic language. Sotos Ochado (almost 100 years before Brown) invented a language based on the classifications of science. Some artificial languages of the past correspond to obvious pragmatic functions. Ars Magna, designed by Ramon Llul (celebrated in history books dedicated to precursors of the digital age), was to be a language of missionaries. Lingua Ignota, attributed to the legendary Abbess Hildegard, is a language of practical monastic experiences extended well beyond the performance of the liturgy. When we acknowledge these languages we implicitly acknowledge attempts to improve the performance of language functions. In some cases, the effort is driven by the goal of transcending barriers among languages; in others, of getting a better description of the world, with the implicit hope that this would facilitate mastery of it. Awareness of the fact that language is not a neutral means of expression, communication, and signification, but comes loaded with all the characteristics of our practical endeavors, prejudices included, motivated attempts to generate languages reflecting an improved view of the world. Regardless of the intention, and especially of the success they had, such languages allow us a closer look at their cognitive condition, and hence at their contribution to increases in the efficiency of human practical activities. Increased expressive power, as in the artificial languages invented by Tolkien and Burgess, or in the language of the Klingons, is an objective relatively easy to comprehend. Propagated by means of literacy and within the literate experience, such languages are accepted primarily as artistic conventions. Precision is the last quality they aim for; expressive richness is their goal. These are languages of sublime ambiguity. Those seeking precision will find it in Loglan, or better yet in the languages of computer programming. Disseminated by means contradicting and transcending the assumptions of literacy, and within a pragmatics requiring means of higher efficiency, programming languages, from Cobol and Fortran to C, C++, Lisp, or Java, are accepted for their functionality. They are not for poetry writing, as the family of expressive artificial languages are not for driving a computer or its peripherals. These are languages of never-failing univocality. With such languages, we can control the function, and even the logic of the language. These languages are conceived in a modular fashion and can be designed to optimally serve the task at hand. Among the functions pursued are provability, optimization, and precision. Among the logics that can be used are classical propositonal logic, intuitionistic propositional logic, modal logic, temporal logic, and others. Reflecting human obsession with a universal language, some artificial constructs advance hypotheses regarding the nature of universality. Dedicated, like many before him, to the idea of a universal language, François Sondre (1827) invented a language based on the assumption that music comes the closest to transcending boundaries among various groups of people. Imagine a theory expressed as a melody, communication accomplished by music, or the music of the law and law enforcement. There is in such a language enough room for expression and precision, but almost no connection to the pragmatic dimension of human self-constitution. If time is, as we know, encoded in music, the experience of space is only indirectly present. Accordingly, its functioning might address the universality of harmony and rhythm, but not aspects of pragmatics which are of a different nature. A category of so-called controlled languages is also establishing itself. A controlled language is a subset (constrained in its vocabulary, grammar, and style) of a natural language adapted to a certain activity. Artificial languages are products inspired and motivated by the functioning of our so-called natural language. Their authors wanted to fix something, or at least improve performance of the language machine in some respect. In order to understand the meaning of their effort, we should look into how language relates the people constituted in the language to the world in which they live. Let's start with the evolution of the word and its relation to the expression of thoughts and ideas, that is, from the univocal (one-to-one relation to what is expressed) to the ambiguous (one-to-many relation). Systems of univocal signs participate in the production of ideas only to a small degree. As an outgrowth of signals, initial signs are univocal. Feathers are definitely not from fish or mammals; blood stains are from wounds; four-legged animals leave different marks than biped humans. Polysemy (more than one meaning assignable to the sign) is a gradual acquisition and reflects the principle of retroaction of meaning on the carrier: words, drawings, sounds, etc. A drawing of an animal points to what is depicted, or to things associated with the animal: the softness of fur, savage behavior, meat, etc. Philosophy and literature (and the arts, in general) became possible only at a certain level of language development brought about by the practical experience of society confronted with new tasks related to its survival and further evolution. The philosopher, for example, resorts to common speech (verbal language) but uses it in an uncommon way: metasemically, metaphorically, metaphysically. Ancient philosophy, important here for its testimony regarding language and literacy, is still so metaphoric that it can be read as literature, and actually was enjoyed as such. Modern philosophy (post-Heidegger) shows how relations (which it points out and dwells upon) have absorbed the related. As a formalized argumentation, freed of restrictions characteristic of literacy, but also so much less expressive than the philosophy of the written word and the endless interpretations it makes possible, philosophy generates its own motivations and justifications. Its practical consequences, within a pragmatics based on different forms of semiotic functioning than those of literacy, diminish constantly. The distance between the verbal and the significance of the idea is itself a parameter of the evolution from nature to culture. Words such as space, time, matter, motion, become possible only after experience in writing. But once written, there is nothing left of the direct, probably intuitive, human experience of space and time, of experience with matter in its various concrete forms, or of the experience of motion (of the human body or other bodies, some flying, some swimming, running, falling). Visual representations-other forms of writing-are closer to what they report about: the Cartesian coordinates for space, the clock for a cyclical perception of time, etc. They express particular instances of relations in space or time, or particular aspects of matter or motion. The word is arbitrary in relation to the idea it embodies. The idea itself, getting its life in instances of activity, is knowledge practically revealed in the order of nature or thought. In expressing the idea, rational rigor and expressiveness collide. Synthesizing ideas is an instance of the self-constitution of the human being. Ideas express the implicit will of the human being to externalize them (what Marcuse called "the imperative quality" of thought). Once written, words not only defy the ephemerality of the sounds of speech, but also enter the realm of potentially conflicting interpretations. These interpretations result from the conversion of the way we use words in different pragmatic contexts. To be literate means to be in control of language, but it also means acceptance and awareness of being hostage to the experiences of the past in which its rules were shaped. When spelling, for instance, is disassociated from the origin of the word, a totally arbitrary new realm of language is established, one in which transitory conventions replace permanency (or the illusion of permanency), and the appearance of super-temporality of ideas is questioned. Each idea is the result of choices in a certain paradigm of existence. Its concrete determination, i.e., realization as meaning, comes through its insertion in a pragmatic context. When the context changes, the idea might be confirmed, contradicted (it becomes equivocal), or open to many interpretations (it becomes ambiguous). To give an example, the idea of democracy went through all these stages from its early embodiment in Greek society to its liberal application, and even self-negation, in the civilization of illiteracy. It means one thing- the power of people-but in different contexts, depending on how people was defined and how power was exercised. It means so many things in its new contexts that some people really wonder if it actually means anything at all anymore. Literacy made communication of ideas possible within a scale of humankind well served by linear relations and in search of proportional growth. But when ideas come to expression in a faster rhythm, and turn in shorter cycles from the univocal to the ambiguous stage, the medium of literacy no longer does justice either to their practical function or to the dynamics of an individual's continuous self-constitution. Moreover, it seems that ideas themselves, as forms of human projection, are less necessary under the new projection of pragmatic circumstances we examine. What once seemed almost as the human's highest contribution impacts today's society less and less. We live in a world dominated by methods and products, within which previous ideas have, so it seems, cultural significance, at most. Knowledge is reduced to information; understanding is only operational. Artificial languages, which keep multiplying, are more and more geared towards methods and products. In the interconnected world of digitally disseminated information, we do not need Esperanto, but rather languages that unify the increasing variety of machines and programs we use in our new experiences on the World Wide Web. Efficiency in this world refers to transactions which do not necessarily involve human beings. Independent agents, active in business transactions of what emerges as the Netconomy, act towards maximizing outcome. Such agents are endowed with rules of reproduction, movement, fair trade, and can even be culturally identified. Even so, the Netconomy is more a promise than a reality. The functioning of such agents allows us to see how the metaphor of language functioning reverts to its literal meaning in the civilization of illiteracy. Making thoughts visible At a minimum, the object for which the written sign-the word, sentence, or text-stands is the sign of speech. But writing came a relatively long way before reaching this condition. In prelinguistic forms, graphic representation had its object in reality-the re-presentation of the absent. What is present need not be represented. The direction impressed on visual representation is from past to present. What must be retained is the originating tendency of distancing in respect to the present and the direct, what I called the alienation of immediacy. Initial representations, part of a rather primitive repertory, have only an expressive function. They retain information about the absent that is not seen (or heard, felt, smelled) for future relationships between human beings and their environment. The image belongs to nature. That which is communicated is the way of seeing or perceiving it, not what is actually seen. The execution of the written sign is not its realization as information, as is the case with pictographic representations, some leading to the making of things (tools, artifacts). What matters is not how something is written, but what it means. A relatively small number of signs-the alphabet, punctuation and diacritical marks-participate in the infinite competence of writing. No matter how we conceive of human thought, its stabilization comes about with that of writing. The present captured in writing loses its impact of immediate action. No written word has ever reached the surface without being uttered and heard, that is, without being sensed. The possibility of meaning (intended, assigned) stems from the establishment of language within human praxis. It is not accidental (cf. Leroi-Gourhan) that spatial establishment (in village-type settlements) and the establishment of language in writing (also spatial in nature) are synchronous. But here a third component, the language of drawings, no matter how primitive, helping in the making of things related to shelter and to work, needs to be acknowledged, too. This is the broader context leading to the great moment of Greek philosophy in the temporal context of alphabetization, and the cultural context of all kinds of forms of craftsmanship, architecture probably in the lead. Socrates, as the philosopher of thinking and discovering truth through dialogue, defended oral culture. Or at least that is what Plato wanted us to believe when he mentioned Socrates' opposition to writing. The great artisans of Socrates' time shared this attitude. For building temples, conceiving tools, creating all kinds of useful objects, writing is not a prerequisite. Heuristics and maieutics, as methods of questioning human choices, those of craftsmen included, and generating new options, are essentially oral. They presuppose the philosopher's, or the architect's, physical presence. Not too much has changed since, if we consider how the disciplines of design and engineering are taught and exercised. But a lot is changing, as design and engineering practical activities rely more and more on digital processing. Computational practical experiences, as well as genetic engineering or memetics, are no longer in continuation of those founded on literacy. Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia The history of culture has recorded numerous attacks against writing, culminating, probably, in Marshall McLuhan's philosophy (1964): alphabetic cultures have uniformized, fragmented, and sequentialized the world, generating an excessive rationalism, nationalism, and individualism. Here we have, in a succinct list, the indictment made of Gutenberg's Galaxy. Commenting on E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, McLuhan remarked: "Rational, of course, has for the West long meant uniform and continuous and sequential. In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology." That McLuhan failed to acknowledge the complementary language of design and engineering, with its own rationality, is a shortcoming, but does not change the validity of the argument. The consequences of these attacks-as much as they can be judged from the historical perspective we have since gained-have nevertheless not been the abatement of writing or of its influence. In the same vein, the need to proceed to an oral-visual culture has been idealistically suggested (Barthes' well known plea of 1970 can be cited). There is no doubt that all the plans devised by architects, artisans, and designers of artifacts belong to a praxis uniting oral (instructions to those transposing the plan into a product) and visual cultures. Many such plans, embodying ideas and concepts probably as daring as those we read in manuscripts and later in books, vanished. Some of the artifacts they created did withstand the test of time. Even if the domination of the written word somehow resulted in a relatively low awareness of the role drawings played over time, experiences were shaped by them and knowledge transmitted through them. Drawings are holistic units of a complexity difficult to compare to that of a text. The meaning conferred by the intermediary of writing is brought about through a process of generalization, or re-individualization: What is it for the individual reading and understanding it? It inversely travels the route that led from speech to writing, from the concrete to the abstract, from the analytic to the synthetic function of language. At any given time, it looks as though we have, on the one hand, the finite reality of signs (alphabet, words, idiomatic expressions) and, on the other, the practically infinite reality embodied in the language sequences or ideas expressed. In view of this, the question arises regarding the source of ideas and the relation between signs (words, in particular) and their assigned meanings, or the content that can be communicated using the language. Meaning is conjured in Western culture through additive mechanisms, similar to those of mixing pigments. In Eastern culture, meaning is based on subtractive mechanisms, similar to those of mixing light. Alphabetic writing, although more simple and stabilized, is really more difficult than ideographic writing. The experience from which it results is one of abstraction. Henceforth, it subjects the readers of the alphabetic text to the task of filling the enormous gap separating the graphic sign from its referent with their own experience. The assumption of the literate practical experience is that literacy can substitute for the reference through history or culture. Readers of ideographic texts have the advantage of the concreteness of the representation. Even if Chinese characters stand for specific Chinese words, as John DeFrancis convincingly showed, the experience of that writing system remains different from that of Western alphabets. Since every language integrates its own history as the summary of the practical activity in which it was constituted, reading in a language of a foreign experience means that one must step- by-step invent this writing. Research undertaken in the last 15 years shows that at a certain stage, aphasia brings on a regression from alphabet to image reading as design, as pictographic, iconic reading. Letters lose their linguistic identity. The aphasic reader sees only lines, intersections, and shapes. Ideas expressed in writing crumble like buildings shaken by an earthquake. What is still perceived is the similarity to concrete things. The decline from the abstract to the concrete can be seen as a socio-cultural accident taking place against the background of a natural (biological) accident. In our days we encounter symptoms similar to those described above, testifying to a sort of collective aphasia in reverse. Indeed, writing is deconstructed and becomes graffiti notation, shorthand statements freed of language, and defying literacy. For a while, graffiti was criminalized. Later on it was framed as art, and the market absorbed the new product among the many others it negotiates. What we probably refused to see is how deep the literacy of graffiti goes, where its roots are, how wide the extensions, and how much aphasia in its writing and reading. After all, it was not only in the New York subway that trains were literally turned into moving papers or moving books, issued as often as authority was circumvented. Much of the public hated graffiti because it obliterated legitimate communication and a sense of neatness and order that literacy continuously reinforced. But many also enjoyed it. Rap music is the musical equivalent of graffiti. Gang rituals and fights are a continuation of these. Messages exchanged on the data highways-from e-mail to Web communication-often display the same characteristics of aphasia. Concreteness is obsessively pursued. :) (the smiley) renders expressions of pleasure useless, while (: (the grince) warns of being flamed. On the digital networks of today's furious exchange of information, collective aphasia is symptomatic of many changes in the cognitive condition of the people involved in its practical experiences. Neither opportunistic excitement nor dogmatic rejection of this far-reaching experience can replace the need to understand what makes it necessary and how to best benefit from it. More private languages and more codes than ever circulate as kilo- and megabytes among individuals escaping any form of regulation. On the increasingly rewarding practical experiences of networking, literacy is challenged by transitory, partial literacies. Literacy is exposed in its infatuation and emptiness, although not discarded from among the means of expression and communication defining the human being. It is often ridiculed for not being appropriate to the new circumstances of the practical and spiritual experience of a humankind that has outgrown all its clothes, toys, books, stories, tools, and even conflicts. A legitimate follow-up question is whether the literate experience of the word contributes to its progressive lack of determination, or the change of context affects the interpretation, i.e., the semantic shift from determinate to vague. Probably both factors play a role in the process. On the one hand, literacy progressively exhausts its potential. On the other, new contexts make it simultaneously less suited as the dominant medium for expression, communication, and signification of ideas. For instance, the establishment of a vague meaning of democracy in political discourse leads to the need for strong contexts, such as armed conflicts, for ascertaining it. In the last 10 years we have experienced many such conflicts, but we were not prepared to see them in conjunction with the forces at work in facilitating higher levels of efficiency according to the new scale that humankind has reached. There is also the attempt to use language as context free as possible-the generalities of all demagogy (liberal, conservative, left or right, religious or emancipated) can serve as examples. But so can all the crystal ball readings, palm readings, horoscopes, and tarot cards, revived in recent years against the background of illiteracy. None of these is new, but the relative flourishing of the market of vagueness and ambiguity, reflective of a deviant functioning of language, is. Together with illiteracy, they are other symptoms of the change in pragmatics discussed in this book. These and other examples require a few more words of explanation regarding changes in the functions of language. It is known that the oldest preserved cave drawings are marks (indexical signs) of an oral context rather than representations of hunting scenes (even though they are often interpreted as such). They testify more to those who drew them than to what the drawing is about. The decadent literacy of mystified messages does the same. It speaks about their writers more than about their subject, be this history, sociology, or anthropology. And the increased oral and visual communication, supported by technology, defines the post-literate condition of the human cognitive dimension. The transition from speech to writing corresponds to the shift from the pragmatic-affective level of human praxis to the pragmatic-rational level of linear relations among people and their environment. It takes place in the context of the evolution from the syncretic to the analytic. The transition from literacy to literacies corresponds to the pragmatics of non-linear relations, and results from the evolution from analytic to synthetic. These affirmations, at least as far as the civilization of literacy is concerned, apply to the universe of European cultures and their later extensions. The cultures of the Far East are characterized by language's tendency to present, not to explain. The analytical structure of logical thought (which will be discussed in another chapter) is actually formed in the sentence structure of speech, which is fundamentally different in the two cultures mentioned. The imperative energy of the act of expressing confers on the Chinese language, for example, a continuous state of birth (speech in the act). The preeminence of the act in Oriental culture is reflected by the central position the verb occupies. Concentration around the verb guides thought towards the relationship between condition and conditioned. The experience of logic characteristic of European cultures (under the distinctive mark of classical Greek philosophy) shows that the main instrument of thinking is the noun. It is freer than the verb (tied to the forms it specifies), more stable, capable of reflecting identity, invariance, and the universal. The logic founded on this premise is oriented toward the search for unity between species and genus. European writing and Oriental ideographic writing have each participated in this process of defining logic, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics. From a historic perspective, they are complementary. Recalling the history of knowledge and history per se, we can say that the European Occident achieved the meaning of knowledge and world control, while the Orient achieved self-knowledge and self-control. It would seem utopian (and with vast historical, social, ideological, and political implications) to imagine a world harmoniously uniting these meanings. However, this would imply, as the reader can easily surmise, changes in the status of literacy in both cultures. This is exactly the direction of the changes we witness, as languages function towards convergence in the two cultures mentioned. Literacy is not only a medium of exchange between cultures; it also sets boundaries among them. This holds true for both Western and Far Eastern (and any other) civilization. Japan, for instance, despite the spectacular effort of assimilation and development of new technologies, maintains inside its national boundaries a framework quite well suited to its traditional literacy. Outside, it assimilates other literacies. In different ways, this holds true for China. It is willing to build its internal network (Intranet) without connecting it to the all-encompassing net (Internet) through which we experience some aspects of globality. The organization of hierarchy, which made the object of many studies telling the West why Japan succeeds better in economic terms, is centered around the unity semmai-kohai, i.e., senior-junior. Within the pragmatic framework of a literacy different from that of the Western world, a logic and ethics pertinent to the distinction mentioned evolved. The moral basis of the precedence of the senior over the junior is pragmatic in nature. The Chinese formula (cho-jo-no-jo) results from a practical experience encoded not only in language but also in the system of ranking. In fact, what is acknowledged is both experience and performance, expressed by the Japanese in the categories of kyu, referring to proficiency, and dau, referring to cumulative results. The system applies to economic life, calligraphy, wrestling (sumo), and flower arrangement (ikebana), as well as to social rank. In the dynamics of current changes, such systems are also affected. From the viewpoint of language functions, we notice that national language can serve for insulation, while adopted language-English, in particular-can serve as a bridge to the rest of the world. Nevertheless, Japanese society, like all contemporary societies, is more and more confronted with the world in its globality, and with the need to constitute appropriate means for expression, communication and signification pertinent to the global world. While Japan is an example of many literate prejudices at work, rigidly hierarchic, discriminating against women and foreigners, dogmatic, it also exemplifies the understanding of changing circumstances for human practical experiences of self-constitution as Japanese, and as members of the integrated world community as well. Consequently, new literacies emerge within its homogeneous cultural environment, as they emerge in countries such as China, Korea, and Indonesia, and in the Arab nations. As a result, we experience changes in the nature of the relations between the cultures of the Far East, Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and the West. The process expands, probably more slowly than one might expect, to the African and South American continents. Global economy requires new types of relations among nations and cultures, and these relations need to correspond to the dynamics of the new pragmatic framework that has emerged against the background of the new scale of human activity. The identity urge expressed in the multiculturalism trend of our days will find in the past its most unreliable arguments. The point is proven by the naive misrepresentation of past events, facts, and figures through the activists of the movement. Multiculturalism corresponds to the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy: from the uniqueness and universality of one dominating mode to plurality, not limited to race, lifestyle, or cultures. Whoever sees multiculturalism as an issue of race, or feminism as one of gender (against the background of history), will not be able to design a course of action to best serve those whose different condition is now acknowledged. A different condition results in different abilities, and thus different ways of projecting one's identity in the practical experience of self-constitution. The past is irrelevant; emphasis is always on the future. Language and Logic Around the time computers entered public life, a relatively unknown writer of science fiction described the world of non A (A). It is our planet Earth in the year 2560, and what non A denotes is the non-Aristotelian logic embodied in a super-computer game machine that rules the planet. Gilbert Gosseyn (pronounced Go Sane, with an obvious pun intended) finds out that he is more than just one person. Anyone even marginally educated in the history of logic will spontaneously associate the experience described here with Levy-Bruhl's controversial law of participation. According to this law, "In the collective representations of primitive mentality, objects, beings, phenomena can be, in a way we cannot understand, themselves and something different at the same time." The relatively undifferentiated, syncretic human experience at the time of the inception of notation and writing testifies to awareness of very unusual connections. Research of artifacts originating with primitive tribes makes clear the relative dominance of visual thinking and functioning of human beings along the line of what we would today call multi-valued logics. The world of non A, although placed by its author in some fictional future, seems to describe a logic prevalent in a remote time. Even today, as anthropologists report, there are tribes in the Amazon jungles and in remote Eskimo territories whose members claim to be not only the beings they are, but also something else, such as a bird, plant, or even a past event. This is not a way of speaking, but a different way of ascertaining identity. Inferences in this pragmatic context go beyond those possible in the logical world of truth and falsehood that Aristotle described. Multi-valued logic is probably a good name for describing the production of such inferences, but not necessarily the explanation we seek for why it is that self-constitution involves such mechanisms, and how they work. Moreover, even if we could get both questions answered, we would still wonder-because our own self-constitution involves a different logic-what the relation is between the language experience and the logical framework of those living in the non A world of ancient times. Practical experiences with images, dominant in such tribes, explains why there is a logical continuum, instead of a clear-cut association with truth and falsehood, or with present and absent. Multi-valued logics of different types, corresponding to different pragmatic contexts, were actually tamed when language was experienced in its written form and thinking was stabilized in written expressions. Awareness of connections distinctly integrated in human experience and quantified in a body of intelligible knowledge progressively clears the logical horizon. As many-valued logics were subdued, entities were constituted only as what the experience made them to be, and no longer simultaneously many different things. The change from orality to the practical experience of written language affected many aspects of human interaction. Writing introduced a frame of reference, ways to compare and evaluate, and thus a sense of value associated with limited choices. Orality was controlled by those exercising it. The written, stabilized in marks on a surface, gave rise to a new type of questioning, based on its implicit analyticity. Over time written language led to associations. Some were in relation to its visual aspect. Other associations were made to writing patterns, a kind of repetition. Integrative by its nature, writing stimulates the quest for comparing experiences of self-constitution by comparing what was recorded. The expectation of accurate recording is implicit in the experience of writing. The rather skeletal incipient written language makes visible connections which within orality faded away. A very raw definition of logic can be the discipline of connections-"if something, then something else"-that can be expressed in many ways, including formal expressions. Connections established in orality are spontaneous. With writing, the experience is stabilized and a promise for method is established. This method leads to inferences from connections. What I am trying to suggest is that although there is logic in orality, it is a natural logic, reflecting natural connections, as opposed to connections established in writing. Writing provides the X-ray of the elusive body of experience in whose depths awareness of connections and their practical implications was starting to take shape. Time and space awareness are gained relatively slowly. In parallel, connections to experiences in time and space are expressed in an incipient awareness of how they affect the outcome of any practical experience. No less than signs, logic is rooted also in the pragmatics of human self-constitution, and probably comes into existence together with them. Co-presence, of what is different or what is alike, incompatibilities, exclusions, and similar time or space situations bcome disassociated from actions, objects, and persons and form a well-defined layer of experience. Mechanisms of inference, from objects, actions, persons, situations, etc., evolve from simpler configurations or sequences of connections. Writing is more effective than rituals or oral expression in capturing inferences, although not necessarily in providing a mechanism for sharing. What is gained in breadth is lost in depth. As human practical experiences get more effective they also become more complex. The cognitive effort substitutes more and more for the physical. Stabilized in inferences based on increasingly more encompassing cycles of activity-agriculture is definitely more extensive than hunting or food gathering-experience is transmitted more and more in its skeletal form, deprived of the richness of the individual characteristics of those identified through it. Less information and more sequences of successful action-this is how from the richness of connections logic of actions takes shape. The accent is on time and space, or better yet on what we call, in retrospect, references. As writing supplants time-based means of expression and communication (rituals, first of all), temporal logic begins to lose in importance. Once the pragmatic horizon of human life changes, literacy, in conjunction with the logic it houses, constitutes its invisible grid, its implicit metrics. The understanding of anything that is not related to our literate self-constitution remains outside this understanding. Literate language is a reductionist machine, which we use to look at the world from the perspective of our own experience. Aware of experiences different from ours, at least of their possibility, we would like to understand them, knowing perfectly well that once captured in our experience of language, their own condition is negated. Oral education maintained the parent-child continuum, and memory, i.e., experience, was directly transmitted. Literacy introduced means for handling discontinuity and, above all, differences. It stored, in some form of record, everything pertaining to the experience. But as record, it constituted a new experience, with its own inherent values. As a reductionist device, writing reduces language to a body of accepted ways of speaking, recording, and reading governed by two kinds of rules: pertinent to connections (logic), and pertinent to grammar. The process was obviously more elaborate and less focused. In retrospect, we can understand how writing affected the experience of human self-constitution through language. It is therefore understandable why those who, following the young Wittgenstein, take the logic of language for granted, seeing only the need to bring to light what is concealed in the signs of language, are wrong. Language does not have an intrinsic logic; each practical experience extracts logic from the experience and contaminates all means of human expression by the inference from what is possible to what is necessary. Logics behind the logic The function of coordination resulting from the use of language evolved over time. What did not change is the structure of the coordinating mechanism. Logic as we know it, i.e., a discipline legitimized by literate use of language, is concerned with structural aspects of various languages. The attempt to explain how and why conditions leading to literacy were created, after the writing entered the realm of human experience, can only benefit from an understanding of the coordinating mechanism of writing and literacy, which includes logic but is not reducible to it. This mechanism consisted of rules for correct language use (grammar), awareness of connections specific to the pragmatic framework (logic), means of persuasion (rhetoric), selection of choices (heuristics), and argumentation (dialectics). Together, they give us an image of how complex the process of self-constitution is. Separately, they give us insight into the fragmented experiences of language use, rationality, conviction, selection, actions, and beliefs. There is a logic behind the (relative) normal course of events, and also behind any crisis, if we want to extend the concept of logic so as to include the rational description or explanation of whatever might have led to the crisis. And there are logics behind the logic, as Descartes, the authors of the Port Royale Logic (actually The Art of Thinking), Locke, and many others saw it. The logic of religion, the logic of art, of morality, of science, of logic itself, the logic of literacy, are examples of the variety people consider and establish as their object of interest, subjecting such logic to the test of completeness (does it apply to everything?), consistency (is it contradictory?), and sometimes transitivity. Independent of the subject (religion, art, ethics, a precise science, literacy, etc.), human beings establish the particular logic as a network of reciprocal relations and functional dependencies according to which truth (religious, artistic, ethical, etc.), relevant to the practical experience in more than one way, can and should be pursued. This logic, an extension of the incipient awareness of connections, became a formal system, which some researchers in philosophy and psychology still believe is somehow attached to the brain (or to the mind), ensuring its correct functioning. Indeed, successful action was seen as a result of logic, hard-wired as part of the biological endowment. Other researchers perceived logic as a product of our experience, in particular thinking, as this applies to our self-constitution in the natural world and the world we ourselves created. As a corpus of rules and criteria, logic applies to language, but there is a logic of human actions, a logic of art, a logic of morals, etc., described by rules for preserving consistency, maintaining integrity, facilitating causal inference and other relevant cognitive operations, such as articulating a hypothesis or drawing conclusions. An old question sneaks in: Is there a universal logic, something that in its purity transcends differences in language, in biological characteristics, in differences, period? The answer depends on whom one asks. From the perspective assumed so far, the answer is definitely no. Differences are emphasized, even celebrated here, precisely because they extend to the different logics that pertain to various practical experiences. Formulated as such, the answer is elusive because, after all, logic is expressed through language, and once expressed, it constitutes a body of knowledge which in turn participates in practical human experiences. No stronger proof of this can be given than the Boolean logic embedded in computer hardware and programming languages. A more appropriate answer can be given once we notice that major language systems embody different logical mechanisms that pertain to language's coordinating function. The main logical systems require our attention because they are related to what makes literacy necessary and, under new pragmatic conditions, less necessary, if not superfluous. Since the civilization of illiteracy is viewed also from the perspective of the changes resulting in a new scale of human praxis, it becomes necessary to see whether in the global world forces of uniformity or forces of heterogeneity and diversity, embodied in various literacies and the logic attached to them, or associated with their use, are at work. As almost all scholars agree, Aristotle is the father of the logic that applies to the Western language system. Writing helped to encode his logic of proper inference from premises expressed in sentences. Literacy gave this logic a house, and a sense of validity and permanency that scholars accept almost as religion. For Eastern systems, contributions of equal value and relevance can be found in the major writings of ancient China and Japan, as well as in Hindu documents. Instead of a superficial overview of the subject, I prefer to quote Fung-Yu-lan's precise observation regarding the particular focus of Chinese philosophy (which is also representative of the Far East): "Philosophy must not be simply the object of cognition, it must also be the object of an experience." The resulting expression of this endeavor differs from the Indian, in search of a certain state of mind, not formulations of truth, and from Western philosophical statements. It takes the form of concise, often enigmatic, and usually paradoxical statements or aphorisms. A very good presentation of this experience is given in a famous text by Chuang-tzu: "The words serve to fix the ideas, but once the idea is grasped, there is no need to think about words. I wish I could find somebody who has ceased to think of words and have him with me to talk to." The logic of the Indo-European languages is based on the recognition of the object-action distinction, expressed in language through the noun and the verb. For over 2,000 years, this logic has dominated and maintained the structure of society, of the polis, to use Aristotle's term. Indeed, he defined the human as zoon politikon- community (polis), animal (zoon)-and his logic is an attempt to discover what was the cognitive structure that ensured proper inference from premises expressed in sentences. Probably as much as some who today hope for a similar achievement through formal languages, he wanted logic to be as independent as possible of the language used, as well as independent of the particular language spoken by people belonging to different communities. Parallel to the language housing Aristotle's logic was a different system in which the verb (referring to action) was assimilated in the object, as in the Chinese and Japanese languages. Every action became a noun (hunting, running, talking), and a non-predicative language mode was achieved. Aristotle's construction goes like this: If a is b (The sky is covered), and if b is c (the cover are clouds), then a is c (cloudy sky). Non-predicative constructions do not come to a conclusion but continue from one condition to another, as in approximately: Being covered, covers being clouds, clouding being associated with rain, rain...and so on. That is, they are open-ended connections in status nascendi. We notice that Aristotelian logic derives the truth of the inference from the truth of the premise, based on a formal relation independent of both. In non- predicative logic, language only points to possible chains of relations, implicitly acknowledging that others are simultaneously possible without deriving knowledge, or without subjecting conclusions to a formal test of their truth or falsehood. To the abstract and formal representation of knowledge inference, it opposes a model of concrete and natural representation in which distinctions regarding quality are more important than quantity distinctions. Based on observations already accumulated, first of all that ideographic writing keeps the means of expression very close to the object represented in language, we can understand why languages expressed in ideographic writing are not adapted to the kind of thinking Aristotle and his followers developed and which culminated in the Western notion of science, as well as in the Western system of values. The successive rediscovery of Far Eastern modes of representation and of the philosophy growing out of this very different way of thinking, as well as of the interest in subtleties rather uncommon to our culture, resulted in the many attempts we witness to transcend the boundaries between these fundamentally different language structures. The purpose is to endow our language, and thus our thinking and emotional life, with dimensions structurally impossible within the Western framework of existence. The logic of dependency-the Japanese amé-is one of embedded relations and many conjectures resulting in a logic of actions, a different way of thinking, and a different system of values. These are partially reflected in the periodic misunderstandings between the Western world and Japan. Of course, it can be simplified as to mean that if a company and an employee accept it, and they do so since amé is structurally embedded in the life of people, both parties will be faithful to each other no matter what. Amé can also be simplified to mean a mutual relationship within families (all prejudices included), or among friends. But as we get closer to the practical experience of amé (Takeo Doi's writing on the "anatomy of dependence" helps us a great deal in this attempt), we realize that it constitutes a framework, marking not only distinct decisions (logically justified), but an entire context of thinking, feeling, acting, evaluating. It is reflected in the attitude towards language and in the education system, inculcating dependency as a logic that takes priority over the individual. Evidently, the only way to integrate the logic of amé into our logic-if indeed we think that this is right, moreover that it is possible-is through practical experience. Although amé seems to point to some limits inherent in our language, it actually reveals limits in our self-constitution, as part of establishing a network of generalized mutual relationships as part of our experience. It should be added that practically a mirrored phenomenon occurs in the Far East, where what can be perceived as the limitations of the language system and the logic it supports (or embodies), triggered an ever-growing interest in Western culture and many attempts to copy or to quickly assimilate it in vocabulary and behavior. From the Indian universe comes not only the mysticism of the Vedic texts, but also the stubborn preoccupation with the human condition (both the aspect of conditioning and of what Mircea Eliade called de-conditioning). This resulted in the attraction it exercises on many people looking for an alternative to what they perceive as an over-conditioned existence, usually translated as pressure of performance and competitive attitudes. Some opted out of literacy, and generally out of their culture, in search of liberation (mukti), a practical experience of lower preoccupation with the useful and higher spiritual goals, and of obstinate refusal of logic. (Some really never fully appropriated or internalized the philosophy, but adopted a lifestyle emulating commercialized models, the exotic syntax of escapism.) In short, and trying not to preclude future discussion of these phenomena, the historic development of language and logic within the many cultures we know of-more than the Western and Far Eastern mentioned-bears witness to the very complex relation between who and what people are: their language and the logic that the language makes possible and later embodies. The hunter in the West, and the hunter in the Far East, in Africa, India, Papua, the fishermen, the forager, etc. relate in different ways to their environment and to their peers in the community. The way their relatively similar experiences are embodied in language and other means of expression plays an important role in forms of sharing, religion, art, in the establishment of a value system, and later on education and identity preservation. There are common points, however, and the most relevant refer to relations established in the work process, as these affect efficiency. These commonalties prove relevant to understanding the role language, in conjunction with logic, exercises on various stages of social and economic development. A plurality of intellectual structures Since scale (of humankind, of groups performing coherent activities, of activities themselves) plays such an important role in the dynamics of human self-constitution through practical activities involving language, it is only fair to question whether logic is affected by scale. Again, the answer will depend upon who is asked. Logic as we study it has nothing to do with scale. An inference remains preserved no matter how many people make it, or study it, for that matter. But this reflects the universalistic viewpoint. Once we question the constitution of logic itself, and trace it to practical experiences resulting in the awareness of connections, it becomes less obvious that logic is independent of scale. Actually, some experiences are not even possible without having reached a critical mass, and the relation between simple and complex is not one of progression. But it is certainly a multi-valued relation, granted with elements of progression. The practical experience of a tribe (in Africa, North America, or South America) is defined at the scale of relations inside the tribe, and between the tribe and the relatively limited environment of existence. The logic (or pre-logic, to adapt the jargon of some anthropologists) specific to this scale corresponds to the dominance of instincts and intuitions, and is expressed within the visually dominant means of expression and communication characteristic of what is called the primitive mentality. From all we know, memory plays a major role in shaping patterns of activity. The power of discrimination (through vision, hearing, smell, etc.) is extraordinary; adaptability is much higher than that of humans in modern societies. These tribe members live in a phase of disjoint groups, unaware even of biological commonalties among such groups, focused on themselves in pursuing survival strategies not much different from those of other living creatures who share the same environment. Once these groups start relating to each other, the practical experiences of self-constitution diversify. Cooperation and exchange increase, and language, in many varieties, becomes part of the self-constitution of various human types. Languages originate in areas associated with the early nuclei of agriculture. These are places where the population could increase, since in some ways the pragmatics was effective enough to provide for a greater number of people. Probably primitive agriculture is the first activity in which a scale threshold was reached and a new quality, constituted in the practical experience of language, emerged. It is also an activity with a precise logic embodied in the awareness of a multitude of levels where connections are critical for the outcome of the activity, i.e., for the well being of those practicing it. The sacredness of place, to which the Latin root of the word culture (cultus) refers, is embodied in the practical activity with everything pertinent to human experience. Logic captures the connection between the place and the activity. In a variety of embodiments-from ways to sequence an action to the use of available resources, how to pursue a plan, craft tools, etc.-logic is integrated in culture and, in turn, participates in shaping it. It is a two-way dependency which increases over time and results in today's logical machines that define a culture radically different from the culture of the mechanical contraption. There are differences in the type of intelligence, which need to be acknowledged. And there are differences resulting from the variety of natural contexts of practical life, which we need to consider. Commonalties of the survival experience and further development should also be placed in the equation of human self-constitution. Within the pragmatics of the post-industrial, the logic extracted from practical experiences of self-constitution in the world and the logic constituted in experiences defining the world of the human are increasingly different. We no longer read the logic of language and infer from it to the experience, but project our own logic (itself a practical result of self-constitution) upon the experience in the world. The algebra of thought, a cross section of rational thinking that Boole submitted with his calculus of logics, is a good example, but by no means the only one. Languages are created in order to support a variety of logical systems, e.g., autoepistemic, temporal and tense propositional, modal, intuitionist. One would almost expect the emergence of a universal logic and a universal language (attempts were and are made to facilitate such a universalism). Leibniz had visions of an ideal language, a characteristica universalis and a calculus ratiocinator. So did many others, from the 17th century on, not realizing that in the process of diversification of human experiences, their dream became progressively less attainable. In parallel, we gave up the logical inheritance of the past: logic embedded in a variety of autarchic primitive practical experiences that various groups (in Africa, Asia, Europe, etc.) had up to our time is rapidly becoming a cultural reference. The scale that such experiences embody and the logic appropriate to that scale are simply absorbed in the larger scale of the global economy. We are simply no longer in the position to effectively unveil the logic of magical experiences, not even of those rational or rationalizable aspects that refer to the plants, animals, and various minerals used by the peoples preceding us for avoiding disease or treating illness. In our days, the cultures swinging from the sacred to the profane, from the primitive to the over-developed, come closer together. This happens not because everyone wants this to happen, not even because all benefit (in fact, many give up an identity-their own way of life-for a condition of non-identity that characterizes a certain style of living). The process is driven by the need to achieve levels of efficiency appropriate to the scale humankind reached. The various groups of people are integrated as humans in the first place (not as tribes, nations, or religions), and consequently a pragmatic framework of increasing integration is progressively put in place. The Euro-centrist (or Western) notion that all types of intelligence develop towards the Western type (and thus the Western practice of language culminating in literacy) has been discredited many times. The plurality of intellectual structures has been acknowledged, unfortunately either demagogically or in lip-service to the past, but never as an opening to the future. Literacy eradicated, for valid practical reasons- those of the Industrial Revolution-heterogeneity, and thus variety from among the experiences through which people constitute themselves in the universe of their experience. When those reasons are exhausted, because new circumstances of existence and work require a new logic, literacy becomes a hindrance, without necessarily affecting the role of the logic inhabiting it. The scale of human life and activity, and the associated projection of expectations beyond human survival and preservation, lead less to the need for universal literacy than to the need for several literacies and for a rich variety of logical horizons. Since the coordinating mechanism consists of logic, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics, the new scale prompts the emergence of new rhetorical devices, among other things. It suffices to think about persuasion at the level of the global village, or about persuasion at the level of the individual, as the individual can be filtered in this global village through mechanisms of networking and multimedia interactivity. Logical mechanisms of mass communication are replaced by logical considerations of increased individual communication. Think about new heuristic procedures at work on the World Wide Web, as well as in market research and in Netconomy transactions. Consider a new dialectic, definitely that of the infertile opposition between what is proclaimed as very good and excellent, as we try to convince ourselves that mediocrity is eradicated by consensus. Fascinating work in multi-valued logic, fuzzy logic, temporal logic, and many areas of logical focus pertinent to computation, artificial intelligence, memetics, and networking allow progress well beyond what the science fiction of the world of non A presented us with. The logics of actions Between the relatively monolithic and uniform ideal of a literate society convinced of the virtues of logic, and the pluralistic and heterogeneous reality of partial literacies that transfer logic to machines, one can easily distinguish a change in direction. Persons with a rather adequate literate culture, educated in the spirit of rationality guarded by classic or formal logic, are at a loss when facing the sub-literacies of specialized practical endeavors, or the illogical inferences made within new fields of human self-constitution. Let us put their attitude in some perspective. At various stages in human evolution-for instance, transition from scavenging to hunting, or from hunting and foraging to herding and agriculture-people experienced the effects of the erosion of some behavioral codes and projected their new condition in new practical patterns. One type of cohesion represented in the declining behavioral code was replaced by another; one logic, deferring the code, was followed by others. When interaction among groups of different types of cohesion occurred, logic was severely challenged. Sometimes, as a result, one logic dominated; other times, compromise was established. Primitive stages are remarkably adaptive to the environment. Our stage, remote in many ways from the wellspring (Ursprung), consists of an appropriated environment within which the effort is to provide a pragmatic framework for high efficiency. Logic, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics interact inside this framework. In other words, human evolution goes from sensorial anchoring in the natural world to an artificial (human crafted) world superimposed on the concrete reality-and eventually extended into artificial life, one from among the most recently established fields of scientific inquiry. Within this world, humans no longer restrict the projection of their natural and intellectual condition through one (or very few) comprehensive sign systems. Quite to the contrary, the effort is towards segmentation, with the aim of reaching not global cohesion, but local cohesiveness, corresponding to local optima. The complexity and the nature of the changes within this system result in the need for a strategy of segmentation, and a logic, or several, supporting it. In the interaction between a language and the humans constituted in it, as the embodiment of their biological characteristics and of their experience, logical conflicts are not excluded. After all, the logic of actions, influenced by heuristics as well, and the logic inherent to literacy are not identical. Actions bring to mind agents of action and thus the logic integrated in tools and artifacts. The assumption that the same logic housed in language is involved in the expression leading to the making of tools and other objects related to people's activity went unchallenged for a long time. Even today, designers and engineers are educated according to an ideal of literacy that is expected to reflect in their work the rationality exemplified in the literate use of language. Complementing most of the development of humankind's language, drawings have expressed ideas about how to make things and how to perform some operations that are part of our continuous experience of self- constitution in practical activity. Each drawing embodies the logic of the future artifact, no matter how useful or even how ephemeral. There is a large record of literate work from which logical aspects of thinking can be derived. There is a rather small record of drawing, and not too many surviving artifacts. They were conceived for precise practical experiences and usually did not outlast the experience, or the person who embodied it. Roads, houses, tools, and other objects indeed survived, but it is not until better tools for drawing itself and better paper became available that a library of engineering was established. As a hybrid between art and science, engineering accepts the logic of scientific discovery only in order to balance it against the logic of aesthetic expectations. In the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy, engineering definitely has a dominant position in respect to the self-constitution of the human being in language- based practical experiences. This is due to the impact it has on the efficiency of human practical experiences and on their almost endless diversification. There is a phase of conflict, a phase of accommodation, and a phase of complementarity when some means (such as language and the means for visualization used by designers and engineers) replace others, if they do not render them useless. In our time of experiences involving many more people than ever, of distributive transactions, of heterogeneity, and of interactions that go beyond the linearity of the sequence, the structural characteristics of literacy interfere with the new dynamics of human development as this is supported by very powerful technologies embodying a variety of logical possibilities. At this time, the implicit logic of literacy and the new logics (in the plural) collide in the pragmatic framework. Within the logic of the literate discourse, followed volens nolens in this book, it should be clear that the attempt to salvage literacy is the attempt to maintain linear relations, determinism, hierarchy (of values), centralization-which fostered literacy-in a framework requiring non-linearity, decentralization, distributed modes of practical experiences, and unstable value (among others). The two frameworks are logically incompatible. This does not mean that literacy has to be discarded altogether, or that it will disappear, as cuneiform notation and pictographic writing did, or that it will be replaced by drawing or by computer-based language processing. The linear will definitely satisfy a vast number of practical activities; so will deterministic explanations and centralism (political, religious, technological, etc.), and even an elitist sense of value. But instead of being a universal standard, or even a goal (to linearize everything that is not linear, to ascertain sequences of cause and effect, to find a center and practice centrality), it will become part of a complex system of relations, free of hierarchy-or at least with fast changing hierarchies-valueless, adaptive, extremely distributed. Of no less significance is the type of logic (and for that matter, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics) housed in language, i.e., projected from the universe of human self-constitution in the system of inferences, knowledge, and awareness of the being characteristic of literate frameworks of practical experiences. Language successfully captured a dualistic logic indebted to the values of truth and falsehood, and supported experiences embodied in the abstract character of logical rationality. It was complemented by logical symbolism and logical calculus, very successful in formalizing dualism, and in eliminating logical models not fitting the dualistic structure. Literacy instilled bivalent logic as another of its invisible layers-something is written or not, the written is right or wrong-allowing only quite late, and actually in the realm of logical formalism, the appearance of multi-valued schemes. The non-linearity, vagueness, and fuzziness characteristic of the post-industrial pragmatic framework opened avenues of high human efficiency, better adapted to the scale of humankind that required efficiency and eventually made efficiency its major goal. Literacy is ill endowed for supporting multi-valued logic, although it was always tempted to step in its vast territories. Even some of the disciplines built around and in extension of literacy (such as history, philosophy, sociology) are not able to integrate a logic different from the one seated in the practical experience of reading and writing. This explains, for instance, computationalism as a new horizon for science, within which multi-valued logic can be simulated even if the computer's underlying structure is that of Boolean logic. The literate argument of science and multimedia's non-linear heuristic path to science are fundamentally different. Each requires a different logic and results in a different interaction between those who constitute their identity in the practical experience of scientific experiments and those who constitute their identity in co- participation. It took longer in the world of predicative logic and in the science based on analytic power to accept fuzzy logic and to integrate it in new artifacts, than it took in the world of non-predicative logic and in the science based on the power of synthesis. Within the universe of non-predicative language, fuzzy logic made it into the design of control mechanisms for high-speed trains, as well as into new efficient toasters. It was accepted in Japan while it was still debated among experts in the Western world, until 1993, when a washing machine integrating fuzzy logic was introduced in the market. This fact can go on record as more than a mere example in a discussion regarding the implications of the global economy for the various language systems and the logical coordinating mechanisms specific to each. Progress in understanding and emulating human thinking shows a progression from a literacy-based model to a model rooted in the new pragmatic framework. Rule- based, pattern-matching systems generalize predicate calculus; neural networking is devoted to mimicking the way minds work, in a synthetic neuron-plex array; fuzzy logic addresses the limitations of Boolean calculus and the nondeterminism of neural networks, and concentrates on modeling imprecision, ambiguity, and undecidability as these are embodied in new human practical experiences. Sampling Within the civilization of literacy, recollection and the logic attached to it are predominantly made through quoting. In the literate framework, to know something means to be able to write about it, thus reconfirming the logic of writing. Lives are subject to memories, and diaries are our interpreted life, written with some reader in mind: the beloved, one's children, a posterity willing to acknowledge or understand. The literate means of sharing in successive practical experiences contain the expected logic and affect both the experience and its communication. Everything seems to originate in the same context: to know means to re-live the experience. The literate gnoseology, with its implicit logic, is based on continuously remaking, reconstituting the experience as a language experience. This is why every form of writing based on the structure embodied in literacy-literary or philosophic, religious, scientific, journalistic, or political-is actually rewriting. The civilization of illiteracy is one of sampling, a concept originating in genetics. To understand what this means, it is useful to contrast quotation and sampling. Literate appropriation in the form of quotation takes place in the structure of literacy. Sequences are designed to accept someone else's words. A quote introduces the hierarchy desired or acknowledged by invoking authority or questioning it. Authorship is exercised by producing a context for interpretation and maintaining literate rules for their expression. Interpretations are determined by the implicit expectation of reproducing the deterministic structure of literacy, i.e., its inner logic. The quote embodies centralism by establishing centers of interest and understanding around the quoted. Illiterate appropriation corresponds to a dissolution of hierarchy, to an experience of dissolving it and doing away with sequence, authorship, and the rules of logical inference. It questions the notion of elementary meaningful units, extending choices beyond well formed sentences, beyond words, beyond morphemes or phonemes (which always mean a lot to linguists, but almost nothing to the people constituting themselves in literate language experiences), and beyond formal logic. These techniques of sampling lead to actual undoing. Rhythms of words can be appropriated, as writers did long before the technology of musical sampling became available. So can the structure of a sentence be appropriated, the feel of a text, or of many other forms of expression that are not literacy-based (the visual arts, for instance). Anything pertaining to a written sentence-and for that matter to music, painting, odor, texture, movement (of a person, of images, leaves on a tree, stars, rivers, etc.)-can be selected, decomposed into units as small as one desires, and appropriated as an echo of the experience it embodies. Genetic configurations, as they apply to plants and other living entities, can be sampled as well. Genetic splicing maintains the relations to the broader genetic texture of plants or animals. Spliced, a word, a sentence, or a text still maintains relations to the experience in which it was constituted. These relations are enormously relativized, subjected to a logic of vagueness. When they relate to what we write, they are empowered by emotional components that the literate experience expelled from literate expression. There is room for variation, for spontaneity, for the accidental, where before the rigor and logic of good writing stood guard against anything that might disturb. When they relate to a biological structure, they concern specific characteristics, such as composition or perisability. Within the culture of sampling, the expectation of a shared body of literacy and its attached logic are quite out of touch with the dynamics of discarding the past as having no other significance than as an extended alphabet from which one can choose, at random or with some system, letters fitting the act. The letters are part of a sui generis alphabet, changing as practical experiences change, interacting with many logical rules for using them or for understanding how they work. In this new perspective, interpretation is always another instance of constituting the language, not only using it. Biological sampling, along with the associated splicing, also regards the living as a text. Its purpose is to affect some components in order to achieve desired qualities related to taste, look, nutritional value, etc. This is the core of genetic engineering, a practical experience in which the logic of life, expressed in DNA sequences and configurations, takes precedence over the logic of language and literacy, even if the text metaphor, so prominent in genetics, plays such a major role. It is worth recalling that the word text derives from the Latin word for to weave, which was later applied to coherent collections of written sentences. Sampling does not necessarily transform everything into the gray mass of information. In their practical experiences, people sample emotions and feelings as they sample foods in supermarkets, sample entertainment programs (television sampling included), sample clothing, and even partners (for special occasions or as potential spouses, partners in business, or whatever else). As opposed to quoting, sampling- periodic, random, or sequential-results in the severing from what literacy celebrated as tradition and continuity. And it challenges authorship. With increased sampling as a practical experience of diversification, the human being acquires a very specific freedom not possible within boundaries of the literate experience. Tradition is complemented by forms of innovation impossible within a pragmatic framework of progression and dualistic (true-false) experience. This becomes even more clear when we understand that sampling is followed by synthesis, which might be neither true nor false, but appropriate (to some degree). In the case of music, a device called a sequencer is used for this purpose. The composite is synthetic. A new experience, significant in itself at formal levels corresponding to the constitution of ad hoc languages and their consumption in the act, becomes possible. The mixmaster is a machine for recycling arbitrarily defined constitutive units such as notes, rhythms, or melodic patterns freed from their pragmatic identity. What is significant is that the same applies to the biological text, including the biology of the human being. In some ways, genetic mutation acquires the status of a new means for synthesizing new plants and animals, and even new materials. The artistic technique of collage is based on a logic of choices beyond those of realistic representations. Logical rules of perspective are negated by rules of juxtaposition. Collage, as a technique, anticipates the generalized stage of sampling and compositing. It changes our notion of intellectual property, trademark, and copyright, all expressions of a logic firmly attached to the literate experience. The famous case of Dr. Martin Luther King's plagiarism reflected aspects of primitive culture carried over to the civilization of illiteracy: there is no authorship; once something becomes public, it is free to be shared. In the same vein, there is no Malcolm X left in the poetry resulting from sampling his speeches, or anyone else's for that matter. Post-modern literature and painting result from sampling exercises governed by an ear or eye keen to our day's vernacular of machines and alienation. The same applies to plants, fruits, and microbes insofar as sampling does not preserve previous identities, but constitutes new ones, which we integrate in new experiences of our own self-constitution. From the perspective of logic, the procedure is of interest to the extent that it establishes domains of logical appropriateness. Logical identity is redefined from a dynamic perspective. From a pragmatic viewpoint, certain experiences might be maximized by applying a certain logic to them. Moreover, within some experiences, complementary logics-each logic assigned to a precise aspect of the system-can be used together in strategies of layered management of the process, or in parallel processes, checked against each other at defined instances. Strategies for maximizing market transactions, for instance, integrate various decision-making layers, each characterized by a different logical assumption. We experience a process of replacing the rigid logical framework of literate condition with many logical frameworks, adapted to diversity. In conclusion, one more aspect should be approached. Is it enough to say that language expresses the biological and the social identity of the human being? To deal with language, and more specifically with the embodiment of language in literacy, means to deal with everything that makes the human being the bio-socio-politico- cultural entity that defines our species. The logical appears to be an underlying element: bio-logical, socio-logical, etc. The hierarchy will probably bother some, since it seems that language assumes a higher place among the many factors participating in the process of human self-constitution. Indeed, in order for the human being to qualify as zoon politikon, as Homo Sapiens, or Homo Ludens (playful man) or Homo Faber, he or she must first qualify for the interactions which each designation describes: on the biological level, with other human beings, within structures of common interest, in the realm of a human being's own nature. This is why humans define themselves through practical experiences involving signs. At the various levels at which such signs are generated, interpreted, comprehended, and used to conceive new signs, human identity is ascertained. This is what prompted Felix Hausdorf to define the human being as zoon semeiotikon- semiotic animal, sign-using animal. Moreover, Charles Sanders Peirce considered semiotics as being the logic of vagueness. Signs-whether pictures, sounds, odors, textures, words (or combinations), belonging to a language, diagram, mathematical or chemical formalism, new language (as in art, political power, or programming), genetic code, etc.-relate to human beings, not in their abstraction but in the concreteness of their participation in our lives and work. Memetic optimism John Locke knew that all knowledge is derived from experience. But he was not sure that the same applies to logic or mathematics. If we define experience as self- constitutive practical activity, whose output is the ever-changing identity of the individual or individuals carrying out the experience, logic derives from it, as do all knowledge and language. This places logic not outside thought, but in experience, and raises the question of logical replication. Dawkins defined the replicator as a biological molecule that "has the extraordinary property of being able to make copies of itself." Such an entity is supposed to have fecundity, fidelity, longevity. Language is a replicator; or better yet, it is a replicative medium. The question is whether duplication can take place only by virtue of its own structural characteristics, or whether one has to consider logic, for instance, as the rule of replication. Moreover, maybe logic itself is replicative in nature. This discussion belongs to the broader subject of memetics. Its implicit assumption is that memes, the spiritual equivalent of genes, are subject to mechanisms of evolution. As opposed to natural evolution, memetic evolution is through more efficient orders of magnitude, and faster by far. In experiences of cultural transfer (sharing of experience as a practical experience itself) or of inheritance-genetic or memetic, or a combination of both- something like a gene of meaning was suspected to exist. Were it to exist, that would not mean, within our pragmatic system, that signification is carried over through memetic replication, but that practical experiences of human self-constitution involve the act of conjuring meaning under the guise of various logics pertinent to sign processes. Replication is, then, not of information, but of fundamental processes, conjuring of meaning being one of them. Evolution of language, as well as of logic, belongs to cultural evolution. Meme mutation and spread of a reduced scale, such as the scale of finite artificial languages and limited logical rules, can be described in equations similar to those of genetics. But once the scale changes, it is doubtful that we could encode the resulting complexity in such formalizations. Be this as it may, expression, communication, and signification, the fundamental functions of any sign system, regardless of its logic, are endowed with replicative qualities. Logic prevents corruption, or at least provides means for identifying it. The easiest way to understand this statement is to relate it to the many replications involved in the manipulation of data in a computer. The Error message announcing corruption of data corresponds to a replication process that went astray. Like all analogies, this one is not infallible: a certain logic, against whose rules the replication is tested, might simply prove to be inadequate to processes of replication that are different in nature. Indeed, if the logic implicit in the experience of literacy were to authenticate semiotic processes characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy, the Error message of corruption would overrun the monitor. All that occurs in the experience of networking and all that defines virtuality pertain to a logical framework that is by no means a memetic replication of the Aristotelian or some other logical system intrinsic to the experience of literacy. Memes residing in the brain's neuronal structure, as a pattern of pits on a CD- ROM, or in an HTML (hypertext markup language) Web format can be replicated. Interactions among minds correspond to a different dynamic realm, the realm of their reciprocal identification. Book Three Language as Mediating Mechanism Mention the word mediation today, or post it on the Internet. Swarms of lawyers will come after you. From the many meanings mediation has acquired over time, dispute resolution is the practical activity that has appropriated the word. Nevertheless, in its etymology, mediation attests to experiences that pre-date lawyers as they pre- date the earliest attempt to introduce laws. Mediation, along with heuristics, is definitory of the human species. From all we know, nature is a realm of action and reaction. The realm of human activity implies a third element, an in-between, be this a tool, a word, a plan. This applies to primitive experiences of self-constitution, as well as to current embedded mediating activities: mediation of mediation ad infinitum. In each mediation there is the potential for further mediation. That is, the inserted third can be divided in turn. A lever used to move a very heavy object can be supplemented by another one, or two or more, all applied to the task at hand. Each tool can progressively evolve into a series of tools. Each individual called upon to mediate can call upon others to perform a chain of related or unrelated mediations. The same holds true for signs and language. Mediation is the practical experience of reducing to manageable size a task that is beyond the abilities of an individual or individuals identified through the task. Mediation is a mapping from a higher scale of complexity to a scale that the persons involved in a task can handle. This chapter will examine various phases of mediated human experiences. We shall examine at which pragmatic junctures language and, subsequently, literacy provide mediating functions. More important, we will define the conditions that require mediations for which literacy is no longer adequate. Since tools, in their mediating function, will be frequently brought into the argument, a distinction needs to be made from the outset: Signs, language, artificial languages, and programs (for computers and other devices) are all mediating entities. What distinguishes these from tools is their caoability for self-replication. They are, as much as humans constituting their identity in semiotic processes, subject to evolutionary cycles structurally similar to those of nature. Their evolution is, as we know, much faster than genetic evolution. The genetic make-up of the human species has changed relatively little, while the mediating elements that substantially contributed to the increase in human efficiency underwent many transformations. Some of these are no longer evolutionary, but revolutionary, and mark discontinuities. Genetic continuity is a background for pragmatic discontinuity. The moments of discontinuity correspond to threshold values in the scale of human activity. They regard mediating devices and strategies as dynamic components of the pragmatic framework. The power of insertion Self-constitution in mediating and mediated practical experiences is different from self-constitution in direct forms of praxis. In direct praxis, the wholeness of the being is externalized. But it is the partial being-partial in respect to the human's biological and intellectual reality-that is projected in mediated practical experiences. The narrow, limited, and immediate scope of direct human activity explains why no mediation, or only accidental mediation (unintended mediation), characterizes the pragmatic framework. In the long run, mediation results in the severed relation between individuals and their social and natural environments. As we shall see, this fact has implications for literacy. A long chain of mediations separates the working individual from the object to be worked upon, be this object raw material, processed goods, thoughts, or other experiences. It is not easy to immediately realize the pervasiveness of mediation and its effects on human activity and self-constitution. People introduce all the intermediaries they need in order to maintain efficiency. Because we notice only the immediate layer with which we come into contact-the tool we use or the object we act upon-we have difficulty in recognizing the pervasiveness of mediation. The multitude of intermediaries involved in fabricating one finished product is far beyond our direct involvement. Division, in the context of labor, means to break a task into smaller parts that are easier to rationalize, understand, and execute. Division engenders the specialization of each mediating element. To specialize means to be involved in practical experiences through which skills and knowledge pertinent to activity segmented through labor division are acquired. Whether division of physical work or of intellectual activity, at the end of the process there is a large number of components which have to be assembled. Even more important, the quantity of pieces, the order in which various pieces come together, and the intermediary sequences of checks and balances (if something does not work, it is better to find out before the entire product is assembled) are essential. All these constitute the integration aspect, which requires the element of coordination through tools and methods. The segmentation of work in order to reach higher efficiency is not arbitrary. The goal is to arrive at coherent units of simpler work, which in some ways are like the letters of an alphabet. In this model, production resembles writing different words by combining available letters. Segmentation of work takes place concomitant with the effort to conceive of tools appropriate to each segment in order to ensure the desired efficiency. In effect, to specialize means to be aware of and to master tools that correspond to a step in the sequence leading to the desired result-the final word, in keeping with our example. Conversely, what sometimes looks like excessive specialization in our day-e.g., in medicine, physics, mathematics, electronics, computer science, transportation-is the result of the propensity of each mediating element to engender a need for further mediations, which reflect expectations for efficiency. Simultaneously with the differentiation of work, language changed, becoming itself more differentiated. The efficiency reached in specialization is higher than that of direct action and of low levels of labor division. With each new specialization of a mediating element, humans constitute a body of practical knowledge, in the form of experience, that can be used again and again. This body of knowledge reflects the complexity of the task and the scale in which it is exercised. For instance, stones (the Latin calcula) were used to represent quantities (just as the early English used stone as a measure of weight). Over the centuries, this practice led to the body of knowledge known as calculus and to coherent applications in various human endeavors. The physical presence of stones gave way to easier methods of calculation: the abacus, as well as to marks recorded on bone, shell, leather, and paper, to a number system, and to symbols for numbers. The vector of change starts at the materiality and heads towards the abstract-that is, from objects to signs. Computers were invented as a tool for calculation, as well as for other activities. They are the result of the labor of philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, and finally technologists, who changed calculation from a physical to a cognitive practical experience. Boolean logic, binary numbers, and electronic gates are mediating elements that enhance the effectiveness of calculation by high orders of magnitude. As things stand today, computer technology has led to myriad specialties: design and production of chips; information processing at various levels; manufacture of components and their integration as machines; networking; visualization techniques; the creation of machine languages for rendering the illiterate input, and on and on. This development exemplifies the active character of each mediation, especially the open- endedness of the mediation process. As an insertion, mediation proves powerful also in terms of the cognitive awareness it stimulates. Through mediating elements, such as signs, language, tools, and even ideas, the individual gets a different perspective on the practical experience. The distance introduced through mediation, between actions and results, is one of space-the lever, not the hand, touches the stone to be moved-and duration-the time it takes to execute an action. With each inserted third, i.e., with each mediation, seeds are planted for what will eventually result in a totally new category of practical experiences: the conception of plans. The power of insertion is actually that of acquiring a sense and a direction for the future. Myth as mediating pre-text Among the mediating elements mentioned so far, language performs its role in a particular way. Tools (such as pulleys, levers, gears, etc.) extend the arms or the legs, that is, the human body; language extends the coordinating capability of humans. Words, no matter how well articulated, will not turn the stone or lift the trunk of the fallen tree. They can be used to describe the problem, to enlist help, to discuss how the task can be accomplished, to render intelligible the sequence of accomplishing it. Once writing was developed, coordination was extended to apply from those physically present to people who could read, or to whom a text could be read if one did not have reading skills. Language is in extension and succession of the pragmatic phase of immediate and direct appropriation of objects. As Leonard Bloomfield-probably a bit hasty in his generalization-observed, "...the division of labor (...) is due to language." Although different in nature from physical tools, language is instrumental: It is applied on something and embodies characteristics of human beings constituted in a practical experience that made language possible and necessary. The mediating nature of early words and early articulated thoughts derived from their practical condition: medium for self-constitution (the voice externalizes the anatomy pertinent to producing and hearing sounds), and medium of exchange of experience (pertinent to nature or to others in the group). Early words are a record of the self-awareness of the human, denoting body parts and elementary actions. They also reflect the relational nature of the practical experience of those constituting viable groups. Researchers infer this from words, identified in proto-languages, that point to an other, or to coalitions, or to danger. What distinguished words from animal sounds was their coherence in extending the practical experience of appropriating a uniform survival strategy. Cave paintings, always regarded as a sequence of animal representations, constitute what can be called a coherent image of a small universe of human life. They are an inventory of a sort-of fauna as opposed to humans, and as a reference to animals different from humans-and a statement regarding the importance of each kind of animal to human beings. By relating animals and drawings of man and woman, they also show that there is a third element to be considered: incipient implied symbolism. This is not to say that we have language, even less a visual language, articulated in the Paleolithic. But at Lascaux, Niaux, Altamira, and at the caves in northern China, in images preserved in the caves along the Lena River in Russia, there are some patterns, such as the co-presence of bison and horses, and the hinted association with male and female, for example, which show that the visual can go beyond the immediate and suggest a frame of work with mytho-magical elements. Indeed, myths are singular mediating entities. They convey experience and preserve it in oral societies. Magic is also a mediating element, metaphysical in nature. Magic, in the pre-literacy context, inserts, between humans and everything they cannot understand, control, or tame, something (actions, words, objects) that stands for the practical implications of this failure. An amulet, for example, stands for the lack of understanding of what it takes to be protected from evil forces. Spells and gestures intended to scare away demons belong to the same phenomenon. Though not without purpose, magic is action with no immediate practical purpose, triggered by events language could not account for. Myth is a pre-text for action with a practical, experiential purpose. Each myth contains rules for successful activity. The context in which language, as a complex sign system, was structured was also the context of social mediation: division of social functions and integration in a cohesive social structure. In syncretic forms of social life, with low efficiency, and limited self-consciousness, there is little need for or possibility of mediation. Once human nature was constituted in the reality of practical, mytho-magical relations, both labor division and mediation became part of the new human experience. Tools for plowing, processing skins, and sharing experience (in visual or verbal form) kept the human subject close to the object of work or human relation. It is probably more in respect to the unknown and unpredictable that mediation, via priests and shamans in various rituals, was used in forms of magical practice. Cave paintings, no less than cuneiform, and later phonetic writing, constituted intermediaries inserted in the world in which human beings asserted their presence or questioned the presence of others. The centralized state, which is a late form of social organization, the church, and schools are all expressions of the same need to introduce in a world of differences elements with uniformizing and integrating power. What we today call politics simply belongs to the self-constitution of the individual as member of the politeia, the community. By extension, politics means to effectively participate in the life of the community. The nature of this participation changed enormously over time. It started as participation in magic and ritual, and it evolved in participation in symbolic forms, such as mancipatio, conventions embodied in normative acts. In the framework of participation, we can mention goal determination and forms of organization and representation, as well as the payment of taxes to support the mediators of this activity. At the beginning, participation was an issue of survival; and survival, of natural condition, remained the unwritten rule of social life for a very long time. While in oral language there is no mediating element to preserve the good and the right, in written language, law mediates and justice, as much as God (actually a plurality of gods and goddesses) or wisdom, are inserted in community affairs. Differentiation and coordination Mediation also implies breaking the immediate connection, to escape the domination of the present-shared time and space-and to discover relations characteristic of adjacency, i.e., neighboring in time and space. Adjacency can be in respect to the past, as expressed through the practice of keeping burial records. It can also be in respect to the future. The magic dimension of the ritual focused on desired things-weather, game, children-exemplifies this aspect. The notion of adjacency can pertain also to neighboring territories, inhabited by others involved in similar or slightly different practical forms of experience. Regardless of the type of adjacency, what is significant is the element that separates the immediate from the mediated. The expanding horizon of life required means to assimilate adjacency in the experience of continuous human self-constitution. Language was among such means and became even more effective when a medium for storing and disseminating-writing-was established. In orality-dominated social life, opinion was the product of language activity, and it had to be immediate. In writing, truth was sought and preserved. Accordingly, logic centered around the true-false distinction. Literate societies are societies which accept the value of speaking, writing, and reading, and which operate under the assumption that literacy can accomplish a unifying function. Mediation and the associated strategy of integration relied on language for differentiation of tasks and for coordination of resulting activities and products. Language projects both a sense of belonging to and living in a context of life. It embodies characteristics of the individuals sharing perceptions of space and time integrated in their practical experiences and expressed in vocabulary, grammar, and idioms, and in the logic that language houses. Language is simultaneously a medium of uniformity and a means of differentiation. Within continuously constituted language, individual expression and various non-standard uses of language (literary and poetic, probably the most notorious of these) are a fact of life. In the practical constitution of language for religious or judicial purposes, or in order to give historic accounts of scientific phenomena, expression is not uniform. Neither is interpretation. As we know from early attempts at history, there is little difference between languages used to describe relations of ownership (of animals, land, shelter) and texts on astronomy or navigation, for instance. The lunar calendar and the practical experience of navigation determined the coherence of writings on the subject. There is very little difference in the work of people who accounted for numbers of animals and numbers of stars. Once differentiation of work took place, language allowed for expressions of differences. Behind this change of language is the change of the people involved in various aspects of social life, i.e., their projection into a world appropriated through practical experiences based on the human ability to differentiate-between useful and harmful, pleasant and unpleasant, similar and dissimilar. In order to distinguish the level at which a language is practiced, people become aware of language's practical consequences, of its pragmatic context. Plato's dialogues can be read as poetry, as philosophy, or as testimony to the state of language-based practical experiences in use at the time and place in which he was active. What is not clear is how a person operating in and constituting himself in the language identifies the level of an oral or written text, and how the person interprets it according to the context in which it was written. The question is of more than marginal importance to our understanding of how Plato related to language or how people today relate to language: either by overstating its importance or by ignoring it to the extent of consciously discarding language, or certain aspects of it. Here is where the issue of mediation becomes critical. The inserted third- person, text, image, theory-should understand both the language of the reader and the language of the text. More generally, the third should at any instance understand the language of the entities it mediates between. States, as political entities, are constituted on this assumption; so are legal systems, religion, and education. Each such mediating entity introduces elements into the social structure that will finally be expressed in language and assimilated as accepted value. They will become the norm. The process is sometimes extremely tight. Retroaction from mediating function to language and back to action entails progressive fine-tuning, never-ending in fact, since human beings are in continuous biological and social change. Mediations lead to segmentation. The coordination of mediations is necessary in order to recover the integrality (wholeness) of the human being in the output of the practical experience. Mediations, although coordinated by language or other mediating means, and subject to integration in the outcome of activity, introduce elements of tension, which in turn require new mediation and thus progressive specialization. When the sequence of mediations expands, the complexity of integration can easily exceed the degree of complexity of the initial task. The efficiency reached is higher than that of direct action or of low levels of labor division. With each new mediation, the human being constitutes a body of practical knowledge that can be used again and again. The necessary integrative dimension of mediations makes the strategy of using mediating entities, along with the appropriate coordination mechanism, socially relevant and economically rewarding. One can speak of mediation between rational and emotional aspects of human life, between thought and language, language and images, thought and means of expression, communication and signification. Regardless of its particular aspect, mediation is an experience of cognitive leverage. Integration and coordination revisited From the entire subject of mediation, two questions seem more relevant to our understanding of literacy and of its dynamics: 1. Why, at a certain moment in human evolution, does literacy become the main mediating instrument? 2. Under which circumstances is language's mediating function assumed by other sign systems? Let us answer the questions in the order they are posed. Language is not the only mediating instrument people use. In the short account given so far, other mediating entities, such as images, movements, odors, gestures, objects (stones, twigs, bones, artifacts) were mentioned. Also mentioned was the fact that these are quite close to what they actually refer to (as indexical signs), or to what they depict based on a relation of similarity (as iconic signs). However, even at this level of reduced generality and limited coherence and consistency, human beings can express themselves beyond the immediate and direct. The cave paintings of the Paleolithic age should be mentioned again in this respect. The immediate is the cave itself. It is shelter, and its physical characteristics are perceived in direct relation to its function. The surprise comes in noticing how these characteristics become part of the practical experience of sharing what is not present by involving a mediating element. The drawings are completions, continuations, extensions of the ridges of the stone walls of the cave. This is not a way of speaking. A better quality photograph, not to mention the actual drawings in the caves, reveals how the lines of the relief are extended into the drawing and made part of them. The first layer of exchange of information among people is comparison, focused on similarities, then on differences. We infer from here that, before drawing-a practical experience involving a major cognitive step-the human beings seeking shelter in the cave noticed how a certain natural configuration-cloud, plant, rock formation, the trail left by erosion-looked like the head or tail of an animal, or like the human head, for example. The completion of this look-alike form-when such a completion was physically possible-was an instance of practical self-definition and of shared experience. When the act of completion was physically performed, probably by accident at the beginning, the immediate natural (the cave) was appropriated for a new function, something other than merely shelter. The shape of the wings of galleries in the Altamira or Niaux caves suggests analogies to the male-female distinction, a sexual identifier but also a first step towards distinctions based on perceived differences. The selection of a certain cave from among others was the result of an effort, no matter how primitive, to express. Together, this selected physical structure and the added elements became a statement regarding a very limited universe of existence and its shared distinctions. Further on, the animals depicted, the sequence, the addition of mytho-magical signs (identification of more general notions such as hand, wound, or different animals) make the painted cave an expression of an inserted thought about the world, that is, about the limited environment constituting the world. In the case of Egyptian pictographic writing, we know that images were used as mediating devices in such sophisticated instances as the burial of pharaohs and in their life after death. In the universe of ideographic languages (such as Chinese and Japanese), the mediating function of images constituting the written is different. Combinations of ideograms constitute new ideograms. Accordingly, self-constitution in language takes over experiences of combining different things in order to obtain something different from each of the combined ingredients. In some ways, the added efficiency facilitated by mediations was augmented by formal qualities that would eventually establish the realm of aesthetic practical experiences. This should come as no surprise, since we know from many practical experiences or the remote past that formal qualities often translate into higher functionality. Language use, which opened access to generality and abstraction, allowed humans to insert elements supporting an optimized exchange of information in the structure of social relations, and to participate in the conventions of social life. There is not only the trace of the immediate experience in a word, there is also the shared convention of mediated interactions. Language, in its development over time, is thus a very difficult-to-decode dynamic history of common praxis. We understand this from the way the use of the ax, millstone, or animal sacrifice expanded, along with the appropriate vocabulary and linguistic expression, from the universe of the Semites to the Indo-Europeans. Reconstructed vocabulary from the region of the Hittite kingdom testifies to the landscape (there are many words for mountains), to trees (the Hittites distinguished various species), to animals (leopard, lion, monkey), and to tools (wheel- based means of transportation). Language is not only a reflection of the past, but also a program for future work. The nuclei of agriculture where language emerged (in China, Africa, southeastern Europe) were also centers of dissemination of practical experience. Writing, even when it only records the past, does it for the future. Progress in writing resulted in better histories, but moreover in new avenues for future praxis. In the ideal of literacy, the individual states a program of unifying scope in a social reality of diverse means and diverse goals. Literacy as such is an insertion between a rather complex social structure, nature, and among the members of society. Within a culture, it is a generic code which facilitates dialogue among the members of the literate community and among communities of different languages. Its scope is multidimensional. Its condition is one of mediation. A major mediating element in the rationale of industrial society, literacy fulfilled the function of a coordinating mechanism for mediations made otherwise than through language, along the assembly line, for instance. Obviously conceived on the linear, sequential model of time and language, the assembly line optimally embodied requirements characteristic of complex integration. Once the reductionist practice of dividing work into smaller, specialized activities became necessary, the results of these activities had to be integrated in the final product. At the level of technology of industrial society, literacy-based human practical experiences of self-constitution defined the scope and character of labor division, specialization, integration, and coordination. Life after literacy The answer to the second question posed a few pages back is not an exercise in prophecy. (I'll leave that to the priests of futurology.) This is why the question concerns circumstances under which the dominant mediating function of language can be assumed by other sign systems. The discussion involves a moving target because today the notion of literacy is a changing representation of expectations and requirements. We know that there is a before to literacy; and this before pertains to mediations closer to the natural human condition. Of course, we can, and should, ask whether there is an after, and what its characteristics might be. Complexities of human activity and the need to ensure higher efficiency explain, at least partially, complexities of interhuman relations and the need to ensure some form of human integration. What this first assessment somehow misses is the fact that, from a certain moment on, mediation becomes an activity in itself. Means become an end in themselves. When individuals constituted themselves in structurally very similar experiences, mediation took place through the insertion of rather homogeneous objects, such as arrows, bows, levers, and tools for cutting and piercing. Interaction was a matter of co-presence. Language resulted in the context of diversification of practical human experiences. Self-constitution in language captured the permanence and the perspective of the whole into which variously mediated components usually come together. Later on, literacy freed humans from the requirement of co-presence. Language's mediating capabilities relied on space and time conventions built into language experience over a very long time and interiorized by literate societies. Characteristics of writing specific to different notational systems resulted from characteristics of practical experiences. Literacy only indirectly reflects the encoding of experience in a medium of expression and communication. Moreover, the shift from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of partial literacies involves the encoding of the experience in media that are no longer appropriate for literate expression. We write to tape or to digital storage. We publish on networks. We convert texts into machine- readable formats. We edit in non-linear fashion. We operate on configurations or on mixed data types (that constitute multimedia). Experiences encoded in such media reflect their own characteristics in what is expressed and how it is expressed. Although there are vast qualitative differences in linguistic performance within a literate society, a common denominator-the language reified in the technology of literacy-is established. The expectation is a minimum of competence, supposed to meet integration requirements at the workplace, the understanding of religion, politics, literature, and the ability to communicate and comprehend communication. But as literacy became a socially desirable characteristic, language became a tool-at least in some professions and trades-and the command of language became a marketable skill. For example, during periods of greater political activity in classical Greece and Rome, the practical experience of rhetoric was a discipline in itself. Orators, skilled in persuasion, for which language is necessary, made a career out of language use. The written texts of the Middle Ages were also intended to foster the rhetorical skills of the clergy in presenting arguments. In our time, speechwriters and ghostwriters have become the language professionals, and so have priests, prophets, and evangelists (of all religions). But what is only an example of how language can become an end in itself has become a very significant development in human praxis. Not only in professions such as expository writing (for journalists, essayists, politicians, and scientists), poetry, fiction, dramaturgy, communications, but also in the practice of law (normative, enforcement, judicial), politics, economics, sociology, and psychology has language become a principal tool. Nevertheless, the language used in such endeavors is not the standard, national, or regional language, but a specialized subset, marginally understood by the literate population at large. While the grammar governing such sub- languages is, with some exceptions, the grammar of the language from which they are derived, the vocabulary is more appropriate to the subject matter. Moreover, while sharing language conventions and the general frame of language, these sub-languages project an experience so particular that it cannot be properly understood and interpreted without some translation and commentary. And each commentary (on a law, a new scientific theory, a work of art or poetry) is yet another insertion of a third, which refers to the initial object sometimes so indirectly that the relation might be difficult to track and the meaning is lost. A similar process can be identified in our present relation to the physical environment. Many things mediate between us and the natural environment: our homes, clothes, the food processing industry. Even natural artifacts, such as gardens, lakes, or water channels, are a buffer against nature, an insertion between us and nature. Constituted in our language are experiences of survival and adaptation: the vocabulary of hunting, fishing, agriculture, animal husbandry, coping with changes in weather and climate, and coping with natural catastrophes such as floods and earthquakes. The mediating function of language is different here than on the production line. Mediated practice leads to distributed knowledge along successive or parallel mediations that are not at all literacy-based or literacy-dependent. Within the global scale of human experience, it makes sense to use a global perspective (of resources, factors affecting agriculture, navigation, etc.) in order to maximize locally distributed efforts. For example: people involved in various activities must rely on persons specialized to infer from observation (of plants, trees, animals, water levels in rivers and lakes, wind direction, changes in the earth's surface, biological, chemical, atmospheric factors) and generate predictions regarding natural events (drought, plant or animal disease, floods, weather patterns, earthquakes). What we acknowledge here is the new scale of the practical experience of meteorology, as well as methods of collecting and distributing information through vast networks of radio, television, and weather services. Both the means for acquiring the information and for disseminating it are visual. Local networks subscribe to the service and receive computer-generated maps on which clouds, rain, or snow are graphically depicted. The equations of weather forecasting are obviously different from local observations of wind direction, precipitation, dew point, etc. The chaotic component captured and the necessity to visually display information as it changes over time are not reducible to equations or direct observation. It is hard to imagine having weather predicted through very mediated meteorological practice, and even harder to imagine forecasting earthquakes or volcanic activity from remote stations, such as satellites. Still, weather patterns display dynamic characteristics that made the metaphor of the butterfly causing a hurricane the most descriptive explanation of how small changes-caused by the flapping of the butterfly's wings-can result in impressive consequences-the hurricane. The language of the forecast only translates into common language the data (the majority in visual form) that represents our new understanding of natural phenomena. There is yet another aspect, which is related to the status of knowledge and our ways of acquiring, transmitting, and testing it. Our knowledge of phenomena such as nuclear fusion, thermonuclear reaction, stellar explosions, genes and genetic codes, and complex dynamic systems is no longer predominantly based on inductions from observed facts to theories explaining such facts. It seems that we project theories, founded on abstract thinking, onto physical reality and turn these theories into means of adapting the world to our goals or needs, which are much more complex than survival. Memetics is but the more recent example in this respect. It projects the abstract models of natural evolution into culture, focusing on replicative processes for the production of phenomena such as ideas, behavioral rules, ways of thinking, beliefs, and norms. Mediation probably qualifies for a memetic approach, too. Theories require a medium of expression, and this is represented by new languages, such as mathematical and logical formalisms, chemical notation, computer graphics, or discourse in some pseudo- language. The formalism of memetics reminds many of us of formal languages, as well as of the shorthand used in genetics. The goal is to describe whatever we want to describe through computational functions or through computable expressions. Since experiential space and time are housed in our language, we can account for only a three-dimensional space and a homogeneous time that has only one direction-from past to future. Nevertheless, we can conceive of multidimensional spaces and of non-homogeneous time. To describe the same in language, especially through literate expression, is not only inadequate, but also raises obstacles. With the advent of digital technology, a language of two letters-zero and one-and the grammar of Boolean logic, we have stepped into a new age of language, no longer the exclusive domain of the human being. Such a language introduces new levels of mediation, which allow for the use of machines by means of sentences, i.e., sequences of encoded commands triggered by a text written in a language other than natural language. Physical contact is substituted by language, inserted in processes of complexity impossible to control directly or even to relate to in forms characteristic of previous scientific and technological praxis. Indeed, there are instances when the speed of a process and the requirement of sequencing make direct human control not only impossible, but also undesirable. This mediation is then continued by sequences automatically generated by machines, i.e., mediation generating new mediation. Although the structure of all these new languages (which describe phenomena, support programming, or control processes) is inspired by the structure of natural language, they project experiences which are not possible in the universe of standard language. New forms of interaction, higher speeds, and higher precision become available when such powerful cognitive tools are designed as custom-made instruments for advancing our understanding of phenomena that evade analytic or even small-scale synthetic frameworks. The discussion of mediation brought up other sign systems that assume the mediating function characteristic of literacy. Not only artificial languages-instruments of knowledge and action, new pragmatic dimensions, in fact-but also natural languages are increasingly used in a mediating capacity. I would submit to the reader the observation that the visual, primarily, and other sensory information are recuperated and used in ways that change human experience. Where words no longer suffice, visualized images of the unseen constitute a mediating language, allowing us to understand phenomena otherwise inaccessible-the micro- or remote universe, for instance. Touch, smell, and sound can be articulated and introduced as statements in a series of events for which written and spoken language are no longer adequate. Virtual reality is synthesized as a valid simulation of real reality. Virtual realities can be experienced if we simply put on body-sensitive gloves, headgear (goggles and earphones), special footwear, or a whole suit. Powerful computer graphics, with a refresh rate high enough to maintain the illusion of space and motion, make a virtual space available. Within this space, one's own image can become a partner of dialogue or confrontation. Journeys outside one's body and inside one's imagination are experienced not only in advanced laboratories, but also in the new entertainment centers that appeal to children as well as adults. Such projections of oneself into something else represent one of the most intriguing forms of interaction in the networked world. The experience of self-constitution as an avatar on the Internet is no longer one of a unique self, but of multiples. Language guards the entrance to the experience, but once the human subject is inside, it has only limited power or significance. Mediations other than through language dominate here, invoking all our senses and deep levels of our existence, for which literacy produced only psychoanalytic rhetoric. In other words, we notice that while language constituted a projection of the human being in the conventions of abstract systems of expression, representation, and communication, it also exercised an impoverishing function in that it excluded the wealth of senses-possibly including common sense-and the signs addressing them. Language made of us one monolithic entity. In the meantime, we have come to realize that the transitions between our many inner states can be a source of new experiences. The answer to the question regarding alternatives to literacy is that part of the mediating function of language has extended to specialized languages, and to sign systems other than verbal language, when those systems are better adapted to the complexities of heretofore unencountered challenges. Virtual reality is not a linear reality but an integrating, interacting reality of non-linear relations between what we do and what results. Among these newly acquired, different mediating entities, relations and interdependencies are continuously established and changed at an ever faster pace. It appears that once human activity moves from the predominantly object level to the meta condition (one of self-awareness and self-interpretation), we have several languages and several contingent literacies instead of a dominant language and dominant literacy. When writing is replaced by multimedia along the communication channels of the networked world, we seem to enjoy rediscovering ourselves as much richer entities than we knew or were told about through literate mediation. The entire transition is the result of pragmatic needs resulting from the fundamental change in continuous human self-constitution and the scale in which it is exercised. Mediations break activities into segments that are more intensive and shorter than the cycle from which they were extracted. Therefore, mediation results in the perception of the reality of faster rhythms and of time contraction. Massive distribution of tasks, finer levels of parallelism, and more sophisticated integrating and coordinating mechanisms, result in new pragmatic possibilities, for which literacy is not suitable, and even counter-productive. This entire transition comprises another vector of change: from individual to communal survival, from direct work to highly mediated praxes, from local to global to universal, from the visible to the invisible of macro and micro-universe, from the real to the virtual. Mediation, in its newest digital forms of enmeshed nature and evolving culture, causes boundaries to disappear between the elements involved in practical experiences of our self-constitution. Literacy, Language and Market Markets are mediating machines. In our time, the notion of a machine is very different from that of the industrial Machine Age associated with the pragmatics of the civilization of literacy. Today, the term machine is evocative of software rather than hardware. Machine comprises input and output, process, control mechanisms, and the expectation of predictable functioning. Here is where our difficulties start. At best, markets appear as erratic to us. Market prediction seems to be an oxymoron. Every time experts come up with a formula, the market acts in a totally new manner. An amazing number of transactions, ranging from bargaining at a garage sale to multi-prong deals in derivatives, continuously subject the outcome of practical experiences of human self-constitution to the test of market efficiency. There is nothing that can escape this test: ideas, products, individuals, art, sports, entertainment. Like a tadpole, the market seems to consume itself in transactions. At times, they appear so esoteric to us that we cannot even fathom what the input of this machine is and what the output. But we all expect the charming prince to emerge from the ugly frog! What can be said, without giving away the end of the story too early, is that the functioning of this growing mechanism of human self-evaluation could never take place at its current dynamics and size in the pragmatic framework of literacy. All over the world, market processes associated with previous pragmatic frameworks-barter is one of them-are relived in bazaars and shopping malls. But if anyone wants to see practical experiences of the civilization of illiteracy unfolding in their quasi-pure manner, one has only to look at the stock market and commodities exchanges and auctions conducted over the Internet. Moreover, one must try to envision those invisible, distributed, networked transactions in which it is impossible to define who initiated a transaction, continued another one, or brought a deal to an end, and based on what criteria. They, too, seem to have a life of their own. Mediating machine also evokes the notion of machine as program. Although some stockbrokers have second thoughts about how their role is diminished through the mediation of entities that cannot speak or write, programmed trading on the various stock exchanges is a matter of course. Computational economists and market researchers, who design programs based on biological analogies, genetics, and dynamic system models, can testify to the truth of this statement. Preliminaries In viewing the market in its relation to the civilization of literacy, and that of illiteracy, we must first establish a conceptual frame of reference for discussing the specific role of language as a mediating element characteristic of the market. In particular, we should examine the functions filled by literacy in allowing people to diversify markets and make them more effective. When the limits of literacy's mediating capabilities are reached, its efficiency becomes subject to doubt. This does not happen outside the market, as some scholars, educators, and politicians would have us believe, or want to happen. It is within the market that this stage is acknowledged, rendering intellectual travail itself a product negotiated in the market, as literacy itself already is. To establish the desired conceptual frame of reference, I take the perspective of market as a sign process through which people constitute themselves. Consequently, transactions can be seen as extensions of human biology: products of our work embody the structural characteristics of our natural endowment and address needs and expectations pertinent to these characteristics. These products are extensions of our personality and our culture, as constituted in expectations and values characteristic of the human species becoming self-aware and defining goals for the future. With language, and more so with literacy, markets become interpretive affairs, projective instantiations of what we are, in the process of becoming what we must be as the human scale reaches yet another threshold. Human self-constitution through markets reflects attained levels of productive and creative power, as well as goals pertinent initially to survival, later to levels of well-being, and now to the complexity of the global scale of current and future human activity. From barter to the trading of commodities futures and stock options, from money to the cashless society, markets constitute frameworks for higher transaction efficiency, often equated with profit. The broad arguments, such as the market as semiosis, often stumble upon specific aspects: Semiosis or not, practical experience or not, how come a rumor sends a company's stock into turmoil while an audited report goes unnoticed? The hidden structure of the processes discussed throughout this book might have more to do with explanations and predictive models than the many clarifications empowered by academic aura. Products 'R' Us The reality of the human being as sign-using animal (zoon semiotikon) corresponds to the fact that we project our individual reality into the reality of our existence through semiotic means. In the market, the three entities of sign processes meet: that which represents (representamen), that which is represented (object), and the process of interpretation (interpretant). These terms can be defined in the market context. The representamen is the repertory of signs that are identified in the market. These can be utility (usefulness of a certain product), rarity, quantity, type of material used to process the merchandise, imagination applied to the conception and creation of a product, and the technology used and the energy consumed in the manufacturing process, for example. People can be attracted by the most unexpected characteristics of merchandise, and can be enticed to develop addictions to color, form, brand name, odor. Sometimes the representamen is price, which is supposed to reflect the elements listed above, as well as other pricing criteria: a trend, a product's sexiness; a buyer's gullibility, ego, or lack of economic sense. The price represents the product, although not always appropriately. The object is the product itself, be it a manufactured item, an idea, an action, a process, a business, or an index. Except for the market based on exchange of object for object, every known market object is represented by some of its characteristics. That these representations might be far removed from the object only goes to show how many mediating entities participate in the market. Nothing is a sign unless interpreted as a sign. Someone has to be able to conjure, or endow, meaning and constitute something (an idea, object, or action) as part of one's self-constitution. This is the interpretant-understood as process, because interpretations can go on ad infinitum. For example: bread is food; an academic title acknowledges that a course of study was successfully completed; computers can be used as better typewriters or for data mining. As a sign, bread can stand for everything that it embodies: our daily bread; a certain culture of nourishment; the knowledge involved in cultivating and processing grain, in making dough, building the ovens, observing the baking process. Symbolic interpretation, relating to myth or religion, is also part of the interpretation of bread as a sign. Interpretation of an academic title follows a similar path: educational background (university attended, title conferred), context (there are streets on which mostly lawyers and doctors live), function (how the title affects one's activity), and future expectations (a prospective Nobel Prize winner). Likewise with computers: Intel inside, or Netscape browser, networked or stand-alone, a Big Blue product, or one put together in the back alleys of some far Eastern country. According to the premise that nothing is a sign unless considered as such, interpretation is equivalent to the constitution of human beings as the sign, represented through their product. A product is read as being useful; a product can be liked or disliked; a product can generate needs and expectations. Self-constituting individuals validate themselves (succeed or fail) through their activity as represented by the product of this activity, be it tangible or intangible, a concrete object, a process (mediations are included here), an idea. These readings are also part of the process of interpretation. A conglomerate of the readings mentioned above is the mug shot of the abstract consumer, behind whom are all the others who constitute their individuality through the transactions that make up the market. A used car or computer salesman, a small retailer, and a university professor identify themselves in different ways in and through the market. Each is represented by some characteristic feature of his or her work. Each is interpreted in the market as reliable, competent, or creative in view of the pragmatics of the transaction: Some people need a good used car, some a cheap, used computer, others a leather wallet, others an education or counsel. The forms of interpretation in the market are diverse and range from simple observation of the market to direct involvement in market mechanisms through products, exchange of goods, or legislation. As a place where the three elements-what is marketed (object), language or signs of marketing (representamen), and interpretation (leading to a transaction or not)-come together, the market can be direct or mediated, real or symbolic, closed or open, free or regulated. A produce market, a supermarket, a factory outlet, and a shopping mall are examples of real market space. The market takes on mediated, conventional, and symbolic aspects in the case where, for example, the product is not displayed in its three-dimensional reality but substituted by an image, a description, or a promise. Mail-order houses, and the stock and futures markets belong here, even though they are derived from direct, real markets. Once upon a time, Wall Street was surrounded by various exchanges filled with the odors, tastes, and textures of the products brought in by ships. It is now a battery of machines and traders who read signs on order slips or computer screens but know nothing of the product that is traded. In our day, the stock market has become a data processing center. Pressures caused by the demand for optimal market efficiency were behind this transformation. Nevertheless, the time involved in the new market semiosis is as real and necessary as the time of transactions in the market based on barter or on direct negotiations; that is, only the amount of time needed to ensure the cooperation of the three elements mentioned above, as human beings constitute themselves in the pragmatic context of the market. The pragmatic context affects market cycles and the speed at which market transactions take place. This is why a deal in a bazaar takes quite a bit of time, and digital transactions triggered by programmed trading are complete before anyone realizes their consequences. Market regulations always affect the dynamics of mediations. The language of the market Language signs and other signs are mediating devices between the object represented in the market and the interpretant-the human beings constituting themselves in the process of interpretation, including satisfaction of their needs and desires. No matter what type of market we refer to, it is a place and time of mediations. What defines each of the known markets (barter, farmers' markets and fairs, highly regulated markets, so-called free markets, underground markets) is the type of mediation more than the merchandise or the production process. Of significance is the dynamic structure involved. It is obvious that if anything anticipated our current experience of the market, it was the ritual. Objects (things, money, ideas, process), the language used to express the object, and the interpretation, leading or not to a transaction, constitute the structural invariable in every type of socio-economic environment. In the so-called free market (more an abstraction than a reality) and in rigidly planned economies, the relation among the three elements is the variable, not the elements themselves. Interpretation in a given context can be influenced in the way associations are made between the merchandise and its representations. The history of language is rich in testimony to commerce, from the very simple to the very complex forms of the latter. Language captures ownership characteristics, variations in exchange rates, the ever-expanding horizon of life facilitated through market transactions. It is within this framework that written records appear, thus justifying the idea that, together with practical experiences of human self-constitution, market processes characteristic of a limited scale of exchange of values are parents to notation, to writing and to literacy. Expectations of efficiency are instantiated, within a given scale of human activity, in market quantities and qualities. Nobody really calculates whether rice production covers the needs of humankind at any given instance, or if enough entertainment is produced for the billions living on Earth today. The immense complexity of the market machine is reflected in its dynamics, which at a certain level of its evolution could no longer be handled by, or made subject to the rules and expectations of literacy. Market processes follow a pattern of self-organization under the guise of many parameters, some of which we can control, others that escape our direct influence upon them. Languages of extreme specialization are part of market dynamics in the sense that they offer practical contexts for new types of transactions. Netconomy started as a buzzword, joining net, network, and economy. In less than one year, the term was used to describe a distributed commercial environment where extremely efficient transactions make up an increasing part of the global economy. But the consequences of the Netconomy are also local: distribution channels can be eliminated, with the effect of accelerating commercial cycles and lowering prices. Computers, cars, software, and legal services are more frequently acquired through the virtual shops of the Netconomy. To see how the practical experience of the market freed itself from language and literacy, let us now examine the market process as semiosis in its various aspects. As already stated, in trading products, people trade themselves. Various qualities of the product (color, smell, texture, style, design, etc.), as well as qualities of its presentation (advertising, packaging, vicinity to other products, etc.), and associated characteristics (prestige, ideology) are among the implicit components of this trade. Sometimes the object per se-a new dress, a tool, wine, a home-is less important than the image it projects. Secondary functions, such as aesthetics, pleasure, conformity, override the function of fulfilling needs. In market semiosis, desire proves to be just as important, if not more so, than need. In a large part of the world, self-constitution is no longer just a question of survival, but also one of pleasure. The higher the semiotic level of the market in a context of decadent plenty-the number of sign systems involved, their extent and variety-the more obvious the deviations from the rule of merely satisfying needs. Human activity that aims at maintaining life is very different from the human activity that results in surplus and availability for market transaction. In the first case, a subsistence level is preserved; in the second, new levels of self-constitution are made possible. Surplus and exchange, initially made possible through the practical experience of agriculture, constituted a scale of human activity that required human constitution in signs, sign systems, and finally language. Surplus can be used in many ways, for which sign and later language differentiation became progressively necessary. Rituals, adornment, war, religion, means of accumulation, and means of persuasion are examples of differentiations. All these uses pertained to settled patterns of human interaction and led to products that were more than mere physical entities to be consumed. To repeat, they were projections of individual self-constitution. Behind each product is a cycle of conception, manufacture, and trade, and an attached understanding of utility and permanence. With the advent of writing and reading, from its rudimentary forms to the forms celebrated in literacy, and its participation in the constitution of the market, the avenue was opened towards using what was produced in surplus to cover the need to maintain life, so that more surplus could be generated. The market of merchandise, services, slaves, and ideas was completed by the market of salaried workers, earning money for their life's salt, as Roman soldiers did. These belong to the category of human beings constituting themselves in the pragmatic framework of an activity in which production (work) and the means of production separated. The language through which workers constituted themselves underwent a similar differentiation. As work became more alienated from the product, a language of the product also came into being. The language of products Exchanging goods pertinent to survival corresponds to a scale of human praxis that guarantees coherence and homogeneity. People who have excess grain but need eggs, people who offer meat because they need fruit or tools, do not require instructions for using what they obtain in exchange for what they offer. Small worlds, loosely connected, constitute the universe of their existence. The rather slow rhythm of production cycles equals that of natural cycles. A relatively uniform lifestyle results from complementary practical experiences only slightly differentiated in structure. Together, these characteristics constitute a framework of direct sharing of experience. This market, as limited as it is, forms part of the social mechanism for sharing experience. Today's markets, defined by a complexity of mediations, are no longer environments of common or shareable experience. Rather, they are frameworks of validation of one type of human experience against another. This statement requires some explanation. Products embody not only material, design, and skills, but also a language of optimal functioning. Thus they project a variety of ways through which people constitute themselves through the language of these products. Accordingly, the market becomes a place of transaction for the many languages our products speak. The complexity of everything we produce in the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy is the result of expectations made possible by levels of human efficiency that literacy can only marginally support. This comes at a cost, in addition to the dissolution of literacy: the loss of a sense of quality, because each product carries with itself not only its own language, but also its own evaluation criteria. The product is one of many from which to choose, each embodying its own justification. Its value is relative, and sometimes no value at all dictates the urge to buy, or the decision to look for something else. Rules of grammar, which gave us a sense of order and quality of literate language use, do not apply to products. Previous expectations of morality were anchored in language and conveyed through means of literacy. The morality of partial literacies embodied in competing products no longer appears to participants in the market as emanating from high principles of religion or ethics, but rather as a convenient justification for political influence. Through regulation, politics inserts itself as a self-serving factor in market transactions. Transaction and literacy A visit to a small neighborhood store used to be primarily a way of satisfying a particular need, but also an instance of communication. Such small markets were spaces where members of the community exchanged news and gossip, usually with an accuracy that would put today's journalism to shame. The supermarket is a place where the demands of space utilization, fast movement of products, and low overhead make conversation counterproductive. Mail-order markets and electronic shopping practically do away with dialogue. They operate beyond the need for literacy and human interaction. Transactions are brought to a minimum: selection, confirmation, and providing a credit card number, or having it read automatically and validated via a networked service. Literacy-based transactions involved all the characteristics of written language and all the implications of reading pertinent to the transaction. Literacy contributed to the diversification of needs and to a better expression of desires, thus helping markets to diversify and reach a level of efficiency not possible otherwise. With required education and laws prohibiting child labor, the productive part of people's lives was somehow reduced, but their ability to be more effective within modes adapted to literacy was enhanced. Thus market cycles were optimized by the effects of higher productivity and diversified demands. From earliest times (going back to the Phoenician traders), writing and the subsequent literacy contributed to strategies of exchange, of taxation- which represents the most direct form of political intervention in the market-and regulations regarding many aspects of the constitution of human beings in and through the market. Written contracts expressed expectations in anticipation of literacy- supported planning. There are many levels between the extraction and processing of raw material and the final sale and consumption of a product. At each level, a different language is constituted, very concrete in some instances, very abstract in others. These languages are meant to speed up processing and transaction cycles, reduce risk, maximize profits, and ensure the effectiveness of the transaction on a global level. Literacy cannot uniformly accommodate these various expectations. The distributive nature of market transactions cannot be held captive to the centralism of literacy without affecting the efficiency of market mediation. The ruin left after 70 years of central planning in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries-highly literate societies-is proof of this point. The expected speed of market processes and the parallelism of negotiations require languages of optimal functionality and minimal ambiguity. Sometimes transactions have to rely on visual arguments, well beyond what teleconferencing can offer. Products and procedures are modified during negotiations, and on-the-fly, through interactive links between all parties involved in the effort of designing, manufacturing, and marketing them. As fashion shows become prohibitively expensive, the fashion market is exploring interactive presentations that put the talent of the designer and the desire of the public one click away from each other. The expectation of freedom results in the need to ignore national or political (and cultural and religious) allegiances, which, after all, means freedom from the literate mode of a national language, as well as from all the representations and definitions of freedom housed in literate discourse. Indeed, since sign systems, and language in particular, are not neutral means of expression, one individual has to specialize in the signs of other cultures. There are consulting firms that advise businesses on the cultural practices of various countries. They deal in what Robert Reich called symbol manipulation, semiotic activity par excellence. These firms explain to clients doing business in Japan, for instance, that the Japanese have a penchant for exchanging gifts. Business cards, more symbolic than functional, are of great importance. These consultants will also advise on customs that fall outside values instilled through literacy, such as in which countries bribery is the most efficient way to do business. Whose market? Whose freedom? A market captive to moral or political concepts expressed in literate discourse soon reaches the limits of its efficiency. We face these limits in a different way when ideals are proclaimed or negotiations submitted to rules reflecting values attached to expectations-of a certain standard of living, fringe benefits-frozen in contracts and laws. Many European countries are undergoing the crisis of their literate heritage because outdated working relations have been codified in labor laws. Contracts between unions claiming to represent various types of workers are not subject to criteria for efficiency at work in the market. On the other hand, the freedom and rights written into the U.S. Constitution are totally forgotten in the global marketplace by people who take them for granted. An American-even a member of a minority group-who buys a pair of brand-name sneakers is totally ignorant of the fact that the women, and sometimes the children, making those sneakers in faraway countries earn less than subsistence wages. It is not the market that is immoral or opportunistic in such cases, but the people who constitute their expectations for the most at the lowest cost. Would literacy be a stronger force than the demand for efficiency in bringing about the justice discussed in tomes of literature? To read morality in the market context of competition, where only efficiency and profit are written, is a rather futile exercise, even though it might alleviate pangs of conscience. Markets, the expression of the people who constitute them, are realistic, even cynical; they call things by their names and have no mercy on those who try to reinvent an idealized past in the transaction of futures. For reasons of efficiency only, markets are frameworks for the self-constitution of human beings as free, enjoying liberties and rights that add to their productive capabilities. It will probably irk many people to read here that markets, instances of terrible tension and amorality, are the cradle of human freedom, tolerance (political, social, religious, intellectual), and creativity. To a great extent, it was a fight over market processes that led to the American Revolution. Now that Soviet-style communism has fallen, the flow of both goods and ideas is slowly and painfully taking place, in ways similar to that in the West, in the former Soviet Bloc. Democratic ideals and the upward distribution of wealth are on a collision course. But the compass is at least set on more freedom and less regulation. Only mainland China remains in the grip of centralized market control. The struggle between open markets and the free flow of ideas going on there today can have only one outcome. It may take time, but China, too, will one day be as free as its neighbors in Taiwan. Market interaction is what defines human beings, facilitating the establishment of a framework of existence that includes others. Some people would prefer a confirmation of culture as the more encompassing framework, containing markets but not reducible to them. Culture itself is an object in the market, subjected to transactions involving literacy, but not exclusively. Here new languages are used to expedite the exchange of goods and values. When literacy reaches the limits of its implicit capabilities, new transaction languages emerge, and new forms of freedom, tolerance, and creativity are sanctioned through the market mechanism. There is a price attached here, too. New constraints, new types of intolerance, and new obstacles come about. An example is the preservation of wildlife at the expense of jobs. Efficiency and wide choice entail a replacement of what are known as traditional values (perceived as eternal, but usually not older than 200-300 years) with what many would have a hard time calling value: mediocrity, the transitory, the expedient, and the propensity for waste. The market circumvents literacy when literacy affects its efficiency and follows its own course by means appropriate to new market conditions. In the quest for understanding how markets operate, the further cultivation of explanations originating from previous pragmatic circumstances is pointless. The time-consuming detour might result in nostalgia, but not in better mastery of the complexities implicit in the practical experience of human self-constitution in the market. New markets, new languages With the descriptive model of markets as sign processes, allusion was made to the open character of any transaction. With the discussion regarding the many phases through which markets are constituted, allusion was made to the distributed nature of market processes. In order to further explain the changed condition of human self- constitution in the market of a radically new scale and dynamics, we need to add some details to both characteristics mentioned. Like any other sign process, language processes are human processes. The person speaking or writing a text continues to constitute his identity in one or the other, while simultaneously anticipating the constitutive act of listening to or interpreting the potential or intended readership. Visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, verbal, or written expression, as well as combinations of these, which composes the language of performance, dance, architecture, etc., are in the same condition. A viewer or viewers can associate an image with a text, music, odors, textures, or with combinations of these. Furthermore, the association can continue and can be conveyed to others who will extend it ad infinitum, sometimes so far that the initial sign (which is the initial person interpreting that sign in anticipation of the interpretation given by others), i.e., the image, text, or music that triggered the process, is forgotten. Expanding this concept to the products of human activity, we can certainly look at various artifacts from the perspective of what they express-a need specifically fulfilled by a machine, a product, a type of food or clothing, an industry; what they communicate-the need shared by few or many, the way this need is addressed, what it says about those constituted in the product and those who will confirm their identity by using it, what it says about opportunity and risk taking; andwhat they signify-in terms of the level of knowledge and competence achieved. This is not to say that the milk we buy from a farmer or in the supermarket, the shoes, cars, homes, vacation packages, and shares in a company or options in a stock are all signs or language. Rather, they can be interpreted as signs standing for an object (the state of manufacturing, quality of design, competence, or a combination of these) to be interpreted in view of the framework for the pragmatics of human self- constitution that the pragmatics makes possible. There are many instances when a word simply dies on the lips of the speaker because nobody listens or nobody cares to continue interpreting it. There are as many instances when a product dies because it is irrelevant to the pragmatic framework of our lives. There are other instances when signs lose the quality of interpretability. A company that goes public is identified through many qualifiers. Its potential growth is one of them-this is why Internet-oriented companies were so highly valued in their initial public offerings. Potential can be conveyed through literate descriptions, data regarding patents, market analysis, or an intuitive element that there is more to this new market sign than only its name and initial offering price. At a small scale of human experience, the neighbors wanted to own some of the action; at a larger scale, literacy conveyed the information and acted as a co-guarantor. At today's scale, many similar businesses are already in place, others are emerging; supply and demand meet in the marketplace where one's risk can be someone else's gain. Literacy is no longer capable of providing the background for the dynamics of change and renewal. If literacy could still control market transactions, Netscape-synonymous with the Internet browser-would have never made it; nor the companies that develop software facilitating telephone calls via the Internet. In the markets of relative homogeneity, language proved to be an appropriate means of coordination. For as long as the various contexts making up today's global market were not as radically different as they are becoming, literacy represented a good compromise. But when market transactions themselves shift from exchanging goods against goods, or the exchange of goods for some universal substitute (gold, silver, precious stones with qualities of permanency), or even for a more conventional unit (money), for more abstract entities, such as the Ecu (the basket of currencies of the European Community), the Eurodollar, or the e-money transacted over networks, literacy is replaced by the literacies of the segmented practical instances of each transaction. Shares of an Italian or Spanish company, futures on the American commodities market, bonds for Third World investment funds-they all come with their own rules of transaction, and with their own languages. The specialization that increases market efficiency results in a growing number of literacies. These literacies bring to the market the productive potential of companies and their management value. They encode levels of expected productivity in farming (and a certain wager on weather conditions), entrepreneurial risks assumed within the context of progressive globalization of the economy. In turn, they can be encoded in programs designed to negotiate with other programs. In addition, the mechanisms assuring the distributed nature of the market in the global economy insert other literacies, in this case, the literacy of machines endowed with search and heuristic capabilities independent of literacy. Market simulations trigger intelligent trade programs and a variety of intelligent agents, capable of modifying their behavior, and achieve higher and higher transaction performance. In short, we have many mediations against the background of a powerful integrative process: the pragmatic framework of a highly segmented economy, working in shorter production cycles, for a global world. In this process, almost nothing remains sequential, and nothing is centralized. Put in different words, almost all market activity takes place in parallel processes. Configurations, i.e., changing centers of interest, come into existence on the ever fluid map of negotiations. Being a self-organizing nucleus, each deal has its own dynamics. Relations among configurational nuclei are also dynamic. Everything is distributed. The relations between the elements involved are non-linear and change continuously. Solidarity is replaced by competition, often fiercely adversarial. Thus the market consumes itself, and the sequels of literacy, requiring provisional and distributed literacies. Each time individuals project their identity in a product, the multi-dimensional human experience embodied in the product is made available for exchange with others. In the market, it is reduced to the dimension appropriate to the given context of the transaction. Human behavior in the market is symptomatic of the self-awareness of the species, of its critical and self-critical capabilities, of its sense of the future. The progressive increase of the abstract nature of market transactions, the ominous liberation from literacy, and adoption of technologies of efficient exchange define a sense of future which can be quite scary for people raised in a different pragmatic context. We are beyond the disjunctive models of socialist ideologies of bourgeois property, class differences, reproduction of labor power, and similar categories that emerged in the pragmatic framework that made literacy (and human constitution through literacy) possible and necessary. Property, as much as markets, is distributed (sometimes in ways that do not conform with our sense of fairness). People define their place in the continuum of a society that in many ways does away with the exceptional and introduces a model based on averaging and resulting in mediocrity. The human being's self-constitutive power is not only reproduced in new instances of practical activity, but also augmented in the pragmatics of surplus creating higher surplus. Along with the sense of permanency, humans lose a sense of the exceptional as this applies to their products and the way they constitute themselves through their work. Literacy and the transient When a product is offered with a lifetime warranty and the manufacturer goes bankrupt within months from the date of the sales transaction, questions pertaining to ethics, misrepresentation, and advertisement are usually asked. Such incidents, to which no one is immune, cannot be discarded since the experience of market transactions is an experience in human values, no matter how relative these are. Honesty, respect for truth, respect for the given word, written or not, belong to the civilization of literacy and are expressed in its books. The civilization of illiteracy renders these and all other books senseless. But it would be wrong to suggest that markets of the civilization of illiteracy corrupt everything and that, instead of confirming values, they actually empty values of significance. Markets do something else: They integrate expectations into their own mechanisms. In short, they have to live up to expectations not because these were written down, but because markets would otherwise not succeed. How this takes place is a longer story, starting with the example given: What happens to a lifetime warranty when the manufacturer goes bankrupt? The pragmatic framework of human self-constitution in language through the use of the powerful means of literacy is one of stability and progressive growth. The means of production facilitated in this framework are endowed with qualities, physical, first of all, that guarantee permanency. The industrial model is an extension of the model of creation deeply rooted in literacy-dominated human activity. Machines were powerful and dominating. They, as well as the products they turned out, lasted much longer than the generation of people who use them. After participating in the complex circumstances that made the Industrial Revolution possible, literacy was stimulated and supported by it. Incandescent lighting, more powerful than the gas or oil lamp, expanded the time available for reading, among other activities. Books were printed faster and more cheaply because paper was produced faster and more cheaply, and the printing press was driven by stronger engines. More time was available for study because industrial society discovered that a qualified workforce was more productive once machines become more complicated. All this happened against the background of an obsession with permanency reflected also in the structure of the markets. As opposed to agricultural products, subject to weather and time, industrial products can be accepted on consignment. Literacy was a mediating tool here since transactions became less and less homogeneous, and the institution of credit more powerful due to the disparity between production and consumption cycles. The scale of the industrial market corresponded to the scale of industrial economy. Industrial markets are optimally served by the sequential nature of literacy and the linearity inherent in its structure. Production cycles are long, and one cycle follows the other, like seasons, like letters in a word. Remember when new model automobiles came out in October, and only in October? A large manufacturer embodied permanence and so did its product. In this framework, a lifetime warranty reflects a product's promised performance and the language describing this performance. This is no longer the case in the civilization of illiteracy. From the design of the product, to the materials used and principles applied, almost nothing is meant to last beyond a cycle of optimal efficiency. It is not a moral decision, neither is it a devious plan. Different expectations are embodied in our products. Their life cycle reflects the dynamics of change corresponding to the new scale of human self-constitution, and the obsession with efficiency. Products become transient because the cycles of relative uniformity of our self-constitution are shorter. We know that life expectancy has increased, and it may well be that people past the peak of their productive capability will soon represent the majority of the population. Nonetheless, the increased level of productivity facilitated by mediating strategies is independent of this change. Longer life means presence in more cycles of change (which translates into other changes, such as in education and training, family life). What was once a relatively homogeneous life becomes a succession of shorter periods, some only loosely connected. In comparison to centuries of slow, incremental development, relatively abrupt change testifies to a new human condition. Where once literacy was necessary to coordinate the variety of contributions from many people-who projected as much permanency in their products, even if the individuals were more literate in drawing than in writing-new forms of coordination and integration are now in place. The corresponding pragmatics is characterized by intension and distribution, and the products capture the projected sense of change that dominates all human experiences. Thus conditions were created for markets of the transient, in which lifetime functioning of ingenious artifacts is promised, because the lifetime meant is as short as the cycle of the entire line. The fact that the manufacturer goes bankrupt is not even surprising since the structural characteristics of the obsession with efficiency results in manufacturing entities that last as long (or as short) as the need for their product, or as long as the functional characteristics of the product satisfy market expectations. This is how expectations are integrated in market mechanisms. Since mediation is now exercised through many literacies integrated in the product, it is clear why, together with the exhausted lifetime warranty, we throw away not only manufactured items, but also the literacy (and literacies) embodied in them. Each transaction in the transient corresponds to a pragmatics that transforms the Faustian promise into an advertising slogan. Market, advertisement, literacy First, the indictment: "If I were asked to name the deadliest subversive force within capitalism-the single greatest source of its waning morality-I should without hesitation name advertising." These words belong to a commentator of the ill-reputed supply side economics, Robert L. Heilbroner, but could have been signed by many sharing in this definition. Now comes the apologia: "The historians and archaeologists will one day discover that ads of our times are the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities." McLuhan's words, as familiar as they are, bear the imprint of his original thinking. The issue is not to take sides. Whether admired or despised, ignored or enjoyed, advertisement occupies an inordinately important place in our life today. For anyone who went through the history of advertisement, it becomes obvious that the scale of this activity, which is indeed part of the market, has changed radically. It used to be true that only 50 to 60 percent of the investment in advertisement resulted in higher sales or brand recognition. Today, the 50 to 60 percent has shrunk to less than 2 percent. But of the 2 percent that impacts the market, 2 percent (or less) results in covering the entire expense of advertisement. Such levels of efficiency-and waste, one should add, in full awareness that the notion is relative-are possible only in the civilization of illiteracy. The figures (subject to controversy and multiple interpretation) point to efficiency as much as to the various aspects of the market. Our concern with advertisement is not only with how literate (or illiterate) advertisement is, but also with how appropriate literacy means can be to address psychological, ethical, and rational (or irrational) aspects of market transactions. A look at advertisements through the centuries is significant to the role of literacy in society and in the world of merchandising. Word-of-mouth advertising and hanging signs outside a business reflect the literacy levels of an age of small-scale market transactions. The advertisements of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century exemplify the levels of literacy and the efficiency expected from it for merchandising in the context and scale of that time. The ads contain more text than image and address reason more than the senses. In the age of the magazine and newspaper, advertisers relied on the power of verbal persuasion. Honesty or value was not the issue here, only its appearance. The word committed to paper, black on white, had to be simple and true. In Europe, advertisement took a different style at this time, but still reflected value. Manufacturers engaged many well known artists of the time to design their ads. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, El Lissitzky, and Herbert Bayer are among the best known. To the highly literate but more artistically inclined Europeans of the time, such ads for upscale products and events were more appealing. Probably taking their cue from Europe, American designers experimented with image advertising after World War II, and graphic design took off in the USA. With the advent of more powerful visualization media, and based on data from psychology to support its effectiveness, the image began to dominate advertising. As ambiguously as an image can be interpreted, its efficiency in advertising was confirmed in rising sales figures. In the rare cases when literacy is used today, it is usually for its visual impact. In an attempt to relate to the qualities of the black-on-white advertisement of earlier times, Mobil started a series of ads in the mid-1980's. To those not semiotically aware, the ad was simply text appealing to the reader's reason. Literacy rediviva! To people attuned to semiotics, the ad was a powerful visual device. The simple tombstone style evoked relations between literacy and values such as simplicity, honesty, the permanence of the idea, the dominance of reason. The visual convention was actually stronger than the literacy element, used as an alibi in these ads. Indeed, the people who hand out the Clio awards for advertising were so taken in as to award Mobil a first prize for these ads. Markets are far from being simple causal phenomena. A market's easy switch from a well structured, rational interpretation and ethical conduit, to irrationality and misrepresentation is revealed in the new forms markets take, as well as in their new techniques for transactions and the associated advertisement. The term irrationality describes a contradiction of common sense rules (or economic theories setting them forth) of exchange of goods. During the 1980's, this occurred in the oil market, the art market, the market for adoptable children, and in new stock market offerings. The literate discourse of theories or of an advertisement can only acknowledge the irrationality and suggest explanations. There are schools of market analysis based on game theory, psychodrama, cyclical modeling, the phases of the moon, etc., etc., each producing newsletters, giving advice, trying to render understandable economic and financial phenomena difficult to predict. Language-like explanations and advice are part of advertising, part of market language, forming its own literacy and keeping many captive to it. But even the most literate participant cannot stop the process since the literacy involved in what some perceive as an aberration is different from the literacy embodied in the product traded or in its advertisement. Irrational elements are present in the market, as in life, at all times, but not to the extent to which the language of the market reflects hysteria (as on Black Monday in 1987 on the New York Stock Exchange) or simply ceases its pragmatic function. We all deplore the continuous shrinking of the intimate sphere of our lives, but admit, in the act of constituting ourselves in the space and time of market transactions, the integrating power that the market exercises, ignoring how close the relation between the two aspects is. Literacy was once a protective medium and entailed rules of discretion and decency. Illiteracy makes us fear; it allows us to become more efficient, but at the same time we become subject to intrusion by all the means that capture our identity. People making purchases on-line will not hesitate to write down their personal data and credit card numbers, trusting in a sense of privacy that is part of the code of literate behavior. Of all people, the computer-literate should realize the power of the Net for searching, retrieving, and sorting such information for all types of uses imaginable. In the civilization of illiteracy, advertisement is no longer an integrative device that addresses a non-differentiated market but a device that addresses powerful distinctions that can capture smaller groups, even the individual. "Tell me what you want to buy or sell and I'll tell you who you are," is a concise way of declaring how market semiosis X-rays its participants. The enormous marketing efforts associated with a new brand of cereal, software, a political campaign, a role in a movie, or a sports event result in advertisement's becoming a language in itself, with its own vocabulary and grammar. These are subject to rapid change because the pragmatics of the activities they represent change so fast. "Tell me what you buy and I'll tell you who you are"-mug shots of all of us are taken continuously, by extremely inventive digital devices, while the market fine-tunes us. Buying products ended long ago. Products now buy us. Advertising in the civilization of illiteracy is no longer communication or illustration. It is an information processing activity, bizarre at times, extremely innovative in the ability to cross reference information and fine-tune the message to the individual. Automatic analysis of data is complemented by refinement methods that adjust the weight of words in order to fit the addressee. In the reality of the market and its attendant advertising, languages pertaining to art, education, ideology, sexuality, are integrated at a high level of sophistication in the infinite series of mediations that constitute the pragmatic framework of human existence. Nothing is more valuable than the knowledge of who we are. One can risk stating that brokers of information about each of us will probably fare best in this market of many competing partial literacies. When markets rely more and more on mediations, and market cycles become faster and faster, when the global nature of transactions requires mechanisms of differentiation and integration far beyond the scope of language, literacy ceases to play a dominating role. The literate message assumed that the human being is the optimal source of information and the ideal receiver. The illiterate message can send itself automatically, as image or as speech, as video or as Internet spamming, whatever best hits its human target, to people's addresses. Whether we like it or not, face-to-face negotiations have already become fax-to-fax and are bound to be converted into program-to-program dealings. The implications are so far-reaching that emotional reactions, such as enthusiasm or disgust, are not really the best answer to this prospect. Market pragmatics in our civilization is defined by the need to continuously expand surplus to meet a dominant desire and expectation driven exchange of goods and services. These desires and expectations correspond to the global scale of human interaction for which a dominant literacy is poorly suited. Hundreds of literacies, representing hundreds of forms of human self-constitution around the world, are integrated in the supersign known as the market. The market-in its narrow sense as transaction, and as a sign process joining structure and dynamics-focuses all that pertains to the relation between the individual and the social environment: language, customs, mores, knowledge, technology, images, sounds, odors, etc. Through the market, economies are ascertained or subjected to painful restructuring. Recent years brought with them turmoil and economic opportunity as an expression of new pragmatic characteristics. Competition, specialization, cooperation, were all intensified. An exciting but just as often disconcerting growth path of economic activity generated markets of high performance. Just-in-time, point-of-sale, and electronic interchanges came into being because the human pragmatic made them necessary. This is why it is difficult to accept views, regardless of their public acclaim, that explain the dynamics of economic life through technological change. The increased speeds of economic cycles are not parallel but related to the new practical experiences of human self-constitution. Cognitive resources became the main commodity for economic experiences. And the market fully confirms this through mechanisms for accelerated transactions and through sign processes of a complexity that technology has really never reached. New algorithms inspired by dynamic systems, intelligent agent models, and better ways to handle the issues of opportunity and prediction are the expression of cognitive resources brought to fruition in a context requiring freedom from hierarchy, centralism, sequentiality, and determinism. As exciting as the model of the economy as ecosystem is (I refer to Rothschild's bionomics), it remains an essentially deterministic view. No semiosis triggers forces of economic change. But sign processes, in the form of elaborate transactions, reflect the change in the pragmatic condition of the human being. All those new companies, from fast food chains to microchip makers and robot providers that convert human knowledge into the new goods and services, are the expression of the necessity of this pragmatic change. Diversity and abundance might be related to competition and cooperation, but what drives economic life, market included, is the objective need to achieve levels of efficiency corresponding to the global scale human activity has reached. Central planning, like any other centralized structure, including that of businesses, does not come to an end because of technological progress, but in view of the fact that it prevents efficient practical experiences. Markets of the civilization of illiteracy, like the economy for which they stand, are more and more mediated. They go through faster cycles, their swings wilder, their interdependency deeper than ever. The literate experience of the market assumed that the individual was the optimal source of information and the ideal receiver. Decision- making was an exclusively human experience. The illiterate message of complex data processing and evaluation can send itself automatically and reach whatever has to be reached in a given context: producers of raw materials, energy providers, manufacturers, a point-of-sale unit. As shoppers start scanning their purchases by themselves, information regarding their buying patterns makes it quickly into programs in charge of delivery, production, and marketing. Face-to-face negotiations, many times replaced by fax-to-fax or e-mail-to-e-mail transactions, are converted into more program-to-program dealings. Instead of mass markets, we experience point-cast markets. Their pragmatics is defined by the need to continuously meet desire and expectation instead of need. Their dynamics, expressed in nuclei of self-organization, is in the last instance not at all different from that of the human beings self-constituted in their reality. Language and Work Work is a means of self-preservation beyond the primitive experience of survival. Actually, one can apply the word work only from the moment awareness of human self- constitution in practical experiences emerged from these experiences. Awareness of work and the beginnings of language are probably very close to one another. By work we understand patterns of human activity, not the particulars of one or another form of work. This defines a functional perspective first of all, and allows us to deal with replication of these patterns. Interaction, mutation, growth, spreading, and ending are part of the pattern. For anyone even marginally informed, it is quite clear that work patterns of agriculture are quite different from those of the pre-industrial, industrial, or post-industrial age. Our aim is to examine work patterns of the civilization of literacy in contrast to those of the civilization of illiteracy. That agriculture was determined, in its specific aspects, by different topography and climatic biological context is quite clear. Nevertheless, the people constituting their identity in experiences of cultivating the land accomplished it in coherent ways, regardless of their geographic location. Their language experience testifies to an identifiable set of concerns, questions, and knowledge which is, despite the fragmented picture of the world, more homogenous than we could expect. If, by contrast, one considers a chip foundry of today's high technology, it becomes clear how chip producers in Silicon Valley and those in Chinese provinces, in Russia, or in a developing country of Eastern Europe, Asia, or Africa share the same language and the same concerns. The example of agriculture presents a bottom-up structure of pre-literate nature, based mainly on reaction. Reaction slowly but surely led to more deliberate choices. Experience converged in repetitive patterns. The more efficient experiences were confirmed, the others discarded. A body of knowledge was accumulated and transmitted to everyone partaking in survival activities. In the case of the chip foundry, the structure is top-down: Goals and reasons are built in, and so is the critical knowledge of a post-literate nature required for achieving high efficiency. Skills are continuously perfected through reinforcement schemes. Activity is programmed. An explicit notion of the factory's goals-high quality, high efficiency, high adaptability to new requirements-is built into the entire factory system. In both models, corresponding to real-life situations, language is constituted as part of the experience. Indeed, coordination of effort, communication, record keeping, and transmission of knowledge are continuously requested. As a replicative process, work implies the presence of language as an agent of transfer. Language pertinent to the experience of agriculture is quite different from the language pertinent to the modern production of chips. One is more natural than the other, i.e., its connection to the human being's natural stage is stronger than that of the activity in the foundry. In the chip age of the civilization of illiteracy, languages of extreme precision become the means for an efficient practical experience. Their functions are different from those of natural language, which by all means still constitutes a medium for human interaction. All these remarks are meant to provide a relatively comfortable entry to the aspects of the changing relation between language and work. The terminology is based on today's fashionable lingo of genetics, and of memetics, its counterpart. Still, I would suggest more than caution, because memetics focuses on the quantitative analysis of cultural dynamics, while semiotics, which represents the underlying conception, is concerned primarily with qualitative aspects. As we have already seen, evolutionary biology became a source of metaphors for the new sciences of economics, as well as for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, or the replication of ideas. Many people are at work in the new scientific space of memetic considerations. The majority are focused on effective procedures, probably computational in nature, for generating mechanisms that will result in improved human interactions. As exciting as all this is, qualitative considerations might prove no less beneficial, if indeed we could translate them in effective practical experiences. If the purposeful character of all living organisms can be seen as an inevitable consequence of evolution, the dynamics of human activity, reflected in successive pragmatic frameworks, goes beyond the mechanism of natural selection. This is exactly where the sign perspective of human interaction, including that in work, differentiates itself from the quantitative viewpoint. As long as selection itself is a practical experience-choose from among possibilities-it becomes difficult to use selection in order to explain how it takes place. In the tradition of analogies to machines-of yesterday or of today-we could look at work as a machine capable of self-reproduction (von Neumann's concept). In the new tradition of memetics, work would be described as a replicative complex unit, probably a meta-meme. But both analogies are focused ultimately on information exchange, which is only a limited part of what sign processes (or semioses, as they are called) are. This is not to say that work is reducible to sign processes or to language. What is of interest is the connection between work and signs, or language. Moreover, how pragmatic frameworks and characteristics of language experiences are interconditioned is a subject that involves a memetic perspective, but is not reducible to it. Inside and outside the world Comparisons of the efficiency of direct human practical experiences to that of mediated forms-with the aid of tools, signs, or languages-suggest one preliminary observation: The efficiency of the action mediated through sign systems is higher than that of direct action. The source of this increase in efficiency is the cognitive effort to adapt the proper means (how work is done) to the end (what is accomplished) pursued. In retrospect, we understand that this task is of a tall order-it involves observation, comparison, and the ability to conceive of alternatives. As we learn from attempts involving the best of science and the best of technology, the emulation of such cognitive processes, especially as they evolve over time, is not yet within our reach. Language, together with all other sign systems, is an integral part of the process of constitution and affirmation of human nature. The role it plays in the process is dynamic. It corresponds to the different pragmatic contexts in which human beings project their structural reality into the reality of their universe of life. The biophysical system within which this projection took and takes place underwent and still undergoes major changes. They are reflected in the biophysical reality of the human being itself. To be part of a changing world and to observe this change places the human being simultaneously inside and outside the world: inside as part of it, as a genetic sequence; outside as its conscience, expressed in all the forms through which awareness, including that of work, is externalized. Whether a very restricted (limited by the pragmatic horizon of primitive human beings), or a potentially universal system of expression, representation, and communication, language cannot be conceived independent of human nature. Neither can it be conceived independent of other means of expression, representation, and communication. The necessity of language is reflected in the degree to which evolutionary determination and self-determination of the individual or of society, correlate. Language is constituted in human practical experiences. At the same time, it is constitutive, together with many other elements of human praxis: biological endowment, heuristics and logic, dialectic, training. This applies to the most primitive elements of language we can conceive of, as well as to today's productive languages. Embodied in literacy, language accounts for the ever-deepening specialization and fragmentation of human praxis. The replacement of the literate use of language by the illiteracy of the many languages dismissing it in work, market transactions, and even social life is the process to which we are at the same time witnesses and agents of change. Sign systems of all kinds, but primarily language, housed and stored many of the projects that changed the condition of praxis. The major changes are: from direct to mediated, from sequential to parallel, from centralized to decentralized, from clustered (in productive units such as factories) to distributed, from dualistic (right or wrong) to multi-valued (along the continuum of acceptable engineering solutions), from deterministic to non-deterministic and chaotic, from closed (once a product is produced, the problem-solving cycle is completed) to open (human practical experiences are viewed as problem generating), from linear to non-linear. Each of these changes, in turn, made the structural limits of language more and more evident. Practical experiences in the design of languages, in particular the new languages of visualization, are pushing these limits in order to accommodate new expectations, such as increased expressiveness, higher processing speed, inter-operability-an image can trigger further operations. Globality of human practical experience succeeds against the background of the emergence of many languages that are very specific, though global in scope in that they can be applied all over the world. The chip factory already mentioned-or, for that matter, an integrated pizza or hamburger production facility-can be delivered turn-key in any corner of the world. The languages of mathematics, of engineering, or of genetics might independently be characterized by the same sequentiality, dualism, centralism, determinism that made natural language itself incapable of handling complexities resulting from the new scale of human activity. Once integrated in practical experiences of a different nature, such as those of automation, they all allow for a new dynamics. Obviously, they are less expressive than language-we have yet to read a DNA sequence poem, or listen to the music of a mathematical formula-but infinitely more precise. We are what we do In the contemporary world, communication is progressively reified and takes place more and more through the intermediary of the product. Its source is human work. Characteristics of the languages involved in the work are also projected into them. A new underlying structure replaces that which made literacy possible and necessary. In the physical or spiritual reality of the product, specialized languages are re-translated into the universal language of satisfying needs, or creating new needs, which are afterwards processed through the mediating mechanisms of the market. Reification (from the Latin res: transformation of everything-life, language, feeling, work-into things) is the result of the alienating logic of the market and its semiosis. Markets abstract individual contributions to a product. In the first place, language itself is reified and consumed. Markets reify this contribution, turning life, energy, doubts, time, or whatever else-in particular language-into the commodity embodied in the product. The very high degree of integration leads to conditions in which high efficiency-the most possible at the lowest price-becomes a criterion for survival. The consequence is that human individuality is absorbed in the product. People literally put their lives, and everything pertaining to them-natural history, education, family, feelings, culture, desires-in the outcome of their practical experiences. This absorption of the human being into the product takes place at different levels. In the second place, the individual constituted in work is also reified and consumed: the product contains a portion of the limited duration of the lives of those who processed it. Each form of mediated work depends upon its mediating entities. As one form of work is replaced by another, more efficient, the language that mediated is replaced by other means. Languages of coordination corresponding to hunting, or those of incipient agriculture, made way for subsequent practical experience of self-constitution in language. This applies to any and all forms of work, whether resulting in agricultural, industrial, artistic, or ideological products. The metaphors of genetics and evolutionary models can be applied. We can describe the evolution of work in memetic terminology, but we would still not capture the active role of sign processes. Moreover, human reproduction, between its sexual and its cultural forms, would become meaningless if separated from the pragmatic framework through which human self-constitution takes place. To illustrate how language is consumed, let us shortly examine what happens in the work we call education. In our day, the need for continual training increases dramatically. The paradigm of a once-for-life education is over, as much as literacy is over. Shorter production cycles require changes of tools and the pertinent training. A career for life, possible while the linear progress of technology required only maintenance of skills and slight changes of knowledge, is an ideal of the past. Efficiency requirements translate into training strategies that are less costly and less permanent than those afforded through literacy. These strategies produce educated operators as training itself becomes a product, offered by training companies whose list of clients includes fast food chains, nuclear energy producers, frozen storage facilities, the U.S. Congress, and computer operations. The market is the place where products are transacted and where the language of advertising, design, and public relations is consumed. Training, too, focused more and more on non-literate means of communication, is consumed. Literacy and the machine Man built machines which imitated the human arm and its functions, and thus changed the nature of work. The skills needed to master such machines were quite different from the skills of craftsmen, no longer transmitted from generation to generation, and less permanent. The Industrial Revolution made possible levels of efficiency high enough to allow for the maintenance of both machines and workers. It also made possible the improvement of machines and required better qualified operators, who were educated to extract the maximum from the means of production entrusted to them. At present, due to the integrative mechanisms that humans have developed in the processes of labor division, natural language has lost, and keeps losing, importance in the population's practical experience. The lower quality of writing, reading, and verbal expression, as they apply to self-constitution through work and social life, is symptomatic of a new underlying structure for the pragmatic framework. Literacy-based means of expression and communication are substituted, not just complemented, by other forms of expression and communication. Or they are reduced to a stereotyped repertory that is easy to mechanize, to automate, and finally, to do away with. Overseeing an automated assembly line, serving a sophisticated machine, participating in a very segmented activity without having a real overview of it, and many similar functions ultimately means to be part of a situation in which the subject's competence is progressively reduced to fit the task. Before being rationalized away, it is stereotyped. The language involved, in addition to that of engineering, is continuously compressed, trimmed according to the reduced amount of communication possible or necessary, and according to situations that change continuously and very fast. Today, a manual for the maintenance and repair of a highly sophisticated machine or weapon contains fewer words than images. The words still used can be recorded and associated with the image. Or the whole manual can become a videotape, laser disk, or CD-ROM, even network-distributed applications, to be called upon when necessary. The machine can contain its computerized manual, displaying pages (on the screen) appropriate to the maintenance task performed, generating synthesized speech for short utterances, and for canned dialogues. Here are some oddly related facts: The Treasury designs dollar bills that will tell the user their denomination; cars are already equipped with machines to tell us that we forgot to lock the door or fasten our seat belt; greeting cards contain voice messages (and in the future they will probably contain animated images). We can see in such gadgets a victory of the most superficial tastes people might have. But once the gratuitous moment is over, and first reactions fade away, we face a pragmatic situation which, whether synthesized messages are used or not, reflects an underlying structure better adapted to the complexities of the new scale of humankind. The holographic dollar bill that declines its name might even become useless when transactions become entirely electronic. The voice of our cars might end up in a museum once the generalized network for guiding our automobiles is in place, and all we have to do is to punch in a destination and some route expectations ("I want to take the scenic route"). Moreover, the supertech car itself might join its precursors in the museum once work becomes so distributed that the energy orgy, so evident on the rush-hour clogged highways, is replaced by more rational strategies of work and life. Telecommuting is a timid beginning and a pale image of what such strategies might be. The speaking greeting card might be replaced by a program that remembers whose birthday it is and, after searching the mugshot of the addressee (likes rap, wears artificial flowers, is divorced, lives in Bexley, Ohio), custom designs an original message delivered with the individualized electronic newspaper when the coffee is ready. A modest company manufacturing screensavers, using today's still primitive applications in the networked world, could already do this. Anticipation aside, we notice that work involves means of production that are more and more sophisticated. Nevertheless, the market of human work is at a relatively low level of literacy because human being do not need to be literate for most types of work. One reason for this is that the new machines incorporate the knowledge needed to fulfill their tasks. The machines have become more efficient than humans. The university system that is supposed to turn out literate graduates for the world of work obeys the same expectations of high efficiency as any other human practical experience. Universities become more and more training facilities for specific vocations, instead of carrying on their original goal of giving individuals a universal education in the domain of ideas. The statement concerning the literacy level does not reflect the longing of humanists but the actual situation in the manpower market. What we encounter is the structurally determined fact that natural language is no longer, at least in its literate form, the main means of recording collective experience, nor the universal means of education. For instance, in all its aspects-work, market, education, social life-the practical experience of human self-constitution relies less on literacy and more on images. Since the role of images is frequently mentioned (formulated differently, perhaps), the reader might suspect this is only a way of speaking. The actual situation is quite different. Pictographic messages are used whenever a certain norm or rule has to be observed. This is not a question of transcending various national languages (as in airports or Olympic stadiums, or with traffic signals, or in transactions pertinent to international trade), but a way of living and functioning. The visual dominates communication today. Words and sentences, affected by long-time use in various social, geographical, and historical contexts, became too ambiguous and require too much educational overhead for successful communication. Communication based on literacy requires an investment higher than the one needed for producing, perceiving, and observing images. Through images a positivist attitude is embodied, and a sense of relativity is introduced. Avoiding sequential reading, time and money consuming instruction, and the rigidity of the rules of literacy, the use of images reflects the drive for efficiency as this results from the new scale of human survival and future well-being. The change from literacy-oriented to visually-oriented culture is not the result of media development, as romantic media ecologists would like us to believe. Actually, the opposite is true. It is the result of fundamental ways of working and exchanging goods, within the new pragmatic framework that determined the need for these media in the first place, and afterwards made possible their production, dissemination, and their continuous diversification. The change under discussion here is very complex. Direct demands of mediated praxis and the new, highly mediative means of mass communication (television, computers, telecommunication, networks), acting as instruments of integrating the individual in the mechanism of a global economy, are brought to expression in this mutation. Transition from language to languages, and from direct to indirect, multimediated communication is not reducible to abandoning logocentrism (a structural characteristic of cultures based on literacy) and the logic attached to it. We participate in the process of establishing many centers of importance that replace the word, and compete with language as we know it. These can be found in subculture, but also within the entrenched culture. One example is the proliferation of electronic cafés, where clients sipping their coffee on the West Coast can carry on a dialogue with a friend in Barcelona; or contact a Japanese journalist flying in one of the Soviet space missions; or receive images from an art exhibit opening in Bogota; or play chess with one of the miracle sisters from Budapest. These experiences take place in what is known generically as cyberspace. The disposable human being While it is true that just as many different curves can be drawn through a finite number of points, consistent observations can be subsumed under various explanations. Observations regarding the role and status of literacy might result in explanations that put radically different glosses on their results, but they cannot escape confirming the sense of change defined here. This change ultimately concerns the identity humans acquire in illiterate experiences of self-constitution. Progressively abandoning reading and writing and replacing them with other forms of communication and reception, humans participate in another structural change: from centralization to decentralization; from a centripetal model of existence and activity, with the traditional system of values as an attraction point (religious, aesthetic, moral, political values, among others) to a centrifugal model; and from a monolithic to a pluralistic model. Paradoxically, the loss of the center also means that human beings lose their central role and referential value. This results in a dramatic situation: When human creativity compensates for the limited nature of resources (minerals, energy, food supply, water, etc.), either by producing substitutes or by stimulating efficient forms of their use, the human itself becomes a disposable commodity, more so the more limited its practical self-constitution is. Within the pragmatics characteristic of the underlying literacy, machines were changed less often; but even when changed, the human operator did not have to be replaced. A basic set of skills sufficed for lifelong activity. Engineering was concerned with artifacts as long lasting as life. The pragmatic framework of illiteracy, as one of rapid change and progressively shorter cycles, made the human more easily replaceable. At the new scale of human activity, the very large and growing commodity of human beings decreases in value: in its market value, and in its spiritual and real value. The sanctity of life gives way to the intricate technology of life maintenance, to the mechanics of existence and the body-building shops. In the stock market of spare parts, a kidney or a heart, mechanical or natural, is listed almost the same way as pork bellies and cement, van Gogh's paintings, CD players, and nuclear headscrews. They are quoted and transacted as commodities. And they support highly specialized work, compensated at the level of professional football or basketball. Projected into and among products of short-lived destiny, the human beings working to make them project a morality of the disposable that affects their own condition and, finally, the dissolution of their values. As a result of high levels of work efficiency, there are enough resources to feed and house humankind, but not enough to support practical experiences that redeem the integrity of the individual and the dignity of human existence. Within a literate discourse, with an embedded ideology of permanency, the morality of the disposable makes for good headlines; but since it does not affect the structural conditions conducive to this morality, it soon gets lost in the many other literate commentaries, including those decrying the decline of literacy. The broader picture to which these reflections belong includes, of course, the themes of disposable language. If basic skills, as defined by Harvard professor and Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Lester Thurow, and many educators and policy-makers, become less and less meaningful in the fast-changing world of work, it is easy to understand why little weight can be attached to one or another individual. Under the guise of basic skills, young and less than young workers receive an education in reading and writing that has nothing to do with the emergent practical experiences of ever shorter cycles. Companies in search of cheap labor have discovered the USA, or at least some parts of it, and achieve here efficiencies that at home, under labor laws originating from a literate pragmatics, are not attainable. Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, and many Japanese companies train their labor force in South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, and other states. The usefulness of the people these companies train is almost equal to that of the machine, unless the workers are replaced by automation. The technological cycle and the human cycle are so closely interwoven that one can predicate the hybrid nature of technology today: machines with a live component. As a matter of fact, it is interesting to notice how progressively machines no longer serve us, but how we serve them. Entirely equipped to produce high quality desktop publishing, to process data for financial transactions, to visualize scientific phenomena, such machines require that we feed the data and run the program so that a meaningful output results. In the case in which the machine might not know the difference between good and bad typography, for example, the human operator supplies the required knowledge, based on intangible factors such as style or taste. Scale of work, scale of language Within each framework, be that of agriculture, pre-industrial, industrial, or post- industrial practical experiences, continuity of means and methods and of semiotic processes can be easily established. What should most draw our attention are discontinuities. We are going through such a discontinuity, and the opposition between the civilization of literacy and the civilization of illiteracy is suggestive of this. Evidently, within the new practical experiences through which our own identity is constituted, this is reflected in fast dynamics of economic change. Some industries disappear overnight. Many innovative ideas become work almost as quickly, but this work has a different condition. Discontinuity goes beyond analogy and statistical inferences. It marks the qualitative change which we see embodied in the new relations between work and language. One of the major hypotheses of this book is that discontinuities, also described in dynamic systems theory as phase shifts, occur as scale changes. Threshold values mark the emergence of new sign processes. As we have seen, practical experiences through which humans continuously ascertain their reality are affected by the scale at which they take place. Immediate tasks, such as those characteristic of direct forms of work, do not require a division into smaller tasks, a decomposition into smaller actions. The more complex the task, the more obvious the need to divide it. But it is not until the scale characteristic of our age is reached that decomposition becomes as critical as it now is. In industrial society, and in every civilization prior to it, the relation between the whole (task, goal, plan) and the parts (subtasks, partial goals, successive plans) is within the range of the human's ability to handle it. Labor division is a powerful mechanism for a divide and conquer strategy applied to tasks of growing complexity. The generation of choices, and the ability to compensate for the limited nature of resources as these affect the equation of population growth, integrate this rule of decomposition. Literacy, itself a practical experience of not negligible complexity, helps as long as the depth of the division into smaller parts, and the breadth of the integrative travail do not go beyond litercy's own complexity. When this happens, it is obvious that even if means belonging to literacy were effective in managing very deep hierarchies in order to allow for re-integration of the parts in the desired whole, the management of such means would itself go beyond the complexity we are able to cope with. Indeed, although very powerful in many respects, when faced with many pragmatic levels independent of language, literacy (through which language attains its optimal operational power) appears flat. Actually, not only literacy appears flat, but even the much glorified human intelligence. Distinctions that result from deeper segmentation of work, brought about by the requirements of a scale of population and demand of an order of magnitude exponentially higher than any experience an individual can have, can no longer be grasped by single minds. Since the condition of the mind depends on interaction with other minds within practical experiences of self-constitution, it results that means of interaction different from those appropriate to sequentiality, linearity, and dualism are necessary. This new stage is not a continuation of a previous stage. It is even less a result of an incremental progression. The wheel, once upon a time a rounded stone, along with a host of wheel-based means of practical experiences, opened a perspective of progression. So did the lever, and probably alphabetic writing, and the number system. This is why the old and new could be linked through comparisons, metaphors, and analogies in a given scale of humankind. But this is also why, when the scale changes, we have to deal with discontinuity and avoid misleading translations in the language of the past. A car was still, in some ways, the result of incremental progression from the horse-drawn carriage. An airplane, and later a rocket, are less along a line of gradual change, but still conceptually close to our own practical experience with flying birds, or with the physics of action and reaction. Nevertheless, a nuclear reactor is well beyond such experiences. The conceptual hierarchy it embodies takes it out of the realm of any previous pragmatic experience. The effort here is to tame the process, to keep it within a scale that allows for our use of a new resource of energy. The relation between the sizes actively involved-nuclear level of matter compared to the enormous machinery and construction-is not only beyond the power of distinction of individual minds, but also of any operators, unless assisted by devices themselves of a high degree of complexity. The Chernobyl meltdown suggests only the magnitudes involved, and how peripheral to them are the literacy-based experiences of energy management. The enormous satellite and radio-telephonic network, which physically embodies the once fashionable concept of ether, is another example of the scale of work under the circumstances of the new scale of human activity; and so are the telephone networks-copper, coaxial, or fiberglass. The conceptual hierarchies handled by such networks of increasingly generalized communication of voice, data, and images make any comparison to Edison's telephone, to letters, or to videotapes useless. The amount of information, the speed of transmission, and the synchronicity mechanisms required and achieved in the network-all participate in establishing a framework for remote interaction that practically resets the time for all involved and does away with physical distances. Literacy, by its intrinsic characteristics, could not achieve such levels. Finally, the computer, associated or not with networks, makes this limit to our ability to grasp complexities even more pressing. We have no problems with the fact that a passenger airplane is 200 times faster than a pedestrian, and carries, at its current capacity, 300-450 passengers plus cargo. The computer chip itself is a conceptual accomplishment beyond anything we can conceive of. The depth encountered in the functioning of the digital computer-from the whole it represents to its smallest components endowed with functions integrated in its operation-is of a scale to which we have no intuitive or direct access. Computers are not a better abacus. Some computer users have even noticed that they are not even a better cash register. They define an age of semiotic focus, in that symbol manipulation follows language processing. (The word symbol points to work become semiotic praxis, but this is not what I am after here.) In addition to the complexity it embodies, the computer makes another distinction necessary. It replaces the world of the continuum by a world of discrete states. Probably this distinction would be seen only as qualitative, if the shift from the universe of continuous functions and monotonic behavior-whatever applies to extreme cases applies to everything in between-were not concretized in a different condition of human self-constitutive practical experience. In the universe of literacy-based analog expectations, accumulation results in progress: know more (language, science, arts), have more (resources), acquire more (real estate). Even striving-from a general attitude to particular forms (do better, achieve higher levels)-is inherent in the underlying structure of the analog. The digital is not linear in nature. Within the digital, one small deviation (one digit in the phrase) changes the result of processing so drastically that retracing the error and fixing it becomes itself a new experience, and many times a new source of knowledge. In a written sentence, a misspelling or a typographical error is almost automatically corrected. Through literacy, we dispose of a model that tells us what is right. In the digital, the language of the program and the data on which programs operate are difficult to distinguish (if at all). Such machines can manipulate more symbols, and of a broader variety, than the human mind can. Free of the burden of previous practical experiences, such machines can refer to potential experiences in a frame of reference where literacy is entirely blind. The behavior of an object in a multi- dimensional space (four, five, six, or more dimensions), actions along a timeline that can be regressive, or in several distinct and unrelated time frames, modeling choices beyond the capability of the human mind-all these, and many more, with practical significance for the survival and development of humankind are acceptable problems for a digital computer. It is true, as many would hasten to object, that the computer does not formulate the problem. But this is not the point. Neither does literacy formulate problems. It only embodies formulations and answers pertinent to work within a scale of manageable divisions. The less expressive language of zeros and ones (yes-no, open-closed, white- black) is more precise, and definitely more appropriate, for levels of complexity as high as those resulting from this new stage in the evolution. The generality of the computer (a general-purpose machine), the abstraction of the program of symbol manipulation, and the very concrete nature of the data upon which it is applied represent a powerful combination of reified knowledge, effective procedures for solving problems, and high resolution capabilities. Those who see the computer as only the principal technological metaphor of our time (according to J. D. Bolter) miss the significance of the new metrics of human activity and its degree of necessity as it results from awareness of the limits of our minds (after the limits of the body were experienced in industrial society). Edsger Dijkstra, affirming the need for an orthogonal method of coping with radical novelty, concludes that this "amounts to creating and learning a new foreign language that cannot be translated into one's mother tongue." The direction he takes is right; the conclusion is still not as radical as the new scale of human activity and the limits of our self-constitution require. Coming to grips with the radical change that he and many, many others ascertain, amounts to understanding the end of literacy and the illiteracy of the numerous languages required by our practical experience of self- constitution. This conspectus of the transformation we experience may foster its own forms of fresh confusion. For instance, in what was called a civilized society, language acted as the currency of cultural transactions. If higher level needs and expectations continue to drive the market and technology, will they eventually become subservient to the illiterate means they have generated? Or, if language in one of its illiterate embodiments cannot keep pace with the exponential growth of information, will it undergo a restructuring in order to become a parallel process? Or will we generate more inclusive symbols, or some form of preprocessing, before information is delivered to human beings? All these questions relate to work, as the experience from which human identities result together with the products bearing their mark. The active condition of any sign system is quite similar to the condition of tools. The hand that throws a stone is a hand influenced by the stone. Levers, hammers, pliers, no less than telescopes, pens, vending machines, and computers support practical experiences, but also affect the individuals constituting themselves through their use. A gesture, a written mark, a whisper, body movements, words written or read, express us or communicate for us, at the same time affecting those constituted in them. How language affects work means, therefore, how language affects the human being within a pragmatic framework. To deal with some aspects of this extremely difficult problem we can start with the original syncretic condition of the human being. Innate heuristics Conceptual tools that can be used to refer to the human being in its syncretic condition exist only to the degree to which we identify them in language. In every system we know of, variety and precision are complementary. Indeed, whether human beings hunt or present personal experiences to others, they attempt to optimize their efforts. Too many details affect efficiency; insufficient detail affects the outcome. There seems to be a structural relation of the nature of one to many, between our what and our how. This relation is scrutinized in the pragmatic context where efficiency considerations finally make us choose from among many possibilities. The optimum chosen indicates what, from the possibilities humans are aware of, is most suitable for reaching the goal pursued. Moreover, such an optimum is characteristic of the pragmatics of the particular context. For example, hunting could be performed alone or in groups, by throwing stones or hurling spears, by shooting arrows, or by setting traps. The syncretic primitive being was (and still is, in existing primitive cultures) involved in a practical experience in its wholeness: through that being's biological endowment, relation to the environment, acquired skills and understanding, emotions (such as fear, joy, sorrow). The specialized individual constitutes himself in experiences progressively more and more partial. Nevertheless, the two have a natural condition in common. What distinguishes them is a strategy for survival and preservation that progressively departs from immediate needs and direct action to humanized needs and mediated action. This means a departure from a very limited set of options ("When hungry, search for food," for example), to multiplying the options, and thus establishing for the human being an innate heuristic condition. This means that Homo Sapiens looks for options. Humans are creative and efficient. My line of reasoning argues that, while verbal language may be innate (as Chomsky's theory advances), the heuristic dimension characteristic of human self- constitution certainly is. In hunting, for instance, the choice of means (defining the how) reflects the goal (to get meat) and also the awareness of what is possible, as well as the effort to expand the realm of the possible. The major effort is not to keep things the way they are, but to multiply the realm of possibilities to ensure more than mere survival. This is known as progress. The same heuristic strategy can be applied to the development of literacy. Before the Western alphabet was established, a number of less optimal writing systems (cuneiform, hieroglyphics, etc.) were employed. The very concrete nature of such languages is reflected in the limited expressive power they had. Current Chinese and Japanese writing are examples of this phenomenon today. In comparison to the 24-28 letters of Western alphabets, command of a minimum of 3,000 ideographic signs represents the entry level in Chinese and Japanese; command of 50,000 ideographic signs would correspond to the Western ideal of literacy. Behind the letters and characters of the various language alphabets, there is a history of optimization in which work influenced expression, expression constituted new frames for work, and together, generative and explanatory models of the world were established. The what and the how of language were initially on an order of complexity similar to that characteristic of actions. Over time, actions became simpler while languages acquired the complexity of the heuristic experience. The what and the how of mediation tools of a higher order of abstraction than language, achieved even higher complexities. Such complexities were reflected in the difference in the order of magnitude between human work and outcome, especially the choices generated. Parallel to the loss of the syncretic nature of the human being at the level of the individual, we notice the composite syncretism of the community. Individual, relatively stable, wholeness was replaced by a faster and faster changing community- related wholeness. Language experiences were part of this shift. Self-constituted in the practical use of language, the human being realized its social dimension, itself an example of the acquired multiplication of choice. Indeed, within the very small scale of incipient humanity corresponding to the stage of self-ascertainment (when signs were used and elements of language appeared), population and food supply were locked in the natural equation best reflected in the structural circularity of existence and survival. It is at this juncture that the heuristic condition applies: the more animals prey on a certain group, this group will either find survival strategies (adaptive or other kinds), or indeed cease to be available as food for others. But once the human being was ascertained, evidence shows that instead of focusing on one or few ways to get at its food sources, it actually diversified the practical experience of self-constitution and survival, proceeding from one, or few, to many resources. Homo Habilis was past the scavenging stage and well into foraging, hunting, and fishing during the pre-agricultural pragmatic frame. What for other species became only a limited food supply, and resulted in mechanisms of drastic growth control (through famine, cannibalism, and means of destroying life), in the human species resulted in a broadening of resources. In this process, the human being became a working being, and work an identifier of the species. Language acquisition and the transition from the natural experience of self- constitution in survival to the practical experience of work are co-genetic. With each new scale that became possible, sequences of work marked a further departure from the universe of action-reaction. The observation to be made, without repeating information given in other chapters, is that from signs to incipient language, and from incipient language to stabilized means of expression, the scale of humankind changed and an underlying structure of practical experiences based on sequentiality, linearity, determinism (of one kind or another), and centralism established a new pragmatic framework. Individual syncretism was replaced by the syncretism of communities in which individuals are identified through their work. Writing was a relatively late acquisition and occurred as part of the broader process of labor division. This process was itself correlated to the diversification of resources and types of practical experiences preserving syncretism at the community level. Not everyone wrote, not everybody read. The pragmatic framework suggested necessitated elements of order, ways of assigning and keeping track of assignments, a certain centralism, and, last but not least, organizational forms, which religion and governing bodies took care of. Under these circumstances, work was everything that allowed for the constitution, survival, change, and advancement of the human species. It was expressed in language to the degree such expression was necessary. In other words, language is another asset or means of diversifying choices and resources. Over time, limited mediation through language and literacy became necessary in order to optimize the effort of matching needs with availabilities. This mediation was itself a form of work: questions asked, questions answered, commitments made, equivalencies determined. All these defined an activity related to using available resources, or finding new ones. When productivity increased, and language could not keep up with the complexities of higher production, variety, and the need for planning, a new semiosis, characteristic of this different pragmatic level, became necessary. Money, for example, introduced the next level of mediation, more abstract, that translated immediate, vital needs into a comparative scale of means to fulfill them. The context of exchange generated money, which eventually became itself a resource, a high level commodity. It also entailed a language of its own, as does each mediation. With the advent of means of exchange as universal as language, the what and how of human activity grew even more distant. Direct trade became indirect. People making up the market no longer randomly matched needs and availability. Their market praxis resulted in an organizing device, and used language to further diversify the resources people needed for their lives. This language was still rudimentary, direct, oral, captive to immediacy, and often consumed together with the resource or choice exhausted (when no alternative was generated). This happens even in our day. In its later constitution in practical activity, language was used for records and transactions, for plans and new experiences. The logic of this language was an extension and instantiation of the logic of human activity. It complemented the heuristic, innate propensity for seeking new choices. Influenced by human interaction in the market, and subjected to the expectation of progressively higher efficiency, human activity became increasingly mediated. A proliferation of tools allowed for increased productivity in those remote times of the inception of language. Eventually tools, and other artifacts, became themselves an object of the market, in addition to supporting self-constitutive practical experiences of the humans interacting with them. As a mediating element between the processor and what is processed, the tool was a means of work and a goal: better tools require instructed users. If they use tools properly, they increase the efficiency of activity and make the results more marketable. Tools supported the effort of diversification of practical experiences, as well as the effort of expanding the subsistence base. The means for creating tools and other artifacts fostered other languages, such as the language of drawing, on which early engineering also relied. Here, an important point should be made. No tool is merely used. In using it, the user adapts to the tool, becoming to some extent, the used, the tool of the tool. The same is true of language, writing, and literacy. They were developed by humans seeking to optimize their activity. But humans have adapted themselves to the constraints of their own inventions. At the inception of writing, the tension between an imposed written precision (as relative as this might appear from our perspective today)-keeping language close to the object, allowing into the language only objects that pictograms could represent- and a rather diverse, however very unfocused, oral language resulted in conflicts between the proponents of writing and the guardians of orality (as documented in ancient Greek philosophy). The written needed to be freed from the object as much as the human being from a particular source of protein, or a particular food source. It had to support a more general expression (referring to what would become families, types, classes of objects, etc.), and thus to support practical efforts to diversify the ways of survival and continuous growth in number. The oral had to be tamed and united with the written. Taming could, and did, take place only through and in work, and in socially related interaction. The practical effort to embody knowledge resulting from many practical experiences of survival into all kinds of artifacts (for measuring, orientation, navigation, etc.) testifies to this. Phonetic writing, the development of the effort to optimize writing, better imitated oral language. Personal characteristics, making the oral expressive, and social characteristics, endowing the written with the hints that bring it close to speech, are supported in the phonetic system. The theocratic system of pictographs and what others call the democratic language of phonetic writing deserve their names only if we understand that languages are both constitutive and representative of human experience. Undifferentiated labor is theocratic. Its rules are imposed by the object of the practical experience. Divided labor, while affecting the integrity of those becoming only an instance of the work process, is participatory, in the sense that its results are related to the performance of each participant in the process. Practical experience of language and experience of divided labor are intrinsically related and correspond to the pragmatic framework of this particular human scale. Labor division and the association of very abstract phonetic entities to very concrete language instantiations of human experience are interdependent. The realm of alternatives In defining the context of change leading from an all-encompassing literacy to the civilization of illiteracy, I referred to the Malthusian principle (Population, when unchecked, increases geometrically, while food sources increase arithmetically). What Malthus failed to acknowledge is the heuristic nature of the human species, i.e., the progressive realization of the creative potential of the only known species that, in addition to maintaining its natural condition, generates its own a-natural condition. In the process of their self-constitution, humans generate also the means for their survival and future growth beyond the circularity of mere survival strategies. The 19th century economist Henri George gave the following example of this characteristic: "Both the jayhawk and the man eat chicken, but the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens." (Just think about the Purdue chicken industry!) The formula is flawed. Humans also intervene in the jayhawk-chicken relation; the number of animals and birds in a certain area is affected by more elements than what eats what; and the population increase is meaningless unless associated with patterns of human practical experiences. Species frequently become extinct due to human, not animal, intervention. Despite all this, Henri George's characterization captured an important aspect of the human species, as it defined itself in the human scale that made literacy possible and necessary. George's time corresponded to some interesting though misleading messages that followed the pattern of Malthus' law. People were running out of timber, coal, and oil for lamps, just as we expect to run out of many other resources (minerals, energy and food sources, water, etc.). Originators of messages regarding the exhaustion of such resources, regardless of the time they utter them, ignore the fact that during previous shortages, humans focused on alternatives, and made them part of new practical experiences. This was the case leading to the use of coal, when the timber supply decreased in Britain in the 16th century, and this will be the case with the shortages mentioned above: for lighting, kerosene was extracted from the first oil wells (1859); more coal reserves were discovered; better machines were built that used less energy and made coal extraction more efficient; industry adapted other minerals; and the strict dependence on natural cycles and farming was progressively modified through food processing and storage techniques. The pragmatic framework of current human praxis is based on the structural characteristics of this higher scale of humankind. It affects the nature of human work and the nature of social, political, and national organization within emerging national states. A retrospective of the dynamics of growth and resource availability shows that with language, writing and reading, and finally with literacy, and even more through engineering outside language experience, a coherent framework of pragmatic human action was put in place, and used to compensate for the progressive imbalance between population growth and resources. Our time is in more than one way the expression of a semiosis with deep roots in the pragmatic context in which writing emerged. Engineering dominates today. In trying to define the semiosis of engineering, i.e. how the relation between work we associate with engineering and language evolved, we evidence both continuity-in the form of successive replications-and discontinuity-in the new condition of the current engineering work. Our reference can be made to both the dissemination of the writing system based on the Phoenician alphabet, and the language of drawing that makes engineering possible. Phoenician traders supplied materials to the Minoans. The Minoan burial culture involved the burial of precious objects that embodied the experience of crafts. These objects were made out of silver, gold, tin, and lead. In time, increased quantities of such metals were permanently removed from the market. Phoenicians, who supplied these materials, had to search farther and farther for them, using better tools to find and preprocess the minerals. The involvement of writing and drawing in the process of compensation between perceived needs and available resources, and the fact that searches for new resources led to the dissemination of writing and craftsmanship should be understood within the dynamics of local economies. Up to which point such a compensatory action, implying literacy and engineering skills, is effective, and when it reached its climax, possibly during the Industrial Revolution, is a question that can be put only in retrospect. Is there a moment when the balance was tilted towards the means of expression of and the communication specific to engineering? If yes, we do not know this moment; we cannot identify it on historic charts. But once the potential of literacy to support human practical experiences of self- constitution in a new pragmatic framework was exhausted, new means became necessary. To understand the dynamics of the changes that made the new pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy necessary is the object of the entire book. While engineering contributed to them, they are not the result of this important practical experience, but rather a cause of how it was and is affected by them. The stream of diversified experiences that eventually gushed forth through new languages, the language of design and engineering included, resulted in the awareness of mediation, which itself became a goal. Mediation of mediation With the risk of breaking the continuity of the argument, I would like to continue by suggesting the implications of this argument for the reality to which this book refers: the present. First, a general thesis derived from the analysis so far: The market of direct exchange, as well as the market of mediated forms, reflect the general structure of human activity-direct work vs. mediated forms of work-and are expressed in their specific languages. From a certain moment in human evolution, tools, as an extension of the human body and mind, are used, some directly, some indirectly. Today we notice how, through the intermediary of commands transmitted electronically, pneumatically, hydraulically, thermally, or in some other way, the mediation of mediation is introduced. Pressing a button, flipping a switch, punching a keyboard, triggering a relay-seen as steps preparing for entirely programmed activities-means to extend the sequence of mediations. Between the hand or another body part and the processed material, processing tools and sequences of signs controlling this process are introduced. Accordingly, language, as related to work, religion, education, poetry, exchange in the market, etc., is restructured. New levels of language and new, limited, functionally designed languages are generated and used for mediating. The language of drawings (more generally the language of design) is one of them. Relations among these different levels and among the newly designed languages are established. But how is this related to the innate heuristic condition of the human being and to the working hypothesis advanced regarding the change in the scale of humanity? Or is it only another way of saying that technology, resulting from engineering interpretations of science, defines the path to higher levels of efficiency, and to the relative illiteracy of our time? The increase in population and the dynamics of diversification (more choices, more resources) at this new scale assume a different dimension. It is irrelevant that resources of one type or another are exhausted in one economy. As a matter of fact, Japan, Germany, England, and even the USA (rich in the majority of resources in demand) have exhausted whatever oil, copper, tin, diamonds, or tungsten was available. Due to many factors, farmland in the western world is decreasing, while the quantities and different types of food consumed per capita have increased substantially. Faced with the challenge posed by the national, linear, sequential, dual, deterministic nature of the pragmatic framework that generated the need for literacy, humans discover means to transcend these limitations-globality, non-linearity, configuration, multi-valued logic, non-determination-and embody them in artifacts appropriate to this condition. The new scale necessitated creative work for multiplying available resources, for looking at needs and availabilities from a new perspective. Those who see globality in the Japanese sushi restaurant in Provence or in the Midwest, in the McDonalds in Moscow or Beijing, in multinational corporations, in foreign investments mushrooming all over, miss the real significance of the term. Globality applies to the understanding that we share in resources and creative means of multiplying them independent of boundaries (of language, culture, nations, alliances, etc.), as well as in high efficiency processing equipment. This understanding is not only sublime, it has its ugly side. The world would even go to war (and has, again and again) to secure access to critical resources or to keep markets open. But it is not the ugly side that defines the effective pragmatics. Nor does it define the circumstances of our continuous self-definition in this world of a new dynamics of survival needs and expectations above and beyond such needs. Where literacy no longer adequately supports creative work based on higher levels of efficiency, it is replaced by languages designed and adapted to mediation, or to work destined to compensate for an exhausted resource, or by machines incorporating our literacy and the literacies of higher efficiency. Hunting and fishing remain as mere sport, and foraging declined to the level at which people in a country like the USA no longer know that in the woods there are mushrooms, berries, and nuts that can be used as food. Even agriculture, probably the longest standing form of practical experience, escapes sequentiality and linearity, and adds industrial dimensions that make agriculture a year-round, highly specialized, efficient activity. We share resources and even more in the globality of the life support system (the ecology); in the globality of communication, transportation, and technology; and, last but not least, in the globality of the market. The conclusion is that, once again, it is not any recent discovery or trend that is the engine of change, from local to national to global, but the new circumstances of human experience, whose long-lasting effect is the altered individual. Freed from the human operator and replaced by technology that ensures levels of efficiency and security for which the living being is not well adapted to provide, many types of work are simultaneously freed from the constraints of language, of literacy in particular. There is no need to teach machines spelling, or grammar, or rules of constructing sentences. There is even less of a need to maintain between the human being and the machine a mediating literacy that is awkward, inefficient, stamped by ambiguity, and burdened by various uses (religious, political, ideological, etc.). The new languages, whether interfaces between machines or between humans and machines, are of limited scope and duration. In the dynamics of work, these new languages are appropriately adapted to each other. Our entire activity becomes faster, more precise, more segmented, more distributed, more complex. This activity is subordinated to a multi-valued logic of efficiency, not to dualistic inferences or truth or falsehood. Some might read into the argument made so far a vote against the many kinds of activists of this day and age: the ecologists who warn of damage inflicted on the environment; Malthusians tireless in warning of upcoming famine; the zero-population- growth movement, etc. Some might read here a vote for technocracy, for the advocates of limitless growth, the optimists of despair, or the miracle planners (free marketers, messianic ideologists, etc.). None is the case. Rather, I submit for examination a model for understanding and action that takes into account the complexity of the problem instead of explaining complexities away and working, as literacy taught us to, on simplified models. Mapping out the terrain of the descriptive level of the relation between language and work under current pragmatic circumstances will assist in the attempt to plot, in some meaningful detail, the position so far described. Literacy and Education Education and literacy are intimately related. One seems impossible without the other. Nevertheless, there was education before the written word. And there is education that does not rely on literacy, or at least not exclusively. With this in mind, let us focus, in these preliminary words, on what brought literacy into education, and on the consequences of their reciprocal relation. The state of education, like the state of many other institutions embodying characteristics of literacy-based practical experiences, is far from what is expected. Literacy carried the ideal of permanency into the practical experience of education. In a physical world perceived as limited in scale and fragmented, captive to sequentiality, characterized by periodic changes and intercommunal commitments aimed at maintaining permanency, literacy embodied both a goal and the means for achieving it. It defined a representative, limited set of choices. Within this structure, education is the practical experience of stabilizing optimal modes of interaction centered around values expressed in language. Education based on literacy is adapted to the dynamics of change within the reduced scale of humankind that eventually led to the formation of nations-entities of relative self-sufficiency. Within national boundaries, population growth, resources, and choices could be kept in balance. Purposely simplified, this view allows us to understand that education evolved from its early stages-direct transmission of experience from one person to another, from one generation to another-to religion-based educational structures. Filtered by a set of religious premises, education later opened a window beyond the immediate and the proximity of life, and evolved, not painlessly, into schools and universities concerned with knowledge and scholarship. This, too, was a long process, with many intermediate steps, which eventually resulted in the generalized system of education we now have in place, and which reflects the separation of church and state. Liberal education and all the values attached to it are the foundational matrix of the current system of general education. If you give someone a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If you give someone an alphabet, every problem becomes one of literacy and education-this would probably be a good paraphrase, applicable to the discussions on education in our day. It should not follow, however, that with the World Wide Web, education is only a matter of on-line postings of classes and the accidental matching of educational needs to network availabilities. In our world of change and discontinuity, the end of literacy, along with the end of education based on literacy, is not a symptom, but a necessary development, beyond on-line studies. This conclusion, which may appear to be a criticism of the digital dissemination of knowledge, might seem hasty at this point in the text. The arguments to follow will justify the conclusion. "Know the best" Resulting from our self-constitution in a world obsessed with efficiency and satisfaction, the insatiable effort to exhaust the new-only to replace it with the newer- puts education in a perspective different from that opened by literacy. Education driven by literacy seems to be condemned to a sui generis catch-up condition, or "damned if you do, damned if you don't." In the last 30 years, education has prepared students for a future different from the one education used to shape in a reactive mode. Under the enormous pressure of expectations (social, political, economic, moral) it simply cannot fulfill, unless it changes as the structure of the pragmatic framework changed, the institution of education has lost its credibility. Classes, laboratories, manuals, any of the educational methods advanced, not to mention the living inventory of teachers, account for contents and ways of thinking only marginally (if at all) linked to the change from a dominant literacy to numerous literacies. IBM, fighting to redefine itself, stated bluntly in one of its educational campaigns, "Since 1900, every institution has kept up with change, except one: Education." More money than ever, more ideals and sweat have been invested in the process of educating the young, but little has changed either the general perception of education or the perception of those educated. The most recent laboratory of the high school or university is already outdated when the last piece of equipment is ordered. The competence of even the best teachers becomes questionable just as their students start their first journey in practical life. The harder our schools and colleges try to keep pace with change, the more obvious it becomes that this is a wrong direction to pursue, or that something in the nature of our educational system makes the goal unreachable-or both of these alternatives. Some people believe that the failure is due to the bureaucracy of education. Much can be said in support of this opinion. The National Institute for Literacy is an example of how a problem can become a public institution. Other people believe that the failure is due to the inability of educators to develop a good theory of education, based on how people learn and what the best way to teach is. Misunderstanding the implications of education and setting false priorities are also frequently invoked. Misunderstanding too often resulted in expensive government projects of no practical consequence. Other explanations are also given for the failure of education-liberalism, excessive democracy in education, rejection of tradition, teaching and learning geared to tests, the breakdown of the family. (Listing them here should not be misconstrued as an endorsement.) It seems that every critic of today's education has his or her own explanation of what each thinks is wrong. Some of these explanations go well back, almost to the time when writing was established: education affects originality, dampens spontaneity, and infringes upon creativity. Education negates naturalness during the most critical period of development, when the minds of young people, the object of education, are most impressionable. Other arguments are more contemporary: If the right texts (whatever right means) were to be taught, using the best methods to put them in a light that makes them attractive, education would not lose out to entertainment. Some groups advocate the digest approach for texts, sometimes presented in the form of comic strips or Internet-like messages of seven sentences per paragraph, each sentence containing no more than seven words. These explanations assume the permanence of literacy. They concentrate on strategies, from infantile to outlandish, to maintain literacy's role, never questioning it, never even questioning whether the conditions that made it necessary might have changed to the degree that a new structure is already in place. Educators like to think that their program is defined through Matthew Arnold's prescription, "Know the best that is known and thought in the world," an axiom of tradition-driven self- understanding. This attitude is irrelevant in a context in which best is an identifier of wares, not of dynamic knowledge. Some educators would follow Jacques Barzun's recommendation: "serious reading, serious teaching of reading, and inculcation of a love for reading are the proper goal of education." Ideal vs. real Schools at all levels of education purport to give students a traditional education and promise to deliver the solid education of yesteryear. Contrast this claim to reality: Under the pressure of the market in which they operate, schools maintain that they prepare students for the new pragmatic context. Some schools integrate practical disciplines and include training components. Courses in computer use come immediately to mind. Some schools go so far as to sign contracts guaranteeing the appropriateness of the education they provide. In the tradition of the service industry, they promise to take back pupils unable to meet the standardized criteria. Every spring, a reality check is made. In 1996, a poll of 500 graduating seniors revealed that only 7% succeeded in answering at least 15 of 20 questions asked. Five of these were on math, the rest on history and literature-all traditional subject matter. Experts called to comment on the results of this poll-E.D. Hirsch, author of Cultural Literacy and active in having his educational ideas implemented; Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education; and Stephen Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, constitute themselves in the pragmatic framework of literacy-based education. They declare, and appropriately so, that educational standards are declining, that education is failing to produce the type of citizen a democracy needs. As reputable as they undoubtedly are, these scholars, and many of those in charge of education, do not seem to realize what changes have been taking place in the real world. They live in the richest and probably most dynamic country in the world, with one of the lowest unemployment rates, and the highest rate of new business creation, but fail to associate education with this dynamism. If education is failing, then something positive must be replacing it. In modern jargon, one can say that until education is re-engineered (or should I say rethought?), it has no chance of catching up with reality. In its current condition of compromise, education will only continue to muddle along, upsetting both its constituencies: those captive to an education based on the literacy model, and those who recognize new structural requirements. The reality is that the universality implicit in the literacy model of education, reflected in the corpus of democratic principles guaranteeing equality and access, is probably no longer defensible in its original form. Education should rather elaborate on notions that better reflect differences among people, their background, ethnicity, and their individual capabilities. Instead of trying to standardize, education should stimulate differences in order to derive the most benefit from them. Education should stimulate complementary avenues to excellence, instead of equal access to mediocrity. Some people may be uneducatable. They might have characteristics impossible to reduce to the common denominator that literacy-based education implies. These students might require alternative education paths in order to optimally become what their abilities allow them to be, and what practical experience will validate as relevant and desired, no matter how different. Equal representation, as applied to members of minority students or faculty, ethnic groups, sexes or sexual preferences, and the handicapped, introduces a false sense of democracy in education. It takes away the very edge of their specific chances from the people it pretends to help and encourage. Instead of acknowledging distinctions, expectations of equal representation suggest that the more melting in the pot, the better for society, regardless of whether the result is uniform mediocrity or distributed excellence. Actually the opposite is true: equal opportunity should be used in order to preserve distinctive qualities and bring them to fruition. As a unified requirement, literacy imparts a sense of conformity and standardization appropriate to the pragmatic framework that made standardized education necessary. Numerous alternative means of expression and communication, for which education has only a deaf ear, facilitate the multiplication of choices. In a world confronted with needs well beyond those of survival, this is a source of higher efficiency. The necessary effort to individualize education cannot, however, take place unless the inalienable right to study and work for one's own path to self-improvement is not respected to the same extent as liberty and equality are. The globality of human praxis is not a scenario invented by some entrepreneur. It is the reflection of the scale at which population growth, shared resources, and choices heading to new levels of efficiency become critical. In our world many people never become literate; many more still live at the borderline between human and animal life, threatened by starvation and epidemics. These facts do not contradict the dynamics that made alternatives to literacy necessary. It is appropriate, therefore, to question the type of knowledge that education imparts, and how it impacts upon those who are educated. Relevance Schools and universities are criticized for not giving students relevant knowledge. The notion of relevance is critical here. Scholars claim that knowledge of facts pertaining to tradition, such as those tested in the graduating class of 1996, are relevant. Relevant also are elements of logical thinking, enough science in order to understand the wealth of technologies we use, foreign languages, and other subject matter that will help students face the world of practical experience. Although the subjects listed are qualified as significant, they are never used in polls of graduating students. Critics of the traditional curriculum dispute the relevance of a tradition that seems to exclude more than it includes. They also challenge implicit hierarchical judgments of the people who impose courses of study. Multiculturalism, criticism of tradition, and freedom from the pressure of competition are among the recommendations they make. Acknowledging the new context of social life and praxis, these critics fail, however, to put it in the broader context of successive structural conditions, and thus lack criteria of significance outside their own field of expertise. With the notion of relevance, a perspective of the past and a direction for the future are suggested. That literacy-based education, at its inception, was xenophobic or racist, and obviously political, nobody has to tell us. Individuals from outside the polis, speaking a different mother tongue, were educated for a political reason: to make them useful to the community as soon as possible. Conditions for education changed dramatically over time, but the political dimension remains as strong as ever. This is why it can only help to dispense with certain literate attitudes expressing national, ethnic, racial, or similar ambitions. It is irrelevant whether Pythagoras was Greek and whether his geometry was original with him. It is irrelevant whether one or another person from one or another part of the world can be credited with a literary contribution, a work of art, or a religious or philosophic thought. What counts is how such accomplishments became relevant to the people of the world as they involved themselves in increasingly complex practical experiences. Moreover, our own sense of value does not rest on a sports-driven model-the first, the most, the best-but on the challenge posed by how each of us will constitute his own identity in unprecedented circumstances of work, leisure, and feeling. Relevance applies to the perspective of the future and to the recognition that experiences of the past are less and less pertinent in the new context. What should be taught? Language? Math? Chemistry? Philosophy? The list can go on. It is indeed very hard to do justice by simply nodding yes to language, yes to math, yes to chemistry, but not yes wholesale, without putting the question in the pragmatic context. This means that education should not be approached with the aura of religion, or dogmatism, assumed up to now: The teacher knew what eternal truth was; students heard the lectures and finally received communion. All basic disciplines have changed through time. The rhythm of their change keeps increasing. The current understanding of language, math, chemistry, and philosophy does not necessarily build on a progression. Science, for example, is not accumulation. Neither is language, contrary to all appearance. Rules learned by rote and accepted as invariable are not needed, but procedures for accessing knowledge relevant to our dynamic existence are. To memorize all that education-no matter how good or bad-unloads on students is sheer impossibility. But to know where to find what a given practical instance requires, and how one can use it, is quite a different matter. Should square dancing, Heavy Metal music, bridge, Chinese cuisine be taught? The list, to be found in the curriculum of many schools and colleges, goes on and on. The test of the relevance of such disciplines (or subjects) in a curriculum should be based on the same pragmatic criteria that our lives and livelihoods depend on. New subjects of study appear on course lists due to structural changes that make literacy useless in the new pragmatic context. They cannot, however, substitute for an education that builds the power of thinking and feeling for practical experiences of increased complexity and dynamism. Education needs to be shaped to the dynamics of self-constitution in practical experiences characteristic of this new age of humankind. This does not mean that education should become another TV program, or an endless Internet voyage, without aim and without method. We must comprehend that if we demand literacy and efficiency at the same time, ignoring that they are in many ways incompatible, we can only contribute to greater confusion. Higher education was opened to people who merely need training to obtain a skill. These students receive precious-looking diplomas that exactly resemble the ones given to students who have pursued a rigorous course of education. Once upon a time, literacy meant the ability to write and read Latin. Therefore, diplomas are embellished with Latin dicta, almost never understood by the graduates, and many times not even by the professors who hand them out. In the spirit of nostalgia, useless rituals are maintained, which are totally disconnected from today's pragmatic framework. The progressively increased mediation that affects efficiency levels also contributes to the multiplication of the number of languages involved in describing, designing, coordinating, and synchronizing human work. We are facing new requirements-those of parallelism, non-linearity, multi-valued logic, vagueness, and selection among options. Programming, never subject to wrong or right, but to optimal choice, and always subject to further improvement, is becoming a requirement for many practical experiences, from the arts to advanced science. Requirements of globality, distribution, economies of scale, of elements pertinent to engineering, communication, marketing, management, and of service-providing experiences need to be met within specific educational programs. The fulfillment of these requirements can never be relegated to literacy. We have seen that the broader necessity of language, from which the necessity of literacy is derived, is not defensible outside the process of human self-constitution. Language plays an important role, together with other sign systems, subordinated to language or not. In retrospect, we gain an understanding of the entire process: natural instincts are transmitted genetically and only slightly improve, if degeneration does not occur, in the interaction among individuals sharing a habitat. The conscious use of signs takes newborns from the domain of nature and eventually places them in the realm of culture. In this realm, life ceases to be a matter of biology only, and takes on non-natural, social and cultural dimensions. To live as an animal is to live for oneself and for very few others (mainly offspring). To live as a human being is to live through the existence of others, and in relation to others. Established before us and bound to continue after us, culture absorbs newcomers who not only begin their existence through their parents, but who also get to know culture and to adapt to it, or revolt against it. Education starts with the experience of the absent, the non-immediate, the successive. In other words, it implies experiences resulting from comparisons, imitation of actions, and formation of individual patterns corresponding to human biological characteristics. Only much later comes the use of language, of adjectives, adverbs, and the generation of conventions and metaphors, some part of the body of literacy, others part of other languages, such as the visual. With the constitution of the family, education begins, and so does another phase in labor division. The initial phase probably marked the transition from a very small scale of nomadic tribal life to the scale within which language settled in notation and eventually in writing. The generality of sequences, words, phonetics, nouns, and actions was reached in the practical experience of writing. The language of drawings, resulting from different experiences and supporting the making of objects, complemented the development of writing. When the scale of humankind corresponding to incipient literacy was reached, literacy became the instrument for imparting experiences coherent with the experience of language and its use. This account is inserted here as a summary for those who, although claiming historic awareness, show no real instinct for history. This summary says that education is the result of many changes in the condition of humankind and makes clear that these alterations continue. They also entail a responsibility to improve the experience of education and re-establish its connection to the broader framework of human activity, instead of limiting education to the requirements of cultural continuity. It has been said, again and again, that what we are we had to learn to become. Actually, we are who and what we are through what we do in the context of our individual and social existence. To speak, write, and read means to understand what we say, what we write, and what we read. It is not only the mechanical reproduction of words or sound patterns, which machines can also be programmed to perform. The expectation of speaking, reading, and writing is manifested in all human interactions. To learn how to speak, write, and read means both to gain skills and to become aware of the pragmatic context of interhuman relations that involve speaking, writing, and reading. It also means awareness of the possibility to change this context. To educate today means to integrate others, and in the process oneself, in an activity-oriented process directed towards sharing the knowledge necessary to gain further knowledge. Its content cannot be knowledge in general, since the varieties of practical experiences cannot be emulated in school and college. Within the pragmatic framework that made literacy possible, it sufficed to know how an engine functioned in order to work with different machines driven by engines. Literacy reflected homogeneity and served those constituted as literate in controlling the parameters within which deviations were allowed. The post-industrial experience, based on an underlying digital structure, is so heterogeneous that it is impossible to cope with the many different instances of practical requirements. The skills to orient us towards where to find what we need become more important than the information shared. Ownership of knowledge takes a back seat; what counts is access, paralleled by a good understanding of the new nature of human praxis focused on cognition. Education should, accordingly, prepare people to handle information, or to direct it to information processing devices. It has to help students develop a propensity for understanding and explaining the variety in which cognition, the raw material of digital engines, results from our experiences. The unity between the various paths we conceive in projecting our own biological reality into the reality of the world housing us and the result of our activity is characteristic of our mental and emotional condition. It defines our thinking and feeling. At some moment in time, after the division between physical and intellectual work took place, this thinking became relatively free of the result. The abstraction of thinking, once attained, corresponds to our ability to be in the process, to be aware of it, to judge it. This is the level of theories. The dynamics of the present affects the status of theories, both the way we shape them and how we communicate them. At least in regard to the communication of theory, but also to some of its generation, it is worthwhile to examine, in the context of our concern with education in this age, the evolution of the university. Temples of knowledge Education became the institution, the machine of literacy, once the social role of a generalized instrument of communication and coordination was established. This happened simultaneously with the reification of many other forms of human praxis: religion, the judiciary, the military. The first Western universities embodied the elitist ideal of literacy in every possible way: exclusivity, philosophy of education, architecture, goals, curriculum, body of professors, body of students, relation to the outside world, religious status. These universities did not care for the crafts, and did not acknowledge apprenticeship. The university, more than schools (in their various forms), extended its influence beyond its walls to assume a leading role in the spiritual lives of the population, while still maintaining an aura about itself. This was not just because of the religious foundation of universities. The university housed important intellectual documents containing theories of science and humanities, and encompassing educational concepts. These documents emphasized the role of a universal education (not only as a reflex of the Church's catholic drive) in which fundamental components constructed a temple of knowledge from which theories were dispensed throughout the Western world. Through its concept and affirmed values, the university was intended as a model for society and as an important participant in its dynamics. Tradition, languages (opening direct access to the world of classic philosophy and literature), and the arts were understood in their unity. Engineering and anything practical played no part in this. Compared to the current situation, those first universities were ahead of their time almost to the effect of losing contact with reality. They existed in a world of advanced ideas, of idealized social and moral values, of scientific innovation celebrated in their metaphysical abstraction. There is no need to transcribe the history of education here. We are mainly interested in the dynamics of education up to the turn of the century, and would like to situate it in the discussion caused by the apparent, or actual, failure of education to accomplish its goals today. When universities were founded, access to education was very limited. This makes comparison to the current situation in universities almost irrelevant. It explains, however, why some people question the presence of students who would not have been accepted in a college a century ago, even 50 years ago. Yes, the university is the bearer of prejudices as well as values. The relevance of historic background is provided by the understanding of the formative power of language, of its capacity for storing ideas and ideals associated with permanency, and for disseminating the doctrine of permanency and authority, making it part of the social texture. Religion insinuated itself into the sciences and humanities, and assumed the powerful role of assigning meaning to various discoveries and theories. Education in such universities was for eternity, according to a model that placed humanity in the center of the universe and declared it exemplary because it originated from the Supreme power. The university established continuity through its entire program, and did so on the foundation of literacy. As an organization, it adopted a structure more favorable to integration and less to differentiation. It constituted a counter-power, a critical instrument, and a framework for intellectual practice. Although many associate the formula "Knowledge is power" with the ideology of the political left, it actually originated in the medieval university, and within conservative power relations for which literacy constituted the underlying structure. Looking at the development of the medieval university, one can say that it was the embodiment of the reification of language, of the Greek logos and of the Roman ratio. The entire history of reifying the past was summarized in the university and projected as a model for the future. Alternative ways of thinking and communicating were excluded, or made to fit the language mold and submit, without exception, to the dominating rationality. Based on these premises, the university evolved into an institution of methodical doubt. It became an intellectual machine for generating and experimenting with successive alternative explanations of the universe, as a whole, and of its parts, considered similar in some way to the whole they constituted. The circumstances leading to the separation of intellectual and educational tasks were generated by an interplay of factors. The printing press is one of them. The metaphors of the university also played an important role. But the defining element was practical expectations. As people eventually learned, they could not build machines only by knowing Latin or Greek, or by reciting litanies, but by knowing mathematics and mechanics. Some of this knowledge came from Greek and Latin texts preserved by Moslem scholars from the desolation following the fall of the Roman empire. People also had to know how to express their goals, and communicate a plan to those who would transform it into roads, bridges, buildings, and much more. Humans could not rely on Aristotle's explanation of the world in order to find new forms of energy. More physics, chemistry, biology, and geology became necessary. Access to such domains was still primarily through literacy, although each of these areas of interest started developing its own language. Machines were conceived and built as metaphors of the human being. They embodied an animistic view, while actually answering needs and expectations corresponding to a scale of human existence beyond that of animistic practical experiences. Industrial experience, a school of a new pragmatic framework, would impart awareness of creativity and productivity, as well as a new sense of confidence. Work became less and less homogeneous, as did social life. Once the potential of literacy reached its limits of explaining everything and constituting the only medium for new theories, universities started lagging behind the development of human practice. What separates Galileo Galilei's physics from the Newtonian is less drastic than what separates both from Einstein's relativity theory, and all three of these from the rapidly unfolding physics of the cosmos. In the latter, a different scale and scope must be accounted for, and a totally new way of formulating problems must be developed. Humans project upon the world cognitive explanatory models for which past instruments of knowledge are not adequate. The same applies to theories in biology, chemistry, and more and more to sociology, economics, and the decision sciences. It is worth noting that scale, and complexity therein, thus constitutes a rather encompassing criterion, one that finally affects the theory and practice of education. Coherence and connection Education has stubbornly defended its turf. While it fell well behind the expectations of those in need of support for finding their place in the current pragmatic context, a new paradigm of scientific and humanistic investigation was acknowledged- computation. Together with experimental and theoretical science, computation stimulated levels at which the twin concerns for intellectual coherence and for the ability to establish connections outside the field of study could be satisfied. Computation made it into the educational system without becoming one of education's underlying structures. The late-in-coming Technology Literacy Challenge that will provide two billion dollars by the year 2001 acknowledges this situation, though it fails to address it properly. In other countries, the situation is not much better. Bureaucracies based on rules of functioning pertinent to past pragmatics are not capable of even understanding the magnitude of change, in which their reason for being disappears. In some colleges and private high schools, students can already access the computer network from terminals in their dormitories. Still, in the majority, computing time is limited, and assigned for specific class work, mainly word processing. Too many educational outlets have only administrative computers for keeping track of budget execution and enrollment. In most European countries the situation is even worse. And as far as the poor countries of the world are concerned, one can only hope that the disparity will not deepen. If this were the case with electricity, we would hear an uproar. Computing should become as pervasive as electricity. This view is not necessarily unanimously accepted. Arguments about whether education needs to be computerized or whether computers should be integrated across the board go on and on among educators and administrators with a say in the matter. It should be noticed that failure to provide the appropriate context for teaching, learning, and research affects the condition of universities all over the world. These universities cease to contribute new knowledge. They become instead the darkroom for pictures taken elsewhere, by people other than their professors, researchers, and graduate students. Such institutions fathom a relatively good understanding of the past, but a disputable notion of the present and the future, mainly because they are hostages to literacy-based structures of thought and activity, even when they use computers. To function within a language means to share in the experiences which are built into it. Natural language has a built-in experience of space and time; programming languages contain experiences of logical inference or of object-oriented functioning of the world. These experiences represent its pre-understanding frame of reference. Knowledge built into our so-called natural languages was for a long time common to all human beings. It resulted in communities sharing, through language, the practical experiences through which the community members constituted themselves in space and time. The continuity of language and its permanence reflected continuity of experience and permanence of understanding. Within such a pragmatic framework, education and the sharing of experience were minimally differentiated from each other. Progressively, language experience was added to practical experience and used to differentiate such an experience in new forms of praxis: theoretic work, engineering, art, social activism, political programs. Diversity, incipient segmentation, higher speeds, and incremental mediations affected the condition of self-constitutive human experiences. Consequently, literacy progressively ceased to represent the optimal medium for sharing, although it maintains many other functions. Indeed, plans for a new building, for a bridge, for engines, for many artifacts cannot be expressed in literate discourse, no matter how high the level, or how well literate competency is served by education or impacts upon it. Accelerated dynamics and a generalized practice of mediations, by means not based on literacy, become part of human praxis in the civilization of illiteracy and define a new underlying structure. Language preserves a limited function. It is paralleled by many other sign systems, some extremely well adapted to rationalization and automation, and becomes itself subject to integration in machines adept at sign processing (in particular information processing). The process can be exemplified by a limited analogy: In order to explore in depth the experience embodied in Homer's texts, one needs a knowledge of ancient Greek. In order to study the legal texts of the Roman Empire, one needs Latin, and probably more. But in order to understand algebra-the word comes from the Arabic al-jabr/jebr, meaning union of broken parts-one really does not need to be fluent in Arabic. Literacy embodies a far less significant part of the current human practical experience of self-constitution than it did in the past. Still, literacy-based education asserts its own condition on everything: learning what is already known is a prerequisite to discovering the unknown. In examining the amount and kind of knowledge one needs to understand past experience and to make possible further forms of human praxis, we can be surprised. The first surprise is that we undergo a major shift, from forms of work and thinking fundamentally based on past experience to realms of human constitution that do not repeat the past. Rather, such new experiences negate it altogether, making it relatively irrelevant. Freed from the past, people notice that sometimes the known, expressed in texts, obliterates a better understanding of the present by introducing a pre-understanding of the future that prevents new and effective human practical experiences. The second surprise comes from the realization that means other than those based on literacy better support the current stage of our continuous self- constitution, and that these new means have a different underlying structure. Searle, among many others, remarked that, "Like it or not, the natural sciences are perhaps our greatest single intellectual achievement as human beings, and any education that neglects this fact is to that extent defective." What is not clearly stated is the fact that sciences emerged as such achievements once the ancillary relation to language and literacy was overcome. Mathematization of science and engineering, the focus on computational knowledge, the need to address design aspects of human activity (within sociology, business, law, medicine, etc.), all belong to alternative modes of explanation that make literate speculation less and less effective. They also opened new horizons for hypotheses in astronomy, genetics, anthropology. Cognitive skills are required in the new pragmatic context together with meta-cognitive skills: how to control one's own learning, for example, in a world of change, variety, distributed effort, mediated work, interconnection, and heterogeneity. We do not yet know how to express and quantify the need for education, how to select the means and criteria for evaluating performance. If the objective is only to generate attitudes of respect for tradition and to impart good manners and some form of judgment, then the result is the emulation of what we think the past celebrated in a person. In the USA, the bill for education, paid by parents, students, and private and public sources, is well over 370 billion dollars a year. In the national budget alone, 18 different categories of grants-programs for building basic and advanced skills in 50,000 schools, programs for Safe and Drug-free schools, programs for acquiring advanced technology, scholarships, and support for loans-quantify the Federal part of the sum. State and local agencies have their own budgets allowing for $5,000 to $12,000 per student. If a class of 25 students is supported by $250,000 of funding, something in the equation of financing education does not add up. The return on investment is miserable by all accounts. Knowing that close to one million students drop out each year-and the number is growing-at various stages of their education, and that to reclaim them would cost additional money, we add another detail to the picture of a failure that is no longer admissible. In other countries, the cost per person is different. In a number of countries (France, Germany, Italy, some countries in Eastern Europe), students attend school years beyond what is considered normal in the USA. Germany discusses, forever it seems, the need to cut schooling. Are 12 or 13 years of schooling sufficient? How long should the state support a student in the university? With the reunification of the country, new needs had to be addressed: qualified teachers, adequate facilities, financing. Japan, while maintaining a 12-grade system, requires more days of schooling (230 per year compared to 212 in Germany and 180 in the USA). France, which regulates even pre-school, maintains 15 years of education. Still, 40% of French students commit errors in using their language. When, almost 360 years ago, Richelieu introduced (unthinkable for the American mentality) the Académie Française as the guardian of the language, little did he know that a time would come when language, French or any other, would no longer dominate people's life and work, and would not, despite money invested and time spent to teach, make all who study literate. The new pragmatic context requires an education that results in abilities to distinguish patterns in a world of extreme dynamism, to question, to cope with complexity as it affects one's practical existence, and with a continuum of values. Students know from their own experience that there is no intrinsic determination to the eternity and universality of language-and this is probably the first shock one faces when noticing how large illiterate populations function and prosper in modern society. The economy absorbed the majority of the dropout population. The almost 50% of the American population considered functionally illiterate partakes, in its majority, in the high standard of living of the country. In other countries, while the numbers are different, the general tenor is the same. Well versed in the literacy of consumption, these people perform exactly the function expected: keep the economic engine turning. Plenty of questions Industrial society, as a precursor to our pragmatic framework, needed literacy in order to get the most out of machines, and to preserve the physical and intellectual capability of the human operator. It invested in education because the return was high enough to justify it. A qualified worker, a qualified physician, chemist, lawyer, and businessman represented a necessity for the harmonious functioning of industrial society. One needed to know how to operate one machine. Chances were that the machine would outlast the operator. One needed to study a relatively stable body of knowledge (laws, medical prescriptions, chemical formulas). Chances were that one and the same book would serve father, son, even grandson. And what could not be disseminated through literacy was taught by example, through the apprenticeship system, from which engineering profited a lot. What education generated were literate people, and members of a society prepared for relations without which machines made little or no sense at all. The more complex such relations, the longer the time needed for education, and the higher the qualifications required from those working as educators. Education ensured the transmission of knowledge, filling empty containers sent by parents, from settled families, as incoming students to schools and colleges. Industrial society simultaneously generated the products and the increased need for them. Some would argue that all this is not so simple. Industrialists did not need educated workers. That is why they transferred a lot of work to children and women. Reformists (probably influenced by religious humanism) insisted on taking children out of the factories. Children were taught to read in order to uplift their souls (as the claim went). Finally, laws were enacted that forbade child labor. As this happened, industry got what it needed: a relatively educated class of workers and higher levels of productivity from employment that used the education provided. Under the right pragmatic conditions, an educated worker proved to be a good investment. Alan Bloom detailed many of the motives that animated industrial philanthropists in supporting education. I beg to differ and return to the argument that industrial society, in order to use the potential of machine production, had to generate the need for what it produced. Indeed, the first products are the workers themselves, projecting into machine-based praxis their physical attributes, but foremostly skills such as comprehension, interaction, coordination. All these attributes belong to the structural condition of literacy. Industrial products resulting from qualitatively new forms of human self- constitution were of accidental or no interest to illiterates. What would an illiterate do with products, such as new typewriters, books, more sophisticated household appliances? How would an illiterate interact with them in order to get the most out of each artifact? And how could coordination with others using such new products take place? We know that things were not exactly divided along such clear-cut borders. Illiterate parents had literate children who provided the necessary knowledge. The trickle-down effect was probably part of the broader strategy. But all in all, the philanthropists' support of education was an investment in the optimal functioning of a society whose scale necessitated levels high enough for efficient work. Education was connected to philanthropy, and it still is, as a form of wealth distribution. But it is not love for the neighbor that makes philanthropists' support of education necessary, rather the sheer advantage resulting from money given, estate or machines donated, chairs endowed. Cynical or not, this view results from the perception one experiences when noticing how generosity, well supported by public money, ends up as a self-serving gesture: donations that resulted in buildings, scholarships, endowments, and gifts named after the benefactor. The obsession with permanence-some live it as an obsession with eternity, others as a therapeutic ego massage-is but one of the overhead costs associated with literacy. Lines from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales come to mind: "Now isn't it a marvel of God's grace/that an illiterate fellow can outpace/the wisdom of a heap of learned men?" How a manciple (probably equivalent to a Residence Life Administrator and Cafeteria Head combined) would perform today is worth another tale. Education, as a product of the civilization of literacy, has problems understanding that literacy corresponds to a development in which written language was the medium for the spoken. Nevertheless, it did learn that today we can store the spoken in non-written form, sometimes more efficiently, and without the heavy investment required to maintain literacy. As an industry, with the special status of a not-for-profit organization, education in the USA competes in the market for its share, and for high returns. Endowments qualify many universities as large businesses that are buffered from the reality of economics. With or without the aid of philanthropy, learning has to free itself from its subordination to literacy and restrictive literate structures, as it previously freed itself from its subordination to the church, in whose bosom it was nurtured. Obviously, if this new awareness manifests itself only in mailing out videotapes instead of printed college catalogues, then we may ask whether it is educators, or only marketers, who understand the current dynamics. The same should be asked when some professors put their courses on tape, in the belief that canned knowledge is easier for the student to absorb. On-line classes break with the mold, but they are not yet the answer, at least as long as they do not belong to a broader vision reflected in different priorities and appropriate content. There is nothing intrinsically bad about involving media in education, but the problem is not the medium for storage and delivery. Media labs that are covered by dust because they convey the same useless information as the classes they were supposed to enhance only prove that a fundamental change is necessary. Fundamental, for instance, is the skewed notion that knowledge is transferred from professors-who know more-to students-who know less. Actually, we face a reality never before experienced: students know more than their teachers, in some disciplines. In addition, knowledge still appropriate to a subject a short time ago-call it history, politics, or economics, and think about classes in Soviet and East European studies- has been rendered useless. Physics, mathematics, and chemistry underwent spectacular renewal. This created situations in which what the textbooks taught was immediately contradicted by reality. Should education compete with the news media? Should it become an Internet address for unlimited and unstructured browsing? Should education give up any sense of foundation? Or should universities periodically refresh their genetic make-up in order to maintain contact with the most recent theories, the most recent research techniques, the most recent discoveries? These are more than enough questions for a pen still writing one word at a time, or for a mouth answering questions as they pile up. Without posing these questions-to which some answers will be attempted at the conclusion of this book-no solution can be expected. The willingness of educators and everyone affected by education to formulate them, and many more, would bear witness to a concern that cannot be addressed by some miraculous, all-encompassing formula. The good news is that in many parts of the world this is happening. Finally! The equation of a compromise As the scale of humankind changed, and the efficiency of human practical experience corresponding to the scale ascertained itself as the new rationality, the practical experience of self-constitution had to adjust to new circumstances of existence and activity. There is no magic borderline. But there is a definite discontinuity between what constituted the relatively stable underlying structure of literacy and what constitutes the fast-changing underlying structure of the pragmatic framework. Because in our own self-constitution literacy is only one among many media for achieving the efficiency that the new scale requires, we come to realize, even if public discourse does not exactly reflect it, that we cannot afford literacy the way we have until now. And even if we could, we should not. People recognize, even if only reluctantly, that the literacy machine, for some reason still called education, endows the new generation with a skill of limited significance. The resulting perspective is continuously contradicted by the ever new and ever renewing human experiences through which we become who we are. Education based on the paradigm of literacy is, as we have seen, a luxury which a society, rich or poor, cannot afford. Conditions of human life and praxis require, instead of a skill and perspective for the whole of life, a series. Skill and perspective need to be understood together. Their application will probably be limited in time, and not necessarily directly connected to those succeeding them. Nobody seriously disputes the relevance of studying language, but very few see language and language-based disciplines as the prerequisite for the less than life-long series of different jobs students of today will have. Although colleges maintain a core curriculum that preserves the role of language and the humanities, the shift towards the languages of mathematics-a discipline that has diversified spectacularly-and of visual representation is so obvious that one can only wonder why the voices of mathematicians are not heard over those of the Modern Language Association. Mathematics prepares for fields from technical to managerial, from scientific to philosophic, and from design to legal. The realization that calculus is first of all a language, and that the goal of education is fluency in it, corresponds to an awareness that musicians had for the longest time with respect to musical scores, but the champions of literacy always refused to accept. The same holds true for the disciplines of visualization: drawing, computer graphics, design. In today's education, the visual needs to be studied at least as much as language-dependent subjects. Against the background of deeper changes, education is focusing on its on redefinition. The major change is from a container model of education-the child being the empty container who needs to be filled with language, history, math, and not much more-to a heuristic education. Our pragmatics is one of process, as the pragmatics of education finally should be. Education needs to be conducive to interaction and to the formation of criteria for choices from among many options. But change does not come easily. Still using the impertinence of literacy, some educators call the container model "teaching students to think." They do not realize that students think whether we teach them to or not! Students of all ages are aware of change, and familiar with modes of interaction, among themselves and with technology, closer to their condition than to that of their teachers. The majority of the new businesses on the Internet are instigated by students and supported by their inventiveness and dedication. They have became agents of change in spite of all the shortcomings of education. And students have become educators themselves, offering environments for conveying their own experience. To be a child No one can declare better ways of teaching without considering the real child. In a world of choice and free movement, children are more likely to come from families that will consist of a single parent. Many children will come from environments where discrimination, poverty, prejudice, and violence have an overpowering influence. Such an environment is significant for a society dedicated to democratic ideals. We have to face the fact that childrearing and education are being transferred from family to institutions meant to produce the educated person. With the best of motives, society has created factories for processing children. These socio-educational entities are accepted quite obligingly by the majority of the people freed from a responsibility affecting their own lives. "Everything will be fine, as long as the education of the new generation basically repeats the education of the parents," sums up the expectations regarding these institutions. Although we know that, generally speaking, cycles (of production, design, and evaluation) are getting shorter, we maintain children in education well past the time they even fit in classroom chairs. One needs to see those adults forced to be students, full of energy, frustrated that their patience, not their creative potential, is put to the test. Dropping out of high school or college is not indicative of a student's immaturity. Society's tendency to decide what is best for the next generation has determined that only one type of education will ensure productive adults. Society refuses to consider humans in the variety of their potential. From the Projection of Education Statistics to the Year 2006, we learn that the total private and public elementary and secondary school enrollment in the USA will increase from 49.8 million in 1994 to 54.6 million. Of the 49.8 million in 1994, only 2.5 million graduated high school, and by the year 2006 the number will not exceed 3 million. Students themselves seem to be more aware of the excessively long cycle of education than do the experts who define its methods, contents, and goals. This creates a basis for conflict that no one should underestimate. Growing up in an environment of change and challenge is probably rewarding in the long run. But things are not very simple. The pressure to perform, peer pressure, and one's youthful instincts to explore and ascertain can transform a student's life in an instant. The distance between paradise (support and choice without worry) and hell (the specter of disease, addiction, abandonment, disappointment, lack of direction) is also shorter than prior generations experienced it. Hundreds of TV channels, the Internet, thousands of music titles (on CD, video, and radio stations), the lure of sports, drugs, sex, and the hundreds of fashion labels-choosing can be overwhelming. Literacy used to organize everything neatly. If you were in love, Romeo and Juliet was proper reading material. If you wished to explore Greece, you started with Homer's epics and worked your way up to the most recent novel by a contemporary Greek writer. The problem is that drugs, AIDS, millions of attractions, the need to find one's way in a world less settled and less patient, do not fit in the neat scheme of literacy. The language of genetics and the language of personality constitution are better articulated through means other than books. Heroes, teachers, parents, priests, and activists are no longer icons, even if they are portrayed to be better than they were in reality. Bart Simpson, the underachiever, "mediocre and proud of it," is a model for everyone who is told that what really counts is to feel good, period. Still, some young people go to school or college full of enthusiasm, hoping to get an education that will guarantee self-fulfillment. All that is studied, over a long period of time and at great financial sacrifice, comes not even close to what they will face. Tehy might learn how to spell and how to add. But they soon discover that in real life skills other than spelling and arithmetic are expected. What bigger disappointment is there than discovering that years of pursing a promise bring no result? If, after all this, we still want both literacy and competence for experiences which literacy does not support, and often inhibits, we would have to invest beyond what society is willing and able to spend. And even if society were to do so, as it seems that it feels it must, the investment would be in imposing useless skills and a primitive perspective on the new generation, until the time comes when it can escape society's pressure. Education in our day remains a compromise between the interests of the institution of education (with tens of thousands of teachers who would become unemployed) and a new pragmatic framework that few in academia understand. One of the elements of this equation is the practical need to extend education to all, and if possible on a continuous basis. But unless this education reflects the variety of literacies that the pragmatic framework requires, admitting everyone to everything results in the lowest general level of education. The variety of practical experiences of self-constitution requires that we find ways to coordinate access to education by properly and responsibly identifying types of creativity, and investing responsibility in their development. Continuous education needs to be integrated in the work structure. It has to become part of the reciprocal commitments through which the new pragmatic framework is acknowledged. To all those dedicated to the human aspects of politics, business, law, and medicine, who deplore that the technicians of policy-making can no longer find their way to our souls, all this will sound terrifying. Nevertheless, as much as we would like to be considered as individuals, each with our own dignity, personality, opinions, emotions, and pains, we ourselves undermine our expectations in our striving for more and more, at a price lower than what it costs society to distinguish us. Scale dictates anonymity, and probably mediocrity. Ignorance of literacy's role in centuries of productive human life dictates that it is time to unload the literacy-reflected experiences for which there is no reference in the new pragmatic context. Who are we kidding? Scared that in giving up literacy training we commit treason to our own condition, we maintain literacy and try to adapt it to new circumstances of working, thinking, feeling, and exploring. In view of the inefficiency built into our system of education, we try to compromise by adding the dimension characteristic of the current status of human experience of multiple partial literacies. The result is the transformation of education into a packaging industry of human beings: you choose the line along which you want to be processed; we make sure that you get the literacy alibi, and that we train you to be able to cope with so-called entry-level jobs. Obviously, this evolves in a more subtle way. The kind of college or university one attends, or the tuition one pays, determines the amount of subtlety. Students accept the function of education insofar as it mediates between their goals and the rather scary reality of the marketplace. This mediation differs according to the level of education, and is influenced by political and social decision making. As an industry for processing the new generation, education acts according to parameters resulting from its opportunistic search for a place between academia and reality. Education acknowledges the narrow domains of expertise which labor division brought about, and reproduces the structure of current human experience in its own structure. Through vast financial support, from states, private sources, and tradition- based organizations, education is artificially removed from the reality of expected efficiency. It is rarely a universe of commitments. Accordingly, the gap between the literate language of the university and the languages of current human practice widens. The tenure system only adds another structural burden. When the highest goal of a professor is to be freed of teaching, something is awfully wrong with our legitimate decision to guarantee educators the freedom necessary for exercising their profession. Behind the testing model that drives much of current education is the expectation of effective ranking of students. This model takes a literate approach insofar as it establishes a dichotomy (aptitude vs. achievement) that makes students react to questions, but does not really engage them or encourage creative contributions. The result is illustrative of the relation between what we do and how we evaluate what we do. An expectation was set, and the process of education was skewed to generate good test results. This effectively eliminates teaching and learning for the sake of a subject. Students are afraid they will not measure up and demand to be taught by the book. Teachers who know better than the book are intimidated, by students and administration, from trying better approaches. Good students are frustrated in their attempts to define their own passion and to pursue it to their definition of success. Entrepreneurs at the age of 14, they do not need the feedback of stupid tests, carried out more for the sake of bureaucracy than for their well-being. Standardized tests dominated by multiple-choice answers facilitate low cost evaluations, but also affect patterns of teaching and learning. Exactly what the new pragmatics embodies-the ability to adapt and to be proactive-is counteracted through the experience of testing, and the teaching geared to multiple-choice instruments. The uncoupling of education from the experiential frame of the human being is reflected in education's language and organization, and in the limiting assumptions about its function and methods. Education has become a self-serving organization with a bureaucratic "network of directives," as Winograd and Flores call them, and motivational elements not very different from the state, the military, and the legal system. Like the organizations mentioned, it also develops networks of interaction with sources of funding and sources of power, some driven by the same self-preserving energies as education itself. Instead of reflecting shorter cycles of activity in its own structure, it tends to maintain control over the destiny of students for longer periods of time. Even in fields of early acknowledged creativity-e.g., computer programming, networking, genetics, and nanotechnology-education continues to apply a policy that takes away the edge of youth, inventiveness, and risk. The lowest quality of education is at the undergraduate level in universities, where either graduate assistants or even machines substitute for professors too busy funding their research, or actually no longer attuned to teaching. This situation exists exactly because we are not yet able to develop strategies of education adapted to new circumstances of human work and to the efficiency requirements which we ourselves made necessary. The "network of recurrent conversations," to use Winograd's terminology again, or the "language game" that Wittgenstein attributed to each profession, hides behind the front of literacy and thus burdens education. Once accreditation introduces the language game of politics, education distances itself even more from its fundamental mission. Accreditation agencies translate concerns about the quality of education into requirements, such as the evaluation of colleges and universities based on scores on exit tests taken by students. These are supposed to reflect academic achievement. In other cases, such scores are used for assessing financial support. The paradox is that what negatively affects the quality of education becomes the measure of reward. Test results are often used in politicians' arguments about improved education, as well as a marketing tool. In fact, to prepare students for performance makes performance a goal in itself. Thus it should come as no surprise that the most popular book on college campuses-today's education factories-is a guide to cheating. Many times comparisons are made between students in the USA and in Japan or in Western European countries. In many ways these comparisons are against the pervasive dynamics of integration that we experience. Still, there are things to consider-for instance, that Japanese students spend almost the same amount of time watching TV as American students do, and that they are not involved in household tasks. Noticeable differences are in reading. The Japanese spend double the number of hours that American students do in reading. Japanese students spend more time on schoolwork (the same 2-to-1 ratio), but much less on entertainment. Should Japan be considered a model? If we see that Japanese students rank among the best in science subjects, the answer seems to be positive. But if we project the same against the entire development of students, their exceptional creative achievements, the answer becomes a little more guarded. With all its limitations, the USA is still more attuned to pragmatic requirements. This is probably due more to the country's inherent dynamics than to its educational institutions. Largely unregulated, capable of adaptive moves, subject to innovation, the USA is potentially a better network for educational possibilities. What caused the criticism in these pages of evaluation is the indecisiveness that the USA shows-the program for school reform for the year 2000 is an example of this attitude-and the difficulty it has in realizing the price of the compromise it keeps supporting. Once Japanese businesses started buying American campuses, the price of the compromise became clear. Universities in the USA were saved from bankruptcy. Japanese schools, whose structured programs and lack of understanding of the new pragmatics made for headlines, were able to evade their own rigid system of education, reputed for being late in acknowledging the dynamics of change. Abruptly, the Americanization of world education-study driven by multiple-choice tests with a dualistic structure-was short-changed by a Japanization movement. But in the closer look suggested above, it is evident that the Japanese are extricating themselves from drastic literacy requirements that end up hampering necessary accommodations in the traditional Japanese system of values. Although caution is called for, especially in approaching a subject foreign to our direct experience and understanding, the trend expressed is telling in its many consequences. What about alternatives? A legitimate question to be expected from any sensible reader refers to alternatives. Let us first notice that, due to the new pragmatic framework, we are more and more in the situation to disseminate every and any type of information to any imaginable destination. The interconnectivity of business and of markets creates the global economy. In contrast, our school and college systems, as separate from real life, and conceived physically outside our universe of existence, are probably as anachronistic as the castles and palaces we associate with the power and function of nobility; or as anachronistic as the high stacks of steel mills we associate with industry, and the cities we associate with social life. Some alumni might be nostalgic for the Gothic structures of their university days. The physical reference to a time "when education meant something" is clear-as is the memory of the campus, yet another good reason to look at the homecoming party in anticipation of the football game, or in celebration of a good time (win or lose). To make explicit the shift from a symbolism of education, coordinated with the function of intellectual accomplishment, to a stage when debunking this symbolism, still alive in and outside Ivy League universities, is an urgent political and practical goal is only the beginning. There is no justification for maintaining outmoded structures and attitudes, and investing in walls and campuses and feudal university domains. As one of the successful entrepreneurs of this time put it, "anything that has to do with brick and mortar and its DISPLAY is-to use some poetic license-dead." The focus has to be on the dynamics of individual self-constitution, and on the pragmatic horizons of everyone's future. Fixing and maintaining schools in the USA, as well as in almost any country in the world, would cost more than building them from scratch. The advantage of giving up structures inappropriate to the new requirements of education is that, finally, at least we would create environments for interaction, taking full advantage of the progress made in technologies of communication and interactive learning. There is no need to idealize the Internet and the World Wide Web at their current stage. But if the future will continue to be defined more by commerce expectations than by educational needs, no one should be surprised that their educational potential will come to fruition late. Humans do not develop at the same pace, and in the same direction. Each of us is so different that the main function of education should be not to minimize differences through literacy and literacy-based strategies that support a false sense of democracy, but to identify and maximize differences. This will provide the foundation for an education that allows each student to develop according to possibilities evinced through the relations, language-based or not, that people enter into. The content of education, understood as process, should be the experience, and the associated means of creating and understanding it. Instead of a dominant language, with built-in experiences more and more alien to the vast majority of students, the ability to cope with many sign systems, with many languages, to articulate them, adapt them to the circumstance, and share them as much as the circumstance requires, should become the goal. Some would counter, "This was attempted with courses labeled modern math and resulted in no one's understanding it, or even simple math." There is some truth in this. The mathematically gifted had no problem in learning the new math. Students who were under the influence of literate reasoning had problems. What we need to do is to keep the mind open, allow for as much accumulation as necessary, and for discarding, if new experiences demand an open mind and freedom from previous assumptions. Some students will settle (in math or in other subjects) for predominantly visual signs, others for sounds, some for words, for rhythm, for any of the forms through which human intelligence comes to expression. Interactive multimedia are only some of the many media available. Other possibilities are yet to emerge. The Internet is in the same situation. A framework for individual selection, for tapping into learning resources and using them to the degree desired and acknowledged as necessary by praxis, would be the way to go. Not only literacy, in the accepted sense, but mathematical literacy, biological, chemical, or engineering literacy, and visual thinking and expression should be given equal consideration. Cross-pollination among disciplines traditionally kept in isolation will definitely enhance creativity by doing away with the obsessive channeling practiced nowadays. Education needs to shift from the atomistic view that isolates subjects from the whole of reality to a holistic perspective. This will acknowledge types of mediation as effective means of increasing the efficiency of work, the requirements of integration, and the distributed nature of practical experiences in the world today. Collaborative effort needs to be brought to the forefront of the educational experience. We can define communities of interest, focused on some body of experience (which can be incorporated in an artifact, a book, a work of art, or someone's expertise). Education should provide means for sharing experiences. A variety of different interests can be brought into focus through sharing and collaborative learning. There are many dimensions to such an approach: the knowledge sought, the experience of the variety of perspectives and uses, the awareness of interaction, the skills for intercommunication, and more. Implicit is the high expectation of sharing, while at the same time maintaining motivations for individual achievement and individual reward. This becomes critical at a time when it becomes more and more evident that resources are finite, while expectations still grow exponentially. The change from a standardized model, focused on the quick fix that leads to results (no matter how high a cost), to the collaborative model of individuality and distinction re-establishes an ethical framework, which is urgently needed. Competition is not excluded, but instead of conflict-which in the given system results in students who cut pages from books so that their colleagues will fail-we ought to create an environment of reciprocally advantageous cooperation. How far are we from such an objective? In the words of Jacques Barzun, a devoted educator committed to literacy, education failed to "develop native intelligence." In an interesting negative of what people think education accomplishes, he points to the appearance of success: "We professed to make ideal citizens, super-tolerant neighbors, agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexually adept and flawless drivers of cars." All this is nothing to be ashamed of, but as educational goals, they are quite off the target. Citizenship in the society of the new pragmatic context is different from citizenship in previous societies. Tolerance requires a new way to manifest it, such as the integration of what is different and complementary. Peace, yes, even peace, means a different state of affairs at a time when many local conflicts affect the world. As far as family, sex, and the culture of the car are concerned, nothing can point more to the failure of education. Indeed, education failed to understand all the factors involved in contemporary family life. It failed to understand sexual relations. Faced with the painful reality of the degradation of sexual relations, education resorted to the desperate measure of dispensing condoms, an extension of what was gloriously celebrated as sex education. The flawless drivers never heard the criticism voiced by citizens concerned with energy waste. We made students rely on cheap gasoline and affordable cars to bring them to school and college, instead of understanding that education needs to be decentralized, distributed, and-why not-adapted to the communication and interaction possibilities of our times. The Green Teens who are active against energy waste might be well ahead of their educational system, but still forced to go through it. Moreover, education should be seen in the broader context of the other changes coming with the end of the civilization of literacy: the status of family, religion, law, and government. While education is related to the civic status of the individual, the new conditions for the activity of our minds are also very important. Ideally, education addresses all the facets of the human being. New conditions of generalized interconnection almost turn the paradigm of continuing education into continuous education that corresponds to changes in human experience unfolding under even more complex circumstances. It might well happen that for some experiences, we shall have to recuperate values characteristic of literacy. But better to rediscover them than to maintain literacy as an ideal when the perspectives for new forms of ascertaining ourselves as human beings require more, much more, than literacy. Book Four Language and the Visual Photography, film, and television have changed the world more than Gutenberg's printing press. Much of the blame for the decline in literacy is attributed to them, especially to movies and television. More recently, computer games and the Internet have been added to the list of culprits. Studies have been conducted all over the world with the aim of discovering how film and television have changed established reading habits, writing ability, and the use and interpretation of language. Patterns of publishing and distribution of information, including electronic publication and the World Wide Web (still in its infancy), have also been analyzed on a comparative basis. Inferences have been drawn concerning the influence of various types of images on what is printed and why, as well as on how writing (fiction, science, trade books, manuals, poetry, drama, even correspondence) has changed. In some countries, almost every home has a television set; in others even more than one. In 1995, the number of computers sold surpassed that of television sets. In many countries, most children watch television and films before they learn to read. In a few countries, children play computer games before ever opening a book. After they start to read, the amount of time spent in front of a TV set is far greater than the time dedicated to books. Adults, already the fourth and fifth generations of television viewers, are even more inclined to images. Some images are of their choice-TV programs at home, movies in the theater, videotapes they buy, rent, or borrow from the library, CD-ROMs. Other images are imposed on the adult generations by demands connected to their professions, their health, their hobbies, and by advertisement. After image-recording and playing equipment became widely available, the focus on TV and video expanded. In addition to the ability to bring home films of one's choice, to buy and rent videotapes, laser discs, and CD-ROMs on a variety of subjects, we are also able to produce a video archive for family, school, community, or professional purposes. We can even avail ourselves of cable TV to generate programs of local interest. The generalized system of networking (cable, satellites, airwaves), through which images can be pumped from practically any location into schools, homes, offices, and libraries, affects even further the relation of children and adults among themselves and the relation of both groups to language and to literacy in contemporary life. Anyone with access to the printing presses of the digital world can print a CD-ROM. Access to the Internet is no more expensive than a magazine subscription. But the Internet is much more exciting because we are not only at the receiving end. The subject, as almost all have perceived and analyzed it, is not the impact of visual technology and computers on reading patterns, or the influence of new media on how people write. At the core of the development described so far is the fundamental shift from one dominant sign system, called language, and its reified form, called literacy, to several sign systems, among which the visual plays a dominant role. We would certainly fail to understand what is happening, what the long-lasting consequences of the changes we face are, and what the best course of action is, if we were to look only at the influence of technology. Understanding the degree of necessity of the technology in the first place is where the focus should be. The obsession with symptoms, characteristic of industrial pragmatics, is not limited to mechanics' shops and doctors' offices. New practical experiences within the scale of humankind that result in the need for alternatives to language confirm that the focus cannot be on television and computer screens, nor on advertisement, electronic photography, and laser discs. The issue is not CD-ROM, digital video, Internet and the World Wide Web, but the need to cope with complexity. And the goal is to achieve higher levels of efficiency corresponding to the needs and expectations of the global scale that humankind has reached. So far, very few of those who study the matter have resisted the temptation to fasten blame on television watching or on the intimidating intrusion of electronic and digital contraptions for the decline of literacy. It is easier to count the hours children spend watching TV-an average of 16,000 hours in comparison to 13,000 hours for study before graduation from high school-than to see why such patterns occur. And it is as easy to conclude that by the time these children can be served alcohol in a restaurant or buy it in stores, they will have seen well over a million commercials. Yet no one ever acknowledges new structures of work and communication, even less the unprecedented wealth of forms of human interaction, regardless of how shallow they are. That particular ways of working and living have for all practical purposes disappeared, is easily understood. Understanding why requires the will to take a fresh look at necessary developments. Some of today's visual sign systems originate in the civilization of literacy: advertisement, theatrical and para-theatrical performance, and television drama. They carry with them efficiency expectations typical of the Machine Age. Other visual sign systems transcend the limits of literacy: concrete poetry, happening, animation, performance games that lead to interactive video, hypermedia or interactive multimedia, virtual reality, and global networks. Within such experiences, a different dynamics and a focus on distinctions, instead of on homogeneity, are embedded. Most of these experiences originate in the practical requirement to extend the human being's experiential horizon, and the need to keep pace with the dynamics of global economy. How many words in a look? In a newspaper industry journal (Printers' Ink, 1921), Fred R. Barnard launched what would become over time a powerful slogan: "One look is worth a thousand words." To make his remark sound more convincing, he later reformulated it as "One picture is worth a thousand words," and called it a proverb from China. Few slogans were repeated and paraphrased more than this one. Barnard wanted to draw people's attention to the power of images. It took some years until the new underlying structure of our continuous practical self-constitution confirmed an observation made slightly ahead of its time. It should be added that, through the millennia, craftsmen and the forerunners of engineering used images to design artifacts and tools, and to plan and build cities, monuments, and bridges. They realized through their own experience how powerful images could be, although they did not compare them to words. Images are more concrete than words. The concreteness of the visual makes images inappropriate for describing other images. However, it does not prevent human beings from associating images with the most abstract concepts they develop in the course of their practical or theoretical experience. Words start by being relatively close to what they denote, and end up so far removed from the objects or actions they name that, unless they are generated together with an object or action (like the word calculator, from calculae, stones for counting), they seem arbitrary. Reminiscences of the motivation of words (especially onomatopoeic qualities, i.e., phonetic resemblance to what the word refers to, such as crack or whoosh) do not really affect the abstract rules of generating statements, or even our understanding of such language signs. Images are more constrained, more directly determined by the pragmatic experience in whose framework they are generated. Red as a word (with its equivalencies in other languages: rot in German, rouge in French, rojo in Spanish, in Japanese, adom in Hebrew, and in Russian) is arbitrary in comparison to the color it designates. Even the designation is quite approximate. In given experiential situations, many nuances can be distinguished, although there are no names for them. The red in an image is a physical quality that can be measured and standardized, hence made easier to process in photography, printing, and synthesis of pigments. In the same experiential framework, it can be associated with many objects or processes: flowers, blood, a stoplight, sunset, a flag. It can be compared to them, it can trigger new associations, or become a convention. Once language translates a visual sign, it also loads it with conventions characteristic of language-red as in revolution, cardinal red, redneck, etc.-moving it from the realm of its physical determination (wavelength, or frequency of oscillation) to the reality of cultural conventions. These are preserved and integrated in the symbolism of a community. Purely pictorial signs, as in Chinese and Japanese writing, relate to the structure of language, and are culturally significant. No matter to which extent such pictorial signs are refined-and indeed, characters in Chinese and Kanji are extremely sophisticated- they maintain a relation to what they refer to. They extend the experience of writing, especially in calligraphic exercise, in the experience conveyed. We can impose on images-and I do not refer only to Chinese ideograms-the logic embodied in language. But once we do, we alter the condition of the image and transform it into an illustration. Language, in its embodiment in literacy, is an analytic tool and supports analytic practice quite well. Images have a dominantly synthetic character and make for good composite tools. Synthesizing activities, especially designing, an object, a message, or a course of action, imply the participation of images, in particular powerful diagramming and drawing. Language describes; images constitute. Language requires a context for understanding, in which classes of distribution are defined. Images suggest such a context. Given the individual character of any image, the equivalent of a distributional class for a language simply does not exist. To look at an image, for whatever practical or theoretical purpose, means to relate to the method of the image, not to its components. The method of an image is an experience, not a grammar applied to a repertory, or the instantiation of rules of grammar. The power of language consists of its abstract nature. Images are strong through their concreteness. The abstraction of language results from sharing vocabulary and grammar; the abstraction of images, from sharing visual experience, or creating a context for new experiences. For as long as visual experience was confined to one's limited universe of existence, as in the case of the migrating tribes, the visual could not serve as a medium for anything beyond this changing universe of existence. Language resulted from the need to surpass the limitations of space and time, to generate choices. The only viable alternative adopted was the abstract image of the phonetic convention, which was easier to carry from one world to another, as, for instance, the Phoenicians did. Each alphabet is a condensed visual testimony to experiences in the meanwhile uncoupled from language and its concrete practical motivations. Writing visualizes language; reading brings the written language back to its oral life, but in a tamed version. Whether the Sumerian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Latin, or Slavic alphabet, the letters are not neutral signs for abstract phonetic language. They summarize visual experiences and encode rules of recognition; they are related to anthropologic experience and to cognitive processes of abstracting. The mysticism of numbers and their meta-physical meanings, of letters and combinations of letters and numbers, of shapes, symmetry, etc. are all present. With alphabets and numbers the abstract nature of visual representation took over the phonetic quality of language. The concreteness of pictorial representation, along with the encoded elements (what is the experience behind a letter? a number? a certain way of writing?), simply vanished for the average literate (or illiterate) person. This is part of the broader process of acculturation-that is, breaking through experiences of language. Experts in alphabets show us the levels at which the image of each letter constituted expressive levels significant in themselves. Nevertheless, their alphabetic literacy is as relevant to writing as much as a good description of the various kinds of wheels is relevant to the making and the use of automobiles. The current use of images results from the new exigencies of human praxis and developments in visualization technology. In previous chapters, some of these conditions were mentioned: 1. the global scale of our activity and existence; 2. the diversity made possible by the practical experiences corresponding to this globality; 3. the dynamics of ever faster, increasingly mediated, human interaction; 4. the need to optimize human interaction in order to achieve high levels of efficiency; 5. the need to overcome the arcane stereotypes of language; 6. the non-linear, non-sequential, open nature of human experiences brought to the fore through the new scale of humankind. The list is open-ended. The more our command of images improves, the more arguments in favor of their use. None of these arguments should be construed as a blank and non-critical endorsement of images. We know that we cannot pursue theoretic work exclusively with images, or that the meta-level (language about language) cannot be reached with images. Images are factual, situational, and unstable. They also convey a false sense of democracy. Moreover, they materialize the shift from a positivist conception of facts, dominating a literacy-based determinism, to a relativist conception of chaotic functioning, embodied, for instance, by the market or by the new means and methods of human interaction. However, until we learn all there is to know about the potential of images in areas other than art, architecture, and design, chances are that we shall not understand their participation in thinking and in other traditionally non-image-based forms of human praxis. Images are very powerful agents for activities involving human emotions and instincts. They shy away from literal truth, insofar as the logic of images is different from the logic inhabiting human experiences of self-constitution in language. Imagery has a protean character. Images not only represent; they actually shape, form, and constitute subjects. Cognitive processes of association are better supported visually than in language. Through images, people are effectively encultured, i.e., given the identity which they cannot experience at the abstract level of acculturation through language. The world of avatars, dynamic graphic representations of a person in the virtual universe of networks, is one of concreteness. The individuals literally remake themselves as visual entities that can enter a dialogue with others. Within a given culture, images relate to each other. In the multitude of cultures within which people identify themselves, images translate from one experience to another. Against the background of globality, the experience of images is one of simultaneous distinctions and integration. Distinctions carry the identifiers of the encultured human beings constituted in new practical experiences. Integration is probably best exemplified by the metaphor of the global village of teleconnections and tele-viewing, of Internet and World Wide Web interactions. The characteristics of images given here so far need to be related to the perspective of changes brought about by imaging technologies. Otherwise, we could hardly come to understand how images constitute languages that make literacy useless, or better yet, that result in the need for complementary partial literacies. The mechanical eye and the electronic eye The photo camera and the associated technology of photo processing are products of the civilization of literacy in anticipation of the civilization of illiteracy. The metaphor of the eye, manifest in the optics of the lens and the mechanics of the camera, could not entirely support new human perceptions of reality without the participation of literacy. Camera use implied the shared background of literacy and literacy-based space representations. The entire discussion of the possibilities and limitations of photography-a discussion begun shortly after the first photographic images were produced, and still going on in our day-is an exercise in analytical practice. Some looked at photography as writing with light; others as mechanical drawing. They doubted whether there was room for creativity in its use, but never questioned its documentary quality: shorthand for descriptions difficult, but still possible, in writing. The wider the framework of practical experiences involving the camera, the more interesting the testimony of photography proved. This applies to photography in journalism and science, as well as in personal and family life. With photography, images started to substitute for words, and literacy progressively gave way to imagery in a variety of new human experiences related to space, movement, and aspects of life otherwise not visible. Testimony of the invisible, made available to many people through the photographic camera, was much stronger, richer, and more authentic than the words one could write about the same. Early photographs of the Paris sewer system-the latter a subject of many stories, but literally out of sight-exemplify this function. Before the camera, only drawing could capture the visible without changing it into words or obscure diagrams. Drawing was an interpreted representation, not only in the sense of selection-what to draw-but also in defining a perspective and endowing the image with some emotional quality. The camera had a long way to go before the same interpretive quality was achieved, and even then, in view of the mediating technology, it was quite difficult to define what was added to what was photographed, and why. Today's cameras-from the disposables to the fully automated-encapsulate everything we have to know to operate them. There is no need to be aware of the eye metaphor-which is undergoing change with the advent of electronic photography-and even less of what diaphragm, exposure time, and distance are. The experience leading to photography and the practical experience of automated photography are uncoupled. To take a picture is no longer a matter of expertise, but a reflex gesture accompanying travel, family or community events, and discrete moments of relative significance. Thus photographic images took over linguistic descriptions and became our diaries. As confusing as this might sound, a camera turns into an extension of our eyes (actually, only one), easier to use than language, and probably more accurate. In some way, a camera is a compressed language all set for the generation of visual sentences. If scientific use of photography were not available, a great deal of effort would be necessary to verbally describe what images from outer space, from the powerful electronic microscope, or from under the earth and under water, reveal to us. In Leonardo da Vinci's time, the only alternative was drawing, and a very rich imagination! The camera has a built-in space concept, probably more explicit than language has. This concept is asserted and embodied in the geometry of the lens and is reflected in some of the characteristics of photographic images. They are, mainly, two- dimensional reductions of our three-dimensional universe of experience, also influenced by light, film emulsion, type of processing, technology and materials used for printing, but primarily by physical properties of the lens used. Once our spatial concept improved and progress in lens processing was made, we were able to change the lens, to make it more adaptive (wide angle, zoom) to functions related to visual experiences. We were also able to introduce an element of time control that helped to capture dynamic events. Another important change was brought about by Polaroid's concept of almost instant delivery of prints. It is with this concept-compressing two stages of photographic representation into one and, in initial developments, giving up the possibility of making copies-that we reached a new phase in the relation between literacy and photography. As we know, the traditional camera came with the implicit machine-focused conversation: What can I do with it? The Polaroid concept changed this to a different query: What can it do for me? This change of emphasis corresponds to a different experience with the medium and is accompanied by the liberation of photography from some of the constraints of the system of literacy. "What can I do?" concerns photographic knowledge and the selection made by photographers, persons who constitute their identity in a new practical experience. "What can it do?" refers to knowledge embodied in the hardware. The advertisement succinctly describes the change: "Hold the picture in your hand while you still hold the memory in your heart." As opposed to a written record, an instant image is meant for a short time, almost as a fast substitute for writing. A more significant change occurs when photography goes electronic, and in particular, digital. Both elements already discussed-the significance of the smallest changes in the input on the result, and the quality aspect of digital vs. analog-are reflected in digital photography. I insist on this because of the new condition of the image it entails and our relation to the realm of the visual. Language found its medium in writing, and printing made writing the object of literacy. Images could not be used with the same ease as writing, and could not be transmitted the way the voice is. When we found ways to have voice travel at speeds faster than that of sound, by electromagnetic waves used in telephone or radio transmission, we consolidated the function of language, but at the same time freed language of some of the limitations of literacy. Digital photography accomplishes the same for images. A written report from any place in the world might take longer to produce, though not to transmit, than the image representing the event reported. Connected to a network, an electronic camera sends images from the event to the page prepared for printing. The understanding of the image, whose printing involved a digital component (the raster) long before the computer was invented, requires a much lower social investment than literacy. The complexity is transferred from capturing the image to transmitting and viewing it. Films are used to generate an electronic simile of our photographic shots. At the friendly automated image shop, we get colorful prints and the shiny CD-ROM from which each image can be recalled on a video screen or further processed on our computers. From the image as testimony, as literacy destined it to be, to the image as pretext for new experiences-medium of visual relativity and questionable morality- everything, and more, is possible. Images can mediate in fast developing situations- transactions, exchange of information, conflicts-better than words can. They are free of the extra burden words bear and allow for global and detailed local interpretation. Electronic processing of digital photography supports comparison, as well as manipulation, of images in view of unprecedented human experiences requiring such functions. The metaphor of the one-eye, which the photographic camera embodies, led to a flat world. Cyclopes see everything flat. Unfortunately, but by no accident, this metaphor was taken over in computer graphics. Images on the computer screen are held together by the conventions of monocular vision. Digital photography can be networked and endowed with dynamic qualities. But what makes digital photography more and more a breakthrough, in respect to its incipient literate phase, is that we can build 3D cameras, that is, technical beasts with two eyes (and if need be, with more). This leads to practical experiences in a pragmatic framework no longer limited to sequences or to reductionist strategies of representation. Who is afraid of a locomotive? The image of a locomotive moving in the direction of the spectators made them scream and run away when moving pictures were first shown to the public. Movement enhanced the realism of the image, captured on film to the extent of blurring the borderline between reality and the newly established convention of cinematographic expression. In the movies of the silent era, the literacy-based realism of the image- actually an illustration of the script-successfully compensated for the impossibility of providing the sound of dialogue. The experience of literacy and that of writing movement onto film were tightly coupled. Short scenes, designed with close attention to visual details, could be understood without the presence of the word, because of the shared background of language. The convention of cinematography is based on sharing the extended white page on which the projection of moving images takes place. Humor was the preferred structure, since the mechanical reproduction of movement had, due to rudimentary technology and lack of sound, a comic quality in itself. Later, music was inserted, then dialogue. Everyone was looking forward to the day when image and sound would be synchronized, when color movies would become possible. It adds to the arguments thus far advanced that cinematographic human experience, an experience dominantly visual, revealed the role of language as a synchronizing device, while the mechanics of cameras and projectors took care of the optical illusion. Cinematography also suggested that this role could be exercised by other means of expression and communication as well. Language is related to body movement, and often participates in the rhythmic patterns of this movement. Before language, other rhythmic devices better adapted to the unsettled self-constitutive practical experience of the Homo Hominis were used to synchronize the effort of several beings involved in the endeavor of survival. Although there is no relation between the experience of cinematography and that of primitive beings on the move after migrating herds of animals, it is worth pointing out the underlying structure of synchronicity. The means involved in achieving this synchronicity are characteristic of the various stages in human evolution. At a very small scale of existence, such as autarchic existence, the means were very simple, and very few. At the scale that makes the writing of movement possible, these means had become complex, but were dominated by literacy. With cinematography, a new strategy of synchronization was arrived at. In many ways, the story of how films became what they are today is also the story of a conflict between literacy and image-based strategies of synchronization. The intermediary phases are well known: the film accompanied by music ("Don't kill the pianist"), recorded sound, sound integrated in the movie, stereophonic sound. Their significance is also known: emulate the rhythm of filmed movement, provide a dramatic background, integrate the realism of dialogue and other real sounds in the realism of action, expand the means of expression in order to synthesize new realities. Some of the conventions of the emerging film are cultural accomplishments, probably comparable to the convention of ideographic writing. They belong, nevertheless, to a pragmatic context based on the characteristics of literacy. They ensue also from an activity that will result in higher and higher levels of human productivity and efficiency. Each film is a mold for the many copies to be shown to millions of spectators. The personal touch of handwriting is obfuscated by the neutral camera-a mechanical device, after all. That the same story can be told in many different ways does not change the fact that, once told, it addresses enormous numbers of potential viewers, no longer required to master literacy in order to understand the film's content. The experience of filmmaking is industrially defined. It also bears witness to the many components of human interaction, opening a window on experiences irreducible to words; and it points to the possibility of going beyond literacy, and even beyond the first layers of the visible-that is, to appropriate the imaginary in the self-constitution of the human being. Some of the changes sketched above occurred when cinematography, after its phase of theater on film, started to compress language, and to search for its own expressive potential. Compression of language means the use of images to diminish the quantity of words necessary to constitute a viable filmic expression, as well as the effort to summarize literature. Indeed, in view of the limitations of the medium, especially during its imitative phase, it could not support scripts based on literary works that exceeded film's own complexity. Cinematography had also to deal with the limited span of its viewers' attention, their lack of any previous exposure to moving images, and the conditions for viewing a film. When, later on, filmmakers compressed entire books into 90 to 120 minutes, we entered a phase of human experience characterized by substituting written with non- or para-linguistic means. The generations since the beginning of cinematography learned the new filmic convention while still involved in practical experiences characteristic of literacy. Conventions of film, as a medium with its own characteristics, started to be experienced relatively recently, in the broader context of a human praxis in the process of freeing itself from the constraints of literacy. Films are an appropriate medium for integration of the visual, the aural, and motion. People can record on film some of their most intricate experiences, and afterwards submit the record to fast, slow, entire, or partial evaluation. The experience of filming is an experience with space and time in their interrelationship. But as opposed to the space and time projected in language, and uniformly shared by a literate community, space and time on film can be varied, and made extremely personal. Within the convention of film, we can uncouple ourselves from the physical limitations of our universe of existence, from social or cultural commitments, and generate a new frame for action. The love affair between Hollywood and emerging technologies for creating the impossible in the virtual space of digital synthesis testifies to this. But we cannot, after all, transcend the limitations of the underlying structure on which cinematography is based. Generated near the height of the civilization of literacy, cinematography represents the borderline between practical experiences corresponding to the scale for which literacy was optimal, and the new scale for which both literacy and film are only partially adequate. It is even doubtful that the film medium will survive as an alternative to the new media because it is, for all practical purposes, inefficient. Cinematography influenced our experience with language, while simultaneously pointing to the limits of this experience. A film is not a visually illustrated text, or a transcription of a play. Rather, it is a mapping from a universe of sentences and meanings assigned to a text, to a more complex universe, one of consecutive images forming (or not) a new coherent entity. In the process, language performs sometimes as language (dialogue among characters), other times as a pre-text for the visual cinematographic text. Before film, we moved only in the universe of our natural, physical existence, on the theatrical stage, or in the universe of our imagination, in our dreams. The synchronizing function of language made this movement (such as working, going from one place to another, from one person to another) socially relevant. Our movement in language descriptions (do this, go there, meet so-and-so) is an abstraction. Our movement recorded on film is the re-concretized abstraction. This explains the role of filmed images for teaching people how to carry out certain operations, for educating, or for indoctrinating them, or for acquainting them with things and actions never experienced directly. It also explains why, once efficiency criteria become important, film no longer addresses the individual, or small groups; rather, it addresses audiences at the only scale at which it can still be economically justified. The industry called Hollywood (and its various copies around the world) is based on an equation of efficiency that keys in the globality of the world, of illiteracy, and of the distribution network already in place. On an investment in a film of over $100 million, five continents of viewers are needed, and this is still no guarantee of breaking even. It is not at all clear whether Dreamworks, the offspring of the affair between Hollywood and the computer industry, will eventually create its own distribution channels on the global digital network. The temptation to ask whether the language of moving images made literacy superfluous, or whether illiteracy created the need for film, and the risk of falling prey to a simplifying cause-and-effect explanation should not prevent us from acknowledging that there are many relations among the factors involved. Nevertheless, the key element is the underlying structure. Books embody the characteristics of language and trigger experiences within the confines of these characteristics. When faced with practical requirements and challenges resulting from a new scale of existence, the human being constitutes alternatives better adapted to a dynamics of change for which books and the experience they entail are only partially appropriate. Books in which even literate people sometimes got lost, or for which we do not have time or patience, are interpreted for us, condensed in the movie. The fact is that more than a generation has now had access to established works of fiction and drama, as well as scientific, historic, or geographic accounts only through films. A price was paid-there is no equivalent between the book and film-and is being paid, but this is not the issue here. What is the issue is the advent of cinematography in the framework in which literacy ceased to support experiences other than those based on its structure. Films are mediating expressions better adapted than language to a more segmented reality of social existence. They are also adapted to the dynamics of change and to the global nature of human existence. They prepared us for electronic media, but not before generating those strange books (or are they?) that transcribe films for a market so obsessed with success that it will buy the rudimentary transcription together with the paraphernalia derived from the stage design and from the costumes used by the characters. We can find substitutes for coal or oil or tin, but seemingly not for success and stars. As a result, everything they touch or are associated with enters the circuit of our own practical existence. An American journalist ended his commentary occasioned by Greta Garbo's death: "Today they no longer make legends, but celebrities." Being here and there at the same time Four generations old (or maybe five), but already the medium of choice-this statement does not define television, but probably captures its social significance. It can be said from the outset that while cinematography is at the borderline between the civilization of literacy and that of illiteracy, television definitely embodies the conflict between the two. In fact, television irreversibly tipped the balance in favor of the visual. The invention of television took place in the context of the change in scale of humankind. Primarily, television occasions the transition from the universe of mechanics and chemistry, implicit in film making and viewing, to that of electricity, in particular electronics, and, more recently, digital technology. Television, as a product of this change in the structure and nature of human theoretic and practical experience, results from the perceived pragmatic need to capture and transmit dynamic images. Electricity was already the medium for capturing and transmitting sound at the speed of electrons along telephone networks. And since images and actions are influenced by the light we view them in, it followed that light is what we actually wanted to record and transmit. This is television. Cumbersome and still owing a lot to mechanics, television started as a news medium, allowing for almost instantaneous connection between the source of information and the audience. It was initially mostly illustrative. Today, it is constitutive, in the sense that it not only records news, it makes news. It constitutes a generalized mass-medium supporting entertainment and ritual (political, religious, military). Literacy corresponds to the experiences of human self-definition in the world of classical physics and chemistry. It is based on the same underlying structure, and projects characteristics of this experience. Electricity and electronics correspond to very fast processes (practically instantaneous), high leverage of human action, diversity, more varied mediating elements, and feedback. The film camera has the main characteristics of literacy. It can be compared to the printing press. But the comparison is only partially adequate since it writes movements to film, and lets us read them together on the shared white page called the screen. Between recording the movement and viewing it, time is used for processing and duplication. Television is structurally different, capturing movement and everything else belonging to what we call reality, in order to make it immediately available to the viewer. Electronic mediation is much more elaborate, has many more layers than cinematography, and as a result is much more efficient. Film mapped from the selected world of movement, in a studio, on the street, or in a laboratory, to a limited viewership: public in a movie theater. It requested that people share the screen on which its images were projected. Television maps from many cameras to the entire world, and all can simultaneously partake in its images. Television is distributed and introduces simultaneity in that several events from several locations can be broadcast on the TV screen. By comparison, cinematography is centralized. Filming is limited to the location where it is being carried on. Cinematography is intrinsically sequential in that it follows the narrative structure and constitutes a closed entity. Once edited for showing, the film cannot be interrupted to insert anything new. There are still many who see the two as closely related, and others who see the use of television only as a carrier (of film, for instance). They ignore the defining fact that film and television, despite some commonalties, belong to practical experiences impossible to reconcile. In fact, while film passed the climax of its attraction, television became the most pervasive medium. Due to the use of television in education, corporate communication, sports, artistic and other performances, such as space exploration and war, television impacts upon social interaction without being an interactive medium. A televised event can address audiences close to the world's entire population. When recording images for television became possible, television supported continued human experiences of decentralization, which previous communication technologies could not provide. The video camera and the video cassette recorder, especially in its digital version, make each of us own not only the receivers of the language of images and sounds, but also emitters, the sources, the private Hollywood studios. That is, they make us live the language of TV, and substitute it for literacy. Interactive TV will undoubtedly contribute even more in this direction. It is already the case that instead of writing a letter, some people make a video and send it to family and authorities, and to TV stations interested in viewer feedback and news stories. The massive deployment of troops in the Desert Storm operation made clear how the shift from literate to illiterate communication integrates video communication. Together with the telephone, television and video dominated communication patterns of the people involved. Subsequent troop deployments confirmed the pattern of illiterate communication. Among the many networks through which the foundation of our existence is continuously altered, cable TV plays a distinct role. Many consider it more important than libraries, probably for the wrong reasons. Whether living in thickly populated urban clusters or in remote locations, people are physically connected through multi- channeled communication networks, and even through interactive media. Cable TV is often seen only as another entry to our home for downloading classical programs as well as pornography and superstition. The full utilization of the electronic avenue as a multi-lane, bi-directional highway through which we can be receivers of what we want to accept, and senders of visual messages to whomever is interested and willing to interact with these messages, is still more a goal than a reality. With computer- supported visual communication integrating digital television, we will dispose of the entire infrastructure for a visually dominated civilization. In the age of Internet, wired or wireless networks become part of the artificial nervous system of advanced societies. Whether in its modem-based variant, or through other advanced schemes for transporting digital information and supporting interaction, the cable system already contributes to the transformation of the nature of many human practical experiences. These can be experiences of entertainment, but also of learning, teaching, even work. There is a negative side to all this development, and a need to face consequences that over time can accumulate beyond what we already know and understand. Children growing up with TV miss the experience of movement. Jaron Lanier discussed the "famous childhood zombiehood," an expression of staring into nothing, a limited ability to see beyond a television image, the desire for instant gratification, and a lack of basic common sense appreciation for doing work in order to achieve satisfaction. Games developed around video technology train children to behave like laboratory rats that learn a maze by rote. They grow up accepting the politics of telegenic competition, a poor substitute for competence and commitment. Their vote is focused on brands, regardless of whether they regard political choices or cereals. Addressed en masse, such viewers gel in the mass image of polls that rapidly succeed one another. That technology makes possible alternatives to literacy embodied in the visual is unquestionable. To what extent these alternatives carry with them previous determinations and constraints, or they correspond to a new stage in human civilization, is the crux of the matter. The degree of necessity and thus the efficiency of any new form of visual expression, communication, or interaction can be ascertained only in how individuals constitute themselves through practical activities coherently integrating the visual. There is no higher form of empowerment than in the fulfillment of our individual possibilities. Telegenic or not, a president or a TV star has little, if any, impact on our fulfillment in the interconnected world of our time. Television implies a great deal of language, but such language frees the audience from the requirement of literacy. You do not need to know how to write or read to watch TV; you need to be in command of a limited part of spoken language in order to understand a TV show, even to actively participate in it-from going on a game show to using cable networks, videotex, or interactive programs, exploring the Internet, or setting up a presence on the network. Growing up with TV results in stereotypes of language and attitudes representing a background of shared expressions, gestures, and values. To see in these only the negative, the low end, is easier than to acknowledge that previous backgrounds, constituted on the underlying structure of literacy, have become untenable under the new pragmatic circumstances. Due to its characteristics, television belongs to the framework of rapid change typical of the dynamics of needs and expectations within the new scale of humankind. There are many varied implications to this: it makes each of us more passive, more and more subject to manipulations (economic, political, religious), robbing (or freeing) us from the satisfaction of a more personal relation (to others, art, literature, etc.). Nobody should underestimate any of these and many other factors discussed by media ecologists and sociologists. But to stubbornly, and quite myopically, consider TV only from the perspective and expectations of literacy is presumptuous. We have to understand the structural changes that made TV and video possible. Moreover, we have to consider the changes they, in turn, brought about. Otherwise we will miss the opportunities opened by the practical experience of understanding the new choices presented to us, and even the new possibilities opened. There is so much more after TV, even on 500 channels and after video-on-demand! Language is not an absolute democratic medium; literacy, with intrinsic elitist characteristics, even less. Although it was used to ascertain principles of democracy, literacy ended up, again and again, betraying them. Because they are closer to things and actions, and because they require a relatively smaller background of shared knowledge, images are more accessible, although less challenging. But where words and text can obscure the meaning of a message, images can be immediately related to what they refer to. There are more built-in checks in the visual than in the verbal, although the deceptive power of an image can be exploited probably much more than the power of the word. Such, and many other considerations are useful, since the transfer of social and political functions from literacy (books and newspapers, political manifestos, ceremonies and rituals based on writing and reading) to the visual, especially television, requires that we understand the consequences of this transfer. But it is not television that keeps voters away from exercising the right to elect their representatives in the civilization of illiteracy, and not the visual that makes us elect actors, lawyers, peanut farmers, or successful oilmen to the highest (and least useful) posts in the government. Conditions that require the multitude of languages that we use, the layers of mediation, the tendency to decentralization, to name a few, resulted in the increased influence of the visual, as well as in some of the choices mentioned so far. High definition television (HDTV) helps us distinguish some characteristics of the entire development under discussion-for instance, how the function of integration is carried out. Integration through the intermediary of literacy required shared knowledge, and in particular, knowledge of writing and reading. Integration through the intermediary of modern image-producing technology, especially television and computer-aided visual communication, means access to and sharing of information. Television has made countries which are so different in their identity, history, and culture (as we know the countries of the world to be) seem sometimes so similar that one has to ask how this uniformity came about. Some will point to the influence of the market process- advertisements look much the same all over the world. Others may note the influence of technology-an electronic eye open on the world that renders uniform everything within its range. The new dynamics of human interaction, required by our striving for higher efficiency appropriate to the scale of humankind, probably explains the process better. The similarity is determined by the mechanism we use to achieve this higher efficiency, i.e., progressively deeper labor division, increased mediation, and the need for alternative mechanisms for human integration, that is reflected in TV images. This similarity makes up the substratum of TV images, as well as the substratum of fashion trends, new rituals, and new values, as transitory as all these prove to be. Literacy and television are not reciprocally exclusive. If this were not the case, the solution to the lower levels of literacy would be at hand. Nevertheless, all those who hoped to increase the quality of literacy by using television had to accept that this was a goal for which the means are not appropriate. Language stabilizes, induces uniformity, depersonalizes; television keeps up with change, allows and invites diversity, makes possible personalized interaction among those connected through a TV chain of cameras and receivers. Literacy is a medium of tedious elaboration and inertia. TV is spontaneous and instantaneous. Moreover, it also supports forms of scientific activity for which language is not at all suited. We cannot send language to look at what our eyes do not see directly, or see only through some instruments. We cannot anticipate, in language, processes which, once made possible on a television screen, make future human experience conceivable. I know that in these last lines I started crossing the border between television and digital image processing, but this is no accident. Indeed, human experience with television, in its various forms and applications, although not at all closed, made necessary the next step towards a language of images which can take advantage of computer technology and of networking. With the advent of HDTV, television achieves a quality that makes it appropriate for integration in many practical experiences. Design (of clothes, furniture, new products) can result from a collaborative effort of people working at different sites, and in the manufacture of their design during a live session. Modifications are almost instantaneously integrated in the sample. The product can be actually tested, and decisions leading to production made. Communication at such levels of effectiveness is actually integrated in the creative and productive effort. The language is that of the product, a visual reality in progress. The results are design and production cycles much shorter than literacy-based communication can support. HDTV is television brought to a level of efficiency that only digital formats make possible. The reception of digital television opens the possibility to proceed from each and every image considered appropriate to storing, manipulating, and integrating it in a new context. Digital television reinstates activity, and is subject to creative programming and interactivity. The individual can make up a new universe through the effort of understanding and creative planning. It is quite possible that alternative forms of communication, much richer than those in use today, will emerge from practical experiences of human self-constitution in this new realm. That in ten years all our TV sets, if the TV set remains a distinct receiver, will be digital says much less than the endless creative ideas emerging around the reality of digital television. Visualization Whenever people using language try to convince their partner in dialogue, or even themselves, that they understood a description, a concept, a proof, and answer by using the colloquial "I see," they actually express the practical experience of seeing through language. They are overcoming the limitations of the abstract system of phonetic language and returning to the concreteness of seeing the image. Way of speaking equals way of doing-this sums up one of the many premises of this book. We extract information about things and actions from their images. When no image is possible-what does a thought look like, or what is the image of right, of wrong, of ideal?-language supports us in our theoretic experiences, or in the attempt to make the abstract concrete. Language is rather effective in helping us identify kinds of thoughts, in implementing social rules that encode prescriptions for distinguishing between right and wrong, for embodying the just in the institution of justice, and ideals in values. But the experience of language can also be an experience of images. Once we reach the moment when we can embody the abstract in a concrete theory, in action, in new objects, in institutions, and in choices, and once we are able to form an image of these, share the image, make it part of the visual world we live in, and use it further for many practical or intellectual purposes, we expand the literate experience in new experiences. So it seems that we tend to visualize everything. I would go so far as to say that we not only visualize everything, but also listen to sounds of everything, experience their smell, touch, and taste, and recreate the abstract in the concreteness of our perceptions. The domination of language and the ideal of literacy, which instills this domination as a rule, was and still is seen as the domination of rationality, as though to be literate equals being rational, volens nolens. In fact, the rationality associated with language, and expressed with its help, is only a small part of the potential human rationality. The measure (ratio) we project in our objectification can as well be a measure related to our perceptive system. It is quite plausible to suspect that some of the negative effects of our literate rationality could have been avoided had we been able to simultaneously project our other dimensions in whatever we did. The shift from a literacy-dominated civilization to the relative domination of the visual takes place under the influence of new tools, further mediations, and integration mechanisms required by self-constitutive practical experiences at the new human scale. The tools we need should allow us to continue exploring horizons at which literacy ceases to be effective, or even significant. The mediations required correspond to complexities for which new languages are structurally more adequate. The necessary integration is only partially achievable through literate means since many people active in the humanities and the sciences gave up the obsession of final explanations and accepted the model of infinite processes. Images, among other sign systems, are structurally better suited for a pragmatic framework marked by continuous multiplication of choices, high efficiency, and distributed human experience. But in order to use images, the human being had to put in place a conceptual context that could support extended visual praxis. When the digital computer was invented, none of those who made it a reality knew that it would contribute to more than the mechanization of number crunching. The visionary dimension of the digital computer is not in the technology, but in the concept of a universal language, a characteristica universalis, or lingua Adamica, as Leibniz conceived it. This is not the place to rewrite the history of the computer or the history of the languages that computers process. But the subject of visualization-presented here from the perspective of the shift from literacy to the visual-requires at least some explanation of the relation between the visual and the human use of computers. The binary number system, which Leibniz called Arithmetica Binaria (according to a manuscript fragment dated March 15, 1679), was not meant to be the definitive alphabet, with only two letters, but the basis for a universal language, in which the limitations of natural language are overcome. Leibniz tried hard to make this language utilizable in all domains of human activity, in encoding laws, scientific results, music. I think that the most intriguing aspect, which has been ignored for centuries, was his attempt to visualize events of abstract nature with the help of the two symbols of his alphabet. In a letter to Herzog Rudolph August von Braunschweig (January 2, 1697), Leibniz described his project for a medal depicting the Creation (Imago Creationis). In this letter, he actually introduced digital calculus. Around 1714, he wrote two letters to Nicolas de Remond concerning Chinese philosophy. It is useful to mention these here because of the binary number representation of some of the most intriguing concepts of the Ih-King. Through these letters, we are in the realm of the visual, and in front of pages in which, probably for the first time, translations from ideographic to the sequential, and finally to the digital, were performed. It took almost 300 years before hackers, trying to see if they could use the digital for music notation, discovered that images can be described in a binary system. This long historic parenthesis is justified by two thoughts. First, it was not the technology that made us aware of images, or even opened access to their digital processing, but intellectual praxis, motivated by its own need for efficiency. Second, visualization is not a matter of illustrating words, concepts, or intuitions. It is the attempt to create tools for generating images related to information and its use. A text on a computer screen is, in fact, an image, a visualization of the language generated not by a human hand in control of a quill, a piece of lead or graphite, a pencil or a pen. The computer does not know language. It translates our alphabet into its own alphabet, and then, after processing, it translates it back into ours. Displayed in those stored images which, if in lead, would constitute the contents of the lower and upper cases of the drawers in each typography shop, this literacy is subject to automation. When we write, we visualize, making our language visible on paper. When we draw, we make our plans for new artifacts visible. The mediation introduced by the computer use does not affect the condition of language as long as the computer is only the pen, keyboard, or typewriter. But once we encode language rules (such as spelling, case agreement, and so on), once we store our vocabulary and our grammar, and mimic human use of language, what is written is only partially the result of the literacy of the writer. The visualization of text is the starting point towards automatic creation of other texts. It also leads to establishing relations between language and non-language sign systems. Today, we dispose of means for electronically associating images and texts, for cross-referencing images and texts, and for rapidly diagramming texts. We can, and indeed do, print electronic journals, which are refereed on the network. Nothing prevents such journals from inserting images, animation and sounds, or for facilitating on-line reactions to the hypotheses and scientific data presented. That such publications need a shorter time to reach their public goes without saying. The Internet thus became the new medium of publication, and the computer its printing press-a printing press of a totally new condition. Individuals constituting their identity on the Internet have access to resources which until recently were available only to those who owned presses, or gained access to them by virtue of their privileged position in society. The visual component of computer processing, i.e., the graphics, relies on the same language of zeros and ones through which the entire computer processing takes place. As a result of this common alphabet and grammar (Boolean logic and its new extensions), we can consider language (image translations, or number-image relations such as diagrams, charts, and the like), and also more abstract relations. Creating the means to overcome the limitations of literacy has dominated scientific work. The new means for information processing allow us to replace the routine of phenomenological observation with processing of diverse languages designed especially to help us create new theories of very complex and dynamic phenomena. The shift to the visual follows the need to change the accent from quantitative evaluations and language inferences based on them, to qualitative evaluations, and images expressing such evaluations at some significant moments of the process in which we are involved. Let us mention some of these processes. In medicine, or in the research for syntheses of new substances, and in space research, words have proven to be not only misleading, but also inefficient in many respects. New visualization techniques, such as those based on molecular resonance, freed the praxis of medicine from the limitations of word descriptions. Patients explain what they feel; physicians try to match such descriptions to typologies of disease based on data resulting from the most recent data. When this process is networked, the most qualified physician can be consulted. When experimental data and theoretic models are joined, the result is visualized and the information exchanged via high-speed broadband digital networks. Based on similar visualization techniques, we acquire better access to sources of data regarding the past, as well as to information vital for carrying through projects oriented towards the future. Computed tomography, for instance, visualized the internal structure of Egyptian mummies. Three-dimensional images of the whole body were created without violating the casings and wrappings that cover the remnants. The internal body structure was visualized by using a simulation system similar to those utilized in non-intrusive surgery. The design and production of new materials, space research, and nano- engineering have already benefited from replacing the analytical perspective ingrained in literacy-based methods with visual means for synthesis. It is possible to visualize molecular structures and simulate interactions of molecules in order to see how medicine affects the cells treated, the dynamics of mixing, chemical and biochemical reactions. It is also possible to simulate forces involved in the so-called docking of molecules in virtual space. No literacy-based description can substitute for flight simulators, or for visualization of data from radio astronomy, for large areas of genetics and physics. Not the last among examples to be given is the still controversial field of artificial intelligence, seduced with emulating behaviors usually associated with human intelligence in action. But it should not surprise anybody that while the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy requires freedom from literacy, people will continue to preserve values and concepts they are used to, or which are appropriate to specific knowledge areas. Paradoxically, artificial intelligence is, in part, doing exactly this. When people grow up with images the same way prior generations were subjected to literacy, the relation to images changes. The technology for visualization, although sometimes still based on language models, makes interactivity possible in ways language could not. But it is not only the technology of visualization applied within science and engineering that marks the new development. Visualization, in its various forms and functions, supports the almost instantaneous interaction between us and our various machines, and among people sharing the same natural environment, or separated in space and time. It constitutes an alternative medium for thinking and creativity, as it did all along the history of crafts, design, and engineering. It is also a medium for understanding our environment, and the multitude of changes caused by practical experience involving the life support system. Through visualization, people can experience dimensions of space beyond their direct perception, they can consider the behavior of objects in such spaces, and can also expand the realm of artistic creativity. The print media, as an overlapping practical experience uniting literacy and the power of sight, are more visual today than at any previous time. We are no longer subjected-sometimes with good reason, other times for dubious motives-to the sequentiality of literacy-dominated modes of communication. An entire shared visual language is projected upon us in the form of comic strips, advertisements, weather maps, economic reports, and other pictorial representations. Some of these representations are still printed on paper. Others are displayed through the more dynamic forms at public information kiosks, or through interactive means of information dissemination, such as computer-supported networks and non-linear search environments, which Ted Nelson anticipated back in 1965. The World Wide Web embodies many of his ideas, as well as ideas of a number of other visionaries. Parallel to these developments, we are becoming more and more aware of the possibilities of using images in human activities where they played a reduced role within literacy-civic action, political debate, legal argumentation. Lawyers already integrate visual testimony in their cases. Juries can see for themselves the crime being committed, as well as the results of sophisticated forensic tests. Human destinies are defended with arguments that are no longer at the mercy of someone's memory or another's talent for rhetoric or drama. The citizen is frequently addressed by increasingly visual messages that explain how tax dollars are spent and why he or she should vote for one or another candidate. In becoming the Netizen, he or she will participate in social interactions fundamentally new in nature. On the Net, politicians claiming credit for some accomplishment can be immediately challenged by the real image. Political promises can be modeled and displayed while the campaign speech is given. A decision to go to war can be subjected to an instant referendum while the simulation of the war itself, or of alternatives, is played on our monitors. But again, to idealize these possibilities would be foolish. The potential for abusive use of images is as great as that for their meaningful application. Many factors are at work slowing down the process of educating visually literate individuals. We continue to rediscover the wheel of reading and writing without advancing comprehensive programs for visual education. Illustrative visual alternatives, advanced more as an alibi for the maintenance of literacy-dominated communication, are by the nature of their function inappropriate in the context of higher efficiency requirements. Utilized as alternatives, these materials can be, and often are, irrelevant, ugly, insignificant, and expensive. More often than not, they are used not to enhance communication, but to direct it, to manipulate the addressee. It will take more than the recognition of the role of the visual to understand that visual literacy, or probably several such literacies, comprising the variety of visual languages we need, less confining, less permanent, and less patterned, are necessary in order to improve practical experiences of self-constitution through images. We are yet to address the ethical aspects of such experiences, especially in view of the fact that the visual entails constraints different from those encoded in the letter of our laws and moral principles. In discussing the transition to the visual, I hope to have made clear that the process is not one of substituting one form of literacy for another. The process has a totally different dynamics. It implies transition from a dominating form of literacy to a multitude of highly adaptive sign systems. These all require new competencies that reflect this adaptability. It also requires that we all understand integrative processes in order to make the best of individual efforts in a framework of extremely divided and specialized experiences of self-constitution. If seeing is believing, then believing everything we see in our day is a challenge for which we are, for all practical purposes, ill prepared. Unbounded Sexuality "Freedom of speech Is as good as sex." Madonna The Netizens were up in arms: The Communications Decency Act must be repealed. Blue ribbons appeared on many Websites as an expression of solidarity. This Act was prompted by the American government's attempt to prevent children from accessing the many pornographic outlets of the Internet. This first major public confrontation between a past controlled by literate mechanisms and a future of illiterate unrestricted freedom seemed to be less about sex and more about democracy. But that the two are related, and defined within the current pragmatics of human self- constitution, has escaped both parties to the dispute. Seeking good sex In Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, Karl Marx (a product of the civilization of literacy) addressed alienation: "We thus arrive at the result that man feels that he acts freely only in his animal functions-eating, drinking, procreation, or at most using shelter, jewelry, etc.-while in his human functions, he feels only animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal." How an analysis of industrial capitalism, with its underlying pragmatic structure reflected in literacy, can anticipate phenomena pertinent to the post-industrial, and reflected in illiteracy, is not easy to explain. Although he referred to economic self-constitution, his description is significant in more than one way. Sexuality is of concern in the civilization of illiteracy insofar as the human being in its multi-dimensionality is of concern. This might sound too broad to afford any meaningful inference from the condition of literacy to the condition of human sexuality, but it is an existential premise. Through sexuality humans project their natural condition and the many influences, language included, leading to its humanization. An understanding of the multiple factors at work in conditioning human experiences as intimate as sexual relations, depends upon the understanding of the pragmatic framework in which they unfold. Child pornography on the Internet is by no means the offspring of our love affair with technology. Neither is pornography being invoked for the first time as a justification for censorship. Nevertheless, the commotion regarding the Communications Decency Act constitutes a new experience that is intimately related to the condition of human existence in today's world. "SWF seeks unemployed SWM grad student for hideaway weekends, intimate dinners, and cuddling. Must know how to read, and be able to converse without extensive use of 'you know' or 'wicked.'" This announcement (dated October 6, 1983) is one among many that use qualifying initials, but with one twist: "Must know how to read."-moreover, to be articulate. What over ten years ago was formulated innocently (hideaway, intimate dinner, cuddling) would today be expressed quite bluntly: "Looking for good sex." What does reading, and possibly writing, have to do with our emotional life, with our need and desire to love and be loved; that is, what does reading have to do with sex? Long before Homo Sapiens ascertained itself, reproduction, and all it comprises in its natural and and form, ensured survival. Do literacy, language, or sign systems affect this basic equation of life? Mating seasons and habits shed some light on the natural aspect. Colors, odors, mating calls, specific movements (dances, fights, body language) send sexual signals. Molecular biology places the distinction between hominids and chimpanzees at four million years ago. After all this time of freeing themselves from nature, even to the extent of self-constitution in the practical experience of artificial insemination, human beings still integrate color, odor, mating calls, and particular movements into the erotic. But they also integrate the experience of their self-constitution in language. Since the time hominids distinguished themselves, the sexuality of the species started differentiating itself from that of animals. For example, humans are permanently attractive, even after insemination, while animals attract each other only at moments favorable for reproduction. Along the timeline from the primitive being to our civilization, sex changed from being an experience in reproduction to being predominantly a form of pleasure in itself. Instead of the immediacy of the sexual urge, projected through patterns subject to natural cycles, humans experience ever more mediated forms of sexual attraction and gratification, which are not necessarily associated with reproduction. An initial change occurred when humanized sexual drive turned into love, and became associated with its many emotions. The practical experience of language played an important part in extending sexual encounters from the exclusive realm of nature to the realm of culture. Here they acquired a life of their own through practical experiences characteristic of the syncretic phase of human practical experiences, mostly rituals. During the process of differentiating these experiences-constitution of myths, moral and ethical self-awareness, theater, dance, poetry-sexual encounters were subjected to various interpretations. Beyond immediacy The birth of languages and the establishment of sex codes, as primitive as they were, are related to the moment of agriculture, a juncture at which a certain autonomy of the species was reached. Rooted in the biological distinction between male and female, labor division increased the efficiency of human effort. Divisions were also established, some under the model of male domination, others under the model of female domination, pertinent to survival activities, and later on to incipient social life. Eventually, labor division consecrated the profession of prostitution, and thus the practice of satisfying natural urges in a context in which nature was culturized. The prototypical male-dominated structure of the sexual relation between man and woman marked the history of this relation more than female domination did. It introduced patterns of interaction and hierarchies today interpreted wholesale as harmful to the entire development of women. What is probably less obvious is the relation among the many aspects of the pragmatic context in which such hierarchies were acknowledged. Moreover, we do not know enough about how these hierarchies were transformed into the underlying consciousness of the populations whose identities resulted from experiences corresponding to the pragmatic context. The implicit thesis of this book is that everything that made language and writing possible, and progressively necessary, led to a coherent framework of human practical experiences that are characterized by sequentiality, linearity, hierarchy, and centralism, and which literacy appropriated and transmits. Consequently, when the structural framework no longer effectively supports human self-constitution, the framework is modified. Other aspects of human existence, among them sexuality, reflect the modification. Reading and writing have much to do with our emotional life. They remove it from the immediacy of drive, hope, pain, and disappointment and give it its own space: human striving, desire, pleasure. They are associated with an infinity of qualifiers, names, and phrases. With language, feelings are given a means for externalizing, and they are stabilized. Expectations diversify from there. Structural characteristics of the context that makes language necessary simultaneously mark the very object of the self- constitutive experience of loving and being loved. There are many literary and visual testimonies to how the erotic was constituted as a realm of its own: From Gilgamesh, the Song of Solomon, Kama Sutra, Ovid's Art of Love, through Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, to the erotic literature of 18th and 19th century Europe, down to the many current romance novels and handbooks on lovemaking. No matter which of them is examined, one inference becomes clear: the pragmatic context of the continuous human self-constitution effects changes in the way people are attracted to each other. Love and integration of sexual experiences, in the manifold of acts through which hominids move from the self-perpetuation drive to new levels of expectation and new intensities of their relations, is also pragmatically conditioned. Writing, as a practical experience of human self-constitution, is conducive to relations between male and female that are different from random or selective mating. It is bound to continue along a time sequence severed from the natural cycle of mating, reshaped into the marriage contract and the family alliance. Literacy, as a particular practical experience of language, regulates the sexual, as it regulates, in a variety of forms, all other aspects of human interaction. In the literate erotic experience, expectations pertinent to the pragmatics of a society in search of alternative means of survival evolve into norms. The inherited experience of female-male relations, affected through the experience of rituals, myths, and religion, is condensed in literacy. Encoding hierarchy, some languages place women in a secondary position. There is almost no language in which this does not happen. "Many men and women" is in Arabic ("rijaalan kafiiran wa-nisaa'aa") literally "men many women." In Japan, women speak a Japanese reserved to their sex alone. In the English wedding ceremony, the woman had to repeat that she would "love, honor, and obey" the husband. To this day, Orthodox Jewish men give thanks to God that He did "not make me a woman." With the demise of literacy, the sexual experience gets divorced from procreation. Statistics of survival in the past world of limited available resources, of natural catastrophes, of disease, etc., cease to play any role in the illiterate sex encounters. Sexuality becomes a diversified human experience, subject to divisions, mediations, and definitely to the influence of the general dynamics of the world today. As markets become part of the global economy, so does sexuality, in the sense that it allows for experiences which, in limited communities and within prescribed forms of ceremony (religious, especially), were simply not possible. From the earliest testimony regarding sexual awareness up to the present, everything one can imagine in respect to sex has been tried. So often placed under the veil of secrecy and mystery, sex is no less frequently and vividly, to say the least, depicted. Yet a rhetorical question deserves to be raised: Does anyone know everything about sex? The land of sexual ubiquity Borges, in his own way, would have probably mapped the sexual realm: Freud aside, to know everything about sex would require that one be everyone who ever lived, lives, and eventually will live. Such a Borgesian map is indeed detailed but leads no further than ourselves. Connect all sex-related matter that is on the Internet today- from on-line striptease and copulation to legitimate sex education and the passionate defense of love-and you will still not have more than a partial image of sexuality. When one considers all the books, videotapes, songs, radio and television talk-shows, private discussions and public sermons, the subject of sex would still not be exhausted. If sex were an individual matter-which it is, to a large extent-how could we meaningfully approach the subject without the risk of making it a personal confession, or worse, a pretentious discourse about something any author would unavoidably know only through the many and powerful filters of his or her culture? But maybe sex is less private than we, based on prejudice, ignorance, or discretion, assume. Ritualized sex was a public event, sometimes culminating in orgies. It took a lot of taming, or acculturation, for sex to become an intimate affair. Myths acknowledged sexual habits and propagated rules coherent within the pragmatic framework of their expression. Like myths, many religions described acceptable and unacceptable behavior, inspired by the need to maintain the integrity of the community and to serve its goals of survival through lineage and proprietary rights, especially when ales began to dominate in society. Art, science, and business appropriated sex as a subject of inquiry, or as a lucrative activity. Sex is a driving force for individuals and communities, an inescapable component of any experience, no matter how remote from sex. Sexual ubiquity and the parallel world of self-awareness, embodied in forms of expression, communication, and signification different from the actual sexual act, are connected in very subtle ways. Once sexual experiences are appropriated by culture, they become themselves a sign system, a symbolic domain, a language. Each sexual encounter, or each unfulfilled intention, is but a phrase in this language written in the alphabet of gestures, odors, colors, smells, body movement, and rhythm. We are the sexual sign: first, in its indexical condition-a definite mark left, a genetic fingerprint testifying to our deepest secrets encoded in our genetic endowment; second, in iconicity, that is, in all the imitations of others as they constitute their identity in the experience of sexuality. As many scholars have hastened to point out, we are also the sign in its symbolism. Indeed, phallic and vulvar symbols populate every sphere of human expression (and obsession). Nevertheless, our own self-constitution in the sexual act confirms a double identity of the human species: nature, involved in the struggle for survival, where the sheer power of numbers and strategies for coping with everything destructive make for continuous selection (Darwin's law of natural selection); and culture, in which humans pursue a path of progressive self-definition, many times in conflict with the natural condition, or what Freud and his followers defined as the psychological dimension. The two are related, and under specific circumstances one dominates the other. In my opinion, Peirce's encompassing notion that the sign is the person who interprets it integrates the two levels. In the pragmatic framework, experiences of self-constitution result from the projection of natural characteristics in the activity performed, as well as from the awareness of the goals pursued, means incorporated, and meanings shared. Does the pragmatic perspective negate explanations originating from other, relatively limited, perspectives? Probably not. An example is furnished by the theories explaining sexuality from the viewpoint of the conflict between sex (libido) and self-preservation (ego) instincts, later substituted by the conflict between life instincts (Eros) and the death instinct (Thanatos, self-destruction). Such theories introduce a language layer into a subject which, although acknowledged, was simply not discussed, except in religious terms (mainly as prohibitions), or in poetry. As with any other dualistic representation, such theories also end in speculation, opposing the experience to the scheme adopted. The scheme functions in extreme cases, which psychoanalysis dealt with, but explains sexual normalcy-if such a thing can be defined, or even exists-to a lesser extent, and inconsistently. The labels remain unchanged-Eros, Logos, Thanatos-while the world undergoes drastic alterations. Some of these alterations affect the very nature of the sexual experience as human beings unfold under new pragmatic circumstances, some of extreme alienation. The literate invention of the woman The case I am trying to make is for the acknowledgment of the conflict between a new state of affairs in the world and our perspectives, limited or not by the literate model of sexuality. The current situation recalls the world before literacy, before the expectation of homogeneity, and before the attempt to derive order and complexity through linear progression. The atom of that sexual world was the genderless human being, a generic existence not yet defined by sexual differentiation. The male-female distinction came as a surprise-the realization of seeing the same and its negative, as in the case of a stone and the hole that remains after it is unearthed. Some read the genderless world as androcentric, because the generic human being it affirmed had a rather masculine bent. The significance of whatever such a genderless model embodied needs to be established in the pragmatic realm: how does difference result from same, if this same is an archetypal body with characteristics celebrated copiously over time? Painting, medical illustration, and diagrams, from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, focus on this genderless person, who seems today almost like a caricature. The pragmatics of the time period just mentioned were conducive to a different image of genders. The sense of excitement associated with human advances in knowing nature certainly spilled over into every other form of human experience, sex included. A new scale of mankind required that the efficiency of human activity increase. This was a time of many innovations and groundbreaking scientific theories. It was also a time of diversified, though still limited, sexual experiences, made possible by a framework of creativity different from the framework of the Middle Ages. Discoveries in many domains shook the framework of thinking according to Platonic archetypes, appropriated by the Catholic Church and used as explanatory models for all things living or dead. Pragmatics required that the one-sex model be transcended because limits of efficiency (in thinking, medical practice, biological awareness, labor division) were reached within the model. The world of practical experiences of this time unfolded in the Industrial Revolution. With literacy established, some sexual attitudes, consonant with the pragmatic circumstance, were enforced. Others were deemed unacceptable, and qualified as such in the literate language of church, state, and education. From the ubiquity of natural sexuality to what would become sexual self-awareness and sexual culture, no matter how limited, the journey continued in leaps and bounds. To acknowledge the woman as a biological entity, with characteristics impossible to reduce to male characteristics, was not due to political pressure-as Thomas Lacquer, a remarkable writer on the subject, seemed to believe-but to pragmatic needs. It simply made sense to know how the body functions, to acknowledge morphology, to improve the quality of life, however vaguely acknowledged as such, by addressing the richness of the human being. Interestingly enough, the order in nature and matter found by science contradicted the new experience of variety, sexuality included, made possible by the scientific revolution. A gulf opened between reality and appearance, motivating a healthy empirical program, well extended in the realm of sexual encounters. Back in the medium aevum, Maximus of Torino thought that "the source of all evil is the woman," probably embodied in the prototypical Eve. The social importance of women in the context of the empirical program, leading to the need for generalized literacy and better knowledge of the human body, discredited this prejudice of the Middle Ages, and of any age since. Sexuality made the transition to the two-sex world with a vengeance. Reproduction still dominated, since incipient industry needed more qualified workers in its own reproduction cycles, and productivity triggered the need to maintain consumption. But the unnatural dimension widened as well. The context was population growth, limited means of birth control, and levels of production and consumption characteristic of the pragmatics of high efficiency. Those who think that the relation between industry, sexuality, and reproduction is far-fetched should recall the birth policies of countries obsessed with industrial growth. In what was communist Romania, workers were needed to do what there were no machines to do: to produce for the benefit of the owners of the means of production. To a similar end, the Soviets handed out medals to mothers of many children. The government structure, bearing the characteristics of literacy, clashed with the harsh pragmatic framework existing in the former communist countries. The result of the clash was that women avoided birth at all cost. Ahead to the past Longer life and the ability to enjoy the fruits of industry altered attitudes towards sex, especially reproduction. Sexuality and marriage were postponed to the third decade of life as people acquired more training in their quest for a better life. Children were no longer a matter of continuity and survival. After decades of denying the strength of nature's drive towards self-perpetuation of a species, today we again recognize that sexual life starts very early. But this realization should not have come as a surprise. Juliet's mother was worried that Juliet was not married at the age of 13. Beyond the realization of early sexuality, we notice that adolescents have multiple sex partners, that the average American is bound to have 37 sex partners in his or her lifetime, that prohibitions against sodomy are ignored, and that half the population is involved in group sex. Statistics tell us that 25% of the adult population uses pornography for arousal and another 30% uses contraptions bought in sex shops; 33- 1/3% of married couples have extra-marital affairs; the average marriage lasts 5 years; the open practice of homosexuality increases 15% annually. Incest, bestiality, and sexual practices usually defined as perverse are reaching unheard of proportions. It's not that changes in sexual experience take place, but that practices known from the earliest of times assert themselves, usually by appealing to the literate notion of freedom. As with many aspects of the change human society undergoes, we do not know what the impact of these sex practices will be. Probably that is the most one can say in a context that celebrates permissiveness as one of the highest accomplishments of modern society. Such changes challenge our values and attitudes, and make many wonder about the miserable state of morality. We already know about the cause and physical effects of AIDS. We do not even know how to wonder what other diseases might come upon humanity if the human relation with animals moves in the direction of bestiality. "Is this the price we pay for democracy?" is asked by people accused of having a conservative leaning. Enthusiasts celebrate an age of unprecedented tolerance, indulgence, and freedom from responsibility. But no matter to which end of the spectrum one leans, it should be clear that these considerations are part of the pragmatics of sexuality in the civilization of illiteracy. Shorter cycles are characteristic not only of production, but also of sexual encounters. Higher speed (however one wants to perceive it), non-linearity, freedom of choice from many options, and the transcendence of determinism and clear-cut dualistic distinctions apply to sexuality as they apply to everything else we do. Although it is a unique experience, impossible to transmit or compare, and very difficult to separate from the individual, sex is widely discussed. Media, politicians, and social scientists have transformed it into a public issue; hypocrites turn it into an object of derision; professionals in sexual disorders make a good living from them. Sex is the subject of economic prognosis, legal dispute, moral evaluation, astrology, art, sports, and so on. One should see what is made public on the World Wide Web. Highly successful networked pages of pornographic magazines are visited daily by millions of people, as are pages of scientific and medical advice. Questions referring to sexuality in its many forms of expression increase day by day. Questions about sex have also extended to areas where the sexual seems (or seemed) excluded-science, technology, politics, the military. For example, the contraceptive pill, which has changed the world more than its inventors ever dreamed of, and more than society could have predicted, has also changed part of the condition of the sexual. The abortion pill (with a name-RU486-that reminds us of computer chips) only accentuates the change, as do many scientific and technological discoveries conceived with the purpose of sexually stimulating the individual or augmenting sexual pleasure. Emancipation-social, political, economic, as well as emancipation of women, children, minorities, nations-has also had an impact on sexual relations. As such, emancipation results from different pragmatic needs and possibilities, and reflects the weaker grip of literate norms and expectations. Emancipation has reduced some of sexuality's inherent, and necessary, tension. It freed the sexual experience from most of the constraints it was subjected to in a civilization striving for order and control. Still, individual erotic experiences have often culminated not in the expected revelations, stimulated by the use of drugs or not, but in deception, even desperation. This is explained by the fact that, more than any activity that becomes a goal in itself, sexuality without the background of emotional contentment constitutes individuals as insular, alienated from each other, feeling used but not fulfilled. Lines of a similar sway were written by opponents of sexual emancipation, and as a suggestion of a price humans pay for excess. These lines were articulated also by firm believers in tolerance, free spirits who hardly entertain the thought of punishment (divine or otherwise). Concerns over human sexuality result from the role of scale and the erotic dimension. Within a smaller scale, one does not feel lost or ignored. Small-scale experiences are constraining, but they also return a sense of care and belonging. The broader the scale, the less restrictive the influence of others, but also the more diminished the recognition of individuality. In the modern megalopolis, the only limits to one's sexual wishes are the limits of the individual. Nonetheless, at such a scale, individuality is continuously negated, absorbed in the anonymity of mediocre encounters and commercialism. The realization that scale relates not only to how and how much we produce, and to changes in human interaction, but also to deeper levels of our existence is occasioned by the sexual experience of self-constitution in a framework of permissiveness that nullifies value. The human scale and the altered underlying structure of our practical experiences affect drives, in particular the sexual drive, as well as reproduction, in a world subjected to a population explosion of exponential proportions. The entire evolution under consideration, with all its positive and negative consequences, has a degree of necessity which we will not understand better by simply hiding behind moral slogans or acknowledging extreme sexual patterns. No person and no government could have prevented erotic emancipation, which is part of a much broader change affecting the human condition in its entirety. The civilization of illiteracy is representative of this change insofar as it defines a content for human experiences of self-constitution, including those related to sexuality, which mark a discontinuity in sexual patterns. Sex dreams turn into sex scripts on virtual reality programs within which one can make love to a virtual animal, plant, to oneself, projected into the virtual space and time of less than clear distinctions between what we were told is right and wrong. Telephone sex probably provides just as much arousal, but against fees that the majority of callers can hardly afford. Less than surprising, lesbians and gays make their presence known on the Internet more than in literate publications. Discussions evolve, uncensored, on matters that can be very intimate, described in titillating terms, sometimes disquietingly vulgar, obscene, or base, by literate standards. But there are also exchanges on health, AIDS prevention, and reciprocal support. Gay and lesbian sexuality is freely expressed, liberated from the code language used in the personal columns of literary publications. Freud, modern homosexuality, AIDS The godfather of modern homosexuality is Freud (independent of his own sexual orientation), insofar as sexual expression remains a symbolic act. Homosexuality, evading natural selection and eliciting acceptance as an expression of a deeply rooted human complex, is part of the ubiquitous sexual experience of the species. The fact that homosexuality, documented in some of the earliest writings as a taboo, along with incest and bestiality, predated Freud does not contradict this assertion. Homosexual Eros has a different finality than heterosexual Eros. The extent of homosexuality under the structural circumstances of the civilization of illiteracy is not only the result of increased tolerance and permissiveness. Neither is it merely the result of freedom resulting from an expanded notion of liberal democracy. It is biologically relevant, and as a biological expression, it is projected into practical experiences constitutive of individuals, men or women, acknowledged as different because their practical experience of self-constitution identifies them as different. Their experience, though necessarily integrated in today's global world, has many consequences for them and for others. While research has yet to confirm the hypothesis of structural peculiarities in the brain and genes of homosexuals, the specifics of the self-constitution process through practical experiences in a world subject to natural selection cannot be overlooked. Genetics tells us that the borderline between genders is less clear-cut than we assumed. Be this as it may, homosexuality takes place under a different set of biological and social expectations than do heterosexuality and other forms of sexuality. It is an act in itself, with its own goal, with no implicit commitment to offspring, and thus different in its intrinsic set of responsibilities and their connection to the social contract. But for this matter, so is heterosexuality under the protection of the pill, the condom, or any other birth control device or method, abortion included. A different sense of future, moreover an expectation of instant gratification, is established in the sexual experience of homosexuality. Exactly this characteristic acknowledges the underlying structure of the pragmatics of high efficiency that makes homosexual experiences possible, and even economically acceptable. Acknowledged also is the scale of humankind. Survival is much less affected by fruitless sexuality than within a limited scale of existence and activity. The freedom gained through birth control methods and the freedom to practice non-reproductive sexual relations, such as homosexual love, are in some ways similar. It is impossible not to notice that the development under discussion displays a shift from a domain of vulnerability in regard to the species-any imbalance in procreation, under conditions of severe selection, affects the chances of survival-to the domain of the individual. The extreme case of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), which is transmitted sexually (among other ways), reintroduced moral concerns at a time when morality was almost dropped from erotic language and expelled from the human erotic experience. The frenzy of sexual freedom and the confusion resulting from the spread of AIDS present contradictory images of a much broader development that affects human erotic behavior, and probably much more than that. Nobody, no doomsayer on record, whether coming from a literate perspective or already integrated in the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy, predicted the new vulnerability which AIDS makes so painfully evident, inside and outside the homosexual segment of the population. The integrated global nature of human life brought Africa, with its large AIDS-infected population, close to countries that reached a different (not to use the word higher) level of civilization. AIDS impacted on the sense of invulnerability, assumed by individuals in industrialized countries as almost a right. This invulnerability is now drastically tested, despite the enormous effort to address AIDS. The disease suddenly put globality in a new light. Statistics connect the sense of danger experienced in Hollywood by HIV-infected movie stars, fashion designers, and dancers to the desperation of the disenfranchised in the first world-drug addicts, the urban poor, and prostitutes-and to the disenfranchised and working poor of the Third World. Far from being a new phenomenon, the homosexual and lesbian preference, or lifestyle as it is euphemistically called, reaches a status of controversial acceptance in the civilization of illiteracy. The paradox is that while the choice of homosexuality over heterosexuality is facilitated by the pragmatic context of the civilization of illiteracy, the activism of homosexuality solicits recognition within the structures characteristic of literacy. It is very ironic that gay activism, stimulated by the many consequences of the AIDS epidemic, attempts to reverse time, fighting for equal access to exactly those means in which the values and prejudices that condemn homosexuality are embedded. It looks like homosexuals want to rewrite the book or books in which they are damned, instead of freeing themselves from them. Homosexuals want their voice to be heard in church and politics. They want their cause present in ethical writings, and their rights encoded in new laws and rules. They want to enlighten others by making their experience known as art, literature, and social discourse. The genetic condition of the homosexual choice needs to be considered together with the variety of contexts pertaining to the diversity of the civilization of illiteracy that make its unfolding possible. There is a need to be aware that, between the function of procreation and divergent sexual behavior, a whole gamut of human cultural experience continues to unfold and challenges settled standards. This experience goes beyond language and the literate structure of a linear, sequential, hierarchic, centralized, deterministic pragmatics of limited choice. Human language, as a projection of human beings living within a context appropriate to their self-preservation and development, participated in the taming of our sexual drive. Illiteracy leads to its endless diversification, affecting sexuality in all its manifestations, such as patterns of mobility and settlement, family and community life, social rules, and the encoding of values in moral, economic, and educational systems. Orality and sexuality were characterized by immediateness, and a reduced sense of space and time. Sex equaled instinct. With writing, and thus the possibility of what later would become literacy, a new set of underlying elements was acknowledged. Sexuality was subjected to the experience of accepted rules-the do's and don'ts appropriate to expectations of efficiency, and their resulting values, corresponding to the scale of humankind and the natural condition. Reproduction still dominated sexuality, while rules of optimal human interaction, encoded in religion or social expectations, started to permeate erotic behavior. To a great extent, language in its literate form expresses the awareness of the various erotic dimensions as they were socially acknowledged at any given time. Literacy enrolled sexuality in the quest for higher productivity and sustained consumption characteristic of the pragmatics associated with the Industrial Revolution. Once conditions making literacy necessary are overruled by new conditions, sexuality undergoes corresponding changes. Basically, sexuality seems to return to immediateness, as it integrates many mediating elements. Sexuality unfolds in an unrestricted set of varieties, escaping some of its natural determination. In keeping with the shorter and shorter cycles of human activity, sexuality turns into an experience of transitory encounters. Since it is a form of human expression, it ascertains its condition as yet another sign system, or language, among the many participating in the practical experiences of our new pragmatic context. It now bridges dramatically between life and death, in a world where the currency of both life and death is, for all practical purposes, devaluated. Sex and creativity Experts from fields as different as brain research, cognitive science, and physiology agree that a distinct similarity between the practical experience of self- constitution in sexual acts and in creative efforts of art, scientific discovery, and political performance can be established. It seems that they all involve a progression, reach a peak, experienced as enormous pleasure and relief, and are followed by a certain feeling of emptiness. Like any creative experience, the erotic experience is one of expression. To express means to constitute oneself authentically, and to project hope that the experience can impact others. From this stems the possible language, or semiotics, of the erotic: how it is expressed, what the erotic vocabulary (of sounds, words, gestures, etc.) and grammar are. The semiosis of the erotic includes the participation of the language of sexual relationships, without being limited to it. Having reached this understanding, we can apply it to the observation that Homo Eroticus is a subject who continuously negates naturalness (from what and how we eat to how we dress, etc.) while simultaneously regretting the loss. Not surprisingly, sexuality is continued in the practice of producing, reading, viewing, and criticizing erotic literature, printed images, video, film documentaries, CD-ROM, or virtual reality. Real- time interactive erotic multimedia captures even more attention. In parallel, humans try to be authentic, unique, and free in their intimate sphere. They scan through image- dominated books, some more than vulgar, subscribe to magazines, face their own sexuality on videotapes, register for sex initiation seminars, or take advantage of group sex encounters. Millions land on pornographic Websites or create their own sex messages in the interconnected world. They do all this in an attempt to free themselves from natural necessity and from the conformist frame of literate Eros, including the many complexes explaining painful real or imaginary failures. Living in an environment in which science and technology effectively support human experiences of overcoming the constraints of space, time, and material existence, humans freed sexuality from the influence of natural cycles. These, as we know, can even be altered as pragmatic conditions might require for sportswomen and ballerinas. New totems and taboos populate this environment in which Eros, as a reminder of distant phases of anthropological evolution, continues to be present. Like any other creative act, the sexual act involves imagination, and the urge to explore the unknown. It is irrepeatable, yet another instance of discovering one's identity in the uniqueness of the experience. Although continuously programmed through endlessly refined means, humans maintain a nostalgia for the authentic, but accept, more often unconsciously than not, a mediocre syntax of the sexual impressed upon them from the world of celebrity and success. This syntax is a product of erotic experts, writers, and imagemakers. It is a contentless semantics-the meaning of erotic encounters fades in the meaning of the circumstance-and an absurd pragmatics-sexuality as yet another form of competition, deliriously celebrated by mass media. While artificial insemination was a scientific breakthrough, it is also symptomatic of the process analyzed here, in particular of the changes in the underlying structure leading to the civilization of illiteracy. Artificial insemination is part of this background; so is the entire genetic research that resulted in our ability to design not only new plants and animals with expected characteristics, but also human beings. Specialization reached a point where the market can satisfy a new type of consumption, in this case represented by artificial insemination, under acceptable economic conditions. Whether a pill, or aesthetic insemination, will ever make those who desire to be artists become creative is still to be seen. (The same holds true for science, politics, and any other creative career.) But we have already seen the dissemination of tools (mainly computer- based) that give many the illusion of becoming abruptly talented, as some women discover that they are abruptly fecund because they found the right pill, or the right gynecologist, to make the impossible happen. As part of contemporary society's generalized illiteracy, erotic illiteracy is eloquently illustrated by the pervasiveness of sex in art. The transition from pornography to artistic pornography corresponds to the search of those human obsessions that legitimize art's appropriation of territories considered taboo. As some see it, once freed from the constraints implicit in the pragmatic framework relying on literacy, art and sexuality intensified their reciprocal influence. Aesthetic concerns changed from elaboration and method to improvisation and process. The expectation of education or therapeutics gave way to triggering excitement, more obliquely sexual excitement. Striptease has moved from the back alleys of bigoted enjoyment into movie theaters, museums, prime time television, the Internet. And so has the language of arousal, the voice of pleasure, the groan of post-coital exhaustion, or disappointment from teleporn services to the pay-per-session Websites, where credit card numbers are submitted without fear of their being used beyond payment for the service. In certain countries still under a literate regimen, the problem of pornography has been solved by administrative prohibitions; in others, a solution arises from blind market logic. The market acknowledges the various aspects of sexuality in the civilization of illiteracy through products and services geared towards all those involved. Many market semioses work in this direction-from the pornographic sites on the Internet to the red light districts where risk can be generously rewarded. Sometimes the market's attention leads to unexpected changes in what is marketed, and how previous acceptable codes of sexual behavior are revised and new codes publicly sanctioned. The many forms of advertisement catering to homosexuals, sexploitation, gendered sexuality, group experiences, while never using one qualifier or another, are quite explicit in identifying their public and the patterns of behavior characteristic for this public. Means used for this purpose correspond to those of the civilization of illiteracy. There is, probably, no other medium of more precise narrow casting of sexual wares, from legitimate to scandalously base, than that of the networked world. In the framework of literacy, the erotic (as all other creative contributions) was idealized in many respects. Language projected the erotic experience as one that transcended sexuality, leading to stable and selective male-female relationships within the boundaries of the family characteristic of industrial society. In time, various value representations, symptomatic of a peculiar understanding of the differences between man and woman, and stored in the language of customs and rituals, took over the substance of the erotic and made form predominant. Literacy and the ceremonies celebrating the erotic-especially marriage and wedding anniversaries-are connected far beyond what most would accept on first reflection. The fact that the civilization of illiteracy took over these ceremonies, and created a service sector able to provide a substitute for an instance that used to signify commitment only proves how ubiquitous the expectation of high efficiency is. The vows that made marriage a social event, sanctioning the implicit sexual component of the contract, and sometimes celebrating more prejudice than tolerance, are expectations expressed in literate language and submitted for public validation. Whether newlyweds knew what they signed-or did not know how to sign-does not change the fact that the institution was acknowledged in the integrating reality of language. Equal access to erotic mediocrity Once the homogeneous image of society breaks, and sexuality more than previously turns into another market commodity (prostitution, in its hetero- and homosexual forms), once morals and direct commitments are substituted by rules of efficiency and population control, the language of the erotic is emptied. It is useless to accuse people of lower moral standards without understanding that, under new conditions of human experience, these standards simply embody ways of achieving the efficiency that this civilization of illiteracy strives for. To own your partner, as the marriage certificate is interpreted by some, and to buy pleasure or perversion as one buys food or clothing, are two different contexts for the self-constitution of the individual. It is much cheaper-and I cringe to state this so bluntly-to buy sexual pleasure, regardless how limited and vulgar it can be, than to commit oneself to a life of reciprocal responsibility, and unavoidable moments of inequity. The economic equation is so obvious that facing it, one ends up discouraged. But this equation is part of the broader equation of high expectations defining the illiterate practical experience of self- constitution in a world of a very large scale. In this equation, access to pornographic sites on the Internet can indeed appear to some as an issue of freedom of speech or freedom of choice. Even those living outside the platinum and diamond belt of wealth and prosperity partake in the illiterate expression of sexuality as this created global markets of prostitution, pornography, and vulgarity, or widely opened the doors to sexual experimentation. From food, music, and photography, to video, films, and clothing, almost everything seems to address sexuality, moreover, to stimulate it. Crime and sex drive the market (the art market included) more than anything else. All age groups are addressed on their own biological and cultural terms; all backgrounds, including ethnic and religious, are involved in the fabric of sex messages. One million children are forced yearly into the sex market, the majority of them from poor countries. People who do not know how to read or write, and who probably never will, live under the seduction of the Calvin Klein label and will imitate the lascivious moves of the models through which they learn about them. Enormous numbers of people who might not have appropriate shelter, or enough food, buy Madonna videos and indulge in the fantasy that sexual freedom embodies in their particular illiterate expression. Today, humans no longer share a literate notion of the sexual, but display a multitude of attitudes and involve themselves in a variety of experiences, which include the expectation of a common denominator, such as the family used to be. Humans tamed their own nature and discovered, at the peak of what seemed to become a collective sense of invulnerability, that there are still points of individual vulnerability. Some are reviving hopes of chastity and clean marriages, of generalized heterosexuality-in short, of a return to the safe shores of an idealized erotic experience of the past. Sexuality, however, always had its bright and dark sides. Suffice it to recall the explicit images in the ruins of Pompeii, or those in Indian and Japanese art. Sometimes, not even our most aggressive sex magazines, porno shops, Hollywood crap, and Internet sites equal their boldness. But people have managed to hide the dark side, or at least what could be construed as such, and to propagate, through literacy, the sublime erotic poem, the clean erotic novel, the romance, the love songs and dances, and everything else testifying to the sublime in love. What is new in the context of the civilization of illiteracy is that one side no longer excludes the other. To be is to be different, even if the biological equation of only two sexes seems so limiting. Becoming more indirect and transitory, human relations affect sexuality and the ability to cope with what is defined as deviant erotic behavior in respect to tradition. AIDS will not turn back events that made the current pragmatic context necessary. Rather, it will add to the demystifying of love and sex, and thus effectively bridge between genetic research and the self-perpetuation drive of the species, rationalized in formulas meeting higher levels of efficiency, resources, and human reproduction. Such formulas, more sophisticated than the progressions Malthus used, are already tested by various organizations concerned with strategies for avoiding human self-destruction by overpopulation. A condom is cheaper than giving birth; all the pills women swallow over a lifetime are far less costly than taking care of one child. It should not surprise that Japan, committed to all the values of literacy and the sexuality attached to them, is reluctant to adopt the pill. The country has a very low birth rate, so low that its leaders are justified in fearing that soon Japan will not have enough people to fuel the economy through production and consumption. Still, Japan sees a relation between the pill and the state of morality as part of the cultural homogeneous fabric on which it relies. Nobody really doubts that the globality of human experience, to which Japan contributed through its productive genius probably more than any country, will catch up with it. Sexually, the literate Japanese are no less daring than the illiterate Americans. To continuously tend towards having more at the cheapest price-in many ways an expression of rape of other people's work and resources-means to exhaust not only the object, but also the subject. Rape, one of the most heinous crimes people commit, generalized in political and economic rape, projects sexuality and its powerful action even outside the biological realm of human life. To want all (especially all at once) means to want nothing in particular. At the end of the total sexual experience lies nothing but disappointment for some; for others, the next experience. Profoundly subjective, deeply individual, unique and irrepeatable, human sexuality has meaning only to the extent that it remains an integrating factor, relating individual destiny to that of the species. The similarity between the creative and sexual acts might explain why changes similar to those occurring in erotic experience can be identified in the artistic, scientific, or political practice of the civilization of illiteracy. Unless we understand the many implications of such changes, we would only leap into a vortex of wild conjecture. Family is the part of the experience of human self-constitution in which such implications are most likely to have a profound effect. Family: Discovering the Primitive Future A paradox has developed: Homosexuals want to establish families and to have them acknowledged by society. Adults who have children choose to avoid the family contract. Well over 30% of the children born in the USA are born out of wedlock. In the pragmatic equation of human self-constitution, these facts bear deeper signification. Commenting before a television camera after a celebrity divorce trial, an onlooker remarked that there is more communication in preparing a pre-nuptial agreement than during a marriage. As exaggerated and imprecise (communication between whom-the couple or their representatives?) as this remark probably is, it nevertheless captures some traits of family life in our age. Indeed, families are constituted on the basis of economic agreements, mediated by lawyers and financial consultants. The risk of family breakdown is carefully integrated in the calculations establishing the viability of the marriage. Children are part of the calculation-minus the long-lasting emotional effects-as are the odds for illness, disability, and liabilities, such as living parents and siblings who might need assistance, or obligations due to previous marriages. The curves registering amount of time the recently married spend together reveals that once the agreement is signed, dialogue shrinks to less than eight hours a week, which is well below the time spent watching television-almost seven hours a day-or devoted to physical exercise. If surfing the Net is part of the newlyweds' life, there is even less dialogue. Typically, both partners in the marriage work, and this affects other aspects of family life besides dialogue. When children arrive, the time parents spend with them decreases progressively from the days following birth through the critical years of high school. It is reported that on the average, youngsters in the USA get their parents' attention for less than four hours a week. In some European countries, this time can reach eight to ten hours. On the Asian sub-continent, many children lose contact with their parents before the age of six. Statistics show that over a quarter of the American student population planning to enroll in college never discuss their high school programs, or necessary preparation courses, with their fathers. Close to half this amount never discuss their plans with their mothers (single or not). The same holds true for students in Italy, France, and Belgium. Divorce percentages, abortion rates, number of partners over one's lifetime, and hours spent with the family in meaningful exchange of ideas or in common tasks express a condition of the family that reflects the dynamics of today's human practical experiences. Over 16 million children under the age of eighteen years live with one parent (mainly the mother). Economics (income level, joblessness, opportunity) plays a critical role in the life of the young and of their progenitors. All the changes leading to the civilization of illiteracy affect the experience of family life, and result in radical changes of the family model itself. Faster rhythms of experiences leading to casual relationships and to forming a family are on record. Shorter cycles during which the experience is exhausted result in increasingly unstable relations and families. Permanence is no longer the expectation in marriage. Throughout society, clear-cut distinctions between morally right and wrong are being replaced by situation ethics. Increased mediation, through counselors, lawyers, doctors, and financial planners, explains the new efficiency of the family as short-lived interaction and cooperation. The factors mentioned characterize the new pragmatic framework of human existence in which a new kind of interpersonal commitment is made and a new type of family is established, not unlike the short-lived corporations that are exhausted as soon as their product's potential has been reached. In this pragmatic framework, family-like interactions harking back to the civilization of literacy, with its hierarchy and central authority and the promise of stability and security, are considered the only alternative to the new situation of the family. The people who consciously seek this alternative discover that the family is bound by relatively loose connections and that reciprocally advantageous distributed tasks replace family unity. Mediated and segmented experiences and vague commitments, which evolve into a frame of vague morality, dominate family life today. Marriages of expediency, undertaken to solve some difficulty-such as resident status in some countries, health insurance, care for one's old age, better chances at a career- illustrate the tendency. Once the conditions for the perpetuation and dissemination of values associated with literacy are no longer granted, at the current globally integrated scale of humankind, family life changes fundamentally. Even the notion of family is questioned. Family unity, reflected in the coherent pragmatic framework afforded by literacy, is replaced by individual autonomy and competition. An array of options greater than the one feasible at the scale characteristic of agricultural or industrial economy, presents itself to adults and children in their practical experiences of self-constitution. Nobody escapes the temptation of trying and testing in the multiple of choices that are characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy. There are many facets to what is called family. The concept displays ample variety in its perceived or construed meaning. Sexual instincts manifested as attraction, associated with the awareness of the consequence of reproduction, might lead the list in defining what it took to establish a family. At the same level of importance is the need to establish a viable unity of economic, cultural, and psychological significance, a framework, sanctioned by religious and political entities, for carrying out obligations significant to the community. These, and a number of additional elements, such as morality based on the pragmatics of health, inter-generational exchange of information and aid, social functions ensuring survival and continuity through cooperation and understanding with other families, are tightly connected. The nature of this interconnectedness is probably a much better identifier of what, under given socio- historical circumstances, is considered and experienced as family. Togetherness Dictionaries point to the broader meaning of an extended notion of family-all living in a household-with the root of the word extending to all the servants, as well as to blood relations and descendants of the same progenitor. What is probably missing from such a definition is the understanding of interconnectedness, more specifically, awareness of the role played by agents of connection, among which language, in general, and literacy, in particular, become relevant. Much has been written concerning the change from animal-like sexual drive to the formation of family; much, too, about the many specific forms of practical experiences through which families were established and maintained. The history of the human family captures the nature of the relations between man and woman, parents and offspring, near and distant kin, and between generations. Natural aspects of production and reproduction, and cultural, social, political, and ethnic elements are also expressed through the family. Its reality extends even to the area of interdependencies between the language of individuals constituting families as viable survival units, and the language of the community within which family is acknowledged. Whether female- or male-dominated, as the pragmatic context afforded, the family ascertains a sense of permanency against the background of need and flux. It is another constitutive practical experience involving the projection of individual biological characteristics in the context of life and work, an experience that progressively extended beyond biology into its own domain of expectations and values, and finally into its own effectiveness. In search of a family nucleus, we arrive at female, male, offspring. The biological structure is maintained by some bond, probably a combination of factors pertaining to survival (the economy of family), emotions, sexual attraction (which includes psychological aspects), and ways of interacting with the extended family and with other families (social aspects). But beyond this, little else can be stated without causing controversy. Within each family, there is a maternal and a paternal line. In some family types, mother and father together feed the children, introduce them to survival tactics, and train their family instincts. In other cases, only one parent assumes these functions. The implicit linearity of family relations unfolds through new family associations. Anthropological research reports in detail how families are established. The pragmatic aspect is decisive. In Melanesia, the goal is to acquire brothers-in-law who will join the woman's family in hunting, farming, and other activities. Margaret Mead described the rule of not marrying those one fights. Expressed in language, this rule has a normative quality. Nevertheless, in some tribes in Kenya, enemies marry to ensure that they become friends. The language expressing this strategy is more suggestive than imperative. Research also documents variations from the nuclear model. The Nayar, a population in India, consecrates a family in which children belong to the maternal line; fathers visit. The woman can have as many lovers as she desires. The semiosis of naming children reflects this condition. Rules established over time in some countries are indicative of peculiar pragmatic requirements: polygamy in societies where marriage is the only form of protection and fulfillment for women; polyandry in societies with a high man to woman ratio; uxorilocation (the new couple resides in the wife's home territory), and virilocation (the new couple resides in the husband's home territory). The scale at which family self-constitution takes place affects its effectiveness. When this scale reaches a certain threshold or critical size, structural changes take place. The family, in its various embodiments, and within each specific pragmatic framework, reflected these major changes in the human scale of mankind at many levels. From the first images documenting families over 25,000 years ago, in the Paleolithic Age, to the paintings at Sefar (Tassili des Ajjer, 4th century BCE), and to many other subsequent forms of testimony, we have indicators of change in family size, the nature of family hierarchy, inheritance mechanisms, restrictions and prohibitions (incest foremost), and above all, change in the family condition when the pragmatic context changes. The testimony extends to cemeteries: It matters who is buried with whom or close to whom; to the evolution of words: What Beneviste called glottochronology; to contracts. Marriage contracts, such as the cuneiform tablet of Kish, dated 1820 BCE, or contracts documenting the sale of land, in which the family tree of the sellers is reproduced as testimony that the entire family accepts the transaction, shed light on the evolution of family. When Aristotle stated "Each city is made up of families," he acknowledged that a stage of stabilized family relations had been reached, well adapted to the stabilizing pragmatic framework facilitated by the new practical experience of writing. By Aristotle's time, togetherness was designated through a name. The expectation at this scale of human relations was: without a name there is no social existence. Characteristics of sign processes pertinent to self-constitution as members of various family types become characteristic of the family. That is, the structure of family-based semiotic processes and the structure of the family are similar. Rudimentary signs, incipient language, oral communication, notation, and writing are stages in the semiosis of means of expression and communication. The sign processes of family develop in tandem. The quest for permanency At the time literacy became possible and necessary, it embodied an idiom of effective relations, both synchronically-at a given instance of those relations-and diachronically-over time, such as from one generation to another, each attached to the same use of language in writing, reading, and speaking. It is precisely the need to achieve efficiency, in every human endeavor, that assigns to the family the function of co-guarantor of tradition. Even before the possibility of literacy, language carried the do's and don'ts transmitting rules, based on the practical experience, that ensured survival through cooperation and new ways to satisfy direct needs and respond to expectations-rules that affected the efficiency of each practical experience. The family appropriated these requirements, shaping them into a coherent framework for efficient togetherness. Directness, sequentiality, linearity, centralism, cooperation, and determinism marked the family experience as it marked other experiences of human self-constitution. Family members relied directly on each other. As one male assumed the role of provider, and the female, or females, of caretaker, a certain structure of dependence was put in place, resulting in hierarchy and sub- hierarchies. Family activity involved repetitive and sequential phases related to survival: reproductive cycles of animals; the progression of seasons and its relation to agriculture (rainy and dry, cold and hot, long days and short days). The pragmatics of survival seemed determined; there was little choice in method and timing. The family took shape in a world of cause-and-effect, which also determined religious practices. The source of each rule for successful family life was direct practical experience; the test of validity was the effectiveness appropriate to the specific scale of humanity. The do's changed over time, as experience confirmed their efficiency. They became a body of accepted knowledge from which moral ideals are extracted, laws derived, and political action inspired within the context of literacy. In the industrial equation, output (products, end results, increase or profit) should equal or exceed input (raw materials, energy, human effort). The don'ts, adopted by religion, law, and rudimentary medical praxis, were engraved in language even more deeply. They were encoded together with punishments that reflected the urgency behind preserving the integrity of the family- based pragmatic framework, in the experience of the agricultural and, later on, the industrial model. The association between act and result was continuously scrutinized in a world of action and reaction. In a world of experience mediated through literacy, rules were followed for their own sake; or rather, for the sake of the permanence that literacy embodied. That at some time sexual relations outside marriage could be the cause of so many prohibitions and dire punishment, mainly for women, does not bear as much significance on the state of morals as upon the pragmatic implications of the act of infidelity and wantonness. These implications refer to lineage, continuity, and inheritance, psychological effects on other family members, health, and status of offspring born out of wedlock. Rules regarding family integrity were encoded in the language of custom, ritual, and myth. Later on they were encoded in the language of religion, philosophy, ethics, law, science, ideology, and political discourse. Eventually, they were recorded in the rules of the market. Filtered over time through a variety of experiences resulting in success or failure, they are acknowledged in culture, and adopted in the language of education, and probably most directly in the language of market transactions. To give birth meant to continue the sequence and enhance the chances of survival; to rear children to adulthood meant to afford new levels of efficiency. More people could be more effective in ensuring survival in a pragmatic framework of direct action and immediacy. Beyond a certain scale, it became effectively impossible to coordinate the complex of families that went into the entire family. City life, even in early cities, was not propitious to extended families. During this period, the strategy of labor division took over undifferentiated, direct execution of tasks. Over time, as the scale of human experience changed, community expectations were reflected in what used to be the domain of the individual or that of families. The term over time needs some clarification. The first phases to which we refer are of very slow change. From the initial indications of family-like relations up to the establishment of language families, the time span is greater than 15,000 years. From nuclei practicing agriculture to the first notation and writing, the time is in the range of 4,000 to 5,000 years. From then on, the cycles became more compressed: less than 2,000 years to the time religions were established, another 1,000 years to settlement in cities. Each moment marks either progressive changes in the pragmatic framework or radical change, when the scale of human life and work required different means to meet efficiency expectations. Language acquisition, settlement of populations, development of writing, the emergence of philosophy, science and technology, the Industrial Revolution, and the civilization of illiteracy are the six changes in the scale of humankind, each with its corresponding pragmatic framework. Many agents of influence contribute to the change from one pragmatic framework to another: climactic conditions, natural selection, the environment, religions, communal rules, distribution of resources, and the experience of the market. Regardless of the difference in languages, language use is probably the common experience through which natural changes are acknowledged and social differentiation effected. Exactly what made literacy necessary-the need to achieve levels of efficiency corresponding to the human scale that led to industrial society-made the corresponding type of family necessary. Families reproduced the needed working force and transmitted the literacy required to attain the efficiency of qualified work. Such work was accomplished in a setting fundamentally different from that of immediate, direct, practical experiences with nature (farming, animal husbandry), or small-scale craftsmanship. Literacy was fostered by the family as a means of coordination and as a universal language of human transactions. This is how family fulfills the function of co- guarantor of education. Conversely, among the forms through which the future contract of literacy was acknowledged, family is one. The pragmatic need for permanency reflected in the expectation of the stable family has many consequences inside and outside family life. These can be witnessed in the spirit and letter of contractual obligations people enter under the coordinating power of the literate commitment. Education, law, politics, religion, and art are impregnated with this spirit. As the ultimate family-the homogeneous family of families-the nation asserts its permanency as a reflection of the permanency of its constituent atoms. When deterioration occurs in the conditions that make literacy possible and necessary, many of the permanencies associated with literacy, including the interpersonal relations adapted to it, or the homogeneity of nations, fail. As we entertain the prospect that nations, as definable political entities, might disappear, we automatically wonder whether the family, as a definable social entity, will survive-and if yes, in what form. What breaks down when family fails? The downfall of nations and empires has been attributed to the breakdown of the family. The weakening of family has been cited as a cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Anti-abortionists and other traditionalists in the United States blame the breakdown in traditional family values for many of the social ills of our day. Now that the royal children in Great Britain are divorced, people wonder how long the monarchy will last. One of the symptoms of the civilization of illiteracy is the perceived breakdown of family. Simultaneously, other institutions, such as schools, the church, the military, embodying permanency and stability, are undergoing drastic reassessment. In a broad sense, a transition from one way of life to another has been taking place. But things are a little more confusing since what used to be is not always actually replaced by something else, but rescaled, turned into a possibility among many, in a dynamics of ever-expanding diversity and wider choices. Many have argued that the breakdown of the traditional family was inevitable. They bring up cultural, ideological, and socio- economic arguments-from the liberation of women and children to the exhausted model of the patriarchal structure. All these arguments are probably partially right. After previous economies of scarcity and limited means of production, human experience at the global scale has brought about a wealth of choices and means of affluence that question the very premise of the family contract. In a context of rapid change from the practical experience of authority to the pragmatics of endless choice, subsumed under the heading of freedom, the permanency of the family structure comes under the methodical doubt of our new patterns of praxis. The tension between choice and authority was experienced in family life in the specific context of human relations based on hierarchy and centralism. New questions have a bearing on sexuality, parent-child relations, interactions among families, and the whole social fabric. Likewise, the transition of what was projected as self-control-with elements of self-denial, for the sake of family, a form of internalized authority-to the discovery of new frontiers, and the alternative pursuit of self- indulgence, follows the same path. These new frontiers and alternatives make values appear relative and undermine the spirit of sharing implicit in the traditional experience of family. Sharing is replaced by strategies of coordination and wealth preservation, all involving many mediating elements, such as political power, the legal system, taxation, charity. It is argued, probably with good reason, that the high rate of divorce-the socially sanctioned breakdown of a family, but probably only relatively indicative of the breakdown-is not meaningful unless put in a broader context: how many people still marry, how many remarry, how much longer people live. The high rate of divorce at the end of World War II is symptomatic of events above and beyond the structural characteristics of family constitution, re-constitution, or breakdown. The rate of divorce in the years following the war, especially in the last 10-15 years, is nevertheless connected to the underlying structure of a pragmatic framework within which permanency, whether that of language, family, values, nations, laws, art, or anything else, becomes a liability because it affects the dynamics of change. One out of two marriages-and the proportion is changing quite fast-ends in divorce. This is, nevertheless, only one aspect of broader modifications making such a rate more of a qualifier than an accident in human pairing. The dynamics of reproduction-births per marriage, average number of children per family, children living with one parent, infant mortality-is significant from the perspective of one of the most important functions of family. In the pragmatic context of today's integrated world, the need to have many children in order to maintain continuity and viability is different, even in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, or Africa, than at any previous time. The species has practically freed itself from the direct pressure of natural selection. What is at work, even in areas of extreme poverty, is a perverted mechanism of interdependencies echoing what herders in East Africa expressed as: "He who has children does not sleep in the bush." The family has ceased to be the sole source of welfare. Its functions are taken over by the community, the state, even international organizations. The fact that in some parts of the world this structural change is not acknowledged, and very high birth rates are on record, shows that the result of ignoring the pragmatic exigencies of this new age adds to the burden, not to the solution. Another phenomenon difficult to assess is the single woman who decides to give birth. If individual or social material resources are available, moral and educational needs or expectations still remain to be addressed. Individualism fostered to the extreme partially explains the trend, but cannot satisfactorily indicate the many aspects of this new phenomenon characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy. If one reads the statistics, single parenthood appears like a sure winner in the lottery of poverty and frustration. The problems of children who will be growing up with a mother single by choice will be the source of much sociological and psychoanalytical research in the future. But existence is more than numbers in ledgers, or psychological predicaments. Self-fulfillment, the instinct to nurture and to ensure continuity are all at work in such cases. The homosexual family No group has done more in the way of forcing us to rethink the definition and role of family as homosexuals have. Within the civilization of illiteracy, homosexuals assert their identity in the public eye. Gay and lesbian groups fight for the ratification of the homosexual family, which could not even be conceived of within the pragmatics associated with literacy. Their fight corresponds to a practical experience that is not motivated by the self-perpetuation drive of the species, but by other forces. These are economic, social, and political-the right to enjoy the same benefits as members of heterosexual families. Interestingly enough, social principles adopted in the age when pragmatics required that society support childbirth, family nurturing, and education are extended today, under totally different circumstances, in ignorance of the necessities that were reflected in these principles. A tax deduction was an expression of social co- participation, since society needed more people, better educated youth, a stable framework of family life. The economy and the military could not succeed without the fresh flesh of new generations. Gays and lesbians challenge the traditional notion of family in a context that no longer requires hierarchy and that redefines roles that have become stereotypes and undemocratic. They propose a model on a continuum in which each partner can be provider and assume household duties to any degree. There are no clear-cut roles, no clear-cut hierarchy, and no long-term commitments. Children are not the consequence of sexual relations but of desire and choice. This choice has two aspects of special significance for the pragmatics of our age. One concerns the human desire to form an alliance in the form of family, which seems almost instinctual. It may be difficult to recognize a natural inclination in a context (homosexuality) that negates propagation of the species. It is this threat to survival that caused so many taboos to be placed on homosexuality in the first place. These taboos took on other dimensions when encoded in a literacy that ignored the pragmatics. The second aspect has to do with the extent to which homosexuals' desire for a family constitutes its own validity in the pragmatic framework of our time. To what extent does the desire to have a family reveal characteristics of human self-constitution in the current context? In a world in which there is a high rate of births out of wedlock, a world in which the traditional family is no guarantee of relationships free of abuse and exploitation, a world with great numbers of children in orphanages or in foster care, any desire to place children in a loving family context is worthy of attention. What constitutes a family in an age whose pragmatics is not defined by the values perpetuated in and through literacy? The new definition might go along these lines: main provider (the father role); second provider (the mother role), who is also manager of the household. The two roles are not polarized; each provider participates in household work and in salaried work outside the home, as circumstances require. A child is a dependent under the age of 18 years (or 22 years if in college), for whom the providers are legally responsible. A grandparent is qualified through age and willingness to assume the role. Aunt/uncle is someone with fraternal ties to the providers. The definitions can go on. In considering these literate definitions, we can see that they apply to the situation of the current traditional family as well, in which father and mother both work, in which a child may live with and be cared for by a parent's second or third spouse, in which distance from or lack of blood relations calls for ad hoc relatives. The most vital implications concern our culture as it has been passed down over the centuries through literate expression, laden with values that literacy perpetuates and endows with an aura, in defiance of the new pragmatics and the new scale in which humans operate. The homosexual family and its occasional focus on adopting children reflects the fact that we live in a world of many options, and consequently of very relative values. Their desire for a family, under circumstances that are far from being conducive to family life, is as valid as that of an unmarried woman who wants to give birth and rear a child (the one-parent household). It is as valid as the desire of infertile couples who use every means the market offers to have a child, through costly medical intervention or by hiring surrogates. In the civilization of illiteracy, each person forms his or her own definition of family, just as people form their own definitions of everything else. The only test of validity is, ultimately, effectiveness. In the long run, the biological future of the species will also be affected, one way or another, as part of the effectiveness equation. To want a child The new pragmatics ultimately affects the motives behind forming a family in the civilization of illiteracy. Marriage, if at all considered, has become a short-term contract. Its brevity contradicts marriage's reason for being: continuity and security through offspring and adaptation to life cycles. The attitudes with which partners enter the family contract result in a dynamic of personal relations outside of that sanctioned by society. Vows are exchanged more as a matter of performance than of bonding. Natural instincts are systematically overridden through mediating mechanisms for providing nourishment, acquiring health care, and settling conflicts. Child rearing is the result of pragmatic considerations: What does a couple, or single parent, give up in having a child? Can a mother continue working outside the home? In order to correctly qualify answers to these questions, we would need to acknowledge that many characteristics of the individuals constituting a family, or seeking alternatives to it, are reflected in the family experience, or in experiences that are parallel to it. Economic status, race, religion, culture, and acculturation play an important role. Literacy assumed homogeneity and projected expectations of uniformity. The new pragmatic framework evidences the potential of heterogeneous experiences. Data indicating that the average numbers of divorces, single-parent households, number of partners, etc. vary drastically among groups of different biological, cultural, and economic backgrounds shows how necessary it is to realistically account for differences among human beings. Let us take a look at some statistical data. But before doing that, let us also commit ourselves to an unbiased interpretation, free of any racial prejudice. Almost 60% of Black children in the USA are living in a one-parent household. Of these children, 94% live with their mothers. It was documented that 70% of the juveniles in long-term correctional facilities grew up without a father. To make any inference from such data without proper consideration of the many factors at work would only perpetuate literacy-based prejudices, and would not lead to a better understanding of the new circumstances of human self-constitution. Our need to understand the dynamics of family and what can be done to effect a course of events that is beneficial to all involved cannot be served unless we understand the many characteristics of the practical experience of self-constitution of the Black family, or of any non-standard Western family. Under the expectations of literacy, a prototypical family life was to be expected from all. As the expectation of homogeneity is overridden by all the forces at work in the civilization of illiteracy, we should not be surprised by, and even less inclined to fasten blame on people who constitute themselves in ways closer to their authenticity. Multiplication of choice is-let me state again-part of the civilization of illiteracy. Modern, enlightened laws introduced in some African countries prohibit polygamous families. With this prohibition in place, a new phenomenon has occurred: Husbands end up having extra-marital affairs and support neither their lovers nor their children, which they did under polygamy. Paradoxically, activists in the Women's Liberation movement are seriously considering the return to polygamy, as an alternative to the increasing number of deadbeat dads and the misery of abandoned wives and children. There is no necessary relation between the two examples, rather the realization that within the civilization of illiteracy, tradition comes very powerfully to expression. Children in the illiterate family Nobody can characterize families of the past (monogamous or polygamous) as unfailingly unified and showing exemplary concern for offspring. Children, as much as wives and husbands, were abused and neglected. Concern over education was at times questionable. The projected ideal of authority and infallibility resulted in the perpetuation of patterns of experiences from which we are still fighting to free ourselves. Notwithstanding these and other failures, we still have to acknowledge that a shift, from individual and family responsibility to a diffuse sense of social responsibility, characterizes the process affecting the status of children. The family in the civilization of illiteracy embodies expectations pertinent to progressively mediated practical experiences: from childbirth-an almost industrial experience-to education; from entering the family agreement, mediated by so many experts-lawyers, priests, tax consultants, psychologists-to maintaining a sense of commonalty among family members; from embodying direct interaction and a sense of immediacy to becoming instances of segmentation, change, and interaction, and instances of competition and outright conflict. The institution of the family must also counteract sequentiality and linearity with a sense of relativity that allows for more choices, which the new human scale makes possible. This new pragmatic framework also allows for higher expectations. Like any other institution, the institution of marriage (and the bureaucracy it has generated) has its own inertia and drive to survive, even when the conditions of its necessity, at least in the forms ascertained in the past, are no longer in place. In short, the breakdown of the family, even if equated with the failure of the individuals constituting it-children included-is related to the new structural foundation of a pragmatic framework for which it is not suited as a universal model, or to which it is only partially acceptable. This does not exclude the continuation of family. Rather, it means that alternative forms of cooperation and interaction substituting the family will continue to emerge. Just as literacy maintains a presence among many other literacies, the family is present among many forms of reciprocal interdependence, some expanding beyond the man-woman nucleus. To understand the dynamics of this change, a closer look at how the new pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy affects experiences pertinent to family is necessary here. The history of the family, independent of its various embodiments (matriarchal, patriarchal, polygamous, monogamous, restricted or extended, heterosexual or homosexual), is in many respects the history of the appropriation of the individual by society. The offspring of primitive humans belonged to nobody. If they survived to puberty, they continued life on their own, or as members of the group in which they were born, as nameless as their parents. Children and parents were amoral and competed for the same resources. The offspring of the humans constituting their own identity, and their own universe parallel to that of nature, belonged more and more to what emerged as the family, and by extension to the community (tribe, village, parish). The child was marked, named, nurtured, and educated, as limited as this education might have been. It was given language and, through the experience of work, a sense of belonging. In all known practical experiences-work, language, religion, market, politics-the succession of generations was specifically acknowledged. Rules, some pertaining to the preservation of biological integrity, others to property and social life, were established in order to accommodate relations between generations. Over centuries, family ownership of children decreased while that of society increased. This is reflected in the various ways church, school, social institutions, and especially the market claim each new generation. In this process, mediation becomes part of family life: the priest, the teacher, the counselor, the language of advertisement, direct marketing, and much, much more is insinuated between children and their parents. The process intensifies as expectancies of better life for less effort become predominant. Responsibilities, procreation included, are distributed from the parents to the practical experiences of genetics. Test tube production of babies is an alternative to natural procreation. More to come. As a matter of fact, both procreation and adoption are dominated by strong selective methods and design procedures. Genetic traits are identified and matched in the genetic banks of adoptable children. Surrogate mothers are selected and contracted based on expectations of behavior and heredity. Sperm banks offer selections from high IQ or high physical performance bulls. Other mediators specify ideal cows, surrogate mothers whose offspring are treated like any other commodity-"satisfaction guaranteed." If the product is somehow unsatisfactory, the dissatisfied parents get rid of it. Obviously, the language and literacy expected for the success of the biochemical reaction in the test tube is different from that involved in the constitution of the family. It is also different from the literacy involved in the change from instinctual sexual encounters to love, procreation, and child rearing. In each of the procedures mentioned, new languages-of genetics, for example-introduce levels of mediation that finally affect the efficiency of procreation. As nightmarish as some of these avenues might seem, they are in line with the entire development towards the new pragmatics: segmentation-the task is divided into sub-tasks-networking-to identify the desired components and strategies for synthesis-and task distribution. Children are not yet made on the Internet, but if the distinction between matter and information suggested by some geneticists is carried through, it would not be impossible to conceive of procreation on networks. A new individuality The process of mediation expands well further. Family life becomes the subject of practical experiences involving family planning, health, psychology, socialized expectations of education, the right to die. The private family owned their offspring and educated it to the level of its own education, or to the level it deemed advantageous, consistent with the progress of literacy. To the extent that this family was involved in other experiences, such as religion, sport, art, or the military, children grew up partaking in them. Once one aspect of the relation between environment, home, family, and work changes-for example, living in the city reshapes the nature of the dependence on the environment, the house is one of several possible, family members work at different jobs-the family is made more and more part of a bigger family: society. In turn, this belonging dissolves into solitary individualism. Nothing any longer buffers the child from the competitive pressure that keeps the economic engine running. Industrial society required centers of population while it still relied on relatively nuclear families that embodied its own hierarchy. The human scale reflected in industrial society required the socialization of family in order to generate an adequate workforce, as well as the corresponding consumption. With networking, children as much as adults are on their own, in a world of interactions that breaks loose from any conceivable constraints. There is no need to fantasize here, rather to acknowledge a new structural situation of consequences beyond our wildest imagination. Literacy unified through its prescriptions and expectations. It facilitated the balance between the preserved naturalness and the socialized aspect of family. It projected a sense of permanency and shielded the family from the universe of machines threatening to take over limited functions of the body: the mechanical arm, the treadmill. As a human medium for practical experiences involving writing and reading, literacy seemed to represent a means of resistance against the inanimate. It helped preserve human integrity and coherence in a world progressively losing its humanity due to all the factors that the need for increased efficiency put in place (machines, foremost). It eventually became obvious that procreation had to be kept within limits, that there is a social cost to each child and to each mother giving birth. Moreover, family structural relations needed to be reconsidered for the expected levels of efficiency to be maintained and increased, as expectations took over desires. The new pragmatic framework is established as this borderline between the possible and the necessary. The civilization of illiteracy is its expression. At the family level, the civilization of illiteracy corresponds to increased segmentation, affecting the very core of family life, and mediation. The family can no longer be viewed as a whole by the many mediating entities constituting the market. The market is with us from birth to death. It deals in every aspect of life, and extends the pressure of competition in each moment of our existence. The market segments medical care. It is most likely that each family member sees a different doctor, depending on age, sex, and condition. It segments education, religion, and culture. It is not uncommon that family members constitute their identity in different religious experiences, and some of them in none, as it is not uncommon that their educational needs run the gamut from a modicum of instruction to never-ending study. They live together, or find togetherness on the network matrix-one running a business on some remote continent, the other pursuing solitary goals, and some adapting to foreign cultures (less than to foreign languages). The market has broken society into segments and the family into parts on which it concentrates its message of consumption. There is not one market entity that views the family as a whole. Children are targeted on the basis of their economic, cultural, and racial background for everything from food to clothing to toys and recreation. And so are their respective natural or adoptive parents, grandparents, and relatives. We can all decry this as manipulation, but in fact it corresponds to the objective need to increase commercial efficiency through narrow marketing. Accordingly, a new moral condition emerges, focused on the individual, not on the family. Part of the broader pragmatic framework, this process stimulates the relative illiteracy of the partners constituting the family. This illiteracy is reflected in varied patterns of sexual behavior, in new birth control strategies, in a different reciprocal relation between men and women, or between individuals of the same sex, and in as-yet undefinable codes of family behavior. The condition of the child in the civilization of illiteracy corresponds to the same dynamics. Children are less and less cared for at home, often entrusted to specialized caretakers, and finally started on their way through the vast machine called the education system. Discontinuity It makes no sense to decry the hypocrisy of double (or multiple) standards and the loss of a morality associated with the misery of people obliged to remain together by forces they consider legitimate (religion foremost). In the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy, forces kept under the control of rules and norms established in the practical experience of literacy are unleashed. It would be difficult to speak about progress where one sees the demise of family, the erosion of private life, the increased number of one- parent households, of early and very early maternity, of incest, rape and increased child abuse, of obsession with contraceptives or ignorance of their use, and the threat of sexually transmitted diseases and drugs. Still, before hurrying value judgments, one would be better advised to consider the entire picture and to assess what makes all these occurrences possible, indeed, what makes them necessary. It might well be true that what we perceive as the sources of morality and happiness-the family, children, love, religion, work, and the satisfaction associated with all of these-are exhausted. It might well be that fresh sources must be sought, or invented, or at least not eliminated because they do not fit the mold of previous choices. Even the thought that morality and happiness are altogether unnecessary deserves to be considered. They are loaded with the expectation of permanency and universality rendered impossible in the new pragmatic framework of permissiveness, local values, instant gratification, change, and interconnectedness. The nuclear family of the civilization of literacy has been absorbed in the illiterate dynamics of societal functioning. It is coming out of the experience restructured. On the other hand, socially acceptable patterns of development are encouraged through the public education system, where the chief objective is the socialization of children, not the dissemination of knowledge. Ethnic characteristics are progressively, although timidly, acknowledged. The seemingly losing battle against drugs leads many parents and social researchers to wonder whether legalization would be more efficient than spending immense amounts of money and energy to fight the underground market. In this world of mediation, science and technology make genetic engineering possible in the form of influencing the profile of the offspring, ways to avoid what does not fit the fashionable, ways to induce early in development (almost at the embryonic stage) preferences and cognitive characteristics. Together with everything pertaining to the human being self-constituted in the framework of the civilization of illiteracy, the family goes public in the stock market of the many enterprises involved in the self-perpetuation and the well being of the species. Its value is no longer a matter of those constituting it, of its goals and means, but of the return on the investment society makes in it. As a competitive unit within the pragmatic framework associated with literacy, the family freed itself from the constraints implicit in literacy that affect its efficiency. It became a contract, one among the growing number, in whose expression literacy gives way to the alternative litigation language of the law, in respect to which, with the exception of lawyers, everyone else is illiterate. Favorable taxation supports children-euphemistically called deductions when they are really additions-but not beyond what is socially expected of them, at least in the USA: to become agents of consumption and increased efficiency as soon as possible. In this sense, the tensions between generations are simply refocused-society is willing to make available social help in the form of transitory family substitutes. The problem is not addressed, only its symptoms. The languages of counseling and psychiatry at work here are another instance of specialized literacy. They substitute for family communication while projecting limited and limiting psychological explanations upon all those involved. In an age that expects efficiency to lead to satisfaction, if not happiness, the family relies on specialists when problems arise: psychiatrists, counselors, specialized schools. Sometimes the specialists are imposed when society perceives a need to intervene, especially in cases of suspected child abuse. It is reflective of the pragmatics of our time that the elderly receive attention in the market of mediations and specializations on a less obvious level. They are considered only to the extent that they are viable consumers. Once upon a time, and still in isolated cases, such as the Amish and Mennonites in the USA, age was to be honored for its own sake, a value kept alive through literacy. While many elderly enjoy the benefits of better healthcare and economic sufficiency, they effectively divorce themselves from the family in enjoying what the market offers them. Their participation in the family is a matter of choice more than necessity. The success of the Internet among the elderly, in need of communication and support groups, is a very telling phenomenon. Networks of reciprocal support, as nuclei of self-organization, emerge independent of any form of social intervention. Their viability is based on this dynamics. The struggle between the value of life in the civilization of literacy and that of illiteracy can be seen in hospitals and nursing homes where the aged are treated on machine-based analogies, abandoned or entrusted to specialists in the care of the dying. While aging and death cannot be eliminated, the market provides ways to avoid them as long as we can afford to. It used to be that the new generation continued the family work-farming, carpentry, pottery, law, business, banking, publishing. This happened in a context of continuity and relative permanence: the work or business remained relatively unchanged. Literacy was appropriate for the transfer of know-how, as it was for the maintenance of family-based values and successive assumption of responsibilities regarding the family, moreover the community. These pragmatic elements no longer exist the way they did. Today, even within the same generation, the nature of business evolves, and so does the nature of the values around which family is established. In addition, ownership changes as well; businesses are more and more integrated in the market; they become public entities; their shares are traded with no regard to the object those shares represent. The consequence is what we perceive as lack of family continuity and bonding. The new nature of the family contract is such that its basis of affection is eroded. Sequentiality of work is replaced by cycles of parallel activity during which generations compete as adversaries. This is why the family contract is shifted more and more to the market, depersonalized, indexed like one among many commodities. This contract is no longer literacy-bound, but rooted in circumstances of distributed activities of intense competition and networking. Once demythified, family relations are reassessed; continuity is severed. The market acknowledges the segmentation of family-no longer an economic entity in its own right-and in turn accentuates it. The baby business, the infant market, teenagers, and so on to the senior market are well focused on their respective segments as these embody not just age groups, but foremostly expectations and desires that can be met at the level of each individual. How advanced the past; how primitive the future No matter how intense the desire to maintain a neutral discourse and to report facts without attaching teleological conclusions to them, it turns out that the language of family, probably more than the language of science, machines, or even art, religion, sports, and nourishment, involves our very existence. Where should somebody place himself in order to maintain some degree of objectivity? Probably at the level of the structural analysis. Here, everything affecting the status of family and the condition of morality appears as a network of changing interrelations among people involved in the practical experiences of defining what a human being is. It seems, at times, that we relive experiences of the primitive past: the child knew only his or her mother; women started giving birth at an early age (almost right after menarche); children were on their own as soon as they could minimally take care of themselves. But we also build an ideal image of the family based on recollections of the less distant past: permanent marriages ("until death"), respect for parents, mother cooking meals for which the whole family sits down, father bringing wood for the family hearth, children learning by participating, assuming responsibilities as their maturity permitted. This idealized image is also the bearer of prejudices: women's subservient role, the authoritarian model passed from one generation to another, frustration, unfulfilled talents. So the paradox we experience is that of a primitive future: more animality (or, if you want a milder term, naturalness) in comparison to a civilized (or at least idealized) past. There is no cause for worry, especially in view of the realization that despite our success in labeling the world (for scientific and non-scientific purposes), the majority of human behavior is determined (as already pointed out) independent of labels. Taking into account that the notion of permanency is related to relatively stable frames of reference makes it easier to explain why the high mobility of our age results in changes, both physical and psychological, that undermine previous expectations. Losing the discipline of the natural cycle that affected human work for centuries, human beings freed themselves from a condition of subservience, while at the same time generating new constraints reflected in the nature of their reciprocal relations. What does it mean to become used to something-environment, family, acquaintances-when this something is changing fast, and with it, we ourselves? The Industrial Revolution brought about the experience of labor-saving machinery, but also of many new dependencies. In Henri Steele Commanger's words, "Every time-saving machine required another to fill the time that had been saved." One might not agree with this description. But it would be hard to contradict its spirit by taking only a cursory look at all the contraptions of illiteracy filling the inventory of the modern household: radio, photo camera, TV set, video recorder, video cassette player, WalkmanT, CD player, electronic and digital games, laser disc player, CD-ROM, telephone, computer, modem. The one-directional communication supported by some of these machines affected patterns of interaction and resulted in audiences, but not necessarily in families, at least not in the sense acknowledged in practical experiences of family life. With the two-directional communication, supported by digital networks, human interaction takes on a new dimension. Choices increase. So do risks. Once the substance of one's experience is substituted by mediations, even the rationale for communication changes, never mind the form. Families separated by virtue of assignments (war, business) at remote locations, or in pursuit of various interests (sport, entertainment, tourism), exchange videotapes instead of writing to each other, or focus on telephone conversations meant to signal a point of reference, but not a shared universe of existence and concerns. They discover e-mail and rationalize messages to a minimum. Or they become a Web page, available to whoever will surf by. All these changes-probably more can be acknowledged-took place concomitant with changes in our expectations and accepted values. With the increased gamut of choice, attachment to value decreases. When all emotions come from soap operas, and all identity from the latest fashion trend, it becomes difficult to defend notions such as sensitivity and personality. When love is as short as the random encounter, and faith as convincing as reading a person's palm or tarot cards, it is impossible to ascertain a notion of reciprocal responsibility or the moral expectation of faithfulness. On the other hand, when the need to achieve levels of efficiency dictated by a scale of humankind never experienced before and by expectations and desires in continuous expansion is as critical as we make it, something is given up-or, to put it the other way around, somebody has to pay for it. With the sense of globality-of resources, actions, plans- comes the pressure of integration of everybody into the global market, and the expectations of consumption attached to it. Many-to-many communication is not just a matter of bandwidth on digital networks, but of self-definition, also. The family used to reflect the perceived infinity of the universe of existence., despite the family's finite and determined internal structure. With the awareness of limited resources, in particular those of the natural support system, comes the realization that alternative practical experiences of life and cooperation become necessary in order to generate new pragmatic frameworks for increased efficiency and enhanced dynamism. The indefinite expansion of what people want and the progressive incorporation of higher numbers of human beings into the market through which affluence, as much as misery, can be achieved, results in the devaluation of life, love, of values such as self-sacrifice, faithfulness, fairness. The moral literate philosophers of the 19th century-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, William James-thought that the answer lay in our recognition that the world is not only for enjoyment. One can imagine a TV debate (interrupted by commercials, of course) between them and the romantic proponents of the ideology of progress-John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith, David Hume. It's safe to wager that the audience would zap over their literate debate, while they would enjoy the illiterate 30-second spots. None of the philosophers would establish a Web site, as none would be terribly excited about the discussion forums on the Internet-not a place for intellectual debate. Who would read their elegant prose? To say more at this point would almost preempt the argument: The family in the civilization of illiteracy ascertains new forms of human interaction. It departs from the expectation of conformity for a model that acknowledges many ways to live together and, even more important, how we transcend our own nature in this process. We might, after all, be much more than we know, or trust that we could become. A God for Each of Us On the Memetic Algorithms Web page on the Internet, H. Keith Henson illustrates the lifelike quality of memes by recounting an episode from his time as a student (University of Arizona, 1960). Having to fill out a form on which religious affiliation was to be disclosed, he chose the denomination Druid, after having initially tried MYOB (the acronym for Mind Your Own Business). As he stated, "It was far too good a prank to keep it to myself." Replication mechanisms, in addition to a healthy dose of social criticism, soon had the university record almost 20% of the student body as Reform Druids, Orthodox Druids, Southern Druids, Members of the Church of the nth Druid, Zen Druids, Latter-Day Druids, and probably a number of other variations. Once the question regarding religious affiliation was removed from the entry form, the chain of replication and variation was interrupted. There are many aspects of the relation between religion and language embedded in the anecdote. In some of the themes to be discussed in the coming pages, the humorous aspects will resonate probably less than questions on how religious experiences extend from early forms of human awareness to the current day. Using, or even inventing, advanced technology, asking the most probing questions, experiencing injustice and pain, being subjected to antireligious indoctrination, or even repression, does not result in the abandonment of religion. Ignorance, primitive living conditions, extreme tolerance and liberalism, the possibility to freely choose one's religious affiliation from the many competing for each soul might lead to skepticism, if not to outright rejection of Divinity. In other words, conditions that seem to support religious beliefs do not automatically lead to practical experiences of human self-constitution as religious. Neither do adverse conditions generate atheists, or at least not the same kinds. There is no simple answer to the question of why some people are religious, some indifferent, and others actively against religion. Enlightenment did not result in generalized atheism; the pressure of the church did not generate more believers. Scientific and technological progress of the magnitude we experience did not erase the verb to believe from among the many that denote what people do, or no longer do, in our day. To believe, and this applies to religion as it applies to all other forms of belief, is part of the practical experience of human self- constitution. It involves our projection in a world acknowledging distinctions that are pragmatically significant and synchronized with the dynamics of life and work. The world of nature is not one of belief but of situations. We humans perceive the world, i.e., project ourselves as entities, forming images of the surroundings in our mind, through many filters. One of them is our continuously constituted beliefs, in particular, our religious faith. Webster's dictionary (probably as good a source as any reference book) defines religion as "belief in a divine superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshipped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe." Religion today is far less a coherent and consistent practical experience than it was in previous pragmatic frameworks. The manifold relation between literacy and religion can be meaningfully understood by explaining the pragmatic context of the constitution of religion. Its further development into different theologies, and its embodiment in various churches and other institutions connected to religion, also help in this understanding. The centralized and hierarchic structure of religion, the basic notions around which theology evolves, and the dynamics of change in religion and theology that reflect adaptive strategies or goals of changing the world to make it fit a theology, have a strong bearing on the values that formed and transformed literacy. Truly, language and religion, especially language after the experience of writing, developed practically in tandem. The transition from ritual to myth to incipient religion is simultaneously a transition from primitive expression, still tightly connected to body movement, image, and sound, to a more self- organized system of expression becoming communication. During the process, presented here in compressed form, writing appears as a result of interactions between the experiences of language and religion. That writing is a premise for pragmatic requirements that will eventually lead to literacy has already been generously explained. It has also been pointed out that with writing emerges the perspective of literacy into whose reality many more practical experiences will eventually crystallize. Literacy and religion are intertwined in ways different from those characteristic of other human practical experiences. In the historic overview to be provided, these peculiarities will be pointed out. Expression, as a practical experience of human self-constitution, interrupts the slow cycle of genetic replication, and inaugurates the much shorter cycles of memetic transmission-along the horizontal axis of those living together, and along the vertical axis in the quickly succeeding sequence of generations. The role of scale of human experience, the relation between religious, ethical, aesthetic, political, and other aspects, the relation between individual and community, and between right and wrong will also be addressed in their context. In addition, logical, historic, and systemic arguments will be employed to clarify what religions have in common. In anticipation of a short history, it should be clarified that living in a religion of one God (such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam), or of many (as the Hindu world entertains), or of a mixture of pantheism and mysticism (as in the Chinese or Japanese worlds), even living in animism, does not imply identification with its history, nor even with its national or ethnic confines or premises. Islamic enthusiasm and Christian retreat in our day is not a matter of the validity of one religion over the other, but rather a matter of their pragmatic significance. United in accepting Allah as their God, or a broadly defined way of living according to the Koran, Moslims are far less united than the less religious, and less homogeneous, Christians. But in giving up the clear-cut distinctions between right and wrong, and especially involving relativity in the search for options leading to higher efficiency, we constitute ourselves in a framework of vagueness and relativity-different from the transcendental value of Hinduism, or from the clear-cut values of contemporary Islam-which can no longer rely on the certainty embodied in literacy-based praxis, and which leads us to subject human existence to doubt. In realizing the broad consequences of a pragmatics based on the desire to achieve levels of efficiency appropriate to a given scale of human experience, we can understand why some conflicts involving forces identifying themselves with religions from the past against forces of the present appear as religious conflicts. The most vivid examples can be found in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the southern republics of the defunct Soviet Union. Through a religious past to which they have lost any meaningful connection, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians try to reconnect to the world of experiences to which they traditionally belong. In the Central Asian conflicts, allegiances are confused-Sunni from Tadjikistan align themselves with the Shiites of Iran, while the Uzbeks pursue the hope of a new pan-Turkish empire. In a different vein, the sanctity of life celebrated in Taoism, as well as in Judaism and Christianity, ends at the doors of the shiny palace of cheap, replaceable values of planned obsolescence, eventually of the human being itself. In hope of redemption, many give their lives, probably not understanding that they close the cycle of potential practical experiences just as drug addicts, suicidals, and murderers do, obviously in different contexts and with different motivations. This might sound too strong, but it is no more extreme than the extremes of existence and faith, or lack thereof. Friends and foes of religion will agree that, for better or worse, it has played an important role in the history of humankind. The complement to this agreement is less clear: We cannot define what replaced, or could replace, religion. The new world order brought about by the downfall of communism in the Soviet Union and East Europe raises even more questions regarding religion: Are the extremist-not to say fanatical- forms of religion that replace official atheism religion or disguised forms of ethnic or cultural identification? To which extent do they reflect pragmatic reintegration in the global economy or safe isolationism? Practical experiences of religious nature were all affected by a change in their details: different ways of preserving religious doctrine, a different attitude towards authority, a change from self-denial to indulgence, but not in the fundamental acceptance of Divinity. Characteristics of religions are still in flux. For instance, religious events embedded in various cultures take on a merely ceremonial role in today's world, aligning themselves with the newest in music, imagery, interactive multimedia, and networks. Believers as well as casual spectators have access to religious ceremonies through Websites. Probably even more telling is the appropriation of social, political, and moral causes, as religion ascertains itself in our time as open, tolerant, and progressive, or conversely as the guardian of permanent values, justifying its active role outside its traditional territory. This ascertainment is dictated by the pragmatic framework of the dynamic reality in which religion operates, and not by the memetic replication of its name. This is, of course, the reason for not limiting our discussion to variation and replication, no matter how exciting this might appear. But who made God? The variety of religions corresponds to the variety of pragmatic circumstances of human identification. Regardless of such differences, each time children, or adults, are taught that God made the world, the oceans, the sun, stars, and moon, and all living creatures, they ask: But who made God? Trying to answer such a question might sound offensive to some, impossible to others, or a waste of time. Still, it is a good entry point to the broader issue of religion's roots in the pragmatic framework. The commonalties among the majority of religions, to which comparative studies (especially those of Mircea Eliade) point, are significant at the structural level. We have, on the one hand, all the limitations of the individual human-one among many, mortal, subject to illness and defeat, object of passion and seduction, deceitful, limited in understanding of the various forces affecting one's projection as part of nature, and as part of the human species. On the other hand, there is the uniqueness of the immortal, untouchable, impervious, omniscient, entity (or entities) able to understand and unleash forces far more powerful than those of nature or of men, an entity (or entities) upon which depends the destiny of all that exists. Through belief, all the limitations of the human being are erased. It is quite instructive, as well as impressive, how every limitation of the human being, objective and subjective, is counteracted and given a life of its own in the language housing the progression from man to gods or to God, on one side, and to the practice of religion, on the other. The various gods constituted in the world's religious texts also recount what people do in their respective environment, natural or tamed to some degree. They tell about what can go wrong in their life and work, and what community rules are most appropriate to the pragmatic context. The value of rain in the Middle East, the fine- tuning of work to seasonal changes in the Far East, the significance of hope and submission in the Indian subcontinent, the increased role of animal domestication, the extension of farmland, the role of navigation in other parts of the world are precisely encoded in the various religions and in their books. These books are bodies of explanations, expectations, and norms pertinent to practical experiences, written in very expressive language, ambiguous enough to accommodate a variety of similar situations, but precise in their identification of who is part of the shared religious experience, and who is outside, as foreign and undesirable, or foreign and subject to enticement. The plurality of religious experiences What makes religion necessary is a subject on which it would be foolish to expect any degree of consensus. What makes it possible, at least in the forms experienced and documented from ancient times to the modern, is language, and soon after language, writing-although Japanese Shintoism, like Judaism, began before writing-and reading, or more to the point, the Book. For the Judeo-Christian religions, as well as for Islam, the Book is the sufficient condition for their development and persistence. When the Book grew into books, it actually became the center of religious praxis. This is reflected in the nature of religious rituals, an extension of mytho-magical experiences previous to writing. They were all meant to disseminate the Book, and make its rules and prescriptions part of the life of the members of the respective community. The timeline of the practical experience of religious human self-constitution suggests significant commonalties among the various religions. The way the notion of God was constituted is only one of these commonalties. What separates religion from pre-religious expression (such as animism) is the medium in which each is articulated. The subject is relatively constant. Acknowledgment of forces beyond individual understanding and desire to overcome confusion or fear in facing difficult and inexplicable aspects of life and death go hand in hand. A perceived need to pursue avenues of survival which promise to be successful because of the implied expectation that forces residing in the unknown would be, if not directly supportive, at least not actively opposed, is also discernible. But when rationalizing the coming of age of religion, one automatically faces the broader issue of the source of religion. Is it given to humans by some perceived superior force? Does it result from our involvement with the environment of our existence and from the limits of our experience? When praxis began to differentiate, mytho-magical experiences proved unadaptable to the resulting pragmatic framework. Farming and animal husbandry replaced scavenging, hunting, and foraging. Communities started to compete for resources (manpower included). Efficiency of human work increased, resulting in more forms of exchange and leading to accumulation of property. Relations among people within communities became complex to the extent that arguments, attributed to forces outside direct practical experiences, were necessary to instill and maintain order. The process was multi- faceted, and still involved myths, the magical, and rituals. All three-still retraceable in some parts of the world-were carried over to religion, progressively forming a coherent system of explanations and prescriptions meant to optimize human activity. The sequence is known: Practical experiences conveyed by example from one individual to another, or orally from one to several. Where the unknown forces were ritually conjured in new forms of human practical self-constitution, these practical experiences were progressively unified and encoded in forms apt to further support the new scale achieved in the insular communities around the world. Abraham, accepted almost equally by Jews, Christians, and Moslems, lived at around 2,000 BCE and proclaimed the existence of one supreme God; Moses in the 13th century BCE; the six sacred texts of the Hindus were compiled between the 17th and 5th centuries BCE; Taoism-the Chinese religion and philosophy of the path-came to expression around 604 BCE, and Confucius's teachings on virtue, human perfectibility, obedience to Providence, and the role of the sage ruler shortly afterwards; Buddhism followed within decades, affirming the Four Noble truths, which teach how to exist in a world of suffering and find the path to inner peace leading to Nirvana. This listing is meant to highlight the context in which the practical experience of religious self-constitution was expressed in response to circumstances of life and work that necessitated a coherent framework for human interaction. The Torah, containing the five books of Moses dedicated to the basic laws of Judaism, was written around 1,000 BCE. It was followed by the other books (Prophets and Writings) and form the Old Testament. The Greeks, referring to all seven books (the Septuagint), called the entire work ta biblia (books). This collection of books is dedicated to the theme of creation, failure, judgment, exodus, exile, and restoration, and introduced prescriptions for conduct, diet, justice, and religious rites. The themes were presented against the broad background in which laws pertinent to work, property, morals, learning, relations between the sexes, individuals, tribes, and other practical knowledge (e.g., symptoms of diseases, avoidance of contamination) were introduced in normative form, though in poetic language. The pragmatic framework explains the physics of the prescriptions: What to do or not do in order to become useful in the given context, or at least not to be harmful. It also explains the metaphysics: why prescriptions should be followed, short of stating that failure to do so affects the functioning of the entire community. What was kept in writing from the broader oral elaborations that constituted the covenant (testament) for practical experience was the result of pragmatic considerations. Writing was done in consonantal Hebrew, a writing system then still at its beginning, on parchment scrolls, and thus subject to the limitations of the medium: How much text could be written on such scrolls in a size that facilitated reading and portability. Between these books and what much later (translations notwithstanding) came from the printing presses following Gutenberg's invention, there is a difference not only in size, but also in sequence and in substance. Over time, texts were subject to repeated transcriptions, translations, annotation, revision, and commentary. The book that appeared to be given once and for all kept changing, and became subject to interpretations and scrutiny ever so often. Still, there is a fundamental element of the continuity of its expressed doctrine: life and work, in order to be successful, must follow the prescribed patterns. Hence the implicit expectation: read the book, immerse yourself in its spirit, renew the experience through religious services meant to extol the word. But since alternate explanatory systems were progressively developed-science not the last-parallel to relative fixed pragmatic frames sanctioned in early religion, a certain separation of religion from practical experience took place. Religion consecutively constituted its own domain of human praxis, with its own division of labor, and its own frame of reference. Christianity, Islam, the Protestant Reformation, and various sectarian movements in China, Japan, the Indian subcontinent (neo- Confucianism, Zen, the Sikh religious movement) are such developments. We have heard about such expatiations and hear as well about conflicts triggered around them, but fail to put these conflicts in the perspective that explains them. Within a given context, a new growth triggers reactions. Members of the Baha'i religion (a faith that began in the 19th century) are subjected to the repression of Muslims because its program is one of unity of religions, not subordination of some to others. The expectation of universal education, or active promotion of equality between sexes, corresponds to a pragmatics different from that from which Islam emerged, and for that matter, many other religions. The Religious Society of Friends, i.e., the Quaker movement, was a reaction to the corruption of the church as an institution. It spells out a program in line with the requirements of the time: reaching consensus in meetings, doing away with sermons, pursuing a program of education and non-violence. It was also subjected to repression, as each schism was, by the powers that were in place. These and many other developments mark the long, as yet unfinished, process of transition from religion to theology and church, and even to business, as well as the process of permutation of religion into culture, in particular from religion to secular culture and market. The Book became not only many different books, but also varied experiences embodied in organized religion. Alternative perspectives were submitted as different ways to practice religion within a pragmatic context acknowledged by religion. And the word became religion In the circular structure of survival in nature, there was no room for metaphysical self-constitution, i.e., no practical need to wonder about what was beyond the immediate and proximate, never mind life and death. When the practical experience of self-constitution made rudiments of language (the language of gestures, objects, sounds) possible, a sense of time-as sequences of durations-developed, and thus a new dimension, in addition to the immediate, opened. This opening grew as awareness of oneself in relation to others increased in a context of diversified practical experiences. Acknowledging others, not just as prey, or as object of sexual drive, but as associates (in hunting, foraging, mating, securing shelter), and even the very act of association, resulted in awareness of the power of coordination. Thus the awareness, as diffuse as it still was, of time got reinforced. Be-Hu Tung ventured a description of the process: "In the beginning there was no moral or social order. People knew only their mothers, not their fathers. Hungry, they searched for their food. Once full, they threw the rest away. They ate their food with skin and hair on it, drank blood and covered themselves in fur and reeds." He described a world in its animal phase, still dependent on the cycles of nature, perceiving and celebrating repetition. Myth and ritual responded to natural rhythms and incorporated these in the life cycle. Once human self-constitution extended beyond nature, creating its own realm, observance of natural rhythms took new forms. This new forms were more able to support levels of efficiency appropriate to the new condition achieved in the experience of farming. It was no longer the case that survival equaled finding and appropriating means of subsistence in nature. Rather, natural cycles were introduced as a matrix of work, modulating the entire existence. Once the experience of religion was identified as such, religious praxis adopted the same matrix. In almost all known religions, natural cycles, as they pertain to reproduction, work, celebrations, education, are detailed. Cooperation and coordination progressively increased. A mechanism of synchronization beyond the one that only accommodated natural cycles became necessary. In retrospect, we understand how rules of interaction established in the nature-dominated pragmatic framework turned into the commandments of what would be asserted through written religion. We also understand how animistic pre-religious practice-embodied in the use of masks and charms, in worship of the untouched natural object (tree, rock, spring, animal), and the employment of objects meant to keep harm away (tooth, bone, plant) took new forms in what can be defined as the semiotic strategy of attaching the religious word (more broadly, the Book) to the life of each member of the religious community. The need to establish the community, and to identify it through action, was so pressing that ceremonies were put in place to bring people together for at least a few times during the year. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, one can distinguish an affection for coordination of effort, expressed in the depiction of rowers on boats, builders of pyramids, warriors. The written word of the Hebrews was inspired by the experience of hieroglyphics, taking the notion of coordination to a more abstract level. This level provided a framework for synchronizing activity that brought ritual closer to religion. This added a new dimension to ceremonies based on natural cycles, gradually severing the link to the practical experience of interaction with nature. Notation evolving into the written word was still the domain of the very few. Accordingly, religious reminders were strongly visual, as well as aural, a state of affairs that continued in the religions that sprouted from Judaism and established themselves after the fall of the Roman Empire. The populations adhering to these religions were largely illiterate, but derived important characteristics from religions based on the written word-the Word that was equated with God. Nailed to the doorways or inscribed over portals, converted into many types of charms, the words of a religious creed became elements of the synchronizing mechanism that religion embodied in the pragmatic framework of its constitution. Prayer punctuated the daily routine, as it continues to do in our day. The seasons and the cycles of nature, embodied in the mytho-magical, were reinterpreted in religious celebrations, which referenced the natural cycle, and appropriated pre-religious rituals. Cycles of activity aimed at maintaining and increasing the outcome of work for survival were thus confirmed. A community's well-being was expressed by its ability to satisfy the needs of its members and achieve a pattern of growth. Still heavily dependent upon natural elements (rain, floods, wind, insects, etc.), as well as subjected to attacks from neighbors, communities developed strategies for better use of resources (human included), storage, and defense mechanisms. These strategies were carefully encoded in the respective religious covenants. The religions that have survived and developed seem to gravitate around a core of very practical writings and associated visual reminders of the power they invoke in connection to the pragmatic identity of the community. The book was the standard; those who constituted the organization of religion-the priesthood-could usually read the book. Scribes, even some of the priests, could write and add to the book. The majority listened and memorized, resorting to better memory than we exercise today, memory that their practical experience required. They subscribed to religious patterns, or carried out rituals on a personal or communal level. It is helpful to keep in mind that religious involvement was facilitated by the fact that religion is not only pragmatically founded, but also pragmatically ascertained and tested. Rules for farming, hunting, preparing food; rules for hygiene and family relations; rules for conducting war and dealing with prisoners and slaves were expressed against the background of an accepted supreme reference, before evolving into future ethical rules and legal systems. Those rules which were not confirmed, progressively lost authority, were "erased" from the people's memory, and ceased to affect the rhythm of their lives. The written word survived the oral, as well as the living who uttered it or wrote it down. This word, abstracted from voice, gesture, and movement, and abstracted from the individual, was progressively assigned a more privileged place in the hierarchy. The writings seemed to have a life of their own, independent of the scribes, who were believed to be only copiers of everlasting messages entrusted to them. Written words express the longing for a unified framework of existence, thought and action. Within such a framework, observance of a limited number of rules and procedures could guarantee a level of efficiency appropriate to the scale at which human activity took place. This is a world of human practical experiences transcending natural danger and fear. It is a universe of existence in which a species is committed to its further self-definition in defiance of nature while still dependent upon it. Religion as a human experience appears in this world as a powerful tool for the optimization of the effort involved, because it effectively constitutes a synchronizing mechanism. In the practical experience of religious writing and the associated experience of reading or listening to a text, the word becomes an instrument of abstraction. Accordingly, it is assigned a privileged position in the hierarchy of the many sign systems in use. Memetic replication appropriately describes the evolution of religious ideas, but not necessarily how these ideas are shaped by the pragmatic framework. Tablets, scrolls, and books are blueprints for effective self-constitution within a community of people sharing an understanding of rules for efficient experiences. The outcome is guaranteed by the implicit contract of those self-constituted as believers in the supernatural from which the rules supposedly emanate. In search of authority, this world settled for unifying motivations. The rules of animal, and sometimes even human, sacrifice, and those of religious offerings were based on the pragmatics of maintaining optimal productivity (of herds, trees, soil), of entering agreements, maintaining property, redistributing wealth, and endowing offspring. The immediate meaning of some of the commitments made became obscured over time as scale changed and the association to nature weakened. The rules were subsequently associated with metaphysical requirements, or simply appropriated by culture in the form of tradition. To ensure that each individual partook in the well-being of the community, punishments were established for those violating a religious rule. Immediate punishment and, later, eternal punishment, although not in all religions, went hand in hand as deterrents. The involvement of language, in particular of writing and reading, is significant. As already stated, the individual who could decipher the signs of religious texts was set apart. Thus reading took on a mystical dimension. The division between the very few who wrote and read and the vast majority involved in the religious experience diminished over a very long time. More than other practical experiences, religion introduced the unifying power of the written word in a world of diversity and arbitrariness. Under the influence of Greek philosophy, the Word was endowed with godlike qualities, implicitly becoming a god. Seen from a given religious perspective, the rest of the world fails because it does not accept the word, i.e., the religion. The irreligious part of the world could be improved by imposing the implicit pragmatics that the religion carried; it could submit to the new order and cease to be a threat. At this time, religion entered the realm of the abstract, divorced from the experience with nature characteristic of religions originating in the oral phase of human self-constitution. It is at this time that religion became dogma. All over the globe, in the worlds of Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, and later Islam, the conflict between communities embracing a certain creed and others, in pre-religious phases or dedicated to a different religion, is one of opposing pragmatics in the context of increased differentiation. In other words, a different religious belief is a threat to the successful practical self-constitution of one group. To get rid of the threat is a pragmatic requirement, for which many wars were fought. Some are still going on. With each religion that failed, a pragmatic requirement failed, and was replaced by others more appropriate to the context of human self- constitution. That these conflicts appeared under the aegis of conflicting deities, represented by leaders regarded as representatives of divinity, only goes to show how close the relation is between the underlying structure of human activity and its various embodiments. In a world of unavoidable and even necessary diversity, religion maintained islands of unity. When interaction increased among the various groups, for reasons essentially connected to levels of efficiency required for current and future practical experiences, patterns of common activity resulted in patterns of behavior, increased commonalty of language, accepted (or rejected) values, and territorial and social organization. The commonalty of language, as well as the commonalty of what would become, during the Middle Ages, national identity (language and religion being two of the identifiers), increased steadily. From among the major changes that religion underwent, the most significant are probably its reification in the institution of the church and the constitution of vast bodies of discourse regarding its intrinsic logic, known as theology. Once asserted as an institution, religion became the locus of specific human interaction that resulted in patterns based on the language (Latin, for some in the Western Christian world, and Arabic in the Islamic East) in which religion was expressed. Religious practical experience progressively distanced itself from the complexities of work and socio- political organization, and constituted a form of praxis independent of others, although never entirely disconnected from them. The organization of religion concerns the pattern of religious services at certain locations: temple, church, mosque. It concerns the institution, one among many: the military, the nobility, guilds, banks, sometimes competing with them. It also concerns education, within its own structure or in coordination, sometimes in conflict, with other interests at work. A multitude of structural environments, adapted to the practical aspects of religious experience appear, while religion progressively extricated itself, or was eliminated, from the pragmatics of survival and existence. The institution it became dedicated itself to pursuing its own repetitive assignments. At the same time, it established and promoted its implicit set of motivations and criteria for evaluation. In many instances, the church constituted viable social entities in which work, and agriculture in particular, was performed according to prescriptions combining it with the practice of faith. Rules of feudal warfare were established, the day of rest was observed, education of clergy and nobility were provided. From the Middle Ages to the never abandoned missionary activity in Africa, Asia, and North and South America, the church impacted community life through actions that sometimes flew in the face of common sense. The effort was to impose new pragmatics, and new social and political realities, or at least to resist those in place. Whether in agreement or in opposition, the pattern of religious experience was one of repeated self-constitution of its own entity in new contexts, and of pursuing experiences of faith, even if the activity as such was not religious. In this process, the church gained the awareness of the role of scale, and maintained, though sometimes artificially, entities, such as monasteries, where scale was controllable. Autarchy proved decreasingly possible as the church tried to extend its involvement. The growing pragmatic context had to be acknowledged: increased exchange of goods, reciprocal dependencies in regard to resources, the continuous expansion of the world-a consequence of the major discoveries resulting from long-distance travel. In recent years the challenge has come from communication-in particular the new visual media-requiring strategies of national, cultural, social, and even political integration. From the scrolls of the Torah and from the sacred texts of the Rig Veda and Taoism, to the books of Christianity, to the Koran, to the illuminated manuscripts copied in monasteries, and to the Bible and treatises printed on the presses of Fust and Schöffer (Gutenberg's usurpers) in Mainz, Cologne, Basel, Paris, Zurich, Seville, and Naples-over 4,000 years can be seen as part of the broader history of the beginning of literacy. This history is a witness to the process, one of many variations, but also one of dedication to the permanency of faith and the word through which it is reified. Replications of all kinds mark the memetic sequence, and so religion appears in retrospect as propagation of a special kind of information, generated in the human mind as it started labeling what we know, as well as what is beyond our direct understanding. What did not change, although it was rendered relative, is the acknowledgment and acceptance of a supreme authority, known as God, or described through other names such as Allah and Myo-Ho-Ren-Ge, and the nature of the practical experience of self- constitution as believer. If Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, and the Japanese and Indian religious leaders were alive today, they would probably realize that if religion had any chance, it could no longer be founded on the written text of the Book or books, but in the practical experiences of the civilization of illiteracy. By no accident, the first category on one of the Web sites dedicated to religion is entitled Finding God in Cyberspace. The educated faithful-a contradiction in terms? The pragmatic requirement of optimally transmitting experience essential to a group's permanency was recognized as one of the main functions of language. It should come as no surprise that education was carried out, if not exclusively then at least to a high degree, in religion. Neither should it surprise that religion appropriated literacy as one of its programs once the scale of human activity that made literacy necessary was reached. In the context of nation-states that adopted religion as one of their identifiers, the entire history of the relation between society and religion can be seen in a different light. As we know from history, the quest for power frequently brought state and religion into conflict, although one needed and relied on the other. In the unifying pragmatic framework of industrial society, their alliance was sealed in literacy programs. These were simultaneously programs for higher efficiency and for the maintenance of values rooted in religious belief, as long as these did not adversely affect the outcome of work or of market transactions. Parallel to the initially dominant religious view of life, change, origins, and future, alternative views were expressed as the result of self-observation and observation of the outside world. Philosophy, influenced by religion and by religious explanations of the world, of men, of society and its change, is one example. Sciences would diverge from philosophy, multiplying alternate models and explanatory contexts. These were usually carefully construed so as not to collide with the religious viewpoint, unless they bluntly rejected it, regardless of the consequences of such an attitude. There were also heresies based on an individual's notions, or holdovers from past religions. During the Renaissance, for instance, such holdovers derived from studies of the Bible, which led to the Reformation. Ideas not rejected as heresy were usually within the scope of the church. These ideas were expressed by men and women who founded orders. They were put into practice by religious activists or made into new theologies. There is no religion that does not go through its internal revisions and through the pain of dividing schisms. On today's list of religious denominations, one can find everything, from paganism to cyberfaith. The rational explanation for this multiplication into infinity is not different from the explanation of any human experience. Multiplication of choices, as innate human characteristic, applies to religious experiences as it does to any other form of pragmatic human self-constitution. The practical experience of science, diverging more and more from philosophy and from religious dogma, also followed many paths of diversification. So did the unfolding of art, ethics, technology, and politics. The unifying framework offered by the written word, as interpreted by the monolithic church, was progressively subjected to distinctions that the experience of literacy made possible. When people were finally able to read the Bible for themselves-a book that the Catholic church did not allow them to read even after the Reformation-protest started, but it started after the Renaissance, when political entities were strong enough to defy the papacy with some degree of success. The illiterate warriors of centuries ago and the sometimes illiterate, at least unlettered, worshipper and military insurgent of today belong to very different pragmatic frameworks. The former did not have to be able to read or write in order to fight for a cause superficially (if at all) related to the Book. One had only to show allegiance to the institution guarding souls from hell. In the scale characteristic of these events, individual performance was of extreme importance to the community, as we know from the stories of King Frederick, Joan of Arc, Jan Hu?s-or, to change the reference, from the story of Guru Nanak (the first guru of the Sikhs, a religion prompted by the Muslims' persecution of Hindus at about the time Columbus was on his last expedition to the New World), Martin Luther, George Fox (founder of the Quaker movement), and many others. The educated faithful of the past probably obtained access to the established values of culture and to the main paradigms of science as these confirmed the doctrine defended by the church. An educated faithful in contemporary society is torn between accepting a body of knowledge ascertaining permanency, while experiencing change at a pace for which no religion can prepare its followers. Indeed, from the unity of education and faith-one meant to reinforce the other-the direction of change is towards their contradiction and disparity. The secular web is not only that of the Internet infidels, but also of a broad segment of the population that has no need for either. Challenging permanency and universality For many, the survival of religion is itself a miracle. For many more, it is indicative of human aspects not sufficiently accounted for in science, art, or social and political life. Its role in a new pragmatic framework of fast change, mediated activity, alienation, decentralization, and specialization, is obviously different from that it played in the time of religious constitution and in a reduced scale of humankind. Religion did not start out to deceive, but to explain. Its practices, while seeming violent, empty, extreme, demagogic, cunning, or even ridiculous at times, fulfill a purpose deemed pragmatic at the inception. The old and familiar are reassuring, if only by resort to endurance. The promise of redemption and paradise gain in attraction the more people face change and uncertainty. While the original purpose of religion was modified over time, the practice is kept up precisely because novelty and progress, especially in their radical form, are difficult to cope with. Once old values are questioned in the light of succeeding pragmatic circumstances, under new patterns of self-constitution, the result is complacency and deception, if there is no alternative. Religion and literacy ultimately find themselves in the same predicament. Religious diversification reflects each new scale at which human practical experience takes place. Changes in the pragmatic framework in which people constitute themselves as religious result in tension between the variability of the elements involved in work or new aspects of social life and the claims of the eternal. This tension triggers numerous rethinkings and consequent rewritings of the books, as well as the generation of numerous new books of new forms of faith. Christianity and Islam are revisions; within them other revisions (schisms) took place, such as the Roman and Orthodox churches, the Sunni and Shiite. Other sects and religions, schisms, and reformations and protestations (movements claiming to reconstitute the original status, whatever that means), are to a great extent rewritings based on acknowledging new contexts-that is, new pragmatic requirements. Once upon a time, the Book was supposed to address everyone in the small community in which it came to expression. Over time, many books addressed their own constituencies-adherents to certain teachers, to particular saints, or to some subset of the religious doctrine-within a larger community. The success of these sub-groups grew in proportion to the diversification of human praxis and to the function of education exercised on a broader and broader scale. From the religion of small-scale human activity to the churches of universal ambitions, many modifications in the letter and the spirit of the respective books occurred. They ultimately reflect alterations of values that religious institutions had to adapt to and justify. The tribes that accepted the Book as a unifying framework- embodiment of tradition which became law-as well as the followers of the prescriptions in the Hindu scriptures of Veda and Upanishad, the followers of the Enlightened One (Buddha), the practitioners of Taoism and Confucianism, also acknowledged a sense of community. It is the same sense of community held, at a different scale and with different goals, by the nation-state. The spread of religions, parallel to military conquest, resulted in the spread of the respective religious books, and of the letters that the books were written in. This is not necessarily the same as the spread of literacy. Religion established its own state, the Holy Roman Empire (which is now down to the size of Vatican City) that transcended national boundaries and languages, and was considered universal. In the language of Islam, umma is the world community of Moslems, while wattan is the Motherland. The Moslem armies, defeated at Poitiers by the Catholic Charles Martel, were also disseminating the religion, language, and culture of the world community they envisioned. The Crusades, in turn, and the religious wars that plagued Europe did not spread literacy as much as they attempted to defend or establish the dominance of a way of living meant to ensure an order that promised eternal life. In the scale of today's human practical experience, efficiency in general is almost independent of individual performance. It is independent of the degree of faith, ethical behavior, family status, and other characteristics of what religion calls good, and which ethics appropriates as a desired set of social expectations. Within a small scale of existence and work, things belong together: the practical and the spiritual, politics and morals, the good and the useful. Religion is their syncretic expression. The need for specialization and mediation changed the nature of pragmatic relations. Various realms of human practical experience are severed from each other. As this takes place, the religiously grounded system of values based on unity and integration-after all, this is what monotheism, in its various embodiments, represents-is submitted to the test of new circumstances of human self-constitution. Among the many explanations of the events of the late sixties, at least the phenomenon of the attraction exercised by the various churches of meditation and their gurus is reflective of the crisis of monotheism, and of the culture that grew around it. An increasing number of esoteric, exotic, scientific, or pseudoscientific sects today bear witness to the same. The difference is that these sects are no longer isolated, that almost the entire religious dimension of people is connected to some sect, be it even one that used to be a dominant church. Religion-based values or attitudes are carried over into the new segmented practical experiences of work, family, and society, and thus into the realm of politics, law, and market relations. Originating from sexual drive, love is one of the experiences from which family, friendship, art, and philosophy derived over time. Once written in the Book as a different form of love, once ascertained as a practical experience, it bridges between its natural biological basis and its cultural reality as a characteristic of a framework of human interaction in which individuals project their biological and cultural identity. Written about in religious books, love starts a journey from naturalness to artifact. Expressed as intelligence, temperament, appearance, or physical ability (our natural endowment), love is subjected, in conjunction with the experience of writing the Book, to a set of expectations expressed as though they originated from outside the experience. In this process, there is no passive participant. The written word is permeated by the structural characteristics of the act of preferring somebody to somebody else, one course of action from among many, and, more generally, something over something else, according to religious values. The implicit expectation of permanency (of faith, love, or ownership) results from the pragmatic reasons acknowledged by the Book(s). A consensus essential for the survival and well being of the community is reached by acknowledging forces from outside, and accepting their permanent and quasi-universal nature. In a universe of immediacy and proximity, change other than that experienced in natural cycles is not anticipated. Divinity makes sense only if constituted in practical experiences from which a notion of eternity and universality result. The written words exalting unity, uniqueness, eternity, and the promise of a better future are the result of the practical experience, since in the realm of nature only the immediate and the proximate are acknowledged. Forever marked by this experience of time and space beyond the immediate, the written language of religion, together with the written language of observations connected to the awareness of natural cycles (the moon, the seasons, plagues), remains a repository of the notion of permanency, universality, and uniqueness, and an instrument for hierarchical differentiation. Whenever constituted in activities related to or independent of religion, language, as a product of and medium for human identification, projects these structural characteristics upon whatever the object of practical experience is. Once written, the word seems to carry into eternity its own condition. With the advent of literacy, as this is made possible and necessary by a different scale of human praxis, literacy itself would appear as endowed with the quality of eternity and universality, triggering its own sense of exaltation and mission, lasting well into our day. For millions of citizens from countries south of Russia, who once gave up their roots to show allegiance to the Soviet Empire, to return to Arabic writing after being forced to adopt the Cyrillic means rediscovering and reconnecting to their eternity. That some of them, caught in the geo- political confrontation of their neighbors, adopt the Roman alphabet of their Turkish Moslem brothers, does not change the expectation. Religion and efficiency In the literate forms of language experiences, not only religion, but also science and the humanities, literature, and politics are established and subjected to the practical test of efficiency. Each projects a notion of permanency and universality, which is influenced by the practical experience of religion, sometimes in contradiction to the archetypal experience resulting in the notion (or notions) of God (or gods). Now that the pragmatic framework of the very ample scale of human practice makes permanency and universality untenable, the tendency to escape from the confines of religion becomes evident. There is a strong sense of relativism in science, an appropriate self- doubt in humanistic discourse, and an appropriate understanding of the multiplicity and open-endedness in almost every aspect of our social and political life. This was not achieved through and in literacy, but in disregard of it, through the many partial literacies reflecting our practical self-constitution. The reality of the global nature of human experience, of interconnectedness, of its distributed nature, and of the many integrative forces at work, renders the centralism implied in the Book(s) obsolete for many people. At the same time, let it also be noted that this reality makes the Book even more necessary than ever for many, and at different levels of their practical life. The many religious literacies of these days-promoting permanent modes of life, exotic and less exotic codes of behavior, ways of eating and dressing, hopes for a happy future or some form of afterlife-maintain dualistic schemes of good and bad, right and wrong, sacred and secular in a world of extremely subtle and painfully vague distinctions. The question whether love and reason can undergird community awareness, social action, political activism, and education if, as seems to be the case, their connection to faith continues to decline, belongs to the same dualistic perspective. This perspective is common to both partisans and enemies of religion. It used to be the backbone of the ideology of religious suppression-either under communism, or wherever a dominant religion takes upon itself the eradication of any other religion. And it is becoming the argument of the many emancipatory movements promoting the religions of atheism and agnosticism as a substitute for religion. The subject is ultimately one of faith, concerning very intimate aspects of individual self-assessment, but not necessarily the institution of creed. Still captive to dualism, brought about and nourished by experiences constitutive of literacy, we have problems coping with a world where the enemy is us and where religion is different from what it was at the time of its inception, or the time we were first were exposed to it. In view of these developments, we wonder how the rules and values established in the original religious framework are to survive. If the literacy through which these rules come to us is seen only as a vessel, a means of expressing values and criteria for evaluation, then any other means could perform the same function. The Crystal Cathedral of television fame, no less than the Web sites of many churches, proves the point. Since we are our language, and we constitute ourselves as spiritual and physical entities in the experience of language, writing cannot be seen as a passive medium, nor reading as a mechanical rendition. Accordingly, the medium through which religion is expressed affects the religion, changes its condition. Applied to contemporary religious experience, this argument is confirmed again and again. From the entire practical experience of religion, what survives is the liturgy, transformed into a performance of limited cathartic impact. Merchandising completes this new condition of faith. For millennia, a community considered its priests vital to its survival. In the civilization of illiteracy, the situation is reversed. Ministers, and to some extent priests, depend on a community for their survival. Ministers are in the business of selling themselves as much as they are in the business of selling their church or even God. Some evangelists remain independent in the sense that they package their own programs for presentation to large crowds in tents, in auditoriums, or on television. These religious enterprises create a vast business empire around a persona. As long as the enterprise can deliver what the preacher promises-through his performance act and the merchandise he sells to the faithful-then the tele-congregants-no less fascinated by celebrity than the rest of society-will buy him. A newer phenomenon is less personality dependent and more message- oriented, but the goal is the same: ministers need to make a living. Relying on information polled from hundreds of middle-class non-churchgoers, some enterprising ministers came up with a product bound to please: nothing boring or aggressive; cost- efficiency; comfortable seating; no organ. According to a study by the Harvard Business School, the resulting church was the embodiment of the phrase "knowing your customers and meeting their needs." Church attendance grew by relying on customer recommendation. Soon, the ministers franchised their operation in localities with a target market: 25-to-40-year-old seekers ("a growing market"), with middle to upper middle class salaries. Other seekers look in different directions. Almost anyone with a message can establish a religion, and sometimes entire sects are based on just a few words from the Bible (the Seventh-Day Adventists, for example, or the snake handlers of the Appalachians, or the Pentecostals). Participatory forms of worship are another trend. They may derive inspiration from the book, but they aim to involve avenues of perception not bound to literacy: song, dance, meditation, the inhaling of aroma, touching minerals. Some religions hark back to nature, animism, and what can be called neo-paganism, as in the Wikka religion. No matter how far back some of these religions claim to go, they are religions of the civilization of illiteracy. They do not repeat the original pragmatic framework but respond to today's framework of self-constitution and the individual needs or desires of the people who constitute themselves as religious through these new manifestations. While observations made in language can be subjected to confirmation, religious assumptions are expressed through the inner reality of language, and are only subject to language correctness. It is impressive how language houses concepts for which there is no referent in practical experience, but which are constituted exactly because some aspects of practical experience cannot be otherwise explained. In the history of how ideas, generalities, and abstractions are formed, the experience of religion is of particular interest. Values and beliefs that cannot be submitted to the physical senses, but can be comprehended through language-written, read, sung, danced, and celebrated-are transmitted through religion. Many assume that the new status of religion in our day is due not only to market pressure and obsession with consumption, but also to the advancement of science. Supposed to debunk the rationality of faith and offer its own rationality as the basis of new ways of understanding the origin of life, the role of human beings, the source of good and evil, and the nature of transcendence, science introduces a positivist conception of facts, irreconcilable with that of the relativity of religious images. Research in artificial intelligence discovered that "97% of human activity (is) concept- free, driven by control mechanisms we share not only with our simian forebears, but with insects." If this is indeed true, the role of rationality, religious or scientific, in our practical experiences of self-constitution has to be revisited. The various manifestations of religion subtly address this need because they recognize dimensions of human experience that cannot be reduced to scientific explanations and logic, or cannot be explained without explaining them away in the process. One interesting tendency in the civilization of illiteracy is less to assimilate the new science and technology-as was the case only 20-30 years ago-and more to subject it to what religion considers right. Fundamentalism of any kind corresponds to the dynamics of this illiterate society, in the sense that it promotes a very limited and limiting subset of the language of religion, in a world segmented into more religious denominations than ever before. If over 350,000 registered churches serve the religious needs of the population in the USA, and almost as many meeting places are available to small groups of believers, nobody will seriously argue that people are less religious, rather that they are religious in a different way, often integrating the latest in science and technology. Among the most active Internet forums, religion maintains a presence supported by the best that technology can offer. With each new scientific theory unveiling the deeper structure of matter, more subtle forms of interconnectedness among phenomena, new sources of creativity, and new limits of the universe, the need for religion changes. To cope with complexity means either to have a good command of it-which seems less and less possible-or to accept a benevolent underwriting. The challenge of complexity generates its own need for creed. Social, economic, and political realities are not always encouraging. Integration based on pragmatic motives increases, as does individual anxiety. No matter how much we learn about death, we are still not free of its frightening randomness. Realistically speaking, the belief in an afterlife and the dedication to cryonics are less far apart than they seem at first glance. Religiosity in the civilization of illiteracy Some will argue, probably with good reason, that religion in the civilization of illiteracy is but another form of consumerism, or at least of manipulation. No matter what the religious occasion, and if it is still indeed of religious motivation, the market celebrates its highest results in anticipation of holidays (the former holy days). The 40,000 car dealerships, many designed as car cathedrals, and almost 35,000 shopping malls get more visitors during the holiday season than do churches. In addition, even ceremonies whose significance is fundamentally different today than during previous periods, generate more business than religious awareness. The language of ceremonies is entrusted to consultants in marriage, confirmation, baptism, bar mitzvah, and death. Texts related to circumstances of practical experiences different from those of our day are written and read, or, to be more precise, performed without either understanding what kind of pragmatics made them necessary or realizing the discrepancy between past and present pragmatics. This is why they ring so hollow in our day. When permanence is exalted, faithfulness promised, acceptance of biblical or other precepts (of the Koran, of Far Eastern pantheistic religions) ascertained, literacy and religion are only mimicked. Talaba, the 100 rubles (or whatever the currency of choice) per month paid by Shiite missionaries from Iran, brings many Tadjiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmenians to the new religious schools of Islam. Chances are that a higher bidder from another religion would spoil the game. Under the new pragmatic circumstances of human self-constitution, change, variety, self-determination, individualism, negation of authority, divine or secular, and skepticism are decisive for reaching the levels of efficiency demanded by a dynamic scale of existence. Today's world is not one of generalized atheism. It is, rather, one of many partial religious literacies, sharing in some basic symbolism, although not necessarily in a unifying framework for its consistent interpretation. Many do not believe, for reasons of science or convenience, in the religious explanation of the origin of the universe and life. Or they do not care for the message of love and goodness embedded in almost every current manifestation of faith. They see in every religious book the handwriting of some groups who, in order to impose their values, invented the image of a supreme force in order to achieve, if not authority, at least credibility. We live in an environment of compromise and tolerance, infinite distinctions, fast sequences of failure and success, challenged authority and generalized democracy. In today's huge and ineffective social mechanism, in the integrated and networked world, individual failure does not affect the performance of the system. Illiteracy, while dangerous under circumstances characteristic for the pragmatic of the recent past, only marginally affects the levels of efficiency reached. Religiosity, of consequence in the same pragmatic framework, plays no role whatsoever in the illiterate practical experiences of human self-constitution. Calling such assessments heresies, as some might be inclined to do, does not really answer the question of whether religious law can still serve, alone or together with other laws, as the binding tie of community-as it does not address the broader issues of whether literacy can serve as the binding tie of community. Because of their pragmatic nature, characteristics of religion and structural characteristics of language are fundamentally similar. If we want to understand the condition of religion today, we have to specifically address the pragmatic circumstances of self-constitution within the civilization of illiteracy. In the events of tele-evangelism there is no place for literacy. But the video church, and computer-aided religion, the bible on CD-ROM, or CD-I, the vacation village for believers, and religious tourism are mainly forms of entertainment. Their validity is divorced from the concept of the exalted individual, critical in the context of a small- scale community. Consequently, the religious dimension of transcendence is annihilated. Ours is the time of the eternal instant, not of some vague eternity promised as reward after the present. Partially banalized through abuse of the word, concepts such as dignity, decency, and human values have become the clichés of the video church, with as many gospels as there are preachers. Religiosity today differs from the religiosity of previous pragmatic frameworks insofar as it corresponds to the accentuated insularity of the individual. As long as the viewer is only a digit away on his or her remote control from a pornography channel, from the latest quote on the stock market, of from a commercial message-for denture adhesive, gastric relief, and home pregnancy tests-it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between sanctity and triviality, righteousness and venality. The global community of tele-viewing is splitting into smaller and smaller groups. And TV, as a pulpit of missionary activity, reveals itself as only syntactically different from the missionary work of advertisement. Mass religion proves to be as impersonal as the market. In effect, it severs the relations between religion and the mysterious, still unexplained aspects of human existence. A virtual reality package can be as good as the performance of having the blind see, and the cripple leave the wheelchair to enter the 100-meter dash. The virtual cathedral, the stadium, and the mass audience addressed in front of the camera are themselves of a scale inadequate to both the teaching disseminated and the nature of religious experience, no matter how far the effort to change the vocabulary goes. The language of the books is rooted in experiences to which the tele-viewer no longer has a direct relation. They cannot be substituted in a medium adapted to change and variety. The categories that religious discourse centers on-faith, goodness, transcendence, authority, sin, punishment-were established in a pragmatic framework totally different from that of the present. Today, existence offers variety, immediate satisfaction, and protection from the whims of nature. The sense of danger has changed. The equity accumulated by the church in these categories may be enough to entitle claims of ownership, given people's inertia, but not to maintain them as effective means of affecting current practical experiences. It might well be true that three out of five Americans now believe there is a hell, and that people in other countries share the same assumption, but this has no bearing on their self-constitution in the world of quickly changing scenarios for fulfillment outside faith. Networking and distributed work are better synchronized with the pragmatics of high efficiency of our day. Software for interactive multimedia keeps track of a person's religious patterns, and provides prayer and interpretation integrated in the same package. In its attempt to adapt to a new framework of human activity, religion adopted social causes (renouncing its metaphysics), scientific terminology (renouncing agnosticism), or the means of entertainment (renouncing its asceticism). With each step outside the boundaries of religion, the transcendental dimension is sacrificed. This dimension is embedded in the medium of literacy through which religious practical experience became a fixture in society. When the word does not satisfy, believers resort to other means of expression, some older than religion. It is not unusual to have a religious celebration during the day in some Catholic churches in Brazil, and at night, on the same altar, a chicken sacrificed to Yemenyá. The literate celebration, of European import, and the illiterate sacrifice to which a different group of believers connects, are impossible to reconcile. In this framework, freedom of choice, as vulgar or trivial as those choices might be, takes precedence over authority. In Brazil, "Graças a Deus!" is paired with the practice of African cults (Candomblé, Umbanda, Macumba), just as "Allah-hu-akbar" is with shamanistic or Buddhist celebrations in Azerbaidjan and Kazakstan. These are particular expressions of religion in the civilization of illiteracy, as much as TV evangelism is. For as much as religion was submitted to the word, performance always seems to get the upper hand. To blindly ascertain permanence against the background of change would only further undermine religious practice. This is why the new religions focus on the immediate and produce the reward as fast as it is expected. The continuous proliferation of new religious denominations, soon to be as many as there are people who constitute the networks of human interaction in today's pragmatic context, reflects also the ability of the church to adapt. But this was not religion's reason for being in the first place, and will not represent more than what actually happens when we all wear the same shoes, or shirts, or hats but read a different label on each, when we all eat the same food that is only packaged differently, when we all vote for the same politics (or lack of same) while maintaining party affiliations. When each has his or her own god, God ceases to exist. With the end of the civilization of literacy, partial religious literacies emerge, developing their own languages, their own organizations, their own justification. The heterogeneity of the world, its intrinsic relativity, and its dynamics of change mark religious practical experiences in ways not dissimilar to those of scientific, artistic, political, educational, moral, and many other experiences. Consumption of the language of religion in ceremonies and holidays that promote the expectation of more and cheaper, on which the quest for unlimited satisfaction of needs and desires is based, does not qualify anyone as religious or literate. Neither does secularism for that matter, no less illiterate, and no less subjected to the same expectation of high efficiency which undermines the core of any religion. Secular religion In our day of increased secularism, the extent to which religion permeates people's lives, whether faithful, indifferent (neutral), or actively antireligious, is probably difficult to assess. The separation of church and state is powerfully anchored in constitutions and declarations of independence, while new presidents, kings, emperors, state officials, and members of the judiciary still swear on the books of their religious faith, invoke their respective gods as the ultimate judge (or help), and openly, or covertly, participate in the rituals inherited from theological practical experiences. The dominant symbolism of our day has a religious aura. It seems that both the faithful and the secularists of all nuances entered a mutual agreement in sanctioning what came to be known as civil religion. People pledge allegiance to the flag, get emotionally carried away when the national anthem is played, and partake in the celebration of holidays, never questioning their justification. These elements of civil religion come to us in perverted forms, divorced from the pragmatic context within which they were constituted. To swear on the Bible was specifically prohibited ("You are not to swear at all, not by heaven, for it is God's throne, nor by earth, for it is his footstool..." Matthew 5:33-36). Swearing-in ceremonies take place in the open in order to make them manifest to the gods. In some countries a window is still opened when an oath of office is recited. Holidays, meant as occasions of religious recollection, or to instill a sense of solidarity, remain only what each person makes of them. Even more, in countries making a point of avoiding the domination of one religion over another, the holidays of the dominant religion become the holidays of the entire nation, enjoyed foremostly as market celebrations. To notice the contradictory nature of the presence of religion in contexts of secular practical experiences, some directly contrary to religious beliefs, means to notice how some of the motivations of religion expatiate in a context contradicting the legitimacy of the theological experience in our day and age. This became clear even within the particular circumstances of revolutions whose stated goal was to eradicate religion through state oppression or by education. The French Revolution discovered, soon after the king and other members of the power elite were decapitated, that the authority of its ideals, embodied in the call for liberty, equality, fraternity, was not enough, despite being housed in the same body of literacy as religion was, to substitute for the higher authority of Divinity. The Soviet Revolution hoped that theater or cinematography would substitute for religion, or at least for church. Some of its ideologues experimented with a secular god- building strategy, inventing a sui generis higher force to which people could relate, and on which hope could be placed. They tried, very much in the spirit of the utopian Marx, to deify the collective force of the working class in order to inspire a religious sense of community. Enormous energy was invested in designing new rituals. Many of the atheist artists of the Russian avant-garde served the cause they thought opened the gates of artistic freedom and universal love. Their own escape from the realm of literacy into the realm of imagery-intended to replace the confining texts of religion and ideology-should have warned them about the impossibility of the task at hand. Disappointed by their own naiveté, but incapable of acknowledging failure, some of them wound up embracing the new civic religion of gods and holidays, as shallow as the theology around which they were built. What we identify in all these elements is the continuation of structural characteristics pertinent to religion and to the medium of its expression, i.e., literacy in a fundamentally different context. The encompassing principles of tolerance, equality, and freedom contradict the spirit on which religion and literacy were based. They weaken our convictions of what is right and efficient in view of the desired end, and of endurance as a group. The decline of morals in a context in which moral behavior does not affect efficiency is not due to the decline in religiosity, but to the general perception, justified or not, that morality and religion do not count; or that they play no role in making people happy. The sanctity of life gone, there is little sanctity left in forms of celebrating it: birthdays, communions, marriage, funerals. Between birth and death, the audience at our rites of passage diminishes painfully. We know that death is very personal, but communities, for pragmatic reasons, used to confront death and its consequences, many related to inheritance, not relegate it to specialists in the various aspects of dying. Death is reduced to a biological event leading only to biochemical decomposition: No fun, no direct practical significance for others, except in the inheritance process, a market event for funeral parlors and pushy clergy. Appropriation of life events in the civilization of illiteracy equals the structuring of small languages of post-literate celebrations, taken over by baptism, communion, and marriage consultants, all alienated from the religious meaning they had, moreover from the initial pragmatic motivation. Literacy stood as the rulebook for all these direct, integrated, sequentialized, deterministic occurrences. The illiterate celebrates the randomness and the relative and makes everything a festival of randomness-crime, deadly disease, a riot, a bargain, a love affair. Religion and church tried to instill permanency. Baptism was the initiation rite that opened the cycle. Confirmation entailed acceptance in the community. Marriage, once and forever, introduced a sense of unity and continuity. The last rites freed one from life for an afterlife in which the deceased still watched over the living faithful. Today, each of these moments is associated with a civil ritual: birth is recorded in the town or city hall. The child must have a social security number by the age of two. At age five, children must enter school. Children no longer join the community as responsible members at the age of 12 or 14 years, but they are given rights that they sometimes cannot handle. Marriage and the establishment of family come much later than in earlier pragmatic contexts. Extracted from the religious context, family life is a strange mixture of biological convenience and contractual obligations. Death, always the focus of religion, is defined in terms of its effects on efficiency. The fine distinction between clinical death and total death only shows how priests, the final witnesses to the end of a life, are replaced by the technologists who keep the heart beating under the alibi of "sanctity of life." Life ends as it begins, as an entry in the record books, for tax purposes. Japanese parents-to-be might still consult an ekisha (a sort of fortune teller) in order to choose the proper name for a newborn infant, already thinking about the marriage (names should fit in order to ensure harmony); others will have difficulty in understanding the similarity between choosing a name and the observance of agricultural cycles, as both were religiously encoded in minute rules centuries ago. These people will even cringe at the discourse in a monastery where the priest might indulge in the discussion of the unity between inner order (of the individual) and outer order. The fact that mandala, traded all over the world, once represented that order escapes their personal experience. Religions distinguished between nature and cosmos. Whether explicitly stated or not, nature was seen as earthbound, the source of our existence, the provider. Cosmos, beyond our reach, should not be interfered with. The experience of extraterrestrial research expanded the notion of nature. In today's integrated world, resources and environmental concerns also contribute to the expanded notion of nature pertinent to our activity and life. Our worries about pollution of earth, oceans, and skies are not religious in nature. Neither is the distinction between what is feasible and what is desirable. The Ten Commandments tell us what we should not do, while the devil called desire whispers into our ears that nothing is forbidden unless we really do not care for it. The relation between the wholeness of the being and its parts is subject to maintenance, just as the automobile is. Once gods were described as jealous and intolerant. Now they are presented as accommodating a world of diversified experiences and heterogeneous forms of worship, including Satanism. Our pragmatic context is one of generalized pluralism, embodied in the many choices we pursue in the practical experience of self-constitution. When the pragmatics of self-constitution can be based on rationality, the churches of the civilization of illiteracy are houses of secular religion. A Mouthful of Microwave Diet Have you ever ordered a pizza over the Internet? It is an experience in illiterate cooking. The image on the screen allows clients to prepare the most individualized pizza one can think of: they decide what the shape, size, and thickness of the crust will be; which spices and how much; what kind of cheese; and which toppings. They can arrange these the way they want, layer them, and control how much tomato sauce, if any, should be used. Done? Ask your children, or your guests, whether they want to correct your design. The on-line chef is open to suggestions. All set? The pizza will be delivered in 20 minutes-or it's free. The entire transaction is illiterate: selection is made by clicking an image. With each choice, prices are automatically calculated and listed. Addition is as error-free as it can get. Taxes are calculated and automatically transferred to the IRS. A voice announces over the Internet, "Food is ready! Thank you for your order. And please visit us again." No, this is not fantasy. Pizza shops and hamburger joints figure visibly on the Internet (still in its infancy). Their structure and functioning, as well as the expectations connected to them, are what defines them as belonging to the civilization of illiteracy. But the picture of what people eat and how their food is prepared is more complicated than what this example conveys. This chapter will describe how we arrived at this point, and what the consequences of the fundamental shift from the civilization of literacy in our relation to food are. Food and expectations How does one connect food to literacy? In the first place, how we eat is as important as what we eat and how we prepare it. There is a culture of dining, and an entire way of viewing food-from obtaining raw ingredients to preparation and to eating-that reflects values instilled in the civilization of literacy. Food and eating in the civilization of illiteracy are epitomized not only by the pizza outlet on the Internet, by McDonalds, Burger King, and the frozen dinner waiting to be thrown into the microwave oven, but also by the vast industry of efficient production of primary and secondary foodstuffs, the anonymous, segmented processing of nutrition. It is not an individual's literacy that characterizes the meal, but the pragmatic framework in which people emerge and how they project their characteristics, including dietary and taste expectations, in the process. The hunger-driven primitive human and the spoiled patron of a good Italian restaurant have in common only the biological substratum of their need, expressed in the very dissimilar acts of hunting and, respectively, selecting items from a menu. Primitive beings are identified by projecting, in the universe of their existence, natural qualities pertinent to the experience of feeding themselves: sight, hearing, smell, speed, force. Restaurant patrons project natural abilities filtered through a culture of eating: taste, dietary awareness, ability to select and combine. These two extremes document a commonalty of human self-constitution. Nevertheless, what is of interest in the attempt to understand food and eating in the civilization of illiteracy are actually differences. The nuclei of ancient incipient agriculture, which were also the places of origin for many language families, are distinct pragmatic frameworks relevant also to the experience of cooking. Within agriculture, absolute dependencies on nature are changed to relative dependencies, since more food is produced than is needed for survival. The food of this period is cause for some of the rituals associated with the elements involved in producing it. The layers between animal hunger and the new hunger, filter new experiences of satisfaction or illness, of pleasure or pain, of self-control or abuse. Symbolism (concerning fertility, agriculture, power) confirms patterns of successful or failed practical experiences against the background of increased awareness of the biological characteristics of the species. Notation and writing contribute to the change of balance between the natural and the cultural. But the difference between the primitive eater and the person who awaits his dinner at a table derives from the distinctive conditions of their existence. In the pragmatic framework that constitutes the foundation for literacy, expectations regarding food were already in place: slow rhythm, awareness of the environment, environment and natural cycles, labor division according to sex and age (the female was usually the homemaker and cook). Food preparation was characterized by its intrinsic sequentiality, by linear dependencies among its variables. Cooking was inspired and supported by the sequence of seasons, local stock, and relative immediacy of needs, affected by weather conditions, intensity of effort, and celebration pertinent to seasons or special events. In short, the relation to food was governed by the same principles that notation and writing were. In the civilization of illiteracy, personal attitudes towards preparing food and eating, whether at home or in a restaurant, are affected by a different pragmatic framework. Probably more is known about food in the civilization of illiteracy than at any other time in the history of agriculture and cuisine. But this knowledge does not come from the direct experience of the food, i.e., how it is grown and processed. Human beings in the civilization of illiteracy know better why they eat than what they eat. It is not what is in the food that concerns many people, but what the food is supposed to do for them: maintain and service the body through the proper balance of vitamins, minerals, and protein; help people cope with residue; and, eventually, conjure meaning as a symbol in a universe of competing symbolisms. Fashion extends to food, too! People feed themselves today according to expectations different from those of primitive human beings-hunters, farmers, craftsmen, and workers involved in pre- industrial experience. Needs are different, and food resources are different. Many layers of humanity stand between an individual projecting animal hunger in a world of competing animals and an individual expressing desire for French cuisine, in its authentic variations, in its snobbish form, or in its fast food versions, fresh or frozen, regular or dietetic. Pizza, spaghetti, falafel, sushi, tortillas, cold cuts, and egg rolls figure no less on the list of choices. Many filters, in the form of various taboos and restrictions, as well as personal tastes, are at work. Meaning is incidentally elicited as one chooses the recipe of a celebrity cook, or decides on a certain restaurant. The hungry primitive human, the human beings working the land in the agricultural phase, the farmers, craftsmen, soldiers, and scholars of the pre-industrial age expected only that food would still their hunger. More is expected from the eating experience today, and some of these expectations have nothing to do with hunger. People take it for granted that they can buy any type of food from anywhere in the world, at any time of the year. Globality is thus acknowledged, just as the sequence of seasons is ignored. In between these two extremes is the literate eating experience, with its own expectations. The experience of eating reflected a way of life, a way of self-constitution as civilized, progressive, literate. Here are the words of Charles Dickens, recorded during his visit to the United States in 1842. He gave a vivid summary of American eating habits west of the big eastern cities (Boston, New York) as he observed them on steamboats and in inns where stagecoaches stopped for the night in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Missouri. I never in my life did see such listless, heavy dulness [sic] as brooded over these meals: the very recollection of it weighs me down, and makes me, for the moment, wretched. Reading and writing on my knee, in our little cabin, I really dreaded the coming of the hour that summoned us to table; and was as glad to escape from it again as if it had been a penance or a punishment. Healthy cheerfulness and good spirits forming part of the banquet, I could soak my crusts in the fountain with Le Sage's strolling players, and revel in their glad enjoyment: but sitting down with so many fellow-animals to ward off thirst and hunger as a business; to empty each creature his Yahoo's trough as quickly as he can, and then to slink sullenly away; to have these social sacraments stripped of everything but the mere greedy satisfaction of the natural cravings; goes so against the grain with me, that I seriously believe the recollection of these funeral feasts will be a waking nightmare to me all my life. Dickens was the epitome of the literate experience, and he was addressing a literate audience that had literate expectations in the experience of dining: what time meals were held, who sat where and next to whom, the order in which certain foods were served, how long a meal should last, what topics could be discussed. Literate characteristics persist in the literate frameworks of political and formal dinners: hierarchy (who sits where), the order in which food is presented, the types of dishes and eating utensils. Fishing in a videolake Many questions come to mind with respect to how, and what, and when, people eat and drink. Human beings still project their reality in the environment through biological characteristics-the ability to see, smell, taste, move, jump, etc.-but some in unnatural ways. Not only do we help vision with glasses and hearing with aid devices, but even taste and smell are helped through the appropriate chemistry, in order to buffer some odor and enhance others. From odorless garlic to tofu smelling of pork chops, everything is within the possibility of biochemistry. At the extreme, nutrition is altogether removed from the context of nature. This is the case not just with people who are fed artificially, through tubes, pills, or special concoctions. What does this have to do with literacy? How is it influenced, if at all, by the increased illiteracy of the new condition of human activity? The answers are far from being trivial. An editorialist from Germany, a country of solid, if not necessarily refined, eating instincts, went to great lengths to explain the alienation of nourishment in our age. The final scene he described is comic and sad at the same time. Some artificially obtained nutritive substance, molded in the shape of fish, is fried and served to a video- literate who eats the food while watching a videotape about fishing. The ersatz experience of tele-viewing is probably disconnected from the experience of river, trees, sunshine, and fish biting the hook, not to mention the taste of fresh fish. Dwindling stocks of fish is one reason why we can no longer afford the nourishment that results from direct involvement with nature. Not everyone can or wants to be a hunter, a fisherman, or a farmer. The romanticism of literacy, and of the utopian ideologies it helps express, would lead some to believe that this is possible, even desirable. But maybe not, since the new scale of humankind does not go unnoticed, even by those still clinging to the continuity and permanency embodied in literacy. Values, rules, and expectations such as health considerations, efficiency, and taste are embodied in programs and procedures for which machines are built, new substances designed, and waste reprocessed. It might make some people shiver, but about 50% of a person's average caloric intake is the result of artificial synthesis and genetic engineering. Louis de Funés (in a 1976 French film directed by Claude Zidi) almost wound up as part of the food processed at Tricatel, a new factory that produces tasteless food based on the rules and looks of French cuisine, which the factory effectively undermines. The comedian, performing as a food inspector, has to decide what the real thing is and what is the fake. Competing with this burlesque, a national program, Awakening of Taste, under the aegis of the Minister of Culture, was set up to encourage French students in primary schools to rediscover the true national cuisine. That such a program parallels the effort of the Académie Française to maintain the purity and integrity of the language is a convenient argument concerning the interdependence of the ideal of literacy and that of haute cuisine. The movie satirizes the human being's relation to food and technology. Eating something reminiscent of a fish, whether farmed or synthetically produced, while having video nostalgia for fishing is not an exception. In the mental gardens we plant each spring, when magazines and television shows present images of the beautiful tomatoes we might enjoy in a few months, there is a virtual space for every practical experience we gave up in order to satisfy our desire for more at the lowest price. The tomato in the civilization of illiteracy, hydroponic or garden grown, ripens faster, is perfect in form, and tastes almost like we think it should. Irony and science fiction aside, we are indeed engineering proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals. They are designed to optimally maintain the human being and enhance his or her performance. This can be seen as a new phase in the process of transferring knowledge pertinent to nourishment from the encompassing and dominating medium of literacy to the many partial literacies- chemical, biological, genetic-of the civilization of illiteracy. Having in mind the image of where we currently stand and the direction in which we are heading, we can trace human self-constitution with the practical experience of food. Language and nourishment The relation between what people eat, how they prepare their food, how they serve and how they eat it, is accounted for in language, especially in its literate use, in many ways. Experiences of our continuous constitution through work, personal life, habits, defense, and aggression are expressed through language and other manifestations of our nature and culture. The same holds true for such peculiarities as the way people eat, entertain, dress, make love, and play. Language, as one among many expressive means, is a medium for representation, but also for diversifying experiences. It supports the research of new realms of existence, and participates in the maintenance of the integrity of human interdependencies as they develop in work, leisure, and meditation. When the question "Why are there fewer alcoholics in China, Korea, Japan, and India?" was asked, answers were sought in culture. Reformulated as "Why can't Asians tolerate alcohol?" the question shifted the focus from what we do or do not do- the filters of exclusion or preference-to biology. Environmental, cultural, social, psychological, and cognitive characteristics can be acknowledged once the biological substratum is brought to light. Many people of Asian origin display an intolerance to alcohol that is due to a metabolism peculiar to their race. The intolerance to alcohol is associated with the lack of a catalytic enzyme, which under normal circumstances does not affect the functioning of the body. Only when alcohol is consumed do unpleasant symptoms appear: the face becomes flushed, skin temperature rises, the pulse quickens. Europeans, black Africans, and North American Indians are not affected in the same way. But they are subject to other genetically determined food sensitivities. For example, lactose intolerance is highest in Blacks. The example given above tells us that the projection of biological characteristics into the universe of people's existence results in the image of differences among various groups of people and among individuals. People noticed these peculiarities before science existed in order to explain them. Relating the effect to a cause-a certain food or drink-people incorporate this relation into their body of experiences. Established connections become rules that are intended to ensure optimal individual and group functioning. Rules pertaining to food and ways of eating were eventually encoded and transmitted through literate means. In short, patterns of work and life are affected. They point to various levels at which human practical experiences and the experience of nourishment are interconditioned. A first level regards nourishment and our biological endowment. A second level is nourishment and the environment-what we can afford from the world surrounding us. A third level is nourishment and self-consciousness-what best suits our life and work. Over time the interdependency changes. And at moments when the scale of mankind reaches a threshold, it is drastically redefined-as in our times, for instance. On a larger scale, food- and drinking-related instances prompt vast servicing activities and the establishment of networks of distributed tasks. Today, diet engineers, caterers, geneticists, nutritionists, are set up to provide whatever fits the occasion, the guest list, dietary prescriptions, and astrological or medical recommendations. A formal dinner can become a well mediated activity, with many prefabricated components, including table manners-if the commissioning party so desires. Associated or not to the menu, a preparatory seminar in what to wear, how to use utensils (if more than plastic spoons and knives are used), what kind of conversation with the entrée, and which jokes before, or after, or instead of the wine, educates for the event. In fact, the buffet, a configuration from which each can assemble his or her menu, not unlike the on-line order form for the Internet pizza, is more and more preferred. It is less confining than the literacy-based sequence of the three-course meals-structured as introduction, thesis, and conclusion, known under the labels appetizer, main entrée, dessert. Sequence and configuration revisited With writing and reading, the experience of feeding oneself and one's family expanded to partaking in the experience of food preservation and sharing. French Assyriologist Jean Bottero read recipes, in cuneiform writing on clay tablets from around 1700 BCE, for food cooked at important occasions for people in power. That this was "cuisine of striking richness, refinement, sophistication, and artistry" should not necessarily impress us here. But the description of the ingredients, some no longer known or in use, of the sequence, and the context (celebration) deserve attention: "Head, legs and tail should be singed. Take the meat. Bring water to boil. Add fat. Onions, samidu, leeks, garlic, some blood, some fresh cheese, the whole beaten together. Add an equal amount of plain suhutium." This is a stew of kid, a meal for an exceptional occasion. The pragmatic framework that made this cooking possible also made writing possible and necessary. Over time, this connection became even closer. Between the experiences of language and that of eating and drinking, a continuum of interactions can be noticed. Language distinctions pertinent to the practical experience of cultivating plants, taking care of animals, processing milk, and seasoning food expanded from satisfying needs to creating desires associated with taste. New knowledge is stimulated by experiences different from nourishment, such as new forms of work (cooking included), use of new resources, new tools, and new skills. And so is the expression of logic in the act of preparing, serving, and eating the food. On reading a book of recipes from the Tiberian era of the Roman Empire-De Re Culinaria (The Art of Cooking, attributed to Gaelius Apicius) and De Re Rustica (by Cato)-one can discern how things have changed over 1600 years. Apicius expressed many distinctions in foods and in ways of cooking and eating. He also expressed a certain concern for health. "Digging one's grave with one's teeth," as the expression came to life in connection with gluttony (crisp tongues of larks, dormice marinated in honey, tasty thighs of ostrich are listed), was replaced by elaborate recipes to relieve an upset stomach or to facilitate digestion. The books do not say what everyone ate, and there are reasons to believe that there was quite a difference between the menu of slaves and that of their owners. Advances in identifying plants and in processing food go in tandem with advances in medicine. Writings from other parts of the world, especially China, testify to similar developments. It was already remarked, by no other than Roland Barthes, that the two basic language systems-one based on ideographic writing, the second on the phonetic convention-put their characteristic stamp on the menus of the Far Eastern and Western civilizations. A Japanese menu is an expression of a configuration. One can start with any of the dishes offered simultaneously. Combinations are allowed. Eating is part of the Japanese culture, a practical experience of self-constitution with strong visual components, refined combinations of odors, and participation of almost all senses. It also reflects the awareness of the world in which the Japanese constitute themselves. Japanese food is focused on what life on an island affords, plus/minus influences from other cultures, resulting from the mobility of peoples. The more concrete writing system of the Far East and the more down-to-earth nourishment, i.e., the closeness to what each source of nutrition is (raw fish, seaweed, rice, minimal processing, strict dietary patterns based on combinations of nutritional ideograms), are an expression of the unity of the pragmatic framework within which they result. A Western menu is a sequence, a one-directional linear event with a precise culmination. Eating proceeds from the introduction to the conclusion, "from soup to nuts." A meal has a progression and projects expectations associated with this progression. Within the language of our food, there are well formed sentences and ill- formed sentences, as well as a general tendency experience gastronomic pleasure. A literate society is a society aware of the rules for generating and enjoying meals according to such rules. The rules are based on experiences transmitted from one generation to the next, not necessarily in written form, but reflecting the intrinsic sequentiality of language and its abstract writing system. Goethe fired his cook (Lina Louise Axthelm) because she could not realize the distinction between healthy meals and the more sophisticated art of preparing them according to rules of literacy and aesthetic distinction. On cooks, pots, and spoons Cooking food-a practical experience that followed catching prey-represents an important moment in human self-definition. As a form of praxis, it parallels the experience of self-constitution through language. It extends, as language does, far beyond satisfying immediate needs, allowing for the establishment of expectations above and beyond survival. Cooking implies generality, but also integrates elements of individuality. Some foods taste better, are more easily digested, support specific practical experiences. For example, some foods enhance prowess. When eaten before a hunt, they can trigger lust for chasing the animal. Some foods stimulate sexual drive, others induce states of hallucination. Cooking was, in many ways, a journey from the known into the unknown. Together with the sensorial experience, intellectual elements were involved in the process. They are observations, of similarities and dissimilarities of certain procedures, of substances used, of the influence of weather, season, tools, etc.; simple inferences, discoveries-the effect of fire, salt, spices. The experience of preparing food, together with many other practical experiences on which it depends or which are connected to it, opens avenues of abstraction. Cooking improves the quality of individual life, and thus empowers members of a community to better adapt to pragmatic expectations. The constitution of the notion of food quality, as an abstraction of taste, and crafting of tools appropriate to the activity, is of special interest. An example: Pottery, in the natural context where it was possible, became the medium for preserving and cooking. In other contexts, carved stone, carved wood, woven branches, or metal was used, for storing or for cooking, according to the material. Progressively, tools for preparing and tools for eating were crafted, and new eating habits were acknowledged. When the multiple interdependency food-container-cooking-preservation was internalized in the activity of preparing food, a framework for new experiences was established. Some of these experiences, such as how to handle fire, transcend nourishment. The significance of this process can be succinctly expressed: cooked food, which we need to associate to the tools used, is food taken out of the context of nature and introduced in the context of culture. The experience of cooking involves other experiences and then expands into other domains unrelated to nourishment. This experience requires instruments for cooking, but even more an understanding of the process involved, of the effects of combinations and additions, and a strategy for delivery to those for whom cooking was undertaken. Satisfying hunger in the fight for survival is an individual experience. Preparation of food requires time. In the experience of achieving time awareness, cooking played a role not to be ignored. If time can be used for different purposes by different people, associated in view of shared goals, then some can tend to the need of prepared food for others, while in turn partaking in their effort of hunting, fishing, agriculture, and craftsmanship. It was a simple strategy of labor assignments, affected by tribal life, family, rituals, myth, and religion: knowledge gained in preparing food disseminated without the need for specialized activity. But once pragmatic circumstances of life required it, some people assumed the function and thus, once a critical mass of efficiency was reached, what we today call the cook was identified. From the not-too- many written recipes that come down to us through the centuries, as well as from religious writings containing precise, pragmatically motivated restrictions, we learn enough about the stabilizing role of writing upon food preparation. We also gain understanding of the new functions played by food preparation: celebration of events, sacrifice to gods, expression of power. People learn to cook and to eat at the same time. In this process, they come to share values beyond the immediacy of plants, fruits, and a piece of meat. Mediations pertinent to the art of cooking and eating are also part of the language process and become language. Culinary restrictions, such as those set down in some religions, are but an example of this process. They encode practical rules related to survival and well- being, but also to some conventions beyond the physical reality of the food. Language makes such rules the rules of the community; writing preserves them as requirements and thus exercises an important normative role. Each pragmatic context determined what was acceptable as food and the conditions of food preparation, henceforth the condition of cooks and their particular role in social life. Many cooks, serving at courts of royalty, in monasteries, in the military, became the object of folk tales, fiction, of philosophers' comments. No cook seems to have been highly educated, but all their clients tried to impress through the food served and the wines, or other drinks, accompanying them. In such circumstances, the symbolic function of food indeed takes over the primary function of satisfying hunger. Thus the cook, like the singer and the dancer and the poet, contributes his part to what becomes the art of living. It is probably worth pointing out that memory devices similar to those used by poets and musicians are used by cooks, and that improvisation in preparing a meal plays an important part. Writing entered the kitchen; and some of the last to resist literacy, when it became a pragmatic requirement, were those who cooked for others. Orality is more stubborn, for many reasons, when it involves the secrecy of food preparation. There are good reasons for this, some obvious even in our day of cracking the most guarded secrets. Indeed, labor division does not stop at the gates of factories. The segmentation of life and labor, increased mediation, and expectations of high efficiency make mass production possible. Almost everything people need to feed themselves, in order to maintain their physical and mental productive powers with a minimum of investment, is provided in favor of productive cycles. In the pragmatic framework of the industrial age, this meant the reproduction of the productive forces of the worker in a context of permanency. The investment in education and training was to be recuperated over a lifetime of work. Nourishment contributed to the same pattern: the family adapted to the rhythms of the practical experience of industry related jobs. At work, at home, in school, at church, and last but not least in nourishment, acceptance of authority together with the discipline of self-denial were at work. That literacy, through its own structural characteristics (hierarchy, authority, standardization) accentuated all these peculiarities should at this time be evident. On special occasions, accounted for in the overall efficiency of effort, nourishment became celebration. It was integrated in the calendar of events through which authority was acknowledged: Sabbath, religious holidays, and political celebrations were motives for a better, or at least different, menu. Other days were meant to raise the awareness of self-denial (fish on Friday, for instance). The cook did not necessarily become a literate person, but he or she was a product of the literate environment of practical experiences of pre-industrial and industrial societies. The tools and the culture of spices, ingredients, matching food and dishes, of expressing social status in the dinnerware set out, and the meal, i.e., the structure of the entire statement which a meal constitutes were all subjected to literacy. Labor division made the cook necessary, while simultaneously generating an industrial culture of food. In the equation of the labor market in industrial society, with literacy as its underlying structure, eating equals maintenance of productive and reproductive power. It also means the reproduction of needs at an increasing scale, as well as their change from needs to desires triggering the expansion of industrial production. In the expectations associated with food there is more than only the voice of hunger. Our system of values, as it was articulated in the literate use of language, is expressed in our hunger, and in our particular ways to satisfy it. Based on this observation, we acknowledge that all the forces at work in structuring democratic social relations also affect the socialization of our nourishment. Uniform quality, and access to this common denominator quality, are introduced in the market, and with them the possibility of stating and maintaining health standards. Within the boundaries of the civilization of literacy and its associated hygiene and health standards, there is little left that can be identified with the country home that cannot be industrialized and made uniformly available. Beyond these boundaries starts a new reality of expectations, of transcended needs, and of technological means to satisfy them within standards of quality that reinforce the notion of democracy. The identity of food It is the act of mixing ingredients, boiling or stir-frying them, and the preparation of everything, the testing of different proportions, of new ingredients, of new combinations that results in the food we care for so much. The awareness of the entire process during which humans distanced themselves from nature is reduced in our understanding to some simple facts: instead of devouring the hunted animal, humans cooked it, preserved some parts for other days, learned how to combine various sources of nutrition (animal and plant), noticed what was good for the body and the mind. What is generally not accounted for is the fact that the break from the direct source of food to the experience of preparing is simultaneous with the emergence and establishment of language. Consequent changes are the use of methods for preserving, the continuous expansion of the food repertory (sources of nourishment), the development of better artifacts for increasing the efficiency of production and preparation of foods, and industrial processing. These changes parallel differentiations in the status of language-based practical experiences: the appearance of writing, the emergence of education, progress in crafts, the pragmatic of industrial society. With the experience of literacy, human awareness of food experienced as a necessity, and as an expression of human personality and identity, increases. Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others, forcefully dealt with this subject. The basic idea-of human dimensions expressed in nourishment-becomes more significant today. None of the many writers infatuated with the subject have noticed that once the limits of literacy, as limits of the pragmatics that made it necessary, are reached, we transcend the age of McDonalds, of synthetic nutritional substances, and of an infinity of prefabricated foods. This is also the age of endless variations and combinations. The human personality and identity are more difficult to characterize. It is expressed in our nourishment, as well as in how we dress-choosing from an infinity of available cloths-our sexual behavior- free to experiment in ever-expanding possibilities: patterns of family life, education, art, and communication. The infinity of choices available in the civilization of illiteracy eradicates any center, and to some extent undermines commonalty, even at the level of the species. In this civilization, the investment in self is less community-related and more an act of individual choice. These choices are embodied in precise, customized diets based on individual requirements as defined by dietitians. Computer programs control personalized recipes and the production of any meal or menu. The balance of time and energy has changed totally. Experiences of work, free time, and fitness mix. The clear borderline between them is progressively blurred. It is not clear whether one burns more calories today in jogging than in working, but it is clear that discipline, in particular that of self-denial, is replaced by unpredictable self-indulgence. Consequently, to maintain the body's integrity, individual diet and exercise programs are generated, given a new focus through the transition from the economy of scarcity to that of consumption. Illiterate subjects accept that the market decide for them what and when and how to eat, as well as what to wear, with whom to pair, and how to feel. The appearance is that of self-determination. Independence and responsibility are not instant-mix experiences. Whether embodied in fast food chains, in microwave nourishment, in the television cooking shows, there is an illusion of self-determination, continuously reinforced in the seductive reality of a segmented world of competing partial literacies. The appearance is that one can choose from many literacies, instead of being forced into one. The fact is that we are chosen in virtue of having our identity constituted and confirmed within the pragmatic context. Awareness of and interaction with nature, already affected in the previous age of industrial processing of basic foods, are further eroded. The immediate environment and the sources of nutrition it provides are assimilated in the picture of seasonless and context-free shelves at the supermarket. Space (where does the food come from?) and time (to which season does it correspond?) distinctions, accounted for so precisely in literacy, dissolve in a generic continuum. One does not need to be rich to have access to what used to be the food of those who could afford it. One does not need to be from a certain part of the world to enjoy what used to be the exotic quality of food. Time and space shrink for the traveler or TV viewer, as they shrink for the supermarket patron. They shrink even more for the increasing number of people shopping through the World Wide Web, according to formulas custom designed for them. With brand recognition, brands become more important than the food. The rhythms of nature and the rhythm of work and life are pulled further apart by the mediating mechanisms of marketing. The natural identity of food vanishes in the subsequent practical experience of artificial reality. There is little that distinguishes between a menu designed for the team of the space shuttle, for the military personnel in combat far from home, and the energy calculations for a machine. A little artificial taste of turkey for Thanksgiving, or the cleverly simulated smell of apple pie, makes the difference. The language of expectations Beasts of habit, people expect some reminders of taste and texture even when they know that what they eat or drink is the result of a formula, not of natural processes. This is why the almost fat-free hamburger, devised in laboratories for people in need of nourishment adapted to new conditions of life and work, will succeed or fail not on the basis of calories, but on the simulation of the taste of the real thing. This is how the new Coke failed. Non-alcoholic beer and wine, fat- and sugar-free ice cream, low cholesterol egg, vegetable ham, and all substitutes for milk, butter, and cream, to list a few, are in the same situation. In the fast lane of the civilization of illiteracy, we expect fast food: hamburgers, fish, chicken, pizza, and Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Thai, and other foods. The barriers of time and space are overcome through pre-processing, microwave ovens, and genetic engineering. But we do not necessarily accept the industrial model of mass production, reminiscent of literacy characteristics quite different from those of home cooking. We cannot afford those long cooking cycles, consuming energy and especially time, that resulted in what some remember as the kitchen harmony of smell and taste, as well as in waste and dubious nutritional value, one should add. A McDonalds hamburger is close to the science fiction image of a world consuming only the energy source necessary for functioning. But the outlet reminds one of machines. It is still a manned operation, with live operators, geared to offer a uniform industrial quality. However, the literate structure gives way to more effective functioning. At intervals defined by a program continuously tracking consumption, the restaurant is stocked with the pre-processed items on the menu. None of the cooks needs to know how to write or read; food preparation is on-line, in real time. And if the requirements of the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy overcome the current industrial model, the new McDonalds will be able to meet individual expectations no less restricted than those of the Internet pizza providers. If this does not happen, McDonalds and its many imitators in the world will disappear, just as many of the mass production food manufacturers have already disappeared. The mediating nature of the processes involved in nourishment is revealing. Between the natural and artificial sources of protein, fats, sugar, and other groups recommended for a balanced meal and the person eating them with the expectation of looking, feeling, and performing better, of living longer and healthier, there are many layers of processing, controlling, and measuring. Many formulas for preparation follow each other, or are applied in parallel cycles. After we made machines that resemble humans, we started treating ourselves as machines. The digital engine stands for the brain, pump for the heart, circuits for the nervous system. They are all subjected to maintenance cycles, clean sources of energy, self-cleaning mechanisms, diagnostic routines. The end product of food production-a customized pizza, taco, egg roll, hamburger, gefilte fish-resembles the "real thing," which is produced at the lowest possible cost in a market in which literate food is a matter of the past, a subject of reminiscence. The new dynamics of change and the expectation of adaptability and permanence associated with the nourishment of the civilization of literacy collide at all levels involved in our need to eat and drink. What results from this conflict are the beautiful down-sized kitchens dominated by the microwave oven, the new cookware adapted to the fast food and efficient nourishment, the cooking instructions downloaded from the digital network into the kitchen. The interconnectedness of the world takes rather subtle aspects when it comes to food. Microwave ovens can perfectly be seen as peripheral devices connected to the smart kitchens of the post-industrial age, all set to feed us once we push the dials that will translate a desire, along with our health profile, into a code number. Three-quarters of all American households (Barbie's included) use a microwave oven. And many of them are bound to become an address on the Internet, as other appliances already are. The conflict between literate and illiterate nourishment is also documented by the manner in which people write, draw, film, televise, and express themselves about cooking and related matters. This addresses the communication aspects of the practical experience of what and how we eat. The people who could go to their back yard for fresh onions or cabbage, get meat from animals they hunted or tended, or milk their own cow or goat, belong to a pragmatic framework different from that of people who buy produce, meat, cheese, and canned and frozen food in a small store or a supermarket. To communicate experiences that vanished because of their low efficiency is an exercise in history or fiction. To communicate current experiences in nourishment means to acknowledge mediation, distribution of tasks, networking, and open-endedness as they apply to communication and the way we feed ourselves or are fed by others. It also means to acknowledge a different quality. Once upon a time, writing on food and dining was part of literature. Food authorities have been celebrated as writers. But with the advent of nourishment strategies, literate writing gave way to a prose of recipes almost as idiosyncratic as recipes for the mass production of soap, or cookbooks for programming. Some gourmets complained. Food experts suggested that precision was as good for cooking as temperature gauges. The understanding of how close the act of cooking is to writing about it, or, in our days to the tele-reality of the kitchen, or to the new interactive gadgets loaded with recipes for the virtual reality cooking game, is often missing. When conditions for exercising fantasy in the kitchen are no longer available, fantasy deserts the food pages and moves into the scripts of the national gourmet video programs and computer games-or on Web sites. Moreover, when predetermined formulas for bouillons, salad dressings, cakes, and puddings replace the art of selecting and preparing, the writing disappears behind the information added according to regulation, as vitamins are added to milk and cereals. A super-cook defines what is appropriate, and the efficient formula turns our kitchens into private processing plants ensuring the most efficient result. What is gained is the possibility to assemble meals in combinations of nutritional modules and to integrate elements from all over the world without the risk of more than a new experience for our taste buds. From the industrial age, we inherited processing techniques guaranteeing uniformity of flavor and standards of hygiene. The price we pay for this is the pleasure, the adventure, the unique experience. Food writing is based on the assumptions of uniformity. In contrast, cooking shows started exploring the worlds of technological progress, in which you don't cook because you are hungry or need to feed your family. You do it for competitive reasons, in order to achieve recognition for mastering new utensils and learning the names of new ingredients. In the post-industrial, the challenge is to break into the territory of innovation and ascertain practical experiences of cooking, presentation, and eating, freed from literate constraints. Coping with the right to affluence Pragmatic frameworks are not chosen, like food from a menu or toppings from a list. Practical experiences of human self-constitution within a pragmatic framework are the concrete embodiments of belonging to such a pragmatics. A new pragmatic framework negates the previous one, but does not eliminate it. Although these points were made in earlier chapters, there is a specific reason for dealing with them again here. As opposed to other experiences, nourishment is bound to involve more elements of continuity than science or the military. As we have already seen, literacy-based forms of preparing and eating food exist parallel to illiterate nourishment. This is the reason why some peculiar forms of social redistribution of food need to be discussed. From self-nourishment to being fed Humanized eating and drinking come with moral values attached to them, foremost the rule of sharing. Pragmatic rules regarding cleanliness, waste, and variation in diet are also part of the experience of nourishment. These associated elements- values, expectations, rules-are rarely perceived as constituting an extension of the practical experience through which humanity distinguishes itself from sheer naturalness. Literacy appropriates the rules and expectations that acknowledge and support ideals and values. Once expressed in the literate text, however, they appear to be extraneous to the process. Changes in the condition of religion, civic education, family, and the legal code, as well as progress in biology, chemistry, and genetics, create the impression and expectation that we can attach to food whatever best suits the situation morally or practically. The self-control and self-denial of previous pragmatic contexts are abandoned for instant gratification. In the competitive context of the new pragmatics that renders literacy useless, the sense of a right to affluence developed. Parallel to this, institutions, founded on literacy-based experiences, were set up to control equity and distribution. Against the background of high efficiency that the new pragmatics made possible, competition is replaced by controlled distribution, and the experience of self-nourishment is replaced by that of being fed. Absorbed by tax-supported social programs, the poor, as well as others who chose giving up responsibility for themselves, are freed from projecting their biological and cultural identity in the practical experience of taking care of their own needs. Thus part of the morality of eating and drinking is socialized, in the same manner that literacy is socialized. At the same time, people's illiteracy expands in the sphere of nourishment. Today, there are more people than ever who could not take care of themselves even if all the food in the world and all the appliances we know of were brought into their homes. Dependencies resulting from the new status of high efficiency and distribution of tasks free the human being in relative terms, while creating dependencies and expectations. The problem is generally recognized in all advanced countries. But the answer cannot be so-called welfare reforms that result only in cutting benefits and tightening requirements. Such reforms are driven by short-sightedness and political opportunism. A different perspective is necessary, one that addresses motivation and the means for pursuing individual self-constitution as something other than the beneficiary of an inefficient system. The pragmatics that overrides the need for literacy is based on individual empowerment. As necessary as soup kitchens are under conditions of centralism and hierarchy, the dissemination of knowledge and skills that individuals need in order to be able to provide for themselves is much more important. Run and feed the hungry "Sponsorship for a charitable track event. Funds for Third World countries threatened by starvation sought. Register support through your donations." And on a nice sunny weekend, many kind-hearted individuals will run miles around a city or swim laps in a pool in order to raise funds for organizations such as CARE, Oxfam, Action Hunger, or Feed the World. Hunger in this world of plenty, even in the USA and other prosperous countries, derives from the same dynamics that results in the civilization of illiteracy. The scale of humankind requires levels of efficiency for which practical experiences of survival based on limited resources are ill suited. Entire populations are subjected to hunger and disease due to social and economic inequities, to weather conditions or topological changes, or to political upheaval in the area where they live. Short of addressing inequities, aid usually alleviates extreme situations. But it establishes dependencies instead of encouraging the best response to the situation through new agricultural practices, where applicable, or alternative modes of producing food. Seduced by our life of plenty and by the dynamics of change, we could end up ignoring starving and diseased populations, or we could try to understand our part in the equation. Living in an integrated world and partaking in the pragmatics of a global economy, people become prisoners of the here and now, discarding the very disconcerting reality of millions living in misery. But it is exactly the pragmatic framework leading to the civilization of illiteracy that also leads to the enormous disparities in today's world. Many forces are at work, and the danger of falling prey to the slogans of failed ideology, while trying to understand misery and hunger in today's world, cannot be overestimated. Starvation in Africa, South America, in some East European countries, and in parts of Asia needs to be questioned in light of the abundance of food in Japan, West Europe, and North America. Both extremes correspond to changes in human self-constitution under expectations of efficiency critical to the current scale of humankind. If human activity had not changed and broadened its base of resources, the entire world would be subject to what Ethiopians, Sudanese, Somalis, Bangladeshis, and many others are facing. Extreme climatic conditions, as well as decreasing fertility of the land due usually to bad farming practices, can be overcome by new farming methods, progress in agricultural technology, biogenetics, and chemistry. Spectacular changes have come about in what is considered the most traditional practice through which humans constitute their identity. The change affected ways of working, family relations, use of local resources, social and political life, and even population growth. It resulted in a new set of dependencies among communities that had afforded autarchic modes of existence for thousands of years. The environment, too, has been affected probably as much by scientific and technological progress as by the new farming methods that take full advantage of new fertilizers, insecticides, and genetic engineering of new plants and animals. Motivated by literacy-based ideals, some countries took it upon themselves to see that people in less developed lands be redeemed through benefits they did not expect and for which they were not prepared. At the global levels of humankind, when the necessity of literacy declines, dependencies characteristic of literacy-based interactions collide with forces of integration and competition. What results is a painful compromise. Hunger is acknowledged and tended to by enormous bureaucracies: churches, charities, international aid organizations, and institutions more concerned with themselves than with the task at hand. They maintain dependencies that originated within the pragmatics of the civilization of literacy. The activities they carry out are inherently inefficient. Where the new dynamics is one of differentiation and segmentation, the main characteristics of these experiences are those of literacy: establishment of a universal model, the attempt to reach homogeneity, tireless effort to disseminate modes of existence and work of a sequential, analytic, rationalistic, and deterministic nature. Consequently, where nourishment from the excess attained elsewhere is dispensed, a way of life alien to those in need is projected upon them. Aid, even to the extent that it is necessary, re-shapes biology, the environment, the connection among people, and each individual. Diseases never before experienced, behavioral and mental changes, and new reliances are generated, even in the name of the best intentions. In some areas affected by starvation, tribal conflicts, religious intolerance, and moral turpitude add to natural conditions not propitious to life. These man-made conditions cannot and should not veil the fact that human creativity and inventiveness are prevented from unfolding, replaced by ready-made solutions, instead of being stimulated. Empowerment means to facilitate developments that maintain distinctions and result from differences, instead of uniformity. Would all the populations facing hunger and disease actually jump from the illiteracy of the past-a result of no school system or limited access to education, as well as of a pragmatics that did not lead to literacy-to the pragmatically determined illiteracy of the future? The pragmatic framework of our new age corresponds to the need to acknowledge differences and derive from heterogeneity new sources of creativity. Each ton of wheat or corn airlifted to save mothers and children is part of the missionary praxis commenced long ago when religious organizations wanted to save the soul of the so-called savage. The answer to hunger and disease cannot be only charity, but the effort to expand networks of reciprocally significant work. The only meaningful pragmatics derives from practical experiences that acknowledge differences instead of trying to erase them. Access to resources for more effective activities is fundamentally different from access to surplus or to bureaucratic mechanisms for redistribution. Where literacy never became a reality, no organization should take it upon itself to impose it as the key to survival and well being. Our literacy-based medicine, nourishment, social life, and especially values are not the panacea for the world, no matter how proud we are of some, and how blind to their limitations. Human beings have sufficient means today to afford tending to differences instead of doing away with them. In this process, we might learn about that part of nourishment that was rationalized away in the process of reaching higher levels of efficiency. And we might find new resources in other environments and in the peculiar self-constitution of peoples we consider deprived-resources that we could integrate into our pragmatics. No truffles (yet) in the coop Our civilization of illiterate nourishment is based on networks and distributed assignments. The change from self-reliance to affluence corresponds, first and foremost, to the change of the pragmatic context within which the human condition is defined. We project a physical reality-our body-that has changed over time due to modifications in our environment, and the transition from practical experiences of survival to the experience of abundance. The room for invention and spontaneity expands the more we discover and apply rules that guarantee efficiency or limit those preventing it. There might be several dozens of sauces one can select from, and no fewer cereals for breakfast, many types of bread, meat, fish, and very many preprocessed menus. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that all taste alike. But it would not necessarily be false to ascertain that behind diversity there are a limited number of changing formulas, some better adapted to succeed in the marketplace than others, and some better packaged than others. Yes, people are nostalgic. More precisely, people are subjected to the nostalgia- triggering stimuli of mass media: the attraction of the homemade, homestyle, Mom's secret recipe. This is not because the majority of us know what these icons of the past are, but rather because we associate them with what is no longer possible: reassurance, calm, tradition, protection, permanence, care. We also hear the voices of those who demystify the literate cooking of yesteryear: women spent their lifetime slaving in their kitchens. They did so, the argument goes, to satisfy males, only too happy to be taken care of. Both voices, those idealizing and those demystifying the past, should be heard: We enslaved part of nature and took it upon ourselves to annihilate animals or, worse, change their genetic structure. In order to satisfy our appetites, we sacrificed the environment. And, giving in to gluttony, we effectively changed our genetic constitution. The truth, if there is any above and beyond the cultural and economic conditions of cooking, is that transitions from one scale of humankind to another subjected practical experiences of self-constitution to fundamental modifications. Trying to understand some of the patterns of life and work, as well as patterns of access to food or of preparing it, requires that we understand when and why such changes take place. Language stored not only recipes, but also expectations that became part of our nourishment. The culture of food preparation and serving, the art of discovering new recipes and enjoying what we eat and drink, is more than language can convey. Truffles, the food of kings and nobles, and more recently of those who can afford them, bear a whole history, obviously expressed in language. Whether seen as the spit of witches, a more or less magic aphrodisiac, or a miraculous life-prolonging food, truffles gain in status because our experience, reflected in the language pertinent to cooking, led us to regard them from a perspective different from those who first discovered, by accident, their nutritive value. It is in the tradition of orality that fathers whispered to their sons the secret of places where truffles could be found. Practical experiences involving writing, and later literacy, raised the degree of expectancy associated with their consumption. They affected the shift regarding the eating of truffles from the sphere of the natural (the pigs that used to find them, and liked them probably as much as the gourmets, had to be replaced by specially trained dogs) to the realm of the cultural, where the interests of human beings prevail over anything else. Through language processes paralleled by the semiosis of high gastronomy, truffles enter the market as sign-of a discriminating palate, of snobbery, or of actually knowing why truffles are good. Language and food interact. This interaction involves other sign systems, too: images, sounds, movements, texture, odor, taste. Through the influence of language and these other sign systems, the preparation of food and the appropriate drinks becomes an art. In the age of illiteracy, the languages of genetics, biology, and medicine make us aware of what it takes to avoid malnutrition, what it takes to maintain health and prolong one's life. Literacy was reinforced in the convention of how people eat, what, when, and how satisfaction or disappointment was expressed. In our new nutritional behavior and in our new values, literacy plays a marginal role (including interaction at the dining table). The artificial truffle is free of the mystique of origin, of the method for finding truffles, of secret formulas (except the trade secret). It is one item among many, cheap, illusory, and broadly available, as democratic as artificial caviar or, as Rousseau would have put it, government by representation. Identical in so many ways, the cafeterias that extend an industrial model in a post-industrial context feed millions of people based on a formula of standardization. Hierarchies are wiped away. This is no place for truffles. One gets his tray and follows those who arrived before. There is no predetermined sequence. All that remains is the act of selection and the execution of the transaction-an exercise in assemblage not far removed from composing your own pizza on a computer monitor. When the language of available nourishment is standardized to the extent that it is in these feeding environments-elegant coops stocked with shining metal coffee, tea, and soda dispensers, refrigerated containers of sandwiches, cake, fruit-the language of expectations will not be much richer. The increased efficiency made possible this way accounts for the wide acceptance of this mediocre, illiterate mode of nourishing ourselves. We are what we eat If we were to analyze the language associated with what, how, when, where, and why we eat, we would easily notice that this language is tightly connected to the language of our identification. We are what, how, why, when, and where we eat. This identification changed when agriculture started and families of languages ascertained themselves. It changed again when the pragmatic framework required writing, and so on until the identity of the literate person and the post-literate emerged from practical experiences characteristic of a new scale of human experiences. Today we are, for quite a broad range of our social life, an identification number of a sort, an address, and other information in a database (income, investment, wealth, debt history) that translates into what marketing models define as our individual expectations. Information brokers trade us whenever someone is interested in what we can do for him or her. Powerful networks of information processing can be used to precisely map each person to the shelf surface available in stores, to the menus of restaurants we visit on various occasions, and to the Internet sites of our journeys in cyberspace. Our indexical signs serve as indicators for various forms of filtering calories (how many do we really need?), fats (saturated or not), proteins, sugars, even the aesthetics of food presentation, in order to exactly match individual needs and desires. Scary or not, one can even imagine how we will get precisely what best suits our biological system, influenced by the intensity of the tennis game (virtual) we just finished, the TV program we watched for the last 30 seconds, or the work we are involved in. To make this happen is a task not so much different from receiving our customized newspaper or only the information we want through Pointscape, saving our monitors from excessive heat and saving us time from useless searches. In the pragmatic framework where illiteracy replaces literacy, eating and drinking are freed from the deterministic chain of survival and reproduction. They are made part of a more encompassing practical experience. Each time we take a bite from a hot dog or sandwich, each time we enjoy ice cream, drink wine or beer or soda, take vitamins or add fiber to our diet, we participate in two processes: the first, of revising expectations, turning what used to be a necessity into luxury; the second, of continuous expansion of the global market present through what we eat and drink. Many transactions are embodied in our daily breakfast, business lunch, or TV dinner. With each bite and gulp (as with each other product consumed), we are incorporated into the dynamics of expanding the market. The so-called Florida orange juice contains frozen concentrate from Brazil. The fine Italian veal microwave dinner contains meat from Romania. The wildflower honey "Made in Germany" is from Hungarian or Polish beehives. Bread, butter, cheese, cold cuts, jams, and pasta could be marked with the flag of the United Nations if all the people involved in producing them were to be acknowledged. Meat, poultry, fruits, and vegetables, not unlike everything else traded in the global market, make for an integrated world in which the most efficient survives in the competition for pleasing if not our taste, at least our propensity to buy. The efficiency reached in the pragmatic framework of illiteracy allows people to maintain, within the plurality of languages, a plurality of dietary experiences, some probably as exotic as the literacy of ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Aramaic, or cuneiform writing. Even the recipes of the Roman Empire can be enjoyed in exclusive settings (as in Saint-Bernard-de-Comminges in the Pyrénées) or as haute, ready-made cuisine (the Comptesse du Barry food company offers wild boar in spicy sauce, stuffed duck in ginger, and sea trout with wild leeks). The Japanese have their sushi prepared from resuscitated fish flown, in a state of anabiosis (organic rhythm slowed through refrigeration), from wherever the beloved delicacies are still available. The multiplicity of food-related experiences in our time is representative of segmentation and heterogeneity in the civilization of illiteracy. It is also an expression of the subtle interdependencies of the many aspects of human self-constitution. The democracy of nourishment and the mediocrity of food are not necessarily a curse. Neither are the extravagant performances of artist-cooks that fetch a price equivalent to the average annual salary of a generic citizen of this integrated world. Difference makes a difference. Feminism, multiculturalism, political activism (from right to left)-all use arguments related to how and what we eat, as part of the broader how and why we live, to advance their causes. If nothing else, the civilization of illiteracy makes possible choices, including those pertinent to nourishment, for which we are ill prepared. The real challenge is still ahead of us. And no one knows how it tastes. The Professional Winner The connections between sports and literacy are far from obvious. Watching sports events, as a spectator in the stadium, or in front of the television, does not require the literacy we associate with libraries, reading and writing, and school education. One does not need to read in order to see who is fastest, strongest, or jumps the farthest or highest, or throws or catches the best. And one does not really need to be literate in order to become a champion or to make it into a first-league team. Running, jumping, pushing, throwing, catching, and kicking are part of our physical repertory, related to our day-to-day existence, easy to associate with ways through which survival took place when scavenging, hunting, fishing, and foraging were the fundamental ways for primitive beings to feed themselves and to avoid being killed. Even the association of sports and with mytho-magical ceremonies implying physical performance is easy to explain without reference to language, oral or written. Exceptional physical characteristics were, and still are in some parts of the world, celebrated as expressions of forces beyond immediate control and understanding. Gods were worshipped through exceptional physical feats performed by people worshipping them. In archaic cultures, athletes could even be sacrificed on the altar of gratitude, where the best were destined to please the gods. The initial phases of what was eventually called sport correspond to establishing those sign systems (gestures, sounds, shapes) which, in anticipation of language, made language possible and necessary. This was a phase of syncretism, during which the physical projection of the human being dominated the intellect. Running after an animal or from one, and running for play are different forms of human experience corresponding to different pragmatic contexts. They have different motivations and different outcomes. Probably 20,000 years separate these two experiences in time. In order to reach the level of generality and abstraction that a competition embodies, the human being had to undergo experiences of self-constitution within which the domination of physical over intellectual characteristics changed drastically. The qualifier sport-a word which seems to have ascended within the English language of the 19th century-probably came about in the framework of the division between secular and non-secular forms of human praxis. Both maintenance and improvement of the human biological endowment and mytho-magical practice were based on awareness of the role the body plays and the recognition of the practical need to disseminate this awareness. Efficiency was the governing aspect, not recognized as such, not conceptualized, but acknowledged in the cult of the body and the attempt to make it part of the shared culture. The contest (for which the Greeks used the words athlos) and the prize (athlon, which eventually led to the word athlete) embody generalizations of those practical situations through which survival and well-being came about. As a complex experience, sports involves rational and irrational components. This is why approaching the relation between literacy and sports, one has to account for both dimensions. Sports is approached here from the perspective of the changes through which it became what it is today: a well defined form of relaxation, but probably more a competitive type of work acknowledged in the market like any other product of human practice. The immediate connection between physical fitness and the outcome of practical experiences dominated by physical aspects was established within very limited, but strongly patterned, activity. It soon became the measure of survival success, and thus the rationality shared by the community experiencing the survival of the fittest is reflected in competition. Athletes competed in order to please gods; to conjure fertility, rain, or the extension of life; or to expel demons. The process is documented in a variety of petroglyphs (cave paintings, engravings on stone) and in carvings or etchings on animal horn and metal, as well as in the first written testimony, in which the role of the stronger, the faster, the more agile was evinced. Documents from all known cultures, regardless of their geographic coordinates, have in common the emphasis on the physical as it acquired a symbolic status. To understand how some biological characteristics improved chances of survival means to understand the rationality of the body. Its embodiment in the culture of physical awareness facilitated practical experiences of human self-constitution that would result in sports professions. The irrational element has to do with the fact that although all males and all females are structurally the same, some individuals seem better endowed physically. As with many other aspects of the practical experience through which each person acknowledges his or her identity, what could not be clarified was placed in a domain of explanations where the rationality is lost. This is why expectations of rain, of longer life, of chasing away evil forces are associated with sports. The cult of the body, in particular of body parts, resulted from experiences leading to awareness of oneself. When the body, or parts of it, became a goal in itself, the rationality of physical fitness for survival is contradicted by the irrationality of fitness for reasons other than individual and communal well-being. Rituals, myths, religion, and politics appropriated the irrational component of physical activities. In ancient communities, in the context of a limited understanding of physical phenomena, attempts were made to infer from the immediate well-being of the body of competing athletes to the future well-being of the entire community. When it comes to physical fitness in the context of survival of the fittest, can we suppose that a lone human being stands out, something like the lonely animals on their own until the time for pairing comes, competing with others, killing and being killed? Probably not. Scale defines the species as one that ascertains its self-constitution in cooperative efforts, no matter how primitive. Up to a certain scale, the only competition was for survival. It translated into food and offspring. Only after the agricultural phase, which corresponds to a level of efficiency of more food than immediately necessary, the element of competition shifts from survival to ascertainment. Competition and expectations of performance correspond to the period of incipient writing, and were progressively acknowledged as part of the dynamics of communal life. Every other change in the role of humankind brought with it expectations of physical fitness corresponding to expected levels of efficiency. Sports and self-constitution Gymnastics is an expression of the cult of the body parallel to that of art. In order to realize its dimensions, it needs to be seen from this broader perspective, not as a random set of exercises. It has a physical and a metaphysical dimension, the latter related to the obsession with ideal proportions that eventually were expressed in philosophic terms. There are plenty of explanations to be considered for both the origin of the practical experience of sports and the forms this experience took over centuries. Alluding to some explanations, though not in order to endorse them, will help to show how diversity of sports experiences resulted in diversity of interpretations. The basic assumption of this entire book, human self-constitution in practical experiences, translates into the statement that sports is not a reflective but a constitutive experience. Indeed, through running, jumping, wrestling, or otherwise participating in some game, human beings project themselves according to physical characteristics and mental coordination that facilitate physical performance in the reality of their existence. This projection is a direct way of identifying oneself and thus of becoming part of an interacting group of people. The majority of researchers studying the origins of sports identify these in the experience of survival, thus placing them in the Darwinian evolutionist frame. When survival skills, maintenance, and reproduction skills become distinct and relatively autonomous, they follow recurrent patterns on whose basis social practice takes place and new ideas are formulated. From the perspective of today's jogger, running might seem an individual experience, and to a great extent it is. But fundamentally, running as a practical experience takes place among people sharing the notion of physical exercise and attaching to it social, cultural, economic, and medical meaning. We create ourselves not only when we write poetry, tend land, or manufacture machines, but also when we are involved in athletic experiences. There is in sports, as there is in any other form of practical experience, a natural, a cultural (what we learn from others and create with others), and a social (what is known as communication) dimension. The sports experience appears to us as the result of the coordination of all these elements. For someone attending a sports event, this coordination can become an object of description: this much is due to training, this much to natural attributes, and this much to social implications (pride, patriotism). This is why sports events sometimes appear to the spectator as having a predetermined meaning, not one resulting from the dynamics of the interaction characteristic of this human experience. In the mytho-magical stage of human dynamics, in which the ability of the body was celebrated, the meaning seemed to drive the entire event more than it occurs today in a game of hockey or football. Due to the syncretic nature of such events, rituals addressed existence in its perceived totality. The specialized nature of games such as hockey or football leads these to address only one aspect of existence-the experience of the particular sport. A game can degenerate from being a competition structured by rules to a confrontation of nerves, violence, or national pride, or into sheer exhibitionism, disconnected from the drive for victory. Although the physical basis for the practical experience of sports is the same- human beings as they evolved in time-in different cultures, different recurrent patterns and different meanings attached to them can be noticed. This statement does not align itself with explanations of sports given in Freudian tradition, Marxist theory, or in Huizinga's model of the human being as playful man (Homo Ludens). It takes into consideration the contextual nature of any form of human practice and looks at sports, as it does at any human experience, from the perspective of a constitutional, not representational, act; in short, from the pragmatic perspective. When Japanese players kick a ball in the game called kemari, the recurrent pattern of interaction is not the familiar football or soccer game, although each player constitutes his identity in the performance. When the Zen archer tenses his bow, the pattern, associated with the search for unity with the universe, is quite different from the pattern of archery in Africa or of the archery competition at the Olympic games of the past. The ball games of the Mayans relied on a mythology which was itself a projection of the human being in quest of explaining and finding an answer to what distinguishes the sun from the moon and how their influence affects patterns of human practice. It is probably easier to look at the recurrent patterns of interaction of more recent sports experiences not rooted in the symbolism of the ancient, such as baseball, aquatic dancing, or ice skating, to understand what aspect of the human being is projected and what kind of experience results for the participants (athletes, sports fans, public, media). The surprising reality is the diversity. People never exhaust their imagination in devising new and newer forms of competition involving their physical aptitude. No less surprising is the pursuit of a standard experience, modeled in rules for the competition. Some are intrinsic to the effort (the rules of the game), others to the appearance (expected clothing, for instance). Parallel to the standard experience, there is also a deviant practice of sports (nonstandard), in forms of individual rules, ad hoc conventions, private competition. The social level of sports and the private level are loosely connected. To become a professional means, among other things, to accept the rules as they apply in the standard experience, within organizations or acknowledged competition. The language professional is pretty much in a similar situation. Literacy serves as the medium for encoding the rules. Language and physical performance But the subject here is not the similarity between sports and language, butrather their interrelation. The obvious entry point is to notice that we use language to describe the practical experience of sport and to assign meaning to it. As obvious as this is, it is also misleading in the sense that it suggests that sports would not be possible without language-an idea implicit in the ideal of literacy. In ages when written language emerged, sporting events become part of social life. Visual representation (such as petroglyphs and the later hieroglyphics), while not exactly a statement about the awareness of exercise, contain enough elements to confirm that not only immediate, purposeful physical activity (running after a wild animal, for instance) and the exercise and maintenance of the physical were, at least indirectly, acknowledged. Testimony to the effect that at a certain moment in time the community started providing for the physically talented-in the tombs of the Egyptian Pharaoh Beni Hasan the whole gamut of wrestling is documented in detail-helps us understand that labor division and increased efficiency are in a relation that goes far beyond cause and effect. The specialization, which probably started at that time, resulted not just from the availability of resources, but also from the willingness to allocate them in ways that make the sports experience possible because a certain necessity was acknowledged. The pattern of kicking a ball in kemari and the pattern of language use in the same culture are not directly connected. Nevertheless, the game has a configurational nature: the aim is to maintain the ball in the air for as long as possible. Soccer, even football, are sequential: the aim is to score higher than the opposing team. In the first case, the field is marked by four different trees: willow, cherry, pine, and maple. In the second, it is marked by artificial boundaries outside of which the game rules become meaningless. The languages of the cultures in which such games appeared are characterized by different structures that correspond to very different practical experiences. The logic embodied in each language system affects, in turn, the logic of the sports experience. Kemari is not only non-predicative and configurational, but also infused by the principle of amé, in which things are seen as deeply interdependent. Soccer and football are analytical, games of planning, texts whose final point is the goal or the touchdown. No surprise then, that mentality, as a form of expressing the influence of practical experience in some patterned expectation, plays a role, too. There are many extremely individualistic forms of competition, and others of collective effort. While in today's global market mentality plays a different role than in the past, it still affects sports in its non-standard form. These and other differences are relevant to understanding how different practical experiences constitute different instances of human objectification, sports being one of these. Even when the sports instance is disconnected from the experience that made it necessary, it is still affected by all the structural elements that define the pragmatic context. Indeed, while there is a permanency to sports-involvement of the human body-there is also a large degree of variation corresponding to successive pragmatic circumstances. Sport is also a means of expression. During the action, it externalizes physical capabilities, but also intellectual qualities: self-control, coordination, planning. Initially, physical performance complemented rudimentary language. Afterwards the two took different paths, without actually ever separating entirely (as the Greek Olympics fully document). When language reached some of its relative limits, expression through sports substituted for it: not even the highest literate expression could capture the drama of competition, the tragedy of failure, or the sublimity of victory. But more interesting is what language extracted from the experience of sports. Language captured characteristics of the sports experience and generalized them. Through language, they were submitted, in a new form, to experiences very different from sports: sports for warfare, athletics for instilling a sense of order, competitions as circus for the masses. But primarily, people derived from sports the notion of competitiveness, accepted as a national characteristic, as well as a characteristic of education, of art, of the market. Rationalized in language, the notion of competition introduces the experience of comparing, later of measuring, and thus opens the door to the bureaucracy of sports and the institutionalized aspects we today take for granted. Greeks cared for the winner. Time-keeping devices were applied to sports later, more precisely at the time when keeping records became relevant within the broader pragmatics of documentary ownership and inheritance. While playing does not require language, writing helped in establishing uniform rules that eventually defined games. The institution of playing, represented by organized competitions, is the result of the institution of literacy, and reflects pragmatic expectations pertinent to literacy. In every sports experience, there is a romantic notion of nature and freedom, reminiscent of the experience of hunting, fishing, and foraging. But at the same time, sports experiences testify to changes in the condition of human beings as they relate to the natural environment, their natural condition, social environment, and the artificial world resulting from human practice. Target shooting, or, more recently, Nintendo-type aiming with laser beams, is at the other end of the gamut. The circumstances of human experience that made literacy necessary affected the status of the sports experience as well. The contest became a product with a particular status; the prize reflects the sign process through which competition is evaluated. Allen Guttman distinguished several characteristics of modern sports: secularism, equality of opportunity, specialization of roles, rationalization, bureaucratic organization, quantification, and quest for records. What he failed to acknowledge is that such characteristics are not relevant unless considered in connection to the recurrent patterns of sports seen against the background of the general pragmatic framework. Once we make such connections, we notice that efficiency is more important than the so-called equality of opportunity, quantification, and bureaucratic organization. The quest for efficiency appropriate to the new scale of humankind is exactly what today affects literacy's degree of necessity. The quest for efficiency in sports becomes evident when we compare the changes from the very sophisticated, indeed obscure, rules governing sports performances in ritualistic cultures (Indian, Chinese, Mayan, Apache) with the tendency to simplify these rules and make the sports experience as transparent as possible. When certain African tribes adopted the modern game of soccer, they placed it in the context of their rituals. The entire set of premises on which the game is based, and which pertain to a culture so different from that of the African tribes, was actually dismissed, and premises of a different nature were attached as a frame for the adopted game. Consequently, the Inyanga (witch-doctor) became responsible for the outcome; the team and supporters had to spend the night before the game together around a campfire; goats were sacrificed. In such instances, the ceremony, not the game, is the recurrent pattern; winning or losing is of secondary importance. Once such tribes entered literate civilization, the utilitarian aspect became dominant. If we take European soccer and extend it to the American game of football, we can understand how new patterns are established according to conditions of human practice of a different structural nature. This discussion cannot be limited to the symbolism of the two games, or of any other sport. The attached meaning corresponds to the interpreted practical experience and does not properly substitute for the recurrent patterns which actually constitute the experience as a projection of the humans involved. What is of interest here is that literacy was a powerful instrument for structuring practical experiences, such as sports (among others), in the framework of a dynamics of interaction specific to industrial society. As the cradle of the industrial age, England is also the place where many sports and experiences associated with physical exercise started. But once the dynamics changed, some of the developments that the Industrial Revolution made necessary became obsolete. An example is national isolation. Literacy is an instrument of national distinction. By their nature, sports experiences are, or should be, above and beyond artificial national boundaries. Still, as past experiences show (the 1936 Olympics in Berlin was only the climax) and current experiences confirm (national obsession with medals in more recent Olympics), sports in the civilization of literacy, like many other practical experiences, is tainted by nationalism. Competition often degenerates into an adversarial relation and conflict. In the physical exercises of ancient Greece, China, or India, performance was not measured. The patterns were those of physical harmony, not of comparison; of aesthetics, not of functionality. In England, sports became an institution, and performance entered into the record books. Indeed, in England, the history of competitions was written to justify why sports were for the upper, educated classes, and should be kept for amateurs willing to enjoy victory as a reward. Some games were invented in the environment of the civilization of literacy and meant to accomplish functions similar to those fulfilled by literacy. They changed as the conditions of the practice of literacy changed, and became more and more an expression of the new civilization of more languages of a limited domain. In the information age, where much of language is substituted by other means of expression, sports are an experience that results primarily in generating data. For someone attracted by the beauty of a tennis game, the speed of a serve is of secondary relevance. But after a while, one realizes that tennis has changed from its literate condition to a condition in which victory means obliteration of the game. A very strong and fast serve transforms the game into a ledger of hits and misses. Quite similar is the dynamics of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, all generators of statistics in which the experts find more enjoyment than from the actual event. The dynamics of changes in the nature and purpose of sports is related to what makes the sports experience today another instance in the process of diversification of languages and the demotion of the necessity of literacy. The illiterate champion The dynamics of the change from the sports experience embodying the ideal of a harmoniously developed human being to that of high performance is basically the same as the dynamics of change behind any other form of human projection. Structurally, it consists of the transition from direct forms of interaction with the outside world to more and more mediated interrelations. Chasing an animal that will eventually be caught and eaten is a performance directly related to survival. In addition to the physical aspect, there are other elements that intervene in the relation hunter-hunted: how to mask the presence of one's odor from the prey; how to attract game (through noise or lure); how to minimize energy expended to succeed (where to hit the prey, and when). Ritual, magic, and superstition were added, but did not always enhance the outcome. Running for the maintenance and improvement of physical qualities is immediate, but still less direct in relation to the outcome than in hunting. The activity displays an understanding of connections: What do muscle tone, heartbeat, resilience, and volition have to do with our life and work, with our health? It also testifies to our efforts to preserve a certain sense of time and space (lost in the artificial environments of our homes or workplaces) and projects sheer physical existence. Running for pleasure, as we suppose animals do when young and enjoying security (think about puppies!) is different from running with a purpose such as hunting an animal, catching someone (friend or foe), running after a ball, or against a record. Running for survival is not a specialized experience; running in a war game implies some specialization; becoming the world champion in field and track is a specialized effort for whose outcome many people work. In the first case, the reason is immediate; in the second, less direct; in the third, mediated in several ways: the notion of running to compete, the distance accepted by all involved (athletes, spectators, organizations), the value attached, the meaning assigned, the means used in training and diet, the running costume. Before specialization, which is exclusive commitment to a particular practical experience, socially acknowledged selection took place. Not everybody had the physical and mental qualities appropriate to high sports performance. In the background, the market continuously evaluates what becomes, to variable degrees, a marketable product: the champion. In the process, the human being undergoes alienation, sometimes evinced through pain, other times ignored-books never read don't hurt. People tend to remember the festive moments in a champion's life, forgetting what leads to victory: hard work, difficult choices, numerous sacrifices, and the hardship inflicted on the bodies and minds engaged in the effort of extracting the maximum from the athlete. How literate should an athlete be? The question is not different from how literate a worker, farmer, engineer, ballerina, or scientist should be. Sports and literacy used to be tightly associated in a given context. The entire collegiate sports world (whose origin in 19th century Britain was already alluded to) embodies this ideal. Mens sana in corpore sano-a healthy mind in a healthy body-was understood along the line of the practical experience involving literacy as a rule for achieving high efficiency in sports. Some forms of sport are a projection from language and literacy to the physical experience. Tennis is one example, and possibly the best known. Such forms of sport were designed by literates and disseminated through the channels of literacy. Collegiate sports is their collective name. But once the necessity of literacy itself became less stringent, such sports started emancipating themselves from the confinements of language and developed their own languages. When winning became the aim, efficiency in specific sports terms became paramount and started being measured and recorded. Literates are not necessarily the most efficient in sports where physical prowess or quick scoring are needed to win: football, basketball, or baseball, as compared to long-distance running, swimming, or even the exotic sport of archery. This statement might seem tainted by stereotype or prejudice to which one falls prey when generalizing from a distorted past practical experience (affected by all kinds of rules, including those of sex and race discrimination). What is discussed here is not the stereotypical illiterate athlete, or the no less stereotypical aristocrat handling Latin and his horse with the same elegance, but the environment of sports in general. People involved in the practical experience of sports are sometimes seen as exceptionally endowed physically, and less so intellectually. This does not have to be so; there is really nothing inherent in sports that would result in the intellect-physique dichotomy, one to the detriment of the other. Examples of athletes who also achieved a high level of intellectual development can be given: Dr. Roger Bannister, the runner who broke the four-minute mile barrier; William Bradley, the former basketball player who became a United States senator; Michael Reed, once defense lineman who is now a concert pianist; Jerry Lucas, now a writer; Michael Lenice, a wide receiver who became a Rhodes Scholar. They are, nevertheless, the exception, not because one kind of experience is counterproductive to the other, but because the expectations of efficiency make it very difficult for one and the same person to perform at comparable levels as athletes and as intellectuals. Specialization in sports, no less than in any human activity, requires a focus of energy and talent. Choices, too, come with a price tag. While literacy does not result in higher performance in sports, a limited notion of sports literacy, i.e., control of the language of sports, allows for improved performance. It is relevant to analyze how today's sports experience requires the specialized language and the understanding of what makes higher performance, and thus higher efficiency, possible. Once sport is understood as a practical experience of human self- constitution, we can examine the type of knowledge and skill needed to reach the highest efficiency. Knowledge of the human body, nutrition, physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology is important. Information focused on reaching high performance has been accumulated for each form of physical exercise. As a result of the experience itself, as well as through import of pertinent knowledge from other domains of human activity, expertise becomes more and more focused. In some ways, the commonalty of the experience diminished while the specific aspect increased. For instance, on the basketball court, as we see it in various neighborhoods, playing is the major goal. Rules are loosely respected; players exert themselves for the pleasure of the effort. One meets others, establishes friendships, finds a useful way of getting physical exercise. On the professional basketball team, various experts coordinated by a coach make possible an experience of efficiency predictable to a great extent, programmable within limits, original to some measure. The effort to coordinate is facilitated through natural language; but the expectation of efficiency in achieving a goal-winning the game-extends beyond the experience constituted in and communicated through language. Games are minutely diagrammed; the adversary's plays are analyzed from videotapes; new tactics are conceived, and new strategies followed. In the end, the language of the game itself becomes the medium for the new game objectives. In the last 30 seconds of a very tight game, each step is calculated, each pass evaluated, each fault (and the corresponding time) pre-programmed. Technology mediates and supports sports performance in ways few would imagine when watching a volleyball team in action or a runner reaching the finish line. There are ways, not at all requiring the tools of literacy. To capture recurrent patterns characteristic of high efficiency performance and to emulate or improve them, adapt them to the type of sportsperson prepared for a certain contest, becomes part of the broader experience. Indeed, boundaries are often broken, rules are bent, and victories are achieved through means which do not exactly preserve the noble ideal of equal opportunity or of fairness. Sports experiences were always at the borderline. A broken rule became the new rule. Extraneous elements (mystical, superstitious, medical, technological, psychological) were brought into the effort to maximize sports performance. The entire story of drugs and steroids used to enhance athletic prowess has to be seen from the same perspective of efficiency against the background of generalized illiteracy. The languages of stimuli, strategies, and technology are related, even if some appear less immoral or less dangerous. As drugs become more sophisticated, it is very difficult to assess which new record is the result of pure sports and which of biochemistry. And it is indeed sad to see sportsmen and sportswomen policed in their private functions in order to determine how much effort, how much talent, or how much steroid is embodied in a performance. Stories of deception practiced within the former totalitarian states of Europe might scare through gruesome detail. People risked their lives for the illusion of victory and the privileges associated with it. But after the ideological level is removed, we face the illiterate attitude of means and methods intended to extract the maximum from the human being, even at the price of destroying the person. Whether a state encourages and supports these means, or a free market makes them available, is a question of responsibility in the final analysis. Facts remain facts, and as facts they testify to the commercial democracy in which one has access to means that bring victory and reward, just as they bring the desired cars, clothes, houses, alcohol, food, or art collections. Among the records broken at the Olympic games in Atlanta is the number of samples collected for doping control (amounting to almost 20 percent of the number of athletes). American football is possibly the first post-modern game in that it appropriates from the old for use in a new age. Comparing American football with sports of different pragmatic frameworks-to tennis, volleyball, or rugby-one can notice the specialization, mediation, new dynamics, and language of the game. There are twenty- two positions and special formations for place kicks, kick-offs, and receiving. There are also support personnel for different functions: owners, managers, coaches, trainers, scouts, doctors, recruiters, and agents. The game is burdened with literacy-based assumptions: it is as totalitarian as any language, although its elementary repertory is quite reduced-running, blocking, tackling, catching, throwing, kicking. Rules implicit in the civilization of literacy-all know the language and use it according to its rule, sequentiality, centralism-are observed. The word signal, snap numbers, color code, and play name are part of the semiosis. It is a minimal rule experience, which seems a comedy to someone who never watched it before. The players are dressed in ridiculous gear. They seem actors in a cheap show, and act according to plans shared through private code. As opposed to many games that we can only sketchily retrace to someplace back in history, we know how all this came about in American football. The goal was no longer the game, as it was in its early history as a college sports, but winning. A more efficient game required more efficient football machines, specialized in a limited repertory, present only for the duration of their task. The game acquired a configurational aspect, takes place at many levels, requires distribution of tasks, and relies upon networks of communication for maintaining some sense of integration. Its violence, different from the staged buffoonery of wrestling, is in sync with the spirit of belligerence implicit in today's competitive environment: "We teach our boys to spear and gore.... We want them to plant that helmet right under a guy's chin." (Woody Hayes, legendary coach at Ohio State University, better known for its football team than its academic standards). There is physical involvement, injury, steroids, drugs, illicit money-and there are statistics. The spirit of the game is disseminated to other sports and other aspects of life (business, politics). In the case of baseball, the statistics are most important. They attach to each gesture on the field a meaning which otherwise would escape the mind of the viewer. In games of a more continuous flow (soccer, tennis, handball), the attraction is in the particular phase, not in the number of yards gained or the average (hits, home runs, strike-outs). The general dynamics of existence and human interaction in the civilization of illiteracy also marked the dynamics of the practical experience of sports. Higher speed, shorter encounters, short action spans-these make the sports event more marketable in the environment of the new civilization. The more precise the experience, the less expressive. Almost no one watched the compulsory ice skating exercises at world championships, and so they were canceled, but millions enjoy the dramatics of dancing on ice that is becoming more and more a show watched around the world. The more extensive the effort, the less attractive to spectators. A twenty-five kilometer cross- country competition will never interest as many viewers as a fast, dangerous downhill race. These characteristics are definitive of the civilization of illiteracy. People do not want to learn how to perform at the same level; knowledge is irrelevant. Performance is what attracts, and it is the only thing which gains prizes that the winner of the ancient Olympics, who was also spoiled, never dreamed of. "Winner take all" is the final rule, and the result is that winning, more than competing, has become the goal. The efficiency requirement leads not only to the relative illiteracy of those involved in sports, but also to a practice of discriminatory physical selection. In the USA, for instance, black African-Americans dominate football and basketball, which have become national obsessions. If equal opportunity were applied to professional sports as it is to other activities, the competitions would not be so attractive. The irony of this situation is that, in fact, black African-Americans are still entertainment providers in the USA. Regardless of how profitable professional sports are, the obsession with efficiency effectively consecrates an important segment of the population to entertaining the rest. Blacks are also playing in the most advanced major basketball leagues in the world. In what used to be the Soviet Union, chances were that the winter sports teams would be recruited from the Siberian population, where skiing is a way of life. All over Europe, soccer teams recruit from Spain, Italy, Africa, and South America. It is easier to attain maximum efficiency through those endowed with qualities required by the new goals of the games instead of creating a broad base of educated athletes. The public, homogenized through the mediating action of television, is subjected to the language of the sports experience and is presented with performance and interpretation at the same time. Thus, even the mechanism of assigning meaning is rationalized, taken over by the market mechanism, freed from the constraints of literacy and reason, and rendered to human subjects without requiring that they think about it. Blaming changes in sports, or for that matter in literacy, the condition of the family, the fast-food curse, television, increased greed, new technology, or lower levels of education, results in only partial explanations of the new condition of sports. Yes, the greatly celebrated champions are illiterate. No matter how good in their political game of finding excuses and alibis, colleges care for the high performances of physically gifted students, recruited only insofar as they add to the marketability of the institution, not to the academic entry requirements. Literacy is not a prerequisite for sports performance. It might actually interfere with it. In the world of competitions, sportsmen and sportswomen are either jetting around the globe or traveling from one exhibition game to another, barely able to breathe, never mind to take care of their literacy or their private lives. Their language is one of pitiful limitation, always inferior to the energy spent in the effort or externalized in frustration when the rules don't work in their favor. They don't read, they don't write. Even their checks are signed by others. The description might be somewhat extreme and sound harsh, and the attitude might seem impertinent, but after all, it is not because sportsmen and sportswomen know Shakespeare's sonnets by heart that people watch baseball, nor because they write novels (or even short stories) that the public applauds the ice skating dancers, and even less that they keep diaries, with minimal spelling errors and full sentences, that spectators die to be on the stand of the stadium where the drama of football starts in the fall and ends shortly before another sports takes over the media. Sports are marketable work, of high intensities and no literate status. The efficiency of each sport is measured in the attraction it exercises over many people, and thus in the ability of a sport to transmit messages of public interest, insofar as public interest is part of the market process. Alienated from the expectation of integration, corresponding to the ideal of the complete human being, sport is as specialized as any other form of human praxis. Sports constituted their own domains of competence and performance, and generate expectations of partial sport literacies. That in the process, because they address physical attributes and intellectual functions, sports became a molding machine for the athletes, another nature, should not go without saying or understanding what it takes to succeed. All over the world, where efficiency reached levels corresponding to the new scale of humankind, football, basketball, soccer, and tennis players, swimmers, runners, and gymnasts are created almost from scratch. Experts select children, analyze their genetic history and current condition, devise training procedures, and control diet, psychology, and emotional life until the desired performer is ready to compete. Gentlemen, place your bets! The investment in sports, as in the stock market, is supposed to return profit. Successful sportspeople need not testify to how high their own return is. That this return also means compromised physical or mental integrity is part of the cynical equation that the public enthusiastically validates. When players are traded and contracts are signed, the money they earn, disproportionate as it seems at times, corresponds, almost to the last digit, to the number of people who will watch them, some for the sake and pleasure of the performance, others making money from a team's victory or an athlete's record. In some states and countries, whether betting is legal or prohibited, it is by far the strongest sector of the economy. It takes very interesting forms, however. One is the direct bet: this horse, this player, this team. Betting, with its partial literacy involving its own mediating elements that render reading and writing useless, is not a new institution. People were challenged by the odds down through history. But once the structural change that entailed means of networking, task distribution, and almost instant access to any event in the world was in place, the experience of betting totally took over that of competing. All our unfulfilled desires and drives are now embodied by those we choose to represent us, and for whose victory we not only root, but also invest in. There is an ideal stake-the successful player-and a mundane stake-the actual wager. Expectation of high figures is an extension of literate expectations. It embodies the naive assumption that cultivated minds and challenged bodies unite in a balanced personality of high integrity. The reason this model failed over and over need not be restated here. But the point needs to be made that the ideal stake and the trivial stake are not independent. This introduces to competition an element of obscurity in the form of motivations not intrinsic to sports. The indirect wager represents this element. The message is the sneaker The biggest indirect bet is made by marketing and advertising. On the never- ending table of Olympic records, the most spectacular performances are dollar signs preceding figures into the billions. Within the general shift from manufacturing to service economy characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy, sport becomes a form of entertainment. New media, replacing the printed word as the dominant means of communication, makes possible international viewing of competitions as they happen. In the past, we were satisfied with the image of the winner. Now we can own the tape of the game and can retrieve each moment of any event. More broadband, and soon we will download the running athlete directly onto our monitors. For a price, of course. People consume sports. They are able to fly to the Olympics, wherever the best bid takes them (Barcelona, Atlanta, or Sydney), even able to pay for forty-five minutes or a whole week of shaping up with the very best trainers. Facts in the world of sports, as much as in the rest of our activities, are less important than the image. The authority and self-discipline, on which physical education was built, are replaced by the freedom and opportunity to choose from among many sports events, and by an attitude of permissiveness and self-indulgence which many times results in considering the whole world as a sports show. Sports are used to further many causes and support many interest groups. On the stage of the events they sponsor, the world's largest companies compete with feminism, equal opportunity, AIDS, and various disabilities for the attention and dollars of the audience. Sponsorship is a highly selective experience. Nevertheless, it frequently contradicts the slogans it sets before the public. These are important because the indirect bet on sports takes into consideration the huge market of entertainment, and defines within this market the segments it will address. Product endorsements, advertising, and public relations are the media through which marketing places its bets. No less than 500,000 brands were traded in Atlanta. Only to keep track of them was a major task, described officially as "protecting the integrity of the Olympic Games and the rights of official sponsors," but also "detecting attempts at parasitic marketing." Every square inch on the body of a tennis player or a track and field athlete can be rented. And is. The better the manager (not necessarily a player's game), the higher the endorsement contract. The minute detail picked up by the camera allows us to see the name of the maker on the watch, the manufacturer's logo on the socks, a sponsor company's name on the shirts and headgear, the brand of glucose or mineral water, the maker of ice or snow for winter games. It seems that the competition on the court and the competition among those who buy the space available on cyclists' ware, football players' uniforms, skiers, swimmers, runners, and chess players are feeding off one another. When the Canon company chose as its prime-time advertising actor a tennis player who did not make it beyond the preliminary games, the bet continued on the waves, on the screens, on the videotapes, and on any other imaginable display. Marshall McLuhan plays year after year in the Superbowl. The world indeed becomes a village. Moreover, the world has almost decided that the outcome is less important than the new commercials, the new thirty-second drama, followed by the numbers telling us all how much more a second of prime time costs, and what benefits it might bring. But the message is actually lost. Here McLuhan was still somehow captive to literacy, believing there was a message, as we are used to when writing or reading a text. The message is the sneaker, or whatever will take over, for its own short turn in the glory of consumption, the world. The day the object is acknowledged, between New York and Zambia, Paris and the tribes in the Brazilian rain forests, Frankfurt and the starving populations of Africa or Asia, there will be a trade in the original and its many substitutes, reaching sheer madness. Sports entrusted with the marketing image are equalled in their persuasive power only by the entertainment stars, of similar illiterate condition, singing for the world's hungriest only in order to add one more marketing craze to their torment. In these and in other characteristics mentioned, the unnatural aspect of sports takes over their original, natural component. It seems almost as though the sports experience is falling into itself, is imploding, leaving room for the many machines and gadgets we use at home in order to salvage our degenerating bodies. Now we still bicycle, ski, climb stairs, and row in the privacy of our rooms, with our eyes glued to the images of the very few who still do the real thing, but for reasons less and less connected with excellence. Soon we will swim in the pools and ski on the slopes of virtual reality. Some are already timing their performance. Little do they know that they are pioneering one of the many Olympic games of the future. Science and Philosophy-More Questions Than Answers Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. T.S. Elliot, Burnt Norton In some of the most advanced fields of scientific inquiry, research results are exchanged as soon as they become available. Obviously, the sluggish medium of print and the long cycles involved in the review process prior to academic publication do not come into the picture. On Web sites dedicated to research, the review process consists of acknowledging, challenging, and furthering breakthrough hypotheses. It is carried out by real peers, not by the geriatric or opportunistic hierarchies that have the publishing process in their firm grip. Frequently, research is carried out in and through the communication media. Images, data, and simulations are part of the work and part of the shared knowledge, already available in formats that can be inputted for further work or can be technologically tested. Of course, there are many issues connected to the new dynamics of science, not the least of which is intellectual property and integrity. A totally new experience in research and knowledge dissemination is taking place. The majority of the researchers involved know that previous models, originating in the pragmatics of the civilization of literacy, will not provide answers. As beautiful as the science embodied in the technology of industrial society is, it will not, not even accidentally, contribute to the scientific progress in nanotechnology, in bioinformatics, in fluid dynamics, and in other frontier domains researched today. Gene expression and protein syntheses are many working centuries-the total of the years contributed by researchers to the advancement of their respective fields-ahead of everything that science has produced in the past. Add to these accomplishments in the ever-expanding list of modern sciences, and you get the feeling that humankind is literally reinventing itself in the civilization of illiteracy. The list to follow is telling of the shift from the coarse level of scientific effort corresponding to the industrial operations of milling and grinding, to a level of atomic and sub-atomic re-ordering. The same components, differently ordered, can appear to us as graphite or diamonds, sand or silicon for chips. The list represents a reality of enormous consequence, confirmed in the daily commotion of a never-ending series of discoveries. Life on Mars, molecular self-assembly, protein folding, atomic resolution imaging, nano-structural materials with unprecedented properties, quantum devices, advances in neuro-medicine-the list is a shameless exercise in creating headlines, soon to be replaced by newer and more creative endeavors. This is why, in addressing issues of science and philosophy, I do not intend to offer a catalogue of current research, but to put the subject in a dynamic perspective. By all means, I want to avoid the danger of presenting science especially as the agent of change, as though its own motivations and means could give humankind its direction and purpose. Rationality, reason, and the scale of things The dynamics of change in scientific and philosophic thinking is not independent of the underlying structure of the pragmatics that leads to the civilization of illiteracy. Both involve rationality, which connects human practical experiences to consistent inferences (sometimes seen as logical conclusion) and to the ability to predict events (in nature or society), even to influence and control them. Rationality is connected to efficiency insofar as it is applied in the selection of means appropriate to accomplishing goals; or it serves as an instrument for evaluation of the premises leading to a selected course of action. In short, rationality is goal oriented. Reason, in turn, is value oriented; it guides practical experiences of human self-constitution in the direction of appropriateness. Rationality and reason are interconditioned. Right and wrong, good and bad, are the axes along which human action and emotion can be diagrammed in the matrix of living and working that they constituted under the guise of literacy. The process through which human rationality and reason become characteristics of human self-constitution is long and tortuous. People defining themselves in different pragmatic contexts enter into a network of interdependency. At a very small scale of human existence and activity, rationality and reason were indistinguishable. They began to differentiate early on, already during hunting and gathering. But during the long experience of settlement and taking care of plants and animals, they grew aware of the distinction between what they were doing and how. With the culture of artifacts, to which tools belong, reason and rationality took separate paths. With the advent of science, in its most primitive forms, documented in ancient China, Egypt, India, and Greece, rationality and reason often conflicted. Things can be right, without being good at the same time. There is a rationality-goal oriented: how to get more goods, how to avoid losses-with the appearance of reason-actions to please forces supposed to control nature or matter. Parallel to science, magic manifested itself through alchemy, astrology, and numerology, all focused on the attempt to harmonize human beings, constituted in practical experiences focused on goodness, with the world housing them. In some cultures, rationality resulted in the propensity to face, change, and eventually dominate nature-that is, to submit the environment to a desired order. Reason aimed at finding practical grounds for harmony with nature. After the phase of orality, writing served both of them equally. It made language a mold for new experiences, a container for storing knowledge, and an effective means for the practical experience of evaluation and self-evaluation. The overwhelming majority of human accomplishments leading to the possibility and necessity of literacy were connected to the experience of human self-constitution in writing. The science and philosophy upon which the scientific revolution and the revival of humanities (in particular philosophy) of the 16th and 17th centuries took place are deeply rooted in the pragmatics that made writing necessary. This revolution is usually summarized through three main accomplishments. First: a new picture of the universe, scientifically expressed in heliocentric astronomy and philosophically a turning point in understanding the role of the human being in this world. Second: the mathematical description of motion. Third: the new conceptual framework of mechanics. As impressive as they are, their meaning is revealed in the fact that the Industrial Revolution was actually triggered by the scientific and humanistic renewal embodied in these accomplishments. The change from an agrarian economy, appropriate to a relatively reduced scale of population and work, to industrial production changed efficiency by orders of magnitude corresponding to those of the critical mass reached by humankind. All the characteristics of this new pragmatics-sequentiality, linearity, centralism, determinism (mechanical in nature), clear-cut distinctions, interdependencies-contributed to the establishment of literacy. A lost balance Within the pragmatic framework of the industrial society, science progressively assumed the leading role over philosophy. In fact, science changed from an elitist practical experience strongly controlled by the guardians of literacy (i.e., religion) to an experience integrated in society. Philosophy followed an inverse path, from a generalized attitude of wonder to becoming the privilege of the few who could afford to contemplate the world. Generalized in technology, the rationality of science reached its peak in the civilization of literacy through standardization and mass production of processed food, means of transportation (cars, airplanes), home building, and the use of electricity as the efficient alternative energy source. But the real challenge was yet to come. Einstein took a daring guess. "The tragedy of modern men...is that they created conditions of existence for which, from the perspective of their phylogenetic development, they are not adjusted." The lost balance between rationality and reason is reflected in the image of all the consequences of the Industrial Revolution that led to the runaway capitalism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Exhaustion of raw materials, air and water pollution, erosion of productive land, and mental and physical strain on humans are the concrete results of this imbalance. But if these consequences were all people and society had to cope with, the dominance of literacy in science would still be defensible. The challenge comes from the new scale of humankind for which the Industrial Revolution model and literacy are no longer adequate. Efficiency expectations, of an order of magnitude incompatible with the underlying structure of the pragmatic framework based on literacy, result in the need for a new dynamics, for mediation, acknowledgment and use of non-linearity, vagueness, and non-determinism. Science, as well as the implicit philosophic component of this new science, already approached areas of knowledge beyond the borderline guarded by literacy. On the initial success of micro-physics, the first non- literacy-based technological challenge for more energy was met in the form of relatively rudimentary weapons. In the meanwhile, it became clear that a new physics and a new chemistry, and a new biology, along with many disciplines non-existent within literacy, of a systemic focus with quality and process is what we need. Some of the scientific themes mentioned already illustrate how science is evolving. They also illustrate how a new epistemological condition is established, one that is based on projecting explanatory models upon the world and testing them for appropriateness and coherence. In the lead are practical experiences of science driven by cognitive resources no longer constrained by observation. What is free of epistemological doubt is that almost all the science that has emerged has reclaimed interest in the living. These new sciences, which are philosophies at the same time, are computationally disclosed biophysics, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, medicine, and knowledge of the micro- and nano-universe. Literacy, because of its inherent structural characteristics, is no longer the appropriate mold for such new experiences, the proper container for knowledge, or even an effective means of evaluation. Among many possible literacies, it maintains a domain of appropriateness, and within this domain it allows for local performance synchronized with the general expectation of efficiency. The shift from literacy to literacies-in fact, the shift to the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy- takes place against the background of conflict between means of restricted efficiency and new means for coping with larger populations, and with the newly acquired right to well-being, or even affluence. Almost all new sciences evolve in new technologies. We are already familiar with some, since we were told that from science programs (space exploration, genetic research, biophysics), products as trivial as calculators, thermal fabric, and new construction materials were made available at prices affordable in the global economy. We are getting used to others as they become available: intelligent materials able to alter their structure, and self-assembling materials. Thinking about thinking One dominant inherited assumption is that thinking takes place only in language; that is, that language is the medium of thinking. This is a very difficult subject to deal with because, despite claims to the contrary, some people (Einstein is most quoted witness) maintain that they think in images, others in sounds, others in some combination of shapes, colors, textures, even odor and taste. Until now, no one could conclusively prove whether this is a way of speaking or a fact. But the same can be said of language. That we can express thoughts, sometimes frustratingly incomplete, in language does not necessarily mean that we think in language, or only in language. That language is a medium for explanation and interpretation, well adapted to support incomplete inductions or deductions, and sometimes hypothetical thinking (so-called abductions), is not necessarily the proof that it is the only one. Scientists think in the language of mathematical or logical formalism, or in some of the new programming languages, even if they do not carry on dialogue or try to write poetry or love letters in such languages. Literacy, as a socially encompassing ideal, states that people should be literate because people think in language. Accordingly, proper use of language, as set forth in the rules of literacy, is a premise for successful thinking. Besides introducing circularity-the premise turns out to be the conclusion-this is a strong assumption, with too many implications for science and for philosophy to be left unchallenged. The assumption was never entirely proven; and it is probably impossible to prove, given the strong connection between all signs participating in thinking processes. Images call up words, but so do odors, flavors, textures, and sounds. Words recall or trigger images, music, etc. The integrated nature of thinking is probably affected by mechanisms of voluntary decision-making or by genetic mechanisms structured to accept a certain sign system (language, mathematical formalism, diagrams) as dominant, without precluding modes of thought different from those resulting from the premise of literacy. If defining thinking as language processing resulted in human experiences possible only under this assumption, there are also other ways to define thinking which, in turn, may become, if they haven't yet, necessary and beneficial. In this respect, one question can be raised: Are thinking machines, i.e., programs able to autonomously perform operations we associate with human thinking, excluded from the discussion because they do not qualify as literate? Many scientific endeavors of our time would not have started if potential success were to be put to a literacy test. The area of new materials, able to fix themselves, and of machines resulting from self-assembly belong among our examples. Fortunately, science based on alternative practical human experiences, fairly independent of language and literacy, discovered that there are alternative ways to define thinking, and rationality, for that matter. Considering thinking together with other human traits, such as emotion, sense of humor, aesthetics, the ability to project ideas through various media, senses or languages will probably lead to even more daring scientific research. Before considering alternative ways to define thinking and the relation between rationality and human reason, let us look at the characteristics of thinking in current praxis, science and philosophy included. The amount of language we need to function in the workplace and in social life has diminished in comparison to previous circumstances of human experience. If thinking took place only in language, that would mean that thinking itself has diminished. Very few people would be inclined to accept this conclusion. The small subset of language used in social life and in professional interaction is representative of the segmented nature of this life and of the interactions it supports. This small subset of language, the command of which does not require literacy skills, is composed of social stereotypes, but is not sufficient to constitute a medium for thinking. Parallel to the diminished subset of natural language, the languages of science and technology expanded as expectations of scientific and technological efficiency increased. Expressions in the small subset of natural language that people use in order to function are generated regardless of the requirement of variety and change in our reciprocal relations. As canned expressions of limited function, they are taken over from previous circumstances, and used independently of what once determined their need. Chances are that an illiterate neighbor will never be noticed since everything pertaining to the social status of such a neighbor is literacy independent: driving, washing clothes, cooking, banking, telephoning, watching television, connecting to the Internet. The trained illiterate can perform these tasks and those pertinent to work perfectly without ever displaying a literacy handicap. No doubt that the new machines, new materials, new foods, and new medicines that are more at the frontiers of science than in the mainstream of living and working will further affect the need and possibility of a civilization dominated by more than one of its means of expression and communication. People can function as illiterates in societies of extreme specialization without being noticed as illiterates and without affecting the efficiency of the system to which they belong because their own involvement in the functioning of the world in which they live is changing. Illiterate rationality is no less goal oriented than any other rationality. It is just expressed through other means. And it is no less concerned with predicting the behavior of systems driven by languages of extreme functionality, working regardless of the literacy of the operators. Scientific literacy is either stored in skills, through training, or in the systems operated by people who know less about their functioning than the machines themselves. Symptoms such as misuse of words, sloppy language and grammar, use of stereotypes, the inability and even unwillingness to sustain dialogue might be telling something about thinking, too-for instance, that forms of thinking based on sign systems other than language are more effective, or more appropriate to what people do in our days; or even that appropriateness in one particular sign system does not translate into appropriateness and effectiveness in another practical experience. No wonder that science, in addition to reasons implicit in the nature of scientific inquiry, shies away from language, from its imprecision, ambiguity, and tendency to coalesce in stereotypes, or become stereotypes under circumstances of patterned use. Philosophy, by and large, follows the same tendency, although its alternatives are not comparable to those of science. The experience of science, and to a more limited degree that of philosophy, is simultaneously an experience in generating language capable of handling continuity, vagueness, and fuzzy relations. Spatial reasoning and replication of phenomena, usually associated with the living as aspects of common-sense knowledge, are also constitutive of the new science. Extremely specialized human practical experiences are no longer predominantly experiences based on knowledge, but on constituting the person as information integrator. The continuous diminution of the need to think corresponds to the extreme segmentation of work and to the successful technological integration of various partial contributions resulting from this highly efficient segmented and mediated work. In one's individual life, in activities pertinent to self-maintenance (nourishment, rest, hygiene, enjoyment), the process is the same. Thinking is focused on selection: cooking one from many pre-processed meals at home, dressing in one from among many ready- made clothing items, living in pre-fabricated homes, washing objects in programmed machines. But the objects embody someone else's thinking. The reified thinking projected into gene manipulation, materials, and machines leads to a reduction of live thinking. People integrate themselves in the information network, and for a greater part of their existence they act as information processors: heat something until it pops; snap or zip to close; press a button that will adjust water temperature and wash cycle according to the type of clothes. More generally, people rely on the living machine that adapts to the user, re-assembles itself as requirements change, and/or fixes itself. Rationality is more and more integrated in the technology; thus it is rationalized away from the process of individual self-constitution. As tremendous as the consequences can be, they will be infinitely more dangerous if we do not start thinking about them. Technology at this level uncouples the past from the present. Consequently, life and actual existence are alienated. Individuals do not have to think, they have to integrate themselves into the program embodying high efficiency rationality and reason. Today, knowledge of what goes into food, how preparation affects its qualities, what makes for a good shirt or sweater, what makes for a good house, what it means to wash, and how a material is affected by certain chemicals and water temperatures are rendered irrelevant. What matters is the result, not the process. What counts is efficiency, not individual know-how. Thinking is detached from thinking in the sense that all thinking, and thus rationality, is embodied outside the self-constituted human being. The appearance is that this outside thinking and this outside rationality have a life of their own. Memetic mechanisms are a testimony to the process. In the civilization of illiteracy, we experience not only the benefits of high efficiency, but also the self-perpetuating drive of new pragmatic means. At times it appears that humans do not compete for achieving higher levels of creativity and productivity. Affluence appears as a given that takes over the need to match efficiency expectations characteristic of the global scale of humankind. To keep pace with technological progress and with scientific renewal becomes a rationale in itself, somehow disconnected from human reason. The confusing rationality of ever- increasing choices is matched by the frustrating realization that value options literally disappear, leaving no room for sensible reasoning. As a result, social and political aspects of human existence are short circuited, in particular those affecting the status of science and the condition of philosophy. Frequently, research is questioned as to whether its goals make sense at all. Only 15 years ago, half of the population in the USA suspected that science and the technology it fosters were the cause rather than the cure of many problems faced in the country, social problems included. The balance changed, but not the attitude of those captive to literacy's goals and values, who oppose science and the humanities instead of seeing them in their necessary, although contradictory, unity. Quo vadis science? Discovery and explanation From among the many levels at which the issue of language in relation to science is relevant, two are critical: discovery and explanation. In all fairness, it should be said that literacy never claimed to be a way towards scientific discovery, or that language is the instrument making discovery possible. The main claim is that access to science, and thus the possibility to continue scientific work, is primarily through language. This assertion was correct in the past as long as scientific practice took place in a homogeneous cognitive context of shared representations of time and space. Once this context changed, the built-in language metrics of experience, what is called the ratio, the shared measure, started to get in the way of new discoveries and efficient explanations of previous discoveries. Among the many new codes scientists use today, symbolic reasoning (used in mathematics, logic, genetics, information science, etc.) is the most pervasive. All in all, a transition has been made from a centralized scientific practice to new experiences, which are quite often independent of each other and better adapted to the scale of the particular phenomenon of interest. This independence, as well as sensitivity to scale, results from different objects of specialized disciplines, from different perspectives, and from different sign systems structured as research tools or as medium for constituting efficient explanatory theories. Plato would have barred entrance to the Academy to those who did not master mathematics: "Let no one enter who is not a mathematician." In today's world, the guardians of science would require logic, and others the mastery of artificial languages, such as programming languages, themselves subject to improved focus (as in object programming) and increased computational efficiency. In the time of Socrates, "the orator," language was ascertained to be constitutive of cities, laws, and the arts. In the time of the Roman poet Lucretius, physics was written in verse (7,000 lines of heroic hexameter were used to present Epicurus' atomic theory). Galileo preferred the dialogue, written in colloquial Italian, to share discoveries in physics and astronomy with his contemporaries. With Newton, equations started to replace words, and they became, almost to our time, the vocabulary of physics. Very similar developments took place in the evolution of science in China, India, the Middle East. The emergence of new visual or multimedia languages (of diagrams, systems of notation, visual representations, mixed data types) corresponds to the different nature of visual and multimedia experience. They are steps in the direction of deeper labor division, increased mediation, and new forms of human interaction-in particular, of a practice that is more intensional than extensional. Time and space: freed hostages The Encyclopedic tradition centered around the scientific human being (l'homme scientifique) who it defined through language. This tradition continued a line of progressive changes in humankind's scientific experience. We can learn about these changes by examining the language through which they are expressed. The syncretic stage of human activity was dominated by observations and short cycles of action- reaction. Incipient, rudimentary science was not independent of the human being's practical projection. Images and, later, names of plants, animals, mountains, and lakes pertained to the beginning. Only when the scope of observation broadened and, instead of the immediate connection, a series of connections was accounted for, did science become a praxis in itself. Science was born together with the magical, and would continue to develop in this symbiosis. Eventually, it joined religion in opposing the magic. Observation and fear of the observed were one. Names of stars testify to changes in the language in which what we call astronomical science is embodied. Obviously there was little awareness of the mechanics of the cosmos during the time names changed. Mytho-magical terminology, followed by zodiac signs of magic origin (in both cases with reference to the practical activity of people during changing seasons), and by the Christian names (after the establishment of Christianity), is a line continued today in detailed catalogs encoding positions, dynamics, and interrelations in numeric form. In the experience of observing the sky and in deriving the notion of duration (how long it took for celestial objects to change position), humans projected their biological and cognitive characteristics: seeing, association, comparison. Names were given and observations were made, of position mainly, but also of light intensity. With the emergent notion of time, generalized from the notion of duration, stars were nolonger related to divinities. Still, astronomical observation was used to structure monastic life. Stars served as a nighttime clock. At a time of reduced scientific inquiry (Europe from the 5th century to the 10th), the observation of the skies, reflected in maps of various constellations, prepared for future progress in astronomy. Physical properties, such as intensity of light, color, and brilliancy, later suggested better names because the experience in which stars were recognized (navigation, in the first place) required identification for successful performance. Magic and science explained success in very different ways. This was the time when planets were identified through properties evident to all who needed the sky. The magic layer was projected as a result of associations people made between qualities characteristic of persons and the behavior of certain stars, i.e., the perceived influence they had on events pertinent to human existence. During the entire process, language served as an instrument of integration and observation, as well as a means for logical practice, such as deductions. Molding the experience of time perception, storing the acquired knowledge, and further shaping practical experiences of time, language acquired a very powerful position in the human being's self-constitution in time. This position would be strengthened by literacy, bound to generalize distinctions in language and introduce them as effective means of structuring new expectations. Only when time-dependent practical requirements, such as those of relativity, impossible to satisfy within literacy, became critical was time freed from the captivity of verbal language. A giant cognitive step bridged the immediacy of the surroundings-where magic forces were rumored to exist, waiting for humans to free them-and the notion of space. Geometry-which literally means to measure land-is relevant as a practical experience of human self-constitution that unites the concrete task at hand (surveying, building, decorating, observing the sky) and the generalization of distance. Measuring land ends up not only in description of the land, but also in its reconstitution in the abstract category of space. Language was part of the process, and for as long as practical experiences in the immediate surrounding were direct, geometric conventions remained very close to their practical implications. Once distinctions beyond direct relations in space were made possible by the experience of navigation, by settled forms of social life (leading to future cities), and by strategies for successful securing and defense of land, the language of geometry changed. Internally motivated developments, as well as those rooted in forms of human praxis other than geometry, resulted in the constitution of many geometric languages. The languages of the foundations of geometry and of algebraic, differential, or topological geometry are as different as the practical experiences from which they are derived. In many cases, literate language suffices for formulating geometric problems, but breaks down in supporting the practice of attempting solutions. Obviously enough, the intuitive visual aspect of geometry is quite often better adapted to subjects such as symmetry, higher order spaces, and convexity than is literacy. Rigid spaces and elastic spaces behave differently from spaces describable in language. Geometry frequently uses notations whose referent is rather abstract. The freeing of time and space from the captivity of language made an impact on the condition of rationality, where scientific praxis is rooted, and of reason, where philosophy originates. Coherence and diversity Science integrates the results of diversified experiences and expresses the perceived human need to maintain a coherent perspective of the whole. As a reaction to the establishment of a permanent and universal language embodied in the practice of literacy, partial languages of scientific focus emerged. Those who knew from their own self-constitution in scientific practice that global coherence, as preserved in language, and specialized knowledge conflict, gave up the effort to harmonize the general framework (of language) and the specialized perspective (of science). The understanding that the language of science is not simply a descriptive device, but a constitutive element of scientific practical experience, did not come easy, especially since language kept human awareness of space and time captive to its mechanism of representation. Seemingly, it was less difficult to notice how measuring some phenomena (especially in physics) changed the system observed than to understand how a scientific hypothesis expressed in language created a framework of subjective science. The subjectivity of the language description corresponds to a particular practical experience involving identification through language. Particular developments in science are not identical in all scientific branches. Astronomy and geometry evolved differently from each other and from other sciences. As a result of the inherent dynamics of conflict between means and goals of sciences, a phase of liberation from language started. Once language itself reached its limits in literacy, in respect to the efficiency of the new human experiences that the current scale of humankind brought about, new languages were needed. Breaking the language barrier, with implicit emancipation from literacy, is a practical experience in itself. In this experience, two aspects of language come under scrutiny: the epistemological and the communicational. In the epistemological status, we evaluate how language is a medium for embodying science and shaping the perspective of scientific inquiry. The communicational status refers to language as a medium for sharing knowledge. The levels of problem formulation, of solutions, of interpretation, of experiment and validation, and of communication are quite different. They will continue to differentiate even more in order to be efficient. The rationality intrinsic to this new science is no longer reducible to finding the logos in things and phenomena, or to instill a logos into techné. This is why the legacy of Francis Bacon-the prophetic theoretician of experimental science-as well as of Descartes-whose rules for understanding dominated the literate phase of humankind's scientific practical experience-literally cease to be relevant once we move from language to languages, from literacy to illiteracy. Computational science Language is ambiguous, imprecise, and not neutral in respect to the phenomena observed and accounted for. For these and other reasons, researchers working within the informational paradigm needed to synthesize specialized languages designed in such ways to avoid ambiguity and make higher efficiency of automated processing possible. Many formal languages have become the new scientific laboratories of our time, preparing quite well for the new stage of computational disciplines. In parallel, new forms of scientific experimentation, which correspond to the complexity of the phenomena under observation and to their dynamics, were developed. These forms are known under the name simulation (sometimes modeling) and consist of observing not the behavior of the researched aspect of the world, but one or several of its descriptions. To observe the explosion of a remote star, a time-span of data collection that extends well over the age of humankind is required. Instead of waiting (forever, so to speak), scientists model astrophysical phenomena and visualize them with the aid of sophisticated computable mathematical descriptions. These are better suited to the scale of the phenomena than all the equipment ever used for this purpose. Radio astronomy is no longer about the stars seen through human eyes. It is not about the visible, and it is not burdened by all the history of star names. Radio-astronomy is about star systems, cosmic physics, dynamics, even about the notion, so often discarded, of the beginning of the universe. The geometry of higher (than three) space dimensions is not about the visible-the surveyed land, building, or ornament-never mind the magical spirits inhabiting it. Such geometries submit theoretical constructs supporting a practice of thinking, explaining, even acting, that is not possible without the generalization of space dimensions. Whether in the fiction of Flatland (Edwin Abbott's book about how different life is in lower-dimension space compared to life in what we take to be 3-dimensional reality), or in the computer graphics animated representation of the hypercube, or in the theories of higher dimension spaces (relating to Einstein's relativity theory), scientific languages, irreducible to the general language and non- translatable into it, are at work. There are quite a number of similar subjects which make evident the border at which science can no longer rely on language. A non-language-based rationality- spatial reasoning, for instance-becomes necessary in this realm of inquiry. As sciences enter the age of computation, necessities become possibilities. There are subjects of research in which the brevity of a process makes impossible its direct observation and appropriate description in language. Indeed, the universe of extremely short interactions, of fast exchanges of energy, of high frequency patterns (which give the appearance of a continuum), among others, can be approached only with instruments of observation whose own inertia is lower than that of the phenomena scrutinized and with a conceptual framework for which language (of high inertia) is ill equipped. Language preserves in its structure the experience that made it necessary; literacy does the same. This is why their sequentiality conflicts with subjects of configurational condition. This is also why linearity, inherent in the pragmatics that formed literacy, conflicts with the inherent non-linearity of the world. Many other conflicts are at work at the same time: centrality of work opposed to distribution of tasks; hierarchy and distributed networking; clear-cut distinctions and vagueness; deterministic experiences of limited scope opposed to self-configurational, chaotic processes of infinite adaptation to new circumstances; dualism as opposed to pluralism (in scientifically significant forms). At stake is the efficiency of the effort, as it approaches issues of recuperation mechanisms in nature and society, strategies of co- evolution (replacing strategies of dominance) with nature, holistic models made possible by both increased mediation and powerful integrative mechanisms. Idealizing all these possibilities would be as counterproductive as demonizing literacy-based practical experiences. Nevertheless, we need a better understanding of what no longer responds to requirements of human self-constitution under the new scale of humankind, as we need an image of the alternative practical experiences through which a new rationality is formed. In the rapidly expanding context of parallel scientific endeavors and distributed tasks supported by speedy and reliable networks, scientific research is liberated from the industrial model. Instead of centralized institutions sharing in the use of expensive instruments, there is an increasing number of experiments taking place all over the world. Tele-presence is less expressive a name for what researchers actually perform thousands of miles away from each other, using expensive machines and various measuring and testing devices. The laboratories that once served as the place for scientific self-constitution are replaced by collaboratories, a combination of real instruments, which can be used more efficiently, and virtual places of research that allow for more creativity. Real-time interaction is fundamental to the context of focusing on nano-scale. Multidisciplinarity is no longer an illusion, but a practical requirement for the integration that scientific effort requires. Explaining ourselves away Systematic domains of human practical experiences are changing fast. The science of the ever shorter and more intense phenomena in which the human being of this age is constituted consists of a body of expressive means in which language either plays a secondary function or is substituted with forms of expression other than language. Procedures to capture the coherence of the phenomena researched now need to be adapted to this reality. The coherence embodied in language reflects past experiences, but does not properly explain experiences characterized by new kinds of coherence. In recent years, a question has come up time and again: Is there some common element in language, in the possible messages exchanged in our universe by civilizations different from ours, in the messages exchanged at the genetic level of our existence or in the biochemical trails which we associate with the behavior of ant colonies or beehives? It would be premature to attempt an answer. As already mentioned, David Hirsch ascertains that 97% of human activity is concept free. Control mechanisms in charge of this form of activity are common not only to humans, but also to lower level biological entities (insects, for instance). Exploration of cosmic civilizations, genetics, biochemistry, not to mention memetics, is not necessarily helped by this answer. Having to explain abstract mathematical concepts or the behavior of complex systems (such as the human nervous system), some displaying learning capabilities or self-organization tendencies, raises the stakes quite high: Do we explain ourselves away in the effort to emulate the human being? Replication of ideas (scientific, philosophic, or of any other type) based on the genetic model inspired by evolutionary theory, contributes new angles to the subject. But even if we manage to establish methods for successful replication, have we captured the characteristics of human self-identification? In the same vein, another question needs to be addressed: the mystique of science comes from the realization that the law of gravity applies everywhere, that electricity does not depend on the geographic coordinates of the place where people live, that computation is a universal calculus. Still, science is not value neutral; one model dominates others; one rationality wins over others. The truth of a scientific theory and its empirical adequacy are only loosely related. To accept one science over another is to the scientist an issue of rationality, while for those integrating it in their practical experiences, it becomes an issue of adequacy. This aspect constitutes more than a cultural or memetic issue. At stake is the fact that the natural condition of the human being is quite often rationalized away, regardless of the reason. The efficiency of science In recent years language has changed probably more than in its entire history. Still, these changes are not of the depth and breadth of scientific and technological praxis. Computer science, as Dijkstra pointed out, deserves a better name, more in line with the fundamental change this practical experience brings about. ("Would anyone call surgery knife science"? he asked.) We don't have better names for many other fields of new human experience: artificial life, artificial intelligence, genetics, qualitative reasoning, and memetics. But we do have powerful new notation systems, new ways of reasoning (combining qualitative and quantitative aspects), and fresh methods of expression (interactive). Consequently, a new human condition resulting from the practice of science will probably emerge. This condition will reflect the changed premises of scientific experiment. Experimentation joined logical analysis over 350 years ago. Simulation, the experiment of the civilization of illiteracy, is becoming the dominant scientific form of expression of the systematic search for the multitude of elements involved in new scientific theories and in their applications. A variety of simulators embody knowledge and doubt. This can be seen in a broader context. Through simulation, variability is accounted for, relations are scrutinized, functional dependencies are tested over a wide array of data critical to the performance of new systems, or over a wide array of the people involved with them. After heroically, and necessarily, separating from philosophy and establishing its own methods, science is rediscovering the need for the dimension covered by human reasoning. This is, after all, what the subject matter of artificial intelligence is and what it ultimately produces: simulations of our capability to reason. In the same vein, scientists are concerned with the metaphysics of the beginning of the universe, and the language of the mind (lingua mentis), evidently assumed to be different from language as we use it in the framework of community, cultural, and national existence. To reflect upon the beginning of the universe or upon the mind means to constitute oneself, together with the appropriate language, in a pragmatic context different from community interaction, cultural values, or national characteristics. The focus is changed from obsession with quantity to preoccupation with quality. Qualities are pursued in the attempt to build a science of artificial reality. As a scientific artifact, this reality is endowed with characteristics of life, such as change and evolution over time, selection of the fittest, the best adapted to that world, and acquisition of knowledge, common sense, and eventually language. Focused on the model of life as a property of organization, artificial reality is intent on generating lifelike behavior: iterative optimization, learning, growth, adaptability, reproduction, and even self-identification. Whereas science followed strategies of standardization, artificial life is focused on generating conditions for diversity, which eventually foster adaptability. Allocation of resources within a system and strategies of co-evolution are seen as resources of incremental performance. Research starts from a premise that belongs to the realm of reasoning, not rationality: humans and the problem being solved are continuously changing. Exploring the virtual Virtual realities are focused on almost everything that art pursues: illusion of space, time, movement, projection of human emotions. Interacting with such a system means that the person becomes involved in the inside of images, sounds, and movements. All these are simulated, using animation as the new language of the science that the moving image embodies. In some ways, virtual reality becomes a general purpose simulator of a captivating variable reality, made possible by mediating elements such as computer graphics images, animation, digital sound, tracking devices, and quite a number of other elements. Inside this reality, virtual objects, tools, and actions open the possibility of practical experiences of self-constitution in a meta- knowledge world. Quality in virtual reality is also pursued as scientists try to give a coherent image of the very first minutes of the universe. Physics, genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, geology, and all else integrated in this multi-mediated effort are turned from science into natural history or philosophic ontology. To explain why physicists needed an indestructible proton for explaining matter is not an issue of numbers, precision, or equations, but of common sense: If protons could decay, mountains, oceans, stars, and planets would crumble and turn back into neutrons and electrons, and a reversal of the Big Bang might occur. Is this predictive rationality? Is validation of this type of experimentation a subject of language? As a possible explanation, which facilitates a new array of experiments in computer simulation, particle accelerators, and radio- astronomic observations, virtual reality facilitates new forms of human praxis and is embodied in new theories of physics. Obviously, the efficiency factor, one of the major elements in the transition from one dominant literacy to partial literacies, plays an important role in this endeavor. This generalized notion of efficiency has several components in the case of science. One is the efficiency of our attempts to make science productive. Compared to the efficiency of the lever and the pulley, the efficiency of the electric engine reaches a different scale of magnitude. The same applies to our new tools, but in more dramatic ways. So far, we have managed to make science the most expensive human endeavor. Its current development appears to be motivated by a self-perpetuating drive: knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Science generated technology, which dramatically affects the outcome of human effort. The second component factor in the transition to the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy is the efficiency of our preparation for commanding these new tools, new forms of energy, and new forms of human interaction. Learning how to operate simple mechanical devices is different from learning how to program new tools capable of commanding sophisticated technology and of controlling tremendous amounts of energy. Although mediation has increased in human praxis, people do not yet know how to handle mediation, even less how to adapt education, their own and their children's, to shorter cycles of scientific and technological renewal. Last among the factors at work in the change we are going through is the efficiency of invention, discovery, and explanation. Largely supported by society (states invest in science in order to pursue their goals, as do businesses and various interest groups), science is under the pressure of performance. Markets confirm scientific results from the perspective of the return on investment they promise to deliver. Parallel to the most advanced and promising scientific endeavors, venture capital underwrites the industries of the near future. Insulation of any kind, even secrecy, no matter how stubbornly pursued and justified, is no longer possible within the economic dynamics of the present. No matter how hard companies try to impose secrecy, they fail when faced with the interactivity and integration of effort characteristic of the new dynamics. The expectation of change, of shorter cycles of investigation, and of shorter times for integration of results in the productive ability of technology is unavoidable. Still, in the USA and in Europe, there are conflicts between the new dynamics of scientific and technological progress and the bureaucracy of science. Driven by motivations characteristic of literate infatuation with national pride and security, this bureaucracy extends well beyond science and is hard at work to protect what is already passé. For science to advance, networks of activity, distributed tasks, and shared resources, all implying transparency and access, are essential. The conflict between scientific goals and morality takes on its own characteristics in the civilization of illiteracy. Indeed, scientific results might be right, but not necessarily always good for humankind. They might support higher efficiency, but sometimes to the detriment of people obsessed with maintaining high standards of living. There are many activities-too many to list-in which humans can be entirely replaced by machines. Extreme effort, exposure to chemicals, radiation, and other unfriendly elements could be avoided. However, doing away with the living person whose identity is constituted in work experiences makes the activity itself questionable. It is no longer the case that we only talk about genetic control of populations, or about mind control, about creating machines endowed with extreme capabilities, including control of the people who made them. These are distinct possibilities, to which we are closer than many believe. Neither science nor technology, even less philosophy, can afford to ignore the conflict immanent in the situation, or the danger posed by giving in to solutions resulting from a limited perspective, or from our dedication to make real everything that is possible. After all, we can already destroy the planet, but we do not, or at least not so radically as it could be destroyed. Short of being paralyzed by all these dangers, science has to question its own condition. In view of this, it is far from accidental that sciences in the civilization of illiteracy rediscover philosophy, or they re-philosophize themselves. Quo vadis philosophy? The language of wisdom Reflecting upon human beings and their relation to the outside world (nature, culture, society) constitutes a determined form of philosophical experience. It involves awareness of oneself and others, and the ability to identify similarities and differences, to explain the changing dynamics of existence, and to project the acquired understanding into the practice of formulating new questions. Practical implications of philosophic systems are manifold. Such systems affect scientific, moral, political, cultural, and other human practical experiences of self-constitution. They accumulate wisdom more than knowledge. To this effect, we can say that the classic model of philosophy remains a science of sciences, or at least the alma mater of sciences. Philosophic systems are concerned with human values, not with skills or abilities involved in reaching goals defined by our rationality. Nevertheless, this status has been continuously challenged from inside and outside philosophy. The decline of respect for philosophy probably results from the perceived omniscient attitude philosophers have displayed and from their unwillingness to focus on aspects of human reason. Philosophy has never been a domain for everyone. In our day, it has become a discourse expressed, if not in painfully contorted language, in a multitude of specialized languages addressed to a relatively small circle of interested parties, themselves philosophers for the most part. The change in the pragmatic condition of philosophy is reflected in its current linguistic equivocations. "My philosophy" is an expression used by anyone to express anything from a tactic in football to investments, drug use, diet, politics, religions, and much more. Misunderstood cultural exigencies, originating in the civilization of literacy, and political opportunism maintain philosophy as a required subject in universities, no matter what is taught under its name, who teaches it, or how. Under communism in East Europe and the Soviet Union, where free choice was out of question, philosophy was obligatory because it was identified with the dominating ideology. In most liberal societies, philosophic abstraction is as much abhorred as lack of money. Philosophic illiteracy is a development in line with the deteriorating literacy manifested in our days. But what affects this change is the new pragmatic framework, not the decline in writing and reading proficiency. The specialization of philosophic language, as well as the integration of logico- mathematical formalism in philosophical discourse, have not contributed to recuperating the prestige of philosophy, or of the philosopher, for that matter. Neither did it contribute to resolving topics specific to the discipline, in particular, to human experience and conscience. In fact, philosophy has disappeared in a number of philosophies practiced today: analytic, continental, feminist, Afro-American, among others. Each has constituted its own language and even perspective, pursuing goals frequently rooted in the philosophy of the civilization of literacy, or in its politics. The relevance (or irrelevance) of philosophy cannot be ascertained outside the practice of questioning and answering, a practice that made philosophy necessary in the first place. Indeed, as a practice of positioning the human being in the universe of human experience, philosophy is as relevant as the practical results of this positioning. There are scientific theories, such as the theory of relativity in physics or gene theory in biology, that are as philosophically relevant as they are scientifically significant. And there are, as well, philosophic theories of extreme scientific significance. Many components of Leibniz's system, of Descartes' rationalism, and Peirce's pragmaticism can be mentioned. Each originates within a distinct pragmatic framework of practical experiences through which reason comes to expression and questions specific forms of rationality. Philosophy, as we know it from the texts in which it was articulated, is a product molded through the experience that initially made writing possible (though not universally accepted) and, later, literacy necessary. Its fundamental distinctions- subject/object, rational/irrational, matter/spirit, form/content, analytic/synthetic, concrete/abstract, essence/phenomenon-correspond largely to human practical experiences in the framework of language. The traditional gnoseological approach reflects the same structure, as does formal logic, based on Aristotle's syllogistic theory. The fundamental linguistic distinction of subject/predicate marks-at least for Western civilization-the entire approach. Expectations of efficiency pertinent to the human scale leading to the Industrial Revolution affected the condition of philosophy. At this juncture, philosophers realized the practical aspect of the discipline. Marx thought that it would empower people and help them change the world: "Until now philosophers interpreted the world; it's time to change it." And change it did, but in ways different from what he and his followers anticipated. The hard grip of reified language turned the workers' paradise into a mental torture chamber. Once the underlying structure (reflected in the requirements of literacy) changed, philosophy changed as well, also freeing itself from the categories of language that molded its speculative discourse. Nevertheless, its institutions (education, professional associations and conferences) continue to pursue goals and functions peculiar to literate expectations. This prompted a strong movement of philosophic dissidence (Feyerabend and Lakatos are the main representatives), attuned to the practical need of a philosophic praxis aware of the relative nature of its assertions. Multi-valued logic, the logic of relations, fuzzy set theory, and computation in its algorithmic and non-algorithmic forms (based on neural networks) allow philosophers to free themselves from the various dualisms embedded in the language of philosophy. Significantly better answers to ontological, gnoseological, epistemological, and even historic questions have to reflect such and other cognitively relevant perspectives of knowledge. Philosophy undergoes a process of mathematization in order to gain access to science and improve its own efficiency. It has become logic oriented, more computational. It has adopted genetic schemes for explaining variation and selection, extending to the current memetic conversations and methods. It is not unusual for philosophers to abandon the pattern of rehashing older theories and views, and to attempt to understand pragmatic exigencies and their reason. The scientification of philosophy could not have happened under the scrutiny of language and the domination of literacy. Neither could we expect, within the literate framework, anything comparable to Plato's Dialogues, to the great philosophical systems of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, to the literary seduction of Heidegger, Sartre, or Martin Buber. In scientific disguise Developing, parallel to common language (which philosophers frequently call natural language), different types of sign systems, humans utilize the latter's mediating force in order to increase the efficiency of their action. "Give me a fixed point and I'll move the world" is the equivalent philosophical statement characteristic of the civilization of the lever and pulley. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty says in a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." "The question is," says Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." Reading the dialogue from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, with the magnificent works of great philosophers (from Plato to Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, Peirce and many more) in mind, one understands Alice's trouble. With the exception of Wittgenstein, nobody really seems to have been bothered by the ability people have to make words mean many things. Today, we could be directed to a philosophical paraphrase in which, instead of a fixed point, the need for a sign system (a language) is spelled out. Adapted to the scope of the conceived practical experience, such a sign system, when put into practice, will change the world, will "move" it. Diagrammatic thinking, the powerful cognitive model Peirce advanced, exemplifies the idea. Cybernetics, biogenetics, computers, and research in artificial intelligence and artificial life, as well as political, social, aesthetic, or religious concepts are examples of domains where such sign systems have been devised. They have facilitated forms of human self-constitution that contribute to the contradictory image of today's world. Such languages reflect the fundamental process of progressive mediation, participate in the diversification of the languages used, and affect the status and value system of the ideal of literacy. They serve as the scientific disguise of philosophy. Clarity (difficult to achieve in natural language), evidence, and certainty seem guaranteed in the language of science. In addition, objectivity and the ever seductive truth, for which philosophy was never known, are also apparently within reach. There is to philosophic discourse an internal reason for its continuous unfolding: People constituting themselves as philosophers change as the world they live in changes. Human reasoning is part of the world; the ability and, moreover, the desire to think of new questions, attempt answers, and doubt our own ability to reach the right answer are part of what defines the human being. The consequences of mediation in philosophy should not be ignored. Mediation implies, on one hand, a high degree of integration of human praxis (to the extent of making individual contribution anonymous), and on the other, a no less high degree of the subject's independence in respect to the object of work or reasoning, or the object represented by the other participants in human praxis. While it seems appropriate for science to know more and more about a narrower range of subjects, it contradicts the image of philosophy as it is formed in language and embodied in the ideal of literacy. Due to this metaphorically defined deepening of knowledge, each philosopher is more independent of the other, but more intensely integrated than ever before due to the necessary interconnection of this knowledge. The meaning of this paradoxical situation is not easy to clarify. The overall process has followed two qualitatively contrary directions: 1) concentration on a precisely delineated aspect of knowledge or action in order to understand and control it; 2) abandoning interest in the whole as a consequence of the assumption that the parts will finally be reunited in the social integrating mechanism of the market, whether we want it or not. We now have particular philosophies-of law, ethics, science, sport, recreation, feminism, Afro-Centrism-but no longer a comprehensive philosophy of existence. The scientific disguise of philosophy contributes to its renewed struggle for legitimacy. It adopts concepts and methods pertinent to rationality. In order to deal with reason, or to do away altogether with questions of reasoning, it unfolds in science and technology. Durkheim tried to apply Darwin's natural selection model to explain labor division. At present, philosophers have become memeticians, and examine computational simulations of Darwinian principles in order to see how ideas survive and advance. Spencer believed that the increase of the productive power of work increases happiness. Present-day philosophers are eager to diagram the relation between work satisfaction and personality. Some even try to revive Compte's positivist philosophy, to improve upon past Utopian schemes, or to invent a calculus of intellectual well-being. Short of a philosophic inquiry, everything becomes a subject waiting for a philosopher who does not want to stay within the boundaries of the history of philosophy. Once new movements, some better justified than others, and all reflecting the shift from the authority-based civilization of literacy to the endless freedom of choice of the illiterate context, needed a powerful instrument to further their programs, they chose, or were chosen by, philosophy. Secularism and pluralism meet within philosophic concerns with the gay movement, feminism, multi-culturalism, integration of new technology, implications of aging, the new holisms, popular philosophy, sexual emancipation, virtuality, and more along this line. In a way, this reflects the new awareness of efficiency that permeates philosophic activity, but also its struggle to maintain its relations to literacy. Legitimate doubt is generated by the choice of subjects that seem to attract philosophers, and by the apparent lack of philosophic matter. When the language is not obscure, the philosopher seems to discuss matters, not really question reasons, and even less advance ideas or explanatory models. Wholesale generalizations do not help, but one can really not escape the feeling that the process through which philosophy liberates itself from literacy has been less productive than the similar process of science's emancipation from language. A journey through the many philosophically oriented Web sites reveals very quickly that even when philosophy opts out of the print medium, it carries over many of the limitations of literacy. The ability to open philosophic discourse, to adopt non- linearity, and to encourage dialogue free of the pressure of tradition is often signaled, but rarely accomplished. The medium is resisted, not enjoyed as an alternative to classic philosophical discourse. Such observations have prompted the opinion that scientists are becoming the most appropriate philosophers of their own contributions. Who needs philosophy? And what for? At this point, one question naturally arises: Is philosophy relevant after all? Moreover, is it even possible without the participation of natural language, or at least without this intermediary between philosophers and their public? In blunter terms, can we live without it? In the context in which efficiency expectations translate into a practical experience of an unprecedented degree of specialization, will philosophy turn into another mediating activity among people? Or will it be, as it was considered in the culture of a Romantic ideal, humanity's self-consciousness, as expressed in Hegel's philosophy? If indeed philosophy is absorbed into science, what can its purpose be? As with literacy, the inclination is to suggest that, regardless of the new condition of language, philosophy remains possible and is indeed relevant. As far as its functions are concerned-mediating activity, humanity's self-consciousness, corpus of interpretive discourse about humanity and nature-they remain to be defined in the pragmatic context. It is needless to reiterate that within each scale of humankind, philosophy pursued different interests as these proved pertinent to efficiency expectations. Philosophers never contributed bread to the table nor artifacts. Their skill was to formulate questions, especially the very probing questions-"What is what?" and "Why?"-in their attempt to address the origins of things. Deciphering the reason of things and actions-in other words, understanding the world and its apparent order (what the Greeks called eunomia)-made them simultaneously philosophers and interpreters of science. "How can we know?" and "How can we explain?" are subsequent questions, pursued more stringently by people in search of scientific rationality than by philosophers per se. No historic account, no matter how detailed, can do justice to the definition of philosophy. Its subject changes as human beings change in the process of their practical self-constitution. From philosophy, science and all the humanities (ethics, aesthetics, politics, sociology, law) evolved. Even our concern with language is of a philosophic nature. It seems that philosophy is, in the final analysis, the only authentic domain of abstraction. Its interest is not the individual, the concrete, the immediate, not even the idea, but the abstraction of these. Where other domains, such as mathematics, logic, linguistics, and physics are intent on understanding the abstract notions around which their domains are built, on giving them life in the context of practical experiences, philosophy seems driven by the quest for reaching the next level of abstraction, the abstraction of abstractions, and so on. Science uses abstraction as an instrument for reaching concreteness; philosophy follows the inverse path. There is always to the philosophic attempt a call for the next step, into the infinite. Each accomplishment is provisional. To experiment philosophically means not so much to search systematically for causes as to never end the inquiry. There are no right or wrong philosophic theories. Philosophy is cumulative and self-devouring. That people will never stop wondering what is what, the more their own activity will multiply the domain of existing entities, goes almost without saying. That they will ask again and again how they can know, how they can be sure that what they know is true, or at least relevant, is also evident. The species is characterized by its ability to think, produce and master tools, acknowledge value, and constitute itself as a community of shared concern and resources, through its playfulness and other characteristics (alluded to in terms such as Homo economicus, Zoon semiotikon, Zoon politikon, Homo ludens). Probably more than all these partial qualifiers, the species is the only one known to question everything. As language experience marked the genetic condition of the human being, questioning marked it too, probably through language mechanisms in the first place. When the child articulates the first question, the entire genetic endowment is at work. We are who and what we are in our inquisitive interaction with others. Our minds exist only through this interaction. This statement says in effect that to philosophize became part of the process of human self-constitution and identification. The only referent of philosophy is the human being constituted in practical experiences. Together with other surviving literacies, philosophic literacy will be one of many. The philosophy of the civilization of illiteracy will reflect the circumstances of work and life characteristic of the pragmatic framework. It will also be subjected to the severe test of market exigencies as these reflect efficiency expectations characteristic of the new scale of humankind. Science can justify itself by the return in investment in new explanatory models. It also leads to new technologies and to higher levels of efficiency in human practical experiences. Philosophy certainly has a different justification. Philosophic necessity is evasive. Short of living off the past, as literacy, religion, and art do, it needs to refocus on reason as the compass of human activity. Focusing on alternative practical experiences, philosophy can practically help people to free themselves from the obsession with progress-seen as a sequence of ever-escalating records (of production, distribution, expectation)-and moreover, from the fear of all its consequences. It can also focus people's attention on alternatives to everything that affects the integrity of the species and its sense of quality, including the relation to their environment. When past, present, and future collapse into the illiterate frenzy of the instant, philosophy owes to those who question its articulations an honest approach to the question, "Is there a future?" But as this future takes shape in the presence of humans partaking in the open world of networked interactions, banalities will not do. Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes Confusing as it is, a snapshot of everything that today goes under the names art and literature conveys at least a sense of variety. Forget the never-ending discussions of what qualifies as art and what does not. And forget the irreconcilable disputes over taste. What counts are practical experiences of self-identification as artist or writer, as well as involvement with artifacts eventually acknowledged within the experience as art or as literature, i.e., experiences through which the art public and readership are constituted. What comes to mind when we think about the art and literature of the civilization of illiteracy are not illiterate writers-although they exist-and not illiterate painters, composers, pianists, dancers, sculptors, or computer artists of all kinds. Rather, disparate examples of works, each remarkable in its own way (or altogether unremarkable), but above all marked by characteristics that distinctly disconnect them from the literate experience of art and literature capture our memory. Cautionary note ended. Here are the examples: surviving Auschwitz translated into a comic book parable populated by cats (depicting the Nazis) and mice (depicting their victims); a Grammy Award returned by a famous singing group because someone else was doing the singing for them; the tear-jerkers from Disney Studios (a company whose audience is the world), classic stories or history turned into feminist or politically correct musicals; paintings by a controversial artist (self-made or made by the market?), fetching prices as high as overvalued shares of a new Internet company, after he died of AIDS at an early age; the never-ending parade of computer animation miracles; the Web sites of uninterrupted aesthetic frenzy that would have delighted Andy Warhol, one of the authentic founders of art in the civilization of illiteracy, if anyone could pinpoint the beginning of this civilization. These are examples. Period. Originality, aesthetic integrity, homogeneity, and artfulness are the exception. The process through which these examples were produced begs qualifiers different from art produced under the aegis of literate expectations. Today, art is produced much faster, embodied-or disembodied-in and disseminated through more media, and exhausted in a shorter time-sometimes even before it comes into being! Cycles of artistic style are abridged to the extreme of being impossible to define. Artistic standards are leveled as the democracy of unlimited access to art and literature expands their public, without effecting a deep rapport, a long-lasting relation, or a heightened aesthetic expectation. Never before has more kitsch been produced and more money spent to satisfy the obsession with celebrity that is the hallmark of this time. Museums became the new palaces and the new shopping malls, opening branches all over the world, not unlike MacDonalds and fashion retail stores. And never before were more technological and scientific means involved in the practical experience of art, always on the cutting edge, not only because art is traditionally associated with innovation. These new experiences make possible the transition from an individual, private, almost mystical, experience to a very public activity. Open a virtual studio on the Web, and chances are that many people will exercise their calling (or curiosity) on the digital canvas. Not infrequently, this activity is carried on at the scale of the integrated world: major concerts viewed on several continents, attempts to integrate art from all nations into a super-work, the melange of literatures fused into new writing workshops, distributed, interactive installations united in the experience of digital networks. Good taste and bad co-exist; pornography resides as bits and bytes in formats not different from those of the most suave examples from art history. The Internet is the one and only uncensored place left on the earth. All these phenomena deserve to be understood as testimony to the change of the condition of human experience, and in the context of change from a literacy-dominated art to an art of many partial literacies, of mediations, and of relatively vague notions of value and significance. Making and perceiving Nature and culture meet in artistic practical experiences of human self- constitution, as they meet in any other human experience. What makes their meeting extraordinary is the fact that what we see, or hear, or listen to is the expression of their intersecting. Through art, humans project sensorial, as well as cognitive, characteristics. The experience of structuring a category of artifacts, defined through their aesthetic condition, and the complementary experience of self-definition through aesthetically relevant actions constitute the realm of the artistic. In their interaction with objects and actions resulting from such experiences, individuals conjure meaning as they define themselves in respect to the experiences in a given context. Like any other practical experience, the production of art belongs to the pragmatic framework. We are what we do: hunting, running, singing, drawing, telling stories, creating rhymes, performing a play. In their respective doings, artists identify themselves through particular aptitudes and skills: rhythm, movement, voice, sense of color, harmony, synchronism, contrast. The emergence of language and the consecutive experience of recording led to the association of skills with the writing of the language, that is, drawing and reading it to others, performing it in rituals. The domain of art seems to be characteristic only of the human species. Since the practical experience of art is so close to our biogenetic structural reality, while at the same time constitutive of a non-existential domain, the making of art and the cultural appropriation of art are perceived as similar experiences. Nevertheless, language exercised coordination for the simple reason that successive motivations of the art experience-such as the mytho-magical, practical, ritual, sexual, gnoseologic, political, or economic-and the underlying structure of art belong to different domains. The underlying structure of art defines its aesthetics. The underlying structure of magic, ritual, or the sexual defines their respective condition, as it expresses human understanding of the unknown, or the many aspects of sexuality. The interaction between artist and society, once markets emerged and art was acknowledged as a product with its own identity, resulted in specific forms of recurrence: recognition of the uniqueness of the work, of the artist, and of interpretive patterns. Once the framework for recognizing artworks as merchandise was established, transactions in artworks became transactions in the artist-society relation, with a lot of give-and-take that was difficult, if not impossible, to encode. The nature of the relations can be partially understood by examining behaviors of artists, who are almost always seen as eccentric, a little off the middle of the road, and behaviors of the public. There is much instinctive interaction, and even more learned behavior, mediated through an experience constituted in and communicated through language. Looking at a painting-once painting is acknowledged as artifact-is more than acknowledging its physical reality: the optical, and sometimes the textual, appearance, or the context of contemplation. The action of painting, sculpting, dancing, performing, or writing poetry or a novel is simultaneously an action of constituting oneself as artist or writer and projecting this self, as it results from the practical experience characteristic of such an endeavor, into the social space of interactions. This is why art is in the first place expression, and only secondly communication. This is also why looking at a work is to constitute the individual experience of context, in the first place, and only secondly to conjure and assign meaning. In both the action of painting and looking at a painting, biologically inherited characteristics, together with learned elements (skills), participate in the process of constituting the being (the painter and the onlooker, for instance) as both individual and member of the community. The natural and the acquired, or learned, interact. And in the course of time, the natural is educated, made aware of characteristics connected to culture rather than nature. Two simultaneous processes take place: 1) the recurrent interaction of those making art and those acknowledging it in their practical life; 2) establishment of patterns of interpretation as patterns of interaction mediated by the artwork. Language experiences take place in both processes. Consequently, artistic knowledge is accumulated, and art-related communication becomes a well defined practical experience, leading to self-identification such as art historian, art theoretician, art critic, and the like. The nature and characteristics of the practical experience of art-related language ought to be examined so that we can reach an understanding of the circumstances under which they might change. Art and language Language is a multi-dimensional practical experience. In the interaction between individuals who produce something (in this case, works of art) and those who consume them, self-constitution through language makes coordination possible. Production and consumption are other instances of human self-constitution. Frequently, integration takes place in the process of exchanging goods or, at a more general level, values. Drawing something, real or imaginary, and looking at the drawing, i.e., trying to recognize the drawn object, are structurally different experiences. These two practical experiences can be related in many ways: display the drawing and the object drawn side-by-side; explain the drawing to the onlookers; attach a description. Here is where difficulties start to accumulate. The artifact and the experience leading to it appear as different entities. Descriptions (what is on paper or on canvas) lead to identification, but not to interaction, the only reason behind the artistic experience. Language substitutes its own condition for the entire physical-biogenetic level of interaction. It overplays the cultural, which is consequently made to represent the entire experience. People speak about works of art, write about art, and read writings about art as though art had no phylogenetic dimension, only a phylocultural reality. Language's coordinative function is relied upon because of the dissimilarity between the practical experiences of making art and of appropriating it in the cultural environment. Through cultural experiences, the coordinating function of language extends to facilitating new forms of practical experiences associated with making art: instruction, use of technology, and cooperation peculiar to artmaking. It also facilitates experiences of appropriation in the art market, the constitution of institutions dedicated to supporting education in art, the politics of art, and forms of public evaluation. Art implicitly expresses awareness, on the part of artists and public, of how persons interacting through artistic expression are changed through the interactions. Language, especially in forms associated with literacy, makes this awareness of reciprocal influence explicit. In the civilization of illiteracy, all non-literate means of information, communication, and marketing (e.g., songs, film, video, interactive multimedia) take it upon themselves to reposition art as yet another practical experience of the pragmatics of high efficiency peculiar to a humankind that reached yet another critical mass. It was not unusual for an artist in the literacy-dominated past to go through very long cycles in preparing for the work, and for the work itself to unfold after years of effort. It is quite the contrary in the case of the instantaneous gratification of a video work, of an installation, or of gestural art. Within the pragmatics of an underlying structure reflected in literacy, art was as confined as the experience of language, which represented its underpinning. The pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy makes the experience of art part of the global experience. Many people wonder whether the basic, though changing, relation between art and language, in particular art and literacy, is unavoidable-furthermore, whether coordination can be assumed by a sign system other than literate language. In prelude to answering this question, I would like to point out that the influence of language on the arts, and even on the language arts (poetry, drama, fiction), was hailed by as many as deplored it. To account for attitudes in favor of or against an art connected to, or resulting from, high levels of literacy, i.e., of favoring an art emancipated from the domination of language, means to account for the change of art and its perceived meaning. The entire artistic effort to transcend the figurative and the narrative, to explore the abstract and the gestural, to explore its own reality, and to establish new languages testifies to this striving towards emancipation. Ascertaining that the art- language relation is not inescapable does not purport the invention of a new relation as an alternative to what culture acknowledges as the relatively necessary dependence of the two. As with the case of other forms of practical experiences discussed against the background of literacy, examination of directions of change and the attempt to conjure their meaning is required. Human beings are agents of change and, at the same time, outside observers of the process of change. An observer can distinguish between the recurrent influence of the human biogenetic structure and the interactions based on this structure. An observer can also account for the role of the phylocultural, in particular the interactions this triggers. Restricted to the literate means of communication that I chose for presenting my arguments, I want to show that art and its interpretation are no longer the exclusive domain of literate language. Alternative domains of creation and interpretation are continuously structured as we project ourselves in new practical experiences. Moreover, the eternal conflict inherent in art experiences, between what is and what unfolds, best expressed in the quest for innovation, integrates aspects of the conflict between literacy-dominated pragmatics and pragmatics dominated by illiteracy. Were I an artist, and were we all visually attuned, this topic could have been explained through one or several artworks, or through the process leading to an artwork. The role of processing current practical experiences of art needs to be properly highlighted. Exacerbated in the self-consciousness of art in the age of illiteracy, artistic processes take precedence over artifacts; the making of art becomes more important than the result. Artists would say that we exist not only in the environment of our language projections, but probably just as much (if not more) in the environment of our art projections. Impatience and autarchy The prophets of the end of the arts (Hegel was their most convincing, but most misunderstood, representative) were so confused by changes in the arts that, instead of approaching the dynamics of the process, they concentrated on the logical possibility that artistic practice is self-devouring and self-destructive. The initial end-of-the-arts prophecies were delivered during a time of relatively mild change in the status of the aesthetic appropriation of reality. Recent prophecies occurred in a very different context. It was only after World War I that aesthetic experiences really difficult to connect and integrate in an accepted explanation changed our notion and expectations of art. With the experience of disposable language, which the Dadaist movement submitted to a community already skeptical of language, came the experience of disposable art. While literacy supplied a framework for (almost) consistent representations of values and norms, human practice at the border between literacy and a-literacy introduced and fostered inconsistency, believed to be the last resort of individual freedom. Eclecticism and consumption joined in this experience, since mixing without system or justification of any kind is like stating that everything is worth whatever people make of it, and therefore they want to have it. Re-evaluation of available art, good or bad, aesthetically relevant or kitsch, significant or insignificant, is part of this change. Once re-evaluation started, the processes of artmaking and aesthetic appropriation grew relatively disconnected. Where language, through literacy as a generalized medium of interaction, maintained cultural distinctions, such as the ones embodied in our notions of perspective, resemblance, and narration, the new art experience introduced distinctions at the natural level, such as instinct, energy, choice, and change. For as long as literacy maintained control and integration, viewers, irritated by conventions foreign to them, physically attacked works (such as Impressionist paintings) resulting from artistic practices different from those congruent to the practice of language and to the associated expectations of seeing. Art under the scrutiny of literacy is always model driven. Once the necessity of literacy as the only integrating mechanism was challenged by the need to maintain levels of efficiency for which language is not well equipped, new forms of artistic appropriation of reality and a new notion of reality itself became possible. Model was replaced by iconoclasm. Walter Benjamin captured some of these changes in the formula of "art in the age of its mechanical reproduction." The end of the aura, as Benjamin has it, is actually the aura's shift from the artifact to the process and the artist. It corresponds not to the end of art's uniqueness, but to the artist's determination to get rid of all restrictions (of subject matter, material, technique) and to ascertain artistic freedom as the goal of artistic experience. But there are yet more possibilities for the emancipation of artists and their work. As we enter the age of electronic reproduction, massive communication that supports interactive multimedia, and information integration through networks (adapted for pipelining data and all kinds of images), we encounter such possibilities. We are also subjected to new experiences-for instance, simultaneous transmission of art and interpretation, moreover the possibility to contribute our own interpretation, to become co-makers of whatever is presented to us through the very malleable digital media. Technology and change of aesthetic goals affect the scale of artistic experience, as well as the relation between artists and the world. Projects such as Walter de Maria's Lightening Field and Christo's Umbrella project (extended over California and Japan) are examples of both the change of scale and of new interpretation processes. They are also vivid proof that globality permeates art at each level. So does the sense of rapid change, the acknowledgment and fear of perishability, and the open-endedness of the practical experience of making art. I doubt that anyone could have captured this sense as well as the Web site on which millions of viewers could experience the wrapping and unwrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin. Christo and Jeanne-Claude might remain the authors of record, but the event grew beyond the notion of authorship. The artistic experience of the civilization of illiteracy is also characterized by impatience and autarchy. Things happen fast and relatively independent from one another. Artistic experiment always embodied characteristics of the practical experience of human self-constitution. From petroglyphic expression to the art of our age, this happens again and again, obviously in context-dependent forms. The Dutch and Flemish Baroque artists celebrated results of industriousness through mythological themes. Before that, religion dominated up to and through the Renaissance. In the context of African, Asian, and South American art, the forms were different, but the pragmatic stamp is faultlessly evident. No wonder that in the settled age of literacy, art had a structure similar to that of the practical experience of literate language, regardless of the richness of its forms. It even called for experimental settings reminiscent of industry, or of the university context, as we know from art history. And it was sanctioned on the same pragmatic criteria as any other literate experiment: success (it was useful), or failure (it was discarded). Accordingly, it implied sequential development and a rather settled succession of operations. As artistic experimentation took place in line with all other experiments characteristic of the pragmatic context of literacy, it even resulted in an industrial model based on modularity, which the Bauhaus enthusiastically promoted. A number of shops produced thousands of ready-made artistic objects with a clear goal in mind: value through usefulness, function over form, functionality as aesthetics at work. Artistic practice and appropriation were coordinated through the still literate language of the market. Art in the civilization of illiteracy is less a matter of invention and discovery, as it was in the civilization of literacy, and more one of selection, framing, and endless variation. Since the end of the last century, artists started breaking away from some of the characteristics implicit in the literate experience, such as hierarchy, centralism, and nationalism. This is not a time for rules and laws, unless they are taken from the books of the past, relativized and integrated in the tools needed in artistic practice, made into underlying principles. Appropriation is not of the object, but of the method, process, and context. The tools of this civilization are endowed with the literacy required for certain partial experiences. Artists, instead of acquiring skills, are trained to master such tools. In his series of ready-mades, Marcel Duchamp anticipated much more than a style. He anticipated a new kind of artistic practice and a different interrelation among the individuals involved in producing-literally selecting from the infinite repertory of ready- mades and framing-and the individuals who appropriate the artifact for whatever reason (aesthetic satisfaction, status, investment, irrational drive to collect). Today, artists are more dependent on others involved in the pragmatic framework of the time. This dependency is the result of the more integrated nature of human effort. Everything that is eventually built into the work, regardless of whether this work is an object, an action, or a process, results from other human practical experiences. The time of the artist's inventing his own pigments, making his own canvasses and frames, that is, the time of the artist's integral ownership and quasi- independence, was already over with the advent of industrial production. In the context of mediation and task distribution, new levels of dependencies are established and reflected in the work. Video art, photography, film, computer-based installations, and much of the computer music, interactive multimedia, and virtual art experiences are examples of such dependencies. Simultaneously they are examples of the new forms of conflict and tension that mark the artistic experience. Artistic freedom and self- determination are only apparent. The limits of the many elements involved in an artistic experience affect choice and artistic integrity. Free choice, a romantic notion, is a delusion under these new circumstances. There is no censorship on the Internet, but that does not make the medium totally free. The forms of integration in the guise of new science and technology are probably less troublesome than integration through language. They are, however, much more constricting and restrictive because they derive from elements over which the artist has little, if any, control. The growth of non-verbal modes of human expression, communication, and interaction introduces elements of mediation. These can be seen as intermediaries, such as images to be integrated, sounds, political actions (a sit-in is the best known example) that are involved in the practical experience of art in all its phases. Formulation of aesthetic goals, in the form of video improvisations, diagrams, multimedia installations, computer-generated simulations, interpretation of an artwork (animation of a painting or sculpture, for example), and processes of meaning realization and valuation (represented by market transactions, insurance estimates, political relevance, ideological tendency, cultural significance) use mediating elements. None of Christo's elaborate and very comprehensive projects could have been carried through without such means. Keijo Yamamoto's widely celebrated virtual performance could not come into being without an understanding of all that it takes to establish a Worldwide Network Art. Art, as a human experience, emphasizes its own transitory nature and becomes less permanent than in previous stages of artistic practice, but far more pervasive. Still, to qualify this process as mere democratization of the arts would be misleading. That supermarkets are full of meat, oranges, cheese, and all kinds of graphic signs should not be interpreted as the democratization of meat, oranges, cheese, or graphic signs. The majority of artists still strive for recognition. To the extent that their own recognition as different means that there are people who do not qualify for the same recognition and reward, there is no equality in the realm of art. On the other hand, the pressures of leveling and the iconoclastic component of artistic experience reduce the passion that drove artists in the past, or at least changes the focus of this passion. Although the artistic process has changed in line with other changes in the systematic domain of human experience in general, it still resists doing away with the terms for artistic recognition. The uncertainty (including that of recognition, but not limited to it) projected in the work qualifies it as an expression of individualism. The heuristic attempt to establish new patterns of human interaction through art reflects the uncertainty. To own art that is stored in units of information and in invisible processing instructions means something totally different from being in possession of unique artifacts embodied in matter, regardless of how much they are affected by the passing of time. The recurrent phylogenetic and phylocultural structure, on which the artist-public interaction was built in the pragmatic framework fostering literacy, is questioned from within artistic practice. Art is only indirectly affected by the new scale of humankind, as it tries to acknowledge this scale. But the efficiency that this scale requires is reflected in the means available to support experiences of human self-constitution as artist. Related to scale are the notions of survival and well being. People do not need art to survive, and the majority of people on Earth are living proof of this assertion. But in a broader sense, life that does not have an artistic dimension is not human. That is what we have learned or what we want to believe. To express oneself in forms involving an artistic element is part of self- constitution as a human being, distinct from the rest of the natural realm. Moreover, to have access to the richness of other expressive forms-rhythms, colors, shapes, movements, metaphors, sounds, textures-is to reascertain a sense of belonging. In this vein, the right to affluence implicit in the civilization of illiteracy extends well into the domain of the aesthetic. New artistic structures and means are continuously submitted and consumed. Some end up in oblivion; others suggest dynamic patterns. Freed from the constraints of a dominant literacy, artistic practice is becoming more and more like any other form of human experience, emancipated from the obsession of universality and eternity (embodied in museums and art collections), from centralism (expressed in such elements as the vanishing point, the tonal center of music, the architectural keystone). True, a great deal of narcissism has come to the forefront. And there is a tendency to break rules for the sake of breaking them, and to make the act of breaking the rule the object of artistic interest. In transcending old media boundaries, production and appropriation come closer together. The person making the artwork already integrates the appropriation in the making. Thus a complicity beyond and above language is established in defiance of time, space, and the universal. Nevertheless, artists still want to be eternal! Art establishes itself on a plurality of levels of interaction. This is its main characteristic, since the cultural level supported by literacy is breaking the bonds of a generic, pervasive literacy. Several specialized languages mediate at various levels. The language of art history addresses professionals at one level, and laymen at another, through an array of journals and magazines. Art theory speaks to experts and, in a different tone, to neophytes who themselves will judge or produce artworks. The language of materials and techniques delves into particulars beyond oil, canvas, melody, beat, and rhythm that a generally literate onlooker or listener would not readily comprehend. The art of the civilization of illiteracy partly reprocesses previous artistic experience. By no accident, the entire modern movement looked back at ancient art forms and exotic art and appropriated their themes and structural components. In this experience, cultural conventions expressed through literacy (such as the recurrent linear perspective, illusory space, or color symbolism) are of secondary import. The goal is to account for the tension between motives (the magical, the sacred, or the mythic), the realistic image, and abstract extensions. The experience, which language inadequately reported, but could not substitute, is the subject of artistic investigation. African and Chinese masks, Russian icons, Mayan artifacts, Arabic decorative motifs, and Japanese syllabaries are invoked with the intention of arousing awareness of their specific pragmatic context, which in turn will influence new artistic practical experiences. This is art after art. Evidently, Russian avant-garde, French cubism, American conceptualism, and all the other isms cannot be seen as ordinary extensions to experiences alien to tradition, or as attempts to loosen the ties between art and literacy in conscious preparation for relative emancipation from language. This phase has its own, new, recurring interactions. The post-modern is probably the closest we have come to the expression of awareness and values about art in art, a generic hall of mirrors. Artistic practice led to a change in the structure of the domain: art assumes a self-referential function and submits the results to the public at large (literate or not). To look at post-modern art and architecture as only illustrative of cultural quotes, and possible self-irony, would mean to miss the nature of the experience projected in making the new artifacts. It is an undoing of the past in order to achieve a new freedom (from norm, ideal, value, morality, even aesthetics). The concept of art, resulting from the theoretic practice focused on accumulated artistic experience in its broadest sense, is subjected to change. Artifacts resulting from the practical experience of artists constitute a domain congruent to the aesthetic dimension of human interaction in the social environment. This art is illiterate in the sense that it refuses previous norms and values, comments upon them from within, and projects a very individual language, with many ad hoc rules, and a vocabulary in continuous change. Think about how, in the post-modern, the condition and function of drawing change. Drawing no longer serves as an underlying element of painting, architecture, or sculpture. Rather, drawing ascertains its own aesthetic condition. In a broader sense, it is as though art continuously generates its definition and redefinition, and allows those involved in artistic practice to constitute themselves as entities of change more than as manufacturers of aesthetically relevant objects. In a similar way, harmony is re- evaluated in the experience of music. The specializations within artistic practice (e.g., drawing, harmony, composition) correspond to an incredible diversification of skills and techniques, to the creation and adoption of new tools (digital devices included), and awareness of the market. Those who know the language of an artifact, or of a series of relatively similar artifacts, are not necessarily those who will appropriate and interpret the artifact. In this age, aesthetic expression becomes an issue of information processing resulting from the systematic deconstruction of the aesthetic practice of the age dominated by literacy. Images and sounds are derived from various experiences (photographic, mechanical, electronic). Spontaneity is complemented by elaboration. Previous stylistic characteristics- spontaneity is only the most evident-are reified and framed in new settings together with the interpretation. They are also reified in artistic expression as the gesture of making the work and the act of submitting it to the public with the aim of pleasing, provoking, criticizing, ridiculing, confounding, challenging, uplifting, or degrading (intentionally or not). Post-modern artistic practice results from the display of broken conventions and rules, or of disparate and sometimes antagonistic characteristics. Suffice it to point out how the private (the personal side of art, layout strategies, art of proportions, drawing, symbolism, harmony, and musical or architectural composition) becomes public. Real Life, an MTV series, is the personal drama of five young people trying to make it in New York City. The script was their day-to-day existence, the attempt to harmonize their conflicting lifestyles in the elegant loft that MTV provided. When the director fell in love with one of the characters, he was brought in front of the camera's merciless eye. Likewise, the artist-painter, composer, sculptor, dancer, or film director-submits the secrets of his experience to the viewer, the listener, and the spectator. The artifact comes to the market delivered with its self-criticism, even with a time bomb set for the hour after which the work has become valueless. The making of art made public is at the same time its unmaking. Appropriation, one of the preferred methods of the art experience, is based on a notion of aesthetic or cultural complicity. The illiterate public accepts a game of allusions. The alluded must be present in the work, because in the absence of a unifying literacy, there is no shared background one can count on. Insinuations, innuendo, and provocation are practiced parallel to the quote around which the work establishes its own identity. Art is infinitely fragmented today. No direction dominates, or at least no longer than the 15 minutes of fame that Warhol prophesied. There is a real sense of artistic glut and a feeling of ethical confusion: Is anything authentic? The public is lured into the work, sometimes in ridiculous forms (a painting with live characters touching the viewers, pinching them, reaching for pocketbooks, or spitting chewing gum); other times in naive ways (through mirrors, interactive dialogue on computer screens, live installations in a zoo, live keyboards in a music hall). Art is delivered unfinished, as a point of entry, and as an open challenge to change. To copyright openness and sign it is as absurd, or sublime, as delivering beautiful empty bars of music to serve as a score for symphonic interpretation or a multimedia event. The copy is better than the original Within artistic practice, as much as within any other practical form of human projection, we notice the transition from a centralized system of reference and values to a system of parallel values. In the continuum generically qualified in the market as art- and what cannot be declared art today?-there is a noticeable need for intrinsic relations of patterns: what belongs together, and how commonalties are brought about. And there is a need for disparity and distinction: How do we distinguish among the plenty accumulated in a never-ending series of shows when all that changes is the name on the canvas? The same applies to photography, video art, theater, dance, minimalist music, and the architecture of deconstruction. An evident tension results, not different from the one we perceive in the market of stocks and options. The dilemma is obvious: where to invest, if at all, unless someone has insider information (What is hot?). This is not an expression of an ideal, as the values of literacy marked art to be, but of alternatives delivered together with the uncertainty that characterizes the new artistic experience as one of obsession with recognition in an environment of competition that often becomes adversarial. (The umbrellas that the Parisians used to attack Impressionist canvases at the turn of the century are children's toys in comparison to the means of aesthetic annihilation used in our time.) Becoming a practical experience focused on its own condition and history, this kind of art affects the appropriation of its products in the sense of increasing artificiality-the shared phylocultural component-and decreasing naturalness. Accordingly, interpretive practice is focused on establishing distinctions (often hair- splitting), more and more within the artistic domain, in disregard of message, form, ethical considerations, and even skill. This is the type of art whose photographic reproduction is always better than the original. This is the music that always sounds crisper on a compact disk. This is the art whose simuli of the show, performance, dance, or concert on television are even better than the production. Meaning comes about in an individual experience of relating distinctions, not common experiences. The specialization of art, no less than the specialization of sciences and humanities, results in the formation of numerous networks of recurrent or non-recurrent interaction. Examples of this are layering, tracing from photo-projection, expanding the strategies of collage (to include heterogeneous sources), mixing the elaborate and the spontaneous (in dance, performance, video, even architecture). The pencil and brush are replaced by the scanner and by memes of operations favoring minute detail over meaningful wholes. Music is generated by means of sampling and synthesizing. We deal with a phenomenon of massive decentralization-each is potentially an artist-and generalized integration through networks of interaction, within which museums, galleries, and auction houses represent major nodes. It is not unusual to see the walls of a museum become the support for a work whose life ends with the end of the show, if not earlier. Many musical compositions never make it to paper, forever sentenced to tape or compact disk. Composers who do not know how to read or write music rely on the musical knowledge integrated in their digital instruments. With the advent of technological means for the production and dissemination of images, sounds, and performances begins an age of a sui generis artistic environment of life that is easy to adapt to individual preference, easy to change as the preference changes. The new artistic practice results in the demythification of artists and their art. Art itself is demythified at the same time. As a consequence of electronic reproducibility and infinite manipulation, art forms a new library of images with memory devices loaded with scanned art, but with no books. Sound samples are the library of the composer active in the civilization of illiteracy. Using networking as a matter of practicability, people could display, in places of living or work, images from any collection, or listen to music from any ongoing concert around the globe. They could also change the selection without touching the display. They could redo each artwork as they please, painting over its digital double in the act of appropriating it, probably beyond what any artist of the past would ever accept, or any artist of the present would care for. Music could be subjected to similar appropriations. As a matter of fact, televised images are already manipulated and r-written. DVD-three letters standing for Digital Video Data- yet to make it into the everyday jargon reflecting our involvement with new media, will probably replace the majority of televised images. With the advent of digital video delivered via the familiar compact disk format, a tool as powerful as any TV production facility will support artistic innovation that we still associate with high budgets and glamorous Hollywood events. Art, as much as any other form of human interaction in the civilization of illiteracy, involves shorter cycles of exchange and contact at each of its levels: meaning constitution, symbolism, education, merchandise. The eternity and transcendence of art, notions and expectations associated with the literate experience, become nostalgic references of a past pragmatics. Viewers consume art almost at the rhythm at which they consume everything else. Art consumes itself, exhausting a model even before it can be publicly acknowledged as one. In its new manifestations, not all necessarily in digital format, but many in the transitory existence of networks, it either comes in an abundance, which contradicts the literacy-based ideal of uniqueness, or in short-lived singular modes, which contradicts the ideal of permanency. Strategies of over-writing, over-dancing, over-sounding, and over-impression are applied with frenzy. Grid structures made visible become containers for very fluid forms of expression, bringing to mind the fluidity of Chinese calligraphy. Afro-American street dancers, West European ballet groups, and theaters in which the human body is integrated into the more comprehensive body of the show, practice these strategies for different purposes and with different aesthetic goals. There is also a lot of parody, and fervor, in expanding one medium into another: music becomes painting or sculpture; dance becomes image; sculpture lends its volume to theatrical projects or to 3D renditions, virtual or real events that integrate the natural and the artificial. In this vast effort of exploration, authenticity is rarely secured. Photography, especially in its digital forms, would be impossible without the industry it created; nor would painting, sculpture, music, or computer-based interactive art (cyberart, another name for virtual reality) without the industries they stimulated. The legitimate market of fakes and the illegitimate market of originals meet in the illiterate obsession with celebrity, probably the most fleeting of all experiences. The extension of art as practice to art as object, resulting from the aesthetic experience in the space of reproductions better than originals, is challenged by the intensions of the act (process). Intensity is accepted more and more as the essence of the artistic practical experience, impossible to emulate in a reproduction, and actually excluded in the perfection of a concert transposed onto a compact disk, for example, or of images on CD-ROM and DVD disks. When each of us can turn into a gazelle, a lobster, a stone, a tree, a pianist, a dancer, an oboe, or even an abstract thought by donning gloves and goggles, we are projected in a space of personal fantasy. Creativity in virtual reality, including creativity of interaction on the Internet, invites play. It can be in someone's private theater, sex parlor, or drug experience. As an interactive medium, virtual reality can be turned into an instrument for knowing others as they unfold their creativity in the virtual space shared. As opposed to art in its conventional form, virtual reality supports real-time interactions. The artist and the work can each have its own life. Or the artist can decide to become the work and experience the perception of others. No Rembrandt or Cézanne, not even the illiterate graffiti artists in the New York subway system could experience such things. Surprisingly, this experience is not limited only to non-language based experiences, but also to the art of writing and reading. Embodied in avatars, many would-be writers contribute their images or lines to ongoing fictional situations on chat sites on the World Wide Web. While art is freeing itself from literacy, literature does not seem to have the same possibility. Or is this another prejudice we carry with us from the pragmatic framework of literacy-defined self-constitution? The borderline, if any, between art and writing is becoming fuzzier by the hour. A nose by any other name The art of the word, of language, as exemplified in poetry, novels, short stories, plays, and movie scripts, takes place in a very strange domain of our existence. Why strange? The languages of poetry and of our routine conversations differ drastically. How they are different is not easy to explain. Many a writer and interpreter of poetry, plays, and stories (short or long) used their wisdom to explain that Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose," (or for that matter, Shakespeare's "A rose by any other name...") is not exactly the same as "A nose is a nose is a nose..." (or "A nose by any other name..."). Although the similarities between the two are so evident that, without a certain shared experience of poetry, some of us would qualify both as identically silly or identically strange, there is a literary quality that distinguishes them. The art of written words, usually called literature, involves using language for practical purposes other than projecting our common experiences and sharing them on a social level. Nabokov once told his students that literature was not born on the day someone cried "Wolf! Wolf!" out of the Neander Valley as a wolf ran after him (or her). Literature was born when no wolf chased that person. "Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story, there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism [Nabokov qualified Proust as a prism] is the art of literature." This is not the place to discuss the definition of literature, or to set one forth. It is clear, nevertheless, that literature is not the mere use of language. By a definition still to be challenged, there is no literature outside written language. (The term oral literature is regarded as a sad oxymoron by linguists who specialize in oral cultures.) Furthermore, there is no appropriation of the art of language, of its aesthetic expressiveness, without understanding language, a necessary but still insufficient condition. (It is insufficient because to understand language is not equal to using language creatively). Partisans of literacy will say that there is no literature without literacy. However, language use in literature is not the same as language use in daily life, in the self-constitutive experience of living and surviving. When human experience is projected in language and language becomes a medium for new experiences, there is no distinction in the experience. The syncretic character of language as it is formed in a particular pragmatic framework corresponds to the syncretic character of human activity in its very early stages. Distinctions in language are introduced once this experience of self-constitution is segmented and various forms of labor division are brought about by expectations of efficiency. The scale of humankind, whatever it might be at a given moment, is reflected in distinctions in the pragmatic framework, which, in turn, determines distinctions in human expression and communication through language. Survival becomes a form of human practice, losing its primeval condition when it implies the experience of cooperation, and the realization, though limited, of what transcends immediacy. Killing an animal to satisfy hunger does not require awareness of needs and the means to fulfill them, as much as it requires natural qualities such as instinct, speed, and strength. Noticing that the flesh of an animal hit by lightening does not rot like the flesh of slaughtered animals requires a different awareness. The first reports about the immediate sequence of cause and effect; the second, about the ability to infer from one practical domain to another. So does the perceived need to share and expand experience. In the oral phase, and in oral cultures still extant, the immediate and the remote (fear, for example, and the magical addressed with the hope of help) are addressed in the same language. The poetry of myths, or what is made of them as examples of poetry, is actually the poetry of the pragmatics pertinent to efficiency expectations of a small scale of humanity conveyed in myth. Rules for successful action were conveyed orally from one generation to another. Only much later in time, and due to demand for higher efficiency and the expanding scale, do different forms of practical experience separate, but not yet radically. Wolf is wolf, whether it is running after someone, or it is only a product of someone's imagination, or it is displayed in a cage in the zoo, or it is in the process of becoming extinct. Behind each of these situations lies an experience of conflict, on whose basis symbolism (rooted in zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, geometric, astrologic, or religious forms) is established. The use of language symbols is structurally identical to the use of astronomic, mathematical, or mytho-magical symbols in that it uses the conventional nature of the representation in sign processes (generation of new symbols, associations among symbols, symbolic inferences, etc.). Crying wolf started early Literature results from the perceived need to transcend the immediate and to make possible an experience in a time and space of choice, or in the space and time of language itself. Naming a place Florence, Brugges, Xanadu, Bombay, Paris, Damascus, Rio de Janeiro, or Beijing in a story derives from a motivation different from how names were given to real cities, to rivers, to mountains, even to human beings. Names are usually identifiers resulting from the pragmatic context. They become part of our environment, constituting the markers for the context, the stones and barbwire fence of the borders of the experiences from which they result. In each name of a person, place, or animal in what is called real life, as well as in fiction (poetry, plays, novels), the practical experience of human self-constitution creeps in. When readers of a novel, audiences at a play, or listeners at a poetry recitation say that they learn something about the place, characters, or subject, they mean that they learn something (however limited) about the practical experience involved in constituting that novel, performance, or poem. Whether they really know about something, or whether they care to know it, is a different question. Usually, they do not know or care to know because, being born in a language, moreover being subjected to literacy, they believe that things are real because they are in language. They take the world for granted because words describe it. With such a frame of mind, things become even more real when they are written about. Some people are educated to accept some things as more real than others: historical accounts, geographic accounts, biographies, diaries, books, images on a screen. More often than not, people walk through Verona in order to see where Shakespeare's famous pair of enamored adolescent lovers swore undying love to each other. They wind up in front of some ridiculous plaque identifying the place. And because the incident has gone down in writing, they accept the place as real. A picture taken there seems to extend the reality of Romeo and Juliet into their lives. The same can be said of Bran Castle and the fictional Dracula; likewise for the so-called holy places in Jerusalem, reputed cafés in Paris, or sites associated with the name of Al Capone. Real life eventually makes the distinction between fiction, the fiction of fiction, the tourism of the fiction of fiction, and reality. There is a borderline between the practice of writing (fiction or not) and the appropriation of literature by critics, historians of literature, linguists, tourist organizations, and readers. In the experience of writing, authors constitute themselves by projecting, in selected words and sentences, the ability to map between the world they live in and the world of language. In the experience of reading, one projects the ability to understand language and recreate a world in a text, not necessarily the same world in which writers constitute their identity. The process comprises a reduction, from the infinity of situations, words, ideas, characters, stylistic choices, and rhythms, to the uniqueness of the text, and the extension from one text to an infinity of understandings of the many components of a printed book or performed play. In this process, new reductions are made possible. The history of literature and language is well known for the stereotypes of systematic scholarly exposition. Literary critics proceed with a different strategy of reduction; book marketers end up summarizing a novel in a catch- phrase. What we learn from this is that there are several ways to encode, decode, and then encode again thoughts, emotions, reactions, and whatever else is involved in the experience of writing and reading. The history of literature is connected to the diversification of language in more ways than traditional historic accounts lead us to believe. Even the emergence of genres and subgenres can be better understood if we consider the practice of literature in relation to the many forms of human practice. My intention is not to endorse the convention of realism, one of the weak explanatory models that theoreticians and historians of art and literature have used for a long time. The goal is to explain and document that various relations between spoken and written language and the language of literature lead to various writing conventions. In the syncretic phase of human practice, the relation was based on identity. In other words, the two forms of language were not distinguishable. Language was one. Distinctions in practical experiences resulted in distinctions in the self-constitution of the human being through a language that captured similarities and differences, and became a medium for conventions. These eventually led to symbols. Symbolism was acknowledged in writing, itself an expression of conventions. The language of astronomy, agriculture, and alchemy (to refer here to incipient science, technology, and magic) was only as remote from normal language as normalcy was from observing stars, cultivating soil, or trying to turn lead into gold, conjuring the benevolence of magic forces. Reading today whatever survived or was reconstituted from these writings is an experience in poetry and literature. Unless the reader has a specific interest in the subject matter (as a scientist, philosopher, historian, or linguist), these writings no longer recall the wolf, but the art of expression in language. They are considered poetry or literature, not because they contain wrong ideas or false scientific hypotheses-their practical experience is in a pragmatic context to which we have difficulty connecting-but because their language testifies to an experience of transcending the borders between human practice and establishing a systematic, encompassing domain which now seems grounded in a fictional world. Religious writings (the Old Testament, Tao) are also examples. The same happens to the child who saw a wolf (the child did not really see a wolf, he was bored and wanted attention), started crying wolf, and when finally adults show up, there is no wolf. "Oh, he likes to tell stories," or "She has a wild imagination. She will probably become a writer." In some cases, elves, ghosts, or witches are blamed for a sudden wind, changes in weather, or trees creaking in a storm or under the weight of snow, and this is reported as private fiction. Artistic writing and appropriation form a domain of recurrences at least as much as painting, dancing, observing stars, solving mathematical equations, or designing new machines do. Literature involves a convention of complicity, something along the line of "Let us not confuse our lives with descriptions of them," although we may decide to live in the fiction. As with any convention, people do not accept it in the letter, spirit, or both, and wind up crying with the unhappy hero, laughing with the comic character or at somebody. In other words, people live the fiction or derive some lesson from it, or identify with characters, in effect, rewriting them in the ink or blood of their own lives. Meta-literature The recurring interaction between a writer (indirectly present) and a reader takes place through writing and reading. It is proof of the practicality of the literary experience and an expression of its degree of necessity. The extent of the interaction is thus the expression of the part of the practical experience that is shared, and for what purpose. This is illustrated by the uses we give to literature: education, indoctrination, moral edification, illustration, or entertainment. Becoming who they are, the writer and reader project themselves in the reading through a process of dual reciprocal constitution, changing when circumstances change, objectified in the forms through which literature is acknowledged. It has a definite learned quality, in contrast to the arts of images, sounds, and movements, in which the natural component (as in seeing, hearing, moving) made the art possible. Accordingly, artistic writing has an instrumental characteristic and exercises virtual coordination of the experience of assigning meaning. In some ways, this instrumental characteristic begs association to music. To someone watching how the process unfolds, it seems that the recurrent interaction is triggered less by the dynamics of writing and reading, and more decisively by what comprises the act of instilling meaning of the objectified practice of the poem, play, script, novel, or short story. The fact is that language, more than natural systems of signs, pertains to an acquired structure of interactions, as humans progress from one scale to another, within which meaning is conjured. Language is influenced by the conditions of existence (human biology), but not entirely reducible to them. It constitutes as many domains of interaction as there are experiences requiring language, a subset of language, or artifacts similar to language. The claim made from the perspective of literacy was, and still goes strong, that the universality of language is reflected in the universality of literature, and thus the universality of conveying meaning. Actually, to write literature means to un-write the language of everyday use, to empty it of the reference to behavior, and to structure it as an instrument of a different projection of the human being. It means understanding the process through which meaning is conjured as human self-constitution takes place. While it is true that when someone reads a text for the first time, the only reading is one that refers to the language of that particular reader's experience (what is loosely called knowledge of language); once the convention is uncovered, personal experience takes second place, and a new experience, deriving from the interaction, begins. The acquaintance makes the interaction possible; but it might as well stand in the way of its characteristic unfolding as a literary experience. Sometimes, the language of artistic wording establishes a self-contained universe of self-reference and becomes not only the message, but also the context. The practical experience of writing is discovery of universes with such qualities. The practical experience of reading is populating such a universe through personal projection that will test its human validity. Both writer and reader create themselves and ascertain their identities in the interaction established through the text. It goes without saying that while literature is not a copy (mimesis) of the world, neither does it literally constitute something in opposition to it. In a larger framework, literature is but one among many means of practical human experiences resulting, like any other form of objectification, in the alienating process of writing, reading, criticizing, interpreting, and rewriting. Alienation comes from giving life to entities that, once expressed, start their own existence, no longer under the control of the writer or reader. For as long as language dominated human praxis according to the prescriptions of literacy, we could not understand how writing could be an experience in something other than language, or how it could be performed independent of language-based assumptions. Since the turn of the century, this situation has changed. Initially, there was a reaction to language: Dada was born when a knife was used to select a word from a Larousse dictionary. Between the action and its successive interpretations, many layers of practical experiences with language accumulated. The literature of the absurd went further and suggested situations only vaguely defined with the aid of language, actually defined in defiance of language conventions. There is more silence in the plays of Beckett and Ionesco than there are words. Before becoming what many readers have regarded as only the expression of the poetics of self-reference, the experience of concrete poetry attempted to make poetry visual, musical, or even tactile. Happening was based on structuring a situation, with the implicit assumption that our domains of interactions are not defined only through language. The modern renewal of dance, emancipated from the condition of illustration and narration, and from the stifling conventions of classic ballet; the new conventions of film facilitated by understanding the implicit characteristics of the medium; and the expressive means of electronic performances only add to the list of examples characteristic of a literature trying to free itself from language and its literate rules. Or, in order to avoid the animistic connotation (literature as a living entity trying to do something), we should see the phenomena just mentioned as examples of new human experiences: constitution of the literary work as its own language, with the assumption that the process of appropriation would result in the realization of that particular language. A realization, in literature as much as in science, is a description of a system which would behave as though it had this description. Accordingly, the day described in Joyce's Ulysses (Thursday, June 16, 1904) was not a sequential description, but a mosaic in which rules of language were continuously broken and new rules introduced. There is no character by the name of Ulysses in the book. The title and the chapter subtitles were meant to enforce the suggestion of a parallel to Homer's Odyssey. ("A beautiful title," wrote Furetière almost 300 years ago, "is the real pimp of the book.") Language-rather, the appearance of language-provided the geometry of the mosaic. For Joyce, writing turned out to be a practical experience in segmenting space and time in order to extract relations (hopeless past, ridiculous tragic present, pathetic future), an aesthetic goal for which the common use of language is ill equipped. The allusion to the Odyssey is part of the strategy, shared in advance with the critics, a para-text, following the text as a context for interpretation. But before him, Kafka and others, following a tradition that claims Cervantes' Don Quixote as a model, seemed no less challenged by the experience of designing their own language, ascertaining characters who transcend the conflict put in words, of using the power of para-text. Dos Passos, Laurence Sterne, and Hermann Hesse are examples from the same tradition. Gertrude Stein was a milestone in this development. In poetry, designing a language of one's own is strikingly evident, although more difficult to discuss in passing (as I know I am doing with some of the examples I give). Many poets-Burns comes easily to mind-invented their own language, with new words and new rules for using them. Others-and for some reason Vladimir Brodsky comes first to mind-wrote splendid para-texts (political articles, interviews, memoirs) that very effectively framed their poetry and put it in a perspective otherwise not so evident. The experience of artistic writing does not happen in a vacuum. It takes place in a broader frame. To realize and to understand that there is a connection between the cubist perspective, Joyce's writing, and the scientific language of relativity theory will probably not increase reading pleasure. It will change the perspective of interpretation, though. The connection between genetics, computational models, and post-modern architecture, fiction, and political discourse is even more relevant to our current concern for literature. Recurrences of interactions come in varieties, and each variety is a projection of the individual at a precise juncture of the human practical experience of self-constitution as a writer or reader. Language split, and continues to split, into languages and sub-languages. Rap frequently subjects the listener of its rhythmic stanzas to slang. Gramsci, the Sardinian leftist philosopher, suggested the need for a language of the proletariat. Pier Paolo Pasolini, an admirer of Gramsci and a very sophisticated artist, wrote some of his works in the Friaul dialect and in the argot used by the poor youngsters of the streets of Rome. His argument was aesthetic and moral: corrupted by commercial democracy, language loses its edge, and people living in such a deprived language environment undergo anthropological mutation. Art, in particular literature, can become a form of resistance. A new language, reconnected to the authentic being, becomes an instrument for new literacy experiences. Tolkien wrote poems in Elvish; Anthony Burgess made up a language by combining exotic languages (Gypsy, Malay, Cockney) and less exotic languages (English, Russian, French, Dutch). An entire magazine (Jatmey) publishes fiction and poetry written in Klingon. In a broader perspective, it is clear that in order to effectively create literary domains, people need instruments and media for new experiences. Meta-fiction is such an experience. It unites special types of illustrated novels, photographic fiction (which proliferates in South America and the Far East), and comic books. In Further Inquiry, Ken Kesey offers a documented journey in order to recapture the spirit of the sixties. Images (including some from Allen Ginsberg's collection) make the book almost a collective oeuvre. Using similar strategies, a text of meta-fiction first establishes the convention of the text as a distinct human construct made up of words, but which behave differently from informative, descriptive, or normative sentences that we use in interhuman communication. The strategy is to place the domain of the referent in the writings. The writer thus ensures that the potential reader will have no reason to look for references in empirical reality. This act of preempting the practice of reading, based on reflex associations in a different systematic domain, is not necessarily a warranty that such associations will not be made. There are many people who, either due to their cognitive condition, or to their relative illiteracy, take metaphors literally. However, the writer makes the effort to establish new kinds of recurrent, inter-textual, and self-referential relations that signal the convention pursued. When the act of writing becomes, overtly or subvertly, the object of the writing experience, writers, and possible readers with them, move from the object domain to the meta domain. The writer knows that in the space of fiction, as much as in the space of the empirical world, people write on paper, tables are used to set dinner on, flowers have a scent, subways don't fly. But artistic writing is not so much reporting about the state of the world as it is constituting a different world, along with a context for interactions in this world. The validity and coherence of such worlds stems from qualities different from those that result from applying correct grammar, formal structure of arguments, syntactic integrity, and other requirements specific to the practice of language within the convention of literacy. Writing as co-writing (painting as co-painting, composing as co-composing...) The post-modern practice of creative writing involves the intention of interaction in ways not experienced in the civilization of literacy. The written is no longer the monument that must not be altered or questioned, continued, or summarized. Reading, seen in part as the effort to extract the truth from the text, takes on the function of projecting truth in the context of text interpretation. Actually, the assumption of this practical experience of co-creation (literary, musical, or artistic) has to do with different languages in the practice of writing and reading (painting and viewing, composing and listening, etc.), and even of co-writing (co-painting, co-composing, etc.). Recent literary work in the medium of hypertext-a structure within which non- linear connections are possible-shows how far this assumption extends. A structure and core of characters are given. The reading involves the determination of events through determination of contexts. In turn, these affect the behavior of characters in the fictional world. This can unfold as a literary work conceived as a game, whose reading is actually the playing: The reader defines the attributes of the characters, inserts herself or himself in the plot, and the simulation starts. Neither the writer nor reader needs to know what programs stand behind the ongoing writing, and even less to understand how they work. The product is, in all of these cases, an infinite series of co- writing. The reader changes dialogues, time and space coordinates, names and characteristics of participants in the literary event. No two works are alike. Characteristics of self-ordering and self-informing-such as "X knows such and such about Y's peculiarities," or "Group Z is aware of its collective behavior and possible deviations from the expected"-allow for the constitution of an entirely artificial domain of fiction, with rules as interesting to discover as is the mystery behind a suicide, the complexities of a character's philosophy, or the existence of yet unknown universes. This extreme case of the literature of personal language-of languages as they are formed in the practice of creative co-writing-was anticipated in the various forms of fantastic literature. Voyages (anticipated in Homer's epics), explorations of future worlds, and science fiction have paved the way for the writing of meta-fiction. This probably explains how Jorge Luis Borges constituted a meta-language (of the quotes of quotes of quotes) for allegories whose object are fictions, not realities. There is no need to be literate to effectively appropriate this kind of writing, although at some level of reading the literate allusion awaits the literate reader (at least to tickle his or her fancy). To a certain extent, it is almost better not to have read Madame Bovary, with its melodramatic account, because the constitution of Borges' universe takes place at a different level of human practice, and in a context of disconnected forms of praxis. Co-writing also takes the form of using shared code as a strategy of literary expression. The many specialized languages of literary criticism and interpretation- such as comparative studies, phenomenological analysis, structuralism, semiotic interpretation, deconstructionism-as difficult and opaque to the average literate reader as scientific and philosophic languages, are duplicated in the specialized language of creative post-modern writing. Reading requires a great deal of preparation for some of those works, or at least the assumed shared understanding of the particular language. The writings of Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Barthe are not casual reading, for sheer enjoyment or excitement. Mastery of the language, moreover of the language code, as part of the practical experience it facilitates, does not come from studying English in high school or college, rather from decoding the narrative strategy and understanding that the purpose of this writing is knowledge about writing and reading. The epistemological made into a subject of fiction-how do we know what we know?-makes for very dense prose. This is why in this new stage, it is possible to have readers of a one and only book (I am not referring to the Bible or Koran), which becomes the language of that reader. Alice in Wonderland is such a book for quite a few; so is Ulysses; so are the two novels of William H. Gass. In the civilization of illiteracy, we experience the emergence of micro-readership attracted to non-standard writing. Efficiency considerations are such that the non-standard practical experience of writing is met by a non-standard experience of reading books, and other media (including CD-ROM) that address a small number of people. The effort to recycle (art or literature) is part of the same co-writing strategy. The co-writers are authors (recycled) and readers whose past readings (real or imaginary) are integrated in the new experience. Recycling (names, actions, narratives, etc.) corresponds to, among other things, the attempt to counteract the sequentiality of writing, even the literate expectation of originality. Taking a piece from a literary work and using it in its entirety means to almost transform the language sequence into a configuration. That piece resembles a painting hung in the middle of a page, or, to force the image, between the parts of a sonata. It entails its own history and interpretation, and triggers a mechanism of rejection not dissimilar to that triggered by organ transplants. The convention of reading is broken; the text is manipulated like an image and offered as a collage to the reader. The seams of different parts sewn together are not hidden; to the contrary, a spotlight is focused on them. Gertrude Stein best exemplifies the tendency, and probably how well it synchronized with similar developments in art (cubism foremost). W. H. Gass masterfully wrote about words standing for characters, object, and actions; he invented new worlds where the writer can define rules for their behavior. Concrete poetry, too, in many ways anticipated this type of writing, which comes from visual experiences and from the experiments in music triggered by the dodecaphonic composers. In concrete poetry, one can even discover the expression of jealousy between those interacting in the systematic domain of abstract phonetic languages, and those in the domain of ideograms. Japanese writers of concrete poetry seem equally eager to experience the sequential! The effort to recycle, interpret, visualize, to read and explain for the reader, and to compress (action, description, analysis) corresponds to the ever faster interactions of humans and to the shorter duration of such interactions. The reader is presented with pieces already known, or with easily understandable images that summarize the action or the characters. Why imagine, as writers always expected their readers to do, if one can see-this seems to be the temptation. The end of the great novel The ideal of the great novel was an ideal of a monument in literacy. Despite the technology for writing, such as word processing machines and the hypertext programs for interactive, collaborative authoring, writing the great novel is not only impossible, but irrelevant. Expectations associated with the great novel are expectations of unity, homogeneity, universality. Such a novel would address everyone, as the great novels of the civilization of literacy tended to do. The extreme segmentation of the world, its heterogeneity, the new rhythms of change and of human experiences, the continuous decline of the ideal embodied in literacy, education included, are arguments against the possibility of such a novel. An all-encompassing language, which the practical experience of writing such a novel implies, is simply no longer possible. We live in a civilization of partial languages, with their corresponding creative, non-standard writing experiences, in a disembodied domain of expression, communication, and signification. If, ad absurdum, various literary works could talk to each other (as their authors can and do), they would soon conclude that the shared background is so limited that, beyond the phrases of socializing and some political statements (more circumstantial than substantial), little else could be said. Furthermore, writing itself has changed. And since there is a consubstantiality among all elements involved in the experience, the change affects the self-constitution of the writer, and subsequently that of the reader. Technology takes care of spelling and even syntax; more recently it even prompts semantic choices. This use of technology in creative writing is far from being neutral. Different rhythms and patterns of association, as embodied in our practice with interface language-the language mediating between us and the machine-are projected volens-nolens into the realm of literature. Moreover, different kinds of reading, corresponding to the new kinds of human interaction, become possible. One can already have a novel delivered on tape, to be listened to while driving to work. The age of the electronic book brings other reading possibilities to the public. An animated host can introduce a short story; a hand- held scanner can pick up words the reader does not know and activate a synthetic voice to read their definitions from the on-line dictionary. And this is not all! Language used to be the medium for bridging between generations in the framework of homogeneous practical experiences. Edmund Carpenter correctly pointed out that for the civilization of literacy, the book-and what, if not the literary book, best embodies the notion of a book?-"became the organizing principle for all existence." Yes, the book seemed almost the projection of our own reality: beginning (we are all born), middle, and end (at which moment we become memory, the book itself being a form of memory), followed by new books. Carpenter went on to say, "Even as written manuscript, the book served as a model for both machine and bureaucracy. It encouraged a habit of thought that divided experience into specialized units and organized these serially and causally. Translated into gears and levers, the book became machine. Translated into people, it became army, chain of command, assembly line, etc." Handwriting, typing, dictation, and word-processing define a context for the practical experience of self-identification as novelist, poet, playwright, screenplay author, and scriptwriter. Interaction with word-processing programs produces a fluidity of writing that testifies to endless self-correction, and to rewriting driven by association. Word-processing is cognitively a different effort from writing with a pen or typewriter. And no one should be surprised that what is written with the new media cannot be the same as the works of Shakespeare, Balzac, and Tolstoi, entrusted by hand to paper. A distributed narrative effort of many people, via network interaction, is a practical experience above and beyond anything we could have had in the framework of literacy. The first comic strip in America (1896) announced the age of complementary expression (text and drawing). Nobody really understood how far the genre would go, or how many literacy-based conventions would be undone in the process. Comic-strip characters occupied a large part of the memory of those who grew up with the names of characters from books. The influence of new media (film, in particular) on the narrative of the strip opened avenues of experiments in writing. When classics of literature (even the Bible) were presented in comic-strip form, and when comic strips were united under the cover of books, the book itself changed. Structural characteristics of the strip (fast, dense, focused, short, expressive) correspond to those of the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy. Does the civilization of illiteracy herald the end of the book? As far as the practice of creative writing goes, it might as well, since writing does not necessarily have to take a book format. Narrative, as we know from oral tradition, can take forms other than the book. My opinion in regard to books should not be understood as prophecy. Pointing to alternatives (such as digital books, electronic publications distributed on networks and stored on disks), some perhaps not thought through as yet, keeps the influence of our own framework of reference at a distance. A video format, as poor and unsatisfying a substitute as it might seem to someone raised with the book, is a candidate everyone can name. After all, the majority of the books studied a generation ago are known to the students of this time mainly through television and movie adaptations. The majority of today's children's books are released together with their video simuli. Computer-supported artifacts, endowed or not with literary intelligence, are another candidate for replacing the book. What we know is that paper can be handled only so much and preserved only so long (even if it is non-acid paper). Furthermore, it becomes more and more an issue of efficiency whether we can afford transforming our forests into books, which humankind, faced with many challenges, may no longer be able to afford, or which are so disconnected from current pragmatics that they have lost their relevance. Today, while still entirely devoted to the ideal of literacy, societies subsidize literary practical experiences which are only peripherally relevant to human experience. A large number of grants go to writers who will probably never be read; many more to contests (themselves anchored in the obsession with hierarchy peculiar to literacy) open to students lost in the labyrinth of an illusion; and even more to schools and seminars of marginal or very narrow interest, or to publications that barely justify the effort and expense of their endeavor. From the perspective of the beneficiaries, awarding such grants is the right thing to do. In the long run, this altruism will not save more of the literacy-based literature than highly specialized contemporary society perceives as necessary in respect to efficiency requirements facing the world at the current scale. In labor division, the literate writer and reader constitute their systematic domain of interaction. The book will no doubt remain in some form or another (words on paper or dots on an electronic page of a portable reading device) as long as people derive pleasure or profit from the printed word. But as opposed to the past, this is only one among many literary and non-literary domains of interaction. It is, for example, very difficult to say whether the artists of the graffiti movement were writers, using an alphabet reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs, or painters with words, or both. Keith Haring, their best known representative, covered every available square inch-horror vacui-with expressions that constituted a new systematic domain of interaction among people, as well as a new space for his own self-constitution as a different type of artist. Instead of decrying the end of an ideal, we should celebrate the victory of diversity. Those who really feel that their destiny relies on the ideal of literature might choose to give up some of their expectations, stimulated by the literate model, in order to preserve the structure within which literacy is possible and necessary. The demand for more at the lowest price that heralds the multi-headed creature called the civilization of illiteracy affects more than the production of clothes and dishes, or of cars and an insatiable appetite for travel. It affects our ways of writing, reading, painting, singing, dancing, composing, interpreting, and acting-our entire aesthetic experience. Libraries, Books, Readers Carlyle believed that "The true university is a collection of books." If books truly represent the spirit and letter of the civilization of literacy, a description of their current condition can be instructive. Obviously, one has to accept the possibility that the civilization of literacy will continue in some form, or in more than one, that will extend the experience of the book, as we know it today through its physical form. Or the civilization of literacy may continue in a totally new form that responds to the human desire for efficiency. Addressing the International Publishers Association Congress in June, 1988, George Steiner tried to identify the "interlocking factors" that led to the establishment of book culture. The technology of printing, paper production, and advances in typography that are associated with the "private ownership of space, of silence, and of books themselves" are among factors affecting the process. Another important factor is book aesthetics, the underlying formal quality of a medium that had to compete with vivid images, with powerful traditions of orality, and with patterns of behavior established within practical experiences different from those of book culture. Near the end of the 15th century, Aldus Manutius understood that the new technology of printing could be, and should be, more than the mere continuation of the tradition of manuscripts. The artifact of the book, close to what we know today, is mainly his contribution to the civilization of literacy. Manutius applied aesthetic and functional criteria that led to the smaller-sized books we are familiar with. He worked with covers; the hard cover in thicker cardboard replaced the covers of pinewood used to protect manuscripts and early printed texts. The understanding of aesthetics and of the experience of reading led him to define better layouts and a new typography. His concern with portability (a quality obsessing contemporary computer designers), with readability (of no less interest to computer display experts), and with a balanced visual appearance make him the real saint of the order of the book. The book also entails conventions of intellectual ownership. In their effort to stop the dissemination of heretical books through print, Philip and Mary, in 1557, limited the right of printing to the members of the Stationers' Company. In 1585, copyright for members was introduced; and in 1709, copyright for authors. From that time on, the book expanded the notion of property, different from the notion of ownership of land, animals, and buildings, especially in view of the desire, implicit in literacy, to literally spread the word. Now that desktop capabilities and technologies that facilitate print on demand affordably reproduce print, old notions of property and ownership need to be redefined. Our understanding of books and the people who read them, too, needs to be redefined as well. Today, books can be stored on media other than sheets of paper, on which words are printed and which are bound between hard or soft covers. One hundred optical disks can store the entire contents of the Library of Congress. This means, among other things, that works of incredible significance cost five cents per book printed digitally. Another result is that the notion of intellectual ownership becomes fuzzy. Actually, the word book is not the proper one to use in the case of digital storage. The new pragmatics makes it crisply clear that the book is merely a medium for the storage and transmission of data, knowledge, and wisdom, as well as a lot of stupidity and vulgarity. For people who prefer the book format, high-performance printing presses are able to efficiently provide runs for very precisely defined segments of the population just waiting for the Great American Novel that is custom written and produced for one reader at a time. "Personalized Story Books Starring Your Child," screams an advertisement. It promises "Hard cover, full color illustration, exciting stories with positive image building storylines." All that must be provided is the child's name, age, city of residence, and the names of three friends or relatives. The rest is permutation (and an order form). Grandma did a better job with her photo and keepsake album, but the framework of mediation replaced her long ago. Paper is available in all imaginable quantities and qualities; the technologies of typesetting, layout, image reproduction, and binding are all in place. Nowadays, there is enough private space. The wash of noise is not a serious obstacle to people who want to read, even if they do not wear noise cancellation headphones. And never were books published at more affordable prices than today. Some books reside on the shelves of the Internet or are integrated in broader hyper- books on the World Wide Web. A word from one book-let's say a new concept built upon earlier language experiences-connects the interested reader to other books and articles, as well as to voices that read texts, to songs, and to images. The book is no longer a self-sufficient entity, but a medium for possible interaction. At the threshold of the civilization of illiteracy, how many books are printed? In which medium? How many are sold? Are they read? How? By whom? These are only some of the questions to be posed when approaching the subject of books. Even more important is the "Why?"-in particular, "Why read books?"-the real test of the book's legitimacy, and ergo, the legitimacy of the civilization which the book emblemizes. The broader issue is actually reading and writing, or to be more precise, the means through which an author can address many readers. The fine balance of factors involved in the publishing and success of a book is extremely difficult to describe. The general trend in publishing can be described as more and more titles in smaller and smaller editions. Ideally, a good manuscript (of a novel, book of poetry, plays, essays, scientific or philosophic writings) should become a successful book, i.e., one that sells. In the reality of the book business, many mediating elements determine the destiny of a manuscript. Most of these elements are totally unrelated to the quality of writing or to the satisfaction of reading. They reflect market processes of valuation. These elements are symptomatic of the book's condition in the civilization that moves towards the pragmatics of many competing literacies, almost all contradicting the intrinsic characteristics of literacy embodied in the book. The life of books is shorter (despite their being printed on acid-free paper). Books have a decreasing degree of universality; more books address limited groups of readers as opposed to a large general market, not to mention the whole of humankind, as was once the book's purpose. Books use specialized languages, depending on their topics. The distinct ways these languages convey contents frequently contradict the culturally acknowledged condition of the book, and are a cause of concern to people who are the products of (or adherents to) a civilization based on books. More and more books end up as collections of images with minimal commentary. Some are already delivered together with a tape cassette or compact disk, to be heard rather than read, to be seen rather than to engage the reader's mind. Road Reading is a billboard trademark for recorded books. Narrated by voices appropriate to the subject (a southern drawl for a story like To Kill a Mockingbird; a cultivated voice for Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities), the books compete with red lights, landscapes, and other signs along the road. Many books written in our day contain vulgar language and elevate slang to the qualitative standard of fiction. There are books that promise the excitement of a game (find the object or the criminal). A reward, effectively replacing the satisfaction of reading, will be handed to the lucky finder. The subject of reading has also changed since the time the Bible and other religious texts, dramas and poetry, philosophic and scientific writings were entrusted to the printing press. Melodramatic fiction, at least 200 years old, paved the way for pulp fiction and today's surefire bestsellers based on gossip and escapism. Our goal is to understand the nature of change in the book's condition, why this change is a cause for concern, as well as our own relation to books. To do this, we should examine the transition that defines the identity and role of the writer and reader in the new pragmatic context. Why don't people read books? "Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" Clarisse McClellan asks in Fahrenheit 451. (This book is also available in video format and as a computer game.) Guy Montag, the fireman, answers, "That is against the law." This conversation defines a context: The group that still reads is able to pass the benefits of their experience to people who are not allowed to read books. In our days, no fireman is paid to set books ablaze. To the contrary, many people are employed to save deteriorating books printed in the past. But the question of whether people read any of the books they buy or receive, or even save from destruction, cannot be dismissed. The majority of the books changing hands and actually read are reference publications. The home contains an increasing number of radios, television sets, CD players, electronic games, video cassette recorders, and computers. The shelf space for books is being taken up by other media. Instead of the personal library, people consecrate space in their homes for media centers that consume a great deal of their free time. Instead of the permanence of the printed text, they prefer the variability of continually changing programs, of scanning and sampling, and of surfing the Internet. The digital highway supplies an enormous amount of reference material. This material is, moreover, kept up to date, something that is not so easy to accomplish with bound sets of encyclopedias or even with the telephone book. Books are not burned, but neither are they read with much commitment. Scanning through a story or reading the summary on the flip jacket, filling one's time during a commute or at the airport is all that happens in most cases. A variety of books are written for such purposes. Required reading for classes, according to teachers, cannot exceed the attention span of their pupils. Growing up under the formative influence of short cycles and the expectation of quick conclusions to their acts, youngsters oppose any reading that is not to the point (as they see it). In most cases, outlines provide whatever knowledge (information is probably a better word) is needed for a class or for a final examination. The real filter of reading is the multiple choice grid, not the satisfaction of immersion in a world brought to life by words. All this is almost the end of the story, not the substance of its arguments. The arguments are manifold and all related to characteristics of literacy. In the first place, publishers simply discard the traditional reverence for books. They realize that a book placed somewhere on the pedestal of adulation, extended from the religious Book to books in general, keeps readers away or makes them captive to interpretive prejudices. How can one be involved in the practice of democracy without extending it to books, thus giving Cervantes and Whitman a place equal to that of the cheap, mass- produced pulp literature and even the videotape? The experience of the book reveals a double-edged sword, deriving mainly from the perception that the book, as a vessel, sanctifies whatever it carries. Hitler's Mein Kampf was such a book in Nazi Germany, and still is for Nazi revivalists. In the former communist countries, the books of Marx and Engels were sanctified, printed without end (after careful editing), and forced upon readers of all age groups, especially the young. Nobody could argue against even trivial factual errors that slipped into their writings, into translations, or into selective editions. Mao's little Red Book was distributed free to everyone in China. In our day, Hitler and other authors of the same bent are published. These very few examples follow a long line of books dealing in indoctrination (religious, ideological, economic), misrepresentation, and bigotry. As insidious attempts to seduce for disreputable, if not frankly criminal causes, they have inflicted damage on humanistic expectations and on the practice of human-based values. Champions of literacy point to the classics of history and enlightenment and to the great writers of poetry, fiction, and drama as the authentic heritage of the book. How much space do they occupy on the shelves of bookstores, libraries, and homes? In good faith and without exaggerating, one can easily conclude that from all the books stored in homes and places of public access, the majority should probably have never been written, never mind printed or read. If these books and periodicals were only repetitive of what had been said and thought previously, they would not deserve such strong condemnation. The judgment expressed above refers to words and thoughts whose shallowness and deceit are consecrated through the associations that the printed word entails. Hard facts about books in the new pragmatic context confirm that people, either due to illiteracy or a-literacy, read less and use books less and less for their practical experiences. Titles make it onto the bestseller lists only because they are sold, not read. Intrinsic qualities-of writing, aesthetics, the ideas set forth-are rarely taken into consideration, unless they confirm the prejudices of their consumers. Books often make it onto the bookshelf as a status symbol. In the early eighties, everyone in Italy, Germany, and the USA wanted to display The Name of the Rose. Or they become a subject of conversation-"It will be made into a movie." But even such books remain unread to the last page 70% of the time. Today, by virtue of faster writing and printing, books compete with the newspaper in capturing the sensational. The unholy alliance between the film industry, television, and publishing houses is very adept at squeezing the last possible drop of sleaze from an event of public interest in order to catch one more viewer or purchaser of cheaply manufactured books. Because of a combination of many factors-long production cycles, high cost of publishing and marketing, low transparency, rapid acquisition of knowledge that makes high quality books obsolete in one or two years, to name a few factors-the book has ceased to be the major instrument for the dissemination of knowledge related to practical experiences. First among the factors affecting the book's role is that the rhythm of renewal and conversion requires a medium that can keep pace with change. Prior to the breakdown of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Block, the majority of books on politics, sociology, economics, and culture pertinent to that part of the world became useless from one day to the next as events and whims rendered their content meaningless. Once the Eastern Block started to unravel, even periodicals could not keep pace with events. All around the world, strikes, various forms of social activism, political debates, successive reorganizations, new borders, and new leaders contradicted the image of stability settled in the books of scholars and even in the evaluations issued by intelligence agencies. Not only politics required rewriting. Books on physics, chemistry, mathematics, computing, genetics, and mind and brain theory have to be rewritten as new discoveries and technologies render obsolete facts associated with past observations published as eternal truth. In some cases, the books were rewritten on tape, as visual presentations impossible to fit in sentences or between book covers, or on CD-ROM. More recently, books are being rewritten as Internet publications or full-fledged Web sites that can easily be kept current. Photocopies of selected pages and articles already substitute for the book on the desks of students, professors, scholars, and researchers. College students, who are obliged to buy books, don't like to invest in items that they know will be outdated and useless within a year. The book will appear in a new edition, either because the information has been updated or because the publisher wants to make more money. Students prefer the videotape, so much closer to tele-viewing, an experience that ultimately forms cognitive characteristics different from those of reading and writing. Or they prefer to find material on-line, again a cognitive experience of a dynamic condition incompatible with the book. The complexity of human practical experiences is as important as the dynamics. The pragmatic framework that made literacy and the book necessary was relatively homogeneous. Heterogeneity entails a state of affairs for which books can only serve after the experience, as a repository medium. Even in this documentary or historic function, books capture less than what other media, better adapted to sign processes irreducible to literacy, could. For the experience as such, books become irrelevant, whether we like it or not. The facts relating to the consequences of the increased complexity of current pragmatics have yet to be realized, much less recorded. What is available is the accumulated human experience with alternate media, not necessarily cheaper than books, but certainly better adapted to instances of parallelism and distributed activities. Books do justice to simultaneous temporal phenomena only at the expense of capturing their essence. The nature of human praxis is so radically disconnected from the nature of literacy embodied in the book that one can no longer rely on it without affecting the outcome. Practical experiences in which time is of the essence, and activities that require synchronization or are based on a configurational paradigm are different in nature from writing and reading. To open a book, to look for the appropriate page, and to read and understand the information slows down (or stops) the process. The sequential nature of literacy misses the requirement of synchronism and might not even lead to solutions to questions related to non-sequential connections. In addition to these major factors, there is the broader background: Access to knowledge conveyed through literacy implies a shared literate experience. Shared experience, especially in open, dynamic societies, can no longer be assumed as a given. There are cultural as well as physical differences to be accounted for among all the human beings in the developed world. There are the visually impaired and physically handicapped who cannot use books. There are people with conditions that do not allow for the deciphering of printed letters and words. These individuals must rely on devices that read for them, on senses other than sight, and on a good memory. The decreased interest in books is indicative of a fundamentally different human practical experience of self-constitution. In line with the shift from manufacturing to service, books perform mainly functions of incidental information (when not replaced by a database), amusement, and filling time. Even if the great novel, or great epic poem, or great drama were written, it would go unnoticed in the loud concert of competing messages. It might be that literature today is passionless, or it might be that the seduction of commercial success brings everything to the common denominator of return on an investment, regardless of cultural reward. Books written to please, books published to satisfy vanity, and books of impenetrable obscurity did not exactly trigger reader interest. All in all, good and bad considered, the general evolution does not testify to less literary talent. The issue of quality is open to controversy, as it always has been. Many books reflect a level of literacy that is not exactly encouraging. Still, literature does not fail on its merits (or lack thereof). It fails, rather, on the context of its perception. Like anything else in the civilization of illiteracy, the multiplication of choices resulted in the annihilation of a sense of value and of effective criteria for differentiation within the continuum of writing. The overall development towards the civilization of illiteracy suggests that the age of the book is being followed by an age of alternative media. The promoters of literacy are doing their best to resist this change. Their motto is "Read anything, as long as you read." They effectively discount any and all other means of acquiring knowledge, and totally disenfranchise individuals who cannot read. There are many avenues to self-constitution: all our senses-including common sense-repetition and memory. Some of these avenues are more efficient than the medium of the book. If they were not, they would not be succeeding as they do. The champions of literacy also imply that anything acquired through reading is good. The harm that can be transmitted through the book medium can be recorded in volumes. On the collective level, it has led to persecution and violence, even mass destruction. On the individual level, it can lead to imbalance. The child who is forced to read at age three is being deprived of time for developing other skills essential to his or her physical and mental well-being. The cognitive repertory of these children is being stunted by well meaning but misguided parents. It is being stunted, too, by the market that sells literacy as though there were no tomorrow despite the fact that literacy has lost its dominant position in our lives. Topos uranikos distributed This book began by contrasting the readers of the past to today's typical literate: Zizi the hairdresser and her boyfriend, the taxi driver with the college degree in political science. The underlying structure of human practical experiences through which average persons like Zizi and Bruno G., as well as the Nobel prize winner in genetics, artists, sportsmen and sportswomen, writers, TV producers, and computer hackers (and many other professionals), constitute themselves is characterized by a new type of relations among parts. These relations are in flux. Whereas many functions associated with human experiences can be rationalized, levels of efficiency beyond individual capabilities can be achieved. Thus, one of the main goals is to harmonize the relation between human experience and the functioning of devices emulating human activities. This raises the issue of the altered human condition. In this context, the relevance of knowledge has changed to the extent that, in order to function in a world of arbitrary bureaucratic rules designed to blindly implement a democracy of mediocrity, one has to know the trivia of prices in the supermarket. Someone has to know how to access them when they are stored in a memory device, and how to charge the bill to a credit card number. But no one has to know the history of cultural values. It actually helps to ignore value altogether. The roots of almost everything involved in current practical experiences are no longer effectively anchored in tradition, but in the memory of facts and actions extracted from tradition. At a time when books are merely an interior designer's concept of decoration, beautifully crafted editions fill the necessary bookcase. Humanity has reached a new stage: We are less grounded in nature and tradition. This condition takes some of the wind out of the sails of memetics. Practical experiences of human self-constitution extended the human phenotype beyond that of any other known species. But this extension is not the sum total of genetic and cultural evolution. It is of a different quality that neither genetic nor memetic replication suggests, let alone explains. Our obsession is to surpass the limitations of the past, cultural as well as natural. That makes us like the many things we generated in the attempt to reach levels of efficiency which neither nature nor tradition can support. The hydroponic tomato, the genetically engineered low-fat egg, the digital book, and the human being of the civilization of illiteracy have more in common than one thinks at the mere mention of this opinion. The life of books, good or bad, useful or destructive, entertaining or boring, is the life of those who read them. Free to constitute ourselves in a framework of human experiences opened to much more than books, we have the chance of exploring new territories of human expression and communication, and of achieving levels of significance. Individual performance in the civilization of literacy could not reach such levels. But this formulation is suspect of cheap rhetoric. It begs the question "Why don't we?" (accomplish all these potentialities). We are so many, we are so talented, we are so well informed. The civilization of illiteracy is not a promised land. Interactive education centers, distributed tasks, cooperative efforts, and cultivation and use of all senses do not just happen. Understanding new necessities, in particular the relation between the new scale of humankind and the levels of efficiency to be reached in order to effectively address higher expectations of well being, does not come through divine inspiration, high-tech proselytizing, or political speeches. It results from the experience of self-constitution itself, in the sense that each experience becomes a locus of interactions, which transcends the individual. The realization of potential is probably less direct than the realization of dangers and risks. We are still singing the sirens' song instead of articulating goals appropriate to our new condition. One area in which goals have been articulated and are being pursued is the transfer of the contents of books from various libraries to new media allowing for storage of information, more access to it, and creative interaction. The library, perceived as a form of trans-human memory, a space of topos uranikos filled with eternal information, was the collection of ideas and forms that one referred to when in need of guidance. Robert de Sorbon gave his books to the University of Paris almost 750 years ago. Little did he know what this gesture would mean to the few scholars who had access to this collection. By 1302 (only 25 years after his donation), one of the readers would jot down the observation that he would need ten years to read the just under 1,000 books in the library. One hundred years later, Pembroke College of Cambridge University and Merton College of Oxford obtained their libraries. The Charles University in Prague, the universities in Krakow (Poland), Coimbra (Portugal), Salamanca (Spain), Heidelberg and Cologne (the future Germany), Basle (Switzerland), and Copenhagen (Denmark) followed suit. Libraries grew into national cultural monuments. Museums grew within them and then became entities in their own right. Today, billions of books are housed in libraries all over the world. Books are in our homes, in town and city libraries, in research institutions, in religious centers, in national and international organizations. Under the guise of literacy, we are happy to be able to access, regardless of the conditions (as borrowers or subscribers), this enormous wealth of knowledge. The library represented the permanent central storehouse of knowledge. But the pragmatic framework of human self-constitution moved beyond the characteristics embodied by both library and book. Therefore, a new library, representative of many literacies-visual, aural, and tactile, relying on multimedia, and models and simulations-and able to cope with fast change had to come about. This library, to which we shall return, now resides in a distributed world, accessible from many directions and in many ways, continuously open, and freed from the anxiety that books might catch fire or turn into dust. True, the image of the world limited almost exclusively to reference books does not speak in favor of the enormous investment in time, money, and talent for taking the new routes opened by non-linear means of access to information, rich sensorial content, and interactivity. Still, in many ways Noah Webster's experience in publishing his dictionary-a reference for America as the Larousse is for France and the Duden for Germany-can be retraced in the multimedia encyclopedias of our day, moreover in the emergence of the virtual library. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote his prophetic article in the Atlantic Monthly. He announced, "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them." He went on to illustrate how the lawyer will have "at his touch the associated opinions and decision of his whole experience." The patent attorney could call "the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest." The physician, the chemist, the historian will use Bush's modestly named Memex to retrieve information. The conclusion, in a well subdued tone, was "Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shoddy past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems." Written immediately after World War II, Bush's article was concerned with applying the benefits of scientific research for warfare in the new context of peace. What he suggested as a rather independent application is now the reality of on-line communities of people working on related topics or complementing each other's work. The benefits of electronic mail, of shared files, of shared computing power are not what interest us here. Ted Nelson, whose name is connected to Project Xanadu, acknowledged the benefits deriving from Bush's vision, but he is mainly concerned with the power of linking. Nelson learned from literacy that one can link text to a footnote (the jump-link), to a quote (the quote-link), and to a marginal note (the correlink, as he calls it). He designed his project as a distributed library of ever new texts and images open to everyone, a medium for authoring thoughts, for linking to others, for altering texts and images. Multiplicity of interpretations, open to everyone else, ensures efficiency at the global level, and integrity at the individual level. He called his concept a thinker-toy, an environment that supports dedicated work without taking away the fun. Generalized beyond his initial scheme, the medium allows people to make notes, by either writing them, dictating them, or drawing diagrams. Text can be heard, images animated. Visualization increases expressivity. Participation of many readers enlarges the library while simultaneously allowing others to see only what they want to see. Privacy can be maintained according to one's wishes; interaction is under the control of each individual. In this generalized medium, videotapes, films, images from museums, and live performances are brought together. The rule is simple: "Accessibility and free linking make a two-sided coin." In translation: If someone wants or needs to connect to something, i.e., to use a resource created by someone else, the connection becomes available to all those to whom it might be relevant. Relinquishing the right to control links, established in the first place because one needed them, is part of the Xanadu agreement. It is part of the living library, without walls and bookshelves, called the World Wide Web. Roads paved with good intentions are notorious for leading where we don't want to wind up. For everyone who has searched for knowledge in the Web's virtual library, it becomes clear very soon that no known search engine and no intelligent agent can effectively distinguish between the trivial and the meaningful. We have co-evolved with the results of our practical experiences. Selection neither increases the chances of the fittest, nor eliminates the biologically unfit. Cultural artifacts, books included, or for that matter, the zeroes and ones that are the making of digital texts of all kinds and all contents, illustrate the thesis no less than the increasing number of people kept alive who, under Darwin's law, would have died. These individuals are able to constitute their practical experiences through means, among which books and libraries do not present themselves as alternatives. Global networks are not a habitat for the human mind, but they are an effective medium for mind interactions of individuals who are physically far from being equal. Custom access to knowledge available in the virtual library is the main characteristic, more so than the wealth of data types and retrieval procedures. The question posed at the beginning of this section, "Why don't we?" referring to the creative use of new means, finds one answer here. As more and more people, within their realms of needs and interests, become linked to what is pertinent to their existence and experience, they also enter an agreement of exchange that makes their linking part of the distributed space of human memory and creativity. The naked need to enter the agreement is part of the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy. Reading and enjoying a book implied an eventual return of money to the publisher and the writer. It might also have affected the reader in ways difficult to evaluate: Some people believe that good books make better people. Distributed environments of knowledge, expression, and information change the relation. From the world of orality-"Tell me and I will forget"-to that of literacy-"Let me read, but I might not remember"-a cognitive change, still evident today, took place. The next-"Involve me and I will understand"-began. The line of thought continues: Involvement returns value to others. The Sense of Design To design means to literally involve oneself in a practical experience with signs. To design means to express, in various signs, thoughts, feelings, and intentions pertinent to human communication, as well as to project oneself in artifacts appropriate to human practical experiences. In the remote age of direct practical experiences, there was no design. The practice of signs entails the possibility to transcend the present. In nature, future means insemination; in culture, future is in-signation: putting into sign, i.e., design. In its broadest definition, design is the self-constitution of the human being as an agent of change. This change covers the environment, conceiving artifacts (tools included), shelter, clothing, rituals, religious ceremonies, events, messages, interpretive contexts, interactions, and more recently, new materials and virtual realities. Shakespeare, who would have enjoyed the intense fervor of our age, gave a beautiful description of design: "...imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown" (Midsummer Night's Dream). Although design contains elements ensuing from experiences involving language, design is essentially a non-verbal human activity. Its means of expression and communication are grounded in the visual, but extend to sound, texture, odor, taste, and combinations of these (synaesthesia), including rhythm, color, and movement. To the human being involved in practical experiences of self-constitution, the realm of nature appears as given. In counter-distinction and in retrospect, human nature appears as designed. In some cases, design is an act of selection: something is picked up from the environment-a stick, stone, plant-and assigned an a-natural function through implementation: mark territory, aid an activity, support a structure or the human body, trap animals or humans, attack or defend against attack, color skin or clothing. In other cases, selection is followed by some form of framing, such as the frame of the ritual around a totem pole, animal sacrifice, mourning, and celebrations of fecundity and victory. Selection and framing are related to efficiency expectations. They embody the hope for help from magic forces and express willingness to pursue goals that support the individual, family, and community. Between the present of any experience and the future, the experience of design bridges in the form of new patterns of interaction (through tools, artifacts, messages), recurrences, and extensions of consequences of human activity from the immediate to the future. The projection of biology into an experience of long-lasting consequences implies elements of planning, no matter how rudimentary, and expectations of outcome. It also leads to new human relations in family-based interactions, education, shared values, and patterns of reciprocal responsibility. Random sexual encounters that reflect natural drives are not designs. Awareness of reciprocal attraction, shared feelings, and commitments extending well beyond the physical encounter can be identified as a design component present even in sexuality. Between the design component of sexual consequence of the evolving human being and the design of offspring by selection of a partner, by selection of genetic traits catalogued in semen banks, by genetic splicing and mutation, and by all that is yet to come upon us, there is a difference that reflects the altered human pragmatic condition. Of real interest here is how the future is captured in design. Moreover, we want to know how it unfolds in practical experiences of design by which human beings extend their reality from here and now to then and there. In ways different from language, design gives the human being another experience of time and space. This experience is for the most part coherent with that of language. But it can also make individuals constituting themselves through design work aware of aspects of time that the language experience misses altogether or makes impossible. Designs are expressed in drawings and eventually complemented by models testifying to the experiences of volume, texture, and motion. The anticipated time dimension is eventually added in simulations. Design liberates the human being from total conditioning through language. Within the convention of design, signs are endowed with a life of their own, supported by the energy of the persons entering the convention. This is how human symbolism, of confirmed vitality and efficiency, is factually established. Symbols integrated in human experience are given the life of the experience. The entire heritage of rituals testifies to this. Today the word ritual is used indiscriminately for any habitual preparation, from bathing to watching TV to after-game celebrations. Initially, rituals appeared as dynamic designs centered around episodes of life and death. Their motivation lay in the practical experience; their unfolding in connected interactions acquired an aesthetic quality from the underlying design. From the earliest known experiences, the implicit aesthetic component is the optimizing element of the experience. This aesthetic component extends perceived formal qualities found in nature to the aesthetics of objects and activities in the realm of human nature. The language of design expresses awareness of these formal characteristics. Practical experiences display a repetitive pattern: the optimal choice (of shapes, colors, rhythms, sounds, movement) is always pleasing. The quality through which pleasure is experienced is not reducible to the elements involved, but it is impossible without them. Selection is motivated by practical expectations, but guided by formal criteria. Individuals involved in the earliest pragmatic framework were aware of this. Other formal criteria make up a generic background. One of the recurrent patterns of the practical experience of design is to appropriate the formal quality associated with what is pleasing in nature and to integrate it in the optimal shaping of the future. This is how the aesthetic dimension of human practical experiences resulted within such experiences. Notation systems (e.g., the quipu, representational drawings on stone or on the ground, or hieroglyphics) that eventually became writing can be classified as design, not lastly in view of their aesthetic coherence. Only when rules and expectations defined by verbal language take over notation does writing separate from design and become part of the broader experience of language. We can now understand why changes in verbal language, as it constituted a framework for time and spatial experiences, were not necessarily reflected in changes in design. By the time literacy became possible, the underlying structure that led to it was embodied in the use of language. This is not true, to the same extent, in the practice of design. It is at this juncture that design is ascertained as a profession, i.e., as a practical domain with its own dynamics and goals. By no coincidence, engineering design emerged in the context of the pragmatics that began with building pyramids, ziggurats, and temples, and culminated in the Industrial Revolution in the design of machines. The broad premise of the Industrial Age is that everything is a machine: the house, the carriage, stoves, the contraptions used in literate education, schools, colleges, institutions, art studios, even nature. From a relatively focused and homogeneous field of practical experiences within industrial society, design evolved, in the civilization of illiteracy, as an overriding concern that extended to many specialized applications: tool design, building and interior design (architecture), jewelry design, apparel design, textile design, product design, graphic design, and to the many fields of engineering (including computer-aided design), interactive media and virtual reality, as well as genetic engineering, new materials design, event design (applied to politics and various commodities), networking, and education. Technologies, from primitive to sophisticated, supporting visual languages made possible complexities for which the intuitive use of visual expression is not the most effective. Consequently, the scope of design-oriented practical experiences changed. Design now affords more integrative projects of higher levels of synaesthesia, as well as experiences involving variable designs-that is, designs that grow together with the human being self-constituted in practical interactions with the designed world. In the pragmatic framework based on the digital, design replaced literacy more than any other practical experience has. The results of design are different in nature from those of literacy. As optimistic as one can become about a future not bound to the constraints of literacy, it takes more to comprehend the sense of design at a time when evolutionary progress is paralleled by revolutionary change. Drawing the future Drawing starts with seeing and leads to a way of envisioning and understanding the world different from the understanding filtered through language. From a cognitive viewpoint, drawing implies that persons constituting their identity in the act of drawing know the inside and the outside of what they render. To draw requires that things grow from their inside and take shape as active entities. Visible and invisible parts interact in drawing, surface and volume intersect, voids and fills extend in the visual expression, dynamically complementing each other. Each line of a drawing makes sense only in relation to the others. In contrast to words and sentences, elements of a drawing conjure understanding only through the drawing. Visual representation, as opposed to language expression, attains coherence as a whole, and the whole is configurational. One can write the word table without ever experiencing the object denominated. Extracted from direct or mediated experiences, knowledge about the object and its functions is a prerequisite for drawing an old table or conceiving a new one. To design means to express in a language that involves rendering. It also involves understanding that practical expectations are connected to the projected object. Consequently, to design means to experience the table in advance of its physical embodiment. Thus designing is the virtual practical experience, at the borderline between what is and what new experiences of self-constitution require. In designing, people virtually project their own biological and cultural characteristics in whatever they conceive. This corresponds to the reality that design is derived from practical experiences, extending what is possible to what is desirable. Functionality expresses this condition, though only partially. With the emergence of conditions embodied in the underlying structure reflected in literacy, image and literate renditions-statements of goal and purpose, descriptions of means, procedures for evaluation-met. Literacy then effected changes in the condition of design. These are reflected as general expectations of permanence, universality, dualism, centralism, and hierarchy. International style-an expression that really covers more than the name of a style-reflects these literate expectations from design. Is drawing natural? The meaning of such a question can be conjured only if articulated with its pendant: Is literacy unnatural or artificial? Everything already stated about drawing implies that it is not natural, though it is closer to what it represents than words are. Except for metaphoric qualifications, there is no such thing as drawing an abstraction of drawing, although there is abstract drawing. Through drawing, persons constitute themselves as having the ability to see, to understand (for instance, the invisible part of objects, how light affects an image, how color or texture makes an object seem lighter or rounder), to relate to the pragmatic context as definitory of the meaning of both the object-real or imagined-and the drawing. Different contexts make different ways of drawing possible. Disconnected from the context, drawing is almost like the babble of a child, or like a fragmented, unfinished expression. Vitruvius had a culture of drawing very different from that of the many architects who followed him. Critics who compared him to Le Corbusier and his architectural renditions, to the architects of post-structuralism, and to the deconstructivists and deconstructivist designers declared the drawings of these architects to be ugly, bad, or inappropriate (Tom Wolfe went on record with this). At this instance, drawing ceases to be an adjunct to art; it petitions its own legitimacy. If we ignore the pragmatic context and the major transition from a design initially influenced by language-Vitruvius wrote a monumental work on architecture-the statement stands. But what we face here is a process in time: from design influenced by the pragmatics embodied in Vitruvius' work, to design subordinated to literacy, and finally to design struggling for emancipation as a new language, in which the critical component is as present as the constructive impulse to change the world. Design carries over many formal requirements from practical experiences subordinated to literacy. But there is also an underlying conflict between design and language, moreover between design and literacy. This conflict was never resolved inside the experience of designing. In society, literacy imposed its formative structure on education, and what resulted was design education with a strong liberal arts component. Needless to say, designers, whether professionals in the field or students (designers-to-be), resented and resent the assumption that their trade needs to be elevated to the pedestal of the eternal values embodied in literacy. Instead of being stimulated to discover the need for literacy-based values in concrete contexts, design and design education are subjected to the traditional smorgasbord of history, language, philosophy, a little science, and many free choices. Its own theoretic level, or at least the quest for a theory, is discarded as frivolous. Moreover, the elements grouped under intuition are systematically explained away, instead of being stimulated. Whereas the context of education allows for the artificial maintenance of literacy- based training programs in design, the broader context of pragmatic experiences confirms the dynamic changes design brought about since the profession ascertained its identity. The conflict between training and engaging prompted efforts to free design from constraints that affect its very nature: How do we get rid of the mechanical components of design (paste-up, rendering, model making)? These efforts came from outside the educational framework and were stimulated by the general dynamics of change from the pragmatics of literacy to the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy. The change brought about the emergence of new design tools that open fresh perspectives for the expression of design: animation, interactivity, and simulation. It also encouraged designers to research within the realm of their domain, to inquire into the many aspects of their concern, and to express their findings in new designs. The computer desktop and various rapid prototyping tools brought execution closer to designers. It also introduced new mediating layers in the design process. Breakaway The majority of all artifacts in use today are either the result of the design revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, or of efforts to redesign everyday objects for use in new contexts of practical experiences. From the telephone to the television set, from the automobile to the airplane and helicopter, from the lead pencil to the fountain pen and disposable ball-point pen, from the typewriter to the word processor, from cash registers to laser readers, from stoves to microwave ovens-the list can go on and on-a new world has been designed and manufactured. The next world is already knocking at the door with robots, voice commanded machines, and even interconnected intelligent systems that we might use, or that might use us, in some form. The steam and pneumatic engines fired by coal, oil, or gas are being replaced by highly efficient, compact, electric or magneto-electric engines integrated in the machines they drive, controlled by sophisticated electronic devices. There is almost nothing stemming from the age that made literacy necessary that will not be replaced by higher efficiency alternatives, by structurally different means. What about the technology of literacy? One can only repeat what once was a good advertisement line: "The typewriter is to the pen what the sewing machine (Remember the machine driven by foot power?) is to the needle." Remington produced the beautiful Sholes and Glidden typewriter in the 1870's. It was difficult to decide whether the ornate object, displaying hand-stenciled polychrome flowers, belonged in the office or in a Victorian study. Now it is a museum piece. Compare it to the word processor of today. Its casing might survive the renewal cycle of two to three years that hardware goes through. The chip's processing abilities will double every eighteen months, in accordance with Moore's Law. The software, the heart and mind of the machine, is improved almost continuously. Now it provides for checking spelling, contains dictionaries, checks syntax and suggests stylistic changes. Soon it will take dictation. Then it will probably disappear; first, because the computer can reside on the network and be used as needed, and second, the written message will no longer be appropriate in the new context. Those who question this rather pedestrian prediction might want to ask themselves some other questions: Where is the ornamental ink stand, the beautiful designs by Fabergé and Tiffany? Where are the fountain pens, the Gestetner machines? Carbon paper? Are they replaced by miniature tape recorders or pocket computers, by integrated miniature machines that themselves integrate the wireless telephone? Are they replaced by the computer, the Internet browser, and digital television? Edward Bulwer-Lytton gave us the slogan "The pen is mightier than the sword." Today, the function of each is different from what it was when he referred to them. They became collectibles. The disposable pen is symptomatic of a civilization that discards not only the pen, but also writing. The breakaway of design occurs first of all at structural levels. It is one thing to write a letter, manuscript, or business plan with a pencil, quite another to do the same on a typewriter, and even more different to use a word processor for these purposes, or to rely on the Internet. The cognitive implications of the experience-what kinds of processes take place in the mind-cause the output to be different in each case. No medium is passive. In each medium, previous experiences and patterns of interaction are accumulated. The more interaction there is to a process, and sometimes to a collaborative effort, the more the condition of writing itself changes. We can think of messages addressed to many people at once. Think of the Mullah chanting evening prayers at the top of a minaret; or of the priest addressing a congregation; of the president of a nation using the powerful means of television, or of a spammer on the Internet, distributing messages to millions of e-mail addresses. Each communication is framed in a context constituting its parameters of pre-understanding. To the majority, spam means no more than chopped meat in a can. Even today, over 50% of the world's people have never used a telephone. And with some 50 million people on the Internet, Netizenship is more vision than reality. Design as a semiotic integrative practical experience is a matter of both communication and context. The possibility to customize a message so that it is addressed not to an anonymous group (the believers gathered for the occasion, or members of society eager to learn about political decisions affecting their lives), but to each individual, reflecting concern for each one's individual condition and respect for his or her contribution in a system of distributed tasks, was opened by design. The semiosis of group and mass communication is very different from the semiosis of pointcasting. Technologically, everything is available for this individualized communication. However, it does not occur because of the implicit literate expectation in the functioning of church, state, education, commerce and other institutions. Design experiences submit the centrality of the writer to reassessment. One relates to the literate model of one-to-many communication. This model is based on the assumption of hierarchy, within a context of sequential interaction (the word is uttered, the listener understands it, reacts, etc.). In the industrial pragmatic framework, this was an efficient model. Perfected through the experience of television, it reached globality. But scale is not only sheer numbers. More important are interactions, intensities, the efficient matching of each individual's needs and expectations. Thus, efficiency no longer means how many individuals are at the receiving end of the communication channel, but how many channels are necessary to effectively reach everyone. A different design can change the structure of communication and introduce participatory elements. For those still captive to literacy, the alternative is the ubiquitous word-processed letter matched to a list in a database. For those able to re-think and reformulate their goals, effectiveness means transcending the literate structure. The challenge begins at knowing the language of the individuals, mapping their characteristics (cognitive, emotional, physical), and addressing them specifically. The result of this effort is represented by individualized messages, addressing in parallel people who are concerned about similar issues (environment, education, the role of the family). Moreover, it is possible to have many people write together, or to combine one person's text with someone else's image, with animation, spoken words, or music. In the design effort that takes the lead here, hierarchies are abolished, and new interactions among people are stimulated. The design that leads to such patterns of human experiences must free itself from the constraints of sequentiality. Such design can no longer be subject to the duality of good or bad, as frequently related to form (in particular, typography, layout, coherence). Rather, it covers a continuum between less appropriate to very well adapted to the scope of the activity. No longer cast in metal, wood, or stone, but left in a soft condition (as software or as a variable, self-adaptive set of rules), the design can improve, change, and reach its optimum through many contributions from those who effectively constitute their identity interacting with it. The user can effectively finish the design by choosing identifiers and modifying, within given limits, the shape, color, texture, feel, and even function of the artifact. There is also a deeper level of knowing the language of the individuals addressed. At this level, to know the language means to know the experience. Henceforth, the new design no longer takes place at a syntactic or a semantic level, but is pragmatically driven. To reach every individual means to constitute a context for a significant practical experience: learning, participation in political decisions, making art, and many others. But let us be realistic as we experience the urge to convey a sense of optimism: the common practical experience involves partaking in the distribution of the wealth and prosperity generated in this extremely efficient pragmatic framework. As discouraging as this might sound, in the last analysis, consumption, extremely individualized, constitutes the most engaging opportunity for efficient pointcasting. The questions entertained today by visionaries, innovators, and venture capitalists placing their bets on the Internet might not always make this conclusion clear. Convergence and divergence Telecommunications, media, and computation converge. What makes the convergence possible and necessary is a combination of factors united in the necessity to reach efficiency appropriate to human practical experiences at the global scale of existence and work. It is within this broad dynamics and inner dynamics that design ascertains itself as a force for change from the civilization of literacy to the civilization of many, sometimes contradictory, literacies. A shirt used to be mere clothing; the T-shirt became, in view of many concurrent forces, a new icon, a sui generis medium of communication. The commercial aspect is obvious. For example, each university of certain renown has licensing arrangements with some manufacturer who advertises the name on the walking billboards of chests, backs, and bellies. The T-shirt effectively replaces wordy press statements and becomes an instance of live news. Before Operation Desert Storm got into full swing, the T-shirt already signaled love for the troops or, alternatively, anti-war sentiment. Magic Johnson's admission that he had tested HIV positive was followed, less than two days later, by the "We still love you" T- shirts in Los Angeles. The quasi-instantaneous annotation of events is in keeping with the fast change of attitudes and expectations. Institutions have inertia; they cannot keep up with the rhythm of the times. The news, formed and conveyed outside the institution of media, reads as a manifesto of immediacy, but also as a testimony to ephemerality. We actually lose our shirts on the immediate, not on the permanent. Design projects this sense of immediacy and ephemerality not only through T-shirts or the Internet. The house, clothes, cars, the Walkman, everything is part of this cycle. Is design the cause of this, or is it something else, expressed through design, or to which designers become accomplice? The shorter fashion cycles, the permanent renewal of design forms, the 30-second drama or comedy of advertisement-more appropriate to the rhythms of existence than never-ending soap-operas-the new VLSI board, the craze for designer non-alcoholic beer or low-fat pork-all testify to a renewal speed met by what seems an inexhaustible appetite on the side of our current commercial democracy. The refresh rate of images on our TV sets and computer monitors, predicated by the intrinsic characteristics of technology and human biology, is probably the extreme at which cycles of change can settle. To take all this with enthusiasm or trepidation, without understanding why and how it happens, would contradict the basic assumption pursued in this book. The pragmatic context of high efficiency is also one of generalized democracy, extended from production to consumption. The ubiquitous engine driving the process is the possibility, indeed necessity, of human emancipation from all possible constraints. The experience of design acknowledges that emancipation from constraints does not ultimately result in some kind of anarchic paradise. The right to partake in what human experiences generate often takes the form of taste that is equalized and rendered uniform, and of ever-expanding choices that ultimately turn out be mediocre. As a reaction to the implicit system of values of literacy, related to limited choices, illiterate design expression does not impose upon the user in design, but involves the user in choices to be made. In this way, design becomes an indicator of the state of public intelligence, taste, and interest. It also points to a new condition of values. The indicator might not always show a pretty picture of who we are, and what our priorities are. The honest interpretation of such an indicator can open avenues to understanding why the Walkman-which seems to seduce people by an ideal of insulation from others-has the success it has, why some fashion designs catch on and others don't, why some car models find acceptance, why movies on significant themes fail, and why, on a more general level, quality does not necessarily improve under circumstances of expectations in continuous expansion. New thresholds are set by each new design attempt. The wearable computer is yet another gadget in the open- ended development that unites evolution and revolution. The need to achieve high levels of efficiency corresponding to the current human scale is probably the aspect most ignored. Efficiency, pre-programmed through design, confirms that human involvement is expensive (do-it-yourself dominates at all levels of design), and service more profitable than manufacturing in developed countries. None of these solutions can be taken lightheartedly. After all, design bridges to the future, and to bridge to a world of depleted resources, destroyed ecology, and a mediocre human condition is not necessarily a good reason for optimism. The goal of reducing human involvement, especially when the human is forced into exhausting and dangerous experiences, is very attractive, but also misleading. To reduce human involvement, energies different from those of an individual involved in experiences of self-constitution as a user need to be provided. Faced with the challenge posed by the dualistic choice expectations vs. resources, designers often fail to free themselves from the literate ideology of dominating nature. Fortunately, design based on co-evolution with nature is gaining momentum. So is the design of materials endowed with characteristics usually associated with human intelligence. The inherent opposition between means and goals explains the dynamics of design in our time. Extremely efficient methods of communication lead to information saturation. New methods for designing result in an apparent overabundance of artifacts and other products of design. It seems that the driving force is the possibility to practically meet individual expectations at levels of productivity higher than those of literacy-based mass production, and at costs well below those of mass production. The challenge-how to maintain quality and integrity-is real and involves more than professional standards. Market-specific processes, probably well reflected in the notion of profit, affect design decisions to the extent that often human practical experiences in the market result in under-designing or over-designing negotiated items. Changing expectations, as a consequence of rapidly changing contexts of human experiences, affect the design cycle even more than the production cycle. The ability to meet such changes by a built-in design variability is, however, not only a test of design, but also of its implicit economic equation. Enormous segments of the world population are addressed by design. This fact gives the design experience, taken in its entirety, a new social dimension. Against the background of the opportunity to fine-tune designs to each individual without the need to build on expected literacy, the responsibility of such an activity is probably unprecedented. Whether designers are aware of it, and able to work within the boundaries of such an experience, is a different question. The new designer Designs mediate between requirements resulting from human practical experiences and possibilities (Gibson defined them as affordances) in nature and society. They embody expectations and plans for change; and they need to interface between the given and the desired or the expected. The language of design has an implicit set of anticipations and a projected endurance. Aesthetic structuring, culturally rooted and technologically supported, affects the efficiency of designed items. The explicit set of expectations is measured against this implicit set of anticipations. It translates from the many languages of human practical experiences to the language of design, and from here to the ways and means of embodying design in a product, event, message, material, or interaction. It is interesting to consider the process of designing from as many perspectives as possible. From the thumbnail sketch to the many variations of a conceptual scheme, one eliminating the other, many decisions are arrived at. Design resembles a natural selection process: one solution eliminates the other, and so on until a relatively appropriate design emerges. This is the memetic scheme, successfully translated into design software programs based on genetic algorithms. In the absence of rules, such as those guiding literacy, and freed from dualistic thinking (the clear-cut good vs. bad), the designer explores a continuum of answers to questions that arise during the design process. The fact that various solutions compete with each other confers a certain drama on design. Its open-endedness projects a sense of change. Its mediating nature explains much of its engaging aspect. There is an obvious difference between the design experience within a context of assuming identity between the body and machines, and the new context of digital cloning of the human being. Designs in the area of neurobionics, robotic prosthetics, and even the cyber-body could not have emerged from any other pragmatic context but the one on which the civilization of illiteracy is established. Still, if someone had to choose between the Greek Temple typewriter of 1890 and today's word processor, thoughtlessly designed and encased in cheap plastic, the choice would be difficult. One is an object of distinct beauty, reflecting an ideal we can no longer support. Its distinction made it unavailable to many people who needed such an instrument. Behind or inside the word processor, as behind any digital processing machine, are standardized components. The entire machine is a highly modular ensemble. One program is the archetype for all the word processing that ever existed. The rest is bells and whistles. Here is indeed the crux of the matter: The ability to achieve maximum efficiency based on the recognition that raw materials and energy mean nothing unless the creative mind, applied to tasks relevant to human experiences of self-constitution, makes something out of them. In the line of the argument followed, design sometimes seems demonized for what we all experience as waste and disdain for the environment, or lack of commitment to the people replaced by new machines. That people eventually become addicted to the products of design-television sets, electronic gadgets, designer fashion, designer drugs-is an irony soon forgotten. At other times, design seems idealized for finding a way to maximize the efficiency of human practical experiences, or for projecting a challenging sense of quality against the background of our obsession with more at the lowest price. But it is not so much the activity as the people who are the activity that make either the criticism or glorification of design meaningful. This brings up the identity of the designer in the civilization of illiteracy. Designers master certain parts of the vast realm of the visual. Some are exquisite in visualizing language: type designers, graphic artists, bookmakers; others, in realizing 3-dimensional space either as product designers, architects, or engineers. Some see design dynamically-clothes live the life of the wearer; gardens change from season to season, year to year; toys are played with; and animation is design with its own heart (anima). The variety of design experiences is only marginally controlled by design principles. There is integrity to design, consistence and pertinence, and there are aesthetic qualities. But if anyone would like to study design in its generality, the first lesson would be that there is no alphabet or rule for correct design, and no generally accepted criteria for evaluation. Literacy operates from top (vocabulary, grammar rules, and phonetics are given in advance) to bottom. Design operates the opposite way, from the particular context to new answers, continuously adding to a body of experience that seems inexhaustible. People expect their environment to be designed (clothes, shoes, furniture, jewelry, perfume, home interiors, games, landscape) in order to harmonize with their own design. There are models, just as in the design process, mainly celebrities, themselves designed for public consumption. And there is the attempt to live life as a continuum of designed events: birth, baptism, communion, graduations (at different moments in the cycle of designed education), engagement, marriage, anniversaries, promotions, retirement, estate planning, funerals, estate execution, and wars. As a designed practical experience involving a variety of mediations, life can be very efficient, but probably not rewarding (in terms of quality) at the same time. The conclusion applies to the result of all design activities-products, materials, events. They make possible new levels of convenience, but they also remove some of the challenges people face and through which human personality emerges. The relation between challenges-of satisfying needs or meeting higher and higher expectations-and the emergence of personality is quite intricate. Every practical experience expresses new aspects of the individual. Personality integrates these aspects over time and is projected, together with biological and cultural characteristics, in the never-ending succession of encounters of new situations, and consequently new people. The civilization of illiteracy shifts focus from the exceptional to the average, generating expectations affordable to everyone. The space of choices thus opened is appropriate to the endless quest for novelty, but not necessarily for the affirmation of the extraordinary. In most cases, the designer disappears (including his or her name) in the designed product, material, or event. Nobody ever cared to know who designed the Walkman, computers, earth stations, or new materials, or who designs designer jeans, dresses, glasses, and sneakers, tour packages, and Olympic games. No one even cares who designs Web sites, regardless of whether they attract many interactions or turn out to be only ego trips. Names are sold and applied on labels for their recognition value alone. No one cares whether there is a real person behind the name as long as the name trades well on the market in which the very same bag, watch, sneakers, or frame for glasses, sells under different identifiers. This has to be seen in the broader picture of the general disconnectedness among people. Very few care to know who their neighbors or colleagues are, even less who the other people are who namelessly participate in expected abundance or in ecological self-destruction. Illiteracy indeed does away with the opaqueness of literacy- based human relations. All the means through which new practical experiences take place make each of us subject to the transparency of illiteracy. The result is even deeper integration of the individual in the shared databank of information through which our profile of commercial democracy is drawn. Design endlessly interprets information. Each time we step out of the private sphere-to visit a doctor or lawyer, to buy a pair of shoes, to build a house, to take a trip, to search for information on the Internet-we become more and more transparent, more and more part of the public domain. But transparency, sometimes savage in competitive life (economy, politics, intelligence), does not bring people closer. As we celebrate new opportunities, we should not lose sight of what is lost in the process. Designing the virtual The experience of design is one of signs and their infinite manipulation. It takes place in an experiential context that moved away from the object, away from immediacy and from co-presence. Some people would say it moved from the real, without thinking that signs are as real as anything else. When pushing this experience to its limits, the designer lands in imaginary territories of extreme richness. One can imagine a city built underwater, or a spherical house that can be rolled from location to location, devices of all kinds, clothing as thin as someone's thought, or as thick as tree bark or a rubber tire. One can imagine the wearable computer, new intelligent materials, even new human beings. Once the imagination is opened to fresh human endeavors-live in an underwater city, wear the lightest or heaviest clothing, interconnect with the world through what you wear, interact with new, genetically engineered humans-virtual space is opened for investigation. Regardless of how a virtual experience is made possible-drawings, diagrams, combinations of images and sounds, triggered dreams, happenings, or the digital embodiment of virtual reality-it escapes literacy-based constraints and embodies new languages, especially synaesthetic languages. In fact, if design is a sign focused on the practical experience, the design of virtual space is one level beyond, i.e., it is in the meta-sign domain. This observation defines a realm where the person frees himself from the structures characteristic of literacy. In virtuality, the sequentiality of written language is overwritten by the very configurational nature of the context. Reciprocal relations among objects are not necessarily linear because their descriptions are no longer based on the reductionist approach. This is a universe designed as vague and allowing for the logic of vagueness. Within virtual space, self-constitution, hence identification, no longer regards cultural reference, which is literacy-based, but a changing self-reference. All attempts to see how a human being would develop in the absence of language could finally be embodied in the individual experience of a being whose mind reaches a state of tabula rasa (clean slate) in the virtual. That such an experience turns out to be a design experience, not a biological accident (e.g., a child who grew up among animals, whose language fails to develop and whose behavior is uncouth), is relevant insofar as freedom from language can be investigated only in relation to its consequences pertaining to human practical experiences. Virtuality is actually the generic reality of all and any design practical experience. From among the very many designs in a state of virtuality, only a small number will become real. What gives one or another design a chance to transcend virtuality are contextual dependencies within any defined pragmatic framework. Designers do not simply look at birds flying and come up with airplanes, or at fish swimming and come up with boats or submarines. There are many design experiences that are based on knowledge resulting from our interaction with nature. But there are many more that originate in the realm of humanity. There is nothing to imitate in nature that will lead to the computer, and even less that will lead to designing molecules, materials, and machines endowed with characteristics that allow for self-repair and virtual environments for learning difficult skills. Design in the civilization of illiteracy relies foremost on human cognitive resources. Experience, like most of the practical endeavors of this pragmatic framework, becomes predominantly computational and disseminates computational means. Design human praxis, as the dominant factor of change from the pragmatics embodied in manufacturing to the new experiences of service economy, effected differentiations in respect to means of expression and communication, in respect to the role of representation, and to our position in regard to values. The electronic data storage and retrieval that complements the role of print, and progressively replaces it, results from the experience of design supported by fast and versatile digital data processing. When, at the social level, representation is replaced by individual activism, and by the militancy of interest groups, we also experience a diffusion of politics into the private, and to a certain extent, its appropriation by interest groups assembled around causes of short-term impact that keep changing. This change effects a shift from the expectation of authority, connected to literacy-based human experiences, to the slippery authority of individual choice. The designed world of artifacts, environments, materials, messages, and images (including the image of the individual) is a world of many choices, but of little concern for value. Its life results from the exercise of freedom to choose and freedom to re- design ad infinitum. Almost everything designed under these new pragmatic conditions embodies expectations associated with illiteracy. The object no longer dominates. The impressive mechanical contraptions, the engines, the shift systems, articulations, precious finish-they all belong among the collectibles. Quite to the contrary, the new object is designed to be idiot-proof (the gentler name is user friendly), reflecting a generalized notion of permissiveness that replaces discipline and self-control in our interaction with artifacts. Design also affects change in our conception of fact and reality, stimulating the exploration of the imaginary, the virtual, and the meta-sign. Facts are replaced by their representations and by representations of representations, and so on until the reference fades into oblivion. Henceforth, the positivist expectations ingrained in the experiences of the civilization of literacy are reconstituted as a frame of relativist interactions, dominated by images, seconded by sounds (noise included). Imaging technologies make drawing available to everyone, exactly as writing was available to those processed as literates. The photographic camera-drawing with light on film-the electronic camera, the television camera, the scanner, and the digitizer are, effectively, means for drawing and for processing the image in full control of all its components. A sound level can easily be added, and indeed sound augments the expressive power of images. Interactivity, involved in the design process, adds the dimension of change. That literacy, as one of the many languages of the civilization of illiteracy, uses design in its various forms to further its own program is clear. Probably less clear is that the literate experience is itself changed through such instances. After all, literacy is the civilization that started with the conventions of writing and grew to the one Book open to all possible interpretations, as these were generated in the attempt to effectively conjure its meaning in new pragmatic contexts. Literacy subjected to all the means that become possible in the civilization of illiteracy, in particular to those that design affords, results in the infinity of books, printed for the potential individual reader (or the very limited readership that a title or journal tends to have) who might finally give it one interpretation (equal to none) by placing it, unopened and unread, on a bookshelf. The radical description given above might still be far away from today's reality, but the dynamics of change points in this direction. On the Internet, we come closer to what emerges as a qualitatively new form of human interaction. Design is integrated in the networked world in a number of ways: communication protocols, hypertext, document and image layout, structure of interactive multimedia. But no one designer, and no one company (not even the institution of defense, which supports networking) can claim that it designed this new medium of human practical experiences. Many individuals contributed, mostly unaware that their particular designs would fit in an evolving whole whose appearance and function (or breakdown) no one could predict. These kept changing by the year and hour, and will continue to change for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future. Consider the design of communication protocols. This defies all there is to literacy. A word spelled correctly is disassembled, turned into packages that carry one letter at a time (or a portion of a letter), and given indications where they should arrive, but not through which route. Eventually, they are reassembled, after each package travels its own path. But in order to become a word again, they are further processed according to their condition. Such communication protocols negate the centrality and sequentiality of literacy and treat all that is information in the same way: images, sounds, movements. Many other characteristics of literacy-dominated pragmatics are overridden in the dynamic world of interconnections: formal rules of language, determinism, dualistic distinctions. Distributed resources support distributed activities. Tremendous parallelism ensures the vitality of the exponentially increasing number and types of transactions. Design itself, in line with almost any conceivable form of practical experience, becomes global. Enthusiasm aside, all this is still very much a beginning. Networks, for transportation (trains, buses, airplanes, highways), for communication (telephone, telegraph, television), for energy distribution (electric wires, gas pipelines) were designed long before we knew of computers and digital processing. In the context in which human cognitive resources take precedence over any other resources, as we face efficiency requirements of the global scale of humankind, connecting minds is not an evolutionary aspect of design, but a revolutionary step. All the networks mentioned above can participate in the emergence of humankind's integrated network. Their potential as more than carriers of voice messages, electricity, gas, or railway passengers is far from being used in the ways it can and should be. Design experiences of integration will make the slogan of convergence, applied to the integration of telecommunication, media, and computing, a reality that extends beyond these components. In some curious ways, the Netizen-the citizen of the digitally integrated world-is a consequence of our self-identification in practical activities based on a qualitatively new understanding of design. Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning Hölderlin's verse, "There was never so much beginning" (So viel Anfang war noch nie) captures the spirit of our time. It applies to many beginnings: of new paradigms in science, of technological directions, of art and literature. It is probably most applicable to the beginnings in political life. The political map of the world has changed more rapidly than we can remember from anything that books have told us. It is dangerous to generalize from events not really settled. But it is impossible to ignore them, especially when they appear to confirm the transition from the civilization of literacy to the civilization of illiteracy. People who deal with the development and behavior of the human species believe that cooperative effort explains the development of language, if not its emergence. Cooperative effort is also the root of human self-constitution as political animals. The social dimension, starting with awareness of kinship and followed by commitments to non-kin is, in addition to tool-making, the driving force of human intellectual growth. Simply put, the qualifiers political animal (zoon politikon) and speaking animal (zoon phonanta) are tightly connected. But this relationship does not fully address the nature of political human experiences. Different types of animals also develop patterns of interaction that could be qualified as social, without reaching the cognitive sophistication of the species Homo Habilis. They also exchange information, mainly through gestures, noises, and biochemical signals. Tracking food, signaling danger, and entrance into cooperative effort are documented aspects of animal life. None of these qualifies them as political animals; neither do the means involved qualify as language. Politics, in its incipient forms or in today's sophisticated manifestations, is a distinct set of interhuman relationships made necessary by the conscious need to optimize practical experiences of human self-constitution. Politics is not equivalent to the formation of a pack of wolves, to the herding tendency of deer, nor to the complex relations within a beehive. Moreover, politics is not reducible to sheer survival strategies, no matter how sophisticated, which are characteristic of some primates, and probably other animals. The underlying structure of the activities through which humans identify themselves is embodied in human acts, be they of the nature of tool-making, sharing immediate or remote goals, and establishing reciprocal obligations of a material or spiritual nature. Changes in the circumstances of practical experiences effect changes in the way humans relate to each other. That the scale of human worlds, and thus the scale of human practical experience, is changing corresponds to the dynamics of the species' constitution. Incipient agricultural activity and the formation of the many families of languages correspond to a time when a critical mass was reached. At this threshold, syncretic human interaction was already rooted in well defined patterns of practical experience. The pragmatic framework shaped the incipient political life, and was in turn stimulated by it. Politics emerged once the complexity of human interactions increased. Political practical experiences are related to work, to beliefs, to natural and cultural distinctions, even to geography, to the extent to which the environment makes some forms of human experiences possible. This is why, from a historic perspective, politics is never disassociated from economic life, religion, racial or ethnic identity, geography, art, or science. The underlying structure of human praxis that determined the need for literacy also determined the need for appropriate means of expression, communication, and signification. This becomes even more obvious in politics, which is embedded in literacy-based pragmatics. Consequently, once the particular pragmatic circumstances change, the nature, the means, and the goals of politics should change as well. The commercial democracy of permissiveness The condition of politics in a pragmatic framework of non-sequentiality, non- linear functional dependencies, non-determinism, decentralized, non-hierarchic modes of interaction or accelerated dynamics, extreme competitive pressure-that is, in the framework of the civilization of illiteracy-currently escapes definition. State of flux appropriately describes what such a political experience can be. What we have today, however, is a conflict between politics anchored in the pragmatics that is still based on literacy and politics shaped by forces representing the pragmatic need to transcend literacy. The conflict affects the condition of politics and the nature of contemporary political action. It affects everything related to the social contract and its implementation: education, exercise of democracy, practice of law, defense, social policies, and international affairs. Changes affecting current political experiences are part of a sweeping dynamics. These changes range from the acknowledged transition from an industrially based national economy to an information processing global economy focused on service. Part of the change is reflected in the transition from national economies of scarcity (usually complemented by patterns of preserving and saving) to large, integrated commercial economies of access, even right, to consumption and affluence. Established in the context of political movements that focused on individuality, these integrated economies affect, in turn, the condition of the individual, who no longer sees the need for self-restraint or self-denial, and indulges in the commercial democracy of permissiveness. Consequently, political trials are met, or avoided, with an Epicurean response: withdrawal from public life for the pleasures of buying, entertainment, travel, and sport, which in a not-so-distant past only the rich and powerful could enjoy. Politics itself, as Huxley prophesied in his description of the brave, new world, becomes a form of entertainment, or yet another competitive instant, not far from the spirit and letter of the stock market, of the auction house, or the gambling casino. Political involvement in a democracy of permissiveness is channeled into various forms of activism, all expressions of the shift from the politics of authority to that of expanding freedom of choice. The new experience of increasingly interactive electronic media is probably correlated to the shift from the positivist test of facts, as it originated in science and expanded into social and political life, to the rather relativist expectation of successful representations, in public opinion polls, in staged political ceremonies, in the image we have of ourselves and others. Albeit, the power of the media has already surpassed that of politics. All these considerations do not exhaust the process under discussion. They explain how particular types of activism-from emancipatory movements (feminist, racial, sexual) to the new action of groups identified through ethnic origin, lifestyle, concern for nature-use politics in its newer and older forms to further their own programs. Openness, tolerance, the right to experiment, individualism, relativism, as well as attitudinally motivated movements are all illiterate in nature in the sense that they defy the structural characteristics of literacy and became possible only in post- literate contexts. Some of these movements are still vaguely defined, but have become part of the political agenda of this period of fervor and upheaval. Literacy, in search of arguments for its own survival, frequently embraces causes stemming from experiences that negate it. The impact of new self-constitutive practical experiences and definition on digital networks already qualifies these experiences as alternatives, regardless of how limited an individual's involvement with them is. Within the realm of human interaction in the only uncensored medium known, a different political experience is taking shape. What counts in this new experience are not anonymous voters lumped into ineffective majorities, but individuals willing to partake in concrete decisions that affect their lives in the virtual communities of choice that they establish. While the mass media, still connected to the literate nest in which they were hatched, partake in the functioning of political machines that produce the next meaningless president, a different political dynamics, focused on the individual, is leading to more efficient forms of political practical experiences. There is nothing miraculous to report in this respect. Notwithstanding, the Internet can be credited for the defeat of the attempt in 1991 to turn back the political clock in Russia, as well as for the way it is influencing events in China, East Europe, and South America. How did we get here? Human relations can be characterized, in retrospect, by recurrences. Distinctions within self-constitutive experiences occur under the pressure of the realized need to achieve higher levels of efficiency. Relations, which include a political component pertinent to cooperative efforts and the need to share the outcome, have been evinced since the syncretic phase of human activity. There is no distinct political dimension in the syncretic pragmatics of immediacy. Incipient political identity, as any other kind of human self-identification, is foremostly natural: the strongest, the swiftest, those with the most acute senses are acknowledged as leaders. The most powerful are successful on their own account. And this success translates into survival: more food, more offspring, resilience, ability to escape danger. Once the natural is humanized, the qualities that make some individuals better than others were acknowledged in the realms of nature and human nature. Whether as tribal leaders, spiritual animators, or priests, they all accomplished political functions and continuously reaffirmed the reasons for their perceived authority. Over time, natural qualities lost their determinant role. Characteristics based on human nature, in particular intellectual qualities such as communication skills and management and planning abilities, progressively tipped the balance. Current textbooks defining politics do not even mention natural abilities, focusing instead on the art or science of governing, shrewdness in promoting a policy, and contrivance. From participatory forms of political life, in which solidarity is more important than differences among people, to the forms characteristic of our time of personal and political shift away from each other, changes have taken place because human practice made them necessary. Politics was not and is not a passive result of these changes, some of which it stimulated, others of which it opposed. The survival drive behind participatory forms was continuously redefined and became a different kind of assertion: not just better than other species, but better than those before us, better than others. Competition shifted from the realm of nature-man against nature-to the realm of humanity. Once the element of comparison to the other, or judgment by others, was introduced, hierarchy was established. Hierarchy put on record became, with the advent of notation, and more so with the advent of writing, a component of experience, one of its structuring elements. It is no longer a here-and-now defined action of immediacy, but action expanded as progression over generations and societies, and among various societies. Accordingly, while solidarity, though permanently subject to redefinition, was still in the background, the driving forces were quite different. They resulted from the need to establish a political practice of efficiency pertinent to the pragmatic framework, henceforth to the needs of the community. For as long as human activity was relatively homogeneous, there was no need for political delegation or for reifying political goals into rules or organizations. Once diversification became possible, the task of integration, to which rituals, myths, religion, assignment distribution, and leadership contributed, changed. Not only did people involve more of their past in new practical experiences, but they also started to keep records and to measure the adequacy of effort, and thus the appropriateness of their own policies. Attention to their past, present, and future also allowed them to become aware of the means that distinguished political practical experiences from all other experiences (magic, myth, religion). It was a difficult undertaking, especially under the provisions of centralized, syncretic authority. The natural, the magical, the religious, the logical, the economical, and the political mingled. The critical element proved to be represented by practical expectations. To implore unknown forces for rain, a successful hunt, or fertility was very different from articulating expectations related to what needs to be done to maintain the integrity of work and life. Initially, these expectations were mixed. They progressively became more focused, and a sense of accountability, based on tangible results, embodied in comparisons, was introduced. While self-constitution is the projection of individual characteristics (biological, cultural) in a given practical experience, political practice is to a great extent a projection of expectations. At each juncture in humankind's practical experience, the previous expectation is carried over as new expectations appear. Accordingly, it is expected that a political leader will embody, in fact or through the symbolism of authority, natural qualities, cognitive abilities, and communication skills (rhetoric included), among other attributes. When these expectations are embodied in specific functions (tribal chief, judge, army commander, elected legislator, or selected member of the executive body) and in political institutions, the projection is no longer that of individuals, but of the society committed to the goals and means expressed, to its acknowledged values. Whether indeed each tribal leader was the fastest, or each judge the most impartial in ascertaining the damage done by a person who defied rules of life and work, whether the military leader was the bravest, or the legislator the wisest, became almost irrelevant after their political recognition. Expectation overcame reality. This aspect becomes very significant in the context of literacy. Moreover, it becomes critical in the transition from the pragmatics on which literacy is based to a pragmatic framework in respect to which literacy requirements only hinder. Political institutions firmly grounded in the assumptions of literacy still debate whether tele-communting is acceptable, tele-commerce secure, or tele-banking in the national interest. While the debates are going on, these new practical experiences are taking hold in the global economy. Networks, in full expansion, are altering the nature of human transactions to the extent that fewer and fewer people participate in elections because they know that the function of these elections-to present choice-is no longer politically relevant. There is a need to bring politics closer to individuals; and this need can be acknowledged only within structures of individual empowerment, as opposed to empty representation. Political activity resulted in norms, institutions, values, and a consciousness of belonging to society. Not by any stretch of the imagination is politics a harmonizing activity, because to live with others, to enter a contract and pursue one's individual goals within its limitations, means to accept a condition of a sui generis trade-off. Political experiences involve, in various degrees, skills and knowledge for giving life and legitimacy to trade-offs. Language is the blood that flows through the arteries of the political animal. When tamed by literacy, this language defines a very precise realm of political life. The heartbeat of the literate political animal corresponds to a rhythm of life and work controlled by literacy. The accelerated rhythm that became necessary under a new scale of experiences requires the liberation of political language from the control of literacy, and the participation of many languages in political experiences. It should come as no surprise that the expectation of language skills, even when language changes, in people involved in the practical experience of politics is carried over from one generation to another. Regardless of the level of sophistication reached by a particular language, and of the specific form of political practice, effective use of powerful means of expression and communication is required. Even when they did not know how to write, kings and emperors were regarded as being better writers than those who could. They would dictate to the scribe, who created the perception that they probably translated what higher authorities whispered into their ears. Even when their rhetoric was weak, the masters of persuasion they used were seen as only agents of power. Books were attributed to political leaders; victory in war was credited to them, as well as to military commanders. Law codes were associated with their names, and even miracles, when politics joined the forces of magic and religion (often playing one against the other). All this and more represent the projection of expectations. The particular expectations of literacy confirm values associated with its characteristics. Politics and the ideals embodied in the Enlightenment-it carried into action political aspirations originating in religion-and the Industrial Revolution cannot be separated. Expectations of permanency, universality, reason, democracy, and stability were all embodied in the political experience. New forms of political activism were encouraged by literacy and new institutions emerged. Awareness of boundaries among cultures and languages increased. Centralism was instituted, and hierarchies, some very subtle, others insidious, were promoted with the help of the very powerful instrument of language. Within this context, the practical experience of politics established its own domain and its own criteria for effectiveness, very different from those in the ancient city-state or in the pragmatics of feudalism. Identification of the professional politician, different from the heir to power, was part of this process. Politics opened to the public and affirmed tolerance, respect for the individual, and equality of all people before the law. Political functions were defined and political institutions formed. Rules for their proper operation were encoded through literate means. The alliance between politics and literacy would eventually turn into an incestuous love, but before that happened, emancipation of human political experiences would reach a historic climax in the revolutions that took place during this time. To celebrate all these accomplishments, while remaining aware of the many shadows cast upon them by prejudices carried over from previous political experiences (in regard to sex, race, religion, ownership), was a task of monumental dimensions. We can and must acknowledge that human political experiences played a more important role than in previous social contexts in maximizing efficiency in the pragmatic framework that made literacy necessary. It was at this time that the role of education, and especially the significance of access to it, were politically defined and pursued according to the efficiency expectations that led to the Industrial Revolution. The process was far from being universal. The western part of the world took the lead. Its political institutions encouraged investment, and education was such an investment. Political institutions reflect the pragmatic condition of the citizen and, in turn, effect changes in the experience of people's life and work. While the word illiteracy probably first appeared print in 1876 in an English publication, in 1880 illiteracy in Germany was only one per cent of the population: "Heil dem König, Heil dem Staat/ Wo man gute Schulen hat!" went the slogan hailing the king and state where good schools were the rule. This was the time when Thomas Alva Edison invented the incandescent light bulb (1879); Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone (patented in 1876); Nicklaus Otto, the four-stroke gas engine (1876); Nikola Tesla, the electric alternator (1884). Nevertheless, before Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, he learned that only one per cent of all Russians were literate. In many other parts of the world, the situation was not much better. In addition, this was also a time when literacy was literally an instrument of political discrimination. Those not literate were looked down on, as were women (some held back from literacy and study), as were nations considered ignorant and of inferior morals (Russia being one of them). Reflected in the ability to dominate nature, the growth of science and the use of effective technological means influenced the political nature of states, as well as the relation among nations. Rationality formed the foundation of legality; the state ascertained priority over individuals-a very direct reflection of its literate nature. Rules were applied to everyone equally (which later translated into an effective "all are equal," quite different from the empty slogans of populist movements). The rationality in place derived from literacy. To be effective meant to dominate those who were less effective (citizens, communities, nations). Far from being a historic account, these observations suggest that the literate political animal pursues political goals in line with the sequential nature of literacy in a context of centralized power, acknowledged hierarchies, and deterministic expectations. The political institution is a machine, one among many of the pragmatics of the Industrial Revolution. It did one thing at a time, and one part of the machine did not have to know what the other was doing. Energy was used between input and output, and what resulted-political decisions, social policies, regulations-was mass production of whatever the society could negotiate: lubrication diminished friction. Parties were formed, political programs articulated, and access to power opened to many. Two premises were implicit in the literate discourse: people should be able to express opinions on issues of public interest; and they should be able to oversee the political process, assuming responsibility for the way they exercise their political rights. These two premises introduced an operational definition of democracy and freedom, eventually encoded in the doctrine of liberal democracy. They also confirmed the literate expectation that democracy and freedom, like literacy, are universal and eternal. The failure of literacy-based politics takes place on its own terms. Dictatorships (left-wing and right-wing), nationalism, racism, colonialism, and the politics of disastrous wars and of the leveling of aspirations that leads to the mediocrity embodied in bureaucracy have brought the high hopes, raised during the climax of literate political action, to the low of indifference and cynicism we face in our day. Instead of the people's broader participation in the political process, a hope raised by progress in making equality and freedom effectively possible, society faces the effects of the ubiquitous dedication to enjoyment in corrupted welfare states unable to meet the obligations they assumed, rightly or not. At times, it seems that the complexity of political experience prevents even the people's symbolic participation in government. Volunteering and voting, a right for which people fought with a passion matched only by their current indifference, have lost their meaning. There is no proper feedback to reinforce the will and dedication to participate. It also seems that in advocating equality and freedom, a common denominator so low was established that politics can only administer mediocrity, but not stimulate excellence. From among all its functions, nationhood, as the embodiment of the experience of political self-constitution, seems to maintain only the function of redistribution. Individual liberty, hard fought for under the many signs of literacy, appears to be conformistic at best, and opportunistic. To many citizens, it is questionable whether the lost sense of community is a fair trade-off for the acquired right to individualism. The hundreds of millions again and again seduced by the political discourse of hatred (in fascism, communism, nationalism, racism, fanaticism) wasted their hard-won rights in order to take away from others property, freedom of expression and religion, liberty, dignity, and eventually life. Politics after Auschwitz was not meant to become yet another instance of pettifogging. But it did, and we all are aware of the opportunistic appropriation of tragedy (hunger, oppression, disease, ecological disaster) in current political entertainment. The efficiency expected from political action under the assumptions of literacy is characteristic of the scale at which people constitute themselves. The nation is the world, or the only thing that counts in this world of opportunity and risk. The rest is, relatively speaking, superfluous. Nations, even those that acknowledge the need to integrate, try to secure functioning as autonomous entities. National borders may be less guarded, but they are maintained as borders of literacy translated into economic opportunity. When the goal of autonomous existence is no longer attainable, expansion is the answer. Ideological, racial, economic and other types of arguments are articulated in order to justify the extension of politics in the experience of battle. The two World Wars brought literate politics to its climax, and the Cold War (the first global battle) to its final crisis, but not yet to its end, even though the enemy vanished like a humorless ghost. A closer look at the systematic aspects of the political experience of human self- constitution should prepare us for approaching the current political condition. This should at least provide elements for understanding all those accumulated expectations that people have with respect to politics, politicians, and the institutions through which political goals are pursued. Political goals are always practical goals, regardless of the language in which they are expressed or the rituals attached. As recurrent patterns of human relationships, political experiences appear to have a life of their own. This creates the impression that agreements dictated by practical reasons originate outside the experience, at the initiative of politicians, due to a certain event, or as the result of random choice. Political tongues Language is the instrument through which political practical experience takes place. To reconstitute past succeeding political experiences therefore means to reconstitute their language(s). The task is overwhelming because politics is mingled with every aspect of human life: work, property, family, sex, religion, education, ethics, and art. It is present even in the interrelations of these aspects because politics is also self-reflective. That is, the identity of one entity is related to the identity of others in relation to which self-identification takes place. The variety of political experiences corresponds to the variety of pragmatic circumstances within which humans project their identity. Individual existence resulting from interaction with others extends to the realm of politics and is embodied in the recurrent patterns that make up expectations, goals, institutions, norms, conflicts, and power relations. The individual is concealed in all these. In some ways, politics is a social-educational practice resulting in the integration of instinctive actions (a-political) and learned modes of practice with social impact. What constitutes politics is the dynamics of relations as they become possible and as they unfold as openings towards new relations. One of the concrete forms of such relations is the propensity to coalition building. Politics is contingent upon subjects interacting. Their past (ontogeny) and present (pragmatics) are involved in these interactions. To a certain extent, it is a learned form of practice requiring means for interaction, among which language has been the most important. It is also a practice of investigation, discovery, and social testing. The manifold of political languages corresponds to the manifold of practical experiences. There are probably as many political tongues as there are circumstances of self-identification within a society. But against the background of this variety is the expectation that word and deed coincide, or at least that they do not stray too far from each other. The advent of writing changed politics because it attached written testimony to it, which became a referential element. As Socrates and Plato noticed, this was a blessing in disguise. Since the time writing entered the political sphere, the practical argument shifted from the fact, argued and eventually settled, to the record. It became itself a practical experience of records (of property, law, order, agreements, negotiations, and allocations for the good of society). The institutions that emerged after the practical experience of writing operated within the structure of and in accordance with the expectations brought about by writing. And soon, as relative as soon can be, political self-consciousness was established parallel to political action and pursued as yet another practical experience. The many languages of political experience multiply once more in the new languages of political awareness. Where values were the final goal of politics, the value of the political experience itself became a subject of concern. Many political projects were pursued at this self-reflective level: conceiving new forms of human cooperation and political organization, advancement of ideas concerning education, prejudices, emancipation, and law. This explains, too, why in the sequence of political practical experiences, expectations did not nullify each other. They accumulated as an expression of an ideal, forever moving away from the last goal attained. Without a good understanding of the process, nobody could account for the inner dynamics of political change. The same applies to accounting for the role played by political leaders, philosophers, and political organizations involved, by virtue of their own goals and functions, in political life. Politics in the civilization of illiteracy is not politics out of the blue sky. Along the continuum of political practical experiences, it entails expectations generated under different pragmatic circumstances. And it faces challenges-the major challenge being the efficiency expected in the new scale of human experience-for which its traditional means and its inherited structure are simply not adequate. Political discontinuity is always more difficult to accept, even understand. Revolutions are celebrated only after they take place, and especially after they successfully establish a semblance of stability. Can literacy lead politics to failure? In our time, much is said regarding the perception that the language of politics and the political practice it seems to coordinate are very far apart. People's mistrust of politics appears to reach new heights. The role and importance of political leaders and institutions apparently have changed. The most able are not necessarily involved in politics. Their self-constitution takes place in practical experiences more rewarding and more challenging than political activism. Political institutions no longer represent the participants in the political contract, but pursue their own goals, survival included. Law takes on a life of its own, more concerned, so the public perceives, with protecting the criminal, in the name of preserving civil rights, than upholding justice. Taxes support extravagant governments and forms of social redistribution of wealth, more often reflecting a guilt complex over past inequities than authentic social solidarity. Instead of promoting meaningful human relationships and addressing the future, they keep fixing the past. Everyone complains, probably a phenomenon as old as any relation among people involved in a sui generis give-and-take interaction. But fewer and fewer are willing to do something because individual participation and effort appear useless in the given political structure. The majority of people look back to some prior political experience and interpret the past in the light of books they have read. They fail to realize that the complexity of today's human experience cannot be met by yesterday's solutions. They are convinced that if we are faithful to our political heritage, all problems, credibility and corruption included, will be solved. They also believe religious systems and their great books contain all that is needed to meet all imaginable present and future challenges. Even the very honorable conviction that the founders of modern democracies prepared citizens to cope with this unprecedented present cannot go unchallenged. The Constitution of the United States (1787) as well as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in France (1789) reflect the thinking and the prose of the civilization of literacy. Similar documents are on record in Latin America, Europe, India, and Japan. They are as useless as history can be when new circumstances of human self- constitution are totally different from the experiences that gave birth to these documents. Revisionism will not do. The new context requires not a static collection of admirable principles, but dynamic political structures and procedures of the same nature as the pragmatics of shorter cycles of change, non-determinism, high efficiency, decentralization, and non-hierarchical modes of operation. As the world reinvents itself as interwoven, it breaks loose from prescriptions of local significance and traditional import. Although the number of emerging nations has increased-and nobody knows how many more will emerge-we know of no political documents similar to those articulated in 1776, 1789, 1848, or even 1870. Nothing comparable to the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, even the Communist Manifesto (no matter how discredited it is at present), whether in substance or style, has accompanied current political movements. The reason why no such document can emerge can be connected to the inadequacies of literacy-based politics. This civilization is no longer one of ideas, religious or secular. It is characterized by processes, methodologies, and inventions expressed in various sign systems that have a dynamics different from that of language and literacy. The ideas of the civilization of literacy address the mind, soul, and spirit. The most one can expect in our time of upheaval and change are provisions for establishing conditions for unhampered human interactions in the market and in other domains of human self-constitution (religion, education, family). Steady globalization means that the health of national economies, education, sports, or art matters just as little as national borders and the theatrics of diplomacy and international relations. One can hear Dostoyevsky's prophetic line: "If it's otherwise not possible, make us your servants, but make us full." It hurts to repeat it, but it will hurt more to ignore it at a time when nothing grows faster than the urge of millions of people to emigrate to any developed country willing to take them, even as second-class citizens, so long as they escape their current abysmal condition. The dynamics of change in the world is characterized by the acknowledged need of many countries to be integrated in the global economy while preserving or requiring a token of national identity. State sovereignty is self-delusive in the context of commercial, financial, or industrial autonomy that is impossible to achieve. Self- determination, always to the detriment of some other ethnic group, echoes those tribal instincts that make the ideal of constitutional government an exercise in futility. The underlying structure of literacy is reflected in national movements and their dualistic system of values. The logic of the good and the bad, more difficult to define in a context of vagueness, but still pursued blindly, controls the way coalitions are established, migration of populations is handled, and national interests defended, while these very nations argue for integration and free market. Nevertheless, the language of today's politics is, in the final analysis, shaped by the pragmatic framework. Its sentences are written in the language of ledgers; the freedom it purports to establish is that of commercial democracy, of equal access to consumption, which happens to be the main political achievement of recent history. The fact that the nations forming the European Community gave up sovereignty with respect to the market proves the point. That they still preserve diplomatic representation, defense functions, and immigration policies only attests to the conflict between the politics of the civilization of literacy and the politics of the civilization of illiteracy. The great documents of the literate past perpetuate the rhetoric of the time of their writing. All the structural characteristics of literacy, valid for the pragmatic framework that justifies them, deeply mark the letter and spirit of these documents. They ascertain politics as sequential, linear, and deterministic. They rejoice in promulgating ideals that correspond to the scale of humankind in which they guarantee the means that result in the efficiency of industrial and productive society. Liberté, egalité, fraternité are shorthand for rights of conscience, ownership, and individual legal status. They are an expression of accepted hierarchy and centralism to the degree that these could be rendered relative as need required. Expectations of permanency and universality were carried over from earlier political experiences, or from religion, even though separation of Church and State was emphatically proclaimed during the French Revolution, and in revolutions that took place afterwards. Amendments required by altered circumstances of human self-constitution in practical experiences not anticipated in the documents render their spirit relative and solve some of the problems caused by the limitations mentioned. Political documents, such as the ones mentioned above, are still perceived as sacrosanct, regardless of their obvious inadequacy in the pragmatic context of the civilization of illiteracy. It is one thing to establish the sanctity of property in a framework of agricultural praxis, whose politics was inspired by a shared expectation of cycles parallel to natural cycles. Jefferson envisioned the land as a vast agrarian state. "We are a people of farmers. Those who work the fields are the chosen people of God, if He had a chosen people. In their heart He planted the real virtue." It is quite another thing to live in a pragmatic context of new forms of property, some reflecting a notion of sequential accumulation, others an experience of work with machines, of humans seen as commodity. It is a new reality to live in today's integrated world of property as elusive as new designs, software, information, and ways to process it. To apply to this context political principles inspired by a movement that sought independence from England while using slaves brought from Africa is questionable, at least. Equality of natural rights, deriving from nature-based cycles, is quite different from equality of political rights and responsibilities deriving from a machine-inspired model for progress. Both of these sources are different from the political status of people involved in a pragmatics of global networking and extreme task distribution. One can cautiously make the case that the major political documents of the past were conceived in reaction to an intolerable state of affairs and events, not proactively, in anticipation of new situations and expectations. These documents are the expression of the need to unify, homogenize, and integrate forces in a world of relatively autonomous entities-national states-competing more for resources and productive forces than for markets. The values reflected therein correspond to the values on which literacy is founded and for which literacy-inspired ideologies fought. But maybe these political documents are exemplary in another way, let's say as an expression of moral standards that we apparently lost in the course of 200 years; or of cultural standards for both society and politicians, standards that can only rarely be acknowledged today, if at all. If this is the case, which is difficult to prove, what this seems to suggest is that the price paid for higher political efficiency is the lost ethics of politics, or its current deplorable intellectual condition. The lack of correlation between political practice and language results from the pragmatic context reflected in the condition of language itself. While in real life, many literacies are at work, Literacy (with a capital L) still dominates the structure of politics. Its rules are applied to forms of human interaction and evaluation that are not reducible to self-constitution in language. Political activity by and large follows patterns characteristic of the civilization of literacy, despite its own indulgence in non-linguistic semioses: the use of images, film, and video, or the adoption of new networking technologies focused on information exchange. Former expectations that politicians adhere to standards of the civilization of literacy are carried over in new political and practical experiences. The expectation that their literacy should match that of political documents belonging to the political tradition (the Constitution of the United States of America, for instance) is paradoxical, though, since the majority of Americans cannot recall what these political documents state. And they see no reason to find out. Their own practical experience takes place in domains for which the past is of little consequence to their well-being. As things stand now, the political principles required by the dynamics of industrial society are embodied in institutions and laws dedicated to their own preservation. Free of concern for their own freedom, politically rooted in a prior pragmatic framework, citizens take freedom for granted in their new practical experiences and end up evading the associated civic responsibility. They expect their politicians to be literate for them. We deal here with a strange mixture of assumptions: on the one hand, a notion of political life corresponding to a context of homogeneity and a deterministic view of the social world; on the other, a realization that today's world requires specialized political practical experience, means and methods characteristic of heterogeneous and non-deterministic political processes. The simmering conflict is met with the type of thinking that will not solve the problem because it is the problem. The coordination of political action through literacy-based language and methods and the dynamics of a new political practice, based on the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy, simply diverge. As in many other domains of literate condition, it is as though institutions, norms, and regulations take on lives of their own, as literate language does, perpetuating their own values and expectations. They develop as networks of interaction with an autonomous dynamics, uncoupled from the dynamics of political life, even from the new pragmatic context. The tremendous amount of written language (speeches, articles, forms, contracts, regulations, laws, treatises) stands in contrast to the very fast changes that make almost every political text superfluous even before it is cast in the fast eroding medium of print or in the elusive bits and bytes of electronic processing. Many economies have undergone, or realize they must undergo, profound restructuring. Massive down-sizing, paralleled by flatter hierarchies and smoother quality control, have affected economic performance. But very little of this has touched the sacrosanct centralized state institutions. In the USA alone, 14 departments, 135 federal agencies employing more than 2.1 million civilians and 1.9 million military personnel account for $1.5 trillion in yearly expenditure. If the economy were as inefficient as political activity is, we would face a crisis of global proportion and consequences that are impossible to anticipate. This is why today, some citizens would write a Declaration of Independence that begins with the following line: "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore." But this would not mean that they would vote. When five times more people watch Married with Children than vote in primaries, one understands that the morality and intellectual quality of the politician and citizen correspond closely. Cynical or not, this observation simply states that in the civilization of illiteracy, political action and criteria for evaluating politics do not follow the patterns of political practical experiences peculiar to the civilization of literacy. Multiplied to infinity, choices no longer undergird values, but options that are equally mediocre. The issue of literacy from the perspective of politics is the issue of the means through which political practice takes place. A democracy resting solely upon the contribution to political life in and through literate language is at the same time captive to language. The experience of language resulted from developments not necessarily democratic in nature. Embedded in literacy, past practical experiences pertinent to a pragmatic context appropriate to a different scale of humankind are often an obstacle to new experiences. So are our distinctions of sex, race, social status, space, time, religion, art, and sport. Once in language, such distinctions simply live off the body of any new design for political action. Language is not politically neutral, and even less so is the literate practice of language. Various minority groups made a very valid point in stating this. Power relations, established in political practice, often become relations in the literate use of language and of other means, as long as they are used according to literacy expectations. It is not that literacy prevents change; literacy allows for change within the systematic domain of practices relying on the literate practical experiences of language. But when literacy itself is challenged, as it is more and more in our day, it ends up opposing change. Discrepancies between the language and actions of politics, politicians, and political institutions and programs result from the conflict between the horizon of literacy and the dynamics for which the literate use of language is ill equipped. If the formula deterioration of moral standards corresponds to the failure of politics to meet its constituency's expectations, the most pessimistic views about the future would be justified, because politicians are not better or worse than their constituency. But as with everything else in the new pragmatic context, it is no longer individual performance that ensures the success or failure of an activity. Integrating procedures ascertain a different form of cooperation and competition. Such processes are made possible by means characteristic of high efficiency pragmatics, that is, task distribution, parallelism and reciprocal testing, cooperation through networking, and automated procedures for planning and management. They are meaningful only in conjunction with motivations characteristic of this age. If, on the other hand, the romantic notion that the best become leaders were true of today's political experience, we would have cause to wonder at our own stupidity. In fact, it does not matter which person leads. Political processes are so complex that the industrial model of successful stewardship no longer makes sense. Political life in society does not depend on political competence, people's generosity, or self-motivation that escapes institutional, religious, or ideological coercion. The degree of efficiency, along with the right ascribed to people to partake in affluence, speaks in favor of political experiences driven by pragmatic forces. Such forces are at work locally and make sense only within a context of direct effectiveness. But short of taking these forces for granted, we cannot escape the need to understand how they work and how their course can be controlled. Crabs learned how to whistle Some of today's political systems are identified as democracies, and others claim to be. Some are identified as dictatorships of some sort, which almost none would accept as a qualifier. But no matter which label is applied, there is an obsession with literacy in all these systems. "We need literacy for democracy to survive," says the literacy special interest group. But how do dictatorships come about in literate populations? The biggest dictatorship (the Soviet block) was proud of its high literacy rate, acknowledged by the western world as an accomplishment impossible to overlook. It fell because the underlying structural characteristics reflected in literacy collided with other requirements, mainly pragmatic. An empire, the fourth in the modern historic succession that started with the Turkish Empire and continued with the Austro-Hungarian and British Empires, crumbled. What makes the fall of the Soviet Empire significant is its own underlying structure. The former members of COMECON, those East European countries that, along with the Soviet Union, once formed the communist block, represent a good case study for the forces involved in the dynamics of illiteracy. While writing this book, I benefited from an experiment probably impossible to duplicate. A rigid structure of human activity, basically captive to a slightly amended paradigm of the Industrial Revolution, hailing itself as the workers' paradise, and laboring under the illusion of messianic collectivism, maintained literacy as its cultural foundation. Even the harshest and blindest critics of the system had to agree that if anything of historic significance could be attributed to communism, it was its literacy program. Large segments of the population, illiterate prior to communism, were taught to read and write. The school system, deficient in many ways, provided free and obligatory education, much better than its free medical system. This effort at education was intended to prepare the new generations for productive tasks, but also to subject each person to a program of indoctrination channeled through the powerful medium of literacy. Questioned about his own ideas for the reform of the orthodox communist system, Nikita Kruschchev, the maverick leader of the post-Stalin era, declared: "He who believes that we will give up the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin deludes himself tremendously. Those who are waiting for this to happen will have to wait until crabs learn how to whistle." When, throughout Russia, statues of Lenin started falling and Marx's name became synonymous with the failure of communism, people probably started hearing strange sounds from crustaceans. The abrupt and unexpected failure of the communist system-an event hailed as victory in a war as cold as the market can be-makes for unexpected proof of this book's major thesis. The breakdown of the Soviet system can be seen as the failure of a structure that kept literacy as its major educational and instrumental medium, and relied on it for the dissemination of its ideological goals inside and outside the block. Literacy, as such, did not fail, but the structures that literacy entails: limited efficiency, sequential practical experiences of human self-constitution in a hierarchic and centralized economy; deterministic (thus implicitly dualistic) working relations, a level of efficiency based on the industrial model of labor division, mediation subjected to central planning without choice as to the mediating elements; opaqueness expressed in an obsession with secrecy, and last but not least, failure to acknowledge the new scale of humankind-in short, a pragmatic framework whose characteristics are reflected in literacy-all led to the final result. Indeed, the system acted to counter integration and globality. It maintained rigid national and political boundaries under the false assumption that insularity would allow a controlled and orderly exchange of goods and ideas, perpetuation and dissemination of an ideology of proletarian dictatorship, and eventually coexistence with the rest of the world under the assumption of its progressive conversion to communist values. In the doctrine of Marx and Engels, the proletariat appears endowed with all the qualities associated with Divinity in the prototypic Book (the Old Testament): omniscience, omnipotence, and right almost all the time. There is a self-creative moment in the historic process they described, resulting from political activism and commitment to change in the world. No one should lightly discard the Utopian core or the ideal embodied in the doctrine. After all, nobody could argue against a world of freedom where each person participates with the best one has to offer, and is rewarded with everything one needs. Free education, free medical care, access to art and liberty in a context of limitless unfolding of talent and harmony with nature, of shared wealth and emancipation from all prejudices-all this is paradise on Earth (minus religion). It should be pointed out that, within the system, the entire practical human experience related to literacy-and the accomplishments listed above are literacy- based-was subsidized. In no other part of the world, and under no other regime, were so many people subjected to literacy. That the system failed should not lead anyone to ignore some of the achievements of the people regimented under a flag they did not care for: fascinating art, interesting poetry and music, the massive collection and preservation of folklore, spectacular mathematics, physics, and chemistry arose from beneath terror and censorship. To survive as an artist, writer, or scientist meant to force creativity where almost no room for it was left. Under no other regime on Earth did people read so much, listen to music more intensely, visit museums with more passion, and care for each other as family, friends, or as human beings, episodes of brutality notwithstanding. It is too simplistic to accept the line that people read more in East Europe and the Soviet Union because they had nothing else to do. The pragmatic framework was set up under the assumption of permanence, stability, centrality, and universality founded on literacy. It goes without saying that the misuse of language (in political discourse and in social life) played its role in the quasi-unanimous silent rejection of the system, even more in silent, cowardly complicity with it. When the literate machine of spying on the individual fell apart, people saw themselves in the merciless mirror of opportunistic self- betrayal. The records will stand as a testimony that writing does not lead only to Solzhenitsyn's novels, Yevtushenko's poetry, Shoshtakovich's music, and the romantic Samizdat, but also to putrid words about others, kin included. The opaqueness of literacy partially explains why this is possible. Something other than the opaqueness granted by literacy (i.e., complicity established in society) explains how it became a necessary aspect of that society. Germans were not better, exceptions granted, than their fascist leaders; the peoples in the Soviet block were not better, exceptions granted again, than the leaders they accepted for such a long time. But what went relatively unnoticed by experts in East European and Soviet studies, as well as by governments fighting the Cold War, is the dynamics of change. The system was economically broke, but still militarily viable (though overrated) and over-engaged in security activities-tight control of the population, economic and political espionage, active attempts to export its ideology. The structure within which people were to realize their potential-one of the ideals of communism-had few incentives. But all this, despite the impact of the yet unfinished revolution, is only the tip of the iceberg, the visible side when one looks from the riverbank of the free world where incentives lead to self-sufficiency and complacency. The major aspect is that the dynamics of the system was severely affected by artificially maintaining a pragmatic framework and a system of values not suited to change. This applies especially to the major shift-from the industrial model to post-industrial society, to a context of practical experiences of human self-constitution freed from the restrictions carried over from the politics of mind and body control-experienced by the rest of the western world. Levels of expectation beyond the satisfaction of immediate needs (food, clothing, shelter), and of literacy-associated expectations (education, access to art and literature, travel), could not be satisfied unless and until levels of efficiency impossible to reach in the pragmatic context of industrial societies were made possible by a new pragmatics. Despite the fact that more writers, more publishing houses, more libraries, as well as more artists, theaters, opera houses, symphonic orchestras, research institutes, and more museums than in the rest of the world were politically and economically supported in the Eastern Block (almost to the extent that the secret police was), activities related to literacy had only a short-term impact on the individuals subjected to or taking advantage of them. This was proven dramatically by the proliferation of commercially motivated newspapers and publications (pornography among them) following the breakdown of the power structure in various countries of the Block, and followed by an even faster focus on entertainment television and obsession with consumption. The main events leading to the breakdown-each country had its own drama, once the major puppeteer was caught off-guard by events in the Soviet Union-took place with the nation staring at the TV screens, seduced by the dynamics of the live transmission for which literacy and prior literate use of the medium were never well equipped. The live drama of the hunt for Ceausescu in Romania, the climax of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the events in Prague, Sofia, and Tirana continued the spirit of the Polish tele-drama in the shipyards. It then took another turn, during the attempted coup in the Soviet Union, practically denying the literate media any role but that of late chroniclers. The initial lessons in democracy took place via videotape. Various networks, from WTN (World-Wide Television News) to CNN, but primarily the backward technology of the fax machine, which absorbed essential literacy into a focused distribution of individual messages, provided the rest. As primitive as digital networks were, and still are in that part of the world, they played an important role. Not political manifestos or sophisticated ideological documents were disseminated, but images, diagrams, and live sequences. In the meanwhile, entertainment took over almost all available bandwidth. What the rest of the world consumed in the last fifteen years (along with fashion, fast food chains, soft drinks, and consumer electronics) penetrated the lives of those whose revolt took place under the banner of the right to consume. Here, as in the rest of the world, the spiritual and the political split for good. The spiritual gets alimony; the political becomes the executor of the trust. What failed the system was the lack of understanding of all the factors leading to new productive experiences: the framework for optimal interaction of people, circumstances of progressive mediation and further specialized human self-constitution, a practical context of networking and coordination based on individual freedom and constraints assumed by individuals as they define their expectations. Parallel to the literate structure of a politics that failed is the experience of churches in the Soviet Block. In a show of defiance towards the political dictatorship, people attended church, itself a mainstay of literate praxis (independent of the book or books they adopt for their basic program). Once religion was able to assert its literate characteristics through the imposition of constraints-so like those of the political system just overthrown- churches began to experience the low attendance that the rest of the world is already familiar with. No matter how much more quickly events take place in our age, it is probably still too early to understand all the implications of the major political event represented by the fall of the Soviet empire. For instance, in a context of global economy, how can one correctly evaluate the emergence of new national states and forceful national movements when the post-national state and the trans-national world are already a reality? The question is political in nature. Its focus is on identity. Identity reflects all the relations through which people constituted themselves as part of a larger entity-tribe, city, region, nation-defined by biological and cultural characteristics, shared values, religion, a sense of common space and time, and a sense of future. A world of worlds "We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians," declared Massimo d'Azeglio during the first meeting of the Italian Parliament. A little over 100 years old, the nation-state was the most tangible product of the political practical experience in the pragmatic context whose underlying structure is so well reflected in literacy. Together with the nation-state, the modern notion of nationality was defined and became a major force of political life. As part of the political consciousness in the age of industrial production, national consciousness played a very precise role, ultimately expressed in all forms of nationalism. It unified all those whose similarities in biological characteristics, language, lore, and practical experiences were constituted in a framework of shared resources and political goals. Germany came into existence through a unifying language (Hoch Deutsch) and was consolidated through its literacy. Italy went through a similar process. In other instances, nations were born as a result of voluntary political acts: the United States, the nations declared independent after the fall of the Soviet Union, Croatia, Macedonia, some of the Arab countries, and a number of African nation-states, once colonial powers could no longer afford to resist the force of change. As with everything pertaining to politics, national politics entails expectations corresponding to past phases (the basic passions that once made up tribal solidarity), to instances of human interaction well overhauled by the new realities of the integrated world. What, if any, explanation can one find in the dissolution of Yugoslavia? Against the background of conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this question has divided many well intentioned intellectuals (not only in France) inclined to solve an absurd situation of genocide. Intellectuals questioned what appeared to be irreducible religious contradictions between Catholic and Orthodox Christians, or between Christians and Moslems. The old conflict between the pro-fascist Croatian Ustash and the Serbian Chetniks dedicated to the vain goal of a greater Serbia was also on their minds. They also wondered what the chances of the new nation-states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, and many of the autonomous regions and republics of the former Soviet Union were. How will the Commonwealth of Independent States function once goals and purposes of nation-states take over those assumed in a nebulously defined commonwealth? And how can one explain the enormous discrepancy between the attempt to constitute a broad European Community (actually, the United Markets of Europe), while other parts of Europe break into small nation-states? How much of the underlying tribalism, or provincialism, or religious adherence, or how much of the functions of literacy at work can be read in the political fervor of nationalistic activism of our day? One answer, no matter how encouraging, cannot address a full paragraph of questions. These questions suggest that the politics of nations is so multifaceted that understanding it requires not so much rehashing the past but focusing on the broad picture of its dynamics. Between the old city-state, the early empire (Roman, Byzantine), the medieval world of local attachments (pertaining to shared space used mainly for agriculture, and under the firm grip of the Papacy), and today's world of mass immigration and human displacement (for political, economic, religious, or psychological reasons), we find inserted the settled universe of nation-states and their respective literacies. In this universe, literacy and religion undergird the legal system. Politics defines national identity, subsuming language, ethnicity, ways of working, culture, superstitions, prejudice, art, and science. Within the nation-state's borders, citizens are subjected to a political practical experience of homogeneity, centralism, and uniformity, required by the efficiency expectations of the Industrial Revolution. The ideal of cosmopolis, the all- embracing empire of reason declared by the Stoics, runs counter to the ideal of the nation-state, which celebrates national reason and willingness to compete with others. When the pragmatic circumstances leading to today's global economy started exercising their action, an all-embracing empire of a different nature resulted. The new statement says that Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, animists, even atheists, although bearing a national identity, are part of the global economy. Not surprisingly, political action and economic integration each run its own course. Commerce, with all its imbalances and unfairness, the almost uncontrollable financial dynamics, and migration of industries take more and more frequently what appears as the necessary path of globality. Politics, even when it acknowledges globality, focuses on national definitions. To an outside observer, a nation's politics appears insignificant, powerless in comparison to economic forces, although it claims to control these forces through monetary policies, labor laws, and trade regulations. The trans-national world has its own impetus. It continues to evade political constraints, ascertaining its own life. It was described from the perspective of its financial and economic condition as The Borderless World (the title of Kenichi Ohmae's book), within which nationality counts only marginally. This is yet another reason for the low interest in public life on the part of the wealthy in our days. When the new southern republics freed by the breakdown of the Soviet Union debate which form of writing they should adopt-Arabic, Cyrillic, or Roman-and how to define their respective nations, they still look for national identifiers. Turkmanis and Uzbekistanis, Latvians and Estonians, Ukrainians and Georgians, Hungarians and Romanians, and enterprising Poles comb their territories in search of business opportunities. The same takes place in many other countries, whose citizens are obsessed more with prosperity than with sovereignty, with access to financial means more than with self-determination, and with cooperative effort, even involving traditional enemies, more than with a constitutional foundation or universal protection of human rights. Interestingly enough, while national identity is more and more superseded by people's a-nationality, many new countries, emerging as a result of the asserted right to self-determination, face as their first task not the future but the past: definition of their national identity. Nevertheless, the civilization of illiteracy does not promise that Italians can be made for all these new countries. Rather, these nations will become, in not necessarily satisfying ways, a-nationals, citizens of the world economy. Many of them will make up the new immigrant populations settled in ethnic neighborhoods where access to consumption will arouse a nostalgia for some remote homeland. No one can or should generalize. Many prejudices still heat the furnaces of hatred and intolerance. Enough citadels from the past pragmatic framework maintain hopes for expansion and cultivate a politics appropriate to ages long passed. But regardless of such unsettling developments, the nation-state enters an age of denationalization, absorbed into a world of economic globality, less and less dependent on the individual and thus less and less subject to political dogma. Of tribal chiefs, kings, and presidents Changes in the condition of human practical experiences effect changes in the self-identification of the individual and of groups of people. Emphasis is less and less on nature and shared living space, and more on connections free of arbitrary borders, even of elements pertaining to culture and history. New political experiences, still subjected to expectations carried over from the past, do not actually continue the past. Accordingly, the nature of political experiences changes. Assumptions regarding leadership, organization, planning, and legality are redefined. Tribal chiefs might well have turned, through the centuries, into the kings of the Middle Ages, and, with the advent of a new society, into presidents. There is, nevertheless, no reason to believe that in a universe of distributed tasks and massive parallelism, a need for political centralism and hierarchy will remain. The president, for instance, is the king of the civilization of literacy; and his wife becomes the queen, in defiance of all the literate documents that justify presidency. Executive power, in conjunction with the legislative and judicial branches, implements ideals of liberal political democracy as these became essential to the pragmatics of industrial society. But once new circumstances emerge, the underlying structure reflected in the power structure undergoes change as well. In the spirit of the dynamics of change, one should notice that, in a framework of non-hierarchic structures, there is no legitimate need for the presidency. Theoretic arguments, no matter how rigorous, are after all irrelevant if not based on related facts. New circumstances already made the function of president strictly ceremonial in many countries. In other countries, a president's ability to exercise power is impeded by laws that make this power irrelevant. Economic cycles, affecting integrated economies, turn even the most visionary heads of states (when they happen to be visionary) into witnesses to events beyond their control. Politics does not happen at levels so remote from the individual that individuals disconnect themselves from the political ceremonial. It happens closer and closer to where ideals and interest crystallize in the form of new human interactions. Who would represent the country if the function of head of state were abolished? How can a country have a consistent political system? Who would be responsible for implementing laws? Such questions originate, without exception, within literacy's system of expectations. The extreme decentralization that is made possible by the new means of the civilization of illiteracy requires, and indeed stimulates, different political structures. Instead of the self-delusion and demagoguery triggered by an idealized image of the politically concerned citizen, we should see the reality of citizens pursuing goals that integrate political elements. Literacy resulted in a politics of representation that ended up in effectively excluding the citizen from political decision-making. Rationalized in the structures of democracy, political ideals are now a matter of efficient human interaction. A president's performance is totally irrelevant to the exchange of information on networks of human cooperative effort. Agreements relevant to the people involved, executed in view of reciprocal needs and future developments, result more and more outside political institutions, for reasons having little to do with them. The majority of political functions, as they apply to presidents, congresses, or other political institutions, still originate in forms characteristic of past political experiences. They are based on allegiances and commitments contradicted by the pragmatics of today's world. The fact that heads of states are also heads of the military (commander-in-chief) comes from the time when the strongest man became the leader. But in the modern world of growing emancipation, women are valid candidates as heads-of-state all over the world. However, sexual bias has kept women from gaining the military competence that a commander-in-chief is expected to have. Another example: What is the reason for a president to be at the funeral of a deceased head-of- state? Blood ties used to bond kings and nobility more strongly than political arguments, long before fast transportation could carry a monarch to the deceased in less time than it took for decay to set in. A farewell wished today at the funeral of a Japanese emperor, a Moslem ruler, or an atheistic president belongs to the spectacle of politics, not to its substance. The expensive, and delusive, literate performance of state funerals, oath-taking, inauguration, parades, and state visits is more often than not an exercise in hypocrisy. These spectacles please only through their cynical pandering to the people's desire for circus. Pragmatically relevant commitments are no longer the privilege of state bureaucracies. When the historic necessity of states winds up to be no more than the expression of remote tribal instincts, the literate institution of state becomes superfluous. Political idolatry, commercial nationalism, and ethnic vanity affect politics at many levels. Nationalism, emerging as a form of collective pride and psychological compensation for repressed instincts, celebrates gold medals at Olympic games, the number of Nobel Prize laureates, and achievements in the arts and sciences with a fervor worth a better cause. Borders of pride and prejudice are maintained even where they have de facto ceased to exist. No scientist who achieved results in his or her field worked in isolation from colleagues living all over the world. The Internet supports the integration of creative effort and ideas, beyond borders and beyond national fixations, often expressed as military priorities rather than as cooperation and integration. Art is internationally nurtured and exchanged. Rhetoric and politics Political programs, very much like hamburgers, cars, alcohol, sports events, artworks, and financial services, are marketed. Success in politics is valued in market terms rather than in the increasingly elusive political impact. The expression "People vote their pocketbooks" bluntly expresses this fact. But are they voting? Poll after poll reveals that they are not. Illiterates used to be excluded from voting, along with women, Blacks in America and South Africa, and foreigners in a large number of European countries. In an ideal world, the best qualified would compete for a political position, all would vote, and the result would make everyone happy. How would such an ideal world function? Words would correspond to facts. The reward of political practical experience would be the experience itself, satisfying the need to best serve others, and thus oneself as a member of the larger social family. This is a Utopian world of perfect citizens whose reason, expressed in the language of literacy, i.e., made available to everyone and implicitly guaranteed to be a permanent medium for interaction, is the guardian of politics. We see here how authority, of the thinking human being, is established and almost automatically equated with freedom. Indeed, the doctrine of individual conformity to rational necessity was expressed in many pragmatic contexts, but never as forcefully as in the context that appropriated literacy as one of its guiding forces. In the horizon of literacy, the expectation is that the experience of self- constitution as literate makes people submit their own nature to the rationale of literacy and thereby find fulfillment. In short, the belief that to be literate makes one respect his word, respect others, understand political expectations, and articulate one's ideas is more of an illusion. Moreover, if political action could result in having everyone accept the values of literacy and embody them as their second nature, conflicts would vanish, people would all share in wealth and, moreover, would be able to abide by the standards of democracy. It even follows that the literate need to feel the obligation of inculcating literacy in others, thus creating the possibility of changing patterns of human experiences so that they reflect the demands of reason associated with literacy. Isaiah Berlin, among others, noted that the belief in a single encompassing answer to all social questions is indefensible. Rather, conflict is an overriding feature of the human condition. This conflict develops between the propensity to diversity (all the ends pursued) and the almost irrational expectation that there is one answer-a good way of life-worth pursuing and which can be attained if the political animal acknowledges the primacy of reason over passion, and freely chooses conformity to widely shared values over chaotic individualism. Under the pragmatic circumstances of the civilization of illiteracy, the literate expectation of unanimous or even majority vote is less than significant. Voting results are as good an indicator of a society's condition as seismographs are of the danger of an earthquake. On election days, the results are known after the first representative sample makes it through the voting mechanism. Actually, the results are already at hand days before the election takes place. The means within our reach are such that it would suffice to commit a short interval of telephone time so that people who want to vote-and who know why they vote- can, and without having to go our of their way. Any other connection, such as the generalized cable infrastructure, connected to a central data processing unit outfitted for the event, would do as well. Such a strategy would answer only one part of the question: making it easy for people to vote. The second part regards what they are asked to vote for. The political process is removed from the exciting practice of offering authentic choice. Literacy-based political action is opaque, almost inscrutable. Accordingly, the citizen has no motivation for commitment and no need to express it through voting. There is a third part: the assumption that voting is a form of particpating in the power of democracy. No one aware of the dynamics of work and life today can equate the notion of majority with democracy. More often than not, efficiency is achieved through procedures of exception. Under the circumstances of a global economy of fast change and parallel practical experiences, no president of a country, no matter how powerful, and no central political power can effectively influence events significant to the citizen. The civilization of illiteracy requires alternatives to centralism, hierarchy, sequentiality, and determinism in politics. It especially entails alternatives to dualism, whether embodied in the two- party system, the legislative and executive opposition, and lawfulness vs. illegality, for example. This implies a broad distribution of political tasks, in conjunction with a politics that takes advantage of parallel modes of activism, networking, open-ended policies, and self-determination at meaningful levels of political life. Political fear of vagueness can only be compared to the fear of a vacuum that once upon a time branded physics and political doctrines. Faster rhythms of existence and the acknowledged need to adapt to circumstances of action never before experienced-scale of politics, globality, scale of humankind-speak against many of the literate expectations of politics as a stabilizing form of human practice. Politics, if true to its call, should contribute to speeding up processes and creating circumstances for better negotiations among people who have lost their sense of political adherence, or even lost their faith in law and order. In this global world, where scale is of major importance, politics is supposed to mediate among the many levels at which people involved in parallel, extremely distributed activities, partake in globality. Apportionment of goods, as much as the apportionment of rights pertaining to creative aspects of human practical experiences, on a scheme similar to auctioning, follow the dynamics of the market more closely than rigid regulations. Awareness of this apportionment is a political matter and can be submitted to the concerned parties in forms of evolving opinions. Politics has also to address the new forms of property and their impact on political values in the new pragmatic framework. For instance, the real power of information processing is in the interaction of those able to access it. One should not be forced to apply rules originating from the feudal ownership of language, or from the industrial ownership of machines, to the free access to information, or to networks facilitating creative cooperative efforts. The challenge is to provide the most transparent environment, without affecting the integrity of interaction. A specific example in this regard is legislation against computer hackers. Such legislation, as well as the much publicized Communication Decency Act, only shifts attention from the new pragmatic context-unprecedented challenges arising from very powerful technologies-to one of routine law enforcement. Administrative reaction is the consequence of the built-in dualism, based on the clear-cut distinction between good and bad, characteristic of literacy-based politics. A positive course of events can originate only from political experiences of individual empowerment. Wider choice and broader possibilities involve specific risks. Hacking is by no means an experience without precedent in past pragmatics. The German war code was hacked, and nations are very eager to confer honor upon other hackers of distinction: scientists who break the secrets of genetic codes, or spies who discover the secrets of the enemy. Examined from a literate political perspective, hacking, as a peculiar form of individual self-constitution, can appear as criminal. In a political experience coherent with the pragmatics leading to the civilization of illiteracy, hacking appears on a continuum joining creativity, protest, invention, and non- conformity, as well as criminal intention. The answer to hackers is not a code of punishment of medieval or industrial inspiration, but transparency that will, in the long run, undermine possible criminal motivations. A society that punishes creativity, even when relatively misdirected, through its policies and laws punishes itself in the long run. Someone who works at his terminal for a company producing goods all over the world, and pursuing social and economic programs that effectively touch citizens of many cultures, different faiths, race, political creed, sexual preference, different history and different expectations, participates in the politics of the world more than the institutions and the bureaucrats paid for functions that they cannot effectively fulfill. It is again pragmatics that makes us citizens of our small village or town, that integrates all of us, Netizens included, in the global world. Judging justice This short parenthesis in the discussion of politics can be justified by the fact that justice is the object of both politics and law. The practice of law is the practice of politics on a smaller stage. Political action, involving a new concept of law and justice, closer to the environment of industrial work, established not only that all (or almost all) were equal in respect to the law, but also that justice would take its own course. In the course of history, the various moments of change in the pragmatic framework were also moments of change in regard to the justice system. In incipient political praxis, rulers administered the law. Even today, a governor or president is the court of last resort in some legal cases. And law, like politics, relies on rhetoric, on language as the mediating mechanism of concepts. In the course of history, the various moments of change in the pragmatic framework were also moments of change in regard to what today we call justice. The more powerful applied their own ideas of law under circumstances of incipient human practical experiences. It was the role of the appointed leader, whether in the magic of ritual, in tribes, in religion, in forms of settlement, to judge matters under dispute. Law focused on agreements, commitments, and integrity of the human body, of property, of goods, and of exchange. In time, the distance between what was done, affecting the balance of people's rights and obligation, and the reaction to it increased. A whole body of mediating elements, religion included, governed action and reaction. Just as myth and ritual did in their ways, major religious texts testify to how rules of living together and preserving life were established and implemented. The scale of society, reflected in the nature of the pragmatic context, played a crucial role in the process in respect to what was considered a crime, the type of punishment, and the swiftness of punishment. What is of concern here is the change from the legal code elaborated in the framework of literacy and legal experience in the civilization of illiteracy. The institution of law and the professions involved in it embody expectations of justice under assumptions of efficiency pertinent to human practical experiences. New lands were discovered, new property was created, and machines and people made higher productivity possible. Rights were fought for, access to education opened, and the world became a place of new transactions for which the law of the land, inspired by natural right, no longer sufficed. It was in this context that literacy stimulated both the practice of legality and the inquiry into the nature of human rights and obligations. But it is also in this context that the language of legal practical experiences commenced its journey into today's legalese that no ordinary person can understand. Raskolnikov, in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, criticized the "legal style" of those educated as lawyers. "They still write legal papers that way." Though he remarks that the writing had "a kind of flourish to it..., yet look how illiterate his writing is." The criticism could be glossed over, due to its context, if it were not for an interesting remark: "It's expressed in legal language and if you use legal language, you can't write any other way." Trying to cope with ambiguity in language forces the lawyer to look for precision. The equivocal condition of the practice of justice is that law originates in the realm of political experiences, but needs to be implemented free of politics, i.e., regardless of who is in power. The blindfolded goddess holding the scales of justice is expected to be objective and fair. The separation between judicial and governing entities is probably the highest achievement of the political system based on literacy. But it is also the area where, under circumstances of practical experiences different from those based on the underlying structure of literacy, the need to change is critical. This applies to new means of maintaining a just system for people less affected by the subjectivity of those holding the balance of power, and more by the ability to process information relevant to any object of dispute. The blindfolded goddess already uses X- ray vision in order to substantiate claims and counterclaims. Modeling, simulation, expert genetic testimony, and much more became part of the justice routine. Each party in a trial knows in advance what type of jury best serves its interests. The context for all these changes sheds light on their political meaning. If the practical experience of politics and justice are disconnected, the effectiveness of both suffers. Politics stimulated change in respect to the perception of democracy, civil rights, political authority, and welfare. It demystified the origin, function, and role of property, and introduced a generalized level of relativity and uniform value. Law, on the other hand, supposed to protect the individual, should therefore be less inclined to trade off fairness for the lowest common denominator. Comparing this ideal to real legal practice is an exercise in masochism. The ever increasing, and fast increasing, human interaction via market mechanisms was followed by instances of conflict and expectations of negotiation. Without any doubt, the most pervasive mediating role is played in our day by legal professionals. Due to its own self-interested dynamics, the legal profession insinuates itself in every type of practical experience, from multinational business to relations between individuals. Lately, it is involved in finding a place for itself in the world of new media, involving copyright laws and private rights versus public access. So one cannot say that law, as opposed to politics, is not proactive. The problem is that it is so in a context bound to literacy, and in such a way that style transcends substance. Latin, reflecting the origin of the western legal experience, used to be the language of law. Today, few lawyers know Latin. But they are well versed in their own language. Legalese is justified by the attempt to avoid ambiguity in a given situation. There is nothing wrong with this. What is wrong is when legal language and the procedures encoded in legal language do not meet the pragmatic expectation, which is justice. Law and justice are not the same thing. A good case in point is the recent case of the State of California vs. O. J. Simpson. The spectacle of the legal procedure showed how a literate practice ended up convoluting justice. In fact, literate law is not meant to serve justice. Its purpose is to use the law to acquit a client. Allan Derschowitz claimed that the lawyer's duty is to his or her client, not to justice. This statement is far from the expectation that each member of society has. Therefore law loses its credibility because it undermines the notion of the social contract. Some might say that this state of affairs is nothing new. Even Shakespeare criticized lawyers. Far from being a wholesale attack on the profession, the description I have given deserves to be contrasted to the possibility of effective judicial mediations in the civilization of illiteracy. Since changes occur so rapidly, the law of yesterday rarely applies to new circumstances created today. It used to be, people often find themselves reminiscing, that laws and rules (the Ten Commandments, at least) were expected to last and be respected, in their letter-which was carved in stone-and spirit, forever. No one will argue that justice is not an eternal desideratum. But achieving it does not necessarily mean that laws and the methods of lawyers are eternal. Some actions that society once accepted-child abuse, sexual harassment, racial discrimination-are now considered illegal, as well as unjust. Other crimes (whistling on Sundays, kissing one's spouse in public, working or operating a business on Sunday) might still be in some legal books and locally observed, but they are no longer considered instances of law- breaking. The result of changes brought about by changing pragmatics is the realization people have that there is no stable frame of reference, either for morality (as it is subject to law and law enforcement) or for legality. Did lawyers create this situation? Are they a product of new human relations required by the new pragmatics? Who judges the legal system in order to determine that its activity meets expectations? There is no simple answer to any of these questions. If justice is to affect human practical experiences, it has to reflect their nature and participate in defining its own perspective in respect to the rights that people integrate in new practical experiences of self-definition. It is all well and good for the legal system to use non-literate means, such as DNA evidence, videotapes, and access to legal information from around the world via Internet. But if they are then subjected to literate pettifogging, all this effort is to no avail. The programmed parliament Politics in action means not elections but the daily routine of hard work on matters of interest to the people represented. Party affiliation aside, in the end the common good is supposed to be maintained or improved. Legislative political work continues a tradition that goes well beyond literacy. Nevertheless, effective legislation became possible only within the pragmatic framework that made literacy necessary. Once literacy itself reached its potential, new means for the political legislative practical experience became necessary. The driving force is the expectation that the legislative process should reflect practical needs emerging in a context of rapid change over shorter patterns of recurrence. As within the entire political practical experience, forces at work continuously collide. Although literacy-based perspectives and methods for political legislation are no longer appropriate in handling issues and concerns stemming from a pragmatics that invalidates the literate model, politicians seem to be unwilling to realize the need for change. They find it more useful, and easier to defend, to legislate improved literacy- based education, for example, instead of rethinking education in the context of its necessity. They accept the mediating power of specialized knowledge, the generalized network of information, use all means for disseminating their own programs, but work within constraints originating in the literate practice of politics. It is hard to believe that in an age of limitless communication, speakers, mainly in the USA, arguing for the most intricate programs, will perform before an empty room in Congress. It is also hard to believe that a language rooted in experiences established a long time ago, and many times proved ineffective, is maintained. Procedures, testifying more to the past than the present, govern the activity of many legislative bodies (not only in Great Britain, where this legacy translates into a dress code as outmoded as the British monarchy). As with the executive political experience and the infatuation of justice, symbolism overtakes substance. Nevertheless, under the pressure for higher efficiency, major changes are taking place. Legislative practical experiences, as disconnected as they are from new human practical experiences, are less and less an exercise in convincing writing or in formal logic. They increasingly reflect the expectations of globality and often apply mediation, task distribution, and interactivity. Electronic modeling is applied, simulation methods are tried out. The new methods of accessing information free the legislative politician from the time-consuming task of accumulating data. Consultants and staff members make use of powerful knowledge filters in order to involve in the political process only information pertinent to the subject. Politicians know that knowledge, at the right time and in the right context, is power. Their new experience, as members of computerized parliaments of many countries can testify, is that everyone has the data, but only few know how to process it effectively. In fact, political parties develop competitive processing programs that will give politicians pursuing their goals more convincing arguments in a public debate, or in discussions leading to legislative vote. The transparency brought about by means in the civilization of illiteracy ensures public access to the debate. The competitive edge is provided by the intelligent use of data. Power, that elusive aspect of any political activity, comes from the ability to process, not from the amount of information stored. All this, kept at a minimum in this presentation, might sound like anticipation, or dreams for the politician of the future. It is not. The process is probably still at the beginning, but unavoidable. It will sooner or later affect such components as time in office-permanence of a representative reflects literacy-based expectations- procedures for public evaluation, candidacy, and voting. It will also require a rethinking of the relation between politicians and constituents. Rethinking the motivations and methods of legislation, even its legitimacy, are goals worthy of being pursued. Increased mediation affects the connection between facts and political action. Unless balanced by the use of the new means of communication that allow personal interaction with each voter, it will continue to alienate politics from the public. Mass-media politics is already a thing of the past-not because television is overridden by the Internet, but because of the need to create a framework for individual motivation for political action. Political efficiency is based on human interaction. What counts is not the medium, as this will continue to change, but what is accomplished through the medium. To create a legislative framework that reflects the new nature of human relations and is appropriate to the pragmatic context means to understand the nature of the processes leading to the civilization of illiteracy. Consolidation of bureaucracy is as counter-indicative of this understanding as is the continuation of the monarchy and the House of Lords in Great Britain. Both these phenomena are as convincing as the mass generation of electoral letters that report on how the political representative best served his or her constituency. A sense of the process, as it involves the need to overcome models based on sequentiality, dualism, and deterministic reaction, can be realized only when the political process itself is synchronized with the prevalent pragmatics. A battle to be won As a practice of building, changing, and destroying coalitions, politics today is a summation of human practice. Professional politicians design strategies for coalition implementation and identify the most effective interactions for a certain policy. They develop their own language and criteria for evaluating the efficiency of their specialized practice and of their mediating function in a society of many and varied forms of mediation. The obsession with efficiency, whether applied to politics or not, is not imposed by forces outside ourselves. The tendency to transfer responsibility does not result in some curse spoken by a disappointed politician, philosopher, or educator. The shorter political cycles that we encounter correspond to the dynamics of a human practical experience focused on the immediate within the framework of a global existence. It seems that the transition is from the small communal life striving for continuity and permanence, to a global community of interacting individuals, whose identity itself is variable, prepared to experience discontinuity and change. Coordinations of actions in this universe are no longer possible through large integrative mechanisms, such as language and bureaucratic institutions. Small differentiating operations, in the nature of coalitions tested through polling or electronic balloting, and modified in accordance with the rapid change of political roles, represent an alternative. Monarchies embodied the eternity of rule; treaties among monarchs were supposed to outlast the monarch. The 15-minute access to political power, far from being a metaphor in some parts of the world, is as relevant as any other form of celebrity (Warhol's included), since political processes and power relations are more and more uncoupled from each other and disconnected from the obsession with universality and timelessness. A 15-minute coalition is as critical as access to power, and as useful as the new principles accepted by the people involved. Instead of the top- down model of politics, we can experience a combination of bottom-up and top-down procedures. Under these circumstances, the making and unmaking of coalitions remains one among very few valid political functions. The centers of political power- economics, law, interest groups-constitute poles around which such coalitions are established or abandoned. One should ask whether such coalitions do not come into being in the universal language of literacy. Literacy is defended with the argument that it is some kind of common denominator. What is not accounted for is the fact that coalitions are not independent of the medium of their expression. Literacy-based coalitions pursue and further goals and actions consistent with the pragmatic framework that requires them. Needs characteristic of a pragmatic context incompatible with the structures imposed by literacy-based practical experiences require other means for establishing coalitions. When the leaders of the most advanced industrial states agree on indexing the value of their currency, or when friend and foe establish a political coalition against an invasion that could set a precedent and trigger consequences for the global economy, the means in place might take the appearance of literacy. In fact, these means are freed from words and literate articulations. They emerge from data processing and simulation of behavior in financial markets, virtual reality scenarios turned into actions for which no script could provide a description in advance. While politicians might still perform their script in a literate manner, the centers of power choose the most efficient means for evaluating each new coalition. As a consequence, and this is a distinguishing element, there is little connection between the authority of political institutions, as it results from their literate premise, and the dynamics of coalitions, reflecting the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy. The sense of beginning experienced in our day goes well beyond the new states, new political means, beyond the science (or art) of coalition making. It is basically a beginning for the new zoon politikon, for a political animal that has lost most of its natural roots and whose human nature is probably better defined in terms of political instincts than cultural accomplishments. Culture is by and large discarded. People simply cannot carry culture with them, but neither can they negotiate their existence without political means appropriate to a social condition structurally different from that experienced in the past. The self-centered individual cannot escape relating to others and defining himself in reference to them. "We Am a Virtual Community" is not merely a suggestive title (conceived by Earl Babble) for an article on Internet interaction, but a good description of today's political world. The specific forms of relations, the We Am faction among them, are subject to many factors, not least to the biological and cognitive redefinition of the human being. When everything, literally everything, is possible and indeed acceptable, the political animal has to find new ways to make choices and pursue goals without facing the risk of losing identity. This is probably the decisive political battle that the humans have yet to win. "Theirs not to reason why" High precision electronic eyes placed on orbiting satellites picked up the firing of the rocket and the launch parameters. Data was transmitted to a computer center for information processing. The computed information, specifying angles, firing time, and trajectory, was relayed to antirocket missiles programmed to intercept enemy attack. The system-consisting of a vast, distributed, highly interconnected configuration- incorporates expertise from electronic vision devices, knowledge encoded in software designed to calculate rocket orbits (based on launch time, position, angle, speed, weight, meteorological conditions), fast transmission networks, and automated positioning and triggering devices. This integrated system has replaced literacy-based modes of practical experiences pertinent to war. Instead of manuals describing the many parameters and operations that military personnel need to consider, information is contained in computer programs. These also eliminate the need for long training cycles, expensive practical exercises, and the continuous revision of manuals containing the latest information. Distributed knowledge and interconnectedness have replaced the structure of top-down command. The system described above contains many mediating components that allow for highly efficient wars. Examples similar to the relative annihilation of the infamous (and ineffective) Scud missiles can be given from other episodes of the Gulf War, including the 100 hours of the so-called ground battle. This battle displayed the deadly force of artillery and tanks, the power of modeling and simulation, and major planning and testing methods independent of literacy-based military strategy and tactics. The enemy consisted of an army structured on the principles derived from the pragmatic framework of literacy: centralized line of command, rigid hierarchy, modern military equipment integrated in a war plan that was essentially sequential and deterministic, and based on a logic of long-term encounters. The first war of the civilization of illiteracy An earlier draft of this chapter-introductory lines excepted-was written when no one anticipated a conflict involving American troops in the Arabian Gulf. During this war, theoretic arguments regarding the institution of the military in the civilization of illiteracy were tested in the flesh and blood of confrontation, probably well beyond my, or anybody's, expectations or wishes. The Gulf War reported by the media resembled a computer game or a television show. As I watched, I felt as though someone had lifted part of my text and sent it through the news wires. The story made for great headlines; but out of context, or in the context of a reality reduced to the TV screen, its overall meaning was obscured. In many ways, the armed conflict ended up trivialized, another soap opera or spectator sport. Other reports related the frustration of the troops with the limited number of phone lines. The reports also commented on the replacement of the traditional letter by videotape as the preferred method of communication. We also heard about an almost magical device, called CNX, used to help orient each person involved in the vast desert theater of war. And we saw or heard about the exotically named preprocessed and prepackaged food, about the pastimes of the troops. The context started coming into focus. This was to become the first war of the civilization of illiteracy: a highly efficient (the word takes on an unintended cynical connotation here) activity that involved non-sequential, massively parallel practical experiences. These required precise synchronization (each failure resulted in victims to what was euphemistically called "friendly fire"), distributed decision-making, intense mediation, advanced specialization, and task distribution. These characteristics embodied an ideology of relative value disengaged from political discourse, and even more from moral precepts. Nobody expected this war to reinvent the bow and arrow (documented shortly after human self-constitutive experiences in language), or even the wheel (originating in the practical experience of populations whose home was the territory where the fighting took place). It is possible that some of the military personnel had heard about the book entitled The Art of War (written by Sun Tzu in 325 BCE or earlier), or about the books, some of undisputed notoriety, filling the libraries of military academies and the better research libraries. But this was not a war fought for the Book, in the spirit of the Book (Koran or Bible), or in the way books describe wars. In a way, the Gulf War was truly the "mother of all battles" in that it rewrote the rules on war-or did away with them. All the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy are retraceable in the practical experience of today's military: highly mediated praxis through electronic information storage and retrieval; transition from an economy of wartime scarcity to a war of affluent means of defense and destruction; shift from war based on the positivist notion of facts (many requiring incursions into enemy territory) to a relativistic notion of image, and the corresponding technology of image processing; shift from a hierarchical structure of rigid lines of authority and command to a relatively loose line of context dependent on freedom of choice extended almost to the individual soldier; a discipline of austerity and isolation from the non-military (conditions accepted in the past as part of a military career) replaced by expectations of relaxation and enjoyment, derived from the permissiveness and drive for self-satisfaction of society at large. That some of these expectations could not be fulfilled was criticized, but not really understood. The hosts of the American army live by different standards. Muslim law prohibits alcohol consumption and certain forms of entertainment, as well as burial of dead infidels in a land claiming to be holy. The Gulf War, on its various fronts, was not a conflict of irreducible or irreconcilable religions, morals, or cultures. It was a conflict between an artificially maintained civilization of literacy, in which rich reserves of oil serve as a buffer from efficiency requirements in all aspects of life, and another civilization, one that entails the illiteracy of a society and an energy-hungry, global economy that reflects a dynamics of high efficiency. It might well be that the final attack reminded experts in war history, military strategy, or evolution of tactics of the surprising maneuver tried by Epaminondas, the Theban commander (371 BCE) in the battle of Leuctra: instead of a frontal assault, an attack on one flank. General Schwartzkopf is not Epaminondas. He succeeded in his mission by allowing for task distribution in an international army-more of a pain than a blessing-that resulted in many flanks. Helmuth von Moltke, in the exhausting Franco- Prussian War (1870-1871), changed the relation to his subordinate commanders by letting them operate under broad directives. The generals and commanders of the many armies involved in the Gulf War took advantage of the power of networking in order to orchestrate an attack that tested extremely efficient, and costly, annihilation technology under a plan that today's computers have simulated many a time over. But once I confessed that I wrote much of this chapter three years before the Gulf War, the reader might question whether I looked at the war through the spectacles of my hypothesis, seeing what I wanted to see, understanding events as they fit my explanatory model. I asked myself the same questions and concluded that presenting the argument as it stood before the war would shed light on the question and ultimately qualify the answer. War as practical experience "War is a sheer continuation of politics with other means," wrote Carl von Clausewitz (On War, 1818). It is difficult to argue against this; but a paraphrase, intended to put the line in historic perspective, might be appropriate: War is the continuation of the practical experience of survival in the context of a society trying to control and adjudicate resources. Accordingly, combat follows the line of other practical experiences. The practical experience of hunting-formerly combat with non-human adversaries-required the weapons eventually associated with war. These were the tools that primitive humans used to wrest food for their survival and the survival of their community. Future aspects of these activities, and the associated moral values, make us sometimes forget that the syncretic nature of human beings, i.e., projection of their natural endowment in the practical act, is expressed in the syncretism of the tools used. This syncretic condition evolved under the need for labor division, and one of the main early demands of labor division resulted in the establishment of the semi-professional and professional warrior. As the tools of the martial profession diversified more and more from working tools, a conceptual component (tactics and strategy) became part of the praxis. The conceptual component set forth a sequence to be followed, a logic to be used, and a method for counteracting enemy maneuvers in order to achieve victory. Von Clausewitz was the first to explicitly point out that war continues politics, while other writers on the subject, living centuries before he did, perceived war as a practical effort. Two Byzantine emperors, Maurice (539-602) and Leo, called the Wise (886-911), tried to formulate military strategy and tactics based on the pragmatic premise. They stipulated that the pragmatic framework defined the nature of the conflict and the actual condition of the battle, weapons included. Indeed, every known change in military materiel in a society has been synchronized to changes in the status of its practical experience. The invention of the stirrup by the Chinese (600) improved the ability of men riding horseback. It opened the avenue to wars where the backbone of battle formation was no longer composed of foot soldiers but of warriors on horses. Mechanical contraptions (e.g., the Trebuchet, acknowledged at 1100, based on releasing a heavy counterweight) for throwing large stones or missiles, opened the way to what would shift superior defensive capabilities (through fortifications, city walls, castles built before the 14th century) to superior offensive power. This was also the case with the cannons that the Turks used to conquer Constantinople (1453). But it is not military practice per se that concerns us here, but rather the implications of language, in particular literacy. At a very small scale of human activity, with many autarchic groups composed of few people, there was little need for organized combat or specially trained warriors. Incipient, rudimentary military practical experience, in its basic functions of aggression and defense, became desirable at a larger scale of human activity. This experience was simultaneous with the establishment of language, especially writing. Sun Tzu's book, as well as many earlier testimonies to battles (mythology, religious writings, epic poetry, and philosophy), can be mentioned here. This military practice integrated the means and skills of survival, such as hunting and safeguarding the territory from which food was obtained. Awareness of resources corresponded to awareness of scale. The scale of human activity in which the constitution of community member-warrior took place corresponded to increased settlement of populations, increased demand for resources, higher productivity, and accumulation of property-all reflected in the need to expand the practical experience of language beyond the immediate characteristic of orality. The efficiency of work and combat was at about an equal level. In a sense, wars lasted forever; peace was merely respite between conflicts. The notion of prisoner (usually sold into slavery) confirmed the importance of human labor and skill for consolidating a community, producing wealth for those in power, and subsistence for everyone else. The social constitution of the military was not excepted from pragmatic requirements of efficiency and mediation, i.e., of ensuring the highest efficiency within the given scale of human experience, as needs and expectations corresponding to this scale were manifested. While it is true that combat efficiency was spelled out in units of intentional destruction or preservation (of life and various artifacts relevant to human self- constitution), combat efficiency also referred to defenders whose goal was to make destruction by the enemy less possible (even impossible). While individual conflicts did not require the intervention of language more than orality could provide, conflicts between larger groups made the need for a coordinating instrument clear. Human language, through new words and constructs, testified to the experience of conflicts and the associated mytho-magical manifestations. Through language, this experience was projected against the background of many different forms of human praxis. As a general rule, armies of all types, under every type of government, acquired a special status in society due to the function they fulfilled. Written language did not generate armies; but it served as a prerequisite (even in its most rudimentary notation forms) for the institution of the military. Writing introduced many elements that influenced the combat experience: a record of means and people, a record of actions, an instrument for planning, a record of consequences. All the components of the military institution objectify the purpose of war at a particular time. They also objectify the relations between a society at war and, during times of peace, between society and its warriors. Language is the medium through which objectification takes place. The sequentiality of writing and the need to express sequences pertinent to conflicts are consubstantial. Von Clausewitz's line encompasses the extension in language of the many aspects of wars. "Did Gideon know how to read Hebrew? Did Deborah?" some people might ask, referring to leaders of decisive battles documented in the Old Testament. Others would refer to examples from the same time that are accounted for in Greek epics and the chronicles of the Middle East. Roman mythology and the testimony of Islam do not tell us whether all their warriors wrote or read. These documents do inform us of the pragmatic circumstances that led to the institution of the army as a body constituted in continuation of syncretic practical experiences, progressively constituting its own domain of existence and its own reason for being. From face-to-face conflicts that required almost no language, and which resulted in the victory of the stronger, to the conflicts between humans in which much technology-requiring little language-was also involved, changes parallel to the levels of literacy occurred. Under the circumstances of wars fought by armies facing each other, language was the medium for constituting armies and coordinating action. In order to define goals, to share plans for achieving victory, and to modify plans in response to changing conditions, language was as important as the number of horses, quality of swords and shields, and quality of ammunition. The profession of warrior, as much as the profession of hunter, was based on the ability to attack and defend, and on the skills needed to adapt means to goals within a changing balance of power. The first wars, and probably the majority of them, were fought before generalized literacy. The major warriors-the Egyptian pharaohs Tuthmose III in the battle for Meggido (1479 BCE), Ramses II battling the Hittites at Kadesh (1296 BCE), Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, the Spartans under Leonidas (480 BCE), Alexander the Great (conquering Babylon in 330 BCE), Julius Caesar (49-46 BCE) and Octavian (31 BCE), and the many Chinese warriors of this period and later-did not need literacy for their battles as much as for their politics. Their strategies resulted from the same expectations and pragmatic requirements that gave rise to the experience of written language. Wars were fought on terrain well chosen, by armies composed of men who carried out orders selected from a limited set of possibilities. To paraphrase the terminology of generative grammars, it was a limited war language, with not too many possible war sentences. Once improved means of work and production became the means of carrying on war, those in command could write more war texts, more scripts. As war efficiency increased, so did the possibility of a breakdown of the effort due to lack of integration and coordination. The military structure reflected the characteristics of the human praxis that fostered written language and, much later, literacy: relatively limited dynamics, centralized, hierarchical organization, low level of adaptability, a strictly sequential course of action, a deterministic mentality. David Oliver convincingly described the process: "Mechanics is the vehicle of all physical theory. Mechanics is the vehicle of war. The two have been inseparable." He refers to the practical demands of warfare in the context that led to the science of mechanics and eventually to the beginnings of projectile ballistics. By 1531, Nicolo Tartaglia of Brescia overcame his disdain for war and devised the gunner's square, which was perfected 100 years later by none other than Galileo. In 1688, the French introduced the socket bayonet on their muskets, which occurred simultaneous to changes in tools used at the time, i.e., the tools that allowed for manufacturing the bayonet. The framework that created conditions for the ideal of literacy affected the pursuit of war not only in technology, but also in the way wars were played out. The advancing line of exposed troops were involved in a dynamics of confrontation that reflected linearity, a phenomenon prevalent in the practical experience of civilian life. Destructive power was added until the enemy was destroyed. Row by row, soldiers stopped to fire platoon volleys, then continued onto the decisive bayonet charge. The structure of writing (sequences, hierarchy, accumulation, closure) and the structure of this particular military engagement were similar. Literacy as such was registered rather late as a qualifier of the warrior. But once integrated in the practical experience of military self-constitution, literacy changed the nature of making war and enabling higher levels of efficiency corresponding to the new scale of war. These were no longer skirmishes among feudal warlords, but major conflicts between nations. These conflicts diminished in number but grew in intensity. Their duration corresponded to the relatively long cycles of production, distribution, and consumption characteristic of literacy-based practical experiences. Under the pressure of many types of necessity embodied in human pragmatics, war was submitted to rules. It was civilized, at least in some of its aspects. The Catholic Church, preserver of literacy during the Dark Ages, when many little wars between feudal lords were carried on, took the lead in this direction. In order to avoid destruction of crops and lives in the barbarian societies of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, the only viable hierarchy tried to tame warriors with the literate rules that the Church preserved. With their own pragmatic considerations in mind, rulers accepted these prescriptions. It took a millennium for people to discover that wars never have final results. But they also learned that the experience of war creates knowledge-for example, of means used, weather patterns, territory, characteristics of the enemy-and creativity-what is called the art of war. Resulting in death and destruction, wars are also instances of self-education in one of life's most unforgiving schools. The institution of the military "The draft is the legitimate child of democracy," as Theodor Heuss defined it. Obligatory military service was introduced during one of the first modern revolutions- the French levée en masse (conscription) of 1793. The citizen-soldier replaced mercenaries and professional soldiers. The call "Aux armes, mes citoyens" that became a stanza of the French national anthem, glorified the expectations of the moment. Prussia followed suit almost immediately, motivated by economic reasons: cheap manpower for war. During the prolonged process of becoming an institution, the military enlisted the support of the state it defended or of those private establishments (church, landowners, merchants) that needed its services. Feeding off the means generated by society, the military institution integrated the practical experience of the people in its structure and actively pursued courses of action meant to increase its efficiency. At every juncture of humankind's continuous change, the military had to prove levels of efficiency that justified its own existence as a factor in the active defense of resources. When it was no longer efficient and weighed too heavily on the socio-economic foundation, it was eventually overthrown, or the society supporting it stagnated, as we see happening time and again in military dictatorships. As one of the many highly structured environments for human interaction, the military identified itself, as did all other social mechanisms, through repetitive actions. Each action could be further seen as a set of tasks, or orders, connected to motivations or justifications, which anticipate or follow practical experiences specific to the military. Some were connected to life within the organization, such as the possibility to advance in the hierarchy and affect future activity. These were internal in the sense that they were affected by the implicit rules adopted by the institution. Others were external, expressed in the nature of the relation between the military and society: symbolic status, participation in power, expectations of recognition. Evolution of the military resulted in changes in the language involved in defining and modifying the interactions characteristic of military practical experience. This language became progressively more adapted to the goal-win the war-and less coordinated with civilian language, in which the discourse of motivations leading to the conflict occurred. Correspondingly, relations with the outside world-future members of the military, social and political institutions, cultural establishments, the church-took place in what appeared to be a different language. Changes in the structure of the practical experience of human self-constitution, as well as changes resulting from a growing scale, had an influence both inside and outside the military. When the individuals making up the world constituted themselves as literate, the functioning of the military assumed the expectations and characteristics of literacy. What would emerge as military academies were probably established at this time. Von Moltke's ideas of changing the nature of relations with subordinates just predated the many modern advances in war technology: the use of steam-powered warships (by the Japanese in their war against the Russians in 1905); the introduction of radio, telephone, and automotive transportation (all tested in Word War 1); and even the articulation of the concept of total war (by Erich Lindendorf). All these correspond to a pragmatic framework within which literacy was necessary, and literacy's characteristic reflected upon new practical experiences. The total war is of the same nature as the expectation of universal literacy: one literacy replaces all others. There is to the military institution of the civilization of literacy an expectation of permanency, embodied in rules and regulations, in hierarchies, and centralized structure, similar to that of state, industry, religion, education, science, art, and literature. There is also an expectation of centralism, and thus hierarchy and discipline. These characteristics explain why almost all armies adopt similar literacy-based structures. Guerrilla wars, in their early manifestations (skirmishes during the American Revolution) and in their current forms in South America, for example, are illiterate in that they are not based on the conventions of literacy. They unfold in a decentralized manner, and are based on the dynamics of self-organizing nucleii. This is why military strategists consider them so dangerous today. Patterns of military action and the language recurrences associated with these patterns express attitudes and values pertinent to the pragmatic framework. England, at the height of its literate experience, had a highly structured, almost ritualized way of carrying out war. One of the main complaints during the American Revolution was that the colonials did not fight according to the rules that literate West Europe had established over the centuries. Under circumstances of change, as those leading to the end of the need for a generalized, all-encompassing literacy, these attitudes and values, expressed in language and in patterns of military activity, are exhausted, except where they are carried over to other forms of praxis, especially to politics and sports. As is the case with many literacy-based institutions, the military became a goal in itself, imposing rules on social and political circumstances, instead of adapting to them. Following World Wars I and II, the military took control of many countries under the guise of various political and ideological justifications. Military, or military-supported, dictatorships, displaying the same characteristics of centralized rule as monarchy and democracy under presidents, sprang up where other modes of government proved ineffective. This happens today in many parts of the world that are still dedicated to economic and political models of the past, such as in South America, the Middle East, and Africa, for example. From the literate to the illiterate war The last war fought under the sign of literacy was probably World War II. The very fact that the last world war came to its final end after the atomic bomb was deployed is indicative of the fact that once one aspect of human practical experience is affected by a change of scale, others are affected as well. While the millions of victims (the majority of whom were raised in the expectations of the civilization of literacy) might make us reluctant to mention literacy, in fact, war's systematic cruelty and extermination power are the result of literacy characteristics implicit in the effective functioning of the war machine and in the articulation of war goals. In the history of World War II, the chapter about language is probably as enlightening as the chapters devoted to the new weapons it brought about: the precursors of modern rocket systems, in addition to the atomic bomb. Each of the powers involved in this large-scale war understood that without the integrating force of literacy, exercised in and around the conflict, the enemy could not succeed. Many books were written about the escalation of hostility through the language of political and ideological discourse. Many prejudices associated with this war were expressed in exquisitely literate works, supported by formally perfect, logical arguments. On the other hand, some writers pointed out the weaknesses of literacy. Roland Barthes, for example, studied its fascist nature. Others mentioned the inadequacy of a medium bound to fail because it was so opaque that it covered thoughts instead of revealing them, validated false values instead of exposing them for what they were. The language of politics extended truly into the language of the conflict. Thanks to radio and newspapers, as well as the rhetoric of rallies, it was able to address entire nations. The industrial establishment, upon which the war machine was built, still embodied the characteristics of the pragmatic framework of literacy. It was based on the industrial model of intense manufacturing. Millions of people had to be moved, fed, and logistically supported on many fronts. The war involved elements of an economy in crisis, affording much less than abundance. Germany and its allies, having planned for a Blitzkrieg, threw all their limited resources into the preparation and execution of the war. Europe was coming out of the depression resulting from World War I. The people were promised that victory would bring the well deserved recompense that had eluded them the first time around. Against this background, literacy was mobilized in all the areas where it could make a difference: education, propaganda, religious and national indoctrination, in the racist discourse of justifications and in articulating war goals. Ideological purposes and military goals, expressed in literate discourse, addressed equally those on the front lines and their families. Literacy actively supported self- discipline and restraint, the acceptance of centralism and hierarchy, as well as the understanding of extended production cycles of intense labor and relatively stable, although not necessarily fair, working relations. All these characteristics, as well as a self-induced sense of superiority, were reflected in the war. Advanced levels of labor division and improved forms of coordination of the parties involved in the large scale experience of factory labor marked the military experience. The war entailed confrontations of huge armies that practically engaged entire societies. It combined strategies of exhaustion (blockades, crop destruction, interruption of any vital activities) and annihilation. Millions of people were exterminated. The structure of the army embodied the structure of the pragmatic framework. Its functioning was reflective of industrial systems designed to process huge quantities of raw material in order to mass-manufacture products of uniform quality. What made literate language use essential in work and market transactions made it essential, in forms appropriate to the goal, to the prosecution of the war. From this perspective, it should become clear why major efforts were made to understand this language. Efforts were also made to get information about tactics and strategy embodied in it, as much ahead of time as possible, and to use this literate knowledge to devise surprise or counter-strategies. This is why language became a main field of operation. Enemies went after military code (not a different language, but a means of maintaining secrecy) and did not spare money, intelligence, or human life in their efforts to understand how the opposing forces encoded their plans. The brightest minds were used, and strategies of deceit were developed and applied, because knowing the language of the enemy was almost like reading the enemy's mind. At the risk of dealing with the obvious, I should state here clearly that the language of war is not the same as everyday language; but it originates in this language and is conceived and communicated in it. Both are structurally equivalent and embodied in literacy. To dispose of the enemy's use of language means to know what the enemy wants to do and how and when. In short, it means to be able to understand the pragmatics of the enemy as defined under the circumstances of war, as these extended the circumstances of life and work. Since language projects our time and space experience, and since wars are related to our universe of existence, understanding the language of the enemy is actually integrated in the combat plan and in a society's general war effort. Climbing hills to establish a good offensive position, crossing rivers in a defensive move, parachuting troops behind enemy lines in a surprise maneuver are human experiences characteristic of the pragmatic context of literacy, impossible to relate to the goal pursued without the shared conventions implicit in language. Some people still believe that the master coup of World War II was the breaking of the ciphers of the Enigma machines used by the Germans, thus making the function of language, in such an effort of millions of people, the center of the war effort. Polish cryptoanalysts and the British operation, in which Alan Turing (the father of modern computing) participated, succeeded in deciphering, reconstructing, and translating messages that, re-enciphered in Allied codes (the ULTRA material), decisively aided the war effort. By the end of the war, the world was already a different place. But within the framework of war, and in direct connection to the changes in practical human self- constitution, a structural shift to a different dynamics of life and work had started. Various aspects related to the determinism that eventually resulted in the war started to be questioned through new practical experiences: the need to overcome national interests; the need to transcend boundaries, those boundaries of hate and destruction expressed in the war; the need to share and exchange resources. Visionaries also realized that the incremental increase in world population, despite the enormous number of deaths, would result in a new scale of human experiences that could not be handled within a rigid system with few degrees of liberty. The recent illiterate war in the Arabian Gulf, and the never-ending terrorist attacks all over the world, can be seen, in retrospect, as the progeny of the war that brought down the civilization of literacy. The concept of Blitzkrieg and the dropping of the A-bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a foretaste of the quick, efficient, illiterate war. The Nintendo war (a cliché revisited) Military all over the world disposes of the highest technology. Even countries that can afford to maintain outmoded large armies-because of population density, relatively low salaries, and the ability to draft the entire population-seek the latest weapons that scientific discovery and technological progress can offer. The weapons market is probably the most pervasive of all markets. Among the numerous implications of this state of affairs, none is more disconcerting than the fact that human genius serves the cause of death and destruction. In some countries, food reserves barely cover needs beyond a season or two; but the military has supplies to cover years of engagement. Today the military is in control of the most sophisticated technology ever created. It is also becoming an institution of a rather low level of literacy, publicly deplored and politically questioned. This assertion applies less (but it still applies) to the command level, and more to its enlisted men and women. Addressing the topic of language proficiency, Darell Bott provides an interesting portrait of a person who joins the military intelligence unit of the National Guard as a linguist. After training in the Defense Language Institute, the individual loses 25 percent of his language skills and fails to meet language proficiency standards. Every effort is made to change this situation, even before understanding it. Darell Bott's description does not refer to an accidental, individual failure, but to the implicit dynamics of military practical experiences in the civilization of illiteracy. A linguist, of all professionals, does not choose to lose literate language proficiency. This proficiency is just not necessary for attaining the efficiency called for in the military. Not really understanding this structural condition, armies introduce their recruits to weaponry-the majority designed for the illiterate warrior- and to the skills of reading and writing. These skills dispense ideology, religion, history, geography, psychology, and sex education in concentrated doses. The situation is paradoxical: what defines the practical experience of the military today-high technology, division of tasks, networking, distributed responsibilities-conflicts with the traditional expectations of clear lines of command, hierarchy, authority, and discipline. The means that render useless the characteristics stemming from literacy-based pragmatics are welcome, but the human condition associated with them is frightening. Yes, a literate soldier can be better indoctrinated, subjected to the inherent arguments of literacy, of rules and authorities to be obeyed. But the nature of the pragmatics of war has changed: faster action makes reading-of instructions, commands, messages-inappropriate, if not dangerous. For focusing on targets moving at a speed far higher than that afforded by literacy-based training, one needs the mediation of the digital eye. Conflicts are as segmented as the world itself, since clear- cut distinctions between good and bad no longer function effectively. Centralized military experiences based on structures of authority and hierarchy are counterproductive in actual conflicts of complex dynamics. The war in Vietnam is a good example of this. During this war, instructions were transmitted from the top of the hierarchy down to the platoons through commanders not adept at the type of war Vietnam represented. Even the President of the USA was effectively involved, more often than not through decisions that proved detrimental to the war effort. The USA forgot the lesson of its own pragmatic foundation in imitating, as it did in Vietnam, the literate wars of Europe in a context of confrontation characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy. Memoirs, published too late (Robert MacNamara's is but one example), reveal how the literate paradigm embodied in the government and the military kept from the public essential information that, in retrospect, rendered the loss of so many human lives meaningless. The luxury of a standing army and the cost of subjecting soldiers to long cycles of training, literacy included, belong to the previous pragmatic framework. The time of the life-long warrior is over. The experience of war changes as quickly as new weapons are invented. The new scale of humankind requires global levels of efficiency impossible to attain if productive forces are withdrawn from productive experiences. Once upon a time, the military distinguished itself as a separate body in the social texture. The civilization of illiteracy reintegrated the military in the network of assignments and purposeful functions of the pragmatics of high efficiency. From the complete suit of armor worn in medieval Europe (before firearms rendered it ineffective) to the plain-clothes military of today, not only have over 500 years gone by, but, more important, new forms of self-constitution, and hence identification, became necessary and real. Sulfur fumes used over 2,000 years ago in the battle at Delium and the threat of chemical and biological weapons in the Gulf War are superficially related. The same knowledge that goes into producing new chemical and biological means used in high efficiency agriculture and in food preparation goes into chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. This is not a discourse in favor of efficient armies which are of great help during natural disasters, nor is it a discourse in favor of destructive wars, no matter who justifies them. If it sounds like one, it is because the literate description of the structural background against which, whether we like it or not, the practical experience of the military takes place, bears the stamp of literate praxis. In the civilization of illiteracy, the military has come to acknowledge that there is little that can, or should, be done to restore literacy as its coordinating mechanism. Literacy is not necessarily the best system for achieving optimal military performance at the level facilitated by new technologies. Neither is it, as some would like to believe, a means of avoiding war. The literate human being proved to be a war beast equal, if not superior, to the illiterate who was subjected to impression and conscription, or who enlisted as a mercenary. Current military research attempts to remove human beings from the direct confrontation that war used to entail. Nothing affects public support for military action more than body-bags. These spoil the fun and games that expensive missiles provide, the reason for which the Gulf War was nicknamed "the Nintendo War." And missiles fare better among the Netizens, despite their reluctance to embrace belligerence for settling disputes. Highly efficient, sophisticated digitally programmed systems do not relate to space and time the way humans do. This aspect gives the machines an edge in respect to the implicit coordination expected in war. The kinds of interaction that military praxis requires makes literacy inadequate for coordinating the humans who constitute today's armies. Time is segmented beyond human perception and control; space expands beyond what a person can conceive and control. Major components of a war machine are placed in outer space and synchronized by extremely time-sensitive devices. The Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed Star Wars) was the most advertised example. More trivial systems, like those used in orienting troops in the desert, are a matter of routine. The expressive power required for increasing motivation, and for projecting a rational image of irrationality, collides with the requirement for speed and precision essential to accomplishing complex tactical and strategic plans. Coordination of sophisticated information systems machines does not have to rely on a language frequently not precise enough, or fast enough, to accommodate very dynamic processes. At speeds beyond that of sound at which battles are fought with airplanes, rockets, satellites, and missiles, a soldier observing a target would be late in pressing a trigger, not to mention waiting for the command to fire. The complexity of war machines is such that even their maintenance and repair requires means independent of the language that functions according to the rules of literacy. It should come as no surprise that the electronic book has already appeared in the military sphere of human experience. This book is the digitally stored description of a device, not the printed book that was once the manual describing it. If the device is an airplane, or gun system on the airplane, or equipment on a ship, the weight of manuals needed to explain its functioning, or to support maintenance and troubleshooting, would keep the airplane grounded. Any change in such a complex system would require reprinting of thousands of pages. In its electronic version, the book is a collection of data manipulated by a computer, displayed in visual form when necessary, and programmed to make recognition of the problem and its solution as simple as possible-idiot-proof, in fact. It is not a sequential collection of pages indexed in a table of contents and requiring a linear reading strategy. The electronic book opens to the appropriate page, and every page is generated only as necessary, according to the maintenance or repair requirements of the case. Obviously, the readers addressed by the electronic book are different from the literate. They are at least partially visual literates who know how to look at an image and follow pictographic prompts. Instead of reading, the human operators carry out the required operation, supervised by the system, counting only on the feedback from the machine. Under these circumstances, efficiency expectations make the use of the human being almost a luxury. The paradigm of self-servicing machines, of circuits that can fix themselves (von Neumann's genius at work) is already a reality. The electronic book-here presented in an application of military relevance, although there is more to it than that-is one example from the many that can be given regarding how our good old verbal literacy is becoming obsolete. Electronic books constituted over networks (wired or wireless) support a wide range of collaborative activities. By their nature, military experiences utilize such activities. Access to resources and to an unlimited array of possible interactions is essential to collaboration. Literate expression cannot fulfill these requirements. Digital formats used in electronic books serve as a medium for sharing and understanding goals. The subsumation of individuality to the goal is probably the only specifically military component that carries over from previous experiences of war. Nevertheless, this subsumation does not follow the patterns of centralism and the hierarchy of literacy. The methods are different in that more initiative than ever before is required from the soldiers. This initiative is embodied in alternate means of expression and communication. In electronically synchronized instruments, programs of distributed tasks and massive parallel computation replace literacy and literacy-based actions. Today's technology permits flying at low altitude and high speed, but limitations of the human biological system make this dangerous for the pilot. When reaching a certain speed, the human can no longer coordinate movements without which low altitude flying becomes suicidal. But suicide is no alternative to avoiding enemy radar, since there are no words capable of alerting a pilot to the heat detector guided missile. Accordingly, languages addressing machines and vision systems with detection capabilities change the nature of human involvement in military situations. Again, these languages make the participation of literate language less and less significant. Literacy-based means cannot provide for the expected coordination. Mediation takes place among many distributed, loosely interconnected devices; efficiency increases due to the many resources integrated in such powerful and ubiquitous systems. I give these examples-rudimentary in comparison to the Nintendo war we watched on our television screens a few years ago-from the viewpoint of someone who believes in life, peace, and human understanding, but also as one who sees a progressive discarding of literacy from one of the most language-dependent forms of human interaction and coordination. As with everything liberated from language and literacy, military practice was dehumanized. This consequence is likely to be welcomed in its more general significance-let machines kill machines. Just as in factories and offices, the human being is replaced by programs endowed with knowledge mediated by something other than literacy. What changes the structure of military activity, and language's participation in it, are the new languages embodied in the technology. That computer-game simulations of flight or target-shooting are basically equivalent to the systems of precision and destruction used in the Gulf War need not be repeated. But that players of computer games grow up with skills expected from jet pilots and from operators of extremely productive technology deserves attention and thought. Do weapons speak and write and read? Do they understand the language of the officer who decides when they are to be fired? Is an intelligent weapon system capable of interpreting whether a legitimate target should indeed be wiped out, even if at the time of its use, circumstances would speak against destroying it on moral grounds? I ask these questions-which can only be answered with a "No"-on purpose. The literate attitude, according to which military praxis is one of command and execution requiring language, presents us with a contradiction. Non-military practical experience is more and more mediated by many languages and synchronized in a vast network of distributed assignments. If military experiences were to remain literacy-based, this would be equal to maintaining different pragmatic structures and pursuing goals of disparate efficiency. It is true that the literacy still involved in the military is reflected in structures of hierarchy, a relative expectation of centralism (in the USA, as in many other countries, the President is the commander-in-chief), and dependency on deterministic models. Nevertheless, the expectation of efficiency makes critical the need to adopt essentially non-hierarchic, self-management structures promoting coordination and cooperative efforts within a distributed network of different assignments. In the partial literacy of the military, a redefinition of the process of goal- setting and the pursuit of assignments other than destruction, such as relocation of refugees or aiding vast populations subjected to natural disasters, continuously takes place. Security is another area of self-constitution that derives benefits from military praxis. The smaller and more distributed wars through which terrorism seeks to accomplish its goals have resulted in small armies of highly trained security personnel to protect the civilian public. Combat is truly global. But as opposed to the small war of the Middle Ages, the illiterate terrorist respects no rules and no higher authority. No army could have changed the world more than the new system of human relations geared toward achieving levels of efficiency corresponding to numbers of people in pursuit of satisfying their needs, and of others achieving levels of prosperity never before experienced. Armies, as much as schools and universities, as much as the nations they are supposed to defend, as much as the nuclear family, and all the activities related to them and all the products they generate, correspond to the structure of praxis of a loosely connected world with patterns of human practical experiences marked by individual success and dependent on personal performance. The look that kills Smaller, more deployable, as efficient as possible-this description sums up the characteristics of new weapons on the wish-list of almost any army in the world. On a more specific basis, defense officials have sketched some research and development objectives. Here are some, obviously all subject to obsolescence: Worldwide all-weather forces for limited warfare, which do not require main operating bases, including a force that is logistically independent for 30 days Tracking of strategically relocatable targets Global command control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) capabilities to include on-demand surveillance of selected geographical areas and real-time information transfer to command authorities Weapon systems that deny enemy targeting and allow penetration of enemy defenses by managing signatures and electronic warfare Air defense systems to overmatch threat systems Weapons that autonomously acquire, classify, track, and destroy targets Reduction of operations and support resources requirement by 50% without impairing combat capability Expected are a force powered by electricity (ecological concerns), robotic tanks and aerial vehicles, and-this is not science fiction-bionically enhanced soldiers with embedded chips, able to sleep when commanded, and an exoskeleton system allowing individuals to carry 400 pounds around the battlefield (compared to the mere 100 they carry now). General Jerry C. Harrison even formulated the following order: "Okay guys, let's shoot number 49. Tune in your goggles to see but not be seen." The look that kills (the proud accomplishment of university-based research) becomes reality. The only comment that can follow such a description is that all the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy are embodied in the expectations of military efficiency. Globality, interconnectedness, open-ended goals and motivations, reduced human involvement, and many partial literacies are all here, presented in specific expectations. The questionable aspect is the implicit theme of the permanence of the institution of the military, probably the most resilient legacy of the civilization of literacy. What the technology of the civilization of illiteracy requires is the command of the abstractions (the language) driving it, the partial literacy associated with this language, pertinent to military or any other use. As one of the partial literacies of this time, military literacy defines the domain of action and the interpretation of such actions. It is relevant, for instance, that disarmament treaties not be formulated without military language, i.e., without the military experts, the ones we want to release from their functions. Each such treaty either discards a part of the language of weapons and associated technologies, or makes it less relevant, as it opens new avenues for increased military efficiency. The new organization of the military is one of confronting technologies and associated military literacy. Accordingly, to talk about orders given by an officer, whether a weapon understands such orders, and all similar logocentric examples, means to still look at the military from the perspective of a civilization from which it continuously distances itself. Artificial eyes (radar, vision systems), odor detectors, touch-sensitive devices, speed sensors, and many other digital devices free the human being from confrontation and progressively eliminate death from the equation of war. Those who compare the photographic images of previous wars to animation on computer game terminals compare a condition of direct confrontation, of our own nature, and of the realization of the limited condition of life to that of mediated experiences. The night sky lit up by tracers, the eerie video-game-like actions, the targets seen through remote cameras are of a realm different from that of destruction and blood, where moral concern is triggered. The expectation is pragmatic, the test is efficiency. The survival of the military institution in its literate structure and the lack of understanding of just what makes literacy unnecessary in the pragmatic framework of today's global world are not the same thing. The first aspect refers to the immense inertia of a huge mechanism; the second involves the difficult task of freeing ourselves, as products of literate education, from ourselves. Recognition of such a fundamental change does not come easy. Universities, bastions of literacy, producing the illiterate technology of war, are caught in the dilemma of negating their own identity, or becoming agents of illiterate action. We hang on to the ideal of literacy, as well as to the so-called necessity of strong defense-which reflects literacy-based values such as national borders in a global world-because we are not yet ready to cope with a new dynamics of change that is not militarily determined, but which results from structural necessities of a socio-economic nature. The political map of the world changed drastically in recent years because factors affecting the pragmatic framework of human practical experience, at the scale we reached today, are at work. Globality is not a dream, a political goal, a Utopian project, but a necessity resulting from this new scale. Book Five The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in the Age of the Web Collapse and catastrophe as opposed to hope and unprecedented possibilities- these are the party lines in the heated discussions centered on the dynamics of ongoing changes in which the whole world is involved. Paul Virilio is quite expressive in his formulation of the problem: "An accompanying evil...is the end of writing, as it unfolds through image technology, cinema/film, and television screen. [...] We don't read anymore, we hardly write each other, since we can call each other on the phone. Next, we will no longer speak! I'd really like to say: this will indeed be the silence of the lambs!" No less powerful in their assertions are those who see chances for social renewal in interactions not embodied in the rules of literacy. The electronic forum of the European Commission, involved in Project Information Society, lists Ten Bones of Contention from which I chose the following: "The system we are stuck with and frantically trying to fix comes from another time and an entirely different set of circumstances. It is changing massively in front of our noses and needs to be completely rethought and radically overhauled." The statement is less expressive than Virilio's, but no less intolerant. As discussions continue to bring up extremely important aspects of the conflict marking this time of discontinuity, the billions of people populating our world today constitute themselves through a broad variety of practical experiences. A list of these experiences-from primitive patterns of hunting and gathering food to eye movement command of remote systems and applications driven by voice recognition in the world of nanotechnological synthesis-would only augment the confusion. Given this broad pragmatic spectrum, no one could seriously project the future as one of virtual communities, or of an electronic democracy, without sounding overly naive or directly stupid. We know how far we have come, but we do not really know where we are. In advancing a comprehensive pragmatic perspective, I chose to undertake an elaboration well beyond the short-breathed argumentation peculiar to this moment in time. The advantage of this approach deserves to be shared. Endorsing one perspective or another, such as the California Ideology-defined by its critics as "global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology, and politics"-or alternatives-the so-called European model, or the transactional structure, or neo- Marxian solutions, to name a few-is not an option. Indeed, the argument of this book is that answers cannot result from infatuation with technology, cultural self-replication, models based on biological mechanisms, unfocused bionomic elaborations, or incessant criticism of capitalism. Affirmations of a deep nature, above and beyond the rhetoric of intellectual controversy and political discourse, must originate from those affirmative actions through which our identity as individuals, communities, and society are established. The metaphor of the interactive future is the expression of a simple thesis: At the global scale, human interaction, as the concrete form of engaging infinitely diverse cognitive resources, is the last available resource on which the future of the species can depend. Transcending literacy Transcending literacy takes place in the practical experiences of the pragmatics of high efficiency corresponding to the global scale of humankind. This scale affects the constitution of human communities and the interaction between individuals and community. As has already been mentioned, Bedouins in the Sahara Desert and Indians in the Andes Mountains are no less hooked up to television than people living in technologically highly developed countries. More important, the identities of peoples in less developed societies on the global map of economic and political interdependencies are already subject to the most advanced processing techniques. In the ledgers of the global economy, their existence is meticulously entered with respect to what they can contribute and through what they need and can afford. People constituting virtual communities, in Silicon Valley, Japan, France, Israel, and any other place on this globe, are subject to integration in the global scale through different means and methods. The expansion of non-literacy based human practical experiences of self- constitution raises legitimate concern regarding the social status of the individual and the nature of community interdependencies. Children, for example, are subjected to more images than language. They have the tendency to perceive time as a continuous present and expect gratification to be as instantaneous as it appears on television, or as easy to achieve as connecting to exciting Web sites. They wind up experts in interactive games and in controlling extremely fast processes. Disconnected from culture and tradition, they are extremely adaptable to new circumstances and in a hurry to ascertain their version of independence. Sex, drugs, rap music, and membership in cults or gangs are part of their contradictory profile. These adolescents are the pilots of the Nintendo wars, but also the future explorers of outer space, the physicists, biologists, and geneticists who create new materials and subject machines of breathtaking complexity to tasks in which every millionth of a second is essential to the outcome. They are also the future artists and record-breaking athletes; they are computer programmers and designers of the future. And they will be the service providers in an economy where change, predicated by the need to swiftly match outcome to ever-increasing demand, cannot be met by means burdened by the inertia and heavy-handedness of literacy. As data make clear, such individuals are bound to be less involved in community life and less committed to the ethics of the past. Moral absolutes and concern for others do not play a major role in their lives, which are shaped by practical experiences tending towards self-sufficiency, sometimes confused with independence. In view of all these characteristics, which reflect the decreasing role of literacy-based human experiences, the question often asked is how will the relation between the community and extremely efficient individuals, constituted in relatively insular experience, be shaped? Moreover, what will the status of community be? In this respect, it is important to know what forces are at work, and to what extent our own awareness can become a factor in the process. In our day, many people and organizations deplore the state of urban life (in the USA and around the world), high unemployment, the feeling of disenfranchisement that individuals, and sometimes whole communities, have. Immigrants of all the countries they landed in; guest workers in the European Community; the young generation in Asia, Africa, and the countries that once made up the Eastern Block; the minorities in the USA; the unemployed around the world-each of these groups faces problems reflecting the relation between them as a different entity and the society as a whole. Immigrants are not necessarily welcome, and when accepted, they are expected to integrate. Guest workers are required to work at tasks with which citizens of the host country do not want to dirty their hands. The young generation is expected to follow in their parents' footsteps. One minority group will have problems with another, and with society at large, in which they are supposed to integrate. The unemployed are expected to earn their benefits and eventually to accept whatever job is available. Literacy implied expectations of homogeneity. Immigrants were taught the language of their new homeland so they could become like any other citizen. Guest workers, defined by their status in the labor market, were expected to gradually become unnecessary and to peacefully return to their native countries. Young people, processed through education, and the unemployed, after being offered some short retraining, would be absorbed in the machine called national economy. In respect to community, the historic sequence can be summarized as follows: individuals loosely connected to their peers; individuals constituting viable entities for survival; transfer of individual attributes (self-determination, choice) to the community; integration in centralized community; distribution of tasks; decentralization. Each step is defined by the extent of an individual's optimal performance: from very high individual performance, essential to survival, to distributed responsibility, until society takes over individual responsibility. Liberal democracy celebrates the paradox of socialized individualism. In this respect, it ends the age of political battles (and, as we hear, the age of history), but opens the age of increased access to abundance. Commercial democracy is neither the result of political action nor the expression of any ideology. Within its sphere of action, the boundaries between the individual and the very unsettled community represent the territory of conflict. Moral individualism succeeds or fails within a framework of adversarial human relations. Since moral individualism is actually the underpinning of liberalism-"Do what's best for yourself"-the liberty it advances is that of competitive access to abundance. Socialized individualism accepts the state only as purveyor of rights and possibilities (when the Hegelian notion of the priority of the state over the individual is accepted de facto), not as moral instance. The transition to a pragmatics in which individual performance becomes marginal, in view of the many coordinating mechanisms ensuring redundancies that obliterate personal participation, is definitive of this process. The relative significance of malfunctions-breakdown in the legal and social system, for example-as instances of self-awareness and new beginnings, prompted by the need to remedy past practices, is different in each of the stages mentioned. So is the possibility of change and renewal. Creativity in current pragmatics is less and less an issue of the individual and more the result of orchestrated efforts in a large network of interactions. The underlying structure of the civilization of illiteracy supports a pragmatics of heterogeneity, distributed tasks, and networking. Human practical experiences of self-constitution no longer generate uniformity, but diversity. There is no promise of permanency, even less of stable hierarchies and centralism. We face new problems. Their formulation in literate form is deceptive; their challenge in the context of illiteracy, in which they emerge, is unprecedented. This is what prompts concerns about the civilization of illiteracy. Being in language The two aspects of human self-constitution through language-individual and community (society)-derive from the basic issue of social interrelationships. One's language is not independent of the language of the society, despite the fact that, in a given society, people identify themselves through noticeable peculiarities in the way they speak, write, read, and carry on dialogue. Elements pertaining to language are integrated in the human's biological structure. Still, language does not emerge, as the senses do, but is progressively acquired. The process of language acquisition is at the same time a process of projecting human abilities related to language's emerging characteristics. Regardless of the level of language acquired, language overwrites the senses. It projects integrated human beings-a unity of nature and language-prone to identify themselves in the culture that they continuously shape. While nature is a relatively stable system of reference, culture changes as humans change in the process of their various activities. To be within a language, as all human beings are, and in a community means to participate in processes of individual integration and social coordination. Individual language use and social use of language are not identical. Individuals constitute themselves differently than communities do. That in each community there are elements common to the individuals constituting it only says that the sum total of individual practical experiences of language is different from the language characteristic of the social experience. The difference between the language of the individual and the language of a community is indicative of social relationships. A more general thesis deserves to be entertained: The nature and variety of human interactions, within and without practical experiences of self-constitution in language, describe the complexity of the pragmatic framework. These interactions are part of the continuous process of identification as individuals and groups in the course of ascertaining their identity as a particular species. Acknowledged forms of relationships in work, family life, magic, ritual, myth, religion, art, science, or education are evinced through their respective patterns. Such patterns, circumscribed by human self-constitution in the natural and cultural context, are significant only retroactively. They testify to the human being's social condition and express what part of nature and what part of culture is involved in this condition. The primordial significance of these two phenomena lies in the expression of practical experiences followed, not preceded, by cognition. Active participation of individuals in practical experiences of language acknowledges their need to identify themselves in the patterns of interrelation mentioned. People do not get involved with other people because either party may be nice. Involvement is part of the continuous definition of the individual in contexts of conflict and cooperation, of acknowledging similarity and difference. Any dynamics, in biology or in culture, is due to differences. People take language for granted and never question its conventions. As a natural, inherited (in Chomsky's view) attribute, rather like the human senses, language is not reinvented each time practical experiences of constitution through language take place. Neither is its usefulness questioned-as happens with artifacts (tools in particular)-each time our practical experience reaches the limits of language. The breakdown of an artifact-i.e., its inappropriateness to the task at hand-suggests the possible experience of crafting another. The breakdown of language points to limits in the human experience, not in its accessories. Malfunctioning of language points to the biological endowment and the ways this is projected in reality through everything people do. This is not true in respect to other, less natural, sign systems: symbols, artificial languages, meta-languages. What changes from one scale of humankind, i.e., from one situation of matching needs to means for satisfying them, to another is the coefficient of the linear equation, not the linearity as such. A small group of people can survive by combining hunting, fruit gathering, and farming. The effort to satisfy a relatively bigger group increases only in proportion to the size of the group. In the known moments when a critical mass, or threshold, was reached (language acquisition, agriculture, writing, industrial production, and now the post-industrial), the expectation of higher efficiency corresponding to each scale of human experiences triggered changes in the pragmatic framework. The awareness of language's failure derives from practical experiences for which new languages become necessary. Miscommunication is an instance of language not suitable to the experience. Lack of communication points to limitations of the humans involved in an activity. Miscommunication makes people question (themselves, others) about what went wrong, why, and what, if anything, can be done to avoid practical consequences affecting the efficiency of their activity. Other forms of language malfunction can affect people as individuals or as members of a community in ways different from those peculiar to communication. The failure of political systems, ideologies, religion(s), markets, ethics, or family is expressed in the breakdown of patterns of human relations. We keep alive the language of those political systems, ideologies, religions, and markets even after noticing their failure, not by accident or through oversight but because all those languages are us, as we constitute ourselves as participants in a political process, subjects of ideological indoctrination, religious believers, commodities in the market, family members, and ethical citizens. The inefficiency of these experiences reflects our own inefficiency, more difficult to overcome than poor spelling, etymological ignorance, or phonetic deafness. The wall behind the Wall An appropriate example of the solidarity between language experience and the individual constituted in language is provided by the breakdown of the East European block, and even more pointedly by the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Nobody really suspected that once the infamous Berlin Wall came down, the people who lived to the east of it, trained and educated in and for a pragmatic framework whose underlying structure was reflected in their high degree of literacy, would remain captive to it as their legal, social, and economic conditions changed. Despite the common language- German is the language through which national unity was ascertained-East Germans are prisoners of the structural characteristics of the society projected on them through literacy: centralism, clear-cut distinctions, determinism, strong hierarchical structures, and limited choice. The invisible but powerful inner conditioning of the East Germans' literacy-categorically superior to that of their Western brothers and sisters-is not adequate to the new pragmatics attained in West Germany and raises obstacles to East Germany's integration in a dynamic society. The illiterate pragmatics of high efficiency, associated with high expectations that seem to outpace actual performance, was foisted on East Germans by the well intentioned, though politically opportunistic, government from across a border that should never have existed. Things are not different in other parts of the world-Korea, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, etc., where the rhythms of pragmatic developments and social, political, economic, national, and cultural developments are totally desynchronized. The best poetry was written in East Europe; most of the books ever written were read by its people. It is impossible to ignore that the best theater in the world, the most elaborate cinematography, the best choirs and dance ensembles, and even the highest level of mathematical theory, physics, and biology became possible in a context of restriction, oppression, and disregard of individuals and their creativity. It is also impossible not to finally realize that the strength built on literacy-based structures was deceiving and self-deceiving. In the not-too-distant past, the people of these countries read books, attended concerts and operas, and visited museums. Now, if they are not in misery, they are as obsessed with indulging in everything they could not have before, even if this means giving up their spiritual achievements. Consumption is the new language, even before a basis for efficient practical experiences is put in place, and sometimes instead of it. The old relation between the language of the individual and the language of society displayed patterns of deception and cowardice. The new emergent relation expresses patterns of expectation well beyond the efficiency achieved, or hoped for, in this integrated world of extreme competitive impact. The wall behind the Wall is embodied in extremely resistant patterns of human interaction originating in the context of literacy- based pragmatics. With this example in mind, it is critical to question whether there are alternatives to the means of expression people use and to the social program they are committed to-democracy. The experience of language today is very different from that of the time when the Jacobins asserted a notion of democracy as the general will (1798), under the assumption of a literate background shared by all people. The message is the medium Language is a form of social memory. When saying something or listening to some utterance, we assume a uniform use of words and of higher level linguistic entities. As stored testimony to similar practical experiences, language, stabilized in literacy, became a medium for averaging them. The patterns of human relations captured in language make people aware, in retrospect, of the relevance of these patterns to human efficiency. So it seems that we constitute ourselves as our own observations about how we interact. These observations are identified as cognition, because it is through interaction that we know each other and know how, what, and when our immediate and less immediate needs are satisfied. The paradigm of literacy asserts that human self-constitution takes place in language, moreover that it could effectively happen only in language, expressed in written forms and made available through reading. Indeed, knowledge was derived from praxis implying human interaction that integrated language-based exchanges of information. This knowledge shaped political, ideological, religious, and economic experiences, as well as efforts to improve the technology used, and even broaden the scientific perspective. The dimension of future is intrinsic to life, from where it extends to language and literacy, as it extends to artifacts, work, and pragmatic expectations. The practical experience of language, as any other semiotic practical experience, embodies agreements regarding the nature and condition of whatever is constituted in language, human identity included. The projection of the biological and cultural characteristics on the world of our life and action establishes elements of reference. The ability to see, hear, and smell, and the ability to use tools are acknowledged as humans interact. Ability and performance differ widely. Self-evaluation and evaluation by others in the process of defining and achieving goals of common interest are quite distinct. Language mediates, hence it makes commitments part of the experience. When these are not carried through, language can become a substitute medium for confrontation. Experiences of agreement and experiences of confrontation are part of the patterns of interrelationship that define how the language of individuals and the language of the community are related. Socialization of language leads to paradoxical situations: humans self-constituted in the language experience perceive their own language as though confrontation is not among themselves, but among their languages. Only a few years ago, we heard about how much Americans and Russians liked each other, although the language of politics and ideology was one of conflict. Now we hear how Ossies (East Germans) and Wessies (West Germans) have strong feelings about each other (one side is described as lazy, the other as arrogant; one side as cultivated, the other as ignoramuses; some as honest, the others as corrupt) although the language they both share is the same (though not quite). Iranians and Arabs, Armenians and Georgians, and Serbs and Croats could add to this subject more than we want to know about the language of prejudice. Shortly before Malthus issued his equation of population growth in relation to the growth of subsistence means, Rousseau stated a law of the inverse proportion between size of population and political freedom. Rousseau ascertained that the strength of those exercising power over others increases as the number of those subjected to power increases. The inverse proportion has to do with the influence each individual has in the political process-the more people, the weaker each voice. Scale is critical, but so is understanding the relation between the underlying structure of the pragmatics that defines the role of language and how this role is carried out. Practical experiences of power concentration are supported by literacy, whose implicit structure and expectation is centralism and representation. Literacy generates instances of conflict as well as institutions that regulate the nature of agreements and disagreements. Bureaucracy, the expression of these institutions, is the offspring of the incestuous relation between literacy and democracy. A new scale of humankind, for which literacy-based practical experiences are not adequate, and within which democracy-the power of the people-can no longer be exercised (as Rousseau pointed out), poses many challenges. Among them: What, if anything, should replace literacy? What could replace democracy? How do we free ourselves from the choking grip of bureaucracy? Even before attempting an answer, the notion that the cultural experience of literacy and the social experience of democracy have reached their potential and are due for replacements has to be understood. In a different vein, the understanding that literacy participates in power, of which people become aware in a given cultural and social context, triggers another reaction: means of expression and communication different from those originating under the aegis of literacy participate in pragmatic processes that result in access to power. It is not what a political leader says, but how. Powerful images, sophisticated directing, and inspired stage design or selection of backdrops become the message itself. This is why "The message is the medium," a not irreverent reversal of McLuhan's famous formula, phrases the altered nature of the relation between language and the world. Interactions in the networked world exemplify this rephrasing even better. The redefined relationship between the many languages of our new practical experiences and reality is expressed in the means and values of the civilization of illiteracy. Written into the pompous architecture of Mitterand's palaces and monuments in Paris, and into the "new" Berlin reflecting the medieval notion of centralized power-to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars-the message of literacy is turned into the medium of brick-and-mortar. In an age of task distribution and decentralization, the appropriate alternative is virtual environments and an advanced infrastructure for access to cognition. "The message is the medium" translates into the requirement of overcoming infatuation with the past, never mind trying to reinvent it. The statement demands that we create alternative media that support the empowerment of individuals, not the further consolidation of power structures that were relevant in the past but which prevent the unfolding of the future. From democracy to media-ocracy Democracy is a domain of expectations. Humans constitute themselves as members of a democracy to the extent that their practical experiences acknowledge equality, freedom, and self-determination. The concept of democracy has varied enormously over time. In ancient societies, it acknowledged equality of the demos, and that free men-not slaves, not women-were entitled to vote. Subject to many emancipations, democracy denotes the right of people to elect their government (based on the general will set forth by the Jacobins, as mentioned above). How this self- government actually works-through direct or indirect representation, in forms of government based on the division of power between the executive and legislative, or under monarchies-is itself a matter of practical experiences pertinent to democracy. The democracy of human misery and neglect is quite different from the democracy of affluence. Equal access to work, education, health care, and art, and equal access to drugs, murder, joblessness, ignorance, and disease are far from being similar. A small town-meeting in Vermont or one in a Swiss canton, effectively governing life in town, is quite different from the forms of political self-governance in countries where the central power effectively overrides any self-governance. The same can be said of the overriding power of other factors-the economy, for instance. Democracy is a major form of social and political experience. The power of the majority, expressed in votes, is only one of its possible manifestations. When only a minority of the population votes, the so-called majority ceases to be representative, no matter what the formal rules say. We live by democratic practices of delusion, and multiply, enthusiastically, their effect through the literate discourse of democracy. As a domain of expectations, mirroring hope implicit in literacy, democracy conjures meaning only if it is paralleled by democratic participation in social and political experiences. When one of the two terms of this critical equation diminishes-as is the case with participation-democracy diminishes in the same proportion. There are many reasons for decreasing participation. In countries where effective democracy was replaced by democratic demagoguery, changes, such as those brought about by revolutions, revolts, and reforms, initially mobilize the people, almost to the last citizen. We are still observing a phenomenon symptomatic of democracy in East Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union. From the almost unanimous enthusiasm over renewal, leading to formal conditions for democracy, individual participation in government is slowly diminishing. What are the causes of this phenomenon, which is paralleled by diminishing interest in religion, art, and solidarity? Many answers are given, and even more hypotheses are advanced: psychological fatigue, lack of democratic tradition, egotism, desire to catch up with affluent societies. From the perspective of the relationships characteristic of an individual's literate language and literacy programs of societies claiming to be democratic, the answer should be sought in the conflict between literacy-based values and the expectations of efficiency characteristic of the new scale of humankind. Efficiency made possible by a pragmatics emancipated from the structural characteristics reified in literacy converted democracy into commercial democracy. People can buy and sell whatever they want. Their equality is one of access to the market of affluence; their freedom is sealed in the mutually acknowledged right to plenty. Democratization, which people believe is taking place all over the world, is a process of absorbing newer and newer groups of people into prosperity, into the superficial culture of entertainment (including sports competition), and into a government that guarantees the right to wealth and consumption. This description can easily become suspect of moralizing instead of tight analysis. Literacy embodies certain expectations from democratic institutions. Like other institutions, this type is also subjected to the test of efficiency. When the institutions of democracy fail this test, they are, in the language of democracy, diverted to consolidating not democracy, as a practical experience of the people, but the institution. Bureaucracies are generated as a diversion of democracy from its social and political focus in an incestuous love with the language in which its principles are enunciated. Mediation insinuates itself between the people and the institutions of democracy. Media generalize the role of the literate system of checks and balances and, as mass-media, becomes a participant in the equation of power. Taking full advantage of means that characterize the civilization of illiteracy-the power of images, instantaneous access to events, the power of networking, communicative resources of new technologies-the media play a double role: representative of the people and representative of power. Since their own domain of experiences is representation, the media depend on the efficiency of the practical experiences of people's self-constitution in productive activities. Mass media activity is carried not by its own motivations, but by those of the market, whose locus it becomes. Consequently, the equation of democracy becomes the equation of competition and economic success. The media select and endorse causes and personalities appropriate to the process of marketing democracy. Instead of government, and the responsibilities associated with it, democracy becomes the people's right to buy, among other things, their government and the luxury of transferring their democratic responsibilities to its institutions. Media bashing is a favorite sport of politicians whenever things don't work the way they expect. It is also practiced by the public, especially in times of economic uncertainty or during political developments that seem out of control (wars, violent mass demonstrations, elections). Bashing or not, criticism of the media reflects the fact that media expanded their participation in power. The practical experience of public relations, an outgrowth of media participation in power, uses the methods of the media to promote causes and personalities as products best suited for a certain need: support hungry children, elect a sheriff, endorse a tax hike or reduction, etc., etc. The domains of competence and ability are effectively disconnected from the domain of representation. Literacy-based methods of establishing hierarchies and influencing choices are enforced by new technologies for reaching targets, even in the most saturated contexts of information dissemination. Advisers committed only to the success of their endeavors use the discriminating tools of the market in order to adapt the message to all those who care to play the muddled game of democracy. Information brokerage, feedback strategies, symbolic social engineering, mass media, psychology, and event design form an eclectic practical experience. Calling it by a certain name-media-ocracy-is probably tendentious. But the shoe seems to fit. From all we know, the effort of this activity does not go towards promoting excellence or persuading communities that democracy entails quality and defending self-government from corruption. It rather focuses on what it takes to convince that mediocrity adequately reflects the quest for equality, and is the most people can expect if they are not dedicated to the exercise of their rights. The literate and illiterate means used to defend democracy, and the entire political system built on the democratic premise, make it only more evident that democracy, an offspring of language-based practical experiences, is far from being the eternal and universal answer, the climax of history. Indeed, the scale of humankind renders impossible participation in power through the definition of ideals and goals, as well as awareness of the consequences of human actions. Alternative forms of participating in democracy need to be found in the characteristics of the pragmatics corresponding to the new scale. Such alternatives have to embody the distributed nature of work, better understanding of the connection (or lack thereof) between the individual and the community, awareness of change as the only permanence, and strategies of co-evolution, regarding equally all other people and the nature to which humans still belong. Democracy is the offspring of human experiences based on the postulate of sameness. The alternatives derive from the dynamics of difference. Self-organization Time, energy, equipment, and intellect have been invested in the research of artificial life. Knowledge derived from this research can be used to advance models of individual and social life. This knowledge tells us that diversity and self-organization, for instance, prompted by structural characteristics and externalized through emerging functions, maintain the impetus of evolution in a living system. Obviously, humans belong to such a system. In the past, we used to focus on social forms of variable organization. Within such forms, iterative optimization and learning take place as an expression of internal necessities, not as a result of adopted or imposed rules of functioning. The entire dynamics of reproduction that marks today's states and organizations in the business of population control, needs to be reconnected to the pragmatic context. As a result, we can expect that communities structured on such principles are endowed with the equivalent of social immune systems, able to recognize themselves and to counteract social disease. Reconnection to the pragmatic context needs to be understood primarily as a change of strategy from telling people what has to be done to engaging them in the action. All the promises connected to the fast-growing network of networks are based on this fundamental assumption. A social immune system ought to be understood as a mechanism for preventing actions detrimental to the effective functioning of each and every member of the community. Social disease entails connotations characteristic of a system of good and bad, right and wrong. What is meant here is the possibility that individual effort and pragmatic focus become disconnected. Reconnection mechanisms are based on recognition of diversity and definition of unity, means, goals, and ideals. Adaptability results from diversity; so does the ability to allocate resources within the dynamic community. More than in the past, and more than today, individuals will partake in more than one community. This is made possible by means of interaction and by shared resources. Today's telecommuting is only a beginning when we think of the numbers of people involved and the still limited scope of their involvement. The old notion of community, associated mainly with location, will continue to give way to communities of interests and goals. Virtual communities on the Internet already exemplify such possibilities. The major characteristic of such self-organizing social and cultural cells is their pattern of improvement in the course of co-evolution, which reflects the understanding that political and social aspects of human interaction change as each person changes. The model described, inspired by the effort to understand life and simulate properties pertinent to life through simulations, applies just as much to the natural as to the artificial. Global economy, global political concerns, global responsibility for the support system, global vested interests in communication and transportation networks, and global concern for the meaningful use of energy should not lead to a world state- not even Boorstin's Republic of Technology will do-but to a state of many worlds. Complexities resulting from such a scale of political practical experiences are such that self-destruction, through social implosion, is probably what might happen if we continue to play the game of world institutions. The alternative corresponds to decentralization, powerful networking associated with extreme distributions of tasks, and effective integrating procedures. In more concrete terms, this means that individuals will constitute their identity in experiences through which their particular contribution might be integrated in different actions or products. They will share resources and use communication means to optimize their work. Access to one another's knowledge through means that are simultaneously open to many inquiries is part of the global contract that individuals will enter, once they acknowledge the benefits of accessing the shared body of information and the tools residing on networks. Self-organizing human nuclei of diverse practical experiences will allow for the multiplicity of languages of the civilization of illiteracy, freedom from bureaucracy, and more direct co-participation in the life of each social cell thus constituted. Advanced specialized knowledge, empowering people to pursue their practical goals with the help of new languages (mathematical notation, visualization, diagramming, etc.), usually insulates the expert from the world. If circumstances are created to meaningfully connect practical experiences that are relevant to each other, fragmentation and synthesis can be pursued together. We are very good at fragmentation-it defines our narrow specialties. But we are far less successful in pursuing synthesis. The challenge lies in the domain of integration. Since human activity reflects the human being's multi-dimensionality, it is clear that nuclei of overlapping experiences, involving different perspectives, will develop in environments where resources are shared and results constitute the starting point for new experiences. The identity of people constituting themselves in the framework of a pragmatics that ensures efficiency and diversity reflects experiences through many literacies, and survival skills geared towards co-evolution, not domination. Co-evolving technology is only an example. From the relatively simple bulletin boards of the early 1960's to the Internet and Web of our day, co-evolution has been a concrete practical instance of the constitution of the Netizen. Michael Hauben, who coined the term, wanted to describe the individuals working towards building a cooperative and collective activity that would benefit the world at large. Conflicts are not erased. The Net community is not one of perfection but of anticipated and desired diversity, in which imperfection is not a handicap. Its dynamics is based on differences in quantity and quality, and its efficiency is expressed in how much more diversity it can generate. The solution is the problem. Or is the problem the solution? The inadequacy of literacy and natural language, undoubtedly the main sign system of the human species, is brought more forcefully to light against the background of new forms of practical experiences leading to human self-constitution through many sign systems. Extremely complex pragmatic circumstances, predicated by needs that long ago surpassed those of survival, make the limits of literacy-based language experiences stand out. This new pragmatics demands that literacy be complemented with alternative means of expression, communication, and signification. The analysis of various forms of human activity and creativity can lead to only one conclusion: the patterns of human relationships and the tools created on the foundation of literacy no longer optimally respond to the requirements of a higher dynamics of human existence. Misled by the hope that once we capture extensions in language-everything people do in the act of their practical self-identification-we could infer from these to intensions-how a particular component unfolds-we have failed to perceive the intensional aspects of human actions themselves. For instance, we know of the diverse components of the practical experience of mathematics-analytic effort, rationality, symbolism, intuition, aesthetics. But we know almost nothing about each component. Some simply cannot be expressed in language; others are only reduced to stereotype through literate discourse. Does the power of a mathematical expression rely on mathematical notation, or on aesthetic quality? How are these two aspects integrated? Where and how does intuition affect mathematical thinking? The same criteria apply, but more critically, to social activities. Interactions among people involve their physical presence; their appearance as beautiful, or fit, or appropriate; their capability to articulate thoughts; their power of persuasion; and much more. Each component is important, but we know very little about the specific impact each one has. Surprised at how dictators come to power, and even more by mass delusion, with or without television as part of the political performance, we still fail to focus on what motivates people in their manifestations as racists, warmongers, hypocrites, or, for that matter, as honest participants in the well-being of their fellow humans. When the argument is rotten but the mass follows, there is more at work than words, appearance, and psychology. Language has projected the experience involved in our cultural practice, but has failed to project anything particularly relevant to our natural existence. Thus patterns of cultural behavior expressed in language seem quite independent of the patterns of our biological life, or at least appear to have acquired a strange, or difficult to explain, independence. We must give serious thought to our obsession with invulnerability, easy to conceptualize and express in language. It is, for instance, embodied in the medicine of the civilization of literacy. The abrupt revelation of AIDS, marking the end of the paranoia of invulnerability, might help us understand the ramifications of the uncoupling of our life in the domain of culture-where human sexuality belongs-and our life in the domain of nature-where reproduction belongs. Magic reflected the attempt to maintain a harmonious relation with the outside world. It has not yet been decided whether it is medicine-the reified experience of determinism applied in the realm of individual well being-or a parent's embrace that calms a baby's colic; or whether the psychosomatic nature of modern disease is addressed by the technology of healthcare in our days. What we already know is that populations were decimated once new patterns of nourishment and hygiene were imposed on them. When an attained balance was expelled by a foreign form of balance, life patterns were affected. This happened not only to populations in Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but also in the native populations of the American continents. Medical concepts resulting from analytic practical experiences of self-constitution-many reified in the medicine of the civilization of literacy-defy the variety of possible balances and embody the suspicion that "The solution is the problem." Literacy, when applicable, works very well, but it is not the universal answer to humankind's increasingly complex pragmatics. In the fortunate position of not having totally abandoned experiences with sign systems other than language, people have been able to change the patterns of training, instruction, industrial production, modern farming, and healthcare. Patterns of practical understanding of domains which for a very long time were concealed by literacy are also affected: pattern recognition, image manipulation, design. As a result, new methods for tackling new areas of human experience are becoming possible. Instead of describing images through words, and defining a course of action or a goal through a text, and then having the text control the use of visual elements, people use the mediating power of design systems with integrated planning and management facilities. A new product, a new building, and concepts in urban planning are generated while the pertinent computer program computes data pertinent to cost, ecological impact, social implications, and interpersonal communication. The practice of transcending literacy, while still involving literacy, also resulted in the development of new skills: visual awareness, information processing, networking, and new forms of human integration, far less rigid than those characteristic of integration exclusively through verbal language. There is no need to eliminate literacy, as there is no need to reduce everything to literacy. Where it is still applicable, literacy is alive and well. On the Internet and World Wide Web, it complements the repertory of means of human interaction characteristic of computer-mediated communication. Television holds a large audience captive in one-way communication. The ambition of the World Wide Web is to enable meaningful one-to-one and one-to-many interactions. The civilization of illiteracy is one of diversity and relies on the dynamics of self- organization. But in order to succeed, several conditions need to be met. For instance, we have not yet developed in appropriate practical experiences of human self- constitution the ability to think in media other than natural language. Like many beginners in a new language, people still translate from one language to another. When this does not work, they look for help in the language they know, instead of formulating questions in the alternative language in which they suspect they can be answered. After intuition was eliminated by rationality and system, only minor effort is made towards understanding how intuition comes about, whether in mathematics, medicine, sports, the arts, market transactions, war skills, food preparation, and social activities. In the civilization of literacy, people were, and to a great extent still are, able to ignore some forms of human relationships without affecting the general outcome of human practice. Within the new scale and dynamics, human civilization relies on the interplay of more elements. The timing involved in integrating this diversity is much more difficult to accomplish through literacy-based methods, even though timing is critical to the outcome. Literacy captures the rough and linear level of relations. New practical experiences of higher efficiency require finer levels and tools adequate to non- linear phenomena for dealing with the parallel processes involved in the self- constitution of individuals and of society. From possibilities to choices If the multiplication of possibilities were not to be met by effective ways of making choices, we would be sucked into the whirlwind of entropy. In practice, this translates into an obvious course of events: allowing for new possibilities, which sometimes take the appearance of alternatives, means to disallow certain known and practiced options of confirmed output. For example, where democracy is taken over by bureaucracy, the town meeting fulfills only a decorative function. There is nothing of consequence in the American President's State of the Union address, or in the conventions where political parties nominate candidates for the Presidency. With the choice of local and national political representation, the possibility to directly participate in power is precluded. The possibility of using sign systems other than language is far from being a novelty. Even the possibility of achieving some form of syncretism is not new by any means. What is new is the awareness of their potential malfunctioning and of the potential for losing control over forms of praxis that become highly complex. From among the many ways the relation between the individual and the community is manifested, the condition of the legal system is probably the best example. Whether independent, constituting a domain of regulations and checks with its own motivations, or part of other components of social and political life, the institution of justice encodes its typologies, classifications, and rules in laws. This domain parallels one of human interactions where expected values are permanently subjected to the scrutiny of the pragmatic activity. Integrity of the individual and his lawfully acquired goods, the binding nature of commitments, and prohibition of misrepresentation or of rules essential to the well being of the community are rules on which legal experience developed. Right and wrong, once identified under circumstances of direct practical experience through consequences for the community's well being, are now constituted in a domain with a life and rules of its own. Killing, stealing, and misrepresentation are actions well defined in the written texts of the law. But the law itself, anchored in literacy, consequently detached itself from the real world and now constitutes its own reality and motivations. Since this is the case, it is no surprise that legal practice turns out to be nothing more than interpretations of texts and attempts to use language to bring about an outcome based on chimera, not reality. The legal system reacts to innovation by forcing rules originating in other pragmatic frameworks-the strong evidence of DNA analysis is only one example-to fit its own criteria of evaluation. Instead of constituting a proactive context for the unfolding of the human genius, legal praxis ends up defending only its own interests. The jury system in the USA might appear to many people as an expression of democracy. In the pragmatic context in which the jury system originated, even the notion of peer made sense, since it applied to a reduced and relatively homogeneous community. Today, the jury has become part of the odious equation of the dispute between lawyers. The jury is selected to reflect the lowest common denominator so that its members, mostly incompetent, can be manipulated in the adversarial game of the performance produced under the generic label of justice. As an extension of literate language, the experience of legal language builds on its own rules for efficient functioning and establishes criteria for success that corrupt the process of justice. It is a typical example of malfunctioning, probably as vivid as the language of politics. Judicial and political praxes document, from another angle, how democracy fails once it reaches the symbolic phase manifested in the bureaucracy of the legal system and of reified power relations. Coping with choice Self-definition implies the ability to establish a domain of possibilities. But possibilities do not present themselves alone. In the transition from the civilization of literacy to the new civilization of illiteracy, the global domain of possibilities expands dramatically, but the local, individual domains probably narrow in the same proportion. This happens because what at the global level looks like a multiplication of choices, at the level of the individual appears as a matter of effective selection procedures. As long as there is little to choose from, selection is not a problem. The primitive family had few choices regarding nourishment, self-reproduction, and health. Choices increased as the practical experiences of self-constitution diversified. Migrating populations chose from among selections different from those available to settled human beings. The first known cities embodied a structure of relations for which written language was appropriate. The megalopolis of our day embodies a universe of choices on a different scale. Within such a domain of possibilities, there are no effective selection procedures. Reduction from practically infinite choices to a finite number of realizations is at best a matter of randomness and exposure. Inversely, the slogan "Act locally, think globally" can easily lead to failure. Many accomplishments that are successful on a local scale would fail if applied globally if they do not integrate awareness of globality from the beginning. Within literacy, the expectation that literate people receive, by virtue of knowledge of language, good selection procedures-considered as universal and permanent as literacy itself-was part of its multi-layered self-motivation. In the civilization of illiteracy, this expectation gives way to pursuing consecutive choices, all short-term, all of limited scope and value-free, which even seem to eliminate one's own decision. It appears that choices grab individuals. This explains why one of the main drives in the world today is towards greater numbers of people seeking to live in cities. Once a choice is exhausted, the next follows as a consequence of the scale, not as a result of searching for an alternative. This applies as well to professional life, itself subject to the shorter cycles of renewal and change. The powerful mechanism of social segmentation, the result of the many mediating mechanisms in place, makes the problem of coping with choice look like another instance of democracy at work. Let's consider some of these choices: to distribute, or not to distribute, condoms to high school and junior high school students; to confirm or deny the right to end one's life (pro-choice or pro-life); to expand heterosexual family privileges to homosexual cohabitation; to introduce uniform standards of testing in education. These examples are removed from the broader context of human self-constitution and submitted, through the mechanism of media- ocracy, more to market validation than to a responsible exercise of civic responsibility. Mediation mechanisms characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy cause the choices that a community faces to become almost irrelevant on the individual level. In the new universe of possibilities, expanding as we speak, human beings are giving up autonomy and self-determination, as they participate in several different communities. They share in the apparent choices of society insofar as these match their own possibilities and expectations. But they often have the means to live outside a society when their choices (regarding peace, war, individual freedom, lifestyle, etc.) are different from those pursued by states. Citizens of the trans-national world partake in the dynamics of change to a much higher degree than do people dedicated to the literate ideals of nationalism and ethnicity. We can fly to the moon (and people will, either as participants in the space program or as paying passengers). We can afford partaking in unique events- concerts, contests, auctions-some in person, others through the electronic means they can afford. Each individual can become president or member of some legislative body; but only some can afford applying for these positions. Whether through wealth, intelligence, sensitivity, race, gender, age, or religion, we are not equal in our possibilities, although we are equal in our rights. Coping with choice involves matching goals and means of achieving them. Literacy is a poor medium for this operation, which takes place between individuals and the many communities to which they belong. The various languages of the pragmatic identification of all those involved in coping with choice operate more effectively. The network of interrelations that constitute our practical existence and the patterns of these relations will continue to change and become globally more complex and locally more confined. While we gain global freedom, we lose local dynamics. At the particular level at which we input our mediating performance, we are in almost total control of our own efficiency. Each of the many service providers for industry, physicians, lawyers, or writers is an example of local choices reflected in the increased productivity of those they service and of their own output. At higher levels, where these services are integrated-regardless of whether they provide rust control, X-ray processing, graphic design, or accounting-choices become more limited. Consequently, coordination becomes critical. The strategy of outsourcing is based on the notion that maximum efficiency requires specialization that companies cannot achieve. If the process continues in the same direction, coordination will soon be the most difficult problem of practical experience. This is due to the complexity that integration entails, and to the fact that there are no effective procedures for simplifying it. The simpler each task, the more complex the integration. Short of submitting a law that reflects this situation, another thesis can be formulated: Overall complexity is preserved regardless of how systems are subdivided, or tasks distributed. Complexity is transferred from the task to the integration. Trade-off Awareness of possibilities is more direct than that of complexities. Trading choice and self-determination for less concern and higher rewards in terms of satisfying needs and desires is not an exciting alternative. Language has not brought the promised awareness of the world, but has made possible a strategy of confinement. The loss of language seems to trouble mainly people who work at language dissemination, maintenance, and awareness. However, after taking language for granted for a long time, people notice those instances when, in need of a word or trying to function in a world of language conventions, language is not up to the task. Faced with unprecedented experiences in scientific experimentation, large-scale communication, radical political change, and terrorism, people observe that they do not have the language for these phenomena. They look for words and ultimately realize that those words, assumed to exist, cannot be found because the pragmatic framework requires something other than language. In contrast to tools, like the ones we keep around the house or see mechanics and plumbers using, language is not taken away or lost because we are our language. What is lost from language is a certain dimension of human being and acting, of appropriating reality and producing and exchanging goods, of acknowledging our experience and sharing it with others. Cultural, historical, economic, social, and other developments contribute to our notion of literacy. Its crisis is symptomatic of everything that made literacy necessary and is based on the particular ways in which literate societies function. This statement does not suggest that the crisis of literacy implies a cultural or economic crisis. For instance, women's emancipation did not start with the emancipation of language. In Japanese, in which the man-woman distinction goes so far as to require that women use a different vocabulary than men, women's emancipation could hardly be considered. As an expression of a specific type of social relations, this distinction in language maintains a status against which women might feel entitled to react. Many other patterns of human interaction, which prompt practical action for change, are deeply seated in language. Watching our children, upon whom we impose literacy, grow, we almost always count the words they learn and evaluate their progress in articulating desires, opinions, and questions. What we neglect to ask is what kind of world does language bring to them in the process of learning language? What kind of practical experiences does language make possible? When children break loose of our language, it is almost too late to understand the problem. Language use seems so natural that its syntactic and value-loaded conventions are not questioned. We accept language as it is projected on us. It comes with gods or God, goodness, right, truth, beauty, and other values, as well as distinctions (sexual, racial, generational) that are held to be as eternal as we were taught that language itself is. We project language on our children only in order to be challenged by them through their own language, pretty much attuned to their different pragmatic frame of reference. As a framework within which parents, and ultimately society, want children to think, communicate, and act, language appears to have two contradictory characteristics: liberty and constraint. The all-encompassing change we are witnessing concerns both. In order to function effectively in a society of very specialized patterns of interaction, people realize that a trade-off between liberties and constraints is inescapable. On the level of social and cultural life, people realize that constraints, represented by accepted prejudices and ideologies, impinge upon their limited space of decision-making and infringe upon individual integrity. Language turned out to be not only the medium for expressing liberating ideals, but also a stubborn embodiment of old and new prejudices. It is also the instrument of deception, and bears in its ideal of literacy the most evident deception of all-literacy as a panacea for every problem the human species faces, from poverty, inequity, and ignorance to military conflict, disease, starvation, and even the inability to cope with new developments in science and technology. Interestingly enough, Netizens believe the same thing regarding the Internet! In their campaign for free choice of literacy, they are just as dogmatic about their type of literacy as the Modern Language Association, for example, is about the old-fashioned kind. We can accept that this world of enormously diversified forms of human practice (corresponding to the diversity of human beings) requires more than one type of literacy. But this is not yet sufficient condition for changing the current premise of education if the avenues of gaining knowledge are not developed. The assumption that language is a higher level system of signs is probably correct, but not necessarily significant for the inference that in order to function in a society, each member has to master this language. To free ourselves of this inference will take more than the argument founded on the efficiency of illiterate and aliterate individuals who constitute their identity in realms where literacy does not dominate, or ceased being entirely necessary. Learning from the experience of interface The exciting adventure of artificially replicating human characteristics and functions is probably as old as the awareness of self and others. Harnessing tools and machines in order to maximize the efficiency of praxis was always an experience in language use and craftsmanship. So far, the most challenging experience has been the use of computers to replicate the ability to calculate, process words and images, control production lines, interpret very complex data, and even to simulate aspects of human thinking. Programming languages serve as mediating entities. Using a limited vocabulary and very precise logic, they translate sequences of operations that programmers assume need to be executed in order to successfully compute numbers, process words, operate on images, and even carry out the logical operations for playing chess and beating a human opponent at the game. A programming language is a translation of a goal into a description of the logical processes through which the goal can be achieved. Computer users do not deal with the programming language; they address the computer through the language of interface: words in plain English (or any other language for which interface is designed), or images standing for desired goals or operations. The entire machine does not speak or understand an interface's high-level language. The interaction of the user with the machine is translated by interface programs into whatever a machine can process. Providing efficient interfaces is probably as important as designing high level abstract programming languages and writing programs in those languages. Without such interfaces, only a limited number of people could involve themselves in computing. The experience of interface design can help us understand the direction of change to which the new pragmatics commits us. At the end of the road, the computer should physically disappear from our desks. All that will be needed is access to digital processing, not to the digital engine. The same was true of electricity. Once upon a time it was generated at the homes or workplaces where the people who needed it could use it. Now it is made available through distribution networks. Natural language accomplished the function of interface long before the notion came into existence. Literacy was to be the permanent interface of human practical experiences, a unifying factor in the relation between the individual and society. Ideally, interface should not affect the way people constitute themselves; that is, it should be neutral in respect to their identity. This means that people can change and tasks can vary. The interface would account for the change and would accommodate new goals. Even in their wildest dreams, computer scientists and researchers in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, who work with intelligent interfaces, do not anticipate such a living interface. Interfaces affect the nature of practical experiences in computing. As these become more complex, a breakdown occurs because interfaces do not scale up. Instead of supporting better interactions, an interface can hamper them and affect the outcome of computing. Language has performed quite well under the pressure of scaling up. It grows with each new human practical experience and can adapt to a variety of tasks because the people constituted in language adapt. In the intimate relation between humans and their language, language limits new experiences by subjecting them to expectations of coherence. Language's expressive and communicative potential reaches its climax as the pragmatics that made it possible and necessary exhausts its own potential for efficiency. Literate language no longer enhances human abilities in practical experiences outside its pragmatic domain. Literacy only ends up limiting the scope of the experience to its own, and limits human growth. Many impressive human accomplishments, probably the majority of them, are testimony to the powerful interface that literate language is. But these accomplishments are equal testimony to what occurs when the interface constitutes its own domain of motivations, or is applied as an instrument for pursuing goals that result in a forced uniformity of experiences. If literacy had been a neutral mediating entity, it would have scaled up to the new scale of humankind and the corresponding efficiency expectations, once the threshold was reached. Successive forms of religious, scientific, ideological, political, and economic domination are examples of powerful interface mechanisms. To understand this predicament, we can compare the sequence of interfaces connected to the experience of religion to the sequence of computer-user interfaces. Notwithstanding the fundamental differences between these two domains of practical experience, a striking similarity has to be acknowledged. Both start as limited experiences, open to the initiated few, and expand from a reduced sign system on interactions to very rich multimedia environments. From a limited secretive domain to the wide opening afforded by a trivial vocabulary, both evolve as double-headed entities: the language of the initiated individuals interfaced with the language of the individuals progressively integrated in the experience. No one should misconstrue this comparison, meant only to illustrate the constitutive nature of the experience of interfacing. We could as well focus on the experiences of economics, politics, ideology, science, fashion, or, even better, art. The experience of literacy resulted in some consistency, but also in lost variety. Every language of interaction (interface) that disappeared took with it into oblivion experiences impossible to resuscitate. The relation between the individual and community, once very rich at various levels, grew weaker the more literacy took over. Literacy norms this relation, shaping it into a multiple-choice quiz. Information processing techniques applied on literacy-controlled forms of social interaction require even further standardization in order to be efficient. As a result, the individual is rationalized away, and the community becomes a locus for data management instead of a place for human interaction. The process exemplifies what happens when interface takes over and interacts with itself. The various concerns raised so far only reiterate how important it is to understand the nature of interface processes. But experience gained in computational research of knowledge points to other aspects critical to the relation between the individual and society. Humans constitute themselves in a variety of practical experiences that require alternatives to language. Powerful mathematical notations, diagrams, visualization techniques, acoustics, holography, and virtual space are such alternative means. Non-linear association and cognitive paths, until now embodied in hypertext structures that we experience on the World Wide Web, belong to this category, too. Processing language is not equivalent to integrating these alternative means. Cognitive requirements put severe restrictions on experiences grounded in means different from language, on account of the intensity and nature of cognitive processes, as well as of memory requirements. The genetic endowment formed in language-based practical experiences of self-constitution is not necessarily adapted to fundamentally different means of expression. Communication requires a shared substratum, which is established in an acculturation process that takes many generations. Enhanced by the new media, communication does not become more precise. Programs are conceived to enable the understanding of language. Everything ever written is scanned and stored for character recognition. Images are translated into short descriptions. A semantic component is attached to everything people compute. Hopes are high for using such means on a routine basis, though the compass might be set on some elusive direction. Even when machines will understand what we ask them to do-that is, when they integrate speech and handwriting recognition functions in the operating system-we will still have to articulate our goals. A technology capable of automating many operations that human beings still perform will increase output, and thus the efficiency of the effort applied. But the real challenge is to figure out ways to optimize the relation between what is possible and what is necessary. Procedures that will associate the output to the many criteria by which humans or the machine determine how meaningful that output is, are more important than raw technological performance. Until now, literacy has not proven to be the suitable instrument for this goal. People and language change together. Individuals are formed in language; their practical experiences reshape language and lead to the need for new languages. If we cannot uncouple language and the human being, especially in view of the parallel evolution of genetic endowment and linguistic ability, we will continue to move in the vicious cycle of expression and representation. The issue is not language per se, but the claim that representation is the dominant, one might say exclusive, paradigm of human activity. Neither science nor philosophy has produced an alternative to representation. There is more to physical reality than what language can lay claim to. And there is much more to the dynamics of our existence in a world whose own dynamics integrates it while extending far beyond it. Skills needed to function in the physical world-skills which children and newborn animals display-are only partially represented in language. The entire realm of instinctive behavior belongs here. This includes coordination and the very rich forms of relating to space, time, and other living beings. Advanced biological and cognitive research (Maturana's work leads in this area) shows that various organisms survive without the benefits of representation. Very personal human experiences-among them, pain, love, hate, and joy-happen without the benefits and constraints of language representation. There are skills for which we have no representation in language. Various tags are used to name them under the heading of parapsychology, magic, and non-verbal communication. Once these are described through their results only, they cause reactions ranging from doubt to ridicule. The unusual and inexplicable performances of individuals called idiots savants belong to this category. An idiot savant hears a piano concerto and replays it masterfully, although he or she cannot add two and two. A matchbox falls and the idiot savant can state, without looking at the box, the exact number of matches that fell out. These are feats that are on record. Some idiots savants are able to go through long sequences of phone numbers, produce complete listings of prime numbers, and execute incredible multiplication and division. Researchers can only observe and record such accomplishments. For other inexplicable phenomena, we simply have no concept available: the amazing last moments before death, the power of illusion, and the visualization aptitudes of some individuals. Researchers have accumulated data on the power of prayer and faith, and on paranormal manifestations. It is not the intention of this book to venture explanations of these phenomena, but to point out the great variety of experiences which could be integrated into human praxis but are not, merely because they still defy explanation in language. Functioning in a world that we read through the glasses of literacy makes us often blind to what is different, to what literacy does not encompass. A realm of fact and possible abstraction, difficult to compare with the world of existence that language reports about, remains to be explored. When the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman reported on a difference in machine and human computation, this report pointed to aspects for which language was not prepared to serve as a useful interface, and to a realm different from representation. Crises, catastrophes, and breakdowns testify to the borders of a given pragmatic context. They are references as to how far such a context can extend. Beyond the context begins the universe of fundamental change and revolution, constitutive of a new framework. The really interesting level of language, and of any other sign system, is not the referential level but the level of constituting new worlds. These worlds do not necessarily extend the old one. Telecommuting is an extension of the previous pattern of work. Cooperative real-time practical experiences are more than the sum of individual contributions. They are constitutive of non-linear forms of complementarity. The virtual office is but another form of office. Virtual community is a constitutive experience. Nothing of what we have learned in experiences of broadcasting is pertinent to the participatory aspect of human self-constitution in an environment of fluidity and unsettled patterns of interaction. The goal is not to inform, but to enable and empower. The elaborate combinations of chemicals concocted to increase the effectiveness of medicine, of construction materials, or of electronic components continues earlier patterns. Atomic manipulation, intended to synthesize intelligent materials and self-repairing substances and devices, constitutes a new domain of practical experiences. Each of these examples belongs to a pragmatic framework different in nature from the one that defined literacy and which literacy embodies and forces upon our experience. Centrism-Euro-, ethno-, techno- or any other kind-as well as dualism- good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly-and hierarchy have exhausted their potential. The attempt to measure the emergent pragmatics against ideals that do not originate from within them can only result in empty slogans firmly entrenched in the avatars of machine-age ideologies. As we experience it at the juncture between literacy and illiteracy, the legacy of language is not only accomplishments but also the diversion from what the world is to descriptions that stand for it in our minds, books, and social concerns. The networks of objects and their properties (qualifiers of objects) exist in the civilization of literacy only through language: things are real insofar as they are in language. To overcome this perception is a challenge well beyond the power of most individuals. What emerges in the new pragmatic framework of distributed practical experience and of cooperative, parallel human interactions is a human being self-constituted in a plurality of interconditioning means of expression, communication, and signification. We might just be on the verge of a new age. A Sense of the Future Beyond literacy begins a realm which for many is still science fiction. The name civilization of illiteracy is used to define direction and to point out markers. The richness and diversity of this realm is indicative of the nature of our own practical experiences of self-constitution. The landscape mapped out by these experiences is simultaneously its own Borgesian map. One marker along the road from present to future leaves no room for doubt: the digital foundation of the pragmatic framework. But this does not mean that the current dynamics of change can be reduced to the victorious march of the digital or of technology, in general. Having challenged the model of a dominant sign system-language and in its literate experience-we suggested that a multitude of various sign processes effectively override the need for and justification of literacy in a context of higher efficiency expectations. We could alternatively define the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy as semiotic in the sense that human practical experiences become more and more subject to sign processes. The digital engine is, in final analysis, a semiotic machine, churning out a variety of signs. Nevertheless, the semiotization of human practical experiences extends beyond computers and symbolic processing. As we have seen, in all human endeavors, semiotic awareness is expressed in choices (of means of expression and communication) and patterns of interaction. Successive fashion trends, no less than the new media, global interaction through networks, cooperative work, and distributive configurations are semiotic identifiers. Interfaces are semiotic entities through which difficult aspects of the relation between individuals and society are addressed. More precisely, to interface means to advance methods and notions of a new form of cultural engineering, that has the same condition as genetic engineering, although not necessarily based on its mechanism, as the proponents of memetics would like us to believe. No matter how spectacular new technologies are, and how fast the rate of their adoption, pragmatic characteristics that make the quantum leap of efficiency possible within the new scale of humankind remain the defining element of the dynamics of change. To make this point clear no argument is superfluous, and no stone of doubt or suspicion should be left unturned. Our concern is not with the malignant rhetoric against technology of a probably insane Unabomber, for example. It is with a false sense of optimism focused on fleeting embodiments of human creativity, not on its integration in meaningful experiences. Whether a spectacular multimedia program, a virtual reality environment, genetically based medicine, broadband human interaction, or cooperative endeavors, what counts are the human cognitive resources, in the form of semiotic processes irreducible to language and literacy, at work under circumstances of globality. Cognitive energy It is impossible to tire of acknowledging applications from which many will people benefit, but which many resent even before these applications become available. They all become possible once they transcend the pragmatic framework of the civilization of literacy because they are based on structurally different means of expression, communication, and signification. We have all witnessed some of these applications: sensors connected to unharmed nervous terminals allow the quadriplegic to move. A child in a wheelchair who exercises in virtual reality can be helped to function independently in the world that qualifies his condition as a handicap. Important skills can be acquired by interpolating patterns of behavior developed in the physical world in the rough draft of the simulated world. People are helped to recover after accidents and illness, and are supported in acquiring skills in an environment where the individual sets the goals. In Japan, virtual reality helps people prepare for earthquakes and tests their ability to cope with the demand for fast response. Interconnected virtual worlds support human interactions in the space of their scientific, poetic, or artistic interest, or combinations thereof, stimulating the hope, as naive as it may sound, for a new Renaissance. Not everything need be virtual. Active badges T transmit data pertinent to an individual's identification in his or her world. Not only is it easier to locate a person, but the memory of human interaction, in the form of digital traces, allows people and machines to remember. You step into a room, and your presence is automatically acknowledged. The computer lets you know how many messages are waiting for you, and from whom. It evaluates how far you are from the monitor and displays the information so you can see it from that distance. It reminds you of things you want to do at a certain time. Details relevant to our continuous self-constitution through extremely complex practical experiences play an important role in making such interactions more efficient. A personal diary of actions, dialogues, and thinking out loud can be automatically recorded. Storing data from the active badge and from images captured during a certain activity is less obtrusive than having someone keep track of us. This is a new form of personal diary, protected, to the extent desired, from intrusion or misuse. This diary collects routine happenings that might seem irrelevant-patterns of movement, dialogue, eating, reading, drawing, building models, and analyzing data. The record can be completed by documenting patterns of behavior of emotional or cognitive significance, such as fishing, mountain climbing, wasting time, or dancing- according to one's wish. At the end of the day, or whenever requested, this diary of our living can be e-mailed to the writer. One can review the events of a day or search for a certain moment, for those details that make one's time meaningful. In the world beyond literacy and literacy-based practical experiences, we can search for artistic events. A play by Shakespeare can be projected onto the screen of our eyes, where the boundary between reality and fiction starts. The play will feature the actors of one's choosing. The viewer can even intercalate any person in the cast, even himself or herself, and deliver a character's lines. Sports events and games can be viewed in the same way. In another vein, we can initiate dialogues with the persons we care for, or get involved in the community we choose to belong to. Belonging, in this new sense, means going beyond the powerless viewing of political events that seem as alien as almost all the mass-media performances they are fed with. Belonging itself is redefined, becoming a matter of choice, not accident. Belonging goes beyond watching the news and political events on TV, beyond the impotence we feel with respect to the huge political machine. All these can happen as a private, very intense experience, or as interaction with others, physically present or not. To see the world differently can lead to taking another person's, or creature's, viewpoint. How does a recent immigrant, or a visitor from abroad, perceive the people of the country he has landed in? What do human beings look like to a whale, a bee, an ant, a shark? We can enter the bodies of the handicapped to find out how a blind person negotiates the merciless world of speeding cars and people in a hurry. The empathy game has been played with words and theatrics in many schools. But once a person assumes the handicapped body in a simulated universe, the insight gained is no longer based on how convincing a description is, but on the limits of self-constitution as handicapped. People can learn more about each other by sharing their conditions and limitations. And, hopefully, they will ascertain a sense of solidarity beyond empty expressions of sympathy. That all these semiotic means-expression in very complex dynamic sign systems-change the nature of individual practical experiences and of social life cannot be emphasized enough. Everything we conceive of can be viewed, criticized, felt, sensed, experienced, and evaluated before it is actually produced. The active badge can be attached to a simulated person- an avatar-let loose to walk through the plans for a new building, or on the paths of an expedition through mountains. The diary of space discovery is at least as important as the personal diary of a person working in a real factory, research facility, or at home. Before another tree is cut, before another riverbed is moved, before a new housing development is constructed, before a new trail is opened, people can find out what changes of immediate and long-term impact might result. It is possible to go even a step beyond the integrated world of digital processing and to entrust extremely complicated processes to neural networks trained to perform functions of command, control, and evaluation. Unexpected situations can be turned into learning experiences. Where individuals sometimes fail-for instance under emotional stress-neural networks can easily perform as well as humans do, without the risks associated with the unpredictability of human behavior. The active badge can be connected, through a local area network of wall-mounted sensors that collect information, to a neural network-based procedure designed to process the many bits and pieces of knowledge that are most of the time wasted. People could learn about their own creativity and about cognitive processes associated with it. They can derive knowledge from the immense amount of their aborted thoughts and actions. Ubiquity and unobtrusiveness qualify such means for the field of medical care, for the support of child development, and for the growing elderly population. With the advent of optical computers, and even biological data processing devices, chances will increase for a complete restructuring of our relation to data, information processing, and interhuman relationships. Individuals will ascertain their characteristics more and more, thus increasing their role in the socio-political network of human interaction. Some people still decide for others on certain matters: How should children play? How should they study? What are acceptable rules of behavior in family and society? How should we care for the elderly? When is medical intervention justified? Where does life end and biological survival become meaningless? These people exercise power within the set of inherited values that originated in a pragmatic context of hierarchy associated with literacy. This does not need to be so, especially in view of the many complexities hidden in questions like the ones posed above. Our relation to life and death, to universality, permanence, non-hierarchical forms of life and work, to religion and science, and last but not least to all the people who make up our world of experiences, is bound to change. Once individuality is redefined as a locus of interaction through rich sign systems, not just as an identity to be explained away in the generality that gnoseologically replaces the individual, politics itself will be redefined. Literacy is not all it's made out to be Enthusiasm over technology is not an argument; and semiotics, obfuscated by semiologues, is not a panacea. George Steiner pointed out that scientists, who "have been tempted to assert that their own methods and vision are now at the center of civilization, that the ancient primacy of poetic statement and metaphysical image is over." This is not an issue of criteria based on empirical verification, or the recent tradition of collaborative achievement, correctly contrasted to the apparent idiosyncrasy and egotism of literacy. The pragmatic framework reflects the challenge of efficiency in our world of increased population, limited resources, and the domination of nature. This framework is critical to the human effort to assess its own possibilities and articulate its goals. Let us accept Steiner's idea-although the predicament is clearly unacceptable-that sciences "have added little to our knowledge or governance of human possibility." Let us further accept that "there is demonstratably more insight into the matter of man in Homer, Shakespeare, or Dostoevsky than in the entire neurology of statistics." This, if it were true, would only mean that such an insight is less important to the practical experience of human self-constitution than literacy-based humanities would like us to believe. Literary taste or preference aside, it is hard to understand the epistemological consequence of a statement like "No discovery of genetics impairs or surpasses what Proust knew of the spell or burden of lineage." All this says is that in Steiner's practical experience of self-constitution, a pragmatics other than genetics proves more consequential. Nobody can argue with this. But from the particular affinity to Proust, one cannot infer that consequences for a broader number of people, the majority of whom will probably never know anything about genetics, are not connected to its discoveries. We may be touched by the elegant argument that "each time Othello reminds us of the rust of dew on the bright blade, we experience more of the sensual, transient reality in which our lives must pass than it is the business or ambition of physics to impart." After all the rhetoric that has reverberated in the castle of literacy, the physics of the first three minutes or seconds of the universe proves to be no less metaphysical, and no less touching, than any example from the arts, literature, or philosophy that Steiner or anyone else can produce. Science only has different motivations and is expressed in a different language. It challenges human cognition and sentiment, and awareness of self and others, of space and time, and even of literature, which seems to have stagnated once the potential of literacy was exhausted. The very possibility of writing as significantly as the writers of the past did diminishes, as the practical experience of literate writing is less and less appropriate to the new experiences of self-constitution in the civilization of illiteracy. The argument can go on and on, until and unless we settle on a rather simple premise: The degree of significance of anything connected to human identity-art, work, science, politics, sex, family-is established in the act of human self-constitution and cannot be dictated from outside it, not even by our humanistic tradition. The air, clean or polluted, is significant insofar as it contributes to the maintenance of life. Homer, Proust, van Gogh, Beethoven, and the anonymous artist of an African tribe are significant insofar as human self-constitution integrates each or every one of them, in the act of individual identification. Projecting their biological constitution into the world- we all breathe, see, hear, exercise physical power, and perceive the world-humans ascertain their natural reality. The experience of making oneself can be as simple as securing food, water, and shelter, or as complex as composing or enjoying a symphony, painting, writing, or meditating about one's condition. If in this practical experience one has to integrate a stick or a stone, or a noise, or rhythm in order to obtain nourishment, or to project the individual in a sculpture or musical piece, the significance of the stick or stone or the noise is determined in the pragmatic context of the self-constitutive moment. Many contexts confirm the significance of literacy-based practical experiences. History, even in its computational form or in genetic shape, is an example. Literacy made quite a number of practical experiences possible: education, mass media, political activism, industrial manufacture. This does not imply that these domains are forever wed to literacy. A few contexts, such as crafts, predated literacy. Information processing, visualization, non-algorithmic computation, genetics, and simulation emerged from the pragmatics that ascertained literacy. But they are also relatively independent of it. Steiner was correct in stating that "we must countenance the possibility that the study and transmission of literature may be of only marginal significance, a passionate luxury like the preservation of the antique." His assertion needs to be extended from literature to literacy. The realization that we must go beyond literacy does not come easy and does not follow the logic of the current modus operandi of the scholars and educators who have a stake in literacy and tradition. Their logic is itself so deeply rooted in the experience of written language that it is only natural to extend it to the inference that without literacy the human being loses a fundamental dimension. The sophistry is easy to catch, however. The conclusion implies that the practical experience of language is identical to literacy. As we know, this is not the case. Orality, of more consequence in our day than the majority are aware of, and in more languages that do not have a writing system, supports human existence in a universe of extreme expressive richness and variety. Many arguments, starting with those against writing enunciated in ancient times and furthered in various criticisms of literacy, point to the many dimensions of language that were lost once it started to be tamed and its regulated use enforced upon people. Again, Steiner convincingly articulates a pluralistic view: "...we should not assume that a verbal matrix is the only one in which articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable. There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not on language, but on other communicative energies, such as the icon or the musical note." He correctly describes how mathematics, especially under the influence of Leibniz and Newton, became a dynamic language: "I have watched topologists, knowing no syllable of each other's language, working effectively together at a blackboard in the silent speech common to their craft." Networks of cognitive energy Chemistry, physics, biology, and recently a great number of other practical experiences of human self-constitution, formed their own languages. Indeed, the medium in which experiences take place is not a passive component of the experience. It is imprinted with the degree of necessity that made such a medium a constitutive part of the experience. It has its own life in the sense that the experience involves a dynamics of exchange and awareness of its many components. The cuneiform tablets could not hold the depth of thinking of the formulas in which the theory of relativity is expressed. They probably had a better expressive potential for a more spontaneous testimony to the process of self-identification of the people who projected themselves in the act of shaping damp tablets, inscribing them, and baking them to hardness. Ideographic writing may well explain, better than orality, the role of silence in Taoism and Buddhism, the tension of the act of withdrawal from speech and writing, or the phonetic subtleties at work when more than 2000 ideographs were reduced to the standard 600 signs now in use. The historic articulation of the Torah, its mixture of poetry and pragmatic rules, is different in nature from the writings, in different alphabets and different pragmatic structures, reflected in the language of the New Testament or of the Koran. Writing under the pragmatics of limited human experiences, and writing after the Enlightenment, not to mention today's automated writing and reading, are fundamentally different. Gombrich recalls that Gutenberg earned a living by making amulet mirrors used by people in crowds to catch the image of sacred objects displayed during certain ceremonies. The animistic thought marks this experience. It is continued in the moving type that Gutenberg invented, yet another mirror to duplicate the life of handwriting, which type imitated. Printed religious texts began their lives as talismans. After powerful printing presses were invented, writing extends a different thought- machines at work-in the sequence of operations that transform raw materials into products. All the characteristics associated with literacy are characteristics of the underlying structure of practical experiences, values, and aspirations embodied in the printing machines. The linear function, replicated in the use of the lever, was generalized in machines made of many levers. It was also generalized in literacy, the language machine that renders language use uniform. Writing originated in a context of the limited sequences of human self-constitutive practical experiences embodied in the functioning of mechanical machines. The continuation of the sequential mode in more elaborate experiences, as in automated production lines, will be with us for quite a while. Nevertheless, sequentiality is increasingly complemented by parallel functioning. Similar or different activities carried through at the same time, at one location or at several, are qualitatively different from sequential activities. Self-constitution in such parallel experiences results in new cognitive characteristics, and thus in new resources supporting higher efficiency. The deterministic component carried over from literacy- based practical experiences reflects awareness of action and reaction. Its dualistic nature is preserved in the right/wrong operational distinctions of the literate use of language, and thus in the logic attached to it. Pragmatic expectations of efficiency no longer met by conceptual or material experiences based on the model embodied in literacy have led to attempts to transcend determinism, as well as linear functions, sequentiality, and dualism. A new underlying structure prompts a pragmatics of non-linear relations, of a different dynamics, of configurations, and of multi-valued systems. A wide array of methods and technologies facilitates emancipation from the centralism and hierarchy embodied in literacy-based pragmatics. The pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy requires that the centralism of literacy be replaced through massive distribution of tasks, and non- hierarchic forms of human interactions. Augmented by worldwide networking, this pragmatics has become global in scope. Probably just as significant is the role mediation plays in the process. As a specific form of human experience, mediation increases the effectiveness of praxis by affording the benefits of integration to human acts of self-constitution. Mediation replaces the analytic strategy inherited through literacy, opening avenues for reaching a sense of the whole in an experience of building hypotheses and performing effective synthesis. In order to realize what all this means, we can think of everything involved in the conception, design, manufacturing, distribution, and integration of computers in applications ranging from trivial data management to sophisticated simulations. The effort is, for all practical purposes, global. The brightest minds, from many countries, contribute ideas to new concepts of computation. The design of computers involves a large number of creative professionals from fields as varied as mechanical engineering, chip design, operating systems, telecommunications, ergonomy, interface design, product design, and communication. The scale of the effort is totally different from anything we know of from previous practical experiences. Before such a new computer will become the hardware and software that eventually will land on our desks, it is modeled and simulated, and subjected to a vast array of tests that are all the expression of the hypothesis and goals to be synthesized in the new product. Some people might have looked at the first personal computers as a scaled- down version of the mainframes of the time. Within the pragmatics associated with literacy, this is a very good representation. In the pragmatics we are concerned with, this linear model does not work, and it does not explain how new experiences come about. Chances are that the mass-produced machines increasingly present in a great number of households reach a performance well above those mainframes with which the PC might have been compared. Representing the underlying structure of the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy, the digital becomes a resource, not unlike electricity, and not unlike other resources tapped in the past for increasing the efficiency of human activity. In the years to come, this aspect will dominate the entire effort of the acculturation of the digital. Today, as in the Industrial Age of cars and other machines, the industry still wants to put a computer on every desk. The priority, however, should be to make computation resources, not machines, available to everyone. Those still unsure about the Internet and the World Wide Web should understand that what makes them so promising is not the potential for surfing, or its impressive publication capabilities, but the access to the cognitive energy that is transported through networks. Bumps and potholes Expectations stemming from the civilization of literacy differ in their condition from those of the cognitive age. Infinitely more chances open continuously, but the risks associated with them are at least of the same order of magnitude as the changes. Walking along a road is less risky than riding a horse, bicycling, or driving a car. Flying puts the farthest point from us on the globe within our reach, but the risks involved in flight are also greater. Cognitive resources integrated in our endeavors contribute to an efficiency higher than that provided by hydropower, steam engines, and electric energy. With each new step in the direction of their increased participation in our praxis, we take a chance. There is no reason to compare simulations of the most complex and daring projects to successful or failed attempts to build new cities, modify nature, or create artifacts conceived under cognitive assumptions of lesser complexity than that achieved in our time. A failed connection on today's Internet, or a major scam on the Web, should be expected in these early stages of the pragmatic framework to which they belong. But we should at no moment ignore the fact that cognitive breakdowns are much more than the crash of an operating system or the breakdown of a network application. We learn more about ourselves in the practical experiences of constituting the post-literate languages of science, art, and the humanities than we have learned during the entire history of humankind. These languages-very complex sign systems indeed- integrate knowledge accumulated in a great variety of experiences, as well as genetically inherited and rationally and emotionally based cognitive procedures. Changes in the very fabric of the human being involved in these practical experiences are reflected in the increased ability to handle abstraction, refocus from the immediate to the mediated, and enter interhuman commitments that result from the practice of unprecedented means of expression, communication, and signification. During the process, we have reached some of our most critical limitations. Knowledge is deeper, but more segmented. To use Steiner's words once again, there is a "gap of silence" between many groups of people. Our own efficiency made us increasingly vulnerable to drives that recall more of the primitive stages of humankind than all that we believed we accumulated through the humanities. The new means are changing politics and economic activity, but first of all they are changing the nature of human transactions. And they are changing our sense of future. Let us not forget Big Brother, not to be brushed away just because the year 1984 has come and gone, but to be understood from a viewpoint Orwell could not have had. If the means in question are used to monitor us, too bad. In the emerging structures of human interaction, to exercise control, as done in previous societies, is simply not possible. It is not for the love of the Internet that this constitutes a non-regulated domain of human experiences. Rather it is because by its nature, the Internet cannot be controlled in the same way our driving, drinking, and social behavior are controlled. The opportunity for transparency afforded by systems that replace the domination of literacy is probably too important to be missed or misused. The dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy results from its implicit condition. We can affect some of its parameters, but not its global behavior. For instance, the integration required by parallelism and the massive distribution of tasks cannot take place successfully if the network of interactions is mined by gates, filters, and veils of secrecy, by hierarchic control mechanisms, and by authorization procedures. Imagine if a person's arms, eyes, ears, or nostrils had to obtain permission to participate in the self-constitution of the whole human being. Individuals in the new pragmatic context are the eyes, arms, brains, and nostrils of the complex human entity involved in an experience that integrates everyone's participation. It is an intense effort, not always as rewarding as we expect it to be, a self-testing endeavor whose complexity escapes individual realization. Feedback loops are the visible part of the broader system, but not its essential part. The authenticity of each and every act of our self-making contributes to the integrity of the overall process-our ascertainment through what we do. Relative insularity and a definite alienation from the overall of the system's goals-meeting higher demands by higher performance-are part of the picture described. Complemented by a sense of empowerment-the ability to self-determine-and a variety of new forms of human interaction, the resulting human pragmatics can be more humane than the pragmatics of the huge factories of industrial society-commuters rushing from home to job to shopping mall, to entertainment. It is not Big Brother who will be watching. Each and every individual is part of the effort, entitled to know everything about it, indeed wanting to know and caring. Without transparency that we can influence, the effort will not succeed. We are our own active badge. The record is of interest in order to justify the use of our time and energy, but foremost to learn about those instances when we are less faithful to ourselves than our newly acquired liberty affords. It is much easier to submit to outside authority, as literacy educates us to do. But once self-control and self-evaluation, as feedback mechanisms under our own control become the means of optimization, the burden is shifted from Big Brother, bureaucracies, and regulations to the individual. It is probably useful at this point to suggest a framework for action in at least some of the basic activities affected by the change brought about in the civilization of illiteracy. The reason for these suggestions is at hand. We know that literate education is not appropriate, but this observation remains a critical remark. What we need is a guide for action. This has to translate into positive attitudes, and into real attempts to meet the challenge of present and shape the future in full awareness of forces at work. The University of Doubt Literacy-based education, as all other literacy experiences, assumes that people are the same. It presumes that each human being can and must be literate. Just as the goal of industry was to turn out standardized products, education assumes the same task through the mold of literacy. Diplomas and certificates testify how like the mold the product is. To those who have problems with writing or reading, the labels legasthenic and dyslexic are applied. Dyscalculus is the name given to the inability to cope with numbers. The question of why we should expect uniform cognitive structures covering the literate use of language or numbers, but not the use of sounds, colors, shapes, and volume, is never raised. Tremendous effort is made to help individuals who simply cannot execute the sequentiality of writing or the meaning of successive numbers. Nothing similar is done to address cognitive characteristics of persons inclined to means different from literacy. In order to respond to the needs of the pragmatics of high efficiency leading to the civilization of many literacies, education needs first of all to rediscover the individual, and his or her extensive gamut of cognitive characteristics. I use the word rediscover having in mind incipient forms of education and training, which were more on a one-to- one or one-to-few basis. Education also needs to reconsider its expectation of a universal common denominator, based on the industrial model of standardization. Rather than taming and sanitizing the minds of students, education has not only to acknowledge differences in aptitudes and interests, but also to stimulate them. Every known form of energy is the expression of difference and not the result of leveling. During this process of re-evaluation, the goals of education will have to be redefined, methods of education rethought, and content reassessed. A new philosophy, embodied in a dynamic notion of education, has to crystallize as we work towards educational alternatives that integrate the visual, the kinetic, the aural, and the synesthetic. In the spirit of the pragmatic context, education ought to become an environment for interaction and discovery. Time taken with reiterations of the past deserves to be committed to inferences for the present, and, to the extent possible, for the future. Some of the suggestions to be made in the coming lines might sound utopian or have the ring of techno-babble. Their purpose is to present possibilities, not to conjure up miraculous solutions. The path from present to future is the path of human practical experiences of self-constitution. To achieve goals corresponding to the requirements and expectations of the civilization of no dominant literacy, education needs to give up the reductionist perspective that has marked it since generalized education became the norm. Education has to recognize its students as the individuals they are, not as some abstract or theoretic entity. Basic education should be centered around the major forms of expression and communication: language, visual, aural, kinetic, and symbolic. Differences among these systems need to be explored as students familiarize themselves with each of them, as well as combinations. Concrete forms of acculturation should be geared towards using these elements, not dispensing instructions and assigning exercises. Each student will discover from within how to apply these systems. Most important, students will share their experiences among themselves. There will be no right or wrong answer that is not proven so by the pragmatic instance. Fundamental to the educational endeavor is the process of heuristic inquiry, to be expressed through programs for further investigation. These programs require many languages: literate inquiry, mathematics, chemistry, computation, and so on. By virtue of the fact that people from different backgrounds enter the process, they bear the experience of their respective languages. Relevance to the problem at hand will justify one approach or another. Frequently, the wheel will be re-invented. Other times, new wheels will emerge as contributions of authentic ingenuity and inventiveness. In their interaction, those involved in the process share in the experience through which they constitute themselves at many levels. One is to provide access to the variety of perspectives reflecting the variety of people. Interactive learning Education has to become a living process. It should involve access to all kinds of information sources, not only to those stored in literate formats. These resources have their specific epistemological condition-a printed encyclopedia is different from a database. To access a book is different from accessing a multimedia knowledge platform. Retrieval is part of the practice of knowledge and defines a horizon for human interaction. All these differences will become clear through use, not through mere assertion or imitation. The goal of education cannot be the dissemination of imitative behavior, but of procedures. In this model of education, classes are groups of people pursuing connected goals, not compartments based on age or subject, even less bureaucratic units. A class is an expression of interest, not the product of statistical distribution based on birth and zoning. The physical environment of the class is the world, and not the brick and mortar confined room of stereotyped roles and interactions. This might sound hollow, or too grandiose, but the means to make this happen are progressively becoming available. Here is one possible scenario: Students approach centers of interactive education after the initial phase of acculturation. Perhaps the word center recalls one of the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy. By their own nature, though, these centers are distributed repositories of knowledge stored in a variety of forms- databases, programs pertinent to various human practical experiences, examples, and evaluation procedures. With such a condition, such centers lend themselves to making refreshable knowledge available in all imaginable formats. On request, its own programs (known as intelligent agents) search for appropriate sources through the guidance of those in need, independent of them, or parallel to them. Requests are articulated in voice command: "I would like to know ...." Or the requests can be handwritten, typed, or diagrammed. Such interactive education centers are simultaneously libraries of knowledge, heuristic environments, laboratories, testing grounds, and research media. The hybrid human-machine machine that constitutes their nucleus alters as the individual involved in the interaction changes. As we all know, the best way to learn is to teach. Students should be able to teach their neural network partners subjects of interest to their own practical experiences. In many cases, the neural networks, themselves networked with others, will become partners in pursuing practical goals of higher and higher complexity. The fact that students interact not based on their address and school district, not based on homogeneity criteria of age or cultural background, but on shared interests and different perspectives gives this type of education a broader social significance: There is nothing we do that does not affect the world in its entirety. Repeating these words ad nauseam will not affect the understanding of what this means, as one practical endeavor of global consequential nature can. In the model suggested, interests are identified and pursued, and results are compared. Questions are widely circulated. What students appropriate in the process are ways of thinking, procedures for testing hypotheses, and means and methods for ascertaining progress in the process. Professional educators, aware of cognitive processes and freed from the burden of administrative work, no longer rehash the past but design interactive environments for students to learn in. Teachers involve themselves in this interaction, and continue to evolve as knowledge itself evolves. Instead of inculcating the discipline of one dominant language, they leave open choices for short and long-term commitments, their own included. Not having to force themselves to think in an imposed language, students are freed from the constraints of assigned tasks. They are challenged by the responsibility to make their own choices and carry them through. In the process, differences among students will become apparent, but so will the ability to understand how being different, in a context of cooperative interactions, is an asset and not a liability. Motivation is seeded in the satisfaction of discovery and the ability to easily integrate in a framework of practical experiences that are no longer mimicked in education, but practiced in discovery. Footing the bill Instead of an education financed by the always controversial redistribution of social resources, interactive learning will be supported by its real beneficiaries. That a biogenetics company, for instance, can do this better than an organization engaged in bureaucratic self-perpetuation is a fair assumption. Freed from the costs associated with buildings and high administrative overhead, education should take place in the environment of interactions characteristic of the pragmatic framework. As extensions of industries and services, of institutions and individual operations, education would cease to be training for a hypothetical employer. Like the practical experience for which it is constituted, education points to the precise reward and fulfillment, not to vague ideals that prove hollow after the student has paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn them. Vested in the benefits of a company whose potential depends on their future performance, students can be better motivated. Will business cooperate? As things stand now, business is in the paradoxical situation of criticizing the inadequacies of an education that has many of the same characteristics as outmoded ways of doing business. Once students reach a level of confidence that entitles them to attempt to continue on their own or to associate with the company, the alumni of such educational experiences have better control over their destinies and can follow the cognitive path of their choosing. There will be analytically oriented and synthetically oriented individuals, many embracing the experience of articulating hypotheses and testing them. Some will follow cognitive inclinations to induction, to making observations and drawing generalizations. Others will follow the path of deduction, noticing general patterns and seeing how they apply in concrete cases. Others will follow abductions, i.e., applying knowledge about a representative sample in order to infer for a broader collection of facts or processes. No cognitive path should be forbidden or excluded, as long as human integrity, in all aspects, is maintained and human interaction supported in the many possible forms it can assume. Motivation reflected in integrity is the element that will bring individual direction into focus. As it is practiced today, education cultivates motivations that exclude integrity and the development of skills appropriate to understanding that you can cheat your teacher but not yourself without affecting the outcome. In the current system of education, integrity appears as something incidental to the experience. Collaboration on a project of common interest introduces elements of reciprocal responsibility in respect to the outcome. Since outcome affects everyone's future, education is no longer a matter of grades, but of successful collaboration in pursuing a goal. In order to accomplish these goals-obviously in a greater number of manifestations than the ones just described-we need to free education from its many inherited assumptions. Progress can no longer be understood as exclusively linear. Neither can we continue to apply a deterministic sequence of cause and effect in domains of non-deterministic interdependencies, characteristic of distributed cooperative efforts. Neither hierarchy nor dualism can be cultivated in the educational environment because the dynamics of association and interaction is based on patterns of changing roles within a universe focused on optimal parameters, not threatened by the radical disjunction of success vs. failure. Complexity must be acknowledged, not done away with through methods that worked in the Industrial age but which fail in the new pragmatic context. Unless and until one discovers through practical experience the need for a different viewpoint, for values outside the immediate object of interest, nothing should be imposed on the individual. Shakespeare and Boole are neither loved, nor understood, nor respected more by those who were forced to learn how to spell their names, learn dates by heart, or learn titles of works, fragments of plays or logical rules. The very presence of art and science, sport and entertainment, politics and religion, ethics and the legal system in educational forms of interactive media, books, artworks, databases, and programs for human interaction opens the possibility for discoveries. As serious as all these matters are, no education will ever succeed without making its students happy, without satisfaction. In each instance of education, good or bad, the human being, as a natural entity, is broken in. Tension will always be part of education, but instead of rewarding those more adept at acculturation, education should integrate complementary moments. No, I do not advocate interactive study from the beach or from a remote mountain ski resort; and I am not for extending human integration in the world of practical experiences around the clock. But as education frees itself from the industrial model-factory-like buildings, classes that correspond to shifts, holidays and vacation time-it should also let students make choices that are closer to their natural rhythms. Instead of physical co-presence, there should be interactive and cooperative creativity that does not exclude the playful, the natural, and the accidental. If all this sounds too far-fetched to bring about, that is because it is. Even if the computer giants of the world were to open interactive learning centers tomorrow, it would be to little avail. Students will bring with them attitudes rooted in traditional expectations. There is more consensus in our world for what is right with the current system of education than for what can or should be done to change it. But with each nucleus of self-organization, such as on-line classes on subjects pertinent to working on the network, seeds are sown for future development. In our time, when the need for qualified people surges in one field or another-computational genetics, nanotechnology, non-linear electronic publishing-the model I presented is the answer. Waiting for the educational system to process students and to deliver them, at no cost to the corporations that will employ them, is no longer an acceptable strategy. Instead of endowing university chairs dedicated to the study of the no longer meaningful, corporations should invest in training and post-academic life-long learning. To preach that in order to be a good architect one has to know history and biology and mathematics, and to know who Vitruvius was, equals preaching the rules of literacy in a world that effectively does not need them. To create an environment for the revelation of such a need, if indeed it is acknowledged as humans discover new ways to deal with their questions, is a very different task. How much reading, how much writing, mathematics, drawing, foreign language, or chemistry an architect needs is the wrong question. It assumes that someone knows, well in advance of the changing pragmatic context, what is the right mixture and how future human practical experiences will unfold. The ingredients change, the proportions change, and the context changes first of all. As opposed to the current hierarchy, which proclaims drawing or singing as extraneous but orthography and reading as necessary, education needs to finally acknowledge complementarity. It has to encourage self-definition in and through skills best suited to practical experiences of self-constitution in a world that has escaped the cycle of repetition, and pursues goals unrelated to previous experiences. Instead of doing away with or rationalizing intuition, or being suspicious of irrationality, education will have to allow the individual to pursue a search path that integrates them. Students should be able to define goals where intuition, and even irrationality and the subconscious, are applicable. They should be freed from the constraints and limitations of the paradigm of problem solving, and engaged in generating alternatives. A wake-up call All this relies heavily on the maturity of the student and the ability of educators to design environments that stimulate responsibility and self-discipline. The broad-stroke educational project sketched up to here will have to address the precise concerns connected to how and when education actually starts, what the role of the family should be-if the family remains a valid entity-and how variety and multiplicity will be addressed. In today's words and expectations, even in today's prejudices, education is of national interest in one main respect: to equip students with skills so they can contribute to the national coffers in the future. But the arena of economic viability is the global economy, not an economy defined by national boundaries. The trans-national marketplace is the real arena of competition. Re-engineering, far from being finished, made it quite clear that for the sake of efficiency, productive activities are relocated without any consideration for patriotism or national pride, never mind human solidarity and ethics. In today's world, and to some extent in the model described so far, the unfolding of the individual through cultivation of the mind and spirit is somehow lost in the process of inculcating facts. It is its own reward to enjoy subtleties, or to generate them, to partake in art, or be part of it, to challenge the mind, or indulge in the rich world of emotions. Prepared for work that is usually different from what educators, economists, and politicians anticipate, people face the reality of work that becomes more and more fragmented and mediated. On the assembly line, or in the "analysis of symbols" (to use Robert Reich's term), work is, in the final analysis, a job, not a vocation. Physicians, professors, businessmen, carpenters, and burger flippers perform a job that can be automated to some degree. Depriving work of its highest but often neglected motivation-the unfolding of individual abilities, becoming an identity in the act- negates this motivation. Replaced by external rationale-the substance of commercial democracy-the decline of inner motivation leads to lack of interest, reduced commitment, and declining creativity. Education that processes humans for jobs promises access to abundance, but not to self-fulfillment. The decline of family, and new patterns of sexuality and reproduction, tell us that expectations, sublime on their own merit, of improved family involvement will be the exception, not the rule. Accordingly, the challenge is to understand the nature of change and to suggest alternatives, instead of hoping that, miraculously or by divine intervention of the almighty dollar (or yen, franc, mark, pound, or combinations thereof), families will again become what literacy intended they should be. If the challenge is not faced, education will only become a better machine for processing each new generation. Many scholars of education have set forth various plans for saving education. They do not ignore the new pragmatic requirements. They are unaware of them. Therefore, their recommendations can be classified as more of the same. The sense of globality will not result from taking rhymes from Mother Goose (with its implicit reference and culturally determined rhythm) and adding to them the Mother Goose of other countries. The Victorian and post-Victorian vision transferred upon children, the expectation of "everything will be fine if you just do as you're told," reflects past ideals handed down through the moralizing fiction of the Industrial Age. The most ubiquitous presence in modern society is the television set. It replaced the book long ago. Notwithstanding, TV is a passive medium, of low informative impact, but of high informative ability. Digital television, which extends the presence of computers, will make a difference, whether it is implemented in high resolution or not. Television in digitally scalable formats is an active medium, and interactivity is its characteristic. Education centers will integrate digital television, and open ways to involve individuals regardless of age, background and interests. We can all learn that there are several ways of seeing things, that the physics of time and music report on different aspects of temporal characteristics of our experience in the world. The movement of a robot, though different from the elegant dance of a ballerina, can benefit from a sense and experience of choreography, considered by many incompatible with engineering. The new media of interaction that are embodied in educational centers should be less obsessed with conveying information, and more with allowing human understanding of instances of change. But these are only examples. What I have in mind is the creation of an environment for exploration in which knowledge of aesthetic aspects is learned parallel to scientific knowledge. The formats are not those of classes in the theory or history of art, or of similar art oriented subjects. As exploration takes place, aesthetic considerations are pursued as a means of optimizing the effort. It is quite clear that as classes dynamically take shape, they will integrate people of different ages and different backgrounds. Taking place in the public domain of networked resources, this education will benefit from a sense of creative competition. At each moment in time, projects will be accessible, and feedback can be provided. This ensures not only high performance from a scientific or technological viewpoint, but also aesthetic relevance. The literacy-based educational establishment will probably dismiss the proposals set forth as pie-in-the-sky, as futuristic at best. Its representatives will claim that the problem at hand needs solutions, not a futuristic model based on some illusory self- organizing nuclei supported by the economy. They will argue that the suggested model of education is less credible than perfecting a practice that at least has some history and achievements to report. The public, no matter how critical of education, will ask: Is it permissible, indeed responsible, to assume that a new philosophy of education will generate new student attitudes, especially in view of the reality of metal detectors installed in schools to prevent students from carrying weapons? Is it credible to describe experiences in discovery involving high aesthetic quality, while mediocrity makes the school system appear hopelessly damned? Self-motivation is described as though teenage pregnancy and classes where students bring their babies are the concern of underpaid teachers but not of visionaries. More questions in the same vein are in the air. To propose an analogy, selling water in the desert is not as simple as it sounds. We can, indeed, dream of educational tools hooked up to the terminals at the Kennedy Space Center, or to the supercomputers of the European Center for Research of the Future. We can dream of using digital television for exploring the unknown, and of on-line education in a world where everyone envisions high accomplishments through the use of resources that until now were open to very few. But unless society gives up the expectation of a homogeneous, obligatory education that forces individuals who want-or do not want-to prepare themselves for a life of practical experiences into the same mold, education will not produce the desired results. Good intentions, based on social, ethnic, or racial criteria, on love of children, and humanistic ideals, will not help either. While all over the world real spending per student in public education and private institutions increased well above the levels of inflation, fewer students do homework, and very few study beyond the daily assignment. This is true not only in the USA but also in countries with high admission standards for college, such as France, Germany, and Japan. Translated into the language of our considerations, all this means that education cannot be changed independent of change in society. Education is not an autonomous system. Its connections to the rest of the pragmatic context are through students, teachers, parents, political institutions, economic realities, racial attitudes, culture, and patterns of behavior in our commercial democracy. In today's education, parochial considerations take precedence over global concerns. Bureaucratic rules of accumulated imbecility literally annihilate the changes for a better future of millions of students. What appears as the cultivation of the mind and spirit is actually no more than the attempt to polish a store window while the store itself lost its usefulness long ago. It makes no sense to require millions of students to drive daily to schools that can no longer be maintained, or to pass tests when standards are continuously lowered in order to somehow justify them. Consumption and interaction In view of the fundamental changes in patterns of human activity, not only students need education, but practically everyone, and probably educators first of all. Connection to education centers needs to be different from the expectation of children sitting in a class dominated by a teacher. On the interactive education networks, age no longer serves as a criterion. Learning is self-paced, motivated by individual interests and priorities and by the perspectives that learning opens. A sense of common interest is expressed through interaction, unfolding through a diversity of perspectives and ways of thinking and doing. Nothing can help generations that are more different and more antagonistic than ours to find a common ground than an experience of education emancipated from hierarchies, freed of authoritarian expectations, challenging and engaging at the same time. Education will be part of the continuous self-definition of the human being throughout one's entire life. Whether we like it or not, the economy is driven by consumer spending. This does not automatically mean that we can or should let the feedback loop follow a course that will eventually lead to losing the stability of the system to which we belong. If consumption were to remain the driving force, however, we would all end up enjoying ourselves to death. But the solution to this state of affairs is not to be found in political or educational sermonizing. To blame consumption, expectations of abundance, or entertainment will not help in finding answers to educational worries. Education will have to integrate the human experience of consumption and facilitate the acquisition of common sense. A sense of quality can be instilled by pursuing cooperative projects involving not only the production of artifacts, but also self-improvement. Generations that grow up with television as their window to reality cannot be blamed for lack of interest in reading, or for viewing reality as a show interrupted by thirty-second messages. Young minds acquire different skills, and education ought to provide a context for their integration in captivating practical experiences, instead of trying to neutralize them. Television is here for good, although changes that will alter the relation between viewers and originators of messages will change television as well. The cognitive characteristics and motor patterns of couch potatoes and moderate viewers in the age of generalized TV and interactive networking are very different from those of people educated as literate. These characteristics will be further reshaped as digital television becomes part of the networked world. Where reading about history, or another country, is marginally relevant to praxis in the new context of life and work, the ability to view, understand images, perceive and effect changes, and the ability to edit them and reuse, to complete them, moreover to generate one's own images, is essential to the outcome of the effort. Without engaging the student, education heads into oblivion. As difficult as it is to realize that there are no absolute values, unless this realization is shared by all generations, we will face more inter- generational conflicts than we already face. Television is not the panacea for such conflicts, but a broad ground for reaching reciprocal awareness of what it takes to meet an increasingly critical challenge. Sure, we are focused here on a television that transcended its mass communication industrial society status, and reached the condition of individual interaction. Understanding differences cannot be limited to education, or reduced to a generalized practice of viewing TV (digital or not). It has to effectively become the substance of political life. While all are equal with respect to the law, while all are free and encouraged to become the best they can be, society has to effectively abandon expectations of homogeneity and uniformity, and to dedicate energies to enhancing the significance of what makes its members different. This translates into an education freed from expectations that are not rooted in the process of self-affirmation as scientists, dancers, thinkers, skilled workers, farmers, sportspeople, and many other pragmatically sanctioned professionals. The direction is clear: to become less obsessed with a job, and more concerned with a work that satisfies them, and thus their friends and relatives. The means and methods for moving in this direction will not be disbursed by states or other organizations. We have to discover them, test, and refine, aware of the fact that what replaces the institution of education is the open-ended process through which we emerge as educated individuals. Does education henceforth become a generic trade school? For those who so choose, yes. For others, it will become what they themselves make of it through their involvement. Remaining an open enterprise, education will allow as many adjustments as each individual is willing to take upon oneself for the length of one's life. The education of interactive skills, of visualization technologies, of methods of search and retrieval, of thinking in images, sounds, colors, odors, textures, and haptic perception requires contexts for their discovery, use, and evaluation which no school or university in the world can provide. But if all available educational resources are used to establish learning centers based on the paradigms of interactivity, data processing, multimedia, virtual reality, neural networks, and genetic engineering, using powerful carriers such as digital TV or high-speed and broadband networks, we will stop managing a bankrupt enterprise and open avenues for successful alternatives. As humanity ages, and societies have to cope with a new age structure, education will have to focus also on how to constitute one's identity past the biological optimum. Among the fastest growing segments on the Internet, the elderly represent a very distinct group, of high motivation, and of abilities that can better benefit society. Access to knowledge in the form of interactive projects, pursued by classes constituted of individuals as different as the world is, is not trivial, and obviously not cheap. The networked world, the many challenges of new means of communication already in place, the new medium of digital TV-closer to reality than many realize- and computers, are already widely available. A major effort to provide support to many who are not yet connected to this world, at the expense of the current bureaucracy of education, will provide the rest. Instead of investing in buildings, bureaucracies, norms, and regulations, instead of rebuilding crumbling schools, and recycling teachers who intellectually died long ago in the absence of any real challenge, we can, and should, design a global education system. Such a system will effect change not only in one country, not only in a group of rich countries, but all over the world. The practice of networking and the competence in integrating work produced independently in functional modules can be attained by tackling real problems, as these are encountered by each person, not invented assignments by teachers or writers of manuals. Education can succeed or fail only on the terms of efficiency expected in our pragmatic framework. Scores, religiously accounted for in literacy-based political life, are irrelevant. Practical experiences of self-constitution are not multiple-choice examinations. They involve the person in his entirety, and result in instances of personal growth and increased social awareness. A global world requires a live global system of education that embodies the best we can afford, and is driven by the immense energy of variety. Unexpected opportunities We have heard the declaration over and over: This is the age of knowledge. The statement describes a context of human practical experiences in which the major resources are cognitive in nature. In the civilization of literacy, knowledge acquisition could take place at a slow pace, over long periods of time. The interlocking factors that defined the pragmatic context were such that no other gnoseological pattern was possible. Knowledge arising from practical experiences of industrial society progressively contributed to making life easier for human beings. Eventually, everything that had been done through the power of human muscle and dexterity-using mainly hands, arms, and legs-was assigned to machines and executed using energy resources found in the environment. Cognition supported the incremental evolution of machines through a vast array of applications. Human knowledge allowed for the efficient use of energy to move machines which executed tasks that might have taken tens, even hundreds of men to perform. To make this more clear, let us compare some of the tasks of the Machine Age with those of the Age of Cognition we live in. Within industrial pragmatics, the machine supplanted the muscle and the limited mechanical skills needed for processing raw materials, manufacturing cars, washing clothes, or typing. Discoveries of more sources of coal, gas, and oil kept the machine working and led to its extension from the factory to the home. Literacy, embodying characteristics of industrial pragmatics, kept pace with the demands and possibilities of the Machine Age. In our age, computer programs supplant our thinking and the limited knowledge involved in supervising complex production and assembly lines that process raw materials or synthesize new material. Computer programs are behind the manufacture of automobiles; they integrate household functions-heating, washing clothes, preparing meals, guarding our homes. Publishing on the World Wide Web relies on computers. The scale of all these efforts is global. Many languages, bearing the data needed by each specific sub-task, go into the final product or outcome. Older dependencies on natural resources and on a social model shaped to optimally support industrial praxis are partially overcome as the focus changes from permanence to transitory communities of interest and to the individual- the locus of the Cognitive Age. Cognitive resources arise from experiences qualitatively different from those of the Machine Age. Digital engines do not burn coal or gas. Digital engines burn cognition. The source of cognition lies in the mind of each human being. The resources of the Machine Age are being slowly depleted. Alternative resources will be found in what was typically discarded. Recycling and the discovery of processes that extract more from what is available depend more on human cognition than on brute force processing methods. The sources of cognition are, in principle, unlimited. But if the cognitive component of human practical experiences were to stagnate or break down for some unimaginable reason, the pragmatics based on the underlying digital process of the Age of Cognition would break down. To understand this, one need only think of being stuck in a car on an untravelled road, all because the gasoline ran out. Compare this situation with what would happen if the most complex machine, more complicated than anything science fiction could describe, came to a halt because there was no human thought to keep it going. In the current context, the dynamics of cognition, distributed between processing information and acquiring and disseminating knowledge, stands for the dynamics of the entire system of our existence. Embodied in technologies and processing procedures, cognition contributes to the fundamental separation of the individual human from the productive task, and from a wide variety of non-productive activities. It is not necessary that an individual possess all knowledge that a pragmatic experience requires. This means, simply, that operators in nuclear power plants need not be eminent physicists or mathematicians. Neither do all workers in a space research program need to be rocket scientists. A programmer might be ignorant of how a disk drive works. A brain surgeon does not know how the tools he or she uses are made. Each facet of a pragmatic instance entails specific requirements. The whole pragmatic experience requires knowledge above and beyond what the individuals directly involved can or should master. Instead of limited knowledge uniformly dispensed through literate methods, knowledge is distributed and embodied in tools and methods, not in persons. The advantage is that programs and procedures are made uniform, not human beings. For example, data management does not substitute for advanced knowledge, but a data management system as such can be endowed with knowledge in the form of routines, procedures, operation schemes, management, and self-evaluation. Just as everyone kept the mechanical engine going, everyone, layperson or expert, contributes to the functioning of the digital engine. The only source of cognition that we can count on is within people self-constituted through practical experiences involving the digital. This does not mean that everyone will become a thinker and everyone will produce knowledge. Two sources of knowledge are relevant in the Age of Cognition within which the civilization of illiteracy unfolds. One source is the advanced work of experts and researchers, in areas of higher abstraction, way beyond what literacy can handle. The other, much more critical, source is to be found in common- sense human interaction, in day-to-day human experience. We know that the knowledge of experts will continue to be integrated in the pragmatics of this age. The specific motivations of human practical experiences resulting in knowledge have to be recognized and stimulated. And we must also be aware of circumstances that could have a negative effect on these experiences. We know less about the second source of knowledge because in previous pragmatic contexts it was less critical, and widely ignored. In particular, we do not know how to tap into the infinite reservoir of cognitive resources that are manifested through the routine work and everyday life of the overwhelming portion of the world's population. Taken individually, each person can contribute cognitive resources to the broader dynamics of the world. But these individual contributions are random, difficult to identify, and do not necessarily justify the effort of mining them. In our lives, many decisions and choices are made on the basis of extremely powerful procedures of which we, as individuals, are almost never aware. There is a grain of genius in some of the most mundane ways of doing things. Here the nodal points of integration in the multi-dimensional array that constitutes the globality of humankind are what counts. Delving into the dynamic collective persona makes such an effort worthwhile. Years ago, in a dialogue with a prominent researcher in education, who used to maintain interactive simulations for youngsters who logged in at his institute, I discussed the then fashionable Game of Life (developed by John Horton Conway). As an open-ended simulation of the rules of birth and death, and based on the theory of cellular automata, the game required quite a bit of thinking. There is no winner or loser in the Game of Life. Although the rules of the game are relatively simple, highly complex forms of artificial life arise on the matrix: a cell going from empty to full describes birth, from full to empty, death. Satisfaction in playing is derived from reaching complex forms of life. The idea we discussed was to make the game widely available on the network. The hundreds of thousands of players would leave traces of cognitive decisions that, over time, would add up to an expression of the intelligence of the collective body who shared an interest in the game. The cognitive sum total is of a Gestalt nature-much higher than the sum of its parts. That is, the sum has a different qualitative condition, probably comparable to that of the experts and geniuses, or even much higher! Considering all the instances of human application to tasks that range from being frankly useless to highly productive, one can surmise that the second source of knowledge and intelligence is much more interesting than that of the dedicated thinkers. There is more to what we do and how we choose than rationality and thinking, never mind literate rationality. This collective persona need not comprise the entire population of the world (minus the knowledge professionals). It would help to start with groups formed ad hoc, groups which share an interest in a certain activity, such as playing games, or surfing for a particular piece of information, from the trivial "How do I get from here to there?" to whatever people are looking for-football scores, pornography, crossword puzzles, recipes, investment information, support in facing a certain problem, love, inter- generational conflicts, religion-anything. The challenge comes in capturing the cognitive resources at work, making inferences from the small or vast collective bodies of common focus, and coming up with viable procedures that can be utilized to enhance individual performance-all this without shaping future individual performance into grotesque repetitive patterns, no matter how successful they might be. If there is validity to the notion that we are in the age of knowledge, we cannot afford to limit ourselves to the knowledge of a few, no matter how exceptional these few are. The civilization of illiteracy transcends the literate model of individual performance considered a guarantee of the performance of society at large. As practical experiences become more complex, breakdowns can be avoided only at the expense of more cognitive resources. We know that it took millennia before primitive notation progressed to writing and then to generalized literacy. In the Age of Cognition, we cannot afford such a long cycle for integrating human cognitive resources. Marvin Minsky once pointed out how much mind activity is lost in the leisure of watching football games on TV. While relaxation is essential to human existence, nobody can claim, in good faith, that what has resulted from the enormously increased efficiency of cognition-based practical experiences is not wasted to a great extent. Short of giving up, one has to entertain alternatives. But alternatives to this situation cannot be legislated. It is clear that within the motivations of the global economy, the need to identify and tap more sources of cognition will result in ways to stimulate human interaction. Watching TV probably generates thoughts that only die on the ever larger screens in our homes. Surfing the Web, where millions of hits are counted on the pornography sites-not on mathematics or literature sites-is also a waste and a source of mediocrity. Mouse potatoes are not necessarily better than the couch variety. If we could derive cognition even from the many experiences of human self- constitution in computer games, we could not only further the success of the industry that changed the way humans play, but gain some insight into motivations, cognitive and emotional aspects of this elementary form of human identity. Above and beyond the speculation on playful man (Homo Ludens), there are quantifiable aspects of competition, satisfaction, and pleasure. And as the Internet effectively maps our journey through a maze of data, information, and sources of knowledge, we can ask whether such cognitive maps are not too valuable to be abandoned to marketing experts, instead being utilized for understanding what makes us tick as we search for a word, an image, an experience. Data regarding how and what we buy is not always representative of what we are. For many people, buying a book or a work of art, a fashionable shirt, a home, or a car is only an experience in mediation performed by the agents of these objects. But there are authentic experiences in which no one can replace us human beings. Games belong to this domain, and so do joking and interactions with friends. No agent can replace us. Within such authentic moments of self-constitution, cognitive resources of exceptional value are at work. Many people from very different locations and of different backgrounds might simultaneously be present on a certain Web site, without ever knowing it. The server's performance could suggest that there is quite a crowd at a Web site, but it cannot say who the others are, what they are looking for, what kind of cognition drives the digital engine of their particular experiences. While the medium of networking is more transparent than literacy experiences, it still maintains a certain opaqueness, enhanced by the firewalls meant to protect us from ourselves. Many individuals present at the same time on a Web site is not a situation one can duplicate in literacy, in which the ratio was one reader to one book, or one magazine, or even one videotape (although more than one can watch it on the family TV set, in a class, or on an airplane). Thousands of viewers simultaneously landing on a Web site is a chance and a challenge. We should accordingly think of methods for identifying ourselves, to the extent desired, and declare willingness to interact. This next level of self-constitution and identification is where the potential of rich interactions and further generation of cognition becomes possible. Tapping into cognitive resources in such situations is an opportunity we should not postpone. Burning cognition, digital engines allow us to reach efficiency that is higher by many orders of magnitude in comparison to the efficiency attained by engines burning coal and oil. But the experience introduces the pressure of accelerated accumulation of data, information processing, and knowledge utilization. To understand the intimate relation between the performance of the digital engine and our own performance, one has only to think of a coal-burning steam engine driving a locomotive uphill. The civilization of illiteracy is a rather steep ascent, facing many obstacles-our physical abilities, limited natural resources, ecological concerns, ability to handle social complexity. To pull the brake will only make the effort of the engine more difficult, unless we want to tumble downhill, head first. Feeding the furnace faster is the answer that every sensible engineer knows. This would sound like a curse, were it not for the excitement of discovery, including that of our own cognitive resources. Analogy aside, what drives the digital engine is not abstract computing cycles of faster chips, but human cognition embodied in experiences that support further diversification of experiences. It has yet to be the case that we had enough computing cycles to burn and we did not know what to do with the extra computing power available. On the contrary, human practical experiences are always ahead of technology, as we challenge ourselves with new tasks for which the chips of yesterday and the memory available are as inappropriate as the methods and means of literacy. Bio-electric signals associated with the activity of our minds have been measured for quite a number of years. We learned from such measurements that minds are constituted in anticipation of our practical experience of self-identification as human beings. The idea seemed far-fetched, despite the strong scientific evidence on which it was ultimately founded. Cognition is process, and bio-electric signals are indicative of cognitive processes in our minds. Sensors attached to the skin, such as through a simple finger glove, can read such signals. In effect, they read unfolding mind processes based on our cognitive resources. Feeding digital engines hungry to burn cognition, we arrive not only at mind-controlled prosthetic devices for people with disabilities, but also at a mind-driven painter's brush, or desktop film directing, allowing us to get involved with cinematographic projects of scripting and affecting variations of the plot. From pinball games to tennis and skiing, from virtual bowling to virtual football, our thoughts make new experiences possible. For those affected by disabilities, this is a qualitatively new horizon. Einstein, but many others as well, was quite convinced that only 10 percent of our cognitive abilities are effectively engaged in what we do. As the digital engine burns more and more cognition, this number will change, as probably our physical condition, already marked by forms of degeneration, will change too. If, by using only one-tenth of our cognitive resources, we reach the level of possibilities open to us, it is not too hard to imagine what only one more tenth might bring. The civilization of illiteracy, with all the dangers and inequities it has to address, is only at its beginning. That its duration will be shorter than the one preceding it is another subject. 1982-1996: Providence RI; Rochester NY; Bexley OH; New York NY; Little Compton RI; Wuppertal, Germany. *** Literacy in a Changing World During the writing of this book, several articles were published and lectures presented on themes pertinent to the subject. None was taken over in this work. Among these are: J. Deely and M. Lenhard, editors. The Civilization of Illiteracy, in Semiotics 1981. New York: Plenum, 1983. H. Stachowiak, editor. Pragmatics in the Semiotic Framework, in Pragmatik, vol. II. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986. La civilization de l'analphabetisme, in Gazette de Beaux-Arts, vol. iii, no. 1430, March 1988, pp. 225- 228. Writing is Rewriting, in The American Journal of Semiotics, vol. 5, no. 1, 1987, pp. 115-133. Sign and Value. (Lecture)Third Congress of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, Palermo, Italy, June 25-29, 1984. The Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) Sixth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, October 1-4, 1981. Philosophy in the Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) XVII World Congress of Philosophy, Montreal, August, 1983. Values in the Post-Modern Era: The Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) Institute Forum, Rochester Institute of Technology, November 9, 1984. A Case for the Hacker. (Lecture) University of Oregon, Oct. 27, 1987. Communication in a time of integration and awareness. (Lecture) New York University, April, 1989. De plus ça change... Creativity in the context of scientific and technological change. (Lecture) University of Michigan, January, 1993. The bearable impertinence of rationality. (Lecture) Multimediale, the1st International Festival of Multimedia, February, 1993. From a very broad literature on literacy, including the emergence of writing and early written documents, the following proved useful in defining the position stated in this book: John Hladczuk, William Eller, and Sharon Hladczuk. Literacy/Illiteracy in the World. A Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hildyard, editors. Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Robert Pattison. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gerd Baumann, editor. The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. National Advisory Council on Adult Education. Literacy Committee. Illiteracy in America: Extent, Causes and Suggested Solutions, 1986. Susan B. Neuman. Literacy in the Television Age. The Myth of the TV Effect. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991. Edward M. Jennings and Alan C. Purves, editors. Literate Systems and Individual Lives. Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1990. David Diringer. The Alphabet. A Key to the History of Mankind (3rd edition). New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968. Colin H. Roberts. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford University Press,1987. Martin Koblo. Die Entwicklung der Schrift. Wiesbaden: Brandsetter, 1963. R. Hooker. Reading the Past. Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Donald Jackson. The Story of Writing. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1981. Hannsferdinand Dobler. Von der Keilschrift zum Computer. Schrift, Buch, Wissenschaften. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974. Colin Clair. A History of European Printing. New York: Academic Press, 1976. Lucien Paul Victor Febre. The Coming of the Book. The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: N.L.B., 1976. Karlen Mooradian. The Dawn of Printing. Lexington, KY: Association for Education in Journalism, 1972. Warren Chappel. A Short History of the Printed Word. New York: Knopf, 1970. Peter S. Bellwood. Prehistory in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985. Andrew Sherrat, editor. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1980. Peirce's pragmatic perspective was extracted from his writings. In the absence of a finished text on the subject, various scholars chose what best suited their own viewpoint. A selection from an unusually rich legacy of manuscripts and published articles was made available in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (eight volumes). Volumes 1-6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; volumes 7-8 edited by A. Burks. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931-1958. The standard procedure in citing this work is "volume.paragraph" (e.g., 2.227 refers to volume 2, paragraph 227). Important references to Peirce's semiotics are found in his correspondence with Victoria, Lady Welby. This was published by Charles Hardwick as Semiotics and Significs. The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977. Peirce's manuscripts are currently being published in a new edition, The Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition (E. Moore, founding editor; Max A. Fisch, general editor; C. Kloesel, Director), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984-present. Peirce's pragmaticism was defined in a text dated 1877, during his return journey from Europe aboard a steamer, "...a day or two before reaching Plymouth, nothing remaining to be done except to translate it into English," (5.526): "Considerer quels sont les effets pratiques que nous pensons pouvoir être produits par l'objet de notre conception. La conception de tous ces effets est la conception complète de l'objet." In respect to Peirce, his friends William James and John Dewey wrote words of appreciation, placing him "in the forefront of the great seminal minds of recent times," (cf. Morris R. Cohen, Chance, Love, and Logic, Glencoe IL: 1954, p. iii). C. J. Keyser stated, "That this man, who immeasurably increased the intellectual wealth of the world, was nevertheless almost permitted to starve in what in his time was the richest and vainest of lands is enough to make the blood of any decent American boil with chagrin, indignation, and vicarious shame," (cf. Portraits of Famous Philosophers Who Were Also Mathematicians, in Scripta Mathematica, vol. III, 1935). C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures and a Second Look (An Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution). Cambridge: At the University Press, 1965 (first printed in 1955). Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). From the few works published during his lifetime, reference is made to Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria (Leipzig, 1666). G.H. Parkinson translated some works in Leibniz Logical Papers (London, 1966). Another edition considered for this book is by Gaston Grua, Leibniz. Textes inédits (Paris, 1948), which offers some of the many manuscripts in which important ideas remained hidden for a long time. Humberto R. Maturana. The Neurophysiology of Cognition, in Cognition: A Multiple View (P. Garvin, Editor). New York: Spartan Books, 1969. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. El árbol del conocimiento, 1984. The work was translated as The Tree of Knowledge. The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston/London: Shambala New Science Library, 1987. Terry Winograd. Understanding Natural Language. New York: Academic Press, 1972. -. Language as Cognitive Process. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1983. Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition. A New Foundation for Design. Norwood NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1986. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980. George Lakoff. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. (What Categories Reveal about the Mind). Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. "The point is that the level of categorization is not independent of who is doing the categorizing and on what basis" (p. 50). With his seminal work on fuzzy sets, Lotfi Zadeh opened a new perspective relevant not only to technological progress, but also to a new philosophic perspective. Fuzzy Sets, in Information and Control, 8 (1965), pp. 338-353. Fuzzy Logic and Approximate Reasoning (in Memory of Grigore Moisil), in Synthèse 30 (1975), pp. 407- 428. Coping with the impression of the real world, in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 27 (1984), pp. 304-311. George Steiner. Language and Silence. New York: Atheneum, 1967. -. After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. -. Real Presence: Is There Anything in What We Say? London/Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989. -. The End of Bookishness? in The Times Literary Supplement, July 8-14, 1988, p. 754. Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1962. Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Illich states bluntly: "Universal education through schooling is not feasible" (Introduction, p. ix). Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988. Y. M. Lotman. Kul'tura kak Kollektvinji Intellekt i Problemy Iskusstuennovo Razuma (Culture as collective intellect and problems of artificial intelligence). Predvaritel'naya Publicacija, Moskva: Akademija Nauk SSSR (Nauchinyi Soviet po Kompleksnoi Problemi Kibernetika), 1977. Jean Baudrillard. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Mittelmaß und Wahn. Gesammelte Zerstreuungen. Frankfurt am Main: 1988. Norbert Wiener. The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society. 1st ed. New York: Avon Books, 1967. Wiener was very concerned with the consequences of human involvement with machines and the consequences of the unreflecting use of technology. "Once before in history the machine had impinged upon human culture with an effect of the greatest moment. This previous impact is known as the Industrial Revolution, and it concerned the machine purely as an alternative to human muscle" (p.185). "It is fair to say, however, that except for a considerable number of isolated examples, this industrial revolution up to present [ca. 1950] has displaced man and beast as a source of power, without making any great impression on other human functions" (p. 209). Wiener goes on to describe a new stage, what he calls the Second Industrial Revolution, dominated by computing machines driving all kinds of industrial processes. He notes: "Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor" (p. 220). "What can we expect of its economic and social consequences? In the first place, we can expect an abrupt and final cessation of the demand for the type of factory labor performing purely repetitive tasks. In the long run, the deadly uninteresting nature of the repetitive task may make this a good thing and the source of leisure necessary for a man's full cultural development. It may also produce cultural results as trivial and wasteful as the greater part of those so far obtained from the radio and the movies" (p. 219). Nick Thimmesch, editor. Aliteracy. People Who Can Read but Won't. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Policy Research, 1983. Proceedings of a conference held on September 20, 1982 in Washington, DC. According to William A. Baroody, Jr., President of the American Enterprise Institute, the aliterate person scans magazines, reads headlines, "never reads novels or poetry for the pleasures they offer." He goes on to state that aliteracy is more dangerous because it "reflects a change in cultural values and a loss of skills" and "leads to knowing without understanding." Marsha Levine, a participant in the conference noted that although educators are concerned with universal literacy, many people read less or not at all: "A revolution in technology is having an impact on education...they [technological means] increase the level of literacy, but they might undermine the practice of what they teach." At the same conference, an anonymous participant posed a sequence of questions: "Exactly what advantage do reading and literacy hold in terms of helping us to process information? What does reading give us that is of some social advantage that cannot be obtained through other media? Is it entirely certain that we cannot have a functioning society with an oral-aural method of communication, where we use television and its still unexploited resources of communication? [...] Is it impossible to conceive of a generation that has received its knowledge of the world and itself through television?" (p. 22). John Searle. The storm over the university, in The New York Review of Books, 37:19, December 6, 1990, pp. 34-42. Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters. Trans. Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973. In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments against writing: "It will implant forgetfulness in their souls [of people, M.N.]: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling these things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon, a potion; some translate it as recipe, M.N.] not for memory, but for reminder" (274-278e. p. 96). (References to Plato include the Stephanus numbers. This makes them independent of the particular edition used by the reader.) Claude Lévi-Strauss. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1967. The author continues Socrates' thought: "It [writing] seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment" (p. 298). From a very broad literature on literacy, including the emergence of writing and early written documents, the following proved useful in defining the position stated in this book: John Hladczuk, William Eller, and Sharon Hladczuk. Literacy/Illiteracy in the World. A Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hildyard, editors. Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Robert Pattison. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gerd Baumann, editor. The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. National Advisory Council on Adult Education. Literacy Committee. Illiteracy in America: Extent, Causes and Suggested Solutions, 1986. Susan B. Neuman. Literacy in the Television Age. The Myth of the TV Effect. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991. Edward M. Jennings and Alan C. Purves, editors. Literate Systems and Individual Lives. Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. Dr. Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1990. David Diringer. The Alphabet. A Key to the History of Mankind. 3rd edition. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968. Colin H. Roberts. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford University Press, 1987. Martin Koblo. Die Entwicklung der Schrift. Wiesbaden: Brandsetter, 1963. Donald Jackson. The Story of Writing. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1981. Hannsferdinand Dobler. Von der Keilschrift zum Computer. Schrift, Buch, Wissenschaften. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974. Colin Clair. A History of European Printing. New York: Academic Press, 1976. Lucien Paul Victor Febre. The Coming of the Book. The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: N.L.B., 1976. Karlen Mooradian. The Dawn of Printing. Lexington, KY: Association for Education in Journalism, 1972. Warren Chappel. A Short History of the Printed Word. New York: Knopf, 1970. C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures and a Second Look. An expanded version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1959. John Brockman. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. A recent criticism of the book, by Phillip E. Johnson, on the World Wide Web, states that the scientists contributing to the book "tend to replace the literary intellectuals rather than cooperate with them." Alan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Antoine de St. Exupéry. The Little Prince. Trans. Katherine Woods. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943. Helmut Schmidt, ex-Chancellor of West Germany, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Edzard Reuter, ex-CEO of Daimler-Benz, along with several prominent German intellectuals and politicians, met during the summer of 1992 to discuss issues facing their country after reunification. In their Manifesto, they insisted that any concept for a sensible future needs to integrate the notion of renouncing (Verzicht) and sharing as opposed to growing expectations and their export through economic aid to Third World countries. See Ein Manifest: Weil das Land sich ändern muß (A Manifesto. Because the country needs to change), Reinbeck: Rowohlt Verlag, 1992 Jean-Marie Guéhenno. La Fin de la Démocratie. Paris: Flammarion, 1993. Edmund Carpenter. They Became What They Beheld. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey/Ballantine, 1970. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Earth's Holocaust, in The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Garden City NY: Doubleday & Co., 1959. George Steiner. The end of bookishness? in Times Literary Supplement, July 8-14, 1988. "To read classically means to own the means of that reading. We are dealing no longer with the medieval chained library or with books held as treasures in certain monastic and princely institutions. The book became a domestic object owned by its user, accessible at his will for re-reading. This access in turn comprised private space, of which the personal libraries of Erasmus and of Montaigne are emblematic. Even more crucial, though difficult to define, was the acquisition of periods of private silence" (p. 754). Thomas Robert Malthus. An Essay On the Principle of Population, 1798, in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. E.A. Wrigley and David Souden, editors. London: W. Pickering, 1986. Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorn Clemens). The Annotated Huckleberry Finn: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With introduction, notes, and bibliography by Michael P. Hearn. New York: C.N. Potter and Crown Publishers, 1981. "Twain drives home just how strongly we are chained to our own literacy through Huck's illiterate silence" (p. 101). "Thus Twain brings into focus the trap of literacy. There is a whole world in Huck Finn that is closed to those without literacy. They can't, for ironic example, read this marvelous work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And yet we must recognize a world rich with superstition and folklore, with adventure and beauty, that remains closed to those who are too tightly chained to letters" (p. 105). George Gilder. Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life. New York: Norton, 1992. Neil Postman. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Knopf, 1992. America-The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy John Adams. Letters from a Distinguished American: Twelve Essays by John Adams on American Foreign Policy, 1780. Compiled and edited by James H. Hutson. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1978. -. The Adams-Jefferson: the Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Lester J. Cappon, editor). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. The American Challenge. Trans. Robert Steel. With a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Neil Postman. Rising Tide of Illiteracy in the USA, in The Washington Post, 1985. "Whatever else may be said of the immigrants who settled in New England in the 17th century, it is a paramount fact that they were dedicated and skillful readers.... It is to be understood that the Bible was the central reading matter in all households, for these people were Protestants who shared Luther's belief that printing was 'God's highest and extremest act of Grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.' But reading for God's sake was not their sole motivation in bringing books into their homes." Lauran Paine. Captain John Smith and the Jamestown Story. London: R. Hale, 1973. Henry Steele Commager. The American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Charles Dickens. American Notes. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. The book is a journal of Dickens's travels from Boston to St. Louis, from January through June, 1842. Alexis de Toqueville. Democracy in America, Vol. 1 (Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bowen). New York: Vintage Books, 1945. Several other writers have attempted to characterize the USA, or at least some of its aspects: Jean Baudrillard. Amérique. Paris: Grasset, 1986. -. America. Chris Turner, London/New York: Verso, 1988. Gerald Messadie. Requiem pour superman. La crise du mythe américain. Paris: R. Laffont, 1988. Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel. Liberalismo y Jacobinismo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Depalma, 1967. In practically all her novels, Jane Austen extols the improvement of the mind (especially the female mind) through reading; see especially Pride and Prejudice, Vol. 1, chapter 8. (New York: The New American Library, 1961, p. 35). Thomas Jefferson. Autobiography, in Writings. New York: The Library of America/Literary Classics of the United States, 1984. Jefferson's father placed him in the English school when Thomas was five years old, and at age nine in the Latin school, where he learned Latin, Greek, and French until 1757. In 1758, Jefferson continued two years of the same program of study with a Reverend Maury. In 1760, he attended the College of William and Mary (for two years), where he was taught by a Dr. William Small of Scotland (a mathematician). His education consisted of Ethics, Rhetoric, and Belles Lettres. In 1762, he began to study law. Joel Spring. The American School 1642-1990. 2nd ed. New York/London: Longman, 1990. Benjamin Franklin's model academy embodied his own education. " '...it would be well if [students] could be taught every thing that is useful, and every thing that is ornamental. But Art is long, and their Time is short. It is therefore propos'd that they learn those things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental.' [...] Franklin's early life was a model for getting ahead in the New World [...] The 'useful' elements in Franklin's education were the skills learned in apprenticeship and through his reading. The 'ornamental? elements,... were the knowledge and social skills learned through reading, writing, and debating" (p. 23). Theodore Sizer, editor. The Age of the Academics, New York: Teachers College Press, 1964. "The academy movement in North America was primarily a result of the desire to provide a more utilitarian education as compared with the education provided in classical grammar schools" (p. 22). Lester Frank Ward. The Psychic Factors of Civilization. 2nd ed. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1970. "The highest duty of society is to see that every member receives a sound education" (p. 308). Transcendentalism: "A 19th century New England movement of writers and philosophers who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of deepest truths." The main figures were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller (cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, Micropedia. 1990 ed. Paul F. Boller. American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860. An Intellectual Inquiry. New York: Putnam, 1974. Major philosophers of pragmatics: Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Although no finished work deals explicitly with his pragmatic conception, this conception permeates his entire activity. His semiotics is the result of the fundamental pragmatic philosophy he developed. John Dewey (1859-1952). Dewey bases his pragmatic conception on the proven useful. This explains why this conception was labeled instrumentalism or pragmatics of verification. Among the works where this is expressed are How We Think (1910), Logic, the Theory of Inquiry (1938), Knowing and Known (1940). William James (1842-1910). James expressed his pragmatic conception from a psychological perspective. His main works dedicated to pragmatism are Principles of Psychology (1890), Pragmatism (1907), and The Meaning of Truth (1909). Josiah Royce (1855-1916). He is the originator of a conception he called absolute pragmatics. John Sculley, ex-CEO of Apple Computer, Inc took the bully pulpit for literacy (at President-elect Clinton's economic summit in December, 1992), stating that the American economy is built on ideas. He and other business leaders confuse ideas with invention, which is their main interest, and for which literacy is not really necessary. Sidney Lanier. The Symphony, 1875, in The Poems of Sidney Lanier. (Mary Day Lanier, editor). Athens: University of Georgia Press, 198. Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). American economist and social scientist who sought to apply evolutionary dynamic approach to the study of economic constructions. Best known for his work The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), in which he coined the term conspicuous consumption. Theodore Dreiser. American Diaries, 1902-1926. (Thomas P. Riggio, editor). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. -. Sister Carrie (the Pennsylvania Edition). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. -. Essays. Selected magazine articles of Theodore Dreiser: Life and art in the American 1890's. (Yoshinobu Hakutani, editor). 2 volumes. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985-1987. Henry James. The American Scene. London: Chapman and Hall, 1907. -. The Bostonians. London: John Lehmann Ltd. 1952. "I wished to write a very American tale," James wrote in his Notebook (two years prior to the publication of the novel in 1886). He also stated, "I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point of our social life. The answer was: the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex...." Henry Steele Commager. The American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. In the section aptly entitled "The Literature of Revolt," Commager noticed that the tradition of protest and revolt (dominant in American literature since Emerson and Thoreau) turned, at the beginning of the 20th century (that is, with the New Economics), into an almost unanimous repudiation of the economic order. "...most authors portrayed an economic system disorderly and ruthless, wasteful and inhumane, unjust alike to working men, investors, and consumers, politically corrupt and morally corrupting," (p. 247). He goes on to name William Dean Howell (with his novels), Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and others. In the same vein, Denis Brogan (The American Character), J.T. Adams (Our Business Civilization), Harold Stearns (America: A Reappraisal), Mary A. Hamilton (In America Today), André Siegfried (America Comes of Age) are also mentioned. Howard Gardner. Frames of Mind: Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Diane Ravitch. The Schools We Deserve. New York: Doubleday,1985. Peter Cooper (1791-1883). Self-taught entrepreneur and inventor. As head of North American Telegraph Works, he made a fortune manufacturing glue and establishing iron works. In 1830, his experimental locomotive made its first 13-mile run. The Corcoran case. The incredible secret of John Corcoran, 20/20, ABC News, April 1, 1988. (Text by byTranscripts: Journal Graphics, Inc. pp. 11-14.) Noah Webster. The American Spelling Book: containing an easy standard of pronunciation. Being the first part of a Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1793. William Holmes McGuffey. McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic First Reader: containing progressive lessons in reading and spelling (revised and improved by Wm. H. McGuffey). Cincinnati: Winthrop B. Smith, 1853. It is doubtful that all the clever remarks attributed to Yogi Berra came from him. What matters is the dry sense of humor and logical irreverence that make these remarks another form of Americana. Akiro Morita, et al. Made in Japan. New York: Dutton, 1989. United We Stand, the political interest group founded by H. Ross Perot, is probably another example of how difficult it is, even for those who take an active stand (no matter how controversial), to break the dualistic pattern of political life in the USA. This group became the Reform Party. Gottfried Benn. Sämtliche Werke. (Gerhard Schuster, editor). Vols. 3-5 (Prosa). Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1986. Benn maintains that the language crisis is actually the expression of the crisis of the white man. Andrei Toom. A Russian Teacher in America, in Focus, 16:4, August 1996, pp. 9-11 (reprint of the same article appearing in the June 1993 issue of the Journal of Mathematical Behavior and then in the Fall 1993 issue of American Educator). Among the many articles dealing with American students' attitudes towards required subject matter, this is one of the most poignant. It involves not literature, philosophy, or history, but mathematics. The author points out not only the expectations of students and educational administrators, but also the methods in which the subject matter is treated in textbooks. Interestingly enough, he recounts his experience with students in a state university, where generalized, democratic access to mediocrity is equated with education. From Orality to Writing Peter S. Bellwood. Prehistory in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985. Andrew Sherrat, Editor. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1980. Eric A. Havelock. Schriftlichkeit. Das griechische Alphabet als Kulturelle Revolution. Weinheim: Verlag VCH, 1990. Ishwar Chandra Rahi. World Alphabets, Their Origin and Development. Allahabad: Bhargava Printing Press, 1977. Current alphabets vary in number of letters from 12 letters of the Hawaiian alphabet (transliterated to the Roman alphabet by an American missionary) to 45 letters in modern Indian (Devnagari). Most modern alphabets vary from 24 to 33 letters: modern Greek, 24; Italian, 26; Spanish, 27; modern Cambodian, 32; modern Russian Cyrillic, 33. Modern Ethiopian has 26 letters representing consonants, each letter modified for the six vowels in the language, making a total of 182 letters. Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the World. London and New York: Methuen, 1982. The comparison between orality and writing has had a very long history. It is clear that Plato's remarks are made in a different pragmatic framework than that of the present. Ong noticed that: "...language is so overwhelmingly oral that of all the many thousands of languages-possibly tens of thousands-spoken in the course of human history, only around 106 have even been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced literature, and most have never been written at all" (p.7). Ong also refers to pictographic systems, noticing that "Chinese is the largest, most complex, and richest: the K'anglisi dictionary of Chinese in 1716 AD lists 40,545 characters" (p. 8). Recently, the assumption that Chinese writing is pictographic came under scrutiny. John DeFrancis (Visible Speech. The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989, p. 115) categorizes the Chinese system as morphosyllabic. Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1990. David Diringer. The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind. 2nd ed. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953. -. The Story of Aleph Beth. New York/London: Yoseloff, 1960. -. Writing. Ancient Peoples and Places. London: Thames of Hudson, 1962. Ignace J. Gelb. A Study of Writing. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963. Gelb, as well as Ong, assumes that writing developed only around 3500 BCE among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. Many scripts are on record: Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan or Mycenean Linear B, Indus Valley script, Chinese, Mayan, Aztec, and others. Ritual: a set form or system of rites, religious or otherwise. Ralph Merrifield. The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. London: B. T. Ratsford, 1987. Catherine Bell. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Rite: a ceremonial or formal, solemn act, observance, or procedure in accordance with prescribed rule or custom, as in religious use (cf. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary). Roger Grainger. The Language of the Rite. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974. Mythe-rite-symbole: 21 essais d'anthropologie littéraire sur des textes de Homère. Angers: Presses de l'Université d'Angers, 1984. Weltanschauung: one's philosophy or conception of the universe and of life (cf. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary). A particular philosophy or view of life; a conception of the world (cf. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English). Francesco d'Errico. Paleolithic human calendars: a case of wishful thinking? in Current Anthropology, 30, 1989, pp. 117-118. He regards petroglyphs were looked at as a possible mathematical conception of the cosmos, a numbering or even a calculation system, a rhythmical support for traditional recitation, a generic system of notation. B.A. Frolov. Numbers in Paleolithic graphic art and the initial stages in the development of mathematics, in Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology, 16 (3-4), 1978, pp. 142-166. A. Marshack. Upper paleolithic notation and symbol, in Science, 178: 817-28, 1972. E.K.A. Tratman. Late Upper Paleolithic Calculator? Gough's Cave, Cheddar, Somerset, in Proceedings, University of Bristol, Speleological Society, 14(2), 1976, pp.115-122. Iwar Werlen. Ritual und Sprache: Zum Verhältnis von Sprechen und Handeln in Ritualen. Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 1984. Inner clock, or biological clock, defines the relation between a biological entity and the time-based phenomena in the environment. As with the so-called circadian cycles (circadian meaning almost the day and night cycle, circa diem), rhythms of existence persist even in the absence of external stimuli. The appearance, at least, is that of an inner clock. The notion of genetic code describes a system by which DNA and RNA molecules carry genetic information. Particular sequences of genes in these molecules represent particular sequences of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and thereby embody instructions for making of different types of proteins. On the same subject, but obviously at a deeper level than a dictionary definition, is James D. Watson's celebrated book, The Double Helix: a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. (A new critical edition, including text, commentary, reviews, original papers, edited by Gunther S. Stent). London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981. Homeostasis: the tendency towards a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements of the human body. Physiological processes leading to body equilibrium are interlocked in dynamic processes. References to the oral phase of language in Claude Lévi-Strauss: La Pensée Sauvage (1962). Translated as The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Le Cru et le Cuit (1964) The Raw and the Cooked. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Andrew and Susan Sherrat (quoted by Peter S. Bellwood, Op.cit): A distinction accepted is that between unvocalized (Hebrew, Arabic) and vocalized alphabets (starting with the Greek, in which the vowels are no longer omitted). Some languages use syllabaries, reuniting a consonant and a following vowel (such as in the Japanese Katakana: ka, ke, ki, ko, ku). When two different conventions are applied, the writing system is hybrid: the Korean language has a very powerful alphabet, hangul, but also uses Chinese characters, but pronouned in Korean. The hangul system (15th century) expressed, for Koreans, a desire for self- identity. Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters (translated from the Greek), with an introduction by Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973. In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments against writing: "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls [of people, M.N.]; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling these things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon, a potion; some translate it as recipe] not for memory, but for reminder" (274-278e). Oraltity and Language Today: What Do People Understand When They Understand Language? Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. Guinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961. Amos Oz refers to self-constitution in language as follows: "...a language is never a 'means' or a 'framework' or a 'vehicle' for culture. It is culture. If you live in Hebrew, if you think, dream, make love in Hebrew, sing in Hebrew in the shower, tell lies in Hebrew, you are 'inside'. [...] If a writer writes in Hebrew, even if he rewrites Dostoevksy or writes about a Tartar invasion of South America, Hebrew things will always happen in his stories. Things which are ours and which can only happen with us: certain rhythms, moods, combinations, associations, longings, connotations, atavistic attitudes towards the whole of creation, and so forth," (Under This Blazing Light, Cambridge, England: University Press, 1979, p. 189). J. Lyons. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Semantics requires that one "abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their designata" (Vol. 1., p.115). Noam Chomsky. The distinction between competence and performance in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Many scholars noticed the dualism inherent in the Chomskyan theory. Competence is "the speaker- hearer's knowledge of his language;" performance is "the actual use of language in concrete situations" (p.4). Noam Chomsky started to formulate the idea of the innate constitution of a speaker's competence in the famous article A review of B.K. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in Language, 35 (1959), an idea he has developed through all his scholarly work. In the review, he considered the alternatives: language is learned (within Skinner's scheme of stimulus-response), or it is somehow innate. In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1965), Reflections on Language (London: Fontana, 1976), and Rules and Representations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), the thought is constantly refined, though not necessarily more convincing (as his critics noticed). Roman Jakobson. Essais de Linguistique Générale, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963. Jakobson refused to ascertain any "private property" in the praxis of language. Everything in the domain of language "is socialized" (p. 33). Feedback: "The property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance" (Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, p.47). In 1981, Martin Gardner and Douglas Hoffstaedter shared a column in Scientific American, which Hoffstaedter called Metamagical Themes. In his first article, he defined self-reference: "It happens every time anyone says 'I' or 'me' or 'word' or 'speak' or 'mouth.' It happens every time a newspaper prints a story about reporters, every time someone writes a book about writing, designs a book about design, makes a movie about movies, or writes an article about self-reference. Many systems have the capability to represent or refer to themselves, or elements of themselves, within the system of their own symbolism" (Scientific American, January, 1981, vol. 244:1, pp. 22-23). Hofstaedter finds that self-reference is ubiquitous. Para-linguistic elements are discussed in detail in Eduard Ataian's book Jazyk i vneiazykovaia deistvitelnost: opyt ontologicheskovo sravnenia (Language and paralinguistic activity, an attempt towards an ontological comparison). Erevan: Izd. Erevanskovo Universiteta, 1987. Luciano Canepari. L'internazione linguistica e paralinguistica, Napoli: Liguori, 1985. Canepari insists on prosodic elements. The pragmatic aspect of arithmetic is very complex. Many more examples relating to the use of numbers and their place in language can be found in Crump (the examples given are referenced in The Anthropology of Numbers, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 34 and 37). Face-to-face communication, or iteration, attracted the attention of semioticians because codes other than those of language are at work. Adam Kendon, among others, thought that non-verbal communication captures only a small part of the face-to-face situation. The need to integrate non-verbal semiotic entities in the broader context of a communicative situation finally leads to the discovery of non-verbal codes, but also to the question of how much of the language experience is continued where language is not directly used. Useful reading can be found in Aspects of Non-Verbal Communication (Walburga Raffler-Engel, Editor), Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1980. Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1994. (His book appeared eight years after this chapter was written.) As opposed to pictograms, which are iconic representations (based on likeness) of concrete objects, ideograms are composites (sometimes diagrams) of more abstract representations of the same. Chao Yuen Ren (in Language and Symbolic Systems, Cambridge: At the University Press, 1968) shows how Chinese ideograms for the sequence 1,2,3 are built up: yi, represented as -; ér as - ; san as - . François Cheng. Chinese Poetic Writing, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. (Translation by D.A. Riggs and J.P. Seaton of L'écriture poétique chinoise, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977). "The ideogram for one, consisting of a single horizontal stroke, separates (and simultaneously unites) heaven and earth" (p. 5). He goes on to exemplify how, "By combining the basic strokes,...one obtains other ideograms." The example given is that of combining [one] and [man, house] to obtain [large, big] and further on [sky, heaven]. On protolanguage: Thomas V. Gamkredlidze and V.V. Ivanov, The Early history of Indo-European Languages, in Scientific American, March 1990, pp.110-116. Reading by machines, i.e., scanning and full text processing (through the use of optical character recognition programs) led some companies to advertise a new literacy. Caere and Hewlett-Packard, sponsors of Project Literacy US and Reading is Fundamental came up with the headline "We'd Like to Teach the World to Read" to introduce optical character recognition technology (a scanner and software), which makes machine reading (of texts, numbers, and graphics) possible. In another ad, Que Software depicts English grammar, punctuation and style books, and the dictionary opposite a red key. The ad states: "RightWriter improves your writing with the touch of a hot key." The program is supposed to check punctuation and grammar. It can also be customized for specific writing styles (inquiry to your insurance agent, answer to the IRS, complaints to City Hall or a consumer protection agency). As a matter of fact, the phenomena referred to are not a matter of advertisement slogans but of a new means for reading and even writing. A program such as VoiceWorks (also known as VoiceRad) was designed for radiologists who routinely review X-rays and generate written reports on their findings. Based on patterns recognized by the physician, the program accepts dictation (from a subset of natural language) and generates the ca. 150-word report without misspelling difficult technical terms. VoiceEm (for Emergency Room doctors) is activated by voice clues (e.g., "auto accident"), displaying a report from which the physician chooses the appropriate words: "(belted/non-belted,) (driver/passenger) in (low/moderate/high) velocity accident struck from (rear/head-on/broadside) and (claims/denies) rolling vehicle." Canned medical and legal phrases summarize situations that correspond to circumstances on record. When the doctor states "normal throat," the machine spells out a text that reproduces stereotype descriptions: "throat clear, tongue, pharynx without injections, exudate tonsilar hypertrophy, teeth normal variant." The 1,000-word lexicon can handle the vast majority of emergencies. Those beyond the lexicon usually surpass the competence of the doctor. The subject of visual mnemonic devices used in the interpretation of Shakespeare's plays is marvelously treated in Frances A. Yates's book The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1966). She discusses Robert Fludd's memory system of theater, from his Ars memoriae (1619), based on the Shakespearean Globe Theater. In ancient Greece, orators constructed complex spatial and temporal schemata as aids in rehearsing and properly presenting their speeches. Functioning of Language Research on memory and language functions in the brain is being carried out at the University of Minnesota, Institute of Child Development. Work is focused on individuals who are about to undergo partial lobotomies to treat intractable epilepsy. The goal is to provide a functional map of the brain. "History remains a strict discipline only when it stops short, in its description, of the nonverbal past." (Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, p. 3). Derrick de Kerkhove, Charles J. Lumsden, Editors. The Alphabet and the Brain. The Lateralization of Writing. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1988. In this book, Edward Jones and Chizato Aoki report on the different cognitive processing of phonetic (Kana) and logographic (Kanji) characters in Japanese (p. 301). André Martinet. Le Langage. Paris: Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, 1939. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque des Idées, 1945. André Leroi-Gourhan. Moyens d'expression graphique, in Bulletin du Centre de Formation aux Recherches Ethnologiques, Paris, No. 4, 1956, pp. 1-3. -. Le geste et la parole, Vol. I and II. Paris: Albin Michel, 1964-1965. -. Les racines du monde, in Entretiens avec Claude-Henri Rocquet. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1982. Gordon V. Childe. The Bronze Age. New York: Biblio and Tannen, 1969. John DeFrances. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. 1983. Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill 1964. In many of his writings, Roland Barthes suggested characteristics of the oral and visual culture. The distinction between the two preoccupied him. Klingon is a language crafted by Marc Okrand, a linguist, for use by fictional characters. The popularity of Star Trek explains how Klingon spread around the world. By eliminating sources of ambiguity and prescribing stylistic rules, controlled languages aim for improved readability. They are easier to maintain and they support computational processing, such as machine translation (cf. Willem-Olaf Huijsen, Introduction to Controlled Languages, a Webtext of 1996). An example of an artificial language of controlled functions and logic is Logics Workbench (LWB), developed at the University of Berne, in Switzerland. The language is available through the WWW. Drawing: The trace left by a tool drawn along a surface particularly for the purpose of preparing a representation or pattern. Drawing forms the basis of all the arts. Edward Laning, The Act of Drawing, New York: McGraw Hill, 1971. Design: Balducinni defined design as "a visible demonstration by means of those things which man has first conceived in his mind and pictured in the imagination and which the practised hand can make appear." "Before Balducinni, its primary sense was drawing." (cf. Oxford Companion to Art). More information is given in the references for the chapter devoted to design. Alan Pipes, Drawing for 3-Dimensional Design: Concepts, Illustration, Presentation, London: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Thomas Crump. The Anthropology of Numbers, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Referring to Yoshio Yano's article of 1973, in Japanese, entitled Communication Life of the Family, Crump writes: "...age, in the absence of other overreaching criteria, determines hierarchy: this rule applies, for instance, in Japan, and is based on the antithesis of semmai-kohai, whose actual meaning is simply senior-junior. The moral basis of the precedence of the elder over the younger (cho-yo-no-jo) originated in China, and is reflected in the first instance in the precedence of siblings of the same sex, which is an important structural principle within the family" (p. 69). On the issue of context affecting language functions, see George Carpenter Barker, Social Functions of Language in a Mexican-American Community. Phoenix: The University of Arizona Press, 1972. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Disuniting of America. Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Sneja Gunew and Jan Mahyuddin, Editors. Beyond the Echo. Multicultural Women's Writing . St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. Stephen J. Rimmer. The Cost of Multiculturalism. Belconnen, ACT: S.J.Rimmer, 1991. Language and Logic A.E. Van Vogt. The World of Null-A. 1945. The novel was inspired by a work of Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity. An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933). Walter J. Ong seems convinced that "...formal logic is the invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing, and so made a permanent part of its noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabetic writing made possible" (Op. cit., p. 52). He reports on A.R. Luria's book, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations (1976). After experiments designed to define how illiterate subjects react to formal logical procedures (in particular, deductive reasoning), Luria seems to conclude that no one actually operates in formally stated syllogisms. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Paris: Alcan, 1910. (Translated as How Natives Think by Lilian A. Clave, London: Allen & Unwin, 1926.) Lévy-Bruhl reconnects to the notion of participation that originates in Plato's philosophy and applies it to fit the so-called pre-logic mentality. Anton Dumitru. History of Logic. 4 vols. Turnbridge Wells, Kent: Abacus Press, 1977. In exemplifying the law of participation, Dumitru gives the following example: "In Central Brazil there lives an Indian tribe called Bororó. In the same region we also find a species of parrots called Arara. The explorers were surprised to find that the Indians claimed to be Arara themselves. [...] Put differently, a member of the Bororó tribe claims to be what he actually is and also something else just as real, namely an Arara parrot" (vol. 1, pp. 5-6). René Descartes (1596-1650), under his Latinized name Renatus Cartesius, sees logic as "teaching us to conduct well our reason in order to discover the truths we ignore" ("qui apprend à bien conduire sa raison pour découvrir les vérités qu'on ignore"). For Descartes, mathematics is the general method of science. Oeuvres de Descartes. Publiées par Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Eds. 11 vols. Nouvelle présentation en co-édition avec le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Paris: Vrin. 1965-1973 (reprint of the 1897-1909 edition). In English, the rendition by Elizabeth S. Haldane and George R.T. Ross was published in London, Cambridge University Press, 1967. "Logic is the art of directing reason aright, in obtaining the knowledge of things, for the instruction both of ourselves and of others. It consists of the reflections which have been made on the four principal operations of the mind: conceiving, judging, reasoning, and disposing" (Port Royal Logic, Introduction). John Locke (1632-1704) was looking for simple logical elements and rules to compound them. Certainty is not the result of syllogistic inference. "Syllogism is at best nothing but the art of bringing to light, in debate, the little knowledge we have, without adding any other to it." An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690) sets an empirical, psychologically based perspective of logic. George Boole (1815-1864) conceived of a logical calculus, in An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London,1854), which eventually became the basis for digital computation. Fung-Yu-lan. Précis d'histoire de la philosophie chinoise. Paris: Plon, 1952. "It is very difficult for somebody to understand fully Chinese philosophical works, if he is not able to read the original text. The language is indeed a barrier. Due to the suggestive character of Chinese philosophical writings, this barrier gets more daunting, these writings being almost untranslatable. In translation, they lose their power of suggestion. In fact, a translation is nothing but an interpretation" (p. 35). Chang-tzu. cf. Anton Dumitru, Op.cit., p. 13. Kung-Fu-tzu (551-479, BCE), whose Latinized name is Confucius, expressed the logical requirement to "rectify the names." This translates as the need to put things in agreement with one another by correct designations. "The main thing is the rectification of names (cheng ming) [...] If the names are not rectified, the words cannot fit; if the words do not fit, the affairs [in the world] will not be successful. If these affairs are not successful, neither rites nor music can flourish. If rites and music do not flourish, punishments cannot be just. If they are not just, people do not know how to act." The conclusion is, "The wise man should never show levity in using words;" (Lun-yu, cf. Wing-Tsit-chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Logic in his view is thinking about thinking. The whole logical theory of the syllogism is presented in the Analytica Priora. The Analytica Posteriora gives the structure of deductive sciences. The notion of political animal is part of the Aristotelian political system (cf. Politics). Takeo Doi. Amae no kozo. Tokyo: Kobundo. 1971. (Translated as The Anatomy of Dependence by John Bester, Tokyo/New York: Kodansho International and Harper & Row,1973.) Vedic texts, the collective name for Veda, defined as the science (the root of the word seems to be similar to the Greek for idea, or the Latin videre, to see) of direct intuition, convey the experience of the Rsis, ancient sages who had a direct perception of things. The writings that make up Veda are: Rig Veda, invocatory science; Yajur Veda, sacrificial; Sama Veda, melody; Atharva Veda, of incantation. In each Veda, there is a section on the origin of the ritual, on the meaning, and on the esoteric aspect. Mircea Eliade. Yoga. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. "India has endeavoured...to analyze the various conditioning factors of the human being. ...this was done not in order to reach a precise and coherent explanation of the human being, as did, for instance, Europe of the 19th century,... but in order to know how far the zones of the human being go and see whether there is anything else beyond these conditionings" (p. 10). The logic of action, as part of logical theory, deals with various aspects of defining what leads to reaching a goal and what are the factors involved in defining the goal and testing the result. Raymond Bondon, in Logique du social (translated by David and Gillian Silverman as The Logic of Social Action: An Introduction to Sociological Analysis, London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), gives the subject a sociological perspective. Cornel Popa, in Praxiologie si Logica (Praxiology and Logic, Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1984) deals with social action. Authors such as D. Lewis, A. Salomaa, B.F. Chelas, R.C. Jeffrey, and Jaako Hintikka, whose contributions were reunited in a volume celebrating Stig Kanger, pay attention to semantic aspects and conditional values in many-valued propositional logics (cf. Logical Theory and Semantic Analysis, edited by Soren Stenlund, Dordrecht/Boston: Reidel, 1974). The term culture originates in human practical experiences related to nature: cultivating land, breeding and rearing animals. By extension, culture (i.e., cultivating and breeding the mind) leads to the noun describing a way of life. In the late 18th century, Herder used the plural cultures to distinguish what was to become civilization. In 1883, Dilthey made the distinction between cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften, addressing the mind) and natural sciences. The objects of cultural sciences are man-made and the goal is understanding (Verstehen). For more information on the emergence and use of the term culture, see A.L. Kroeber and C. Kluckholm, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, in Peabody Museum Papers, XLVII, Harvard University Press, 1952. Ramon Lull (Raymundus Lullus, 1235-1315) suggested a mechanical system of combining ideas, an alphabet (or repertory) and a calculus for generating all possible judgments. Called Ars Magna (The Great Art), his work attracted both ironic remarks and enthusiastic followers. Athanasius Kircher, in Polygraphia nova et universalis ex combinatoria arte detecta (New and universal polygraphy discovered from the arts of combination, Rome, 1663), tried to introduce an arithmetic of logic. George Delgarus, in Ars signorum (The art of signs, London, 1661), suggested a universal language of signs. John Wilkins dealt with it as a secret language (1641, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger, and 1668, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language). Lotfi Zadeh introduced fuzzy logic: a logic of vague though quantified relations among entities and of non- clear-cut definitions (What is young? tall? bold? good?). Felix Hausdorf/Paul Mongré. Sant 'Ilario. Gedanken aus der Landschaft Zarathustras. 1897. p. 7 W.B. Gallie (Peirce's Pragmatism, in Peirce and Pragmatism, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1952) noticed that Peirce, "in the Pragmaticism Papers, approaches the subject of vagueness from a number of different sides. He claims, for instance, that all our most deeply grounded and in practice indubitable beliefs are essentially vague" (cf. Peirce, 5.446). According to Peirce, vagueness is a question of representation, not a peculiarity of the object of the representation. He goes on to specify that the source of vagueness is the relation between the sign and the interpretant ("Indefiniteness in depth may be termed vagueness," cf. MSS 283, 141, 138-9). Additional commentary in Nadin, The Logic of Vagueness and the Category of Synechism, in The Monist, Special Issue: The Relevance of Charles Peirce, 63:3, July, 1980, pp. 351-363. Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. -. The Extended Phenotype. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Elan Moritz, of the Institute for Memetic Research, provides the historic and methodological background to the subject in Introduction to Memetic Science. E.O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1975. Mihai Nadin. Mind-Anticipation and Chaos (from the series Milestones in Thought and Discovery). Stuttgart/Zurich: Belser Presse. 1991. "Minds exist only in relation to other minds" p. 4. The book was based on a lecture delivered in January,1989 at Ohio State University. Language as Mediating Mechanism Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. -. The Extended Phenotype. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Elan Moritz, of the Institute for Memetic Research, provides the historic and methodological background to the subject in Introduction to Memetic Science., a Webtext. E.O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1975. Mediation: a powerful philosophic notion reflecting interest in the many ways in which something different from what we want to know, understand, do, or act upon intercedes between the object of our interest, action, or thought. G.W. Hegel. Hegels Werke, vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten, vols. I-XIX. Berlin. 1832-1845, 1887 The dialectics of mediation includes a non-mediated mode, generated by the suppression of mediation, leading to the Thing-in-itself: "Dieses Sein ist daher eine Sache, die an und für sich ist die Objektivität" (vol. V, p. 171) (This being is, henceforth, a thing in itself and for itself, it is objectivity.) Everything else is mediated. In all post-Hegelian developments-right wing (Hinrichs, Goeschel, Gabler), left-wing (Ruge, Feuerback, Strauss), center (Bauer, Köstlin, Erdmann)-mediation is a major concept. Emile Durkheim. De la Division du Travail Sociale. 9th ed. Paris: Presses Univérsitaires de France, 1973. (Translated as The Division of Labor in Society by W.D. Halls. New York: Free Press, 1984). Michel Freyssenet. La Division Capitaliste du Travail. Paris: Savelli, 1977. Elliot A. Krause. Division of Labor, A Political Perspective. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. Gunnar Tornqvist, Editor. Division of Labour, Specialization, and Technical Change: Global, Regional, and Workplace Level. Malmo, Sweden: Liber, 1986. Marcella Corsi. Division of Labour, Technical Change, and Economic Growth. Aldershot, Hants, U.K.: Avebury/Brookfield VT: Gower Publishing Co., 1991. Leonard Bloomfield. Language. 1933. rpt. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 1964. In this work, the author maintains that the division of labor, and with it the whole working of human society, is due to language. Charles Sanders Peirce. "Anything that determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum" (2.303). "Something which stands to somebody in some respect or capacity" (2.228). Other sign definitions have been given: "In the language, reciprocal presuppositions are established between the expression (signifier) and the expressed (signified). The sign is the manifestation of these presuppositions," (A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language. An Analytical Dictionary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983, p. 296; translation of Sémiotique. Dictionnaire Raisonné de la Théorie du Langage, Paris: Classique Hachette, 1979). According to L. Hjelmslev, the sign is the result of semiosis taking place at the time of the language act. Benveniste considers that the sign is representative of another thing, which it evokes as a substitute. Herbert Marcuse. The One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters (translated from the Greek), with an introduction by Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973. Regarding cave paintings, see: Mihai Nadin. Understanding prehistoric images in the post-historic age: a cognitive project, in Semiotica, 100:2-4, 1994. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 387-405 B. Campbell. Humankind Emerging. Toronto: Little, Brown & Co.,1985. W. Davis. The origins of image making, in Current Anthropology, 27 (1986). pp. 193-215. Luigi Bottin. Contributi della Tradizione Greco-Latina e Arabo-Latina al Testo della Rhetorica di Aristotele. Padova: Antenore, 1977. Marc Fumaroli. L'Age de l'Éloquence: Rhétorique et 'Res Literaria' de la Renaissance au Seuil de l'Époque Classique. Geneva: Droz and Paris: Champion, 1980. William M.A. Grimaldi. Aristotle, Rhetoric: A Commentary. New York: Fordham University Press, 1980- 1988. Rhetoric is generally seen as the ability to persuade. Using many kinds of signs (language, images, sounds, gestures, etc.), rhetoric is connected to the pragmatic context. In ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in China and India, rhetoric was considered an art and practiced for its own sake. Some consider rhetoric as one of the sources of semiotics (together with logic, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language (cf. Tzvetan Todorov, Théorie du Symbole, Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1977). Gestures are a part of rhetoric. Quintillian, in De institutione oratoria, dealt with the lex gestus (law of gesture). In the Renaissance, the code of gesture was studied in detail. In our days of illiterate rhetoric based on stereotypes and increasingly compressed messages, gestures gain a special status indicative of the power of non-literacy-based ceremonies. The rhetoric of advertisement pervades human interaction. George Boole (1815-1864) conceived of a logical calculus, in An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London, 1854), which eventually became the basis for digital computation. Howard Rheingold.Virtual Reality. New York: Summit Books, 1991. Rheingold offers a description that can substitute for a definition: "Imagine a wraparound television with programs, including three-dimensional sound, and solid objects that you can pick up and manipulate, even feel with your fingers and hands. Imagine immersing yourself in an artificial world and actively exploring it, rather than peering at it from a fixed perspective through a flat screen in a movie theater, on a television set, or on a computer display. Imagine that you are the creator as well as the consumer of your artificial experience, with the power to use a gesture or a word to remold the world you see and hear and feel" (p. 16). In an Internet interview with Rheingold, Sherry Turkel points out that computers and networks are objects- to-think-with for a networked era. She predicts, "I believe that against all odds and against most current expectations, we are going to see a rebirth of psychoanalytic thinking" (cf. Brainstorms, http://www.well.com, 1996). Literacy, Language, and Market Reference is made to the works of Margaret Wheatley (Management and the New Science); Michael Rothschild (Bionomics); Bernardo Huberman (Dynamics of Collective Actions and Learning in Multi-agent Organizations); Robert Axtel and Joshua Epstein (creators of Sugarscape, a model of trade); and Axel Leijonhufvud (Multi-agent Systems), all published as Webtexts. Transactions as extensions of human biology evince the complex nature of human interactions. Maturana and Varela indirectly refer to human transactions: "Coherence and harmony in relations and interactions between the members of a human social system are due to the coherence and harmony of their growth in it, in an ongoing social learning which their own social (linguistic) operation defines and which is possible thanks to the genetic and ontogenetic processes that permit structural plasticity of the members" (Op. cit., p.199). They diagram the shift from minimum autonomy of components (characteristic of organisms) to maximum autonomy of components (characteristic of human societies). A Walk Through Wall Street, in US News and World Report, Nov. 16, 1987, pp. 64-65. One from among many reminiscences by Martin Mayer, author of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Men and Money. "Wall Street as price setter for the country dealt with much more than pieces of paper. Commodities markets proliferated. The fish market was on the East River at Fulton; the meat market on the Hudson just to the north.... The 'physicals' of all commodities markets were present...there were cotton sacks in the warehouse of the Cotton Exchange, coffee bags stored here for delivery against the contracts at the Sugar and Coffee Exchange on Hanover Square and often a smell of roasting coffee. "In the 1950's, this was a male world-women were not allowed to work on the floor of the Stock Exchange, let alone become members. The old-timers explained with great sincerity that there was no ladies room." The report points out that today Wall Street "sees less of the real world outside, depends more on abstract information processed through data machinery and more than ever responds to forces far from its borders." Zoon semiotikon, the semiotic animal, labeled by Paul Mongré (also known as Felix Hausdorf). Charles S. Peirce gave the following definitions: Representamen: a Sign is a Representamen of which some interpretant is a cognition of a mind (2.242). Object: the Mediate object is the object outside the Sign; ...the sign must indicate it by a hint (Letter to Lady Welby, December 23, 1908). Interpretant: the effect that the sign would produce upon any mind (Letter to Lady Welby, March 14, 1909). In reference to the symbolic nature of market transactions, another Peircean definition is useful: "Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs.... We think only in signs.... If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts" (2.307). The pragmatic thought is, nevertheless, inherent in any sign process. Markets embody sign processes in the pragmatic field. Winograd and Flores state bluntly "A business (like any other organization) is constituted as a network of recurrent conversations" (Op. cit., p. 168). Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (with the assistance of Takashi Hikino) Scale and Scope. The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge MA/London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990. "...the modern industrial Enterprise...has more than a production function." (p. 14). Chandler further notes that "expanded output by a change in capital-labor ratios is brought about by economies of scale which incorporate economies of speed.... Wholesalers and retailers expand to exploit economies of scale" (p. 21). James Gordley. The Philosophical Origins of Modern Contract Doctrine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Mariadele Manca Masciadri. I Contratti di Baliatico, 2 vols. Milan: (s.n.), 1984. John H. Pryor. Business Contracts of Medieval Provence. Selected Notulae from the Cartulary of Girard Amalric of Marseilles, 1248. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1981. ECU: In 1979, the process of European unification led to the creation of the European Monetary System (EMS), with its coin being the European Currency Unit (ECU) and the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). As a basket of European currencies, the ECU serves as a reserve currency in Europe and probably beyond. It is not the currency of choice for international transactions, and as of the Maastricht negotiations, which affirmed the need for a Community currency, the ECU was not adopted for this purpose. Although predominant weight in the basket (over 30%) is given to the German mark, the ECU is designed on the assumption that it is quite improbable that a certain currency will move in the same direction against all others. Therefore, exchange rates are statistically stabilized. Michael Rothschild. Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem. Webtext, 1990. Robert L. Heilbroner. The Demand for the Supply Side, in The New York Review of Books, June 11, 1981, p.40. He asks rhetorically: "How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If the barrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, were devoted to some other purpose-say the exaltation of the public sector-it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive element that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it escapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point out that a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from its own doings, not from that of its governing institutions." Literacy and Education Will Seymour Monroe. Comenius and the Beginnings of Educational Reform. New York: Arno Press, 1971, (originally printed in 1900). Adolphe Erich Meyer. Education in Modern Times. Up from Rousseau. New York: Avon Press, 1930. Linus Pierpont Brockett. History and Progress of Education from the Earliest Times to the Present. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1860. (Originally signed "Philobiblius," with an introduction by Henry Barnard.) James Bowen. A History of Western Education. 3 Vols. London: Methuen, 1972-1981. Pierre Riché. Education et culture dans l'occident barbare 6-8 siècles. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962. Bernard Bischoff. Elementärunterricht und probationes pennae in der ersten Hälfte des Mittelalters, in Mittelalterliche Studien I, 1966, pp. 74-87. James Nehring. The Schools We Have. The Schools We Want. An American Teacher on the Frontline. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992. Irenée Henri Marron. A History of Education in Antiquity. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956. Jacques Barzun. The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (Morris Philipson, Editor). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. The review mentioned was written by David Alexander, Begin Here, in The New York Review of Books, April 21, 1991, p. 16. Polis (Greek) signifies settled communities that eventually evolved into cities. The City-State in Five Cultures. Edited with an introduction by Robert Griffeth and Carol G. Thomas. Santa Barbara CA: ABC-Clio, 1981. J.N. Coldstream. The Formation of the Greek Polis: Aristotle and Archaeology. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984. Individual and Community: The Rise of the Polis, 800-500 BC. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Will Durant. The Story of Civilization. Vol 4, The Age of Faith. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950. In 825, the University of Pavia was founded as a school of law. The University of Bologna was founded in 1088 by Irnevius, also for the teaching of law. Students from all over Latin Europe came to study there. Around 1103, the University of Paris was founded; by the middle of the 13th century, four faculties had developed: theology, canon law, medicine and the seven arts. (The seven liberal arts were comprised of the trivium-grammar, rhetoric, and logic-and the quadrivium-arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.) Some time in the 12th century, a studium generale or university was established at Oxford (pp 916-921). The name university derives from the fact that the essences or universals were taught (cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 12, 1990. Logos: (noun, from the Greek, from the verb lego: "I say"): word, speech, argument, explanation, doctrine, principle, reason; signified word or speech. Ratio (from the Latin "to think"): reason, rationale; signified measure or proportion. Some of the work linking the early knowledge of the Latin and Greek heritage of European thought, especially that part shut off to Christendom in Moorish Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, Sicily, and Spain, was transmitted by the Jews, who translated works in Arabic to Latin. The Moslems preserved the texts of Euclid and works dealing with alchemy and chemistry. In 1165, Gerald of Cremona studied Arabic in Spain in order to translate works of Aristotle (Posterior Analysis, On the Heavens and the Earth, among others), Euclid (Elements, Data), Archimedes, Apollonius of Perga, Galen, works of Greek astronomy and Greco-Arabic physics, 11 books of Arabic medicine and 14 works of Arabic astronomy and mathematics from the Arabic to Latin. Beginning 1217, Michael Scot translated a number of Aristotle's works from the Arabic to Latin (cf. Will Durant, Op. cit., pp. 910-913). Galileo Galilei. Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche (Two New Sciences: Including Centers of Gravity and Force of Percussion, translated, with a new introduction and notes, by Stillman Drake) Toronto: Wall & Thompson. 1989 -. Galileo's Early Notebooks. The Physical Questions (translated from the Latin, with historical and paleographical commentary, by William A. Wallace). Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 1977 Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). In 1687, he published Philosophiae Principia Mathematica, in which he offered explanations for the movement of planets. In this work, the abstraction of force (of attraction) is constituted and a postulate is formulated: every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other with a force whose magnitude depends directly upon the product of their masses and inversely upon the square of the distance between the two. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) published in 1916 his contribution as Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, in which he referred to the attraction of massive objects. The cosmic reality of such objects and of huge distances and high velocities is quite different from the mechanical universe under consideration by Galileo and Newton. Movement of planets cause the curving of space. Einstein's theory shows that the curvature of space time evolves dynamically. Newton's theory turned out to be an approximation of Einstein's more encompassing model. John Searle. The Storm Over the University, in The New York Review of Books, 37:19, December 6, 1990, pp. 34-42 Mathematization: the use of mathematical methods or concepts in particular sciences or in the humanities. The conception of mathematics as a model for the sciences as well as for the humanities has been repeatedly expressed throughout history. In some cases, mathematization represents the search for abstract structures. Today mathematization is often taken to mean modeling on computer programs. Académie Française: French library academy established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1634. Its original purpose was to maintain standards of literary taste and to establish the literary language. Membership is limited to 40 (Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 1, 1990. p. 50). Alan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. How Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1987 "Those despised millionaires who set up a university in the midst of a city that seems devoted only to what they had neglected, whether it was out of a sense of what they themselves had issued, or out of bad conscience about what their lives were exclusively devoted to, or to satisfy the vanity of having their names attached to the enterprise," (p. 244). Bart Simpson, the main character of the animated cartoon series of the same name, created by Matt Groening. Bart was first sketched in 1987; the television series first aired in the winter of 1990. Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition. A New Foundation for Design. Norwood NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1986. "Organizations exist as networks of directives and commissives. Directives include orders, requests, consultations, and offers; commissives include promises, acceptances, and rejections" (p. 157). They state also: "In fulfilling an organization's external commitments, its personnel are involved in a network of conversations" (p. 158). Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations (Translation by G.E.M. Anscombe of Philosophische Untersuchungen). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1984 (reprint of the 1968 edition) If a multiple choice test in World History (given in June, 1992 at Stuyvesant High School in New York City) asks whether the Holocaust is an Italian revolutionary movement, and if Mein Kampf was Hitler's body guard or his summer retreat, why should anyone be surprised that American students show no better choices than those they are supposed to choose from? Steve Waite. Interview with Bill Melton, Journal of Bionomics, July 1996. Family: Discovering the Primitive Future Statistics on family in the USA and the world are a matter of public record. The processing and interpretation of data, even in the age of electronic processing, takes time once data has been collected. The Statistical Handbook on the American Family (Phoenix AZ: The Orynx Press, 1992), for instance, deals with trends covering 1989-1990. The numbers are intriguing. Well over 85% of the adult population married by the time of their 45th birthday, but only around 60% are currently married. 10% are divorced and almost as many widowed. The general conclusions about the family are: There is a decline in marital stability with over one million children per year affected by the divorce of their parents. Less than 20% of the people see marriage as a lifetime relationship. The POSSLQ (persons of opposite sex sharing living quarters) is well over 5% of the population. The size of the average American household shrank from 3.7 persons over 40 years ago to 2.6 recently. Interracial marriages, while triple in number compared to 1970, include slightly below 2% of the population. A.F. Robertson. Beyond the Family. The Social Organization of Human Reproduction. Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1991. Martine Fell. Ça va, la famille? Paris: Le Hameau, 1983. Nicolas Caparros. Crisis de la Familia. Revolución del Vivir. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Pargieman, 1973. Adrian Wilson. Family. London: Travistock Publications, 1985. Charles Franklin Thwing. The Family. An Historical and Social Study. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1887. Edward L. Kain. The Myth of Family Decline. Understanding Families in a World of Rapid Social Change. Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1990. Herbert Kretschmer. Ehe und Familie. Die Entwicklung von Ehe und Familie im Laufe der Geschichte. Dornach, Switzerland: Verlag am Goetheanum, 1988. André Burguière, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen, Françoise Zonabend, Editors. Histoire de la famille (preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss)..Paris: Armand Colin, 1986. Family is established in extension of reproductive drives and natural forms of cooperation. Regardless of the types leading to what was called the family nucleus (husband and wife), families embody reciprocal obligations. The formalization of family life in marriage contracts was stimulated by writing. J.B.M. Guy. Glottochronology Without Cognate Recognition. Canberra: Department of Linguistics Research, School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1980. Although the processes leading to the formation of nations is relatively recent, nations were frequently characterized as an extended family, although the processes reflect structural characteristics of human practical experiences different from those at work in the constitution of the family. Martin B. Duberman. About Time. Exploring the Gay Past. New York: Gay Presses of New York City, 1986. Jeffrey Weeks. Against Nature. Essays on History, Sexuality, and Identity. London: Rivers Oram, 1991. Bernice Goodman. The Lesbian. A Celebration of Difference. Brooklyn: Out & Out Books, 1977. Jean Bethke Elshtain. Against Gay Marriage, in Commonweal, November 22, 1991, pp. 685-686. Brent Hartinger. A Case for Gay Marriage, in Commonweal, November 22, 1991, pp. 675, 681-686. Not in The Best Interest (Adoption by Lesbians and Gays), in Utne Reader, November/December, 1991, p. 57. William Plummer. A Mother's Priceless Gift, in People Weekly, August 26, 1991, pp. 40-41. Nelly E. Gupta and Frank. Feldinger. Brave New Baby (ZIFT Surrogacy), in Ladies Home Journal, October, 1989, pp. 140-141. Mary Thom. Dilemmas of the New Birth Technologies, in Ms., May, 1988, pp. 4, 66, 70-72. Cleo Kocol. The Rent-A-Womb Dilemma, in The Humanist, July/August, 1987, p. 37. Marsha Riben. A Last Resort (excerpt from Shedding Light on the Dark Side of Adoption), in Utne Reader, November/December, 1991, pp. 53-54. Lisa Gubernick. How Much is that Baby in the Window? in Forbes, October 14, 1991, pp. 90-91. Self-sufficiency, reflecting contexts of existence of limited scale, marks the Amish and Mennonite families. The family contract is very powerful. Succeeding generations care for each other to the extent that the home always includes quarters for the elderly. Each new generation is endowed in order to maintain the path of self-sufficiency. The Amish wedding (the subject of Stephen Scott's book of the same title, Intercourse PA: Good Books, 1988), as well as the role the family plays in educating children (Children in Amish Society: Socialization and Community Education, by J.A. Hosteter and G. Enders Huntington, New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1971) are indicative of this family life. Andy Grove. Only the Paranoid Survive. New York: Doubleday, 1996. The CEO of Intel, one of the world's most successful companies, discussed the requirement of genetic update and his own, apparently dated, corporate genes. Adam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, Editors). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature (L.A. Selby-Bigge, Editor). 2nd edition. Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1978. -. Inquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals (L.A. Selby-Bigge, Editor). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Takeo Doi. Amae no kozo. Tokyo: Kobundo, 1971. Translated as The Anatomy of Dependence by John Bester. Tokyo/New York: Kodansho International and Harper & Row, 1973. A God for Each of Us The following books set forth the basic tenets of their respective religions: Bhagavad Gita: part of the epic poem Mahabharata, this Sanskrit dialog between Krishna and Prince Arjuna poetically describes a path to spiritual wisdom and unity with God. Action, devotion, and knowledge guide on this path. Torah: the books of Moses (also known as the Pentateuch); for Chistians, the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. These describe the origin of the world, the covenant between God and the people of Israel, the Exodus from Egypt and return to the Promised Land, and rules for religious and social behavior. Together with the books labeled Prophets and Writings, they make up the entire Old Testament. The controversy among Jews, Roman Catholics, Eastern Christians, and Protestants about the acceptance of some books, the order of books, and translations reflect the different perspectives adopted within these religions. New Testament: the Christian addition to the Bible comprises 27 books. They contain sayings attributed to Jesus, his life story (death and resurrection included), the writings of the apostles, rules for conversion and baptism, and the Apocalypse (the end of this world and the beginning of a new one). Koran (al Qur'an): the holy book of the Moslems, is composed of 114 chapters (called suras). Belief in Allah, descriptions of rules for religious and social life, calls to moral life, and vivid descriptions of hell make up most of the text. According to Moslem tradition, Mohammed ascended the mount an illiterate. He came down with the Koran, which Allah had taught him to write. I-Ching: attributed to Confucius, composed of five books, containing a history of his native district, a system for divining the future (Book of Changes), a description of ceremonies and the ideal government (Book of Rites), and a collection of poetry. In their unity, all these books affirm principles of cooperation, reciprocal respect, and describe etiquette and ritual rules. Mircea Eliade, Editor-in-Chief.The Encyclopedia of Religion (). New York: Macmillan, 1987. Mircea Eliade (with I. P. Couliano and H.S. Wiesner). The Eliade Guide to World Religions. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. Eliot Alexander. The Universal Myths: Heroes, Gods, Tricksters, and Others. New York: New American Library, 1990. P. K. Meagher, T.C. O'Brien, Sister Consuelo Maria Aherne. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion. 3 Vols. Corpus City Publications, 1979. In regard to the multiplicity of religions, the following works provide a good reference: John Ferguson. Gods Many and Lords Many: A Study in Primal Religions. Guildford, Surrey: Lutterworth Educational, 1982. Suan Imm Tan. Many Races, Many Religions. Singapore: Educational Publications Bureau, 1971-72. H. Byron Earhart. Religions of Japan: Many Traditions within One Sacred Way. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984. John M. Reid. Doomed Religions. A Series of Essays on Great Religions of the World. New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1884. Although no precise statistics are available, it is assumed that ca. three billion people acknowledge religion in our days. The numbers are misleading, though. For instance, only 2.4% of the population in England attends religious services; in Germany, the percentage is 9%; in some Moslem countries, service attendance is close to 100%. The "3-day Jews" (two days of Rosh Hashana and 1 day of Yom Kippur, also known as "revolving door" Jews, in for New Year and out after Atonement Day), the Christian Orthodox and Catholics of Christmas and Easter, and the Buddhists of funeral ceremonials belong to the vast majority that refers to religion as a cultural identifier. Many priests and higher order ecumenical workers recite their prayers as epic poetry. Atheism. The "doctrine that God does not exist, that existence of God is a false belief" (cf. M. Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 1, pp 479-480). Literature on atheism continuously increases. A selection showing the many angles of atheism can serve as a guide: The American Atheist (periodical). Austin TX: American Atheists. Gordon Stein, Editor. An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism. Buffalo NY: Prometheus Books, 1980. Michael Martin. Atheism: A Philosophical Analysis. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Jacques J. Natanson. La Mort de Dieu: Essai sur l'Athéisme Moderne. Paris: Presses Univérstaires de France, 1975. Robert A. Morey. The New Atheism and the Erosion of Freedom. Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1986. James Thrower. A Short History of Western Atheism. London: Pemberton Books, 1971. Robert Eno. The Confucian Creation of Heaven. Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Ronald L. Grimes. Research in Ritual Studies. A Programmatic Essay and Bibliography. Chicago: American Theological Library Association; Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985. Evan M. Zuesse. Ritual Cosmos. The Sanctification of Life in African Religions. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979. Godfrey and Monica Wilson. The Analysis of Social Change. Based on observations in Central Africa. Cambridge: The University Press, 1968. "A pagan Najakunsa believes himself to be dependent upon his deceased father for health and fertility; he acts as if he were, and expresses his sense of dependence in rituals" (p. 41). References for the study of myths are as follows: Eliot Alexander. The Universal Myths: Heroes, Gods, Tricksters, and Others. New York: New American Library, 1990. Jane Ellen Harrison. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. New York: Arno Press, 1975. Walter Burkert. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. John Ferguson. Greek and Roman Religion: A Source Book. Park Ridge NJ: Noyes Press, 1980. Arcadio Schwade. Shinto-Bibliography in Western Languages. Leiden: Brill, 1986. Japanese Shintoism began before writing. Hinduism: With one of the highest number of followers (ca. 650 million), Hinduism is an eclectic religion. Indigenous elements and Aryan religions, codified around 1500 BCE in the Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajor Veda, Atharva Veda, Aranyakas, Upanishads, result in an amalgam of practices and beliefs dominating religious and social life in Indiat The caste system classifies members of society in four groups: priests (Brahmins), rulers, farmers, and merchants, laborers (on farms or in industry). Devotion to a guru, adherence to the Vedic scriptures, the practice of yoga are the forms of religious action. The divine Trinity of Hinduism unites Brahma (the creator), Vishna (the preserver), and Shiva (the destroyer). Taoism: In the Tao Te Ching (Book of the Way and Its Virtue), one reads: "The Tao of origin gives birth to the One. The One gives birth to the Two. The Two gives birth to the Three. The Three produces the Ten Thousand Things." With some background in Tao, the poetry becomes explicit: The One is the Supreme Void, primordial Breath. This engenders Two, Yin and Yang, the duality from which everything sprung once a ternary relation is established. Tao is poetic ontology. Confucianism: Stressing the relationship among individuals, families, and society, Confucianism is based on two percepts: li (proper behavior) and jen (cooperative attitude). Confucius expressed the philosophy on which this religion is based on sayings and dialogues during the 6th-5th century BCE. Challenged by the mysticism of religions (Taoism, Buddhism) in the area of its inception, some followers incorporated their spirit in new-Confucianism (during the period known as the Sung dynasty, 960-1279). Judaism: Centered on the belief in one God, Judaism is the religion of the Book (the Torah), established at around 2000 BCE by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Judaism promotes the idea of human improvement, as well as the Messianic thought. Strong dedication to community and sense of family are part of the religious practice. Islam: The contemporary religion with the highest number of adherents (almost 9000 million Muslims on record), and growing fast, Islam celebrates Mohammed, who received the Koran from Allah. Acknowledged at 610, Islam (which means "submission to God") places its prophet in the line started with Abraham, continued with Moses, and redirected by Jesus. The five pillars of Islam are: Allah is the only God, prayer (facing Mecca) five times a day, giving of alms, fast of Ramadan, and pilgrimage to Mecca. Christianity: in its very many denominations (Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Protestant, which split further into various sects, such as Baptist, Pentecostal, Episcopal, Lutheran, Mormon, Unitarian, Quakers), claims to have its origin in Jesus Christ and completes the Old Testament of the Hebrews with the New Testament of the apostles. It is impossible to capture the many varieties of Christianity in characteristics unanimously accepted. Probably the major celebrations of Christianity (some originating in pre-Christian pagan rituals related to natural cycles), i.e., Christmas and Easter, better reflect elements of unity. Christianity promotes respect for moral values, dedication to the family, and faith in one God composed of three elements (the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). Bahai of Bahá'i: ascertains the unity of all religious doctrines as these embody ideals of spiritual truth. The name comes from Baha Ullah (Glory of God), adopted by its founder Mirza Husain Ali Nuri, in 1863, in extension of the al-Bab religion. Universal education, equality between male and female, and world order and peace are its goals. The religion is estimated to have 5 million adherents world-wide. Richard Wilhelm. I Ging; Das Buch der Wandlungen. Düsseldorf/Köln: Diedrichs, 1982. Wilhelm states that, in the context described, Fuh-Hi emerged: "He reunited man and woman, ordered the five elements and set the laws of mankind. He drew eight signs in order to dominate the world." The eight signs are the eight basic trigrams of I Ging, the Book of Changes (which attracted Leibniz's attention). King Frederick Barbarossa (Frederick I of the Holy Roman Empire, 1123-1190). Well known for challenging the authority of the Pope and for attempting to establish German supremacy in religious matters. Joan of Arc (1412-1431). A plowman's daughter who, as the story goes, listened to the voices of saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret. Thus inspiring the French to victory over British invaders, she made possible the coronation of Charles II at Reims. Captured by the English, she was declared a heretic and burned at the stake. In 1920, Pope Benedict XV declared her a saint. Jan Hus (1372-1415). Religious reformer whose writings exercised influence over all the Catholic world. In De Ecclesia, he set forth that scripture is the sole source of Christian doctrine. Martin Luther (1483-1546). A priest from Saxony, a scholar of Scripture, and a linguist, who is famous for having attacked clerical abuses. Through his writings (The 95 Theses), he precipitated the Reformation. Moslem armies defeated the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, led by Charles Martel, at Poitiers (cf. J.H. Roy, La Bataille de Poitiers, Octobre 733, Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Crusades: a series of military expeditions taking place from 1095 to 1270) intent on reclaiming Jerusalem and the holy Christian shrines from Turkish control. David Kirsch poses the questions: Is 97% of human activity concept-free, driven by control mechanisms we share not only with our simian forebears, but with insects? (Today the Earwig, Tomorrow the Man? in Artificial Intelligence, 47:1-3, Jan. 1991, p. 161). The Bible on CD-ROM is a publication of Nimbus Information Systems (1989). The CD-Word Interactive Biblical Library (1990), published by the CD-Word Library, Inc. offers 16 of the world's most used Bible texts and reference sources (two Greek texts, four English versions). Secular god-building in the Soviet Union: Ob ateizme i religii. Sbornik Statei, Pisem i drughich materialov (About atheism and religion. Collected articles, letters, and other materials) by Anatoli Vasilevich Lunacharskii (1875-1933), Moscow: Mysl, 1972. This is a collection of articles on atheism and religion, part of the scientific-atheistic library. See also Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts (translated by Herman Erolaev). New York: P.S. Ericksson, 1966. Ernest Gellner, Scale and Nation, in Scale and Social Organization (F. Barth, editor). "Max Weber stressed the significance of the way in which Protestantism made every man his own priest" (p. 143). Glen Tinder. Can we be good without God? in Atlantic Monthly, December, 1989. Michael Lewis. God is in the Packaging, in The New York Times Magazine, July 21, 1996, pp. 14 and 16. Lewis describes pastors using marketing techniques to form congregations. The success of the method has led to branch congregations all over the USA. Tademan Isobe, author of The Japanese and Religion, states: "The general religious awareness of the Japanese does not include an ultimate God with human attributes, as the God of Christianity. Instead, Japanese sense the mystery of life from all events and natural phenomena around them in their daily lives. They have what might be called a sense of pathos" (cf. Web positing of August, 1996, http://www.ariadne.knee.kioto-u.ac.jp). A Mouthful of Microwave From a strictly qualitative perspective, the amount of food people eat is represented by numbers so large that we end up looking at them in awe, without understanding what they mean. The maintenance of life is an expensive proposition. Nevertheless, once we go beyond the energetic equation, i.e., in the realm of desires, the numbers increase exponentially. It can be argued that this increase (of an order of magnitude of 1,000) is higher than that anticipated by Malthus. On the subject of what, how, and why people eat, see: Claudio Clini. L'alimentazione nella storia. Uomo, alimentazione, malattie. Abano Terme, Padova: Francisci, 1985. Evan Jones. American Food. The Gastronomic Story. Woodstock NY: Overlook Press, 1990. Nicholas and Giana Kurti, Editors. But the Crackling is Superb. An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society. Bristol, England: A. Hilger, 1988. Carol A. Bryant, et al. The Cultural Feast. An Introduction to Food and Society. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1985. Hilary Wilson. Egyptian Food and Drink. Aylesbury, Bucks, England: Shire, 1988. Reay Tannahill. Food in History. New York: Stein and Day, 1973. Charles Bixler Heiser. Seed to Civilization. The Story of Food. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Margaret Visser. Much Depends on Dinner. The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. Esther B. Aresty. The Delectable Past. The Joys of the Table, from Rome to the Renaissance, from Queen Elizabeth I to Mrs. Beeton. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978. Maria P. Robbins, Editor. The Cook's Quotation Book. A Literary Feast. Wainscott NY: Pushcart Press, 1983. The Pleasures of the Table (compiled by Theodore FitzGibbon). New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Charles Dickens. American Notes. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. (pp. 154-155). On the symbolism of food, informative reading can be found in: Carol A. Bryant. The Cultural Feast: An Introduction to Food and Society. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1985. Lindsey Tucker. Stephen and Bloom at Life's Feast: Alimentary Symbolism and the Creative Process in James Joyce's Ulysses. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984. In L'aile ou la cuisse (Wing or Drumstick), a 1976 French film directed by Claude Zidi, Luis de Funés became, as the French press put it, "the Napoleon of gastronomy" fighting the barbarian taste of industrial food, seen as a real danger to the authentic taste of France. At the initiative of the Minister of Culture, a Conseil National des Arts Culinaires (CNAC) was founded in 1989. Culinary art and gastronomic heritage were made part of the French national identity. Awakening of Taste (Le reveil du goût) is a program launched in the elementary schools. A curriculum originating from the French Institute of Taste is used to explain what makes French food taste good. The CNAC provides a nationwide inventory of local foods. A University of Taste (Centre de Goût) would be established in the Loire Valley. Jean Bottero. Mythes et Rites de Babylone. Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1985. Reallexikon der Assyriologie. Vol. III, Getränke (Drinks), pp. 303-306; Gewürze (Spices), pp. 340-341; Vol. VI, Küche (Cuisine), pp. 277-298. Berlin/New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1982. La Plus Vieille Cuisine du Monde, in L'Histoire, 49, 1982, pp. 72-82. M. Gabeus Apicius. De re conquinaria (rendered into English by Joseph Sommers Vehling, New York: Dover Publications, 1977) first appeared in England in 1705, in a Latin version, based on the manuscripts of this work dating to the 8th and 9th centuries. Apicius was supposed to have lived from 80 BCE to 40 CE. This book has since been questioned as a hoax, although it remains a reference text. Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. De re rustica. (12 volumes on agriculture. Latin text with German translation by Will Richter). München: Artemis Verlag, 1981. Roland Barthes. Empire of Signs. New York: Hill and Wang. 1982. (Originally published in French as L'Empire des Signes, Geneva: Editions d'Art Albert Skira, S.A. "The dinner tray seems a picture of the most delicate order: its frame containing, against a dark background, various objects (bowls, boxes, saucers, chopsticks, tiny piles of food, a little gray ginger, a few shreds of orange vegetable, a background of brown sauce)...it might be said that these trays fulfill the definition of painting which according to Piero della Francesca is merely demonstration of surfaces and bodies becoming even smaller or larger according to their term" (p. 11). "Entirely visual (conceived, concerted, manipulated for sight, and even for a painter's eye), food thereby says that it is not deep: the edible substance is without a precious heart, without a buried power, without a vital secret: no Japanese dish is endowed with a center (the alimentary center implied in the West by the rite which consists of arranging the meal, of surrounding or covering the article of food); here everything is the ornament of another ornament: first of all because on the table, on the tray, food is never anything but a collection of fragments, none of which appears privileged by an order of ingestion; to eat is not to respect a menu (an itinerary of dishes), but to select, with a light touch of the chopsticks, sometimes one color, sometimes another, depending on the kind of inspiration which appears in its slowness as the detached, indirect accompaniment of the conversation...." (p. 22). The writings of the various religions (Koran, Torah, New Testament) contain strictures and ceremonial rules concerning food. For cooking and eating restrictions in various cultures, see Nourritures, Sociétés et Religions: Commensalités (introduction by Solange Thierry). Paris: L'Harmattan, 1990. On the microwave revolution in cooking, see: Lori Longbotham. Better by Microwave. New York: Dutton, 1990. Maria Luisa Scott. Mastering Microwave Cooking. Mount Vernon NY: Consumers Union, 1988. Eric Quayle. Old Cook Books: An Illustrated History. New York: Dutton. 1978; and Daniel S. Cutler. The Bible Cookbook. New York: Morrow, 1985, offer a good retrospective of what people used to eat. In World Hunger. A Reference Handbook (Patricia L. Kutzner, Santa Barbara CA: ABC-Clio, 1991), the author gives a stark description of the problem of hunger in today's world: "With more than enough food in the world to feed everyone, hundreds of millions of men, women, and children still go hungry" (p. ix). It is not the first time in history that starvation and famine affect people all over the world. What is new is the scale of the problem, affecting well over one billion human beings. In June, 1974, in the Assessment of the World Food Situation, commissioned by the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the situation was described in terms still unchanged: "The causes of inadequate nutrition are many and closely interrelated, including ecological, sanitary, and cultural constraints, but the principal cause is poverty. This in turn results from socioeconomic development patterns that in most of the poorer countries have been characterized by a high degree of concentration of power, wealth, and incomes in the hands of relatively small elites of national and foreign individuals or groups. [...] The percentage of undernourished is highest in Africa, the Far East, and Latin America; the hunger distribution is highest in the Far East (in the range of 60%). Of the hungry, the majority (up to 90%) is in rural areas. Data is collected and managed by the World Food Council. The Bellagio Declaration, Overcoming hunger in the 1990's, adopted by a group of 23 prominent development and food policy planners, development practitioners, and scientists noticed that 14 million children under the age of five years die annually from hunger related causes. Among the organizations created to help feed the world are CARE, Food for Peace, OXFAM, Action Hunger, The Hunger Project, Save the Children, World Vision, the Heifer Project. This list does not include the many national and local organizations that feed the hungry in their respective countries and cities. Science and Philosophy: More Questions than Answers T.S. Elliot. Burnt Norton, in V. Four Quartets. London: Faber & Faber, 1936. For information on the development of science and philosophy in early civilizations, see: Shigeru Nakayama and Nathan Sivin, Editors. Chinese Science: Exploration of an Ancient Tradition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973. Karl W. Butzer. Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: a Study in Cultural Ecology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Heinrich von Staden. Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. The Cultural Heritage of India, (in 6 volumes). Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission, Institute of Culture, 1953. James H. MacLachlan. Children of Prometheus: A History of Science and Technology. Toronto: Wall & Thompson, 1989. Isaac Asimov. Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. The Lives and Achievements of 1195 Great Scientists from Ancient Times to the Present. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1972. Fritz Kraft. Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft. Freiberg: Romback, 1971. G.E.R. Lloyd. Methods and Problems in Greek Science Cambridge University Press, 1991. Robert K.G. Temple. China, Land of Discovery. London: Patrick Stephens, 1986. Temple documents discoveries and techniques such as row cultivation and hoeing ("There are 3 inches of moisture at the end of a hoe,"), the iron plow, the horse harness, cast iron, the crank handle, lacquer ("the first plastic"), the decimal system, the suspension bridge as originating from China. In the Introduction, Joseph Needham writes: "Chauvinistic Westerners, of course, always try to minimize the indebtedness of Europe to China in Antiquity and the Middle Ages" (p.7). What is of interest in the story is the fact that all these discoveries occur in a context of configurational focus, of synthesis, not in the sequential horizon of analytic Western languages. In some cases, the initial non-linear thought is linearized. This is best exemplified by comparing Chinese printing methods, intent on letters seen as images, with those following Gutenberg's movable type. Obviously, a text perceived as a holistic entity, such as the Buddhist charm scroll (printed in 704-751) or the Buddhist Diamond Sutra of 868 (cf. p. 112) are different from the Bibles printed by Gutenberg and his followers. Contributions to the history of science from India and the Middle East also reveal that many discoveries celebrated as accomplishments of Western analytical science were anticipated in non-analytical cultures. Satya Prakash. Founders of Science in Ancient India. Dehli: Govindram Hasanand, 1986. G. Kuppuram and K. Kumudamani, Editors. History of Science and Technology in India. Dehli: Sundeep Prakashan, 1990. Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Islamic Science. Persia. Tihran: Surush, 1987. Charles Finch. The African Background to Medical Science: Essays in African History, Science, and Civilization. London: Karnak House, 1990. Magic, myth, and science influence each other in many ways. Writings on the subject refer to specific aspects (magic and science, myth as a form of rational discourse) or to the broader issues of their respective epistemological condition. Richard Cavendish. A History of Magic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1977. Gareth Knight. Magic and the Western Mind: Ancient Knowledge and the Transformation of Consciousness. St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1991. Umberto Eco. Foucault's Pendulum. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1989. In this novel, Umberto Eco deals, in a light vein, with the occult considered as the true science. Jean Malbec de Tresfel. Abrège de la Théorie et des véritables principes de l'art appelé chymie, qui est la troisième partie ou colonne de la vraye medecine hermetique. Paris: Chez l'auteur,1671. Adam McLean. The Alchemical Mandala. A Survey of the Mandala in the Western Esoteric Traditions. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1989. Titus Burckhardt. Alchemie, Sinn und Weltbild. London: Stuart & Watkins, 1967. Translated as Alchemy. Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul, by William Stoddart. Longmead/Shaftesbury/Dorest: Element Books, 1986. Marie Louise von Franz. Alchemy. An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980. Neil Powell. Alchemy. The Ancient Science. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. Alchemy. The Secret Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. J.C. Cooper. Chinese Alchemy. The Taoist Quest for Immortality. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1984. Robert Zoller. The Arabic Parts in Astrology. The Lost Key to Prediction. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International (distributed by Harper & Row), 1989. Dane Rudhyar. An Astrological Mandala. The Cycle of Transformation and Its 360 Symbolic Phases. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1973. Cyril Fagan. Astrological Origins. St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1971. Percy Seymour. Astrology. The Evidence of Science. Luton, Bedfordshire: Lennard, 1988. Rodney Davies. Fortune-Telling by Astrology. The History and Practice of Divination by the Stars. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1988. "Astrological herbalism distinguished seven planetary plants, twelve herbs associated with signs of the zodiac and thirty-six plants assigned to decantates and to horoscopes" cf. Lévi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit, p. 42. Ruth Drayer. Numerology. The Language of Life. El Paso, TX: Skidmore-Roth Publications, 1990. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Nobel prize laureate, 1921. He discusses the conditions of existence for which we are not adjusted in Über den Frieden, Weltordnung und Weltuntergang (O. Norden and H. Norden, Editors.), Bern. 1975, p. 494. In a letter to Jacques Hadamard (1945), Einstein explained: "The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanisms of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced or combined" cf. A Testimonial from Professor Einstein, in The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, edited by J. Hadamard, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945, p. 142. Raymond Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. "Rather than defining intelligence in terms of its constituent processes, we might define it in terms of its goal: the ability to use symbolic reasoning in the pursuit of a goal" (p. 17). Alan Bundy, The Computer Modelling of Mathematical Reasoning. New York: Academic Press, 1983. Allan Ramsey. Formal Methods in Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. M. Reinfrank, Editor. Non-Monotonic Reasoning: Second International Workshop. Berlin/New York: Springer Verlag, 1989. Titus Lucretius Carus. De rerum natura (edited with translation and commentary by John Godwin). Warminster, Wiltshire, England: Aris & Phillips,1986. -. The Nature of Things. Trans. Frank O. Copley. 1st ed. New York: Norton., 1977. Epicurus, called by Timon "the last of the natural philosophers," was translated by Lucretius into Latin. His Letter to Herodotus and Master Sayings (Kyriai doxai) were integrated in De rerum natura (On Nature). A good reference book is Clay Diskin's Lucretius and Epicurus, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Galileo Galilei. Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche (Two New Sciences: Including Centers of Gravity and Force of Percussion, translated, with a new introduction and notes, by Stillman Drake). Toronto: Wall & Thompson, 1989. -. Galileo's Early Notebooks. The Physical Questions (translated from the Latin, with historical and paleographical commentary, by William A. Wallace). Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977. Starting out as a dictionnaire raisonné of the sciences, the arts, and crafts, the Encyclopédie became a major form of philosophic expression in the 18th century. Philosophers dedicated themselves to the advancement of the sciences and secular thought, and to the social program of the Enlightenment. The Encyclopédie showcased new directions of thought in all branches of intellectual activity. The emergent values corresponding to the pragmatic condition of time, tolerance, innovation, and freedom, were expressed in the Encyclopedic writings and embodied in the political program of the revolutions it inspired. One of the acknowledged sources of this orientation is Ephraim Chamber's Cyclopedia (or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences), London, 1728. The examination of star naming is in some ways an exercise in the geology of pragmatic contexts. The acknowledgment of what is high, over, above, and beyond the observer's actions suggested power. The sequence of day and night, of seasons, of the changing weather is a mixture of repetitive patterns and unexpected occurrences, even meteorites, some related to wind, fire, water. Once the shortest and the longest days are observed, and the length of day equal to that of night (the equinox), the sky becomes integrated in the pragmatics of human self-constitution by virtue of affecting cycles of work. Furthermore, parallel to the mytho-magical explanation of what happens follows the association of mythical characters, mainly to stars. Saturn, or Chronos, was the god of time, a star known for its steady movement; Jupiter, known by the Egyptians as Ammon, the most impressive planet, and apparently the biggest. Details of this geology of naming could lead to a book. Here are some of the names used: Mythomagical: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Pluto; Zodiacal: Gemini, Capricorn, Sagittarius, Scorpio, etc. Space: limitless, 3-dimensional, in which objects exist, events occur, movement takes place. Objects have relative positions and their movement has relative directions. The geometric notion of space expands beyond 3-dimensionality. Paradigm: Since the time Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the concept of paradigm was adopted in philosophic jargon. The underlying thesis is that science operates in a research space dominated by successive research models, or paradigms. The domination of such a paradigm does not make it more important than previous scientific explanations (paradigms are not comparable). Rather it effects a certain convergence in the unifying framework it ascertains. Logos: ancient Greek for word, was many times defined, almost always partially, as a means to express thoughts. By generalization, logos became similar to thought or reason, and thus a way to control the word through speech (legein). In this last sense, logos was adapted by Christianity as the Word of Divinity. For a description of holism, see Holism-A Philosophy for Today, by Harry Settanni (New York: P. Lang, 1990). Techné: from the Greek, means "pertaining to the making of artifacts" (art objects included). Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Statesman and philosopher, distinguished for establishing the empiric methods for scientific research. Intent on analytical tools, he set out methods of induction which proved to be effective in the distinction between scientific and philosophical research. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) and especially Novum Organum (1620), Bacon set forth principles that affected the development of modern science. René Descartes (1596-1650): Probably one of the most influential philosophers and scientists, whose contribution, at a time of change and definition, marked Western civilization in many ways. The Cartesian dualism he developed ascertains a physical (res extensa) and a thinking (res cogitans) substance. The first is extended, can be measured and divided; the second is indivisible. The body is part of res extensa, the mind (including thoughts, desires, volition) is res cogitans. His rules for the Direction of the Understanding (1628), influenced by his mathematical concerns, submitted a model for the acquisition of knowledge. The method of doubt, i.e., rejection of everything not certain, expressed in the famous Discourse on Method (1637), together with the foundation of a model of science that combines a mechanic image of the universe described mathematically, are part of his legacy. Edwin A. Abbot. Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions. By a Square. A broad-minded square guides the reader through a 2-dimensional space. High priests (circular figures) forbid discussing a third dimension. Abruptly, the square is transported into spaceland and peers astonished into his 2-dimensional homeland. Spatial reasoning: a type of reasoning that incorporates the experience of space either in direct forms (geometric reasoning) or indirectly (through terms such as close, remote, among others). Linearity: relation among dependent phenomena that can be described through a linear function. Non-linearity: relations among dependent phenomena that cannot be described through a linear function, but through exponential and logarithmic functions, among others. Jackson E. Atlee. Perspectives of Non-Linear Dynamics. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. S. Neil Rasband. Chaotic Dynamics of Non-Linear Systems. New York: Wiley, 1990. Coherence: the notion that reflects interest in how parts of a whole are connected. Of special interest is the coherence of knowledge. Ralph C.S. Walker. The Coherence Theory of Truth: Realism, Anti-Realism, Idealism. London/New York: Routledge, 1989. Alan H. Goldman. Moral Knowledge. London/New York: Routledge, 1988. A major survey, focused on the contributions of Keith Lehrer and Laurence Bon Jour, was carried out in The Current State of the Coherence Theory. Critical Essays on the Epistemic Theories of Keith Lehrer and Laurence Bon Jour, with Replies (John W. Bender, Editor, Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989). David Kirsch. Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. (A special volume of the journal Artificial Intelligence, 47:1-3, January 1991. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Self-organization is a dominant topic in artificial life research. The Annual Conference on Artificial Life (Santa Fe) resulted in a Proceedings in which self-organization is amply discussed. Some aspects pertinent to the subject can be found in: H. Haken. Advanced Synergetics: Instability Hierarchies of Self-Organizing Systems and Devices. Berlin/New York: Springer Verlag, 1983. P.C.W. Davies. The Cosmic Blueprint. London: Heinemann, 1987. G. M. Whitesides. Self-Assembling Materials, in Nanothinc, 1996. http://www.nanothinc.com/webmaster @nanothinc.com More information on self-assembling materials and nanotechnology can be found on the Internet at http://www.nanothinc.com/webmaster @nanothinc.com and at http://www.foresight.org/webmaster@foresight.org. Richard Feynman, in a talk given in 1959, stated that "The principles of physics...do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. [...] The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to...do things on an atomic level is ultimately developed, a developmet which I think cannot be avoided." (cf. http://www.foresight.org). Preston Prather. Science Education and the Problem of Scientific Enlightenment, in Science Education, 5:1, 1996. The money invested in science is a slippery subject. While direct funds, such as those made available through the National Science Foundation, are rather scarce, funding through various government agencies (Defense, Agriculture, Energy, NASA) and through private sources amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars. How much of this goes to fundamental research and how much to applied science is not very clear, as even the distinction between fundamental and applied is less and less clear. Ernst Mach. The Science of Mechanics (1883). Trans. T.J. McCormick. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1960. Henri Poincaré. The Foundations of Science (1909). Trans. G.B. Halsted. New York: The Science Press, 1929. N.P. Cambell. Foundations of Science (1919). New York: Dover, 1957. Bas C. van Fraasen. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1980. Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. -. The Extended Phenotype. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Elan Moritz, of the Institute for Memetic Research, provides the historic and methodological background to the subject in Introduction to Memetic Science. E.O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1975. Mihai Nadin. Mind-Anticipation and Chaos (from the series Milestones in Thought and Discovery). Stuttgart/Zurich: Belser Presse, 1991. -. The Art and Science of Multimedia, in Real-Time Imaging (P. Laplante & A. Stoyenko, Editors). Piscataway NJ: IEEE Press, January, 1996. -. Negotiating the World of Make-Believe: The Aesthetic Compass, in Real-TIme Imaging. London: Academic Press, 1995. "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it," Karl Marx (cf. Theses on Feuerbach (from Notebooks of 1844-1845). See also Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1967, p. 402. Paul K. Feyerabend. Against Method. Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: Verson Edition,1978. -. Three Dialogues on Knowledge. Oxford, England/Cambridge MA: Blackwell,1991. Imre Lakatos. Philosophical Papers, in two volumes (edited by John Worrall and Gregory Currie). Cambridge, England/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. -. Proofs and Refutations. The Logic of Mathematical Discovery (John Worrall and Elie Zahar, Editors). Cambridge, England/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Multivalued logic: expands beyond the truth and falsehood of sentences, handling the many values of the equivocal or the ambiguous. Charles S. Peirce ascertained that all necessary reasoning is mathematical reasoning, and that all mathematical reasoning is diagrammatic. He explained diagrammatic reasoning as being based on a diagram of the percept expressed and on operations on the diagram. The visual nature of a diagram ("composed of lines, or an array of signs...") affects the nature of the operations performed on it (cf. On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation, in The American Journal of Mathematics, 7:180-202, 1885). Brockman, John. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. (A collection of essays with Introduction written by John Brockman.) New York: Simon & Schuster. 1995 Here are some quotations from the contributors: Brockman maintains that there is a shift occurring in public discourse, with scientists supplanting philosophers, artists, and people of letters as the ones who render "visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are." "We're at the stage where things change on the order of decades, and it seems to be speeding up...." (Danny Hillis) Auguste Compte, in whose works the thought of Positivism is convincingly embodied, attracted the attention of John Stuart Mill, who wrote The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Compte (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1871). Some of Compte's early writings are reproduced in The Crisis of Industrial Civilization (Ronald Fletcher, Editor, London: Heinemann Educational, 1974). Stefano Poggi. Introduzione al il Positivisma. Bari: Laterza, 1987. Sybil de Acevedo. Auguste Compte: Qui êtes-vous? Lyons: La Manufacture, 1988. Emil Durkheim. De la division du travail social. 9e ed. Paris: Presses univérsitaires de France, 1973. (Translated as The Division of Labor in Society by W.D. Halls, New York: Free Press, 1984. Durkheim applied Darwin's natural selection to labor division. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903): very well known for his essay, Progress: Its Laws and Cause (1857), attempted to conceive a theory of society based on naturalist principles. What he defined as the "super- organic," which stands for social, is subjected to evolution. In his view, societies undergo, cycles of birth- climax-death. Productive power varies from one cycle to other (cf. Principles of Sociology, 1876-1896). Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes Art Speigelman. Maus. A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986; and Maus II: A Survivor's Tale-And Here My Troubles Began. New York Pantheon Books, 1991. Started as a comic strip (in Raw, an experimental Comix magazine, co-edited by Speigelman and Françoise Monly) on the subject of the Holocaust, Maus became a book and, on its completion, the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a show to the artist. Over 1500 interlocking drawings tell the story of Vladek, the artist's father. The comic book convention was questioned as to its appropriateness for the tragic theme. Milli Vanilli, the group that publicly acknowledged that the album Girl You Know It's True, for which it was awarded the Grammy for Best New Artist of 1989, was vocally interpreted by someone else. The prize winners, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, credited for the vocals, were hardly the first to take advantage of the new means for creating the illusion of interpretation. As the 'visual entertainment," they became the wrapper on a package containing the music of less video-reputed singers. Their producer, Frank Tarian (i.e., Franz Reuther) was on his second "fake." Ten years earlier, he revealed that the pop group Boney M. was his own "mouthpiece." Image-driven pop music sells the fantasy of teen idol to a musically illiterate public. Packaged music extends to simulations of instruments and orchestras as well. Beauty and the Beast is the story of a handsome prince in 18th century France turned into an eight-foot tall, hideous, hairy beast. Unless he finds someone to love him before his 21st birthday, the curse cast upon him by the old woman he tried to chase away will become permanent. In a nearby village, Maurice, a lovable eccentric inventor, his daughter Belle, who keeps her nose in books and her head in the clouds, and Gaston, the macho of the place, go through the usual "he (Gaston) loves/wants her; she does not care for/shuns him, etc." As its 30th full-length animation, this Walt Disney picture is a musical fairy tale that takes advantage of sophisticated computer animation. Its over one million drawings (the work of 600 animators, artists, and technicians) are animated, some in sophisticated 3-dimensional computer animation. The technological performance, resulting from an elaborate database, provided attractive numbers, such as the Be Our Guest sequence (led by the enchanted candelabra, teapot, and clock characters, entire chorus lines of dancing plates, goblets, and eating utensils perform a musical act), or the emotional ballroom sequence. Everything is based on the accepted challenge: "OK, go ahead and fool us," once upon a time uttered by some art director to the computer-generated imagery specialists of the company. The story (by Mme. Leprince de Beaumont) inspired Jean Cocteau, who wrote the screenplay for (and also directed) La Belle et La Bête (1946), featuring Jean Marais, Josette Day, and Marcel André. Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). Seduced by the relation to history, he produces allegories in reference to myth, art, religion, and culture. His compositions are strongly evocative, not lacking a certain critical dimension, sometimes focused on art itself, which repeatedly failed during times of challenge (those of Nazi Germany included). Terminator 2 is a movie about two cyborgs who come from the future, one to destroy, the other to protect, a boy who will affect the future when he grows up. It is reported to be the most expensive film made as of 1991 (over 130 characters are killed), costing 85 to 100 million dollars; cf. Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, August 12, 1991, pp. 28-29. Kitsch: defined in dictionaries as gaudy, trash, pretentious, shallow art expression addressing a low, unrefined taste. Kitsch-like images are used as ironic devices in artworks critical of the bourgeois taste. The relation between art and language occasioned a major show organized by the Société des Expositions du Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels. A catalogue was edited by Jan Debbant and Patricia Holm (Paris: Galerie de Paris; London: Lisson Gallery; New York: Marian Goodman Gallery). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Ästhetik (Hrsg. von Friedrich Bassenge). Berlin: Verlag das Europäische Buch, 1985. Dadaism: Hans Arp defined Dada as "the nausea caused by the foolish rational explanation of the world" (1916, Zurich). Richard Huelsenbeck stated that "Dada cannot be understood, it must be experienced" (1920). More on this subject can be found in: Raoul Hausmann. Am Anfang war Dada. (Hrsg. von Karl Riha & Gunter Kampf). Steinbach/Giessen: Anabas-Verlag G. Kampf, 1972. Serge Lemoine. Dada. Paris: Hazan, 1986. Dawn Ades. Dada and Surrealism Reviewed. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978. Hans Bollinger, et al. Dada in Zurich. Zurich: Kunsthaus Zurich, 1985. Walter Benjamin. Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction is a translation of Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit: drei studien zur Kunstsoziologie. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963. Walter de Maria's Lightning Field project was carried out with the support of the Dia Art Foundation, which bought the land and maintains and allows for limited public access to the work. As the prototypical example of land-art, this lattice of lightning rods covers an area of one mile by one kilometer. Filled with 400 rods placed equidistantly, the lightning field is the interplay between precision and randomness. During the storm season in New Mexico, the work is brought to life by many bolts of lightning. The artist explained that "Light is as important as lightening." Indeed, during its 24-hour cycle, the field goes through a continuous metamorphosis. Nature and art interact in fascinating ways. Christo's latest work was entitled Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, July 1995. Regarding Christo's many ambitious projects, some references are: Erich Himmel, Editor. Christo. The Pont-Neuf Wrapped, Paris 1975-1985. New York: Abrams, 1990. Christo: The Umbrellas. Joint project for Japan and the USA, 25 May - 24 June, 1988. London: Annely Juda Fine Art, 1988. Christo: Surrounded Islands. Köln: DuMont Buch Verlag, 1984. Christo: Wrapped Walkways, Loose Park, Kansas City, Missouri, 1977-1978. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1978. Christo: Valley Curtain, Riffle, Colorado. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1973. The Bauhaus, a school of arts and crafts, founded in 1919 in Weimar, by Walter Gropius. Its significance results from the philosophy of education expressed in the Bauhaus program, to which distinguished artists contributed, and from the impressive number of people who, after studying at the Bauhaus, affirmed its methods and vision in worlds of art, architecture, and new educational programs. Among the major themes at Bauhaus were the democratization of artistic creation (one of the last romantic ideas of our time), the social implication of art, and the involvement of technology. Collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts were encouraged; the tendency to overcome cultural and national boundaries was tirelessly pursued; the rationalist attitude became the hallmark of all who constituted the school. In 1925, the Bauhaus had to move to Dessau, where it remained until 1928, before it settled in Berlin. After Gropius, the architects Hans Mayer (1930-1932) and Mies van der Rohe (1932-1933) worked on ascertaining the international style intended to offer visual coherence and integrity. In some ways, the Bauhaus was continued in the USA, since many of its personalities and students had to emigrate from Nazi Germany and found safe haven in the USA. Leon Battista Alberti (15th century) wrote extensively on painting and sculpture: De pictura and De Statua were translated by Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972). Alberti's writings on the art of building, De re aedificatoria, was translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (10 volumes, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1988). Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Intently against those who were "intoxicated by turpentine," he pursued a "dry art." From the Nu descendant un escalier, considered "an explosion in a fireworks factory" to his celebrated ready-mades, Duchamp pursued the call to "de-artify" art. Selection became the major operation in offering objects taken out of context and appropriating them as aesthetic icons. He argued that "Art is a path to regions where neither time nor space dominate." Happening: An artistic movement based on the interaction among different forms of expression. Allan Kaprow (at Douglas College in 1958) and the group associated with the Reuben gallery in New York (Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Whitman, Hausen) brought the movement to the borderline where distinctions between the artist and the public are erased. Later, the movement expanded to Europe. Andy Warhol. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and Back Again. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. -. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw Hill, 1973. Andy Warhol is remembered for saying that in the future, everyone will be a celebrity for 15 minutes. Vladimir (Vladimirovich) Nabokov. Lectures on Literature. Edited by Fredson Bowers, introduction by John Updike. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980-1981. "A rose is a rose is a rose...," now quite an illustrious (if not trite) line, originated in Gertrude Stein's poem Sacred Emily. But "...A rose by any other name/would smell as sweet." from Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet can be seen as a precursor. Symbolism is a neo-romantic art movement of the end of the 19th century, in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and positivist attitudes permeating art and existence. Writers such as Beaudelaire, Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, Huysmans, composers (Wagner, in the first place), painters such as Gauguin, Ensor, Puvis de Chavannes, Moreau, and Odilon Redon created in the spirit of symbolism. At the beginning of the 20th century, symbolism attempted to submit a unified alphabet of images. Jung went so far as to identify its psychological basis. James Joyce (1882-1941). Ulysses. A critical and synoptic (though very controviersial) edition, prepared by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfgang Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Garland Publishers, 1984. Antoine Furetière. Essais d'un Dictionnaire Universel. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968 (reprint of the original published in 1687 in Amsterdam under the same title). Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). 2000 Pagine de Gramsci. A cura di Giansiro Ferrata e Niccolo Gallo. Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1971. -. Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings. (Edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Newell-Smith; translated by William Boelhower). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. -. Le Ceneri di Gramsci. Milano: Garzanti, 1976. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). Turc al Friul. Traduzione e introduzione di Giancarlo Bocotti. Munich: Instituto Italian di Cultura, 1980. Ken Kesey. The Further Inquiry. Photographs by Ron Bevirt. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). Madame Bovary. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. -. Madame Bovary. Patterns of provincial life. (Translated, with a new introduction by Francis Steegmuller). New York: Modern Library, 1982. Donald Barthelme. Amateurs. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1976. -. The King. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. -. The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or The Hithering Thithering Djinn. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1971. Kurt Vonnegut. Breakfast of Champions or, Goodbye Blue Monday! New York: Delacorte Press, 1973. -. Galapagos. A Novel. New York: Delacorte Press, 1985. -. Fates Worse than Death. An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980's. New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1991. John Barth. Chimera. New York: Random House, 1972. -. The Literature of Exhaustion and the Literature of Replenishment. Northridge CA: Lord John Press, 1982. -. Sabbatical. A Romance. New York: Putnam, 1982. William H. Gass. Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Knopf, 1970. -. Habitations of the Word: Essays. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. -. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Gary Percesepe. What's Eating William Gass?, in Mississippi Review, 1995. Gertrude Stein's writing technique is probably best exemplified by her own writing. How to Write, initially published in 1931 in Paris (Plain Editions), states provocatively that "Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean nor how clearly you mean what you mean." In an interview with Robert Haas, 1946) in Afterword, Gertrude Stein stated that "Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them," (p. 101). "I write with my eyes not with my ears or mouth," (p. 103). Moreover: "My writing is as clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear." Gertrude Stein. How to Write (with a new preface by Patricia Meyerowitz). New York: Dover Publications, 1975. The author shows that "the innovative works of an artist are explorations" (p.vi). -. Useful Knowledge. Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 1988. -. What are Masterpieces? New York: Pitman Publishing Corp., 1970 (reprint of 1940 edition). Edmund Carpenter. They Became What They Beheld. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey/Ballentine, 1970. The author maintains that the book became the organizing principle for all existence, a model for achieving bureaucracy. It seems that the first comic strip in America was The Yellow Kid, by Richard F. Outcault, in the New York World, 1896. Among the early comic strips: George Harriman's Krazy Kat (held as an example of American Dadaism); Windsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland; Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirated. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944). Il Futurismo was written in 1908 as the preface to a volume of his poetry and was published in 1909. Its manifesto was set forth in the words "We declare that the splendor of the world has been increased by a new beauty: the beauty of speed." Breaking with the livresque past, the Italian Futurism took it upon itself to "liberate this land from the fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, guides, and antiquarians." The break with the past was a break with its values as these were rooted in literate culture. Dziga Vertov (born Denis Arkadievich Kaufman,1986-1954). Became known through his innovative montage juxtaposition, about which he wrote in Kino-Glas (Kino-Eye). The film We (1922) is a fantasy of movement. Kino-Pravda (1922-1925) were documentaries of extreme expressionism, with very rich visual associations. Experiments in simultaneity are also experiments in the understanding of the need to rethink art as a representation of dynamic events. Michail Fyodorovich Larionov (1881-1964). Russian-born French painter and designer, a pioneer in abstract painting, after many experiences in figurative art and with a declared obsession with the aesthetic experience of simultaneity. Founder of the Rayonist movement-together with his wife, Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), painter, stage designer, and sculptor-Larionov went from a neo-primitive painting style to cubism and futurism in order to finally synthesize them in a style reflecting the understanding of the role of light (in particular, as rays). His Portrait of Tatline (1911) is witness to the synthesis that Rayonism represented. Fernand Léger (1881-1955). Machine Aesthetics, 1923. "La vitesse est la loi de la vie moderne." (Speed is the modern law of life.) Libraries, Books, Readers In his Introduction to A Carlyle Reader, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), G.B. Tennyson is unequivocal in his appreciation: "No one who hopes to understand the nineteenth century in England can dispense with Carlyle," (p. xiv). Since nineteenth century England is of such relevance to major developments in the civilization of literacy, one can infer that Tennyson's thought applies to persons trying to understand the emergence and consolidation of literacy. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) wrote Signs of Times. (He took the title from the New Testament, Matthew 16:3, "O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky, but can ye not discern the sign of the times?") He condemns his age in the following terms: "Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not a Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop to make room for a speedier, inanimate one," (cf. Reader, p. 34). Parallels to the reactions to new technology in our age are more than obvious. New Worlds, Ancient Texts. The Cultural Impact of an Encounter, a major public documentary exhibit at the New York Public Library, September 1992-January 1992, curated by Anthony Grafton, assisted by April G. Shelford. At the other end of the spectrum defined by Carlyle's faith in books comes a fascinating note from Louis Hennepin (1684): "We told them [the Indians] that we know all things through written documents. These savages asked, 'Before you came to the lands where we live, did you rightly know that we were here?' We were obliged to say no. 'Then you didn't know all things through books, and they didn't tell you everything'" A. Grafton, A. Shelford, and N. Siraisi,The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. In comparison to Carlyle's criticism of mechanical mediation of the Industrial Age comes this evaluation of the Information Age or Post-Industrial Age: "In the industrial age, when people need to achieve something, do they have to go through a series of motions, read manuals, or become experts at the task? Not at all; they flip a switch.... It isn't necessary to know a single thing about lighting; all one needs to do is flip a switch to turn the light on. [...] To take care of a number of tasks, you push a button, flip a switch, turn a dial. That is the age of industry working at its best, so that you don't have to become an electrical engineer or physicist to function effectively. "To get the information you need...do you need to go on-line or open a manual? Unfortunately, most of us right now end up going through a series of activities in order to get the precise information we need. In the age of information...you will be able to turn on a computer, come up with the specific question, and it will do the work for you." (cf. Address by Jeff Davidson, Executive Director of the Breathing Space Institute of Chapel Hill, before the National Institute of Health, Dec. 8, 1995; reprinted in Vital Speeches, Vol. 62, 06-01-1996, pp. 495, and in the Electric LibraryT.) George Steiner. The End of Bookishness? (edited transcript of a talk given to the International Publishers' Association Congress in London, on June 14, 1988) in Times Literary Supplement, 89-14, 1988, p. 754. Aldus Manutius, the Elder (born Aldo Manuzio, 1449-1515): Known for his activity in printing, publishing, and typography, especially for design and manufacture of small pocket-sized books printed in inexpensive editions. The family formed a short-lived printing empire (ending in 1597 with Aldus Manutius, the Younger) and is associated with the culture of books and with high quality typography. Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. An abridged version appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction (1950) under the title The Fireman. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Mein Kampf (translated by Ralph Manheim) Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Mao (1893-1976). Comrade Mao Tze-tung on imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1958. Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose (translated by William Weaver). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1983. Originally published in Italy as Il nome della rosa. Milano: Fabbri-Bompiani, 1980. Topos uranikos, in Plato's philosophy is the heavenly place from which we originally come and where everything is true. Vilém Flusser wrote that, "The library (transhuman memory) is presented as a space (topos uranikos)" cf. On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise), in Leonardo, 23-4, 1990, p. 398. Great libraries take shape, under Libraries, in Compton's Encyclopedia (Compton's New Media), January 1, 1994 Noah Webster (1758-1843) wrote The Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 2 volumes, in 1828. He was probably inspired by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who wrote his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. Larousse de la Grammaire. Paris: Librairie Larousse. 1983 Dudens Bedeutungswörterbuch: 24,000 Wörter mit ihren Grundbedeutungen (bearbeitet von Paul Grebe, Rudolf Koster, Wolfgang Müller, et al). Zehn Bänden. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut. 1980 Vannevar Bush. As We May Think, in The Atlantic Monthly, A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics. vol. CLXXVI, July-Dec., 1945. The blurb introducing the article states: "As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. VANNEVAR BUSH has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article, he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge," (p. 101). In many ways, this article marks the shift from a literacy-dominated pragmatics to one of many new forms of human practical activity. Ted Nelson. Replacing the Printed Word: A Complete Literary System, in Information Processing 80. (S.H. Lavington, Editor). Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1980, pp. 1013-1023. Rassengna dei siti piu' utilizzati, and Bibliotechi virtuali, in Internet e la Biblioteca, http://www.bs.unicatt.it/bibliotecavirtuale.html, 1996. The Infonautics Corporation maintains the Electric LibraryT on the World Wide Web. The Sense of Design The term design (of Latin origin) can be understood as meaning "from the sign," "out of the sign," "on account of the sign," "concerning the sign," "according to the sign," "through the medium of the sign." All these possible understandings point to the semiotic nature of design activity. Balducinni defined design as "a visible demonstration by means of lines of those things which man has first conceived in his mind and pictured in the imagination and which the practised hand can make appear." It is generally agreed that before Balducinni's attempt to define the field, the primary sense of design was drawing. More recently, though, design is understood in a broad sense, from actual design (of artifacts, messages, products) to the conception of events (design of exhibitions, programs, and social, political, and family gatherings). "Nearly every object we use, most of the clothes we wear and many things we eat have been designed," wrote Adrian Forty in Objects of Desire. Design and Society since 1750 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986; paperback edition, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992, p. 6). International Style: generic name attached to the functionalist, anti-ornamental, and geometric tendency of architecture in the second quarter of the 20th century. In 1923, Henri-Russel Hitchcock and Philip Johnson organized the show entitled International Style-Architecture Since 1922, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Among the best known architects who embraced the program are Gerrit T. Rietveldt, Adolf Loos, Peter Behrens, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Eero Saalinen. H. R. Hitchcock and P. Johnson. The International Style. New York: Norton, 1966. Jay Galbraith. Designing Complex Organizations. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1973. Devoted to the art of drawing, a collection of lectures given at the Fogg Museum of Harvard University in March, 1985, Drawing Defined (Walter Strauss and Tracie Felker, Editors, New York: Abaris Books, 1987) is a good reference for the subject. Richard Kenin's The Art of Drawing: from the Dawn of History to the Era of the Impressionists (New York: Paddington Press, 1974) gives a broad overview of drawing. Vitruvius Pollio. On Architecture (Edited from the Harleian Manuscripts and translated into English by Frank Granger). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Marcus Cetius Faventius. Vitruvius and Later Roman Building Manuals. London: Cambridge University Press. 1973. This book is a translation of Faventius' compendium of Vitruvius' De Architectura and of Vitruvius' De diversis fabricis architectonicae. Parallel Latin-English texts with translation into the English by Hugh Plommer. Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965). One of the most admired and influential architects and city planners whose work combines functionalism and bold sculptural expression. Since the time design became a field of study, various design styles and philosophies crystallized in acknowledged design schools. Worthy of mention are the Bauhaus, Art Deco, the Ulm School (which continued in the spirit of the Bauhaus), and Post-modernism. A good source for information on the becoming of design is Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design, Harmondsworth, 1960. The Scholes and Glidden typewriter of 1873, became, with refinements, the Remington model 1 (Remington was originally a gun and rifle manufacturer in the state of New York.) Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 12, 1990. pp. 86-87). See also History of the Typewriter (reprint of the original history of 1923). Sarasota FL: B. R. Swanger,1965. Peter Carl Fabergé (1846-1920). One of the most renown goldsmiths, jewelers, and decorative artists. After studying in Germany, Italy, France, and England, he settled in St. Petersburg in 1870, where he inherited his father's jewelry business. Famous for his inventiveness in creating decorative objects- flowers, animals, bibelots, and especially the Imperial Easter Egg-Fabergé is for many the ideal of the artist-craftsman. Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). American painter, craftsman, decorator, designer and philanthropist who became one of the most influential personalities in the Art Nouveau style who made significant contributions to glassmaking. Son of Charles Louis Tiffany (1812-1902), the jeweler, he is well known for his significant contributions to glassmaking. Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873): British politician, poet, and novelist, famous for The Last Days of Pompeii. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 7, 1990. p. 595). James Gibson. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. In our days, design is focused on major themes: design integrity (promoting exemplary forms of typography and form studies, as with the Basel School and its American counterparts), design function (of concern to industry-oriented schools), computation based on design. Originating from Gibson's studies in the psychology of man-nature relations, the ecological approach in design has its starting point in affordance. Thus many designers reflect concern for an individualized approach to the understanding of affordance possibilities. Costello, Michie, and Milne. Beyond the Casino Economy. London: Verso, 1989. D. Hayes. Beyond the Silicon Curtain. Boston: South End Press, 1989. Mihai Nadin. Interface design: a semiotic paradigm, in Semiotica 69:3/4. Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988, pp. 269-302. -. Computers in design education: a case study, in Visible Language (special issue: Graphic Design- Computer Graphics),vol. XIX, no. 2, Spring 1985, pp. 282-287. -. Design and design education in the age of ubiquitous computing, in Kunst Design & Co. Wuppertal: Verlag Müller + Busmann, 1994, pp. 230-233. Kim Henderson. Architectural Innovation: The reconfiguration of existing product technologies, in Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 35, January, 1990. M. R. Louis and R. I. Sutton. Switching Cognitive Gears: From habits of mind to active thinking. Working Paper, School of Industrial Engineering, Stanford University, 1989. Patrick Dillon. Multimedia Technology from A-Z. New York: Oryx Press, 1995. Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). So viel Anfang war noch nie, in Poems. English and German. Selected verses edited, introduced, and translated by Michael Hamburger. London/Dover NH: Anvil Press Poetry, 1986. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). Brave, New World. New York: Modern Library, 1946, 1956 Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931). Noted for inventing, among other things, the phonograph and the incandescent bulb. Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). Inventor of the graphophone. He is credited with inventing the telephone and took out the patent on it. Otto Nicklaus Otto (1832-1891). Inventor of the four-stroke engine applied in the automotive industry. Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Inventor of the electric alternator. Lev Nikolaievich Tolstoy (1828-1910). War and Peace. Trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. This is a translation of Voina i Mir, published in Moscow at the Tipografia T. Ros, 1868. The Declaration of Independence was approved by a group delegates from the American colonies in July, 1776, with the expressed aim of declaring the thirteen colonies independent of England. Signed at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, after much dispute over representation, the Constitution of the United States of America entered into effect once all thirteen states ratified it. Its major significance derives from its ascertainment of an effective alternative to monarchy. The system of checks and balances contained in the Constitution is meant to preserve any one branch of government from assuming absolute authority. The Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen was approved by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789 and declares the right of individuals to be represented, equality among citizens, and freedom of religion, speech, and the press. The ideals of the French Revolution inspired many other political movements on the continent. Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in a year of many popular uprisings all over Europe against conservative monarchies, the Communist Manifesto of 1848 expresses the political program of a revolutionary movement: workers of the world united, leading the way to a classless society. The Romantic impetus of the Manifesto and its new messianic tone was of a different tenor from the attempts to implement the program in Russia and later on Eastern Europe, China, and Korea. Married...with Children: A situation comedy at the borderline between satire and vulgarity, presenting a couple, Al and Peggy Bundy, and their teenage children, Kelly and Bud, in life-like situations at the fringes of the consumer society. Born in 1918, Alexander Solzhenitsyn became known as a writer in the context of the post-Stalin era. His books, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962), The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), The Oak and the Calf (1980), testify to the many aspects of Stalin's dictatorship. In 1974, after publishing Gulag Archipelago (about life in Soviet prison camps), the writer was exiled from his homeland. He returned to Russia in 1990. Yevgeni Alexandrovich Yevtushenko: A rhetorical poet in the tradition of Mayakovsky's poetry for the masses. During the communist regime, he took it upon himself to celebrate the official party line, as well as to poeticallly unveil less savory events and abusive practices. His poetry is still the best way to know the poet and the passionate human being. See also Yevtushenko's Reader. Trans. Robin Milner-Gulland. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972. Dimitri Dimitrevich Shostakovich (1906-1975): For a very long time the official composer of the Soviet Union. After his death, it became clear how deeply critical he was of a reality he seemed to endorse. He created his harmonic idiom by modifying the harmonic system of classical Russian music. See also Gunter Wolter. Dimitri Shostakovitch: eine sowjetische Tragödie. Frankfurt/Main, New York: P. Lang, 1991. There is no good definition of Samizdat, the illegal publishing movement of the former Soviet Block and China. Nevertheless, the power of the printed word-often primitively presented and always in limited, original editions-remains exemplary testimony to the many forces at work in societies where authoritarian rules are applied to the benefit of the political power in place. From a large number of books on various aspects of Samizdat, the following titles can be referenced: Samizdat. Register of Documents (English edition). Munich: Samizdat Archive Association. From 1977. Ferdinand J. M. Feldbrugge. Samizdat and Political Dissent in the Soviet Union. Leyden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1975. Claude Widor. The Samizdat Press in China's Provinces, 1979-1981. Stanford CA: Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1987. Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-1989). His life can be summed up in John Sweeney's statement: "In Ceausescu's Romania, madness was enthroned, sanity a disease" cf. The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu, London: Hutchinson, 1991, p. 105. Berlin Wall. Erected in August, 1961, the wall divided East and West Berlin. Over the years, it became the symbol of political oppression. Hundreds of people were killed in their attempt to escape to freedom. The political events in East Europe of Fall, 1989 led to destruction of the wall, a symbolic step in the not so easy process of German reunification. See also: J. Ruhle, G. Holzweissig. 13 August 1961: die Mauer von Berlin (Hrsg von I. Spittman). Köln: Edition Deutschland Archiv, 1981. Red. B. Beier, U. Heckel, G. Richter.9 November 1989: der Tag der Deutschen. Hamburg: Carlsen, 1989. John Borneman. After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Political unrest, due to intense resentment of the Soviet occupation, and economic hardship led to the creation of an independent labor union, the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) in 1980. In 1981, nationwide strikes brought Poland to a standstill. Martial law was imposed and Solidarity was banned in 1982 after dramatic confrontations at the Gdansk shipyards. Reinstated in 1989, Solidarity became a major political factor in the formation of the new, non-communist government. Massimo d'Azeglio (1798-1866): I miei ricordi. A cura di Alberto M. Ghisalberti. Torino: Einaudi, 1971. Germany has a rather tortuous history behind its unification. After the peace of Westphalia (1648) ending the Thirty Years' War, a sharp division between Catholic and Protestant states arose. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo (1815), the German Confederation (led by Austria) prepared the path towards future unification. In 1850, the attempt to form a central government was blocked, to be resuscitated after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). On his defeat of Ludwig II of Bavaria, the Prussian Wilhelm I became the first emperor of a unified Germany in 1871, and Bismarck his first chancellor. Prepared by Garibaldi's conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1860), the creation of the Kingdom of Italy by Victor Emmanuelle (1861) ended with the seizure of Rome (1870) from the control of the Vatican. Italy became a republic in 1946. The establishments of various Arab states is a testimony to the many forces at work in the Arab world. The victory of the Allies in World War 1 brought about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Modern Turkey was established in 1920, ruled initially by a Sultan, becoming a republic in 1923 under the presidency of Kamal Atatürk. At around the same time, Syria (including Lebanon) fell under the mandate of the French League of Nations. Lebanon became a separate state in 1926. Iraq was established as a kingdom in 1921, falling under the same status as Syria within the British League of Nations. Saudi Arabia was created in 1932, and Jordan became an independent kingdom in 1946. The history of national definition and sovereignty in the Middle East is far from being closed. For information on the Ustasha organization in Croatia, see Cubric Milan's book Ustasa hrvatska revolucionarna organizacija, Beograd: Idavacka Kuca Kujizevne Novine, 1990. Chetniks (in Serbia), see A Dictionary of Yugoslav Political and Economic Terminology (cf. Andrlic Vlasta, Rjecnik terminologije jugoslavenskog politicko-ekonomskog sistema, published in 1985, Zagreb: Informator). The reality of the breakdown of the country that used to be Yugoslavia is but one of the testimonies of change that renders words and the literate use of language meaningless. Omae Kenichi. The Borderless World. Power and Strategy in the Interlinked World Economy. New York: Harper Business, 1990. Isaiah Berlin. The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Chapters in the History of Ideas. London: John Murray, 1990. Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881). Author of Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie), Trans. David McDuff, Harmondsworth: Viking, 1991. Toqueville noticed that "...scarcely any question arises in the United States which does not become, sooner or later, a subject of judicial debate.... As most public men are, or have been, legal practitioners, they introduce the customs and the technicalities of their profession into the affairs of the country.... The language of the law becomes, in some measure, a vulgar tongue" cf. Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America. Gary Chapman. Time to Cast Aside Political Apathy in Favor of Creating a New Vision for America, in Los Angeles Times, Aug. 19, 1996, p. D3. Edward Brent (writing as Earl Babble). Electronic Communication and Sociology: Looking Backward, Thinking Ahead, in American Sociologist, 27, Apr. 1, 1996, pp. 4-24. "Theirs not to reason why" A professional description of the initial strike in the Gulf War gives the following account: "In the blitz that launched Desert Storm, Apache and special forces helicopters first took out two early warning radar stations. This opened a corridor for 22 F-15E aircraft following in single file to hit Scud sites in western Iraq. Also, 12 stealth F-117A fighters, benefiting from Compass Call and EF-111 long-distance jamming, hit targets in Baghdad, including a phone exchange and a center controlling air defenses. Other such underground centers were hit in the south. Tomahawk missiles took out power plants. All this occurred within 20 minutes. "About 40 minutes into the assault, a second wave of strike 'packages' of other aircraft, including 20 F-117As, attacked. They were guided by AWACs (airborne warning and control systems) crafts, which had been orbiting within a range of Iraqi radar for months. Coalition forces flew 2399 sorties the first day, losing only three planes." cf. John A. Adam, Warfare in the information age, in IEEE Spectrum, September, 1991, p. 27. One more detail: "The architects of the huge raid are the Central Commander, Lieutenant General Charles A. Horner, and Brigadier General C. Glosson, an electrical engineer by training. For months they have overseen complete war games and rehearsed precision bombing in the Arabian expanse," p. 26. Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Boston & London: Shambala Dragon Editions,1988. "Military action is important to the nation-it is the ground of death and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is imperative to examine it" p. 41. "Speed is the most important in war," Epaminondas of Thebes. Battle of Leuctra, 371 BCE. Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891). Geschichte des deutsch-französischen Krieges von 1870-1871. The Franco-German War of 1870-1871. Trans. Clara Bell and Henry W. Fischer. New York: H. Fertig, 1988. Reprint of the version published in New York by Harper in 1892. Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831).Vom Kriege. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Editors. On War. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. Theodor Heuss (1884-1963). Theodor Heuss über Staat und Kirche. Frankfurt/Main: P. Lang, 1986. C. W. Groetsch. Tartaglia's Inverse Problem in a Resistive Medium, in The American Mathematical Monthly, 103:7, 1996, pp. 546-551. Roland Barthes. Leçon, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978. The book is based on the lecture delivered at the inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France on January 7, 1977. "But Language-the performance of a language system-is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist, for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech." Alan Mathison Turing (1913-1954). British mathematician, one of the inventors of the programmable computer. During World War 2, Turing worked at the British Foreign Office, helping crack the German secret military code. William Aspray and Arthur Burks, Editors. Papers of John von Neumann on Computing and Computer Theory. Cambridge MA: MIT Press; Los Angeles: Tomash Publishers, 1987. Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, Vol. 12. John Condry, TV: Live from the Battlefield, in IEEE Spectrum, September, 1991. Regarding the role of imagery and how it effectively replaces the written word, the following example is relevant: An Israeli visiting Arizona talked to his daughter in Tel Aviv while simultaneously watching the news on the Cable News Network (CNN). The reporter stated that a Scud missile had been launched at Tel Aviv, and the father informed the daughter, who sought protection in a shelter. "This is what television has become since its initial adoption 40 years ago...The world is becoming a global village, as educator Marshall McLuhan predicted it would. Imagery is its language" p. 47. Darrell Bott. Maintaining Language Proficiency, in Military Intelligence, 21, 1995, p. 12. Charles M. Herzfeld. Information Technology: A Retro- and Pro-spective. Lecture presented at the Battelle Information Technology Summit. Columbus OH, 10 August 1995. Published in Proceedings of the DTIC/Battelle Information Technology SummIT. Linda Reinberg, In the Field: the Language of the Vietnam War, New York: Facts of File, 1991. The strategic defense initiative (SDI) was focused upon developing anti-missile and anti-satellite technologies and programs. A multi-layered, multi-technology approach to ballistic missile defense (BMD) meant to intercept offensive nuclear weapons after they had been launched by aggressors. The system consisted of the so-called target acquisition (search and detection of an offensive object); tracking (determination of the trajectory of the offensive object); discrimination (distinguishing of missiles and warheads from decoys or chaff); interception (accurate pointing and firing to ensure destruction of the offensive object). The critical components are computer programs and the lasers designed to focus a beam on the target's surface, heating it to the point of structural failure. The Pentagon. Critical Technologies Plan, March, 1990. Restructuring the U.S. Military, a report by a joint task force of the Committee for National Security and The Defense Budget Project. Obviously, the post-Cold War momentum provided many arguments for new plans for a scaled down, but highly technological, defense. The new circumstances created by the end of the Cold War require strategies for conversion of industries that until recently depended entirely upon the needs and desires of the military. The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in the Age of the Web Elaine Morgan. Falling Apart: The Rise and Decline of Urban Civilisation. London: Souvenir Press, 1976. David Clark. Urban Decline. London/New York: Routledge, 1989. Katharine L. Bradbury. Urban Decline and the Future of American Cities. Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1982. Hegel's theory of state derives from his philosophy of history. Civil society affords individuals opportunities for freedom. But since the state is the final guarantor, it accordingly has priority over the individual; cf. Philosophy of Right, T.B. Knox, Editor. London, 1973. E.A. Wrigley and David Souden, Editors. Thomas Robert Malthus. An Essay On the Principle of Population, 1798, in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. London: W. Pickering, 1986. "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio" (p. 9). Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Philosopher of the French Enlightenment. In Du Contract Social, he stated the law of inverse proportion between population and political freedom (cf. Book 3, chapter 1, Paris: Livre de Poche, 1978. Also in Social Contract. Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau. Sir Ernest Barker, Editor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Bernard Rubin & Associates. Big Business and the Mass Media. Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1977. Craig E. Aronoff, Editor. Business and the Media. Santa Monica CA: Goodyear Publishing Corp., 1979. David Finn. The Business-Media Relationship: Countering Misconceptions and Distrust. New York: Amacom, 1981. Observations made by media scholars give at least a quantitative testimony to many facets of the business of media. Ed Shiller, in Managing the Media (Toronto: Bedford House Publishing Corp., 1989) states "The media are everywhere and they are interested in everything" (p. 13). A. Kent MacDougall (Ninety Seconds to Tell It All. Big Business and the News Media, Homewood IL: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1981) observed that "To communicate with the American public, companies must first communicate with the media" (p. 43). Interestingly enough, they reach huge audiences by using the rent free public airwaves. Consequently, as the author shows, the news media shine by any measure of profitability. According to Forbes magazine's annual study of profits, broadcasting and publishing companies led all industry groups in return on stockholder's equity and capital in recent years. Specialized publications also keep track of the profitability of the media. Study of Media and Markets, a service of Simmons Market Research Bureau, Inc., makes available standard marketing information. Communications Industry Forecasts, brought out by Veronis, Suhler & Asso. of New York, gives a detailed financial status of the entire communication industry (radio, television, magazines, entertainment media, recorded music, advertising, promotion). J.H. Cassing and S.L. Husted, Editors. Capital, Technology, and Labor in the New Global Economy. Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1988. Raymond Vernon. Exploring the Global Economy: Emerging Issues in Trade and Investment. Cambridge: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Press, 1985. Stephen Gill. The Global Political Economy: Perspectives, Problems, and Policies. New York: Harvester, 1988. Gene Grossman. Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Facts for Action (periodical). Boston: Oxfam America, from 1982. John Clark. For Richer or Poorer: An Oxfam Report on Western Connections with World Hunger. Oxford: Oxfam, 1986. J.G. Donders, Editor. Bread Broken: An Action Report on the Food Crisis in Africa. Eldoret, Kenya: Gaba Publications, AMECEA Pastoral Institute, 1984. In his study Eighteenth Brumaire, (1852), Karl Marx described bureaucracy as a "semi-autonomous power standing partly above class-divided society, exploiting all its members alike." Harvey Wheeler. Democracy in a Revolutionary Era. Santa Barbara: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1970. Wheeler defineds bureaucracy as "a vast organism with an assortment of specialized, departmentalized tentacles for coping with the different kinds of reality it may encounter" (pp. 99-100). Max Weber. Essay in Sociology. Edited and translated by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Oxford University Press, 1946. In this classical theory of bureaucracy, the author saw its roots in the cultural traditions of Western rationalism. As such, it is characterized by impersonal relations, hierarchy, and specialization. R. Chackerian, G. Abcarian. Bureaucratic Power in Society. Chicago: Nelson Hall, Inc., 1984. B.C. Smith. Bureaucracy and Political Power. Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, Ltd., 1988. The author argues that "Bureaucracy is a political phenomenon" (p. ix), not a mere administrative occurrence. Eva Etzioni-Halevy. Bureaucracy and Democracy. A Political Dilemma. London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. George C. Roche. America by the Throat: The Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy. Old Greenwich CT: Devin Adair, 1983. Eugene Lewis. American Politics in a Bureaucratic Age: Citizens, Constituents, Clients, and Victims. Cambridge MA: Winthrop Publishers, 1977. Michael Hanben and Ronda Hanben. Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. A Netbook. http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106, June, 1996 Michael J. A. Howe, The Strange Feats of Idiots Savants, in Fragments of Genius, London/New York: Routledge, 1989. "'Idiots savants' is the term that has most frequently been used to designate mentally handicapped individuals who are capable of outstanding achievements at particular tasks" (p. 5). He also mentions alternative labels: talented imbecile, parament, talented ament, retarded savant, schizophrenic savant, autistic savant. Among the examples he gives: A 14-year old Chinese who could give the exact page for any Chinese character in a 400-page dictionary; a 23-year old woman hardly able to speak (her mental age was assessed at 2 years, 9 months), with no musical instruction, who could play on the piano a piece of music that a person around her might hum or play; a subject who knew all distances between towns in the USA and could list all hotels and number of rooms available; a person who knew Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address but could not, after weeks of classes on the subject, say who Lincoln was or what the speech means. In The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1920), Henry Adams presented a logarithmic curve of the acceleration of history. In 1909, Adams noted that between 1800 and 1900, the speed of events increased 1,000 times. Gerard Piel. The Acceleration of History. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1972. Nicolas Rashevsky. Looking at History through Mathematics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968. End of The Civilization of Illiteracy, by Mihai Nadin (C) Mihai Nadin 1997 
47024	----	Established by Edward L. Youmans APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS VOL. LVI NOVEMBER, 1899 TO APRIL, 1900 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1900 COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. [Illustration: FREDERICK C. SELOUS.] APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. DECEMBER, 1899. EXACT METHODS IN SOCIOLOGY. BY FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS, PH. D., PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. Those who do pioneer work in science encounter not only the inherent difficulties of research and interpretation, but also the misapprehension of certain educated men whose distinctive gift is a fatal genius for applying false standards of measurement to the progress of thought. Seizing upon some branch of knowledge that is in a state of vigorous development, when its newer results are out of harmony with its earlier hypotheses, such critics love to point out these contradictions, and try to prove that the branch in question is no science at all, and that its teachers are hardly worthy of respectful consideration. The history of science contains many interesting chapters pertaining to this kind of criticism and the fate that has invariably overtaken it. When Copernicus and Galileo showed the absurdity of the Ptolemaic astronomy, the theologians enjoyed themselves for a time, as they demonstrated--to their own entire satisfaction--the folly of all rationalistic attempts to explain what revelation only could make clear. When Darwin explained the origin of species through variation and natural selection, the pretensions of biology were completely exploded by its lay and clerical critics (they thought and said so) by the extremely simple device of the "deadly parallel column." Was not Cuvier a great anatomist, and had he ever taught this nonsense about the mutability of species? Was not Agassiz the most learned naturalist alive, and what had he to say about Darwinian vagaries? Had he not proved, over and over again, that the very concept of the species was the notion of a group of characteristics that could not possibly change or be changed from generation to generation? In more recent years we have again seen the same method of reducing science to a variety show for the entertainment of the tired general reader applied to both biology and psychology. Weismann has tried to prove that acquired characteristics are not transmitted in heredity, and that the germ plasm is distinct from the somatic cells. The neo-Lamarckians, Spencer, Cope, and some of the botanists have contended for the older interpretation. Is biology, then, a science? Forbid the thought! Heaven preserve our minds from such confusion! If the sociologists have hoped that they alone might not be overtaken by easy annihilation, they deserve to be humiliated. But it is safe to say that they have cherished no such illusions. If the men who have devoted much time to the scientific explanation of society have had no other qualification for their task, they have at least shown some acquaintance with the history of thought. And so it is not likely that they have suffered deeply from disenchantment when they have been confronted with the regulation exposure of "the present position" of their science. There is no need of wasting space to prove that the kind of criticism here referred to is without scientific value. The present position of any science can not be determined by arraying its contradictions and inconsistencies, irrespective of a serious attempt to ascertain which of its concepts and hypotheses have inherent vitality. It is precisely when a science is at its best, surely advancing year by year and full of promise for the future, that contradictions most abound in its monographs and text-books. A true scientific criticism, then, must proceed by a different method. The present position of a science can be ascertained only by instituting three specific inquiries, namely: First, among the more or less contradictory conceptions and hypotheses which constitute its groundwork, what ones are surely displacing all others and gaining the wider acceptance among active students? Second, what progress is being made in the application of exact methods to research? Third, is there a practical or working harmony between the concepts that are gaining ground and the more exact methods of research that are being perfected? Do the concepts and hypotheses lend themselves to exact methods, and do they, on the whole, help to perfect methods? Do improving methods, on the whole, confirm or strengthen the concepts that are gaining wider acceptance? If these inquiries are applied in the domain of sociology they bring to light unmistakable evidence of a steady and gratifying progress toward scientific consistency and rigor of method. Much babble about social ills and possible reforms still masquerades as social science. A great deal of loose thinking and slipshod investigation is paraded as expert opinion on questions of social welfare. But no one who has seriously followed the efforts of scientifically trained minds to discover the natural laws of social evolution is in any danger of confounding the results thus far obtained with the chatter over every passing fad. In the more serious work itself there is found a vigorous and hopeful disagreement of opinion upon all unsettled questions. But the fact of real significance is that the disputation has become intensive. The debate no longer ranges over a wide field. A selective process has eliminated one after another the more loose and vague conceptions of the science, the irrelevant issues, and the superficial analogies. There has been a progressive concentration of attention upon a group of closely related and fundamental problems. The sociology of August Comte was little more than a highly intelligent and quickening talk about social order and progress. It convinced thoughtful men that there is a social order to be studied in a scientific spirit and by scientific methods, and that social progress conforms to laws that may be discovered. Mr. Spencer narrowed the field of sociological inquiry and gave precision of statement to all social problems by bringing them within the formulas of universal evolution. He still further narrowed the field by demonstrating the close relationship of social phenomena to the phenomena of organic evolution and by seizing upon certain psychological facts as chief factors in social causation. All fruitful later work in social interpretation has been a further concentration of investigation upon the psychic factors. While admitting that social as well as mental phenomena are subsumed under biological phenomena, and that the parallelism of social organization to biotic organization is real, the younger students of sociology have developed the science as an offshoot of psychology, and have dropped the biological analogy as unfruitful for purposes of research. The pioneer in this movement was Dr. Lester F. Ward, whose masterly analysis of the psychic factors of social phenomena gave the right direction for all time to sociological inquiry, and whose emphasis of the importance of reason and volition in the social process, although it has not yet received the attention that it merits, is destined to be fruitful in coming years. To the further study of the psychological foundations of society practically all the valuable work on fundamental social problems has been given during the past ten years. Tarde has given us profound studies of imitation and invention; Gumplowicz and Le Bon, of the psychology of races and culture groups; Novicow, of the psychology of conflict and toleration; Le Bon and Durkheim, of the psychology of crowds, of co-operation, and of the division of labor; Baldwin, of the psychology of the social unit--the _socius_. Thus it appears that while sharp disagreements of opinion still exist relative to the priority or the generality of one or another of these psychic factors in the social process, discussion has focused about the psychological phenomena themselves. There has been a progressive limitation of the field and an increasing definiteness of conception and hypothesis. My own effort, if now I may be pardoned for referring to it, has been to restrict the field yet further, and to make the problems of sociology yet more specific. I have contended that these psychological phenomena which have been seized upon for purposes of sociological interpretation are still too vaguely conceived. They are often disclosed to the inquirer in purely individual as well as in social aspects. The lines of inquiry between the study of mind in general, of mind as individual, and of mind as manifesting itself socially in the concert or co-operation of a number of individual minds, have not been drawn with sufficient precision. I have tried to show that the psychological phenomena that Ward, Tarde, Gumplowicz, Novicow, Le Bon, Durkheim, Baldwin, and others have so admirably analyzed as psychic factors of society are social when, and only when, they have certain coefficients, namely: (1) The coefficient of resemblance--that is, a fundamental similarity of individuals to one another underlying and, on the whole, dominating their innumerable differences; (2) the coefficient of awareness or consciousness of resemblance--that is to say, certain feelings, perceptions, or thoughts of resemblance, which give rise to varied prejudices and preferences that facilitate or prevent effective co-operation. Whether this contention of mine will prevail, whether there will ultimately be a general agreement among sociologists that these coefficients of resemblance and consciousness of kind are the true _differentia_ of social phenomena, time and further research must determine. The second inquiry through which we may learn somewhat of the present position of sociology relates to the development of method. Exact method in social research is statistical. Wherever we can obtain numerical data within the domain of social phenomena, there we arrive at exact or quantitative knowledge. The development and application of statistical methods to social problems has been one of the most striking scientific achievements of the present century. When Quételet, in 1835, published his great work, _Sur l'Homme et le Développement de ses Facultés_, he laid the foundation for a thorough statistical investigation of psychological and sociological no less than of anatomical phenomena. And after the publication, in 1846, of his work, _Sur la Théorie des Probabilités appliquées aux Sciences morales et politiques_, followed, in 1848, by _Du Système social et des Lois qui le régissent_, there was a rapid development of statistical methods in precision, and of attempts to extend the statistical method to groups of facts which had until then been studied only from a purely qualitative or, at best, a vaguely comparative point of view. At the present time every subdivision of descriptive sociology draws data from rich collections of statistical materials, and employs statistical methods for the further extension of knowledge. Thus, in the study of the social population, statistical methods are employed not only to give the total number of inhabitants dwelling within a given territory and the degree of density of population per square mile, but also to show to what extent population increases by births in excess of deaths, to what extent by immigration in excess of emigration, and to what extent the composition of the population is rendered complex by the intermingling of many nationalities. The character of a population, also, and its social capacities are in a large measure statistically investigated. General intelligence is studied by means of statistics of literacy and illiteracy; industrial preferences by statistics of occupation; habits of industry by statistics of the number in every thousand of the total population who regularly follow gainful occupations; frugality by statistics of savings, insurance, and home ownership; and the amount of communication, whereby assimilation and co-operation are rendered possible, by statistics of travel, mail, and telegraphic service. Passing to that study of concerted feeling, thought, and purpose which may be called a study of the social mind, and which constitutes the second great division of descriptive sociology, we find that it can be carried on, and that to a great extent it is prosecuted, by means of statistical research. We have statistics incomplete, but admitting of perfection, of those impulsive, emotional disturbances of masses of men which take the form of strikes, insurrections, lynchings, and revivals. The report of the United States Department of Labor on strikes, published in 1894, and a recently published monograph by Dr. Frederick S. Hall on Sympathetic Strikes, show the possibilities of this method whenever it shall be exhaustively applied. It could be successfully applied to the other phenomena mentioned. By painstaking effort and a sufficient expenditure of money the data could be obtained. Lombroso and Laschi, in their work, _Le Crime politique et les Révolutions_, have made a beginning toward the collection of statistics of insurrections and revolutions. More exact, at present, are our statistics of the rational working of the minds of large numbers of men in communication and co-operation. These we have in the familiar form of election returns, which show us the decisions that communities make on questions of public policy and administration. This information could be increased by the application of statistical analyses to the vast body of statute law and judicial decisions. A beginning of such work has been made in the valuable Bulletin of State Legislation, published by the New York State Library. In the third division of descriptive sociology--that, namely, which treats of social organization--the application of statistical method is proceeding with great rapidity. We have not only statistics (yearly improving in quality) of marriage and divorce, of the organization of all governmental departments, military and civil, of chartered corporations, of religious and educational societies, but also of the thousands of associations formed for the promotion of special interests, recreation, scientific research, art and literature, and philanthropy. Every year the statistical information on these matters, included in such compilations as The World Almanac, becomes not only more extensive but more precise. Yet more abundant are the statistical accumulations pertaining to that fourth and last division of descriptive sociology which treats of the social welfare--of the functioning of society, of the ends for which it exists. We have statistics of prosperity, of the accumulation and distribution of wealth, of the expansion and contraction of credit, and of business failures. We have statistics of longevity. We ascertain improving sanitary conditions by changes in the death rate. We learn by statistical methods of the increase or decrease of accident and death due to public disorder or maladministration. We ascertain through educational statistics the decrease of illiteracy and superstition. And by the same means we ascertain the dimensions of pauperism and of crime. Not only so, but, by a certain refinement of statistical method, applied by competent men like Sir Francis Galton, we ascertain the increase or decrease and the distribution of the higher manifestations of intellectual ability and moral character. Thus the whole field of descriptive sociology is being more and more exhaustively studied by statistical methods that are yearly improving in precision. So far, then, as may be judged from the development of its methods, no science at the present time is making surer and better progress than sociology, and none is offering to the general public conclusions based upon more exact methods of induction. Let us now look at the relations which the development of statistical method bears to that development of fundamental conceptions, which has already been described. Do we here discover increasing harmony, a tendency toward co-ordination, or have analyses of concepts, on the one hand, and developments of statistical method, on the other hand, followed diverging lines? There can be no possible doubt of the answer that must be made to these questions. Conceptions and methods are in as perfect accord as can be discovered in any branch of science. The merest glance over the field of social statistics shows that, for the most part, they record and classify phenomena that are essentially psychological. In working from the general theory of evolution through the biological parallelism down to psychological premises, analytical sociology has been doing in one way precisely what statistics have been doing in another. The moment we pass from statistics of density and distribution of population we find ourselves dealing next with groups of facts that are biological (the facts, namely, of distribution according to sex and age periods), through facts that are partly biological and partly psychological in character (the facts, namely, of nationality), and then, leaving these behind, we deal henceforth entirely with facts that belong to the mental and moral categories. To name them would be only to repeat the categories already enumerated: the statistics of intelligence, industry, and moral character, of emotional or rational social action, of various forms of organization for the achievement of as many different purposes, and of the development of the conscious personality of man as a result of his social relations and activities. Not only is this true, but the further interesting fact may be discovered that social statistics of every category employed or known are based upon a frank recognition of that coefficient of resemblance, physical or mental, which I have contended is a mark of social phenomena. The first step in statistical tabulation is classification, and classification invariably starts from an assumption of real or supposed resemblance. Not to dwell on such fundamental distinctions as those of color, race, and nationality, we encounter the more special resemblances of agreement in religious belief, agreement in industrial preference, agreement in political conviction (as shown in election returns), similar susceptibility to emotionalism, similar capacities for rational comprehension, similar imperfections of nature, which result in lives of crime or pauperism. Remove from social statistics this postulate that blood kinship or mental resemblance between one social unit and another is the basis of social phenomena, and the statistics themselves would cease to exist. Statistics reveal also the consciousness which men have of their resemblances and their differences. It is statistically known that the geographical distribution of nationalities is not accidental or capricious. Immigrant Italians, Germans, and Scandinavians find their way to those parts of the country where men of their own blood and speech are already established. Intermarriages of men and women of different nationalities are statistically known to be frequent where no differences of religion exist, and infrequent where different nationalities profess different faiths. The statistics of political elections are quite as much statistics of the consciousness of kind as of differences of mental type itself. The most significant fact of all, however, has still to be named. It is this: From the first known beginnings of statistical research to the present time every extension of statistical inquiry has been in a large measure due to the consciousness of kind. The first statistical surveys of communities of which we have any record were such tribal enumerations as those recorded in the book of Numbers, the avowed object of which was to ascertain the strength and resources of the various tribes by clans, lesser gentile groups, and households, not more for utilitarian reasons than for the gratification of gentile and tribal pride. The census taken in Greece in 594 B. C. was for the purpose of dividing the people into four classes and levying taxes according to wealth. The constitution of Servius Tullius, 550 B. C., distinguished six property classes, and the attempt to determine these statistically was one of the earliest experiments in census-making at Rome. The Domesday Book of William I (1086) is the first great statistical document in English history, and its origin was due to a desire to know not only the military and fiscal strength of the nation, but also its class distinctions and feudal relationships. The great stimulus given to statistical investigation by the French Revolution was an obvious product of class feeling. Most of the refinements of statistical inquiry in later years have had a like origin. Such, for example, was the cause of the discrimination in our own census of the foreign born from the native born, and of the native born of foreign parents from both native and foreign born. Such has been the cause of the attempt to get more exact statistics of religious denominations, of labor organizations, and of the distribution of wealth. Had there been no reason for including these costly inquiries in statistical investigations, except that of their general utility and scientific interest, the appropriation for them would have been denied in Congress without an instant's hesitation. They have been included because of the political deference given to class feeling and to various forms of religious and educational prejudice. Thus there is seen to be a remarkable interdependence of statistical method and psychological analysis in the development of sociological research. Analysis and method have converged upon the same postulates, and it is apparently by the development of methods frankly founded upon these postulates that our sociological knowledge is to be further increased. It would be a great mistake, however, to assume that sociological knowledge is to be increased only by the further collection and interpretation of numerical data. Careful monographic description and historical research must continue to be important sources of both information and hypothesis. The great defects of monographic work, both descriptive and historical, are, first, a certain lack of precision, attributable to the large part played in investigation by the individual judgment of the student (the lack of objective tests by which his subjective impressions may be critically examined); second, a certain incompleteness, attributable to a failure to separate each inquiry into all its scientific subdivisions and to attempt to obtain desired data under each subdivision, as is done in statistical investigation where, in every table, as many topics as there are scientific subdivisions of the general subject are represented by columns, and an entry of some kind is made in every column. I wish now to point out the possibility of giving greater precision to monographic work in sociology by the introduction of quasi-statistical methods--methods that are essentially quantitative in an algebraic sense, though they are not numerical. Social phenomena have the interesting characteristic that small forces, while never lost in that composition of forces which determines the ultimate equilibrium of the social system, often count for absolutely nothing in the practical affairs of a given generation. If, for example, Mr. Bryan and a Democratic Congress had been elected in 1896, the practical consequences for the United States would have been much the same whether the Democratic plurality had been one hundred thousand, half a million, or two or three millions. This is but one example of a large class of facts. Social phenomena are more often than not determined by a mere matter of more or less, rather than by the exact amount or degree of more or less. The determination is algebraic rather than arithmetical. Is the element under investigation a positive or a negative quantity? Is its sign plus or minus? That is usually the important question for the sociological student. Now it happens that a great many investigations in descriptive sociology do not as yet admit of the introduction of exact statistical--that is, arithmetical--inquiries which, nevertheless, do admit the use of algebraically quantitative methods. In the monographic description of a community many questions arise which can not be answered by the entry of figures in a column, but which could be answered by entering in a column a symbol indicating that a certain trait, habit, or choice could be predicated of a large majority, or of a small majority, or of only a large minority, or of only a small minority of the entire population. That is to say, it often happens that an observer who can not take a perfect census (getting answers to all his questions from every individual in the community), and who therefore can not fill out his columns with arithmetical values, can, by such interviewing as is possible to him and by such an examination of the objective products of social activity as are open to the inspection of any one who chooses to observe them critically, determine with absolute certainty whether certain things are true of majorities or only of minorities. Suppose, for example, that a traveler is studying an out-of-the-way settlement, or a tribe, which presents many points of interest that are comparatively novel. All who are familiar with the narratives of travel and exploration which Mr. Spencer has used as data for his Descriptive Sociology are aware that they are almost totally devoid of system. The reader is told that such marriage customs, such clan relationships, such political institutions, such industrial operations, have been observed. The all-important coefficient is left out. What the student of sociology would most of all like to know is how many individuals in the community manifest such or such a trait; how many have such or such a habit; how many profess such or such a belief; how many adhere to this organization, how many to that. But since this exact arithmetical knowledge usually can not be obtained within the limited time and under the circumstances of a traveler's researches, he should try to get at least partially quantitative results by noting in every instance whether the phenomenon observed is true of a majority or only of a minority of the people under investigation. This simple method admits of a high degree of refinement by the obvious device of subdividing the total human mass under observation into enumeration units. If, for example, we are studying the social character and activities of the people of the United States, we may take the fifty Commonwealths and Territories as enumeration units. Making out a tabular form, we may enter in the left-hand column the names of the several States and Territories. At the top of successive columns, counting from left to right, we may enter words designating the social phenomena to be observed. Then, taking the States and Territories in order, we may enter opposite the name of each a symbol indicating that a majority large or small, or a minority large or small, of the inhabitants of the State or Territory in question manifests the trait or follows the activity, or belongs to the social organization designated at the top of the column. The symbols that I have found most convenient in use are these: For a large majority, a double plus sign thus, ++; for a small majority, a single plus sign thus, +; for a large minority, a double plus sign in a circle thus, [++]; for a small minority, a single plus sign in a circle thus, [+]. The great possibilities in this method of giving precision to observations and records of the facts of social psychology and activity become daily more obvious to students who practice it with reasonable care. Almost any desired degree of accuracy can be attained by taking smaller and smaller enumeration units. Thus, if I wish to form and to record my judgment as to whether the people of the United States as a whole manifest a high, a medium, or a low degree of general intelligence, I seem to be raising a question that admits of little better answer than a statement of vague impressions. But let me take a concrete measure of high general intelligence--for example, the general intelligence of a town noted for its large proportion of scientific and professional men, its graded schools, its satisfactory school attendance, and its low percentage of illiteracy. Let me then subdivide the United States into fifty parts--namely, the Commonwealths and Territories--and let me enter in a column opposite the name of each a symbol indicating that, as compared with the general intelligence of the town which I have taken as a standard, a large majority or a small majority, or a large minority or only a small minority, of the people in that Commonwealth are of the high general intelligence; that a large majority or a small majority, or a large minority or only a small minority, are of medium intelligence; and that a large majority or a small majority, or a large minority or a small minority, are of low intelligence. Obviously, when I have completed this process I have subjected my vague general impression that the people of the United States as a whole are of high, medium, or low general intelligence to a certain correction and measure. I count up the entries in my columns. I discover that I have made, let us say, nine entries indicating that a large majority of the people in each of nine States are of high intelligence. I find that I have made, let us say, eighteen entries indicating that in each of eighteen States a small majority of the people are of low general intelligence; and this mere counting of the entries may show me that, when taking the States one by one, I have made a somewhat different estimate of the general intelligence of the people of the entire country from that which I made when looking at all the people of the country as an undivided mass. If still unsatisfied with my judgment, I may proceed to subdivide each State into its counties, and take the counties as enumeration units. I may go through the process of recording my judgments by entering symbols in the several columns of my table, and at the end I may again count up my totals of high, medium, and low intelligence. Obviously, I can do this work only if I am able to travel through every county in the United States, and, by interviews with people, by forming general impressions and by visiting schools, get a fairly definite idea of the relative intelligence of each civil division; or if, being unable to make this personal inquiry, I resort to printed information--namely, educational reports, miscellaneous public documents, historical records, newspapers, and other objective data throwing light upon the intellectual status of these various divisions. This, I find, is an enormous labor; but if I conscientiously perform it I correct my subjective impressions, and there is a fair presumption that my final result is a judgment vastly nearer the truth than was my first general impression of the intelligence of the whole undivided mass of the American population. Thus the conscientious use of the method which I have suggested insures, in the interest of precision, two important modifications of ordinary sociological description: First, it subjects the purely subjective processes of judgment to a certain correction and measurement; secondly, it leads the observer step by step, and almost unconsciously, to resort more and more to definite objective data in place of first impressions. Essentially the same method, by slight modifications of detail, may be extended to historical inquiries. How often do we encounter in historical monographs the statement that, since a certain date, there has been a marked increase of this or that activity, or that such a trait or such a habit, occasionally observed half a century ago, is now characteristic of whole sections or populations! To the credit of the historians, it must be said that careful men seldom make such statements without offering in substantiation of them a certain amount of objective evidence. But the method is loose, and it has the radical defect of permitting such terms as "increase" and "decrease," "great increase" and "great decrease" to stand for different quantities when applied to different phenomena under examination in the same treatise. There is no uniformity of measurement. Now, it is easy to introduce uniformity, even where arithmetical values are not known. It is possible to know that we are applying the same method of measurement when we say that, since 1850, there has been a "great" multiplication of lynchings in the United States that we apply when we say that there has been a "great" increase of population, although, in the case of the lynchings, we have not arithmetical values, while in the case of the increase of population we have. This can be done in the following way: Distinguish and designate degrees of increase or decrease by symbols thus: No change, = 0; absolute increase but relative decrease, = +1; absolute increase with no relative decrease, = +2; great absolute increase without relative decrease, = +3; absolute and relative increase, = +4; absolute decrease but relative increase, = -1; absolute decrease without relative increase, = -2; great absolute decrease without relative increase, = -3; absolute and relative decrease, = -4. Now let the historian who wishes to pass in review the quantitative changes that have occurred since a given time--for example, 1850--before he puts on paper his impressions, based upon such evidence as he has been able to collate, put down all these symbols against the name of each of the social phenomena which he is studying. He will instantly see that he is trying to apply to each of the phenomena whose changes he wishes to record a certain scale of measurement, and he at once asks himself: What do I really mean by such a term as "relative" increase or decrease when contrasted with "absolute" increase or decrease; and what do I mean by such a term as "great" increase or decrease when contrasted with such a term as "increase" or "decrease" without a modifying word? The moment he puts these questions before his mind he will feel a sinking of heart as he reviews the pages in which he has confidently told his readers that such "absolute" and "relative" changes have from time to time occurred, and reflects that he has seldom been consistent in his use of these terms. How, then, shall he attain consistency and precision? To be consistent and precise in the use of the word "relative" it is necessary to make at the outset an arbitrary choice of a term of comparison, just as in making comparative judgments of such a phenomenon as general intelligence it is necessary to take as a standard the phenomenon as observed in a particular community. The most suitable term of comparison for all judgments of increase or decrease in social phenomena is the increase or decrease of population per square mile within the area and during the period studied. The increase of population is arithmetically measured, and it stands in relations of direct causation to every social change. The historian, therefore, in forming his judgments of relative increase or decrease should always take the increase or decrease of population per square mile as his term of comparison. What meaning, finally, shall be attached to the word "great" when the historian wishes to distinguish "great" increase or "great" decrease from "increase" or "decrease" in general, and absolute statistics are not available? There is one, and, as far as I can see, only one, perfectly satisfactory procedure. Let the investigator subdivide the community which he is studying into enumeration units according to the method suggested above for the descriptive monograph. Let him then make as many tables as there are ten-year periods in the general historical period that he is investigating. That is to say, let him make a table for 1850, for 1860, for 1870, for 1880, and for 1890. Let him then proceed according to the method laid down for the descriptive monograph, entering opposite each Commonwealth the symbol for majority or minority, thus showing by States, for each of the ten-year periods, the prevalence of the trait or activity under investigation. Suppose, for example, that the phenomenon studied is the growth of popular interest in prize fighting since 1850. The historian should begin by asking, In what States, if any, in 1850 were large majorities of the people interested in prize fights to the extent of countenancing them and eagerly following their progress? In what States were only small majorities so interested, in what States only large minorities, and in what ones only small minorities? The best answers that the historian can make to these questions, after examining all the evidence that he can command, he should record by entering the proper symbol against each State, after which he should repeat the procedure for the date 1860, for the date 1870, and so on. When his tables are thus completed, he should count up the number of entries of each symbol in each table. If then he finds that in less than half of his enumeration units--i. e., in less than half of all the States and Territories--small minorities have become large minorities, large minorities have become small majorities, or small majorities have become large, he will be justified in concluding that there has been an increase, but not a "great" increase, in popular interest in prize fighting. If, however, he discovers that these changes have occurred in more than half of his enumeration units, he can say with reason that the increase of interest in prize fighting has been "great." Cases may arise in which a correction of the judgment thus formed may be necessary. It might be erroneous to say that there had been no great increase of interest in prize fighting if it were discovered that the increase had occurred in two or three Commonwealths only, but that in them it had been phenomenal. The method itself, however, reveals the necessity for correction in such cases and measures the error; for, obviously, a phenomenal increase or decrease in any one enumeration unit would be disclosed by a dropping of the intermediate symbols between [+] and ++. That is to say, small minorities would become majorities, or great majorities would become small minorities, within an interval during which lesser changes were occurring elsewhere. Thus, by taking a little trouble, the historian can apply one constant measure to his judgments of increase and decrease, as he reviews social changes. He must subdivide his community into enumeration units, and against each unit, at each convenient date, he must enter a record of his judgment that the trait, activity, interest, or relation under investigation can be predicated of a large or of only a small majority, of a large or of only a small minority, of the individuals composing the enumeration unit. He must then count up the changes from minority to greater minority or to majority, or from majority to minority. Conscientiously following this method, the historian may often make comparisons of great precision, when otherwise his comparisons, made without reference to a common measure, would be little more than suppositions. Following such methods as these, the writers of descriptive and historical monographs can increase our approximately exact sociological knowledge. Constructing and filling out such tables as have been described, they can bring to light serious gaps in our numerical statistics, and they can thereby suggest and stimulate new statistical inquiries. Thus co-operating, the descriptive writers, the historians, and the statisticians can in time perfect our descriptive sociology, and, co-operating with those students who are completing the analysis of fundamental concepts, they can gradually give precision to our formulations of sociological law. * * * * * Bishop Creighton, of London, has characterized the present English idea of education as embodying the supposition that "all the child had to do was to sit still like a pitcher under a pump while an expert hand poured in the proper amount of material for it to hold." His own view was that the only education anybody really obtained was that which he gave himself. "The idea prevailing at the beginning of the century was that men should read a good book, master its contents, and pursue for themselves the lines of thought it suggested, and talk it over and make its ideas the subject of discussion among themselves. No system could surely be better." VINLAND AND ITS RUINS. SOME OF THE EVIDENCES THAT NORTHMEN WERE IN MASSACHUSETTS IN PRE-COLUMBIAN DAYS.[1] BY CORNELIA HORSFORD. [Footnote 1: A paper read before the Viking Club of London on December 16, 1898; also before the Section of Anthropology of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the Boston meeting, August, 1898.] The evidences that Northmen were in Massachusetts in pre-Columbian days are drawn from two sources, geography and archæology. The archæological evidence is found by comparing certain ruins in Massachusetts with ruins of the Saga-time in Iceland, and also with the native and early European ruins on the coast of North America. The geographical evidence is found by comparing the descriptions of the country called Vinland in Icelandic literature with the coast of North America. The geographical data for this paper are taken from each and all of the three oldest manuscript versions of the story of Vinland, because they complement each other where the descriptions vary in detail. These are called the Flat Island Book, Eric the Red's Saga, and Thorfinn Karlsefni's Saga. If the coast of North America should repeat the same geographical features, it would obviously be impossible to determine the site of Vinland by geography alone. Let us see if this is so. It is stated in Eric the Red's Saga that Karlsefni's party, which consisted of one hundred and sixty men and their live stock in three vessels, after sailing southwest from Greenland for a number of days and seeing two new countries, came to a certain cape. "They cruised along the land and the land lay on the starboard.... There were there an open, harborless coast and long strands and sand banks. And they went in boats to the land and found there the keel of a ship, and they named it Keel Cape. And they gave a name to the strands and called them Wonder Strands, because they were long to sail by. Then the land became scored with bays, and they steered the ships to the bays."[2] They remained here for some time, but they had not yet seen the Vinland which Leif Erikson had found a few years before. [Footnote 2: The translations are from the Icelandic texts in The Finding of Wineland the Good by Arthur Middleton Reeves. Henry Frowde, London.] Thorhall started to seek for it "northward round Wonder-strand and westward off Keel Cape." Therefore we must first look for a cape, the trend of whose shore is north and south, with open water west of it, and beyond that again land. This cape must have a long, sandy, harborless coast, with sand banks on the east, and it must be broken up into bays farther to the south, and one of these bays must be large enough and deep enough for three vessels, one of which could carry at least fifty men across the Atlantic. The icelandic word "öroefi" which is used in this text means "harborless," and is the descriptive local name of the convex, sandy, unsheltered coast of southern Iceland (Oroefa), the present Skaptafells district, from Stokksnes to Dyrhólaey. This gives a clear idea of what we ought to look for along the coast of North America. The eastern coast of North America[3] shows us that, south of rock-bound Labrador, the only places north of New York where capes are to be found jutting northward from the land are northern Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island, the southern shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Cape Ann, and Cape Cod. [Footnote 3: Chart of North Atlantic, No. 98. Norie & Wilson, London.] There is no stretch of open, harborless, sandy coast from Cape Bauld to Cape Spear, with its steep, sterile, rocky shores.[4] There are two or three stretches of unbroken coast from three to five miles long, north and south of Canada Bay, northwest of Conception Bay, and northeast of Bonavista Bay, but these are not the shores of capes jutting to the north, with long strands and sand banks. [Footnote 4: Belle Isle to Boston, No. 102. Norie & Wilson, London.] If we begin with Cape Breton and follow the coast northward we find no extensive stretch of harborless coast until we reach Island Point. From this point to Cape Smoke there is a comparatively unbroken coast about thirty miles in extent whose "headlands are composed of primary and metamorphic rocks, principally granite, with clay slate in nearly vertical strata, while sandstone, conglomerate, shale, limestone, and occasionally beds of gypsum and red and yellow marl occur on the intervening shores."[5] Here, then, there are not long strands and sand banks. Cape North is a headland of slate one thousand feet high.[6] Dr. Gustav Storm, of the University of Christiania, in his well-known book, _Studier over Vinlandsreiserne, etc._, page 42, points out a resemblance between Cape Breton and Keel Cape, and states that the eastern shores of Cape Breton Island are "specially described as low-lying and sandy." According to the United States Hydrographic Office Report, No. 99, page 289, the southeast coast of Cape Breton Island from Michaux Point to Cape Gabarus "is low and has a barren and rocky appearance, and the shore is broken into numerous lakes and ponds, protected from the sea by beaches of gravel and some small rocky islands and ledges.... From Cape Gabarus to Cape Breton, a distance of fifteen miles, the land is of moderate height and the shore broken into coves and small harbors." Between Louisburg and Cape Breton, eight miles beyond, "there are three small harbors, too intricate and rocky in their entrances to admit vessels of any burden," and Cape Breton itself is "low and rocky and covered with grassy moors." This is unlike the open, harborless coast with long strands and sand banks of the Sagas. Within the Gulf of St. Lawrence the capes which jut to the north are Cape St. George,[7] with rocky, precipitous cliffs six hundred feet above the sea; North Point,[8] on Prince Edward Island, which is broken about five miles down the coast by Tignish River, and beyond that by the red sandstone cliff of Cape Kildare; Escuminiac Point,[9] at the entrance to Miramichi Bay, a broken coast with low sandstone cliffs; and Birch Point,[10] on Miscou Island, with a steep cliff of sandstone ten feet high. [Footnote 5: United States Hydrographic Office Report, No. 99, 1897, p. 315.] [Footnote 6: Ibid., p. 314.] [Footnote 7: United States Hydrographic Office Report, No. 100, 1897, p. 70.] [Footnote 8: Ibid., pp. 130, 152.] [Footnote 9: Ibid., p. 157.] [Footnote 10: Ibid., p. 173.] Campobello is a rocky island, and Cape Ann is rocky and has no long, harborless coast. Cape Cod[11] juts to the north with open water west of it, and beyond that again land. It has also a long, harborless coast on the east, with strands and sand banks, and is scored with bays toward the south. [Footnote 11: United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, General Chart of the Coast, No. VII.] Cape Cod, then, is the only cape north of Sandy Hook which corresponds to the description in the Saga, and near here we should look for Vinland, leaving the southern shores until later. Vinland, which was discovered by Leif Erikson, is only described as _Vinland_ in the Flat Island Book. This account states that Leif Erikson's party "came to a certain island which lay north of the land." That Leif Erikson should have thought that Cape Cod was an island is obvious, because it is impossible from the cape to see the southern shore of Massachusetts Bay twenty miles away. There is no need to explain why he also believed it to lie north of the land, as no one and final answer can be given, although several can be easily suggested; that water and land again lay to the west is clearly stated in all three accounts. Afterward "they sailed into that sound which lay between the island and the promontory which jutted northward from the land; they steered in westward past the promontory. There was much shallow water at ebb tide, and then their ship stood up and then it was far to look to the sea from their ship." Across the water which lies between Cape Cod and the mainland is Rocky Point, a high and therefore noticeable promontory jutting northward from the land. Past this one can only continue westering to the north, and thence we must now look along the land to find the place where, in the words of the Flat Island Book, "a certain river flowed out of a certain lake," having, as was said before, great shallows at its mouth at ebb tide, whence it was far to look to the ocean. Following round the inner coast of Cape Cod, we pass Plymouth and on to Boston before we find in the Charles River and Boston Back Bay a river flowing through a lake into the sea, where great shallows at its mouth are a conspicuous feature and it is far to look to the ocean. At this point we may add one more feature to the description of Keel Cape--that it appears to be an island when approached from the north. Now we can continue our search down the North Atlantic coast, noting that Sandy Hook is not scored with bays at the south, and that Cape Henlopen and Cape Henry could not have been mistaken for islands.[12] [Footnote 12: Chart of North Atlantic, No. 98. Norie & Wilson, London.] There is one event described in all three versions of the Vinland story--the battle with the natives. According to the Flat Island Book, this battle took place in Vinland; according to the other two Sagas, Vinland was supposed to be north of Keel Cape. But in these Sagas it is said that this battle took place _south_ of Keel Cape, where Karlsefni had found a river flowing through a lake into the sea. It was this word south which led the Danish archæologist Carl Christian Rafn to think that Vinland was in Rhode Island. Although there is no land south of Cape Cod (with the exception of Nantucket Island) between Cape Cod and Santo Domingo, it is only fair to look once more at Mount Hope Bay[13] (Rafn's Vinland) to see whether it really corresponds to the description before us. The Taunton River flows through Mount Hope Bay to the sea, but there are no shallows here, and the mouth of the river looks directly out, southward and not eastward, to the open ocean. In Boston Harbor, moreover, are great tongues of land and islands such as are described in Eric the Red's Saga. There is perhaps cause for comment in the use of the word "fjöll," fells or mountains (according to Vigfusson[14]), applied to the hills about Boston, of which the highest, "Blue Hill," is seven hundred and ten feet high. If "fells" is a correct translation, it would be unobjectionable. [Footnote 13: United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Chart, No. 13. Cuttyhunk to Block Island.] [Footnote 14: Icelandic-English Dictionary. R. Cleasby. Enlarged and completed by Gudbrand Vigfusson.] One morning Karlsefni saw the natives in their skin boats rowing toward his house, from the south, past a promontory. It is not difficult to find the only promontory past which canoes could have come from the south between the mouth of the river and Watertown, the head of navigation. Here, then, Leif Erikson and Thorfinn Karlsefni should have built their houses, if this history be true, because this place corresponds with the description of Vinland, and also because we can find no other place on the coast like it. Having found what appears to be the site of Thorfinn Karlsefni's houses, it is well to inquire next what the characteristic features of the Norse houses of the Saga-time were, and what traces one might hope to find after nearly nine hundred years. Icelandic homesteads of that period usually consisted of a main house, composed of three or four apartments and one or two outhouses, built on the surface of the ground. The walls were one and a half metres thick, and from one to one and a half metres high, built of alternate layers of turf and stones on the inside and on the outside, the space between being filled in with earth. Often, however, the walls were built entirely of turf and earth, or with only disconnected rows of stones at the base. Wood also was sometimes used. It is stated in Thorfinn Karlsefni's Saga that some of the trees in Vinland were "so large they were laid in a house." [Illustration: PLAN OF THE HOUSE OF ERIC THE RED IN ICELAND.] A long, narrow fireplace usually extended through the middle of the principal room, and an essential feature was the cooking fireplace, which was about one metre square. These were either paved or surrounded by upright stones. The plan is of the ruin of the house of Eric the Red in Haukadalr, Iceland. It shows the different forms of fireplace, and that the walls, which were built of turf, were one and a half metres thick. Outhouses were often dug into the hillside, and were sometimes walled up on the inside with stone and turf. Ruins of such old settlements in Iceland are usually low, grass-grown ridges and hollows. When Professor Horsford first visited the site which his study of maps and literature had led him to believe was Vinland, he found a few hollows in the hillside and also some broad, low ridges on the level ground, indicating that a building about twenty metres long by five metres broad had once stood there. There was also a mound some distance away which has since proved to be of modern construction. [Illustration: PLAN OF SUPPOSED NORSE RUIN IN MASSACHUSETTS.] No digging was done here until after Professor Horsford's death, with the exception of a few trenches across the supposed site of Leif Erikson's house on the other side of the creek. In 1896, during a visit of Dr. Valtyr Gudmundsson and Mr. Thorsteinn Erlingsson, of Copenhagen and Iceland, extensive excavations were made, leaving practically nothing unexamined at this site. Three kinds of earth were revealed. The upper layer was of black loam from thirty to forty centimetres deep; below this was a yellow soil of sand and clay thirty centimetres deep; and below that again the sand and gravel which had remained undisturbed since the close of the Glacial epoch. The ruins were at the junction of the black and yellow earth. Throughout the black loam to the bottom, wherever we dug, within or away from the ruins, were scattered fragments of china, glass, glazed pottery, nails, pipestems, broken bricks, etc., all belonging to the period of the occupation of this region by the English. None of these were found in places where their presence would show that they belonged to or preceded these ruins. In the paved pathway, which will be described later, a few pieces of brick lie between the stones, but not deeper than similar fragments of brick were found in the undisturbed earth near by, apparently trodden in by the cattle which have been pastured there for years. There were also objects of aboriginal manufacture, such as stone implements, pottery, pieces of flint, etc. Occasionally, at different levels, remains of fires were found, some of which were merely thin layers of charcoal and ashes. There were, however, two well-built fireplaces, in good condition, entirely unlike each other. One of these was an Indian clambake, neatly paved and piled with ashes and unopened clam shells. This lay sixty-three centimetres below the sod. The photograph is not of this fireplace, but is a good example of all Indian fireplaces or clambakes in Massachusetts. [Illustration: AN INDIAN FIREPLACE IN MASSACHUSETTS.] [Illustration: ICELANDIC FIREPLACE IN SUPPOSED NORSE RUIN IN MASSACHUSETTS.] The second fireplace, which was about one metre square, surrounded by upright stones at the four corners and filled with oak charcoal, but no ashes, was the distinctive feature of this ruin, and resembled the cooking fireplaces of the Icelanders. The absence of ashes has been accounted for by absorption in the soft clay soil. Ashes often disappear in this way, but can be detected with acids. Although the outline of the walls of the long house can only be suggested, the few stones which were found at the base of the old walls were placed about a metre and a half apart, as in the walls of the Saga-time. This, so far as is known, is peculiar to that period and race. Iroquois long houses were constructed for communal use, and were usually from one hundred to three hundred feet long. The chief traces left are fire rows and kitchen middens. They are not known to have used stone foundations, nor to have made any attempt at regularity of outline. The drawing shows the method of construction of these long houses, which were built only by the Indians of the Iroquois tribe. Depressions which appeared to be the sites of old huts were in the hillside back of the terrace on which the long house stood, but the roadway in front had apparently destroyed all but one of these, and had also carried away the front wall of this. [Illustration: EAST WALL OF A SUPPOSED NORSE RUIN IN MASSACHUSETTS, SHOWING LAYERS OF TURF BETWEEN THE STONES.] [Illustration: WEST WALL OF A SUPPOSED NORSE RUIN IN MASSACHUSETTS, SHOWING LAYERS OF TURF BETWEEN THE STONES.] This hut was four metres across the front, and may have been five metres deep. When the sod, stones, and the clearings, which had been thrown in from the cultivated field above, were all removed, the remains of two side walls were found, supported and protected by the upper portions of these same walls which had slipped down from above and lay close to them, forming a compact mass of earth and stones. None of the stones in this wall were in contact with each other, being separated by two or three inches of dark earth such as results from the decay of vegetable matter. There was no fireplace. The manner of constructing these walls was the counterpart of Icelandic work. I shall now show you how this differs from post-Columbian cellars. [Illustration: ANCIENT WALL IN ICELAND, SHOWING LAYERS OF TURF BETWEEN THE STONES.] This is a photograph of a ruin in the Thjór's River Valley, in Iceland. It shows the sod between the stones closely packed but distinct. The stones in our early English and French cellars practically touch each other, as in the old cellar in Fort William Henry, in Maine. Sometimes broken stones fill the interstices, as in another example of stonework at Fort William Henry. Mortar has been used here more or less since the beginning of the seventeenth century. [Illustration: OLD WALL IN A CELLAR IN FORT WILLIAM HENRY, MAINE.] [Illustration: OLD WALL AT FORT WILLIAM HENRY, MAINE.] Although European or post-Columbian walls and cellars differ considerably among themselves, it is within certain limits. Post-Columbian walls, or foundation walls when built on the surface of the ground, were practically homogeneous in character, the French only attaining to one metre in thickness, whereas Icelandic walls were disposed in three distinct parts, the inner and outer sides being constructed in layers and the space between being filled in with closely packed earth, while they were never less than a metre and a half thick. Icelandic outhouses when dug into a hillside dispensed with the triple wall at the back and on the sides, and thus when stone-faced partially resemble our cellars. But even then they still retain one characteristic feature, in their alternate layers of turf and stone. [Illustration: SUPPOSED NORSE PATHWAY IN MASSACHUSETTS.] [Illustration: SOUTHERN TURN OF SUPPOSED NORSE PATHWAY.] While this hut was being dug out, our attention was called to stones protruding through the turf a short distance away and nearer to the water. When the earth was cleared away, it proved to be a rude stone-laid pathway leading along the margin of the old creek to the river. Here at the landing place a similar pathway branched away in another direction, stopping suddenly a few metres south of the supposed house of Thorfinn Karlsefni. This pathway is called in Iceland a _sjávar-gata_, or path to the sea. Ancient pavings have been found at Fort William Henry, near Pemaquid, Maine. They are, however, similar to many street pavements still to be found in our eastern cities. There is also a remarkable paved gutter at the Lewis Farm, in Maine, which has long interested historians. But none of these resemble the _sjávar-gata_ in its peculiar construction, especially where it broadens and divides with a wide margin of pebbles on one side and small heaps of stones on the other. [Illustration: A PAVEMENT AT FORT WILLIAM HENRY, MAINE.] [Illustration: A PAVEMENT AT PEMAQUID, MAINE.] This map was made for Professor Horsford about ten years ago. It shows the site of the long house, in which the Icelandic fireplace was found, and the cot, in which Icelandic walls were found. The paved path ran along the shore in front. Professor Horsford fixed Thorfinn's landing place a short distance south of this, on solid ground. Geologists are unable to say how long ago the salt marshes were formed. They are on Winthrop's map of 1634, but the _sjávar-gata_ could hardly have been accessible as a landing place after their formation. [Illustration: MAP OF THE SUPPOSED NORSE RUIN IN CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS.] In summary, it may be said that at the only point of land on the coast of North America which we have found to correspond with the description of the site of Thorfinn Karlsefni's houses, ruins have been dug out which bear peculiar features characteristic of the period in Iceland known as the Saga-time, and differing in certain essential features from the handiwork of all the native races of North America, and, as far as is known at present, from all other races in Europe or in America in post-Columbian days. _Extracts from the Reports of Dr. Gudmundsson and Mr. Erlingsson._ The following extracts, from reports by Dr. Gudmundsson and Mr. Erlingsson, refer to the ruins described in the preceding paper. The plan for these researches was first to compare the aforesaid ruins with the work of the native races supposed to have inhabited or visited these shores, next with that of the Norsemen of the eleventh century, and later, if necessary, with the earliest English, French, Spanish, and Dutch ruins on these shores. Dr. Gudmundsson and Mr. Erlingsson noted the points of resemblance between these and Icelandic ruins, and in their reports by request wrote everything they could think of in opposition to, as well as in favor of, their being of Norse origin. When these gentlemen left Cambridge the characteristic features of the early post-Columbian ruins on this coast had not been ascertained, and these researches were not finished satisfactorily until a year and a half after the Icelanders returned to Europe. _From Dr. Gudmundsson's Report._ The next place into which we dug was a depression or hollow in the hillside in a northerly direction from the above-mentioned place. Here we found unquestionable remains of a house which had been dug into the hillside, with walls constructed of stones, and layers of earth between the single rows of stones. The foundation and the lower parts of the two side walls were solid and well preserved, but the whole back wall, with the exception of a single row (the foundation), had fallen down. The stones from this and the upper parts of the side walls covered the whole bottom, so that they at the first glance seemed to form a pavement. When carefully examined, it was evident, however, that most of the stones which covered the bottom belonged to the walls, though some might have rolled down from the hill above the house. Thus it could clearly be seen how some of the stones had fallen down from the walls and some were just sliding down, without having as yet reached to the bottom, as some stones underneath had hindered them from gliding farther. The front wall of the house was wanting, and must either have been of wood or--which seems most likely--have been spoiled when the road which runs close past the house was made. When the bottom was cleared of the stones which had fallen in it proved to consist of a level black floor. The construction and situation of this house are _quite_ Scandinavian, built in the same way as houses in Iceland and Greenland. I would therefore not have had the least hesitation to declare it to be a ruin of a house built by Scandinavians in the pre-Columbian period if between and under the stones which covered the bottom we had not found some pieces of glazed pottery and bricks, of which some small pieces were found trodden down even into the floor itself. This seems to indicate that the house must be post-Columbian, or at least have been occupied by the first English or French colonists. As in the meantime several American scholars, with whom I have had an opportunity to discuss this matter, positively declare that the post-Columbian colonists never would have built such walls of stones without mortar, and it must be regarded as _quite_ certain that Indian people could not have built it, there seems to be no other explanation possible than that this ruin must be Scandinavian, and, having been found by some of the first post-Columbian colonists (e. g., some fishermen), had been repaired and occupied by them for a shorter or longer time. If it can be proved that such a building as this could not have been built by the post-Columbian colonists nor by Indians, it can hardly be anything else than Scandinavian. This, however, must be left to American scholars, who have sufficient knowledge in these matters. But so long as this is not proved, the pieces of pottery and bricks which were found in it rather seem to speak for its post-Columbian origin, as those pieces must have been there when the house fell down, and such a house as this built in the beginning of the eleventh century could not have stood five hundred years before its roof and the upper parts of the walls fell down. On the other side of the road we found an end of an old path paved with small stones, running from the house in the hillside along the edge of the old river bank down to a kind of promontory which in olden time, when the water stood much higher than it now does, seems to have served as a landing place. In the middle of this path, which was from about six to ten inches under the surface, was a hollow as trodden down by the feet of men and (perhaps) horses. This path is very like Icelandic paths, such as may still be found in many places in Iceland. But as we in some places in this path found some bricks between the stones which formed its pavement, it must be regarded as doubtful whether it is Scandinavian. The bricks seem rather to speak for a post-Columbian origin, though the whole path is so primitive that it hardly can be suggested that so advanced a people as the first post-Columbian colonists should have made such a path. To settle the question whether it could belong to those colonists must be left to American scholars. This path seems, at any rate, to have been made by the same people who built the house in the hillside, so either both of them must be regarded as post-Columbian or they both are Scandinavian. Another path runs from this landing place in a westerly direction along the old river bank, where it stops very abruptly on a certain spot a very short distance east of the supposed "Thorfinn's house." As I could not find any other reason for its stopping on this spot than that near it stood a building, I examined the river bank beside it, and here I found the earth, about eight inches under the surface, mixed with charcoal, which could indicate that some refuse from a house had been thrown there. This seems to lead to the conclusion that there at the end of this path really has stood a building, of which we could not now expect to find any traces, or even a building constructed of turf only (turf walls), which also might have wholly disappeared, as earth walls on an elevated ground like this perhaps might have blown away. The result of these researches is briefly, according to my opinion, this: As far as concerns the construction, both the house in the hillside and the two paths, or the two branches of the path, could be of Scandinavian origin, but I am not so well acquainted with the life and customs of the first post-Columbian colonists as to be able to decide whether they could not have been made by them. This, therefore, must be left to American scholars. Very respectfully yours, VALTYR GUDMUNDSSON. CAMBRIDGE, MASS., _July 16, 1896_. _From Mr. Erlingsson's Report._ It is not uncommon in Iceland that houses, especially small outhouses, are dug into small hills, hillsides, or sloping ground, just as this house is. It is, in fact, built very like what I have seen in outhouses in many places in Iceland, and what is left of the walls here nobody could distinguish from Icelandic walls. The size and the whole form is also very like an outhouse, but as most frequently in outhouses either all the four walls are made of stones or none of them, it would seem strange that one of the walls here is completely wanting. But those stones which were used in it could have been used in the road which has been made past the house, or, besides, it is possible that the front wall of the house has been a wooden one, and, although this is very rare in outhouses certainly, yet it must be taken into consideration that here it is much easier to procure wood than in Iceland. The whole form, the method, and the condition of the house itself seemed like nothing else than that it was built by Icelandic hands, although some of the stones seem to be rather small, but, as pieces of pottery and bricks have been found beneath the stones which had fallen down from the walls and on the floor itself, it seems to prove sufficiently that the house can not belong to the old Icelandic period; but as nobody has expected such a house here, the discovery is very remarkable. This path is so like paths in Iceland, for which there have been gathered stones and which later on have been trodden down by the feet of horses and men, that I would not have hesitated to declare that it might be Scandinavian if in it there had not been found bricks beside the other stones, which seems to indicate that the path must belong to the same period as the house which was dug into the hill. This discovery must therefore, too, be regarded as very remarkable.... Respectfully, THORSTEINN ERLINGSSON. CAMBRIDGE, MASS., _July 12, 1896_. THE EDUCATION OF THE NEMINIST. BY DAVID STARR JORDAN, PRESIDENT OF LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY. The meeting of the Astral Club of Alcalde, on September 10, 1899, was rendered memorable by the return, from a month's absence in the East, of the secretary of the club, Miss Corintha Jones, D. N. N. N. Her presence had been sorely missed at the August meeting (though I say it who should not), for it is not often that one of our devoted band is absent from his post. Miss Jones had left Alcalde to complete a course of study in medicine in one of the most famous colleges of the East. At the suggestion of the president of the club, Mr. Asa Marvin, F. T. S., the usual programme was suspended on her return, and Miss Doctress Jones, D. N. N. N. (for such indeed is the title she has now earned), told us of her studies at the Massachusetts University of Mentiphysics, in Boston, a noble institution, up to date in all respects, for it received its charter from the General Assembly of Massachusetts in the year 1881. Miss Doctress Jones left her home in Alcalde on the 20th of July, designing to visit certain relatives residing at Homer and Virgil, Cortland County, N. Y., on the way. She reached Boston on the 5th day of August, and at once proceeded to the university. An ignorant hackman took her over to the suburban village of Cambridge, which is the seat of Harvard College. Making inquiry of the professors there, she found none who had ever heard of the University of Mentiphysics, having eyes and ears for nothing but Harvard, which in some respects is indeed a great institution, but on a material plane. At last, after much inquiry, Doctress Jones was sent to the Neministic Headquarters, a small building on the corner of Milk and Transcendental Streets. Here she learned, from a little lady with a withered face and a serene smile, that the University of Mentiphysics was situated not in Boston, but in the neighboring town of Lynn, which lies some miles to the north. "But in Massachusetts," she said, "we call it all Boston." "So I took the train for Lynn," Miss Doctress Jones continued, "and drove at once to the street and number named on the card. The little white house with green blinds, white columns on the veranda, and a few weedy roses in the front yard did not fill my conception of a university, for it did not look like our universities in California. But the fault was with my conception, not with the fact. "The maid who answered the bell assured me that this was indeed the university, and ushered me at once into the office of the president. The wall was covered with pictures and photographs, showing elderly ladies with serene smiling faces. Under each one were the letters N. N. N., and a card giving an account of how each one had been made whole and happy through Neministic Science. The president was a middle-aged, matronly lady, with a high forehead and brown hair, streaked with gray, done in graceful frizzes over her brow. Above the corners of her mouth, which were always drawn up in an engaging smile, were three deep creases. Mr. Gridley, our schoolmaster, tells me that these correspond to the grave accent in Greek, and that there being three of them shows that the lady had been married three times. I do not know as to this, but somehow her face seemed startlingly familiar and at the same time strangely pleasant. "I murmured something about having had the pleasure before. She said, taking the words from my mouth: 'I know what you are going to say. We are indeed very much alike, though she is on the material plane. Still, my friends call me the "Lydia Pinkham of the soul," and I do not resent it, for what dear Lydia tries to do, that I do.' "I told the president," Doctress Jones continued, "that I wished to learn the wisdom of Boston, and especially the science of Neministic Healing, of which I had heard much in Alcalde. 'But perhaps I should call at the university, and not trouble you in your rest at home.' At this her eyes blazed, and she said, with a tragic air: 'Having eyes, ye see not! I read the Soul and the Stars through a higher than mortal sense. Has the Sun forgotten to shine and the Planets to revolve around it? Who was it discovered, demonstrated, and teaches the marvel of Neministic Healing? That one, whoever it be, does understand something of what can not be lost.' "I looked dazed. She quieted down and explained to me that she was herself the university, because no one but herself could explain what was revealed to her alone. The whole Neministic Science was taught in twelve lessons, and I could begin then and there. "I said something about preparatory work and the books I would need to read. She placed in my hands a slip which read: "'N. N. N. Persons contemplating a course in the Massachusetts University of Mentiphysics can prepare for it through no books save Neministic Science and Astral Health, with a Key to the Stars. Man-made theories are narrow, else extravagant, and always materialistic. _Nihil nemini nocet._' Then she added: 'I recommend students not to read so-called scientific works antagonistic to Neministic Healing, which advocate material systems, because such works and words becloud the right sense of Mentiphysical Science. A primary student richly imbued with the Neministic spirit is a better healer and teacher than a normal-class student, who partakes less of this power. Even an apt scholar who has dipped into my Neministic Science and Astral Health, with a Key to the Stars (the last revised edition), may enter this field of labor, without any personal instruction, beneficially to himself and the race.' "Then she continued blandly: 'You must learn, my dear, to enter this great field in a manner beneficial to yourself and the race. You must teach others to render to Cæsar what is Cæsar's, and to do this you must first render unto Cæsar yourself. Do you understand?' I looked puzzled for a moment. Then she said: 'Twenty-five dollars, please, dear, and be sure to come promptly at ten o'clock to-morrow. You are now admitted to the Primary Plane, the first degree of Neministic Healing.' As I gave her the California gold, she bowed me out of the room with a tender and motherly smile, while she tested the unfamiliar coins by ringing them softly on the table. "At the second lesson she gave me the fundamental principles of Neministic Healing. I received them eagerly, for I recognized in them a close harmony with the teachings of our dear old Mr. Dean: "'God is the principle of Mentiphysics. As there is but one God, there can be but one Principle in this Science. As there are many stars, there must be many fixed rules for the demonstration of this Divine Principle. "'The fundamental propositions among these rules are proved by inversion, for this is the basis of all true mathematics. Two times two is four, therefore four is two times two. As a star is the same whether seen from the north, south, east, or west, so a precept of Mentiphysics must be the same as seen from every side. To invert is not to change its meaning, and must prove its truth.' Then she gave me a printed card containing these words, over which I was to ponder until the next lesson: "'N. N. N. There is no Pain in Truth, therefore there is no Truth in Pain. There is no Nerve in Mind, therefore there is no Mind in Nerve. There is no Matter in Mind, therefore there is no Mind in Matter. There is no Matter in Life, therefore there is no Life in Matter. There is no Matter in Good, therefore there is no Good in Matter. _Nihil nocet nemini; nihil nemini nocet._' "'Twenty-five dollars, please,' and I returned to my hotel filled with new thoughts, which I found later were very incomplete. "The next day she said: "'Man, my dear, is governed by Soul, not sense. Sense is the reflection of matter, and matter does not exist. Thus sense is but the shadow of a dream. In dreams the laws of health are valueless. There is but one Law of Health, and that is the one precept of Neministic Healing. "'To the awakened mind the seasons will come and go, with changes of time and tide, cold and heat, latitude and longitude. The agriculturist finds that these changes can not affect his crops. The mariner will have dominion over the atmosphere and the great deep, over the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air. The astronomer will no longer look up to the stars. He will look out from them upon the universe, and the florist will find his flower before he beholds its seed. Thus matter will be finally proved to be nothing but a mortal belief, wholly inadequate to affect man through its supposed organic action or existence.' "Then she gave me another mystic card, which read: "'N. N. N. We tread on forces. Withdraw them, and Creation must collapse. _Nihil nocet nemini._' And this time I did not need to be reminded of the final ceremony with which the lesson ended. Nor did she need to clink the coins on the table. "In the fourth lesson the president discoursed more fully on 'the popular gods, Sin, Sorrow, and Sickness, the three S's of Satan; all three illusions of the Sinful Soul. The very word Illusion proves their nothingness. These are but troubled dreams of the darkened soul, and to rise above them is to wake from a cataleptic nightmare to see the stars shining on the hills. "'When troubled by a horrible dream, my dear, one has only to say, "This is a Dream; I will awaken." Then the stars will shine through the open window and the hideous vision will disappear. "'So in afflictions of disease and dread and death, one must say, "This is a Dream." Then it becomes a dream, and we rise above it into an atmosphere of Perfect Serenity. "'To the material sense, dear,' continued the president, 'to cut the jugular vein takes away life. But in Neministic Science Life goes on unchanged, mounting ever and ever to higher reaches, because there is no jugular vein, and Matter can not make its mark on Mind. "'The Barometer, that little prophet of storm and sunshine, can not be deceived by testimony of the senses. It points to fair weather in the midst of the unreal apparition of murky clouds and threatening rain. Thus does Neministic Science, the perfect culmination of Mentiphysics, point to the changeless Health and Happiness of the Enlightened Man whatever material science may have to say about the condition of his members. Man is made in the image of perfection, therefore failure and imperfection can never assail him. As well expect to gather peaches from a pine tree as to gather discord from the Concord of Being.' "Then she gave me a card: "'N. N. N. The Equipollence of the Stars above and of the Mind below shows the awful unreality of Evil. _Nihil nemini nocet._' "After the usual parting ceremony I returned to my room, well convinced of the unreality of Boston, and doubting whether I should ever again find my own Alcalde. I feared lest some further precept might arise by which Alcalde could not exist. "In the fifth lesson the president informed me that I was now in the second degree, or Normal Plane. We were ready for the first glimpse into the full, rounded perfection of Neministic Healing. "'To cure men of all ills whatsoever, we have only to show them the stars. When we waken in the night, only the sight of the stars can tell us we are awake. When we are awake all dreams must vanish, and all is dream which breaks the serenity of the mind or checks the perfect perspicacity of being. We need not deal with the body, for the body does not exist. It is dull, heavy, and aching, because it is the dead Residuum of Dream. When we forget it, it is no longer there. Then and not till then can you smile the serene smile of the Neministically Healed and Mentiphysically Perfect Soul.' "The little card read: "'N. N. N. The body says, "I am ill." The reports of Sickness may form a coalition with the reports of Sin and say, "I am Malice, Lust, Appetite, Envy, Hate." Treat a belief in sickness as you would sin--with sudden dismissal. If it were not for what the human mind says of the body, the body would not be weary any more than an inanimate wheel. _Nihil nemini nocet._' "On the sixth day the president greeted me with her serenest smile. "'We have now reached the point, my dear,' she said, 'when we must abandon Pharmaceutics and take up Ontology, the science of Abstract Being. In this we have many rivals who echo the cry, "Why art thou, NEMINISM, come hither to torment us before our time?" Among the systems that thus cry out are many whom this world deems successful. Animal Magnetism, Atheism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Agnosticism, Pantheism, and Infidelity are antagonistic to Mentiphysics and fatal to the demonstration thereof, and of Neminism, its noblest culmination; and so,' she continued, 'are some other systems.' "She warned me especially against Pantheism, 'the worship of the sylvan god Pan,' a cult reputed to be especially rife among the members of our club at Alcalde. "I tried to explain to her the difference between Pantheism and Sciosophy, but I did not succeed very well, for she grew impatient. In her judgment, I discovered, Sciosophy was grossly impractical, and the views of Mr. Abner Dean would take the bread from the mouths of better men than he. 'I am told,' she said, 'that Mr. Dean actually signed that wicked paper[15] of those Washington soreheads, who call themselves the Reformed College of Neminism.' With this, she would not listen to another word about Sciosophy. [Footnote 15: In this document it is asserted that Neministic Science and Astral Health with a Key to the Stars "and all of the inspired writings shall be free--i. e., free from the love of the lust of gain and that the charging of three dollars for Science and Health, etc., when it can be printed and sold for less than fifty cents per copy, is wrong in principle, and, in effect, shuts the doors of this beautiful truth upon the poor by thus putting a prohibitive price upon it.... "We hold that in the giving of class instruction the teacher is entitled to a reasonable compensation, and give our opinion that such compensation should be ten dollars, and we do condemn the present practice when they charge one hundred dollars for a series of twelve lessons. Take a class of thirty--which is not unusual--the teacher receives about $258 per day for two hours' work. This is unjust, and especially so, because many of these teachers are unable and unfit for teaching. "In the matter of healing, when the healer gives the proper time to the work, one dollar per treatment ought not to be excessive, but the practice of some of charging before the patient is received into the room and then heavily charged for the treatment, is an outrage, ... and should be prohibited."--_See full text, Washington News Letter, September 6, 1899; Editor._] "Then I regretted that I had said anything, for this pleasant lesson came to an abrupt end, and left me without even the customary card to ponder over. I still wondered what could be the secret meaning of N. N. N., _nihil nemini nocet_. "On the next day the storm had blown over, or rather, like all other storms, it had no real existence, and the smile of the president at the closing act of the lesson was the sweetest I had ever seen, the most perfect witness to the truth of her teachings. "She took up the subject of Materia Medica. After reading from a printed book the names of a host of poisons, from Abacus to Swamproot and Sandalwood and _Zygadene_, she warned us against them all. All are alike evil. All alike have no real existence. Therefore the student will do well not to learn their names. It will only interfere with his serenity of mind, and perfect serenity is the sole symptom of success. "'Surely this is better,' she said, 'than to support the popular systems of medicine, when the physician may be perchance an infidel and lose ninety-and-nine patients where Neminism cures its hundred. Is it because Osteopathy and Ostariopathy are more fashionable and less spiritual? Even business men have found that Neministic Science enhances their physical and mental powers, enlarges their perception of character, gives them acuteness and comprehensiveness, and an ability to exceed their ordinary business capacity.' "Then she gave me this card: "'N. N. N. In 1866 this discovery was made by me and by me alone: "The erring Mortal misnamed Mind produces all the organism and action of the mortal body." This led to the demonstration that Mind is All and matter is naught, and being nothing, nothing hurts nobody. Nobody hurts nothing, which proves it plainly by inversion. _Nihil nocet nemini; nihil nemini nocet._' "On the eighth day the president discoursed on Anatomy. Referring briefly to the pernicious notions of the 'ancients,' as with a broad sweep of her hand she designated the professors in Boston and Cambridge, concerning the structure of the human body, she called it the nightmare of undigested learning. 'Why should we care where the jugular vein goes, when we know that there is no jugular vein? What of bones and muscles, and teguments and integuments? "Toil fatigues me," you say; but what is this me? Is it muscle or Mind? Which is tired, and so speaks? Without Mind could the muscles be tired? Do the muscles talk, or do you talk for them? Science includes no rule of discord, but governs harmoniously.' "On the card were these words: "'N. N. N. Flesh is an error of physical belief; a supposition that life, substance, and intelligence are in matter; an illusion; a belief that matter has sensations. _Nihil nocet nemini._' "On the ninth day I was admitted to the third degree, or the Introspective Plane. As the president entered, I noticed a touch of camellia powder on her face, for the subject of the day was Beauty. 'Beauty,' she said, 'is internal before it is perceived outwardly. To have perfect faith in the principle of Neminism is to regain the charms of Eternal Youth.' She told me of patients of hers who had become beautiful through faith. One good lady at ninety developed new teeth through belief in Neminism--incisors, cuspids, bicuspids, and one molar. A gentleman at sixty had retained his full set of upper and lower teeth without a decaying cavity. "On her card were these words: "'N. N. N. The receipt for Beauty is to have less Illusion and more Soul. _Nihil nemini nocet._' "And, as the final ceremony was passed, the president looked almost beautiful herself. "On the tenth day the president gave some account of her early studies and of the origin of Neministic Healing. "'While from the human standpoint I inherited the refinement that goes with culture of family and moral rectitude, as usual here in Boston, yet there was a marked degree of spiritual Grace, Soulful Delicacy, and Esoteric Elegance that comes not from human ancestry, neither from communion with Nature. It was the exquisite coloring of the touch of the astral hand which opens the petals of thought as it does the opening rose. This ended in a soft glow of ineffable Joy, and out of its perfect serenity Neministic Science was born. "'The discovery was so new, the basis laid down for physical and moral health so hopelessly original and men so unfamiliar with the subject, that not until later did I venture to proclaim it to the world.' "On the card was-- "'N. N. N. "'My world has sprung from Spirit In Everlasting Day; Whereof I've much to glory, Wherefor have much to pay.' "Under this was a picture of the egg of a vulture, in which, through his microscope, Agassiz once saw the sun, moon, stars, and the gathering of clouds. '_Nihil nemini nocet._' "At the eleventh lesson I was directed to go out for clinical practice. In my hotel I found a dear little six-year-old boy who had been invited, with the rest of a kindergarten class, to attend a picnic. "He did not feel that he wanted to go. He seemed dumpish, and, according to mortal belief, was not well. At noon he said that he wanted to go to sleep. I took him in my lap and began to read to him from Neministic Science and Astral Health with a Key to the Stars. Very soon he expressed a wish to go to the picnic, and did go. So I gave him a little card, with the words '_Nihil nemini nocet_,' and all day he said nothing more about being sick. "Next morning the president gave me an account of various wonderful cures in her experience. Among others, she showed me a letter from John B. Higgins, of Little Egg Harbor, N. J. This I copied down as follows: "'I am glad to tell you how I was healed. Beliefs of consumption, dyspepsia, neuralgia, ulcers, tobacco, and bad language.... Doctors that were consulted did nothing to relieve me, and I constantly grew worse. Nearly two years ago you told me that if I would read a book called Neministic Science and Astral Health with a Key to the Stars, I would be healed. I told you I would go into it for all it was worth, and I found that it is worth all. I got the book and read day and night. I saw that it must be true, and believed that what I could not then understand would be made clear later. After some days' reading I was afflicted with drowsiness, followed by vomiting. This lasted several hours, when I fell into a sleep. I awoke healed.' "The president assured me that if I would spend no time in intellectual drifting, adhering to the impersonal and scientific deductions of the one discoverer to whose clarified spiritual eye all truth of the mind had been revealed, with all the loyalty of a mathematician to the principles of mathematics, I would be sure of a comfortable fortune. Although money had no real existence, the shadow in its substance proved that there was after all substance in its shadow. The Neministic Healer is at no expense for books or instruments or medicine, providing always that the one perfect Key to the Stars (including Neministic Science and Astral Health) lies open before him. With that in sight he can not go wrong, and with perfect faith in the unreality of all external things it matters not in earthly affairs what he does or leaves undone. "The card for this lesson was: "'N. N. N. The population of our cities is ample to supply many practitioners, teachers, and preachers with work. To enter this field of labor beneficially to ourselves, it is necessary to demonstrate that _the patient who is able to pay for being healed is more apt to recover_ than he who withholds a slight equivalent for health! _Nihil nemini nocet._' "At the last lesson the president informed me that my course of instruction was complete, and that I must now go forth and bless the world. I must lean no longer on her personal leadership, but, trusting in the spirit, I should rest solely on the pure Mentiphysical principle at work. As a pioneer of Neministic Healing in the far uncultured West, I must stand alone in the conflict, smiting error with the falchion of Truth. The rare bequests of the spirit are costly, and they have won fields of battle from which the dainty borrower would have fled.' "I spoke once or twice of my diploma, without which I could not practice my profession under the laws of Fresno County. At first she made as if she did not hear me, but at last she said: "'The Massachusetts University of Mentiphysics draws its breath from me, but I yearn for retirement. No one else can sustain this institution amid the legislation aimed at its vital purpose. This has given me conscientious scruples about diplomas, and, with the growing conviction that every one should build on his own foundation, no more diplomas shall be issued from this flourishing school. "'But do not worry, dear,' she said. 'Your power is just the same with or without diploma. You can make known the rare bequests of the Spirit quite as well as a martyr as you could as a physician. The faithful will stand by you. Those who believe will always pay. Take this locket, and hang it about your neck. It will contain the quintessence of all my teachings, and with this in your right hand and Neministic Science and Astral Health with a Key to the Stars in your left, you will drain the cup which I have drained to the dregs as the discoverer and teacher of Neminism, and without tasting this cup its inspiration can not be gained.' "Then I took the little locket, and here it is. On one side are the letters D. N. N. N., 'which,' she said, 'makes its holder a doctress.' On the reverse is the face of Lydia Pinkham, while around the margin, in fine gilt letters, is a scroll with the motto, '_Nihil nemini nocet._' Mr. Gridley, the learned professor of our Alcalde school, says this means 'nothing hurts nobody.' But I am sure that there is more in it than that; besides, whatever it is we can prove it by inversion: _Nihil nocet nemini; nihil nemini nocet_--one is true like the other, and its symbolic significance is proved by its three N's, for N is the symbol of eternity. At least, this is what the president told me. But now that I am back in Alcalde, the whole thing seems like a dream, while all the things I had learned to call dreams seem more real than ever. Maybe I am still on the Material Plane after all, in spite of all I have done and all the rest of us in Alcalde are doing to try to rise above it." DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER. BY WALTER L. HAWLEY, OF THE NEW YORK EVENING SUN. At the beginning of the present century the newspapers published in the United States numbered 200--one for each 26,450 of population--while at the present time the total of regular publications slightly exceeds 20,000--one for each 350 inhabitants of the country; and in that growth and development of the business is represented more of science and art, more of physical ingenuity and mental activity, than in any other line of human endeavor. One hundred years ago the publication of a newspaper did not rank as a business, and the preparation of its contents was regarded as a pastime or the indulgence of a whim, rather than a profession. At the end of the century, journalism is the history of the world written day by day, the chief medium of enlightenment for the masses, the universal forum of scholar, sage, and scientist. As a business enterprise, the newspaper of to-day commands unlimited capital, and as a profession it ranks second to none. For three centuries and a half following Gutenberg's invention of type little progress was made in the art of printing, and the production of a newspaper in this country in 1800 was accomplished with crude machinery and involved much slow and difficult hand labor. The printing was done on wooden presses of primitive pattern, the type was large and ill formed, the paper used was in many cases inferior to the lowest grade made at the present time, and the production of a large number of copies of any issue was out of the question. No attempt was made in this country to publish a daily paper until 1784, and in 1800 daily editions were issued only in four or five of the larger cities. [Illustration: FROM THE NEW YORK GAZETTE AND GENERAL ADVERTISER OF WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1, 1800.] [Illustration: FROM THE NEW YORK GAZETTE AND GENERAL ADVERTISER OF JANUARY 1, 1800.] [Illustration: A MUNICIPAL NOTICE FROM THE NEW YORK GAZETTE AND GENERAL ADVERTISER OF JANUARY 1, 1800.] The publications of that period were not newspapers in the sense in which the word is now used, because no particular effort was made to present an account of the happenings of the day. Notices of the arrival and departure of ships, time tables of mail coaches, and brief announcements of matters of political interest filled the limited space devoted to domestic news. Foreign news consisted entirely of matter reprinted from the English journals received by sailing vessels, and therefore weeks or months old when it appeared. The wooden presses used a hundred years ago were operated entirely by hand. After the type had been set it was placed in a frame or "form," with little or no regard to artistic arrangement of headlines or displayed matter. To print the edition, the "form" was placed on the bed of the press and ink spread over the type by the use of hand rollers. The white paper was then dampened with water, sheet by sheet, laid over the stationary "form," and the impression was made by pulling down the upper part of the press with a lever. This work was so slow that a circulation of three or four hundred copies of a daily newspaper would severely tax the capacity of the press room. The weekly publications were as a rule limited to about the same figures, because the entire mechanical part of production devolved upon one man, who was often owner and editor as well as printer. Some iron presses were imported from England in 1810, and in 1817 George Clymer, of Philadelphia, invented a lever press that was a marked improvement over the crude machines then in general use, reducing the manual labor required and increasing the speed with which printed papers could be turned out. The first power press used in this country was invented by Daniel Treadwell, of Boston, in 1822, and operated by the American Bible Society, the power being furnished by a team of mules. These presses were not adapted to newspaper work, and the first considerable advance in the mechanical part of the business was made in 1829 and 1830, when a Washington hand press was invented. Seventeen years later a cylinder power press was perfected by Richard M. Hoe, and the mechanical ability to produce periodicals was more than doubled; but during the time when American ingenuity developed the steam engine, the cotton gin, the sewing machine, and the electric telegraph, the progress made in the mechanism of newspaper making was comparatively insignificant. The process of stereotyping was introduced into this country from England in 1813, and a year later the New Testament was printed from plates, but the discovery was not utilized in the publication of newspapers until 1861. [Illustration: ADVERTISEMENTS FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY ADVERTISER OF WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1, 1800.] [Illustration: The Daily Advertiser of Wednesday, January 1, 1800.] In the first half of the century journalism did not at any time rank as a profession requiring special training, and capacity, and the returns of the counting room were so meager, the cost of material so high, and the appliances in the mechanical department so imperfect, that the publication of newspapers rose only by slow degrees to recognition as a business enterprise in which capital might seek investment with fair prospect of a satisfactory return. Modeled after English publications, the early American newspapers depended, for whatever of reputation or success they achieved, upon the fame and ability of the editor. The reporting of current events without comment was a secondary feature of the daily papers, and in the weekly publications it was not attempted. Before the days of railroads and prompt and reliable mail service, communication between men in public life and, in fact, all persons of education, was chiefly by letter. The custom grew into a fixed habit, and to a large extent influenced the character of the newspapers published prior to 1850. The editor addressed himself directly to his readers through long editorials upon topics in which he was interested, and his publication was in reality a mere instrument for the expression of opinions. Public men and politicians were encouraged to write letters for publication upon public questions, and a long communication from a man of national reputation was regarded by the editor as matter of far more value to his journal than any amount of news of the events of the day. The organization and development of political parties in the early part of the second quarter of the century resulted in a rapid increase in the number of newspapers throughout the country. Party leaders found that they could reach a greater number of citizens by means of published letters and speeches than by the primitive process of campaigning by easy stages from one State or county to another. From writing personal letters to friends in their districts, senators and representatives in Congress found that they could keep their constituents better informed of the progress of legislation and politics by means of signed statements in the press of their respective States. The party organ and the personal journal were the immediate natural results of this condition of public life and politics. Every secular journal supported some political party or organization without qualification, and there was little or no independence of the press. The editor found his subscribers among the members of his own party, and often looked to the organization or the candidate for financial support. Papers were established and editors hired by parties, factions, and individual leaders to advocate some particular plan of finance or tariff, or some general policy for the nation or State. During this stage of American journalism the influence of a paper depended largely upon the reputation, individuality, and force of character of the editor. He needed not to possess any particular qualification for the work, except a general knowledge of the affairs on which he was to write and a command of vigorous language to compel attention to his utterances. For many years the majority of the periodicals of the country, daily and weekly, were critical reviews of the events of the time, rather than mediums for the spread of general information. News of important happenings at home spread through all the States ahead of the circulation of the papers, and the people looked to the latter for review and comment upon events, rather than for detailed accounts of the occurrences. Foreign affairs, as reported in the English publications received in this country, took precedence in the classification of news in the journals of the first half of the century, and local events, often matters that were subsequently recognized as of great historical value, were briefly and too often imperfectly recorded. It is a matter to be regretted that in the days when American statesmen and orators were making history for the world, when the new republic, having passed beyond the stage of experiment, was advancing with prodigious strides toward glorious achievements in material development, the journals of the country kept but an imperfect and often inaccurate record of events that should have been reported in full. [Illustration: J. Russel's Gazette of Monday, September 1st, 1800.] During the first forty years of the present century there was no system of collecting the news for publication, and the capital invested in the newspaper business was insufficient to permit of any extra outlay to obtain reports of events occurring at a distance in advance of the regular mails. Such reports as were obtained were usually voluntary contributions written by a friend of the editor, and often colored or distorted according to the prejudice of the writer. These letters were, almost without exception, semi-editorial in character, the writers indulging freely in comment and expression of opinion upon the event they attempted to record, so that no political or public matter was reported entirely free from partisan coloring. The drivers of mail coaches, the captains of coastwise or river vessels, strolling peddlers, lawyers, surveyors, and wandering missionaries, who made long journeys into the interior and from town to town, were the news reporters of early days. When they arrived in a city or town they would tell the latest news from the places they had visited, and the next issue of the local paper would contain a story beginning, "The Rev. Mr. Bland, the traveling missionary, relates," etc., or, "Captain Smith, of the schooner ----, reports having heard," etc. Information received in this way might relate to Indian uprisings, fires, floods, crimes, accidents, or political events; but in every case the published account would be interspersed with opinions of the narrator and the comments of the editor who prepared the story for publication. For news of events happening in the larger cities, the journals of the first half of the century depended almost entirely on reprinting from exchanges. They had no regular correspondents anywhere, and a paper published in New York would reprint from the papers of Boston and Philadelphia such of the news of those cities as impressed the editor as being of more than local interest. During the War of 1812, the subsequent Indian wars, and the conflict with Mexico, news of battles and movements of armies in the field was obtained by the slow process of waiting for official reports to the Government or private letters from officers and men at the front. The Mexican War stimulated the public demand for news, increased the circulation of newspapers, and did more than any other event up to that time to arouse the editors of the country to the fact that the people wanted early and complete information of what was going on in the world, rather than individual opinions on general problems. While that struggle was in progress the arrival of the weekly mail in a remote village was an event of importance. The inhabitants would gather in large numbers at the post office, and the meager war news contained in the newspapers would be read aloud. The postmaster or some subscriber to a paper would often post a copy of the latest journal in some conspicuous place in the town, and from that simple beginning there was developed the newspaper bulletin board, where the public may obtain brief information of great events before the full report can be put in type. [Illustration: FROM THE NEW YORK EVENING POST OF NOVEMBER 16, 1801.] [Illustration: New York Evening Post of Monday, November 16, 1801.] After the division of the voters of the country into organized political parties, the tariff, banking and currency, the acquisition of additional territory, and States rights developed into great national questions, precipitating prolonged and heated discussion by the statesmen of that period. This condition stimulated the growth of a certain class of newspapers, and brought into prominence many writers of ability. The statesmen and politicians of that time turned to the press as an available and valuable medium through which to disseminate arguments. They sought to convince rather than to inform the public, and the journalism of that period made no substantial progress except as an instrument for the development and exploitation of writers of force and influence. Whatever power the press exerted in shaping events, whatever it accomplished in swaying the public mind in the days when nullification was scotched and territorial expansion was accepted as a fixed policy of the majority, should be credited to the genius and individuality of the leading writers of that time, rather than to a full presentation of facts. The years of agitation of the question of slavery still further developed individuality in journalism. The newspaper became an instrument for educating the people on certain public questions, and an influence upon public opinion by means of editorial writing. That was the period of so-called great editors, of whom Horace Greeley may be mentioned as a conspicuous example, who made and unmade politicians with their praise or criticism, who shaped the policy of political parties, controlled conventions and nominated candidates, changed the current of their country's history at critical points, and in many ways wielded an influence in public affairs greater than that of the leading statesmen. The editor of that time was greater than his newspaper, and the power of the press was in reality the force of character of the individual exerted through the instrument within his control. [Illustration: A BOOKSELLER'S ADVERTISEMENT FROM THE NEW YORK EVENING POST OF FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1801.] From 1830 to 1860 the progress made in the mechanical department of the business was slow and unimportant in comparison with recent inventions. Cylinder presses came into general use for the printing of daily papers, but the weekly and monthly publications continued to use the primitive hand machines. The speed of press-work was still limited to a few hundred copies per hour, so that an extensive circulation could not be supplied even if there had been a demand for it. The white paper used was still made entirely of rags, and most of the material was imported from Austria and Italy. The cost of production was high, and few newspapers in the United States were published at a fair profit. The uncertainty of the financial returns from the business greatly retarded its development. Inventors found that their ingenuity would receive more substantial rewards in other fields, and editors and publishers were rarely practical men who could discover imperfections in mechanism and suggest improvements in their own shops. Throughout the first half of the century most of the improved methods of printing were developed in the establishments of book and job printers. There new presses and all new mechanical devices were first installed, and the newspaper followed, instead of leading, in the work of material progress in the art. [Illustration: AN EDEN MUSÉE OF 1801. FROM THE NEW YORK EVENING POST OF DECEMBER 23, 1801.] To the New York Herald is generally credited the departure from old-time methods that resulted in the creation of newspapers devoted entirely to the publication of news, the reporting of the happenings of the world day by day. The innovation was not well received by the editors, who believed that the public cared more for opinions than a record of events. The new method proved popular, however, and the development of the newspaper from the personal journal and party organ dates from that time. The founder of the Herald and the new school of journalism spent money to obtain the news of the world ahead of the ordinary channels of communication. He established a system of special couriers, employed correspondents, and made the collection of reports of events of general interest a matter of first importance in the business of making a newspaper. Other editors followed the new movement slowly, and often with much doubt and hesitation, but those who stood still and refused to supply their readers with the news were in time compelled to go out of the business. When the civil war began the new order of journalism had progressed far enough to create a general demand for a full report of the progress of that great conflict. All the larger cities of the country were connected by railroads and telegraph lines, the political agitation for five years prior to the beginning of hostilities had aroused the people to a feeling of intense interest in the struggle, the circulation of the daily papers had increased almost to the limit of their mechanical capacity, and every condition favored a rapid development of the business with a certainty of profitable returns. The leading editors of the country still exerted a far-reaching influence in public affairs, and they were consulted by the highest officers of the Government; but the time had come when the people wanted the news, rather than individual opinions. American genius and ingenuity responded promptly and adequately to the demand, and from the time of the civil war the development of the newspaper has been a marvel of science and art. The telegraph came into general use for the transmission of news, correspondents and artists were sent to the front with all the armies, the men employed in Washington to write their own views of public questions were instructed to send to their papers only a record of the great events then transpiring around them, and in a month, or at most a year, American journalism was well advanced upon a new era of marvelous development. The time when the opinions, the power in phraseology, or the individuality of one man could alone make a daily newspaper a financial, literary, or political success had passed. The press had become an institution, journalism a profession, and the publication of newspapers a practical business requiring and rewarding enterprise and sagacity. With the sudden demand for more papers came rapid progress in the mechanical department of the business. Double cylinder presses capable of printing twenty thousand papers an hour were soon perfected, folding machines came into general use, stereotyping was employed to save time, labor, and wear of type, white paper was made from wood pulp at greatly reduced cost, and the progress in all departments of the business was by leaps and bounds until every demand was more than supplied and new expectations created. From that time forward invention kept pace with every increase of circulation. As soon as one press was found inadequate or imperfect, the manufacturers were ready to set up a faster and better one. As competition reduced the selling price of the newspaper, invention supplied every demand for the material of production at a reduced rate. The impetus to circulation imparted by the civil war created a new reading public, which rapidly grew to include every person who could read and a demand for all the news of the world once created would not be denied. The collection of news was quickly reduced to a system and perfected, until to-day no event of importance occurring in any part of the world is omitted from the daily record of current history. The great cost of collecting news at the front and transmitting by telegraph full reports of battles during the civil war caused certain newspapers in New York city to enter into an arrangement to receive reports in duplicate and share expenses. Then the cost was further reduced by selling the news to papers in other cities. That was the beginning of the Associated Press, a plan of newspaper combination that ultimately made the buying and selling of news a great commercial enterprise. Within a few years after the close of the war this system had been developed until practically all the daily newspapers of the country were interested in it or subscribers to the news collected and sold. This feature of the business continued to grow until agencies for the collection and transmission of news were established throughout the world. Similar associations were formed in England and on the continent of Europe, and news exchanged with the American organization. In the United States the business was developed until newspapers of particular sections of the country and even those of single States formed associations on the principle of mutual benefit for the collection of full reports of all important events within the territory where they circulated. At the present time the system has been perfected until the great news agencies of the country receive reports of important events from every quarter of the globe with a degree of promptness and accuracy rendered possible only by thoroughness of organization and the constant exercise of the keenest intelligence. The collection of all the news of the world would not be possible under any other plan, but the American newspapers, having created a demand for the news, were the first to devise a system of obtaining it promptly at a cost that made possible the publication of daily papers at a profit in almost every town in the country. Brief reports of all important events are transmitted by cable or telegraph to a central office in New York, Washington, or Chicago, where they are condensed or elaborated, as occasion may require, and then sent out over special telegraph wires to papers all over the country that are subscribers to the service. The larger papers of the country, however, do not rely upon this service alone. They are represented by special correspondents not only in all the chief cities of the United States, but in London. Paris, Berlin, and other news centers of the Old World. The development of the newspaper into a medium for recording day by day every event of human interest was so rapid during the civil war and the stirring times immediately thereafter that many faults of form and detail remained. The journalism of that period was a new departure, and the men who created it had no precedent to guide them, but all the time there was a steady and intelligent effort to improve in all directions. The efforts of the leading men in the profession, influenced by conditions and surroundings, resulted in the creation of what were for a time known as schools of journalism--that is, one man set up an ideal, and another man strived to create a journal of another character. The aim of all was to publish the general news of the day, but political influences were still strong enough to control editorial policy, and ultra-partisan and sectional views were incorporated in the record of events. There were still editors of great power and influence in politics and public affairs, and they tried to shape the current of the new condition by the force of editorial writing. A number of editors, of both the old and new order, for a time followed the policy of subordinating to partisan politics all other features of the newspaper. They sought to make the press the dominant influence in politics, and to do that they presented in their journals only one side of public and party questions. They undertook to think and to reason for their readers, and their partisan and sectional views were reflected in the news columns of their papers. So long as party feeling ran high this style of journalism was popular and successful, but the newspaper, being in the nature of an educator of the masses, soon set the people to thinking for themselves, and created a demand for the news of public and political events without the color of individual opinion. The change from intense partisanship to partial or complete independence of editorial utterance has come slowly, and is still under way. To-day there is no great daily newspaper in the United States so entirely subservient to a political party as to support any man or measure without question or protest. Politicians fear this spirit of independence, and therein lies the secret of the great power of the press in public affairs. The most powerful and successful journals are those that combine absolute fairness and honesty with independence. So-called schools of journalism, in the rapid development of the profession during the past twenty years, have merged into one general system or plan, which is to get all the news and publish it. Journals may be graded or classified by their treatment of news and their judgment as to the intelligence and moral character of the reading public. A detailed record of the development of the mechanical part of the newspaper business during the past thirty years would be almost a synopsis of all progress in science and art. The newspaper printing press of to-day, which prints, cuts, folds, and counts ninety-six thousand papers per hour, with one man to operate it, is the mechanical wonder of the age. It is justly regarded as the greatest piece of machinery that the ingenuity of man has yet devised. Type is no longer set by hand in the making of a newspaper, the letters being formed from the metal direct and cast in finished lines by machinery. Studying the perfection and magnitude of the newspaper printing press of to-day it is difficult to realize that little more than half a century of time and invention stand between this piece of mechanism, that seems to work with human intelligence, and the Washington hand press, upon which the production of printed sheets was a matter of slow and arduous labor. The great metropolitan newspapers of to-day are printed by monster machines weighing thirty tons, composed of four thousand separate pieces of steel, iron, brass, wood, and cloth. In the great printing-press factory of R. Hoe & Co. eighteen months' time is required to build one of the modern presses, and the cost of it would have more than paid for all the newspaper printing presses in use in the United States at the beginning of the century. These monster machines are known as quadruple presses, which means that four complete presses have been built into one. When in operation, white paper is fed to them automatically from rolls, and this paper, with a speed greater than the eye can follow, is converted into the finished newspaper, printed on both sides, cut into sheets, pasted together, folded, counted, and deposited in files of fifty or one hundred at one side of the press. White paper is fed to the press from two points, and finished newspapers are delivered at two places on the opposite side. An idea of the speed with which the work is done may be gained by watching the printed papers fall from the folder. They drop so fast that the eye, no matter how well trained, can not count them. These presses have a capacity of ninety-six thousand four-, six-, or eight-page papers per hour, and forty-eight thousand ten-, twelve-, or sixteen-page papers. Their mechanism is so perfect and so carefully adjusted that the breaking of a narrow band of tape in the folder, the loosening of a nut, the slightest bending of a rod, friction in a bearing, or any other derangement, no matter how slight, is instantly apparent to the skilled machinist in charge. [Illustration: OCTUPLE STEREOTYPE PERFECTING PRESS AND FOLDERS (printing on both sides of the paper). Capacity 96,000 4-, 6-, or 8-page papers per hour; down to 24,000 24-page papers per hour. A, paper rolls (Webb's), sometimes five miles long; B, printing cylinders, each one carrying sixteen plates (pages); C, blanket or impression cylinders; D, inking motion (fountain and inking rollers); F, folding mechanism or formers (four of these); G, deliveries (four of these); H, controlling lever; I, bar slitting, pasting, collating, and collecting devices (between press and folders). (We are indebted to the courtesy of R. Hoe & Co. for permission to reproduce this photograph. This picture and the succeeding one represent the most powerful and complete printing presses which have been constructed up to date.)] [Illustration: SEXTUPLE STEREOTYPE PERFECTING PRESS AND FOLDERS (with color attachment for printing three additional colors on outside pages). It prints per hour 48,000 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, or 12-page papers, 36,000 16 page papers, or 24,000 14-, 16-, 20-, or 24-page papers--all delivered folded, pasted, and counted. Also magazines with pages half the size of the newspaper pages, one half the pages printed in four colors and the other half in one color, at the rate of 48,000 of 8, 12, 16, 20, or 24 pages, and 24,000 of 28, 32, 40, or 48 pages, delivered folded to page size, cut open at the heads, bound with wire staples, and counted. (We are indebted to the courtesy of R. Hoe & Co. for permission to reproduce this photograph.)] The white paper used in making the newspapers of to-day is manufactured from wood pulp and is put up in long rolls, wound about an iron cylinder that can be adjusted in place at one end of the press. These rolls contain from two to four miles of paper, and weigh from eight hundred to twelve hundred pounds each. As soon as one roll is used up another is lifted into place, the loose ends of the two are pasted together, and, after a stop of less than two minutes, the great press is again belching forth finished newspapers at the rate of sixteen hundred a minute, or two hundred and sixty-six each second. Almost every invention and device of recent years in connection with the use of electricity is in some way utilized in the production and distribution of the daily newspapers. The evolution of journalism having finally established the fact that the chief function of the daily newspaper is to publish the news of the world, the problem of the business is how to obtain the news surely, accurately, and promptly. The ocean cable has taken the place of the sailing vessel, the trained correspondent has succeeded the occasional contributor, the electric telegraph and telephone have entirely superseded the mail in the transmission of domestic news, and every event of human interest throughout the civilized world is placed before millions of readers within a few hours of its actual occurrence. The collection of news is not restricted by any question of the cost of obtaining it. Fifty years ago it was considered a remarkable feat for one newspaper to obtain information of an important event in advance of competitors. To-day it is a matter of comment if any newspaper fails to publish all the news desired by its readers. If a war is fought on any part of the earth there are reporters on the firing line, and no expense is spared in collecting and transmitting by the quickest method available full reports of any event of world-wide importance. To-day the hiring of special trains, the stringing of a special line of telegraph wire, the charter of a ship, the fitting out of an exploring expedition, or any other great enterprise in the way of collecting information for the newspapers of the United States, is so much a part of the everyday business of journalism that such things are accepted as a matter of course, or cause no more than a passing comment. Half a century ago the result of a national convention or election was not known all over the country for weeks afterward. In the case of a national convention to-day, telegraph wires lead from the convention hall into the offices of all the newspapers in the larger cities. An operator sits near the platform of the presiding officer, and with a muffled key he sends over the wire a full report of the proceedings, with a description of every incident of interest. At the other end of the line is an operator at a typecasting machine receiving the report and putting it into lines as fast as received. When a candidate for President has been nominated, extra editions of the daily papers are selling on the streets of cities a thousand miles away almost before the applause for the winning man has died out in the convention hall. The people of every city and town in the United States where a newspaper is published would feel themselves cheated of their rights if they failed to receive news of the result of an election by midnight of the day on which the ballots were cast. In enterprise and originality the journalism of America leads the world at the end of the nineteenth century. As a profession, it commands, with alluring prospects of fame and fortune, the services of men of genius and learning. Those who enter it from choice succeed or fail quickly. It is a life of activity, a work where energy and intelligence are essential qualifications, and honor and honesty are certain of reward. There is no enduring place in the profession for hypocrisy, indolence, or mediocrity. VALUE OF THE STUDY OF ART. BY GEORGES PERROT. Georges Perrot is one of the leading art writers and teachers of France. Born in 1832, not far from Paris, he was graduated from the École Normale about 1855, and was then for three years at the French School at Athens. From his return to the present day he has occupied, with honor and distinction, many positions in the world of letters. At present he is a member of the Institut, an officer of the Légion d'Honneur, a professor à la Faculté des Lettres de Paris, and the director of the École Normale Supérieure. He is best known to scholars outside of France by the magnificent work on the History of Art in Antiquity, which he is writing, assisted by Charles Chipiez, architecte du gouvernement, and of which seven superb quartos have already appeared. (Hachette et Cie.) In 1891, by a decree of the Minister of Public Instruction, the study of the history of the fine arts was introduced into a section of the studies pursued at the lycées. In an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1899, Perrot pleads for an increase of the time assigned to the study and for its introduction into other parts of the curriculum. I have translated those pages of the article which are of general interest as a contribution to a subject which is deservedly attracting the attention of American institutions of learning. D. CADY EATON. Written and spoken language, the language of which the signs are words, is not the only language which man uses to convey his ideas. There is also the language of forms, which, with no less clearness and force, conveys the conceptions of the intellect and the sentiments of the heart. We study the history and the literature of bygone people for the purpose of acquiring a better knowledge of ourselves, and this knowledge is secured by becoming conscious of the different states of mind, to use a modern expression, through which our ancestors have passed. Even the most elementary and the most remote of these successive conditions are, unconsciously perhaps, represented in the depths of our being by beliefs and customs for which the present order and progress of civilization can not account.[16] [Footnote 16: The highest education consists in the presentation and in the acceptance of the purest ideas and the highest ideals of all ages, whether they be presented in written or spoken words, in songs of voices or sounds of instruments, in plastic forms or glowing pictures, in humble lives or glorious actions. The well-educated man should be the product and the epitome of the best thoughts and sentiments the world has produced, for he carries the responsibility of past centuries.] Not to go back to the Quaternary period or to the cave dwellers, there are many of these mental ideas or conditions which would remain hidden from the inquiry of the historian if he were limited to written testimony. One example may suffice: the discoveries of Schliemann, at Troy, Mycenæ, and Tiryns have rescued from oblivion a primitive Greece of which the Greeks themselves had preserved but a faint remembrance. Thus has been given to the Homeric epoch a background of many centuries. Now this Greece, contemporary of the Thutmoses and the Ramses of Egypt, anterior to not only Grecian history but even to Grecian tradition, could not write, but could work and use stone; could hew wood and fashion it for carpentry; could mold and bake clay; could melt and hammer lead, bronze, gold, and silver; and could carve ivory. Every bit of material fashioned by the instruments of this period has the value of an authentic document. How society was constituted, the life that was led, what notions were held of the hereafter--all these things are revealed by the marks the hands of man have left upon everything he touched. The colossal walls of Tiryns, the majestic funeral cupolas of Mycenæ, the divisions of the royal abodes of which the outlines can still be traced on the surface of the soil, and the arrangement of the sepulchres hidden beneath it all testify. So, too, the weapons, the instruments, the vases, and the jewels which have been found scattered about amid the ruins of the buildings or buried in the tombs. Thanks to all these monuments, we are beginning to recognize in a shadow which year by year glows with a brighter light the features which characterized the world of Achæan heroes of which the image, transformed by oral tradition and singularly enlarged by power of invention, is reflected in the Iliad and the Odyssey. From these obscure and remote ages let us transport ourselves to the Greece of Pisistratus, of Pericles, and of Alexander. Instructors of youth tell of the losses which have been made, and of how small a part of the literary work of Greek genius has escaped the great shipwreck of antiquity. Should they not also indicate where precious supplements of information may be found to fill the voids of written tradition? There are many variations of important myths, hardly mentioned in passing by obscure epitomizers of the lower centuries, which have furnished to ceramic artists subjects for pictures which make us acquainted with personages and with episodes of which writers have hardly left a trace. But even if we had the works of the cyclic poets, all of which have perished; if we had the lyric poets, of whom only Pindar has survived, and Bacchylides whose fragments are to-day the joy of Hellenists; if we had the whole of tragedy, of which we have but the remnants; if we had all of that comedy which is represented by Aristophanes alone; if we had all of the more ancient comedy, all of the middle period and all of the new, with Menander who since the Renaissance is the regret of all critics of fine apprehension--all this poetry could not exhaust the multiple fecundity and the prodigious richness of the imagination which created it. If malevolent Fortune had decreed the destruction of every bit of Greek plastic art we should have been condemned to perpetual ignorance of many aspects and methods of the Greek soul. Is there anything in literature worth the little clay figures of Tanagra in making clear how the Greeks apprehended and enjoyed female beauty: how they loved it not only in the noble and serious types of a Pallas or an Aphrodite, but even as presented by the humble inhabitants of little villages in the graceful _abandon_ of their everyday life and in the liberty of their most ordinary attitudes? If we base an opinion of the religion of the Greeks only upon the epithets used by poets in defining the gods and upon actions they attributed to them, we run the risk of judging wrongly. In contemplating their images we obtain clearer notions of the ideas associated with each divine type. Alas! we do not possess the great works of Phidias which according to men of authority made men more religious--the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia. But even in the reduced copies of these two masterpieces which have reached down to our time we can divine how the master expressed in the one the idea of calm and luminous intelligence and of supreme wisdom, and in the other the idea of that sovereign force in repose and of that omnipotence, tempered by goodness, which were conceived to exist in the sovereign of the universe, the father of gods and men. In subsequent paragraphs Perrot imagines the Greek statues of the Louvre thus addressing a classical student: "Young man, you who are studying Greece in Homer and Plato, in Sophocles and Herodotus, do not pass us by so quickly. We also belong to that Greece which you discern and which you seek in their writings, of which not without difficulty you decipher the prose and the verse. To understand and to love us, to read in our features the thoughts of which we are the expression, to seize in the modeling of our flesh and in the pure outline of our limbs the secret of the genius which created us, no grammar nor dictionary is needed; only apply yourself to the education of your eye. In this exercise, in this apprenticeship, you will find a pleasure which will become more and more keen as you become more capable of perceiving rapidly the finest gradations. If you aspire to become an authorized interpreter of Greek genius, do not fear that you may be losing time. When, by long and affectionate intercourse, you shall have sufficiently entered into our intimacy to be able at any given hour to evoke in your spirit, as clearly as if we stood before you, a vision of the forms which shall have become dear to you, then the images which shall be awakened in your memories when you read the poets will be akin to those which the same recitals and the same epithets suggested to the Greeks who saw us born. To them you will be drawn by similarity of impression. You will be nearer to them, nearer to thinking and feeling after their fashion, at least by moments, than the most subtle grammarian or the most learned Hellenist who never has seen us." Turning from Greece to Italy, Perrot derives a no less striking lesson from the statues of Roman emperors: "Is there a lesson, though given by the most learned professor, that could cause to live before us all the life of the Rome of the Cæsars as do these effigies? In the long succession of portraits which embrace three centuries of history the differences of times and of men are contrasted more keenly and more vividly than in the recitals of ancient authors or in the dissertations of modern erudites. Augustus and Tiberius, Constantine and Theodosius, all bore the same title--'imperator'; all were called consuls, Cæsars, Augusti, _patres patriæ_, etc. Nevertheless, from the first to the fourth centuries the supreme power was greatly modified. Volumes have been written to explain the change, but there is nothing that makes it so clear as the comparison of the images of these princes. Augustus, in perhaps the most beautiful of all his statues, called _de Prima Porta_, has his head, arms, legs, and feet bare. Over the soldier's short tunic he wears a cuirass, and over it is thrown the military mantle of command. He is represented as supreme chief haranguing his troops. Another statue may represent him as a simple citizen, clothed with the toga and holding in his hand the manuscript of the discourse he proposes reading to the senate. The statues still show forth the Roman Republic, at least the customs and the style of it. Most vividly is the spirit and also the deception of the system perceived which, while investing a single individual with a power almost limitless, affects for two centuries a preservation of ancient liberties. Turn from these to an image of one of the successors of Diocletian, one who preferred to reside in Constantinople, the new capital of the empire. Do not seek his image in one of the ceremonial statues where, by force of routine, the sculptor may perchance have preserved classic rules; but in monuments of another order, where the artist kept closer to reality, in miniatures adorning manuscripts, in mosaics, in ivory diptychs, etc. There you will find figures which have nothing left of the simplicity and nobility which Rome borrowed from Greece, but figures which in some particulars recall the old art of Asia, and in others already announce the art of the middle ages. The head is encircled with a diadem. The body and the limbs are entirely hidden by clinging draperies which are very long and very narrow. The materials which form this species of case are decorated from top to bottom with rich embroideries in the shape of medallions, flowers, animals, and even persons. There is no more deception; we are no longer in Rome; fictions so long preserved have finally disappeared; the empire has turned into an Oriental despotism. "Between the two extremes of the series, how many degrees are there which furnish the very best commentaries of history? The heads of all the Cæsars, even those of Claudius, the accidental scholar, and of Caligula, the wicked and witty fool, are aristocratic. They show the nobility and the pride of race. You recognize in them the descendants of those grand patrician families which at first seemed to hold exclusively the right to give masters to the Romans. With Vespasian, scion of a middle-class family pushing its way into second-class public positions, the advent of a new order is evident. Vespasian has the round and smooth, double-chinned face of the chief clerk of a commercial or banking establishment. Trajan has the features of a soldier who has probably pushed his way to the front from the ranks. Hadrian, who turns his head to hear the better, whose bright eyes gleam even in the marble, whose half-opened mouth seems in the act of speech, shows the features of a learned and intelligent scholar. Marcus Aurelius, with his bristling hair and beard, would be taken for a Greek philosopher. In Caracalla's looks there is derangement. His eye betrays that murderous and fantastic frenzy which seized more than one emperor, especially of those who from early youth had been exposed to the temptations of absolute power.[17] [Footnote 17: There is a bust of Julius Cæsar in England of which a cast or a copy should be by the side of every expounder of the Commentaries. The presence of the bust would give new life to the narrative, for there is more life in the marble than in the writing. There are in the Louvre, placed side by side, three representations of Nero which tell the story of the man more graphically than the pages of Suetonius. The first represents the youth, whose thoughts are pure, hopes bright, and resolves noble. The second shows the conflict with evil and the beginning of the triumph of sin. The third is so monstrous in its brutality and lust that it must have been taken but a short time before the catastrophe which terminated the matricide's career. Historians may detail the circumstances of the fall of Rome, philosophers may investigate the causes which led to it, but that hideous face in the Louvre tells the whole story with a force so startling, so instantaneous, that history and philosophy seem weak and wanting.] "Not to personages alone do pictured monuments give life. The same character of sensible reality is imparted to the frame and to the surroundings of the picture, to all the theater where these actors played their parts. Of this truth no one of our teachers, when I was a collegian, seemed to have a suspicion. There was not an illustration in the cold and dry compendiums which were placed in our hands. I can almost ask myself if, when I studied Greek and Roman history, I was really convinced that Sparta and Athens, Rome and Carthage had actually existed. I certainly did not know how or where to place them in space, what idea to have of their situation, or of the outlines made by the ridges of their walls, their houses, and their temples. All these cities were to me vague shadows, floating between heaven and earth. No one of them answered to a distinct and defined form. "If this be the case with classical antiquity, in spite of the color and splendor of the narratives of its writers, how much more difficult is it to know and understand France of the middle ages when condemned to study it in its literary work alone! The literature of the period is partly in debased Latin, partly in early French. The French of the day was not the language of the thinkers. The deep thought of the age is not to be found in minstrelsy and ballads. It must be asked of the learned, of philosophers, of theologians, and of sacred writers. But to follow them in the subtle analyses and in the excessive complications of symbolism, in which they delight, requires mental efforts which are made all the more laborious by the artificial character of the church Latin, which no longer continued to renew itself at the source of popular speech. It is impossible to see how such works, in spite of their value to erudition, can be called to take part in the education of the young. It is for this reason that lately, by a judicious innovation, a discreet place has been made in the curriculum for histories and poems written in the common language, for the Chanson de Roland, and for the works of Villehardouin and Joinville. But the student can only read these in translations, or in those adaptations which so modernize the language as to leave but a little of its original flavor, and which therefore make but an imperfect contact between the original work and the mind of the reader. But supposing the scholar capable of mastering the original text: can its formless and superabundant prose, or the tiresome monotone of its flowing dissonances, give him emotions which have the vivacity of those which a page of Tacitus or a song of Virgil gives to those who know even a modicum of Latin? Can they have the power to excite the imagination in the same degree as any strong and concise sentence of the historian, any sonorous and glowing verse of the Roman poet? "It is only exceptionally and as by flashes that the writings of the middle ages give the impression of true beauty. The conceptions are often grand, but the expression is always weak and dragging. On the other hand, Roman or Gothic churches are not less beautiful after their manner than Greek temples. Their beauty is of another fashion, but many souls are touched more deeply. They manifest no less clearly the power of the religious faith which constructed them. The particular character of Christian faith is shown with singular clearness in their majesty, in the elevation of their vaults, in the half lights which flood them, and in the thousands of figures which populate and animate every surface. As in Greece, the sculptor co-operates intelligently and docilely with the architect and has occupied no less happily the allotted fields. As Phidias and Alcamenes represented on the pediments and friezes of Doric temples the great gods of Greece and the local myths of Athens and Olympia, so anonymous masters, called to decorate the cathedrals of the middle ages, have placed impressive statues on the sides and in the _voussoirs_ of the portals, in the open galleries which run along the façades, on the top of the pinnacles which throng the roof--in fact, everywhere where space is offered. These statues, distributed in an order regulated by doctrine and tradition, show forth the Saviour, the Virgin, saints and angels, prophets and apostles, and hosts of personages and scenes suggested by Holy Writ or by local and popular legends. Among these images there are many at Bourges, Chartres, Rheims, Amiens, and Nôtre Dame de Paris, which are marvels of severe elegance, of chaste and haughty grace, and of lofty moral nobility. This wonderful statuary has but lately been investigated, exposed, and studied, but already it would be difficult to find a connoisseur unwilling to compare with the most boasted statues of antiquity that admirable image of the teaching Christ of the west portal of Amiens, to which the popular surname has been attached of _le Beau Dieu d'Amiens_. "For evident reasons, French sculpture of the thirteenth century did not, as did Greek sculpture, devote itself to the study and reproduction of the nude. It denied itself this attraction. All figures are clad; but beneath the drapery, which is in fine masses with large folds, the outline and the movement of form are indicated with precision. The principal interest and the rare originality, however, of this sculpture is that it is perhaps the most expressive that has ever existed. This expressiveness appears in the general effect of the pose, in the disposition of the drapery, but especially in the character which the artist has succeeded in giving to the features of the face. "The august mysteries of the Christian dogma, the poetry of the Old and of the New Testament, the triumphant deaths of martyrs, the miracles of saints and their infinite charity--these things which the middle ages failed to put into clear and intelligible words are fully rendered in sculpture. The work of the chisel is large and firm. Difficulties are not sought, nor are they feared. Whatever be the material, the form is sure. To understand how superior the plastic is to the literary work, and to measure the distance, compare the Amiens statue with the portraits the authors of the Mysteries endeavor to draw of the Son of God. 'What can be more flat than these poor verses, which are nevertheless of the sixteenth century? The authors had good intentions and an apprehension of what should be done, but they were betrayed by the language in which they wrote. The sculptors of the thirteenth century, on the contrary, who possessed fully the grammar of their art, expressed all they felt, and have left us the most divine images of Jesus Christ in existence.'[18] [Footnote 18: E. Mâle. Revue Universitaire, Third Année, l. i, p. 15.] "Italy of the Renaissance is quite unintelligible to any one who has not measured the place held by art in the preoccupations not only of artists who practice it, but of all men of all conditions--of princes, nobles, tradesmen, and of citizens of most humble occupations. No one in any rank is without a passionate love for plastic beauty. This love was Italy's life and Italy's death. She died of it, because all her sap was consumed in satisfying it. It made her indifferent to her dismemberment, to the hard yoke of her tyrants, to the loss of her political liberties, and of her independence. But, at the same time, it constituted the intensity of her life which was exhausted and renewed again in the ardor with which she pursued her ideal and in her endeavors to realize it under all its aspects. Let him who would wish to obtain an exact idea of this condition reside for a while in Mantua, in Parma, in Sienna, in Florence, or in any other less-known city which nevertheless had its local school of art, its architects, its sculptors, its painters, some of whom, though they only worked for their native city, were not far from manifesting genius.[19] [Footnote 19: Raphael's Madonnas save the reputation of the papal see of the sixteenth century, for pontiffs who cherished such pure and gentle representations could not have been so corrupt as Luther's partisans assert.] "The written history of the seventeenth century and its rich literature can not alone give an idea of the situation occupied by Louis XIV in Europe when he was admired, imitated, or rather servilely copied, as pre-eminently the type of the modern king even by those who hated him the most. After two centuries, have we not seen his wonderful prestige still potent in dominating the sickly mind of Louis II of Bavaria? In his desire to copy his chosen model Louis ruined himself in building palaces. In this folly he showed discrimination. Louis XIV, when dying, may have accused himself of having indulged too great a love for building; but his edifices, with their majestic grandeur and the opulence of their decoration, gave that royal life a frame which had much to do with the dazzling which all Europe experienced when in the presence of _le Roi Soleil_. In order to recognize and experience, though but for a moment, a little of the impression felt by all contemporaries, Versailles must be visited; the apartments of the palace, the terraces, and the alleys of the park must be traversed. Thus will be thrown upon this historic figure a light far more brilliant and true than could possibly be the result of learning by heart accounts of all the campaigns of Turenne or Condé, or all the clauses of the treaties of Nimègue and Ryswick. "The same may be said of the eighteenth century, of which only an incomplete idea can be had without a knowledge of its art. This century, to which Voltaire gave the note, seems to have had no sentiment of poetry. Down to the time of André Chenier everything called poetry was no more than rhymed prose. The imagination, however, did not lose its rights. Like a stream which changes its bed, it withdrew from literature to flow into the arts of design. There it gives evidence of invention and of light and spontaneous grace. Architects adopt plans of happy arrangement. They employ forms of rare elegance both in the elements of construction and in the ornaments which decorate them. Such sculptors as Capperi and Houdon give to portraiture a marvelous intensity of life, while the terra cottas of Clodion, with their fantastic and voluptuous charm, recall the clay modelers of antiquity. Such painters as Greuze, Lancret, and Boucher spread before the eyes living idyls, while Watteau and Frangonard conjure dreams of ideal Cytheras, of a chimerical paradise where reign eternal youth and eternal desire. The politics of our kings and of our ministers of the period is but a succession of faults and weaknesses. The best concerted plans come to naught. The most brilliant victory produces no useful results. If France, in spite of so many reverses, still held her supremacy in Europe, she owed it to her writers and to her artists." Perrot's arguments might be used with even greater force in reference to those notions which have had no Comines, no Joinville, no Froissart, no Villehardouin, but the history of whose civilization may be traced in monuments along the Rhine and the Danube, the Ems and the Elbe. In the last part of the article Perrot considers the best methods of giving the desired instruction. However interesting and valuable his suggestions may be in communities where the instruction has already been established, it is evident that there must first be a conviction of the value and necessity of such studies and the determination to have them started. Methods are not difficult to devise, and will vary with national and individual tastes. That American colleges of thirty, forty, or fifty years ago should have objected to the introduction of the history of the fine arts into their curricula is easily understood. Art in any form was regarded by the New England mind as an emanation of the devil, and the New England mind controlled American colleges. Why the repugnance continues to exist is harder to understand. It may subsist from ignorance, from prejudice, or from conservatism. Conservatism may still regard all information to be derived from art as objectionable. Prejudice may still be strongly fixed in the notion that written and spoken words are the only vehicles of instruction, and that the arts are useless and idle vanities, while ignorance may be awaiting demonstration which will have to be strong and conclusive to awake it from self-satisfied apathy. May the good words of Perrot help on the cause and accelerate the time when the best and the fullest education will be offered by the American university! HOW STANDARD TIME IS OBTAINED. BY T. B. WILLSON, M. A. Almost everybody knows that observatories are the places from which standard time is sent out and corrected daily or hourly. But comparatively few have more than the vaguest idea of the means used at the observatories for obtaining it. Probably the majority of people suppose that the observatories obtain the correct time from the sun. When the average man wishes to give his watch the highest praise he says, "It regulates the sun," not being aware that a watch which would keep with the sun around the year would have to be nearly as bad as Sam Weller's. The farmer may safely decide when to go in to dinner by the sun, but if the mariner was as confident that the sun marked always the correct time as the farmer is he would be sure to be at times two or three hundred miles from where he thought he was. In other words, the sun--that is, a sundial--is only correct on a few days in each year, and during the intervening times gets as far as a whole quarter hour fast or slow. These variations of the sun from uniform time caused no end of trouble between the astronomers and the fine clockmakers before it was discovered that sun time is subject to such irregularities. The better the clock, the worse it often seemed to go. But as the variations in sun time are now accurately known, correct time might be obtained from the sun by making proper allowance, were it not for the difficulty of observing its position, with sufficient exactness. The large disk of the sun can not be located so perfectly as can the single point which a star makes. For this reason astronomers depend almost wholly upon the stars for obtaining accurate time. It is the method of doing this which we propose to describe. There are several hundred stars whose positions have been established with the greatest accuracy by the most careful observations at a number of the principal observatories of the world. If a star's exact position is known, it can readily be calculated when it will pass the meridian of any given place--that is, the instant it will cross a north-and-south line through the place. The data regarding these stars are all published in the nautical almanacs, which are got out by several different observatories for the use of navigators and all others who have uses for them. These stars are known as "clock stars." Every observatory is provided with at least one, or, better, several clocks that are very accurate indeed. Every appliance and precaution which science can suggest is resorted to to make these clocks accurate. The workmanship is, of course, very fine. What is known as the "retaining click" prevents their losing a single beat while being wound. The small variations in the length of the pendulum which changes of temperature would cause are offset by compensation. The rise of the mercury in the pendulum bob, if the weather grows warmer, shortens the pendulum precisely as much as the expansion of its rod lengthens it, and conversely if it becomes colder. Such clocks, too, are set on stone piers built up from below the surface of the ground and wholly independent of the building itself. Often the clocks are made with air-tight cases, and sometimes are placed in tightly closed chambers, only to be entered when absolutely necessary. Some fine clocks even have appliances for offsetting barometric changes, but these affect such clocks less than other influences or imperfections which can not be accounted for, and thus they are seldom provided against. The astronomer's principal clock--the one he uses in all his calculations--marks what is known as sidereal, not ordinary, time. The revolution of the earth in its orbit sets the sun back in its place in the heavens at the rate of about four minutes a day, or one whole day in a year, so that this clock, indicating star time, gains this amount and is only with ordinary clocks once a year. After it is once adjusted, no attempt is made to regulate it exactly, as the astronomer would better calculate its differences than disturb its regulation, always provided its rate is very uniform and accurately known. One or more of the other clocks, however, are made to show ordinary time, and corrected by observations taken every few days. It is from this clock that the standard time is sent out. It is possible to connect any of these clocks telegraphically with an instrument in the observatory, known as a chronograph. It consists of a cylinder with a sheet of paper around it, on which rests a pen connected with the telegraphic instrument which follows the beats of the clock. The cylinder is turned slowly by clockwork, and the pen, carried slowly along by a screw, describes a spiral on the paper with jogs or teeth in it about a quarter of an inch apart, caused by the beats of the clock. In this way the astronomer secures a visible record of the beating of his clock, or rather of the movements of his telegraphic recorder. Thus, if he has another key on the same circuit with the clock, connected with his chronograph recorder, and should touch it between the beats of his clock, it would put in an extra jog or tooth on his record, and it will show, what he could not have told in any other way, in just what part of the second he touched this key, whether in the first or last part of the second, and precisely how far from either end--that is, he can determine fractions of a second with great nicety. [Illustration: A SHORT SECTION FROM THE PAPER BAND OF THE CHRONOGRAPH CYLINDER, SHOWING TRACINGS OF PEN CONNECTED WITH CLOCKS: 1, seconds of sidereal clock; 2, both sidereal and common clocks; 3-10, the tracings of the mean-time clock fall steadily behind the other; 11, sidereal only; 12, connected with observer's key. The extra teeth show when a star passed each of the five spider lines. At the extreme right is a "rattle," put in to show where the observation is on the cylinder.] As a matter of fact, he has such a key at the telescope which he uses to make his observations in taking time, so that when he wishes to record the precise instant in which anything takes place which he is viewing through his telescope he has but to press the key in his hand and an extra tooth will be put into the record which the clock is making, somewhere among the regular teeth put in by the beating of the clock. Later, when he takes out the sheet he can see just where the tooth came, and so at what instant it was. If, now, he knows exactly what the instant was according to the true time as given in his almanacs--that is, what his clock ought to have shown at that instant--he can tell how nearly right his clock is. Once knowing how this clock is, it is a simple calculation to find how the clock which sends the signals is running, and to alter it if needed in a manner we shall describe later. The observations the astronomer makes use of to determine these instants of time are upon the "clock stars." He uses a rather small telescope, known as a transit. It is placed with the nicest accuracy in a north-and-south line. It can turn over vertically, but can not move sideways out of its line. Its alignment is kept perfect by occasionally sighting some small mark a few rods from the observatory, either north or south. If the astronomer points this transit, say, halfway up the southern heavens and sees a star pass across the center of its field he knows that that instant gives, as it were, the "noon mark" of that star. If it is one of the "clock stars," he knows by his tables what that instant of time is--should be--by his clock. We have seen what his means are of comparing his clock and his observations. But observe, now, how much pains he takes to get the most exact observations. To begin with, he must have calculated to a nicety his location. The director of an observatory always knows where he is located in a sense that few other men do. The accuracy of a large part of his observations of any kind depends on his first having determined the latitude and longitude of his observatory within a very few feet. Then the data given by his tables are all modified, and adapted to conform to his locality. There are stretched across in the eyepiece of his transit five spider lines. The central one is on the central line of the field of his instrument. In observing a star for time the astronomer watches it as it is carried by the rotation of the earth past each of these spider lines, and presses his key--that is, makes a record--as it crosses each line. Taking the average of these five observations, he makes the possible error very small. But, in addition to this, he also usually makes observations on at least four clock stars, which gives him twenty observations to average up and determine by. As he inspects the record of these observations which has gone upon the chronograph sheet along with the clock beats he is able to determine, after proper calculations, how his clock stands. Such observations are made every three or four evenings, and thus the clocks are not given time to get far out of the way. It is not usual for a good clock to show a variation of more than half a second. If the astronomer finds that his clock which is sending the time is running a fraction of a second slow, he goes to it and lays on the top of the pendulum bob a minute clipping of metal, which is equivalent to shortening the pendulum an infinitesimal amount. When he takes his next observation he discovers how his clock has been affected, and again treats it accordingly. Thus the time that is sent out automatically by the clock is kept always correct within a small fraction of a second. Those who receive the time sometimes arrange electro-magnets near the pendulums of their clocks, which act with the beats of the observatory clock, and their attraction is enough to hold or accelerate the pendulums as needed to make them synchronize with the observatory clock. It will be seen that the means of obtaining exact time involve a very considerable outlay, and that the services of highly trained men are needed. The public is thus greatly indebted to the railroads, telephone companies, and other corporations which usually bear the expense of securing standard time. It is probable, however, that from motives of scientific pride no observatory would undertake to charge for this anything like what would be exacted for such rare service in any department of the commercial world. It is worth while to note that even with such perfect clocks and favorable conditions it is still impossible to secure perfect timekeeping. Add to this the fact that it is not usual for those who send out the time, after it has been received from the observatory, to pay much heed to variations, even of several seconds, in their master clocks, and we see why it is a disheartening task to keep the best watch as near the second as the owner would fain have it. In the first place, the watch could hardly be made to keep such time if kept still in an unchanging temperature; secondly, it is still less capable of it when subjected to the jolting and changes of temperature it encounters when carried; and, thirdly, the means of obtaining time with sufficient exactitude are rarely available to the general public. AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES. BY W. E. DE RIEMER, M. A. The recent death, at the closing of the year 1898, of the lamented Senator Justin S. Morrill, who, as being the author of the Land-Grant College Act, is justly styled the father of agricultural education in the United States, seems to suggest the desirability of taking a survey of agricultural education as it at present exists in other countries than our own. Since the pursuit of agriculture is one which concerns more of the people of our globe than any other pursuit, the necessity for scientific training for agriculturists becomes more and more evident to educated people. It is true that the cultivators of the soil do not generally admit the need of special schooling. At the beginning of this century very few educators, even, thought so. It was supposed that tilling the soil had nothing to do with schools, and that science had no connection with plowing and sowing. Agricultural lectureships were established early in the eighteenth century in several European universities, but they were regarded as curiosities of the age--superfluities of culture, rather than aids to the cultivator. Farmers themselves were supposed to be the only competent teachers of agriculture, and experience the only possible guide. But it has become apparent that no farmer's experience is broad enough to be adapted to all soils and climates. The successful farmer has come to regard the land which he owns as a wonderful machine which, if rightly managed, will turn out the most costly and perfect product; but which, if neglected or ignorantly handled, will disappoint his high hopes and possibly impoverish its owner. The development of commerce which so easily introduces the wheat and potatoes and other products of our country into competition with the grain produced in a distant land has taught the producers of this generation, and especially the citizen of European countries, that the farmer who can produce the largest crop of grain from the fewest acres, at the lowest price for the best cereal or vegetable, is the only successful cultivator. The nation which succeeds best in this direction with all its soil products is the one which is sure to have the "balance of trade" always in its favor. The United States awoke to this idea when, in 1862, Congress passed the Land-Grant College Act, allotting Government lands in every State to aid in founding agricultural colleges. The country became more profoundly moved by this idea when, in 1887, Congress passed the Hatch Act, granting annually to each State the sum of fifteen thousand dollars to organize and perpetuate agricultural experiment stations, and still further when it organized a Department of Experiment Stations as an integral part of the Department of Agriculture. But several of the countries of Europe have anticipated our action in behalf of agricultural education by a quarter of a century. Germany and France and little Switzerland realized fifty years ago that agriculture in its various departments must be pursued with the aid of the latest science combined with the broadest experience. These countries have not waited for the laborer to perfect himself in experience--an impossible attainment--but they have opened schools of every possible grade, arranged courses of lectures by the best educated scientists, made elementary agriculture a compulsory subject in the curricula of the common schools, sent out traveling instructors to confer with and advise and give courses of lectures to the older farmers, made it possible--even compulsory--that young people should attend technical schools at odd hours of the day or evening, and even tempted them to pass a serious examination in their respective studies by the offer of a valuable prize as the reward of success. It is said that Charles Dickens once made a speech at an agricultural dinner in which he somewhat derisively said that "the field it paid the farmer best to cultivate was the one within the ring fence of his own skull." Dickens was correct. The farmer needs scientific education. The best civilized and progressive nations of to-day are admitting the utterance of Dickens to be a serious truth. Vast sums of money are appropriated by European governments to prevent their agricultural classes from continuing in or subsiding into ignorance of their art. Even the peasants of Russia, notably in the province of Ekaterinoslav, by the generous appliances for special agricultural education made by the Ministry of Agriculture and State Domains, united with the efforts of the Ministry of Public Instruction, are made to feel that without expert teaching a man can not succeed even in the raising of fowls or of bees, the culture of silkworms, the making of wine, or the manuring of his fields. Consul Heenan[20] says that in the province named above the Government annually rents thirty-two experiment fields, each eight acres in extent, distributed four in each district, and each one located in the midst of peasant fields. Each of these fields is placed in charge of some scientifically educated public-school teacher, who is paid twenty-five dollars per year for his direction, and receives, besides, all the harvest produced. The teacher uses the native tools and seeds, and hires neighbor peasants to assist in demonstrating that with care in plowing, cleaning of seed, cultivating, and reaping, his field will produce larger crops than his slovenly or ignorant neighbor. The object lesson has its certain result. The peasants are gradually adopting the four-field culture system--viz., fallow, winter crops, pastures, and summer crops. [Footnote 20: See United States Consular Reports, vol. lvii, No. 215, August, 1898, article on Gardener's Schools in Russia, by Consul Heenan.] Besides these, Russia sustains 68 agricultural schools, containing 3,157 pupils, at a cost of $403,500, of which sum the Government pays $277,500, and the local _zemstovs_ (societies) or the school founders pay $136,000. In France the eminent scientist Lavoisier, at the close of the last century, advocated the founding of a national school for the teaching of agricultural science. His plan for government initiation was not realized, but in 1822 Matthieu de Dombasle founded, near Nancy, the first true agricultural school. In 1829 and 1830 the schools at Grignon and Grandjouan were founded by August Bella and Riefell respectively. Now France boasts of one of the most perfect systems of agricultural education of any country of the world. Under the joint direction of her Ministers of Agriculture and of Public Instruction, France plans to cover every phase of education from the simplest forms of object lessons taught by law in all her primary schools to the crowning National Institute of Agriculture at Paris. The facts of science, united with the soundest experience, are demonstrated to the farmer by lectures and experimentation; the future agriculturists of the country are educated in the certainties of scientific research at graded schools, ranging from elementary to university degrees, and every milkmaid is taught the necessity of promptness, cleanliness, and system in the care of milch cows and in the disposal of their milk. The former able Director-General of French Agriculture, Monsieur Tisserand, says: "The aim and object of France has been not only to give to children and young people the means of acquiring knowledge, but also to establish means for _interesting old cultivators_. In this century of extreme competition we must admit that the agriculturist can only thrive if, in working the soil, he adopts scientific methods. Old routine is no longer sufficient in this branch, as it is proved to be insufficient in manufacture." In carrying out her enlightened policy, instruction was given in 1893[21] to 3,600 pupil teachers. Thirty agricultural laboratories throughout the country furnish analyses of soils and manures for the help of cultivators, and 3,362 trial fields are established where farmers can profit by experiments suitable to their own districts. The special farm schools number sixteen; practical schools of agriculture, thirty-nine; national schools of agriculture and horticulture, six; three veterinary schools; and one each, bearing the name of National Agronomic Institute, is a shepherd school, a cheese, and a silkworm school. In the universities are no less than 160 departments and chairs of agriculture for students of profoundest research. All this costs the departments alone over 4,504,050 francs per annum. [Footnote 21: Statistics of 1893. The French Government only occasionally issues its official report of agricultural schools.] In Prussian Germany no less activity is displayed or energy put forth to make the farmer's occupation one of financial profit and scientific status. Statistics for 1897 are at hand in the report of the Prussian Minister of Agriculture. The German system is based on the theory that schools and colleges are the only places where theoretical agriculture can be properly taught. Few of the higher agricultural schools first established were exclusively such. A liberal education could be obtained at most of them without touching the subject of agriculture. Later educators have developed a system which begins by fostering a love for Nature in the minds of the pupils in the kindergarten, and patiently develops that love through all the dozen or more grades of schools until it culminates in the polytechnic school or the degree granted by the university. Germany is indebted to the learned Professor Thaer for the establishment of its first agricultural school at Möglin in 1807. But more than all is she, in common with all the world, indebted to the famous chemist Baron von Liebig, who, in 1840, announced the scientific truth which underlies all arguments for agricultural education--viz., that no matter how impoverished a soil is naturally, or has become by excessive cropping, its fertility may be restored, maintained, and even increased by providing it with the mineral and organic matter which it lacks. Prussian agricultural affairs are under the supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture, Domains, and Forests. The state maintains three grades of schools--higher, middle, and lower--as in other European countries. The most celebrated are the Royal Agricultural High Schools at Berlin and Popplesdorf, two royal academies of forestry, and the university courses in agriculture at Halle, Göttingen, Königsberg, Leipsic, Giessen, and Jena. The state expends something like two hundred thousand dollars annually on agricultural education. In Germany agricultural education has so broadened out as to include training in every technical part of a farmer's work--culture of forests, fruits, flowers, and vines; schools to teach wine, cider, and beer making, machine repairing, engine running, barn construction, and surveying; knowledge of poultry, bees, and silkworm raising; domestic economy, sewing, and accounts for farm women--all in addition to the long scientific courses of study and years of practical work on an established farm. Verily, the country that excels Germany in training agriculturists must be _par excellence_ in its methods. A special feature of agricultural teaching is the traveling professor (_Wanderlehrer_). United States Consul Monaghan enthusiastically describes him: "These teachers, supported partly by the state and by agricultural unions, go from place to place ... and lecture on agricultural and horticultural subjects. Their purpose is to lift up and ennoble agricultural life; to afford the farmer the knowledge gleaned by science since he left the school; to impart to him the best methods of selecting soils, fertilizers, cattle, trees, etc.; to teach him how to use his lands to best advantage, to graft, to breed in; to get the best, quickest, and most profitable results. These teachers are skilled scientists, practical workers, not theorists, ... perfectly familiar with the wants and needs of their districts. Armed with this knowledge, the teacher's usefulness is certain and unlimited. When he speaks his voice is that of one in authority, it is heeded.... He is a walking encyclopædia of knowledge, especially of knowledge pertaining to the woods, hills, farms, and fields." Austria has, like Germany, a system of agricultural and forestry schools in three grades--viz., superior, middle, and lower. Its oldest school of superior grade was established in 1799 at Krumman.[22] Similar schools existed later at Grätz, Trieste, Lemberg, Trutsch, and Altenburg. The latter is especially complete in every appliance for instruction, and well patronized. The middle schools provide two-year courses of study and practice, and are located at Grossan, Kreutz, Dublany, and other points, while the lower schools incline less to study and more to lectures and farm practice. They are located in the provinces of Bohemia, Styria, Galicia, and Carinthia. [Footnote 22: See Barnard's Journal of Education, vol. xx, 1870, p. 673.] Forestry schools of various grades exist at Mariabrunn, Wissewasser, Aussen, Pibram, Windschact, and Nagny; of these, Mariabrunn is especially deserving of mention for its thorough course and complete equipment. Switzerland was the home of the philanthropist and educator Fellenburg. His school, established at Hopyl in 1806, was a philanthropy in aid of the peasantry, concerning whom he said that possessing nothing but bodies and minds, the cultivation of these was the only antidote for their poverty. At least three thousand pupils received their education in agriculture here. The Federal Polytechnic School at Zurich is the nation's pride. Out of six courses of superior training which it provides for its one thousand students, forestry and agriculture count as two. Five universities and numerous special schools furnish aid to agricultural education. The little kingdoms of Belgium and Holland are following hard upon the tracks of their powerful neighbors. In Belgium may be found superior institutions of agriculture, horticulture, veterinary science, and forestry at Gembloux, Vilvorde, Cureghem, and Bouillon respectively. In Holland, whose people robbed the sea to obtain lands for farms and homes, about £71,500 were expended by the state on its agricultural department in 1897. Its first school, established by a communal society at Hären in 1842, was discontinued. The state in 1876 adopted the school of agriculture which has been established at Wageningen as its own, and this institution can fairly lay claim to equality with any in Europe. Government also supports the State Veterinary College at Utrecht, and subsidizes a school of forestry and several dairy schools. Agricultural teaching in primary schools has not yet proved a success. Italy has not made such progress in agricultural education as her northern neighbors, yet she is not indifferent to the requirements of the times. She has a most unique scheme for Government superintendence of agricultural matters. All comes under the purview of a general Director of Agriculture, assisted by a Council for Agricultural Instruction, which latter was established by royal decree in 1885, and reorganized in 1887. Four divisions of the department exist--namely, (1) agriculture proper, (2) zoötechny, (3) forestry, and (4) agricultural hydraulics. Statistics are not easily procured, but recent catalogues show that the two Royal Superior Schools of Agriculture, located respectively at Milan and Portici, are institutions of which any country might be proud. Of the latter Mr. E. Neville Rolfe, British consul, wrote in 1897 that it was originally a provincial establishment, but in 1885 it had been established by royal charter and domiciled in the magnificent grounds and buildings of a disused royal palace. Its study course requires three years to complete, and graduates obtain the degree of Laureato Agronomo. Up to 1896, two hundred and twenty-eight students had obtained this degree, most of whom are instructors or Government employees of high rank. It is known also that thirty-three special and practical agricultural schools exist in different parts of the kingdom. Much can not be said in praise of agricultural education in Spain. That country possesses the machinery for education of the higher grades, but through her seven distinctly agricultural colleges, located at Madrid, Saragossa, Barcelona, Corunna, Valencia, Caceres, and Jerez, she seems only to have obtained men for Government service at home or abroad. Spain expended in 1896 on agricultural education the sum of £58,460, but she evidently sends no _Wanderlehrer_ instructors among her peasant farmers. It is said that Portugal possesses seven agricultural schools, attended in 1896 by one hundred and eighty-seven students, but of their location, save one, and courses of study the writer has no information. The Government conduct of education is committed to a Director-General of Agriculture. The leading school is named the General Institute of Agriculture, and is located at Lisbon. It provides four courses--viz., (1) rural engineering, (2) agronomy, (3) sylviculture, (4) veterinary medicine. It has a large tract of land for demonstration purposes located a few miles from the city. Concerning Greece and the smaller kingdoms in southeastern Europe, together with the land of the Turk, not much to the encouragement of the scientific agriculturist can be said; but turning northward across Europe to the Scandinavian countries quite a different state of things becomes apparent. At once we find that the system of agricultural education is highly developed, and in some phases is not surpassed by other countries. Immediately we are in a network of dairy schools, experiment stations, chemical and seed-control stations, agricultural societies, colleges, and universities. Here we find five institutions all under royal patronage and state support. In Norway is the Higher Agricultural School at Aas, established in 1859. In Sweden stands the Agricultural Institute at Ultuna, established in 1849, and the Alnarp Agricultural and Dairy Institute, established in 1862. In Denmark is the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College at Copenhagen, established in 1773 as a veterinary college. In Finland the Mustiala Agricultural and Dairy Institute, established in 1840. In these four small states there exist agricultural, horticultural, forestry, and dairy schools of all grades to the number of one hundred and fifty-nine. Education in agriculture is not attempted in the primary public schools of Norway or in any of these Scandinavian countries, but agricultural elementary instruction is begun in what other continental countries would call secondary schools, and is provided for persons intending to be farmers and who are eighteen years of age and older. Norway spent on elementary agricultural education in secondary schools, in 1895-'96, the sum of $31,182, and Finland more than doubled that sum. Crossing the Channel to Great Britain, again we see a nation intent on solving the question of success for her agricultural population. Celebrated Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen early began to plan for an educated peasantry, but it was long before any national system was evolved. The sectional divisions and peculiarities belonging severally to Scot and Celt and Saxon have not yet permitted a uniform legislation. Ireland and Scotland each has its own scheme of Government supervision, and both differ from England and Wales. It is estimated that but ten per cent of England's laboring population is concerned with agriculture for support, while in Ireland there is scarcely ten per cent of the people who are not dependent on agriculture for existence. In consequence, we find in Ireland, as in France, intense interest centers upon the plan to teach agriculture and horticulture in the elementary public schools, while in England, until very recently, agricultural education served principally to produce a class of educated scientific men fitted for the Government home and colonial service. In Ireland compulsory attendance on primary schools is made by law. In 1876 Ireland claimed to be the pioneer country in providing compulsory elementary agricultural instruction in all her rural schools. She has desperately clung to the theory that in providing such education in her elementary schools she would eventually train a nation of agriculturists. To attain this end, elementary text-books were prepared, which all teachers must use. The Government grant for a pass at examination in agriculture was much larger than a pass in any other study; teachers who held certificates to teach it were given higher salaries than others, and to enable teachers to prepare for such certificates, scholarships were offered them at teachers' colleges (normal schools), and their railway fare was free in going and coming. Plots of ground at schoolhouse or teacher's house were provided, where flower and vegetable culture could be constantly practiced, and a special grant was allowed to the school for cultivating a successful garden, and another special for classes showing proficiency in practical work. Gardens were cultivated at convents and workhouses, and the subject was taught theoretically to "half-time" pupils and students at the "evening continuation schools." In December, 1896, Ireland had 8,606 national schools, with an average attendance of 815,248 pupils. She also had 150 half-time schools, 155 workhouse schools, 267 convent schools, 30 model schools, five training colleges for teachers, and two training agricultural institutes (at Glassnevin and at Munster), and in all of these agricultural science or practice is either a compulsory or a voluntary subject. What country can surpass Ireland's enthusiasm for agricultural training?[23] [Footnote 23: A bill for the development of Irish agricultural industry and Irish technical education, providing for Government aid to private enterprise in agriculture, and in manufacturing industries also, has just passed (August, 1899) the House of Commons, and is assured its passage by the House of Lords also.] Scotland enjoys deservedly the distinction of having been first among the peoples of Europe to introduce in the university course scientific education in agriculture. In 1790 a chair was established in the University of Edinburgh, and a course of agricultural lectures was given therefrom by Rev. D. Walker. Better than that, in 1743 a volume entitled Select Transactions was published by Maxwell, representing the agricultural society known as the "Society of Improvers," and numbering at one time three hundred members. Out of this society grew the "Highland and Agricultural Society," which organization has fostered every agricultural effort which private beneficence or royal grant has initiated in the land since 1834. Through its munificence both the departments of forestry and veterinary surgery have been placed upon a firm educational basis, and the educational lectureship of Edinburgh University has been permanently endowed. It has instituted its own syllabus of examinations for granting "Fellowships in Agriculture," and stimulated pupils of the secondary schools to make the effort by offering prizes and scholarships to the ambitious students. The University of Aberdeen has lately entered the field as an agricultural educator by becoming what the Government styles a "collegiate center," receiving a straight subsidy of £100 per annum, and furnishing professional instructors to rural assemblies arranging lectures for them. In the public schools of Scotland agricultural science is arranged for as an optional study from the third to the sixth standards inclusive. In 1895-'96, 4,148 pupils passed examinations in the subject, and the cost of this to the state was £42,792. In 1896-'97 pupils in the "evening continuation schools" to the number of 1,089 passed in agriculture, and 115 others in horticulture. England and Wales are under a joint administration of agricultural affairs. The Government policy, so far as it has one, has been continually opposed to paternalism and direct subsidy or ownership of schools. Rather has her Parliament waited to be solicited to make subventions by way of encouraging individual or local society initiative. The flourishing agricultural schools at Cirencester and Downton, for the instruction of the higher classes, have grown out of private establishments, then been perpetuated by obtaining royal charters, by which the Government became pledged to supply any lack of income. But since 1893 the state has so far relaxed her policy as to grant subsidies to certain colleges centrally located, which it styles "collegiate centers," through which colleges it offers superior instruction to the public. These colleges associate with themselves ample farm lands for experiment grounds and dairy machinery, and equip themselves with competent lecturers, who are also practical experts, and who, upon invitation from agricultural societies or county councils, go forth as lecturers upon their special subjects. Each adjacent county makes an annual grant of £75 to the college funds, and is privileged to nominate students to attend the college agricultural course at a reduction of twenty-five per cent on the usual fee. In 1898-'99 the Board of Education granted to fifteen colleges and associations in England and Wales the sum of £7,200. The colleges were the Yorkshire College at Leeds, Durham College of Science at Newcastle-on-Tyne, University Extension College at Reading, University College at Nottingham, Southeastern Agricultural College at Wye, and in Wales the University Colleges at Bangor and Aberystwith. Besides the direct Government subsidy to higher education, the state grants to the several counties part of the money raised from the excise ("drink money") for educational purposes, out of which at least £78,000 were spent by the committees in 1896-'97 in promoting agricultural education. Still further, Parliament puts into the hands of the Science and Art Department large sums of money to be expended as grants-in-aid of "technical education." The state recognizes instruction in the principles of agriculture as instruction in elementary science, and through this Science and Art Department's grants to primary and secondary schools, and to teachers' colleges, it encourages agricultural education as a technical study. In 1896-'97, 1,023 pupils passed examination, and the respective school managements received as grant on their account a total sum of £140,150.[24] [Footnote 24: Appendix to Report of Science and Art Department, 1896-'97.] In 1897 the Royal Commission on Agricultural Depression in England made its report. Among other declarations made by the commission were these: "We believe that it is essential for the welfare of agriculture that there should be placed within the reach of every young farmer a sound, general school education, including such a grounding in the elements of sciences bearing upon agriculture--e. g., chemistry, geology, botany, and animal physiology--as will give him an intelligent interest in them and familiarize him in their language."[25] [Footnote 25: Page 152 of Report.] They further recommend that hereafter the control of all funds for technical agricultural education be placed with the Board of Agriculture, and that the entire income of the Customs and Excise Act of 1890 should be devoted to educational purposes, agriculture receiving its adequate share. Should the first recommendation carry for all divisions of the United Kingdom, agriculture would cease to be one of the subjects provided for examination by the Science and Art Department. Should the second recommendation become a law, the sum expended by local county councils in agricultural education would be vastly increased. Passing from England to her colonies, let us journey toward the sunrising. Stopping for a moment in Egypt, we note with pleasure the existence of the newly established School of Agriculture at Gizeh, which is under the direction of the Ministry of Public Instruction for Egypt. Its reconstructed course of study was open to students in 1898, and it provides for four years of study. Arabic and English are the teaching languages, especially the latter, and allotments of land for individual culture are made to all pupils. Beyond the Indian Ocean lies Hindustan. Here all science study is awaiting its development. The best cultivation of India is not behind that of England as a matter of empiricism,[26] but the science of cultivation is yet to be developed. Agricultural chemistry and agricultural botany and horticulture, as related to India, have scarcely been investigated, and text-books in the native tongues have yet to be written. For this accomplishment all elementary instruction in public schools must patiently wait. For an agriculturally educated set of teachers, also, Indian youth studying in the vernacular must patiently wait. In 1889 the home Government (Parliament) laid upon the Indian Educational Department the duty of providing school "readers" which should contain elementary instruction in agricultural science, and it authorized a liberal grant-in-aid toward such schools as could furnish pupils for passes in this subject. For those students who have mastered the English language a few colleges exist. Saidapet, near Madras, with about forty students in a three-years' course, including veterinary, is a pure agricultural institution. Fourteen students received diplomas in agriculture in March, 1897. [Footnote 26: Dr. Voelker, in his Report on Improvement of Indian Agriculture, made to the English Board of Agriculture in 1893, said: "At the best, the Indian _raiyat_, or cultivator, is quite as good as, and in some respects the superior of, the average British farmer. It is wonderful, too, how much is known of rotation, the system of mixed crops, and of fallowing. Certain it is that I, at least, have never seen a more perfect picture of careful cultivation, combined with hard labor, perseverance, and fertility of resource, than I have seen at many of the halting places. Such are the gardens of Máhim, the fields of Nadiad, the center of the garden of Gujarat, in Bombay."] Several colleges have agricultural departments, notably the Poona College of Science in the Bombay presidency; the Baroda College; the Maharajah's College and the Shimoga College, Mysore; the Central College, and the Sanskrit College of Bangalore. All of these are affiliated with the University of Bombay, and present pupils for examination in agriculture for the degree of B. Sc. A. In many of the English high schools of India are found agricultural classes which give both science teaching and field practice. These schools are at Nagpur, Nasik, Sholapur, Ahmednagar, Ahmedabad, Dhulia, Kolapur, Surat, Belgaum, and Nadiad. The stimulus to study in these schools is the hope of obtaining a diploma in agriculture, which would result in employment in the Government service. In Lucknow is a celebrated veterinary school whose graduates have been greatly sought after. One at Bombay has become still more celebrated. In 1897 sixty-nine students were in attendance. Graduates easily found employment with native rajahs, and on the island of Ceylon, and at Mozambique. Another Government veterinary school recently established at Belgatchia, Calcutta presidency, has done good work. The forestry school at Dehra Dun, in the Northwest Provinces, has attained a great reputation. About seventy students attend, and the Government charges the cost of the school, 33,000 rupees, to the districts which send up pupils for study. India, under the British rule, will soon come into line with educated agriculturists. In Burmah and in Assam steps have been taken to introduce science lessons into Government, or grant-in-aid, elementary schools by the preparation of "readers," as in India, but no secondary or superior schools in agriculture exist in these countries. So far as we know, the same is true of Siam and the Malayan Archipelago and of the Philippines. Australia, as a federation of states, is late in its development, but some of its states are surprisingly advanced. New Zealand has its superior university, combining the three colleges at Auckland, Lincoln, and Otago. Its syllabus provides for searching examinations in agriculture to obtain the degree of B. Sc., either of these colleges having previously granted the diploma of agriculture to successful students. Each of these colleges has ample grants of land, but only one--the Canterbury College at Lincoln--has yet presented agricultural candidates. Forty-four graduates have received diplomas previous to 1895. Instruction in elementary schools seems not yet to have included agriculture. In Queensland the Queensland Agricultural College was opened at Gatton in 1897. In South Australia is an agricultural college at Roseworthy and another at Adelaide which has graduated several recipients of the diploma. In Victoria there exists a college at Dookia and another at Longerong. There is also a school of horticulture at Richmond. To New South Wales belongs the banner for furnishing the greatest opportunities for agricultural education. Its university at Sydney grants a degree of B. Sc. to students from the colleges of St. Paul, St. John, St. Andrew, the Woman's College, and the Sydney Grammar School. At Sydney also is the splendid Technical College, handsomely endowed, having an agricultural department. The superior of all other schools is the Hawksbury Agricultural College and Experimental Farm at Richmond, established in 1891, richly endowed with land (three thousand acres), and organized on the most approved modern models. Science teaching is not carried so high as the university standard, but all manner of practical work must be performed by each student. Homeward bound, we reach Cape Colony, South Africa. Here, in 1887, the Government inaugurated a scheme for aiding farm schools in which elementary agriculture was taught. In 1894, out of 352 schools aided by the Government, 202 were classed as "farmhouse schools." In higher education there may be found (1898) the School of Agriculture and Viticulture at Stellenbosch, and a second one at Sunset East. As both of these schools are young, statistics concerning them are not yet available. Last of England's colonies we notice the Dominion of Canada on our northern frontier. No evident progress has been made in introducing agricultural science teaching in the primary schools of the entire Dominion. The first step taken in the direction of agricultural education was for the enlightenment of farmers. In 1886 Parliament authorized the establishment of a system of experiment farms, one in each province in Canada, viz.: one at Ottawa (to serve both Quebec and Ontario), and one each at Nappan, in Nova Scotia; at Brandon, Manitoba; at Indian Head, Assiniboia; at Agassiz, British Columbia; and at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. To give these stations greater efficiency, the Government encouraged the formation of farmers' institutes in every electoral district for the hearing of lectures from experts which it provided, and for discussion or business. To each regularly organized institute of fifty members a grant of £10 is annually made. In Nova Scotia five primary and secondary schools are reported as giving agricultural instruction to two hundred pupils. Some of these schools have farms or gardens. The Provincial School of Agriculture at Truro is making a good beginning. In its last class three students were granted teachers' diplomas, seven received farmers' diplomas, and eighteen took farmers' certificates. Three hundred and fifty students have pursued its course of studies. There is also a horticultural school at Annapolis Valley. Another horticultural school exists at Wolfville, Nova Scotia, under the control of a committee of the Fruit-Growers' Association. Students take a thorough course of two years' duration. The Legislatures of New Brunswick and of Prince Edward Island grant bonuses of fifty dollars to each young man of their provinces who will take a course at this school. Fine creamery plants are found at various points, and several provinces sustain each a "traveling dairy," which systematically visits accessible centers and gives demonstration lectures to farmers' families. The crowning agricultural educational institution for the entire Dominion is the college at Guelph, Ontario. It combines instruction in veterinary science, horticulture, bee and poultry keeping, dairying, and the experimental farm. The course continues for three years. Two years confers the "associate diploma," and three years' study, with successful examination in the syllabus of the Toronto University, secures the degree of B. Sc. A. Success attends all these educational efforts and marks this colonial empire as among the ranks representing true progress. Mexico and the countries of South America next claim our notice. In the first-named country, as early as the year 1850 provision was made at the old college of San Gregorio for instruction in agriculture in five different courses. But in 1854 the Government came into possession of the disused convent of San Jacinto, Agosta. Here a national school was organized, combining the two departments of agriculture and veterinary science. It was opened February 22, 1854, and designated the National School of Agriculture and Veterinary Science. Its courses of study are up to the best standards. Three years are necessary to complete the agricultural course and receive the title of Superintendent of Rural Estates, and four years' study must be given to secure that of Ingeniero Agronomo. The course was readjusted in 1893. During the five years past 169 graduates have received the former and 68 the latter degrees. The management consists of 48 persons, whose salaries annually cost the Government 96,424 Mexican dollars. Ample grounds and buildings are provided to make this institution a matter for national pride. Besides this college, a farm school exists in one of the federal districts, costing annually $17,564, and another at the colony of Porfirio Diaz, costing the state $14,708. Mexico is also moving to introduce agriculture as a subject for primary instruction in public schools. In Uruguay exist fine schools for teaching agriculture and viticulture which are of recent organization. At Montevideo the Government has created a Department of Live Stock and Agriculture, subject to the Home Ministry. The budget of 1897 provides for organizing and sustaining agricultural schools and experiment farms to the extent of $28,222, with an additional allowance of $90,000 for experiments on farms, installation of plants, furniture, instruments, etc. Chili is coming to the front in her educational efforts. In the city of Concepción exists a Practical School of Agriculture. Others are found at Santiago, at Talca, San Fernando, Elqui, and Salamanca. The school at Santiago receives an annual subvention of $40,000, and that at Concepción the sum of $23,000. Attached to the latter are agronomic stations for soil analysis and oversight of irrigation systems of the state. The Sociedad Nacional de Agricultur at Santiago receives an annual grant of $20,000, which it distributes at agricultural shows and for the support of the zoölogical garden. At Quintan Normal is also an Institute Agricola of high grade for agricultural engineers and agronomics, or for furnishing a simple certificate in agriculture. Other countries of South America possess education facilities, but we are not supplied with details concerning them. Our closing glance must be directed to the far Orient. Japan, the newest of kingdoms, has a model brace of institutions for superior education in agriculture. When Japan awoke to the new ideas, to which for ages she was oblivious, her keenest statesmen grasped the thought that her agricultural people needed new light and intellectual quickening along the lines which so vitally affected their daily subsistence. She took the United States into her confidence. She imported for a season our Commissioner of Agriculture (General Capron), in 1871-'72, as "Adviser to the Colonial Office at Hokaido," who, after visiting Japan, advised the Government to organize at once an agricultural college at Sapporo, and still another at Tokio. This advice was cordially received and speedily adopted. American scholars of the highest wisdom and experience were imported to inaugurate the work. The college was inaugurated by Colonel W. S. Clark, LL. D., President of Amherst Agricultural College, in August, 1876, with twenty-four students. Its new location was Sapporo, and its new name was the Sapporo Agricultural College. The Government dealt liberally in grants of land, but these ample acres have since been mostly confiscated, leaving only sufficient for educational purposes. Few can estimate the wonderful uplift which has come to Japan through this efficient school. In 1893 it had sent out from its agricultural course 123 graduates; from the engineering, 4; military, 42; and from the practical department, 114. In 1874 an agricultural department was added to the Imperial University at Tokio, the original location of the Sapporo College. An exhaustive syllabus in the Department of Agriculture provides examination for many profound students of this science, and admits them to the highest university degree. Four courses are open in the university--viz., agriculture, agricultural chemistry, forestry, and veterinary medicine. In 1895 there were 261 students of agriculture in the university. From this extended though by no means exhaustive review of the status of scientific instruction in agriculture throughout the world, it is evident that all the progressive nations have caught the inspiration which attaches to this branch of education, and are swinging into line in their efforts to adopt it. Old ideals are rapidly giving place to the new. Educators are forced to admit that mental culture is as possible under the study of science as by the protracted study of languages and literature; that such study aids vastly more than the latter in the training which prepares men for the active duties of life; and that if the development of husbandry as a pursuit does not keep pace on an intelligent basis with every other technical pursuit, national greatness and permanence will never be achieved. EASTERN OYSTER CULTURE IN OREGON. BY F. L. WASHBURN, A. M., STATE BIOLOGIST AND PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON. During the past two years the United States Fish Commission, with characteristic enterprise, has been carrying on experiments in the propagation of Eastern oysters in the bays of the Oregon coast. Work of a similar nature is now being undertaken in the State of Washington. [Illustration: "OYSTER CITY," YAQUINA BAY, OREGON.] As the result of an application through official sources, re-enforced possibly by the results of a biological survey made by this department during the preceding summer, twenty-two barrels of Eastern oysters were, on November 7, 1896, deposited on a portion of Oysterville Flat, so called, in Yaquina Bay, Oregon, seven miles and a half from the ocean. The oystermen of that section have agreed to abstain from tonging for native oysters upon the portion of the flat thus reserved until sufficient time has elapsed to justify an opinion as to the result of the experiment. These introduced oysters were of two varieties--the long, slender East Rivers and the more oval, fan-shaped, and ribbed Princess Bays. Their journey of twelve days across the continent, in sugar barrels, from New York to San Francisco and thence to Oregon without water did not cause the mortality one might expect, for in strewing them over the bed from the scows of the oystermen very few dead individuals were observed--certainly not one half of one per cent. [Illustration: AN EXPERIMENTAL SPAWNING FLOAT.] This alien oyster has much to contend with here. It was realized that the cold and salt water rushing in from the Pacific--colder and salter by far than in their Atlantic home at the same time--if it did not entirely prevent spawning would at least make the survival of the young embryos a matter of doubt; yet it was hoped that perhaps, after a number of years, the oysters might become acclimated, as it were, and their spawn, inheriting their parents' acquired hardiness, we might present to the people of the State a new form of Oregon product in the shape of Eastern oysters hatched and grown in the waters of this bay. Notwithstanding the fecundity of this oyster, a female producing in the vicinity of sixty million eggs at a spawning, it must be remembered that even under the most favorable conditions in its own home, where the water has in summer a fairly constant temperature of over 70° F. and a salinity of 1.012 on an average, but a very small proportion of this multitude survive. How much more unlikely is its survival in the waters of Yaquina Bay, Oregon, where the writer has seen the water change from a temperature of 70° F. and a saltness of 1.012 to a temperature of 55° and a salinity of 1.022 within six hours! It was to save the young embryos from exposure to these and kindred dangers that I, as a volunteer employee of the United States Fish Commission during the summers of 1897 and 1898, among other things resorted to the artificial fertilization of the eggs in a temporary laboratory, carrying the delicate embryos to the swimming stage and dumping them by thousands into the bay. Given some clean crocks, a microscope, dissecting instruments, tumblers, rubber tubing, thermometers, and instruments to test the saltness of the water, and innumerable embryos can be cared for without much trouble. The process, as practiced by Brooks, Ryder, Nelson, and others in America, is too well known to need repeating here. Its efficacy is well established, and, in spite of the incredulity of the oystermen, who wished to see the oysters spawn "spontaneous," as they expressed it, an incredulity amounting almost to opposition, the writer has persevered in this work for two seasons and intends to continue it the coming summer. [Illustration: 1, native oyster spat on clam shell; 2, same on inside of oyster shell; 3, 4, 5, native spat (_Ostrea lurida_) on Eastern oyster shells; 6, showing size and appearance of native spat one or two months old.] The native oyster of this Northwest coast (_Ostrea lurida_), smaller and by many preferred to its Eastern congener, while it is far less fruitful in its spawning than the latter, retains its young within the parent shell until long after they have passed the tender stages, when they leave the mantle cavity of the parent to swim for themselves. This oyster could rightly be called viviparous, while the Eastern oyster is oviparous. On account of its nurse-acting proclivities this West-coast oyster has an immense advantage here over the introduced species. The latter's eggs have to run the following gantlet: (1) Not meeting with a fertilizing cell and perishing in consequence; (2) sinking, before or after fertilization, in the fatal mud; (3) being eaten by small fish and other minute animals; (4) being killed by sudden changes in the temperature and density of the water. Artificial fertilization and the rearing of the embryos in the laboratory largely eliminate these dangers. We have adopted other methods to insure success. A few of the oysters were removed from the Government plant and deposited two miles farther up the bay, nine miles and a half from the ocean, where it was thought the water was warmer, less salt, and less variable than on Oysterville Flat. Some, during the breeding season, were placed on spawning floats and anchored near the shore, where the shallow water is thoroughly warmed by the sun. It was in one of these floats that the oystermen had an opportunity to see the oysters spawn "spontaneous," for the water therein, reaching 70° F., became milk-white with spawn or milt within an hour after the oysters had been taken from the plant. This was really our first proof that the introduced oyster would spawn here. Some were placed in sloughs adjoining the bay, with the hope that favorable conditions would be met with there. Others were placed in artificially constructed salt ponds somewhat after the style used by the French. [Illustration: EASTERN OYSTERS IN OREGON. The lower row shows size when planted in 1896; the upper row represents their appearance in 1898.] What has been the outcome? The oysters, particularly the Princess Bay variety, have grown enormously and are in excellent condition. Until this spring no Eastern spat or young Eastern oysters had been discovered; this, of course, is the crucial point in the experiment; we know they will spawn, but will the spawn develop? Recently, much to our encouragement, a few young oysters, apparently of last summer's spawning, have been found and forwarded to Washington, proof positive that the oyster will propagate here, but not certain evidence of the practical outcome of the experiment. It is too early to predict results as yet; two years more are really required to tell the story. For thirty years Eastern oysters have been shipped to San Francisco by enterprising firms of that city, planted there in the bay until a large size is attained, and then sold at an immense profit. These firms have always claimed that the Eastern oyster did not reproduce there. As far as can be ascertained from a reliable source, the shipments in recent years have rather increased than diminished, this fact being used as an argument to support the above statement. It is nevertheless a known fact that much Eastern spat and many adult oysters undoubtedly hatched there have been found by members of the United States Fish Commission and others. Moreover, with increasing trade one would naturally expect more shipments, even though the introduced oyster did propagate to some extent. _Ostrea lurida_, the toothsome little native oyster which years ago was so abundant at Yaquina Bay, affording support to many families, has decreased in numbers to such an alarming extent that unless some radical measures are soon taken to prevent, the native oyster industry of this locality will be a thing of the past. This decrease in the size and numbers appears to be due to several causes. In the first place, there has been a very persistent tonging on a somewhat limited area. This might have been counterbalanced by proper precautions to insure a future supply, but, with characteristic lack of foresight, such precautions have been neglected, and the beds have been culled year after year, until the comparatively few oysters now marketed from Yaquina Bay are of very questionable size. Each oysterman has two acres of flats for private use. Three natural beds in the bay afford sources of supply for these private beds. The larger oysters tonged on the natural beds are marketed, and the smaller specimens spread on the private ground referred to. Beyond strewing clean shells on these private beds, no provision is made to collect the swimming embryos during the spawning season, and multitudes must be carried away and lost. The writer has urged upon the oystermen the need of collectors of brush or tile, by the use of which the oysters which they have acquired may be largely increased in numbers, and will endeavor to demonstrate, by the use of tile collectors, that hundreds of young spat may be saved and raised to marketable age. Our native oyster structurally and physiologically resembles the European oyster (_Ostrea edulis_), and, like it, could be propagated in artificial oyster ponds. The practicability of such work on the West American coast depends, of course, on the market price of the resulting product as compared with the outlay required for labor. MALAY FOLKLORE. BY R. CLYDE FORD. The Malay is an Oriental, and, of course, possesses a goodly number of superstitions and old wives' fables, but he does not hug them to his soul like some of the other peoples of the East--the Chinaman, for instance, who lives only by favor of gods, ghosts, goblins, and devils. The Malay lives in spite of spirits, good or bad, and tries to be a model Mohammedan at the same time. With bold assurance and positiveness, he puts his trust in Allah; but, after all, this does not keep him from cherishing, on the sly, a knowledge of a few uncanny, hair-raising beliefs any more than to be a devout churchman with us removes one from the occult influences of stolen dishcloths, overturned saltcellars, and the phases of the moon. The Malay man's _aberglaube_--his superstition--is undoubtedly of ancient origin. For five hundred years or more he has said his prayers five times a day in response to the muezzin's cry of _Allah ho akbar_, and his religion has penetrated the very life of his race and spread to the most distant confines of the archipelago, but it has never been able to remove entirely the heritage of that past when he was governed by Sanskrit gods or by deities of his own. Whatever he may have believed then and since changed, these fragments and relics of goblindom and superstition go back to that time, and so link on to all the weird love that prevailed in the ancient world. Another evidence of the primitiveness of Malay folklore may be seen in the fact that the inhabitants of the jungles and _padangs_ and the aboriginal dwellers of mountains and dense forests cherish much more heathen notions and greater elaborations of everyday superstitions than the more enlightened and modernized Malays of towns and _campongs_. In the East, as in the West, the man who lives close to Nature "holds communion with her visible forms," and likewise finds out, or thinks he does, a good deal about her invisible shapes. The Malay has on his list of uncanny things the names of several spirits. Disease is everywhere a great dread of men, and often looked upon as an infliction of the supernatural powers. There are several spirits of sickness recognized among the Malays, but they reserve their greatest horror for the influences of the _Hantu Katumbohan_, or spirit of smallpox. But other spirits abound; there are some that inhabit the sources of streams, and many that dwell in forests. Mines, too, have their patron goblins, which are propitiated by the miners. The sea-going Malay, also, whose vision has been clarified by bitter salt spray, knows and frequently sees the spirits that inhabit certain parts of the ocean. The _Hantu Pemburo_, or phantom hunter, is a spirit the Malays take special account of; in general, he seems to resemble the _wilde Jäger_ of German folklore. Long ago, so the story has it, there lived a certain man and his wife in Katapang, in Sumatra. One day the wife fell sick, and, thinking the flesh of a mouse-deer might strengthen her, she asked her husband to kill one for her. He went forth on the hunt, but was unsuccessful and soon returned. His wife now became very angry, and told him to try again--in fact, not to return till he could come home with the coveted game. The man swore a mighty oath, called his dogs, took his weapons, and set out into the forest. He wandered and wandered, and always in vain. The days ran into months, the months became years, and still no mouse-deer. At last, despairing of finding the animal on earth, he ordered his dogs to bay the stars, and they sprang away through the sky, and he followed. As he walked with upturned gaze, a leaf fell into his mouth and took root there. At home things were not going well. His son, born after his departure, when he became a lad, was often taunted by the other children of the _campong_, and twitted of the fact that his father was a wandering ghost. After hearing the truth from his mother, the boy went out into the forest to meet the huntsman. Far from the haunts of men, in the depths of the forest, they met and conversed. The boy told of his wrongs, and the father vowed to avenge them, and ever since that time, say the Malays, he has afflicted mankind. At night he courses through the wood and sky with a noisy, yelping pack, and woe to the man who sees him! On the peninsula the people mutter this charm to ward off his evil influence: "I know thy history, O man of Katapang! Therefore return thou To thy jungle of Mohang, And do not bring sickness upon me." The Malay is a firm believer in the efficacy of charms. He wears amulets, places written words of magic in houses, and sports a tiger's claw as a preventive of disease. If he is specially primitive and backwoodsy, when he enters a forest he says: "Go to the right, all my enemies and assailants! May you not look upon me; let me walk alone!" To allay a storm he says: "The elephants collect, they wallow across the sea; go to the right, go to the left, I break the tempest." When about to begin an elephant hunt, according to Thompson, he uses this charm: "The elephant trumpets, he wallows across the lake. The pot boils, the pan boils across the point. Go to the left, go to the right, spirit of grandfather (the elephant); I loose the fingers upon the bowstring." The Malay believes in witches and witchcraft. There is the bottle imp, the _Polong_, which feeds on its owner's blood till the time comes for it to take possession of an enemy. Then there is a horrid thing, the _Penangalan_, which possesses women. Frequently it leaves its rightful abode to fly away at night to feed on blood, taking the form of the head and intestines of the person it inhabited, in which shape it wanders around. Such beliefs may perhaps have their origin in metempsychosis, which in other ways has some foothold among the common people. For instance, elephants and tigers are believed sometimes to be human souls in disguise, and so the Malay addresses them as "grandfather" to allay their wrath and avoid direct reference to them. Crocodiles also are often regarded as sacred, and special charms are used in fishing for them. One such, given by Maxwell, is as follows: "O Dangsari, lotus flower, receive what I send thee. If thou receivest it not, may thy eyes be torn out!" The domestic animals also figure in Malay folklore. Dogs are unlucky and regarded with suspicion, for they would like to lick their master's bones. Cats, on the other hand, are lucky, and show a fondness for their owners. Owls are regarded as birds of ill omen, and their hooting forebodes death. Days are lucky and unlucky. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are fortunate birthdays, and a dream on a Thursday night will come true. To dream of a dog or a flood is unlucky. To stumble when starting on a journey is a bad sign, and before setting out on a pilgrimage to Mecca certain formulas are muttered and signs followed. The Malay hates to tear down a house, and so the old one is left standing when a new one is built. The ladder of a house must be built just so, or disaster comes to the owner or builder; and to knock one's head on the lintel is regarded as unfavorable. One rises quickly from a meal; otherwise, if he is single, he may be regarded with disfavor by his prospective father-in-law. As one travels over the archipelago he finds that superstitions vary, and what may be regarded by the Malays of the peninsula as particularly ominous may have no meaning at all with the Malays of the south or east. The Dyaks of Borneo are probably the most uncivilized of all the Malay tribes, for Mohammedanism has taken but little hold upon them, and their natural paganism remains as yet unshaken. Of their folklore we know but little. It awaits the conquest of the West, like the island itself. ELECTRICITY FROM THALES TO FARADAY. BY ERNEST A. LESUEUR. It is so common a notion nowadays that electricity had its birth and rise in the nineteenth century that it gives one a strange mental sensation to contemplate the fact that all the myriads of commercial applications that have of late years been developed in this field might have been made by the Chinese or the ancient Egyptians, so far as the potentiality of Nature for developing electrical phenomena is concerned. The writer used to know a delightful old gentleman in Vermont who once referred, as to a well-known fact, to Edison's having invented electricity. It is astonishing how closely his state of mind typifies that of a great many people. In the form of the lightning, the aurora, and the shock of the electric eel or torpedo, electrical manifestations have been known ever since man commenced to observe those phenomena, but the fossil resin amber was the substance which eventually gave its name to the now tremendous agency. This material was observed, many centuries before our era, to possess the property of attracting light bodies to itself when rubbed with wool, and, being called [Greek: êlektron] (electron) by the Greeks, transmitted its name to the property or force which it thus brought into evidence. The fact is mentioned as early as 600 B. C., by Thales of Miletus, although he does not transmit to us the name of the original observer of the phenomenon. Homely as was the experiment, it marked a beginning in electrical research. Not that scientific investigations in that or any line were pushed very assiduously in those days, for there is a great gap between the discovery of the property above alluded to and the acquisition of any more solid knowledge pertaining to electricity. The phenomenon was at that time set down in the list of natural facts, and no attempt appears to have been made to connect it with others. The inquiring spirit of the present age can hardly be brought into more striking relief than by a comparison of the, at present, almost daily advances in scientific knowledge with the fact that twenty-two hundred years elapsed between the discovery of the above-mentioned power of amber by the ancients and the later one that a very large number of other substances, such as diamonds, vitrefactions of all kinds, sulphur, common resin, etc., possess the same property. A few other scattered facts were, however, also noted by the ancients: fire is said to have streamed from the head of Servius Tullius at the age of seven, and Virgil asserts that flame was emitted by the hair of Ascanius. In examining, now, the history of the rise of electrical science we find, as just mentioned, the vast gap of over two millenniums between the discovery of the attracting power of rubbed amber and the mere extension of man's knowledge so as to include other substances. The philosophers Boyle and Otto von Guericke, who were active during the latter half of the seventeenth century, added a mass of new data in this line. Boyle, moreover, discovered the equivalence of action and reaction between the attracting and the attracted body, and that the rubbed amber or other "electric" retained its attractive powers for a certain period after excitation had ceased. Otto von Guericke made a vast step forward by constructing the first electrical machine, in a crude form, truly, but which proved of the utmost service in adding to our knowledge of the properties of electricity. His machine was constructed very simply of a globe of sulphur mounted on a spindle, which could be rotated by means of a crank; the operator applied friction with the hand, his body receiving a positive charge, while the surface of the sulphur acquired a negative. The fact of the two electrifications being separated at the surface of the sulphur was not, however, known at the time; the only charge that Guericke observed being that appearing on the sulphur. The reason for this was that the latter, being a nonconductor, any electricity generated upon it was compelled to stay there, for a certain time at least, and consequently accumulated so as to be observable; whereas the opposite electrification flowing into the operator's hand continuously escaped to earth without giving any sign of its presence. Had the operator stood upon an insulating support, the electrification would have accumulated on his body as well as upon the sulphur. Guericke made the discovery that a light body, having been once attracted to an electrified surface, was almost immediately repelled from it, and could not be again attracted without having its imparted electrification removed by contact with an uncharged surface. Sir Isaac Newton, about 1675, made an interesting application of a principle allied to this. He used a hollow, drum-shaped contrivance with glass ends and a very short axis, into which he put a number of fragments of paper. On briskly rubbing the outside of the glass with a piece of silk the paper was caused to "leap from one part of the glass to another and twirl about in the air." This was repeated in 1676 before the Royal Society, to the great edification of that learned body. Newton made a considerable improvement in the electrical machine of Guericke by the substitution of a hollow globe of glass for Guericke's sulphur one. What is chiefly interesting about the improvement is the fact that Guericke's sulphur globe, of comparative weight and cumbrousness, was made by casting melted sulphur into a glass globe and then breaking off the glass. Guericke observed in the dark a peculiar luminosity of conducting surfaces when well charged by means of his machine; he compared it to the phosphorescent light observed when lump sugar is broken in the dark. It was what is now known as the brush-discharge effect. In 1705 Francis Hawksbee discovered the peculiar phenomenon which he termed the mercurial phosphorus. It was produced by causing a stream of well-dried mercury to fall through an exhausted glass receiver. The friction of the particles of mercury against the jet piece and the glass caused an electrification which evinced itself in a phosphorescent glow. The receiver, indeed, had not to be by any means thoroughly exhausted, the phenomenon occurring at an air pressure up to about fourteen inches of the barometer. The crackling noise and the spark accompanying electrical discharge suggested about this time the analogy of those miniature disturbances to thunder and lightning, but the identity of the two was not fully established until later. Up to this time the fact that certain substances were capable of conducting electricity was not known, but in 1729 Stephen Gray, F. R. S., an enthusiastic investigator, made the discovery, and at the same time the cognate one that a large class of materials are nonconductors. The only source of electricity which was at the disposal of experimenters up to this time was the electrical machine, improved, as described, by Newton, which furnished intermittent currents (discharges) of infinitesimal quantity, as we should say now, but of extremely high pressure. This fact of the enormous pressure resulted in the electricity's forcing its way through very imperfect conductors, so as to cause our investigators to rank many of these latter with the metals. Thus Gray concluded that pack thread was a good conductor because it did not oppose sufficient resistance to prevent the flow of his high pressure (or, as we should now say, high voltage or tension) electricity. He tried wire as well, but did not realize it was a better conductor than the thread, although its conductivity was actually in the millions of times as great. In collaboration with his friend Wheeler he conveyed electrical discharges a distance of eight hundred and eighty-six feet, through presumably air-dry pack thread--an achievement which would almost be notable at the present time. He insulated the line by hanging it from loops of silk thread. Gray hoped "that there may be found out a way to collect a greater quantity of electric fire, and consequently to increase the force of that power, which, _si licet magnis componere parva_, seems to be of the same nature with thunder and lightning." About this time Desaguliers discovered that those materials which, upon being rubbed, develop electrical charges, are all nonconductors, and that, conversely, nonelectrics are conductors. The terms electrics and nonelectrics were applied to bodies respectively capable and incapable of excitation; the words idioelectrics and anelectrics were also used in respectively equivalent senses. In France, Dufay discovered that the conductivity of pack thread was greatly improved by the presence of moisture, and he succeeded in conveying a discharge a distance of almost thirteen hundred feet. He suspended himself by silken cords and had himself electrified, and then observed that he could give a shock accompanied by a spark to any person standing on the ground. He also established the fact of the two opposite kinds of electrification, and gave them the names of vitreous and resinous, from the fact that the former was developed by the excitation of glass and vitreous substances generally, and the latter from that of amber and resins. He observed that the distinguishing characteristic of the two was the fact that opposite charges attracted each other, while similar ones exerted mutual repulsion. Dufay and Gray died within three years of each other, both at the age of forty, Gray having added to the results already mentioned the discovery of the conducting powers of certain liquids and of the human body. Experimental research now began to spread into Germany and the Netherlands. The electrical machine was greatly improved by Professor Boze, of Wittenberg, and Professor Winkler, of Leipsic, who respectively added the prime conductor and the silk rubber to that important piece of apparatus. A Scotch Benedictine monk of Erfurt--Professor Gordon--substituted a glass cylinder for the sphere, and thereby brought the instrument in its essentials practically to the form in which it exists to-day. The improvement enabled the production of very large sparks, which were caused to produce the inflammation of various combustibles. Gordon went so far as to ignite alcohol by means of a jet of electrified water. We now come to an epoch-making discovery--that of the condenser, or, in its conventional laboratory form, the Leyden jar. Professor Muschenbroeck, of the University of Leyden, was struck with the idea that it would be a good plan to try to prevent the dissipation of the electric charge by inclosing the conductor containing it in an insulating envelope. He therefore took a glass jar, partly filled it with water, and electrified the latter. His assistant, who was holding the bottle, accidentally touched the wire which made connection with the water, and received on the instant a shock much more violent than any that the electrical machine was capable of giving. This led to the discovery that as the charge of vitreous electricity had accumulated in the water, a corresponding charge of the opposite kind had gathered upon the outside of the glass and been "bound" there, as it is called, by the attraction exercised upon it by the charge on the inside. It had been enabled to get upon the glass by the fact of the assistant's hand having covered part of the surface of the latter, and, since he stood upon the ground, the electricity had quietly flowed from the latter up through his body to the outside surface of the glass. The apparatus was quickly perfected by coating both the inside and outside of a jar with tin foil, applying the charge by means of a wire or chain to the inside coating and allowing the outer one to stand upon the earth or upon a conducting substance in electrical contact with the latter. The exaltation of spirit with which the discovery was hailed by the _savants_ appears to have been extraordinary--one student who took a discharge through his body being reported to state that he would not have missed the experience for a fabulous consideration, and that he would not repeat it if it were to save his life. In reality the advance was enormous; it gave a means for literally bottling up electricity in quantities previously unthought of. The prime conductor of an electrical machine could not retain any considerable quantity of electricity for the reason that, a certain small intensity of electrification having been reached, the addition operated to upset the balance, so to speak, and the electricity escaped by a sudden (disruptive) discharge, or spark, or by the brush discharge already alluded to. With the Leyden jar, however, as fast as electricity was supplied to the inside coating it became "bound" there by the charge of opposite sign accumulating on the outside, and the limit of capacity of the jar was simply one of strength of the glass: if too much electricity was supplied, the stress of mutual attraction between the two charges relieved itself by destroying the jar. Although Professor Muschenbroeck discovered the principle in the manner above referred to, it appears extremely probable that two other investigators, working independently, also did the same. One Cuneus and a monk named Kleist each claimed the honor of original invention of the condenser. About 1747 the first gun was fired by electricity; this was accomplished by Sir William Watson, who also succeeded in kindling alcohol and gas by means of a drop of cold water and even with ice. The same experimenter reversed the ordinary procedure of causing the electric influence to pass from an electrified body to the one to be experimented upon, the latter being unelectrified, by electrifying the latter, and then producing the desired effect by approaching it to an unelectrified one. A party of the Royal Society with Watson as chief operator instituted a series of researches on a grand scale to determine, if possible, the velocity of the electric discharge, and arrived at a number of conclusions which, however, were of a decidedly negative nature. The most important of these were as follows: That they could not observe any interval between the instant of applying the discharge to one end of the line and its reception at the other; that the destructive effects of discharge are greater through bad conductors than through good ones; that conduction is equally powerful whether occurring through earth or water. Just previous to this there had been some brilliant experiments carried on in France, and the discharge had been conveyed through twelve thousand feet of circuit, including the acre basin of the Tuileries, but they had not been performed as systematically, or with the definite objects in view, as had the English experiments. The following year the Royal Society continued its researches on a larger scale than previously, using 12,276 feet of wire, and found that even through that length the velocity was practically instantaneous. Watson urged as a theory that electrical disturbances were caused by influx or efflux of a single electric fluid from the state of normal electrification, thus differing from Dufay in his opinion as to the existence of two fluids. He was led to this belief by observing that he obtained a larger spark between two oppositely electrified bodies than from either to the earth. From this time on there appears upon the scene a host of workers in this field, one of the most prominent being the distinguished American, Benjamin Franklin. Somewhat previous to his remarkable work, or about 1750, Boze made certain discoveries in the matter of the surface tension of conducting liquids being diminished by electrification, and Mowbray and Nollet ascertained that the vegetation of flowers and of vegetating seeds was hastened by electrifying them. Franklin (born 1706, died 1790) made the important discovery of the active discharge of electricity from an electrified body by points as well as the converse of it--i. e., that electricity was rapidly abstracted from a charged atmosphere by points. This enabled him to increase the efficiency of the electrical machine by adding a comb-shaped series of points to the collector of the prime conductor. Up to this time, although the identity of lightning with electricity had long been suspected, it had not been at all established, and to Franklin may be said to belong the honor of doing so, although in this, as in the case of the invention of the Leyden jar, there appears to have been successful contemporaneous research elsewhere. Before performing his great experiment Franklin published a book strongly supporting the belief in the identity of the two. Once having conceived the idea of drawing electricity from the upper atmosphere, he unfortunately lost some time through waiting for the completion of the spire of a certain church in Philadelphia, from the top of which he hoped to be able to collect electricity by means of a wire, but finally hit upon the device which now fills much the same place in connection with his memory that the classical cherry tree does with Washington's--the lightning-collecting kite. This apparatus was very simply constructed, and had a pointed wire projecting a short distance above the framework. It was controlled, and electrical connection made, by an ordinary string which terminated in a short length of silk ribbon to protect the person from possible injury, and to give electricity a chance to accumulate in the system, by insulating the "line." At the end of the string proper Franklin fastened a metallic key. In company with his son he flew the kite during a thunderstorm which occurred in June, 1752; for some time no electric disturbance approached the neighborhood, and he was on the point of abandoning the experiment when he observed what he had been waiting for--the outer fibers of the string standing out from the latter by repulsive force--and, applying his knuckle to the key, he drew a spark. Subsequently, when the rain soaked the string and caused it to conduct much better, there was a fine supply of electricity, and Franklin charged a Leyden jar from the key, thus achieving the actual storage of "lightning." He continued his investigations in atmospheric electricity, and discovered that the electrification of the clouds (or of the upper atmosphere) was sometimes positive and sometimes negative. The invention of the lightning rod is due to him. Franklin sided with Watson in his belief in the single nature of the electric fluid. As intimated above, atmospheric electricity appears to have been collected independently about the same time in Europe, and certain very daring and dangerous experiments were performed there. One sad occurrence, as a result, was the death of Professor Richman, in St. Petersburg, in 1753. Richman, in company with a friend, Sokolow, was taking observations on an electroscope connected with an iron rod which terminated in the apartment and extended in the other direction above the roof of the building. During the progress of their experiments a violent peal of thunder was heard in the neighborhood, and Richman bent to examine the instrument. In doing so he approached his head to within a foot of the end of the rod, and Sokolow saw a ball of fire "about the size of a man's fist" shoot from it to Richman's head with a terrific report. The stroke was, of course, immediately fatal, and what we now know as the return shock stupefied and benumbed Sokolow. The unfortunate event served as a warning to other daring experimenters. Canton, another prominent worker in this field, discovered that the so-called vitreous electricity was not necessarily always developed by the friction of glass, as had hitherto been believed to be invariably the case. By applying different rubbers to glass he obtained either positive or negative at pleasure. This at once disposed of the idea that one kind of electricity resided in certain bodies and its opposite in others. Canton also made the interesting discovery that glass, amber, rock crystal, etc., when taken out of mercury, were all electrified positively. He was thus enabled to make the improvement in the electrical machine of coating its rubber with an amalgam rich in mercury, which greatly enhanced its powers. Among the numerous names now coming into prominence must be mentioned those of Beccaria, Symmer, Delaval, Wilson, Kinnersley, Wilcke, and Priestley. The first named, Father Beccaria, was a celebrated Italian physicist who did most valuable work in connection with atmospheric electricity, and who published several classical works on that and allied subjects. Among these may be mentioned his _Lettre del Elettricità_, 1758, and _Experimenta_, 1772. He ascertained that water is not by any means a good conductor, as it had previously been supposed to be, and, by using pure water, he caused the electric spark to become visible in it, a phenomenon capable of occurring only through media almost nonconducting. In these experiments he used thick glass tubes with wires led through the opposite ends, the latter being sealed, and the tubes filled with water. These were invariably shattered by the passage of the spark on account of the accompanying elevation of temperature, which caused expansion. He also established the facts that the atmosphere adjacent to an electrified body acquires electrification of the same sign by abstracting electricity from the body, and that the air then parts with its electricity very slowly. He advanced the theory that there is a mutual repulsion between the particles of the electric fluid and those of air, and that a temporary vacuum is formed at the moment of the passage of a disruptive discharge or spark. Robert Symmer, in 1759, described some most entertaining experiments, making use of the opposite electrifications of superposed stockings of different materials or merely of different colors (the dye matters in the latter case causing differentiation). If, in a dry atmosphere, a silk stocking be drawn over the leg and a woolen one pulled over it, the two will be found, upon being removed, to be very powerfully electrified in opposite senses. If the four stockings of two such pairs be used and then suspended together, they will indulge in remarkable antics due to each of the silk stockings trying to attract both of the woolen ones, and _vice versa_, and, on the other hand, each of each kind repelling the other. The amount of electrical attraction and repulsion produced in this simple way in a dry atmosphere is remarkable. The experiment may also be performed with all silk stockings, one pair white and the other black. Symmer advanced the theory of two fluids coexisting in all matter (not independently of each other, as had been previously supposed), which by mutual counteractions produced all electrical phenomena. His conception was that a body, positively electrified, did not exist in that condition because of the possession of a charge of a positive (as distinct from a negative) electric fluid which it had not held before, and did not hold in a normal state; nor that it possessed a greater share of a single electric fluid than it did in an unelectrified condition, as had been believed by Franklin and Watson, and by Dufay respectively; but that such a body contained both positive and negative electricities which, when the body behaved as "unelectrified," entirely counteracted each other, but which, on the other hand, caused a positive or negative charge to be evinced should either positive or negative electricity respectively preponderate. Æpinus was the author of another notable theory, of which we must omit further mention for want of space. Disjointed observations connected with animal electricity had been accumulating for many centuries. The first chronicled note that refers to the subject dates back to 676 A. D. Whether or not entirely by chance, the Arabians named the electric eel, or torpedo, in a way that impresses us now as singularly felicitous, _raad_ (the lightning). Toward the end of the last century Redi discovered that the shock was sometimes conveyed through the line and rod to the fisherman, and Kampfer compared the effects to those of electrical discharges. It does not appear, however, that the resemblance was actually believed to be more than accidental until Bancroft urged, in the last ten years of the eighteenth century, the view which was shortly proved. Investigation since has shown that several other aquatic animals possess this astonishing manifestation of vitality, notably the _Gymnotus electricus_ (Surinam eel), the _Trichiurus electricus_, and the _Tetraodon electricus_. Humboldt gives an account of wonderful battles in South America between gymnoti and wild horses. In fact, the most expeditious method, if not the most humane one, of capturing these alarming creatures appears to be to drive horses into the pond inhabited by them, and to allow the eels to exhaust their strength by repeated electric discharges before endeavoring to bring them to land by other means. Cavendish was one of the most noted experimental investigators in the electrical field during the latter third of the eighteenth century. His work was remarkably accurate, considering the lack of a proper equipment for taking observations incident to operations in those days. He computed the relative conductivities of iron and water as four hundred million to unity, and found that the addition of but one part of common salt to one hundred of water increased the conductivity of the latter a hundredfold. A twenty-six-per-cent solution of salt he found to possess only seven and one quarter times the conductivity of the extremely weak one mentioned. He also established the law that the capacity of condensers (of which the previously mentioned Leyden jar is an example) varies directly as the active area, and inversely as the distance separating the conducting surfaces. It was reserved for later investigators to make the grand discoveries which relate to electrochemical dissociation, but Cavendish succeeded in accurately determining the ratio of combination of the elements of water in a method which superficially suggests the inverse of electrolytic decomposition--i. e., by inducing the combination of hydrogen and oxygen by the electric spark in the instrument known as the eudiometer. Hard on the heels of this work came news of Galvani's remarkable discovery (1790) of the fact that freshly amputated frogs' legs, on being touched along the lines of the muscles by dissimilar metals, were powerfully agitated. We can only speak of this discovery as the stumbling on to an isolated fact, for it was reserved for Volta to establish the generalization that a current is produced in the conductor joining dissimilar metals when the latter are both in contact with a suitable electrolyte (or liquid capable both of conducting electricity and of acting on one, and incidentally also sometimes both, of the metals). Meantime (Du Bois-Reymond observes), "wherever frogs were to be found, and where two different kinds of metal could be procured, everybody was anxious to see the mangled limbs of frogs brought to life in this wonderful way. Physiologists believed that at last they should realize their visions of a vital power, and physicians that no cure was impossible." Volta first discovered merely the fact of electrification by contact. He wrote to Galvani: "I don't need your frog. Give me two metals and a moist rag, and I will produce your animal electricity. Your frog is nothing but a moist conductor, and in this respect it is inferior to my wet rag!" Nobili, nevertheless, in 1825 proved the existence of galvanic currents in muscles. Later on Volta invented the "_couronne des tasses_" (crown of cups), thus at the same time adopting the general form of cell used, with modifications, to-day, and producing the higher electromotive force, or electrical pressure, consequent on the multiplication of the cells in a series battery. Just before Volta's celebrated communication to the Royal Society, in 1800, Fabroni, of Florence, in discussing Galvani's phenomenon, went to the root of the matter by suggesting that the energy of chemical action was at the bottom of galvanic manifestations, and he was warmly upheld in this contention by Sir Humphry Davy, who, upon the publication of Volta's discoveries, constructed a most elaborate battery with which (apparently about 1806) he produced the arc light between carbon pencils. In the year referred to, Davy published the results of a series of experiments of enormous significance, among other things of the isolation of the alkali metals, sodium and potassium, whose existence had hitherto not been dreamed of. The simple electrolytic decomposition of water had been accomplished by Nicolson and Carlisle in the last year of the eighteenth century. Sir W. S. Harris says: "A series of new substances was speedily discovered, the existence of which had never before been imagined. Oxygen, chlorine, and acids were all dragged, as it were, to the positive pole, while metals, inflammable bodies, alkalies, and earths became determined to the negative pole of the battery. When wires connected with each extremity of the new battery were tipped with prepared and well-pointed charcoal, and the points brought near each other, then a most intense and pure evolution of light followed, which on separating the points extended to a gorgeous arc." It was at first supposed that the galvanic or voltaic electricity was distinct from the so-called "frictional" or "ordinary" electricity. A distinguished contemporary of Cavendish was Coulomb, the value of whose work in developing certain exceedingly important mathematical laws with regard to action at a distance, surface densities, and rates of charge dissipation can hardly be overestimated. His name was given to the torsion balance which, since his day, has been the standard instrument for measuring electric and magnetic attractions and repulsions. The importance of his work has since been recognized by the perpetuation of his name in connection with the unit of quantity of electricity, as that of Volta has been honored by its use, abbreviated (volt), to designate the unit of electrical tension or pressure. Certain highly instructive and interesting data were accumulated about this time by Volta, Laplace, Saussure, and the renowned chemist Lavoisier, in connection with the subject of electrification produced when evaporation, and the liberation of gases and vapors in general from any cause, occurs. The liquid, solid, or mixture liberating the gas was contained in a metallic dish and the resultant electrification of the latter examined qualitatively. Volta's observations led him to conclude that the electrification was always negative, but Saussure demonstrated finally that its sign was dependent on the material of the dish. These experimenters covered, between them all, a somewhat extensive field, examining, among other things, the electrification resulting from the ebullition of various liquids, from the ordinary combustion of fuel, and from the decomposition of acids by metals to liberate hydrogen. About the end of the first decade of the century Poisson attacked the phenomena of electricity analytically, and succeeded in demonstrating the right of electrical investigation to rank among the exact sciences. Of his most important mathematical propositions is one in which, assuming as a working hypothesis the existence of two mutually attracting fluids, he deduced formulæ covering the distribution of these fluids on the surfaces of two conducting spheres, in or out of contact. A great deal of work was done during the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one on what is now known as pyro-electrification. The Abbé Haüy discovered that fragments of tourmaline crystal exhibited opposite electrifications on opposite extremities of their lines of cleavage. It is this crystal also which has unusually remarkable powers of polarizing light, and which, under electro-magnetic stress, suffers modifications of the latter property. Haüy investigated the field with much diligence, and succeeded in cataloguing a large number of natural crystals by the side of tourmaline. The subject was amplified later by Sir David Brewster, who added a series of artificial crystalline salts to the list of pyro-electrical materials, among them, notably, hydro-potassic (and sodic) tartrate. The property was found not always to reside on these substances, but to be developed by heating them. Brewster found that even powdered tourmaline exhibited opposite electrifications on the opposite extremities of each tiny particle, causing the latter to act, so far as attractions and repulsions went, as infinitesimal magnets. Our rapid and imperfect survey has now brought us to the threshold of the great activity in electrical work elicited by the tremendous discovery, made by Professor Oersted, of Copenhagen, of the existence of the electro-magnetic field. It happens that two of the most amiable and estimable individuals that have ever devoted their lives to scientific research stand out in this connection head and shoulders above all other investigators--Ampère and Faraday, the latter sixteen years younger than the former and destined to long survive him. WINGLESS BIRDS. BY PHILIPPE GLANGEAUD. It is often said that there are no rules without exceptions. We purpose to test the truth of this maxim once more. Fishes are made to live in water, but some of them pass the greater part of their existence in mud. Some even perch upon trees, thus competing with birds, whose kingdom is the air, and which are able, with the aid of their wings, to plunge into space and travel rapidly over considerable distances. Yet there are birds, deprived by Nature, which do not possess the wing characteristic of the feathered tribe, and are consequently, like the majority of animals, pinned to the soil. Birds do not all have equal power of flight, which is closely related to the extent of the development of their wings. There exist all grades in the spread of wings between that of the condor, which is four times the length of the body, whereby the bird is able to rise to the height of nearly twenty-five thousand feet, and the little winglets of the auk, which are of no use to it. The penguins have still smaller wings, which are nothing more than short, flattened stumps, without proper feathers and covered with a fine, hairlike down which might be taken for scales. Another group of birds exists, called appropriately _Brevipennes_, the wings of which are so poorly developed as to be wholly unsuitable for flight. As an offset and just compensation for this, their long and robust legs permit them to run with extraordinary speed. For that reason they have been called running birds, in distinction from other kinds that constitute the group of flying birds. Among them are some gigantic birds, and also some that have no visible wings on the outside of their bodies, and may therefore be properly called wingless. The ostrich is a member of this group. With its bare, callous head and short bill, its long, featherless neck, and its massive body, supported by long, half-bare legs, ending in two large toes; its very short wings, formed of soft and flexible feathers; and its plume-shaped tail, it presents a very special appearance among the birds. The nandous, the American representatives of the ostrich, have still shorter wings, which have no _remigia_ at all, and terminate in a horny appendage, and they have no tail feathers. The cassowary and the emu also resemble the ostrich in many points, but their wings are still more reduced than those of the nandou. They are only slightly distinct, and can not be seen when the bird holds them close up to its body. In the _Apteryx_, the name of which, from the Greek, means without wings, the organs of flight are hardly apparent, and consist simply of a very short stump bearing a thick and hooked nail. The _Apteryx_, which is also called _Kiwi_, a native of New Zealand, is the most singular of living birds. The neck and the body are continuous, and the moderately sized head is furnished with a long beak resembling that of the ibis. Having long hairs similar to the mustaches of cats at its base, it is different from the bills of all other existing birds in possessing nostrils that open at its upper point. Although the _Apteryx_ can not fly, it runs very fast, despite the shortness of its legs, and can defend itself very effectively against assailants by the aid of its long-nailed and sharp-nailed feet. The tail is absent like the wings. The very pliant feathers are extremely curious, of the shape of a lance-head, pendent, loose, silky, with jagged barbs, and increase in length as they go back from the neck. The bird is of the size of a fowl, and when in its normal position stands with its body almost vertical, and carries the suggestion of a caricature--resembling, we might say, a feathered sack, with only a long-billed head and the claws projecting, and one beholding it feels that he is looking at some unfinished creature. It is a nocturnal bird, of fierce temper, and has become rare in consequence of the merciless war that is made upon it. Everything is strange about it, even the single egg it lays, which weighs about a quarter as much as its body. Together with the _Apteryx_, there lived in New Zealand a bird that reached the height of nearly twelve feet--the _Dinornis_. It and the _Phororhaces_ and the _Brontornis_, which have been recently exhumed in Patagonia, might be regarded as the giants of birds. This bird was known to the natives as the _Moa_, and lived in troops like the ostriches. Its organization was very much like that of the _Apteryx_, from which it was, however, distinguished by its great size, long neck, and short beak. It seems to have had the aspect of an ostrich, with a feathered neck and no wings or tail. The feet of the _Dinornis_, with their three large toes, were really enormous. Isolated fragments of its bones suggest very large mammals, rather than birds. The femur and tibia are larger than those of a bear, the tibia alone being about four feet long, and the thickness, in the narrowest part, of the width of a man's hand, while it was more than seven inches in the thickest part. The sternum, on the other hand, was small, convex, and longer than broad. The wing could not have been visible on the outside of the body, for the bones that constitute them are proportionally smaller than those of the _Apteryx_. There was, therefore, a maximum reduction of the wing in this bird. The _Dinornis_ was covered with a rich plumage, and this was doubtless what led to its destruction, women preferring its plumes to all other ornaments. The large number of bones which have been discovered in the alluviums, the caves, and the peat bogs of New Zealand authorize the thought that the island was once inhabited by a considerable number of these birds, which were able easily to repel the attacks of other animals by means of their big feet. But they could stand no chance against Nature's more terrible destroyer--man--who, when seeking the gratification of his taste and fancy, does not hesitate to exterminate whole species. The natives of New Zealand still recall the history of these singular birds; their extermination seems to have occurred about the time the island was visited by Captain Cook (1767-1778). Moreover, some of the bones collected in later years still had animal matter upon them. Even parts of the windpipe have been discovered, mixed with charcoal, and evidences of cooking have been found. A near relative of the _Dinornis_, which the Maoris regard as extinct, is the _Notornis_, of which only four living specimens have been found since 1842, the last one having been captured in the latter part of 1898. The eggs of the _Dinornis_ were very large, having a capacity of about a gallon and being equivalent to eighty hen's eggs. Still larger eggs than these, however, are known. In 1851 Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire exhibited, in the French Academy of Sciences, eggs of a bird coming from Madagascar that had a capacity of two gallons. Some specimens of these eggs may be seen in the galleries of the Paris Museum, and still larger eggs have been found. The museum in London has one with a capacity exceeding eleven quarts, or equivalent to two hundred and twenty hen's eggs, or more than seventy thousand humming birds' eggs. It was thought at first that the bird which laid these gigantic eggs was still living, for natives of Madagascar spoke of having seen a bird of colossal size that could throw down an ox and make a meal of it. Such, however, were not the ways of the bird called the _Epiornis_, which had no talons or wings, and fed on vegetable substances. The description by the celebrated traveler Marco Polo of a great flying bird of prey, called a roc, has no reference to the _Epiornis_. M. Grandidier has demonstrated that this bird no longer exists in Madagascar, and that if man ever knew it the stories with marvelous details which the savages hand down from generation to generation make no mention of it. We owe to M. Grandidier, M. Milne-Edwards, and Major Forsyth what is known of the history of this large wingless bird, which resembles the _Dinornis_ in several points. If its size was proportioned to that of its eggs it should have been twice as large as the _Dinornis_. It was not, however, but constituted a family represented by very diverse forms and of variable size, though never much exceeding eleven feet. The head was similar in appearance to that of the _Dinornis_, but the surface of the forehead was furrowed with wrinkles and cavities, indicating the presence of a crest of large feathers. A curious peculiarity was the opening of the Eustachian tube directly on the exterior. The cervical vertebræ are very numerous, while the sternum is much reduced. It is a flat bone, broad but very short, especially in the median part. The wing also has suffered a great regression, for it comprises only a thin, short rod, the humerus, and a small osseous mass representing all the other bones of the wing stuck together. The _Epiornis_ had no wings externally visible. The bones of the feet were, on the other hand, of considerable size, and indicate that the bird that possessed them was larger than the _Dinornis_. The _Epiornis_, according to M. Milne-Edwards, frequented the borders of waters, keeping among the reeds along lakes and rivers, for its bones are found associated with those of turtles, crocodiles, and a small hippopotamus. It most probably nested in the low plains around lakes. Just as the _Apteryx_ among birds, and the bison and the beaver among mammals, so the _Dinornis_ and the _Epiornis_ have been destroyed as man has extended his abode and his domination. When we regard the fauna of Madagascar and of New Zealand we are struck by the great resemblance between them, from the points of view of their recent and ancient vertebrate fauna. These resemblances suggest the past existence of relations between these two lands now separated by a wide expanse of sea, and this agrees with geological observations.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from La Nature._ SKETCH OF FREDERICK C. SELOUS. The description of Selous, in Men and Women of the Time, as "explorer, naturalist, and sportsman," is suggestive of the manner in which his career has been developed and his fame has grown. Beginning his active life as a mere hunter of big game in the wilds of South Africa, and known at first only as a sportsman, he has become recognized as one of the leading, most intelligent, and most efficient explorers of his time, and is accepted as the most eminent authority respecting what relates to the large and important region of Mashonaland. FREDERICK COURTENAY SELOUS was born in London, the son of a father of Huguenot extraction and of a mother who, descended from the Bruces of Clackmannan, could count Robert Bruce among her ancestors, and was also related to Bruce, the Abyssinian traveler. He was taught at Bruce Castle, Tottenham, and then went to school at Rugby, where he distinguished himself by his activity, which was displayed in his high spirits and love of violent mischief and by his personal courage to such an extent that his schoolfellows wittily nicknamed him "Zealous." Leaving Rugby when sixteen or seventeen years old, he spent two years in Switzerland and Germany, studying at Neufchâtel and Wiesbaden. His hardy activity seems to have been as marked in Germany as at Rugby, for it is recorded of him that he attracted some notice in the papers by jumping into the Rhine in winter after a wild duck which he had shot. He was not dressed for a swim, and, his great coat and top boots becoming filled with water, he had much difficulty in getting to shore with his game. His determination to achieve a career in South Africa by hunting and collecting specimens was apparently reached while he was still a youth, and at nineteen years of age he sailed from England, to land at Algoa Bay in 1871. Hunting was his object, as is substantially confessed in the title of his first book, A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa. The book won instant recognition as a story of sport and a hunter's prowess, and was regarded in that light by the critics and the general public. The Royal Geographical Society, however, perceived other qualities in the story he had to tell, and gave him successively honorable mention, the Cuthbert Peake grant, and, in 1883, the Founder's Gold Medal, the highest honor it had to bestow. Among the earliest testimonials paid by this society to the value, as yet not generally appreciated, of Selous's work was that given by Lord Aberdare, president, in his anniversary address, delivered in May, 1881, to the services rendered to geography in the regions west of Lake Nyassa by Mr. Selous, who had "hitherto been known as a mighty hunter of large game.... This gentleman, we learn, in 1878 penetrated for one hundred and fifty miles the unknown country north of the Zambezi, in the direction of Lake Bangweolo. He has since crossed in various directions the Matabele country south of the Zambezi, discovering two new rivers and defining the course of others which had previously been laid down from vague information." Selous's Notes on the Chobi, it appears, had already been published by the Geographical Society. Mr. Selous has spent most of his time since he began his African wanderings in 1871, except for occasional visits to England, in traveling and hunting over that part of the African continent with which his name as an explorer is associated. In 1877 he and some companions penetrated into Matabeleland to hunt elephants. Relating the story of his wanderings in an address to the Royal Geographical Society in 1893, he described his experiences with fever and ague, the attacks of which began in Griqualand in 1872, but came on only when he halted anywhere a few days. North of the Zambezi he made several journeys among the Balongas, and spent a wretched rainy season, almost without equipment, on the Manica table-land, of the luxuriant vegetation of which, with sweet-smelling flowers after the rains, he gave a glowing description in his address. Interesting observations were made on some of the northern rivers. The curious phenomena of the steady rise of the waters of the Chobi and Machabi--an outlet of the Okavango--was observed from the first week in June till the last week in September, when the flood began to recede. From 1882 the journeys acquired additional geographical importance, and Mr. Selous proceeded to rectify the maps of Mashonaland made by earlier travelers, taking constant compass bearings, sketching the courses of rivers, and fixing the positions of tributaries. The value of this work was made manifest in a magnificent large scale map of the country. This map, which was published in 1895, was intended, first and chiefly, to illustrate the work done by Mr. Selous while in the service of the South African Company; and, secondly, to embody, as far as possible, the knowledge possessed of the entire region extending from Fort Salisbury to the northward as far as the Zambezi, and to the eastward as far as the lower Pungwe. Mr. Selous's manuscript originals, deposited in the map room of the Royal Geographical Society, comprise a compass survey, showing the routes during a year's employment in the service of the British South African Company, September 1, 1890, to September, 1891, on a scale of 1:255,000; a sketch map, showing the route of the Manika Mission from Fort Charter to Umtassa's and thence to the camp near Mount Wedza, and also the routes taken by Mr. Selous from the camp near Mount Wedza to Makoni's, Mangwendi's, Maranka's, and back to Makoni's, on a scale of 1:255,000; a sketch of routes from Umtali to Mapanda (Pungwe) and back, in 1891, on the same scale; a sketch of Mashonaland, showing tribal boundaries, on the same scale; a rough survey map of the countries ruled over by the Makorikori chiefs, for which a mineral concession had been granted to the Selous Exploration Syndicate, on a scale of 1:210,000; and about thirty sheets of manuscript maps and rounds of angles, utilized in the compilation of the first four maps of this list. Although Mr. Selous did not determine latitudes or longitudes, his long-distance compass bearings enabled him to lay down a network of triangles connecting Fort Salisbury with Masikesi. These triangles included Fort Charter, Sengedza, and Mavanka's in the south, Mount Mtemwa in the north, and Mount Dombo in the east; and it turns out that the distance between Fort Salisbury and Masikesi, as resulting from this triangulation, differs to the extent of only about a mile from that obtained by careful astronomical observations made at the two terminal points. The greater part of Mr. Selous's compass bearings were taken during the rainy season, when the air was very clear and landmarks could be seen at great distances. Mr Selous's determinations of altitude were not so accurate, and those obtained with the aneroid were characterized by himself as "of little value." During all of his twenty years' wanderings Mr. Selous represented in his address to the Royal Geographical Society, with the exception of a treacherous night attack made upon his camp by the Mashuku-Sumbwe, led by a few hostile Marotse, in 1888, he had never had any serious trouble with the natives. He had gone among many tribes who had never previously seen a white man, and was always in their power, as he seldom had more than from five to ten native servants, none of whom were ever armed. Mr. Selous's pioneer work began in 1889, when he conducted a gold-prospecting company through eastern Mashonaland. The journey took the party to the Portuguese settlements on the Zambezi, where those people were found to have a full appreciation of the richness of the gold region. The British South Africa Company, or "Chartered Company," as it is sometimes called, was incorporated about the same time (October, 1889), with power to occupy and possess the large domains that constitute what is now called Rhodesia. The return of Mr. Selous to the Cape of Good Hope with the report of what he had observed had the effect of determining the company to speed its operations so as to anticipate the Portuguese. Mr. Selous entered the service of the company, and, although he was not yet an explorer in the scientific sense, the accurate memory of his early wanderings over the region enabled him to guide successfully the pioneer expedition that took possession of Mashonaland. One of the sensational incidents of this campaign was the refusal of Lobengula to allow the pioneer force to use the road that led through Buluwayo, his capital, the only existing wagon road from the British frontier to the Mashonaland plateau. A new road was cut, under the guidance and superintendence of Mr. Selous, through four hundred and sixty miles of wilderness, the whole work being accomplished in two months and a half. Among the chiefs who submitted to the British occupation after the seizure of Gonvola was Moloko, ruler of the country north of Manica, who made a treaty with Mr. Selous. After two years spent in various operations for opening up the country and securing treaties with the native chiefs, Mr. Selous returned to England in December, 1892, and put the narrative of his adventures to press, but was called back in August, 1893, returning at very short notice, on account of the threatening attitude of the Matabele chief Lobengula and the consequent risk of interruption in the development of the country. The tribes had risen against the assumption of the company to claim as a territorial cession what they had regarded as simply a grant of mining and exploiting privileges. Mr. Selous engaged actively in the campaign, in which he is credited with having fought with great gallantry by the side of the colonists, and was wounded while protecting some negroes who had been surprised by the enemy. Returning again to Mashonaland, he reached there in time to witness a second outbreak of the natives, vexed by the triple plague of locusts, rinderpest, and the stringent regulations of the Chartered Company's government with respect to cattle. His own cattle were stolen, and he headed a company of volunteers that went out to check the insurgents and protect the people who were still on their farms. The fruits, in acquisition to geographical knowledge, of Mr. Selous's adventures and explorations are to be found, mingled with much about sporting and exciting incident, in his books: A Hunter's Wanderings in South Africa, already mentioned; Travel and Adventure in Southeast Africa (1893); Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia (1896); and in lectures to the Geographical Society and periodical contributions concerning Mashonaland. These books abound in observations on natural history, often constituting real contributions of new facts or new demonstrations to the science, usually occurring incidentally in the narrative of adventure, but sometimes given in more formal shape. The author avows that his conclusions respecting animals are drawn from personal experience of the beasts, and are not influenced in any way by the stories of old hunters, Dutch or native. Among these notices are original observations on the giraffe and its habits, notes on buffaloes and their disposition, and remarks on variations in the types of South African lions. Of this animal, while some authors would make three species, the author believes there is only one. "As out of fifty male lion skins," he says, "scarcely two will be found exactly alike in the color and length of the mane, I think it would be as reasonable to suppose there are twenty species as three." So in Notes upon South African Rhinoceroses, a paper read before the Zoölogical Society of London in June, 1881, and reprinted in this volume, Mr. Selous gives his reasons for affirming that there are only two species of rhinoceros in South or in all Africa--the square-mouthed or white _Rhinoceros simus_ and the prehensile-lipped or black _Rhinoceros bicornis_--while the supposed _Rhinoceros keitloa_, or blue rhinoceros of the Boers, is merely a variety of the _bicornis_, the distinction between the two being based only on differences in the relative length of the horns. Another paper from the Proceedings of the Zoölogical Society, reprinted here, is Notes on the South Central African Antelopes, embodying again only the results of the author's own observations. In this paper twenty-two species are described by their scientific, native, Dutch, and English names, and their characteristics, habits, appearance, and distinctions are indicated. In the preface to his Travel and Adventure in Southeast Africa Mr. Selous tells how he had determined, in 1881, upon visiting the ostrich farm of his friend Frank Mandy, to settle down in Africa for a quiet life. Then he went home and spent a few months in England. Visiting the Natural History Department of the British Museum, he was shown by Dr. Gunther and his associate how old and dilapidated some of the specimens were, and how many noble forms were not represented at all. He took note of what he ought to get should he visit the interior of Africa again. Next we find him in South Africa, not quiet on a farm as he had intended to be, but in the wilderness, where he spent six years (1882-'87) engaged principally in collecting specimens "of the magnificent fauna which once abounded throughout the land," but many forms of which were now becoming scarce and some were verging on extinction. He shot and preserved a great many fine specimens of the larger antelopes, some of which may be seen in the New Natural History Museum at South Kensington, while others are in the collection of the South African Museum at Cape Town. Besides the stories of specimen hunting and adventures with the lions that are always to be found where game is abundant, the volume contains much matter of more general interest, such as notes of personal experiences among the Boers; accounts of two expeditions sent against the Batauweni by Lobengula; the devastations committed by the Matabele in Mashonaland; valuable notes on the Bushmen or Masarwas; accounts of journeys beyond the Zambezi to the countries of the Machukulumbwi and Barotsi tribes; and a review of the past history and present condition of Mashonaland. We find here also a notice of the caves of Sinola, with a subterranean lake in the principal cave having water marked by a deep-blue color like that of the blue grotto of Capri, an account of which was published by Mr. Selous in the Proceedings of the Geographical Society of London for May, 1888. An account of Mr. Selous's Twenty Years in Zambezia was published in the Geographical Journal in 1893. Mr. Selous has done more than any other man to bring Mashonaland into notice, and is credited, together with Cecil Rhodes, with having contributed most to the creation of Rhodesia. The first comprehensive account of Mashonaland was given by him in the Fortnightly Review for May, 1889, when he described the country as a land of perennial streams in which thirst is an unknown quantity; with its high plateau, standing at an elevation of from four thousand to forty-six hundred feet and forming a very important watershed, endowed with a network of important streams, the springs supplying which, welling out from the highest parts of the downs, were capable of being applied to the irrigation of an enormous area, and having a salubrious climate, the continuous southwest wind giving cool breezes in summer and cold ones in winter. The high plateaus were further of much ethnological interest, in that they gave shelter to the very few remnants of the peaceful Mashonas who had escaped extermination at the hands of the Matabele. Editor's Table. _SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIFIC MIND._ The address delivered by Prof. Michael Foster, as president this year of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, was not as long or elaborate as such addresses are wont to be, but it contained many thoughts of great value. After sketching the vast advances in scientific knowledge made within the present century, he observed, with great truth, that "the very story of the past which tells of the triumphs of science puts away all thoughts of vainglory." Why? In the first place, because no one can study the history of science without being made to feel how very near, in many cases, the men of the past came to anticipating some of the most famous discoveries and generalizations of later years. Translate the language of an earlier age into modern terms, and you often find that you have expressed the most advanced scientific doctrine of to-day. In the second place, if we find a certain lack of definiteness and truth to fact in the ideas of the past, how can we be at all sure how _our_ ideas will look when confronted with the fuller knowledge which doubtless our successors will possess? Lastly, "there is written clearly on each page of the history of science the lesson that no scientific truth is born anew, coming by itself and of itself. Each new truth is always the offspring of something which has gone before, becoming in turn the parent of something coming after." However great the work of a man of science may be, "it is not wholly his own; it is in part the outcome of the work of men who have gone before." In this respect Professor Foster sees a striking difference between the man of science and the poet. We always know whence the former came, but the latter is almost as devoid of visible ancestry as Melchizedek. When the man of science dies the results which he achieved remain, and his work is taken up where he left it off; whereas the poet, strictly speaking, has no continuators. The Homeridæ do not represent Homer, nor do Dryden and Congreve take the place of Shakespeare. The story of natural knowledge or science, we are reminded, is a story of continued progress. "There is in it not so much as a hint of falling back--not even of standing still." The enemies of science sometimes seek to turn against it the fact that each age revises the conclusions of the preceding one. They ask, What dependence can be placed upon opinions or theories that are thus subject to change? The answer is that the science of each age is the nearest approximation which that age can make to the truth, and upon some points represents the truth with a great approach to finality of interpretation. The law of gravitation, for example, as formulated by Newton, lies at the foundation of the physics of to-day. The circulation of the blood was discovered once for all by Harvey. The true theory of the solar system was given once for all by Kepler. It is the glory of science that whatever of imperfection may lurk in a scientific theory is sure to be brought to light and corrected by subsequent observation and analysis. The learned professor dwelt briefly but forcibly upon the qualities of the scientific mind. In the first place, the scientific mind must "vibrate in unison with that of which it is in search." It is in search of truth, and it must therefore vibrate in unison with truth. The follower of science must have a truthfulness beyond that of the ordinary man, who does not set a great price upon exactness in his observations or conclusions, and readily confounds things which, superficially similar, are fundamentally different. Nature resents even the most trifling inexactness, and the careless student will find that the further he carries his inquiries the further he goes astray. The scientific mind must also be alert. The indications and hints which Nature gives are sometimes very slight, and only one who is watchful in the extreme and attentive to the smallest things will catch them. Then the problems which Nature sets are often complicated, and call for a high degree of courage and perseverance. An inquiry which seemed easy at first will suddenly become overcast by what seems the most hopeless obscurity, and the scientific worker, unless he possesses the necessary moral as well as intellectual qualities, will fail in his quest. Considering the characteristics which the pursuit of science tends to develop in its votaries, and considering that scientific method is now and has been for many years past a wonderfully devised system for carrying on research, Professor Foster is surprised that the progress of science is not even more rapid than it is. He fears that perhaps Science does not get the best minds enrolled in her service, and rather hints that our institutions of education are responsible for turning aside many who might lend great aid in the advancement of real knowledge to less profitable pursuits. In words of almost precisely similar import to some that we used in these columns not very long ago, he observes that "that teaching is one-sided, and therefore misleading, which deals with the doings of man only and is silent about the works of Nature, in the sight of which he and his doings shrink almost to nothing." The whole address is stamped with the high thoughtfulness which so eminently distinguishes its author, and deserves to be carefully pondered by all who would understand the character and mission of science and the intellectual needs of the present age. _THE LATE WILLIAM H. APPLETON._ As many of our readers will have learned through the daily press, Mr. William H. Appleton, long the head of the well-known publishing house of D. Appleton and Company, passed away at his home in Riverdale on the Hudson, October 19, 1899, having reached the advanced age of eighty-five years. As one of the founders of this magazine, who from the start was in close sympathy with its aims, kept up an active interest in its management, and was ever ready to aid its conductors with advice and encouragement, it is fitting that a few memorial words should be spoken of him in these columns. The career of Mr. Appleton was a marked one in many respects. Entering the book business of his father, Mr. Daniel Appleton, at an unusually early age, he soon developed such an aptitude for affairs that at twenty-one he went abroad for the purpose of making the acquaintance of the leading foreign publishers and paving the way for closer relations with them in the importation and sale of their books in this country. Three years later, or at the age of twenty-four, his father made him a partner in the business, which had previously been extended so as to include the publication as well as the sale of books, and had now so increased in volume as to compel removal to more commodious quarters. Ten years of growth and uninterrupted prosperity followed, when Mr. Daniel Appleton, in 1848, retired from the now well-established firm, William H. Appleton, at the age of thirty-four, becoming its head, with his brothers John A. and Daniel Sidney as partners. In co-operation with these and other brothers who afterward entered the business, Mr. Appleton guided the operations of the firm for a period of nearly fifty years, successfully piloting it through several financial crises and carrying it to a foremost place among the publishing houses of America. Besides the routine of an extensive publishing business, the history of the house during this time includes a number of large undertakings involving the expenditure of vast sums of money, and years of labor by many workers, and attended with risks that only the most far-seeing business sagacity could justify. We may presume that the several members of the firm shared a common faith in the success of these great enterprises, but it is fair to infer that as the head of the house William H. Appleton took a leading part in their origin and execution. One of these ventures was the publication of the American Cyclopædia, which in its present revised form represents an outlay of over a million dollars and some ten years of time. Another undertaking, and the one that we wish more particularly to speak of here, was the extension of the business in the line of popular scientific publications. Scientific circles in this country have never realized the debt they owe to D. Appleton and Company, and especially to William H. Appleton, in this regard. It is no exaggeration to say that the advance of science in the United States was hastened by more than a quarter of a century by the enlightened and courageous policy which led the firm to add this class of books to their lists at the time they did. Everything apparently was against it--nothing in its favor. Our scientific literature consisted mainly of a few text-books having only a limited sale. Science itself was an affair of laboratories and bug collectors, the one to be shunned and the other commiserated. The few utterances of scientific men having a bearing on the great questions of the right interpretation of Nature, man's relations to his fellows and to the world at large, social betterment, etc., that here and there arrested public attention were received with contemptuous sneers or scouted as the rankest infidelity. Few who are not past middle life will find it possible now to realize that this was the general attitude toward science forty years ago, but we have only to refer the reader to the writings of the time for abundant confirmation of our statements. It was such conditions as these that the firm was called upon to face when considering the question of entering this new field of publication. All ordinary business instincts were against it. Scarcely a publisher either here or abroad would even listen to the proposal to risk his capital in such an enterprise. Nevertheless, Mr. Appleton, lending an appreciative ear to the arguments of the former editor of this journal and displaying his usual foresight, finally decided in favor of the project, which afterward resulted in the introduction of the works of Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Bain, Romanes, and other distinguished writers to American readers. A further step in the same direction, taken later, was the publication of the International Scientific Series, now numbering some eighty volumes. The scheme as originated and shaped by Professor Youmans was heartily seconded by Mr. Appleton, as was also the plan of the Popular Science Monthly. A distinctive feature of the arrangements for the issue of all these foreign books, and one which redounds in no small degree to the credit of the firm, was the voluntary agreement, in the absence of an international copyright law, to pay their authors the usual royalties, making no distinction between them and authors at home. Mr. Appleton had been a lifelong advocate of international copyright, founding his contention on the simple justice of recognizing the property rights of the author, no matter where he lived. Although to adopt such a course was to expose themselves to the possibility of heavy loss through the issue of reprints by irresponsible parties, a thing which actually happened in the case of a good many of the volumes, the principle was faithfully adhered to, thus anticipating by many years the central provision of our present law. The storm of denunciation raised abroad by the appearance of the earlier installments of these writings might well have deterred the boldest from repeating the experiment of giving them currency in America. But in spite of solemn warnings that dire consequences would be visited on the publisher who ventured to issue them here, the books continued to appear, while the predicted evils never came to pass. It must not be inferred from the foregoing, however, that Mr. Appleton was either unmindful or wanting in respect for the opposition which his course aroused. Much of this had its origin in the religious convictions of the community, not a little of the criticism, be it said, emanating directly from the Church or its leading representatives. But, being a strong churchman himself, actively furthering the work of the Church with his private means and personal co-operation, in full sympathy with its purposes, and rejoicing in its beneficent influence, he was the last one who would wantonly outrage the sacred beliefs of his fellow-men. Yet, gifted with a large-mindedness that is at least unusual in the walks of business, he was enabled to see that the onward march of natural knowledge which had so often before excited alarm among men of narrow views could have nothing in it that was inconsistent with a truly religious life; while, on the other hand, to promote its advance and diffusion was to contribute by so much to the highest human welfare. The wisdom of Mr. Appleton's course has been fully justified by the event. As we look over the last half of the century, which has been so fruitful in discovery and has witnessed the development of so many agencies for the amelioration of human ills and so manifold an increase in man's power for right living, we can see at the various stages of this evolution how large a part the broadening of thought fostered by these authors and the new aims and methods in inquiry suggested by them have contributed to the advance. It could not, in short, have been made so rapidly or effectively without the stimulus they gave. For what has been done in this line in this country we think--when we reflect that it was he who had the courage to bring the works of those thinkers here, and who made them accessible to students and the reading public, who constituted the agency through which the new thoughts and aims were spread--a very important part in the achievement may fairly be ascribed to Mr. William H. Appleton. Scientific Literature. Owing to the increasing demands upon our space, authors and publishers are notified that hereafter the department of Scientific Literature, with the exception of Publications Received, will be discontinued. SPECIAL BOOKS. The busy pen of Mr. _John Fiske_ has produced another book marked by the qualities which the public has learned to associate with all his work--lucidity of expression, felicity of illustration, a large command of the conventional elements of literary composition, and a philosophy which, while very free and lightsome in its steps and paces, always has the luck to fetch up within easy hailing distance of a moderate orthodoxy. Mr. Fiske undertakes to conduct us on an excursion _Through Nature to God_,[27] somewhat as Cook, of international fame, might undertake to see us safe from New York to the Holy Land. Of the two, we think Cook makes the surer thing of it; yet no one can deny that Mr. Fiske has done his best to trace the itinerary and encourage his excursionists to believe that they will "get there." [Footnote 27: Through Nature to God. By John Fiske. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.] We may as well candidly confess that we have not much faith in the method followed in the work before us. The intention is to show that an analysis of Nature and of Nature's ways yields God; in other words, that we have only to carry out the processes of thought which an examination of the external world and of human history sets in motion in order to find God at the end of the argument. Thus, by searching, contrary to what Scripture has generally been held to imply, we find out both that God is and to some extent what he is. We prefer the older view. The world's greatest Teacher said simply, "God is a spirit." He did not say that this was a conclusion to which many lines of argument led. He did not hint at any kind of argument, but assumed the affirmation of God by the human consciousness. We venture to say that if Mr. Fiske's method were successful and we could argue ourselves into a belief in God, the result would be disastrous; for the God of argument, or even of analogy, is not the God of the human soul or conscience. We should have one conclusion more of science, but we should lose that for which no conclusion of science could make amends--our sense of the infinite and the possibility of faith. Mr. Fiske discusses, in the early chapters of his book, The Mystery of Evil. He takes the familiar ground that evil is the necessary correlative, and in a manner the necessary condition, of good. We are placed in a universe that abounds in evil in order that by conquering it we may raise ourselves to a moral level otherwise impossible. On one page the author goes so far as to say that God, and not the devil, "is the creator of evil," but elsewhere he relaxes his boldness and speaks of evil being "permitted." One feels like asking, If good and evil are equally made by God, then which is which? When we speak of electricity as positive and negative we do not ascribe any superiority to one over the other. Nor do we say that centrifugal is a more commendable form of force than centripetal, or _vice versa_. "For strong and resolute men and women," we are told, "an Eden would be but a fool's paradise." This is not complimentary to our first parents in their primitive condition of innocence, and it puts the curse pronounced upon them in a somewhat equivocal light. There is also quite a rehabilitation of the "serpent," who, it seems, knew quite well what he was talking about and gave excellent advice. We wonder whether Mr. Fiske is really of opinion that it helps us to solve any of the practical problems of life to be told that without evil there could not be good. Men have known for centuries that it is good to fight evil, though what evil is essentially they have often been in doubt. Upon the latter point Mr. Fiske does not in the least attempt to enlighten us; and yet it should be rather a more hopeful enterprise to attempt to show us what is specifically evil and ought therefore to be resisted, than to vindicate evil in general as the indispensable condition of good, and something, therefore, which God was justified in making. The second division of the book deals with The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self-Sacrifice. We can not see that these roots are traced further back than the mother's affection for her offspring. Mother's love is doubtless an old story in the world by now, and perhaps as good a story as earth has to tell; but it seems to us that the "cosmic" character of it is not very apparent. We may believe that it was destined to come in the fullness of time, but this can be said equally of all that exists. "I think it can be shown," says Mr. Fiske, "that the principles of morality have their roots in the deepest foundations of the universe; that the cosmic process is ethical in the profoundest sense; that, in that far-off morning of the world when the stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy, the beauty of self-sacrifice and disinterested love formed the chief burden of the mighty theme." All we can say in regard to this is that Mr. Fiske has _not_ shown it. He has shown just what we all knew before--that love exists in the world, that it antagonizes selfishness, and that human beings are endowed with a moral and religious sense--but he has not made it plain that the meaning of the universe is to be found in these (as we regard them) higher developments. He has himself acknowledged that, on a broad view of the world-wide struggle for life, there are no moral elements to be seen. Religion, as we hold, is its own justification. There is more of religion in one verse of the Psalms than in all the Theodicies that ever were written. "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God." Here is the whole essence of the matter--the affirmation of the human heart that there is something or some one beyond and above the mesh of circumstance and fact in which our lives are involved; something or some one who authenticates all that is good, and everlastingly condemns what is evil; something or some one to which or to whom the soul gravitates as to nothing else in the universe. When this affirmation is strong, religious life is strong; when it is weak, religious life is weak; should it cease entirely, then religion is dead. The book Mr. Fiske has given us is interesting from first to last--all his books are interesting--but it does not increase our knowledge, nor does it add to our knowledge faith. GENERAL NOTICES. The author of _Extemporaneous Oratory for Professional and Amateur Speakers_[28] is himself one of the most effective orators, especially in debate, of the time. He has embodied in this book the results of ripened thought and successful experience gained in a field in which he is a master, for the instruction and help of those who would follow what he regards as the greatest of all arts, including the elements of all--music in the intonations of the voice, and painting and sculpture in the life, attitudes, and expression of the speaker. It is an art, too, which has wielded a more general and important influence than any other, which is almost universal in its appeals, and which any one may at any time find useful, when it will be of great advantage to him to possess the ability "to speak distinctly to the purpose, gracefully, with genuine fire." Extemporaneous oratory concerns the delivery, in form and language suggested by the occasion, "of ideas previously conceived and adopted with more or less fullness and precision, together with such thoughts and feelings as may arise and obtain utterance." It has many advantages over other methods of oratory, all tending to give the speaker greater power over his audience, and particularly in the fact that the extemporizer is at all times ready to expound, defend, illustrate, and enforce his opinions. The extemporaneous speaker must have a full and fluent command of language, and a full store of facts which he may at any time have to bring to bear upon the subject of his address and in the vindication of his opinions. The first place of importance is given to facts of natural science, which are of increasing utility. "To the educated and uneducated alike, natural science is now the most interesting of themes." Next come the facts of history and biography, those of the special branches bearing on the speaker's theme and purpose, and the great general conceptions included in the thoughts of the learned; and he must have settled opinions. At the basis of Dr. Buckley's treatment of this art and of his advice to those who would perfect themselves in it is the principle that extemporization is evolution after involution. This advice, in which the various phases of the subject are commented upon under a great variety of aspects, concerns the general preparation for the address, the acquisition of effective command of language, the exercise and training of the voice, the intellectual and physical elements that enter into oratory, its accessories, and the factor of the audience--all plainly and practically presented, with a facility of style that makes the reading of the book a pleasure. [Footnote 28: Extemporaneous Oratory for Professional and Amateur Speakers. By James M. Buckley. New York: Eaton & Mains. Pp. 480. Price, $1.50.] Readers of the Popular Science Monthly have already had an opportunity of perusing some of the narrative and observations which Professor _Heilprin_ has embodied in his _Alaska and the Klondike_.[29] In it he has attempted to portray that remarkable region in its true aspects. Professor Heilprin is well able to do so, for he is a keen observer and looks with a scientific eye, and his literary style is free and graphic. He made a summer journey to the region last year (1898), between the end of July and the middle of October, with the object of being "able to determine between fact and fancy, and to obtain a personal knowledge of the region and its varied conditions." What he saw and heard is here presented. While by no means pretending to that degree of accuracy and of proper insight which can only come with more protracted and intimate knowledge, the author believes that he has given a careful and unprejudiced account. Persons whose ideas of the regions about Dawson are associated with visions of arctic severity and sterility may be a little surprised at reading of one's looking from the heights about the town northwestward "over a most lovely stretch of river, with hillsides closely besetting it, and with a vegetation of most striking brilliancy and vigor," and of the eye turned southward, losing, in consequence of the different configuration of the ground, "all but the beautiful verdant slopes which still mark out the valley"; of the beholder being able for hours at a time to sit watching the beauty of the landscape; and of the difficulty of recommending to one endowed with a proper appreciation for the works of quiet Nature "a more enjoyable exercise than to take in a bit of this wonderful land of the North, and with it a mellow sunshine that is not to be found elsewhere." These pretty landscape pictures of the arctic summer are followed by accounts of society at the Klondike as the author found it, of the trail, steamboat travel, and the routes to the region; a description of the placers, their occurrence, and the methods of mining; observations on the physical history and geology of the gold fields; and a summary of the laws regulating mining. In the summary of his geological discussion the author expresses the opinion that it seems probable that "the Klondike gold region is merely a fractional part of a discontinuously continuous auriferous tract that extends in a westerly course into the heart of Alaska, and southward into British Columbia." [Footnote 29: Alaska and the Klondike. A Journey to the New Eldorado. With Hints to the Traveler and Observations on the Physical History and Geology of the Gold Regions, the Conditions and Methods of working the Klondike Placers, and the Laws governing and regulating Mining in the Northwest Territory of Canada. By Angelo Heilprin. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 315. Price, $1.75.] _Mr. Bullen's Idylls of the Sea_[30] comprises three groups of essays, each group being marked by distinct characteristics. The sketches in the first group, the designation of which gives the name to the book, answer approximately well to Mr. Strachey's estimation of the whole as "some of the most vivid things ever written about the sea," such as only a man who really knows the sea in all its humors, and "has heard all those multitudinous voices that echo along the waste spaces of the deep," could write. There is something weird about them, and they have the air of mystery and superstitious awe with which, according to tradition, the sailor regards the imperfectly understood features of the sea. They are short stories of curious or striking incidents of sea life. The essays of the second group are real natural-history sketches--accounts of some oceanic birds, the kraken, sharks, the devilfish, etc., by a man who is well and scientifically acquainted with them. The third group includes longer sketches of sea-farers' life, rather more actual ones than those of the first group, and papers having a critical bearing on the present conditions of British seamanship. [Footnote 30: Idylls of the Sea. By Frank T. Bullen. With an Introduction by J. St. Loe Strachey. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Price, $1.25.] The constant advance in the knowledge of dietetics makes it desirable that its results should be put in an accessible form, and this is particularly the case in regard to food for those in ill health, to whom it may be the means of restoring the normal condition. In her book on _Diet in Illness and Convalescence_[31] the author has endeavored to present the substance of Diet for the Sick, now out of print, together with recent thought on the subject, especially in the treatment of typhoid and malarial fevers, which we owe in such variety to the present war. An outline is given for suitable food in the more common forms of disease, suggestions for serving meals tastefully to an invalid, and numerous recipes for beverages, soups, dishes of meats, vegetables, and desserts. Some of these are taken from English and French treatises; others are contributions of American cooks, and include many novel and excellent ideas. From the preparation of koumiss and May wine to the manipulation of Dixie biscuit there is no want of explicitness, and one is tempted to covet the state of convalescence in which he could fare upon such attractive compounds as rose, violet, or amethyst jelly. A word of caution is inserted now and then. We are told "a fritter of any kind should never be mentioned in an invalid's book." Macaroni croquettes and soufflé of shad roe are, however, admissible. The beginning of the volume is devoted by the author to a brief consideration of the constituents of food and processes of digestion, with directions for the use of the pancreatic ferments. There are unfortunately many disputed points concerning a fit dietary in illness; not only idiosyncrasies of constitution but incomplete knowledge of physiological chemistry still render the problem difficult. New foods are constantly introduced which subsequent experiment proves to be harmful. The last dictum, we believe, in regard to saccharin is that it is not wholly innocuous, so that it might be as well for the diabetic patient to learn to do without sweets in the beginning, while as for the digestive ferments, they are at the least hazardous concoctions. We can not be too wary of artificial substitutes and laboratory products which claim the virtues of organic material or living protoplasm. [Footnote 31: Diet in Illness and Convalescence. By Alice Worthington Winthrop. New York: Harper & Brothers. Pp. 286.] The reason for the being of _John Munro's The Story of the British Race_[32] is briefly indicated in the preface as to be found in the fact that the current ideas on the subject are derived from the views of historians representing the doctrines of an earlier and less critical generation, while the fact is overlooked that the new science of anthropology, using careful observations and exact methods, has put the real nature of the British people in a light in which it was never seen so clearly before. The result is that the old ideas on the subject have been greatly modified. Mr. Munro believes that his little book is the first attempt to bring these important results and views of modern anthropologists before the general public in familiar language, whereby the oversights of historians and teachers may be redeemed. An important error to be controverted, in the author's view, lies in the fine-drawn distinctions and sharply defined demarcations that have been made between Celts and Saxons. It is inferred from anthropology that the population of the British Isles is a mixture of all the races of western Europe, in which the Teutonic and Mediterranean elements--"the aborigines of Europe"--predominate, while "the intrusive Celtic race from Asia," still represented by the Bretons, passed into the British Isles in comparatively small numbers. Scotland is perhaps more Teutonic and less Mediterranean than England, Wales, or Ireland. Wales is the least Teutonic and the most Mediterranean, if not Celtic, of the three. England has more of the Dutch and Low Country elements than of the Scandinavian, with apparently not far short of an equal share of the Mediterranean and Teutonic elements. Ireland is perhaps as Teutonic as England, though the better fusion of the elements may disguise the fact. The author thinks that the first chapters of English history will have to be written over again by the light of anthropology. [Footnote 32: The Story of the British Race. (Library of Useful Stories.) By John Munro. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 228. Price, 40 cents.] The _Eighteenth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey_[33] mentions, as an important change in the field work that made necessary by the legislation providing for the establishment of levels and permanent monuments and bench marks, of which 10,840 miles of levels were run and 1,820 bench marks were established. The topographic surveys to date covered an aggregate area of 759,525 square miles, of which 240,000 square miles were on a scale of four miles to the inch. The topographic work has progressed very satisfactorily under the present organization of the survey, including, in the year covered by the report, surveys in the Indian Territory and of the northern part of the boundary line between Idaho and Montana--the first work of the kind assigned to the Geological Survey--and the beginning of the survey of the forest reserves. The work on the educational series of rocks has been completed. It includes two hundred and fifty larger and smaller sets, which will be distributed to institutions where geology is taught. In his general report the director mentions the work of more than thirty geological parties in all parts of the United States, of six paleontological parties, hydrographic and topographic surveys by States, and the work of the division of mineral resources, the full account of which will constitute Part V of the report. The theoretic and other papers in Part II relate to the Triassic Formation of Connecticut (W. M. Davis), Geology of the Edwards Plateau, etc., Texas (R. T. Hill and J. W. Vaughan), North American Tertiary Horizons (W. H. Dall), Glaciers of Mount Rainier (I. C. Russell) and Rocks of Mount Rainier (G. O. Smith), The Franklin White Limestone of New Jersey (J. E. Wolfe and A. H. Brooks), the Geology of San Clemente Island (W. S. T. Smith), Geology of the Cape Cod District (N. H. Shaler), and Recent Earth Movement in the Great Lakes Region (G. K. Gilbert). Part III contains papers on the gold districts of Alaska, by G. F. Becker, J. E. Spurr, and H. B. Goodrich; Coal Fields of Puget Sound (B. Willis), the Judith Mountains of Montana (W. H. Weed and L. V. Pirsson), Certain Mining Districts in Idaho (W. Lindgren and F. H. Knowlton), and the Mining Districts of the Telluride Quadrangle, Colorado (C. W. Purington). The four papers in Part IV are a Report of Progress of Stream Measurements during 1896, by A. P. Davis; the Water Resources of Indiana and Ohio, by Frank Leverett; New Developments in Well-boring in South Dakota, by N. H. Darton; and Water Storage and the Construction of Dams, by J. D. Schuyler. [Footnote 33: Eighteenth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey to the Secretary of the Interior, 1896-'97. Charles D. Walcott, Director. In Five Parts. Director's Report, including Triangulation and Spirit Leveling. Pp. 450, with 4 plates. Part II; Papers chiefly of a Theoretic Nature. Pp. 653, with 105 plates. Part III; Economic Geology. Pp. 861, with 118 plates. Part IV; Hydrography. Pp. 756, with 102 plates.] The purpose of _Belle S. Cragin's Our Insect Friends and Foes_[34] is illustrated from a passage in the author's own life, cited in the preface: "In my younger days, when Nature study was unknown in schools and my problems had to be solved by my own investigations or remain unsolved, I used to long for somebody to write a book that would tell me the things I wished to know, or show me how to find them out for myself; and that is what I have tried to do for you." The beginning of the book is a chapter on the collection, preservation, and care of insects for specimens, giving explicit directions for collecting them perfect, for putting them to death, for mounting and placing them in the cabinet, and for protecting them against vermin, dust, and mold, with descriptions of the instruments, cases, etc., that are used. In the descriptions of insects no attempt is made to mention any except the commonest species, and not all of those. The habitat, in most cases, is included in the description. As a rule, most of the species are those found in the States east of the Rocky Mountains and north of the Gulf States. Scientific names are attached to the illustrations and a list of popular names, with their scientific equivalents. The descriptions are brief and well adapted to the purpose indicated in the quotation with which our notice begins. [Footnote 34: Our Insect Friends and Foes. How to Collect, Preserve, and Study them. By Belle S. Cragin. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 377. Price, $1.75.] In presenting a revision of their _Plane and Solid Geometry_[35] Messrs. _Beman_ and _Smith_ express their belief as being, that amid all the schemes for breaking away from the formal proofs of Euclid and Legendre and leading the student to independent discovery, the best results are secured by setting forth a minimum of formal proofs as models, and a maximum of unsolved or unproved propositions as exercises. They likewise share in the belief that such of the notions of modern geometry as materially simplify the ancient should find place in our elementary text-books. Accordingly, they have introduced various ideas, such as those of one-to-one correspondence, anti-parallels, negative magnitudes, general figures, prismatic space, similarity of point systems, etc., which are of real use in the early study of the science. In general, whatever is found to be usable in elementary work has been inserted where it will prove of most value. [Footnote 35: New Plane and Solid Geometry. By W. W. Beman and D. E. Smith. Boston: Ginn & Co. Pp. 382.] The plan of the investigation undertaken by Mr. _Walter Smith_ in his _Methods of Knowledge_[36] is, first, to give a definition of knowledge. The methods are then considered by which men have thought it possible to attain knowledge of the self on the one hand, and the not-self on the other. The common view of philosophers and men of science that truth is given in general concepts, or universals, or categories, is taken up, and the special form of the doctrine given in empiricism is considered and found to be a doctrine wanting in all its forms. Yet it is pointed out that the concept has its uses in the mental economy. The method is then expounded of knowing the not-self as being gained by sympathetic imitation. It is then determined wherein self-knowledge consists, and the bearing of this theory on the philosophical problem and on certain practical questions is indicated. [Footnote 36: Methods of Knowledge. An Essay in Epistemology. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 340. Price, $1.25.] In _The Philosophy of Memory and Other Essays_[37] Dr. _D. T. Smith_ develops a theory of mental action, the basis of which is the setting up in the cells of the gray matter of the brain, and possibly of the spinal cord, of orderly grouping of waves or vibrations among certain atoms or molecules by whatever may affect any of the senses; that these undulations are realized first as sensations, and then group themselves so as to form perceptions, ideas, emotions, etc. They rise in succession into the scope of consciousness. After a time the effect of these vibrations in consciousness is weakened, without perhaps utterly passing away, and retains the possibility of being re-enforced by kindred vibrations in harmony with it. This is memory. [Footnote 37: The Philosophy of Memory and Other Essays. By D. T. Smith. Louisville, Ky.: John P. Morton & Co. Pp. 203.] In _The Psychology of Reasoning_[38] M. _Alfred Binet_ makes reasoning a process of the formation of mental images. He finds no decided difference between perception--the cognizance of sensations and assignment of them to their source--and logical reasoning. "The two operations are both reasonings, transitions from the known to the unknown"; "the two extremes of a long series of phenomena." A premise is "a judgment, an association of images," and a conclusion that follows from the premises is "an association of images produced by other associations." The theory of three images--the two premises and the conclusion--"is applicable to reasonings of every kind, and therefore constitutes a general theory of reasoning.... If it be recollected that images are fragments, residues of former sensations; that they spring from the place where former sensations have been received, in the sensory centers of the cerebral surface layers, it will be understood that the purpose of these images in grouping themselves in reasonings, according to the laws of their affinity, is to replace the absent sensations. Such is therefore the function of reasoning; it enlarges the sphere of our sensibility, and extends it to all objects which our senses can not know directly. Thus understood, reasoning is a _supplementary sense_, which has the advantage of being free from those strict conditions of time and space--the two enemies of human knowledge." In memory, "the suggested image is projected and localized in the panorama of the past, of which it appears to be a fragment." Imagination is "a faculty of creating assemblages of images which do not correspond to any external reality." [Footnote 38: The Psychology of Reasoning. Based on Experimental Researches in Hypnotism. By Alfred Binet. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company. Pp. 191.] The idea of preparing _Who's Who in America_[39] was suggested by the success of the English book, Who's Who? now in its fifty-second year, and the work has been prepared on similar lines. Its purpose is to supply information concerning living American men and women who have achieved distinction, who hold recognized public positions, and who have contributed so as to have it talked about to the growth, development, knowledge, and civilization of the country. Eight thousand six hundred and two such persons are represented in this book, including, _ex-officio_, all members of the Fifty-sixth Congress, Governors of States and Territories now in office, United States, State, and territorial judges of courts of high jurisdiction, persons of other prominent official classification, national academicians, members of the National Academy of Sciences, heads of the larger universities and colleges, and a few others chosen on similar arbitrary lines. Special effort has been made to include all living American authors of books of more than ephemeral value. The data for the book have been obtained from first hands, except in a very few cases, where the modesty of the subjects made it necessary to supply the material from other sources, when the articles were submitted to the subjects for revision. [Footnote 39: Who's Who in America. A Biographical Dictionary of Living Men and Women in the United States, 1899-1900. Edited by John W. Leonard. Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Co. Pp. 822.] In _The Dawn of Reason_[40] Dr. _Weir_ has provided a most interesting book for the unscientific reader as well as for the comparative psychologist. He traces the gradual unfolding of conscious mind in animal life from the actinophryans which discriminates between the grains of starch and sand, and the Stentor which changes its position to catch a ripened spore, to the higher forms that decorate their homes, exhibit parental affection, exercise mathematical faculty, and extricate themselves from unforeseen dangers. As the field of observation of the senses of touch, taste, and smell has been so thoroughly worked by Lubbock and other naturalists, special attention is paid by the author to the senses of sight and hearing, in regard to which he furnishes new and valuable data. In addition to these he claims to establish the fact that tinctumutations and "homing" are auxiliary senses--not instincts. He located the center of color changing in the frog exactly below the optic, and by artificial stimulation produced the alteration in tint, and by excision, or treatment with atropine, destroyed the chromatophoric function. By experimentation upon snails he found the center of the sense of locality at the base of the cephalic ganglion, and, removing it, rendered them unable to return to their homes. Many anecdotes are given showing that the lower orders of animal life exercise conscious determination, and that among those with more complex nervous systems there is a mind akin to that of man. Not only do animals remember friends, strangers, and events, but they love, hate, and fear. They evince æsthetic feeling also when the spider ornaments its web with logwood flakes, the dog howls in harmonic accord with the church bell, and salamanders assemble at the sound of a piccolo. Still higher psychical attributes are those of animals that show parental affection or ability to count, like the mason wasp, which provides invariably five spiders for the male larva and eight for the female; or the harvester ants that plant their grain, weed and winnow it. Examples are cited of the capacity of the elephant to form abstract ideas and of the dog to indulge in brown studies. The author scouts at the theory that "specialized instinct," or "intelligent accident," prompts actions in animals which in man would be ascribed to reason. "Instinct," he writes, "is the bugbear of psychologists," and thereupon he differentiates sharply the two sadly confused functions. [Footnote 40: The Dawn of Reason. By James Weir, Jr., M. D. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 234. Price, $1.25.] In the thesis entitled _A Step Forward_, _F. Theodor Kruger_ proposes, as a measure of possible social reform, placing the medical and legal professions wholly under the direct control of the civil authorities, to be exercised through duly constituted boards or departments of the several communities. In his study of _Centralized Administration of Liquor Laws in the American Commonwealths_ (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law) _Clement M. L. Sites_ finds that widely variant policies are followed by the several States in the regulation of the liquor traffic, all based upon the broad powers of taxation and police. While we hear much of characteristic plans of regulation, little is said about characteristic systems of administration. This is because the liquor laws are administered incoherently. There is no consensus, even within the Commonwealth, in standards of administration. Each community practically determines for itself how the law shall be enforced, and we have all degrees of enforcement, from rigid severity to none. The various plans of regulation are classified by the author according to the dominant aspect in which they regard the liquor traffic. It has been treated as an open traffic, subject simply to taxation and reasonable safeguards; as a necessary but dangerous business, to be limited to approved persons and places and surrounded by special safeguards; as a criminal enterprise, to be suppressed, like highway robbery; and as a subject of legal monopoly. It is the purpose of Mr. Sites's essay to follow the developments of centralized administration that have taken place in recent years in each of these spheres, and in that of the institution and maintenance of judicial proceedings. The phases of current development that seem to merit special note are the substitution of the liquor-tax system for the license system, the extension and elaboration of local option, the contingent central control of city police administration, and the recognition of the general province of administration. The author's study shows that these developments accord in general with the laws of evolution, each representing some special aspect of the differentiation. In considering the "dispensary" plan, illustrated in South Carolina, a significant contribution to current thought is remarked in the approval it gives to the use of liquors as a beverage, while their abuse is disapproved in an equally marked degree, a distinction being attempted here, with correspondingly different methods of treatment between those who can be trusted with liquors and those who can not. _The Report of the United States Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries_ for the year ending June 30, 1898, represents that the operations of the division of fish culture were in some respects more important during that than in any preceding year. This was owing in part to the natural growth of the work, and in part to greater efficiency in dealing with the various questions and problems that came up for consideration. The propagation and distribution of food fishes exceeded by about forty per cent the work accomplished in any other twelve months. The steady increase in the catch of shad is cited as being conclusive evidence of the value of artificial propagation. The constant decline in the lobster fishery accentuates the necessity for increased work in that line. The efforts to acclimatize food fishes in waters to which they are not indigenous have been continued. The special papers published in connection with the report relate to mackerel investigations, the alewife fisheries, the oyster beds of Louisiana, the shad fisheries of the Atlantic coast, reports of fishes obtained in sea explorations, a list of publications, and a report of the exhibit at the Tennessee Centennial. _The Tenth Annual Report of the Interstate Commerce Commission on the Statistics of Railways in the United States_ covers the year ending June 30, 1897. The year is characterized as having been for the transportation industry one "of deferred expectations." While the years from 1890 to 1893 each closed with increased gross earnings as compared with the preceding year, 1893-'94 was disastrous, showing a large decrease; no recovery took place in 1894-'95, but an increase took place in 1895-'96. A downward turn came again in the year of the present report, with no revival till the last month of the twelve. The total increase in mileage for the year of the report was only 1,651.84 miles, the smallest increase and the smallest percentage of increase noted in any year since 1890. "In many States," says the report, "railway construction seems to have been practically abandoned. Especially is this noticeable in the more populous districts of the country--a result which is not entirely due to the general commercial depression, but to the marvelous increase in electric railways for suburban and short-distance traffic. The influence of electric construction upon steam transportation is noted in certain of the reports of State railway commissions for the current year." These are only two of the numerous interesting facts presented in the report. _Small Accumulators, how Made and Used_, is the first of a series of popular scientific handbooks for students and engineers. The particular subject has been selected for beginning the series under the suggestion of a large number of requests for advice which the author, _Percival Marshall_, had received in his capacity as editor of the Model Engineer and Amateur Electrician. The work is intended to be an elementary handbook--"a practical and trustworthy guide"--for amateurs and students. The theory of the accumulator is explained, directions are given for making them, types of small accumulators are illustrated, the charging and use of accumulators are explained, and the applications are shown. Useful receipts and a glossary of technical terms are given. (The book is published by Spon & Chamberlain, New York. Price, 50 cents.) In his _Better World Philosophy--a Sociological Synthesis_ (Chicago: the Ward Waugh Company), _J. Howard Moore_ utters a protest against the egoism or selfishness of our day, and suggests an ideal scheme. The problem of life is defined as being the relation of each individual to the rest of the universe, and is peculiarized by the existence of the social problem involving relations of individuals to each other different from those sustained to the impersonal universe. There are in the nature of living beings the egoistic element, which impels action in behalf of self, and the altruistic element, which prompts or prevents movement out of consideration to others. At present the egoistic element predominates, with results that make a picture far from bright. In the social ideal the strong should supplement the weak as they would like to be supplemented if they were weak; individuals not unequal but diverse may mutualize their efforts to the advantage of all; and each individual should perform in the social economy that function for which he is best fitted, and should receive in return "a graceful equity in the means for satisfying his desires." Among the books announced for issue soon by Henry Holt & Co. are _The Book of Vertebrate Zoölogy_, by Prof. _J. S. Kingsley_, author of The Elements of Comparative Zoölogy, published by the same house, which can be used as a companion to McMurrich's Invertebrate Zoölogy; _Elementary Studies in Chemistry_, by Prof. _Joseph Torrey_, of Harvard, which, while it is characterized by the emphasis laid upon quantitative laboratory work in general chemistry, will be a comprehensive text-book on the whole subject; and _Moulds, Mildews, and Mushrooms_, a guide to the systematic study of the fungi and _Mycetozoa_ and their literature, by Prof. _Lucien Underwood_, of Columbia University. Miss Cornelia E. Horsford, being interested in the question of the origin of certain ancient ruins situated on the Charles River, Mass., and elsewhere in America, which were discovered by the late Prof. E. N. Horsford and were believed by him to be relics of the settlements formed by the Norsemen in the tenth century, commissioned Mr. Thorstein Erlingsson to examine for comparison certain ancient dwellings in Iceland, in the summer of 1895. The inquiries assigned to him related to the method of construction of the long houses, square buildings, hillside cots with pavements, mounds, things and doom rings, irrigation and drainage, ditches, river dams, hithes and ship docks, or _nauts_, grave-hills, and forts. The results of the study are given, with illustrations, in a small book, _Ruins of the Saga Times_, by _Thorstein Erlingsson_. (Published by David Nutt, London.) Mr. Erlingsson's report is supplemented by an outline of already ascertained knowledge regarding early Scandinavian home building, derived from previous excavations and investigations furnished by F. T. Norris and Jön Stefánsson, and a summary in French by M. E. D. Grand. _The Quarterly Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland_ was issued during the thirty-seven years from the beginning of 1871 in the form styled demi-octavo. The small pages of this size entailed some inconveniences, especially when ample plates and tables were needed for illustration. With the double number (August and November, 1898) a new series was begun, in the form styled imperial octavo, with a page considerably larger than in the old form and corresponding in size with the important publications of some of the continental societies of Europe. This number contains the proceedings of seven meetings of the society and important anthropological articles, some of them on American subjects. Among them is a criticism, by Prof. W. Z. Ripley, on Deniker's Classification of the Races of Europe. In _How to Swim_ (Putnams, $1) Captain _Davis Dalton_, Chief Inspector of the United States Volunteer Life-Saving Corps, gives a practical treatise upon the art of natation, together with instruction as to the best methods of saving persons imperiled in the water and of resuscitating persons apparently drowned. The treatise covers every branch of the art, and abounds in cautions in connection with nearly every topic, against the mistakes that may arise from timidity or the carelessness of over-confidence. The author holds that swimming is an art to be acquired and learned like other athletic arts, although it depends upon natural principles. The best movements for taking advantages of the physical laws involved in it have been studied by competent men, and a brief and clear presentation of them is attempted here. First, we have the lessons for the beginner, who must, before all things, "have confidence." The different strokes are described in detail and illustrated; the different modes of swimming and the postures, swimming in clothes, taking off clothes in the water, diving and swimming under water, swimming in waves, and other features are explained; and, finally, the life-saving directions are given, and public education in swimming is insisted upon. _The Southern Magazine_ is a new monthly, published at Manassas, Va., by the Southern Publishing Company, of which we have the third number, that for August. It has a definite flavor of the old South, for which we find no fault with, for there was much about the old South which ought to be preserved, and no little that was too precious to be lost. Among the matters of special interest in this number are the Sketch of Sidney Lanier, by Ellen Manderson, with selections from his writings; The Last Meeting of the Confederate Cabinet (held, by a curious coincidence, at Abbeville, S. C., where secession was started), by Walter L. Miller; an account of the University of Virginia, by John S. Patten, which appears to be the first of a series on Southern Educational Institutions; and an article on South Carolina in Letters, by Colonel J. P. Thomas. The fifth yearly number of _L'Année Psychologique_ of MM. _Alfred Binet_, _H. Beaunis_, and _Th. Ribot_ is a volume of 902 pages, of which 591 pages are included in the first part, devoted to Original Memoirs and General Reviews. The papers are nineteen in number, on such subjects as muscular fatigue, the foreshortening of objects rising from the horizon, stereognostic perception and stereoagnosy, suggestibility, applications of the calculation of probabilities to psychology, colored audition, mental labor and nutritive changes, measure of mental fatigue, sensations of smell, phonographs and the study of the vowels, cephalometry, pedology, volume of the arm and muscular force, chronophotographic and other apparatus, and muscular sense; and the authors are MM. Van Biervliet, of Ghent; Blum, of Nîmes; Bourdon, of Rennes; Claparède, of Geneva; Clavière, Delage, Demeny, Druault, Mlle. Joteyko, MM. Larguier, Manouvrier, Marage; Marbe, of Würzburg; Obersteiner, of Vienna; Tscherning and Zwaardemaker, of Utrecht. M. V. Henri's paper on Muscular Sense would make a volume by itself. The second part--Analyses--consists of reviews of psychological publications entered under ten headings. The Bibliography contains 2,558 titles, and the index of authors fills upward of seventeen double-columned pages. (Paris: Scheicher Frères.) Valuable papers on Comparative Tests of Bituminous Steam Coals, by John W. Hill; the Artificial Preservation of Railroad Ties by the Use of Zinc Chloride, by W. W. Curtis; and the Theory of Concrete, by G. W. Rafter, are given in the _Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers_ (vol. xxv, No. 4, April, 1899), together with discussions respecting street grades and cross-sections in asphalt and cement and to loads and maximum stress on members of a bridge truss; also biographical sketches of D. L. Barnes and W. R. Michie. A valuable addition to D. Appleton and Company's International Education Series, and a sprightly book in itself withal, is _Montaigne on the Education of Children_, a volume of selections bearing on the subject from the writings of the quaint old Frenchman, translated and annotated by L. E. Rector. The significance of Montaigne, as the editor of the series observes in his preface to the volume, lies chiefly in his protest against pedantry, and the translator finds Montaigne's modernity shown in his attempt to degrade men learning from the first place, and to lay the emphasis on fitness for practical life, ability to use one's judgment, and morality and virtue. While Montaigne had limitations and defects in his educational views, such as are pointed out by Dr. Harris, he still appears to have been far in advance of his own time, and in some respects of the present time as well. The solution of the human problem, success in dealing with one's self and his fellows, was his ideal. The translator shows how Locke and Rousseau, and, of course, all educational writers who have built upon these, drew from him. The subjects of the selections given here are the Education of Children, Pedantry, the Affection of Fathers, Liars, Physiognomy, Anger, the Art of Conversation, Idleness, Experience, and History. An essay on _The Object of the Labor Movement_, by _Johann Jacoby_, translated by Florence Kelley, and published by the International Publishing Company, advocates co-operation, demands that the employer recognize the laborer whom he employs as a being fully his own equal and treat him accordingly, and claims of the State an especial consideration of the working class as an act of reparative justice. The _Transactions of the First and Second Regular Meetings of the Wyoming State Medical Society_, May 13 and November 1, 1898, shows that that body is vigorous and active, and that the doctors of Wyoming are interested in maintaining the dignity and reputation of their profession. It is represented that fully fifty per cent of the regular physicians of the State have already been enrolled as members of the society. Mr. _Frederick H. Gelman's Elements of Blowpipe Analysis_ (New York: The Macmillan Company; 60 cents) is intended to serve the twofold purpose of giving the student a general outline of the analysis and of introducing him to the methods of determinative mineralogy. Every effort has been made to simplify the account. The first chapter is devoted to Apparatus and Details, and the second to the General Outline of Blowpipe Analysis. Then the general reactions for the detection of the metallic elements in simple compounds are described, the behavior of some of the principal ores before the blowpipe, and comparative tables. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Abbot, A. C., M. D. The Hygiene of Transmissible Diseases, their Causation, Modes of Dissemination, and Methods of Prevention. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders. Pp. 311. $2 net. Allin, Arthur. Extra-Organic Evolution and Education. Pp. 8. Baker, Charles Whiting. Monopolies and the People. Third edition, revised and enlarged. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 368. Baker, M. N. Potable Water and Methods of Detecting Impurities. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company. Pp. 97. 50 cents. Baskett, James Newton. The Story of the Fishes. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (Appletons' Home-Reading Books.) Pp. 297. Borodine, N., Editor. Revue Internationale de Pêche et de Pisciculture. (International Review of Fisheries and Fish-Culture.) No. 1. August, 1899. (Three times a year.) St. Petersburg, Russia. Published by the Russian Imperial Society of Fisheries and Fish-Culture. (In English, German, and French.) Pp. 37, with supplement of one folded page. Annual subscription, four francs. Bulletin, Le, Médical de Quebec. Volume I, No. 1. September, 1899. Published under the direction of the Medical Society of Quebec. Monthly. Pp. 56. $2 a year. Burgess, O. O., M. D. Consciousness, Being, Immortality; Divine Healing and Christian Science. San Francisco. Pp. 20. Christian Science Publishing Society, Boston. Legal Aspects of Christian Science. Decisions of Courts, Opinions of Lawyers, etc. Pp. 83. Conn, H. W. The Story of the Living Machine. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (Library of Useful Stories.) Pp. 191. 40 cents. De Morgan, Augustus. Elementary Illustrations of the Differential and Integral Calculus. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company. Pp. 144. $1. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method; or the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Translated, etc., by John Veitch. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company. (Religion of Science Library.) Pp. 87. 25 cents. Flynt, Josiah. Tramping with Tramps. Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life. With Prefatory Note by Hon. Andrew D. White. New York: The Century Company. Pp. 396. $1.50. Giles, William A., Chairman of the Legislative Committee of the Civic Federation (Chicago). Papers on Reform Legislation, Corrupt Practices Acts, and Pawnbroking in Different Countries. Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company. Pp. 35. Griffith, G. W. The Influence of the Earth upon the Field of a Bar Magnet. Pp. 4. Harrington, Mark W. About the Weather. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (Appletons' Home-Reading Books.) Pp. 246. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Contemporaries. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 379. $2. Holland, Frederick May. Liberty in the Nineteenth Century. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 257. Korscheldt, Dr. E., and Helder, Dr. K. Text-Book of the Embryology of the Invertebrates. Translated by Matilda Bernard, and edited, with Additional Notes, by Martin F. Woodward. Vol. II. Pp. 369. Vol. III. Pp. 441. $3.25. Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration. Report of the Fifth Annual Meeting, 1889. Pp. 142. Lo Blanco, Dr. Salvatore. The Methods employed at the Naples Zoölogical Station for the Preservation of Marine Animals. Translated by E. O. Hovey. United States National Museum. Pp. 42. Newman, George. Bacteria, especially as they are related to the Economy of Nature, to Industrial Processes, and to the Public Health. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 348. Newton, Alfred, Gadow, Hans, and others. A Dictionary of Birds. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 1088. $5. Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station. Press Bulletin No. 199. Plums. A Comparison of Varieties. Pp. 2. Oliver, Charles A. Description of an Adjustable Bracket for the Reid Ophthalmometer. Pp. 3; A Case of Foreign Body in the Optic Nerve. Pp. 3; A Case of Reflex Irritation. Pp. 5; A Case of Fibroma of the Eyelid. P. 1, with plate; A New Method for the Plantation of Glass Balls into the Optical Cavity. Pp. 30. Putnam, F. W. Address as Retiring President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Columbus Meeting, 1899. Pp. 17. Ribot, Th. The Evolution of General Ideas. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company. Pp. 231. $1.25. Russell, Charles T. The At-one-ment between God and Man. ("Millennial Dawn." Vol. V.) Allegheny, Pa.: Watch-Tower Bible and Tract Society. Pp. 507. Stuver, E., M. D. The Importance of a Knowledge of the Phylogenetic Development of the Child in the Prevention of Children's Diseases. Pp. 11. Thompson, Ernest Seton. The Trail of the Sandhill Stag. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 93. $1.50. United States Department of Agriculture. Farmers' Bulletins. No. 70. The Principal Insect Enemies of the Grape. By C. L. Marlatt. Pp. 23; No. 80. The Peach-Twig Borer. By. C. L. Marlatt. Pp. 15: No. 99. Three Insect Enemies of Shade Trees. By L. O. Howard. Pp. 30;--Division of Entomology. No. 37. The Use of Hydrocyanic-Acid Gas for Fumigating Greenhouses and Small Frames. Pp. 10; No. 38. The Squash-Vine Borer. Pp. 6; No. 39. The Common Squash Bug. Pp. 5. United States Fish Commission. Check-List of the Fishes of Florida. By B. W. Evermann and W. C. Kendall. Pp. 68. Upsala, University of (Sweden). Bulletin of the Geological Institution. Hj. Sjögren, Editor. Vol. IV, Part I, No. 7. 1898. Pp. 131, with four plates. Weed, Clarence Moores, Editor. The Insect World. A Reading Book of Entomology. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (Appletons' Home-Reading Books.) Pp. 207. 60 cents. Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey. Bulletin No. 4. On the Building and Ornamental Stones of Wisconsin. By Ernest R. Buckley. Pp. 544. Wisla. A Geographical and Ethnographical Publication (in Polish). Vol. XIII, Nos. 1 to 5. Warsaw, Poland. Pp. 320. Wright, Mabel Osgood. Wabenor the Magician. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 346. Fragments of Science. =The Dread of the Jew.=[41]--The Dreyfus affair and the furious passions that it has awakened have their ultimate foundation in dread and hatred of the Jews. There is a Jewish question, more or less acute, in every continental country, and we are told by pessimists that before long we shall have an anti-Jewish movement in the East End of London. These facts naturally suggest an inquiry into the causes of the dread and hate which the Jews inspire, and the asking once again whether there are any good grounds for regarding the Hebrew race as a menace to the Christian world. The main fact about the Jews on the Continent which emerges from a study of the present situation is that for some reason or other they inspire terror. That this terror is as absurd and as unreasonable as is the terror caused respectively by Jesuits and Freemasons, we ourselves do not doubt for a moment, but that does not alter the fact that the sense of terror exists. It is hardly too much to say that the majority of people on the Continent honestly believe that unless the Jews are in some way or other curbed, controlled, and kept down, something very dreadful will happen. In Russia the vast Slavonic population and its leaders believe that unless the Jews are impounded in the Polish Pale they will swamp the true Russian, and utterly ruin and destroy the Russian nationality and the Russian ideal. In Austria it is believed that if the Jews are allowed to go on as they are going on they will get everything into their hands--the land of the peasants, the sources of public information and the press, and the nerves by which trade and commerce are moved. In Germany it is much the same story, and there the Jews are believed, unless stopped in time, to be about to monopolize the universities. In France it is thought that the Jews, if not put down with the strong hand, will capture the whole administration, as well as "strangle commerce by their octopus grip." The Jews are called a "parasitic race," whatever that may mean. It is said that the Jew never becomes an agriculturist, that he is a usurer and a bloodsucker, that he is a gross materialist, and that he has no ideals beyond the precious metals; and that they habitually act together to further their own racial interests and to injure those communities which have been foolish enough to trust them. To take the charge of want of patriotism first. How is it substantiated? We can not say that we have ever seen any real evidence of want of patriotism in the Jews. Look at the case of France at present. There is something extremely pathetic in the way in which the French Jews cling to their nationality in spite of all the hatred they inspire. The truth is, the Jew is a sort of expert in patriotism. Did not the Maccabees teach the world one of its first lessons in patriotism? Depend upon it, if the Jew is only allowed to be a patriot he will not fail here. The charge, indeed, is like that so often made in Russia against the Jews. They are accused of not tilling the soil, their accusers ignoring the fact that no Jew is allowed to buy, or to lease, or to occupy land, and is, in fact, excluded by law from acting as a farmer. Take next the charge of "aloofness." Probably this charge is well founded, but what can be expected of a people so newly freed from the Ghetto? If you treat a race for centuries as lepers, and visit its members with dire penalties, if they do not keep "aloof" they are likely to remain for some time disinclined to free intercourse. The third charge is, in reality, that the Jews of the world, having obtained control of cosmopolitan finance, act together in the interests of their race, and inflict grievous injuries upon the nations. But what proof is there of this? Curiously enough, Mr. Arnold White--though in other ways he seems to encourage this charge--accuses the great Jewish financiers of not doing this very thing. He tells us that after the Russians had driven the Jews into the Pale they wanted to raise a loan. One would have expected the great Jewish loanmongers to have absolutely refused to help the enemy of the race. Instead they basely, as we think, found Russia the money she wanted. But though this was a base act, it certainly is not consistent with the charge that the Jews control the international money market for tribal ends. We believe, in fact, that this whole charge is a pure delusion. The great financiers, whether Jew or Gentile, look for a profit, and not to deep and mysterious racial aspirations. The charge that the Jews are steeped in materialism, and so are a demoralizing element in the community, is equally unfair and absurd. Many Jews may be fond of pomp of a vulgar kind, and may affect what we confess personally to finding very disagreeable forms of Asiatic luxury; but these are externals. In essentials and as a race the Jews are no more materialistic than their neighbors. And can we say that they are a demoralizing element when it is universally confessed that the Jews are among the best fathers, sons, and husbands in the world? [Footnote 41: From an article in the London Spectator.] =Death of Professor Bunsen.=--With the death of Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, at Heidelberg, August 16th, the world loses a student whose name is inseparably connected with nearly all the chemical work that has been done in the last fifty years, for it is safe to say that hardly a discovery has been made or experiment performed to the success of which some process, property, or instrument discovered, invented, or suggested by Bunsen, and usually named after him, has not contributed. A sketch of this illustrious chemist, with a portrait, and an enumeration of his principal works, each of which might be characterized as a milestone in the advance of the science, was published in the Popular Science Monthly for August, 1881 (vol. xix, page 550). One of the principal events in his life since that sketch was published was his election, in 1883, as one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences--the highest honor that that institution is competent to confer. Besides Bunsen's personal interest in the work and success of his students, one of his most salient traits, as described by a careful and appreciative biographer in the New York Evening Post, was his absentmindedness concerning what he had himself accomplished. He was afflicted with an "incipient aphasia," which made it impossible for him to talk about them. "He could not answer verbal questions, whether oral or written. He could not have passed a decent examination in his own discoveries. Let the question come in the shape of an emergency in a chemical operation, and a wealth of knowledge would be poured out, but let it be put in words and he could not answer it." He is said to have answered a student once, who asked him about some substance, that he knew nothing about it--"You will have to look up the literature." The student looked up the literature, and found that it consisted of a single article, and that by Bunsen! Professor Bunsen prized what would stimulate him to effort, enjoyed life, was fond of travel and interested in everything human, and was a good novel reader. =The Unprofitableness of Strikes.=--The cost of a large strike is impressively illustrated in some of the results of the great colliery dispute of 1898 in South Wales, as they are set forth in the British Board of Trade returns and the reports of the consular service. In direct financial loss, the company suffered to the extent of $100,000, and the men of $300,000 in wages, besides the demoralization from being so long out of work. To a certain extent, other districts gained what the South Wales mines lost by the diversion of trade to them, but that simply aggravated the evil in the mines, for some of this diverted trade will stay where it went. It is sometimes said, indeed, that strikes have only a temporary effect on business, from which it will recover in time. This is true, however, as is suggested in Industries and Iron, only when the locality affected has a virtual monopoly of the trade, while in the competition of the nations instances of that kind are growing rarer. England especially has many rivals in these days, eager to take advantage of every opportunity to profit by its mistakes or misfortunes, and which, when they get their hands on a good thing, are not apt to let go. Notwithstanding some strikes at home, the coal trade in the United States derived benefits from the British strike by sending to markets which the Welsh mines should have supplied; Germany sent coal to Sweden, and Belgium increased its shipments to the Canary Islands. Other countries are induced, by conditions making the usual sources of supply inconvenient to them, to a more active development of their own resources, as Austria-Hungary, Spain, and France were in the present case. So it is more than doubtful whether the present strike paid. =The Scientific Spirit.=--The study of science, especially of an experimental science, said Prof. R. H. Chittenden in an informal talk to students of the Sheffield Scientific School, is peculiarly adapted for developing the power of independent thought, and of training one in drawing logical conclusions from experimental data. In the laboratory is afforded an opportunity for making observations, but if real benefit is to be derived from the experimental work there must be a full realization of the necessity of careful thought in drawing deductions from the results observed. Broad generalizations built on a slender foundation of fact frequently topple to the ground, and sometimes carry destruction with them, all because of a lack of that critical spirit which prompts a careful and thorough consideration of all the premises. The man who has acquired the habit of careful thought, of reasoning out each step in a process, of weighing carefully each reaction involved, of seeking in his own mind the reason for this or that phenomenon, who looks at both sides of a question, and carefully considers all the facts available, will build much more surely and firmly than he who by specious arguments constructs a glittering hypothesis, only to see it fade away. Hasty reasoning, insufficient data, obscure facts, are the bane of modern science. The true scientific spirit prompts to thorough inquiry; it will have nothing to do with hasty generalizations that may glitter but do not convince; it puts a restraining hand on all immature conclusions, and demands, above all else, careful, thorough observation. It shuns all shams. Good, honest work is the only passport to the domain of science. =Constitution of the Funafuti Atoll.=--In the boring of the coral atoll of Funafuti, Professor David, of the University of Sydney, reached a depth of 697 feet, and a subsequent boring was made down to about 1,000 feet. The core obtained by the David party was sent to England and placed in the hands of Professor Judd for investigation. The general statement is made respecting it that the material brought up presents much the same character throughout, and so far is regarded as supporting Darwin's theory. There are no layers of chalky ooze, such as Murray's hypothesis might have made possible, and no trace of volcanic material has been found. The later boring beyond 700 feet passed through a hard limestone containing many well-preserved corals. In a boring of the bed of the lagoon down to 144 feet, after passing through 101 feet of water, the first 80 feet below were found to consist of the calcareous alga Halimeda mixed with shells, and the remaining 64 feet of the same material mixed with gravel. =Metallic Calcium.=--Metallic calcium, as prepared by Professor Moissan from solution in liquid sodium, separates in hexagonal crystals which have a specific gravity of 1.85 and melt at 760° _in vacuo_. On solidifying, the metal is somewhat brittle, is less malleable than potassium and sodium, and shows a crystalline fracture. When free from nitride it is silver-white in color, and has a brilliant surface. Heated to redness in a current of hydrogen, a crystalline hydride, CaH_{2}, is formed. When pure, calcium is not acted upon at ordinary temperatures by chlorine, though at 100° C. the action is decided. But if the metal contains nitride, chlorine attacks it at the ordinary temperature. At 300° C. calcium ignites and burns brilliantly in oxygen. Gently warmed in air, it burns with brilliant scintillations. It combines with sulphur, with incandescence, at 400° C. At a red heat it unites actively with lampblack, giving a carbide, CaC_{2}. It gives some brittle alloys with magnesium, zinc, and nickel. The alloy with tin slowly decomposes water. A crystalline amalgam is formed with mercury, which may be distilled in hydrogen at 400° C., but which forms nitride when heated in nitrogen. Heated to redness with potassium or sodium chloride, calcium sets the metal free. Water acts on calcium only very slowly, with the evolution of hydrogen. In liquefied ammonia at -40° C. calcium ammonia is formed--a reddish-brown solid. =Prosperity and Enterprise in Mexico.=--The increasing prosperity of Mexico is one of the striking features of current history. In four years the imports of the country increased from $30,000,000 in 1894 to upward of $45,000,000 in 1898, the average for five years having been $40,000,000. The chief sellers to Mexicans are the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany, and the keenness of the competition for trade is shown in the fluctuations in the relative shares of it of the several countries. Spain has a small share of trade, which is growing. Industrial enterprises are being developed throughout the country with energy, enterprise, and success. Cotton and linen factories have been established, attention is given to the erection of woolen mills, and a noticeable activity prevails in mining industries. Under all these influences the railroads are prospering too. =A Question of Economy.=--A paper, "Shall we grow the Sugar that we consume?" by Freeman Stewart, called out by an article by ex-Secretary Wilson, besides matter bearing directly on the question, embodies observations on general political principles. Thus, it seems necessary to observe "that the idea that republicanism requires our public officials to act as mere weathercocks for the transient waves of popular clamor and excitement is also a deplorable delusion, which, if persistently carried into effect, will soon utterly destroy republicanism. As free institutions depend on the recognition of correct principles by the people, it is primarily necessary that correct principles should be constantly impressed upon the attention of the people. The great need of the nation to-day is wise leadership--unselfish men, who appreciate the necessity of being governed by immutable divinely appointed principles, to act as leaders, to keep the minds of the people centered in the right direction." Coming to the main subject of the essay, we have, as to the expediency of taxing ourselves to have sugar made here: "If the farmer's profits must come from the consumers of sugar as a bounty or tax, and not from the inherent profitableness of the business, then the farmer's profits are the consumer's loss. The business is inherently unprofitable, and no farmer, or any one else, has a right, 'inherent' or otherwise, to carry on an unprofitable business, except at his own expense.... It may be assumed that the farmers who are growing the sugar are now growing crops which, if not as profitable as they desire, are at least sufficiently so to keep them from being burdensome to the rest of the nation. And how can the prosperity of the nation be increased by having these same farmers engage in a new business which will require them to draw on the productive capacity of the rest of the people to the extent of many millions of dollars annually, in order to keep their heads above water?" =Bacteria of the Dairy.=--An investigation of the relation of acid fermentation to the flavor and aroma of butter, made by C. H. Eckles at the Iowa College Experiment Station, has given the results that the flavor is produced by the bacterial fermentations which have taken place in the milk and cream. The kind of flavor depends upon the class of bacteria causing the fermentation. The ripening of a good quality of acid cream is mostly a development of acid bacteria. Four species of acid-producing bacteria, tested in ripening pasteurized cream, were found to give the butter the typical flavor and aroma. Of the species tried, the most common milk-souring organism (_Bacterium lactarii_) was found to give the most satisfactory results in ripening cream. Cream ripened with common bacteria found in hay dust (_Bacillus subtilis_) gives a very undesirable flavor to butter. The superior flavor of summer butter is due to the greater number of bacteria of the acid class found in milk during that season. =For Outdoor Improvement.=--The American Park and Outdoor Association has taken up and aims to nationalize the important work of the improvement of outdoors. Not that it expects to improve upon Nature, but it hopes to be able to neutralize or remedy the devastation and disfigurement which man has wrought upon her face. At the third annual meeting of the association, held in Detroit in July, 1899, preliminary steps were taken toward offering prizes for the improvement of grounds about manufactories and homes--both front and back lots--and especially about the homes of artisans. A standing committee was instituted to consider the best way of checking abuses of public advertising. A paper read by Mr. F. Law Olmstead, on the Relation of Reservoirs to Public Parks, concerned such construction of reservoirs and the surrounding them with suitable settings as would bring them into closer harmony with the park landscape and make them more a part of it. Another paper, by Mr. R. J. Coryell, of the Detroit parks, might be described as an effort to show how a similar service may be performed for the parks and the people--in other words, how to make the people at home in the parks. Its points were illustrated by citing what had been done in Detroit. Respecting means of preventing depredations, Mr. C. C. Lancey told of good results accomplished in Rochester, N. Y., by the distribution of circulars of information on the subject; and Mr. F. L. Olmstead, Jr., of the interest taken by the children in the school gardens in Cambridge, Mass. =Where Physical Investigation Fails.=--From the discussion of the physical method, with its descriptive laws and applications and hypotheses, Prof. J. H. Poynting was led, in his address at the British Association, to the consideration of the limitation of its range. It was developed in the study of matter which we describe as non-living, and with non-living matter it has sufficed for the particular purposes of the physicist. Of course, only a little corner of the universe has been explored, but in the study of non-living matter we have come to no impassable gulfs, no chasms across which we can not throw bridges of hypothesis. Does the method equally suffice when it is applied to living matter? Can we give a purely physical account of such matter? Do we make any attempt to apply the physical method to describe and explain those motions of matter which on the psychical view we term voluntary? In practice the strictest physicist abandons the physical view, and replaces it by the psychical. He admits the study of purpose as well as the study of motion, and has to confess that here the physical method of prediction fails. =Honors to Sullivant and Lesquereux.=--"Sullivant day," August 22d, was devoted in the American Association to the commemoration of the lives and works of William S. Sullivant and C. Leo Lesquereux, botanists, the former distinguished for his studies in the mosses and the latter for his researches in paleobotany, both of whom lived and did the work by which they became famous in Columbus, Ohio. Sullivant was born and passed the whole of his life in Columbus. Lesquereux, a Swiss by birth, lived in Columbus during many of his most fruitful years, and worked alongside of Sullivant. A considerable number of objects associated with the two botanists were on exhibition--rare botanical specimens, charts and pictures connected with their labors, and complete sets of their published works--and excellent and highly prized portraits of them were shown. The families of both were represented by the presence of daughters and granddaughters, among whom was Miss Arhart, a granddaughter of Lesquereux, who was associated with him in part of his work, and made most of the drawings for his later books. Prof. C. R. Barnes presided over the exercises. Prof. W. A. Kellerman read a tribute to Sullivant from Dr. Gray's supplement to the Icones. Mrs. Britton gave a short review of the species named from Sullivant (including twelve North American mosses). Professor Barnes read a tribute to Lesquereux, taken from the Botanical Gazette. Remarks were made and papers read on the Progress in the study of the Hepatica, by Prof. L. M. Underwood; the Moss Flora of Alabama, by Dr. Charles Mohr (read by Professor Earle); the History of the Study of the Mosses, by Mrs. Britton; the Classification of Certain Mosses, by A. J. Grout; the Study of Lichen Distribution in the Mississippi Valley, by Bruce Fink; and Botanical Teaching in the Secondary Schools, by W. C. Stevens and Ida Clendenin. Among the exhibits, those of twelve species of hepaticæ from California, by Prof. F. E. Lloyd; forty-five photographs of American students and collectors made famous by their work in mosses, by Mrs. Britton and Professor Underwood; and six species of mosses discovered and collected originally by Sullivant and Lesquereux near Columbus, deserve special mention. =Rate of Evolutionary Variation in the Past.=--Mr. Adam Sedgwick, speaking, in his address at the British Association, of variation, selection, and heredity, having raised the question whether the variability of organisms has ever been different from what it is now, answered it in the affirmative, because it would be absurd to suppose that organisms would remain constant in this respect while they have undergone alteration in all their other properties. According to the Darwinian theory of evolution, one of the most important factors in determining the modification of organisms has been natural selection. It acts by preserving certain favorable variations, and allowing others less favorable to be killed off in the struggle for existence. It will thus come about that certain variations will be gradually eliminated, while the variations of the selected organisms will themselves be submitted to selection, and certain of these will in their turn be eliminated. In this way a group of organisms becomes more and more closely adapted to the surroundings. It would thus appear that the result of continued selection is to diminish the variability of a species. Hence, as selection has been going on all the while, variation must have been much greater in past times than it is now. Following out this train of reasoning, we are driven to the conclusion that one of the most important results of the evolutionary change has been the gradual increase and perfection of heredity as a function of organisms and a gradual elimination of variability. This view, if it can be established, is of the utmost importance to our theoretical conception of evolution, because it enables us to bring our requirements as to time within the limits granted by the physicists. MINOR PARAGRAPHS. Of the archæology of Block Island, Arthur Hollick found in his explorations that around the shores of Great Salt Pond and on the sand dunes that border the western shores of the island evidences of former occupation by the Indians are numerous. Kitchen middens are exposed in several street cuttings, implements are often found scattered over the surface of the ground in certain localities, and skeletons have been unearthed from time to time. In many places the kitchen midden accumulations were so obvious that it was impossible to ignore them entirely. They were found to consist of the customary collection of oyster and other shells, bones, pottery fragments, fire-cracked stones, charcoal, finished implements, rejects, flakes, chips, etc. The finished implements found were two axes, of a plagioclase igneous rock, and three arrow points, all of quartzite. In the sand dunes were many old fireplaces, mostly buried by the sand which has drifted over them. They could generally be located by the richness of the turf on the surface immediately above. Mixed with the accumulations in these places were the bones and teeth of animals. The island promises a good reward for archæological investigation. In a form of disease known as peckiness in the cypress and pin-rot in the _librocedrus_, described by Hermann von Schrenk in a thesis presented to Washington University, the wood is destroyed in localized areas, which are surrounded by apparently sound wood. The cell walls are changed into compounds, which diffuse through the walls and fill the cells surrounding the decayed center, and these have been called humus compounds. In both trees a fungus mycelium occurs, with strongly marked characteristics, which flourishes within the diseased centers, and grows between them without affecting the intervening wood. This wood can be utilized for many purposes even when much rotted, and in neither case does the mycelium grow after the tree has once been cut down. The two trees thus diseased, both representatives of a race of trees the majority of which are extinct, are closely related genetically, although growing in different parts of the country. The two forms of decay differ but slightly, and not more than might be expected in two woods of different character. Mr. J. C. Arthur, of the Purdue University Agricultural Experiment Station, a few years ago picked up a small white flower (_Cerastium arvense oblongifolium_) growing unobtrusively among the grass and low weeds of the roadside. It was a little more attractive than its relative which is called the field chickweed, and the author suggests the name of starry grasswort for it. Under cultivation it spread out over the ground in a close mat of foliage in a manner characteristic of many members of the pink family, to which it belongs; and now for six weeks in April and May it is a mass of "dazzling whiteness, softened with the pale green of stems and leaves," while "all winter long the prostrate stems remain alive to their very tips, and the leaves maintain a summerlike appearance," without the indurated, polished look so usually associated with evergreen foliage. This is one roadside flower taken up, perhaps casually, for cultivation and improvement. There are others--no one knows how many--that will doubtless likewise reward the pains taken with them; and this inspires Mr. Arthur to suggest to others that they keep a lookout for plants that may become desirable garden varieties and try them. "It is evident that showiness in the wild state is not the most important criterion by which to gauge the future culture value of a plant. One needs to have many factors in mind to meet with success, and it is hoped that the study of the starry grasswort will be suggestive in this line. The byways and fields undoubtedly hold many incipiently valuable decorative plants which await the discoverer, as truly as do those of the unexplored regions of Asia and Africa." An experiment has been tried in New York during the past summer in the way of "vacation schools" for teaching housekeeping and domestic economy. Instruction was given daily in these arts in the public schoolrooms in Front and Oliver Streets and in Hester Street. At Front and Oliver Streets girls were taught to air, clean, and take care of a bedroom; to set table, clean, and take care of a living room; kitchen cleanliness; laundry work--one week being devoted to each course, and talks were given on furnishing a flat, the care of a cellar, and the importance of air and sunlight to health. The children were also taught daily to cook appetizing dishes and serve them. At Hester Street more time was given to the cooking lessons, instruction was given on the feeding of babies, and a class in nursing was taught; among other things, emergency bandaging, caring for helpless patients, and the hygiene of the sick-room. Mr. A. P. Coleman, during some geological work last summer on the north shore of Lake Superior, about Heron Bay, discovered a new mineral, which he has named _Heronite_, and which he describes at length in the Journal of Geology for July-August. It is a dike rock, consisting essentially of analcite, orthoclase, plagioclase, and ægyrite, the analcite having the character of a base, in which the other minerals form radiating groups of crystals. The analcite clearly represents the magma left after the crystallization of the imbedded minerals, and it is evident that it can be formed only from a magma highly charged with water, and therefore under pressure. From the examination of a number of nearly pure hydrocarbons obtained from American petroleum by Young, it appears that the same classes of hydrocarbons, paraffins, polymethylene compounds of naphthenes and aromatic hydrocarbons are present in these and in Russian and Galician petroleums; but that Russian petroleum contains a relatively larger amount of naphthalenes and, in all probability, of aromatic hydrocarbons, than Galician, and Galician a larger amount of the same hydrocarbons than American petroleum. NOTES. An old contributor, Dr. A. F. A. King, of Washington, D. C., writes us calling attention to the interesting fact that we printed an article of his as far back as September, 1883, suggesting the mosquito theory of malaria, and giving a number of observations which seemed strongly to support this view. Experiments made by F. H. Hall and W. P. Wheeler, at the New York Agricultural Experiment Station, regarding the best food for "chicks, pullets, cockerels, and ducklings," seem to indicate conclusively that part of the protein must be drawn from animal sources if we are to get the best results. Rations in which from forty to fifty per cent of the protein was supplied by animal food produced more rapid growth and at less cost of production. Messrs. A. Stutzer and Hartlieb, of Breslau, have detected bacteria in Portland cements, which provoke the liberation of the nitrogen from nitrogenous compounds in water, and the formation of nitrous and nitric acids that act upon the lime in the cement and promote its disintegration. According to Industries and Iron, the tides are now utilized for generating power at Pont-l'Abbé, Finisterre, France, during fourteen hours per day. At flood tide the water flows through a canal two miles and a half inland into a pond in the rear of the power house, and returns to the sea at ebb tide. The total fall is seven feet and a half, and eighty-horse power is generated by means of turbines. Means have been considered for applying this method of generating power to various industries. A proposal for an International Physical Congress has been accepted by the authorities of the Paris Exposition of 1900, and the congress will be held from the 6th to the 12th of August, under the auspices of the French Government. It immediately precedes the International Electrical Congress. So far as has yet been determined, the subjects of the addresses and reports will be classified under the headings of the definition and fixing certain units (of pressure, scale of hardness, quantity of heat, etc.), the Bibliography of Physics, and National Laboratories. The final programme is, however, still to be settled. The subscription for membership is twenty francs, or four dollars. The foreign secretary of the congress is M. Charles Edouard Guillaume, Pavillon de Breteuil, Sevres (Seine et Oise), Paris. In a book called Literary Munich Portraits, with brief biographical sketches by Paul Heyse, are given of twenty-five of the most prominent literary men of that brilliant capital. Only two authors not Germans are included. One of them is our contributor, E. P. Evans. The other is the Norwegian novelist Björnson. Heyse leaves himself out, although he is the greatest literary character of them all. Some recent experiments, conducted jointly by the Kew Observatory Committee and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sèvres, were made to compare the platinum thermometer of Professor Callendar, which measures temperature by the varying resistance of a platinum wire, and the older mercury and gas thermometers. It was found that below 100° C. the differences between the observed values on the nitrogen scale and those deduced from the platinum thermometer are exceedingly small, and that even at the highest temperature (590°) the differences only amount to a few tenths of a degree. The American Chemical Society has gained 232 members during the past year, making the present number 1,540. The report of the committee on the analysis of coal, submitted to the recent meeting of the society at Columbus, Ohio, embodied detailed instructions in regard to the best methods of analyzing coke, and outlined a plan for securing uniformity in such analysis by chemists throughout the land. This report was adopted. At the recent annual meeting of the American Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science Prof. W. J. Beal reported concerning the germination of seeds, after long keeping, that experiments had been tried with various seeds five, ten, fifteen, and twenty years old, from which it appeared that seeds of a large number of important plants would germinate after fifteen years, but the number sprouting after twenty years was small. A paper was read by Dr. L. O. Howard, at the recent meeting of the American Society of Entomologists, recording the success which has been obtained by the fig-raisers of California in fertilizing the Smyrna variety of figs by the aid of the blastophaga which issues from the Capri figs covered with their pollen. A generation of the blastophaga has been developed at Fresno by which many Smyrna figs have been satisfactorily fertilized, and there is considerable probability that the insect has at last established itself on California soil. The five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Gutenberg, associated with the invention of printing, is to be celebrated at Mayence, June 24, 1900. It is hoped that the foundation of a Gutenberg Museum may be a result of this movement. An exhibition illustrating the art and progress of printing is also expected to be held. The conclusion is drawn by the Italian, Signor Albini, from investigations on the nutritive value of whole-meal bread, that it is inferior to that of ordinary white bread, and that a further disadvantage comes from the excessive quantity of indigestible matter, formed of the harder parts of the pericarp of the grain, which it contains. We have to add to our obituary list of men known in science the names of Edward Orton, LL. D., Professor of Geology in Ohio State University, late State Geologist of Ohio, and late President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Columbus, Ohio, October 16th, in his seventy-first year, of whom we shall shortly give a more extended sketch, with portrait; Grant Allen, writer of several scientific books and articles, and a contributor to the Popular Science Monthly; Prof. Theodore Elbert, German geologist, aged forty-two years; Dr. Max Barth, Director of the Agricultural Station of Rufach, Alsace, aged forty-four years; M. Paul Janet, member of the Paris Academy of Moral Science, and formerly professor at the Sorbonne; Edward Case, English engineer, well known for his method of groining to prevent the sea from encroaching on the coast, September 22d; Hamilton Y. Castner, whose name is associated with the establishment of processes for the electrolytic production of alkali and bleaching powder from common salt, and for the extraction of aluminum; Dr. Oscar Baumann, of Vienna, African explorer, author of a map of the Congo, geographical articles, and books relating to his explorations; and Dr. J. W. Hicks, Bishop of Bloemfontein, formerly demonstrator in chemistry in the University of Cambridge, and author of a text-book on inorganic chemistry. Transcriber's Notes: In this e-text, the following symbols have been used: - Words surrounded by _ are italicized. - Words surrounded by = are bold. - Symbol _{2} means the number 2 is a subscript. - Symbol [+] means a plus sign in a circle - Symbol [++] means two plus signs in a circle - Symbol ++ means two plus signs attached together Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent spellings have been kept. Captions added to captionless illustrations and some illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text.